#and that's worked for the past decade just fine

[sugarushwriting]

vampire enhypen ot7, you’re their human blood bank (part eight and last part!!) (or is it the end?)

last part! thank you for loving this series, that i didn’t expect to be a series!

also i realized mfc roomies name is jen 🤦🏽‍♀️ pls ignore that and imagine two different jens

not proof read.

reblog, like, comment, share but please do not repost or translate.

again, i am not shipping any le sserafim girls with enhypen, especially ni-ki and eunchae!!

₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ₊˚⊹♡

a few days passed and jay felt like he lost all authority of the guys. ni-ki was ignoring him and all the other guys, they couldn’t find him after he disappeared in the middle of the night. he hadn’t showed up to classes the rest of the week.

they lost you. you ignoring every effort of them trying to reach out. again, it hurt you to ignore jake and the younger ones, but you couldn’t be sure they were genuinely concerned or doing it because of jay and sunghoon.

sunghoon was pissed at jay as well. jay was still angry with jake. jake was just trying to focus on classes but he missed your taste and blood.

jungwon only got to feed on you once, and his body was definitely craving your blood. heeseung tried to help him feed on another human safely, but it seemed his body rejected the blood.

soon it would be sunoos turn to feed on a human, and he was less than thrilled.

jay stood in the middle of the library in the house that you loved so much. your scent lingering behind. he sighed in frustration, more at himself.

“jay.” sunghoon caught his attention.

jay turned around. “yeah.”

“we have trouble.”

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

the trouble? sakura called in a friend.

bang chan, also known as chris. he was an elder vampire, even older than jay by a decade. but not only was he a vampire, but a vampire—werewolf hybrid.

bang chan brought two of his own vampires, lee know and seungmin.

“thank you for coming so quickly.”

“of course.”

bang chan lived not too far away, but stayed low. he didn’t just take in vampires, but all supernatural creatures that don’t have a family or their original living arrangements didn’t work out.

ni-ki bowed to the oldest.

“you must be ni-ki.” bang chan smiled.

bang chan explained how he made sure all supernatural creatures learned to live among humans all while balancing their other lifestyle.

he has fairies, a banshee, a ghoul, other vampires, werewolves and so much more he helps and takes care of.

“i could come with you?”

“if you want. i understand your original living plans may not be going the way it should?”

ni-ki shook his head, “he’s threatening to send me to switzerland.”

“sounds like good ole jay. just hauling newbies off when he finds it too hard.” lee know laughed.

you soon came down the stairs surprised by the handsome men in the living room.

“is she a creature needing a living space too?” lee know asked.

“no. she’s a human hiding from the guys. they poisoned her to keep her at bay to behave.” sakura answered.

“jay has become more unhinged since the last i have seen him.” bang chan said and looked at sakura. “basically since he last had you, when you were human.”

“they know we’re in town.” seungmin whispered.

he was talking about jay and sunghoon. bang chan looked back to the younger one. “do they know where exactly?”

“they shouldn’t, i made sure they couldn’t track us.” sakura said.

“that’s why we couldn’t smell you all.” bang chan nodded. “smart.”

sakura got a phone call from one of the girls.

“we’re being followed by them.” kazhua said.

sakura already knew who she meant by them. sakura looked at the three vampires in her living room.

“lead them here. it’s fine.” sakura answered then hung up.

kazuha and eunchae led sunghoon and jay straight to the seraphims house, pretending they didn’t know they were being followed.

both girls entered the house, greeting the three men. sakura made quick introductions, then a knock came at the door.

“oh how nice for them to knock.” bang chan laughed.

sakura went to open the door, jay and sunghoon pushed past her but stopped when they came eye to eye with bangchan.

“hello men.” he smirked. he knew those two had no power over him. bangchan was one of the strongest living supernatural creatures there was.

jay didn’t even acknowledge him. “ni-ki, pack your things, you’re coming home with us.”

“no, you’ll just send me to switzerland!”

jay shook his head. “i realized i over reacted. i promise not to send you to switzerland.”

“why? so you can chain me in the basement instead?”

sunghoon made eye contact with you. “babydoll.” he said barely above a whisper. he couldn’t even recognize his own voice.

your heart fluttered at hearing sunghoons voice. “hi hoonie.”

he went to step closer to you, but stopped himself. “babydoll, how are you?”

“she’s fine now that she’s not poisoned by you.” kazhua spat.

sunghoon frowned. “i am so sorry.” he was defeated. you were special to them.

jay was fighting his emotions. his family was basically falling apart. jake was ignoring him, sunoo and jungwon was tiptoeing around him, ni-ki had ran away, sunghoon and heeseung was frustrated with him.

most of all, he lost you. he betrayed you and your trust. and because of that, his own clan was struggling. but he just needed you to know you belonged to them and no one else.

he didn’t like the idea that you may be going off with bangchan and his clan.

jay looked up at you with pleading eyes. “love, i am so so sorry for how i treated you and made the guys treat you.” jay stepped closer to you, you instinctively stepped back. “love, please don’t go off with them.”

you looked at him surprised. “you think i was going to leave with them?” you pointed towards bangchan and the other two guys.

eunchae shook her head. “she wants to become a seraphim.”

everyone in that room looked at you in shock. eunchae was tired of holding onto what you asked her last night.

“absolutely not! i will not lose another love!” jay yelled in anger. then looked to sakura with pleading eyes. in order for you to become a seraphim you would have to die. you knew that much.

“what’s the point of me staying human if i grow older and you all stay the same huh? what happens then jay?” you argued once again. “like i have stated, i refuse to be at your beck and call for the rest of my life!”

“fine! you wanna become a supernatural creature?”

no one, not even bangchan saw what was coming next. jay used his vampire speed to pass everyone, to get to you.

you couldn’t even realize he was in front of you until he sunk his teeth into your neck. this time, it felt different. it didn’t feel like jay was feeding. no, this stung, terribly. you screamed out in pain.

you heard screaming, gasping, your named being yelled, jays name being yelled, and then jay ripped off of you.

all before you blacked out.

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

“babydoll, wake up please.” you heard sunghoons pleading voice.

“jay has lost his damn mind!” jake said next.

“what the hell is wrong with him?” this was heeseungs voice.

“it’s his emotions.” you think that was bangchan. “he’s blinded by her like he was sakura. but this time, he refused to lose her.” bangchan sighed. “he went against his morals to keep the woman he wanted.”

“but now we won’t even be able to feed off of her. her blood is like ours!” jake stated in worry. oh how he was going to miss your taste.

“not necessarily,” bangchan offered, “her body still needs to accept or reject the change.”

you squirmed. what does he mean accept or reject? you slowly opened your eyes, realizing you were at the boys house, in sunghoons room. you had a cold towel pressed on your forehead, a mini heart monitor attached to your finger.

“baby, you’re awake!” jake smiled in relief and went up next to you to grab your hand.

bangchan asked, “how are you feeling?”

“like hell.” you answered with a groan. “what do you mean accept or reject?”

bangchan didn’t beat around the bush. instead simply and straightforwardly answered your question. “when someone gets turned into a vampire, their body will either reject the transformation or accept it. by accepting it, you turn into a newbie. by rejecting, you’ll either return back to a human with some complications or die.” bangchan explained. “we’ll know in the next 12 hours what your body does.”

“what kind of complications?” you asked.

“there’s no limit or straight answer. some who have rejected the change became blind, or mute, or deaf. they’ve became paralyzed. some develop paranoia, ptsd, and other mental disorders. some end up getting tumors or cancer. very rare has those who rejected the change return to their normal self.”

“im gonna kill him.” sunghoon said under his breath.

“no need for that, let’s see how she does, first.” bangchan said trying to ease the tension. “remember, you all said she was special. it’s very rare a vampire loses all their morals and senses over a human. there must be a reason.”

“any ideas?” sunghoon asked.

“there’s a few,” bangchan began. “all of you say she’s special, at least the ones that have fed on her. and there’s some reasons to that. her blood could have a rare genetic marker that makes you all more attracted to her. it could be simple as her blood type is rare and more diserable. or it could be symbolic.”

“symbolic how?” you asked now interested yourself.

“a human who’s special to a vampire can represent the human side or humanity that vampires lost once they became what they are. a reminder of their past life of what they once were. it causes an emotional attachment and significance.”

“what was it for sakura?” you asked.

“her blood type was rare and more desirable back then.” sunghoon answered. “same for kazuha. the more we fed the more we bonded with them through their blood.”

“what happens if my body accepts the change?”

“you’ll have to feed on jays blood to complete the change.”

“and if i don’t?”

“you die.”

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

jay was being watched heavily by lee know, seungmin, sakura, and kazuha. eunchae stayed back at the house with ni-ki, and jen, chae and garam showed up to keep them company after what they witnessed.

jay was surprised by his own self. he’s never went against his morals. he vowed to never bite a human to change them unless they were close to dead and agreed to become a vampire.

“i don’t need a babysitter.” jay huffed.

“if she dies, i will rip your head off myself.” sakura snapped. “another human doesn’t deserve to die because of you.” sakura wanted to cry but she stayed strong.

“sakura, im so sorry.” jay apologized.

“centuries too late buddy.”

sunghoon walked into the living room where jay was being watched. jay stood up quickly, “how is she? any change? any idea of what her body will do?”

“she’s okay for now, she’s awake. no worries or ideas yet. she’s aware her body may accept or reject and bangchan explained what may happen if her body rejects it. bangchan even explained why we could be so attached to her.” sunghoon said.

“why are yall so possessive of her?” sakura asked. “is her blood that rare like how mine and kazuhas was? it’s the 21st century, im sure her rare blood type is more out there than before.”

sunghoon shook his head. “im not sure. she doesn’t remind me of my past before i became a vampire.”

jay shook his head. “me niether.”

“then it could be a genetic marker in her blood.” lee know offered as insight. “meaning she could come from a line of heritage that is just meant to be a human blood bank for vampires.”

“meaning she was made to be fed on by vampires.” seungmin summarized.

“then why aren’t yall going crazy for her? is it because you all haven’t tasted her?” sakura asked.

lee know shook his head. “she smells sweet, but not something i want. she is made for jay and his line of vampires, meaning, everyone he’s turned.”

“if we taste her, she may either taste normal or bitter to us.” seungmin added. “it also means someone in her family has the same genetic marker and was fed on by a descendant of jays. whether it be a great-great grandmother or great aunt or uncle, or whatever. there’s no pattern on how many generations it skips or passes down to.”

“if that’s the case, then her body will reject the change because she’s not meant to be a vampire.” bangchan spoke up as he came down to the living room. “if her genetic make up is made for her being fed on, then she’ll reject the change, survive, and go back to normal, hopefully with no complications. we just have to wait and see.”

“that still doesn’t excuse your behavior!” sakura scolded. “poor eunchae and ni-ki are probably traumatized!”

︶꒦꒷♡꒷꒦︶

12 hours later, you felt the same. you didn’t feel sick, you didn’t feel stronger, you felt like the same ole plain you. your body rejected the change with no complications.

bangchan explained the reasoning behind that. your genetic marker and why you’re so special.

“so i still grow old, they’ll be young, and eventually throw me to the curb?” you sighed.

bangchan shrugged. “not necessarily, weirder things have happened.”

you realized you do have a bond with these boys, and it started when jay took note of you in class. when your eyes met, you knew there was something special, some different. when he told you about him and the other guys, you weren’t scared, it almost felt normal.

you were stuck with them and you were okay with that.

little did you know, it was your great-great-great grandmother who carried the genetic marker. she was special to jays father. jays father fed on her and continues to with his wife, jays mom.

yes, that is right. your great-great-great grandmother is still alive. after she died, jays dad found a witch to bring her back to her young human form so he could continue to feed with the one blood he had a bond with.

jays dad would make sure his son knew the truth, when it came time to say goodbye to you and how he could keep you alive and young.

₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ₊˚⊹♡

[bacchuschucklefuck]

the never stop blowing up vhs is where cute twinks go to get harmed

[ultimaid]

seeking advice on how to not borrow grief from the future. preemptive grief is exhausting and useless.

[cloud-somersault]

fucking crying because of the immediate implication in chapter 6 of the epilogue that macaque and wukong teaching MK together is absolutely the way to go because the progress MK makes is immediate, overly successful, and cannot be denied

and the way they taught and thought about things was good and worked very well for MK, who needed that hour to build confidence in himself and practice in a low-pressure environment with no stakes, no catastrophes, nothing on the line.

MK believed in the love and wonder of magic while cloud-somersaulting, and he did the same thing with the tree. he did magic for magic's sake. he did it because he wanted to, because he wanted to see a flower bloom. but because of his connection to the element of wood, MK's magic is much easier to direct. He probably thought of a ginkgo tree for like a SECOND and his magic was like "YUP! okay!"

i just love the conversation they have with MK before leaving him alone. They give him what he needs, they tell him that if he fails, it's not his fault; it's theirs. they rewrote the method of teaching elemental magic just for him. they love and care about MK so much and they want him to succeed it's so precious!!!

physically holding myself back from just making the epilogue be more magic lessons, but nooooo we gotta have shadowpeach feelings and wukong has to give his mans a plum or some shit 🙄

[risingsunresistance]

feels weird to not have much to post, i feel like i basically disappeared off social media compared to how i used to post but. there is simultaneously so much going on (things that are boring/heavy and not fun to post about) and nothing at all going on (i have not been able to play anything very much and havent been watching anything besides random documentaries i stumble across), leading to me having nothing to say lmao

i did finally write down a bunch of hypixel worldbuilding headcanon junk instead of having it only be word-of-mouth between me and ark lol. only 1700 words, i can do better 👍 it was literally only about admin magic, what exactly it means to "hack," what a server is, and limbo kjgfhk. i might make a big post about the limbo section one day :]

[mejomonster]

When ppl in person realize i can draw, and i mention im writing, theyre like: oh are you making a comic? Then when i say no, it took me 30 days to do a 30 page 1 chapter comic last time I tried at 4-6 hours of work a day and ideally id like a turnaround of like one 30 page chapter per 1-2 weeks if i was going to do it long term so. No. I am not making comics any more.

Then theyre like: are u gonna illustrate ur book???

And while i deeply appreciate the sentiment. Its also like... well my good sir madam elder, do u typically... look for adult novels with illustration pages? I mean yes i love illustrations too but im not sure why id draw extra, when im already gonna probably make my own cover, and i want my books to be enough within confines of expected that ppl idk... give em a chance? Idk. Food for thought. Do i illustrate my book chapters mm

[yellobb]

Guess who gave herself ✨food poisoning✨

[schwazombie]

Being an immigrant is so difficult i want to SCREAM

[wewontbesleeping]

people are sooo weird about thrifting and resellers. do you know how much clothing ends up in landfills? everyone who is working to keep clothing out of the landfills is fucking awesome in my book. there is NO SHORTAGE of used clothing. not even CLOSE.

