#This is from the Sin Eaters by the way

[twingeof-cosmic-angst]

I love that doctor who writers have the ability to just create any lore. Anything they can dream up with practically no reprecussions. and they abuse the hell out of it (as they should!!) listening to an audiobook, and i am now having to cope with the fact that Icelandic people are aliens. shit man... sure! Why not?

[trauma-bot]

sin eater

[quatregats]

I'm rereading Master and Commander and I'm deeply in danger of just posting every single passage from it ever but I did love the way that the capture of the prize in Chapter 6 was framed on either side by the logbook's entry, and also the way he transitions out of it to set the scene and tone:

Sunday, July 1 … Mustered the ship’s company by divisions read the Articles of War performed Divine Service and committed the body of Henry Gouges to the deep. At noon dº weather. Ditto weather: but the sun sank towards a livid, purple, tumescent cloud-bank piled deep on the western horizon, and it was clear to every seaman aboard that it was not going to remain ditto much longer. The seamen, sprawling abroad on the fo’c’sle and combing out their long hair or plaiting it up again for one another, kindly explained to the landmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night ahead. The sailormen had plenty of time to depress their hearers, already low in their spirits because of the unnatural death of Henry Gouges (had said, ‘Ha, ha, mates, I am fifty years old this day. Oh dear,’ and had died sitting there, still holding his untasted grog) – they had plenty of time, for this was Sunday afternoon, when in the course of nature the fo’c’sle was covered with sailors at their ease, their pigtails undone. Some of the more gifted had queues they could tuck into their belts; and now that these ornaments were loosened and combed out, lank when still wet, or bushy when dry and as yet ungreased, they gave their owners a strangely awful and foreboding look, like oracles; which added to the landmen’s uneasiness.

[...]

Jack leant back against the curved run of the stern-window and let Killick’s version of coffee down by gulps into his grateful stomach; and at the same time that its warmth spread through him, so there ran a lively tide of settled, pure, unfevered happiness – a happiness that another commander (remembering his own first prize) might have discerned from the log-entry, although it was not specifically mentioned there: 1/2 past 10 tacked, 11 in courses, reefed topsail. AM cloudy and rain. 1/2 past 4 chase observed E by S, distance 1/2 mile. Bore up and took possession of dº, which proved to be L’Aimable Louise, French polacre laden with corn and general merchandise for Cette, of about 200 tons, 6 guns and 19 men. Sent her with an officer and eight men to Mahon.

[itwasanangryinch]

10/10 Creepy

10/10 Cinematic

9/10 Characters

4/10 Answers

Spoilers in tags

[impossible-rat-babies]

yeah eyrie is like. deeply angry jsut like a lot of my other oc’s but they are unfortunately kinda uhhh. deeply afraid of their own anger <3

[kitabasis]

Reading through the Geist: The Sin-Eaters Second Edition corebook to prep for a campaign I’m going to run this year (assuming I can get enough players) and. I’ve heard a lot of praise for this game I was shocked at how transparently it was written with an audience of GTSE First Edition fans in mind. YMMV, but there’s a ton of terms that aren’t really…explained until later (they throw around all the different Keys before even telling you what a Key is), and the lore is generally really weirdly interspersed. I mean, I’m going to change a decent amount of lore, as is my wont, so I would already have to type up a bunch of stuff… But now I’m probably going to have make a doc explaining the rules in an order that won’t confuse the players if they haven’t read a 300 page book.

[meat-loving-meat]

Just finished The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean for a book club and it was. Fine? I guess? Legitimately the most 🤷 book ever. It wasn’t bad at all—I actually thought that the writing style was pretty appealing—it just didn’t compel me

[qqueenofhades]

I think its genuinely fascinating how Biden has somehow become the bad vibes sin eater for the party. I'm seeing people who were doing the whole "voting doesn't matter both old men are the same" pivot hard into voting as harm reduction. The anti voting rhetoric has COMPLETELY lost The Youths on tiktok. People suddenly remember the good things the Biden administration has done but don't associate Harris with any of the things they didn't like. In my swing state volunteers are signing up in droves. People feel ENERGIZED, the vibe shift pre and post Biden dropping from the race has just been insane

Y'know, that is a... good way of putting it. It's also why I'm quite sure that Biden has probably been planning it for a while. I don't think he was intending to step down, and didn't want to be forced out at the drop of a hat, but after he realized that the circus was never going to stop until he did, he did the honorable fall-on-his-own-sword thing and definitely, DEFINITELY spent some time choreographing this behind the scenes. Because while the roll-out has been very smooth, it could just as easily (as many of us were expecting) have been a total disaster, and that doesn't happen without SOME planning. It's also entirely possible that the campaign staff flipped from Biden to Harris are superhuman, to come up with a massive online roll-out, new branding, new signs (they had plenty of 'em in Wisconsin yesterday), new everything, but I'm guessing it's a combination of both. Biden has spent his entire political career being underestimated, and after we literally made a meme out of Dark Brandon juking the Republicans out of their shoes, we should definitely give credit where credit is due in how masterfully he pulled it off.

Because we have had eight years defined by the central question of Whether The President Is a God King Who Should Serve For Life (the MAGAts obviously think yes), the sheer idea of a president willingly giving up his power BEFORE he had to is also novel and admirable. It's sad that this is the case, but so be it. The Republicans also got a heaping helping of Be Careful What You Wish For that was undoubtedly brilliant; they've been yelling for years that Biden is old and frail and can't serve and should step down. Biden went "lol okay" and gave it to them, and now they're fucked.

Aside from that, on the most basic level, it's far, far easier to see the actual difference in the parties with Harris as the nominee, just because it shows that one party is willing to make progress and reflect the new demographic reality and social mores of America, and the other one is not. Now to be clear, Biden deserves an incredible amount of credit for coming out of retirement (he was ALREADY 77 years old when he became president and had had decades of a long and respected career in public service behind him) to fight, beat Trump, and deliver an incredibly successful presidency. He held the line against authoritarianism at home and abroad, he rescued the trashed American economy and managed a world-leading recovery from Covid, he stood up for democracy, he spent four years filling the benches with liberal judges to reverse even some of the Trump/McConnell hack job, he finally passed comprehensive infrastructure investment and the Green New Deal under the name of the Inflation Reduction Act -- and so on. Many of these priorities had been languishing for decades or were completely trashed under Trump, and he could not have done so much in just 4 years without all that age, skill, and experience. Hence why all the Ageism!!! was (aside from being a Republican/media smear job) dumb. He's able to do the job because he has had decades to study. Turns out that makes you actually pretty damn good at it.

Yes, Biden could not do as much as he wanted or originally planned, had to deal with MAGA Republicans and Joe Manchin/Kyrsten Sinema sabotaging him the whole time (lololol Manchin, possible possessor of the World's Biggest Ego and with Trump around that's saying something, popping out of obscurity to self-righteously announce he would not be willing to be Kamala's VP. YEAH ASSHOLE. LITERALLY NOBODY ASKED YOU. NOBODY WHATSOEVER. NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS AT LEAST WE WILL SOON NO LONGER HAVE MANCHIN IN THE SENATE). And yes, Biden made some serious mistakes of his own, because he IS from an older generation and a different style of doing politics/different beliefs that no longer resonate with the younger segments of the electorate. But this old white Catholic guy at the age of almost 80 still managed to be the most progressive president ever, coming in at a moment of incredible domestic and international crisis and getting us safely to the other side, and all cynicism, criticizing, and caveating aside, he deserves an incredible amount of credit for that. I mean that absolutely, and I am very grateful.

As I said, willingly relinquishing that power takes guts, and when Biden saw the writing on the wall that he had to sacrifice himself, he took his time, he didn't jump too early, and he didn't jump too late. On the most basic level, it becomes a hell of a lot easier to make the "both parties are not the same" argument when one is running a (comparatively) young brown woman and the other is still running their loathed felonious old demented orange traitor. Most Americans are not plugged into policy minutiae and details. They look at Biden-Trump, they see two old white guys. When you take one of those old white guys away (who goes in a self-sacrificially heroic manner and in sharp contrast with the coup-happy fascist) and put Kamala Harris in there instead, it generates an obvious jolt. People can see for themselves that there is a real difference that doesn't rely on closely reading news and tracking complex policy, because as noted, most Americans simply don't. The brown first-generation American daughter of brown immigrants is a quantifiably different story from "old white guy career politician," which for better or worse is how Biden was seen, especially the old part. We needed that establishment expertise to beat Trump in 2020; I still think Biden is the only one who could have done it, and as noted, we owe him a great debt for doing so.

However.... 2024 is not 2020, and it is not 2016. There has been this HUGE and unbelievable swing to Kamala because she represents the antithesis of what the last eight years of Trump-induced anger, fear, panic, chaos, and hatred has stirred up. That's why people are so ready to rally around her, just as they were (I daresay) around Obama in 2008, after the exhaustion, chaos, war, and mounting economic misery of Bush. Trump has been out of office for the last four years, but his shadow over the American political landscape has been omnipresent. Now people know that we finally have a real chance at getting rid of him forever, and just as Biden was uniquely positioned to capitalize on that in 2020, so Harris is now. Which is why, however tough it will be, she has a real shot at winning. I can guarantee the Republicans know that, and are shit scared. Because the Black Lady Army of Democracy has indeed arrived in force to Get This Shit Done and I don't know about you, but I found that incalculably comforting:

Yikes! All lined up for Kamala pic.twitter.com/Dt4OCDp7WX

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) July 24, 2024

This, at the most basic level, is what scares fascists the most, it's exactly what we need now, and what Harris is uniquely positioned to mobilize, along with her gangbusters appeal to young voters:

This is the energy we need. This is what Biden saw and planned for and which he launched us into, and where all that experience and age paid off. This is why people, even people otherwise disengaged, disillusioned, or checked out of the tedious and mind-numbering drudgery and depression of American politics, are responding to it. Because it's easy to understand, it offers hope, and it tells a very simple story that is nonetheless long overdue:

Thanks so much, Joe. Go absolutely waste that orange fucker, Kamala. We got your back.

[bbokicidal]

[REUPLOAD] skz + hands (and how they use them)

warnings: hand kink, sexual content (MDNI), fingering, oral (f receiving), squirting (hyunjin), putting that i mention jeongins church ring in here bc some people are religious n i aint tryna stir the pot

notes: a reupload from my previous blog !!

Chris : Man absolutely fingers you to the Gods. He's the type to know his hands drive you wild and he will absolutely use it to his advantage. That little 'Hall of Fame' move? Yeah - he's doing that shit to you under the dinner table when you join the boys for a night out. He's extremely good at using his hands to coax an orgasm out of you. (And you best bet he rubs over your clit with his thumb. Man is too experienced in fingering at this point. He knows all of your weak points.)

conclusion: uses his index and ring finger during sex + thumb for the clit <3 skilled enough to use one hand and make it amazing

Minho :  He... *sigh.* I'm going to be that person and say that when he fingers you, you can feel the veins in his fingers. Not in a gross way - in a like, textured... ribbed-for-your-pleasure-dildo kind of way. His hands are soft - incredibly so - and because of how the blood pools in his hands any time he lowers them below his ribcage, you just feel it when he's kneeling over you and two fingers deep in your pussy. He'll use his free hand to touch and pinch at your clit though - he's a little too disoriented to use just one hand. But he loves the way his hand looks when he grabs at the plush of your thigh and the veins in his hand become more prominent the tighter he holds onto you, keeping you open for him.

conclusion: uses his middle and ring finger during sex, uses the opposite thumb for the clit <3 too eager to use one hand, gets messy and uses two

Changbin : He - Girl. He.. *sigh pt. 2* He's the type to not...? finger as much? But more, use his hands to spread your pussy open for him so he can shove his tongue as deep as possible into you. He's going to use his hands to hold your thighs apart (as if his broad ass shoulders dont push your thighs open enough) but he's going to do it specifically by putting his hands on the junction between your thighs and hips and splaying his fingers are far apart as he can. (also an ass grabber.)

conclusion: enjoys some good handfuls of ass while he eats you out

Hyunjin : Absolutely fingers you - but always does three instead of two because he's an overachiever. He's going to be fucking you with his fingers so hard that the fucking wet squelches that come from your pussy are NOTHING short of absolutely drop dead sinful. Y'both goin' to Hell for the way he destroys your pussy with his hand. Also, who cares about the clit. You're not even going to be worrying about that because you'll be too busy squirming and crying at the way he fucks you with his fingers.

conclusion: the type to fuck you with his hands so hard that you squirt. that's his end goal.

Jisung : Less of a finger-er, more of an eater. A grabber. Very grabby. He'll hoist your legs over his shoulders (mf is broad and nobody ever talks about it bc they're too focused on his waist) and slip his arms (which are again- big as FUCK) under your thighs so he can rest his hands on your abdomen. He likes feeling over your sides and tummy, maybe even reaching up to pinch your nipples and he's absolutely going to be just groping and kneading at your breasts when you start to squirm against his face.

conclusion: likes to grope and grab, knows you enjoy the feeling of his hands on your body.

Felix : Again, less of someone who fingers and moreso someone who eats. Man is hungry. Man needs that meal. Man - needs that meat. (LMAO SORRY) Anyway absolutely will grab at you while he eats you out. But unlike Ji where he's groping and grabbing and whatever - Felix will slap his hands on your thighs, arms wrapped under your legs, and then he'll lay there and eat - and knead at your skin while he does it. There is never a moment where his fingers aren't digging into the soft plush of your thighs and kneading the skin, pulling lightly on it and feeling how it bulges between his fingers. He's weak for it.

conclusion: thigh man 100%

Seungmin : The type to start by eating you out and letting you relax and think you're being taken care of but then slip his middle finger in and fuck you with it while he abuses you with his tongue. No warning, just a sudden intrusion that's definitely not unwelcome. Uses his free hand to pin your abdomen/hips down to the mattress so you can't move around too much. Also the type to absolutely bury his face in your pussy and try 'n get his tongue as deep into you as he possibly can. A messy eater.

conclusion: eats you out like you're his last meal but likes to keep you on your toes and wiggly. he thinks you're so cute.

Jeongin : We all know he's got pretty hands. (next to seungmo, imo.) So we know he's going to use his long fucking fingers to destroy your pussy. Definitely the type to use his middle and ring finger to fuck you, free hand splayed over your thigh to push it away from his head. You swear on God he's pushing at your cervix every time he goes knuckle deep and it makes you try to close your thighs but he refuses to let it happen and holds you open. Where Seungmin fucks you with his tongue and his fingers - Jeongin fucks you with his fingers and lets his mouth take care of your clit only. But his tongue is a topic for another time. 

conclusion: certified clit sucker. has the longest fingers known to mankind and keeps his rosary ring ON while you fuck.

[stoopidpigeonxx]

⋆˚｡⋆୨✧୧˚ 𝑶 𝑪𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒂𝒊𝒏, 𝒎𝒚 𝑪𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒂𝒊𝒏. ˚୨✧୧⋆｡˚⋆ (PT. 2)

OKOKOK I MADE THE PART TWO PLS STOP YELLING AT MEEEE

NSFW under the cut. MDNI.

Characters/fandoms: Captain Curly, Mouthwashing Content warnings: Smut, obvi, p in v whatt, curly being a SLOPPYYYYY eater, praise (from you and him), boobs, tits even, curly being 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓴𝔂, alot of dirty talking, etc. Our boy curlys a bit of perv.

-Manners? What manners?

Curly is a, what do you kids call it... a munch? Yes. If he goes down on you, and he most likely will, he will be SLOPPY with it. I'm talking drooling all over your cunt, licking it from top to bottom, shaking his head side to side and pressing wet kisses to your clit. It's ironic, really, since he's so polite in and out of bed, but he doesn't really care about a mess if it means pleasuring you. What's a little mess? Sheets can be washed.

"Sorry *kiss* about the mess, sweetheart.. *kiss* can't *kiss* help myself."

-Beautiful tits. And rack. Love it.

When asked the question 'ass, tits or thighs,' he's gonna pick tits. He's a titty guy. Sure, your ass and thighs are nice too, and he gives them an equal amount of love, but nothing can beat the feeling of shoving his face into your boobs when he's thrusting in and out of you. It has something to do with hearing your heartbeat and how fast it is, but mostly he just likes suffocating between your twins. And if he's particularly stressed, he'll just set you on his desk and lift your shirt up and go to town. Sucking, squeezing, rubbing, all that. His favorite stress balls. And god forbid the day you get nipple piercings... He's mindlessly playing with the metal with his teeth, enjoying the feeling of the cold brass on his tongue. You'll have to wear bandaids. (which he'll apply, apologizing profusely.)

-Praise me for sin.

Call this man a good boy and he's whining and shaking. It goes both ways with him. He loves getting praised, and he loves praising. A few of his favorites.. "You're doing such a good job." "Look at you, taking everything like a champ." "God, you're gorgeous." "Good girl." "You're so pretty, baby.." "Atta-fuckin-girl." He knows you fold every time for that kind of talk, so he makes sure to say at least one while you're getting naughty. On the other hand, some of his favorites to hear.. "That's a good boy." "Thank you." (Manners.) "I love you so much." "You're too good." "Fuck, that's good." Hearing how good of a job he's doing is only fuel for him to keep going, and gets him hard as a rock. So, use that mouth. (Unless its occupied, wink wink.)

-He babbles when he comes.

When he's right on that edge, he goes a bit dumb. You feel so warm and good, and he's so fucking close, and his brain just loses all ability to form coherent thoughts. So he just mumbles whatever comes out of his mouth in that adorable whiny subby voice. (You know the one.) "Fuuuuck too good too good too good.. baby.. g'na make me come, coming, coming." Or just a chorus of 'yes' over and over. Its really cute because he tries to be quiet with it, but his brain is so broken that he can't control his volume too well. He has to shove his face into your shoulder or a pillow to muffle himself so the crew doesn't overhear.

-Can't stop, won't stop.

