#Regardless I want to see what else is out there

[sixty-silver-wishes]

yep. knew a guy in high school with an abusive girlfriend. 100% sounds like what happened with them.

I was friends with this guy, let's call him david, since like. first grade; our moms were good friends as well. so, our families went out for ice cream once, and david and I took a picture together, and I posted it to my snapchat. I did that whenever I went out with friends; that's just a normal thing that teenagers do.

a while later, david isn't talking to me at school. I found out that david's girlfriend had seen the picture of us. she asked david who I was, and he said I was his friend. she then asked if he thought I was pretty, and he said yes (what do you answer in that situation?). she then told david not to talk to me, or any other female friends he had. david's girlfriend didn't even go to the same school as us.

later on in college, david ended up dropping out to move out of state with his girlfriend. I didn't hear from him since he stopped talking to me in high school, so I assumed our friendship was basically dead. it wasn't until months later when he messaged me and told me that they broke up. she'd go through his phone and demand to see everything, saying that she had "trust issues" from being cheated on in the past.

I want to make this clear- regardless of gender, "trust issues" is not an excuse for controlling someone else. if you don't trust someone enough to accept that they have their own life- their own phone, their own friends, their own interests, their own documents- maybe you shouldn't be in a relationship with them in the first place.

I don’t know how many boys follow me, but I gotta bet there’s some. I just wanna tell y’all to be careful.

Abusive girls exist and what they’re doing is seen as like “badass tough don’t take no shit” but your girl should not hit you. Ever.

She should not demand for you to hand over your phone to look through.

She should not yell at you and humiliate you either alone or in front of people.

She shouldn’t make you distance yourself from your friends or family.

She shouldn’t scratch you or twist your arms.

She should not call you names.

She shouldn’t tell you ‘she’ll kill herself if you break up’

These are just a few examples of abuse and it’s just seen as okay when girls do it and god knows I’ve fallen victim to it a few times, but you shouldn’t have to.

Never worry about not being in a relationship. If they’re worth it, they won’t hurt you.

No one has the right to hurt you.

[pankowperfection]

Good Intentions

reposting because Tumblr doesn't like the old link

GIF by normatural

Summary: JJ keeps watch over you at a party, but decides he can't stay away anymore

Warnings: smut, mentions of drinking, mentions of drug use, oral (fem receiving), 18+

Being John B's younger sister meant inheriting the other pogues as family, regardless of whether you wanted them or not. They were basically siblings you'd never asked for, so while everyone was polite when you were all together, you weren't particularly close with any of them. Unfortunately, John B always dragged you out with them so you weren't just sitting at home alone and tonight that had meant going to a kook party on Figure 8, the very last place you wanted to be.

You had stressed about what to wear, in the end opting for a pair of ripped jeans and a lacy black tank top that showed a little bit of under boob. Strappy sandals on your feet you headed to the kitchen, finding JJ and John B gathering beer to take to the party. "Are you guys almost ready?" JJ turned around at the sound of your voice, looking you over head to toe. You missed the way his eyes darkened at the sight of your exposed breasts, how he swallowed thickly before looking away. "Yes y/n, chill. Just gathering supplies. Let's go." You follow the group outside, piling into the Twinkie and praying the night goes smoothly.

Of course as soon as you arrived at the party, everyone split off into different directions, leaving you alone. John B had gone to search for Sarah, Kie and Pope settling into a deep conversation about environmental changes needed to protect the beaches. JJ headed out to the back patio overlooking the beach, searching for a quiet spot to roll a joint. Wanting to look like you belonged you wandered into the kitchen, pouring yourself a drink into the red plastic cup before making your way back to the main part of the party. Unbeknownst to you, JJ had come back inside, positioning himself in the corner of the room to keep watch over you as John B had instructed.

He'd always been secretly attracted to you, never making a move because he didn't want to be the guy to go after his best friend's younger sister. He had spent many hours admiring you from a distance, wanting to be the one to make you laugh on a bad day. Countless nights he had laid wide awake in bed, wondering what it would be like to kiss you, to feel your bare skin beneath his fingers. How did you taste? What would it sound like for you to moan his name? The thought of anyone else touching you, getting to see you in that way, made JJ see red.

Over the next few hours, several guys approached you and tried to get you to dance. Each time you turned them away, getting more frustrated with each pursuit. The final straw was when none other than Rafe Cameron had stalked up silently behind you, placing his hands on your hips and pulling you back against him. You let out a gasp, spinning around in his arms quickly and attempting to shove him away. "Rafe, get off of me." He smirked down at you, leaning in closer. "Shh, relax sweetheart. I just want a quick taste. Let me show you a good time." Without further thought you threw your drink into his face, leaving him fuming before stalking off to grab another.

Suddenly you were pulled into the hallway, a familiar large frame caging you in against the wall. "JJ, what are you doing?" He sighs, letting his hand trail down your face before tucking your hair behind your ear. "I just wanted to make sure you were okay. Seems like you haven't had a moment of peace all night, all these dumb kooks treating you like a piece of meat." You look up into his blue eyes, something different in them that you haven't seen before that makes butterflies erupt in your stomach. "I'm fine J. Why do you care anyways? I know John B asked you to look out for me, but I can take care of myself." He smiles, dimples on display making your heart beat faster. "Oh I know, I saw that for myself. You look so hot, even hotter when you threw that drink in Cameron's face. Sexiest thing I've ever seen."

He leans closer, hands on either side of your face, close enough you can feel his breath on your lips. "JJ...." His lips are on yours in an instant, soft at first, savoring the feeling of your lips against his. When you let a moan slip and tangle your hands into his hair he loses all restraint, pressing his body into yours as his tongue plunges into your mouth. His hands are everywhere, caressing softly over your breasts and bringing your nipples to hard peaks before traveling further south, ghosting over the front of your jeans and making your panties soaked. You can feel his hard cock pressing into your core, grabbing onto his ass to pull him closer still causing him to groan into your mouth. You pull apart breathless, chests heaving and heat flooding through your system. "Take me home J, please." He nods, making some kind of excuse to John B about you not feeling well and letting him know he was taking you home.

The ride back to the Chateau is quiet, air thick with sexual tension. You barely make it over the threshold into the house before he is on you again, picking you up and carrying you to the spare bedroom he calls his own. He sits down on the bed with you straddling his lap, hands kneading the flesh of your ass as you grind down over his length. You pull his head back, exposing his neck as you kiss and suck over every inch of exposed skin. "Shit y/n. We shouldn't do this, your John B's sister." You push him down onto the bed, rocking over length again in slow, deliberate motions that cause him to moan again. "Tell me you want me to stop J and I will." You continue, friction of your jeans rubbing your clit perfectly as you start to pick up speed. "Fuck,” he groans, flipping you over quickly and trapping your hands over your head.

"You're sure this is what you want? Cause once I start, I won't be able to stop." He searches your face for any sign of discomfort, wanting to be certain that you really do want to cross this line. "I want you JJ. Please, please make me feel good." With that he helps you sit up, quickly discarding your shirt and taking in the sight of your naked breasts. "God, you're so perfect," he coos, leaning down to take your left nipple into his mouth. You weave your fingers into his hair, holding his face close as he lavishes your sensitive bud with his tongue. He kisses his way to your right breast, repeating the same actions as his hand pops the button on your jeans. He pulls the zipper down slowly, connecting his lips to your neck as his fingers dive under the material of your panties. When you feel the coolness of his ring touch your overheated skin you moan, hips bucking up into his touch. "Mmm JJ, feels so good." He takes his time, teasing two fingers up and down through your folds, lightly grazing your clit with each pass. "So wet for me sweetheart, bet you taste so good."

His hot, greedy mouth kisses down your body, pausing long enough to remove the rest of your clothes before settling between your thighs. "You have no idea how long I've wanted to do this." His breath tickles your pussy, eyes threatening to roll at what is about to happen. "J please, need you so bad." With that he dives in, devouring you with such ferocity you swear you might pass out from the overwhelming pleasure. Your nails rake into his scalp and he moans, vibrations making your thighs tremble. Two fingers tease around your entrance before he plunges them inside, curling them just right so his ring massages your walls. "Fuck J, don't stop." He increases his pace, fucking you with his fingers while his talented tongue worships your clit. "Come on sweetheart, cum for me." His soft command does you in, body trembling as you grind against his face while you ride out your orgasm.

The sight of your release shining on his chin as he comes up to kiss you makes you feral, pushing him onto his back again before hovering over his length. "Easy sweetheart," his abs tense beneath your touch, struggling to not show how excited he is at the thought of you riding him. "Is this okay? Can I ride you?" His eyes roll back at your words, moan leaving his plump lips that tells you all you need to know. You line him up before starting to slowly sink down, his thick length stretching you in a way no one has. "God, you're so big." You finally bottom out, taking a moment to breathe and adjust to how deep he is inside of you. "Y/n, fuck. Need you to move, squeezing me so fucking tight."

His hands grab your hips, guiding your motions as you start to bounce up and down on his length. His fingers dig into your hips, grip bruising but you just don't care. Suddenly he lands a soft smack to your ass making you gasp and clench around him. "Oh god," he groans, bucking up into you to meet your thrusts. Before you can realize what happened he has you on your back, legs over his shoulders as he plows back into you. You let out a whimper, nails digging into his back as he starts to thrust hard and fast.

"You feel so good, don't want to ever stop." He pins your hands over your head again, laying down on top of you and sucking bruises into your neck. The new angle feels amazing, each thrust stimulating your clit. "Yes J, just like that. I'm gonna cum again." He somehow speeds up, rocking into you faster. When he bites the sensitive spot on your neck your orgasm washes over, wave after wave of pleasure coursing through your veins as you moan out his name. "Shit princess, gonna fill you up." A few thrusts later he stills, warm release coating your walls as he comes to a halt.

Please let me know if you want to be added to my taglist

[postcardsfromheapside]

I need to be salty for a hot second about people who are upset about aspects of Lucanis' romance.

I'll put everything else under the break for spoilers, but in general, I am so disappointed in a large portion of this fanbase who apparently thought "disaster" meant "romantasy," but also it's in keeping with how a lot of people seem unable to put things in context.

One of the complaints I keep seeing run past is that the scene where you commit to a relationship with Lucanis seems pefunctory, or out of the blue, there's nothing really romantic about it, it's too similar to the platonic route, etc, etc, ETC.

I romanced Emmrich, but I've seen other people's versions of romancing Lucanis. I'm just going to kind of word vomit here, and hope I can come up with something cohesive.

As someone who id's with Lucanis for "generational abuse" and "dumpster fire disaster bi" and "using socially acceptable drugs as coping mechanisms in place of addressing your problems" reasons, it's been really fucking annoying watching the almost deliberate misinterpretation of his character even after Mary Kirby dropped several explanations on social media. It's like a large part of the fanbase saw all that and turned into the "yes yes, very sad...anyway!" meme and went right on fetishizing him...then got mad when he didn't turn into the seductive Dom with wings they were hoping for.

You commit to Lucanis after (what I consider) a very intense scene inside his "mind prison." He's struggling so much internally that Spite wrests control of his body from him in front of witnesses and begs Rook to help them. Lucanis would never ask Rook to do so on his own, he's terrible at asking for the help he truly needs. Spite drags Rook into the Fade Ossuary and demands they free Lucanis from his self-imposed prison. And whether you're a friend or would-be lover, Rook slowly talks Lucanis out of a host of self doubts regarding his family and friends. Can he trust himself not to hurt other people, now that he's saddled with this affliction? Has he disappointed the people he cares about most? Do these new people he's coming to care about actually trust and care about him? The rooms are filled with fragmented thoughts that peter out into regrets. You're literally seeing Lucanis' fractured and complicated emotions.

One of them tore a hole straight through me: "You'd have to kill me...And Spite would die."

You'd have to kill him to get rid of the demon. And he'd regret the death of the demon that's protected him and given him strength, through a brutal year of betrayal and torment. I don't know if y'all remember the scenes in the Ossuary of the failed experiments and the corpses you had to pass to get to his jar of blood. It wasn't fun.

When you break out of the mind prison after helping him bond with Spite, it's intimate and momentous, even on a platonic route. You've seen desperate and lonely parts of him he'd never willingly show anyone.

As you're convincing Lucanis that it's okay to leave his mind-prison, you tell him you understand that it's easier to deal with problems like the Ossuary and Zara than healing and living with Spite, potentially hurting people he cares about. But he wants to. It's Rook's job to help him see a path out, a way for him to make the struggle easier so he can begin to heal himself.

I need to stress: you aren't "fixing" him. You're acting as his lighthouse, regardless of whether you're a friend or a lover. Sometimes people need help. He's still going to have to do the work to get there.

As a friend, it was extremely rewarding to come back to the kitchen and see him doing exactly as I'd hoped: moving on with the business of *living*. He made a nice dinner for everyone he's come to care for, and a special dessert for Neve. Cooking is where Lucanis finds creativity, and comfort, and connection with his friends and family. He isn't very good with words, but he will note everything you consume, and try to make you feel loved by expressing it that way.

Which is why I think it's important you don't dismiss the commitment on the romantic route. He remembers YOUR favorite drink and makes YOU a special dessert if you're romancing him. Lucanis isn't going to get poetic. You've already made him feel raw. You've seen the ugly, embarassing parts of him. What is he supposed to say? Usually it takes Spite reaching through his body to actually be direct. Instead, Lucanis reaches for food, his favorite medium, to try and apologize for inadvertently showing you those things, to thank you for helping him despite seeing what he considers the most shameful parts of him. Your commitment is letting him know that you value him, that he has nothing to be ashamed of, that you understand what he's trying to express with his struggling communication skills, which appear to get better as your relationship progresses from there.

It's weird that some of y'all don't feel that this is heartfelt and important, because you'd rather him act out some sensuous fantasy trope. It's also weird that some of you haven't figured out that many scenes in RPG's can be similar on platonic and romantic routes with tweaks to shade context.

(Also just in case this comes up: cooking is not his "love language" - that whole concept was invented by a misogynistic weirdo and we should remove it from our ideas of communication)

Anyway, this guy is my Rook's bestie and I'll go down swinging for him, you should appreciate the fuck out of him and stop acting like his writer didn't craft a perfectly funny little weirdo who is bad at showing people his tender parts and terrible at interpersonal relationships.

[sleepyparalysisdmon]

Enhypen and their 'oh' moment

Requested? Yes! Request: ‘so happy you’re willing to write for other groups 💞 my request is enhypen members falling in love / realizing they’re falling in love’

Jungwon Like most group leaders, he carries a lot on his shoulders. He probably feels that he can’t share that responsibility with anyone else from time to time. Still, he finds himself opening up about his stresses one night and he lets you comfort him. He likes to be strong for everyone else and wants to appear unaffected, but he feels safe appearing affected in front of you because you’re so gentle about it. It’s when he’s got his head in your lap after he unloads all his worries that he has his little ‘oh’ moment.

Heesung He might come off as reserved and even a little bit cold at first (someone please prove me wrong though!!). You might even think he doesn’t like you very much because he’s perhaps not as outwardly expressive as others. But trust that he has a soft spot for you. He might not let some of the younger members get away with something, but you can right in front of him and he’ll never say a word. If one of the younger members throws a fit about this preferential treatment, he’ll blink a few times and think, ‘huh. That’s weird.’ Largely unaffected by this revelation though.

Jay I think he’d be one of those that knows pretty early on that he’s falling. Within the first few times he meets you, he recognizes what’s happening in slow motion, so there’s no big ‘oh’ moment. Just a series of little confirmations along the way that his assumption was correct. You do the slightest, most monotonous thing and he thinks. ‘Yep, I think I’m in love.’ It’s not this big, scary feeling like some of the other members might experience, but rather a comforting feeling to fall.

Jake Now he might be shocked. Say you aren’t even dating but you share some mutual friends. He sees you playing with Layla in the other room and one of his group members calls him out for his staring, and maybe even calls him ‘lovesick’. Totally flabbergasted because what do you mean?? It’s not like that?? His group members’ faces tell him everything he needs to know - which is that he’s a blind idiot (affectionate).

Sunghoon Ok, he realizes because he’s jealous. Regardless of whether you are dating or not, he’ll see someone get way too close to you, or hear someone talk about how they’re going to ask you out, and he’s panicking!! Cannot determine right away why he’s panicking because he’d like to think he’s not a very possessive person. But here we are. The ‘oh’ moment is when he realizes he perked up as soon as your attention was back on him. Might just confess in a roundabout way right then, like, “don’t pay attention to anyone else, okay? Only me!” A big baby.

Sunoo lol he says he hates annoying things. Then lets you annoy him continuously. Doesn’t say a word when you poke his cheek or boop his nose. Doesn’t complain when you keep him up with your yapping in the middle of the night. Doesn’t think the first thing of bailing on any other plans because you’re bored. This will be a super slow realization, but when it finally does hit him, it’s because HE said he missed you and you laugh and say, “but we’re constantly together!” ‘Oh’ indeed.