[citricacidprince]

Could you draw that "I trust you" scene with Mabel and Stan but with the relativity AU? (The stan twins and pine twins swap ages au)

OF COURSE, I WILL GLADLY DRAW THEM!!! 💥💥💥

I’m gonna post a long winded thesis about my thoughts on this AU, my take on the AU, and two additional arts under the cut because ooooh boy it’s a tad bit long lol. Also, please please forgive the formatting, I’m writing this all on the fly and it’s extremely disjointed, sorry- 💥

I know there’s the ‘canon’ Relativity AU designs and character dynamics, however I don’t really like them that much ngl. I feel like it mostly just ends up with ‘Mabel and Dipper get switched with Stan and Ford with no nuances once so ever’ and that BLOWS!!! There’s so much potential there and no one is playing with it!! YOU GUYS DON’T EVEN HAVE MABEL PRETENDING TO BE DIPPER, WHATS THE POINT????

Not only that but I feel like making Dipper and Mabel’s dynamic just Ford and Stan’s when they’re adults is a HUGE simplification of their characters. Like, Mabel and Dipper fight, but they don’t fight like Stan and Ford, they’re not as hard headed and stubborn. Mabel would commit some crimes yes, but I don’t believe she would get into some of the heavy shit Stan had in his past. I refuse to believe Mr. Dipper ‘Undiagnosed Anxiety Disorder’ Pines would fall for Bill’s flattery as easily as Ford did.

The Pines Twins are very different from the Mystery Twins. Mabel and Dipper didn’t grow up with a father constantly comparing the two and pinning them against each other, outright telling one kid they’ll always be a failure while the other is going to have the burden of making their family rich. They never had that tension. They wouldn’t be walking on eggshells around eachother as adults.

I know that makes the concept sound boring to some, ‘Where’s the fun in the AU if you take away the sibling fighting’. You cowards, you can still have it, young Stan and Ford are RIGHT THERE. During the second half of the show when Dipper comes back through the portal, instead of having the older set of twins, something that doesn’t male sense with their characters, have a building tension that’s going to explode soon and keep it between Stan and Ford, don’t take it away from them. If anything, I think taking away the resentment and anger growing between the two and giving it to Mabel and Dipped is a butchering of all the characters.

Sure that means some of the episodes would have to change or be completely erased, but that’s fine!!! Make up some new ones!!! Get silly with it!!!

Mabel and Dipper talk about feelings, Stan and Ford don’t. Mabel and Dipper can’t stay mad at each other, Stan and Ford will try and stay mad for decades because being angry is easier than being upset.

In my idea of this AU that fight at the end of Weirdmageddon HAS to be between Stan and Ford, and Stan HAS to still be the one getting his memories erased.

💥 Post Not-What-He-Seems Relativity AU Rambling Below 💥

Dipper is a paranoid man, fool him once you’re never going to fool him again. He would never in a million years ever work with Bill again. Ford however is an extremely lonely child, both he and his brother are desperate for any type of positive attention. I think Bill would see him as a potential protege, especially since Ford is a ‘freak’ like he is and the kid is extremely smart for his age. He’s malleable, Bill probably thinks he could shape him uo to be the perfect lackey.

Ford, being the lonely kid he is, probably does fall for the praise initially. He craves attention and Bill pushes all the right buttons and says all the right words, tries and gains his trust even if time has proven again and again that he shouldn’t be trusting the demon.

The tension between the Stan Twins would grow after Grunkle Dipper comes back because Ford is upset that Stan didn’t listen to him (even if it was for the best that he did) and that Grunkle Dipper forgave Graunty Mabel so easily because if Ford was in those shoes he wouldn’t have. It grows more and more as Ford becomes distant and Stan tries to connect with his brother to no avail. Which, of course, comes to a boiling point when Ford says he’s going to stay in Gravity Falls and learn under Grunkle Dipper. Stan is rightfully upset. He can’t go back to New Jersey by himself. It’s always just been the two of them, he needed Ford, he couldn’t handle school or their father by himself. He can’t be alone.

Unlike Mabel who just wanted one more day of summer, Stan wishes that he wouldn’t be alone, which indirectly causes Weirdmaggendon.

Stan’s prison bubble would probably be a fake New Jersey-esc town full of a bunch of little Stan running around. Town O’ Stan. A place where no Stan is left behind.

Ford says some nice words to Stan there to get him outta there but there is still this intense tension between the two.

During the Cipher Wheel Ford is the one who tackles Stan. The two fight, whining out hurtful words neither of them mean and only stop when Bill shows up and captures them. Graunty Mabel and Grunkle Dipper run off and distract Cipher in hopes that they can keep the attention on themselves long enough that their great nephews could come up with a plan to escape.

The younger twins don’t find a way out and instead, finally, have an actual talk about their feelings, one that definitely ends up in tears as the two talk about the pressure that’s put on them or how worthless they feel. After that the boys get a rush of determination to escape when Stanley has a plan. Ford immediately hates the plan but Stan insists that they do it, in his own words, ‘Let me prove I can do something right for once.’

When Bill comes back and threatens to kill either Mabel or Dipper just for the hell of it, Ford calls out that he’d like to make a deal.

He wants to work with Bill, let Bill into his mind willingly. Bill immediately jumps on that offer. Ford is a promising young kid, perfect henchmaniac potential, not to mention it would absolutely devastate Dipper is his great nephew willingly turned to Bill’s side.

He goes into Ford’s head, revealing Stanley just in time to reveal that he was trapped, panicking as he was erased with a swift left-hook along with a kid who was happy to prove he was good for something after all.

Everyone was devastated after Weirdmaggedon of course, a child had his mind completely wiped. Stanford took it the worst, he just managed to finally break down those words that others built in his head, that he was too good for Stanley or that he didn’t need a knucklehead like him dumbing down his brain, and now his brother was gone. Just like that.

We all know what happens after this, Stan gets his memory back, everyone celebrates and the Stan twins are sent home, promising each other that they’ll never let anyone try and tear them apart ever again. Dipper and Mabel stay at the shack, after all, all they could ever want is there, where else could they possibly go?

Sorry this was… extremely rambly and long, I am extremely tired and can’t think straight I have a bunch more ideas and concepts so if anyone’s desperately wants to hear them just ask I guess, sorry you read this dumb of ass essay haha 💥

[jcbmcdrmtt]

Sorry if I am not as good about tagging stuff for the foreseeable future. I shattered the screen of my tablet (to the point where there are chunks missing and glass dust coming off under your fingers and you can see the electronics under the screen), and I normally use that + a keyboard case to browse tumblr. I’m using my phone now which means a.) no physical keyboard, and b.) I don’t have as much battery life so my time is more limited. I do not see a point where I can replace the tablet or get it fixed anytime soon either.

All that coupled with the fact that I normally use tumblr in a browser, not the mobile app, means it’s a lot harder to tag things now, especially if I can’t just tap to apply OP’s/the reblogger’s tags because they didn’t add any or i don’t like what they used etc.. Tumblr mobile is honestly tiny and kind of crap on my phone browser - the keyboard makes the screen elements squish together and some things like tag rearranging are broken.

TL;DR: You may possibly see more untagged posts from me in the coming weeks. I apologize, understand if you unfollow, and just. Yeah. I guess I just wanted to explain myself as I normally pride myself on my tagging etiquette.

[victim9d]

hm.

[bunnys-kisses]

Hi bunny I was wondering if I could get a Boston cream pie with coffee and mocha coffee with dark!lando maybe? Thank youuu

bakery menu

want to submit your own order? then hit up the menu! i love receiving all kinds of requests! thank you to everyone who had sent something! i hope you enjoy this, especially the one who submitted it! thank you all and enjoy! <3

boston cream pie ("yeah, i'll use protection.") + coffee (rivals au) + mocha coffee (breeding kink) served by lando norris (formula one)!!

cw: smut/pwp, dark-ish fic, dark!lando, breeding kink, rivals au, mercedes driver!reader, lying, no protection, mentions of pregnancy

you were a level headed driver, you came down that track like lightning and even when things went south, you kept your cool. you never got snippy on the radio and even when you loss the race, you dealt with it with total grace.

you were a good sport, congratulatory towards whoever was on the podium. as a result you were a darling on the track, especially to the media. the first woman in decades to race with the big leagues. you were sweet as honey to everyone, or so it seemed.

everyone except when you went toe-to-toe with lando off the track. your hands dug into the front of his t-shirt as you said to him, "how dare you, norris."

"aw, what's wrong, princess? did you break a nail?" lando didn't make it any better, leering at you as you held onto him.

this was a common back and forth. the snapping of jaws between you two. lando looked at you with a healthy smirk while you got right into his face. oscar piastri once described it as watching you two fuck without the 'fun' part. he also suggested that you two found other ways to take all the stress out.

"no. you played dirty today, norris. you know, mclaren's strategy isn't playing mad max fury road all over the track!" your hands held deeper into the shirt. you swore you could feel his quickening heartbeat.

lando made a face at you and said, "then if you can't handle the heat... get off the track... i bet you'd do lovely in craft services... or maybe you could be my assistant." he licked his top lip, "my logo all over your pretty tits, but you know i like my cum on them better."

your cheeks went hot as you pulled him closer to you, your foreheads almost touching as you glared at him. "you are a sick fuck, lando."

lando got his arms around you behind and gave your ass cheek a squeeze, "and yet... you can't get enough of me."

you both heard a loud groan from behind you, you both looked over and saw oscar standing there with his hands in his pockets. he took a hand out and scratched the back of his head. this wasn't the first he had caught you, he was used to it at this point.

"uh.. hey. the press are going to be in here soon. so unless you want to make national news. i suggest you." he pointed to you, "get back to your team and we." he pointed to lando, "have to do an interview."

you pulled away and said to oscar, "thank you, mate." before you 'accidentally' stepped on lando's foot as you headed out of the room. that night you'd get a text message with a location and time. and the message 'wear something orange', which you never complied with. orange made you feel less like a sex symbol and more like the fruit.

but a short black dress would work just fine for the evening.

you were a normal sighting at the hotels that mclaren were staying at. while you tried to cover up that it was all purely platonic, they knew. your team knew, lando's team knew. teams that weren't involved knew. you were certain even teams not in formula one knew. but, yet you went to the hotel room and knocked three times in quick succession.

lando opened the door and got a good look at you. he said, "i asked for orange."

you got past him, "i prefer mercedes black. feel like it highlights me better." you said as you got inside the hotel room, "bed? couch? don't tell me you want to do it on the floor."

he chuckled and closed the door before he came to you. he was dressed casually. sweatpants and a black t-shirt that highlighted his toned frame. he followed you as you sat on the edge of the bed to get your heels off.

he sat beside you, up against you with his large hand on your soft thigh. he kissed at your neck before you even had the chance to get undressed. he sighed against your scent.

"beautiful as always."

you took him by the jaw and looked him in the eyes. it was a dangerous glance. even without the make-up wore off the track, you looked beyond beautiful. lando once said that they should make you the trophy, come out in something skimpy. that earned a death glare from you before lando made it up to you with kisses along your thighs.

"is it a crime now to state the obvious? i thought you were all about telling the truth." he said as you held him. his words were silenced when you pulled him in for a tender kiss. he made a soft noise against your lips as you invaded his space. it felt good, it felt right.

like two magnets come together. opposites that pulled together. his hands were soon on your shoulders before you pushed him back into the bed. when he pulled away, he said, "let me on top. i want to see that face." then started to undress himself with you beside him on the bed.

"yeah, no. you're just going to make fun of me. remember you said once when i orgasm i look like i ate a lemon. it's doggy for me tonight."

he chuckled, "whatever the princess wants." he beamed at you.

you looked at him. a knowing look you've given a million times. with you soon naked, your breasts capturing his attention fully that he barely noticed the expression on your face. you coughed into your fist and looked at him.

he looked back at you before he said "yeah, i'll use protection." you two may had been playing a risky game over the last few weeks. using the pull-out method was dumb, but it wasn't like you two carried condoms around.

in all fairness lando could've been a gentleman and bought some. but, he lied to you about having them. his mind was somewhere else. lando norris wanted you pregnant. keep you off the track, but still in his life. be easier to get a hold on you when your hips got a little softer and soon you were taking care of a norris baby.

he was lucky that tonight you wanted doggy style as you wiggled your ass to him enticingly which made his heart rate skip. you were a real siren's call, he could imagine you on the rocky shores of england singing your siren's song. but usually in those tales, the siren doesn't get pregnant so... maybe it was a little different.

"got the condom, norris?" you asked as you pressed your chest against the soft bed. you held over the pillow under your head and pressed your cheek against it.

"yes." he said, "i got it." his cock was bare and the tip was leaking. he stroked it a few times and admired your naked body in front of him. he shifted a little bit on the bed before he nudged his cock up against your slick entrance. it was a familiar feeling, he had become hooked on you like an itch he couldn't scratch unless he was balls deep inside of you. and he thankfully was able to scratch that itch as he sank into you.

your back arched and your short nails dug into the pillow under your head as your back was curved more as he invaded your space further. you didn't even notice that he wasn't wearing a condom. you moaned as he started to thrust up against you. it felt really good, you hated to admit it. but sex with lando was always good and it made your brain sometimes go blank in the rush of pleasure as he moved against you.

he was good in the bedroom, if only he was as good on the track. then maybe mclaren would have their winner. but that snarky comment died on your tongue as you felt his cock prod some of your softest areas.

lando was on cloud nine, he always was when he got to fuck you. it was like a jolt to the system that made his nerves feel alive. but not in the way that anxiety did. he wanted to jump your bones and keep his thick cock inside of your sweet pussy. he wanted to cream in it so badly, he wanted to make a big mess of it.

make sure that no other man could have you.

maybe his breeding kink was running strong after today's race. he could feel it all the way in his balls as he rutted against you. you felt like a dream as he moved. he wanted you pregnant, you'd make the most perfect mother to his children. he came from a big family so he was hoping for at least four kids with you. he'd make sure that he'd get a nice place for all of you to live in. you'd be a nice little family.

his little rival becoming his wife. the thought excited him as he rutted against you. his heart beated wildly in his chest, his lips found the back of your neck, which caused your to moan and tense up around him. that felt good, it only encouraged him to keep doing it. feeling your slick hole clench around him.

"you feel amazing. so good around me." he pushed into your harder, "fuckin' hell. he swallowed, he felt himself starting to lose a bit of control as he really worked your body. it felt so good, especially without a condom. the rubber stopped him from feeling all of his future wife. that was your new name while he was in a state of heighten euphoria.

you came quickly with your back arched. your groaned into the covers and clawed down the soft comforter. you felt everything kind of go blank for a moment. the only thing that left your mouth was his name. first name and last name. and how you said it made him move even further. and when pleasure struck him, he finished inside the back of your soaked cunt.

he then trailed his blunt nails down your back, hoping to leave deep red lines come morning. a little reminder of him as if his cum stuck to your cunt wasn't enough. but your over stimulated body made you jerk a little bit and moan a little louder into the bed. you looked good face down ass up.

lando slapped your ass before he pulled out and watched your hips drop to the bed. you were out for now, but lando was certain that with a few strokes of his fingers and his mouth on your breasts, he could at least get another round out of you. even as you laid panting on the bed.

after all, he had a baby to make with his little rival.

