#and no one knows where he is or what happened

[mariasont]

HI i have an idea and its making me really giddy

ok so reader is a translator for the bau and they’re always reading and translating texts or calls or anything like that. and the reader to spencer is basically like penelope to derek. they flirt all the time and all of those lovely things.. and it��s kinda just where they’re flirting on the phone and morgan teases reid about it and reid gets all flustered

IDK IF IT CAN WORK I JUST LOVE FLUSTERED SPENCER :(

anyway i’ll probably be in your inbox a bunch uhhh so call me h or something

-h

Warm Under the Collar - S.R

summary: spencer insists he is not flirting. morgan insists that spencer absolutely is. one of them is lying. pairings: spencer reid x translator!reader warnings: heavy flirting, pre-relationship mutual pining, verbal sparring as foreplay, workplace hr violations, use of angel wc: 0.6k

“Are you thinking about me, Dr. Reid? Because I’ve been thinking about you.”

Spencer exhales, tugging at the collar of his dress shirt as if loosening it might alleviate the sudden stranglehold of your words. He wasn’t sure if it was always this constricting or if it was conspiring against him at the mere sound of your voice.

He rolls his eyes, performative, really, because you can’t see him, and it’s easier to feign exasperation than admit the effect you have on him. His mouth, however, twitches in betrayal, flirting with a smile before he crushes it. 

The crime board he was supposed to be focusing on, filled with monochrome photos and reports, was now blurring into meaningless scribbles as his thoughts veer off-course, plummeting headfirst into you.

“I’m always thinking about you.”

The words come easily because they require no effort to be true. Always isn’t hyperbole, it’s a mathematical constant, an irrefutable fact.

He was thinking about you before he even called you, felt the shape of you in his mind like an afterimage burned onto his retinas. 

Thought about what color you were wearing, whether your hair was up or down. He wondered if you’d eaten, if you were drinking enough water, if you’d remembered to bring a jacket to the office because the temperature had dropped unexpectedly. 

“Always? Spencer, if you wanted me that bad, all you had to do was say so.”

He isn’t sure why he hesitates — why his brain takes a detour through all the ways he has said so, if not in words, then in the way his thoughts orbit you like a law of nature. 

“I feel like I did say so. Quite literally. But if you’d like me to be more explicit about it, I’m happy to oblige.”

Another pause. He wonders if you’re smiling.

“Mmm, well, I’m certainly not going to stop you.” You sigh, a little dramatic. “Go ahead, be explicit.”

Spencer physically winces at how hot his face gets. The very concept of explicit sits indecently in the pit of his stomach.

“Tempting.” He exhales, rubs a hand down his face, forcibly redirects. “But I do actually have a job to do. And, lucky for me, it just so happens to require your specific set of skills.” 

He leans against the crime board, half-smirking despite himself, because if nothing else, this is fun — the sharp back-and-forth, the way you press all the right buttons just to see what happens.

“I have a recording that needs translating. Think you can focus for long enough to help me, or do I need to, I don’t know, compliment your intelligence first to get you in a professional mindset?”

“Complimenting my intelligence to get what you want? Interesting. Manipulative, even.”

He groans, tilting his head toward the ceiling, appealing to some higher power for patience. He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I didn’t say I was going to —”

“Too late, you put the idea in my head, and now I expect it. Preferably in an eloquent, well-structured speech. Bonus points if you make it poetic.”

“Or,” he counters, “you could translate the recording first, and I’ll… circle back to stroking your ego at a later, more convenient time.”

A small pause. The kind that feels intentional, like you’re weighing your options.

“I guess that works,” you say. “Send it over, pretty boy.”

Spencer shakes his head, fingers moving on autopilot as he sends the file, because if he thinks too hard about the way you lilted that last pretty boy, he might die. “Alright, thanks. Be good, angel.”

He hangs up, still grinning like an idiot, still entirely too warm under the collar. He exhales, staring at the phone in his hand like it might have the decency to cool him off, maybe undo the physiological mess you’ve left him in.

“If I have to listen to one more of your phone calls with her, I’m sending y’all an invoice.”

Spencer freezes when he sees Morgan standing behind him.

He clears his throat, ignoring the flush he knew was climbing up his neck. “Flirting is an unsubstantiated claim.”

Morgan just stares at him. Stares. “You don’t even believe that.”

Spencer mutters something about professionalism because he’s nothing if not a walking contradiction.

💌 masterlist taglist has been disbanned! if you want to get updates about my writings follow and turn notifications on for my account strictly for reblogging my works! @mariasreblogs

[rosiecosy]

the hickey scandal˚ʚ♡ɞ˚

(ot13 x reader) — fluff

you were bored.

which, in seventeen’s world, usually meant chaos was about to happen.

and today’s chaos? a fake hickey.

a little smudge of red and purple eyeshadow on your neck, just barely peeking out from under your collar. it was perfect.

you casually strolled into the waiting room where the members were lounging, sipping on your drink like nothing was out of the ordinary.

but seventeen was seventeen. and seventeen noticed everything.

"wait." dino’s eyes locked onto her neck immediately. "wait, wait, wait, WAIT."

"…what?" you blinked innocently.

"WHAT IS THAT?!" he practically shrieked, pointing at your neck like it was a crime scene.

"what’s what?"

"DON’T PLAY DUMB," seungkwan hollered, already on his feet.

"oh my god," mingyu gasped, nearly dropping his phone. "IS THAT A—"

"IT CAN’T BE," joshua said, but he sounded disturbed.

seungcheol stood up so fast his chair scraped across the floor. "come here."

her eyes widened. "uh… no?"

"Y/N," jeonghan said, voice dangerously soft. "you’re hiding something."

"i’m literally not—"

"WHOSE HANDS HAVE BEEN ON YOU?" hoshi suddenly dove across the couch, grabbing your shoulders.

"GET OFF ME—"

"who is it?" minghao asked, completely serious. "do we know them?"

"are they alive?" wonwoo muttered darkly.

"let’s not jump to violence—" joshua started.

"violence is the answer," woozi interrupted.

"GUYS," you groaned. "IT’S NOT A BIG DEAL."

"NOT A BIG DEAL?!" seungcheol exploded. "OUR BABY HAS BEEN—"

"—DEFILED," jun finished dramatically.

"STOP SAYING THAT," you yelled.

vernon, sitting quietly in the corner, just stared at you. "damn."

"NO, NOT DAMN," SEUNGKWAN SHOUTED. "VERNON, WHY ARE YOU CALM?!"

"she’s grown," vernon shrugged. "let her cook."

"COOK WHAT?!"

by now, the room was absolute chaos.

seungcheol was pacing. seungkwan was having a meltdown. dino looked like he was about to cry. jeonghan had gone completely silent, which was somehow worse.

woozi, arms crossed, stared at you. "if you don’t tell us who, we will find out."

"guys, please," you sighed, barely holding in your laughter. "it’s really not that deep."

but before you could say anything else—

mingyu grabbed his phone. "i’m calling our manager."

"WHAT?!"

"we need to check security footage," he said seriously.

"YOU ARE NOT CHECKING SECURITY FOOTAGE FOR THIS," you screamed.

"i already texted them," joshua said calmly.

"OH MY GOD."

"y/n," seungcheol said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "if you don’t tell us the truth right now—"

you opened your mouth—

but then dino sniffled.

you froze.

"we raised you better than this," he mumbled, eyes glossy.

"OH MY GOD, DINO," you cried.

"i can’t believe we have to let her go," jun sighed dramatically.

"YOU DON’T HAVE TO LET ME GO, I’M STILL RIGHT HERE—"

"it’s always the youngest ones," vernon muttered.

she looked at woozi desperately. "help me."

he shook his head. "you brought this on yourself."

you groaned, slumping onto the couch. they were never going to drop this.

and at this point… telling them the truth was way less fun.

so instead, you sipped your drink, shrugged, and said—

"i guess you’ll never know."

that was the final straw.

"GET HER."

you barely made it two steps before twelve very determined members tackled you to the floor.

[reiding-writing]

Heyy!! i was wondering if you could perchance do a drabble with dad!spencer and mom!bau!reader where they've gotten into the rhythm of calling each other mommy and daddy in front of the kids and one of them accidentally slips up and does it work without realising. And then the team is like "hold on 🤨" (probably morgan) and they have to defend themselves. Just something i've been thinking about and i don't have the artistic ability to right it myself but you do! Thank youuuu! xxx

SLIP UP. /spencer reid/

your at-home naming habits find their way into the office.

bau!mom!reader 1.1k fluff masterlist.

a/n | this is so funny i love it.

The bullpen hums with its usual energy—phones ringing, keyboards clacking, conversations weaving through the space.

It’s late, and exhaustion weighs on everyone like a heavy fog. Cases have been stacking up, the paperwork never-ending, and you’re all running on caffeine and whatever sugar-laden snack Garcia has left in the breakroom.

You and Spencer, despite being used to sleepless nights—courtesy of two small children at home—are still feeling the burn.

Parenting while profiling is a delicate balance, and some days, it feels like you barely hold it together. But you've found ways to cope, to slip into a rhythm that works.

Spencer leans over his desk, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he scans a report. His hair is slightly disheveled—likely from running his hands through it—and his tie is loosened, his sleeves rolled up. He looks exactly how you feel, drained.

You, seated across from him, are going through another file when you sigh and reach for the next document. “Pass Mommy the file, please,”

The moment the words leave your mouth, the bullpen stills. For a brief second, no one reacts. Not even Spencer, who doesn’t hesitate to slide the file over to you, his tired brain not even registering what just happened.

But then—

“Hold on, what?”

Your head snaps up so fast you nearly give yourself whiplash. Across the table, Morgan is staring at you with wide eyes, a slow, knowing smirk spreading across his face. JJ’s eyebrows are raised nearly to her hairline, and even Rossi has paused his paperwork, looking mildly amused.

Hotch looks like he’s trying very hard not to react.

You glance at Spencer, who is blinking rapidly, his brain trying to catch up with what just happened.

And then, it hits you.

“Oh my God.” Your stomach drops. Heat rushes to your face. “I didn’t mean—”

Morgan leans forward, elbows on the table, his smirk growing. “Did you just refer to yourself as Mommy?”

Spencer makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. “It’s— It’s not—”

“Because I swear I just heard that,” Morgan continues, clearly enjoying himself.

JJ covers her mouth, eyes twinkling with suppressed laughter.

You groan, dropping your face into your hands. “It’s not what you think,”

“Oh, I think it’s exactly what I think.” Morgan chuckles, leaning back in his chair. “Reid, you calling her Mommy at home?”

Spencer makes another choked noise, shaking his head furiously. “No! I mean— yes, but not like that!”

JJ snorts, and even Hotch finally cracks, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s debating whether or not to intervene.

You lift your head, groaning again. “We have two kids under four. There’s a lot of third-person referencing, okay?”

Morgan raises an eyebrow, amused.

Spencer, still red-faced, starts rambling. “It’s a psychological phenomenon, actually. When individuals—particularly parents—are frequently addressed in a particular way, their brains develop an associative response, reinforcing the use of the terms even in situations outside the expected context. It’s entirely innocent. Just an unconscious linguistic habit.”

Morgan whistles low. “Damn, Pretty Boy. You really just tried to profile your way out of calling your wife ‘Mommy’ in front of us,”

Spencer groans, burying his face in his hands.

Your face feels impossibly warm. “We’re tired, Morgan. We haven’t had a full night’s sleep in—” You glance at Spencer. “How long has it been?”

“Three years, three months, and sixteen days,” he answers automatically.

Morgan lets out a low whistle. “Damn,”

Emily places a hand over her heart. “That’s actually kind of adorable,”

Garcia practically vibrates with excitement. “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I need to hear more,”

“There’s nothing more to hear,” Spencer says, shaking his head quickly. “It’s just a habit. Strictly innocent,”

“Oh, we believe you,” Rossi says, the corners of his mouth twitching. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to let it go,”

“Not a chance,” Morgan agrees.

You groan, dropping your head into your hands. “This is never going away, is it?”

“Nope,” JJ says cheerfully.

Spencer sighs, rubbing his temples. “Great.”

And just like that, the teasing begins.

For the rest of the day—and likely for weeks to come—you hear variations of:

“Daddy, can you pass me that report?” from Emily.

“I don’t know, Mommy, what do you think?” from Morgan.

Garcia, of course, takes it the farthest, occasionally referring to you both as “Mommy and Daddy dearest,” complete with exaggerated winks.

By the time you make it home that evening, you collapse onto the couch with a groan, Spencer falling beside you.

“I’m never going to live this down,” you mumble.

“At least they think it’s funny,” Spencer says, leaning his head back against the cushions.

You sigh. “This is your fault,”

He turns his head to look at you, eyebrows raised. “My fault?”

“You didn’t even hesitate when I said it. You just handed me the file like it was totally normal,”

His lips twitch. “To be fair, it is normal,”

You nudge him with your foot. “Not at work, it isn’t,”

He chuckles, then tilts his head, considering. “Maybe if we just… pretend it never happened, they’ll drop it,”

You snort. “You really think that’s going to work?”

“…No,”

“Exactly.” You groan again, rubbing your hands over your face. “I’m never going to hear the end of this,”

Spencer smiles softly, reaching over to squeeze your hand. “At least we’re in it together, Mommy,”

You open your eyes just to glare at him. “You better not start doing that on purpose,”

He presses his lips together, trying to suppress a grin.

“Spencer,” you warn.

His grin widens. “Yes, Mommy?”

You grab a throw pillow and smack him with it, and his laughter fills the room, warm and familiar.

Exhausted as you both are, you wouldn’t trade this—your life, your family, the teasing from your team—for anything in the world.

[iimplicitt]

hiii 🤠 anon here

how do you feel about writing for mafia lando where he’s married to the reader who’s not his choice it’s basically an arrangement and his family hates her and she’s having a really hard time in his house and Lando doesn’t notice and he’s cold and one day her family causes her to have a panic attack and he sees her in his room all small and scared and then he helps her and makes her a feel better and etc something about a heated confession and people being put in their place. if you do write this thank you :)

HAPPINESS IS A BUTTERFLY | LN4

pairings: mafia! lando x arranged marriage reader

an/warnings: arranged marriage, violence, mentions of abusive parents, angst, panic attacks, fluff, hea

wc: 5.2k

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱��� ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

He bit the inside of his cheek as he watched the sleek back car roll up in the long drive way from his office. Windows tinted but he could make out the faint outline of a person as they moved around before Oscar got out of the car to open the door for its passenger.

His new wife.

The words tasted sour on his tongue as he drank some of his whiskey, not caring that it was nine in the morning. He needed a pick-me-up for the day that was ahead.

Gleaming hair caught in the sunlight, a delicate hand with a blinding diamond hesitantly taking Oscar’s as red bottom Louis’ met the pavement.

His eyes narrowed a bit as he watched you, mere curiosity to see how you acted when he wasn’t around. When the wedding happened it was short and extravagant. All the glitz and glamour expected of such a pair. A politician's daughter and a booming business man whose money usually came tinted red. A shame that most of the world didn’t know your fathers money was just as dirty as his.

It was an alliance in London’s eyes. A step towards peace.

He hadn’t even seen you until the white lace veil was lifted.

You were pretty but that wasn’t enough to suddenly sway his mind into liking the whole arrangement. He didn’t have much choice. Having coppers on a payroll was a deal too good to pass up, so he agreed. Shook hands. It hadn’t mattered much, not in the long run. Lando was always busy. Always working. If a marriage hadn’t been forced upon him, he didn’t think he would’ve ever had a ring on his finger.

He watched silently as you waited for Oscar to grab your bags. Your eyes flickering around the property, taking in the well kept gardens and security cameras mounted every few yards. A fortress.

His eyes took in the dress you wore, expensive silk draped over skin. Flowing like liquid in the subtle summer breeze. He took note of how your hand kept flexing, the one with a ring. His ring.

The one he had slid on your finger a week ago as he whispered, “I do.” Your own voice low as you muttered the vow, eyes not meeting his.

He could barely remember what the kiss had been like. It was quick, soft. Obligatory. Both of you seemed relieved it was over with, arms linked with one another as you left the cathedral. White flower petals falling into hair as they were tossed into the sky.

Lando set his tumbler down and backed away from the window, trying to take a calming breath before walking downstairs. He needed to make this livable. An ecosystem. Staying out of each other's way, respecting boundaries. Telling where and what was off bounds. If you needed help, ask Oscar. If you wanted someone to talk to, also ask Oscar. Leave him be, because he was busy.

You seemed reasonable enough in the few minutes of shared company. You knew this was a business transaction. It wasn’t something to get hopes up on. Lando knew you were smart enough not to be a burden so hopefully it would feel like nothing had changed. Just an extra person in the household. Another echoing voice.

He could hear the sharp click of your heels as you entered the front foyer, the soft sound of your voice as you spoke in hushed tones. Your whole presence seemed cautious. Like you were treading in a minefield.

As he stepped down the stairs and into the light, your eyes met. The air shifting. Tense. Dangerous. Your painted lips pressed into a line as you waited for instruction. Ever obedient. Compliance being woven into you as a child.

He had met your father on more than one occasion and he knew he wasn’t a kind man.

But the problems of your past were yours.

Lando sighed lightly through his nose, head tilting and hands in pockets as he let himself look at you for another moment before dismissing Oscar.

The foyer was still. The only thing he could hear was the faint hum of electricity and birds outside. Watching you as you watched him.

“Nice drive?” He asked, not quite sure on the formalities of the situation.

You laughed slightly, the sound coming out in a short exhale as you looked away from him. “It was fine.”

He hummed, not seeing a point in furthering the conversation and he gestured for you to follow him.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

The summer had gone by in a repetition of droning days and lonely dinners. The only thing keeping you company were the few books you packed, although you had already read through them all. An endless cycle of talking to the walls and sitting near your window, feeling like a modern day Rapunzel.

It’s not necessarily like you weren’t allowed to go anywhere, but it still felt off limits. Frowned upon. A burden if you were seen walking the halls.

His family didn’t like you very much. Which you both understood yet couldn’t come to terms with. They had to have known this wasn’t any more of your choice than it was his. And why shovel the blame onto someone’s child? It wasn’t your fault your father was corrupted and played a better hand.

Pressing your forehead against the cool glass, you watched as the world went by. The silent hum of air conditioning was the only thing to droll out your thoughts and lately it hadn’t been working. The room felt suffocating but there was no one to turn to. Even voicing your thoughts out loud to yourself seemed like some boundary was being crossed. Maybe even to yourself. That you were starting to get too comfortable.

Oscar seemed nice enough. Timid. Not sure how to approach you or if he even should. He brought your meals to your door like clock work. Part of you felt bad but the thought of eating in the dining room seemed like suicide. You had tried the first night, assuming that was just part of the routine. To have dinner with your…husband.

But Lando was nowhere to be found, leaving you at a large oak table alone and shoveling food around. Appetite non-existent. Oscar had told you he usually took dinner in his office. That most of the other members of the household ate out.

His words hit you dully as you stared at the polished wood, not quite believing this was going to be the rest of your life. Then again, you weren’t sure what you wanted. Did you want Lando to make an effort? Did you even want to be around him? You didn’t know much, just that he was a bad man. But aren’t they all? Apparently that’s all the world thought you were fit for. Violent men with money in their eyes.

No, you didn’t want to know him.

But god, loneliness caught up to everyone.

The hours ticked by and you sat there, tracing lines into the skin of your thighs with your nail. Over and over again till skin prickled and red lines appeared. The itch and sting foreign, numb. As if you’d shot your heart with novacaine. Your eyes unblinking as you did the action, pure muscle memory. You didn’t have to think. You didn’t want to.

At least you never wanted to think about yourself. Your situation. The listless marriage you now found yourself trapped in.

But your mind would wander. What did he get up to? What did he even do? Was it really any different from the current political affairs the nation got up to? Would he one day change his mind and want more?

The thought made you shiver, eyes trailing to your locked door. He’d never tried to come in. Hell, he’d never even been to your room. In the weeks you’d been there you had probably only seen him a handful of times. Walking down the hall and his eyes would catch yours for a moment but nothing else. Looking through you like a ghost. Cold. Indifferent. Sometimes you’d hear him in the house. Talking to Oscar or on the phone. Always business. Always something you didn’t understand.

He couldn’t seem bothered at the thought of you being around. Didn’t seem interested. And that weird, fucked up little voice in the back of your mind whispered that Lando was keeping himself entertained just fine. That he found comfort in other women. Having affairs. You barely felt married. There weren't technically any commitments beyond regurgitated vows. So why did the thought still make your stomach churn?

Perhaps it was the feeling of being unwanted. A constant companion of doubt. Your family didn’t want you, pawned you off. Your husband didn’t want you. You would never get to experience love. You’d go through life longing for creature comforts—

You pressed your forehead harder into the glass. Wanting the thoughts to stop. You pushed so hard you hoped it’d break and you’d go hurtling towards the ground.

There was a sharp knock on the door. Six o’clock sharp.

Dinner.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

You felt like you were going insane. The walls bending inward. The wallpaper swirling. The ceiling breathing.

Crazy.

