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therealslimshakespeare · 10 months ago

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Masters of the Air Fanfic

As requested by sweet @arianatheangel-girl and the subsequent poll for a “Buck Cleven Fic before the series comes out” -and I, being a madwoman with no impulse control and a faint recollection of the book, have delivered…this…whatever this is

Song Challenge: i was challenged by dear @the-ugly-swan for a twenty favored songs challenge and I’m gonna go ahead and make this part of it. August by Taylor Swift informed some of the bittersweet timeline here, with infidelity not being the enemy but rather the lack of possessing oneself fully during wartime to give to another

Spoilers: historical accuracy and inaccuracy abound here so, beware there are some biographical facts about Cleven in here that might count as spoilers to those who wish to watch the series with a blank slate. While to the history purists I must beg for a substantial amount of artistic license to be granted me, and obviously I’ve not seen the show yet and I crunched the timeline to my own will

Reader insert but without the use of “y/n” -I’m utterly fudging a bit on the likelihood of a WAAF lady being part of the American ground crew, however, I had in my minds eye the vision of a greasy mechanic and a glamorous flyboy and it wouldn’t budge, so shhh, go with the vibe

Warnings: mature, 18+. Fluffy smut was requested and while it is very brief and mild in here, not very explicit in phrasing, it’s quite present and a plot point so beware. Also, Virgin!Gale has my heart so we went with that. No shade to dear Marjorie irl, I’ll probably end up writing fics about her once the show gives me Inspo. Some angst due to war, POW’s, etc, mild language

Word count: a monstrous 12k

They came in like locusts at the height of summer, long prayed for, oft cursed in moments of perilous isolation, those ever so intriguingly shiny Americans.

Swarming with a metal buzz over the flatlands of East Anglia, big hulking beasts touched down on fresh tarmacs with more grace than anything that size ought to have, flashing the most bizarre and suggestive paintings on their gleaming fuselages. Flying Fortresses, they were called, and deserved the name. Nothing but the biggest, the loudest, the most alarming machinery would do for the American war effort, and now all this mighty strength was Britain’s too, no longer alone, no longer enduring.

Now the fight could be taken to the enemy in earnest. Out of their flying ships poured the most alarmingly young looking faces, jaunty hats and leather jackets, they looked every bit the sort of fellows war was advertised to.

Farmers in their tractors, mothers with daughters still under their command and RAF veterans all looked askance at such pristine warriors. Had their fertile fields been paved into airfields just for this? Were these gum chewing boys the long expected aid? It wasn’t anti-climactic, nothing American could ever be, it was all just alarmingly fresh. It was understandable then, the initial tentativeness the locals felt towards their new occupants, the way the boys took up such space in the rural villages, made such a racket in the pubs, chased every skirt that swished in the rainy summer breeze, stuck hands out for a shake no matter the introduction. They were a warm, boisterous and confident lot, all much needed attributes in wartime Britain, and soon, the initial distrust of the citizenry thawed, hands were shaken in return and invitations made. An amiable amalgamation eventually occurred, Norfolk never to recover or return to whatever placidity had been her’s before the arrival of the 100th.

Personally, you couldn’t wait to get your hands on them. The planes, that is.

Amalgamation was less a choice for yourself and your service members than a duty. It was abnormal, having a mixed ground crew, British and American servicemen too often clashing in hierarchy disputes for it to be standard, but with deployment rates so high and casualties mounting, ground crew became a case of whichever skilled individuals could be called upon to keep the operation running, the pilots up and the enemy bombed.

You were just glad to be near home, first time back since ‘39 when you’d signed up in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force -even if your rural hometown was now overrun with Americans. They weren’t a bad lot at all, at least not the ones you’d encountered so far on base. Amiable and unexpectedly eager, undeterred by veterans’ grim looks and tales of the woodchipper across the channel, that line of anti-aircraft that shredded anything trying to penetrate the continent.

“Better get crackin’ then.” Was the common response followed by a grin.

Your crew chief sergeant, Ken Lemmons, an American with a forelock of sandy ringlets and the patience of a saint, made the job easier even as every ounce of expertise was exacted from each man -or woman- under him. Feeding a fiery chain of bullets into the turret gun under a hot July sun, you thought your papa may have had the right of it when he tried to dissuade you from choosing the harsher duties of the Auxiliary Force. You could’ve been pouring over a map in the cool of the boardroom right now, or passing on radio messages, even shuttling planes would’ve been more relaxing, but no, you’d spent your life passing him tools in his garage, your papa had been building flying machines when most for these boys were still in diapers, and that path called to you, too. So for you it was grueling maintenance work and the ever present grime of grease on your hands and the awkward reach of twisted metal repairs. Gratefully, after their first mission, there were plenty of them back safe, however riddled their fortresses might’ve been.

It was interesting, the way certain of the flight crew treated the ships. Some were endeared but indifferent to their repairs while others hovered at each hole and tear, like over protective mothers, while you and your mates tried to do your jobs.

Why, one plane in the five assigned to your care was even named “Our Baby”. With such a moniker it made sense that its porcelain faced pilot would caress the shredded wing with a misty eyed frown at each wound, like it were a breathing thing, a race horse, a friend. You didn’t judge it, and he didn’t seem aware of his audience, he’d be back out there doing his own check up after debriefing. Never interrupting your work, always quick to step aside or duck out of the way of a ground crewman’s path, it wasn’t time to chatter or make introductions, although sometimes when the work took long and his reports longer, he’d be there to bid goodnight to you all, soft, American drawl saying “Goodnight, thank ya, goodnight, good work, thank ya” again and again to each.

You grew to recognize them, the ones each mission spared, there were so many and under hats and bundled in leather jackets they tended to blend together, but there were those who made their mark, if not on you then on Dorace in cartography and Eileen at the Red Cross. There was much tittering and speculation, after all, spread thin as their time was, there was also plenty of off time, made all the more charged and anxious as it came in the form of waiting for new orders. The men would be vibrating with nervous energy and generous in the flush of a recent victory and they took it out on the little villagers who in good British fashion took it on the chin and challenged them to a contest of good spirits.

Those were happy days, less anxious than the preceding ones and less heavy than those making up the year after. You dared be roped into the multiple pub crawls, often choosing the most sensible and quiet of the group as your victim and attaching yourself to their side for the evening. This tactic had its fallibility, sometimes those moderates were such a bore as to be unsupportable or hadn’t enough verve to make a full night of it and retired early like respectable, curfew-abiding saps. That’s how you found yourself one night ensconced in a beer pungent corner of Flaggen’s, green leather seats sticky under your palms, with Major Egan fanning out a wad of cash in front of you. It was a blatant attempt to bribe you to clear his aircraft sooner than the last inspection suggested.

“Suggestions” was Egan’s term for regulations.

If you were less tipsy you wouldn’t have giggled at the man’s idiocy, but his arm was heavy around your shoulders and this very cash had bought you one too many gin and tonics. “These regulations keep you alive!” You chided him, shaking your head and feeling the room tip as you did. Truly these Americans could hold their liquor, almost as well as the Polish Squadron when it came to a binge.

“A little flack isn’t gonna keep her down.” he scoffed, “I’ve been grounded for a week now-“

“-I don’t have the authority-“

“-and I’m not gonna sit here while Buck goes up and racks up his number!” Eagen was vehemently slurring and your drunken mind tried to process who Buck was, if not Egan himself.

“Aren’t you Bucky?” you asked, bewildered.

-Americans and their nicknames.

“Yeah.”

“So who’s Buck?” you concentrated very hard on the ancient coaster beneath your latest pint.

“It’s Buck! It’s Gale, Cleven, Major Gale Cleven!” Egan waxed louder and more dramatic with each addition. “You keep clearing his plane! But not mine! Why’s that, huh?”

“How do you know that?” you asked, dubious and only in the raucous of this little pub would his loud voice go unheeded. Compared to the ongoing dart game to the left behind the half wall, an elephant’s trumpeting would be considered bashful.

“ ‘Cause he tells me?” he replied, bewildered at your slowness, “Says you and your crew are little fairies, crawlin’ all over his plane and patching it up better than ever after each mission. And then you clear him. Simple as that.”

“I don’t have authority to clear anyone.” you repeated.

“Huh,” Egan grunted, “how’does he mean then?”

“I don’t know.” you replied firmly, “I doubt I’ve even got your plane, i don’t see you around.”

“I don’t stay around, that’s your job, patching up. I just fly the damn thing.”

“Oh, well.” you shrugged, “I’ve had five, it’s down to three after last mission.” Three years ago the mention of that ratio of losses would’ve sank your mood to the floorboards, by now it’s horrifically routine. “What’s yours called?”

“Mugwump.” he grinned proudly, a flash of white beneath his dark mustache, the man’s face positively shimmered with sweat.

“Serial?” you asked demurely, just to be difficult.

He squinted his eyes shut briefly, head tilted back as if to ask the heavens for help and the recited in a drill master’s staccato “42-30066, ma’am, yes ma’am.”

You giggled again and Egan’s arm jostled your shoulders, smushing you further into him. They were good fun, these boys, didn’t even mind your horrifyingly unflattering uniform with its bulging pockets adding bulk where your curves should take center stage and your stupid pleated cap making you look to be half baker, half doll. You preferred your plain navy coveralls but you’d hardly be let into an establishment in them. Egan’s warm arm didn’t seem to mind the excess poof of the material, he smashed it right down with his hand’s firm grip, he was fun, you decided, no harm in good fun. “Alas, not one of mine.” you sighed, focusing hard on the serial number.

“Damn.” he swore, playing at dejection.

“No,” you went on, “but I’ve got this one, a very spoiled one, maybe you know whose it is. They named it ‘Our Baby’!”

Poor manners and personnel etiquette though it was, you couldn’t say it without tittering.

Egan didn’t laugh, he just looked at you like you’d proved his point. “Yeah,” he replied vehemently, “That’s Buck Cleven’s!”

“Oooh.” -So it was him, the fighting cherub, the walking doughboy, toothpick, baby at wings: there were a dozen or more nicknames you and the ground crew gave the wing-petting Major behind his back. “He always says goodnight to us.” you said instead.

“Is that where he is when I wanna go for a drink?” Egan exclaimed, “Ha! You’d think he was married to the ole ship.”

“He handles her beautifully.” You feel oddly compelled to defend, he’s a master at flight and as someone who must repair each fault of his landings and his leavings and his missions, you feel some loyalty to his finesse. “He handles her so well.” you repeat in the tone of a woman who’s seen some aviation in her time, young though you may be.

“Well let me let you into a lil secret,” Egan smirks and you brace without knowing why, he is, after all, not the respectable and dull men you choose to go out with, he is the dangerous sort you bring those dullards along to deter, “shes the only ‘she’ that boy has ever ‘handled’ -if ya get my drift.”

The sleazy wag of his eyebrows leaves no room for ignorance, you feel your face heat up, wether in prudery for the topic or second hand embarrassment for his friend’s sake, you don’t know.

“Nothing wrong with that.” you reply coldy, only to distance yourself from the road his body language seemed to be hurtling you both down.

“Quite right. Nothin’ at all!” Egan agrees vehemently, his smile easy and his eyes clever “But I’d be a poor friend if I didn't try to remedy his predicament.”

“Telling me is somehow part of this remedy?” you were suspicious, rightfully so.

“Maybe.” Egan drawls it out, shifting in his seat to no longer corner you, his attention drawn to the nearby dart game. The man of the moment, the subject, the handler of planes and none else, was not here. He had such a luminous head of golden hair, it would be a beacon amongst the muddy haired crowd flinging darts. “The thing of it is, dear,” Egan confided, “I've had an absolutely marvelous time since I got here. And I think that’s rather essential, for sanity and for international relations, don’t you? I’ve gotten to know all sorts of wonderful people, lovely people like yourself-“

“-word is, you’ve known them a little too biblically, no wonder Cleven avoids your outings.” You could not help but temper him. “Half of Great Britain has had the privilege, if some are to be believed.”

“And so what if I have? I love dancin’!” he laughed quite happily at your barb and you didn’t have it in you to pull down any further a man who was sacrificing so much day in and out. “Getting to know Great Britain is a better occupation than pettin’ plane wings under the moonlight.”

You tittered again at his words and the oddly endearing memories you had of watching Major Ceven petting and whispering to his plane like she was his long-standing beloved, loitering ground crew unheeded. “He does do that.” you agreed.

“Hey, everyone’s got their method.” Egan insisted in his friend’s defense, “But I have told him, it’s good for the morale to mingle, even if he hates drinkin’.“

You pucker your face at that. “I know he mingles, Violet says he’s a doll when he goes to market.” you point out, small town chatter gets around and while you can’t say you know Cleven, you know he’s mild mannered and precious. And a terribly pretty face too, which isn’t fair, he oughta be an ass which a face that cute. “And he got a tan from somewhere last week.“

“Oh, so ya noticed!” Egan is triumphant, “A bunch of us used our day passes to go messin’ around in boats on the canals.”

“Good for you.” you didn’t know what else to say. “Why are we talking about him? What’s your point? I can ask for your plane to be transferred to my crew, but it won’t get you a sloppy clearance. And if your friend is so socially awkward he can’t even manage a pub night, you can hardly expect me to be flattered that you consider me prime material to throw at him.”

“He’s not awkward.” Egan cut to the chase quite serious, in mission mode, “Buck just had his hopes tangled up back home, and now he’s here he’s finding it hard to accept that hopes were all they were. She’s real moved on.” Well that had hurt, you winced in sympathy. “I warned him, everything during this war has got to be taken as a bit inpermanent. Don’t fall in love with Texas girls when you’re headed to England -via: Louisiana, Indiana, hell, by New York she’d stopped writing.”

“And now the texas girl has-“

“-found a Texan, I guess.” He shrugged and chugged the last of his pint. “She’s gettin’ married, it's really over. So, -“ he made a broad gesture as if to explain his reasoning for this entire segue. “-you like projects, you wouldn’t be in the line of work you’re in if ya didn’t, so whaddya say?”

You looked around the dimly lit pub in search of two things, sunny blonde hair and a clock to tell you how badly you were going to regret this night, come morning. “He’s not even here.” you balked.

“Well, no-“

“-what I say is,” you grinned at him disbelieving, “you owe me another gin and tonic for subjecting me to such inane chatter.”

His grin should have served as warning enough that he would neither drop the subject nor let you off free this evening. In fact, the ticking clock and its late curfew breaking hours became the least of your concerns come morning. The cool wash of bitter juniper blended into the pungent flow of beer, it blurred everything, soon there was a great swelling of pride for your native village, a pub crawl was on, all three visited and drank from, an army Jeep was requisitioned without authority, there was some incident regarding a policeman‘s helmet. The latter being the reason why you found yourself in “jail” the next morning, nursing a raging headache and questioning life decisions while glaring at John Egan’s polished boots.

There was very little talk about bail or Air Force hours being exceptioned, the more pressing concern to the Bobbies who had nabbed you was the coed holding cell. Thorpe Abbotts was a small place, after all, and you liked it that way. If this overly indulgent night could be kept away from the military police, all would be well.

You had one hope: Harry Crosby was sensibly absent from the holding cell, having a keen sense of when to depart from the raucous joyride at the precise moment to save himself a demerit. It was an extreme embarrassment to you that you’d not had the same sense. In fact, fond as you were of a bit of a knees up, you couldn’t quite credit the fact you had allowed yourself such free reign, or accomplished such foolishness. Glowering at Major Egan’s face now, animated with delighted chagrin at your shared plight as it was, you vowed to never again hook your fortunes to his, as it were.

Your resolve, and humiliation, was about to be compounded, exponentially.

There was a bustle of a visitor entering the precinct, easily heard in the small space, followed by the low hum of mild mannered conversation. It went on for sometime, and no amount of straining at the bars and cocking of ears would allow you, Egan or your fellow misfortunates to ascertain the gist of it. Violet’s husband was the main constable, and you were quite certain he’d be moderate in his sentence, he had his helmet back, after all. It was the Air Force penalty of not being on base in time this morning that you feared, a growing nausea that compounded the misery of your aching head. They’d not discharge Egan, they’d probably not even demote him, he was too crucial and he’d done this one too many times for it to be grace alone saving him. When he was needed, really needed, he was there. That’s what counted. The same could be said of you, but that hardly mattered given your low rank.

Violet’s husband, also known as constable Herbert, came in sight and with a jangle of keys and a tap to the side of his nose, swung open the bars of infamy and gestured for you and your fellow inmates to file out.

“All sorted.” He declared. His gaze lingered on you as it had many times in your life when you’d been caught jumping in puddles after church, “Let this be a lesson and a warning to you.”

You tried your best at both obeisance and penitence, both of which were rather natural feelings at the present time, while hurrying past as fast as was respectful, your approaching shift hours making your heart thump in panic.

On the steps outside, your savior was loitering against the wrought iron fence, thumbing at the petunias in the nearby window box. Gale Cleven was a mile long of lanky body in perfectly pressed and tailored Air Force greens, fresh faced as the good conscienced are, hair combed without his cap and a smile on his soft face that was composedly long suffering, rather than endeared, as he watched you miscreants pour out of the modest brick building.

You stumbled to a halt on the first step at the sight of him and allowed your instincts to take over, hands smoothing down hair and skirt with frantic self consciousness. You must’ve looked a rumple.

“I hope last night was worth it.” Cleven drawled in that voice of his, so oddly deep for so fresh a face, his placid smile growing into something more genuinely mirthful as Egan smooched at him in gratitude and swore that he knew his Buck wouldn’t abandon them, that his Buck would pull through for them. “I order a round of toothpaste for everyone and cold showers, you stink.” Gale shied away without any real effort, nodding in greeting to the boys he recognized.

Then, as if in the most painfully slow motion with all the strong string accompaniment of a silver screen scene, his eyes landed on you and an odd ache formed in your chest at the anticipation of his disapproval.

It made you tense and draw yourself up to your full height, looking about as regal as a drenched bantam in your disheveled dignity, but you weren’t about to be relegated to another tier than these boys he so amusedly indulged.

“Y’all know what time it is?” he asked mildy, those azure orbs with their batting dark fringe didn’t waver and you realized he indeed had more guts than you’d given him credit for.

There was a chorus of “no”s and various guesses based on the fast evaporating fog and the lightening sky.

“Zero five thirty.” he ended the suspense with the cock of an eyebrow at you.

“Shit!” Egan was suddenly animated, “Shit, shit-“

“Hey, you keep your swearin’ away from my sweet lil corporal.” Cleven chided, and it took you a brief moment to startle upon realizing he meant you. And he thought you sweet? “C’mon Miss,” he waved you down the steps and for some inexplicable reason you felt very compelled to obey and suddenly stood beneath his gaze like a dutiful child awaiting deliverance or censure, “I’ve only got this bike, petrol allotment ran out when we went to the canals last week. But it’ll get ya back faster than this lot. Reckon you can manage on the handlebar?”

“Wha-?“ you glanced sideways at the bike with its large, sweeping handlebars and second guessed his meaning until he himself was straddling it. His legs required the seat to be hiked up impossibly high and the narrow nip of his waist was accentuated by the posture. Those padded, fleece puffed jackets you had seen him in had done no credit to his form, a toothpick he may have been with how terribly lean he was, but he was firm in all the right places. He was also waiting on you to answer while you ogled him.

“Gosh yes, I can, if you’re sure? Awfully kind of you.” you blathered and moved in a hurry to make up for your stalling, keenly conscious of his eyes on your back as you shimmied your backside up onto his handlebars, feeling the warm press of his hand as he helped steady you from tipping all the way back. You wiggled on the thin metal bar, spreading your legs on either side of the front wheel and doing your best to ignore the raucous commentary of the still tipsy audience of your fellow inmates swaying on the precinct steps. “Y’all just be glad there’s no mission scheduled today.” he snarked to them instead and they chimed up that last night’s idiocy was calculated with that in mind.

“Huh.” Cleven uttered, unimpressed, behind you and it made you shiver, worse than if your father caught wind of this stunt. “Darlin’ put your hands over mine, s’gonna get wobbly takin’ off.” he directed next and you did as you were told, looking back over your shoulder at him with a grateful smile that you were relieved to see returned, pink lips stretching and a freckled nose bunching up sweetly when all of the sudden a rush caught you by surprise and the bike was in motion and you whipped your head back to view the street as it rushed up ahead of you. “See ya boys!” he hollered out as a mutinous babble rose from his friends at being left to jog back.

The young man could put some speed on a bike, uphill too. Or, as much of a hill as could be found this far East. You could hear him chuckle when you squeaked at the first jolt of a pothole, your thumbs hooking under his hands and curling into his palms. They were warm and calloused, dry from the cool breeze and you may have imagined the way he squeezed them in assaurance but you did not imagine the way his voice piped up again, smooth and conversational: “Harry told me if I was quick I could get you out in time, I think we’re gonna make it. S’dont worry, even if Sergeant Lemmons gives ya trouble, I’ll insist.”

“That’s really too kind of you.” The chill of windburn and a substantial amount of remorse made your cheeks glow scarlet. “All of it is. I’m rather ashamed.”

“I didn’t take you for an all nighter sort.” he agreed but followed it with a soothing compliment, “You’ve always been nothin’ but perfect. P-p-perfectly punctual, I mean, and there’s no reason to let Egan’s idea of fun ruin your record.”

“Wasn’t his fault. Not wholly.” you sighed, giving Violet a bashful wave as you passed her opening the shop, a wave which Cleven mirrored behind you and between the two of you letting go the bike, it nearly dumped you both. It was luck and sheer persistence that righted you and kept your balance. “I’m afraid it’s a bit of a bad habit, picked it up at Northolt.”

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“South, by the coast.” you said, unsure why you felt the need to explain your debauchery away, “I was working a ground crew down there for a bunch of Polish Pilots. Spitfires mainly. That squadron nabbed the most kills of any in the RAF back in ‘40. Why, even Churchill visited more times than I can count, he found them good fun. Too much fun, they never went to bed without downing half a barrel. There was dice built into the bottom of the pints at the Black Bull, rather addictive, rolling to see who would buy the next round. —There was always a next.” You added upon reflection.

That was also the year you had lost your brother. The correlation between the habit and the loss wasn’t to be dwelt on.

“Huh,” Cleven let out one of him contemplative hums, “and how do we compare?” he asked surprisingly.

“How?” you laughed, daring to crane your neck back to see him in the early morning sunshine, pretty and sweet and arch in his expression. Dusk had not done his mama’s work on his face any justice, it made you want to pant he was so pretty.

“I dunno, in any way,” he laughed in turn, not even breathless as he sped the bike over the cobblestones, the village barely awake and mostly quiet, “how do we compare?”

“To the Poles?”

“Or the French. Or your own, the RAF ain’t no joke.” he amended, “Whoever is our competition.”

“So it is a competition.” you smirked -how very American of him. “Depends,” you hedged playfully, “Our boys are so very nice, familiar, they never run out the right coinage during a date either. But the French are better flirts while the Dutch are better dancers. But the Poles, they know how to romance. Lots of hand kissing and flowers, so many flowers there had to be rules made for overstocking the billet.”

“Sounds like we gotta step up our game.” he decided.

“Is that what you meant? How you compare? First impressions?”

“I-I- guess, yeah.” he now sounded confused, “I mean, what else? You got scores for aircraft?”

“I do.” you replied, as it was true, “But that’s unfair, you’ve only just arrived. I thought maybe you wanted to know something more -salacious.”

“Like?” His tone behind you was guarded and you doubted if the alcohol of last night were not still buzzing and fortifying your brazenness, that you’d ever go through with what you said next.

“Other performances. For instance, in bed.”

You felt his fingers flutter around the bars beneath your own, you gripped them tighter, not just because the stretch of old road before the air base was ancient and pitted but because you were in an agony of suspense as to how he’d take your forwardness.

“There’s a record of that somewhere?” he asked at last, a beat too long, too delayed for casualness, too morose for flippancy.

“In fact there is.” you responded carefully. “A little diary of rankings, actually, there’s multiple and whenever there’s a grand assembly of the WAAF or the WACs, they’re passed about and tallied.”

“Sweet Jesus.” he swore behind you, “And here I’ve been chalkin’ up railways and munition dump targets like they’re some achievement.”

“Oh it’s all a bit of silliness.” You assured, not intending to make him glum.

“Do-“ he hesitated and you prayed for strength for him to spit it out as the airfield came in sight on the flat plain ahead. He didn’t.

“-Do I what?” you prodded softly.

“Are one of these little tallies yours?” he asked miserably.

You grinned to yourself and felt the sunshine seemed brighter and the air crisper than ever before as it rushed in your face with the slowing speed of his bike. “No, not in the least. I merely keep track of Sally’s ledger. It’s all a bit too -messy, for me.”

You dared peak behind you again and he looked relieved, then blushed furiously at your observance of him. “Well, who does Sally say is winning?” he dared.

“Romania.” you chortled and he did too, in shock if nothing else. “But Egan’s caught wind of it, he’s quite determined to save your country’s dominance, you don’t need to sweat it.”

His frown was back and you had to focus on not falling off as he slowed the bike to a halt, momentum precarious as his long legs kicked out and walked it the last yard to the segregated barracks, you felt his hand again on your waist to steady you. “Does that bother you?” he asked earnestly, sorrow in his blue eyes.