-

you held that trophy over your head. you could've yelled in excitement. but instead you grinned. you were almost moved to tears, but you held them back. even in the face of victory, you had to show strength. a history maker as the cameras flashed.

you were beyond lucky. the blood tests from the recent evaluation hadn't come back yet before the last race of the season. you knew what formula one didn't know. you were pregnant.

nothing noticeable yet. everything ailment was pinned of the anxiety of performing well for the final race of the season. you held the world champion high over your head. in the coming weeks the media storm around your pregnancy will come to light.

you felt on top of the world as your national anthem played, hand over your heart as you felt the soar in your pulse. the almost imaginary weight in your middle was replaced with the heft of the world champion title over your head as you held the trophy once more for photos. you knew that your career would be halted if not ended in the next few days.

you knew lando was watching, not because he had to. but, because he wanted to. your little rivalry had halted when you disclosed to him in quiet whispers that you were pregnant. and lando whispered promises of a wedding during the off season. something quiet, with family.

for now on the shiny stage, you were a champion. in a way you won the battle. but with the norris baby in your womb, lando won the war. <3

[yeyinde]

dangle on the leash | Simon "Ghost" Riley x F!Reader

The flimsy sarcophagus housing all his wants, his desires, cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant. Ghost cocks his head in consideration. Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. But he's a rabid dog burning with the urge to bite. No one should really be surprised when he finally decides to sink his teeth into you. Unfortunately, that hail mary Price sent into the aether never reached you.

(your bird is too big for a cage— —but maybe a collar would do.)

this is a babytrapping fic lmao but please read the tags carefully. a companion piece to this (Price + babytrapping).

DEAD DOVE. SMUT. 18+

HARD WARNINGS—coercion. dependency. intentional alienation. unsafe, unprotected sex. this very much toes the line of noncon (that is still very dubcon even when consent is given) in many ways, notably: somnophilia, and condom/contraceptive tampering. intrusive, violent thoughts. mentions of violence. manipulation; slight gaslighting. implied kidnapping. references to past abuse (Ghost), brief mention of drugging/threats of drugging (ambiguous as to if it was ever followed through on or not, mostly just Ghost's internal monologue unfiltered). ADDITIONAL TAGS—smut. rough sex. unsafe sex. dom!Ghost. mean, obsessive, unhinged!Ghost. spit kink. dacryphilia.

he's feral, but he's yours. too bad for you, no one is really sure if that's a good thing or not.

One of the things Price often tells new recruits is to shove their old life into a box. 

“There's home,” he huffs, fingers twitching as if he's subconsciously flexing around the hilt of a lit cigar. “And then there's work. Whatever box you decide to put this, or your family, your personal life, into is your choice. But for fuck’s sake. Keep them separate.” 

Most of the new recruits are fresh off selection, shaded sickly chartreuse, and take his words as a literal gospel. Work, this; home, them. They don't start to unravel the second part of his gruff speech until much later. Until they can't wash the blood from their hands, and the scent of their mum’s eucalyptus hand soap is nauseating. Unfamiliar. When being in civvies feels like wearing skin that doesn't fit, and everyone around you is alien, foreign. They don't know. They'll never know. 

It's only when they find themselves gazing at the clock on the wall of their family home, counting down the minutes until their mandatory leave is over do they realise that home is the barracks. 

That's something Ghost has always understood. Maybe it was because his home life was already in ruins, tatters. Beer soaking into the knock-off Persian rug a cousin nicked from a flea market when he was nine. No fine china in the cupboards because it'll end up in shards on the floor. Plastic plates and forks and cups. Always. Howling in his head. Screaming from down the hall in his mum's room. His bedroom door creaking open at night. The anger, the curdling fear (shameful—be a man; punch him back, hit him before he hits you, you useless prick—), of not knowing whether or not it was his dad, high as hell and itching for a fight after busting their mum’s lip wide open, or Tommy sneaking into his bed at night because his is soaked in piss and he can’t sleep when they scream at each other like this.  

(Funny that, he always found; neither of them could ever sleep when it was silent, either.)

Blood on the linoleum. Trying to eat burnt toast and overcooked beans with a busted lip and a twinge in his jaw—

(Fractured, they'll say later, years later, during his mandatory medical checkup when he's first recruited. Healed all wrong. Son, didn't anyone take you to hospital?) 

He understands the separation between home and work—even if the former lost all relevancy nearly a decade ago. Back when he buried them all. Was buried himself—

What Ghost never really understood was the box. 

Shove it into a box. 

When he asks over cheap whisky somewhere in Siberia, Price tightens his fingers around his glass before bringing it up to his head. His index finger juts out. He knocks the tip of that bruised, scabbed knuckle against his temple. Once, thrice. Levels Simon with a pointed look he both can’t understand and somehow knows all too well. 

“Up here."

“Paid nearly fifty quid for that,” he grouses, shaking his head. “Think I've been ripped-off, Price.” 

Price scoffs, places the glass down with a hollow thud. “Don't be a fuckin’ muppet, Simon—” his real name makes his shoulders tense. Around the barracks, they know him only as the Ghost. “You put it away somewhere. Hide it. I don't fuckin’ know. But if it keeps you goin’, keeps you sane, and doesn't become a mess I gotta clean up, well—”

The implication is stark. Heavy. 

Price was always good at chiselling through layers of accumulated indifference to get to the madness within, but considering Ghost’s past and his mile-long rap sheet, the warning digging into his words like a dull blade isn't unwarranted. 

Old dogs, he'd called the pair of them when they first met. There was a sharp keenness in his eye when he lifted his hand, waved his cigar toward the tangled mess of scar tissue crisscrossing his face (made with a dull, rusted knife, one that gouged out deep pocks of skin, ugly fuck, looks like the badlands, don't he? like a postcard from the Grand Canyon, sweetheart. not so cute anymore, are ya, pretty boy—), and said, “well, you're fuckin’ rabid, ain't you? Better put a muzzle on that before it becomes a problem, mm.”

His problem, specifically. 

And Ghost gets it. Thinks Price might understand that particular brand of madness—despite growing up on literal opposite sides of the track, his Manchester to the others Liverpool; poverty and prestige—if only just. Because Price seems to be able to curb those baser impulses in a way Ghost hadn't yet mastered (and won't for quite some time yet). He's put together. Sort of. Respected. Normal.

The men in the barracks don't look at him and flinch. 

But he sees the way the man's eyes linger in the crowd, shrewd and careless, before falling on the pretty bartender in the back. The one with roses in her eyes and a smile full of dandelions. Soft, like butterscotch. It's here when they darken. When he reaches, almost angrily, for his whisky. Pats his chest with a heavy fist searching for his cigar. 

She's a sweet thing, he reckons. All pretty and trusting. Birds like her make his head itch—

“Don't even think about it, Simon,” Price grumbles, and it feels like territorial posturing, a challenge he almost raises to meet with his chin, if only to make Price fluster, but it's hollow. Empty. He denies himself, too. The prick. 

“How'd you do it?” He asks, and doesn't specify. Doesn't think he needs to. 

When Price swallows, it looks like a grimace. “Years of practice.” 

He considers the weight of it, his eyes straying back to the woman behind the bar. She's tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, wrist delicate like bone china, the kind they could never afford, and for a moment, the intrusive thoughts, the ones he gets sometimes about wanting to tear things to bloody pieces, rears—

It's stamped down in a swig of flat lager You stupid fuckin’ mutt, Price would say tomorrow morning, shaking his head. You always think with your prick? 

Simon cranks his head sharply to the side instead. The resounding crack seems to echo through the empty pub. 

Price just shakes his head. “Christ. No one ever house break you, yet?” 

“Yeah, they did,” he rasps, staring at the bartender who gazes back at him now. Skittish, unsure. Not so sweet after all. She looks away, cowed. Her hands tremble. He leans back, and hums. “And now I piss outside, like a good ‘ol boy.” “Ain't nothin’ good about you, Simon. Fuckin' Christ—”

And he's not wrong. 

The Ghost has a reputation of being a cold-hearted bastard. A Frankensteinian beast cobbled together with spare parts robbed from a jailhouse graveyard. Worst of the worst. An arm from a mass murder. The leg from a spree killer. Heart a patchwork mess of ichor and sulphur. Sutured together with barbed wire. 

It's all sort of macabre. Rather trite, too. 

The rumour mill in the barracks is insatiable.

But sometimes, he wakes up and he's still buried. Still dead. Dirt in his throat, lodged in his nose. He breathes in and feels pebbles scraping his lungs. Feels worms in his ears. Maggots in his head. 

They crawl through his grey matter. Leeches burrowing into his thoughts, sucking the good in him dry. 

Or, whatever's left of it, anyway. 

He thinks with his teeth because it's easier that way. Cold, calculative instinct. Just barely boxed into a neat package slapped on the desk of Price's higher-ups. 

A good man, they say, and turn him loose on the streets. One of the best we have, as he breaks jaws, and tears through jugulars. A force to be reckoned with. 

They hand him a gun, a rifle, when the bloodied footprints leading back to camp become too much of a hassle to clean. Shoot from a distance. He takes to it like the bulk of metal was made for his scarred hands. Scythe to a Reaper. 

It feels like bloodletting. Draining him of his anger, his fury, until a cold, gnarled indifference curls in the basin left behind. Icy, frigid. Down to the bone. 

Sometimes, he doesn't remember what it felt like to be warm, even buried under a thick balaclava and layers of military fatigues. 

Frankenstein’s monster. Patched together from the rotten remains of horrible men. 

And as he stares in the mirror at the patchwork ruins of his face, his body, he wonders if there's some truth to it, after all. He's pretty sure if someone cracked his skull open—again—they’d find rot. Tumulus. Infested with maggots and worms. Cobwebs behind his eyes. In his nose. His brain perfectly preserved: a zombified tombstone. And oh, how it hungers. 

Wants. 

But in a box it goes. One shaped like a coffin. Placed pretty in the back of his broken head. 

He stares in the mirror and thinks he sees something moving under his eye. Wriggling around. The temptation to claw it out rears, but the shredded tissue on his thighs reminds him of what happens when he listens to that insidious hiss in the back of his head (some amalgamation of his old man, and that bastard—) and goes searching for gold in bone marrow. 

He huffs. Fingers curling around the porcelain. His head is rotten. Putrefied. He can feel the decomposing sludge press against his temples. It grows teeth sharp like a razor blade and hacks away at jaundiced bone. Ghost lifts his hand, digs his fingers into his temple. Down boy—

(Simon doesn't even want to consider what his heart must look like, then.)

Cold-hearted, sure—

But he likes sweet things. 

The kind that will undoubtedly give him cavities. A spillover, perhaps, when candy bars were too expensive, and the only dessert he was given was a toffee by the neighbour when she wasn't moaning to his old man about all the shit he and Tommy got up to. 

(Bruises came afterwards, the colour of liquorice. Sour cherries.)

Unfortunately for him, sweet things don't like him much—a shame, really. Simon has always had a sweet tooth. 

His rough edges are too sharp for their liking, and Simon's—

Intense. Like a dog with a bone, he doesn't know when to let go. When to unhinge his jaw from the morsel between his teeth. He bites hard. Shakes his head. Tears into the things he wants until it's bloodied meat pinched in his incisors. 

And so, they keep their distance. Like they can smell the rot on him. The funeral dirt. The stench of an unearthed sarcophagi. 

Sometimes, though, the wiley ones will inch closer, looking to get messed up badly by a bad man, and it makes something inside his head howl when he turns them down. Following Price’s creed. Can't give in to the pretty ones, he'd said. Nothin’ but trouble. 

Trouble, like a pair of shackles. A noose. Trouble, like gentle, clean hands and fragile bones. Fine china. Fine powder. The marshmallow soft kind of trouble that will melt in the acid that leaks from his pores. Aqua regia. Attacking anything that gets close. 

(Breakable, is what Price means. Pretty chew toys that are beyond repair once he's finished with them.

He must think Ghost is some sort of psychopath—)

But still. He stays away. It's easier on base, in safe houses, too far out from the general public to have to worry about doe eyes and soft touches. He doesn't need it, anyway—

Then comes you. 

And the forfeiture of his self-control. 

You're trouble of a different kind. 

Trouble, like the end of a sledgehammer. Trouble, like the grill of a car. The barrel of a gun. 

In the shape of a battering ram, one strong enough to dislodge the madness in the back of his head. Where the corrosive acid should ruin you, eat you alive, it doesn't. Not with your tantalum skin. 

But oh, do you pack a punch—

At first, you think he's homeless. 

Some scruffed-up man sleeping on a park bench outside of your apartment. 

In another life, he might have been. He isn't a stranger to bad habits, and had the military not been his only choice in life for some semblance of good (laughable, considering what he does for a living), he could see the threads of his life leading him here. Drugs. Manchester is good for it, this he knows all too well. Especially the shithole neighbourhood he's from. 

He doesn't clue into this, though, until you glance at him, warily, and then shuffle into the cafè he’s holed outside of, the place where his current target gorges himself on steeped tea and crumpets. 

(Price's dry text sits, open, on his burner phone: and don't fuck this up—)

It feels a bit like an omen. Made worse when you meet his gaze through the glass, and—

Well. Shit. 

The impact is a collision. Hitting a pole at top speed. Metal bent around concrete. 

His teeth ache (so, so bad—).

You emerge from the small building a few minutes later—the faded eggshell with chocolate trim is nauseatingly sweet against your pastel yellow raincoat—holding a takeaway bag, and balancing a tray of coffees in your hand. 

He tenses. It's instinctual. There's nothing about you that's an immediate threat to his person—unless you plan on adding to his scars with the tip of your umbrella, the scalding coffee in your hand—but it's odd, isn’t it? No one approaches him. Not unless they have a reason to. 

And no one, in his experience, ever has a good one. 

“Hi,” you chirp, disarmingly sweet, as you come to stand in front of him. His jaw aches. Even sprawled across a bench, you're barely looking down at him. Sticky, cold fingers tap a strange rhythm down his spine. “I, um, hope this isn't weird, but I saw you sitting here, and—well. I got this—”

You wiggle the bag. He smells something greasy. A breakfast sandwich, he's sure.

It's an unusual assassination attempt. Price will be livid. 

“What for?” He rumbles, sitting up in the seat. The shift of his bulk seems to make you nervous. You take a step back, and he fights the urge to follow. To back you into a corner. No escape. 

You regain your footing, even if the smile on your face wobbles. Weakens under his flat stare. Some people can smell the rot on him. 

