#Tire Cord Machine

[cherrise-rose]

imagine a small town having an annual mechanical bull riding contest but for overdue pregnant people

[kewindia]

Manufacturer of Flexible Packaging, Paper, Tire-Cord, and Textile Machinery

Krishna Engineering Works is a company based in India that specializes in manufacturing and supplying a wide range of industrial machinery and equipment. The company was established in 1980 and has since become a well-established name in the industry.

Krishna Engineering Works offers a wide range of products including Flexible Packaging, Paper, Tire-Cord, and Textile Machinery, Slitter Rewinder Machines, Coating Machines, and many more. The company's products are widely used in industries like packaging, printing, paper conversion, and textiles.

[0bticeo]

lurk | feyd rautha

part four of five. (part 1.) (part 2.) (part 3.)

summary:

“i need you,” he rasps, etching a molten kiss on the dip of your collarbone. “need to get rid of his taste.”

his hand crawls up your thighs, the folds of your velvet dress gliding against your skin. you can still hear the soldiers outside, feel the low thrum of their clamour in your very bones. should you focus, you’ll perceive the baron’s suspensors sucking away at gravity, the servants’ roaming about, feet like neelde-ants on cold marble.

anyone could catch you.

“what are you waiting for, my lord na-baron?”

wc: 1.6k

tw: political machinations, reader being inches away from killing everyone in the damn place including feyd, kissing, biting, mentions of breeding, possessive & needy feyd, sub!feyd, oral (fem receiving), fingering, hallway sex.

you’re getting tired of dreams. 

there’s terrible, terrible purpose dripping from their edges. you see it all - snapshots of horror, fractals reflecting endless bodies dropping to the ground. sixty one billion people, dead. ten thousand worlds burning, the universe begging for respite under your brother’s crushing fist.

paul. little mouse, whom you’ve shielded all your life, whom you’ve sparred with, crysknife pressed against his throat, his shield a feeble protection against your blade. something shatters. blades. so many of them. your blade. jamis’ blade. feyd-rautha’s blade. 

your dream has you standing in what you know to be the emperor’s ship, shrouded in bene gesserit veils. two silhouettes stand against the bleeding sun of arrakis. 

the realisation embeds itself in your mind, marble-carved. fate is looking down upon you and tells you: one of them dies in the end.

when you wake up, there’s a scream dying on your tongue.

you don’t know where you are. you don’t know where you are, why your side is on fire, why you taste blood in your mouth.

slowly, you rise, heart beating furiously, breath laboured. i must not fear. your fingers dig your sheets. the infirmary. fear is the mind killer. you close your eyes, will yourself to breathe. fear is the little-death that brings total -

a hand settles over yours, bone pale fingers weaving with yours. warmth settles on your shoulder. you relax, ever so slightly, leaning into the touch, burying yourself in the crook of feyd-rautha’s neck. he’s all sharp edges, honed to deadly perfection. in the quiet midnight of geidi prime, he softens for you.

“what troubles you?”

you wonder if you should tell him. of the golden path, paved with blood, so much blood it clings to the soles of your feet, you see it rise, rise, eager to seize you-

a low mumble of your name.

“dreams are messages from the deep,” you whisper in the crook of his neck. 

his hold tightens over you, brings you closer to the warmth of him, thumb running over the smooth skin of your belly, over your unborn child growing there. from your position, you can feel it, the way his vocal cords vibrate. he’s purring, soothing you bit by bit.

you tilt your head, hand coming to cradle his face, knuckles brushing against his cheek.

“i should be plotting your death.”

a low chuckle, a flash of almost eagerness in his eyes.

“i don’t doubt you will.”

his hand wraps around your neck, resting on the soft skin of your throat, bringing you closer to him, shifting your bodies until you’re straddling him, arms wrapping around his neck. you could strangle him. you could use the voice. ask him to take the knife you know rests on the bedside and slit his own throat like the harkonnen beast he is. use it yourself.

but you’ve sealed your fate the moment you stepped on arrakis. so instead, you let the darkness swallow your confession.

“i don’t want you to die.”

“i won't,” he mumbles against your lips, words like an oath as he kisses you.

they say the beat of a butterfly wing can cause a tempest on the other side of the globe. you wonder what tempest will be borne out of the fury beating in your chest. here goes: morning comes. the spice rules it all, even the baron’s affairs, so he gathers his troops to make a planetary governor out of feyd-rautha. 

the glorious sun of geidi prime shines its lifeless light upon you all. 

the finest harkonnen soldiers, ruthless hounds barking their sovereign’s name in fervent adoration, thousands upon thousands of ants stretching as far as you can see. they corrupt it all the harkonnen, eating away at the horizon. waiting. 

you’re waiting, too, hands folded before you, lone silhouette clad in dark robes, veils like a mask before your face. bene gesserit, the court calls you. 

not quite.

by bearing feyd-rautha a child, you’ve gained a modicum of respite. the bene gesserit will spare you, the mother of their precious kwisatz haderach. they will keep your survival a secret and bury it behind inscrutable eyes.

plans within plans within plans. you’re a pawn in the baron’s meaty hands, he’s a pawn in yours, and the bene gesserit have been pulling the strings for ninety generations. 

your gaze flits to the scene before you. feyd-rautha harkonnen, clad in dark leathers, silver embroidery like pauldrons over his shoulders. the mass of his uncle hovers above him, a hovering beast eager for power. two meaty hands encompass his face - absolute disgust coils in your chest as you watch vladimir harkonnen kiss his nephew. he kisses back. a show of dominance.

the soldiers howl his name, earth trembling under the clamour. they salute, arms crossed over their heads, a living, breathing organism, synchronicity at its peak. 

arrakis has a new ruler. 

a hand clasps over your wrist, drags you away from the adoring masses, in the sweet darkness of the palace’s hallways. you’re pinned against the wall, and feyd-rautha looms before you, terrible hunger burning in his eyes. slowly, he lifts your veils, high enough to bare your mouth to him. 

“my lord-”

you’re cut off by his lips on yours, eager, desperate, savouring you like fine arrakean spice-wine. 

“i need you,” he rasps, etching a molten kiss on the dip of your collarbone. “need to get rid of his taste.”

his hand crawls up your thighs, the folds of your velvet dress gliding against your skin. you can still hear the soldiers outside, feel the low thrum of their clamour in your very bones. should you focus, you’ll perceive the baron’s suspensors sucking away at gravity, the servants’ roaming about, feet like neelde-ants on cold marble.

anyone could catch you.

“what are you waiting for, my lord na-baron?”

he nips at your ear, grin sharper than his blade as he sinks to his knees. slowly, intimately, a shadow curling at his mistress’ feet. he unravels you, nails raking up your thighs, liquid desire burning in their path. 

“eyes on me.”

your eyes snap open. oh, he’ll be the death of you, with the way his eyes freeze you in place, willing, begging for his touch. you shiver, a low, needy sound escaping you. 

he grins, a flash of black teeth against the liquid darkness of your robes. shadows will swallow you whole - he will swallow you whole. already is, with the way he trails kisses up your thighs, teeth sinking in the meat of it until blood drips on your skin. 

he’s lapping at it, hands wrapping around your leg, spreading you apart inch by precious inch until he fits the broad expanse of his shoulders in the space he’s carved for himself. he raises his head, leans his cheek against your thigh, nuzzling in its softness. there’s blood coating his lips, sweet like forbidden fruit, and an unquenchable fire in his eyes.

“exquisite,” he purrs, nail digging in the blossoming mark he’s left, until your hips seek his touch.

he puts his mouth to you. you bite your lip, hard, as you feel him tease you, tongue lapping at you like sweet pomegranate, skilled fingers coaxing pleas for more. the cold of his silver ring has you keening - you're melting against him.

it’s obscene, how the only sounds you can hear are the pleased moans of your lover, the squelching of your juices dripping down his face, his wrist. it’s too much, too fast - your nails dig into his nape, bringing him closer. fucker’s purring, hands digging in your hips. he’s making a feast out of you, and you’ve never seen prettier sight. 

feyd-rautha, kneeling at your feet, a pretty, pretty blush dusting his cheeks, his soft mouth on your cunt, ruining you as he denies himself sweet release.

“feyd-”

a jolt - he’s just nipped your clit, and you’re falling apart with his name on your tongue, burning, melting in the pits of desire. you grow boneless, faltering on unsteady legs. he pulls you to him before you can fall, kissing you, moulding his devouring mouth to yours. 

distantly, you register that he’s breathless, that he’s pressing you against him, that you can feel the dampness at the front of his pants.

his voice is a low, needy rasp.

“you taste divine, my dear.”

there’s a commotion. someone, somewhere, is calling. a servant. a feast is prepared. blasphemy - the baron is a beast, and he will not have his nephew leave without obscene amounts of food. good. it leaves room for you to plan - you’re running out of precious, precious time. there are too many variables for you to act alone, yet you are.

you’re sitting at feyd-rautha’s side at a banquet table. on you watch, a mockery of a bene gesserit, nails digging in your palm. there’s a knife before you, of course. the baron’s sitting at the head of the table, stuffing himself until he’s about to burst. 

repulsive.

you could do it now. put an end to the harkonnen, avenge your family. plunge that knife in the baron’s throat and watch him die like an animal. 

but revenge is best served cold. you remember princess irulan being seated in front of you. you remember the emperor at the head of the table. you remember his knife slicing through unknown poultry. a falcon. he’s doomed your family to death. 

the emperor is old. paranoid. anybody would’ve seen that the atreides were far too loyal to even consider rebelling against him, rising influence or not. someone convinced him otherwise. the truthsayer, reverend mother gaius helen moriam. 

you take a bite of your own meal and find it tasting like ash. the only dish you yearn for is revenge.

you want the baron dead. you want the emperor stripped of his power. you want to watch the split second of horrified realisation on the reverend mother's face. 

you want them to burn, and burn they will.

taglist: @kpopnstarwars @moonsoulk @alexandrainlove @saturnhas82moons @coureurs-de-bois9 @kamcrazy123 @beebeechaos @avidreader73 @yzuposts @jaiuneamesolitaiire

[yawnderu]

K-9 — Simon "Ghost" Riley x Reader | Chapter III

Sick as a dog, and just as vicious.

1 2 3 4 5

You work magic with your hands

Or

The human body is able to withstand extreme damage.

"Medic!" Price's voice boomed across base, heavy footsteps following right after. The door slammed open before you could even get up, Gaz and Simon carrying a bloodied Soap. They set him down on the medical bed and you got up, rushing to them and examining the damage.

It's incredible, really, how the human body can withstand extreme conditions and stay resilient, such as a gunshot that had blood leaking out of Johnny's head like a faucet.

"Out. With me, Simon." You bark out orders and the men obey, Price patting your shoulder twice, the look in his eyes saying much more than words. Fix him.

"Apply pressure on the wound." Simon nods his head, quickly discarding his skull gloves as his bare hands apply pressure on Johnny's chest to limit the blood loss. You felt a weak pulse earlier, yet the sound of the EKG machine as soon as you hook him up served as reassurance. You immediately put on your gloves, not bothering to hook him up to an IV to avoid wasting time. His heartbeat is weak, but he's still here.

Your hands get to work immediately as Simon begins to treat the wound on Johnny's chest, a much simpler injury than the bullet in his head. You bring the light closer to his head, able to make out the familiar glint of the bullet encrusted in his brain.

Twelve hours. That's how long it took to complete surgery on Johnny to remove the bullet in his head and stabilize him. He's a lucky motherfucker; the base of his brain and spinal cord being completely untouched, allowing him to be part of the 10% of people who have survived a headshot.

Your knees give out right after you make sure Johnny is all covered up, exhaustion and stress along with the disappearing adrenaline finally catching up to you. Strong arms wrap around your torso to prevent you from falling— Simon, who refused to leave your office, staying awake those twelve hours in case his help was needed.

"With you, lass." He reminds you, helping you stand up and guiding you to your chair, crouching down to get a better look at you.

"Need a cuppa?" He asked gently, the back of his hand making contact with your forehead to check for your temperature.

"Fucking brits..." You grumble, tired eyes looking down at him, the way his gaze softens and the corners of his mouth tilt up into a small smile, a deep laugh escaping out of his lips for a second.

"Some coffee?" You nod your head, hands going under your glasses to gently rub your eyes as you struggle to stay awake. He gets up, hand on your shoulder squeezing softly to make you look up at him.

"I'll go tell that lot Johnny made it, think you can stay awake until they're here?" His words had hints of teasing despite the concern in his eyes, only turning away once you nodded your head. You got up from the chair, walking over to the medical bed and looking at Johnny's unconscious body. His heart beat was stable, at the very least.

"I miss you, Johnny." Your hand reaches out to hold his, squeezing softly before you bring it to your lips and plant a soft kiss on his knuckles, slowly putting his hand back on his stomach. As annoying as he can be, he feels like a younger brother, someone you'd lay down your own life for with no hesitation, though that secretly goes for the rest of the team.

You take a step back when you hear footsteps approaching, pretending to fix the new IV injected to him.

"Doc." Price greets, walking over to you and looking down at Johhny. Bruised and bloody, but alive.

"Knew I made the right choice with you." His heavy hand pats your shoulder, managing to offer you a smile despite all the stress he was in, not knowing whether or not one of his boys was going to make it.

"I'm honored, Captain." He could hear the appreciation under the layer of sarcasm.

"I don't know when he's going to wake up, but there wasn't any damage on the frontal lobe or top of the brain, so probably not gonna have brain damage either... not that it'd make much of a difference." You drift off, eyebrows furrowing slightly as you think back on the twelve hours that just passed, the deep chuckle escaping the captain turning your attention back to him.

"Good. Go rest, Gaz and I will take turns watching over him." You simply nod, turning away to leave and patting his arm gently as you walk past. A small smirk sets on your lips when you feel the muscle, quickly leaving the office and going to your quarters. You barely manage to remove the bloodstained white coat before you collapse in bed, any thoughts about what happened and the coffee Simon was making for you completely forgotten as you finally drift off to sleep.

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[lipglossanon]

Crossing the Frame

Infected!Leon S. Kennedy and fem!reader

Warnings: 18+ MDNI, one shot, horror, body horror, unwanted insemination, OC, mentions of blood/death/bodily harm, vomiting, reader called chief

not proofread; inspired by the Alien series; something before October—might add more later idk

title from Crossing the Frame by Coheed and Cambria

It’s sudden. One moment you’re empty, a void unto yourself. The next, your eyes are open, unseeing as your brain begins to think again, thoughts filling the crevices of your mind. 

You cough violently, curling onto your side, an homage to your fetal beginnings. Pressing a hand to your abdomen, a skittering fear runs down your spine like spider legs. 

