#at this point idk if im ever gonna be able to write again

[housewifebuck]

My wish for season 7 (once we get it): madney wedding where Buck is alone, getting a drink and going to find an empty table. As he’s walking he also looks at who’s on the dance floor and sees Madey (duh) and all the other main couples. But then he sees Eddie and Chris dancing together and laughing, and has his classic “oh” moment.

Alternatively: pillow princess Eddie gets his ass ate by Buck

Hope your kitty is okay! Sending good vibes ✨

two equally intriguing concepts....

[uravichii]

* ੈ✩‧₊* you fell first, but bakugo katsuki fell harder

notes: pls idk what this is ive literally never written anyth like this but ive always wanted to write a fic w/ this prompt,, also im thinking of doing an angst version of this 🤩

genre: fluff, lovesick bakugo + reader flirts w/ him a lot, childhood friends to lovers, tw: BARELY PROOFREAD ‼️

bakugo katsuki doesn't know anyone who annoys him more than you do.

he doesn't believe he's gotten this far in one piece when he's been stuck with someone like you since childhood. there's something infuriating about the way you tug on the strap of his school bag when both you and his mother are insisting that you walk to school together in the morning. it's even more infuriating when he doesn't know what in the world is fluttering in his chest and churning in his stomach when you start tugging on his sleeve instead.

bakugo katsuki has no idea why and when exactly he started doing it, but now his blood boils watching that dorky smile on your face while he carries your bag to school every morning and on the way home too.

"katsuki." you playfully bump your shoulder against his arm and grin, "you love me, don't you?"

"i'm doing this 'cuz you look like a fucking camel with this bulky ass bag of yours." he scowls, trying to ignore the tiny, tingling spark he felt on the fleck of his skin that met yours for a single second. "what hell is even in this, rocks?"

"is your back hurting? let me give you a back massage then. c'mon, take off your shirt and lie down."

he grimaces, a flush of scarlet spreading from his cheeks to the tip of his ears.

"what?" you chuckle. "you know we've seen each other naked before, right? remember when we used to take baths together as children? i even let you touch my-"

"shut the fuck up, l/n."

it's maddening how easily you fluster him, like it's your second nature. a teasing remark and a single wink, and he's all over the place. all he can do is click his tongue and walk straight ahead of you (though occasionally looking back if you're still with him)

bakugo katsuki tries to counter your flirty remarks. he can do better, he swears he can. a multitude of emotions takes over him when he sees a sliver of your underwear peeking through your clothes. his cheeks flush and his nails bury into his palmsー partly from the thoughts racing relentlessly in his head, and partly out of wrath for anyone who would dare to ogle you or loudly point it out to the whole room.

he stands protectively close behind you like a guard dog, obstructing anyone even a glimpse. he speaks in a low voice you didn't know he was even capable of, his breath grazing your skin. "oi. nice underwear." once again, he's annoyed to the brim hearing that faint tremble in his words.

he's relieved and all the same, flustered, watching you realize and immediately fumbling with your clothes, but no matter how many attempts, no matter how much he swears he can be a match to you and your teasing nature,

"nice? i'll let you borrow if you like it that much then."

you are the only losing game bakugo katsuki has ever been in.

what annoys him even more is that for some reason, he's able to bare his soul to you, in spite of the sheer ugliness, the cruelty of it, and the pathetic, endless heaps of insecurities overflowing from him.

he presses his palms against his face in a futile attempt to muffle out his angry sobs. you brush a hand over his heaving shoulder, "it's gonna be okay, katsuki. i promise." when he doesn't flinch nor pulls away, you gently coax him into a light embrace, your torsos barely touching yet emitting such intoxicating and soothing heat onto each other.

"the fuck are you crying for?" he snaps, confused and concerned as to why you're suddenly sniffling with him.

"i know, it's stupid." you hug him tighter. "i swear i'm not making this about me. i justー i wish i knew how to make you feel better."

'annoying,' he thinks as he hugs your waist and buries his tear-stained face into the crook of your neck. "i'm going to kill you if you tease me about this tomorrow, l/n."

"hey, i don't do that." you whisper comfortingly despite the threat. "you know i won't."

he knows you won't.

most of all, it gets on bakugo katsuki's nerves the most when he remembers you've had genuine, actual romantic feelings for him since you were children, and it's not just fickle banter and incessant flirting here and there.

"shit. your fever's still high." he mutters, pressing his large palm on your forehead. it astounds both of you how it almost covers your whole face. mindlessly, he shifts his palm sweetly to your cheek, tucking in any stray hair out of your face. what in the world have you done to have him wrapped around your little finger like this? you have him buying you medicine and checking your temperature with pure and utter concern, feeding you food he cooked specially for your taste, and holding your perfect little hand just because you asked him to.

"thanks for taking care of me, katsuki."

"you're a pain in the ass, l/n."

katsuki anticipates another joke or a flirty remarkー something about ass most likely, but then you look up at him, widely staring, and you speak in the steadiest voice you could muster, "am i really?"

he doesn't answer.

"can i tell you something?" you continue. there's a pang in katsuki's chest when you slide your hands off of his. "i like you, katsuki. i still do after all these yearsー"

"shut up. that's your fever talking"

"no, this is just me talking. even if i wake up tomorrow and don't remember anything i said to you today, i'll probably end up saying the same thing again someday, and my feelings won't have changed at all."

steering clear of your eyes, katsuki starts rearranging the stacks of medicine on your nightstand and adjusting your blanket when your frail hand latches onto his wrist.

"i just need to know if you're actually uncomfortable with me or if i have absolutely no chance at all, then i'll stop. i'll distance myself from you even. if that's what you want."

he would never forgive you nor himself for it.

you laugh weakly and continue, "and then maybe i'll just date todoroki or somethingー"

"fuck it." he hisses. he swings the blanket over your face so he won't have to bear your gaping eyes when he spits out, "dumbass, i do like you. don't ever do that, jesus."

there's half a minute of silence between you, him still distraught over the mere image of you and todoroki, and you still buried in the blanket, sinking everything in. you pull the sheet slowly until your eyes peek out. it's unbelievely annoying, again, how fucking adorable you are, katsuki thinks.

"you do? since when?" you ask in a tiny voice that will echo in his mind for the rest of the day, he knows it.

"does it matter?"

"no?" you pull the blanket over yourself again.

and then another minute of agonizing silence.

"katsuki?"

"what? you need anything?"

"yeah. kind of."

"what is it?" he starts to panic a little, "tell me." your fever completely slipping his mind in the heat of the moment.

"can you tell me you like me again when i get better? i have a feeling i'll remember this is a fever dream, then i won't stop talking about it to you, and it'll be so embarrassing."

his mouth quirks up into a smirk. "how about this," he pulls the blanket off you and leans slowly, your cheeks flushing even hotter. he brushes his hand against your forehead and gently presses a kiss, his heart in shambles when he catches brief sight of you shutting your eyes tight. "i like you."

you open them again to see a devilish smirk on his face, except it's noticeably much softer than the usual one he wears. he kisses your cheek next, inhaling your scent as he presses his lips against your warm skin, "i like you."

you're a whole mess now. it's the feverish heat spreading across your cheeks as his hand makes its way to yours under the blanket, the close proximity of bakugo katsuki, his scent, the immense heat that gets you dazed and hitches your breath when he props his forehead onto yours. it's the years of closeness and familiarity you've always shared with him, now blooming into something more, like a flower that has just learned to face the sun and bask in the sweet, easy morning air.

"i like you." he says again. maybe he is a match for you after all. "if it's the only way to shut you up. i'll tell it over and over again."

you fell first. bakugo katsuki fell harder, much harder. seeing you escape under the blanket again and squealing when he tries to pull it back down, he doesn't remember what is it that he found so terrifying in falling in love with you.

it's you, after all, isn't it? the most annoying little shit he's always loved.

[sil-te-plait-tue-moi]

My heart is a bloodhound!

PART 1 ★ PART 2

Quick summary: It happens again, when the year festers into August again and leaves the two of you raw and vulnerable like open wounds.

Word count: 15K… 🤓

Warnings: canon-typical mentions of death, violence and injury (there is mention of like eating people but idk); grief; misogyny; Rust's personality; semi-public SMUTT T-T (MINORS DNI); same level of pretentiousness, maybe a little more, as the first part.

A/N: Holy fuck this sucked the soul out of me (wish Rust Cohle would suck the soul out of I MEAN WHAT), i am super proud of this though!! Went through many iterations and this was the least shit! 🎀🎀🎀 This is technically part two to The idler wheel but can be read by itself too. May or may not write other things for this guy but for the time being, I need a cleanse 😭 BUT please please enjoy and please please interact, i love reading comments and so many lovely people commented on the first part, im gonna do my best to respond to any/all this time 🤘MWAH MWAH

***

It’s difficult to differentiate between the thrill of being left alone here with him and the slow-sinking dread of the implications of that.

With the return of the musk of the summer, those three ruthless, windless, unrelenting months that would seem to drag on for several lifetimes when I was a kid, the memory of where I was last year—and the year before that, and the one before that—hangs brightly in my mind. Stale, not quite dead – so bright. Crawling with mildew.

Stepping into the bar had felt like entering another dimension. Maybe it was the suits that gave it away – every single God-haunted patron—the truckers, the farmers, even the old dog lying at a man’s feet—had turned, sensing foreigners as acutely as the immune system registers a bodily threat. I knew Johansson felt it: that dark pull over the back of the neck. But under Marty’s overconfident, swaggering lead, that winning smile, we soon assimilated. Skin swallowing a bullet.

God forbid you ever leave the town you grew up in. Shame on you if you don’t, though. How sanctimonious of me to change my mind and return after earning a spot amongst the lucky few escapees.

Something in this place still irks me.

At least, in Brooklyn, there was always noise: cries of a baby in the apartment over, the discord of traffic bursting through the streets below, the rush of a crowd, the overlap and slur of private conversations. At least the badness would stare you right in the face; at least people were evil to be evil. At least there were corners where things could hide, where it made sense for shadows to exist: all to explain the paranoia that stalked me.

But here?—it seems so open. Like, if a rare, hot wind would blow through a Louisiana town, it could do so in one straight path, through walls, through people, without ever getting disrupted. Everything is so light in the blazing sun, you can practically hear it: the hum of rays passing over every surface. Nothing should be able to hide. And, at night, with no sun, no rays, there is no noise. Maybe a dog. And ghosts. But perhaps it’s just the area in which I live. 

When Marty started drinking, flirting with the twenty-one-year-old barkeep, Johansson’s face had stiffened. He himself had never even touched a bottle of beer – devil stuff. We shared a look once the blond detective started gabbin’ like an idiot.

“Know what Maggie thinks?” he had laughed, slumping over the sticky table of the booth, big, sweaty palm choking out his drink. “She thinks you might be pissed at me.”

Johansson blinked hard to keep his nose from wrinkling, but, even then, he couldn’t keep from physically cringing away. “Who?” he asked, confused by those hazy, unfocused eyes.

Marty cracked a toothy grin – there was that slight gap between those front two, which had been charming at first and only managed to thoroughly disgust me now in moments like these – and pointed his finger right at me, accusing. “You.”

My stomach churned dangerously at the sight of him.

“Marty,” his partner had drawled, a low warning.

Waved away like a fly.

“Naw, it’s like—you’re on your high fuckin’ horse or somethin’.”

The words were spoken through a laugh, but I knew there was meat behind that so-called good mood. He was one of those people that tended to overcompensate. A mistake, an ill feeling. He liked to point out how I was alone, and often, too, poorly disguised as a passing joke, complete with one of those shit-eating grins that seemed to come so easy to him.

Shouldn’t he have been happy? Not only had he gotten our case, by then, but we’d handed it over with smiles on our damn faces. Nice enough to walk them through the original crime scene, introduce them to the key witnesses. Complicated. We didn’t have to do shit for ‘em, but we did. Hell, even that beer he was clutching to his chest was paid for out of the goodness of my own fuckin’ heart. Who was he to moan about the situation? He was the one who insisted on staying in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, brushing off any and all pointed questions on whether his family would be missing him at dinner.

“You know, I’d rather you were pissed,” he continued, where, really, I should have just smothered him into silence.

Rust was staring into the side of his flushed face, iron-grey eyes like a drill, like he was thinking the same thing.

“Look, you’re smilin’ at me now, but I sure as hell don’t trust it, buck. You wanna bite my head off, don’t ye?”

Like I ever could have done that.

Though the familiar weight of rage curdled in my chest, I would never admit it to the likes of Martin Hart. When he got like this—jealous, insecure, whiny—I wondered whether it was just a temporary lapse, or if this him, this true him, just lay under the surface all the time.

It wasn’t that fucking hard to plaster on a smile and take what you fucking got – I did it all the time. He could dream of a different life, but this was the one we were dealt. Fact that his grown ass hadn’t accepted that by now twisted violently in my gut. Between the two of us, I was the one that knew this – so why did he get myfucking case?

In my head, I’d let Salter have it, too. How could I ever admit I had an ego? How could I ever admit I had a mind to wrench the teeth out of the sheriff’s fucking gums? 

But I have plenty of practice acting like things don’t bother me, which is why it was so easy to plaster on my amiable smile and laugh, “C’mon, man, you know it’s only ‘cause o’ the workload.” Not that you could comprehend that, lazy fuck. To Marty, my kind’s natural state was amiable—anything otherwise would be a defect—so I’d expected to convince him. “You’ll do right by it, ‘m sure.” 

If he were sober, I know he would’ve bought it – he could convince himself that the way of the world was right and I was only being sweet to be sweet, because he deserved it. 

But Marty was drunk. Piss-drunk, loud drunk. His mind was clumsier than usual, unable to muster the energy to jump points, ignore the evidence, like he did daily. I hoped I had the power—if I had to let the case go, I wanted to at least retain an into its goings-on—but there was only one way to really have power over men like Marty when they were drunk, and I had had no interest in being one of his girls. 

My partner twitched beside me, picking at some spongy, yellow fluff protruding from a thin split in the chocolate-brown fake leather of the booth. He was just as furious as I was beneath his fort of calm.

Marty took a swig of his beer. “She wants you over soon. Maggie. Barbecue or some shit.”

“Maybe you should go home,” Johansson interjected, sharper than intended. If I were him, with his body, with his life, I’d have hit the fucker—long time ago, too. I couldn’t, but Johansson wouldn’t. He didn’t lack the temperament for brutality—I’m not sure anybody does—but, rather, couldn’t justify it to a necessary degree in his head. “I’m going home,” he’d reasoned kindly – he made it sound so easy. “Just let me take you. It’s on my way.”

Itching to leave, to return to the comfort of his wife and his little daughter. Marty had always found Johansson’s fondness of them disingenuous, had disliked my partner as long as they’d worked in the same office. He complained to me once that none of his stories seemed complete. When I asked him what he meant by that, he couldn’t answer—but I knew.

Breath short in my chest, I had half-expected Marty to lunge over the table, scratch Johansson’s eyes out. Only, Rust leaned over, dipping his head down to mutter something quietly into his partner’s ear, which was all flushed red. 

And then he went willingly into Johansson’s car, stumbling through the still, open night into the backseat.

My partner had squeezed my shoulder goodbye – I’m not sure why I didn’t leave with him. Now, I was doomed to leave with Rust. 

There, he sits across from me, smearing the ashy tar of his half-smoked, flaking cigarette over the mottled glass ashtray dragged over to his side of the table, little circles, waves, absent-minded art. Has me transfixed, some hypnotist.

If I look down like this, if I sacrifice the opportunity to look at him, I earn his careful attention: this sits in the back of my idle mind. I’ve been taking advantage of it more and more since summer broke through the sweetness of spring, which has since curdled like milk, sour. His stare drags over my face like fingers – I can almost feel his touch pressing into the softness of my cheek, dragging over the ridge of the orbital bone. 

“You’re okay?” he asks after a couple slowed heartbeats, pulling me out of the honey-pit of my thoughts.

I dart my eyes up, breaking the spell – his observation retreats, clouds, and drifts away to fix on the broken clock on the wall, the one that reads one forty-five at eleven o’ clock.

Primarily, his question irritates me. Nobody asks “are you alright?” imploringly, not unless it concerns themselves and their own wants. Salter had asked me that, right after telling me he was pulling me from my case, and, then, I had thought about crying, just to unsettle him. But what good would that have done? He’d only asked “are you alright?” to test the waters, to see if there was a future possibility of letting him pull the rug out from under me with zero consequences. Again. I couldn’t win. 

But Rust doesn’t want much from me. He doesn’t even want the case, really, which just twists the knife even further. 

“You—you know I’m good in there, right? In the box.” I carve a jagged thumbnail into this message in the table, twisting the characters wider, or taller, risking splinters.

Why should I have to give it up? And to a fucking idiot? Marty wasn’t the one who stayed all those late nights alone at the office, wasn’t the one scoured over heaps of files under low light, wasn’t the one who took the fucking beating when the suspect fought against arrest. Marty was not the one who conducted an interview like that.

My mouth thins into a hard line, but I know the words will come out whether I let them voluntarily or not. Around Rust, it’s that way. I should’ve left when I could. 

“It’s just that—it was so weird,” I continue, my head pulsing with the unwanted memory of that cabin. Marty didn’t have to experience it, Rust didn’t have to experience it—but I did. “Not jus’ wrong, or sad. Makes me feel strange, thinking about it.” 

