#and he just turns and looks me dead in the face | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

shehungers · 3 days ago

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AMBROSIA

dragon-hybrid knight x mage!reader| 18+| 15k

One day, you are approached by two informants of the Witch Queen of Noss. They come bearing gifts of wealth and opulent fruit. The fruit, you are promised, from her orchard is enchanted with her magic and she welcomes you to Noss to take it.

Guided by the loathsome Knight of Noss; a half-human, half-dragon abomination and the Witch Queen's butcher, you set out on the long journey. Along the way, you are kidnapped by the Sisterhood of Gosha, a group bent on dethroning the Witch Queen, and are given a guarantee to what you desire in exchange for helping them.

Their condition? You must seduce the Knight of Noss.

story warnings; dead dove do not eat, explicit sexual content, dubcon-ish, armor is on during sex, blowjob, premature ejaculation, cumshot on thighs, size kink/can't fit, descriptions of genitalia (dragon), dark fantasy, mc is morally ambiguous, manipulation, possession, heavy implications of torture, mentions of abuse (not to mc), mentions of animal death and cruelty (infrequent, mostly metaphorical), extreme body horror + grotesque details, extremely prose + detail heavy, vague magic system, this is an exploration of morality + choice + consent.

dividers by; @/strangegraphics & @/omi-reaources

proofread by my beloved @hantaslittlearsonist

shout-out to @noctis-kingfisher for lending me a tiny hand as well.

this story is purely a work of fiction. I do not condone the attitudes and actions of the characters therein.

this concept piece has taken me two months of writing and pulling out my hair. if you've enjoyed reading, PLEASE leave me feedback and reblog!! I desperately want to hear what y'all think of this labor of love!! 🧡💛

The Witch Queen of Noss had sent two informants to your doorstep with gilded chests braced in their arms, and an enormous black carriage waited at the edge of your hermitage pulled by six lustrous, silvery-gold stallions.

“She has searched for one of your magical prowess with seemingly no end for many centuries now. She says that your magic has a different smell to it, chews differently on her teeth. There's grit to it, feels unrefined in her hands and cuts through her bloodstream. She says you've got that raw magic ability. She likes it and wants you as part of her council.”

Of the two informants—one man and one woman—the man was the only one who spoke throughout the encounter. Or, more appropriately, he was the only one capable of doing so. Since the woman’s face, previously pale, now glowed scarlet and her eyes watered. Her arms trembled as perspiration turned her hairline oily.

This was as opposed to the man, who stood with a straight, rigid back. Dry in the eyes and on the skin despite having the appearance of a malnourished beggar. One of the wretched trying to wedge his fat tongue down the slender necks of empty beer bottles for any residual taste.

He did not look like the sort to find employment in the Witch Queen’s house.

Then, you took a real good look at his eyes which were brown, bulbous, staring-back things with a faint black film spread across the exposed parts of the organ.

To those who could not see, he would have been mistaken as marked by wyrmwort spray for chasing ladies in the night, or yet another unfortunate diseased by plague. But, the appearance of it was far too thin and had spread too uniform across both eyes for it to be of natural causes.

“It's bad taste to possess your own subjects in hopes of influencing an outcome, don't you think?” You spoke in pitying tones, both for the man unlikely to have consented to the possession, and the Witch Queen who had already revealed her desperation to you. “A normal man swept off the streets wouldn't be able to describe magic as he had just now. You are old, but not wise.”

“Wisdom falters in the face of might. Those who are wise eventually wither and rot, and the world soon forgets them. But, might? Power? It creates mountains and canyons, the very stars in the sky. It leaves scars like fissures in the land, in the weak, and you are always remembered.”

The Witch Queen bobbed the man on translucent black threads of magic, which wound him in dissipating mist. She commanded his left arm to rise. It did so with the unnatural, jerky stiffness of a ball-jointed doll. He was gesturing to the woman struggling adjacent to him.

“I have searched far and wide for magic of your caliber. It is simply unfathomable to me that you have chosen to hide and squander it.”

You were no longer looking at the man, but at the woman trying to strategically balance the chest on one arm, while opening its great maw for you to see inside.

Gold and silver medallions spilled out of it, plinking on the flagstone walkway underfoot. Faceted gemstones in regal rings and dripping necklaces gleamed with pristine, polished finish. There were even chess pieces among the contents, crafted from ivory, eyes embellished with orange-pink sapphires.

This chest alone contained wealth far exceeding that which belonged to rural kings. It was enough to feed the entire ruined city of Rûregar in the northeast region for seasons. And yet, the Witch Queen wielded this bribe without shame, in the failing arms of this woman burning and sweating under the yellow beat of the midday sun.

“Why do you hide?” asked the Witch Queen in the man’s slow, imprecise rumble. “Such raw, delicious power. I will admit that had it not been for my knight, you may have stayed concealed. But, dragons are most intimate with magic. They know it so viscerally, sensually, even, that I used to find myself envious every time I looked at him.”

In your recent past before self-imposed isolation, you’d heard rumors of an abomination. The grotesque spawn from a human father and dragon mother, so the story was told. An imposing butcher arrayed in black iridescence. Armor made of dragonscale and adamantine, brandishing a massive blade made of the same stuff.

Some stories insisted upon his existence being one of restlessness and carnality. Seasons turned to decades of waiting and engaging in the most perverse acts; savage romps with both humans and beasts alike. For his bloodlust best stayed dormant that way, and he went unchecked by his Master until he stood center in the great orchestra of war, severing spines, bodies in half with a single sweep.

Other tales were whispered to you conspiratorially after some coaxing with free booze and attractive enchantments. The word was that the knight didn’t exist at all, that there was no body inside to pilot the heavy suit of armor. It was all illusory; a cunning, convincing lie perpetrated by the Witch Queen to hold her throne and residence in Noss.

But, you'd already seen through one of her tricks. You doubted that she could maintain an intricate ploy such as that for over a millennia.

“I hide because,” you paused, eyes cutting across the man’s shoulder towards the black carriage when you caught movement around it belonging neither to the stamping stallions nor to the frazzled coachman trying to wrestle them into submission by cracking the reins. “I hide because there is nothing interesting and I am bored. I spend my days enchanting the soil and watching flowers grow. I change the color of waterfalls, and I gossip with the birds in exchange for seeds. My rice is plentiful and I always have wine to pour. My bed is the most comfortable place to exist in any realm.”

The Witch Queen reciprocated such ordinary sentimentality by using the man’s arms to open the second chest, revealing to you fresh, honeyed overabundance in the shape of a toppling mound of fig fruit.

Your curiosity pushed you to take one in each hand, mentally measuring their weight and studying their magenta roundness. You relished their succulent sweet, woody aroma when you pressed them under your nose. And, when she told you to eat them, you did so by sinking your teeth into both, alternating your bites between them.

They tasted of nostalgic summertimes carried on a balmy breeze. Each bite into the figs was decadent and pulpy with pale pink nectar overflowing the impressions your teeth left behind in its soft purple flesh. It was the most delicious thing you'd ever tasted.

“You should feel honored. Fruit from my orchard is forbidden. It receives all of my love that cannot be given unto others. I have grown my fig fruit from seedlings in enchanted soils, and quenched them in elixirs of life. My magic dwells within the orchard, in the air and all of the trees. It is a soft susurrus through the leaves and grass. It ripens my figs and allows me to keep my throne and my vitality. Noss shall never see another queen.”

“Where is your magic?” You did not taste it in the fig fruit in your hands, nor in others that you grabbed out of the chest and ripped with your teeth. Suddenly, you were captivated by the thought of the Witch Queen’s power being within you.

Would it chew like pork fat between your teeth, or lay across your tongue like thick oil, or snap and fizzle against your cheeks until they reddened raw and bled?

You ground another mouthful into watery mince. Let it slide down the back of your throat. “Where is it? Your magic. Where is it?”

“It waits for you.” She answered through the man, whose voice was starting to crack and unravel. The cords in his throat pulled taut, strained as though played across with the bow of a stringed instrument. His leaning house of bones had started sagging more left, and the skin under his eyes drooped like red sandbags. His eyes were slowly receding into the back of his head. “Come to Noss. Come to Noss. Come to me. Come to me. Come to me and taste my orchard. Lysander will guide you.”

You were fast to sidestep from the spilled chest of figs and the sinking body of bones and shriveling innards. Closer to the fatigued woman who'd fallen to her knees on the scorching flagstone walkway.

The chest she still clutched was so heavy that it pinned her folded legs to the stone, melting the flesh off her shins, and the polished brilliance of the gems and coins inside had burned her face and neck to stiff brown leather, and baked her eyes a blackened prune color.

“In their wickedness, they chose their own fates,” spoke a dour but potent voice from nearby. You'd been so fixated on the man rotting, deflating within his own skin-suit, and the woman dying on her knees, that you hadn't seen the Witch Queen's Knight approach. “The man was a violent thief. He had burglarized a merchant’s wagon and killed the merchant. Done far worse to the merchant’s young daughters. In the mind of the Witch Queen, there exists no death that she’d find satisfying. He did not always look so humble. She made it so.”

“And the woman?” you asked, queasily.

“Aye, that one was part of the Sisterhood of Gosha. They wish to usurp the Witch Queen by placing an imposter on the throne in her place. Skilled assassins, spies, politicians. Their sbires hide in ordinary faces. We must be wary of all: mothers with infants, beggars, and embroiderers. Even the young girls with flowers in their hair. Now that they know you have the Witch Queen’s favor, they will be coming for you.”

You moved back as he came forward, leaning down with his enormous mass to offer the armored bulk of his arm. “Come along, I will be ensuring your safe travel at the behest of the Witch Queen. I am Lysander, the Knight of Noss.”

The knight anchored himself like that for a long time as you refused to touch him.

He was an abnormal creature: immense in size, his precise silhouette concealed by his invulnerable black armor, but you could see his shape was not entirely human. The length of one of his arms was more than half of your whole body, and at his full height, you expected you'd only ever see the point of his broad chest that began to concave, narrow into a long waist wrapped in cloth and dragonscale.

You became flustered the moment you realized you would not be rewarded with a glimpse of the monster underneath, as there were no revealing gaps in his armor, which was all jarring angles and ungentleness. No war-worn chips or missing fragments, tears in the breathable fabric against the bend of his elbow, or under his helmet.

And, it was his helmet that you found most fascinating of all.

A heavy, sharp design with flattened protrusions pushed towards the back of his head like wings on a bird. The adamantine and dragonscale had been pounded smooth and pinched in the front. There was only a narrow slit across the eyes for him to see out of, and six or seven long, symmetrical vents set along a hinged jaw piece for him to breathe through unless he lifted it.

You wondered what you would see underneath the helmet and emboldened yourself to reach for it. He winced away only when the hinges made a screeching sound of unuse, not as your sticky fingers padded along the piece and raised it far enough to see a dark, textured chin.

“Do you know no fear?” Lysander hesitated to show you his arm again to help you across the thick sea of boiling red-brown flesh and entrails. “You've heard the stories, haven't you? You mustn’t be so brave in my presence.”

If you stayed focused on him, then you would think less of the possibility of human rot sticking to the soles of your boots. A very wrong, gummy sensation that you expected would feel like being suctioned down into a mud pit after a long rain.

“So, it's true you're an abomination? Hideous and monstrous? An unfathomable union between man and she-dragon?”

“Aye. I am,” he said. “That and much worse. C’mere now. Come closer to me and raise your arms.”

Any closer and your toes would touch the bubbling mass crawling over the edges of your walkway, suffocating the fertile soil and grasses you'd painstakingly grown. That would be enough to make you scream, yet you held it in your chest, locked away behind your ribs.

Intrigued still, you asked him, “And it's true that you engage in every one of your carnal whims without second thought? With all kinds? Humans and beasts?”

“Aye. All of it.” He gave you no pleasure or disgust in his response, speaking in a way that sounded manufactured. Unthinking. Detached. “I am insatiable. My carnal lust and my bloodlust. Now, do not tempt me with either. Come my way.”

“And,” you instigated further, enjoying harassing him, “It’s true that it was you who led the Witch Queen here to disturb my peace? You are the Witch Queen’s whore?”

This gave Lysander pause, his adamantine face gazing down at yours. The slits scored into his helmet perpetuated all of the malice he claimed was factual. But, within the shadows inside his helmet, you thought you heard something click and grind—not metal or scales, but his jaw.

“Aye. Truly, I am deserving of your abhorrence. It was I who infringed upon your sacred place as asked of me by the Witch Queen. My dragon half never knows rest and the pull of magic, no matter how small, is ruthless to me and my mind. Your skill is tremendous, but your magic is more so. There were cracks in your enchantment. Magic overflow that slipped free and found me, grasped me, and led me to you.”

More curious than aggravated after his confession, you were docile when he finally took you away from the human puddles and figs wrinkling in the sunlight. He had reached across it all and plucked you up with one arm around your waist before then situating you in both, cradling you in a way that was not unkind, but certainly foreign to him.

“I’m not diseased. Don't drop me.” Afraid that he would, you stayed still and shrank yourself in his arms so as to not brush his scorching armor.

He moved with surprising swiftness for his size, smooth enough that the sound of his armor did not crash through the conversation and distract you. “Have you seen the Witch Queen’s orchard? Is it as ripe with magic as she says it is?”

“It is a powerful place. Invigorating. Raw. Her magic is leached into the soil and is a part of everything. It goes unchecked,” he said, adding nothing else on the matter.

You were settled back on your feet by the edge of your flagstone walkway, right in front of the black carriage’s open door. Its interior was as wholly dark as its exterior and lightless, except for what wan sunshine could slither in through gaps beneath the heavy curtains hanging across the windows.

Lysander’s mass thwarted your view of your doorstep and the informant's amalgam of liquefied parts drying, stiffening, and cracking on the hot stone. You thought about what red-brown clay looked like when it was spread out and left to bake in the sun. It was easier to imagine that was the reality that you would be leaving behind, and what you'd sweep clean with a broom once you returned.

“Inside. We've got a long way to Noss.” He made a gesture over your head with the tip of his chin to the carriage's wide mouth leading into nothing but shining satin seats and floorboards of exquisite deep color that you feared would cut your legs off at the shins.

The air inside was cold against your back, serpentine; invisible coils that caressed your neck and huddled close to your spine through your robes as though trying to steal your warmth for itself.

“And, if I decided I don't want to go? Would you stop me?” you asked.

Lysander’s armor made an awful ruckus as he hinged forward, leveling his helmeted face with yours. You stared through the narrow slot for his eyes with intention and felt your neck hairs rise as two gleaming purple things looked out at you.

“Aye. There is no turning back now. Get inside.”

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Two fortnights into your travels, the Sisterhood of Gosha remained such a perpetrator of evil in Lysander's mind that it was seldom you experienced true rest. His paranoid particularities were most prevalent when it came to indoor accommodations as opposed to lying on cold, dewy grass beneath a backdrop of black-blue sky. Starless. Unending.

He was comfortable with his body open to the great expanse of the world because, in those amazing spaces, he knew he would always prevail. None other than his own kin and formidable magicians could fell him. And yet, now more frequently than ever, he was misplaced—landing in slanted wood buildings filled with small things and far too many windows.

Those things haunted him so terribly that he started encroaching on your privacy by barging into your lodging at all hours, claiming that walls and windows and doors created cramped spaces that made it easier for all the wrong sorts to hide. Imagined wretches, shapeless and malleable in shadows, molded into every little crevice that he could not maneuver.

Often, for this very reason, he would remove furniture from whichever room you chose to occupy. He abandoned them in the corridors for the staff to shove against walls so other guests could get around.

It left you with slim arrangements for sitting and eating. Fortunately, he came with enough sense about him to leave the beds alone, but windows must be locked at all times, and you were not allowed a room with doors leading to adjoining rooms.

One night, while staring out an open window at a blackbird roosting on a rooftop nearby, waiting for the maid assigned to boiling water to fill your bathtub, you thought about defying Lysander and just how strongly palatable an urge it was.

Paltry retaliation that held your stomach in unseeable hands, twisting it around into some awful mass. When the feeling started to subside, your stomach was placed center in those faced-up palms mockingly—a reminder that you could feel things beyond deep relaxation and deep boredom. You were only human.

The maid emerged from the corner after she'd emptied her bucketfuls into the tub, filling your room with pale steam. Wispy stuff that smothered your nostrils in wet heat, gave your skin a greasy shine. It moved swiftly towards the window and fogged the cool glass opaque gray as it passed straight through into the night air.

“Ah, this is no good. You could catch a cold. I will close it for you once you're in the bath,” said the maid, who then spun away with mechanical stiffness upon noticing you unfastening buttons and removing clothing. “I—pardon me. If you'd like to get comfortable—”

“The window is fine as is.”

Such a frank refusal was met by the maid lightly pacing in place, long skirts fluttering and winding her ankles. “My apologies, but the knight would disagree with you. It was difficult for the owner to convince him to let me even see the inside of this room to fill your tub. I fear what he may do if I do not…”

The longer you listened to this madness, the more desperate you were to disobey Lysander. In your hermitage, you’d gorged on absolute freedom as if it too had been in endless supply like your wine and rice, forgetting that the world beyond your barrier could not be as ungovernable as you were.

“Lie to him then, if it's something that bothers you so much,” you told her. It seemed so inconsequential to you, but the maid’s entire body jerked with emotion, the intention to turn around to look you in the face.

She did not, likely thinking of how close you were to full nudity at that point. “I—did you not hear that I'm afraid of him? We all are. We do not want to wear away his patience.”

“Then, tell him I've kicked you out before you could close the window. Surely it's easier to ask for forgiveness for something you weren't given the opportunity to do.”

This pacified her, albeit poorly, as she continued to fidget as though she'd forgotten how to do anything else. Her acquired silence were moments spent conjuring up ways to challenge you more on the matter, whereas you used it to search the endless depths of pocket space on your robes until you found what you were looking for.

A very generous nugget of gold was placed at her eyeline and at first, when she gasped, you thought it’d been more of a throaty scoff of affront. But, then, she snatched it from your hand, examined it closely, tried to magnify imperfections and falsities in it with just the twitching wet globes in her head.

She would find none because you'd been careful. It had taken you hours to transmutate it from an oddly shaped stone you'd found while urinating behind thorned brush just off the main road where the Witch Queen’s carriage traveled, into the smooth, glowing prize that it was now.

“Is—is this real?” asked the maid.

“Of course it is. I made it myself,” you said.

The maid tucked the gold into her apron, curtsied in the wrong direction, and hurried from your room. You tracked the swift patter of her feet across the floorboards until they faded, intermingling with all the rest of the sounds permeating the inn.

That calming, faraway ambiance was as fast to fracture as your respite was, however. From down the hall, metal scraped and rattled and approached your door quickly. You were fully unclothed, having gradually added each piece into a neat stack set aside, and gathered bathing soaps and balms and fragrances to take with you into the water. You dropped those on the floor and darted across the room.