Niki To no one’s surprise, Niki has maknae privileges and totally milks it for all it’s worth. He’s totally fine with being babied by his members. He’s used to being protected, but feels rather protective of you. Might even speak up to his hyungs if they mess with you too much, to which they’ll tease him about. Thing is, he might start swinging on them if they don’t stop!! The thought that it’s anymore than friends doesn’t compute for him until it’s spelled out for him by one of his group members, probably in a sarcastic way - like, “Fine, fine, we’ll stop messing with your girl.” Never occurred to him that you could be his until that moment.

[boundlessdisaster]

Red state leftist here: the moderates see you calling them names, dragging them through the mud, and that is why they hate you. Nothing else. I'm going to let you in on a little secret: if you don't use buzzwords even hella alt right people will agree with you. They hear the buzzwords and all they see is hate for them as a person. It's no different to them than the transphobic comments. They see it as a direct attack on them. You want to change minds and change the world? Talk to people as people, regardless of their political ideology. Don't use buzzwords, because just like when you check out of a conversation at dog whistles, they check out at buzzwords. Speak to them on their level, learn how to really utilize that vocabulary to say the same thing 20 different ways. Say it the right way, they will see the light, they will start to agree with you.

I work in fundraising, and I was fundraising for a non profit that helps kids that are experiencing food insecurity. A blue state liberal told me she didn't want to donate because "we're only raising a country of idiots,"

Had I been a righty, that would have pushed me further right, because "Dumb Democrats don't want to feed hungry kids because they don't like who got elected, how can they say that they actually want to help people," and you know what? I understand that line of thought, because I want to feed the hungry no matter who is in office. And it did piss me off, because how can you sit there with the ability to help a hungry kid, and then not actually help them because of who is in office? You want to see a better world? BE BETTER. You may not like outstretching your hand to help these people and some are indeed beyond help, but liberals radicalize conservatives. I see it every single day.

The left SUCKS at recruiting people. And so many of you are part of the problem.

The talk about centrists and moderates being the literal devil I see constantly in online leftist spaces is one great example of the left's failure. Yes, it sucks when the people don't see how horrible the right is. But centrists are some of the most open people to discussion- and some already lean left!!

You can't demonize moderates to such an extent that you close yourself off to them and then wonder why you're losing swing states.

Centrists aren't even always people with all the privileges- you will find plenty of people who are part of marginalized groups who are concerned about politicians on all sides.

You can be a smol radical leftist bean all you want who only talks to other smol socialist and communist beans, but you're never going to make the difference you want to in the world that way. It's the cold, hard truth. It doesn't mean you have to engage in discourse with everyone- some people have no real hope of changing and are emotionally draining- just more than your bubble.

I am tired of the left eating itself alive and deranged people like Trump winning.

[constantcrying]

Ersatz, baby

m!shape-shifter!yandere x gn!reader. 4k words. yes. I'm so sorry.

TW: Obsession, possessive thoughts and behaviors, mentions of violence, gore, consumption of humans, idk how to tag it but the shape-shifter eats humans and has considered eating the reader so like heads up about that

Heeeeey

Somebody PLEASE tell me if the length of this piece is detrimental to the experience of reading it it’s like 4k words. Here’s something I’ve been kicking around for ages. Frankly I am shocked I have something at all after a year

“Odd couple” is the best way to describe the friendship between you and Sasha. You’re awkward and responsible and outwardly boring. He’s highly social, wild, and intriguing. You’re genuine to a fault. He’s an expert in facades; he is a facade. You’re human and he’s something utterly not.

The freak accident of affection between you two is...still hard for him to wrap his head around. It seems to be your fault. If you weren’t so pitifully earnest toward him he would have just gotten rid of you. You were aware of his true nature, and definitely scared of it, but you kept going out of your way to be the Good Roommate™, to play friends. He had to let you live, just to see what the fuck your deal is. Now it’s too late. Now he wants you around.

You are the only person in the world that he has shown his real body to.

Some of his victims have seen it, but you’re the first person he intended to see it. The decision was quiet, perhaps a little impulsive. A simple exchange of “What are you, Sasha?” and “I don’t know. Wanna see?” had you both going to your bedroom and locking the door.

For the first time in his life, his heart pounded as he shed his clothes. He almost didn’t want you to turn around and look. It might be better if you only knew the carefully curated version of him, the handsome appearance he painstakingly crafted for the easiest social life. Even though you already knew he wasn’t human and pretended it didn’t matter, what if you saw him now and knew with absolute certainty that you didn’t want to look at him ever again? He would have to swallow you whole. He wasn’t sure if he could do it.

Regardless he said, “turn around.”

He showed you the unvarnished form that he had inherited from his mother. To be frank: It’s a predator’s body. Worse that that, it’s a monster’s. There are features and junctures of him so uncanny it must hurt the logical mind to observe them. If you were ever looking for the perfect rebuttal to the existence of a loving God, look no further than his cruel mouth.

He crept onto you bed looking like this, towering over you, your bed-frame screaming to protest the weight. He’d have to cut you off at the source, if you were to scream. And though he could smell the fear wafting from your skin, could practically feel the constricting blood vessels and tightening muscles in you, you still asked him, “Hey, is it more comfortable? Do you prefer being like this?”

Honestly? He isn’t sure there’s a body that’s comfortable and natural to him anymore. He’s so used to a human state that anything else feels awkward, even when it’s easier to shift to. As you took his massive claws into your hands and examined them with gentle curiosity, though, he was struck by the warmth of you. It was a long time since anyone had really touched him. It might’ve been even longer for you, loner that you are. Which meant you were the only person who could understand the way he felt in that moment.

He flopped over next to you, letting out an embarrassing dog-like whine, but you just laughed sweetly, and shifted pillows around to accommodate his bigger size. His feet and tail still dangled awkwardly off the bed. “You can relax in here,” you said. “You’re always welcome, since you’re my friend.”

You rambled about your classes and professors until all the adrenaline had left your system. He didn’t say much in response, but you didn’t mind. After a while, you could almost meet his preternatural gaze. You even dozed off like this, with a monster beside you, you utter weirdo. He put his head closer to your chest and felt your sleeping breaths for hours, thinking that your throat would be butter-soft under his teeth.

Sasha knows very little about what he really wants. He’s not sure if he’ll stay in his major, or in school, or even in human society. He knows for certain, though, that he wants more time to study you. He wants just your quiet voice and humble body heat and the understanding that, whatever he is, it isn’t going to chase you away.

So you two keep doing this. Every few days he’ll skulk over to where you are and make room for himself, and the two of you will talk for hours. Sometimes he shifts. He doesn’t always want to, but you get more comfortable with him that way. You...seem more keen to pet him when he looks and acts like an animal, and he wants you to touch him so bad he’s worried he’ll start asking for it. Could he ever live it down, if he started asking to be coddled? No. So he wags his tail and butts his head against you like that isn’t it’s own special brand of pathetic.

It’s not like you’re one to judge, though. You’re just so happy to have a friend that comes to hang out with you. You’ve never had very many of those, but of course Sasha knows he’s extra special. There’s much he’s learned about the world from his strange perspective, and you’re always excited to listen to his stories.

You do understand that he needs to eat a lot. You see him clear out four bacon cheeseburgers as a snack once, and he cracks jokes about how breakfast was red bull and adderall, but you know that it’s just a part of his biology that works against him. So you go out of your way to cook more meat, and give him bigger portions than anyone else, ignoring the way your blatant favoritism must look to the other roommates and occasional visitors. He doesn’t bother explaining that your idea of a big meal is like his idea of an appetizer, and he never will.

He doesn’t talk about the people he eats, either. He’s starting to think you don’t realize he does that.

(If you really don’t know, if this is the way you treat him when you don’t know, there’s no fucking way he can tell you.)

As for you, you talk about your courses and your classmates. From the way you talk around it, he’s mostly figured out the sad shape of your childhood and he decides that’s why you’re so weird and naive.

Mostly, you tell him about your hobbies, and your taste in TV shows. That’s when something in you is unlocked, revealing you to be more witty and giggly than your initial impression. It’s gratifying to know most other people don’t discover that side of you, like being the only prospector who knows where gold is. You tell him about everything you used to watch and play with your best friend, back when she had time for you. He’s a little confused by just how fervently you love things, how you start to care one day and then never, ever stop.

He never did it before, but now the two of you watch garbage TV together. (You tried to invite your best friend to join you, but to Sasha’s satisfaction, she gave you that cringing sort of smile and told you she didn’t have time.) Every Friday comes a new episode of Crater County, this schlocky supernatural police procedural, so every Thursday night you ask him to watch it with you. He’s a busy man, of course, but he’ll fit it into his schedule since he knows you so look forward to it.

This Thursday you must have forgot.

Somehow, in the early morning on Friday, you slip away without Sasha noticing. He wakes up to the honks of geese and distant cars, and the ever-present hum of electricity. As he thinks of pestering you to make ham and eggs, just to watch you get annoyed, he notices the conspicuous lack of your heartbeat.

He knows better than to doubt his hearing. But he still goes into your room across the hall to find the bed unmade and unoccupied. He almost goes to check your pillow for warmth, only stopping when he realizes it’s...stupid, to do that. He stays in the doorway for a long moment, overly-conscious of your scent. Then he goes to pace in the empty kitchen.

It hadn’t occurred to you to say goodbye to him, or leave him a portion of breakfast as you usually do, so you must have been in a hurry. Distantly, he remembers your fast food job. You probably got called to cover for someone at the last minute. Even so, shouldn’t you have said something to him? So that he wouldn’t wonder? Because he’s—

—well, you called him your friend.

It bothers him the more he thinks about it, while he showers and gets coffee and goes to class. The two of you haven’t talked since Monday and it feels weird. You always tell him when you’re going out, so what happened? Where can he even find you?

Not that he would need to find you. Sasha isn’t clingy. Clingy is his ex making alt account after alt account to pester him on instagram with stupid questions like, “are you seriously trying to ghost me you asshole?” And Sasha isn’t doing that. He hasn’t even texted you yet, because you haven’t texted him, and you always text first. If you don’t go through with the trouble of asking for him, he absolutely will not bother coming.

You haven’t sent so much as a “hey!” in the last seventeen times that he’s checked, so. Guess you guys aren’t hanging out. Whatever. It’s not like he doesn’t have stuff to do. He’s behind on several classes, a habitual skipper, and there are four other people begging him to come out tonight. He hasn’t hunted in a while so he should probably do that too.

He should go and talk to other humans, re-acquire their speech patterns and body language. He should catch himself when he makes gestures you would make, stop himself from making them. That’s why he goes to lunch with a friend group he met last month, and fits in with them seamlessly—or, almost seamlessly. No one can say he isn’t a good talker, slick as oil and quick with comebacks, but he’s a little more sensitive than usual today. While he’s in the middle of charming them he slips up and says something you would say.

“Isn’t that a Crater County reference you just made?” One girl says to him, stopping the conversation cold. “I thought you hated nerdy stuff like that.”

Sasha laughs shortly. “What? Says who?”

“Says you. You laughed at someone’s Supernatural tattoo at the party, remember?”

“It was a fucking horrendous tattoo. And I don’t like Crater Country or whatever, either, I just know some lines because my,” his throat feels like a desert, but he continues, “my roommate is obsessed with that shit.”

They brush over that thought soon enough, shifting focus to upcoming concerts, but Sasha can’t get comfortable again. He feels like he forgot how eyes work, and his are going to slip and turn reptilian in the middle of this well-populated restaurant. He’s scared his hands are going to morph into paws. In the end, he excuses himself before he can finish his meal.

Since he’s still quite hungry, Sasha decides he’ll drop by the butcher and get a few pounds of beef chuck to tide him over until dark. He’ll go to that fancy shop with all the grass-fed cruelty-free organic stuff, because he’s passionate about the well-fare of livestock, and definitely not because it’s just down the street from your job.

But since he’s there, anyway, he’ll pass by and peek through the windows to see what’s happening there.

Your restaurant is packed. A sports team, or special event or something, has filled every table in sight, and more people queue up at the register. You’re boxing fries and passing them over to waiting customers’ trays. Even though you’ve got mountains of food to work through, you’re smiling. It takes only a few seconds to find out why, following the arc of your eye up to a man in the same uniform as you.

The guy is tall and average-looking, and he keeps leaning toward you to talk like he doesn’t know how to speak loudly even though he works in a goddamn kitchen. Sasha doesn’t know him by face, or by word of mouth, since you’ve never told him about a co-worker that can make you giggle so much.

Why hadn’t you told Sasha about the funniest man of the century, huh?

More importantly, why hadn’t you noticed the way this asshole was looking at you? Staring so intently, exaggerating his expressions, mirroring you. All the same tricks Sasha has used before but with none of the grace, and yet somehow you liked it from this guy when Sasha had seemed scary to you.

He just can’t understand. That wouldn’t be such a problem if he hadn’t believed that he did understand you, and the way your mind worked. You had said Sasha was your friend and you had sat in the truth with him, relieved to see him for what he truly was, and you had been asking after his health and his happiness, wasting nights with him, cooking for him, cuddling up with him, and now here you were forgetting about his existence with another friend that he didn’t know about.

Sasha has been cheated on by a partner in the past. They left him one night and came back in the wee hours smelling like a fresh shower, with traces of someone else’s odor still clinging to them. It hadn’t felt like anything, to know that they were sneaking behind his back. Not a betrayal, no sting or ache in the heart he supposedly had. He broke up with them a week after, and that, like all his other breakups, was simply annoying. Sasha had always felt like he wasn’t with any of the people he was with. He was watching them, and touching them, and living among them, but there was some kind of invisible barrier between him and all the world. So when they broke a connection, well, what was there to even break? How could he care?

And why did being cheated on come to mind when he saw you happy with some other guy?

Sasha would later find out that you pulled a twelve hour shift that day, and, pushover that you were, you didn’t take a break long enough to check your phone. But he doesn’t stay to watch you, he really couldn’t. A pit had formed in his stomach, some void, some black hole that he had to attend to.

He leaves you there in your job and your apparent fun, none the wiser, and goes to the butcher. He gets himself a rack of ribs, and a few pounds of steak, and a heart just because the shop had one on hand and they were happy to serve a customer with such deep pockets as him. He gets a couple of cheeseburgers for the ride home and finishes them in a few bites.

As soon as he knows your other roommates aren’t home, he tears into the paper packaging of the prepared meats and gorges himself over the kitchen sink, soiling his shirt with myoglobin. It all tastes like ash, disappearing into him the way so many things do. When he’s done, when every last shred of flesh and sliver of bone has been swallowed, his stomach growls.

He’s always been this empty. Maybe that was the thing you saw that made you so afraid upon first meeting him—the bottomless trench that he actually was.

You said he was your friend. You knew what he was and didn’t back away. But you have so little else in your life. If you gained anything more, real friends, real family, a lover, wouldn’t someone as hollow and alien as Sasha be easily discarded?

There’s nothing for it. He has to go and hunt now.

Your co-worker is pitifully easy to discover. By checking the likes on your posts, he finds the creep has been hounding you for three weeks now. His unmitigated social media addiction leaves the entirety of his existence splatter across the internet. Sasha learns and forgets his name. He knows exactly what place he’ll be at tonight, with whom, for how long. He shifts to look exactly like you, heads out and stops at the right street corner with a bulky gym bag, waiting.

It’s so easy. Sasha can play You, but this guy hardly deserves all that effort. It’s enough to show up magically with your face, even if your clothes and piercings seem out of place. All Sasha has to do is bat lashes and flash a smile that he has already memorized—your stupid sincere grin that had made you, like the sun, difficult to look at directly—and this idiot thinks the person in front of him is really you, out on the same night by coincidence. He’s happy to see you, and happier still that you want to go somewhere together. He lets Sasha take him by the hand, convinced that the two of you are going out for drinks through innocuously empty backstreets. It doesn’t strike him as weird that you’re so energetic and flirty all of a sudden. Asshole.

He at least has the decency to carry the bag, no doubt hoping to come off as a gentleman.

“Why a duffel bag, anyway?” He marvels.

“To change clothes before I go home, silly,” Sasha tells him, leading him further into the night.

It turns out the co-worker is deeply uncomfortable with silence. He cracks jokes that aren’t funny, to which Sasha politely chuckles for what is only ten minutes but feels like an hour.

“When you kept turning me down,” he says, predictably, “I was worried you had a boyfriend or something.”

“Why would I not tell you if I had a boyfriend?” Sasha croons in your voice, fighting with all his will-power to not crush your co-worker’s hand. They’re finally on a quiet street, between two condemned houses, where there are no cameras and no pedestrians.

“Haha, I don’t know. You’re like, really private. That roommate you talk about all the time? The one going to the same school? I honestly feel like I know more about her than I know about you.”

