#after he spent more than a decade fighting

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Burning Rotten Bridges

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[silverselfshippingchaos]

Your guy!!!

MAXXIIIIIII HI BABEEEE!!!!

[alchemistc]

Eddie tips his beer against his lips, fights the smile turning up the corners of his mouth as Mara and Jee each cling to one of Buck's arms, the both of them screaming to their hearts content. It's - loud, and Buck isn't doing anything to temper the noise, growling out one of his Roledex of monster noises, lifting one arm and then the other like some bastardized workout routine.

Beside him, Tommy sighs.

It's a familiar sound, at this point. Tommy is so fucking full of love, and Eddie knows he's spent a long ass time looking for a place to put it. He can't think of a person better prepared to take the bulk of it on than Evan Buckley.

"I cannot handle your lovelorn sighs, dude. You got the guy, you don't need to act like some regency hero watching from the sidelines."

Tommy eyes the neck of Eddie's bottle like he's thinking about punishing Eddie for the comment with a beer tap, so Eddie shifts it out of his reach - he's in no mood for another lesson on the physics of cavitation from Buck while he's cleaning foam off the patio and trying to prevent Jee from lapping it up like a dog.

Denny's too old for most of the horseplay, now, but there's something about Buck that makes kids unafraid to act like kids - he takes a flying leap and gets an arm around Buck's neck, and now he's somehow hauling three of them around with one of those wide, uncareful smiles Eddie's always been a bit jealous of.

Tommy's chest expands, and Eddie can feel his lips pursing, his eyes rolling to the side in warning. Tommy blows the breath out through his nose and scowls.

"I knew Shannon was it for me after our first date," Eddie says into the silence, shocking himself with the ease her name slides past his lips. He hasn't - he doesn't - Christ, even thinking her name sets him back sometimes. But this feels - it feels like the only memory pertinent to the situation.

Tommy's pretty good at keeping a straight face when he's feeling big things - decades of practice, Eddie knows, and he's aware that Tommy has spent another ten years unpacking that, forcing himself to wear his heart on his sleeve. Still. It seems easiest when it's Buck, and Eddie can't fault him that.

"She was such an asshole," Eddie continues, fond, while Tommy's gaze shifts to him, careful, concentrated, that special blend of steady eye contact and a stilling of his body that lets people know he's really listening, retaining, will be able to recite word for word something personal someone told him about themselves. "Even then, even as young as we were, I just wanted to share everything with her. Jokes, and stories about my day - happiness and sadness and... life, you know?"

Tommy swallows. His gaze shifts in the quiet of Eddie's confession, unerringly returning to Buck. Eddie's watched plenty of women in love with Buck looking at him. It's never been that look.

The one Eddie'd clocked months ago, a subtle shift from smitten to in love to something else. Something more.

In the grass, Buck levers himself to his knees and begs for mercy, and nearly takes a knee to the groin for his surrender.

Tommy's chest expands.

"You measured his ring size while he's passed out coming off an extra shift, yet?" (Buck has. Eddie's been fielding a fucking deluge of links in his messages, at least a hundred different rings at this point that look identical to Eddie but Buck apparently has half a million opinions about that he seems to think Eddie can help him with.)

Tommy doesn't give him time to react, this time. The bottom of his bottle hits the top of Eddie's and Eddie scrambles too late, foam spilling along the sides, over his fingers. The patio rug soaks up the liquid as it spills over his fingers, but Tommy seems to think the hassle of cleaning off his brand new patio is worth it, if the smirk on his face is anything to go by.

"I'm going to go rescue my boyfriend before Jee-Yun decides hearing Evan howl in real pain is her new favorite hobby."

Eddie's beer is still foaming, a steady trickle up the neck and down the side, right over his fingers, dripping to the rug beneath his feet. He'll need to go inside and wash his hands soon, maybe rearrange Tommy's tea drawer while he's in there - it's the only thing safe from Buck's wrath in that kitchen. "Get me another beer while you're up," Eddie snarks back, and leans back to watch the way Buck's eyes gleam when, instead of rescuing Buck, Jee and Mara both take aim at Tommy instead, and Tommy's swings them both up into the air while they screech in delight.

[sturnsdarling]

gloves off

Hockeyplayer!Matt is on the ice, and a guy from the other team says something about his girl, so Matt deals with him

vibe check: based of this edit, violence, fighting descriptions, blood, fluff at the end, lowkey pick me vibes from reader but i don't actually care i love being cringe

1.7k words

A/N: I got a req for hockey matt and didn't see it until i saw that edit... I know some people don't like it but angry!matt makes my coochie tingle

love and cigs, merc

It was weekly occurrence, coming to watch Matt play hockey. Sometimes you were just watching him practice, others you were watching actual games. Today was the latter, his team was playing against the rival college, a game everyone had been waiting for for months.

They had spent weeks working their way up the leagues to finally get into the final stretch against each other, the school rivalry going back decades and either side being riddled with personal beef, some petty, some slightly more serious.

It was half way through the match, Matt had already been given multiple penalties for violent behaviour, slamming kids into the ice and barriers, sometimes because they deserved it, mostly because it was fun.

There was one specific kid on the other team, Josh Anderson, and Matt fucking hated him. They went through all of school together, playing hockey against each other since they could hold a stick. Anderson had always been bigger than Matt, until he had his growth spurt, and he made it his personal mission to make Matts life a living hell purely because he could. They hadn't played against each other in nearly three years, and Matt knew he had to come down hard on him.

They spent the whole first half of the game tormenting each other, pissing each other off in every way possible. Matt had already broken a stick, whacking his first one off the barrier after Anderson got him a penalty for something ridiculous. He was by the sidelines, standing with you as you taped his new stick for him, a tradition you had started even before you started dating.

"I'm gonna fuckin' bury him" Matt said, eyes trained on Anderson as he rubbed small circles on your arm.

You were taping the stick with green tape, your favourite colour, and just letting Matt rant, "he's irrelevant, my love, don't let him get under your skin" you cooed, knowing it would go in one ear and out the other.

"I dunno who he thinks he is, fuckin' pussy always coming after me like I wont break his jaw" Matt wasn't listening to you, but you didn't mind, you knew what he was like when he got in the zone for hockey, especially when he was pissed off.

You finished taping up his stick, scanning it with a satisfied hum and handing it to him, catching his attention. He looked to you with a clenched jaw that relaxed the moment he looked in your soft eyes.

"thanks, baby" Matt smiled, leaning over the barriers slightly to kiss you before pulling his helmet over his head properly and putting in his mouth guard.

He pushed away, skating across the ice to take his place, waiting for the second half buzzer to go off. As it did, he pointed to you, followed by a double tap on his chest plate, one for every year you'd been together.

The game began, and they didn't hold back at all. Matt was angrier than ever, and knowing that only made Anderson more eager to piss him off. They played for about ten minutes before the score shifted in the other teams favour. Anderson skated across the ice, celebrating a goal he didn't even score and b-lined for Matt, skating past him and maintaining eye contact through their helmets.

"Yo, Sturniolo, when we win, tell your girl I want her on her knees for me in the locker rooms as my trophy" Anderson said, his tone smug as a sly grin formed on his face.

A hot rage flooded through Matt, every once of anger boiling to the surface as he watched Anderson skate around him, taunting him to do something. His jaw clenched tight, and he saw red.

Matt threw his stick on the ice, bounding over to Anderson and pushing him backwards, sending him flying back onto the ice. Everyone in the stadium gasped in sync, and you immediately stood to your feet.

"you wanna say shit about my girl? huh? say it again, I fuckin' dare you" Matt spat, pulling out his mouth guard and standing over Anderson on the ice.

Anderson just laughed, pushing himself to his feet and pulling his mouth guard out.

"still that same angry little kid, aren't you Sturniolo?" He grinned, pressing his tongue to his teeth.

"yeah, I am, and you're still the same fuckin' loser you were back then, so come on, Anderson, say something about my girl again" Matt said, squaring up to the boy, who was once double his height, that he was now eye to eye with.

Everyone in the stadium had stopped, time standing still as the whole room watched the disaster in front of them unfold, not even the ref was getting involved, knowing from the events of the first half that the boys clearly had something to sort out.

"ion' want your bum ass girl, Sturns, she's probably been passed around the whole team" Anderson chuckled, looking to the boys all standing round in anticipation.

That was all it took, before Anderson could look back, Matts gloves were off, and his fist was connected with the plastic of Andersons helmet, sending it flying across the ice as Matts knuckles connected with Andersons jaw.

Matt sent him flying onto the ice, crawling on top of him and pummelling into him relentlessly. The whole room erupted, people screaming to get Matt off him, Matts team cheering him on and Andersons team berating the ref for not stopping it. No one even tried to get involved, all slightly terrified by the sight of Matt denting the ice with the back of Andersons skull. You on the other hand, were begging security to let you on the ice, moving in a flash the moment you saw Matt take his gloves off

Matt was relentless, and Anderson was just as bad, hitting Matt back the best he could. There was a split second where Anderson was on top of Matt, laying into him and cracking the plastic face shield off the bridge of his nose. Matt simply smiled with blood covered teeth, just before cocking his head forward, head butting Anderson with the plastic of his helmet, and the next thing you knew, Matt was back on top of him, punching him over and over again.

You finally got onto the ice, struggling to walk straight as you screamed Matts name over and over again. He couldn't hear you, he was in a world of his own, laying into the nearly unconscious boy beneath him.

"Matt!" You screamed, grabbing his arm as he raised it once more to hit Anderson with a final blow.

Your touch brought Matt back to reality, his attention snapping to you immediately. His eyes were bloodshot, a bruise already forming on his definitely broken nose as bright red blood began to dry on the lower half of his face. The look of pleading on your face, the tears pricking in your eyes and your grip on Matts wrist, made all the muscles in his body relax.

"stop, please" you said, softly.

Matt looked up at you, brows flinching slightly before he looked down to Andersons groaning, stuttering body on the ice, and then back to you. You lowered your head slightly, looking at Matt through your lashes with pleading eyes. He couldn't help but crumble, getting up off the ice and near enough melting into your arms.

Your hands round his shoulders, his arms round your waist and head buried in your neck, you just stood their on the ice for what felt like forever, rubbing Matts back with slow touches as everyone began to tend to Anderson.

"lets go, yeah?" you muttered to Matt, and he nodded into your neck.

In the locker rooms,

Matt sat on the bench opposite you, his broken helmet next to him as you perched on the bench, patting the blood from his face with a damp, warm towel. He hissed with every touch, and you apologised softly nearly every time.

"that was really fucking stupid, Matt" You said, looking at his bloodied features intently.

Matt sighed, "I know" He scanned over your face as you gently cared for him.

"you could get kicked from the team" You said, shaking your head slightly

Matt hissed as you brushed his bruised and blooded nose with the towel, "I know" he repeated.

"so then why did you do it?" You asked, only a small once of judgement in your tone.

"he said shit about you" Matt admitted

You stopped your movements, pulling your eyes from Matts nose to lock eyes with him. He was already looking at you, eyes sad like a puppy. You sighed, shaking your head as an uncontrollable half smile formed on your face.

Matts bloodied hand came to your jaw, cupping your cheek in his big hand as his thumb rubbed the soft skin there.

"he started speaking about you, and - and I just lost it" Matt said, his tone soft.

You leaned into his touch, brows furrowed slightly as your eyes poured into his bright blue ones, flitting between them.

"the kid has basically bullied me my whole life, and now I'm finally just as big as he is, I jus-" Matt sighed, "I needed a reason to batter him, and he gave me one"

"me?" you questioned with tight knit brows

Matt nodded, pressing his thumb into your skin with more pressure, "you're the most important thing in my life, more than any stupid place on the team or petty childhood beef, n' I can handle him comin' for me, I don't give a fuck, but he came for you and-" frustrated tears started to form in his eyes, so he stopped talking.

You practically melted at the sight, pressing a long kiss into Matts palm,

"I love you" you said, softly.

Matt smiled slightly, despite the pain it caused him and brought your head to his lips, pressing a short kiss onto your forehead.

"I love you more" Matt replied.

Normally, you would have gotten into a twenty minute long back and forth about who loved who more, but today, Matt had earned rights to that title, and even though the way he handled the situation wasn't ideal, at least you knew you never had to doubt his love for you.

taglist: @sturniozalt@mattslolita@shaquilles-0atmeal@blahbel668@sleepysturniolo@le4hsblog @sarosfilms @joemamaaa42069 @2muchofaslvt @seluky10 @cherib3lla @jetaimevous @witchofthehour @sofieeeeex @ncm9696 @lovesturni0l0s @pepsicola-pussy

[softfem-dom]

wedding ring

origins!husban!logan x origins!wade x wife!reader

a/n : I don't know what came over me to write this, I have no excuse I'm just horny.

wc : 3k

NSFW , PORN WITH (LITTLE) PLOT , WADE IS A HORNY SHIT , MOMMY & DADDY KINK , GENERAL WADE™ BEHAVIOUR sub!origins!wade wilson . dom!origins!logan . dom!reader

synopsis : wade has always been a kinky little shit, it seems that title is well-deserved when he starts to fantasize about squeezing himself into a married couple old enough to be his parents.

If someone in the team were to ask Wade why he looked as if he hadn't slept in a decade, he'd say he was up practising his katana skills.

When in reality, he had spent the whole night groaning and moaning against his pillow while rubbing himself raw to the thought of you and Logan.

What was so special about you two, you may ask? You were married and were old enough to be his parents.

It was absolutely not his fault. You two had no right to come into the X-Team, looking so fucking hot and expect him not to get hard.

You couldn't just walk around the place with Logan's strong arm around your waist and expect him not to stare. You couldn't just hum in acknolovedgment everytime Logan leant into your ear to rumble something that the merc couldn't quite catch and expect him not to grow desperate.

He was a walking mess. Day and night his thoughts were consumed by you and Logan, Logan and you, and what you could do to him. He couldn't help it, he'd blame the undiagnosed ADHD anyday for titty-flashing him with so many dirty scenarios anytime you walked past.

,,

Logan and you had been through a lot of shit togheter.

You had met sometime between the 1880's and the 1900's, both mutants and escaping from someone who was trying to do you harm. Both with the weight of taken lives over your shoulders, both with spilled blood on your hands. Both with the promise of living far too long.

And, cliche-y enough, you both had fallen in love. After uniting forces as acquintances, then growing as close as long-life friends, and then falling into the claws of love, you two had gotten married.

Happyly married, always attached to the hip, gold wedding wands on your ring fingers. Always watching out for the other.

And when William Stryker offered you both a place in a 'special opperations' team called X-Team, you both agreed —happy to help a cause—.

What you didn't expect, though, was Wade Wilson turning into another shit you had to go through togheter.

The mercenary seemed to never know when to shut his mouth, or how to read social cues, he just simply had a mouth too big for his own good. Hence why the nickname merc with a mouth was born amidst the members of the team.

He was a young man in his 20's, a cocky asshole and a total flirt that talked big game. He liked to show off during missions, pulling stunts, to impress Logan or you was another question that didn't have an answer yet.

You and your husband just knew the kid seemed to have the hots for one of you. Which made Logan boil with possesiveness because you were his damn wife, his and his only —possesiveness that in turn only made Wade all the more horny.

It wasn't until today's mission that you realized that the mercenary didn't have the hots for just one of you, but for both.

After trying to break in a building to stop some drug dealers, the team had split up and —ironically enough— left you three to flee from more guards than you could fight. And now, ironically enough again, you three were hidding in a really small supply closet.

You hadn't intended for it to end up this way, but your husband was with his broad back against the wall and with a pupil-blown Wade completely sandwiched between you two.

Wade was totally trying to keep his cool, desperately keeping up his usual cocky fachade, but his gut felt so damn coiled at having his ass pressed against Logan's crotch and his chest in level with yours.

"How did they notice us?!?" you asked your husband in a low breath, completely ignoring the merc between you.

Logan growled slightly, his nose twitching when a strangely strong scent wafted into his nostrils, shaking his head slightly as he tried to peek out from the small gap in the door. "dunno, doll, but I guess they didn't see us come here"

As you kept talking with your husband in hushed breaths, Wade was starting to feel his brain turning to damn mush as he was trapped between you two. He couldn't help it, your body warmth was sweeping into his bones from back and front —melting him—.

And then, suddenly he heard your voices stopping. Looking up with his half-glassy eyes, he was met by a quirked eyebrow and a deep scowl from Logan.

"are you damn horny right now, mouth?" Logan pretty much growled. His voice rumbling in his chest as he looked down at the young man between you two.

Wade blinked, realizing he had been so aroused —and locked up in his dirty fantasies— that he had pretty much started to leak in his pants.

"ohw, c'mon, what'd you expect?" the merc breathed out under your questioning gaze. "I've got my hot ass against someone's big dick and my face is smushed against this massive titties and jesus fucking christ—"

His words died down in a choked way when Logan's hand flied up to his throath, wrapping around it without issue —damn big hands the Canadian had— and squeezing. Choking a wheezed noise out of his mouth.

"shut your damn mouth if ya wanna keep your throath, bub" Logan growled in the merc's ear, his voice almost like the roar of a lion with how much red he was seeing.

You were just staring at the way Wade's eyes seemed to roll into the back of his head, thighs twitching before shamelessly parting —as if he wanted someone's hand between them—. The mercenary seemed to really be horny for you two.

"really, Wade?" you purred, voice low, as you stared at the young man —letting your husband do the job of shutting him up. "going after a married couple like this? didn't think you'd fall that low.."

Wade struggled to breathe through his nose with Logan's tight grip around his throath, but he spoke nonetheless. "aughn— you two are fucking god- relax the grip old man literally bisexual culture-"

His gasped words only made the growl bubbling up in Logan's throath grow louder. You saw the veins in your husband's arm bulging as he squeezed around Wade's throath again, watching the way the merc choked on his spit —saliva slobbering down the corner of his lips.

You reached out your own hand and placed it atop of Logan's, as if methaporically holding your husband's hand while he choked Wade.

"fucking god you two are really feeding my mommy and daddy issues right now y'kno-oh-oww—"

Wade's spech got cut off my another series of squeezes around his throath, making the mercenary cough and choke on his spit as his head fell forwards against your chest.

"watch your damn mouth, mouth"

"ngh-ah- unluckily for you I've got a thing for being put in my place by dominant, sexy, grown-ups. Big ones with huge—"

His voice died in his own throath when two, huge and thick, fingers were proding at his mouth. Sneaking past his lips and stuffing him full, his eyes rolled back, knees almost buckling underneath him when the meaty taste of sweat invaded his mouth.

"shut it, bub"

"hmn-nhgh"

"you managed to shut him up" you low whistled at your husband, impressed by how quickly and efficiently the merc had shut up. Now busy with nibbling at the fingers inside of his mouth.

"easy peasy" Logan huffed with a slight roll of his eyes. "don't know how long it'll last, though, just look at how damn much the kid's leaking"

Wade whined around Logan's fingers at the way you two were speaking as if he wasn't there, thighs trying to close when he felt your eyes going down and settling on the obvious tent in his pants —and the wet spot.

"so horny" you hummed, more to yourself than anything, before looking back at his face. "what does this mean, baby?" you purred as you pointed to the gold ring on your finger with a neutral look on your face —as if he wasn't coming undone before your eyes. "I don't think you're that dumb yet. C'mon, what does this, right here, mean, Wade?"

Wade struggled to swallow the spit pooling in his mouth around Logan's fingers, body almost tumbling forward when the Canadian ripped his fingers off of his mouth so suddenly.

"I- aughn- I—" he stumbled over his words, swallowing again, as his hazy eyes looked up at you. "that's a daddy and mommy ring" he wheezed out, a little "ah-ah!" escaping his lips when Logan grabbed his hair from the back —forcing him to behave—. "means- angh means that you're married. And old enough to be my grand-parents-"

"That's right, bub" Logan growled, leaning in close to whisper in Wade's ear. "We're a married couple and you're nothing but a pest."