Wandering the halls was reckless but you started to care less and less if Lando saw you. For the first time in months you wanted him to see you. Be reminded that you were there. Proof you were alive. You were here. Even when it never felt like it. You felt like a phantom who haunted the house, mostly only coming out at night when the rest of the world slept. Chasing the creaks of wood and following the patterns in the rug. Chasing something. Feeling wild. Deranged like a white rabbit who was late for tea.

His mother yelled at you. For something, you weren’t sure what. It seemed like no matter what you did you were wrong. Skin not fitting right over bones. Disassociating and staring at her. That only made her more mad and she slapped you. Not for the first time. Hard across the face. You hadn’t noticed till you heard the echo of it around the kitchen. Didn’t realise till some of the staff gasped, hands flying over mouths. Glowing wide eyes staring at you in shock.

You blinked again, subtle warmth creeping into your cheek. Hand slowly going up to hold your face. What had you done wrong? Why were you always wrong?

His mother scoffed. “You’re no good. You’re not even all the way there are you?” With a look of disgust she turned away, disappearing down the hall.

One of the cooks slowly approached you, as if you were some wounded animal. Holding out a pack of ice. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“For what?” Your voice sounded distant. Distorted. Like it was coming from somewhere else. Taking the ice, you left. Letting it sit in your hand instead, the bitter coldness of it sending a dull shock up your arm.

You felt like crying. At least you thought about it. But nothing would fall out. Your eyes felt dry and heavy. Staring at nothingness as you walked with your heartbeat thudding in your ears.

This was your life. This was going to be your forever. Sucked into yet another man's orbit who didn’t give a shit about you. Because fuck what you want, right?

You turned into what you thought was your bedroom. You weren’t quite sure how you got there. It had been odd lately. Like moments of time blacked out. Arriving one place and not knowing how you got there. Tuning out to your depressing reality.

You were going to die alone. It wasn’t even your fault. Or maybe it was. Maybe you should’ve tried harder. Fought your father and left as soon as you had turned of age. Why didn’t you try harder to fight back? Did some twisted part of you want this? The lack of effort. Things being handed to you. Maybe you thought you deserved it. After all, you'd been living off your fathers dirty money guilt free. Perhaps this was just your karma.

Longing for a life you’d never have.

You sucked in a sharp breath, tears finally beginning to prick at your eyes. The droplets stung so bad your vision went blurry.

You barely felt it as your knees hit the hard wooden floors. Didn’t register the scratching sound of your nails dragging against the planks, blindly trying to crawl your way out of the hell you were living. Feeling pathetic and ungrateful because you knew it could be worse. It could always be worse.

A sob left your throat, bubbling up and out like acid.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

The door flew open to his office and he was about to yell at whoever had the audacity when he turned, paused. The look on Oscar’s face wasn’t one commonly seen.

“What?”

“There’s a problem.”

Lando sighed, tapping his pen on his desk. “Care to elaborate?”

“It’s your mother and your wife.”

Lando reared back slightly at the word. It wasn’t thrown around often. Hell, he hardly saw you. And when he did, when he’d catch you wandering around well past three in the morning something was just…off. He didn't know how to approach you. Or if he even should. You’d seemed equally disinterested by his company. Staring at him sometimes like he was an apparition that wasn’t meant to be there.

He wouldn’t blame you if you hated his guts. Lando knew most women would prefer a love filled marriage compared to whatever the hell they had.

“What about them?” He asked, eyes flicking down to his papers again. Not seeing why—

“The staff said there was an altercation in the kitchen.”

Pausing, his eyes flicked up. Brow raising.

Oscar sighed, “your wife is in your room.”

That got him up. What the hell were you doing in there? And why? It wasn’t like he kept important documents in there, he knew better than that but he still didn’t trust you much. You were your fathers daughter. Maybe this was all some ploy to get into his personal things, find weaknesses, cracks.

His feet moved briskly down the hall, his polished shoes clicking dully on the ornate rugs and painted eyes followed him as he went. Lando didn’t pause as he saw his door, didn’t pause as he turned the handle.

“What do—“

Lando halted to a stop as his eyes found you. Feeling as if the earth had been yanked out from beneath him when he heard you try to smother the sound of your crying with a hand. Curled up in the space between his bed and the nightstand. Looking so small as you trembled.

Your eyes didn’t meet his. He wasn’t even sure if you heard him come in. Your breathing was too fast, too ragged. Short bursts of oxygen, your lungs not being able to keep up.

He shut the door softly behind him and quietly made his way over to you, lowering himself to his knees. Debating if he should touch you or not. You hadn’t touched in months. Not since the wedding.

“Hey,” his voice was soft and you flinched. Head shooting up and staring at him. He’d never seen you look so frightened and you tried to push yourself back harder into the wall. Shaking your head as if he’d caught you doing something wrong.

He immediately caught the red outline of a hand on your cheek. His jaw clenched. An odd, unbearably awful sensation churned in his stomach at the thought of someone hurting you. Knowing it was his mother only made the fire burn hotter. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like you were close. But the rage was itching up his spine like a spider.

“You’re okay,” he said again. His voice was rough, but a whisper. He reached out to you, slowly. Hands gently taking hold of you as he pulled your shaking frame into his, feeling the way your lungs struggled to catch up. Your muscles coiled in tension as he touched you. He hated it.

“You’re alright, darling.” He soothed your hair back, feeling your nails bite into his skin as you twisted the fabric of his shirt. Trying to ground yourself. Trying to make sense of it all. Of why he was here.

He knew it had to be confusing. That his sudden reassurance was off putting and regret was starting to inch its way up his throat. The spindly legs tickling and desperate. He should’ve handled this whole thing better. It was selfish. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. Holding your head beneath his chin as you tried to calm down. “I’m here, if you need me to be.”

You didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure what to do. Where to go from there. This was new territory for him. Second guessing wasn’t usually in Lando’s playbook but you were something new entirely.

He began to lean away but your grip tightened on his shirt, your head pressing further into the crook of his neck.

Sighing, he maneuvered himself into a sitting position, holding you in his lap as he leaned against his bed. Giving you time. Gently running circles into the nape of your neck. His grandmother always did that for him, it always seemed to help calm him down. Lando waited patiently, taking in the faint scent of your shampoo. Smiling to himself a bit despite everything because it was the same one he used.

Slowly your harsh breathing began to subside but your body still trembled from the aftershocks.

His fingers still ran lightly over your skin, his voice a low hum and he could feel the vibration of his own rib cage with your weight against him. “I’ve had panic attacks too, you know?”

You didn’t do anything for a moment, and then, like the first break of daylight, you slightly shifted your head and your voice was a whisper. “Really?”

“Mhm.”

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

Something had shifted. Maybe others wouldn’t have noticed, but you did. That next morning there was a knock on your bedroom door. Eight o’clock sharp. You hadn’t slept much, your eyes still raw and body restless from the previous evening. The feeling of his light, delicate touch on you was on replay in the back of your mind. You hadn’t been held in what felt like years.

You hadn’t expected such kindness from him.

Padding over to the door, you rubbed at your eyes, trying to look alive before opening it. “Morning, Oscar–” you blinked at the form of Lando standing in the hall. Wearing a casual linen shirt and dress pants, jacket draped over one arm and he looked at you expectantly.

“Ready?” He asked.

You felt dumb as you continued to stare at him. Not expecting to see him so soon. Not thinking he’d even want to see you after yesterday’s mess. “What?”

He sighed lightly through his nose. “We’re going out for breakfast.”

“Why?”

There was a slight crease forming between his brows. “Do you not want to?”

You blinked again before reality finally caught up to you. “No, no. That’s fine. Just… let me get dressed.” You eyed him as you shut the door. He was acting weird.

It was nice.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

“What on earth are you doing?” His mother shouted over the sound of a power drill. Standing in the doorway with her arms crossed.

Lando looked at her for only a moment. Still cross with her after the kitchen incident a couple of weeks ago. He had yelled at her after he managed to get you into bed. Yelled at his whole family. The staff, for not telling him.

“She is the lady of the household and my wife. You do not touch her, you do not say a fucking word to her unless it’s praise.” He looked directly at his mother. “Understood?”

“I’m building a reading nook.” He finally said, standing back to look at his progress so far. He took you to the fabric store yesterday but you were beyond indecisive and he wasn’t sure the new couch went with the interior of his office.

He had been trying to go out more, just small places. When he found out you hadn’t left the house since you arrived he was confused and furious with Oscar. His friend and right hand had merely raised his hands in surrender, muttering how you had never wanted to go anywhere.

“Whatever for? Since when do you read for pleasure?” His mother asked, mostly teasing. Trying to weave her way back into his good graces. He doubted that would ever happen. He was on the verge of throwing her out but you managed to talk him out of it.

“It’s not for me.” Lando left it at that. Watching how his mother’s shoulders fell at the realisation and she turned away.

He smiled slightly to himself as he set up the couch, pushing it under the window so you could get good light and a nice view of the gardens. Plus, he could watch you more easily from his desk when he worked.

You looked pretty when you were reading.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

For the first time in months you were bored, and not in a bad way. Lando made sure there was always something for you to do when he wasn’t around. Part of you felt bad, following him around like a kicked puppy. But any time you’d start to back off, give him some space, it was like his hand blindly found yours, not even looking up from his work, tugging you back.

Muttering a quiet, “stay.”

You tried to ignore the butterflies that began fluttering in your stomach, chasing after whatever this was. You didn’t know why you felt stubborn over it. He was your husband after all, butterflies are supposed to be a good thing.

You took up cooking as a hobby, mostly different kinds of fresh pasta. Trying to keep your hands steady as Lando would walk behind you, fingers lightly dragging along the small over your back. Leaning over your shoulder, lips nearly brushing your neck as he quietly spoke, “that looks lovely.”

He always spoke so softly to you. His touch always delicate.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

Lando fixed his cuff links as he stood in the foyer, making sure his suit was wrinkle free in the large mirror. There was a big Christmas gala that night in London. A whole cluster of politicians, businessmen, philanthropists, etc. He didn’t have much of a role to play besides being seen, given his bookies did most of the under the table work.

When he’d asked you to go with him, you hesitated. He knew seeing your father was something you’d like to avoid. Over time you slowly opened up to him about how strained the relationship was.

He had lifted a hand to your cheek, gently brushing his knuckles along your cheekbones, watching in satisfaction as your pupils expanded at his touch. “I won't let him near you,” he whispered. Watching as you debated before eventually nodding, leaning slightly into his touch.

When he heard the sound of heels clicking sharply against marble flooring his eyes flicked up, watching you approach in the mirror. Looking like heaven in high heels. Your black dress fit you perfectly, the white fur shawl was draped lazily over your shoulders.

Lando felt his mouth go dry as he turned, his heartbeat pounding in his ears as you approached. The sweet smell of your perfume swirling around him, making him feel hazy.

God, if you knew what you did to him.

It seemed like every night now that he dreamt of kissing you, doing a whole list of unruly things. Despite the ring on his hand and yours it still felt off limits. Not feeling sure of what you actually wanted.

“Ready?” You asked, a small smile playing on your lips.

He blinked at you, still in a daze. “What?”

You bit your lip, holding back a laugh and he felt his stomach pool.

“The gala. Yes, right.” He cleared his throat, not thinking twice as he took your hand. “Let’s go.”

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

You felt all the eyes on you as he took you around the dance floor. The whispers. Lando Norris’ wife who he liked to keep hidden away. Apparently most people hadn’t even known he was married. They thought you were just a new date till they saw the blinding diamond on your finger and his matching gold one.

You felt stiff. Too perceived.

But he lightly took hold of your chin between his fingers, making you look at him.

“It’s just you and me, love.”

Love. You felt equally reassured and nauseous.

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

Lando was using every excuse he could to touch you. Hand splaying on the small of your back where your dress dipped low. Fingers lightly brushing the back of your neck as he talked to the other guests. Hand on your thigh beneath the table. When he’d first done it you jumped slightly and his heart skipped a beat when you looked at him, eyes low, before turning away again and taking a sip of your wine.

He couldn’t help it as his lips pulled back slightly when he began to rub circles with his thumb, feeling the muscles of your leg tighten. But you leaned toward him, an invitation. He felt more drunk off of you than any wine he had been drinking.

He’d only see glimpses of your father. Lingering to the side of the ballroom walls. Whispering in corners with other greedy men. His eyes always on you, though.

Lando didn’t like it. Then again he never liked anything enough for that to be a fair test. But he knew never to ignore his intuition, so he took your hand in his and tugged you along until you were outside, the cold December air twirling around them.

You shivered as you waited for the valet to pull his McLaren around, blushing a bit when he draped his jacket over your shoulders. Or maybe it was just the wind, he wasn’t sure. But he’d liked to think he made you flustered.

The engine purred as he drove away, feeling your eyes on him as city lights flicked back.

“Why’d we leave early?” You finally asked.

His grip adjusted on the steering heel, looking in the rearview mirror, always vigilant. He hadn’t realised till now that going public made you a target. Made him vulnerable.

“Just wanted to,” is all he offered. Not wanting to scare you. He knew you already had a difficult time adjusting to his world. Then again he shouldn’t cut you any credit. Growing up with your father couldn’t have been any easier.

You hummed, not believing him. Your eyes finally pulled away to stare out the window. Letting him relax. It was strange, having somebody for the first time see him. The thought was equally relieving and terrifying.

When they pulled up to the house the car fell quiet, a heavy silence falling over like a blanket. He wanted to say more to you, but what? This was all new territory and the thought of messing up this bridge he’d built—

“Lando.”

He turned, looking at you as moonlight painted your skin through the window.

You reached forward, hand taking his, “I know you’ll keep me safe.” Another pause and you played with his wedding ring. “I trust you.”

୧‿̩͙ ˖︵ ꕀ⠀ ♱⠀ ꕀ ︵˖ ‿̩͙୨

A loud thud woke you up, your heart beating erratically as your door handle began to move. Thankful that you had locked it but fear was still crawling up your spine. You were just about to reach for your phone to call someone for help when a ragged voice poured out from the other side, weakly saying your name. The sound of a body slumping to the floor.

Lando.

You quickly tore off the sheets, stumbling a bit in the dark and you yanked your door open. A hand flying up to your mouth as you took in the state of him. Bruised and slick with blood, one arm wrapped around his rib cage, his breath rattling.

His eyes cracked open, gleaming in the low lamp light of the hall. His lips pulling back in a bloodied grin.

“Hello, darling.”

“Oh my god,” you did your best to get him up, almost falling under his weight as you maneuvered him to your bathroom. “What happened?”

Your heart lurched as Lando coughed, turning his head to spit out some blood into the bin and he sat himself up on the sink. Wincing as he did so. Not answering you.

“Lando,” you said quietly, afraid that even loud noises would hurt him and you gently took hold of his face in your hands. Not caring blood and dirt would get on them. Gently running your thumbs along his cheek bones.

He seemed to melt into you, letting his head fall forward and rest against yours as you brushed the damp curls back. Seeing him like this was a new kind of pain you never wanted to experience again.

“Who did this to you?” Although your voice was gentle, there was a layer of conviction under it that even surprised you.

He sighed, a wheeze coming up from the back of his throat and his hands came up to hold onto your wrists. You didn’t miss his cracked and bleeding knuckles.

“I have a duty of care,” he muttered.

Your father. You felt like throwing up.

Gently pulling his head forward, you held him to you. Letting his heartbeat bring some life back into you. He was okay. He was here. He came back to you. Everything would be fine.

Slowly, Lando’s arms wrapped around you, holding you as tight as he could.

“I’m going to kill him,” you mumbled into his hair and he laughed, not caring that it hurt.

He leaned his head back slightly, eyes flicking between your own and your lips. His hand that had snaked up to the back of your neck pulling you in slightly. Hesitant. Then all at once.

Mouths colliding, a kiss that felt like a tuning fork struck against a star.

His fingers twined in your hair and you tried to be gentle with him. As much as you could. But the feeling of finally was making you feel weightless. Reckless. Desperate as he held you tighter.

You felt high as he whispered the words my wife between kisses.

“So much for a marriage of convenience,” you managed after you pulled away. You didn’t want to, but he needed your help.

He smiled again, those dimples you loved so much deepening in his cheeks. “Nah,” he said lightly. “I think this will be a marriage of inconvenience.”

And he kissed you again.

taglist: @theonottsbxtch @fortunapre @c8lap1nto @ashbone

[musicforastylesrestaurant]

Run Baby, Run.

masterlist || ask me anything <3

my blurb masterlist is here!

authors note - seeing harry run a marathon just made him ten times hotter for some reason. 😫

word count - 1.4k

in which, harry is running the 2025 tokyo marathon, and who better to cheer him on than his fiance and little boy.

The air is crisp, the kind that clings to your skin but isn’t unpleasant. The streets of Tokyo hum with anticipation, the crowd thick with strangers who have all gathered for the same reason.

The hum of the crowd rises and falls around you, a mix of excited chatter and the occasional announcement over the loudspeakers.

Your fingers tighten around the handle of the stroller, your two-year-old nestled inside, bundled in a soft jacket despite the mild weather. His tiny legs kick idly, hands clutching a half-eaten rice cracker as his big eyes dart around and then back to the iPad hooked onto the front of the bar securing him in place, before his eyes then shift back to the sea of runners.

He doesn’t fully understand what’s happening,

Only that daddy’s going to be running a very, very long race.

You crouch beside the stroller, adjusting the blanket draped loosely over your son’s lap. He shifts in his seat, kicking his little legs, the hand that’s not holding the cracker is clutching his favorite stuffed bunny, its fur worn from love.

His dark curls peek out from under his hood, and he looks at you with wide, eager eyes.

The race started around an hour ago, and your stood at the halfway mark, and your son had been okay so far, (supplying him with snacks was the way to go).

The halfway mark was where you told Harry you’d be, and then towards the finish line.

“Bluey go zoo,” he announces, eyes locking on the iPad (something had to keep him entertained) nodding firmly, as if this is the most important thing in the world.

You smile, pressing your lips together to keep from laughing. “Oh yeah?”

“Yuh,” he says, chewing his snack between words.

“Bluey see big ‘affe. Giraffe eat leafs.” His little fingers pinch at the air, mimicking the long neck stretching up. “And lion go—RAAHH!”

He throws his arms up dramatically, startling a woman standing nearby, who chuckles as she steps aside.

You grin, reaching to brush a few crumbs from his jacket.

“You’ve been watching that episode a lot, haven’t you?” you murmur, tucking the blanket around him a little tighter.

“Uh-huh,” he says through a mouthful, then pauses, his face screwing up in thought. “I wan’ see ‘affe too.”

“We’ll see if we can find one later, buddy,” you say softly, but your voice trails off as something shifts in the atmosphere around you.

The twenty minutes that follow stretch and fold in on themselves, time both fleeting and endless. Your son chatters on, switching topics with the rapid, boundless energy of a toddler—Bluey, then trucks, then something about a bird he saw earlier that morning. His little hands gesture wildly as he speaks, his face lighting up with each new thought.

You nod along, your attention split between him and the shifting sea of runners passing by. Every so often, a wave of cheers erupts from the crowd as clusters of athletes surge forward, their rhythmic footfalls pounding against the pavement. You scan their faces, searching, waiting.

And then, finally, you see him.

A familiar figure weaves through the pack, his stride steady but powerful. Sunglasses shield his eyes, but you don’t need to see them to know the determination etched into his features. A white bandana is tied securely around his head, keeping his curls from falling into his face.

Even from a distance, you recognize the way his arms move, the slight furrow in his brow as he focuses on his breathing.

Your heart tightens, pride swelling in your chest.

Without thinking, you unbuckle your son from the stroller, lifting him onto your hip so he can see. He clings to you, his little hands pressing against your shoulder as his wide eyes scan the crowd of runners.

And then—he spots him.

“Daddy!” he yells, his voice bright and excited, cutting through the noise.

A few heads turn, but it doesn’t matter, because Harry hears him.

His head snaps to the side, his pace faltering just slightly before he spots you both at the barrier. His lips part, his breath catching, and for a moment, he just stares—his expression shifting from surprise to something softer, something deeper.

You smile, calling his name, your free hand lifting to wave.

Harry doesn’t hesitate. He veers toward you, breaking from his rhythm as he jogs over, his hands pressing against the barrier to steady himself. His chest rises and falls with heavy breaths, but it’s not just the run that has him breathless.

It’s you.

It’s your son.

It’s the sight of the two of you standing there, waiting for him.

Cheering you on.

“Hi, my loves,” he manages, voice thick with emotion, sweat glistening along his temples. His eyes flicker between you and the small boy in your arms, whose hands are now reaching out eagerly. “Oh, buddy, look at you.”

“Daddy runnin’!” your son exclaims, bouncing slightly against your hip. “Go fast, Daddy!”

Harry lets out a breathless laugh, his dimples appearing even as his bottom lip quivers just slightly. He reaches forward, brushing his fingertips over your son’s curls before cupping the back of his head, pressing a quick kiss there. “M’trying, bub. Doin’ my best.”

You stretch your hand out, fingers brushing his damp forearm.

“You’re doing amazing,” you tell him softly, and the way his shoulders drop just slightly lets you know he needed to hear it.

His gaze locks onto yours, something unspoken passing between you. He swallows hard. “Love you.”

You squeeze his arm. “Love you more.”

A voice over the loudspeaker reminds the runners to keep moving, and Harry exhales, nodding. He straightens up, rolling his shoulders back.