“You mean, ‘him’? Sasha?” Sasha blinks owlishly with your eyes, his heart melting a little when he imagines you gushing about him to other people.

The guy laughs nervously. “No, I mean Maya. Is Sasha another roommate? Have you mentioned her before?”

Really. Maya. That “best friend” who basically pretends you don’t exist, who takes up valuable real estate in your mind when some people who have spent months getting to know you don’t even get a text.

Sasha gives up on looking friendly.

Your co-worker has finally sensed something is off, wincing as he tugs his hand out of Sasha’s vice-grip. Stretching out his fingers, he asks, “Hey, how much farther ‘til we get there? I swear we’ve passed like, three bars already...”

He doesn’t get to say more because Sasha lets out his teeth and goes for the throat.

It must be said that a warm meal always beats a cold one, but other that that it’s a shitty fare, gristly and lacking in flavor. This guy’s blood, fresh from the veins, is flat and forgettable. Even the marrow of his bones disappoints. At least he didn’t put up a fight...though maybe some enrichment could have saved this boring dinner.

Sasha feels more bloated than full when it’s all over. He wipes down and changes into fresh clothes, stuffing all the bloody garments into the duffel bag. He still feels kinda gross, and considers a long, hot shower while picking muscle fibers from between his teeth.

Are you going to worry about your co-worker? Are you going to miss him? Will you cry if they identify his blood on clothes found in the dump? Will you even tell Sasha why you’re crying?

Sasha snaps out of his deep thoughts when his phone buzzes. The text from you reads:

hey! i forgot to ask, are you on for crater county tonight?

What the fuck. Renewed frustration flushes through his system. What is he, your backup plan? He has a life—actually, many more lives than you! You should know better than to screw around with his time. He shouldn’t even dignify your bullshit with a response, but he does anyway—

At a party

And your answer is,

oh ok

we’ll watch it some other time

have fun!

…

Stay safe ok! Call me if you need something

It’s such a low blow he has to wonder if you’re doing it on purpose: you’re telling him all the same things he’s heard you tell Maya when she blows you off. He can hear the disappointment and embarrassment in your voice, the way you assure her of your eternal affection and concern while she practically dismisses you. Once he’s imagining your face, then, all he wants in the world is to look at it.

He’s a good runner. He’s barely out of breath when he arrives home, tossing aside his sweaty hoodie and kicking off his shoes while he quietly closes the door behind him. The dishwasher is running. He can just make out the low moan of the central air system, and one lazy heart thumping in the living room.

For a moment you don’t notice that Sasha is there. He gets to watch you quietly. You’re languishing on the couch in your bedclothes, staring blankly at the No Signal screen on the TV with a bowl of popcorn untouched on the coffee table. It surprises him. He hasn’t seen you with an expression this dull in a while.

But it disappears in an instant.

“Sasha!” You bolt upright, your face brightening like the sky at dawn when you find him standing in the doorway. “Did the party end already?”

He doesn’t know what to say.

You glance back at the TV. “Um, I swear I wasn’t going to watch without you! I was just…”

“Were you waiting for me?” He asks.

Your expression flickers, betraying the anxiety in your eyes before you have the chance to look away. Why did he even bother to ask? You’re here for him, like a puppy waiting for their owner, and suddenly he’s flushed and queasy—no, it’s not sickness that he feels, it’s butterflies. He’s so delighted he feels dumb, all of his frustration and embarrassing angst vanishing in an instant because all he can think of is how sweet you are.

“Ah,” he laughs dryly. “I’m screwed.”

Before you even know to cry out, he’s thrown himself at you, arms coiling around your waist. The two of you fall back on the couch.

When you get your bearings, you scold him. “Sasha, don’t just do that! You scared me!”

He mumbles, “I had a bad day.”

“...you did?” Your left hand cups his head, almost protectively, and your right strokes his back. “What happened? You’re not hurt, right? Are you hungry? I have some stuff in the fridge—”

“Can we just stay like this?” He asks.

“U-um. Well...” You must be thinking of your other roommates, who could walk in on this scene and “misunderstand” the relationship you have with him. You don’t want to cause weird rumors or tension. But he wants you so much he can’t pretend to be above it anymore. He squeezes you just a little bit, betraying his own desperation, so you say tenderly, “Of course we can.”

It’s scary to be honest. Sasha considers it contrary to his nature. However, he has never in his life avoided adapting or transforming to get what he wants. If he has to bare himself again to endear himself to you, he’ll do it.

“You’re the best friend I have,” he admits, “and I didn’t see you all day, and I missed you.”

Your heart quickens. “Sasha…”

“I know I’m being clingy. I just can’t help it. Say you missed me too. Say I matter to you.”

“I did miss you,” you murmur, your smile bleeding into your voice. You pull him closer. “It feels wrong when we don’t talk all day. And I worry about you, you know. I never see you make a proper meal.”

“I like it better when you make it. So keep cooking for me. Please.”

“I was going to do that anyway,” you say.

His whole body thrums with satisfaction. You care about him so much he can feel it all the way through. He’s soaking up your warmth and savoring your smell, face pressed into your neck. Twisting his hands into your shirt, he finds that he resents your clothes. He even resents your flesh and bones for barring direct access to your heart. Right now, though, he’s almost content with a body in his grasp, a pulse fluttering under his lips.

God help him, he’s been starving for this.

[caffeinatedmunchkin]

An Iron Hand in a Velvet Glove

Emmrich Volkarin x Fem!Rook ✦ Rating: M (MDNI!) ✦ 13k words

"Their corpse proved quite stubborn." He presented her an opportunity, and she grasped at it in desperation. "I'm surprised, you're so very good at taming stubborn." Her playful attempt at schmoozing won a stiff snort, and nothing more. "Oh..." Breathed with a coy lilt, she feigned innocence that could have been believable, if she were anyone else. "Are you still cross with me?" Stealing another gulp, he sneered against it's bite. The strength of which smoked his voice to a heady resonant. "Back during your apprenticeship, when you disobeyed one of your superiors, or spoke back at them out of turn; in what manner did they see fit to punish you?" A preemptive attack from which she was slow to recover. "I... got a good tongue lashing." Her words were tight from a throat that fought against their release. "A common occurrence, I might add." "Just as I suspected." After a breath, he then angled a brow down into his drink. "The correction of your behavior falls into my lap after all."

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Crossposted to AO3!

I just want to take this opportunity to once again acknowledge and thank you for all the wonderful feedback I received on my first Emmrich piece. All of your praise, engagement, compliments, freak-outs - you name it - have been the single most gratifying, uplifting, validating and humbling experience I have EVER received in all my years of sharing what I’ve written. From the bottom of my little perfectionist heart, you are all in my cool book.

With that said, may I humbly offer this to all you incredibly sexy, gorgeous Emmrich babes to which I’m forever indebted. This one’s for you. 

This is hands down the most stressed I’ve ever been to post something LOL

Writing this was a wild oscillation of; “I’m on to something here” and “this is straight trash”. So I either really popped off with this fic, OR, I lost my mind and it’s documented here for all to witness. Regardless, I REALLY hope you all enjoy!  *blows kiss for all you lovelies* and to my one super sweet anon, this ones especially for you 😩 you kept the imposter syndrome caged so I could finish this. 

Dusk settled over Treviso like a veil. The gradient of a setting sun against the encroach of twilight a dreamlike glow, it stretched across the skyline in a rosy, gossamer haze.

Despite the festering boils of blight, and roving Antaam units, the city was still almost serene. Crickets chirped and nightingales squawked. Music drifted from the odd window, cracked open to invite the warmth of the breeze. A strong city; one too proud to kneel. Too enamored with its culture to bend to the devastation.

Emmrich and Ariadne were dutifully at each others side, while Neve trailed behind to afford them privacy at what she thought was an adequate distance.

The three were on their way to report back to Teia and Viago; their beloved city, and her people, no longer unwitting victims of the Qamakmaster, or his modified poison. The younger Watcher insisted they traverse the more "scenic route" along the canal proper.

In this it's most desperate hour, much of it's familiarity withstood the test of its carnage; sprawls of ivy wove through panels of lattice work. Pockets of lamplight dotted the pathways, their warm flicker reflecting off the lazy churning of the waters they strode beside.

The younger mage coiled herself around his arm like a vine. Content to take in the sights alongside him in shared silence, their physical contact was non-negotiable. She didn't care much for discretion when it came to their burgeoning affair. There were high stakes and grave consequences greeting her at every turn, every decision consigned to her.

She possessed neither the patience nor energy to pander to self-control. Least of all during these scarce luxuries of calm; the lulls between urgency.

She needed Emmrich's closeness. His touch.

Though the elder mage was more reserved in his displays, he bore her attachment with pride.

Still not quite used to the notion that his affections were requited, he couldn't deny the swell of his heart with how candid she was with her own.

How could he protest, when such a pretty thing wanted to be seen cozied up to him? Hanging off his arm like he was some young, and virile stud?

No, Emmrich could deny her nothing. He was weak to her. And by the ingratiating little simpers she'd aim his way, he swore she could smell it.

At times it still caught him off guard, her wild attraction to him, her insistent fawning. The elven necromancer lunged at him like a little lioness in heat, regardless of when or where - or who might be unfortunate enough to happen upon them in the midst.

But it wasn't a habit he felt compelled to curve.

The others seemed largely unphased. Bellara thought their relationship held devastating romance, no doubt drawing on bits and pieces for inspiration to her new craft. Neve adored Ariadne, and Araidne her - the two kindred street rats. He surmised her blessing had more to do with seeing such a close friend so happy, than the bearing of her personal approval of him.

Lucanis was content to get in his subtle teases and knowing smirks whenever he was the first to breakfast in the early mornings. Slinking off with servings for two, looking more than a hint disheveled and stupefied. Taash pretended not to pay attention, though he sometimes caught them initiating a covert high-five when crossing paths with Ariadne.

That left Davrin and Harding as the outliers.

Nothing malicious, Harding would sometimes make remarks that at times seemed innocent, while others were more coy. They all made him squeamish, which he maintained his best to keep polite about.

Davrin's approach was more blunt, albeit good-natured. Chuckling at his own crude jokes; those to the effect of the poor young Watcher abandoned by her parents, and her subsequent daddy issues. And how 'good old Emmrich sidled up to scratch that itch.' All in good fun, they turned his complexion ashen, and rang in his ears all the same.

However none was a harsher spectator than himself.

He'd lay awake deep into the night, with her pert figure sprawled naked atop him. Her shorter limbs curled around his like another one of his jewels, while she slumbered.

His racing mind tormenting him, even in the safety of his post-coitus haze, by the disparity of their years. Or by the stomach-turning truth of their first meeting, one he kept close to the chest.

That this little body that writhed under him in worship to his prowess, that rode him to mutual release while screaming his praises, was the same one that fit in the palm of his hand those twenty odd years ago. An incongruity he could draw because he had done just that. Only once, but the memory was sharp. Punishing.

Every time he reminded himself of that fact, he felt even more ill than when Harding had, rather abruptly and in full company, asked if he was old enough to be Ariadne's father.

It would have made him a very young father to have sired a woman of her age, but that didn't exempt him from that candidacy, he'd have to concede.

Is what he said at first, and a touch too defensive.

Until he did the math, and the realization dawned that it was not only reasonable for a man of 27 to have a babe - the age that he was when he met her, a fresh infant - but that most 27 year old Neverran men did. Some even had several by then.

He hadn't smoked in quite some time, but after that self-confrontation his clammy fingers itched to feel the length of a cigarette dangle between them.

"A pity." He volunteered with a sigh, willing his tortured psyche to rest. The craving for that detestable vice he worked so hard to best now rearing once more. "to see such a place ravaged by the blight. Though I would be remiss not to commend the perseverance of it's romance, despite all it's had to endure. I can only imagine how magnificent the blooms here might have been before."

"I thought you might think so." She drew herself tighter into him, both arms winding around the one she leaned into. To his measured chuckle, she melted.

"Dear girl, do you mean to tell me my accompaniment was requested just so you could hear me wax poetic?" His smile soft and amused. "Do you find me so predictable?"

She gazed up at him from beneath the thick flutter of her lashes. "I had hoped the atmosphere might inspire some of that famed spontaneity from the trysts of your past you've seen fit to regale me."

His gait faltering, he peered down the bridge of his nose at her, gawping at the confession.

He was becoming more adept at swift recoveries from her flirtation. She was almost disappointed in how quick he rebounded from this attack.

"You little jezebel." His reprimand was steeped in such a deep sultriness it burned the tips of her ears, murmured low to keep his words between them. But not low enough. Neve shook her head with a wry grin.

"Why don't I catch back up with you two at The Diamond." Her gaze flicked over them with an impish gleam. "I think you know your way back from here."

Emmrich had forgotten himself, and Neve, swept up in the generous evocations from his little blonde temptress. A profuse apology - and a begged pardon - at the ready, Ariadne cut in on behalf of his mortification.

"Are you sure?" Her eagerness to having him all to herself betrayed by the smirk she fought and lost.

"If I know one thing well, it's to leave the party when I'm having the most fun." Neve waved her hand as she sauntered on ahead. Without looking back, she called to them from over her shoulder with a smile in her voice. "Behave yourselves."

The pair of Watchers paused in a testament of their resolve. Their combined focus trained to the ice mage, as she moved further along the cobblestone walk and rounded the corner of a building, disappearing from sight. Leaving them alone.

Ariadne was the first to strike; hard and fast. Winning a startled grunt from him to the sudden impact of her body colliding with his.

Her arms snaked around his neck, she pulled him down to bridge the gap in their heights. A necessity in capturing his lips, even as she perched on the tops of her toes. Latching her mouth to his, she kissed him deeply, and with hunger.

One might have suspected a long-awaited reunion between the two, if her fierceness was anything to go by. And the loud, exaggerated approval she moaned, as his fingers began their own storm of her figure.

A new fragrance decorated her pulse, one he knew she selected with him in mind. A suggestive mingling of praline and black peony, it pervaded his senses to disarmament. When he breathed, he could smell only her. When he swallowed, he could taste only her.

In one swift motion - careful not the break their frenzied necking - he hoisted her up in his arms, while her legs curled around his waist. Her ankles locked at the small of his back, the little necromancer wrapped herself around him as if she wanted to permeate his flesh. Unable to get close enough.

He walked her the few steps to the banister overlooking the canal below. Placing her atop the railing, his hands were freed to explore. His wide palms roamed her, their paths indicated by the soft jingle of his bracelets, as one settled against the small of her back, while the other trailed up to her neck.

Though he handled her as if she were as fragile as a pressed flower, the placement of his hands were overwhelming with how deliberate. He cradled her with possession.

Her thighs parted to allow his stance between them, tugging his lean torso closer to press up against. Lulling her head back to grant his tongue deeper access down her throat, one hand fisted in the cloth of his robes, while the other made a brazen cop of his length.

Palpating his shaft with intent, Emmrich rolled a grunt against her tongue, both exasperated and needy in equal measure.

"Ariadne- please." His lips numb from her fervor, the corner of them twitched in a smarmy grin at her impatience. "We've made enough of a spectacle as it is."

She gazed up at him like a wild thing; her eyes glossy and lips kiss-swollen, with a heaving chest to match. Looking over first one shoulder, and then the next, she found the streets were calm, and still. The only sound between them were the breaths they exchanged, and the gentle laps of the canal to its revetment.

"You're in luck. There's no one else here now. Only us." Leaning back in to mouth at the jut of his Adams apple, she then tilted back to nip him beneath the jaw. Smiling into his skin as it rumbled with a relenting chuckle.

Peppering a trail of light pecks up and over the cleft in his chin, she sought his mouth once more. "And I've-missed you-Emmrich." Her whispered declaration broken apart by lips that crashed ceaseless upon his.

"I'm-right here, my-darling. I haven't-gone away-" He managed to slip out sections at a time, in the breaks of her assault for breath.

He felt nimble fingers sweep across his shoulder blades, to knot in the draping along his upper back. Her free hand had found the close-cropped hairs at his nape, to comb her nails through the base of his scalp.

Stalling any reservations he might have held, he purred to her attention like a pacified panther. With his guard lowered, she pounced.

"I've missed you inside me." Her hips rocked against him in emphasis.

The little Watcher's words dropped his stomach to somewhere down around his knees. She abandoned his mouth altogether to nose at his pulse, humming in satisfaction at how it quickened beneath the press of her kiss.

The sharp cut of his jaw lured her next, nipping a path along the ridge of bone from chin to mandible. Relishing the deep groan she won for her efforts, and the musk of his aftershave; pine and cedar-wood heightened by the spice of Neroli. Even freshly groomed, stubble was quick to shadow his gaunt cheeks, and she adored the way it caught her lips, and snagged her flesh whenever he nuzzled into her.