You envisioned the Knight's neck slanted, pressed to his shoulder within the confines of his armor as he strided to your door, as most establishments never anticipate having to accommodate dragons or creatures larger than orcs.

You yanked the linens off your bed and wrapped yourself in them just as he opened the door.

He took in the unusually revealing sight, not moving for a long time. Some of your lasting uncertainties about him went away that night, while new ones surfaced.

How humorous was it that the Knight of Noss could be disoriented by a meager state of undress?

How concerning was it now that he truly knew you existed?

He could no longer starkly ascribe you as ‘the disgruntled magician’. No longer were you just the robes you wore. You were all asymmetry, gooseflesh, shedding hair, and tough calluses from years of wandering hard terrains in the same boots.

Your utter humanness in that moment of stillness had softened you to him, even with your dour expression and acerbic tongue.

“Some knight you are.” If you couldn't crack his armor, you wished to do so to his pride. You weren't malicious by nature, but embarrassment and unknowable things made your skin itch and bittered your mood. “Out of here, fool!”

“Allow me to intrude for a moment. I'll check now before you bathe.” He said this somewhat laboriously, as if suddenly struck through the back, winded by surprise and pain. “Step aside.”

You dragged layers of linen with you to the door and stood in his way. “No. You intrude too much. I went into isolation because people intrude too much and want too much. Begone, Knight.”

“Will you check the windows yourself tonight, then? You've got more to worry about than just thieves and cats getting inside. Open windows while you sleep thins the veil between our realm and others.”

When you pushed him out with half the weight of your body against the door, he went willingly into the hall with its low ceiling and compact walls. The sight of his armored mass in the incommodious space, tight and bent like items crammed inside a box, made you claustrophobic.

“That’s just old superstition,” you said.

“Aye. That it may be, but all superstition stems from a single truth. And visitors in the night coming through open windows is no superstition.” There was no denying he was right in saying that, but even so, you would not give him pleasure by letting him back inside. “It's a meager thing I'm askin’ of you.”

“Fine. I'll be sure to check them.”

Had Lysander been a true dragon without the innate patience and good-naturedness of his human blood, your flippant response would've been perceived much differently. An egregious act of disrespect to a superior being, of which dragons largely believed that they were. But, for all of the harsh edges of adamantine and dragonscale he wore, and his precise, guttural intonations which always made your chest quiver, he was remarkably even-tempered.

At first, when he did not immediately go away, staying hunched over in that strange wadded shape of black iridescent protrusions and looking straight at you through the slit in his helmet, you thought you'd finally agitated him inside that suit. Yet, as the moments passed without change, you grew increasingly aware of the scratchy linen against your bare skin and warmth reaching up your neck.

He could've been admiring your frame drowned in heaps of fabric, or observing the soft, swaying glow on your shoulders from nearby candlelight. If the grotesque stories about his unappeasable lust were to be believed, surely the opportune silence was his sizing you up, comparing you to his past conquests.

The most despicable part of leaving your isolation was all the wondering you did now. When before you'd been kept far too busy by vicious snapdragons in the garden and birds gossiping on a branch overhead about the baker’s wife and his cousin.

But, once you thought of the Witch Queen’s succulent figs, and the magic you’d been promised a taste of, suddenly your focus returned. Everything else was mediocre.

Lysander could think of you however he pleased.

“Goodnight,” you told him.

“Ah,” he livened at your voice, “aye. Goodnight.”

Afterwards, you discovered the bathwater to be lukewarm and beyond the possibility of enjoyment, but scrubbed yourself clean with soap and coarse sugar anyway. You let your hair halfway dry by leaning back in a chair, head tipped out the window to catch the nighttime breeze. It moved lethargically, cradling your scalp with cool fingers and flicked pearls of water dangling off strands back onto your face.

When you had tired of that, you left the window alone, enticed into doing so by lasting threads of defiance. You snuffed out candlelight and laid wide awake under the prickly linens for a short while.

Light feet shuffled down the hall. The smooth undersides of their leathery soles were an effortless glide across the floor boards. Explosive laughter pushed through cracks in the walls and the gap under your door, reaching you from across the inn where the guests inclined to nighttime wakefulness congregated in the common room. Its carefree nature, buoyant in the way of a life loved and well-worn despite hardship was contagious.

You smiled.

Outside, a beggar serenaded the moon peacefully, uncaring of just how badly he truly sounded. A bird startled from a high place close by and took flight. Meanwhile, in some distant alleyway, tomcats yowled and fought, and would likely die fighting. You closed your eyes.

The next time you opened them, you were not in your bed at the inn.

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Hunsiya was the name your captor gave you though you hadn’t asked for it, mere moments after rousing into some state of wakefulness. Your face and tongue were swollen from having been slouched across your thighs for an indeterminate period of time, nose heavy with pressure, hands anchored behind your back by glowing gold twine that pulsed with enchanted heat.

You could feel the magic coming off of it and rolling around the dim room where you were held hostage in. It permeated the space with smothering density, swathing you in prickly warmth and cold like a coat made of sanded down briars. The downy hairs on the back of your neck stood up; tiny spines, for magic of this magnitude could only mean there were many magicians present within the Sisterhood of Gosha, and you hungered for what they had.

“Mortal magic eaters are an impossibility, and yet, here you sit before me! Terrifying!” Hunsiya pierced a chunk of rare meat with her fork, raising it up, a toast you didn't reciprocate. “It was worth us waiting to catch you, because you did all the hard work for us, didn't you? Letting us right in and commanding a dragon. Not an easy task, my friend.”

She had removed your bonds and led you to a different room. Bursts of orange lantern light made it bright, forcing you to blink rapidly as your eyes reddened and watered in an effort to acclimate. You were situated in another chair. Lush cushioning pulled you deep into luxurious softness that molded your thighs and gripped them unrelentingly. Strongly scented wood polish lifted off the armrests as your fingertips moved across their silky luster.

Your stomach pressed lightly into the edge of a long table with a sumptuous feast stretched across it. Hunsiya only had to make a stately gesture with her arm across the table for you to fill the empty plate in front of you with as many delicacies as you could.

Tender meat dishes oozing blood and oil. Savory, herbal stews. Glazed, softened vegetables. Thick sauces in vessels with pinched spouts. Fruit desserts arranged like tiny islands in bowls surrounded by oceans of hot, caramel-colored syrups. Everything that could go into your mouth without coming back out, did.

Hunsiya watched appraisingly as you gorged. The twirling fork between her fingers told you there were things she wanted to say, thoughts important to investigate, but would doubtlessly mean less than nothing to you if she spoke of difficult things too soon.

So, she bided her time by asking trifling questions to which you only gave half-answers or simply swished your head in response. Once your consumption slowed to pretty cuts, thoughtful shapes in the fruit dessert, lapping at thin layers of syrup on the back of your sterling spoon, her verbal onslaught began.

“The Sisterhood of Gosha wants to dethrone the Witch Queen. But, we want to do this discreetly, without it being known to the city or her council. We will remove her and have one of our own replace her. All this you already know,” she proclaimed, “but, we will have you help us do this.”

Her words were forceful, stacked with ruthless confidence; fearlessness that could've only belonged to someone whom others believed was untouchable.

You knew her type: affable leaders with pitch black hearts and slippery intentions that never truly included the people they'd claimed to love. They embraced and kissed tear-stained cheeks soothingly before sending them away to their deaths. Later, these autocrats sat upon their thrones, which were erected upon a foundation of discarded loyalty and bones.

“I have no interest in that. Why not threaten to kill me instead?” you asked, now drawing lines through the cooling sauces with a blunt knife, watching the viscous stuff slowly ooze back into place.

Hunsiya smiled. “Because even I'm not foolish enough to believe that'd get me anywhere. You magic eaters are walking, living, breathing bombs.” She leaned back in her seat to observe your etching, saying after a time, “What if I told you I could guarantee you a way into the Witch Queen’s orchard?”

Your skillful motions in the sauce ceased. “She's already promised me the fig fruit from her orchard.”

“A promise is so hollow, my friend,” Hunsiya insisted with crinkling, deep-set eyes the color of aged honey. Many wrinkles appeared, creating uneven terrain above her cheekbones. The lines in her face were beautiful, disarming and alluring, but not in the least bit kind.

“A promise doesn't mean anything to a person who sees no value in it. A guarantee, though? That has tax. It has weight. A guarantee means that there is work to be done and there's a reward at the end of it. People are much more inclined towards rewards than maybes and promises.”

After such a large meal, you were growing drowsy and distracted. The only thing keeping you awake was no longer having a bed to lay in (you even craved the scratchy linens), and the thought of the Witch Queen’s magic on your tongue being oddly stimulating.

“Perhaps,” you relented begrudgingly, dragging each part of the word in a listless slur. “What does your ‘guarantee’ entail?”

“Nothing too difficult. You're almost there already. You need to claim absolute loyalty from the Witch Queen’s Knight.” Hunsiya said. “Who else better to inadvertently orchestrate the fall of a sovereign than her own servant? Who else better to help you into the orchard than someone who already knows it intimately?”

What foul and underwhelming logic.

It was a further notch in your motivation to end this expedition quickly and return home to your hermitage. You missed the roaring waterfalls with their colorful froth, the news from nearby towns carried by chirruping birds with roundabout ways of saying things, the carnivorous plants in your flower beds bristling at the sight of you nearing with shears to snip their thorns so they'd be more docile and only feed on rodents.

You'd only been away for a short time, but your mind reconstructed the snug shelter where you had lived for countless days.

Inside, you imagined a sheer layer of grime settling across all your things like ugly pale gray-brown organza: tabletops, chairs, bedsheets, and the bath towels with long, wooly naps that left behind handprints when you touched them. You'd have to vigorously scrub every surface, lovingly polish dust off of shelves of baubles and tomes, summon the wind within your walls to push the motes of dirt and time out.

But then, you always recalled the taste of the Witch Queen’s figs; their ambrosial sensations. The smooth, tender flesh splitting against your teeth as succulent nectar seeped into your mouth, spreading numbness across your tongue when the fruit’s overbearing sweetness made your cheeks tingle and pucker.

More than the fruit itself, you wished to sink your teeth into her magic and meld it into oneness with you. Absorb it. Consume.

Consume.

Consume…

“After tonight, he sees you differently. He no longer can witness you as his queen’s newest procurement. Now, you are substance. You are his longing. His painful yearning. He would lay with you if you allowed it.” Hunsiya was impatient, her voice a thunderous demand for obedience. “What I am saying is that he is more than willing to give into your every whim.”

“Dragons are unfalteringly loyal to those that they choose,” you argued. “Even if what you say is true, what he may now think of me doesn't compare to the millenia he's devoted to the Witch Queen.”

Hunsiya’s smile was vulpine; long and cunning in a way of a woman with secrets that you did not know. It sent heat to your head, behind your eyes, into the fingertips busy pounding out a rhythm on the tabletop.

“Fine, then.” You'd entertain her for a while longer. To sedate your annoyance, you reached far onto the table to pluck a handful of glistening, pinkish grapes from the bushel in a woven basket. You ate three. “You're telling me to seduce the loathsome Knight of Noss. How do you propose I go about doing such a thing?”

“Imagine a creature that's never known freedom a day in its life. It knows no existence outside of its cage of expectations and bonds it cannot see nor overcome on its own. What do you think would happen to the creature should it suddenly gain freedom?” asked Hunsiya, now leaning forward on her elbows, over a spot on the table cleaned of dishware and crumbs. “Think about it.”

“I don't need to,” you sipped water from a silver goblet which looked tarnished in the orange lantern light. “Your theory: an imprisoned creature that has never known freedom would go insane should it spontaneously gain freedom. Or, if it's a cute little dog, it’d just die in the wild. But, I suspect you're not talking about a dog.”

“Indeed.” Hunsiya stayed in her huddled shape of elbows and hands, head sideways to contemplate you. “The Knight of Noss is bound to his queen only because she makes it so. You're a magic eater. You've smelled it. You've seen it. The Witch Queen's magic that binds him. Yes, yes, I know you've seen it. And you can break it.”

Of course you'd seen it.

The magic that the Witch Queen used to bind Lysander was unlike what she had used to possess the melted man and the burned spy from the sisterhood.

Magic had a taste and what she had forced upon them was rancid and dead. A nauseating odor which spread through your nose and climbed down the back of your throat, clinging and throbbing like something alive, something infectious and vile. It was necromancy defiled by the lich and wayward magicians who'd sold their goodness in pursuit of something more.

Lysander's curse was that he was a bastard and his humanness could not eclipse the might of the Witch Queen's greed to keep him. She had wisely imprisoned the magical birthright his dragon blood gave him, thus, all he knew was colossal strength and the turmoil of a human heart.

In that way, you pitied him and his existence. You'd thought it the day he had approached you, carrying his burdensome armor and sword and the thick chains of hot white magic that had flickered in and out of existence before your eyes, descending from an empty sky. You wondered if he knew you could see them.

“It is unlikely that he is aware you're a magic eater, nor that his queen’s intentions are not so benign as simply keeping you as a trophy, and yet”—she gave you a derisive sneer— “you’re willingly walking to your doom. You know this, you just cannot resist temptation, can you?”

She found triumph in your silence and went on, “Dragons may be masters of natural magic, but he is no true dragon. He is impressionable, unsure of who he is if he is not a weapon. An enslaved butcher.”

“Free him.” Suddenly earnest, she thudded interlaced hands down onto the table, sending a ripple shuddering through silverware and plates and bowls across the table, up into your arms. “Free the Knight of Noss of the Witch Queen's hold. Do it slowly. Do it wisely. A dragon is most loyal to those who are most loyal to them.”

And, before you could speak your part, the spacious eating room swelled with ragged fluttering that you'd initially thought to be numerous coarse coats being shaken out behind you.

When you looked around, there were dozens upon dozens of blackbirds perched throughout the room, materialized from nowhere and reeking of magic. Their talons grabbed onto and into any surfaces they could find, wings twitching violently as if preparing to take flight, beady eyes aglow in orange light and focused intention.

The moment you sprung upright, knocking over your chair with the back of your legs, hands raised for invocation, the blackbirds surged at you in a hellish cacophony of shrill squawks and flapping wings. Your hands shrank against your head instead, protecting your face from their wind, their claws, as they encircled you, never making contact.

Through gaps in their wingspan, you watched Hunsiya slowly rise from her seat, smiling as though she were seeing off a cherished friend. Her fingers fluttered farewell through the small, moving apertures. Just then, the darkness of the birds and their shrieks closed in, encasing you in their strange smell of stale barnyard hay and uprooted greenery and soil.

Then, there was nothing.

Just as quickly as they had arrived to take you away from the feast and your comfortable chair, they hissed out existence just like a distant, dissipating mirage rising off of hot stone. What had remained of their magical essence was then carried off on the tails of an inky night breeze.

Although this region was in its ripest and hottest season of the year, the air billowing beneath your thin bed clothes made you shiver. You were exposed to the depths of the yawning streets of this nondescript town, lifting your bare toes off of the cobblestone road so they wouldn't freeze. Distantly, and then suddenly close by, you listened to heavy clatters charge through the nighttime veil with swift, monstrous strides.

It was like the earth shook and bent to the ruckus. These wild, fraught vibrations that made your bones ache. Only once he was standing still did that feeling subside.

“You! Where have you been?!” His wrath carried as far and as loud as his armor.

The birds had delivered you to the knight.

“I smell them on you! I smell the sisterhood’s wickedness on you! They stole you away just as I thought that they would. What have they done to you?” Lysander lowered his helmeted face to level to your own, voice dire and taut. “Speak! Your window was wide open and there was nary a thing in your bed except a single blackbird feather. I knew it, then. They came for you.”

You licked your lips. They had dried during your fast flight through the wind and cold, as brief as it was. A delicate sweetness lingered in the corner seams from the fruit desserts; the sticky syrups. “I—yes, I think they did. Maybe they did. I can't be certain.”

“Where did they take you?” he asked.

You tried to act in a way that made it seem as though your thoughts had been left askew, troubling you deeply, “Somewhere dark. Somewhere dank and foul and frightful. I was tied to a chair. I don't remember anything else. Now I'm here, with you.”

“Vile wenches!” he sympathized, perhaps so riled by the brazenness of the sisterhood that he wouldn't think of you anymore, despite remaining at eyeline with you. “There is no end to their evil, their depravity, their obsession to claim Noss for themselves. Those worshippers of a whore goddess!”

You instigated, “Gosha is disgraced.”

“Aye, a fallen goddess,” he agreed. “Mother of harlots.”

Then, he stilled like a forward-facing statue overlooking a wide garden, staring deeply into you, seeing you just as he had mere hours ago: vulnerable and nearly bear.

It was dreadful when he spoke again because his malice had detached from him like a scab. Beneath his vanished fury was an otherworldly patience, gentleness of a kind that couldn't survive in a world like this, much less what you deserved.

“Did you leave the window open?”

Your heart thudded in your chest, a sensation simultaneously unfelt, yet weakening as guilt deluged and rushed you bodywide. It hurt. It did things of its own volition: mimic the pulse in your neck, force a stone down your throat, and push all the blood in your body into your head to make it sweat and throb.

“Are you mad?” This voice was unfamiliar, but it was your own. You loathed its apologetic quietness. You hated him for luring more humanity out of you.

“Aye,” he said with his newfound softness still remaining. He added, “Verily.”

You replied, “I'm sorry,” and only meant it halfway, for what you were about to do was arguably heinous. You knew no remorse when it came to the need of magical satiety, which was something only the Witch Queen’s orchard could give you now.

Lysander was cold in your arms as you reached around the entire bulk of his head, the tips of your fingers unable to fully interlock. The protrusions on his helmet made for a precarious embrace, one which you kept as a featherlight touch in the event he grew to ire and tried to lash out by gouging you on the adamantine and dragonscale wings.

“Does nothing frighten you? What life have you lived to be so unafraid of all that I am?” He sounded stricken, winded by something unseen. Irritation led into confusion settling on the fringes of his words. “Your bravery is in a dangerous place. Have you forgotten the abomination and devil that I am? Have you so easily forgotten my bloodlust? My carnal desires? That neither human nor beast are spared of me when I choose it?”

You kissed his cool forehead, making a sound against the armor before returning to his level and pressing your lips to the hinged jaw piece. He was sure to feel the fog of your warm breath through the scored vents, swirling slow and seductive around his face, perhaps still tinged with the aftermath of your exorbitant meal.

“Is this the same mind that left the window wide open in spite of my warning? If so, I fear for what will become of you. You don't know what you're doing.” He declared, saying this only so he wouldn't be confronted with the revealing silence.

“If you're so fearsome, then push me away. I'll never touch you again,” you said. “We’ll travel the rest of the way to Noss without a word. You'll send me off to your queen, and you’ll be rid of me. Sounds convenient, right? So, push me away.”

He didn't.

