#Writing Task 3

[drgnflyteabox]

can't get much better

pairing: ghost / simon riley x fem reader summary: simon is forced to take some time off - he makes the most of it. tags/warnings: very soft, pregnant sex, size difference, softdom!simon- he's a masculine man who doesn't let his lady lift a finger :'), oral (f), one (1) butthole kiss, dacryphilia, daddy kink (sigh), minor minor foot stuff, allusions to injuries and chronic pain, title from an adrianne lenker song w.c: 2.5k

You try very hard not to think about it, but it's hard not to notice how massive he is.

Even shirtless, he somehow looks bigger, muscles flush with heat and exertion under the sun. He toils and breathes hard like an ox, working while you sit on the porch wrapped in his big flannel. Wearing his clothes is like being swaddled in a blanket straight out of the dryer, warm and nostalgic and syrupy with love. It leaves you feeling some type of tender. You're afraid of that feeling sometimes, of how soft it is and how soft it makes you. He could ask anything of you, and you'd yield like he was pressing his thumb into a bruised peach.

You have.

"How are you two?" Simon is so quiet when he wants to be. One would think he'd clomp like a horse with how big he is, but he can float like dust. It used to startle you, but you've been sinking deeper into the memory foam mattress of this life with him and it doesn't anymore.

"Tired, even though I'm not doing anything," you squint at him through the late afternoon sun. It haloes him like an angel.

"You're growing my baby in there, love. That's not nothing," his voice is rough, it always will be. But it's rough now like earth and soil rather than rough with pain and smoke the way he'd sounded when you met him.

You're feeling especially nostalgic, it seems, not like it's hard here. His hand is warm on your belly.

"I guess so," you let him pet you for a moment. Your stomach is swollen but not as big as it'll get, just enough to veto pants. A few months to go still. "How's your back?"

"Argh," Simon says, taking a heavy seat next to you. Dismissive and yet he groans a little when his muscles unclench. Classic.

You slowly reach up and nudge him until he's facing the field opposite to you, face toward the golden afternoon sun and his back to you. He's never asked you to do this, to take care of him, but it's your favourite thing in the world.

His back is always rock-hard no matter how many times you take your knuckles and fingers to it. Just a condition of a hard life lived for him, countless falls and impacts and pushing through injuries. There's a slight slant to his spine now that isn't there in the pictures he's shown you of his youth, but the stiffness is the same. You might've said he was born to be a soldier, had you not known him as a father. He could do both, but - you'd never say this out loud - you were privately grateful for this injury. It wouldn't take him out forever, but the recovery would be long. Long enough to get the homestead started, to get you pregnant.

Simon would never be completely still. This was compromise. Sweet compromise, a life started and time with him you could think back on the next time he shipped out. Making the most of things, he would always say. Making the time count.

"That feels good, love" he groans. Bending forward slowly, relaxing, he's like an aloof stallion finally accepting an apple from your hand. Acquiescing. Showing you his back. It's trust, and you savour it.

"I bet it does," you tease back, just a little. Your fingers are nimble and attuned to his specific aches and pains. "Are you hungry for dinner?"

"I'm hungry for something," he turns, slowly, hands reaching for your thickened waist. Huge, work-roughened hands. War-roughened hands, holding you like a delicate egg. Sometimes it feels like he's the only thing that holds you together; all your pieces, everywhere, until he's holding you.

Kissing him is a contact sport. It's his hands moving, cupping your breast and then your pussy through your panties, your own hands wrapping around his broad shoulders like he's the only thing keeping you from drowning. It's open-mouthed, breathing into each other. Impossibly, you get softer, melting like ice on a hot day. 

Before you can lean back on the bench, he stands and lifts you with him. He's still hot from the day, damp with sweat, pushing you into the house while kissing you still.

"Simon-" you start, with no goal in mind. "Please."

"I've got you, love," he murmurs. He always does. Before you know it, you're laid back onto the plush armchair in your living room. Simon knows this is the most comfortable place for your newly-aching body. Affection swells in your chest uncontrollably and comes out through your eyes leaking down your face. Sure, pregnancy makes people emotional - but you're still embarrassed, touched by how considerate he is.

"It's alright, shh," he thumbs the tears at the corner of your eyes. His cock tents his work pants, aroused by them. "Let me take care of you."

The next words he murmurs are into your cunt, right over your panties, tongue laving over the already-wet fabric. "Just need your daddy, don't you?" You clench in tandem with his words, hot all over, skin prickling. He pushes your dress up, bunching it right under your tits.

It's reminiscent of how you spent the first night with him, on the very first day you'd met. Hurried, his big head between your thighs and clothes hanging off you still while he made you fall apart.

He's fucking good at it, too. Pulls your panties to the side and builds up the pressure with which he sucks on your clit, softly and then harsher until you shake. You've been extra horny lately, always wet around him and always so swollen. The scrape of his five-o-clock shadow against the sensitive skin of your inner thigh is what tips you over, clamping his head tightly and shouting your orgasm into the heady summer air.

"That all it takes?" Simon grins, chin wet, fingers moving from your hips to your pussy to gently rub along your slit.

"Give me a second, please," it's humbling how quickly you come nowadays. Quick and intense. Fireworks.

You set your foot on his shoulder and he turns towards it, kissing your ankle. Patience is rare with him, something come about only since you confirmed your pregnancy. You miss being overwhelmed by him, miss the nights where he'd guide you over the edge one, two, three times in succession.

He pushes now, just a little, not waiting for your go-ahead but watching you intently. His fingers spread your cunt in a V and he puffs a breath on your sensitive clit. You jump. He grins again, leaning down to lick you, using one hand to hold both your legs under your knees and push them until they meet the soft bump of your belly.

"Hold them there," he says. It's spoken not to you, but to your hole, which he spears his tongue into. You obey as you're helpless to do, holding your legs up and giving him an unimpeded view. It's more than vulnerable, it's not only baring yourself to him completely but giving him the authority to do what he wants. What you need.

Simon eats you out like it's a kiss, slurping you down and letting you leak until the evidence of your weakness to him is all over you. Your legs are wet, and it drips down onto your other hole. He pushes a thumb into your cunt, dipping it in and out.

"Needed me, did'ya? Watched me all day," he's so smug, sometimes. His lips find your bare foot, kissing your sole. "Been wet like this all day?" His other hand finds the meat of your asscheek, spreading you open further, letting the split of you open to him. He leans down, kissing your inner thigh, then your other hole. You whine and clench your pussy around his thumb. 

"So needy," he murmurs, finally finally moving back to your clit. Flicks his tongue over it, something that might've been teasing before but is intense now. Your hands tighten against your legs, head thrown back.

"Oh please- Simon!" You shout again, abs drawing up, stars in your eyes. "Ahh- I'm-"

"I know, honey," his lips suction again around the hard little pebble of your clit, eating like a man starved. 

This is how he likes you. Losing control, coming apart, helplessly vocal against the onslaught of his tongue. No matter how many times you've done this, it never gets old. The release almost always makes you cry, especially intense like this. You're wet all over, face and cunt and legs. He is, too.

"You still with me, love?" He pets your flank like you're a horse.

"Yes," but that's not what he wants.

"Yes what?"

"Yes, daddy."

"Good girl," and fuck if that doesn't always fill you with warm fuzzy energy. Wipes your brain, keeps you soft and floaty.

He guides you up and out of the armchair, lifts you into his arms when your legs shake too much. That electric feeling is still coursing through you, tingles in your extremities as they come back to life.

The hand he strokes over you is half affectionate, half proprietary. You've been his since the first time he laid eyes on you.

He reminds you of it as he sets you down gently on the bed, your hair a halo around your head and hands reaching to his face where you pull him down for a kiss. Hands find his shirt, pulling it off you, and then the dress. Fingertips touch the headboard, your arms stretching up, making room for him. Slips your panties down your legs.

It's a lingering, indulgent kiss. Breathing each others air, gasping into his mouth, he puts his elbows by your head and lays as much weight down as he can without cramping your full belly. He's as vocal as you, groaning and rutting like a dog.

"Ready for me, sweet girl?" He leans out of the kiss, sitting back on his heels. You nod, desperate and pulsing between the legs again like you didn't just come twice.

"Daddy's gonna take care of you, don't you worry," he rearranges you like a doll, turning you to your side and getting between your legs. A pillow is tucked under your belly, and he tests your flexibility by holding your leg tight to the length of his body. Your hamstring burns a little with it.

A hand holds your knee, another to your waist. His jeans scrape against your sensitive skin.

You focus on little details. His scar, touching his eyebrow and splitting through his nose, ending down by his jaw. The knuckles on his fingers holding your knee, and how rough the pads of his fingers feel on your waist. This man has never had soft hands in his life. Those same hands capable of so much force, so much violence, the very same that hold you and guide you. A shepherd, you his lamb.

The weeping head of his cock kisses your hole, catching there and traveling up. He taps it against your clit until you're tensing, whining, needy again. Tears down your cheeks.

He steadies you, pets your waist, guides his cock inside and it feels like you can breathe again. His mouth laves hot kisses over your ankle, the sole of your foot again, reverent and controlling all at once. The stretch burns - it always does, and maybe always will. Simon is just so big, thick all around and the mushroom head of him could always bump your cervix if he's not careful.

He's careful now, but only just. You can sense his control fraying, his hips driving forward steadily but his thighs tensing and his grip getting meaner. This is your favourite part. Watching him sweat, breathe hard, taking his pleasure in you.

"Yeah-" he cuts himself off with a long, drawn out groan. Deep, from the bottom of his belly and out. "Already so full of me, aren't ya? Can't get full enough."

You plead with your sounds, words out of your grasp. Your hands clutch at the sheets but it isn't enough. He's solid, he's your anchor, but he's losing himself in your cunt and you're free falling.

"Play with your tits for me," he commands, pumping faster. You're reflexively tightening around him, clit jumping for attention, squeaking each time he lets himself in as deep as possible and touches the mouth of your cervix.

Sunlight slowly fades on the bed, the last golden rays escaping out the window as you're bathed in dusk. 

There's nothing to do but obey, hands finding your swollen breasts and squeezing. They've been sore and huge, like that week before you get your period only it's been a couple months. None of your bras fit anymore.

Simon appreciates it, he loves it. Has you cooking for him with your tits out, nipples peaked and pussy leaking. They bounce, now, stopped only by your hands pinching and twisting. It's insane - no one in the world could replicate the feeling. No artist, no musician. Electricity zips from your breasts down to your clit and shit - you might come just like this, untouched, just full of your man and fondling yourself.

"Fuck, I can feel you squeezing me. Fucking," he pants, leaning over you, bending your leg. "Pinching my dick, sweetheart. Your pussy's so fucking good."

The orgasm begins in your toes, tingling. Your muscles tighten, drawing up, up, towards your cunt, which is making obscene sounds around him.

Simon sees the signs, sees your eyes rolling and your body going taut. He abandons your leg in favour of rubbing your clit with two big fingers quickly, up and down.

"That's it, sweetheart, come all over my cock. Go on," his voice is a snarl, barely distinguishable as human, beastly. "Be good for daddy.”

It's like the crescendo of an orchestra, like a summer afternoon in august, like waking up without a clogged nose after being sick, it's - really fucking good. You're near sobbing, crying out his name, abandoning your tits to reach for him desperately. He meets you halfway, shuddering his own orgasm into you. The press of his hips against yours is better than buttered toast, the delicate press of his chest against yours as he lets your leg go is bliss.

"Si-imon," you slur, hands on his cheeks. He laughs and kisses your forehead.

"What's that, sweet girl?"

"I love you," you cry a little more then, feeling him pull out and lay next to you. You're boneless.

"I love you too," his arm reaches across you, pulling you into him. "Both of you." Hand on your belly again.

"That was insane," you pant. He barks a laugh against your hair. "I'm serious."

"I know you are, love," he kisses your forehead, petting your stomach. You can tell it's meaning, can feel the gratefulness behind the kiss. He's saying thank you, for staying with him, for making him a father. Your hand finds his, squeezing back a wordless reply. Of course, it says.

<3

[the-palelady]

I love that u gave crime wife!reader a butterfly obsession like deep down she’s secretly super nerdy but her shitty husband doesn’t let her indulge in those things anymore.

Personally feel like Ghost would swoon at seeing her get all excited over seeing a certain butterfly or moth, especially ones she rarely gets to see.

I hope u write more of them in the future!!!

not but seriously he would fall to his knees seeing a woman like her, someone kept hidden from the outside world, get this sparkle in her eyes when she sees something she adores.

ghost, much like his name, ceases to exist when your husband is home. at first, you thought maybe him being there at all was just a figment of your imagination; your mind conjuring up some fake entity so you'd feel less lonely in the prison you were supposed to call your home.

as it turns out though, ghost was not a hallucination. in fact, he was a very real man who came around more and more as time went on. he knew your husbands routine, knew when he would leave the house for extended periods of time, and that's when he would make his appearance.

in the beginning, you never spoke, and ghost never pushed you to. you had grown accustomed to the silence between you and your husband, only ever speaking if he was scolding you or flatly informing you that'd he'd be gone for a few days.

ghost simply watched you water your flowers, sitting beside you on the plaid grey and white blanket you always brought out to sit on while you read. he spoke here and there, asking questions about the flowers you grew, what it was you were reading, or what you ate for dinner the previous night. admittedly, you found his awkwardness…reassuring?

it was like talking to others was unfamiliar territory for him as well.

you felt bad that you gave him little to work with. he was coming from a good place after all, keeping you company all through the afternoon and even late into the evenings while your husband was away. the least you could do was meet him in the middle.

but the more you thought about it the more you doubted yourself. you hadn’t talked to anyone besides your husband in so long. what if you sounded stupid? what if your topic of conversation was dull to ghost? you had been your husband’s little secret for so long, shut off from society, that you didn’t know much about current events, what was popular, what would be interesting. so you kept yourself shut out, continuing to only meet his questions with simple nods and shakes of your head.

until one warm summer afternoon when you sat on a gardening chair, looking over a gardening magazine that you’d read god only knows how many times.

ghost was situated in front of you, eyeing the magazine as well, not exactly interested but you supposed he was looking for something, anything to say. that was his usual way of driving the conversation and you didn’t mind it.

you flipped the page and he noticed a flower that looked awfully similar to a bed of flowers you had planted near the back door, to which he pointed at the page, and looked up at you.

“this where ya got the idea ta plant those?” he asked, gesturing with a nod of his head towards the pastel pink dahlia’s growing in the flower bed near the house. he looked over at the flowers, admiring the color of the petals and how well you had taken care of them until he noted how silent you had been. when he looked up, your eyes were practically bulging from your head, locked on something behind his shoulder.

however, when he made an attempt to turn around, your hands darted forward, keeping him in place before you placed your index finger over your lips, indicating for him to stay quiet.

ghost was beyond confused. even more so when you stood, shaking in your shoes as you tip toed to a large bush behind him.

“i can’t believe it…” a chill shot down his spine at the soft sound of your voice, a light rainfall trickling down during the spring.

he turned in his seat, being quiet like you had asked when his hooded whiskey eyes landed on you, hunched over, gazing at a butterfly that slowly flapped its wings together while it lay stationary on a leaf.

“wha’ is it?” he whispered back, and instead of answering with words, you beckoned him over. he didn’t hesitate to follow your command, a moth to a flame.

leaning forward, he consumed every last word you uttered to him, your voice music to his ears, a song he wanted to put on repeat.

“a purple emperor. i’ve never seen one before. they normally keep to the treetops in the woods. this one is probably a male, resting after his lunch.”

ghost felt his heart lurch forward at the sound of the giggle that left you, breathy and quiet, barely there, but there all the same.

“we should leave him be. i just couldn’t believe i got to see one. the purple on his wings was just too pretty to not want to get closer.”

when you turned to look at ghost, it took everything in him to keep himself from saying, “you’re too pretty.”

[python333]

your writing is literally the best in the cod fandom. we need more injured reader angst. it's too good

don't breathe — python333

— — — —

synopsis [reader] gets buried alive after refusing to give intel to enemy soldiers and *slips up and writes reader almost dying again* oops how did that happen haha

relationships platonic!price & gn!reader.

characters cap. john price.

word count 2.7k

warnings suffocation [reader], just generally really depressing thoughts, near death??, 2nd person pov [you/yours/yourself], usage of c/n [code name/call sign].

note aww tysm :(( dont say its the best im gonna get a complex LMAO but i appreciate it!! and yes i agree injured reader angst ftw :3 i present to you: reader gets very injured and theres a lot of angst and its basically just you suffering for a good 3/4 of the fic while the last quarter has the actual comfort!

“Hello?” You try again, your voice cracking and your tone as desperate as it can get, “Please, God, say someone can hear me.” 

You’ve been trapped in a casket for about five minutes now—at least, you woke up five minutes ago. God knows how long you’ve been stuck in the stupid thing, but realistically, it’s probably been much longer than five minutes.

The last thing you remember from before you were buried is being in the interrogation room of some small terrorist group’s facility, one you and the others were led to believe was abandoned weeks ago. 

Unfortunately, whoever gave you the information must’ve either had incredibly outdated information or was setting you all up for failure, because the facility was very much not abandoned and was instead full of enemy soldiers.

You all had already gotten into the building before you knew that, because of course you all had to be in the same spot at the same time—practically sitting ducks for the enemy—and of course you all had to be clueless about the possibly hundreds of people in the facility until it was too late. 

As far as you know, everyone managed to escape. Everyone but you. They didn’t mean to leave you behind, of course they didn’t, they were more focused on just booking it out of the facility. However, because of that, you were now stuck—you assume—several feet underground in a casket that has a limited amount of oxygen that drops every time you take a breath. 

You let out the breath you’re currently holding and suck in another deep breath, holding it as you think. Your strategy of holding your breath until you no longer could mostly worked, but it wouldn’t for long, you knew that soon you’d suffocate in all of the carbon dioxide gathering in the enclosed casket.

You don’t know how long you’d been unconscious in the casket, breathing in oxygen carelessly in your slumber, which made the whole situation worse. You didn’t even know how much time you had left. 

You hate to waste your breath checking your comms, but the enemy soldiers had accidentally left your earpiece in your ear—the small device apparently going undetected under their radar—and you wanted to make the most of it. You move your arm from your side and press onto the PTT button on your earpiece, wincing a little at how cramped the casket was.

“Does anybody copy?” You ask again, staring up at the almost pitch black space above you, “I repeat, does anybody copy?” 

It’s a vain attempt at contacting your team, really. You don’t know if they’re thinking about you, if the signal is going through, if they even have their earpieces on—you know nothing, and that terrifies you because you really don’t want to die right now but there’s literally nothing else you can do besides helplessly talk into your earpiece, not knowing if anyone’s listening. 