Often, the suspects underestimate me. Johansson’s broad shoulders and tough-set jaw come off as offensive—nothing like my voice, low and gentle, and my eyes, sympathetic and warm. I’m the mother who will never judge, who is spilling over with unconditional love.

Beneath this, though, I am good at the maths of the job, the connections. Though all detectives technically develop the same constituent skills—close attention to body language tells and other biological betrayals—I ain’t sure most understand the sensitivity and strength required to confront shit like this head-on. To not avert your eyes at the mutilated woman on the bed. To inspect her eunuched boyfriend’s severed appendage, to have steady hands when photographing the scene—with flash, of course, to highlight every detail with sufficient clarity—for evidence, which must be returned to and examined again and again, each time with greater fervour still. 

I could name a few who’d joke about a thing like that, to ease the burn of that image in their heads, to sleep better at night, to leave behind the uninvited, vicarious sensation of a knife teasing over the meat of their dick. 

But the boyfriend’s corpse, we eventually located separately in a cabin in the woods, laid into the basement freezer, so peaceful, such a brutal image. Pretty parts of him preserved for mauling.

And Salter has the fucking audacity to take it away. He wasn’t the one to see something like that, to feel sick to his very stomach, to gag and have to turn away, to cringe and writhe like his skin suddenly wasn’t his, like he ought to pick himself out. I’ve been reeling with that image for weeks, living with motion sickness, and have been denied the relief of vomiting. 

“So, you need me to get that confession.”

Rust comes back into focus, perfectly still.

I nod, the back of my neck prickling with mean goosebumps. “Campbell, his DNA was all over the bodies. He was proud of it, even.” My ribs still glow with the phantom-sensation of his brutal kick there when we located him. Stomach clenching, I struggle to remain level. “But there ain’t no way in hell she wasn’t involved. He denies it, but the house is registered under her name. Maiden name, Phelps.”

“I read,” he confirms. 

I tremble in frustration – I almost wish he hadn’t. 

“It’s just—this lady’s tough.”

Eyes darting over to the dim-lit bar, scouring the scuffed hardwood floor, I can feel my face growing hot with indignation. Christ, it sounds pathetic, like a whiny kid insisting on continuing a task all wrong in order to protect their damaged pride. 

“You know Johansson: once she starts with the tears, he can’t see past ‘em. Southern manners ‘n’ all: a crying woman is a delicate thing not for a man to understand but to comfort. But, with me, it ain’t the same. She doesn’t respect me.”

“What d’you mean ‘respect ’? Don’t need respect in this game.”

I scoff, which would’ve been a dire mistake with anyone else. “Y’wouldn’t know what I’m on about,” I tease through an easy smile, though I’m not feeling so funny at the moment.

He inclines his head down to me, an invitation to elaborate.

My boot feverishly taps against the floor, thrumming light like a jackrabbit on the run. 

I sigh, mouth twisting. “She keeps asking me if I’ve slept,” I confess. “Says I look like her daughter.”

For all my mothering, here comes a perp who’s desperate to play me at my own game.

I can see how intelligent she is: some hollow glint in her eyes with nothing behind; past that gleaming screen of kindness, something black, like a cherry pit.

Sitting across from her, it felt like looking into a mirror. Not just physically—though her skin is a similar shade to mine, her nails bitten and splitting like mine, and she looks close to what I imagine my own mother could’ve grown into. It was in the way that, when I smiled, she smiled. When I took a sip of my coffee, she would drink some tea. At times, it would even seem like she would speak in my voice: the pitch, the intonations, the phrasing all far too similar. I was reluctant to tell her my name. It reminded me of this folk tale, of these tall, dark creatures who only required your name to speak like you, to look like you, to replace you in your own life. Its victim would die—in some way or another. Wander the woods, eaten alive.

A harrowing feeling had crept over me, winter pressing against the two-way mirror – I was sure Johansson, on the other side, would pick up on it. Only, when I confessed my worries to him, he’d given me this doubtful look, and I really wasalone then.

“She’s playin’ you,” Rust states simply, tracing his fingers over his mouth like some pseudo-cigarette. 

“Yeah.” I grind my teeth together. Under the table, where he cannot see, my fingers curl into a tight fist, trembling with my secret violence. “And now Salter wants Marty to have it? Bull.” 

I should’ve socked him right in his dumb, slack fuckin’ jaw. One day, I will. 

“He don’t want Marty to have it,” Rust retorts smartly, a half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. His eyes are warm in the dark – I should’ve taken my chances, raced to meet ‘em, but I’m too late. “He wants me to have it.” 

Yeah, well, I wish what was mine would stay mine.

Even if I’m inclined to be pissed off at Rust by proxy, I just can’t be. The difference between him and Marty is that he actually pays attention, real attention, not the selfish kind. Just by watching, I can tell he knows exactly what he could say, how he could act, in order to appeal to somebody—which is why I find it so odd that he chooses not to. I sacrifice my damn dignity to keep myself palatable. He does not. As a result, he is not well-liked at the office – people tend to feel caught out by him; they don’t like to feel observed, known.

When did being seen become a threat? I thought it was intimate. Though, I suppose, a piece of shit never wants to believe they’re a piece of shit.

Everyone’s the hero of their own story. 

Rust slides Marty’s half-empty beer across the table to me, which I receive with a crooked smile and a quick hand.

“Sure I won’t catch whatever he had?” 

He shrugs. “Y’ain’t as deadbeat as the rest of ’em. Oughta drag you down to their level.” 

I snort. “What, you don’t think you’re deadbeat?”

He huffs. “I’m worse.” 

Bitter, the beer washes over my tongue, leaves that funny aftertaste I never really liked, not the first time, not the last. I don’t suppose I’ll ever turn one down though, not if it was offered to me: I’d accept it if only to win points with whoever it was, points I could spend at a later date. 

“Maybe,” I start, “if you were a little more deadbeat, you’d be popular. Go out with the boys.”

When he meets my eyes momentarily, smirking, I have to grip my hand over my knee, fingertips digging into bone, and consciously remind myself via mantra not to let my face freeze. He hums, voice smooth and low like liquor, “What, like youdo?”

I should be pissed off, really. Maybe I will be. Instead, though, I choke on the smart retort I had meticulously configured in my head, some quip that would’ve maybe interested him based on what caught him before. 

I don’t know whether it would have been worse pretending like it never happened. That’s my strong point: pretending. It’s his, too, when he wants it to be. Maybe we could’ve outlasted it – all we needed was stamina.

But, instead, it’s this. Looking across at each other and knowing exactly what’s going on in the other’s head. I can see exactly how he thinks of me, what he wants to do. When he tilts his head ever so slightly, my neck glows with a promise, like the movement was mine in the first place. When I would bite at the pendant of my necklace, he used to narrow his eyes, like he ought to yank the chain off my neck. But now, he looks on softly, so unlike him, his own fingers at his own lips. I know what it feels like – I’ve kissed him there, too. 

“Don’t give me that. At least Geraci would stop shit-talkin’ ye,” I manage, tearing myself away. “Swear he’s stuck at sixteen or somethin’. But—you don’t mind it, do you?”

He shakes his head. “‘f he was smarter, maybe I would. Jus’ likes the sound of his own voice.” 

The clock has replaced me as his focal point – I can’t help but feel jealous. 

“S’why I like you,” I mumble from behind my beer. “First time I met you, I thought you’d make me feel stupid.

That seems to get him. 

He blinks, a barely noticeable twitch. “Do I? I don’t mean to.”

Can I spin this? I’m sure, if I were a little more awake, I’d be able to spin this. 

Some evil part of me hopes to make him feel guilty, to trick him into feeling tenderness for me, though I know the pursuit of that would be in vain. The type of men I know how to work—creatures of habit that take the exact path you want them to, to believe that they’re the real seducers—Rust seems entirely separate from that. He can sniff out rehearsal and practice, that robotism, like a dog – he sees it enough in criminals, doesn’t he? That’s why he’s called in for favours across state police departments.

When I met him the first time, I shook his hand, smiled, friendly-like, only to be met with rigidity and stoicism. No trouble, of course: some people just are that way. Wild horses on the highway. But his quietness?—now, that had set alarm bells off in my head. Boys at the precinct were loud – you couldn’t pay ‘em to shut up about their weekends, their football, their college years, their fuckin’ yards. When I was first exposed to it, I thought I’d gain a lot of friends. But then I realised they weren’t so much talking with me as they were talking at me. It’s why they’re so easy to read: they just tell you everything you want to know right off the bat. Even their secrets are bursting at the seams of their fat mouths, begging to be released. 

But Rust?—doesn’t talk until he finds it necessary. It’s impressive. Before that, though, the trait was enviable. I had—have—no comparable method. Even though, at first, it can seem blunt, even cold, his eloquence is refreshing. Never running in circles – only determinedly forward. So intimidating, almost like a freight train – I have to consciously keep myself from jerking back and out of the way. 

How low he must really think of me then, to see me like this. And I know he does: he sees. Everything I might have done to prevent it perhaps even had the opposite effect. I hate, I burn, I curse: it’s ugly. I cry over cases I would’ve left behind in two months tops, anyways, onto the next. I obsess over just another woman in the box. I think about him almost constantly. 

“You don’t,” I mumble, wondering if I ought to be wishing myself far away. “Make me feel dumb, that is. Not me. Others, I can’t speak for.”

We’ll have to leave soon – no doubt, this local bar is used to slow days and early nights, a blissful routine rudely disrupted by two outsiders who haven’t even really shown them good business. I glance over at the barkeep, slumped over the scuffed wooden counter and flatly watching the football up on the boxy TV set, and I recall my first job. Then, too, I’d let men twice my age buy me drinks, flirted with them. Was worth the tip money. 

Rust hums, though I really wish he wouldn’t speak at all. “Don’t pay mind to what Marty said.”

My neck prickles. 

He’s not trying to console me, is he? No, that’s not like him. Besides, it’s not like any amount of coddling could reverse the merciless truths I’m constantly reminded of in this line of work – if I’ve learned anything about sympathy, it’s that it doesn’t fix shit. If anything, it’s just another complication. It can seem beautiful, but, really, it isn’t. I can miss it, miss its warmth, miss the kind, sweet nothings my husband would whisper into my hair on the hardest nights, but it never changed the fact that I would have to get up in the morning and do it again. Rust knows this, has maybe lived this, so he’s not trying to console me. 

Maybe he’s trying to defend Marty.

Sharp and sure, that anger comes lurching up in my throat, slashing and snarling. 

The sensible part of me—what I hope is the larger part of me—knows this is not possible. Rust understands Marty’s faults better than anyone, even himself, even his wife. 

“Thing is,” I mumble bitterly, “he really means it, don’t he? He just don’t show it.” I trace the warm, smooth rim of the bottle with a light finger, though my mind is currently toying with the idea of jamming it violently down the opening. “Maybe it means more that he does keep it hidden – at least some part of him knows it’s wrong.”

Placid in the periphery of my vision, Rust shrugs. “‘s what separates us from our killers. Feelin’ it ain’t the problem. Resistance is where strength is tested.” 

“Ego,” I chuckle darkly. 

He hums. “Fragile ego.”

Underneath my smile lies an uneasiness stirred by his criticism.

Rust is not gentle with his opinions – I don’t suppose that’ll ever change. Resistance is a losing game – not even he is immune to the impermanence of these things. I’m sure he said that to me once, on a night like this. 

I’ve never been very good at refraining from things. Even from an early age, I just couldn’t say no. Teenage years: alcohol, drugs, sex. If it was tossed my way, I’d take it, anything I could get, hungry to experience something. 

Ha!—maybe I actually am more like Marty Hart than I’d like to admit. He’s trying to be an adult, albeit really, really poorly. As long as he believes he’s a good, family man, then his reality is protected. But I know I’m rotten, really. One of the boys at the precinct will call me pretty—in that sick way somewhere between the unchecked lust of a man and his paternal right to claim—but, below, I know I’ve got sickness swimming through my veins. Not blood. Something accumulated over the years, maybe from pretending all the time. 

I feel like I want to cut things, break them. Told myself to hang on until I retire, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. I’ll break. What will Rust think of me then? 

Maybe I was his low point: that fault in resistance. 

Some awful, gnawing feeling collects at the pit of my stomach, like black tar. Must be all those cigarettes. 

“Wha’s in that head?” he probes suddenly, stealing razor-sharp, fleeting glances.

I shrug, swallowing down a bout of nausea. “I dunno.” And I really don’t. Behind the surface tension, I don’t know what I feel, only that I do, and it’s so, so much. “It kinda—makes me happy to see him like that: jealous. ‘Cause he knows I’m good, and he’s wondering why he’s finishing what I started. He knows he don’t deserve it. Not like I do.” 

My confession lingers in the air like smoke – I have mind to reach a hand up and wave it all away, or suck it down, deep, erasing reality. Fuck. I’ve always been a little off when reading into Rust’s quiet – with that tightrope he seems to have mastered, I know I should avoid any step at all—it could just as easily miss its mark—but I can never seem to help myself. 

I stare at him—and I think it makes him uncomfortable, though there’s nothing there, not any normal human reaction, in his face for me to draw from. That’s fine. In my gut, I’m pretty sure I’ve got it down.

“You want to be seen as competent,” he finally says, a simple-enough statement. 

I scrunch my nose up distastefully. “No, I want to be competent.”

“Well, what good is bein’ somethin’ if there’s no-one there to witness it?” 

Unable to press down an exasperated sigh, I close my eyes, roll them with all the subtlety I can manage.

Foul words push under my tongue, like vomit. 

I don’t know if I’m in the mood for this tonight: smart conversation. What feels like debate. Maybe if he hadn’t been given my case, I’d take him up on the challenge, but I’ve already lost. 

I eye him, try to figure out his game. 

“I dunno, Rust,” I tell him flatly. “I think that’s called having an identity issue.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “Most people do.”

My chest burns. “This isn’t a go at me, is it?”

Slow, he draws the ashtray towards him from across the table, as if the grind of the glass against the wood is a noise that ought to be savoured. 

I could be deaf, but reading his lips would be easy: “And how’d this be about you exactly?” 

I’m able to fight off the initial instinct to wince, the way in which he delivers the words, calm and deliberate, stinging like a slap to the face. What’s worse is the growing impression that he’s as bored of me as I am. 

With a furrowed brow, I watch him, heartbeat thrumming in my ears. 

“I ain’t out to get you, s’you can quit lookin’ at me like I kicked you or somethin’.”

Frowning shallowly and trying to pretend like I’m not, I glance away and commit to rearranging my face—but at the glimpse of that twitch at the corner of his mouth in my periphery, I know I’m only digging a deeper grave for myself. The noticeable heat of my embarrassment must please him.

Playing with the food. 

And I’ve got nothing to say to him—not a single word or phrase up to par, nothing to measure up to Rust’s clinical detachment, let alone destabilise him. He might’ve been reciting the coroner’s report. There’s nothing I can say to scathe him—and fuck, I want to leave a mark, prove to him that I can. I scan him for weakness, but either I’m still too stunned to see it or there is none. I have no plan of attack and no line of defence. 

Rust seems to soften in the knowledge of this. 

“I mean,” he begins, knowing now that I’m really listening, “identity ain’t fixed – it’s not permanent. I don’t scrutinise my appearance. I don’t mind my body, and my body don’t mind me. My personality hardly feels under my control – ‘s just somethin’ that is and will be—‘n’, I guess, will change, but only against my will, never because of it. Feels pointless to feel insecure about that.”

Is this supposed to be some fucked-up attempt at advice?

My priorities changed, but this place never has, never does, never will. So, it’s all dumb and the people are dumb and this bar is dumb and the boys at the precinct are dumb and, fuck, I wish Rust were dumb, too. I feel pathetic, and he does not alleviate that feeling at all. If he were dumb, I could laugh at him and make myself feel better. I could laugh at myself for sleeping with a dumb man. Instead, I think of him religiously and crave his approval. Afflicted with the knowledge that he needs to be corrupted to want me, that I’m awful enough to want it enough to corrupt him again. Tainted waters. It would be so much more comfortable if I could look down on him.

My skin writhes and ripples, and I know the only thing that would soothe it is if he touched me. Jesus and the sick man—or some polluted version of that.

My world swings under a bout of nausea as it begins to spiral – the beer does not help. 

Maybe he’s waiting it out, like I’m trying to. Forgetting is the wisest decision anyone could make, the most fortunate outcome. Though, my efforts are paradoxical: I think so, so much about not thinking about it all. 

“Sure seems like y’think about yourself a good deal, too, s’don’t you criticise me,” I mumble, clumsy. It’s a mistake to even open my mouth again – he’ll use it all against me eventually. 

Rust hums again, low, some muscle twitching in his jaw, like his body has no clue what to do when not blindly occupied with a cigarette. “Never said I don’t think about myself,” he rectifies, staring at the sweaty palms I’m wringing together tightly against the lip of the table. 

I allow my mouth to pool with saliva, trying to combat the increasing dryness of my mouth. 

“Guess the thinkin’ part is where insecurity comes from in the first place,” I add after swallowing.

When my eyes dart up to look at him, his are on my throat.

Immediately, I look away.

Maybe this is the bad kind of intimacy.