“Alright,” he says, mostly to himself, steeling his focus. “I’ll see you at the finish line, yeah?”

Your son wiggles excitedly in your arms. “Win, Daddy!”

Harry grins, shaking his head fondly. “I’ll try, little man.” He presses one last lingering glance at you before he steps back, blending once again into the sea of runners.

You press another kiss to his lips and murmur. “—run baby, run!”

You watch him go, your heart swelling with a mix of pride, love, and anticipation. And as your son settles back against you, resting his head on your shoulder, you whisper, more to yourself than to him—

“He’s got this.”

🏃🏃🏃🏃

He shifts restlessly in your arms, rubbing at his tired eyes with balled-up fists but refusing to settle.

“Wan’ Daddy,” he mumbles, his head heavy against your shoulder.

“I know, baby,” you murmur, swaying gently as you maneuver through the crowd. “He’s almost here. Just a little longer.”

You glance at the tracking app on your phone, your heartbeat kicking up as the little dot moves closer and closer to your location.

Two minutes.

Your breath catches as you press up against the barrier, shifting your son slightly so he can see the runners approaching in the distance. The energy is electric here—cheers erupting as each runner crosses the finish line, the collective exhilaration tangible in the air. But your world narrows to a single focus.

And then, through the blur of movement, you see him.

Harry’s strides are strong, his form steady despite the miles he’s endured. His bandana is damp with sweat, his sunglasses pushed up onto his head now, revealing the exhaustion in his eyes—but when he spots you, when he sees the small, sleepy figure in your arms, something shifts. His expression softens, his pace quickens.

You don’t even have time to react before he veers off course, heading straight for you.

“Here, give ‘im to me,” he breathes out, his voice raspy from exertion as he reaches for your son.

You hesitate. “Harry, you’re exhausted—”

“Please,” he says, and that’s all it takes.

Carefully, you pass your son into his waiting arms. As soon as Harry holds him, the little boy sighs, nestling instinctively against his chest, his tiny fingers curling into the damp fabric of Harry’s shirt.

“Daddy,” he mumbles sleepily.

Harry exhales shakily, pressing a kiss to the top of his curls. “Hey, bub. You waited for me, huh?”

You swipe at the tear pricking your eye, your heart clenching at the sight of them.

Harry turns back toward the finish line, adjusting his grip on the small, drowsy weight in his arms. He grins, breathless but determined. “Alright, let’s do this together, yeah?”

And then, with your son tucked safely against him, he runs the last few steps.

The crowd erupts as they cross the finish line, the cameras flashing, the cheers deafening—but all Harry cares about is the little boy in his arms and the person waiting for him just beyond the barrier.

And as he finally stops, as he leans forward to press his forehead against yours, his voice is thick with emotion when he whispers,

“We did it.”

[m1ckeyb3rry]

Series Synopsis: When the husband you’ve never met returns from the war you’ve never understood, he comes bearing a strange and inexplicable gift — a prince in chains who he refuses to kill.

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Mydei x F!Reader

Chapter Word Count: 10.2k

Content Warnings: pls check the masterlist there is. a lot. and i’m not retyping all of that LOL

A/N: I AM SOO SCARED TO POST THIS NGL LMAOAO like i said in the warnings i literally. have not played amphoreus yet. idek anything about mydei SDKJH i am so worried i will disappoint everyone who's expressed interest in reading this HAHA i was also. not expecting anyone to do that tbh. BUT thank you all for your kind words on the masterlist and i hope this lives up to expectations at least a bit!!

You spent the day of your wedding with a man made of marble — a stand-in for your new husband, who was off fighting in a war of the kind which had neither cause nor, seemingly, end. The statue was carved in his image and sneered down at you as you whispered to it, swearing vows of duty and obedience and docility, but, in spite or maybe because of its detached lifelessness, you found its presence to be a kindness. What did it say of your husband, that you preferred the company of that dead stone to him? Perhaps very much, or perhaps very little. 

He is a generous man, the servants assured you, giggling amongst themselves, exchanging knowing looks as they dragged you into the foreign palace where you would spend the rest of your days. You will want for nothing.

It was draftier than your home, the wind bouncing off of the white walls and nipping at you skin. You spent your time buried under seven-and-twenty layers of furs and fabrics, lying in an unfamiliar bed and flinching away from the shadows upon the ceiling. This was an idle and dull way to waste away your existence, and yet you could not bring yourself to do anything else, trapped in the mire of waiting and waiting for your husband’s return.

He came back in the third month, which was as auspicious as anything. They loved that number here, you had come to find: three, the symbol of fortune and fate, of magic and mischief, of power and punishment. Three vows sworn; three blessings granted; three months passed before you finally met the man you had married.

There was much fanfare about his arrival. When you peered out of the window, you saw that the streets were stuffed to the bursting with throngs of people shoving one another around, hissing and biting as they craned their necks. At first it surprised you — was he truly so loved here, even when he was elsewhere despised? — but then you realized that it was not your husband upon his charger that they were all lined up to meet. Rather, it was the procession following him which captured their interests, the spoils of war which he displayed with a juvenile, worthless pride.

A triad of elephants covered in finely wrought armor, their heads hung low and resigned, their plodding walks spiritless and lame. A herd of sheep with silver wool, dotting the dark cobblestones like a cluster of stars, stumbling along at the prodding of a soldier-turned-shepherd. A wagon filled with spears and swords, ostensibly once neatly stacked, now a matted mess of steel and bronze. Vases carried in the arms of the younger men, overflowing with coins that trailed after them like breadcrumbs, snatched up by the most daring of the onlookers, who did not fear rebuke. And, finally, in a place so honorable it could only have been mocking—

“Lady,” a soft voice said. You drew your coat tighter around you, although today was, by all accounts, warm for the season, and pretended like you did not hear the girl. She sighed and then tugged on your arm insistently; perhaps it was improper, but there wasn’t anyone who would chide her for it. “You have been summoned by his majesty.”

Hadn’t you known this would happen eventually? Hadn’t you expected it? You had had your time to come to terms with it, which was more than most got, and so there was no excuse for the reluctance which choked your throat and stilled your footsteps. This was your duty, this was what you had sworn, and so — and so you could not hesitate.

“Lady…” the girl said with another sigh. You pretended to be all-consumed with the action of closing the curtains, your back to her as you struggled to force a smile onto your face. When you deemed your expression acceptable, you spun around and nodded at her.

“It will not do to keep him waiting,” you said, motioning for her to lead the way. She did so without complaint, perhaps relieved that you were not giving her further trouble; even now, the servants did not know what to think of you, could not quite fathom what category of being you were. Some were fond of you, but most treated you with a careful distrust that you could not blame them for, even though you sometimes wanted to.

The grand entrance hall of the palace opened to the mouth of the road, which swelled out into a sprawling courtyard. Its centerpiece was an enormous fountain which sprayed a fine, cool mist into the air no matter the time of year, and it was by this fountain that you waited, wringing your hands as your husband drew nearer and nearer. Belatedly, you thought that you should try to conceal your distress, but there was nothing to be done about it now. The best you could do was say, if you were asked, that it was simply the joy of a bride faced with the prospect of a reunion with her beloved. Nobody would question that, although then again, nobody questioned you very much in general, so it was doubtful that you’d even have to use the quick excuse.

Your husband’s warhorse was a sprightly, slender beast, its coat the dappled grey of royalty, its face pretty and dished in the way of the Eastern breeds. When it paused in front of you, it shoved its black muzzle into your shoulder, nearly knocking you down, and then it stomped its hoof when your husband tightened the reins, pulling it back before dismounting and handing it off to a waiting stableboy. 

“My apologies, dear lady,” he said, bowing before you with as much gallantry as you had been told he possessed. His voice was gentle and amused, his face even more handsome in flesh than it had been in stone; you should’ve, by all rights, felt pleased. You were married to this man. You belonged to him. How many women wished to be in your place? Yet all you could muster was fear, throttling and all-consuming. He was beautiful in the way of a snake, and you knew without knowing that he was poised, in some way, to strike.

“It is alright,” you said, disguising the tremble of your voice with a broad, false grin. “I am glad to finally make your acquaintance…my lord.”

The address was unfamiliar on your tongue. What would your younger self, that girl who had never known subservience nor strife, say if she saw you ducking your head in defeated compliance? How she would laugh! How she would pity you! My lord. But he was exactly that.

“The sentiment is returned in full,” he said, and then he extended his arms in a grand, sweeping motion. “Indeed, to celebrate this momentous occasion, I have arranged for you a gift!”

“A gift?” you repeated. Certainly, you had asked for no such thing, and you did not have the time to school your face into neutrality, naked surprise flashing across it. Your husband chuckled at the sight, nodding at you.

“I have brought the finest of plunders for you, dear lady,” he said, and your stomach twisted into knots at the familiarity with which he spoke to you, as if you were affable lovers instead of strangers. “Even your father’s treasures, vast and bountiful as they may be, cannot compare to this!”

The mention of your father stabbed at your heart, and hidden in the folds of your coat, you clenched your fists. Your father, the richest man in the world…and yet your husband dared compare his meager gift to that? You wanted to spit in his face that for your third birthday, your father had gifted you a villa made of gold, the walls inlaid with gemstones and painted with flowers. Indeed, you might’ve goaded him in such a way if you had the capabilities, but then you noticed what the army-men were bringing forth and your mouth suddenly refused to move.

It was the prisoner, the one kept in a place of honor by your husband and his soldiers, the one who the entire empire had ridiculed as he had been paraded through it like a champion hound. He was tall, towering over the army-men flanking him, and although his eyes drooped nearly shut, there was a heat to his demeanor, a severe, ferocious anger which shone through his exhaustion. He seemed like more of a half-tamed jungle cat than a man, and indeed when he halted before you, you half-expected him to snarl, to bare bloody fangs and lunge at your throat with fingers like claws, like swords, tearing through your neck as if it were paper.

“When he’s like this, you almost forget what a monster he can be,” your husband mused, reaching out and flicking the man on the forehead with a snicker. “Isn’t he all but lovely? Oh, don’t worry, dear lady, he can’t do anything to you. He’s under the influence of a sleeping draught at the moment, and anyways, those chains are thrice-blessed. It’s perfectly safe.”

The chains he spoke of were as gold as the man’s hair, looping around his wrists and forearms, curling over the red marks emblazoned on his shimmering skin, weaving in between his legs and around his torso. They were sturdy and gleamed with the power of their three blessings, and although you still understood little about this strange place with its strange power, you could tell that it would take a great force, greater than was possessed by any mere man or deity, to break them.

“He’s the prince of Kremnos,” your husband said when your shock stretched on. “A right beast, I’ll say. We almost fell to his efforts, but in the end, we bested him — as you can see. What do you think? Do you like him?”

“He’s — it’s — horrible,” you said, your skin crawling the longer and longer you stared at the prince, your words a jumble, your head spinning. You wanted to be anywhere but in this courtyard, in front of this fallen man, who was kept alive for — for what? For amusement? For play? As a gift?

“Isn’t he?” your husband said, patting you on the shoulder with a grim smile. “And now he is yours.”

The thrice-blessed chains flashed in the sun, and you shook your head, both in refusal and to clear your vision of the blinding, searing spots they left in it.

“I have no need of a prisoner,” you said, and although your tone remained ever-muted, you spoke as cuttingly as you could manage to. “What will I do with him? Why do you torture him so? You bested him; if he was as fierce an opponent as you claim, then the least you owe him is a death with dignity. Kill him and be done with the matter. Why have you brought him all this way? I don’t want him.”

“He will die, eventually,” my husband said. “I shall execute him myself when it comes to it, but the time is not yet right. I don’t expect you to understand such matters, and neither should you trouble yourself with doing so…but know this, dear lady: you cannot give back a gift once it has been freely given. You can do what you’d like with him now that he is yours, but you cannot refuse him. Perhaps that is how affairs were conducted in your backwards land, but here it is not so.”

You wanted my land, you longed to say. You took me from my father and wed me to a statue in search of it. And still you call it backward? But you could not, so instead, you turned away — away from the prince, who was close to crumpling and only remained standing out of sheer will, and away from your husband, who beamed as if he had done something great or wonderful.

“I will retire now,” you said. Do not follow me. This remained implied, unsaid, but a fool your husband was not, and so he only hummed in agreement.

“Be well, dear lady,” he said. “My messengers have told me that you are having difficulties adjusting to the climate here. I shall be sure to pray for your feeble constitution.”

“Thank you, my lord,” you said, stiffly, primly. It scratched like bile and you hated every minute of it, but you had no recourse for the matter, so you swallowed it down, as you always did and always would.

“And what of the prisoner?” he said. “Shall I send him to a jail? Do you think he is better suited for deprivation or pain?”

They meant to make him shatter, to methodically yank him apart until he faced death with the dull eyes and swayed back of an over-aged broodmare. You supposed to them it was meaningless — why should they show consideration or kindness to a man who would never show them the same? — but you were no warmonger, and that apathy did not cling to you yet. The prince was a beast born of sun, a wild, vicious creature, and if he really was slated to die, then you wanted him to meet his end as just that, nothing less. 

“Leave him be,” you said. “Treat him as well as you are able.”

“He would’ve killed me,” your husband said, a low note of warning in his voice. You shrank into the safety of your clothes, as if they were a shield against his vexation.

“But instead you will kill him,” you said. “So how does it matter? You said I could do as I like; well, this is what pleases me. Don’t prolong this anymore than necessary.”

You darted back into the palace without waiting to hear his answer, your jaw burning and your footsteps heavy against the mosaic floor as you ran all of the way to your chambers and slammed the door shut behind you.

For three days and three nights you did not leave your room, taking all your meals in seclusion, refusing any visitors that might attempt entry. You could not help it; the thought of seeing your husband or any of the soldiers made you want to weep — you! Who never wept, even as a baby! So you claimed that you were terribly unwell, that you could not stand for fear of collapse, and that managed to ward away your husband without incurring his wrath, even though it was only a temporary solution.

As the sun set on the fourth day, there was a knock on your door, and you were about to call out that you had no interest in conversation when someone hissed through the crack in the entrance: “Lady, I come not on your husband’s behalf but another’s. There is trouble, and you must attend to it.”

“What?” you said, scrambling to your feet, crouching by the entrance, pressing your ear to the wooden door without opening it. “Who is this? Who are you? Speak plainly, so that we may understand one another!”

There was a shuffling sound, and then an exhale. You worried with the collar of your shirt as you waited for them to continue, your arms pulled tightly around yourself, your brows furrowing together as you chewed on your lower lip.

“The prince of Kremnos,” they whispered. “He calls for you.”

“Are they mistreating him?” you said, straightening and flinging the door open. “The prince, are they — hello?”

The hallway was devoid of life. You peered down it, craning your neck this way and that, but it was placid, showing no signs of having been disturbed. Shutting the door slowly, you leaned against it, holding your head in your hands. Was this place driving you to insanity, then? And if it was, then why could you not have thought of something more pleasant than summons from a prisoner — prisoner!

Wasn’t it your duty to make sure your husband had held good on his word? The prisoner was yours, though the notion of ownership sent unpleasant shivers down your spine and didn’t feel quite right — perhaps a better way to think of it, then, was responsibility. He was your responsibility, and maybe the strange vision had been nothing more than a reminder of what you owed the man.

You waited until it was midnight, when you could be certain that your husband would not rise from his slumber at the sound of your activity, and then you donned a pair of slippers and a cloak, throwing the hood on and retreating into the billowing depths of the fabric, so that your face was obscured from prying eyes. Of course, there would not be very many of those, not at such a late hour, but you did not want to risk even one person recognizing you and reporting back to your husband, whose reaction to this escapade you could not foretell.

Although you were not so familiar with the palace’s layout, as you had never spent much time exploring it, most constructions of this nature followed a similar plan, and you had grown up in exactly such a grand, sweeping home, so you found the doorway to the cellar in record time. As the palace had no towers, the cellar was the only logical option for the keeping of such a dangerous prisoner, and you had no doubt in your mind that this was where you would find the prince, if he was still somewhere that you could find him.

The half-moon was your only witness as you fumbled with the lock, trying every key in your possession until one finally slotted into place and turned. Wincing as the door heaved open with a profound creak, you yanked it shut behind you quickly, without ceremony, lighting a small candle and using it to guide your way down the dark stairs, rushing so that you were out of sight in case someone came to investigate.

You did not know how long you walked for, but eventually the stairway ended, giving way to cool, damp earth. The must of uncut stone permeated the thick, heavy air, and the adjustment of your eyes to the surrounding blackness was slow, the pain of it only alleviated somewhat by the little candle’s valiant flame.

“Come to toss scraps at me?” The voice was rumbling and low; in spite of its weakness, you could hear a sneer in it, a disdain in the rough baritone. “You needn’t try again. Like I told you, I won’t eat your trash.”

“No,” you said. “I’ve brought nothing with me.”

There was a brief pause, and then: “You sound different than the others.”

“This tongue is foreign to me, as it is to you,” you said. “I cannot speak it in the same way as those who were born here. Verily I have been instructed in the art since I was but a child, for my father must have known in that manner of his what would eventually become of me, but I will never lay claim to it the way that a native of this empire would.”

“You’re his wife.” Chains clanked, the harsh drag of metal against stone reverberating in the cellar, and then you felt more than saw his looming countenance, filling what you had mistakenly believed upon arrival to be an empty room. Swinging your candle before you so that it was close to your heart, you gasped when it reflected in a pair of eyes glaring at you from mere paces away, the irises possessing a hollow and impossible brilliance in the way a pair of fading embers might. 

The chains now only encircled his left leg, binding him to the wall but leaving him otherwise free to move as he liked within the length of his confines. He had been stripped of armament and adornment alike, his mane of hair tangled and falling lank about his broad shoulders, yet for all of these injustices, you had no doubt in your mind that he was anything but a prince. He had a dignity to him, a hard-won pride to the straightness of his back and the firmness of his gaze; before you could chase it away, the thought came to you that there was far more intrinsic nobility to this man than there was even your husband.

“I suppose that I am,” you said.

“Have you come to gloat about your craven lord’s cowardly victory, then?” he said. The chains were pulled taut, so he could come no closer to you than he already was — you were sure of this, but you were still a slave to your instincts, which urged you farther and farther from him with every second. He watched you go with some measure of delight, like he was relishing in this power which you had inadvertently gifted him, and when you skittered to a stop, he huffed. “There is nothing to be proud of, and you look a fool for suggesting there might be.”

“I was just…” you trailed off, because it suddenly felt entirely absurd to suggest that you were inquiring after his wellbeing. What did it mean, the wellbeing of a doomed man? What reason would he have to believe your intentions? “What is your name?”

“My name?” he said with a brittle, incredulous laugh that rapidly descended into a cough. “Why? Do you wish to curse your husband with it? Does your language not have gods you can swear on?”

“You’re sickly,” you said, frowning and ignoring his jabs.

“You have torn me from the sun and chained me in this dingy room, and yet you have the gall to be surprised by that?” he said, scoffing. “You’re more of an idiot than that husband of yours.”

“I did no such thing!” you said. The defiance took you by surprise. You had forgotten what it felt like to defy someone, to disagree and resist their words, to feel alive with resentment and bad-temper. “I didn’t wish for this. I didn’t wish to keep you here anymore than you wished to be kept!”

“Is that so?” he said, and then he grinned at you, but it was less of a smile and more of a threat. “Then free me.”

“What?” you said.

“If you don’t want me, then free me,” he said.

“You’ll kill me if I do,” you said uneasily, shifting from foot to foot. 

“I give you my word that I will spare you,” he said, placing a solemn hand over his heart. 

“Not the others?” you said.

He did not respond, which in and of itself was a response. It was one you shouldn’t have liked as much as you did, but in truth the prospect of such a slaughter made your fingers twitch towards him. Only for a moment, and immediately, you shoved your hands behind your back, but it was too late — he had seen, and he raised his eyebrows at you in return.

“Well, anyways, it doesn’t matter,” you said hastily, hoping to distract him before he could comment on the treason. “I couldn’t free you even if I wanted to. Your chains are thrice-blessed. I didn’t know what that meant until recently, but now that I do, I understand why you have been kept without even a permanent guard.”

“Blessings,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t tell me you put genuine stock into that drivel.”

“Perhaps the gods of other lands have forsaken their subjects, but this empire is known as the birthplace of every divine act, and so deities still sometimes glance upon its people and offer up their favor. Thrice-blessed chains are one such offering, for they are in fact more like contracts than they truly are chains,” you said. When he did not interrupt you with any snide remarks, you were emboldened to continue. “They can restrain anything, even a god, but this strength comes at a cost: they are conditional. If their captive can understand this condition and meet it, they will crumble into dust, but until then, the chains remain unbreakable.”

“What is it?” he said insistently, reaching out his hands like he was going to grab you and shake the answer out. He fell short, grasping at empty air, his muscles straining against the chains which, true to legend, did not falter. “This condition. Whatever it is, I will do it. You only need to tell me and I will do it!”

“I don’t know,” you said. His lip curled, and you shook your head frantically. “No, no, I’m telling you the truth, I really don’t know! Only the wielder and the gods he prayed to can know for certain. The conditions are decided arbitrarily, without trend or reason. It could be anything from singing a song to moving a mountain! At least, that’s what I’ve gathered from the little I’ve read on the topic.”