Your lungs start to burn and you let out the breath you were holding, taking another deep breath and beginning to hold that one. The air feels… thick. It’s starting to get harder to breathe, and you know you shouldn’t panic but you can’t help the few worried thoughts that come to the forefront of your mind. 

What am I going to do when I run out of oxygen and the only thing left for me to breathe in are my own discarded breaths? What will I do when all there is to do is suffocate? Am I going to try, in one last desperate attempt, to break out of the casket, or am I going to just lay here and die? Will my team try to find me, or will they forget about me? Have they already forgotten about me? 

Before you can listen to any more of those depressing thoughts, a voice comes from your earpiece. 

“H—lo? [c/n]?” It’s hard to tell with the static and the cuts in between the words, but you think it’s Price talking. 

“Price?” You ask immediately, all thoughts of preserving your breath forgotten. “Holy shit, you can hear me?” 

“Je—s— whe—e—” He cuts out for a moment and your stomach drops when all you can hear is static for a moment. 

“You’re— You’re cutting out, Captain, what did you say?” 

“Wher— —re you?” It takes you a moment to realize what he’s saying, your mind working much slower than it usually does, but once you do you shake your head negatively despite him not being there to see you. 

“I don’t— I don’t know,” You respond, taking a deep breath before adding on, “I think I’m underground, I just know I’m in a casket and it’s getting harder to breathe and—” 

“Okay, o—y,” You hear Price’s voice crackle, his voice becoming more distant and sounding almost muffled to you, “Sa— —ur bre—th, I’ll try to g—t some—e to track your— —tion.” 

With the constant cutting out of his words and the distortion of his tone, you can barely register or process what he’s saying, and that only panics you more but you refuse to let your emotions get the better of you even in the state of disorientation you’re in, so you keep holding your breath. 

A minute later, Price’s voice crackles through your earpiece again. 

“Okay, we’ve got your loc—tion,” Price’s voice sounds… oddly far away, “We can—” 

His voice slowly becomes muffled, and you release the breath you were holding without realizing it, slowly blinking up at the ceiling of the casket. A sort of haze falls over your mind and you can barely even hear Price anymore before you suddenly snap back to reality and hear his now much clearer voice loud in your ear. 

“[c/n]? [c/n], are you still there?” You recognize his tone now, and you’re just a little shocked at the sheer amount of worry in it. 

“Haven’t moved an inch,” You breathe out, before lying, “You cut out for a second for me, sorry.” 

“Don’t be sorry, it’s okay,” Price reassures you, “I said we got your loc—tion and we’re hea—g out th— —w. It’s not t— far away from where —e alre—dy are, we’re ba—ely three clicks away.” 

“… Clicks?” You ask, your eyebrows drawing together in confusion.

“Yes, clicks,” Price replies, sounding concerned, before hesitantly asking, “… You know what those are, right?” 

“I don’t—” You struggle to find words for a moment before you speak again, your own voice starting to sound distant, “I don’t think so?”

“What do y—u mean you don’t thi— —o?” Price asks, his voice sounding freakishly close, “Are you okay?” 

“No, yeah, I’m fine,” You lie through your teeth, not wanting to worry Price further, “I just… how far away are you?” 

“Just ab—t two cli—ks now,” Price says, before pausing and clarifying, “Two kilometers.” 

Two kilometers… how far is that? “And that’s… is that far, or?” 

“No, it’s not too far. It’s just a mi—te away, we didn’t ge— —o far before Laswell got your loc—tion,” Price tells you, “We’ll be there soon, ok—y? We’ll get y— —ut of there.” 

“A minute—” You cough and feel tears pricking at your eyes from how hard it is to take another breath, “A minute?” 

“Yes, a minute— [c/n], are you okay?” Price asks again, before laughing nervously, “You know what a minute is, do— —ou?” 

“...” You struggle to answer the question, thinking long and hard for a few seconds before hesitantly answering, “… Yeah, I do, sorry. It’s sixty seconds.” 

“Why’d it take you so long to answer?” 

“I don’t know, I’m sorry, I—” You take a few shallow breaths, and feel a headache start to build up, “How far away are you guys?” 

“We’re alm—t there,” Price promises you, “The heli’s ab—t to l—nd, and we’ll dig you up, and—” 

Why is it so cold? Price’s voice cuts off and when he stops talking you realize that you’re shivering. You ball your fists up and can’t even feel your nails digging into your palms, your hands having gone numb from the cold, and realizing that makes you discover that your lips feel numb too. 

Your ears start to ring and you feel that uncomfortable pins and needles feeling in your hands, the sensation slowly traveling up your arms, making you both wanting to peel off your own skin and also grateful that you can at least feel something besides the cold.

In the midst of your thinking, you hear muffled thumping coming from above you—whoever buried you couldn’t have buried you anything below six feet. 

“—llo? [c/n]? Are you still there?” 

You bring your hand up, the movement slow and sluggish, and you try to search around the side of your face for your earpiece. You eventually find it and when you do you press against it until you feel the PTT button being pushed. 

“Still here,” You confirm breathlessly, coughing again as you take a few more shallow breaths, “I think I’m running out of— of… what’s the fuckin’ air that you can breath in, it starts with an o…” 

“… Oxygen?”

“Oxygen, yeah,” You slowly blink up at the ceiling of the casket, “There’s— I think— I don’t… I think… I think I’m gonna pass out, Captain.” 

“[c/n], don’t you fucking dare,” Price growls, “You stay awake, I swear to fucking god.” 

“I can’t—” You take a few more shallow breaths, before coughing, the tears escaping your eyes reaching the corners of your mouth. 

You can hear Price briefly talk with someone else, his voice the most serious you’ve ever heard it, before he talks directly to you again, “How much longer do you think you have before you run out of oxygen?” 

It takes you a moment to register the question, but when you do, you answer, “Uh… I don’t— I think… maybe a few more minutes? I can’t tell, it’s just hard to breathe, I can’t…” 

“Okay, okay,” Price softly says, gusts of wind blowing into his mic as he talks, “Give me a second, okay? We’re almost there, kid, we’ll— we’ll be there in just a minute, we just passed over you, I just need you to stay awake.” 

“In a minute,” You repeat to yourself, before taking a deep breath, hoping that you have enough oxygen to make it out of this casket because you really don’t want to die here, not when there’s help just a minute away. 

After what you assume is a minute or two, instead of thumping, you hear something cut into the dirt above you. The sound, however, is heavily muffled, so muffled to the point where you don’t know if you’re hallucinating or not.

Is that a symptom of CO2 poisoning? Hallucinations? You lay still in the casket and can’t help but release the breath you’d only just taken, the ringing in your ears starting up again and growing louder faster than they had before. 

Your entire body is numb, your chest is heavy, and you can feel a sort of fog fall over your mind. You can distantly hear Price yelling through your earpiece, but you can’t find it in yourself to respond, instead simply laying there, your blinking starting to slow down before it eventually stops, leaving your eyes closed. 

— 

For a moment, you think you died and went to heaven, which would be weird, considering all the things you’ve done in your life. Not saying you’d go to hell, just saying God would probably hesitate for a second before letting you in through the pearly gates. 

You blink awake, slowly but surely, and the first thing you realize is that you can feel things again. You tilt your head down to the bump under the white bed sheets laid on top of you, and squeeze your hand into a ball, watching the bump move and feeling your fingers dig into your oddly sore palms.

You let out a sigh of relief and pull your hand out from the sheets, bringing it up to your face and feeling the oxygen mask that’s been placed over your mouth and nose.

“Don’t mess with that,” You hear a voice say to your right. You turn your head and see a very tired Captain Price, dark eyebags hanging under his eyes and arms crossed, his hands having a white knuckle grip on either one of his elbows. 

“…” You don’t say anything, instead you simply stare at him until he sighs and gets up from his seat. You watch silently as he leans over your bed and bends down, before pausing, and then quickly snaking his hands under your back to pull you up just enough for him to properly hug you. 

You reach up with shaky hands and tentatively hug him back, not nearly as tightly—not that you don’t want to, but you physically can’t with how weak your arms are right now—but with just as much sincere affection. You can feel Price’s beard rubbing against your neck and hear his small sniffles as he embraces you tightly. 

Maybe it’s his sniffling, or the way you can finally feel warmth for the first time in what feels like forever, or maybe it’s just the fact that he’s holding you with so much care and affection that it almost makes you burst at the seams, whatever it is, it causes you to tear up as well. 

Those tears quickly become sobs that bubble up in your throat and crawl their way out of it, forcing you to tuck your head into the crook of Price’s neck and muffle your sobs in it, muttering a small ‘sorry’ after each one. 

After each ‘sorry’, Price responds with, “It’s okay, let it out, sweetheart, you’re okay,” and those reassuring words only make you cry more because God, you didn’t even think he’d find you, yet here he is, letting you cry into his neck and is reassuring you after every apology that it’s okay. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” You mumble a litany of apologies into Price’s neck, your breath stuttering and hitching as you try to hold back your sobs. Price only shushes you and rubs his hand up and down your back in a comforting gesture, bringing his head up to kiss the top of your head. 

He tucks your head under his chin, “Don’t apologize, it’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.” 

And fuck, you know it’s just words, but it only makes you cry more. 

Your sobs eventually stop, leaving you hiccuping against Price’s neck, silently crying as he continues to rub your back. 

“I thought you died,” He whispers, his hand stuttering on your back, “I thought you died and I was going to dig up your dead body, when you didn’t answer me.”

You stay silent, letting him continue, “I thought you were dead when we dug you up and needed to feel your heartbeat for myself to confirm that you were still alive.” 

He pauses for a moment before continuing, “I’ve been here ever since they put you in here. I haven’t slept, I’ve just stayed here, waiting for you to wake up so I could tell you that I—”

He chokes up for a moment before taking a deep breath and continuing, “I’m sorry for not even thinking to drag you out of the facility with me when we all ran out. You were— you were right there, and I couldn’t just grab your arm and take you with me, I just had to leave you behind and I—” 

“You watched me while I was asleep?” You ask quietly, your eyebrows drawing together. 

Price pauses and pulls his chin off of your head, and pulls you away from his neck so he can properly give you the most incredulous look he can pull, before saying, “I’m pouring my heart out to you and apologizing for practically leaving you for dead, and that’s what you’re worried about?” 

“Well, I’m not worried, I’m just—” You shrug, not knowing how to explain it. Price sighs and chuckles quietly before tucking your head back under his chin. 

“You’re insufferable,” He mumbles, sniffling a bit. 

“… I forgive you, by the way,” You say after a moment of silence, “I didn’t really blame you in the first place.” 

“You had the right to.” 

“Sure I did.” 

“But you didn’t blame me.”

“Right.” “…” Price stays silent for a moment before pressing another soft kiss to the top of your head and saying quietly, “You should blame me.” 

“Maybe,” You mumble back, “But I won’t.” 

Later, maybe an hour later, if the others see you asleep in Price’s arms while he keeps your head tucked under his chin and rubs your back affectionately—no they don’t.

[privateolives]

This is probably because I grew up watching 24/7 animal planet, but what finally made the allo/aplatonic thing click for me were the nature's of big cats.

Lions are powerful, regal creatures who are uniquely adapted to pack life. They need these connections to live a healthy life; A lonely lion is a miserable creature indeed.

Jaguars are solitary, beautiful creatures who live happily solitary. They prowl their lush world with self-sufficient majesty. A jaguar is not lonely without a pack. In fact, forcing jaguars to share space with others they do not enjoy is just as damaging as forcing a lion to live alone.

A lion may choose to head out on it's own for the most part, but in the end must return to the pack to thrive. A jaguar can choose to trust and enjoy the company of others, but they never feel the need to form a pack.

Is a jaguar selfish for this? A psychopath, a narcissist or any other such horrid assumptions? Is it a less moral creature than a lion, who seeks others like it to thrive?

Is a lion pathetic, or needy, or selfish for wanting community? For requiring contact with others like they require water? For their inherent need to string complicated webs of relationships that may seem silly or dramatic to others?

Of course not. These are ridiculous questions to even ask.

They are simply lions and jaguars.

In fact, is a jaguar that chooses to spend time with you not as magical as a lion's love? For a creature that needs no bond to thrive to still enjoy your presence enough to share it a time? Is a lion who can prowl the night alone not impressive in its strength and resilience? Is it not awe-inspiring in its ability to conquer a life it was never wired for and reign still?

Are they not both beautiful and awe-inspiring in their own ways, without being wrong?

Alloplatonics. Aplatonics. Are we not both special and beautiful in both our bonds and self-confident happiness equal, in each our ways? Is there not unique beauty in lifelong bonded packs and magical encounters that need no perpetuity to carry life forward?

Are we not but lions and jaguars? Neither wrong, neither selfish, but just different and beautiful creatures in each our ways?

That's how I've come to see it, anyway.

[lunarw0rks]

you know how when you click on an operator in MW3, it plays a different voiceline/greeting thing?? well...... i was doing some scientific research and clicking on soap several times in a row (for science)

and there's a voiceline that says "bonnie!" and it's so fucking cute but i can't find any videos of it to share with you guys 😠

[sant-riley]

Uhhh brain wracking brain wracking-

Imagine S/O surprising Ghost with their strength by picking him up and perhaps spinning him around

They insist that he's as light as a feather. They're visibly struggling while holding him up

Thank you anon for the food, I haven't written anything in AGES I'm sorry if I'm rusty but fuck it we ball, gonna do these as bullet points!

Warnings; nothing I can think of! But as always, lmk!

(Literally me and Simon)

Trying and somewhat achieving in picking up Simon!

The first time you bring it up, asking if you can attempt it, Simon looks at you like you're fucking stupid.

He's a big dude, bigger than most and will almost always be the biggest person in the room, he's built like a fucking mountain.

You throwing him pretty eyes and begging for his permission isn't gonna change the fact that you're smaller than him, you'll hurt yourself, he knows you will, so he says no.

This does nothing to ward you off, only fueling you to want to work out and gain upper arm and body strength to prove him wrong out of spite.

He'll ask Soap where you've been in the last few weeks,, noticing your slight absence when training hours are over, nowhere to be found an hour or so afterwards.

Soap only chuckles and throws a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the gym where the creaks of the workout gear can be heard still.

"They're still workin' wouldn't tell me why though."

Simon makes his way towards the gym, leaning on the doorway as he sees you huff and puff as you do sets of bicep curls.

He can't help but a small smirk run under his mask, you're so committed to this. It's so stupid, but he can't deny it makes him happy.

No one can just pick the man up, takes Price, Gaz and Soap usually to keep up right and that's with his arms thrown around their shoulders.

He still doubts you'll be able to, but he's flattered. You're trying (asshole)

Simon creeps silently to you, waiting til you set down the weights before whispering out a "boo", his shit eating grin when you yelp and whirl around, wide eyes staring oh so prettily up at him.

"What the fuck! Why would you do that?" "It's funny." "It is fucking not." "Mmm, sure is."

He moves to ruffle your hair, ignoring your hand swatting at his own.

"Why are you here afterhours? You're missing chunks of your dinner." He knows why, he just wants to hear you admit it.

"Is it a crime to work out some more? To stay in top shape for our job?" The eyebrow he raises is catastrophic, immediately calling you the fuck out without any words.

"Okay, fine. I've been working out so I can prove to you I can pick you up."

At this point, he figures he can humor you, you've been trying so hard.

"Y'know what? Why the hell not, cmon, try and lift me."

"Are you fucking with me or-" "hurry up before I change my mind." "Aye Aye sir."

He stands in front of you, arms loosely at his side, head tilted to the right as he watches you get into form.

The key to lift with your legs, the strength in them far outweighing anything else, wrapping your arms across his stomach (a feeling of electricity jumps up his spine at your touch, he hopes you don't notice.)

You take a deep breath, nuzzling your head into his chest and try your fucking damndest to lift this behemoth of a man up and to your and Simon's surprise, you DO manage to lift him up, at least an inch of the ground before your legs buckle and you shakily place him down.

A whoop leaves your mouth, jumping up and down as you giggle about lifting Ghost, "I did it! You weren't that heavy at all!" Simon can literally see the sweat on your brow, but he just rumbles out a laugh and moves to plant a masked kiss on your temple, congratulating you on your win over him.

You run out into the base, no doubt going to tell the others about your feat.

He sighs a gross lovesick sigh, and moves to grab your gym bag from the bench and follow after you.

[franabz]

★ A fresh start Band141!AU

(part 4)

The days following your note of leave were completely silent, though you couldn't help but say you weren't surprised. You couldn't deny the twisting pain in your gut every time you stumbled across more posts about your former band and their newest member, your replacement. It always hurt to see how they were seemingly doing much better with "Sadie" than they were ever doing with you. They never once really gave you a second glance, simply seeing you as an extra burden to carry due to your stage fright, and always put that against you during gigs. It was about time for a fresh start.

"Is Y/N gonna freeze up again?" Followed by stupidly sickening snickers of agreement. You hated it.

Constantly overshadowed by your former bandmates, you were sick of it. Sick of being overcasted as just another voice, another unheard opinion, another burden.

After weeks of thoughtful consideration, you finally snatched up that 141 business card that had been collecting dust on your bedside table and walked over to your desk, plopping down in your chair with a heavy sigh and letting your eyes roam over the wording one last time, before finally biting the bullet and giving it a call, your hand subtly shaking in anxiety as your fingers dialed the number on the card.

You listened to the tone dial for a few moments, knee bouncing slightly in anticipation, feeling like every moment passing was hours.

"Price! Ye phone is ringin!'" Soap shouted from across the couch in Price's flat with Gaz. Price looked up from over the kitchen counter where he was currently nursing a cigar over an ash tray. As for Ghost, he was out doing god knows what. He was never the verbal guy. "Who is it?" John grunted, weary eyes flickering up to meet Soap's gaze with a small sigh. Soap glanced over at the phone once again. Gaz as well looked up curiously from his spot in the kitchen, downing a bottle of water while leaning against the counter. "Some unknown number." He replied, rolling to lay on his belly, and resting his chin in his palm. Price sighed again, setting his cigar down onto the ashtray on the counter and exhaling the smoke through his nose, before crossing the room to his phone and picking it up off the coffee table and bringing it to his ear. "Hello?" He placed a hand on his hip, glancing out the window as he listened to a familiar voice croak through the phone, immediately recognizing it as the young bird he met at the bar during the band night.

"Hey... Is this, uh... John Price?" You spoke sheepishly, twirling a strand of hair around your finger to try and take your mind off of the crippling fear of rejection despite barely even speaking to the guy properly. "It's me, Y/N... From the band night?" You added, gulping quietly.