"now, now, darling" you hummed lovingly as you looked at your husband, who was still grabbing Wade by his hair. "don't be so mean.. It turns him on"

That last was a low drawl, before your hand was cuping Wade's cheek and making sure the cold metal of the gold wedding ring you wore was against the merc's skin. "We've lived through wars, honey, you're a literal baby compared to us" you added, voice low and degradatory.

Wade shuddered as the cold metal of your wedding ring pressed against his skin, his eyes looking up at you with a mixture of desire and submission.

"I'm a- nnnng baby" he repeated, almost breathless. "Logan and you are old. So old."

Logan leaned in closer, his hand still clamped around Wade's hair. "Old enough to be your parents" he repeated, his voice dark and gravely. His teeth almost gracing Wade's ear. "Old enough that you shouldn't be interested in us, bub."

"Please, I- I- ahhhhnn I promise I'm good, I promise I'm good, I- I can be good."

It was funny, really, to see such a cocky and show-off of a man being this needy and whiny between you two. But what could you say, it was the Howlett effect.

You slowly slipped your gold wedding band out of your ring finger, right infront of Wade's eyes —watching the way he almost busted on the spot just from the sight alone—.

"this is what'chu want, ain't it honey?" you teased the mercenary trembling and whining between you. "you want this pretty ring on your finger too, don't ya? you wanna be the throphy toy to a hot, married couple old enough to be your parents, don't you, sweetheart?"

You held the wedding ring infront of Wade's face as one of your hands started to rub his arm —slowly going down to his hand—. Wade was shaking, he didn't even know how he hadn't cum untouched yet with how tight and hot his gut felt. All of his muscles coiled.

Wade looked like he was about two seconds away from spontaneously combusting right there in the small supply closet.

"Please" he breathed out, his voice strained and his eyes fixed on the ring in your hand. "Please, I- I want to be- nngah, I want it. I- I'll be good, I- aaahhhnn"

"Are you?" Logan asked, using the grip on Wade's hip to pull him closer against him. "Are you going to behave for us?"

After a series of jerky and rapid nods coming from the drooling mercenary trembling between you, "good fucking boy, there you go" your voice was low and syrupy, as you grabbed Wade's twitching hand and slowly —almost sensually— slipped the cold golden wand on his finger.

It looked as if he was going to combust just from having the ring on his finger, from the implications of having a wedding ring from a married couple on his finger.

Maybe you'd find an explanation for the creamy wet spot between Wade's legs and the way he was wearing your wedding ring when you meet the team in a few minutes. Or maybe you won't, who knows.

[risuola]

ENTRY #5 ♡ F. READER X GOJO SATORU // There's sugar to your kisses, it tastes like dessert.

contents: arranged marriage!au, fluff — wc. 2093

a/n: you welcomed the series so warmly and lovely, that I made this part longer. it's sickly sweet, it's fluffy — enjoy!

series masterlist

“What the hell am I doing–“

You groaned. Again and again. Sighing and throwing your hands into the air, helpless and hopeless. Resignation crawling up your skin, threatening to fight and win with your stubbornness and determination. You felt the characteristics you proud yourself with falter and peel away along with your pride and dignity and you found it ironic — pathetic — that years of harsh trainings, of bloody torture you endured, years of fights and pain did nothing to break you and now you’re losing your mind over a goddamn mochi.

Mochi.

A dessert made of rice dough, sweet and objectively adorable with its round shape and sugary filling. If someone asked you how much time you spent in the kitchen already, heating up the glutinous rice flour, mixing and kneading the dough, you wouldn’t know. Hours, most likely. Fighting a battle that you weren’t ready for, mixing ingredients, adding water, whisking, and then kneading again, burning your fingers and pads of your palms more times than you’d ever admit. And you hated it. Hated the corn starch that dusted all around the place, the sticky mass of heated rice flour that you tried to get just right and above all, you hated how much time it took you before it finally started to look like something you can work with.

“There we go,” you mumbled, kneading and stretching the dough between your hands and the marble countertop. There was a reason you were a fighter, not a cook and the current state of your kitchen made enough of a proof. Mochi now, cleaning later.

The fillings were delicious, you had to pat yourself on the back. You were very lucky today to grab the sweetest strawberries you ever ate. They tasted like summer, like hot, tropical heaven and you fought with yourself before you ate them all. The cream you whipped turned out just perfectly thick and fluffy. Then the green edamame paste — your husband’s favorite — came out just as good. Decadent almost, smooth and sweet, with perfect, bright green color and texture of a cloud. Half of your cream you mixed up with melted chocolate and while happy with the insides, you were still a little concerned about the dough.

You’re not gonna be defeated by a rice dough.

You managed to roll out the mass very thinly, perfectly, and began forming mochi, which turned out to be much easier to do than you anticipated.

Take the dough.

Scoop on the filling.

Close the dough.

Roll.

Repeat.

You filled up a tray, all of the balls prettily displayed on top of a parchment paper and you took it upon yourself to have a taste of each one. Delicious. Absolutely mind-blowing.

To the fridge they go.

Now clean.

* * *

Satoru got home around 7 pm — typical, if nothing comes up or hold him at work. His job as a teacher, you learned it quickly, was repetitive, predictable. He’s out the door just shy of 10 am and back near the evening, before the soft pinks and oranges of the summer turn into nightly blues and greys and you grew to appreciate the routine that settled into your lives. Spending most of the days separately made the first weeks of marriage much more bearable. It gave you and him enough time to get used to the new situation and cool off after many fights you had. But that was about to change and you were meaning to tell him today, sweetening the deal with mochi.

Oh right, mochi!

It got you a little too excited for Satoru to ignore, you looked a little brighter than usually, nervous even and he found it concerningly amusing. You’re rarely happy to see him back, he’s more used to see you ignore him than to greet him, and even if so – you’d usually pass him with a hi or an attempt of a small talk that he hated. Gojo couldn’t tell what was it that made you so much more vibrant that evening, you looked thrilled, your eyes glimmered in the dim lights of the house. You almost looked… happy? To see him? No, that couldn’t be it.

“Did something happen today? You look oddly excited,” he spoke, following his usual routine of taking off his uniform jacket and putting it neatly on a hanger in the hallway, folding his blindfold in half to have it ready in the morning and washing his hands and face. The soft, dry towel soaked up the excess wetness from his skin as he patted it away, pointing his ocean-blue eyes toward you expectantly.

“Well, yes, kind of,” you replied and dropped onto the soft cushions of the sofa in the living room. You twisted your body slightly and looked at him, and he got the hint because few seconds later, he sat down next to you. “Two things. First, I got an offer to work as a teacher in your school. Yaga contacted me–“

“You are the new teacher for the second years?” Satoru cut you and you couldn’t read him. A slight surprise was all you could decipher from the expression of his features.

“Yes. Well, not yet,” you sighed, “before I agree I wanted to ask you what you think.”

“And you’ll do as I say? Since when you’re doing as you’re told?” He teased and for a moment you considered eating all the mochi yourself. Maybe tying him to the chair and devouring it right in front of his eyes? You opened your mouth to say something rather unpleasant before he spoke again. “If you’re asking me for permission, we both know you don’t need it. I’m sure kids will benefit from having you to lead them.”

“Are you willing to be civil with me if we spend more time along each other during the day? Last thing I need is to argue with you more than we already do.”

“We don’t argue that much lately,” he protested and you huffed out a chuckle, nodding in agreement. You didn’t fight at all, if you think about it. It seemed as if slowly you were getting used to… everything.

“So, you’re fine with the idea?”

“I’m fine with the idea, yes,” he said, running a hand through his white, slightly damp hair and brushing it back. You took in his features, allowing yourself to just stare at the man you married, because even if wedded, you see him no more than his students are. He still sleeps on the couch; he still spends most of his time outside. “You’re staring.”

“I am,” you confirmed, shamelessly and it made him chuckle. “Talking about staring, close your eyes.”

“Why would I–“

“Close your eyes and open your mouth,” you ordered, getting up from the comfortable seat you were sunken into. “Please?”

“I’m honestly concerned,” he said but reluctantly lowered his eyelids. As if it made him any less aware of his surroundings. “What are you planning?”

“Don’t peek.”

Quickly, you padded into the kitchen and uncovered the mochi you kept out of the fridge for about ten minutes now. You took the tray and a glass of water and got back to where Satoru was situated. With his eyes closed, comfortable against the cushions. He felt your weight sinking onto the pillows next to him and a hint of something sweet in the air.

“Open up,” your voice made him hum, still uncertain but curious nonetheless. ‘Open up’ was such a foreign command for him to follow and the small amount of trust that was secure between you and him had to suffice for him to comply. “There we go,” you almost whispered and Satoru slightly flinched at the first contact of his mouth with, what felt like, a blob of cold unknown substance. For a reason he couldn’t really rationalize, he grabbed onto your waist to balance himself, even if there was nothing to throw him off.

Slowly, with caution, Gojo closed his mouth, allowing his teeth to meet the dough, go through it. Mochi. He recognized the sweet taste of his very favorite treat immediately but something about what was just melting against his tongue felt different to what he’s used to. The rice envelope was softer but chewy, sweetened just perfectly and the paste inside — green bean — had a texture of silk and butter, a luscious heaven itself. He felt it spreading along his taste buds, warming against the insides of his cheeks. A perfect mixture of fluffy inside and glutinous outside. So sweet, so delicious.

“Oh my god,” he whimpered. A sound so foreign, that it almost surprised you if not for the very vibrant wash of pleasure that relaxed his features. Just as the mochi melted in his mouth, he melted against the couch.

“Was it good?” You asked, while the answer was relatively clear from what you had a chance to witness. “I made them for you and they are not perfect yet but–“

“You made this mochi for me?”

Satoru’s bright blue eyes snapped open and his grip on your waist tightened. A shock pushed to the front of his expression, he blinked — once, twice — before you nodded slowly. Then he followed the direction of your gaze; his own landing on the tray full neat rows of plump rice balls, so perfectly imperfect against the dark wood below them. He could tell some had a green undertone, the edamame filling, and some were looking white and plain. Next row seemed to have chocolate inside and he could catch the hint of it in the air.

“You made all of this? With your hands?”

“From scratch, yeah,” you nodded, reaching for another one. “Chocolate.”

Being fed by you — his wife — felt odd, unfamiliar, and yet the subtle brush of your fingers against his lips whenever you gently pushed the doughy ball into his open mouth felt just right. Satoru thought he could get used to it, and the mochi.

“So you’re not only a good cook,” you’re not, but you hummed. “But also you can make mochi? If we weren’t already married, I would have asked you to marry me now.”

“That easy, huh?”

“That easy.”

You shook your head, visibly suppressing a giggle and Gojo hoped you wouldn’t hold it. It’s only now that he’s learning how pretty is your smile, how your eyes crinkle every time you allow your face to relax and take on a pattern of joy. He likes the shape your lips form, how they stretch whenever you’re happy and how your brows lift up just slightly above your half-closed lids. He wished you’d let yourself burst out laughing, but instead you shook your head yet again and let out a sigh of content. Good enough.

You reached onto the tray again. This time it was the white blob of doughy goodness hanging heavy between your dainty fingers. “This one is my favorite.”

There was no need to tell him twice. Satoru opened his mouth, eager for the sweetness you called your favorite although from your words he had a suspicion what was inside. Strawberries. You love strawberries. He learned that during the wedding celebration, when you eyed the fruit on his piece of the cake with the most adorable envy he’s ever seen – and then, those very same eyes glittered with pleasure when he exchanged his plate with yours. He remembers how you left the red, plump strawberry for the last bite, how you sighed with content as you bit into the juicy flesh of the fruit, how you nearly purred despite the stressful predicament you were placed into.

“Divine,” Gojo purred himself, as the flavors mixed in his mouth. The crisp, fresh strawberry, along the velvety cream and chewy dough made for an experience he could only compare to orgasm.

He wanted more.

Craved more and he blames it on you that the moment you sunk your teeth into the sweet treat, he leaned closer. His mind went blank when he wrapped his own mouth around the half mochi that sticked out, his lips brushed against yours. A drop of red juice run down his chin, wet and sticky against his skin. He didn’t care. Greedy for more, for you, he leaned in even more, tempted by the sweet taste of your sugar-powdered lips flush to his own.

You gasped. Purred. In surprise, in pleasure, or both.

The feeling unfamiliar, addicting, syrupy.

You should stop it.

You wanted more.

He should stop it.

He wanted more.

It was slow, sloppy and nothing but strawberry and cream.

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[thatbloodymuggle]

MASTERMIND (i)

ONE- THE EQUINOX

SUMMARY: A child of light and dark, you are the Night Court’s best kept secret. After decades spent in hiding, you yearn to stretch your wings. But you quickly learn that freedom comes with a price, as you find yourself trying to outfox the fox in his own den.

PAIRING: eris vanserra x reader

WORD COUNT: 6.7k

SERIES MASTERLIST

WARNINGS: none for now

“There is no shot Rhys is a pillow princess,” Cassian snips through howls of laughter.

“Are you kidding me? Have you seen the way Feyre does every little thing for him? She wiped the crumbs off his face at dinner last night!” you counter in a fit of giggles.

Cassian shakes his head, the tendrils of hair tied back behind his head coming loose at the motion. Azriel sits beside him, arms crossed against his tattooed chest. It’s obvious to everyone in the room that, although the Spymaster tries his best to feign disinterest, he is highly amused by the subject matter of the argument. On the other hand, Morrigan, who lays leisurely on the couch across from the bickering pair, doesn’t even attempt to conceal her delight.

“I’m with my sister on this one. He follows her around like a puppy—he stares longingly out the window when she’s gone and wags his wings when she returns,” Mor quips.

You burst into another fit of laughter and clutch your stomach as you are reminded of your soreness from your training session the day before. 

“All the more reason he’s a munch, not a pillow princess,” Cassian barks back, his voice booming through the living room and down the hallways.

Nesta, who sits quietly in the corner and actually appeared disinterested in the discussion, perks up at Cassian’s words and gags at the thought of her sister in bed with her brother-in-law. 

“That’s enough,” Azriel interrupts before your rebuttal can roll off your tongue, “We should not be discussing what our High Lord and Lady do in the bedroom.”

“Oh, come on, Az, you can’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” Cass rolls his eyes and yelps at the subsequent kick in his side from Nesta.

“Now that’s enough from you,” she snaps, cold eyes narrowed into slits, “And you should know better than to pick an argument with her. It’s a losing fight.”

Cassian glares at the way your lips curl into a feline smirk and your chest puffs out slightly with pride. 

“Little Miss Know-It-All isn’t right about everything,” he drawls with a playful glint in his eyes. 

“She most definitely is,” Mor giggles.

“Oh, come on. Az? A little help here?” the Illyrian general lulls his head towards his friend.

Azriel drums his fingers against the arm of the couch in thought before humming, “I’m with Little Miss Know-It-All.”

Cassian throws his head back with a groan as all the females in the room laugh at him. He is spared from further humiliation by the opening of the door. You are forced to stifle a giggle at the sight of Feyre at the doorway. Her brows cinch together as you and Mor share a knowing glance, mischief dancing in your identical eyes. Despite his irritation, the corners of Cassian’s lips twitch as he tries, and fails, to suppress a smile. 

“Something funny?” the High Lady quirks a brow with a hand on her hip.

The three of you shake your heads in unison, but refrain from laughter.

“It’s always you three,” Feyre grumbles before diverting her attention to the room full of her inner circle, “Rhys is back from his meeting with Eris. He’d like to call a brief meeting before dinner.”

The joyous atmosphere of the living room is dampened, as everyone is reminded of the looming threat of yet another war. This time, you have no problem wiping the smile from your face. An unspoken tension hangs over everyone as you follow Feyre out down the hallway and up the stairs of the House of Wind. Upon entering the meeting room, you immediately notice the frustration painted across your High Lord’s features—the tick of his jaw, his white-knuckled grip around his glass of wine. Eris must have really pissed him off, you think to yourself as you take your seat between Azriel and Mor. 

“The fox was even more irritating than usual, I presume?” Amren muses as she glides into the room last, the twin doors slamming shut behind her. She was always one for subtlety.

Rhys runs a hand over his face, “I was about five seconds away from wringing his neck,” he grunts. Everyone waits patiently for the High Lord to collect himself before continuing, “I think we should consider re-evaluating our alliance with Eris.”

“As much as I would love to be rid of him for good,” Feyre is the first to pipe up, “I don’t know if we are in the position to turn our backs on him if he is our only source of information on Beron’s inner-workings.”

“I’m beginning to wonder if he may be more trouble that his information is worth,” Rhys counters.

You catch Mor chewing on her bottom lip in thought out of the corner of your eye.

“Well how valuable has his information been thus far? Has he mentioned anything Az hasn’t found out on his own?” Cassian leans his elbows on the table.

All eyes turn towards the Spymaster.

Azriel sighs and his wings flex behind him, “I’ve heard next to nothing this week. They’ve put up heavy wards that even my shadows can’t get through,” he pauses before adding, “Perhaps precisely so my shadows can’t get through.”

Rhys inhales deeply through his nose to simmer his frustration.

“Well even if Eris is feeding you more than Az can pick up on, who’s to say we can trust anything the little cunt says?” Mor spits with a venomous edge to her words.

“So we must find out if he can be trusted,” Feyre interjects.

Rhys grunts, but doesn’t disagree, “And how do we do that?”

Silence envelopes the room as everyone ponders over their options. The House of Wind seems to sense their agitation and summons a glass of red wine in front of everyone’s seat. You sing praises in your head at the sight, and don’t hesitate to reach forward and lift the generously full glass to your lips.

“Why don’t we send in our reserve spy?” Cassian pipes up from the opposite end of the table.

You splutter at his words, sending wine dribbling down your chin. You hastily wipe it off and narrow your eyes into an icy glare as you hiss, “I told you to quit calling me that.”

Mor tenses beside you.

“Absolutely not. Her role works because no one knows who she is. As soon as Eris catches wind that we have a secret member of the inner circle, we can kiss any niceties he may offer goodbye. Besides, she’s never dealt with the politics of High Lords before,” Azriel is quick to counter Cassian’s suggestion.

Your lips dip into a frown, and you open your mouth to speak, but Cassian beats you to it.

“Then we ensure Eris doesn’t find out who she is. She already has contacts in the Autumn Court. She can pretend to go there on a business trip for her father and get close enough to Eris to catch his interest. Just close enough that she gains access to the Forest House, but not so close that she ends up wrapped up in Beron’s schemes,” Cassian speaks methodically as the gears turn in his head.

Mor’s grip around the stem of her wine glass tightens.

“She has a name,” you hiss at the two Illyrians, “And you may consider asking her what she thinks before bickering about it.”

The two males shut their mouths and turn to you expectantly. Feyre eyes Mor seated beside you. She can sense the annoyance radiating from her, and speaks softly, “What do you think, Y/N?”

All eyes flick towards you. Yet, you don’t so much as tremble, even under Amren’s scrutinizing gaze.

“I’m not opposed,” you speak slowly, cautious of your fuming half-sister, “But I don’t understand how you expect me to get Eris to take interest in me, let alone tell me anything useful.”

Rhys drums his fingers along the mahogany wood of the table, “We could prep you. I’ve seen the bastard with enough women to know what he gravitates towards.”

Mor’s thinly veiled patience seems to have run its course as she slams her wine glass down onto the table, red liquid sloshing over the edges, “You are not whoring my sister off to him.”

You subconsciously shrink into your seat.

“No one’s whoring her off,” Cassian speaks carefully, “She just needs to get close enough to prod him a little and snoop through the Forest House.”

“Could I not just take the wards down and then get out?” you offer your spell-cleaving abilities, searching for a compromise that could satisfy both parties.

Amren shakes her head tightly, “There’s no telling what Eris or Beron will do once they found out their wards have been breached. Not worth the gamble.”

“Don’t tell me you think this is a good idea now,” Mor seethes at the female across from her.

“It’s not our best idea,” Amren matches her icy glare, “But it’s the only one we have.”

Mor leans forward in her seat, her rosy lips curling into a snarl, “I will not stand idly by as you through my sister to the wolves.”