He offered a hand for you as you hopped down and it was you who held onto it long after it was needed. “Bother me?”

“Yeah, him -consortin’…with Sally?” he pressed, hands quite engulfing your one, “Does it hurt you? Bucky, see, he doesn’t mean to hurt, he’s just so-“

“-Blimey, you are a dear.” you marveled and then amended your interruption as your amusement only further creased that sweet face, “If I am ever again in Major Egan’s company, it will only be to escape it just as quickly. I’ve had quite enough of…consorting.”

“That so?” The lackadaisical confidence he exhibited outside of the precinct was back again, a not unattractive smirk plastered on his vulnerable face, a scheme in his guileless eyes. “Had enough of holding cells?”

“Quite.” you smirked back. “A quiet family dinner is more my style, the occasional picnic, even a zip round Oxford as one must show the foreigners about.” you paused and squeezed his hand once more, “And I do enjoy a bike ride.”

You did not know if he cataloged your preferences for an ideal date or not, life was busy, after all, and the momentary frolics in the July sunshine and banter on the tarmac and evenings in the pub were the exception. Time went on. Most of life was spent in the air, in his case, and in yours, beneath the belly of his beast, wrench in hand. But ever after his gallant rescue of you, there was more than the passing “goodnight” paid to you, there were cheerful smiles on his exhausted face when he returned from a mission, as if you were the one face he was coming back to. With an old familiar dread you noticed the way you begin to take each hole and dent and damage to his plane personally, as if it had been exacted on something precious to you. You have begun to care, for him and for his men, and your tired heart could barely do more than dread what that might lead to.

Good fun. That’s what these boys were supposed to be.

Gale Cleven hadn’t proven much fun. And somehow that was worse. It was worse and also unbearably honoring to be the last face he saw before taking it off, flags in your hands waving in front of his hulking bomber, giving the old familiar directions for a perfect takeoff, one he executed sublimely time and again. His sober, purposeful nods to you before he engaged and taxied out for a mission of death was more intense and intimate than any bouquet or even, your thought, a kiss. It was true the donut dollies on the sidelines were often the last faces of home that many of those boys would see. But in the his cockpit, looking down at your shrimp sized figure on the tarmac, both Major Cleven and you knew that for him, it was yours.

Once, there was a scare, in the first days of august. More than a scare if you were being honest, your heartbeat about stopped and didn’t pick back up for a few hours until word came in. The rest of the base wasn’t much better.

Ten planes had not come back. -Among them, Our Baby. And Mugwump. For two officers, so crucial, so senior, idolized and beloved as they were, to not return, was a blow like none other. You weren’t alone in hovering around the control shack, taking license of your friendship with Dorace to get a play by play of any news. When news came, such as it was, it was both relieving and exasperating.

It would seem there was some problem, a defect or too great of a hit. Orders to land in enemy territory were ignored, however, by Cleven no less. He had doggedly pushed on, safely landing them in allied Africa, of all places. It took almost a day for this information to finally be pasted together, by the end of it you were sad, haggard and half useless in your coveralls, stupendously relieved for a man you were supposed to feel professionally about.

Instead, that night, tucked in your own bed after a meal with your parents and little brother, you thanked God for keeping him -them, all of them- safe. And found yourself pondering the tan on him when he got back from his African foray. Some jealous part of you feared he might be kept there but a week later the thunderous hum of approaching bombers buzzed the air overhead of Thorpe Abbotts and the satisfying thwump of wheels touching down brought them back. There was a frenzy of greetings, flight and ground crew eager to welcome them back, the radio operators, too, and even the civilians who’d managed to get on base.

Your little brother among them. Donald wanted to see them back safe and it wasn’t dangerous, and it wasn’t dire, not returning from a mission the planes wouldn’t be in such poor shape. They’d been repaired in Africa, enough to fly them all the way back to England. So little Donald was nearby and when the crowd parted and a bee-line for Cleven became apparent, he took advantage and gave the young man a firm handshake in greeting.

“Hey buddy, thank ya, who do you belong to?” Buck laughed while returning the firm grip.

“I’m her brother.” Donald pointed you out proudly among the dispersing crowd and you rolled your eyes at his expectancy for Gale to know or care about you, more than your most pertinent work on base.

“Oh are ya now, hers, huh?” he grinned at you, “Been talkin’ about me?” he greeted, there was a still healing scrape on his left temple that your fingers itched to soothe. How badly had he hit his head?

“Of course I have.” you defended, happiness bubbling under your lips and threatening to make you smile more than was professional, you could see Sergeant Lemmons observing you from the side and tried to keep some decorum. “We thought you’d died.” You stated plainly, it wasn’t any secret to Donald, as soon as the plane had gone missing and before radio contact had been reestablished, you’d rushed home and made the family pray over supper.

“We’ve been praying for you.” Donald agreed, and you saw Cleven startle, a gasped intake of breath between those lush lips and his eyes seemed to water as he searched first your brother’s face and then your own.

“You have?” he choked out, raspy and touched.

“Yes.” you whispered, mouth twisting in a ugly grimace to hold back your own emotion. It was of little use, something beyond War Effort investment in his well being had been admitted. “We thought you might be dea-“

-you didn’t finish your reiteration of your dread. Your face, a greasy and mist spattered face, was suddenly smushed into the padded leather of his bomber jacket, nose tucked right into the fleece apex where his pale blue scarf always rested on his throat.

He was hugging you, you realized with delayed surprise.

“-even though it made the potatoes cold, Da insisted on prayin’ every night after she told us-“ Donald was waxing eloquent on his own sacrifices of having one added prayer request lengthening his mealtime but you were oblivious to more than the firm press of Cleven’s still gloved hand to the back of your scarf wrapped head, some strong emotion shuddering through his body against your own. A tremor of terror and pain, you suspected, emotions he’d been suppressing all week.

After all, the saved weren’t supposed to be shaken up. They’d been saved, what was there to be off about? You’d seen enough pilots after a close call to know it was every bit as bad or worse than actual disaster. They’d send him right back up again in days, and that was what was expected, demanded, required. He was tremoring against you and you gripped him tighter, sympathetic and aching to cure it somehow. Even for a moment.

“We’ll keep praying.” you assured, and you heard him clear his throat, snotty and rough. “Oh, blast, I’ve positively greased your jacket.” you mourned as he let you go, finally, and you caught sight of the mess your filthy hands and face had imprinted on it during the embrace.

He chuckled as he looked down at the imprint, “S’fine.”

After such an exchange of emotion the air felt charged between you two, without privacy or precedence, it felt unthinkable to linger in that mood. You turned to his plane and pet the fuselage with unstudied fondness, it had been horrid having the old bird absent. You were not above having favorites and the love he poured into his ship, somehow, like some old fairytale truism, made the hulking metal beast lovable, in turn. “How’s our baby, hmm?” you asked him, giving him a sly smile and he took your proffered out seamlessly, joining you in cataloging the damage that had not been deemed severe enough to hamper his return.

“Don’t crawl under here, sir!” you protested as you wiggled under the belly only to find him beside you in the plane’s shadow, “You’ll be a mess!”

“I’ve already got stains.” he brushed your worries off, and you knew it was true. Bloodstains in fact. He had lost a man, the report said, and apparently, judging by his trousers, Buck had held the poor fellow as he bled out. “And I wanna show you the spot I’m worried ‘bout.”

“Alright.” you conceded, allowing him to direct you to the nose. “Watch it Donald!” you had to reprimand your little brother who predictably followed after, “You’ll burn yourself if you touch that, this thing was just running.”

“Careful buddy.” Gale echoed gently beside you and pushed his little head down, more into a crawl. You refused to allow the gentle way he treated the brat to warm you, you refused. Or at least, you refused to let it show, the tingle and heat you felt being all too consuming to be denied.

He was lovely. But you already knew that. He was even more lovely when, upon crawling out from under Our Baby, he took his scarf from around his neck, silk decadently soft, flesh warmed and smelling strongly of his exertions, and swiped it across your greased cheek.

“You’ve got just a lil more…” he practically mumbled and wiped down to your chin, firm, gentle little rubs of the silk which required his other hand to grasp your chin to steady you. You weren’t sure when he’d taken off his gloves, but the feel of his skin on yours was heady.

“It’ll take a couple days.” You predicted regarding the repairs, “Which means you’ll have a few days free, if they don’t drown you in reports.”

“Oh they will.” he laughed, “But s’long as my days are free, means yours aren’t.” he pointed out.

“I guess that’s true.”

“We shoulda thought of that when we chose this line of work.” he joked and your cheeks flamed at the realization he wished to spend time with you. “But you’ll have your nights still, yeah?”

Coming from anyone else, the request for your nights to be reserved would strike you as suggestive indeed. But this was Buck, and when he mentioned nights you imagined nothing but taking him home for a tepid potato and rationed powdered milk supper and the warm reception of your family. His weary eyes suggested how badly he needed that. You could give it to him, and it made your heart glow.

“Yes, I’ll have my nights.” you agreed, “And you can have them, too.”

Sergeant Lemmons agreed with your estimation of Our Baby’s damage the following day and four long days after were spent patching up damage that suggested what a hellish ride that must’ve been. Someone else hosed the blood out of the bay but it turned the puddle on the concrete beside you sickly pink.

To and fro from office to barracks to observation tower, Cleven would stop by to see his ‘baby’ on these occasions. The heckling the ground crew gave you regarding this potential double meaning was agonizing and almost made his attentions not worth it. But then he’d be dropping to a squat to chat with you as you soldered metal, heedless of the sparks, or else bringing scones from the mess to refresh you and, again, wiping your face often with his fancy scarves despite your protests that it was futile.

And at night, on the second day, you made good on yours and Donald’s word and brought him to dinner. It was a quiet walk from the base to the end of the long main road, right to the outskirts of the village, where your family’s unassuming little thatched cottage nestled amongst mama’s victory garden, daddy’s aeroplane hanger and repair shop loomed ugly and dark behind.

The look on Buck’s face when you met him outside the base’s gate at seven in the evening in a dress and heels was worth capturing. But you hadn’t a camera with you and it wasn’t like you were liable to forget. His pure look of awe and appreciation for your cleaned up and girlish state was nearly comic if it weren’t so flattering.

“Darlin-“ he began in a rush but did not finish, only taking you lightly by the fingertips and spinning you slowly, his eyes wide like he was seeing a marvel, which, maybe he was, -your womanly form finally liberated from puffy uniforms and ugly coveralls. Wholesome as your intentions were for the evening, and indeed for him in general, it was some relief and delight to know he was capable of getting hot under the collar. His mama’s well drilled manners soon caught up to his unbridled appreciation and a deluge of charmingly proper compliments rained down on you next until you had to put a stop to his babble by tugging him down the road with the reminder of dinner as incentive.

“You’re sure they won’t mind?” he began his worries again, nervous to meet your parents.

If he’d been like the rest of the boys he’d know just how much mingling was already common. It wasn’t remotely odd to bring him home, not when you lived so near. “Don’t be silly, they’ve been begging to meet you and Donald has plans of torturing you with his plane models and Papa wants to show you his shop and mama thinks you're much too skinny, I’m sure she’s gone to the black market to grab something to fatten you-“

“-how’s she know that?” he interrupted in shock.

“Oh,” you flushed, realizing your misstep, “I’ve talked of you. And she recognized you, she and Violet are thick as thieves and -it’s not like you’re unremarkable. A physical description is rather easy to give when you, well, when you look like…you.”

“What do I look like?” he cried out but his cheeks were smiling despite his outrage, “Malnourished?”

“Like a lanky cherub.” you refuted and were pleased that the late summer sun was still bright enough at this long hour to show his pretty blush.

“A cherub.” he repeated in disbelief.

“Yes.” you were firm, both in tone and the press of your hand in the crook of his offered elbow, “And as we’ve been commended to entertain angels unaware, how much more when we are certain of one?”

“Oh shut up.” he begged you and you two staggered into each other as you laughed your hearts out. It felt good to laugh, for the both of you, and a little too foreign, as well. It left a hollow melancholy in its wake that was soothed by the near and swaying proximity of each other’s body.

“They’ll be glad to have you at the table.” you dared go on, feeling you should prepare him, should the subject arise, “I’ve a brother, you see, an older brother. Rafe, he was stationed in Burma. We’ve not heard of him in over two years. There’s an empty seat at our table, it takes a certain sort of soul to fill it without it feeling like a sacrilege. But you fit the bill nicely, I think.”

“Burma.” he repeated with all the gravity of a man who understood, who knew the ache of almost hoping a dear brother, a beloved son, was dead rather than enduring the slow hell of a Japanese internment camp. How awful to almost wish for a decisive end for one so loved. “No word at all?”

“None.”

“I’m terribly sorry.”

“Thank you.” you whispered, “And thanks for making it back, yourself.” you squeezed his arm jovially and felt his other hand fall atop yours there in the crook of his elbow and a sweetness filled you at the gesture, such as you’d never known before. It was peaceful and lovely and your little village suddenly looked as pretty and idyllic again as it was always supposed to, the routine route home was seen through his eyes, the eyes of a homesick boy with a soft girl on his arm, bound to meet her parents and inspect Donald’s plane models.

Your mother and father loved him, little surprise there, he was a darling and homesick and yours was a happy home, humble and wounded though it may be. Your mother was obnoxious in her delight the moment father took him out back to see where your expertise for welding first began, the little aerodrome, no longer fitted with pleasure craft but now fitted to scrap the more useless casualties. Mother pestered you as you helped clear the table, asking after him and whatever this thing was between you. When you assured her it was only dinner to fill that chair and some unfathomable knowledge that had grown each time you stood before his propeller and waved him off to death, she knew it for what it is.

War and the urgency of living that goes with it, shrinks long emotions into fast passion and steady hearts into foolish daring. Neither of you were the sort to tumble into the passing vogue passions that had seized hold of your friends and comrades. Yours was a quieter path. Even so, after the fourth evening of dinner rations and quiet fireside chatter and the patter of late summer rain on the roof, there was a kiss as he walked you back to base, his jacket over your shoulders, his shirt clinging to him and the sweetest intent etched on his misted features as his lips descended to yours.

“Thank you,” he had said so passionately yet so subdued, a wall of wisteria at your back and his honey blonde hair dripping into his eyes, “I’ve needed this bad.”

His words suggested the family dinners, his scorching lips suggested the molded flesh of your body in his large palms.

“So you’ve wanted this?” your breathed mixed, a hazy little cloud between you in the damp evening air, your little alcove of shelter from the rain under old Mosley’s shed was like another little world entirely, fauna filled and peaceful, even the ever present drone of machinery was drowned out by the downpour.

Your mother had been right, you should've waited longer till the clouds passed but you had both cited curfew -and maybe even subconsciously sought just such a predicament as the one that had you necking Gale Cleven in a wisteria claimed tool shed.

“I’ve wanted you.” he clarified, firm grip on the base of your neck punctuating his turmoil, his lips met yours again and whatever oath of abstinence he had chosen, it did not seem to include kissing. He was soft and persistent and all consuming, those restless hands migrating in an ever mapping caress, making every part of you thrum with butterflies. “Wanted you for a long while.” he spoke into your lips, “I think you’re just great.” And there was happiness then, untinged with anything temporal beyond the feel of warm flesh beneath cold, rain soaked cloth and lips that tasted of honeyed biscuits.

It was impossible to maintain the stoic propriety of behavior you’d once managed before, on base, after that. You knew now how he sounded when he moaned into your mouth and he his stare alone could make you blush, you had spoken to his mother on the phone and he had seen your childhood bedroom. He learned once, laying amongst sea grass on the beach during a cloudy Sunday, the silky moist feel of you beneath your swimsuit, his long, bashful fingers that were ever so fond of petting anything and everything, finally finding a place that responded to his swipes with jolts and gasps and sighs and pleasure. You peaked three times on that sand dune, Buck none the wiser as he had nothing to compare your little deaths to, you kept a firm grip on his forearm and told him he was doing marvelous and that’s all it took for him to be persistent. Persistent beyond what you imagined any other man could be due to cramp. He was getting freckles from so much sunshine, but it was well, the rains would be here soon come autumn.

These happy days had you risking your life to pause your work and watch his pretty form swagger across the asphalt to his next destination and he, ever so right and proper and by the book, became devil enough to lie in wait for you and catch you by the waist when you least suspected it and drag you into some abandoned corner.

Only to kiss you.

To kiss and to ask after your day, as if your evening was not to be spent sat beside him at table or the movies, lying on a picnic blanket with him near or in the back of a jeep on top of Mayberry Rise, the tallest point around where the stars ran into the sea on the horizon.

One of the first days of September, you made good on your promise to Harry and drove with him to muck about Oxford for a day and see the college, the library, too. It was a long ride and as you were at the wheel, Harry was gem enough to allow Gale along, too, and by the end of it, driving back late and in a rush before the headlights would be needed, you were quoting favorite literary passages to each other. As if you were all students, not misplaced youths in the business of killing.

You said as much and in the burgeoning gloom Gale’s rich voice asked if you knew any Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

“Not Wordsworth!” Harry clarified.

“No, I don’t.” You admitted, for all your chiding today of their not being cultured enough, you didn’t know your American writers as you should.

“He’s got a poem for that.” Gale said, “For what you said. Or at least, it makes me think of today -that verse, ‘member Crosby?- the one it goes:

-I remember the gleams and glooms that dart across the school-boy's brain; The song and the silence in the heart, That in part are prophecies, and in part, Are longings wild and vain. And the voice of that fitful song, Sings on, and is never still: "A boy's will is the wind's will, And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."

The deafening silence for the rest of the car ride was filled with truth and your own heart was heavy when you bid them both goodnight that evening, headed to your seperate billets. You paused in you departure to turn back once more at the door and holler to Buck in the chilled September air, “That poem, is there more of it?”

“Lots more.” he’d spun round on his heel, pleasantly surprised at your inquiry.

“What’s it called?” you intended to search it out, though it was doubtful that a copy would be found near this remote place.

“How about I write it out for ya?” he suggested as if thinking the same.

“You’ve got a whole damn poem memorized?” you balked, incredulity warring with amusement that you should’ve guessed he’d be the sort.

“I-I-I might.” he stuttered before laughing.

“Then please do.” you grinned and threw him a kiss across the distance which he jumped up and caught from the air in a grand show of dedication. “Goodnight, cherub.” you wished him, “Sleep tight.” He had a mission in the morning, a daylight one.

“Goodnight old Bean.” He teased your accent and the door swung shut behind you blocking out the cold and the retreating sound of his footsteps.

If you’d have known that was the last time you’d hear them you’d have stayed an age out in the cold night listening to him go, memorizing the cadence of his gait, the sway of his shoulders disappearing into the twilight, the turn of his head as he’d throw a glance back at you, sweet and handsome and cheerful despite his ominous itinerary.

If you’d have only known.

It wasn’t like last time, like Africa. There had been no loss of contact. Dorace had heard every awful minute until the clock ran out. They’d been shredded, their precious ship turned into a raging inferno and Major Cleven’s gritted and garbled transmissions left only one hope that some at least had jumped out. Jumped out only to land in Nazi occupied Europe, it was a faint mercy to cling to.

The empty chair sat next to you again at the table and mocked you all. Mocked your hope and your resilience to dare love again. How foolish to bring home a man who belonged to a group they were calling “Bloody”, and not as a curse but an epithet.

The losses had been staggering all summer and now in September they hit close. You were confident that Crosby and Egan were every bit as dismal inside as you felt, Egan’s warm hand had clasped your shoulder like you were a fellow officer and told you he was sorry. You took the condolences and gave them back, a stupid little exchange that only highlighted how unspeakable some pain is.

Three weeks later, Egan’s plane didn’t come back either.

In your more fanciful moments you allowed yourself to imagine Egan and Cleven alive, somewhat whole and reunited. You could almost hear Cleven’s joking welcome, “What took you so long, Bucky?”

You’d indulged these fancies for Rafe, too, until years of silence suggested the worst.

However, this time, well into October and with an entirely new set of planes under your care, word came at last through the Red Cross, and the truth was exactly as you’d dreamed. There was only the paltriest letter back to command but it said they were well, they were alive, together indeed and being moved to the Polish border. Away from their own comrades' bombs. It was more than most ever got, and your family celebrated the news with the gratitude it deserved.

As October turned to November and your gloved fingertips froze as you worked, every sharp needle of chill reminded you of him, how much more awful it must be that far north, snow piled deep and muck everywhere and lice covered blankets and illness left untreated. As the holidays hurtled nearer, days of peace and goodwill you had planned to be spent with him, you were consumed by the dread of losing him to the elements since war had proven too clement. At night you lay abed and reread the one bit of handwriting you had from him, that damned poem he had written out, left under your door in the early dawn that had taken him from you.

My lost youth. That was the title of the thing. It cut like glass every time you read it, but Buck had touched that paper and looped those letters and dotted those i’s and it was precious to you. It became a prayer of sorts.

“There are things of which I may not speak;

There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

And a mist before the eye.

And the words of that fatal song

Come over me like a chill:—

“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Strange to me now are the forms I meet

When I visit the dear old town;

But the native air is pure and sweet,

And the trees that o’ershadow each well-known street,

As they balance up and down,

Are singing the beautiful song,

Are sighing and whispering still:—

“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

Then, in January, as if prayers got heard, the most unexpected happened.

Major Gale Cleven, what was left of him after cold, starvation, murder and a treck across Europe, had returned. Things like this, seeing your lost beloved ride up to your workplace in the shotgun seat of a jeep, was the stuff of movies, hopeful propaganda or a woman’s mind that had finally cracked. You just stood there, welding helmet in hand, frozen rain spitting down at you, watching him jump out, watching Harry tear down from the observation tower to embrace him.

Dully, you could hear behind you Segreant Lemmons kind cheer of “so it was true, he got away from the bastards!” and a congratulatory thump between your shoulder blades. It was a moment of truth, to realize how far your faith had dwindled when the very answer to your prayers stood steaming with life in the cold air and yet you still could not accept it as reality.

“Baby.” his hands were warm compared to your damp cheeks and the span of them, so familiar and large, cupping your jaw with the calloused thumbs swiping at your temples, that was reminiscent of August and of happier days. Yet still, you had dreamed of him doing this, dreamed of a million different embraces and each time you woke up. “Baby, I’m back, I came to ya.” his voice was wrecked, from disuse and illness and whatever misery that had subjected him to. That, that was real enough, the rattling cough more so, you’d imagined his suffering in your worst nightmares too, this was something you could believe.

Familiar flesh was gaunt under your touch, gray cheeks where once there’d been freckles and the sinful pout of his once ruby red mouth was a dull violet, as if the vitality had been leached out of him. “What’d they do to my cherub?” you mourned, worst nightmares and wildest hopes blending into this one moment.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry f’me, I’m back. I came back.” he cooed to you, rough and sad himself, and your face was buried again in the placard of his coat, a great woolen overcoat this time, no fleece or any vestige of the swanky finery that got the flyboys ribbed for being soft, fancy, spoiled.

Nothing soft about these men, nothing gentle about their lot, nothing glamorous about being hurled down from the skies in a ball of fire.

“We kept praying for you.” you realized, it seemed important to tell him that however hopeless you all had felt, you’d gone through the motions anyway.

That was faith, wasn’t it? The hope of things not seen?

“I felt ‘em.” he said. “How else you think I managed it?”

It. -had managed it, that tiny word represented a host of terrors and miseries and unforgettable incidents that ricocheted in his brain like the lead fired into his boys head’s when they couldn’t manage a forced march, barefoot and underfed, in the snow.

Christmas had passed but January was not so very advanced, that evening your family turned back the clock and it was a matter of guessing as to who was celebrated more, baby Jesus or Buck Cleven. The two seemed intertwined at this point and in the warm glow of gas lamps and rationed toddy, with Buck’s hollow cheeks beginning to bloom and his dull eyes starting to animate, some part of you finally understood why so many felt worshipful on the holiday. The shit war rations felt like a feast, mama’s canned vegetables being the freshest thing he’d eaten in ages and with him sat at table again, empty chair filled, his hand creeping into your lap to lace with your own, there was peace.

Even the airforce, hard driving and high demanding though it was, took one look at his battered condition and admitted a period of conveyance was due. It wouldn’t do to send up a shoddy pilot, lose another plane, yet another crew or a hero of the hundredth. It’s not every day one of your squadron leaders escapes a POW camp and marches over occupied Europe and fordes the Channel to get back home.

A month was set aside. And you took as many weekday passes as you could during that month, happier than anything that he had been permitted to stay in town, to lodge with one of the locals. Rafe’s room was now occupied by him and mama’s broth was poured down Gale’s throat twice daily and his days kept busy with paperwork and Donald’s math problems. The ticking clock, the passing days, like the evil crocodile gobbling up time, was politely and britishly ignored in favor of enjoying what was. You no longer slept with the tear stained and crumpled poem clasped to your throat but his head lay there often enough instead. The thump of your heart helping him sleep, because exhausted and sick as he was, sleep and solitude were not comforts.

He was wracked with guilt for leaving Egan and his men behind, it had been every man for himself during that brutal forced march, he knew that and yet he’d left a friend behind. Buck waited for news of Egan like you’d waited for news of him. Nameless and senseless guilt ruining much of his own success and peace.

