#Joe graves x you

[yeyinde]

fever in a shockwave

pt., iii | stagnant on my betterment

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with.

WARNINGS: angst, pining, yearning; eventual smut; trauma; grief and the existentialism of moving on; recovery; poor/unhealthy coping methods; codependency; reference to drug use (but it's just weed); reader has a backstory; spoilers for the series

WORD COUNT: 14,7k

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an update; this isn't the final part lmao dangerous words coming from someone like me oops. there's probably going to be three more parts after this.

There is no sense of closure when you watch the jagged pieces of a broken man fall to the floor by your feet. The splintered edges offer no succour, no victory, when they come to rest along the scattered ruins of a delusional love affair: alcohol bottles—Kraken, Captain Morgan—and grease-stained boxes of takeaway, most unfinished in favour of satiating yourselves on flesh, sex. 

(Booze, more often than not.)

Seeing him struggle to find meaning in what you say—watching that ethanol-soaked resignation filter through hazy, electric blue—brings a fresh pain instead, taking space in the hollow gaps where you expected vindication and self-worth to bleed through. 

You're doing the right thing, after all. Aren't you? 

Aren't you? (please, someone, anyone, say yes—)

Uncertainty is an uneasy, nauseating feeling inside your guts. Much like a broken bone, it emanates a visceral sense of perturbation through your body. Every synapse fires in protest; every nerve screaming out. They bellow one thing in unison: something is wrong and not quite right. 

You feel their cries deep in your being. Each muscle twitch and frayed thought that passes carries the echo of it. 

This pain, it seems, is cracking your ribs apart and exposing the rotting marrow to the open air. Slurping from the putrefying sludge, satiating itself on the sickness eroding you from within. 

It's all wrong. It feels wrong. 

Bear swallows. You watch the way his throat works around the bitterness that lashes across the cut of his brow; gyres darkening in his eyes. Storms on the horizon. 

(You think you'd welcome the squall. Might embrace anything to get out of this place—)

“That's what you want?” He rasps, thick and gritty, and you think about the last time he sounded like that—all torn up, and broken. Words mangled in his throat. Husked out when he told you about Rip, about the boy, his daughter, and—

No. No.

None of this is what you want, and it pains you that he can't see that. 

(Such a selfish, broken man.)

Inside the festering slurry of your marrow, an urge wells up. Bubbles in the putrid pools until it's frothing, raging against the walls keeping it trapped until it seeps through the cracks, leaking into your muscles, your tissue, your bloodstream. 

This silly little body of yours carries it up to your heart where it sinks talons into your pericardium, subsumes the serous in this terrible essence, this idea, this whim—

(“what?” the scoff he lets out trails on the coattails of what might have been a laugh in another life. if he was another man, maybe. you, more honest with yourself. but you are just two broken people in a run-down bar. humour exists somewhere in the muzzle of a loaded pistol. “got a saviour complex or something?”

or something. or something—)

Because the thing is: you do. 

You spend most weekends wandering around antique stores because you're convinced that everything deserves a home. A place of its own. You find the unwanted, the unsellable, and you let it take space in your lonely, cramped apartment. 

And why not? No one else will buy it. You're, technically, helping the environment. It's a win-win. 

(and more lies you tell yourself.)

These false promises are always made that one day, one of these days, you'll find something to do with it all—maybe you could learn how to make something out of it; stitch all the unuseable parts, the unwanted pieces, and create something that everyone will want—but so far, none of your rescues has ever been finished. Saved. They sit in a corner taking up space. Untouched. Unused. Collecting dust. 

That insidious whim curls inside of your heart, and whispers: 

it's never too late to try again. maybe this time, it'll work out for you—

It's the same one that lures you in, making you purchase a complete set of ugly-looking dolls because some ladies were recoiling at the sight of their lumpy, antediluvian faces, and you felt bad thinking that they were doomed to end up sitting on the shelf until they were unceremoniously tossed into the bin with all the other things that won't sell. 

And the one, now, that stares at the terse set to Bear's shoulders, the lines rucked across his broad, the helplessness etched into ashlar, and considers that maybe all he needs is someone. A friend, maybe. 

(And maybe, maybe, that it could be you—)

“Bear—” it would be so easy to swallow the words back down until you choke on them. 

You breathe in. Taste nicotine in your throat; the phantom burn of a memory from long ago: one once buried under the rubble of your crumbling foundations, now rearing into this yawning abyss as you waver on the precipice. This vacuum that syphons you dry. Leaves you empty, gaping. 

It’s your mum leaning over the railing of a mezzanine as she smokes a cigarette—the eighth in the last three hours, pack near gone—and tries (and fails; always, always, always) to find some temporal kinship with a higher power as you sit on the porch swing and drink in the scraps she tosses your way. 

(Today, it’s the way the smoke curls in the periwinkle sky like a naked gospel; grand televangelist to a crowd of one.)

She scrambles within the ruins of her own making to seek answers to compensate for the lack of worth that slips from the cracks. Left behind again. Again, but it’s not her fault. It’s never her fault. 

(You should know best, she tells you—you suckled from the shattered parts of herself before you broke away from the cradle of her arms. Genetics leaves you wrecked for company, for permanence.

It’s just not made for us, baby. We’re unloveable only because we love too much—)

An epiphany comes in the middle of her eighth cigarette, and she divines enough wisdom to come to the succinct conclusion that those broken pieces are not the cause of her misery. 

(How could they be when they’re a part of her and she’s a part of everything?)

Can't fix a broken man, she murmurs into the midmorning fog, blood-red mouth splitting into a sneer. There was beauty, you thought, to be found in the pale yellow of her teeth against the pastel dusting of dawn. Rapturous, almost. You couldn't look away even as the words snaked through the underdeveloped fibres of your mind. They're like someone who's drowning, you know? They'll grab on to anyone that gets too close and try to pull them under, too. Maybe because they want to save themselves, or maybe because they don't want to die alone. Better to leave them behind. 

Can't fix a broken man, (but maybe—)

Your dad tried to fix me, she adds, and it comes in the same cadence of an afterthought, blase; but the thinness in her voice, the reedy pitch of barely veiled urgency, all feigned indifference to the topic, all give her away. She's been waiting for this, you know. Gearing up in steady increments so that the blow lands harder when it's thrown. 

Isn't that stupid? And he couldn't even bother to stick around. What a joke… But I guess some people are like that, huh? Couldn't be me, she scoffed, jabbing her finger in your direction. You could see the yellow of her nails beneath the pock marks in her chopped, blue nail polish. And don't let it be you, either. The best thing you could ever do for yourself and someone else is leave. Don't cheat. Don't be the other woman. Just fucking—

The bubble bursts, and in that breaking, a truth is revealed to you in some strange, hangover-induced epiphany brought on by dehydration, malnutrition, and the terrific idea of going home with a man who has never once talked to you while being completely sober. It screams—first and foremost—you are an idiot, but beyond that, you really are your father's child, aren't you? 

Lost amid your memory, the emergence of a forgotten fallow, it’s Bear who shakes you awake when he reaches for you after the silence sat for too long. Fingers touching, too tender and too rough at the same time, and the juxtaposition makes you quiver as it ploughs disquiet into your being. 

Tears pebble in your lash line, threatening to spill over. You haven't cried in a long time and yet, yet—

His hand folds over your wrist, tight and unrelenting. Shackles against your bones. Grinding them into soft, fine powder. 

“C’mon,” he slurs, pleads; tugging you closer as if distance is what makes you say these things to him and not the heavy, overwhelming scent of alcohol wafting off of his numb tongue. “You don't know what you're saying right now—”

His fingers tighten. The midnight scabs on his knuckles tear from the strain, the stretch. Blood wells under the slit that lifts from his broken, battered skin. Pebbles like a tear-drop on the wrinkle of his bruised knuckle, and then sheds itself free. Running down the yellow mess of moulted flesh until it meets the cliff edge of where his palm rests against yours. 

“You don’t mean it. You can’t mean that. Stay with me, stay—”

The alcohol makes him sway where he sits, eyes upturned but focused inward, lost to thoughts and feelings and places unreachable to you. Ephemeral lines in jaded, blue sands. It slips, too, from between his fingers. Uncatchable to anyone but the flush under his skin, the slur in his words. 

Can’t fix a broken man. 

The motion dislodges the droplet and it waterfalls over his palm until his blood kisses the clean, unmarred skin of your hand. 

He doesn’t notice the way he bleeds on you (through you, in you; drowns you in it, in him—): outside of a thready determination built on drunk devotion, he doesn’t seem to see much at all. Clouded. Overcast. Those hazy eyes regard you with a thin, untouchable distance. Filmed over and too far gone for you to pull him back—

(and you can’t help but wonder if he even notices you or if, in those unending crevasses, an icy, broken bergschrunds, the misshapen silhouette of you strikes a different chord to him; if these slurred hymnals are just a hollow orison for someone else in your stead.)

—so you stop trying. Let it sit, let it rot. Smell the infection in the air as the wound splits apart. Gangrenous and beyond palliative help. 

Something must flicker across your face sharp enough to cut through the fog he drowns himself inside because his eyes widen slightly, and his hand tenses around your wrist. Tight. Unyielding. 

As his fingers dig in over your pisiform, deep enough to bruise—to mark you once more with his stain, his touch—you’re struck by the sudden thought of brittleness. It’s not something you’d ever considered yourself as—delicate, fragile—but with the way he holds you now, not at all dissimilar to the way he held on last night, fingers loosely wrapped around your wrist as he used your joints as a stress ball to calm himself down, you feel vulnerable. Swallowed whole, caught. 

What once felt like a comfort, a sense of security as you moulded yourself into an anchor point, a lighthouse on the sandy, dark shore, for him to find, to swim for amid the roaring waves dragging him down, now feels like dead weight. 

For the first time since you've met him, you taste chlorine in the back of your throat. Feel the pull of the currents dragging you down. 

You know all too well what it feels like to drown. 

You pull away. He clings tighter. 

“Bear, please—”

Please, you think. Please, please, please—

(If you keep stripping yourself bare, you'll be nothing but bones—)

He doesn't even notice. Nothing, it seems, will pull his fixed attention from every minuscule expression that flickers across your face as if the mere notion of weakness, of hesitancy, will give him reason to hold on just that much harder. 

“Can't just give up on this—” the words are tangled in his throat, caught on the end of a snarl, and vicious. He tugs on you, pulling you closer. “On us.”

“There's no us, Bear.” 

And it isn't a lie. Of course, it isn't. 

There's an empty chasm between you both, void of any tangible substance. Whatever he thinks this is, it can't work. Won't. Not in the real world. Not outside of the bottom of a bottle. 

You won't be his crutch. His bad habit. His midlife crisis amid a downward spiral. 

You can't be.

Won't be. 

(you will not be the other woman. you will not be your father's child.)

And it isn't remotely the same, you know. Bear's wife is—

Dead. Gone. 

—and yet, this whole situation still makes you feel like a homewrecker even though the home you demand he returns to is empty. 

Selfish, you think, but you can't even begin to know who you're referring to in this beautifully devastating moment. Bear, for chasing ghosts, drowning them in alcohol and bad choices and vices that end with bringing strange women back to his lonely hotel room just to feel more than the vicious bite of grief in his chest.

Or you, for pulling away from this drowning man because you're not strong enough to save him and yourself at the same time. 

(or—something sneers—you just hate the idea of being like either of your parents, but what can you do when you've stolen all of their bad parts for your own?) 

You think of the man in the bar. One hundred dollars to send him back home. Where he belongs. 

(...he can't destroy himself like this. You'd know that, though, as his friend.

send him home, alright?)

“Go home,” you say, harsh and severe. All the things that your mother wished she said to him. Regurgitated words spat out by his feet because borrowed doctrines are you've ever known. 

A fissure crackles across his expression, cutting through the fog. It's anger, bitterness, pain—some strange, fantastical amalgamation of the three—and it coalesces into broken defiance where it sits, clinging to the glossy grease around his brow, his nose. 

It makes your fingers itch with the urge to soothe—to unfurl the wrinkles in his brow, to tuck this grown man close to your chest until the tension in the thick set of his shoulders liquifies in your hands, and he melts into malleable putty. 

(Another trinket to collect dust on your mantle.)

You swallow it down—the salt and blood, and the pathetic pulse of your heart, and all. Hurt him, you think. Hurt him deeply. Deeper, still. Push him away and run. Run. Keep running until your legs give out, until your lungs collapse because if you don’t, if you don’t, you know you’ll stay with him until he throws you to wayside, until he wakes up one morning and decides that you are not enough compared to the big, wide world just outside his door; that your walls and your roof are not big enough for him—

“Please. Go home. Go home, Bear—”

Your words land like you knew they would, and he reels back for a moment, as if struck, but the anger, the twisted pain etched in the lines of his unkempt beard, his greasy brow, make stand firm. Unmoving. 

You catch the acrid scent of gasoline on his skin when he leans forward, forcing himself back into your space with his chin dipped low, eyes blazing with a defiant inferno. His scarred, battle-battered hands drop to his splayed knees, gripping tight. Holding firm. 

(Or holding himself back—)

His voice is a matchstick when he speaks. Smouldering embers sparking to life. Renewed with a sense of purpose you can't make sense of. What set him off? What made him flip—

(You're not worth it. You're not worth it—)

“M’not giving up on this.” 

His jaw is slack. Laxed. The words slip out slow, languid. Curling with a touch of humid derision, mordant humour, at the idea that after all of this, everything (nothing, you think—nothing, nothing, nothing), you could just walk away unscathed. 

If I burn, the crackle in his throat says, promises: then you're burning with me. 

“Bear—”

“I'm not giving up on us.” 

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him. 

(You sever a part of yourself and leave it in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

The aftermath goes like this: 

A tsunami of regret and indecision dredges up terrible, awful things—phantom memories and stains in the shape of fingerprints that pollute the inside of your psyche—ones that should have been left to rot at the bottom of your buried trenches. It makes leaving harder than it should have been considering the abrupt nature of this—whatever it is. 

(Untitled. Unnameable. Unknowable.)

There's betting on losing dogs, and then there's this: 

Pacing all your cards, all your coins, on one that wasn't even in the race. 

One foot in, one foot out doesn't apply when Bear has never even stepped over the threshold. That notion roots itself in the scorched fibres of your chest, knotweed in your alveoli, as you scent liquor on his breath when he speaks. A cavernous distance grows between want and reality. 

You thought you knew him. Learned and memorised all his hard lines, his soft valleys, the thick thatches of hair that dust his body like the dark depths of a riverbed; a nebula of loosely connected scar tissue—Orion's belt made of fine, silvery lines—and pock marks from blemishes and bumps born from the rich, enigmatic tapestry of his life beyond the mere sliver of you. Crows' feet in the corner of his eyes, but only when they're crested in pleasure, twisted in that tender sort of humour only comfort brings. 

It takes you a weekend to map out the burly topography of a man, and only seconds to realise you know nothing about him outside of this rapacious intimacy. 

And even though you want to feel like this was the right choice—because it is, it was—you can't seem to stem the sheer brutality in which regret tears through you as you stand alone in a desolate parking lot under the waning sun. A whimpering ending to a desolate beginning. 

Was it loneliness that brought you here, or just the mundanity of fearing failure? It's these unanswerable questions, these skewed thoughts, that tumble over themselves, struggling to stay buoyant in the molasses of your sicky grey matter. 

(Let them sink. Let them drown.)

These distant sentiments barely echo in the gaping vacuum of that is your mind. Untethered, whispering by as you stare, transfixed, at the broad strokes of pretty pastels in periwinkle, tangerine, and bluebonnet are rapidly consumed by the darkening sky that opens like a chasm above your head. The sight of it a little too close to the colours that danced in the aether when you both broke, finally, meeting somewhere in the middle, tangled webs. Broken people coming together in a cataclysm that was always, always, headed down a single path to devastation. 

(The perfect conclusion to a story without a beginning.)

It's something you shouldn't think about. Let them sink. Let them drown—

This looping, knotted thread is a dangerous one to follow—the agony of watching Bear storm off (even after asking, demanding, that you let him drive you home; an offer you quickly refused) is still raw and gaping; a pulsating wound in the back of your throat—but you're brittle enough to want it to hurt, maybe. Chasing that unequivocal high only self-flagellation brings. 

Masochism in failure. In heartbreak by your own design. 

And it should hurt, right? This lonely climax (not with a bang, but a fizzle) should devastate you. Cut you to the core. Leave false starts on your bones. Scars on your ribcage. A meteor shower in milky white. Something tangible. Permanent. 

But instead, it feels unfinished. More of a sudden paroxysm than a defining choice you've made. Concretely. Absolutely. It's a hollow win for your bruised ego. Your battered pride. It slinks, somewhere, in the depths of this renewed pain, and licks at the tender wound made when you pierced your chest and ripped your heart cleanout. 

Threw it at the floor by his feet. 

Quid pro quo, maybe. Or a desperate bid to rid yourself of the Bear-shaped hole now taking residence inside. 

(It's fine, though. That pesky thing, all wrapped up tight in thick layers of duct tape, has never really felt like it belonged to you, anyway—)

It's all such a beautifully horrific panoply, you find. Paradoxical. Oxymoronic. Smothering and somehow claustrophobic at the same time. Being burnt alive and dying from hypothermia. 

The cudgel of pain to your chest is white-hot and vicious, but there's a seismic polynya in the lavascape of sadness that drapes through the topography of your being like a sluice, and in that little island of ice sits the unrelenting sense of flat resignation. 

You left Bear of your own free will, but in the jaded fibres of your being, you know it was all—

Inevitable. 

And fuck—

(fuck, fuck, fuck—)

Was it? Was it all inexorable or are you just making up flimsy excuses for yourself? 

Yes, you think. And then: no. Maybe. Maybe. 

(you are your father's child—

and your mother's broken daughter.)

You want to cry, and scream, and break the pain against something willing to fight back, to cut you just as deeply as you hack at it, but all you have are fragmented memories swarming you in this vacant parking lot on the wrong side of Virginia Beach, and—

(don't let it in, don't—)

—you chase it, lure it all in as you compare the blue in the sleepy gloam to the colour of his eyes, and then—

Your back against a brick wall, his knuckles sticky with blood closing around the nape of your neck, pulling you closer. Closer. The wide expanse of his palm swallowing your wrist as he led you to his truck; then, heavy on your thigh the entire—ill-advised—drive to the Motel 6 down the road where you stand now, fragile, raw, and all alone. 

When this all started, when you finally had the cobbled remains of Bear’s lucidity in your arms, the flat press of his attention against your jugular, you considered it to be a victory—

(a victory in amber)

—but hindsight is a cruel, mocking laugh in the back of your head. Twisting the knife deeper, severing the fraying threads that anchor you to yourself. With a sadistic glee it tells you that while you might have won the battle over the bottle, you lost the war (—abysmally, and without even the haze of a fever in your veins to numb the hollowness of your loss). 

You just can’t fix a broken man, and you certainly can’t keep him afloat all on your own when you’re too busy trying not to drown yourself. 

It's just that the weight of your shared brokenness was incompatible and insurmountable to the grief in Bear’s heart, but really. You just wonder if it was inevitable that everything you offered would be passed over in favour of numbed indifference at the bottom of a bottle. For someone, something, else. And while you might have been the one to leave first, but somewhere in the misplaced hurt inside of your chest threatening to collapse in on itself, folding into a black hole that devours all of your messy, ugly parts, you know that Bear was never really there, anyway.

That thought stings more than it should because you know, you know—

It’s just not made for us, baby.

—and maybe it’s all your fault for forgetting that inevitability in the first place. 

(shame on me—)

The thread you warned yourself not to chase gets tangled around your throat, choking you with the very same line you should have stayed far away from. It feels like hollow cyclicity—a gluttonous ouroboros gorging on itself—when it all, eventually, leads back to the beginning. 

Your fault, again, for trusting broken guidelines in the dark. For betting on losing dogs. For picking up another stray who already had a home. Another trinket to gawk at that ended up being chock full of arsenic, killing you with every touch. 

But He's gone, now, despite the fire that raged in his eyes, he still left you here to burn on your own. 

(inevitable—)

You should learn when to let go, you suppose, and fight the urge to bite your nails down to the wick just to taste blood in your mouth that isn't his. 

For the most part, though, you’re fine.

You’ve always been a good liar (“terrible, actually,” Bear snorts, and it’s the closest you’ve ever come to seeing him roll his eyes. “Jesus, never play poker if I'm not around—”), and especially to yourself, so after a moment of self-reflection in the form of a scalding bath and a purging cry in your car as you shoddily cut the Joe Graves-shaped cancer from your aching heart before it can metastasise and infect you further, you come out of it all standing, somehow. 

It might be the pastiche of indifference you slip into; a facsimile of the one, jaded and so bone achingly tired, that fell over you when you stumbled out of the bathroom, ready for something more only to find a man half-gone already to a bottle in the span of a few moments alone with his thoughts. 

Regardless of what it is, it works (—in shades, and only as long as you cling so tightly to anger that your fingers bleed and your joints ache—), and you let the familiarity of your unpractised trot to some gnarled finish line lead you forward.  

A clean break, you think (—hope: plead, bargain; wishing so hard on every eyelash that falls, every eleven you come across so that something, someone, listening might cradle the delicate splinters in their arms and nurse this whim, this want, into fruition), and you'll be fine. Fine. 

You have to be. 

But the thing is this:

Despite your best efforts to put some sense of distance between you and the heartache that must be, at least a little bit, on par with being gutted, a clean break is never clean, is it?

Case in point—

Thinking about him makes you bleed, and you think about him constantly. 

(Regret, then, is a wellspring in which the pain drinks and you didn't know a body could thirst this much.)

And it's made even worse when you realise just how bullish a man like Joe Graves can be. 

Maybe it's the thought of everything that had built up between you shattering into pieces that awakens this sense of urgency within him. Clinging, perhaps, to the only form of comfort he knows. The only one who toughed it out—in part, due to your employment obligation; the rest? an unresolved saviour complex when it comes to the people even a contrarian wouldn't place a bet on. Maybe. 

(Probably. Undoubtedly. 

You stopped trying to find the reason why you kept picking up the strays who always bite you in the end.) 

Whatever the reason, Bear is persistent. Relentless. 

He makes it Wednesday (you'd left him behind Sunday evening—day of the Sabbath, you learn; how fucking ironic) before his campaign starts. 

It's forty-six missed calls, half a dozen texts (because he doesn't like texting—he likes talking. Face to face. No fallacies, no bullshit), and thirty voicemails (twenty-seven of which are drunken ramblings you don't even bother to listen to, and the rest—

Pick up. We need to talk. 

Listen, I—

I fucked up. I fucked everything up—

Delete. Delete. Delete. 

What are you supposed to do with any of that, anyway?) 

The crux of the issue that Bear seems to miss swims in ethanol and leaves behind a five-minute voicemail filled with slurred I miss you's amid a background chorus of a rowdy bar. Then, a woman's voice—a woman who isn’t you—urging him back for more shots. 

You can imagine how the rest of that night unfolded. 

(You wonder if the word meant for you—I miss you—was still on his tongue when he followed her back.)

It's your fault (again; always) in the end because while you don't answer him—neither text, nor call; all voicemails deleted—you can't bring yourself to block him, either. 

You let it sit somewhere in the murky middle. Untouched but looked at. Longed for. 

It would be so easy to just give in. To let Bear back into your life—properly this time, maybe—and to take him up on those slurred promises made at two in the morning about coffee shops on the boardwalk, and breakfast at the Gulfstream, and movies and dinner, and talking until three in the morning, fucking in the back seat of his pick-up truck—

But that's the thing about yearning, isn't it?

Everything seems sweeter when you want it bad enough. 

So, you drown yourself in him. Stand as close to the fire as you can without burning alive.

Dousing yourself in the scent of ethanol cleaner. Clinging to broken pinky promises. Thinking about peanut butter and bacon staining your fingers. Prying information from rotting timber, and keeping the saprophyte that falls off the wood in your pocket for safekeeping. Filling space on a drumroll because you talk too much, anyone ever tell you that? 

(ad infinitum.)

Taping the ugliest bible verses to the back of your eyelids just to get closer, to feel closer, only to come to the realisation that you have no stake in religion to care about the deeper meaning behind it all. Metaphors and imagery are hollow when they mean nothing at all. 

There's no comfort, no succour, to be found in the thin pages. 

(You roll them up and smoke them instead. Easier to digest that way, you find.

Bear would probably hate it, and that alone balms the hurt some. Marginally, infinitesimally, because nothing can cauterise this gaping hole in your chest so you might as well fill it up with paper mache instead. Origami cranes with how much you hate him miss him need him want him written on the inside.)

You ache. Moulder. But you let it all rot inside of you until it's a congealed mess of putrefying memories and the moulted remains of the yearning you kept locked in shackles; the one that keeps biting, gnawing at the limbs of its cage to free. 

It's easier to let it all decay together in a controlled space so that you can bisect the necrosed mass in a single go. Sever the limb to save the body. It's a mantra you repeat as you call in sick to work over and over again. 

The flu, you say, and if the sniffle you give is from crying, and the cough from the weed you've been smoking all morning (blue dream, the shaggy-haired kid tells you with a nod; adds: the good shit), well. No one—especially your shitty boss and his shitty work ethic—has to know. You balm the hurt in a way that makes you feel good, smoothing it all over with trashy reality television (though, the Japanese dating show you end up dozing off to is pretty good, admittedly), and junk food. 

Moving on—even some sad, pathetic facsimile of it—helps. Routines forged in wilful avoidance take the edge off of the livewires inside of your body, nerves overstimulated and burning up with a fever much too hot, too vicious, for you to palliate with home remedies. 

And so, you throw yourself into it. Become a human battering ram against the ghosts in your head. 

Things quickly become more of a coping mechanism than a potential, but that's fine. It's all fine. It'll work in the long run until the bruises that line your flesh fade along with the want and the hope, and the terrible memories, too. 

(Terrible, in the way only a desperate, all-consuming one-sided love can be.)

All of it up in flames, in smoke. 

You burn through an ounce in retaliation while watching his name flicker across your screen, and then spend an hour googling whether or not weed is really addictive (it isn't, but the routine, the habit, can be), before deciding that this whole affair is stupid, anyway. 

It's a carousel of self-pity, spite, and masochism that feels like it might never end. Your efforts to palliate the sickness amount to a week of paid sick time spent watching a slew of old romantic dramas on repeat, and ignoring the string of texts that pour through (talk to me, let me fix this, let me—). All voicemails are immediately deleted before you can even hear the hitch in his voice. 

It's duct tape over a gaping wound. Drifting aimlessly along Lethe, careless and indifferent, but all the while, desperately reaching down and cupping water into your palm for a sip that never seems to quench the thirst in the back of your throat.

You think you could drink until you're just standing in a dry riverbed and still feel parched. Effloresced by your own hand. 

(as usual. as always—)

But this wound is still raw, still tender, even beneath the tape. 

Ignore it. Ignore it—

(—before the edges begin to tear. Cloved down the middle.)

Another buffer is born when you get a text message from your boss—u comin in tmrrw?—and realise you can't avoid it, work, forever. 

The prospect of going back on Friday evening—tomorrow, you suppose (the days have been slipping like molasses through your spread fingers)—makes you nervous. 

You're not ready to see Bear. 

But more than that (deeper than it, too), you’re not ready to see Bear unaffected by all of this. Sitting in his usual spot, in their chair he barely fits in, ordering the same drink over and over and over again. 

Moving on, too—in his own way. Meeting someone else.

(His horoscope holds no punches when it tells you a past relationship may re-enter your life, which may open your eyes to a world of new experiences—)

It isn't as if he usually pairs celibacy with his whisky, and with the plethora of ignored messages (read receipt turned off), unanswered phone calls, and deleted voicemails, you know it's inevitable for him to give up. To get the hint—whatever that might be. Move on, maybe? 

(get your shit together and chase this properly, Bear, jesus christ—)

You consider calling in again, but without any paid sick days left at your disposal, you know you can't afford to. So, you swallow it. 

(And if it takes a little longer than usual to get ready for work, then so be it.) 

Even with all of the false bravado you can scrape together come Friday, your nerves are frayed. Raw. The anxiety rolls off of you in waves, noticeable enough that even the regulars loitering outside (the ones who usually try and bum smokes off of any passersby, yourself included) offer you a cigarette. 

(Politely turned down, but fuck—fuck—you wish you took it.)

The first hour into your shift is spent trying to pretend you're not aware of the way your roaming eyes skirt to the door in thirty-second intervals. Traitors. Or the involuntary flinch each time the door opens. 

It would be easier to get lost in the familiarity of this desolate dive bar on the fringes of town, and so, you do. 

(Try to, anyway.)

Immersing yourself in the routine of it all—the motions of pouring drinks, sizing the newcomers up (profiling their personage down to a drink and a random idiosyncrasy); the astringent scent of alcohol, the mild barley and hops; the noise of hushed conversations lulling between the static rumble of the television (sports, per usual). 

The clock ticks down the seconds, the minutes, hours. You pour drinks. Clock the local gossip. Listen to the patter of condensation dripping into the tin bucket beneath the hole in the roof. In between the threadbare stirrings of routine, you find yourself waiting with dread gnawing at your insides until they're shredded and raw, pulsing ligaments burning with the fever of infection. 

But it's moot. All of it. 

He doesn't come back to the bar. 

Where you expect to see his broad shoulders slouched over the counter, head hanging low over his steady accumulation of shot glasses (a drinking challenge with only one participant; his demons the spectators), the seat he usually occupies remains empty. 

And maybe you're idealistic and stupid and wet behind the ears, but a part of you expected him to. To wander up to the counter with roses and chocolate and sobriety etched into the Neptune blue glow of his eyes, and to pick you, to choose you, but—

A fairytale. 

The box on the counter—complaints—$5—is picked up by some wayward frat boy, and the mocking laughter that follows makes you think of cobalt blue, and peanut butter and bacon burgers in the empty parking lot near the beach, watching the endless midnight black ocean rock against the sandy shore. Talking. Talking. Talking. 

Everything. Nothing. All the things in between. 

You told him about college—failed the first semester, and then my dad… well. Anyway, had to drop out for a bit. But. I went back. Stupid, I know, and it doesn't matter but—

His hand falls on your arm, fingers a little greasy from the sweet potato fries, the ones he kept sneaking from your pile when he thinks you aren't looking, and he says:

It matters to you. 

And it did, but only because it was something your dad mentioned a long time ago—I'd be proud if you followed in my footsteps—and despite everything he'd ever done, his attention, his affection, was all you'd ever wanted. 

Yeah, you'd said, and stared out at the vat of blue until your eyes burned. Yeah, I guess so. 

Well, he had peanut butter staining the corner of his mouth when you blinked the sting from your eyes, and turned to him. What do you wanna do?

Nothing. Everything. 

Your dad once picked you up from practice, hands tight around the steering wheel. He filled you in about his day (stupid fuckin' guy from upstate came down and bought all the houses we were fixing to sell), complained about your mother (god, you know, that woman didn't even tell me what school to pick you up from? Said I should know where my daughter goes to school, as if I'm not working all damn day to keep you fed, and—), and gave you the biggest piece of advice you'd ever get:

"Look, no job is better than real estate. All that crap you think you want to do? Not important. All you need is four walls and a roof, and that's it. The rest is secondary."

(If that was true, why weren't you enough for him? Why weren't your four walls and roof enough to keep him?)