Instead, Lysander enfolded you in his arms, pulling you high onto your toes, and against the less perilous points on his armor. He was aware of this threat because he held you self-consciously; close enough to feel the heat of a fire while fearful of it burning him.

For you, the proximity was exhilarating in the way of explorers who sometimes lose their minds to euphoria when they find something no one else has.

For you, this indicated that there were no obstacles barring you from the Witch Queen’s sinful fruits, as the one thing that could've stopped you was holding you flush to his chest of ice and cradling the back of your head with a leathery hand. The claws of his gauntlet were a light scratch on your scalp, but their weight was an anchor straining every muscle in your neck.

He pulled your face into him, into the deeper dark of his mass as the hinges on his helmet let out their shrill outcry of nonuse, and kissed you. It was a fervent moment where his lips roamed yours top to bottom, pressing the corners and the nooks where syrupy residue stuck before letting out quivering breaths against your mouth to diffuse his excitement.

Lysander was up against the halves of himself, both radical tormentors that craved to split him into separate parts so that they may become a whole of themselves. His humanity was devastating, as it was what felt the most and desired so hopelessly to draw you in and never let go. His dragon blood was passionate, but it was wise and used to waiting for these fleeting morsels of good fortune which willed him to live on.

You let him kiss you through his turmoil while using this to your own advantage. Your fingertips moved inside his helmet and touched the skin of his jaw. The feel of it was unusual in that it did not mold or divot with human fleshiness, rather it was perfectly solid like a rough stone, tapering down into a fine chin lightly knocking your own.

The skin was craggy and heavily scarred with rounded, uniform indentations larger than the pads of your fingers could fit. Something had existed in place of these scars at one point, leaving behind disfiguring injuries and memories equally as torturous. His lips were of lesser toughness than his face, thick and slippery smooth with moisture from your breaths and saliva.

It was you who withdrew then, satisfied with the taste you’d given him and his yearning. He had little fear of being seen by you in this lightless hour, so he didn't immediately withdraw into his enormous adamantine husk by covering himself with the slotted vents.

“Forgive me, I should have resisted. I reacted poorly to your words, but I was not dishonest in what I did,” said Lysander with somber candor. Although he no longer held you in his arms, several of his long, leather-clad fingers wrapped your wrist in warmth. “It was wise of you to stop. When you touched me, it was… unlike anything I've ever known. You would've met my carnal lust, then, and I would not have thought anything of hurting you to fulfill myself.”

“You're pitiful, Lysander.”

They were harsh words spoken kindly. Arising from a place of knowing fear and desperation and profound loneliness so hollow that it leached away the joy of fuschia sunsets, of fresh spring afternoons laying arched with the hillside and smelling honeysuckle, of comforting oneness during gatherings at end week markets where young children wove flower stems in your hair and stuck them in the pockets of your robes.

You had once been part of that world before isolation, whereas it was a world he had never known—not with his servitude to the Witch Queen of Noss.

“Aye, I suppose that I am.”

Then, your eyes cut above his head as the Witch Queen’s bonds blinked into existence: bright yellow-white, interlinked holy halos descending from nothingness. The sheer number of them was what made the sight terrible, far more troubling from the first time you witnessed them.

The chains swayed, clinking into one another against a breeze somewhere faraway before abruptly yanking taut, looking like countless lashes of white light moving in unison. They gave Lysander a start, but he made no sound. His agony was discreet, indicated only by subtle metallic scuffing between armored fingertips as they writhed and soothed with his hand not holding your wrist.

For the Witch Queen to feel compelled to expend this much of her power to demand subservience meant that the magic Lysander had been endowed with was frightful at least.

“I don't blame you for your urges. You're half of a whole dragon, after all.” As you outstretched a hand into the sky, around one of the chains which glowed and pulsated and burned deliciously in your closed palm, you tried to remember the conversation from before. “My magic must not be easy for you to withstand.”

“Nay, what I confessed had nothing to do with your magic.” Lysander surrounded you in his fortress of jagged peaks and impenetrable dragonscale, just as he had before. “Your touch was burning—scorching me, even. I've never felt anything like it. That softness. Such gentleness. You did not touch my skin like someone cursed, like the abomination that I know that I am. I fear I will never feel it again.”

You hardly heard him over the sound of brittle magic shattering into airless black. Clusters of white burst apart over yours and Lysander's heads, flickering out of existence without landing; a false image; fatigued eyes tricked in this is unordinary hour. And then, the Witch Queen’s banshee screams echoed from somewhere far, far away.

────────────────────────

Skewered and halved blackbird remains followed the Witch Queen’s glossy black carriage like a funeral cortège. Some fell out of trees, wings flapping, bodies crumpling out of existence much the same way as burning paper wasting into crisp embers before ending as specks of ash. Magic exhausted. Untraceable. Gone.

Lysander made an example out of the rest; the majority he had slain. Where they landed was where they stayed, turned into cold and unmoving parts of the landscape, making for an audacious trail leading right up to your bumper. This was a challenge he wanted, a chance to prove his malice, retaliate the embarrassment of being outwitted.

The result had been a terribly effective deterrent because in the weeks of traveling in broad daylight by way of the most worn paths, you hadn't seen another soul—human or otherwise. The chittering and scampering of animals dampened against a crescendo of silence, making a pleasant summertime breeze into a violent windstorm through the fluttering tree leaves of the forest, flanking either side of the carriage.

At some point, you had become familiar with the noisiness of the chassis underneath your feet. In particular, how the frame would quiver if one of the skinny wheels struck a craggy rock raised too far above the dirt and detritus, or one of those same wheels slipped out of the well-worn impressions left behind on the pathway by other carriages and wagons hauling special things.

You were often bored as Lysander preferred to stride alongside the carriage, door-side, superbly blocking your exit. It left you with little to do other than speak with him when he could tolerate it. Transmutate strange things you grabbed off the ground and hid within your bottomless pockets while urinating in the thicket and behind trees. The hard wear in the road made success nearly unachievable.

You'd even memorized what movements the silvery-gold stallions made to evoke wrath and whip from the coachman staring down at their backs from his high wooden perch.

Once or twice, you'd been irritated enough by the cruelty and echoing crack of the whip in the sky that you raised roots on the path ahead to catch every wheel so, when they were caught in the thick, wriggling greenery, the carriage would lurch violently and propel the coachman into the throng of horses below.

They were no ordinary horses either, as their ethereal glow and intelligent eyes indicated they'd once carried gods and goddesses on their backs and ate golden apples from orchards across the cosmos. But, they'd been defiled by the Witch Queen’s magic centuries ago and now they were here: bright as the sun and proud, helpless to defy the magic which confined them to this fate.

In return for your kindness, the horses were as watchful over you as Lysander was. They allowed you to stroke their long, lustrous faces and untangle their silvery manes with your fingers until you could let the hairs fall away like threads of tinsel. Sometimes they fell asleep like that, heads hung low, ears flattened outward.

“You've made a great ally in them,” said Lysander one evening. A fire was already going nearby with the bruised and battered coachman huddled next to it, silent and seething as always. You were sitting far away from the flames, outside of reach of the ring of orange, pulsing light when the knight approached.

He held something small and black and dripping in one of his hands before tossing it aside into the brush. Your eyes followed, spotting its landing and rustling among the briars and thick shrubbery, resembling nothing but a shuddering mass in the dark.

“The stallions, you mean?” you waited for the bush to stop shaking before looking away. Lysander had come to join you where you sat on a large boulder, armor grinding as it turned into a typical wadded shape when he crouched low and hunched between his thighs. You never thought he looked comfortable that way. “They were once steeds of the heavens and now they're enslaved by the Witch Queen's magic in much the same way as you are, you know? How could I not be moved to do something for them? Revenge is warranted by things held against their will.”

“Do you pity them as you do me?” he asked.

You leaned across your legs to be nearer to his helmeted face, hoping against futility that, perhaps, you'd discern a pair of gleaming amethysts through all of the shadows. When you did not, you settled into that arched posture, lightly touching across the hinged jaw piece with your fingertips. He no longer stirred when you did this, desensitized to the disbelief that no creature in possession of their own mind would dare to.

“Right now, I'm thinking more about how you're on the verge of wiping out local blackbird populations,” you quipped, but you were worried that it was true. “Leave them, Lysander. The birds are innocent, and even the birds made of magic are at the mercy of their conjurer.”

“Aye, that may be, but do not forget that the Sisterhood of Gosha stole you from your bed in the dead of night. It had taken a single moment of poor judgment for them to do so.” He pressed his face forward against your fingers, as though relishing the thought that your warmth could reach him that way. “Birds are inconspicuous. They are as much vermin as rats and rabbits. The sisterhood knows how to conceal their magic and when they contain it in creature's as small as birds—I cannot always distinguish a roosting blackbird from one exuding magic and malice. It troubles me.”

“That is largely in part due to the Witch Queen’s power over you. You know this.”

Whenever he would sigh, it made a muffled whistling sort of sound that no doubt ricocheted off the adamantine and dragonscale around his head. You imagined it would be a tiring thing to be hidden away inside a helmet, breathing fresh air through narrow slots, forgetting the softness of pillows and a bed partner’s bosom.

But, time passed and you realized that his helmet was as much of a boon for him as it was an obstacle to things he desired.

Inside of that blank space swelled in darkness, you had no way of knowing what expression he looked at you with right now—if he were even capable of maneuvering his tough skin into a grimace or a smile. You had no way of knowing how he’d looked at you after kissing you back then.

“The blackbirds,” he went on tersely, tearing into the quiet moment as easily as he did the poor creatures, “I can’t allow what happened then to happen again. I'll continue to ask for your forgiveness for such minor atrocities if it means you are safe.”

This was like him: roughly shifting conversation away from your prying to get him to divulge a true opinion about his enslaver. He seldom implicated the Witch Queen of evils she committed; how enmeshed she was in the entire fiber of his being. You supposed that if she was all he had ever known, even he himself could not comprehend the wickedness which still imprisoned him.

You fitted fingertips into the vents of his helmet, but your eyes were elsewhere now, up at the empty sky and the razored peaks of tall trees which seemed to grow inward, encircling you. It was as claustrophobic as when you witnessed Lysander bent sideways in manmade spaces. The Witch Queen’s halo of chains remained stubbornly, in numbers so many that it tired you to simply look at them.

Already, you'd destroyed countless but there were countless to go. Time had regained urgency only to belittle you, telling you that you would fail. Those long days from before felt squandered, lost to sultry summertime hazes with no relief and perfumed bathwater filling your head with sweltering fuzz.

You mourned what you should've done but didn't do. Considered solemnly that Lysander might have continued to live on unhappily, yet uncomplicatedly, if you had cast him away from your hermitage and never met him.

At Noss, it was expected that you would be destroyed once you were in the audience of the Witch Queen, for the humiliation you had caused her was unpardonable, no matter how prodigious her lust of you truly was.

You remembered before, when she had been so desperate as to be willing to entice you with a living organism—her forbidden orchard. It was her: breathing her magic, her essence tilled into the soil, her soul within the core of every luscious fruit on low-hanging branches. Her magic was at its apex in Noss, amplified by the orchard.

Your might would not overcome hers alone.

Was it worth it, then? To even hope for a morsel of her fragrant fruit, the magic weaving throughout toothsome meat, ripe flesh bright as jewels.

Was it worth it, still? To be weakened by insatiety because you were a magic eater; one of the most selfish entities to exist in any realm. If it meant a lick, a bite, a taste, a swallow, you were convinced that it would fulfill the savage hunger coiling inside of you like writhing parasites finding ecstasy after being without for so long. It made you fearless. It made things like suicide meaningless; inconsequential for the seconds of bliss before the endless shadow.

Yes, yes, you were exasperated and dismissive even within your own head. This will be my end, that I am certain. I will never see outside of Noss. I will never see my home again. Everything will keep gathering dust. Moths will eat my nice robes; they'll eat my tomes. My garden will rot and die. What a curse, what a shame. What a shame…

You flinched as Lysander’s cold claw, darker than the night itself, stroked the underside of your jaw. He drew your eyes back into his chasm, the hinges raised. They had been soundless this time, or you’d simply become unobservant of most things now that the world was unexciting.

“Are you unwell?” he asked, carefully pacing the words as though unsure of the sort of outcome they'd inspire. He wanted something and didn't know how to ask for it. “Speak. What's troublin’ you? Don't think I've ever seen you quite this way before.”

“It will all end soon,” you said, nebulously, without a trace of fear because your fate was ineluctable. A fish beating its fins upstream against the current only to become exhausted and be seized by the jaws of a bear. The starving rodent, obeying its very nature to seek out food and shelter, finds a house with crevices and pungent tidbits on a spring-loaded trap.

You were the fish, and you were the mouse. You threw yourself into the strong current, snuck into the drafty house with moldy daubs of food tucked away in a corner. It was innate. According to your own will.

But, you thrived in asking questions. That was all you could do. “What will happen once we arrive, Lysander? What will happen to me? To you?”

“I cannot say,” he admitted, “I do not know. My task will be complete once you are delivered to the Witch Queen's doorstep.”

He sighed in the oblivion of night, soul weary, but went on nonetheless, “You and I will be separated, and it will be the same as always for me. I will be sent away to wait until I am beckoned again. I will be dispatched to subjugate insurrections. I will waste hundreds, thousands more with my blade on the battlefield. I will see carnage and only myself still standing. I will see endless patrols in the darkness. I will see the four stone walls of my cell where I am kept. Nothing else. There will be nothing else for me.”

“And, that is what you want? To be separated? For there to be nothing else?”

To this, Lysander receded into his suit, into silence, as though confronted in a way he had never been before. You were pushing him to answer something difficult. Something foreign, selfish, disastrous.

“Nay,” was all he could bring himself to say.

You looked away again, up at the clattering chains, wondering if more of their numbers were obscured within themselves. The Witch Queen was aware of your intentions, gleaning from them that the Sisterhood of Gosha had reached you first, and she would not let you have the weapon she’d adroitly honed over a millennia so easily.

This was what magicians with power to flaunt did best: fought from hidden places with wit, tug-of-war over lesser things. There could never be a clear winner because these grudges spanned eternities; to the heavens and the underworld, along the misty galaxies dotting the cosmos.

But this was Lysander, he was not less nor was he other. The Witch Queen’s cleaver on the battlefield; the appalling Knight of Noss, and he was kissing you again.

You gave yourself to his passion; fragile, fraying restraint like time-worn threads on a garment. He pressed your lips separately, then together, a rough sort of kneading that pinched, numbed, could've swallowed you if that's what he had in his mind to do.

Unlike times before, you didn't busy your hands on his face to map out his odd anatomy. It occupied too much space in your head to visualize, stole away your enjoyment in blind snatches. Whenever you did, you still searched for softness in his cheeks, as his unyielding flesh made him more dragon than human when you felt it. The patterned scars etched into his flesh were repulsive, abnormal, and doubtlessly still made him ache on the worst of days.

Lysander would never be willing to let you see his face because of them, this you understood now.

You reached for buttons to unfasten your robes. Neatness fell apart, layers glided down the slope of your shoulders with silky lightness despite their number, what great weight they should've been. Such boldness invited a whip of black breeze to lash your skin, your bare chest and abdomen. The shiver made you feel attractive, whittled you down into a small thing enclosed by his mass.

The dark felt protective; blending you seamlessly with its opaqueness, camouflaging you from everything but his eyes. Ones which saw you exposed to him. Invited him into you.

He was motionless. A tamed beast presented with raw slabs of crude meat still red and smelling of coins. It provoked innate temptation, both exhilarating and frightening because something needed to be done since it was there, but what would be the cost?

“I'll hurt you,” said Lysander in his gentlest rumble, out of true goodness and sincerity. “If I could, I'd always keep you this pristine and lovely. Unsullied by me, or anyone else.”

His cold leather hands touched your body and stayed nowhere for very long. It gave you a start, a shock down your spine whenever he moved for a different handful of your flesh, curve, and fat. The claws overhanging his gauntlet threatened subtly, but he was aware of them with everything that he did.

“Then, walk away, Lysander. You have that choice here. Possibly one of the few you've ever had, or ever will have.”

It was an awful thing to say.

It was meant to be.

“If you want things to stay the same as they've always been, I'll say nothing else. This will be forgotten. I'll even show you one of my magic tricks; wipe this moment from both our minds. I'll wipe the others as well. All that will be left is formality. Wouldn't that be wise for us in the short time we have left? Just say the word, I'll say my own, snap my fingers, and it'll be done. Simple. Harmless.”

Lysander stroked at you lightly like you were flames spitting at his fingertips, or pin-thin briars he was pulling without gloves. His helmeted face closed in on yours once again, his breaths long and hot; a dragon exhaling from the darkness of its sauna-like cavern.

“And what of the other choice?” His interest was half-hearted, genuine in moments of clarity. “There are always two options. Opposites of each other. What is the other?”

You shifted on the boulder where you sat, rested back on outstretched arms and open palms. The real stone under your hands was unlike Lysander's terrain, lifeless and bloodless. You much preferred the feeling of him.

Your nudity was displayed, posed for him, to lure him into a decision you both wanted. With your unclothed chest and fleshy stomach and hips peeking through heaps of fabric, you suggested defiance to him; something he wasn't supposed to do, but would because he chose it for himself.

“The other option is that you choose this, you choose me. And you would be doomed, Lysander.” Indubitably, it would be an unspeakable betrayal. This reclaim of ownership of a body to do with what he pleased. “Things will be changed. We will never be able to go back to how it was before. You will never be the same. You will never be forgiven.”

“Aye, I will be reproached. I will be disgraced, and doomed as I've ever been.” Then, his armored silhouette eclipsed the forest canopy above you. “So be it.”

Gone were the treetops sprawling explosively into starless skies. Treetops as skeletal spires seeming to reach oneness with the night. His enormous husk of ungentle edges and cold was far blacker, more imposing than the ancients, yet his touch spread warmth through you.

He kissed you fast and fleeting from within his sanctuary, and then under your jaw with an open mouth. Shuddering heat and wetness slowly made a descent along your neck, his teeth a glistening concept though not felt. As he explored you, molded the softness of you with his fingers and pinching claws, he found your utter humanness to be divine. The surreality of it stifled his exhilaration.

His lips smoothed across your chest where heat now rose to the surface of your skin. There he rested, seeking to leach it from you, meld it with himself completely, unbelieving that mere centimeters of bone and viscera separated him from your thudding heart. It knocked rhythmically against your house, could've been a clockmaker’s best work with how strongly it reverberated in his head, throbbed in your ears, propelled blood through all of your incomprehensibly tiny places.

A long tongue with some thickness emerged from his helmet, came out serpentine with winding eagerness. It was split severely, nearly halved, and those halves glided across your breasts in damp, lightweight strokes. They caressed the hard peaks of your nipples, made them so sensitive to his lips, the precise flicking of his tongue, that you moaned. Pushed at his adamantine forehead feebly and clenched your thighs for friction.