“He’d have expected nothing less of you.” you had taken to reminding him, “He’d be angry if you hadn’t taken the opportunity like you did.”

“I know.” he agreed miserably.

You admitted to him then, the horrid guilt of feeling that somehow, some missed defect or some lousy flaw had been the reason he’d been downed. Your work somehow not sufficient to keep him in the skies. When you’d admitted as much, Sergeant Lemmons had looked at you with all the censure such moronic introspection deserved: “Cleven got bombed to hell. He expected it, daytime raid and all. Blame the Nazis.”

“Blame the Nazis.” you suggested now to Gale as he lay sprawled in your arms, sweaty and feverish but his color was back and he looked pretty as anything so alive and near.

He looked ready to dare something, his face hovering nearer yours and the heavy weight of his limbs suddenly feeling full of intent but then his sparkling eye caught sight of something in the doorway and his lips quirked and his body shifted away.

“Whatcha doin’ sulkin’ out there Donny?” he addressed your brother and sure enough the little scamp emerged from the shadow of the doorway and joined you two on the bed, comic book clutched in his hands. They had a routine, apparently, Papa was no longer the chosen one for bedtime stories. It made you want to wince in anticipation for when Buck would move back to base and things would become full of dread again.

That day came sooner than you’d counted on. A month is not so very long, after all, and it was filled with so much work and business, stolen moments at home hardly being the norm.

“It’s an easy mission.” he’d said at dinner, as if arguing the point to you all. You knew he was trying to convince himself more than anything and so you all let him specify just how easy, how routine, how utterly unworrying tomorrow's flight would -should- be.

If it’s hard to get back into the saddle after being bucked off, how much worse to climb back into a plane after being tossed from the skies.

That evening he lounged on your bed instead of Rafe’s, the house emptied as your mother and father took Donny to the movies, the appeal of a new film finally showing cited as being too alluring to resist. He was lost in his thoughts, watching you go about your little evening routines that you tried to maintain when at home. It was domestic and cozy, warm where the world outside was cold and then there was Buck, golden as anything in the low lamp light, utterly unaware of the figure he cut lying on his side.

“I’ve missed it.” he told you, “Flying, I’ve missed it.”

“Of course you have. You were born for it.” you murmured.

“Ya know,” he reflected, “I signed up for the Air Force before it all got hot, before Pearl Harbor. I was gonna fly no matter what. I remember grittin’ my teeth durin’ training and tellin’ myself it would all be worth it. Just hang in there and it would pay off. I just felt something important would need me. Hell, guess I got more than I ever bargained for, didn’t I?”

“I guess you did.” you agreed.

“I couldn’t do this if I didn’t believe in it.” He insisted and you knew he was talking to himself again, until his face turned towards yours and the softest look of fondness crossed features turning them almost pained when he said next, “I couldn’t do it, get back up there, if it weren’t for love. The rightness of it but -love, for my boys, my family. For you.”

“I know, and we’re terribly lucky to have your devotion. -And…and I love you, too.” you vowed earnestly, then giggled at the absurdity of this being the first time to admit it.

“I’d had my suspicions.” he grinned back, some of that old cockiness returning along with his vigor as he snagged your wrist and pulled you down beside him.

“Do you know why my parents have gone?” you asked him pointedly, turning on your side to face him.

“To see a movie.” His face was so innocently perplexed you almost lost control of yourself and ruined the game right then with something terribly forward.

“My parents aren’t in the habit of seeing movies.” you corrected him soberly.

“No?”

“No.”

“So where’d they go?” Buck asked.

“Oh they’re at the movies.” you smirked, “But they’ve gone for us.”

Gale’s eyes narrowed in suspicion, if not of you then of his own naïveté. “For us.” he repeated and his voice had dropped an octave in the interim.

“Yes. Something about wanting us to have a goodbye.” you quoted.

“I’m not dying tomorrow.” he pointed his finger firmly in your face and it made you smile to see him so fiesty again.

“No,” you agreed with his prophecy, “but I wanted to give you some incentive to hurry back.”

“Oh?” those lips of his puckered again in confusion before his smarts caught up with him and the pink corner tugged up in mischief, “Ooooh.” he repeated, suddenly very close, his energy, his body, his heart, inches from being one with you. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, oh yes.” you confirmed, slotting your lips against his gently only to be met with eager, desperate need in his own kisses.

Your childhood bed was narrow and the counterpane below you familiar and dear, stitched by your mother in colors you’d once wished to update upon entering maturity. Now, laid out in perfect security and familiarity, you watched Buck Cleven dangle a toe off the abyss before diving in, pausing to caress the blanket beside your hip, smiling to himself.

“What?” you were breathless to know every thought in that dear head.

“My mama made me one, looks lots like this.” his eyes were watery soft yet his smile was glad, his hips narrow and sharp in the cradle of your own, stark hipbones not yet padded by your mother’s cooking pressed you down into the bedding, grounded and right. “You’ve made me real at home here.” he whispered and it pleased you ever so much. “Do I dare take this last liberty?” he muttered as if to himself, even as those blue orbs bore into your own, his fingers fiddling with the hem of your skirt and you ached from need long deferred and the weight of remedy lying heavy between your thighs.

“It’s no liberty,” you whispered, catching his dog tags and bringing his face to yours, the size of the man so very apparent now he was hovering above you, “it’s yours.” you watched his pupils blow out at the statement, his ragged breath fanned minty across your face, even angels wield swords. “I’m yours.”

“And I’m yours.” he concluded.

With that exchange of truths something snapped between you, like a ribbon cut, gone was the hesitant cordiality and deference that had marked your courtship. Here now was fierce possession and the gloated satisfaction of those who possess something cherished and are no longer kept from partaking of it, buckles and garters snapped in the quiet room and the rustle of sheets and shirts wafting to the floor made your breaths hitch with anticipation. Precious flesh came into touch with every brush and it was enough for many minutes merely to cling and grasp, imprinting desire into the back and the arms and the throat of each other, like an armor of love against the decay of death.

“Yours, yours.” you swore as his finger played you once more, his breathing hard and rough in your ear, harsh commands for you to say it again and again, reminding you he was fearsome when he wanted to be.

“Don’t look,” he begged when you realized through a haze of joy what he was about, pressing in with all the finesse of a cricket bat knocking at the wicket, hoarse and doe eyed above you, there was only the whine, “please, darlin’ don’t look, just, my eyes, please.”

It was a fumbling entry but nature and pleasure prevailed, as it had since the first couple. And dear boy that he was, he knew you had indulged in a leg up, one or two at least, before he came along but still, he could not bear it for you to see more, not this time. He wanted it just to be the kisses and the sight of your precious face contorting at the fullness of your belly and the force of his hunger for you. All the rest were vulgar details left somewhere under your skirts, and, unbeknownst to him, reflected in your childhood mirror situated on the wall behind his plump arse.

“Oh god.” he had choked out, winded and in awe as his body shook at the feel of you accepting him deep, “You’re a slice of heaven, heaven that’s-that’s what you fee- oh god, oh god.”

He had giggled at the absurdity of this dance and then broke off with a moan that made you giggle in turn and back and forth it went as his body jerked into yours as if he’d no control over it, led quite literally by the part of himself buried inside you. He knew it was foal-like and a poor showing as a lover and he also knew you didn’t care a bit, your eyes wide at the size of the intrusion and captivated by the sight of his newly enlightened face.

“You alright?” he asked urgently, as a sudden and familiar feeling took over his body. The feeling of his brakes giving out, his flaps malfunctioning, the hydraulics failing -it took over him, his spine tingling and his vision beginning to blur and only your punched out gasps and sweet smile wavering on his horizon as the frantic, masculine, natural need to drive in deep enough to puncture your heart seized him and propelled him in you, against you, above you with such force you forgot to breath. For all Egan’s teasing of Buck’s hatred for athletics, the man wasn’t shabby when it came down to it, even after months of internment, or maybe due to that stolen time, his life force seemed to pour out in a torrent and your belly buzzed at the sweet abuse.

“I’m perfect.” you managed at some point, “You’re perfect, so perfect.”

He shuddered at the praise and as if terror struck him then, he was suddenly pulling away and moaning “I should- I shouldn’t -I’m gonna, darlin, I’m gonna lose it-“ and young and sweet and clumsy as anything he rutted against your slick frantically, mouth pressed to yours until the hot gush of his satisfaction spilled out and added to the mind fuzzing feel of him sliding against your little pearl.

You encouraged his shaky limbs to collapse on you, the lanky frame of him a sweet weight, sweaty cheek pressed to your breast, you could feel the dopey curve of his smile against your plump flesh. His hair curled at the nape from the sweat of his exertions, all winter chill forgotten in this bed. War and missions and bombs, too. You petted each other for a while before he raised his head and, gazing at you adoringly, he murmured “thank you.” his nose nudging yours and the steadiest of kisses lingering in the tingly aftermath.

“Darlin?” he broached the subject a while later, cheek again pressed to your chest and his fingers sliding in a hypnotic caress over your thigh.

“Yeah, Buck?”

“Later,” he prefaced, tentative and raw, “when -when the war’s over, and when, well, when I can make my own promises…”

Your heart hammered beneath his ear and you squeezed your legs around him, as if to shore him up enough to say what you wanted him to say so very badly. “Yes?”

“Would you marry me then?” he begged and somehow you knew this, what you had just indulged in, was never going to happen without that hope for him.

Perhaps that’s why it felt so strong, like a communion of souls more than anything else. “I’ve half a mind to make you wait and get my answer when you come back tomorrow.” you teased and his head reared up with a dangerous glint in his eye.

“Don’t you dare.” he warned, grin breaking out despite himself.

The sound of the front latch grating on the door startled you both but he pressed you down when you went to scamper and clothe yourself. “The door’s closed anyway,” he argued in a whisper but you knew he felt as nervous as you at being caught, if not more so, yet still he was a stubborn one. His hand was firm and large clasping your cheek, expression arch and expectant. “Promise you’ll be a good little girl and say yes when I do ask.”

You laughed at his gall, to make you wait, to make you promise when he wasn’t even proposing. But then again -you had said you were his, and he was yours. It had already been done. Sometimes life was as simple as Gale Cleven made it out to be.

“I promise.” you whispered happily, bringing him back down to your embrace and willing away thoughts of tomorrow and flagging him out to danger.

One day he’d come back for good. One you could make promises again. Until then, there was hope.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed. Feedback is a writers lifeblood, I’d adore hearing your thoughts. 💋

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salem-witch-slut · 16 days ago

Text

Keep The Pressure Up (18+)

Ellie Williams x Fem!Reader x Abby Anderson

SYNOPSIS: Ellie and Abby love to tease you and torture you. But tonight, they want to see how far you can actually go.

WARNINGS: OVERSTIMULATION, eating pussy, strap-on usage, lots of swearing, slight mental abuse, polyamory, face-sitting, Ellie is brutal as hell, Abby is the caring one here, NSFW AF

WORD COUNT: 2K

A/N: This was probably one of my most favorite smut pieces I did for kinktober last year. I mean, it's still october right? I'll post it again! Also, this should go without saying, but don't steal my shit and then post it on wattpad as your own. Someone did that with this fic and just switched Ellie's name so it was fuckin' Billie Eilish and Abby (make that make sense), but do NOT steal my work.

Dividers made by @cafekitsune

“Abby, fucking hold her!”

“You think it’s easy? She squirms around too much!”

“Unbelievable; you’re built like a goddamn tank, and you can’t even hold her still.”

“You think it’s so fuckin’ easy? You hold her then!”

“Fine! Move, bitch. I got this.”

The shuffle on the bed was bordering on distracting as the two switched positions overtop of you. The blonde that attempted to hold down your squirming legs was now grabbing at both of your wrists with one hand, holding it over your head while picking up the discarded vibrator on the bed next to her.

The redhead had replaced her spot, cold hands digging into your shins and shoving your legs apart as far as you’d allow without trying to hurt you, keeping them down and letting them both see your glistening cunt that was slightly gaped out and dripping with the aftermath of the two stretching you out with the fat silicone toy resting on the nightstand.

You had already cum at least three times, but they weren’t finished with you. As much as you fought against them, they were relentless. At first it was simply Ellie holding your arms down and towering over you as Abby put her mouth to good use and licked your cunt until you were crying. Her hair was long undone from her braid and wild in golden waves around her head, tickling against your thighs as she feasted upon you.

But Ellie got impatient. After too long, she grabbed Abby by the hair and forced her to look up, demanding that they switch spots. You sobbed pathetically. Abby was the champion when it came to strapping you two, but Ellie? Ellie ate pussy like she was starving. You knew you didn’t stand a chance.

They traded off every few minutes, exchanging a few sweet kisses between each other before deciding on the ultimate torture for you. Abby kept your wrists pinned to your head and kept the vibrator in her hand, turning the toy on and pressing it against your lower stomach just to tease you.

“What do you think, babe?” Abby looked at Ellie who was grinning like a madwoman. “Think she needs more, doesn’t she?”

“A-Abby…” You looked up at the blonde who was biting her lip and pressed a little kiss to your cheek. “C-Can’t…”

“Oh, yes you can,” Abby ignored your fear and pressed the vibrator directly on your clit, smirking when you attempted to squirm away, but Ellie kept you down on the bed. “You will take it… gonna make you cum until we decide when it’s enough.”

The noise you made was borderline feral. You made a guttural cry of pleasure and Ellie laughed at your voice cracking. Her nails raked across your skin and admired how your hips twitched, bucking up against the vibrator in Abby’s massive hand and admiring how her veined hands flexed in place to keep it on your clit.

It hurt, but it felt so fucking good. You wanted them to stop, but also wanted more. You loved being the center of attention, and adored how they were trying so hard to make you speechless and a blubbering mess at their mercy. As if they didn’t make you like that all of the time anyway…

“Sit on her face,” Ellie said, almost like she was desperate to see more. Her hands flexed aggressively and you flinched when she touched a vein behind your knee, making your leg jerk. Abby looked up at Ellie, biting her lip and then licking over the teeth marks. “Go on. She keeps on screamin’, she needs to use that mouth.”

“Ellie—” Abby warned.

“Just fucking do it, Abby!” Ellie demanded. It was like she was also getting off to watching this, heart pounding as she held you down into the mattress. Abby shared a look with you and momentarily removed the vibrator from your pussy, making you gurgle on a breath of relief.

Ellie was getting impatient as she released your legs and crawled up closer, yanking the vibrator away from Abby’s hand and went back for the harness that Abby had discarded earlier. You were very distracted, watching the blonde strip off her black boxers and swing her leg over the side of your head, her pussy mere inches from your face.

“Fuck…” You salivated, hands reaching up and gently grabbing her ass, squeezing and playing with her strong muscle and making her blush with embarrassment. Had she been in her right mind, she would have been teasing you about having a thing for her ass, but it was your turn to knock the breath from her. “So fucking pretty.”

Abby bit her lip and rolled her eyes back for a second, reveling in your tongue against her slit and gently grinding down against your face. “Nnnn… that’s it pretty girl… just like that… just fuck—E-Ellie, what are you—“

The redhead grabbed a fistful of Abby’s long hair and kissed her desperately. She wiggled her way between your legs and Abby knew something was different when she felt your dull teeth graze her clit and she looked down to see Ellie sinking her strap inside of your pussy with little to no warning.

In protest, your hands began to smack at Abby’s rear, almost desperately begging for Ellie to slow down, but she refused. You screamed into the blonde’s cunt. In between huffs of pleasure, Abby told the redhead how you must have been feeling. “E-Ellie, Ellie slow down! It’s too much for her.”

Ellie chuckled. “Fucking bullshit, I saw you damn near fist her the other day… Not gonna fit? I’ll fucking make it fit.”

Abby held your thighs open and began to slowly rub your clit, trying to ease out more wetness from you and get your pussy nice and slick so you could easily take Ellie. A few extra seconds passed before Ellie grabbed you by the waist and slammed down inside of you. The tip of her massive toy cock kissed your cervix and you shrieked into Abby’s pussy.

Everything felt so overwhelming, and you thought you were drowning, and it wasn’t because Abby was wetter than a damn waterfall. There wasn’t much you could do other than keep licking and slurping on Abby’s clit like you were made to please her.

“Shit… fuck, she’s so good at this,” Abby praised you, rubbing one hand over your belly while the other reached up and grabbed the back of Ellie’s neck. “M-Made a really good choice with her, d-didn’t we El?”

Ellie was thrusting wildly, grip around your waist as she split you apart on her strap, pushing her forehead against Abby’s and peppering her handsome face in kisses like she couldn’t get enough of this woman in front of her. If she wasn’t being so rough, this moment may have been really cute and sweet.

“Wanna make her cum again…” Ellie huffed, rolling her hips and touching so deep inside of you with her dick that you saw stars behind your eyes. She scrambled forward, grasping the vibrator and when she pressed it to your clit where Abby’s hand was, you started screaming into Abby’s pussy once again.

Abby wanted to hear you, so she crawled off your face and sat down right next to you, watching how you squirmed and trembled in place, grabbing at Ellie’s wrist and trying to find some form of pause in her movements. There was none. Ellie wasn’t stopping. She had far too much stamina to let up any fucking time soon.

“Come on- Come on baby,” Ellie growled, her thrusts growing harder and harder with every passing second. You didn’t stand a chance. The buzzing of the vibrator, how she was hammering into your cervix, and the way that Abby was holding you at the shoulders to keep you down.

The noise you made when you finally climaxed was enough for Ellie to roll her eyes back in response, basking in the sounds you made. “Fuuuuuuck! Ohmygod, OHMYGOD! Ohfuckfuck! Nnnnnn…!! S-Stop! Stopstopstop Elliepl-please I c-cant—”

She didn’t turn off the vibrator or stop fucking you when you came. Abby had never seen her like this, and she was staring in wonder as her wife destroyed you without any form of mercy in her body. Her tattooed forearm flexed, and she pushed her other hand down into your abdomen, fucking deep into your cunt and watching you start to sob and shake against Abby’s hold.

“Not a chance, little slut,” Ellie barked meanly, angling the vibrator against your clit to give the maximum stimulation. Your hands grabbed at Abby’s arms, nails digging in and the blonde was so out of it that she almost didn’t notice your grip at all. She was too busy watching Ellie and how she was basically torturing you. That smirk on the redhead’s face was so beautiful and so terrifying… “You’re gonna cum again.”

You sobbed brokenly, squirming and thrashing around on the bed as your hips bucked upward, doing anything and everything to shake her off so she would pull the vibrator away, but this woman was uncompromising. Nothing in hell could stop her from making you cum again.

“Ellie,” Abby said, trying to gain her wife’s attention. She was seeing the tears streaming down your face and how your thighs were shaking so bad that you looked like you were going to break. “Ellie, you gotta let up—”

“She’s got one more in her,” Was all Ellie said, looking down at your pathetically whiny face and seeing how your eyes were rolling back in your head and you started screaming bloody murder. The neighbors definitely hated you all at this point. “Come on baby… cum one more time and I’ll stop…”

Your clit was going numb, and you wished her thrusts would stop, but you were falling into the dark again. The pleasure was blinding, and you had no choice but to comply with Ellie’s words. Your climax this time was so intense that your vision went spotty and you lost your voice, heart racing and eyes crossing so bad that Ellie started laughing.

“Fuck, look at her Abby,” Ellie teased, wiggling the vibrator around on your clit and pulling out more screams from you. “Look at how fucked dumb she is…”

“Ellie,” Abby reached out and grabbed her wife’s wrist, carefully removing the vibrator from your cunt and turning it off. “Ellie, ease up…”

The redhead complied this time, slowing her thrusts and then carefully removing her strap from you. A white ring was around the base of the cock, and she smirked, pulling off the harness and flopping down onto the bed next to you. She left soft little kisses on your neck and cheek, Abby following her lead and pushing the hair away from your face.

Your focus was only on breathing. Your muscles twitched a little and you felt like everything was going dark, eyes fluttering closed and body going completely limp on the mattress.

Abby chuckled and gently caressed your face. “That’s it, sweet girl… you get some rest, did so good for us, didn’t you?”

“Prettiest little fucktoy we could ever have,” Ellie taunted, kissing your face and then kissing Abby’s face.

“Really did a number on her, didn’t we?”

Ellie snorted. “We? Please, I did everything.”

“Oh, bullshit, you did not!”

“Yeah? You wanna bet on that?”

Before Abby and Ellie could prove their dominance by fucking each other, you let out a whine of protest and grabbed at Ellie’s waist, holding her down onto the bed and whining. “Don’t go anywhere… please…”

Ellie smirked, loving when you got clingy and whiny like an attached puppy. She fell down onto her back and turned to her side, holding you close and resting her head on the pillow above yours. Abby sighed, ignoring the throbbing in her cunt as she laid down next to you, gently rubbing your tummy and soothing your trembling muscles.

“Once she’s rested,” Abby breathed slowly, looking up to meet Ellie’s eyes. “We’re gonna double-team you.”

Ellie snorted. “Good luck doming me. Couldn’t even hold her down.”

“Ugh, can’t wait to fuck that attitude out of you.”

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dngrs-untld-hrshps-unnmbrd · 1 year ago

Text

We’re In This Together

You’re having a hard time coping with everything that's happening to you and your crew, but your Dream Visitor knows how to make you relax and keep you on the right path. His path, of course. You know about his true form and you’re intrigued by what those tentacles can do for you.

AKA please will an eight foot monster wrap his tentacles around you and lovingly use you as his fleshlight.

***

It’s been a bitch of a day. Your stomach is churning as you recall the manic gleam in Gale’s eye when he spoke about keeping the crown’s power for himself. Wyll wants you to decide whether he should sacrifice himself to save his father’s life. Karlach is going to die and you don’t know what to say to her, because there’s nothing you can say. To top it off, Lae’zel has been kidnapped by that madwoman, Orin.

Everything is too much. You rub a tired hand over your face as you sit before the crackling flames of the campfire. Who decided it was a good idea to put you in charge?

Tomorrow. You’ll fix it all tomorrow, you tell yourself as you crawl into your bedroll, your throat burning with despair. Everything will be clearer after a good night’s sleep, or maybe something will kill you and you won’t have to think about it anymore. That would be nice.

There’s blackness all around you as you drift off to sleep, and then stars prickle into life in the sky. You’re no longer at the camp, but in a dreamy, ethereal location with marble columns and purple twining flowers.

You see a tall elf with long, white hair, a handsome face, and knowing eyes striding toward you. He’s so beautiful that he takes your breath away, but this isn’t his true form. You’ve seen the real one, and he’s a mind flayer.

He stands head and shoulders over you in glinting armour, folds his arms, and gives a heavy sigh. “What a bundle of self pity you are tonight.” But there’s gentleness in his eyes as he says it.

“Shut up, Mr. Perfect. If this is all so easy, switch places with me and you do it.”

“We’re doing this together,” he assures you in that deep, velvety voice.

Are you? You want to trust him, but you’re still unsure of his motives.

He reaches out and takes your hand in his enormous one, and the gesture is so kind and comforting and you need comfort so much right now that you allow it.

Looking deep into your eyes, he says, “I would spare you if I could. You know I’m nothing without you.”

His thumb rubs circles on the centre of your palm and it feels so good. Why does he always know exactly what to say and do to make the tension in your body melt? And other parts of you melt as well.

He knows that, doesn’t he? He knows everything about you because he lives inside your mind.

“Yes, I know,” he says, answering the question that you didn’t ask aloud. “I’m flattered, but I’m nothing thinking about me. I’m thinking about you. I can help you relax,” he offers, the smallest smirk on his lips. “It’s the least I can do for you after all you’re doing for me.”

You’ve seen that smirk before. It’s the same pleased, secretive smile that was on his lips as he boasted that he saved your life. Twice. Then again when you spared his life inside the Astral Prism. He was so proud of himself for convincing you to be on his side, but he is a mind flayer after all. Everything about this species seems to be about domination and power.

“Why have you appeared to me in your elf form?” you ask.

He flicks a sideways look at you, that same self-satisfied smile on his lips. “No reason. I just felt like it.”

“What’s the real reason?”

“You are too clever, little one. You read me as easily as I read you.” He laughs softly and takes a look around at the heavens. When he finally turns back to you, his eyes have darkened. “Because I’m hoping to seduce you, and I believe you’re more attracted to this form.”

His confession sends a hot spark shooting through you. No doubt this is more manipulation. He’s trying to use you, but maybe you can use him right back.

Experimentally, you reach up and cup the nape of his neck. Stroke his strong jaw with your thumb. He’s solid and warm. Very solid. He feels real.

Moving toward you, he whispers, “I am real. Close your eyes.”

He waits to see what you will do--lift your chin to receive his kiss, or tell him that you're not crazy enough to try this with him?

If he wants to touch you, you can think of no better way to relax tonight. Your eyelids drift closed, and a moment later you feel the brush of his lips across yours, soft and questioning.

You open your eyes and you see that he’s wearing not the armour anymore, but robes that reveal his strong shoulders and chest. Heavens, he’s beautiful. The world can go away and leave you alone tonight, because crazy is looking and feeling pretty wonderful right now.

You hook your fingers into the fabric of his robes and pull his mouth down to yours.

He kisses you insistently, and you moan as his tongue flicks your lips.

“That’s right,” he murmurs softly in between kisses. “Just relax, little one. You’re safe here with me.”