A shrug. I don't know. I've never been good at anything. You think of bruised knees. Scraped skin. Chasing a car, a dream, that never once slowed down. Can't even run right, it seems. 

I can teach you. He clears his throat when you look at him, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand twice but somehow misses the dollop of peanut butter tangled in his beard. M’used to training men, I'm sure I can whip you into shape. Teach you how to run. Put you through the wringer until you come out sprinting on the other side. 

"Teach me how to swim instead." 

The bark of laughter he let out was cut off when you held your pinky up. 

His brows bounced, incredulous. "Really?"

"A Taurus always keeps their promise." 

"Christ's sake," he shakes his head, and you count the lines on his forehead when he turns, and rubs his fingers against his temple so hard, you wonder if he's trying to chisel through his skull to get at where it hurts the most. "I might not even be a Taurus."

"When were you born?" 

His tongue pokes out from between his teeth, chin dropping to his chest when he huffs. You watch the way his shoulders shake, the flesh softening around his neck when he dips it low, and wonder if this is what it was like to yearn. 

His eyes spark, Neptune blue, when he looks up. He says nothing, but holds his pinky up to yours, the digit swallowing yours whole. 

It's a promise. He squeezes your hand in three pulses. One. Two. Three. You think you might get lost in the canyons that keep dividing inside of his eyes. 

"Bet you were born in April." 

"Not even close." He grins, all teeth, and drops your hand. Motions to the fries spilling over your console with his chin. "Finish up."

"Oh, did you even leave any for me? Thought you ate them all."

"Watch it."

Your stomach churns at thoughts, the memories. Plagued by him, it seems. So tantalisingly out of reach, and yet—your phone vibrates in your pocket; another voicemail left for you to listen to in your car and pretend that this whole thing is fine—so close. 

He's everywhere, it seems. The scent of this place makes you think of him, and the stench of sickness—

Every square inch brings back some reminder of him. 

When he got too trashed the first few visits and stumbled into the washroom. His bulk falls into the cheap door frame, and sends the ugly photo of what might have been the boardwalk crashing the floor. His call of: take it outta my tab when it shattered into pieces. 

(You didn't. You hated that picture, anyway.)

When he knocked over his shot of tequila when you told him you thought he'd look really handsome in a beanie—a touch too bold, high off of the ethanol that leaked from his pores—and the rubescent smear over the bridge of his nose that followed. The ruddy stain on the counter—nail polish, you think, from that time a group of bridesmaids stumbled in after a wedding on the beach, and used the washroom to freshen up—matches the shade of his blush. 

You spend an hour before closing scrubbing the counter down until your fingers are cracked and dry and burning from the chemicals you douse on the cheap, aged wood. It doesn't come out. Nothing you do will ever make the table unsticky. It's too far gone. 

Like him. Like—

"Whisky," a man barks, slapping a dollar bill down on the stain. "Two shots." 

Four walls and a roof, right? Right. Right. Right. 

The walls here bleed condensation from the humidity outside, and the roof leaks when it rains. Always. It's patched up with duct tape and pipe dreams. 

(Like you—)

The box on the counter catches his attention, rheumy eyes skimming the words. He scoffs. "Funny. Make me a drink worth a tip, and maybe I'll—"

"You know what?" You snap, throwing the wet cloth down with a splat that sends droplets pelting across his abdomen. There's a vindictiveness in seeing the splatter on his smooth, unwrinkled shirt. 

Your eyes sting from the bleach, the lemon cleaner. Pebbled tears in your lash line threaten to spill over, but you swallow it all down. You won't cry. Not now. Not anymore. 

Your hands twitch, an aborted motion to scour the wetness from your lashes, but you stop it in time. Curl your fingers into fists instead. 

(And stupidly, nonsensically, you have the sudden, passing regret over washing your hands of the blood he'd spilled on your skin.)

"I don't work here."

"Since when?"

"Now. Get your own whisky, and take your shitty tip, and shove it up your ass—"

Quitting your only source of income certainly isn't the wisest decision you've ever made—but you've never been wont to make good ones, anyway, and so, you think it's all perfectly fine, considering. 

Considering. 

If anything, it's better than waiting around for the inevitable collapse of this shaky, patchwork foundation of paper-mache you cobbled together (reinforced with pipe dreams) to come crumbling down around you when Bear wandered in.

(If he ever would—

Fuck. You hope he does. Hope he doesn't. 

Get better. Come back—)

You sit in your car at the end of your shift—the very last one after several odd years of growing roots down into the worn floorboards, and keeping more secrets about the occupants in this town than you care to admit—and just—

Breathe. 

Sort of. 

It's twisted in a way that makes you entirely too aware of what everyone would think if they knew about it. So, you cup this little secret between the palms of your hands, and cradle it to your chest, only exposing it to the outside world when things become too much. It's easier to say you count to ten—in, out, in, out—than to admit that your methods of self-soothing, of quelling the visceral sense of anxiety from pinballing around inside your guts like a marble, is to lean back, close your eyes, and pretend that you're back in the deep end of the swimming at the local chapter of a YMCA. 

Drowning, of course. 

Or some fictive version of it. 

It comes to life in smeared yellow against hazy blue. A cacophony of muted sounds in the background—exultant shrieks of children, splashes in the distance, the low chatter of garbled conversation—is all you can hear in your underwater sanctuary, but only just. Noise is distorted and strange. A warbled mimicry of noise. 

Your world is pressed into a cerulean marble, untouchable and inescapable. You linger in the centre, floating aimlessly in stagnation. 

Down here, nothing matters. Everything is dissolved in the heavy chlorine that saturates the cold waters, and whatever resilient pieces remain sink low to the pool floor, scattered around the yellow goggles just within arm's reach. 

You sink with them. Your thoughts become liquid; mercury slinking around your head. Intangible. Nonsensical. And above all else—silent. 

Or they're supposed to be. 

But even down here where nothing can touch you, where no one noticed you haven't surfaced in ages, your thoughts are carried by the lulling currents. Saved from your murky grey matter, from the sap that traps them in the mouth of a pitcher plant, they buoy to the surface, unmoored now. Free to scream at you in whispers. 

You think of Bear.

Or rather, you think about not thinking about Bear. 

About other things. And nothing—forced white noise. Static. What you're going to do now that you don't have a job. The scabs on his bloodied knuckles. No. Work, maybe. Finishing up that degree you promised yourself you'd get, if only to fill some absent void in your chest—or a futile obligation to a man who forgot your birthdays. Who spelled your name wrong on holiday cards—on the rare occasions he ever bothered to send them. 

Other things. Other things—your faucet is leaking. You'll need to call the property manager to fix it. You need to get gas, too. Groceries. 

Faintly, you catch the musk of his cologne still clinging to your passenger seat when you breathe in. Hold it, count to ten. It makes you remember the warmth of his humid breath on your cheek when he leaned in close, tapping your console as he pointed out your CHECK ENGINE light was on. Had been, you confessed sheepishly, for a few weeks up to that point. 

Stupid pothole, you grumbled around the electricity running down your spine when his arm brushed yours as he leaned back with a derisive snort. 

You caught the headiness of white oak, musk, when he turned his face to you, decidedly unamused by your answer, and flatly told you that you were driving around in a death trap. 

Things not even on its last leg—it's in the damn grave. 

Whatever, you shrugged. I'll just hit another pothole on the way home and it'll turn off. 

Jesus Christ—

He didn't smell terrible. Faded cologne from a few days ago. Something woodsy. Cedar, maybe. Leather, smoke, pine. Sweat from the unrelenting humidity. Loam clinging to his skin. Spiced rum around his collar when he spilled his drink down his chin (you, eagerly, hungrily watching the amber droplet roll down the length of his neck—). He always seems to smell like he had been working in a thick, taiga forest in the dead of winter. Cindersap. Evergreen. Sweat-soaked leather. Chopped wood. 

It congeals in your senses. Glueing to soft tissue, embedding itself in your skin. Permanent, unshakeable. 

Unwashed sheets shouldn't be appealing. Motel shampoo. Cheap soap. The muted smell of old, stale cigarettes. 

And yet, in this marbleised world, you think of it. 

Of his skin, and the way it feels against yours. The slight sheen of grease along his nose when it nudges the soft slope of your neck. The rough drag of his beard over your pulse. Wry curls that end up on your tongue after he'd kiss you. 

Any plans on shaving?

He dragged his cheek over your collarbones, eyes lidded, heavy. None at all. That a deal breaker?

You hold your breath until your lungs start to quiver, to ache; until you're dangling precariously on the verge of hypoxia with ink blots splashing across your vision in a garish Rorschach (they're all butterflies. with knives. what does that say about me, doc?). Phosphenes scatter in a nebula of colour. Your throat constricts around nothing, empty. Empty. The urge to swallow follows on the coattails of a pitifully fleeting euphoria. Temporal and untouchable, but you still reach out, grabbing and grasping with straining fingers because you'll hate yourself forever if you don't try. Scrambling, desperately, to catch cosmic dust on the tips of your fingers. To imbue your disjointed cracks with the chemical makeup of a Magellanic cloud until your broken parts burn incandescent. Kintsugi in cuts, scraps, of Andromeda. 

But for as much as you want to shatter your lungs into infinitesimal pieces, and scatter them across the universe, your body has a failsafe against stupidity. 

It forces you to gasp, gulping down thin, crisp air until you feel the burn in your chest from overexertion. 

You open your eyes, and wish the world around you was still draped in teal and hazy yellow. That you could taste chlorine in the back of your throat. It's a brutal awakening to find a gossamer of silken midnight draped over the parking lot in the back of the dive bar. Empty, barren, save for yourself and the chef. A man you guess you'll never see again. 

Soft, crushed ochre smears a hazy ring in the east. The dawning sun of a new day. 

Leaning against the old leather of your car, your eyes cut to the console briefly. The CHECK ENGINE light is off. You made Bear groan, out loud, when you hit a pothole on the freeway and it flicked off, like you knew it was. Problem solved. More duct tape over what is probably something wrong with your engine (probably dented the filter in your catalytic converter, Bear grumbled, and you nodded along, pretending like you knew what that meant). 

A light catches your eye. Your phone buzzes on the dashboard, screen illuminated in the reflective surface of your window. 

You could pretend you were getting a call from RAEB if you tried hard enough. Answered it, maybe, and feigned ignorance while you chatted away to him like nothing happened. Like you sometimes don't try to drown yourself on land. 

You reach for it, fingers tingling at the last vibrations before the screen cuts out, and bring it close. 

It takes a second, but the voicemail icon pops up in the notification bar beside a text from your friend sent hours earlier begging you to come out next weekend (haven't seen you in forever okay?? come out w us!!). 

You don't know why he keeps trying. Why he's so persistent over something that is, quite decidedly, nothing. 

The icon taunts you. You hate seeing it—always have. It can't be swiped away. Can't be hidden. It irks you somewhat, seeing this little symbol. 

Make it go away—

You shouldn't. Not when your insides are this raw, this fractured. Broken. But you turn your phone over in your hands for a moment, mood mulish and itching for something. A fight, maybe. Something to be angry about, justifiably. To vent your frustrations. 

You tap it before you really think things through, watching as it dials VOICEMAIL and the automated message pops up after a ring. 

Please enter your password—

You have one new message. To play your messages, press one—

It starts shaky—like he's moving. You can hear the shuffle of his body, the rasp of his shirt. A door slams. He huffs. 

Look, uh. I'm not… I'm not good at this kind of thing. I was hoping—hoping we could talk… but. I guess I, uh. Anyway—

It goes quiet. You reach up to hit SEVEN on the keypad, delete the message like all the others, but a noise stops you. The screen hums under your finger. 

I've been thinking lately. About a lot of things. The team, myself. You. I made—some bad calls. Got some good men…uh, into some trouble. The kind of trouble you… don't walk away from. 

It made me think about Rip. I told you about him, right? In the—the motel. Rip is—Rip was… important to me. To us. Saved my life. In Iraq. Mosul. Bullet nearly hit me but somehow, he pulled me back just in time, took the bullet instead. Right in his stomach. And you know, he, uh—he huffs. It sounds like a laugh, but one he's choking on. He got right back up and took the bastard out. Just—wasted him. I owe him my life. Always have. It's muffled, as if he has his hand pressed to his mouth, keeping the words in. Should have saved him, but I couldn't. Couldn't do a damn thing to help him. I let him get that bad and I knew. I fucking—I knew. I saw it. Watched him spiral. And now—shit. Now I'm—uh, talking to your voicemail at four in the morning—

You think you catch what am I doing before the line cuts out. 

Fog settles in the midmorning dawn. You lean against the headrest, clutching your phone, and try not to think at all. 

(wash, rinse, repeat)

The hole in your chest, filled in with clay and papier-mache, crumbles under the seaspray.

What am I doing. It stays with you. 

These flimsy excuses become a house of cards. 

It doesn't surprise you much at all when they wobble, falling on top of you.

It's his name flashing across your screen—just Bear—as you lay in bed days later, pretending not to think about him that starts it all.

(again, again, again)

This is all a cruel sort of timing, you think, and feel the harsh thud of your heart so strongly against your rib cage that you wonder if the silly thing might break through them yet. 

You shouldn't answer. Know, without any hint of uncertainty, that Bear has the potential to pull you back in—fish to a pretty, glimmering lure—and that the moment you acquiesce to one thing, others will immediately follow in rapid succession, much too quick for you to keep up with. 

There will be no stopping the deluge once it breaks. 

And yet—

What did you expect?

The words thrown back into your face echo in the small of your flat as the walls around you wobble, teetering on the edge of collapse. 

Like most things when it comes to him. 

After the second buzz, one that sends a thrill through your spine that you refuse to give attention to, you hesitantly press your finger against the green answer key and slowly bring the phone up to your face, inches away from your nose, before stopping. Abruptly. 

You can handle Bear at a distance, you think, and so, deciding better than to have him murmur directly into your ear, you quickly tap the speaker button, and stammer out a muzzy greeting. 

“...Bear?” 

There's a sharp inhale that threads through the speaker, and you know, all at once, that he hadn't expected you to pick up. Was, instead, ready to meet and reluctantly embrace the cool, blithe distance of your voicemail. 

“You answered,” he hedges, and you wonder if the wariness in his tone means anything deeper. “I didn't think you would.”

Despite his honesty, there are shades of derision tainting the gruff timbre. 

“I wasn't going to,” you volley back, matching the fickleness of his misplaced scorn with your own. 

“Then why did you?” 

“You know why,” you admit quietly. 

No one is around to see your boundaries crumble. To watch as the cards you kept so close to your chest dip once, quick enough for him to glimpse them, to see what is tucked in the palm of your hand. 

In that loneliness, you find a sense of freedom that you had been missing. One tinged in the bitter coat of nostalgia. 

It feels too much like those nights spent arguing about the meaning behind the perfect pour (and why yours would always be trash), and showing him abysmal creations on Instagram in a thinly veiled attempt to make him see that you weren't, objectively, the worst at it. 

Back when you held the patchwork remains of your bruised, duct tape heart out over the countertop that never seemed to ever be clean as an offering to a man who bluntly looked down into the nozzle of his bottle instead. 

He huffs a little, then. Put-off, maybe, by the distance you pitch when giving in is always just within reach. “I don't see the problem.” 

“Well, yeah…” you mutter, shuffling in bed to get comfortable. You drag your knee to your chest, as the other stretches out in the sheets, and lazily wrap your arm around your shin, fingers digging into your flesh. Bruising, biting. It centres you, this fleeting pain. “You wouldn't, but I'll have you know—”

It's comfortable. The thought is a battering ram, one that hits hard, vicious, and dredges up the realisation of just how much you missed this. And just how easy this all is with him, even know when your heart is in tatters and you can hear the slur in his words (though, that might be his usual mumble—the man is hard to understand on a sober day, what with his penchant to grit words out between his teeth, as if he needs to tear them to shreds, to chew on them, before forcing them out), the normalcy in all of this, or as normal as this abnormal situation can get, is a bludgeon to your resolve. 

“...what, huh? What'll you have me know?”

You'll get suckered back in again, but this time, all the way to the event horizon. Inescapable. 

“You know, Bear.”

It's flimsy when he huffs, and sounds too much like relief when he growls: “Then why fight it?”

“I don't want to talk about this right now.”

The line goes still, but you catch the hitch in his throat all the same. “We should. I can fix this. We can fix this. You can't just decide—”

You can, you think, and drop your forehead to your knee, letting the phone slide down the valley of thigh and stomach where it comes to rest on the clothed crease of your hip bone. A prison. Your body is the cage. 

Not being able to see him gives you some sense of power back, and you reach for it. Needing to wield something decisive and distant before the rough timbre of his voice, his desperation, scoured your resolve into thin powder. 

“ Just give up, Bear. It's over. There's nothing to fix because there was nothing there to begin with.”

“Nothing there, huh? Is that what you think?”

Overtaking the bitter resignation is anger. A bone-deep fury that simmers to the surface, dredged up from the bottom of the bottle you thought you lost him to. You can hear it in the sharp breath he takes, the little growl he lets out. 

“Fuck that,” his viciousness stabs into your defences like a battering ram. Unrelenting, dizzying. You make to step back, but he fights you on it. Keeping you close. Blazing anger so hot, it nearly burns you. “You waltz into my life, chasin’ after me and then, what? You just decide it's too much for you? I warned you. I fucking warned you, didn't I ?”

“I—I know. I just—”

What, you wonder. What? Because was it ever as simple as wanting a hurting man to be a little less lonely in an empty pub? 

It's moments like this that make you contend with your self-sabotage, the unmaking of yourself (morality, compassion, kindness) by your own hands. Your complicity in all of this is staggering, and suddenly the idea of a clean break feels vile. 

How could you drop a man you spent months pursuing, expecting him to change overnight? 

Your faults, and flaws, soften the part of you that wants to run, fleeting into the dark to avoid the consequences of your actions. 

It takes two to tango, and the idiom bludgeons through the headache like a battering ram. 

“I guess I just wanted to help, at first. To be your friend. You seemed so—” lonely. Sad. One bad day away from slipping too deep into the bottle that he couldn't climb out again. 

His laugh is ugly, biting. “What? Pathetic? A sorry fucking drunk—”

“Alone.” 

It quiets him, this soft confession. 

“Can't save everyone,” is what he says after an agonising beat, and you think of the priest he tore into viciously for uttering the same sentiment. Bruising with his words, his tone, instead of his fists. Creating walls from the craters it left behind. 

“Doesn't mean you can't try.” 

“Wasted your time, don't you think?”

“No.” The word is immediate. Forceful. “With you? For you? No. But Bear. The thing you don't get, what you don't understand, is that you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped. And maybe it's selfish, and honestly, I know it is, but you always risk your own life whenever you try to save someone from drowning, and I know I'm not enough to help you.” 

He's quiet. “Reading up on being a lifeguard?”

“In my spare time.” 

A huff. It's barely a ghost of laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Well. Hope it all works out for you.” 

You can imagine the grim twist of mouth as he says it. The downward pitch to his chin, dipping in his misery. 

“I hope the same for you.” You whisper, and it feels like finality. 

Moments ago, the thought might have brought a sense of bitter relief to you, but now it just feels sickeningly like loss all over again. 

“Shit,” Bear grouses suddenly, and then draws a sharp breath once more. “I miss you,” he rasps on the exhale. 

You don't know why he would, but you understand, maybe, because you do, too. 

(So much, so much, so much—)

“I miss you, too, Bear.”

The tentative words seem to shake him, and all at once, he's commandeering again. Authoritative, in that way only he can be. 

“I'm getting better,” he rumbles. “I gotta. For the—for the team—”

It's the wrong thing to say, though, and he seems to realise it midway through. A quick course correction comes with a rushed, and for me, too, that reminds you too much of all the times you heard this same thing from behind the counter as you topped up their third, fourth, fifth glass. 

You know better than to believe in this hollow gospel, this midnight epiphany, and for the most part, you don't. It's all empty words. False promises from a prophet, spoken as a defence mechanism against the ugly reality of what happens when people catch on to their bad habits. 

But it's Bear.

Out of everyone who murmured the same phrase in that exact tone, you believe in him just a little bit more than the rest. 

(Stupid, stupid, stupid—)

It's his intense tenacity. That gritty determination seems ingrained within his very being. Inseparable. 

You wonder when you started divining truths from its scripture. 

“I don't want to lose you,” he's saying, and it's odd because he never really had you to begin with. 

“Bear—” It's late, and your thoughts are just running themselves aground. Turning into a tangled, indecipherable mess. “I need to get some sleep. Can we—can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow? Will you answer?”

It's deserved, of course, but you know that particular knife twist hurts him just as much as it does yourself, and whatever little vindication he finds from it is swallowed, quickly, by regret. 

“I just…want to talk to you.”

You imagine that somewhere between the lines, the things unsaid, sits the glaring truth of his sudden devotion, his obsession: 

there's no one else. 

(never anyone's first choice—)

“Sure. Okay, yeah, we can. We can talk. You're—” you need distance. You need space. A minute, maybe, to sort through the ugly thoughts making webs in the back of your head. “You're my friend, Joe. We're… we can be friends, again.”

“Friends?” 

It's not what he wants. That much is clear by the threadiness in his tone, but at two in the morning and with your thoughts liquifying into syrup, it's all you can offer him, all you're willing to give. 

Friends. It makes you remember the limbo you sat in before, the murk and heartache of watching him ply himself with overpriced liquor and then stumble out the door, sometimes with company but most often, all alone and with just ten minutes to spare before closing. The yearning. The pining. The want that made you feel sick to your stomach with guilt for some unseen, unknown woman back home. 

(“Dead. She's dead—”)

It sickens you even more to think about that. The ring he kept, the sadness that draped over his shoulders in a swath of agony. The one he didn't take off, not even for you. The warning signs were there. 

You just ignored them all.

Friends, you murmur again, and wonder where, in all this, you went wrong. The beginning, maybe, when you looked at him and couldn't bring yourself to look away. Friends. We can be friends, Bear. 

“Oh, yeah?”

“Best friends,” you echo back, hollow and thin. “With matching bracelets and everything—”

“Thought it was a tattoo?” 

“That, too.” 

“Okay,” he acquiesces quietly, but you can hear the threads of obstinacy in his voice when he says it. The combativeness, the steadfast refusal to fully submit, rears in the things he doesn't say, pitching bivouacs in his tone. This isn't over, it says. You're not over. “Friends.”

It's scornful, and you hate the way it blisters under your skin. Burning hot, the same feverish delirium that turned you incandescent with just his touch. 

Everything about Bear tells you to relent. Submit. 

It would be so easy to just give in. 

And the thing is:

You want to. Desperately, achingly. 

His certainty, his acuity in all of this, has a way of dismantling your sense of reason. Or, at the very least, your rationale for why you're keeping him at a distance. It's not just being diametrically opposed, though; this is the unerring knowledge that your complicity needs to be curbed. That you are, in small parts, responsible for this barren husk of a man. For aiding and abetting in his spiral, sure, but mostly for expecting him to greet you with sobriety when he woke up, as if spending an entire weekend between your thighs was enough to negate all the demons clawing at the walls of his skull. Scarring bone. Chiselling into marrow. 

Simply put: you're not enough. You knew this, and yet—

Pursued, persisted. Laughably, even echoed the same words you repeat now to a man on the verge of going nuclear under the pressure of his rage, his grief. 

It's impossible to make a levee out of skin and bones, and no matter how much Bear might want to try—maybe has tried with his late wife, with a bottle, with vice, with bloodied, bruised knuckles and a chip on his shoulder deeper than a canyon—it's just not feasible. 

Too bad, you think, that this bone-weary epiphany didn't come sooner. That you didn't kick him out when you realised those beautiful valleys in his eyes were really just trenches. 

Hindsight, of course.

(How were you supposed to know that the rough growl in his timber wasn't a security blanket against the world but just the aftereffects of inhaling too much artillery fire?)

You should have, though. Your mum was a how-to manual on the things to avoid. She could channel wisdom directly from a man's marrow, and you—made in her spitting (vitriolic) image—seem to have learned nothing at all about divination. 

And you—forgotten ilk—can barely tell the difference between a portend and good fortune when you sift through clumps of barley tea at the bottom of your cup. 

For all of her stolen wisdom, you make a promise to yourself that you won't tear yourself into pieces just to make a safety net for him out of your flesh. Or set yourself on fire to keep him warm. 

(Not anymore, anyway—)

But then, cruelly, viciously, you wonder if you ever really helped him at all, or if this is just a manifestation to assuage your own guilt. Doubtless, you find. What have you done for him that wasn't, in some part, mutually beneficial? All this time, you've been gambling equivalence with a broken man, and then ran the moment those jagged pieces cut you. 

And maybe a little bit of this hesitancy is rooted in fear as well. A fickle thing you try to ignore in favour of something that makes you seem more altruistic than you really are, but still lurks in the shadows, in the words you, too, won't say. 

Things like: 

He's never met you sober. Not completely. And certainly not in a way that counts. 

Each interaction is marred with some form of a buffer between you both. Distance shaped in sips of his (fourth, fifth) beer; a shot of whisky. 

What if he doesn't like what he finds sober? 

You heard enough jokes at the bar about falling in love drunk and then waking up sober. If this is that, you don't know how you'd regain any sense of ground back. 

The precipice you clawed your way up to is endlessly steep, treacherous, and yet: you still let yourself fall. Still took the risk in opening your hand just to show him your still-beating heart. 

Return to the sender, you think a touch hysterically, deliriously. 

In the suffocating silence, his voice rings out. Quiet, rough, as if his vocal cords were made of charred wood, smouldering embers, and not warm, wet tissue. It's just your name, but the sound of it seems to drag you down to yourself, if only in increments.

“You good?” He asks when you hum noncommittally in response. 

With your forehead braced against the slope of your knee, it feels like bowing your head in a confessional when you whisper, paper soft, “I'm tired, Bear.”

It sounds like he is chewing on glass when he sighs. Throat torn, raw. The ghost of it whispers across your chin; fingerprints tapping over a tender bruise. 

“Haven’t been sleeping much these last few days. Been thinkin’ of us. Of you. And the team. All the people I let down—”

“Bear…” 

“And I—I want to see you soon. When you're ready. I'm not going to rush things this time. Not gonna mess it up again—”

He speaks like this is settled. Over. As if you've already climbed into the palm of his hand, and all he has to do is just close you up tight in his fist. A little flower he can carry around in his pocket. Kept safe. Kept close. 

It's—

A lot. Overwhelming. He sounds sober enough, and you know that he's not wholly dependent on drinking—it’s palliative; a coping mechanism to numb himself from the reality of everything else that happened to him—but there's a real crutch there that can't be erased by determination alone. But thinking about that—the future—makes your chest feel like it's going to cave in on itself; collapse and become another black hole in the Milky Way, swallowing everything down. 

You need to breathe. You need to think—

“You should get some sleep, Bear. And—”

Don't drink. Stop. Get help. Talk to someone. 

But the words are empty. Hollow vessels to placate your sense of responsibility. Your own guilt. 

Coward. You've always been so good at running—

“Take care of yourself.” 

“Yeah,” he rasps. The hushed timbre makes you tremble. “You too. Get some sleep. I'll talk to you in the morning.”

And so, this delicate dance made of putting duct tape over fractured promises and palliating the sickness in patchwork hope begins again, working in pieces. 

There's a distance that lingers between the folds of you both, unspoken hurt and distrust—a lingering symptom of letting yourself get swept away by the idea of a man rather than the flesh and bone cut of one—but despite it all, each misgiving that passes your mind when you see Bear’s name flash across the cracked screen of your phone, it works. 

Somehow, somehow. 

It isn't as deep as missing puzzle pieces, because as much as you and Bear seem to connect on a level beyond sex, and booze, and fleeting highs to numb a phantom ache in the pit of your chest, the idea of soulmates seems to be frangible for your fractured selves; with all of your jagged, sharp edges, something so soft would break into pieces, shatter apart. But it is something. 

And that might just be enough. So, you let it root. Let it grow limbs, and leaves, and curl around you like gentle, strangling wisteria until it reaches up to your chest. 

This delicate, fragile thing makes a home, again, inside the empty landscape of your heart.

(shame on me, you think, but still pick up his call as this tender, soft thing you're nurturing snakes across your jugular where it's the warmest, leeching heat from the fever that thrums under your skin.)

Despite his bold declaration, though, he seems to waver on a full pursuit. Content, almost, to maintain this idea of closeness without shattering the bubble you've reconstructed. 

It's odd, though. 

Bear is a man who seeks logic out but always ends up relying on his hunches. Emotional in the sense that he places all confidence in himself beyond the scope of what he might be able to deliver. If his determination can't bring him across the finish line—well, then it was unwinnable from the start. 

For a man so tenacious, so driven, his hesitation in all of this surprises you. 

But something has to give eventually. 

It always does.

Bear isn't terrible at texting, but he prefers phone calls. Something he admits has less to do with his occupation (no, I won't have to kill you for telling you this, you need to stop believing what you see on tv), and is more just a way of gleaning nuances he can't with written word. 

Though, not always. 

There's a softness when he speaks tonight, a quality you're unfamiliar with, as he confesses on a hushed memory, half musing aloud when the world is dead asleep and the sun is a distant idea in the back of your head, that he used to write letters to his wife whenever they weren't on the phone talking. Or Skyping each other. 

“Deployment with a group of guys doesn't leave much room for privacy,” he says, as if he hasn't just unravelled this hidden part of himself at three fifteen on what was meant to be a rather mundane ending to your Thursday. “They're not really, uh, sensitive to that. We're on top of each other for most of it, anyway. Asking a whole room to clear out just so I can talk isn't happening. So, uh, we—uh, me and Lena, we wrote letters.”

There's a stutter in his voice when he relays this to you, and you're struck numb by it all. Lena, you think, putting a name to a concept. 

“Oh,” you say, and you're not sure what to think about it. So, you don't. You tuck it aside, where all the other things you've learned about Bear go. The ones revealed to you in shambles. “That sounds— romantic. ”

It makes him scoff, and it's this terrible, broken thing. “Romantic, huh? Is that what you think?” 

You hum, taking it in. The grand reveal of his ex-wife (she… we, he corrects and clears his throat like it burns: we decided to separate. See, uh… see other people), and his marital problems, you connect the dots lingering in the foreground. 

You're not completely ignorant of his intentions. 

It's the first move on a fresh chessboard: a show of his commitment to this—whatever it might be—and how serious he's taking it all. Where you'd been the only one to dare pry open the rusted nails keeping your secrets at bay before, he's taking the initiative to do so now, to meet you somewhere in the middle where the olive branch still grows. Placing his bets before the race. Offering himself, and his secrets, up as collateral in this strange game you found yourself in. 

But does he know that you can still hear the slight slur in his voice when he speaks, or notice the way he seems to skirt around the conversation of his drinking habits on the days when it must be hitting him harder? Surely, he must. 

And yet, he still calls. Still decides to gamble with your devotion in maintaining a strange facsimile of friendship with whisky on his breath, slurring his words, and gives out the pretence of playing for keeps under the table. 

Maybe he knows you'll still give him the chance to keep playing no matter how many times his luck runs dry. It makes sense, considering. 

You'd always had a weakness for men like him. 

(Stupid—)

Outside of the tipsy phone calls, you've yet to hear him completely gone. A testament to his dedication, maybe, but you know the first week is always the easiest. When the high of the epiphany roars through their bloodstream, and the weight of the world doesn't feel as crushing as it once had, it's easy to make deals you don't have the means of keeping up with. But the debt is insurmountable to those who aren't fully invested, and the collectors are vicious. 