Something isn’t right. 

Closing your eyes, you struggle to remember why you’re here. You were to help an agent… one who had been infected by the Plagas strain. Kennedy, you think. The president’s lapdog. 

Pain radiates through your pelvis and you gasp wetly. It needs out, you think. Followed immediately by, what needs out? What’s inside you? Bile rises in your throat. 

Weak as a newborn kitten, you raise up onto your knees. Turning your face away, you gag and cough, a mix of stringy bile and saliva spilling from your mouth. 

A headache throbs behind your right eye; slipping your glasses off, you cup the socket and gently rub your eyelid. It doesn’t ease the pain—but it doesn’t make it worse—so you give up and put your glasses back on. 

Finally looking around, you take in the mess of what was once the lab. Beakers and burners are overturned, unknown liquid spilling off the surface and onto the floor; papers are scattered about like someone just tossed them before leaving. Another searing cramp makes you double over even further, breasts pressing against the tops of your thighs, hands hugging your stomach as you cry out painfully. 

Once you can breathe without wanting to die, you ease back up, slowly climbing to your feet so you can find help. There’s no one left in the lab and the door’s opened halfway, showcasing an empty hallway as far as you can see. 

Shuffling steps outside halt your own progress—hip digging into a counter as you freeze in place. 

“Hello?” Your voice cracks and you have to clear your throat—the dry heaving from earlier making it sting. “Hello?!”

A rattling breath makes you duck behind the counter—unable to see—only able to hear the door being pressed fully open while those same footsteps shuffle inside. 

“Hello,” a voice whispers, “are you in here, Chief?”

You slowly arch your neck up to peek over the counter. An intern, Andy you recall, looks around the room, hand cupping his side where blood has stained through his lab coat. Pushing yourself up, you use the counter as a crutch in order to stand in place. 

“Thank god! You’re alive!” He smiles, hazel eyes tired and strained. 

“What happened?” You rasp, swallowing to smooth your vocal cords. “I think I have a concussion.”

“The subject escaped. Leon Kennedy,” the intern steps closer, wincing with the movement. “He was infected with—“

“Plagas, I remember that,” you gesture to his side. “What about this? Or why’s the room trashed? I think I’m—“

Infected. The word curdles on your tongue like spoiled milk. 

“I woke up already bleeding,” he moves his coat and shirt aside, showing off the padded gauze and tape keeping it bandaged. “I think I got cut from the window overlooking the observation room. It shattered when he broke out.”

You nod, short flashes of memories coming back to you.  It was early morning when they brought Kennedy in for observation. Dressed in only a hospital gown, his skin looked sallow and washed out. The bags under his eyes made the blue that much darker. His hair seemed to be the only thing that defied his poor health, looking sleek and shiny under the fluorescent lights. 

The examiner had the agent remove the upper half of his gown, letting everyone see the raw and irritated scar from the machine that supposedly destroyed the embryo in his chest. X-rays proved there were remnants clinging to his chest wall—the reason why he had been called in to your lab. 

Being the chief medical officer in charge, you had sat quietly in the audience chamber above the room—watching as the scientists and doctors argued and questioned Kennedy, who only had the scattered notes from his mission to really backup any of his claims. 

They injected him, you remember suddenly. He had reacted negatively, body jerking and twitching before he began to scream incoherently, voice raising in pitch until your vision wavered. The glass splintered and rained down on the room, slicing anything in its path.

The alarm began to blare and you locked eyes with what used to be Agent Kennedy, black washing out his sclera and dark veins overtaking his skin like twisting vines. 

“Are you okay?”

Shoulders jerking upward, you shake your head before looking back up into Andy’s drawn face. 

“Yeah, just trying to make it all make sense.”

“Yeah,” he sighs, clenching his teeth suddenly. “Fuck, I fixed myself up as well as I could, but I definitely need to get help.”

“Of course. Are we still under lockdown?”

“Uh huh,” he sucks in his top lip. “It’s why I came this way. I was hoping to find your keycard.”

In case you were dead rings as loud in the room as if he had spoken it. Reaching down, you hold up your lanyard. 

“Lucky for you, I didn’t lose it.”

You both smile even if it’s an empty consolation. 

“Do you need help walking?” You point to his side. 

“I’ll be alright as long as we don’t have to run.”

Both of you know if it comes to that, neither of you would be making it out alive. 

Slowly making your way out of the specimen room—why were you even in this room?!—the intern follows behind you, quiet and careful. The two offices you pass by are empty, not a pencil out of place. The hallway itself doesn’t look like anything is off. A blaring light by the exit’s the only thing to signify anything is awry. 

Leaving the safety of the hallway, you hold the door open for Andy, letting it fall shut once he’s past the threshold. 

“Do you know why I was in this section?” You turn to him, keeping pace instead of walking out in front. 

He shrugs, “Everyone kinda went their own way once he got out. I think someone said you needed to grab the data on the latest test batch?”

You pat your pockets and find a small thumb drive in your overcoat. 

“Okay…” 

You frown down at it, mind still entirely blank. 

“He—“ Andy cut himself off. 

“He what?”

“The subject followed after you. I don’t know if they stopped him or anything like that. I kinda passed out,” he gave you a bitter smile. “I guess at least I wasn’t outright killed.”

“So he killed people?”

Andy nodded, “We’ll pass a few colleagues. Rose and Dr. Kline. Others are too bad to guess.”

You feel a pang of sadness, “That’s awful.”

The intern doesn’t say anything, eyes cast down to the floor. You let the conversation go, splitting your attention between your surroundings and the young man walking next to you. Surprisingly, it’s an uneventful walk out of the research and development area. But once you meet the intersection between it and medical, everything changes. 

The door slides open with a low hiss and you freeze, the salty tang of copper wafting out. The stench of blood and god knows what dogs your footsteps as you guide Andy through the carnage littering the floor. 

“It’s so much worse than before,” he whispers. “It’s like he came back.”

Fear makes your legs weak but you press on, eyes darting around for any movement, ears straining for any odd sounds. The alarm system wails in the distance, amber emergency lights pulsing in time with the sound. You eventually pass by Dr. Kline and his assistant Rose, mutilated in ways that turn your stomach. Andy touches your arm and you push past the bodies, eyes eagerly seeking out the red EXIT sign attached to the stairwell door. 

You touch the handle and a searing bolt of agony rips through your abdomen, like something with a mouthful of teeth is shredding your uterus. It hurts so much you can’t even make any noise, collapsing onto your knees, hands wrapped around your middle like it will stave off the pain. 

“Chief?!”

Andy tries to kneel but groans, legs shaking as he rights himself, hand grasping your shoulder. 

“I can’t,” his voice breaks, “I can’t lift you, Chief. Please, stand up. We’re almost out.”

You open your mouth to reply and puke, bile rushing up from your stomach to stain the floor. Eyes watering, you dry heave for far longer than last time until your body has nothing left to give. 

“Please,” the young man whimpers, “I don’t wanna be alone.”

A shaky hand reaches up to pat the one he has in your shoulder, “I-I’m okay. I think.. I think I’m sick. I don’t know if it’s safe to even be around me.”

Standing up, he doesn’t pull away. 

“We both probably are,” he mumbles, eyes drifting to the door. “But we gotta try.”

You press a hand to your abdomen, “No, Andy. I think I’m—“

“A host.”

A new voice cuts in—low, humorous. You both turn, the young man beside you grabbing your bicep with an iron grip. It takes a second to spot who spoke. Eyes partially concealed by blood soaked fringe peek from around the corner, an off shoot hallway in the opposite direction of the emergency exit.

One hand with abnormally long fingers, creeps over the edge like a deformed spider. The nails look like sharp little talons, and what skin you can see is dark, dry and scaly. 

“He’s, he’s not—oh god, what is he?” Andy whispers, and you shake your head. 

“I don’t know.”

Kennedy laughs and it floods your body with chills. 

“I’ve evolved,” he speaks, voice normal in complete opposition to his looks. “She will be, too.”

Andy subtly tugs your arm and you both take a step back, eyes never wavering from the eerie stare from the creature in front of you. A chittering noise comes from Kennedy and his other hand joins the first, splaying wide against the wall. 

“It was so easy to make you a host,” he laughs again, eyes glittering. “And you didn’t even lose any blood.”

The pair of you make another shuffling step back before those dark eyes narrow. You snap your CAC off of your lanyard clasp and press it against the hand Andy’s using to grip your arm. 

“Take it,” you hiss under your breath. “Go first, get to the containment ward. If everything’s gone to shit, activate the evacuation code and seal yourself off from here.”

“What about—“

Tears drip from your eyes, “I’m contaminated. Please, Andy, just get out of here. I’ll try my best to buy you time.”

“Okay,” he lets out a wet sounding breath. “Okay, Chief. I-I’ll do what I can. Thank you.”

You nod and he finally lets go of you, the heat at your side slipping away. Listening to his shuffling steps, you hear the security pad beep, followed by the stairwell door swinging open. It closes with a soft snick, but you don’t turn away from the pair of eyes in front of you.  

“You knooow you can’t stop me,” that chittering noise again making you realize that’s his laugh. “But it’s sweet of you to give him a head start.”

The cramping in your abdomen is beginning to flair up again but you grit your teeth and take a half step back. You continue walking backwards until your back bumps the door. Hating having to lose sight of him, you turn your sights on the security pad. You make quick work of it, you pull the lab ID card from your pocket, slide it into the slot, and snap off the bottom. The pad blares red—ERROR repeating itself across the small screen. 

“Do you think that’ll stop me?”

He murmurs directly behind you, raising the hairs on the back of your neck. 

You’re too scared to turn around. 

“Probably not, but it invokes a building wide security warning and shutdown,” voice trembling, you reply. “It also alerts the Agency that there’s been a breach.”

He hums, “Clever. Not that it matters.”

Those hands of his, basically scaly claws at this point, wrap their disjointed fingers across your waist and interlock—trapping you in place. The parasite in your body trashes wildly, cramps perforating your abdomen until you become only pain; your legs tremble, weight now held up by the monster’s hands—fear overriding the incessant will to live. 

“It needs out,” he croons, a strange clicking echoing behind you—like mandibles, you think almost deliriously. “Doesn’t it?”

Glancing down, you catch a segmented tail slipping away, tipped with a hardened exoskeleton that looks sharp enough to pierce. Gray begins to creep into your vision as your legs fully give out, Kennedy’s odd hands catching you underneath your breasts, pressing on your ribs so hard you feel the muscles shift.

You’re able to catch sight of his mutated face before passing out; too horrified to scream, you welcome the reprieve of inky darkness. 

[phoenixblaze1412]

HCs for reader and Dottore who have a child pls? - 🐓

Having a child of his own was a topic that Dottore rarely talks about. He already has his segments of different timelines and ages, why would he need a child when he can create a child segment of himself?

During Pregnancy

Dottore didn't expect for you to waltz into his lab, hug him from behind and suddenly announce that you're pregnant with him going to be a father soon. Even the segments stopped working on their tasks as they stared at you in shock.

You were shocked to see the doctor faint and fell to the floor, the vials he was holding shattered when he dropped it. You were panicking the whole day while the segments reassured you that Dottore will be fine.

The news of your pregnancy eventually reached the ears of the other harbingers. Most of them congratulated you while some, Pantalone mostly, just teased Dottore at how a mad scientist like him could be able to create an infant properly instead of creating it in a lab.

Regrator even gifted him with books like 'Parenting 101', 'How to care for an infant', 'How to be a good father and husband'. Dottore was definitely pissed about it.

The whole pregnancy progress actually went smoothly. With your husband as a doctor and scientist himself, he immediately has a medicine for any pain or cramps that you are feeling.

The only thing Dottore couldn't handle well was your cravings and mood swings.

Sure he experiments on a lot of things, humans and machines for example. But he doesn't experiment on meals. He and his segments could only watch in shock as you eat a Jueyun Chili popsicle. You literally just froze the damn ingredient and stuck a popsicle stick on it.

"Are you sure you're supposed to be eating something spicy while pregnant? I don't think that's good for the baby, love."

"If you don't shut the fuck up, I will stick this up your ass."

He immediately turned and walked away when he saw you bite a large chunk of the food, proving you weren't bluffing. He decided to just let you be, you would come to him later and ask for affection anyways.

Whenever Dottore is busy and can't be by your side, Pantalone is there to be your company at the time. Pantalone would literally spoil you, if you ask him anything you want, he only need to snap his fingers and you immediately get the thing you asked. Dottore didn't liked it though.

"Come now, doctor. She told me you weren't letting her have what she wants most of the time."

"That's because I'm doing it for both her and the baby's health. Besides, she is my wife, Regrator. Go fuck someone and make them pregnant then you'll come to experience what I'm going through."

During Labor

When your time for labor came, Dottore was the one to personally help you deliver the baby. He doesn't trust any other doctors or midwifes. Besides, his segments are also there to assist him.

What he didn't expect though is for you to crack Delta's fingers from gripping too hard. Strangled Gamma when he encouraged and told you how easy it is to just push the baby, when it's not. Even punched Alpha to the gut when he tried to calm you down. Omega and Theta had to hold you down by grabbing each of your arm so you wouldn't hurt anymore segment.

What surprised him even more was when you yelled out curses and threats towards him.

"Just one more push, darling."

"I'm already pushing you fucking cocksucker! If you weren't such a whining bitch, I wouldn't be in much pain! I'll fucking chop your fucking dick off and feed it to the rishboland tigers!"

Dottore could only stand in shock as he held the baby in his hands. He knows he's supposed to be happy since he's holding his child in his arms but your threat made him froze in fear and possibly traumatized.

Epsilon and Sigma gently took the crying infant in his grasp before cutting off the umbilical cord and went to clean the blood off.

In the end, both you and Dottore were tired from the whole event but you two happily held your newborn baby.

Aftermath

Your child was loved by not just the segments, but the entire fatui harbingers as well. Pierro and Pulcinella becoming the grandfathers while the rest of the members are either the aunts or the uncles.

Dottore actually did read the books Pantalone gave him and surprisingly, he's doing great.

Whenever you or Dottore are busy, Dottore would let a segment or two babysit your child. He doesn't trust his fellow harbingers when it comes to taking care of his kid.

One time he let Arlecchino babysit, he came back to see both her and Columbina dressing up your child like it was a doll. It was cute, from what the damselette said, but he prefer his child wearing the same color palette as his.

He is not going to let 'Uncle Childe' babysit. He could already tell that the ginger war freak would try to teach your infant how to hold a weapon at a young age.

You had to convince your husband to not be too overprotective of your child and let the others at least spend a bit of time with 'mini Dottore', Sandrone was the one who gave the nickname.