"My dear, your enthusiasm flatters more than my words could ever hope to express; but we must exercise some restraint."

She giggled into the open-mouthed kiss that stretched her lips over his high cheekbone.

"Asking me to heel, are you?"

A challenge to his authority, he rose to the occasion with the grace of one who didn't have to force his hand. Submission had been freely given, in offering to receive his lead.

"Not asking, my pet." He increased the pressure of his palm slipped around her nape, scruffing her like an unruly kitten as he pried her off the side of his face to lock eyes. He tried not to dwell on how limp she went in his hold, or the salacious little mewl that squeaked past her lips. "Expecting."

She peered up at him as if in a daze. The hazelnut of her eyes nearly overtaken in full by her pupils, her ferality was softened by the thick lashes she fluttered up at him. His other hand rose to cup her jaw, dragging his thumb down over her bottom lip.

They parted for him in obedience, the pink of her tongue coming to flick over the tip of his digit in dizzying suggestion.

"One of these days, my love, I will be undone by you." He slid the gloved pad of his thumb over the muscle, through her teeth. Sealing her lips around him, she began to suckle whilst holding his eye-contact, his lids now just as heavy as her own.

The gentle pulling of her suction, and the swirl of her limber tongue, were sent straight down to the heavy twitching of his groin. His voice all the hoarser for it. "And it will come to the surprise of no one."

A smile spilled across her face. A retort no doubt at the ready, a distant, hostile shout in qunlat - that presented like an expletive - caused her words to die on her tongue.

They turned in unison to see three hulking Antaam charging their way, their painted faces screwed in rage.

Three warriors against the two necromancers, they untangled from one another's embrace. Offering his hand, Emmrich helped her down from the railing to her feet, as her much smaller one slid over it in acceptance of the gesture.

The roaring Qun's interference offered harsh sobriety, Emmrich's withdrawal from her body heat stung. Not at all dissimilar than if he had plunged himself in an ice bath.

Sharing a brief glance as the assailants advanced, the two Watchers split up to close in before they lost the chance.

The largest of the three, the surmised leader, honed in on Ariadne. Though there wasn't much assistance he could lend, his hands full with the other two.

He made sort work of the first; ensnaring him in vortex of the intolerable hisses and shrieks of damned souls. It pulled him to his knees while he held his ears to the tortured plight they now put upon him. With shut eyes and covered ears that wept crimson, Emmrich turned his attention to the second.

In a display far less flashy, he swept him up in a similar, vicious gust that sent him careening backwards into a far-off trellis, one he had been admiring mere moments ago. The collision saw it splinter into a cloud of wooden slats and mangled greenery. The warrior remained motionless, upended over the wreckage.

Having all but written off the first, he ignored his presence in favor of seeking out Ariadne. Availing himself to her aid had been his desire from the start.

Spinning on his heel he found her, standing above the leader who had begun the process of disintegration by way of concentrated necrosis. Sprawled at her feet, he clutched at his throat in a futile attempt to prevent his gasping breaths from continuing to siphon. The unassuming young Death Caller took a step back, prying her eyes away long enough to catch his.

The beginnings of a triumphant smile morphed into a flash of panic, as her gaze shifted from his face, to beyond his shoulder.

"Emmrich!"

Her warning had sufficed. Whipping his head around with plenty of time, and distance, between himself and the charging Qun, the chipped edge of his blade poised to embed itself in the senior Watchers chest. Stricken blind, it saw him swinging it with heightened aggression, and in a worrying lack of direction.

The situation corrected itself just as quick. One moment he had been staring down the jagged bite of battleaxe, and before he could react, she had taken his place. A violet ripple flickering in the Fade, she then materialized in front of him. Right in the buffer that separated him from hungry steel wielded by an angry, blinded Qun.

Insinuated between them as if to shield him with her smaller, delicate frame. Only by then the warrior had been much closer than before, shortening the distance with his lumbering flails.

Placing herself in much more danger than he himself had been.

An acidic eruption of necrosis sprang forth from her outstretched hands, and not a moment too soon. A plume of murk that enveloped him in unending smoke, the torrent bent to her whim and swirled at her command, as if it possessed sentience.

Curling around his being in gaseous rot, it dissolved his armor with the same ease it did his flesh. Rending him to the ground in a sloughed heap of bone glinting from beneath pulpy tissue.

She kept her eyes trained to the veritable sludge that up until recently resembled a fearsome biped, all the while his bore into the back of her head. Molten embers where placid pools used to be.

How could she be so cavalier in risking what was most precious to him?

The very thing that called the entirety of his pursuit of Lichdom into question; unable to conceive of the loss of her from the remainder of his days, much less having to bear her absence for all of eternity.

A gesture that could have endeared him, his innermost turmoil saw it twisted.

And as much as he didn't want to acknowledge it, it touched on the sensitivity of his age - the tenderest spot. All his frustrations and guilt as of late wove back to that resentful infestation of the self.

Did she think him feeble? Impotent?

It was a curious thing, he never considered himself old before her. Fresh into his fifties, he was just as fit and alert as ever. Even more so then some of the youngest men at the Necropolis.

Softness has gathered in areas where there hadn't been. Aches in his joints persisted for longer than before. The salt and pepper of his hair had since committed to it's silver luster, and his crows feet had decided to stay. Despite all physical signs of maturity, it hadn't stemmed the flow of admirers he'd attracted, both in and outside of his classroom.

Yet when Ariadne all but plopped herself into his lap, he felt geriatric.

A coy glint roused in the hazelnut of her eyes upon noting his bewilderment. Having misread his expression entirely.

"What would you do without me?"

The muscle of his jaw rippled as he clenched it. "An apt question indeed."

His terse grit startled her like a clap to the cheek, quirking her brows.

"What's wrong?"

"Your recklessness." He bit back, frustration narrowing his round eyes to accusatory slits. "Needless endangerment is not heroic, it is inane."

Emmrich had never snapped at her before. Once she thought on it, she realized she had never seen him lose his temper with anyone.

Grappling with a whirlwind of confusion, she latched on to one point of many that insulted her sensibilities. "Needless?" She parroted. "You were seconds from being cleaved in half! What would you have had me do, stand idle to your demise?"

He softened, but only some.

"Do you think, in such a scenario, that I'd prefer you, then, in my stead?"

Hip cocked, she folded her arms across her chest in defiance. "You were threatened, so I acted."

"Yes, you most certainly did." He conceded. "With breathtaking imprudence."

The scar striping her nose disappeared into the adorable, girlish crinkle at the bridge. "I'm no thing to be coddled."

"I'm not coddling, dearest." His anger ebbed into the tired patronizing of a professor lecturing a rebellious student. His inclusion of the pet name had her bristling. "Do you hold self preservation in such low regard?"

"I'll not apologize for wanting to protect you." Knowing full well her spite would only worsen things, she was too aggravated to ponder the decision. "You're very welcome, by the way."

"I'm quite able to fend for myself, my dear." For how dignified he maintained, his ruefulness was just as clear. Splintering his poise like veins through marble. "I've been doing so since well before you were even born."

That sent her eyes back into her skull. "Oh, Maker - anything to bring that up, I see."

"It bares repeating." He stiffened.

"Is that what this is about?" She scoffed, her tone raising to a chirp. "Is your ego so fragile that it's bruised just by coming to your defense?"

His hackles raised despite himself. For how soon he was to forget just how mouthy she was, her attitude was quicker to remind him. As did her penchant for needing the last word.

"This isn't about ego - I'd just simply ask that you abstain from rushing into danger headlong."

Enunciated with the air of someone unruffled, Emmrich had succeeded in snuffing out the spark of his anger before it spread, while hers only seemed to blaze in full swell.

"Are you quite finished berating me like I'm a child?"

"That," he plunged his voice into his chest, his admonition firm. "is contingent on whether or not you continue to behave like one."

Her pupils dialed to points that pierced him. Her pout pressed to thin line, she glared up at him with a suspiciously stilled tongue. He matched her, but with a significant discrepancy in vitriol.

"A necromancer so afeared of his very medium, it reduces him to petty insults."

A hideous thing to say. No sooner did the words escape her mouth, did the tension between them see fit to gag her, but it had come too little too late. Her venom singed him.

Holding her stare, he remained quiet, his uncertainty of how to proceed etched in the deepened lines of his face. All the while, remorse spilled through hers. Gradual and dreaded, like a wound as it bled through gauze.

A sigh then bruised his lungs. "So it would seem."

Her rationale pleaded with her to say something - anything - her owed apology notwithstanding. Her throat locked with a dry, acrid taste in her mouth to the mere thought.

The infestation of her foul mood first needed to be exterminated, before she'd be allowed to speak. Lest she do further damage.

"We've dallied for long enough." While chaste, his inflection had regained much as it's usual strength, and his expression matched his solemn posture. Though he couldn't hide the wistful glint from his eye. Not from her. "I believe it's time we were on our way."

The rest of their time together was condemned to contemplation, and unbearable silence.

By the time they reached The Cantori Diamond, Ariadne had simmered. More regretful of what she said in carelessness, than what had gotten her so hot in the first place.

She thought to try for reconciliation, but her pride - and shame - kept her preoccupied, as she relived their argument.

Her temper had flared, but she didn't mean to lash out so. Her confusion to his vulnerability certainly didn't excuse her indelicate handling of it.

Though Emmrich's state remained questionable.

His frustration with her had been much quicker to cool. A sudden spark of unchecked emotion before he smoothed himself back over, as if his careful disposition had never cracked in the first place. Yet he was still troubled. Still on edge.

Still dismayed by her accusation, and how rash her behavior.

The little elf stole sidelong glances at him on the occasion, brimming with the hope their banter had returned with every breath he took, or sighed.

But Emmrich opened his mouth to broach her not once. So neither did she.

Upon their return, they were greeted by Neve. Waiting for them outside on the balcony, poised with the anticipation of one who bore news.

Her keen observation noted the shift right away.

Mussed hair and disheveled armor, with more than enough guilt between them weighing their repentant expressions. Though she deduced it wasn't from unbridled passion at each other's hands; a suspicion that had everything to do with the space that split them down the middle, and kept them apart.

As they approached her, Emmrich maintained his separation. Holding hands - that never seemed able to resist the cheeky little blonde for any reasonable length of time - clasped behind his back. It raised her brow, but she refrained from commenting.

"Emmrich, Viago's waiting for you. A Crow took down an alleged associate of The Butcher's, and they're hoping you could lend your expertise in getting their dead to talk."

"Certainly." He obliged, at the ready to take his leave of the women, though not before lingering for a moment as he looked to Ariadne.

Expecting her to follow, the junior Watcher never refused an invitation to watch him work - least of all for the opportunity to observe corpse whispering. However she stood in place with no motion to join him, finding herself unable to meet his gaze. His chest caved in with a sigh.

"Until later then, darling?"

She merely hummed.

With the discomfort of that parting metastasized, she at last looked up in time to see his retreating form disappear inside. Shoulders sagging, she turned to Neve, whose manicured brow arched in suspicion.

The young mage looked spurned, as if she hadn't been the one to rebuff him. She cut in before the detective could begin her line of questioning.

"You've got the look of a bearer of bad news."

The taller mage tittered. "Only depending on how you look at it."

"Alright, let's hear it." She urged with a tired grimace.

"The Eluvian's acting out. Bell sent word she won't have it sorted before first light."

Ariadne expelled a lengthy breath. Hands on her hips, she shot her eyes upwards, seeking the strength of some unknown, higher-power. "Great."

Neve's simper threatened to become a full smile. "Aren't you going to ask me for the good news?"

"There's good news?"

"Teia's putting us up for the night." She revealed, implicit slyness alight in her hooded gaze. "I've heard tell that The Diamond's suites are something intimate."

The Watcher's heart fluttered at her friends insinuation, though reality was quick to temper that girlish rush of excitement. As if she'd been so fortunate to have forgotten about their spat so soon.

A turn events that would have been kismet, now it just seemed cruel.

"Oh..." Was all she gave. A weak, resigned mutter, it was a far cry from the reaction Neve presumed. "We could use some time away... that could be good for us."

"Alright you," she sighed, a warmth to her impending patronization. "Far be it from me to pry, but those were certainly not the faces I expected when you returned." Her shift from partner in crime, to sororal confidant complete, she gestured towards the balcony with one arm, while she encircled Ariadne with the other. "Want to talk about it?"

Ariadne stayed with Neve for a long while, probably too long. While she valued the slightly-less-than-impartial insight, she was stalling. Only leaving the comfort of her company after she was all but shooed away to go to Emmrich, and make amends.

Finding their room with relative ease, she had run into Viago on her way - without the professor- having deduced that he retired to their shared suite, and was awaiting her there.

Trying the door knob before knocking, she found it unlocked. A pit had sunken in her stomach at the confrontation that she wouldn't be able to avoid him for any longer, no matter how ardent her attempts.

The unlatched handle was an open invitation, one she now found herself hesitant to accept. Suffocated by the weight of indignity at once more receiving his severe disapproval, she only had herself to blame.

She let herself inside, creeping through the door with as muffled of footsteps as she could manage. Unsure why she even bothered to avoid attracting attention to herself, knowing her appearance was expected.

She found his regal figure stood before a large picture window adjacent from the doorway, bathed in the luminous glow of the moon as it spilled in through the panes. An arm bent at the small of his back, the other held a stout glass of deep burgundy liquid.

The room was every bit as romantic as Neve's implication. Rich sanguine textiles dressed sturdy, ebony wood furnishings, all carved with correlating floral motifs that were as intricate as they were subtle. A handful of lanterns had already been lit; just enough to keep him from the same shadows they whipped against the ceiling, and stretched across the walls. His back to her, she slipped the rest of the way inside.

Her concentration shattered into a wince, at how deafening the latch clicked into place behind her amidst his silence. Though to the announcement of her arrival, he didn't budge an inch.

She waited in the beat that followed, suspended in the moment like a withheld breath.

Unsure of where they now stood, she needed him to be the first to act. She needed him to lead. After an eternity made to stew, he then turned his head just as far as his shoulder, his silhouette heightened by candlelight.

"Darling." Was all she got by way of a greeting, or clue to his mood. His even tone addressed her like the whisper of fine silk shifting over steel.

Dignified and assertive as ever, it both lured her in, and hid away his inner machinations. Her eyes followed his hand as he brought the glass to his lips for a healthy sip.

"Were you able to learn anything?" She tested while remaining by the door, working her cadence into conversational neutrality. Steeling herself to the possibility of a long evening ahead; one cold and lonely.

"Unfortunately, nothing the Crows were not already aware of." He dismissed with a sigh, his attention coaxed back through the window to regard the smattering of stars that smeared the midnight sky, instead of her. "Their corpse proved quite stubborn."

He presented her an opportunity, and she grasped at it in desperation.

"I'm surprised, you're so very good at taming stubborn."

Her playful attempt at schmoozing won a stiff snort, and nothing more.

"Oh..." Breathed with a coy lilt, she feigned innocence that could have been believable, if she were anyone else. "Are you still cross with me?"

Stealing another gulp, he sneered against it's bite. The strength of which smoked his voice to a heady resonant.

"Back during your apprenticeship, when you disobeyed one of your superiors, or spoke back at them out of turn; in what manner did they see fit to punish you?"

Far from the course of conversation she anticipated, it had her reeling. A preemptive attack from which she was slow to recover.

"I... got a good tongue lashing." Her words were tight from a throat that fought against their release. "A common occurrence, I might add."

"Just as I suspected." After a breath, he then angled a brow down into his drink. "The correction of your behavior falls into my lap after all."

Every time she believed she had righted herself on even footing, he staggered her once more, each time quicker than the last.

He now had her pinned and wriggling from beneath his thumb. The obstreperous little necromancer who never knew when to quit.

Who acted out, and prodded boundaries - yearning to know where one ended, and the next began.

He was inundated all of a sudden with the memories of his colleagues, and from not long ago, bemoaning the unruly young apprentice. How stubborn, and non-compliant she portrayed. How impossible she was to reign in.

Emmrich now well understood what she needed. And his was just the firm hand for the undertaking.

She cocked her head at him with a wrinkled brow of her own. "Meaning...?"

To this, he turned to her. At last face to face, she fought the urge to squirm beneath the weight of his gaze. Shrinking away like a frisky cub who had nipped the ear of the panther one time too many.

"Tell me, my dear, do you recall during our first night together, you mused what discipline by my hand might have been like?"

The little elf blinked. Opening her mouth, only for it to fall shut, she then answered lamely. "Yes... I do."

Though his expression was serene, his tone lowered several octaves.

"That mouth of yours has landed you in quite the bind." Without breaking eye contact, he pushed away from the window and strode the short distance to the writing desk that sat between them. "One a miserly tongue lashing will not relieve you of."

Her lips quirked in the beginnings of a scoff, but before the sound could complete itself, Emmrich interjected. His brow lifted in infuriatingly dashing arrogance, his authoritative edge cut through her with a shiver as he made his first demand.