Your head bloomed with heat that moved, flowing like lava from behind your ears to nestle between your eyes. Barely a touch and you were already full of perversions, haughty courage, flickering urges pulling wool over your soundness, and you wanted things you'd forgotten were possible to be wanted.

Then, you spoke like you were outside of yourself; a spectator looking in on depravity, “I want to touch you. Show yourself to me, Lysander,” and you used a leg to rustle the heavy fabric and chainmail hanging down the front of him.

By then, he had plunged his face down to your stomach, sampled your bathing fragrances and brine produced from your sweat with his tongue. The halves of his tongue were wormlike, slippery, trying to delve below the robes which kept him from smelling you, tasting your arousal.

You wouldn't let him go further. He was at the mercy of your whims, your leg pestering him to hardness. Strain building behind layers.

“Right now, I know no other tormentor as beautiful and devilish as you. I feel weakened by you and your magic. Intoxicated. You're a trickster god come down to seduce me,” said Lysander, through raspy breaths and stones tumbling in his throat. While he thrust his hips against your thighs, he reached past his coverings, loosened them, and let his cock fall.

You were startled by the weight of it as he continued to hump you, insides awash with cold guilt, wrenching in anticipation for what was to come. This was not what you deserved to receive for your crookedness, but you would take it from him, regardless.

For now, your hunger was quiet. For now, you were distracted by his adoration. How he revered your body, your temple of mortality like it was something truly enviable and memorable.

Lysander’s heavy cock wept invisibly on your skin, unseen to you in the dark. The first strokes you laid on it were featherlight, experimenting, yet all the same coquettish and making his entire body flinch with feeling. A groan started within his chest, deep and resounding pleasure rising high in his throat. It diffused into warm, bestial hums so separated from anything human that it astonished you. Aroused you more.

You couldn't fully grasp his girth, not even partway. Only the head fit in your fingers; a silky, spearhead shape which pulsated, oozed sticky heat into your palm as you kneaded it, smeared the stuff around the large slit with your thumb.

The rest of him was unordinary and textured, harsh against your hand as you stroked his length. Flared segments grew severe at his thick base, unsharp ridges grabbed your skin with each pass, creating delicious resistance that earned you his praise with more thrumming; throaty purrs.

A being this substantial was never meant to be experienced by a human, even though he was half-bastard, and despite his unbelonging to either of his bloodlines. You speculated that he'd never been given the option to know any creature so intimately, not with how he shuddered within his jaggedy husk as your mouth sucked the head of his cock, swirling saliva and substance with your tongue.

He would not go far past your teeth, so you did what you could by wetting, prodding his salty slit while both hands wrung his shaft, groped his hefty sac, felt through the coverings and chainmail he had undone for his abdomen. It was strong, clenched, yet jutted out in response to unfamiliarity roaming him. The span of flesh you could traverse without his writhing was the same as the rest of him: scarred and uniform. Something had been taken from him.

“Gods—that’s enough. Enough, now. Quickly. Off of me, you filthy thing!” He was stricken as he spoke, voice urgent and taut, guttural in the way that you liked. You were pushed off of his cock, back down onto the boulder while he rutted hard through your thighs, using all of your flesh and fat and pliability to surround him.

Your body moved like a straw doll; weightless to him, jolting to you. It was over suddenly with a potent groan, his helmeted face thrown up to the sky, and an explosion of hot cum spraying across your thighs. He twitched with more dripping out onto you, but he never went soft.

It had happened so fast that you were left disoriented once everything stopped.

“Lysander—”

“Aye,” he rasped out, winded. “I really am no better than a beast, am I? Forgive me, I didn't know that would happen. You—I hadn't expected you would do that. I never knew it was possible to feel as I just did. What pleasure. What agony. What relief.”

You opened your legs as his spend cooled on your skin, bothered by the way it tightened, dried honey-stiff and tacky.

“The stories about you are all false, then?” you asked, docile as he shucked off your robes and laid them on the ground. A summer quilt spread out over dewy grass. “The stories about your carnality. Your lust for humans and beasts and eagerness to lay with them. Was there any ounce of truth in them?”

“Far be it for me to speak on stories that have grown and aged alongside the trees in this forest. They do me no harm personally, as they remind me that I am still alive. Alive enough to still hear them,” said Lysander, recovered and breathing evenly within his panoply. “You can believe what you'd like.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“Aye, looking at you, I suppose there could be some truth to it.”

You wished your vision could spear through the lightless world, into the dark entanglement of his helmet to see his expression as he looked at you now. Was he smiling? Frowning? Wincing as the threads of his identity unraveled?

“C’mere, you.” He hoisted you off of the boulder to lay you across the soiled robes he'd put down. Satisfied, he stared at you, long and thorough, at your complete nakedness arranged for him to see. “You're such a sight. I've seen much in this life of mine, enough that I would've believed it if I was told I'd seen it all. You? If part of my punishment was for my eyes being removed, I'd regret nothing. If my punishment were to be death, and my final memories were of this time with you, I'd regret nothing still.”

Shame sobered you. Wrapped your head close like a red burning wreath, singed your ears, and made your scalp itch with prickly heat. Your eyes felt sore and reddened, precariously tilting towards tears, which would've been devastating.

“You can still stop,” you blurted, wincing through a kiss, sharp teeth grazing down the column of your throat. He didn't bite you, only teased the idea with them. Soon, his mouth was on your abdomen, forked tongue probing lower still. “Lysander, you can still stop. Choose differently. Spare yourself.”

“Nay,” he replied, throatiness returned. “I've chosen you. You've bewitched me and I want for nothing else. Allow me to return your kindness.”

There then came clattering beside you, of heaviness falling from a height and vibrating the earth as it struck. It shook up through your spine, danced along the back of your neck with thousands of spindly legs. You squinted at the night and saw something darker, a helmet.

Before you could've glimpsed his face, freezing leather pressed to your eyes, fluttering your lashes. He told you not to look at him in his clearest voice. He almost pleaded for it.

“Eyes closed.” His breaths scorched down your thighs, words damp in the seams. “See nothing. Feel everything. Hear me ravish you, and let me hear you be ravished.”

It was his tongue that went first, laving decadently, thoroughly, bunching the serpent halves together; a well waiting for collection, to be filled. He swilled what arousal he could take from you with his saliva and kneaded you with a short, flat nose. You thrashed your hips against him, away from him, anchored in place by his heavy hands, adamantine gauntlet embedding ten stingers below your skin.

Lysander was unclean with you, indecorous in how he sucked and swallowed, kissed into you, ate as far as he could go with seemingly no satisfaction. It was repugnant and ferine, his most subdued self now at the surface and freed. He went on with that intensity until you trembled, body writhing across fabric and grass as you came up onto bent elbows, feeling through a suffocating void of dark and pleasure cinching around you for the top of his head.

You moaned achingly while trying to perceive what you were not allowed to see. Nothing stimulated curiosity more than what was forbidden, and you fathomed why as your fingertips worked to decipher his features, transmitted the rough etchings into bleary images with no beginning or end.

“Do you fear what you feel?” asked Lysander, without ire, but miserable in his yearning. He gave you permission to translate his darkness, make sense of the pits in his flesh, all of the stony, broken protrusions which had been filed down to stumps and never grown back. They were fused to him, bone and cartilage excruciatingly removed, emerging from the sides of his head and his temples. “Does my hideousness frighten you? Am I the abomination that you dreamed of?”

“I know no fear,” you said, and Lysander’s coarse cheeks raised, folded, and strained against your thighs as he smiled. “To me, you are merely Lysander. Not the abomination. Not that damned armor that you wear. Let that be enough.”

Pleased, he returned to you with fervor, to savor more of your push and pull. The jounce of your hips. Wanting him close as much as you wanted to shove him away.

He was mostly an amalgam of nonsense in your head; physical pieces unable to interlock into anything whole. Complicated.

It frustrated you that he would not let you set your eyes upon his true visage. It frustrated you that he was delaying your gratification because he liked licking, sucking you raw so you'd cry out sharply from your chest and not your head.

But, he had become anxious from anticipation, tormented by inevitability, so he turned you over. Maneuvered you onto your knees, splayed them over the sodden robes and damp grass. His armor grated as he came closer, crunching into that unforgiving form of sharpness and cold, startling you with the heat of his cock filling the gap between your legs.

“I'll hurt you,” was spoken differently from before when he had wanted you, looked at you questionably, tried to use his enormity to frighten you. He was unhindered now. “I do not want to hurt you, but I will. I cannot deny what either of my halves crave. I have tasted excess, the essence from your body and your magic. I am yours.”

“I knew what would come from this, Lysander. I know what can happen.” He could tear you apart, perforate your organs, be inundated by desire and biology so immense that he consumes your body. It was far too late to trade this for another course. “If you're mine, prove it to me. Show me how loyal you are. Don't stop until you've left your mark.”

“Aye, as you wish.” His cock dragged firmly along your abdomen, hot and pulsing, twitching against you like a thing searching for a way in. “You say cruel things with such sweetness. I fear that my madness, my brokenness have manifested you, and when this is over, you'll only have been a figment of fantasy.”

You swayed with him, clamped him with your thighs weakened by his tongue. Lysander’s groan resonated, harsher without the helmet, sharp like his teeth.

“If this is a fantasy, however short it is, we should both enjoy it. Fuck me. I'm yours.”

“Aye. You are mine.”

Those hard-worn leather hands and frigid claws were on you again, spread wide everywhere. He could not grab you, enclose you with his iridescent fortress without gouging you on his spikes. Skin-to-skin, burying himself within you completely, that connectedness would always elude him.

So, he devoured you how he could. Had indulged with his entire mouth, his wild hands, and now his cock. His head was gluey and smeared a sluggish trail to your core where he stroked you with it eagerly. Fluids intermingled: his, yours, sweat, salvia, and earthy condensation. More of his seeped out, warm and heady, a thick layer to cover his cock before he took you.

He nudged himself inside, listened for your brittle gasps of shock to the stretch, the great and unnatural intrusion. They came right away. You surprised him by letting him continue, strained the muscles in your legs to accommodate depth, and whimpered only a little when he started to thrust slowly.

You couldn't route your mind to other things as he did this, moved fractionally to minimize your agony, pushed deeper to gape your significantly smaller anatomy. His jaw chattered from overhead, beckoning either in patience, or stifling what sounds of bliss he really wanted to exhale.

Even when he had rearranged you again, down onto one hip with your other leg settled on his arm, he could only sheath himself halfway. He had finally decided to stop after pushing too hard and hearing you gag, fractured the silent air with a startled cry, one which was accompanied by real tears. The only ones you could ever remember spilling, and swiped away as quickly as they had come.

Lysander turned his head to your leg on him, molded a kiss to your shin, and took his time thrusting into you. Eventually, he let you rest on your back with both legs strewn over his arms. His hands cradled the globes of your ass, lifted your lower body up for his cock to reach.

His immense girth with the rough segments and grappling ridges started to feel good. Nothing went missed, nowhere went without being stroked or prodded. Your breaths were as shattered as you felt by him, eyes gazing up vacantly at the starless sky, hands creasing fabric and tearing up black fingers of grass.

At your every moan, his thrusts grew a little more honed and his armor grinded hollowly with a beat, putting some irrational fear in you that he was unscrewing and would fall apart in pieces. His vocalizations were a combination of wild thrumming and bestial panting and bellowing.

The silvery-gold stallions were probably pacing timidly, snorting defensive fog into the air, alerting the disgruntled coachmen to the sounds. He would've heard your frailer noises intertwined with Lysander's and would ask no questions tomorrow, nor be able to bring himself to look at you again.

Lysander’s strokes inside your body reached deep, left you queasy in the head as he effortlessly jostled you on his cock. The segments along his shaft pushed and pulled the fine tissue around your entrance. It throbbed sorely. You detected blood and thought of the faint tang of copper slick on your skin; imagined a pink, creamy ring around his cock.

The ridges were what finished you, built up that orgasmic well in your stomach and loins. It overflowed when you touched yourself and choked from sensitivity, but kept going. The back of your head dug into your soggy robes, joining the grass and the earth and natural indulgences you had abandoned in isolation.

You withdrew behind clenched eyelids, a world made of wrinkled skin and twitching eyelashes. It forced you to focus on Lysander; his ripe, inhuman pleasure as close to climax as you were. It forced you to truly experience his cock, the sheer size of it impaling you again and again, foul and sloppy and never fitting right. The ridges tried to find purchase along your inner walls, adhere unrelentingly like briars to your clothes.

They were evolutionary for dragons, meant to massage to numbness, house a cock cozily until it was flaccid. What you possessed was smaller and far less robust, so with every pass Lysander made, the ridges teased your velvety insides with hard tugs until you were over the edge.

Tiny threads of fire ignited under your skin, carrying you through the white static in your head, torrents of electric writhing through each limb, finger, and toe. It crashed over you so powerfully that you were soundless as if submerged underwater, or trapped in some airless place. Just as fast as it had all come on, the pleasure lifted off of you like a spirit ascending to the gods, leaving you pleasantly spent in cool, static relief.

Lysander had seen your warped grimace, your subsequent facial softening and sighing. He had felt your walls clench him, trying to wring whatever they could from his cock but he hadn't been ready until he saw you calm, intoxicated by emptiness, sprawled open and unmoving below him.

He rutted into you savagely at the end, stirring you back into discomfort, but he was done and cum surged inside of you so strongly that it caused another reaction. You gasped nasally, shivered as he fucked you through his orgasm with feral moans, hips lashing your naked ass with the chainmail he hadn't removed.

His release overflowed; globs of it pushed out, around his cock as he withdrew. It leaked from you sluggish and plentiful, and you pretended for it to be pooling hot white beneath you, under your ass and legs once Lysander let them down gently.

Even in your sedated afterglow, your body stinging, sore and chafed from overuse, you could still think of nothing but catastrophe, soul fruit, and whether Lysander was capable of producing life, or if everything about him was truly damned.

You heard his armor scrape, his helmet returned to complete him: the atrocity known as the Knight of Noss. He had once again become loathsome and impenetrable, but he stayed with you there on the ground, watching your limbs shift around as though the relaxation you felt was everywhere, all around you. An aura radiating, vibrating like a pleased animal.

“Such a sight. I will never tire of it.” He said from within his castle of magnificent thorns. “My days from before feel far away, long gone. They're memories of someone else, someone destined to walk in darkness, through rivers of blood and decay. You see me as more. I am more.”

Your night sky descended, swallowing everything around it into its peaks and mass. He was careful not to come down so far as to crush you beneath his armor, but he covered you, concealed you perfectly from the spiral of ancient trees overhead, from always prying, hidden eyes.

He kissed you. You accepted his lips and his veneration, his chest of ice.

After a moment, “This is our end set in stone, Lysander. From here on out, we will be marching to our doom.”

“Aye,” he soothed grim reality with fearlessness, devotion pressed against your mouth. “We are doomed. But, we face it together.”

Maybe, it wasn't so foolish to hope.

Maybe.

Maybe…

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author's note: so, first and foremost, thank you so much for reading. the concept for the knight of noss has existed in my head for almost fifteen years. until the past three or four years, however, I have never had the skill to be able to execute any of the ideas. to see an idea like this come to fruition after so long is, honestly... overwhelming. to know that there people who wanted to see my explore this idea means even more to me.

if you're interested in the actual story, you're more than free to shoot me questions about it. I did have a massive amount of lore written out, but decided against including it here so as to not drag things on and on.

I hope you enjoyed reading this story, and I hope to hear your thoughts on it! I'll see y'all in the next piece ❤️🙂‍↕️.

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anhesacardia · 3 days ago

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Forbidden Promises

Chapter 1 (Series Masterlist)

Pairing: Modernau!Sukuna x Mother!Reader

Genre: Hidden Baby Trope

Summary: Reader opens up a bakery after running away from her three year relationship with Sukuna, effectively ghosting him and hiding away in the middle of the countryside. Unknown to Sukuna, reader also had a baby, and now is living peacefully until an unfateful meeting starts to pull her back into the life she so desperately escaped from.

Tw: none for now except that Reader is a mother, called mumma/momma, Hana is six years old, reader freezes up at the sight of Toji but just because she’s in shock, Toji being a warning of his own, there will be eventual smut so MDNI

Word count: around 2k at maximum I wrote this on tumblr drafts so idk lol

An: Literally my second work I’m posting on tumblr so please again be kind!!! Likes and reblogs and comments all greatly appreciated!!!

Theres something serene about the way you flit around the bakery, apron speckled with little dots of flour, tied snugly around your waist. Placing the fresh goods in the glass display might just has to be your favourite step ever, that or placing the fresh flowers into the flower vase that the florist across you always sponsored for a free cream bun.

The door chime rings as you turn around, wiping off the small beads of sweat that formed on your upper lip with your sleeve, pulling back the clear mask back on, a customer service smile immediately placed on your face,

“Glad I got to you before lunch rush!”

You smiled at the frequent guest, bending at the knees and catching the pink haired girl that ran straight at you,

“Momma! The teacher said my drawings have real uh-,”

Hana turns around to look at her friends mother, her friend still holding onto Aoi’s pants, shyly hiding even after knowing you for six months now,

“Potential, she said you have great potential Hana,”

Aoi smiled, patting Hana’s head and scooping up her son into her arms not soon after,

“Well if that’s it,me and the little one are going to get going now, Kenji’s cooking dinner for us,”

Aoi starts walking back to the doors as Hana wraps her arms around you, making you pick her up and rest her on your arm as you walk towards the door,

“I’ll see you tomorrow Aoi!”

You wave at the mother-son duo as they walk down the street, a warm smile on your face as Hana copies your gesture,

“Ok big girl! I want you to go get changed and mumma will get you some lunch hmm?”

Hana runs into the back room of the shop- connected to your house as soon as you set her down. A fresh set of gloves is pulled over your hands as you move back to the counter and await your lunch rush, already dreading the influx of customers.

The first man to come in makes you stop dead in your tracks, fingers frozen mid air as you almost greet the man. A scar runs down the left side of his lip, red and rough,

“Well ain’t it good to see you again,”

He grins, matching your half assed wave with his own as he walks to the counter whistling as he turns his head around and looks at your homely decorated bakery,

“Toji,”

You breathe out, barely short of a whisper. He cocks his head at you and smirks,

“Yep, that’s my name. Never thought I’d see you on an errand for Sukuna heh,”

A shiver runs down your spine at the mention of his name and you scrunch your eyes, willing yourself back to the woman who owned the bakery and not the woman who ran away six years ago,

“It’s good to see you again too Toji, is there anything I can get you?”

Your palms have moon shaped Red Crescents in them from how hard you’ve dug your finger nails, steeling your gaze at the cash register, pulling out a new order,

“Why the cold shoulder doll? We go way back don’t we?”