Your baby's first word was 'Lonnie'. Both you and Dottore had to chase Pantalone around the palace for him being your child's first words instead of Mama or Dada. Luckily their second word was Dada, you were a bit disappointed it wasn't you.

Your child has Dottore's soft, blue, curly hair meanwhile their eye color was the same shade as yours. The only problem was they had the same sharp teeth as your husband. You had to endure all the biting from both your child and husband.

Dottore would be the one who teach your child how to read and learn. He lets you teach them how to write, his own handwriting is barely understandable and he doesn't even have the patience for it.

You have a family picture of you three and another with all the segments placed on your bedside drawer.

There was another time where you and Dottore let the segments take care of your child while you both go out to the city and enjoy dinner together.

You both came back to see your child asleep in Omega's arms while the other segments were trying to wipe away the colorful doodles your child drew on their faces.

Since Dottore is the last one to go to bed due to him wanting to finish his work for the day, he would expect to see you and your child on the bed asleep already.

He would lay down beside you, your child in the comfort of your arms as you both dozed off to sleep. Dottore could only smile and place a kiss on both of your foreheads before wrapping his arms around your figure and pulling you and your child close to him.

[intheorangebedroom]

Tonight you belong to me, prologue

Summary: He comes to you every Friday, in a shady motel on the outskirts of town. 

This is the beginning of what you wished had no end.

Pairing: Frankie Morales x fem!Reader (OFC)

Rating: Explicit 🔞

A/N: Happy Frankie Friday, orange besties 🧡 See series masterlist for extensive a/n blurb and especially for trigger warnings. Tread carefully. Ily 🧡 Please be gentle, I'm terrified 🫣

Word count: 5.1k

[series masterlist] * [next]

Prologue: In The Beginning

He comes to you every Friday. 

He gets in after dark. He is gone before dawn. 

In this shady motel on the outskirts of town, where no one will recognise your car. The curtains are yellow, and the carpet is brown. There’s a dollar store painting of the Appalachian above the bed, and the tap runs either trickling and scalding or high pressure and cold. 

You hated that in particular, in the beginning. Now you don’t care. You don’t wash him off your skin anymore. Not until you’ve got no other choice. 

Because he can’t mark you, you’d been firm on that point, he likes to come on your skin. 

When he’d finally spoke, that very first time, he’d told you he was Frankie, but you assume it’s not his real name. Which is fine, you didn’t give him your real name either. 

“Frankie” had been far subtler than you, regretful, perhaps, you like to entertain the delusion, when he’d hinted that you couldn’t leave any trace on his body. 

And, in the beginning, you couldn’t imagine that it would ever matter. 

You were wrong. 

You were wrong about a lot of things, in the beginning. 

—

Friday night. Again. 

The swinging door creaks on its hinges to let in the regulars at random intervals. Mostly men, mostly middle-aged, mostly unshaven. Mostly clad in the working-class uniform of jeans, boots and t-shirt. Few of them sit around the round wooden tables. The bar isn’t large, there’s only four of those.  

When they come in small parties, the men favour the two pools on the right. They’re lined with blue felt. The casing is made of plywood. No one ever plays darts, no one ever feeds the jukebox. Its electric cord lays unplugged on the floor, coiled like a sad sagging tail. 

If they walk in alone, they tend to sit at the bar. Head turned toward the giant television screen hung on the wall to their left, where younger men in more colourful uniforms fight, run, kick or throw balls in all shapes and sizes. Its noise is at the forefront, the middle-aged men’s conversations a low humming sound that falls into the background. 

The long and angled bar itself takes up most of the rectangular room’s space. The counter is stripped-down to the bare minimum. Stainless steel, easy to clean, practical. Four beer taps and a gambling machine and beyond the counter, a large mirror with three rows of dusty liquor bottles. 

Food is served, occasionally, as evidenced by the paper napkins dispensers and the two yellow and red plastic condiment bottles on each table. 

The barman runs the place on his own. You drink here every Friday evening, and you’ve never seen more than six customers at once, you included. Admittedly, you might not be very observant. 

Being observant requires endurance, far more than you possess and are willing to deploy and direct towards others. You’re not selfish, not in the least. But you’re tired. You’ve been tired for years. There’s no rational explanation for your exhaustion. No honourable, awe-inspiring, valid ground. You don’t even know what wears you out. It might be sadness, disappointment, or boredom. Or all three in equal parts. All you know is that, come Friday night, your head needs the support of the gray wall behind you.

The creaking noise on your left signals the arrival of another customer, stomping in with a sure gait. Your eyes stay shut. You don’t come to the very aptly named Hole in The Wall seeking the company of other people, whoever they may be. 

You come here to hide for a few hours, between the styrofoam ceiling and the dusty carpeted floor. To drink your week away in peace, but not in nerve-racking silence. Alcohol, you found out at a young age, has interesting properties: it blurs out the sharp edges of your dark thoughts in just the right amount. 

Back in spring, when you stepped in here for the very first time, you looked comically out of place in your corporate attire, and you did raise quite a few eyebrows from the other patrons. Five months later, they must have learned to see past the charade of your overpriced clothes, because none of them pays you any mind anymore. It’s better than anonymity: it’s casual indifference.

You loosen your grip around your tall cocktail glass and let the condensation drip down onto the cardboard coaster. Reluctantly, you lift your weary eyelids to locate the square napkin lying somewhere on the table and dry your fingertips on it.

That’s when you see him taking a seat at the counter, directly across from your small table. 

Years from now, you will still remember the precise circumstances of your first, brief encounter, even though you’re not fully paying attention yet. Nothing indicates tonight will be any different. Nothing suggests you are about to live through a pivotal moment in your existence.

Details will stand out, however. Mostly visual, surprisingly, given the dim lighting of the place. The back of his trucker hat, midnight blue plastic mesh, flattening the dark curls on his nape. The washed out denim of his shirt, worked-in, greenish in the diffuse artificial light, pulled taut across his back, as he sits facing away from you. 

The square shape of his shoulders is backlit against the bar’s mirror. Your empty gaze finds the solid slope of his broad silhouette, and you let it rest there, lazily following his movements whenever he picks up his glass. It’s the same comfort you find when you rest your empty head against the hard wall. It’s aimless, inconsequential.

Later, on different kinds of Friday nights, the sight of his muscles bunching as he tugs off his shirt will bring you back to this very moment. The thought will reshape into a sharp, wistful ache deep inside your heart. What would have happened, to you, to him, if he had chosen to stop for a drink at another bar, somewhere further down the road? What if you had done the same, back in April? 

For now, your mind is blessedly blank.

Does he catch your reflection in the mirror? Does he feel your gaze on the back of his head? 

After a while, how long, you cannot tell, he pivots slowly on his stool, grounded and dense. Slowly, like a mountain would if a mountain came to life and decided to walk into the ocean. He doesn’t turn around completely, just enough to look at you, one of his arms still propped on top of the counter. 

The right side of his face is darkened by the shadow from the brim of his hat, but you can make out the pronounced crease in his brow. His eyes are black, and unfathomable, like the ocean at night, but alight with a bright glimmer. They find yours instantly. 

Something shifts inside your rib cage, something close to the heart, close to pain. 

You feel exposed, entirely bare. Your breathing subsides, you cannot move, trapped in a nightmare-like stretch of time as he glares down at you, immobile, impressive, gigantic. Dark eyes boring into yours. You’re drowning in them. 

You don’t want it to end. 

Inevitably, he breaks eye-contact, and swivels back toward the mirror. He sits still for a few seconds, before grabbing his glass to finish his beer in long gulps. 

You watch him lift his hat and brush his hair to the side with a large hand, and he’s out the door less than a minute later, without so much as a glance in your direction, a conscious choice, given the minute proportions of the place. 

He leaves you sitting there, with your brow pinched and your empty drink, struggling to understand the rippling effects of his massive presence on your body and your brain.

You bring your fingers to your chest and rub them over your sternum, where the shifting sensation continues to prickle. 

Neither a second drink nor a third helps dull the feeling, but a fourth one is not an option if you want to get home without a DUI. 

It follows you into the darkness of the deserted parking lot, on the drive home and into the glass prison of your clinically clean apartment. It’s there when you get into bed, when you lie wide awake at 3am next to your sleeping fiancé, and it’s still there when you wake up, hungover and sore, four hours later. 

Nestled between your lungs. The memory of his cold hard stare. Of his soft sad eyes. 

It bypasses your most foolproof diversions of painful pleasure and pleasurable pain. Your attempts at hard work and your compulsive distractions. It robs you of your appetite, of your lucidity, of your ability to rest. It corners you in the first floor toilet of your office building on a Thursday morning, on the verge of a panic attack, until you consider calling your sister for help. 

Ava would figure it out. She’d get you out of that loop in which you’ve locked yourself up, she’d know what to say. With her crude words and her unforgiving formulations, she’d admonish your silly overreaction and dismissively rebuke your daydreams over a mundane interaction, probably throwing in something about your heteronormative fantasies. 

Dude, you’re all worked up because of a staring contest with a rando in a dive bar? she’d say. She’d toss the rhetorical question at your face, you can hear her as if you’ve already sweated through the conversation. 

She’s often harsh but she’s always right. 

And normally, you’d be seeking that out. For your little sister to bully some good sense back into your nebulous brain. 

But something has shifted. 

Dark curls, thick fingers, flexing shoulders. Solid arms. Cold, hard stare. 

He abraded something on the surface of your skin, and you don’t think you’re capable of withstanding Ava’s sarcasm in your current state. 

By the following Friday, you feel so vulnerable you consider going to another place, or not going out at all. 

Only, the alternative is worse. 

You walk into The Hole in The Wall convinced that your unsteady gait is betraying your apprehension, squinting to adjust to the dim light of the place. The bar is nearly empty, as always, save for a couple of bearded graying men you vaguely recall having seen here before. They all look the same to you, anyway. Another thing you hate about yourself.

The barman tells you to sit while he prepares your drink. The gesture is kind but uncustomary, and it only serves to increase your uneasy feeling. 

Within an hour of waiting, because that's what you've been doing, you register with an icy trickle of shame dripping down your sides, you realise he won’t be coming. 

That man’s presence here last week is the very definition of sheer happenstance. Nothing more. Nothing else. If anything, you’ve been a nuisance to him, ogling him while he was simply trying to unwind with an afterwork drink. 

You’ll never see him again. 

And it’s fine. You’ll move on, drift back into drifting, avoiding at all costs to process what happened to you when you met his gaze. The tree hiding the forest. 

When you walk up to the counter to order your second drink, the question slips away from you. 

“Can I have the same thing the man in the trucker hat had last Friday, please?”

The barman looks up at you from the tray of clean dishes he's pulling out of the dishwasher and he huffs. He’s handsome, by most standards, you notice for the very first time. Very tall, and broad, green-eyed with a three-day stubble. He’s probably a couple of years above forty. His head is shaved bald. He’s manly in a burly, albeit fatherly way. 

“Oh sweetheart, d’you know how many guys with a trucker hat I see here every day?”

It’s not meant to make you feel small, his tone is gentle. It’s a straightforward, factual answer. 

“What do you wanna drink?” he asks when you don’t answer. “Tired of that G&T yet? Cos I got good beer. This is a beer place, you know? Wanna try a light blonde, to start? Something stronger? An IPA?”

What do you want. You’ve been drinking gin all your life because that’s what your mother always has. Starting at 5pm in the afternoon. Would you, indeed, like to try a light blonde? Something stronger? An IPA, to start? 

It’s a brand-new world unfurling in front of you, a yellow brick road paved with what-do-you-wants.

“Sure,” you nod, “I can try an IPA.”

—

The barman goes by the name of Mark. He’s also the owner of The Hole in The Wall, you learn. Bought the place two years ago, after a painful divorce. A cliché, he adds, with a charming, self-deprecating smile.

The interaction’s short and altogether not unpleasant, and the beer, to your surprise, is fresh and enjoyable. It’s much tastier, in fact, than the cheap, tepid gin you’ve been sipping so far. It gets you drunk just as fast, but this time when you leave the bar, your mind is quiet, if not at ease. 

The following week, a heatwave hits the Tampa Bay. The melting asphalt sticks to your leather soles, like your sweaty clothes to your clammy skin, like your brooding mood to your dampened dreams. In a couple of days eventually, August will draw to an end, but the summer won’t end with it. It never truly does. It taunts you all year round, a sweltering reminder of how much you hate living here.

And if it wasn’t for the humidity, you’d be jogging the short distance between your car and the cool haven of the air-conditioned bar. 

You push the swinging door forward, eyes shut in anticipation of the blinding darkness and you stand in the entrance for a few seconds. The familiar and comforting smell of moldy dust mixed with beer yeast greets your senses as you take in the chill air grazing your naked arms. 

And then you reopen your eyes. 

He’s here. 

Trucker hat, blue jeans, gray T-shirt. Different clothes, same silhouette. He’s sitting at your table, his position a magnified echo of yours two weeks ago, hand loosely wrapped around his pint, seemingly asleep with his head propped against the wall. 

Mark looks at you and tilts his head in his direction, wiggling an eyebrow with a silent question of “Is this the guy you were asking about?”

Your breathing’s so loud you think everyone must hear it over the droning television. Mark’s brow furrows with incomprehension at the alarm widening your eyes, and you anchor yourself to his face, walking toward him in slow motion, climbing on the first high stool you reach.

“Hey. You ok?”

You stretch your lips in a wince of a smile.

“So? What will it be today? Wanna try a Free Dive? It’s local.”

You nod in silence, but then he grabs a large glass, and you ask tentatively, “Can I have only half a pint?”

Fuck, your mouth is so dry.

Behind you, to your right, you feel more than you hear the man shift in his chair.

Mark sighs, his left hand paused on the tap handle. 

“I don’t have beer glasses this small, sweetheart. Get a pint, the first one’s on me, okay?”

You reiterate your silent nod. He places the beer in front of you, and you swallow the first swigs too quickly. The back of your throat throbs with the fast flowing intake of the cold liquid, or perhaps it’s because of the frantic beating of your heart.

He’s getting up now, you can tell by the friction sound of the chair dragging on the carpeted floor, and your frightened expression turns downright pleading as you hear him close the distance between you.  

He’s at your back, sliding his thick naked arm past yours to return his empty glass to the counter. His movements are slow, deliberate. You get a whiff of his scent, a masculine musk, with a faint smell of laundry detergent, it’s wholesome, safety, comfort. You turn your head. He’s looking at you. Looking at you with intent.

He’s so tall you have to lift your chin to hold his gaze. Hard cold stare, soft sad eyes, it’s swirling violently inside your exhausted chest and he’s leaving again already, walking toward the door like nothing just happened.