Will not give up until you come, no matter how sore his cock is or how cramped his legs are. He wants you to come as many times as possible before the night is over, and he's willing to overwork himself to achieve that. You've told him its okay, but he doesn't really care. Feeling you clench around him and ride out your orgasm is the best thing he's ever felt, so he's gonna have you coming at least 3 times each session. Unless, of course, you're begging him to stop since its too much. He'd never want to hurt you. He'd pull out and lay with you for a while and let your body calm down before starting up again. "Take it easy, angel. I'm right here. It's okay, you're doing so well." (Why does his dirty talk sound like him coaching you through birth?? 😭)

[chilumi-shipper]

Can we have some more of genshin men eating us out?

Eating You Out (2)

Thoma x Fem!Reader / Arataki Itto x Fem!Reader / Alhaitham x Fem!Reader / Kamisato Ayato x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Smut, NSFW, Oral Receiving, Horny Characters, Overstimulation, Squirting

Summary: Genshin men eating you out I mean c'mon now what did you expect me to write here.

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Thoma

At any moment, can just make you spread your legs, suck on your pussy, and make you cum, then just go back to his house keeping chores like he didn't just eat cunt.

Will approach you casually with a cute puppy smile, then proceed to tell you the foulest things ever with said smile.

"You're so pretty, honey! I wanna eat you out in that dress."

"I wish I was between your thighs right now, but I'm not done with my chores yet :("

"You should get ready for later! I think I might go really rough and leave you sore for a week."

He's just so cute! Ohh, but you know that he's capable of the most vulgar activities, and you know that he does them well.

The way he eats you out though...

Like the sweet puppy boyfriend that he is, he makes sure that you're enjoying it as much as he does.

Thoma gets so happy when you let him eat you, almost like he grows a tail and it wags with happiness as he laps up your wetness.

Your moans motivate him, whenever you let out a particularly sinful moan, he perks up, trying to do what caused you to moan so deliciously.

And he likes to stare into your eyes as he sucks your pussy. You just look down and see him with bright eyes looking up at you, and when you make eye contact, he goes even harder.

When you cum, he would try so hard to have it all squirt out into his mouth, then get up to look you in the eyes before swallowing the whole thing.

And finally, he would go back in and lick your pussy a few more times just to clean it up and make sure you're nice in comfy.

He would then lay beside you and snuggle into your chest.

Thoma would enjoy eating you out so much, that he would forget about the raging hard-on in his pants and just go to sleep.

Itto

Very brave, does it wherever he wants.

In a field where you could get ambushed by monsters? Seems like the perfect place to eat some sweet sweet pussy.

Eats you out like a hungry animal, no control whatsoever, just straight sucking and licking.

Absolutely loves it when you grab onto his horns, even more so when you pull him closer into your cunt.

He is a menace and will literally not stop until he's satisfied, overstimulating you so much until he's tired. No force in this world could part him from between your thighs.

Itto is so determined to eat you out that he will sacrifice breathing just to not break away from you, he's only going to stop when he starts feeling lightheaded from the lack of air.

He would guide your hand to grab his horns, urging you to grind your hips into his face. You would usually be feeling so good yet so annoyed that he just pulled you into some sort of cave and then proceeded to give you the greatest realization of pleasure with his stupid mouth.

He would be sweet talking to your sex, looking so love-struck as he says things like:

"Ohh, look at you all dripping, can't wait to suck all that into my mouth."

"You're so soft, so delicious."

"Look at you, all twitchy and puffy, but we're not done yet..."

He says such things while staring right between your legs, with so much conviction that it almost makes you jealous.

Itto will then carry you back home to eat you up some more.

Alhaitham

Possibly the most nonchalant pussy eater of the bunch.

This man calculates everything.

So you bet he knows just how to prod at the right spots when he's between your legs.

He knows the right amount of pressure to apply with his tongue, how hard should he suck, how long he has to play with your clit before you're nice and relaxed for him. He just knows everything.

Alhaitham eats you out as if he's completing an assignment, everything is planned and calculated, and despite looking submissive with his lips pressed against your folds, his intense gaze studies you like a book. His expression remains stoic despite the work his mouth is putting on your pussy.

The morning after he had eaten you out to the point of not being able to keep your eyes open, he would absolutely embarrass you with questions.

"Did you prefer that I keep my tongue on your clit or do you wish for me to explore you a bit more?"

"I observed that after your first orgasm, you seem to push my face further into you. Do you always prefer to have multiple orgasms when I eat you out, or is one enough?"

"Shut up, Alhaitham!" You would scream at him with your cheeks tainted red.

"What? Did you not enjoy me eating you out last nigh-"

"SHUT UP!"

But then he offers to do it again and who are you to refuse.

Kamisato Ayato

For someone rather high-ranking within the nation, this man shamelessly eats out his wife in his own office, in the middle of the day, doors unlocked, possible witnesses buzzing about the estate a room away.

Thoma is often the victim witness of your escapade, but he understands his lord quite well (read Thoma's part).

Ayato is a very busy man, with his unrelenting duty and whatnot, he finds that a good break from his busy hours would be to have his face squished between your thighs, lazily enjoying the taste of his beloved wife with his mouth.

He eats you out as if he was savoring a meal prepared by the finest cook of Inazuma, indulging himself by tasting every part of your cunt.

He would be slowly licking into you as you were sat on his desk, his head rest comfortably on your thigh as he starts to make out with your heat.

He would then part for a bit to catch his breath, then to look up at you and smile while a strand of wetness still connected his lips to your pussy.

This man is a lazy pussy eater, enjoying his meal for hours on end, ushering orgasms out of you ever so slowly as he makes sure to lick up every crevice.

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Mmmmmh, yummy update...

[windupaidoneus]

like. obviously he could tell something was off. i feel like for any wol with an affinity for magic (but especially white magic) it kind of makes sense. can't imagine the aether corruption would keep your magic the same, it'd have to have some impact... & hildegarde has researched aether before. for the necromancy. yknow the necromancy that he did. & tried his hardest to keep it ethical (ftr haurche agreed to it due to his ride or die sick & twisted devoted heart), hence all the researching. not only that but i mean obviously he immediately noticed sin eaters used the same magic he did. it was kind of a really easy tell

& the only people he knew in that world were either obviously hiding shit from him or just... gestures toward whatever thancred had going on in shb. the twins don't count bc hilde is a grown ass man he was never going to emotionally rely on them. once his aether's corruption started being bad enough that haurchefant's form became subtly (but not subtle enough for hilde to not notice) distorted he just... stopped. he could rely on haurchefant a little at first, manifesting him a physical form by feeding his soul his own aether, it was always temporary but it did offer him some measure of comfort. but his aether just HAD to not be able to contain the wardens' light! WOMP WOMP. & so he bade haurchefant adieu in a much less dramatic way than in the vault lmao. haurche would've wished to be summoned again "once his aether got better" surely, but hilde absolutely expected himself to be unsalvageable even before mt gulg. this was the actual final goodbye for him. & surely they'd meet again in the aetherial sea. maybe. maybe not. maybe his aether would be too corrupted to go there

& of course ardbert was there. but um. ardbert was also kinda in the midst of watching his world maybe die maybe not after having traversed it as a ghost for a hundred years unable to do anything to help. hildegarde was hardly gonna put much emotional weight on him. there were things they could talk about but they weren't That familiar with each other & had very different lived experiences, & hilde takes a while to trust people. it's not like they knew they were shards of the same ancient at the time lmao, they were kinda just stuck together because of circumstances... & it is kind of hard to look a ghost in the eye, the ghost of a hero who tried everything, & tell him you think you're not capable of saving his world, actually, & you're probably gonna destroy it even.

so well. who was left but emet-selch. very twisted for hildegarde to rely on him considering he very much wore the face of solus! as someone raised in the empire hilde both resented him for the horrors the empire committed (the same way he resents himself for participating in it. yknow. something he totally had a choice in. lol) & like... well... indoctrination doesnt really go away in a day. everyone's made to revere solus. regardless of whether he ever met the man personally (which he didn't), the emperor is a religious-like figurehead ; there's just going to be an odd sense of trust associated with him even if hilde knows all he's done is horrific.

that, & hilde felt emet might've been the most straightforward with him at the time (not quite true but not quite wrong either, he does willingly give away a loooot of information which shouldn't be nearly enough for hilde to put trust in him but he wasn't exactly the pinnacle of mental stability & good decisions at the time), alongside with um. well i hate to say it but emet being demeaning & rude toward him was validating to him #TERRIBLESELFESTEEM. it felt like he was finally being seen for what he was (& let's not even get into how horrible yet cathartic it felt for emet to call him "eater" post crown of the immaculate.. lol.....), which sure says a lot about the kind of mindset growing up in garlemald while visibly not 'pureblood' can instill in you. & emet also gets more personal. calls him nicknames even if condescending, shows him his humanity, even gets a little vulnerable with him.

& so i do believe the black magic knowledge hildegarde has at the time of shb comes from emet himself training him from time to time. in my beautiful canon. bc hilde asked, believing magic that is more inherently umbrally aligned could help him quell the corruption. which does lead to more "bonding" if you can even call it that... & makes it easier for hilde to dissociate emet from solus in a sense? he sees more of emet beyond the character he embodies (which is also just part of canon. ppl who think emet acted as himself while playing the role of emperor are completely fucking stupid. but i digress), it feels less & less like there is a power imbalance between them (to hilde) (TO HILDE) (HILDEGAAAARDE THERE'S STILL A POWER IMBALANCE!!! HILDEGAAAAAAAAAARDE)

btw i started thinking about all this bc im drawing arr hildegarde you know it's bad when drawing arr makes you think about shb

i don't really know what the conclusion of this post is. misplaced trust because he felt he had no one else to rely on yeah, & ofc emet pulled at his heartstrings due to how emotional & empathetic he is (not to the point he ever considered actively switching sides or anything of the sort, but more than enough for him to desperately wish for another way that didn't lead to the ascian dying Again). & he did fully intend on going to the tempest alone. though it baffles me to think emet might've believed the wol capable of working out how to get to the tempest let alone amaurot on their own while being tormented by the horrors of light corruption. especially since he claims to expect them further into the transformation, at which point they would likely not be as... sapient. if i'm honest with you i genuinely fully believe emet was consciously orchestrating his own death there despite everything he says & does because there's no other way to make sense of everything that leads up to the dying gasp. oughhh i miss him

amaurot fucking sucks guys.

shb was so heavily the shitter for hilde thancred was there but clearly not emotionally available bc he never is but ESPECIALLY NOT then, had to stop doing necromancy on his one actual proper partner bc his aether corruption couldve ended up corrupting haurche's aether too, hancock was decidedly not in the first, shtola & urianger hiding shit from him the exarch never ever being straightforward on anything alisaie being traumatised every other day & having to keep supporting alphinaud to the best of his ability through everything despite it all. also trying & failing to shield ryne from bearing too much responsibility as the oracle of light. & having to save the world. while his own aether was eating at him in the form of the very magic he wielded best threatening to turn him into something hed always believed himself to be deep down (a monster. not a sin eater specifically.). And if all of that wasnt enough emet-selch was there. is it really any surprise he ended up emotionally relying on the antagonist the most out of all the characters in the expansion bc he really did not have anyone else when shit got bad

[gemissleeping]

Moonlight & Masks

Theodore Nott x Fem!Reader

Summary: Newly turned Death Eater Theodore Nott is tasked with hunting down Harry Potter and the Order Operative protecting him. Only to discover the person he hunts happens to be the one he loves.

Length: 1.8k

Notes: Back from the dead (I am so sorry things are hectic and I don’t want to release a chapter I’m not feeling) with this little one from @thatdammchickennugget’s Hogmarch Challenge! Death Eater Theo. Use of the killing curse. Angst as always because we know I live for the drama. For those of you wanting more Veleveteen, in my head this occurs in the same story universe (which I know isn’t the same as an update pls forgive my sins). Not proofread, we have deadlines to meet.

The sting of lightning hung in the air as she weaved through the trees. The thundering footfall still pressing behind her. Lungs burning with need, she pressed on. Dizzied from the turbulent descent she and Mad Eye had suffered.

Alastor. He was dead.

She hadn’t even been able to take his body from the dirt where it had fallen. And the Death Eaters certainly wouldn’t afford him the dignity of a proper burial.

Tears clawed at her cheeks as she bounded over the tree roots twisting across the forest floor. Thinking only of Mad Eye, the way his voice had simply ceased when the curse had hit him. No cry of pain, no strangled wail. Only silence.

Her grip on her wand tightened as her tears ran hot. The taunting laugh of one of her pursuers echoing through the trees as they crashed after her. The darkness spinning endlessly around her. It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. Gone were the rules they had been taught to play by. Humanity sacrificed for power. Thoughtless with rage, she cast back her wand into the leering shadows. Letting the words fall from her lips before her heart could catch them.

Avada Kedavra

The green light felt as though it tore right through her as it ricocheted from her wand. Scattering through the trees and hitting its mark with a crack. Ripping at her chest with blistering heat, forcing her ribs apart until the spell dissipated. The laughter ceased. That same absence that had followed earlier resting through the trees. She was dragged to a still.

The force of the spell brought her to her knees. Bark breaking the skin of her palms, blood blooming as she fell forward in agony. She felt it being torn from her throat just now; some vital piece of herself. What she had given to cast the curse. The crack rung through her ears. Trailing her even as its ringing grew soft, faded into the background of the forest’s creaks and stutters. She could feel the heaving of her chest, dizzied by the absence that had been dug into her.

Before she could break upon the forest floor completely, the snap of a twig behind her brought reality rearing back. Whipping to face the darkness, she searched the teasing shadows that surrounded her. Nothing answered but the wind. She pushed herself up on bloody palms, staggering towards the nearest tree. Catching the glint of a metal smile hit by moonlight as she turned. But it was too late.

The Death Eater was on her in a second, wand jammed to her throat. One hand wrenching her head back by the hair. A mutilated snarl coming from the unmoving mask.

“Potter.”

She still had Harry’s face.

The figure towered before her, gloved hand pulling harshly at her hair as she strained against their grip. More tears pricking at her eyes as she faced the smooth and indifferent wall between them. Both of them were wearing masks really. But the thought brought little comfort to the nausea biting at her.

She was going to die someone else.

Wand to her throat, she closed her eyes. Preparing for the flurry of hot green light. Perhaps it was what she deserved, it could be a mercy. This way she would never have to truly face what she had done. There was no doubt in her mind that the person before her would finish the job. And yet she waited, but nothing came.

Opening her eyes once again she found him watching her carefully. Blue eyes clouded with something foreign, his silver mask lodged in the dirt at their feet. Looking at her with nothing but quiet restraint. She felt her throat close at the sight of him, all defences leaving her as she stared up at the boy before her.

“I asked something of you, when I saw you last,” Theo spoke lowly, wand still jammed to her throat as though he didn’t fully trust the person he saw before him. “Do you have an answer for me?” His voice fell flat against the forest air, low and heavy as his empty eyes.

His words sent another wave of dizziness crashing through her. The events of the past ten minutes threatening to bring everything up from her stomach. She wanted to fall into his chest and let his robes soak up her tears. To slice her palm clean across his cheek. Fall to the forest floor and not get up. Beg him to finish the job.

But instead, she did as she was told; she stayed quiet. Like the good little soldier they had taught her to be. Counting the freckles and moles that dotted the skin of his cheeks like they were her favourite constellations.

“Answer the question,” Theo snarled again, shoving her back forcefully. Back hitting the jagged edges of bark with an audible crack as a groan left her. Still she didn’t speak, blinking up at him as her head spun from when it had made contact with the tree.

“I’ll do it Potter,” he hissed lowly. His wand cutting further into her throat as she struggled to breathe under its pressure. He barely seemed to notice, staring down at her with empty eyes. “Don’t think I won’t just because you have something I want.”

She only watched him carefully, trying not to let herself give it away as she watched him. Staving off the clouds of memory that threatened to consume her at the sight of him.

“No?” He chimed, a sharp edge to his warm voice, “Very well.”

He drew a breathe, anger taking him in its burning grip. But just as the curse he had planned to cast was forming a whisper of air on his lips; she felt it. The rippling beneath her skin. Pulling and tugging and melting at the fibres of her. She bit her tongue as the pain of it ripped through her. Reforming beneath the skin as everything cracked and popped in and out of place. Until only she remained, swimming in Harry’s ridiculous hoodie.

Theo still had her pressed against the tree, all colour drained from his face as he watched the skin seem to melt and reform on her bones. His hands began to shake. She watched him with distant eyes, trying to hold onto what little restraint remained.

“What’s wrong?” She asked hoarsely, her throat aching from the potion’s due course. Theo’s wand still hesitantly pressed to the delicate skin of her throat. “Can’t do it anymore?”

It happened like the break of a dam. Her name fell from his lips in a rush of credence. Lips falling apart at the sight of her before him, what he’d almost done without realising. His wand dropped in a stagger, as though she had struck him. The darkness of the forest enclosing around them.

“You left me there,” he breathed suddenly, as though it hadn’t meant to come out. She blinked up at him as confusion swept her. But the lost look he carried only washed away as his eyes hardened.

“What?” she breathed.

“You left me there alone,” he spoke again, ignited with a sudden rage. His words were like kindling to her own. Her brow cracking with anger.

“No, Theo,” her voice shook, “you left me.” Theo looked to the ground, shaking his head gently in denial. He took a hesitant step forwards, as though to reach for her. But she stepped back, her spine hitting the tree. “Do you know how much I had to go through alone before I got out of there? Because you were too busy running off with Draco, or-”

He closed the distance between them with a blistering intensity.

“Do you know what it’s been like since? Without you?” It came out in a boiling whisper. “He wants your head almost as much as he wants Potter’s,” Theo’s eyes softened at the words, swept up in whatever memory they procured. “And I just have to sit there and take it, listening to the vile things they plan to do to you. Knowing there’s not a single fucking thing I can do about any of it, except for-”

He didn’t have to say it, the break of his voice said enough. The way his eyes fled from her own. He had meant to kill her.

“Why don’t you do it then?” She whispered, eyes brimming with more tears. Looking to the boy she had loved since she was too young to understand the word. “It would save me the-”

“Stop it.”

“I deserve it, don’t I? For leaving you. You said so yourself, in your letter. I read it you know.”

