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rememberwren · 4 months ago

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A Dichotomy of Thought || 10

Prior and future chapters here.

A visitor in the park.

CW: domestic violence, rape, ableist language, homophobic slurs (f-word), internalized ableism, suicidal ideation, mention of burning.

It seems cruel that such terrible things must happen at moments when you are your happiest. There’s logic in it, sure—there can be no joy without pain, and happiness is bracketed on either side by sadness—but logic and cruelty don’t have to live apart from each other. In fact, you would often say they are married.

Your boyfriend stands over you, blotting out the sun like a raincloud come to pour down on the briefest moment of peace you have felt in the last several days. Everything about him is innocuous: his clothes, his posture, hands shoved deep into his pockets as he stares down at you with unspeakable fondness in his eyes.

“Hi honey,” he says. “How was work?”

Johnny goes to stand, but your boyfriend is quicker, banging his shin violently against Johnny’s knee. Johnny sucks in a breath as the pain winds him, body bowing over to protect his most vulnerable areas.

“Don’t stand on my account,” your boyfriend says to his crumpled figure. “Did I get the right knee? I did, didn’t I? I wasn’t sure if it was the right or the left—“

“Hey!” you bellow, the volume of your own voice surprising you. You stand between them, put both hands against your boyfriend’s chest, and push. He nearly goes sprawling on the sidewalk, only barely managing to get his feet under him in time. You point a shaking finger in his face. “You don’t fucking touch him!”

“An accident,” he laughs, lifting his hands. “I stumbled into him. It could have happened to anybody.”

“Yer a fucking cunt,” Johnny groans, both hands gripping his thigh above his knee, knuckles pale. “And so’s yer mother. Syphilis-infected-cocksucking bitch.”

“Not nice,” your boyfriend says mildly, shoving his hands back into his pocket. “Do you kiss my fiancé with that mouth?”

“You don’t even know what you’re talking about,” you hiss. All three of you quiet down as an older couple inches by, hand in weathered hand. When they are a safe distance away, you ask: “How did you know I was here? Were you following me?”

“I can’t reveal all my secrets,” he says, lowering his voice to a dangerous timber, one that promises violence. “The same way you’re not willing to give up all of yours. You thought I wouldn’t notice you coming home late all the time? Do I look stupid?”

Johnny makes a sound, some kind of wounded laugh that only serves to put you on edge even more. You can imagine his answer—but he doesn’t know your boyfriend. He doesn’t know the kind of grim, intelligent cruelty that is wielded against you every day. Johnny is hot headed and craving violence, but he’s in no condition to experience it.

You have to protect him.

“We can talk about it at home,” you mutter, making sure to keep between the two men who seem eager for each other’s blood. Your boyfriend tongues his cheek, eyeing Johnny, weighing his options.

“Come on,” you say, louder. Reaching out, you grip his arm, nails digging into his skin. He doesn’t even flinch. But after an endless moment of waiting for further provocation from Johnny, he decides Johnny isn’t worth his time. He laces his fingers in yours and pulls you along, further away from the bench, from Johnny, from the sunlight.

“Get in the car,” he says, walking to the driver’s side.

“You’re not supposed to drive.”

“I won’t say it again.”

He won’t, either. You know him. So instead you slip into the passenger seat. There’s no worse feeling than being in an enclosed space with him. The air feels heavy and oppressive, weighing you down. At the same time, your body buzzes with adrenalin, preparing for pain. You numbly buckle your seatbelt while he starts the car.

“How long have you been cheating on me with that cripple next door?” he asks calmly.

“I’m not.”

The calm snaps, nothing but a thin sheet of icy veneer over a deep, dark lake of fury.

“Don’t—lie—to—me,” he says through his teeth. He holds out a hand and wiggles his fingers. “Phone. Hand it over. You’ve lost your privileges.”

“I don’t have it,” you lie. “It’s at work.”

“You really do,” he says, staring at you with borderline awe. “You think I’m a fucking idiot, don’t you? Oh, baby. Oh, honey. You’re in for it. How do you think I fucking found you? Give me the goddamn phone.”

You shake your head. You can’t give it up. Not when it’s the only safe way for Simon to contact you.

He reaches for your hand. The two of you struggle as you try to avoid his touch, briefly banging your knuckles on the car window, but then he has your hand in his grasp, and he takes your smallest finger and wrenches it back, back—you feel the pop, pain lancing through your hand all the way to your wrist.

You screech.

“Give me the phone,” he says, letting you cradle the misshapen hand against your breast. You grit your teeth, tears dripping off your chin. When he reaches for your hand again, you break and turn out your pockets, handing over your last lifeline. He takes the phone and beats it against the dashboard, again and again and again until the screen is a spider’s web of cracks, glass littering your knees.

He hands you back the broken phone.

“You broke my fucking finger,” you cry, voice warbling embarrassingly.

“You broke your own finger by not listening to me the first time,” he says, tossing the phone in your lap when you don’t take it. He puts the car in reverse. “Don’t blame me for your mistakes, baby.”

The two of you spend five hours in the emergency room together. This is an integral part of the experience; when he hurts you, he has to heal you.

Your pinky isn’t broken, only dislocated. They set it and splint it and warn you that it could take months to feel normal again, like you know at all what that word means. Beneath the tinny lights of the exam room, your makeup job must be failing, because the nurse asks your boyfriend to step out so that she can ask you a few questions alone.

This isn’t your first time in the emergency room, and you know the rules. You stick to your story (the one he had stitched together on the drive to the ER) even without your boyfriend’s oppressive presence looming over your shoulder. The nurse gives you a look that is both professional and pitying. You spend the rest of the visit refusing to meet her eyes, chewing on the nails of your good hand.

“Could you be any more suspicious?” your boyfriend asks mildly while the two of you leave. He waves to one of the nurses, who gives back a cheerful little salute.

Making friends wherever he goes; that’s your boyfriend.

Walking into your apartment is like walking into another world.

Everything has been upended: the couch cushions, the silverware drawers, the chairs at the table. DVD’s have been removed from their boxes. Even the fucking lamps have had their lampshades removed. The bathroom and bedroom doors have been taken off their hinges and laid neatly against one another in the bedroom.

“You weren’t the only one busy today,” he says, relishing in your grim expression. “You know the drill. Clean up. Then we’ll go to bed.”

This is an old trick of his that you know well. He tore the place apart searching for contraband—but he knows that even he isn’t all-powerful. Now he waits to see where you will rush to clean up first, where your anxious mind will take you, desperate to find out if he’s found whatever you’ve been hiding. Once it was money. Another time, a business card for a lawyer.

This time, a lighter that’s not your own.

You’re smarter now, though. You don’t go straight for your sock drawer where the lighter is hidden. You begin at the northernmost point of the apartment and clean north to south, east to west, methodical, your hand throbbing as the anesthetic wears off.

It is deeply late by the time you make it to the bedroom to find your clothes strewn across the bed. Your eyes burn with exhaustion, body aching from a long day at work (and a longer day after work). You can’t help but think of Johnny as you clean, tucking clothes back into their drawers, putting clothes back on their hangers. Did he make it home safely? Did he finally message Simon? Did he try to walk home? Thinking about Johnny out alone in the dark makes your stomach turn unpleasantly.

Sock drawer now. Most of these are still in the dresser, though some have been pushed out into the floor in your boyfriend’s search for ammunition to use against you. You pick up the few outliers and stuff them back into the drawer.

No lighter.

It’s not there. You know even as you continue to search without hope, rifling through your paired socks as subtly as you can. This is all just another game. He’s found the lighter and has just been waiting for you to notice it’s gone so that he can torment you with it. Maybe he’ll flick the spark wheel (the way Johnny can’t—God, Johnny, please be okay—) and hold the flame to your skin or your hair—

You touch something hard, plastic. Your breath catches. It’s there. It’s still there, tucked inside a pair of socks. He hadn’t found it. Relief rises up in you so poignantly that tears fill your eyes, even as you force yourself to shut the drawer and move on to another part of the room, feeling your boyfriend’s presence at the door, watching.

The lighter was so little, but it meant so much. You couldn’t even put into words why. Because it was Johnny’s, maybe. Because it was yours, now. Because it was one thing your boyfriend hadn’t put his hands on and destroyed or claimed as his own. Nothing belonged to you—not your money, not your body, nothing. Except maybe that silly lighter.

You wait until after he fucks you to speak, stubbornly maintaining your silence even through the pain and humiliation he inflicts on you. There’s something even worse about the way he draws your body against his afterwards, an arm looped possessively over your waist, the imitation of a loving cuddle.

“I want to break up,” you say.

He gives a long-suffering sigh, breath rustling your hair. “Keep dreaming, baby.”

The words won’t stop tripping out of your mouth.

“I mean it. I hate you—and you hate me. All we do is fight and hurt each other. Why…” you get choked up, swallow past the lump in your throat. “We don’t have to do this anymore. You can’t possibly be happy. Is this really how you want to live the rest of your life? Tormenting me?”

He is quiet for longer than you expect. You hold your breath, tears dripping from your eyes and over the bridge of your nose, down into your pillowcase. Maybe he’s thinking about it. Maybe he’s really considering it.

At last, he says: “Don’t ever think that there’s anywhere else in the world…anything else I’d rather be, than right where I am.”

Your heart plummets.

“Now go to sleep,” he says, kissing your neck. “You work in the morning.”

The sun goes down before Simon finds him. Johnny sits shivering on the bench where you left him, his eyes red rimmed and unseeing even when he hears the familiar footsteps of his lover against the pavement.

Simon sits next to him where you once sat, and for a long time, neither of them speaks. When Johnny finally breaks the silence, his voice is rough from hours of crying and disuse.

“I brought her here,” he says.

Simon nods. He knows. Of course he knows.

“I think she liked it,” Johnny adds, trying to find any brightness in the dark that encompasses him.

But all at once the tears come back, his throat burning, head throbbing. He bends at the waist, elbow on his thigh, and shakes, trying to keep his crying quiet, still clinging to the remnants of a dignity that God tears more from his grasp every day. When Simon’s warm arm wraps around him, it just makes him cry harder, even as he leans into the heat of the other man like a flower bends toward the sun.

“I’m useless,” Johnny weeps. “Fuckin’ useless. He showed up and just—took her, and I couldn’t do a thing to stop him. Even you think I’m useless—druggin’ me to keep me from getting in your way. I can’t dress myself, can’t tie my own shoes. What fucking good am I, as a human being? What’s the good in being alive if I have to live like this?”

Simon says nothing. Johnny leans up, letting the moonlight wash over his tear-soaked face. He wipes at his cheeks.

“You can’t be happy, either,” he says, taking in the solemn lines of Simon’s face, the shadows under his eyes. Simon looks older than his age, and Johnny knows who is responsible, who has aged him. Terrified to know the answer, he asks: “Is this how you want to live? With an overgrown child as your lover? One who can’t remember where he took off his shoes? Who needs you to, to cut up his food and button his shirts?”

“If that’s how it’s going to be,” says Simon simply. “If that’s how I get to be with you. Then yeah, Johnny. I’m solid.”

Johnny shakes his head. He can’t even find the energy within him to be angry. All that’s left is disbelief. “You can’t mean that.”

“I mean it. I—“ Simon ducks his head. “—I never should have put those pills in your juice. I should have trusted you. I wish I could take that back.”

Johnny sniffs wetly. It’s as close to an apology as he’s ever heard Simon give, and it makes no small amount of guilt bloom in Johnny’s aching chest.

“You were right not to trust me,” says Johnny. “I was lying.”

“I know,” says Simon. He reaches down and laces his fingers with Johnny’s one hand. “But I want to be a man who trusts you, even if I’m wrong.”

Johnny is quiet for a long time, turning those words over in his head. A painful longing rises up in his chest, one he hasn’t felt since the days when he was still in the 141, days when he could barely breathe for wanting the man beside him so badly. When they’d had to love each other in secret, and it felt like he would happily have given anything if it meant they didn’t have to hide anymore.

I miss you, he thinks. I miss myself. Leaning in, he lays his cheek against Simon’s shoulder.

“Are we gonna make it?” he wonders quietly, watching the last of the fireflies twinkle around the dim park. Soon it will be too cold for them. Soon it will be too cold for Johnny.

“Whatever we do, we’ll do it together,” Simon promises, laying his temple against Johnny’s head.

He waits until you are asleep to creep out of the bed. There is no rest for him—not when he gets in these restless, paranoid moods. Not when he has a hunch to follow.

Quietly, he drifts through the apartment like a ghost. Everything is back in its place, but he tries to think of anywhere he might have missed to search. You are hiding something; he knows it. He knows you. You’re see-through to him, predictable in a way that used to thrill him but now just irritates.

“Where is it?” he mutters, standing in the living room, turning a slow circle.

Was the lighter really all you’d been hiding? That stupid piece of plastic and metal? He’d found it easily and decided it served him better left in its place. Let you think that he had missed it. Let you think that he was slipping.

“I’m sharper than ever, baby,” he mutters to himself in the darkness.

Halfheartedly, he searches a few places that he had already gone through: checking some of the mugs on the top shelf in the kitchen, feeling beneath the table in the foyer for anything taped beneath it.

He thinks about the cripple next door while he does it. Johnny. A problem, if he’s ever seen one. Him and his boyfriend both. What two faggots want with you, he can’t imagine—good Samaritans, perhaps? Well they would find out in good time what happened to people who put their noses where they didn’t belong.

Regardless, he doesn’t like it. It leaves a sour taste in his mouth.

Sighing, he braces his hands against the table, resting his weight against it. If he’d known that this building would cause so much trouble, he never would have moved you in here. Not that the two of you had been swimming in options.

Your keys on the table catch his eye, but he doesn’t know why. He nudges them with his hand, metal dragging over the wood. On a whim, he counts them.

There is an extra key.

His brows lift. He picks up the keys and goes through them one by one, wracking his brain to remember what each one is for. At last he’s left with a single unfamiliar key. One that looks identical to the key to their apartment. A duplicate? he wonders. For when she’s locked out?

But no, the keys are different. Just similar.

An idea tickles at the back of his brain, but he’s never been the kind of man to ignore his instincts. He goes to the door without bothering to slip on his shoes, and steps silently out into the hallway. At this time of night, there is no one out and about, no one peeking at him from their doors. On silent feet, he pads to his neighbor’s door and grips the knob. Locked.

He slips the key into the lock—and it opens.

Oh that little bitch. Fury rises up in him until he can taste it in the back of his throat. He wants to go and wake you, take a fistful of your hair and drag you out into the hallway for all your nosy neighbors to see, wants to hear that shriek of pain you give when he hurts you so unexpectedly—

But no. He has to be smart.

He locks 5C’s door again, checks the handle, then slips back into his apartment. There will be no rest for him tonight. Not when there is so much to think about.

#ghoap x reader #dichotomy of thought

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acotarxreader · 1 month ago

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Other Worlds part 3

Azriel x Reader

Synopsis - An unfortunate infection has the Inner Circle scrambling to try to save your life, only to settle on sending you home to receive the treatment you need, accompanied by Azriel who is about to meet a whole Other World, ours.

Warning: YN is very very ill at the start, silly, serious, Az has a panic attack boo, sickly sweet, fluff, jealous Az, agnst

A/N; You guys! It has been awhile! So long that I forgot my login and there was mild panic that @lady-of-tearshed helped to settle lol! But anyways here's a part 3 of the Other Worlds. Its always scary to write for the series because people loved part one so much but anyways here it is! Once my exams are finished I hope to write another part of Eris's fic as I kinda left ye high ad dry there! Anyways, as always, let me know what you think!!