“The wielder — your husband, then? That’s easy enough. Bid him to tell you, and then relay to me his answer,” he said.

“Easy enough? Not in the slightest. He would just as soon do your bidding as he would mine,” you said. The prince squinted at you, and evidently he must’ve determined that you were serious, for he broke into that awful laugh again, the one that must’ve once been handsome and full-bodied but now was little more than a rattling plea for air. 

“You are pitiful,” he said. “I thought that you must be some great, fearsome empress, as wicked as your husband, but you are just a frightened mouse of a girl. You would not survive a day in Kremnos, you know. It would crush you.”

Duty. Obedience. Docility. They were branded onto you, swirling letters that you had unwittingly carved into yourself with every wedding vow you spoke, and you could not escape them any more than the prince could escape his chains. If only you could argue with him, tell him that once upon a time, you had been someone unrecognizable from who you were now…but already, you had tested their limits. Your tongue was frozen in your mouth, refusing to move in anything but accordance with your oaths, and so you only clasped your hands together.

“If you say it is so, then it really must be the case,” you said. “Farewell, prince of Kremnos.”

“Farewell,” he said, but it was clear he did not mean it. “Dear lady.”

“Don’t call me that,” you said, recognizing the provocation for what it was. “You are not my husband, nor do I wish for you to be.”

“Then what should I refer to you as?” he said. “Your excellency? Your grace? Your most exalted highness? Your holiness, the saint of the realm?”

“Here, I am only known as lady,” you said quietly. “But I bore a different name before. I cannot…I cannot say it anymore, but if you ever come to know of it by other means, then please call me as such.”

Morning brought with it a freezing palm pressed to your brow. It startled you to consciousness both because of its temperature and its temerity, for you could not fathom who had dared to enter your room without your permission, and while you were asleep, at that! In the haze of your sleep-addled mind, a rebuke rose to your lips, but then someone clicked their tongue and you fell silent even as you clambered to a more alert state.

“Your fever has finally broken, dear lady! You do not know how overjoyed I am to hear it,” your husband said, helping you into a sitting position, one hand cradling the back of your neck and the other holding up a glass. You blinked, trying to clear the fog from your vision, swallowing down the water he poured down your throat without objection.

“Fever?” you said.

“The ailment you have been suffering from,” he said. “I was told it was a fever of some sorts. I bore it quietly, the prospect of your malaise, but today I could not stop myself from checking on you. I had some dreams of playing the nurse, but here you are, entirely well! Such a miraculous recovery.”

His grandiose words masked suspicion with affection, but he did not make any further accusations, for just as you had sworn to heed him, so too had he promised to trust you. His vows had been made to a portrait of yours, as well as written in pig’s-blood and sent to you in a sealed envelope. You could recall them with perfect clarity, the way the stench of iron clung to the parchment as you unfolded it and rang your fingers over the lines, which were grouped in stanzas of three. 

Trust. Favor. Companionship.

You spent the entire day with your husband, although you had neither the desire nor the will for it. You hardly ever had the desire or the will to do anything, of course, not nowadays, but this was the worst of all, because your husband was not just a reminder but the very reason for everything which had happened to you. Still, you could not refuse, so you trotted along at his side, motionless as he showed you off to his officers, his advisors, and even, at one point, his cousin, who could not be less interested in you if he tried.

“Brother,” he said boredly, for indeed he and your husband were the only children of their respective fathers, and so were more like siblings than anything, “you have better things to be doing than showing off a woman who doesn’t bear showing off in the first place.”

“Are you saying that she is somehow deficient?” your husband said, swelling up with righteous indignation. Anyone else might’ve lost their head for the statement, especially given how blandly he had said it, but his cousin was above reproach, being the only person he really loved.

“I’m saying that she looks ill with misery,” his cousin said, and then he sighed, returning to his book. “I’m not so sure the lady has recovered from her illness. You ought to be more cautious with her, that’s all.”

His cousin was younger and handsomer than he, and as the two of you walked away, you thought that you would not have minded marrying him as much. Though perhaps this was a paradox — after all, if he had taken you in the manner that your husband had, then you would have hated him, too. It was your lot in life, then; always you would detest whoever you wed, whoever stole your freedom in that way and bound you to them with the cruel ropes of matrimony.

The hall where you took your dinner was like an enormous cavern, so large that you felt like your voice might echo if you spoke. You and your husband were the only ones in it, which heightened the effect, and every clank of his silverware against his porcelain dishes resounded in your ears like discordant bells.

“My prisoner,” you said after a long time had passed wherein the two of you discussed nothing. Your voice was dry with disuse, and you pushed the food on your plate around without attempting to eat, although it was all appetizing and you were certainly hungry.

“What?” your husband said, covering his mouth with his hand as he chewed.

“My prisoner,” you said, clearing your throat but keeping your gaze trained firmly on your food. “The prince of Kremnos. Is he well?”

“You’re asking after his health?” your husband said with a chuckle. When you did not laugh or otherwise indicate that you were joking, he frowned at you. “You needn’t fret. As you requested, I am treating him as well as I am able. Far better than he deserves.”

The image of the prince, chained and kept in darkness, the only sound his persistent cough and unsteady breathing, given scraps for sustenance and mice for company, flashed across your mind. 

“I wish to see him,” you said. There was a warning in the back of your head — duty, obedience, docility — but you ignored it as best as you could, stabbing oversharp fingernails into your thighs, hard enough to draw blood and distract you from the dangerous line you tread. “My lord, I wish to see the prince and ensure that he is alright with my own eyes.”

At this your husband did not even pretend to humor you. He burst into a raucous fit of cackles, his fork and knife clattering to the table, his eyes watering at the corners. You waited for him to stop, picking your own cutlery up in vain before setting it down and folding your hands in your lap.

“No,” he said. “I am afraid that I cannot allow that, dear lady.”

“You cannot—” you began, but it was too much, you had stepped over that precarious boundary, and now you were frozen. Gulping, you counted to five before continuing. “He is mine. He is mine, you said it yourself, so why — can’t — I — see — him?”

Each word dug into you like gravel, and you knew that you had lost this argument before you could even attempt to have it. How could you ever win? When you had sworn thrice over that you would be tractable, how could you ever try to be anything else? Your intentions did not matter as much as the execution, not to the number three and the power it lent this empire.

“How obstinate,” your husband said, appraising you with a new eye. “I am sorry, dear lady, but as my cousin said, you are still weak. It will do you no good to be faced with such a base creature. You can see him again on the day of his execution.”

“Yes,” you said through gritted teeth, which was not as much as you wanted to do but was as much as you could, at present, manage. “Might I be excused?”

“Excused? You haven’t eaten anything,” he said, pointing at your plate. True to his word, it was untouched, and you picked it up, holding it close to your chest as you stood. 

“My stomach is protesting,” you said. “I will take it to my room and eat it later. If it pleases you.”

“Very well,” he said, waving at you. “I shall pray for your health, dear lady. Sleep as late as you’d like tomorrow, but once you are awake, I implore you to join me in my preparations. There is a grand celebration in the afternoon, as a marker of our victory against Kremnos, and I have been summoned to speak; if you could muster some words as well, it might hearten the people and warm them to you.”

“Yes, my lord,” you said. “I shall think of something.”

“See to it that you do,” he said, watching you with an unreadable expression on his face as you left, your footsteps growing faster and faster until you were all but racing to your room, your head spinning and palms clammy like you had gotten away with some great crime. 

Tonight, there were no strange voices beckoning you, but that did not stop you from staying awake far past the moon’s rise, waiting until it hung over the clocktower before picking your way back to the cellar, your heart pounding as you crept back down those dark, endless stairs, an actual lantern in one hand and your plate in the other.

The prince was still there. You had half-expected him to have disappeared, to have turned out to be some figment of your imagination, but he was leaning against the wall, his arms folded over his chest and his lips pursed as he watched the light of your lantern approach. When he realized it was you, his eyes narrowed, and he tucked his chin to his chest in what you could only assume was a stubborn display of the meager strength he had left.

“I brought food for you,” you said, setting the lantern on the last stair and presenting the plate before you. “Please eat it.”

“What do you think I am?” he said. “Some kind of a dog, such that I am eager for  you to foist your refuse on me? Hardly. Take it and leave me at once.”

“You’ll waste away,” you said. “You are only doing yourself a disservice! This is my own dinner, which I have gone without so that I could bring it to you. Does that make it easier to stomach?”

“Shall I sit on the floor, then, and eat it with my hands?” he said with a disparaging smile. “Will that amuse you? Is that why you’ve come? I heard your husband, you know. ‘Do what you’d like with him now that he is yours.’ How joyless your life must be, to think that this is what you entertain yourself with!”

“It is joyless,” you bit back, and your eyes widened at the freedom of the declaration. “It is! But you are not my — you are not some kind of amusement, I resent that you — I even spoke against my husband for you, and you say that! Fine, then. Starve, you thoughtless simpleton! Starve and die for all the good it’ll do me!”

You turned on your heel and stomped towards the stairs with the graceless irascibility of a child, not even sparing a glance over your shoulder at the prince. He was quiet, but you knew from the heavy weight of his stare on your back that there was something like turmoil brewing in his mind, a turmoil which weakened your resolve with every step you took away from him.

It was to your credit that you made it all of the way to where the lantern was sitting before you wavered, your stride shortening until you halted in place. Scrunching up your face, wondering when you had developed this love for punishment, for strife and conflict, you allowed your shoulders to sag in acceptance.

“Dispose of this before anyone comes to see you,” you said, shoving the plate into his hands before he could protest. “I suppose it matters little how you do it, but you must, or else I will be convicted of treason, and where will that leave us? Imprisoned side by side and left to rot together.”

He did not respond until you were almost out of earshot entirely, and then he coughed. You could not tell whether it was to capture your attention or to clear his voice of any residual hesitance; regardless, he accomplished both objectives, as you lingered for a moment longer than you would’ve.

“Ten,” he said. “That’s how many times I could’ve killed you in the time you’ve been here. But I—”

You continued walking before you could hear the rest of it.

You woke up the next day in better spirits than you had in some time, and in fact when a servant announced that you had a visitor, you opened the door with a new vigor. Upon realizing that the man in front of you was not your husband but rather his cousin, you thought that you might die from the glee of it all. Taking his arm, you allowed him to escort you to where the imperial contingent was setting up for the festival, at a grand stage which took up most of the square and was already laden with visitors at its base.

“It is a relief to see you recovering so well,” your husband’s cousin said. “The rumors in the palace are that you’ve contracted some illness of the chronic variety; in truth I believed them, especially after our meeting yesterday, but today I see that you have been revitalized. Did you rest well last night, then? I heard that you did not eat your dinner, but you must’ve taken it in your room, yes?”

You had done neither of those things, and his questioning did make you pause. What was the cause of your good mood? You had gone to sleep for only a short time, without much of anything in your stomach, and your situation had not improved any, so why did you feel, even if only marginally, as if you were something like yourself again?

“I suppose it must be something like love,” he mused, without waiting for your answer. 

“Ah, pardon?” you said, startled from the winding turns and byways of your thoughts at the strange declaration.

“To think that even a day in your husband’s presence has cured you to such an extent,” he explained. “Surely it is love? I cannot think of any other name for it…but I apologize! It is not my place to inquire, nor to speculate. I trust you will not tell my cousin about this?”

He had, in the taken-aback blink of your eyes and the pinch of your brow, found what he was seeking: a demure shyness which he could only comprehend as a lack of affection. You knew, then, that you had passed the test of the man, who had not believed any more than your husband that you were truly ill.

“I will take your leave,” he said, and then his palm clamped down on your shoulder. “But I trust you know this: however much you may love your husband, he is a difficult man to be loved by in return. If ever you are in search of solace…there are places you may turn to, dear lady.”

“What did he say to you?” your husband said, appearing at your side with his expression arranged into something like a frown. “I could not hear. Was he bothering you? I am sorry if he was. He has always been headstrong.”

“He was not bothering me,” you said, incapable of lying to your husband with any great skill but remaining certain that it was absolutely imperative you did not divulge his cousin’s secrets to him. “We spoke as family members might.”

If he recognized your evasive language, he did not comment on it. Instead, he stroked his chin in thought, and then he directed his attention towards the stage, where one of his generals was beckoning him — and, by extension, you.

The sun hung high in the sky as you ascended to the podium, though its rays did not dare touch you, disguised in your husband’s shadow as you were. Your vows tied more than your tongue, after all; your entire being, everything but your heart and your mind, were trained and twisted into the picture of submission, and soon those, too, would fall, leaving you a husk which could do nothing but nod and follow along.

Your husband did not need to start with any address. His mere presence was enough to silence the gathered empire, every single onlooker leaning towards the stage in eager anticipation of his words. From your vantage point, it was like the swell of a tide, crushing and suffocating, inescapable in its overwhelming intensity, but where you withdrew, your husband brightened at the weight, lifting his head and squaring his shoulders.

“Mydeimos,” he said, over-enunciating every syllable. The word, unfamiliar and foreign to your ears, had a rhythmic, marching cadence, more suited to a battle-cry than a formal declaration, and it seemed you were not alone in your thinking, for it had all the effect of one on the crowd.

A heckling clamor burst from them, the individual words indecipherable but for brief snippets. Demon. Monster. Warmonger. Kill. Curse. Blood. Kill. Kill. Kill! Your husband waited for them to quiet of their own volition, and only then did he venture to continue, this time with a wide, beaming grin.

“Mydeimos has fallen. The prince of terrors is no more!” he shouted, raising his fist in the air to thunderous applause. “Without him to lead the army, Kremnos will surely follow suit. Their lands will be ours within the year, of this much I assure you! Our empire will soon be the most prosperous in all the world. Even the great lands of the Southern Sea will pale in comparison!”

Your heart twinged at the mention of the Southern Sea. You could envision it even now, the streaks of salt left on the cliffs where the water lapped at them, the ripples in the placid blue where the balmy winds skimmed along the surface, the moon-white sand as it clung to the crevices of your feet and hands.

When you were younger, your father would take you on his boat and dip his fingers into it, urging you to do the same. You would ask him why and he would answer, always with a laugh or a smile: of all the jewels in my treasury, my darling, the Southern Sea is the second-loveliest. Then you would ask him which could be the first, if even the sea was not its equal, and he’d press his damp hands to your cheeks and kiss your hair and say you, my darling, you and only you.

“What a horrible thing he was,” your husband said. “Mydeimos. That wretched excuse of a man…the world is all the better now that he is locked away. I watched him — watched him, good citizens, with my own eyes — tear out a man’s heart with naught but his nails and teeth! Even now I can imagine it…the tips of his canines dark with pierced flesh…bits of entrails coating his fingers…the heart still beating in his palms…he looked the proper part of a devil, and I was certain that I had died and found damnation!

“But as I said, he is no more. Our army prevailed, as we always have, and as we always will; I made Mydeimos beg for mercy with my sword at his throat and my foot upon his inhuman heart, and then I dragged him back so that all of you could see what he has been relegated to — a chained puppy, given to my dear lady as a pet and kept as a servant until the day of his execution.

“For the surest way to kill a Kremnoan is to destroy their pride, and the prince of terrors has more pride than most, so we must endeavor to strip him of it, systematically and fastidiously, until even a child can cut him down!”

Your husband concluded his speech and pulled you forward simultaneously, with a great flourish which invited praise and drew attention to you both. You swallowed, your mind racing at breakneck speed, far too quickly for you to make any sense of the things you were saying until you were saying them.

“I have not seen the prince of Kremnos — Mydeimos — since the day that he was brought to me,” you said. The applause that had begun faded as soon as the soft words sparkled into existence, and the many eyes of the audience blurred together until you could pretend like you were alone, like you were speaking to nothing but small, bright stones reflecting your own sentiments. “But as my lord husband said, he was proud. I feel as though I have never seen a man prouder. Even after his loss, he remained proud. Even with nothing else left, he clung to that pride, that assurance…I remember thinking to myself that it was, in its own way, admirable. That he was admirable.”

Your husband’s arm around your waist grew tighter with unspoken warning, though it needn’t have. You had said all that you wanted, all that you could, and now there was nothing left but the judgement of the collective.

“Lady!” someone shouted, the singular soul brave enough to speak. She was a woman — you wondered if this was what bolstered her confidence, a perceived kinship between the two of you for that fact alone. “Do you fear the prince?”

“No,” you said, and although you had meant it only as a vague and empty placation, you were surprised to find that it rang true. You were not afraid of him, and it wasn’t his chains or his infirmity which caused this emotion to surge in you; rather, it was what he had told you last night, that declaration he had made with the utmost of seriousness, which you had not even allowed him to complete. “I am not. He cannot harm me.”

You knew your words would be interpreted as faith in your husband and the empire, and furthermore that this misinterpretation would curry favor with your subjects and your lord alike, so you did nothing to correct it. Yet you would know, and would hold close to your heart the knowing, that it was not your husband who you held faith in: it was Mydeimos, the prince of Kremnos, who might’ve killed you ten times over but had instead let you live.

“You have much to improve in terms of your orating,” your husband said coldly as the three of you — him, his cousin, and yourself — returned to the palace.

“I thought her speech was excellent,” his cousin said, shooting you a sly smile behind his back. “Very concise, and of a good style. It’s a gift to be able to convey meaning so succinctly. You ought to nurture it.”

“She certainly conveyed a meaning,” your husband said. “It remains to be said what value that meaning truly holds.”

“Is that for you to decide? Ah, brother, don’t be a curmudgeon, I am only teasing you! You spent so much of our childhood poking fun at me, so how can you fault me for paying you back in kind?” his cousin said.

“You need some lessons in respect,” your husband said, but without any real bite behind it. His cousin snickered before sobering, shifting his weight toward you.

“Will you take your dinner in your chambers again, lady?” he said. You nodded.

“If it does not offend,” you said. 

“Do as you please,” your husband said. “Though I expect you’ll do that anyways, sworn to me or not. Isn’t that right, dear lady?”

You couldn’t think of any response which would be satisfactory, so you said nothing, allowing the two of them to escort you to your room, where you waited with bated breath until the night fell and you could return to the cellar.

The entire way down the stairs, you turned the name over in your mind, polishing it in the way waves polished driftwood, battering it with incessant worry until it shone, uncanny and unrecognizable. Mydeimos. Mydeimos. Mydeimos. The prince of terrors. The man who had torn a heart out with his teeth. What did it say of you, that you were making your way to exactly such a knave? With trepidation, of course, but what did it say that you were still doing it anyways? Perhaps very much, or perhaps very little.

“There is an odd pattern to your footsteps,” he said before you could even greet him. He stood as he always did, prepared for a battle that he would never again see. “Or perhaps it is your breathing, or something else entirely.”

“What do you mean?” you said, putting your lantern and the dinner down in the space between you both. “I walk and breathe as I always have, as others do.”

“I know you,” he said, disgust mingling with the barest traces of awe in his tone. “The door to this cellar opens frequently. All manner of men come to visit me, to mock me from their places at the bottom of the stairs, lambasting me from the safety of their distance. I recognize few, and  I remember fewer — nor do I have any great desire to — but when it is you, I know. From your very step, from the very creak of the door, I know. I cannot understand how or why, but I know.”

“My husband told me your name,” you said after a pause, when it became clear he was not expecting a reaction from you. Motioning towards the food in a gesture you hoped he took to kindly, you continued: “I did not ask him, but he mentioned it in passing, so naturally now I know it.”

“I see,” he said, and although his gaze flicked towards the ground, he did not move. You remembered, then, what else your husband had said in that speech of his, the vainglorious words echoing in your ears: for the surest way to kill a Kremnoan is to destroy their pride, and the prince of terrors has more pride than most, so we must endeavor to strip him of it, systematically and fastidiously, until even a child can cut him down!

“Mydeimos,” you said, and then you sat on the floor, which was made of a cold stone that shot chills down the backs of your legs. Resting your elbows atop your thighs and your chin in your hands, you blinked up at him. “That is what he called you. ‘The prince of terrors.’”

“How unimaginative,” he said, and you suppressed a shudder at his glare, which was baleful and acute as it settled upon you. “My-deimos. Many-terrors. Yes, that is my name, though that ridiculous nickname is of his own invention. The Kremnoans would laugh if they heard it.”

“He said that he watched you tear out a man’s heart with your nails,” you said, and then you glanced at his lips, simultaneously and unconsciously wetting your own with the tip of your tongue. “And your teeth.”

He bared those very teeth, white and glinting, in a barking laugh — as much an expression of warning as it was humor. “My teeth! Your husband is one for fiction.”

“And — and he spoke of how he defeated you,” you said. At this, anything resembling mirth vanished from Mydeimos, and he grew curiously immobile — you almost thought that you had frightened him into the grips of memory, but then you realized that he was not frozen as much as he was waiting.

“Did he?” he said. “And what did your husband say of my defeat, dear lady?”

“He  made you beg for mercy with his sword at your throat and his foot upon your inhuman — upon your heart,” you said, correcting yourself for the slip of the tongue, finding no merit in telling him about that particular detail. “And then he dragged you back here.”