Still. Still. 

This is as close to sobriety as he's ever been, and you soak up his unbridled attention like you're starving for it. 

And in all honesty, you are. 

Bear is a strange, complex web of a man. Full of grit, anger. Misery curls in the corners of his eyes, hidden there amongst the powder keg of obsessive devotion just waiting to go off. You scented kerosene on his skin—napalm drenching his pores—when he'd lifted two fingers up and nearly snarled his order from across stained cedar wood. 

Having the brunt of his fire listing your way is a character study in restraint, in penance. It taps against the delicate binds holding everything back, and loosens the ties with every piece of him you're given. 

It's hard, you think, to stay so far away from someone when you're wobbling on the brink of devotion. Love, in shades of obsession. The taste of which settles in the back of your throat like a sickness, aching each time you swallow. 

You're not sure what it is about Bear, about this particular brand of miserable, angry man, but his very existence feels like it was constructed, handspun, to make you hunger for a taste. 

And then, you know. It's just that, isn't it? Miserable, angry man. 

(saviour complex, maybe. maybe, maybe, maybe—)

It feels deeper than that, though. It might have been the cause for this unravelling, this unmaking between you both, but the rest—the helplessness and the anger and the worry; answering his call even when you swore you wouldn't, leaving him in the motel room like a bad dream smeared across your pillow only to pick him up again, another bad habit in a sea of others—is than just a simple desire to fix problems that are not your own. 

(especially when they aren't your own.)

“Never really been the romance type,” he rumbles, shattering this strange, introspective reverie you've fallen into. 

“You seem to be doing okay for yourself, though,” you volley back, a touch too cautious compared to how it all was before. When you'd read him his horoscope, and pester him about trying your audacious food combinations he'd complain about, but eat, anyway. 

“Is that what you think?”

“It's what I know.”

You expect him to pick up your jab, turning it on you instead. Something caustic, something severe. Something equally mean and mordant in the way only Bear could be. But he doesn't. He lets it fall to the wayside instead, humming under his breath in something that might be acquiescence, or maybe avoidance of the topic entirely, and shifts back into neutral territory. 

How was your day? He asks, as if that wasn't one of the first things he'd said to you when you answered the call.

“Fine,” you hedge, breezing the word out between your teeth. “It was okay. Bear—”

“I, uh, have a meeting tomorrow,” he steamrolls through your concern like it's made of paper instead of the broken remnants of your heartache. “Another eval., to see if I'm fit to return to training. Make my way back to being an Officer.” 

More secrets are revealed to you in the slow dawn of his unfurling fist. Held out like a beacon, a piece of candy. Good job, it says when you reach for it like the good, obedient dog you are. 

Pavlov's finest. 

“That sounds…” You're not really sure what it means, in all honesty. Words coming together to form a sentence. The meaning is absent from between the lines. You could infer, but you've never been good at guessing. So, you stagnate. “Good. Um, really good, Bear.”

He huffs, and you take it as a laugh—or as close to one you'll get from him. “Gotta pass the eval first.”

“Should be easy for you.” 

“Should be,” he mumbles, and you catch the faint end of a muffled groan. “But I've been slacking. Put on extra weight. Need to burn it all off before I can really get into the old routine. Gonna fall behind worse than a newbie.”

Newbie being growled out in his flat intonation makes you snort. 

“You find something funny? ”

“Ha, no—” his words turn over in your head—put on extra weight—and, damningly, you remember what all that extra weight felt like, stretched out beneath you; arched over your body, heavy and suffocating, and—

Fuck. 

Bear catches the hitch in your breath, and makes a questioning noise in response. You can't let him ask. Can't let him know that you keep painting a picture of his hairy belly brushing against yours in the forefront of your mind. His biceps. Burly is what you'd thought of him before. Thick. Husky. A heavy man, in more ways than one. 

The softness around his waist belied the hard muscles below. You could feel it pressing firm against your palm when he rolled under you, bracing your hands over his chest as he let you ride him. 

That's it, sweetheart. Just like that—

“No,” you swallow around the desire welling up inside of your throat. “Nothing.”

He hums, and it's tainted in disbelief. Like he knows, somehow, what you were thinking of. What you keep thinking of—especially after these phone calls, his voicemails, when you're lying in bed with your fingers whispering between your thighs—and you almost expect him to call you out on it. To demand an answer. 

Instead, he offers a tender truth that nudges against the soft pulse in your throat. 

“...Not drinking as much helps.” 

You almost want to call him out on the as much he tacts on to the end of his confession, to question the logistics behind those two words. To quantify it in a number, in tangible data. Something concrete you can plinth your hope on. But the answer scares you. 

Too much and you'll fall all over again. Too little and you'll have no choice but to run. 

So, you retreat in the face of his truth. A coward. 

“That's—It's good. That's good, Bear—” and it is. Of course, it is. Great, even. He isn't even yours and this silly notion of pride staples itself to the front of your chest for the world to see. “I'm, um. I'm proud of you.”

It sounds hollow, pyrrhic, coming from you—repentant enabler—but the airiness in his voice strikes something deep inside. Pulses against a dormant place that comes alive, fecund with the bittersweet stirrings of hope germinating in the fibres. 

Skingraft over the wound. 

“Proud, huh?” 

And the sound of his voice cuts that thread as soon as it forms. 

His voice is pitched low, throaty. He draws the syllables out as he says, at length, “I, uh, keep thinking about you.” 

You should warn him away. Tap the impish fingers sneaking to the cookie jar—a thorough chastisement to keep wandering hands in check. Bad dog, is the passing thought, and you try to swallow down the hysterical giggle that bubbles in the back of your throat. 

You should.

But you don't. 

It comes out breathier than you intended when you say his name, and it sounds much too malleable in the face of this tactile man. 

“Been thinkin’ about you a lot.” 

“Yeah,” you whisper. Too much. Too much. “Same. Uh, me too.” 

“What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going out with some friends. Probably going to get dinner. Watch that new movie that just came out. And, um, have a few drinks after.”

“How're you getting home?” 

“Taxi, most likely.”

He hums low, throaty. The sound seems to reverberate through the phone and tremble deliciously down the length of your spine. “That so?”

“I'm not going to be drinking much.” You weigh the ethics of discussing your intentions to drink, to get completely wasted, and maybe go home with someone who isn't Bear, who doesn't even so much as look like him, before waving the thought away before it can take shape. “It's just—social. Getting caught up. Haven't seen them in a while because of school and stuff.”

And because you've invested so much of your free time spinning in circles around a man who didn't even really seem to look at you (who insisted on calling you kid to force distance and indifference between you) until a few months ago, letting your social life dawdle on the wayside. 

Not that there was ever much one. It's easier, sometimes, to push people away than to explain the inner workings of your borrowed scar tissue. 

He hums again—and he really needs to fucking stop doing that before you do something stupid, something reckless, like remember the way he sounded when he lifted his head up after coming deep inside of you, panting in your ear from exertion, and groaned just like that when he shifted forward, inching his softening cock further you, seemingly content to stay like that as you melted into the mattress that reeked of stale sweat and sex.

“I'll drive you.”

Your breath catches. “You don't have to.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, but it's decidedly noncommittal and comes completely undone when you catch the crackle of iron in his mulish tone as he adds: “but I want to.”

And he will, is the underlying promise that brims to the surface, wrapped up neatly in a way that brokers no real room for a counterargument. Not that he'll give you the chance to make one. 

Still. You try, if only to snatch at some modicum of control that slips, gossamer thin, between your fingers.

“It's fine. Making you go out all that way is kinda…”

“Don't worry about it. Beats paying for a cab, anyway.”

“Bear…”

It's firm when he says: “let me drive you home. Make sure you get there safely.” Final. But to soften the blow, he adds, voice tender like a bruise: “Just let me do this for you.” 

And how are you supposed to stay no to that?

“Okay, Bear.”

(Answer: you don't.)

[multi-fandom-imagine]

« Helping Hand || Joe Graves ||

A/n: He’s so hot! Help!

Tag List: @filliandkili , ilovedaddyprice , shadesofreyes

You and Joe have been together for years, having meet the man when you were treating one of his wounds and after that you’ve been together ever since and it wasn’t until a few months ago that you both started to try for a baby.

After the first few attempts, and when the negative tests started to roll in you both went to see the doctor, which lead him to this moment. Sitting in some room in a fertility clinic trying his best to collect a sperm sample.He tried everything besides the tapes and with a reluctant sigh he sat down unbuckling his pants, his hand slipping into his boxers as he slowly jerked himself off as his eyes were glued to the porn displayed on the screen.

He knew it should be turning him on, that he should have been hard by no but nothing was working but his thoughts were torn away when he heard a sudden knock on the door.

Gritting his teeth he fixed his pants yanking the door open about to yell at the doctor until he saw you.

“oh luv... what are you doing you can't be back here”

He glanced around then tugged you into the room locking the door, a light giggle escaping your lips.

“I just came in to help.”

Joe raised an eyebrow at your sly smile, a mixture of surprise and curiosity crossing his face. He stepped back, creating some distance as he lent back against the wall.

“Help me? How exactly do you plan on doing that?” he asked, his voice low and filled with skepticism.

Taking a step forward, you gave your husband a smirk. Your fingers trailing down his chest. “Well Hun, I was thinking about getting down on my knees, letting my lips wrap around your cock.” You turned your head and with a slight shrug of yours you glanced down to see his pants lose on his hips. “Or you can just fuck my tits.” Your voice dipped as your fingers slipped into his pants grasping his cock.

Your lips then trailed down his neck as you pulled your out of his pants. “Or I can do this.” You whispered as you rubbed your clothed pussy over his boxers.

Joe narrowed his eyes watching you straddled his lap only to feel you rub yourself against his boxers, a low growl escaping his lips at the sensation, a deep desire stirring within him.

"Naughty girl.” Licking his lips. “That’s it luv, make me cum.”His hands moved to grasp your hips, his fingers digging into your flesh as he guided your movements, encouraging you to roll your hips against his erection. Joe's breath came in shallow pants as he felt the friction building between you, his arousal growing with each tantalizing movement.

His lips found yours as he pulled you in for a passionate kiss.His tongue exploding your mouth with a hunger. His nails digging deeply into your hips feeling his erection straining against his boxers, desperate for a release. Breaking the kiss, his gaze focused on you, the whimpers escaping your lips, the little gaps.

"That’s it love, ride me.Make me cum. Make me fill that damn container," he murmured against your neck, his hands squeezing your ass.

You let out a weak laugh as you continued to hump him, your fingers freeing his erection from his boxers as the other grasped the container.

“Once you fill this cup Bear, I’m going to ride you and you’re going to fill my pussy like your going to do that container.”

Joe's eyes darkened with a mix of desire and amusement as he listened to your words. He could feel his cock twitch in anticipation as you freed him from his boxers, your fingers wrapping around his erection. The thought of filling the container and then filling your pussy with his cum sent a surge of lust through his veins.

Joe narrowed his eyes, a smirk slowly forming on his lips. “What a dirty mouth you have” he then gave your neck a nip. “You know me too well though, I can’t resist a challenge.I'll fill that damn container and then I'll fuck you hard until you're begging for more."

He watched intently as you positioned the container, ready to catch his release. Joe's hips moved in sync with yours, his cock sliding against your hand, the friction intensifying the pleasure building within him. He could feel himself nearing the edge, the familiar tightening in his balls signaling his impending orgasm.

Joe’s eyes glanced over, your fingers brushing the tip of his cock. “Fuck, keep going luv, Milk every drop, make me cum for you.”

Joe continued to move his hips his cock now thrusting in your hand as his movements becoming more desperate and erratic. He could feel the pressure building, his release close and with primal grunt, he finally reached his peak, his hot cum spurting into the container as he rode out his orgasm.

As the last pulse of pleasure subsided, Joe let out a deep breath, his chest heaving. He looked at the container, now filled with his essence, and then at you with a hungry gaze. A smirk on your lips as you slowly tightened the lid on the container, your fingers licking up and cum that might have spilled out.

"Now it's my turn, luv," he said, a wicked grin spreading across his face. "Get ready to be fucked senseless."

[angel5ofp0rn]

that’s it that’s the whole post

[frogchiro]

Imagine Phillip, Joe, and Price all fighting for your attention as they but heads with one another as they all want your hand in marriage. One day while Phillip and Price are arguing Joe takes you away and says that he will not be as bad as those brutal oafs so you should let him caught you

As he courts you he constantly leaves you high and dry so when he suggests marriage after a few months you agree to it as you finally will get to taste what has been denied to you and more

I WANNA KISS YOUR BRAIN

And not Joe basically edging poor you😭 He's a tough man, a born soldier and leader but he gets so soft-spoken around you :((

That deep rumbly voice of his crooning to you, wrapping his strong arms around you and keeping you warm if you ever get cold. You may wander off to do your stuff bc Laswell might need something from you and Joe goes from :> to >:( real quick when he spots that asshole Philip fighting with Price, their dick fights almost pathetic judging by the fact that they are full grown men pushing 40 and yet they fight like teen boys over precious you which makes you shy and skittish WHICH in turn takes Joe's time with you away >:(

However he knows that Philip nor John are particularly religious like he is and his want to wait for anything...intimate until marriage seems to make you frustrated and slightly jittery. Joe is quite touchy with people he's close to, and because he's very interested with you, he unconciously got a but touchier with you which yes, made you swoon but at the same time he leaves you high and dry bc of his believes :((

Joe know this is a big disadvantage and curses himself every time he sees Philip bullying you and getting all nice and close to you during training or while you both work on some technical stuff, Joe sometimes gets a infuriating look on how Philip gropes and runs his big rough hands all over your soft body, your quiet whines making the sly blonde only grin as he slips his hands under your shirt >:(

Fuck.

[lokidbadguy]

me 🤝 making dark barry sloane edit

[kalivodas]

Craving sum Fluff and comfort from John price 🙏🏻🙏🏻‼️‼️ how gentle and Wholesome he is whenever he's not deployed 😭😭

SNAKE IN MY BOOTS — john price

oh captain my captain we all chant in unison!! cod requests make my brain go brrrrr

warnings: she’s tending to his wounds this is so wattpad. descriptions of injury. ps i think the twisted part of me can’t really write fluff. so checks notes and shoves papers at u take this

IT WAS EVIL, had it not made your heartbeat run wild under your chest. it knocked on your ribs like an outstretched palm to a tall oak door.

john price was staring at you, gaze intent and heavy as his eyes drew. a familiar smile hung tight on his lips.

“i’ve missed ya, princess.” he purred. but his words and his eyes weren’t following what his hands were doing. calloused palms ran gingerly down his sides, cargos stained and caked in crimson that had dried into something brown, unrecognizable amongst the red dirt.

your gaze was menacing.

he was hurt, yet finally standing here infront of you for the first time in four, long, treacherous months. every spark in your brain wanted to jump on him. hold him to your chest and never let him walk out of that door again, world be damned.

“don’t distract me, john price,” is what come out of your mouth as you jumped to the soles of your feet. your hands fell in some sort of synchronous motion, arm looped in john’s thick one as you drug him off to the bathroom.

you let the toilet seat lid down and gesture your head there once. sit.

he huffed. “it’s not bad, just a graze wound.”

your head cocked to the side, eyebrows drawn high and unyielding. “i’ll show you a real graze wound if you don’t sit your ass down.”

his eyes roll, but his knees have already buckled. he sits, and that tight smile is splitting his face. his little spitfire.

he raises his arms high, lets you peel that sweaty dri-fit shirt off of him. you toss it in the sink, already running through the stain treatments you’re gonna attempt to scrub the sin out of it with.

being a military spouse came hand in hand with blood and grime. if it wasn’t caked on his face, or he hadn’t tracked it in, his clothes were adorned with it.

you stare at his graze wound. he meant knife wound in his lower belly, untreated and oozing crimson. you want to kiss his face, thank him for coming home to you in one piece as his beard tickles your cheeks.

a deeper part of you, the one that’s got two rows of pearls gingery grinding against one another, wants to smack him upside the fat of his skull. you throw a quarter in the wrongful conviction jar and hit him anyways.

“why wouldn’t you stop by medic, honey? i need you safe, not bleeding out on your way home.”

his palms find the fat of your hips, soothing. “i know, princess. i just figure only my wife could patch me up like i needed.”

guilt swells in the soft underbelly of you. conniving son of a bitch. john price had always been a man of solemn words, but he seemed to save the best ones for you.

silence blankets the two of you after that. you clean his wound, let the vice of his white knuckles clutch you unforgivingly when you flush it with alcohol. wrap it up nicely, pat his abdomen and place a cool, open-mouthed kiss there on his gauze.

he stares down at you, some filthy idea gaining traction on the backside of his mind when he sees your mouth so close to him.

couldn’t help it, he’d say. pretty wife on her knees, so forgiving and so damn sweet to him that he thought his heart might rot of out of his chest.

later that night, after you’d made him shower while you threw something together on the stove to satiate your husband’s vast appetite, you feel thick forearms wrap around your torso. constricting, yet gentle. like a snake who’d been taught to take his war-riddled boots off at the door.

his mouth finds it’s heaven on the right side of your neck, and he plants a few wet kisses there. the burn of his beard tickles, makes your head jerk and a snort fall from your mouth.

“i missed you,” he says. “i miss you horribly when i’m away.”

you want to reply, to snake your own arms tight around him and vow to let 141 go without its captain. you don’t get the chance.

“i can’t breathe when i’m not without you.” his hands find the supple of your ass, squeezes there and grins when you yelp. he urges your legs to wrap around his waist, and he sets you up on the counter between him.

his eyes are blown, the deep brown like whiskey that ignited heat in your cheeks. he kisses the scarlet there.

[turnstileskyline]

The Oral History of Take This To Your Grave – transcription under the cut

The pages that are just photographs, I haven't included. This post is already long enough.

Things that happened in 2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California. Teen Vogue published its first issue. The world lost Johnny Cash. Johnny Depp appeared as Captain Jack Sparrow for the first time. A third Lord of the Rings movie arrived. Patrick Stump, Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, and Andy Hurley released Take This To Your Grave.

"About 21 years ago or so, as I was applying to colleges I would ultimately never go to, Fall Out Boy began as a little pop-punk side project of what we assumed was Pete's more serious band, Arma Angelus," Patrick wrote in a May 2023 social media post.

"We were sloppy and couldn't solidify a lineup, but the three of us (Pete, Joe, and I) were having way too much fun to give up on it."

"We were really rough around the edges. As an example of how rough, one of my favorite teachers pulled me aside after hearing the recording that would eventually become Evening Out With Your Girlfriend and tactfully said, 'What do you think your best instrument is, Patrick? Drums. It's drums. Probably not singing, Patrick.'"

"We went into Smart Studios with the Sean O'Keefe... So, there we were, 3/5 of a band with a singer who'd only been singing a year, no drummer, and one out of two guitarists. But we had the opportunity to record with Sean at Butch Vig's legendary studio.

"Eight or so months later, Fueled by Ramen would give us a contract to record the remaining songs. We'd sleep on floors, eat nothing but peanut butter and jelly, live in a van for the next three years, and somehow despite that, eventually play with Elton John and Taylor Swift and Jay-Z and for President Obama and the NFC championship, and all these other wildly unpredictable things. But none of that would ever come close to happening if Andy hadn't made it to the session and Joe hadn't dragged us kicking and screaming into being a band."

Two decades after its release, Take This To Your Grave sits comfortable in the Top 10 of Rolling Stone's 50 Greatest Pop-Punk Albums, edging out landmark records from Buzzcocks, Generation X, Green Day, The Offspring, Blink-182, and The Ramones.

It even ranked higher than Through Being Cool by Saves The Day and Jersey's Best Dancers from Lifetime, two records the guys in Fall Out Boy particularly revere.

Fall Out Boy's proper full-length debut on Fueled by Ramen is a deceptively smart, sugar-sweet, raw, energetic masterpiece owing as much to the bass player's pop culture passions, the singers deep love of R&B and soul, and their shared history in the hardcore scene as any pioneering punk band. Fall Out Boy's creative and commercial heights were still ahead, but Take This To Your Grave kicked it off, a harbinger for the enduring songwriting partnership between Patrick Stump and Pete Wentz, the eclectic contributions from Joe Trohman, and the propulsive powerhouse that is Andy Hurley.

The recordings document a special moment when Fall Out Boy was big in "the scene" but a "secret" from the mainstream. The band (and some of their friends) first sat down for an Oral History (which doubled as an Oral History of their origin story) with their old friend Ryan J. Downey, then Senior Editor for Alternative Press, upon the occasion of the album's 10th anniversary. What follows is an updated, sharper, and expanded version of that story, newly re-edited in 2023. As Patrick eloquently said: "Happy 20th birthday, Take This To Your Grave, you weird brilliant lightning strike accident of a record."

– Ryan J. Downey.

A Weird, Brilliant Lightning Strike Of A Record. The Oral History Of Fall Out Boy's Take This To Your Grave.

As told by:

Patrick Stump

Pete Wentz

Joe Trohman

Andy Hurley

Bob McLynn - Crush Music

Sean O'Keefe - Producer/Mixer

John Janick - Fueled By Ramen

Tim McIlrath - Rise Against

Mani Mostofi - Racetraitor

Chris Gutierrez - Arma Angelus

Mark Rose - Spitalfield

Sean Muttaqi - Uprising Records

Rory Felton - The Militia Group

Richard Reines - Drive-Thru Records

"To Feel No More Bitterness Forever" - From Hardcore to Softcore, 1998-2000

PETE WENTZ: When I got into hardcore, it was about discovering the world beyond yourself. There was a culture of trying to be a better person. That was part of what was so alluring about hardcore and punk for me. But for whatever reason, it shifted. Maybe this was just in Chicago, but it became less about the thought process behind it and more about moshing and breakdowns. There was a close-mindedness that felt very reactive.

TIM MCILRITH: I saw First Born many years ago, which was the first time I saw Pete and met him around then. This was '90s hardcore - p.c., vegan, activist kind of hardcore music. Pete was in many of those bands doing that kind of thing, and I was at many of those shows. The hardcore scene in Chicago was pretty small, so everyone kind of knew each other. I knew Andy Hurley as the drummer in Racetraitor. I was in a band called Baxter, so Pete always called me 'Baxter.' I was just 'Baxter' to a lot of those guys.

JOE TROHMAN: I was a young hardcore kid coming to the shows. The same way we all started doing bands. You're a shitty kid who goes to punk and hardcore shows, and you see the other bands playing, and you want to make friends with those guys because you want to play in bands too. Pete and I had a bit of a connection because we're from the same area. I was the youngest dude at most shows. I would see Extinction, Racetraitor, Burn It Down, and all the bands of that era.

WENTZ: My driver's license was suspended then, so Joe drove me everywhere. We listened to either Metalcore like Shai Hulud or pop-punk stuff like Screeching Weasel.

MCILRITH: I was in a band with Pete called Arma Angelus. I was like their fifth or sixth bass player. I wasn't doing anything musically when they hit me up to play bass, so I said, 'Of course.' I liked everyone in the band. We were rehearsing, playing a few shows here and there, with an ever-revolving cast of characters. We recorded a record together at the time. I even sing on that record, believe it or not, they gave me a vocal part. Around that same time, I began meeting with [bassist] Joe [Principe] about starting what would become Rise Against.

CHRIS GUTIERREZ: Wentz played me the Arma Angelus demo in the car. He said he wanted it to be a mix of Despair, Buried Alive, and Damnation A.D. He told me Tim was leaving to start another band - which ended up being Rise Against - and asked if I wanted to play bass.

TROHMAN: Pete asked me to fill in for a tour when I was 15. Pete had to call my dad to convince him to let me go. He did it, too. It was my first tour, in a shitty cargo van, with those dudes. They hazed the shit out of me. It was the best and worst experience. Best overall, worst at the time.

GUTIERREZ: Enthusiasm was starting to wane in Arma Angelus. Our drummer was really into cock-rock. It wasn't an ironic thing. He loved L.A. Guns, Whitesnake, and Hanoi Rocks. It drove Pete nuts because the scene was about Bleeding Through and Throwdown, not cock rock. He was frustrated that things weren't panning out for the band, and of course, there's a ceiling for how big a metalcore band can get, anyway.

MANI MOSTOFI: Pete had honed this tough guy persona, which I think was a defense mechanism. He had some volatile moments in his childhood. Underneath, he was a pretty sensitive and vulnerable person. After playing in every mosh-metal band in the Midwest and listening exclusively to Earth Crisis, Damnation A.D., Chokehold, and stuff like that for a long time, I think Pete wanted to do something fresh. He had gotten into Lifetime, Saves The Day, The Get Up Kids, and bands like that. Pete was at that moment where the softer side of him needed an outlet, and didn't want to hide behind mosh-machismo. I remember him telling me he wanted to start a band that more girls could listen to.

MCILRATH: Pete was talking about starting a pop-punk band. Bands like New Found Glory and Saves The Day were successful then. The whole pop-punk sound was accessible. Pete was just one of those guys destined for bigger things than screaming for mediocre hardcore bands in Chicago. He's a smart guy, a brilliant guy. All the endeavors he had taken on, even in the microcosm of the 1990s Chicago hardcore world, he put a lot of though into it. You could tell that if he were given a bigger receptacle to put that thought into, it could become something huge. He was always talented: lyrics, imagery, that whole thing. He was ahead of the curve. We were in this hardcore band from Chicago together, but we were both talking about endeavors beyond it.

TROHMAN: The drummer for Arma Angelus was moving. Pete and I talked about doing something different. It was just Pete and me at first. There was this thuggishness happening in the Chicago hardcore scene at that time that wasn't part of our vibe. It was cool, but it wasn't our thing.

MCILRITH: One day at Arma Angelus practice, Pete asked me, 'Are you going to do that thing with Joe?' I was like, 'Yeah, I think so.' He was like, 'You should do that, dude. Don't let this band hold you back. I'll be doing something else, too. We should be doing other things.' He was really ambitious. It was so amazing to me, too, because Pete was a guy who, at the time, was kind of learning how to play the bass. A guy who didn't really play an instrument will do down in history as one of the more brilliant musicians in Chicago. He had everything else in his corner. He knew how to do everything else. He needed to get some guys behind him because he had the rest covered. He had topics, themes, lyrics, artwork, this whole image he wanted to do, and he was uncompromising. He also tapped into something the rest of us were just waking up to: the advent of the internet. I mean, the internet wasn't new, but higher-speed internet was.

MOSTOFI: Joe was excited to be invited by Pete to do a band. Joe was the youngest in our crew by far, and Pete was the 'coolest' in a Fonzie sort of way. Joe deferred to Pete's judgement for years. But eventually, his whole life centered around bossy big-brother Pete. I think doing The Damned Things was for Joe what Fall Out Boy was for Pete, in a way. It was a way to find his own space within the group of friends. Unsurprisingly, Joe now plays a much more significant role in Fall Out Boy's music.

WENTZ: I wanted to do something easy and escapist. When Joe and I started the band, it was the worst band of all time. I feel like people said, 'Oh, yeah, you started Fall Out Boy to get big.' Dude, there was way more of a chance of every other band getting big in my head than Fall Out Boy. It was a side thing that was fun to do. Racetraitor and Extinction were big bands to me. We wanted to do pop-punk because it would be fun and hilarious. It was definitely on a lark. We weren't good. If it was an attempt at selling out, it was a very poor attempt.

MCILRITH: It was such a thing for people to move from hardcore bands to bands called 'emo' or pop-punk, as those bands were starting to get some radio play and signed to major labels. Everyone thought it was easy, but it's not as easy as that. Most guys we knew who tried it never did anything more successful than their hardcore bands. But Pete did it! And if anyone was going to, it was going to be him. He never did anything half-assed. He ended up playing bass in so many bands in Chicago, even though he could barely play the bass then, because simply putting him in your band meant you'd have a better show. He was just more into it. He knew more about dynamics, about getting a crowd to react to what you're doing than most people. Putting Pete in your band put you up a few notches.

"I'm Writing You A Chorus And Here Is Your Verse" - When Pete met Patrick, early 2001.

MARK ROSE: Patrick Stump played drums in this grindcore band called Grinding Process. They had put out a live split cassette tape.

PATRICK STUMP: My ambition always outweighed my ability or actual place in the world. I was a drummer and played in many bands and tried to finagle my way into better ones but never really managed. I was usually outgunned by the same two guys: this guy Rocky Senesce; I'm not sure if he's playing anymore, but he was amazing. And this other guy, De'Mar Hamilton, who is now in Plain White T's. We'd always go out for the same bands. I felt like I was pretty good, but then those guys just mopped the floor with me. I hadn't been playing music for a few months. I think my girlfriend dumped me. I was feeling down. I wasn't really into pop-punk or emo. I think at the time I was into Rhino Records box sets.

TROHMAN: I was at the Borders in Eden's Plaza in Wilmette, Illinois. My friend Arthur was asking me about Neurosis. Patrick just walked up and started talking to me.

STUMP: I was a bit arrogant and cocky, like a lot of young musicians. Joe was talking kind of loudly and I overheard him say something about Neurosis, and I think I came in kind of snotty, kind of correcting whatever they had said.

TROHMAN: We just started talking about music, and my buddy Arthur got shoved out of the conversation. I told him about the band we were starting. Pete was this local hardcore celebrity, which intrigued Patrick.

STUMP: I had similar conversations with any number of kids my age. This conversation didn't feel crazy special. That's one of the things that's real about [Joe and I meeting], and that's honest about it, that's it's not some 'love at first sight' thing where we started talking about music and 'Holy smokes, we're going to have the best band ever!' I had been in a lot of bands up until then. Hardcore was a couple of years away from me at that point. I was over it, but Pete was in real bands; that was interesting. Now I'm curious and I want to do this thing, or at least see what happens. Joe said they needed a drummer, guitar player, or singer, and I kind of bluffed and said I could do any one of those things for a pop-punk band. I'd had a lot of conversations about starting bands where I meet up with somebody and maybe try to figure out some songs and then we'd never see each other again. There were a lot of false starts and I assumed this would be just another one of those, but it would be fun for this one to be with the guy from Racetraitor and Extinction.

TROHMAN: He gave me the link to his MP3.com page. There were a few songs of him just playing acoustic and singing. He was awesome.

WENTZ: Joe told me we were going to this kid's house who would probably be our drummer but could also sing. He sent me a link to Patrick singing some acoustic thing, but the quality was so horrible it was hard to tell what it was. Patrick answered the door in some wild outfit. He looked like an emo kid but from the Endpoint era - dorky and cool. We went into the basement, and he was like, trying to set up his drums.

TROHMAN: Patrick has said many times that he intended to try out on drums. I was pushing for him to sing after hearing his demos. 'Hey! Sing for us!' I asked him to take out his acoustic guitar. He played songs from Saves The Day's Through Being Cool. I think he sang most of the record to us. We were thrilled. We had never been around someone who could sing like that.

WENTZ: I don't think Patrick thought we were cool at all. We were hanging out, and he started playing acoustic guitar. He started singing, and I realized he could sing any Saves The Day song. I was like, 'Wow, that's the way those bands sound! We should just have you sing.' It had to be serendipity because Patrick drumming and Joe singing is not the same band. I never thought about singing. It wasn't the type of thing I could sing. I knew I'd be playing bass. I didn't think it'd even go beyond a few practices. It didn't seem like the thing I was setting myself up to do for the next several years of my life in any way. I was going to college. It was just a fun getaway from the rest of life kind of thing to do.