Other Worlds and Part 2

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The feeling deep within your abdomen woke you from your light sleep, the growing pain keeping you from reaching REM. Perched up on an elbow you rubbed a lazy hand across your eyes, the buttery sheets clinging to the sweat on your back, uncomfortable heat sticking to your bones. Azriel moved slightly alongside you, burying his face further into your college hoodie you must have discarded during your sleep. The heat was choking, sending you quickly to dash to the bathroom, your cheek flushing purple from the suffocating sickly heat. Splashes of the coolest melted mountain water did little to stave away the purple blotting in your cheeks. You didn’t know if you were going to be sick or faint as the feeling of what felt like claws took hold of the muscles in your abdomen. You met the marble floor hard, that pain was nothing compared to what was growing in your abdomen. The cool marble gave some relief to your cheek as you met it but nothing could seemingly stop the inferno setting through your skin as your bones began to rattle with a chill off the stone.

“YN!” Azriel reached for your face, ice cold to the touch contradicting the feeling inside. He pulled you to your feet, your groans of pain bouncing off the tile as you clutched your arms around your waist until the pain became unsurmountable and blackout was your body’s only solution.

Your eyes hardly flickered, beads of sweat wiped with a cloth from your forehead as various fae shuffled around the room in frantic fear of Azriel’s stern orders. You groaned lightly, the pain remaining and the heat only having lessened slightly no doubt owed to the concoction of fluids Madja and her team plied you with.

“Am-am I dead?” You managed, eyes unable to open fully.

“No, love. We don’t know what’s wrong, but we’ll help you.” Azriel’s soft words were followed by a glare at the panicked-looking healer team, which couldn’t seem to figure out what was happening.

“I-I think it's the appen-appendix” You attempted to sit up, Azriel gently guiding you back down.

“What? What is that love? Do we need to banish it? Poison it?” He sank to his knees at your bedside, running his thumb over your hand in soothing circles as you gave a gentle smile.

“Out-it needs to come out- I’ll get sep-sepsis”

“Who is that? Can I get him now to fix you?” You gave the weakest of smiles. You’d die at the hands of medieval magic medicine, but at least you’d die with your love by your side. You fought the dark pull of sleepiness, its taunting comfort calling to you to dance with it, to stay with it. Rhysand burst through the door, boxes of supplies and tinctures in hand, Madja looking grateful but hopeless.

“Try these!” Nesta called over Rhysand’s shoulder, Cassian and Feyre holding multiple other elaborate glass bottles.

“I’m afraid we’ve tried all those” Azriel’s head whipped up from your direction to Madja’s melancholy voice, the look of a female who had exhausted the resources available to her.

“No” Tears rimmed Azriel’s eyes, looking back to you, waiting for a witty comment or comforting word, only a greying pasty complexion looked back.

“Well we could… no I’m not sure” “What Nesta!?” Azriel sprang to his feet, looking to the eldest Archehon like she was the answer to all his pleas.

“Well Azriel we could… we could send her home? Other world disease, other world solution?” Nesta shuffled from one foot to the other, an unusual discomfort in her own skin radiating as Cassian shared a concerned look with Rhysand.

“But-but what if you send her in the wrong place? Or what if-what if she can’t come back?” He looked amongst the four, all of which didn’t want to answer but Rhysand finally filled the airspace.

“She will die here Az”

“And what if she dies there?” his voice rattled.

“Then at least she can die knowing everything possible was done for her, we should want that for her” Cassian added softly, taking hold of one of Azriel’s shoulders in his hand. The healer team looked amongst themselves before looking to their leader to speak.

“She hasn’t got much longer, we must decide” Madja spoke with a kind firmness that Azriel knew so well.

“Fine, but I go with her” “Azriel” The four friends spoke in unison, being cut off by Azriel’s raised hand.

“You would not allow your mates to go alone, YN is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a mate, perhaps she is my mate but the human stuff is getting in the way, I don't know. Regardless, I will accompany her to her end, no matter what way that may present itself. Get Amren right away, Nesta and her will send us together” With the orders of the Spymaster the inner circle reluctantly went about the necessary preparations, fully unsure if this would even work or simply kill you both on conjuring. It didn’t matter to Azriel, in every reality he’d lose you and in every reality he would stay with you.

“Az how do we know when to try to pull you back?” Feyre did her best to hide her worry but it was easily read by her friends. Azriel took a moment to think, he didn’t know how time worked in our realm or how his friends would find him, all he knew is he had to get you to help.

“Your birthday Feyre, I’ll be home to help you blow out the candles” He hugged her tightly before doing the same to Cassian and Rhysand, the three ignoring that this could be goodbye forever.

“Until we meet again” Were Azriel’s final words to his friends before he took your weakened body in his arms, Feyre sliding a filled satchel over a shoulder as Amren and Nesta circled around you both. Blinding light followed.

The thud of his boots on the solid oak floors of a mildew-covered yet cosy dorm room echoed off the picture-covered walls. Azriel felt like he might vomit, never one to enjoy being at the will of Nesta’s power. He took an unbalanced step, realising that his wings had seemingly vanished from his back, the feeling turning his already upset stomach on its head. He clutched your body into him, taking in the room that held the same scent as your hoodie he loved so much, your home, it calming him. Your deep groan skyrocketed him back into reality as he took unsure steps out of your room and into the fluorescent-lit hallway. Every cell of Azriel’s body was screaming at him to freak out, a feeling he hadn’t felt since a child of utter uselessness towards his own outcome.

“Eh, hello?” He whipped around to the small voice of an even smaller woman as she stood toothbrush and shower caddy in hand. Azriel couldn’t find his voice, the whole situation was overwhelming.

“YN?” A man called from behind the girl as he ran towards the both of you. Azriel instinctively pulled you from his grasp.

“Cammy call an ambulance!” The man shouted and the small girl ran for the phone.

“Look buddy, I don’t know who you are but you’re going to tell me what the fuck is wrong with my YN” The male snapped, managing to take your weight in his arms as pure shock rattled through Azriel. What? What? What? Bounced around the head of the Illyrian as your weight began to go fully limp in the man's arms.

The next 40 minutes were a complete whirlwind that Azriel couldn’t find his voice in. The ambulance swept you all away, the male close behind in his car. The whole vehicle experience nevermind the beeping alarms within the ambulance cabin making Azriel feel fully out to sea. The next thing Azriel could comprehend he was being refused entry to the emergency bay, being forced to sit alongside the man in yet another fluorescent hallway.

“This has been a crazy fucking month” Azriel heard the man whisper under his breath.

“Thanks for finding YN-” Azriel sat up straighter, subconsciously puffing out his chest at the sound of your name on another males tongue “-I hope she didn’t cause you too much trouble, she gets kinda crazy around exam season, I’m Damien” Damien outstretched a hand that Azriel did not take, only refocusing his gaze on the double doors they took you through. The two sat in awkward silence for nearly three hours until a doctor returned to meet them.

“Well, we got very lucky, we got to her before any serious damage could be done, she's awake now if you want to see h-” Azriel stood before she could finish the sentence, bursting through the cursed double doors to find you, a small rattling intern leading the way to your room where you sat still groggy in the bed.

“Az” You gave a weak smile, morphine still flooding your system, the realisation of who you saw then sending you further upright in the bed.

“Az! What the fuck!?” You half shouted half laughed as he rushed to hug you into him, burying his head into your hair, taking deep breaths of the scent he loved so much.

“YN, I was so afraid” his voice hoarse from the somewhat vow of silence he had taken since arriving. You pushed him back, your hands wiping across his chiselled cheeks as you touched your forehead on his. He ran a hand up your arm, it catching on the IV.

“What is this?” he looked, taking in the sterile environment.

“Fluid, it's okay, it doesn't hurt. I can’t believe I’m back here, that you’re here!”

“YN you’re alive!” Damien's voice came from the doorway, sending Azriel back to his ironing board-like posture. He gave you a gentle hug under the scrutinising eyes of Azriel, your cheeks blushing.

“Damien I-I can’t believe you’re here?” “Can’t believe I’m here? You go awol for a month and then show up in the arms of this guy” Damien looked judgingly towards Azriel, arms tucked across his chest. Your sense of time was completely lost, you had been gone at least 6 months, had that translated as a month in this realm, the physics side of your brain was hurting.

“Visiting time is over” a burly nurse saved you from responding.

“I go nowhere without her” Azriel replied, the nurse only raising an eyebrow.

“C’mon Leathers, I’ll give you a lift back to the dorms” Damien replied bitterly, digging through his pockets for his keys.

“I doubt your puny muscles could carry me” Azriel whispered to no one in particular, you smiled gently.

“Go Az, stay in my room and one of my friends can bring you back to me tomorrow” You gave your best reassuring smile but met the doubtful face of the Illyrian. You leaned across the bed, beckoning him in to hear your whisper

“Az, trust me, an ICU nurse makes a naga look like a kitten” you grinned, Azriel shooting upright again, looking to the nurse with a respectful fear before kissing the top of your head and following Damien out.

Sat into the small Ford, Azriel dug what training he could to remain calm within another metal cage, this time the alarms absent.

“So, how'd you meet YN?” Damien broke the 5 minutes of dead air in the car, Azriels hand finding the handle above the door to cling to as Damien indicated onto a busy road.

“Not the ‘Jesus Christ we're going to die’ panic handle” Damien laughed at the sight, Azriel now using all training you had given him to read between the lines and not ask a silly question, he would save those for you.

“Well?” Damien tried again.

“She sort of…fell into my life” Azriel buried a grin, white knuckles growing across the handle.

“She has a tendency to do that, hard to saddle that one” he laughed, Azriel now glaring.

“She's not an animal she-”

“-oh dude I know, I get it, feminism woo-” Damien raised a sarcastic fist before returning it to the wheel “-but some women are meant to be left wild” he laughed, Azriel not returning the sentiment.

“So called ‘wild women’ are revered where I come from” he bit, Damien pulling up outside the building Azriel had hazy memories of landing in.

“And where is it you're from?” Damien raised an eyebrow, Azriel finding the door handle to allow air in.

“Somewhere YN will never need to bow to feeble insecure males” were his final words shared before exiting the car.

Azriel found your room again with some difficulty but was happy to find the door still open from the rush of excitement earlier in the night. The room felt like you, your photos and books and brilliance across every inch of the space. Azriel sat on the edge of the bed, taking it all in before the flood of sea he was thrown in overwhelmed him. Tears freely flowed down his cheeks, his hands knotting through his hair as the stress of it all reached boiling point before he fell back into the bed and allowed himself to be overtaken by the near miss you both had tonight. Sleep quickly stole away the cries.

—--

“Az, get your filthy shoes off my bed” You laughed from the doorway, skyrocketing the Illyrian upright, a daze of confusion to follow.

“YN!” He ran to you, swaddling you in his arms once again as you leaned into him.

“I-I just closed my eyes? How are you here already? How are you feeling” A rush of questions separated you both again.

“I wouldn't think too much about the time thing, it'll rot your brain sweetie-” you pulled from him, throwing down the jacket you had left Prythian wearing “-I got sent home, they said they've never seen someone heal so fast from halfway to death, those treatments from Madja must have worked wonders after surgery, I feel a lot better” you sat down on the bed, Azriel still trying to work his way through the time difference.

“YN I was so scared, I really thought you were going to leave me” “I can’t believe you’re here with me, in some ways I think I must still be in an infection-fueled catatonic state-” You looked at Azriel, his head tilted in confusion like when a dog hears the word walkies “- nevermind, I believe it, as much as I can’t, I chose to believe this is real” You smiled, eyes then landing on his bear shoulders, Azriel seemingly shrinking under the gaze.

“I know, wingless, how terribly odd, I feel like my balance is off” he laughed, a knocking coming to the door.

“She lives!” Damien beamed as you pulled open the chipping door. He squeezed you into a hug, the heat from Azriel’s eyes and your fresh stitches radiating through your body.

“Hello Dam, thank you for bringing Azriel back here”

“Oh it was no problem at all, me and ol Azills had a lovely chat” Damien clapped a hand on Azriel’s shoulder, a huff of air leaving his nostrils as he did.

“Azriel will do just fine” he corrected.

“Nonsense buddy, you’re a friend now, c’mon we’re all going for lunch to celebrate your return from whatever place you were in” Damien left his side, taking your hand gently in his and leading you to the door.

Azriel crammed his figure into the back seat of the tiny Ford once again, trying his best to not glare holes into the back of Damien's head as he drove.

“You’ll have to tell us all of the great mischiefs I’m sure you got into YNN” Damien almost lovingly tapped your knee before returning his hands to the steering wheel.

“Not must mischief..” you trailed off, thinking of the great vast amounts of mischief you got up to in Prythian, all of which would land you in a psychiatric hospital if you tried to explain it to your friends.

Azriel folded his shoulders like a deck chair, squishing as best he could into the booth of the large, dilapidated pub some miles from your residence.

“Do they only make furniture for the miniature in this city?” He asked you under his breath and you laughed lightly as Damien returned to the table accompanied by three of your closest friends. Azriel fought the urge to block his ears as you and your friends all squealed at the sight of one another.

“I know, like howling dogs” Damien whispered across the table to Azriel as you swaddled your friends in hugs.

“You seem to have an affinity for referring to females as animals” he bit back, Damien rolling his eyes.

“Well hello there-” a red-headed female slid in alongside them, hand outstretched like a grand dame greeting a suitor “-let’s get properly acquainted” She playfully batted her eyelashes as you rolled your eyes.

“Easy Georgie” Cassy, Azriel remembered from the corridor, slid alongside his new friend. Damien gestured with his head for you to sit alongside him, allowing Ellie, Azriel's final new friend, to cap off the bench at the end.

“Tell us, tall dark and handsome, where are there more of you?” Georgie laughed, and your eyes looked down towards the menu burying a grin.

“I am a dying breed, my brothers are all mated off” Azriel answered in a somewhat serious tone, eager to end the affections of this new female as a waitress filled your glasses with refreshing water.

“Now who’s obsessed with animal analogies” Damien shot back as you took a drink to cover your confusion.

“If I was I’d correctly identify you as a little bitch” You began to sputter on the water at Azriel’s comment.

“Oh my god it’s like the real housewives” Cammy laughed as Damien and Azriel began to stare one another down.

“Okay okay enough of that” you coughed out, Damien rubbing your back to ease the deathly grip you faced for a second time in 48 hours, Azriel thought of all the ways he could have Damien taken care of, giving him comfort.

Azriel pushed around his burger on the plate, nothing compared to the food of home and simply couldn’t stomach it.

“YN, I thought you weren’t going to date boys until you finished the degree?” Ellie asked between bites of salad.

“Guess she went and found herself a man” Georgie laughed, the table other than Damien joining in.

“Tough luck Damien” The three girls laughed loudly accompanying your nervous chuckle as Azriel examined the pair of you. Soon after more teasing you found yourself at the bar top, waiting for an order of the coffee you had had dreams about.

“Hello love” Azriel joined your side, an arm wrapping tenderly around your waist, ever careful of the fresh stitches.

“Having fun?” “Yeah, it’s nice to meet the people from your stories, although I don’t remember a pig-headed troll being part of any?”

“Damien’s just being nice Az, maybe calling him a little bitch wasn’t the nicest thing you’ve done” you teasingly reprimanded him. “I call it as I see it” he proclaimed, observing the bar staff as they worked.

“It's funny how no matter the realm, the tavern will survive in any form” he laughed, kissing the top of your head as a member of staff passed a cup into your hand. You retrieved your card from your pocket, Azriel raising a hand before digging through his own pockets and pulling out coins.

“Az-” you tried but he had already placed the solid gold coins into the young staff member's hand.

“We don’t take Renaissance Fair money here buddy”

“Why do people keep calling me buddy?” You laughed at him, tapping your card on the outstretched card machine, the beep signalling a successful payment.

“What a strange place, a piece of…whatever that is containing all your wealth”

“Strange? A winged goblin takes my wages in a bank made of seashells at home and you think this is strange?” You laughed, taking a glorious sip of the coffee.

“You don’t think Gerry is helpful?” Azirel bemused as you rolled you eyes again.