“Mor, please,” you speak softly as you place a hand on her knee. The tension in her shoulders eases slightly, but her jaw remains clenched. Your eyes scan over Rhys, who watches your exchange silently. You take a deep breathe, steadying yourself before speaking, “I think I can do it.”

“You think?” Amren challenges.

“I know,” you snap at the second-in-command.

Mor’s knee jerks against your hand and she bitterly grumbles, “I don’t like it.”

Rhys sighs and leans back into his seat at the head of the table. The lines have been drawn: Amren and Cassian versus Morrigan and Azirel. The High Lord cocks his head towards his mate, “I’ll defer the decision to you, Feyre darling.”

If it weren’t for the tension thick in the air, you would giggle at his words considering your earlier dispute with Cassian.

All eyes shift to the High Lady, who chews the inside of her cheek in thought. Her blue-grey gaze lands on you, “You’re confident you can do this?”

Subconsciously, your back straightens and your chin raises ever so slightly. You do your best to ignore your fuming half-sister in your peripheral as you steadily reply, “Yes.”

Feyre nods and glances towards her mate, “Then under the condition that she is adequately prepared before stepping foot anywhere near the Autumn Court, I’m in favor.”

Mor doesn’t hesitate to storm out of the room the moment Rhys calls the meeting adjourned. You rub your temples as you know you’ll be having a rather unpleasant conversation with her later about your decision. You are aware of her history with the Vanserra family; although she has never gone into details about the events, and you have never pushed her to do so, you have heard about what transpired centuries ago from Cassian. But that is a matter to be dealt with later. Everyone files out the room after Mor, leaving you, Azriel, and Rhys to hammer out the details of your new mission.

Your façade is carefully constructed. As the fabled Athena Ellesmere, you will be visiting the Autumn Court at the start of harvest season to set in motion tradings for a variety of goods. Under Rhys and Azriel’s instructions, you send letters to two of your previous contacts ahead of your impending arrival; one to Willow, the wife of a corn farmer, and one to Ginerva, a widowed herbalist. You tell them your stay will be longer than usual, as your father has tasked you with researching some new trade routes along the border. When the time comes, your research will give you the perfect excuse to request access to the Autumn Court library, and by proxy, the Forest House.

To his part, Azriel presents all the information he has been able to collect over the years on the Autumn Court: a map of the Forest House with each room labelled, a list of employees within Beron’s inner circle, and a list of empty residences positioned conveniently between the main town and the Forest House. You study the layout of the Forest House diligently, tracing your finger along each twist and turn of the long hallways. You pay particular attention to areas surrounding Eris’s personal chambers and office. The Spymaster lists off items you should keep an eye out for if you are successful in gaining entry to the Forest House: correspondences with other High Lords, meeting notes, any information pertaining to the Night Court and Velaris.

Most importantly, Rhys and Azriel warn many times through your meeting, you are to stay far, far away from Beron. You are there to spy on Eris, and Eris alone. While any information you can gather on Beron will be welcome, you are not to interact with him directly. Females are not treated with the same respect in the Autumn Court as they are in the safety of Velaris. And if anything goes awry, you will be under his jurisdiction.

As the conversation shifts to the man of the hour, you can surmise one thing: Eris Vanserra is a fox. Sly and cunning, with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue. A predator. He enjoys the hunt more than the catch itself. If you want to ensnare the fox in your trap, you will need to play a convincing game of hard to get; hard enough to keep him chasing, but not so hard that he deems the grapes sour and moves to a different branch.

The fox is a far cry from any of your previous expeditions. You should feel on edge; nervous, anxious about what is to come. But you can’t kindle the flicker of excitement in your gut at the prospect of outfoxing the fox himself.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

“Please check in with Rhys daily. Even if you don’t find anything. And don’t forget the tunnel escape routes Az showed you if something goes awry,” Mor rambles on as she fiddles with the buttons of your cloak.

You roll your eyes with an exaggerated sigh, “Anything else, Mother Mor?”

She flicks your forehead, and you scrunch your brows with a yelp at the assault. 

“Don’t fret, dear Morrigan. Our little Spymaster-in-training has got this,” Cassian ruffles your hair with a grin. 

You swat his hand away and turn to him with a glare, “I said quit calling me—”

“That’s enough, you two,” Feyre interjects before you can bicker with the Illyrian fool.

You hike your bag onto your shoulder and smooth down the emerald-green dress underneath your heavy cloak. The wrinkles in the fabric instantly return as Mor throws her arms around you, sending you stumbling backwards.

“Be careful,” she whispers into your neck.

You fight the urge to roll your eyes, and instead return her embrace. 

“It’s just a month. I’ll be fine. Promise,” you give her a reassuring squeeze before squirming out of her tight grip.

“I’d suggest you leave now before Mor changes her mind,” Rhys speaks lowly into your ear. You don’t need to turn to see the smirk plastered on his face.

With one last adjustment to your clothes, carefully crafted to blend seamlessly into the Autumn Court, you turn towards your misfit family. An impish smile tugs at your lips as you wave at them.

“Don’t miss me too much. And Nesta, please keep your pet in check for me. Sometimes all he needs is a good yank on his leash.”

You don’t stick around to hear Cassian’s protests as the air around you twists and folds. You hold your bag tightly as you winnow one, two, three steps. With each step, you take in the chance in scenery. The beating sun of Day, snow-capped mountains of Winter, and finally the unmistakable kaleidoscope of Autumn. Your grip on your bag loosens slightly as you marvel at the latticework of red, brown, gold, and green. This isn’t your first time in the Autumn Court—in fact, it must be your fifth visit at this point. But the colorwork, reminiscent of the stained-glass windows in the Dawn Court libraries, never ceases to amaze you. Twigs crunch under your feet as you walk leisurely through the expansive forest. You suck in a deep breath, taking in the delicious smell of pine, before winnowing once more.

This time, you hit your mark. About 10 yards in front of you sits a quaint little cabin. Smoke steadily blows out from the chimney on the roof, and you smile to yourself at the sight. Ginerva must have prepared a fire prior to your arrival—a welcome gift, of sorts. You dig out the key in the pocket of your coat, which the herbalist had sent you the day prior following your payment for one month’s rent.

A sweet cedar smell invades your senses as you swing the cabin door open. The hinges creak loudly, indicative of a desperate need for oil. You take in the small space as you set your bag down on the wooden floor. A fire burns brightly in the fireplace in the corner, contained by some sort of enchantment. Directly across from the flames is a modest bed, slightly larger than a twin. A smile tugs at your lips as you picture Azriel or Cassian trying to sleep on it with their ginormous Illyrian wings. On the other side of the cabin is a small kitchenette, stocked with all the pots, pans, and utensils you could possibly need. You swing the door shut behind you, and relish in the warmth the fire brings—a stark contrast from the brisk autumn winds outside. Despite the scattered cracks in the wall and the sheer layer of dust covering the floor, the cabin has a certain rustic charm. After spending so many years confined within the same book-lined walls, you never fail to appreciate such changes in scenery. 

You set to work unpacking your bag, charmed to fit more than it should hold. The clothes Amren and Mor have packed for you are a mixture of warm oranges, reds, and greens—a far cry from your typical Night Court attire. A sharp knock snaps you from your task at hand. You plaster a kind smile on your face as you swing the door open.

Ginerva is the epitome of a typical Autumn Court inhabitant. Her hair is tied back in an intricate braid, its copper hue a beautiful compliment to her piercing green eyes. A constellation of freckles are dotted across her pale skin, lifted by the wide grin on her lips.

“Athena!”

The herbalist doesn’t give you a chance to reply as she envelopes you in a warm embrace. Your gut churns as the reality that you are now in Athena Ellesmere’s skin, not your own, settles in. Still, you return her gesture with a laugh. 

“It’s good to see you again, Ginerva,” you pull back from her with a soft smile, “I can’t thank you enough for arranging this for me.”

The female brushes off any flattery, “Please, don’t thank me. I’m merely appreciative to have your company for a short while. It does tend to get lonely around here with Ambrose gone.”

You suppress the frown that twitches at your lips at the thought of her deceased husband. You had the displeasure of meeting him twice before the war against Hybern claimed his pitiful life. Just as Ginerva was the epitome of an Autumn Court female, so was Ambrose the epitome of an Autumn Court male: pompous with a vicious temper. 

“I can only imagine,” you reply, voice dripping with faux remorse, “How has business been at the shop?”

Her juniper eyes brighten and a rosy hue spreads across her pale cheeks, “Oh, it’s been wonderful! I’ve just restocked a new barley tea which works wonders for joint pains. My customers can’t seem to get enough of it!”

That could surely come in handy after your brutal hours in the ring with Cassian. You make a mental note to purchase a stock of it before the end of your trip.

“That’s wonderful to hear. I’ll have to swing by once I’m settled in,” you grin.

“Please do,” Ginerva smiles, “I hate to cut my visit short, but I must get going to re-open the shop. Will I see you at the equinox celebration tonight?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” you swiftly reply, your cheeks beginning to ache from your calculated smile.

Your head dips into a kind nod as Ginerva departs with a wave over her shoulder. The door shuts, leaving you to the comfort of your temporary home once more. The twisting in your gut returns as you continue unpacking your belongings. It shouldn’t bother you—the seamless weaving of lies and deceit. You have been playing the role of Athena Ellesmere for decades now. But this trip is different; longer, yes, but it’s more personal. You feel a guilt you have never felt before manipulating others into trusting a person who doesn’t exist. 

The once comforting aroma of the cabin begins to grow suffocating, and you decide a walk of the premises is needed. You slip on a pair of boots and drape your cloak over your shoulders as protection from the biting autumn wind before heading out into the forest. Although the breeze in Velaris is soft and comforting, you can’t help but revel in the slightly more sinister wind that nips at your nose as you wander in the direction of the Forest House. You have frequented the Autumn Court several times now, but have never approached the grand estate, let alone entered it. With sentries littered at every entrance, it is impossible to breach. No enemies approach Beron’s home without his knowledge, and none leave without his permission. That is, with the exception of the Autumnal Equinox.

Although the falling leaves of autumn preside year-round within the court, the equinox marks the official start of autumn in Prythian, and for Autumn Court inhabitants, the beginning of harvest season. Celebrated since the country was divided into the seven courts, it is a tradition which spans centuries of High Lords. For one night each year, the High Lord opens the gates of the Forest House to his citizens, and indulges them in music, wine, and dancing until the early hours of the morning. 

You have never attended an Autumnal Equinox celebration, but you have read extensively about it. You have read extensively about a lot of things, for that matter; but have experienced so few.

As you make your way through the woods, your eyes land on the Forest House peeking through the trees. It is absolutely breath-taking. One hundred books couldn’t do the moss-covered shingles and centuries-old red brick justice. A bitter taste floods your mouth at the thought; the reality that in your 70 years of existence, you’ve seen so little of the world. You love your home in Velaris, and your little misfit family. And yet, you can’t help but dream of another reality in which you free from any obligation, free to move as you please, free to never settle down. You suppose that this must be the price for immortality.

Rather than dwindling into an existential crisis, you collect your thoughts and begin your scaling of the Forest House perimeter. Images of Azriel’s carefully detailed maps swim through your mind as you study each window. The fabled story of Athena Ellesmere rolls off your tongue as the colorful leaves crunch under your feet. And for a few short hours, you find yourself lost in the beauty of a small piece of what the world beyond Velaris has to offer.

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

You didn’t think it possible, but somehow the Forest House is even more magnificent up close than what you caught glimpse of from behind the rolling hills. The golden archway beckoning citizens inside its premises is full of intricate details, nearly invisible to the naked eye. Red leafed decorations are so bright they seem to reflect the stars in the night sky above. Vibrant green ivy snakes and twists along the cobblestone walls of the courtyard, tying the whole scene together. 

It is surely a sight for sore eyes. But as are you.

The silk of your ruby red dress pools at your feet and flows like a blood river with each step. The expensive material hugs your hips, but does not constrict them, accentuating your figure. A deep plunging neckline and open back expose just enough skin to leave any male wanting more. Your hair is pulled back in a tasteful updo with a few tendrils loose to shape your face, highlighting your natural beauty. And to top it all off, a deep, red lipstick. You look regal. 

If Cassian could see you now, he’d never again call you Bookworm. 

As you enter the center of the courtyard, you take in the joyful scene before you. A band of enchanted instruments play a lively tune as faeries dance and sing, the sweet smell of cinnamon filling the air. 

But you have a job to do.

You imagine Azriel’s voice in your head as you survey the perimeter of the courtyard, making note of each potential exit. Your eyes scan the crowd for any potential threats. Once you come up empty, you take a step forward towards the middle. You hold your chin high, and move with an elegance that does your elegant gown justice.

You ignore the lingering gazes of onlooking males as you weave through the crowd and help yourself to a goblet of wine. You have never tasted anything quite like it—a sweet undertone of crisp apple and nutmeg. You nonchalantly scan the crowd, this time searching for a head of flaming, crimson hair. The task, however, proves to be difficult, as nearly every head is red.

 An ominous shiver crawls up your spine as you sense an unwanted presence lingering behind you. You try to ignore the male breathing down your neck and sip your wine, but to no avail.

“What’s a pretty thing like you doing here alone?” your nose scrunches at the sour scent of liquor on his breath.

His threatening stance disturbs you, but you are prepared for this.

You glamour a glittering, diamond ring onto your left hand and raise it in a delicate gesture, not bothering to meet his eye.

“Waiting for my husband,” you swiftly reply.

His drunken grumblings barely reach your ear as your eyes lock in on your target.

You know what Eris Vanserra looks like; Rhys has shown you through his own eyes. But you aren’t quite prepared for how, for lack of a better word, stunning the man across the crowd truly is. 

His towering stature exudes power. The first few buttons of his emerald silken shirt are undone, leaving the top of his chest exposed. You can’t help but ogle at the way the silver chain around his neck falls gracefully down his radiant, almost golden, skin. The sharpness of his chiseled jaw slices through the air; a stark contrast to the soft texture of his wind-swept, crimson hair. A golden wreath sits flawlessly on top, its shine reflecting the moonlight above. It takes everything in you not to gawk at his beauty.

You down the rest of your wine, willing the alcohol to give you the confidence you need, before refilling your goblet. You stalk through the crowd, all the while keeping your eyes locked on him. You lean against a red brick wall about 20 yards behind the male he is speaking to—directly in his line of view. You wait patiently, allowing yourself to indulge in his regal beauty. Finally, his chin dips to the side. 

The roaring sound of music and screaming faeries washes away as his amber eyes flick towards yours. Your heart thumps as you hold his curious gaze, your own inquisitive one unwavering. A feline smile curls onto your face and you slowly, teasingly, raise your goblet of wine to your red lips. Eris’s eyes narrow ever so slightly as he studies your movements. You cock a brow in response as you take a sip of the dark liquid. A venomous smirk tugs at his lips, and your heart leaps into your throat at the playful glint in his eyes.

Just as quickly as it appears, he vanishes.

You catch sight of his golden wreath weaving through the crowd, and swiftly push yourself from the wall. With a deep breath, you will yourself into the shadows (a gift bestowed upon you by your unknowing father), and glide in the opposite direction. You stop a few yards away, and smirk as you spot Eris approach your previous spot on the wall. His brows furrow as he looks around in confusion. You wait patiently for his eyes to find yours again. The burning bonfire flickers in his irises, highlighting the unmistakable glint of mischief. He swiftly moves in your direction, and you slip away into the shadows once more, careful to conceal your Night Court power. Again, you stop a small distance away. You repeat your vanishing act a few more times, slowly luring the fox away from the center of the party and into your snare. Once you reach the outskirt of the courtyard, you will yourself completely from the shadows and set into a casual strut. You can feel his presence approaching, and your heart thrums in anticipation.

“Where are you flying off to, Little Bird?” 

His warm voice crackles like the flames of the bonfire.

You shiver as his warm breath fans over your neck, his aroma of sandalwood and cranberry dizzying.

“Maybe I’m stretching my wings,” you muse, “Or maybe I’m luring the fox from the safety of his den.”

Your knees buckle as his lips graze the shell of your ear with a smile, “I quite like pretty things with sharp tongues.”

Your lips part and goosebumps erupt along your skin. His charm is alluring, but you are prepared for this. So, you swiftly spin the face him. His golden wreath nearly scrapes the tip of your nose as he lazily raises his head, but you resist the instinct to step back. All air leaves your body as he rises to his full height. His amber eyes bear into yours, and you are suddenly aware of just how much of your skin is exposed. 

“I think you underestimate just how sharp my tongue can be,” you purr as you raise the wine still in your hand to your lips.

Eris watches intently as your lips wrap around the rim and you tip back the goblet. You allow a droplet to leak from the side and spill down the curve of your lips. As you lower the goblet from your face, his ring-clad hand darts out and catches the red drop. His thumb rubs gently along your chin, his warm touch igniting a fire in your gut. His soft grips tightens ever so slightly as he tilts your face upwards before removing his hand. Your lips part as he sucks his wine-covered thumb into his mouth, his cheeks hollowing at the motion. 

“Good?” the airiness of your voice betrays you.

“Delicious,” he sings.

He is taunting you—circling his prey, preparing to pounce. 

“A bit too sweet for my taste,” you hum and blindly set the goblet down on the low cobblestone wall beside you, “And I think my wings are adequately stretched.”

The crimson silk of your dress ripples as you turn swiftly on your heel and saunter back towards the party. A playful smirk dances on your lips as you feel Eris’s gaze on your swinging hips. His powerful aura trails behind you. He allows you to lead through the crowd, giving you a fleeting semblance of control, before his strong hand wraps around your wrist in a commanding grip.

You swallow down a gasp as he abruptly spins you around and pulls your chest flush against his. He has a direct view of the curve of your breasts down the deep cut of your dress; but his luminous eyes don’t waver from yours. He intertwines his right hand with yours so that your palms touch, while his left finds solace in the dip of your waist. Despite your best efforts, you are unable to will away the deep flush creeping up your neck as he moves you gracefully along the floor in a waltz to the beat of the music.

“I’m not familiar with the customs of the Autumn Court, you tease, “But where I come from it is impolite to steal a dance from a female without her permission.”

He ignores you and twirls you around before pulling you close again, “And where is it that you flew from, Little Bird?”

You hum nonchalantly, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

His chest rumbles with laughter, sending a shiver down your spine. His head dips down so that his lips are millimeters from your ear as he whispers, “I’ve seen your eyes before.” Your heart skips a beat—you hadn’t even considered the possibility that he might recognize your similarity to Morrigan. But the tension in your shoulders eases as he continues, “Did the Mother send you from my dreams?”

You mimic his gesture and raise your lips to his ear before replying, “From your nightmares, actually.”

“Little Bird knows how to play,” Eris muses. He rises to his full height once again before spinning your body so your back is flush against his chest, your feet moving with his in a gentle sway to the strings of the orchestra, “Does she have a name?”

“She does,” you retort simply.

He knows your game. And he’s willing to play.

“It seems only fair you indulge me with yours, seeing as you know mine,” he probes.

Your face warms as he moves your bodies closer to the blazing bonfire.

“Who’s to say I know your name?” you tease in a lilted voice.

His hands trail down your body at an agonizingly slow pace before landing on your waist, pulling you impossibly closer.

“Everyone knows my name, darling,” molasses drips from his lips as his voice tickles your neck.

You reply coolly, “Vanity working on a weak hand produces every sort of mischief.”

A humorless laugh escapes from his lips, and you jolt as his fingers dig tightly into your waist, “I can assure you my hand is many things, but weak is not one of them.” His right hand leaves your waist, and you gulp as it wraps around your throat. He doesn’t squeeze—but his grip is just strong enough to prove his point. “What can I do to get the canary to sing?”

You spin around to face him and lace your right hand with his left once more. Your gentle sways become brisker as the tempo of the violins accelerates. 

“My name for a question,” you cock a brow.

“Indulge me.”

His gaze shifts from your eyes to your intertwined hands as your fingers dance along his, gently slipping one of his rings off. You roll it teasingly between your fingers before slipping it onto your thumb.

“Athena,” you finally relent with a coy smile.