“No, I didn’t mean-”

“I know you’ve cast it before-”

“I said stop,” he bellowed, pressing himself against her in a flash of pent up fury. His body flush against hers as his chest heaved with the weight of his rage. “Even if I wanted to,” he whispered, his lips brushing lightly against her ear, “I can’t.” His hands tightened into fists, “He wants to do it himself.”

He peeled himself away from her, as though every inch of his skin that couldn’t feel hers was the worst form of torture. Drinking in every part of her except for her eyes, which he couldn’t bring himself to meet. She searched his, begging him to pull himself to meet hers.

“Is it that?” She breathed, fearful eyes rounded as she looked up to him. Searching for that thread that had always hung between them. His eyes grew tense as he saw what thoughts lay in hers, “Or is it because-”

“Stop.”

-you love me.

“Don’t,” he snapped, but even the sharp edge of his voice couldn’t distract from the despair swimming in his eyes. “Please,” he breathed, his head dipping towards her neck in defeat, but not daring to brush the skin, “don’t.”

He wanted to hold her, let his fingers trail across her cheeks, brush his thumb over her eyelashes. Just to make sure it was really her. Not some cruel trick made out to test his loyalty. But instead he let his breath fan across the bare skin of her neck. Knowing it was the only way he could allow himself to touch her.

“It was you I asked after,” his confession fell dead against the skin of her neck. He heard the breath she drew as though it was taken from him. Felt himself unravelling being so close to her now, after months of waiting and silence and searching.

Fuck it.

He’d be flayed for it, but everything could be damned. None of it mattered if he could feel her lips on his again. His hands flew to the delicate skin of her cheeks. Palms soaking in the remainder of her tears as his lips met hers. They parted effortlessly for him, welcoming him in as though she had been waiting just as he had. The softness of her lips balancing against his hunger. Her head tilted towards him, completely at his mercy beneath his calloused palms. Just as she should have been all this time.

[nemesyaaa]

bones and all au // rafe cameron x reader

summary : “ you're so handsome when I'm all over your mouth. ” strangers by ethel cain.

warnings : if you were not comfortable with the movie by luca guadagnino, don't read this !! mature plot. a lot lot lot of blood. sick and gore attitude. cannibalism used as a form of love. strangers/ode to eaters by ethel cain muse. smut. pomegranate used as a metaphor of cannibalism. jealousy. mentions of organs and anatomy. some b&a refs but you can read it without watching the movie. violence. minors DNI. +18.

author's note : crdits to @starfxkrreloaded for this au. you can reach for her ode to eaters au which is very insane ! please, i know this is very twisted but don't send hate or be mean in the comments. if you dont want to read something like that, it's your right and i respect it, just scroll. to the rest, hope you will enjoy. it's my first time writing something like that so i'm kinda nervous. and by the way, the movie is very beautiful, taylor russell was incredible in this. i highly recommend you.

you lived in an old house in the midwest, the southern gothic type with an empty fridge, broken stairs, carcasses of eaten animals in the garden, a tv too old to be turned on, a radio player too damaged to be listened to , a completely dirty kitchen with dishes full of dishes in the sink, and nasty dirts on the floor. there was also that damn lamp that flickered and came on every other time, that icy water that froze your bones, that cold tiles that creaked under your feets. the windows were rarely open but when they were, the shutters slammed against the wind, your underwear hung over the radiator. but you really liked this place, in fact, it was the only place you could call home without wanting to collapse in tears.

you had your headphones on in that empty quiet space, and a probably dead singer in your ears living through your swaying body. you found this pomegranate on the table while searching. it was intact, still shiny and full of good things.

you didn't need a knife when you had a hungry beast inside you to cut the fruit with your teeths. you had dug your molars inside the seeds, directly into the fresh and virgin skin, opened the eviscerate flesh, tearing away everything you can with your mouth, the still delicious juice ready to feed your thirst and starved your hunger.

you smelled the fruity and juicy scent through your nose, splitted open the pomegranate, discovering the clean and clear inner bones, a pretty red color, even more oozing and sublime than your blood, a perfect complexion reminiscent of the sanguinary meat of your anatomy. your tongue and teeth were sunk in, completely buried in the dripping morsel. your face and cheeks were full of it, shining onto your dirty and sticky fingers. the juice burst, squeezed in your hands as you devoured this fruit, the liquid of which flowed, dripping down your neck and chest, slipping toward your tummy like an unstoppable river.

you were bad as a demon, but nothing stopped you. you bit and bit like a mad dog into the flesh of the fruit like a piece of meat, extracting with your molars everything that you could recover and stuck in your throat.

the more you ate, the more the fruit bled. but you heard nothing, no lamentations. nothing could stop you from eating, from the rage beating. it was sickly, obscene and depraved.

you looked like such an innocent thing, but inside you, there was nothing like that. and you couldn't fool anyone with your tears and your regrets, because you didn't have any.

you had dropped the pomegranate on the ground, there was nothing left except a broken corpse. you had consumed everything from the flesh to the bones, from the skin to every part.

your dress was stained. you stank of pomegranate as much as sin. there was nothing good in you, and above all, there were too many people in you.

rafe had come home in the night while you were waiting in the armchair in the living room, with this juice stuck to your body. you hadn't moved. for some reason you were faithful to your partner. maybe because he scared you, or because you understood that without him you couldn't survive.

he had thrown the key in the table and came before you.

he came toward you in the same state you had seen him for the first time, covered in blood and with glowing blue dilated eyes. you knew that he had eaten, that he had devoured someone because he was not like you. rafe was worse. he understood that nature was to kill but beyond that, it was something he was trying to teach you as your mentor. that we should not regret giving in to impulses, that if we did not listen to them, they would end up killing us.

that we were originally monsters, and that we had to deal with it. you didn't know if he was telling the truth, if he was right. but he was taller than you. you found a maturity in him that fascinated you, that forced you to listen to him.

he had taken off his shirt, and you looked up at his face. he smelled of blood, that strong, metallic smell that you could sniff from several meters away but especially his because you knew him by heart.

“jesus, don’t look at me like that. you wanted to stay at home, i didn't force you to. ”

“it was a girl. what was she like? did you like it ? ”

you didn't know if it was jealousy, or curiosity. you just knew you didn't like knowing he was with some girls even if it wasn't going to last.

with a smirk but at the same time terribly cold face, he answered you. "if you're that jealous, use that energy and mouth to taste it. maybe, you will have some answers. ”

you got up from the chair to join him. you didn't want to share him, even though you knew there was only you in his life. you knew it because since you knew him, he had never talked about his family, nor contacted relatives in the payphone. then, he rarely spoke about his private life. he often made fun of you, because it was more your type of thing to open up about personal moments. you never knew if he was really listening to you but he stayed until the end of your speech.

eagerly, you kissed him, that girl’s blood sliding against your lips, your mouth capturing rafe’s in a kiss, as your cheeks crushed against his bloody face. “ mine, mine.” you whispered, pushing your tongue against his. “ clean that blood, babe. i can't be yours if she's still here. ” he had slipped his hands under your skirt, pressing the flesh of your ass. he had a ring on, the cold metal playing against your skin. you could smell it, just like what he had eaten before coming home.

he sat on the probably moldy and torn couch in your living room, you were almost his height now that you were sitting on top of him. you were hungry, as much for him as for sex. he made you feel so many things, or it was this jealousy, this thirst within you that made you so hungry. you weren’t really sure.

you took one of his fingers still covered in blood, the recent taste of raw flesh now in your cavity. he had pushed his thumb deeper in your mouth, making you suck the pulp properly. the liquid bleeding against your tongue, as his flesh quickly brushed your cavity, your drooling lips curved around him. he pushed it in until he felt your throat.

he was playing with fire, he was playing with you, because he knew you could bite him at any moment but he had also conditioned you not to.

“so, how is it? ”

“nothing tastes better than you.” you simply replied. “ right ? nothing can be as good as me. ” he said in a mocking tone.

he had undone the strap of your dress, revealing one of your tits which he had taken in his palm before taking it in his mouth. your nipple was pressed between his teeth, your skin trapped in his hand as he sucked on your piece of flesh, pinching it only ever so gently in his mouth. he still had remnants of blood, slipping between your body and his tongue.

there was something sensual between this slow sucking, fast suction of the tongue around your throbbing nipple, your spiraling stomach against the void, the movement of his adam's apple in his throat while he tasted every beads of your boobs. rafe was good at it.

he pressed your tits, grabbed them tightly and firmly against his palm, nibbling the tip, caressing the pulp, kissing the flesh. and maybe if he had bitten into it, you would have cum instantly.

his hand was on you, covering your body in blood and sweat, tracing your figure with his soiled and bloody fingers like a canva, letting them run over your skin like a paintbrush.

he was hidden by your sucked breasts. and you wanted him full. you had started to grind against him, even with your underwear separating you from him and his piece of jeans, you managed to be completely soaked on him. your hips moved in motion, lifting delicately like a porcelain doll too afraid of getting hurt.

you were no worse than him, and he was no worse than you. you were both terrible people. there was no hierarchy among people like you.

but the first time you saw him, in that shirt full of blood, with that mouth so red and that oozing dripping neck.

it was dark, but you knew very clearly what he had done, and perfectly well who he had eaten. you had observed it and you had not seen a monster. you weren't afraid.

he wasn't mean and monstruous, just indifferent.

"if you want to eat, that man is still over there." he said simply, not trying to hide or deny what you were seeing.

and you liked it. you instantly liked it.

“ you're the one who interests me.”

“you know the drill, we don’t eat each other.”

“i mean, will you let me come with you?”

"listen to me carefully, i don't have the face of a babysitter, nor the skills to do so. get by, you may be a minor but if you're old enough to do what you do when mom and dad have their backs turned, i swear, you can get through this on your own. ”

“i’m an adult.” you cut him off.

“your age was a nice excuse for me to tell you that i’m not interested. i bet you're an adult. ”

you had followed him when he approached his pickup. "i wouldn't bother you. but i need help. i mean, this is new to me. i don't do this often while you seem to be experienced. i want.. .i want to be like you, not to be afraid of that.”

“what makes you think i’m the right person for this?”

“you may not necessarily be the right person, but you’re the one I want.”

“you know, i already have a lot of problems, i don’t need a burden on all of them.”

“please. i won’t be one. you have my word.”

"you really don't give me a choice. come up crybaby, but if you bother me, i won't hesitate to abandon you, no matter where."

you nodded. it was going back, but in the meantime, you had traveled to many states of america, and probably left a pile of corpses on your way. even though it hadn’t been easy, he had taught you how to drive.

one cold summer night, in the darkness of a tent in the middle of nowhere, you hadn't managed to sleep. but when you opened your eyes, rafe wasn't sleeping either.

“you should sleep, you’re the one driving tomorrow. ”

“you want to know who my first victim was? "

"i guess even if i don't care, you're going to tell me. so go ahead. knock me out, tell me something your little lips haven't told me yet. and don’t say victim, you're much an innocent thing than a killer. but don’t worry, i'm about to raise you very well. ”

his hands had gripped your hips to position you above him. “but for now, tell me about your boring story, maybe it will help me sleep.”

you had told him a lot of your past. the first time you had eaten someone, the babysitter your father had hired who had ended up torn apart on the floor and another part in your mouth. oh it really wasn't beautiful. and this time, in the summer camp where a boy had mysteriously disappeared because you had devoured him in the woods. and that friend at school whose finger you swallowed. it was stronger than you. you needed to eat.

and rafe was the only one to understand it.

the most intimate moments in a relationship should be sex, but for the two of you it was different. it was when you ate together, when you both had blood around your mouth, that you could taste his, and he could taste yours. when there was this connection between you.

he was a different eater from you, he was bestial and cold, sinking his teeth straight into the flesh, tearing off the parts of the body one by one. his bites were mean and cruel. the way, his teeths pulled the organs, the ribcage. you watched him, his hungry raging mouth embracing the darkness of his needs, ripping all the raw meat out roughly. oh the blood, it leaked into every corner of his pretty and bloody lips that you wanted to kiss so badly, to feel the liquid and flesh filling and consuming the space of your throat and your tongue as your body swallowed everything he gave you. oh how much, rafe loved to feed you directly in the mouth, letting you suck the flowing red wet all around his jaw, and down his neck to the cool grass. he was beautiful. insanely handsome. but also, so scary.

his skin was covered in a red, metallic coat. his eyes were consumed with pleasure, while devouring the body of your victim.

he was very different from you, who was more delicate in your movements, or rather clumsy. your bites were messy, your touches lighter, even with the blood all over you.

but it was in those moments that the sex was the best afterwards. when his tongue, still red and famished with blood, circulated over the skin of your stomach, leaving a reddish river against your flesh.

and it went even further than that, when he found himself lost between your legs, his warmth muscle completely buried inside you, lapping your soaked folds, licking you like a starving man, his mouth pressed around your sloppy wet cunt. your juices dripping against his open wided mouth and jaw, the throbbing of your clit against his nose, the way your beating pussy smeared the blood across his lips and cheeks every time he entered and devoured your delicious slick.

since you didn't eat each other, it was your only way to feed him, to make him taste you. you didn't know if he loved your taste but in any case his tongue always came back to find you, to fuck that cunt, lodging itself between your soggy walls.

he forced you to keep your thighs apart, one hand resting on your bruised tummy which contracted every time you felt him on your core.

your legs shaking around his shoulders, the way his bloody mouth nibbled on your clit. you moaned in the middle of this abandoned place. you could shout as loud as you wanted, no one would come, no one would hear you.

you loved feeling his large hands on your bruised skin, especially after eating, because they were dirty and sloppy. you let your tongue clean the blood stuck to his fingers, the drops falling into your mouth.

it was strange how love can be perceived for everyone. ever since you were a child, you have been unable to show affection without hurting people. when you loved someone, it was tragic because you had this need to devour and consume them, to make them a part of you, to make them live within you.

but for rafe, it was different.

you were total opposites. and even though you lived together, you wondered if he felt things for you. if he had ever been in love.

because you liked to think that the way he kept you around, the way he let you stay with him at night, the way he always came home, and was open to doing all these things with you, that was his way to show you that you mattered to him. you even wondered if he came back every night because he couldn't let go of you. yet, at the beginning of your relationship, he wouldn't have hesitated.

here, in this rickety house, you didn't pay rent. it belonged to one of your victims. you always did that, you killed people, and robbed them of their belongings. you took their money, clothes and possessions. you were stealing the lives of these people. at first you felt guilty but now you feel nothing. it was life.

“i love you. ” you told him, as you straddled him on your shared bed, your fists curled in the pieces of sheets. “i really love you, rafe.” you were moaning and feverish, every inch of his thick cock buried in your core, hitting your spot.

while you were bouncing on him, your ass slapped against his muscular thighs. he grabbed your breasts moving over his face, as his dick was ruining you, each of his thrusts destroying your canal. you were as tight as the first time he fucked you in the back of the pickup. he gripped your ass, pinching the flesh.

he wrapped his hand around your throat before losing his face in your neck, his mouth kissing that immaculate part of your body. he placed kisses, before lightly sinking his teeths into your skin, nibbling and sucking on this skin offered to him, while you continued to take him just below him. “yea, you love me. ” with a hard stroke further into you. “still fucking tied to me. ”

and he wasn't wrong, you were so glued to him, completely submissive. he was inside you, filling you completely, every part of his length stuck to your walls, parting your pussy lips, your moans muffled above his head as your arms wrapped around his back. you were desperate and whimpering, the wet sounds of your repeated moans echoing around the room.

you could feel the twitch of his stomach against your skin, the perfect harmony of your two bodies in sync, he speared you violently with his fat cock, let you hear his grunts and heavy breathing against your neck, coming straight from his throat.

you were sweaty and noisy, like one of his victims, but most of all, you were his, his hands all over your body like a prize. every touch was possessive, your head tilted back, and his mouth melted onto your jaw. he fucked you roughly, making you bounce on him and cry.

his blue eyes shone in the darkness of the room. they were on you, in a perfect focus.

“do you love me? " you asked him, your body going through trembling spasms, your skin covering his. you were desperate and suffocating. your breaths were rapid and frantic.

he moved your head with his hand on your throat, his gaze flickering above your collarbones. you felt like you were pretty with the importance his pupils gave you.

you wondered if he had ever wanted to eat you alive, because after all, even if you were an eater, you were still easy prey.

and maybe even sometimes you fantasized about what he could do, because you wouldn't have minded seeing him dug his teeth into your flesh like meat, seeing him consume you one by one, your bones getting sucked, your blood spurting against his tooth.

you would have loved to sacrifice your body to feed him, to be that pomegranate to him, to see him smile through your organs, to see his belly swell because you were in a thousand pieces inside.

you would have loved for him to eat you alive, because you knew rafe would have done it out of love.

“ don't leave me or i will eat you. ” you said to him, his hands brushing your hair like a lover. “ every part of you. like you taught me. ”

“ bones and all ? ”

“ bones and all, my love. ”

and he smiled, fucking smiled all over your kisses, his lips covered yours.

“ then, what are you waiting for ? sunk those teeths in me. scared for what, babe ? nothing that you have not tasted before.”

[a-hazbin-reader]

Please. Alastor x single mom?

Oh my god and imagine how he’d give her the best Mother’s Day ever after years of just her waking up to a normal day aside from her baby giving her a macaroni necklace or a card and now she’s waking up to a breakfast in bed and a day to relax I’m not getting emotional you are

Okay, but y'all are giving me baby fever fr with these asks

Alastor X Reader Headcanons

✅️Romantic

❌️Platonic

TW: F L U F F, A little bit of sex towards the end but a very small amount

Description: ☝️⬆️

Whether or not you were a mother when you were alive, you certainly were one now. You took in and protected as many children sinners you could because nobody else would

You took care of toddlers all the way up to teenagers, it was an exhausting and thankless job but you don't think you could ever quit

Not when one of your kids comes crying to you because they scraped their knee, or they had their first heartbreak, or they had a nightmare

How any of them ended up down here was baffling to you, especially the youngest ones

You protected your family fiercely and have even gone toe to toe with overlords to keep your kids safe, earning you a reputation for being a mama bear

You loved being their mother and wouldn't give it up for anything, no matter your own sins

So when one of your little ones goes missing, you're panicking and searching everywhere for her. You spend all day trying to find her and asking anybody if they've seen her

After hours of searching, one of your teenagers calls you, telling you they found her but that you need to come home immediately. You don't need to hear anything more

When you get home, you find your little girl sitting in the lap of Charlie Morningstar, Hell's Princess. All your kids are gathered around her while she tells them about her hotel

Something you had been trying not to let them know about because you didn't want to get their hopes up only to be heartbroken. It was cruel

Not to mention the shady characters that probably stay there.