“Gerry is the most helpful of anyone at home I suppose” Azriel beamed down towards your use of home, Valeris was still your home. You offered the drink to him and he took a regretful deep sip of the honey black liquid. His face contorted into shapes as the energetic liquid of life entered his system,

“Nice?” “I think Cassian’s dirt mixture was nicer” he winced out as you rolled your eyes. It wasn’t long before Azriel’s small sip of coffee had him bouncing off the walls with energy, so unused to the power of caffeine and colourings rife in our food. As the evening turned into night, the pub filled with college students ready to relax and the dance floor came to life. Georgie had the caffeine bursting Azriel quickly on his feet to swing around the dance floor with the other two girls, leaving you and Damien to chat in the booth.

“Looking for that ring before Spring YNN?” He laughed into his pint as the back of your hand gently met his chest. He quickly caught hold of it to keep it there, beckoning you to turn to face him.

“I could give it to you” he said quietly, barely audible over the booming music the was blowing Azriel’s mind some feet away.

“Dam, stop” You smiled sadly, taking back your hand.

“We were great together!”

“We were fuck buddies” You laughed in surprise at his bold statement.

“Exactly!” He joined your laugh, a familiar playfulness falling back between you both. Azriel swirled Cammy around when a sudden creep of a sugar crash headache started to slide up from the nape of his neck. He released Cammy’s hand and apologised to the girl's pleas to stay as he made his way back to the booth. Through the sea of people, Azriel found his eyes land on you and Damien, looking ever so comfortable in the booth. He watched as Damien took a ring from your finger and placed it on the one where people's wedding bands on before he leaned in and whispered something into your ear. Azriel felt a wash of rage, it chasing away any semblance of a headache from him as he shoved his way through the crowd trying to find the door. Meanwhile, you began to laugh at the obscene idea that Damien would ever be the one you’d end up with, slipping your ring back to your thumb. You looked out to see the back of Azriel’s head exit through the door as you attempted to follow him, finding it a lot harder to break through the crowd than the broad Illyrian.

Azriel stormed through the drizzle-drenched streets, crowds and crowds of people washing around him, the deafening buzz of overhead street lights had Azriel wondering how you weren’t all driven mad. He had no idea where he was, only that he wanted to go home to where things made sense and fluorescents were only found in the brightest flowers of Spring and not around every corner. The Spymaster stopped in front of an electrical goods shop, shut for the night but with the displays still on. Flashes of the news painted across the rectangular screen, more hypersonic buzzing radiating through the glass. Azriel watched in horror at the scenes of unrest, scenes of familiar trenches but with more gruesome otherworldly weapons. The sight turned his stomach, forcing his feet onward as pictures of the battlefield danced across his mind. He wandered off the step onto the road, a large SUV breaking harshly in front of him, blowing the bellowing horn in his direction, more incomparable noise. Azriel darted from the road, narrowingly missing being flattened by another SUV. This world was so noisy, so deafening he couldn’t understand you ever finding peace here.

The rain picked up its hammering from a drizzle to a drum as his rain soden boots met the pavement with increasing weight. Even the weather was different here, somehow crueller than what he faced in the darkest of storms at home. Azriel felt out of control, overwhelmed in every sense of the word, swaddled by the choking of the deafening never-ending buzz of street lamps. He couldn’t find his way through the sea of nausea and people, people chattering into their little glowing boxes, tapping a deafening finger on the buzzing screens. Buzzing, so much buzzing, all Azriel could think of until he found his breath uneven, no match for the buzzing. His heavy hips met the step outside a jeweller, the quietest of buzzing but still pinging in his ears. Calloused hands dug into his face as he tried to bring his breathing back, unable to capture its elusiveness.

“Az!” Your voice rose above the buzz, Azriel, lifting his head from his hands as you ran to him, the colour drained away from his cheeks. You caught him gently by the shoulders, his rattling bones bouncing off your rain-soaked sleeves.

“C’mon love, it’s okay” You did your best to pull his weight up from the step, guiding the seemingly shellshocked Illyrian back the few blocks to your dorm, the buzzing never really easing but breath beginning to return.

Once inside, you took his rain-soaked clothes from him, leaving him in just his undergarments before swaddling him in the duvet and guiding him down to the bed. The bone-rattling buzz continued inside your room, the maddening sound causing Azriel to claw at his ears.

“What Az, what?” you pleaded.

“It's so-so loud here!” he winced, eyes scrunched closed. You quickly darted around, unplugging everything, and shoving a pillow along the foot of the door to block the noise and light from outside. The motheaten curtains were quickly swooshed closed, soothing darkness swallowing the room until you lit a few candles to illuminate your bath back to Azriel as he lay in your bed. You discarded your own drenched clothing before sliding into the space alongside Azriel. His clammy skin clung to you as his arms wrapped around your waist.

“That, that was horrible” he whispered into your hair.

“I think you had a panic attack sweetie, a symptom of my realm” you nuzzled into his chest, eager to hear his heartbeat return to normal.

“Did I steal you away from your life here?” he questioned after a moment of comforting silence. He had seen you beam with joy many times since meeting you but never with the level of familiarity you seemed to have tonight.

“If you want to get technical, Nesta stole me” You chuckled softly before lifting to rest your chin on his peck and meet his eye.

“Details” he grinned.

“The only thing you stole was my heart” You admitted sweetly before making a retching sound “ew gross feeeeeeeelings” you mocked, Azriel rolling his eyes before kissing you sweetly.

“I bet Damien would have a few words to say about that”

“Yeah well Damien is a little bitch” You smiled, Azriel looking as proud as ever.

“My girl” he squeezed you tight.

“No one else’s”

For the following two weeks, you introduced the world a lot more softly to Azriel, with lots of breaks in the haven of safety from the buzz you had built in your room. Azriel began to see so many things right in this realm and challenged the wrong. He could see how someone could call this place home but it would never be his and he counted down what sense of time he could before you would return to his realm. Azriel’s bravery grew and one late one evening he ventured out alone into the world while you slept off a day of explaining how cars, debit cards, instant noodles and electric razors work.

The street where all the deafening had occurred was silent, as the sun sinking banished the need for overhead street lamps. He wandered with more comfort down the street until he landed at the step that you had rescued him from, a neon sign glowing in the window of the shop. “Cash for gold” Azriel read allowed, an idea sounding off in his head.

When you woke up to an empty bed, panic had stolen your voice as you began to haphazardly clothe yourself, your hand barely touching the door knob as Azriel strode in.

“Gods Az, I thought you were gone on another rampage-” You smiled, taking the flowers he offered you “-these are lovely” you beamed.

“YNN, I have a surprise for you” You raised an eyebrow as he came in, closing the door behind him. You watched him carefully cross the room, discarding the jacket you had bought for him in a charity shop, along with his other new clothing. You placed the delicate flowers on the dresser before turning to see a somewhat worried Illyrian.

“YNN, this is a strange world, filled with strange customs, but this is the custom I like the best-” “-yes”

“YN, I love you so much and I know we’ve only been officially together for a short time or a very long time, who can tell but-” “-yes” you mumbled in shock, Azriel not hearing you as he was wrapped up in anxiously delivering his speech.

“-I just know you're supposed to be mine forever and-”

“-yes”

“-I will work harder for the life you deserve-”

“-yes”

“-because you deserve the moon and stars and I want to be the one to give them to you, in every and all realms, YNN, will you be with me forever” Azriel retrieved a ring of precious stones, dazzling rays of your favourite colour danced along the precious metal as he held it out to, where it met silence.

“This is-this is where you answer, from what I’ve read” he mumbled after a moment, staving off the rising panic he wished to never feel again.

“I said yes Az” Tears brimmed your cheeks as he launched forward for you, holding you so tight that it may burst your bones.

“I love you so much YN, I don't know how I got so lucky to find you” he slipped the ring on gently, it fitting perfectly.

“I love you too Azriel” You kissed again, shielding each other from the chill of the night that leaked through the poorly insulated walls.

“I did contemplate pulling a Rhysand and have you face a beast to retrieve your own ring but I didn’t fancy trying to slip the ring under Nesta’s pillow while she slept” You laughed at him, gently hitting him into the chest, the gleam of the rings charm catching your eye.

“So now can we go get some sleep”

“I wasn't thinking of doing much sleeping tonight YN” he smirked and you returned the same, rolling your eyes.

“I don't know you didn't get down on one knee, kinda ruins it” You teased and he grinned biting his lip.

“Oh Gods I change my mind I can't be stuck with a Smart Ass for a wife the rest of my life”

“Wife” you repeated and it caused both of you to smile greatly, a tinge of sadness then panging through you.

“What about finding your mate Az?” you looked from the stones to his jewel-like amber eyes.

“I found her” he kissed you deeply, draining any and all doubt from your bones. Forever was a long time but you looked forward to its endlessness with Azriel.

------------------------

Whatcha think????

188 notes · View notes

chososdiscordkitten · 10 months ago

Text

Bite me.

Synopsis:Choso tastes readers blood for the first time >ᵥ_ᵥ<

Pairing: Vampire!Choso x fem!reader Content: porn w/plot, established relationship, blood (duh), biting, missionary, spit stuff, blood stuff, cream pie

MDNI

The little secret Choso had was supposed to stay just that- a secret. A secret pushed to the back of his mind- too shamed and fearful of what could happen had you found out.

But there were times Choso swore you knew. When you’d carelessly brush your hair onto one side, giving his teeth full access to the tastiest part of you. Even if to the bare eye it wasn’t noticeable, he could see the thick stream of blood in your jugular pulse whenever he looked at it.

As though you were begging him to sink his teeth into your skin without words.

His suspicions only grew when you would ask questions in an insinuating tone. Why the brown of his eyes had a sprinkle of crimson in them, why at times he would show up to your apartment- his lips lightly stained in a distant red. And why he had a metallic scent to him every now and then.

And most of all- why he would look at you like you were a meal to be had.

And with the blooming relationship between you and him, you simply blamed it on something all humans feel—something a man would feel when looking at a person he had an interest in.

But to him, Choso never picked apart the reasons why he wanted to drink from you. The only way he could describe it was starvation that couldn’t be satiated even with stolen blood bags. A hunger that Choso felt rumble his very soul when he looked at you.

And he would push that feeling down- too fearful of the risk of tasting you and the inability to stop, making him wish he was never plagued with such a disease.

That hunger roused in his heart the very first time you kissed him. Along with the itching feeling of a new kind of hunger. Desperately chasing the warmth your lips pressed onto his cold skin.

That very same warmth that reminded him that you were filled with the cerise liquid he dreamt of.

You had your own suspicions. Sure, Choso was a little strange at times. Specific phrases indicating he had claimed you, at once even saying how fucking good you smelled first thing in the morning. It made you squint- and tilt your head in the slightest.

But maybe he just couldn’t formulate ‘normal compliments’ that you had heard before. Instead of strange, you saw it as endearing when he would say those kinds of things.

But when Choso spoke as though he were from another time, his brown eyes blotted with deep red spots. How his pupils would pulse when you looked a little too closely into them. He could go in the sun, but rare were the times he would.

The time you nicked yourself while mincing vegetables- he ran up to help. At first, with all the urgency of the world- grabbing your finger and scolding you for being so careless.

And holding your lightly oozing digit in his hand, he would watch the cherry blood seep from your tissue. And god- your scent stuck in his nose the longer he held you. And when the smell flooded his brain- hazing any reservations he had.

Choso lifted the tip of your finger to his lips- flashing them up at you only for you to snatch your hand away from him- muttering something about how it would get infected before wrapping it up.

How his cold hands would cling to you and feel the humanity pulse through your veins. The overwhelming urge to have you, have you moved into his place- far too precious to leave you on your own.

If he, himself- your boyfriend was having these carnal urges to do these things to you- to taste you. What would another person do to you?

And Choso, when the realization that you would be sleeping beside him- thick thighs bare and your neck exposed, along with the pulse in your wrist. In deep sleep- unaware of the starved creature lying beside you.

That’s when Choso realized just how masochistic he was being.

He loved you more than enough to endure the rowling thoughts in his mind- enough to stay awake and watch you. Even if he closed his eyes and tried to ignore it- he could hear the liters of blood pulse beneath your skin. Choso endured it as much as he could.

And with you moving in, it made it harder to hide that secret. Why there was a mini fridge with a lock on it, stuffed full of blood bags—Choso was sure you would find any day now.

So when it came to the late-night activities only done in the bedroom- as though your bare skin begged for his teeth all over your body. Choso could feel two kinds of hunger pulse beneath his skin when he first touched you.

Even more so when your bare body was pressed against his- unknowing of the torment the act inflicted onto him. The plush warmth that would surround his member, reminding him that you were filled with the tantalizing red liquid everytime he pushed himself into you.

It ate away at him. It felt like a lie- the idea that you’d look at him as a monster had he told you plagued him.

But he feared you finding the bags and seeing him as a serial killer- or a madman, and losing you before he could explain what he was.

So he sat you down- hoping you’d have an open mind when he dared say the words.

Sitting on the couch, his cold hands holding yours. You found it odd—rare were the times Choso held that much severity in his eyes when he spoke to you.

You smiled genuinely, unknowing what he had to be so serious about.

His thumbs lightly caressed the tops of your hands. “Do you remember when he watched that movie—with the strange girl and the man who played Batman?”

You squint your eyes. “Twilight?” His cold thumbs halt their caresses, looking at you seriously with a soft nod.

Choso started stuttering over his words- saying that he was like that man, but it was different. Words were spewed from his throat, throwing them at you and hoping you would understand. Confessing this greatest sin that had eaten away at him from the moment of meeting you.

You only raised your eyebrows- hearing the blathering go on and on. Only for your eyes to squint, “Are you trying to tell me you’re a….” hesitating, knowing how insane it would have sounded.

Choso only nodded, looking down at your hands with a little laugh falling from your lips. “Is this some kind of roleplay you wanted to try?” You joked, watching his face fall from its severity and mumble a small ‘no.’

“First of all- if you were, you wouldn’t be living with me. You’d be off in Rome living in a castle-” Leaning back onto the couch with an unbelieving smile. “And your teeth aren’t pointy.” you giggled, watching the man before you look at you with sorry eyes.

He parted his lips to speak- “And? I’ve literally seen you go into the sun.” pulling your hands from his and crossing them across your chest.

“I don’t know how to explain it to you—I can barely comprehend it myself,” he defended, watching your face wear an unamused look.

You pursed your lips, sarcastically saying, “Start with proof—how ’bout that?” Bored of this larping Choso decided to start.

Choso pulled his lips to the side, thinking of his least jarring approach. Proof- there was a lot of, but he tried finding the least callous one to show you.

He parted his lips, lightly bearing his top row of teeth with a little huff falling from your throat- seeing the unsharpened canines look back at you.

Choso thought back to you- closing his eyes and recalling your blood’s metallic scent when he almost lost himself in it. He could hear your steady heartbeat quicken when the pearly canines grew slightly- pointed downwards with a sharp end.

You scoffed- refusing to believe his attempts at a joke. And as though he could hear your thoughts- claims that this had to be some parlor trick. He reached from your hand, placing it onto his chin and urging you to touch.

Gulping lightly when his voice rumbled from his throat, “Touch them- they’re real.”

And as your thumb lightly grazed his bottom lip, you leaned in closer with squinted eyes. Lightly pressing the pad of your thumb against the pointy tooth, unknowing how hard Choso’s heart was beating in that moment.

You slid your thumb down the tooth, pressing up into the pointed edge with a wince. Pulling away, you looked at the little prick on your thumb.

You parted your lips to speak, only for Choso to beat you to it. “And-” he muttered, placing his hands on the side of your head and pulling you close to him- looking into your eyes. Far too close and watching the little pupils dilate- the color around them slightly swirling with splotches of red.

Choso pressed his lips against yours- knowing he had drunk earlier. Pulling away from you and watching your smug expression fade- “Taste it-” he muttered, pressing his lips onto yours again.

And as you allowed his tongue to press against yours- you could taste what he was referring to. The light flavor of metal mixed with his spit. Pulling away from you and holding your head with urge- “Do you taste it?” he muttered, his lips lightly brushing against yours with every word.