A pleasured hum rumbles in his throat as he rolls the ring around your thumb, “Fitting name, Little Bird. Though I think you’re better suited as a canary than an owl.”

Pure, unbridled desire clouds your eyes as Eris raises your thumb to his mouth and nips it tauntingly.

“Do intelligent females scare you?” you muse, pushing your thumb against his bottom teeth.

A sinister grin curls onto his lips as you trail your ring-clad thumb down, over his bottom lip and to his chin, before retreating to its place in his hand.

“They terrify me,” he purrs before twirling you in time with the crescendo of the orchestra.

“My question,” you state simply as your playful eyes meet his again.

“Shoot.”

His Adam’s apple bobs as you trail your right hand from his shoulder to the nape of his neck, stroking your fingers gently through his scarlet locks. Your gaze shifts from his amber eyes to the walls of the Forest House behind him.

“What do you guard inside your henhouse, Fox?”

Your heart thumps wildly in your chest as the words leave your lips. A dark look glazes over his eyes, sending a wave of instant regret crashing over you. Have you said too much? Pushed too far?

His grip on your hand tightens and he lowers his lips to your ear once more. But this time, they don’t graze. His teeth sink into your earlobe, and he tugs hard enough to elicit a wince; a warning.

“I indulge your question, but I didn’t promise an answer,” Eris drawls. He presses a kiss to your ear before whispering, “Be careful, Little Bird. If you fly too close, you might just get burned.”

Cauldron, save you. Your knees buckle and an involuntary moan escapes you as he trails his lips down your neck. Your eyes flutter shut as you crane your neck to the side, giving yourself fully to him. He ghosts open-mouthed kisses along your sensitive skin and your nails dig into the nape of his neck, pulling him impossibly closer. He nips at the junction of your collarbone and you gasp, your eyes shooting wide open.

The twinkling stars above blink down at you and a wave of panic rushes in.

Rhys’s words from earlier sing in your ears: Don’t get too close.

Eris senses the rapid uptick of your pounding heart. He hums against your skin and drags the tip of his nose up your shoulder, along your neck, and finally to your chin. His lips ghost over yours as he breathes, “Change of heart, Little Bird?”

This time when you look into his amber eyes, the playfulness, the mischief, the humor, is all gone. You are looking into the eyes of a predator, seconds away from closing in on its kill. You gulp and pray that your mask of apathy hasn’t slipped. 

“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” 

A wide grin takes over his face, but the predator within him lurks. Still, he hums in understanding and leans away, “I see. But I must warn you that my patience is notoriously thin.”

A swift movement in your peripheral captures your attention. You look past Eris’s shoulder and catch sight of a tall male stalking towards you—one of his brothers, you deduce from his flaming red hair and regal posture. A sense of relief rushes over you, as you plot your escape for the evening.

Your plaster on a sickly-sweet smile and raise your lips to his cheek, giving the Autumn Court heir a chaste kiss.

“’Till we meet again, Eris Vanserra,” you whisper.

He nearly groans at the way his name rolls off your tongue, but his brows furrow as the meaning of your words sinks in. He turns his head towards your line of sight, and you use the opportunity to swiftly slip away. You don’t stick around to hear his conversation with his brother. Instead, you will yourself to slip back into the shadows. A rush of adrenaline surges through you as you make your escape. 

It isn’t until you are far past the golden gates of the Forest House that the reality of what just happened sinks in. You gasp for air as your heart thunders in your chest. You steady yourself against a large tree, sinking your nails into the bark until the splintering pain stabilizes you. As you retract your nails from the trunk, a glimmer catches your eye. The shining silver of Eris’s ring, still sitting snugly around your thumb, seems to wink at you. You roll it around with your index finger, and a faint smile ghosts over your lips. Pride burrows in your chest as you push off the tree and begin your trek back to your temporary home.

Although the night didn’t go quite as you had envisioned it, you have the fox right where you want him. 

And he is none the wiser.

[miley1442111]

reams and reactions (part 1)- r.cameron

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a/n: HELLO! welcome to my new obx series, don't worry, if you follow me for cm or anything else I'll still be posting that, but i've just been on a obx binge recently so i cooked this story up in my head.

tropes: childhood bestfriends to lovers, enemies to lovers

pairing: rafe cameron x fem! reader (use of Y/n, and the nickname Bunny/ bun (but i promise not in a weird way there's a story to it i swear it's not just one of those weird smut things))

summary: how you and rafe fell apart, then finally meet again.

warnings: drugs, drug use, drinking, parental and sibling death, kissing, crying, violence, fighting, cursing, guys being creepy, misogyny, asshole dude. (i think that's it?)

not entirely proofread

2k+ words

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When Rafe was 5 years old, he ran with you in the garden of Tannyhill, chasing you in a game of tag. When he finally caught up to you, you both fell to the ground, limbs tangled in the way only friends did, giggling the way only friends do, and he pressed the sweetest kiss to your cheek. 

When Rafe was 8, he came sobbing at your doorstep, on the verge of throwing up. He’d run all the way there. His mom was dead. He didn’t know what else to do. Besides his mother, you were the only person you’d ever been there for him like that, showing him that emotions were ok, and normal. When he felt you hugging him, and crying with him, he knew he would be with you forever. That he would stick with you through anything. 

When Rafe was 10, he came back to your house after a particularly long day (aka you had no classes together) and you two sat on your couch with your family surrounding you, Romeo and Juliet on the screen. He felt himself blush when your sister made the joke that he was like your Romeo, since your dads didn’t get on. Though you both adamantly denied it, a few minutes later he felt your hand holding his under the blanket, your matching friendship bracelet brushing off each other's skin. He was smitten. A smile landed swiftly on both of your faces. 

When Rafe was 13, he watched as you walked down the aisle of his father’s second marriage, a bunch of flowers in hand. He thought you looked beautiful, you were so beautiful. The pale blue dress Rose had picked and, of course, white roses in your hand. You shot him a small smile, one he responded to by blowing you a kiss. You laughed it off and went to stand where you were meant to. Rafe’s eyes were glued to you through the entire ceremony, almost forgetting to give his dad the rings. After the ceremony, you two ran off, away from Tannyhill. You went to your ‘little cove’ as you’d call it. It was a tiny beach just beside your house, but it led into the most magnificent field full of wildflowers, insects, and tall grass. It was beautiful. You and Rafe spent the whole night there, joking and talking. Then he finally mustered up the courage to kiss you. You kissed him back, but you’d both never speak about it again, too scared to mess up your incredible decade of friendship. 

When Rafe was 15, he saw you for the last time. Three months earlier you had come to him, sobbing about the fact that you were moving to California of all places. More than a day's drive away. 42 hour drive. He promised you, no, swore to you that you’d keep in touch, that you’d be there for each other even with the distance. 

He was wrong. After a few months, he’d stopped texting back, stopped calling back, stopped being there for you. And he never saw you again. 

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Rafe woke up with a banging headache and an uncontrollable urge to vomit but swallowed it back and took the glass of water that remained on his bedside table for days at a time. Today was going to be shit. It was the 28th of July, the day you left him, and the day his world got turned upside down. This day was always hard. He was reminded of everything he’d messed up in life. What was he now? A drug addicted, drunk, piece of shit. He was barely getting by in college and he’d already had to repeat a year twice. Often, he’d go to your little cove and sit, thinking about what you were doing now. Were you a teacher, like you’d wanted to be as a kid? Were you an artist? He remembered how good you were at sketching. Were you even alive and he’d missed the funeral? What did you look like? What colour was your hair? Did you think about him?

Everything was too loud in his mind. He grabbed a beer, and set on his way. The cove was in full bloom, a sea of colours under the boiling sun. He sat in his usual spot, the spot where you two had kissed. You two had these small chairs that Rafe barely fit in then, and definitely didn’t fit in now, so he sat beside them. What time was it? Was the sun going down? He searched in his pocket for his phone, only to find it dead.

“Excuse me?” He turned to see a girl shouting from across the field. 

“Yeah?” he called back, feeling rather inconvenienced by the whole ordeal. 

“Do the Cameron’s still live in Tannyhill?” She asked. 

“Yeah, why?”

“Just an old friend, thanks!” 

And she walked off. He tried to remember her physical features as best he could, but ultimately forgot them in his pursuit of washing his troubles away with the beer in his hand. 

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“Y/n? Is that you?!” Sarah squealed as she leant out the window of the Twinkie. 

“Sarah?” You practically ran into the road to meet her. The car was stopped at a stop-light, and she pulled you in to properly greet you. 

“Oh my god! It is so good to see you!” She smiled. Despite you and Rafe’s falling out, you’d stayed in touch with Sarah, even though you were a little older than her. You even followed Wheezie on instagram and texted back and forth sometimes. But Rafe… static. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, I’m here to teach, I just finished my 2nd year of college and I’m doing my work experience here!” You explained, as she pulled away from the hug. 

“So you’re going to be here, like for the whole year?”

“Not just the whole year, I’m moving back once I'm done with my exams,” you explained. “I’m doing this programme that means I can work from here and do college from here, I’m so fucking sick of California.”

Both Sarah and Kiara squealed with excitement, and the three boys cheered. You’d been friends with the pogues, being a sort of pogue-kook hybrid. 

Kiara pulled you in for a hug, then Pope, then Jj, then John B gave your hand a squeeze instead, since he was busy driving. 

“So you’re back for good?” Kie asked. 

“I’m back for as long as you’ll have me,” you smiled. 

“We have to celebrate tonight!” Jj cheered.

“There’s a party down at Figure 8, I’m sure Y/n’s kook heritage will get us in,” Pope shrugged and you all agreed. 

You spent the rest of the afternoon hanging around the pogues and Sarah and got ready at Kiara’s place for the party. Her parents welcomed you back with open arms, and then asked the dreaded question of ‘how are your parents?’

Your parents had been dead for 3 years. They’d died in an accident, and you’d been alone since then. 

“They’re good,” you lied. “Working hard back in California.”

That satisfied them, and they stopped asking. 

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The Figure 8 party was just how you remembered them to be. Loud, drunk, and almost too much. Even though you had been 14 at the time, Rafe had convinced you to come to one, since he was friends with some older kooks who wanted him there. Halfway through you told him you were going home, and instead of just waving you off, he brought you to your little cove, and sat with you for a couple hours. After that he brought you back to his house, and you had a sleepover.

When you’d asked him why he did that, he’d just shrugged and said ‘I prefer being around you.’

God, you could’ve married that man. You were supposed to, if your diary ‘ideal life’ had gone to plan. 

Step One: Start dating Rafe

Step Two: Become highschool sweethearts and make it through college (even if it's long distance) and become a teacher! 

Step Three: Work as a teacher and live on the mainland for a few years, have Rafe propose in the little cove, say yes, obviously and start wedding planning. 

Step Four: Have the wedding at Tannyhill, move into a house on Figure 8 and start having kids, we’ll have 4 or 5 (Rafe wants 7 kids????? 4 or 5 is pushing it buddy), and live a long happy life as a teacher with Rafe and our family. 

Step Five: Die happy. 

Ok, it wasn’t exactly inspired, but come on, you were 13. 

You noticed what looked like a grown version of Topper in the crowd and when he turned and saw you, a smile grew on his face. He ran over and scooped you up in a hug.

“Bun! You’re back!”

Bun was the nickname you were given as a kid because well, you liked bunnies. You had two as a kid, and for a year, you wouldn’t respond to someone unless they called you bun. It was ridiculous, but people obliged all the same. You'd never regretted anything more in your life in that moment.

“Hey Topper,” you smiled. 

“Have you seen Rafe yet?” he asked.

“No, not yet,” you smiled slightly faltered, but you kept the smile up for good appearances. When you’d gone to Tannyhill yesterday, only Ward, Rose, and Wheezie were in, so your anxiety around seeing Rafe had grown. One day, he’d just stopped replying. Not one reason, not one apology. Nothing. One part of you wanted to say he didn’t even deserve to see you, and another missed her best friend/ supposed love of her life. “Is he around?”

“He is, but he’s high as shit,” Topper laughed. Rafe Cameron? Rafe Cameron was getting high?

“Rafe is high?”

“Oh yeah, he’s totally into all that shit now,” he laughed and you noticed the dilated pupils, the white residue on his nose, the red, irritated skin of his nose. He was high too. “It’s good shit too, you want some?”

“I’m good, just point me in Rafe’s direction,” you nodded, deeply uncomfortable with the drugs around. You’d grown up with a brother who did drugs, who’d died from drugs at the young age of 17. You didn’t want anything to do with drugs, but here you were, being led into one of the Figure 8 mansions to be led to Rafe Cameron, selling, and doing drugs. 

“Gentleman, I present to you, the Princess of Figure 8, making her great return, Bunny!” he cheered as all eyes turned to you. The group of boys cheered, getting up to give you a group hug. Rafe stayed seated. 

“How’s life on the mainland Bun?How was Cali?” Kelce asked, sitting down beside you as you joined the circle, trying to ignore the cocaine on the table. 

“It’s fine, but I’m back in the Outer Banks for good now,” you smiled as another round of cheers rippled through the group. 

“We’re finally good enough for you again?” Topper joked. “What’s brought you back home huh? Aside from the strapping young men?”

You rolled your eyes. “I’m teaching here Top, I'm in my third year of college.”

“Shit no way, you’re a teacher?” Ryan, a sleeze you remembered from school. He was always the creepy guy, trying to look up girls' skirts and play kiss-tag at the ripe old age of 12. “You're way too sexy to be a teacher. You should be a pornstar or something.”

You felt bile rise in your stomach as a handful of the boys laughed at the joke. 

“That’s not funny,” Kelce defended. “Fuck off asshole.”

“What? You and I both have eyes and we can both see her tits. Too bad Cameron has dibs.”

You froze and looked to Rafe who was looking at you through hooded eyes. 

The silence was awkward, and you knew it was time to take your leave, even though you hadn’t said a word to Rafe, so you said your goodbyes and left in search of the pogues. 

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“Gentleman, I present to you, the Princess of Figure 8, making her great return, Bunny!” Topper announced as all eyes turned to you. 

Holy fucking shit. You were gorgeous, and it was you. Rafe’s Y/n. Rafe’s Bun. He was shocked to see you in the Outer Banks again, let alone in person again. You were here. In front of him. Then he realised, you were here. Here, where there was cocaine on the table, and he was the one selling it. Here, where there were about three guys looking at you like you were a piece of meat. Here, where he sat at the top of the table, stoned out of his mind. 

“How’s life on the mainland Bun? How was Cali?” Kelce asked, sitting down beside you as you joined the circle. Rafe could see you trying to ignore the table, staring directly at Kelce, all your attention on him. He couldn’t help but feel jealous. You were his best friend before you were anyone else’s friend. He’d known you better than anyone. And here he was, silent as he watched you talk to everyone else. 

“It’s fine, but I’m back in the Outer Banks for good now.” 

His heart almost stopped. Back in the Outer Banks, for good. 

“We’re finally good enough for you again?” Topper joked. “What’s brought you back home huh? Aside from the strapping young men?”

You rolled your eyes at him, but Rafe could tell it was playful. God, his life was so fun when you had been in it. Impromptu boat rides and trips to the mainland, spending hours just talking and laughing about nothing and everything all at the same time. He missed it. He missed you.“I’m teaching here Top, I'm in my third year of college.”

“Shit no way, you’re a teacher?” Ryan. Rafe often wondered why he even kept him around. He could feel the awful comment coming, but he knew he couldn’t stop it. “You're way too sexy to be a teacher. You should be a pornstar or something.”

Rafe felt the anger boil in his blood the second he said it. Ryan should’ve known better than to talk about you like that.

“That’s not funny,” Kelce defended, beating Rafe to it. “Fuck off asshole.”

“What? You and I both have eyes and we can both see her tits. Too bad Cameron has dibs.”

Rafe stared back at you as you truly looked at him for the first time that night. He couldn’t tell how you felt, something he didn’t like. Ever since you two were kids, he could always tell how you were feeling, what you were thinking. He could always anticipate what you needed. He didn’t know now and it scared him. He just looked back into your beautiful eyes, allowing himself to be lost in the fact that you were here in front of him. 

The silence was awkward and he knew it, so he didn’t protest when you took your leave, even if he wanted to. He spoke when he knew you were out of ear and eyeshot, he didn't need you know what he was about to do.

“Ryan?” he scoffed. “You have ten seconds.”

“Until what?” Ryan chuckled. 

Rafe counted down the seconds in his head, Topper and Kelce became more and more uneasy as the seconds went by. 

Rafe didn’t even give warning, he just got up, grabbed a nearby beer bottle, and smashed it over his head. Nobody dared to stop him, not even when he started punching Ryan, promising to kill him if he ever spoke about you like that again. 

People knew not to fuck with Rafe and, even after all these years, you were an extension of Rafe. Too bad Ryan forgot that.

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obx masterlist :)

navigation for my blog :) (criminal minds, obx, the bear, marvel, top gun, the hunger games, challengers :)

[scarletttries]

When Fallout Characters Fall In Love... (Fallout Show Request)

Pairings: Cooper Howard/The Ghoul x Reader, Maximus x Reader, Norm x Reader

Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who has sent in a request for the Fallout show, please keep them coming as this is definitely the show that I'm thinking about the most at the moment! Also let me know if you want a part two of these headcanons or something similar :)

The Ghoul:

- Cooper Howard couldn't put his finger on exactly when he had accepted that the life he now led would be one devoid of love, but it was a hollow feeling he carried in his chest wherever the wasteland took him. Maybe it was in the decades he'd spent wandering and gaining a reputation as a heartless cowboy without an ounce of mercy. Or the fact that he hadn't met anyone that had stirred up a single emotion inside him, fearing the aching betrayal of his wife would haunt him even as lifetimes passed. Maybe it came to him in the way he flinched each time he caught his reflection in the few unbroken windows he passed, flesh slowly forming caverns and creases where once there were only the faintest of lines that showed endless signs of life. The wasteland was no place for love. That's what he had decided.

- But even in the fall of civilization there's room for a surprise, and you were certainly one of those..

- He heard rumour of you before your bounty crossed his desk, a runaway scientist from a mysterious body known only as The Institute, a target to everyone for the sheer volume of classified knowledge you might possess.

- A life on the run was no easy one, and Cooper knew that better than anyone, so it didn't take long for him to track you down to a small town just on the outskirts of the radiation's no man's land. His gun was cocked as he strutted towards the half open door of the rundown house he'd narrowed your location down to, glancing at the poster in his hand one last time before he burst inside. Even from the poorly illustrated version of you, he could see your eyes were kind, almost hopeful, like you still believed science could make right what had gone so wrong in the last 200 years. He almost felt a tinge of guilt as he steeled himself for a fight, saying a silent prayer that you wouldn't be behind the walls in front of him.

- Stepping in carefully he expected traps, or an army of robots to jump to arms, but instead he found you travelling alone, a small satchel of papers clutched in your arms as you stared him down with a calm resolve that caught him more off guard than any weapon.

"Do you still believe there's hope for this world Mr Howard?" Your voice was soft, not the trembling fear he was so used to hearing. You stared up at him without a trace of disgust in your expression, your eyes locked on his as he considered your question, and then lowered his weapon.

"And what if I do?" His heart ached at the question, so hardened by years of cynicism that even the idea of hope and goodness were almost too heavy to bear. He felt more human than he had in years as you slowly inched towards him, the creaking floorboards beneath you cutting through a tense silence that had The Ghoul feeling like he was back on a movie set, everything so perfectly orchestrated to have his stomach in knots. And then you extended your hand to him and gave him the most genuine smile he could remember receiving in this whole sorry chapter of his after-life,

"Then I think we could really make a difference. Together." Your pip-boy screeched as his irradiated hand stretched out to reach yours, but you didn't flinch, gently squeezing the twisted flesh as you shook on what you bought felt in the depths of your souls was going to be a meaningful partnership.

- It would be a straight forward life trying to use your research to get the world back on track for there to be joy and peace again. But with The Ghoul by your side you can expect; a personal bodyguard who cares more about your safety than his own by far, a gleaming look of pride in his eyes any time you tell him which Cooper Howard film was your favourite, the slow and steady acceptance that he is still worthy of love even in his new twisted form, and Cooper being endlessly grateful that you are the person who wants to give that love to him.