Price leaned against the armrest of the couch beside him and glanced from Soap on the couch to Gaz in the kitchen, before nodding slightly and clearing his throat. "Yes ma'am, that'd be right." He replied respectfully. "I'm interested in your offer as a secondary vocalist and i'm wondering when would be a good time to... come in?" Your voice spoke through the phone once again, and by now Soap is already practically half way off the couch to put his ear against the other end of Price's phone, trying to pitch what was going on. As soon as he got a catch of who was on the other line, he couldn't help but let his smile grow wider. "Simon's gonnae be surprised..." He snickered, earning a small shove from Price as a warning.

"F'course. How does next Saturday sound?" Price hummed gruffly, pleased that he managed to get a call back after being convinced you would have forgotten or not given the offer much mind. Soap's smile widened as he heard faintly what was being said from the other end, mouthing "We got 'er!" to Gaz, earning a small smile from him as well. "Yeah... Next Saturday is fine. Thank you!" You replied, the relief in your voice slightly noticeable. You were just relieved you weren't outright turned down, and that eased your anxiety a bit.

"Perfect. I'll see ya then." Price grinned, the corners of his eyes crinkling up slightly. You two exchanged goodbyes, Price texted you the address... And that was it.

You listened to the line go flat, letting go of a breath you didn't even realize you were holding until now. That was it... right? You set your phone down against your desk with a small thud and simply sat in your own emotions for a few seconds. Today was Thursday... meaning two days to prepare. Had to make good first impression, of course, and make sure you looked presentable— but there wasn't a mental checklist without worries as well. What if i voice crack? What if my hands get clammy and I drop the mic? What if they don't like me?—

No. Get out of your head. You mentally scolded yourself as you finally pushed yourself off your desk, deciding to do what you did best and simply sit on it. It was always easier to make decisions on a clear head, as you always reminded yourself.

The days following the interview were grueling. Countless hours of preparation that frankly didn't even need to get done got done. Nothing could go wrong. The confirmation text the day of the interview threw an even deeper pit into your gut, fumbling your phone as you read the text, grabbing your car keys and purse before reaching for the front door to your apartment, and typing out a quick and short reply.

Thankfully the place wasn't too far from where you lived, which meant you didn't have to worry as much about sweating bullets through your perfectly ironed button-up during the drive even though lets face it: you'd probably still manage it either way in the state of balled up nerves you were in.

Don't worry... It's a fresh start.

[b1rds3ye]

Task Force 141 but it's Battlefield's Bad Company - a unit of disgraced soldiers who are valued no higher than cannon fodder but who are also too skilled to simply get the boot. Despite being thrown at the most devastating threats, they are low on resources and lack respect from the rest of the military. No one bothers learning their names, they're not expected to last more than a week. But a small unit of them always manage to pull through.

Captain John Price says he only took up Bad Company because he was given an offer of early retirement if he survived leading the dredges of the military. In truth, he's gone off the books one too many times, his last mission had him temporarily A.W.O.L. as he pursued what he believed was right. If the military can't silence him with retirement, they'll silence him with Bad Company where they'll throw every mission under the sun at him until he inevitably falls. He doesn't comment on how his last official mission went, but if you ever bring up General Shepherd he says he has a special bullet reserved for that bastard.

No one knows exactly why Lieutenant Simon "Ghost" Riley got into Bad Company, he doesn't say. In fact, no one knows shit about him. All anyone knows is that he's a damn good soldier, the longest lasting in Bad Company - he transferred even earlier than Price. Simon says he willingly transferred here because he thrives with the freedom and informality compared to the standard military and no one dares comment on how utterly unhinged that sounds. Still, his personality seems to fit the story; he's not afraid to go off the beaten path to reach the mission objective which seems to have taken out everyone but him.

Sergeant Johnny "Soap" MacTavish is just a menace, but a crafty one which is a problem for the military. He enjoys being demolitions expert and one day got too bored and a little too curious. Destroying physical objects would be too obvious but he may or may not have infected the military system with a virus to see what sort of information he could extract. He learnt the hard and very expensive way that he has a knack for hacking. Perhaps that's why they transferred him to Bad Company, with trash-quality guns, outdated tech and precisely negative ammo, there's not much destruction he can wreak. Well, that was likely the thought process but Johnny's always loved a challenge.

Sergeant Kyle "Gaz" Garrick was framed - he presumes. He excels in all the drills, his performance is promising, he follows all the orders, and yet he's here. What he doesn't know is that he doesn't have the personality superiors desire. He questions too much, he's far too open minded, he can't be molded like other soldiers. He's stubborn - they transferred him because he filed one too many complaints of inefficient directives that could be boiled down into polite military speak of "screw you and your orders, I have a better way (P.S. may your tea always be lukewarm)". He's annoyed the big bad men at the round-table and now he's paying the price. Fortunately, those are the traits that thrive in Bad Company and the exact traits that prompted Price to take him under his wing.

And that just leaves you, the newest member on the brink of promotion to sergeant until you were transferred into Bad Company. You're jittery, you've heard of the nightmare that is Bad Company, how it contains the worst of the worst (and yes you are aware that it apparently includes you now). When you step off the helicopter, you repeat your simple goal - to survive this one mission with Bad Company so that you can go back to your squadron and get your damn promotion.

But as the mission progresses you find yourself getting closer to all the members of Bad Company. You look back fondly at the memory of Price forcing the rest of you to run back into gunfire to retrieve his stupid bucket hat, the same hat he plops on your head if you're ever too on edge. You can only feel thankful for Ghost's unconventional medical advice - you have to give it to him, this discount Bear Grylls has saved your life more times than you can count. You look forward to the new creative ways Soap will blow up an enemy cache, or watch as Gaz hilariously tries to mimic your direct superiors with an overly high-pitched voice as Price begrudgingly talks to them over comms.

And that's when you realise that there will be a day where the mission is inevitably over. And instead of looking forward to your transfer back, you find yourself wanting to risk your life every day with your beloved bunch of military misfits, the group of you against the rest of the world, than whatever stuffy perks come with being sergeant.

Call of Duty Masterlist

[silkythewriter]

Hi there I saw that your doing death note and it’s my fav anime so I was thinking for some headcannons for L with a older sister who is the complete opposite of him and comes to Japan to see him when the Kira case is happening and doesn’t take anything seriously and is just flirting with the task force and Misa and knows Light is Kira and says it all the time

(I have a death oc like this and I thought it would be cool)

Thank you bye

✬Being L’s older Sister!✬

Warnings!: grammer, spelling mistakes! May be a bit OOC!

Fandom!: Death Note!

Author note!: AH HELLO!!!! (⊃｡•́‿•̀｡)⊃YOUR MY FIRST DEATH NOTE REQUESTER THANK YOU SO SO SO SO MUCH!!! I REALLY HOPE YOU ENJOY ٩(ᐛ)و

Summary!: Being L’s older flirty sister!(who doesn’t take much seriously!)

✬☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆✬

“if you see my sister Evelyn

Tell that girl to hurry home again!

Where oh where'd my sister Evelyn go?”

✬☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆✬

Everyone was in shock the first time he introduced you, most likely by accident (￣▽￣💧)

Really!, the first time you walked in and hugged L while ruffling his hair made everyone baffled. I mean, L keeps everyone at arms length so to see him let you do it with no expression shocked everyone.

“There’s my favorite little brother!” You cooed as you pitched his cheeks teasingly. “I’m your only little brother Y/n.”

Everyone genuinely just stared, especially light, as you two bickered like, well, siblings!

“ shouldn’t you respect your elders or something!” You said crossing your arms at the dark haired man. “Well, yes, but considering how ancient you are, your probably considered a fossil by now.” He snickered softly.

L, snickering is a rare sight in of itself, L bantering, now that’s a new game feild!

Of course, L takes extra precautions when it comes to you. Especially with his suspicions of light being Kira, and Misa. So he makes sure to use some kind of nickname, or fake name of your choosing.

In all honesty your flirty attitude shocks everyone, especially form how polar opposite’s you and L are compared to each other. From personality wise, to even speaking wise.

MATSUBA WOULD ESPECIALLY BE BASHFUL AND FLUSTER AROUND YOU(≧▽≦)

I honestly see L sharing one of his toppings with you, like a cherry or strawberry!, he only does it when you lounge around while he’s looking over the information he has so far. Almost absentmindedly, though for a piece of his actual dessert is harder to have then catching Kira…(¬_¬)

This doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a soft spot for you though!, as you are the only thing he has to consider family, you mean a great deal to him. That’s why he’s wary of having you by his side on your visit due to the risks.

But once proven you can handle your own and not let your real name nor any other info he’d be a bit more willing to have you around the task force!

Adding onto that, you catching on to L’s suspicious of light being Kira definitely helps your case. But it takes everyone by surprise when you casually blurt it out without a care.

“I bet a strawberry short cake light is Kira” you say swiveling around the in the rolling chair as everyone turns to face you. L especially, A bit surprised but not stunned only muttered out a response “Deal.”

Misa is so happy to see another girl around! But not so much about you siding with L, that light is Kira. But she quickly shoved that aside to become friends!

She does like talking a lot so please be warned before you talk to her, especially about light.

She loves some playful flirting!, and she’s willing to do it but also is quick to make sure to tell light it’s nothing serious(like he cares much). She calls you some cute nicknames!, you guys are probably quick to become friends.

As for light himself, he’s quite wary of you at first, are you another L?, we’re you after him too? How’d you suspect him so quickly?. He ‘s put off by you, but at the same time keeps his acts up as the innocent deputy’s son.

He’s not sure if he should concider you a threat or not, you don’t take the investigation seriously much, but as well are quick to point the finger at him. Your on a gray line with him due to this, he keeps his guard up, but tries to play it off so no one gets suspicious.

Even in tense situations during the investigation you still have a way of calming L, mostly by your calm composure. It makes him feel a bit better

And having someone siding with him during the investigation without question is a big comfort as-well!

Going back to the flirting part, I do think L does get a bit wary. Not necessarily with you, but the task force as he wants them to focus on the case. But also as a brother he is protective of you and watching people get flustered by your flirty comments is something he doesn’t necessarily enjoy seeing. But at the same time he doesn’t do much to stop you, just kinda glares with his unsettling wide eyes at the person who is bright red.

“Y/n, please leave Mogi alone, he look’s red” L said bluntly. “Awww, cmon I’m just having some fun” you said waving him off before retreating to your chair to let him get back to work.

Poking at L’s face repeatedly to get him to take a break is a common occurrence, but if he’s coming to a break through he will push your hand away and push your rolling chair as far as he can. (╥_╥)

L loves you a ton, and although his almost unchanging face and beady eyes feel like other wise you read him like a book and can tell he does care!. It’s nice having someone that cares about him outside of watari. This case is probably the most if not only hardest case to come to date, so having som support is genuinely helpful.

Speaking of watari, depending on your relationship with him he’d love you!, of course since you are L’s older sister he will treat you with the same respect he has for L. And will do his best for your safety as he knows what you mean to L.

He does lecture you two about getting along some times though (｡ﹷ ‸ ﹷ ✿)

Honestly most of the task force thought that he was actually the older sibling and you the youngest at first glance.

I imagine after you and L have an argument like any sibling does. Although getting into an argument is hard due to his monotone voice. He makes up by it in sweets, though it’ll probably end up with him stealing some after he finished his.

It’s also nice having a second opinion, like voicing what you think the evidence is leading to, or your thoughts on the investigation so far. It makes a thought provoking experience for him.

Please force this man to get some rest cause with those dark circles under his eyes he looks 10 years older then you 😭

Overall he really does care for you, and sure you may not see it. But due to the Kira case he will keep a closer eye on you, older sister or not. He takes it upon himself to keep you safe!, even if you banter like you were still young! (•̀ᴗ•́)و

✬☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆✬

GRAHHH TYSM FOR BEING MY FIRST DEATH NOTE REQUEST I AM SO GREATFUL PLEASE COME AGAIN!

[necrotic-nephilim]

"I don't care how much you hate me - you need to eat!"

DickTim during Bruce's Lost In Time phase but with Dick stopping Tim from leaving💕

send a quote and a ship and I'll write a short fic!

fucked up DickTim during Bruce's lost in time era my beloved. this is 2k of *very* dead dove DickTim, with one-sided feelings from Dick and unreliable narrator vibes. it is a smidge OOC, just bc of how dark Dick gets, but i think i kept it best i could. enjoy <3

It wasn’t supposed to go this far.

Dick thought he was doing this to honor Bruce. The last thing Bruce would’ve wanted was to see Tim drive himself over the edge and go too far, all for a fruitless chase to bring Bruce back from the dead. And sure, maybe deep down Dick knew he reflected some of Bruce’s worst traits. The obsessive control. The worrying to the point of being overbearing.

It came with the capes and spandex territory. Especially now that Dick had decided to man up and put on that damned cowl.

But even at Bruce’s worst, Dick was pretty sure he wouldn’t dare go this far.

Dick knew it was wrong. What he didn’t know was why he couldn’t stop himself. Why the gnawing guilt was so easy to compartmentalize and why every good point Tim had got ignored by Dick’s logical side, brushed off by one simple mantra.

He was doing this for Tim’s own good.

All of this was to protect Tim from doing something he would regret.

Dick had done brain scans, had Tim magically checked up, and even managed to get him to properly talk to a psychiatrist. Everything came back normal. Tim was perfectly healthy.

So maybe this was something that had always been a part of Tim. Maybe it was a bad idea for any of them to have let Tim into the vigilante world so young.

Some people could handle it. Some people couldn’t. Dick had seen firsthand how it broke minds and ruined lives. He’d seen people turn to drugs, cults, murder, and god knew what else just to try to cope with it.

That didn’t make Tim weak. Tim Drake was the furthest thing from weak, and Dick would fight anyone on that.

This was just a hard life to cope with. Sometimes, people needed support through the worst of it.

That’s what Dick was doing.

Giving support.

“I don’t care how much you hate me- you need to eat!” Dick stepped back, dodging Tim’s attempt to kick his feet out. The bowl of salad Dick had set next to Tim was completely ignored.

Dick had learned not to give Tim hot food after Tim flung potato soup at his head the first time, chunks of potato stuck to his hair.

Tim’s scowl was lethal. Technically, he wasn’t restrained. He could move freely around the manor and do whatever he wanted.

It was the shock collar that kept him from leaving the grounds or breaking into the Batcave.

Dick had decided that would be the most humane way. The shock was only momentarily painful, it was designed to knock Tim unconscious if he tried to get somewhere he wasn’t supposed to. The collar had taken three tries before Dick found a lock Tim couldn’t pick, and a few more unfortunate incidents of Tim finding weak spots in the barrier.

But Dick always found Tim and brought him back home.

That was what was important.

The fact Tim kept trying to break out and go to god knew where on some fruitless quest to find a dead man made Dick more secure about this decision.

He was doing this to protect Tim. Once Tim worked through the worst of his grief, all this would be in the past. Something they would laugh at.

Hopefully.

It was like one of Tim’s contingency plans. Really, he of all people should understand.

But he didn’t. Which was what hurt Dick the most, the angry look in Tim’s eyes and the way his fists clenched when Dick came into Tim’s room. Tim had access to the whole manor, but he stuck mostly to his room, refusing to talk to anyone.

Especially Dick.

And now, it seemed, his latest tactic was a hunger strike.

“I’ll let you look over the burglary case we’re working on,” Dick offered. “I’ll bring you all the files and your computer if you just…” he gestured to the salad, “eat something.”

That had worked, in the beginning. Dick could coax good behavior out of Tim by offering to let Tim help with whatever case Dick was facing. It took a load off of Dick’s back and gave Tim something to focus on.

Of course, Dick couldn’t leave Tim’s computer with him. The first time Dick did that, Tim managed to break all of the firewalls and safeties put on it to start a case file about Bruce. Dick had to delete everything and only allow Tim monitored access from that point on.

After that, Tim really didn’t like Dick.

“Can’t you just go back to ignoring me?” Tim snapped. He sounded… resigned. Emotionless in a way he hadn’t been, like all the fight he’d been putting up for weeks was finally going out.

“Ignoring you?” Dick frowned. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut at the words. He kept a wide berth from Tim, wary of more punches being thrown, and decided to sit at Tim’s desk chair, a good few feet from where Tim was on his bed. “What makes you think I’m ignoring you?”

Tim scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You only talk to me to ask if I’ve dropped the Bruce thing yet, or to try to force self-care on me. The rest of the time you ignore me so you don’t have to face your own guilt.”

Dick violently shook his head. “That’s not-” he sighed, running a hand over his face- “I’m just busy, I promise. Between being Batman, managing Bruce’s estate, and trying to handle Damian, I just…” his voice trailed off. So many things to balance. He still didn’t know how Bruce managed it all. “I haven’t made enough time for you. I’m sorry.”

He decided to take on the burden of helping Tim. It was his responsibility and Tim was right, Dick was doing a piss poor job of taking care of him.

No wonder he pushed away Dick’s attempts to reconcile. It must’ve come across as half-assed, in Tim’s eyes.

Dick wished Bruce was here. He would’ve known the right way to handle this.

“Don’t start now,” Tim said icily. He picked up a book from his nightstand and opened it, pointedly not looking at Dick anymore. “Just leave me alone.”

“Will you eat first?” Dick asked. “If you just eat, I’ll go. I promise.”

With a loud sigh, Tim snapped his book shut. He picked up the salad Dick brought and shoveled down mouthfuls, all while glaring at Dick. Once the bowl was empty he set it back down and spread his hands, waiting.

Dick didn’t leave.

He wasn’t going to abandon Tim.

Dick stood up and Tim relaxed for just a moment before he realized Dick was walking toward Tim’s bed instead of the door. Slowly, like he was approaching a wild animal, Dick crept forward. He chose to sit on the foot of the bed, still far enough away from Tim to give him personal space.

“Tim-”

“Out. Now. You promised.”

Dick ran his fingers through his hair. “I know, but-”

“What do you want from me?” Tim almost yelled the words. “Do you want me to just say I don’t believe Bruce is alive? Will you finally leave me alone, then?”

“Can you say it under a truth serum?”

Tim went quiet, grinding his jaw.

“I want you to get better,” Dick sighed.

“What happens when I get better, then?” Tim challenged. He moved to sit cross-legged on the bed. So close to Dick that Dick could reach out and touch him, but emotionally, they were miles apart and it hurt Dick’s chest. “You ‘fix me’-” he put finger quotes around the words- “to your liking, then set me free?”

“Don’t talk about yourself like you’re an animal.” Dick frowned, fist clenching at the idea Tim thought of himself that way.

Tim just stared at him. “Then don’t treat me like one.” He raised a hand and tapped the collar.

It looked like it had new scratch marks on it.

“That’s not what I’m doing,” Dick said. He tried to find the words. It was so hard to explain it when Tim wasn’t listening to him. He wasn’t even given a chance. Dick tried to reach out. For once, Tim didn’t pull away. He was completely rigid under Dick’s touch, though. His hand rested on Tim’s arm, thumb stroking back and forth. “You know I’m doing this because… because I’m worried about you. And I care, Tim.”