Too in awe and bordering on fear- you only looked into his eyes with a hint of suspicion.

Standing up and taking your hand- guiding you to that little locked mini fridge and yanking off the lock. Too much urgency and frustration to go find the key.

He showed you another form of proof he was, as he claimed—his strength. Sure, you knew he was strong—able to manhandle you with ease, leaving light bruises on your skin whenever he would get too rough, able to bring in all the groceries in one trip. You blamed it on his physique, knowing he was beautifully sculpted beneath his loose-fitting clothing.

But this—pulling a metal lock from a metal hinge without any resistance or even a grunt of struggle leaving his lips. Made you wonder just how strong he was—and how much he was holding back before now.

All of that was proof enough- but the sight of neatly stacked blood bags confirmed it. You stood there for a second- looking at the crimson bags of plastic and feeling Choso’s gaze on your skin. Suddenly, too aware of how vulturous it felt. Before, it felt admiration-filled. It felt like a gaze full of love.

But now it felt like he was looking at you with appetite.

Your heartbeat beating quickly made Choso realize you took this seriously now. You looked over at him- face deadpan with your eyes hinting to fear. “You don’t- eat people, right?” you muttered, a scared tone infiltrating his ears.

Choso looked down to the ground, “Not currently, no.” he confessed, hearing your hand lightly close the little door of the minifridge and gulp.

“Are you gonna eat me?” you asked, causing his eyes to flash back up to you in fear.

He knit his eyebrows and took your hands in his again, “I would never eat you.” he vowed, looking into your eyes.

“Have you thought about it?” you murmured, watching his eyebrows pinch in shame.

“it’s hard not to,” he confessed, watching your head lightly nod.

And with a light inhale- you walked back onto the couch, watching him sit on the other end as you stared at him. A million questions whirring in your mind as he shifted in your gaze. Wishing he could hear what you were thinking.

Somehow, still trying to justify the proof you asked for; just more larping, he’s a weirdo- or a psychopath. But that softness in his eyes- gave you a reason to try and ignore the proof.

You stared at him for a few minutes, trying to find the words to say- or an excuse to leave the apartment and run.

And when you were finally able to conjure the words, “Can I ask questions?” you peered, your face stoic and unshowing how hard your heart was beating. Choso nodded his head ‘yes’- knowing the truth of what he just confessed must feel like a lie.

In a world of fictional demons and countless books written with blood sucking people- it was fair that you had your suspicions.

Choso knew—he watched those very movies with you, holding back comments like ‘that’s not true’ whenever an incorrect fact was spoken in the films.

Even if you held a deadpan expression, your heartbeat gave away how you truly felt, “For how long have you been,” stopping your sentence short and thinking on what word to use.

“Since the 1870’s.” he spoke honestly.

You peeked your eyebrows- mentally doing the math and taking a long blink. “That would make you-”

“175 years old.”

You lightly grimaced, thinking back on every time he would say some timely word you had only heard in the black-and-white movies you’d watch with him. “Why are you here—with me?” you reiterated, watching his avoidant eyes look down at his hands.

“I mean, it must be torture,” you muttered, thinking of the difficulty shown in every movie with this exact plot line.

Choso looked up at you. “At times, it can be.” He lightly nodded, being able to hear your heartbeat slow in the slightest. “But I know I would never hurt you.”

After a handful more questions; if he preferred a specific kind of blood, what kind of people tasted better. Your heartbeat fell back into its normal state.

There was an adjustment period- asking if you could sleep on the couch rather than next to him. Not scared- but nervous to sleep next to him. And Choso being the man he was- he took that responsibility and slept on the couch for as long as you asked.

But then came the moment of acceptance- and Choso swore you started doing these things on purpose. Pulling your hair back and giving him a complete view of your neck. As controlled as his bloodlust was- it was still obscene how thirsty he got looking at you. And something carnal threatened to control his actions rather than his head.

And times when he would hug you- getting a nose full of that sweet scent that seeped from your skin. Or when you started sleeping in tank tops- exposing more of your skin to him as you slept. Helpless and too tired to notice his heavy gaze on your collarbones.

It also didn’t help when you realized that Choso was turned when he was a few years older than you— it hit you like a truck.

Fearing to get older than the age he was when he was turned. Then came the talk of if he would turn you.

When Choso thought about it- he wasn’t like any other protagonist in any vampire media. Choso was selfish and afraid of the day when you’d die- leaving him to roam the earth alone again.

“It isn’t as simple as just turning you,” he muttered, knowing what it meant when someone like him turned their partner. That’s the only part the stupid films got correct.

Sat on the kitchen counter and watching him patter through the kitchen- cooking you a meal as you pestered him with the same question. “You mean the whole- once I turn, we’re supposed to stay together forever?” you asked, unamused with the doubt he held.

“That- and technically, you’d be soulless,” he muttered as you let out a small laugh.

“Of all people- you are the last one I would describe as soulless, Choso.”

You scoffed, pulling your hair to the side and watching his shoulders tense up. Slightly tilting your neck and looking at him- “Is it not tempting?” You whispered in a taunt, watching his eyes flash to the smooth skin you displayed for him.

Thinking the way it worked was the same as the Twilight movies- one bite and you’d be turned, right?

Only your offerings meant nothing but a way of tasting you. Choso knew you wouldn’t become as he was from one bite. But christ- it was tempting.

It made his brain throb in his skull, being able to hear every little pulse your neck pumped with crimson. “It doesn’t work like that.” he muttered, stepping away from the stove and taking a step towards you.

“Still, you never wanted to taste it-” his hips easing between your thighs, placing his cold hands against the sides of your thighs. “You never wanted to taste me?” you whispered, his eyes blinking down to the exposed skin of your neck and gulping.

Choso’s hands gripped lightly at your thighs, almost bracing for what he was about to say- “I don’t want to hurt you.” he breathed, his eyes dark and full of want.

“You can control yourself, right?” you whispered, his head nodding softly. “Think about it- once I turn, you’ll never be able to taste me.” tone full of feigned pity, knowing he would turn you- even if he hadn’t said it yet.

Choso’s lips parted slightly and his mouth went dry. The thought pained his heart- knowing you had a point. “‘Lemme think about it.” he muttered, kissing your cheek quickly before turning back to the pan on the stove.

You sighed a drawn-out breath, “Dunno how you do it,” you muttered, watching his shoulders fall from tension. “If you were begging me to bite you- to taste you.” you exhaled sharply, “I wouldn’t have made you ask twice.”

And he did think about it- weighing out the options in his brain. How bad it would actually be if he tasted you- ’cause that’s all you offered. Just a taste, but with how sweet you smelled- Choso wasn’t sure that 'ust a taste' would be enough for him.

That paired with the pain you would feel, two sharp teeth sinking into your skin- Choso had no idea why you would keep offering. Why you kept provoking him to hurt you.

So one late night, your hands drawing searing touches onto Choso’s skin with your lips softly peppering kisses onto his cheek.

Most of the time, it was you who would instigate these activities. Too afraid to hurt you had Choso not kept his hands to himself.

However, this was the first time you instigated these acts after he confessed his secret to you. And still- Choso tried keeping his hands to himself, even if your own were daring to slip past the band of his sweats.

Topless and on your back, legs spread with his hips daring to rut into your clothed core. You raised a hand beneath the hem of his t-shirt, lightly grazing his back with your nails and kissing his ear lightly.

“Touch me-” you whispered into his ear, intent and urge soaking your words as his hands roam up your thighs.

A soft whimper left his lips at your words- his mind reeling at the fact that you were aware of the kind of monster he was, and you still wanted his touch.

His lips lightly pressed kisses onto your jugular- holding all the restraint he could as he felt the pulse of life beneath your skin. Your hands tugging at the fabric on his back in desperation- his hips responding by bucking into the clothing separating him from your warmth.

Taking a hand from your hip and placing it onto the band of your bottoms- sinking his fingers beneath the layers and to your soaked cunt. Showing him just how negligent he had been since he confessed to you.

A light whimper left your lips as he pulled his own from your neck, too tempted by the vulnerability to keep himself there.

The tips of his middle and ring fingers sink down to the source of your slick- lightly circling at your entrance and coating them before trailing them to the puffy bud atop.

Placing your lips on his again- desperate to relieve the ache between your legs as your tongue swirled against his. The distant taste of metal in his mouth as your eyebrows knitted together. His eager fingers started small circles against you, his hips mindlessly bucking into the air between you as your moans rumbled onto his lips.

It was agonizing the pace Choso tried keeping- your walls so desperate to pull him between them and feel him thrust.

The light touch his fingers kept only made your hips buck into his hand- gasping between every other kiss at the pressure. The grip his other hand held on your side- bordering on bruising from how frustrated he was starting to feel.

Beneath the layers of fabric- throbbing tears soiling his bottoms with every light roll his hips made to relieve the yearning his cock felt.

You tried holding out- suffered sighs of frustrations leaving your lips as his hand continued its snail pace.

But the ache you felt- Choso’s fingers only taunted it. So as you pulled away from him- looking into the mix of brown and red eyes staring back at you, “Need you inside-” you murmured with need, your words filling the air between your lips and his as your hands pushed down the band of his sweats.

The tips of your fingers pressing against the side of his thigh- almost as a plea.

And as you asked of him, Choso clashed his lips back to yours as he removed his hand from your bottoms- his hands full of desire as they pulled your pj bottoms off. Far too eager and desperate to grant your wish with the sweet scent of your skin filling the air- muddying his mind as your hands assisted in removing his bottoms.

Tugging at the hem of his shirt with his chest heaving- watching his hands remove the useless fabric and toss it aside. A small groan of appeasement left your lips as you got an eyeful of his sculpted torso.

Wasting no time in placing your hands on his hips, guiding him to ease himself back where he was before. Choso’s cockhead bordered on turning a violent shade of red as his hands found their place on your hips.

Your hand reaching for is base- urging him to sink into you as you had asked. Choso’s mind was hazy, unable to think as he looked down to the millimeters of space separating his cock from your entrance.

Your bare skin secreting the aroma the cause of the misty state his brain was in. Feeling the light pang of his canines that threatened to grow- a telltale sign he wanted to feed.

His hips followed the guidance your hand led him to, sucking air sharply through his teeth as your warmth surrounded the tip of his aching cock. The alarming rate of your heartbeat causes his eyes to blink back at you.

Wearing a desperate expression and a trembling lip- your mouth whispering muddy words in a silent plea.

And as your hand eased off his cock- Choso’s hips moved forwards, nuzzling his tip further into you as he closed his lips. Avoiding your gaze with his eyes shut tight- trying to hold back every urge that pulsed in his head.

His hips started slow strokes, easing himself out of you with a sigh of desperation. And your cunt tried with all its might to suck him back in, and Choso- not knowing how much longer he could keep his urges at bay, was so fucking close to rutting into you again- quicker and without hesitation.

Your hands clawed at his biceps, drawing him from the focus he tried holding. Soft moans escaped your plush lips when the tip of his cockhead nudged against the most sensitive spot inside of you.

Choso raised his head to face you- his mouth parted and his eyebrows pinched tightly. Your eyes caught onto the glistening peaks of white that Choso’s lips tried hiding, eyes full of hunger and thirst.

His hand rose from your hip and landed on your neck, feeling the warmth course beneath his grasp. Some way of bracing himself as he fought off the impulse.

Your hand trailed up his shoulder, landing on his nape and lightly pulling his ear to your lips. With a tone that sounded like the very gates of heaven to his ears, “Bite me.” you whispered, your hand guiding his head down to your neck where his lips previously kissed.

Choso’s mind was too foggy to even focus on his past reservations. The hand at his back clawing gently, your cunt surrounding his cock, the light hold your hand held on his scalp; made Choso yield the very last of his will over to you.

Closing his eyes as his nose engulfed the scent of your skin, his hips losing pattern in the slow strokes he held. Parting his lips and placing a wet kiss onto the place his teeth ached for.

The light moans leaving your lips were heard as an urgency to his ears, bearing his teeth and lightly grazing the sharp canines against your skin. A shiver settling in your spine at the feather-like scratch.

Choso’s teeth sinking into your skin with a wince mixed with a gasp falling from your lips. The groan Choso rumbled against the punctures made your hand lightly pull on his hair, tucking your lip between your teeth at the sting, losing the feeling of it as it mixed with the pleasure from his cock.

Choso almost came when your taste waved into his mouth. His thrusts sloppy as the saccharine taste of you trickled down his throat- warm, unlike the countless blood bags he had sustained himself on. And sweet- so fucking sweet.

Eyes closed and bordering on rolling to the back of his head with his hips quickening.

Then the reminder of, ‘just a taste’ rumbled in his mind. Unsheathing his sharp teeth from your skin and opening his eyes. Looking back to you- small trickles of blood on his lip with a look of fear in his eyes. His breathing labored and trying to hold back the throaty whines that dared leave his lips.

You moaned lightly- pulling his lips back to yours and tasting yourself on him. Uncaring of the strong taste of metal, you slathered your tongue against his, sloppy and inconsistent. Mostly sharp teeth clashing against your own as your essence laced his spit.

Your hold on his hair strengthened, a mess forming between your lips and his. Your eyes squinting tightly as his thrusts became rougher, the warmth in your tummy pooling at the action.

The hand on the opposite side of your neck lightly squeezed in desperation, your orgasm building as his tip bullied your gspot. Pulling away from him in a hymn-like moan, unable to keep the attempts of a kiss with every strong thrust he made.

Choso’s eyes blinked at your lips, lightly glazed in your essence with a small smudge at the corner of your mouth. He couldn’t help the mumbled words of, ‘M’sorry-’ that left his throat, connecting his lips with yours again and feeling the walls of your cunt flutter around him.

His eyes rolling back with the evident taste on your tongue. Thrusts sloppy and fast- pounding into you as your hands tugged at whatever they could find. Clawing at the broad of his back, and grasping a handful of brown hair in the other.

Soft whines lacing your exhales as you come undone, a low guttural moan separating your lips from his. Choso’s teeth clenched at the sudden vice-like grasp your cunt held around him.

The hand on your hip held a mean grip as he worked himself to orgasm. His chest caving against yours with every sharp exhale he made.

Your hand trailed from his hair and down to his jaw, placing your thumb on his lower cheek and curling your fingers beneath his chin. Angling his face for you to see, his scarlet-tinted lips trembling, his dark hairline dampened with a light veil of sweat, your low eyes watched with soft grunts leaving your lips.

Choso parted his eyes as he felt the grip you held his lower face with, watching an expression of desire form on your face as he felt the wave of his orgasm crash through him with a low grunt.

Thick and heavy pumps of his essence filled you, watching his peaked eyebrows wiggle with the slowing thrusts his hips made.

Huffing heavily as he nuzzled his cock further into you- as deep as he could. Lowering his forehead to yours and batting his eyes closed, pressing down a lazy kiss to your plush lips.

Steadying his breathing as your hands eased their grip. Lifting himself slightly, blinking his eyes open in a hazy afterglow- darting his eyes to the holes he punched into your skin.

Regret filling his stomach as he lightly tilts your head to the side, to give him a better view of the wounds. Mentally scolding himself for losing control and doing as you asked, even if the light trickling of your blood enticed him for more- the love he felt in his heart overrode his primal urges.

Easing himself out of you with a wince, sitting on his knees as you followed him. Pulling a sheet from the side of the bed over your bare body.

Sitting up and feeling his hand hold your neck in a curve, you grinned, peering into his worried expression. "It's okay." you declared.

You reached up to his hand, holding it in yours and looking at him straight on. “I liked it.” you whispered, watching his eyes blink in confusion. The corners of his mouth stained with your blood, parting his lips as you lightly caressed his cold hand.

Furrowing his eyebrows in disappointment in himself, “I can't-” Choso whispered, bordering on a whimper.

Just seeing the scabbing wounds was more painful to him than to you.