You’re in your soft and thin sleeping clothes, and his large hands slide down to your ass, gathering you closer and kneading your flesh as he pulls you tightly against him. Your body molds to his muscles, you breasts pushing against him and your nipples tingling. This feels more real than anything that happens while you’re awake, and you give into it completely, opening your mouth so his tongue can caress yours.

He lifts you up in his arms and lays you down on blankets that have suddenly appeared.

You deserve someone kissing you and holding you like you’re precious.

It’s so hard being strong and steely all the time.

You don’t have to be strong right now.

You can be sweet and soft and surrender to this..

You frown slightly. Are these your own thoughts, or are they his? Some of them feel like his, as if he’s pushing them into your mind and making you believe them, but you don’t want to shove them away. It’s everything you want to hear right now.

Your Dream Guardian pushes your robes up your thighs and drags your underwear down your legs, hunger and possession lighting his eyes. He strokes your inner thighs wonderingly, like he’s never felt anything so soft.

Then he pushes your thighs apart and runs his fingers down your sex. “So pretty. I have been imagining the way you taste. I know that it’s...” He lowers his head and caresses you with his tongue, making you gasp and jump. “Wonderful.”

With a deep, contented sigh, he licks you again. As your breathing picks up, he strokes a finger down your sex, and then pushes it inside of you, all the way to the knuckle. You cry out loudly. Oh, by all the gods in the heavens. Nothing has ever felt so good before.

As he goes on licking and thrusting his fingers into you, you whimper and clench your hands on the blankets.

“This is one thing I like about this form. A tongue,” he murmurs.

“Which form do you prefer?” you gasp.

“Whichever you prefer,” he answers smoothly.

This form. Of course this form. Right? How would you even touch and kiss in his mind flayer form?

But even as you’re enjoying his soft tongue on your clit and his thick fingers pushing inside you, your heart and your core crave something...more.

Finally the words spill from your lips. “I want your true form.”

Your Dream Guardian sits up and looks at you, and for the first time you see worry in his eyes. The desperation of someone who hasn’t known intimacy in a long time. “Please let me stay like this. I worked so hard to make you trust me so I could finally kiss you. I can only persuade you so far that you...I don’t want this to end.”

You reach up and touch his face. “Who says it will end?”

He thinks about this for a moment, his fingers still moving in and out of you. Then he lowers his head and tastes you again, more insistently now. His voice is roughened with desire as he says, “You’re already irresistible. If I transform, I don’t know if I’ll be able to let you go until I’m finished with you. It’s a primal form. Everything I have will want to latch onto you. You have to be sure.”

Everything he has. His tentacles? The mental image you get makes heat pulse through you, and he groans.

“Yes, just like that,” he whispers.

You’re so close to coming. Heat is balling up inside you as he thrusts his fingers in and out of you, hitting that sweet spot over and over. You don’t want this to end either. There’s so much more the two of you could have together. “Please,” you beg him. “I want your true form.”

He sucks thoughtfully on your clit, and this slowly sits up, considering your body. “It seems a waste not to use this form when I know you like it. Let me just…” He pulls off his long robe so his naked body is revealed to you. A breath-taking form. Strong thighs. A muscular stomach. He’s hard and his cock is thick and beautiful.

Wrapping his hand around his cock, he moves so he’s braced over you, and you feel the broad, plush head of him pushing against you, and then sinking into you, inch after inch of his length. He’s right. This is wonderful. His body is entrancing as he slowly starts to fuck you.

With each thrust, you moan louder and louder, your hands clenched on his shoulders.

“Yes. Beautiful. You’re so good to fuck. You take me so well,” he whispers. His voice is hypnotic. The adoring expression on his handsome face is everything you’ve ever craved. Heat swells inside you with every thrust and drag of his cock. It grows and grows until you can’t take it anymore. Your nails dig into his muscular shoulders and you cry out, pulling him closer and deeper into you until you’re left shaking and gasping.

“So you do want me like this,” he murmurs, more to himself than to you as he pulls out of you. “Then let us try the other way.”

You open your eyes to look at him but he covers them with his hand. Suddenly, the air around you shifts. Everywhere you’re touching him suddenly feels bigger.

When he takes his hand away, it’s a purple colour tipped with black claws. Your Dream Guardian is looming over you in his true form, with its tapered skull, luminous eyes, and four long tentacles where a moment ago there was a mouth.

So strange. But not unfamiliar by now. And...alluring. You reach up and stroke your fingers over his smooth, fleshy tentacles. His hands stay braced against the ground, but his tentacles move over you, exploring your breasts, your hips, between your thighs.

He watches you carefully as a tentacle pushes inside you, deeper than his cock. Thicker. It pulsates, making you cry out. Your whole body feels alive.

His cock has grown larger and turned a deeper purple than the rest of him, aggressively thickened, and with bumps along the underside and a slightly tapered head.

You don’t get much chance to look at it before he moves closer, the tapered head slipping easily into you, and thrusts inside you. You feel every bump. The tapered head probing sharply. The stretch of a thickness you’re not used to. He feels so strange, but as you cry out, you hold onto his shoulders with both hands, watching in fascination as the monstrous and strange cock moves in and out of you.

“Yes. This will work. But you need more. I want to give you everything.” His reverberating voice speaks inside your mind.

He pulls out and two of his tentacles snake down to caress your thighs before slowly massaging your sex. Pleasure ripples through you and you close your eyes and relax back. This feels right. This feels even better than his handsome elf form. His tentacles are firm and fleshy and first one of them pushes inside you, and then the other. You reach down and stroke your clit as the thick, slippery tentacles slide and thrust inside you.

He pulls you up and astride him. You put a hand out to steady yourself in his embrace but, faster than a striking snake, his other two tentacles wrap around your body and pin your hands behind your back.

Without pulling his tentacles out, he pulls you firmly and sharply down on his cock. The sensation is overwhelming. You’re not sure if you can take much more.

You feel a victorious growl inside your mind. He’s hungry for you. Greedy for you. “I have wanted you like this ever since we were connected. I am with you everywhere. I hear all your thoughts. I am always inside your head, but your body has fascinated me just as much. Each time your power has grown and evolved, I have craved you more and more. You’ve held yourself apart from me. You wouldn’t let me dominate you, but now you haven’t no choice.”

His clawed fingers dig into your waist, pricking sharply. Your sex clenches at his possessive, dangerous words, and then allows him deeper.

You can do this.

You want this.

A tentacle snakes up and wraps around your throat. You open your mouth to tell him that you don’t want him to stop, but the tentacle pushes past your lips and all the way to the back of your throat.

“I can hear you. I hear every thought you have. You can never hide from me. You’re mine.”

Your mouth waters around his tentacle. You feel saliva stream from the corner of your mouth and down over your breasts. So many wet, squelching, sucking noises fill your ears, along with your muffled moans and the deep rumbling from within his chest.

“You don’t want to think. You want to surrender to me. Have me dominate you completely. Fill you so full until there’s no room for doubt and uncertainty. Until there’s only me. Forever.”

One of the tentacles inside you slowly wriggles free, and he continues to move you up and down on his cock. Almost like a rag doll. You’re helpless in his grip. The tentacle pushes against the tight ring of your ass. That isn’t anything you’ve ever felt before. Your eyes open wide and alarm shoots through you.

The Emperor sends a soothing impulse into you at the same time as his tentacle slips inside you, just a little at first, and then worming deeper. Gentle ripples flow along its length in time with his cock moving in and out of you. By all the gods, that feels so strange, but so good. Your head falls back. Your eyes close. He moves even deeper into your throat. Deeper into your pussy adn ass. He would never hurt you. He only wants to give you pleasure, and he feels so good everywhere that he’s deep inside you.

“So good. So obedient, and all mine. This is what I can do for you. Only me. You love this, don’t you? Feel how good it is to surrender and do exactly what I say. Just a little more and we can be together forever. Just a little more. Just a little more…”

The mind flayer pushes deeper and deeper, stretching your ass, and making your pussy throb. Your core is lighting up with every rough thrust. All the delicious tension is winding your body tighter and together.

“You were made to be fucked like this. You were made for me. Only me. ”

Suddenly, all the tension in your body releases in an overwhelming rush. Your core burns with golden light. You feel his victory and self-satisfaction stabbing through you along with his cock, driving your climax higher and higher. You’re his. He owns this pleasure. He owns you.

Every place he enters you convulses against his cock and tentacles, gripping and squeezing him. His pride and victory turn to urgent pleasure as your body works its magic on him. His thrusts grow sharp and selfish. Needy. Faster. His panting fills your ears and his pleasure fills your mind. He hasn’t let go in so long.

A spasm goes through you as he bursts inside you, and he pulls your body roughly against his and rocks you back and forth in his embrace. You’ve never felt anything like this. You never want to leave him. He lets go of your hands, and you wrap your arms around him.

Slowly, you both open your eyes. He lays down on the ground, taking you with him and withdrawing his tentacles from everywhere but keeping his cock inside you.

With your cheek pillowed against his shoulder, he strokes you lovingly and murmurs, “I need to stay inside you longer. I’m not ready to let you go. Sleep. You may stay here with me as long as you need to rest. Time passes differently here, and when you finally awake, you’ll be deeply rested, your mind will be clear, and you’ll understand everything you have to do for me. For you. For us.”

You close your eyes, your whole body relaxing and feeling deliciously full, and you drift off into dreamless sleep.

***

Thank you so much for reading! I hoped this pleased your horny monster heart. Please leave me a comment/reblog and let me know what you think.

#baldur’s gate 3 #bg3 #the emperor #dream visitor #fanfic #baldur's gate 3 spoilers #i hope you like tentacles #tav you lucky bish #reader x the emperor #reader x dream visitor

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genshingorlsrevengeance · 9 months ago

Note

Request for basically the shrunken down s/o incident but with the Fontaine girls (Lynette, Furina and Navia) and March 7th from HSR

(Genshin Impact/H:SR) Lynette, Furina, Navia, and March 7th with their S/O being shrunk

Lynette picks up S/O, gently, staring at them curiously as her ears twitched.

(Lynette) "What happened?"

(S/O) "How am I supposed to know? And why are you picking me up by my shirt like I'm a cat?!"

Her tail swished for a brief moment, giving away her amusement.

(Lynette) "I'm not sure."

As funny as she finds it, she immediately finds every contact she knows to figure out what was going on with S/O.

All the while, Lynette had a hat on, with S/O underneath it.

She would have left them at home, but considering there were cats everywhere, that was not a good idea.

Once she learned that they would return to normal after a few days, she has them in her hands 24/7.

(Lynette) "...You're cute when you're bite sized like this."

(S/O) "I am NOT a cat toy, Lynette."

She's mildly concerned, but as long as she was watching over, nothing would happen.

Furina laughs at the sight of her pocket sized loved one.

(Furina) "What a splendid trick! Since when could you perform such a logic defying ability?"

(S/O) "N-Never!"

(Furina) "Hah!....Ha...Oh, you're serious."

Her smile vanishes quickly as she scoops up S/O into her hands.

(Furina) "Fear not my tiny beloved, for nothing will bring you harm!"

(S/O) "I-I'm not sure I trust you to handle me carefully!"

(Furina) "Nonsense! Come, we shall find Neuvilette to cure you of this!"

Which she learned, this cannot be cured, at least not instantly.

They would just have to wait it out.

Well, it's a good thing Furina is not beholden to anyone, as she sits at home and watches S/O.

She has tiny water familiars the size of S/O play around with them to pass the time.

(S/O) "I feel like I'm in an aquarium right now..."

(Furina) "Oh, is that something you'd like to go to?"

(S/O) "When I'm this size, no. I feel like you'd feed me to the fish."

(Furina) "Why do you have no faith in me, my dear?"

S/O stared at the fish currently circling them.

(Furina) "Playing with you, and using you as fish food are quite different things!"

(S/O) "But I bet you're wanting to see what happens with your vision, aren't you?"

(Furina) "N-No!"

(S/O) "..."

(Furina) "...Maybe a little-"

Navia blushes slightly at the small S/O currently on her table.

(Navia) "You're...SO CUTE!"

(S/O) "Not the word I would've chosen-"

Navia makes them yelp as she scoops them into her hand and rubs them against her cheek.

(Navia) "SO TINY! Oh my gosh, you're adorable!...W-Wait, how did you get that way?!"

Navia rushes around like a madwoman, trying to find a cure or someone who knows about this kind of thing.

Meanwhile, S/O has a full bodyguard detail outside their room, and around the table they're on.

(S/O) "Alright, even you have guys have to admit this is a little overkill."

(Bodyguard) "S/O, you know better than any of us that trying to reign Miss Navia in is a fool's errand."

(S/O) "...Fair point."

Once she learns that the duration will run its course for the next few days, she spends this time creating the smallest macarons in existence, solely for S/O.

She has them use dollhouse furniture so they have somewhere to sleep and eat.

(S/O) "You're having fun with this aren't you?"

(Navia) "Well, I can't say this is the worst thing we've done together!"

(S/O) sigh "Well, thank you anyway for taking care of me."

(Navia) "Oh please. I'd do this even if you were normal height!"

March 7th stares silently at the tiny S/O standing on her bed, looking panicked at their predicament.

(March 7th) "..."

SNAP!

(S/O) "D-DID YOU JUST TAKE A PICTURE OF ME!?"

(March 7th) "You're right!"

She immediately gets in frame of her phone to take a selfie with her tiny S/O.

(March 7th) "Okay, NOW let's see what the heck is happening!"

Of all the people to tell her S/O's affliction, it was Pom-Pom.

And that this wouldn't last more than a few days at worst.

Thank the Aeons.

That meant March could live this up!

The entire time, March is taking pictures of S/O, giggling lightly.

(S/O) "For the record, if this happens to you-"

(March 7th) "Then I'll be as adorably pint-sized as you!"

(S/O) "You can at least show a little more concern!"

(March 7th) "I am! It's why no one else is allowed in this room! I bet Caelus would use you to go dumpster diving."

S/O shuddered at the thought, the smell was already bad but being this small...

(March 7th) "You're much better as a paperweight!"

Despite her teasing and carefree nature, there was truth to her words.

She violently rejects entry for ANYONE to go into her room while S/O is in this state because she's worried.

But, this would be a fond memory down the line she felt!

#genshin impact x reader #honkai star rail x reader #lynette x reader #furina x reader #navia x reader #march 7th x reader #genshin impact imagines #genshin impact headcanons #honkai star rail imagines #honkai star rail headcanons #lynette genshin impact #furina genshin impact #navia genshin impact #march 7th honkai star rail #march 7th hsr

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ruruvxz · 3 months ago

Note

hello! new reader here. i think hanni would write romantic love songs!

“My Dearest Clementine”

Hanni Pham x fem!reader

↳ synopsis: You and your overachieving (ex)girlfriend broke up, but little did you know, she still hasn't gotten over her little clementine. And what's better than food to get into a woman's heart? A good serenade.

↳ cw: foul mouth reader, reader once again is lowkey so mean, breakup, established relationship, comfort, fluff

↳ word count: 2.1k

a/n: omg my first ever anon, im tweaking out, but i agree she definitely would make/cover love songs about reader. and she’d put her whole heart into the performances too… she’s such a cutie pie nfgagggghhhhhh fun fact this was originally a jihyo fic but then i thought really hard, and decided on not making it about her. oh and this is song is clementine by grant perez heheheheh

Skimming through the channels, you really couldn't help but be so agitated by everyone broadcasting this god-awful music show. "God, do these people only watch one thing, and why does it have to be music shows of all things?" You huffed to yourself, whilst aggressively mashing the poor remote. To be honest you'd be the first one to admit that you did enjoy all the award shows and music festivals. Hell, you've even been to your fair share, but do all these channels have to screen the same thing?

It's been the same MAMA award show on almost every channel, even networks that talked about important news, couldn't help but talk about it. Almost as if there wasn't anything else of importance to speak about, making your blood boil even more at the thought.

However, your visceral hatred for music programs wasn't always like this, well, not before at least. You used to adore watching the latest performances, always admiring the work put into performing on stage. It came to the point where you'd buy tickets for venues near your apartment. Despite not always recognizing everyone performing, you'd always sit through every performance, all the while waiting for that one special person to take the stage. Embarrassingly your true intentions were to go watch your then-girlfriend, Hanni, and cheer her on from the sidelines.

That was before, and now, the one who you called your one true love, had just recently shattered your heart into pieces because of work.

All the memories of her loving presence came back flooding into your mind, like how she'd escape practice using Minji's help just to find herself wrapped around your arms. Everything was just too much, the fact she would leave you to save face just enraged you further. "Argh! I am not about to reopen old wounds! Leave me alone you— minx!" You yelled at the screen, before throwing profanity after profanity, like some madwoman trying to stop the voices in her head. At this point, your neighbors were on the verge of sending a wellness check to the apartment.

Your rage was at a tipping point when you saw her gorgeous face popping up on the screen. You held up the remote, ready to shatter the poor television by projectile throwing the remote at the screen. It wasn't until your phone started vibrating erratically that snapped you out of your female rage. Holding your hand out and snatching the phone from the coffee table, you put the speaker to your ear.

"Yeah? Who is this?" You asked curiously, taking a mental note of how the caller's number looked eerily familiar, summing it up to being a coworker.

"Hey, I know we aren't close, but my friend needs a favor." The woman on the other side spoke with a soft and soothing voice, it sounded familiar, though the loud sounds of chanting made it hard to decipher who was on the other end. Thinking for a moment, you took your gaze out from the phone and to the television screen, biting your teeth as you saw New Jeans without Hanni nor Danielle. Sighing in relief you didn't have to see your stunningly aggravating ex-girlfriend.

Still reminiscing about all the times she's carefully and delicately peeled various fruits for you to eat without you even asking. You started to drift off thinking of ways to get her back, before snapping out of your pitiful daydreams, just to respond to the woman on the phone. "Uhm, not to sound round or anything, but who is this? I mean I'd love to do you a favor but—" You rightfully questioned, since this was just such a perplexing thing to ask someone, especially since you had no memory of them.

"Listen I’m…a friend of a friend...?" She spoke unsurely.

"Look, I'm really busy at the moment, I've got a maximum of 30 seconds before the next song starts..." The woman spoke, while you sat there still trying to puzzle together who she was. "It's just, my friend REALLY—" she exasperated the 'really' as much as her voice could. "Wants you to watch the MAMA performance today."

"What... I'm sorry, with all due respect, that's such an odd demand. I must emphasize that I don't know you, and you're not making the effort to state who you are." You commanded at the mic before the call closed, the woman on the other end not wanting to argue with you.

Before you could interrogate me further, the speakers connected to the television erupted loudly with my nose, the screams and praises abundantly clear. And of all the songs it could blast powerfully loud, it was "How Sweet" by NewJeans, but all that you could notice was Danielle throwing the phone to one of the staff before her muscle memory pushed through. (And that Hanni, who was previously sitting perfectly fine with the other members wasn't going to perform the song with them.)

As quickly as you comprehend the song was playing, you put down the volume to a bearable state. Admittedly you still felt a bit creeped out by that call, but then again compared to the phone calls and letters you received from crazed lovers, it wasn't the worst thing you've gotten.

Suddenly a sinister realization hit you, other than working, you didn't do much during your day off, only thing mildly interesting happening today on my day off was this fuck ass show. And if that caller's so-called "friend" wanted you to watch the performances, you'd do just that. So that's how you decided that you'd spend your precious time letting out your toxic rage on these performances in the comfort of your own home.

The time flew so quickly, and most if not all the artists were so enjoyable, but then, the performance you had dreaded the most was about to happen. However, a part of you was quite ecstatic to watch that dreadfully alluring woman fail miserably on stage. (But be honest, Hanni never does, she always looks perfect doing what she loves, not the mention how elegant she sounds when she sings.)

"God Hanni, even till this day you're insufferable. Fuck." You screeched, as the painfully beautiful memories of her flooded your brain, while all you could do was continue to shove chips into my mouth, eating them up with a bittersweet rage. But with your prior knowledge, before the performance started, the artists were given about a 10-minute break to get all the equipment and stage ready. So you were left with your heart racing inside your chest.

After a dreadful wait, you watched as the dim lights began to slowly light the stage with a warm spotlight, and the LED backboard displayed a beautiful orange orchard. It took you aback since Hanni’s most recent solo tracks never mentioned anything about flowers or fruits. You hated to admit that no matter what you still supported her career to the bitter end of your relationship, so every little detail about her was engraved into your mind. But oh hell, if it's a mess up, even better for you right?

"Ah, hello everybody. I hope you've been enjoying the performances today. Everyone is so good!—" Hanni spoke, the crowd roared at her words, and the camera flashed to her coworkers smiling proudly at her words.

"I understand everyone wants my more recent solo songs, but I wanted to showcase a new song. I made it about someone close to me." She continued, while even more mental anguish bubbled up inside your head by how she spoke so softly about the song, and how you assumed she moved on so quickly.

"I hope you all will enjoy this performance." That was the last thing she said before the backtrack began to play. It was a gentle stroke of a guitar before the other members of the band continued to play to the rhythm. The song continued as you leaned closer into the TV, using your remote to turn up the music playing from the speakers.

“Color it gray...” She sang, your heart thumping out of your chest, your mind drifting to the moments leading to your eventual fallout.

“Until I forget you

Like I never met you” The memory of her pleading you to forget about whatever connection you both shared because she didn’t want to drag your career down. Her tears still linger in your mind.

“My dearest, my dearest Clementine” She continued, looking back at the first time she ever spoke so dearly about you, using ‘Clementine’ as a term of endearment because you both cringed at the thought of calling each other ‘baby’ or anything of that sort.

“Color it gray

Until I forget you

Like I never met you”

“My dearest Clementine”

“Throw it away

But close enough to you” Her voice strained by her sorrow.

“Cause although I hate you

I will still fall in love, my Clementine”

“Every time, always”

“No matter how hard I try”

“My Clementine, every time”

You're always on my mind” She ended, fixing her gaze to the camera, looking longingly, as if she was looking at something— no someone through the screen.

You watched in disbelief as she closed up her performance, and walked off the stage, still wearing the matching dragonfruit and orange necklace you bought together. It was a few minutes sitting in utter bewilderment before getting a call on your cellphone. All you could do is weakly pick it up, while still being in complete shock at what you just watched, and without checking the contact you forced yourself to speak up, "Uh..." with a very long pause, you resumed "Hello."

"Clementine!" The voice on the other line spoke loudly, there was no other person who called me that sickening nickname other than the one and only Hanni Pham.

"I thought I blocked you!" You shouted defensively at your phone trying to get this woman to hang up.

"Yeah! But you never blocked Danielle since she never really messaged you, haha!"

"Just leave me alone you freak!" You argued loudly, "I'm hanging up on you Han—" Before you could press, block caller, you heard her scream from the other side.

"No wait!"

"You saw my performance right?"

"Uhm... I wouldn't say I didn't." You awkwardly admitted, still trying to avoid answering her questions.

You sat in awkward silence for a while before she spoke again, "Please, I know you— we weren't the most mature people, but please give me one more chance. I know I shouldn't be asking you on the phone…” You hear a faint sigh before Hanni carries on with her whole speech. “but I don't know any other way to contact you without you running in the opposite direction."

Rolling your eyes behind the phone, you took in a deep breath and analyzed the situation before making a very calm, calculated response. "No! Die in a ditch, Hanni! You dumped me! Then made a song with my nickname and aired it out to everyone!"

"No! No! No wait! Please! Clementine! That's the only way to get through to you! Please Y/N, I wouldn't be begging like this for anyone else."

"Ugh... fine! We'll talk about this later once you're done with work alright? Besides you shouldn't be stressed during award shows, it shows."

"Really?!" She questioned, a bit shocked that you would even give her the time of day.

"Yeah, whatever, don't overwork yourself."

"Thank you so much, I promise I won't, thanks for caring so much, even with everything I’ve done."

"Yeah yeah, you know my place, I'll cook something up, and bring you comfortable clothes, because I'm going to give you a piece of my mind."

"I should've expected that, don't worry, we'll talk, I promise, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say— and I promise I won’t make any more stupid decisions."

"Sure."

"I never break my promises clementine."

"Just— go back to work, Hanni! You're pissing me off, your sweet talk won't work on me this time, I'm gonna beat your ass no matter what."

"It was worth the try." She laughed before hanging up the phone, you swore you were gonna kill her when she came back home. But for now, you forced yourself off the couch and prepared everything for her arrival, after all, she never broke her promises.

#hanni pham x reader #hanni x reader #newjeans x reader #newjeans imagines #hanni imagines #Newjeans x fem reader #Newjeans ff #girl group x reader #gxg #pham hanni x reader

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st4rbe0m · 3 months ago

Text

𖤐⭒๋࣭ ⭑ DANGEROUSLY YOURS - SJY

✺ now playing - cigarettes out the window by tv girl

✺ pairing - spy!jake x president's daughter!reader

✺ contents - angst, themes of betrayal, political talk, guns, use of feminine terms

✺ wc - 0.8K

✺ a/n - i'm ngl i was really really disappointed with how much my yeonjun fic flopped considering it was 12k words T-T

masterlist

"If I betray you, I betray myself. If I betray him, I betray my country."