STUMP: Andy was the first person we asked to play drums. Joe even brought him up in the Borders conversation. But Andy was too busy. He wasn't really interested, either, because we kind of sucked.

WENTZ: I wanted Hurley in the band, I was closest to him at the time, I had known him for a long time. I identified with him in the way that we were the younger dudes in our larger group. I tried to get him, but he was doing another band at the time, or multiple bands. He was Mani's go-to guy to play drums, always. I had asked him a few times. That should clue people into the fact that we weren't that good.

ANDY HURLEY: I knew Joe as 'Number One Fan.' We called him that because he was a huge fan of a band I was in, Kill The Slavemaster. When Fall Out Boy started, I was going to college full-time. I was in the band Project Rocket and I think The Kill Pill then, too.

MOSTOFI: After they got together the first or second time, Pete played me a recording and said, 'This is going to be big.' They had no songs, no name, no drummer. They could barely play their instruments. But Pete knew, and we believed him because we could see his drive and Patrick's potential. Patrick was prodigy. I imagine the first moment Pete heard him sing was probably like when I heard 15-year-old Andy Hurley play drums.

GUTIERREZ: One day at practice, Pete told me he had met some dudes with whom he was starting a pop-punk band. He said it would sound like a cross between New Found Glory and Lifetime. Then the more Fall Out Boy started to practice, the less active Arma Angelus became.

TROHMAN: We got hooked up with a friend named Ben Rose, who became our original drummer. We would practice in his parents' basement. We eventually wrote some pretty bad songs. I don't even have the demo. I have copies of Arma's demo, but I don't have that one.

MOSTOFI: We all knew that hardcore kids write better pop-punk songs than actual pop-punk kids. It had been proven. An experienced hardcore musician could bring a sense of aggression and urgency to the pop hooks in a way that a band like Yellowcard could never achieve. Pete and I had many conversations about this. He jokingly called it 'Softcore,' but that's precisely what it was. It's what he was going for. Take This To Your Grave sounds like Hot Topic, but it feels like CBGBs.

MCILRITH: Many hardcore guys who transitioned into pop-punk bands dumbed it down musically and lyrically. Fall Out Boy found a way to do it that wasn't dumbed down. They wrote music and lyrics that, if you listened closely, you could tell came from people who grew up into hardcore. Pete seemed to approach the song titles and lyrics the same way he attacked hardcore songs. You could see his signature on all of that.

STUMP: We all had very different ideas of what it should sound like. I signed up for Kid Dynamite, Strike Anywhere, or Dillinger Four. Pete was very into Lifetime and Saves The Day. I think both he and Joe were into New Found Glory and Blink-182. I still hadn't heard a lot of stuff. I was arrogant; I was a rock snob. I was over most pop-punk. But then I had this renaissance week where I was like, 'Man, you know what? I really do like The Descendents.' Like, the specific week I met Joe, it just happened to be that I was listening to a lot of Descendents. So, there was a part of me that was tickled by that idea. 'You know what? I'll try a pop-punk band. Why not?'

MOSTOFI: To be clear, they were trying to become a big band. But they did it by elevating radio-friendly pop punk, not debasing themselves for popularity. They were closely studying Drive-Thru Records bands like The Starting Line, who I couldn't stand. But they knew what they were doing. They extracted a few good elements from those bands and combined them with their other influences. Patrick never needed to be auto-tuned. He can sing. Pete never had to contrive this emotional depth. He always had it.

STUMP: The ideas for band names were obnoxious. At some point, Pete and I were arguing over it, and I think our first drummer, Ben Rose, who was in the hardcore band Strength In Numbers, suggested Fall Out Boy. Pete and I were like, 'Well, we don't hate that one. We'll keep it on the list.' But we never voted on a name.

"Fake It Like You Matter" - The Early Shows, 2001

The name Fall Out Boy made their shortlist, but their friends ultimately chose it for them. The line-up at the band's first show was Patrick Stump (sans guitar), Pete Wentz, Joe Trohman, drummer Ben Rose, and guitarist John Flamandan in his only FOB appearance.

STUMP: We didn't have a name at our two or three shows. We were basically booked as 'Pete's new band' as he was the most known of any of us. Pete and I were the artsy two.

TROHMAN: The rest of us had no idea what we were doing onstage.

STUMP: We took ourselves very seriously and completely different ideas on what was 'cool.' Pete at the time was somewhere between maybe Chuck Palahniuk and Charles Bukowski, and kind of New Romantic and Manchester stuff, so he had that in mind. The band names he suggested were long and verbose, somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I was pretty much only into Tom Waits, so I wanted everything to be a reference to Tom Waits. The first show was at DePaul [University] in some cafeteria. The room looked a lot nicer than punk rock shows are supposed to look, like a room where you couldn't jump off the walls. We played with a band called Stillwell. I want to say one of the other bands played Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath in its entirety. We were out of place. We were tossing a few different names around. The singer for Stillwell was in earshot of the conversation so I was like 'Hey, settle this for us,' and told him whatever name it was, which I can't remember. 'What do you think of this name?' He goes, 'It sucks.' And the way he said it, there was this element to it, like, 'You guys probably suck, too, so whatever.' That was our first show. We played first and only had three songs. That was John's only show with us, and I never saw him again. I was just singing without a guitar, and I had never just sung before; that was horrifying. We blazed through those songs.

ROSE: Patrick had this shoulder-length hair. Watching these guys who were known for heavier stuff play pop-punk was strange. Pete was hopping around with the X's on his hands. Spitalfield was similar; we were kids playing another style of music who heard Texas Is The Reason and Get Up Kids and said, 'We have to start a band like this.'

MOSTOFI: The first show was a lot of fun. The musical side wasn't there, but Pete and Patrick's humor and charisma were front and center.

TROHMAN: I remember having a conversation with Mani about stage presence. He was telling me how important it was. Coalesce and The Dillinger Escape Plan would throw mic stands and cabinets. We loved that visual excitement and appeal. Years later, Patrick sang a Fall Out Boy song with Taylor Swift at Giants Stadium. It was such a great show to watch that I was reminded of how wise Mani was to give me that advice back then. Mani was like a mentor for me, honestly. He would always guide me through stuff.

MOSTOFI: Those guys grew up in Chicago, either playing in or seeing Extinction, Racetraitor, Los Crudos, and other bands that liked to talk and talk between songs. Fall Out Boy did that, and it was amazing. Patrick was awkward in a knowing and hilarious way. He'd say something odd, and then Pete would zing him. Or Pete would try to say something too cool, and Patrick would remind him they were nerds. These are very personal memories for me. Millions of people have seen the well-oiled machine, but so few of us saw those guys when they were so carefree.

TROHMAN: We had this goofy, bad first show, but all I can tell you was that I was determined to make this band work, no matter what.

STUMP: I kind of assumed that was the end of that. 'Whatever, on with our lives.' But Joe was very determined. He was going to pick us up for practice and we were going to keep playing shows. He was going to make the band happen whether the rest of us wanted to or not. That's how we got past show number one. John left the band because we only had three songs and he wasn't very interested. In the interim, I filled in on guitar. I didn't consider myself a guitar player. Our second show was a college show in Southern Illinois or something.

MCILRITH: That show was with my other band, The Killing Tree.

STUMP: We showed up late and played before The Killing Tree. There was no one there besides the bands and our friends. I think we had voted on some names. Pete said 'Hey, we're whatever!'; probably something very long. And someone yells out, 'Fuck that, no, you're Fall Out Boy!' Then when The Killing Tree was playing, Tim said, 'I want to thank Fall Out Boy.' Everyone looked up to Tim, so when he forced the name on us, it was fine. I was a diehard Simpsons fan, without question. I go pretty deep on The Simpsons. Joe and I would just rattle off Simpsons quotes. I used to do a lot of Simpsons impressions. Ben was very into Simpsons; he had a whole closet full of Simpsons action figures.

"If Only You Knew I Was Terrified" - The Early Recordings, 2002-2003

Wentz's relationships in the hardcore scene led to Fall Out Boy's first official releases. A convoluted and rarely properly explained chain of events resulted in the Fall Out Boy/Project Rocket split EP and Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend. Both were issued by California's Uprising Records, whose discography included Racetraitor's first album and the debut EP by Burn It Down. The band traveled to Wisconsin to record their first proper demo with engineer Jared Logan, drummer for Uprising's 7 Angels 7 Plagues.

TROHMAN: This isn't to be confused with the demo we did in Ben's basement, which was like a tape demo. This was our first real demo.

STUMP: Between booking the demo and recording it, we lost Ben Rose. He was the greatest guy, but it wasn't working out musically. Pete and Joe decided I should play drums on the demo. But Jared is a sick drummer, so he just did it.

TROHMAN: We had gotten this great singer but went through a series of drummers that didn't work out. I had to be the one who kicked Ben out. Not long after, our friend Brett Bunting played with us. I don't think he really wanted to do it, which was a bummer.

STUMP: I showed up to record that demo, feeling pulled into it. I liked hanging out with the guys, but I was a rock snob who didn't really want to be making that type of music. The first few songs were really rough. We were sloppy. We barely practiced. Pete was in Arma Angelus. Joe was the guy determined to make it happen. We couldn't keep a drummer or guitar player, and I could barely play guitar. I didn't really want to be in Fall Out Boy. We had these crappy songs that kind of happened; it didn't feel like anything. Joe did the guitars. I go in to do the vocals, I put on the headphones, and it starts playing and was kind of not bad! It was pretty good, actually. I was shocked. That was the first time I was like, 'Maybe I am supposed to be in this band.' I enjoyed hearing it back.

SEAN MUTTAQI: Wentz and I were pretty tight. He sent me some demos, and while I didn't know it would get as big as it did, I knew it was special. Wentz had a clear vision. Of all the guys from that scene, he was the most singularly focused on taking things to the next level. He was ahead of the game with promotion and the early days of social media.

STUMP: Arma Angelus had been on Eulogy. We talked to them a bit and spoke to Uprising because they had put out Racetraitor. At some point, the demo got to Sean, and he decided to make it half of a split with Andy's band, Project Rocket. We were pretty happy with that.

HURLEY: It was kind of competitive for me at the time. Project Rocket and Fall Out Boy were both doing pop-punk/pop-rock, I met Patrick through the band. I didn't really know him before Fall Out Boy.

TROHMAN: We got this drummer, Mike Pareskuwicz, who had been in a hardcore band from Central Illinois called Subsist.

STUMP: Uprising wanted us to make an album. We thought that was cool, but we only had those three songs that were on the split. We were still figuring ourselves out. One of the times we were recording with Jared in the studio, for the split or the album, this guy T.J. Kunasch was there. He was like, 'Hey, do you guys need a guitarist?' And he joined.

MUTTAQI: I borrowed some money to get them back in the studio. The songwriting was cool on that record, but it was all rushed. The urgency to get something out led to the recording being subpar. Their new drummer looked the part but couldn't really play. They had already tracked the drums before they realized it didn't sound so hot.

STUMP: The recording experience was not fun. We had two days to do an entire album. Mike was an awesome dude, but he lived crazy far away, in Kanakee, Illinois, so the drive to Milwaukee wasn't easy for him. He had to work or something the next day. So, he did everything in one take and left. He played alone, without a click, so it was a ness to figure out. We had to guess where the guitar was supposed to go. None of us liked the songs because we had slapped them together. We thought it all sucked. But I thought, 'Well, at least it'll be cool to have something out.' Then a lot of time went by. Smaller labels were at the mercy of money, and it was crazy expensive to put out a record back then.

MUTTAQI: Our record was being rushed out to help generate some interest, but that interest was building before we could even get the record out. We were beholden to finances while changing distribution partners and dealing with other delays. The buck stops with me, yes, but I didn't have that much control over the scheduling.

WENTZ: It's not what I would consider the first Fall Out Boy record. Hurley isn't on it and he's an integral part of the Fall Out Boy sound. But it is part of the history, the legacy. NASA didn't go right to the moon. They did test flights in the desert. Those are our test flights in the desert. It's not something I'm ashamed of or have weird feelings about.

STUMP: It's kind of embarrassing to me. Evening Out... isn't representative of the band we became. I liked Sean a lot, so it's nothing against him. If anybody wants to check out the band in that era, I think the split EP is a lot cooler. Plus, Andy is on that one.

TROHMAN: T.J. was the guy who showed up to the show without a guitar. He was the guy that could never get it right, but he was in the band for a while because we wanted a second guitar player. He's a nice dude but wasn't great to be in a band with back then. One day he drove unprompted from Racine to Chicago to pick up some gear. I don't know how he got into my parents' house, but the next thing I knew, he was in my bedroom. I didn't like being woken up and kicked him out of the band from bed.

STUMP: Our friend Brian Bennance asked us to do a split 7" with 504 Plan, which was a big band to us. Brian offered to pay for us to record with Sean O'Keefe, which was also a big deal. Mike couldn't get the time off work to record with us. We asked Andy to play on the songs. He agreed to do it, but only if he could make it in time after recording an entire EP with his band, The Kill Pill, in Chicago, on the same day.

MOSTOFI: Andy and I started The Kill Pill shortly after Racetraitor split up, not long after Fall Out Boy had formed. We played a bunch of local shows together. The minute Andy finished tracking drums for our EP in Chicago, he raced to the other studio in Madison.

STUMP: I'm getting ready to record the drums myself, getting levels and checking the drums, pretty much ready to go. And then in walks Andy Hurley. I was a little bummed because I really wanted to play drums that day. But then Andy goes through it all in like two takes and fucking nailed the entire thing. He just knocked it out of the park. All of us were like, 'That's crazy!'

WENTZ: When Andy came in, It just felt different. It was one of those 'a-ha' moments.

STUMP: Sean leaned over to us and said, 'You need to get this guy in the band.'

SEAN O'KEEFE: We had a blast. We pumped It out. We did it fast and to analog tape. People believe it was very Pro Tools oriented, but it really was done to 24-track tape. Patrick sang his ass off.

STUMP: The songs we had were 'Dead On Arrival,' 'Saturday,' and 'Homesick at Space Camp. There are quite a few songs that ended up on Take This To You Grave where I wrote most of the lyrics but Pete titled them.

WENTZ: 'Space Camp' was a reference to the 1986 movie, SpaceCamp, and the idea of space camp. Space camp wasn't something anyone in my area went to. Maybe they did, but it was never an option for me. It seems like the little kid version of meeting Jay-Z. The idea was also: what if you, like Joaquin Phoenix in the movie, took off to outer space and wanted to get home? 'I made it to space and now I'm just homesick and want to hang out with my friends.' In the greater sense, it's about having it all, but it's still not enough. There's a pop culture reference in 'Saturday' that a lot of people miss. 'Pete and I attack the lost Astoria' was a reference to The Goonies, which was filmed in Astoria, Oregon.

HURLEY: I remember hearing those recordings, especially 'Dead on Arrival,' and Patrick's voice and how well written those songs were, especially relative to anything else I had done - I had a feeling that this could do something.

WENTZ: It seemed like it would stall out if we didn't get a solid drummer in the band soon. That was the link that we couldn't nail down. Patrick was always a big musical presence. He thinks and writes rhythmi-cally, and we couldn't get a drummer to do what he wanted or speak his language. Hurley was the first one that could. It's like hearing two drummers talk together when they really get it. It sounds like a foreign language because it's not something I'm keyed into. Patrick needed someone on a similar musical plane. I wasn't there. Joe was younger and was probably headed there.

HURLEY: When Patrick was doing harmonies, it was like Queen. He's such a brilliant dude. I was always in bands that did a record and then broke up. I felt like this was a band that could tour a lot like the hardcore bands we loved, even if we had to have day jobs, too.

"(Four) Tired Boys And A Broken Down Van" - The Early Tours, 2002-2003

STUMP: We booked a tour with Spitalfield, another Chicago band, who had records out, so they were a big deal to us. We replaced T.J. with a guy named Brandon Hamm. He was never officially in the band. He quit when we were practicing 'Saturday.' He goes, 'I don't like that. I don't want to do this anymore.' Pete talked with guitarist Chris Envy from Showoff, who had just broken up. Chris said, 'Yeah, I'll play in your band.' He came to two practices, then quit like two days before the tour. It was only a two-week tour, but Mike couldn't get the time off work from Best Buy, or maybe it was Blockbuster. We had to lose Mike, which was the hardest member change for me. It was unpleasant.

TROHMAN: We had been trying to get Andy to join the band for a while. Even back at that first Borders conversation, we talked about him, but he was too busy at the time.

STUMP: I borrowed one of Joe's guitars and jumped in the fire. We were in this legendarily shitty used van Pete had gotten. It belonged to some flower shop, so it had this ominously worn-out flower decal outside and no windows [except in the front]. Crappy brakes, no A/C, missing the rearview mirror, no seats in the back, only the driver's seat. About 10 minutes into the tour, we hit something. A tire exploded and slingshot into the passenger side mirror, sending glass flying into the van. We pulled over into some weird animal petting zoo. I remember thinking, 'This is a bad omen for this tour.' Spitalfield was awesome, and we became tight with them. Drew Brown, who was later in Weekend Nachos, was out with them, too. But most of the shows were canceled.

WENTZ: We'd end up in a town, and our show was canceled, or we'd have three days off. 'Let's just get on whatever show we can. Whatever, you can pay us in pizza.'

STUMP: We played in a pizza place. We basically blocked the line of people trying to order pizza, maybe a foot away from the shitty tables. Nobody is trying to watch a band. They're just there to eat pizza. And that was perhaps the biggest show we played on that tour. One of the best moments on the Spitalfied tour was in Lincoln, Nebraska. The local opener wasn't even there - they were at the bar across the street and showed up later with two people. Fall Out Boy played for Spitalfield, and Spitalfield played for Fall Out Boy. Even the sound guy had left. It was basically an empty room. It was miserable.

HURLEY: Even though we played a ton of shows in front of just the other bands, it was awesome. I've known Pete forever and always loved being in bands with him. After that tour, it was pretty much agreed that I would be in the band. I wanted to be in the band.

WENTZ: We would play literally any show in those days for free. We played Chain Reaction in Orange County with a bunch of metalcore bands. I want to say Underoath was one of them. I remember a lot of black shirts and crossed arms at those kinds of shows. STUMP: One thing that gets lost in the annals of history is Fall Out Boy, the discarded hardcore band. We played so many hardcore shows! The audiences were cool, but they were just like, 'This is OK, but we'd really rather be moshing right now.' Which was better than many of the receptions we got from pop-punk kids.

MOSTOFI: Pete made sure there was little division between the band and the audience. In hardcore, kids are encouraged to grab the mic. Pete was very conscious about making the crowd feel like friends. I saw them in Austin, Texas, in front of maybe ten kids. But it was very clear all ten of those kids felt like Pete's best friends. And they were, in a way.

MCILRITH: People started to get into social networking. That kind of thing was all new to us, and they were way ahead. They networked with their fans before any of us.

MOSTOFI: Pete shared a lot about his life online and was intimate as hell. It was a new type of scene. Pete extended the band's community as far as fiber optics let him.

ROSE: Pete was extremely driven. Looking back, I wish I had that killer instinct. During that tour; we played a show in Colorado. On the day of the show, we went to Kinko's to make flyers to hand out to college kids. Pete put ‘members of Saves The Day and Screeching Weasel’ on the flyer. He was just like, 'This will get people in.'

WENTZ: We booked a lot of our early shows through hardcore connections, and to some extent, that carries through to what Fall Out Boy shows are like today. If you come to see us play live, we're basically Slayer compared to everyone else when we play these pop radio shows. Some of that carries back to what you must do to avoid being heckled at hardcore shows. You may not like our music, but you will leave here respecting us. Not everyone is going to love you. Not everyone is going to give a shit. But you need to earn a crowd's respect. That was an important way for us to learn that.

MOSTOFI: All those dudes, except Andy, lived in this great apartment with our friend Brett Bunting, who was almost their drummer at one point. The proximity helped them gel.

STUMP: There were a lot of renegade last-minute shows where we'd just call and get added. We somehow ended up on a show with Head Automatica that way.

MCILRITH: At some point early on, they opened for Rise Against in a church basement in Downers Grove. We were doing well then; headlining that place was a big deal. Then Pete's band was coming up right behind us, and you could tell there was a lot of chatter about Fall Out Boy. I remember getting to the show, and there were many people there, many of whom I had never seen in the scene before. A lot of unfamiliar faces. A lot of people that wouldn't have normally found their way to the seedy Fireside Bowl in Chicago. These were young kids, and I was 21 then, so when I say young, I mean really young. Clearly, Fall Out Boy had tapped into something the rest of us had not. People were super excited to see them play and freaked out; there was a lot of enthusiasm at that show. After they finished, their fans bailed. They were dedicated. They wanted to see Fall Out Boy. They didn't necessarily want to see Rise Against play. That was my first clue that, 'Whoa, what Pete told me that day at Arma Angelus rehearsal is coming true. He was right.' Whatever he was doing was working.

"My Insides Are Copper, And I'd Like To Make Them Gold" - The Record Labels Come Calling, 2002

STUMP: The split EP was going to be a three-way split with 504 Plan, August Premier, and us at one point. But then the record just never happened. Brian backed out of putting it out. We asked him if we could do something else with the three songs and he didn't really seem to care. So, we started shopping the three songs as a demo. Pete ended up framing the rejection letters we got from a lot of pop-punk labels. But some were interested.

HURLEY: We wanted to be on Drive-Thru Records so bad. That was the label.

RICHARD REINES: After we started talking to them, I found the demo they had sent us in the office. I played it for my sister. We decided everything together. She liked them but wasn't as crazy about them as I was. We arranged with Pete to see them practice. We had started a new label called Rushmore. Fall Out Boy wasn't the best live band. We weren't thrilled [by the showcase]. But the songs were great. We both had to love a band to sign them, so my sister said, 'If you love them so much, let's sign them to Rushmore, not Drive Thru.'

HURLEY: We did a showcase for Richard and Stephanie Reines. They were just kind of like, 'Yeah, we have this side label thing. We'd be interested in having you on that.' I remember them saying they passed on Saves The Day and wished they would have put out Through Being Cool. But then they [basically] passed on us by offering to put us on Rushmore. We realized we could settle for that, but we knew it wasn't the right thing.

RORY FELTON: Kevin Knight had a website, TheScout, which always featured great new bands. I believe he shared the demo with us. I flew out to Chicago. Joe and Patrick picked me up at the airport. I saw them play at a VFW hall, Patrick drank an entire bottle of hot sauce on a dare at dinner, and then we all went to see the movie The Ring. I slept on the couch in their apartment, the one featured on the cover of Take This To Your Grave. Chad [Pearson], my partner, also flew out to meet with the band.

STUMP: It was a weird time to be a band because it was feast or famine. At first, no one wanted us. Then as soon as one label said, 'Maybe we'll give 'em a shot,' suddenly there's a frenzy of phone calls from record labels. We were getting our shirts printed by Victory Records. One day, we went to pick up shirts, and someone came downstairs and said, 'Um, guys? [Owner] Tony [Brummel] wants to see you.' We were like, 'Did we forget to pay an invoice?' He made us an offer on the spot. We said, 'That's awesome, but we need to think about it.' It was one of those 'now or never' kinds of things. I think we had even left the van running. It was that kind of sudden; we were overwhelmed by it.

HURLEY: They told me Tony said something like, 'You can be with the Nike of the record industry or the Keds of the record industry.'

STUMP: We'd get random calls at the apartment. 'Hey, I'm a manager with so-and-so.' I talked to some boy band manager who said, 'We think you'll be a good fit.'

TROHMAN: The idea of a manager was a ‘big-time' thing. I answered a call one day, and this guy is like, 'I'm the manager for the Butthole Surfers, and I'd really like to work with you guys.' I just said, Yeah, I really like the Butthole Surfers, but I'll have to call you back.' And I do love that band. But I just knew that wasn't the right thing.

STUMP: Not all the archetypes you always read about are true. The label guys aren't all out to get you. Some are total douchebags. But then there are a lot who are sweet and genuine. It's the same thing with managers. I really liked the Militia Group. They told us it was poor form to talk to us without a manager. They recommended Bob McLynn.

FELTON: We knew the guys at Crush from working with Acceptance and The Beautiful Mistake. We thought they'd be great for Fall Out Boy, so we sent the music to their team.

STUMP: They said Crush was their favorite management company and gave us their number. Crush's biggest band at the time was American Hi-Fi. Jonathan Daniels, the guy who started the company, sent a manager to see us. The guy was like, "This band sucks!' But Jonathan liked us and thought someone should do something with us. Bob was his youngest rookie manager. He had never managed anyone, and we had never been managed.

BOB MCLYNN: Someone else from my office who isn't with us anymore had seen them, but I hadn't seen them yet. At the time, we'd tried to manage Brand New; they went elsewhere, and I was bummed. Then we got the Fall Out Boy demo, and I was like, Wow. This sounds even better. This guy can really sing, and these songs are great.' I remember going at it hard after that whole thing. Fall Out Boy was my consolation prize. I don't know if they were talking to other managers or not, but Pete and I clicked.

TROHMAN: In addition to being really creative, Pete is really business savvy. We all have a bullshit detector these days, but Pete already had one back then. We met Bob, and we felt like this dude wouldn't fuck us over.

STUMP: We were the misfit toy that nobody else wanted. Bob really believed in us when nobody else did and when nobody believed in him. What's funny is that all the other managers at Crush were gone within a year. It was just Bob and Jonathan, and now they're partners. Bob was the weird New York Hardcore guy who scared me at the time.

TROHMAN: We felt safe with him. He's a big, hulking dude.

MCLYNN: We tried to make a deal with The Militia Group, but they wouldn't back off on a few things in the agreement. I told them those were deal breakers, opening the door to everyone else. I knew this band needed a shot to do bigger and better things.

TROHMAN: He told us not to sign with the label that recommended him to us. We thought there was something very honest about that.

MCLYNN: They paid all their dues. Those guys worked harder than any band I'd ever seen, and I was all about it. I had been in bands before and had just gotten out. I was getting out of the van just as these guys got into one. They busted their asses.

STUMP: A few labels basically said the same thing: they wanted to hear more. They weren't convinced we could write another song as good as 'Dead On Arrival.' I took that as a challenge. We returned to Sean a few months after those initial three songs, this time at Gravity Studios in Chicago. We recorded ‘Grenade Jumper' and 'Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy' in a night or two. 'Where is Your Boy' was my, 'Fine, you don't think I can write a fucking song? Here's your hit song, jerks!' But I must have pushed Pete pretty hard [arguing about the songs]. One night, as he and I drove with Joe, Pete said, 'Guys, I don't think I want to do this band anymore.' We talked about it for the rest of the ride home. I didn't want to be in the band in the first place! I was like, 'No! That's not fair! Don't leave me with this band! Don't make me kind of like this band, and then leave it! That's bullshit!' Pete didn't stay at the apartment that night. I called him at his parent's house. I told him I wasn't going to do the band without him. He was like, 'Don't break up your band over it.' I said, 'It's not my band. It's a band that you, Joe, and I started.' He was like, 'OK, I'll stick around.' And he came back with a vengeance.

WENTZ: It was maybe the first time we realized we could do these songs titles that didn't have much do with the song from the outside. Grand Theft Auto was such a big pop culture franchise. If you said the phrase back then, everyone recognized it. The play on words was about someone stealing your time in the fall. It was the earliest experimentation with that so it was a little simplistic compared to the stuff we did later. At the time, we'd tell someone the song title, and they'd say, 'You mean "Auto"'?

JOHN JANICK: I saw their name on fliers and thought it was strange. But I remembered it. Then I saw them on a flyer with one of our bands from Chicago, August Premier. I called them and asked about this band whose name I had seen on a few flyers now. They told me they were good and I should check it out. I heard an early version of a song online and instantly fell in love with it. Drive-Thru, The Militia Group, and a few majors tried to sign them. I was the odd man out. But I knew I wanted them right away.

HURLEY: Fueled By Ramen was co-owned by Vinnie [Fiorello] from Less Than Jake. It wasn't necessarily a band I grew up loving, but I had so much respect for them and what they had done and were doing.

JANICK: I randomly cold-called them at the apartment and spoke to Patrick. He told me I had to talk to Pete. I spoke to Pete later that day. We ended up talking on the phone for an hour. It was crazy. I never flew out there. I just got to know them over the phone.

MCLYNN: There were majors [interested], but I didn't want the band on a major right away. I knew they wouldn't understand the band. Rob Stevenson from Island Records knew all the indie labels were trying to sign Fall Out Boy. We did this first-ever incubator sort of deal. I also didn't want to stay on an indie forever; I felt we needed to develop and have a chance to do bigger and better things, but these indies didn't necessarily have radio staff. It was sort of the perfect scenario. Island gave us money to go on Fueled By Ramen, with whom we did a one-off. No one else would offer a one-off on an indie.

STUMP: They were the smallest of the labels involved, with the least 'gloss.' I said, 'I don't know about this, Pete.' Pete was the one who thought it was the smartest move. He pointed out that we could be a big fish in a small pond. So, we rolled the dice.

HURLEY: It was a one-record deal with Fueled By Ramen. We didn't necessarily get signed to Island, but they had the 'right of first refusal' [for the album following Take This To Your Grave]. It was an awesome deal. It was kind of unheard of, maybe, but there was a bunch of money coming from Island that we didn't have to recoup for promo type of things.

JANICK: The company was so focused on making sure we broke Fall Out Boy; any other label probably wouldn't have had that dedication. Pete and I talked for at least an hour every day. Pete and I became so close, so much so that we started Decaydance. It was his thing, but we ended up signing Panic! At The Disco, Gym Class Heroes, Cobra Starship.

GUTIERREZ: Who could predict Pete would A&R all those bands? There's no Panic! At The Disco or Gym Class Heroes without Wentz. He made them into celebrities.

"Turn This Up And I'll Tune You Out" - The Making of Take This To You Grave, 2003

The versions of "Dead on Arrival," "Saturday," and "Homesick at Space Camp" from the first sessions with Andy on drums are what appear on the album. "Grand Theft Autumn/Where is Your Boy" and "Grenade Jumper" are the demo versions recorded later in Chicago. O'Keefe recorded the music for the rest of the songs at Smart Studios once again. They knocked out the remaining songs in just nine days. Sean and Patrick snuck into Gravity Studios in the middle of the night to track vocals in the dead of winter. Patrick sang those seven songs from two to five in the morning in those sessions.

STUMP: John Janick basically said, ‘I'll buy those five songs and we'll make them part of the album, and here's some money to go record seven more.'

MCLYNN: It was a true indie deal with Fueled by Ramen. I think we got between $15,000 and $18,000 all-in to make the album. The band slept on the studio floor some nights.

STUMP: From a recording standpoint, it was amazing. It was very pro, we had Sean, all this gear, the fun studio accoutrements were there. It was competitive with anything we did afterward. But meanwhile, we're still four broke idiots.

WENTZ: We fibbed to our parents about what we were doing. I was supposed to be in school. I didn't have access to money or a credit card. I don't think any of us did.

STUMP: I don't think we slept anywhere we could shower, which was horrifying. There was a girl that Andy's girlfriend at the time went to school with who let us sleep on her floor, but we'd be there for maybe four hours at a time. It was crazy.