So imagine your irritation when all your children suddenly swarm you and start begging to stay at the hotel. Each one excited and hopeful to learn how to go to heaven

You can't tell them no so you try to dissuade them but they insist on going so you allow it. It's very reluctant agreement though.

You try to keep all your children close to you once you enter the hotel and see the others. Let's see, an angelic exorcist, a p0rnstar, a tiny murderous maid, a drunk bartender and one of the most deadly overlords around

You were unimpressed, and it showed as you held your kids a little tighter, not even hearing Charlie excitedly telling you about all the amenities

You have a difficult time letting your kids sleep so far away from you, all of them excited to get their own rooms. You often check on them throughout the night

More than once, Alastor has caught you peeking into their bedrooms to make sure they're still safe in their beds

You startle when you hear his amused laughter, nearly bumping right into his chest as you close the door behind you

"Nobody is going to eat them while they're asleep, you know."

You can't help but feel defensive, crossing your arms and giving Alastor a withering look

"That's not funny coming from you."

His smile only gets wider, gripping your chin and tilting your head up as he leans in close

"Darling, it's even funnier because it's coming from me!"

You insist on making sure your children eat a good diet, often making it yourself because you don't trust anybody else to do it. That and some of your little ones can be picky eaters

Often, Alastor stops by the kitchen to watch you, curious about what you're making and how much of it you plan to make

"My my~ That smells absolutely delicious, my dear~! What are you making?"

You're guarded, setting down the plates on the table a little harder than you meant to

"It's just an old family recipe, nothing special."

So imagine your weary surprise when he starts to help you cook, helping with the food preparation and even setting the table. You start to get used to his help, relaxing a little more each time you two stand hip to hip, cooking

He's even taken to sitting down to meals with you and your family, an amused smile on his face as he watches all of you interact. Eventually, he joins in the conversations, and your youngest ones get comfortable enough to even eat off his plate

"Don't take food from his plate! That's rude..!"

"It's quite alright, my dear~ I find it endearing~"

He's even in your corner when your picky eaters rise up and try to say they don't like what you made. Pushing their plates away and pouting

"Mom, I don't like it..."

You can't help but sigh and roll your eyes, exasperated and annoyed that you have to go through this again

"Yes you do, you've eaten this before and you gobbled it up... Just try it, baby."

They whine and try to refuse when Alastor speaks up, pushing their plate back towards them gently

"Now, now, your mother worked hard on this meal... We don't want her good efforts to go to waste, do we?"

"No..."

Your child whines but reluctantly takes their fork and begins eating, Alastor giving you a triumphant grin as he sits back down

You take a bite of your own food to hide the fond smile that wants to creep up onto your face

The hardest, scariest moment at the hotel for you was when you and one of your older girls got into an argument in front of Alastor

It all started over a party and a boy, you wouldn't let her go and in typical teenage fashion, she started to fight with you. The more you held your ground and said no, the worse it got

"Young lady, that is not a good environment for you! It is a disgusting den of perverts, drugs and uninhibited violence!"

You tried to stay calm and reason with her, but her emotions were running too high

"We're in HELL! There's no place here that's good for any of us! Why do you have to be such a bitch!?"

Before you can even open your mouth to reply, Alastor places a hand on her shoulder, his smile twitching and the sound of static buzzing

Your heart drops as you fear he's going to hurt her, instinctively moving forward to stop him

"Alastor-"

"Dear one, it's bad manners to talk to your mother like that. She only worries for you and wants to keep you safe. I suggest you go to your room and calm down, then come back to apologize to her. Hm~?"

He pats her head and nudges her to go to her room, turning to you and tilting his head. She looks embarrassed and a little ashamed, seemingly taking Alastor's words to heart

"Ah, teenagers~ Always so temperamental even when dead~"

You do your best to ignore the sudden heat on your cheeks, the way Alastor handled the situation having you feel some type of way

If Alastor were to have a type...he would have to say he's definitely drawn to the motherly type, it's a weakness of his

So when Charlie drags you and your gaggle of children to the hotel, Alastor has an inkling of the kind of trouble he's in for the moment he sees you

He's seen how you've come running out of your room in the dead of night because you heard one of your little ones crying from a nightmare. How you spend the rest of your night awake and rocking them back to sleep

Alastor has watched you run yourself ragged trying to get all of your children ready to go out for the day, juggling your teenagers yelling at you because they can't find their clothes and your little ones tugging on your clothes for your attention

He's noticed how you'll shield your family from sinners at least twice your size without fear. Not even he himself was an exception from your intense protectiveness

In the earlier days of your family moving in, Alastor had picked up one of your younger kids to stop them from touching something and you had panicked

He'll never forget how you had tore your kid away from him and held them tight, giving Alastor a intense look as you poked his chest

"Never do that again."

He had tried to brush it off and charm you with a smile, acting unbothered

"Darling, your family is in no danger here. I can assure you-"

"Bullshit. There's no such thing as a safe place or someone you can trust, not here."

You had stormed off after that and Alastor was left with a warm feeling building in his chest that has yet to leave

Your soft smile whenever one of your kids snuggled with you, the way you sighed and put your hands on your hips when they argued with you. Your voice when you sang your littlest ones to sleep

It was all so addicting for him, he found himself wanting to be a part of your family and the love within it

Without even realizing it, Alastor had begun filling the role of the father in your family, ending up getting attached to each of your kids

He learned what made them happy, what made them sad or scared, which ones needed hugs and which ones preferred words

Both you and Alastor began to work together as a team, and most people outside of the hotel just assumed you two were a married couple. A married couple with a small army of kids

You stop one child from bumping into someone, and Alastor scoops up the other two before they can do the same

Alastor will cook dinner and you'll clean up the mess while you both sneak the dessert that the kids don't know you have

All of you will hang out together in the lobby of the hotel, Alastor humming to himself and pretending to nap while your girls play with his hair and paint his claws

Your boys will all be cuddled up around you while you read a story to them, both of you enjoying the domestic bliss

There's a building tension between you and Alastor that everyone can sense, even the kids but nobody comments on it

Except Angel but he doesn't dare bring it up around you two

Your kids start pulling little stunts to get you two to end up together, offering to make you both dinner only for it to be classically romantic with candles, flowers and your children pretending to be waiters

Or asking embarrassing questions in front of the two of you, like if Alastor thought you looked pretty or if you liked Alastor's voice

Or wanting both of you to tuck them and give them goodnight kisses at the same time

The worst part is...it was totally working

The tipping point came when one of your boys woke up crying in the middle of the night, both you and Alastor barging into the bedroom

He was inconsolable, having obviously had a nightmare and repeating that he didn't belong here. He only quieted down once you and Alastor wrapped your arms around him

The three of you were cuddled up on a bed that was far too small for all of you, you couldn't contain your blush once you realized this

So Alastor offered up his room for the night, and the three of you snuggled together in his bed, Alastor's arms wrapping around you

You both woke up with more kids in the bed than you remember going to sleep with, your little boy having climbed onto one of his sisters instead

Leaving you tucked under Alastor's chin with your face in his neck, Alastor's strong arms around your waist and his face buried in your hair

The two of you had pulled away out of embarrassment, making eye contact before suddenly melting back together, soft smiles on your faces

"Alastor..?"

"Hm~?"

"I really want to kiss you right now..."

You two are unofficially, officially a couple after that. Grossing out your children by kissing each other, saying sappy things, just embarrassing them with how in love you are

It's so painfully domestic, but Alastor wouldn't give it up for anything. Not when the youngest ones grab his legs and try to hold him down, not when the teenagers get snarky with him. Not when you two bicker over what's best for the family

Even the more embarrassing moments, like when you two are in bed together, Alastor chasing his release as you lock your legs around him and dig your nails into his back

He's nearly about to spill inside you when there's a tentative knock on the door, making the two of you freeze and whip your heads towards the sound

"Papa..? Mama? I keep hearing scary noises, and I can't sleep..."

It's an awkward untangling of limbs and soft cursing before you two start laughing at how absurd it is

Or the softer moments when he looks into the bedroom to see you singing your kids to sleep, feeling himself grow relaxed and sleepy at the sound of it

His life has nearly completely changed since meeting you and your family, but he wouldn't change anything even if he could

Rosie often teases him about how much he's softened up for his family. It's all good-natured, though, she just as attached to them as he is

"So Alastor~ How's that little family of yours doing? Did your girls finally stop fighting over that boy?"

"They're lovely as always, but unfortunately, that boy seems to have been scared off."

"Such a shame~"

"Quite~"

Honestly, the only thing Alastor needs now is to find you a ring

@valerie-is-in-the-cupboard I know we talked about you writing a lil' something about this, so I tried to twist it up because I didn't want to inadvertently take any ideas you had!

[halcyone-of-the-sea]

PREY

PAIRING: Hunter!Simon 'Ghost' Riley x F!Werewolf!Reader

SYNOPSIS: There’s blood on your hands again.

WORDCOUNT: 16.8k

WARNINGS: Intense gore, body horror, death, mutilation, weapons, firearms, knives, intended harm, violence, blood, descriptions of wounds, angst, fluff, protective!Simon, religious mentions, period time standards for men/women (1700s), etc.

A/N: The first of my reverse AUs is finally here! Enjoy!

*I do not give others permission to translate and/or re-publish my works on this or any other platform*

The tale of the Werewolf extends back to around 2100 BC. It was written in The Epic of Gilgamesh, scored into a clay tablet by hands long buried—a corpse forever still in the earth so deep, the bones have yet to be found by greedy eyes. Perhaps the oldest surviving story in human history, and there is still a passage that bleeds into stories hundreds of thousands of years later.

In such, Gilgamesh, a man on the search for immortality, rejects a woman for the reason of turning her previous husband into a wolf. 

“You have loved the shepherd of the flock; he made meal-cake for you day after day, he killed kids for your sake. You struck and turned him into a wolf, now his own herd-boys chase him away, his own hounds worry his flanks…”

And then, the tales spread, changed, through history and through spoken words of caution. Like water trickling from a well, down the shape of the wooden bucket delving deeper and deeper into a pit of age—of caution. 

“The Beast of Gévaudan. Man-eater.” Through France

“He has a wolf-head, you know? Tall thing—short brown hair all over him.” Through Scotland

“Beware the man that changes shape under the full moon.” England.

Now, in the late seventeenth century, it all comes to a head. Even the people in 2100 BC knew that someone who changes into a wolf, or some bastard-like imitation of one, was very much real; it is very much an affliction that overtakes sense and reason. A curse. 

Transferable down to the saliva of one entering your bloodstream.

You must never get within the beast’s sights. 

—

There’s blood on your hands again. 

Hunched over, your body quivers, and the bareness of your flesh in the moonlight is of little concern to you—trapped in a fetal position while the chilled wind howls.

Howls.

Howls.

“Get out of my head.” Your fingers grasp at your scalp, pulling; ripping. A sob jaggedly slashes your throat open. “Please,” you rattle in a fast breath, the grass snapping as you writhe. “Get out of my head.”

It had happened once more, and you can’t remember any of it. 

The forest is deathly still. No birds sing their songs—no breeze moves the long grass, patches trampled down around you as if a beast had staggered into the small clearing you’re lying in. Maybe it had. There are shadows that listen to your quiet panic, the low whines and gasping quivers of your throat; from behind the trees that speak in the way that only they could. The deep night creeps into you, and the moonlight bathing your flesh doesn’t push back the terror in your bloodstream. 

Your body burns like you’ve broken every bone twice over, and judging by the blood stuck in between every line and dip of your skin, to anyone walking past, the analogy could be very real. Fingers flexing and bending, you try to force out the venom inside of your head with desperation befitting a dying dog, spine visible out of the skin of your back as you sob all the harder. 

You tried to stop it—you had; you always do. But, just like every month when the full moon mocks you with its silver-hued face, it never works. 

It never works.

Your eyes stare at nothing as you lay here, in this place of grass, blood, and bile, of corruption as deep as a vile sin of flesh. It came over you like a wave, fingers trapping your throat and bearing it to the caress of fangs. There were different names for it here, miles from your village and the terrified eyes that search the tree line; names coming from the hunters and their black deeds. 

Shapeshifter.

Demon spawn.

Werewolf.

“I can’t take it anymore,” you shove the side of your head into the ground, pushing the torn earth away from the cuts of long claws. Tears flood the dirt until it’s wet and muddy, pushing the crimson stains on your skin away in long streaks. “It hurts, God, please, it hurts.”

The sound of your hysterics rises and falls in the stillness—the inactivity of fearful birds and beasts wondering if your fangs would rip from your gums and your claws would tear from your fingertips. Fur along your body the color of which leads to stories of their own spreading far and wide. 

The White Wolf. The Specter of St. Francis’ Village. A hound from Hell. 

More pale than snow, and sharper seen than a knife or blade through the black trees. Even if the memories of your shifts were fuzzy at best, there were flashes of those who’d seen your gargantuan form from the confines of their stone-cut homes. Those wide eyes. Yelling—screaming; sprays of blood as heads were separated from bodies—

“Stop!” You scream, your legs kicking out as your toes scrape the grass. “It’s not me! It’s not!” 

There’s a call of alarm from deep within the woods, the flash of torches and bellow of hunting dogs. They’re running you down, you’d forgotten that in the depths of your breaking mind and body, and by the time your elongated limbs had set themselves back into a more human-like appearance, your spine cracking at every vertebrae, it had slipped your thoughts entirely. It always took you a long time to understand what had happened after…everything. 

But even now, the shouts of the hunt are pointless to the visceral breaking of your consciousness, stuck between leaving bloodlust and knowledge of horror. There’s flesh in your teeth, and you wail before your fingers drag down your face, cupping over your ears. In the back of your skull, the panting of dogged breath echoes; running, blood, blood, blood. It’s a dance of fangs, of pale fur, staining every inch and flooding the back of your mouth. Drinking it down like water.

Flesh—lovely, disgusting, flesh rent and torn to the bone with smacking gums belonging to a square snout. 

Who had you killed this time?

By the time the dogs had tracked your scent to your curled body, it was already too late. 

“Here!” Male voices shift in and out on the backs of crows, hard and cruel. “It’s here!”

“Get the dogs on it!” 

“It’s not me,” you mutter incessantly, not truly understanding what you’re saying as hounds burst through the bushes, all snapping teeth and slobbering tongues your eyes widen in an instant. Panting, your jaw clenches; long whines move your throat. 

“What…?” Blinking quickly, the dogs surround you—having to be at least ten of them on their nimble legs and thin tails. Everything is distant to you; separated. A knife could be driven through your heart, and you wouldn’t even realize it until minutes later, bleeding out on the grass. 

The hounds are afraid of you. 

They dart forward and balk back, your scent driving them up a wall until rabid slobber drips from their maws. Torchlight pulls through the trees—quicker now, running. Fangs nick your shoulder and you yell, shoving up to your backside as the world swirls, shuffling away as the dogs snarl. Their eyes are red-huen. Drunk off fear and order. 

Your head darts and shifts, blood dripping off your chin to travel down the flesh of your stomach and navel—so much crimson that the whites of your eyes are violent under the moon. Hands slipping over the wet grass, your face pulls and slackens in delirious confusion as you try to stand but fail. You cry out in sharp pain, and the dogs go wild in their kill circle, nearly attacking one another in anticipation. 

You glance down and see the black crossbow bolt sticking out of your thigh. 

The scent of wolfsbane in the air only then becomes clear to you, and the realization is slow. Wolfsbane—you’d been told about it by the village priest. It makes beasts of the night dumb and weak; minds unclear. 

In a moment of clarity, the reason behind your incurable hysteria becomes clear.

Lungs heaving and eyes far-off, the hunting party bursts through to where you stay, and you look up in animalistic fear. Figures dip and slip into one another, faces becoming demons as the visages melt into twos and threes. You yell out, sniffling and sobbing, trying to back up until the hounds grapple onto your shoulder and rip a chuck out of your arm. Screaming, your hand moves back, shoving at its snout before hands staple themselves to your wrist. 

“No!” You wail, injured leg dragging as you’re forced back into a heavy chest. Hot breath fans against your neck as multiple grips pull and touch you—shackling you down with rope and chains. Your throat screams itself raw, kicking and struggling futility. “Let go!”

You’re too weak—too drugged off wolfsbane and blood loss. Rotting teeth move across the canvas of a smeared painting, you can’t focus beyond the riot of your heart inside of your ribs.  

Grubby hands snap under your chin, digging into your flesh as you cry, not able to move as the restraints are tightened. A silver muzzle is slapped over your jaw. Dark eyes shimmer as you rage—aggravating the bolt wound until fresh blood forms a puddle on the ground, which the dogs lick their lips at. 

“Look at that,” a low, lust-filled voice eases out, and hands around your body tightening as you squirm, head spinning. Silver and wolfsbane. Your eyes snap to fight the sudden flood of fuzzy heaviness in your body.  “Pretty little Hell-Beast, eh? Almost seems a bit strange to have the Spector be her. Think that hunter shot the right bitch?”

“Course,” another grunt, a hand grabs the top of your head, jerking it up as your head lulls along with the force. You can barely focus on the words being said. “He isn’t a fuckin’ twat. Killed a werewolf in the next village over, too. Heard he skinned the fucker and took its head for his mantlepiece—just like the vampire skull he wears.” A pause. The dogs are still barking—echoing out in the trees. You can’t feel your legs. “Isn’t that right, Hunter?!”