The barrel of the gun is staring straight down Jake’s head. There’s sweat beading on his forehead as he looks where you’re standing, and the slight tremor in your careful hand doesn’t go unnoticed by him. He’s gulping in fear - not for his life, but your own. There was no telling who could’ve called the cops by now, with all the shouting and yelling that had ensued upon your revelation.

You look absolutely wonderful tonight. Of course you did, is there any event where the President’s daughter didn’t look gorgeous. Floor length black gown with gold detailing on the trimming, and a pearlescent silver chain delicately balanced across your collarbones, with the view Jake was facing currently, he was going to die a happy man it seemed. The only thing he wanted to change, if he could, was the heavy tears pooling in your eyes, and the absolute look of betrayal on your face. If his superiors were to see him right now, they'd reprimand him straight. The best spy of his country, the best of his team and the best agent the law enforcement could procure. The best of his best was on his knees in front of you currently, with no weapons to defend him. Only the raw, unforgiving truth.

“Explain yourself then.” Your voice is shaky, and what was supposed to sound more ironclad sounded like a broken, hopeful curiosity. Your hands are still shaking and the finger delicately perched atop the trigger is lingering like a broken echo stuck in a limbo.

“Y/N, I offer you three things right now. My heart, my country, and my life.”

“Stop! Stop with your lies! God, even now you’re cruel? You know how I fell for you, yet you couldn’t find the honor in you to remove yourself from charting these dangerous waters with me, for this mission? Where’s your compassion, Jake? Your dignity?”

“I love you, Y/N. I do. Deeper than the betrayal that I was raised on, and stronger than my traitorous blood.” He’s holding a steely determination in his eyes, more focused than he’s ever been on any other mission before. This wasn’t simply just a classified case on a document anymore. This was about the thin line between life and death.

“You don’t get it, do you Jake? From the first hour that I’ve met you, I’ve been irrevocably yours. And how am I to ever return to a point before that? How can I trust you?”

“Because I love you!”, he finally explodes in a single, shallow breath of exclamation. The last wish of a dying man.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t take your life right now!”, you explode in anger. Screaming like a madwoman, your heart hurts as you absorb in the vision of the man you love on his knees before you, pleading guilty for his betrayal.

“You may as well take my heart, Y/N. It’s already full of you.” He’s breathing heavily as you clutch your gun tighter. Your guards were to appear at any moment. It’s a starry night outside, twinkling lights littered across an inky black sky. The marble is cold beneath his knees. You’re sobbing even harder now. The lights from the chandelier behind his head reflect the glistening moisture on your cheeks.

“I love you, Y/N. And I know you love me. I could disappear right now, but I’ll always find moonlit nights strangely empty, because when I’ll call your name, Y/N, I’ll receive no answer.”

The breaking of the mahogany doors, loudly clattering open, made you both shake violently in surprise. There stood your guards, armed and ready to save you. Badges of honor laid across their lapels, the honor of the country that represented everything Jake stood against. “Don’t be afraid madam! We’re here now!”, one of them calls out to you as they swiftly make their way across the lavish ballroom to where the pair of you stood. You were still shaking, but this time Jake noticed a maniacal look in your eyes, searching and scattering around.

It was almost like the scene was slowed down. The tremble in your hands stilled as you raised your arms up, pointing with excellent marksmanship to the where the glass connected the chandelier behind his head to the ceiling. The chandelier, which with the loud bang of the bullet, made a cacophonous, crystal crashing noise against the marble floor, just a few paces ahead of your guards. Jake’s understanding of the situation makes him bolt up to his feet, and with almost automatic movement, he’s grabbing your wrist and running away towards the exit with you.

“My country is very dear to me.”

“Dearer than I?”

“No, not dearer than you.”

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fastlikealambo · 1 year ago

Text

Connubium.|| Coriolanus Snow x Black Fem Reader

Chapter One

table of contents.

Chapter One.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three.

Chapter Four.

Summary: Stealing from The Capitol is a deadly offense, yet you’ve done it more times than you can count but when you do something you should not have done, Volumnia Gaul decides a fate for you that might just be worse than death.

Notes: This takes place post The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes and Coryo is in his last year at The University, studying under Dr. Gaul. This might not follow canon, I’m not an expert on all the lore so I apologize if I get things wrong.

Disclaimer: You know Coriolanus is a POS, I know Coriolanus is a POS, please don’t yell at me because this is just a fun little story, something for thee hotties, and if you feel that strongly against President Snow, please let me know if you’d like me to sign you up for tessarae.

This is a quick sample chapter to test the waters and see what people think! If you’d like to see more, please comment, reblog, or like!

The streets of The Capitol looked different during the day.

You were used to the shadows, two feet in the dark at all times kept you secret, kept you safe, hiding was not cowardly, it was instinctual.

But you weren’t hiding now, a coward in high heels and stockings dark enough to hide the purpling bruises that kissed the back of your legs, a high collar dress and coat the color of fresh blood concealed the rest that served as a reminder of how you got there in the first place.

Somewhere, a clock struck noon and as if on a timer of his own, Coriolanus Snow emerged from the university doors, chiseled face even more sculpted in person and you took your place on the opposite side of the road.

You stepped off the curb, turning your face ever so slightly towards a camera and a tucked curl behind your ear signaled the car Gaul had waiting to come barreling around the corner and down the street.

A few capitol citizens jumped back onto the sidewalk but not you, you had your nose in a book, seemingly oblivious to the car that would surely end your miserable little life if this plan did not work.

You did not know Coriolanus Snow, but you did know men.

Peacekeepers who’d do anything to relax after a hard day, Capitol boys who wanted to know if district lips tasted like treason or honey wine, they were all the same when the lights were off and pockets went unattended.

You tripped and dropped the books, loud enough for Snow to look up and see the car mere feet from you now as you bent down to retrieve the books, silently cursing everything and everyone that had led you to this moment.

It occurred to you now that perhaps the madwoman in the lab had no designs on Snow that required you and this was an opportunity for her to kill someone in a fun, if not slightly convoluted, way.

You were going to die.

And then, you weren’t.

The lean body of Panem’s golden boy crashed into yours before the car did, strong arms around your middle and sent you both tumbling out of harm’s way. That pretty face of his blocked out the sun and the whole world went still, freezing the pair of you in a tableau of heaving chests and scraped hands.

Beauty made men blind and you had made a blind man of Coriolanus Snow.

And now, the games begin.

#coriolanus snow x reader #Coriolanus Snow x black!reader #coriolanus x reader #coriolanus snow #coriolanus x you

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anne-chloe · 5 months ago

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Imagine : You have just been kidnapped by Peter and his Lost Boys, but they’ve bit off more than they can chew with your modern attitude

“What is she yelling about now?” Peter asks while approaching his loitering boys, the distant yells of your voice infiltrating the main camp.

Devin looks to Peter and shrugs his shoulders, his confused expression mirroring Pans. “Something about… a message?” Devin repeats, unsure if he had even translated your words correctly. None of the boys were accustomed to the native tongue you spoke so fluently in.

“A message?” Peter echoes, his brow arching. “I shall find out what message it is that she has.”

Peter soon appears at the base of the tree, where two bamboo cages hang like trophies in the air. He tugs at a thick rope and begins lowering the cage downwards, ensuring it wouldn’t suddenly drop and harm the hostage inside: you.

He releases the rope and saunters over, a small whistle tune passing his lips as his shadow looms over your face.

You seem to perk up, but your momentary delight morphs into frustration. “About time!” You scoff loudly, waving your hand like a madwoman. In your hand you grip a device unknown to Peter, it’s metallic and sleek looking, otherworldly.

“I am told you have a message…” Peter starts slowly, deliberately drawing out his words to increase the fearful tension you should surely feel. But he is once again surprised as you do not react the way he desired.

“I want to send a message,” you correct, using your pointer finger to gesture to your phone. “There isn’t any signal here. What network does Neverland provide?”

Peter blinks rapidly. He understood almost every word you said individually, but all together they sounded far too much like gibberish. He knew, of course, that the other worlds had evolved over the years, but generally speaking he was able to make a connection with potential lost boys. You, on the other hand were something entirely new.

“Neverland does not support your modern lifestyle,” Peter explains flatly. He approaches the cage until he was leaning on the bars, his fingers wrapping around the bamboo until he swore it would snap between his fingers.

Bizarrely, you sigh and tuck your phone into your pocket before leaning as close as possible to Peter. “Count yourself lucky, magic-boy, or else I’d be calling the police immediately on your ass for kidnapping me.”

And it was with that strange threat that Peter realised how interesting you were as a hostage. Certainly more fascinating than the rest. In fact, you were such a curious being that Peter was debating whether or not he’d release you back to your world once he had gotten what he achieved.

Because who would lose a magnificent source of entertainment like you?

#fan fiction #imagines #peter pan #once upon a time #ouat peter pan #modern reader #short stories #writing prompts #Neverland #dark fairy tales #dark Peter pan #Peter pan x reader #fantasy #female reader #lost boys

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ganjas-shit · 7 months ago

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Oh, You’re Breaking My Heart

Warnings: sexual thoughts, angst, mentions of ptsd, Neil Hargrove, mentions of loneliness and isolation.

Pairings: main pairing Billy x reader, some slight Steve x reader

Summary: Your longing for an exciting romance finally comes true when Billy Hargrove becomes your next-door neighbor. But is love everything you thought it would be?

Authors note: hi everyone! I’m most likely going to be turning this into a series (don’t know how long yet) but I’m so very excited because this has been sitting in my drafts for about a year already and I’ve finally decided to just finish it. There will be eventual smut for this soooooooooooo yea tee hee anyways hope you guys like it! Btw the timeline I’m using is not the same as the one in the show.

Chapter 1: Sea of Stars, Chapter 2: You’re gonna to be okay.

☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚☆˖°☾ ⋆˚

Love was something you deeply craved, something you longed for. As ridiculous as it sounds, you thought about it almost every day.

Having that one partner in crime; someone you can be reckless, wild, and free with. Someone who makes you forget about reality; someone who would do anything for you. Someone who knows the deepest, darkest parts of you.

For a while it became something you obsessed over.

Intimate, passionate, crazy love—blamed for the constant loneliness you felt. Your obsession with fictional romance failed to alleviate it. No amount of reading or watching could fill the cavity in your heart, that horrible feeling of emptiness in your chest.

Then Billy Hargrove became your next-door neighbor.

It all happened so fast.

Your belly erupted with a swarm of butterflies the moment his ocean-blue eyes met yours, as if the world paused just for that brief moment.

His dirty blonde curls and tan skin ignited something deep inside you. Soon enough, the emptiness in your chest was replaced by the fierce pounding of your heart.

Pretty boys came with a lot of attention, though, meaning Billy Hargrove came with a lot of attention.

Every girl threw themselves at him the moment he set foot in Hawkins High. And who could blame them? With a face like his, he was downright gorgeous. If you had the courage, you'd throw yourself at him too.

But for now, simply admiring him from a distance would suffice.

You took pride in that though. Who else can say they had a perfect view of Billy Hargrove almost every night through their window?

You spent countless nights watching him smoke cigarettes outside on the hood of his Camaro, admiring the way the moonlight hit his face as he was in deep thought about God knows what.

It was pretty hard not to look at Billy other than those nights through your window though...

In Mrs. Clarke's biology class, you'd often catch yourself staring at him. He'd sense your gaze and once smirked back at you, letting you know he felt your eyes on him.

And God, he would never forget the look on your face—wide-eyed and embarrassed as hell.

He thought it was the funniest thing in the world and he found it quite entertaining.

He found you quite entertaining.

Billy was so accustomed to girls throwing themselves at him; it was something he had gotten used to since he hit puberty. And although he enjoyed all the flirtatious looks and comments girls threw at him, he eventually grew bored of it.

However, you and Billy shared a common craving. Whether it was for love, excitement, intimacy, or entertainment, both of you yearned for something more.

“Shit guys, we totally forgot to hang up banners in the gym for tomorrow's basketball game!” You screamed like a madwoman startling the entire student council.

With just two minutes left until dismissal, exhaustion hung heavy in the air. The entire week had been a relentless blur of preparation for the school's first basketball game of the season and its accompanying activities. By this point, everyone, including you, was over it.

As the bell rang, everyone dashed out of the classroom as if their lives depended on it. They gave you apologetic looks, patted your shoulder, and mumbled every excuse imaginable to avoid putting up those banners in the school gym.

“So fuck me huh?!” you yelled after them, throwing both your arms up in frustration before dropping them in defeat.

As head of the student council, you couldn't afford to procrastinate. The principal had emphasized that those banners had to be up and ready for tomorrow's game, or there would be consequences. That prick didn't intimidate you in the slightest, but, you had a reputation to maintain, and everything had to be flawless.

You huffed and grumbled as you entered the gym, your arms hugging a variety of large banners needing to be hung up. Your frustration completely blinded you to the sight of the gym full of shirtless basketball players.

Suddenly, a basketball collided with your shoulder at full speed, knocking the banners out of your arms.

The gym erupted in laughter.

“This isn't the student council club you do know that right kooks?” Tommy H. yelled from the court, laughing, trying so hard to impress his dickhead teammates.

Kooks.

They had given you that nickname after the scene you caused at Tina's Halloween party last year. It's the reason you no longer associate yourself with that crowd.

You remember it like it was yesterday.

You arrived at Tina's party with Tommy and Carol by your side, just one week after your harrowing experience of getting stuck in the Upside Down. It probably wasn't the wisest decision to be out, and you knew it. You had been home, cutting class, and ignoring their calls, and they had noticed a change in you. You were easily irritable and on edge. Carol even made a snide comment about how you'd probably been hanging out with Munson, snorting too much Special K.

According to them, you were a real drag to be around. So, they dragged you out of the house, urging you to let loose and forget about whatever it was you were dealing with. And so you did. You drank until you couldn't feel anymore, indulging in anything and everything that was being passed around.

Carol was never truly your friend; she was someone you grew up with and were kind of forced to know. She never really cared for you, so it was no surprise when you overheard her snickering with a few girls from the cheer squad.

They all eyed you up and down as you drunkenly swayed to the music.

“Wonder what hell she's been living; she's out of fucking control,” Carol remarked, smacking her gum as she laughed with the girls next to her, rolling her eyes at you.

Your ears perked up at her words, and they echoed in your head on a relentless loop, amplified by the effects of alcohol and marijuana.

Hell. Hell. Hell.

Images from that fateful night flooded your mind—the frantic sprint through the woods, the desperate attempt to escape the unknown terror pursuing you. You ran until your lungs burned and your legs gave out, only to find yourself in a place that resembled home but felt like a nightmare. It was as though you had fallen into a pit and landed in a realm you could only describe as hell. Darkness enveloped everything, the air thick with swirling black particles, and a monstrous creature hunted you down as if you were its final prey.

Tears welled up at the memory, and you couldn't hold back any longer. You had been bottling up your emotions, feeling isolated because what you had experienced sounded utterly unbelievable.

You charged at Carol and shoved her into the wall, causing picture frames of Tina's seemingly perfect family to crash to the floor.

Like the breaking picture frames, the smiles masking their true essence shattered that night, much like your own exterior, revealing the turmoil within.

You started to laugh manically, tears spilling out of your eyes.

“Oh, Carol, you haven't seen hell,” you chuckled, leaning in to whisper in her ear. “It's right beneath this town, and it's anything but pretty. It's downright awful.”

Carol was frightened tears threatening to spill from her eyes, she felt powerless in this position.

“Hey! What the hell is your problem, Y/L/N? Get off of her!”Tommy yelled, rushing towards you and Carol, pulling you away from her.

You pushed him back. “Don't you dare put your fucking hands on me!” you yelled, your words laced with venom. He backed away, refocusing his attention on Carol, attempting to comfort her throbbing head.

The images flashed in your head: your screams, the Demogorgon, the overwhelming sense of isolation. You turned to face the party, and all eyes were on you as the music came to a sudden stop.

“How can you all just sit here and party,”you sobbed, your voice growing louder, more terrifying with each word. Nobody dared to approach you or even attempt to calm you down. It was clear you were experiencing a psychotic break.

You hadn't spoken to Steve in months, ever since he started distancing himself from you, Tommy, and Carol. But you couldn't forget the moment when he threw you over his shoulder, with Nancy by his side, and dragged you out of that party.

That night, you cried until you fell asleep, finding comfort in the presence of Nancy Wheeler and your old friend Steve Harrington. When you woke up the next day, you found yourself in Nancy's bed, bombarded with all sorts of questions. You ended up sharing the horrifying experiences you had down there, and for the first time in a long while, you didn't feel alone. Now, you were stuck with a new nickname and a family bonded by the traumas of the Upside Down.

You laughed at the memory but the anger you felt in the moment snapped you back to reality.

The basketball rolled to the side, catching your attention. With all eyes on you, including Billy's intrigued gaze, you felt an itch for release. Without a second thought, you picked up the ball and with one swift motion, threw it at full speed. It struck the side of Tommy's head, catching him completely by surprise as he was too preoccupied trying to make his teammates laugh.

“You do realize there's a basketball game tomorrow, right?” You questioned voice dripping with sarcasm. “Maybe you should practice your passes a little more, you fucking prick!” you shot back, mimicking his tone with a hint of venom.

The laughter in the gym was quickly replaced by a chorus of “oooh's,” and Tommy was visibly seething with anger, clutching the side of his head where the basketball had struck him.

“You're so lucky you're a girl, freak!” Tommy yelled, pointing his finger at you in frustration.

You smiled and flipped him the bird.

Your reaction sparked something in Billy's gut, a mix of amusement and something else. He couldn't help but burst into laughter, though you might not have noticed being too preoccupied with picking the banners up.

Before he even realized it, Billy found himself inexplicably drawn towards you, as if some invisible force was guiding his steps.

Like his legs had minds of their own.

“That was quite a throw,” a deep, angelic voice sounded from behind you. Shit, you had totally forgotten he was here.

“Those throws are especially reserved for dickheads,” you retorted without turning around, your face turning as red as a tomato.

Billy's chuckle caught you off guard, something you never thought you'd hear up close. As you started to walk off to finish what you came here for, you heard him clear his throat, stopping you in your tracks.

“Aren't you forgetting something?” he questioned, giving you no choice but to turn around and see what he was referring to.

And god all mighty

There he was, shirtless. His tan skin glistened with sweat, revealing defined abs and muscular arms. Geez, you could've passed out right then and there.

He wore a proud smirk, revealing a perfect set of teeth as he held out the tape you needed for the banners. You almost drooled at the sight of him, feeling your core heat up and your cheeks flush.

“Oh, uh—thanks” you nervously said, quickly grabbing the tape from his hand. Surprisingly, you still maintained eye contact. God, he loved the effect he had on you.

“You need any help with those?” he chuckled once again. That's twice now; one more and you might just jump on him.

“Don’t you have to get ready for tomorrow’s game?” You asked timidly.

Jesus, why did you care?

“They can’t overwork their star player sweetheart.” He winked, once again flashing his pearly whites

You died and went to heaven at this point.

Sweetheart? That wink?

Your mouth hung open and he left you speechless, like a crazed fan girl. You started to wonder how he’d look at you if you were on your knees taking all of him.

How he’d talk to you..

“Look at you taking all of me sweetheart.”

God you really needed to get your shit together.

“Come on sweetheart don’t leave me hanging,” he said as he waved his hand in your face, trying to bring you back to reality.

He really needed to stop calling you that.

“Um, yeah, I guess I could use a little help,” you said, swallowing harshly. Your gaze shifted from the banners in your hands to his lips.

You really hated how flustered you got around him but a small part of you loved these new feelings.

“Great.” he responded with a cheeky grin.

You found yourself not being much help; he took charge and handled the banner hanging almost entirely by himself. He insisted on doing it, claiming it was the gentlemanly thing to do.

Tommy looked over at the two of you, confused. Billy Hargrove being a gentleman, to the psycho? Hell must've frozen over, he thought.

With Billy taking on the work, you had no choice but to stand there, looking all pretty, as you ripped pieces of tape with your mouth and passed them to him. You guided him on how to position the banners into place.

You couldn't help but notice the way his back muscles flexed when he reached up to position the banner, sending a flutter through your stomach.

You’d never been this close to him.

It also didn’t help that he brushed his fingers against yours every time he went to grab a piece of tape from you. And with him on the stool, towering above you, looking down at you, there was plenty of room for imagination for you both.

You were convinced he was trying to fucking kill you. Was he aware of the effect he had on you?

Every touch from him sent every single nerve in your body into a frenzy.

And those were just your fingers; you could only imagine what would happen if his fingers touched the spot you longed for him the most.

In the past few weeks, Billy had noticed that he was always running into you one way or another. So, he decided he might as well make it fun.

You were different from the girls he usually pursued, and he liked that. It made things all the more exciting. Billy had learned a few things about you: you were timid but had a backbone, responsible (an assumption he made because you were the student council president), and not too worried about your appearance, which didn't really matter because you were already breathtakingly beautiful.

“LADIES, HUDDLE UP! HARGROVE, GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE!” Coach Williams's voice rang out, snapping both you and Billy out of your thoughts.

Billy climbed off the step stool and leaned in towards your ear, catching you completely by surprise. He whispered, "Glad I can be of help, sweetheart. If you need help with anything else, I'm only one house away." With a smirk, he pulled back and left to return to his team captain duties.

The hot of this breath made your body shiver.

The look on your face was embarrassing, with your cheeks hot and your mouth slightly hanging open. Billy would never forget it; in fact, the mere sight of your mouth hanging open made him twitch in his pants as his imagination ran wild once again.

Your thoughts wouldn't allow you peace of mind as you finished tidying up the banners into place. Lost in thought, you hadn't even noticed that everyone had already left the gym, leaving you alone in the empty space.

The sound of the door gym doors opening startled you, snapping you back to reality.

You smiled at the sight of the tall brunette.

“Ah if it isn’t King Steve” you say teasingly, “or should I say EX King Steve who has been dethroned by the new California hottie.” You tease poking at his face

“Ha. Ha. Ha.” Steve replied dryly swatting your fingers away, taking fake offense to your comment.

Steve could care less about his so called “throne” he had new priorities, which consisted of ooking after you and his newfound family of children.

“Very funny y/n,” he said sarcastically.

Steve couldn't help but wonder if you and Billy had been hanging out. He had noticed how fond you had grown of him ever since he stepped into town. Lately, he had observed a change in your demeanor, how excited you were to get home, and how your face lit up at the sound of Billy's name. Steve could practically feel the butterflies radiating off of you.

“Hanging around is pushing it, Steve. We're just neighbors,” you reply, with a slight blush on your face that doesn’t go unnoticed by Steve.

“Yeah, I don't blush when someone mentions Agatha, my next-door neighbor,” he scoffs, shivering at the thought of his creepy stalker neighbor.

You roll your eyes at him, though it's quickly replaced with a smirk. “Well, Billy isn't a creepy stalker,”you say, though you wouldn't mind if he was. “Plus, he's kinda hot,”you finish, nudging his shoulder as you two make your way out of the gym.

“Yeah, gross,” Steve dramatically gags, though he also cringes at the slight twinge of jealousy he keeps feeling in his stomach.

You and Steve never hooked up. However, you two did develop some weird feelings for each other, but it was probably because you were so close to dying together.

You frown at the memory you thought was going to be the last.

Vines from the Upside Down began to wrap around your neck and body. Steve was right next to you, suffering the same fate. He looked at you, his heart breaking at the fear in your eyes. Trying to bring you some comfort, he gathered as much strength as he could and reached his hand out for yours, interlocking them together.

Thankfully, Eddie and Dustin saved you and everyone who thought it would be a bright idea to fight off Vecna. Ever since that day, though, Steve has been attached to your hip, making sure you get home safely after school and always ensuring you aren't alone.

Sometimes he'd find himself gazing at your lips or absentmindedly brushing away strands of hair that danced across your face on a windy day.

Steve didn’t know where you two stood. Neither of you had made a move, and he was too afraid to make one and face rejection.

You weren't sure how you felt about Steve, but you knew how you felt about Billy, and that feeling was becoming increasingly difficult to brush off.

“Coach still benching you for tomorrow's game?” you ask, changing the subject immediately. You regret it the moment you see the disappointment on Steve's face.

Basketball was his first love and ever since Billy got to town he’s slowly been losing the love he once held for the game.

He ran a hand through his messy head of hair and sighed.

“Yeah, thanks to your boy toy over there,” Steve says, glaring at the blonde who was a car away from Steve's. You wrap your arms around him as you two reach his burgundy BMW.

“You're a great player, Steve,” you state matter of factly, squeezing him a little tighter. “I think everything that's been going on—the Upside Down, us fighting interdimensional monsters, and almost dying—has taken a toll on you.” You reassure him and then let go to look into his eyes.

“It's normal to have a little setback; it's understandable. Plus, you've saved the world multiple times!” you said, slapping his chest lightly. “That beats being a starter on the stupid Hawkins High basketball team any day.”You finished, smiling at him.

Steve’s eyes softened at your words and smiled.

Christ, this is exactly why his feelings were a mess for you.

Steve brought you in for a tight hug because words couldn’t express how grateful he was for you.

From the next car down, Billy observed the two of you and couldn't shake the thought: had you and Harrington ever been a thing? The idea unsettled him because Billy Hargrove didn’t want to share you.