Maximus:

- All Maximus had ever wanted was to be a knight of the Brotherhood. He wakes up every morning and does his best every day just to try and earn his spot in this family of welded metal and unflinching loyalty. It wasn't until you arrived on the base that he started to realise there were other ways he might form a family.

- A nearby village had been half destroyed by raiders until the Brotherhood stepped in, clearing out the violent scavengers and bringing anyone with skills they could utilise back to base for assessment. Maximus was sitting alone, nursing the most recent wounds inflicted by his so-called brothers when he watched you march in alongside two soldiers, the final evacuee of your faded community, a distance in your eyes that he felt akin with from his own home's destruction. You could feel his eyes on you before you spotted him, a rag damp with blood pressed to his nose as he sat huddled against a corrugated iron shack.

- Despite the sheer joylessness of the situation, Max couldn't stop himself from sporting a smile, waving at you like you had locked eyes across the schoolyard not some barren military base. Whatever he hoped for in that moment seemed to pay off as you waved back, a small laugh escaping your lips at the absurdity of his blood soaked grin. He watched as the knights around you escorted you to the medical tent for a check up, waiting until they left their guard posts beside you to sneak behind the off-white fabric, following some unknown instinct he'd never felt call to him before. You bolted upright where you perched on one of the medical beds as he appeared, visibly relaxing when you recognised him from outside and once again waving in his direction. His mouth worked faster than his brain in that moment, heart hammering in his chest as the words gushed out with his new found affections,

"I used to live in Shady Sands. I know what it's like to have your home destroyed, your family hurt, everything changing all at once. But you're safe here with the Brotherhood, and even if it doesn't feel like it today, things are going to be okay eventually. Also I'm Maximus and if you ever need to talk to someone, I'm, like, around all the time, and no one else really wants to talk to me so I'm probably going to be available... " He trailed off as he tried to recover what had ended up a far more embarrassing sentence than he'd hoped, his lungs burning as he realised he'd forgotten to take a breath through his whole winding spiel. But when you smiled at him any shame seemed to float away, and as you patted the bed and nodded for him to take a seat beside you, the once lonely squire suddenly felt much closer to finding a family than he had surrounded by his brothers.

- As you settle into life on the base, you and Maximus only grow closer. Expect; late nights of sneaking out of your dorm so you and Max can stare up the stars and plot your escape from this life, fantasising about what a life beyond these walls and this world could be like for the two of you, someone who has your back no matter how bad things get and how low you feel, and truly some of the most god awful flirting you will ever hear.

Norm:

- Growing up in the Vault, Norm had always been told the value of belonging to a community, and how everyone in the vault was just a big happy family. But none of that stopped Norm feeling like an outsider, like he didn't quite operate on the same wavelength as the rest of the cheerful strangers he shared his deep underground walls with. After a few of the annual exchanges between vaults, he had all but given up on hoping to meet anyone he felt he could actually feel close to.

- When his overseer father had finally decided it was his turn to continue the vault's legacy and be part of what Norm considered an archaic tradition of arranged marriages between the linked vaults, Norm couldn't have been more resistant. He pleaded for the council to reject his nomination, begging them not to force some young hopeful to be subjected to his notable lack of enthusiasm for the rest of their life in this dutiful swap, but with limited options of eligible young men, he soon found himself staring down the doors of your vault. The suit previously used by his fellow bachelors had been tailored to within an inch of its life to try and fit his slight frame, the shoulders still feeling like they hung off him, threatening to swallow him up along with ground as he watched the round door slowly start to roll open.

- He thought this whole thing was stupid and outdated, and he knew there was no way he could actually find someone to love and love him in return behind those doors, so why was his stomach so full of butterflies as slowly your face started to appear in the artificial light of Vault 33. He waited to see you throw him a false smile, going through the motions as much as he had planned to, or even a look of disappointment that he was not the man you had been picturing as the door crept open. Instead he really thought he saw sincerity in your eyes, a thoughtful understanding as he choked out his name, his stammering not going unnoticed by his sister who quietly chuckled behind him.

"It's really nice to meet you, Norm." You spoke each word with intention, like it wasn't just a rehearsed greeting but an honest confession that sent sparks flying in the air between you.

- Suddenly the pressure of matrimony didn't feel so all consuming. And maybe this system was more advanced than he had appreciated. And there might be a small chance that he wasn't destined to spend his life feeling like he was on the outside, that he might finally have someone that could take him as he is, darkness and light, for better or for worse.

- Whether you stay in the vaults, or make your move to the surface world, with Norm by your side you can expect: Sarcastic comments muttered under his breath at inopportune moments just to see the way you fail to contain your laughter, being the sounding board for all of each other's thoughts and feelings no matter how serious or silly they might be, Norm clinging to your side through everything knowing that he only feels himself when he's stood in your light, and being the one person Norm would do absolutely anything for, bringing out the bravery and intelligence that was always just below the surface of this sweet man.

[haerni]

OH MY GOD, “who is he? ”

summary: feels like you’re fallin’ deeper & maybe you’re going crazy, right? does he want you or not? he’s so confusing!

ft. park sunghoon (based on ‘OMG’ by newjeans!)

content: fem! reader, tooth-rotting fluff, a lil bit of hurt comfort, sunghoon is that confusing guy, mutual pining, reader is a bit embarrassing i think? sunoo your support system! 1.8k words

— very very minimal proofread and editing bc ive only done this in one sitting (help me).

( 🍃 ) notes: this took me so long omfgsbks but here we are with my very first content on this blog, please be nice TT sunghoon might be ooc saur.. theres that! can u tell i love sunoo, i have to sneak him in. maybe the story will jump for awhile so sorry for that also.

you've probably liked PARK SUNGHOON for almost half of your life.

ever since he sat with you at the swing from the park you used to go to when you were kids and offering his own comfort when you were crying on that day, to this day forward when he offers his shoulder for you to cry on.

he never questions the reasons behind your cries, he never pushes and all he does is sit there and offer you whispers of solace that you take to heart.

because your best friend wouldn't want the worst for you.

because all he does is care for you.

and maybe—just maybe—you hate him a little for it, for doing things that make your heart flutter, for simply just touching your hair and pulling you closer hoping that it will quell the sadness that consumes you. or when he would walk with you home after his practice despite being tired and run down to the bones, he would never miss a day. or when he would call you such sweet things like you are together when you aren't.

or when one time he heard through jay how someone was making passes on you and disgusting comments about you, he comes home with a bruised lip and wounded knuckles. he refused to let you see him, not until you forced your way to his room with the first aid kit his mother let you borrow, because he also wouldn't let her treat him.

or when you can't even pretend to be okay in the sea of bodies in a party and he notices right away. he drags you by your hand and drags you out of the party without a care for anyone. he only tells you that he hates the party and would rather eat out in a convenience store nearby.

he holds your hand tightly, you knew that night you loved park sunghoon more than you could ever imagine.

a decade into your friendship, you fell in love with your best friend, park sunghoon.

you did your best to hide it, to keep these emotions at bay and lock away into the very bottom of your heart. you swallow the bubbling feeling in your throat whenever he's close. you did your very best to preserve the relationship the both of you built together. even if all you wanted was just ruin it and become something more.

loving park sunghoon was easy, it was easy as the breeze that touched your hair, it was easy as falling into a routine of living and looking forward to days when he's with you. the prospect of loving sunghoon comes naturally and you don't know how to stop it. it just grows more everyday and suddenly you find yourself in garden of flowers blossoming in your heart, so much that's its starting to flow out little by little and you're slipping, you're heart is becoming unguarded, the walls you've spent all your life building is chipping away slowly.

it's becoming suffocating, it's hard to breathe around him.

the passing touches, the stolen glances and brief silence has been occurring more and more.

it's only a matter of time, before someone catches on. unfortunately, that time is right now.

"what's with you and sunghoon, lately?" your friend, sunoo asks, "did you guys have a fight?"

a second passes before you answer him, "we did not. why do you ask?"

sunoo sits closer to you and puts his face on his palm, "you have been avoiding him."

you stopped, "no, i'm not."

"it's lunch and you're sitting here with me in the library, working on an assignment that's not due until next week, when you usually never miss eating when he comes by our room to eat with you." he pointed out.

too specific. were you that predictable? and when you don't answer sunoo realizes something. when his eyes widen too much for your comfort that's when you interject from whatever train of thought he had.

"or maybe—"

"i don't know what you are talking about, sunoo."

"you're avoiding him.."

"i already told you, i'm not—!"

"sure, keep telling yourself that." sunoo snorts at that, "i know you like him and not how a best friend should."

you can't breathe again, you were absolutely done for. because sunoo was right, he got the answer right and you couldn't find it in yourself to quip back at him. you can't find it in yourself to deny and brush it off, because it's simply not real, it's not what your heart is telling you. maybe, that was your last straw.

maybe that was all it needed for you to let out your heart just for once and face the reality.

you don't want sunghoon as a best friend.

the realization hits harder when someone utters it out, because you have lived all your life hiding and suddenly, it pours out like rain after a long unending drought.

now here you are. in the porch of your house under the moonlight with you encased in sunghoon's arms, because you were stupid enough to go out and try to forget about him, to go see other people and hope that you can lose all these feelings you have for him. it didn't, maybe it never will. a boy, somehow he's the same height and stature as sunghoon it was enough for you to agree for a dinner out.

it was stupid to begin with. you didn't even know this guy's name (you can't even bother to remember). because while you sat there and tried to engage with him, your mind drifted far on how he does not have the same moles as sunghoon, he does not make you laugh like sunghoon does, maybe he would've took you out to that ramen place you always go to after a long day instead of this fancy restaurant that you don't even know. quite sure enough that guy only talked about himself, you didn't listen.

"so are we going?" he gives you an all-knowing smile and as you try to turn him down a voice comes in.

"she's not going with you." you look behind, and there he stands one hand in his pocket wearing a white button-up shirt that you haven't seen before, a cold gaze accompanying it and his hair done all too perfectly—like he was on a date.

"hey! who do you think you are?" sunghoon ignores him as he offers his hand to you. tilting his head in question. you did not hesitate to grab it. it's almost a curse for him to know when you need him the most.

you can feel the heat rising up in your body as he intertwines both of your hands and gives it a squeeze.

he brings you home, like how he promised your dad when you were sixteen.

you bite your lips in hopes of suppressing all the emotions running down on you. but you can't really do that in front of sunghoon, can you?

you broke down.

and sunghoon was there—it was enough. it was enough for everything to pour out.

"i'm tired, hoon." his arms tighten around you, burying his face to your hair, almost as if he's kissing it in comfort.

you're tired? is it because of that guy? should he beat him up? you wouldn't like it anyway, so he erase the thought. park sunghoon has never hated anyone more than that jerk right now. he curses that stupid guy who made you like this.

"i hate you park sunghoon."

"you don't mean that."

you don't.

"i really really hate you." you were probably the worst to utter such words to him. to your best friend, to sunghoon out of all people. but you can't stop. "you're so stupid, stupid."

it takes him back, he didn't expect for you to be mad at him. he's silent for a moment as he continues to hold you like you're going to disappear.

"how am i stupid, baby?" there he goes again with those stupid nicknames.

you refuse to look at him, burying your face to his nape. and when you don't answer he talks for you.

"do you hate me that much for you not to look at me?" you really hate park sunghoon.

he sighs at the lack of your response. he shakes his head before he turns his face closer to your ear, "what am i gonna do, baby? you hate me, but i like you so much."

what? what the fuck?

that makes you widen your eyes processing what he just said as you sit up straight and facing him. and it makes him laugh a little, he probably shouldn't, but he couldn't help it. not when you're this adorably looking at him like you can't believe it.

"don't joke about things like that park sunghoon!"

wow, using his government name? "you don't believe me?" you don't answer. "why do you think i came to that awful restaurant wearing this shirt?" you knew it was new, you've never seen him wear it.

"because you want to fit it?" you answer.

"that too," he laughs, "and because you didn't eat lunch with me, you didn't walk home with me. i heard from sunoo, that you were out with someone and you didn't dress up because of me. you were on a date and it wasn't me. you were avoiding me, baby."

he looks at you and it hurts because both of you are a fucking idiot. all this time, sunghoon liked you.

park sunghoon likes you.

"how long?" and you can't help it, you have to know.

he thinks for a second, "hm.. since when you were on that swing? i thought you were pretty." he smiles so easily.

oh my god.

you buried your face once more, not really knowing what to do, because for the longest time you thought you were the only one feeling this way.

but sunghoon understands, he continues to talk, "jay thinks i'm obsessed with you. he's not wrong, you know? you don't have to say anything right now, i know you're having a har—"

you kissed him. park sunghoon is really an idiot. how can you not like him? how can anyone not even like him? he's so stupid. sunghoon's eyes widen a bit, but melts into your touch as quickly.

god, was this really happening? please don't ever wake him up if this is a dream.

you pulled away for a breather and he reached for another one causing you to block his lips with your hand.

feeling the blood in your cheeks, flustered as sunghoon kisses your palm instead. his hand coming up to yours to remove it.

"can i kiss you again?" you were going to die, "please?" you're sure of it.

"no!"

sunghoon laughs at that. you can't feel it, but his cheeks are really hurting now from smiling. maybe one day you'll let him kiss you more, but for now this is enough.

he has loved you almost all of his life.

𖹭 likes and reblogs are highly appreciated! i hope he is not too out of character :')

[nochukoo97]

we can’t be friends (wait for your love) - teaser

pairing: childhoodfriend!jk x childhoodfriend!oc

summary: you and jungkook have been friends since birth, and as you both grow into teenagers, you can’t help but have some sorr of longing feeling towards him. but after a turn of events, you move away from your home town, growing apart from the boy you onced were close to. almost a decade later when you decide to move back, there’s someone familiar yet unfamiliar waiting for your arrival… was this the universe giving you a sign about him?

warnings/tags: story starts off when the both of them are children, but most of the plot is when they are adults :)), eventual: kissing, an emotional rollercoaster 🥲, they’re stuck in a ‘what are we’ moment, playing a waiting game of who confesses first, a little bit of angst, smut, but fluff too hehe

a/n: IM BACK 🥲 after being in writers block sighhh but i am back hehehe hope u r excited for this!! anyways this is just an intro for the actual fic, its more of what happened before the present which will be in the main part hehehe

TAGLIST OPEN!!

(this is the introduction, the main part is coming soon :)))

MASTERLIST

23 July 2007

You’re currently wedged between two bookshelves in the living room of your house, eyes trained on the words in your book, giggling to yourself when the plot takes a funny turn. Meanwhile in the background, Jungkook and your brother Taehyung, both a year older than you, the two ten year old boys play fighting in your parents backyard, their game was way too rough for you to even watch, you decided.

That’s always the way it’s been since you were young, Jungkook’s mum dropping him off at your parents place as he spent time with your brother, mostly roughhousing like they are now, and you, at nine years old, simply tucking yourself in another fairytale, which to you seemed like a much better way to past time.

You never truly spent a lot of time with the two of them when Jungkook would come over, besides the once-in-a-while moments where your parents would make you guys bond a little through board games or card games which the two elder boys would never take seriously, the games always ending in them either throwing the board game pieces at each other or stacking the cards into a pyramid.

When it came to school, you tried your best to stay away from bumping into your brother at school, but you’d always end up being teased in front of your friends by him and Jungkook, making fun of your two pigtails or your very glittery pink bag you had just gotten as a birthday gift, but you were used to it anyways, having grown up with a brother.

12 August 2011

Four years go by and now you’re finally completing your last year in middle school, Jungkook and your brother having moved on to high school, and as expected, they end up attending the same school, as they have done their whole life.

But since four years ago, a lot has changed. You’ve grown much closer to Jungkook, having gone on quite a few trips with his family, and you could even consider him a close friend. Most importantly, he’d grown from being a kid to a teenager, even though he was only a year older than you, the 14 year old boy suddenly became someone you always wanted to hang out with. To you, you saw him as someone cool. Instead of teasing you along with your brother, he now would defend you from your brother’s teasing, treat you to ice cream on the weekends and even teach you the video games he played with your brother.

“And then he let me get as many toppings as I wanted,” You tell your friends, clicking the buttons on your phone to show them the picture of your ice cream, filled to the brim with all sorts of toppings because Jungkook said you could.

“You’re so lucky, I wish I had a boyfriend like that,” Jiyeon sighs, pouting her lips as she sulks.

Your face turns red, tip of your ears warm as you quickly deny, “He isn’t my boyfriend! Just a friend… In fact he was my brother’s friend first,” No, you couldn’t even begin to try and imagine Jungkook as someone more than your friend!

“Well, but you should definitely confess to him on valentine’s day, it’s in like six months,” Yuji twirls her hair, nudging your leg slightly as she giggled.

To the three of you, as 13 year old girls, having a valentine was a big deal, especially since the whole idea of a crush and all was new to you guys as teenage girls.

“No! I don’t have feelings for him! He’s just nice to me I guess,” You frown at Yuji, just because she confessed to her crush and now apparently has a boyfriend, doesn’t mean you need to do it too, you decided.

You didn’t have a crush on Jungkook right?

You push away the thought quickly, this whole topic was so taboo to you, it made you feel squirmy thinking about it. No, you didn’t have any sort of feelings towards the older boy, never.

-

So that day when you arrived back at home, spotting Jungkook and Taehyung sitting at the table and doing their homework, you decide to take a seat away from the certain boy.

“Huh? Why are you sitting all the way there? Come back here,” Jungkook hums, pulling out his earphones in bewilderment, you had always sat next to him whilst the three of you would do homework together after school, nudging him here and there to ask for help with a math problem.

“I- okay,” You scooch towards the chair next to him, dragging your books along the table as you avoid eye contact. Your cheeks heating up again as you remember your conversation with your friends in school earlier, it made you feel all tingly inside, but why were you being so weird in front of him?

“You’ve been staring at that math problem for ages, need help?”

You jump up in surprise at Jungkook’s voice , letting out a small yelp as your brother snickers at you from across the table, you kick his shin in response, sending his hands flailing to the injury, mumbling some cuss word you don’t understand.

“Yeah,” You only muster out a whisper, handing over your pencil to the boy, who finds your behaviour a little off but nonetheless, doesn’t comment on it.

And while he explains the solution and working to find the value of X, you can only notice his eyes, his nose, the mole under his lips, the scar on his cheek from when he fought with your brother years ago, his lips.

And then you for yourself to snap out of your daydream when his eyes lock with yours in confusion as to why you’re staring at him instead of your workbook.

03 January 2012

But then five months later, opportunity for valentine’s day didn’t even come for you anyways, as you pack your bags to move miles away from the place you once called home, since your father had been posted to a new country for his work.

The whole idea of leaving your life behind and all the people you’ve ever known since young was such an overwhelming feeling that you didn’t even think once about your feelings for Jungkook anymore, or maybe you did once, but it didn’t matter.

So when you tugged your luggage and watch your brother sadly hug his best friend goodbye at the airport, reality struck, you wouldn’t ever get a chance to even properly assess your feelings for Jungkook anyways, so you simply wave him goodbye, not looking back so you don’t think further than a goodbye.

He did make sure to exchange his Instagram and Facebook with you, promising you and your brother to keep in touch, which you agreed to. Maybe there was a part of you that wanted to cling onto the idea of him, but you didn’t let yourself believe that anyways.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

ON AN AUGUST night in 2003, a young woman who went by the name Paulina sank into the sofa of her modest, rented apartment, opened up her laptop, and began talking about sex with a man she’d recently met in a Yahoo chat group. His name was Stephen Bolen. His first communications had been terse, but he soon warmed to Paulina. It didn’t take long for both of them to begin to open up.

Paulina had told Bolen she lived in the Atlanta area, that she had a three-year-old daughter, that her daughter’s father was no longer in the picture. Soon, she was sharing more intimate details: what it was like growing up a skinny white girl in a rough neighborhood outside of D.C.; how her dad, a Marine, had died by suicide two weeks before she was born; how her mom had been emotionally and physically abusive, and had never really shown her love. How she’d had a sexual relationship with her stepfather.