A shout is sent into trees as your panic breeds with the drug, eyelids drooping as your head is snapped and moved by your hair. Your buggy eyes don’t focus on the man until he steps into the torchlight, the crowd parting for him as the metal of your chains drags and clinks together. 

It’s as if the very blackness of night takes human form. 

The man, the Hunter, is tall—very tall. He looms like an aloof animal over most of the others here with his dark boots and his black hood, and yet, under the fabric, there is no whisper of his face. 

Only the upper visage of a pure white skull, and two long, needle-pointed teeth where canines should be. 

“Ghost,” one of the men laughs, groping at your bleeding thigh before you shriek, muffled from behind the muzzle, and weakly kicked out. “Good shot, Mate. Right in the meat of the thing. Gave a good trail for the hounds.” 

Ghost blinks slowly, grunting under his breath as the large crossbow in his hands is shifted. He stays silent as your visible pulse hurries on as if you were a rabbit and not a wolf, watching from under the cover of his hood. The darkness of his clothes is blue in the moon—silver buttons down the length of a loose shirt and pants stuffed into boots. The hood is attached to a jacket, which itself extends down to his knees and sways lightly with every shift. The silent resting of weapons and tools is not lost to anyone. 

Belt of filled vials and large knives; a firearm over his back, and two pistols hidden on either thigh. That crossbow was still in his hands.

Brown eyes openly dig into your soul, dead as a corpse, and your voice whines as your thigh is finally released with a laugh. Your vision blacks and comes back a moment later as you try to breathe from behind the muzzle, gasping. That skull on his face…you don’t like it. It scares you. 

And the Hunter only continues to watch numbly as his wide shoulders stay stationary.

“Get the cage!” Someone roars, and you flinch, shrinking until a dog with short fur comes and nips at your ankles, the man holding you grinning sharply as you sob and shake.

“C’mon—expected more of a fight from you, Spector. Getting bullied by dogs, now? Ain’t that a twist of fate, then. Bet this devil’s whore can’t even walk with all that wolfsbane in ‘er, eh?”

A grumble of chuckles as the rattle of metal is in the distance. You grow more fearful, mind flashing to a burning stake and the trials you’d seen in village after village. No—no they can’t put you in a cage; they can’t put you on trial.

They’re going to make it hurt.

“Say we try it out.” A shadow comes closer and grabs you by the arm, ruthlessly shoving you to the ground. You cry out as your spine meets the earth, arms and legs kept under chains that tangle and screech in their metallic way. The rope that holds the muzzle pulls against your neck until you can’t breathe except in ragged wheezes. 

“Go on,” they taunt, some holding back the rampaging dogs just to watch you flail and shimmy. Your face grows hot as you struggle to sit up—shaking so violently you can’t focus on anything but the quiver. “Put on a show for us, Beasty!” 

Death would be better than this.

Tears hit the ground as the cage is finally brought into view, the men all groaning and annoyed that you hadn’t even attempted a forced shift or a desperate run into the trees. 

Ghost’s fingers, you notice from the side of your blurring eye, tighten minutely around the body of his weapon. You do not doubt that he’s wondering if it would be easier to just put a bolt through your eye right now. 

“Get it loaded up,” the Hunter’s voice is accented and gravel-like. As if rotting wood is being peeled back and scraped along gravel, he stares at you for a long moment and then glances at the dogs. “And get those fucking mutts under control.”

“Which one?” Is the low-blow joke, and the ruckus of loud amusement that follows makes you want to die. 

It’s not your fault, how do you tell them that? It’s not your fault.

Your throat bobs in an attempt to speak, but you can’t move your jaw from behind the restraint of your face—held tight to you as the men come back over and grapple for you again. The priest was right, wolfsbane makes werewolves sluggish.

You can do nothing as you’re ruthlessly dropped into a silver cage, borrowed, no doubt, from the Vatican itself, and christened with holy water. But it was a funny thing, really, and the dark humor wasn’t lost to you even like this. There was nothing godly about this contraption.

Locked in, you shove yourself immediately into a corner and hunch over, grasping at your thigh as the bolt still leaks fluid in a long trail over the ground. The pain is so great in your head, that the physical agony is little—a bullet wound to a sliver. 

Your temple slams into the metal, smacking into it as your eyes shove themselves closed. 

Head hurts—hurts. I can’t think. Can’t think. It’s humming, my skull is breaking open.

Bile pools in the back of your throat, but the muzzle keeps it in, leaving you gagging as the cage is lifted with a grunt and carried by long poles; back to St. Francis' Village, no doubt, but you can’t…focus.

“Think you might ‘ave given her too much, then, Hunter,” one calls, slapping Ghost on the shoulder as the crowd follows after the panicking quarry. The large man only gives him a look from the side of his eye and the villager pulls away immediately, awkwardly chuckling before hurrying off after the others.

Brown eyes watch your bare body hunch and spasm, pupils wide as you’re carted off. 

He’d been generous with the wolfsbane, truth be told. He’d expected you to be…Ghost’s dark brows pull in from behind his grim mask…he’d expected you to be different.

Humming under his breath, the Hunter watches the torches disappear into the trees and lets his gaze linger on you. 

There was something…off.

Blinking, he turns, eyes studying the place where they’d found you with sharp attention that misses nothing—not even the birds that come back to settle into the trees again. Large boots shift through the grass, and as he’s re-settling the crossbow in his hands, his eyes find something glinting. 

Watching, Ghost takes another step and brings his body to the item in the grass, hidden, before he kneels. Digging with large digits, the Hunter’s hands loop through the chain of a necklace, dragging it through the torn earth until he can gaze at it fully under the light of the moon.

Blinking in slight surprise, Ghost finds the body of a silver bullet hanging from the confines of a leather strap. Brown eyes shifting to look over his shoulder, the man listens to the cheers and merriment of the hunting party mutely. A simmering understanding brews in his gut. It’s only one that you could know from years of experience doing just as he had—hunting and being hunted in turn with a knowledge of all things dark and unholy.

It could never be easy, could it?

A low grunt later, the man sighs out a deep, “Fucking hell,” and moves to slowly stand, slinking back into the darkness. 

—

They kept you in the cage and set it on display in the middle of town for days.

Shivering now from the cold more than the wolfsbane, you stay collapsed into yourself as people come past to poke and prod at you—even sticking knives into the slits of the cage and digging them into you like an animal until your flesh was marked and brutalized. 

You don’t remember what it’s like to not be bloody.

The bolt wound was festering; infected. You dare not touch it, because the pain only makes you want to vomit, and if you do, you’ll most likely suffocate on your own bile before the trial ever happens. 

Yet, on the fourth night of this, as your eyelids flutter and your body grows weaker, a shadow comes to visit. 

“You weren’t born one.” It isn’t a question, but the sudden voice makes you startle. 

Eyes locking onto Ghosts’, your mind flies with fear—thinking that perhaps there’s more abuse that you’ll be put through. But no…the man has no weapons on him tonight. Only a long knife at his belt. The mask stays. 

You stare, unable to speak as your fingers twitch.

Grunting, Ghost’s head tilts, gaze moving up and down as you curl in tighter around yourself. A cold breeze rips through the square, and your eyes clench closed with breaking will. When you open them again, the Hunter is kneeling by the cage, and holding up something in his hand loosely. 

“You going to behave if I take that muzzle off?” You nearly gasped at the hanging image of your necklace—a silver bullet on a leather strap; that dark and heavy thing usually kept around your neck. A reminder.

After a moment of wide-eyed staring, you nod quickly to his question, a desperate, pleading thing without the need to utter words. Please, you want to scream at him, take it off.

Ghost’s eyes are as dark as a mound of dirt, sharply intelligent and filled with an unflinching reality. He doesn’t care what you are, and he won’t until you speak to him and let him judge your character far before any courtroom can. The man knows what a lie is better than any priest. 

“Good,” he says curtly, accent far more deep as he thinks, re-capturing the bullet in his palm and standing before he shuffles it into his pocket. 

You can’t help the anxiety as Ghost moves forward, loping to the side of the cage with the side of his eyes on you incessantly. It’s obvious how his other hand lays limp on the hilt of his blade that, with only one wrong move, you’d feel the chill of the edge with no time at all. 

But the temptation of getting this muzzle off was too good to ruin, and so, you stay as still as you’re able as crows call in the distance and the deadness of the town leaks into your blood. 

Ghost moves his free hand and orders, blankly, “Closer.” 

You hesitate, body tight before you drag your face closer to the bars, angling it parallel with the metal so the tight bind on the back can be taken up. The fear can be smelt the second your eyes have to break contact with his with the turn of your head—neither of you trusts the other. 

Ghost hums under his breath at the sight of your broken body coming farther into the open light of the moon, the whites of your eyes all the more visible from under the slathering of blood and tears. He hadn’t been absent to witness the abuse you’d been put through, even if the coin from his successful hunt was feeding him at the inn, a small window allowed the tight view of your torment at the hands of the people you’d once lived around. 

But the reality was that you’d killed people—scores of them—and yet the worst part of it was that he wasn’t sure if you even knew that.

It took four nights for him to break his only rule: never get involved after the job’s done.

But the hunch he had was too important to ignore. 

Large fingers latch onto the knot at the base of your skull through the cage itself, Ghost grunting at the sight ahead of him. The rope had been gradually chafing over your flesh, peeling back hair and skin until only the bloody meat was left—Simon had to wonder if the people of this village even wanted you alive for the trial or not at this rate. You’d be dead by tomorrow if that infected bolt at your thigh wasn’t taken care of.

Despite himself, a part of his chest tightens at the sight of the thing sticking out of your leg, dripping a yellowish puss. It had been a good shot, and he had overcoated the bolt in wolfsbane. 

Ghost hadn’t expected you to be so susceptible to it—most werewolves only got slower, but you…you seemed to have a stronger reaction. He files that fact away and tilts his masked face to the side. 

Grasping at his blade, the sound of a knife being slipped out of a sheath makes you startle, jerking your head back and shoving away even as your muffed whine of pain falls out. Ghost momentarily readies himself for an attack, but the way you force your mangled body to the opposite corner has him grumbling out a hard, “Easy.” 

The Hunter raises the blade, watching you with unblinking eyes. Your body shakes; panting. It was like calming a feral dog.

“You want the thing off or not? Have to cut it.” Once more, the man rises and walks over, boots almost silent over the small raised platform the cage had been set on like a trophy, you inside are comparable to the golden coins that greedy eyes touch and run their dirty hands over. 

Your mind is a troubled thing as you watch this Hunter and his crude knife come closer, kneeling again, and motioning with two fingers to shift your head. 

“Out ‘ere,” Ghost says, brown eyes not letting you guess anything about his true motives. “Don’t have time to fuck around. Guards’ll make a round soon and I’d rather not get caught wide-eyed.” 

Your brows pull in, hands clenching and unclenching in your lap as goosebumps travel the length of every limb. You were tired—hungry and thirsty; there were open wounds that burned with infection and ones that were crusted over with dirt and grime. You can’t feel your toes, and the tips of your fingers have long since gone numb. 

The thought of getting this muzzle off was like the promise of heaven being dangled in front of your nose. Your hesitation this time is far longer than the first, moonlight glinting off the visible blade in Ghost’s hand as he stares. That mask holds death. 

The hood is gone from him—only that pale bone left and sewn into dark, dark, fabric. The sharpness of the teeth leaves your throat bobbing in a nervous swallow as your head carefully shifts to rest on the bars. Bending, you present the knot once more and try not to focus on the way Ghost’s attention is fully on your expanding lungs; the pulse that is seen through the meat of your neck. 

But he says nothing before his fingers once more grasp the rope and the tip of the knife slips up. You don’t even feel it before the sudden slackening of the muzzle, and then the thing slips from your face before it slaps the bottom of the cage with a dull thump. 

The first thing you do is vomit. 

Spine pulling in, your body jerks as the bile that had been in the back of your throat rockets out, restrained hands slapping the ground as the acidic concoction leaks from between your torn lips. Face on fire, you choke and retch for what seems like minutes before you can finally breathe in the damp air—the innate shame and disgust rolling through as you cough raggedly. 

It’s only after you’d forgotten the man kneeling outside that he seems to remind you of his presence with a grumble. 

“Breathe. It’s no use if you can’t speak to me.”

A weak, quivering glare comes across your eyes, saliva dripping off your chin as your tongue moves to lick at your lips. But the brown gaze is as immovable as stone. Finding it pointless, your hands come up and delicately touch the base of your skull, only making you flinch when the fresh blood pools down and over your neck, licking at your shoulders. Tiny droplets fall to hit the metal one at a time. 

Ghost’s fingers twitch as he puts the knife away. 

“Who bit you?” You stare at him, hands falling before your wrists rub at the aggravated skin of your jaw. He shifts his head, voice slow but heavy. “Speak.”

“...I’m not a dog,” your voice is scratchy, hoarse. You send a small glance his way, mouth open and nostrils flaring in an attempt to bring in the oxygen you’d been lacking. 

“Really?” A hidden eyebrow is slowly raised. “Hell, coulda fooled me.” 

“Damn you,” you whisper, not meeting his gaze as you shuffle back. The crossbow bolt catches on one of the cage’s bars and you bite on your lip to stop the shrill yell that threatens to exit. Head moving, you lightly slam your skull into the wall in pain. 

Breath hitched, you clench your trembling jaw tight. 

“Speak or don’t,” Ghost grunts, and he makes a move to stand. “Your funeral.” 

A spark of fear stabs you as he begins to shift, and you can’t explain why. Perhaps it was because it was the first conversation you can remember having lately that wasn’t one-sided or on the edge of a blade.

“W-wait,” you stutter, blinking through the blood. The Hunter doesn’t slow, and then he’s on his feet and fixing the gloves over his fingers, flexing his hands before his foot begins to pivot— 

“Please, don’t go,” your voice is thin and pleading, echoing through the street. “I’ll answer your questions, any of them you want,” the sentence cracks through a dry throat, tears welling. “Please, don’t leave me here alone.” 

Ghost had half of his body turned away before it went rigid; the side of his dead eyes flash to you, swirling with specs of moonlit silver. A hunter and a werewolf lock gazes, great beasts respectively brought together in seconds that seep into slow minutes of delicate need.

Knowledge and company. Understanding and a horrible fellowship. 

The Hunter’s eyes twitch in their ever-narrow resting place, glancing away before he mutely moves back to where he was before. 

He wastes no time.

“Who bloody bit you?” 

You stifle a pathetic sigh of great relief, taking company with a man who had shot you not days before. Yet the ability to speak and be heard was a commodity that was dimming each and every day.

“It was already fully turned,” you speak quickly, tongue tripping. “A big wolf—a gray one with eyes like the sky.” 

Ghost glares to the side. Gray? There were no contracts for gray werewolves with blue eyes in the area. Only you—only Specter. The next question is just as stiff. 

“When?”

“Three years ago,” your lips move. “Only three years, I promise.” Brown eyes narrow slowly, fingers tapping the fabric of his pants once before he makes a noise in the back of his throat. Ghost’s jaw clenches, mind working through the hoops that need to be jumped. 

To you, the questions might seem pointless, but to a hunter, they were important—very important. Werewolves who are born afflicted with this moon-drunkenness are different from those turned by a bite. Not only are shifts from turned werewolves more violent, more deadly, but they rarely know their own actions from that of the frenzy under their skin; those that are born as such are rarely out of control, unlike your faction. 

The only question now was if Ghost could condemn you to death when it was obvious your human form was entirely different and you had no semblance of an idea of what was going on. Was it even his problem to care about? Even looking at you now, the man blinked away from cuts and inflicted injuries—the muzzle on the ground. 

The blood and the bolt.

He’d known it had been a foolish play to bring all of those townsfolk with him on this hunt but he needed their knowledge of the terrain; he hadn’t passed through St. Francis’ before. At the time, Ghost hadn’t been averse to assistance as long as he got the job done in his own fashion: capture or kill, the contract had stated. Rarely was he known for capture.

Maybe, deep down, he’d known something was already wrong about this.

“Show me it,” the Hunter grunts, staring you down, a deep anticipation growing in his bones. He had to make sure you weren’t lying.

You lick your lips, face pulling with every twitch and sway of your form. The black at the edges of your vision was coming back, and you blinked quickly, chains dragging before you shifted your back with a quivering breath. The punctures were difficult to see through all of the gore, but Ghost made do as he grabbed at the waterskin at his waist and the rag hanging from his belt. 

Flooding the fabric in the lukewarm water, he hums out a firm, “Don’t move. Cleanin’ it,” before you feel the press of the rag to your back. 

Gasping lightly, you almost jerk away before the sensation becomes a nearly welcomed one—the drag and slight scrape of rough material. Your averted eyes dip lower, staring at nothing as your heart momentarily slows to a normal pace. Ghost cleans the areas where the swell of scar tissue is the most obvious, and, one by one, the violent groves spread out like a slash of paint over canvas. Along the left side of your waist, the blood gives way to a dented ‘v’ shape of healed punctures. Deep, dragging; a point to where your side was almost ripped away before it broke off swiftly. 

Ghost’s dark eyes fight the need to widen, and that hidden blankness stays. 

A great gray wolf with blue eyes…

His mask tilts, head shifting as his gaze moves slowly. Gloved fingers twitch to touch them, moving in an almost examining way that befits a surgeon and not a decapitator. Your breath is held in the back of your throat, but you sag nearly entirely into the bars of the cage, growing more unsteady by the second. 

The scent of infection is so strong it makes your head burn, and you’re overtaken by it as Ghost’s presence suddenly disappears. 

You don’t know if it’s minutes or hours before you understand that you’re alone again, but when your limp neck finally turns to wonder where your silent captor is, you are greeted with nothing but moonlight. Blinking through the sludge behind your eyes, the sinking in your gut was stark and sudden—like a knife dragging itself from gullet to navel. 

But all you offer is a light whine as more blood moves to cover the places where Ghost’s rag had just cleaned. You were scared of him, no doubt. A hunter through and through down to the vampiric skull on his face and the shroud of death at every inch of his form. 

He’d shot you and drugged you with wolfsbane. Found your necklace. 