He wonders if you can, too. 

(Pity that. You're a pretty bird, ain't you?)

And the way you take him in lacks a distinct thrum of hesitation, fear that’s normally there. It occurs to him, then, that you see him as just another man. Just another person. 

(“deader than a doorknob, this one. such a goddamn waste, boss. he was a fun one, wasn’t he? should we burn ‘em?” 

nah. bury him out back—)

It's laughable, really. A joke. He has the urge to crack one—sick and awful enough to make that little smile on your face wilt. Wither away. Almost does, too, but it get tangled in his throat when he feels the weight of your stare on him. 

The easy sweep of your eyes is barely discrete, but it's clinical. Pitying. But the softened edges of that empathy dissolve as your pretty head adds up all the numbers on him, coming to a standstill. Your eyes linger on his wrist. The gold of his wristwatch peeks out beneath the black sleeve of his hoodie. An intricate web of complex timekeeping that only he's privy to. A little luxury he picked up in Italy when the cash he'd been given was getting too tiresome to carry around. 

Dead men, after all, don't need bank accounts. 

And then—

You fluster. “Sorry, I just thought—”

It clicks, then. The pity. The soft words. The goddamn coffee— 

His gums itch. He has the sudden urge to be mean about it. Pick you apart in this street until nothing but embarrassment and humiliation remains. 

“That I was homeless? ‘nd you brought me, what? A coffee? ‘ow sweet of you. Some breakfast, too. Well, aren't you a lovely girl?” 

You are embarrassed. It blisters across your expression. Has your hands trembling around the cardboard tray, spilling droplets of coffee down the side. Your head is bowed, cowed in shame. It reminds him of that bartender some years prior. Pulling away when the bad dog growls—

But there's a thin sheen of intrigue in your eyes, burrowing holes into the shoes in front of you; a tangled knot of want coiling in the heat of your embarrassment over this blunder. Over offending him. 

Well—

That's new. 

Some get off on it. On humiliation. Specifically, of the public variety. He didn't take you as the type. The way you twist, squirming in place, is odd, though. It doesn't fit as well as he originally thought. No. It's not the public shame, but—

Him. 

Ah. 

Sweet, sweet girl. 

(So naïve.)

He reckons he could get you to do just about anything to make it up to him. You would, too. You're soft enough to be submissive, to bow your head in contrition, but there's a flicker of defiance in the jut of your chin when you lift your head. 

This is a blunder and you're sweetly embarrassed, sure, but it isn't enough to break you. 

And now Simon just wants to ruin you. Teach you a lesson about bad, vile men—

(Something you'd welcome with open arms, wouldn't you?)

“Didn’t know Manchester was so charitable,” he rasps. His throat is dry. Parched. He reaches for the coffee—black, with extra creamer and sugar on the side, tucked neatly in a little bag; fuckin’ hell. Ain't you just adorable—and places it on the spot beside him. “I’ll be takin’ this. Will need it for later.” 

You look like you want to protest. Fight back. His hackles rise, ready for it—eager. Something anticipatory, dark, bleeds through the moulted mess of his head. Sickly. Terrible. He thinks about what you'd look like sprawled under him, shaking and begging for more, for him to stop—

Fuck. Birds usually make his head itch, but you make his fucking skin crawl. 

In the end, you just huff. Roll your eyes. He wants to chew them out of your head. Pop them between his teeth. He bet you'd taste divine. 

You walk away from him before he can. You don't look back once. 

Pity, he thinks. Someone's gonna snatch you clean off the streets like that—

Hours later, he sends Price a text message with the coordinates for where to pick up the package Ghost left. 

He considers it a blessing when the man sends him back, good job, now get a pint from me as a little reward. Can't say I don't treat my team well. 

A reward, huh? 

Well. With your stature in comparison to his own, Ghost easily can see you being considered a pint. 

So, he follows you home, and tallies this one as being on Price. 

It's easy. Too easy. He slips deftly behind you, tucked away from view, and masks his footsteps under the echo of yours until he's standing in the shadows outside of your house. This, too, feels like a blessing. It's a duplex. He waits for one of the lights to flicker on, and—

The window brightens. Room number two. 

He hums, and palms his pockets for the pack of smokes he nicked off the man. Needing something to take the edge off. To quell the urge to bite. 

It's even easier to engineer meetings. Random run-ins. All blamed on happenstance, chance. Of course. This towering mountain of a man with his thick manc twang—the sort of gallows humour that can only be found in the blue-collar streets of Salford from the nasty old men squatting on the corners—must have better things to do than stalk you. Surely. You're not special enough to be hunted, right? 

Still. You're a touch wary of him. Distrustful. You keep your distance—six inches for Jesus Christ, aren’t you a peach?—and try to skirt the line between neutrally polite to the strange man loitering outside of the shops you frequent (your schedule burned to his memory, naturally) and that fascinating skittish intrigue from before. All simmering heat. Blunt want. The kind wrapped up in silk threads. 

It's interesting to watch it play out when he steps closer and all those long-forgotten instincts in the back of your head flare up. The shaky step you take back. The inward frown of confusion when you're not sure why your body craves space, acting almost on its own. And then the sweet defiance that breaks over you. The intentional step closer. The feigned warmth in your tone as you talk to him.

It's easy to pocket the uglier aspects of his personality. The coldness. The indifference. The flat, droll insincerity that leaks into his tone. All of it shelved, locked away, and he's not sure if Price would be happy that he listened to what he said, followed his example, or furious that he's bastardising it to lure this pretty fish in.

)The latter, undoubtedly. But Simon gets a sick kick from it all.)

Especially when it brings you closer to him. Thaws you as you rationalise his reaction during the first meeting, gears spinning. Kicking up excuses. 

Anyone would be angry, offended. It's natural. He's alright now—

It makes you look at him differently as you forcefully fight the urge to flee. 

Silly bird. 

Wary eyes rake over his massive bulk. Brows furrow at the series of black medical masks he wears in public. Always. That, in addition to the heavy black of his wardrobe—black jacket, black hoodie, black leather gloves—sometimes makes you glance at him with a touch of worry. Fear. Probably wondering if you brought home a delinquent. 

But it changes when he rolls up his sleeves one day after you've been moaning about your broken beach cruiser (the, I don't know, chain—or something—keeps catching—), and crouches down to fix it. 

There's a hitch in your breath. A distinct swallow. A guilty tinge of something shy, deliciously so, shading your eyes ruby-red when you look down at him. 

And ah—

Sweet little treat snagged on the line. Ain't he a lucky lad? 

It's all the better when you do the work for him. Reeling yourself in, practically throwing yourself in his cooler when you ask about his tattoos, carefully—considerately—nudging the topic away from his ugly scars. 

He guts you clean as he tells you he's in the military. Top secret, pet. Don't ask because I'd hate to ‘ave to hurt a pretty face like yours—

You preen under it. Pet. Pretty. You don't even notice when he slides his knife over your scales, dices you up on his chopping board. 

You're the picture of sweetness when he unkinks the chain in your bike, and sets it straight. All happiness. Smiles. Appreciative glances. You flutter your pretty eyes at him as you say—

“Thank you—”

You're waiting for a name. His belly rumbles. He could eat, he thinks, and licks his teeth. 

“Simon. Simon Riley.” 

The risk-reward ratio is balanced when you breathe it out between plump lips, chasing the end of it with your tongue. He wants to eat it out of your mouth. Swallow it down. 

You touch his arm, hand warm, soft. “If there's anything I can do to pay you back—”

He takes you out for a kebab later on. Nudges you out of the way when you open your wallet to pay. Draft girl. Naïve, too, because he can feel the heat in your cheeks from where he stands, reaching over to snatch the bag from the man with a grunt. 

You must think him quite the gentleman. So trusting. 

Doesn't matter. He lets it take root. Especially when you shyly invite him back to yours to eat. 

He makes a feast of it, and fucks you on your mint green chaisse after he's finished. 

(Not on birth control, you say, and hand him a box of condoms, suddenly shy. It's unopened. He hums, and burns that to memory.) 

He keeps his distance—an easy feat when he's halfway around the world, and you're stuck in the gloom of Manchester. 

It's purposeful, of course. He made a promise to Price not to give him a reason to worry, but fuck—

You're proving hard to quit. He's never had anyone cuff him upside the head on his bullshit. Not anymore, anyway. Not as the Ghost. He likes the thrill of it, of this chase. 

You don't let him steamroll you when he's in a mood to fight. You punch back, hitting him right in the mess of his guts, and fuck. Fuck. He's a little bit obsessed with it. With you. This wily little fish that acts so shy when he's got three fingers buried in your cunt, but rides him after like you're starving for it. Clawing at his chest. Scratching his arms. It's raw. Primal. He wants to break you—this fiery little kitten that bites his fingers until they bleed, and then purrs in his lap as he drives a pickaxe through your head, shredding logic into pieces. Rummaging around until he nicks the optic nerve that lets you see red. 

You’re everywhere. In everything. In the back of his head, under the howling that hadn't stopped since you trailed your finger down the jagged topography of his bare chest, digging your nail into the crude x across his heart, and whispered, soft and sweet: you're all kinds of fucked up, aren't you? 

A bludgeon to his self-control—

He resists. Has to. Is mean about it, too. Doesn't tell you where he's going (it's need to know), or what he's doing (would ‘ave to bash your pretty ‘ead in if I told you), but keeps you strung on the line (keep thinkin’ about that pretty cunt of yours; can't wait to come ‘ome and ‘ave you sit on my ugly mug—). 

It's dangerous, this game of his. Thrilling for all the wrong reasons. 

But he’s a good mutt. Good—

Until the text. 

The one you send to him when you're out with friends. A picture. You're in a pub somewhere in Moss Side, a drink in hand. A gaggle of nobodies crowded around you. It makes sense, he supposes. There's that old idiom—you’ll trap more flies with honey—and he doesn't know anyone nearly as sweet as you. 

His sweet girl.

(you fuckin’ mutt—)

Ghost stares at you for a moment, teeth aching. The little ensemble—a crop top and jeans—is a vision, he reckons. But it's spoiled when he catches more eyes on you than pointed at the camera. Practically spilling out of your top, aren't you? 

He breathes heavily through his nose. Tastes guncotton in his throat. 

Ghost commits every face to memory, and then calls you. 

You're drunk. Too drunk to remember it tomorrow. Stuck in a pub on what's supposedly a bad part of town. Chatting away about going to your friend’s house. He gets the address, and something sour twits in his stomach. Shit council houses. 

“That safe?” He asks, leaning back in his chair. He's already chubbed up in his slacks at the slur in your voice. “And dressed like that? Didn't take you for a slag—”

It makes you sputter on the line. “I'm—I’m not—”

You're so quick to placate him. So hasty to make him happy. Please don't be angry with me, Simon. I'm just having some fun—

The claws and fangs are tucked away when you're drunk. He shoves the information in the cache, eyes burning. Head aching. He's feverish. Hot under the collar.

Odd considering he's dead—

“Sounds like you will be.”

“It's not like that—”

“‘ow would you know? Might meet a nice fellow. Might take him home.”

“I don’t—I wouldn't—”

The sniffle makes him throb. Fuck. “Yeah? Well, ain't none of my business, I reckon—”

“It is.”

“Oh? How's tha’?”

“I—I like you, Simon—” he can taste your embarrassment through the phone. He didn't even need to bring you flowers and you're already boxing him into monogamy, confessing to him. So sweet. So tender. If he were a better man, he might have told you to sober up. To talk about this tomorrow. 

Too bad for you, he isn't. And what’s worse is that he’s a loyal bastard, too. 

But that's later, and right now—

He's halfway across the world, and you're vulnerable. In the den of hungry mutts. 

It’s charr in his throat. Anger in his veins. “You like me? An’ you go out dressed like that?”

“There's nothing wrong with how I'm dressed—”

He sucks his teeth. “Dunno ‘bout tha’, pet. You look like you're achin’ to get fucked.”

You take a shuddering breath. “I just want you—”

“Yeah?” It's a growl. His cock spits prespend in his trousers. “Then be my good girl. Go home and wait for me.”

It's quiet on the line. He catches the hitch in your throat, the sharp exhale, like you can't really be sure if he's serious or not. He says nothing. Waits. 

Where there would have been a fight—fists and teeth and snarling words—you quieten in the silence. Docile. Submissive. It's in you, he knows. He saw the glimpses back when you first met, when he'd bent down and fixed the bike he broke. All it needs is a little—

“Jus’ worried about my sweet girl, is all.” 

And you relent. 

Corrosive oil spills out of the necrosed holes in his head. It curls over his thoughts, liquid sin. He takes himself in his hand, blood pulsing in his veins, white-hot, damning, and bares his teeth at the urge to come to you, to push you down on the floor, and mount you like a snarling beast—

“Good girl,” he growls when you tell him you'll call a taxi, that you'll go home and have some wine with your friend instead.

Friend. Friends. 

He'll have to do something about that. 

(The thing about deprivation is that it bleeds into a vicious sense of possession when it's finally obtained. Greed. His wants have wants, have wants—

A perfect ouroboros. One you feed into almost destructively.)

Because the thing is—

Simon wants to tie you to his bed. Keep you locked up in the safe house he has in Manchester. Chained, shackled. A prisoner with him as your iron guard. 

It isn't just fantasy, either. 

The flies that congregate around you are an annoying, incessant buzzing in his ears. Remora clinging to the biggest fish. 

But they're easy to scatter when he waves his hand. 

(Waves off. Threatens with bodily harm, with physical aggression—

Same thing.)

The sting in his knuckles and the blood on his shoes are worth it in the end when your tantalum skin cracks. An aggregate of beautiful lines, pretty in their fragility, their brokenness. He wedges his fingers between the splints, widening the chasm to pet at the sticky-soft centre hiding beneath all that rough rock. Sweet girl. Hard candy enclosing taffy-softness. 

His coos melt you to the consistency of mercury. Liquid silver pebbles along your lash line, spilling over in a dizzying display of raw vulnerability. 

It makes every predatory instinct inside of him bristle. Locking onto the sweet lines of crystalline sadness that run down your cheeks. It has his heart racing. Eager, anticipatory. The thrill of the chase, of running you down into the ground until you're fine powder under him. 

And it’s there, it's in his arms—the maw of a beast—where you seek comfort, lamenting the loss of your friends, your coworkers. No one wants to hang out with you anymore. They don't return your calls or answer your texts. 

What did I do? You sniffle, throat bared. Belly turned up. 

Flooded with tears. The lachrymal face that peers up at him makes his teeth ache. He rolls his head back, feels himself thicken in his pants. 

Simon loves it when you cry.

“Fuck ‘em,” he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. “If they can't see what a catch you are, then they don't even deserve to breathe the same air as you.”

It makes you cry harder, makes you mumble into his chest about how lucky you are to have someone like him. Someone who cares. 