Paulina would put her daughter to bed and then she and Bolen would chat throughout the night, over Yahoo and sometimes on the phone. The back-and-forth could feel like dating, but with an added element of danger and risk: Both Paulina and Bolen knew they were tiptoeing up to a line to see if they trusted each other enough to cross it. It could take a while to figure that out.

Eventually, Bolen asked Paulina to send pictures of her daughter, and she agreed to do so, though the ones she’d shared were chaste — the little girl clothed and her face turned away from the camera or obscured behind an untamable halo of blond curls. After seeing the pictures, Bolen asked to meet. While a lot of the men Paulina had encountered in chatrooms like “Sex With Younger” just wanted to trade images and videos of children, to expand their illicit collections, Bolen was a “traveler,” someone looking to act upon his obsessions.

On Sept. 17, just as they’d arranged, Paulina sat on a bench outside Perimeter Mall with a stroller parked in front of her, scanning the parking lot nervously. Part of her hoped Bolen wouldn’t show. When he did, she could see he was handsome, a preppy guy in a pink polo shirt and khakis. “Paulina?” he asked eagerly. She nodded. As he smiled and pulled back the blanket draped across the stroller, he found himself surrounded, handcuffs slipped around his wrists.

“Paulina” watched his face fall, his confusion giving way to distress as FBI agents took him into custody. It was her first undercover arrest. It would be the first of many.

[long read]

IF ONE WANTED to hide in plain sight, one could do no better than the tidy, suburban neighborhood on the outskirts of St. Louis, where FBI Special Agent Nikki Badolato now resides. The well-tended, two-story homes are so pleasantly indistinct that I could hardly tell you what hers looks like, even if it were safe for me to do so, which it is not. Suffice to say that Midwestern comfort and conformity unspool around every gently winding curve. Here Badolato has raised her two children, a daughter who is now in college and a son who is a junior at a local high school. When planning a neighborhood scavenger hunt or tending the community garden, Badolato does not often mention her many years as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force, a joint effort between the feds and local law enforcement that targets some of the country’s most heinous crimes. Open a cabinet in her kitchen, however, and a government-issued Glock 42 can be found stowed away between the vitamins and mixing bowls.

On a sunny morning this past October, Badolato sat at her dining room table, scrapbooks and albums spread out before her on the dark wood. There was the acceptance letter she’d received from the bureau the spring of her senior year of high school, after a representative had shown up to administer a test in the typewriting room. “I chose to wear a red dress and red heels,” she says of her first day as an FBI mail clerk, two weeks after her 18th birthday. “I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I guess maybe I was trying to go in bold?” She pauses at a picture of herself on the gun range at Quantico almost 10 years later, her shoulders squared and her caramel hair pulled back into a ponytail as she fires off rounds. By then, she’d married a man she met just after high school, had a little girl, completed college at night, and been accepted into agent training in the heady days after 9/11. She’d seen her first dead body only a few weeks into the job, after the pursuit of a bank robber ended with a shootout in a Walmart. When Badolato got to the scene, the body was still warm, and the perp’s head was resting on a bag of cookies. “It was surreal,” she says. “How many times have you been in a Walmart and walked down Aisle 4, not really expecting there to be a dead person with his head lying on a bag of Chips Ahoy?”

Badolato wasn’t deterred. She felt like the bureau saved her, plucked her out of a shitty home life, and gave her prospects and purpose. As a new agent, she was intent on proving herself worthy. “My training agent told me, ‘You know, Nikki, it’s a marathon, not a sprint,’ ” she says. “I was like, ‘That’s ridiculous. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.’ ” She turned a few pages to show a picture of the 391 kilos of cocaine and 140 pounds of meth she’d recovered on a single raid during a stint with a cartel squad, then pointed out another in which she poses with a five-year-old child she’d rescued, the little girl’s hair cut short because the kidnapper had wanted her to look like a boy. But the keepsake she really wants to find is the card that Bolen’s wife had pressed into her hand at his sentencing, the one with the picture of their children — a blond girl of about three years and a tiny baby — and the words “These are the faces of the children you protect each day.” Bolen’s wife had been the only one she’d ever encountered who had lobbied for her husband to receive the maximum sentence. Some wives accused the FBI of planting evidence inside computers. Most seemed intent on clinging to their delusions. (Attempts to reach Bolen for comment were unsuccessful.)

“Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It is happening all the time.”

Which, Badolato has come to understand, is the way it goes with child trafficking and sexual abuse. She had invited me into her home — had agreed to speak on the record about her decades-long career working undercover — because when it comes to the crimes she’s spent her career fighting, she has had enough of the delusions people are under. She’s had enough of the way movies like Sound of Freedom both glamorize and trivialize the work she and her colleagues do, enough of the idea that swashbuckling white men burst through doors and rescue trafficked children with a Bible in one hand and a firearm in the other, enough of conspiracy theories about Hollywood and Washington that detract from the real root causes of why children are trafficked and abused. “Human trafficking is not the movie Pretty Woman — the girl doesn’t get the guy — and it’s not the movie Taken, where people are kidnapped in a foreign country and sold on the black market, or shipped in a container across the world,” one of the detectives who worked on Badolato’s task force tells me. “I’m not saying that doesn’t ever happen, but it’s not what we’re seeing.”

What they are seeing is a lot more insidious and a lot more homegrown. A report released in 2018 by the State Department ranked the U.S. as one of the worst countries in the world for human trafficking. While the Department of Justice has estimated that between 14,500 and 17,500 foreign nationals are trafficked into this country every year, this number pales in comparison to the number of American minors who are trafficked within it: A 2009 Department of Health and Human Services review of human trafficking into and within the United States found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that between 244,000 and 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked specifically in the sex industry. Heartbreakingly, many of these children are victimized not by strangers who’ve abducted them from mall parking lots but rather by people they know and trust: Studies have found that as much as 44 percent of victims are trafficked by family members, most often parents (and not infrequently parents who were trafficked themselves). Between 2011 and 2020, there was an 84 percent increase in the number of people prosecuted for a federal human-trafficking offense. Of the defendants charged in 2020, 92 percent were male, 63 percent were white, 66 percent had no prior convictions, and 95 percent were U.S. citizens.

Badolato started her career as an FBI agent in some of the earliest days that children could be bought, sold, and traded online. As the internet-porn industry mushroomed, its most lucrative branch turned out to be that of child sexual-abuse materials (the term “child pornography” is no longer used by those in the field, as it implies consent). And as demand for these images increased, so did the abuse that led to their creation.

In 2003, just a few months after Badolato graduated from Quantico, a Crimes Against Children squad was formed in the Atlanta office where she’d been stationed. By then, the FBI was starting to get a handle on the extent of the problem — if not exactly what to do about it. At a weeklong training in Baltimore, Badolato was given a tour of the darkest underbelly of fetish chat groups and then instructed to figure out how to infiltrate. “Everyone was a little nervous,” she explains of the directive. “It was a process, a direction that was new.” Agents were told that they would need to come up with a “persona” and a “story,” and that they would likely have to provide images of children to “prove” they had a minor on offer. They were also told that they could use images of their own children, if they were comfortable doing so (the FBI no longer endorses this policy).

Badolato’s unit with a kidnapping victim after her recovery in 2011. A Health and Human Services review found that roughly 199,000 American minors are sexually exploited each year, and that as many as 325,000 American youths are considered to be at risk of being trafficked in the sex industry. 

Badolato developed “Paulina” based on her understanding that any persona would need to share most of her own backstory and traits. “That’s the only way you can really do undercover work,” Badolato says. “People can tell the sincerity in what you’re saying, so there has to be a level of genuineness, but then you just add this criminal element to it.” Most of the things Badolato had told Bolen were true: where she was from, her family background, the monstrousness of her mother, a woman who she says would pass out cigarettes and beers to Badolato’s 13-year-old friends in a state of manic permissiveness one minute and fly into a violent rage about a piece of lint on the floor the next. (Badolato’s mother declined to comment for this article, but a childhood friend corroborated Badolato’s account.) It was true that growing up in an unstable home with a string of stepdads, she had never really felt loved, true that she had divorced her first husband, true that she was raising their three-year-old daughter on her own. The only thing that wasn’t true was her tale of being molested, her initiation into the “lifestyle” — to use the chatroom parlance — that Paulina said she now wanted for her daughter. As Badolato had familiarized herself with the language and behaviors of the chatrooms, she’d honed that added criminal element, imagining what psychological conditions might believably lead a parent to traffic their own child and how those conditions could be grafted onto her real life story. She already had a history of abuse; it was not hard to extrapolate to a fictional stepfather who had seemed to provide a gentle counterpoint, showing her love and making her feel special when no one else had, even if others couldn’t understand. From there, it was easy to convince the chatroom participants that she shared their belief — or justification — that most people had it all wrong and that “child love” was natural, and could even be beneficial for the child.

Badolato estimates that she has arrested more than a thousand people; not one of those arrests has failed to end in a conviction. She didn’t know until she was in the thick of it that most agents refuse this sort of work, that most can’t even pretend to forge a relationship with someone looking to victimize a child. But she could. “Paulina,” she points out, is not a name she chose at random; it’s similar to her own mother’s name. Badolato says she had grown up learning to compartmentalize for the sake of her own emotional survival. She’d perfected the art of engaging with someone whose actions she couldn’t stand. Doing this work had felt like a way of taking her trauma and putting it to good use, of leveraging her past as a safeguard against her daughter’s and other children’s futures.

Of course there were moments that were hard to take — when suspects mentioned which brands of lubrication were best or whether or not a parent might hold a child down. There were times when she knew that even talking about these things was a turn-on for these men, times when the conversations made her nauseous, times when she’d lie awake all night or play back a recording and think, “Holy shit, I listened to this? I said these words?” But she kept faith in the mission. She reminded herself that the pictures she sent of her daughter — the beautiful, little girl sleeping in the next room — did not represent a real child on offer. “I was thinking, ‘If I send this obscure picture of my daughter and he acts on it, then he’s never going to harm my daughter or anybody else’s,’ ” Badolato says now. “I was presenting a fake girl to save a real one.”

KYLE PARKS SEEMED to think he could get away with anything. He seemed to think, for instance, that he could get away with running a brothel, a 1-900 sex line, and a housecleaning company out of the same Columbus, Ohio, office park and under the same oxy-moronic name, XXXREC and Hygiene Services. He seemed to think he could invite one young woman and five teenagers (four of whom he had only just met) on a road trip to Florida, but instead deposit them in two rooms of a Red Roof Inn in St. Charles, Missouri. When they piled out of the minivan — high on the drugs he’d given them — saw snow falling and asked to be taken home, he thought he could make a little money off them first. All it took was a few ads in Backpage — the Craigslist of sex advertisements — and men began showing up.

Even after things started going south for him, Parks couldn’t fathom that he wouldn’t prevail. When someone alerted law enforcement as to what was going on, Parks (who, according to legal documents, had been out getting food when the police showed up) burst into the precinct the next morning looking to bail his “friend” out. When questioned about the 88 condoms found in the back of his van, he said they had been prescribed to him by a doctor. After being taken into custody, he protested that he was being set up. Most people would have cut their losses and pleaded guilty, but not Parks. He thought he could take his case to court and win.

And it wasn’t impossible to imagine that he might. Badolato knew that even the tightest cases could go sideways when put before 12 people who would inevitably enter the courtroom with a cinematic sense of what sex trafficking was supposed to be. In fact, it wasn’t just the jury that Badolato knew she would need to convince; it was also often the victims themselves, young people who had internalized the exact same misconceptions about trafficking that the jury had — along with any number of other judgments society had thrown their way — and who were loath to submit themselves to a courtroom full of more judgment.

Of all of Parks’ underage victims, the hardest to pin down had been a 17-year-old we’ll call Sierra. Once she returned to Columbus, Sierra seemed to basically disappear. Calls to her mother’s number went unanswered. When one of the other victims managed to track her down in December 2016, a month before the case was to go to trial, Sierra agreed to meet Badolato on a blighted Columbus block with a string of dilapidated homes, climbing into the bureau’s Chevy Malibu with matted hair, dirty clothes, and a wary expression.

By this time, Badolato had remarried, had a second child, relocated to St. Louis, and taken over as head of the Child Exploitation Joint Task Force, which had become one of the most productive FBI teams in the country in terms of arrests and convictions. Meanwhile, as the internet streamlined the process of buying or selling any good or service, trafficking had become one of the fastest-growing criminal enterprises, estimated by the Department of Homeland Security to bring in $150 billion globally and considered by many criminals to be a superior business model: If caught, the sentences were often lighter than those for peddling drugs; and unlike crack or heroin, the same product could be “used” again and again and again.

Badolato taught her team of 20 how to do the online undercover work she’d trailblazed in Atlanta, tracking the movements of child-abuse material through the online underworld and then prosecuting those who distributed and produced it. Her new squad also initiated her in the type of undercover work it had been doing before her arrival: covert sting operations in which a detective would pose as a john, set up a “date,” and then meet said date in a hotel room fitted out with hidden recording devices while, in the next room over, a taskforce team listened in, waiting for the code word that would let them know that enough evidence had been gathered for them to swoop in and shut the op down. This had proved a very effective technique for getting convictions, but Badolato’s arrival coincided with both a growing sentiment that consensual sex work had been over-criminalized and an increasing awareness that what looked like consensual sex work might actually be trafficking, no matter what the “date” professed in that hotel room.

Badolato has a tendency to say aloud the things she notices — about you, about others, about situations — observations that are not at all unkind but are perceptive enough that most people would keep them to themselves. She points out when someone deflects, and she has a sharp eye for defense mechanisms. She once casually mentions my tendency to mirror other people’s vocal and speech patterns. She is not shy about bringing up the emotional and physical abuse she says she experienced as a child, and she is quick to comment when someone is making excuses for someone else’s behavior. It was soon clear to her colleagues that Badolato brought a trauma-informed mentality to the work, a tendency to look beyond what someone was doing and instead try to parse why they were doing it. And she was relentless: While some squads did one or two trafficking sting ops a year, her team was doing four or five a month. In addition to the hotel rooms reserved for the john and the team, they would have a social worker set up in a third room, ready to offer services to the victims. They would have lookouts stationed to see who might be dropping the date off. If that date was found to be underage, the case was automatically classified as trafficking. But even if they weren’t, Badolato’s team was primed to get to the bottom of what was going on, to figure out whether they were being manipulated or coerced, and by whom.

“If I could put my hands on a pimp, that’s what I wanted,” says Jeff Roediger, a St. Louis county detective who was the “john” for many of Badolato’s sting ops and who makes clear that the team was not interested in policing voluntary sex work. “When I had those types of cases, and I knew they were being sincere with me, I wouldn’t book them,” he says. “It was all about talking to the girls. It’s not like in the movies where they come running to you. You know, ‘Thanks, you rescued me!’ It’s not like that. A lot of them try to bullshit you at first — ‘That’s my boyfriend, blah blah blah’— but once I talked to them for a while, they would become more forthcoming.”

Badolato’s unit was one of the first in the country to take on this “progressive and proactive” approach, as she puts it. Soon, St. Louis looked like a sex-trafficking capital — not because it was actually trafficking more victims than other cities but because the task force was so aggressively pursuing those cases, and classifying them as what they were. “I mean, I was working in vice for years,” says Roediger. “Back in the day, it was always ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution,’ ‘prostitution’ — until we started to figure it out a little bit, until we started digging a little deeper.”

Once they did, the task force found that roughly a third of the sex-trafficking victims they recovered were under the age of 17 — and they began to see the reach of the problem. Kids were being trafficked out of every hotel in the area, from the seediest roach motel to the fanciest Ritz-Carlton. They were being trafficked every time of day and by every socioeconomic group (“Before you go do brain surgery, you got to bust a nut real quick,” one underage victim told Badolato of her high-end clientele). Some of the victims were girls. Some were boys. Some were LGBTQ kids who’d been kicked out of their homes. Some were straight cis kids from the suburbs. “I tell people that I could probably name two or three [kids] in the school district they live in that have been trafficked,” Roediger says. “And they just can’t comprehend it.”

“If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work.”

There were kids who were about to age out of foster care (a particularly at-risk group, according to those who work in the field), kids who’d run away, kids who were being sold to pay their family’s rent, or to buy their family member’s drugs. There were kids who’d sit in the hotel room, backpack at their feet, dutifully working on their math homework while agents and social workers tried to figure out what to do with them. Was their home life safe enough that they could be returned to it? Would a residential program take them? Of all the imperfect options, which would make them least likely to be trafficked again?

The one common denominator was this: They all had a vulnerability that could be preyed upon. They all lacked a safety net — societal, familial, emotional, or some combination thereof — that might have broken their fall. Mostly, their stories weren’t dramatic; they were typical American tales of neglect, of abuse doled out casually, of a steady stream of letdowns by people and institutions who should have propped them up. Badolato found that she had a knack for getting them to talk about this, for getting them to open up to her. She didn’t look like an FBI agent — at least not what they’d imagined. She spoke softly, but with authority and a slight vocal fry. And she thinks that, at some level, they could probably sense that she’d once been a vulnerable kid too, that with only a few slightly different twists of fate, she could have become a trafficking victim herself — and that she knew it. “My trauma looks different than theirs, but it’s trauma nonetheless,” she says.

“And I think victims can feel that.”

AS THE TASK force learned more about the psychology of victims, they also learned more about the ways in which their vulnerability was being manipulated, and how those ways were evolving. It was known in law-enforcement circles that once a skilled trafficker set his or her sights on a vulnerable young person, they could be groomed in a matter of days: one day for an introduction, a day or two to make the victim feel special and cared for, and then the day when a “friend” comes over and he needs to be “cared for” as well. Sometimes violence was involved at that point; sometimes drug use was involved throughout. But emotional manipulation was the key element, which is why it was so easy for grooming to move online, for groomers to take advantage of the false senses of connection fostered on social media.

Of the victims who are not being trafficked by family members, the majority are being groomed in this way. “I would say that probably 75 percent of the initial grooming is happening online now,” says Cindy Malott, the director of U.S. Safe Programs at Crisis Aid International. “Recruiters used to have to work really, really hard to get access to kids, but now they’re practically sitting in a child’s bedroom. And kids put everything out there — what’s going on in their life, who they’re angry about, parents are going through a divorce, their insecurities about their body, about themselves, what they do, how they spend their time — so it’s like a gift to these predators.”

The ways to manipulate are legion: Get a kid to send a compromising photo, and she’ll do almost anything to keep you from sending it out to all her Facebook friends; find out a gay kid is still closeted, and the threat of outing him gives you incredible power. And predators aren’t just on Instagram and Snapchat; they lurk in the chat functions of Roblox, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto. “They’re everywhere,” says Malott. “People think, ‘Oh, I just got to keep my kids away from those porn sites, those horrible places.’ Well, no, predators are gonna go where the kids are.” And once there, they’re going to zero in on the kids who are most vulnerable.

That’s what got to Badolato. In her online undercover work, she’d plumbed the psychology of pedophiles, but now she wasn’t just dealing with suspects; she was spending time with victims and seeing the same vulnerabilities in them that the traffickers had seen: the instability or poverty, the addiction or mental health issues or abuse that had been normalized in their lives long before the traffickers entered them. Sometimes Badolato couldn’t help but feel that all the conspiracies and misconceptions weren’t just a distraction from the truth of trafficking but rather some sick attempt to let society off the hook for trying to solve the much more intractable problems at trafficking’s root.

“People would rather stick their head in the sand than address the real problem, because then you have to face and talk about the societal issues,” she says. “With a movie like Sound of Freedom, it’s like, ‘Oh, this is in a jungle in South America. This isn’t actually in [my neighborhood].’ You know? It’s easier for people to ignore the problem than deal with the issues on a societal level.”