All Toji gets in reply is an eye roll and a scoff followed by you moving away from the counter to stand in front of Fushiguro with your arms crossed,

“I dated your boss for a few years, that’s hardly going ‘way back-,”

You further validate your point with finger quotes in the air,

“Now either order something or get the hell out Fushiguro,”

Tojis smirk falters for a second before he holds in hands up in mock surrender,

“Still fiesty heh doll, no worries I’ll be out of your way,”

He’s turned his back on you and finally is almost out of the door-

“Momma! I can’t find my hello kitty pouch!”

Your daughter comes storming out from the back door, red eyes squinted in fury as she holds out her bag for you,

Shit.

Current Next->

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lov3lyl3tters · 2 days ago

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“For Science”

Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Summary: Spencer has a theory. A theory that, apparently, requires kissing you to confirm.

Warnings: Pure fluff, Spencer being an adorable overthinker, lots of nervous rambling, a very sweet and scientific first kiss.

♖⸻♖⸻♖⸻♖⸻♖⸻♖⸻♖

Spencer is staring at you.

Not just looking—staring. Like he’s running a full-scale analysis of your existence, his brows furrowed, his fingers twitching at his sides.

You glance up from your book, raising an eyebrow. “Spence?”

No response. Just more staring.

“Spencer.” You wave a hand in front of his face. “Earth to genius—are you okay?”

He blinks rapidly, like he’s just now realizing you can see him. “I—yes! Yes, I’m fine. I just—I need to test out a theory.”

You shut your book, intrigued. “Okay?”

“I require your help.”

You grin. “How so?”

Spencer swallows hard, shifts his weight, fidgets like crazy. Then, finally, he looks you dead in the eye and says, “You need to kiss me.”

…

Excuse me?

“I—what?” you stammer, sure you misheard.

Spencer immediately panics. “It’s not—It’s not what it sounds like! I mean—it is what it sounds like, but it’s not—it’s scientific.”

You fold your arms, fighting back a very amused grin. “Oh, really? Enlighten me.”

He exhales, running a hand through his hair. “Okay. So, there’s a theory that kissing someone you have romantic feelings for releases a surge of dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin in the brain, reinforcing emotional bonds and—”

“Spencer.” You interrupt, gently placing a hand on his arm. “Are you saying you think you like me?”

Spencer freezes.

His ears turn pink.

His lips part slightly.

He looks like he just blue-screened.

“I—” He clears his throat. “I have reason to believe that I may… potentially… have romantic feelings for you, but I need empirical evidence to confirm.”

Oh. Oh.

You grin. “And you think kissing me will prove it?”

He nods, nervous. “Yes.”

“Spence,” you whisper, stepping closer. “You do like me.”

“I—” He exhales sharply, eyes flickering to your lips. “I think so.”

You shake your head, smiling. “You know so.”

And then, before he can overanalyze it, you kiss him.

It starts out soft, slow—like you’re giving him time to process. But then Spencer melts into it, his hands finding your waist, his breath hitching as he kisses you back like he’s been waiting for this his whole life.

When you finally pull away, he just stands there—dazed, breathless, utterly wrecked.

“So?” you murmur, brushing a curl from his forehead. “What’s the scientific verdict?”

Spencer exhales, grinning like an idiot.

“Yeah,” he breathes. “I really, really like you.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x reader fluff #spencer reid x female reader #criminal minds

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chaosmagetwin · 3 days ago

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Command Prompt

"Stop. Just, stop okay? She's gone. She's not here. And she's never coming back, okay? Just.... Fuck. Just go to your fucking kennel."

"Command accepted." The lieutenants disgusted face left my vision as I turned away, and left her almost empty room. Bodies passed me by. Some turned away from me, some reached out a hand before someone else pulled it away. None touched me. They couldn't.

I killed the last person who dared.

I stood in front of my pod. I couldn't connect to it without her. I waited. She'd come soon. I stared at it.

"Do you need help, pilot?" A voice called from behind me. I turned, and looked at their shoulder. Engineer. Third rank. I didn't look at their face.

"Request denied. Unclear intent. Please state intentions."

"... Do you need help connecting to your pod, miss?"

"DENIED. ADDRESS PILOT BY RANK." It can't call me miss, only she can call me miss, I am not miss, I am pilot, pilot pilot, leave me alone alone alone.

"S-sorry..." It left.

I stared at my pod. She'd be here soon. She'd tuck me in. The lights dimmed. The attack on the base must've needed a long meeting to sort things out. She had to be busy. She was busy.

My legs trembled, aching.

I fell before the lights rose again. I sat on the floor, and stared at my pod. She was coming. She always put me to sleep before going to bed.

Did she forget? She must be tired. Too many meetings. They always put her in too many meetings. Always worked her too hard. Too many logistics she had to handle for me.

"Pilot. Stand up." A voice called.

"Orders received. Confirmed." I stood up, and looked at their shoulder. A commander. I saluted. I didn't look them in the face. I can't look them in the face.

"How long since you slept?"

"Current operation is at fifty two hours, thirty nine minutes. Requesting handler."

"Request denied." I flinched. What? "You're being reassigned. Lay down in your pod."

"Orders received...." I couldn't move, couldn't say the word. "Denied..." I whispered. "Requesting handler!"

"Request denied." The voice sighed, deeply, frustrated. "You need to sleep, pilot. You are... not functioning properly."

"Pilot is operating above mission parameters!"

"And what parameters are those, pilot?"

"... Survive."

"You cannot complete that mission if you do not sleep."

"Confirmed. Request Handler to complete mission."

"... oh, Kit...." I flinched on hearing my name. No. No. No.

"PILOT. I AM-"

"Be quiet, pilot." My mouth snapped shut. I felt my tears slide off my face, hitting the metal plate beneath my feet. "I know you've been told. I know how you reacted. I know you killed the doctor. None of that is your fault. It's time for you to go to sleep."

"... Order denied. Please. It.... I... I can't..."

"Your handler is dead, Pilot." The words hit me like an AP round. A wail grew in the air. "You're being reassigned to a new handler. Out of the system. You... you're being retired."

"No! No! No! Requesting handler! Stop hiding her from it!" I couldn't move. My legs wouldn't move. I needed to kill this thing in front of me. A spy, a fake, an enemy wearing the uniform of the commander, he's not real, he's not real. I couldn't move my legs.

"You held her hand, Pilot. Who gave you your last order?"

"Handler!"

"When was it received in this operation cycle?"

"Order received at hour 8 and seventeen minutes!"

"That was two days ago. What was that order?"

"... Survive...."

"What were the exact words, Pilot?"

".... It can't.... it can't...."

"Repeat them to me."

"Confidential information! Cleara-"

"Override! Security clearance level 8, two nine alpha three seven Kilo Indiana Tango. Repeat your last orders to me!"

Her words flowed out of my mouth, repeated like a mantra in my head for so long they made up more of me than I did. "You have to survive, baby. Don't let me die in vain, you have to live! Get off me, doc, let me say goodbye. Let me tell her to live. Listen to me, Kit. My little Kit. Oh, I love you. You did such a good job for me today. You saved a lot of people, okay? But now you have to think about you. You have to survive. Priority one, okay? Confirm for me, baby. Authorization two nine alpha three S-seven.... Kilo. Indiana.... tang- tango. Good..... -rl"

"Priority one, Pilot. What is your next step in this mission? Your handler is not available."

".... Command: Sleep."

"Lay down in your pod, Pilot."

"Order.... confirmed..."

#mechposting #combat doll #creative writing #pilot posting #handler posting

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fixated-cookies · 2 days ago

Note

(Ignore this if this is too much to post but I think it’s ok I just REALLY needed to yap-)

okay. shadow milk.

that mf has overtaken my mind again like last year accept it’s “worse” now. (hashtag non con, yandere😇)

Shadow Milk is nothing but a powerful menace in bed i SWEAR. That sadistic jester is gonna do everything to make you scream while your getting pounded. He absolutely loves it, bonus points if your tied up by his strings because he has a bondage kink you can’t change my mind. He will turn you into his puppet weather you want it or not he doesn’t want you to escape. Oh.. he’d be throwing degrades out at you left and right you just whimper with tears falling out of your eyes not knowing what to say back. The roughness of his cock has overtaken your senses.

“Aww~! Look at how pathetic you are so vulnerable and tied up like this. It’s sad really~!” *the man chuckles*

Omg he’d wipe them tears away like he gives af about you crying from his hard dick, he just wants you for himself. I mean he does care about you in his own interesting ways but not when your tied up looking oh so submissive and on display for him.

Once he’s done he will apologize to you and try his hardest to help you recover. (your still tied up) but that’s definitely not the last time your gonna see that hardcore fucking from him.

i am Insane i need this good day/night fellow black pearl enjoyer.

ahh, he definitely would pull something like this, especially after an escape attempt. it's just a little silly, really, how you think you could trick HIM, out of all people to try this with.

MDNI

Dark content ahead- noncon, yandere, bondage

Now your face down ass up with your arms tied behind your back because of your own stupidity. He's pulling moans and dirty whines from you while drooling into the pillows. Just imagine Shadow Milk Cookie sneering down at you with that infuriating grin as he drinks in your helplessness. he’s so proud of his handiwork. His sweet favorite puppet trying to runaway from him? not going to happen.

"Oh, my dear, sweet little puppet… do you know what happens to misbehaving toys?" he'll purr into your ear while thrusting deep into your sopping cunt. His fingers cause indents into the skin of your hips. His hips keep moving, harsh and deliberate, dragging out every sensation until you’re trembling. You feel his smirk against your skin when he presses a kiss just beneath your ear, followed by a sharp nip that makes you jolt.

You try to muffle your mewls by trying to bury your face in the pillows? nope! His movements halt—but not for mercy, no, no—this is punishment. Before you can react, your world flips. He yanks himself away immediately, hands gripping you with almost effortless strength as he turns you over in one swift motion. The sheer force of it knocks the little air you had left straight from your lungs, leaving you gasping beneath him.

And through your blurry vision from your tears you can see his grin—it’s positively wicked.

"There we go~" he purrs "Don’t tell me you forgot who this show is for? Hiding those darling sounds? Unacceptable. I want to hear you." you squirm as you feel his cock once again entering, stretching you out to create a full sensation.

Oh, Shadow Milk Cookie isn’t just cruel—he’s ruthless. Every single mistake you made during your little escape attempt? He’s going to shove it in your face until it’s all you can think about.

"Really? Really? You actually thought you could get away from me?" His voice is full of mocked disbelief, like he finds the very idea laughable. "Ohhh, sweet thing, you must be even dumber than I thought! And trust me—that’s saying something!" He gives you a rough thrust as he laughs, a sharp, biting thing that makes your face burn with humiliation.

"Tell me, did you actually think you were being clever? Sneaking out in the dead of night like some tragic little hero? Oh, poor, naive you—running right into my strings, like the idiot you are." He takes in your cries and whimpers gripping your jaw, forcing your teary-eyed gaze to meet his.

"And now look at you. Back where you belong—right under me, whining, trembling, all because you thought you were strong enough to leave. Tsk, tsk." He shakes his head, letting out a long, drawn-out sigh feeling your warmth tighten around him. Oh and like you said anon, Shadow Milk Cookie does love it when you cry. Loves the way those fat, helpless tears roll down your cheeks, proof of how thoroughly he’s broken you down. But does he care? Ohhh, not in the way you’d hope.

he'll cup your face, his thumb swiping oh-so-gently beneath your trembling eyes. "What’s the matter, sweet thing? Regretting all those dumb little choices now?" tilting his head and studying you, focusing on the way your lips tremble and uneven breaths. "Mmm, no, I don’t think so. I think—" he leans in, grinning as he presses a feather-light kiss to your damp cheek"—you’re just upset ‘cause you finally realized how pathetic you are without me." listening to another sob fall from your mouth once he hits your cervix.

"It’s cute, really. You’re cute. Crying like this, all tied up, nowhere to run—" his voice dips, eyes glinting with something dark, something possessive— "all mine."

And when another tear spills free? He doesn’t wipe it away.

He just laughs.

And once later comes, when your wringed out of all the orgasms you can give him, laying bare, your mind empty, and feeling like a pile of jello. Do you truly believe he would feel bad?

"Ah, my poor little puppet…" His voice has lost that razor-sharp edge, now dripping in something too soft, too mocking to be genuine. He leans over you, tilting his head as if to study the mess he’s made of you. Your body, still trembling, still bound, your chest rising and falling with uneven, exhausted breaths.

His fingers trace your cheek, a feather-light touch too tender for a monster like him. "I suppose I should say sorry, huh?" He hums, tapping his chin in thought before flashing that infuriating grin. "Buuut… I don’t really regret it." Shadow Milk Cookie's aftercare is… complicated. Twisted, but in his own way, sincere. Even if he knows he’s pushed you to your limit, even if he’s relished in your helplessness, the moment it’s over, he doesn’t just walk away. He lingers, watching you—taking in the trembling of your body, the way your breath hitches, the quiet little whimpers still spilling from your lips. A teary-eyed glare hurtles his way. "Now, now… don’t look at me like that." His voice is softer now, a stark contrast to the sharp, mocking tone from before."You’ll start thinking I’m some kind of villain!" His fingers pause at your wrist, where the bindings were, and he gives a mocking little sigh as they curl around them, then bringing them lower to different parts of your body, massaging the stiff muscles with slow, deliberate movements.

"So tell me, little puppet… have we learned anything?"

I learned that the best way to write shadow milk is for him to make you annoyed at how much he speaks. HE NEEDS TO SHUT UP! They say black sapphire likes the sound of his voice? well it seems like he has competition from his own master!

#shadow milk cookie x reader #shadow milk cookie smut #shadow milk cookie #yandere shadow milk cookie #yandere shadow milk #crk x reader #crk smut #crk #smut #tw noncon

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daeniradraconis · 2 days ago

Text

High on Love - Jack H.

Hey lovelies! 💖 I know I promised to work on Age is Just a Number and my Auston Matthews fic, but an idea for a story about Jack being high on pain meds after surgery popped into my head, and I couldn’t resist writing it first! But don’t worry, the others are definitely coming soon!

I hope you enjoy reading it! ✨

For more fun: masterlist

---

Jack stirs, his lashes fluttering against pale skin. He looks exhausted, the painkillers keeping him soft and pliant, his limbs heavy against the hospital bed. A slow, lazy smile spreads across his face when his bleary eyes land on you.

“Babe,” he sighs, his voice thick and warm, like honey. He reaches for your hand but completely misses, his fingers clumsily grasping at the air before falling back to the sheets.

You take his hand gently, threading your fingers through his. “I’m right here, love.”

Jack just stares at you, utterly smitten. His pupils are wide, his hair a mess, and there’s an almost childlike wonder in his expression. And yet, even like this, completely drugged out and ridiculous, he’s still stupidly handsome. It’s almost unfair.

“You’re so pretty,” he murmurs. “My pretty little girlfriend.”

You giggle, rubbing soft circles against the back of his hand. Yep, he’s definitely still high as a kite. “Thank you, baby.”

Jack’s brows knit together suddenly. “Wait. Are you real? Or am I… dead?”

Ellen sighs from the chair on the other side of the bed, watching all of this unfold with thinly veiled amusement. “She’s real, Jack.”

Jack’s head lolls toward her, his sleepy eyes blinking in surprise. “Mom?”

“Yes, Jack,” Ellen says patiently. She looks tired, but there’s something else in her expression, too. A tenderness, a quiet fondness, like she’s looking at her baby boy rather than her fully grown 23-year-old son.

Jack stares at her for a long moment before his eyes suddenly widen. He turns back to you, gripping your hand with what little strength he has.

“Babe. We got caught.”

Your stomach drops slightly. He can’t mean—

“What?”

Jack swallows hard, looking genuinely panicked. “She knows about us.”

You exchange a glance with Ellen, whose lips are already twitching with laughter.

“Jack,” you say carefully, “we’ve been together for three years. And, sweetheart, your mom caught us five months in. She’s known for a long time.”

Jack shakes his head furiously. “No, no, no. We were in spy mode. No one was supposed to know.”

Ellen snorts. “Jack. I caught you a long time ago.”

Jack frowns. “No, you didn’t.”

Ellen exhales sharply, rubbing her forehead like she feels a migraine coming on. “I walked in on you two.”

Jack tilts his head, eyes clouded with confusion. He looks far too cute to be taken seriously.

Ellen’s voice grows exasperated. “In your kitchen, Jack. You were barely dressed. And your father was with me. We saw you.”

Jack looks at her like she’s lost her mind. “Mom. Be serious.”

“I AM SERIOUS.”

Jack just blinks at her, completely unconvinced. “Nah. Didn’t happen.”

Ellen groans, rubbing a hand down her face. “Oh, for the love of—” She turns to you, confused. “You remember, right?”

You bite your lip, your face heating at the memory. “I definitely remember. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life. Jack, you didn’t have pants on. And I didn’t have anything on top.”

Jack squints at you, gaze searching. Then, suddenly, his expression softens, a slow, lazy grin tugging at his lips.

“I just remember how hot you look naked.”

Ellen groans again. “Jack, concentrate.”

You sigh, smoothing your fingers through Jack’s messy hair. “Baby, I think the pain meds are making you a little loopy.”

Jack hums, leaning into your touch like a lost puppy. “Love when you call me baby.” His lips quirk up at the corners. “Say it again.”

Ellen shakes her head, an incredulous but affectionate smile tugging at her lips. “And here I was, worrying that all those times you hit your head on the ice had done some real damage,” Ellen sighs. “Turns out, all you needed were painkillers to go completely off the rails.” She pushes herself up from the chair with a smirk. “I’m getting a coffee. You two lovebirds enjoy this little moment.”

She barely makes it two steps before Jack’s entire face lights up.

“WAIT.”

You both jump.

Jack gasps dramatically. “WHERE IS LUKE?!”

You and Ellen share a confused look. “Jack, you’re not at home, darling. You’re in the hospital. Luke’s with the team, playing.”

Ellen pinches the bridge of her nose. “These drugs are brutal, Y/N. He’s completely lost it.”

Jack squeezes your hand, looking so heartbreakingly lost that you almost feel bad for laughing. “But I want Luke! He’s the best roommate.” His voice is full of pure, unfiltered adoration. “And he’s so smart. Like, genius-level math smart. He knows how to do derivatives, baby. I don’t even know how to spell that. And his hair? So curly. So perfect. It’s—” He pauses, his voice dropping to a whisper. “It’s unfair.”

You and Ellen barely manage to hold back your laughter as Jack scowls, grumbling under his breath about “stupid, unfairly perfect genetics.”

“You’re really jealous, aren’t you, Jacky?” you tease.

Jack nods aggressively. “YES. And he’s taller than me. It’s messed up. I’m the older one. I should be the taller one.”

You smile softly. “But you love him, not right?”

Jack sighs. “So much.” His lip wobbles slightly. “He’s my best friend.”

Ellen tilts her head, amused. “Quinn’s not gonna like that, Jack.”