"Remove your clothing. All of it."

A smirk tugged at the corner of her mouth, but she crushed that threat upon recognizing his severity.

The young Watcher couldn't help but hang there with a dumb look on her face, only to be shaken from it by his gentle condescension. Ever patient, but grave in unambiguity. "Was there something of my instruction that necessitates reiteration?"

Speechless in reply, his expectant look goaded her to follow his orders.

However coltish her movements, and the beginnings of embarrassment heating her cheeks, she did as Emmrich said. Prying off her boots and shimmying out of the layers of leather and cotton that clung to her legs, all that was left was to shirk the bolero from her shoulders, and pull her collared blouse up and over her head.

A groan seethed from the pit of his chest at the sight of her body naked and flushed.

Teacup breasts that fit so nice in his hold, it was as if they budded to the exact specifications of his hands. The dusky peaks of her nipples hardened to their abrupt exposure. The temperature of the room mild, they stiffened to attention all the same. An achievement he prided himself on.

Her form so fresh and nubile, an ethereal daintiness afforded by her elven features made for an enticing complement to her other, fuller attributes. Decidedly all woman. A slim waist accentuated how wide her hips were by comparison, the observation incited reckless imagination.

Rousing fantasies from the most debauched of his recesses, the sort he'd otherwise be far too ashamed to acknowledge. The age that he was, and the gentleman's demeanor he paid strict adherence to.

His little Watcher wasn't shy. Even as early into their relationship as they were, he had seen her naked plenty. Yet this was uncharted territory; a new, untried side of Emmrich that both thrilled and intimidated her all at once.

Though she rushed to strip at his behest, her hands rose to cover what indecency she could think to shield. The first mistake of many he'd soon scold her for.

"Ah- drop them." His chin lifted, his one brow arched. "Now."

A whimper blossomed in her throat as she forced her hands to her sides. He flicked his gaze over her from head to toe, candid in his assessment of her presentation.

Her timid posture, her fidgeting. That untamed, seductive shimmer returned to her eye.

The appetitive press of her inner thighs against themselves. Done with her body stilled and expression reserved, in hopes he wouldn't catch her.

"Unlike my fellow colleagues, you'll find me to be far less tolerant of such poor deportment." He stood tall across from her, lengthening his gait to step out from behind the desk. "Might there be even the faintest desire to offer penitence, my girl? Are you willing to submit to me your due deference?"

The blush that began at her cheeks flooded throughout the entirety of her body. The skin of her arms and legs pebbled to his crooning, she felt the impulse to rub them from her limbs, but thought better of it.

Pinned in place by his gaze, every part of him seemed to hold her to some level of expectation. At that moment his eyes alone, bright with persuasion, forbade her from touching herself again without permission.

So she opted instead to nod, and he smiled.

"Come." His fingers thrummed the surface of the desk. "You're to lean across here. Hold yourself up by your elbows. Shoulders straight, and head forward."

His cool voice and composure made for an unfair advantage, one that snuffed her resistance like a candle's flame spluttering at the end of a spent wick.

She ambled to the ledge of the desk before bending herself over it, just as she was told. Her elbows met the the polished wood cold and rigid, while the height dug it's beveled edge just beneath her sternum.

Emmrich left her there, perched on the balls of her feet, as he circled her compromised position.

"Spare the rod, and spoil the child." He volunteered with a mournful sigh, as if a sympathetic father who wanted to spank their ill-behaved offspring about as much as the she wanted to receive the spanking.

Only Emmrich was eager to introduce her to such a lesson. As eager as she was to participate, if the full roseate flush that stained her was any indication. "While I feel compelled to disclaim that I do not condone any harm done to children, you are no child. And the principal rings true."

The air fought her distressed lungs. Her struggle only worsened, as he then set his gloves on the desk for her to see. While he remained behind her, she heard the discordant murmur of him reaching for the Fade, before a hush of fraught silence fell over them once more.

When his palm slid over the swell of her exposed bottom she gasped aloud; both at the sudden contact, and how his touch wasn't just warm - it was just shy of burning.

Startled more than uncomfortable, he had her eased into the increased heat before long. "W-what are you-?"

"Enhancing sensation." His explanation as blasé as if he were no more than reciting the dogma of autogenous liminality, he teased her flesh. "Heat promotes circulation, which in turn, will heighten your sensitivity."

His caress was a means to have her more suggestible to his discipline, though it demanded monumental restraint on his end to not insert his fingers inside her.

Her soft, needy sex mere inches from where his touch occupied. His attention on that area, and all his talk of punishment at last culminated in awareness to what the fog of her mind had prevented her from understanding.

"Are you... going to give me a spanking?" Escaping from her in jest, she couldn't help how her tone quavered beneath the weight of the words. A correct response, as he affirmed her suspicion.

"I am. Twenty times to be exact. Does that seem fair, my dear?"

"Only twenty?" Teased her simper apart, the goad of one who hadn't a clue what she was in for. Her underestimation of the kind professor woeful.

Emmrich gazed upon her petite frame bent in half before him with fondness, unperturbed by her attempted riling. Withdrawing his touch, satisfied with the rosy hue he had rubbed to the surface, his next command was as calm as it was cunning.

"You're going to reach out to the Fade for me. Once you have it, you'll want a firm hold."

He soon caught sight of a chartreuse glimmer curl and wisp itself around the joints of her wrists and fingers, as she flexed them against the wood. Slight and fluid manipulation, it then settled against her hands like a second skin, translucent in the moonlight.

She had professed many times how she was awed when watching him cast; an appreciation for their shared art that he found just as delightful in her demonstration.

Where he was precise and rhythmic, she was energetic, and inconstant. The unapologetic rawness, to his innate grace. "Very good. You're to hold that just as you are; you may release only when I permit you to do so."

His choice of phrasing went straight to her clit, as it pulsed in anticipation. The opulence of the room warped fuzzy and tilted to her bleary vision, her blood-pressure spiking to how stern his directive.

"Yes sir." She breathed, lifting higher on her toes, she gave a performative little sway of her hips.

It clenched his jaw until the joint creaked, though as far as she was concerned, he was otherwise unmoved by her bold provocation.

"With every strike, you will count out each one. Should you fail to maintain your cast, or lose count, we shall have to start again from the top." He cleared his throat upon concluding his recitation of her rules.

His voice had yet to pitch any higher than chest deep, and her heart threw itself at her ribs with every agonizing syllable. "Have I made myself perfectly clear?"

"Perfectly."

"Good."

His hands settling over her flesh had her breath catch, before it melted into the air in a sigh of relief. Emmrich smiled to himself, his ego fostered by how well she took to his touch. The slightest of his attention quelled her fire, rendering her meek and pliant.

His palms still hot, he stroked and massaged her in further preparation. Any time his finger-tips teased a suspicious descent between her thighs, her hips would rock in precious expectancy.

Finding the sense of security he lulled her to advantageous, his arm snapped forward, doling the first strike.

Nothing too severe, though it wasn't gentle - no where near as gentle as she assumed. A foolish assumption she amended on the spot. The slap of flesh echoing against her ear, she sucked in a stunned breath.

"One."

He had her full attention.

"That was very cute." Chuckled with playful condescension, her body betrayed her as it clenched in conditioned response to his voice. "A promising display of your cooperation, though we have yet to begun."

"W-what?"

"A necessary warm-up, dear girl." He collected his glass for one final sip of brandy, before discarding it back to the desk beside her. It thickened his voice to a confident drawl. "You'll know when I begin in earnest."

Thus began what felt like an hour long rehearsal of what was to come.

Emmrich paddled her with a firm hand, and varied positioning. He maintained a steady pressure, taking care between each one to soothe her stinging flesh by either a tickle, or purposeful effleurage strokes. Her grasp on the Fade came close to wavering, but never enough that he could see it's strength falter.

His insolent little mage harmonized their room with her yips, all the while he drip-fed careful praise to make certain her willfulness remained staunch.

"Such lovely little noises you make." His purr slunk between his lips to her twitching ears. It was all the preamble he spared before the transition from exercise to execution.

His first proper smack ripped the loudest gasp from her yet.

True to his word, she could sense the shift in his intentions by the weight and trajectory of his cupped palm alone. Her body sagged against the desk upon feeling him smooth over the faint pinch of toned flesh.

"O-one." She hushed, humility taking root.

"Good." He cooed. "Very good."

The next was a hair firmer, and her eyes widened as it sent her bobbing across the desk.

"Two." A more permanent blush swelled across her cheekbones, the dusty pink deepening to a vibrant rogue. Her fingers curled against the wood.

Emmrich ran a hand through his coif, fingers combing strands of hair that weren't mussed out of place to begin with. When he dropped his hand, it sailed upwards her rear for an underhanded strike.

Clapping her upside the gluteal crease, he swallowed thick beneath his collar at the way her peachy orbs jostled against the belt of his palm.

A strangled noise erupted from her, like a kitten whose tail he caught underfoot.

"Three-!"

"I must profess, darling, I expected you to put up much more of a fuss." He comforted the newest sting to prickle against her backside. "Surely I haven't silenced that smart mouth of yours already."

She was shocked by how well suited he was to playing the disciplinarian, and she was a fool to be.

Emmrich didn't have a cruel or haughty bone in his body, a fact that she would have attested to until that very moment. It wasn't born in the absence of kindness, so much as it came from his pedantic leaning.

He thrived on order, and protocol. Propriety. Steering her back in line came was as natural to him as regulating a classroom, or commanding the dead.

Now that she had been properly acquainted with this side of him, she couldn't help play the brat. Unable to resist the temptation of his masterful ploy.

"I think you're holding back because you're sweet on me." A lazy grin spread her cheeks, while she braced for the bruising she was all but begging for. "Those hands of yours should have me unable to sit for a week."

"Ah," he almost sounded pleased that her bite was returned, if only to excuse his dialed force. "There she is."

Four, five and six made her thighs begin to quiver. Smacking first up the back of her hindquarters, against their left side, and then the right. Thwack-thwack-thwack. A tingle roused beneath the burning skin, it reached the apex of her thighs, as she wept for him there.

Emmrich granted her a moment to catch her breath. Petting the sting, his praise un-spooled from the seat of his chest near vulpine in it's conceit. His croon cloying and velvet rich.

"You are doing very well, my little darling." Continuing to pet her, he eyed the glow emanating from her fists for any signs of weakness in her tether. "Though it comes as no surprise, I'm sure to you this has all felt little more than a tickle."

His next three blows were rapid fire, coming firmer than she was prepared for, and faster than she could count out in sync.

"Seven-e-eight-nine!" Each one echoed by her shrieks, jolting her higher on her toes while she scrambled further along the desk, as if to escape him.

Ariadne held tight to the Fade, willing her focus as it threatened to recede from her grasp with every hit. He leered down the prominent bridge of his nose at how she pressed her thighs together with a whimper, and shook his head.

"Ah-ah, there will be none of that." He inserted his foot between hers, nudging her legs apart. "Come now, widen your stance."

With much chagrin she allowed herself to be spread by him, as if she had much say in the matter. The senior Watcher was quick to correct her with the lashing that followed.

Proceeded by a rush of air, it was all the warning she was given before the punishment landed with a crack.

"AhH-! T-ten!"

The worst of it by far, and they were only half-way through.

Her flesh ached, the strength of which rivaled only by the emptiness her walls throbbed around. The wetness that webbed between her flushed lips maddened with discomfort, teasing her with a need for friction he kept her from chasing.

Eleven, twelve, and thirteen were slower than the last round, but made up for in their heft what they lacked in speed. The first of all of them to well tears along her lash line, each one threatened to reduce her to sniveling, as she fought to announce their respective number.

If at any point during the punishment a break was needed, it was then.

He spared her no such benevolence.

The length of his hand in full, the heel of his palm to the tips of his fingers, swept in hard to where the tops of her thighs met her glutes.

A sharp clap of flesh ripped its way through the stifling air. It shoved her across the desk, the glow from her hands flickering like a dying flame.

Fourteen. Fourteen! She hollered at herself, but her mouth was too preoccupied with gasping for breath to comply with that vocalization.

Fourteen dangled from the tip of her tongue, but her lips refused her will. She was so close to twenty. The tops of her thighs stinging, the reverberation of his whack throughout her body saw each and every inch of her pulled taut and humming.

"I'll issue one final warning." He intoned, encouraging her to keep count. "Use your words, darling."

"F-fourt… fourteen." Her voice was a strangled, weak thing. A flicker of her wildfire not yet extinguished, it goaded the low, mutter of "masal din'an." to seethe from her before she could even think to stifle it.

Aware that Emmrich most likely heard, a shred of hope blossomed in the shelter of assumption that he couldn't decipher the specific venom, obscured in the elvish.

Time ground to a halt. Everything seized in that moment, even her heart.

Then came the shuffling of feet as he positioned himself behind her, caging her against him as he planted one palm alongside her elbow, and then the other.

She braced herself as he swept in low, his mouth hovering beside her blushed ear. Her skin prickled in a wave down her body as that shelter cast her out into exposure, that faint gasp of hope shriveled and wilting.

In a startlingly fluent timbre, "ma nuvenin" was purred in response.

As you say.

The little elf shivered at the depth and severity of his enunciation. Eyes widening, heat flushed upwards from her neck in a vibrant bloom that stained the whole of her face. The arousal at hearing her language in his voice was almost enough to eclipse her dread that he knew exactly what vulgarity she had slung his way.

"Y-you-!"

Another whack doled to her tender flesh, though one that was sharp as it was stinging. Hollow. He didn't allow the meat of his palm to cup the swelling upon impact, nor did he soothe it with a lingering touch. He rebounded like snapped twine. It was a biting smack, one that had her suck at the air around her for strength.

"Fifteen!"

Before she could offer a weak excuse, he scolded her with tired disappointment. "Honestly, dear, you think me unacquainted with your tongue?"

He adored the sight of her flushed skin pebbling in the wake of this revelation. Though the exact verbiage a little muddled, he was able to parse the broad strokes. Recognizing her off-color assertions of his manhood in no uncertain terms.

"Quite the gamble, speaking to me in such a way. Perhaps I've been a touch too lenient?" He clicked his tongue, crooning with silken fluency. "Mala suledin nadas."

Now you must endure.

She craned her neck to steal a glance at him from over her shoulder.

Head held high and shoulders drawn back, not a hair of him was out of place. His leer shone with en-rapt attention - and a stray glint of gratification - one that had knotted her stomach when she caught it. He chided her all the same.

"Don't worry yourself with what's happening back here." His touch teased a path all the way up her spine to her nape, finding a hold in the ashen locks he wove his fingers through. His grip domineering, he squeezed the roots just enough, her scalp flaring in a sensual tingle as her gaped pout let slip a breathy moan.

He chuckled as he guided her head back to it's position by the reigns of her hair. "Keep your head straight and your eyes forward, dear girl. Your attention should be on your cast. Not on me."

Releasing her tresses, his splayed palm dragged back down the length of her body to flatten over her sacrum, pinning her still with even pressure. Switching to his non-dominant hand, he proved it no less proficient, as it whistled through the air before landing against her raw skin.

She didn't think a bare hand, one that fondled her so lovingly, could also raise welts on the very flesh it revered. The chafed skin of her backside served to oppose that mutual exclusivity.

"Sixteen!" Her voice cracked as she pushed it from her chest, wound tight against the blistering sting, and her tenuous grasp on the Fade.

Holding his hand in its place, the one that had just struck her returned, rewarding her with an affectionate graze to the irritation. "You're doing well, sweet girl. Very well indeed."

She opened her mouth to respond - with what, she herself wasn't even sure - before he came down on her once more, this time back against the top of her buttocks. Blossoming a dull, throbbing ache, it wrenched a pathetic sob, hitching her tally.

"S-sev..seven-seventeen." The light from her fists flickered like the flame of a torch whipped in the wind, warning abandonment. She curled her fingers in tighter, until her nails bite the flesh of her palms. Concentration battled her, as did her waning tenacity.

The heaviness of his hand seared across her rump in a ludic swipe. One that melted the beginnings of a harsh gasp into stretched moan.

"Eight-teen-,"

"That's a good girl, we're almost through." His approval at her endurance colored his baritone, soothing her with the tenderness of sincere praise. "You're doing so well for me, da'len." He hushed. "So obedient."

Little one.

She groaned at the familiar pet name, the elvish intonation deepening his voice to a silvery croon. Their power dynamic already tipped against her, this recent development plunged the scale to weigh heavily in his favor.

She could only imagine the humiliation if he let slip such a name to her around the others - he'd have her blushing as furiously as he did back when she was a school girl, buckling her knees in the same fell swoop.

If he only knew the hold he had on her back then.