The intensity of his attention is looming, sifting through my thoughts like sand.

Sometimes, I think he has me figured out but just couldn’t care less about what he’s found. He’s feeling the power of my burning desire for him – maybe it amuses him. Maybe he’s waiting to mechanise it, letting me sit idle while a use for me finds him (if ever). Maybe I know things. Maybe I can break things open. Maybe he can take my cases from me. Maybe I can tire him out, put him to sleep. 

It’s almost worse that he hasn’t put me to work yet. 

Maybe it really was just something in the water. Maybe all I need is to visit somebody close to me. 

“Ever heard o’ that theory? ‘bout internal monologue?” Rust asks softly, leaning in and tipping his head down like only I’m worthy of hearing this here. 

My leg jerks and I can’t place why. I nod, face hot. 

“I think ‘s bullshit—‘bout some not having one. Think everybody’s got that voice in their heads.” He pauses, squints. “Mm, maybe that’s a little generous.” 

I laugh – I hope it makes him feel good. In truth, I know he couldn’t care less. 

“What d’you think it’d be like? No voice.”

The world seems so close right now, wrapping its fuzzy arms tight around us, buzzing in my ears, shadows fur-soft over my face. What does he want me to say? I wish he’d tell me, offer me respite. 

I shrug, and it’s honest, my resignation. “No voice don’t mean no thought.”

“Alrigh’. Then, what about no thought?”

I shrug again. “I like thinking.”

He huffs, angling himself back away from me. Have I disappointed him? Somewhere deep in the pit of my tummy, there’s that fleck of worry, something that tastes an awful lot like vomit. 

I expect him to finally stop talking. 

But “I get tired of it,” is what he says instead. “In between cases, or these—moments where I feel like I could burn a hole through myself ‘f I spent ’nough thought on it. ‘s heavy, like they weigh me down.” He pushes the ashtray away, his fingers the only part of him moving. 

Swept up in the rising tide of your own life, hurting around you in some never-ending circle or spiral of which you happen to be the centre. Swimming with black-eyed angels. I know how he feels – I used to feel that way. Maybe I still do, sometimes. Clinging on to the tenderness my husband used to have for me like it could save me from the guilt I would feel when I moved on. No-one would pull me out: that much was true enough. That memory of stability, of the good times, only depressed me, moving from Brooklyn back to Louisiana. Feeling small in my own life, like a piece on a chessboard, with no semblance of control, only duty, chasing this idea of who I used to be. Hunting down the bad men, wondering what upper hand is driving them across the squares, contemplating the carpenter that fashioned the pieces. Too big of a big picture can be detrimental. The fact that I know this to be true doesn’t make me an exception. 

“I think you’re tired of the things you think about,” I muse, a headache beginning to expand between my temples – perhaps the heat has finally gotten to my head. “Space better occupied by other shit.” 

I’m careful not to pay attention to Rust’s reaction, if there even is one, since the weight of his interest is pressing over my face where I really wish his lips would.

“Like what?” he challenges. 

His eyes glint with curiosity, a blade’s sharp edge. 

I bite my tongue. 

“You think you know me?” It’s more a statement than a question.

I shrug. “You think you know me, don’t ye?”

Though, he kinda does. I think he’s proud that he can read me, but maybe that’s me overcomplicating things. Maybe I’m just another person to him. I wonder if he thinks I’m predictable. Boring, negligible, painfully average. Good for one thing, and that one thing was a mistake, anyway. 

Look at him, now: his eyes have dropped to elsewhere, but there’s a soft smirk that curls up on his face, the hint of a pink tongue that traces lightly over his teeth. 

Geraci always talks shit about that look whenever Rust closes yet another case, securing a tough confession. “So fuckin’ up ‘imself, ain’t he? Jesus.” Sure, he pisses me off—for different reasons. I’ve long since come to the conclusion that he’s worthy of admiration. 

He smiles to himself – I don’t trust it. “You’re calling me arrogant.”

“Are you?” I press, gnawing at the inside of my cheek. I’m surprised at the tepidity of my voice, considering how I’m covered in boils and burns in my head. 

He doesn’t have anything to say to that, only hums in response, seemingly amused. 

“Doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” I murmur. “People are scared of bein’ known, so nobody really tries no more.”

“I don’t observe people for intimacy purposes.”

Then why does he fucking look at me like that? 

A year ago, I’d have put it down to my own desires warping my perception of reality. Really, he wasn’t interested; he was only paying me my due amount of scrutiny in order to keep his mental file of me up to date. Really, he didn’t want to touch me; really, he was just someone who fiddled with his own hands, maybe to remind himself that he could be his own from time to time. Lust is such a dangerous thing – any deeper than surface level, and it has the very strong potential to kill you. If you want something against your better judgement, do you really even want it? The haze of having Rust come so close to me is dampened by such doubts.

But at this point, he either wants me, or I’m crazy. Shit, maybe I’d rather be just that. I’ve seen his eyes like this—dark and bottomless—when hands were unzipping my skirt, or dragging over my skin. To deny intimacy? Now that’s arrogance. Anddelusion. Shit, and I thought he was so above all that stuff. Does he think I can’t figure him out?

Surely his opinion of me can’t be that poor. 

My hand cramps up as I punch down the instinct to pinch the bridge of my nose. 

“Sure you do,” I press. And I’m right. I hope I’m right. 

His stare thickens into something different, what I think might be a black, molten form of gratification. Then, it hardens, cools in a split second into these tough, jaw-breaker pellets. I’d say it was confrontational, but then his eyes flutter just as he happens to swallow thickly. Is that his pulse in his throat? 

I rub at my puffy eyes with a stiff set of fingers.

Rust drops his eyes, brushes his hand over the side of his blazer where his cigarettes are sitting warm and ready beneath. 

“What, you—lonely again or some shit?” he asks. 

I almost recoil at the sudden bitterness of his tone. 

I snort good-heartedly, but, really, the comment stings just right—he knows where to press—all the breath knocked out of my chest. “O-kay, Rust. That an accusation?”

“No. ’S an observation. Thought you jus’ loved those,” he combats flatly.

Chest burning, I have to save myself, jump ship, and look away. My mouth tastes like grainy bile. 

“You were lonely last summer. That’s why you came to me.”

The dim light above us flickers, his face phasing in and out of shadow before me like a candle in the wind. 

I roll my jaw. 

Does he look back on it with disdain? 

“No,” I snap instinctively, instantly burned by the satisfaction that crosses his eyes. 

My breath hitches plaintively. Every fibre of my body trembles and burns to defend myself. There’s not a single word that could repair his opinion of me.

“Or—yeah.” Shut up. 

I rub at my temple, desperate for relief – do they have pills for this shit? – which does not come. If he feels any pity for me, it certainly doesn’t show. 

The harsh line of my mouth trembles. “I just thought you understood me. Or made an attempt to, at least, but maybe that part was self-projection. ‘Cause nobody ‘round here’s like you. I know you think that’s stupid and I was being naïve or—” I swallow though my throat is dry as ever, “—or dumb, or somethin’, but that’s what I felt. At the time.”

His gaze is fixed on my neck.

“At the time,” he echoes. It’s a question, I realise after a couple moments.

“Yeah. Fuck y'want me to say, asshole? 'm not—I’m not gonna embarrass myself with you, Rust. That what you want me to do? Show you just how dumb I can get—?”

“Sure like to speak for me, hm?” he bites back quietly, making it so damn easy to run right over him, to feverishly stamp out that insufferable fucking softness to his voice. Shit, I wish he’d just raise it and yell at me already.

“—Yeah, whatever. You like this shit, don’t you? Y’think you deserve a fight?—well, I’ll give you one. That what you want? ‘Cause what?—what, you get to ignore me, pretend I don’t exist, act like you’re above fuckin’ me—” his eyes flit away, bringing my roiling frustration to a crest, “—No, don’t you fuckin’ look away,” I scold, a bite, jutting a crooked finger into his space. 

He obeys, but that look in his pale eyes is so hollow, it almost makes me feel bad for saying anything at all. Almost. 

I try to press down my anger, but it’s spilling over, now, far beyond things so trivial as control. I clasp my hands together in a prayer that they will finally listen to me and not move again. 

“Fact that you feel anything at all makes you feel like shit, huh?”

His expression has glazed over, cool and smooth.

Half-expecting him to walk out and rightfully abandon me here, I stare hard at him, like I might chip into that exterior. If I managed it, I’d slip it in my pockets as proof. Silently, I beg him to prove me right. 

“Sorry,” I snap. No, I’m not. I hope it cuts at him. “You do what you want, I don’t fuckin’ care. But, please, do not patronise me like that again, Rust.” 

God offers no help with the silent plea I send Him. He does not care, so I shouldn’t care, and that’s the end of things. I’ve survived worse natural disasters than him. He’s just a man, and this is just what happens with them. Still, the disappointment floods like poison under my skin. I’m a stupid girl, really. 

“I understand if you regret things, but you don’t have to say it out loud. It’s mean. But, fuck, I dunno, maybe you mean to be.” 

I take a moment to untangle the knot in my throat. He watches it all, quiet again, his eyeline sitting heavy over where the skin shifts and stretches over my neck. 

I adjust the collar of my shirt, fiddle with the gold necklace that sits hot over the contour of bone. Rust stares as I wedge the small pendant tightly in the vice of my thumb and forefinger. 

“Feels like you don’t even fuckin’ like me half the time. All the time.”

Christ, I should’ve left with Johansson. 

My heart is racing like a wild mustang – it’s a surprise, really, that that old hunting dog lying over by the bar hasn’t noticed, singled me out as something to chase, to kill. My belly’s exposed, soft and ripe and asking for it. I forget, sometimes, that there are things out there that kill things that kill, too. 

He doesn’t plan on giving me a break; I wouldn’t deserve it, anyway. “Wha's it matter to you if I like you or not?”

My cheeks burn furiously. 

I stare at that bone-bird tattoo that fledges from the nest of his sleeve. With the way my head’s spinning, it almost looks like its skeleton wings are actually moving, unfurling and ready for pilgrimage. 

“It don’t.” It’s a disgrace to myself to answer that god-awful question, but what’s more pathetic is the way I shrink into myself when Rust’s attention crowds in over my face. “I jus’ thought you knew me almost as well as I did.” 

“And currently?” he asks.

The moment hangs. 

“Just answer. I already know – just wanna see if you’ll lie again.” 

I close my eyes a second—mistake—and breathe, breathe in and then breathe out, shaky but slow. It’s no use. 

“Same.”

He nods. “Not better?”

I shake my head. “No, never better.”

Furrowing his brow, Rust tilts his head down slightly, a soft curl falling gentle over his tense forehead. “But you wanted intimacy.”

So it is intimacy to him? 

Maybe this should count as a win for me, but it certainly don’t feel like it. This isn’t the slow slip and slide of last summer’s end – though the heat had swallowed whole everything from here to the other side of the Mississippi, there was something so clipped about the words that left me, left him. I’m sure I was more drunk then than now, but, even so, my mind had been so level, like I’d done it all in my sleep. Now, here, I have done it in my sleep. I’ve revisited him a hundred times in my daydreams, but all that practice has left me for dead. I would’ve killed for an opportunity like this a month ago – it’s like he’s taunting me. It should be easy. 

Rust is smart enough to make me wonder if he wants me to feel this way. 

Intimacy is planned and eventual, whether that’s due to his power or some cosmic fate. Everyone knows the decision they’re going to make, somewhere in their brains, deep inside. People only ask for advice to condone their decisions, to spread out the responsibility, which, at the end of the day, still remains solely with them. Shit, he’s rubbing off on me: I sound like a fuckin’ asshole. 

No, all this thinking won’t save him from the sensation of human feeling, emotions. No amount of planning prepares you for skin-to-skin touch. No time spent evaluating can undo it either, and I’ve tried so hard. His way doesn’t work. 

“Everyone wants intimacy,” I end up rambling, voice thin and dry and brittle. “Even folks that don’t want intimacy want intimacy. ’s not love or sex, really, I don’t think, though those are good, too. It’s not a way to find yourself. It’s jus’ trust. Or companionship—”

“And that’s what you want?”

Carefully, I rake my eyes over his face. Does he ever flush from the heat? 

Hopeless and too muddled to bother with concealing it, I try to assess whether he’s displeased with me. I try to memorise this moment, so I’ll be able to turn it over in my head later, just another one of my crime scene photographs. 

“Dunno yet,” I confess quietly. “I’ve had partners. And partners. When I was younger, I thought I’d have this life packed chock full of amazing relationships, and these—connections.”

The soft, disappointed eyes of my husband come to mind, which haunt all my relationships. I’m so hungry for another body, for connection. Why does it seem so easy for other people? 

“Truth is, it don’t happen all that much. To me, at least. You?”

Surly and bone-tired, Rust shakes his head. “Didn’t have much hope for it growin’ up,” he admits. 

“But you wanted it,” I press, clumsy and clinging to the sag of his voice. Of course, he’ll pick up on the trace of hopeful, aimless, false victory that undercuts my words; he’s the only one who ever could. 

For a moment, though, I second-guess myself. 

It’s pathetic, really: I’d give almost anything to walk as him for a day, though, even then, I’m not sure I’d understand him any better.

Sometimes, my imagination runs away from me: in my dreams, I do. I wake under the impression that we’re one and the same, that, just maybe, he, similarly, is dreaming as me. It’s a pulsing obsession, difficult to conceal. Whenever a moment becomes still, I think about it: at night, he is transported; in his dreams, he touches with my hands, sighs with my voice, tastes with my mouth. Then, at least, that would explain these funny sensations I get in the morning: so weathered and worn, a strange ache in my muscles, like I’ve been sleepwalking.

How else could he know me so well? 

Or maybe I’ve really fucking lost it. Somewhere along the way – maybe after seeing that half-eaten body swaddled in thin cotton in its freezer cradle – I think something else took the wheel. Why that thing is racing towards him, I have no idea. It’s laughable, really.

Rust blinks calmly down at his hands. “Reckon the deniers are dumb?” he murmurs. 

Squeezing the bridge of my nose, I do my best to press back against the foul memory of dismembered limbs. Whoever had eaten the man—who was now beyond recognition—did they feel satisfied? Comforted with how forever close he was to them now? When I was small, I used to think sex was crawling into another person's body, like a cave, and letting all of their insides warm you, love you, wrap you tight. 

I swallow thickly. 

“Your words, not mine,” I reply through a tight smile. “Reckon it’s easy to find a distraction.”

"Have you given up?" he asks. “Finding a distraction?”

I don’t entertain him with a proper answer to that – I merely shrug and scratch at my scalp, tucking loose strands of sweaty hair back into the loops of my braid. Rust must be frustrated with me. To want a companion, to want the good life. Rivalling Marty in my delusion. 

He slides his hands into his lap, continuing: “Distraction is the way to peace?”

I shrug again – I think it’s starting to piss him off. “For a time, I guess.” 

“So, ‘s that how you’re takin’ quittin’? Think about other stuff whenever you want a smoke? Occupy yourself?”

Once I realise my leg is going dead, fuzzy from sitting still so long in this dark booth, I flex my thigh, flex my hands under the table, wide-open and then tight-shut, processing the blank slate of his gaunt face. I press my fingers into the sticky vinyl, delight in the interrupted drag of them up, up, up as they curl to fists, my shoulders up to my ears. 

When he says things like that, it makes it so hard to dislike him. I almost wish he’d ignore me, like he did the first couple weeks before it became clear to the both of us that it couldn’t be undone: his back constantly to me, sending messages only through Marty, refusing to look in my direction, like I might tempt him again into being a version of him he hated. At least, before, his coldness hadn’t been directed at me specifically. Then, it was a retaliation, a wall meant to keep me out. Where were his books on philosophy then?—to tell him that attachment leads to desire leads to suffering? That kind of suffering would be better than this kind. 

This is worse. This is so much worse. I’d rather not have something at all than have it toy with me like this. 

It takes a considerable amount of co-ordination to fabricate the apathy in my posture, my eyes, my expression, to compensate for the unease that pulses like a new artery in my throat – though, at the silvery glint that flickers in his eyes, I know it’s all for nothing. He’s already seen the hurt that, really, I can’t pin on anyone but myself. He’s raking his eyes slowly over my face. It’s fucking mean. Do me the favour of a mercy-killing, God.

I never even told him I was trying to quit.

“What,” I begin, concentrating very hard on keeping myself from stammering and from slurring, from crying and from grasping at his hand, “like that association thing?” 

I’ve heard of it, obviously. I know every trick at this point: old wives’ tales to the latest research papers at the state university library. It’s psychological: whenever you want something, instead, think of awful, gross, repulsive things, and make yourself hate it. I’ve tried it before, but it doesn’t always work. How can you convince yourself that one thing is disgusting when it’s undeniable how good it really was?

Rust nods.

“I mean, I tried it,” I tell him lowly. 

Overstatement: I tried it for approximately three days and two nights before I caved, unlocking the drawer in my study with shaky, desperate hands, hungry.

“But I’m always thinkin’ about it.”

Shit. He seems to have regained a nerve: Rust stares calmly ahead at me—not through me or just past me; at me. This is what I wanted, isn’t it?

He leans his weight over his forearms upon the table, on offence. Is this how he works his suspects? Well, shit, I’ve studied his methods from the privacy of the other side of the false mirror enough times to be able to answer that, actually: this is how he works his suspects. Initially, at least, to gauge their personality, their wants, their fears, what they need him to be. 