He pulls it inward and you watch him exit the bar into the dusk light.

Did he come back for you? Are you going insane? 

Sixty-seven seconds. Sixty-seven seconds is the time it takes you to decide your next move. The one that’s going to forever change your life. The one that could be everything or turn out meaningless. 

“I’ll be right back,” you tell Mark, sliding your handbag on the counter and you stand up to follow him outside.

The sunset sky is a pink shade of orange. Shadows are stretching long onto the asphalt, drawing a distorted world upside-down. 

He’s not here anymore, you waited too fucking long. You quickly scan the parked vehicles on the other side of the road to your right, and the parking lot in front of you, but it’s empty, save for your anthracite sedan, a black truck and what you assume must be Mark’s old SUV, because you see it every week. 

“Fuck,” you breathe out, pressing your fingers to your sternum. 

You look to your left, where the parking ends. There’s a white utility vehicle advertising a plumbing service and a dark blue city car. Beyond them, the lot extends into a narrow stretch of gravel behind the small rectangular building. There’s a pile of junk, and the tailgate of a red truck.

Your hand drops to your side and you start walking toward it, going around the white van. 

He’s there. He’s waiting for you by the front of the red truck, behind the building. His hands propped on his waist, head down, hidden under his cap. 

You keep walking toward him, the sound of your shoes on the dirty ground grating your ears, but you stop short when he raises his head, fuck he looks even taller at this distance, with his elbows spread.

It’s like he senses your apprehension, or perhaps he shares it, because he folds his arms over his chest, hugging himself. 

For the very first time, you can fully make out his face. Strong features, a strong curvy nose, a patchy beard peppering a sharp jaw, and plush lips. Your gaze follows the solid column of his neck down to his suprasternal point peeking above the V-collar of his worn-out t-shirt, before it’s drawn back to his eyes.

He stands there perfectly still for you to detail.

Above you, the sky has turned a rusty blue. The humidity is stifling. It’s Friday the 30th, 2019, 8.17pm.

“What do you want?”

His voice is deep, and low, barely louder than a murmur yet intense, his words full and round. 

The question, however legitimate, hits you square in the solar plexus, right under your aching sternum. You fear that if you don’t speak fast enough, he’ll leave you again, alone with the memory of his soft sad eyes and his hard cold stare. 

“I don’t know,” you whisper, and god, if it’s true, what are you doing here? 

He huffs, and it’s the very sound of disillusion. His eyes grow dimmer, you think you’re not the one darkening them. Unfolding his arms, he removes his hat and takes a step closer, then another. You could touch him, if you reached out with your arm stretched. 

He looks at you like he’s already seen how your story ends. 

You could back away. You don’t. 

He moves slowly, thick body thrumming with undiluted strength and unreleased tension, eyes searching yours, giving you the time to leave, should leaving be what you choose, should you turn around and run before the hanging threat breaks like dark stormy clouds and drench you soaked. 

He slowly moves forward until he’s towering over you, until his chest touches your breasts, until the pilled cotton of his t-shirt catches at the satin material of your blouse. His scent floods your senses, he leans down into the curve of your neck and inhales you there, long, deep, unhurried. You hold your breath, still, in turn, for his exploration, nails digging into your palms, heart tripping.  

And then, he touches you. With his lips, a feather-like caress over the soft skin under your ear. Your eyes flutter shut, your thoughts are suspended.

“This what you want?” he murmurs.

His words sink under your skin, they harden your nipples, raise goosebumps on your nape in the muggy evening heat.  

“Yes.”

The cap falls onto the gravel. His hands go to your hips. Clutching you there with a rough grip and he’s tugging you closer, flush to his chest. He licks up a broad stripe along the line of your throat, pivots with you in his arms and backs you into the side of the truck, you have to grab his forearms to keep your balance. 

A guttural sound catches in his throat, like a grunt he tries to hold back, for your touch, for the taste of your skin, for your pliant docility.

Your head rolls back, you’ve gone weeks without a skin on skin contact, and now this man is hunched over you, his body swallowing yours, this stranger who’s infected your dreams with his cold hard stare and his soft sad eyes, his mouth roaming the expanse of your throat, short beard prickling your skin, and the shifting sensation inside your chest drops to your core where it catches fire.

His kisses are lips, teeth and tongue, rough and scraping at you raw in all the right ways, they trail up along your neck, under your jaw, and when they find your lips, he presses you harder into him. He tastes like beer, unfamiliar, you want to get used to it. 

The seams of your blouse strain when he pulls it out of your skirt with an impatient tug. His hands slither under the hem and find the naked skin of your back. His palms are strong, rugged and scalding and his fingertips calloused, they make your skin sizzle underneath their pressing, crackle like snapping wood, like fireworks at a summer county fair, like sweet candy wrapping. 

You're leaking hot and sticky between your hips, responding with your entire body, opening up for him, letting his tongue in past your lips with pathetic grateful little moans, winding your arms around his shoulders, over the cording muscles of his back, musky sweat dampening his t-shirt. The thick, solid shape of him, that got etched behind your eyelids.

You’re a want and a need and an empty flutter, entangled with him, whoever he may be, his tongue swirling inside your mouth, the scrape of his teeth on your lower lip, his splayed hands covering your back, his knee spreading your legs open. 

He’s voracious, harsh in his own need, snatching from you what you’re already willing to give, angling your head with a sharp pull on your hair to deepen his kiss, grunting his approval when you moan at the sting. 

Arousal keeps dripping down your fold where his thigh prods firm and brawny against the black material of your skirt that hinders the pressure. 

He growls, frustration rumbling low and menacing inside his throat. He grabs your ass and squeezes, thick middle finger pushing against the fabric of your clothes into the cleft between your cheeks and you jolt, leaping forward further into him. His belt buckle bites into the soft flesh of your belly, right where you're burning empty and wanting and shameless for him. You feel him hot and hard against your hip, and he tightens his hold, cages you within him. 

He’s big all over, larger than life proportions, you surrender to the fact with your lust-drunk mind, from the height of his frame to the girth of his sex, from his grip on your senses to the sorrow in his eyes. 

It blooms inside you like pain, blossoms of mahogany red spreading along your limbs in relentless waves, the power he already wields over you and you don’t even know his name.  

You buck between his arms, a first and very last attempt at freeing yourself, unconvincing with the scrap of your fingernails along the pebbled skin of his neck, and you press back into him again, squirming against his throbbing length, offering him some friction.  

He pulls out all of sudden, breaking the kiss, and you're left panting, ankles swaying, you’d drop to the gravel without the support of the truck, still sun-warm in the early evening, yet colder than his feverish body. 

He shakes his head with a silent no, his shoulders heaving, a wordless warning hissed through his clenched bared teeth. The simmering anger under the surface only makes you want him more, the unyielding restraint shining dark in his eyes.  

But it’s over. You know it. He gave you this, and took it back. With shaky hands, you smooth down the wrinkles of your blouse where he’s bunched it in his fists. You lick his taste off your trembling lip. You will not cry. 

He shakes his head again, you watch him through welling tears, confused, eyes flickering between his. 

Behind him, the city car’s engine revs up to a start, aggressive headlights backlighting him. His throat bobs up and down in chiaroscuro as he swallows hard. You know what you must look like in the crude white light. Supplicant, dependent, awaiting. Disheveled by his hand. Tires grate on the gravel as the car reverses away from you into the night, and with it the headlights, leaving you standing in the brown city night, urban semi darkness, and you see him shut his eyes. 

He smiles, a puzzling, sorrowful lift of his plush lips, and a new sort of ache washes over you. You raise forward on your tiptoes to peck a soft kiss at the corner of his mouth. His entire frame quivers for you. A muscle clenches in his jaw, the deepening crease in his brow redefines his traits in shadows. 

He leans into you, like he wants you but he doesn’t want to want you, like he’s giving in but not entirely, because giving in would be the end of him, of you.

The flat of his palm to the swell of your breast, and he kneads your soft flesh, slowly at first, growing urgent. The back of your head hits the truck’s window when he pinches your nipple, hard, with two fingers, and you bite down a moan. 

He’s engulfing you again, lips latched around your other nipple, tongue swirling and licking through your blouse and your thin bra and you hold on to him, you cling to his frame when he bunches up your skirt around your waist, leather boot nudging your foot to the side, cock throbbing on your hip, slick dripping down your walls. 

“Stop me,” his mouth brushes the shell of your ear. It’s not a dare, it’s not a plea, it’s your last chance to back down before the free fall. 

Your pulse stutters, you arch into him without hesitation, but he pins you back against the truck with his chest, cupping you through your underwear and he curses into your neck at the sticky leaking mess he finds there.

Your naked leg hitches up rigid and tense against his leg, curled fingers, curled toes, and he hooks his index into the cotton of your panties. 

A brief stroke of his knuckles into the soft, smooth dip between your sex and your inner thigh, unexpectedly tender, before he parts your soaked lips with his two middle fingers, coating them in your sticky slick desire, and he sinks them inside your empty cunt. 

You crumble around the intrusion, forehead hitting his collarbone, slack-mouthed, a short exhale of a silent “oh.” He brings his left hand to the crown of your head and cradles you there, while his fingers pump in and out of your heat fast and rough. His thumb glides through your folds and starts rubbing at your clit, deft and precise, and you shudder between his arms, you slump into his hold. 

He keeps stroking your hair, gentle soothing sounds murmured into your ear as he fucks you raw with his hand, attuned to your moans and your every reaction, gauging what you can take before his fingers curl deeper inside your cunt, merciless, thumb pressing tight circles on your bud at an increasing pace.  

Your breathing comes in ragged and short while his intensifies. It’s pouring into your ear hot and overwhelming and you’re dissolving. Sweat beading at your temples, heat raising from his exerted muscles. 

You focus on the sensation of his flexing muscles under your clawing hands to stave off your building orgasm, it’s growing bright and blinding, searing and violent but it’s inevitable, and soon, too soon, your release flows hot and sticky into his hand. Your whines resound inside his chest but he keeps going, low husks of shhh, come on now, that’s it, until your trapped body trashes with the overstimulation.  

It’s like he can’t let go, pressing his nose heavily to the side of your face, and you struggle to resurface, blood thrumming in your veins, his angry cock pulsating against your hip. 

You let out a dry sob when he slides out of you and the rubber band of your panties slaps your sensitive skin. You don’t miss the flat drag of his tongue licking your taste off his palm, you furrow your fingers deeper into his arm with a short clench of your eyes. 

“Fuck,” your hear him quietly groan, and his fingers disappear into his mouth. 

You want to stay tucked up against him, curled up into his hold. You could live the rest of your life there, you think, between his hands and his scent, between his chest and his truck. 

You lock your ankles and your knees, hoping they will not fail you and you stand, pushing away from him and into the side of the truck. You readjust your skirt, slide it down, palm it smooth. Brush the damp hair from your forehead with the back of your trembling hand.

In your peripheral, he’s leaning down, picking up his hat from the ground and combing his fingers through his hair before he sets the cap back on his head.

You look up dazed and heavy-lidded and you brace yourself before meeting his gaze, cold hard stare, soft sad eyes, and he says,

“I’m Frankie.”

****

Bonus (having déjà vu? that's normal 😝 Gonna use this gif at the end of every first chapter I manage to yank out of my crazy in love brain):

Taglist (thank you 🧡 if you don't wish to be tagged anymore, just drop me a DM 🧡): @elegantduckturtle @mashomasho @lola766 @nicolethered @littleone65 @the-rambling-nerd @saintbedelia @pedrostories @trickstersp8 @deadmantis @hbc8 @princessdjarin @harriedandharassed @girlofchaos @gracie7209 @mrsparknuts @mylostloversbookmarks @its-nebuleuse @flowersandpotplantsandsunshine @all-the-way-down-here

[pigeonwhumps]

Bruises

Everything taglist: @painful-pooch @i-eat-worlds @a-funeral-romance @rainydaywhump

Whumpuary day 21: bruises | "who are you?" | immortality

After being isolated and treated as a punching bag for far too long, Whumpee runs to the only place they hope they might be able to find safety.

1.7k

CWs: bruises, isolation, team whump, arguments, used as a punching bag, abuse, touch-starved

Whumpee knocks on the small metal door weakly, hand dropping to their side after three small knocks. They stand as upright as possible, hand on the wall to help, arm trembling under the weight, and hope it's enough.

The door opens after what feels like both a minute and an eternity, and Caretaker's there, seemingly unchanged after all this time in her ink-covered dungarees, hair braided and pulled back. She blinks at them, at their bruises and blood, at the patched drawstring bag over one shoulder and their scruffy, dirty clothes and shoes. They blink back, almost too tired to be embarrassed. Almost. How much of a mess must they look in her eyes?

"Whumpee?"

"You said once," they croak, "that if I needed someplace to crash then I could, no questions asked. Does that offer still stand?"

A million emotions flash through Caretaker's eyes at once, and Whumpee can't hope to make out what they are. Then she nods and steps aside.

"Honestly I was more thinking at home, it's more comfortable there, but sure. I have an armchair and snacks. Come on in."

Whumpee ducks their head and limps inside. They'd be happy naked on a cold metal floor so long as Whumper's not there. And she's not, would never be, because the whole reason Caretaker made the offer in the first place was because she didn't trust Whumper, didn't like her. It was why they fought.

She has every reason to say 'I told you so' and probably just as many ways to realise that, but she's not.

Caretaker's studio is nice. The old warehouse it's a part of isn't disguised entirely, old pipes and brickwork visible. Her rented space contains a sewing machine, cutting mat, screen printing press, inks and fabrics and threads of all colours and types, everything Whumpee would expect to see here, had they ever bothered to visit. They clutch the corded handle of their bag tightly. It's their most treasured possession, and this is where it's from.

Caretaker waves a hand in the direction of the armchair. "Get comfy. There's the sink if you need it, and the toilet's at the end of the hall. I'll be back in a few minutes."

Whumpee nods gratefully, waiting until Caretaker's left again before cleaning their hands and face, changing into fleecy pyjamas and curling up on the armchair, Teddy in hand. They avoid looking at themself while they do all of this, their appearance not something they want to dwell on. They must be making the furniture dirty, surely, but Caretaker told them to sit so she can't mind too much.

That makes a change. A change from being somewhere where they apparently matter less than everyone else, everything else, where they're so easy to dismiss that–

They swallow a sob, swallow it right down, keeping their emotions clenched tight inside. Caretaker doesn't need to see this, especially not when it's all their own stupid, naïve fault. Can't see what's right in front of their face sometimes, she said, and she was right. The bruises and cuts all down one side of their body from the last time they were dragged across the floor are proof of that. Fucking hell.

They close their eyes.