"Oh, I haven't lost you, have I?" His attempted diversion successful, she hadn't noticed the rustling of his armor behind her, while he began to disrobe. Leisured, and only pieces at a time. The resolve of man well versed in the importance of pacing.

First the onyx outer layers, and gold plated adornments were placed on the desk beside her. Then a green blur in her peripheral, as his collared shirt joined the neat pile. Now bare from the waist up, it was a tactic to further her distraction. For even at the nineteenth, his next blow startled her. Her sore body jerking forward with a throaty groan.

"N-nineteen..."

Grasping the Fade now felt as though she were trying to pluck a sewing needle from the surface of melting ice with a gloved hand. It dimmed in pulsations like the twinkling of a lightning bug, before steadying itself back to his desired opacity. She expelled a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.

"There you are." He purred. "I was beginning to suspect your mind had wandered; we almost began again from the start."

The final blow plucked a yelp from her, frail as her spent lower half felt.

She was finished.

Ending on the same sweet spot of where her rear ended, and her thighs began, a numbness began to seep throughout the burning muscle in ecstasy. A kindness of her body, having turned the intensity of his pain to subdued pleasure. Admittedly not as delicious, but leagues more tolerable.

"Twenty."

"Yes, dear girl, I believe so." One palm swept an absent-minded path over the swell of her, now thoroughly raw and hot to the touch. "I wonder; was I successful in communicating the purpose of this lesson? Or does that darling petulance within you remain?"

"I... but you said-," her tongue stalled, as sluggish and unreliable in her mouth as it was when she was intoxicated. She huffed in frustration, and tried again. "I did as you said-,"

"An adequate performance, though not wholly satisfactory." He of course teased, but did so believably. "I question your interpretation of this exercise."

"I... I've been good." She croaked in embarrassment to how subdued he had her.

"Have you now?" He mused, his palm sweeping over her like his touch was a balm to the angry flesh. "Only one way to be certain."

He sank to his knees behind her, and swallowed hard at what he found.

He could see how swollen she had grown from his spanking. Burning bright pink, and drooling from between her quivering thighs.

"Oh just look at you." His warm breath misted against her as he rumbled in appreciation. Though he still kept firm to his stringency, his admiration was unmistakable. "I fear my punishment was enjoyed, and rather too much, you wicked little thing."

"I-I, I didn't... I-,"

"Shhh." Mouth snapped shut, her eyes misted despite herself, as he spread her apart in more thorough inspection. His fingers adroit and reverent, as if peeling apart the petals of a tulip in fresh bloom. Wet with early morning dew. "It's of no use to demur, my girl. I see well the mess I've made of you."

Any semblance of a reply she might have been able to articulate was strangled by the obscene moan that erupted up her throat.

Opting against prelude, Emmrich had darted between her shivering thighs to flatten his tongue against her slit. Opening her up to his eager mouth, the agile muscle flicked and slithered along her slick heat.

At his first taste of her piquant nectar, he groaned into her, feeling it's conduction along her aching sex as much as she heard it muffled from between her legs.

An imperceptible pressure bore down around the entirety of her body, squeezing a gasp from her burning lungs that choked it's way out. Ariadne felt his lips curl in a smug grin against her tender folds, before beginning to move them against her in the makings of a deep, impassioned kiss.

He worked her entrance to interrogation. Demanding her noises, and her trembles against his relentless mouth. Intent to find the obstinate little hellion he believed to still be lurking within.

"E-em... Emmrich-," her eyes watering, a mantra of his name poured listless for him. Hoping it served as just recompense.

He answered by creating a seal of his glistening lips around her cunt. Pulling hard, he grunted as she rocked back into his face, constricting in hollow pulsations against the tip of his tongue to encourage it's entry.

To surprise so great it collapsed her against the desk, he granted her request.

Palms snatched her thighs to hold her still, he probed the slick muscle in and out of her weeping center with lethal precision. His girth heavy between his thighs, it flicked against his trousers with impatience. His condition worsened with her every strained whimper, and disjointed stutter against his strong chin. That damnable scruff brushing her sensitive clit, the groomed whiskers of his mustache tickled her to similar unraveling.

Between the steady pressure of his shadowed jaw to rub her bud against, and his lips and tongue orchestrating a devoted composition, he had already dragged her before the crest of her release.

She had indeed done well for him, and to her efforts, a reward was owed.

Emmrich tipped his chin to allow his tongue access to her swollen pearl. Teasing it with feather light pressure in clockwise motion, he closed in tighter with every circle. Weaponizing the vibration of his hums in tandem with his ministrations, she came crashing down against his mouth with little more prodding.

The elf whined with such loud sincerity, he was certain the odd passersby as far as the very end of the walk outside their window, could have heard her without difficulty.

He lapped at her mussed petals, cleaning her up with paternal attentiveness as her full-body tremors relaxed to sporadic twitches. Next came his own maw, smeared and shining with her pearlescent remnants. Licking his lips while he rose to his feet, his sharp brow arched as he looked her over.

"Oh, aren't you a treasure." He murmured in reverential disbelief in catching sight of her persistent hold to the Fade, however weakened. "You may release, dearest, just as you may await me in bed."

Ariadne picked herself up from the desk, and lowered herself to her heels for the first time since the professors punishment.

The very professor who watched with open satisfaction as she limped across the floor, on thighs that still wobbled from his oral dissection.

Emmrich dropped his trousers where he stood, stepping out of them the moment she pulled herself onto the lavishly made bed. Electing to keep herself propped up for him on all fours, he hadn't expressed to her the position he wanted her in, she just knew. She could read it in way she felt his leer rake across her, dutiful in her presentation to him on her hands and knees.

He had never been so assertive with her before, least of all with such determination. His dexterous hands bruising in their strength. His height wielded to impose, like he had something to prove.

She hazarded a glance at him from over her shoulder.

A lean athleticism to his tapered physique, his regular, early morning cardio showed in the toned ripple that carved through the length of his abdominals.

Obliques tensed, his traps pulled taut his broad shoulders as he held himself erect before her admiration.

A dusting of silver hair between his pectorals, they mapped down his linea alba, coaxing her gaze down with it to arrive at the soft thatch beneath his naval. That handsome iron trail lead further, not that she required any additional incentive to seek what waited lower still.

His engorged length bobbed upwards in a slender curve towards his abdomen. A bead of precum at his tip, he quirked in gentle pulsations from between his thighs in wait.

He didn't permit her too much indulgence, beginning to make his way towards her with the sort of noble confidence only afforded to one who knew how he appealing we was to his lover. One who maintained exceptional care of himself, and knew his efforts were appreciated.

She wasn't left to her lonesome for long. Joining her at the edge of the bed, he grabbed her by the hip-bones to yank her up, and back to meet his groin. One foot planted on the floor, he drew his knee up on the the mattress. Dropping his pelvis to grant them the deeper angle they both knew they needed.

Grabbing himself roughly about his swollen base, his patience lasted only for as long as it took him to align himself with her soaked folds. Pushing through them with his tip, a whine dislodged from him with the guttural timbre of an animal claiming a compatible mate.

By the time Emmrich sank inside her, just to the point of where curve of his head blended with his shaft, he was completely gone. Head tipped back, a wet and strained noise of fervor sprang from the back of his throat.

Her tight velvet sheathed him one agonizing inch at a time. Even with her lubrication he still hurt her; unable to hold himself back once he felt that initial, hasty stretch of her walls. A growl seeped from his depths, knotted and yanking inward, as her muscle squeezed at him with her own greed.

He was able to will himself still for long enough to allow her time to adjust - a decent girth, he was longer than he was wide when swelled in full. A lot for her small frame to take, slotting himself to the hilt saw him bottom-out in the same motion. A gasp tugged itself from the tender depths of which his cockhead just battered.

The noises he made when he buried himself within her never failed to tighten her around him. Like a reflex, his groaned relief only worsened her need for her own.

This time had been different. He didn't experience relief. He didn't feel satiation from her plush heat kneading his heft. It only worsened his withdrawal. He wouldn't know contentedness until he split her open, and burrowed as far inside her as he could.

"You'll be the death of me, my girl. Gripping me like that," he sighed, relishing the way her core both fought his intrusion, and spasmed wider in frenetic accommodation. "Whimpering, as you are."

Long, spidery digits dug into the firm flesh of her hips for purchase. His chest felt tighter with every breath he relied on to steady himself, to keep from pistoning his hips too hard, too fast. Though her previous defiance tempted half his mind to handle her with such aggression.

Hoarse, full-body pants drooled from him like a sick hound as he began to work himself inside. Fluttering her delicate velvet as he stretched her down around his length, using her hips as both leverage for his slow, too-deep thrusts, and catharsis for what still swirled within him.

The lucidity he had been able to maintain all that time had dissolved just like that. The confines of her slobbering muscle pulsed around him with the suffocating tightness of a woman who sought revenge. Even with how thoroughly she had been broken in, her body reaped retaliation where it could.

It saw his initial thrusts ragged and uneven. The little elf had him sloppy.

"E-em-aHh-!" Ripped from her as he picked up his pace without warning. His taut musculature rigid as he leaned into his momentum, it didn't interfere with his perfect posture, even as he began to drill.

"You're infuriating. No one's ever gotten under my skin quite like you, little Death Caller." His divulgences near frenzied, he suddenly switched his hold on her to clip his hands around her upper arms.

Hoisting her up abruptly, he took from her the hold she had on the duvet. He was all that kept her from falling face first into the mattress. "You haunt my thoughts. I'm unable to rid myself of your smell - how insufferable you are, so arrogant and so effortless as you undo all that I am, all I have striven to become."

Any and all quips or pleas died against the back of her throat, strangled by the shrill yelps from the sheer pressure of his hips snapping against her. Pinching her with his grasp at the crease of her elbows. Locking her against him, while he rode her out with harsh bucks. A single strand of his hair broke free from the pomade that held it in place.

Her bottom still tender and throbbing, it didn't appeal to his mercy to lessen his attack. He was too enamored with how the swell of her fit with his groin, his slick length disappearing into her pretty pink folds with every snap.

Emmrich had always made love to her. Thorough, and meticulous and bursting with tender affection. This time wasn't like that. This was an assertion of his dominance. This was a reminder of her place.

This was a fuck. Pure, and plain as day.

His stamina was a thing to behold, but he had been stretched ever thin since their evening began. Bouncing her up and down his shaft made quick work of his strained resolve, the whispers of his climax pulled at him with neediness reminiscent of his young lover.

"Tell me, my pet." He huffed, his skin prickled at the tightening of his scrotum. Threatening the burst of his dam. "Where would you like me to-"

"In-side-me-!" The demand made breathless and choppy, his unrelenting force stilting each syllable.

He had only ever finished on her; the small of her back, the protrusion of her clavicle, one spur of the moment rendezvous that left him with the visual of him dripping down the quirk of her victorious pout. All at her behest, she had never asked this of him before, and he'd never dare suggest it.

Of course she'd ambush him at such a pregnable moment, when he felt more animal than man. Liable to unwise decisions in his haste to exorcise whatever had possessed him back at the canal.

He shut his eyes tight to her plea, as his stomach flipped over with blunt force. He knew better than to be so irresponsible, and yet-

"Ariadne." Grunted low in warning. "I'll not last much-longer-,"

He hadn't been with her long enough to gauge the risks, unfamiliar with both her cycle, and the strength of her fertility. He hadn't the time to weigh that potential cost, as her wanton mantra of please please please sent the necessary blood blow from his brain to the strain between his legs. As if he could erect harder than he already was.

"Please! Please inside me-please-,"

Her temptation was far greater than the meager shred of resolve he clung to. Her depths were so warm and snug, tugging him in deep and then deeper still. Fluttering around the heft of his cock in frantic coercion.

To feel him crowd against her womb. To leave her feeling full. Of him.

The pressure behind his eyes began to swell, prodding his paper-thin restraint. Pushing him to devolve to his most base biological motivators.

He might have been an older man, but he was still just a man, after all.

Without a hitch in his stride, he released one elbow at a time, snaking her around the abdomen with one wiry arm, he snatched her beneath the dainty cut of her jaw with his other hand.

Bending her head back, he curved over her like a viper. The extra height he had on her allowed him to look into her eyes, manhandling her like a rag doll as his thrusts increased momentum. Reaching new depths with his penetration, signaled by the crude joining of wet flesh. More loosened locks fell into his darkened eyes, further obscuring the man she knew.

Ariadne was mounted by beast who borrowed Emmrich's skin. His touch was known to her, his smell was right; but the force that pummeled her into submission she already surrendered long ago was a force she had yet to reckon with.

His rhythm faltered as she fluttered her lashes up at him, her feline gaze pleading, drunk on his speed and ferocity. Her throat purred beneath his palm with her strangled groans and whimpers, each one sent straight to the knot in his scrotum, uncomfortably tight and twitching.

The jut of his hips canting at a wicked pace, one that telegraphed his crescendo, every withdraw of his veined girth had her keening from the loss. Even from the fractions of a second it took before he thrust back in.

He was only vaguely aware of the depravity that sloshed out from over his neat lines. His crisp presentation crumbling, his mindful respectability now a memory. His view of her full hips unobstructed, her abused womanhood raw and stretched around the brunt of him was all he could subscribe to. The molten ache coiled in the seat of her pelvis cranked tighter and tighter with every nudge to her womb.

A shred of his pride remaining, it was enough. Enough to prevent him from spilling his less savory fantasies, as his tongue tangled a growled litany of English, elvish, and a language unfamiliar to her ear.

An indecipherable proclamation of just what her desire for unprotected copulation did to him, she caught it in fragments only.

Anvallenim, nadas, mamae, and his repeated use of da'len all struck at her with sinful awareness. Each word recognized twitched her ruined cunt around him. Filling in his gaps, enough to betray what he had so thinly veiled.

Somewhere through her mottled stupor she supposed that was by design. To impart his shameful urges without having to face the mortification of hearing himself voice them.

Her perfect gentleman, near unrecognizable with the sheer magnitude of his abandon.

His grunts of elvish and their implications proved to be what brought her to the edge, feeling her seize around him as she fluttered in her tell-tale crest. His tip continuing to jab the spongy patch inside of her his digits had finessed with ease. The way the tine of her right ear gave a little twitch, a call for assistance; all she needed now was a push.

"Come for me, da'len." His grandiloquent embellishment stripped, he commanded her stern and chest-deep. "Come for me."

That broke her.

And she had already been broken from the start.

A release heavy and throbbing, the coil in her stomach sprang loose, scorching her in undulation from the inside out. Fresh wetness dampened the corners of her squint, Emmrich continued to ride her through it. Massaging himself against the clenching ridges of muscle, that wrung him out with every contraction.

"This body of yours, your youth-," he huffed through grit teeth, feeling himself drift further away with every rut against her she had no choice but to take. Yielding to him like she never had before. "-leads my mind to wander to... dangerous places."

"I- l-like you- ...dangerous-," she managed to pant out in pieces. "Please Emmrich - claim me. I want you vulgar and selfish and messy and-,"

Flush against her prenatal chamber, he released.

Without the constraint of reason or dignity, he spent himself with a sharp grunt, his distinguished features screwed up in both elation and regret. His polish had tarnished and dulled, and all for her to witness.

Coating her depths with his seed, and the nagging horror that they could absolutely take root. Yet he could hardly keep his head level, let alone acknowledge such probability. Attempting too proved as successful as pinching a tendril of smoke between his fingertips. Dispersing into oblivion the moment he made contact.

The knots of semen worked their way through his girth, loosening the tension from his bowed shoulders and furrowed brow a little more with each spurt. To his flooding of her sex, she offered tender mewls of repose.

As the blinding ebbed to allow for his good sense's return, he shook like a wet hound. Stuck to her backside, Emmrich was ginger in his movements as he went to withdraw from her blessed center.

She whined in what presented like drunken protest, pawing weakly at him to keep him still, and sheathed to the root inside her. He shut his eyes as he felt the thick viscosity of his spend leak from where their sexes meshed, the sensation stirring lazy kicks of his half-hard cock against her tender walls.

Coiling his arms around her middle to lower her down into the mattress on her belly, he followed her; his softening member still nestled within her sticky heat, as he collapsed half on top of her. It almost could have been spooning, had he more cradled her than crushed her.

Not that she minded at all.

"Mm-mmrich?" Slurred by drowsiness and lousy with satisfaction, the lure of unconsciousness pulled her further and further away from him.

"Yes-," he swallowed his hoarseness, already beginning to rid the evidence of what he had transformed to during their union. "Yes, love?"

After a pause so long he thought her out cold, she then offered; "Your insults aren't petty." Her voice so small he almost didn't hear. A crooked grin curled his lips into her sweat-dampened hair. Her candied musk faint, but lingering.

"No?"

"They're first-rate." She sighed, as if given in grudging propitiation. "Peerless, as you are in all your fields of expertise."

I'm sorry.