Thing is, I can’t pin down his intention with me. Is it just the satisfaction of the kill? Or maybe revenge for what I did to him last August. I broke down his walls: an unforgivable sin. I condemned him to the effort of building them back up, of shoving me out—if I ever managed to intrude in the first place. Maybe I deserve this. 

With his sleeves folded back, the dark lines of Rust’s tattoo jut out, growing along his tawny, leather-tan skin like lichen. I try not to stare.

His eyes complete a pre-emptive scan of my face, and, really, I know I should not let him see any change there in my expression, though my mouth twitches to frown. I try to gather my forces. I try to prepare myself for it, for that inevitable intrusion.

“‘f you’re so desperate for it, why’re you fightin’ back?” he asks, unblinking and cruel. 

My mouth twists, and I let it fall into the frown it wants. “‘Cause I wanted to feel better.”

It sounds dumb because it is dumb, even though it’s true. 

Low, he hums. He straightens, softens, and finally leans away. It’s like the vacuum around me leaves with him, and, there, now, it’s easier to breathe. 

He must note the way my chest rises and falls so stiffly, like there’s a weight resting over my heart. 

“Withdrawal’s a breeze, ain’t it?”

“You’re not fuckin’ funny,” I scoff, digging my nails punishingly into my palm. He smokes and drinks like he welcomes cancer, or hopes for it, so I don’t think we’re on a level playing field.

He quirks his head. “Well, do you?”

“Do I what, Rusty?” 

Amused, he rolls his jaw. Good – I hope I’ve provoked him. 

“Do you feel better?” 

I run my tongue over my teeth. “Sometimes,” I reply truthfully. “Not right now.”

He searches my face. 

“I can give you a ride home,” he offers. 

Fuck, and what will that be like? Ten times worse than this. I’ll come away the husk of a woman, worn down by his disapproval. My own fault for wanting anything from him in the first place, really. 

Teeth gritted together, I shake my head, ready to pull a muscle in my damn neck. “Didn’t mean anythin’ by it. Sorry.” 

No, I’m not. I ought to slap him, and then run away, back home, or back to my house, or to a brand new city. Or he could finally cuss me out, save me the wondering. Then, I could lick my wounds and they would finally stop reopening. 

I scratch at my scalp. 

Rust eyes my hand like he’d like to rip the bad habit away from my body. For a moment, I think he will—the tendons in his hand flex and writhe under the skin—but, no, he only brushes a thumb against the valley between his nose and cheek, and he holds his tongue for once. 

“Wasn’t offended,” he corrects firmly. “I’ll take you home.”  

Flashing with annoyance, my eyes dart up viciously to penalise him. “And what?” I hiss. 

He sits back, doesn’t answer the question.  

Jaw clenched, I wait to see if he’ll look away, but he doesn’t. 

My irritation soon fizzles through, condenses to a low, simmering understanding, steadily tended to by the intensity of his steadfast gaze. 

Oh. 

My eyes soften. 

Oh – I have him, don’t I?

He shows no signs of the tentativeness he had displayed last time—if Rust could ever be tentative. His eyes do not shift and scuttle around me; they meet mine, challenging my comfort. He does not tuck himself into a corner; he remains leaned over the table, just like that. How could I have known? 

I stare back, brow pinched in confusion. 

In the heat of last August, I’d peeled away from him knowing exactly how I’d convinced him he wanted me. Maybe I was evil for it – a good person wouldn’t use somebody’s faults against them, would they? And maybe that’s what it was: selfish. If he hates me, he’d be right to. 

Which is why I’m so puzzled that he doesn’t. Or rather, indifference was the baseline. Hell. And this? I don’t know. 

Swelling dangerously with the well-loved memory of his delirious mouthings over my skin, I grow rigid.

My temples throb and ache, the threat of tears still very real.

“Mind?” he asks – I watch, wide-eyed, as he pulls a pack of Camels from his pocket. 

Trembling slightly, I shake my head, though saliva is already pooling over the pit of my tongue, warm and soft, just like my desire. Luckily, he’s too preoccupied with his lighter to see it: how my body ripples at the scrape of his voice. 

The promise of nicotine dances like a phantom in the mouth, just from watching him place a cigarette between his lips. When he flicks open his Zippo, the sharp, shuddering candle of it taunts me, and I finally understand what they say about moths and flames.

I watch him take a long drag.

That all-consuming hunger lurches up in me again, and I swallow the warm spit that’s steadily been filling my mouth. 

Oh, Christ. This can’t be real. Desire shouldn’t be this bloody. Desire shouldn’t be the thing with teeth and claws, the ugly thing that tips into violence. Or obsession. With how often my thoughts return to us in the summer, I’ve wondered obsession as a possibility. The difference between myself and those who commit crimes of passion is control. Rust is dangerous for me. What is he thinking? What’s in his head? I ache to pry it open and explore, to swim close to him, for my skin to melt into his, to consume and be consumed. Not a moment’s peace, and that’s what I’m chasing, isn’t it? Peace and quiet?

I don’t have to say anything – he can read it all, mulling over the fine changes in my expression, the softening of my body, some pre-emptive instinct. Will he touch me tonight? 

With a cautious hand, ready to jolt back if met with teeth, I reach out to him and remove the cigarette from his pinched fingers—which he allows—then bringing it to my mouth, taking a drag myself, nice and slow, good and deep, a sigh, like home.

He watches me.  

“Don’t say anything.”  

And he doesn’t. He just watches, watches, watches as I take another drag. He shivers, and I feel it reverberate through my bones.

“What are you thinkin’ about?” I ask him softly, pressing down a quivering breath, smoking his cigarette. I’ve never mustered the courage to ask before.  

For once, though, I really don’t have to: I know exactly where his head is. Where else? He’s back in that room, infected by the drowse and drunken fever of August, with me, living it again. Where I’d coaxed him into the temptation, wicked as the snake in the garden. He should’ve pushed me to leave with Johansson and Marty – of course, I would’ve stayed. I’m a rotten thing, and my heart is a bloodhound. He’s the better of the two of us. I’ll take whatever of him I can get – anything. 

He meets my eyes directly, so hopeless, so raw. Is he asking? He shouldn’t be. 

But what will he have me do? I’m at his disposal, really.

“And?” I ask, throat dry. 

When he moves to speak, the words that leave him are low and slow: “You did something to me,” he manages. 

I scoff. 

“S’that a good or bad thing?” I ask.

Rust huffs like what I said was funny. More likely, though, it’s the way my eyes are so wide, the way my hand is pressed between my thighs, that amuses him. “Can’t decide.”

My mouth trembles as my eyes scrape over his neck, which I know, I remember, to be hot and alive, thick with it over the pulse. I was so high off of it: his warmth, his weight, his press. 

I indulge in one last drag, using the last scraps of my energy to conjure the pungent stench of rotting flesh in the cruel sunshine, the pick of eager flies and their cacophonous buzzing, the churn of vomit in the stomach. I look at Rust and try to do the same: the months of silence, his back decidedly turned to me, him accepting my case, and his arrogance and his apathy and his severity. He is a harrowing connection that I should rather not have made.

The technique doesn’t work. I don’t know why I thought, even for a minute, that this time would be different from the last. 

With him staring calmly at me, like I deserve it—the trap, the squirming sensation over my spine, the hopeless, unavoidable heat that claims my face—it’s just another arrow pointing to the same conclusion. Maybe we should just let August have its way with us again. Twin plagues.

Trembling ever so slightly, blood so warm, so thick, I flick ashes out into the tray between us. 

“I should put this out,” I mumble, though my hand yearns to return it to my mouth. 

“’s my cigarette,” Rust mutters.

“Sorry.” I offer my hand to him. “Want it back?”

I know what I must look like to him, pupils dark, the size of the moon, like a plate. Here, in the darkest part of the dark bar, I open myself to him, warm, molten, inviting. And God, this must be a dream—because I know what he wants, and I know that he’ll accept me. How we got here doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe he’s thought about it for some time, and only now, in a moment of stillness with him, have I even noticed. Too caught up in the fine details of a painting to think of the artist’s intention, which is always more important.

Silent, stare inexorable, he accepts the cigarette, only touching my fingers quick, like I’d burn him. Maybe I will. Serves him right: he was always going to haunt me either way. I ought to get mine while I still can.

The hunger laps at me.

I want to coax him open-wide. I want to peel away his demeanour and wrap myself close to him. Body heat is the best way to keep warm, isn’t it? I’m sure I read about that somewhere. It’s still fresh in my mind, like a cut. I can’t manage a day without playing it over at least once. I want it again: I want to breathe him in and let him sit in my chest and seep into every cell and let him be part of me that way, at least until the next breath.

He can see it in my eyes: the freneticism of my thoughts, racing like a storm, desires like bullets like rain.

“You ever think about what you want?” I try asking him, voice strained tight over my heart in my throat. 

“People only ever think about what they want,” he parries, batting away any trace of diffidence. He secures his cigarette between his lips, shifting. “Let’s leave.”

At his first movement, I slide out of the booth. 

Sometime during our conversation, the place emptied out. It must have been around when I finished Marty’s leftover beer that the weight of the locals’ beady stares—which had already faded to the back of my mind, in the same way that a dark alleyway can still make you uneasy though you know nothing would ever happen to you there—finally left me. There are no witnesses left to see me following after Rust like a dog, my body thrumming like the lone bug zapper out on the porch, which cracks! just as we exit. 

The broken clock reads three o’clock when we leave, but I know that, really, it’s only midnight.

Fortunately, the heat has cracked for once, like old, beat-up, splitting leather. Stepping out onto that night path, the breeze is warm and fragrant, dancing over my cheeks, playing gently with the loose threads of my hair. It’s a clear, blue, never-ending night – the dirt road which accompanies us is a long, winding, indigo river that spills unseen over the far, far horizon. The neighbouring fields—one a rolling stretch of grass; the other of wheat—are alive in the wind, flung one way on exhale, drawn the other upon inhale. 

Thank God for the noise of it: their rustling whispers, in a language we can’t understand; the soft whistle of a passing gust of air; the firm, crisp crunch of dry mud and dust under my boots. Thank God for the sway of things: the cradle of humidity; the press of my arm to Rust’s, which he permits only for a second, with his face angled away. Then, he slows, coming to walk just behind me, still parallel.

Flickering strands of long-grass brush my knuckles – I grab onto one, pull the seeds off it in an easy swipe, and scatter them as we go, one by one. 

Briefly, I glance over my shoulder. Sure enough, his eyes are fixed on me, on my every movement, like he’s making sure I’m actually real. The corner of my mouth twitches up into a smile. 

Rust’s cigarette flares between his lips. 

I scratch gently at my wrist, reminded of the flowing of my blood just beneath the skin, hot and thick.

You get nowhere in life just hoping things will fall into your lap like this—and, anyway, what good is getting something that you didn’t work for? Where’s the gratification? It’s artificial, feeble as plastic. Christ, it was even a struggle to get my head around Johansson and his propensity to dole out favours. I understood a write-up – won’t pretend I’m above ass-kissing – but tidying up the office kitchen and keeping quiet about it? I thought it was stupid: letting people reap the rewards of your own effort, and for what?

So, the buzz of earning Rust’s touch that first time?—shit, nothing compared. No drug, no high; nothing. I really thought I did something. Satisfied some secret ambition I didn’t know I held. To have him like that. To be able to replay that night, swallow it like a pill. To look at him and know what was underneath his clothes and his skin, and perhaps further inside, too. Shit, I took so much from him, but the mental gymnastics of the effort justified it, right? And, now, he’s going to give it all up again. Wants it, even.

Haven’t I played this out a thousand times in my head? I’ve seen the future—a number of futures—where I’m able to argue for his affection. Fight for your love – that’s what my daddy used to tell me whenever he was feeling sentimental after yelling.

I’ve had endless conversations with him in my head, edited accordingly as time passed, as he changed, as I changed, as the air between us changed. Possible flirtation seemed silly, futile, after a week. Sex appeal would go unnoticed by him – wasn’t like he looked, anyway. Not the type to chase tail. I found myself longing for him to please linger uncomfortably in doorways to rooms I was in, to leave things near me and come and collect them just after I was gone so that, maybe, he’d still feel the warmth of my presence and understand it was only ever warm that way for him. The idea of genuine confession always sprung up during the quiet nights alone together in the bullpen, but I was always able to talk myself out of it when he wouldn’t so much as glance at me after two, three hours.

It must be a million threads of conversation up in my head, which is why I guess it’s so hard to untangle the great knot and retrieve just one, because, now, there are no words that come to mind when it matters. Or maybe it doesn’t matter: I don’t think he needs convincing at all.

“What you so quiet for?” he asks faintly. 

When I look back, he’s stark against the brooding sky like some shadow-man. His outline hums like he’s pulling away into his own silhouette. 

I can’t seem to smile. “Nothin’.” 

He won’t push—at least, not on this—and I’m glad for it. 

Rust’s beat-up semi is all lonely sat in a dip up in the road, waiting for us. Same semi he’d driven me home in from work this one week I was getting my car fixed up, in which a series of slow, mutual interrogations would take place along the light-streaked highway. In the office, you were lucky to drag a full sentence out of Rust, but, alone, it wasn’t so hard to get him to talk at all.

Maybe I had just wanted to be better than him, to learn how he worked, how he was such a good interrogator, and bleed him dry. That was why I couldn’t look away: every choice in his demeanour could help me surpass him.

Even then, I learned to be careful with my looks. I had the feeling he’d morph into something else if I stared long enough, the way the shadow in the corner of your bedroom changes shape when you’re bone-tired. Sometimes, he would. And on the Thursday night of that week, when he had pulled over and thrown up, shaking, into the dark thrush, I hadn’t uttered a word as he climbed back into the driver’s seat. But, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, I’d stared at him with the filmy eyes of a hungry nocturnal animal.

Then, at least, the curiosity wasn’t a burden. Not like it became when I drove myself home come that morning after.

I could tell it was different the moment I shifted awake, feigning a sleep for just a couple more minutes.

Dressed again and putting on a pot of coffee, his back was to me. I had shuffled up, pulled on my clothes, and I knew the stupor of the night had faded. So, really, when I stepped past him and he closed the door behind me without a word, I shouldn’t have been upset. 

When I reach the pick-up first, I twist to look at him. 

Rust has slowed to finish his cigarette at a safe distance, eyeing me warily.

He crushes the stub into the dirt, then glancing out into the long night. 

“Straight home?” he asks. 

I shake my head, and the rigid line of him gives just a little. It’s so dangerous to be seduced by your own influence, but the realisation that I’ve had any at all is fuel enough to the plea in my wide eyes.

Rust advances haltingly. If I move, I’m sure he’ll flinch and bolt. So, I test the theory: better to weed out what’s already decayed.

I angle myself towards him, open like a door. He tosses his jacket into the bed of his pickup, stepping through.

The heat seeps back between us, slow and thick like a flood of molasses, and it becomes very clear, suddenly, that we never should’ve tried to barricade ourselves. Pretty sure Rust’s known this a while, anyways: he’s the one who leans in for me, kisses me slow.

This time, his hands are quick to curl around my body, where the tension in that tight cord all down his spine has snapped. Or just eased up on him—but that’s unlikely. And unimportant. With his firm touch petting up my spine, climbing each rung, it’s all unimportant.

A pulse of arousal strikes me like an electric current as Rust pulls the blouse out of my skirt, his face close to me.

His tongue pushes into my mouth again, and I hum over the husk of nicotine. It’s a haze in the brain, one I’ve missed. My skin tingles and my thoughts warp in this leer, like a nic rush, only I haven’t had one of those in years and years.

I can’t exactly call what I’m feeling satisfaction. There’s no win to this. My teeth sunk into him so sweet last time, and the thrill of getting him, of tripping him up with his own desire, was almost as good as the actual feeling of him inside me. But it’s different now: so obvious, it’s funny. Though my first instinct is to doubt and pry apart, maybe want is the most trustworthy thing a person can feel. It’s animal and instinctive, and it’s inevitable, so it’s always true. Ugly, sometimes, but always there. There’s no room to question his want, because I can taste it on his tongue, I can feel it pressing over my stomach, I can hear it in the way he hums at the sear of my skin. 

It must be a favour to me: the blatancy of it all. For however direct he may be, I’ve always felt that Rust has these plans within plans. Nothing is as it is on the surface: you have to dig to get to the good stuff. It’s disorienting, having it all laid out for me. And I’ll take anything he gives me.

I don’t want to leave any room for doubt in his mind either. 

So, I clutch at him hungrily, so drunk on his warmth, and thump my back against the door he opens for me to close it again.

I don’t ask, and I’m glad that he doesn’t make me, only presses my body flush against the cool surface of his side-door, until the only part of me free to move are the fingers that curl over his arms, as if they could sink through the fabric and then the flesh underneath. There’s only dogs and ghosts out at this hour, anyway; eyes in the long-grass. No-one but them and him to see my hips jerk against the precise hand under my skirt. 

He hadn’t looked at me this much before. Even when my eyes go glassy and I have to blink hard to try and regain my smarts, to not finish too quickly, I know he’s staring at me like a scientist.