HURLEY: Once, Patrick thought it would be a good idea to spray this citrus bathroom spray under his arms like deodorant. It just destroyed him because it's not made for that. But it was all an awesome adventure.

WENTZ: We were so green we didn't really know how studios worked. Every day there was soda for the band. We asked, 'Could you take that soda money and buy us peanut butter, jelly, and bread?' which they did. I hear that stuff in some ways when I listen to that album.

HURLEY: Sean pushed us. He was such a perfectionist, which was awesome. I felt like, ‘This is what a real professional band does.' It was our first real studio experience.

WENTZ: Seeing the Nirvana Nevermind plaque on the wall was mind-blowing. They showed us the mic that had been used on that album.

HURLEY: The mic that Kurt Cobain used, that was pretty awesome, crazy, legendary, and cool. But we didn't get to use it.

WENTZ: They said only Shirley Manson] from Garbage could use it.

O'KEEFE: Those dudes were all straight edge at the time. It came up in conversation that I had smoked weed once a few months before. That started this joke that I was this huge stoner, which obviously I wasn't. They'd call me 'Scoobie Snacks O'Keefe' and all these things. When they turned in the art for the record, they thanked me with like ten different stoner nicknames - 'Dimebag O'Keefe' and stuff like that. The record company made Pete take like seven of them out because they said it was excessively ridiculous.

WENTZ: Sean was very helpful. He worked within the budget and took us more seriously than anyone else other than Patrick. There were no cameras around. There was no documentation. There was nothing to indicate this would be some ‘legendary' session. There are 12 songs on the album because those were all the songs we had. There was no pomp or circumstance or anything to suggest it would be an 'important’ record.

STUMP: Pete and I were starting to carve out our niches. When Pete [re-committed himself to the band], it felt like he had a list of things in his head he wanted to do right. Lyrics were on that list. He wasn't playing around anymore. I wrote the majority of the lyrics up to that point - ‘Saturday,' 'Dead on Arrival,' ‘Where's Your Boy?,’ ‘Grenade Jumper,' and ‘Homesick at Space Camp.' I was an artsy-fartsy dude who didn't want to be in a pop-punk band, so I was going really easy on the lyrics. I wasn't taking them seriously. When I look back on it, I did write some alright stuff. But I wasn't trying. Pete doesn't fuck around like that, and he does not take that kindly. When we returned to the studio, he started picking apart every word, every syllable. He started giving me [notes]. I got so exasperated at one point I was like, ‘You just write the fucking lyrics, dude. Just give me your lyrics, and I'll write around them.' Kind of angrily. So, he did. We hadn't quite figured out how to do it, though. I would write a song, scrap my lyrics, and try to fit his into where mine had been. It was exhausting. It was a rough process. It made both of us unhappy.

MCLYNN: I came from the post-hardcore scene in New York and wasn't a big fan of the pop-punk stuff happening. What struck me with these guys was the phenomenal lyrics and Patrick's insane voice. Many guys in these kinds of bands can sing alright, but Patrick was like a real singer. This guy had soul. He'd take these great lyrics Pete wrote and combine it with that soul, and that's what made their unique sound. They both put their hearts on their sleeves when they wrote together.

STUMP: We had a massive fight over 'Chicago is So Two Years Ago.' I didn't even want to record that song. I was being precious with things that were mine. Part of me thought the band wouldn't work out, and I'd go to college and do some music alone. I had a skeletal version of 'Chicago...'. I was playing it to myself in the lobby of the studio. I didn't know anyone was listening. Sean was walking by and wanted to [introduce it to the others]. I kind of lost my song. I was very precious about it. Pete didn't like some of the lyrics, so we fought. We argued over each word, one at a time. 'Tell That Mick...' was also a pretty big fight. Pete ended up throwing out all my words on that one. That was the first song where he wrote the entire set of lyrics. My only change was light that smoke' instead of ‘cigarette' because I didn't have enough syllables to say 'cigarette.' Everything else was verbatim what he handed to me. I realized I must really want to be in this band at this point if I'm willing to put up with this much fuss. The sound was always more important to me - the rhythm of the words, alliteration, syncopation - was all very exciting. Pete didn't care about any of that. He was all meaning. He didn't care how good the words sounded if they weren't amazing when you read them. Man, did we fight about that. We fought for nine days straight while not sleeping and smelling like shit. It was one long argument, but I think some of the best moments resulted from that.

WENTZ: In 'Calm Before the Storm,' Patrick wrote the line, 'There's a song on the radio that says, 'Let's Get This Party Started' which is a direct reference to Pink's 2001 song 'Get the Party Started.' 'Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today' is a line from the movie Rushmore. I thought we'd catch a little more flack for that, but even when we played it in Ireland, there was none of that. It's embraced, more like a shoutout.

STUMP: Pete and I met up on a lot of the same pop culture. He was more into '80s stuff than I was. One of the first things we talked about were Wes Anderson movies.

WENTZ: Another thing driving that song title was the knowledge that our fanbase wouldn't necessarily be familiar with Wes Anderson. It could be something that not only inspired us but something fans could also go check out. People don't ask us about that song so much now, but in that era, we'd answer and tell them to go watch Rushmore. You gotta see this movie. This line is a hilarious part of it.' Hopefully some people did. I encountered Jason Schwartzman at a party once. We didn't get to talk about the movie, but he was the sweetest human, and I was just geeking out. He told me he was writing a film with Wes Anderson about a train trip in India. I wanted to know about the writing process. He was like, 'Well, he's in New York City, I'm in LA. It's crazy because I'm on the phone all the time and my ear gets really hot.' That's the anecdote I got, and I loved it.

O'KEEFE: They're totally different people who approach making music from entirely different angles. It's cool to see them work. Pete would want a certain lyric. Patrick was focused on the phrasing. Pete would say the words were stupid and hand Patrick a revision, and Patrick would say I can't sing those the way I need to sing this. They would go through ten revisions for one song. I thought I would lose my mind with both of them, but then they would find it, and it would be fantastic. When they work together, it lights up. It takes on a life of its own. It's not always happy. There's a lot of push and pull, and each is trying to get their thing. With Take This To Your Grave, we never let anything go until all three of us were happy. Those guys were made to do this together.

WENTZ: A lot of the little things weren't a big deal, but those were things that [felt like] major decisions. I didn't want 'Where Is Your Boy' on Take This To Your Grave.

JANICK: I freaked out. I called Bob and said, 'We must put this song on the album! It's one of the biggest songs.' He agreed. We called Pete and talked about it; he was cool about it and heard us out.

WENTZ: I thought many things were humongous, and they just weren't. They didn't matter one way or another.

"Our Lawyer Made Us Change The (Album Cover)" - That Photo On Take This To Your Grave, 2003

STUMP: The band was rooted in nostalgia from early on. The '80s references were very much Pete's aesthetic. He had an idea for the cover. It ended up being his girlfriend at the time, face down on the bed, exhausted, in his bedroom. That was his bedroom in our apartment. His room was full of toys, '80s cereals. If we ended up with the Abbey Road cover of pop-punk, that original one was Sgt. Pepper's. But we couldn't legally clear any of the stuff in the photo. Darth Vader, Count Chocula…

WENTZ: There's a bunch of junk in there: a Morrissey poster, I think a Cher poster, Edward Scissorhands. We submitted it to Fueled by Ramen, and they were like, 'We can't clear any of this stuff.’ The original album cover did eventually come out on the vinyl version.

STUMP: The photo that ended up being the cover was simply a promo photo for that album cycle. We had to scramble. I was pushing the Blue Note jazz records feel. That's why the CD looks a bit like vinyl and why our names are listed on the front. I wanted a live photo on the cover. Pete liked the Blue Note idea but didn't like the live photo idea. I also made the fateful decision to have my name listed as 'Stump' rather than Stumph.

WENTZ: What we used was initially supposed to be the back cover. I remember someone in the band being pissed about it forever. Not everyone was into having our names on the cover. It was a strange thing to do at the time. But had the original cover been used, it wouldn't have been as iconic as what we ended up with. It wouldn't have been a conversation piece. That stupid futon in our house was busted in the middle. We're sitting close to each other because the futon was broken. The exposed brick wall was because it was the worst apartment ever. It makes me wonder: How many of these are accidental moments? At the time, there was nothing iconic about it. If we had a bigger budget, we probably would have ended up with a goofier cover that no one would have cared about.

STUMP: One of the things I liked about the cover was that it went along with something Pete had always said. I'm sure people will find this ironic, but Pete had always wanted to create a culture with the band where it was about all four guys and not just one guy. He had the foresight to even think about things like that. I didn't think anyone would give a fuck about our band! At the time, it was The Pete Wentz Band to most people. With that album cover, he was trying to reject that and [demonstrate] that all four of us mattered. A lot of people still don't get that, but whatever. I liked that element of the cover. It felt like a team. It felt like Voltron. It wasn't what I like to call 'the flying V photo' where the singer is squarely in the center, the most important, and everyone else is nearest the camera in order of 'importance.' The drummer would be in the very back. Maybe the DJ guy who scratches records was behind the drummer.

"You Need Him. I Could Be Him. Where Is Your Boy Tonight?" - The Dynamics of Punk Pop's Fab 4, 2003

Patrick seemed like something of the anti-frontman, never hogging the spotlight and often shrinking underneath his baseball hat. Wentz was more talkative, more out front on stage and in interviews, in a way that felt unprecedented for a bass player who wasn't also singing. In some ways, Fall Out Boy operated as a two-headed dictatorship. Wentz and Stump are in the car's front seat while Joe and Andy ride in the back.

STUMP: There is a lot of truth to that. Somebody must be in the front seat, no question. But the analogy doesn't really work for us; were more like a Swiss Army knife. You've got all these different attachments, but they are all part of the same thing. When you need one specific tool, the rest go back into the handle. That was how the band functioned and still does in many ways. Pete didn't want anyone to get screwed. Some things we've done might not have been the best business decision but were the right human decision. That was very much Pete's thing. I was 19 and very reactionary. If someone pissed me off, I'd be like, 'Screw them forever!' But Pete was very tactful. He was the business guy. Joe was active on the internet. He wouldn't stop believing in this band. He was the promotions guy. Andy was an honest instrumentalist: ‘I'm a drummer, and I'm going to be the best fucking drummer I can be.' He is very disciplined. None of us were that way aside from him. I was the dictator in the studio. I didn't know what producing was at the time or how it worked, but in retrospect, I've produced a lot of records because I'm an asshole in the studio. I'm a nice guy, but I'm not the nicest guy in the studio. It's a lot easier to know what you don't want. We carved out those roles early. We were very dependent on each other.

MCLYNN: I remember sitting in Japan with those guys. None of them were drinking then, but I was drinking plenty. It was happening there, their first time over, and all the shows were sold out. I remember looking at Pete and Patrick and telling Pete, ‘You're the luckiest guy in the world because you found this guy.' Patrick laughed. Then I turned to Patrick and said the same thing to him. Because really, they're yin and yang. They fit together so perfectly. The fact that Patrick found this guy with this vision, Pete had everything for the band laid out in his mind. Patrick, how he can sing, and what he did with Pete's lyrics - no one else could have done that. We tried it, even with the Black Cards project in 2010. We'd find these vocalists. Pete would write lyrics, and they'd try to form them into songs, but they just couldn't do it the way Patrick could. Pete has notebooks full of stuff that Patrick turns into songs. Not only can he sing like that, but how he turns those into songs is an art unto itself. It's really the combination of those two guys that make Fall Out Boy what it is. They're fortunate they found each other.

"I Could Walk This Fine Line Between Elation And Success. We All Know Which Way I'm Going To Strike The Stake Between My Chest" - Fall Out Boy Hits the Mainstream, 2003

Released on May 6, 2003, Take This To Your Grave massively connected with fans. (Fall Out Boy's Evening Out with Your Girlfriend arrived in stores less than two months earlier.) While Take This To Your Grave didn't crack the Billboard 200 upon its release, it eventually spent 30 weeks on the charts. From Under the Cork Tree debuted in the Top 10 just two years later, largely on Grave's momentum. 2007's Infinity on High bowed at #1.

WENTZ: I remember noticing it was getting insane when we would do in-stores. We'd still play anywhere. That was our deal. We liked being able to sell our stuff in the stores, too. It would turn into a riot. We played a Hollister at the mall in Schaumburg, Illinois. A lot of these stores were pretty corporate with a lot of rules, but Hollister would let us rip. Our merch guy was wearing board shorts, took this surfboard off the wall, and started crowd-surfing with it during the last song. I remember thinking things had gotten insane right at that moment.

HURLEY: When we toured with Less Than Jake, there were these samplers with two of their songs and two of ours. Giving those out was a surreal moment. To have real promotion for a record... It wasn't just an ad in a 'zine or something. It was awesome.

MCLYNN: They toured with The Reunion Show, Knockout, and Punch-line. One of their first big tours as an opening act was with MEST. There would be sold-out shows with 1,000 kids, and they would be singing along to Fall Out Boy much louder than to MEST. It was like, 'What's going on here?' It was the same deal with Less Than Jake. It really started catching fire months into the album being out. You just knew something was happening. As a headliner, they went from 500-capacity clubs to 1500 - 2000 capacity venues.

WENTZ: We always wanted to play The Metro in Chicago. It got awkward when they started asking us to play after this band or that band. There were bands we grew up with that were now smaller than us. Headlining The Metro was just wild. My parents came.

MCLYNN: There was a week on Warped Tour, and there was some beel because these guys were up-and-comers, and some of the bands that were a little more established weren't too happy. They were getting a little shit on Warped Tour that week, sort of their initiation. They were on this little, shitty stage. So many kids showed up to watch them in Detroit, and the kids rushed the stage, and it collapsed. The PA failed after like three songs. They finished with an acapella, 'Where is Your Boy,’ and the whole crowd sang along.

WENTZ: That's when every show started ending in a riot because it couldn't be contained. We ended up getting banned from a lot of venues because the entire crowd would end up onstage. It was pure energy. We'd be billed on tour as the opening band, and the promoter would tell us we had to close the show or else everyone would leave after we played. We were a good band to have that happen to because there wasn't any ego. We were just like, "Oh, that's weird.' It was just bizarre. When my parents saw it was this wid thing, they said, 'OK, yeah, maybe take a year off from college.' That year is still going on.

MCLYNN: That Warped Tour was when the band's first big magazine cover, by far, hit the stands. I give a lot of credit to Norman Wonderly and Mike Shea at Alternative Press. They saw what was happening with Fall Out Boy and were like, 'We know it's early with you guys, but we want to give you a cover.' It was the biggest thing to happen to any of us. It really helped kick it to another level. It helped stoke the fires that were burning. This is back when bands like Green Day, Blink-182, and No Doubt still sold millions of records left and right. It was a leap of faith for AP to step out on Fall Out Boy the way they did.

STUMP: That was our first big cover. It was crazy. My parents flipped out. That wasn't a small zine. It was a magazine my mom could find in a bookstore and tell her friends. It was a shocking time. It's still like that. Once the surrealism starts, it never ends. I was onstage with Taylor Swift ten years later. That statement just sounds insane. It's fucking crazy. But when I was onstage, I just fell into it. I wasn't thinking about how crazy it was until afterward. It was the same thing with the AP cover. We were so busy that it was just another one of those things we were doing that day. When we left, I was like, 'Holy fuck! We're on the cover of a magazine! One that I read! I have a subscription to that!'

HURLEY: Getting an 'In The Studio' blurb was a big deal. I remember seeing bands 'in the studio' and thinking, Man, I would love to be in that and have people care that we're in the studio.' There were more minor things, but that was our first big cover.

STUMP: One thing I remember about the photo shoot is I was asked to take off my hat. I was forced to take it off and had been wearing that hat for a while. I never wanted to be the lead singer. I always hoped to be a second guitarist with a backup singer role. I lobbied to find someone else to be the proper singer. But here I was, being the lead singer, and I fucking hated it. When I was a drummer, I was always behind something. Somehow the hat thing started. Pete gave me a hat instead of throwing it away - I think it's the one I'm wearing on the cover of Take This To Your Grave. It became like my Linus blanket. I had my hat, and I could permanently hide. You couldn't see my eyes or much of me, and I was very comfortable that way. The AP cover shoot was the first time someone asked me to remove it. My mom has a poster of that cover in her house, and every time I see it, I see the fear on my face - just trying to maintain composure while filled with terror and insecurity. ‘Why is there a camera on me?'

JANICK: We pounded the pavement every week for two years. We believed early on that something great was going to happen. As we moved to 100,000 and 200,000 albums, there were points where everything was tipping. When they were on the cover of Alternative Press. When they did Warped for five days, and the stage collapsed. We went into Christmas with the band selling 2000 to 3000 a week and in the listening stations at Hot Topic. Fueled By Ramen had never had anything like that before.

MOSTOFI: Pete and I used to joke that if he weren't straight edge, he would have likely been sent to prison or worse at some point before Fall Out Boy. Pete has a predisposition to addictive behavior and chemical dependency. This is something we talked about a lot back in the day. Straight Edge helped him avoid some of the traps of adolescence.

WENTZ: I was straight edge at the time. I don't think our band would have been so successful without that. The bands we were touring with were partying like crazy. Straight Edge helped solidify the relationship between the four of us. We were playing for the love of music, not for partying or girls or stuff like that. We liked being little maniacs running around. Hurley and I were kind of the younger brothers of the hardcore kids we were in bands with. This was an attempt to get out of that shadow a little bit. Nobody is going to compare this band to Racetraitor. You know when you don't want to do exactly what your dad or older brother does? There was a little bit of that.

"Take This To Your Grave, And I'll Take It To Mine" - The Legacy of Take This To Your Grave, 2003-2023

Take This To Your Grave represents a time before the paparazzi followed Wentz to Starbucks, before marriages and children, Disney soundtracks, and all the highs and lows of an illustrious career. The album altered the course for everyone involved with its creation. Crush Music added Miley Cyrus, Green Day, and Weezer to their roster. Fueled By Ramen signed Twenty One Pilots, Paramore, A Day To Remember, and All Time Low.

STUMP: I'm so proud of Take This To Your Grave. I had no idea how much people were going to react to it. I didn't know Fall Out Boy was that good of a band. We were this shitty post-hardcore band that decided to do a bunch of pop-punk before I went to college, and Pete went back to opening for Hatebreed. That was the plan. Somehow this record happened. To explain to people now how beautiful and accidental that record was is difficult. It seems like it had to have been planned, but no, we were that shitty band that opened for 25 Ta Life.

HURLEY: We wanted to make a record as perfect as Saves The Day's Through Being Cool. A front-to-back perfect collection of songs. That was our obsession with Take This To Your Grave. We were just trying to make a record that could be compared in any way to that record. There's just something special about when the four of us came together.

WENTZ: It blows my mind when I hear people talking about Take This To Your Grave or see people including it on lists because it was just this tiny personal thing. It was very barebones. That was all we had, and we gave everything we had to it. Maybe that's how these big iconic bands feel about those records, too. Perhaps that's how James Hetfield feels when we talk about Kill 'Em All. That album was probably the last moment many people had of having us as their band that their little brother didn't know about. I have those feelings about certain bands, too. 'This band was mine. That was the last time I could talk about them at school without anyone knowing who the fuck I was talking about.' That was the case with Take This To Your Grave.

TROHMAN: Before Save Rock N' Roll, there was a rumor that we would come back with one new song and then do a Take This To Your Grave tenth-anniversary tour. But we weren't going to do what people thought we would do. We weren't going to [wear out] our old material by just returning from the hiatus with a Take This To Your Grave tour.

WENTZ: We've been asked why we haven't done a Take This To Your Grave tour. In some ways, it's more respectful not to do that. It would feel like we were taking advantage of where that record sits, what it means to people and us.

HURLEY: When Metallica released Death Magnetic, I loved the record, but I feel like Load and Reload were better in a way, because you knew that's what they wanted to do.

TROHMAN: Some people want us to make Grave again, but I'm not 17. It would be hard to do something like that without it being contrived. Were proud of those songs. We know that’s where we came from. We know the album is an important part of our history.

STUMP: There's always going to be a Take This To Your Grave purist fan who wants that forever: But no matter what we do, we cannot give you 2003. It'll never happen again. I know the feeling, because I've lived it with my favorite bands, too. But there's a whole other chunk of our fans who have grown with us and followed this journey we're on. We were this happy accident that somehow came together. It’s tempting to plagarize yourself. But it’s way more satisfying and exciting to surprise yourself.

MCILRITH: Fall Out Boy is an important band for so many reasons. I know people don't expect the singer of Rise Against to say that, but they really are. If nothing else, they created so much dialog and conversation within not just a scene but an international scene. They were smart. They got accused of being this kiddie pop punk band, but they did smart things with their success. I say that, especially as a guy who grew up playing in the same Chicago hardcore bands that would go on and confront be-ing a part of mainstream music. Mainstream music and the mainstream world are machines that can chew your band up if you don't have your head on straight when you get into it. It's a fast-moving river, and you need to know what direction you're going in before you get into it. If you don't and you hesitate, it'll take you for a ride. Knowing those guys, they went into it with a really good idea. That's something that the hardcore instilled in all of us. Knowing where you stand on those things, we cut our teeth on the hardcore scene, and it made us ready for anything that the world could throw at us, including the giant music industry.

[ceilidho]

exit, no entry wound joe bear graves x reader; part 1 (3.8k)

-

Local time at destination: 0500 hours.

And then the world rushes back to him like the culmination of a terrible dream.

Bear wakes up in another rosebush outside the front steps of the local library worse for wear. Blinking out of sleep-crusted eyes, shapes diverging in blurry unfocus before slipping back into material objects. A bench. A door. The thorny stems of roses already on their way out, already depetalling, the ground below covered in a thin layer of them. One petal even sticking to his cheek when he pulls himself off the ground, wincing at the branches that crunch around him, that tug against his skin and clothes.

His clothes smell of cheap liquor. Gin. Bourbon. It hurts to open his eyes, to sit up. 

“Morning, sunshine,” someone says. He remembers hearing it in his dream too. 

He looks to the source of his awakening, blanching when he notices the man staring at him.

Rip sits on the other side of the bushes on his haunches, looking deeply unimpressed. Hair slicked back for a change. “This what you get up to when I’m gone?”

Bear doesn’t respond. He struggles to his feet instead, hangover only just creeping in. Still drunk, to an extent. His knees threaten to buckle under him, forcing him to lay a hand flat on the wall to keep himself upright. One foot in front of the other. The walk home feels endless in the hour before dawn, hardly any light to guide him. 

“Pretty pathetic shit, Bear,” the man says, trailing along behind him. Not quite mockingly, but bordering on it. “Getting piss drunk and passing out in a bush? Really? C’mon, man. You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me.”

There’s no sense in responding, Bear knows that now. No sense in even turning around to look. One foot in front of the other. Stumbling home alone under the cloak of night, dawn just around the corner; terrified that one day he’ll have to see it—the sun coming over the mountains, over the horizon. 

It’s been less than a year. He hasn’t yet made his amends with God. Forgiveness sits outside of him. Not quite the right time to let it in. Maybe that time passed a long time ago, a small aperture that shuttered closed at the approach of his eyes. He missed it sometime between killing a boy and losing his mind.

A man cannot hold himself up on the scaffolding of the world alone. There has to be something beneath him. There is no sense in repeating the horrors of the world back to him; he’s already lived them. He’s got something of a Midas touch for death. 

The months have been long since the divorce was finalised, since Lena left for good, since Buckley died, since Rip—since it all went down. If he thinks about it for too long, it seems like a nightmare that he woke up from still mad about; a nightmare he had no choice but to drink himself into a stupor over to escape. That’s the reality of the world. 

“You know, Bear, you’re not the one that’s fuckin’ dead,” Rip spits as he follows behind, matching Bear’s stumbling gait stride for stride. “So you can stop acting like it.”

There’s a truth in Rip’s words and it leaves him feeling nauseous. There’s also a kink in his neck and a headache threatening to split his forehead open. In the belly of him, he has a truth that says that the firmament of heaven is beyond his reach. When he looks up and the sky is void of coruscating light, the meagre stars like an exit with no entry wound, it doesn’t surprise him. Of course there wouldn’t be anything there.

On a good day, his heart feels like it’s weathered a siege. 

“So she left you! It’s time to fuckin’ move on. Go to a bar—I mean, you already are, so step one done—and pick someone up. Go on Christian Mingle or something. You keep living your life like this and you’re going to wind up killing yourself. And then the fuck good that’ll do?”

It takes everything in him to not turn around and do something rash. Only the nausea keeps him from making any sudden movements. Even if he were to turn around and do something, his knees would probably buckle under him. Probably throw up the contents of his stomach. Not much in there either. It rumbles when he thinks that, clenching at the thought of food. Then it twists, the nausea returning. 

One foot in front of the other. The walk home takes twice as long, his whole body aching.

“Heard you almost quit. Wouldn’t be the worst idea you ever had. Let Buddha take over—he’s earned it. Get yourself a nice piece of land in fuckin’…Montana or something. Couple cows, maybe some chicken—you could get a dog, Christ. You look like a guy who’d have a dog. Why don’t you have a dog, actually? You would’ve told me if you didn’t like dogs, so it’s not that.”

His forehead is greasy when he touches it to rub his head. Body secreting poison in his sleep. Oily. The corners of his lips crack when he yawns. It’s not like he’s never thought about a dog, about having something to care for, another living thing in his house. 

But—

(“Bear? …I don’t think we should have a child.”)

What he wants often falls to the wayside, slides off him like a glancing blow. 

Her old, familiar shape appears at the sudden loss of a dream: one where Lena’s gaze lingers on him long enough to burn; but then it is the sun.

Bear watches dawn break. Sunday morning. In a different life, he would’ve squinted into the light of a new day and closed his eyes against it, curling into the slighter body tucked into his chest for another hour of rest. Felt the rise and fall of her chest. Woken up to a hot mouth on his cock or fingers curling in his chest hair, petal lips seeking him out. Church after that, showering off the remnants of their morning, solemn in their pews with their chests still holding the laughter of an hour previous. Light as air, as a feather. 

He won’t go to church today; hasn’t in months. Not with the guilt of missing it the week before trailing after him, each missed week compounding month after month. The cracks in his faith webbing. Splintering out like stepping on the lake when it freezes over in the winter, crunching under his boot until he holds his place. Conscious that it could break under his feet.

“I grew up with a dog,” Bear finally responds, voice hoarse. First thing he’s said since last call at the bar. 

“Yeah. Figures. What kind?”

“Black lab. We called her Daisy.”

It’s another lifetime ago. Still living in his parent’s house, Daisy curled by his dad’s feet, her favourite spot to sleep. Television playing at a low volume, mom at the kitchen table doing her crossword, ink bleeding into the side of her hand. It’s been a long time since Bear buried all of them. He’s buried countless people since. 

“What—can’t get another? One and done? That’s how everything works for you?”

Teeth raze across his skin again. Trust Rip to always cut to the quick. Finally back in his neighbourhood at least, the street empty apart from the cars parked in their driveways or along the sidewalk. Bear’s stomach rumbles something fierce now, entreating him to eat. Worse than hunger is how he’d kill for a glass of water though. Anything to settle his head.

“Haven’t wanted a dog,” Bear grumbles, then clears his throat.

“Yeah, you have,” Rip scoffs. Bear hears him kick a rock, sending it skidding across the asphalt. 

“Fuck off.”

Heart silicified in his chest, composed of fossilised shells and rocks and bones. It feels heavy in his chest. 

He turns down the street leading to his house. 

“Gotta let someone else in, Bear. Girl, dog—whatever. You can’t keep this up forever or it’ll kill you.”

When he turns around at the door, fishing in his pocket for his keys, the sidewalk beyond his house is empty. 

(So a man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake or be roused out of his sleep.)

Every Friday like clockwork, Bear stops at the diner down the street for a coffee and a slice of cherry pie before heading to the bar. 

Today is like any other. He leaves the house with only his keys and wallet and walks the long twenty minutes to the diner. Every time he fights the urge to drive, but there has to be something holding him in place. A reason not to throw it all away. 

It’s never completely empty when he shows up, but it’s never full either. His seat at the back of the room is open as usual, like they put up a sign before he comes ambling down the street that says Reserved for Joe Graves and then pluck it away before he opens the door. It’d be nice if that were the case. Nice to have something just for him for a change. The thought comes with its accompanying pang of shame. Desire is a dangerous thing; anything he’s ever wanted has come at him with sharpened teeth, clamping down on his leg and ripping through the flesh. Bear trap for old Bear. 

He slides into the booth and waits for someone to notice him. Never bothers to flag someone down—if it’s ten minutes or even half an hour before he’s served, that’s fine by him. 

“Hiya,” a clear voice says to his right, pulling him away from staring through the blinds out the window. “Can I get you something to drink? Coffee, tea?”

The face Bear turns to meet is pleasant, smiling. Wide and untroubled. It’s not a face he recognizes though, despite months coming to this diner and becoming familiar with the staff. If he had to guess, he’d bet she only started a few days ago, maybe a week at most. She still has the sparkle of someone who hasn’t had the goodness beaten out of them yet. 

“Coffee,” he says, his own smile strained. “And a slice of pie.”

“Sure—we have key lime, blueberry, apple—”

“Cherry,” he interrupts, not letting her build steam. The wick in his chest burns too low for any conversation. The quick flicker of her brow makes the shame in his chest swell again. Forgive me sitting on his lips, unsaid. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I do this. 

She nods and scurries off to the back, skirt swishing with her movements. Bear notices only because his eyes get stuck there, somewhere between the curves of her hips and the roundness of her ass. When he realizes where he’s let his mind wander, he pulls it back, flattening his lips into a hard line. Any sort of indulgence feels wrong, a taking that shouldn’t be taken. He hasn’t even begun to pay penance for all the damage he’s wrought. 

It’s only on her way back that Bear notices the small bump protruding from under her apron. His mouth goes dry. When she reaches him again, he wordlessly accepts the cup of coffee and her reassurance that the pie will be out in just a minute. For a moment, he can hardly meet her gaze, eyes locked on the gentle curve of her belly, caught off guard in a way he hasn’t been in months. 

The first thought with any clarity is, what is she doing working here? A crummy diner on a Friday night. Down the street from an even sleazier pub. His second thought is to look outside at the poorly lit stretch of road and think that this is no place for a pregnant woman to be alone. He recognizes each car in the parking lot save one, likely hers. Drove herself here with the expectation of driving herself home at the end of the night.

If it had been Lena—well, he never would’ve let it be Lena, but if it had been, Bear can’t imagine letting his pregnant wife drive herself home in the middle of the night. Can hardly stomach the thought. 

She’s not Lena though, so he has no right. 

She’s gone before he has time to say anything else, skirt swishing behind her. It catches his eye again. When he tears his gaze away for a second time, he swallows back the metallic taste of self-loathing. It curdles in his mouth. It’s the sign telling him to stop coveting, stop looking out into the world and wondering what he can take. It’s his hamartia, his fatal flaw; thinking himself above the reproach of God. Thinking that he can kill, fuck, curse, and stray farther and farther from the light only to find his way back in the dark. 

The bell above the door rings when someone else comes in and Bear tenses. His shoulders only relax when two older women step in and head to a table. 

He watches as she picks up a plate from the pass-through window and heads back towards him. When she places it in front of him, he draws a deep breath in, trying to catch more than just the aroma of fresh baked cherries.��

“Here we go…one slice of cherry pie, straight out of the oven.”