The longer Mydeimos remained silent, the shallower your breaths became, a cold fist forming around your heart and squeezing, the muscles in your arms and legs contracting, protesting their inactivity. You needed to run. If you were wiser, if you had anything resembling self-preservation, you would run, would flee and hope that you were fast enough to make it to the stairs before he pounced. 

You supposed you lacked both wisdom and self-preservation in spades, for you remained on the floor, peering up at him and praying that he could not read your mind, could not comprehend the depths of your thoughts.

“So that is his story,” he said. “I should’ve known he wouldn’t tell his people the truth.”

“He made it up,” you said rhetorically.

“You don’t sound surprised,” he noted.

“It is not — it is not —” You gnawed on the inside of your cheek, trying to come up with some way to circumvent your wedding vows, some way you could impress upon him what you were trying to say. “When we were wed, it was said that I loved him madly and completely, that I bawled to my father until he allowed me to come here.”

“Then it is not his first time dabbling in such falsehoods,” Mydeimos completed. When you nodded, he snorted. “You cannot speak ill of him, can you? Is it magic?”

“In the way of this land,” you said with a shrug.

“What an emperor,” he said. “So he can neither bed his wife nor win his battles without the use of tricks and obfuscation? Where I come from, they have a word for those like that, but as it is foul, I will not trouble you with hearing it.”

“What do you mean?” you said. “Ah, not by the foul word…that is, what tricks do you refer to? If the story he told is inaccurate, then how did he really defeat you? For surely he must have, or else you would not be here.”

“He did not defeat me,” he said. “Believe it or not, but that is the truth.”

“How?” you pressed, for you had already eschewed wisdom once and did not mind doing so again.

For a moment, it was as if the sun shone down upon him again. You saw him as he was on the day he met you, or perhaps even before — the prince of Kremnos, sleek and powerful and indomitable, red marks blooming in place of the scars he would never receive, eyes ablaze in his hollow face, hair as wild and untamed as his spirit.

“He surrendered,” Mydeimos said, scowling. “Our numbers were smaller, but Kremnoans have never cared for things like odds. We were winning, indubitably we were winning, and your husband knew it as well as we did. They attacked us in our own territory, fought us with our own weapons…how could we have lost? We would’ve wiped them out, but your husband and his men raised their white flags, and so we ceased to attack them.

“I went to parley with them, to negotiate the terms of their surrender. In a show of goodwill, I agreed to your husband’s request to come unaccompanied. His men were exhausted, and I found it honorable that he was putting their wellbeing first, so I ignored my instincts and the warnings of my advisors, going forth alone, leaving my armor and weapons as I was instructed to.

“That was my mistake. I should never have expected honor from a serpent, whose nature it is to bite. The surrender was a ploy; I was met by hordes of guards, each with a spear pointed at my heart. Even then, I fought. Do not think I met my end willingly, dear lady — I fought and killed as many men as he threw at me. I could’ve killed them all, I would’ve killed them all, but right as I was about to, he threw these chains at me from the corner where he hid. It should not have worked, his aim and the strength behind it were both lacking, but it was as if the metal had a mind of its own, and before I knew it I was bound.”

“As I told you, they are thrice-blessed,” you said. “Divine. They long to fulfill their purpose, and will do anything to that end. If it defies the laws of nature, well, what are those laws compared to the ones who wrote them? Those men were only a distraction. Once my husband received these chains, there was nothing which could’ve changed your fate.”

“What sort of a god favors a man who feigns surrender?” Mydeimos said. “What kind of deity loves perfidy?”

“I have often asked myself the same questions,” you admitted, half-expecting yourself to be unable and closing your eyes in relief when you weren't. “Why is it that he is the one they champion? What justice is there in that? He must have been a saint in his past life, to be treated as he is. A saint, or a martyr, or something like that. Something wonderful to the point of deserving so many miracles in this next iteration of his.”

You chose your speech carefully, injecting as much resentment into it as was needed to convey to the prince what you really meant, but not enough that you seized up into inaction. Not enough that you strained against the hold that your vows held over you.

You heard him exhale, and at this, you allowed your eyes to flutter open once more, peeking up at him and immediately wishing you hadn’t.

Whatever had briefly rallied in him, whatever fervor and fire he had briefly regained…it was gone. It was gone, leaving him fractured and bereft, forlorn instead of fearsome, prisoner instead of prince. Your husband had done that to him. Your husband had destroyed him, as he had destroyed you, and it was this reflection of your own fate which tore at you the most.

Breaking off a piece of bread, you dipped it in the long-cooled sauce pooled in the corner of the plate, and, without a word, held it out to him. He eyed it suspiciously, and for a moment you thought he might refuse it. The beginnings of an argument bubbled to the surface, but it never had the chance to take shape — before your lips could so much as part, he knelt across from you and took your proffered hand by the wrist.

Holding it in place, his thumb digging into your pulse like a reminder that he didn’t want this, didn’t want to accept your help, he used his free hand to swipe the bread from your palm. Then, his brows heavy, low over his eyes with mistrust and reluctance, he shoved it into his mouth and ate it.

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[ofbatsandballads]

have a little Jason drabble inspired by me going to my work bestie’s bachelorette party tonight. yes, yes I did imagine all this while getting ready and what about it? also consider this a part of my jason gets the girl series.

Jason Todd is a worrier. You knew that the very first night you met him when he automatically assumed that you, a woman living alone and wearing fuzzy pajamas, would be a danger to him. You know that now by his incessant questions that he’s been pelting at you for the past hour.

“You’ll keep in contact with me, right?” he asks from the other side of the shower curtain.

“Of course, Jay,” you reply as you twist like a contortionist while shaving your legs.

“I know it’s a bachelorette party, but please don’t drink so much that you don’t know what’s goin’ on around you, baby,” he says, voice raised so you can hear him over your hair dryer.

“I know, Jay. I’ve not forgotten where we live!” you shout back as reassuringly as you can.

“You sure I can’t convince ya to stay here with me?” he asks, only half joking, as you flip through the hangers in your shared closet looking for what to wear.

“You’re making a very convincing argument,” you concede as he kisses down your neck. “But no. Alas, I cannot be a shitty friend.”

“Fine. But at least wear somethin’ that goes with the jacket I got you,” he grumbles.

You laugh under your breath. This man. He’s such a worry wart. But you get it. Jason goes out every night into the belly of the beast, sees the worst of the worst. He knows what happens to vulnerable young women in this city, and you can’t blame him for his overprotective nature. So if wearing the tan leather jacket, a smaller replica of the one he wears as Red Hood, that has a tracker sewn into the interior is what he needs to ease his anxious mind, you’ll do it without complaint.

“It’s a gorgeous jacket, Jaybear. It goes with everything,” you say as you scratch soothingly at his scalp.

“You know where you’ll be tonight?” he asks from the foot of your bed, watching you as you put on your makeup.

“Uh huh. We’re not going to any bars or clubs or anything like that. Maid of honor just rented a penthouse in the Diamond District. We’ll probably spend the night eating pizza and drinking cocktails,” you answer as you try not to stab yourself in the eye with your mascara wand.

Jason makes a little grunt of agreement. You idly think that he sounds just like his dad, but you also don’t say that because you’re not a complete idiot. Also because you once told Jason he looked like Bruce and how miraculous that was since he was adopted, and he spent the next three days mumbling 'don't look anythin’ like the old man’ every time he glanced in a mirror.

You glance behind you in the vanity mirror to see the love of your life. His expression tugs your heartstrings. He looks so…melancholy. Emotions are storming in his sea green eyes and all you want is to ease his worries. You lay down your makeup brush and pad over to him, settling down in his lap. His hands come up automatically to rest on your hips, thumbs stroking over the softness.

“What’s wrong, angel?” you whisper, smoothing out the creases between his furrowed eyebrows with the tips of your fingers.

“I don’t—” he stops abruptly, tries to find the words he needs. “I’m not tryin’ to be overbearing. Don’t wanna be one of those guys that tells their girl what to do.”

He takes a breath and you stay silent. He has to get this out and you’ll wait as long as it takes.

“I just…worry. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I can’t lose you. I can’t,” and his voice breaks like stained glass. “I wouldn’t survive it. I know this is fuckin’ stupid. Me actin’ like this over a bachelorette party but I just…I can’t stop thinkin’ about all the things that could happen.”

Oh. Oh, your sweet, loving, heaven sent boyfriend. You know his past haunts him, that this city haunts him. You wish you could take all his worries away and wrap him in a nice warm blanket. You’d tuck him away from the world, keep him safe and happy and cared for all his days if you could.

“Jason, look at me,” you tilt his head up with your fingers under his jaw. “I promise you I will do everything in my power to be as safe as possible. I won’t drink irresponsibly. I’ll make sure to text you if anything, and I mean anything, starts to get weird. It won’t, but if it did you would be on speed dial. And trust me, angel, I have no intentions of staying the night.”

You don’t. Good friend or not, you can’t sleep well if you’re not wrapped in the strong arms of the man beneath you.

“So I expect you to be waiting on that tricked out bike of yours to pick me up,” you beam at him, run your hand through his hair because you know it makes him melt into your touch.

“I’ll be waitin’ for you,” he says, a solemn promise that extends far beyond tonight.

“Good. Now that being said, I will be bringing home all the dick decorations because I wanna plant them in your brother’s apartment. Just to fuck with him,” you giggle.

Jason lights up for the first time tonight. His green eyes gleam with mischief and adoration.

“Oh, you are my fuckin’ soulmate, baby. I’ll help you break in.”

[bi-writes]

dark matter | ghost x f!reader

INSTALLMENT TWO — TIME ROT COLLECTION

type: one-shot, part of anthology series, can be read standalone (6.5k)

cw: dark!ghost, mature language and content, mature sexual language and content, mw3 spoilers, death, grief, unhealthy coping mechanisms, dubcon, size kink, manhandling, breeding kink, cumplay, unprotected piv (18+)

You don't know how long it's been. Maybe days, or maybe it's been weeks, you aren't sure, but it's hard to move when there is nothing that waits for you.

All that's left is a box that sits on your kitchen table. It has his name scribbled across the top, and when you opened it up, just seeing the photos of him tucked into the sides was enough to nearly make you sick. You haven't opened it again since. You haven't touched it. When you touch the cardboard, it burns, it stings.

You don't know what you're supposed to do when the love of your life doesn't come home. You don't know what you're supposed to do when there's bills on the table, when half of the bed is empty, when everything that was supposed to happen died along with him.

You used to sit on this very couch and talk about everything you would do and everything you wanted. You used to lay there, your head in his lap, looking up into those baby blues and tell him about what a good husband he would make, how it was going to be so hot watching him fixing the leaky sink and hanging up the new shelves you bought, being the house husband he was always meant to be.

Someone that pretty deserved to be at home all day, baking bread and fixing a vintage car.

He promised you so much. He promised you love. He promised you laughter. He promised you a lifetime of something more.

But there never really was anything more. He never married you. He never proposed. He just fucked you full before every deployment, whispering into your hair as you drooled about how, "I'll see ye when I get back, bonnie, 'n I'll tell ye how much I luv ye."

But he didn't come back. So you really aren't sure now how much he loved you.

You stand in front of the bathroom mirror, fluffing a brush over your cheeks. The makeup helps, but you look dead, and your eyes are dull.

You don't want to go to work, but you can't pay your bills, and Johnny wasn't your husband, so the box in your kitchen stands as a loving gesture from his mother, and that is all he left behind. And when you went to the service and asked for something, for anything, they said it was out of their hands.

You are entitled to no compensation—because on paper, you are nothing to anyone, and you belong to no one. And though his mother kissed you shakily, with tears in her eyes, you couldn't bear to ask her for anything, because she hurts, too, and you are nothing to anyone, and you belong to no one.

So you work; you work, and you don't stop, and you sleep only a few hours before you get up and do it all over again, and even after a long day, you count the pennies in your purse, and it isn't enough. You let yourself get comfortable, you allowed yourself to succumb to a man, a man you loved, and what did it get you?

Fuck all. You have fuck all, and you let a man do it to you.

Fate and destiny are a cruel reality. Unforgiving—they don't care about the choices you make because they happen anyways, and it's hard to be angry when this is how it was always going to be. It doesn't make you hate any less, and it doesn't make the dust collecting on the box any less thick.

When you do gain the courage to touch it again, you have a week left to find a new flat. You don't know where you will go, but you're packing, and you rip the top of the box off as harshly as a band-aid. Your eyes focus on the knick-knacks that Johnny must've kept. A few different sized sketchbooks, the nubs of worn and used graphite and charcoal pencils, a crystal and beaded rosary that his mother gifted him when he first enlisted. You pick up the crinkled and well-loved papers that are stacked at the bottom, and your eyes blur with fresh tears at the ripped out sketches that sit in your hands.

It's you, in different angles. Asleep, staring out at something, smiling at him. He captures your face beautifully, and you can see where he's smudged the shading with a thick finger to cast shadows and light over you. He sketches in exquisite detail—he always has, but he has always had a certain style, a certain eye, that made lead look like real life. 

It’s odd to see what you looked like through his eyes. Bright. Lovely. Soft. He draws with a breath of fresh air, and you can see where his finger has rubbed away all the harsh lines. When you see a few places where the graphite on his thumb has stamped his fingerprint onto the paper, you feel your throat close up. You want to feel those fingers on your face. You want him to brush the hair out of your eyes and look down at you. You want to feel that hand tracing your jawline, your nose, the lid of your eye—you want to feel the warmth that he always radiated, and you want to breathe in the scent of him until you forget the smell of anything else.

You pick up a loved and bound book, with thinner pages that you know can't be a sketchbook. You unwind the leather string on the front, flipping it open, and you swallow thickly when you realize what this is.

A journal. You never knew he kept one.

The first few pages are dated from when he first enlisted, a few years before he met you. He writes just as eloquently as he draws, and you settle into the couch behind you as you read about his enthusiasm joining, the purpose he finally has, the weight of the world lifting off of his shoulders as he thinks about all the things he will be able to do as he rises through the ranks. You let your fingers skim over the words, feeling how his pen has pierced the paper, and you try to imagine him—fresh shaven with less muscle, life in his eyes as he thought about serving his country. You smile a little, but it hurts after a few moments.

You flip a little further, your eyes skimming over times he cursed out his commanding officer, punched a private for sneaking into the women's barracks, the love he has for a detonator that began when he soldered his first pins. His personality shines, and it's like you can hear him talking to you all over again, and when he begins to talk about a love he doesn't know how to handle, you smile to yourself, because you think he's talking about you.

But when you look again, the dates are wrong. You hadn't met him yet, not at this point, and your smile fades when you realize he's talking about someone else.

He never says their name. He writes at length about them, someone who has captured his eye, someone he says he can't have. Someone unattainable, unavailable, and then there is his own reservations. You don't realize until his entries from a few months later that he's talking about a man.

never felt this way before. not about anyone. rosary i always look at is fucking mocking me, i think. i can hear mum, somewhere, telling me to find a good catholic bonnie, but this is real. i know it is, but i don't know what to do about it. not like anyone i've ever met. can't explain the bond. but i look at him, and i think he looks at me, and i just know. i know. it can't be just in my head, can it? i'm not mad. i'm not. but what am i supposed to do?

You flip the pages frantically. There's sketches of hands on one page, hands that hold a handgun, that squeeze a trigger. They're tame sketches, but you feel a little sick because you feel like you're looking at a part of his life that you're not supposed to be looking at. The intimacy of these sketches—just hands, and you feel like they should be censored to your eyes.

The sketches and the words, they morph as time goes on. Sketches of closed eyes. Of blonde lashes. A harsh brow, a scar cutting across a thin lip. There is no softness in these sketches. Johnny draws with an abrasive pencil. It cuts the shapes, jagged edges akin to glass.

i can't tell anyone. i want to tell the whole world. won't let me. want to scream it from the fucking roof that i love you, but you're such a stubborn bastard. so fucking stubborn.

The sketches suddenly become warped. Angry, spiked, and you can see the emotion from how hard he presses the pencil into the page. More hands, and you can’t help but notice how he draws them simply functioning. Hand over wrist. Holding a utensil. Picking nails. These hands tell a story, and you can see the bumps and bruises and the wounds that litter the surface of them—these hands are anything but delicate. They have wrought. They have dug until their fingernails bled. They have been stuck through barbwire, maimed to the point of texture and roughness and the blurring of scar tissue.

don't fucking believe you. it isn't just me.

You're blind for a few moments from the intensity of your tears. You wipe them furiously, you need to know more, you need to know. The dates skip, and you pause on the day that you met.

so bonnie. so beautiful.

Softer sketches. The delicate lashes that are your own, the gentle curve of your pouty lips. You recognize yourself, but only barely, because he draws you like you are out of focus. He draws you as if you are too far away, just out of reach.

she's everything i've ever wanted. so why can't i let it go?

Your bottom lip trembles when sketches of a butterfly overlap skulls. The motifs never disappear, not completely, and it's only obvious what his true feelings are when you smooth a finger down the sketch of a butterfly escaping its cocoon that hangs from the mouth of a discarded skull head.

haunt my fucking dreams. go away. go away. go away. the ring is right there, so why can't i give it to her?

You close it abruptly. It falls to the floor, the cover of it thudding as you cover your face with your hands. Was he thinking of someone else all this time? Every morning, every kiss, every time he looked into your eyes and told you that he loved you—was all of this meant for someone else? Someone he wanted but couldn't have? Someone that just didn't love him back?

You scream. You toss the coffee table. You shatter the flowers that have died, you pick up the box of his things, and you throw it. You watch the papers fly, the books fall, you hear the rattle of his dead memories meet the floor of the home he left behind, and you scream at all of it just to stop, please, stop, stop, stop—

You're not even sure if it's really Johnny you're angry at. Maybe yourself, because you've never really been good enough to be loved by anyone. No one has ever loved you and you only—you've only ever been additional, on the condition of loving another, never enough to be the one and only, and maybe that's your real problem. Maybe the real problem is that you want to die because you always give everything you have, and no one has ever wanted it enough to give you the same.

Maybe you just want too much. Maybe your dreams are too big, maybe it's just that no one wants what you are handing over. Packaged pretty, all shiny and new, but if no one wants it, you shelve that kind of love, and that's where it rots.

Maybe this kind of love died with Johnny. Not the beginning of something, but the reality of it, and now all you can do is accept the things you cannot change and tame the heart inside of you that isn't good enough to be for anyone else.

When you pick up his things off the floor the next morning, you find a scribbled address on the back of a torn sketch. So, you do the kind thing, and you gather his things back into the box, close the lid on what never really was, and you carry it with you out the door.

The door is unmarked. The paint on it is peeling, but you know this must be the place because there's a pair of dark boots caked with mud sitting out by the bottom step. You raise your hand to knock, and you tap it with your knuckles timidly, adjusting your hold on the box in your arms.

A few minutes pass by, but no one answers. You knock again, louder and firmer this time, and it finally swings open. From the dark flat emerges a large man, sticking his head out from behind the chain latched and glaring down at you. You think he's about to close it on you, but then his eyes flicker down, and you know he must read the name scribbled in big letters on the box that you hold.

It’s enough to make him pause. It’s enough to make him stay, rooted to that spot, even if you can tell all he wants to do is sink back into whatever void he came out of.

"Hi," you whisper, and you have no control over how broken the word comes out. "I...I just thought you should have this."

Because he never really loved me. Not really. Not the way he loved you.

The door shuts, and you hear the chain unlatch, and then he opens it wider. He emerges in the doorway, taking up the entirety of the width of it, and he snarls down at you from behind the mask he wears.

He opens his mouth to spit something at you, but then you hold it out to him with shaky hands, and he can see the tears that are coming down your face. You can't control them, he can tell that much, and he reaches out to take the box from you. You look at his hands, and you recognize them immediately. Uncanny, the resemblance, and you recognize the scar that cuts across the knuckles on his left hand. You know if you push his mask down, you could trace with closed eyes the scar he must wear that starts at his nose and ends at his chin.

He doesn’t know it, but you know what he looks like. You know what he is. If he took off that mask, you would see a face you know, even if Johnny never drew the entirety of it at once. Always bits and pieces of him, but you’d know them if you saw them put altogether. You have the puzzle pieces of him in the back of your mind, and you know you could put them back together if you really tried.

He would not be able to do the same for you. The pieces of you are scattered, and you know they are lost, and that there is no getting them back. Johnny took them to grave; you would never ask for them back, anyways.

You don't ask who he is. He doesn't ask you who you are; but when your eyes meet, there is some kind of understanding. Some kind of knowing. You almost don't want to leave—you know he mustn't be kind, not from what you’ve read of him and the way he looks, but Johnny loved him, and you want to cling onto anything that still breathes that might connect you to him. You hate him, but you love him, and Johnny loved this thing, so maybe...maybe—

The door slams shut in your face, and you catch yourself with the step railing as you crumple to sit there, on his dirty step, crying into your hands. You don't know how long you sit there, but it is dark when you drag yourself home.

It is much too dark outside for you to see the shadow that you pick up along the way—and you’re too in your head to realize it never leaves.

When you come home from work, your knees are weak when you see the letter that’s taped to the front of your door.

EVICTION NOTICE.

They give you until the weekend, a courtesy they tell you they don’t normally give to anyone. You aren’t allowed to stay, even if you come up with the money, and you’re in tears as you pack up your flat. The last place you shared with Johnny, and it’ll be gone soon. You don’t know what you’ll do with your things. You don’t know where you will go.