So why had he talked to you?

Your head is too muddled for this, too delicate. Like the crimson under your nails, it dries and flakes off of your brain as the lack of distraction breeds stored agony. There wasn’t anything left to focus on besides the upcoming trial, your death, and the pain that doesn’t let you sleep except for now, on the brink of not rest but unconsciousness. 

And at the sound of a key being slotted into the silver of your cage’s door, only then does your body slump with the weight of doom. 

You don’t even feel the hand that grasps at your ankle.

—

The sway of the horse makes your teeth clatter with every clop of hooves. 

Your conscience mostly comes and goes, only staying in thin seconds where you feel the press of clean bandages on your afflicted flesh and the tipping of warm broth into your mouth. Grass under your head. 

Blankets being shuffled over your clothed body when you shiver. 

When you’re finally able to speak, when the horse is moving along and hands keep your back stuck to a strong chest, it’s a low, garbled, “Ow.”

Ghost barely blinks down to your head as it slumps to the gait of his horse, glancing before his attention returns to the thin forest trail ahead of him. You’d made noises in your sleep often enough—this was no different except for the fact he felt your shoulders flex.

Slowing the horse with a pull on the reins, the dappled mare settles to a walk. 

“You up, then?” Ghost hums, his hand around your waist tightening as you groan under your breath. “Good. Thought I was dragging a corpse—would have wasted my bandages.” 

Your eyes shudder as they open into the light, having to focus on moving them before the sting of the sun makes them water. But you do, and then the confusion outweighs the numb stinging of tended wounds. 

Head shifting, you look behind you slowly with wide eyes as the horse under both of you snorts.

Brown eyes watch you before a dark brow twitches upward. “What is it?” 

You just blink, mouth slightly open. 

“Where…am I?” 

“Forest.” Ghost states matter-of-factly. 

If you had the energy to glare, you would have. Seeing that nothing will get the man into a proper conversation—he was a brick wall even now—you look down at yourself and land on the scarred forearm that keeps you secure on the saddle. Ghost’s gloves were still on, but the sleeve of his dark shirt had ridden back to his upper forearm, and in the wake of pale skin, you find the black ink of all manner of warfare. 

Werewolf skulls; vampire fangs and fire. The slash of inkish chains with skeletons. 

Your lips thin, your senses slowly becoming your friend again as you stare at the snarling face of a needle-hewn wolf. Eyes tightening as the horse moves to the left, your body follows the reactive action before Ghost’s pressure tightens once more, visibly veins behind the pale flesh. You move on, seeing the thin tunic and pants over your body—feeling under that, the bind of wrappings with the scents of mashed yarrow leaves in the fabric. 

They’d been re-applied recently, too. 

“Stay still unless you want to re-open them,” Ghost utters, eyes scanning the trees for unseen threats. It was midday by now, the sun high above the trees watching the both of you on your trek to seemingly nowhere. “We’re far enough away, but I want more distance before I take the time to close them fully.”  

“The trial,” your arm moves up, fingers grazing the side of your nose before it falls back down. Ghost can feel the air heat with unease. “The…the cage?”

“Trial was two days ago,” he draws, thighs shifting over the saddle. “Give or take.” 

The confession isn’t as shocking now that you have woken up here, but the lack of remembrance on your part of that time startles you. It’s a blank slate—just like the aftermath of your shifts. You don’t like not knowing. 

The next question comes out with a haggard cough, sweat dripping off your nose. “Why?”

“You’re going to tell me ‘bout the werewolf that made you,” the Hunter grunts. “And you can’t speak if you’re lit up like a pig on a spit. Took you the night we met in the square.” 

Through it all, Ghost barely looks at you—always his attention keeps to the trees and the shadows that linger; seeming to listen. He knows more than anyone that they do. 

The horse continues on, your pain surfaces again, and with a shuddering breath, you fall into a fitful sleep once more. The arm around your body tightens, and the warmth it lends is accented when Ghost’s shifting gaze glances at the top of your head. He wears an expression he can’t name yet.

When the throws of fever pull their curtains back for the last time, it shows you the slats of the attic above your head, wood polished and clean as the heat of fire moves over your body. Pulling a large inhalation of air into your lungs, you blink softly as if clearing away cobwebs with a broom—willing sense to return in the few seconds it had flown away. 

The furs are warm. 

In the village, you weren’t anyone of standing. A simple woman—unwed, and, thus, unimportant due to the era the world sees itself in. It wasn’t all bad…namely, it hid your affliction far longer than you could have hoped it did. You had a small piece of family land passed down to you on the edge of the village, and that was where you stayed. Nothing fancy; a hearth, a large, single-room property with a garden and a well. You were known to keep sheep, a fact that had caused perhaps a few hysterical chuckling fits when, every full moon, one or two went missing, but it gave you the ability to accumulate money and, more importantly, an alibi. 

Who would suspect a werewolf to own sheep?

But this home already had a more detached feel to it—something removed. The air was sterile, somehow. Groaning, your face tightens before you rise to the palms of your hands, muscles quivering to keep the strength your stubbornness gives to them. Half-vertical, you turn and study the area. 

Square, the four walls are stone with mortar and clay to keep the rounded blobs together. You’re on the ground floor, a staircase to the far right while the bed is stuck into the left corner; a nightstand sitting void of all except a single chamber-wick holding an unused candle. A sturdy table with one wooden chair, a stone fireplace set into the same wall the headboard is level with, and a large oak door.

There are runes written on it. 

You can’t make sense of what they mean, but when you see them, your tiny-pupiled eyes slip to the rest, all placed at windows or near some point of entry—unassuming things until you realize why they were red in color.

Your shoulders tighten, and whatever bit of magic moves through your skin lets your nose pull to the scent of human blood. 

You clear your throat and look away, licking your lips with a dry tongue. Moving your toes under the two bear furs that rest at your abdomen, you notice the lack of earth-shattering pain that accompanies it, and, shifting a hesitant hand, you grab the edge and push it back a bit farther. 

Bandages with perfect ties meet you, void of any crimson staining. 

Truth be told, you expected more of a Hunter’s home—skulls; trophies. The town always spoke of burnt bodies strung up on crosses that mark the property of those in this profession, a ward and a sign of grim hope. Vampires mostly, wasting away in the brutal sun. Others as well. Werewolf fur and witch bones shoved in blessed boxes. 

This place is almost normal, you think, thighs shifting over the dip of the bed as your finger runs the white wrappings where the bolt should be. Your mind dares not go to how he got the thing out of you, and at the stretch of sutures, you take your curious grip off of it entirely. 

Looking around once more, your brows furrowed tightly. 

Where was the man? The hunter responsible for your current predicament? Ghost. With his vampire skull mask and his black attire—a hellhound with dark ink and intentions. More importantly…

Why were you still alive?

Your memories come back slowly as you stand, bare feet moving to the floor as the tunic over your upper half falls to your knees at the verticality of your spine. They creak a bit, the bones, at the ability to stand fully upwards and not be impaired by bars of silver. A strength seeps through you slowly. 

In the deafening silence, you clear your throat tinily and lightly itch at the clean flesh at the back of your neck where the muzzle sat; rubbed raw now scabbed and healing with the spread of natural oil balms. Taking in a slow breath, you step forward with a heavy limp and watch the door, glancing at locked trunks and cupboards, eyes blinking. Your muscles ached, but the sting only served as a way to remind you that you were still here—living. Few in your position were granted second chances. 

You’re about to study the runes at the door when you’re called to with the creak of the stairs in your left ear. 

“Wouldn’t recommend it.” Your head snaps over, blinking quickly. 

Ghost carries the leather holders of his twin pistols in one hand, the bodies of the weapons in them hanging as he comes to ground level one step at a time. Brown eyes glance over through the confines of his skeletal face-covering as he walks to the table, placing down the items. 

“Keeps the spirits out—smudge ‘em and the house gets haunted,” he grunts. “Rather not bleed myself again to get the runes copied.” 

You stare in mild shock, sound sparking from the back of your throat. “...Right.” 

Side-eyeing the markings, you shiver and step back from the door, silent as Ghost seems to focus on his task at hand—looking over his weapons.

Large hands running the metal and wood, the pistols in his grip shift as the drying light of the day streams in through the curtains of the windows. He touches them intimately, knowing every grove and dip until he tilts one and rubs away a slash of dirt from the barrel with his bare thumb. 

You quickly turn awkward, looking down at yourself and the bareness of your lower legs. It wasn’t lost to you that the man was the reason you were in this situation in the first place. 

“You shot me,” you grumble—not unlike someone who had a knife to their throat. 

“Affirmative,” Ghost says nonchalantly. You get a slow, blank glance and nothing more. 

“Have you drugged me?” You ask, heart speeding up. There wasn’t anywhere to go—not without an escape plan and with Ghost in front of you.

“Wolfsbane?” The Hunter shifts his thighs, boots moving over the hardwood. “Negative. Not yet.” 

“Yet?” An attitude seeps in, lips thinning. 

Ghost sighs under his breath, slipping the pistols back into their holsters. “Forgetting about how we met, Love?” 

“No,” you huff. “Not really.”

“Perfect.” Eyelids pull down slightly. “Don’t.” Ghost nods his head to the table's chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sit.” 

“I told you I’m not a—” A sharp, numb look makes your snappy reply stall itself, and you stand there for more than a minute before you find the pointlessness of this.

You limp forward and sit in the chair.

Looping your arms around your waist, you glare to the side as your skin crawls at the unblinking eyes that stare. Ghost rolls his shoulders, tilting his head. 

“What do you know about the werewolf that bit you beyond appearance?” 

“Nothing,” you chuckle hopelessly, moving a finger in confusion. “I…I don’t know why you’re asking me about it—it’s not like I had a conversation with him.”

The Hunter blinks at your sudden confidence, unable to separate your form now from the one in the cage; blubbering ceaselessly in a grassy clearing. But lesser pains always bring out someone's true colors. As long as you told him what he needed to know.

Ghost explains with a sheen of dull annoyance. “Every turned werewolf holds a connection to the one that bit them. It’s pack mentality.” At your blank look, his brows pull in, the mask shifting. “You telling me you’ve never come back into contact?”

“...No?” Your lips dip. “For three years I’ve been by myself with this.” 

Brown digs into your face, a small sheen of confusion slipping in to tighten them, around his biceps, Ghost’s fingers twitch. 

You lick your lips, speaking up in the impending silence. “I don’t remember anything after I turn. Is that normal?”

“For you?” He mutters, still not taking his eyes off of you. “Yes.” 

“I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going to happen,” you shrug. “But at the very least I want to try and understand why I’m like this.” You open and close your mouth for a moment. “Before you kill me, anyways.” 

“If I wanted you dead,” Ghost grunts through a half-amused tilt of his head. He doesn’t beat around the bush. “...You would be.” 

“‘Capture or kill,’” you huff. You’d seen the flyers; heard from word of mouth. “Right.” You sigh. “They’ll track you down, you know. They’re not going to just let you take me.”

“They won’t make it through the forest. Bastards would get lost on the trail.” The Hunter moves until he can grasp the waterskin from the counter, dragging it over with his hand. He tosses it to the main table in your direction after he comes back over, and you hesitantly reach forward and pull the top off. Ghost changes the subject back to his studies of your condition closely. Dark eyes slip down your front as your lips part to take up the liquid. “Before your shift, tell me what you see.”

Your throat bobs as you drink the water, thirsty as it soothes your dry mouth. You hum, but the inquiry makes your hair rise. Your arm wipes at your mouth as you lower the waterskin, a small thankfulness in your heart. “It’s less of what I see and more of what I hear and smell—blood; metal. River water. I…” Your chest tightens. “I feel my bones breaking and I hear howling mixing with whispers.”

“Whispers?” Ghost leans, eyes alighting with dim interest. “What’re they saying?”

“I try to block it out,” you whisper, not exactly answering. “Makes it go faster.” 

A long nothingness ensues. 

The impending night grows deeper, and then Ghost finally speaks again after you begin to shift with unease. He nods firmly, tilting his head as if it’s already been decided. 

“Next full moon, you’re going to listen to them.” 

Your horrified face snaps up. It’s a moment of stuttering before you force out a heavy, “What? No!”

He’s already turned, moving back over to the stairs and placing one foot on the steps. 

“Ghost!” You yell, face devoid of blood.

He side-eyes you. “Go back to bed. You’re dead on your feet.” 

And then the same man who shot you in the thigh with little remorse disappears into the attic.  

—

The Hunter was a strange beast.

The days the two of you spent together were mostly silent—left with tight stares and tense shoulders. Clipped sentences. 

Ghost, for what it was worth, gave you space in this small house; as much as you could get. He kept himself up above while you stayed on ground level keeping yourself occupied. You’d gotten spare trousers and socks, a jacket, and the bed was practically yours with how your scent rolled off of it now. Yet, you had never been permitted to go outside. 

You’d seen the land from the windows—careful of the runes, of course, and it wasn’t anything… ghastly. A vegetable garden, a single-stall stable with a dappled mare, and a beaten-down trail out the front. 

No livestock.

No bodies. 

It was only when you had become ever more curious about your lupine curse that you braved the stairs to the attic—one week into the impromptu stay. It’s funny due to the fact that Ghost had never said that you couldn’t go up there sooner.

You stand now in the flat room with a sloping roof and find the man making bullets. It’s a long table, parallel to the walls in the center of the room; dark and covered in all manner of books and tomes. Grimoires tied up and locked. Racks of weapons with markings and blessings tied to sheets of ribbon…it was something you’d never seen before. 

Studying it now, the contents were a dark fascination. 

Ghost fiddles with his silver shell, mixing in gunpowder into the hollowness. He doesn’t speak until you do, but he knows you’re there.

“Tell me more about werewolves,” you speak through the air, and he waits before answering. “The ones who are born with it.”

“Rare,” Ghost comments, and you’re stuck by how willing he is to tell you about this. He puts down his bullet and picks up another. “Harder to find, even harder to kill. Unlike you, they know what goes on when they’re running ‘round. Fuckin’ nightmare to pick up the pieces—bloodbath.” You thin your lips. “Not all of ‘em are murderous, but they’re unpredictable. Can’t help but make packs.”

“Instinct,” you murmur, coming a bit closer. Ghost pauses, looking at you before huffing in the form of a gruff ‘yes.’ Your wondering continues. “But why am I alone then?”

“That’s the question,” the hunter says slowly. “Need to figure out why.” Brown eyes slowly move to you. “‘Fore more people end up dead. Or turned.”

“Can I,” you stop at the table, standing opposite the man. “Can I turn people, too?”

“No,” is all you’re given. Ghost’s eyes glint. “And I’d rather you didn’t bite on me to try.”

Your face heats.

Your attention focuses for a while on how he works—prepares for something unseen. He’d said he’d kept you alive to help him find the one who bit you, but he’d also cleaned your infected injuries, bandaged you, and fed you. Kept you warm. Safe. It was far more than could be said about your village.

However, it was strange how Ghost’s stark muteness was something that you found in the darker hours, a small comfort. When the moon was coming in from the windows, and you hid from its rays as if being stalked down, he once found you sleeping under the bed on the floor because of it.

He never said anything, just offered you a silent hand and helped you back out with a slow blink and a tilt of his head.

There was a distrust, obviously, but there was also an unspoken nearness. No one would make any sense of it—you couldn’t either. It was like a wolf and a raven; something built on hesitence but necessity. You didn’t like Ghost’s mask or his brutalist profession of shooting his wolfsbane-coated bolts, and he didn’t like that once a month you turned into a rampaging werewolf. 

Comparable things, really. 

But even here, in this workshop in his attic, you saw the need for this—for hunters. If you couldn’t stop yourself, there came a time when you had to be stopped. Truth be told, you expected it to be a quick and final end. Maybe that was just a foolish hope. 

A silver bullet would have always been your final song, you believed. Perhaps the very one that had once swung from around your neck; the one you’d never taken off until now. 

But then, perhaps that would have been your own brutalist profession.

“Thank you,” you nod. Ghost pauses, fingers stained with gunpowder. He blinks at the bullet in his hand as you continue. “I know you don’t care about anything beyond your work, but if you hadn’t gotten me out of that cage they would have burned me alive. Skinned me.” Your tongue pokes out of the side of your mouth. “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have been kind. Job or not…thank you for getting me out of there.” 

“I shot you,” he utters, voice gravel. Ghost seemed confused.

Your lips flick. “I never said I forgave you for that part.”

A smooth chuckle wafts out over the attic and your own softly mirrors. Your head tilts somewhat quizzically. “But, about that…did you mean to put so much wolfsbane on it?”

Ghost shakes his head, grumbling. A small sense of honesty leaks out. “...Expected you to be bigger.”

You blink, and then, a few seconds later, a loud snort echoes like a ringing bell. 

The Hunter's unimpressed look only leads you to find him all the more enjoyable. “Shut it. Fuckin’ hell.”

A hand is waved from your party, dismissing the harsh snap. “Sorry, sorry.” You puff out amused air. “Spector not up to your expectations?”

Ghost nearly rolls his eyes, trying to focus on the task at hand. He didn’t mind your company, at the very least he knew he needed to keep an eye on you for any potentially forced shifts or hostile attitude. What he hadn’t expected was to find you so…different from your muzzled counterpart, your shared physical inhabitant. 

He could almost call you endearing if he wasn’t so numb to the sight and scent of reality. 

“Sightings were far between,” Ghost grunts. “Here-say. I took an educated guess—better to put something like you out of commission than drag my way out of a forest without legs.”

“No apology?” You try, tilting your head.

“None,” is the drawn response. “I don’t have regrets. You’re alive.” 

Your fingers touch the outside of one of his journals, tracing the bumps and grooves of age and wear. You hum, but don’t reply. Most of your pains have been pushed back now, even if you still weren’t up to full strength. Food and rest helped, but the anxiety that perpetuated only lengthened the healing process. 

When you can’t trust even yourself under the drunkenness of the moon, it only makes your fear of the sun worse. Everything made you afraid—most of all your mind; most of all, the future. 

“Why do you want to find the werewolf that turned me?” You have to speak this, have to push. Your curiosity demands it.