His breath hitches. Warm floods his veins, fever-hot. 

“Thank you, Simon—”

And then you, smooth silver and wickedly sweet, cradle him in your palms as if you could hold all the broken pieces of him together. 

He thinks it's cute. 

Doesn't really have the heart to tell you it's a lost cause.

“Anytime, pet.”

And you're perfect, too.

You take this mangy mutt into your house, and let it eat your food, sleep in your bed. You let him fuck you stupid, and listen so prettily when he convinces you to let him spoil you. Let him pay your rent, your bills. Let Simon dote on you the only way he knows how—mercilessly possessive, and a touch cruel, mean—but you roll over, showing your belly. Submissive and sweet. 

It's even better when you try to lash out at him with a collar in the shape of his teeth branding your neck, spitting and hissing like a feral cat who doesn't know yet that's claws have been clipped. Only to then curl up in his lap, purring as he strokes your fur, and carves out a place for himself in your life. 

He wants to sink his teeth into you, and you think he's a big dog. Undomesticated. One who comes and goes as he pleases. A stray. A mutt. 

It's said fondly. Full of love—

His mouth is full of cavities. His teeth ache. His gums bleed. 

(do you know he's rabid? that the faded name on his dog tags once read cujo—)

Everything about you makes that sludge flood behind his eyes, pounding rotten fists against his temple. take, take, take; mine, mine—

The howling doesn't stop. It tells him to press you into the mattress and fuck you stupid. Tie you to the bedposts and never let you go—

He throws fists in the dark, trying to hit the madness in his head. Ends up with bloody knuckles and laughter in his ears. 

(a voice of reason says, your bird is too big for a cage—)

He clings to it. 

You're warm beside him. Burning hot. He syphons it from your veins when you're asleep, pulling you close just to feel something on his skin other than dirt. Other than blood. 

It's easy to pretend he's fine with these little nips. Leaving teeth marks in your neck. Bloody rings snaking up your thighs. 

He wraps one hand around both of your wrists, holds them high above your head, and tells himself it's enough. Shackled by him, under him, as he takes you apart, pulling at your sense of independence like the gnarled fingers of winter bringing defoliation to summer's bloom, but even with this, all of it, he still aches. Still wants. Needs—

Stupid fuckin’ mutt. 

Then you bring his hands up to your throat, letting him wrap his bearish paws around your delicate neck, and he knows these little bites will never satiate the hunger in his guts. 

He wakes up the next morning feeling warm. Full. Edges softened, if only just, by the sticky sweetness of your breath ghosting over his chest. 

Simon curls his arm around you, holding tight.  He won't let go. Won't—

Hide it. Put it away. 

Ghost does neither of those things. He buries it, instead.  

But in doing so, you find cracks in the foundation. Ones that are just big enough for your willfulness to slip through. To hand him back the cash he gave with a scoff, and a, i work, too, you know? i don't need your money, Simon. that's not why i’m with you—

(All he hears is, I don't need you.)

And then you send him a text. I'm going out with friends from work tonight. We're going drinking. I'll talk to you tomorrow! 

In the zombified remains of his head, a new howling starts. The hisses tell him you're pulling away, running from him—

It's a big world out there. It'll eat you whole—

Like Tommy.

The thing about want is that sometimes it grows teeth, hands. Claws. Without a body of its own, it tends to mould itself after its maker because that's all it knows how to do: devour, consume. Yearn. 

He shouldn't be too surprised to find that this need of his has dug itself out of the grave he buried it in. 

(he did, too—)

The flimsy sarcophagus cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant.

The howling in the back of his head stops abruptly. The pulsing ache in his temple abates. It's heavy, this weight. This absolute, utter emptiness—

No. It's not hollow. The chasm isn't drained, it's—

(In the silence, something growls. Feral. Possessed.)

—full. Perfect equilibrium. All of the patchwork parts of himself, the ones that don't quite fit, suddenly find synergy. 

Communion. 

Ghost cocks his head in consideration.

(your bird is too big for a cage—

—but maybe a collar would do.)

—after all, could you ever leave him with his name etched into your womb—

In leaving the key under the mat for him to come and go as he pleases, you've left yourself vulnerable. But—

Not anymore. 

He has a safehouse he'll take you to. You'll let him, too, because it'll be the best choice for you. The three of you.

He's never entertained any ideas of family, not when the closest approximation he has is drenched in gun oil and smells of smoke from artillery fire, but the howling in his head quietens at the idea of it. He can't shackle you to the bed—stupid fucking mutt—but he can tie you down all the same. Make you his. Wholly. Always. 

And the thing is—despite a pickaxe making figure-eights out of his grey matter; lead poisoning and rust giving him these sour, awful thoughts about locking you up in his house, leaving you a needy mess, dependent only on him—Simon supposes he knows right from wrong. 

Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. 

But in carving himself a place in your life, he failed to realise that the walls behind him closed in. No way out. And so, his only option is to go forward. To keep moving.

He'll be crucified for this, but that's fine. 

He doesn't intend for you to find out, anyway. It'll be an accident. He came home early, and found you drunk. Drank with you. Your drunken idiocy merged, creating a terrible, noxious cocktail of awful, bad choices. Permanent ones. Irreversible. 

(You're so sweet, so docile when you're drunk—)

It'll be easy to convince you. To play the part of a stoic man suddenly in turmoil. You'll offer to get rid of it, a suggestion that he'll flinch at—a cornered dog, a hand raising in the air. You'll whimper. Shake in his arms as you tentatively smooth over the wrinkles in his brow, murmuring out your options in a stilted breath.

You'll be a Riley before the end of your term. It's only proper, he'll mutter, stiff and uncomfortable, and you'll melt. Liquid tantalum in his palm. The fruits of his labour laid bare, seeping from the corners of his mouth. Tucked tight between his teeth. Mercury he can swallow down, keep in the bracket of his rotten ribs. Safekeeping from this world that just takes. Devours. 

But not if he eats you first. 

The mere notion alone serves as an anchor, locking him to the seafloor. The tumult in his head calmed at the promise of owning. Biting to claim. To have. Greedy for it. For you, and the strange sense of quiet your proximity brings him. The warmth, too. 

He's a rabid dog. This he knows—has known—for quite some time. Indisputable. It pools in his mouth. Liquid sin. Makes him ache for just a sip. Unquenchable, though, because he's wary of water. Hydrophobia, but only for how it washes his efforts away. Cleanses. 

The urge inside of him to bite, to infect, quietens when he gets closer to you. 

(a rabid mutt licking at the window you're on the opposite side of, dreaming of just a taste—)

A byproduct of that maddening virus in his veins, the one he must have picked up six feet in the ground. Bite, bitebite—

—and give you a collar in the shape of his teeth.

He finds you in bed. A bottle of wine on the end table beside you, courtesy of your friend. The one lingering remora he couldn't snap at—one who sends you messages about how you are being manipulated. Taken advantage of. Fuck that loser, the latest one says when he picks up your phone, scrolling through the dwindling conversations housed within. Just him now, and them. 

It preaches about empowerment. About how you shouldn't let a man pay your bills (textbook manipulation. he's putting you in a position of dependency. making you feel obligated to stay. it's all on Google, babes. like, fucking get a clue!!!!), or how it's moving so quickly (maybe you should come stay with me in Durham for a bit, hun. get away for a weekend. i worry about ya, is all). He hums, thumbing through the old chats. 

You told her to fuck off about the manipulation, but it came after a lot of, oh, yeah. well, he's just. you know. he's different, and you haven't declined the invitation. i’ll think about it, is what you write. 

It simmers under his skin. That independence he plans on stomping out under his heel. With his kin. 

(sick, sick sick, wrong—)

It's desperation, this. Clawing at the walls—the dirt—until his nails are torn off his fingers. Until his skin splits, peels. Broken under rock and rubble. That animalistic need for air. To breathe. Basic training tells him not to save the person drowning unless he's sure they won't kill him in their struggle to live. But what's he supposed to do when that person is his rotting body, sinking down to unfathomable depths? When all he has is you to cling to—

Damnation built by his own hands. 

You'll die together, he reckons, and tosses your phone on the hamper in the corner of the room. 

Ghost can't remember the last time someone made him feel anything at all other than impartiality. Indifference. Casual apathy. 

Price is the exception to this on the grounds of being consanguineous to him.

And you—

An outlier. 

One he intends on sinking as deep as he can with. Anchored, maybe, by this little plan that beats and pulses in the back of his head. That clogs his throat with a want so thick, he can already taste the brine from the ocean. Water in his nose. Down his esophagus—

Better than dirt, he supposes. And it spurns him forward.

You're malleable like this. Tensile. He bends you easily with just a touch until you're flat on your back, a pillow shoved beneath your tailbone, and stripped. The loose shirt you wear to sleep is hiked up under your neck. Panties are pulled off until your sweet, bare cunt is revealed to him. All pretty and soft, and his. Untouched, he notes, and gives an appreciative stroke over your clit with his thumb. 

It was something you were whining about the other day, panting in his ear as if he wasn't a continent away. Pleading with him on the phone to please, please let you come. 

Simon likes the way you cling to him when it's been a while since something has wrecked you as thoroughly as his cock. When your spoiled pussy was neglected for a few days, weeks, and starved for attention. You were so sweet to him then, cooing in his ear how good you've been, how much you want him and only him, need him. Begging so prettily for it. 

He's almost sad to spoil himself in your cunt when you can't weep for it. Can't bully him closer. Try to claw his eyes out. That delicious push-pull where you hiss at him for pulling away, but whine when he gets too close. 

Sad, but—

Not enough to stop himself. 

You're not wet enough for him to slide inside unprepared—his cock too big, something that makes his bones tremble—and he rectifies it by leaning down, letting saliva pool between his teeth and lips. He holds it there for a moment as he spreads your folds apart with his thumb and forefinger. 

And then he spits on your bare cunt. 

It hits your clit, the thick glob siding down your slit. He reaches between your thighs, pawing at you. Slides his fingers through the slick mess he made, teases around your tight rim. 

Simon usually likes to take his time with you. Lapping at your pussy for hours until you're a weeping, snot-nosed mess whining in the sheets. Spoiled rotten. Begging him to fuck you already, Simon, you can't take it anymore—

He's mean. Cruel. Edges you for hours until your legs shake, trembling around his ears. He never lets you reach that peak—doesn’t let you come until he's buried inside of you. 

Coming on his tongue, his fingers, is rarely a privilege you ever earn. Too much of a spitfire, a spiteful little kitten, to give in and do what he demands. So he keeps you on the precipice until he's ready to fuck you, ignoring your bribes, your bargains. Simon doesn't give in even when you beg, when you relent and tell him you'll finally be good. 

You never are. 

Spoiled, he always huffs. Down to the fuckin’ bone. 

Like now. Pulling away from him. Him, the only person in your life who stuck around. A little bullying (bones breaking, splintering under his fists; the wet, hot smear of blood on his hands, skulls smacking against the pavement—an’ if you tell anyone, he cracks his battered fists and it sounds like a snarl, a gunshot, your parents will be cryin’ over an empty grave—) shooed the gnats away. He took a more clandestine approach to others. Birds that kept circling you tight. Protective, shrill. They made his head ache, but—

(don't want to start nothin’, but i don't want to be alone wit’ ‘er. tried to kiss me, is all. ain't like that, pet—)

It was a test. And they all failed. All but him. 

Yet—

come to Durham. 

i’ll think about it. 

Ungrateful. It's his fault, though. Simon doted on you too much, cosseted by his affection, when he should have clipped your wings from the beginning. 

Ah, well—

Lesson learned. 

You're wet enough now. He pushes in two fingers, scissoring them apart. You'd be yowling at him, kicking up a fuss if you'd been awake. But you're not. It thrums through him. Thick, heady. He likes you like this—probably more than he should. The heat simmering in his veins bubbles. Pops. Sap on charring wood. It clogs his throat with his smoke until it burns, a dry forest fire. 

He needs you. Needs to be in you. He's tired of waiting. Impatience burrows into him like a maelstrom. 

Simon adjusts his hold on your leg, fingers curling behind your kneecap. Steadying himself. His fingers slip out of your cunt with a sloppy squelch that ghosts across his spine. Anticipatory. A touch anxious. He wants you. Wants you bad—

He takes himself in his hand, and slides the weeping tip over your slit. Taps it once, thrice on your clit. And then guides it to your centre. Your warmth bleeds into him. Eager, he shuffles forward. Feeds you his cock. Eyes drilling into the place where his head slips in, swallowed by your sloppy, wet hole. The glands make you stretch around him. Rim pulled taut. 

The sight alone must have been crafted by some Luciferian dream, dangled before him in the shade of nirvana. 

take a bite, it urges. and then take more—

Like this, passed out with your legs hitched over his shoulders, drooling into the pillow unawares, you're just a doll. 

Made for him, and—

“Fuckin’ hell—” He presses into you—cock splitting tight, warm heat—and tries not to lose himself to the sensation of being bare, raw, inside of you. 

—“A perfect fit.”

It's always been condoms. You're not on birth control. Ink blots in his eyes. He goes a little feral with it. Instincts unleashed. Unfettered. 

Simon bullies his fat cock into you until his hips tap the back of your thighs, buried as deep as he can go. It's molten heat cocooning him—a warm embrace. For the first time, ever, he thinks he understands the meaning of home. Sliding home, in particular. 

(Welcome home. Home. Home. He'll make a house out of your body. Sleep inside the brackets of your thighs, head pillowed on your chest—)

As good as you feel around him—slick, wet, and tight—and as much as he wants to saviour the sight of you, passed out on the pillow, cunt split by his cock, he has a goal, a mission, to see through. 

His hand falls, slick and tacky, to your lower belly. Palm pressing against the subtle bulge in your abdomen, the outline of his cock. You always whine and hiss that he's too big for you. That you can't take him to the root. 

Hurts, you complain, hand against your naval. Fingers knotting over the place that aches. 

He presses his fingers there instead, feeling himself under your skin. Changing your anatomy to make room for him to fit—

It lights him in fire. Spurns him on. He bucks into you, pace sloppy, clumsy. Selfish. He's unrelenting as he splits you apart, drilling the full length of himself into your supine body, supple flesh relaxed under him, practically melting into the sheets. 

The thread keeping his resolve, his self-control, sprung up tight begins to quiver. Each piston into you has delicate fingers drumming across the strings of a harpsichord. It reverberates through him, echoing in the stifling, suffocating, silence of the bedroom, overtaking it. Clouding it with the musk of his desire, his devotion to you, to this dream blooming in the prison of his mind. 

Everything narrows into a needlepoint. 

There's just your burning flesh beneath him, softer than it's ever been; pillowy. Welcoming. And the sounds of him fucking into you—lewd squelches, slick and wet; the sound of his cock finding home in the basin of your spread thighs; his heavy breaths, his groans and growls that seem to rattle the bed. The noise breaks, an incomplete requiem of sin in his head, and he loses himself in the lulling notes, dragged under in the bestial beat of taking what his—

A sudden noise shatters through the room. Beneath him, you stir, gasping wetly. The sound mangled in your throat. 