“No you don’t,” Tim leaned away from Dick, but didn’t pull his arm free. “Whatever version of me exists in your head-”

“Tim-”

“-isn’t real,” Tim ignored him and kept going. “You won’t even listen to my theory-”

“Tim!” Dick tightened his grip, ignoring the small wince of pain that came out of Tim. “I’m not entertaining that kind of talk.” He tried to be firm but loving with his tone. But even Dick could hear the anger and frustration that was bleeding off of him. “This is practically self harm.”

“I know I’m right,” Tim mumbled. He wouldn’t look at Dick. “Will you just leave, now?”

Against his better judgment, Dick stood up. He had to patrol soon. “I’m sorry. We’ll talk after-”

“I’m going to sleep,” Tim snapped. “No, we won’t.”

Dick tried to throw his hands up in frustration, but he was still holding onto Tim’s arm.

He didn’t want to let go.

He knew Tim was waiting for him to let go, but Dick couldn’t force his fingers to release. He just stared for a moment, breathing hard.

Dick was doing this out of love.

And now, he loved Tim too much to want to let go of him.

Did he have to patrol tonight? He was pretty sure the Birds of Prey were in Gotham.

“Dick,” Tim said carefully, starting to scoot away from him. The apprehension in his voice was unsteady, eyes narrowed. He was always too on edge. “I’m tired. Just go on patrol.”

Instead of letting go, Dick lifted his other hand and held Tim’s face. Tim flinched but stopped inching away. He was completely still, barely even breathing.

He looked afraid of Dick.

Dick’s chest clenched. He wished he could get Tim to understand. Dick leaned forward and pressed a kiss to Tim’s forehead.

He wanted to kiss somewhere else, somewhere a few inches lower and just as unobtainable. That was a feeling Dick buried deep, deep inside of him.

It wasn’t why he was doing this.

A hand pressed against Dick’s chest. Trying to push Dick away, but for just a moment, the pressure and warmth almost made Dick shudder. Tim hadn’t properly trained in a while.

He wasn’t actually strong enough to push Dick off of him. If Dick wanted to, Tim couldn’t have stopped him.

But their relationship was already fractured. It would take a long time of repairing and letting Tim heal before Dick could even try pursuing those feelings.

Tim had once had a childhood crush on Dick, though. So he was pretty sure they could work their way up to it, be something more.

Dick pulled away. He let go of Tim’s arm and allowed himself one stroke of Tim’s hair. It was getting a little long, brushing against Tim’s shoulders.

The entire time, Tim remained perfectly still. But his eyes got wider and wider, the way they always did when he had just figured out a case.

Dick was getting too close. He needed to pull back.

“You still have the spare comm link?” Dick asked.

Tim didn’t answer. He just kept staring with those wide, searching eyes. He looked a little pale. Dick should get him some iron supplements, Tim becoming anemic is the last thing Dick wanted.

“Use it if you need me for anything,” Dick continued. He gave Tim what he hoped was a calming smile. “Get some sleep, Tim. I love you.”

He turned and walked out of Tim���s room. Slowed to crawl at a snail’s pace, hoping for an answer from Tim. He would take any kind of answer.

But Tim kept silent, even as Dick took his time intentionally, slowly closing the door. Dick just sighed, turning down the hall to head down to the Batcave.

Someday, he’d get through to Tim. Dick would find a way.

Someday soon.

[lorelune]

dawn instinct

|| satoru gojo x reader || E (18+) || foreplay, smut, & hurt/comfort || wc: 6.1k  || ao3 ||

Even sorcerers make time for 'simple' trysts— Satoru Gojo is no exception.

minors, antis, and ageless blogs dni

a/n: oooh man it's the gojo smut 👀 i set out to write some pwp and it became this piece!!! oh to explore intimacy with such a guy!! thank you to the lovely cielo for beta reading 💕 enjoy!!! 💌

CW: soft smut, hurt/comfort, panic/anxiety attacks, intimacy issues/discussion around intimacy, a wittle angst if you squint, cheeky satoru

“Can I take this off?”

You tug at the elastic of his eye mask. It’s silken under your fingers and feels a little too tight under his ears.

Satoru sucks in a breath and chews his lip. You watch his expression shift, the skin of his cheeks drawing up to crinkle his hidden eyes. You draw shapes over his temple, trying to calm down his rabbit’s heart.

You know this is a lot for Satoru. You can feel it. Your fingertips are pressed to his skin, top. him. Satoru Gojo, strongest, is letting you touch him. The divine layer around him is gone and replaced by this. Warmth. From void to heat. 

There’s a subtle shift of his thighs under yours as he muses over your question.

“You don’t have to, “ You assure him, setting your arms over his shoulder. “This all must be… a lot.”

If he’s more comfortable covered, you’re content with that. The expectation to bear oneself in such a way is new for Satoru. Self-imposed expectations, you’re almost sure will crush him as they have before.

You truly want nothing but him, in whatever way he allows you close. If he lets you close.

It’s only the second time you’d been perched in his lap like this, the second time his infinity has been lowered for the sake of intimacy. You wonder, quietly, how long it’s been since he’s shared the heat of human touch. You consider yourself lucky to have the opportunity to know the feel and firmness of his skin. You get to be close to him. It’s such a novel thing, really, but it feels a bit sacred with him.

(The dance prior had been a rite. A ritual to open a space between the two of you, one that could be inhabited by both of you. It was a careful back and forth, smoldering embers and climbing flames that stretched with crooning words and easily seen through lies.)

(You are a good dancer, and you reap a god for it.)

“Nah, it’s fine,” Satoru’s pinched expression falls away. He’s still strained, feigning, as he pulls the silk away from his eyes and over the top of his head. Gossamer hair falls flat, laying gently over his forehead and just barely covering his undercut. You don’t meet his gaze yet. You instead inspect the curve of his jaw to his ear, tracing a fingertip over the bone.

He’s beautiful, you think.

Before you’d met Gojo, you’d heard him described as such. An earthen god with beauty to match it. Atrocious personality, but nice to look at. The rumors weren’t… wrong. Satoru found a way to be both cloying and avoidant while remaining one of the most breathtaking people you’d ever seen. The high praise he receives isn’t in jest.

You adore him, you think. You can’t ever let him know— not to your feeling’s true extent. He’d never let you live it down.

His palm, large and warm, cups your chin and turns you toward him. He knocks his forehead against yours. It’s a bit clammy.

(A spark of pride warms your belly. His infinity has only been off for a few minutes. The room is temperate. The sheen on his forehead is from him reacting to you. Getting a rise, even if only bodily, from Gojo Satoru is exhilarating.)

But Gojo knows exhilarating, doesn’t he? He knows combat and strife, but it’s tenderness that's foreign to him.

If you were in his place, you may have broken a sweat too.

You keep your eyes lowered. You can feel him, looking into and through you. You’re still fully clothed, not bare in the slightest, but Satoru still strips you in a way beyond cloth. The only skin-to-skin contact you have is through your light touches around his neck and the point where your foreheads meet. 

It still feels like a lot.

“You can touch me more, ‘ya know,” Satoru prods you, grabbing your wrist and placing your hand on the back of his neck. “I like when you do. Have you done this before?”

You stifle a snort, “You’re toying with me now? Getting impatient?” 

Satoru hums, and shrugs, “With you? I always am.”

Oh, god, what an admission. To be wanted in such a way by anyone, let alone Gojo. It makes your gut twist with something equally sweet and sour. There’s something to it— you’re not used to it. You’re not used to it. You’re not used to accepting someone’s desire for you. To be perched in someone’s lap, someone you equally desire? Feels like a new experience, even if you had been in this position at some other point.

“Needy,” You grin, and finally look at him.

Satoru, you realize, hasn’t taken his eyes off you. You’re not sure what he’s seeing (the way your cursed energy is melting in pools, the rapid beat of your heart, the tremor in your hands—), but you assume it’s all. You’re at his mercy, in that way. There’s nothing you can hide from him and it's daunting. You’re at such a disadvantage in knowing, but it’s familiar. 

Satoru’s pretty. Especially pretty in his face. Everyone talks about Gojo Satoru’s fabled crystalline eyes, but they really don’t do it justice. You don’t want to stare too much, but it’s the first up-close look you’ve gotten at him, and you’re enraptured. For most of your trysts, Gojo kept his blindfold on for ease. You were never afforded the chance to ogle. His eyes cut, blue topaz, set in a human skull. You swear they refract light from the inside. 

“Go on, stare some more,” Satoru grins, sitting back against the cushions. “I’ve got all day.”

You raise an eyebrow, sitting back on your haunches in his lap, balancing with a hand on his chest, “I’m happy to. You’re beautiful.”

Satoru whistles, “Buttering me up? You’re sweet.” 

“Oh, fuck off,” You say with no edge. You flash him a smile. “You knew that already. You couldn’t keep your size ego without knowing you’re stunning.”

Satoru doesn’t reply for a moment. He licks his lips, chews on the bottom one for a moment. You almost open your mouth to redact a word or two. You are being presumptuous, and perhaps a bit mean. Who knows, maybe Satoru actually has no idea—

“It’s different, since it’s you,” Satoru says, settling his big hand on one of your hips. 

There’s a wealth of unspoken secrets in such a phrase. Satoru’s built too guarded to show you them, and you half-doubt he ever will. You’ll have to settle for your own conjecture. You’ll have to settle for the way such admission makes your heart pound. You’ll have to settle for how his words are followed by a soft squeeze of your ribs in his warm palm. 

To be special to someone, someone who seems so above such connections— it makes your insides melt down your spine.

You kiss him, to let him know you heard him. You lean forward suddenly, half-tipping over into his lap. It brings you chest to chest, where Satoru easily wraps an arm around your waist, tucking you close, holding you there without give. 

And you kiss him like you’ve wanted to for god knows how long. 

It’s not like the chaste touches you’ve had in the past. It’s nothing like the hungry looks you’ve caught Gojo flashing you from across campus. It’s neither entirely carnal, nor pure. It makes your insides, from your brain to your toes, turn to mush.

You press into him, winding a hand into his hair.

Satoru holds you steadfast. The grip he has around your waist is unwavering and keeps you chest to chest. You can feel his expand against your own, even the pounding of his heart in an earthly rhythm.

(As much as you claim to know Satoru, it still shocks you, occasionally, how human he is. His heart beats, thumps and thuds when touched like something fragile and precious. It’s endearing, in a way.)

You cup a hand over his chin and stroke your thumb against the sharp line of his jaw. You curl your nails behind his ear, and nearly die when you feel Satoru shudder beneath you. The half-moan he hums into your mouth has your thighs clenching around his own.

Satoru is nothing if not competitive, even knowing he will always win. A loss is a feint with him, and you forget this in the moment.

He breaks the kiss, only to trail his lips down your neck, deftly unbuttoning your top and sliding it down your shoulders. It settles against your biceps as Satoru lays kiss after kiss against your skin.

“You’re so,” He says, suddenly. “So—”

He cuts himself off and smothers his face into your neck. It takes you a moment to realize he’s pouting. His grip on you gets tighter, and there’s not a smidge of space between you two.

It’s overwhelming, maybe.

You’re not used to this. Your mutual lifestyle rarely left time for things like this, and when they were shared, it was quick and quiet. There simply isn’t enough time of respite for a sorcerer to be so indulgent. There are lives, people— souls left out in the cold if you’re too selfish about this. 

For that reason, you wonder if Satoru has much experience at all.

You know his history, his place, his status (even in this position, the miasmatic knowledge of such things will not leave you.) You can’t decipher whether such things would make him more or less likely to experience physical intimacy. You’ve heard rumors, sure, but you don’t think Satoru has the room in his schedule to be as much of a slut as whispers would have you believe. 

Regardless, you feel special, getting to be so close to him. You covet him too much, probably. It’s been drilled into your head since birth, so you can’t fault yourself too much. 

“You’re thinking so hard,” Satoru kisses your neck again. “Your cursed energy’s going crazy. What’s on your mind?”

You pause. 

“... You.” You answer honestly.

“Oh, wow, me? I’m flattered.” He noses up to your jaw and nips, before grabbing your face in one large hand and dragging you together again. “But, I’d prefer if you were here with me, right now. Think you can manage? I’ll make it easy.”

“I’ll try,” You say, letting Satoru kiss over cheeks. 

Satoru hums, “You will. You’ll stay here, with me.”

...

He does make it easy, notably. 

Satoru drags you close as can be and devours you— there’s no other word for it. He kisses and kisses and kisses until you feel saliva dribble from the corners of your lips. He nips at your bottom lip and tugs more than once. It hurts in a good way. It’s the kind of pain that you want more of. 

Satoru must understand, because he bites your lip and you swear he must bust it to bleeding. You nearly thank him as sparks of pain mix with heat and pleasure like its own heady drug. 

Your grapple onto his shoulders, encouraging him to shrug off his uniform top. It’s shed easily, quickly and he’s down to a tight white shirt that leaves little to the imagination. You run your hands up and down his chest, unabashedly feeling him up. Who knew Satoru was so broad? (tits) Shoulders too. Satoru towered over nearly everyone he met, but he never struck you as anything other than a beanpole.

But now? You can feel the muscle on him. You can feel it tensing and relaxing in rhythm as he massages the meat above your hips. You can feel him and how strong he is. 

It’s exhilarating. You want to drown in him.

“You’re excited,” Satoru breaks away to tease. 

You hum, kissing the corner of his mouth, “So are you.”

That much is obvious. You’ve skillfully been ignoring how hard Satoru is against your inner thigh, even through his trousers. It’s taken a fair amount of willpower to not grind in his lap senselessly. 

Satoru’s grip slips lower, cupping your ass and dragging you down against his clothed cock. He nips at your jaw, up to your ear, and dares to whisper, “I want to feel you.”

You swallow, thick and hard, and Satoru belts out a laugh. You slap his chest for it, hoping the dark of the room distracts from the heat in your cheeks. You know Satoru must notice how your hands tremble as you grab his shoulders and grind down into his lap. You bow your head, hiding in the crook of his neck and fucking take.

It’s shameless, really. 

There are still several layers of clothing between you, yet it feels like so much. Maybe you’re touch-starved, maybe you’re enthralled with the idea of Satoru Gojo and his cock being interested in you, maybe— it just feels good and you’re chasing the feelings. 

Satoru bucks his hips up while holding yours down, letting your circle and grind on him to your heart’s content. Little whines drip from his lips, huffs of breath barely loud enough for you to hear but god, you feel weak for them. The sounds meld with your own. You scratch at his shoulders, cursing under your breath.

Satoru drags you up by your scruff to kiss you, mumbling against your lips, “‘Think you soaked through your panties.”

He confirms this by slipping a hand down your front. Satoru cups your cunt, feels you, and curses under his breath. You don’t have time to process how he’s touching you more gently than you imagined, more carefully, maybe even tenderly— before he’s winding a hand in the hair at the base of your skull and hauling you back.

You’re forced to keep your back arched. You’re bare. Your shirt pools around your waist and one of the straps of your bra slips down your shoulder. It’s obscene, you feel filthy despite being covered to some degree. You’ve probably got the front of Satoru’s trousers filthy—

Satoru pulls you from your thoughts.

He cups your jaw with his free hand and runs his fingers up and down the planes of your face. Cheeks, jaw— down the bridge of your nose before pressing his thumb to your lips. 

He’s a difficult person to make eye contact with. He’s infamous for it. It’s rare anyone actually has the opportunity to meet his gaze, but even when folks do, it’s hard to meet him on his level. Satoru doesn’t need to look at you in such a way to really see you. For him, you imagine direct eye contact must be like a dance, a challenge, and a way to make people squirm under the weight of an immeasurably powerful being. 

You force yourself to look at him and find Satoru looking back at you. He’s tracing your features, up and down, taking you in a way that looks more human than any other way you’ve seen him look. 

“... You okay?” You ask, softly, words slurred by the thumb Satoru has yet to remove from your lips.

He hums, musing, before fully pressing into your mouth, down onto your tongue. You let him, and suck and nip at his thumb. 

“I’m great,” Satoru says. “Basking, a little bit.”

He has a dopey smile on his face as he switches from his thumb to his ring and forefinger. You stay relaxed as he presses further and further back to your throat. He only stops when the tips of his fingers meet soft flesh and your gag around him. 

“You’re so good,” Satoru preens, nearly pulling his fingers from your mouth, before pressing them forward once more. “You’re precious.”

He says ‘precious’ like it's endearing and demeaning, and for some reason, it turns you on even more. You whine around his fingers and struggle for friction against his lap. Satoru clicks his tongue. 

“So needy,” He grins, letting go of your hair in favor of undoing the buckle and zipper of his trouser, rubbing himself over his boxer briefs. He continues to fuck your mouth, smile getting wider when spit dribbles from the corners of your mouth and slips down your chin.

You slowly sink closer, holding yourself up by your thighs and sheer willpower. You are needy— you desperately want to be in Satoru’s lap. You want to be sitting on his cock until the sun rises and sets again. You can see in the dim light that Satoru’s bulge is not small, rather large perhaps, even against his hand. 

You swallow. The thought of stretching around Satoru’s cock’s girth has you clenching around nothing and moaning around his fingers. You get impatient.

You fumble your grip against Satoru’s chest and reach downward. You get as far as his waistband before Satoru shoos you with a laugh, giving you a particularly hard thrust to the back of your throat. You choke.

“Let me take my time,” Satoru hums. He pulls his fingers from your mouth, letting tendrils of thick drool connect from your lips to his fingers. “I want to savor this.”

And the fucking bastard shamelessly pressing his fingers into his own mouth, sucking your saliva from them while not breaking from your gaze. 

“Y-You’re a menace,” Your voice lacks any bite as you speak.

“I’m sure I am,” Satoru looks so smitten as he palms his cock, pulling at the zipper of your uniform skirt with his free hand. You wriggle out of it and it's discarded somewhere beyond your comprehension. 

Satoru uses one deft hand to finish off the buttons of your shirt, peeling it away until you’re skin and heat in his lap. You hold onto a shred of modesty in just panties and a bra. Satoru ogles you all the same, chewing his lip as he traces your figure up and down, and up and down once more. 

Despite your last two garments, you feel naked. 

You can’t help it— you feel shy, even. You wrap your arms around your middle and avert your eyes down to his chest. You can feel that Satoru’s going to say something about it, prod you for being bashful when you’re going to be open for him in moments, more than likely. You distract him by grabbing the bottom hem of his shirt, tugging until he peels it off. 

“I can’t tell if you’re eager or dreading this,” Satoru laughs, but the end of the sound is rotten. It makes something in you shrivel and twitch. “Enlighten me?”

“I...” Your voice dies in your chest and you take a shaky breath.