Next thing they know, someone's shaking their shoulder, setting their body throbbing. They snap their eyes open as Caretaker's hand withdraws.

Ow.

"Sorry. You still sleep like the dead. You also look like hell, so I've brought you a cup of tea, a pot noodle and some biscuits. Relax. You don't have to tell me what happened, I meant that, but I have some plasters and stuff if you need them?" Whumpee shakes their head. They're not going to use everything of Caretaker's when they can't even replace it, this is already way too much. "Okay. Well, drink, eat, sleep, whatever you need to do. I'll– I'll be here. This time. Okay?"

"It wasn't your fault last time," Whumpee whispers. They'd walked out on Caretaker, not the other way round.

Caretaker hums non-committally, in that way that means she disagrees but doesn't want to risk starting an argument, and Whumpee sighs, sipping at their tea with shaking hands. Chamomile, their favourite. They don't want an argument either. Everything has already hurt more than enough recently.

They eat half of the pot noodle without taking a breath. Then they force themself to put it down and look up at Caretaker, who has a concerned frown on her face as she works, sketching in her book.

"You were right. She was awful."

Caretaker looks up. "Whumper?"

Whumpee nods. All those awful things they'd yelled at Caretaker, because they were stupid and starstruck and couldn't see what was right in front of them. And they can't even excuse any of it, because she was right, entirely right, and she's just let them right back in like the last thing they saw wasn't her looking so completely crestfallen.

"I'm sorry, Caretaker. I was horrible to you and you just... you're too good." Too good for them, too good for this world.

She smiles bitterly. "I wasn't entirely innocent in that fight. You always act like I'm either one or the other. That fight was awful, on both sides, but we're here now. Water under the bridge. Okay?"

"Okay."

"For the record, I did hope I was wrong."

Whumpee nods and dives into the remainder of their pot noodle. Better eat now, while they can. Caretaker goes back to drawing at her standing desk.

After a while, they take a sip of their tea. "It was okay at first. Good, even. She was my mentor. I did what she said, I learned, I got to socialise with her and the rest of her team. I helped. It felt good. But then she... I don't know when it started but..."

They trail off. They don't know when Whumper started using her as a punching bag. It wasn't immediately, but then the tasks got harder and the punishments got harsher and Whumper got angrier and they were isolated and then there they were, a convenient punching bag and... other things. Worse things.

"I couldn't tell. Who would I tell? How would I tell? She threatened me. Threatened you. But I– I– it hurt so much, Caretaker."

"She's the one who left you like this?"

Whumpee nods. It's not the worst they've been, but they don't say that, not trying to garner unmerited sympathy from Caretaker. It's their own fault.

"I'm glad you got out of there."

"She's not the reason it hurt so much."

Caretaker cocks her head in concern. "Her team?"

Whumpee nods. Stops to take a long drink and sinks into their seat, wrapping their arms around themself. This is a lot to think about.

They don't know why they're talking, but they are, and that means thinking about it. About what happened, about everything. And that hurts. It's embarrassing, too, they should've guessed. Caretaker did.

They thought the team was just oblivious. Now they're not so sure.

"My first complaint... it didn't... I made everything worse even when I chickened out. Whumper knew I was going to, even though I didn't. And then I tried again through proper channels and it... Team Leader... he already knew. He asked me to... I showed him! And I got suspended when I wouldn't withdraw it. And Whumper... she... I was stupid, I stayed, I thought I could survive it, I thought I'd be fine but she... and now I'm just a coward. What if she hurts someone else? Or if she makes good on her threat against you? I thought she couldn't but..."

Caretaker stares for a moment and then grins cockily. "Come on Whumpee, you know what I used to do for a living, I'll be fine."

"Don't. Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"Stop acting like it's all fine. It's not, and you don't know that it'll be okay! This isn't an assassination and even if it was you remember how we met! Stop trying to– to– stop lying to me!"

Whumpee takes a deep breath, trying to calm themself. They're not being fair, they know that. She's trying to help. They just– how can she pretend it's all okay when it's so very not?

"Sorry."

Caretaker shakes her head. "I'm sorry. Maybe I'm being a bit flippant. But I will be okay. I'll make sure of it, I promise."

"You'd better."

Whumpee shifts, wincing. Curling up so tight hurts, tugging and pushing at the bruises and burns and cuts, but it's safer. No way to kick your chest in if they can't get to it.

"Are you sure you don't at least want painkillers?"

They shake their head. No drugs. No forced weakness and compliance. No weird hallucinations. No... god knows what. Not today.

"Okay. Try to sleep. If I'm not here when you wake don't panic, I just need to sort some things."

Despite the matter-of-fact soothing layered on top, Whumpee knows that tone of voice, all impending action. And they know what she's planning to do. They look Caretaker directly in the eyes.

"Don't do something you'll regret, Caretaker."

She looks taken aback for a moment at their sudden fierceness but then gives a toothy grin, like a predator that's scented blood.

"Oh, who says I'd regret it?"

"I mean just don't– don't get yourself hurt. She's dangerous."

"I know that. So am I." She must see something in Whumpee's bruised and battered face because she softens, tucking her pencil behind her ear and crossing the room to crouch in front of them. Broadcasting her every move, she presses a soft kiss to their forehead. "It was my job for thirty years. It's just a relief to find someone that I'm happy to use my skills on."

Caretaker rests her hands on their upper arms and they lean into the touch, despite the pain at the pressure. Tears prick at their eyes. This warm closeness without malicious intent... it's been too long.

"If you get yourself captured or killed I will bring you back from the depths of Hell and skin you alive for doing that to me. So don't. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir." Whumpee glares half-heartedly. "I promise."

[pokedash55]

Racing against Death

1,786 words, Pre-movie, Oneshot,Turbo escaping the Roadblasters crash, Headcannons about his time homeless, Near Death, Glitching, Minor Canonical character death, TurboTwins (mentioned), Finish Line (the other racing game at Litwack's)

Click for the A03 link but the whole fic is under the cut :) (I usually don't post my fics to tumblr but it's where the Turbo fans are I think. Ya'll are Turbotastic)

-------------- \ō͡≡o˞̶ ---------------

All he could think in that moment was drive... Drive as fast as his racecar could as the pixels around him started to disperse into the black void. This wasn’t where he would end. Dying forgotten in the bowels of some second rate racing game would not be his lasting legacy. His code rushed with adrenaline, mind racing with only one goal: Survival. He gripped the wheel tight with desperation, pushing the engine as far as it could go and looked straight ahead to the exit to Game Central Station. The tires churned roughly on the grassy terrain as he neared the exit, the ground beneath him glitching and separating behind him. He was racing against death, but Turbo never loses. 

His code burned inside and he could feel his pixels glitch all over, the program still recovering from the collision with the more advanced data. It was a strange feeling having the game crash as it did. It was an unexpected, but rather pleasant outcome. With a glitch like that he expected  Roadblasters would be gone for good, but he did not anticipate just how quickly they would pull the plug. It was a fitting end to the worst game ever created. With Roadblasters out of the picture he could go back to being loved by all in the comfort of his machine. A determined grin crossed his face as the tires latched onto the metal of the copper wire, quickly gaining speed on the smooth surface as the last of the pixels dispersed. The car rushed through the cord, ignoring the railroad as he did when he first drove here, driving up and down the tunnel to gain bits of extra speed. 

He pushed out of the gateway, spinning and hitting the brakes as soon as he escaped the outlet, tightly maneuvering the wheel so as to not take damage or spin out into another game. The car spun a donut before he gained control and stopped in the middle of the empty power strip. He lifted the yellow visor from his helmet, breaths still quick and heavy. As he looked up at the game, the red text displaying “RoadBlasters” disappeared from the name screen and Turbo’s panicked breaths morphed into chuckles. He did it! He continued his airy laugh, shakingly getting out of his car, trailing his hands on the door before letting go to stand at its side, one hand reaching up to his face, fingers twitching with glee. His plan worked perfectly! Sure he couldn’t become part of the game, which was unfortunate (he will have to research how to implement outdated -er- retro sprites into a more technologically modern program later), but he was alive and Roadblah-sters was NOT!

Turbo grinned spitefully at the empty plug. Time to go back to his perfect life! He dusted his track suit off, though his arm still had small pixels of white and grey that were displaced from his sprite. That was surely nothing, It was fine he just needed to return to TurboTime and things would be back to the good old days. After a successful mission, he could use a cooldown race with his blue rivals. He didn’t usually enjoy their company, always bragging about the ridiculously small number of times they actually managed to beat him (it was always the players fault), but a celebration was in order after all. The three of them could hit up tappers after closing time and crash Felix’s nightly party’s to cap off the night. 

With glee, he hoped back into his ride. It needed repairs after such a crash but just like his sprite all would be repaired once he got back to TurboTime. He revved up the red and white car and slow rolled casually back to his game with a smirk, although his face started to drop as he got closer and closer to his port. 

“Wh… Where is MY GAME” He babbled in disbelief under his breath. He and Roadblasters were right across from each other but looking at the gateway Turbo saw nothing but pitch blackness. The same darkness he had just narrowly avoided. He laughed nervously, standing up on the seat, leaning his body over the windshield. He analyzed the doorway, anxiety slowly creeping into his mind. Why would they unplug his game too! No one had touched the console for a week there was no way anyone had played the game! Which snot nosed kid decided to come crawling back after that time of betrayal? With the children enamored with the disgusting new game, TurboTime was rendered unplayable far before his absence so why now was it ripped from him? He was stuck with the bitter surprise and his arms dropped sulkingley to his side looking at his empty port. That grief was short lived as the glitches on his body grew more sporadic and rushed through his system, a scowl forming on his face. 

Roadblasters took everything from him. He was his game’s hero, the greatest racer of all time! Everyone loved him and rightfully so! He refused for it to end this way. He deserved more than to be rendered some homeless forgotten wretch. A pitiful nobody who destroyed his own game. What praise and adoration would come from that? Thinking through his situation he realized what would happen if the other games found him here. They would either scorn and lecture him or (worse of all) take pity on him. Losing was bad enough, but having lesser beings pity you for it was worse. He couldn’t be found, that much was clear. He was not going to live a life of mockery, scorn and false sympathy. He deserved more. 

Turbo’s gaze lowered down to his car. It was the only thing that survived… but he couldn’t escape the scene of the incident with it. The car was damaged and without his game’s power source there was nothing to repair it. He usually enjoyed standing out, but at the moment his bright red cart would only slow him down. With a resolved expression he jumped out from the vehicle. Turbo won his very first professional race in this car. It was everything to him. He hated to lose the only thing he cared for but it had to go if he was going to regain the respect and admiration of the gamers. He marched behind it, placing his hands on the rear of the car and pushed it towards the abyss. Once the front wheels touched the darkness it was easy to push in the rest. The car exploded into a cloud of red and white pixels, leaving Turbo the soul survivor of the now defunct machine. 

He stood alone and the station was eerily quiet, with everyone still on the job in their respective games. The silence disturbed him and left him frustrated, scowl growing again on his skeletal face. Turbo had become accustomed to the loud cheering of fans. The loud sound of engines and stands cheering his name. It was all his and rightfully so. He craved those sounds and the desire caused his eyes to flicker. As his determination rose, his glitches creeped around his body, growing harsher and harsher. Just like his car he was damaged and without an energy source his code could be corrupted. He needed to wire himself into another game or he could die in this torturing silence. 

Turbo hated to admit it, but he needed to upgrade. He failed his conquest of Roadblasters because his code was incompatible. Accessing the code was one thing but he needed to know how to control it. If he could edit himself into a game, he could become whole again. But he’d need cover and a plan for that to happen without someone finding him and was getting nowhere standing outside an empty husk of a game. He gave Turbotime one last glance before heading off into hiding.

 He did not have to wait long, as Litwack soon added the game called Finish Line. He watched the game get plugged in, the crowds of characters awaiting the new friends who would join the arcade. When nobody exited the port, the sprites eventually dispersed and the racer made his move into the new racing game. He expected it to be harder to blend in, but Turbo learned quickly that the reason nobody had come through to Game Central Station was because there was nobody living inside the arcade cabinet. All the programmed assets were the vehicles and they were all inside the programming sans drivers, making it an easy hiding place.Turbo got to work quickly, finding the code room and playing around the most he could. He was able to delete the automated program of one of the cars just enough to allow a driver and worked on that code block for weeks. He despised being nothing more than an enemy NPC, just like those blue wannabes back home (whom he just realized they most likely are deleted. The least of his worries however), but the racers' identities here were never shown. He could not regain his rightful recognition in a game like this. Instead of a home it became more of a perfect toy for Turbo. He could code and recode all he wanted while the game automated the other cars and tracks. It was the perfect practice for when something much better came along.  

The glitches never went away and every time they ran through his system he shuttered. It stopped being painful but it still wasn’t sustainable. He tried for years to code into the game, but without a base code block he couldn’t map his digital DNA to anything. Finish Line simply didn’t allow for a character sprite as complex as his since it had no frame of reference; The game had no human renders and nothing resembling in game personalities. He couldn’t even comfortably race anymore, as it became obvious that without a proper connection one crash could lead him dead on the tracks (as the blue hedgehog so kindly reminds everyone every 5 minutes). Despite the limitations, Turbo stayed hidden in Finish Line. It was disgraceful resorting to this but it gave him ample time to test his abilities inside the code room. It was nothing but a waiting game now. He saw every bit and piece of the game’s inner workings. It was replaceable. All he had to do was wait….

1997

Finally…. He grinned as the newest game arrived just across from Finish Line. Racing Avatars with colourful and cheerful expressions lined the box. It was the perfect place to regain his glory. 

Sugar Rush… a game fit for a king.

[rotworld]

16: Trust Fall

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

trapped on a remote outpost, you send distress signals into the void while waiting for salvation. just when you've nearly lost all hope, it arrives--with blood and death.

->warhammer 40k. original drukhari character/reader. explicit; contains dub-con, implied non-con, conditioning, mindbreak, sadism, unhealthy d/s dynamic, implied captivity.

.

.

.

“This is Outpost Urania One-Five-Oh, requesting immediate assistance. I repeat, this is Outpost Urania One-Five-Oh, requesting immediate assistance.” 

The cogitator is dying. It spits sparks, internal cooling systems whirring loudly. The metal casing thrums blisteringly hot. Beneath cracked glass screens, monochrome green displays flicker with warnings and error messages. You have to keep jostling the tangle of thick cables running along the floor and manually resetting the broadcast settings. Toggle “distress signal.” Select “priority - high.” Crank the range knob, again, to make sure the signal reaches orbit, then try to keep your voice firm and steady until it all goes dark and you have to start over.