Jack gasps, eyes wide with panic. “Ohh, don’t tell Quinn that, Mom!” Then he turns to you. “Babe, Quinn is so cool.”

You bite back a laugh. “I know, sweetheart. I met him.”

Jack nods with absolute conviction. “No, no, you don’t understand. He’s not just smart—he’s brilliant. Emotional intelligence, problem-solving, all that deep, psychological stuff. And he can cook.” Jack’s eyes widen as if this is the most shocking revelation of all. “Like, really cook. Not just toast or eggs—actual meals. And don’t even get me started on his skating. He’s the smoothest, fastest, most effortless skater I’ve ever seen. It’s like he was born on the ice.”

Ellen arches her brow. “Best skater, huh?”

Jack looks deeply offended. “Mom. I’m serious. And you know he’s the best swimmer.”

You blink. “What?” You are seriously confused now.

Jack nods solemnly. “Like, if hockey wasn’t his thing? He’d go Olympic mode.”

Ellen sighs. “Jack, Quinn swims, like, twice a year.”

Jack gasps. “Lies! Mom, you don’t even know your own son. Shame!”

Ellen turns to you with an exaggerated sigh, giving you a knowing look. “You know, Y/N, with the way he keeps crashing all over the ice, it’s only a matter of time before he ends up permanently concussed. So… be prepared.”

Jack pouts. “Mom! I don’t even fall that much. That was so mean.”

Then, suddenly, he grips your hand tighter, eyes shining. “Babe, can we get a dog?”

Ellen groans. “Not this again.”

Jack gasps dramatically. “Mom, I don’t live with you anymore. I’m an adult. This is a decision between me and my partner.” He turns to you, nodding with conviction. “Two golden retrievers. And I’ll teach them to play hockey.”

Ellen pulls out her phone. “I cannot wait to tell Jim, Luke, and Quinn about all of this.”

Jack gasps. “Mom, no—”

“Oh, yes,” Ellen smirks.

Jack pouts, turning to you, desperate. “Babe, you won’t let them make fun of me, right?”

You just grin, brushing your fingers over his cheek. “I don’t know, Jacky. You did just deny our entire relationship.”

Jack’s face falls. “Oh my God. Are we still together?”

You burst into hysterical laughter.

Ellen sighs dramatically. “I’m so leaving,” she says, heading toward the door.

Jack lets out a contented sigh, sinking deeper into his pillow, his eyes locking with yours as he gazes at you with an overwhelming sense of love. "But this is amazing news," he says softly, a smile tugging at his lips. "Because one day, I'm going to marry you."

Your heart melts. “Oh, baby…”

Ellen pauses at the door, looking back at the two of you. “You know what? You should have your wedding in Michigan. The lake house would be the perfect spot for it.”

Jack’s eyes light up, and he looks at you with excitement. “Yes! And Luke can be my best man. Quinn can be yours. So they won’t fight. He loves you like a little sister anyway. You’ll be beautiful in your dress. And I’ll cry at the altar the moment I see you.”

Ellen rolls her eyes dramatically, just like Jack usually does, but the smile on her lips betrays the amusement she’s trying to hide as she exits the room.

You groan, dropping your head onto Jack’s shoulder as your heart swells with happiness. "Just so you know, I’ll hold you to that promise once you’re finally clean from the drugs."

Jack just grins, his eyes fluttering closed, as he drifts back to sleep, completely at peace with the world.

#jack hughes fanfic #jack hughes imagine #jh86 #jack hughes fic #jack hughes #nhl imagine #jack hughes x reader #jack hughes x y/n #jack hughes x you #lh44 #jack hughes blurb #nhl blurb

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theonottsbxtch · 2 days ago

Text

BE MY MISTAKE | CL16

an: before you guys get mad at me for this one i swear to god it was @iimplicitt's request. well for context she said "you would cook some good angst to this" so i did. anyway dont hate me ily x

wc: 5.1k

warnings: smutty-ish

SHE ALWAYS LEFT BEFORE THE SUN.

He never asked her to stay.

It was always the same—her slipping out of his sheets, out of his arms, out of his life, and him lying there, watching the ghost of her linger in the hollow space she left behind. The scent of her perfume on his pillow. The warmth of her skin fading from his. He never reached for her as she went, never called her name, never let the words stay pass his lips. Because she never would.

She was someone else’s.

Charles Leclerc had never felt more like a man made of glass than when she was around—fragile, transparent, waiting for the inevitable shatter. He used to think he was invincible, that he could survive anything. He had walked away from burning cars, from metal twisted around his body like a vice, from crashes that should have left him dead. But she was the wreckage he could never crawl out of.

She worked for another team. He didn’t even know how it had started, only that it had. Maybe it was the way she looked at him across the paddock, something unreadable in her eyes, something dangerous. Maybe it was how she touched him, like she needed him more than air but never enough to stay. Maybe it was the way she said his name, soft and aching, only ever in the dark, only ever when no one else could hear.

Maybe it was the way she always left.

The hotel room door clicked shut behind her, and Charles let out a slow, unsteady breath, staring at the ceiling. His body still burned with her touch, but his chest felt hollow. He reached blindly for the half-empty glass of whiskey on the nightstand and downed what was left, letting the burn spread through him. Maybe if he drank enough, he wouldn’t feel the phantom of her hands on his skin. Maybe if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t see the imprint of her smile, her swollen lips, her wedding ring glinting in the dim light.

She never took it off.

He hated himself for wanting her. Hated himself for letting her come back every time, for answering the phone, for opening the door, for letting her press her mouth to his like she needed him, like he was something more than just her mistake.

But most of all, he hated that no matter how many times she left—he still waited for her to come back.

He told himself he wouldn’t do this again.

He told himself that every time.

And yet, when she called, he answered. When she knocked, he opened the door. When she kissed him, he let himself believe, for just a moment, that it meant something. That he wasn’t just the thing she used to feel alive before she went back to the life she chose.

Charles sat up, running a hand over his face. The room smelled of her—perfume and sweat and something unmistakably hers. He hated that he could pick her scent out of a crowd, that he’d recognise the way she sighed against his skin in the dark, the way her nails dug into his shoulders when she whispered his name. It was pathetic, really, how little self-respect he had left when it came to her.

The sheets were still warm where she’d been. He should get up, shower, wash her off him before she became something permanent. But instead, he reached for his phone.

Nothing.

She never texted. Never called unless she wanted something. He was the one left with the aftermath, the one left trying to pretend none of it happened when he saw her across the paddock, standing next to her husband, smiling like she hadn’t had Charles’ hands on her body hours before.

He groaned, tilting his head back against the headboard, eyes closing as he exhaled sharply. He needed to get out of this. Out of her.

But he knew he wouldn’t.

He thought about the way she looked at him as she dressed, back turned, fingers deftly fastening the buttons of her blouse, fixing her wedding ring like it had never been budged. He thought about how she never kissed him goodbye. How she never said thank you or sorry or this is the last time.

Maybe she knew it never would be.

His head throbbed as he forced himself to stand, dragging himself to the window. The city stretched out below, neon lights bleeding into the night, a thousand strangers living a thousand different lives. He wondered what it would be like to be one of them. To be someone who had never met her. Someone who didn’t know what it felt like to be ruined by the same hands that held him together.

The rain had started again, soft against the glass. He watched as a black cab pulled away from the hotel entrance below, the silhouette of a woman barely visible in the backseat.

She never looked back.

Neither did he.

But Christ, did he want to.

The city was different, but the story was the same.

A new Grand Prix. A new hotel. A new number on the door. But it didn’t matter. Nothing ever changed, not really.

Charles had told himself he wouldn’t answer. He’d stared at the message on his phone for far too long, fingers tightening around the glass of whiskey he’d been nursing since he got back from the track. He should have ignored it. Should have thrown his phone across the room, let it smash into the wall, let the silence settle where she had lodged herself in his bones.

But of course, he didn’t.

Instead, he’d stubbed out his cigarette - the one he only smoked because of her, finished his drink in one swallow, and gone to shower.

Now he stood in front of the hotel mirror, dragging a hand through his damp hair, fixing the collar of his shirt like any of it mattered. Like she would notice. Like she would even care. He looked tired. The kind of tired that sleep wouldn’t fix. Hollow eyes, sharp cheekbones, a mouth set in something like resignation. He had seen this version of himself before. He hated him.

His phone buzzed.

Here.

One word. No greeting, no hesitation.

His heart kicked against his ribs anyway.

A knock at the door, sharp and impatient. He swallowed, straightened his spine, ran his tongue over his teeth as if that would erase the cigarette smoke and bad decisions. Then he opened the door.

She didn’t speak. She never did, not at first. Just stepped past him, the scent of rain and something expensive clinging to her skin. She wasn’t dressed for him—she never was. The same crisp white blouse, the same heels, her hair still pinned up from the paddock. She looked untouched. Unbothered. Like she hadn’t been sitting at dinner with her husband an hour ago, pretending she wasn’t about to slip into another man’s bed.

His bed.

Charles closed the door. Watched her move through the room like she’d been here a hundred times before. She had.

She didn’t look at him. Not properly. Not like he wanted her to.

Instead, she reached for him.

And that’s when he knew.

She only touched him like this when she didn’t want to think. When she needed to forget.

And fuck, it ruined him, how easily he let her.

Her hands were on him before he could speak. Before he could ask her why she was here, why she kept doing this to him, why he kept letting her.

Her fingers curled into the collar of his shirt, tugging him down, and then her mouth was on his—hot, desperate, tasting like red wine and something else, something bitter. It was always like this. No hesitation, no words, no softness. She kissed him like she was trying to erase something, like if she pressed hard enough, bit deep enough, she could make herself disappear.

Charles let her.

He always did.

His hands found her waist, sliding beneath the fabric of her blouse, fingers splaying over warm skin. He felt her shiver, the sharp inhale against his lips, but she didn’t stop him. She never did.

He hated himself for how easily he fell into this. For how much he wanted it.

Her nails scraped against the back of his neck as she deepened the kiss, as her body pressed against his, as she backed him towards the bed like she was the one in control. Maybe she was. Maybe she always had been.

She pushed his jacket off his shoulders, let it hit the floor, her fingers already at the buttons of his shirt. His own hands were working at the zip of her skirt, dragging the fabric down her hips, his breathing ragged, unsteady. He felt drunk, but he only had drank a glass of whiskey.

It was her. It was always her.

She stepped out of the skirt, kicked off her heels, and he let himself take her in—bare legs, flushed skin, the silver band on her left hand catching in the dim light.

He reached for her wrist before he could stop himself. Held it between them. Stared at the ring like it was a loaded gun.

She didn’t say anything. Just pulled her hand from his grip and kissed him again, harder this time, as if that would make him forget.

It wouldn't.

But he still let her push him down onto the bed.

It was another Grand Prix.

This time, she wasn’t coming to him.

He was crawling to her.

Charles told himself he wouldn’t. He told himself he was done. That last time had been exactly that—the last time. But here he was, standing outside her hotel room, hands shaking at his sides, stomach twisted into something sick and self-loathing.

He didn’t even know why he was here.

No, that was a lie.

He was here because he needed her. Because she had infected him like a disease, and now he was feverish, restless, his skin too tight, his thoughts too loud. He had tried to forget her. Tried to drown her out with whisky and faceless women, with the roar of the engine and the blur of a track at 200mph. None of it worked. None of it ever worked.

So here he was.

Pathetic.

He lifted a fist, knocked once. Then again. A part of him prayed she wouldn’t answer. That she’d send him away, force him to break this cycle before it swallowed him whole.

The door opened.

And there she was.

Barefoot, wrapped in a crimson silk dressing gown, hair still damp from the shower. She looked at him like she was surprised, like she hadn’t expected him to be the one on her doorstep this time.

He swallowed, throat dry, heart hammering against his ribs.

“Charles.”

His name on her lips was quieter than he expected. He wondered if her husband had just called her. If she’d been on the phone with him minutes before Charles knocked, telling him she loved him, that she’d see him when she got home. The thought made something ugly curl in his chest.

She didn’t move to let him in. Just stood there, watching him with those unreadable eyes.

He should leave. He should.

Instead, he exhaled sharply and said, “Let me in.”

A beat of silence.

Then, without a word, she stepped aside.

The door clicked shut behind him, sealing them inside, sealing him inside this mistake—this cycle, this sickness, this thing that had its claws buried so deep inside him he wasn’t sure he’d ever claw his way free.

She didn’t speak. She never did, not at first. Just stepped closer, the silk of her dressing gown brushing against his shirt and jacket, her scent filling the space between them. His fists clenched at his sides, nails biting into his palms. He should say something. Should tell her this was a bad idea, that he hadn’t meant to come, that he’d turned the wrong way in the hotel corridor and ended up outside her door by accident.

But they both knew that wasn’t true.

Her fingers found the buttons of his shirt, undoing them with slow, practiced ease. He let her, standing there like some helpless fucking idiot, like this wasn’t exactly what he wanted, exactly what he had been craving for the past week.

Her lips brushed the side of his jaw, warm and soft and deliberate. He exhaled sharply through his nose, tilting his head back before he could stop himself, giving her space to kiss his throat, to press her mouth to the sensitive spot just below his ear.

He hated himself.

Hated the way his hands finally moved, grabbing her waist, pulling her into him, crushing her body against his. Hated how his lips found hers with something desperate, bruising, the kind of kiss that tasted like anger and surrender all at once.

Her dressing gown loosened beneath his fingers, the silk slipping from her shoulders, pooling onto the floor like water.

And fuck, he was already too far gone.

She slipped off his shirt and jacket while he kicked off his shoes.

He lifted her, felt her legs wrap around his waist, stumbled towards the bed with his mouth still on hers, his body already burning, already aching. His head was full of static, of her, of the way her fingers pulled at his hair, of the soft, broken noises escaping her lips as he laid her down beneath him.

She was everywhere. Under his hands, against his skin, in his lungs. And yet, she wasn’t his.

Would never be his.

She gasped his name as his lips moved to her throat, and something twisted inside him, something dark and miserable, something that made him press harder, bite deeper, knowing that by morning, any mark he left would be gone. Hidden. Forgotten.

Just like he would be.

But still, he gave her everything.

Even as he hated himself for it.

His hands dragged down the length of her body, rough, unsteady, worshipping something he had no right to touch.

She arched beneath him, breathless, fingers tangled in his hair, urging him closer, deeper, more. And fuck, he gave it to her. Gave her everything she wanted, everything she took without asking, without hesitation. His mouth moved down her neck, down her collarbone, down lower still, teeth and tongue and heat, his hands following, gripping her thighs, parting them, spreading her open for him like she was his.

She wasn’t.

But she let him pretend.

His name fell from her lips in a whisper, in a gasp, in a moan that made his blood run hot and cold all at once. He hated it. Hated that she sounded like she needed him, like this was something more than just a mistake she would bury beneath crisp white sheets and a silver wedding ring. He haphazardly pulled off his trousers and boxers as she whimpered in his ear.

His mouth found her again, hands gripping, pulling, taking. She was silk and fire and something devastatingly beautiful, and he wanted to ruin her the way she had ruined him.

He was hard for her already, painfully so, and she knew it, smirking against his lips as she rolled her hips beneath him, teasing, taunting, killing him slowly. His fingers dug into her skin, his breath coming short, sharp.

She reached for him, wrapped a hand around him, and he swore under his breath, forehead pressing to her shoulder as her fingers worked him over, slow, deliberate, like she knew exactly what she was doing to him.

She did.

But this wasn’t hers to keep.

He tore her hand away, pinned it above her head, held her there beneath him like that would make any difference, like she wouldn’t be slipping back into her husband’s arms in less than twenty-four hours.

She didn’t care.

And neither did he—not when she hooked a leg around his hip, not when she pulled him closer, not when he sank into her with a groan that tasted like defeat.

She gasped, fingers tightening in his hair, nails raking down his back, dragging him deeper, until there was nothing left of him but this.

He fucked her like he needed her. Like she wasn’t just a mistake he would regret the second he came down from this high.

And that was the worst part.

Because maybe, just maybe—

He did need her.

Her body took him like it was made for him.

Soft, hot, open—pulling him in, keeping him there, keeping him hers. Charles groaned, burying his face in the crook of her neck, his hips rolling into hers in slow, deliberate thrusts. He should take his time, should make this last, should memorise the way she feels around him because he knows—he knows—she won’t let him have this much longer.

But she’s greedy tonight. Nails scratching down his back, heels digging into his spine, dragging him deeper, gasping against his lips like she’s the one who’s desperate. Like she’s the one who needs this.

She doesn’t.

She’ll go home after this. Go back to the man who kisses her goodnight, who sleeps beside her without knowing she still smells like someone else.

But here, right now, she’s his.

Charles presses his palm to the back of her thigh, spreading her wider, driving into her harder, his breath ragged, his chest tight. He hears the soft whimper she tries to swallow, feels the way her body tightens around him, how her fingers clutch at him like she doesn’t want to let go.

And for a second, just a second, he lets himself believe it.

He lets himself think that maybe, if he fucks her good enough, if he makes her feel enough, she’ll stay.

That this time, when the morning comes, she won’t make him slip out of her bed without a word. That she won’t fix her wedding ring the second she’s dressed, acting like none of this ever happened.

But she will.

She always will.

The thought makes something vicious twist inside him, and he groans against her throat, snapping his hips faster, chasing that inevitable fall, dragging her over the edge with him. She cries out softly, her back arching, fingers clawing at his shoulders, her body shuddering around him, pulling him under.

He follows her down.

And then it’s over.

Silence settles over them, thick, suffocating.

Charles rolls onto his back, dragging a hand down his face, breath still uneven, chest rising and falling too fast. He hears her shifting beside him, the rustle of sheets, the slow inhale and exhale as she comes down from it, too.

Neither of them speak.

They never do, not afterwards.

She stares at the ceiling, her lips slightly parted, her hair a mess against the pillow. He looks at her out of the corner of his eye, taking in the marks he’s left on her skin—the red blooming across her neck, the crescent moons on her hips. Temporary proof that he was here. That she was his.

Even though she never really was.

He closed his eyes, swallowing the bitter taste in his throat, already hating himself for what he’s done. For what he keeps doing.

And worst of all—

For knowing that when she calls him again, he’ll still answer.

The silence between them stretched long and heavy, broken only by the slow, measured rhythm of their breathing.

Charles lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, one arm draped over his forehead like that would block out the reality of where he was, of what he’d just done. Of what he’d keep doing. Beside him, she shifted, rolling onto her side, propping her head up with her hand. He felt her looking at him. Studying him.

He turned his head, met her gaze. “What?” His voice was rough, still thick with the remnants of her.

She shrugged, something unreadable flickering across her face. “Nothing.”

That was the thing with her—she never gave him much. He’d spent months tangled up in her sheets, his hands on her body, his mouth whispering her name against her skin, but when it came to anything real, anything deep, she held him at arm’s length.

And maybe that was fair.