BY THE TIME Badolato was sitting in that Chevy with Sierra, on that blighted Ohio block, she knew that the rate of revictimization for children who are trafficked was as high as 95 percent, according to FBI reports. She knew that 90 percent of sex-trafficking victims have a history of child sexual abuse, that more than 75 percent had lived in foster or adoptive care. She knew that she could arrest one perpetrator, and another would pop up in his place, that she could send one pimp to prison and the same victims would show up to stings some short time later, run by a different crew. She knew that testifying was a way for Sierra to psychologically push back against what had happened to her, and she was right: After the young woman took the stand on Jan. 10, 2017, Parks was found guilty and sentenced to 25 years; while testifying, Sierra had seemed to transform, to channel and embody a sort of empowerment. But Badolato also knew that once her testimony was over, Sierra would go back to that blighted block. She wondered how long that empowerment would last.

She also wondered about her own trajectory, her own ability to continue doing this work. The youngest trafficking victim she’d ever recovered from a sting op — an 11-year-old who’d been recruited through Facebook — had been returned to her family in a house that had no heat (Badolato had used an FBI slush fund to get it turned back on). One did not become immune to the human misery of such things. They compounded, became harder and harder to compartmentalize. “It’s just a combination of all of those years — and it’s all awful,” she says. “But there are particular moments that, for one reason or another, you can’t get out of your head. I just don’t think it’s in human nature to be exposed to that for so long and it not start changing who you are.”

One night, at a restaurant near where Badolato lives, I ask her whether she thinks children are being sex-trafficked right then, in that very moment, in just the mile or two radius around us. She’s quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed downward at her glass of wine. By the time she looks up, her whole body is trembling. “It’s happening right now,” she says quietly. “Right now some little girl is being dropped off in the parking lot of a motel. There are three or four girls holed up in a hotel next to a McDonald’s. It’s not only when we think about it. It is happening all the time. And if I’m just sitting here, present, having dinner, not thinking about it, that means I’m ignoring a problem that I know is real.” Tears stream down her face.

“Many images have never left my mind,” she says. “It’s really hard to have worked your entire life in law enforcement with a lot of child crime victims and be at the end of your career looking at the situation where you realize you can only do so much to make a difference.” Badolato wipes back the tears with the palm of her hand and shudders her head, as if she can shake the thoughts away. “Damn,” she says. “Fuck. I shouldn’t be the one crying. I’m not the victim of this.” The veteran agent steels herself and repeats, “I am not the victim.”

THE HOUSE WHERE Korina Ellison says she was first sex-trafficked no longer exists. It once stood on an unassuming lot in a residential suburb of Portland, Oregon, that stumbles down to the banks of the Willamette River. Now, Ellison can’t quite bring the house’s features to mind. She was so young back then, maybe four or five. There is so much she’s repressed, or only pieced together after the fact. As a child, she wouldn’t have known what she now believes to be true: that her grandmother scored her drugs by offering up her youngest daughter, Ellison’s mom. Or that, once her mom was hooked on the meth cooked by the man who’d lived in that house, she’d known just what to do to get more. But Ellison does remember being inside the house, unclothed. She does remember how the man would touch her.

Her life unspooled from there. Her father died of a heroin overdose when she was six. Her mom lost custody for good. She bounced around foster care, then various residential institutions, then whatever shelter she could find. In the story she tells of how she was sex-trafficked again in her teenage years, there’s no moment of drama, no kidnapping, no clear coercion. There was just a random, rainy afternoon when she had no place to go and was alone in the street and a car pulled up. The man inside took her home with him, fed her, introduced her to his girlfriend. They took her shopping. They let her stay. When men showed up at the home to have sex with the woman, Ellison was invited to watch, but she wasn’t expected to participate — not at first, anyway. According to a statement Ellison later made to law enforcement, she just “realized that people aren’t going to take care of [me] for free.” Soon, the woman was posting Ellison’s services on Backpage — $150 for half an hour, $200 for a full one — and the trio were traveling the Midwest. For a long time, it didn’t even occur to Ellison, then 16, to leave. “Where would I have gone?” she asks. “I’d been missing for over a year. Nobody was looking for me.” When the man told her to call him “Daddy,” she complied.

That was more than a decade ago, near the beginning of Badolato’s tenure as head of the Child Exploitation Task Force. But by 2021, leaving it had seemed a necessary form of self-preservation. One of her last cases had gone well legally: The perp, a retired police officer from California who had produced child sex-abuse materials of three sisters in Manila, had pleaded guilty to such charges when he learned that Badolato had brought the girls to the states to testify against him. But the experience had been emotionally devastating for Badolato, who had wanted the sisters, then 16, 13, and 11, to have memories of the U.S that consisted of more than reliving their trauma in a courtroom. She took them shopping and to the zoo, invited them to her home to have dinner with her own family, saw them slowly start to open up and laugh and behave like the children they were. Then she’d had to put them on a flight back to Manila, back to the aunt who had allowed the man to abuse them and who Badolato had been unable to extradite. Fortunately, she says, their estranged father ended up intervening and taking custody of the girls, but that feeling of futility in the fight lingered.

“I stayed for a little bit longer after that trial, but it really was when I should have been able to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘Nikki, you’re done,’ ” Badolato had told me in St. Louis. “It became clear that I had been doing it too long.” She’d spend the last couple of years working national security, a position without the immediacy of child-exploitation work, but also without the heartache. “If I can be perfectly honest, I truly don’t believe that the FBI realizes what they put their agents through doing that kind of work. I just don’t,” she says.

And yet, here Badolato was in Portland, leading Ellison, now 30, up to her hotel room, telling her about all the announcements she’d heard in the Atlanta airport instructing travelers to be on the lookout for sex trafficking. “It’s like white noise in the background,” she says as Ellison settles into the sofa. “It’s a false sense of doing something to help.”

“Here’s the thing: Nobody knows what to look for,” Ellison agrees.

“And what about the victims who are in that airport, who are walking around and listening?” Badolato asks.

“I wouldn’t have even heard that announcement,” Ellison replies. “Because I didn’t feel like a victim. It goes a lot, lot, lot deeper than anybody realizes.”

That’s what she and Badolato both understand. That’s why they started talking eight months ago. Of all the teenage victims Badolato’s task force recovered, Ellison is one of the few who she knows has permanently extricated herself from being prostituted, though it took years for her to get to that point, years for her to see that what happened to her was not her fault but rather a fault in the system, a fault in many systems over the course of generations. Neither she nor Badolato can fix that.

Yet they can’t help feeling like there’s something they can fix — or at least try to. Under the umbrella of an organization she’s founded called Innocent Warriors, Badolato created a program for schools, instructing educators on the signs that might indicate a student is being trafficked and teaching kids how to avoid getting groomed online, which, she believes, is not about stranger danger but rather an awareness of subtle manipulation. Ellison has been working with trafficked youth through nonprofits like Children of the Night, the residential program where Badolato’s team sent her when she was 17. Together, they’ve been talking about having Ellison help train undercovers who are learning to do trafficking sting ops. They’ve also discussed starting a mentorship program in which children who are still being sex-trafficked are paired with young adults like Ellison who once were, providing a way for victims to begin to envision a different future for themselves and a path toward it even while being prostituted. Such a program may be retroactive rather than proactive, but it would capitalize on Badolato’s and Ellison’s experience and expertise — and it could help in the healing of mentors and mentees alike.

Badolato had traveled to Portland for the two to talk face-to-face about how the program might work. “You have to understand how they’ve been traumatized because sometimes, to a child, relating doesn’t sound like you’re relating. It sounds like you’re pointing out all the bad things in them,” says Ellison from the driver’s seat of her Nissan Pathfinder as she drives Badolato around to show her certain landmarks of her past after she’d left Children of the Night: the bridge she’d slept under for over a year after a boyfriend had gotten her hooked on heroin, the blocks downtown where she’d bounced between a children’s shelter and the needle exchange. It had taken a prison sentence for her to finally break her addiction and commit to a different kind of life, though that evolution had had less to do with not having access to drugs than with seeing her own mother cycle in and out of the same facility — like looking into her own future and witnessing how bleak it would be. Maybe, she thought, she could provide the inverse of that for kids in Innocent Warriors. Maybe she could reverse engineer her own escape.

“I just want to make it very clear that if you were a victim, you are a victim, and just to not have any shame in that,” she tells Badolato as they drive through Portland’s misty streets.

“What I anticipate and hope is that then we get survivors that are like, ‘They get it,’ ” Badolato replies. “And that it opens up doors to help, for people to recognize that there are people who get what’s really going on.”

“It took a really long time for me,” Ellison says of coming to terms with her own victimhood.

“It’s like reworking your thought process about some of those things,” Badolato agrees. “And that’s hard, and it happens slowly over time, and it looks different for everybody.”

Ellison grips the wheel tightly. “The truth does matter. It does. The truth is the fucking truth. And it’s been empowering to be able to talk about it because that’s another way that I’ve realized, like, ‘Man, I was a victim,’ is re-going over all of this. Because when it happens so many times, you do blame yourself. It’s a lot easier to just continue to live in a lie than believe that you were lied to.”

Still, Ellison and Badolato agree that the impressionability that makes children vulnerable is also what makes them open to guidance and mentorship if a relationship of trust can be established. “What do you think a parent does? They groom you. I’d been waiting to be guided and groomed,” Ellison says.

It’s been instructive to see that potential from another perspective, as a mother doing the guiding. As the afternoon wears on, Ellison stops to pick up her then-15-month-old son, who was being watched by a social-worker friend. She buckles the little boy into his car seat, ruffles his hair, and passes him a bottle. He grins widely and begins removing his shoes and socks, throwing them gleefully onto the floor of the car and then kicking his tiny feet in time with the music as Ellison glances back at him and smiles. “Kids are so perfect,” she says.

The last stop of the day is the large plot of land where the drug dealer’s house once stood. Now, it’s been turned into a playground, with brightly-colored jungle gyms, a covered picnic area, and a large lawn, where a couple leisurely walks their dog. Ellison and Badolato climb down from the car and stand at the park’s edge, as Ellison’s son toddles around the grass, oblivious to what had transpired in that very spot. There is some form of poetic justice in the land being earmarked for children’s enjoyment, but neither woman voices it. Mostly, they’re quiet. Night is falling, the air growing cooler, and the gray sky fading into dusk.

“You would never think a park could hide what it used to be,” Ellison says at last. And yet it did. Driving off with Badolato at her side and her son babbling happily in the back seat, Ellison glances in the rear-view mirror, but only for a moment. Badolato keeps her eyes fixed only on the road ahead.

[big-tiddy-goth-gremlin]

Okay so the finale of Arcane was great in a lot of ways but I feel I need to voice a little bit of disappointment/resentment for Act III.

First of all, Ekko and Sevika deserved better than the endings they got. Ekko did more in that battle than anyone else, and yet he ends up alone and sad. Sevika is the only Zaunite put on a council that will probably be classist asf to her.

Second, the total neglect of Isha (both her life and her death). Acts I and II built a narrative of found family with Isha, Jinx, and Sevika, only for it to not contribute to the greater narrative at all and to be completely thrown out in Act III.

Third, and probably most controversially, I do not think Caitlyn deserved Vi in the end. For reference, I really really liked CaitVi in the first season. I liked seeing a complex dynamic between two well-done lesbian characters. And then in the second season, Caitlyn takes her trauma and misery out on Vi. She essentially becomes a fascist dictator, floods the undercity with poisonous gas, increases imprisonment of Zaunites, works closely with Ambessa, and nearly kills Isha. And I was willing to hear out a redemption arc if it was good enough. But it wasn’t. There was never a decent apology to Vi, never any form of apology or regret for what she did to Zaun, no remorse over pointing a gun at a child. Just a vague air of “my bad” along with killing Ambessa. After everything she did to Vi and her people, I do not think Caitlyn remotely deserved to be with Vi, who spent the season coping, doing damage control, and tirelessly trying to fix her family. I am a wlw with an amazing girlfriend, and I love that we saw an endgame lesbian relationship, but I don’t like their dynamic or the way Caitlyn treats Vi.

Finally, the lack of any kind of conclusion to the Zaun/Piltover conflict. I understand that they were able to unite to fight Noxus, but aside from that, hardly anything has changed. ONE Zaunite was put on the council, and that’s all. No redistribution of wealth, no reparations, no sovereignty for Zaun, no apology for the decades of suffering Piltover caused Zaun. Ekko must return alone to a desolate undercity while Caitlyn and Vi live in the massive, luxurious Kiramman mansion.

My main issues here can be boiled down to this: Act III felt rushed. Very few stories were fully developed and satisfyingly concluded. The ones we did get (Viktor & Jayce, Mel returning to Noxus) were fantastic, but it left much to be desired for the other characters and storylines.

[solbaby7]

Az is so🤤🤤 toxic men in real life repulsive me but Az does it soooo well.

Can you do a slutatious reader meets possessive Az?

Like he refuses to make it official so she continues about her life and he stay hearing rumors about her activities. He doesn’t want to be another fuck buddy but he’s also holding back from her and that pisses her off and encourages her to continue w her endeavors.

I’m talking screaming fighting throwing shit toxic🤭

i love your work mamita, I’ll read ur fics all day😩🤧

Maneater

pairing: azriel x reader

warnings: toxic relationships, possessive!az, promiscuous girl, swearing, sexual themes, lemme just say thank god for this request, probably typos

—

“You’re not wearing that.”

“And who’s going to stop me?” The retort comes easily, all too familiar with this dance. You continue as if he’s not there, staring at the material that molds to your curves like second skin. The entire back is out, the sultry swoop accentuating the fullness of your ass even if the front was fairly tame. Curled hair is flicked over your shoulder, lashes flirty and lips glossy as you reach for your clutch.

A shadow beats you to it, sliding the clutch just out of your reach and a slightly agitated smile quirks at the corner of your mouth as you turn to face him. “I mean it. If that’s what you’re wearing, then you aren’t going.”

A brow raises, eyes taking in the perfect structure of Azriel’s face, the strong neckline and tattoos that crept up the left side. Rippling muscles strain against the black top; a pleasant contrast from his usual leathers and you nearly forget his audacity when appreciating his physique. “You must have the wrong room, Az.” You can’t help yourself but to touch, two manicured fingers dragging down the middle of his abdomen. Nails catch on the belt holding his breeches in place and the teasing tug has his pupils dilating. “Possibly confused me with one of those simpering females with damsel in distress tendencies? The ones who actually allow the tone you’re taking with me right now. ”

“I know exactly whose room I’m in,” Unashamed possessiveness radiates from every word and the step he takes to close the distance has an annoying effect on your body. “Just like I know exactly who won’t be leaving it if you don’t walk back over to that closet and change.”

“I have no reason to listen to you,” Azriel refused to admit it out loud, but he secretly loved this part—the pushback. The flirtatious flutter of your lashes and the seductive scent lacing every inch of glistening skin. “You have no claim over me. I’m a free female,” You know exactly what you’re doing; goading him with the same implications of the relationship that you and Azriel had been dancing around for the better part of a decade. It could’ve been different, could’ve spent more time making love rather than hate fucking against any sturdy surface after the shadowsingers jealousy had gotten the best of him after hearing yet another rumor about your latest conquest. “Free to do whom and whatever I please.”

He’s too good at feigning restraint when he truly was grappling for purchase; falling victim to such feminine curves and unwavering confidence. You peered up at him without fear, heart rate steady in his presence and he just barely catches the slightest hitch of your breath when Azriel’s hand wander up the bodice of the dress. Familiar fingers brush over the thick of your thighs, up the soft curve of your belly, taking special time over supple breasts and peaked nipples. Foolishly, you lean into the touch, goosebumps beginning to dot at your spine when the fabric rips in two. “It’s adorable that you believe that.” He doesn’t acknowledge your surprised expression, hands hovering over the ruined material as if it would magically sew back together. “Don’t ever make me repeat myself again.”

“You just—“

“I will see you there—in something much more appropriate, I’m sure.”

Azriel’s gone before you can respond, a humorless laugh passing glossy lips as you shuck off the remnants of your dress. High heels stomp against hardwood floors as you make your way to the closet, ripping through shades of deep navy’s and obsidian until your sights set on a sexy little number saved for special occasions.

A sinister smirk forms as you slip into it, eyes almost sparkling as you regard yourself in the full length mirror.

The halter neckline crosses at the chest, cupping cleavage with ease as the intricate golden bustier cinches at your sides, creating the illusion of wider hips and ensures nothing less than an elegant posture when you stride inside. Soft silks and chiffon kisses at the length of your legs, grazing over painted toes in painfully high heels but it pulls the attention you were searching for. Necks craning and hungry eyes eat up every dip and curve of your figure, mouths salivating at the liquid gold that pushes up the weight of your breasts. “You’re late,” Rhysand voice murmurs in your mind, utter boredom creeping into his every feature.

Your eyes slide to Azriel when you answer, anticipation buzzing beneath the surface of your body. “Wardrobe malfunction.”

To anyone else, the shadowsinger would appear to be the embodiment of stoicism.

But you knew that hard line of his shoulders, the barely restrained tick of his jaw, the slight flexing of his fingers around the thick arms crossed over his chest. The firelight crackles around him, golden light casting perfect shadows that nearly blend seamlessly to the ones that sang to him. With each step closer to the dias, those shadows grow more agitated, wiggling restlessly at Azriel’s feet, stretching up the length of his back to whisper in his ear.

You play coy too well, nodding respectfully to the High Lord and Lady before taking your place but those shadows shove you in closer. Close enough to feel the warmth radiating from Azriel’s towering form, the wings held high behind him subconsciously tucking you out of view. “Appropriate enough for you?”

“You are the most stubborn female I have ever met in my entire life.”

“I wouldn’t have to be if you’d just admit it.”

He pretends not to care, masking desperate glances with hardened side eyes. The grip on his crossed arms gets tighter, barely refraining from the urge to drag you away from all the eyes greedily eating up your form as if it were a six-course meal with desserts on the side. “Admit what?”

“That you want me.”

That you love me the same way I love you.

That you don’t want it to just be a game anymore either.

Azriel doesn’t answer right away, doesn’t even look your way but the sneer that curls at the edge of his perfect mouth was enough to have your confidence faltering. “I have better things to do with my time than chase after some harlot.”

Your brows snap up, nearly blending in with the seam of your hairline. He regrets every word when the teasing spark fades from your eye. Taking a sizable step away from him, your face goes hard like steel, nose scrunching with barely concealed humiliation and your teeth bare like a wild animal when Azriel reaches out to touch. “Don’t,” Angry tears make your eyes go glassy but not once does your voice waver. “Just stay the hell away from me.”

Rhys had already dismissed the others, waving a lazy hand and music fills the space. The strong smell of food permeating the air and you’re quick to blend into the gathering crowd, making a beeline for the elegant champagne pyramid tucked on the other side of the room.

Your hands shake when you grab the first glass, taking it back more like a shot than a classy sip of the flute but you just needed your hands to stop shaking—your heart to stop racing. One drink quickly turns to three and you’re well on your way to a fourth when a hand curls around your shoulder. “Fueling up for me?” The familiar drawl of Autumn’s first born heir reaches your ear, halting your display of gluttony.

This was why you were here—in Hewn City, prancing about the Court of Nightmares. Acting as a pretty faced guide the Night Court provided as light entertainment before Eris would be escorted off to the private meeting room two halls down. You’d amuse a few dances, allow him to talk your ear off and pretend you don’t notice his fingers inching down the curve of your spine. “There’s not enough alcohol in the world to prepare me for you, Vanserra.”

His brow raises, a sly smirk growing as the lights from the iron-wrought chandeliers casted their shadows against the burnt copper of his hair. Warm eyes trail down the length of your form, a single finger twitching when taking in intricate details of your gold bodice; the rich fabric that was so dark it almost seemed blue in certain light. “Are you flirting with me?”

“No, I’m just hot and talking.”

Eris is just as bold as you remember, laughing softly under your breath at his proximity when you’ve turned around for another glass but a quick hand has swiped it from your grasp before a single drop can coat your tongue. “You’re testy tonight.” You can feel the cool caress of Az’s shadows curling around your ankle, a silent claim that has your teeth gritting against each other.