“This is Outpost Urania One-Five-Oh, requesting immediate assistance,” you say. You order a scan, watching waveforms inch slowly across a rudimentary map of the system. “Situation dire. Life support systems failing. Unknown fatalities. Requesting immediate assistance—” 

Your voice cracks and you press your hand over your mouth, muffling a sob. You inhale shakily. Exhale, fighting a whimper. You can do this. You just have to stay calm. Someone will come. The slow pulse of emergency lights drapes a red glow across your back. The cogitator falls dormant and you hold your breath until it blinks back to life. A cluster of dots suddenly appears on the scanner, blinking slowly across the screen. 

“This is Outpost Urania One-Five-Oh,” you say quickly, rattling off all the necessary proclamations with your heart in your throat. Please answer, you think desperately. You pick at the thick, thermal material of your maintenance uniform, scratching anxiously at the high turtleneck collar. Moments pass in agonizing silence. Your breathing quickens into hyperventilation. “This…this is…”

“Copy, Urania One-Five-Oh.” The voice is stern, every word sharp and clearly enunciated. “This is the Righteous Edict of Patrol Fleet Cobalt-Prime. Describe the nature of your emergency.” 

A patrol fleet! You have to collect yourself, your relief so powerful it almost becomes panic again. “I’m—it’s, uh—” You stop. Deep breaths. You’re so tired and hungry and afraid, but you’re going to get out of here. You just have to keep it together a little longer. “We were attacked. It happened so fast. It was xenos, I think, I didn’t—I’m just a menial. Our orbital defenses are gone and our systems are failing. There’s not many of us left, we were ordered to salvage what’s left but it’s—it’s really not looking good.” 

“Copy.” Another long pause. You watch the dots on the scanner hover in place. They’ll stop, won’t they? They’ll help you? They have to. You pull and pick at the turtleneck of your uniform again, your breath coming in quick, shallow puffs. They have to. They have to. You can’t do this anymore. The communications chamber is deathly silent. There’s no one here but you and the dust in the air and the mess of cords and cables forming knots and webs across the metal floor. The ventilation occasionally wheezes. Coolant leaks from a busted machine chassis in the corner. The emergency lights grow dimmer with each passing hour and you’re starting to see things in the shadows. Swift, moving shapes. Cruel eyes and sharp smiles. 

There’s nothing there. Probably. 

“Forwarding your location via astropathic relay,” the Righteous Edict reports. “Regrettably, we can’t render aid. We’re en route to Lothal to rendezvous—” 

“No, please!” You’re frantic. You can’t help your outburst. “We’ve already been here, waiting, for weeks. Everything is shutting down. Our tech priests are missing, we can’t keep the outpost running anymore! We’re almost out of rations and with all of our defenses down, we’re sitting ducks. Can’t you just…we need help, we need to leave!”  

“Compose yourself, Urania One-Five-Oh,” comes the cold reply. “You are speaking to a Naval Commissar. I cannot divert the entire fleet for a single outpost when we are needed elsewhere. By the grace of the God-Emperor, your message has been received and will be passed along.” 

You’re going to be sick. Your head is spinning and your pulse is racing, cold tendrils of despair squeezing your heart. It could be months before someone comes across this remote corner of the galaxy again. Years, if the tides of the warp set them astray. The communication chamber becomes smears of gray-green and blinking red through your tears. 

“Please don’t leave me here,” you beg, your voice quivering. “Please, I can’t…there’s, there’s supplies! We have supplies, weapons, you can take whatever you want! You can—” You have to think, you have to offer him something. Lothal, he said. They’re going to Lothal. That’s a Forge World. To rendezvous, not for repairs. What does that mean? A meeting? A political maneuver? Supporting an Explorator fleet, maybe. He’s a Commissar, he’s probably going to talk to someone important. He’d want the upper hand in negotiations. “The Magos, he said…he told us we have to get the device somewhere safe. Too risky to keep them here anymore.”

“Device?” The reply comes much faster this time. “What device? Describe it.” 

He’s listening. He’s interested. You have to think fast. “Oh, it’s…it’s not too big. Not tiny, either. Metallic. Sort of oddly-shaped. There’s some sort of interface on it but I was told not to touch it. The Magos made it display a pict once but I’m not sure what it showed. He called it a ‘blessed blueprint.’”

You wait in suffocating silence. One of the emergency lights sputters out. You can smell a sharp chemical stench coming from somewhere, burning and corrosive in your nose. The whole outpost seems to groan and creak around you, the aging metal damaged and threatening to collapse. The planet’s surface outside the outpost isn’t inhospitable. The air is breathable, but the nights are bitterly cold. If the power goes out, could you scavenge enough material to stay warm? You care about that so much less than the eerie quiet. Trickling, spark-popping, shrill electronic beeping, but never voices. Never footsteps. Never anyone but you. 

You are sore and exhausted from hunching over the cogitator, you are starving and running low on emergency naval rations, but more than anything, you are alone. You scratch at your neck with a whimper. 

The cogitator’s speakers hiss with static and the words you’ve waited so long to hear finally arrive. “Urania One-Five-Oh, a ground team is now being assembled. Provide outpost coordinates and prepare for immediate evac. Do not handle the STC blueprint, please, or the tech priests might shoot you on sight. One of my men will provide you with a secure transport safe.” 

“Throne bless you,” you say hoarsely. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. B—be advised, Righteous Edict, there’s a debris field in our orbit.” 

“We see it.” 

You give them the coordinates and then you switch off the cogitator’s microphone so they don’t hear your weeping. Soon. You’ll be out of here soon. Just a little longer. You watch one of the dots on the scanner break from formation and start blinking closer, traces of a shaky, hopeful smile on your lips. 

There’s not much for you to do now but wait. You have nothing to take with you, no precious belongings to pack. You shut off several extraneous functions, rerouting power from other parts of the outpost to brighten the exterior lights so they can find you more easily. The skin of your neck is getting irritated under the cloth from how much you’re rubbing and scratching and picking, but you can’t help it. You just want this to be over. 

The wreckage of dozens of ships circles the Urania outpost’s planetoid in a twinkling river. You can’t see it with the naked eye until a piece nudges loose and plummets through the atmosphere, a streak of green fire across the sky. The arrival of the patrol fleet’s landing shuttle disturbs several chunks of shrapnel that turn into falling stars somewhere over the horizon. You wait at the foot of the outpost’s front step, shivering and rubbing your arms. Midday isn’t as frigid as night, but you can still see your breath in the air. The shuttle makes a quick, bumpy descent to the rocky surface, sliding to a stop on a metal landing platform bearing the ashy stains of artillery blasts. 

The commissar came in person. He’s the last one off the shuttle, preceded by an armed group of naval soldiers. He descends the boarding ramp with a cautious, scowling glance at his surroundings, a sword at his hip and a bolt pistol in his hand. You glance at the sky again, expectant. 

“What happened here?” the commissar asks you. He and his men approach with far more hostility in their body language than you’d expect for rescuers. 

You shake your head. “I don’t know what they were. They had us badly outnumbered. Disabled our defenses somehow and then swooped in like vultures. I think they took prisoners.” 

“But not you?” 

“No. We were trying to get the shields and anti-air artillery back online, so we were in the control center. They never came inside. I’m not sure why. But we’re stranded and things have deteriorated badly since.” 

The commissar narrows his eyes. “How many survivors?” 

“Less than ten of us,” you say. “Maintenance personnel, mostly.” 

“Hm.” He looks suspicious. That’s fine. It doesn’t matter. You’re almost out of here. You’re so close. The commissar studies your face and work uniform, the blood and grit caked to your hands and stuck beneath your nails, and then he nods. “We need the STC secured,” he tells you. 

“Right, of course,” you say quickly. You look past them, towards the horizon, your pulse picking up. It’s fine, isn’t it? Everything’s going to be fine. “Uh. This way.” 

You hoped you’d never have to step foot inside the outpost again. An alarm blares somewhere, a rhythmic, monotonous droning that echoes far away. Smashed cogitator screens hang crooked on the walls, showing fizzling gray lines. Blood spatters the walls of corridors, long dry, but there are no bodies. Every passing moment makes your fear sharpen. This isn’t right. You should be leaving by now. You were good. You did everything you were supposed to. Tears burn your eyes and your throat constricts. 

You get as far as the mess hall, all overturned chairs and shattered tile, when your legs give out. You can’t go any further and you’re inconsolable, curled up beside a broken table with your head in your hands. One of the soldiers kneels at your side, checking for head wounds. The commissar voxes the Righteous Edict asking for a second shuttle and a medic. He frowns tightly, then repeats his request. The sight of his rigid posture and wary glance back at you over his shoulder makes your sobs turn to sniffles, hope blooming in your chest. 

It’s going to be okay, you realize. You never should’ve doubted him.

The commissar orders the soldier beside you to move away. He clutches his bolt pistol and starts to say something. “What…?” You can only guess what he meant. What’s going on? What really happened here? What have you done? It doesn’t matter.

The shriek of a shard weapon firing sounds like a thousand windows shattering. The commissar stumbles back with wide eyes and blood trickling from his open mouth, glittering crystal shrapnel piercing his chest. Luminescent green liquid trickles from each sliver and into his wounds, hissing on contact. The shot is incredibly precise. You hear the clustered ammunition whisper just above your head. You don’t run for cover. You stay where you are and hold perfectly still as the room erupts in a cacophony of blaster fire, streaks of sizzling void punching through armor and unraveling flesh in bubbling bursts because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Sit. And wait. And trust him, like always. 

And you do. You trust him more than anyone. Bodies fall all around you, skin pincushioned, wounds crystal-studded, limbs and throats and clutched, heaving chests weeping red, and you don’t move. You sit there in the middle of all of it, darklight shrieking so close to your cheek that you feel the kiss of the void sizzle on your skin, blood spatters painting your clothes. Not a single shot missed. Not a single blast lodges in the wall or clips a table and not a single stray poison-filled shard lodges in your back. The commissar and his men writhe on the floor in quivering agony. Most of them will live and wish they hadn’t. 

And then you hear it. You hear him. They’re all here, too, the lesser lords and ladies, but you can pick out his slow, confident saunter through the chaos, the click of his boots across the floor. The pain in your heart fades and the fear melts away, everything swirling into peaceful bliss.

“There’s my darling songbird,” Xeranthross coos, looking down at your quivering form. He’s a perfect being, as beautiful as he is dangerous. Every movement is graceful and every word is a low, seductive purr. Eyes like rubies and smile like the curve of a knife, his hair is jet black and uneven, longer one one side than the other. You aren’t ashamed to throw yourself at his feet, letting the barbs and spikes jutting from his armor scrape your skin as you tremble with soft sobs of relief. “Oh, you poor thing! Why the tears?” 

You try to answer but all that comes out is wretched, warbling nonsense. It makes him chuckle. He bends slightly from his towering height, resting the pointed claws of his gloves on your head.

“You didn’t doubt me, did you?” he asks, his voice lowering to something menacing. 

“No!” You make yourself speak, forcing the words out as quickly as you can no matter how incomprehensible they might be through your weeping. “No, no, no, I didn’t, I swear, I didn’t, I never doubted you! Never!” You knew he would come. You knew, deep down, no matter how many days dragged into nights. “I didn’t,” you mewl, rubbing your face against the side of his boot. Your cheek catches on his armor’s spikes and you feel blood beading to the surface, a warm trickle down your chin. You don’t mind. Any pain he gives you is a gift. 

“Hush,” he says. You try. You cover your mouth to stifle your own miserable sounds. “Who do you trust, my dear? More than anyone?” 

“You,” you say. You don’t even have to think about it. 

“And who do you obey, before all others?” 

“You. Only you.” You shudder when his claw grazes your throat, pinching the fabric of your uniform between his fingers. He peels the turtleneck down, exposing a dark ring of metal. It’s a simple but elegant thing, a thick band of black that reflects deep blues and greens when the light dances across it. Made of the same lightweight, skin-tight material that forms Xeranthross’ armor, the band is engraved with the complex scrawl of runes you can’t read. He’s told you they signify ownership. Should you be found by others of his kind, they will know who you belong to.

Xeranthross traces the symbols on the collar with the sharp tip of one finger, his eyes half-lidded and his smile satisfied. He cups your chin and you look up at him, just as you’ve been taught. “And who do you sing for?” he asks. 

“You,” you whisper. “Always you.” 

“Mm. Very good. Now on your feet.”

You rush to obey, standing so quickly you feel lightheaded and sway on your feet. Xeranthross doesn’t tell you where to go. He shoves you back and you stumble, a cracked countertop digging into your back. You’re lifted on top of it effortlessly, your legs left to dangle. Xeranthross slots himself between your open legs and his glove cups the space between your thighs. Before, you would’ve tried to stop yourself from making noise. You would’ve bitten your lip until it bled. Now, you know better. You let him hear every sharp breath and whimper. The stiff, leathery material covering his palm presses hard against your sex and you shamelessly grind against it. 

“There’s my good little songbird,” he says, the praise sending blood rushing between your legs. His touch is rough and fast and not enough, muffled and not enough through your clothing, but you don’t dare ask for more. He’ll give you what you deserve. You push your hips against his hand and moan for him, secretly hoping you can earn something more. “What a needy little thing. Did you miss me?” 

“So much,” you say shakily. Your breathing is quick and frantic. Xeranthross drinks in the sight of your eager, arching body, your parted lips and bucking hips, but most of all, he looks at your collar. He grinds his palm against you harder as he stares at it, rubbing so hard it starts to hurt. 

“Did you touch yourself?” he purrs.

You stiffen under him. You did. You did, and he didn’t tell you that you could. He didn’t forbid it, either, but you’re supposed to ask for permission. You know that. Xeranthross clicks his tongue in disapproval. His claws hook in the waistband of your uniform’s lower half, pulling it down so viciously that the fabric rips around his claws. He doesn’t take them off completely. He keeps it bunched just beneath your hips, keeping your legs trapped. The air in the room is cold and somehow he’s even colder. He teases you with the back of his hand, interlaced plates of metal leaving goosebumps everywhere he touches.

“It’s alright,” he coos. “You can tell me. You trust me, don’t you? More than anyone?” 

You do. Of course you do. Xeranthross drags his fingertips down the heated flesh between your legs and you shudder. He could cut you easily if he’s not careful. He could do much, much worse if he wants. But you trust him, so you squirm and whimper but you don’t pull away. You lay on your back and you let his touch ghost up and down with slightly more pressure each time. 

“I did,” you say, quiet and ashamed. “I…I touched myself. Thinking about you.” 

Xeranthross smiles. “Thinking about me doing what?” 