Ghost puts the bullet down and grabs a rag from his belt, mask turning to look your way as he brushes off his hands. He pauses, looming with that gargantuan height—natural intimidation in the span of his chest and the trunk that makes up his front. You find yourself in his shadow as he rubs at his fingers with the rag, taking it away and slotting it back into his belt a moment later. 

The man’s heat leaks into your body as he blinks over, glancing your form up and down in a single look; keeping a respectful distance but still making his attentions known. 

He stares. “If it keeps biting people, there won’t be any villages left to take up contracts from.”

“Money?” You frown.

“Principle,” Ghost counters, chest rising and falling steadily. “There needs to be a middle ground. Too many feral werewolves, too few people. Cut off the head.”

“Ominous,” your form turns to his, itching at the back of your head again—the scabbing skin. “If what you said was true, how do you know the thing isn’t already dead? If it hasn’t tried to get to me, what was the point of making me?”

“Because you hadn’t left St. Francis’ by the time I put a bolt in you.” Ghost grumbles, rubbing a hand on his bicep, itching above the fabric of his tunic. He stretches with a grunt—and you see his shirt ride up and the pale skin underneath. You gawk for a moment at the length of scars and brutal muscle.

“Charming,” you dryly utter, stuttering in a brief second of pulling back your senses, but the Hunter continues on, ignoring you.

“That was where you were turned—your territory. You stayed because your leader is still close by waiting.” Legs shift, and all of a sudden, a body is over you, hands are on the base of your skull, pushing your own away as brown eyes dig into the injury you pick at. 

Your breath hitches, tensing for a second as your spine straightens. You watch widely from the corner of your eye as Ghost runs a careful hand over the flesh. He puffs a breath, chest moving in a grunt that is both commonplace and expected, yet the brush of his chest to your shoulder is not. 

You restrain a shiver, nostrils moving to the overwhelming swell of leather and gunpowder. Bone fragments; the tang of whiskey. 

His skin as he runs a thumb over the edge of your wound.

“It’ll start cracking.” Ghost utters, and through his fabric, you feel the brush of speech. “Have to apply more balm. Stop messing with it unless you want stitches soon.” 

It takes a moment more of his surgical study and a small clearing of your throat before you can speak. Your mind changes the subject for you.

“So…if my bite can’t turn anyone,” you breathe, nearly sagging as Ghost’s fingers catch in your hair, shifting it under his attention to get a better look. He listens, you know. He wasn’t good at talking, but he always listened. “Why did they muzzle me?”

For a brief instance, you think you feel the Hunter’s fingers jerk a tiny amount—some reactionary muscle twitch that leads your body to still. 

Ghost can’t say why he did that, though perhaps it was the sudden flash of the injuries that he’d wrapped on the road back to his property that went over his eyelids. Or the cage—your pleading face aching for whatever small sliver of brutish company you can get. 

The silver bullet that he still had in his pocket, attached to that leather cord. He knew the purpose; the intent. Just as he knew the scrape of scabbing under his fingertips. 

“Control,” he grumbles, and it’s all he’ll say. 

Your burning face is somewhat down-turned, letting him do as he must, study what he can. He hadn’t made any moves to endanger you, and besides the upcoming full moon, there was nothing here that screamed imminent danger. Danger as a general, yes, of course. You were a werewolf in a hunter’s home—it would always be…your eyes flutter when his fingertips drag over your scalp…it would always be danger….dangerous.

Ghost doesn’t think you notice it, but your eyes are drooping. 

He watches after the slight shock wears off, a tiny smirk flickering the hidden skin of his lips after he realizes the reason. If you had a tail, he’d assume it would be moving in a soft arch by now. 

The man was mildly amused at that, and before he moved away fully, he had to stop himself from uttering a sarcastic, ‘like that, then?’ 

He had to remind himself not to get attached to whatever…this was. He was using you as bait, as some key to his problem. Not a companion. The distance here had to be firm and heavy-handed. 

“The balm is down in my packs,” he grunts, leaving just as his name implied before you had the chance to gather your bearings and the lack of caressing heat. You startle back to the attic room, eyes wide and face loose before Ghost’s retreating footsteps echo on the stairs. “Don’t bloody use it all, then.”

The front door opens and closes with a pull of weighted wood.

—

“I can’t do this,” you mutter, pacing alone in the middle of the night down in the living room 

The full moon was tomorrow. 

“I can’t do it,” you itch at the back of your head, peeling at the nearly healed flesh harshly. Your nails dig into the soft tissue, drilling like a knife. A bead of blood slips around your fingers, but it doesn't stop you.

It’s late—late enough to know that Ghost should be asleep by now. For days, the paranoia, just like always, builds until you are nearly as mute as your Hunter. No more curiously searching his attic; no more questions about his job or how he got into this business. Brown eyes had been lingering more as the days went by, this strange companionship growing. You knew, in his own way, he was…worried.

So silent, even he had been getting noticeably uneasy. Shifting legs and quick glances. Nights where you hid under the bed from the moon until lunch came around, Ghost speaking as easily as he could to try and coax you out to no avail. You, a feral dog with white-rimmed eyes. 

At supper, only hours before this panicked pacing, you had told something to Ghost that made him double-take. 

“If I can’t stop it…I need you to shoot me. In the head.”

He’d never answered, but his eyes seemed to get ever-sharper as the hours continued on. More tense. Ansty.

But…that was his job, wasn’t it? 

“Can’t do it,” you murmur. Blood slips down your wrist. “It isn’t right—”

“Spector?” Ghost’s voice had become so familiar to you that the only thing that made your heart skyrocket was the sudden call of it. Your gasp is sharp from behind a panted breath, hand flinching away from the crater you were steadily digging in your skull. A long string of blood trails into the air as your fingers jerk away, and it’s only then that you notice the deep pangs of pain.

Your eyes shudder for a second as Ghost’s form makes it to ground level. He comes over slowly, attention staying on the way the moonlight makes the crimson stains glint from the dripping line seeping into the sleeve of your tunic. He blinks, and you both stand.

The man’s skeletal adornment was missing, though the fabric under remained. A loose sleep shirt and pants, stained by the rays of night. 

“Let me see,” he sighs under his breath, a tiny rasp telling of the sleep he’d been awoken from.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” you utter. He doesn’t seem to care, grabbing your wrist and pulling the limb away as his body takes up presence behind you. 

“Was already awake,” Ghost grunts, eyes narrowing in hidden worry. You calm down a bit at that, one less problem to worry yourself about. 

The Hunter, quietly, leaves for a second and grabs his pouch near the door. With a muffled command, he nods to the bed until you’re backing up and hitting the back of your knees off of it, sitting. 

Ghost lights the candle on the nightstand and opens his belongings with stiff glances your way. He noticeably doesn’t ask why you’ve harmed yourself like this.

“I can’t,” you say it like a plea for help. “Ghost, I can’t do it again.” 

Hands fiddle with clean bandages and take out his waterskin. The man douses a rag with the liquid and comes over, shifting onto the bed and lightly turning you so your back is to him—legs half hanging off. 

The hard press of cold water makes your breath hitch, and you bite your lip.

“It hurts,” you push out. Ghost knows you’re not talking about the newly opened wound. 

“Breathe,” he says to you, seeing the way your sides expand with heavy lungs. Brown eyes flutter from the push of his large hand to the warmth of your shaking flesh. “Tell me about your home, yeah? Heard you lived in your own place.”

The question makes you double-take.

He’s asking me that? Here? Now? Hours away from perhaps another catastrophe?

Yet, you can’t help the slippage of your tongue as Ghost’s fingers rub into your scalp. The rag is lessened, and, soon, the material is rubbed gently over the sore itch of weeping skin. You fight a whimper and reply with an addled mind. 

“It…it’s quiet. Calm. I always keep the candles going because I don’t like the dark.” Ghost works quietly and quickly. 

“There,” he grunts, glancing at the flickering light of the candle he lit. He’d have to remember that. “And?”

“I kept sheep.”

He pauses, and, without meaning to, a soft scoff bounces off the confines of his chest. It catches your attention far better than a bullet could. Ghost shifts a needle and thread out of his gathering of items, taking away his limbs only for the short while it takes him to loop the two together. 

“How many?” The masked man asks, amusement gone just as quickly as it had come. 

“Only a handful,” you whisper. Your mouth opens and closes, glancing over your shoulder as the candle-light spills out over the room; casting shadows over Ghost’s face, catching on his long eyelashes. Those browns of his glint like tree trunks covered in dew.

“Please,” your words are muffled. Eyes wide and fearful, there isn’t anything that can console you on this. “You need to kill me.”

There was a dichotomy to you—a violent thing. You didn’t want to die, no, you feared it heavily, more than the moon, but the truth was that you couldn’t keep going through this. The unknowing. The breaking bones, the blinding pain. The understanding that nothing that you do can stop it. 

“It hurts, Ghost,” your breath stutters. “More than taking off a limb, more than slicing yourself open and ripping out your intestines—it burns more than the light of the moon.”

The Hunter listens through all of it. He sits, he stares, and he hides the brimming sense of concern behind his dead eyes.

With a pulling of his eyebrows, Ghost’s free hand moves upwards and grabs your chin. Freezing, you study this phenomenon from over your shoulder, face on fire with eyes wide to the pale skin visible to your view. You hadn’t realized until now, but this was the most you’d seen of the man’s face. 

You could make out the point of his crooked nose—the strength of his jaw under the form-fitting fabric. Cheekbones and the heaviness of his brows. Wisps of hair. He had eyes like a cat, you had to admit; something sly about them despite the numbness that seemed to extend bone-deep. 

But his hands had been kind to you. 

Firmly, Ghost’s fingers run your flesh, and he blinks softly before a low sound echoes in his throat. He pushes carefully on your jaw and shifts your head back forward so he can help you. When he lets go, your heart quivers in your breast

“I’m ‘ere,” he mutters, and you feel the first stitch enter the thin flesh of your head. You take down deep breaths, focusing on the scrape of his fingertips and not the point of the needle. Ghost can understand the fear of it—of pain. It’s instinct. He tilts his head and pushes out, “I can only ask for one full moon from you, yeah? No more. I just need one.” 

“And if I can’t find the werewolf?” Your voice vibrates with emotion, staring down at your hands as Ghost’s chest brushes your spine. The scent of him was addling your brain; the rub and slide of his hands.

The Hunter’s jaw clenches softly. “...Then I let you go.”

It wasn’t what you were expecting, but anything from the time you’d gotten a bolt through the thigh was unknown territory, and, like a dog without a leash, you’d run into it. Your brows furrow, blood oozing down your neck before Ghost’s grip shifts to place the rag back again, swiping away firmly. 

“Go?” He nods, but you can’t see it. “But what about the hunt?”

“I can manage.” The stitching pauses. The air is broken up nearly a full minute later. “You’re not evil.” Before they start up again as if nothing was uttered aloud. 

The confession makes the sting in the back of your eyes start up again—a strong thing of confusion and vulnerability. Ghost continues his task, pulling together your skin one suture at a time until the injury is fully closed; clean. 

“Chin,” he lowly states, and you allow him to tap your jaw, shifting it up so the wrappings can loop above your ear and over your forehead—securing them. 

Even far after the blood has seeped through, the two of you stay.

—

Come morning, you already feel wrong.

Your body stays in bed, shaking—sweating. A large pain flairs in your chest over and over like a pulsing well in the earth, skin twitching with the spread of blood. Ghost sits beside the bed all the while, having dragged over his chair. He leans back into it, one arm over the side, hanging with the thing ever so often moving to rub at the back of his neck. 

You don’t think he’s moved since he brought it over last night; since he got another candle to stick into the holder—push back the dark. To watch, to study, or just to stave off your rising anxiety is another question. 

It’s only after the fourth time you try to rip at the stitches at the base of your skull that he finally grabs your hand and holds it silently. Now, his thumb moves over your knuckles—his gloves back on. 

At noon, he tries to suggest eating.

“Hungry?” Ghost asks. 

“No,” you say instantly, sweat dripping over your temple, your body partially buried under blankets. “No, I’ll just throw it up.” 

Brown eyes glint. “Just one bite?” 

Your mouth is already salivating—thoughts of wet flesh and blood in the forefront until you whine and shove your face into the pillow; panting heavily. 

Whispers dance in the shell of your ears. 

I’m here.

I’m here.

I’m here.

“Go away,” you whisper quickly to them. 

Ghost pauses, hesitating. After a moment, his thighs tense with the action of movement, thinking you’re speaking to him. Something swirls in his chest, but he starts to stand nonetheless.

Your eyes widen.

“No!” Both of your hands latch onto the Hunter’s wrist, fear a needle stuck in your gaze. “No, not you. Stay, please.”

A silver cage covered in blood slides across Ghost’s slightly shocked look, but he only licks at the corner of his mouth and slowly leans back once more. 

“Not going anywhere,” he says, accent dipping. “Tell me what you’re hearing, yeah?”

His hand slips back into yours, and he presses into your pulse softly, counting. The sun continues across the sky.

“I don’t like how it sounds,” you say, shaking your head. “It’s wrong.”

“Focus,” Ghost breathes, looming closer. His grip squeezes once. “It can’t hurt you.” 

You shiver, eyes tightly closed as tears burn the back of your nose. “It’s howling.”

A suddenly gloveless hand spreads up your cheek, resting there and pushing back the sweat that pools. It’s calloused—scarred. You whine, head spinning.

I’m waiting. 

Find me.

Find me.

“I don’t want to,” you utter under your breath, words an amalgamation of slurring gasps. 

“Spector,” Ghost calls, head moving closer. “Eh.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” your hurried panic is similar to a mind overdosing on wolfsbane. “Gotta go away—gotta get out—”

“Spec!” The Hunter’s quick bark makes your eyes pop open, and you lock instantly with brown orbs. 

They’re tight, unblinking just as always. They offer just a few moments of clarity. 

Ghost holds your head still while the rest of you shivers with cold sweats, you can hear the blood inside of his veins; his heart pumping. The scent of his skin was addicting to the point of memorization on the airwaves. You watch, gulping down breaths as your throat bobs. 

Eyes dart you up and down, fingers spreading out to offer what little comfort he can. The man wonders if he’s completely in over his head. 

Ghost pulls his face-covering up to his nose, and your heart skips beats at the sight of ravaged skin and stubble, scars spreading out like your own. Long ones, short ones, burn marks, and hyperpigmentation. He wasn’t pretty, but he was real. 

Oh, he was real. 

His grip on you strengthens until all you can focus on is him. 

Ghost blinks, and you see his lips move. The gravel of his voice was never more clear. “Fucking hell, keep that head on, okay? Nothing’s going to happen as long as I’m here. I’ve got you.” He sighs out a low breath, thumb running your undereye as the small dribbles of tears begin to sneak out. Ghost murmurs. “I’ve bloody got you, alright? Let it happen—we can figure it out.”

He’d grown fond of you over the course of a month. You were curious; not pushingly so. Honest. Good. You’d been dealt a bitter hand, and damn him if his stone heart wasn’t stretched thin at the raw fear on your face. This wasn’t your fault, but he needed to find who turned you and stop them before it got any more out of control than it already was. If more unstable werewolves went running through the woods, there wouldn’t be anyone left in the territory alive.

“When you turn,” Ghost says as clearly as he’s able. “Go. Don’t fight it. I’ll find you.”

“Promise?” You ask, a weak flicker coming to your lips—eyes vulnerable. 

Ghost nods once, and it’s all you need. “I’ll find you,” he repeats. “Doubt me?”

“No,” you ease, clearing your throat. “But…one more thing?”

“Anything,” the Hunter instantly says. 

“Just don’t shoot me in the thigh again.”

When the claws start protruding from your nailbeds hours later, you’re bolting to the door with only one last glance at the Hunter and his half-pulled-up mask. Booted feet hitting the wood as he stands, he lets you go even as his thighs tense in a need to run after you. Patience was his beast to tame, but it seemed to have left him in the form of a woman disappearing into the tree line. 

There is companionship in broken things.

Your body slips into the forest just as the creak of your bones begins to shift and bend. You fall into a heap, hearing the gargling of marrow under your skin like a call to sea. An urge grows to infect you; a feral need to run and hide. Biting back a shrill scream, a hoarse yell escapes instead—flesh rippling as your mouth opens, fangs breaking the supple mushiness of your gums as blood floods like a river. 

Find me. 

Find me.

Find me.

“Ghost,” you whisper, hands snapping to your head. “Ghost, please.” 

Your bullet, you want your silver bullet.

A rabid scream rips from your throat, and back in the house, Ghost’s hands tighten into fists as he glares at the open door. He growls under his breath, eyes tightening in a certain type of anger that brews in his gut. The nights your shuffling woke his light slumber were more common than when you hadn’t, and every utterance was clearly heard to his ears. It had become a curse to him—how you’d met.

A regret was seeping in, a care, and now, as he forces himself to back up and head into the attic, Ghost clenches his jaw tightly. So unaffected by the horror of monsters, he was now at a loss of sense for this growth of feelings. 

He wasn’t dull, he knew that some of the contracts he took marked him as a tool and not a person of stable mind. He’d done things he wasn’t proud of, and he would continue to do them for no other reason than they were the orders he was given.

But you had broken a piece of that off of him, somehow, someway, your face had seared itself into his retinas—speared him at the brutality that your community had treated you with. The muzzle. It was cruel, and while Ghost was precisely that, there was a limit. 

He did his job, and that was that. Anything after wasn’t his problem. 

You became his job, and the one who turned you was an add-on. Maybe if he justified it to himself, he could understand his actions better. 

But he was already sprinting to grab his gear when the first howl shattered the night.

—

A white beast prowls the forest. 

It stands on two legs, but it isn’t human—isn’t natural. It’s taller than a grown man is; snout pulled back in a soundless snarl that puts dogs to shame with rows of teeth so sharp, they look like pale knives. Its feet—large, splayed—soundlessly skate the ground until clawed fingers slam to the earth. 

A nose inhales the scent above the dirt, tongue lulling as a shaggy tail lays limp behind a curved spine. In between the erect ears, under the thick skull of the werewolf, the rolling bumps of a brain spark. A pull.