Johnny never married you. You don’t have any family. You’ll have to stuff your car full of as much as it can hold, and you’ll need to toss the rest. You’ll have to—

The knock at your door startles you. You get up off the floor, where you were trying to stuff all your dishes into a small bag. You pull the curtain back on the window beside the door, and your eyes widen when you see a giant man standing at your door. He feels your eyes on him, and he turns his head towards the window, tilting his head to the side menacingly when he looks at you.

You wipe your face, trying to dry the tears on your cheeks. You open the door shakily, poking your head out.

“Hi,” you say. You wish your voice was steady, but it cracks. “Can…C-Can I help you?”

The mask he’s wearing today is different. There’s a skull mouth painted on it, and his hood is flipped up over his head. He seems taller with his boots on, and he takes up nearly the entire width of your doorway. He’s got so much bulk on him—if you reached across and touched him, you know your hand would hit nothing but a solid wall. No give, just pure muscle and fat. His eyes are still dark, and he still looks like the most unapproachable man in the entire world. He clicks his tongue under the mask, and you swallow when he snarls a bit.

He fishes something out of his jacket. You recognize it—Johnny’s journal. He holds it out to you, expectant, and you open the door wider to take it from him. You feel tears come all over again at the sight of it, and you hold the leather to your chest, hugging it. Johnny never married you, but he would’ve taken care of you right now. If he would’ve known you were here, about to live in your car, he would not have hesitated moving you in with him. Getting you into his bed. Shielding you from the world that was much too scary, much too unforgiving. Johnny would know what to do.

Johnny’s dead.

Just as you are about to close the door, a thick boot stops it. You flinch a bit, looking up, and then a big hand presses against your door and pushes it open until it hits the wall. The man cranes his neck to look around you, and he narrows his eyes at the heap of your belongings huddled in the living room of your flat.

You sniffle, shaking your head.

“I’m just…moving.”

You step aside when he moves. He ducks his head just slightly to get through, and you watch as he walks around, taking stock of what’s in front of him. He seems to find what he’s looking for when he sees the notice on your kitchen counter. He snatches it up and and turns it around to face you, and you just stand there, frozen.

“I told you. Moving.”

His house is soulless. White walls. Beige carpet. Grey tiles. There’s one couch, one coffee table, and one TV mounted to the wall. There’s only dishes in the kitchen enough for one person, and he only has one bedroom. It’s the same lifeless place in there, too. His mattress is on the floor, but he has the decency to put a mattress cover and sheet over it. There’s one nightstand, with just a few cables where he must charge his phone, and one lamp. There are no decorations. There is no other furniture. His house is functional, not valuable.

He puts your bag in the bedroom. That settles that.

You cry that first night. You sleep early, curling up under his one measly sheet, and you cry. You cry because you’re sad. You cry because you’re lonely. You cry because you feel like you owe this man now, this stranger who hasn’t told you his name, and you have no idea how you will pay him back. You cry because you miss Johnny, and he never even loved you.

You jump when the bedroom door opens. He walks in, kicking the door shut, and you watch as he strips himself of his jeans and hoodie, tossing them onto the floor. You sit up on your elbows, meeting his eyes, but he doesn’t take off his mask. Instead, he comes towards the bed, plopping down on the mattress next to you, and you pull the sheet up to your chin. You hadn’t anticipated sharing a bed with him, but you’re also too afraid to complain.

“I can sleep…on the floor if—”

A big hand covers your mouth. You’re silenced, startled that he would touch you this way, and you start to cry again when he presses until you are laying on your back again, moving his hand back until it rests behind his head.

“Please—” You hiccup. “Please don’t hurt me.”

He hums at that. Satisfied. Pleased at your reaction. He could pluck your strings right now, and you’d play music. He falls asleep with that thought.

You try to give him money. He never takes it. You try to buy groceries. You find the notes you spent stuffed back into your wallet later. You try to pick up a broom to clean up, and he locks the supply closet after that. The only way you find out his name is when you find his dog tags in the bathroom drawer, because he still hasn’t spoken a single word to you.

Simon “Ghost” Riley. That’s who Johnny really loved.

You don’t know why the sex started—you don’t know why you let him in, not exactly. Simon had been gone, one of his usual spurts of absence that he occasionally had, but he came home earlier than you expected. Simon likes to shower as soon as he comes home, but you are already in there, under the hot water, leaning against the tile as you empty your head of any thoughts. Simon doesn’t knock, and he pulls back the shower curtain even though he sees your silhouette. There are no words exchanged as he comes in, getting under the hot water, and there are no words exchanged when he takes off his mask for the very first time, and he hoists you up against the wall and fucks you into it.

You know this, too. Your hands trace his back, and you can feel every scar you know will be there, and you can taste the same things Johnny said you would taste when you lick over his jaw. Tobacco. Citrus. Animal.

It almost feels like cheating, but you’re too empty inside to be sad about it. It really feels like lying, even though Johnny’s too gone to hear your excuses. At the same time, it feels like getting something back. Not in its entirety, but something close, something that doesn’t feel the same, but feels so good anyways.

You cry again when you realize you like it better. You cry more when you realize that you’re starting to lose your dreams of Johnny in favor of Simon. You see in the dark instead of in blue. At first, you used to mumble Johnny’s name into the pillow. You used to bury your face into it, muffle the sounds as Simon fucked you from behind, two big hands pushing your ass apart as he pulled you back over and over onto his cock. Now your head is turned to the side, and you’re crying Simon’s name, and he’s fucking you harder, getting down onto his elbows, pressing you into the mattress and using your throat as leverage so he can arch your back and get your ass shaking with how firm he pushes his hips against you.

You’re so delicate, but he can’t be nice. He can’t be gentle. He needs to see teeth marks on your thighs and on your back. He needs to taste your blood and your cum and your spit. At first, he thinks he was doing it because he was lonely, too, but now he just wants to eat and eat and eat.

Eat Johnny’s pretty girl. Fuck Johnny’s pretty girl. Keep Johnny’s pretty girl, because how dare he keep this one a secret, and how dare he try and hide her from him? Johnny wrote a lot of things in that journal, but he didn’t talk about Simon’s insatiable appetite, and he didn’t talk about Simon’s rules. He blamed the entire world for his seemingly unrequited love, but the reality was that Johnny was selfish.

Johnny didn’t want to share. He wanted it all for himself, so it’s no wonder he died for it. When your world isn’t in balance, it compensates. Johnny ended up on the wrong side of the scale.

That’s the fucking truth.

Simon’s got you on your knees again. He likes you this way, ass up, face down, on display. On your back, he stacks enough under your back that you’re nearly upside down, pussy in his mouth as he bends you in half and eats it like that. Now, he’s squeezing your hips, pressing down between your shoulder blades, thick tongue inside of you as he teases your ass with his thumb. Johnny used to love that, but you’re such a jumpy girl.

He’s going to fix that.

Johnny is so predictable. Letting you run around, spoiled, never telling you the way it should be. Johnny made you think you were a pretty princess. He probably intertwined your fingers and fucked you in missionary like a good Catholic boy, but soft, delicate things like you don’t need to be reminded of what they are. They need to be so cockdrunk and dizzy that they don’t know anything else but this place right here, in his bed. Simon knows that’s what you really need—to not know the world outside of this bedroom.

Love is useless. Love can be lost. Love comes and goes, it’s subject to change. Time bends it, rusts it like iron, and Simon doesn’t need something else that will slip through his fingers, no. He needs something that is latched onto him forever. He needs to take one of your ribs and absorb it. He needs to taste you on his tongue and between his teeth always. He needs your blood to be his blood, and he needs your eyes to be his eyes.

Marriage is not finality. Love is not permanent. No—it isn’t enough. He couldn’t keep Johnny, and maybe he can’t keep you, but there is something he can give you that will keep you with him. Even if you left, you would stay somehow, some part of you, and he can see it in some distant place.

Once Simon sees something, it’s as good as true. It might as well be real. Simon is something himself of a manifestation, and he realizes now that maybe he never really saw Johnny because it was you hiding in what he couldn’t see.

Everything is in focus now. He knows what he has to do. Johnny was too stupid to see it—to preoccupied with how beautiful you are between the legs, too mindless when he was cock-deep inside of you to understand what he had in his hands. They don’t make things like you. One of a kind. Once in a lifetime. Something that will never be again if you let go, if you look away.

Simon knows all too much about what it means to leave a scar. He understands permanence. It’s why he’s still alive. It’s why he’s got you here, right here, underneath him, wet-faced and sobbing and clenching so tight around him. Your nails are fixtures in his back, holding him here, and he knows that you understand, too. If he asked you, you would think about the answer, but your body knows. It knows who Simon is and what he wants. He’s certain it does because even if he wanted to, your cunt has him tight, barely enough give for him to pull out and push right back in. It doesn’t want him to leave, and he’s glad for it.

You cry so sweet. Blubbers and gentle tears. You want this; it’s evident in the way you claw at him and pull him back in every time he pulls out just enough. When you pull just that hard, he drops onto his elbows, caging you in, and you sob into his mouth as he grinds his pelvis into yours. The wet smack of his thighs has stopped, but the pressure against your clit has you whining so nice. Fuck, you are beautiful, and you look so sad. From the first moment you showed up at his door, you were all big eyes and sadness. You drag around an air of heaviness that hasn’t left, and Simon is so sick of it—Johnny wasn’t man enough to eat you whole, won’t you just fucking let it go?

Maybe Simon did love him, too. Maybe he did love him back. No, he must’ve—that feeling in his chest still hasn’t left. Simon made a thousand excuses. A man like him, simply unloveable. A soldier like him, just too busy and too dedicated to have anything for himself outside of duty. A victim, what a rotten word, but that is what he is; no one can want him, not really. He saw it, in the back of his mind, peeling back layers of himself just for someone to make a face. After everything, after breaking his nails crawling out of an early grave, rejection just might be the thing that finally killed him. Not a bullet, but the sheer pain from the cut of giving a nasty piece of himself over and not even getting everything back.

Johnny was careless. Loving two things at once, pulled in opposite directions. Too distracted by what he couldn’t have that he forgot about how good he really had it—what a fucking dog. Greedy. Naïve. Fucking delusional. Johnny gave up this to chase something that could never be real. It was pathetic. It was stupid.

It was mine.

“Look at me.”

You do. Your eyes, hazy and wet, meet his, and your hands are shaking as you cup his face and sob because yes, yes, yes, please—I need it, it hurts s-so good.

It does hurt. It burns. It steals. It takes. It swallows, like a brush fire against dry land, licking and eating and tearing apart whatever it can reach. Your moans enrage it, and your cunt feeds it, whatever the thing is inside of his chest that is begging to come out.

This isn’t love. This isn’t romance. This is necessity—survival. Without him, you will come apart, and without you, Simon will starve. He used to take bites out of Johnny. Just enough to make the screaming inside of him quiet a little, just enough to be distracted; but he hasn’t eaten in months, and whatever you’re made of is too good to let go of.

This time, he’ll make it permanent. He’ll make it forever. Where you end, where he begins, where his hands have sunk into you, where his teeth are stuck; he’s going to fix himself to this place, and then he’s going to make himself forget how to leave.

You’re buzzing. You’re somewhere else. You feel like you’re floating above yourself, but at the same time, you’re right here. Simon’s so big; he told you he would be, but it’s another thing entirely to have this man inside of you and hitting your squishy cervix. He’s nasty about it, too—he likes putting a big hand on your stomach and pressing; he likes to feel himself inside of you and laugh at how you cry, and he likes the sound it makes when you’ve come, and your thighs are wet, and his skin smacks against yours with a toe-curling squelch.

“‘s mine,” he says, and you whine, and you nod. You don’t know if he’s asking you a question, but you figure he isn’t. Simon isn’t the kind to ask. He just takes what he wants. He always has. When you come back from the dead, consequences don’t apply to you any longer. You’ve cheated reality, and now you get to reap your rewards.

“Yeah.”

Yeah. Yes. Of course. Yes. Yes, Simon, whatever you want, Simon, anything for you, Simon, yes, yes, yes, yes—!

It will take time. As Simon puts his thumb to your clit to hear you sing, he thinks about how it won’t take much of it. You’re already so docile. You’re already in his bed, eating his food, crying with his cock inside of you and your thoughts filled with nothing but white noise and his name.

Simon won’t be like the man before him. Johnny drew you as a butterfly—something in need, but something that would eventually fly away. Fuck that. If there is a light in you, Simon will snuff it out. If he has to keep you from discovering your wings, he will just cut them off. If it’s the blood inside of you that keeps you warm, he will let it drain from the wounds left behind by his teeth because I will keep you warm, I will make it better, no one else, just me—

His index and middle finger in your mouth silence you. You choke on whatever you are saying in favor of sucking on his wet fingers, your eyes crossing a little as he bites down on your ear and pants there. It’s rare to hear him; Simon tends to swallow any noises he makes in favor of concentrating on hitting that same spot inside of you, but you can hear him now. It’s low and rumbly, so much so that you can feel his chest vibrating against yours. A groan—fuck, he sounds so good. To know your pussy feels so good, it’s making him falter is enough to have you just at the cusp of something white-hot and blinding.

You come when he comes. Simon’s other hand has an iron-grip on the side of your thigh, hiking it up around his hips as he comes hot and heavy inside of you. You shake underneath him, sucking hard on his fingers as he presses his pelvis to yours. You can feel it dripping between your thighs, and the heat of it makes you come, too, a sob coming out of you as you spit his fingers out in favor of closing your mouth over his.

He tastes like you. You suck on his tongue softly, lapping it up, and he uses his wet hand to hold your jaw at an angle so he can spit into your mouth and kiss you again. You grip his dog tags hard, tugging him back to you when he tries to look down at where he’s inside of you. He suffocates you when he lays over you, but you don’t care. You need him skin-to-skin. You need his mouth on yours, his cock still this deep, sharing breath and spit and heat. If you lose it, you’ll lose something else, something more, and you can’t lose it again.

His weight crushes you, and you don’t register the significance of one of his hands underneath you and between your shoulder blades. He feels for something that you can’t see, and he kisses you again when he’s satisfied with what he finds. The lack of something. The killing of it. The knowing that you’ve gotten what it is you’ve been searching for all this time.

He holds you like that always. He keeps your eyes on his when he comes inside of you—always wants to look at you when that first spurt of cum fills you entirely. He likes the way your lashes flutter when he brands you. He likes the way you lose the ability to speak. He likes the way your entire body goes rigid and pliant all at once, seizing up and then melting underneath him until it takes no effort to turn you over onto your stomach and do it all over again.

He notices the change before you do. The tender breasts, the warmth of your lower belly. You are wet always now, eager to be bent over wherever you are because the ache between your thighs is tenfold now.

You’re smiling. You haven’t smiled in a long while, and you’re smiling, hips hiked up on the couch, your dress crumpled around your middle as his cum drips down the back of your thighs. Simon licks his lips as he sits back on his heels, thumbing over your puckering hole.

You lay underneath him in your cocoon. Death at your doorstep, and you let him right in. You draw it around you tight, tucked into this blanket of security and warmth and factitious love that you think will hold this time. Simon’s hand draws around your throat, but you easily fall into him. When he squeezes, crushing what you’ve built back up, you sigh with relief, letting yourself fall into his chest and stay there.

When you close your eyes, it feels like something familiar. Like a place you’ve been before. When you open them, it’s gone. Simon is there, staring at your curiously. Your shadow that never leaves. The thing that remains. Time passes, but you know this will stay, you know it won’t go away. When he bends you over again, his hand slides low, cupping your belly, and your mouth twitches—the ghost of another smile. You put your hand over his there and press, feeling the scars you know by memory alone.

You will give him new scars; and these ones will be only for you.

[theemporium]

a luke blurb where him and his gf don't show much pda but quin and jack accidentally walk in on them making out? i feel like it would be really funny

thank you for requesting!🫶🏽

.

You and Luke were never big on PDA. 

It wasn’t a conscious choice either of you really made. Truth being told, you never really noticed how ‘un-coupley’ the two of you acted until a friend had pointed it out to you somewhere in the first few weeks of college when they were shocked to learn that you and Luke were a couple. 

But it never bothered you. It wasn’t a big surprise considering the evolution of your relationship with Luke was something that changed gradually over time. You had been attached by the hip since day one, each other’s best friend for as long as anyone could remember. You were always together, always found together, would always be together. There was no one in this world that you would consider your bestest friend over Luke Hughes.

It just so happened that somewhere between the years of high school, that friendship evolved into something a little less platonic. But he was still your best friend. He would always be your best friend before he was your boyfriend. Neither of you acted differently after you got together because nothing in the relationship had really changed after the two of you confessed that night, except for the fact you just happened to make out with him as much as you laughed at the stupid jokes he told.

So even though you and Luke had been together as a couple for the better part of six years, you never really acted like one in front of people. 

Which is why Jack and Quinn tended to be so dramatic whenever the two of you did anything remotely coupley. 

“Did you put sunscreen on today?” 

Luke paused, pulling back and slowly blinking his eyes open to look at you with an incredulous look. “Why the hell are you thinking about sunscreen whilst making out with me?” 

“Because your skin feels really warm,” you retorted, unbothered by the way his lip jutted out with a small pout as you poked the reddening skin on his shoulder. The hiss he let out instantly made you snort. “Fucking knew it.”

“You were hogging the bottle,” Luke retorted, smacking your hand away when you tried to poke him again before it returned to its rightful place on your ass. 

“No, you were more focused on putting sunscreen on me to remember yourself,” you corrected with a smile.

“Yeah, well, you whine so much when you’re sunburnt,” Luke huffed, laughing a little when you lightly smacked his chest. “Kidding, babe, love you.” 

“Whatever,” you muttered as you leaned down, pressing your lips against his and letting out a content noise as he squeezed your ass, pulling you further onto his lap before he pushed his tongue into your mouth and—

“OH MY GOD, MY EYES! MY FUCKING EYES!” 

Luke let out a heavy sigh, his head falling against your shoulder as he grumbled under his breath. “Every fucking time.” 

“Gross, guys,” Quinn frowned at the sight of you two on the sunlounger whilst Jack dramatically continued to gag behind him. “So gross.” 

“What happened to the two of you doing a grocery run in the town?” You questioned, making no move to shift off your boyfriend’s lap, though his hands moved to rest on your waist now. 

“We did it and came back already to find you—” Jack paused, placing a hand on his chest as he shuddered. “Defiling the furniture.” 

“Drama queen,” Luke grumbled.

You snorted. “As if you didn’t do much worse three summers ago when I saw you and that girl on the boat—” 

Jack’s eyes widened. “LALALA! SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT SHE IS TALKING ABOUT!” 

Quinn whirled around to look at him with narrowed eyes. “What the fuck did you do on the boat?” 

Luke grinned, turning to look at you as his brothers continued to bicker in the background. “It’s kinda hot when you blackmail people.” 

You grinned back. “Yeah?” 

“Mhm.” 

You tucked your bottom lip between your teeth. “Wanna show me how hot? Preferably in a room with a lock so we don’t have to repeat of the other day.” 

Luke scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Quinn should learn to knock. That is not our fault.”

.

[svtiddiess]

Now Baby

Synopsis: What better way to make use of the adrenaline rush from the stage than a post-concert fuck?

Pairing: Seungcheol x stylist!afab!reader

Genre: smut, established relationship, series

Rating: mature

Word count: 1.6k

Warnings: penetrative sex, unprotected sex (don't do this!), creampie, exhibitionism(?), semi-public sex, orgasm denial, dom!Seungcheol, sub!reader, lemme know if I missed anything!

Note: Surprise! The celebration doesn't stop until I say so! Enjoy the final fic for the celebration, a bonus to the Quiet Baby series!

Thank you Ally @lovetaroandtaemin for beta reading!

Quiet Baby | Kneel Baby | Louder Baby | Now Baby

Click here to join my taglist!

Read on ao3

Reblogs are appreciated ♡

.ᐟMinors/blank/no age indicator blogs will be blocked.ᐟ

You rock back and forth on your heels, waiting backstage as the muffled cheers of the crowd bring a smile to your face. They're all here for Seungcheol—your Seungcheol. Even after months of being together, the thought of calling him yours still makes you giddy.

You both tried to keep your relationship a secret, but in Seventeen, secrets don't exist. The rest of the members figured it out almost instantly. Luckily, management is still in the dark—otherwise, you'd be at risk of losing your job, and that's the last thing you want (not that Seungcheol would ever let that happen).

Your eyes stay glued to the monitor as the group takes their final bow, officially wrapping up what felt like an endless concert—courtesy of their never-ending "Aju Nice" encores.

Your grin widens the moment you spot Seungcheol stepping off stage, heading straight for you. Before you can even greet him, he grabs your hand and pulls you deeper backstage.

"Cheol, where are we—" Your words cut off as he shoves you into an empty green room, locks the door, and crashes his lips against yours in a hungry kiss.

You melt into his embrace, completely consumed by the kiss—messy, heated, and desperate. His hands roam eagerly over your body, gripping and exploring every curve. A soft moan escapes your lips as his hands find your breasts, squeezing them with a hunger that sends a jolt of pleasure through you.