There's confusion in your sleepy, hazy gaze when you peer up at him, lashes clumping together. You moan, whimpering, as you struggle to latch on to the threads of cognisance that he's content to fuck out of you. Your hand lifts, falls to his wrist still pressed against your lower belly. The grip is lax, loose. You’re not pushing him away, but clinging to him. Centring yourself. 

It makes his blood thicken. Has him burning red-hot. 

“Wha’s a’matter, pet?” He taunts, grinding his cock into you hard enough to make your dazed eyes water. Your hand tightens around him, holding steady. “Don't like it? Not fuckin’ you hard enough?”

“Simon—”

His name tapers off into a keen when he angles hips, and starts pistoning into you with a mean, merciless fury. The desperate noises that spill, unhindered, from your slack mouth is the perfect accompaniment to the lewd sound of him fucking your sopping cunt; the piece he was missing when this started. His requiem, complete. 

It's a serrated blade to his self-control, already frayed and threadbare as it is. The pressure makes it snap.

“C'mon, sweet thing. Thought you wanted this?” 

There's a place in hell just for him. It's sealed when you blink your tired, sleepy eyes up at him, mind a slurry of lingering somnolence and the heady alcohol on your breath, and offer a shuddering whimper. Always so soft for him, so agreeable when you’re drunk. 

“So’ry, Simon—”

You can barely string words together. Poor, pitiful you—vulnerable under him. Breakable. Malleable. Anyone else could have tricked you into this same position when he was away. Got you beneath them like this, compliant and unawares, and took what belongs to him. 

(The only thing in this destitute existence he claims for himself—)

Not anymore. Not ever again. 

It's almost callous when he grinds into you. Hateful. Brutish. Furious. And dazed as you are, you barely even flinch at the snarls that spill, unfettered, from the back of his throat. The low groans of him making promises with devils unknown; constructing shackles from brass, iron. 

Entrenching his future in motion, cupped protectively between the parentheses your thighs make around his hips. It's almost a vicious sort of poetry, one laid bare in the odious ruins of that broken thing he calls a heart. Etched into his rotten pericardium. Necrosed devotion. He'll see it through—however noxious, and putrid, you might find the miasmal stench of it spun tight in his web. 

It's for your own good.

And as if you agree, you answer him in perfect euphony, moaning sweetly as you tilt your hips up for more. 

Ghost groans low in his throat, bestial and spinning rapidly out of his control. He feels everything spinning, slipping; the trudge to the finish line narrows into a pinprink. He needs something to cling to, to hold on to with broken hands—

The only purchase he finds is in your demise. 

His hand lifts, shaking yours loose. He reaches up, fingers dig into your chin, forcing your pouty mouth open. You blink at him, sluggish, but he catches the thin gossamer of awareness spooling thin cobwebs over darkened crevasses, covering the canyons in your eyes with cognisance. It makes him leer. 

“Stick your tongue out, pretty girl,” he rasps, words sticking together, muffled under the mask. Crushed aggregate stone under the weight of his own desire. “Tha’s it. Open up nice and wide—”

He lets spit gather again, pooling on his tongue. It's degrading, you always say. Gross. But you swallow it down like a good girl, anyway. Always. You come at him with fangs and claws, but somehow, you always merge in a perfectly dizzying polyphony. 

Ghost spits on your tongue. Lets it land right in the middle of fleshy pink. A sick, twisted pleasure thrums in his veins at the sight. 

There's checking the boxes of an established kink, and this. Horrifically proprietary. Ownership that ignites a fire in his marrow, setting him alight from the inside out. Turns bone into blackened char, cinder. He can almost taste it on his tongue. 

It's made worse, turned frenzied, when you—sweet, perfect, you—bracket it protectively in the curve of your tongue. Completely dazed, head filled with a heady slurry of somnolence and alcohol, but still aware enough to know, even if only through muscle memory, what you're meant to do when he spits in your mouth. 

If anything, you're more obedient like this. Little doll. Coddling it lovingly, this little piece of him that he gives you. 

And it might be the madness speaking—these fraying thoughts take on a vitriolic edge, corrosive aqua regia pooling in his throat—but Christ. He's been stabbed in the guts, repeatedly, and it somehow packed less of a punch than this. 

He wants, wants—

Family never crossed his mind, was never even on the table or something to be considered, but with you it brims. Blooms in rot. Roots in tenebrous. 

He has this insatiable urge to devour you whole so you'll always be with him. The waves of his desire are monstrous. The waters below are rapacious. A gaping maw eager to eat you up—

Pity it’s not an option. 

But he’ll make do. Buy a ring tomorrow. Something pretty that matches your eyes. The curve of your smile. Sanctioned ownership. A collar in gemstones and gold, glimmering and shining bright enough that should any light fade from your gaze, it’ll illuminate in the gloom; twilight made in sorrow. The prettiest blues—

Said eyes water. Ghost’s hold on your face relaxes when you give a muffled keen, cheeks bubbling up against the pressure. Tongue still stuck out even as he takes his pleasure from your supine flesh. Suspended in motion, stasis. Such a good girl for him—

He swallows. Tastes poison, rot, on his tongue. “Swallow.” 

You're a little sluggish, a little slow, but you follow his command all the same. He knows, then, that it could only ever be you. 

No one gets under his skin like this. No one makes him itch, want, crave, as much as you do—

You make a face, twisted up in some amalgamation of pleasure and confusion. It nudges the ruins of his chest and feels almost like a heartbeat when it pulses in his flesh. 

“Simon, Simon—”

His name is all you can say, and he's not sure if you're begging for mercy, or muttering it out into the scant air between your heaving breaths like an obsecration, an orison, but he eats it all the same. Bites down on your pleas, your cries, your prayers, and chews them up between fangled teeth. Takes them down into the swirling pits of his belly where they're eaten alive by what grows in the decay.

(belly full of dirt:

he heaves, and heaves, but nothing comes out even though he can taste humus in his throat, feel worms using his organs like a playground—)

“Somethin’ you want, pet?” He taunts, and shifts his hips back just enough to drag a few inches of his cock out of your drenched cunt. A tease—cruel and mean. He’d get lobbed upside the head for this had you been in your right mind. A tap to his temple, shaking the cobwebs loose. He would have bent down, and sunk broken teeth into your jugular. Merging violence with love until bloody knuckles feel like a kiss. “All you ‘ave to do is ask. Use your words, pretty thing—”

You whine, low and drawn out. A lazy whimper in the back of your throat. “Pl’se—”

You can barely speak. Tongue too thick. Sleep too heavy in your veins. Alcohol, too. A lesson, perhaps, for his willful little pet come the morning when you struggle to measure just how deep into his gullet you’ve let yourself fall. 

He can’t help rubbing salt into the shallow cuts, if only because he likes the way you pout. 

“C’mon, sweetheart. You can do better’n that.”

And damn him—damn you—you do. Your hand curls over his wrist, pulling it close to your mouth where you place a kiss against his palm. Tender. Chaste. Midnight blooms in your eyes, casts shadows under pale moonlight. His breath stutters in his chest when you lean your head back, letting his hand fall to your bared neck. 

Your heavy, lidded eyes gaze back at him, cutting through the shade of night that sews the air like satin. Etched in the file silk is threads of trust in stark white. The kind that bleeds for him; hungers. One that aches, always tender like a bruise. The throb of it echoes between mouldering ribs. Booms between his ears. 

Ghost doesn’t fall into pieces. Doesn’t shatter. No. Something in the splintered remains shifts. Settles. He wraps his fingers around the thick of your throat, thumb notched tight against your pulse, and he feels complete. Whole. Remade from the ruins. 

Your breath hitches. The sound is a gunshot in his ears. He squeezes down, a gentle press. Just enough to make the air spill out of your lungs, to let your eyes water. Lachrymose, eager. It does something to him when you cry. He feels tipped upside down, torn inside out. Left all askew, asunder. He wants to drown in the pebbling river growing against your lashline. Wants to drink it down until it quenches his neverending thirst. Wants, wants—

He feels his name spill from your lips. Brassy and broken, trembling against his palm. A plea—

More.

And he gives it to you. 

Simon hitches your ankle on his shoulder. Adjusts the grip he has on your throat. He settles over your body, blanketing you under his bulk. Stygian beast devouring the maiden whole. The thought amuses him even as it knocks the air from his lungs. 

He anchors himself into the mattress with his knees, steadying himself, curls his other hand around the iron ring of the headboard. All the while, you look up at him—glossy eyes burning coals in the dark, in the gloom. Wanting, hungry. Mouth held open as if you’re waiting for his scraps—

And then he bucks into you, the leverage giving his thrust a savage edge. 

The whines are snuffed out under his palm. Your eyes widen, tears now spilling down your temple, soaking the pillow below your head. 

He groans, head rolling back. “Fuckin’ hell—ain’t you a pretty sight?”

Tucked under him, throat swallowed by his palm. Split on his cock, slick and wet. The tears streaming down your face makes him feel wicked, foul; but the spit running down your slackened jaw quells any doubt. The hand on his wrist holds him tight, tighter still, to your flesh. 

You want this. His spoiled rotten bird.

So, he gives it to you.

Simon’s almost ruthless when he snaps his hips into yours, cooing viciously into your ear about how you feel, how you look, how you sound—so pretty wrapped around him, under him; his little doll—

“S’where you belong, pet—” guttural words spill, flintlike and savage, from his mangled throat. Reinforced with the hateful way he blugeons his cock into you. Times it perfectly with the firm squeezes against your jugular, never letting you catch your breath. Your eyes roll back, legs trembling. Shaking. But you don’t move, don’t struggle. The hand on his wrist is a shackle, and it makes him smirk, scars pulling up in a gnarled mess of mirth; ugly and mean. “Right where you belong. Ain’t tha’ right?”

He leans down, babbles nonsense into your temple. Promises you the heads of gods, the ichor they bleed. Swears he’ll build a shrine for you in Durham.

But for as mocking as these words he murmurs into your ear are, they’re tremulous. Raw. A current roars beneath; a steady stream, a plea, all full of need: stay, stay staystay—

(please)

He buries his nose into your hairline to stem the ravening ache in his guts, breathes in the heady scent of you—of sex, and wine, and sweat. Drags it into his lungs in harsh, angry gasps to stain his skin with the smell of you. Of him. 

It goes right to his head in a heavy rush until he’s dizzy, almost sick, with the swell of it flooding in. An animal, he thinks, drunk on merging pheromones that make him mindless. Unfettered. 

It’s as if he’s driven on instinct alone; his frenzied pace ebbs, grows sloppy. The air around him feels thick. Syrupy. Stifling. The balmy breath in his chest is nearly as unbearable as it is addicting. Sickeningly sweet. Still—

His chest expands, taking as much of the potent miasma into his lungs as he can, filling them up, up, until he feels the edges threaten to brust. It’s only then, when ink moults across his vision, that he lifts his head just enough to shove his mouth against yours, a broken snarl ripping free from his throat as he forces the infectious air into your mouth, down to your lungs. Polluting you with the same sickness. The same rot. 

Little hiccups tumble past your lips as you swallow it down, taking everything he gives you, and he catches them on his tongue. Plays with them between his teeth, basking in the salty tang of you—brine, loam; peatsalt. Ashes, guncotton. Molasses. He’s not sure if he wants to drown you in him, or crawl into the warm, wet cavern of your mouth that pulses around his tongue like a heartbeat. 

Both, maybe. Everything. All of it. 

Always—

But he’s chasing pleasure on fumes. Trying to run with broken legs. There’s nothing refined about this. About the way he cudgels the head of his cock into the places that make your mouth twist away from his greedy lips in a silent scream. His weight is crushing you, he’s sure, but you cling to him harder, holding him tighter. Almost afraid to let go. And fuck—the notion alone is a kick to the chest, harsh and heavy. He nearly gags on the litany of broken moans spiling out of his mouth, landing on your tongue. 

Driven mad, maybe (or pussy-drunk, and high off of his own poison); but in that madness, he discovers this:

Nirvana exists between your thighs. 

Home, too. 

(well—

not yet.)

Pleasure fissions down his spine. The paroxysm taking him deeper into the battle-worn depths of his demise until the walls narrow, closing in. Crushing. No escape. But—

He won’t climb out of his hole he dug. Not until he makes a bed from your flesh; shelter out of your bones. He wants to ingrain himself as deep within you as he can, arsenic subsumed down to your marrow. Poisoned with the fill of him, too sick to let go. 

(Bone nausea. 

A death sentence.)

It metastasises inside of him, filling the barren spaces up until it leaks from his pores. 

He wants it: this dream so tantalisingly close. 

Simon lifts his hand from your throat, and reaches out, grasps at it with a shaking paw—

All it takes is a few crass, careless swipes of his calloused thumb across your clit, cock angled toward that spot that makes you rake your broken nails down his back, yowling in his ear for more, there, please, Simon, please—

You clench like a vice around him. A pretty bow tied up at the base of his cock. He bows over you, grunts spilling from his chest as he sinks his teeth into your nape, splitting skin btween his teeth. The warm, ozonous tang of your blood flooding his tongue is euphoric, eclipsing his mind in a haze of pleasure that crackles and burns at the base of his spine, spitting smoke up his body and into his skull. 

The harsh whine you let out—all prey, all animal; wounded, stuck under his muzzle—has some part of him, basal and inborn, rearing up. Roaring in his ears, ripping talons across the jagged remains of his head. 

(mine, mine, mine—)

He answers your scream with a growl, one caught in the smoke clogging his throat. It sounds inhuman when its wrenched out of his mouth—more animal than man: the devastating howl of a forest on fire—but the feel of it vibrating between his teeth is connatural. Innate. It belongs between his incisors; fits like a puzzle piece in his broken muzzle. Unleashed now. Finally free from this ill-fitting cage he housed it, this goddamn box—

Cobbled together from palm ash and brimstone, ichor and salt. Sewed up with copper sutures in the shape of a man for a perfect fit. 

Every cell in his body screams that he was made for this. To be over you, in you. Maw filled with your blood. Pussy stuffed full of his cock. 

He might not have clawed out of the dirt for you, but this mossy, gnarled lump in his chest beats now only for you. Apodictic. Ironclad. His teeth in your jugular, your life pulsing wetly on his tongue. 

It’s his apotheosis. His end. 

His hips stutter. White noise in his head. It drowns out the shrill screams, the hisses. Everything is just—static. Pleasure of a silent kind, humming, buzzing, and molten. Ghost buries himself inside of you as deep as he can, until his cock is fit snug against the plug of your womb, and lays his claim by branding it with the potency of his name. 