Knowing he was the one that did it- hurt just as much. And yet you asked for more. Continuously offering yourself as his own personal blood bag- warmed to the perfect temperature and laced with the sweetest flavor that he had ever tasted.

And he tried—Choso tried with everything in him not to let your words convince him otherwise. But the taste of you couldn’t be washed out from his tongue—not even with a hundred bags of cold blood from strangers.

So convinced that it was only because it came from someone he loved- that he found such addiction in it. That and how you would allow him to drink the liquid from your skin knowing it would satiate his hunger.

And everytime you would offer your body to him- he would always look at your eyes, asking for your sanction.

Even if the hunger pulsed in his stomach, that’s what he would wait for- the clear permission he was allowed to sink himself into you again.

(a.n) how I only used the word 'vampire' once? I have no idea.

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twstyuna · 1 month ago

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Quick doodle to get it out of my head

A professor and his pup /The Girl from the Other Side AU / I like the idea of Crewel in some kind of post apocalypse Twisted Wonderland finding this magicless human child and getting Attached.

Random Notes there isn't whole fleshed out plot also spoilers for the manga.

More of the vibe/concept for the original manga rather than direct plot/mechanics equivalence

Suddenly, using any magic started resulting in massive blot accumlation. Instead of just overblotting and getting phantoms though, people started in turning into the equivalent of Outsiders/Black Children/Children of Mother in the manga. The Phantom thing can happen but this new infection/curse thing turns magicians into creatures/Outsiders first.

Outsiders can't die exactly. In the manga, they begin to lose their memories after a while, then turn into trees. Do they turn ino trees here? Um.

Crewel doesn't remember his name. Yuu calls him Professor.

If you touch one of them you will start to turn into one of them. This is because the "curse" starts infecting the other's magic. Yuu, being totally magicless, is immune to the curse as far as either can tell.

Yuu isn't allowed to touch him directly anyway, just in case. The gloves are a precaution but Crewel will refuse contact with that to be safe. Holding onto his coat is fine/enough layers of separation for him though.

Crewel and Yuu are basically travelling around, trying to find Yuu a way home, as vain as that may be

Yuu's hair turned white from isekai stress because i want them to look like Shiva. Crewel has 3 tails. He is, in fact, still dying his hair in the end times.

#twst au #Totsukuni no Shōjo #the girl from the other side #yuu #twst yuu mc #twst yuu/mc #divus crewel #twst crewel #divus crewel x yuu #platonic #yunart

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eff4freddie · 6 months ago

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Of Comfort

Joel Miller x AFAB Reader Words 1.7k Rated: Explicit, Minors DNI

Joel's formidable powers of observation have kept him alive, got him and Ellie to Jackson, makes him deadly on patrols. It also means he can easily tell when there's something up with you.

Warnings: smut, oral (f receiving), hurt/comfort, you're sad sometimes and Joel notices, plot? we don't know her, the cover art is obnoxiously large but I have nfi how to fix it A/N: guys, I've suffered a loss this week and I'm sad. This is an indulgent comfort fic. I hope you enjoy and if you do please drop me a comment, I could use the boost. Love youse x

There wasn’t even anything really the matter. You just felt low, felt the absence of the people you cared about. Long dead or infected. Most of the time, you had somewhat of a say in when it happened. There were some moments you allowed yourself to think of them, carved out a time in your day to remember just so that you could put them back on the shelf and get on with things.

There were also times when you didn’t have the choice. When the time would come to pay the piper, whether you could spare the change or not. These were the moments you dreaded, feared waiting for you around dark corners, in quiet moments, in little dust motes dancing in the dawning light. These moments that let the melancholy in. In those moments you felt something heavy planted on your chest, and at the same time an emptiness, felt the loss in the sheer weight of it as it crushed you.

You never said anything about it. Everyone in Jackson had suffered such incalculable losses that it felt almost moot. Embedded in the walls, planted in the soil of the place were the spindly threads of grief. No fish ever complains about the cold of the water.

For the most part you were a good enough mimic that you could go about your day in Jackson, work the soil in the greenhouses, spread hay still warm from the sun for the sheep, sit and let the conversations wash over you in the mess hall. You would get away with it, except for Joel.

Joel, whose ability to notice things had kept him and Ellie alive, had brought them to Jackson not once but twice, had kept him steely and watchful on every patrol you’d ever been on with him, cowering under the power of his gaze when he shone it on you.

He didn’t ask anything of you when he appeared on your front porch, sometimes carrying half a bottle of whiskey, sometimes just his coat. He wouldn’t attempt to pry, crack open your ribcage, just sensing with his innate ability that your head would slip under the surface if he did, that the wave would crush you, steal the air from your lungs. He would simply step forward, pulling you firm but soft into the circle of his arms, rest his chin on the crown of your head and blot your tears with the cotton of his shirt.

‘Joel,’ sometimes you’d whimper, and he’d shush you, maybe rock you a little in his arms, let you burrow into his neck and rest there, gather yourself. You would feel the warmth of his skin on your lips as you whispered his name, implored him to help you forget again. And he would lift you, so smooth and effortless, up into his arms, your thighs circling him, ankles locked behind him, as he carried you up to your room.

The chill in the air would raise goosebumps on your skin as he stripped your clothes from you, warming you with his hands and his tongue, peppering kisses over your shoulders and your collarbones, tracing the skin with his lips. Trembling, you would feel the muscles roll themselves out for him, surrender to his heat and the press of his body against yours. You would let him sit you down on the edge of the bed, lifting your chin as he stood between your knees, bending down to drop kisses on your cheek, on your eye sockets, down to your lips.

He would be too quiet, almost silent but for the sharp intake of his breath as he reached down to cup your tits, roll your nipples between his thumbs and listen to the way you keened. The heat would shoot down to your core, your pooling slick gathering on the bedspread, as the shock of the pleasure would grip you, and you’d ask him then, heart racing, to say something, to tell you, to warm you with his words.

‘My sweet girl,’ he’d say, and you would close your eyes, the rumble of it in his chest just an inch from your face. ‘My beautiful girl,’ he’d speak again, pulling your hair over your shoulders, gathering it in his fist and angling your face to him again. You would stare up at him, eyes wide and wet as he gazed down at you, thick lips and warm brown pupils blown. ‘So brave,’ he’d say, and you would hiccup a little sob, the relief and the joy of it bubbling high in your oesophagus. You would never feel more naked than in this moment with him, always with his hands in your hair and his eyes roaming your face, appraising you, praising you. He would wipe away the tears on your cheeks, his fingertips rough against your soft skin. ‘Let me show you how strong you are,’ he'd say, and he’d be pushing you down then, gently by the shoulder, releasing your hair to slide his hands down your spine and under your bottom, pulling you fast to the edge of the bed as your shoulders hit the mattress, knees widening to make room for his shoulders as he crouched between them.

‘Perfect little cunt,’ he’d say, but almost to himself more than to you, and you would feel the thrill of it just the same, the pounding of your heart matching the ache in your pussy as you waited, spread, for him to devour you. You wanted to cry, to groan, to grab his hair and pull him to you, but you let him have his moment with your cunt, let him savour it, borrowed some of his power to believe yourself worthy of his need.

Seconds, minutes, centuries would tick by, and you would wait, breath caught in your throat, chest thundering, until you felt him dip down to you, felt his breath on your lips, hot and humid and sweet. For all the time he had taken to devour you with his eyes, he would not be so languid with his tongue, licking a stripe up your cunt to open you before dipping down, nose nudging at your clit, as he circled his tongue inside.

You would hold your breath, sometimes bite on your fist, so as not to muffle the groan he would let out at the first taste, his breath coming sharp and fast through his nose as his eyes slammed shut, brow furrowed. If you were to get up on your elbows and try to pull him away by the hair he would growl, like a rabid dog fighting for its last meal, and so you would submit to it, the pleasure and his need, let him drink.

But soon you would be writhing, the bedspread in your fists as you rocked your head side to side, gasping for breath and whining, sounds only he is capable of causing in you, whimpers only for him, as he laves at your cunt.

‘Joel…’ you’d whimper again, needing more and simultaneously feeling too much, your nerve endings on fire as your head swam, the room swirling in front of you as you felt your throat dry. You wondered if he would ever kill you this way, warp your bones with the pleasure of it, splinter you right down the centre.

And then, fingers. Finally, fucking fingers. Gasping and blindly groping for him as he slid two fingers into your cunt and swirled them towards your belly button, that little magic spongey spot you can never get to on your own, the one that makes you vault upright, your muscles straining as you extend your neck, throw your head to the ceiling, clench your core and bear down on him.

‘There she is,’ he’d praise from between your thighs, eyes locked on your face as your muscles contorted, bearing the weight of you, of him, rolling the boulder from your chest and letting it flop to the floor beside you, legs extended, arms gripping and hands grasping, every muscle taught and alive on fire, tight as a bow string. ‘My strong girl,’ he’d say again, as you bucked under him, such that he had to hold you down by the hips to continue to break you apart.

‘Oh, God!’ you’d cry, thoughts abandoning ship one by one as you drowned in it, in Joel’s hands and his lips, as he continued to rain pleasure down on your cunt. ‘I can’t…!’ you’d cry, and he would groan, disapproving, into you.

‘You can.’

You’d shake your head, certain this time he was going to end you, was going to topple you into oblivion, suddenly feeling you wanted to howl, to cry, to keen, and to come.

‘Do it,’ he would instruct. ‘I’ve got you. Let it go, baby.’

Baby.

And so, you would. Each time surprised at your body’s capacity to withstand it, the keening pleasure bowing your bones in their sockets. You would come. Sometimes accompanied by a call to the underworld from deep in your chest. Sometimes with a whimper of submission, a groaned, feeble protest at all that been taken from you. Sometimes with a gasping silence, an acceptance high and coarse in your throat, of your survival and of your guilt.

Sometimes with your hands in his hair, his name in your mouth, new tears tracking down your cheeks mixing with garbled declarations of love, and of gratitude.

After, he would hold you as the sobs racked your frame, your head tucked into his neck and his warm arms wrapped firm around you as he lay you down across his chest, bent you to straddle him. He would listen as your whimpers turned into soft breaths, occasional gasps as your mind stilled, blinking slow as you felt yourself washed clean from the inside. He would wait for you to lift your head, to gaze up at him, for him to lower his mouth to your lips and catch them in his.

He would never stay, and you knew better than to ask it of him. Pulling the blanket over you both he would hold you until your breath evened out, until your little snores tickled his chest, before he would release you, slip out of your room and down the stairs, turn the lights off and lock the door behind him as he went.

#joel miller #joel miller x reader #pedro pascal fanfiction #joel miller fanfic #joel miller x you #the last of us fanfiction #pedro pascal characters fanfiction #pedro pascal #joel miller smut #pedro pascal fic

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merakiui · 11 months ago

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TWST APOCALYPSE AU.

ᴛʜᴇ ᴏᴠᴇʀʙʟᴏᴛ ᴠɪʀᴜꜱ — a horrifying infection that has existed for centuries. it doesn't appear to be contagious (yet), but it has devastating effects on those who fall ill with it. it appears to manifest from within a mage, but researchers at S.T.Y.X. note there are external and internal factors that contribute to the speed at which it spreads. it may be possible to treat an infected individual, but it is difficult if not caught by the second stage and requires immense patience, effort, and resources. the virus appears to deteriorate both the body and mind, rendering the infected a mindless monster after a certain period of time.

it is recommended that you avoid those who are beyond saving, for they are highly dangerous!

ᴄᴏᴍᴍᴏɴ ꜱʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍꜱ — officially identified by the lead research team at S.T.Y.X., these are indicators that one has been infected. [please note that case-specific symptoms, while rare but not undocumented, seem to manifest in especially skillful mages.]

☒ patient coughs up a black, tar-like substance (this is known as and has been identified as blot).

☒ patient experiences heightened emotional fragility (especially for negative feelings).

☒ patient develops unsettling, pitch-black coloration on their fingertips.

☒ patient suffers from fatigue, persistent headaches, and irregular body temperatures.

☒ patient's tears and saliva are dark and thick; near-syrupy. gums and teeth are affected as well.

☒ patient claims to hear and see things that are not there (e.g., the wrong reflection in a mirror, a strangely-shaped shadow, voices).

☒ patient's magestone blackens with blot.

ꜱᴛᴀɢᴇꜱ ᴏꜰ ɪɴꜰᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴ — officially identified by the lead research team at S.T.Y.X. after studying countless subjects.

STAGE 1.

little to no immediate changes or symptoms. patient appears mostly fine. they may not even realize they are infected at first and will only complain of feeling itchy or irritable. magestone has just begun to tarnish.

STAGE 2.

common symptoms begin to emerge and will only worsen with time. magestone slowly accumulates blot. fingertips will have begun to blacken. minor headaches stretch on into longer periods of time and grow to be more painful. patient may appear uncharacteristically volatile. blot eats away at the patient's magic reserves. it will spread quicker depending on how much magic is overused and if the patient shows extreme emotional distress. patient develops a cough.

STAGE 3.

patient will begin to see and hear things. S.T.Y.X. named these shadow apparitions phantoms. patient may cast a shadow (phantom) that is not their own. staining on the patient's fingertips will have spread further through the fingers by this point. magestone is very cloudy. patient is prone to coughing fits. patient is unable to recognize bodily cues for hunger or exhaustion. feelings of emptiness persist. patient may experience a stabbing sensation in their chest or stomach areas. patient may not seem very emotionally or mentally present. spotty memory; they struggle to recall what or why they are doing certain things. patient appears almost lost. patient's body undergoes various external and internal changes: loss of appetite, stained fingertips, rotting gums, weakened teeth and bone structures, tears and saliva take on the consistency and color of blot, inability to fall asleep, etc. the blot eats away at the patient from the inside after magic reserves have been depleted. patient is dying.

STAGE 4.

magestone is consumed by blot and is no longer safe to use. patient's internal structures are compromised and failing. blot sustains the patient; they become a host for the blot, which acts almost like a parasite. patient is no longer conscious or living. peculiar structures like extra limbs or unusual growths sprout from and deform the body. it is consumed by blot. the air around the infected patient is thick with a high concentration of blot. patient only speaks in guttural growls and struggles with certain syllables. some are capable of coherent, intelligent speech, but in many cases communication and language are usually lost, as is the memory of who they once were. S.T.Y.X. has yet to identify the lifespan of an overblot (the term coined for those who have succumbed to the infection), as some overblots can exist for a very long time. at this stage, an overblot patient is highly dangerous and hostile. avoid contact at all costs. [additional research on this stage and others is currently being conducted.]

ᴄᴏᴍᴘᴏᴜɴᴅ ɪɴᴅᴇx — below are the dormitory strongholds with notable members and their current status.

RAMSHACKLE.

☒ yuuken enma - not infected. immune.

☒ yuuka hirasaka - not infected. immune.

☒ yuuta mito - not infected. immune.

☒ grim - suspected to be infected. stage: unknown. currently missing. last seen: ???

HEARTSLABYUL.

☒ riddle rosehearts - infected. stage 1.

☒ trey clover - not infected.

☒ cater diamond - not infected. currently at risk.

☒ ace trappola - not infected.

☒ deuce spade - not infected.

SAVANACLAW.

☒ leona kingscholar - infected. stage 2.

☒ ruggie bucchi - not infected.

☒ jack howl - not infected.

OCTAVINELLE.

☒ azul ashengrotto - infected. stage 2, tipping over into stage 3.

☒ jade leech - not infected.

☒ floyd leech - not infected. currently at risk.

SCARABIA.

☒ kalim al-asim - not infected.

☒ jamil viper - infected. stage 1, tipping over into stage 2.

POMEFIORE.

☒ vil schoenheit - infected. stage 2.

☒ rook hunt - not infected.

☒ epel felmier - not infected.

IGNIHYDE.

☒ idia shroud - infected. stage 3.

☒ ortho shroud - not infected. currently at risk.