When the next needy noise is drawn from me, I bury my face into his neck to save myself the embarrassment of being seen like this, even though it’s pointless. His fingers are dragging aside the damp fabric of my underwear anyway, sliding through my silky desire. When his knee shoves between my legs to keep apart, he changes the pressure of his hand, circles tightly over where shame does not apply. Restraint is a man-made practice that never prevails over biology. I should know this. Still, though, my face is hot as I whine into his shoulder. 

Rust doesn’t ask me to look at him, not yet, and I’m so grateful for it. I bite into the meat of him at the push of one finger, then keen all the way to my toes at the hook of two, rocking against his palm thoughtlessly as he fucks the both of them in deep.

The clink of his belt buckle barely processes through the smoke of sticky eyes and open mouths and the press of his body. But the absence of his hand from my hip, of it working between us?—that’s what ushers normal sensation back into me. I recover from the limp slump against him, but not quickly enough to understand or resist him guiding my hand to wrap around his swollen cock, coated with spit. 

He grunts as he tightens my grip around him, coaxes my hand how he wants it. In the back of my mind, though, of course I remember. Only, his fingers are so far inside that my head is spinning, teetering on the precipice of another thought I know I’ll lose, one that dissolves at the slight scrape of nail, one that would never matter as much as the soft then firm press of him against my cervix. My eyes water, and there licking at me is only a faint, abstract impression of embarrassment when Rust grips over my jaw, calloused heel of his palm heavy on my neck, and hauls me away from the hiding spaces of his body’s crevices.

“What, you fuckin’ shy now? You wanted it, so look,” he mumbles, digging his fingers into the soft parts of my face a little more, like there’s some hidden button beneath the surface that can make my droopy eyes fly back open. There must be because, somehow, it works. He angles my face by the scruff of my neck.

I can only stand to look between us for a few jumpy heartbeats before my eyes settle on the comfort of his even face, which he seems to accept readily, breath hitching. He does not blink. The intensity of his observations hounds me, lights me up like points on a star, even when my vision smears and melts at the dizzying curl of his fingers. Lucky for my weak knees he’s got his hand over the nape of my neck, his thighs pinning my own. I shake against him, some pathetic thing, and tremble when he keeps massaging there deep inside.

“Don’t go dumb on me, girl,” Rust scolds quietly when my hand loosens around him, his own having to leave the heat of my neck and come down to correct the pressure, the pull. My head lolls without the support of his hand. “Ain’t gon’ say nothin’?” 

Words spill uselessly into a pool before me, slipping through my fingers. My pulse slams in my throat, lower, too, against his touch, each beat meeting him as he works me over again. 

What I manage is a choked noise, all clogged up inside. I have little to do with it: just a body, a heartbeat and a compulsion to be near, nearer, nearest to him. Half a mind that’s lagging worse than the computers at work, that realises far too late that the body is curling into itself again, so tight, so wet, and fuck, fuck. 

He removes his fingers, that slow drag, and tells me to turn. When I don’t—completely without, dull and aching—Rust twists and shoves me against the window, which goes cloudy at the breathy moan pushed up from my slack stomach. 

Slow-like, a cold hand snakes under my shirt, smooths up my burning spine, all the way up, all the way down, hooking in the waistband of my skirt, knuckles burrowing into the soft dimples in my back. My whole body shivers as he slides his palm over the back of my neck—a comfort for which I’m desperate to become familiar—and squeezes gently. If I keep my eyes open, all I can see of him is that black silhouette in the window, a reflection. A homogenous mass, humming at the edges, devoid of the detail of things: can’t see the way he drags his thumb up along the line of my spine, traces where it meets the skull; nor the way he steps forward, teases the air out of my lungs, enjoys it, tugs my hips closer to him by the gusset of the underwear webbed between my thighs; nor the way the cool metal buckle presses red lines into flesh. 

The sight of Rust doesn’t matter so much as the understanding that it’s him behind me, that it’s his truck my cheek is being pressed into, that it’s his—fuck—that it’s him sliding through the heat of me, so close. The tip notches and makes it all the easier for my eyes to flutter shut. It helps with the vertigo that follows the rough push of him inside. 

My fingers grasp for the little ridges in the door. Best place for them ends up to be under my mouth, though, to keep my head on my shoulders, to muffle the noises I was sure only animals made. My knee jerks sharply against the truck at the first white-hot pulse of pleasure – I hiss, smearing the drool at the edge of my mouth with the back of my hand, so glad he isn’t in clear enough line of sight to chastise me with his tendency to notice and never forget. 

But he knows—he must fucking know by now—because the heavy hand clasped over my scruff curls around my face, and Rust forces two fingers into my parted mouth, presses over my soft tongue. 

He pulls himself out just to feel the total length of me taking him again, so painfully slow. Feel the initial resistance, the spongy give, the sweet slip, the drag, all of it. So full, I feel sick with it. Overindulgence. Knocks me weak, doesn’t mind it when I bite down on his fingers to take most of the weight out of my sob. What I take from him, he takes from me—we’re even that way—so Rust, already with his nose flirting with the crook of my sweaty neck, nips over my erratic pulse, pushes his tongue over where I’m sure he can see the skin throbbing with the violence of it. Vampire. He could draw blood and I wouldn’t mind: he knows I need bloodletting. 

So fucking dumb to think for a second it could be sated by just one time. I needed it again before it even ended – I knew it in the split second he touched me. The grief of closure was as adamant as a shadow. Stupid. He must think it, too, because, shit, the snap of his hips is mean. Punishment: you should’ve known. 

“We ought’a be in your bed. I should be fuckin’ you through your bed,” he complains gruffly, his mouth dragging over hinge of my jaw.

I moan around the fingers in my mouth, which hook together with his thumb to pinch the fleshy inside of my cheek, challenging my lost focus. No matter. There’s nothing we can do now. 

The seize of my body doesn’t take him by surprise at all, not that I expected it to, and the words that follow are easy, like he’s been thinkin’ of them as loud and clear as day as it would be to speak ‘em: “Shit, that feels good, sweet girl, huh? Tha’s it, just take it. That’s good.” And he lets the warmth gush out before stuffing it back in. “You’ll take one more.”

I stare at the endless field to the side of us, melted over the curve of his door, shivering despite the humidity that always finds you around here. I choke more on my own tongue than his fingers as Rust fucks me slow, like I deserve it.

“Need it s’bad, huh?” he drawls into the shell of my ear. “Why you gone all quiet on me, baby?—thought y’wanted it.” 

He drags his fingers out of my mouth, daring me to speak. He slides his hand between my stomach and the side-door, gliding down between the thighs, smearing my dripping arousal over the skin. 

My toes curl tight again as he pushes deeper than before, sits there like he knows my mind will do the rest of the work. The grate of his zipper as he shifts draws a mangled sound from the pit of me, not hidden by the brace of my trembling arm. 

He zeros in on my clit, all sticky, and circles tight. I shudder. 

“Give in,” he says to me in a voice so low and soft that it barely reaches me above the high frequency splitting through my skull. He rolls that bright pearl between his finger and thumb. “You feel it?” 

Mindless and eyes all milky, I still manage a nod, grateful for the mean pin of his knees against my shaking thighs. 

He hums. “So give in.” 

Fuck, this is absurd. The mind can just about string two and two together when Rust lends a forearm beside my head for me to rest on, to grip over: so he’s pictured this, wanted this, for how long? I knew the stagnancy was a front, swallowed something else, but—my mouth goes wet and slack over his forearm at the languid roll of his hips—but it wasn’t realistic to imagine it was this. Rust struck me as someone incapable of reconciling himself with his wants. Shame over acceptance because he thinks it’s atonement. Should’ve known better than to think Rust believed in redemption. 

The silhouette in the window is looking over the empty road, scanning for cars that won’t ever come—but his hand is warm under the tent of my shirt, easing over my waist, slow, as everything clamps up, trembling, again. Body and a heartbeat, he tugs my hips back to him, again and again, until he’s a hot, shuddering line all through me, face in my neck, crushing the fight out of my lungs. 

His nose presses over my cheek, and his breath is coarse there, too, panting, when he lifts his heavy head. My throat goes so loose and open, greedily drinking in the sweet-sticky scent of him. 

“C’mon, now,” he says to me once he’s pulled my underwear back up, dragging the cool, damp gusset against the mess of me for good measure. He pinches my hip, then over my thigh, like that might get me to quit shuddering. “Time to go.” 

When I don’t move, he smooths a hand gently over my hair. Tucks a loose chunk of it back into the mess of my braid before deciding it’s best if he lets it loose completely. 

Rust winds down the window as he holds open the door for me to clamber onto the bench.

“Y’can sleep ‘f you want,” he mumbles once he’s got me curled up on the seat, leaning through the frame. He tilts his head – the shadows have always hidden his eyes, but I like how the pinch in his brow has melted away at least.

If I had half a mind, I’d use it to shove his face out my goddamn way. Instead, I settle for the narrowing of my eyes and a decided huff. “Won’t.”

Lie. I fall asleep like anything, mellowed by the sweet rush of wind over marshland, the spirit of it weaving inside, and the weight of Rust’s hand tucked in the tight bend of my knee.

[readingwiththestars]

₊˚⊹♡ NOTHING LIKE THE MOVIES

["Trust me, Lib," I said, picturing her lips. "In a crowd of million ski masks, I'd still be able to find you."]

| ✮ 3 stars |

ᝰ.ᐟ ⊹ arc review thank you to netgalley + simon and schuster for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review

THOUGHTS ° ᡣ𐭩 . ° . [minor spoilers]

ok. i put this review off for a couple days cause i knew this was gonna be harder to write because i love lynn painter books, really. buuttt i was horribly disappointed with this one. i'm the biggest wesliz fan but... like yeah i cant even form coherent thoughts about it. like this was unnecessary there was no point in shattering their relationship to write this.

like it was good to see wes's pov and everything but it felt so... idk yeah. (see im still struggling so bad to find words.)

one thing i would formally like to invite lynn to STOP doing though is shoving every taylor/ pop culture reference on the planet into the book. like holy shit woman. i few is okay BUT NOT THAT MANY COME ON!!!! they were in the middle of a fucking argument and wes is quoting illicit affairs or some bullshit. usually i love finding little references on page but this felt like too much.

i feel like she's whipped out her computer and gone straight to some dog fanpage or just plainly scrolled through edits seeing people saying "this song is so wesliz coded" and shoved those songs into the book. there is an on page reference to in between reference saying its their montage song.

also um this shit: ”little liz can’t come to the phone right now. why? oh. because she’s dead.” and somehow when jack antonoff was randomly brought up??? like some people are good at weaving taylor swift lyrics into books. lynn you are not.

also lynn take this a plea to never use the word "growl" or "growled" in a sentence ever again when describing your male characters. and to never write this sentence “she’s one of the guys you know? she’s just… different,” EVER AGAIN. PLEASE.

WHAT I DID LIKE THO WAS THE TINY TINY CRUMBS OF BAILEYCHARLIE AND NICKEMELIE (even tho nick was only mentioned and i dont think emelie was even there but eh)

CHARACTERS ° ᡣ𐭩 . ° .

liz - ok so weirdly enough she was the most tolerable and still intolerable at the same time. like she was so different from the liz in bttm the sunshiney, wearing dresses of all different colours and her love of romcoms. she was described as anti-love and was practically a full on different character seriously. if you liked the first book maybe dont have high expectations for nltm. like i do understand she had her heart broken and so obviously that makes sense for some of the change but it had been two years and as liz likes to say SO FUCKING MUCH "she's moved on, she's moved past it, its in the past" well for someone who's moved on you sure like to avoid the past a lot. also idk who tf she was trying to fool with that whole "i don't like wes, im over him." shit like gurl- you were literally kissing 2.5 seconds ago whats with the switching sides. and there was SO much about her leaving "little liz" behind. like what was so wrong with liking flowers and romcoms? and being a hopeless romantic and wearing bright colours?

wes - okay so it was quiet heartbreaking to hear abt wes's side of this book (except for the whole pursuing liz part) and i did feel sorry for him. but like what happened to the sweet, caring wes in the first book. and tell me why i had to read THIS sentence “climb on me like a good girl,” LIKE MY EYES LYNN WTF????? i did not sign up for this wes, like no stop telling me how obsessed you are with liz's lips or how she's a mythological sex goddess- boy sit ur ass down. and don't even get me started on the beginning of the book. WHAT WAS THAT SHIT? why was wes acting like a 7yr old excited for school and talking (so much) abt his love for scootering? SCOOTERING. LYNN PAINTER WHAT THE EVER LOVING HELL? SCOOTERING. DO YOU HAVE SOME OBSESSION WITH THEM OR SOMETHING? WHY DID THOSE DUMB THINGS KEEP SHOWING UP?? like tell me why i needed to read this shit: "i fucking loved the scooters ..... wes + scooters = HEA" ..... lynn.

QUOTES ° ᡣ𐭩 . ° .

im not going to bother to find any of these, see: im too lazy

all in all i still liked some points when both of them were acting normal. which is why its a 3. but i feel like this is leaning towards a hate review but yeah idk i cant actually pin point parts that i remember liking- also the ending??? what was that? it made no sense to me.

[bdudette]

I saw the hcs of hort falling for someone from the good school, but what about not just hcs of them being a princess from that school, but they are different from the others. They don’t like pastel colors like the rest and prefers darker colors (Let’s say they somehow found a black dress or took one colorful dress and just modified it. Plus don’t really care what the rest think), not afraid to stand up for others no matter what school they are from, kind, and empathetic (You could add Tedros too if you’d like)

THE SCHOOL FOR GOOD AND EVIL GUYS FALLING FOR A NEVER LIKE EVER !

• Characters Included: Hort and Tedros

• a|n: tbh, i didn’t know how to do this one super well. I was mostly thinking of like — typical Disney ‘ I’m not like the other girls ‘ kinda gal. don’t beat me up for saying that 😂. idk if this fits with the tittle but I remember when the ‘ever’ girls called Agatha a ‘never’ because of how she first looked and I kinda wanna work with that ? Uh — yeah

• ps. sorry for taking months to do this, y’all know that at this point I generate fics at the pace of a slug in a 5 yard run. rewatched the movie for y’all. i’ve also been trying to write for some different fandoms im into as well, the amount of drafts I have — cough … this was from 2022 btw 💀

• warnings: based on movie, obsessive Hort ( bro needs to chill a lil ), kinda wack Tedros, rusty writing, short.

✫ Hort

Obsessed Immediately

It’s not everyday when Hort gets to see such a … different kind of princess.

Typically, they are all like — sheep in fancy clothes and makeup, always following what the most popular shepherd’s words were as if it were like their last drop of water in a dry and hot desert.

So when you were thrown in and showed up in such dark ‘never’ colors in the entrance ceremony of those lame-o ‘ever’s he just — he stared way too hard at you from afar.

What were you trying to accomplish when you chose that outfit? What were you thinking when choosing such darkness of colors that almost had you thrown to the side of the ‘never’s by the humanized wolf guards the very first day?

He was honestly just confused as soon as he first saw you, you were so much different than what he was used to seeing or hearing. So when he continuously saw you wear such clothings for more than a day, he decided to well — stalk you to learn more about your intentions.

And he wasn’t gonna lie and say he didn’t start liking you as soon as you started to show up the next few days after the second one still wearing dark clothing — further pushing the continuations of his stalking towards you in where he’d just stare at you with his arm perched on the cafeteria table with his head leaned against his closed fist.

All while he sighed so dreamily towards you.

Wow that was long.

But it’s true, he so rarely got to see you though because of your different ‘statuses’— so when he did see you again, he always used that time to stare at You.

It wasn’t far after the first few days that You were able to catch on that an never was staring and soon felt kind of uncomfortable.

And it wasn’t because the guy was an never, no — it was just — that weird guy seemed to have a staring problem since the first time You came in.

Well — everyone here had a staring problem when it came to Your clothing style — the difference was that while the others stared in disgust, envy or pity … he stared with something akin to a Dreamy Look.

And that always seemed to put you on a fluttering edge of — confusion, and extreme flattery —

Not you’d outrightly say it, not to this pretty stranger of a never, after all — what’s the fun in making things easy.

After gathering all your courage one day, you had decided that it was time to finally speak to this staring guy.

A smile grazed your colored lips, eyes squinting under the light of the sun rays as you were lightly caressed by the sun itself all while you stared down at the sitting wolf who looked like he was seeing an ethereal being right in front of him.

So this is how it started, the little romantic advances of a wolf man and dark clothing wearing riding hood.

✫ Tedros

Confused Yet Enamored

He was honestly so — confused as to what you were wearing when he first saw you walking on the grounds of the ever school.

Wondering why a Never was walking in the same grounds of the Evers, but after seeing you on the second to third day, it was solidified that you were an Ever … dressed in darkened items.

At first, he had been confused — extremely confused and not understanding as to why an Ever would ever wear such darkened clothings to the point of being confused to a Never.

Why an Ever would ever be kind to a Never when they were the enemies, the villains, of their future life long stories — even standing up for them from time and time again.

He was unsure, but he could not deny the rapid palpations of his golden heart at the sight of your beautiful figure.

Be it from Far, Far Away or Close By.

As a popular guy, he can’t deny that he was somewhat — arrogant when it came to a romantic advance with pretty ladies, but you had been indifferent to the sight of him.