Steve dropped you off at home, as he usually did. He would usually stay for a bit and keep you company, but tonight he promised Dustin he’d take him to Mike’s for their D&D campaign.

You walked into the house, which was eerily quiet and empty, as it always was. Switching on the kitchen light, you noticed a note attached to the fridge.

Be back in the morning. Love you. -Dad

You sighed as a your traced your finger up down the note.

Your father traveled for work most of the time as a tech service representative for a variety of chemical companies. He'd often be gone for days, sometimes even weeks, so being alone was something you had grown accustomed to.

Your relationship with your father was also very complicated. You would even say it was nonexistent, given that he was always gone, and when he was around, he'd sleep the days away.

You pretended like it didn’t bother you but deep down it was something that made the cavity in your heart unbearable.

You weren't completely alone, though. Steve and you bonded over your shared loneliness, as both of his parents were also always away on business trips, calling only once a week, if he was lucky.

He'd often spend the night at your place, or you'd spend the night at his, rewatching ‘The Breakfast Club’ or ‘Sixteen Candles,’ his personal favorite, although he wouldn't admit that to anyone.

The bond between you two wasn't solely fueled by loneliness; fear played a significant role as well. It was the fear of that night—the night your friends almost died—that kept you together.

You felt goosebumps travel throughout your body at the thought of it. You instantly shook it off and decided to wash your feelings away with a warm, hot shower. You dreaded the night to come because of the insomnia you developed this past year of living in this small town. But thankfully, you had a couple of your favorite romance novels on deck to keep you occupied throughout the night.

You slipped into one of Eddie’s well-worn Metallica tees, its length reaching down to your knees. It was a keepsake from the day you and the gang had spent the night at his trailer, after an exciting evening of sneaking into the Hawkins community pool.

It was one of your favorite memories you’ve made in this shit town.

After slipping on the tee, you put on some black laced panties you pulled from you drawer.

You glanced over to your window, partially covered by your curtains, and wondered what the dirty blonde was up to. Curious, you walked over and took a peek, wondering where he was because he was usually out at this time, either smoking a cigarette or sitting in his car, or doing both at once.

Like clockwork, he slammed his front door, grabbing the red lighter he always kept in his back pocket and reaching it to the cigarette hanging out of his pink lips.

He cupped the cigarette out of habit and lit it, inhaling the silent killer.

He then hopped onto the hood of his car and reclined, still smoking the cigarette as he gazed at the starlit sky, lost in deep thought.

You wanted to join him, eager to learn more about the California boy, even if he didn't show interest in you. Something inside you just needed to know who Billy Hargrove was.

You also wanted to try to settle the intense feelings coursing through your body.

You stared at him for what felt like a lifetime, admiring his chiseled jawline, how his pretty blue eyes looked in the moonlight, and the rhythmic pattern of his inhaling and exhaling cigarette smoke.

Fuck you cigarette.

You envied his cigarettes.

You wanted to be inhaled and exhaled like that, and you didn’t even care if you were disregarded like them when he was done.

Billy felt your gaze through the window, and as he smirked, you couldn't help but notice. Despite being caught, you couldn't suppress a smile of your own.

Billy sat up and looked directly into your window. Your face grew flustered as you two made eye contact, but you held it, unable to look away.

You pushed yourself to do something you found so uncomfortable and you ignored the negative thoughts running through your head.

Billy tossed his cigarette to the ground and he was about to pick up a new one.

That being you.

You quickly threw on some discarded sweats from the floor and made your way to the front door. As you wrapped your hand around the doorknob, you hesitated for a minute. Nervousness gripped you, but you were determined to make things different this year. You wanted to push yourself beyond your comfort zone. No longer content with just fantasizing about romance, you wanted to live it, even if it meant risking a broken heart in the process. After all, at least you'd have a story to tell.

The cool night breeze kissed your face, sending shivers down your spine as you stepped out of your door. Closing it behind you, you were wrapped in darkness, illuminated only by the soft glow of the streetlights. Your heart raced as you descended off the few steps of your front porch.

As you turned the corner, you were met with Billy Hargrove's infuriating smirk. It would've been irritating if you didn't harbor this crush for him. With determination, you walked in front of his car, mere inches away from where he sat. Your heart threatened to beat out of your chest.

“Hi,” you spoke up slightly out of breath. Billy knew it was nervousness that caused you to sound that way.

You think back to the conversation you had earlier in the day.

“If you ever need help with anything, I’m only one house away.”

You wanted something. You knew what you wanted, and you knew what he meant by it, but you didn’t want to jump his bones immediately. You wanted to get to know him, and maybe that was foolish of you given his reputation, but you didn’t care.

“Hi, Y/N,” Billy greeted with a chuckle, his eyes roaming over your figure. He noticed your shirt and furrowed his eyebrows in confusion.

“You listen to Metallica?” Billy questioned, his gaze shifting to Eddie's worn-out black tee. "Oh, this?" you said, grabbing onto the thin material of your shirt. “No, it's a friend's. He let me borrow it,” you partially explained, letting out a shaky laugh.

“Hmm, didn't peg Harrington for a metal kinda guy” Billy remarked, assumingely, lighting yet another cigarette.

"You think Steve's my only male friend?" you asked, raising an eyebrow. "You have more than one?" Billy questioned back, the movement of lighting his cigarette coming to a short pause, his eyes widening momentarily. Billy could take Harrington, but any other male suitors would be a problem for him.“Is that a problem, Hargrove?” you questioned, once again amused by his reaction. Was he jealous?

He laughed and took a drag from his cigarette. He looked so beautiful like this, the view from your window couldn’t compare to the view you had right now. Despite the chill outside, you felt a warmth spreading through you.

“Not that I can’t compete with Harrington and?” He asked waiting for you to provide the name of said friend.

Compete?

“Eddie,” you said filling in the blank for him. “Ah, Munson, the freak,” he chuckled, taking yet another drag from his cigarette.

“You do know you’re talking to right? You remark, raising an eyebrow at him hinting that you fell into the same category as Eddie.

“Never said I had a problem with ‘freaks’,” he said smiling, as he looked down at your lips before meeting your gaze. “If I’m being honest they’re my favorite types of people.” He added licking his lips.

You gulped as his intense gaze met yours. He was undeniably gorgeous. The ache between your legs begged for relief, and you couldn’t help but wonder if he noticed, especially when he then said ,

“Come sit,” making space for you on the hood of his car. You obliged, sitting on the cool surface, crossing your legs, relieving some type of pressure. “You smoke?” he asked, handing you the lit cigarette. You took the cigarette, his warm fingers slightly touching your cold ones.

“Nope, but there's a first time for everything, right?” you smiled, taking a drag of the cigarette. The sensation immediately made you almost cough out a lung and you hadn’t even inhaled it completely. Billy laughed once again and slid his hand onto your back, lightly patting it attempting to ease your coughing fit.

You handed the cigarette back to him and laughed, the coughing fit dying down. “Yeah, first and last time doing that. God, that is nothing like weed,” you remarked.

Billy removed his hand from your back, and you couldn't help but groan slightly at the loss of touch. He looked at you with an amused smile. "I could only imagine how you reacted to hitting a joint for the first time," he said with a grin.

“Oh, trust me, it was nothing like that. I almost died just now,”you said as you wiped the tears that formed in your eyes from coughing.

You leaned back on his car like he did on countless nights and looked up at the starlit sky. Billy did the same after putting out his cigarette.

"The only good thing about this shit town is how pretty the sky looks at night," you said. He looked up at the sky and thought the same. There were so many stars, each one representing hope.

"And the rain," he added, which surprised you. “But you're from California, it’s all sun over there!” You exclaimed, giggling a bit.

“Yeah, I know,” he smiled at your excitement. “It hardly rains over there, but I loved it when it did,” he said, reminiscing about his life in California.

“I liked sitting in my car and listening to the rain; it brought me some sort of peace of mind out there. Especially here, it's stronger and louder, drowns out the thoughts,” he added, tapping his head in a playful manner.

You smiled at his explanation.

“It makes me feel like a kid again,” you added, your voice soft with nostalgia. "Running around, no jacket, laughing, feeling the water down your face and drenching your clothes. Sometimes I sit outside and look up at the sky, enjoying the way it feels on my face," you said, still smiling at the sky above.

Billy turned his head to look at you now, and you were oblivious to it for the first time. He felt his heart skip a beat at your explanation and the way you smiled at the sky full of stars. From that moment on, Billy was determined to know more about you.

You two continued talking, giggling, sneaking glances at each other, but it all came to a halt when you both heard a loud slam from the door of his house. A man in his mid-40s descended down the stairs of Billy’s front porch and made his way towards you both. Billy straightened up immediately at the sight of this man.

“It’s late,” the man spat, keeping his eyes on Billy, completely ignoring your presence. “Get inside; you need to take Maxine and yourself to school tomorrow.”

“Hi, sir,”you timidly intervened. “I'm Y/N. I live next door. I'm sorry for keeping Billy out so late. We were just talking about class, and I lost track of time.” You finished

Billy looked at you in shock as if you said something out of turn.

He looked you up and down with a deadpanned look before giving you a tight-lipped smile and nodded. Then, he gave Billy a warning glance before leaving. Odd. You thought.

You noticed the shift in Billy’s demeanor he was noticeably uncomfortable and even seemed scared. Billy took a deep breath after his father left and ran a hand over his face, visibly tense.

“You okay?” You carefully asked not wanting to overstep any boundaries.

“Yeah, I will be,”he exhaled, mustering up a small smile. “Thank you for tonight. I'll see you around, Y/N.” With that, he left. You waited until he made it inside and you returned home yourself.

As you stepped into the house, the loneliness of it consumed you once again. But you disregarded it, shaking it off, because a bigger part of you felt content and happy.

Billy grew accustomed to loneliness; sometimes, he even preferred it. But when he saw how present his friends' parents were in their lives, the loneliness spread and often consumed him. His mother was gone, her whereabouts unknown, leaving him abandoned and stuck with his monstrous father. He had the shell of a parental figure, but in reality, his father was a bully, a coward. This left Billy feeling trapped and hopeless, like a prisoner in his own home, with no one to relate to, no one to vent to, nothing.

When Billy made it inside his house he had already prepared himself for the worst. His father was seated on the sofa waiting for him to come in.

“I'm sorry, sir, I lost track of—“ Neil raised his hand to stop him from explaining, and like a trained soldier, Billy shut his mouth immediately. Neil stood up, making his way towards him. Billy flinched as Neil raised his hand, and to Billy’s surprise, he patted his shoulder. Billy furrowed his brows in confusion; he hated his father's touch. “Nice girl,” Neil remarked before walking past him and heading to his room.

What the fuck?

Anger coursed through Billy’s veins, his heart beating furiously in his chest. Why you? What the hell was so special about you that had Neil Hargrove's fatherly approval? Billy scoffed. He didn’t care if he'd get beatings for what he had planned or about your feelings at the moment, but he was going to royally piss his father off. Fuck his approval. He didn’t want it nor did he care for or it.

Billy disregarded his strong feelings for you and decided to be the dick he knew himself to be.

Tags:

#eddie munson #stranger things #billy hargrove #dacre montgomery #billy hargrove x reader #steve harrington #steve x reader #nancy wheeler #billy hargrove smut #steve x billy #billyhargroveseries #Steve x female reader #billy hargrove x female reader

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boizandgurlzinthehouse · 1 year ago

Text

𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐝𝐨 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞.

𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐓 𝐈𝐈. 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐀𝐆𝐄.

pairing: coriolanus snow x toxic!fem!reader

summary: someone always throw a spanner in her works, to achieve her biggest dream —being coriolanus’ lover, wife and claiming power. luckily, y/n is not on the loser side when it comes to playing.

trigger warnings (overall): mastermind!reader, toxic!reader (for real, she’s doing nasty things), reader’s family is a bit fucked up, reader is obsessed with coriolanus snow, lying, swearing, blood, violence, killing people, hunger games stuff, i just love volumnia gaul, reader hates lucy gray and everybody who’s around coriolanus, mental health problems mentioned such as psychotism, domestic violence mentioned, drugs, mention of sexual fantasies.

trigger warnings (in this part): mastermind!reader, toxic!reader (for real, she’s doing nasty things), reader is obsessed with coriolanus snow, lying, swearing, drugs, mention of sexual fantasies, wet dreams, screaming out from anger, hate speech, hate-thoughts.

prologue. part 1.

her nose bleed.

looking into the mirror, everybody could wonder that it didn't break from the look on y/n’s face. nosebleeding happened a lot of the time with her, her brother, joked like “this is what happens when even your blood can’t stay near your thoughts.” well, only if he knew that sometimes, it was true.

standing up, blasting the vases and the dolls she had on her shelf with a scream, everything fell down to the floor, broken into pieces, some of it cutting up her foot. still screaming, crouching to the ground, tearing out the pages of the old plan, she split her stupidity into litter. her whole body shook as she drew out the white powder she got from festus, spreading some on the edge of her thumb, sniffing it up. waiting until the calming feeling crawled in her blood to his brain and every little corner of her body, she felt full for a moment. her whole body shook as she stood up, stepping over the shards and thorns of her vases, her dolls and her roses. stomping over a doll with black hair, sy/n sat back to the dressing table. swiping the mascara off her face, then her lipstick, with baggy eyes, smeared makeup, with the eyes of a madwoman, her lips like she just ate something raw, her blood mixing with black and red, she wanted to tear up that bitch.

but let’s not be so fast. let’s begin with the first things and signs, the signs that got y/n in this state.

to begin with the good news, clemensia finally got out of the picture. y/n began the day at volumnia gaul, as she wrote in y/n’s response letter that she should be there tomorrow morning, so she can begin as soon as it’s possible. wearing her best clothes, she stood at nine am before the doctor’s doors. drinking a tea with her, y/n only saw only now how intimidating she looked –one of her, the ice blue one, came from the devil itself.

“i’m not gonna lie miss y/l/n, but when i saw your application letter on my desk, i was surprised.”

“how so? i mean, dr. gaul, i knew only the best biologists and scientists work for you, and i wanted to be one of them.”

“really? oh, yeah, i remember about your assignment, dear. tell me, when you wrote those words and sentences, did you already think about working at the game?”

“i mean… dr. gaul, please don’t get it wrong, i’m not really interested in the outcome of the games. twenty three people die anyway, and it’s not the maker’s task to make the games more interesting. that task is for the marketing section. i only want to see how venom can be planted.”

“is the littlest, sweetest child of cyril y/l/n interested in venom?”

“venom can be useful in so many ways. it can heal, and it can make things more interesting. it can make a single dinner turn into a full-night drama.”

volumnia looked at y/n, then began to giggle. y/n never felt something like before; it crawled down into her veins, just like the drugs she used, scratching her brain, just like the day of the graduation.

“miss y/l/n, i’m sure you have some ideas. and it’s not only about mono– and dicotyledons. come with me, let me show you something.”

their heels clicked on the floor as the biologists looked at a big glass-cage in front them. at first she didn’t even realize what she saw, only a million scales crawling into each other, different metallic colors in every shade of the rainbow, never stopping, always slowly moving pressed to each other like shiny, long bowels. it was a glass cage, full of snakes. but what’s so special about it?

“they are venomous.” could dr. gaul read her mind? “it’s my newest invention. these snakes can poorly see or hear, but have better smell than any dog, and much more venom than any of their natural kindreds.” stepping closer, y/n placed her hand on the glass. only one knock, and they both could be dead at this very moment.

“it’s truly amazing, dr. gaul.” she answered.

as one of dr. gaul’s assistants led her around after her lunch –everybody wore white clothes, some of them had masks on their face–, in the early afternoon, coriolanus and clemensia came in. speaking of the devil, she was sitting at one of the tables in the big, white hall full of canned animals and organs, running through papers and listing the books she had to read as he stepped in. y/n completely forgot about the annoying girl beside her, thinking about their date, she sprayed a little perfume on herself when she saw them coming closer. at night, y/n had first so-called wet dream –she attended a sleepover at arachne’s house twice, and they were talking about these kinds of dreams, when girls dreamed about their ‘crush’. why call it ‘crush’ when you can call it lover? sooner or later, if you’re tenacious enough, they’re gonna be your lover. or was it just y/n? anyway, she knew what sex was and that it was good (although she never did it), but it was strange to wake up feeling hot like having a fever. feeling that her underwear was sticky, at first she thought that she had her period, but looking at it –nothing. she wasn’t a daydreamer, but when she thought back to the dream, reaching for coriolanus as he hovered ove her from above, holding his big hand, caging hers as he kept his other hand at the back of her neck, long fingers digging into the nape of her hair, stroking it with each jolt, burying his face into her neck, giving out grunts like an animal, moving his hips into hers while y/n held onto his broad, sculpted shoulders– it was a little bit weird that her mind wasn’t focused. she was… wandering. how weird!

“hey, y/n, you already here?” clemensia asked her, making her look up from the paper. stilted smile, wide eyes, looking like she was ready to get all the credit from coriolanus for herself… yeah, she’s still a certified, annoying bitch.

“hello, y/n.” corio said, making her look at him with a slight smile. just like she always did.

“hi to you too. yes, well, seems like dr. gaul isn’t a procrastinator. she’s really a professional.”

“aren’t you scared to work between stuff like this? these glasses are creeping me out…” clemensia muttered. these things are hiding in you too, honey. sadly, the brain is missing, maybe in you too.

“no, i’m not. it’s rather interesting, biology and science are the future.”

before they could speak any further, volumnia appeared.

“i see you two just found your little friend, already on the front.”

“yes, and we are so happy about it.” said clemensia, dr. gaul bidded y/n to go with them. of course you are happy, connections are everything. y/n couldn’t decide if clemensia really was this bootlicker by her nature, or that his father was in trouble.

“miss y/l/n already have seen my newest, beautiful babies, but i want you to see them too.”

“is there a point to a color?” clemensia asked as they stepped up on the stairs before y/n.

“there’s a point to everything, miss devcoat, or to nothing at all… which brings me to your proposal.” dr. gaul answered, leaning with one arm on the cage. “which one of you actually wrote it?”

looking at the snake cage, knowing the snakes had really good smelling affinitions, dr. gaul’s question… did she doubt it, too? sure there were cameras on the reception, and as coriolanus told her, he handed in the paper. did she doubt it? no. she knew that it was not her. after clemensia’s little speech, y/n slightly smirked, but when coriolanus looked back at her, she reassuringly smiled.

“...so miss devcoat, reach in it for us, won’t you? so we might all consider your inspired ideas. don’t worry, my little predators are perfectly docile with those who they know they can trust. so if they’re used to your scent, if you’ll handle their food, for example… or if they’ve inhaled the sweat of your palm on a page.”

the fear on clemensia’s face was satisfying. of course, y/n didn’t want her to die, she wasn’t a savage, but she needed to learn her lessons. and when she got bitten in a sudden moment, falling down… y/n almost couldn’t contain the honest smile on her face. coriolanus of course, was scared about what happened to her, and she tried to act like it, too.

“miss y/l/n read about them this morning, surely she can say something about what this was.” dr. gaul said, making coriolanus turn to her.

“i think that this is just the natural selection of humanity. i wouldn’t think that clemensia lied, but… these snakes proved it. by scent, of course, but judging and deciding is in every creature on this planet. they just went against it.”

“mr. snow, your dear friend sees it right. and god, your suggestions! i will recommend my team implement as many as possible tomorrow, spread it in front of my team.” however, coriolanus didn’t seem eased.

“will she die?”

“the pleasure in breaking ground in one’s research as one gets to find it out. you better keep miss dovecote’s faith between us. i don’t think her mother would be happy to learn how her daughter was caught in a sudden… flu.” coriolanus looked at y/n. she furrowed her eyebrows, but knew that dr. gaul wasn’t one to fuck with. but one was out from her list, if she goes with speed like that, she can bid her problems really soon goodbye.

eating lunch together again, coriolanus suddenly held her hand. although it made her excited, his face contained the same worry he had when he saw clemensia.

“y/n, you are one of her workers now. dr. gaul is… i have some precautions with her, did you see what she did with clemensia?��

y/n nodded, stroking his hand with her thumb.

“corio, dear, dr. gaul did that because she knew you were the one who wrote all those proposals and ideas. she just couldn’t stand the unfairness.”

“i know, but she could have done it in a more gentle way, couldn’t she?”

“she could, of course. dr. gaul just wanted her to learn a lesson, she was always on your back, coriolanus. i feel really sorry about her” no, of course i’m not. “, but you need to cut off the people who don't help you by their true being. i think casca highbottom’s goal was also this, for all of you to realize these things.” was it emotional and logical enough? she really hoped, and she eased up when coriolanus’ eyes lit up.

“you are right, y/n. i’m grateful to you for telling me the truth.”

“i’m never telling the truth, i am not a judge. or, only the times when it’s time. i’m just saying my thoughts as an outsider.”

“you may be an outsider by the games, but you’ll never be one in my life. thank you so much.”

“i’m always happy to hear your thoughts, corio.” enough from the bullshit, let’s get to the more important stuff. “by the way, the date… how am i supposed to dress? our chauffeur can drive us anywhere, i talked with my father and he can go with his administrative car, so…”

“i want to bring you to a little restaurant, where i ate with my family when i was a child. it’s not big, but i really hope you will like it. and you can wear anything you want, i’m not gonna be disappointed.”

y/n wanted to kiss him. so bad, to seal their whole life forever. despite that fact and her wants, she brushed one of her locks behind her ear.

“thank you, corio. i just want it to be perfect.”

after lunch, standing up, as y/n guided him out, he held her hand.

“what will you do for the rest of the day?” she asked coriolanus, hoping they can be together for more time than just a simple lunch. if the date goes well, and it will go well, will they have little, secret dates together? will he come for her family’s dinner? it was mandatory always in her family, and he didn’t need to be introduced, but still, it was tradition.

“i’m going to see if lucy gray is okay in the zoo. tomorrow we are planning on getting them food, would you go with me? the others will be there as well, and i’d like to introduce you to her.”

really? well, it can happen, only if the media isn’t there. but it will, because these actions are making history right now. and if y/n is on the side of coriolanus, it can help him. her family, mainly her father will make her a joke, but he was so cynical that it didn’t matter. and this way, she can check that lucy gray for herself.

“i’ll go with you, of course! it’s a wonderful idea.” she grabbed into his arms as they stepped out on the gates. she needed to go back of course, but she didn’t mind.

“thank you, y/n. after that, be there at the restaurant at seven in the evening.”

“i can’t wait for it, corio.” she smiled, looking up at him. brushing her hair, coriolanus bent down to kiss her cheek. it needed such a little move of her head to catch his lips, but she contained herself. today’s sacrifices are for tomorrow’s prizes. his lips were perfect, of course, including her dream from yesterday’s night, she held onto his arm to stroke it.

“then tomorrow, y/n. take care of yourself, okay?”

“just as always, please do the same, dear.” she muttered, making him smile. to kiss his lips, to dig her fingers into his hair, to lay into his arms as they watched that the majority of the votes called to him on the election of the presidency of panem… having dreams like this was the cause she didn’t get medicine through her veins.

well, maybe they needed it after the tv-show at night. laying on her bed as usual, smoking a cigarette while reading, thinking about the outfit she could wear tomorrow night, her sister knocked on her door.

“can i come in, y/n?” stubbing the butt of the cigarette, she stood up to open the door. as she laid back, morphia sat on her bed, putting her hand on her sister’s leg. “what’s up with you, little sister?”

“dr. gaul accepted my application, so i spent the day with her in her office. and you? how is the wedding?”

“well, i chose the taste of the cake yesterday, then spent the night with my old colleagues, the ones who i don’t invite to my wedding. it’s a shame, i know, but i only want my loved ones on my biggest, happiest day. and today, i spoke with timothé who said that the place by the hills is reserved, so we can have it to yourselves. it’s gonna be truly beautiful, isn’t it?”

“yes, it truly will be beautiful. do you want a cigarette?” y/n asked, showing her sister the package. morphia took one, y/n took out a new one and lit it for both of them. “are you sure that you love timothé? from what do you know you love him?”

morphia smiled, blowing out the smoke. it was strawberry flavored, her mother hated it. she only blew those skinny, bad tasting sticks. the only excuse was that sometimes she spiced up with some weed. although y/n didn’t like weed.

“well, i just know it. you have a strange feeling in your heart.” check. “a feeling you have with no one else, and that you feel like you want to be around him, always.” check. “and you would do anything, and i really mean anything for him, and to be with him.” check. “because this is love. why are you asking this?”

“i just… i think i love coriolanus, too. the way you love timothé.”

“so nothing new, little sister.” she giggled, making y/n roll her eyes. she trusted morphia, although her marriage was needed because the family got to guarantee and secure their ten percent income from the district. this way, they could see the papers. the only problem were the plinths, who opposed this, but her father’s hands reached too long to raise a voice against the deal. and y/n wanted sejanus to get out of the picture, and after that, without descendants, they could only hope they will have what they got now until their death.

“but there is news, morphy. coriolanus invited me on a date.” at her words, morphia covered her mouth, pulling up her eyebrows. holding y/n’s hand, morphia smiled at her.

“really, y/n? oh my, it’s so wonderful! invite him for the wedding, if you want, but know that he’s an appreciated guest.”

“i will, if he’ll have the time. but he’s at the games right now in his mind, i don’t want to disturb him.”