“Thanks, honey,” Bear rumbles, smile finally meeting his eyes. 

“No trouble. The guys in the back said they make it special for you. Joe, right?”

That gets him to levy her with the full weight of his attention. The thought of her asking about him. “I go by Bear.”

“Oh. Alright, Bear.” She twists the word around in her mouth and seems to find it satisfying. “I think I’ve heard your name before. You were—I mean, you’re part of Pastor Adams’ parish, right?”

He clears his throat, cutting off the triangle point of his pie with the side of his fork. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Me too,” she confides, voice a low whisper. A secret between strangers. She doesn’t glance around though, doesn’t bother to draw out the ruse. “Or, I was, anyway. Haven’t been to service in awhile. I, um…I remember you. From a year or so back. You and your—um…you and your wife used to always sit up at the front.”

The fork scrapes against the plate. “Ex-wife.”

He catches her wince from the corner of his eye. “Oh. Sorry. You just—” She doesn’t have to say it. The slight dip of her eyes tells him all he has to know, and besides, it’s his own fault for still wearing the ring. Even with the paperwork signed and dated, even with Lena in another state now, starting a new life without him, the thought of taking it off makes him break out in a cold sweat. 

“It’s not—” Bear starts before giving up. He curls his fingers into a fist on the table. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine. Not a big deal.”

She fidgets in the silence. Bear can’t bring himself to break it or make the atmosphere less oppressive. He tenses under it, the ache in his low back worsening. These days, he always aches. Nerve damage, a disc on the verge of slipping, an old ankle injury that flares up whenever he goes running. A ghost that follows him from haunt to haunt. The ring on his finger is just another old ache. 

“So, uh—” he clears his throat, nodding to her belly. “Your first?” 

It’s inappropriate, hardly his place to ask. Incredibly intrusive for someone he’s met for the first time, a stranger just trying to do her job and serve him coffee and pie before he goes off to drink himself half to death again at the dive bar down the road. 

Still, he asks. 

Only the faintest wrinkle of her nose betrays any embarrassment. “Oh. Yeah. First one.”

“Congratulations.” It’s sincere. The envy in his gut is old, but it’s a manageable pain. 

“Thanks,” she says, with a small, private smile, hand resting absently under her belly. “I’m excited. I’m only a couple months along, but, uh…it’s been a journey. Just me and baby against the world, you know.”

That stops him in his tracks. Screws up the whole course of his evening because suddenly the sound of the bell over the door jingling doesn’t draw his attention away. It stays fixed on the smiling girl to his right that just opened her mouth and said something unacceptable. 

“Where’s the dad?” he asks, far too bluntly. 

She shrugs. “Somewhere. Didn’t stick around long enough to tell me where. It’s fine though—I’ve got my little peanut. That’s all that matters.”

“You told him and he left?” 

The pie sits cooling in front of Bear as a pit in his stomach opens up. It’s a terrible, empty hole that holds truths like the fallibility of the body and the good shouldering the burdens of the world.  

He only regrets being so direct when her lip quivers, a little motion that betrays her until she wrests control over her face again. “It’s not his fault. I don’t think he was—well…you know, it was a surprise.”

“That’s—” he struggles to find his words, “—that’s not right.”

Again, she shrugs. “That’s life.”

Bear feels his eyes go hard. A coldness settles under his skin. 

In the deep, dark gut of him, only anger lives. He spends his days questioning why God has allowed everything else in his life to fall apart, has allowed countless other people to die, but refuses, for reasons unbeknownst to him, to kill him. He’s given him enough opportunity and enough reason. 

The answer he circles back to time and again is the same. An eye for an eye. Divine wrath. The litany of his sins could be sung until the end of time and there’d still be more to sing. It’s only right that there would be consequences for him. 

The rage that simmers in his blood now is twofold. It begins with the sharp pang of injustice, of witnessing a punishment meted out to someone innocent. The girl standing by the booth he’s shoved himself into, almost too small for a man of his size, cannot be deserving of the same punishment that he’s brought upon himself. She has never killed. The babe in her belly has never killed. The two of them should never have to meet at the point of two paths converging with the likes of someone like Bear and proceed down the same road together. 

Then it sinks into a familiar territory. A place at the core of him where righteousness gives way to envy, as it always does. After what he's been through, the thought of someone having everything that he's always desperately wanted handed to them on a silver platter and then sending it back leaves him feeling a bit off-kilter. Not quite right. 

“Bear?” Her voice breaks the silence. When he blinks, concerned eyes stare down at him, brows furrowed. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he rasps, dragging a hand down his face. Shaking it off. “Sorry, I—got lost in my head. Sorry.” 

“That’s alright,” she says, again gentle in her voice and smile. “Easy place to get lost in, isn’t it?”

He makes a sound in acknowledgment. Drags the silence out. Her mouth twists shy under his scrutiny. 

“Anyway, I have a few other tables to get to, if you don’t mind. Enjoy your pie. I’ll check on you in a bit.”

He eats his slice of pie in silence as she leaves, eyes following her to her next table. Rage still sizzles under his fingertips. It makes his hands shake, old nerve damage and anger problems. 

It’s like a gun punch to think of her all on her own. It’s not right. For someone like him, well, it’s—deserved, earned. Inevitable, even. Every step taking him further away from grace, from its light. No one who knows his story would think otherwise. 

She’s a pretty thing though, this new waitress. Too tired, the bags under her eyes testament to that, no matter how well she hides them with makeup. Slightly puffy anyway, maybe from a lack of sleep or too many tears. His stomach aches at the thought. It must have come as a shock, the bottom of her world dropping out from under her when the baby’s father took off. Dragged away from the church not through her own doing, but the fault of another. Not her shame to bear, and yet. 

He forces the pie down. Bites that taste like nothing, 

Bear hears the lilt of her voice from two tables over. “Refill on your coffee, hun?” 

A supplicant sits in his place as he sips his coffee. The hour slips by into the next and it starts to come together in his mind. Why he's been forced down this long road alone, why God hasn't struck him down yet despite every terrible thing he's done. His eyes follow her flit across the diner, the light seeming to bend around her like a halation. 

When Bear looks across the room at her, he thinks, Lord, do not think I am waiting patiently for your hands. Every part of me trembles with anxiety.

(O Lord, show me I can fall apart together again; but not just yet.)

He stays until the last customer has finally left, waiting for her to come back to his table with an apologetic smile. When she does, Bear hands her his empty plate, watching her take a step back when he scoots out of the booth, rising to his full height. He makes note of the way her eyes round as they follow him up. Taller than her, unsurprisingly. Surprising though, the way her bottom lip droops just the slightest bit. 

“Is it just you closing up?” he asks, voice a tad too gruff. He clears his throat again, looking around for anyone else. 

“Well, the chef’s cleaning up in the back, but, uh—” she looks around the diner, conspicuously empty apart from the two of them. “Yeah. Just me.”

Bear gestures with his chin towards the door. “I’ll wait ‘till you’re done, then walk you to your car.”

“Oh, Joe—”

“Bear,” he corrects.

“Bear,” she amends, fingers twisting together now. He relishes the sound of it on her lips. “You don’t have to. I’m used to it, honestly. I know I just started here, but I’ve done closes before, you know.”

“I’ll wait outside.” A statement now. Stubborn. He’s always been a bit mulish, hard to shake off. 

He can tell the second she relents, shoulders slumping. “Alright. I shouldn’t be too long…you can leave if you get bored though. Won’t blame you.” 

He fights the urge to tilt her head up by the chin to make her meet his eyes. Just barely restrains himself. 

Leaning against a tree out front, he twirls the ring around his finger as he watches her clean up. For the first time in a long time, he slips it off.

[kitwalker02]

When Time Means Nothing

Joe Goldberg x Reader

Warnings: It's Joe Goldberg so obviously kidnapping stuff, drug use, injury, masturbation, literally wanting this man to break every bone in my body

Summary: Takes place in that three hour time gap when Joe went to get moonjuice while on acid. He gets a sudden urgency to begin his life with you and is willing to do whatever it takes…after all, broken bones heal quicker than broken hearts.

You wanted to trust Joe Goldberg.

You fell for him the moment you saw him, but you would be lying if you said his life was an open book, that he had no secrets.

You loved him but it would be a lie to say that you trusted him.

First, you found the keys. Then it was the storage room.

And then you found the cage.

But the worst of it was the cage wasn’t empty. A bed was inside, a desk, books, souvenirs...used tampons. It had been lived in and was ready to be lived in once more.

You could only wonder how you were ever going to face Joe again.

Unfortunately, you wouldn’t have to wonder for very long. Joe had his own suspicions of you and caught onto your snooping quickly, following you to the storage unit. Damn, nanny cams.

“Don’t say anything. Don’t look at anything. Just…come here.”

But it was all too little too late. Something grave and unspoken passed between your shared terrified gaze…you knew something now that you could never unlearn.

Now it was up to Joe to be able to trust you or kill you trying.

He took your phone and held your hand, backing you into the oversized glass box, whispering empty promises the entire time of coming back for you, trusting you…loving you.

Not even twelve hours later, he was cuffing you to a table with a sure plan of escape. One that, within the next sixteen hours, involved never seeing you again.

You were left alone and abandoned, your heart was heavy with rejection and your wrist was raw from tugging at the time-sensitive handcuffs.

“There is no self override.”

You rolled your eyes remembering Joe’s words, finally halting your movements. Glancing at the timer on the cuffs, you saw that there was less time ahead of you than there was behind. Who knew what that meant for Joe Goldberg and where he was at by this point?

He hadn’t believed you when you tried to convince him that you were different. That you loved him and that this recent dark discovery did nothing to taint the perfectly imperfect way in which you saw him.

Well, of course, Joe didn’t believe you. Why would he? He had caught you snooping after all.

Desperately wanting to ease your lonely heart, you thought back to your final interaction with Joe. You didn’t see the harm in attempting to entertain yourself due to the current circumstances and, with just a pang of guilt, you slipped a hand between your thighs, thinking back to the way Joe had looked down at you as he explained the cuffs. His expression and tone were so condescending, a defense mechanism he had used with you before instead of getting emotional. In your mind’s eye, it all further ignited the fire in your lower belly, remembering the way he crouched in front of you and grasped your wrist. Tightening the cuff you had put so gently on yourself. His calloused fingers were wrapped so firmly around your wrist, the veins in his forearm prominent as the grip of the cuff became almost bruising.

With your eyes closed, you could still feel his grip, the heat of his body so close to your own and his warm breath rafting over your face…

Suddenly the garage door was opened.

You ripped your hand from under your skirt as the screech and slam of the door being forced up brought you right back to your less-than-ideal present.

That was until you saw him…

Your heart started pounding, you easily recognized Joe as he stumbled into the storage unit, clumsily pulling the door shut and almost falling to the concrete floor from the force of it.

“Joe?”

You called out to him, but he didn’t seem to hear you as he pushed a few curly strands of hair out of his face that had fallen in his struggle.

You tried again, “Joe! What are you doing here?”

You struggled against your restraint as Joe began to approach you. His steps were slow and uncalculated, and he watched you through unfocused eyes, mouth slightly agape as he concentrated on getting one foot in front of the other.

“I thought you were leaving…” You reached your hand up to him and Joe grasped it weakly, stumbling into a crouch before you. He shook his head slowly, breathing somewhat heavily. You smiled at that, but your grin quickly fell when you noticed something in his hand and you couldn’t help but flinch when Joe brought a large white flower between your faces. He held it so close that the dainty white petals grazed the tips of your noses.

“I couldn’t stay away.” It was a struggle for him to get the short sentence out and you furrowed your brows at his slurred words and dilated pupils. “Joe…are you fucking high?”

Staring at you in disbelief, Joe shook his head roughly. “What? No!... Yes, but-“ He shuffled closer, ignoring the disapproving look on your face.

“Listen….You.” He said, dropping his voice a few octaves as he spoke the last word. He brought the flower closer to you, tucking it behind your ear with clumsy fingers. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I want a life with you.”

You didn’t answer right away. You couldn’t. Your heart swelled at the confession. That was all you could ever want. But Joe took your silence as a bad sign and his face dropped. “Do you want that with me?”

You didn’t even try to stop the huge grin from splitting your features. Tangling your fist into the soft tendrils of hair that rested at the base of Joe’s skull, you tugged him forward for a messy kiss, that was borderline painful as your teeth clanked in your eagerness.

Joe barely reacted, not quite registering your lips on his until you pulled away. You placed another wet kiss on his cheek before resting your head on his shoulder, your hand leaving the back of his head to instead wrap around his shoulders. You clutched at the dark dress shirt he wore, holding him to you in a tight embrace.

“I want that more than anything, Joe.”

Slowly, Joe’s warm hands came to rest on your back, the gentle action brought your body that much closer to his and you could feel his heartbeat in his chest against your own. Your hearts were in sync.

Just as you began to relax for the first time since you wandered into here, Joe abruptly tore himself from your embrace, instead slamming his hands down onto your shoulders, holding you roughly. “We have to get you out of here. Now.” He told you urgently, his eyes were wide, panicked.

You were taken aback by his sudden outburst and frowned at Joe. “Well, that’s great and all but we still have another-“ glancing down at the little red numbers ticking away on the cuffs, you released a sigh, “six hours.”

“Fuck that.” Joe scoffed, bringing his forehead to rest against your own. “Time means nothing when you’re in love.” He had to cross his eyes to maintain eye contact with you and you couldn’t help but smile at how innocent he looked in that moment.

“Okay then, Romeo. Did you get a key or something? Because you said it yourself, there is no overriding the system, remember?”

Rolling his eyes at your lack of imagination, Joe moved his hands to grasp the forearm of your trapped hand. “No. No, key.” He slurred softly, eyes not entirely focused as he stared at your wrist a little too hard, trailing one hand down to intertwine his fingers with your own. “But I know a little trick.” He looked up at you with a toothy grin, closing his right eye awkwardly in what you assumed was supposed to be a wink but came off as something of a twitch or a really slow, one-eyed blink.

“What trick?” You asked hesitantly, looking at him confused.

Joe cleared his throat dramatically, obviously excited by your question as he tightened his hold on you and shifted himself closer. “Well, I read…somewhere…once, that if you break your thumb you can slip the cuff right off.”

Your eyes widened in horror. He wouldn’t-  “That is so…cool, but we aren’t going to do that, right? I mean, what is six hours in the grand scheme of things?”

Tsking at your reluctance to trust him, Joe shook a finger at you before grasping your thumb in a fist. “That is where you are wrong. A lot can go down in six hours.”

You tried to pull out of Joe’s hold, but between the handcuff keeping you to the table and Joe’s tight grip, you didn’t get very far. “Woah, woah, woah. This is a terrible idea! I mean, you’re not even sober right now, Joe! And besides…it’s going to hurt like a bitch!”

Staring up at you through glassy eyes, Joe addressed you seriously. “I know it’s going to hurt but, you have to trust me, I have never been more clear-headed in my entire life. And besides-“ A sudden desperation washed over Joe’s features and your heart went out to his unexpected display of vulnerability, “it’ll hurt a lot less than dying. I’ve got blood on my hands, Y/N, and I’m not going to lose you too. I won’t lose you.” Your free hand came up to caress his cheek in an attempt to comfort him. “I’m not going anywhere, Joe Goldberg.” Taking in a shaky breath, you swallowed hard. “And…I do trust you.”

Releasing a relieved sigh, Joe gave your hand a reassuring squeeze. “You can scream as loud as you want.” He informed you, gesturing around the room. “I made sure the walls were soundproof.” You gave him a nervous smile, not wanting to think about why that was something he thought of. “How thoughtful of you.”

“And I’ll be quick.” He continued, making two quick clicks with his tongue. “In and out.” You honestly wished he’d shut up already. You swore he’d said more in the last ten minutes than in the entire time you’ve known him and every word he said did less and less to ease your anxiety.

“On three?” Joe asked, waiting for your nod of approval. He instructed you to take a deep breath with him before turning what was left of his attention to your hand. “One…” You leaned your head onto his shoulder, holding onto him tightly and doing your best to relax your hand within his own. “Two..” You bit down on your lower lip, squeezing your eyes shut as you tried to prepare yourself for what was to come when a sudden hot pain shot through your hand, setting your bones on fire. You couldn’t stop the scream of agony and surprise that tore through your throat.

“God damn it, Joe!” You shouted, making him flinch. “You didn’t say three!”

But Joe ignored you, saying nothing as he hurried to guide your hand out of the cuff. You yelped when the metal accidentally grazed your now dislocated joint. You buried your face further into the crook of Joe’s neck not being able to stop the hot tears as he wrapped his fist around your thumb once more before jerking your finger up. Your jaw dropped at the resounding pop it made as your thumb slipped back into its socket.

Joe supported your now injured hand in his own as he wrapped his arm around your shoulders, pulling your shaking figure into a tight embrace.

“It’s done. And you’re safe just like I promised.”

You sniffled, rubbing your tear-stained face into his dress shirt as you clutched his back, returning the embrace. You couldn’t help but be impressed with how efficient Joe had been with the whole thing but you were never going to tell him that, opting to be pissed off about the entire situation.

“Let’s, please, just get the fuck out of here. I think I need an ice pack.”

Joe gently pulled you off of him so he could look into your eyes, bringing a hand up to caress your quivering jaw as tears continued to roll down your cheeks.

“We are going to get the fuck out of here…forever, but first, there’s this script I need to finish.” Your eyes widened in bewilderment. What was he on about now?

Joe shook his head when your frown deepened at his words. “No, no, no. Listen! It’s going to be great…and the best part is, you won’t be in the sequel.”

[yeyinde]

fever in a shockwave., ii | Joe "Bear" Graves x f!Reader

pt., ii | dreaming alone in a hotel bed

You chase kerosene dreams and wrap yourself up in a web of lies but none of it matters when he pulls you close, lips to your temple, and breathes your name out between deep gasps for air. You could stay like this forever, you think, spun tight in his four walls.

warnings: violence; smut, P-in-V sex, female reader, female gendered anatomy, unsafe sex; the slightest flavour of (secret) Dom!Joe, D/s undertones; angst; poor/unhealthy coping methods wordcount: 11,7k notes: this is chock full of smut. gratuitously so. and angst.

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The man in his—Bear's—chair is nothing like him at all. 

A lawyer from out of town. Some smarmy collegiate who wears his honours on his iron-pressed lapels, and slicks his hair back with the same grease he tucks into the folds of his clandestine smile. 

He orders a Moscow Mule, and tells you—unprompted—about the time he went to Russia, and had one at this fancy nightclub in Saint Petersburg. Then, mockingly, brings the one you made to his lips, and says: very American, but what else can you expect in a place like this?

It used to be easy to slip into something that was sure to garner tips from men like him. Ditsy and impressionable; fulsome. It racks in big numbers when you sit back, flutter your lashes, and pretend they're a gift, and just by sitting across from you, indulging you in their worldly wonders and professional prowess is something you'd be remiss to ignore. 

Now, however, the skin you wear feels too tight, tacky. It clings to your flesh, pulling at the downy soft hairs that cover your body until it stings with each movement you make. 

A dance that was once effortless now makes you stumble.  

But you deal with it. 

(Four walls. A roof.) 

"Want anything else?" You ask, smiling so wide it hurts. 

He leans his elbows on the grimy countertop, and then makes a face when his skin sticks to the exposed lath below. His grimace makes him seem more human. Weak. Vulnerable. 

"Eugh," he snorts, and then looks up at you. "Maybe wipe this counter down a bit better, yeah? And I guess I'll go for whisky sour. A mule might not be in your repertoire."

You smile, placid and thin, and miss the gruff responses from Bear a little more with each word the man spits. 

"Sure."

You wonder what Bear would say about him. Something gruff, a rough rasp of stinks of Yale covered up with a cough. 

It makes you smile.

He stays until closing, and considering it's Friday (now Saturday), this isn't too surprising. 

But him following you out the back door is. 

"Come on, I'll take you back to my hotel, and we can have some fun together—"

"No, I'm good," you say, offering some facsimile of a smile. 

It's the standard no, leave me alone without actually having to commit to a full rejection. A man like this—fragile ego, Bear might have said—will undoubtedly complain to your manager if you're not perfectly curated disinterest that he can spin as you being a prude, a bitch, uptight to his friends waiting for him in the car. 

"Oh, come on," he insists, grinning. 

He moves until you're backed up into the alcove, tucked against brick and stucco. The shadow from the awning above stretches over your head. A prison. Anxiety spikes through your chest; the tang of it is a livewire zing that races through your bloodstream. 

It's not that you're in any real danger—the chef is throwing out the trash around the corner; a lady wanders by with her ugly little Pomeranian who keeps barking at the group of guys, windows rolled down, as they holler for him to hurry it up. 

People are around, all within proximity. 

But it's the liquor on his breath. The hands that reach for you without permission, leaving stains over your blouse when the sweat from his palms crinkle the fabric. 

The look in his eye. The things he said—my dad got that one guy off with a light slap on the wrist; you know, the SEAL who betrayed his country? Hogart, or something. Now, the military is kissing his ass—and the way he said them. Oozing scorn. Confidence. 

It is the air of untouchability that wafts from his Gucci belt, Yves Saint Laurent trousers, Ralph Lauren polo tucked into his pants, and the thick watch on his wrist—Rolex, you’re sure.

The military is kissing his ass. 

You've met his particular type before. 

Fragile. A paper-thin ego. 

That, and the whisky sours, all coalesce into a noxious cocktail. Dangerous. 

His hand falls to the wall beside you, blocking off your only escape. The yells turn to whistles, and it's the bravado that sparks in his evergreen eyes that make you recoil. He has an audience, now. A group of peers and mates who'll tear into him should he wander back empty handed after making his interest so clear. 

They, you think, are worse than anything else right now. The idea of failure in front of people who have only ever been allowed to see him succeed. 

"What else are you doing tonight? Hang out with us a little bit—"

"I think she said no."

Bear. It's Bear. 

The relief in seeing him standing under the flushed lamp in the parking lot is dizzying. It stacks in your marrow, piling thick and heavy on one side until you start to list, to dip toward him. 

"Joe—," the word is cut off when the man—Yale graduate, drinks Moscow Mules in Russia—turns, brows bunching in alarm. 

"I don't think I asked you," he scoffs, turning to Bear. The grin on his lips falters at the sight of him—messy burnt umber beard, thick and scraggly; mouth knotted into an even line; but it's his eyes that make him stumble. Angry, burning sapphires leaking something eager and mad into the red blood vessels from sleepless nights, and the thrill of a fight. 

Bear is huge. Massive. The fabric of his red plaid button down strains around his shoulders, his biceps. 

Under the shadows cast in the dusk, he looms unfathomably large. Imposing. 

His hands curl into fists by sides. 

"Yeah, well, I think she said to go away." He takes a step forward, jaw set. 

You want to say something—it's fine, you're not worth it—but it dies on your tongue when the man turns to you, glaring. 

"Like I'd want to slum it with some cheap fuck—"

Bear gets to you in three steps. Three. His hands wrap around the man's jacket, and he hails him off of you, shoving him to concrete with a snarl ripping through his chest. 

Bear says nothing. He just—

Swings. 

In the time it takes for his friends in the Audi to realise something is wrong, he's almost finished. 

He hits him and the sickening squelch, the crunch of bone, makes you gasp, makes your stomach churn—rotten, filled with cheap, flat cola you'd sipped on during lunch—and you expect it to end. 

But it doesn't. 

He doesn't stop. 

"Bear—!" Each hit quiets the man beneath him until all you can hear is the sound of his knuckles splitting over wet, tacky flesh. "Joe—"

You grab his arm, fingers barely spanning the bulk of his flexing, bulging bicep, but he stills at your touch, at the frenzy in your voice. 

His chest heaves with his exertion, eyes swing to you, wild and blacker than the ocean at midnight, and you see something simmering in those depths. It's deeper than anger. Mechanical. Routine. 

This isn't him losing control, but finding it. 

You still, heart hammering in your chest with each garish wheeze the man below Bear makes. It's a rattle that shears through you, that cuts deep until all the ignorance has been expertly flayed, and stripped. Hung to dry. 

There is no pretending. No avoiding the stacking glee in his eyes when he drops them to the man, then the mess of his hand—bloody pulp, cracks in the cartilage of each knuckle where a thick bed of scabs once rested. 

When he turns back to you, he doesn't hide it. He lets you see the unhindered pleasure in the cut of his irises; oceans of mercury shaded blue. Maybe, it itches some dark part of his brain, imbues him with a deluge of chemicals—dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin—until he's satiated the hunger inside that craves control over violence and chaos. 

This is him exercising dominion over something, over someone. Reclaiming ownership. 

This is cathartic for him, you think. 

Brutality. Bloodshed. 

It's a jarring disconnect from the man you'd seen slouched over your sticky table, taking over-generous gulps of his whisky. The intimidating, lour man who was secretly dorky and clean cut beneath the bulk of muscle and disaster. 

Where one ends and the other begins is blurred under the heady scent of oxidising copper and salt, and in that murky coalescence, he waits. 

For you to run, revolt, recoil—

You can’t imagine his anger is easy for anyone to stomach. Bear is a terrifying force of nature: bitter, broken, and brutal. You should run. Flee. Everything inside of you says to do so, to escape the clutch of a man who ruined his hands on the teeth of someone who was just a little too pushy, a little too entitled. He could snap at any moment. 

A wild animal is only as tame as circumstance allows. 

(Run—)

You’ve never been good at listening, anyway. 

You take his hand in yours, fingers threading through wet, warm blood, and tug on his wrist. 

"It's done, Joe," you say, and wonder what he makes of the tremble in your voice, the quiver in your joints. 

He stares at you, plain and bare, and so startlingly sober that you almost can't recognise him, but it's gone in an instant. His eyes shudder, a frisson passes. His hands spasm, a proxysm, and then he's pulling away from you. 

The man drops to the ground with a crunch, loose gravel rucking over pavement, and you wince at the crack his head makes when Joe tosses him. 

He doesn't spare the man a single glance. The heel of his boot catches the shiny pin on the man's lapel when he steps over him, heading right for you. 

His friends yell in the background, muted hollering about calling the police, and jail, and charges, and how they are witnesses to this, but Bear doesn't even acknowledge them outside of barking out a low: get him outta here before I do the same damn thing to you. 

He reaches you in a single step, and all you can hear is the heavy breaths he takes, the way his chest expands under his flannel button down. It's in a state: ripped, buttons around the collar torn off from when the man grabbed him, trying to dislodge the mountain that just kept coming. His collar pokes through, blue shirt below a startling contrast to the red tartan. 

"You alright?" He asks, words scorched and thick with smoke. 

His sense of fashion is not what you should be focusing on right now. He beat a man. Beat him into a pulp. You watch his friends drag him away, threats spilling from their lips as they wedge him into the backseat of the car. None of them make any move to come after Bear, but you guess it makes sense. 

Blood drips from his torn knuckles, but that's all. Aside from the ripped shirt, he stands before you intact. Unblemished. Victorious. 

It took less than a minute. 

A molten heat spumes inside of you. His head tilts, forehead wrinkles. It makes the scar above his brow bone more pronounced, and you find yourself nodding. 

"I'm gonna ask you again, and I expect an answer." It's a command. You're not a soldier and yet you find yourself snapping to attention from his tone alone. "Are you alright?" 

"I am." You offer a shaky smile that feels out of place with the puddle of blood pooling near his feet. "You… you came. I wasn't expecting you—we closed already so, you kinda missed—well. Everything." 

Cerulean flashes, flickers with moondust white. In the indigo aether behind him, you find Tycho's crater, and wonder if the pits in his eyes were made from the same cosmic rock that split the surface of the moon deep enough that the pocks could be seen all the way down here on earth. 

In a parking lot of some sleazy dive that's never anyone's first choice. 

(Like you—)

"I'm here, now." 

"Yeah." It tastes like chlorine when you breathe in. "You are." 

He doesn't let you patch him up. 

It's fine. Worry about yourself first.

There is nothing to worry about. Nothing to fuss over. You're not used to it. 

You first, he says, the divots in his forehead catching in the flushed glow of the lamp above. Always, alright? You first. 

(You can't remember the last time anyone has ever said those words to you. Or if anyone has ever said them before at all.) 

So, you grab a few bottles from under the shelf, and wonder if this is what it feels like to slip into that poetic madness writers talk about sometimes. 

(Or maybe you're just Pavlov's dog.) 

Bloodied knuckles grip the nozzle of the bottle, pulsing and oozing blood that's not, exclusively, his own. He holds it out to you after taking a swig, eyes burning pits of sapphire-crested coal. 

You take the bottle without a word, and taste the acrid tang of his saliva on the rim. Smoky. Musky. You hold it on your tongue for a moment before letting the ethanol cleanse it away. Burning. The scotch is bitter and clean when it slides down your throat. 

"Ugh," you make a noise when you swallow, a gag tangled in a wet grimace, mouth tugging downward at the burn. "That's gross." 

"Yeah," he huffs, eyes crinkling when his lips twist into that strange proxy of a smile. A half-turn, crook. Not ready to commit to the full circle. "Gets the job done." 

"And what is the job?" You push the bottle out toward him, looking away from the not-quite grin that flashes, bloodied and bruised around his upper lip. The sight of him in red makes something sour churn in your stomach. 

You like it a little too much. Sickening. 

"Forgetting." 

You turn to him when he sucks in a sharp breath after uttering the word, catching polluted blue in the hazy lamps above. He takes the bottle from your hands, sticky fingers, still wet with blood, with—

Teeth, pulp. 

Something about the way he skirts his gaze makes you think he didn't mean to say the word aloud. Unutterable, made solid. Filled in with the gritty rasp of his voice, hoarse and raw from his quiet, forceful growl into the face of a man who became the manifestation of his ire. Split lip, busted nose. Broken teeth. 

He's still breathing. Lucid enough to drag himself away from the beast of a man boring down on him, seething plumes of condensation into the midnight air. He'll be fine, you hope. His friends got him home. Maybe, to a hospital. 

(Pray, for the first time in years. Aeons. Don't let him die. Don't let Bear get mixed up in this.)

Bear shows no remorse, or concern for the jagged buccaneer lines splitting flesh that is only just starting to heal. Bruised, bloodied knuckles. Always.

Yet, you think this was the first time in a while it was cut on teeth instead of brick. Drywall.

"Yeah," you say, if only to fill in the gap of silence that settles, oppressive and biting, and stem the echoes of your thoughts from surfacing. 

Vile things like he looks good in red. In anger. Looks, you think, even better when he's bending down, bearing his weight on someone as he punches them over and over and over—

Sick. Wrong. Twisted. 

The way he gave into the ugliness inside of his eyes when he saw the man grab you, so entirely reactive—yet, horrifically aware at the same time—should scare you away. Make you run. Flee. 

It doesn't. 

It grounds you. 

In those snap seconds between staring at the bloom of red on your arm, the sharp inhale between clenched teeth, the wince, and throwing his hand out to snag the loose collar of the man's shirt, you saw everything flicker through hazy blue. 

Assessment. Decision. Outcome. 

He weighed them all on the scale in half-seconds. Measured them all in terms of probabilities, rationality, and concretes in the long term. 

It wasn't thoughtlessness or blind rage that made him throw the punch, but the knowledge that, to him, it was the only way out. 

It doesn't scare you. If anything, it makes you feel safer. 