DIASOMNIA.

☒ malleus draconia - infected. stage 2, tipping over into stage 3.

☒ lilia vanrouge - not infected. currently at risk.

☒ silver - not infected.

☒ sebek zigvolt - not infected.

ROYAL SWORD.

☒ neige leblanche - not infected. currently at risk.

☒ dominic - not infected.

☒ grum - not infected.

☒ shelpie - not infected.

☒ hop - not infected.

☒ timmy - not infected.

☒ snick - not infected.

☒ toby - not infected.

☒ che'nya - not infected.

NOBLE BELL.

☒ rollo flamme - not infected.

#twst apocalypse au #<- i think that was the tag… ^^;;;#now that i think about it idia and ortho technically get their wish of restarting the world in this au T_T #i was going to write body horror for the infected yans but that will be for another apocalypse post #for now i wanted to establish the virus itself :D #also also!!! the yuus are part of this au <3 hopefully they can save (name) from whichever compound they are trapped in >_<

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paper-mario-wiki · 8 months ago

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Here's a short freestyle about positivity!

Wake up every day, you know I'm grateful that it came Not too familiar with the pessimism, I'm not the same I'm blotting out these nasty actors out there spittin' hate, Relinquish enemies without forgettin' whose to really blame Toss em out the back, we got posers on our tailpipe Pedal to the metal, we can lose em at the red light We don't fuck herbs or lames, yeah the future's bright Horizons lookin' clear I shed a tear at such a happy sight We love the sun! We love the sky, we love the trees! We love the smell of promise floating with the gentle breeze You can't infect me with your stinkin' rotten hatin' steez, Antagonistic bastard, leave your stale perspectives up your sleeve And in my world, everyone gets second helpings Not single person goes a day without a blessing The place we know as heaven's pleasant but still in the distance, Pissin off these suckers, show em light like the name is Helsing.

#audio #voice acting #idk how else to tag this honestly #rap #hip hop #sure

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qiribov · 4 days ago

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a little bit about the virus

infected people ignore other infected people from the very first stage because of special secretions (?)

gangrenous lesions on the body are clusters of mucous infectious secretions that can burst on contact.

Later on, the infected mutate and can merge.

#twst ruggie #ruggie bucchi #twisted wonderland #disney twst #twst wonderland #twst fanart #twisted oc #savanaclaw #jack howl #twst jack #blot infection #i love this au

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comfortless · 1 year ago

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in my pottery class thinking abt how much i would rather be painting with König rn pleading emoji btw

lele you are in my head always.. König being artsy..? awkward, spontaneous infatuation developing over sharing portraits of each other? yes yes… 💞

There’s a new man in your class that you have never seen before, not around the rest of the community center. The perplexing titan has chosen to take up painting, of all things, and you wonder as he steps through the threshold of the door how he will ever even be able to hold a brush without the wood splintering in those massive hands.

Painting is calming, gentle most of the time. Only, he embodies that feeling of a failed brush stroke, an accidental tilt of your wrist leaving a swirl of mottled colors that would take far longer to fix than it could ever be worth. Dark, dreary and tense as he seats himself directly next to you.

His creations are dark things, abstract shapes of gray and maroon; red lightning and murky sea. Each dip of pigment glistening off of your own brush leads to softer scenes; poppies and silhouettes of sweet creatures grazing and basking beneath the amber rays of a sun hanging lofty upon the canvas. Gentle things to warm a heart where as his own are to expel something from a chest wound, infected and bursting.

He takes note of your bewildered stares, two weeks after his joining, and even makes a point to place himself at the back of the room, far enough away to keep you from seeing the quivering of his wrist as he paints a new apocalypse. A mercy or an insult, you couldn’t be certain.

When the time comes to create a portrait of one of the other participants, you approach him without thought. “We can paint each other,” you offer, voice like a bowstring. He only nods, once, and allows you into the space adjacent to him as he shifts his long limbs beneath the table in an attempt to accommodate you.

Just mercy, it was, then.

König isn’t talkative, even as you pester over details and ask him to tilt his head a certain way just to ensure you’ve picked the perfect placement for one of the rogue freckles dotting his cheek. He complies with a wide-eyes stare, one that leaves you feeling a strange mixture of curious and uncomfortable. Each time you look up, you notice that the gaze hasn’t lessened, it only proves to be more incessant and intense.

You show him his portrait; attention drawn to the eyes, each fleck of fluorescent light painted in them with the same color used for the pale white of his scars. This is one to be proud of, a certain reverence to the piece that you’ve lacked entirely in your painted fields of little white and gray blotted sheep.

His version of you is a splash of dandelion yellow, flecks of pink in a sea of black. There’s no face to be seen, but it is beautiful in its simplicity. You marvel at it, holding the canvas up to the light and your eye catches on something— buried just below the still-drying paint, a small scrawling of your name in the shimmering gray of pencil lead. You almost think you can make out the shape of a small heart somewhere in that mess of cheap acrylic, too, before the piece is gently tugged from your hands.

“It needs to dry,” he tells you, casually discarding it back onto the wooden table and examining your depiction of himself instead.

You watch as his eyes seem to light up, that weariness within them suddenly gone as his stare drifts from top to bottom of your canvas. You know that you’ve done well, with a certainty when his focus shifts back to you and a barely-there smile is tugging at his lips.

He tells you that he can not paint anything like you, and when you ask him just what that means, he only tells you that you’re just too pretty. The reality is obvious— his hands shake, but only around you. You’ve seen him nodding along to something the instructor says to him as the older man leans over the table to inspect his art, and König has only seemed stiff, unbothered.

There’s a cup of chamomile tea prepared for him the next time he enters the room and you’re nothing but demure smiles and sweet greetings as König takes the space next to you once more.

It’s just as he’s taking a sip that you decide to innocently ask: “Have you ever painted anyone nude?”

He sputters for a moment, trying to conceal the rising tide of crimson that creeps up from his cheeks to the tips of his ears as he turns away from you.

“Nein, but I would like to try.”

#i meant to post this yesterday and then the sleepy hit sorry lele! i hope your class was fun though!!#könig x reader #konig x reader #könig x you #konig x you

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comatosebunny09 · 2 years ago

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solace | leon k.

genre(s): romance, fluff

warning(s): brief mentions of blood, soft boi leon, a little steaminess, stream of consciousness, short af

inspired by this scene from knight and day. can also be read in conjunction with my kindle series. thank you so much for reading! ❤️❤️❤️

You’d been separated.

For how long, you couldn’t gauge. Time moves differently here. Slow like the drag of a tide. Which is why it felt like eons since you last saw him.

There’s a shared sense of relief between you when you reconvene. Comfort in the hand he squeezes on your shoulder, the slightest cant to his lips. However, there isn’t much time for catching up as the muttering of infected villagers closes in.

There’s a thin film of grime coating his face. Errant scratches on his biceps and speckles of old blood on his shirt—thankfully, it isn’t his. He appears otherwise unscathed beneath the firelight of the safe room. Performing maintenance on his weapons, jaw tight, focus etched between his brows.

You study him from your seat across. Arms wound about your legs, chin seated on your knees. His gaze skitters to yours from time to time. A smirk twitches his lips, and a chuckle rumbles his chest as if he’s happy to have an audience.

You feel a smile of your own forming. Want to say something to fill the silence. But it’s comfortable, with the pop and fizz of the campfire and The Merchant humming nearby whilst he mends your gear. So, you carry on this soundless waltz with your partner. An exchange of stolen glances and unspoken words of endearment.

Eventually, your lids grow heavy, the shadows cast by the fire lulling you to sleep. You don’t register when he moves. Just feel a heavy palm burning through the cotton of your shirt on your shoulder and a callused thumb stroking your collarbone. He swaddles you in his warmth as he kneels before you.

“You should get some rest,” Leon rasps, scanning over your features with eyes the color of steel. Fond. Doting. “I’ll take the first watch.” He always does.

If not for the subtle ache of your bones and the exhaustion lancing through you, you would argue. The insistence of his gaze leaves no room for rebuttals. You nod, slowly unwinding yourself from your curled-up position. Leon helps you to your feet. Always a gentleman. Ventures back to his side by the fire to sharpen his blade whilst you meander towards the back of the safe room, eyeing an inviting stack of hay.

You stop mid-step. Don’t know what compels you to speak. What pushes you to utter something so arbitrary. Shielding yourself behind a wooden beam, half-peeking at your partner, bashfulness leaking into your voice.

“Leon,” you caution. Feel your heart stutter when he looks at you. As if you’re the only thing to exist in his world. Your mouth quivers, your voice corked in your chest. What a time for cold feet. “You…you don’t seem very happy to see me.”

His brows quirk. He snorts incredulously, as if you’ve said the most absurd of things. He sets his knife down, leaning forward to get a better listen. “What?”

With a shrug of your shoulders and wandering eyes, “Not really.”

How swiftly he moves for someone so big. Stalking towards you with the galaxy swirling in his eyes, his footsteps a dull cadence, contending with the thudding of your heart. Two of your steps back equate to one of his forwards.

He spills over you like liquid fire. Backs you into the wooden beam, blotting out everything that isn’t him whilst he leans in on his forearm overhead. Your breath abandons you in a gasp as his hand perches on your hip. Feel so very small beneath the might that is Leon Kennedy. Your breaths intermingle for the briefest of seconds, the climate between you rising and making your head spin.

You’ve barely time to make out the contours of his face before he swoops in to claim your lips. Possessive yet gentle as his slant over yours, pouring the deftest sound into your mouth. His thumb kneads soothing circles into your waist as he tests the barrier of your teeth with his tongue. Encourages them open, exploring the warmth of your mouth as you whine so wantonly for him, your wrists crossing behind his neck, drawing him closer. He coaxes your tongue into an ardent dance. Slow and purposeful as he undoes you with his mouth, pouring his feelings into the chasm of your belly.

Before it evolves into something more sinister, Leon breaks contact with a light smack. Huffs a laugh as you chase his lips in pursuit of another kiss. He searches your eyes with affection lining his, his labored breaths hot and matching your own.

“I am,” he states simply, his mouth hovering above yours. The hand, once on your hip, finds solace in the plushness of your bottom lip, his thumb skating over the sensitive skin. “Now,” Leon husks, his voice rough with desire as he draws back, “Go get some sleep.”

He highlights his statement with a playful swat to your hip, shepherding you toward your makeshift bed. You groan piteously, pouting at him over your shoulder. Obey nonetheless, toddling away to lay your muscles to rest. Though you’re not sure how much sleep you’ll get with your limbs humming and your lips abuzz with the feel of his against them.

#leon kennedy imagine #leon kennedy x reader #leon x reader #leon s kennedy x reader #leon kennedy fluff #leon kennedy x y/n #leon kennedy x you #re4 leon x reader #re4r fanfic #leon kennedy drabble #kindle series

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yeyinde · 2 years ago

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circle the drain | Captain John Price x F!Reader

》 WARNINGS: SMUT 18+ — P-in-V sex; unsafe sex; gendered female reader, female gendered anatomy; implied power imbalance; no substance only smut SUMMARY: Somehow, you know his hands are the only things capable of keeping you whole. 》 WORD COUNT: 7,6k 》 NOTES: This was supposed to be a valentine's day gift, but it's super late on account of me being ridiculously sick. I'm also becoming the Patron Saint of "soon-ish" but this is the sequel to Caught p., i. Yeah. That fic that's been requested a bunch lmao. ANYWAY. It's FINALLY here. This was written in a day and edited under a feverish delirium in what feels like four months but was actually less than 10 minutes.

His hands are firebrands, fingers the lit end of a cigar. When he touches your skin, you hear the sizzle of your flesh burning away, and the pop of it cauterising under his blistering heat. He seals a little part of himself in the wounds he wrought: buries them deep in your dermis until they leak into your bloodstream.

There is no victory in this.

And yet—

"Fuck me, captain—"

—you just can't help yourself sometimes.

His eyes flash. "I didn't tell you to stop."

》 Caught p., i

MASTERLIST | JOHN PRICE MASTERLIST | AO3

It's the firm press of his front against your back that starts it all.

His hands, rough, firm. Scorching. They drop to your shoulders, one palm sliding down your bicep, fingers curling over the soft skin in the crux of your elbow.

You try not to tremble when his broad back presses flush to your spine. When he ducks his head down, bending a little at the waist to reach you—Price is a mountain, a tower—and you feel the coarse hairs along his jaw, chin, scratch against the soft curve of your neck, the back of your ears, your cheek.

"Steady."

Your teeth snap tight together when you feel the rumble through his ribcage before he even opens his mouth to utter the words. The rasping little groan—mmh—he makes rolls over your spine, the back of your ribs. It rattles through your bones, clotting in the fibrils of your tissue.

The fluttering wings of a hummingbird beat in the cavity of your chest when he speaks.

"One…two notches higher."

You scent burning sycamore when he breathes out, the rasp of his breath brushing your shoulder. Heat bleeds into your spine when he sidles close to you, hands firm on your body as he strings you into the position he deems best.

You wonder, then, how those broad hands would move you around in a different context. How the unyielding press of his chest would feel naked against your back—

"—y'right?"

Squeaking out a clipped affirmative is all you can do amid the roiling currents that batter through your chest—a dizzying concoction of want, need, for the man pressed against your spine.

He rumbles again, his pitch a guttural whisper that seems so opposed to his very essence—Týr in flesh and bone; a behemoth on the battlefield yelling himself hoarse—and the slow, smoky roll, the muted murmur, makes your toes curl. Fingers itch.

"Yeah?" He presses, unwilling—or unable—to let go until he's satisfied, until the worry in his chest over his men, over you, is abated. Shifted to some other place where it can't distract him. He leans in closer, and you find notes of Tobacco and malt nestled amongst the cindered Sycamore. Psalm ashes tickling your nose.

"Yes—," it's barely more than a breath. A ghost of something you can't place.

When it comes to Price, you never sound like yourself. Breathless, breathy. Voice a whisper amid the rumbling clatter of a rockslide careening down a mountain. His very presence seems to syphon the air from your lungs until you're gasping.

It feels like you've run a marathon—throat throbbing like an open wound; infected and raw. The taste of heme wells on your tongue. Your lungs burn. Ink blots clot over your vision.

"I'm—yeah, I'm good, cap." You say, and try not to focus on how his proximity makes you dizzy. Desperate.

He feels good against you, and you can feel the smoulder of his body even through the thick layers of his tac-vest, his military-issued jacket, and his long-sleeved shirt. The heat is dizzying. Liquifying your sense of propriety, decorum; it leaks over your threadbare resolve—that brassbound lockbox where you keep all of your hidden secrets tucked inside a place no one, nothing, can touch it.

It's absolute hot—one decillion, four hundred and twenty nonillion degrees celsius—and, well—

Who can withstand the hottest possible temperature matter can reach?

The box isn't just burnt or turned to ash—but erased. Swallowed whole by the flames that spark so hot, they don't even leave behind a scorch mark but burn the platform it laid on, too.

It frees everything you struggled to keep bound within you when he steps back, when there's more distance between his thundering heart and your liquified spine than ever before. A chasm.

Your chest is a hollow crevasse, an inexistent hole, and when he steps back, you feel threads of absolute zero snake over the scorched flesh.

You hear the sharp inhale through tobacco-stained teeth when you add sir, and wonder if he feels the same chill clot inside his marrow that you do.

When you swallow, his eyes drop, flashing to the smooth column of your throat. Liquid puddles in those sapphire pools—cenotes framed in burnt umber—and the burn of his eclipsing pupils makes you feel like you're choking.

Price clears his throat, his eyes skirting away from you in a mockery of something disquieted, demure. The loss of his eyes on you makes something sour twist in your guts.

You want it back, you think, and know, then, that it's far too late. That whatever tenuous hold you had over yourself had been carbonised and charred to cinders when he touched you with his molten hands, melting that gossamer of resolve you clung.

And—

Fuck.