“if he loves you, you’ll always be in his mind, you know. but the deadline is in one month, so please, tell me till then.”

“i will, morphy. i will.” she ended her second cigarette, throwing it into the burgundy ashtray, her sister did the same.

“do you want to come down? this night is the game’s night, i heard that the tributes got thrown into the zoo.”

“i know, me and corio will go there tomorrow.”

“then he surely forgot to mention that… he went there, too.”

what? rising to sit on her bed, y/n was really, really surprised.

“how do you mean that?” she asked, trying to believe that her sister just babbled some shit together, but she seemed really certain about what she stated.

“the tributes got thrown into a cage in the zoo, and your coriolanus was there, too. the interview is gonna be on the telly tonight, might come down and watch with us?”

going down on the stairs with a buzz in her head, y/n saw that the show was already on. lucretius ‘lucky’ flickerman, a weathercaster who was now tapped to host the interviews from the 10th hunger games stood in front of the cameras.

“sit down, dear, sit down.” her mother pointed to the place beside her. y/n decided to knee on the pillow where her cat laid, getting persephone into her arms. minutes later, there he was. morphia didn’t joke, he seriously got into that fucking cage? what the fuck?

“is that your new lover, my sweet?” her father asked y/n, getting a giggle from her sister and her mother. “i can admit that he’s really ambitious about winning the prize.”

y/n didn’t say anything, listening to what he and lucy gray said. that fucking bitch had the audacity to smile and brag like she was the new star, but she wasn’t. she was just a poor, miserable wanderer who got into the games because she fucked around. how could a… thing like lucy gray hold onto a hand she held this afternoon, too? she wasn’t a princess or a noble or a singer or an actor to have a big mouth like this, to act like this.

and truly, it seems like she wanted to take away her lover. and it was something y/n could never accept, in any conditions, at any time, or in any situation. never.

“are you okay, y/n?” her mother asked. “your hand is shaking.”

brushing her hair, she looked at her mother, trying to nod with composed moves.

“everything’s fine, mommy. i just need to go upstairs to take a bath, and to take my medicine.”

and now, she was sitting at her dressing table. it wasn’t just unfair and rule-breaking how lucy gray played, but it was really, really degrading. her face burned in shame, and she wanted to claw down it all with her skin.

closing her eyes, she prayed for sanity. sanity to go through the next weeks, for sanity to handle situations well, for sanity for her plan. repeat after me, y/n. repeat after me, you stupid bitch.

i am y/n y/l/n, youngest member of the house y/l/n. we are noble, i am noble, and i deserve everything that i have now.

picking up the doll she stepped over only minutes ago, stroking its hair, it was just a plaything. all people were just playthings, playing. how could lucy gray be anything else?

i am beautiful, clever and nobody can ever drag me down. the people who hate me are only envious of my life, my body and my mind, but they’re all going to soil.

looking aside, the fireplace in her room was on. running her thumb through the doll’s porcelain face the last time, she threw it into the fire. long, skinny flames crawled up on the soft fabric of its dress, licking the wall as the fine china cracked. it was time to take a bath.

i love the life i have, and i will appreciate every single second of the life i will have when i achieve my goals. i have every tool i can use to win, and i will use them to be the woman i want to be. it’s not far away, and everyday is a chance to be closer to the woman i want to be.

“hortense, do you think a woman can make a man hers?” she asked from her maid as she sat in the hot water, hortense braid her hair to be curly for tomorrow, fasten it with silk ribbons.

“i think, miss y/l/n, that women have power. so probably, yes, but please, don’t make yourself hurt. your safety is the first.” hortense answered from behind her back, helping her wash her back. so probably, yes. if even a maid knew that, then why did lucy gray try to stand between her and coriolanus?

laying in her bed, ready to sleep, she stroked persephone’s fur.

“how could she do that, persy?” whispering in silence, only getting a meow back, y/n thought about the cage of the snakes dr. gaul showed her today. only a little crack, and everybody could die in unbearable pain, only under mere seconds. maybe she also had to be a cage full of snakes. only a crack on her mind she already had, and everybody could die into what she did.

maybe she was already.

a/n: thanks for the waiting babiez, i hope you liked this part too <3 also, wish me luck for my exams 😩

taglist: @champomiel @stelleduarte @diamondsbestie

(ask for taglist in comment, dm or here!!)

#coriolanus snow x reader #coriolanus snow imagine #coriolanus snow fanfiction #coriolanus snow icons #coriolanus x reader #coriolanus snow #coriolanus x you #hunger games x reader #hunger games imagine #hunger games fic #hunger games fanfiction

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asvtrials · 1 month ago

Note

Pls make a tyler smut where after they escape the alien they hide in the room where the guns were and due to crazy emotions they have soft romantic sex

masterlist

give you everything

thank you for this wonderful idea<3 summary: An injury leads to you and Tyler realizing how short life really is. warnings/tags: swearing, smut, reader is injured, unprotected sex (don't be fucking silly wrap your willy) a/n: Fun fact, as i'm editing this i'm thinking abt exes with benefits / second chance with Tyler realizing they are still into each other. Anyways FIRST TIME WRITING SMUT so be nice, and I would love any advice (no seriously don't would don't be shy), istg writing dirty talk is so funny I can't thank you to my pookie @spikedfearn for reading it first and giving me confidence <333 English is not my first language so I apologize for any mistakes. wc: 2887

"Hey! Hey, are you okay?" Rain's worried voice somehow managed to reach your ears despite the intense ringing. You squeezed your eyes shut and opened them but the blurriness took some time to disappear.

You found yourself clutching at the person next to you, who turned out to be the forearm of your boyfriend—Tyler.

Tyler's hands hugged your sides, his soft movements brought you comfort despite his trembling hands.

He kept mumbling a string of “It’s alright” and “We're okay now”

You knew you had escaped, that the door was locked, and all of those creatures had no way in, but your heart still raced like crazy in your chest.

You could still hear Tyler's shouts when one of those monsters lunged at you, it's little legs clutching the sides of your face. If it wasn't for Rain, who grabbed the tail of the creature and threw it away with a scream.

As the adrenaline slowly wore off, you felt a stinging pain spread around your left thigh, a groan leaving your lips at the sudden feeling. You grasped your leg, frantically lifting your jeans.

“F—Fuck.” You mumbled breathlessly when you saw the blood gushing out of the cut, just above your knee. You must've cut yourself while running for your life like a madwoman.

“Andy! Andy, what can we do?” Rain's voice caught the synthetic’s attention.

“We must apply pressure and find something to clean and disinfect the wound.” He spoke, his calm voice coming to contrast with the situation.

Tyler's fingers slid down to your back, gently rubbing it as Rain stood up to look for things that might be useful.

When you followed Rain with your eyes you noticed the blinding white walls of the room and the multiple desks that were organized in squares.

“Hey, hey.” Tyler's soft tone brought you back to reality and you turned your attention to his worried face. The boy wiped your forehead and pushed back the loose strands of hair that clung to it, fingers trembling slightly “You're goin’ to be okay, yeh?”

He waited for you to nod to continue. “We have Andy here, he knows what to do.” The softness in his voice significantly changed when his attention moved to the android. “She's going to be alright, yeh?”

Andy took a moment to answer. “Yes. If we clean the wound thoroughly then Y/n will be able to recover relatively soon.”

A small “see” accompanied Tyler's smile when he turned back to you.

Rain finally sat next to you, dropping the first aid kit on the floor with a loud sound. She pushed her hair behind her ears and opened the little red box, quickly taking out bandages and cotton balls. She wet a cotton ball with alcohol and passed it to Tyler before unrolling the bandages.

You were too busy trying to ignore the pain to realize what was happening until Tyler held your shoulder tighter, putting all of your weight on his side.

“Goin’ to hurt a bit, love.” He mumbled against your forehead.

A loud cry escaped past your lips when the soft material made contact with the cut. You felt Tyler's hand hold you closer and Rain's hands push you back by the shoulders when you tried to pull away.

“It’s okay, ‘t’s okay” Tyler murmured against your earlobe.

The boy quickly removed the material, his breath rigid as he held your shaking figure in his arms.

Rain took advantage of your seemingly disoriented state and quickly wrapped a bandage around your thigh.

Your quiet sobs echoed in the spacious room as Tyler held you close to his chest while spewing out soft, encouraging words.

“She should rest and the bandages should be frequently changed but—” Andy spoke after all of you had fallen quiet, pausing momentarily to gather the right words. “We cannot wait.”

You snapped your eyes to the android, breath hitching at the implication.

“What?—No—No, Andy we're not leavin’ Y/n behind,” Tyler warned, holding you tighter.

“Tyler’s right, we aren’t leaving her” Rain agreed, walking closer to her brother and holding his forearms. Maybe she hoped that she could somehow channel the old, sweet Andy.

“Those creatures aren't going to wait—” Andy began but Tyler didn't let him finish.

He hooked his hands under your knees and back and lifted you with him as he stood up. The boy paced forward, getting intimidatingly close to the android “I don't give a flying fuck! I won't leave her behind.” He spat out.

“Tyler, I'm okay, I can conti—” You attempted to defuse the situation but he dismissed your words with a shake of his head.

Rain tried to hold onto his bicep but he ignored her and walked towards the closest door to you. It was, as expected, closed. Tyler groaned and kicked the metal door, shaking you a bit in the process and making you hiss in pain.

After Rain's silent pleas, Andy ended up giving in and opening the door. Tyler stepped in as soon as there was an opening, not even waiting for the door to fully slide open.

The room was way bigger than it looked, like another fucked up lab, similar to the rest of this section. There were multiple doors leading to other smaller rooms.

The boy checked the rooms, holding you close to him until he found one with what looked like a hospital room. This must’ve been the recovery room from whatever experiments they were doing.

Carefully, he lowered you into the hard mattress with a “There we go.” You took a sharp breath when you tried to straighten your back.

“Hey, lie down.” He told you and gently pushed you down against the mattress.

“I don't want to lie down.” You replied through gritted teeth. “I want to get out of this place.”

“We will. Once you're better.” He reassured. His calloused hand reached your warm cheek.

The more time you rested the more the pain was slowly dying down and you could finally notice your boyfriend's worried features more clearly.

His big eyes stared right back at yours, all wet and worried. He rubbed your calf, trying to soothe you as much as he could.

The sight of him was enough to make you tear up. You really could've died and never see him again.

A quiet sob left your chest as you pulled him closer, ignoring the sudden pain in your thigh. You hugged his shoulders, holding him close to your chest. His arms immediately hugged your waist, holding you tightly as if you were going to turn into dust and disappear if he let go.

You refused to pull away for a long while especially when he slid his cold hands under your shirt, his fingertips squeezing your warm and sweat-covered flesh.

“If it wasn't for Rain—” He began and sighed deeply, unable to even imagine what would happen if your friend wasn't quick enough. “I should've been next to you! I—”

Hearing him talk like that about himself was excruciating and you had to bite your lip to stop your tears from spilling.

You could've told him dozens of different things to disagree with, just like you always did when he was doubting himself. But this time you didn't have the strength to argue.

So instead, you cupped his face and pulled him away from your chest. He looked at you confused before you pulled him closer, connecting your lips.

He hugged you tighter and sighed into the kiss when you buried your fingers in his hair.

Quickly the desperation and need overtook both of your senses and what started off as a gentle kiss deteriorated into something else. Something messy and urgent.

Tyler's hands roamed all over the delicate skin of your back. A surprised moan escaped you when he leaned closer, pushing you even further into the mattress, not giving you any time to breathe.

But you didn't want to breathe. You wanted his lips, his hands.

You need him to extinguish the fire that felt like it burning you alive.

Your hand moved from his messy hair down to his neck and body, lightly scraping your nails against him until your palm rested on his crotch.

The space between your brows creased a bit when Tyler hesitantly pulled away.

“What happe—” Your question was cut off by the boy's breathless reply.

“Love, we can't. I want to, I really do—you know that—but you're hurt”

Your other hand rubbed his cheek as you spoke “We're stuck here and we don’t if we'll even get out alive.” You began and you could already see the conversation was making him uneasy. “If something happens.” He was about to object but you didn't give him the opportunity. “I want to spend these last moments with you, Ty.”

Tyler's gaze was melancholic before he connected your lips in a soft kiss once again. “Don’ say that, Y/n” His tone made it sound like he barely believed his own words.

“Or maybe I just want to get in your pants, who knows?” You joked and the boy had a hard time keeping his disapproving front, a small smile threatening to appear on his lips.

You pulled him back to your lips and this time you didn't sense the same hesitation from the boy, just caution.

His lips moved slowly against yours to savor the moment, like he was trying to remember your taste.

He rose from his seat next to you but you didn't have to chase after him since he crouched, refusing to separate from your lips.

The boy leaned forward, bringing his hands to either side of your head. His hands slid down to your sides, grabbing your waist.

You let out a small gasp when his hand instinctively wandered lower to your thighs.

“Sorry, sorry!” Tyler apologized and pulled away.

“It's fine.” You quickly reassured him when you saw how quick worry appeared in his eyes.

You didn't give him time to worry more over that little mishap, quickly pulling him back to your craving lips and that seemed to work because the boy immediately reciprocated.

His hands carefully lifted your shirt and slid lower, fingertips gliding along the flesh of your stomach.

The carefulness and attentiveness of his movements made your cheeks burn even more. Tyler was always like this and it never failed to make your heart flutter. No matter how mad or pent up he was there was always an underlined gentleness to his movements even if he was going faster or rougher than usual. It was things like this that made you feel lucky to have him.

You couldn't help but bite your lip when he left a path of quick kisses from your ribcage to your lower abdomen.

He pulled himself up, bringing his face close to yours once again. He hooked his finger on the waistband of your pants before his eyes met yours momentarily—as a silent question for permission.

You quickly nodded, giving him a string of encouraging pecks on the lips in anticipation.

Your breath got caught in your throat when his hand slid under your underwear.

You aren't sure if it was the adrenaline or the intense need you felt—maybe it was both— but you didn't care one bit about your injured leg. The pain and fear were long forgotten, replaced with lust and desire.

Your bruised lips parted in a soft gasp when you felt his rough finger gently enter your tight folds. The soft motions of his finger send a wave of relief and pleasure through your body. His other hand came to rest on the side of your head, brushing some strands of your hair behind your ear.

He pushed another finger in, his thumb gently circling your swollen clit. His eyes never left yours even when yours closed shut as you threw your head back with a moan.

“Fuck I love you so much,” Tyler murmured, lips trailing down to your neck.

The small room was filled with the wet sounds that followed every time he thrust his fingers in and out of your inviting core combined with the sounds of lips leaving open-mouthed kisses on your flushed neck and collarbone and the soft moan you let out every time he curled his finger inside you. Tyler pulled down the collar of your shirt, continuing to plant kisses lower.

When you felt his mouth harshly suck on your sensitive skin you knew you couldn’t take it anymore.

“Ah, Ty…” You gasped, finally opening your eyes.

The boy reluctantly pulled away from you, his eyes meeting yours as his chest rose and fell, mirroring your own breathless state.

The sheer amount of need in his eyes forced a whimper out of you. You ran your hand over his messy hair as you pleaded “I want you.”

His breath was ragged as he gazed down at you and you swore you felt him twitch against his pants when you said that. “I’ll give you anythin’ you want, my love.” He grunted, quickly pulling you closer to him for a hungry kiss.

You whined against his tongue when his fingers abandoned your gushing insides and instead reached for his belt, quickly undoing the buckle and lowering his pants just below his hips.

“Ty, please…” You didn’t need to beg, you knew Tyler would give you anything you wanted and all you had to do was ask yet the small whimpers and pleas always left your lips at times like this. The way you batted your eyelashes, his name rolling out of your tongue like a prayer always made Tyler lightheaded.

Damn, he would really give you anything you’d ask for.

He grabbed your leg, effortlessly arranging you to lie on your side in hopes that this position wouldn’t hurt your leg too much. You winced when the flesh of your right leg came in contact with the cut on your left hip but you pushed it away.

“Ah fuck, Tyler…” You moaned breathlessly, your back arching when he hastily pushed himself deep inside you, seemingly as desperate as you to be squeezed by your walls.

“Shh…” He cooed, resting his forehead against the side of your head.

“Ah—Ty!”

You really tried to be quiet, really. But how could you do was moan as his cock hit your velvety insides so blissfully?

Tyler’s whispers didn’t help you be any quieter, his lips brushing against your ear as he told you how good you were doing, how good you felt, and how he could stay like this forever.

His own quiet moans and groans mixed with yours, filling the room as he moved his hips quickly. You scrambled to find his hand that was resting on your hair and you held it tightly, intertwining your fingers together.

The pleasure was now becoming unbearable the harsher his movements got earning surprised “ah ah ah”s from you after every deep thrust. Suddenly, you were very grateful that you locked yourself in the lab's farthest room.

“My perfect girl.” He whispered making your toes curl in your shoes.

You felt him repeatedly hit that familiar spongy over and over again combined with his thumb cycling your clit so good send you over the edge with a silent moan, jaw hanging open as you felt your release wash over you.

You knew Tyler wasn’t too far either by the way his short nails dug deep into the flesh of your waist, holding you down as he fucked you through your orgasm, desperately chasing after his own.

Tyler gently wiped the drool off the side of your lips, hips stuttering against you, losing that steady rhythm he set and becoming increasingly clumsy before he attempted to pull away.

“No, Ty” You squeezed his hand in yours. You attempted to keep your voice from breaking and continued, the overstimulation was making you dizzy “I want you to finish inside me.”

His eyes widened at that. Never before have you asked him of such a thing. Both of you knew you preferred for him to wear a condom rather than get stuck in an uncompromising situation yet you could feel him twitch inside you.

The thought of your possible doom in this awful place by whatever those creatures were, made you want—No, Need to feel him as close as humanly possible.

“Are you sure, my love?” His tone was gentle when he asked you, completely opposing his gravelly voice and the way he squeezed your waist.

“Please, babe.” You begged.

You cried out when you felt him move again. Tyler leaned closer, locking lips with you in a deep kiss. You rolled your tongue around his, moans escaping your lips every time his cock drilled into your sweet spot.

“Fuck—Fuck you feel so good…Lettin’ me fill ya full—” He groaned against your ear and with one last push you felt him spill deep inside of you, painting your velvety walls white.

“Tyler!” You moaned as he pushed deeper once, twice and then he stilled against you.

For a while, all you could hear in the room was panting before you spoke “I love you”

“I love you.” He didn’t miss a beat to reply, leaving a small peck on your forehead. “I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you.”

#alien romulus #tyler alien romulus #tyler harrison #archie renaux #bjorn alien romulus #alien romulus fanfic #elle's yappin #smut

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lighteyed · 1 year ago

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like you'd get your knuckles bloody for me / steve harrington

— steve's not used to people throwing punches for him, you'er not used to throwing them. anything for him, though. always, anything for him. (little short fic moment, fem reader, 1.4k words)

"Dude, your girlfriend is such a badass!" Robin skips into Family Video grinning like a madwoman. Steve, shuffling through the tapes he needs to place back onto the shelves, lifts his head and scrunches his brows together.

"I mean, yeah, but-"

Robin doesn't let him finish, she's already telling him the story. "She was all, wham bam thank you ma'am," she throws multiple air punches and Steve drops the tapes on the floor, "and Jason Carver was all, 'my nose you broke my nose-" she puts on a fake-whiney voice and Steve grips the shelf in front of him, feeling faint.

"I'm sorry, she did what-"

"And she was all, fuck you Carver, and she was totally gonna pummel him again until his friend like dragged her off him and her face hit the pavement, but like, still, she kicked ass-"

"Robin!" Steve shouts, waving his hands in front of her face. She stops, finally registering the disbelief on his face. She covers her mouth. She probably shouldn't have said anything. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"She, um, she didn't tell you?" She squeaks out, she takes a step backwards. "Forget I said anything! I'm sure she'll call you-" She trips over the cart Steve was using to stock the tapes and dashes behind the counter to avoid him, knowing you were going to kill her for saying anything and Steve was going to kill her if she didn't say anything else.

"Hey! Robin!" But she's already clocking herself in and beginning her closing shift duties, refusing to say another word on the topic because she's already said too much without meaning to. He completes the rest of his shift in silence, snapping at customers whenever they ask him a question and losing his mind when he looks at the clock and realizes only ten minutes has passed. He tries to call your house with the store phone but you don't pick up, which makes him even more worried and causes him to snap at people even worse, so Keith cuts him early with a disappointed lecture that Steve only half listens to, and he runs out of there once Keith finally shuts up, pulling out of the parking lot and on his way to your house without a second thought.

When you answer the door for him, you brace yourself for his scolding, 'cause the way he's looking at you, at your scratched face and bloody knuckles, with his soft gaze roaming all over you for any other signs of injury, you can tell he wants to. He wants to scold and lecture and fret. He wants to be mad that you got into a fist fight, let alone a fist fight with a guy who, if he had wanted to, probably could've hit you ten times harder.

He can't really be mad, though. "I didn't know Rocky Balboa was visiting Hawkins," he says, sarcastic but not mean, closing the front door behind him before coming to touch your face with his gentle hands, tilting your head to the side so he can take a good look at your cheek. It's a not a deep scratch, but you're bleeding all the same. He runs his fingers over it lightly and rests his hand there. "What'd you do, sweet girl?" You groan, retreating away from him to grab your bag of frozen peas from the counter and setting them flat across your bruise. He follows behind in earnest.

"Jason Carver can go fuck himself," you grumble. "S'all he does now, anyway, since Chrissy dumped his ass. And no wonder why. I can't stand him." You stare at where you're soaking your cheer uniform in the sink, the white fabric staining pink the more you tried to scrub Jason's blood out. You're opting to soak it out now, hoping you won't have to go buy a new one.

"Okay, what'd he do," Steve corrects, tucking your hair behind your ear.

You hesitate. You don't really want to tell Steve. It wasn't nice, what Carver had said, and in particular, it hadn't been nice to Steve. You weren't sure what had prompted Carver to start going in on your boyfriend, about how Steve was a loser, a deadbeat, pathetic, wasn't going anywhere in life, but it why he'd said it hadn't mattered to you. He'd said that you and you'd seen red, burning blistering red, and you'd punched him in the face before you could really think about whether or not that was a good idea. And you'd gotten him good, too, a nice big wallop to his smug face when he hadn't suspected it in the slightest, and you'd gotten on top of him going for more when his friend had yanked you off him by your ponytail and sent you spinning down to the asphalt. Your face had been gotten good, too. But not as good as Jason's. You were defensive when it came to Steve. You couldn't help it. He was Steve. He'd do anything for the people he loved, he was loyal and defensive and smart (as much as he'd deny that), he was sweet and had never been anything but perfect to you, perfect for you, and if someone had something to say about him, you'd make sure they'd have to answer to you. You'd never let him feel like he didn't have someone in his corner.

"Nothin'," you mutter, not looking at him, looking anywhere but him. "Just usual asshole Carver stuff."

"No, no, you don't get this worked up over nothin', baby." He wets a paper towel at your sink with rubbing alcohol and raises it to your face. "S'gonna sting, okay? Stay still," he puts it against you as soft as he can but you still hiss and draw back in pain. "You can tell me what he did. Need to know so I don't worry about you all night long." Had he put his hands on you? On one of your friends on the team? Something worse? The thought of something worse made Steve's blood run cold. He'd kill Jason himself, consequences be damned, if he'd touched you any type of way.

You scowl. "I don't wanna talk about it, Steve, seriously."

"You can't just not talk about it with me," he frowns right back at you. "If it's that bad you need to tell me. What happened? Please," he pouts his lip at you and you can't resist, you're melting in his hands, you're giving him whatever he wants the second that plush lower lip juts out at you and his pretty brown eyes go heavy-lidded and tragic-looking. You lean forward and kiss his protruding lip, wrapping your arms around his waist.

You press your face into his shoulder and murmur against his shirt, "He was talkin' bad about you, okay?" He pulls away, brow furrowed.

"Talkin' bad about me?" He places his hands on your shoulders. "Baby, you don't haveta get worked up over me, okay? And don't go throwing punches for me, Christ, you can't do that." He runs a hand through his hair, and there he goes, hands on hips, like he always does when he's worked up and stressed over something you or the kids are doing. "I don't care what he said, okay?" His hands go back to your shoulders, he's looking in your eyes, deep and distraught. "I don't care you. You don't go throwing punches for me. 'M not worth all that."

You push him off you. "Don't say that! That's not true, you're worth it! You'd do it for me, why can't I do it for you? You deserve it, too." Steve goes quiet. "You're worth it, okay? Don't be stupid." You press the frozen peas harder to your hand.

"I still don't like you fighting," he relents, and you know you've got him in the palm of your hand, he could never stay mad at you, not really, but his brows still knit together with worry. You smooth out the crease in them with your good hand and he softens exponentially with a sigh, leaning into your touch.

"As long as no one talks shit about you, I won't be," you pinch his cheek and he laughs. You'd die for that sound.

"Yeah, yeah, cool it, Rocky," he teases.

"Shut up!" You hit him with your bag of peas.

He grins, and he can't help it, he's a little proud, thinking about you punching someone in the face for him. Knuckles bloody for him. Making sure he knows he's worth fighting for. His heart swells at the thought.