This was one of the many reasons why he has been so enamored with you, why his eyes could not leave you for more than a second.

And sure, it might sound like a typical ‘this is the first time a lady has ever rejected me’ sort of romance, but this was different for Tedros.

This was way too different.

Especially when he started speaking with You, his eyes not leaving You as he had a spark of interest by the time he first spoke to You.

Your empathy, Your kindness, Your wit, Your intelligence — everything about You was different than the ordinary one minded ladies he has met before … not to be insulting.

But You were just different to everyone, to himself, You were — Yourself.

And by the stars above, you were one of a kind to him, You were the beautiful moon that shined the path of salvation to him, the setting sky that held the most beautiful of darkening colors — You ARE his One.

He knew it, he felt it.

From the sole of his feet, to the edge of his fingers and to the top of his hairs — You lit his heart ablaze like the flames on Hades head.

You are the One who held the key within his own Heart and Soul.

Which is why, as soon as he knew, he gently grasped at your darkened nail tainted hands, looking directly at your eyes as his heart trembled within himself while throat dried out for a moment

You looked at him with a light fever within your own, wonder cascading with yourself at this beautiful man that held a tender look within his own eyes.

Was this to be your happily Ever After?

Despite who you were, despite how you dressed — Tedros would not have you any different than right now.

After all, You are the One, truly the One he fell deeply — into the depths of the underworld and above — in love with you.

[wrathofrats]

WRATH YOUR TAGS ON THE SWISSALPS??? HOW DARE YOUUUU IM IN SHAMBLES FUCKKKKK IM GONNA KMS IF U DONT WRITE IT PLEASEEEEEEE

LMAO HI DONT DO THAT I GOT U BESTIE

Original post

I got carried away and blacked out and it became 2k, idk what happened either.

Swiss is so inexperienced and very anxious and mountain is the sweetest actually. This is so awkward because these two are dorks so good luck.

Small small mentions of blood but it’s taken as a joke.

It wasn’t long after Swiss was summoned that he truly started to understand the bands dynamic. Day in and day out of watching his pack mates eye each other like a piece of meat, constant touching and flirting and there was many parts of Swiss that yearned to be included in it.

He didn’t feel ready. Half split between feeling left out as the two ghoulettes he came with have been bonded and together since summon, and the other ghouls really seemed to take to them after a couple days anyways. It wasn’t like no one took to him, but he’s never propositioned, desired, at least not in his line of sight. He feels like he would be intruding if he were to say anything. So he waits.

The other half worries partially about being inexperienced. Never used a human body, barely has even touched himself and god he’s probably embarrassing, no one wants to be with someone so inexperienced right?

He continues to think about it. Fuck he practically studies the other ghouls and sex and whatever the fuck they’re doing together because when the time comes he doesn’t want to embarrass himself. He’s genuinely afraid he will just get laughed out of the room if he’s not ready though he’s sure he’s probably acting insane.

Truly Swiss has no clue what to think.

He sits on his bed, tosses a toy around in his hands. Nothing insane, something normal sized since he’s a beginner but he worries about it anyways. Hypothetically he knows where it’s supposed to go but

How?

He has no clue.

“I’ve seen dew take two before” rain smirks “shouldve seen him around me and aether, didn’t know the tight whore could do it!”

Does Swiss need to be able to take two?

He rolls the dildo in his hands again and gulps.

Maybe that’s a lesson for another day.

“Rain talks a big game but you should see how whiny he gets when he’s got a drop of blood in front of his nose. Had him drinking from my wrist the other day, he’d do anything for it” aether laughs

He almost winced hearing about it the first time. Never really considered… that being a part of things but ….. he can accept it if he has to, if that’s what the others want.

Swiss is probably getting ahead of himself.

He takes a deep breath and lays down in his bed, just stares at the toy in question because he really isn’t sure what to do with it. There’s no question of what he has to do but he doesn’t understand.

There’s a point where Swiss just decides to rip the bandaid off, reaches between his hiked up legs and pushes it into the tight ring of muscle.

It hurts, burns, doesn’t go in more than a millimeter and he thinks he’s probably fucked it up somehow or maybe he’s just awful or whatever other reason but he decides to simply give up for the night. The worries left to eat at him for the next day.

The morning is really no better for his mind. Stands at the kitchen counter lost in thought before anyone else comes in, the boisterous laughter breaking him out of his anxiety induced trance.

“Feeling ok sunbeam?” Mountain gives him a worried look, standing next to him to lean on the marble.

“Yeah! Didn’t sleep well, I’m fine”

“Well if you ever want help sleeping just let me know” mountain winks at him.

Was that?

It couldn’t be. Right?

Did mountain just finally proposition to fuck him?

He can’t say no. He’s come too far and wanted it too bad so he has to go to his room tonight right?

Questions race around Swiss’ brain. He’s the bottom right? Mountain is like a foot taller than him so that has to be it? But what if he that’s not correct and mountain gets offended? What if the rest of the pack hears and hates him? What if-

He desperately needs his brain to shut the fuck up.

The hours pass like molasses. Swiss swears every time he checks his watch after he’s sure it’s been an hour it’s really only been 10 minutes.

What time is he even supposed to go up there?

God he wishes more than anything he could stop this anxiety.

Swiss decides around 10 pm is good. Late enough for a reasonable bedtime but early enough he knows mountain won’t actually be asleep.

Mountain is shirtless, wearing low grey sweatpants when he answers the door. Swiss thinks he may be drooling but attempts to collect himself enough to speak.

“Didn’t think you’d actually come up here, been waiting for you to come to one of us sunbeam” mountain chuckles and motions through the open door to invite him in.

“Been waiting for you myself, hard to ignore such a big guy like you” Swiss pushes himself against mountain. He’s heard in pornos that men like to be called big. That was right to say, right?

“Didn’t know you were so eager” mountain smiles and lightly shoves Swiss onto the bed, straddling his small waist against the sheets.

“Course I’m eager, been waiting for this for ages, want to drink the blood from your wrist” Swiss winks.

Mountain sits up, “what?” He looks at him confused.

Did Swiss do it wrong? Aether made it seem like that was normal….

“I- um …. Yeah, want you to fuck me stupid, make me your whore?” He loses all confidence to his voice, looks scared to even say it and the concerned expression on mountains faces turns to laughter. So he really did fuck it up huh.

“Swiss…… have you done this before?” Mountain gets out between laughs.

Swiss should probably get up, leave with his tail between his legs and god he’s going to be laughed of the band for this,

“No… I’m sorry I ruined it I’ll go-“

“No! You don’t have to do that. Didn’t expect you to know.” Mountain smiles at him “come here, can I teach you? You sure you want this?”

A large hand caresses Swiss’s waist. Mountain moves him against the pillows, studying his language for any sign of hesitation or regret.

“Please” Swiss mumbles

It’s cute to watch him suddenly so shy, came in like a speeding bullet but now can’t look mountain in the eye.

“How much do you know? Have you ever touched yourself sunbeam?” Oh the tone to mountains voice should not be turning Swiss on but god it’s deep and gravely and yeah Swiss definitely may be desperate.

“No.. I tried but I don’t … know how? I’m sorry-“

“Don’t apologize, you’re ok, you’re safe here”

Swiss does feel safe. Safe enough to let mountain undress him, gently lift his shirt over his head and unbutton his pants.

“I’m going to touch you, alright? Tell me immediately if you start to feel strange” mountain caresses his cheek, staring into his warm brown eyes before reaching down for his hardening cock. It doesn’t take much for it to stiffen up fully, just a couple of touches and Swiss is hard against his stomach, still watching for mountains next move.

“There we go, gonna move your knees up. Is it ok if I put my fingers in you? Need to stretch you out if you still want me to fuck you”

Swiss just nods in agreement, bites his lip in favor of speaking and watches as mountain pours some kind of thick liquid onto his fingers.

“Just lube, it’s going to help”

It feels weird at first, more like some kind of intrusion than any mind numbing pleasure he’s heard about it. Swiss moans anyways, doesn’t want to hurt mountains feelings if it’s really supposed to feel good.

“Swiss…. It’s ok it’s not supposed to feel good yet, you don’t have to fake it for me” mountain laughs at the multi ghouls rapidly reddening face

“Besides, you won’t have to fake it here soon”

It’s embarrassing that a drop of pre bubbles at his tip just from that sentence. Mountains smile doesn’t drop, only a little cocky from the situation.

After three fingers mountain starts to push deeper, rolling them up instead of scissoring and-

Oh.

Swiss nearly yelps, vision blurs and jumps off the bed when mountain hits something inside of him.

“There you go, did you like that?” He laughs. God he needs mountain to stop laughing at him, needs his cock to stop jumping at his laughter too.

“Think you’re ready? Still ok?”

“Please” Swiss whines

The first inch feels wrong again. Nothing like when he did it the other night but mountain is much bigger than his toy and it honestly feels like it may be too much. He holds his breath, the stretch knocking the air from his lungs anyways but he grips the sheets and waits for mountain to sink the rest of the way in.

It’s overly slow, mountain being overly caring as always but he can feel every inch carve its way into him and he just waist for mountain to be down so he can collect himself.

“You’re ok, promise I’ll make you feel so good alright? You’re doing so well”

Swiss mentally notes the way his words make him see stars. That’s a kink to deal with another day.

“Gonna move ok?”

The outward thrust feels like it takes years, before mountain quickly moves back in him, trying to loosen him up before really taking him and mountain deserves an award in patience for being able to control himself for so long with Swiss so hot and tight around him.

“Fuck mount- feels- mountain-” Swiss gasps once mountain gets to pace. Eyes closed tight and mouth agape. Soft moans and whimpers escaping his lips and Swiss throws his hand over his mouth to attempt to silence himself.

Mountain quickly grabs his wrists, holding them above his head, “wanna hear you, wanna hear what I’m doing to you, fuck- Swiss want you to be loud for me”

A hot pit forms in Swiss’s stomach, burns in his abdomen and has his eyes crossing with the feeling,

“Mountain- I think I’m getting close I- please i think I’m going to-“ Swiss doesn’t even get the sentence out before he’s spilling hot and thick all over his stomach.

“There you go, fuck Swiss, so good feel so fucking good wrapped around me”

Mountain cums not moments later, pulls out and jacks himself onto the sheets as to not be ungentleman like for Swiss’s first time.

“Feeling alright Swiss?”

“Holy fucking shit I get it now”

[valentine-writes]

for you!

「 tws + notes: no tws, fluff, not edited, kinda ooc my bad,, im learnin,,, 」

↳ ft. gwen stacy, hobie brown/spider-punk, miguel o'hara/spider-man 2099, miles morales, and pavitr prabhakar

「 gn! reader, can be platonic or romantic <3 」

author's note: obvi strictly platonic for miles, pav, + gwen but like. anyways!! just practicing writing for them becuz otherwise they will be So OOC for everyone's reqz and i literally would die. highkey struggled a bit but i'm tryin y'all!!! ("trying" but this is unedited ASF) ...eveyone look away from my obvious bias for gwen i heart her. i wanna,, also write for more characters eventually,, sooo,, hc reqs,,, hehehe :3 no full ficz,,, yet-

GWEN STACY headcanons:

▸ she doesn't do friends. not really anymore. oh but like. aside from miles, ur also an exception.

your friendship just kinda. happened?? it was a slow process but eventually y'all got close

▸ you supported her in her band endeavours! u know how knives chau rocks the homemade sex bob-omb merch in scott pilgrim vs the world (sorry 4 being a scott pilgrim fan and referencing it. im battling DEMONS.) THATZ U. biggest supporter for realz!! and she appreciates it so so much :,(

▸ she tries to hold u at arms length initially but ends up missing u too much when ur not around :( you've gotten really close to her over time– something neither of you had expected. but having a friend is refreshing for her. she's secretly always just a little anxious about losing you.

one time, in the middle of your developing friendship, she just kinda... dipped. left you on seen, didn't return your calls– you hadn't seen her in a while. but she came back, apologized profusely (through a lot of stumbled sentences and awkward rambles), and then swore never to do it again. you were... conflicted. so you asked her if anything was wrong and she mustered the courage to be vulnerable with you.

you are probably one of the first people in a long time that she'd actually been able to open up to.

▸ sleepovers where u jus stay up and watch slasher films. idk man i just feel this one in my heart. even if ur not particularly fond of horror, gwen is cool abt it if u need to cover ur eyes or hide under a blanket. y'all are practically screaming at the screen whenever the protagonist makes a dumb choice, acting like the characters can actually hear u

"if you go into that FUCKING BASEMENT I SWEAR–"

"nah– she's doing it. watch. WATCH."

"I CANT"

HOBIE BROWN headcanons:

▸ u are NOT calling this guy hobart. the first time u ever called him that Everyone Else was thrown off. like. no. we gonna stick w/ hobie for this one.

you, however, had the funny little idea of shortening his nickname even further. now sometimes– just on occasion– it's bee.

naturally, he's too cool to care abt what he's called, so he doesn't seem to have too many feelings about your overly cutesy nickname for him.

▸ you know any instruments? great. jam sessions with him. you don't? he'll teach you to play guitar. few ppl are given permission to touch His Guitar... but he can afford to make exceptions.

as he's teaching you, his chest collides against ur back a couple times, his hands guiding yours. he'll gently guide your fingers on the fretboard and yeah it's like– maybe not the most efficient way to learn. but whatever. he's pretty good with helping you figure it out.

▸ if you express wanting a piercing, tattoo or wanting to change up your hair (dying it, cutting it, whatever–) he's immediately gonna be like. "yea? ok. bathroom. right now." he'll help you out. king of diy truly.

and hey, the piercings never get infected, the stick and pokes turn out fine, the haircuts never look that bad, and the hair dye doesn't turn out awful so like. win???

supports you in your impulsive choices– piercings can close, diy tattoos fade, hair can grow– but the joy of self expression iz 4eva!!!!

▸ he lets you steal clothes from him. totally will point it out, but won't be all that bothered by it. HE'S GONNA BE TAKING FROM UR CLOSET TOO you practically share a wardrobe at this point. the others slowly become unable to differentiate which clothes you and hobie own individually. even if your wardrobes are completely different– trust he will find a way to keep a small piece of you with him

MIGUEL O'HARA headcanons:

▸ this man is emotionally distant asf. how did you achieve this relationship with him. answer: no clue!!! (｡･･｡) now that ur tight w/ him i am begging you. for the sake of the multiverse. get this man a therapy consultation RIGHT NEOWWW..... they literally have therapy services available in the spider society hq. if you dont HAUL HIS ASS OVER THERE–

▸ it's really no secret miguel has a soft spot for you. though he is very adamant about the fact that he doesn't– most people know that he's a little less grumpy with you around.

you seem to be one of the only people who can actually make him smile. which is. crazy. the first time he ever laughed at a joke you made you just kinda froze and stared at him, wondering if you had just vividly hallucinated miguel being happy. it was a light chuckle, where he kinda,, put his hand over his mouth and looked away. but it was SHOCKINGGG

▸ if you managed to get along with miguel, you're probably also besties with lyla. miguel however does not enjoy this. mainly because you two gang up on him. a lot. aka whenever ur arguing about anything w/ miguel, lyla is more likely to take your side. for funzies!!! she calls you her favourite– and it's like. man. are you getting along with miguel just for his little hologram assistant? i would but im gon shut my mouth on this one

it's funny how easily u two get along. she has officially attached all his bank info to ur online shopping accs and gaming shit. go wild. he'll never know (he finds out.. eventually.)

▸ it's actually really weird how you affect him. and everyone's noticing. he's constantly overworking himself to preserve the safety of the multiverse and when he's not, he's reminiscing on the past- but you give him something that he hasn't had in a while- an actual break. you pull him away from his responsibilities, from the screens he gazes into for so long, and for once he can relax. even if it's just for a minute

MILES MORALES headcanons:

▸ i saw hcs of a friendship w/ miles like gumball and darwin and i literally cannot get it out of my head. y'all r tight like that!!!! itz canon now. considering miles doesn't have a lotta friends (in his universe, at least) he's glad to have you!!! you're probably one of the people he hangs around the most. if you're somewhere, miles is probably somewhere around you too. and if he is not? he's probably just late. spiderman-ing around nyc probably

▸ his parents have really grown to like you too!!! let's assume u dont pull a gwen and address them by their first names. (i love her so much no shade at all but PLEADYUWEGFEHF that was So White of her) miles always has you over to hang out– which usually means you're invited to have dinner with them. his mom especially is always makin sure ur feeling at home and u got enough on ur plate (she is so sweet i adore her)

miles is constantly hearing: "when are they coming over again? you haven't had them over in a while-" rio hearts u. (and i heart rio.)

▸ STREET ART WITH MILES STREET ART WITH MILES– he def taught u what he learned from his uncle aaron. eventually u found a place you two can spray paint 2gether and u go w/ him whenever u need to destress a bit ^_^ it doesn't matter what ur skill level is in art, he's happy to teach you! sometimes, for practice, he'll even draw you!!! and though he hasn't shown you yet,,, he's been comfortable enough w/ you to leave his sketchbook open when you're around

▸ ALSO!! your hangouts probably have a killer soundtrack. u share a collaborative playlist w/ miles and swap recommendations every so often– so whenever ur both 2gether and jus chilling you've got good music 2 blast which is a combo of both ur tastes!!! he probably loves ur music, even if itz something he doesn't typically listen to. it's jus so you.