You grab his hands and hold them in your own.

For someone whose hands never actually touch their opponent, Satoru’s are worn. There are calluses around his fingernails. Worn, dry skin on his palms and knuckles that you run your own scarred flesh against. His hands are warm and a bit clammy, which makes him feel a little more human.

“It’s been a while,” You murmur. “It’s scary to be so bare around someone.”

You refuse to look at him for a moment. 

Satoru hums, adjusting his grip so his palms cup your own, “It is.”

Of course, Satoru gets it. 

“I want it. You—” You hiss out a breath between your teeth as Satoru’s grip trails higher, squeezing on his way. “But, I can’t shake the feeling that being so close to someone won’t result in some tragedy.”

Satoru is silent after you speak. His eyes shine glassy and glazed, fixed somewhere else beyond the room. You don’t attempt to pull him back, not yet. He keeps massaging you, hands finding purchase on your hips. 

You suppose Satoru must be familiar with this distinct feeling as well. You both deal in tragedies. Your profession demands it, and so it is. You must purge away that which is addled in suffering, you must go hand-to-hand with grime and hate and everything rotten with the world, so that there’s, perhaps, a chance for someone, somewhere to rest easier.

The thing you are closest to is tragedy. You spar with suffering and feel it in your open palms every day. 

It makes sense you’d anticipate closeness, regardless of its intention or context, as something to be wary of. Frightening, if you really got down to it. Terrified that pleasurable touch is a farce, and that the next moment you’ll be faced with your guts on the floor, and something in you wounded beyond repair. 

“Satoru?” You say his name softly, tugging his face to your chest. His cheek rests against your sternum and his warm breath fans over your skin. “You there?”

“Yeah,” He answers immediately, nuzzling into the heat of you. “You’re better with words than you give yourself credit for, probably.”

You don’t get a chance to reply or process Satoru’s confession. He startles you when he shifts his grip under your thighs and hefts you up. He stands, adjusting you, and whisks you off to a bedroom nearby.

The room you’re brought to is dimly lit, enough that the shadows obscure any of the decor. There’s only a small lamp atop a dresser that gives off the barest bit of warm light. Hardly enough to make out any of the furnishings. You have to rely on feeling as you are set on the bed with a gentle bounce, and pushed into the sheets. They’re cool and buttery beneath you. The mattress is harder than you would expect from someone with Satoru’s tastes.

Any other thought you could have is quickly chased away by Satoru. He’s up over you within moments, settling over your hips and kissing you harder than before. 

He’s handsy, feeling and squeezing anywhere he can get a hold of. No part of you is spared from the heat of his palms and strength of his grip. He’s a bit more forceful, a bit bolder, now that you’re laid out underneath him. He’s big. Broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist and easily keeps you down and pliant.

You meet him where you can. You wind a hand into his hair, tug him closer and try to drink him. It’s a sloppy thing, messier than you’d ever admit. And you like it. The spit pooling out of the corner of your lips and the desperate little noises you exchange warm your guts in a way that feels foreign and welcome all the same.

“Satoru,” You say his name like a smothered prayer, caught between half-breaths. He outright moans when you call to him.

“Fuck, you sound so pretty saying that,” Satoru pulls away to drop his hand to your collarbone.

You run a hand down the nape of his neck, squeezing, “Your ego is showing, be careful, Satoru.”

He makes a choked sound and chomps down on your collarbone. You squeak and slap at his shoulders. Your scolding doesn’t deter him, if anything it eggs him on. His lips trail lower, deftly removing any remaining fabric as he does.

You claw at him, trying to drag him into your skin. You want to mix together, dissolve into a puddle, and never be anything but that. It’s indulgent to think about, and you can’t help the giddy sound that bursts from your lips as Satoru brushes past a particularly sensitive spot on your navel.

“That’s a cute sound,” He peaks up from his lashes, long and silver and he looks fucking angelic. You drop your head to the pillows, steeling yourself as he works. You adjust your leg over his shoulder, tucking him between your thighs and Satoru makes a contented sound that has you thrumming from the inside out.

The heat of Satoru seeps into your skin, making you pliable beneath him. Satoru lies half off the bed and his lower half slips to the floor below. He drags you by your calves. You yelp, grabbing the sheets and regarding him with wide eyes.

Even kneeling on the bed, Satoru is tall. The figure of him sends something stirring in you, some feeling that’s both intimidating and lust, rolling into something hot on the back of your tongue. Satoru tilts his head with a smile that gleams, adjusting you as he pleases. You let him, let him, let him—

He props your hips up with a pillow, leaving you off-kilter and exposed to the cold air of the room. He works off the rest of your uniform skirt, leaving your panties and knee-highs intact. Satoru seems to settle, eyeing your clothed sex with that same smile. He traces a nonsense pattern over your hips, teasing with the tip of his finger.

Blood rushes to your skull and you feel woozy with it. With him. It’s so much. You feel exposed like this. He has hardly touched your cunt, only prodded the parts he could lavish, goading you on. You should’ve met him more, he can’t—

You shoot up, eyes wide and cheeks flushed, “I’m sorry—”

Satoru pauses, raising an eyebrow and withdrawing. 

“Sorry? For what?” He retains an air of mischief to his voice, but it feels hollow. You feel a ringing start in your ears.

You’re scared.

You’re scared.

It’s too close.

You twitch. Your impulse is to grab a weapon, wind up with cursed energy, and punch. The urge claws up your chest in the form of breaths that catch in your nose too fast. Sweat beads on your forehead and you make a tiny, dying sound.

You feel Satoru’s cursed energy crackle and it makes the hairs on the back of your neck raise. You scramble upright on the bed, away, away.

It’s instinct, really.

Your heart pounds, the feeling of violence so thick in your blood that it clouds your vision. You’re nothing but a specter, why would you bother with physical pleasures? You feel foolish and you clutch at your throat.

“Woah, woah there,” Satoru puts his hand up, still kneeling. His brow creases with concern. Gone is the desire and mischief. Caring. Satoru Gojo cares about you, about the way you’re sure he can see how your body and cursed energy are spasming. You’re scared, you’re scared—

This is it, isn’t it? Why you so rarely indulge in the carnal. It tastes bitter. Its bile, rising from your gut and you have to swallow to keep from drowning in it. It’s a fear that’s so fucking hard to place, hard to verbalize, certainly to someone outside of your profession. Even to another sorcerer, you’re not entirely sure you could force yourself to put into words the tangled, horrific feeling that you can’t seem to escape in these moments.

It pulls you. Tugs you. It’s going to tear you apart—

Satoru says your name, sharp and clear, and it brings you back to the room. You’re in Satoru’s low-light bedroom, probably. The sheets are soft. Satoru smells good. There’s a dead stick of incense on a holder on the dresser.

Satoru grabs your cheeks in his hands and drags you nose to nose. You feel the heat pouring off of him.

And you look at him.

“There you are,” Satoru says with an edge of relief you’ve never heard from him. “I lost you for a sec there. Take some breaths with me, ‘kay?”

“S-Sure, yeah,” You reach for Satoru’s wrist without thinking and hold. You ground yourself on the feeling of his pulse and bone.

Satoru counts in little murmurs, coaching you through a few moments of deep breathing. The first ones wrack through you, dragging out sounds you wish you could’ve quieted. Satoru doesn’t seem to mind. He keeps your attention, expression schooled open and inviting, and doesn’t waver until you’ve settled.

“There we go, back down to earth,” Satoru lets out a sigh. Perhaps, of relief, even.

You expect Satoru to pull back and create distance in some way. The necessity for closeness has passed and there’s no reason for him to linger—

(You forget, so easily, that you’re in the exchange of desire. You’re tender in a dance of skinship that you’ve never left, not even for a moment.)

Satoru shifts, dragging you up and pressing you against his chest. You’re both so bare— you’d forgotten. The sudden amount of skin-to-skin contact, superheated and sensitive, makes you jolt. Satoru shushes you, wrapping his arms around your waist and holding you flush against him.

You don’t say anything for a while. You deflate from rigid to slack over some length of time you’re too fuzzy to measure. Satoru is mostly quiet. He only hums in what you can only assume to be approval, with each chest-heaving exhale that leaves you more relaxed against him.

It’s easier to bend now. The heat of the situation has dissipated, and the post-adrenal haze makes it easy to crash. You can feel embarrassed about it later. You’re lulled by bugs that sing night songs in the estate’s courtyard, and the gurgling of the stream that cuts through the property. 

“... You know, it happens to everyone,” Satoru says nonchalantly. He hooks his chin over the top of your head. “I don’t know a single sorcerer I’ve consistently fucked who hasn’t melted down at least once.”

“... How many sorcerers is that?” You surely must validate his data, see if he’s pulling your leg out of pity.

He laughs, “Is that a roundabout way of asking for my body count? You dog.”

You snort and shake your head, “No, I’m asking seriously.”

“More than a handful, less than a dozen,” Satoru answers after a moment of thought. “It’s normal, though. I have my moments too.”

He doesn’t elaborate, just squeezes you. 

You haven’t bedded too many of your colleagues, and even when you had, you hadn’t thought too much about their potential panic (you were too busy quelling your own enough to enjoy physical release.) 

Like all things of this nature, your dance is mutual.

“Huh,” You lean up to look at him, craning your neck. “Comforting. Glad to know the strongest sorcerer in the world cries during sex sometimes.”

He gives you a look, “Hey, I never said that—”

You lean away from him, cupping your hands around your mouth, “Hey world! Did you hear that ‘World’s Strongest Sorcerer’, ‘Well-est Endow-ed’, Gojo Satoru cries during—”

He jabs at your sides and you sputter around your words.

“Oh, sweetheart, you’re in for it—”

And Satoru sets upon you, your ribs and sides and tummy with the tips of his fingers in what can only be called a minor war crime. You snort and gasp between giggling fits and streams of ‘no, no— Satoruuuuu!’s. He relents, eventually. Satoru goes from tickling to petting you as you catch your breath.

“Asshole.” You huff without any bite.

 He kisses your temple, “You started it.”

“Maybe, perhaps.” You jab your elbow into his ribs. You preen at the little ‘oof’ of air Satoru lets out. Victory.

“Do you want to continue? Or is the mood totally ruined.” You ask matter-of-factly. 

You’re still shaken, just a little. But you wouldn’t mind trying again. The silliness of things worked away some of your latent tension. You’re not boneless, but you wouldn’t mind being, you know, bone in if that’s what things led to. 

“The mood’s not ruined,” Satoru squeezes your hips and you shift higher in his lap. “I’d love to see where things go, if anywhere, if you want to continue.”

You adjust, sitting up over his hips. 

“I want to try, even if we have to stop again.”

And in the low light of the bedroom, you come nose to nose with Satoru Gojo yet again. You’re level.

“Perfect, sweetheart,” and he thumbs over your bottom lip before kissing you so soft and gently, it almost cracks your chest in two.

...

Your night continues until it becomes a dawn, and then a morning. 

It’s not a seamless tryst, surely, but your stumbles and brief panics are quelled now that Satoru knows what to look for, and you’re more vigilant of the things that will send you spiraling.

(Satoru says your cursed energy begins to curl around your chest and climbs to your throat in little wisps. You avoid your middle being exposed and vulnerable.)

Satoru holds his own— very well, in more ways than one. His own hiccups in intimacy aren’t panic, like your own, but rather awe. He has moments where he looms above you, eyes glassy and almost unfocused, where you can tell he’s somewhere else. He doesn’t seem scared, just slower, more out of body than the strongest allows himself to be.

(It’s reverence, really. He touches you in those moments like you’re a sculpture at a shrine, a sacred thing to pray to.)

He takes his time. You take yours. It’s a mutual crawl, but a pleasant one. Satoru stretches you open on his fingers, one after another until you swear the fucker is prepping you to take his fucking fist and not his cock. 

(“I’m just being thorough!” There’s a playful lilt to his voice. “— Didn’t you already call me ‘well-endowed’?”)

You try on top of him, first. When Satoru finally considers you prepped ‘enough’ that you could fit his cock into your cunt, you straddle his lap, brace yourself over his navel, and try—

(He’s too big. He’s too fucking big.)

Even sinking down with the help of gravity, and the incessant need to be filled and fucked and anything other than teased, it hurts. It’s a tight fit, and you only get halfway impaled on his cock before the angle and pressure have you tipping off of his lap and away in defeat.

(Then, Satoru makes you come at least three more times— you start to lose count after that. You’re more pliable, soaked through and fucked out without even being properly filled. Satoru easily shifts you onto your stomach and lifts your hip with a pillow or two.)

When Satoru takes you like that, you know you won’t be able to walk for a half day. His rhythm starts slow, to give you time to adjust, wriggle about, and find whatever angle satisfies both your cunt and your bent spine.

(It’s good, it’s sooooo good—)

Satoru comes inside you, which is fine. Unplanned, but fine. You prepped for such a possibility prior. You’re only half-lucid when Satoru’s pace shudders, and he fucks you with a few short thrusts before spilling into your cunt. 

(You can’t remember the last time someone came inside you. Even when he pulls out, and flops next to you, you still feel full of him.)

Satoru gets clingier after that. Less wordy, less mouthy (well, in the traditional sense of the word.) He tugs you to his chest, lets his refractory period pass, before fucking you slow and hard, back to chest. 

The rest of the night passes much the same way.

You’re liquid, by the end of it. You’ve only taken a break or two, mostly to gulp down water, or sit up briefly and kinesthetically reorient yourself as the bodily force of Satoru Gojo’s fucking you rewired your brainstem, maybe. 

When there are threads of hot, gold light spilling in from his bedroom window, you’re only half aware and a quarter awake. Almost dreaming.

Later, you’ll remember this morning. You’ll remember the exact hue of the sun rays, the smell and thread count of the sheets, and him— Satoru. Who looks equally as wrung out, tired, but sated. He looks content and you’ll be forever grateful you burned the image of him like this into your mind. You’ll savor in the worst of times. In your grief.

Satoru’s moving around, somewhere. Maybe in the bathroom? At some point, you’re lifted carried there yourself, and literally set on the toilet— (“You’ll thank me for this when you don’t get a UTI.”)

Satoru helps you back to bed after, now laid with fresh sheets and linens. It’s cool when you flop face first and take a whiff of whatever detergent he uses. It’s fresh, if not a bit minty. Maybe eucalyptus or tea tree? Some scent that clears your sinuses and skull enough to regard Satoru outside of a sleepy or lust-filled haze.

“Busy tomorrow, I’m assuming?” Today, you silently add. You know his answer before he speaks. 

“Yup!” There’s a hollow echo of cheer to it. “Don’t worry about that now, though. We’ll rest, and get something sweet for breakfast in a few hours.”

“... Sure, sure,” You nod into the buttery sheets. You know he’ll treat you to something decadent. 

You crawl up toward the headboard, closer to Satoru, until you’re snug against his side. You wrap yourself around him shamelessly, and let his easy chuckle that follows be the last thing you hear as you slack and fall asleep. 

[ebodebo]

Table Eats

NSFW CONTENT

—price finds a little something in your shared room, and he pretends he doesn't know what it is.

—john price x f!reader

—1.3k+

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You had your music blasting as you prepared dinner in the kitchen while your boyfriend, John, was at work.

While preparing your prized charcuterie board, you heard keys outside the front door, signaling John was back from work. 

You hurried and cut more cheese to put on the board while you heard the front door swing open.

"Hey." You swiveled to face him, noticing a bouquet in his hand. "Are those for me?" You cheekily smiled.

"No. I got them for the dog." He said sarcastically. You let out a laugh.

"And they say chivalry is dead." You chime as you bend to open the oven, checking on the chicken.

John quickly sets his things down and makes his way over to you, grabbing your hips with his rough hands and pulling your ass onto him, causing you to laugh.

"Missed me, huh?" You softly laugh as you continue to check the chicken.

"I always fuckin' miss you." He gruffly says, as his hand lightly roams under your shirt, grazing your bare skin. 

"Are you trying to seduce me?" You finally lift your body back up facing him, his hands never leaving your hips.

He bends down, and his lips lightly brush yours.

"I'll let you seduce me after dinner." You peck his lips and move past him to the stove. A slight groan leaves his mouth.

"Can you go get me a hair tie from the bedroom?" You nicely ask.

"Sure." He turns to go to the bedroom, but not before gently smacking your ass, causing you to squeak. "John!" You shout as a smile spreads across his face. 

He returns after a little bit with a hair tie in hand in one hand.

"Are you developing cataracts?" You chuckle as you reach for it. "What took you so long?"

"What're these?" He questions.

You stop stirring and turn towards him. You let out another chuckle. "Underwear." You say. 

He cocks a brow. "How do these even work?"

You laugh hard as you bring your hand to cover your mouth. "I didn't know you were that old, John." 

"I just don't understand how you would wear these." He states as he stretches the bundle of lace out, examining it more. 

"Would you like me to demonstrate?" You tilt your head. 

"It seems like the only option." He purses his lips.

You step closer to him, grab the fabric and head to the bedroom. "Watch the vegetables!" You yell as you step into the room.

You come back minutes later with the lacy panties over your sweatpants. "See?" You do a twirl.

He squints his eyes. "I'm still not understanding where they would go on your body." He tilts his head. "I think it's best for a bare demonstration."

"Really? You think so?" You cross your arms.

He pretends to contemplate. "I think it's best. I'm a visual learner."

You lightly tug your bottom lip with your top teeth before spinning on your heels and heading back into the room.

You strip yourself of both the lace panties and the sweatpants but swiftly glide the panties back on. 

You step out of the room, feeling the cool air brush against your bare ass. "See."

He lets out a deep breath before slowly stepping closer to you. His fingers lightly graze your bare thigh, causing you to let out a shallow breath. 

"Turn around fer'me." He lazily says, his voice sounding husky.

You oblige, turning around slowly, revealing your bare ass. 

"Christ." He breathes out as he brings his hands up to gently cup your ass, eliciting a moan from you. He's quick to turn you back around and smash his lips onto yours.

He lightly glides his tongue across your bottom lip as he brings his hand up to cup your cunt, causing your mouth to open slightly as you let out a moan, though he is quick to fill your mouth with his tongue.

"More." You breathlessly say, in between kisses. "I need more."

"Ya?" He lustfully says, as his lips move down your jaw. "More what?"

His teeth graze your jaw before moving down to your neck, where he leaves sloppily kisses. "Huh?" He tuts.

"I just want more." You squirm in his arms as he sucks a sensitive part of your neck. "Touch me." You continue. "Please."

"I'll do you one better." He whispers into your neck before gripping the back of your thighs, picking you up, and laying you on the kitchen table.

"I'll make you feel good." He slowly drags his lips up your calf, then your thigh, then stopping at your hip. He gathers the lace fabric on your hip with his teeth and steadily pulls them off.