#steve harrington x reader #steve harrington x you #steve harrington x y/n #steve harrington fanfic #steve harrington fic #steve harrington imagine #steve harrington one shot #steve harrington #stranger things

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cassiebones · 28 days ago

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Character Analysis: Lilia Calderu

Lilia is the eldest witch in the coven by over a hundred years (except possibly Rio). She knows a lot about Agatha's history, so she was probably there, but her vision shows us a medieval history. Others say that she's royalty. If not, she was very wealthy. And she's Sicilian, so she grew up wealthy since Sicily was pretty prosperous.

She has endured so much. She is a Divination witch, so she can see bits of the future. I feel like she has trouble sometimes discerning the future from the present, so she often tries to stop things while still having her visions, calling out disjointed phrases that don't all make it to the real world (I pray this comes into plot in the future to show that Alice is not, in fact, dead and that it was just a vision) and scaring others.

She is a Cassandra-type character, so nobody really listens to what she has to say before it's too late. When it is too late, she is played.

Also see: Bruno Madrigal.

Anyway, girl has more trauma in her pinky finger than most covens have combined. She's been chased from city to city all over Europe and South America before finally making a home in the continental US.

As previously stated, she was likely there when Agatha was attacked by her coven. She probably knew what they were planning, probably tried to warn Evanora about what would happen, but the old bitch would just not listen. Maybe she even wanted to warn Agatha, but she was too late.

Besides, nobody ever listens to the ramblings of a madwoman.

So she watched this all go down. She heard the whispers in the witch's circles, listened to her coven talk about what went down and how horrible and evil Agatha Harkness must be to kill her own coven.

She may even had defended Agatha a little: "Well at least she spared the children," she might have said, upon learning that--against tradition--Agatha didn't finish off the witches' bloodlines.

"But they'll now grow up without mothers to teach them how to properly harness their magic!" would have been a retort. "What are they to do now?!"

Lilia has no answer to that.

So she leaves her coven, seen as a witch-killer sympathizer, and remains covenless until the present time. She tries to join covens, but the way her powers manifest is...odd. It puts others off, they ignore her warnings, and then they blame her for what happens when they ignore her warnings. She starts trying to suppress her magic, watches the witch hunts all over, her faith in humanity dwindling as well as her bank account.

Soon enough, she's broke and trying to cash in on several side hustles, becoming a charlatan. She hates it.

She, like Agatha, took pride in her studies. She knows all the history and the languages and everything there is to know about witchcraft and how witches have been unfairly persecuted from day one. She lights candles for all the friends she's lost, asking the Divine Mother to look after their souls, to protect them against any who might sully their names.

She still gets visions, but she ignores them as best as she can. She's just surviving at this point, not living.

Then Agatha walks in, putting on an Razzie-worthy performance and Lilia can see right through it, but she takes the kid's money anyway. Rent was due weeks ago and she's already being evicted, but any bit of change can help.

How far she's fallen, she thinks.

She has always had empathy for the younger witches, always tried to be a mentor to them, remarking how lucky it is that they live in a time where they can be mostly free from persecution now. Where they can also love who they want to love and be who they want to be. Where they have the support of their friends and many public figures.

I have no idea about Lilia's sexuality, but I want to believe she's loved women in her past. She strikes me as a spinster type who may have entered into her fair share of "Boston Marriages". But nobody stuck around for long, unwilling to put up with her kooky visions.

I want to believe that she had a great love at one point, maybe a mortal woman. Maybe when she was a teenager, still practicing magic. That they were pretty much soul mates, intent on running away from their wealthy and influential families.

But it didn't work out. And Lilia thinks about her when she sees the yearning between Rio and Agatha. It's obvious the way they feel for each other and she wants to shout at them to just kiss and make up already, before it's too late.

But she stays quiet, because nobody listens to the madwoman.

(Also Rio fucking scares her)

#lilia calderu my love #lilia calderu #character analysis #agatha all along #patti lupone is doing a great job #as always #disney+

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vampyrial · 1 year ago

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A World For Her Alone | Stranger

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13

cw (chapter specific): emotional infidelity, abuse, murder, suicide, misogyny

pairing: claude x fem!reader

summary: in which Claude completely loses his head.

He opened his eyes once more to the dimness of his bedroom. His despair did not break, it lengthened like a long red string from one life to the other. His body was whole, reset again to perfect health and he knew that the ringing of his ears with the sound of an infant wailing was only an illusion. However, that reality only made things harder to bear than if there were medicine to be taken to rid himself of the noise. He laid in bed for a while longer, gazing listlessly at the sliver of sunlight that slipped through his heavy curtains. He gave himself over to the utter despondency of one who simply has no choice but to go on. That darkness was very tempting, he could give his strength over to it, he could fall backwards into it and know it would embrace him like a mother. But Claude was not so used to his helplessness, so somewhere in his mind, he held a small flicker of determination which kept him from falling completely. He had but wax wings to fly with and the sun was indeed approaching but he had some thought that he could reach you before they melted.

He set eyes on Diana yet again, and yet again with childish glee. He looked deeply into her ruby eyes and saw nothing but the blood which was still wet on the bedsheets you laid cold and lost to the world on. He thought of the violence of it, your marriage. Even still, the muddled euphoria of being in Diana’s presence raged on, desperately trying to smother everything else. The memory of you remained a cold corner in his mind, a cell to lock his inner self inside as if it would help anything. As if that was the person who needed to be contained, needed to be reminded. But he was just so disgusted with himself, from his past life and watching his current one from outside a body that no longer seemed to be his own that he needed a place to take everything. He needed someone to punish…and he had no one who would obey but himself. He had no one to blame but himself regardless of the fact that he no longer even knew who that was. A ghost perhaps, unable to rest and unable to move forward, to be better. He would always be that man who died under the sword of your knight, always the last to realize. Always too late to save you.

In the corner of his eye, casting a shadow over Diana’s eyes, he saw you stumble to the table. You were a sight that shocked his body into moving as he would if only he controlled it. He had never seen you this way, you stumbled clumsily like you were drunk but your face was harrowed and tense. Words of concern left his mouth but he knew, he knew what the truth was. For once, he knew without doubt what had been done as it unfolded. He looked into your eyes and knew.

Had you come back the same as he had?

“Where are they?” You muttered. His heart dropped. Your eyes were unfocused, forever staring at a point past both he and Diana, at an unreachable figment. He saw your chest rise and fall rapidly with your breaths. He saw your body tremble.

“Sister?” Diana called, her eyes clouding with genuine confusion and unease. Her lovely face went slack with surprise as she watched her sister mumble like a madwoman.

“Where is my child?” Words that bit a hole through his chest. He had desperately hoped that what he believed couldn't possibly be but just those words alone had consumed him completely. You confirmed the nature of this reality, the true extent of his sins. The you who had given birth to his copy, who had died knowing her husband was at the side of another woman, who had died believing he doubted her fidelity, was the same you who stood before him now.

He remembered the eyes of your daughter, those teary eyes without malice that he thought would damn him. He was wrong to think the girl was his complete copy, no, right now he felt her eyes and yours were the same. Crying for something lost, a hazy, clouded little memory. A warmth that dissipated into nothing, a weight that held them to the earth.

But the resemblance was fleeting for your eyes quickly filled with anger. You seized Diana by the shoulders and you looked into her eyes unflinchingly, although Claude’s body rose on instinct, the him within only wondered if you saw in those rosy eyes the very same thing he did.

“It wasn’t enough for you to have him, you wanted the only thing—” He didn’t let you finish, he was grabbing you and pulling you away from Diana like an animal. He felt his hand take your arm into a forbidding grasp. He could not stop, it was useless but if it were inevitable he wished to retreat inside. At very least he did not want to watch himself hurt you, not as he carried the knowledge that you had every right to go mad. Every right in the world to rage against him, rage against Diana even if in her eyes was an utter guileless that he could not deny.

“You don’t have a child yet. No one has taken anything from you.” Uselessly cruel words from a thoroughly and uselessly cruel man. They were more than lies, they were violence. He knew he was robbing you of any right to mourn the loss of a child who never had the chance to even have a name of her own. Forcing you to pretend, he was dragging you from your child just the same as death had. He was twice as forbidding as the universe, far more cruel, far more violent because unlike the universe, he knew your pain inside and out. And he watched himself wound you again.

You wilted, went limp in his grasp, your eyes went blank and confused. Your eyes were big and teary like your daughter’s were. “Please help me….I….” You muttered. He knew you were seeing her in him as you pulled away from his hold and he thinks, just for a moment, he might have been the one to soften his grip. To open his hands. It had felt like a long time since he could control his body in any meaningful way, he could no longer be certain. You were swaying on your feet, teetering away from him. He was still arrogant enough to want to comfort you, even knowing he was the source of your pain. His limbs almost trembled to hold you. To tell you that he had known your daughter too.

Instead, your knight stepped forward and gently caught you before you fell. He felt such a relief to see you caught even if his own body would not move at will. And then he felt…a sickness he could not place. “I’m afraid my lady isn’t feeling well, I’ll see her to her room” He said, without looking at Claude. He spoke informally, inconsiderately. Before he could respond, Felix was already walking away with you. A hollow hearted feeling came over him as he watched your body lean against his as if he was the only thing keeping you tethered to earth. He ought to have been relieved and the darkness that grew on him mostly felt annoyed at your outburst but it wasn’t the only thing there…his heart was sinking too. The one that was his own.

This life, despite the revelation he’d been shown, was much the same except that he was far more brazen than he’d ever been before. He came over to your parent’s manor without even hiding the fact that he only intended to see Diana. You stayed wherever you were, he wasn’t even sure you knew he was there. Your mother led him up to Diana’s room without question, not once did she utter your name. Nor did he.

Again he was shut into a shared world with Diana. Her love was like climbing ivy, it smothered and it grew until he could not see anything more. But a part of him loved the feeling so desperately, he hoped he’d never breathe again without feeling the leaves brush against his insides. He hoped her love would grow part of him, he hoped that her love would continue to be so evasive that he would feel her vines cage his lungs. The longing for her to be a fundamental part of his life was strong, so strong that he pretended it was already so. When he strode up to your parents’ doorstep, he pretended he was supposed to be there for Diana, that she was his fiancée. He did not even have to ask her to indulge this charade, she was more than happy to live in one of the romance novels that lined her bookshelf.

It did not escape his notice that you had been imprisoned in your own home. He looked toward your window each time he came over and the bars installed there remained. You did not even leave your room, he knew not whether you’d been forbidden or whether you simply did not want to see his face. The latter was the better, he thought, if you hated him then there was something to be saved. You not been entirely broken if you still had capacity to hate him for what he did. It would mean you understood his fault, it was all his fault. He would tell you as much if he was free to speak. He would say, “Give it to me, give me what pain you carry and leave it there.”

In this life, he saw you scarcely, desired you frequently. He was pulled this way and that by the high of Diana’s love and the time slowly disappeared. There was dread in the days approaching your wedding and he lived in a daze, always in a daze. This devouring thing inside made him feel bleak, numbed all his concern to nothing but the pathetic mourning for Diana. The wedding date slowly approaching was like a noose around his neck slowly tightening and he knew exactly when the platform would drop from beneath him but it did not give him peace. He could not enjoy his final moments. In other words, he was burdened on both sides.

The day your parents arrived hastily, hands clasped and eyes on the floor, informed him that you’d run away, the first thing he felt was relief. It hit him like the first burst of cold air from outdoors, it stunned him that his own consciousness was forefront for once. But before he had the time to wonder, there was more to be said.

Your mother, her eyes on the floor, had more to confess. She looked like a scolded little girl and frankly, he wanted to laugh at her until she opened her mouth. “It seems she has run away with her personal knight.” She was near choking on the words as if they made her sick.

A strange feeling came over him. A unbearable burn searing through his chest at the thought of you with Felix, alone and out of reach. But his lips curved into the barest hint of a smile, a bitter and hateful smile. “Our knights will take over the search for them.” The anger of his greater self, took him over with ease. It buried and twisted into him. It grew to a flame that cast his own consciousness into shadow. You betrayed him, you ran away with another man after promising to spend your life with another. He grabbed onto the fragments of thoughts his empowered self was too angry to finish. “How could she…” “A whore, nothing but a whore…” “If I ever see her again–”

Wherever you went, he hoped it was too far for his men to reach. He hoped you’d never be close enough for him to reach again. The darkness churned up thoughts to quell itself. Thoughts of the violence he felt owed.

In the days without you, he stewed in his own thoughts. The silver lining was being given reprieve from Diana, at least most of the time. She still sent her letters and he still answered them and enjoyed the brief moment of peace they bought him. The first letter, a hateful thing of pretty lace and ribbons, he wanted to throw out without reading but his hands worked against his own interests and he was treated to Diana’s apology. She apologized for her sister running away and disgracing him. ‘Disgrace?’ he remembered thinking. ‘Am I the one who has been disgraced?’ His fingers traced the lace decorating the letter, as he remembered what he’d accused his wife of in their very earliest life and the life directly after. Death by prison filth and deprivation, death by birthing the child of a man who left her alone. A disgrace? What did he know about being disgraced? All he knew was the very opposite.

All of these were whispers, of course. His greater self was soothed by Diana’s words, words he felt negated his responsibility. For what had he done other than be an exemplary fiancé? What did you have to be displeased with? What was he lacking that any other nobleman had? What was so bad you would run away with another man and have him made into gossip fodder? Her words fortified him, they justified his anger not as an ugly thing eating away at him but as righteous outrage. Diana was comforting him as no one had, not even your sniveling suck-up parents. She understood the value of a promise better than anyone. He held the letter up to his lips with shaking hands and he pressed a kiss to the place where her hands must have been when she pressed the ribbon into place.

The waiting for you to be found was the hardest thing for him. Perhaps if you were not found in a decent amount of time, it would be more prudent both fiscally and emotionally, to wed Diana who was also a daughter of your house. Oh, how he reveled in that thought. His mind conjured such pretty, bloodless thoughts of marriage to Diana. It almost combatted the thoughts he had about seeing you again, the words he’d bring forth to shame you in a place where you could not do anything but accept your own fault. Your indecency, your infidelity, your selfishness. The irony of his anger and his eagerness burned no one but himself, who lay paralyzed in his own mind as he settled into the fact that if you were found, he might truly have to watch himself beat you. For something he was far more guilty of, no less. He couldn’t so much as grit his teeth to express the anguish, all he could do is call upon god, the well in the sky he poured desperate wishes into.

‘Dear god, you seek to punish me, I know. But do not punish my bride, let me go hollow from missing her, from wanting to retrieve some of the person I used to be but do not hurt her to show me your wisdom. Tear me apart as you will but do not use her to do it. Let her stay lost to me.’

The sky really must have been empty, there really must have been no god to hear him, for you were found on a rainy night and brought to his mansion. Felix was dead, slain as a matter of course. A sick delight came about as he heard the report that your new lover had been killed where he stood. He heard himself speak in a low voice that suppressed none of his malice. “Let me see her, then.”

But his mother stopped him, assessing at him with serious eyes, sizing him up. “No. You’re too angry. You might do something to damage her.” She was right and the inner self rejoiced for the prolonged distance, for the fact that although his mother clearly considered you more product than woman, she would not have him harm you.

He kept you like a prisoner, sequestered to some bedroom at the center of the manor, locked from the outside and served by maids who watched you carefully as their jobs would not be spared if you were to pull the same trick again on their watch. The greater part of himself did long to look into your eyes, to feel the rage inside bloom and overflow and finally, finally allow him to release it. He nursed this hate like the phantom child he had left behind.

He allowed for one visitor, the young lady betrothed to Felix, who beseeched him. He wanted you to feel as he did. This woman who’d been forced to only partly display her mourning through plain black clothing rather than the true mourning garb of one whose loss was as great as hers, was a perfect tool for it. It was to show you who your actions hurt besides him. The extent of your selfishness brought consequences for more than just him, he wanted you to know that. He could tell you himself but showing you was all the better. If you hated him so much you’d run away short of your wedding, his emotions likely meant nothing to you. So let you have the hatred of someone else you hurt, let you see what you’ve done through the tears of a woman you’ve hurt just as badly.

The day of your wedding was a humiliation, for both of you. A farce that became the den of gossips gawking at your stiff steps down the aisle. He was relieved to know that you were the target of insult but displeased to be pitied. Still, such was worth it, if only to show a woman who seemed to think she was above having loyalty to her betrothed that you were not even above being gawked at on your wedding day like a caged animal. If he had to put up with being humiliated the inevitable moment everyone found out you fled with another man, you would put up with this. He would have his pound of flesh before you were married, before he’d have to forgive you.

Still, though he wanted your pain, he was caught between that motive and the fact that it still severely angered him that you thought you had the right to pity yourself. When he saw tears in your eyes as you reached the altar, he snapped at you in a whisper. Why were you of all people crying? If anything, it should have been him. You did this, what right had you to cry about it now? In the time you were far from home, living with that knight, what had you done together? Living in the squalor among commoners, had you found some pleasure in that? He had no choice now except to marry a woman who ran about with another man short of their wedding.

Claude rejected the notion of your culpability, but that didn’t matter when the loudest voice within his mind did not belong to him. He knew he had no right to be jealous and bitter as he was, he knew it was ludicrous for him to act like you were the one to betray him as if he wasn’t always alone with your sister, coming to visit her while neglecting you. Never mind the fact that he knew what you had lost, what he had stolen from you. But what did knowing that do? All that mattered to this darkness above him was that you existed and therefore had sinned. The more he pondered this thing which plagued him, the more hopeless he understood his situation to be. This thing, this darkness, its separation from his true self only mattered to him at this point. All you could see was a cruel husband, a man who hated you, who would leave you to die alone. Did it matter if there was more to him, if all he could show you was the most hateful part of him? It might not have been his true self that tormented you for so long but…they shared one body and it was still his hands that dripped with your blood.

When he woke one morning and his consciousness had swam up to the surface of his mind, allowing him to control his own body for the first time in ages, he knew that something was wrong. He felt it in the pit of his stomach, in the quiet of his room with the faded rays of sun reaching through the curtains after a stormy night. The moment he realized he was free, he went to your room still wearing his pajamas, his hair disheveled. Each step was his own doing and yet it still felt as though the path was fated, there was nothing to be done except go to you. See what this life had made of you, pray to a god who wasn’t listening. When he opened the door, what he saw struck him so hard his vision went white.

You were hanging from the center of the room, your body was still and cold. He knew it was too late to save you but stupidly he fumbled with the sheets around your neck, trying to get your body down. Murmuring little words of comfort to ears that could not hear him. If only he could just get you down, he could save you. This time, this time, he had to save you. How foolish he was. How could he not see that such was not the way things worked for him?

Your body was not even warm when he set you down on the floor, when he put his head on your chest, he heard no heartbeat not even a weak and staggered one. Your eyes were open, unblinking and looking constantly at a point in the distance away from him. You had been dead for some time, for your body had not even been swaying from where you hung. He couldn’t feel you anymore. But he could not let go of you either, he stayed with your body until the steward was firmly pulling him away. “My lord…please leave her to us.” His head had been lain again your chest, his tears wetting your chemise for how long? He did not know.

Even after your body was taken, he remained kneeling on the floor where he had held you.

He was not even coherent enough to kill himself but for the state he was in, the doctor recommended he take sedatives. They made the days pass like minutes and often he was in the dark with his misery, not able to speak it, show it. Not allowed the reprieve or the punishment of a knife against his throat. He was in the dark with your body hanging in front of him. He was in the dark every day until the morning he was woken up for your funeral. That day he awoke by a caress, a warm hand against his cheek and for a confused, bleary moment, he thought it was your hand. His heavy eyelids opened and caught a glimpse of golden hair.

He was besotted again. Diana was beautiful even in mourning garb, dressed in delicate black lace, inches away from him with tears in her eyes. “Lord Claude” Her voice wavered. “I’m sorry, but it’s time for you to wake up. The funeral is soon, I’ve already let you sleep as much as you can.” He couldn’t help the enormous love that came over him as he saw her trying to be strong before him. He stretched his stiff limbs around her and held her to his chest. She did not refuse his comfort, she fell apart in his arms and cried. Her face was nuzzled into his neck as he ran his hand up and down her back. Yet again, something had bloomed from the void inside. The honey of her love had sweetened everything and it was reaching inside him to claim control once more. What defense had he against her, his consolation and mercy?

The funeral service was carried out at the marquisate. A lady should be buried in her husband’s family plot after being married, after all. A marchioness is a marchioness, not even the part of him that despised you could deny as much. He’d relinquished himself to that greater instinct again, he was sure it had happened while he was in Diana’s arms. The moment his control was undone indefinitely was when remembered his love for her.

Diana cried throughout the funeral and held to his arm, looking at the coffin which cradled her sister who looked fitful as if she were having a bad dream even in death. She trembled to see her sister, young and newly married, dead. Perhaps she saw herself in the coffin next and the thought of that made Claude hold her closer. No one commented on him embracing his sister-in-law so intimately at his wife’s funeral, least of all your parents who looked more burdened than bereaved. They apologized to him for the inconvenience caused by the whole ordeal from your wedding to your death and offered to take over the planning of the funeral at some point. They apologized to him for your death. Instead of mourning you, their firstborn daughter. You, your mother’s only daughter, a loss that should have shaken her to her very core was being treated as a matter of political burden. You were no more to her than a fallen knight, a matter of replacement or compensation. A financial headache, perhaps a political one but never a mother’s heartache or confusion for a daughter who took her own life.

What did he feel? Was it a husband’s grief? No…no, it was impossible for him to only feel a husband’s grief now. He was not just your husband, he was your killer, your jailor, your tormentor. The constant catalyst of your demise. He had not just lost a wife, he had killed one. There was never a time where he had been a husband to you, it was fitting that his grief was not that of a loving, dutiful husband.

Diana insisted upon not leaving him alone so your parents left her in his care. They didn’t flinch when she asked them and she didn’t think anything of spending so much time alone with her dead sister’s husband even though she had flirted with him so heavily while she was alive. Should she not be ashamed to ask this of him? Or did she think it was alright since she believed what everyone else did, that you didn’t love him, that you ran away to elope with your lover and killed yourself because he had been slain in the end? Nevertheless, he welcomed her.

Diana spent an entire week with him, days that comforted his hateful heart more than anything ever had. Perhaps it shouldn’t have, for she was mourning you as he was supposed to be. But it was as if they were playing pretend again, except this time they had the entire marquisate at their disposal instead of just Diana’s bedroom. When he wanted to see her, she was in the library or out in the garden or taking lunch in the guest room. Always in reach, it made him feel better. She was safe, she was healthy this time around and she was his. More than she ever had been before. Perhaps the suddenness of your death made her all the more open, made the need for comfort greater. Either way, the sweetness of her love was falling over him as warmly as summer rain.

But after that week, Diana did need to return home. For the sweet girl did not want her parents to miss her for too long. Claude insisted on accompanying her home in the carriage, under the guise of her safety but in all reality, just to spend even a few more moments with her.

They were halfway there when the carriage started moving faster than it should have. The horses were whinnying in fright desperately racing forth, Diana’s slight frame nearly flew across the carriage before he caught her and held her. They were run off the dirt road and into the forest. Claude couldn’t understand what was happening, he only caught the glimpse of dark figures out the window before the carriage flipped over.

He used his body to keep Diana from getting hurt the instant he felt the carriage tip. His head hit the door of the carriage hard but he seemed to be alright, there was only a little blood. “Diana?” He hadn’t the time or the wits about him to form the sentence he wished to speak, he could only call her name, frantic and panicked. “I’m alright!” Diana answered, looking up at him, still in his arms. She was trembling and fear clouded her eyes. He could hear commotion outside, fighting, the clang of swords. His heart sank at the staggered realization that they were being attacked but he was quick to action regardless of how badly his head pained him and how he couldn’t find his balance.

Still, by the time he’d helped Diana out of the carriage, his two knights were laying on ground before several men, cloaked in black with their swords wet with blood. He pushed her behind him and gripped his own sword to hold out before him. It was at least four swords against one, there was no way for him to live but he still needed to save Diana. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t logical, that he knew in his rational mind that he had no chance, he had to wield his sword against them. They were quickly done in, Diana seized and his sword arm badly injured. Strangely, they did not seem to have any intentions of killing him which gave him hope that it was a ransom situation. Until the man who had Diana, who seized her as she tried to flee to her best bet of survival — the thick forests around them, slit her throat unceremoniously and let her body drop to the ground into the dirt.

Claude let out a sound of unbridled anguish that startled birds from the trees. He fought against their hold wildly, turned half feral and dripping blood on them. The man who stayed back, took down the hood of his cloak revealing black hair, he seemed to be their ringleader. “Now that we have that out of the way, let me.” He stepped forward and drew his sword. Claude was still fighting, still writhing in the grips of his assailants, uttering curses at them. The stranger pulled Claude’s hair to lift his head and make him look up into his eyes. He wore a soft smile, dissonant from the situation. “Lord Claude, I hope you’d agree you’re entirely too important to be dealt with by just anybody.”

The stranger, his eyes glittering with joy, stood back and brought his sword down over Claude's head.

author's note: Oh, Claude. Didn't anyone ever tell you the forest is full of wicked things?

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#claude x reader #wmmap x reader #claude de alger x reader #claude de alger obelia x reader #wmmap fanfic #x reader

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