"I need you. Now," he murmurs against your lips, his voice low and urgent, before capturing your mouth in another searing kiss. He guides you to the couch, laying you down with a gentle yet firm insistence.

"Cheol, what if we get caught?" You whimper, your voice trembling as his lips trail hot, open-mouthed kisses down your neck.

"Then we'll just have to finish before the others get here, baby," he smirks, his tone teasing but laced with desire before his lips crash into yours again.

A shiver runs through you as his calloused hands slide beneath your shirt, leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake. In one swift motion, he pulls your shirt off, leaving you exposed in just your bra. He leans in, his breath warm against your skin, and teases your bra-covered nipple with a slow, deliberate lick. A whine escapes your lips, your body arching instinctively toward his touch.

"Don't tease," you pout, your voice laced with playful frustration, drawing a low chuckle from him.

"Such a spoiled princess," he murmurs, his lips brushing against your skin as he deftly unclasps your bra, letting it fall away and leaving your chest bare.

A shiver ripples down your spine as the cool air kisses your exposed skin. Without hesitation, Seungcheol's mouth finds your nipple, his lips sealing around it as he sucks gently, his hand teasing and toying with the other. Your fingers instinctively tangle in his hair, tugging him closer and urging him to take more. A sharp whimper escapes you when he bites down, the sensation sending a jolt of pleasure mixed with pain through your body.

You feel yourself growing wetter by the second, the heat between your thighs intensifying as waves of pleasure surge through you. The sensation of your damp panties clinging to your skin is almost unbearable, and your hips begin to grind against his of their own accord, desperate for more friction. Seungcheol chuckles softly at your needy state, his lips trailing a slow, deliberate path down your body, inching closer to where you need him most.

With deliberate slowness, he peels off your pants, his grin widening as he notices the obvious damp spot on your panties. "Already so wet for me," he hums, his voice thick with desire. He drags a finger over the soaked fabric, making you squirm and whine in frustration.

"Cheol, you said we should hurry," you whine, your voice trembling with need.

"Hush, baby. Or I won't let you cum," he growls, his tone both commanding and teasing. You pout at him, but he only grins in response, clearly enjoying the control he has over you.

He slowly slides your panties down, his breath catching at the sight of your glistening, exposed core. "Fuck," he mutters under his breath before slipping a finger inside you, drawing a sharp gasp from your lips.

You squirm instinctively as his finger begins to move, the sensation overwhelming. "Stay still," he growls, his other hand pinning you down firmly. His fingers work you with precision, curling and thrusting in a rhythm that leaves you breathless. The wet, slick sounds of his movements mix with your moans, filling the room.

A choked mewl escapes your throat when he curls his fingers just right, hitting that sweet spot that sends sparks shooting through your body. He knows you too well, and he knows exactly how to push you to the edge with practiced ease.

Your moans grow higher and more desperate as you feel yourself teetering on the brink of release. But, just as you're about to tip over, he suddenly withdraws his fingers, leaving you gasping and writhing, your orgasm ripped away before you can reach it. A loud, frustrated wail escapes you, your body trembling with unfulfilled need.

"Did you really think I'd let you cum on my fingers?" He chuckles darkly, his voice dripping with amusement. "No, baby, you're only allowed to come on my cock." With that, he pulls down his pants, freeing his hard length. The tip is flushed and glistening, beads of precum already leaking as he positions himself between your legs.

In one swift, unrelenting motion, he slams into you, the force of it knocking the breath from your lungs. Your hands fly to his shoulders, gripping them tightly as if they're your only anchor. He sets a brutal, animalistic pace, each thrust driving you deeper into the haze of pleasure. His fingers dig into your hips with a possessive intensity, sure to leave bruises as a reminder of this moment later.

The air around you is thick with the heady mix of sex, sweat, and the faint trace of his cologne, overwhelming your senses and leaving you lightheaded. Your mouth falls open in a silent cry, your eyes rolling back as you surrender completely to the raw, unrelenting pleasure coursing through you.

"Perfect pussy, made just for me. Isn't that right, baby? You're meant to be fucked by me, only me," he growls between thrusts, his voice rough and possessive. All you can do is moan in response, your mind too hazy to form any coherent words.

"Did I already fuck you dumb, baby?" he teases with a low chuckle. Your only reply is another desperate moan.

Your body feels like it's melting beneath him, every thrust hitting that perfect angle that sends electric jolts of pleasure shooting through you.

Knock knock!

The sound of knocking at the door makes you choke back a gasp, your eyes widening in alarm as you glance at Seungcheol. But, he doesn't stop—if anything, his pace becomes even more relentless, his grip on your hips tightening as he drives into you with a ferocity that leaves you breathless.

Suddenly, the air feels heavier, charged with a dangerous thrill. The thought of being caught only fuels your arousal, and Seungcheol groans when your walls clench around him, as if your body is reacting to the risk.

"Shit, you're so tight," he groans, his voice strained. "Fuck, you're such a slut," he chuckles darkly, his breath hot against your ear. "You want them to come in and see how good I'm fucking you, don't you, baby?"

His words send a shiver through you, and you can't help but moan loudly, your body tightening around him again. Seungcheol groans in response, his pace quickening as if he's determined to make sure whoever's on the other side of the door knows exactly what's happening.

You try to muffle your cries, but Seungcheol won't let you. His hand snakes down to your clit, rubbing it with expert precision, drawing loud, unrestrained wails from you.

"That's it, scream my name, baby. Let them know how good I'm making you feel," he purrs, his voice dripping with satisfaction.

With a few more deep, punishing thrusts, you're pushed over the edge, crying out his name so loudly you're sure it echoes beyond the room. Seungcheol follows soon after, his own moans muffled against your neck as he spills into you, his hips stuttering as he rides out his release.

For a few moments, you both lie there, catching your breath as the intensity of the moment slowly fades. Seungcheol brushes a few strands of hair from your face, his touch surprisingly tender, before leaning in to capture your lips in a soft, lingering kiss. It's a sweet reminder of the love that underlies the passion, and you can't help but smile as you melt into it.

After pulling out, he helps you get dressed, both of you cleaning up as best as you can. Seungcheol gives you one last kiss before unlocking the door.

It swings open to reveal Minghao, his expression a mix of disgust and exasperation as he takes in the scene.

"You guys are absolutely disgusting," he scoffs, shaking his head. "You really couldn't wait until you got home? You just had to taint the room with your…horniness?"

Your face burns with embarrassment, and you instinctively hide behind Seungcheol, who only shrugs, looking far too smug for someone who just got caught.

Minghao sighs deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I swear, it's the same thing after every single concert," he mutters, stepping past you to grab the phone he'd left behind. He shoots you both one last disapproving glare before storming out of the room.

"Cheol, you said we wouldn't get caught," you whine, your cheeks still flushed.

He laughs, pulling you close. "Don't act like you didn't enjoy it, baby," he says with a grin, sealing his words with another kiss.

And you can't help but grin back because, well…he's not wrong. You did enjoy it—a lot.

Taglist: @tinyelfperson @gyuguys @stay-tiny-things @unlikelysublimekryptonite @miyx-amour @iamawkwardandshy @codeinebelle @brownbunnyb @do-you-remember-summer-127 @sclovreina @theidontknowmehn @toplinehyunjin @gyuhao365 @mysticfairies @cherrylovescheol @cookiearmy @4shypotato @lxnnrobin @sashaaahh @xueisaaa17 @aeriyell @eshia16 @dreamingofpcy @archivistworld @kyeomiis @iwannakisspoutycheol @foxiesgf24 @livelaughloveseventeen @aliiikareed @jennwonwoo @brownsugarbaybee

[unpretty]

Rare non-kink-taxonomy-hell ask: your description of Sorrowverse Joker as actually good at manipulation and gaslighting, to the point where the act he puts on might sometimes resemble Therapy Joker, has actually made me interested in a version of the Joker. Which has never happened before. Could we hear more about him/this aspect of him? Love your writing btw

what if we had a rare limited-time crossover event

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: 🤡:･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧

"Helloooooo nurse."

"Don't whistle," she snapped, shutting the door. "I'm doing you a favor," she reminded him.

"I thought you were recognizing that denying me cosmetics had no purpose but to dehumanize me," he said.

"You know what I mean," she said, pushing her glasses higher on her nose. "And I'm not a nurse." She pulled the sparkly pencil case she'd brought from the pocket of her coat to offer it to him.

He did not so much rise from his bed as unfold. A spider of a man, all long spindly limbs in ill-fitting pale pink. With all the green of the rest of him, it made him look floral, a mop of green hair and his eyes pastel. Even the white of his skin had a green tinge on closer inspection. She'd been sure it reminded her of something and had spent hours online trying to find it. She'd decided on a small emerald moth, staring at stock photos of delicate wings almost translucent and trying to remember where she ever could have seen one.

Charming as a bouquet full of insects.

He plucked the bag from her hand and pulled what looked like a butterfly knife from inside. He grinned, and when he did his face seemed to grow twice as long and half of it teeth. Gleaming purple metal spun between long fingers, but when he pointed it at her to watch her recoil, it had the teeth of a comb. He waggled his eyebrows at her before running it through his hair, using both hands and raising his elbows much higher than necessary so his shirt rode up. She pressed her lips together rather than dignify the performance with a response.

His eyebrows were still pristine and had been since he'd been admitted. Precise arches with edges razor-sharp.

Without products to keep it in place, his hair fell back down at an angle from his widow's peak. "Don't pretend I'm not funny, Dr. Quinn," he said, metal twirling between his fingers again.

"Quinzel," she corrected.

"Nurse Harlequin," he said, rummaging through the limited personal effects she'd brought him. It was absurd to refuse anyone these few small comforts. She'd always thought so. It was punitive, the way they denied any dignity to anyone they were meant to be treating.

There but for the grace of God, she thought and tried not to.

"I don't have a mirror," he declared, holding a red vial she was sure could not be blood. He reached out to touch beneath her chin. "Hold still."

"Mr. J," she warned, refusing as she always did to refer to him by the only name they had for him.

"I love it when you call me that," he said with relish, using her glasses as a mirror to apply tint to his lips with a wand. "Say it again, doll."

"If they catch you wearing lipstick—"

"It's stain," he said dismissively. "They can't prove it. For all they know I got this the old-fashioned way, sucking dick in the bathroom again."

"Agai—"

"Excellent work, Harley," he said, and then his lips were on hers. She made a muffled sound of indignation and was careful not to move. He'd done this before, the first time they'd met, when he'd learned her name and had a good laugh about it. She'd slapped him for it then, hadn't protested when they'd put him in isolation for it. "Aw," he said as he pulled away, touching her lower lip. "I know it hadn't dried yet, but it doesn't show on you, does it?"

It was only stain, but his skin was so pale the red popped, his grin grotesque. A caricature of something unwholesome, white as a sheet and a mouth like a minstrel, too dark a thought to trust. It was hard not to think the worst of people, ascribe symbolism to nothing at all, fall into spirals. Enough real dog whistles without her inventing new ones.

"That's unacceptable behavior," she said, "and that's not my name."

"You don't call me by my name," he said, tapping the tip of her nose, "and I don't call you by yours." He dropped the pencil case back into her hands before she realized what he was doing, and she had to scramble to catch it in time. "Besides, you seem like a good ride." He made an exaggerated handlebar-revving gesture with both hands and winked as he stepped away from her. Something Fred Astaire in his footwork when he walked. She was careful to stay where she was, tucking the contraband back into her pocket.

"Do you harass all your doctors this way?" she asked pointedly, fixing her glasses again.

"Aggressively," he confirmed as he fell back into his bed. "The rest of them don't like it as much as you do, naughty girl." He sprawled sideways, propping his head up in a pose that might have been provocative if he'd had a curve anywhere but the jutting bones that slotted his hands into his forearms. "It's why they locked me up for being a deviant," he said with a limp-wristed gesture.

"They locked you up for killing people," she corrected.

"They were rich," he scoffed. "That doesn't count as people." Her nose crinkled, pressing her lips together again rather than do anything he'd interpret as a laugh. "You can tell because they didn't send me to prison."

"They didn't send you to prison because Gotham's justice system is fucked," she said. Arkham was privately owned with a budget inflated by charitable donations. It was inevitable that expensive-looking criminals were judged criminally insane, the worst of their excesses no longer a taxpayer problem.

He cocked his head. "Do I look sane to you?" he asked.

"Sane doesn't look like anything," she said. "We both know you knew what you were doing, and there's no medical intervention that would make you behave differently."

He grinned, too wide, too many teeth. She tilted her head a little, only enough to see around the edge of her glasses and confirm that his mouth blurred. "Yet here you are," he said.

"Rehabilitation isn't the exclusive domain of the medically impaired."

This job had been a nightmare from the beginning. Every day in large and small ways it wore her down, an endless river of bullshit trying to smooth down every part of her that believed in anything. No accountability, barely treatment, shifts too long with coworkers as sick as the patients. Less like doctors with patients and more like researchers with lab rats. Rubber stamps and no rocked boats and no goals greater than the status quo. Cameras easily bypassed by any employee who cared to, for whatever reason struck their whim. Her no better.

She should have done more. Her job shouldn't have been worth more than her principles. She could have done more than this, makeup and candy and burner phones in her pockets. She kept notes and told herself she'd blow the whistle someday. She kept her head down and kept her health insurance and knew herself for a traitor.

"Come closer," he said, gesturing with his fingers.

She was halfway across the room before she thought to stop and ask, "Why?"

He was grinning again. "Because I wanted to see if you would," he said, and at the look on her face he threw his head back to cackle. She pressed her nails into her palms and felt her face burn. "This might sound racist," he began.

"Then don't," she warned.

"No, no, it's not like that, I just—"

"Don't."

"I can't tell if you're blushing!" he said, exasperated. He swung his legs around to sit upright, his knees a mile apart. "That's all I was going to say, honestly. Is that bad? You can tell me if it's bad."

"I would call that an 'inside thought'," she said, still blushing. He cackled again.

"Really, though," he said, crooking his fingers again, "you should come over here."

"Why?" she asked first this time.

"So I can kiss you stupid," he said.

Her face felt hot again. "I'm not doing that."

He rolled his eyes so dramatically it took his whole face with it. "I have to come over there?" he asked rhetorically, gesturing at her. "Come on, now, doll. Give yourself a little agency, here. I'm locked up. You get to leave. That little love tap earlier was fine, there were cameras on, I get it, kind of hot if I'm honest, pretty into that. But I've got limits too, you know. You want me to play the big bad taking advantage, that's fine, I'm into it, but trust's a two-way street. Get over here and make it clear you know what you're here for, yeah? Despite what your bosses think, I'm not actually an animal. I'm not sitting here waiting for pretty girls to maim."

"I don't think that," she said, defensive.

"Naw," he said, "you're just coming in here when you're not supposed to be and standing in grabbing range, waiting for nothing to happen. Get over here or leave, I'm not going anywhere."

She half-turned, looking at the doorknob, but hesitated. She wanted the last word, but didn't have one ready and her throat was dry regardless. She felt sick.

"You're real scared I'm gonna laugh at you, huh?" he asked, and she whipped her head around to stare at him. He was leaning forward, chin on his fist, watching her. The pale shade of his eyes made it more predatory than it otherwise would have been. His smile was a wry gash across his face. "That happen a lot?" he asked, cocking his head. "Men telling you you're pretty as a prank, asking you out to make fun when you believed it?" She scowled, and his smile split into a grin. "Awww. Poor l'il Harley. C'mere, then. You wanna make a show of being vulnerable, be vulnerable. Least you can do, don't you think?"

The worst part was realizing, the moment he said it, that it was the thing she most dreaded. That he'd laugh at her for believing him.

She came close enough to stand between his knees, but couldn't bring herself to make eye contact. She looked at the hole in his ear where they hadn't let him keep his earrings, instead.

"There's a doll," he said, grabbing her wrist and yanking so she'd fall into his lap. She narrowly avoided her knee hitting him somewhere awkward. She was distracted by how bony his thighs felt compared to hers, all his limbs too thin as his arms went around her waist. He kissed beneath her ear, and she thought of his mouth, the wide span of it and all those teeth at her throat. "Doesn't being honest with yourself feel better?" he asked against her skin.

"This is very, very bad," she breathed, her voice shaking. Her own body heat was mortifying. He felt halfway to a corpse.

"Awww, don't be like that," he said, and she could feel him smiling. All those teeth. "What's the worst that could happen?"

[myntrose]

Missing You !

ೃ⁀➷: how the l&ds boys are when they miss you.

a/n: I want these men so bad it hurts. n e ways trying something different from smau 🤍 this is part one, will write the other boys later. Also pls send requests !!

content warning: the boys missing you to the point where it's a bit concerning. maybe ooc. Suggestive in Xavier's part towards the end. Did not proof read srry💔

ft: Zayne, Xavier x reader (separately)

pt. 1 , pt. 2

₊˚｡⋆❆⋆｡˚₊ zayne (705 words)

the hospital holds an unnerving chill in the air. everyone can feel it; the staff, nurses, patients and the other doctors. and even though everyone could feel it, no one chose to acknowledge the source of this tension. because no one wants to disturb Dr. Zayne when he's in one of these moods.

It's another hard day for Zayne. The paperwork seemed endless, he's had to deal all sorts of patients, and he hasn't seen you in a week. You were out in a mission, nothing out of the normal for a hunter. But Zayne couldn't help but worry. He loves you, knows you're more than capable of handling yourself, but worrying about you comes as easy as breathing to him. It's second nature, an everyday thought.

Just as he starts to steady himself, the ink of his pen explodes on the report he was writing. He about ready to lose it, letting out a deep, heavy sigh. Zayne isn't usually this disoriented, and it's making him go mad.

Moving from his desk, Zayne paces around his office, opening your last message. it stresses him out that it was 2 days ago.

ms.hunter: ugh this mission is so dumb. smt happened and now it looks like ill be gone longer. im sorry babe :(((

He grips his phone a little harder. Paces the room with heavier steps. Breaths another sigh.

What is wrong with me?

A knock at his door disrupts his pacing.

"What?"

Zayne doesn't realize he said that with a bit too much bite, a bit too coldly. The door opens to reveal his new secretary, looking like a scared little lamb entering the lions den.

He looks at his secretaries face, realizing his harsh tone. Zayne murmurs a quick apology, asking his secretary if there was something needed.

"There's someone here to meet you, Dr. Zayne. Said they had an appointment?" The secretary trails their sentence like a question, knowing that Zayne shouldn't have any appointments today. Poor thing was shivering from the doctor's cold demeanor.

The veins on Zayne's head are almost visible now. On top of this day, an unscheduled appointment? Had it not been for his doctors oath to not harm, he would've denied this appointment.

Another sigh leaves him, as he tells his secretary to let the mystery appointment inside his office. Zayne makes his way back to his desk, head in hands trying to compose himself.

"You really shouldn't be sighing so heavily, Dr. Zayne. Heard it's bad for you"

Zayne's head whipped so fast towards the doorway, that you almost left bad for laughing at the action.

He blinks once, then another, before standing up and meeting you halfway across the room.

" 'm sorry for not texting you sooner, but I've been working twice as hard to get done with my mission-"

You don't get to finish your sentence before Zayne crashes his lips into yours. This kiss was desperate, filled with longing and want. It's almost startling, usually Zayne is more composed than his.

"would be more composed had you told me you'd be arriving back today" Zayne responds, perfectly reading your thoughts. Before you could say anything, he kisses you again. This time, he's softer, placing one hand on the small of your back and the other cradling your face.

You're the one to pull apart first, desperately needing air. Looks like your boyfriend missed you more than you realized. Oh, this was gonna be so fun.

Zayne scoffs, but he's still holding you close. "I do not scowl. It's just been a stressful week at the hospital."

You laugh at that. God, he missed your laugh. He missed you. He walks the both of you to his desk, where he sits you on his lap as he takes a seat.

"Did you miss me that much? It's only been a week."

"A week too long, my love"

While you and Zayne catch up, the rest of the hospital is glad that the chill in the air has died down. Looks like the staff knows who to call when their doctor is in that mood.

𓆩✧𓆪 xavier (570 words)

there's only a few things that causes Xavier to wake up. Either you shaking him awake, peppering his face with kisses, or when you steal the blanket from him.

Actually, it's mostly you that causes him to wake up. And right now, the reason why sleep escapes him is because it seems like you escaped the bed at some point.

Xavier feels around your side of the bed, only to be met with emptiness. Confused, he wakes up, and looks around to see the room still in pitch darkness.

2:34 a.m. It's still horribly early, so you wouldn't have woken up for work. Plus, Xavier knows your schedule better than he knows his. He knows that you don't have any kind of missions to attend to right now.

So, where were you? A sudden rush of thoughts occur at once, and Xavier can't help but assume the worst scenarios. He jumps out of bed and checks around the apartment.

Bathroom? No. Living room? Empty. Kitchen? Quite. He's going a bit crazy, because where did you go?

He just about to rush outside when he hears the sound of keys opening the front door. Turning to the sound, he watches as the door opens to reveal you.

You, holding a bag from the nearby 24/7 convenience store. You walk in, not realizing that Xavier was watching as you enter the room.

You're holding your phone in your other hand, staring at it. It wasn't until you looked up that you noticed you were being watching by your boyfriend.