You shudder as his teeth drag down your body, and the fabric slides off, causing you to feel the cool air grazing your dripping cunt. 

"Take your shirt off fer' me." He instructs. "Let me see those beautiful breasts."

You let out a quiet laugh. John is quick to cock his brow. "Breasts? Just call them tits." You say as you grab the hem of your shirt and lift it over your head. 

"What's wrong with breasts?" He gruffly asks.

"It sounds too formal. Too old-" You promptly throw your head back and loudly moan. You look back at him and realize your nipple is in between his pointer finger and thumb. 

"What was that?" He taunts.

"You can call them whatever you want if you do that again." You breathe out.

He gruffly chuckles as he bends down to get on his knees. "What're you doing?" Your lust-filled eyes dart towards him. 

"I have to taste you." He lowers his head down so it's in between your legs. 

You quickly lift the bottom half of your body so it's closer to his mouth.

"Eager, huh?" He presses his lips onto the inside of your thigh, slowly making his way to your aching cunt, causing you to whimper and squirm. He then focuses on your sensitive region, carefully sucking it. 

You throw your head back. "Fuck..John.." You whine. "I need more."

"Put me where you want me." He mutters against you. You raise your hands to grip his hair and guide him where you ache. He immediately begins sucking and licking harder. "Right there." You moan. 

"Touch me." You whimper. 

He brings his hand up to graze your stomach, slowly moving up so he's cupping your breast. "I... I.." You breathe out.

"Use my mouth." He murmurs into your cunt. You take that as an invitation to grind your body against his wet, hot mouth.

"Fuck." You moan out as his tongue moves faster against your clit. "God, I love your tongue." You praise

You feel more electricity move through your body as you feel the vibrations of his laughter against you.

He could feel your body started to tighten, so he began massaging the breast that was still in his hand and sucking on your sensitive bud.

"R..Right there!" You cry out. "John. Coming." You felt the intense pleasure spread throughout your entire body. Your heart was racing, and your toes were curling. 

Your post-orgasm bliss lasted briefly before you heard the smoke alarm go off.

You swivel your face towards an unconcerned John, whose beard and face are covered in your arousal. 

Your eyes widen. "The chicken!" You screech as you slide off the table, still shaky, to go to the oven. You grab your oven mitts and open the oven. The smoke immediately hits your face and fills your lungs, causing you to cough.

You managed to grab the tray the chicken was on and pull it out, placing it on the stove. It was black and had a charred appearance.

You turn your attention back to John. "You made me burn the chicken!" 

"How did I make you burn the chicken?" He tilted his head, eyes wandering over your naked body.

"You distracted me!" You stated.

"You could have made me stop." He countered, smirking.

"Well...I..I..." He raised his eyebrows as you struggled to come up with something. 

"Exactly." He cockily said. 

reblogs & comments are encouraged!

[python333]

residual self-image — python³

― ― ― ―

synopsis residual self-image is the mental projection of your digital self; it refers to your own physical appearance that is understood by you, that is projected unto you by yourself. you see yourself as something to be ashamed of. price sees something different.

relationships platonic!captain price & gn!reader.

characters cap. price.

word count 7.6k

warnings anxiety/panic attack [not sure exactly how to classify it; i think it's more of an anxiety attack?], reader takes SSRIs [zoloft/sertraline], suicidal thoughts and almost-suicide attempt, reader is the most unreliable narrator known to mankind, second person pov [you/your/yourself], usage of [name], usage of [c/n] for call sign/code name, bad matrix references/spoilers for the matrix and the matrix: reloaded.

note please please PLEASE let me know if this comes off as me romanticizing having anxiety or taking antidepressants so that i can fix/rewrite it /srs i don't take any form of antidepressants or anxiety medication and i also am not diagnosed with either of those!! nothing i say is final!!! i do not have firsthand experience with what reader goes through in this fic!! sorry i disappeared for a second, have some food as an apology. again, feel free to correct me on anything you think is inaccurate and i will (most likely) change it!! also sorry for like 3k words of backstory oopsies

In The Matrix, Morpheus gives Neo two options: blue pill, or red pill?

He says that if Neo takes the blue pill, “the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe”. But the second option, the red pill, if Neo takes that, he will “stay in wonderland and [he] show [Neo] how deep the rabbit hole goes”. Neo, of course, takes the red pill, and is shown the “real world”. 

Neo is thought to be “the One”. With the “O” in “One” being capitalized, so you know that it’s a pretty important title. 

In the end, Neo becomes confident in who he is and what he can do, and defeats the “Agents”. Trinity confesses her love to a “sleeping” Neo, their ship is getting attacked by whatever those weird fuckin’ creatures were called, and Neo defeats the last of the agents. The end. 

You take pills too. But yours are blue. They’re matte, powdery, baby-blue pills that are branded with the name “ZOLOFT”. It’s sertraline, to be specific, and you’ve been taking it for the past few months. You’re new to pills like these, ones meant to treat anxiety and depression and a number of other medical issues, so you didn’t know how much to take at first. You asked your doctor so many questions. You think about it often, and wonder if, even though it’s their job, that doctor had gotten annoyed at some point because of your inquiry. 

These pills do similar things to the ones in The Matrix, though. You take them, preferably at night, and wake up in your bed like you always do. You believe whatever you want to believe, and another chapter is closed at the end of every day, marking another page closer to the end of your story. 

Some days, the story feels like it’s going to end sooner than expected. 

A side effect of sertraline―or, well, Zoloft specifically―happens to be suicidal ideation. It’s not that common, not that talked about, and isn’t the most well-known. But then again, most mental disorder-treating medicines have some kind of side effect like that, and plenty of people take things like antidepressants without an issue―or so you thought―so surely you could deal with something as simple as sertraline, right?

Wrong. So, so, wrong. 

It’s probably really bad for a person who works in a military group to be dealing with such thoughts. You think about quitting sometimes, for the sake of the other people in the task force, because what could happen if the wrong straw breaks the wrong camel’s back while you’re doing an assignment? What if, caught in the crossfire between your team and your enemy, you say fuck it and decide that it’s all just too much? What are the odds of that happening? What are the odds of anything happening? What were the odds of the Earth being created, of the first animals evolving, of the first humans speaking the first languages? Statistics are so important, chance is so important, and odds determine everything. What are the odds of you deciding whether or not you have the will to live? The ability to keep going, to keep the routine you’ve always kept, to keep from taking one of those G19s from the armory and turning off the safety before pulling the trigger? To commit to such a permanent solution, one you’ve deemed as the “s-word”, because thinking about it sometimes is too much.

Or maybe it’d be a rope, your brain continues without your consent, A chain. Anything that will hold your body weight up enough for you to dangle from the fan on the ceiling―an image that makes you lean towards a chain, sickeningly enough, because of the idea of your abnormally stretched neck on display. The purple bruising that would appear, the indentations of each link, the smell of your blood and the metal of the chain unable to be told apart. Maybe your eyes would still be open, and it would look like you’re staring down at anyone who walks into your office. There’s so many possibilities. They add up, and create new odds, new chances. Every time you simply think, you are creating a new way to go about life, and that creation is sometimes stored so deeply in the back of your mind that it haunts you. It comes back around, becomes more common, the chances of it happening go up. 

Sometimes the odds feel like they aren’t in your favor at all. Sometimes you wonder how you could’ve ever thought that any part of the universe was against you. It’s not bipolar; it doesn’t come and go in extremes, it just comes and goes. The odds will lower in your favor some days, and you will deem those days “bad days”, and other days they will be so high you don’t even think about “good days” or “bad days”. But those other days are almost as bad as the “bad days”, because they go by so quickly. You take them for granted so easily, too easily, and they leak through the thin lines between your fingers, leaving you with nothing by the end of the day. 

Sometimes on “bad days”, your hands go from cupped to praying, and you will plead with yourself to just get better. You never do, on those days, and after taking your medicine you will go to sleep and believe that the next day will be better. Or, at least, convince yourself that the next day will be better. 

You would’ve understood if Neo took the blue pill. If he stayed in blissful ignorance, even after all of the weird shit that happened to him. If he continued to wake up every day in a “normal” world, to sell computer systems and hacking programs, to be anyone but “The One”. 

Because that’s what you do. You take your medicine, and go on with life as normally as possible, even with all of the things that you’ve been through. You wouldn’t want to be the one responsible for saving the world, or beating up robot-alien-things, or whatever. Just like how you don’t want to be held responsible for really just… taking care of yourself. 

Which you’re shit at, by the way, if that doesn’t make things worse. 

You take your sertraline and that’s about it. It’s not like it doesn’t work, it’s just underwhelming sometimes. Before you got on it, you would take more things to heart, think about things more, and were probably a little more prone to actually killing yourself. After starting to take it, it was admittedly pretty rough. It felt like your anxiety had increased a little, like your paranoia had only heightened, and everything felt so elevated. 

Then, maybe a few months after beginning to take it, everything dimmed out. Like one of those lightbulbs you can dim, everything gradually came back down, and even lowered to a more tolerable level. You were glad, at first, that you had endured those first few months the way that you did because you’re not sure you would’ve even been here to this day had you not. Reading several articles and Reddit posts about Zoloft definitely didn’t help, especially as someone who was taking it partially for anxiety, but still, you managed. 

And then you realized that just taking the medicine didn’t do as much as you hoped it would. 

It helps you deal with anxious and depressive thoughts, yes, but you still feel like something’s missing. That lightbulb in your mind has dimmed, but it’s only just enough light to see ahead of you. Before all of this, the light was bright enough to blind you, to make you see that dreadful stark-white that still sometimes haunts you―when it dimmed down to where it is now, it was obviously a relief, but you feel like now there’s not enough light. 

You understand the whole point of the medicine is to dim that light, to help bring down your mental state to a more “normal” one, but you think that even people who don’t have diagnosed mental disorders feel strong emotions like you used to. Maybe not as strong, but definitely something adjacent to it. You miss that, funnily enough―getting strong enough emotions. 

Right now, you’re sitting at your desk in your office, staring down at the plate of mashed potatoes in front of you. You get it almost every time it’s offered, and endure the teasing you get from your teammates, all for one purpose. 

To hide your pills in it.

Mashed potatoes are starchy, yes, but easy to swallow without chewing. They’re thick enough to help hide the feeling of the pill going down your throat, and don’t leave that weird aftertaste in your mouth that taking your medicine with water does. You tried taking the pills with water at first, like you would with any other medicine, but with this specifically you just can’t. It’s too easy to notice, they’re too big to just hide with water, and it feels like swallowing a rock every time you take them with water. 

So, mashed potatoes it is. 

The pill is already mixed into it. You had folded the small blue tablet into the mushed vegetable with a plastic fork, trying to keep it as hidden as possible, making sure no hints of blue bled through the beige-yellow of the potato.

You’re now watching the mashed potatoes, unblinking, as if it’s going to grow legs and run away from you. It’s never truly easy swallowing the medicine, even with the mashed potatoes coating it, but it’s usually easier than it is today. Then again, today was deemed a “bad day” the moment you woke up, so this was to be expected. 

You grab the white plastic fork after a brief moment of hesitation and pierce the food with it, hand trembling ever-so slightly as you do―not from anxiety, but from your lack of water intake―and pick up a clump of potato with little strength. The vegetable oddly weighs your hand down the tiniest bit more than usual, but you ignore this in favor of pushing yourself to just force the food into your mouth. You try your best not to chew, your jaw only really moving to chew the side of your cheek instead to satisfy your urges, and eventually manage to swallow the food. 

Right off the bat, you can tell the cluster you swallowed had the pill in it. Lucky me, you think almost bitterly, not sure whether you should be happy or uncomfortable, at least it’s over with. It’s not that it’s a bad thing that you got to the pill so quickly, but usually you’re able to get a few bites of medicine-less potato in before the actual medicine itself. Nonetheless, you scoop up another fork-full―fork-full?―of mashed potatoes and try to eat as much as you can to get rid of the weird feeling of having a pill going down your throat. 

Just the fleeting thought of having a pill that big going down your throat makes it feel like your esophagus is closing. You feel yourself grow closer to nausea at the feeling, setting down your fork and pushing the paper plate of your dinner aside, just to rest your elbow on the table and put your forehead in the palm of your head. It’s bad enough that you feel ashamed because of the fact you even have to take antidepressants, so it’s even worse that those same antidepressants are throwing bad side-effects at you. 

Ashamed because needing medicine to function the same way anyone else does feels so pathetic to you. Maybe it isn’t pathetic. Actually, you know it isn’t; you don’t look at other people who do the same thing and think that they should feel as ashamed as you do. But you still look at your bright orange prescription bottle, labeled with your legal name, and think that you shouldn’t need it. 

You think, for a moment, that it’s because of how much you’ve dehumanized yourself. 

Dehumanized is such an ugly word, and it leaves a strange bitterness in your mind after thinking about it, but deep down you feel that it’s true. You know that you’re human, obviously, because physically that’s what you are. You are, undeniably, a homo sapien―a person, a living being that is a bipedal primate mammal. You, in a less literal sense, have those same cords attached to you that Neo did when he first went to the “real world”. 

But you need those cords, you think, lifting your head so that your chin is resting in your palm instead of your forehead, you need to stay attached to the Matrix. 

Because you took the blue pill. You found a way to keep yourself attached to the Matrix, to keep yourself grounded to what you wish you could experience without them. And those cables weigh you down, and that pod you stay encased in limits your movement―sometimes you feel more like the pod than the person inside of it―but it all seems so worth it to you, doesn’t it? To keep believing what you want to believe, to wake up everyday and dose yourself with that fifty-milligrams worth of sertraline hidden under a pile of food, to eat that food and swallow that pill even though it makes you feel like a mutt? 

You take a shuddering breath in, your thoughts building up in volume and mass, more questions entering your mind too fast for you to process them all. You feel that familiar rush of adrenaline, the kind that triggers your ‘fight-or-flight’. It lights your nerves on fire and causes them to jump, to electrify, and you feel your fingers twitch with the feeling. It almost feels like there’s something crawling along your nerves, under your skin, and the thought almost triggers your gag reflex. Your eyelids flutter, barely shutting for just a moment before you force them open. Your gaze flits over to the still-mostly-full plate of mashed potatoes. 

You’re usually able to finish them, even on “bad days”. But today, with nausea swirling uncomfortably in your stomach, and a too-big pill going through the thin tubes inside your body, you find that it’s much harder to even think about picking that fork back up. You can almost feel your heart beating through your palm, that continuous th-thump, th-thump growing exponentially faster, and your palm getting sweatier by the second. You shift your feet and find that invisible needles are poking at the bottom of them, small pins that push and prod at your skin that leave a strange hot-cold feeling. It forces you to take the pressure off of your feet by holding them up ever-so slightly, the soles of your shoes just barely touching the ground. 

You swear your heart rate increases at all the different sensations lingering on your body. You can feel your breathing starting to pick up, and for God knows what reason, you suddenly find it difficult to keep your eyes locked onto one object. Your gaze dances around the room as a surge of chills runs up your spine. A trail of goosebumps rises after each wave of biting cold, passing over the bony projections of your dorsum. After having so many of them, you know instinctively the signs of an oncoming anxiety attack, and know how quick those symptoms escalate from simple shallow breaths to the inability to keep your breathing consistent at all. Yes, they develop slower than a panic attack does, but the gradient from fine to not-fine is hard to view as slow when there’s so many symptoms to keep track of.

At the thought of such a thing happening, your gaze instantly locks onto the prescription bottle sitting on your desk. It’s still uncapped―fortunate for you, because you’re seriously doubting your ability to uncap something with a child-proof cap on it right now―and in your eyes is practically glowing. It’s so tempting, because it’s just right there, so easily accessible, so easy to just grab and pour however many pills you need down your throat. The thought makes you realize how dry your mouth feels, how constricted your throat feels, but your mind is too filled with a flurry of incoherent thoughts to dwell on such feelings. 

With your free hand, you grab the uncapped bottle. It shakes with your hand, now more from your building anxiety than your dehydration, and makes the tablets inside rattle. You bring it to your lips, ignoring the chiding voice in the back of your mind telling you how disgusting it is to just put it on your mouth like that, and shake it just enough to get a single pill out of it. The dryness of the pill sticks to the wetness of your mouth, just below the border of your bottom lip. You set the bottle down and poke at the pill with the tip of your tongue, the weird vanilla-like taste of the medicine spreading across the muscle easily. 

Your mouth is dry, so you have to use the residual saliva sitting on your tongue to slick the pill up enough to go down somewhat-smoothly down your throat. It’s still rough, and some areas of the pill remain powdery, the feeling of it sliding down your throat enough to make you gag. For a brief moment, the action causes the pill to lodge in your throat―it’s not big enough to make you choke or anything, but it’s enough to make your heart beat faster and your hands grip onto the edge of your desk tightly. Your thumbs are tucked under the edge, the first knuckle at the tip of your finger bent and the flesh of the tips of your fingers turning lighter from the pressure. 

You cough once you feel the pill go down your esophagus entirely, and breathe raggedly afterwards. Deep down, you know that the medicine takes some time to work, and that if you gave it a little longer than a minute that you’d start feeling better. But the reeling anxiety that wraps around your throat like a chain seems to pull you impossibly farther away from that betterness, and forces your throat to tighten to a point where your breathing feels limited. You go from breathing through your nose to your mouth, where you can still taste the lingering artificial-vanilla with every inhale. 

It’s getting worse, an annoying voice tells you, one that manages to be louder than the others, the medicine’s supposed to help. You’ve only taken a hundred milligrams so far. Another and it’s a hundred and fifty. An overdose is only if it goes over two hundred.

It’s stupid logic but more tempting the more you think about it. It is, after all, only a third pill. You’d be pushing it—

Do you really care all that much that you’re pushing it? What if you want to break that limit? The limits you made, to keep yourself alive, that you still sometimes question the existence of? 

―but that doesn’t really compute well in your mind, and you soon find yourself reaching for the bottle again. Each pill shakes with your hand, and with each tremor another wave of tablets hits the sides of the bottle, like a visual representation of the thoughts that bounce off of the walls of your brain. You lift the bottle, and bring it to your lips, the area that makes contact with your mouth cooler than the rest of the bottle from earlier when you had done the same thing. You’re about to tilt it up before you hear a sudden knock at your door. 

The noise is startling and makes you drop the bottle, the pills spilling over the edge of it and onto the table. 

“Shit,” you curse quietly under your breath, quickly flattening your hand and sweeping all of the pills into a pile, and picking them up in clusters. You manage to get them all back in the bottle before another knock sounds out, and cap the bottle before opening up one of the small drawers on the side of your desk and shoving it in there. 

“Come in!” you call out in a strained voice, praying that you’ll be able to keep it steady for as long as the person at the door needs to talk to you. You close the drawer just as the door creaks open. 