For once, you amuse the Autumn heir and his playful fire, dancing into the thick of his flame when you allow him to finish your drink and guide you to the dance floor with the others. “I double booked,” You lie easily, following his lead effortlessly as if you didn’t feel that cool wisp of a shadow steadily clamping tighter against your ankle. Low chatter blocks out the ability for others to eavesdrop but you can feel those golden eyes burning holes into the side of your face—to the bare strip of skin at your hip where Eris’ hand rested for the entire duration of the dance. “Can’t help the attitude that lingers knowing that I have to spend my night prattling about with you when I could’ve been indulging in multiple orgasms.”

A laugh that’s smooth like whiskey escapes Eris, a hint of a dimple forming on his left cheek and you hate that you notice the perfect lines of his teeth; his bottom lip that was fuller than the top, the slight bump on the bridge of his nose indicating it’d definitely been broken at least once in his life. “There’s ample time before my meeting if you’d like to have your cake and eat it too.”

“Maybe I’d agree,” You make a show out of examining him, subtly inhaling the spice of his cologne. Handsome but not Azriel. “If the ‘cake’ was a different flavor.”

Eris doesn’t falter for a second, even with the entirety of your Inner Circle’s attention fixed on him and the hands he had on your body. The deep baritone of his voice rumbles against your chest, nipples pebbling at the sensation. “Close your eyes then,” Words whisper at the lobe of your ear and the glittering jewel poked through it. “You can pretend I’m whoever you want with my tongue between your thighs.”

A witty remark crawls to the tip of your tongue, readying itself to leap off when that ghost chain around your leg pulls taut. There’s only enough time for your eyes to widen before you’re tugged away from Eris like a dog on a leash. It leads you out of the room and into the hall, refusing to loosen even a touch when you stubbornly resist but there’s no point when you’re cloaked in shadows. You barely notice the scenery change before you’re back at home and tossed over a shoulder. “You stupid, brutish, ape of a male!” Your shouts echo through the empty halls, bouncing off closed doors as Azriel strides through the foyer like he was on a mission. “Put me down right now!” Every word is coupled with the palms of your hands slapping at his thighs and digging into the back of his knees. One hand cranes back to dig into the thick of his hair and tug—hard.

Azriel’s hand is harder though, pure heat burning against the skin of your ass when it connects with a deafening clap. “Shut up.”

Your jostled back into place, cheeks warm and hands frozen where they’re bunched in the fine material of his dress shirt. “Az—“

His hand comes down once more and this time you yelp, teeth biting into the fat of your bottom lip as he clears the stairs and makes a sharp left. “I told you to shut up.”

Every bone in your body screams for you to comply, primal instincts igniting deep within advising you take the route of self-preservation but your pride overrides better judgement. “And I told you, I’m a free female. Let me go, right now!” You squirm once more, legs kicking and arms clawing for release when you’re roughly thrown off his shoulder and shoved into the wall in a motion so fluid it takes the air from your lungs.

Fuck your pride for letting her mouth write checks your ass couldn’t cash.

You’d never seen such darkness in such a vast sea of gold, the whole pupil of Azriel’s eyes blown out like a feral animal salivating at the mouth. “Do you feel like a free female right now?” He already knows the answer judging by the pleased smirk beginning to creep in the corner of his mouth at the sight of his shadows holding your hands in place.

You swallow thickly, annoyingly affected by his closeness and the hard bulge that throbs at your belly when he curls a hand around your neck, nose brushing your own. “I certainly don’t feel like I belong to you.”

“I can fix that.” It’s a promise. One you silently scold yourself for praying that it’s a promise he makes good on.

The Mother has favorites and tonight you must be one of them.

The kiss Azriel initiates is nothing short of brutal; the drag of his tongue across the seam of your lips his only kindness before gaining access and completely dominating from the inside out. Every touch is claiming; a strong hand calloused from centuries of skilled swordplay is generous when easing off the expensive gold bodice before the delicate fabric beneath is torn to shreds. Pretty strips of dark material spills to the floor, left for the house to clean as your thighs are gripped and your weight is hoisted up, legs cradling the muscular taper of Azriel’s waist.

He’s sucking marks into your neck, back pressed against the wall as his teeth graze at the sensitive skin there. Breasts spill from the confines of your bra, straps eased down your shoulders to make more room for his mouth to lay claim to. Azriel pinches at your nipples, eating up every sound like it’s offered on a platter. “Those noises sound like you belong to me.” Every nerve burns where he touches, marring your flesh and branding his mark as arousal collects in your underthings.

“Azriel,” You pant, trying to clear the fog of your brain but he’s all consuming; refusing to allow you air if it’s not the same one he breathes.

The flimsy underwear is pushed aside, familiar fingers collecting the slick gathering between your legs and a cruel smile grows on his face. “It certainly feels like you belong to me.” A thumb pressed firmly on the stiff bud of your clit, rubbing slow circles that has your toes curling. A thump sounds from where your head falls back to the ball, exposing the line of your neck and the dark purple bruises smattered along it. Your eyes close for a second, breath labored and mouth salivating from the promise of more but all that changes when his hands bunch up the elegant curl of your hair. He wraps it around like a leash, forcing you to look him in the eye and the rasp of his voice is devastating. “So why the fuck can’t you get it through your pretty head, huh?”

It’s a rhetorical question, that much you gather when he moulds his mouth to yours before you can even begin to muster up an answer. You’re boneless in his grasp, allowing him to take you to his room and share his sheets. The bedside table screeches when Azriel’s boot kicks at it, knocking over lamps and light bulbs shatter on the hardwood. He doesn’t even flinch, glass crunching under the soles of his shoes that he kicks off as he eases you down. “Az,” Insecurity threatens to rear her ugly head and ruin the moment, trying to push forth his hurtful words and the years of dancing around this feeling but Azriel’s already there to push that away. “Are you sure you even want to?”

“You belong to me,” He says and it’s final. Offering up the keys to the locked box filled with everything you’d dreamed about when you closed your eyes and wished on falling stars every year. Off goes his shirt and shortly his pants follow, dragging his underwear along with it and you can’t fight the moan when all of that bare skin is exposed and hovering above you. “Say it,” He urges, the hard length of him slotting between spread legs, grinding against warm need until you’re keening soft pleas into his chest, heels digging into his back.

The intrusion makes you gasp, hands greedy and mouth glued to his while he fucked into you like he always did. It’s a demanding pace; forcing you to take all of him while he watched you lose all your composure—all that beautiful fight that drew him to you in the first place. Az doesn’t stop, spurred on by strangled moans and choked words garbled together begging for more of him; harder, faster, deeper. Your clenching around him when the words stutter out of you in a whisper. “I belong to you.”

[sebastianswallows]

Dreamed of you

— PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha x F!Reader

— SYNOPSIS: A Bene Gesserit sister is sent to kill Feyd. She hesitates as she watches him sleep, all the way until he wakes up and catches her.

— WARNINGS: none, just reader simping for one cute boy

— WORDCOUNT: 1k

— A/N: First of all, this isn't necessarily movie!Feyd, it's more based on the books, but I love him in all his forms. I wrote this in a bout of madness this evening, and it's just a love letter to how beautiful and soft and sad Feyd canonically is. That is all.

A shadow in the corner moved. The door shut behind her with a hiss. Outside, the chanting of his name resounded like a distant wave. Feyd. A myriad of emotions raged inside the way that sylphic syllable was said. So mangled and intense were they that she could hardly tell, even after weeks of being on Giedi Prime, if the feeling in their voices was that of fear, or love.

He had won another battle in the arena tonight. Half-fight, half-play, all a spectacle of violence kept elegant and grim with the flourished motions of his blades in inky black and white. The celebrations were kept modest afterwards. This was no birthday.

His chambers smelled of sweet sweat and bitter blood. It filled her lungs as soon as she stepped in. He slept now, quietly, in a surprisingly small bed. As she approached him, dagger in hand, she realised it was not so small — he just took little space on it.

He slept huddled to one side, his body curled within the black sheets as if he were in a womb.

The na-Baron was an arresting sight, like a work of art left interrupted. His marble-white arms hugged a pillow to his chest, and from beneath a curve of silk draped over him, the corner of a knee peeked through. The soft line of his eyes revealed a dour bend in sleep, delicate dark lashes resting like butterfly wings on his cheeks. His full lips, decadent and lustful, were pulled into a pout. She wondered what he was dreaming of.

Beneath this impressive amalgam of his features, from the dainty to the sultry to the broad shoulders and strong arms, he was just a little boy. Motherless and far from home, preyed on by his uncle, worshipped by a distant crowd. Useless, now that the Atreides line had ended and a child had been secured from him by Lady Fenring.

The Kwisatz Haderach would have to be reached through other means, and from a bloodline less volatile than that of the Harkonnens. They had proved uncooperative, hostile — the Baron, his nephews, even Lady Jessica. Born to be an asset, they made themselves a threat. That was why Feyd-Rautha had to die.

She stood over his black bed.

The guards outside were dealt with, the courtiers were asleep, and the drunk and maddened crowd outside would not realise what happened until it was too late. This was the result of years of planning, months of preparation, and weeks spent on that polluted planet pretending to be one of the new interrogation trainers.

Torturing was not her forté, but there were worse fates than cutting men’s tendons clean or gouging out their eyeballs. All the “noble” prisoners were already long dead before she got there. Failed Harkonnens was all that was left. And all men bled the same.

She stood over his black bed with a knife.

“He must die,” she thought to herself, an angry frown blooming on her brow. Her body was already rebelling. “The Reverend Mother demands it. He must die.”

She stood over his black bed with a knife. And faltered.

The blade shone silver in the low electric light, hanging like a teardrop from her fist. Her body refused to move.

Should she really kill him now? Perhaps she should wait for him to turn on his back. What would it hurt to look at him a second more, just another, and another…? He was a good fighter, no matter the arrangements of the arena. Would it not be ignoble to slay him this way? Generations of genetic planning had culminated in him, and to let it all go now...

Her mind’s motions, the fleshy resistance, it all came to nothing in an instant, blown away like snowflakes on the sand. There was a change in the air all around them, a stillness where unconsciousness was before, a presence, like a horn blown through a storm in the lighthouses of old, sounds swallowed by sounds, an impact of cells in the air blooming into a single point of light. Feyd-Rautha opened his eyes.

She only caught the hint of an impish smile before she backed away as quickly as an indrawn breath. Her back hit the door and her hand scrambled for the handle, but he was upon her with the same speed he applied in his gladiatorial fights.

How could she have missed the signs that he had woken? Had his breathing even changed?

“Got you now,” he purred against her cheek, “Bene Gesserit.”

She bit back a scream, her skull pressed against the metal door, and with clenched teeth, she began a sharp command — the Voice. But her anger overwhelmed her and Feyd’s lips swallowed the words she hadn’t even finished speaking.

“Let me g—”

He kissed her like a lover. There was a passion in him that his ostentations of brutality had not yet killed and she found herself moaning, instinctively pleased with the full and masculine presence that swallowed her being — as if it wasn’t a murderer who had caught her just now.

His breathing was steady, as if he had planned all of that. From beyond the thick folds of her dress, she could feel his naked flesh. They clung to him, her clothes, as if they wanted to embrace him. His left hand held her fist, the blade trapped within their entangled grip. The other held her jaw, tilting her face high enough for his lips.

“I knew you’d come,” he breathed, pausing to rest his mouth on hers. She could taste ink on her tongue — the final traces from the coating on his teeth. “I dreamed of you.”

So that was how he knew. That was why he pouted in his sleep.

“Will you kill me?” he whispered.

She could feel it on her cheeks when that boyish smile of his grew.

“I have to,” she said, and her own voice betrayed her, sounding terribly broken.

“Try,” Feyd grinned.

[otkuhotgirl]

─── 𝐂𝐋𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐔𝐄 .

# with roronoa zoro.

roronoa zoro had a bounty of over one billion berries for his head — and prided himself in it. particularly, out of all of his crimes, you thought that his most heinous one yet had been to dress himself that fine while you were not around to see it.

⎰ & suggestive. mdni. thirsting over wano!zoro. reunion after whole cake. implied fem!reader. no y/n used. i need this man carnally. no spoilers!

W.C: 1.7K

the whole cake island incident had taken less than a week to be solved, and yet, it felt as though you had spent an entire decade and more into that miserable and forsaken place. upon approaching the location where the rest of your crew was stationed at — with your stupid swordsman you so yearned to reunite with — you foolishly believed that the coast was clear.

one single hour with him was all you hoped for. hell, ten minutes would have been enough for the time being. but as so it seemed, fate was a sadistic worm that threw battle after battle onto your lap, against foes stronger than you would have wished for, and whose mere existence was enough to divide the crew for yet longer periods of time.

glimpses of him were what you had been offered amidst that never-ending nightmare, and seas be merciful, wasn’t he a luxury meal course.

you had been praying to whoever listened for a mere opportunity to get that man alone, and at last, the deity of couple-who-spent-two-years-apart-and-now-can’t-keep-it-together-for-more-than-a-week — or something like that — was merciful enough to grant you that desperate wish.

zoro had snatched you by the waist once the opportunity seemed fit enough, and that monument of a man dug his calloused fingers so deep into your figure that it threatened to leave bruises longer-lasting than the ones you received at whole cake. his lips brushed near your earlobe, before traveling lower; chests pressed against one another as he whispered lustful-filled promises amidst small confessions of how much he had missed you.

and oh, hell knew those words were more than reciprocal. unfortunately, your tongue seemed to weigh more than a hundred sea kings as your fingers gripped the hems of his kimono, lips half-parted while your eyes drowned in the sight of him.

at your lack of action, zoro froze. he was an experienced man — so long as the subject involved alcohol or sword-fighting or your detailed schedule. the love matter? he was as proficient in it as he was in differentiating north from south. zoro moved his face from where it was buried in your neck, a tinge of uncertainty shown in his glance.

the silence lingered as zoro’s face scrunched in concentration, gears turning inside his head as the poor and clueless man attempted to understand whatever thought was going through in yours.

“if you want to speak about what happened during the time we were apart—” he began, seemingly planning on taking a step back and further from your body.

you tugged at the kimono and pressed him to your figure, a lonesome finger trailing down the bare skin of his chest, losing itself under the fabric of his clothing. you felt him shudder due to your touch, though your mouth remained sealed and you were sure your eyes were as wide as the four seas. zoro’s own hands were hesitant. there he was — the terrifyingly strong swordsman, the one who’d be the strongest, the one whose name was uttered in fear — completely vulnerable at the palm of your hand.

you wanted to swallow him whole.

“do i need to kill—” he spoke again, and you shushed the attempt yet again. as much as you valued his immediate instinct to eliminate whoever had dared to bring you pain, that was anything but the time for such declarations.

zoro’s grip regained its usual strength as he became more impatient, his words coming out with an edge as sharp as the swords sheathed and carried at his hip. “what is it, woman?!”

“was this given to you?”

he blinked, dumbfounded. “huh?”

“the kimono, zoro. was this given or borrowed?”

the swordsman rolled his eye as he, once again, pressed your chest flush against his, returning his ministrations to your neck once he was sure that nothing was amiss.

“why does it matter?” he rasped against your sensible skin.

as much as you wished to surrender entirely to that sinful mouth, a glimpse of the dark green of the cape he wore made you push his shoulders. your eyes were transfixed, unable to tear themselves from his appearance.

“of course it matters! i need to know whether or not i’ll need to bother stealing them once we leave this place,” you answered, eyes so focused in his chest you failed to notice the darkening of his glance.

zoro’s usual attires consisted of overused pants, the green haramaki that was close to infusing itself with his skin, and — if he felt the need, which was rare — a plain coat or t-shirt. the instances in which your lover dressed himself with such fine clothing were rare. truth be told, the entire crew was more well-dressed in an hour in wano than in an entire month in the sunny. the lack of money was far more common than you would’ve wished, and zoro himself refused to waste his slim fair share of berries and gold with — at least to him — vain and useless things such as new clothes.

hence why you were planning on robbing at least two entire wardrobes worth of those kimonos. the absolute urge to have him like that was gnawing at your insides. you wished for nothing but to have your arms around him for the entire day, acting as though an insistent pendant dangling from his neck and clinging to his chest due to the sweat from battles.

your mind trailed on, wondering if that pirate-surgeon would’ve been able to perform such a feat.

“keep wearing that, at all times,” you punctuated, allowing his hand to raise your thigh to the height of his hip. “you don’t bathe whatsoever, so it won’t be hard.”

he grinned against the skin of your exposed collarbone. “liked it that much?”

you hummed your agreement. zoro pressed your back against the nearest solid surface and opened your legs for further access to where you needed him most. the pair of you had half-an-hour of privacy — if not less — and he clearly didn’t mean to lose those precious minutes with meaningless gestures and words. zoro tossed the cape on the ground and started to undo the knot that kept his kimono shut.

you stopped him in the spot. “nuh-huh.”

“the hell you mean nuh-huh?” he bit back.

“clothes on.”

“how am i supposed to fuck you with shit on?”

you craned your neck to the side, offering him a clear glimpse of the wickedness gleaming in your eyes. “you’ll figure it out. unless you’re not up for the challenge. i’ll understand if you’re feeling like backing out. maybe someone more flexible would’ve—”

he wrapped both of your legs around his waist, supporting your entire weight with the arm placed under you. he moved and aimed for a distinct position, and you blinked a bit surprised at his decision. zoro had suspended you midair, with neither a wall nor a table to aid him. a gasp of delight and awe passed through your lips as zoro’s clothed thigh roughly rubbed itself against your arousal.

a calloused finger guided your chin up with roughness, adjusting your eyesight to his face.

“me,” rough voice wielded in a monosyllabic command whose further intentions he was sure you would understand.

the trance upon the first glance of that set of clothes — and the sinful thoughts thereafter — managed to distract you from the fact that you and zoro had been apart for almost three weeks. and for an instance you had forgotten that the yearning fed by distance was reciprocated. that zoro had been just as eager to have you in his arms as you were to be drowned in the sea of his lust.

that brief pledge — me, look at me — had such a meaning hidden underneath, that for a second you felt the urge to cradle his face in your hands, if only to caress the man beyond the demon with the care he ever so longed for.

most pirates sailed around the seas with postures and expressions that nearly seemed to shout “sex for free”. to them, the act itself conducted with strangers was but another trivial aspect of adventure; an adrenaline-filled activity not to be taken seriously. to zoro, sex symbolized the deepest shade of intimacy. an instance where he laid himself bare to you. not in the sense of nakedness — for he couldn’t care less for the sight of his body beyond the physical strength required to wield his swords and protect his crewmates —, but rather in the act of offering you his soul on a silver platter.

he was not a man of words. his devotion was made explicit through the manner with which he served you. zoro thought himself a wretched creature at your service, meant to protect and please. there was no space available for the hesitation born from the thought of vulnerability. sex was the act of tearing his skin apart with his own blade in order to offer you a warm solace within the walls of his heart. it was a sacred transaction where you were the worshiped deity; the ground beneath your feet the altar he knelt upon. and one should treat the object of their faith with the utmost respect.

yet, due to the scarce time unmatching the accumulated desire, zoro wasn’t given the chance to adore you properly. hence the reasoning of such a request.

a heartwarming action, truly. but your eyes were attracted to the way that stupid kimono hugged his frame, offering a scarce glimpse of his chest — only enough to leave space for imagination. both a curse and a blessing was bestowed upon you.

zoro turned your chin towards him yet again, a vein nearly popping on his forehead, wearing an expression you’ve grown to know too well. “eyes on me.”

you grinned. perhaps your stupidest decision yet. “are you jealous of a kimono?”

that taunt was his undoing.

“up for the challenge,” zoro echoed, tone dead, pupil blown. “clothes on.”

zoro flexes the muscles of his thigh, his entire expression brightening up with wickedness as his other hand reaches for your clothed arousal. “let’s test that, huh?”

“i need my legs to fight!” you suddenly felt the urge to remind him.

he grinned like a devil. “you’ll figure it out.”

— 🐈‍⬛ wrote this while rewatching some zoro moments in wano!!!!!!!! the exclamation marks are a shout for help!!!!!!