"Thanks," you say, words you should have said much earlier, probably, but they're out now. Verbalised. Uttered. Drenched in awe so thick, it makes him tense, jerk his head toward you. 

Disbelief, then, colours his expression. "You're… thanking me. For beating a man to pulp in front of you?"

You shrug. "For helping me."

And Bear just—

Stares. Gawks. His eyes flash with something just as raw and cut open as the cuts on his knuckles, the wounds inside his head when he takes in your blunt sincerity. Your bold-faced honesty. 

He knows, of course, that you never mince words. That you never say things you don't mean. 

He'd told you himself, didn't he? 

You know what I like about you? You said, heart lodged in your throat, beating on the sleeves of your shirt. He looked up from his rye, brows raising. 

At the time, it was meant as a sleazy way to try and pick him but after the two women he turned down in the span of a week, choices he normally would have followed through with. Left with. He didn't. He stayed until closing, and walked you to your car. Stumbled home, then, alone. 

You wondered if he saw that. If there was something in your expression that he picked up on. His guard rose instantly. Hackles rising. Distance in shades of blue and amber pitched in front of him as he brought the glass to his lips, fingers blanching under the strain. 

Rejection, then. You swallowed it down, and offered another truth in exchange: 

That you always tip. 

The way he instantly relaxed broke your heart a little. You know what I like about you? 

Your smile was wobbly. My gin and tonic? 

That you never lie. Never say anything you don't mean. 

You wanted to laugh. Scoff. He's wrong. So, so wrong. 

(You never stop lying. Running.)

His stare is always, always so intense. Soul-searching. His head ducks down, his brows raise, and he stares. Bores those pretty blues so deep into you it almost feels like he can chisel inside your head, crack it open, and rummage about your deepest thoughts. 

But it's decidedly one-sided.

When it comes to himself, he looks away. Drops his gaze. Shirks. Hides. 

"Christ, you think I helped you?"

The blood dripping to the pavement says more than any words could, so you simply nod. Know he'll understand it, anyway. 

"I'm not a—"

A good man. The most clichè thing that every good man has ever said. You huff, shaking your head. "My hero." 

It's supposed to make him smile. Or laugh, or—

Or, something. 

Anything else except flinching. Jerking back as if you'd struck him. 

"Don't—," he swallows thickly, shifting on his feet. His hands leave smears of red on his shirt when he shoves the flat of his palms under his biceps. His head bobs. "Don't say that. Don't—don't call me that. I'm not—"

"You saved me, Joe," you dip your head in a bland punctuation of your sincerity. "Whether you like it or not, in my eyes, that makes you a good person. My hero."

He says nothing. Goes quiet. Still. 

It's not uncomfortable. It isn't, despite the itch under your skin. The effervescent buzz of cheap malt, a stagnant crush on a man who's firmly, decisively, off-limits, and the intoxication of being defended. Fought for. 

No one fights for you. 

Not your mum or her new series of boyfriends or husbands that show up during holidays and trips, and then disappear into the void of cheap monikers—Dominican man, a guy from the pub, a loser from Suffolk, a lawyer from New Jersey. 

Not your dad. 

Not even yourself. 

It pools inside of you, noxious and overwhelming. The land you stand on wobbles, crumbles. You sink beneath the sentiment until you're drowning in a briny, stagnant aquifer at the bottom. 

(You never learned how to swim.)

You take another drink, and feel his eyes on you. Heavy. Oppressive. You almost choke when you swallow. 

It's too much. Too—

Just. Too much. You need it to stop. You need him to see you for what you are, and run. Flee before you can. Before you have this in your hands, and ruin it like you do everything else before sprinting into the void, into the chasm that swallows you whole. 

So. You talk. Open your stupid little mouth, and say stupid little words. Biting. Alluring. You aim for coyness but miss the mark, and sound like a frightened kid.

"If you keep staring at me like that—"

He's close when you turn. Closer than you expected. Hulking. Massive. He towers over you, swaying on his feet. His eyes are murky gyres. 

"What?" He challenges, and takes a step closer. "What will you do?"

He murmurs the word so rough, so low, that you struggle to hear him. 

"I might have to cut you off again." 

It gets you a flicker of humour. Something biting and dry. His brow raises, lines creasing. A flash of his teeth on the left when he pulls the corner of his mouth up into a grin. Mocking. Sardonic. 

"Oh, yeah?" 

Standing over you like this, full height, head bowed, brow raises, he looks intimidating. All bulk. Brawn. He's tall. Broad. He folds you inside the bracket of his body with ease, tucking you into his shadow, and then moves forward. 

You step back. 

His gait swallows yours. Back, back. Forward. Back, back. Forward. Back, back—

You feel the clammy brick wall against your skin. No escape. 

Forward. Forward—

Your hair catches on the pocks in the brick when you drag your chin up to meet burning azure. The pinch feels a little bit like retribution when you see smoke curling in, thick billows of geyser grey eclipsing lazuli until it's drenched in smog. Cloudy. Broken. It smatters across his eyes, a want so thick your breath stutters in your chest, catches like a sharp hiccup in your throat because when, when, has anyone ever stared at you so openly before. 

The want is palpable. Stifling. 

You think of Magellanic clouds; nebulous vapours clinging to the sticky lining of your lungs until it clots in thick plumes of cosmic dust. It gnarls around you until all you can see is the sky above his head—indigo with smears of ochre in the far distance, the breaking of dawn over the horizon—and him. Blistering blue. Surly, sour. The tang of alcohol makes your head feel gummy and soporific. 

Bear closes the negligible distance, his chest brushing over the zipper of your loose windbreaker, bleeding heat through the metal until it scorches your flesh. 

His hands rest on the wall beside each temple. Your fingers tighten around the bottle, head swimming with that same want that echoes like a battle cry in the blood vessels that leak into the milky whites of his eyes. 

"You gonna cut me off again?" His eyes flicker down to the whisky clutched in your hands. 

You tremble. Polymer whines against the brick when you move. His nostrils flare. 

He leans down, his breath, humid and malty, ghosts over your cheek. He smells like a distillery. Like the bottom swallow of a beer bottle left out in the sun. 

Drunk. 

But you are, too. 

His hands fall from the wall, knuckles leaking blood down his wrist, and curl on your hips. They span the entirety of your waist, from the jut of your hip bone to the swell of your ass. 

They slide down, faltering slightly when your cheeks sit in the palm of his hand. He sucks in a deep breath, one that fills the expanse of his chest until it brushes over yours. 

You drop the bottle. It shatters on the concrete, drenching the hem of your trousers in liquor. It goes unacknowledged. He doesn’t look away at all. 

His eyes flash again, filling with that same palpable want as before, and then—

He grips the backs of your thighs, tight in his hold. And moves, shifts. He rocks up when he lifts you, back sliding against the brick wall. You barely have time to gasp before you're several feet off the ground, legs dangling in his grip as he hefts you into his embrace, pushing flush to your chest. 

Your arms wrap around his broad shoulders, clinging to him as he holds you up, takes you in. 

It's hot. The hottest thing that has ever happened to you. He picks you up like you weigh nothing. Not even a shudder from his chest, a tremble in his shoulders. Even with his broken knuckles, he still holds you up, keeping you steady as he stares at you. His forehead drops, but he doesn't kiss you. He swallows your breath, eyes drinking you in. A pendulum of blistering blue between your eyes, your lips. 

A tease. 

You've never seen him so hesitant. 

Your arms tighten. "You ever gonna kiss me, Joe, or—"

He huffs, a choked off laugh, eyes dropping once before he tilts his chin, devouring your mouth in a searing kiss. 

Your head cracks against the brick when he shoves himself into you, swallowing you whole. His mouth is rapacious, his hands grip you tight, keeping you right where he wants you. 

It feels like the culmination of everything. The little touches, fleeting glances. All of it leads to this moment where he presses his mouth to your skin like he's been starved for it, and drinks you down like ambrosia found in the glass that once littered the countertop around him. 

His weight sags into you, beard scratching your chin, jaw, neck as he peppers sloppy, open-mouthed kisses over your skin. 

"M'gonna fuck you." It's a promise. Maybe, even a warning. 

You shiver, head swimming on the heady taste of him, the smell—wet pennies, whisky, and bad choices—and slur your words into his starchy beard. "Just like a Taurus—"

He swallows your words down with an exasperated groan, muttering a husked Jesus Christ into the seal of your mouth, teeth nipping you in something that might have been punishment, but only makes you keen, rutting against him, eager and wanting. 

"Take me home," you gasp, and see napalm flare in the recess of his midnight blue eyes. 

(The shine of it tastes like victory in amber—)

Bear leaks aggression when he latches on to you, pulling you stumbling down the boardwalk until you land at the doorstep of the motel you'd dropped him off at. He pushes your back against the cold door, hands grasping your body, tight and wanting, and plying you with kisses down the column of your throat, your collarbones, your chest. He drops to his knees on the cement, hikes your shirt up, and suckles the soft skin of your navel until it blooms red under his sharp teeth and the scratch of his beard. 

It's rough. Blistering. 

You barely have time to think, to react, before he surges back to his feet, pushing the door open, and dragging you inside. 

There is no time to get acquainted with the ruins of his misery. His hands are molten, rough, on your skin, and push at you until you're splayed out on the bed before him. 

And you expect him to fall onto you, descend on your willing flesh the same way he'd done before until your skin was painted red from his mouth, and bruised by his hands.

But he doesn't. 

He just—

Watches. Drinks you in. 

It's a startling moment of intimacy in something that has been so dizzyingly brutal up until this point. A lapse. A silence. 

And you—

Your throat itches with the need to fill it. To quench the stagnancy that bleeds in from the crease of his eyes, and the heaving of his chest. The congealed blood that smears over your skin, remnants of his still agitated knuckles, cool under the sudden chill that sweeps you through. Hardened like cement on your flesh. 

You sit up, reaching for him. "B—Bear—"

His eyes flash. Throat bobs when he swallows. 

"Lay back." Is all he says. His knee lifts and settles on the edge of the bed. "I need to be inside of you."

And fuck—

It's not dirty talk. It's awkward and stilted, and the words bring a flush to his cheeks that you can't, entirely, blame on alcohol alone, but it fills you with a thick, almost dizzying, sense of heat because it's him. 

Because it's the words you'd longed to hear since he sat down and lifted two fingers up in the air for your attention. Since he looked at you, truly looked at you, and still came back.

And sure—the nameless dive bar on the fringes of town is the perfect spot for someone to submerge themselves in anonymity and vices without the prying eyes of their suburban neighbours knowing about the affairs under the table, and the draw of that would be perfect for him so he didn't have to deal with the thick layer of pity seeping into the eyes of those who know, him knew his wife. 

You're not special. 

But you want to be. 

And when he braces his arms above your head, eyes flaring to life under the jaundiced glow of the lamp beside the bed that creaks and whines with each moment, you feel like you might be. 

"Don't keep me waiting."

He falls on you, thick thighs wrenching you open to fit his bulk between them, and he laughs. Laughs, and laughs, and says:

"You need to learn some patience." 

You respond, breathless and quivering beneath him: "so teach me." 

(And he does.)

His hands tug on the rope securing you to the broken headboard. Military knots. Efficient. Inescapable. 

His hands fall, then, to your hips, fingers tracing the bruises he left last night. The breath he takes is sucked in through clenched teeth, and you try to remind yourself that under this, he's a good man. A good—

His cock nudges against the mess between your legs—fucking take me, that's it, gonna fill your cunt up—and he pushes. No foreplay. You can't remember if there ever was any to start with. 

He's big—thick, cut. His cock splits you apart until you're shuddering beneath his bulk, hands twisting pathetically against the binds that lock you in place. 

Stop squirming, you remember him saying, words sticking to his throat. 

I can't, you whined, and he'd pulled the cord off the phone, and tied your hands to the bedpost. A simple solution. Ever the planner.

Now, you're pinned under a man who fell asleep—twice—while he was still cumming inside of you. 

A man you'd picked up at a dive bar like a stray, like a bad dream, and terrible choices. A venereal disease. Oh, God. 

You shove your forehead into the rough pillow—flat, greasy; it stinks of stale sweat and sleep—and try not to focus on the regret. 

His cock is huge, massive. 

The cheap vibrators you bought on a whim—Amazon.com, four day shipping because you couldn't afford expedited or Prime—are nothing, nothing, compared to this. The real fucking deal. 

And you're not a virgin. Not really. 

(But you've already lost whenever you have to bridge a gap with technically tacked on at the end.)

"Fuck—," and it's too much. You've taken him, to the root, balls fuckin' deep, kid, but your pussy aches, core throbs like a pulsing wound. The space behind your belly button feels battered, bruised. Pried open by the blunt head of his cock, even though you know it's anatomically impossible. A lock picked at; scratches around the keyway. "Stop—!"

It's an embarrassing squeak. A mousy, shrill little thing that whistles through your clenched esophagus, voice strained and high, and draped in shades of pain. 

It didn't hurt before. 

Well, no. It did. It hurt like one of those sunburns you'd sometimes get as a kid. Skin raw and infected, blistering with sweat and oozing. The kind that made touching anything agonising. That made the heat seep out from your pores despite the goosebumps that prickled along your swollen flesh. 

But—

It was good. It was—

Probably the alcohol. You're sober, now. 

"What?" He grunts, word bitten between his clenched teeth. But he stops. 

A good man. A great one, even, had he not been shredded into base parts, primal instinct, then patched up with sutures made of barbed wire. 

"It—," you gasp when he moves, his knees shift on the lumpy, creaking mattress, and cock shifts, length pressed taut to your walls. "It hurts."

His hands are brands on your skin. You can't see him—you can just feel him. Thighs the size of tree trunks glued to the backs of yours, both of them dwarfed by a single one of his, hips spanning wide, so much wider than your own. Several inches of space from the end of your outer leg to his on both sides. 

The thought makes you dizzy. 

"Hurts?" He echoes the words, slurred, but not—

Not like before. He, like you, isn't nearly as drunk as he was when this first started. Lucidity bleeds into the word, and that—

You aren't, entirely, sure what to make of it. 

"I just fucked you," he says, blunt. Brutal. 

Your pussy flutters, core liquifying. God, it's his voice. It's the anger in wrinkles of his forehead, the eyes that would look so fucking pretty if they weren't glazed over, glossy. It's everything, really. All of the bad, the ugly, the rot, and the infectious miasma, and—

All of the potential good. The ones he buries deep.

"I, um…," you aren't really sure how to say I've only ever fucked myself on a pencil-thin, cheap purple vibrator and your cock is, like, the size of five of them clustered together. 

And a steady, long-term boyfriend in college who was extremely religious. A man who had stuck it in, once and not even all the way, and promptly fled. 

Maybe, a hook up here or there to balm your broken heart, but none of them come close to his absurd size. His girth. His length. Most of them were about the same size as your blue vibrator. 

Average. You're used to average men. Normal men. Not ones with a firehose between their thighs, and almost as thick as a coke can. 

(Average men. Not hired, governmentally trained killers who beat a man to a bloodied pulp in seconds because he told him to leave you alone, and the man didn't obey.)

Well. Maybe, you do know how to say it. So, you do. Verbatim, because why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. 

But he stills. 

"You're a virgin?" 

No, you think, huffing. Definitely not after the pounding he gave you last night. 

"I've—been fucked," you refute, burning from the sting of embarrassment. 

He makes a noise—patronising and draped in the hue of disbelief. He must sniff your lies out, then. Like some big, dumb dog—

"They ever cum inside you?"

There's a heat in his tone that makes your toes curl. "No. Never. I've always used—used condoms."

You hear the click in his voice when he swallows. "Good girl."

It does something to you. The low, soft praise goes straight to your core, your heart, and you suck in a shuddering breath, tensing. He notices, he must—a military man of unknown origin, he sees everything. Everything. 

He grunts, and you feel him slowly pull out, cock sliding against your soft, sore, walls in a way that makes you tremble, and pant, mouth pressed, open and gasping, into the pillow. It's gross. You taste salt on your tongue, and a strange sense of regret and relief when he's out of your aching cunt. You liked the fill of him. The feeling of him wrenching you open, but you can't. Can't. He's too big. Too thick. 

"Lay on your back." 

It's an awkward shuffle with your hands still bound at the wrist, and him, still so close behind you. You have to spread your legs apart to fit, and the weight of his gaze, hungry and wanting, on your bare pussy makes you flush. Makes heat pool under your cheeks. 

His broad hand presses against the soft skin of your inner thigh when you go to push your knees together, eyes smouldering blue in the pale yellow light of the lamp on the bedside table. 

"Keep 'em open," he rasps, nostrils flaring as he stares down at you. His gaze lifts, once, brow wrinkled, pinched, as he waits for you to acknowledge his command. Definitely top dog in the military, you think. A commander. Or something. "I'm not finished with you." 

It's a promise and a curse. 

He shuffles down the bed, the box spring creaking with each movement he makes, cock swinging between his legs, heavy and fat and vermilion and leaking cum onto the scratchy sheets. The sight of it—him—makes your heart leap, pulsing in your throat. 

"Where are you—," it's cut off with another embarrassing yelp when he grabs you, and hikes your leg over his shoulder. He bends down, hand splaying out on your thigh, pressing your knee to the mattress as the other dangles over his broad shoulder. "What are you doing—?"

"What does it look like?" he huffs, chin grazing your sensitive flesh. His eyes burn sapphire in the light. "Or has no one ever gone down on you before, either?"

Either. God—

"That's—," you choke when he brings his hand to your cunt, palm pressed flat against the heat of you. "Oh, fuck—"

His fingers pry your folds apart, eyes darting down to gaze at you. His mouth parts, white teeth catching his bottom lip. "Christ… Look at you."

His words puncture a hole deep inside of you that spills molten want in your core. Fuck, fuck—

He groans low, eyes drinking you in. There is a flush to his cheeks, burning roseate beneath thick tuffs of auburn. 

You can't remember the string of slurred words he let out last night, but he seems quieter. Hungrier. 

His mouth is searing when he presses it to your inner thigh, teeth scraping over the flesh until it puddles red under his molars. He starts in the centre, moving his mouth up to your bent knee, nipping the sensitive flesh there until more petals of red blossom. 

It feels good. Better than good. 

"You're getting so wet," he murmurs quietly. A rumble. It ghosts over your flesh until goosebumps bubble across the surface. "You want this, don't you?" 

It's a command. The word is pulled out of your throat before you can even think. Yes. Yes, of course you want that. His cock is as thick as your wrist and almost the length of your forearm. He's stupidly fucking big, that it makes your eyes roll a little in the back of your head just thinking about it. He's a massive man. Terrifying. And you want him to fuck you. To make you feel so good again like last night when you screamed so loud, the room beside you pounded on the wall, and told him to shut that bitch up. 

And he laughed. Laughed when he was balls fuckin' deep, kid, inside of you, and it was stupidly delirious, and clotted over something within you, sealing over a wound you weren't even aware of, and you want more. More of it, more of him. 

More of the way he fell on you, chin notched on your shoulder, lips pressed—messy and wet, breath sour—against your cheekbone and temple, and said, wanna really piss them off? Gonna make you scream. He did. Over and over and over again—made you scream as he fucked you as hard, and deep as he could, splitting your cunt open until just the shape of him could fit. 

You screamed until dawn broke through the seal of the door, spilling grey light through the gap. Until he grunted in your ear, mouth open as he panted against your skin, filling you with hot—too hot, too much—spurts of cum until it sat, heavy and thick, against your womb. 

You didn't cum. No foreplay, too much alcohol; no one fucked you like this. Even your sparse hook-ups were painted in the roseate shade of romance; sickly sweet and unsatisfying, but you'd somehow managed to convince yourself it was the sentiment that mattered. 

But now—

He moves lower, mouthing over your flesh until your leg is tacky and wet from his searing lips, his tongue. It's a promise of what's to come, a mimicry of what he's going to do to you. Each kiss brings his mouth closer, closer, until his tongue is licking a hot, wet stripe over your mons, eyes fever bright, and achingly lucid as he breathes you in. 

His chin dips, nose sliding against the triangular cut of your slit, tip pressed taut to your throbbing clit, and—

You shatter. Break. The aching whimper that spills out, a mangled ruin of something that sounds a little bit like Bear, please seems to spurn him on, as if he was waiting for it. To hear you beg for his mouth on your cunt. 

A frisson of pleasure flutters over his flushed face, beard fluttering when he huffs a deep breath through his nose, drawing the scent of you in, and ghosting his exhale over your spread pussy. It's good—he hasn't even touched you yet, just pressed his nose to your clit and breathed on you, and already your toes are curling, hands tugging harshly against the cord that keeps you from carting your fingers through his hair, or pulling his mouth closer. 

"God, you smell s'fuckin' good," he murmurs into the seam of your cunt, voice wrecked, ruined, a garbled mess of tremulous syllables that only barely sound legible. "Bet you taste even better."

He doesn't give you a second to prepare yourself. 

His mouth devours your cunt with the same fervour he showed your flesh. All lips, teeth, and tongue—a maddening pattern of tactical precision dedicated to making you come undone under the heat of his mouth. 

It's messy, a touch clumsy. He's drunk, and you are, too; but it's good. It's great. It's everything you'd imagined it would be to have him between your thighs. The rough graze of his beard chafing the soft skin of your legs, his big hand settling, hotter than a brand, on the underside of your knee, keeping you open for him. His tongue—

He circles the tip around your throbbing clit until you taste stardust in the back of your throat, eyes flashing with the white nebula that stretches out before you with each insistent swipe over you. 

Thick fingers pressing against your aching hole brings you back to earth. You gasp, mewl, at the stretch when he buries them inside of you; thick, long. The suddenness of his touch makes your back arch, your hips rutting against his face, eager for something, something—

"Please, Joe, please—"

He groans into your cunt, eyes fluttering. "Gotta be patient." 

"I can't—I can't—"

He pushes his fingers inside of you again, and the shock of cold, wet metal catching on your skin, stretched taut around his knuckles makes you tremble, makes you quake. But there is no escape. No way out. You take it as he thrusts them deep, scraping across your sensitive, soft walls until each brush of his knuckles makes you see stars. 

You cum on his fingers, his tongue laving against your clit, and it's the first time—first time—cheap plastic isn't involved but flesh, skin, and you lose it a little in the heat. In the fever that scorches your veins until they're bubbling and blistered. 

And he rides you through it all, eyes fixed on your face when you fall apart. Liquid sapphire. Like the ocean. You yearn to slip below the waves, let the briny water fill your lungs.

Your feet stumble on the slimy sediment below, but your heels dig in, pressed to the warmth of his back, and you hold on tight against the current that wants to sweep you away. 

Out to sea. Away from land. 

Lost, forever, in blue. 

He watches you struggle to swallow his cock, cheeks bulging and eyes watering as you stare up at him kneeling over your head, and the way he looks at you makes your belly burn, blistering, with want. 

"S'good," he groans, forehead wrinkles, cheeks the darkest shade of roseate. His beard is still damp, still wet from when he devoured you whole, and made you cum on his tongue, lips lifted up in a snarl so he could press the flat of his front teeth to your clit. You don't think he's ever looked more handsome than when he stares down at you in raw, naked blue. "Doin' s'good. Takin' me so—uhhhn, fuck—so good—"

He grunts like a beast. A rasping groan dragged up from deep within his belly, echoing through his ribs. It vibrates the air around you until your head buzzes from the decibels, the frequency the perfect pitch to set you on fire. 

Bear cums with a choked roar, and watches—greedily, hungrily—as you swallow down his cum, hand resting over your jugular to feel it all slide down in three, thick gulps. His eyes flutter, chest—slick with sweat; coarse hair matted to his wet skin—heaves as he cums, letting out a series of deep, bone-rattling grunts of your name, and uhhh fuck, fuck, fuck, yeah, take it, that’s it—

Ocean blue eyes fall, lidded and heavy, when he slides his softening cock out of your mouth, spitting cum on your tongue, lips, as he slips free. 

His eyes widen, then, when he sees it staining your skin, and you think of what he said before—church every Sunday, prayer before every meal, before bed, in the morning; before a mission—and wonder if the sight of you covered in the pearlescent mess, proof of your coupling, makes him think of Catholic guilt. Sins. Damnation. 

His thumb slides over your cheekbone, catching the droplets that run down the seam of your swollen, bruised lips. 

"You—," he swallows. You watch his Adam's apple bob, and see more than just concern in the craters of blue. "You alright?"

You run your tongue over your stinging lips, making a show of the slow way you roll it over tender, red flesh, and flash a languid smile up at him, mouth glossy and wet from spit and cum. You feel it pool the corners of your mouth. "You taste so good, Bear."

His eyes darken into a deep slate. The electric blue sky before an approaching tornado hits. 

"Dirty girl—," he groans, voice a thunderclap. A storm surge in the distance. 

(You just haven't figured out yet if you're in the eye of the storm, or should be ducking for cover.)

Your wrists are raw—much like the rest of you. Chafed and red, and cut a little around the delicate bump of your bone. 

He swallows when he sees it. A click in his throat. Something flashes in the depths of moondust blue: awareness, maybe. Coherence. Sobriety. 

His thumb, rough and worn; skin dry and cracked, rubs the congealed blood on the seam. 

You're not sure if it's meant to soothe or to erase. 

(You think that those might not be mutually exclusive with him.)

He doesn't say sorry. Doesn't say much of anything, really. But he rubs your skin, soothing the ache in your wrists, and seems a little flustered at the sight of your raw flesh. Maybe, a little embarrassed that he lost control so much. 

(Or maybe, that he liked it more than he thought he would.)

His hand folds over your wrist—bearish paws; long, thick fingers, knuckles split, cracked, and scarred—and swallows it whole. Consumed, entirely, in his clutch. He shudders when he sees how easily his thumb curls over his index finger. Delicate bones in his loose grip. He squeezes once, twice. The undulations feel rhythmic and routine: the same pattern you used on those dumb, yellow stress balls they handed out in the therapist's office. 

One, two, three. One, two, three. 

You let him. 

Let him hold your arm in his palm, his thumb brushing over your soft skin, and stay quiet. Silent. There is a war cerulean; battles in azul. You watch it play out in the krasts of his eyes, craters that mirror Tycho. 

It's when his jaw clicks, teeth grinding together, do you know that there is a stalemate. 

"C'mon," he rasps, voice static, scratchy. He swallows, and jerks his chin toward the bed. "Lay down with me." 

"There was a man," he clears his throat, and the noise makes you shift, sliding your cheek across his chest to look at him. He meets your stare. Oceanic white. You can't place the look in his eyes. Melting glaciers. He clears his throat again, and brings his hand up to play with the hair falling over your shoulder. "He, uh. He was like… a mentor to me. Didn't… didn't like my old man. He was—"

Something twists over his expression; an old hurt. An ancient ache. It's healed. Skin pink and smooth, but still pulls tight some days. 

"—A piece of shit." 

Your fingers cart through the bed of hair on his chest, sweat-slicked and matted. Gritty. Salt clings to the tips when you drag them through the wry curls. It's not a comfort. It's not much of anything. Just—

Reassurance. You're here, your fingerprints on his skin, his sweat on your hands. His heart thudding in your ear. 

"I see him sometimes," he admits, the words sticking to his throat when he swallows. The words crawl up, climbing through the molasses that congeal there, thick and tacky from his impromptu shattering. "I see all of them." 

You don't offer anything. No words, no sounds of sympathy. He isn't looking for answers; this isn't a problem that needs a solution. It's a confessional. It's taking stock of his scars, and the splinters in his mind. 

You don't know why he's telling you this, these words are meant for someone special. Someone important. 

"I had a daughter, a—" 

Had. Had. 

"She—" it's choked. "I killed a lot of people, and then she died. I wasn't—I wasn't home when it happened. I was a world away, killing a kid."

He swallows, but says nothing more. Waits. Waits.

You wonder if it's for condemnation. For scorn or hatred, disgust. Maybe you should feel those things for a man who confesses to killing a child in war, but—

You don't. 

Simply put. You feel nothing at all. Or—

No. 

You feel too much. It roars through you, an avalanche of emotions, all coalescing together into one massive volley of everything. They whip by, too fast for you to reach out and cling to any of them. 

So, you don't. You let them run through you, shredding your insides until it's raw and empty, and numb. 

Numb. 

But he isn't. Not really.  You feel his muscles tense, coiling. Preparing to flee. 

You press your hand to heart, feeling the rapid pulse against your palm. He quiets under your touch. 

"It's okay." You murmur, raising up to place a kiss at the corner of his mouth. Soft, tender. "It's okay, Joe."

His eyes tell you everything: it isn't, but he doesn't care. He'd do it again, again, again. 

Instead, he says: 

"I don't know how to move on." 

Your breath stutters in your chest. 

You're thirteen again. Your mum has a new husband now. A man who is several shades of okay all neatly wrapped a wholesome bow. A pastor. Less likely to cheat, she says, and then her face sours. Sours and twists with a lingering pain you feel in your bones. 

The perceived loyalty due to occupation. It's a rocky foundation to start a marriage on. 

(You don't tell her this. She would never listen to you, anyway.)

They take you to the Dominican three months after they told you your dad died. 

Left us for something better, and ended up dying alone, is what she tells you, eyes red-rimmed and cheeks raw. Her spite isn't enough to cover up the ache in her voice when she speaks. Good riddance.

You don't think your dad was a bad man. He made terrible choices, and hurt you deep—so, so deep that a chasm formed in the punch he left behind; eroded and blistering—but he isn't a monster. 

Wasn't. 

Wasn't, now, because you never use present tense when talking about him. Never. You forced yourself to grow out of that habit while you were lost inside the strange microcosm you fell into the weeks (months, years) after his death. 

You stop referring to him in currents because it gives you hope (stupid, stupid—) and gnarls behind your ribs like a sickness. A rotting wound that never heals. One you wish you could remove, scrape off of your bones until it's gone. 

They cut off the necrosed parts to save the rest of the body. Sever the gangrenous limb to keep the heart beating. You think about doing the same but then you'd have a hole inside of you the size of a canyon, of Tycho, and nothing to fill it.

You'd gotten used to the stench of rot, anyway.

(Gone, forever. But with this—you still feel him, even if it's poisoning your bloodstream, and rotting your bones.)

It makes you think of before when you could say isn't or is or does or won't or will instead of wasn't, used to, did. Past tense. Gone. Faded. Ripped out of your life like the ugly pages of your journal where you'd penned letters to him each holiday, birthday, father's day—only for them to be crumbled and tossed in the bin. 

Gone. Gone. 

(He never wrote back, anyway.)

You still ache. Still hurt. Things you wished you said, things you wished you didn't. It clots inside of your sternum. Where it leaks hurt and feels like a sore throat whenever you try to say his name, speak of him. 

You wonder if it's the same for him. 

"I lost my dad." 

He tenses, and the breath he takes is dipped in an aching sense of understanding, a small measure of relief. 

It's not happiness over death: it's camaraderie in shades of loss.

Kinship in grief. There is always that resounding sense of familiarity whenever you meet someone who's suffered the same agony, the same bereavement. Around everyone else, you pretend. You have to. Telling them about the clandestine phantoms that reach for you, the talons that dig into your flesh, hooking into your skin, isn't the same as sharing it with someone who knows. 

There is no pity. No sense of discomfort when they flounder, unsure what to say or do, or how to make a throbbing hurt stop. It's just—

Understanding. Acceptance. 