About him taking you. Fucking you. Bending you over the cogitator and sinking his long, pierced cock into your body until he’s fully hilted. Thrusting hard and fast, leaving long, bloody marks down your sides and back with his claws. Taking you any way he wants, as many times as he wants, spilling inside of you and dripping down your thighs. Letting the other lords and ladies use you while he watches, stroking himself to the song of your pleasure and pain. And when the prey comes bumbling in, he guts them like animals and takes you again in the mess he makes. He smears red handprints over your skin and leaves you with scratches and bites. You tell him this and you know it pleases him because he gives you another dangerous stroke with just the tip of his claw. 

“Do you remember what you were like when I found you?” he asks. 

You nod, slight and ashamed. You do. You weren’t much different than the commissar and the others. Not much different than all the repair crews and treasure seekers and pirates and evangelists who came here before them, the remnants of their last foolish venture now circling silently in orbit. But you were special. That’s why he picked you. You were the quietest. You hid the best. Lived longest, day in and day out scurrying through the outpost’s darkness, until you had no strength left. Xeranthross plucked you from the storage closet you’d stuffed yourself inside. He dragged you out by the ankle with a sharp grin and told you he’d grown tired of all the silence and monotony. He wondered if he could make you loud.

“How far you’ve come since then! What a wonderful little songbird you became.” He pulls away suddenly. It’s a struggle not to whine at the loss of his touch. “Get up,” he says. You do, embarrassed by the mess he made of your clothing. The others are smirking at you. Staring intently, with heat in their gazes. “Leave those rags behind. I’ve had something new made for you. Something much more fitting for my darling bird.”

Xeranthross smiles and all the shame of your shame is forgotten. There’s nothing wrong with this. Not if it pleases him. He wraps an arm around you, his claws dragging down your shoulder. It hurts, and it throbs, and it oozes. It makes him look at you like meat. He pulls you closer and you don’t fight, no matter how many times his armor’s spikes gouge your skin.

“I think you’re ready for a much prettier cage,” he says, and you shiver with delight.

[wolven91]

Drifting - Part 2

“Okay, make a fist.” Asked the serious geckin, blue in scale but the owner of long spines that started on his nose and continued up and over his head, down his back and finished at his tail. Zeet was his name.

Casper the friendly human, made a fist and felt the action drain him, as if he’d been at the gym for the last hour doing the same action. However, as his fingers met his palm and the tendons on the back of his hand tensed and corded against his skin, the giant metal fist not a few metres away, suspended in a secure field; made an identical fist.

“What’s the drift?” The blue geckin asked the second geckin who monitored the process not a few feet away, but a fair distance for the diminutive creatures. Her name, as far as Casper knew, was Wren.

“0.001%.” She retorted with an equally serious tone, she turned back and adjusted the two round panes of glass that sat across her snout. If not for the fact that Casper was sweating with the exertion of making a fist, he would have found her cute.

“Impossible. Check it again.” The first geckin demanded, turning to face her as if she had just made a poorly timed joke.

“Sir, I checked it three times, then used the older program to see if it got a different result.” Wren explained, quite confident despite Zeet’s incredulous tone.

“And?”

“It reports 0.002%.”

Both geckins turned back to the human, almost expectantly and gazed at him. No; studying him.

“W-what?” He asked, strain in his voice.

“You can relax Casper. You did very well.” Praised Zeet as Casper gasped, unclenching his fist, and slumping in the chair. He’d been fresh as a daisy when he’d sat down; why had a few wires been so draining?!

“That… took effort…” The young man explained, slipping his arm from the sleeve, and ensuring it was placed carefully onto the caddy.

“You were controlling more than just muscle and sinew young man.” Zeet explained, touching a finger to the control rod of his own personal walker and approached the human. At a foot tall, just like the rest of the geckins, he utilised mechanical legs attached to a platform that he stood upon to move around larger distances.

“Why am I exhausted?”

“Because, unbeknownst to your conscious mind, you not only controlled your own limb, but also controlled that robotic limb.”

“I’ve seen that done before…” Casper licked his lips to try and bring moisture to them. “They used electrodes or something… they had to concentrate, but it didn’t tire them out.”

Wren appeared at Casper’s side and pressed a bottle of orange liquid into his hands. It was almost as tall as her.

“Drink this, you’ll feel better.” She promised, her green scales were a deep emerald, her it was the frill around her neck that was only partially pulled in that made Casper smile. She was agitated. Perhaps worried about him?

The man gave her a curt nod, which caused her frill to pull in tight before he grasped the bottle and drank from it deeply. It wasn’t quite ‘orange’, but it was certainly something citrus and refreshed him almost immediately. After the first gulp he took a breath and downed the rest of the bottle in one, almost immediately feeling better and like his old self.

“What you just did was unconsciously control every single servo, circuit, and piston within that machine. Your mind: without your knowledge, was able to manage and steady all of that. The electrode method, that you mentioned, is a low intensity method of controlling simpler systems.”

“And we can’t use that method with these?”

“These are not for domestic use. I make it quite clear to you; these are bleeding edge machines. Capable of not only reacting as your body, not as a mere extension, but also your mind being able to incorporate the advantages these machines have.”

“Like what?”

“We can have a play with telescopic vision if you like? I’ve heard that is the easiest to manage. If you get addicted to the world those eyes, we can try out electromagnetic wavelengths, infrared, perhaps-“

“Sir.” Wren cut in, a frown on her face and her small, pointed teeth being bared.

“Mm, yes. Carry on.” Zeet surrendered, holding up his hands as if giving up.

“Before we go on, how are you feeling?” Wren asked, looking up at Casper and adjusting her specs.

“Better.” The man replied, giving her a warm grin.

“Better? You weren’t well before?” She poked, not letting him off the hook yet.

“I was tired, like I’d been doing bicep curls all morning. But now it’s like I’m fresh again?” Casper admitted honestly, if she was a doctor checking on him, then he wasn’t about to lie. The speed of his recovery was as if he had been fooled into being tired, rather than actually being tired.

“Marvelous.” Zeet whispered.

“*Sir.*” Wren immediately hissed; the respect of his seniority gone. Casper frowned then cut in, there was something he wasn’t being told.

“What’s going on? Is this about the.. the ‘drift’ thing? What was the drift you were on about?” He asked, demanding an answer.

“I knew he was bright, am I allowed to answer that *direct* question doctor?” Zeet asked the green geckin with a near taunting tone.

Wren merely sniffed, flattening her neck ruffle against herself and shrugged with a single hand, offering Casper up to Zeet, seemingly satisfied.

“’Drift’ is the natural loss of signal strength between your mind and the mechanical parts. The more parts, bits, and pieces, the greater the chance of drift and the more sluggish the movements and actions of the piloted mechs will be, all the way until failure.” Zeet explained with a toothy grin. It was Wren who spoke next, softly explaining it to Casper without infantizing him.

“Geckin have a fantastic drift score. We can manage mechs of incredible size and complexity without much loss of control. Realistically, the next closest would be chintians, but they refuse to be pilots for our mechs.” She said, turning her hand in a gesture as she spoke, still calmly and softly.

“Why?” Casper asked.

“You know the plug in your arm?” Zeet began, pointing at the limb that was limp in Casper’s lap.

Casper looked down and turned his arm over. There was a single dark red dot of scabbed blood. Around it was a bright red circle with the metal casing of the plug had been pressed into his flesh.

“Yeah?”

“It can lead to fur-loss.” Concluded Zeet, rather offhandedly.

“Along with other things.” Cut in Wren, with the speed of someone adding ‘terms and conditions’ at the end of an advert.

“They consider that unacceptable. We consider it the cost of having faster reaction speeds to our machines. They rely on taking hits and surviving them. We believe in the philosophy of never getting hit.” The tiny lizard explained with a mouthful of sharp teeth, eager at the thought.

“Do geckins have any fur to lose? Do you lose scales?” Casper asked, if there were side effects for some species, were there any for geckins?

“No.” Zeet answered immediately.

“Well…” Wren began, but was immediately cut off.

“No, we do not lose scales with use.” Zeet said again, staring at the doctor.

“They can dull though.” She explained, closing her eyes then turning her head to look at Casper before opening them again. She held his gaze firmly.

“Not through usage doctor!” Zeet snapped, certainly exasperated.

“A pilot who is connected for long periods or who is in intense environments requiring constant movement will find side effects, such as scale fading.” Wren continued, putting across the idea that it was not without a cost.

“He doesn’t need to hear this, what is the chance he’s going to be in that environment? Zero!” Zeet shouted, throwing his hands up before gesturing to Casper, then then inert arm.

“Look, it’s fine. As you say; unlikely.” Casper agreed, trying to calm the tension in the room. “So what about me? What about human drift”

“Ah, good male. A fine mind between those big ears.” Zeet grinned again, turning to Casper and clasping his hands. “Your drift, at worst calculation was about 0.002%. That is nothing. That is about as good as a prostetic replacing your actual arm. Unheard of for managing an arm that complicated.”

“What’s a geckin’s drift percentage?”

“5.” Wren said pointedly. “On average. Ace pilots are around the single percent or less range, but that is through biological luck, augmentation and prolonged life-long training. Your natural ability appears to be quite potent.” The tiny green lizard admited.

“Yours, baring in mind your evolution wouldn’t have any sort of natual selection for this, is considered a one in a life time pilot. If humans are all this well adjusted, each and every one of them will be very much welcome in geckin territories…”

Casper turned to the arm and gazed at it. A mech pilot? That would be fantastic! He didn’t like the idea of ‘stressful environments’ though.

“You wouldn’t want me in like, a fight or anything, right?”  Casper asked, staring at Zeet carefully.

“May my tail fall off! No! Could you imagine what the GC would say if we endangered a human? Immediately after your new classification? Absolutely not. Completely out of the question.” He promised, waving his hand as if to dismiss a fly that was bothering him.

“Normally I would warn you about listening to our Zeet here, but he’s right. The geckin people are still under threat by ssypno aggression. Their seat at the table of three means all they have to do is convince one of the other two to agree that they be allowed to create a vassal of our people and we can expect no support from the GC to stop them. Endangering you would all but guarantee the support of one or both of the other two.”

A small hand touched his arm as she leant forward to rest her’s against him, the good doctor offering him a smile.

“The danger to you is over, you can rest easy knowing the rest of your life will be free of hardships.” She lied.

[r/WolvensStories]

[Ko-Fi]

[2009editingtips]

For the writing prompt!!! "i'll see you in the morning, 'kay?"

Early 2009 dnp late night/early morning calls all went like this and you can't change my mind.

Thank you for the prompt <3

"I'll see you in the morning, 'kay?"

Rating: G Words: 583

"I wish you were here," Phil says, voice sounding distant over the grainy phone speaker. He sounds tired.

"I guess we'll just have to live together next year so that won't be an issue anymore." Dan sounds surer than he feels. Always does over the phone, on Skype. He can preen and boast and act above it all with the miles of distance between them.

But he's pushing it now. Feels the telltale signs of a flush starting at the base of his neck. He knows.

He does it anyway.

Phil sucks in a breath. "Yeah?" He prods lightly.

He does that sometimes, doesn't ask with words, but pushes just as much as Dan does when they're like this. Sleepy and alone and hushed, with miles of distance between them.

"Yeah," Dan nods to himself, the motion sending little frissons of nervous energy across his now pink cheeks. "You and me, we... we'll live in a nice big house in the middle of London with a garden—with two gardens—and those floor-to-ceiling windows and a huge couch with the newest gaming systems and the fanciest TV-"

"And a dog," Phil adds. Dan can hear the smile in his voice. Wants to see it in person, to press his lips to it.

"Of course. What do you think the big backyard is for?"

"Yeah, 'course." Phil's yawn is audible over the phone. Dan smiles wide, stupid, in love with him.

"You falling asleep on me, Philly?"

"Hmm? No, no, just... listening."

Dan shakes his head, fondness welling up inside him, threatening to seize his vocal cords and make him say all manner of embarrassing things.

It's too soon. It's too much.

"Go to bed," Dan says instead, even though he quite liked the version of the future they were building in his mind.

"No, it's fine. I'm fine."

Dan pauses, lets himself breathe slowly for just a moment.

And then he pushes.

"I'll see you in the morning, kay? In our house, yeah? With the gardens and the windows."

There's silence on the other end of the line for a beat too long.

"Yeah, promise?" Phil asks, his voice soft, a little scared.

Dan nods quickly, making himself dizzy with it. He doesn't care. "Mhmm. I'll be there, and I'll make you breakfast-"

"You'd burn down the kitchen," Phil interjects.

Dan bites his lip to keep his smile from being audible. "Hush, this is a fantasy."

He fails.

Phil giggles, his breathing noticeably slower. "Okay, okay, sorry. Continue."

"Right, so where was I?"

Phil sighs, and Dan can hear the sound of a body shifting under sheets if he strains his ears. "You were making me breakfast," Phil says softly, "and trying not to burn it," he adds.

"Yeah, okay. So, I'm making you breakfast... and coffee. We have a big fancy espresso machine, and I know how to make it just how you like. And I bring it to you in bed—

"Our bed?"

The needle on the spinning vinyl of Dan's thoughts is abruptly thrown off. "Y-yeah," he stutters out. "Our—our bed."

Phil makes a little humming noise. Contentment laced through every note of it. "That sounds nice."

It does, doesn't it? Dan thinks. Our bed. Mine and yours. Ours.

And it's a fantasy, but if Dan squints his eyes, he can just barely make out the shape of it. The two of them, in their bed, in their house, with their dog and their fancy coffee machine, smiling so bright it's blinding.

[september-rainn]

ANOTHER NIGHT

CG!Jack Twist x Little!Ennis Del Mar

AO3 LINK // BELOW THE CUT

Summary: Ever since the divorce, Ennis has had trouble keeping the nightmares away. The only thing that lulls him to sleep is hearing Jack's voice echo through the payphone walls.

Tags: Nighmares, long distance, phone calls, public regression, secret regression, baby regressor Ennis Del Mar, hurt/comfort, a LOT of crying, non verbal Ennis Del Mar

Word Count: 1354 

Warnings: Nondescript mention of corpse// violence, Nonverbal Ennis Del Mar

A/N: I love them, your honor, I will happily be the first to write age regression Brokeback Mountain fanfiction

Jack Twist slept on the couch. 

Lureen's chest fell heavy, and she took the quilt down. Jack’s baby blues analyzed her, and she curled up alone again as he posed himself against the arm of the couch. The only sound was the gentle roar of stale air and his expectations. This rendezvous reared its head fast after his averse companion’s divorce– The stress of unnavigated loneliness was the perfect background for night terrors. 

It was clockwork by now. Ennis fighting with the blanket, eyes hazy, rolling to fight the tears. He’d stomp on his boots and grab his head for the principle of the thing; Ennis was much for routine. He’d stalk the sidewalk, hugging the shabby bricks of closed stores, seeking out glass security. His beer-stained tank would scrunch up his body when he slumped down. His cowboy hat sheltered his waterworks from peeping eyes. Streaks of headlights passed him by, and he would scrunch closer into himself.