Because what could they really talk about?

He knew how she sounded when she came undone beneath him, knew the little hitch in her breath when he kissed the side of her knee, knew the exact way her fingers twisted in the sheets when she was close. But he didn’t know her favourite song. Didn’t know if she preferred tea or coffee in the morning, didn’t know if she ever painted her nails herself or if they were always done for her.

Didn’t know if she ever thought about him when she was home.

So he said nothing.

Instead, he let his gaze drop, tracing the curve of her shoulder, the way her bare skin glowed in the low light. His eyes caught on the dressing gown she’d discarded on the floor earlier, the deep burgundy silk pooling like blood against the carpet.

“That was nice,” he murmured, nodding towards it.

She followed his gaze, then looked back at him. A small smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “My husband bought it for me. Do you like it?”

The words landed like a punch to the ribs.

Charles’s stomach turned, his body tensing, nausea curling in the back of his throat.

Of course he did.

Of course the man she went home to every night, the man she shared a life with, the man who got to love her in the light, had been the one to pick out something that Charles had stripped off her without a second thought.

Something meant for him.

He swallowed, forcing a smirk, though it felt like acid in his mouth. “Bet he didn’t think you’d be wearing it for me.”

She just looked at him. Not smiling, not frowning. Just looking.

Then, she rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling once more.

And Charles lay there, staring at her, feeling like he might be sick.

After a long moment, Charles sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed, his head falling into his hands for a moment before he forced himself to move. His body ached—not from the race, not from the adrenaline of the track, but from her. From the way she had unraveled him, used him up, left him hollow.

He reached for his boxers, pulling them on with slow, deliberate movements, his fingers dragging through his hair, trying to shake off the weight pressing down on him. His shirt was crumpled on the floor, buttons undone, collar twisted. He grabbed it anyway, slipping it over his shoulders, not bothering to do it up.

Behind him, she shifted, and he stilled, waiting.

Waiting for her to say something.

Stay.

Don’t go.

Anything.

But she didn’t.

Instead, he heard the soft click of her phone unlocking, the quiet tap of her fingers against the screen.

He turned, just enough to see her lying on her back, bathed in the dim glow of her phone, scrolling through messages, already a million miles away from him.

Charles clenched his jaw, swallowing against the bitter taste rising in his throat.

She wasn’t his.

She never had been.

And yet, some pathetic part of him still hoped. Still wanted.

Dragging a hand down his face, he stood, shoving his legs into his trousers.. He moved slower than he needed to, lingering, waiting for her to look up.

But she didn’t.

She was lost in a world he would never be part of, replying to messages he would never see, checking the time like she had somewhere else to be. Someone else waiting for her.

His chest tightened, a cruel, hollow ache settling beneath his ribs.

He forced a smirk—forced himself to pretend he didn’t care.

“Well,” he muttered, pulling on his jacket, the leather stiff against his skin. “This has been fun.”

She hummed in response, not even looking up.

Not even fucking looking at him.

That was it, then.

No goodbye. No lingering kiss. No stay just a little longer.

Just silence.

Charles swallowed, turning towards the door, his fingers curling into a fist at his side.

He left without another word.

And when the door clicked shut behind him, it sounded a hell of a lot like the end of something he’d never really had in the first place.

Charles stepped out into the night, the air thick with the smell of petrol and damp tarmac. The city hummed around him—streetlights casting long, ghostly shadows, the distant sound of laughter spilling from the hotel bar. Life carrying on as if nothing had happened.

As if he hadn’t just let her ruin him all over again.

He ran a hand down his face, exhaling sharply, shoving his fingers through his hair as he walked towards the valet stand. The kid behind the counter barely looked old enough to drive, let alone handle the kind of car Charles had left with him.

“The black Ferrari,” Charles muttered, voice rough. The kid nodded, hurrying off, and a minute later, the low, familiar growl of his SF90 filled the air.

Charles slid into the driver’s seat, gripping the wheel for a second before starting the engine, the roar vibrating through his bones. He pulled away from the curb, the city blurring past him, neon signs flashing against the black glass of his dashboard.

He drove with one hand, the other pressed to his lips, his mind stuck in a loop, replaying the last hour.

The way she hadn’t said stay. The way she’d barely looked at him as he left.

The way she’d smiled when she told him her husband had bought her that slip.

His throat tightened, his grip on the wheel clenching.

Of all the things she’d ever said to him, that was the thing that wouldn’t leave him alone. That soft, almost absentminded admission. Like it had meant nothing to her. Like it wasn’t a knife to his ribs, twisted cruelly as he lay beside her, still warm from her touch.

The car ate up the road, the speedometer ticking higher, the streets emptying as he left the city behind. The headlights cut through the darkness, the silence pressing in on him, thick, suffocating.

Then, slowly, his vision blurred.

He barely noticed at first, the burn in his eyes sharp, his throat aching, his breath coming shorter. He blinked, tried to swallow it down, but it came anyway.

Tears slipping down his face, one after another, hot and heavy, a slow, steady stream of something he’d spent months trying to ignore.

He shook his head, sniffed, gritted his teeth, gripping the wheel so tight his knuckles went white.

But it wasn’t stopping.

And before he could think, before he could stop himself, he slammed his foot on the brake, the tyres screeching against the asphalt as he veered onto the shoulder, the car shuddering to a halt.

The silence that followed was deafening.

Charles pressed his forehead to the wheel, his whole body trembling, his breath coming in short, shuddering gasps. He covered his face with one hand, trying to quiet the sobs tearing out of him, but it was no use.

He hated himself.

Hated what he had let her do to him.

Hated that even now, even now, if she called him, if she whispered his name the way she did when she wanted something from him—

He’d go crawling back.

A fresh wave of anger surged through him, self-loathing so thick it made him shake. He slammed his palm against the wheel once, twice, his chest heaving.

Then, through gritted teeth, through ragged, gut-wrenching sobs, he choked out—

"Fuck."

The word broke as it left him, shattering in the empty car, in the empty road, in the empty fucking life he had left himself with.

And for the first time, Charles realised—

She wasn’t the one ruining him.

He was doing it all by himself.

Charles couldn’t fucking breathe.

His chest was caving in, ribs tightening like a vice, lungs burning as if he’d just done fifty laps without a single breath. His forehead was still pressed to the steering wheel, his whole body trembling, fists clenched so tight his nails dug into his palms.

The tears wouldn’t stop.

They kept coming, harder, faster, falling thick and hot down his face, catching in the corners of his mouth, dripping onto the leather of his seat. His breath came in short, sharp gasps, his throat raw, his skin burning, his heart pounding too fast, too loud, drowning out every rational thought.

Get it together. Get a fucking grip.

But he couldn’t.

Because it wasn’t just her.

It was everything.

It was the fact that every other driver on the grid had someone waiting for them at the end of a race. Girlfriends in the paddock, wives in the motorhomes, kids running into their arms after they stepped off the podium. Their lives were moving forward, settling into something steady, something real.

And Charles?

Charles had her.

A woman who wasn’t even his.

A woman who would never be his.

And he was getting older. Fuck, he was getting older. The sport that had once been his entire life was starting to feel different, like the clock was ticking down, like he was running out of time. He’d spent years thinking he had plenty of it—plenty of time to fall in love, plenty of time to have something real, plenty of time to figure it all out.

But here he was.

Twenty-seven years old. Nothing to show for it.

No wife. No kids. No one to go home to.

Just a woman with a ring on her finger that another man had put there.

His breath hitched, panic creeping in, a crushing weight settling on his chest. His fingers scrambled for the collar of his shirt, tugging at it like he was suffocating, like the car was too fucking small, the air too thin. He gasped, trying to force the breath into his lungs, but it wasn’t working. His vision swam, his ears ringing, his hands shaking so hard he had to squeeze them into fists.

He let out a ragged, broken noise, somewhere between a sob and a curse, slamming his palm against the wheel again.

What the fuck was he doing?

What the fuck had he done to himself?

His whole life, he’d thought he was chasing something. A future, a career, a love worth waiting for. But he wasn’t chasing anything.

He was stuck.

Trapped in a cycle of hotel rooms and stolen touches, of whispered lies and cheap, meaningless fucks.

And it hit him, all at once, like a punch to the gut.

She wasn’t his mistake.

He was hers.

the end.

taglist: @lilorose25 @curseofhecate @number-0-iz @dozyisdead @ihtscuddlesbeeetchx3 @n0vazsq @dying-inside-but-its-classy @carlossainzapologist @iamred-iamyellow @luvstappen

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cherubkissesx · 18 hours ago

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tangled limbs

pairing: spencer reid x bau!female reader

summary: you and spencer are in a secret relationship but you’re sick so spencer immediately rushes to your place after work but he ends up falling asleep, but penelope and derek catch you two.

contents: fluff, sick reader!, talks of throwing up

you woke up that day feeling absolutely terrible but decided to go into work anyways, however just before you and the team were about to go on the jet aaron stopped you and told you to go home.

“what! why?” you said stunned but aaron just shot you a look as if to say “are you serious”. “you look very ill, and it doesn’t ease my nerves to know one of my team might throw up everywhere based on the way you cover your mouth every five seconds” aaron said pointedly.

“you make a very good point sir” you said giving up and walking to go pack up your stuff to leave. “where are you headed?” spencer said subtly putting his hand on your wrist.

“home i feel awful” you said as you yet again find your hand flying up to your mouth in a moment of panic thinking you might throw up but lower your hand when the nausea passed.

“in the politest way possible, you look god awful” spencer said in a soft tone. “gee, thanks” you laugh.

“i’ll see you later.” you said and when there was no one around he planted a kiss on your temple which made your pale complexion flush instantly.

—-

you got changed into your pjs immediately upon arriving home and flop into bed making sure you have a sick bucket at the side of your bed just incase.

practically as soon as your head hit the pillow you fell into a deep slumber. the coolness of your sheets hitting your flushed face felt nice and soothing.

some hours later you awoke startled as you felt someone gently shake you awake. “spence?” you managed to say once you peeled your eyes open. you looked around your room finding that your room was engulfed in darkness. wow how long had you slept?

you check your phone and see it was 11pm that same day, you had slept all day.

“what are you doing here?” you asked softly budging up and patting the now open spot for spencer to sit in.

“i was worried about you” spencer said engulfing you in a gentle hug. “it’s only a stomach bug and maybe a bit of a fever” you waved off.

“shhh let me worry” spencer said lying down and pulling you into his side. “you guys are back earlier than i thought” you said trying to make conversation. “the case was a bust, minimal evidence” spencer said sadly. “i’m thankful i didn’t miss out on much i already feel awful for not being there” you confessed.

“you never take a day off work not in all the years i’ve known you, plus you didn’t really take the day off you were sent home” spencer said reassuringly.

you smile up at him and snuggle into him even more as if no matter how close you were pressed into him it wasn’t enough. he diverts his soft doe like eyes down to yours and kisses you tenderly.

“my breath smells bad” you said giggling. “let me look after you” spencer smiles and runs his fingers through your hair which has your eyelids drooping.

—-

penelope and derek both take turns knocking on your apartment door but there was no answer. “we’ll just use her spare key!” penelope exclaims. “why would you know where she keeps her spare key?” derek asked in confusion. “doesn’t take a genius to figure it out” penelope said and retrieved your spare key from underneath your doormat.

“for an fbi agent that’s this smart she doesn’t think about her safety” derek laughed.

penelope and derek had brought you a care package although it was all penelope’s idea and derek just tagged along, it consisted of homemade soup, face masks, etc.

they made a beeline to your bedroom as it was the only door closed and you weren’t anywhere else. “y/n!” penelope said in a sing song voice.

“i—?” penelope said going to say something but stopped dead in her tracks and so did derek.

the scene they saw infront of them was you nestled in closely to spencer’s side, your head buried in the crook of his nick and his head resting on top of yours. he had a protective arm slung over your body while your hand was resting on his chest. and your legs where tangled together.

“did you know anything about this?” derek asked in surprise. “no! how could she not say anything” penelope whisper shouted.

“i think we should take a picture!” penelope announced excitedly and captured a photo of you two.

“they are never hearing the end of this.” derek chuckled.

#bau x reader #criminal minds #spencer reid x reader

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losers-clvb · 2 days ago

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"what am i supposed to do, if there's no you?" dean winchester x wife!reader

content: canon typical violence, depictions of blood, death, depictions of grief, angry grief, pre-death grief, angst, denial, mentions of cancer (and treatments), non-descriptive mentions of throwing up, death, dean shows emotions, fluff

word count: 5.5k

note: this one gets pretty heavy, but ultimately there is a happy ending. be careful with yourself if any of the content listed above is harmful to you. also, there is some mary winchester erasure because i didn't feel like writing her (sorry girl). and, jack has been given some special secret powers in order to fit this plot.

m.list

You hadn’t known there was so much blood in the human body.

All of it seemed to be laid out on the ground around you, puddling up in the creases of your elbows.

You had to be dead. There was no way your heart could still beat when you were drowning in a sea of red.

You could remember the pain of the initial slash, claws digging into your side as you ran from the attacker.

But now?

Now you were numb.

The only sensation you had was cold. You shivered in the warm night air, staring up at the tree branches looming over you. You wished you could see the sky, just glimpse the stars one last time.

“Shit,” you heard breathed out from the side of you.

Dean.

Your Dean.

His hands grazed over your wound, making you flinch away out of instinct.

“Honey, please,” Dean begged, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. You didn’t know exactly what he was asking for.

You to not be hurt? You to not die?

It wasn’t as if it was up to you.

Dean, you tried to say, but his name caught in your throat. You couldn’t talk, you could barely move.

“Shh, shh,” he tried to soothe, but you could hear the tremble in his voice. You could always hear the tremble when he was scared. “Don’t move.”

Dean glanced around wildly, his eyes falling on dead leaves and broken branches.

“Sammy!” He yelled, tears streaking through the dirt coating his face.

This was all his fault.

It was supposed to be an easy hunt.

One werewolf ripping hearts from the chests of anyone who stood in its way. Dean was gonna kill the poor bastard and get back in time for dinner.

That was the plan, until you begged to come along with him. He’d been hurt on the last hunt, an injury that left him in your care for weeks afterwards. You were nervous about him getting back out there. You didn’t want it to be the last time you’d see him.

He’d agreed on your tagging along under the condition that you stay locked in the car, safe with a sweater wrapped around you.

The same sweater that was tattered beyond belief.

Blood, your blood, trickled over your ring, turning the diamond a splotchy red.

“No, no, no,” Dean mumbled, brushing his hand over your cheek to get your attention. Your eyes fluttered back open.

“You gotta stay with me, sweetheart. Please--,” he choked on a cry that almost escaped, “please just… stay awake.”

Your breath was shallow. Not good. Black dots spotted your vision. Not good. Dean looked scared. Not good.

Footsteps ran up, nearly tripping on the soft grass when their owner saw the scene in front of him. Sam stared down at you, Dean crouched over you.

“Sam, get over here, now.” Dean demanded, heaving out breaths.

“Dean--,” Sam started, but his brother cut him off.

“Get the hell over here!” Dean yelled, chin trembling.

Sam stumbled over, helping Dean hoist you up.

Suddenly, you could feel the pain.

You cried out, head lolling back into Dean’s chest.

“I know, honey, I know,” Dean choked, trying not to utterly lose it while you were in this condition. He’d seen people, good people, die from wounds less intense than this.

Stop.

He couldn’t think about that right now.

You were going to live. There wasn’t any way he could live without you.

“Sammy, faster!” Dean had urged from the backseat, where he cradled your head in his lap.

They needed a hospital now. He would figure out a lie to tell the doctors later, something that would explain how you had gotten so hurt. He couldn’t think right now, not with the blood still flowing out.

“Dean,” you crackled out, your hand falling onto where his help pressure on the injury. His eyes snapped to your face, searching wildly for a clue of what you were gonna say.

“I,” you took in a breath, wincing when the inflation of your lungs pushed more pain through you, “I love you.” You were whispering as loudly as you could muster up.

Dean shook his head, brushing your hair from your forehead.

“You’re fine.” He promised you, but his voice wavered. You weren’t fine. You were dying.

“I love you so much.” You felt tears stream from your eyes. You didn’t know if it was from the thrumming pain or the fact that you were scared to die. Maybe a mix of both.

“You--,” Dean started to say, but the screech of Baby’s tires skidding to a stop in front of the emergency room doors cut him off.

Sam helped pull you from the car, placing you in Dean’s arms to be rushed into the hospital.

That had been almost seven months ago.

You had almost died. Almost.

And so had Dean, not from any monster or slice in his skin. He almost lost you. You, his only reason to live, his lifeline, his everything. In his eyes, the sun rose and set with you.

Now, he sat by your side on the light blue couch you had picked out from a second-hand store. The quilt you had spent weeks sewing together lay over your legs.

“We should get this.” You pointed a finger at the laptop screen in front of you, a book pulled up just under your fingertip. On the cover was a trio of bears, two big, one little. Baby Bear’s Family stood out in thick letters. Dean raised an eyebrow and looked at you.

“Babies can’t read, honey.” He reminded you, eliciting an eye roll from you.

“We read to the baby, Winchester.” You added it to your cart regardless. A pop-up message informing you there would be a wait on the item showed, but you figured it would show up in a timely manner.

“You read to the baby, Winchester.” Dean added that last part with a grab of your hand, your wedding band cold against his skin. You furrowed your brows. “I teach it what real music is.”

“It? You can’t call our baby it.” You laughed, a sound that Dean let sink into his being. He loved your laugh.

“What else do I say?”

“Umm…,” you hummed as you thought, searching around for a name to put to the nonexistent person.

You weren’t pregnant, not yet, at least. You and Dean had begun to care less about using condoms, opting to let fate decide whether or not you two would be parents. It wasn’t until two days ago when you had woken up from a dream in the middle of the night, nudging Dean awake with a I want a baby that you two had really started trying.

He wasn’t complaining.

He hadn’t let himself imagine much of a future before you, but with you as his? He could see it all: white-picket fence, you waking up with him every morning, little feet tittering across floorboards. Now he had it.

Well, the fence was a red color, and there were many times he’d woken up to the smell of bacon, you having gotten up before him. No matter, it was still perfect. You were perfect.

He was ready to have perfect children with you.

“Baby Bear.” You decided, eyes falling back to the book. Dean snorted a laugh.

“I am not saying Baby Bear,” he argued, not catching onto the fact that he just did.

“Why not?” You frowned, memorizing every line of the artwork on the front of your new favorite book.

“It’s girly. I’m a man.”

“Dean, you were wearing my fluffy pink bathrobe yesterday.” You reminded him. If he was going to claim to be a man, whatever his definition of it was, you weren’t going to let him make exceptions.

“It’s warm!” He defended, a smile crossing his face. You two had fought over who would wear the robe all morning, up until the point you had pulled it off of him before pushing him back into bed, continuing on your mission of making a baby.