▸U ARE HIS CANVAS NOW. if u let him, he'll doodle in pen on your arm. he's always so focused, his eyes fixed on your skin as he doodles all over your forearm and hand. his grip is gentle as he turns your arm, tilting it every so often to make sure it looks right. there is no awkward silence, no pressure to make conversation- the quiet shared is comforting.

eventually he runs out of space and blinks up at you,, almost forgetting who he was drawing on. he'll apologize for getting so carried- but his drawings look amazing.

...and then he realized it was permanent marker and immediately doubled his apologizes.

PAVITR PRABHAKAR headcanons:

▸ im going to put this here and i dont know why specifically this came to mind. but never play just dance with him. you will LOSE. one of thse people who don't have to try to win. but he WILL put his 100% in it and eat you UPPPP.

sorry u can't outdo him </3

like bro those moves AREN'T EVEN PART OF THIS DANCE HOW ARE YOU STILL WINNING???

▸ gym bro but not Insane Gym Bro just.... gym bro. will try to get you to workout with him,, but like. cool if you don't wanna! is the most supportive gym buddy to have though. will always encourage you throughout the entire thing and not even just to get you to push through a set- this boy genuinely jus believes in you so much.

▸ he's constantly talking to you about gayatri. he loves his gf sm. if ur one of those people who Don't Like hearing abt other ppls relationships he'll make an attempt to tone it down

but trust he NEVER. EVER. makes you third wheel them. gayatri also will make sure of this- so now... more than often... if you're tryin' to hang with the both of them- THEY BOTH TRY TO PLAY MATCHMAKER FOR YOU.

LIKE. you can't just be LONELY. they're gonna make sure of it. pav and gaytri number one wingmen,..,, women,,, besties

▸ probably texts u like crazy. the type of guy to send u things throughout the day like "this is so you :]" he loves his bestie (YOU!!!)

sometimes it's like,, a particularly interestingly shaped cloud. maybe a cool bug that landed nearby him. a flower growing out of the pavement cracks.

and then sometimes it's like. this.

"this is you."

[ilynpilled]

Hey! So I'm from the Jaime/Lannister side of the fandom but wanted to ask your opinion on where you think GRRM is going with Dany. I don't mean spell out her endgame or anything, but what messages do you think he is trying to impart through her character? I see so much Dark!Dany! theory shaped by the show that has just never really resonated with how I read her in the books. I see her more as a figure who will try to be Queen of Westeros, but will ultimately end up abdicating or even sacrificing herself during the LN because finding "home" is more important to her than ruling... but that is not based on much other than gut feeling. What do you think?

yeah idrgaf about the show tbh. i think it fundamentally misunderstood key themes that the books were exploring. corrupted/mad dany feels so deeply cynical to me. people have been reiterating this: she is a subversive messiah figure & she is given a narrative that is so often reserved for the “male hero”. the gender commentary in that would fall flat on its face to me if she becomes mad fascist female ruler like bffr. yeah, she will get darker come winds, like everyone else she will have to make choices and will face moral dilemmas because she is resolved to continue combatting the institution of slavery. she knows she will not be able to do it without dirtying her hands in some way. i think grrm is gonna explore the concept of necessary force and the question of when it is more moral to take a stand and draw blood: is it justified to cut off and burn something at the root, especially if the alternative is allowing the cancer to exist and continue to spread? the institution of slavery is a wound that cannot just be covered up with a bandaid. like this is a very important aspect of abolition. the only way i can see the idea of “madness” be relevant is in a more subversive john brown paralleling way with how people thought that man was insane bc he wanted to end slavery lmfao. if terrible people think you are mad for attempting to make radical changes that harm them that is a good sign. also would hate her becoming an aerys parallel like in the show like that is cringe bio essentialism territory, again, antithetical to the themes prevalent in these books. d&d’s #subversive #dark #unexpected ending was unironically the equivalent of:

do not want her ‘idealism’ to be completely robbed from her at any point either really. im not opposed to tragedy but i dont think id vibe with it being too cynical in this instance. this series is about earned romanticism. its heroes are the dreamers yada yada. it is about a dream of spring. i always thought she represented hope in some way. she is gonna be the flame during TLN, literally and metaphorically imo. i do think there are thematic and more abstract aspects to lightbringer, like yeah humanity uniting over an ideal for a better future & it can be about hope or whatever, which is why multiple characters have some kind of flaming sword foreshadowing, but a main one is gonna be dany and her dragons. like on top of all the pretty overt foreshadowing, like let us think about the logistics here, what is gonna do more damage to the others?? three magic nukes or some convenient dues ex machina magical flaming toothpick we forge out of murdering a woman? i also do not want to instantly write her off as a doomed martyr either though. i see the appeal in the tragedy of the kind girl who wanted a home dying without ever getting to live in the one she created but still leaving it for millions upon millions of people present and future… but also idk i am just not crazy about martyrdom as a trope unless it is executed very well. i like when characters survive for a cause rather than die for it. dany always kept persevering, not just for herself, but others: her children and her people, so i like when altruism is framed in that way. also i might be a little bitter if she is the only one to die from the new generation or whatever like in the show

[lyubochka]

i treat ask games like surveys this is make me admit stuff by lost-head-adventure or smth idk its deactiviated

Would you have sex with the last person you text messaged?

not including messages i consider too private to share on tumblr. yes

You talked to an ex today, correct?

nope.

Have you taken someones virginity?

no i dont think so. all of my partners have been more experienced than me

Is trust a big issue for you?

yes ): im working on it

Did you hang out with the person you like recently?

i like lots of people but as far as "crushes", no not recently. i should though

What are you excited for?

my partner system to get home from work. our next grocery run. autumn. my birthday next month

What happened tonight?

i posted about that today but, other than all that, i ate some pizza... honestly i should write or record or something tonight

Do you think it’s disgusting when girls get really wasted?

no? wasted chicks are super funny

Is confidence cute?

confidence is hot yeah

What is the last beverage you had?

a monster. i should get water or something

How many people of the opposite sex do you fully trust?

none but i dont really talk to a lot of people. only the women in my family and i cant trust them. its not about being the opposite sex tho

Do you own a pair of skinny jeans?

yes

What are you gonna do Saturday night?

its sunday rn but yesterday i cried so hard i gave myself a headache and listened to a new album

What are you going to spend money on next?

probably a new microphone or sushi

Are you going out with the last person you kissed?

yes

Do you think you’ll change in the next 3 months?

yes? of course

Who do you feel most comfortable talking to about anything?

my partner system, but specifically mar, rich, robin, and trent

The last time you felt broken?

today at like 7pm

Have you had sex today?

yeah lol <3

Are you starting to realize anything?

being 23 aint shit. i dont know fuckin anything.

Are you in a good mood?

its alright. could be better

Would you ever want to swim with sharks?

yeah theyre chill

Are your eyes the same color as your dad’s?

no thank gawd. otherwise id be the type of douchebag to go around calling my shit hazel.

What do you want right this second?

a haircut... jack... a punch to the jaw. (not sft text beyond this point to the end of the answer) to be dressed up in vinyl lingerie to match someone elses military gear and ride his dick while gagging on his fingers

What would you say if the person you love/like kissed another girl/boy?

nothing. id end up in jail

Is your current hair color your natural hair color?

nah i recently dyed my roots again. its black but im a natural blonde

Would you be able to date someone who doesn’t make you laugh?

usually people who arent intentionally witty are unintentionally hilarious so thats hard to picture. but if our humor just isnt compatible i mean. maybe. probably not tho that speaks to a lot of other shit

What was the last thing that made you laugh?

@fuckin-pistol-whipped's replies

Do you really, truly miss someone right now?

yeah. sunset eyes, if this somehow gets back to you, im sorry i didnt give you a better warning. ill be back sooner than you know. it wont be months this time. i want to figure something out but i dont want to keep giving you half promises. soon, i dont know when. i love you. it means something, i swear.

Does everyone deserve a second chance?

yeah id say so

Honestly, do you hate the last boy you were talking to?

sometimes <3

Does the person you have feelings for right now, know you do?

oh yeah for sure. i think we're in a situationship. maybe we're dating? idk i cant rember. god i need to see him again soon. i should watch some videos or smth

Are you one of those people who never drinks soda?

nah but i usually drink diet soda. if im buying it out at like a gas station or smth ill go full sugar cuz its just a one time thing but. i think i drink two diet cokes a day. i dont always finish em

Listening to?

+ shuffle queue

Do you ever write in pencil anymore?

yeah but i prefer pen tbh. i keep like two hand notebooks a pencil and a pen on me at all times

Do you know where the last person you kissed is?

probably at his house with his cats. or with his band

Do you believe in love at first sight?

i believe in instant chemistry but love is kinda something u collaborate on. its like a living thing. ive recently figured out that two people can be in love and still wanna maim each other a little bit from time to time

Who did you last call?

@fadenkreuze but thats like a given. it was @antichristxsuperstar in front

Who was the last person you danced with?

my cat. it counts, in my book

Why did you kiss the last person you kissed?

we were having sex and i guess my mouth just looked that good hanging open and drooling

When was the last time you ate a cupcake?

i dont think its been a year but. it was probably springtime i wanna say-- no, late winter. valentines day cupcakes. mini ones.

Did you hug/kiss one of your parents today?

nah im not a hugger. he knows i like him ok tho

Ever embarrass yourself in front of a crush?

i dont believe in embarassment. but yea sometimes i make a fool of myself. usually it makes em giggle and then its fine <3

Do you tan in the nude?

i do a lot of things in the nude but i dont tan. im goth so

If you could, would you take back your last kiss?

i dont remember it

Did you talk to someone until you fell asleep last night?

yes actually it was rich. hey rich

Who was the last person to call you?

Do you sing in the shower?

yes sometimes but i sing all the time

Do you dance in the car?

Ever used a bow and arrow?

Last time you got a portrait taken by a photographer?

Do you think musicals are cheesy?

no theyre an art form. i think A musical can be cheesy but not all of em. having said that ive never been a huge theater person but ill watch a bootleg every now and then

Is Christmas stressful?

it doesnt have to be but some people make it stressful. its lonely tbh

Ever eat a pierogi?

yep. theyre p good

Favorite type of fruit pie?

peach

Occupations you wanted to be when you were a kid?

equestrian, veternarian, rockstar.

Do you believe in ghosts?

"do you believe in barometric pressure" "do you believe in wool fibers" "do you believe in the oxidation of metals"

Ever have a Deja-vu feeling?

all the time

Take a vitamin daily?

Wear slippers?

yes and i encourage others to do so as well

Wear a bath robe?

nope too warm and humid where i am

What do you wear to bed?

the buff

First concert?

it was a festival for nu metal bands in like 2008 or something. metalfest i think it was? or something close to that name. i dont remember all the acts that played but mudvayne was there i know for sure

Wal-Mart, Target or Kmart?

in my town theres only a walmart but i prefer target

Nike or Adidas?

Cheetos Or Fritos?

fritos are more versatile. remind me of chilis and soups

Peanuts or Sunflower seeds?

Favorite Taylor Swift song?

Ever take dance lessons?

Is there a profession you picture your future spouse doing?

yeah. professional cocksucker

Can you curl your tongue?

some people cant do that?

Ever won a spelling bee?

this is a traumatizing memory for me i refuse to elaborate

Have you ever cried because you were so happy?

yes often. usually during sex

What is your favorite book?

i hate these questions cuz then i forget every single book ive ever read. idk ill say the most recent book i read. the long hard road out of hell by marilyn manson

Do you study better with or without music?

with but it has to be instrumental or so loud its mind numbing owwww speaking of my ear fuckin hurts fuck you billy corgan

Regularly burn incense?

not anymore

Ever been in love?

Who would you like to see in concert?

obvious answers are like. mm. nin. slipknot (but like in 2002 or smth).

What was the last concert you saw?

in person? i dont even remember. its been over a decade

Hot tea or cold tea?

cold tea always preferable

Tea or coffee?

coffee. also cold

Favorite type of cookie?

sugar cookie or chocolate chip

Can you swim well?

nah

Can you hold your breath without holding your nose?

yes??

Are you patient?

extraordinarily

DJ or band, at a wedding?

either or. both? both

Ever won a contest?

nope

Ever have plastic surgery?

nah

Which are better black or green olives?

ew

Opinions on sex before marriage?

theres another type of sex?

Best room for a fireplace?

the den

Do you want to get married?

yes

[lunatic-fandom-space]

I dont think ive mentioned this at any point but Im actually really obsessed elisabeth but I cant engage with it at all or even think too hard about it without feeling like Im gonna start biting people. like, ive been making a lot of tanz der vampire posts and whenever one of my original posts gets interacted with I go and check the account because Im a freak like that and surprise surprise, people who like that musical also often like elisabeth, theres one account in particular who might even recognize me because its a fairly small fandom, and whenever I look at their account Ive always completely forgotten that they post a lot about elisabeth and I get jumpscared and have to very quickly click away as my heartrate inexplicably spikes for a second. And it really sucks because one time one of the posts I got jumpscared by was this one that pointed out how deaths carriage was also rudolfs bed and I hadnt noticed that and its really neat and I would love to see more posts like that about what is basically my favorite musical ever but I cant. look at them

I think the reason my brain is so weird about letting me enjoy it is that it is rpf and also german in origin. or well its from austria but you know what I mean. And i dont know why because its not like hamilton where all the songs slap but its weirdly patriotic so i dont really wanna watch it in full ever again, not only do all the songs in elisabeth slap but its also not patriotic as a whole, like thats the reason i was able to listen to it almost every day while taking the bus to school for about three months, i couldnt do that if it was weirdly patriotic yknow. Speaking of me listening to the soundtrack almost everday for three months, whenever I would do that I would imagine these elaborate and usually very romantic animatics in my head and thats perfectly fine but god forbid i wanna read a fanfic thats just a non-musical prose version of Die Schatten Werden Länger (Reprise) because like, no offense but what other kind of fanfic could you possibly write about this musical. Or maybe I just lack imagination idk

Also, speaking of the nature of this musical as rpf, because Death is the only character thats not like, real, hes the only character that I can read or write fanfic about, like I found a fic about him intracting with the von Krolocks and I liked it so much that I wrote my own oneshot about him having a weird tender moment with Herbert and I have ideas for like 3 more, which is kinda ironic because hes the character Im the most unwell about for all the obvious reasons and usually when Im this degree of unwell about a character i can hardly stand to even think about them but I guess the fact that I can already barely bring myself to think about the musical hes from kinda cancels that out

[cigmuttfreud]

i think today was one of the best if not the best of all our little whatever-ya-call-its

first off i am writing this before i get completely trashed because i feel it impending, so i wanted to get my thoughts out while i still could.

him edging in the morning was probably the best decision ever. i got to taste even more of him, twice. hell yeah. the first time was fun because it got somewhat messy. honestly, don't regret it. only complaint is it getting in my hair.

i spent a lot of time on top of him today. usually its not my favorite because its harder to hit the right angles and my knees give out, but today i was able to actually handle it and god i get the hype. him grabbing my hips as my face is pressed into his shoulder. moving me in time with his movements. i felt so full. and so close to him, which i really like.

the first nap and wakeup surprise was super unexpected, because unlike last time I didn't even feel it. like i didn't wake up until he started with his mouth. achievement i suppose. he's gotten so much better with his mouth. constant improvement. i have 0 complaints.

i noticed today that when using his hands on the outside, he's basically found the spot. tortured me with it a bunch though. i really like it when he makes me wait to cum. i complain and struggle every time but the payoff is always good and i like him controlling me a lot.

lots of hand stuff in general. the three fingers was fine this time, am i getting used to it? it hurt for only a second. me begging and pleading for him to stop.... gaaaaaahhh... him continuing to go faster.

fourth finger was kinda dodgy. unironically really hurt and i think he tore something but the way he handled it... told me to quit complaining and that i'll get better next time. him appearing to have like no regard for my feelings as i cried and begged him to take them out. and when he did, holding me and telling me it'll all be ok as he tells me to quit crying and that he'll do it again next time. agghhhhhhhhhhhh i love when he does stuff like that.

him cutting his initials into me. i literally came from it. as dumb as that sounds. its just, pure ownership. a constant reminder of who i belong to. it feels so good when he does it.

him telling me while i was nonverbal at one point how much he loves everything about me. like going on a whole rant about it. and how much i belong to him. i was literally gonna cry it made me so happy.

so much kissing this time and i love it. literally like top 3 things ever. its just such a hungry feeling that nothing else can really fix its so good.

is it missionary if hes bent over me or is that technically a mating press? dunno and dont really care but every time he'd pull my hips in closer and slam into me. i could do that all day.

something i could seriously do all day was doggy. it's my favorite which i guess makes sense. it feels the best. no angles, no hurt legs, only occasionally falling off the bed. just straight in and fast. he gets really fast with it actually. it makes me so dumb and dizzy.

him recording me and making fun of me with it. another weird thing i came from. idk why i liked it so much. as soon as i got home i rewatched the videos like 4 times. aaaa im weird.

me passing out. i wish i was able to see what he did while i was because he said he did something.

him choking me like severely that one time where there was genuinely no way to breathe. like strangling and pulling my head up. it was crazy.

my head game was sorta alright. i think i got the tongue stuff down and found a new weird suction technique with the front of my mouth but i was having major choking problems and stuff. it made me really lightheaded. even though he told me to stop i kept going because i wanted to make him feel good even when he tood me to stop going so deep.

i felt good just staring at him watching the faces of pure pleasure he made as he jacked off the second time. i was so locked in. and then my throat was like instantly full. i miss that feeling. i'm sorta useless without him using me.

him denying me water. yeah another control thing i like, what about it?

anyway its almost done kicking in its so bad oh my god i wish i could write more

[cenviswasteland]

hellp tumblr user cenviswasteland. tell me about your ocs please? batting my cartoonishly large eyes at you [ insert microphone emoji here its 2:15am and i dojt want to find it ]

- 🍤

HELLO TUMBLR ANON SHRIMP EMOJI I WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO. APOLOGIES FOR NOT RESPONDING SOONER I WAS PLOTTING.

for the sake of everyone involved, im just gonna post one guy. uhhh if you wanna see more i might reblog it later with more people idk idk. also im gonna cut the post here for the sake of mobile users. love peace and little donuts or whatevsies.