His eyes are fixed somewhere on your forehead—either unwilling or unable to look you bare in the eye, and you worry for a moment that he knows. That he can see the want in your gaze, the heavy weight of sin that rolls over your shoulders until they quiver. The want in your hands makes your fingers tremble.

But it dissipates when he offers a facsimile of a smile.

"Good work," he says, the words sticking to the nicotine in his throat, and you wonder if you could become addicted to smoke just from the fumes he exudes.

(You feel the itch in your veins for the smooth draw of smoke into your burning lungs when he moves away from you.)

Fuck—you think, eyes fixed on his broad back, his taped waist, heavy shoulders—indeed.

You've never smoked a cigar before, and somehow you find yourself feening for a hit, for the smooth curl of tobacco smoke in your throat, sticking to your teeth.

Your eyes are drawn to the flash of orange in a perfect ring of controlled fire, to the stem of dark brown clenched between an even thicker thumb and forefinger; the lips pursed around the butt, the beard peppered with ash.

The craving hits you harder than ever when you look at him: the complete picture of your leader, captain, hunched over a bed of papers and files.

It's when the ashlar blue of his gaze flickers up, catching the end of something Soap says, that you know, without any sense of uncertainty, that all the cigars locked inside his case wouldn't be enough to quench the hunger in your chest. Rapacious. Greedy.

(Greedy hands, they'd say when you took too much.

Your joints burn with the urge to cling, to hold.)

Price looks up, catching your wanting gaze. He holds it for a moment, just long enough for you to forget how to breathe, how to function. Something shudders over the thin veil of indifference he wears, sealed over his face like a scab. It splits, peels back until the oozing wound below is once again exposed to the open air.

Raw, pulsating.

You wonder what would happen to your mortal body if you syphoned the ichor of Tyr, let it pool on your earthly tongue.

Your mouth is dry. Lips chapped and numbed. Your tongue lashes out, wetting them. A distraction—an unconscious action. You've studied enough to know that chewing on your lips, nails, the inside of your cheeks until the skin splits and bleeds is a self-soothing mechanism to abate the flood of anxiety that rips through you. Still. You do it, anyway.

It's a trick of the light, you think, when his eyes dim, lowering down to your blood red mouth, narrowing at the tease of your tongue flicking across your trembling bottom lip.

A manifestation, a delusion.

When you want something so badly, your mind is startlingly, debilitatingly, adept at playing pretend.

Your gaze drops to your unfinished plate, and you struggle to pretend you're not losing your mind to the whims of your desire because for a moment there—a brief, almost imperceptible second—it almost felt like he wanted you, too.

You bum a cigarette from Soap, and try not to think about that cold, windy night in Cairo when Price dropped his cigars to save you.

The barking laugh that hacked from his soot-stained lungs when you found a pack of Cleopatra Lights in the warehouse you were hiding in.

"Ain't the same, love." He huffed, white teeth flashing in the blue-green light of the Azbakiyyah quarter spilling in through the smeared windows. "No substitute for the real thing."

You take a drag, and sputter over the side of the balcony, gasping and coughing through the thick musk of tobacco that chokes your lungs.

It does nothing to abate the hunger inside of you.

With tar-stained lungs, and nicotine glueing to your aching throat, you think: no, not the same at all.

(Once you get a taste of the perfect vice, love, no imitation can compare. Keep the cigs. They'll only make me anxious if I start smokin' 'im now.)

The itch in your joints becomes too much.

You slide your fingers over your flesh, and wish it was him—

Your head lifts, glancing once more at the entranceway to the changing room.

Liquid sapphires. Brow drawn tight.

Your heart stutters. "C—captain, I—"

His eyes flash. "I didn't tell you to stop."

It's curt. Direct. Blunt. Everything he is—all narrowed down into this claustrophobic space that fogs with steam; the walls bleeding with condensation. It's sticky, balmy. Feverish heat that prickles hot and cold against your skin.

He says: I didn't tell you to stop.

And you say: I didn't tell you to watch.

An impasse. Stalemate. No victor, no loser.

(Except you. Always, always you.)

This promises nothing but your ruin should you let your arms drop from the tight clench around your bare breasts, nipples hardened, prickled and sensitive from when your delicate, small fingers rubbed at them and dreamed about his mouth.

An invitation.

One you can't bring yourself to open. The envelope is ripped, torn. But the card is folded neatly on the table in front of you.

(Take a peek, it beckons when he shifts, the unmistakable outline of his thick, hard cock bulging through the fabric of his trousers. Just a little look. A little taste.)

But it won't be, will it? Just a little. Laughable. Don't be stupid.

You never learned how to say no to yourself, how to hold back.

(Your moon is fixed in Cancer.)

You give, give, give—and, in equal, if not a little more, measure: take, take, take.

Want, want, want.

You think of his heat searing your back, liquifying your spine, turning your calcified bones to polymer, and know, deep down within your aching marrow, that what you crave is blue.

You can't let yourself want this—want him.

It's dangerous. Wrong. It's a gaping maw of hurt and agony just waiting to sink its teeth into your fleshy body, to tear you apart; ripping you limb from limb until you're a pulpy mess of tendon and crushed bones, barely human, but alive. Stuck in anguish.

He's heartbreak in smoke, in Maduro brown with a golden logo on the stem.

—means dark. Ripe. Used to only be made from the highest leaves, 'cause they spend the most time on the plant.

Dark. Ripe. Price.

Dangerous. Addictive. Inescapable.

His eyes—l'heure bleue—gaze at you through the dense fog. Waiting. Waiting. It's in your hands, now. The option to march forward and commence, to push yourself into his palm, in the worn hands that touched brushed the small of your back one day, and ignited a fire in your veins.

Or to retreat.

To walk back, to end this. To call it. Mentor, mentee. Captain. Disciple. Distance will split between you, stifling like the air that clogs the tiled, tacky room. Heavy, oppressive, and—

Inescapable.

Fuck.

You either take, take, and then deal with the aftermath of a bloody battle that will leave false starts on your bones, cutting deep to bleed marrow into your bloodstream, or you—

Forfeit.

There is no future in this. No grand declaration of romance or togetherness. It's the artificial merging of bodies in an offering to Hēdonē; an evanescent dance. It leaks heartache in the seams, and carries the tang of disillusionment should you dip your fingers in glacial blue. It'll stain you. His fingertips are drenched in agony—molten red, a hot poker—and will brand your flesh, scar your body with the perfect imprint of his touch. Of him.

It'll rear, in those soft, lonely moments when your thoughts are too loud and the room is too quiet, and the phantom press of his skin will become a burden.

Yearning.

You hate how it tastes oh so familiar.

Perpetual. Never-ending. Stasis.

You look at him and see blue: blue eyes, blue blood, blue heart, blues.

(Ache.)

But if you don't:

Stagnancy.

(Is it so different from stasis, really?)

It's nautical twilight somewhere, surely. The centre of the sun is six degrees below the horizon. You have six more degrees to go before it ends.

Six.

And then—

(It's not a jump, but a leap.)

Your fingers dig into the skin of your forearm. Piercing. Painful. The bite leaves crescents behind. Blue moons. You pry them apart, and—

Drop.

Into the sea. Into blue.

He says your name when you bare yourself to him again, consenting to this—whatever it is—and giving yourself over like an offering to some whimsical god of lust and poor choices.

The rasp of it makes your spine prickle—a low simmering heat sparks in your belly: satiated by your own fingers but never satisfied. Him standing before you, eager and wanting, strokes the flames until they burn in a frenzy of wildfire; consuming everything in its wake until you're raw, charred husk on the verge of collapsing.

A fragile supernova.

Your core is molten; liquid heat—absolute hot—and when he moves, you feel the foundations wobble, and start to fall apart at the seams.

(Somehow, you know his hands are the only things capable of keeping you whole.)

Price, still dressed in his sweatpants—tented with the obvious outline of his turgid arousal—and tight t-shirt crosses the threshold in seven easy steps. The soft squelch of his feet against wet tile echo in the room, somehow louder than your gasping breaths.

He doesn't walk to you, he stalks. His gait is measured, purposeful; each step brings him inches closer to your trembling, bare form, and the heaviness of his lidded gaze, liquid blue in a chamber of pearlescent white, cudgels into your ribcage, breaking your resolve apart as it pries the protective ivory wrapped around your delicate, fragile heart apart.

"Price—"

The grey of his pants is splattered with the inkblot stain of the water sprinkling from the looming showerhead. The darkening patches draw your eye to the jut of his hips, wide and expansive, and then further down to the damp outline of his thick, heavy cock still housed in a cotton polymer.

There's a fever in your veins—a sickness echoed in the folds of ever blue that pierce through the smog clouding around you. A blunt weight, a burning heat.

His shirt moulds to the contours of his chest when he finally, finally, stands in front of you. The burnt umber of his chest hair bled through the logo of his faded, worn tee. Liverpool Football Club in bright red against stark white. It glues to his pecs, his biceps.

Your mouth waters at the sight.

"You want this?"

His hands lift, biceps bulging, flexing under the tight cotton when he presses them against the slick, humid tile. His hair clings to his forehead, dark and wet. Droplets bead in his beard.

He presses forward, eyes brimming with want; a palpable sense of desperation that shouldn't frisson over his rigid lines.

Price won't repeat his words—not when his voice is thicker than tar, and stripped bare—and you arch against the cool porcelain pressing into your back, the duality of his unrelenting heat, and the chill of ceramic making every synapse in your head misfire.

Trembling, shaking, and desperately trying to hold on to some sense of cognisance amid this turbulent reality, you force a nod. A jerk of your chin.

He breathes through his nose, the breath wisping over the bridge of your nose. Frustration, you think, and—

Impatience. Uncertainty.

"Do you—"

Your facsimile of consent isn't enough for him. He's not a man known to repeat himself, and this—the words that are ripped from the smouldering depths of his chest should be a warning, if not a bare-faced testament to just how much he wants this—makes your heart flutter. A thrumming beat that seems to echo in the scant space between your bodies, the crevasse pitched at an intentional distance by his stalwart sense of control, propriety.

He won't touch you unless he's absolutely sure you want this, him—

Frustrating.

Verbalising your assent, your eagerness, makes something churn inside of you. As if uttering the words aloud will somehow break the spell you cast over him by your pithy voice ringing his name in the shades of your pleasure, the sight of your delicate fingers threading between your swollen, drenched folds.

You want him—haven't wanted anything nearly as much in your life than to feel his damp, naked chest flush against yours, his hips prying your thighs apart, his massive hands grasping your flesh like each pound was owed to him, and he was collecting his dues.

But—

That leap, the precipice you balance yourself on, is daunting. A touch won't be enough. A taste would just be a tease. A morsel.

You don't want a crumb—you want it all.

"Price," you whine instead, biting back the words he wants to hear. "Just—give it to me—"

It makes him groan. His head tips forward, eyes burning pits of sapphire-stained coal.

"Need to hear you say it."

It borders that illicit equinox of being both too much and not enough: that dangerous precipice where you either climb to higher, deadlier altitudes or fall down to certain death.

You wonder if there is a win somewhere in that. A choice when you come out unscathed, whole.

Price leans in, hair wet, matted to his forehead, beard slick with droplets of water that bead against the auburn, and immediately you think: no.

There is no victory in this.

And yet—

"Fuck me, captain—"

—you just can't help yourself sometimes.

. . .

It's wicked. Intense.

The clothes he wore were shed from his body like a second skin under your quiet, hungry acquiescence. They sit in a sopping pile that keeps drawing your eye.

He's naked—just like you—but there is something marginally more intimate, vulnerable, in seeing your stolid leader in such a state of disarray. His hair is clumped from the humidity and moisture—matted on the top, but moussed on his side when he stepped away from you, and peeled the drenched shirt from his body. It sticks up in pieces near his ears, and your fingers ache with a longing to smooth them down.

Make him presentable, somehow.

Or maybe it's a distraction. A way to skirt around the tangibility of him standing before you, touchable and real, and—

And wanting.

The same shades of your desire are echoed in the rucked crevasses of cenote blue when he gazes down at you, head bowed, and catching the spray like your own personal protector. The water hits the nape of his neck, and glides down his broad shoulders, his chest.

You want to sink your teeth into the puddles caught by the jut of his clavicles. Want to taste the briny water running in rivulets across his skin.

Want, you think, and want, want, want—

Price's hand knots in the fine hair at curve of your neck, a perfect fistful in the thick of his palm, and he uses it as an anchoring point, a steer, to bend your chin in whichever way suits him best to slant his rapacious mouth over yours, and devour.

His kisses are blistering—contained: controlled, powerful, and measured; and desperate: soft gasps, gentle hums, and needy noises spill from the parted seam of his teeth, muffled by his nicotine-soaked tongue that dips in each crevasse it can find.

It's addicting—just like you knew he would be.

His touch is better than anything your nimble fingers could ever conceive; broad strokes of his rough hands run down the inches of skin available to him. Calloused thumbs catch the mooned curve of your nipple, grazing the soft tissue until your mouth drops in a gasp of his name. He rolls the blunt pad of his finger over them until they tingle from his touch, until each brush sends a shock of pleasure to your core.

Price's hand slides down, fingers ghosting over the wet skin of your side, your hip, your thigh. Each whisper of a touch drags out a whimper from your throat. It's too much. Your skin prickles with goosebumps in his wake, and leaves you feeling feverish and chilled at the same time. A war, then, starts as your body tries to oscillate between stemming the ache inside of you, the emptiness in your cunt, and the delicious drag of his flesh over yours. A droplet of intimacy and tenderness in a sea that collects the ashes of Gomorrah when it rains.

It is a shade softer than what you've come to expect from your captain, and far more delicate than you deserve.

The unexpected tenderness of this moment is a stab to your chest. Blunt, brutal—it's a sharp juxtaposition to the ginger way he touches you; the soft reverence in his gaze when he looks down at you.

Just sex, you think. Lust, want. Greed, hunger.

It isn't supposed to mean anything outside of unexpected happenstance; the melding of two willing bodies in a sign of ritualistic devotion to Hēdonē.

And yet—

You want. Full stop.

Everything. All of what he has to offer, and more, because you're never satisfied with just one. Never content until you've consumed, devoured, everything. Every iota of whatever it is that ensnared your attention.

And it's terrifying.

It's not a jump, but a leap. A careening descent down an embankment that has no ledges for you to sink your fingers in, and cling to. It's a treacherous fall to the bottom.

And still. Still. You won't regret the plunge. The drop.

How can you when you know what his skin feels like under your palm—warmer, softer, than you could have ever imagined. What he smells like when he leans in close, head dropping to suckle on your pulse point—vetiver and smoke; thick and musky—and the scent of his damp hair, cigar and malt, that darkens when it's wet, and curls slightly at the ends.

He's hairier than you'd imagined he would be—a thick bed of black curls on his chest that taper off into a line down his stomach, his navel, before thickening around his pelvis. A bed of curls, untrimmed and wry, that frame the jut of his thick, uncut cock. It curves a little to the left, and what he lacks in length—though you'd hardly call nearly six inches lacking—he makes up for in sheer girth. He's fatter than anything you'd ever felt in the palm of your hand, than you'd ever taken before. Your mouth waters at the sight, and you wonder if his cock would taste the same as the skin of his neck, his red nipples that peak through the coarse curls.

Wonder, then, if you'd even be able to take him all the way down to the base or if he'd stuff you full, and make your jaws ache just around the head of his fat cock.

When you gasp it out—wanna choke on your cock—Price shudders. The hitch in his breath, humid on your neck where he buried his face, nipping the skin around your jugular, is punched out of his chest, and accompanies a low snarling noise that sounds more animalistic than it does human.