"He cheated on my mum," you trace figure-eights in the thick bed of hair that covers his chest. "Left us for her. I used to wait for him to come home everyday. I never said anything to her, but I'd hope. And then—," his fingers mimic the pattern on your shoulder blade. You shiver, burrow closer into his warmth. "She left him. And—and he died. All alone. The last thing he ever said to me was that he'd teach me how to swim."

He's quiet, milling over your words. His chest vibrates when he makes a noise; the rasping of an old engine. A grumble. "Did you ever learn?"

"No." 

You wonder if he thinks about the promise he made you that night on the boardwalk. A pinky promise cemented with peanut butter.  

"How do you let go?"

You think of empty bottles, and emptier promises. 

Swimming lessons you avoided. Ones you ran from. 

"It's not something you learn. It's just—something you have to do. You can't bury it because it'll just rot. You can't run from it because it'll just catch up to you. You have to face it. Take it on. Or it ruins you." 

An epiphany in sin. 

"Can't bury it."

His hands slide over your flesh, heavy and wanting, and you let him. Let him take, take—

Rough finger scrape over your hardening nipple before it's swallowed in the cup of his massive palm. 

Bear heaves, breath harsh and heavy, when he rolls you under him, under his bulk. 

Eyes flash blue. Blue. Blue. Clearer than you'd ever seen them before. Melting sapphire cresting over only black. You see nothing but yourself in his eyes, glossy and dark in the shine of his gaze. 

Something gnarls over the surface. Stones skipped over a stagnant pool, a currentless pond. 

It trembles. Water rippling. 

And then it breaks. 

His arms brace on the flat pillow above your head, chest pressed so tight to your own, it almost hurts to breathe. Your lungs can barely expand under his weight, his bulk, but you don't push him away. Your nail digs into the hard, fleshy planes of his back, legs locked around his thick waist as he seats himself as deep as possible inside of you. 

Your gasps, heavy pants, are shared in the thin space that separates you. He swallows each noise you let out down, eyes fixed, unwavering, focused—and so blue, blue, blue—on yours, widening at the corners. 

His mouth is open, parted, and he kisses you, it feels like he's trying to drink you in, devour you. 

It's still not enough. You need him closer. 

"I know," he slurs the word into your mouth, and kisses you again, jaw dropping open, unhinging, as he tries to consume you whole. "I need this, I need it—"

He fucks you hard, and deep. Each thrust is blunt, bludgeoning. It jars into you until phosphenes erupt over your widened eyes, moulting black across your vision. His cockhead grinds into the soft plug of your womb, and each time he hits, he pauses for a moment, and then moves. Moves his hips in a way that feels like he's trying to wrench it open, to jimmy your seal until it gives, until he's closer to you than ever before. 

It's brutal. Deep, and punishing. He takes, takes—

"I need it—fuck—I—"

He babbles into your mouth, lips wide and wet as he presses sloppy kisses to your face in the middle of each desperate, crushing word. 

"If—if it's too much, hit me," he grunts, pushing in so deep inside of you, that something gives. Something gives, breaks, and he's suddenly deeper than he'd ever been before, and it aches. It hurts, but you want it to. "Just—fuckin' hit me if you can't take it—"

Your trembling legs tighten around him, hand raking up his back until you meet the soft hair at the nape of his neck. You cup the back of his head in the palm of your hand, pulling him closer. Closer. 

You'll give whatever he needs. Whatever he wants. 

He groans your name and it sounds like relief, something desperate and aching. It breaks something inside of him. Shatters his tenuous self-control, and he falls into you. Into the seal of your arms. He mouths over your face, catching your lips in a messy, breathless kiss, whispering gospels of need into your open mouth, filling your lungs with his hymnal.

"I need—I need this, I need you—"

He bears down on you, lungs straining under his heft, but you choke it down. Choking in the air he releases, and let it clot in your collapsing lungs. 

"Take it, Joe, take it—"

In your hands, he shatters. 

The days merge, congeal into each other in a sticky-wet gossamer of sweat, and sex, and booze.

You can take him now. To the root. He goes out, once, and brings back a bottle of lube and a tequila, and has a spark in his eyes that makes your heart hammer. 

He drinks from the bottle as you wrap your lips around his cock, hand slick and wet and sticky from the lube, eyes glowing amber as he gazes down at you. 

You forget where you are, and spend your time between the sheets, under his body as he mouths across your ankle, suckling the impression of his teeth into your skin as he fucks you hard and deep, the headboard slamming against the wall each punishing thrust. 

Or on top of him, his hands oscillating between gripping your hips, slamming your pelvis down to swallow his cock to the base, or grasping your swaying breasts, fingers pinching your aching nipples between rough, calloused fingers, telling you how good you look, how amazing you feel. 

(His hand around your throat once. Not squeezing. Not tightening. Just holding you steady as you rode him, bouncing on his cock until you felt your lungs collapse, and your heart lurch.)

He likes you on your back, likes to fuck you deep, hard; punishing. Likes to fold your body in half, knees pressed to your chest as he opens you up, and batters against the seal of your womb as if he was demanding entrance. He can't miss anything like this. Every expression, every flicker across your face, is catalogued. Filtered. Filed. He uses it against you, then. Angling his cock, and battering against that place that made your eyes roll, or made you moan the loudest. 

It's a struggle with his girth, but he spends an hour fucking you stupid, stretching you with his cock, until he can roll you on your belly, fingers gripping the headboard, cheek pressed to the damp pillow, as he fucks you from behind, giving you all of him. Take me, he husks, gripping your hips so hard, you can feel your bones bruise. That's it. Good girl. Good—fuck—!

It's messy, and gross, and he doesn't even bother showering unless it means he can push you flush against the slimy tile, and fill your cunt up over and over again. 

He doesn't bother with condoms. Likes, you think, to watch it leak out of your raw, chafed pussy when he's finished. He leans back on his haunches, eyes fixed on the apex of your thighs, chin tilted to the side as he drinks right from the bottle, and stares. Watches. His throat bobs with each gulp, spent, sticky cock twitching when you clench, spilling more of his cum onto the always damp mattress below. 

You stink of sex and the whisky he pours over your breasts, hungry mouth following to slurp the droplets up. 

It twists around you until everything feels out of focus, dizzying. You don't remember anything except the musky taste of his briny skin, his viscous cum on your tongue, your face and chest (fuck, never did this before—); the searing heat of his body pressing you into the stale mattress again until all you know how to say is yes, please, more, and his name over and over again. 

It's numbed. Dulled. 

You're blissed out on sex and the taste of him, the wrought iron scent of his scabbed knuckles, the crack on the corner of his lip, and alcohol. 

You chase kerosene dreams and wrap yourself up in a web of lies but none of it matters when he pulls you close, lips to your temple, and breathes your name out between deep gasps for air.

You could stay like this forever, you think, spun tight in his four walls.

He lays down, and tugs you into the crook of his body, head resting on his big arm. It's firm, unyielding, under your head. The pressure makes something ache in your skull. 

It feels a bit too natural to turn in his embrace, until your face is pressed into the seam of his armpit, hand falling over his chest, bent at the elbow to let your palm rest over his sternum. The rapid thud of his heart doesn't calm you like those trashy harlequin novels you'd read, but it feels good when it pulses under your lifeline. The rhythm is familiar.

A reminder that you're not alone despite the chasm that looms in the narrow space between your bodies. 

His hand wraps over your shoulders, bringing you closer to him. A lover's embrace. Cuddling. It doesn't make sense inside this, inside—

Whatever this is. 

A mistake. 

(A sickness.) 

His arm tightens around you, head turning toward you. 

It's the closest you'd ever been to him before. Glacial blue framed by thick brown lashes. 

Your mother would have called them kind eyes; small, almond shaped with hooded lids. Upturned. 

You wonder if the sentiment would still ring true even with the ghosts that lurk in the crevasses. Pitched bivouacs in the alcoves where they linger. Fester.

This moment feels like too much. The shades of intimacy are jarring, unnatural considering the status of this whole thing. It doesn't fit. Doesn't belong. 

(You wonder if he held them like this, too, and hate yourself a little bit more when cold metal sears your skin.)

The echo of his heart—

You know why it's so familiar now. 

It's the throb of a gaping wound, pulsing with infection. 

(His four walls begin to crumble under the deluge that rears. A home made of mud, pipe dreams, and papier-mache.)

The towel reeks of mildew when you scour it through your wet hair, and the scent lingers on the split ends that cling to your damp skin. 

Proof of the weekend lingers in the blemishes staining your body, in the soreness between your thighs, the back of your throat when he pressed the cup of his hand to the back of your skull, and fed you his cock—

Your head swims. Dizzy and too full, and too—

Too much. 

It feels like waking up in the middle of a fever. Skin burning, searing; the starchy sheets cling to you, and everything feels—uncomfortable. Too much, too much. 

It's like that, but worse because you're not sick. You're not in the throes of a fever, but of reality. Brutal and crushing, and awful, and—

Your skin feels too small. Too tight. Your head aches—a weekend spent drinking nothing but him, and booze, and cheap spring water, and stale, bitter coffee from the convenience store down the road—and you wish it was from a hangover only, dehydration, and lack of proper sleep, and—

And not from the bitter clutch of poor choices. Bad decisions. 

Sick. Maybe, you are. 

You press the back of your hand to your forehead, but your skin is cold, clammy. 

(You wish it was hot enough to burn.)

He's sitting on the edge of the bed when you open the bathroom door, steam billowing out around you like a hazy white cloud, and lifts his chin, eyes finding yours. 

He's softer, somehow. 

Open. Raw. Vulnerable. 

But the stillness feels like stagnant water brimming with microbes that will kill you with just a drop. 

You taste biofilm when his lips press to yours, tongue carrying the tang of legionella. 

A sickness. A sickness—

A bottle of whisky sits on the end-table. Open. Half-finished. 

His lips are glossy with the shine of it.

Why you expected sobriety when this whole weekend was fuelled with nothing but the bitter taste of regret and ethanol is something you can't contend with when he's looking at you, eyes reddened from the high, lack of sleep. 

Can't bury it so he looks for answers at the bottom of the bottle. 

You think of pretty boy and wonder if this is what he meant when he said send him home, but don't let him destroy himself like this.

"Hey," his hands are too gentle around your forearm, fingers tucked much too gingerly around the circumference. He swallows you whole. Fingers overlapping. You fit in the palm of his hand. 

A place you don't belong. 

He pulls you into the crux of his thighs. 

"Look—," he starts, but says nothing else. His eyes skirt down, running the length of you as you stand, bare and bruised by his hands, fingers, lips, teeth. A mosaic of sin on your flesh. A brutal display of pittence in the form of a handprint on your hips. Black stains over your neck, under your jaw. 

He likes it, you think. His eyes darken, twisting with something proprietary. Possessive. A hunger, a want. Rapacious. 

Your body is painted with lies. Deception. Handprints in the form of self-destruction.

It's—

An awakening. A slap back into reality. 

There is no fairytale ending with a man who loses himself in amber. 

Who fingered you with his wedding ring on—

"I want to—"

"—You should go home." 

You expect anger.

Resentment. Bitterness. 

But something aching gnarls over his brow, a hurt that feels as flummoxing as it is heartaching; a devastating blow—one that leaves him blindsided and crushed. And you don't get it. You don't. He shouldn't be hurt over this. There shouldn't be the glimmer of agony in his eyes when he looks at you as if you'd struck him across the face with your open, searing palm.

It blisters through you. Third degree burns from the sun after spending all day in the ocean before being washed up on the rocky beach. Spat out onto the shore after trying to chase that effervescent feeling of when you were younger, and did nothing at all to try and save yourself from drowning. 

A high in blue. 

A high in booze. 

(Maybe, you're a lot more alike than you want to admit.)

What did your mum say?

If only she sent his sorry ass home instead of sucking his—

"Go home, Bear."

The borrowed words tumble out, shaded in concealed agony. It's everything you wished she had said to him, to your father, before you knew what it felt like to feel water flood your lungs.

"You don't know what you're talking about," it's deadly. Low. A broken husk that shatters the roseate haze that clung to the blue in his iris. It bleeds out. A polynya in its place. 

"I'm not going to be the other woman."

It feels—

Awful. 

There is no catharsis in this when he looks up, when his eyes flash in something that sits heavy in your chest. Recognition. Sobriety. 

"You need to fix yourself. Straighten up. Go home."

He leaves, and takes another part of you with him. 

(You sever a part of yourself and leave in the mouldering hotel room that still reeks of stale sweat, cheap whisky, and sex.)

[multi-fandom-imagine]

Not me about to write a fic based around this clip

Where the reader { replaces his wife } helps him.😈

[oncasette]

just a lil request for Phil Wenneck… car sex? 🫶🏽

𝗜’𝗗 𝗚𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗨𝗣 𝗙𝗢𝗥𝗘𝗩𝗘𝗥 𝗧𝗢 𝗧𝗢𝗨𝗖𝗛 𝗬𝗢𝗨

phil wenneck x wife!reader

summary: 1.4k.

The two of you are barely twenty minutes into your drive–that is, apparently, only an hour and a half according to your husband–when Phil starts getting handsy. You’re back in one of those little sundresses he adores so much, seat pushed back as far as it can go, feet crossed and perched up on the dashboard. 

or the one where phil fucks his wife on a deserted back road.

warnings: smut, piv, car sex, (almost) reckless driving, unprotected sex

masterlist | taglist

Phil wouldn’t admit it to anyone–not even to you, most days–but he was a sucker for the domestic scene. It was such a guilty pleasure, seeing you in those pretty little sundresses while you made lunch in the kitchen. Bare feet against the linoleum of your mudroom as you fold the laundry. Watching you brush your teeth on your side of the jack and jill sinks in your bathroom in one of his old t-shirts from college. 

It leaves his brain a little hazy, a little numb. Clouds his judgment and his rational thought until he’s sliding up behind you while you make breakfast, arms linked around your middle as he presses barely there kisses to the seam of your shoulder. 

“You got any plans today?” he asks, moving the neckline of the shirt you’d stolen with the tip of his nose and humming against the bare skin he finds there. 

“No,” you say. “Unless you count lounging around here.”

“Good,” he says. “Because we’re going on a trip.”

The palms of his hands are splayed wide against your hips, beneath the hemline of the shirt and skimming the thin edge of the panties you were wearing. 

“Phil-” He hushes you, quickly, kissing the spot below your ear. “I’ve already got you a bag packed.”

“We can’t just go,” you scoff, smiling. 

“Why not? C’mon, baby, I’ve already got you a bag packed and everything,” he says. His voice is low and gravely, chest rumbling against your back. “Let me spend some time with my beautiful wife, hm?”

“Y-yeah.” The words come out as a stutter, slipping down your tongue as Phil nips at your pulse point and molds you into putty in his palms. “Yeah, let’s go somewhere.” 

“There’s my good girl,” he says and you huff out of your nose at the loss of contact from his lips. 

He pulls away to give you time to finish cooking the food you were no longer interested in and stalks back up the stairs to grab your bags. 

The two of you are barely twenty minutes into your drive–that is, apparently, only an hour and a half according to your husband–when Phil starts getting handsy. You’re back in one of those little sundresses he adores so much, seat pushed back as far as it can go, feet crossed and perched up on the dashboard. 

He’d left you alone to get ready. He’d loaded up the car, tossing the single bag stuffed full of both of your clothes into the trunk and the trader joe’s bag of snacks into the back seat, leaving you alone in the bedroom to dress as you pleased. 

Needless to say, Phil was more than shocked when his fingers pushed up the pale yellow fabric of your dress and found nothing but more of your soft, bare skin when he’d expected the delicate cotton of your underwear again. 

“Jesus Christ, baby,” he scoffs as he takes his gaze off the road to turn toward you with wide eyes. 

“Eyes on the road, handsome,” you say, tapping his cheek delicately with the hand closest to him. 

“I can’t believe you’re not wearing panties right now.”

You hum in response, bringing your hand down to fiddle with his fingers from where they’re still resting on your leg. It’s like your touch brings him back to the surface, the drag of his hand resuming as he moves closer to the slick between your thighs. 

“Holy fuck,” Phil groans as you guide his hand, coating his fingers in your arousal. “You’re so wet for me, baby.” 

The tip of his middle finger has just barely pressed itself into your pussy when he pulls his hand away entirely, leaving you with a whine caught at the base of your throat. You watch him white knuckle the steering wheel and flick on the turn signal. 

“Phil?”

“Yeah, baby?” He checks the mirrors before abruptly changing lanes. 

“What are you doing?” you ask. 

“Getting off the interstate so I can find a back road… or something,” he says. His jaw clenches so tight you think you can hear his teeth grinding. 

“Phil,” you sigh as you adjust in your seat, leaning toward him over the middle console to slide a hand across the denim of his pants. Your eyes roll back in your head as you think about how delicious it would feel against your clit, thighs clenching as your hand finds the bulge in his jeans. 

“Fucking christ. Give me five minutes…” he sighs. “Two minutes.” 

You palm his cock, heat emanating through the fabric. He’s finally reached an exit, the three minutes that had passed in the midst of the exchange feeling more like twenty as Phil holds your wrist to keep your movements at bay. The two of you are lucky enough to have gotten off at a fairly deserted spot. A decently dense swath of trees surround the parts of the street not taken up by fast food places and gas stations and it only takes you a couple minutes to find a side street to pull off into. 

It feels like the car is thrown into park before the wheels stop rolling. Your seatbelt is unbuckled for you, hands landing on your hips to pull you over the center console until your knees are framing his legs and he’s looking up at you through hazy eyes. His hands are still on your hips, grip strong as he tugs you down fully onto his lap. 

“You’re a fucking tease, you know that?” he asks. He grinds you down, rolling your hips against his until there’s a wet spot in the denim. You were right, too. The way the fabric catches your clit with each drag has drool pooling beneath your tongue. 

“Want your cock, Phil,” you whimper. You lean forward, forehead pressed against his until you’re basically swapping air. 

“You think you deserve it?” he asks before spitting out “no panties” under his breath. 

“Want it so bad, please,” you whine. Your cunt is practically weeping over him, clenching around nothing. You reach between the two of you to paw at his belt. The buckle is bulky between your fingers and it takes you multiple tries to undo it. He lets you handle it, only pitching in to lift his hips to get his boxers and pants down just enough to slip his cock out. 

He pulses in your grasp, dick jumping as you swipe your thumb over the slit to spread the thick beads of his pre-cum over the head. He’s so thick your thumb just barely meets your index finger when fully wrapped around. 

You inhale sharply through your nose as you line him up. 

“You always feel so-” Phil groans. “Perfect wrapped around me.” 

You slide down his length slowly, allowing yourself to soak up the feeling of him stretching you out–despite the fact that you’d fucked the night before–until he’s fully seated inside of you. Until you’re rolling your hips into the coarse patch of pubic hair that meets your clit. 

He leans forward to connect your lips, drowning out the sound of your moans as he licks into your mouth. One of his hands comes up to cradle the back of your head as you lift your hips to start bouncing on him. He didn’t want a repeat of the last time you’d fucked in his car. He’d had to kiss you silly to keep you from feeling the dull throb in the back of your head. 

His other hand guides your movements, allowing you to pull up off him slowly only to slam you down on him so hard he nearly has you seeing stars. 

“God,” he exhales. You can already feel him twitching inside you. 

“I’m so close.”

“Me, too, baby. Hm,  haven’t cum this fast since I was a fucking teenager,” he says. It only takes the feel of you clamping down around him once to send his hips shooting up into you, cum spurting out of him in thick ropes that have your walls fluttering around him. 

You cum around him with a constant chant of oh my god. 

The two of you sit in the silence of your orgasms for the next couple minutes, giving Phil enough time to regain coherent thought as the mixture of both of you cum seeps out around his dick. 

“You know, I was gonna fuck you when we got there, but…” Phil’s lament is cut off with a half-hearted slap to the chest. 

[frogchiro]

YES YES YES

I personally love the fact that Bear is a deeply religious man as shown in the show, but with time his religious resolve starts to crack and weaken the more shit happens in his personal life.

I like to incorporate these ideas in my writing for him, that he sees reader, our sweet Hackergirl, as some sort of temptress that he's insanely attracted to and genuinely likes her but his believes are holding him back resulting in that pent up, primal masculine hunger and need to chase after the female he has his eyes on :((

comes barreling through the walls like KoolAid man

I HEARD WE’RE TALKIN ABOUT OUR LORD AND SAVIOR JOE BEAR GRAVES

YES WE ARE

Joe 'Bear' Graves who drives himself absolutely nuts and blueballs himself because he refuses to fuck you until marriage, but the thing is, you've only interacted with him during debriefs since your transfer to his base as a new hacker :((

Will lay in his bed, back slightly arching and legs kicking out as Joe lets out a deep, rumbly growl from his chest as he slides his palm down his belly to adjust his hard cock in his sweats and he hisses because his balls start to ache with how full they are and how pent up he is :((

But can you really blame him?? You with that perfect smile lighting up the whole room, your soft, smooth voice explaining the intelligence you managed to recover but Joe, as much as he regreted it and felt like the worst sinner, could only focus on your pretty light blue blouse that had a few buttons open and showed your cleavage off like a prize he couldn't obtain.

Your perfect, full hips swaying and together with your beatiful curves he swore you looked like a temptress send on Earth to get him to sin, and now here he is; in his bed all alone, constantly adjusting his dick in his pants as his balls ache to be emptied inside you while you have no idea what the man is doing, instead you're getting chatted up by his nasty cousin, Philip, who wanted to sink his teeth into your soft flesh the moment he laid his eyes on you♡

[fanartist666]

Whiskey and Lead

Joseph 'Bear' Graves x Original Female Character fanfic TAGS/WARNINGS: Hurt/comfort, fix it, slow burn, angst, mentions of: PTSD, child death, canon character death, serious injury, poor mental health, divorce/separation MDNI Summary: Joe Graves is told by his wife, Lena, that maybe it's time to see other people. The biggest problem with that was the when and where, given that Joe's surrogate father figure, mentor and previous team leader, Richard Taggart, had just died, and Lena had said this at his wake. Just before things get too much, an unlikely friend of Rip's knocks him from his trance.

Part 1 wordcount: 1.6k | Part 2: will go here

A/N: just a fun little part one set up, when I started this I hadn't written anything for like two weeks, so I do apologise if this sucks lol, trying to understand writing Joe is a challenge but I like him - also if you like this version of Anubis and want more of her and also like Game of Thrones, I have a long fic called 'A Court of Dragons and Lions' on A03 where she's married to Tywin Lannister bc I'm a sucker for Charles Dance lol, anyway enjoy! Sorry for any typos too I tried but I could still have missed some

Joe’s chest heaved with rage, despair and hurt, all his emotions swirling without a way out on top of the grief he was battling through. Hadn’t he tried hard enough? Tried in enough ways? Love languages, he’d learned what they were and what they meant and fucking tried to show Lena he loved her in all of them.

“Or maybe see other people.”

Lena told him that, then of all times? At Rip’s- At Rip’s fucking funeral? Lena couldn’t have come to him with that at any other point? They were already living apart, wasn’t that enough? Apparently not.

He felt it all swell up inside him as Lena walked away and he stared, talking to this fucked up apparition of Rip telling him it was only there because he wanted it there. It was all too much, Rip had been murdered, and died alone after everything he said on that video and everything fucking else and now he was seeing shit and Joe felt like he was going to explode- suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder. He flinched and turned around to see who had tapped him.

He didn’t know the woman before him, but he recognised the concern in her eyes and the posture of a soldier when he saw it. Her mouth was moving, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.

“What’d you say?” He asked sharply, desperately shaking his head.

“I said ‘are you okay’, but I think you’ve just answered that for me.” She repeated, and somewhere in his head, Graves registered that her accent was British. “You wanna come for a walk with me?”

The woman jerked her thumb in the direction of an exit, and Joe nodded before following her dumbly. Walking helped. His blue eyes scanned his surroundings but didn’t really take anything in, to be honest, he couldn’t even remember what the woman he was walking with looked like. He could focus on her voice, though. She was well-spoken, with a sweet-sounding voice, slightly roughened by what he assumed was tobacco.

“So, you want to tell me about what’s going on?” She asked, her tone not too gentle and not too commanding, perfectly disarming. Although he couldn’t tell if that was just because he really did need to talk about it. But something stopped him. It needed to come out, but she was a stranger. He couldn’t just unload that.

In the end, Joe shook his head. “No, no you don’t need to hear that.”

“Come on now, I know a C.O. when I see one.” She nudged him in the arm gently with her elbow, and he couldn’t not smile a little and raise his hands in surrender.

“Yeah, I guess you got me there.” He chuckled softly, vision expanding from mere tunnels.

“Alright then, tell me about that instead, there’s a good lad.” Joe’s attention was slowly turning to her words.

“Okay...” he had to shrug off the flush rising in his face at how easily he’d obeyed her order, however gentle. He didn’t want to admit how much ‘there’s a good lad’ had encouraged him, either. “my name’s Joseph Graves, n’ I’m a senior chief Navy SEAL. I’ve got my team that I inherited from Rip when he got out. That’s Buddha, Fishbait, Caulder, Chase... Buck, until a little bit ago.” He felt his voice catch on Buck’s name.

“So you’re the famous Bear, eh? Good on you, Rip spoke very highly of you.” The woman said, and the warm reception to his introduction made him perk up a little. “And I was sorry to hear about Buckley. He was a good man.”

“He did?” Joe looked down at his shoes. “Yeah. Buck was the best of us. I miss him.”

“Oh god yeah, Rip loved the shit out of you. All of you guys, but he spoke about you most.” The woman told him, and he craned his neck to look at her curiously, finally taking in her features. She was pretty, by all accounts. Warm brown skin like caramel, inky black hair and startling scarlet eyes behind a pair of aviator sunglasses. She was dressed relatively normally in a green t-shirt and black jeans. The cool of the night air didn’t seem to affect her, and he could see that she was decently muscled.

“You knew him well? How come I never met you before?” Joe asked, an eyebrow raised.

“Could be any reason, knowing Rip. And with our schedules in special forces, things can be hectic.” She shrugged softly. “Would’ve liked to meet you under nicer circumstances. I’m Anubis Demonium, by the way. Teammates liked to call me Jackal, which is exceedingly clever, and the story stupidly embarrassing, drill me for details after a few pints. Rip and I go way back. Or I suppose we did, hey?” she huffed a bitter laugh. Joe was sensing a rusty command on her, just as she’d identified on him like a hound after a rabbit. “I met Rip on a co-op, SAS and SEAL. We wanted the same target, our governments wanted to get along, it’s a long story I could be put in prison for telling you.” Anubis waved a hand impatiently as they walked along together. Bear finally registered then, as she was explaining the story, just how tall she was, because there wasn’t that much difference between the two of them, she must have been six feet, easily.

“Rip was on his last mission before becoming team leader himself and I was already a Captain of my own squad. I remember him telling me about the guys he had lined up while we had downtime. He was my buddy on that trip, his own leader told him to take note from the two of us. We got to know each other, and he kept me filled in on you guys. He was proud of you, especially. In a way I was proud of you all too. Silly to admit, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t call it silly,” Joe huffed a laugh through his nose. “He always had my back, didn’t he? I’m glad to have made him proud.. he didn’t deserve to go out the way he did.”

“Nobody does.. He was a good friend to me, I can imagine he was a good leader to you guys. Everything that happened to him was an injustice.” Anubis said softly as they walked along the street.

“Yeah, he was.” Joe hesitated. “Thank you, for... Uh, walkin’ with me. There’s a lot goin’ on and it’s helped more than you’d think.”

“S’alright. Leaders have it hard, you know?” Joe raised a brow at her, and she elaborated. “Think about it, if you’re in a team, you talk to the leader about what’s troubling you. Who does the leader talk to? Can’t talk to the team, they’ll think you’re weak. Can’t talk to your civilian friends and partners, what if they think differently of you for what you do? If we’re lucky, our own mentors are still breathing, and we can talk to them. And lucky is putting it lightly.”

Joe was floored. He stared at Anubis in disbelief; it was as though she had taken all his thoughts, his fears, his loneliness as a team leader, and put them out in the air. He could hardly find the words to agree with her, just nodding dumbly at her instead.

“Y-yeah,” he stuttered after a moment. “Yeah, you’re right. I appreciate it.”

“It really is no problem, I was in the same position as you not so long ago. After today if you ever want to talk to someone who... You know, gets it like you, or you want to go for a drink, give me a ring.” She put a scrap of paper with a number scrawled on it into his slowly relaxing hand.

“Thank you... I’ll try not to darken your door too often.” Joe chuckled, pocketing the paper.

“Nonsense,” Anubis snorted, waving a hand. “I’d be glad for the company too. I’m retired now, none of the action anymore.” She explained, correcting her expression into a smile.

“Retired? How come?” Joe asked, hardly watching where he was walking now, his eyes fixed on her like a vision from God. He watched her walk, finally taking in more and more detail, and noticing a subtle unevenness to her gait.

“Injury,” she gestured to her left side, where the unevenness was. “I’m covered in scars this side, took a decent hit from an Mk 46, lucky to be alive so I suppose the stiffness and scars are a decent trade for breathing. The rehab was hell, though.”

Joe’s breath caught in his throat. Buck used one of those. He’d seen people blown to pieces by it, and some not. Hearing that would be a story and a half, he thought.

“Jesus, that sounds like a gnarly story…” he trailed off with a breath, and felt her elbow nudge him gently. Blue eyes landed on the weird blood-red ones belonging to his new acquaintance.

“Maybe I’ll tell you it sometime.” She smiled, and Joe realised they’d circled back to the gathering. “See you around, Joe.”

“See you…” He realised that he’d completely blanked what she told him her name was, only a few minutes ago, but they’d already split up, and when he looked back, she had melted into the crowd and firelight. Looking down at the number and his phone, he thought of something that would’ve made Rip laugh, and probably her, if they really had been friends.

‘Hobbles’ Joe typed, and pocketed his phone.

[valscodblog]

HII and

KNOW WHAT? FUCK IT! IMMA WRITE MORE JOE GRAVES X READERS BC THERE NEEDS TO BE MORE OF THEM!!!!

@seconds-over-first you make sure you gimme sum more ideas,

@writing-with-moss YOU KEEP ME COMPANY THRU THIS WHOLE SHABANG!

@staytrueblue you, baby, you just keep on shining and enjoy what i write.

@thebunnednun i know you have no idea whats going on here, but we love you anyways mamas, so come be a part of this, mi amor <3

[ceilidho]

I would completely eat up a Joe graves x reader fic if you wrote it bc mmmmmm, good soup. I haven't even watched six but I want it so badly.

I just don’t have an idea yet but unfortunately both n/eil ell/ice and ba/rry s/loane are my muses and I wish to write only for them for the rest of my life

I really gotta dig into the “obsessed with his wife” angle but I don’t know if it’s more compelling to write the reader character as his original wife/high school sweetheart or his rebound/new fixation post-divorce. Also I’m really obsessed with the christian angle……I need to write Joe being exceptionally weird about religion…..something something about sex only being good when it’s done with procreation in mind so he never uses condoms and never comes anywhere but inside you….

Oohh it could also be interesting to write him as never having been married….idk I need to think about it more. Something about blind faith in his creator guiding him to the woman meant for him….meanwhile you’re just the waitress at the diner that he stopped at after getting drunk off his ass because he’s still dealing with ptsd from his squad mate dying …..staring down at him like mildly concerned and a little uncomfortable