Tidally locked, you’re dragged down the summit with him, tumbling to your demise. Too dazed, too wound tight in his arms, his embrace, to see the jagged rock at the bottom of the hungry chasm thirsting for your blood, you just cling to him. Refusing to let go. 

(silly girl—

His pretty little perigee.)

His body aches in ways that cruelly remind him of his age. Joints stiff, stomach quivering. His knuckles sting when he unfurls it from the headboard, skin pink and raw from the tight hold he had around the metal. 

It’s made worse when he heaves a harsh breath, and pulls away from you with a long, drawn out groan. He settles back on his haunches, eyes searing into the space between your thighs. Messy with his spend. It dribbles down your slit, your ass, pools on the sheets below. 

Your chest shudders, legs splayed out how he left you. He thinks, viciously, of gazelles, and wonders if the blood he feels drying on his mouth looks anything like the muddied mane of a lion after eating its fill. 

“Fuckin’ hell—”

He should clean you up, hide his crime, but he burns the image of you into his head (another tattoo over scar tissue), and drops to a heap beside you. The moment his back hits the mattress and all thoughts of moving are erased in silk, in smoke and clover. 

Chest heaving, slick with sweat, he feels the thrum of his victory in his veins. The high of the chase abates, and he nearly purrs with contentment. Hangs his pride on a pedestal, and doesn’t think about the absence of any guilt. Doesn’t even entertain the thought, not when victory dries between your thighs. When you roll over with a huff, reaching out for him. 

It's as if you're trying to bury yourself inside of him, crawl into the safety of his ribs. 

Ghost grunts, feels his sensitive, spent cock give a feeble twitch on his sticky thigh. The idea of you, blissfully unaware, seeking comfort from the man who writ your body with his virile spend, irrevocably changing your life and entwining it so deeply and so messily with his own that to severe either of you from each other is nearly impossible, floods him with satisfaction so deep, euphorically heady, that his chest seems to shudder. Resounding with some amalgamation of a purr, a grow, so utterly primal, that he sounds more beast than man. 

His roots run deep within you, now, and every misaligned piece of his patchwork body seems to sag and shiver in an almost perfect parallelism. Congruence ascertained with the cupping of you between its mismatched maw. Shackled in a baleen prison. Nestled, safe and sound, between white teeth. 

Ghost pulls you close, holding tight, and hums. As you drool on his shoulder, dripping with his spend, he knows he'll keep you there forever, until you're nothing but bones. 

There's a cloud of confusion hanging over you the next morning, a twinge of uncertainty gnarling across the gaps in your memory. The pieces of a puzzle that belong to a different set. He watches you scramble through them, filling in blanks. Oscillating so deliciously between wariness and discontent. 

“‘morning,” he greets, as if his spend hasn’t dried on your thigh last night. Tucked up nice and tight against your fertile, unprotected womb. As if he couldn't taste brimstone in the back of his throat when you wince as you walk, achy and battle-worn from the weight of his desire crushing you all night. 

“Morning,” it's a sticky rasp in your throat. He wonders if you taste him on your tongue. “When did you get in?”

“Las’ night.”

You nod, but it's absent. Flickering through the timeline of events that aren’t drenched in black, shaded over like a heavy bruise. Your expression is fractured. Raw. Pensive. Something untouchable, unchartable, and yet he reads you as plainly as the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. 

You don’t remember. Don’t know what to make of this chasm, this fissure, that looms, icy and deep, before you. There’s no anger, though. You don’t demand recompense for what he stole, what he took. The lashings he deserves are tucked quietly between your teeth. Hidden under layers of normalcy to prevent yourself from seeing him as is: a beast. 

“Well, um. Some homecoming, huh?” You joke, but it's hollow. Flat. Fragile like fine glass. You're digging for more. Rooting around to connect these vague, absent dots that linger, lost in the vacancy of your memory. 

He almost purrs. 

He wants to chew you up. Spit you in the palm of his hand. Maybe tuck you in his breast pocket, nestled against the lump in his chest—the one those silly enough to dream might call a heart. Keep you there forever. Hidden in the barrel of his loaded gun. 

“Bit rowdy.” 

It’s horrifically vague, but you cling to the prevacation he proffers to you; a lifeline in the turbulent sea, letting it overwrite the absence, the itching in your skull that must be clanging on the walls, begging for you to run. 

“Sorry,” it's sheepish. He knows the ferality in which you sometimes come at him when he's buried deep inside you is something that makes you twinge with embarrassment. Little kitten clawing at the old dog trying to get it to play. Rolling over immediately when it growls. Docile, sickeningly sweet.

But even naive kittens know to watch out for the frothing, foaming maw. 

“Did you use a—?”

He dips his chin. “I might ‘ave.”

And you take it as gospel. As truth. Why would Simon have any reason to lie to you about this? 

Relief shudders over your shoulders. You relax, inching toward the seat across from him. Gazelle making a home for itself in the lion’s den. 

The spell of unease is broken, now, and you quickly fill the chasm with chatter about your day. Your plans. Asking him how he’s been. 

You shove at the warning signs until they’re hidden away, and ignore the bones of your brethren scattered around you. All because you trust him. 

He aches with the urge to crush it between his teeth. 

And he will one day soon, he’s sure, because it’s just as easy to enact his plan as it was to get you to open the door. 

It starts with him convincing you to drink with him after dinner. Jus’ a glass. Got this fancy bottle. Reckon we should ‘ave some. 

But—

Can’t drink forever—no matter what his dogshit dad thought. 

So, he pokes holes in the condoms you hide in the bedside table, a little wary now. A touch fretful about your contraceptives in a way that makes him preen. You have good instincts, but rarely do you listen to them. Your head must be filled with sirens, but it's futile, he supposes. He's already stuffed cotton into your ears. 

It only feeds into that gaping chasm that bellows up from the depths that this world is not good for you. That it will tear you into pieces, into shreds. You need him. Need the Ghost to protect you. 

Case in point:

You’re needy beneath him, panting and mewling into the sheets as he teases your clit with his thumb. So wet, it almost feels like hot oil on his skin. Syrupy thick. 

In your desperation, you cling to him, throat bared. Fragile fine china. Belly up. Vulnerable. 

You barely notice when he pulls off the condom, crumpling it up into a ball and shoving it in the pocket of his slacks.. Don’t even react when he shoves his bare, raw cock into you. 

You don't even notice. 

(or when he slurs in your ear about how badly he wants to knock you up—breed his pretty girl until she’s stuffed full of him, making life with what he offers. salvation in the form of creation. ain’ tha’ a thought? he huffs into your ear, humid mirth curling over your skin. a stain. and the way it unfetters you—tightening around him, gushing slick—he finds his answer, one reinforced in the rolling of your eyes as your common sense, independence, trickle out of your ears and down your slackened jaw—)

And when that fails, he just slips you a sleeping pill. There's always an easier way to the finish line, he finds. 

(stupid fuckin’ mutt—)

Nothing bleeds from the cracks he wrought, or slinks from the shadows cast by his machinations until weeks later. 

Life just goes back to what it once was—Simon coming and going, letting himself into your home with the door you leave unlocked. You go to work, and chatter aimlessly about this vision you have about a home in the countryside, near the ocean. Saving up—uselessly—for sheep and goats, and the sought-after Highland cows. Chickens and ducks first, you say, and barely notice when his gaze drops, drilling holes into your stomach. Watchful. Leering. 

He can almost scent the change on you. Nose pressed to your skin; bloodhound sniffing the ground. 

Ghost keeps time in the slow, susurrus drawl of your voice sifting through the cotton in his ears, waiting for those precious decibels to catch on, to tilt up at the end as your eyes skim the calendar he keeps scratching x’s across in red, almost delicate, innocent even though it's from his sanguinary hand. A countdown to something you haven’t yet caught on to. 

And it’s all so sweet. 

—the waiting game, the subtle changes, the desperate way you cling to normalcy—

Sweet, like the way you carve this life out for yourself, filled with stuffed animals full of idealism. So much so, that it's almost bitter. Acrid. He watches the light glow in your eyes as your plans take shape, moulding putty between your hands, and like a pit viper, he coils in on himself. Frenzied. Fearful—

But only just. 

The excitation has run its course. He’s drifting, languid, into his scheme. Content. The notion of you slipping from his fingers is a thought that rarely crosses his mind these days, especially when that house on the prairie grows from an occupant of one to two—

“And, you know… when you're not out saving the world—” your eye roll and air quotes make his lips twitch, tugging at the scar tissue, the acid burns, splashed across his mouth. An ugly fucking Pollock. “—maybe you can come visit.”

“Never fancied myself a rancher,” he drawls, just to watch you squirm. Brow furrowing into a deep ravine as you struggle to make your intentions known without actually giving them sound. Skirting around the issue of wanting him there, of planning a home with him. 

(Too much, maybe? Or too soon—? 

if only you knew—)

He finds it charming, really. 

Still—

“It's just a thought,” you mutter, downcast. He wants to choke on your misery. Your sadness. Drown himself in your anger. Float in your happiness. 

Fuckin' Christ—

All this playing daddy in his head has thrown him off his rocker. Made him soft. Sentimental. It's probably why he yields to you. Offers a lazy shrug and another smarmy twitch of his lips. 

“Sounds like a plan,” and the way you brighten is a dagger to his chest. 

And the thing is. It does. It sounds like a dream, a perfect vision. Just—

Maybe not in the way you'd want. 

He's been looking into places unmarred by human hands. Ghost towns, uncharted territories. His home here isn't perfect for it, not like the vast geography of Mexico. The uninhabited wilderness of Canada, places so remote that it's almost untethered to modern civilisation. Islands of forest, mountains, all on their own. 

Vast corners and crevasses where someone can disappear and never be found. 

But those won't work in tandem with his flighty lifestyle. While he plans on keeping you barefoot and pregnant (common sense in the back of his head screams that he's foul, vile, monstrous—), he will continue to work. Has to, really, to avoid suspicion. 

So—

Home it is. 

But he gets inspiration from the Highland cows you coo on about and purchases a plot of land in the Western Isles. Gives this whim of his—yours, really—a concrete foundation made of the abstract. The filament provided by his newly christened Sergeant—an overeager mutt that bleeds warning signs from his pores. 

(don’t get close, reactive dog. will bite—

the little mutt is a great pyrenees, ain’t he?)

But bless Johnny’s bleedin’ heart, he thought as the man prattled on about this cabin he owns. A place of solitude. Could fire a gun and no one would even peek out the curtains. Beautiful, the way all of Scotland is. The highlands, he breathes in that shade of catholic madness only the dutiful soldiers of god's right-handed wrath can be, is where he keeps his home. A place chiselled from stone, surrounded by wilderness that eats tourists alive. 

(he didn’t ask at the time why Johnny was so keen on finding these places scattered around Scotland, ones with little traffic and a nearly negligible amount of souls within the vicinity, but he finds its best not to get too close to mutts crossbred with wolves.)

But Simon is nothing if not devoted, and so. 

You’ll get your fantasy ranch in the middle of nowhere. Your highland cows, your billy goats, your chicken, sheep, and ducks. A baby in your arms, too. One that shows its hand the next morning, dashing all your carefully laid plans. These paths of independence of yours run parallel to his whims but never converge. There’s the potential in this for these fraying threads to split, and diverge. Separate. 

(But it’s all put to rest at the sound of you heaving in the adjoining washroom. His path eats yours until it’s overtaken. Consumed. 

The evasive, unfettered little bird trammelled, caught. Wing-clipped, and all his.) 

Any misgivings the part of his gyri not buried under the frothing mess of his polluted grey matter might have is vitiated by the unwavering certitude that, despite his own gains in this, it really is in your best interest. 

And maybe it's something that should have come earlier in your relationship—however threadbare that word is in conjunction with the unhinged desire blooming in the pit of his chest; madness masquerading as love or some obsessive, desperate facsimile of it. Maybe a proper man, a better one, might have dug down and fully laid out the reality of intertwining your life with the living dead. That the idea of danger, death, and revenge are all everpresent threats scratching at the walls of this sickeningly sweet fantasy you wrap around yourself. 

He’s a dangerous man. A creature of devastation—manmade, bent into, or congenital is yet to be unearthed—which, in itself, brings about a certain lifestyle. One with fewer people around, and always shrouded in secrecy. Friends, family—none of that matters when death curdles gnarled fingers around his jugular. 

You’ll get used to it. Eventually. The only other choice is to let you, his now flightless bird, go. Released back into the wild vulnerable and reeking of his stench. 

You’ll be devoured before daylight, ripped into pieces—only if they’re feeling generous, that is. 

Simon has his own twisted remora. Ones with claws and fangs and a hunger that runs deep. Insatiable. Any scraps that fall from his mouth are devoured before they can touch the sea floor. They’ll crush you in their maw and dangle your mangled body from the gaps between their teeth. 

You’re not made for the wild. Not anymore. You’re meant to be protected. You—this fragile, delicate thing. He’ll hold you close, keep you secure and safe in a mausoleum of your own making. 

This little glass jar domicile. 

A billet in the mountains. 

He’ll fill it with the finest things—silk linens, fine china; mahogany and teak, pink ivory; a bed of soft, downy feathers, sherpa, Egyptian cotton; (sticks and stones and grass and moss). Buy you whatever you need. Chickens and ducks. Sheep and goats. 

They’ll keep you company when he’s away. 

(and if that fails, he can always plan playdates for you with whatever dirty secret Johnny’s been keeping tucked away in the woods.)

He draws an x in the empty, white box of the calendar, the tip of his red marker gliding silkily across the glossy surface. Something unfurls in his guts. Blossoms in his bones. There’s an almost indescribable sense of satisfaction—primal and animalistic—that grows from the upturned dirt in his head. Life composted from rot. 

Ghost hums to himself when he turns, the sound nearly a purr—bestial as it is, suffocated under sulphur. It reverberates through his chest, trembling across the brackets of his ribs that expand with his deep, heavy inhale—breathing in the sight that greets him like a lover’s kiss

The kebab he ordered lays untouched on the table across from the television—some trashy reality show playing in the background while you tried to eat; a dating show, you’d said when he merely shrugged, having other things on his mind over what to watch while you ate. It all seems to be preserved in time. Frozen in on the exact moment when you’d sniffed the döner kebab he got for you—the same thing you order each time—and then promptly wrenched yourself back, gagging. The sandwich was flung back in the takeaway box before you slapped your hand over your mouth, rushing into the washroom. 

If his phone wasn’t in the other room, he might have taken a picture. A little memento to remember this moment. Framed it in iron and perched it on the desk they gave him back in Hereford, the one just down the hall from Price. 

(ah, speaking of—he’ll have to send that caustic bastard a fruit basket, or something, won’t he? maybe some pretty flowers for his lady.)

His reverie is shaken when the door to the washroom creaks open slowly, and you emerge through the gap with sweat on your brow, knots across your forehead, and a shaking hand resting over your churning stomach. 