Her stroked his thumb along her exposed scapula, seeking to tame her trembles. "An accomplished denigrator, and an old fool. You give me far too much credit, little love. Something I do not grant you near enough."

As am I.

Her breaths deepening, they shared the silence as she soon drifted away. With much care in his handling, he slid his arm beneath her and flipped them, drawing her to his chest where she belonged.

Sleep wouldn't call for him, not for some time. He was still too keyed up from what she had managed to rip from his depths. A mess she made, one she left for him to clean up.

He raked his knuckles up and down her spine, a motion that served to calm him, more than it was for her. When that no longer occupied him, his fingers crawled for her hair. Her bun had fallen out at some point during their tousle, but he couldn't recall when.

Emmrich stared up at the ceiling, his eye following how the sparse candlelight threw the shadow; flickering and twisting the source, it reminded him of how the Fade took to her. How she held it for him, even as he passed her through the maelstrom of release.

His yearning for a drag flared anew, it squirmed in his slender fingers. Aching for a cigarette, but one with the filter bitten clean off.

Tagging as per request: @goddessnyx216

[mvmnbnv]

Please tell me I'm not the only one who doesn't see sex solely as a fucking submissive and dominant dynamic...pls tell me that some of us just like the idea of pleasing our partner without having to be submissive to them..

Because the thing with caitvi is that people will bring up this stuff solely in this sub dom way and straight up tell on themselves and let us know why this dynamic is toxic

"If Cait topped vi that'd be seen as abuse of power or taking advantage of vi" then she shouldn't be trusted around vi during sex at all???

"Vis topping Cait so it's okay!" Vis on her knees in a damn jail cell with a submissive expression with lyrics over the scene implying Cait is "higher than god" and that vis "down there being a doll" and having to "take it" if she wants someone like caitlyn..she has NO power in this dynamic no matter what acts she's performing. People are literally out here calling her a SERVICE top and saying she's WORSHIPPING caitlyns body...yall tell on yourselves with everything you say. Yall know vi is not in control here...from the lyrics to the scenery to the position vi is in...that scene is gross.

This is not me saying "lol vi is a bottom" either, i couldn't give less of a fuck what position she takes in bed canonically. This is me saying this shit isn't healthy...and yall seeing something this degrading and praising it is wild, while also trying to say vi is exercising any power here but everything else that comes out of your mouth and from the source material says something totally different. Vi "topping" doesn't fix shit, because regardless she's still seen as lesser and someone who has to take bullshit for this relationship to work. On her knees in a dirty jail cell. Seen being desperate as fuck in previous eps for someone who couldnt give less of a shit. Sending her to battle after being wounded and putting her in the hands of someone like ambessa...not even given the comfort of a bed or anything. She's not important in this dynamic

[strawberry-hachi]

Thinking about possessive Chigiri. Anyone would get scarily protective if they lost their dream. He lost his career and his passion over a simple injury. People avoided him because of how closed off he got and he refused to let others get near.

When you saw him again after his injury he didn't look at you once. Only giving you one word answers and nods. You understood how much it destroyed him but it was still hard to see the effects.

But then he started avoiding everybody. Holding himself up in his room and attempting to rot into the earth. Oftentimes his sister would end up calling you in tears because of his refusal to take care of himself.

So it's no wonder you began heading over to their house more to try and help him. It was still Chigiri. The boy that you had found yourself enamored with even before he got crazy good at football.

Albeit, it was not easy taking care of him with his mood swings and injury. Often you and him found yourselves frustrated with each other because of that lack of communication and progress. Regardless, you two worked through it because what was the point of a relationship if you couldn't help each other when you needed each other?

It was around the time he finally started healing, his stitches finally disappearing and finally going from a wheelchair to crutches did you begin seeing that change. How he would follow you everywhere if you were together, always close to you. How he would begin messaging and calling you if you disappeared on him or were talking with someone else (and while this did annoy you, you found it oddly adorable). He even began messaging you at all hours of the day even if he had nothing to say.

You weren't one to reject such affection and took it in stride but you'd be lying if you said it didn't worry you on his sudden switch up. Perhaps it's because he finally has energy to put into his relationship now but that thought only puts a pit in your stomach. Because what if he finds something else? You aren't willing to stay if you were only a replacement for something.

However what you learned right before he went off to Blue Lock was in fact the complete opposite. That only after he got injured did he realize how much he genuinely cared for you. Couldn't stop thinking about you. How he would sit with his phone in his hand wanting to call you even though he could barely move a muscle.

How more often than not he found himself dreaming of you. Wanting you. Waking up in a cold sweat upon realizing you weren't there. How as the days grew longer the more he realized that he needed you next to him always.

His injury most certainly messed him up but it also made him realize many things about himself that he wouldn't give up for the world.

---

"Where are you going?"

You glance back at him, "Groceries, remember? I'm still helping your mom and sister, idiot," You stick your tongue out at him, getting another blanket to put under his leg as he sits on the couch.

His once neutral face turns into a small frown as he sets his head down upon the couch. He sighs, briefly fluttering his eyes and you immediately can tell he's doing it on purpose. Prick.

"Do you need an ice pack?" You chuckle as he crosses his arms and blows a piece of hair out of his face.

He rolls his eyes, "I'm not a baby."

"you're kind of acting like one right now," You raise your eyebrows as he immediately turns to you.

He groans, "You've gotten so much bolder since you've had to take care of me."

You smile, "No, you just never noticed."

He opens his mouth to say something but quickly shuts it again. His brows furrow and his fists tighten.

"Sorry," you smile, "Anyways, do you want an ice pack?"

"No, I want you," He says lowly, almost coming out as a growl.

You blink, "I'm right here, aren't I?"

He extends his arms, "How much clearer do I have to get, idiot?"

You let out a little chortle as you set down the blanket, walking over to him as he quickly goes to knock you down over him.

You squeak as you fall atop of him, his arms going to wrap around you like a vice as his head goes into your neck and nuzzles.

"Are you trying to hurt your knee again," you say incredulously, "Don't knock me over like that," You laugh as you thread your fingers through his hair. It's softer than you last remember.

He hums into your neck as his hold tightens around you. You slowly relax into his hold as you realize he doesn't plan on releasing you anytime soon.

"You okay?" You ask quietly, your voice barely above a whisper as your breath brushes against his ear. You feel him shiver against you and it makes your heart swell.

"Yeah," he glances up at you with a heavy expression and your face flushes.

This idiot.

[chasedeys]

https://www.tumblr.com/chasedeys/768170997377597440/httpswwwtumblrcomchasedeys768169507136159744

Omg you’re so right I’ve noticed that he’s very careful with his words when talking about Ja’Marr and I think that’s so telling like on one hand he is not playing into the media leading questions, and ok the other he wants to keep as much of their priceless relationship to himself

he doessss!!!! to be fair he always chooses his words carefully for all his interview questions that's why he usually takes notable pauses in between the words of all his answers. it always makes me laugh when the nfl/bleacherreport/bengals post clips of his interview they have to trim the dead silence in between his sentences 😭 incredibly precious of him btw

completely drained from the last ask so i can't be assed to actually link these sorry but i really want to list some moments out :') :

he always stutters (?) or like talks haltingly about ja'marr and their connection like he's choosing his words very carefully and deliberately. like think of that interview with ryan clark on his connection with ja'marr or that insane one with joe montana about finding that one special wr or smtg crazy like that or that podcast one where his hair was so fucking perfect and he talked about ja'marr being open etc etc god my brain is too fried for this sorry. oh and that panthers presser where joe laughed and said he likes watching ja'marr play!!! grauaghghhg.

ja'marr's rookie preseason drops, he said he knows the type of guy ja'marr is the kind of player he is despite all his drops. ja'marr gets his first touchdown and joe storms the field to get to him and hug his ass like they're in a romcom idk. the post game presser he makes it clear he remembers all the shit they said about ja'marr 'i thought he was dropping everything'.

this preseason getting constantly asked about ja'marr's contract and him not practicing at all. he gives pr answers sure but you can see he was 100% firm when he says ja'marr would be ready regardless and i think he also mentioned about throwing with him outside of practice?? cute! absolutely devastating for me but cute!!

the 'there’s a whole lot of ways a receiver can tell you hey get me the fucking ball' 😭 somebody wrote a headline like 'ja'marr chase question causes joe burrow to cuss for the first time during press' or something like that and i just about died 😭 kinda clickbaity but honestly it’s soooo funny of course ja’marr would be involved somehow. that presser he was off he was weirdly open?? and teasing??? and when he talked about ja'marr he still took his time to choose his words but he was a whole lot looser on the tongue than usual so boom he drops the f bomb to the shock of every single person who watches his shit.

i cant really think of anything else lmao and this isn't really in line with list sort of but i remember him getting asked about him and ja'marr or pat and travis LMAOOOOOOOO truly why would they ask him this but his voice got so?? fuck it was so????? he 100% tripped up never in my life have i seen him get so flustered and giggly and weirdly defensive. saying something along the lines of 'what do you want me to say? course I'm gonna say us (him and ja'marr) like they (travpat) would answer them' but he was soooo ???? blushy about it???? and like scrunching his entire body in that chair?????? insane man tbh. pr answer ofc but the way he answered it was giving new couple getting asked about how they got together idk. AND LIKE if you compare this with ja'marr getting asked about him and joe or josh allen and stefon diggs (😭😭 bless you all get to a point in your life that you get so close to a someone people know you as a duo instead of just a singular person that you get asked these type of questions) and he calmly without missing a beat rationally straight-faced-ly said that 'i like us more than anybody'........fuck them both so muchhhhh shut uppp 😭

ok bye :')

[sloanesallow]

Mama's Potatoes

Sebastian doesn't know how to cook. Good thing the Niffler does. Sebastian Sallow x F!MC (Siobhan Sloane) Tags: Domestic life, Peter the Niffler, pregnancy, potatoes. 1.8k words A/N: I wrote this while grieving the loss of my cat, Peter. Sloane's Niffler has always been named after him, so this was just another way for me to honor him. Thank you for reading. He loved potatoes, too. [Ao3] | [Wattpad] | [Tumblr Masterlist]

Sebastian doesn't know what he's doing.

It's a rare feeling. He's not stupid—he wouldn't be the youngest curse-breaker at the Ministry if he were—and usually knows how to handle a daunting situation. Crazed Inferi, dangerous artifacts, unusual hexes, you name it. But this...this is a new level of difficulty.

He's been standing in the kitchen since sunrise, flipping through old cookbooks and Sloane's recipe journals, looking for something—anything—within his skillset. Despite his wife's numerous demonstrations and seemingly limitless patience, he has never quite gotten the hang of cooking. If his father-in-law were there, he'd scold Sebastian. What self-respecting man can't cook for his pregnant, bedridden wife?

He hates this, hates that he isn't good at something so simple.

It should, in theory, be akin to potions, which he excels at. But alchemy isn't the same as cuisine—you can't just throw everything in a pot and hope for the best—not if you want it to taste good. Cooking is science, not magic, regardless of how easy Sloane makes it look. Maybe that's why she's so good at it, because she insists on doing it without spells. She's a natural, and Sebastian...

Well, it's a good thing he provides in other ways.

With the birth of their child imminent, however, she's resigned to the bed, on strict orders from the nurses at St. Mungos to keep off her feet. This leaves Sebastian in charge of the meals, which he knows are lackluster, even if Sloane never complains. If they were still in London, he'd pop out and grab something from the local shops, or hire one of the house elves in their old building as a cook. But they moved to the countryside in preparation for Little Sallow's arrival, settling down where he'll need to be self-sufficient.

What he wants is to prepare something hearty and healthy, something warm to lift her spirits before the baby comes. Sebastian allows himself five more minutes of wallowing in self-pity before opening another worn journal, hoping he'll see something he's helped Sloane make before. These recipes aren't in her familiar script, but he quickly finds something promising—Beef Stew.

Except...half the instructions are in Irish.

Sebastian grumbles to himself—just another thing he hasn't mastered. He's learned a few languages in his lifetime, largely due to the thirst for knowledge and travel associated with his work, but Irish isn't one of them. And while his wife is of Irish descent, she speaks it so infrequently that he never caught on.

"This must be her mum's," he says aloud, discouraged. He continues to read over the old parchment and the idea of surprising Sloane with one of her mother's recipes is too enticing to shake.

Sebastian is nothing if not ambitious.

The best-case scenario is that he manages to cook a delicious meal. Worst case, he blows up their kitchen. It wouldn't be the first time.

Emboldened, he gets to work, rolling up his sleeves and clearing off the counter so he has space to prep. Instructions in hand, he grabs everything he needs—or thinks he needs—pots and pans and cutlery, and lights the stove with the flick of his wand. Before he can do anything else, it is yanked out of his hand and he whirls around to find Peter, Sloane's beloved Niffler, already stashing the wand away in his pouch.

"Merp!"

"Hey!" Sebastian shouts before clenching his jaw, glancing toward the hallway that leads to where Sloane is still sleeping. He looks back at Peter in annoyance. The two tolerate each other, but mostly bicker about who Sloane loves more. "Give that back, Peter. I need it—"

"Merp!" he interrupts, batting Sebastian's hand away when he tries to touch his fur.

Sebastian sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I don't have time for this."

Peter makes a series of noises that sound very much like the Niffler is mocking him as he stares at the tattered journal in Sebastian's hands.

"What?" he sarcastically laughs. "Are you going to help me?"

For a Niffler, Peter is incredibly expressive, furrowing his brow and blinking his beady little eyes. "Merp."

Sebastian can't believe he's about to have a Niffler be his sous-chef. "Fine."

"It's beef stew, at least I hope it is," he continues, reading over the recipe again. "Sloane must have it memorized because I've never seen her use this."

Peter chitters.

"Right," he mumbles, moving to the cold box where they keep their perishables. "At least this is in English. Two pounds of roast, cut into small cubes."

Sebastian places the parchment-wrapped meat on the counter before scratching at his chin. "One point of...what is...prátaí?" He frowns, reluctantly looking at Peter for guidance.

The Niffler huffs and carefully scales down the side of the counter before scurrying toward the garden door. He pushed through the little flap Sloane installed, poking his head back in a moment later to glare.

"MERP!"

Sebastian follows after the little beast until they are in the middle of Sloane's vegetable garden. There's a little bit of everything, and even though they have the space (and magic) to grow whatever her heart desires, she's kept a modest size. Peter digs at the soft soil, right beneath a small plot marker that reads Mama's Potatoes.

"Oh," Sebastian hums, feeling dumber than before. He grabs a nearby basket before crouching down to take the unearthed potatoes from Peter. "Since when do you know Irish?"

"Merp," Peter answers, as if to say 'I'm smarter than you, Sallow'.

The Niffler continues to roam the garden, bringing Sebastian the vegetables and herbs he needs for the meal. When the basket is full, the two head back inside where Peter monitors the prep work with an intimidating aura that rivals Papa Sloane.

Sebastian follows the instructions the best he can, relying on memory and Peter's so-called translations. He tenses every time routinely grabs his wrist to correct his movements, wondering if he should hand over the knife to let Peter cut the vegetables but figures. Then again, the last thing he needs right now is a knife-wielding Niffler.

He cooks the meat in a hot skillet until the cut pieces are lightly browned, before moving on to the vegetables—sauteing the diced onion, garlic, rosemary, and bay leaves until they are soft. Peter pushes over the bottle of red wine, and Sebastian carefully pours the liquid into the pan, stirring until Peter gestures to add the beef broth. Once everything is combined, he adds back in the meat and secures the lid before placing it into the hot oven.

"Should be ready in..." he reads over Mama Sloane's instructions.

"Merp," Peter chirps, tapping the counter three times.

"Three hours," Sebastian nods.

He takes some time to tidy up and quietly sneaks down the hall to see his wife still fast asleep. Too nervous to leave the food unattended again, he makes himself comfortable on the floor in front of the oven and starts counting the minutes as they pass by. Peter joins him for a little while but eventually disappears, only returning when it's time to add in the rest of the vegetables.

An hour later, Sebastian holds his breath, protective mitts trembling as he pulls the steaming pot from the oven. He prays to Merlin, and maybe a few other deities, before slowly lifting the lid to inspect the final product. Peter climbs back onto the counter to peer inside, his bill opening slightly as he sniffs the air.

"Want some?" Sebastian quips, scooping a hefty portion into a bowl.

Peter shakes his tiny head. "Merp."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Sebastian mutters, taking a bite for himself. It's not bad, though he isn't sure if that means it's good, either. It certainly tastes just about the same as when Sloane makes it, but doubt swirls in his mind. "I hope she likes it."

If he hoped for some semblance of encouragement from Peter, he doesn't receive it. Instead, the Niffler huffs and leaps from the counter before scampering away. Sebastian reminds himself to find the little troublemaker later so he can get his wand back. Good thing Peter can't perform magic—right?