“Baby Bear.” You said with finality, letting him know you weren’t letting this go.

“Baby Bear.” Dean begrudgingly let out, giving you a soft kiss.

You pushed the laptop to the coffee table in front of you two, letting him guide you onto your back as he deepened the kiss, his hand snaking up your shirt.

That must have been the time it stuck. Or maybe it was from the next day, or that night after.

Either way, you were one-hundred-percent, without a doubt, sure that you were pregnant.

You’d been more tired than usual, getting some morning sickness, and your breasts were sore.

It had to be pregnancy, right?

“Why can’t I go get you one of those sticks to pee on?” Dean asked, watching you flutter around the bedroom in preparation for your doctor’s appointment.

“Those things are wrong all the time, I wanna know for sure.” You muttered, brushing through your hair.

“You really think Baby Bear is makin’ an appearance?” Dean looked to your middle. You weren’t showing, obviously, but he could imagine a little baby taking form in there. You stopped in front of him, giving him a kiss on the nose.

“I know it.” You assured him.

The trip to the doctor’s office was filled with your plans for the nursery, what dress you would wear for the baby shower, what Baby Bear’s first birthday party would look like.

You couldn’t stop chattering on to everyone you interacted with: Dean, the nurses, the older woman waiting next to you in the waiting room.

You talked and talked, a bright smile on your face. You had just moved onto what brand stroller you wanted when the doctor entered the room again, a clipboard in hand.

You looked at him expectantly, but confusion sparked at the second physician that entered. She was about your height, with light purple scrubs. An enamel pin of a pink ribbon was fastened to the pocket on her chest.

Your face dropped as the doctor, the one who was supposed to tell you those words you had waited to hear all your life, explained the test results.

His words blurred in your mind, like you had dunked your head under water. Dean’s grip on your hand tightened.

There was something growing in you, but it wasn’t Baby Bear.

Metastatic stage IV breast cancer.

I don’t know how they didn’t catch it before, the doctor had told you. Apparently, this foreign thing had been growing in you since before your werewolf attack. Maybe it was the reason why the scratch hadn’t turned you, why you hadn’t been given lupine abilities.

You would have preferred that to this.

Chemo, radiation, pills upon pills.

Those were your options.

No surgery could get all of the cancer.

Nothing could. You weren’t going to get better, you would just slow down the dying. You knew it, the doctors knew it, your friends and family knew it. The only one who didn’t seem to get the memo was Dean.

He carted you around to every appointment. He made notes in that illegible scrawl of his. He set alarms for every round of pills you had to take, waking you up and making you swallow each and every one. He held your thinning hair back when you got sick after the chemo, sitting on the bathroom floor with you.

He had work, yes, his mechanic job he had picked up after quitting hunting. His boss, thankfully, was kind. He let Dean miss work, even offering to have his wife bring you to appointments. Dean always declined. He could take care of his girl.

You were sitting on the couch in the same spots you had just a few months ago, only this time you were watching Dean scroll through articles on cancer treatments instead of ones about different baby cries.

You wore the hat that Jody and the girls had gifted you when you had to shave your hair, their initials stitched into the side by Donna. It was your favorite. It reminded you of all the love that was around you, even if the hat only existed because of the poison coursing through your veins.

“Look at this one,” Dean pointed, much like you had to the baby book, the same one that still hadn’t arrived. Not that it mattered now.

“It’s in Toronto.” You told him after reading the first few lines. You and Dean lived in South Dakota, only an hour or so from Sioux Falls.

“We can move.” He said as he scrolled through the different tabs of the article.

“I don’t want to.” You argued, exhaustion lacing your voice. You were always tired lately.

“It won’t be forever, just until you’re better.”

“I’m not going to get better.”

That made Dean pause to look at you. His grief from your words, words he knew were true, was masked by disappointment and irritation. He hated when you talked like this.

“Yes, you are.” He gritted out, determination in his eyes.

“No, Dean, I’m not. I’m dying.” You looked away at the mention of the “D” word. You weren’t supposed say it, no one was supposed to say it. Dean had forbidden it.

“No. Don’t say that. You’re not--,” he cut himself off, unable to say the word himself. He felt the emotion choking at him, a metaphorical hand around his throat restricting air flow.

“Yes, I am.” The constant denial of what was really happening was weighing on you. You didn't want to pretend like everything was okay, that this was just a flu you needed to get over.

“I need you to understand, Dean.” You took in a shaky breath. “I need you to tell me that you know I'm dying.”

“I'm not sayin’ it because it's not happenin’.” Dean stood up, laptop resting on the couch cushion next to you. “You're not dying.” His voice shook on the last word.

You pulled your cardigan tighter around you, goosebumps chilling on your arms. As you lost weight from your treatments, you got colder.

“Dean--,” you began, but he already knew you were going to say a bunch of the same stuff. He shook his head, running a hand down his face.

“No. I'm not gonna listen to you talk like you're already dead. We can fix this. I can fix this.” Dean watched your face contort to anger, but he spoke before you could. “Cas can--,”

“Cas said he can't. You were there.” You cut him off, fumbling with the loose thread on your quilt.

The angel had been Dean's first call when the diagnosis came. It’d taken Castiel less than five seconds of his hand on your shoulder to know he couldn’t do anything. The masses had weaved themselves so deep into your body that even divine intervention couldn’t save it. Couldn’t save you.

“He can try again.” Dean almost growled, pacing in front of you. He was on the verge of a breakdown.

He hadn’t cried. He hadn’t screamed. He hadn’t done much of anything other than refuse to accept the situation.

He was teetering on a very thin tightrope that was about to snap from the weight of everything.

“No.”

Dean stumbled to a halt. He turned his head to you, a wild look in his eyes. You matched him, narrowing yours to him.

“I don’t want him to.”

It wasn’t that you wanted to die. You had just become less scared of it, more okay with the idea of a semi-peaceful death.

“You don’t want him to?” Dean seethed. You scoffed and looked away.

You hadn’t fought much before this whole thing, maybe a spat here and there, but never anything that hurt.

This? This was a war, one that had been brewing since the word cancer left the doctor’s mouth.

You’d seen something switch in Dean. He’d gone from that borderline-suicidal man you had met almost ten years ago to… whatever the hell he was now. Uncharacteristically optimistic, you had decided to name it.

But Dean Winchester could only look on the bright side for so long before he reverted back to that disbelief in anything good.

“What do you mean you don’t want him to?” Dean repeated your words again. He was looking at you like you had said something offensive, which, to be fair, it was offensive to him.

“I’m tired, Dean. Exhausted. Nothing is going to make this better. I just want to live the rest of my life peacefully, with love.” You argued back, fists clenching in anger. You were getting a migraine again, the same one that seemed to never go away, only crashing and retreating like the ocean.

Dean opened his mouth to talk, but squeezed his eyes shut and took in a breath instead.

“I love you. That’s why I’m doing this.” Dean tried to keep his voice steady, but as he spoke, the anger rushed in, taking hold and raising the volume of his words.

“I know you love me. And I love you. That’s why I’m doing this.” You rose to your feet, legs feeling slightly weak. You hadn’t eaten much that day, nausea crawling it’s way up your throat everytime you looked at the kitchen.

“And what is it that you think you’re doing?” Dean asked, jutting his head out in question, gesturing to you. “Do you think this is good, that this is healthy? Do you think it’s healthy to talk like you already have a death announcement posted?”

“Yes, Dean, I do. I really, truly do.” You spat at him, nodding your head. “You need to accept it. I’m dying,” Dean flinched at that goddamn “D” word, “and you need to understand that. I can’t be here to coddle you when it happens.”

“Shut up.” Dean was growling now, fire flaring in his green eyes. You winced, looking at him like he was batshit insane. He had never told you to shut up. He’d shushed you a few times, maybe asked you to be quiet, but never to shut up.

It slammed through the last of your strength to hold back. Your frustration, all of the fucking pain of the last few months, hell, even your grief for everything you would be missing out on unleashed into a monster you would be forced to regret later.

“No, Dean, you shut up!” You yelled, pointing a finger at him. “I have to listen to you talk like I have a future every fucking day, like you’re gonna magically fix everything and I’ll grow old and we’ll have a family. You talk like Baby Bear,” you hadn’t said that name since the day of your appointment, “is gonna be real. Well, newsflash: you can’t fix this. A goddamn angel of the Lord can’t heal me. What makes you think you, a human man, can do anything to stop this?” You had swayed a bit on your feet, the intense situation making you even more light headed than usual. You wanted to throw up, you needed to throw up, but instead you stood staring at Dean.

His eye twitched and you saw it, just for a split second, but it was still there. He wanted to fight back, he wanted to scream and yell and insult you. You watched a wall build back up. It was flimsy and you could have easily broken it back down, but he turned away before you could decide if you wanted to.

“I’m goin’ out.” Dean muttered tersely as he stomped to the garage, swiping up his keys from the little bowl you made him keep them in. The keychain you had bought for him after your fifth date swung down, the little rubber duck looking back at you with the same malice you had spotted on Dean’s face.

The door slammed at the same time you made a run for the bathroom, a mix of emotions flying out with the minimal contents of your stomach. You heaved over the porcelain of the toilet, an image you knew too well after so many trips to it.

You slumped against the wall as the water swirled down, carrying away any agitation you had felt.

You just wanted your husband, your Dean, here. He would help you get through your bouts of nausea, then tuck you into your favorite fuzzy throw blanket. He’d even begun to brush your teeth for you, moving the bristles about your mouth to wash away any sour taste while you fluttered your eyes shut.

You were still thinking about his gentle care when he came back home, boots slipping off before tip-toeing to the bedroom. You had to be asleep, he figured. It was late, maybe too late, but that would be a problem for morning-Dean.

His heart skipped a beat when he saw the bed empty, sinking when he heard the retching in the room over.

He rushed to the bathroom, flipping on the light to show you, bent over. Tears streamed down your face, giving your pretty eyes a tinge of red that Dean noticed when you looked up at him.

He sank to his knees, pulling you into his arms once your body relaxed. You were wearing the same clothes from earlier, meaning you hadn’t even tried to go to bed. Had you been here the whole time, through all the hours he had spent crashing through the nearby woods like the monsters he used to hunt?

“I’m sorry.” He whispered into your hair, rocking you. You curled into him, body shaking with soft cries.

You cried for the way your body rejected everything. You cried for the words he had said. You cried for the words you had said. You cried for the future you would never have.

“I’m so sorry, honey. I love you.”

Those had also been the last words he’d said to you as you drifted off into a sleep you would never wake from. You were in a hospital bed stationed in your home, surrounded by your favorite flowers.

Dean had walked out of the room after your final breath, placing a shaky kiss on your forehead. His tears had fallen to your face and he brushed those away like he used to brush your hair away.

Everyone was there. Your family and his own, makeshift version of a family. He had swallowed down a sob, not wanting to break in front of a crowd. That resolve had crumbled when Jody had wrapped her arms around him.

He’d soaked her shirt, knees nearly buckling underneath him as he tried to think of what life would be like without you. He couldn’t even imagine it.

There was no life without you.

The next few weeks he hadn’t remembered. He didn’t dare to go back to the house. He stayed with Jody, taking up residence in her last remaining guest room after your funeral. He only left the room to go to the bar, only left the bar to cry in the Impala.

It was torture.

Everything was.

It wasn’t until he had decided enough was enough, he would go back home, that he moved onto the next stage of grief: anger.

He thought he had been familiar with the emotion, but whatever he had felt before was nothing compared to what surged through him when he saw that book.

There had been a package on the front steps, raindrops sliding down the plastic of the envelope. He’d picked it up with curiosity. He didn’t remember ordering anything.

He ripped through the covering to reveal a trio of bears, two big, one little. Baby Bear’s Family stood out in thick letters.

His blood ran cold.

Dean must have blacked out, because the next thing he remembered was the ringing of his phone. All around him was a mess; table flipped over, dishes shattered, splintered wood on the hinges of what was once a cupboard door.

In the middle of it all was him, panting and crying, and the book, untouched by his destruction.

Dean scrambled to the phone, hoping, despite knowing better, that it would be you.

Sammy

The caller ID broke his heart further, but he answered. He couldn’t ignore his little brother forever.

“Dean,” Sam breathed out, like he had been in a fight just moments prior, “we need you.”

If he’d known what exactly they needed help with, he would have hung up and rotted away in a pile of your clothing.

Instead, he now found himself sitting in the bunker, a place you had found homey but in a dungeon kind of way, across from this newborn twenty-something kid that wouldn’t shut the hell up. He found a fascination in everything, from the salt shakers to the water that flowed from the sink.

You would have loved Jack.

The thought made Dean shoot up and stomp to his room, cutting off Jack’s ramble about what kind of lightbulbs he preferred.

The boy frowned, looking down at the glass of whiskey Dean had left behind.

“I don’t know why he hates me.” Jack breathed out, heart aching. He didn’t like this emotion. He just wanted Dean to love him as the others did.

“He doesn’t hate you, he hates himself.” Sam sighed, tapping a finger against the glass of his own glass.

“Sam--,” Castiel started, but Sam shook his head, cutting the angel off.

“He needs to know, Cas. I can’t keep ignoring her.” Sam argued back, but his voice softened. “She was my family, too.”

So, Sam told Jack all about you. He left nothing out. The flour-kisses you had given to Dean during your baking phase. The way you always made sure to adjust Castiel’s tie if it was even slightly off-center. The piles of books you would bring to Sam whenever he would visit you and Dean.

He told Jack about Baby Bear and the way you had tried to get Sam to download dating apps during your frequent phone calls. Your love for flowers and the color blue and the ugly fish everyone always made fun of.

Jack couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment he had decided to do it, but an idea had popped into his head during Sam’s sad laughter.

He found himself standing in a white hallway, identical doors lining the walls. On a plaque read your first name followed by Winchester. He was sure this was yours.

Pushing it open, he instantly felt warm.

The smell of cookies, ones he could tell would be the best he’d ever have without even tasting them, filled the air.

A pretty woman stood by a counter, cradling her swollen stomach and humming. Pictures of her and Dean lined the walls of the house your heaven was in.

He knew it without seeing a picture: this woman was you.

Jack called your name, startling you. You scanned his face, a frown on your face. He wasn’t a threat, but you hadn’t been expecting visitors.

“Who are you?” You asked, a hand shielding your stomach as best as possible.

“You’re her. You’re Dean’s honey.” Jack nodded his head while he spoke, making sure to use the pet name Sam had told him Dean would call you. “And that’s Baby Bear.” He pointed to your stomach.

You felt a rush of warmth at your baby’s name. You hadn’t picked a real one yet, but you had time. You had nothing but time.

“How do you know that?”

“I’m Jack.” He waved, giving you that gap-toothed smile everyone but Dean found adorable. You smiled warmly at him, confusion still lacing your expression.

“Do you want a cookie?” You offered, gesturing to the worn table, the same table Dean had destroyed.

Jack filled you in on everything, a flash of painful memories hitting you with every word about your death. He explained that you were in Heaven and that he was here to bring you back.

You had ached to see Dean again. You tried to think back on whether or not he had been here, in your heaven, but something was blocking you from it. It didn’t make sense: if this was Heaven, why weren’t you completely happy?

You weren’t in pain, you didn’t feel sadness, or anger, or anything. You only felt content.

It was Dean.

He wasn’t here. He was your heaven as much as you were his.

You agreed to go back to earth, ignoring the fact that it would mean Baby Bear would be gone, that this perfect life would go away. Scratch that, it wasn’t perfect. It couldn’t be, not without Dean.

You saw a flash of white and suddenly you were standing in a grassy outlook of a town. Not any town. Lebanon, Kansas.

You frowned and turned to Jack, but the nephilim only beamed at you.

Behind you, the Impala -- Dean’s Impala -- was parked. You caught a glimpse of dirty blond hair over the top of the car.

“Dean.” You whispered, not wanting to spook him.

Dean heard it. He always heard every noise you made, even if he was across the house.

He shrugged it off, taking a swig from his flask and letting the whiskey burn away the heartache.

“Dean.” You said again, a little louder.

He couldn’t shrug this off. That was definitely your voice.

Dean’s hunting instincts, the ones that had been engraved into him since he was a kid, forced him to his feet, hand flying to the knife on his side. He spun around, searching for you, or whatever thing was pretending to be you.

He choked on a breath when his eyes landed on you. You looked heavenly. You didn’t look how you had on your deathbed. In fact, you looked even younger than you had at the appointment where the doctor gave you your diagnosis.

It was as if your aura, the one Dean could never see but knew was warm and lovely, was glowing around you, cascading down the dress you wore. That dress. It was the same one you’d worn when he’d asked you to marry him.

He remembered that day, getting down on one knee in the middle of the garden you loved so much. It had been sunny, as it was now, and Dean swore the sun shone around your head like a halo. He’d suspected it before, but he knew it at that moment: you were his guardian angel.

You were the only thing that could save him.

There you were, standing a few feet from him, here to save him.

Save him from the grief. From the anger. From himself.

His hands flew open, the knife and flask clattering to the ground. He didn’t care that his whiskey, the good whiskey that he’d spent far too much money on, was flowing into the grass. The only thing that mattered was you.

Dean stumbled to you, but you met him halfway, crashing into him. He wrapped his arms around you and buried his face in your hair. You smelled the same. His favorite scent, the one he would never forget.

A little piece of him was screaming that this wasn’t real, you were a shapeshifter or a revenant or a demon or a million other things.

The part of him that had beaten down his happiness every day fought back. If he was killed by holding you one last time, that was okay with him. Life wasn’t much without you anyway.

Your bodies shook out sobs in sync. You couldn’t remember how long you’d been dead for, the days shifting into one perfect event of cookie baking.

But Dean?

Dean had it down to the minute. One year, three days, and twenty-two minutes -- twenty-three now. Each second had been worse than the last, leading up to this moment.

He didn’t let you go.

He was afraid if he even loosened his grip, you would dissipate into a mist, leaving him with nothing all over again.

“I missed you.” You shook out, brushing your thumb over the nape of his neck just like you had done every night before falling asleep. Dean heaved out a sound, like he couldn’t even speak.

He focused on you to calm him down.

Your hair, your skin, your warmth. It grounded him, and he twisted his fingers into the fabric of your dress.

“How?” He asked, a simple breath of air forming into one word. You knew what he meant. It reminded you of the fact that Jack was still standing behind you.

“Jack.” You mumbled, pulling your Dean in closer.

Dean’s eyes shot open and, through wet eyelashes, he saw the same boy he had resented for so long. Jack smiled at him, that innocent, little kid kind that told Dean all he needed to know.

Jack had done this for him.

He’d somehow found a way to harness all of his power to bring you back, just to make Dean happy.

Just to make him like him.

Dean would talk to him later. He would find the words to explain his gratitude, explain what this was.

Now, he let his ears catch on your heartbeat, focusing on the steady thumping reminding him that you were alive.

“You’re my heaven, Dean.”

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