Find me.

Your eyes are tiny black dots—and they blink once before you rise once more. A great growl moves inside of your chest, the large collection of hair around your neck standing on end.

I’m waiting.

But there’s something that keeps you here—standing in the grass as the moon shines atop your head, your fur nearly glowing even with the stain of bloody injuries. The remains of clothes are about a meter away; only strips of what was. 

Your gaze looks over your shoulder, and your gargantuan frame lumbers backward until you can stoop to them—nose once more sniffing with your arms reaching.

Your fingers twitch, blackened claws digging through the ground as a near purr echoes in your throat. The scythe-like additions card across the strips.

Gunpowder. 

Leather.

Whiskey.

Something you can’t quite name, but feel drawn to despite the tightening noose at your throat. There was something there you can’t focus on…something that you need. 

Your drooling jaws snap, saliva coating the fangs until they drip off one at a time to stain the grass. Body shifting, your head lowers until your wolf-ish visage rubs against the fabric, licking at the sides of your gums as delicate grumbles slip out of your mouth. 

A far-off howl leaves your frame freezing.

Eyes slipping back into the feral-inhumanity of a wild animal, your body jolts up, gaze to the forest trees and the rustling of bushes. The swell of rain on the clouds is in the back of your nose, and the previous attraction to the ripped clothes is lost as simply as it had come. 

You were being summoned. 

Ears twitching, the entirety of your body refuses to move to the sound; tensed and ready to spring on anything that moves if only to let off the spike of anger at the lack of control. The pull grows stronger, and it feels like something is trying to drag you away into the wilds.

This was the sensation you were always trying to fight—the one that led to the aggression; the hunt. You knew that if you followed that howl, whatever was left of your human sense would be gone entirely before you could stop it. 

Yet, this time, there’s a nagging need to find the owner, and you can’t remember why.

Your large head tilts, feet spaced as the curve of your spine grows more aggressive—hunching forward as you snarl at nothing, claws shaking as your fur is more bristly than sleek. 

Like pure white spikes. 

In the back of your head, a thin sliver of a memory slips in. Fingers on the back of your head, caressing calluses and dark, dark, eyes. Clean bandages and gentle touches.

I’ll find you.

If the side of your vision picked up the shadow shifting from far off into the trees, your curled lip never turned that way. If your nose twitched to the heavy weight of a man’s sweat, it never shifted to point as a mutt would to the rustling bush.

Your body bolts after the resounding echo of a wolf’s howl, and it’s no later that Ghost slips after your clawed prints to follow.

—

Crossbow in hand, the hunter’s mask gleams in the darkness, his pale eyes twinkling. Bending down, he glazes at the long pushing tracks of your form—seeing the spray of dirt to the side and the broken branches. Ghost blinks, shoulders tense before he swiftly stands and continues on. The firearms at his thighs lightly rattle, and the bolts in his crossbow are already laced with wolfsbane; silver tips smelt a week ago. 

He passes a river with only a single glance at the tossed rocks from the bed, sloshing through the water as the bottoms of his pants get weighed down. Ghost’s mind is on one thing only: make sure this plan won’t get you killed. 

The bolts aren’t for you—the silver bullets aren’t for you. 

He grunts under his breath, the dark woods casting phantoms over the ground. The Hunter’s legs shift through tall grass, and he carries himself with the ingrained confidence a man of his station requires. If he were anything less than a monster himself, he would have died ages ago. Ghost shoots and lets others come up with the questions, but he could never be called dumb. 

Seeing what fast glimpse he had of your shifted form after the last time, he was struck by how erratic it acted. Snapping head, twitching ears, and roving eyes. If he didn’t know any better, Ghost would have called it rabid. 

Yet, your actions with his borrowed shirt were…body-stilling, to say the least about it. It had made his gut swirl.

“Give me a trail,” Ghost utters to himself, brown eyes still picking up the dash you’d taken. His agile feet splash through a puddle, the beginnings of raindrops hitting his head. 

The man grabs at his hood and pulls it up stiffly, frowning under his mask.

Rain would wash away the tracks.

“C’mon, Love,” he grinds out, body hunched. “Leavin’ me to do the dirty work, eh?” 

It’s too quiet—even a collection of minutes later of hard hiking, the trees barely move. There aren’t any birds; no animals beyond the black bodies of crows in the far-up branches, waiting, watching with obsidian eyes that don’t blink. 

Ghost isn’t off-put, but the length of his strides gets far tinier, carefully stepping over twigs and rocks like a soldier at war. Then again, he was at war. And if he was caught unawares, there wouldn’t be a bullet to pull out of his side, but, instead, a chunk missing. 

His ears were almost ringing from how hard he was focusing. 

Brown eyes shift from one area to another, and then, suddenly as if a deer, he freezes. 

Ghost’s body winds up, fingers twitching from the stark trigger discipline of his crossbow downward instantaneously. No one but him can explain what just happened, but he knows when he has to listen instead of act. Stuck in a clearing not unlike the place he’s first met you, his feet rest shoulder width apart and his eyes stare blankly into the trees ahead.

Your tracks end here.

From behind him, just as the large raindrops slap the side of his bone-ed visage, the small crack of a twig makes his ears twitch.

A low snarl sets his hair on end. 

Looking over his shoulder, Ghost is met with the same color that he’d become so accustomed to in a full month completely blacked out. Void. Lifeless to anything besides rage and bloodlust. 

Your white fur was infected with dirt, blood, and leaves—a mosaic of ferality ingrained into your body; pale fangs snapping. The beast slips through the treeline, slapping a veined hand into the soggy earth. 

Ghost only watches, eyes a mystery. 

His finger shifts over the trigger, and for the first time in his life, he hesitates. 

The man looks into your glinting orbs, the dripping saliva on your lulling tongue as your esophagus pants for breath. One hesitation, he always knew, would mean death. One mess-up. 

You’d asked him to end it, he shouldn’t feel remorse, guilt, perhaps—he was still human, despite his appearance, but remorse was deeper. It left wounds that were harder to lick clean again. 

…So why isn’t he sending a bolt into your forehead?

Ghost remembers the times he’d found you under the bed, your shaking, and the way you hadn’t allowed him to change your bandages the first few weeks you’d stayed with him; didn’t want him to touch you. The nightmares and the small smile you’d gain when he’d spew his dark, sarcastic words as if this was a joke. How you’d always thank him under your breath for the food he’d give you, hunted by his own hand. 

A silver cage. Crimson blood. The sight of your pleading eyes when you’d told him to shoot you.

Maybe the two of you were far more alike than he’d dare to admit. And he currently won’t, not even on his deathbed. Not even now.

Ghost watches, and he waits. 

He can’t do it.

Your body slinks closer, stalking with the sound of anger, nearly rib-shaking in its volume. Ghost’s jaw clenches, and his body shifts to face yours head-on. At the sight of the crossbow, your snarl turns into an air-biting rage, saliva flying through the rain.

“Spector,” he keeps his voice low, even. The sight he’d seen as you smelled his clothes had to mean something. Ghost tilts his head, moving out a hand from the side of his weapon in an appeasement gesture. “I’m not going to shoot you. We have a job to complete…get those fangs away.”

He wonders if ordering you around will even work. You had told him before—you’re not a mutt. Ghost agrees. No mutt was the size of a fucking boulder.

The werewolf’s claws drag—goring the mud as if a pig to tear apart. 

“Spector,” the Hunter tries again. But something’s different about his tone; he drops it, letting it pull on a softer string. “I’m here to end this. We’re here to end this.” He blinks and lowers the crossbow completely. “Breathe. The night can’t last forever.” A breeze whips the trees. “I made you a promise.”

There’s a second, he thinks, where he can see something shift in your gaze, pupils slightly widening above the deluge that wets down your fur into a sopping mess that hangs off muscle.

“That’s a girl,” Ghost grunts, taking a small step closer. “Never told you,” he utters, eyes locked with yours. He sees your nose twitch minutely. “But if we get this right, Spec, there’ll be no more painful shifts, hear me?”

Your dog-ish mouth is closed, hanging off every word as Ghost comes even closer.

“I kill this bastard,” the hunter breathes, gloved hand still outstretched, nearing closer to the near-silver of your form. “The moon’ll have no claim on you. She’ll let you off the leash, Little Wolf. You get to decide when it happens.” 

He thinks he has you now, back to some state of recognition in the addled brain that tries to see him as prey; as competition. Ghost’s fingers are close enough to almost touch you, but just before he can brush his gloves over your wet fur, your mouth opens in a display of untamed challenge. Your growl is enough to make the man unconsciously reach for his pistol, and in the time it takes him to realize the fault of it, you’ve already rampaged forward with an unhinged jaw.

Ghost’s eyes widen, taking a quick step back. 

Your legs push off, and you shove the hunter out of the way just before the fangs of an immense beast can clamp down on him, your own finding the shoulder of gray, thick fur.

Fighting as wolves do, Ghost only needs a moment to recover and get to his feet, though the sight in front of him can rival any that he’d seen before. His crossbow clatters a few feet away, sending the bolt off into the trees with a metallic ‘twang’.

The two werewolves roll around the pouring clearing, snapping teeth and rending claws drawing blood that’s deep enough to swim in to the green grass. White and gray meld together—blue eyes like a knife to Ghost’s chest when he takes it in from between the sound of tearing fur. 

“Bloody fucking…” the man trails, staggering as his palms slap to the pistols at his side. He blinks, shouting in more of a bark than even a dog could imitate. “Spector!” 

The wolves pull and rip the other to shreds, flesh torn and limbs grasping for purchase. Bodies are slammed to the ground before getting tossed to the side, fangs flashing in the moonlight. Ghost watches crimson stain your fur a pinkish-red.

He can’t get a good shot.

The werewolf that turned you sinks its claws into your sides, dragging them downwards as you yowl, eyes tiny with aggression before your jaws connect with its snout, biting down with more force than a horse’s hooves. The monster screams—a garbed thing of fangs and saliva. 

Just as easily as it called you here to it, as it stalked your Hunter, it bashes your body back into the earth and takes you by the scruff of your neck. Eyes wide in that lupine way, you lock on Ghost’s profile before your body is lifted, and tossed away violently. 

Spine slamming into a tree, you hear the cracking and bending of your bones in your ears just after you hear the sharp shout from the man in the clearing, body dropping to a heap into the grass and mud. Angled head flopping back and forth, black infests the edges of your vision, coughing up blood that seeps from between your gums and slips down the back of your esophagus. Fur and flesh are stuck at the base of your throat. 

Whining, your limbs drag and pull futility, eyes flooded over with crimson and fogged by rain. A great roar worries the air, sending long shivers over your spine as you try to rise to your limbs, a five-fingered hand slamming you back down. 

Just before the fangs can clamp your throat, two great booms burst through the forest. 

The wolf atop you reels back, great bellow escaping its throat when you can finally drag your head to look over. This beast was clawing at its chest, shaking its large head in an arch to try and dispel the shock of having two silver bullets entering its back—the gray head snapped around to Ghost, who held his twin pistols aloft with eyes burning with anger from behind his mask. An avatar of vengeance; a bringer of death. 

The orbs inside of your sockets widened, nose twitching wildly as you bleat a quick warning bark. 

Blue-Eyes rises, body far larger than yours would ever grow to be—on two feet more powerful looking than a bricklayer many years into his craft; tall enough to reach to the sides of black-shingled homes and pull itself up. Ghost takes one look and growls under his breath, knowing there would be no time to reload the weapons in his hands. 

So he drops them and pulls slowly at the cruel blade in his belt until the gleam winks in the low light like a curved smile. Setting it in his hands, the small flicker of a sharp smirk on his lips is lost to you. 

Yet, there isn’t a chance for some brawl between two beasts—there’s only the flash of pale fur and the final crunch of a body hitting the ground. 

You bury your fangs into the wolf’s neck; the one responsible for all of your pain and torment spanning years of isolation. You feel the body seize as it drops, the last remnants of a dying brain trying to fight the inevitable nothingness that ensues, and, you only hold on the harder, the bloodlust seeping back in with every drop of life pooling into your locked jaw.

Your throat releases tiny growls of pleasure, biting a bit to make sure there wasn’t a sliver of a chance that something living was walking away from this scene. 

Ghost pauses, and in the back of his head, he knows he should stop you. Brown eyes see the animalistic sheen of enjoyment at a fresh kill, the way you pull at the flesh until chucks peel away from a gurgling wolf. Even when the thing is long dead and the rain still slaps the earth, you barely let go until you get a hold of the meat and tear with a backward jerk of your snout.

“Love,” the Hunter sheathes his knife, taking a step forward. The blood was pooling under your body. How many of those were treatable? He had to know. “Let me see what’s—”

The eyes that lock on him are not yours. 

Up to your ears, the entirety of your face was awash with the stain of life, dripping off the whiskers at your cheeks; your chin. 

Before he can utter another word, he finds himself on his back with a snapping snout right in front of his face, two dead eyes staring deeply into his own. Ghost sucks down a quick breath, hand snapping to the large wrist shoving down on his chest.

He pants out, gravel accent far more deep than it was before. 

“Easy, Spector. Easy. Eh—focus on me.” Your tongue licks at your fangs, body shaking. Ghost pushes out, “That’s it, then. It’s over, yeah? You did it; let's pack it up and head back home.” He grunts. “Recon even dogs get cold in weather like this—the bed’s waiting. Get a nice fire going.”

Ghost sees your face move closer, and his hand minutely shifts to the vial of wolfsbane on his belt. It wouldn’t kill you, but it could put you out of commission until your body shifted back into its proper form. He could carry you back—that wouldn’t be a problem at all. 

But he was worried about your injuries. Even now the droplets of blood roll off of you faster than the water can. 

Too much.

Brown eyes crease, darting a look down. 

“Fuck,” he growls, seeing the carnage and the open meat. “Sweetheart, we need to get you checked out—you need to listen to me. Can you do that?”

He can see the conflict; the internal fight. 

Your mouth moves with fast pants, claws stuttering over his gear futilely. You blink rapidly, shaking your large head in fast increments with small snarls. 

“C’mon,” Ghost says slowly, fingers looping the vial. “Keep listening. Know my voice is utter shite, but only you can tell me it.” 

Your head drops to his chest just as the wolfsbane is popped open, and, for whatever reason, Ghost pauses. He waits. 

You take a long inhale of his gear—of the leather and the gunpowder, and just before the Hunter can dump the vial over your skin, the long blackish claw on your finger loops the bottom portion of the fabric under his bone attachment. 

The man’s breath hitches as you let it rest along his nose bridge…holding it there as you drag your head upwards as if it were an impossible chore. Your mouth dribbles out gore to his cheeks, but the Hunter stares upwards into your eyes as they soften in a lupine way. 

Inexplicably, you let out a bone-rattling sigh and slump into oblivion. 

—

Come morning, you sleep under the spread of large fur blankets—clean bandages over your bare frame as the man has tended to you for hours. He mutters for you to slip your arms into a spare shirt after he finds your eyes open, not uncomfortable by your nakedness, though he wants you yourself to be at ease. 

His brown eyes are creased, and you can’t remember what you’ve done. 

You comply with small grunts and moans; more sore and cut up than you can recall ever feeling as a large tunic is slipped over your head by scarred hands. 

Gunpowder. 

“What did I—?”

“You finished the job,” he says, sparing you a glance as he shifts back with his eyes averting themselves from your visible legs. The sun seeps in through the windows. “It’s morning.”

You blink slowly, and the man eases you back down into the furs. 

“I’m tired,” your voice yawns out—weak and brittle like the hope you’d had that this plan of his would work. Eyes half-closed, they blink at the hunter with a soft kind of care that you can’t remember showing before. Whatever pain medicine he’d given you, it was working. The underlying itch was still as strong as ever, though. 

“Tired is good,” Ghost nods slowly, standing still until he crosses his arms and sets his feet. He’s in a fresh shirt and pants. There’s blood under his fingernails; traces smeared over his flesh. “Means you accomplished something.”

“Don’t think that’s entirely true,” you breathe. A pause. “...Why is your mask like that?”

It was half pulled up—showing off his lower jaw and the stubble. The scars that you already have memorized. Ghost shrugs, blinking those dead eyes of his. 

“Ah,” he grumbles. “Forgot. Here.”

He reaches up and slips the thing off in one motion. Your loose brain takes a moment to realize the entire face you’re staring into, but the second it does, the image is engraved into your mind forever. You make a noise in the back of your throat. 

“Better, Little Wolf?” 

“W—” Your lips stutter, new sutures pulling tight. “Why would you…?”

“Hungry?” Ghost asks, quickly changing the subject. “Know you like that venison that I caught.”

“No,” you breathe. “No, I’m not…I’m tired, Ghost. My head hurts.”

A hand sweeps over your forehead, staying as you sag into it with a hum and a fluttering of your eyes. 

“Bloodloss,” the Hunter murmurs. “Normal. Go back to sleep; take however long you need. I’ll be here.” 

The bond between the two of you has strengthened to that of a silver rope.

“Stay,” you plead under your breath, already slipping back into nothingness with no promise to wake up again soon. “Hold me, Ghost?”

“Simon,” he grunts to only himself, knowing that the words are lost to you. Perhaps that makes him all the more eager to share it with you when you’re better. “Stay still.”

It wasn’t like you could protest.

The broad man slips in, shifting the furs until you’re covered back up and your forehead is to his chest—keeping himself closest to the door where the runes still sit in their bloody glory. If he listened hard enough, he could even hear them humming him a tune.

No song was better to him than the one of your breath at this very moment. Alive. Moving. There were many times in the night that he thought...hm.

“Better, then?” The dry tease slips out. 

A kiss to the side of his mouth is what he gets in answer, and he doesn't say a peep more until he knows you’re back in the clutches of a dream—a good one, he knows, because he watches your expressions like a loyal guard dog would.

Ghost, Simon, rests his lips on the top of your head, and in a delicate murmur, eases, “You did good, Love.” 

There was much to do, but for now, all he had to do was hold you a little bit tighter and let his stone heart beat a little bit faster.

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