Much to your horror, you look up to see your Captain. 

Your palms are still sweaty as he walks in, so you try to discreetly wipe them off on your pants, and hope to whoever can help you that he doesn’t pay too much attention to the sweat gathered on your forehead. You take a deep breath as silently as you can, attempting to gather yourself before Price can notice anything being wrong.

“It’s a quarter past two,” Price comments once he walks in, closing the door behind him, “why are you still awake?” 

You look over to the digital clock on your desk almost immediately and, oh shit, it is exactly 2:15. You look back over at Price, who is busying himself with pulling the chair that was once in front of your desk around it, presumably to sit next to you. You still feel the dreadfully fast pace of your heart, that th-thump, th-thump, th-thump that you can hear blaring in your ears. It makes itself known in your chest, in your wrist, even in the base of your throat―almost every pulse point in your body has forced you to become aware of its existence.

You swallow dryly, trying to ignore said feeling, and reply, “Why are you still awake?”

Price raises an eyebrow at you, pulling the chair up beside you and sitting down in it, “I asked first.” 

You look at him with an unimpressed look on your face. “Can’t sleep. Why are you up?”

Price hums and leans back in his seat, arms crossing over each other, “Same reason.”

It doesn’t sound like a lie, but it doesn’t sound entirely true either, in your opinion. It’s not that you don’t trust him, but he just seems like he’s up to something. What that something is, though, you aren’t sure. 

“Why the food?” Price nods over to the plate of mashed potatoes, very noticeably unfinished. 

Your gaze follows his to the mashed potatoes. You can still feel the moisture on the palms of your hands, the small tremors that wrack your fingers, and Price’s presence does nothing to soothe your flaming nerves.

“Wanted dinner,” you shrug as casually as you can, forcing a neutral expression onto your face―you briefly overthink what a neutral expression looks like, and decidedly just let your face relax the best you can, “I didn’t get any when everyone else went, I was busy with something, and didn’t really want to head over to the mess with so many people over there, plus I was busy.” 

You look over at Price after your lengthy explanation, not realizing just how lengthy it was, and watch the corners of his lips quirk up into an amused-yet-worried smile. 

“You said you were busy twice,” he points out, before pausing, and pointing out again, “and it looks like you’ve taken a few bites out o’that at most.” 

You don’t bother to look at the mashed potatoes again; you know very well how they look, and know how undeniably full the plate looks. 

“Didn’t feel that hungry,” you make up a poorly thought-out excuse, that even you can understand is unbelievable. 

Price blinks at you, slowly, before sighing. 

“Are you alright?” Price asks, looking more concerned than amused now. You should’ve known from the moment that he walked in that you wouldn’t be able to hide anything from him. If not for the fact that he always seems to know what’s going on, then because of the overwhelming presence of your disquietude. 

You look at him and try to figure out what to say. What is there to say? You were panicking just two minutes ago, with your prescription bottle in one hand, the other too shaky to hold up the damn thing. You can still taste that vanilla. You can still taste the plastic. The bottle itself never once touched your tongue, but every time your tongue rests in your mouth, the tip of it pokes at the same exact place the bottle made contact with. You expect it to taste of vanilla, like its contents, but it doesn’t; it tastes like the pharmacy you got it at. It tastes like the sterile white of the counter, the fingers of the person who handed it to you, the money you spent on it, and the time it took you to get it. 

It’s nothing pleasant. The strange vanilla of the pills aren’t either, but they’re preferable to the bottle itself. 

Price notices you zoning out for a moment, and waves a hand in front of your face. Your eyes unconsciously track his hand for a moment before you blink back into reality and look at him. You knew you were fucked earlier, but when you look at his expression, at the look in his eyes as he watches you snap back to reality, you know that he knows. Maybe he doesn’t know exactly what happened, or how it happened, but he knows something. Fuck, he knows. 

Or, maybe he does know. Maybe he heard your cursing through the door, even with your low voice, maybe he heard the pills spill onto the desk, maybe he heard the opening and closing of the drawer, maybe he―

He’s staring at you.

―has security cameras set up in here, because he does in every room, every hall, everywhere but the bathrooms and the sleeping quarters―

He’s talking. It’s muffled by the sound of your own heavy breathing.

―or maybe it’s just intuition, a gut feeling he has, where he just knows that something’s wrong, that same gut feeling that everyone seems to get when something isn’t the way it’s supposed to be―

Your palms are sweaty. Your heart is pounding out of your chest. You’re starting to feel a little lightheaded.

―the same “gut feeling” that you experience every day but have to ignore because it’s not a gut feeling it’s anxiety and your real gut feelings feel the almost the exact same way anxiety does so you may never know if you ever get an actual one―

Price grabs onto your arm, though the feeling of his skin on yours can’t push past the skin-crawling sensation that coats your skin.

―but how do you really know that your gut feelings aren’t gut feelings? How do you know that anything is anything? That it’s really Price that’s sitting next to you, that it’s your own office you’re sitting in, that―

“[name]!” Price’s voice snaps you out of the trance you seem to be in, and you sharply inhale at the sound of his voice, his volume much louder than you expected it to be. 

You didn’t realize how fast and heavy your breathing had really gotten until this point. You look at Price, a little more on the panicked side now, with restless eyes that can’t stop flitting all over his face. He takes his hand off of your arm before you can even notice it was there in the first place, and leans back away from you. 

You try to take deep breaths, but each breath feels like trying to breathe underwater, and each inhale-exhale leaves you shuddering. You look down at your lap, breath hitching and stuttering, and the moment you open your mouth in the hopes of breathing easier, you are all too aware of just how dry it’s become. You’re sure you let out some kind of sound that alerts Price of your growing distress, because he hesitantly leans forward and takes a deep breath. 

“[name],” Price keeps his voice soft and quiet, quieter than he’d been just a few seconds ago, his soothing voice a gentle wave crashing against the rock of your mind, “you’re okay. Look at me, soldier.” 

Like a remote to TV static, the noisiness of your mind is partially calmed and the waves that wash over your brain provide sweet escape from the overwhelming adrenaline and cortisol thrumming in your veins.

Mindlessly, you do as he asks, his words grounding you and tugging you back down to Earth more effectively than any anchor could. When you look at him, his eyes are clouded with concern and there’s a small frown on his face that almost perfectly juxtaposes his usual quokka-smile.

You know you’re still trembling. You can feel the hairs that stick up on your legs and arms, the weird hot-cold feeling that creates pinpricks of discomfort across your body, the way your heart is trying to escape the prison cell of your ribcage—but none of it compares to the unbelievable dizziness you feel. Your head is a balloon filled with helium and it is slowly deflating, but not fast enough. You feel like you’re no longer in control of your own body—or were you ever in control? 

Your stomach is churning. There’s a sense of dread that dwells there. You might throw up. 

Cutting through your thoughts is Price once again.

“You listenin’?” your Captain asks, to which you nod after a delay of a few seconds. Price holds a hand out and gives you a questioning look, the question of ‘can I touch you?’ clear enough on his face that you nod lightly and he takes your hand gingerly.

“Do y’know where you are?” Price asks. You nod, and he softly requests, “can you tell me where?”

“My office,” you answer simply, the gravel in your voice making you wince. The warbling that escapes your mouth is nowhere near your usual voice, and for a moment you think you might be right about needing to vomit, but you manage to push it down and pray. Price ignores this and pushes on.

“And who am I?” he asks, as if he doesn’t know. 

“... The Captain.” Price purses his lips—he doesn’t really want to accept this as an answer, because he wants you to say his actual name, but he knows what you mean, and you know what he’s doing. He knows that you mean that you’re here, that you’re present, and you know that he’s trying to ground you the best he can.

“Do you know my name?” he questions, to which you nod again, though a little more moderately, seeing as the repetition of nodding your head only makes you more lightheaded, “what’s my name?”

You take a few shaky breaths, ones that are shallow and uneven, ones that hitch enough for it to be so noticeable that Price manages to pick up on it. You open your mouth to talk, but find that your tongue is too heavy to lift to create coherent sounds. The thought somehow heightens your anxiety, something that seems to be noticeable to Price, judging by how his expression shifts to something impossibly softer.

“Here, let me—” Without another word, Price cautiously brings your hand up to the middle of his chest, where his sternum is. 

He exaggerates his breathing, taking long, deep breaths in, and similarly long exhales. His chest rises and falls satisfyingly, and it’s clear that he wants you to copy him. You try your best at first, taking that same too-deep breath that he does and fail almost immediately as you choke on the air you attempt to inhale. Price brushes his thumb over the back of your hand and takes another exaggerated breath, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth. You keep your gaze more focused on the lower half of his face as you copy him, oxygen going in through your nose, and carbon dioxide going out through your mouth. 

That one successful breath is followed by an unsuccessful one, then another successful one, then another, and it’s a little rocky but you find that soon enough you’re breathing. There’s air flowing in and out of your body smoothly, with each exaggerated breath you take, almost in sync with Price, until finally he puts your hand back into your lap but continues to hold it. He squeezes it once before letting go, and clasps his hands together. 

“What’s my name, soldier?” he asks, and this time you think you can answer him. 

“John Price,” his name feels weird coming out of your mouth, especially with no honorifics, but he accepts the answer anyway. 

“Good,” Price praises, giving you a small smile, “you’re doing good.”

The approval he gives you helps to calm your nerves the tiniest bit, and you feel yourself slowly coming down from the God awful high that you’d just been on. Again, you’re not sure how he knows, but he senses that you’re calming down―is it because your breathing is steadier? You aren’t nearly as restless? You’re no longer zoning out?―so he leans back in his chair and watches as you do the same. 

“Now,” he breathes out, “can you tell me what’s going on with you?” 

You look away from him for the briefest moment, sparing a glance at the cabinet you know the bottle of your pills lays in, before looking back at him. If he noticed you pulling your gaze away from him for a split second, he doesn’t mention it nor does he make it known that he did. 

“There’s not really anything going on,” you shrug, to which Price scoffs. 

“[c/n],” he looks at you, disbelieving, “two seconds ago I had to help you breathe normally. I know that there’s something that’s going on, somethin’ that had to trigger what just happened.” 

You stay quiet and he gives you an expectant look. The pressure from his fixed glare makes you feel like you’re about to explode. 

Finally, you answer him defeatedly, though vaguely, “I was in the middle of taking my medicine when you knocked.”

Price stays silent, expecting you to elaborate. 

“And…” you try to find a way to make it sound less awkward than it does in your mind, though you suppose there’s never really a correct way to go about something like this, “I almost took more medicine than I needed to.” 

The silence continues, but now Price looks less expectant, and instead more of a mix between concern and something else you can’t identify. That something, though, is still soft, and still has a hint of pity―maybe sympathy?―to it.

“Almost?” he repeats, “was that on purpose?” 

When you think about it, it’s complicated. You didn’t necessarily intend to overdose, you just dismissed the idea of it. Or, at least, you don’t remember trying to overtly kill yourself. Then again, you knew the risks of taking more pills than prescribed to you; had you taken that third pill, you would’ve only been one more away from an overdose, and even then you’d still probably get some kind of health issue. 

Price’s face hardens when you don’t answer immediately. He must be taking your silence as a “yes”. 

“Not… really,” you answer slowly, “I don’t know what I was thinking.” 

He nods, waiting a few seconds before asking, “Have you thought about it before?”

By it, for some reason, you sense that he isn’t asking exclusively about taking one too many tablets.

It’s tempting to be dishonest about it; it’s a shameful thing to you, to use the things that are supposed to help you to harm yourself, to be so careless with your own life. You know that it isn’t necessarily all your fault, but there’s still that small part of you that can’t help but feel guilty for using something so many other people try so hard to get to almost kill yourself with. 

After a few beats of silence, you decide to answer, “Yeah.” 

Price nods again, and he looks like he expected that answer. “D’you want to tell me more about that?”

You could, hypothetically, go in-depth about all of your weird thoughts about committing. The ones you’d been having just, what, fifteen minutes ago? Thirty minutes ago? The ones about chains wrapped around your throat, stolen guns from the armory, deep purple bruising and a stretched neck. Those thoughts, the ones that try to make ending your life sound pretty, that try to make it sound appealing. It’s not to convince yourself, you don’t think, but rather to help you come to terms with the fact that you were already convinced that you were going to commit at some point. The thought still scares you, because you’re a pussy―terrible, terrible choice of words, a voice at the back of your mind insists, you’re not a pussy, you’re just like anyone else―but you felt like you just knew that you were gonna die by your own hands. That you’d already made the choice, and now you have to understand it, to realize it. 

You are in that room full of TVs, with The Architect in front of you, telling you that you have no choice. That, in fact, the problem is choice. You are surrounded by a million other yous, all protesting, all denying that you have no choice but to kill yourself, all yelling “Bullshit!” because deniability is the most predictable of all human responses. 

But, you remind yourself, The Architect was wrong. He told Neo that he couldn’t do anything to save Trinity from her “fate”, but Neo did save her. He plunged his hand into her chest and forced her heart to beat. 

That’s true. 

And, you add on, The Architect is a computer program, tasked with mimicking human emotions, despite never having felt them. He could never understand the power of human will, of the desperation so many humans have to live. 

Because The Architect was never alive. He is a sentient computer program, whose job is to create a world in which humans can “live” while they are fed on in the real world, but his problem was his inability to create anything less than perfect. We aren’t expected to be perfect, and are taught that flawlessness doesn’t exist, which is why he came to the conclusion that he needed a “lesser mind” to help him create a better Matrix. 

You aren’t supposed to succumb to the idea of having no choice. Because that, in itself, is a choice. Everything you do is a choice. Even if everything you do will only add up to the same ending, to the same fate, why should you waste time not making the choices you want to make? When you assume that you have no choice, you assume that everything you do will go to waste, but that’s not true. You aren’t the only person that exists. You aren’t the only person who makes choices. The choices you make affect other people’s choices, and those choices affect another person, and another, and another. You still have to live through the choices you make, as does everyone else, so even if everything will end the same, why should you make inherently bad decisions when you could be making good ones? Why should you go through things you don’t have to go through, just because you believe that nothing matters in the end?

“Not really,” you answer Price, snapping yourself out of your thoughts, “I don’t… want to think about it too much right now.” 

Price looks a little more worried now but he doesn’t protest your decision.

“Is there anything in here that you could use to hurt yourself?” he asks after a moment, “Or that you’ve already used?” 

You bite your tongue. Technically, the pills count, you suppose, but those are your meds. You can’t really have those confiscated.

“Other than the medicine, no,” you answer truthfully, much to Price’s relief, as is evident on his face as his hardened expression softens. 

“Good, good,” he shifts in his seat. 

He’s gearing up for something. You can tell with the way he subtly presses his clasped hands together, the way his face goes through a mix of emotions, and the way the deafening silence of the room really seems to be getting to him. 

Suddenly, he asks you, “D’you think you’re going to… ?” 

He doesn’t ask you explicitly, but you have a good idea of what he’s asking.

“I was thinking about it,” you respond softly, “before you came in.”

Price nods, having expected that answer. You’re not sure if it was obvious, or if he just assumed you were thinking about it because of you confessing to having thoughts of it before this. 

“Y’know I have to tell someone about this, right?” Price reminds you gently, as if you didn’t already know, “Someone up the chain. Might be Laswell.” 

You hum affirmatively, because you didn’t expect anything less from him, and know that it’s for the better. It doesn’t make you feel any better, obviously, but you know how to be realistic when the time calls for it, and you know that if the roles were reversed you’d do the same thing. Not because it’s mandatory, but because when you imagine Price in your situation, the thought wraps itself around your heart and twists. 

The room is silent for a beat, and you get the feeling that Price is somehow more uncomfortable with the quiet than you are. He shifts in his seat while you stay still, and he clears his throat to break the silence for a brief moment before speaking up again. 

“It’s late,” he points out the obvious, before pausing and irresolutely asking, “do you want to head back to my quarters with me for the night?” 

His words confuse you for a moment. You open your mouth to ask why, before it suddenly hits you―oh, right, you just basically confessed to being suicidal. He doesn’t want to leave you alone right now. 

“Yeah, sure,” you agree, less questioning than Price expected you to be judging by his momentary look of surprise, before he nods and begins to get up. 

He pushes his chair behind him, standing up straight, and holds a hand out for you to grab. You grab it gingerly and use it to haul yourself up, your knees cracking as you do after having been sat for so long. You wince at the sound and Price gives a light-hearted chuckle.

“I thought I was s’posed to be the old one?” he teases, making you give him an unimpressed look and let go of his hand. The room falls back into soundlessness.

You both remain silent as Price leads you out the door of your office, turning off the lights and closing the door after you, and continues to lead you down to his sleeping quarters. His are farther down the hall from yours, because of his higher rank, and therefore takes longer to walk to from your office. The long walk is quiet enough to hear a pin drop, but you both don’t mind this, as the atmosphere here is more comfortable than the one in your office. 

Eventually, you make it to his room, where he opens the door for you and signals for you to walk in first with his hand. You enter the room and hear him enter shortly after you, and go to sit on his bed before pausing. 

“I’m still in my…” you gesture to your clothes, gear-less but still not your “normal” sleeping clothes. Price raises an eyebrow at you as you wave at the state of yourself. 

“I’ve seen you sleep in worse,” he points out, “and I think you sleep in this than in your actual sleeping clothes.” 

You’re about to ask how he even knows about that, before he answers you before you can voice your question, “I’ve seen you walking back t’your quarters in these clothes and hear you snoring a second later at least ten times.”

You close your mouth and sigh through your nose, before muttering, “Didn’t know I was talkin’ to fuckin’ Sherlock Holmes.” 

Price snorts at your retort, “If I’m Sherlock, are you Watson?”

You think about it for a moment, before shaking your head negatively. 

“No?” Price toes off his boots and walks over to you, sitting on the bed, “Then who are you?” 

You sit down next to him, “I dunno. I’m like…” 

“Like Neo,” you continue, ignoring the way Price’s eyebrows immediately raise, “and you’re Morpheus. But less smart.”

“You’re not Neo,” he scoffs, “and I’m not a less-smart Morpheus.” 

“I wasn’t askin’ you,” you grumble, shaking your already-loose boots off of your feet and crawling up Price’s bed. You manage to snake under the covers and feel Price’s eyes on you as you do, staring holes into your face.

He hums in acknowledgment, not bothering to answer you verbally, and instead gets up to lift up the covers and get into bed. The bed is small enough as-is, but with two people inside of it, it obviously gets much smaller. Price doesn’t seem to mind, though, and turns so that his back is facing the door and his front is facing you. Directly in front of you is the base of his neck, but if you tilt your head up, you can see him looking down at you with tired eyes. 