Sebastian places the bowl onto a tray, along with a spoon and a cloth napkin. He tears off some bread from the loaf he (barely managed) to bake the day before and runs back out to the garden to pluck a few flowers for good measure. After steadying his nerves the best he can, he ventures back down the hall to the bedroom.

Sloane is awake now, reclining in their bed, eyes closed as she smooths her hands across her rounded belly. She glances up as Sebastian crosses the threshold, surprise lighting up her expression when she spots the tray in his hands.

"You cooked?" she asks, struggling to sit up. Sebastian quickly sets the food down on the nightstand so he can help her, softly laughing at the way she's too focused on the steam rising from the bowl to cooperate. She sniffs the air. "Is that...my mother's stew?"

He falters when he notices the shine of tears in her eyes, making sure she's comfortably leaning against the pile of pillows. Her emotions have been heightened, to put it mildly, throughout the pregnancy, but he still didn't anticipate tears.

"Hey, hey," he coos, brushing back her hair and swiping his thumbs across her cheeks. "It's alright, sweetheart. I just wanted to make sure you don't starve."

"Well I am starving," she whines and he holds back his amusement, kissing away her pout.

"Here," he says, making sure Sloane has a good handle on the bowl before leaning back. "I uhh...hope it turned out right."

Sloane takes a moment to take in the aromas, smiling at him with glossy eyes as she stirs the bowl. "Thank you."

Sebastian can't respond, not when he's still terrified that he's done something wrong. He watches her, unblinking, as she finally takes a taste. As soon as the spoon is in her mouth, her eyes go wide and she goes still. He panics, leaning forward to grasp her shoulders and tug the spoon from her hand and mouth.

"Sloane? What is it—oh fuck—" he curses, heart racing, clumsily placing the food back on the tray before fussing over her again. "Did I poison you? Are you dying?"

Sloane snaps out of the trance to shake her head, her mouth twitching into a shaky smile. She grabs one of Sebastian's hands and presses it to her enlarged abdomen. His chest tightens for a completely different reason when she finally speaks.

"I think the baby's coming."

Reblogs, comments and likes are appreciated. 💛

[softness-and-shattering]

I think in general it can be easy to forget that other people dont come out and then immediately transition and be fully their true gender in every single aspect, indistinguishable from the outside as a person who's trans at all. I had an...interaction with a few trans femmes like a month or so ago, about a trans guy who had miss-stepped pretty badly in trying to avoid dysphoria, because he had been misgendered by family all day. From that context he's probably a teenager and therefore probably not transitioning much. (I know this is a lot of assumption but I think its fair?). He's been called a girl and treated like a girl all day. And these...femmes? Can I say that? were acting as though he was being a classic entitled guy oozing fragile masculinity. This young person being called a girl all day may know himself to be a man but its clear nobody else in his life does. Nobody looks at him and sees a man. Yeah of course barely hatched trans people are fragile and sensitive about their gender. Doesn't make him entitled to demand whatever from others, but also doesn't make him an entitled macho bro-dude, it makes him someone fucking up because he's in pain.

It sometimes happens to me a little bit the other way in discussion of how like, queer spaces not really being inclusive because you have to pass a femininity vibe to check to get in can be transmisogynistic. Every now and then Im like "huh, this is a trans guy/butch problem" and then I remember, trans women who dont 'pass' also fall into the 'too masculine-looking to be "safe" for femmes and thems' category. Which is also why Im not totally sure on the exact definition/scope of transmisogyny, because from my perspective this particular thing is about anti-masculinity regardless of if its deliberate or wanted or intended, and regardless of one's identity because its an external judgement being made. I think its also getting harder for trans guys to 'pass', like top surgery and what top surgery scars look like are becoming more known. And theres the whole clusterfuck discussion about how people are perceived and how people want to be perceived and in some places if you wear a dress youre seen as obviously a woman but in other places with the exact same presentation youre seen as a man in a dress. I dont have anything to add there, just thinking about it.

wait where are all the trans guys

Historical-anthropological research, especially the work taking place before the 21st century or outside the West, tends to focus entirely on transfeminized groups. So when reading these works it’s pretty natural to ask — wait, where are all the trans guys? This is a reasonable question with a few clear answers; this post is something quick I can point people to.

The central condition of transfeminized groups' absorption into feminist activism has been to accept a kind of symmetry with select TME groups through the understanding of trans femininity as "gender variance." Under this framework, transfeminized groups' social position can be understood as a consequence of gender variance and some abstract violation of cis norms; this was proposed by people like Susan Stryker and Emi Koyama [1], among others, and continues to structure trans inclusion today. It also fails when considering several basic aspects of these groups:

Transfeminized groups are associated with hyperspecific labor practices, most frequently sex work, but also hair styling, drag, makeup artistry, acting, and other forms of 'gender work.'

Metropolitan transfeminized groups appear in the archive as highly clustered and active groups connected with, but usually intensely split from, the masculine men they fucked.

Transfeminized groups become a kind of 'third gender' on an epistemic level; they are Known to wider society before and after “coming out” in a way that USAmerican transmasculinity has only recently vaguely approached.

Transfeminized groups are heavily clustered in labor practice, social organization, and epistemic position, although this is not universal -- certain strains of USAmerican transfemininity have become a bit more labor-agnostic in the last two decades, not-so-coincidentally alongside more general currents of gender-labor liberation. The messy strains of trans male identity recovered from the archive and from current practice tend to lack labor, social, and epistemic coherence. As Aaron Devor notes in FTM, his 1997 history of FTM men, trans men in the 20th century tended to transition out of cities and into the countryside, finding low-profile places they could exist in. These practices, and the earlier "female husband" practices described by Jen Manion, relied on the labor-agnostic nature of transitioned manhood in order to disappear from public life. Transfeminized groups, on the other hand, are categorically restricted from the main form of economic life historically available to women -- marriage. Their labor practices are heavily constrained and have almost always revolved around some form of 'gender work:' as Susan Stryker put it, you need to get people to pay you for being a trans woman. Transmasculinity pushes away feminized restrictions on labor; trans femininity is labor.

Because transfeminized identities are so often labor-identities, and because their specific brand of 'gender work' and hormonal/silicone/surgical embodiment usually requires both specialized training and community support, nearly every metropolitan center in the world developed highly centralized transfeminized groups over the course of the 20th century [2]. As Ochoa notes, this visibility is partially due to epistemic visibility (everyone knows what a trans is), partially due to group structure (people work and train each other), and partially due to the selectively visible demands of finding clients. Fledglings come in with a way of being that is always already visible to society, but changing the body to match and learning how to fully enact and slowly contest the third-gender labor-identity they've been given takes a lot of community support.

So as labor-identities, transfeminized groups tend to a level of labor/community/epistemic coherence that has no clear counterpart. The news archives we have of trans men (as seen in Manion) position them as singular and easily absorbed back into the female gestalt; the cisgender feminist/gayguy/AIDS researchers that form the bulk of historical-anthropological work saw them as unnecessary to their grand theories of gender; the communities themselves have been materially fractured and, for the groups that rise out of lesbian-feminist activism, only partially committed to their own existence. The result of all this is that there is no clear equivalent to the "transfeminized groups" of Jules-Gill Peterson; there is no symmetry to trannydom, and while additional work to unearth trans manhood in the archive remains extremely valuable, sometimes the necessary level of label-coherence and social existence just isn't there.

[1] Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," Emi Koyama, "The Transfeminist Manifesto" [2] As seen in Namaste, Invisible Lives, Prieur, "Mema's House, Mexico City," Kulick, "Travesti," Newton, "Mother Camp," Ochoa, "Queen for a Day," Hegarty, "The Made-Up State," and plenty more. Most of these works came out in the late 80s and 90s due to a combination of the feminist "third gender" craze, the burgeoning field of masculinity studies, and AIDS.

[my-my-my]

I'm aware you are currently working on the Kinktober, but whenever you've time, could you tell us how you think things would have been if Aizen were the Captain and Shinji the Lieutenant?

Thank you for sending me this ask, I've been mulling over it for a few weeks now! I wanted to answer this to give myself a bit of a break from kinktober. It was a really good thought exercise.

I'm not 100% confident in this response, and it's honestly a lot of rambling, but nonetheless, here are my thoughts:

Imo, their relationship would be dependent on what stage Aizen is at with the hogyoku/Hueco Mundo/his research. Before the start of the story, he recruited a low-seated Kaname into his larger machinations/ideology, in TBTP, Aizen was deliberate in choosing a "loyal" aide in the form of Gin to fulfill the more gruesome parts of his plans. But in his captaincy he chose Hinamori for her admiration. The timing of when Captain Aizen and Lieutenant Shinji occur will greatly affect their dynamic.

Regardless, I believe Shinji will still be completely distrustful of Aizen no matter what "era" he meets Aizen at. He can "sense" something is off about him, even if it is the "kind and gentle" Captain Aizen persona that is being displayed to everyone in the Gotei 13 for centuries.

I think it's important that Gin is the third seat in this scenario as well. Unlike what Aizen and Gin did in TBTP, where Gin killed the pre-existing 3rd seat, Aizen will "allow" Shinji to live, because he knows Shinji is distrustful of him. Again, he will use that to his advantage.

This may be a situation where in private, Aizen and Shinji are antagonistic towards each other, whether that be Shinji trying to trip Aizen up, or Aizen being colder and crueler with his words. It would definitely be a game of tug-of-war between them.

This is getting longer so I'll put everything else behind the read more.

That being said, the reversal of power is something that needs to be talked about. Aizen knew that at some point, Gin would betray him, he just didn't know when and how. I think by keeping Shinji away from his own plans, gives Aizen a bit of leeway in how he approaches Shinji as a Lieutenant. It might amuse him that his Lieutenant is so wary of him, but I wonder if this might be how the "real" Aizen comes out, and it's... humanizing to Shinji? Like the sweet, calm, gentle Aizen is an act, Shinji sees through it, and he gets to experience/witness the actual Captain Aizen. And in a way, he likes that better.

I still think Aizen will use Shinji/betray him somehow. Not in a sense of how he used Momo, but it still shakes Shinji to his core. There was a fundamental reason Shinji couldn't trust Aizen, and now he is seeing why.

Aizen's relationships to particular characters are so fascinating to me, and Shinji is one of them. It is "bonded" by a mutual distrust of one another, and from Aizen, a sense of "disappointment." Going by this, if Shinji fell into one of Aizen's traps, it would disappoint Aizen - his Lieutenant couldn't understand/see eye-to-eye to him. I want to say by the time he meets Hinamori, he is done away with trying to meet someone at his level/trying to understand him. It is why he does away with Momo like that, yet also why I don't think Aizen would do Shinji in a similar fashion.

Story-wise, it would certainly add another level of cruelty once Aizen forces hollowfication on Shinji. Again because of the power dynamic now at play. It was certainly cruel of Aizen to do that as a Lieutenant, but if he were the captain? I think it's crueller. I can't find the words as to why I find it that way (lol), but I think its because fundamentally, while Captain and Lieutenant relationships are diverse and complex, there's an underlying bond of "do no harm." It's why when Aizen stabbed Momo, it was shocking - a Captain wasn't supposed to do that to their Lieutenant. Yes Renji and Byakuya fought, but that was of Renji's choice and will. Momo trusted Aizen, her superior, and yet here we are. I think a similar feeling would arise if Captain Aizen had hollowfied a Lieutenant Shinji.

I don't want to say story-wise, things would have played out the same. Shinji's experience and position as a captain is why he connected with Urahara to some degree. I'm not sure if that would play a part if he were a Lieutenant. It would still drive Urahara to action (because Hiyori would be involved), but Urahara's feelings towards his squad and captaincy in general, might not be as fully-realized.

Ok I'm going to cap it here because I'll just go in a circle LOL. Thanks again for sending this ask! It was nice food for thought.

[spiro-nagnew]

Lmao at myself because BTS and BLACKPINK have been around for damn near 10 years and I never cared that much before but here I am almost 30 years old, in the middle of a divorce, entering my kpop obsession era.

That being said, does anybody have some good recommendations for me? Give me your favorite songs or performances from literally any kpop generation. Doesn't have to be BTS or Blackpink either. I have no genre preference. Girl groups, boy groups, solo artists. I'll give it all a listen at least once.

This is also a sort of warning for the people who currently follow me. Prepare for so much content that you'll question when you started following a fan account.

Yes this is a repost from my side blog because that one is strictly used for venting.

[gruesomejack]

"That's alright." He told him, his smile soft. "I'm not going make you do anything you're uncomfortable with. This is for us, not for anyone else." Vi frowned and little; he was tired, but he wished the two of them had a little more time to talk. He wanted to hear about what Charlie had been up to since they last saw each other and just pick his brain for thoughts. A big part of him wanted to insist he stay the night, regardless of if anything would come from it, but he didn't want some freak with a camera popping up and stealing photos of him leaving the next morning. Charlie had a quiet, private life, and he respected that about him.

Vi ducked in one more time and offered a warm, lingering kiss. When he parted, he was smiling again and finally took a step back to let Charlie get up. Folding his hands in front of him, he let out a bashful, breath of a laugh. "I'm really happy you stopped by..." He said, "I'll-... I'll play the full song for you as soon as I work out the kinks." It was a promise. In fact, he hoped maybe Charlie might play with him again and help him with the composition. Sitting next to him at that piano had been on his mind since the moment he left.

"I'll text you." He said, his smile spreading. "I hope you eat well, because I've been known to leave a lot of leftovers." Vi grinned for him and laughed again, "I'll try not to go too overboard, I promise." He said, "I'll see you soon, okay?"

Victory checked his phone again, opening the messaging app and confirming for the hundredth time this was the right spot. He'd pulled off some kind of miracle in the last month, not only getting in contact with one of his favorite artists, but managing to keep it going almost regularly. And now he was standing outside of an unfamiliar building on an unfamiliar street in the middle of Appalachian nowhere, getting ready to meet him in person.

He'd dressed down for the occasion, mostly for his own sake, but for Charlie's too. His own success was leading to more and more people clocking him while he was out, and he doubted dressing like Elton John would help him blend in in a place like this. The bleached hair he'd been sporting recently was tucked nicely under a baseball cap, his extensive ink work covered by a baggy sweatshirt. He'd even taken his earrings out in a rush, storing them in his pocket when he realized he'd forgotten to leave them in his hotel room. The last thing Charlie needed was to be bombarded because he agreed to meet him.

In the middle of using his phone screen as a mirror, his eyes widened as it lit up with a text. Vi quickly shoved it in his pocket and gave a quick sweep of the area. He frowned for a moment, but before he could pull out his phone again, his eyes landed on a familiar face, his own quickly brightening into a grin. Bouncing on his feet, he laughed as he waved his arms to usher his pen pal over.

Charlie Reimes. Cane Corso had been a staple on his playlists for years, and here was the frontman in the flesh. -- All because he'd gotten drunk and too bold, sending him what was an embarrassing DM expressing his admiration. It was a testament to maybe not all of his questionable choices led to questionable outcomes.

Beaming, he practically hopped the rest of the way over to him, his smile toothy, cheeks pink, and his eyes crinkled. "I can't believe it! I don't think you understand how massive this is to me." He said, babbling a little in his excitement. "I can't even begin to thank you. You've been such an inspiration to me forever and-" Oh! Oh, shit. Face flooding with color, he lifted his hands to wave off the starstruck gibberish, and instead offered him his palm. "I-I'm Vi." He managed, "It's nice to see you in person."

@purposefully-lost

[quibbs126]

You know, it’s sad to me that Peach Blossom basically got nothing

He was only given one short scene in the story, and he only talks to one character, that being Dark Cacao. And most of their interaction was about Peach Blossom giving him food and directions, with whatever character work being pretty much Dark Cacao centric. And how he’s left, he’s probably not relevant enough to ever bring back in another update, he’s just a guy tending to a peach bao garden

I mean sure, other playable characters have been relegated to short cameos, like Blueberry Pie, but in Blueberry Pie’s case, she already has Ovenbreak, in which I believe she did have a small story, and she has relationship charts. She has a whole other game of context, and it’s similar with Peppermint (though I never finished Mermaid’s Tale so I don’t know all his scenes), but with Peach Blossom being a CRK original, he doesn’t have that luxury

He doesn’t even have interactions with anybody right now in game, which could be changed later and they hopefully give him someone else to talk to other than Dark Cacao, but as it stands he’s got nothing other than saying a Cake Hound bit him or that the thing on his head isn’t a peach

Heck, there are NPCs who have had more characterization in stories than him. Yes one of those is Smoked Cheese, but still

It’s almost like no wonder he just gets lumped in with Affogato despite being nothing like him other than more feminine appearances and being a new femboy, that’s the most characterization some people are willing to give him because there’s not much else to work with. I mean he does have a character, or at least things you can base one off of, but you generally have to look for them in his story description or some of his in-game lines, and I think most people aren’t gonna go out of their way to do that