===+++===

hey thanks for clicking on the button now let's talk about a wet cat given human form.

Zeno Eldiare

27 yrs, he/him, human-ish, bi

this is the first OC I ever really used. not my current favorite out of all of them, but he deserves to be first just on principle.

he's a pessimistically down-to-earth type of person. he has one hell of a temper. frequent user of swear words (there was a time where i was throwing a "fuck" into every sentence he said). he'll listen to your problems, but don't expect him to help solve them.

years ago, he was wrapped up in the mafia. he was coerced into it and he couldn't properly get himself out, so he just kept going down into the depths of it. he started as a hired gun, he earned a reputation that way. he took a fake name ("Atlas Pierre") and just kept getting worse. he was eventually caught and jailed.

depending on which universe i'm working in, zeno is either jailed on a different planet (sci-fi bullshit) or he's experimented on in jail. either way, he ends up infected with a fictional disease called Glaisica, or Glass Body. unable to be properly treated, the disease binds to every one of his cells-- basically rewriting him on a molecular level-- to basically make him living glass.

it's been a couple years, but was able to get himself out of jail and get his record cleared (it's an INCREDIBLY long story that i don't have time for here). he now has an apartment and a job as a mechanic.

zeno likes greasy american-diner food (large burgers, milkshakes, fries, etc), rock and alt music, crime dramas, cats, hole-in-the-wall bars, neon lights, karaoke, and card games.

zeno dislikes mornings, empty rooms, commercials, and getting wet.

when it comes to vices, he has a bit of a drinking problem. his poison of choice is whiskey. he also, unrelatedly, drinks ACTUAL poison because he practices mithridatism. see below for his recipe! (DO NOT ATTEMPT.)

yeah thats the most basic run down of him. he is my babiest girl and i have about twelve versions of him in the back.

for example: Blaise "Zero" Lucibello, who was born and raised in Adamas, New York [not a real place]. He's an A/V guy for the local news station. His dick leads him to places no one in their right mind would go with a gun (the mafia).

i'm writing a whole trilogy of books about blaise, actually. i might make a separate post about him at some point. teehee.

anyway! moral of the story! uhhh thanks for reading? again how the hell do you end a tumblr post

[emulation-0]

@cursedvibes ty for tagging me ik it was a while ago 😭

20 Questions for Fic Writers

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

on my profile 32, i think? (but actually 35)

2. Whats your total word count?

59,890 tho i do have like 56000 more words in orphaned works

3. What fandoms do you write for?

primarily Jujutsu Kaisen, i had some ideas for other fandoms but those remain as wips... honestly after this tsumiki one im not sure i will be writing for a while siebjfneofneod

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

there's a fire in my brain and im burning up (itadori)

this tired old machine is a-rumbling (higuruma)

the devil's after both of us (itafushi)

oh, lay my curses out to rest (tokyo students + shoko)

oh, ashes ashes dust to dust (nobamaki)

(this makes me upset im not gonna lie cuz looking back and reading these im struck by how mid they are but sjdbdkneodks its whatever)

5. do you respond to comments? why or why not?

i do for the most part !! i love receiving comments and i want people to know how much i appreciate it :) i also love when ppl reply to comments i leave on their fics so i want to do the same

6. what's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

ummm my Curses series was more one-shots without actual plot.. and as many of those were shibuya or post shibuya they were all pretty angsty beifbekdjeodk. i wouldnt say any have this kind of ending because then there would have to be a story. but i would say the saddest one ive written is 'keep running for the sink but the well is dry'

7. what's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

'light of a new morning' for sure. this one actually had some kind of development i would say. also i have bias because this is one of the only three ive written that dont totally suck. though the tsumiki wip im working on for sure will have an even happier ending

8. do you get hate on fic?

im not popular enough for that lol

9. do you write smut?

no

10. do you write crossovers?

i had one in mind a while ago but it escaped me... i never have before but that doesnt mean i never will, even if it is unlikely

11. have you ever had a fic stolen?

i dont think so

12. have you ever had a fic translated?

no but id be honored if so. especially if it was one im proud of

13. have you ever co-written a fic before?

no, but im open to the idea

14. whats your all-time favorite ship?

i go through phases so i cant really answer this lol. my interest waxes and wanes. rn though im really obsessed with uroyuki and in a satosugu phase

15. whats a wip you want to finish but probably won't?

there is a shokohime wip i started two or so years ago about shoko's backstory and the developing of their relationship up until the present but at some point there was a research aspect to it and i thought 'ill do it later'. and then i never did 💀 id like to continue it but i still lowk think it will sit there.. i dont have enough motivation to do research ekdbfkenfkdk

there is also a trigun one i started, it was kind of plotless, just vibes, but i wasnt able to get their dialogue right and idk. maybe when i get into a trigun phase again ill find inspiration and continue

16. what are your writing strengths?

i think im good at describing a scene and emotions. im good at making this kind of poetry

17. what are your writing weaknesses?

im soooo shit at dialogue and even when im not shit at it i keep overthinking it and ruin it anyway lol

18. thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

i mean ive done it (but i orphaned those... lol) and im doing it now for the tsumiki wip so its fine i guess. but id only do it for languages that i know and if not, after profuse grammar checking. also ofc it has to make sense within the context of the story

19. first fandom you wrote for?

septimus heap eiebdkwbdkebd it was so bad

20. favorite fic you've written?

ill do you one better and say three... and these are the not-mid ones

light of a new morning (tsumiki and itadori)

after hours (mob and reigen)

before-the-storm bloom (uroyuki)

my writing style changed a lot and i think these ones emulate the way it is now the best

idk 20 writers but tagging @that-was-anticlimactic @zukkaoru @blackhallow and anyone else who wants !!

[ilguna]

hey babe!! i hope you’re feeling much better than you were a few days ago! (your sickness was passed to me through the phone because i haven’t been able to get out of bed to do anything other than use the restroom, shower, and eat)

but!! i have a small (?) question to ask you. how do you easily write and post a fic??? i’ve gotten quite a few requests, and they’re all very lovely but once i go to write them my mind goes completely blank. like, when i read the request i have so many ideas on how i want it to go, but when i start to write it i just feel bored and end up going to do something else. i really really want to write because i love writing and i used to do it all the time when i was a little bit younger, but now i hardly can anymore :(

i’m thinking about making or reblogging prompt lists, because hopefully that’ll help me put out SOMETHING even if it’s short. but i don’t want to get my hopes up, then lose motivation right after, and it be all for nothing. (it might also be the fact that i’m scared no one will like what i put out and not want to request anything from me again🧍🏻) i know you might not be able to help, but if you are i would really appreciate it! if you can’t, no worries and no hard feelings at all. love ya and stay safe!! xxx

- 🪷

hey!! i am feeling SO much better than i did. and i’m sorry!! i hope you have a speedy recovery too!!

i’m putting a cut cause there’s gonna be a lot of pictures as i explain MY PROCESS, because maybe you’ll be able to pick out some things you’d like to try, because i struggle with the same stuff.

as for your question, this might be a little long. i want to start by saying that it might appear that i’m able to easily write, but the truth is that i also have difficulty starting fics and that’s what fucks me up most of the time.

however!! here’s what i do: i write out what i want to happen. just a couple paragraphs (or more!!) of the idea/general goal/scenes that i come up with that MUST make it. i’ve especially been doing this when it comes to the 3k celebration asks because it helps me to have fics lined up so i can just pick up the next one without worrying what im going to do next.

and i do this either on paper (i have a notebook dedicated to it) or on my phone, which is what i’ve been doing recently. so i just screenshot the ask, put it in my notes app and write down my idea so it turns out what i have below:

the part that i really struggle with is starting the fic, which is why i believe we must be in the same boat. i think that it’s easier to write when i don’t have the pressure of forgetting the idea, because i do have a lot going on and i’d hate for it to escape my mind.

but i have learned some ways to cheat starting the fics. (it’s not really cheating, just basic writing nonsense) and i always have a slow start at the beginning of fics cause idk how to write it without feeling repetitive. so i have a few formulas for that

the following are going to be all examples of how i’ve started my fics:

so either i set up the setting.

i start with an action.

i IMMEDIATELY begin to monologue.

or i start with dialogue.

and sometimes these don’t even work. i can’t tell you the amount of times i’ve started to write a paragraph in google doc, liked where it was going but not how it was phrased, so i pressed enter a couple times and started from scratch while referencing the original paragraph. and i do this SO MUCH that it’s practically part of the writing process now.

also, sometimes writing is just boring in general. i have to really be into the story to want to write it, or i have to accept that it’s boring and make it how i want to. like yes, follow the request. but at the end of the day, if they ever do want to see it, you’ve got to sprinkle some of what you want into the fic.

that’s where i create the backgrounds, start dynamics, give the reader a personality, etc to make it more fun. it gives me something to do while i hit the points of their fics. if that makes sense at all.

ANYWAY, reblogging prompt lists is my worst nightmare tbh. because it can help in many ways or it can literally be the bane of your existence. i hate them, that’s why i only have them available for celebrations.

you don’t get to choose the dialogue, most of the time people won’t give you anything to go off of (an idea to go with the writing), and if you don’t like it, you’re kinda backed into a corner. this is how i see it, it might not be the same for you.

they also might just stack up in your inbox and you’ll see them the same way that you’re seeing your regular requests :( just more stuff to write that you don’t feel like doing anymore.

but also, fear is 100% part of it dude. i still get that way when i post for new fandoms/people and i convince myself that everyone’s gonna hate it. here’s the truth: if people don’t like it, they’re going to keep scrolling. or they’ll read a little bit and then decide that it’s not for them. i have NEVER once received an ask/comment about people hating my fic (except on wattpad cause it’s full of brats 😭) because people don’t usually care that much. i’m even guilty of this!!

honestly, write those fics, just go for it. or if you don’t want to start with those, then write a little blurb you’ve had in your head and post it. gives you some momentum to keep going.

and if people don’t come back, that’s on them. do your own thing in the meantime, you’ll attract people. and when the requests start coming in again, all you have to do is start the process over.

honestly, i’ve been writing and posting fanfic on the internet for the past 7 years now. this is EXACTLY the fear i had each time i got a new account and had to start over. there is literally nothing more terrifying than posting what you love on the internet. but at this point, people dgaf and keep their opinions to themselves. it makes it easier to exist.

i have no idea if any of this made sense but i hope you get what im trying to say 😭 i don’t get this question super often but i try my best. anyway, i love you too 💛 and i will catch you on the flip side!!

[ifidiedinadream]

What are your favourite things about Aleksi? 👀

uuuuhh dear get ready for an essay

it's most definitely a product of idealization but in my head it makes sense. it's gonna be kinda deep and personal and not just a list of features i deem attractive, more why he's attractive to me specifically. it's gonna be super cringe and maybe i'm simply too desperate and lonely and should download tinder again idk

to me aleksi seems sweet, kind and patient. i'm a pain in the ass to deal with when you get close but i think he'd be able to. i think he's self aware and sensitive, at least to some degree, or else he wouldn't be able to calm people down from anxiety/panic attacks. its extremely attractive to me because emotionally speaking i'm all over the place, whereas aleksi appears to be somewhat stable and emotionally mature. i like that he seems a pretty balanced person in a way, reserved just how i like, but not boring at all - in fact i like that despite all of this, even in his (at least apparent) calmness, he still takes risks (joins a band and we all know the circumstances, isn't afraid to play with his appearance and not fit in a box). i love how passionate ("nerdy") he is, he's witty and smart, yet he doesn't try to be the center of attention. i feel like his charm is very subtle, i didn't even notice him for the first two weeks i was into bc, too blinded by joel's inhumane beauty, but once i noticed him there was never a turning back. he's simply magnetic. ive never seen eyes like his before. his lips look incredible. his jawline is very sexy.

basically i think we'd be a good match. we're both on the introverted, private side - our character somehow matches, i think we're both the responsible, reliable ones, but also i think he'd be that "rock" (stability) i so desperately need in my life (listen, i'm 27, i've done many things in my life, most of them stupid, i have bpd and i'm tired. i really need calmness and serenity and that quiet happiness that only a healthy relationship could offer?? not that i've ever had anything like a healthy relationship idk). and the fact that i see an unknown intensity under that seraphic facade?? it keeps me obsessed because i feel that there's something underneath, yet aleksi never shows that side of himself to us (rightfully so, i appreciate it), so we can only imagine what it's like. i think it's what makes him so alluring to me. i wonder how intense he can be. how deep he can love. he never truly shows himself to us fully and what's more intriguing than that??

so i think it's a matter of contrasts. calm yet intense, self aware yet self conscious (HIS FUCKING POSTURE), handsome yet not loudly so (unlike, say, joel), passionate yet quiet, funny yet introverted, a rockstar yet very low-profile. soft and gentle but who knows what lies beneath??

i like joeleksi so much because i'm totally joel, literally like him only quieter on the outside, and i love writing aleksi being the only one able to make the sky in joel's mind clear up, halt the storm. i feel like he'd do that to me.

aleksi and joel are both my favorite but aleksi is a full blown crush and joel isn't, not really anymore at least. i'm attracted to joel for projection reasons mostly, im very interested in him from a psychological point of view, in him as a person and human being. i would never date him. i think we'd hurt each other a lot and as i said i crave serenity. aleksi on the other hand... in my head he's a perfect match for me. exactly what i want and need in a man and more

[rinhaler]

The anon who just found out u were fuwushiguro here!!

Yes I absolutely understand the frustration from not performing as well with follower count to likes ratio - as an artist who used to be quite popular and likes went from thousands to only like seventy. At some point you feel like you’re not doing it for you, but actually for others. I’m happy you realised the happiness can come from writing and not only hate.

The friend who left you I can also relate to a bit, my ex best friend of 6 years also left me quite recently and it was like there was an empty hole in me because even if you’re not friends anymore, your brain can’t quite handle the change. I’m so sorry that happened to you, but the greatest challenge is to not only hold yourself to one person but to be open and try new possibilities, and that’s what you’ve seemed to done! You have new friends, new mental attitude, and a brand new beautiful blog (that I love the theme of btw!!!) You’re doing great and will continue to do so, because if there are 100 rinhaler fans I’m one of them, if there are 10 rinhaler fans I’m one of them and if there are none, I’m dead.

Also to the question you had, idk it’s just the way you describe certain things..? It’s hard to explain, I have about 50 fanfic blogs that I really love the writing of and fuwushiguro was one of them. Your world building, character description as well as development, SO GOOD!! And your wusyaname series was amazing, I used to check your blog religiously for any updates, and I’m happy you’re reuploading them here bc now I’m gonna reread them every week!

Also the way you wrote yuuji in the aita!sukuna fic was extremely similar to the first few chapters in wusyaname before he goes on that trip (if I remember right)

Have a great day/night :D

omg ARTIST AAAAAA im obsessed I'd love to see your stuff if you ever feel comfortable sharing with me sometime but no pressure ofc! I know it's very personal! ive been trying to get more into art but im finding it hard to balance practicing art stuff and writing. I also have massive art insecurity bc I don't think I'm good enough (same with my writing) so I totally understand if u wanna keep it all to yourself but go you for being a talented babe <3

interactions on tumblr suck and I'm starting to be able to tell myself it's purely luck what performs well and what doesn't, so I'm finding it a lot easier to write things I actually want to write now rather than what I think my followers will like.

Also yeah in regard to my friend, we were online friends and we'd only known each other for around two years but god i adored her and i still do tbh. I think about her and our memories all of the time we were so so close so her decision to just randomly cut me off really hurt. I'd love to talk to her again but I know I have to respect her decision and I wish her the best!

It's been a good opportunity to get back into writing so at least something nice has come from something so sad. And I love this little space so much! I'm glad you like my theme! It was greenish at first n i was like nope this aint the one i am a pink girl through and through!

ALSO AAAA THE WAY IM BLUSHING ABT AITA YUUJI BEING LIKE WUSYANAME YUUJI UR SO RIGHT 😩 definitely not intentional but god maybe i missed him more than i thought! I'm so excited to be reposting it though it's going to be like living through the magic of it all again and hearing what everyone thinks and stuff! I haven't read it in so long so I feel like I'm right there with you all hehehe

anyway thank you for supporting me always ur literally the best i adore u pls take care of urself mwah mwah mwah