Ennis’s eyes squeezed, but every time he was sunk into darkness, he was assaulted with the memory of the slowly rotting corpse his dad showed off with a lingering joy. It was a tragedy only the damned mourned. Every night, he vividly saw Jack in the ditch, and every night, he felt compelled to call and check that he had safely returned home.

Ennis’s shaking hands would fumble with what little coin he held in his pajama pants. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s encrusted face peered at him, and he slammed it into the slot before he submitted to the shame. It jostled around the machine. A beep jumpstarted his heart. He had heard it so many times, the sound living in his dreams. The dial tone was quick to comfort. Muscle memory took hold but gave him more time to listen to the apprehension whispering to him. 

The handset hugged his stubbled jawline. The waiting beep taunted him. His ankle wrapped over the other. The tip of his worn-out boot bounced in sync with the pulsing rhythm in his ears. 

Click

“Same nightmare?” came from the other end of the receiver. 

There was nothing but the sound of leather sliding up and down his messy blonde locks.

“Yeah?”

The confirmation arrived with the same sound.

“Yeah,” He repeated. “Poor lamb. It torments you like it’s their nine to five..” Jack’s head leaned forward, lips grazing the phone, and wishing, like always, it was Ennis’s. Ennis huffed through the line. Shivers rolled down the brunette’s spine, the dim light of the room casting long shadows. If he closed his eyes for long enough, he could imagine his secret lover was next to him, the warmth of a shared bed enveloping them, with him snuggling into Jack’s side, breathing delicately.

The sentiment was not shared between the two boys. Right now, all Ennis needed was Jack to calm him down so he could return to the sanctuary of his run-down trailer home. He’d forget the night prior. He’d pretend the call logs didn’t paint a desperate mischaracterization of him.

Jack mumbled, too tired to filter himself, “You know how much these calls break me. I want to take care of you properly. I ain’t a poet, but Goddamn it, I know how to tuck in a man.”

A choked whine twitched his lips into a frown.

“I know, Lamb. You miss me too.” Jack was well acquainted with Ennis going nonverbal. He didn’t talk much when he was big; it was a different story when a trembling baby was behind his pupils. 

Jack swirled the coiled cord around his index. He eyed the open door of his bedroom. “Dada has been lonely without you. ‘Magine, how fast these night frights would disappear if I held you at night.”

He backtracked faster after a wail peaked the audio. Jack saw comfort in living together, and all Ennis could find was another body in a pit. Reassuring Ennis was like stalking a bunny in the woods; the most minor *crack* and he was back to chasing.

He let his aggravation fall before speaking again, “Us in the tent again… warm August air…” He looked at the ceiling and sighed. “Only us. Only Dada and his perfect lamb… in harmony with the world. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?”

Nothing, as if Ennis had stopped breathing altogether. 

He brought himself to grin. “Even found this nice stuffed horse when shopping with my wife-”

The peace faltered fast with shaky sobs. 

“-....With Lureen. It was brown with white spots. Next time I see you, I’ll give it to you.”

Jack looked out to the street. Ennis did the same. They were looking for each other through miles of streetlights and architecture. The wet flick of Jack’s tongue to his dry lips echoed through the phone booth. His head frantically swiveled. No one was out this late in a town this small, but Ennis was nothing if not paranoid. He couldn’t understand how he ducked at the swing of doors, but Jack could ramble with his wife in the other room.

He thought Jack was foolish for being so persistent in his love for him.

“Da..da..?” He slammed his heel into the wall as the terror ran its course through his body. He felt disgusted but too needy to stop himself. His head hung low. Rivers of tears flowed past the plastic held to his face.

“Yes, Lamb?” Jack was grinning. Getting Ennis to speak when regressed was a task. He worked himself up so much and couldn’t push past even a murmur. 

All Ennis wanted was Jack. He wanted him to know this. Jack caught on fast. He drummed his dull fingernails into the chunky cream phone.

“Dada loves you, y’know that. I enjoy these calls. I like hearing your voice every night.”

All Ennis could do was babble an agreement. “Do you think humming to you would help? ‘Know that’s what your mama used to do.”

Jack sprawled himself on the couch. He was exhausted, hardly hanging on to consciousness, but had his priorities on Ennis. That’s how it always went. 

He didn’t hear a response. He could sense it, though, so his lips pursed together and pushed out the notes to the melody Ennis graced him with on Brokeback. It wasn’t a long segment. Hell, he got half of the notes wrong, but what mattered was the calming huffs from the other male keeping pace. Ennis yawned. He tried to distract from it with a whimper.

But Jack knew, “Now dada thinks you should *try* and get some sleep. You’re so deprived of it; I can hear your eyebags hit the floor when you blink.”

The sweetest giggle fluttered Jack’s heart, leaving a remnant in his stomach. “‘Want you to get real comfy. You still got that plushie I got you last time-” He snickered into his hand- “When you shooed me away ‘cuz of the girls?” He heard the ruffle of hair. He assumed the best, “Good. When you get back home, I want you to hold that. Hold it *reaaaaaaaal* close to your heart.”

Ennis whimpered. He was too scared to go back to sleep again, but Jack kept demanding it and making requests. He sucked at the joint of his pointer. It calmed him down, having something to mouth on. If Jack were here, he’d chew on his fingers instead. 

“-Even get yourself some warm milk. Now Dada has to go. I loved talking to you again. I’ll stay by the phone, in case you need him. I can’t abandon my sweetest lamb.”

Jack pressed his lips to the transmitter. He peppered it with kisses. The plastic, warm from his face, was nothing like the perfection of Ennis’s skin. Ennis cupped his mouth and turned his back to the road. He hunched forward like he was hiding something and returned the kisses. Ennis slammed the phone back onto the metal prods and walked back home. The shame followed close behind him. He hated that he required that comfort every night to slip into a dreamless ecstasy. 

Jack fell asleep on the couch, like the countless nights before.

[i-try-to-write-stuff]

Okay, so I'm trying to write up a new story.

Basically, this is something I envisioned with Robert Fischer. Let me know if you wanna see more...

Here is the first paragraph of the story -

Robert was in the middle of reading the quarterly financial report when he heard a sudden crash coming from the hallway. The sound was deafening and rang through the empty corridors of Fischer-Morrow office. It was late, and even with security guards patroling the building; there was no one in the office in L.A. Anyone would be scared of the unknown but not Robert Fischer; he rubbed his tired eyes, and without any bother, he grumpily got up to check the source of that ungodly sound at 8 P.M. on a Friday of a long weekend. He strode out of his cushy office, the motion activated lights lit his way, which further irritated him. He walked in to find you on the ground and tangled up in the electric cords of Xerox machine and the shredder.

And as always,

This blog supports Palestine. Zionists can fuck off.

[asyncmeow]

Its New Weapon

this is my first time doing any kind of creative writing uhhh... ever,, it's probably gonna be bad? but still, here you all go

The pilot had spent its morning jacked into the simulation rig, practicing its skills for today: the day its new toy arrived. It and its handler had been waiting over a year for this. A month ago, it got the neural interface connector installed at the top of its spinal cord. Anyone could do it - with this particular pilot, it only required a drill, a soldering iron, and a steady hand to install. After all, if it only takes an hour to do, why not do it? 
Once the new mech got here, though, they would spend the rest of the day unboxing it, as well as installing the equipment outside to recharge and refuel it. Thankfully for them, this was a lower-end model, with less support infrastructure required to use it. The pilot and handler didn’t need a lot of firepower - but they needed more than the bows, arrows, guns, and otits weapons they had until now. They had quite a few enemies, and defending their territory was getting tiring, but the pilot had done a good job so far, and this was its reward.

The new mech got here around noon. The handler called the pilot through the neural link, where it ended its training for the day to start getting everything put together. The mech came as a set of seven boxes, one for each limb and the head, as well as the torso which housed critical components, with the final box being the charger.

The two spent the rest of the day assembling it, with some mild difficulty from using unfamiliar equipment in the process to hoist the upper parts of the body where they needed to be. Finally, they connected everything up to the pad, and issued a command to run a self-test. This would take about a few hours, so the two had dinner.

Eventually they heard the beeping from the built-in computer on the mech’s pad - the self-test had passed. The pilot climbed into the cockpit of the mech, sat in the chair, and connected the mech to its neural interface port. It had sweat beading on its forehead, shaking a bit. it had done this plenty of times in its room, in simulations, but everyone always told its the real thing would feel different. Those were just glorified game engines, you don’t have to worry as much about silly things like “camera resolution” or “motor speed limitations”, and although the simulations tried to be realistic, you could only get so close.

The pilot reached its hand over to the key, let out a deep breath, and turned the cold piece of metal. It immediately started getting feedback over the link cable as each system started up. It got log data intruding its thoughts from the on-board computer. Sensor readouts started to take over its senses. First was temperature, the simplest of the sensors. The pilot immediately started to feel colder from the late December snow, as its vision got replaced by the mech’s camera feeds, in square-shaped sections starting in its peripheral vision. It started to hear everything happening outside - birds chirping and flying away as they start to hear the high-frequency power circuitry in the machine, a nearby river, even a tree nearly a quarter mile away. Its sense of smell and taste turned to nothing - this lower-end model did not have those sensors. The pilot noticed how this was a very distinct feeling from not smelling or tasting anything, this was a unique feeling to it - the lack of the senses entirely, compared to the senses being present with no input.

Finally, the systems were almost done starting up. Now that its vision had been fully replaced with the machine’s own, it started to see diagnostic information in its peripheral vision - perfectly readable, but out of the way. As this was the first time booting the mech up, it prompted the pilot to do a few things to know how to interpret the data returning from the link cable. It moved each of its joints, one by one, the mech slowly moving in unison. First its fingers, moving back to its wrists, elbows, and eventually motion for its entire arm was one-to-one with the mech.

After doing the same for the legs, it took a few small steps, its handler following along at a fairly small distance, only about ten or twenty feet, just in case anything happened. They slowly got far enough away to test how well the weaponry on the machine worked. Selecting the light machine gun, the pilot cautiously focused on a point far in the distance, blinked, and… a second later, there was a hole there. The new weapon was effortless to use, making the pilot hopeful that this would make defending the two much easier than it had been in the past.

The pilot reached its left hand out, grabbing a tree and pulling it out of the ground. Realizing how heavy it was - the weight displayed on the HUD as “2 TONS”, capital letters and all - and how effortless it was surprised it. it threw the tree as far as it could, reached its right hand toward it, and focused on the tree. Before it knew it, the gun had fired, leaving several holes in the tree at the peak of the arc from throwing it.

It was now becoming close to midnight, the sun having set long ago. The two made their way back toward their home, getting more tired the later it went. After walking for about half an hour, they returned, and the pilot stepped on to the pad, disengaging the neural link between the pilot and machine automatically.

Its vision got replaced with its own again, seeming as unfamiliar to it now as the machine’s vision did not too long ago. It felt the heat of the cockpit, a drastic change from the cold of the outside, feeling the snow landing on it. The odd quietness of the cockpit, isolated from all sounds of both the mech and the outside, to reduce possible interference.

The pilot took the key and stepped out of the cockpit, climbing down the ladder next to the pad. As it stepped off the ladder, the handler - the witch - hugged the doll tight, gently petting its hair, whispering in its ear, “I hope you enjoyed your Christmas present.”

[archergrid]

“I had a dream. I was in a strange land. A vast wilderness. I went on and on, but met no one. I called, I shouted... but no one answered. I was alone.”

-Akira Kurosawa, Ran

<< Ch1-5 Ch 6-10>>

Chapter 1

Look, I get this question a lot for obvious reasons, so I know you won’t like the answer. It’s dissatisfying. But, because you asked, the best cybersecurity commercially available is something called an air-gapped computer.

An air-gapped computer has no network card. You won’t see a cerulean ethernet cord spouting from the stern of the case. There’s no hard, hollow plastic antenna to receive a wifi signal. It doesn’t have Bluetooth. My compsci professor at Tech explained it like this: there’s a literal wall of air—a gap—between the computer and anything that could inject it with compromising code. This abstinence-only approach makes air-gapped computers cheap, simple, and impenetrably secure.

But much like celibacy, not a lot of people opt for the air-gapped method. What’s the point of a computer, they ask, without e-mail and Twitter and porn? And I understand that. There were days I got so dog-tired of the manual data dumps, of examining each file down to the binary before connecting the USB, of hand-transcribing scraps of code onto sheets of paper, of the day-to-day ennui of existence inside those invisible walls. But when I broke into a system, all I saw back then was each and every way very, very bad things could get in.

The air wall was better. It let me breathe.

My laptop had to be online so I could access those vulnerable systems, but my desktop was air-gapped—a little black lockbox of my pdfs, jpgs, pngs, mp3s, mp4s, xls, txts, zips, bins, bats, dats, all my associate backgrounds and every line of my code. Knowing how safe they were in there calmed me at times like this, when I felt Julian Ek’s omniscient data network watching me like an enormous, electronic eye.

Notifications came like machine-gun fire into my phone. My apartment was dark, black under blackout curtains. I saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing but automated search alert after automated search alert filling my notifications: ek trial, julian ek trial, ek trial update, ek trial verdict, ek inc, joseph chambers, joseph chambers shooting, joseph chambers deepfaEk, deepfaEk, deepfaEk scandal, deepfaEk shooting edit, deepfaEk trial. More and more, on and on. I With dread, I went to Twitter, and there it was in blue and white. #EkAcquitted. It was the #2 trending topic, below #NationalVideoGamesDay. My hands began to shake. It had to be misreported—a mistake. I searched “Ek trial” and clicked the first link, scrolling past Ashlan’s disbarment and the Marshals’ conspiracy convictions to read the 6 words I’d dreaded for 4 years.

Julian Ek acquitted on all charges. 

Ek walked. I went to the Herald for nothing; became a fugitive for nothing. I gave up my parents, my friends, my condo—my dream job obviously. I blew my whole life up, and now I’m stuck here, all alone on the other side of the world. Jeopardy attached, meaning I was officially of no use to anyone; meaning I could never, ever go back home. This dusty, pitch-black 300-square foot apartment really was my life. 

I was hyperventilating. Breath after keening breath, air refused to reach my lungs, only rattle in the back of my throat. My head and stomach and knees went fuzzy. My phone screen smeared as it slipped from my hands. I reached for it and missed. The clatter of it hitting the floor—the dull pain of my thigh hitting the floor too—degraded into garbling static as I sank into gasping, grasping unconsciousness.