You let out a soft breath through your nose and realize just how tired you are. Price seems to notice this, because his arm comes up and rests across your side, his hand splaying across the middle of your back. He gives you a comforting sweep of his hand, before settling it on your upper back, absentmindedly rubbing his thumb in soothing circles against your clothed back. 

You close your eyes, and he closes his, and it feels like you’ve woken up in the real world and removed the cables from your body.

[karlachismylife]

Comrades what the fuck we're over 100 subscribers-

I have unleashed the power (of furry) I am afraid of

But on a serious note, oh my god, THANK YOU??? I didn't think my silly little self-indulgent hyena cuddle fantasy will gather so much people, but oh well we're here, we're rolling... happy whoop to every hyena in vicinity??

I don't really know what to do, cuz just a few days ago I started my 30 subs celebration, and I got literally one request, and now I'm just... what do we do next lol?

Anyway I'll have to take time to figure some celebration out, so in the meantime y'all are VERY WELCOME to send requests for the Thirty Frames a Second celebration and/or the hyena 141 au. Send in literally anything, I'll find a way to make it work! Honestly I'm just glad that there's still a place for me and my silly little fics among some writer chads here with their darkfics and deep psycological character analysis and everything...

I know I'm probably incapable of writing deep stuff, so I'm just incredibly grateful to have people to share my lightweight fluff with.

Also I'll be like over the moon happy if you check out some other stuff in my masterlist, especially Karlach x Soap related since this all started with them and I'll always come back to them.

^ that's me looking as my notifications keep blowing up as if my scottish meow meow chucked a ton of explosives there (in a way he did, lol)

[nackrosor]

Mornin' Sunshine

John 'Soap' MacTavish x Teammate!Reader

warnings/tags: MAJOR MW3 SPOILERS, this is all I can say. If you played/watched the new campaign then you know what happened during the last mission. That's all you need to know.

summary: you partake in the "Trojan Horse" mission to stop Makarov once and for all. You're not able to stop him but you prevent thousands of people to die... at the cost of something much more dear to you.

word count: 1,9k.

You’ve been cut off and held back by those Konni bastards while you were heading toward your team to rejoin. You have to cut through their unrelenting forces, losing precious time, until you can dive deeper into the tunnels and rush to aid your mates.

When you finally make it, it’s already too late. The fire has ceased, there’s no Konni in sight anymore nor do you see Makarov anywhere. Your eyes dart for a fleeting moment over all the bodies laying around and with relief you notice more enemies than familiar faces.

Your relief however is short lived for when you raise your gaze, you meet the forlorn looks on the captain, Gaz, Ghost’s faces… They're all standing in front of something, as if their intention is to block it from your view. You immediately notice that Soap is missing and you take a step forward, craning your neck as if expecting to see his face pop up from behind someone’s shoulder.

Price instantly makes a beeline toward you when he sees you move. His hand comes down hard to rest on your shoulder. Your perplexed look meets his intense gaze. There’s something wrong, you can feel it… Something must have happened, but you can't yet seem to understand what. 

Your eyes flicker from face to face, your frown growing harder.

"Where's Johnny?" you ask softly, your voice failing you for a moment as if it knows something you don’t.

Upon seeing the worried glances they give each other you can feel your breathing quicken and your stomach starting to churn in anxiety. There's a horrible thought slowly taking form in the recesses of your mind but you try your best to suppress it… because it can't be true. No. It can't be. 

"Where… is… Johnny?" your voice is louder now and you stress each word on purpose, making it clear that you demand an answer. Your hard gaze roams over your partners' faces once more but again, you’re only met with distraught looks and silence.

You move to step around Price's body, who's clearly - now you realize - trying to hold you in place.

"Y/N, you shouldn't-" 

He tries to stop you but you're growing restless, anxiety eating at you from inside and so you shove your captain out of the way without a second thought.

Your stomach drops the moment you see him. Your heart misses a beat. You can feel the air getting pushed out of your lungs. 

Despite your knees buckling, you drag yourself forward like attracted to a magnet, stumbling toward the inert body laying on the ground in a puddle of blood. His head is turned to the other side but you recognize him. How couldn't you? You've lovingly run your hands through that stupid mohawk so many times… 

"No…"

A strained lament escapes your lips before your hands fly up to cover your mouth.

This time it's Ghost who steps in your way, taking advantage of your shock to wrap his strong hands around your forearms in order to prevent you from both stepping further and collapsing on the ground. 

Your head is shaking in a frantic manner, your breathing growing more ragged by the second. Your eyes are wide open, blood turning to ice in your veins as panic takes hold of you.

"No, no, no, no…" 

You sound like a broken record. You can't seem to be able to say anything else. Your mind is empty. Your tongue tied. 

Your fingers turn white at the force you use to grab Ghost's vest. You want to shove him out of the way too but this time your arms fail you.

"Fuck off! Get out of my fucking way!" you start yelling at him, forcefully hitting him on his chest with your hands clenched into fists. You don't even know what you're saying or what you're doing. You have no control over the way your body is responding to the shock and grief. 

Ghost doesn't flinch, he keeps holding you in place. Your eyes meet his for a fleeting moment and you notice the hurt in them. That rare sight only worsens your distraught state. 

Your head starts shaking again, from side to side, rejecting this heinous turn of events - as if you're unwillingness to accept what's happening would change things, bring him back… back to you. It's as if you're expecting him to turn around and flash you one of those smirks of his and tell you that it was only a joke, a fucking horrible not funny at all joke… You wouldn't care. You would jump in his arms and hug him tight, delaying the scolding for later.

"Let me… Let me see him." you say quietly, feeling a lump forming in your throat as you reluctantly shake that remote fantasy off your mind.

"LET ME SEE HIM." 

You're switching from subdued anguish to pure rage real quick, back and forth without control. 

Ghost's hold on you doesn't budge, despite your every attempt to disentangle yourself from his clench. 

You hear the sound of Price's voice but the sharp ringing in your ears makes you unable to decipher his words. You can only feel Ghost's hands releasing you a moment after. You don't hesitate even a second to rush to the body and drop on your knees beside him. 

Your arms reach for him out of reflex, like you would always do whenever you saw him. But this time he's not returning the gesture. He can't. He won't move. 

Your hands visibly tremble as you reach over to grab his head and turn it your way. Your heart stops once again. You feel something gnawing at the mouth of your stomach, a weight settling there. 

"Johnny…" you call out to him in a soft whisper just like you would do every morning to wake him up while running your fingers along his features and through his dark hair. 

"Johnny…" 

He would always wake up in an instant, as if your touch was the power button to his body. And he would greet you with that beautiful smile of his that would light up even the darkest of days. And he would caress your face, eyes gazing adoringly at you before he would whisper: "Mornin' sunshine."

Your hands cup his cheeks as you lean forward to level your face with his. Your eyes search his bottomless blue gems, but all you're met with is a blank look, a lifeless look. There’s no spark anymore. No lighting up upon seeing your face like after each mission when you would rejoin.

You grab his hands in yours. The same hands that have comforted you, protected you, pleased you, worshiped every inch of your body… His touch was always warm. You would joke about it with him. He had once proclaimed himself your personal radiator and pulled your shaking body against his, simply to have another reason to touch you. 

You bring one calloused palm to your face, longing for that same comfort again… but its warmth is fading. His hand is growing cold. The touch is foreign to you. You don't recognize it anymore. 

"Please… Wake up …"

You're deliberately avoiding looking at the hole in his forehead. It's like your brain is preventing you from even getting a glimpse of it. If you don't see it, it's not there. Right? It's not there. 

Just like the crimson blood leaking from his head is not his. No. No… He's killed plenty of those bastards. It’s their blood. And he's now taking a well deserved rest… Yes. That must be it. He's simply resting. With his eyes open… his pupils unmoving… 

You bend even forward, arms wrapping around his body, turning him toward you. You pull him closer, holding him tight in your embrace. You cradle his lifeless shell, rocking back and forth in a frantic, desperate motion. 

"Johnny… Oh, love… Please… No…. "

Your voice breaks due to the lump tightening in your throat. Your vision starts to blur and you squeeze your eyes closed as you nuzzle your face against his head. Your hot tears merge with his blood smeared on your skin. You feel its metallic taste on your lips but you don't care. You keep cradling him, pressing his body closer to yours as if you want to absorb him into you, to become one thing. To always have him with you. 

Incomprehensible laments leave your lips without respite, your cries subdued and muffled by his flesh. You hold onto his frame for dear life as if you're hanging on by a thread. 

Your mates silently watch the heart wrenching scene of you mourning your lover, incapable of saying or doing anything that could bring you any comfort. They're mourning too, in their own way. You all have just lost someone too important. 

" Why … Why you… How dare you … How dare you leave me… I'm sorry … I'm sorry I couldn't save you… It should have been me … You don’t deserve it… I love you … I love you so much… Please don't leave me alone …" 

Your pain surges out of you like a river in flood. Your voice swaying from shock to anger, from regret to desperation… 

You can't believe he's gone. You can't accept it. His life taken from him in a blink of an eye as if he was worth nothing. You should be used to it, to the swiftness of lives getting taken on the field, each day. But when it's the person you love the most succumbing to such a crude unfair death… You can't accept it. You won't accept it. 

"I will kill him with my own two hands, Johnny… I swear." you whisper against his ear as if you're confessing a secret, your fingers digging hard in his clothes as your voice trembles with pure rage. "I will wrap my hands around his neck and squeeze… squeeze until I can feel his life leave his worthless body. Until I can see his eyes roll back.” The words come out of you in one breath, spat with venom through your teeth. 

“I promise you that."

"Y/N…" 

You hear Price's warm voice call out to you. The hint of protest in his tone makes you snap your head in his direction and pin him with a wild- eyed look filled with anguish.

"I WILL KILL HIM." you scream in an outburst of fury, then as if all your forces have suddenly left your body, your shoulders slump and your head drops back against your lover's limp form. 

You don't say anything anymore, the only sound coming from you is that of intermittent sobs. You hold desperately onto his body, brushing your lips against his cold skin, tenderly kissing his unresponsive lips. You hug him close until he's taken away from you. Or rather, until you're torn away from him by more than a pair of strong hands. You never lose him from your sight, watching with dread as he's secured into a bag and carried away. 

Seeing his motionless body being handled and dragged away like that is excruciating and it serves as the final blow draining you of your last ounce of vitality; he’s really dead. You won’t see him again, talk to him, hug him, kiss him… You’ve just lost the lifeblood to your existence, the ray of sunshine brightening up your days and propelling you to keep going.

You start to feel faint. Your vision flickering and turning black, your body slumping forward toward the ground. 

You see Johnny. Yes, your Johnny , promptly kneeling down in front of you, ready to catch you in his arms, to comfort you, take care of you. You smile feebly at the familiarity of the scene, before you close your eyes and abandon yourself to the darkness.

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A.N: I lost someone too recently, so this story was a medium to express my feelings and cope with what happened, in some way. I hope you enjoyed it, as much as a story this sad can be "enjoyed". Also, despite the circumstances I'm happy to be back after months of writer' block.

[johnslittlespoon]

accidentally just created my own buckbucky college au oops (i love college aus tho, this was far overdue tbh) so here's like ~2k words of (semi–nsfw) drabble that i wanna turn into a oneshot/series :-)

thinking about modern au pre–established relationship buckbucky who meet in their first year of college because they apply to an ad to rent a two bedroom apartment near campus, complete strangers save for a few texts back and forth until move in day.

they become fast friends despite how opposite they are, john being a cliche frat boy type (but subverting expectations by majoring in something english–related? waxing secret poetry about his 'obvious as the sun to everyone but gale' crush on his roommate lol) and gale being a studious math/science major, no interest in parties or campus culture. pining aside, everything's just fine until:

john does something stupid a few months into the school year and ends up spraining/breaking his dominant arm– probably wipes out trying to ride his bike home to his and gale's apartment while drunk after a party. gale gets a call at midnight from a sheepish john asking if he can come drive him to the hospital, and of course he does, though after his initial concern when he picks john up at the side of some random street, he's fuming at john's idiocy.

"you could've rode into traffic, john. jesus, you're gonna give me a stroke one of these days, you gotta start using your brain more." and john's drenched in cold–sweat from pain as he cradles his arm to his chest, head tilted back against the headrest and trying not to curse out every red light as his head spins, but he still cracks a weak smile and says "c'mon buck, you'd be bored if i started using my brain." gale glances over and the stern look is enough to shut john up.

this injury leads to gale having to help him with certain tasks for a bit, like shaving his face, brushing his teeth, doing his hair, tying shoes, etc. john's stubborn the day after, independent to a fault, refusing to ask for help, and gale watches with mild amusement/hidden winces, not wanting to push because he knows by now it'll only make john dig his heels in. gale only decides that enough is enough when he's walking past the half–open bathroom door the next afternoon and suddenly hears a sharp inhale and a stream of profanities and pokes his head in to find john's cut his jaw trying to shave with his left hand.

the intimacy and domesticity of it all– john pretends he's inconvenienced, but once he realizes this means he gets to stare at gale's focussed face up close as he sits on the bathroom counter and gale stands between his legs carefully shaving away his stubble, he's a lot less reluctant to accept help. but being that close to gale's face and being able to unabashedly study his long lashes and the curve of his lips is dangerous for john's lack of impulse control, barely keeping his pining under wraps from the moment they'd met, let alone with this newfound proximity they have to fall into the routine of.

so john has fun being a shithead on purpose during these moments, both to distract his yearning brain and for his own entertainment, just yapping away while gale's frustratedly trying to grab him by his jaw and hold him still for five seconds. biting down on the toothbrush when gale's trying to do a proper job of brushing his teeth so gale has to wrestle it away like he's playing tug of war with a dog, being an asshole and jerking his shoe to the side while gale's doing up his laces for him, heart leaping at the thrill he gets from gale's touches getting firmer when he's fed up, or from being pinned by irritated blue eyes.

he has no idea gale's pining just as hard, because gale's a master of concealing emotions in thanks to a very different upbringing than john's, and because while gale doesn't hide his queerness, he's not as open with it as john is. but gale's losing his mind just as much each time john needs his help, and the way he feels his self control slipping scares him.

this little dance around each other probably comes to a peak when john's being extra difficult one day while gale's trying to tame his wild curls for him. gale's got john pressed back against the bathroom counter with a scowl, working his gelled fingers through thick dark hair, and john can barely think straight because oh, has he ever spent an ungodly amount of time thinking about gale's hands in his hair under very different circumstances.

john's got a grin so big it near splits his face in half as he purposefully leans out of gale's reach, pulling every annoying thing he can think of because if he focuses too hard on gale's motions, he's gonna pop a very inconvenient boner with no hope of concealing it from gale with the way he's pressed up against him.

but gale's got twenty minutes until his next class and it's a ten minute walk from their apartment, and he's at the end of his rope, so he finally snaps and without giving it a second thought he closes the last bit of distance between them to grab at the back of john's hair, and he pulls, hard.

the smile slides off john's face as his mouth falls open and his hips reflexively jerk forward and whatever scolding gale was about to give him dies in his throat because holy shit. there's a few seconds where both of them just stare at each other wide eyed with their hearts pounding, john internally spiralling because he thinks he's just fucked everything up, gale internally spiralling because oh my god, he hasn't been misreading john's behaviour around him.

gale whispers a "fuck" and, more impulsive than he's ever allowed himself to be, goes in for the kiss, hand still tight in john's hair, and john whines into his mouth and his hands fly to gale's waist and everything gets heated really quick– until gale pulls away with a gasp for breath, both of them panting, cheeks flushed and eyes heavy. and then gale's ducking out of the bathroom and grabbing his backpack from the entry way and all but sprinting out of the apartment.

john's left standing there harder than he's ever been in his life but also panicking because he's not sure whether he's fucked up or whether gale's just overwhelmed, because he knows gale well enough to know he likes his space when big things happen.

but gale also knows john well enough to know how big of an overthinker he is; they've probably had to work through some incidents where their communication styles have clashed over the few months they've been roomies. so after his hands stop shaking enough while he's walking to campus, he types out a message to john letting him know 'I'm all good. Sorry for running, was gonna be late for class and panicked. Talk later, yeah?'

and john sighs in relief, texts back a 'np. sounds good :)' and then promptly shoves a hand down his pants and comes embarrassingly quick with the sting of gale's hands in his hair still fresh in his mind.

they talk things out somewhat, blahblahblah plotting problem for future me, but they're both shy and awkward around each other for a bit, which is so out of character for john and how obnoxiously flirty and loud mouthed he normally is.

so maybe what finally breaks them out of this tiptoeing around each other after a few days is something stupid– specifically, john ends up pent up and frustrated because trying to get off with his left hand just isn't doing it for him. and he's one of those 'once a day minimum' guys, so this isn't something he can just ignore; finds his temper is shorter, and he can't focus as well, etc. drama queen.

either gale comments on it lightheartedly and john blurts out his problem unthinkingly, or john makes an offhand joke about it, and gale thinks john's lack of impulse control is starting to rub off on him, because after a beat of silence, he gets out an "i can help."

john's head snaps over to look at him so fast he feels like he gives himself whiplash, eyes comically rounded, wondering if he's heard gale wrong or if gale's making a rare flirtatious joke. gale blinks back at him, looking just as surprised, tips of his ears going a little pink, but he doesn't laugh or throw in a 'only kidding!'

mumbles a "y'know, if you want," second guessing himself as if what happened in the bathroom a few days before isn't in john's top three best things that have ever happened to him list. john gets out a "yeah– yeah, i want," uncharacteristically nervous, and gale nods, turning his attention back to his laptop. and john just stands there in the kitchen, flabbergasted, shifting uncertainly.

works up the courage to shyly ask, "like. now? or." and he feels like he's never fumbled the bag so hard in his life, unable to remember the last time he's felt shy when talking about sex–related stuff, realizes just how bad his crush on gale's gotten. beyond a crush, at this point. and it makes it worse that gale's so nonchalant now, humming to himself as if in deep thought before saying "later. i've gotta get this assignment done."

john loses his mind over those next few hours, trying to be patient and give gale space to focus, but he's half hard the whole time and can't think about anything other than what gale means by 'helping'. gale can sense his impatience from the other side of their apartment, and he can't help the way it makes him smile to himself, having fun teasing john without even needing to do anything, and without john knowing it's fully intentional.

unfortunately this arrangement, however it plays out, probably leads to a lotta miscommunication and repression of feelings, because they're both dumb boys who suck at communicating, neither one of them wanting to ruin a good thing (aka an inevitable friends with benefits situation) by bringing up their feelings for the other. but there's plenty of hot sex and light kink exploration in the meantime, and eventually they sort their shit out, likely by accident like every other situation they've stumbled into together.

and not to cliffhang pre–smut, but i'll leave it there because this is way too long and if i do turn it into a oneshot i don't wanna write it all out of my system into this drabble before it makes it into a fic loll <3