Shame, he thinks. He really should have brought his phone—

You lean against the wall, taking in deep, shuddering breaths to steady yourself, confusion and worry knitting over you like a thundercloud. It tastes of ozone when he inhales. An approaching storm. In the blue gloom of the living room, illuminated only by the light flooding out from the washroom behind you and the static glow of the television, you look etiolated. A wilting flower. 

His budding rose. 

He coos. “You alright?”

You glance sideways at the kebab on the table, mouth pinching into a grimace as if to stem the nausea still rippling through you. You stare at it for a long moment, seemingly trying to make sense of the reality sitting in front of you on scratched, old pine; confusion runs laps over the dawn cresting in your eyes. This puzzle is too unfathomable for you to piece together; the keys and slots all askew. 

The air around him grows still. Silent. Anticipatory. A tiger crouched low in the tussock. A little fawn roaming too close. 

There’s a heaviness in your eyes when they flicker back to the wall where he stands, drilling holes into the x. Something implacable frissons over your threadbare expression, fracturing across sallow cheeks. 

The air is electric. It pulses across his bare flesh, irritating scar tissue, acid burns, and scorch marks. His skin prickles at its whisper. 

“Feelin’ sick, pet?” He ponders, playing pretend. He’s viciously, deeply amused at the desperate denial splashing across your cheeks. The thin shade of askance that unfurls like the leaves of a flytrap when you look at him. “Mus’t’a been the kebab. Bad meat, I reckon?”

You offer a weak nod in response, pinching your lips tight together. The matter seemingly concluded, brushed aside. Pocketed for later. 

And you say nothing else for the rest of the night—gaze unseeing, turned inward; pensive—but he purrs in contentment as if everything was alright, sprawled across the couch with his head pillowed against your churning stomach as if he could hear the whisper of another heartbeat from within. 

In the saturated blue light, he catches your eyes listing toward the calendar every so often. Wary. Nervous. He thinks you might say something, might ask, but you don’t. It’s caught on a stilted breath. A harsh swallow. 

All you do is bring your hand to his shorn head, and raze the stumps of your clipped claws against his scalp. It’s almost as if you’re trying to soothe the madness from within. Scratching that itch deep inside until it goes away. Gentle hands play pretend and dress up as a panacea. Affection to scrape the illness away. 

He thinks you should know better than that, even as he leans into it with a soft exhale, more relaxed than he'd ever been his entire life. Content. Unassailable in his conquest. 

Simon has always been more scar tissue than man, and no place is damaged more than the upturned tumulus inside his head. 

But oh. How you try—

His sweet, sweet girl. 

The look you give him the next evening is, in parts, brumous. 

A polynya of dread, worry, guilt, fear that frissons across the deep valleys in your eyes, shaded in plumes of darkness, filled in deliciously with the weight of your beleaguered uncertainty. It yawns out before him, this heavy gloom. 

So close he catch the embers in his hand. 

“Simon… We should—talk. I, uh—”

You hold up a little rectangle, dismay, misery, etched in the blue tinge spreading across your face. It seems to steal the words from your throat, turn them into ash. What else are you meant to say, he supposes, when you look out at the world now from the gape in his maw? 

But there’s a veil of wonderment that hides below the tidal wave; this precious, deadly, undercurrent that rents the air, splits his chest in two.

The happiness, however meagre, thin, it is right now (just a sunken boat on the seafloor), is there. Ripe for salvage, and he sees that it’s handled with care. Cupped between his palms, nurtured by his own conviction to do what’s right, an’—fuck, pet—know this ain’t what we planned, but—

but:

The howling quiets, turns to a low growl, and then a susurrus hum, when you shakily utter the words he was waiting for. 

“Yes, Simon—”

You shudder when his fist closes over your wrist, pulling you into his purring chest. Shaking like a prey animal in the jowls of a beast, bested and ensnared. It has a profound, almost predatory, sense of satisfaction curling over his bones. He knows this was the right choice, and is sure, in time, you'll come to realise that, too. You’re in the early stages, he knows. Prodromal. You need to be handled with care to curb the lacrimation, the hyperesthesia. 

And there’s no one better than him to guide you through the throes of it. To lead you to the unequivocal end. 

He leans down, and whispers in your crown—

“Good girl—”

—and the sound of his voice is gravel encased in sticky, sweet honey. Dark, smokey molasses. The very same cadence as a key sliding inside of a lock; metal grazing metal. Turning—

“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Tommy.”

Click. 

(he gives you that ring he promised when he takes you to the mountains. you smile wide, and tell him it fits like a gyve.)

Simon stops shovelling his want under the cold dirt and starts burying it inside you instead. Makes a domicile from your flesh; a place where he can rest his aching head every night until the howling scraping down fractured bone stops— (paralytic)

[snapscube]

so i don't know if this is a post i'm gonna keep up cause, like i said, i don't really like talking candidly about aspects of my personal identity often these days, and lord knows i especially hate talking about legal identity and all the dissonance that entails. but this week was a pretty big one for me and i can't shake the desire to share my enthusiasm for even just a fleeting moment.

my name has been a sticking point in my mind for a long time. i've adopted many different ones. first, middle, last, you name it. i've been searching most of my life for a moniker that represented my true self socially, and a surname to distance myself from someone in my life who hurt me very badly and never really learned how to stop.

obviously for a long time now I've been Penny Parker to 98% of people who know me, and for the past couple that number has been bumped up to a solid 99% with a few stragglers. it's a name that is so mundane and assumed at this point that tbh I've even come to resent certain aspects of it. which to me is actually beautiful. i find that mundanity, that nuance, extremely telling of how it encapsulates my life. it's a fully three-dimensional reflection, smudges and sparkles and everything in between.

of course, i only just moved out on my own 3 years ago. and unfortunately that had to be the starting point to make this social and personal progress i've been sitting on for half a decade at least now official, tangible, legal. i've been playing a game of catch-up i didn't sign up for, but it's one that does have a silver lining in that i feel more in resonance with who i am and who i want to be than i ever did before being granted this independence.

and as of this week, i have the pleasure of entering an era of my life where the dissonance between who i am in speech and who i am in contract is nonexistent. my name is Penny Olivia Parker. i'm the same as i've always been, but getting better every day at it. soon i'll even have a license to match!

sometimes more of an Olivia Parker in brief moments nowadays tbh but i haven't worked out the details yet. nothin you need to stress over, ill take care of it. the full set is just fine and legally recognized, which is all i've wanted for as long as i can remember.

this isn't the end of my journey, both excitingly and unfortunately haha, but this is yet another huge milestone for me and in certain respects it's one of the biggest i've managed. i'm so happy to still be here. if you're reading this, thank you for being here too.

also those of you who watched my direct reactions the other day might have a little more insight as to why i was so emotional that the day after a judge signed my legal name change a new game by the Sonic Mania devs was announced called "Penny's Big Breakaway" LOL, it was a lot to handle for me but i wasn't sure how much i wanted to say just yet.

[envy-of-the-apple]

older reader?? SAY NO MORE

you're a confident, popular, charismatic lady in your 30s. you catch a pretty, barely-not-teenage gojo at a bar about to get roofied and rescue him.

you're neither a paragon of moral virtues but apparently you do still have some maternal instincts because you take him aside, help him sober up, and give him a stern but well-meaning lecture about watching drinks, staying safe, etc. maybe he gets a headpat and a caring look while you do this.

that's where you thought this would end but to gojo had absent parents and is starved of all forms of affection, including maternal, so he absolutely cannot let this end here and he will exploit his prettiness, his pitifulness, AND your maternal instincts to the max.

if wires get crossed and he manages to get you to bang him (and hopefully feel so guilty about taking advantage that he can get you to stay with him) then even better!!

omgggggyou know me so well-

(Warnings: manipulation, guilt-tripping, large age gap but both characters are 21+, implied non/dubcon, implied drugging)

Dark!Gojo Satoru x reader

Bad Night

When you open your eyes, your head is pounding.

Last night is a blur, but you get the big picture. You drank too much, and you brought someone home.

He's a cuddler, pressing you against his bare chest, a long arm wrapped around your naked body. It'd be a cute way to wake up if you weren't so sweaty and already in a bad mood.

You're debating on how to kick him out when he shifts behind you. He yawns, one hand reaching up to draw circles on your waist.

"You wake up pretty early."

It's not a stranger's voice. You know him.

You turn your head, almost afraid to look. He gives a sleepy smile.

"...Satoru?"

"Mornin'." Taking advantage of your shock, he gives a quick peck on your lips.

It's a jumpstart for the memories of last night to kick in. Satoru had invited you out, you had a bad day at work and you took the offer, you took shot after shot, one thing lead after another and then-

Shit.

"What's wrong?" He asks, and you doubt you're managing to hide the horror off your face all that well. His usually carefree attitude melted into concern.

"Feeling' alright? I wasn't too rough last night, was I?"

When you open your mouth, the only thing that comes out is a strangled 'I'm fine'.

"That's good." He nuzzles his face into the crook of your neck. "I was worried I hurt you or somethin'. Last night was perfect, by the way. Everythin' I dreamed of, baby."

Baby. You want to throw up.

"Oh, you must be hungry." Satoru frowns, clicking his tongue. "Uh, wait here, I'll go whip somethin' up."

Another kiss, this time on your cheek, before he's sliding off your bed. He's naked. You squeeze your eyes closed when he starts to put on his pants. You keep them closed until the door shuts behind him.

What the fuck did you just do?

You know what you did. You just had sex with someone more than a decade younger than you. You can't even remember it, but the evidence was all around you. Your panties laying crumbled on the floor. The ache between your legs. The bitemarks on your chest, your legs.

You fucked up.

Satoru was by chance You weren't supposed to talk to him, let alone meet him. You were at the right place, at the right time. You happened to catch smug asshole putting something in the oblivious kid's drink. You happened to grab it right before Satoru could, before dumping it on the asshole's face.

Looking back, it wasn't your finest moment. You nearly got the police called on you, but ever since that day, Satoru clung onto you like Velcro. He didn't leave you alone for the rest of the night. You thought your lecture would have embarrassed him enough to leave, which kid wants to be scolded by a thirty-year old? If anything, that might have sparked his admiration for you.

He was determined. Before you knew it, Satoru was everywhere. He spammed you with texts everyday, when he couldn't call. He'd constantly invite you to places adults way past their college years should not be going. Despite your absolute refusal to visit his dorm, you found yourself reluctantly letting him into your house, picking him up from parties when he was too drunk to drive. He'd told you things he'd never told anyone before.

You knew what was happening, you weren't stupid. And unhealthy infatuation. Young, starved for attention, eager to please. You saw the signs, you tried to set boundaries, but you thought you could help him somehow. Your savior's complex grew too big...you thought you could help him.

And then, you ended up sleeping with him.

It wasn't illegal. You knew he was over 18, at the very least. You still feel nothing but nauseating disgust. When you looked down at your hands, they felt dirty.

You needed to fix this, somehow. You needed to tell Satoru that this was a mistake. Rip the band-aide off, nice and clean.

You ignore the crumbled clothes on the floor: your flimsy dress, Satoru's shirt. Instead, you go to the closet and pull out baggy pajama pants and an oversized sweatshirt. You needed to hide as much skin as possible. To preserve the remnants of dignity you had left.

You stayed in the bathroom for ten minutes, practicing what you were gonna say over and over again. I'm sorry, it was a mistake, I was drunk, I took advantage of you, it's not your fault. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

When you step outside your sanctuary, you smell something that makes your stomach growl.

Satoru's standing over a sizzling pan with a smile on his face. He knows his way around your kitchen because he's been here before, doing homework on your countertops. You feel sick all over again.

"Hey." He pouts when you inch closer. "I told you to stay in bed, didn't I? Silly." He reaches over, pinching your cheek in affection.

You swallow and you finally manage to steel yourself.

"Satoru, we need to talk-"

"And done!" Satoru cheers, setting down a plate. "Hungry? You gotta' be, right? We did a whole workout last night." You cringe at his choice of words, wishing he'd stop mentioning your biggest blunder.

When you don't move, he picks up some food with his fork, hovering it close to your lips.

"C'mon. At least try it." He urges. "I promise it's good. Please?"

You look into his baby blue doe eyes. Wide and earnest and eager. When you accept the offering, he glows.

He feeds you like this, one forkful at a time. When you ask why he isn't eating, he just shakes his head.

"I don't think it'll stay down." He admits. "I'm so happy, it almost feels like I'm dreaming."

You clear your throat. Hopefully, you can steer this conversation into something more productive. "Satoru, about last night-"

"Did you like it?" He suddenly asks.

"What?"

"Last night." He says with a sheepish smile. "Did-did you like it? Was I any good?"

You stare at him, utterly bewildered. "I-"

"It was my first time!" He blurts out with clear impulsiveness, and your heart stops. "I-I was pretty nervous. 'Had no fuckin' idea what I was doing, but it looked like you liked it. Right?"

He looks at you with those wide eyes, filled with genuine sincerity and you want to throw yourself off a ledge because not only did you not remember having sex with him, you don't remember taking his virginity.

You were a horrible person.

"It...was a nice night." You mutter quietly.

He beams again, it does nothing to assuage your guilt.

Fuck this all. You needed to put a stop to this. You needed to stop stringing this poor kid along. You needed to be the bad guy.

But, like always, Satoru makes the first move.

He rounds the countertop, coming to a stop by your chair. Satoru kneels to the floor, taking your hands within his owns. If it were anyone else, you would have melted.

Not him. Anyone but him.

"I meant what I said yesterday." He quietly says. "I know you still think I'm young, but I'm 22. I'm more than old enough to treat you the way you deserve to be treated." Oh God. When you turn away, he's reaching out, placing a hand on your cheek. You're forced to stare at him.

"Thank you for giving me a chance." He smiles. "I-I always thought you'd never see me that way, but then you said you liked me too and-"

"Wait wait, hold on." You interrupt. "What?"

He suddenly looks unsure, his gaze darting around. "At the bar last night. I confessed, and you said it back."

That doesn't sound like you. If anything, when you're drunk, you're annoyingly honest. You've never seen Satoru as more than a kid how could you have said that to him?

But he can't be lying. Not with those eyes. Eyes that were suddenly starting to fall like dying stars.

"Oh..." He trails off. "Did you not mean it?"

He handed you your chance on a silver platter. It was a mistake. I was drunk. I've never seen you like that. I took advantage of you.

You can break his heart, here and now. You take in a breath.

"No." You smile. "Of course I meant it. I...really really like you, Satoru."

His smiles returns and he's leaping up. You can't stop him from kissing you, but he's quick, flitting away just as quickly to give you a hug.

"I'm so glad." He whispers. "I'll make you happy, I promise. I'll do anything for you."

You pat his back, still in a daze.

Satoru is smart. He's a physics major, he's got to be smart. You just need to pretend to date him for a while before he realizes that you're too old for him. Then, he'll leave you for someone his age.

He'll snap out of it eventually, right?