Your words don't make it to his ears. Rather, he answers you with a question of his own.

"Where were you?" His voice is deep, laced with a serious tone that doesn't quite suit him. Oh no, was he mad?

"I went out to buy ice cream. I couldn't sleep and wanted something sweet. I texted you where I was!" Defending yourself, showing Xavier the bag with a few ice cream bars.

Oh right, he never checked his phone. Xavier pulls his phone out of his pockets, and opens his notifications to see that you in fact did text him where you were.

"Oh."

You move to the kitchen, putting the ice cream away. "Yeah, oh is right. What, d'ya think I just left without saying a work ?" You only meant that jokingly, of course. Turning around, Xavier is right behind you, caging you between himself and the fridge.

It wasn't until you looked at his eyes when you realized that, oh, he was worried. The realization sets in, and you understand what just happened. Xavier had woken up, and genuinely thought you were done.

Your eyes soften as you look at him, moving your hands to his face "Oh, baby, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you like that." Xavier melts into your touch, and you both stay like this for a while.

You speak up first. "Why don't we go back to sleep?"

Xavier opens his eyes, looking down at you. "Actually, I'm not sleepy right now. I think I'm hungry."

"Do you want some of the ice cream I bought? I got your favorite flavor- Xav- Xavier why are we going to the bedroom?"

"I said I was hungry."

"Oh...?!"

Later that morning, you had to call into work "sick" for both you and Xavier.

[stevieschrodinger]

Part One Two

It’s dark. The window is still open, but the chillier air is kind of nice on Eddie’s flushed skin.

The clean bedding is nice too; Eddie tries to remember the last time he appreciated something as nice as clean sheets and draws a blank.

Probably when he still lived with Wayne. Probably before they made it big. Probably before the partying started.

Eddie picks up his phone, his thumb hovering over the call button. He presses it.

Wayne doesn’t pick up. Eddie’s not surprised, not really.

He tries Chris; she doesn’t answer either.

Likewise Gareth.

He doesn't bother calling Jeff.

There’s no one else in his phone; Chrissy took it all away when Eddie couldn’t differentiate between a friend a dealer or a booty call.

Like the worst Marie Kondo ever, Chrissy had held up the hundreds of friends Eddie had in his phone, one by one, ‘does this spark joy?’

No. Sometimes sucked his dick, though.

Eddie has money though. He twirls his phone on his chest, flipping it from long edge to short. There’s always somewhere open. Flip. Flip. Flip.

Not like anyone's answering him right now anyway. They’ve just left him here. With fucking Steve. It’s just one time anyway, he wouldn’t get away with it more than once. Chrissy would put him on proper lock down if she found out. Probably shove him back in the clinic.

So...just once.

One last go. And then he’d quit for sure. He hasn’t touched it for months, so he’s pretty much proved he can do it, anyway.

Eddie gets dressed. Finds cash balled up in random places.

Eddie stands in the doorway. Look up at the stars and then across the lawn at the security gates. He hasn’t had so much as a cigarette in nearly half a year. This is fine.

“Where you going, Eddie?”

Eddie sighs. Fucking busted. Still, “no where you need to worry about.”

“Uh hu.”

“Look, I’m not on house arrest okay? I can go out, I’m a grown fucking man.”

“You totally are. You want to go out, you go for it. No skin off my nose.”

Eddie whirls, shocked, “what the fuck? Aren’t you supposed to try and stop me from doing dumb shit?”

Steve raises the eyebrow, “so you admit it’s dumb?” He looks sleep rumpled, wearing sweats and a white tee shirt.

Walked right into that one. “You’re dumb.”

The face again. The totally schooled features that are utterly professional and give absolutely nothing away and yet...somehow...he’s laughing at Eddie. Eddie can feel it.

“So you go out,” Steve saunters over, stands next to Eddie, bare toes curling over the doorstep, “you score or drink or do whatever it is you’re aiming to do. Then what?”

“Then what,” Eddie mimics, all bitchy, “I’ll come home, and I’ll sober up, and it won’t change a fucking thing,” Eddie bites out.

“You think? You’ve had sober spells before, is that how it’s gone in the past?”

Eddie takes a deep breathe, because no, no that is not how it’s fucking gone in the past, “this time is different.”

“Is it?” Steve asks, completely fucking nonchalant, “how so?”

Eddie doesn’t think he’s ever wanted to punch someone so bad in all his life. Imagines it viscerally, Steve's fucking head cracking on the door frame while he slumps to the floor in a bloody heap.

Eddie does not do that, obviously.

“Look, I’ll come home, we don’t do anything about it, you still get paid, sound good?”

“I get paid either way,” Steve shrugs one shoulder, because he’s a cunt. “This is how a lot of addicts die, did you know that?”

“What?” Eddie asks, startled by the left turn.

“Yeah, get out of rehab, think their tolerance is still the same, get back on it…” he doesn’t bother to finish.

“That won’t happen to me.”

“Oh yeah, right. Of course. Because you’re Eddie Munson, sorry, sorry, forgot a second there.”

Eddie takes two thumping angry steps into the yard and just...just fucking screams at the sky. Just...roars at nothing. This is shit. It’s so shit. Everything is shit. And Eddie nearly fucking died last time and there’s no escaping that fact. There’s no help. There’s no point to any of this. There’s just pain and fucking misery and something clawing at Eddie’s insides trying to get out.

He roars until he’s hoarse. Until he can’t any more. Until his chin is wet with spit and he feels week and rung out.

He sits on his ass on the cold, dewy lawn.

Steve is still standing in the doorway, he doesn’t look like he’s moved at all. If he’s at all bothered by Eddie’s little meltdown, he isn’t showing it.

“Why did you want to go?” Steve asks finally, "did something change?"

Eddie shrugs, he’s got nothing, not really. No real reason past just wanting to get fucked up. Because it feels good. Because he likes it.

“Okay, what’s worth staying for?”

Eddie makes a dismissive ‘pfffft’, made croaky by his fucked out voice.

“They always say you need to do these things for yourself,” Eddie glares at Steve, because that's some dumb shit right there. Always had it in therapy though. Self worth. Mindfulness. Living in the moment and being proud of what you’ve already achieved and every journey starts with a single step and all that other bull shit they try and feed you. “I know. I agree. When you...feel like you’re nothing, you’re not worth any effort. It’s the hardest time. So pick someone else. Who can you do it for?”

“They don’t care,” Eddie croaks, “they didn’t answer,” he pulls his phone out, flips it onto the grass.

“Who?”

“Chris. Wayne.”

“Okay, give me a good reason why Wayne didn’t answer? That’s your uncle, right?”

“Yeah he...he could be at work,” Eddie admits quietly. Eddie’s given Wayne money. Well, practically forced it on him. Set him up with a nice place; or at least as nice as he could talk Wayne into. Wayne doesn’t believe in free loading though. Eddie’s convinced him to do less hours, but he still works nights two or three times a week. Claims it’s ninety percent of his social life, or some shit like that.

“Okay, and Chris?”

Eddie shrugs, embarrassment over his outburst making him petulant now.

“Eddie, what time is it where Chris is, right now?”

Eddie sighs up at the stars. It’s the middle of the fucking night, “late. Early. I guess.”

“Okay. So they’re not ignoring you, they’re just living their lives like normal human beings. Come on, get up, your ass is gonna be wet.”

“And do what?” Eddie snaps, “what’s the fucking point.” It’s not a question.

“Come on, I want to show you something.”

“It was a tough time, you know? Like, life sucks hard sometimes. Music helps. My favorite is The Wilds, you know? You heard that one?” The interviewer mumbles something indistinguishable, “it’s kind of...like the bit about the shining sea, you know? How like, it’s so beautiful, but it’s fucking hard to sail on. Or like how the mountains are so beautiful, but if you go up there alone, you’re gonna’ die, right? So I think...like how insignificant, and meaningless my life is, in like, the grand scheme of things, but like...that makes what you do even more important, right? Like, it means more, when you choose to be...I dunno,” the kid with a million piercings shrugs, “like just be good to each other, you know?”

“That’s not even remotely what that song is about,” Eddie mumbles at the laptop monitor.

Behind him, Steve snorts a laugh, “well that kid thinks it is.”

Another kid, more makeup than the whole of Kiss slathered on her face, “I just think it has meaning, you know?” The interviewer mumbles something again, “oh my favorite?” A lip bitten in thought, she looks at the sky for inspiration, it’s sunset, Eddie figures. Lots of similarly dressed kids in the background. Takes him a second to realize this was filmed outside of a gig, or something like that. “It’s hard to pick, but if I gotta’, it’s definitely Double Down. Those lyrics are just...Eddie Munson is just...he’s a fucking genius, you know?” She frowns, “but also really fucking dumb soemtimes, I hope he’s okay.”

“I didn’t even write that one. Jeff wrote most of that. On napkins, I think. I just...worked it together.”

Another kid, saying how important Corroded Coffin are; how they helped this kid through hard times. Honestly it’s a difficult watch, Eddie has no fucking clue where Steve even found this, and when Eddie’s phone rings he jumps on it, glad of an excuse to slap the screen of the laptop closed.

“Hi, Eddie! You called, sorry it’s early I got up to go for a run-”

“No. No, it’s fine, I...I shouldn’t have called you so late. Early. You were probably sleeping.”

“That’s okay, of course it’s okay, it’s nice you called me,” she snickers, “you never call me.”

That’s true, and Eddie feels bad. It’s always Chrissy chasing after Eddie. Trying to keep a lid on him...trying to keep him safe. He was always the one dodging her. “Yeah, sorry…” Eddie gets up so he can walk away from Steve, tail between his legs he slinks into the hall, he vows, “I’ll try and do better.”

“Good, how are you feeling? Hows your rut?”

Eddie is not fucking admitting that he just had a breakdown and nearly fucked it all up in the middle of the night. No fucking way is he admitting that, “yeah...yeah, just...couldn’t sleep, you know? I guess the rut...still going. Feels weird.”

Eddie can hear Chris moving around, figures she has him on speaker or something, “uh hu, that’s because you haven’t cycled a proper rut in like, four years honey, these things take time to settle. Is Steve doing okay? You’re not being a cunt to him are you?”

“Well I’ve only thought about punching him,” something jogs in Eddie’s mind, “Chrissy, what happened to the cleaning lady?”

“Oh...we did talk about it honey but you weren't really...taking it in, I don’t think-”

“I was fucked up.”

“Yeah...but she…”

“Just say it.”

“The...you know, the vomit. You were constantly trashing the place. She was worried she was...well she was mostly scared she was going to walk in one day and find your body.”

“Oh.” Eddie slumps down on the bottom step, “that sucks. I liked her.”

“Don’t worry, her final pay was incredible. She got a really impressive bunch of flowers.”

“Oh...well. Thank you. For sorting that.” Eddie’s eyes feel wet. His lip wobbles a little, but he holds it in. He’s got no right to guilt about that, not now. “The place looks okay though, I think Steve’s been cleaning some.”

“Yeah, probably, he seems like a good guy.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, but the first tear breaks free and he knows he can’t hide it much longer, “go on your run.”

“Okay, speak later?”

“Yeah, course.”

“Eddie?”

“Hmm?”

“It’s so great to hear you sounding more like yourself, I missed you so much.”

Eddie hangs up, draws his knees up to his chest, the material of his sweats already darkened with tears.

[sincerelybubbles]

spencer x reader || alarms

late night working on a case, the hotel fire alarms on your floor won’t stop going off. what choice do you have other than to crawl to a pining spencer reid’s room to try and get some rest?

warnings: one slightly ? suggestive comment if you squint, mutual pining, not proof read. build up/background of a bubbly!reader i’ve been meaning to write about <3 v short n sweet fluffy!!!

————

“hey,” you whisper when spencer opens the door, pillow crammed under your arm. your sweats are rumpled, long shirt almost hitting your knees under an equally oversized academy shirt, hair mussed and eyes sleepy.

the sight makes his chest burn and his knuckles grip tight against the doorframe.

“hi?” spencer manages to respond, voice confused but still stepping to the side to let you inside automatically.

you shuffle by, pink fuzzy socks peeking over the tops of your dress shoes. it’s ridiculous, the sight of the fluff spilling over the edges of your mary jane’s (unbuckled), made even moreso by how cute he finds it.

“sorry, i know it’s early. the fire alarm on my building won’t turn off, it’s been almost 45 minutes.” you turn once you hit the small kitchenette in his hotel room and awkwardly clutch your pillow to your chest.

after a moment of squinting, eyes unaccustomed to the dim of the room and contactless, spencer realizes that you’re not holding a hotel pillow. rather, it’s covered in little pink daisies and looks far more comfortable than the rocks on his bed.

“i was wondering if i could take the chair in your room?” you ask, continuing despite how spencer’s mind is now racing with thoughts of your pink daisy sheets that he was aware of before tonight (this morning?) but wasn’t expecting to be reminded of when his mind is still hazy enough to crave the warmth of your body next to his.

“you—yeah.” spencer shakes his head in one, fast motion, rapidly switching to nodding when he realizes that could be misread as a no to your question. it makes him dizzy but wakes him up just enough to dig himself out of dreams. when he opened the door, there was a moment where his heart thudded in his chest, sure you were coming here to climb in his bed for other reasons.

not that you ever had before or that he thought you were the type to, of course not that—never that. it was just that his mind was stuck in a molasses of sleep that so frequently rewarded him of dreams where scenarios like that happen. or, even better, dreams where you two simply sit next to each other, your stocking-ed leg pressed against his pants, knocking together, hands intertwined, a warm glow emanating from somewhere for you to read to him by.

those dreams were the worst, just real enough that he could feel the love emanating from your breath, know that you want him close too, only to be yanked away with the spasms of beeps from his phone serving as his alarm.

“yes, of course you can stay here,” spencer finally says after his tragedy of a nod, moving past you and into the bed area of the room to yank the pillow he was using from the bed, “but you take the bed, i can take the chair.”

“no, spence, it’s like 3 in the morning and you’ll get a headache. i intruded on you, i’ll take the chair.”

spencer is shaking his head no before you finish, turning to stare at you. subconsciously, you mimic how he holds his pillow under his left arm and spencer makes a note to research if it’s actually true that attraction causes people to mimic each other.

and, fuck, this is why he had to put distance between you two because his brain can’t just be normal about things. you’re an affectionate person, spilling over with hugs and hands on arms and kisses on cheeks and he can’t help but analyze everything for a sign that it might be more.

“no, really, i’ll take the chair.”

you laugh at him, shaking your head and making your way closer. “let’s just share,” you suggest, tossing your pillow onto the side of the bed not made messy by spencer and rubbing your eyes with two closed fists, digging in deep. “i’m exhausted and we have to get back to it tomorrow. i’m not winning this fight and i can’t have my best brainiac impeded by a headache tomorrow.”

“no, it’s really—“

“spencer.” your eyes are earnest when you look at him, wide and tired and so so hypnotic. he can’t say no, not when you’re blinking up at him, only lit by the obnoxious street lights filtering in through the cheap hotel curtains, in your pajamas, taking in a tired, tiny voice.

“yeah, okay,” he says, forfeiting the back and forth and allowing himself to give in, just for tonight.

you yawn in response, hand coming up to cover your triumphant smile. you look exhausted, climbing into bed and shoving your feet under the sheets with much more aggression than necessary.

spencer climbs in after you, stretching his legs out and flexing his arm so his shoulder pops with a loud click. it’s a testament to how close you are to sleep that you don’t wince and tell him he shouldn’t do that—you always get onto him for it.

“hey,” spencer says after a moment, mind slowing but still moving fast enough to keep him on the cusp of sleep.

you makes a small sound, high pitched, as you roll over and press your forehead to his bicep. “what?” you say, voice half asleep, half complaint.

“is that my academy sweater? i’ve been looking for it everywhere.”

“mm,” you hum, head moving up and down against his arm. “you left it at my place. i like wearing it—miss you less when i do.” your voice is trailing off, spencer’s heart is pounding, and he nearly misses the soft sigh you let out before tacking on, “makes m’feel like yours.”

it could mean a million different things, spencer tells himself as he listens to your breath deepen and slow, but he lets himself imagine it means exactly what he wants it to as his eyes settle closed.

[madthetruemad]

WHEN YOU REALIZE HOW STRONG HE IS, or when you're just playing around and you see that he can hold you down quite easily...

cw ; a dabble of angst (if you squint) w/ comfort, and maybe a tiny bit suggestive

mydei x reader (implied fem!reader)

MYDEI doesn't always indulge with roughhousing with you. However, today was just one of those days where your playful demeanor finally rubbed off on him.

You were laughing as you lightly pushed at him and tried to knock him down to the couch, but he had other plans when he pushed you down instead.

Your back was flush with the cushions of the couch before you could even blink, and his hands were holding your shoulders down easily. You struggled a bit, try to push up, or even wriggle your way out. But Mydei was strong.

The sudden realization of not being able to push him off of you hit you like a slap to the face.

And when you stopped laughing and giggling, that's when Mydei pulled back. A frown etched across his features as he looked down you... that expression... why were you making that face?

Trying to act like nothing happened, you smiled again, "you're," you laughed awkwardly, sheepishly as you sat up with him, "you're really strong!"

He frowned at you, he could already guess what made you react like that.

"Stop that."

"H- huh, stop what?"

"That fake expression, stop making it. I made you uncomfortable just now, it was obvious."

You dropped the smile as he had asked, "no... it's my fault for thinking of something stupid. I didn't mean to bring the whole mood down...," your voice trailed off and he decided to delve deeper. He didn't want this to happen again. Seeing you smile, a real smile, was far better.

"What was it that you were... thinking about?"

"I guess.. I just realized how strong you were. Like, I couldn't push you off or anything! And you weren't even being serious!"

He raised an eyebrow, "you are worried you won't be able to fight me off?"

You shook your head almost instantly, "no, no! I'm not- I'm not trying to say that at all! Ugh, it's so hard to explain-"

"I'm sorry."

His apology through you off guard sending you into a panic, "you- you don't need to apologize! My mind is just being stupid!"

"And yet when we were messing around, you still feel as if you need to be able to push me off at any given moment if things got bad."

You pressed your lips together and he continued.

"I want you to know that you are safe... with me. And that with even a single word said by you, you can get me to get off of you."

"Mydei..."

"So, until the day comes that you feel safe with me. I guess I'll just have to try harder to prove myself to you. Even with foolish acts like this."

"Like what?"

You tilted your head to the side but just as you asked that you let out a loud squeal as you grabbed onto his shoulders as he flipped you both over.

Now he was the one laying against the couch as you were above him straddling his waist.

"No matter the position we're in, you're always in control."

You felt your face grow hot at the implication, but you were happy nonetheless. You were safe. You are safe with Mydei.

[denelian]

it's even worse than that - I mean, *someone* made that ad, you know the one, where the two actors are on a boat and being all snuggly. To win some MTV award (best ship, maybe? I don't know, I'm the wrong generation to watch MTV anymore, I'm 48...). And it's not like Tyler and Dylan made up the interactions from whole cloth - someone *wrote* their banter and their physical interactions! Someone wrote Derek pushing Stiles into a wall in a manner we *all* know from dozens of pre -sex scenes in action flicks!

Now, I don't pay the most attention, because I'm in the Sterek fandom and not the Teen Wolf fandom (I've only seen 1 episode, but I've read hundreds of Sterek fics) but I've a theory based on internet rumors I've accidentally stumbled across; Jeff Davis apparently modeled the character of Derek after an ex of his (which is why he keeps ADDING to the horrific hell of Derek's life, to at least metaphorically punish said ex) and Stiles is supposed to be on *Scott's* team, and JD has set them as somehow rivals or enemies (Derek and Scott, that is) so if Stiles gets together with Derek, he's "betraying" Scott. Because Derek is, after all, "evil" because he's based on JD's ex. Derek cannot, in JD's head, have nice things - and Stiles is MORE than nice, he's integral to any wolf *surviving* in Beacon Hills.

I've been bitching about the structure of this show since I read the first 2 seasons' recaps - generally, the POV character in a show is the newcomer or the outside. So it makes sense for it to be about in the first season, he was the newcomer. But after the first season, when there are more wolves, and Stiles is the lone human running with them? (Because Lydia isn't human and Allison isn't really with them, even before Gerard twists her up.) from that point, Stiles should be the POV character. He's certainly a better fit for it, given that he *doesn't* betray everyone time and again, then mysteriously become an alpha... Then betray his best friend more times than I can count (and I quit paying ANY attention to the show about the time Scott believed some random dude he knew for a few months back in grade school over STILES, to the point that he *didn't even ask Stiles what happened*, just believed that random dude.)

Like, you could have a GREAT show about morality vs ethics, power corrupting, abusing loyalty, there's MEAT there! But no, JD *tells* is that Scott is some Paragon of virtue (and doesn't do any research or give any thought to what *fallen* Paragons are... It how Scott makes much more sense as a fallen Paragon...) and because he TELLS us, he expects us to ignore that he SHOWS us an abusive, controlling ass who blames Stiles for *everything*. And has probably been doing so for their entire friendship, tbh...

Which is why I stick with the fanfic. JD doesn't know what he has, and he doesn't WANT it - as he's so loudly proven.

(Do NOT get me started on that mess of a movie!)

“You didn’t think you’re doing this without me, did you?” “Without us?”