"Fuckin' hell, love," he heaves through clenched teeth. His gaze flickers up, staring at you through the dusting of brown lashes cut over blue ashlar. His mouth is red from the trail of peppered bites, nips, he laved against your wet sternum. It's sin, you think, when he shivers. When his nostrils flare. "You can't just say shite like that—"

"Played with your pretty little cunt earlier, thinkin' of me, mmhm? Made yourself cum, didn't you?" Price stands to his full height, head bowing over yours. His hand wraps around the thick of his cock, eyes cresting in pleasure at the touch. There is a moment, then, when his gaze flickers to you, catching the burning anticipation that greets him like a kiss. "Gonna fuck you now, yeah?"

The look on his face, the hunger lingering in the cut of cerulean that gleams through the thin mist that clouds around you, is magnetic. Captivating. You can't tear your gaze away from the almost primal way he stares down at you. Wanting. Needy.

You taste heme in the back of your throat, and feel something knot inside your chest—something animalistic, possessive—when his eyes drop like an anchor to the smooth curve of your throat when you swallow the ichor down.

There's is the faintest flash of teeth from beneath his wet beard. A gnarled grimace. A botched grin. He bares the whites of his canines and moves closer to you. The blunt press of his throbbing cock steals the last vestiges of air from your quivering lungs.

"Teasin' me, eh?" He rasps, eyes dropping further to catch the sight of him dragging the silky head over your wet flesh until it's notched at the apex of your sex, kissing the divot above your aching clit.

With your lungs collapsing, you can't find the words to refute him, and settle instead for a meek nod.

"Use your words, love." It's a snarl punched through the clench of his teeth. "I want to hear you, yeah?"

"Yes," you gasp, back arching, aching for him. "Yes, captain—"

His broad shoulders tremble, lashes fluttering when the head of cock meets your cunt. The slide of him, iron-hard and velvet soft, has you mewling out some broken whisper of his name. Price responds with a groan. A wet, rasping noise spills out from his heaving chest.

"Fuck—," the curse is sawed out from between clenched teeth, the brush of his cock parting your slick folds, pressing taut to your leaking hole, has something wanting and possessive simmering in those cerulean pools. A gnarled hunger.

It makes you wonder, then, how often he'd leaned back against the same tile, his hand wrapped around himself just like this, and whispered your name into the steam.

"Look so pretty like this," he rumbles, fingers leaving indents in the thick of your thigh when he grasps you tighter. "All desperate for my fuckin' cock. Want it, don't you?"

The whimpered yes is ripped from your throat and shredded between the small gap of your jaws before his words take any tangible shape in your mind.

Your captain asks you a question—want my cock, don't you? So fuckin' desperate for it, ain't you?—and you respond immediately. No questions asked.

Pavlov's dog, you think, mouth watering when his cock slips against your cunt.

Price stops with just the head of his cock kissing your entrance, movements halting abruptly.

The protesting whine is cut off when he leans down, lips slanting over yours in a soft kiss, a brush. His beard scraps over the sensitive skin of your cheeks and chin, but the wet drag of his coarse hair feels good.

"Price—"

"Are you ready for me?"

No. It's immediate. Quick and decisive. A firm, assured thing that echoes in the scant spaces of your ribs.

You should say no. No, because then you'll want more. No, because once will not be enough to satiate the hunger inside of your chest. The growing chasm that growls out its need with each soft utterance of your name, each touch of his hand.

You're greedy.

You don't, though.

The hunger is stifled under the waves of desire that roll through you when his cock notches against your clit.

Instead, you nod. Whispering, I want it.

His gaze is blistering when he levels it on you. Gyre blue; arsenic white. His mouth knots into an even line, thick with anticipation. Determination. He echoes your nod once, and then presses his forehead against yours, holding it there.

His eyes bore into you when he steadies his hand on your thigh, trapped in his firm hold, and pushes himself against you once more.

"Breathe for me," he rasps, the word a low command, and then he rocks forward.

His cock stretches you with each inch that slides into your cunt. It's a white-hot heat that licks up your spine—the edges of too much and not enough, and how could there possibly be another inch when he's already so fucking deep?

The doesn't stop until his hips are flesh with yours, filling you to the brim. When his cock presses against the plug of your womb, you expect him to stop. He's bottomed out, filling you so deeply that you can almost taste his bitter tang on your tongue, but he doesn't. He doesn't.

His cock notches into your womb: a pulsing grind into the very end of you. The slide of it makes you hiss, makes your nails rake over his flesh, leaving rivers of red when you claw at him, struggling to keep yourself from being swallowed by the waves of pleasure, pain, that roll over you.

He pauses his slow rolls for a moment, just long enough to catch your lips in a searing kiss, and lift his hand up, pressing his palm flat against the wet tile. Distracting you, maybe, from the drag of his cock pulling out of your pulsing, gripping him tight as if to keep him locked inside of you forever. With his mouth on yours, fingers threading through the wet, clumped locks of his hair, you barely have time to brace yourself when he plants his feet on the floor, and rocks into you.

The air is forced from your lungs with the even cant of his hips, the slide of his cock back into you. It burrows deep, hitting something behind your naval that makes you keen, head reeling from the phosphenes that blink, coruscating in front of your eyes. An illicit lure in bioluminescence.

The blunt, bludgeoning thrust rattles through you, hard enough to make your bones tremble, and your head spin—dizzy and heavy with the blow of his hips fucking into the tight clench of you around him.

His hand drops from the wall, falling to your thigh.

He doesn't give you a moment to ready yourself before slips his fingers around your flesh, and hefts you up. Your back slides against the slick wall, thighs pushed tight around his marrow waist, held tight in the grip of his hands.

"C–captain—!"

Price shushes you with a searing kiss full of teeth, tongue. It tastes of charcoal and Sycamore bark when his tongue rolls over yours; a heady, smoky tang that makes you dizzy off the pure nicotine nestled between his teeth.

Comfortably situated in his grasp, legs wrapped around his waist, he starts a new rhythm. The stretch of his cock sawing into your pussy stings, edging sharply against your mettle as he fills you deeper, wrenching you open wider, than you'd ever experienced before.

But it's a good pain.

The kind you don't think you could ever live without now that you had a taste. No substitute for the real thing.

It's a scorching heat that ebbs, notching higher and higher as Price holds you tighter against the slick wall, fucking into you like a man starved.

His pace is hard, fast. Unrelenting.

Pleasure blooms inside of you and feels like a bruise when it brims in your nerves. Sparks of pain, ones that edge into that dangerous precipice of feeling somehow good despite the ache, weave together with the bliss. A quit of too much knotted into an overwhelming sense of euphoria.

Maybe it's the taste of success, of victory, when Price drops his head to your temple, mouthing across your damp skin. His tongue is scorching when it laves over your flesh, chasing the droplets that leak from your hairline to your cheekbone.

The graze of his beard running over your skin feels like everything you wanted, and more.

Your fingers curl over his broad shoulders, holding him close to your trembling chest. He's an anchor, a beacon—a buoy in the middle of the ocean. You can't help yourself from thinking six degrees when his chin lifts, and his mouth swallows the gospel of his name as it's choked out between your bruised lips.

The noises he makes, deep, rasping growls of your name; grunts of pleasure; hisses when you clench tight around the thick of him, desperate to keep him locked inside of you, are better than any fantasy you could have conjured up. The weight of his body on yours, the tight grasp of his hands, the rasp of his tongue, the whisper of your name—it piles and piles; the heavy weight falling on you like an anvil.

Velvet softness, and heat. Each drag of him over your sensitive walls makes you keen, toes curling, back arching in pleasure.

You're already sensitive from earlier, from when you played with yourself thinking of him, and the fullness, the slight sting of taking him into you, make a knot form behind your navel. A spooling thread of bliss pulling taut with each deep plunge of him seating deep behind your belly button.

"Touch yourself," he demands, words rucked through the clench of his teeth, bared in pleasure as he syphons bliss from your willing body. "C'mon, love—want you cum around my cock. Wanna feel you—"

You had expected blunt brutality—it had circled your fantasies the moment you pressed your back against the tile, and slipped your fingers through your folds. It's a staple of him, you think; who he is. Ferocity in flesh and bone. He'd touch you with the same rough hands, and regard you with rougher words.

"Mm, spread your legs for me, dove."

"You want it bad, don't you?"

Words reeking of the same smoke on his breath. Heavy commands fell from his blistering lips. It brought you to the brink, to the ledge of that white-hot pleasure until the thought of his hands branding your skin shoved you over.

Hearing it uttered aloud now nearly has you weeping. Frenzied with desire, and that unignorable sense of victory when he leans down, hands roughly hiking your thighs higher up his waist as he fucks into the molten centre of you. Accomplishment when your skin smarts long after his hand drifts away, knowing there will be a mark left behind—blood pooling under your bruised flesh when he gripped too hard.

It's enough to make you delirious.

"Come on," he husks, pressing the flat of his teeth against the underside of your jaw. "You made your pretty cunt cum on those fingers earlier, mmh? Do it again. Make yourself cum around my cock. You wanted this, didn't you? Moaned my fuckin' name with your fingers buried inside your sweet pussy. Well, now you have it, love. So, fuckin' cum—"

His words make you moan loud, your belly quivering at the heat in his voice when hisses the command into your skin.

Your hand slips from the vice grip around his shoulders, dropping to the apex of your spread thigh. Your cunt is burning to the touch, and hotter than the steam billowing around you like a thick cloud. Condensed sin. The lips of your pussy are slick, and swollen from the brutal way he fucks into you. The tips of your fingers ghost over the chafed, raw skin of your pussy, feeling the thick slide of his wet cock, sticky and drenched in the mess of your arousal, as it pounds into you.

Everything feels somehow heightened, real, when you feel the stretch of your flesh around the molten heat of him.

It makes you moan—a noise you'd never heard yourself make before: low, needy. A desperate whine, broken at the first vowel of his name. Jo—John—!

"That's it, love," he gasps, low and desperate, lashes tickling the skin of your jaw. "Cum for me—uhhh, fuck—gonna—gonna fuckin' cum—"

Your fingers pass over your throbbing clit, circling in tandem with each blunt piston of his cock kissing the seal of your womb. Oversensitive from your earliest orgasm, it doesn't take much for you to march toward that precipice once more, dusting over your nerves where it stings like a bruise, and rips through you like a gale.

The building crescendo of your pleasure ends when Price snaps his hips against yours, hitting deep, and finding a spot inside of you that seems to be a direct link to Nirvana, to bliss. He throws you over the ledge until you're once again falling down with nothing but him (him, him, always him) on your mind, and his name slipping off your tongue.

"C–captain—!"

Your cunt throbs around him, fluttering like the rapid pulse beating against the thin skin he nips with his teeth. It floods your veins with liquid bliss, and the euphoric haze that congeals in your head, a mushy slurry of chemicals and victory, is soporific, heavy. It falls on you like an anvil, an anchor around your neck, and you cling to him, murmuring his name into his crown as his thrusts grow sloppy, clumsy.

Price lifts his head, hands holding you tight to him as he fucks the tight clench of your cunt. His lips slant against yours in a messy, wet kiss, broken by gasps of your name spilling from his mouth. His tongue lashes across your teeth, rhythm stuttering into a desperate series of thrusts.

He groans in your ear, a hushed noise cudgelled in the background of everything else—the slap of his balls slapping against your sopping cunt as he plunges into you, pushing in as deep as he can go, and then deeper still, the heavy pants that tumble from your lips.

"Yeah, fuck, love—," another brutal snap has your mind whiting out in pleasure. "Jus' like that. Takin' it so good. So fuckin' good, ain't you?"

He batters against the seal of your womb like he was trying to bludgeon his way inside.

"Fuck—gonna cum—gonna—"

You spasm around him, tied tight at the base of his cock like a pretty little knot, a bow, and he groans low and dazed when he pulses deep inside of you, filling you up with his cum.

"Fuck—!"

He snarls your name, mouth sliding across your skin; wet and messy. His hands are hot on your skin, heavy and branding as he clings to you, riding out the last smouldering vestiges of his release that paints insides pearlescent with the stain of him.

Branded, you think, inside and out.

Your lips sting when he rubs the coarse hair of his chin over them, mouth trailing sloppy, open-mouthed kisses up the bridge of your nose.

He comes to himself in increments, and you catalogue each notch as they unfold before you. Heaving gasps against your neck; messy, wet kisses; murmurs of devotion into your hairline, your temple (fuck, love, fuck, feels so good, so good, good for me, perfect little thing, aren't you? So fuckin' perfect, can't get enough of your little cunt around me, gonna taste you after, gonna bury my face between these pretty thighs and make you ride my face, kitten, gonna make you cum on my tongue—); and finally, finally—his head lifts.

The sight of him, cheeks stained roseate from the heat of the still running shower, from the exertion of spreading you open, and fucking you against the wall—

It's breathtaking.

His eyes are dark, cindered ash and crushed basalt around the edge of a liquid blue cenote. A lunar mare—Oceanus Procellarum dusted with fine azure.

Thunderclouds of blue.

Something intense brims in the arsenic gyre when he stares down at you, lidded eyes heavy with the weight of his lingering pleasure; subdued and far more docile than you'd ever imagined he was capable of.

He blinks slowly and languidly; liquid strokes of a pale curtain suffering over the glacial canyons cut into ashlar—the motion is almost hypnotic when the thinning fog from the cooling shower sweeps across the scant space between your bodies. A veil of diaphanous white.

The haze makes him seem almost ethereal. Incorporeal. It almost feels like a dream—a manifestation of your wants taking shape in your subconsciousness. An illicit tease from the depths of your endless desire.

But the thud of his heart under your palm, the feeling of his cooling flesh glued to your skin like gauze, and harsh breaths ghosting across your flesh are too good to ever be a dream.

You're not imaginative enough to conjure the phantom feeling of his softening cock seated deep within your aching, tender cunt.

Or the sting of your flesh.

Your body feels like one massive contusion. The throbbing sting of strummed rubber bands snapping across the places he touched, gripped tight between his fingers.

It feels like the aftermath of a battle, and the comparison makes your mouth split, unfurling into a satisfied grin as the quiver in your muscles begins to remind you of that time you sprinted through the bustling streets of Cairo together. The heat blooming in your chest, your core, as hot as the sun that scorched your exposed skin.

The burn in your thighs is the same throbbing pain you felt when you slid on loose sand, and skinned your bare knees on the cobblestone of a hidden alleyway, tucked behind an alcove.

Price is a firm mountain holding you steady—just like then, when he picked you up off the ground despite your protests (just a scratch, cap, I can walk—), and carried you through the maze of winding tunnels on the outskirts of the city centre. Solid. Stalwart. Your dependable leader.

You've looked at him the same way for the last four years. Respect, want. Admiration, desire. Greed. You crave him in ways that always, always, felt unattainable. One-sided.

Silly.

And that was it, you think, staring into the naked blue of his eyes. Bare. Raw. Vulnerable.

You've been so busy running from your own feelings, your own ways, convinced without any proof that they were one-sided. A one-way path without any parallels, any concurrents. All this time, with your head buried in your chest to avoid getting caught staring at him so wantingly, you've missed the look in his eye, bent by refraction—your own avoidance.

The way Price looks at you is rapacious—a twin flame to your own covetous desires.

There's something so unfathomably fragile about how he stares at you, now. Head bowed, catching the brunt of the chilled spray as it rains down on him, shielding you from the cold. He keeps you warm, and tucked safely in the fold of his arms. Unwilling, you think, to let go just yet. To slip back into the same impasse as before. The same forced stalemate forged by hesitation.

It drags something out of your chest—a laugh, maybe: broken and frayed at the edges, a vocal fry of derision, and disbelief.

His chin lifts at the sound, brow furrowing together in a knot of confusion between his nautical blue eyes. Six degrees. You feel every notch when he slowly lowers the two of you to the ground, falling in a clumsy heap to his knees, and still buried within you.

"What?"

The word is drenched in the thick tang of the bloom of his dormant hesitation shucking the tendrils of sleep away as the spell around you splinters at the broken laughter that tumbled from your lips. It makes you coo—a soft, soothing noise to placate the dent between his brow, and the knot of his mouth souring into an even line.

"Just thinking," you hum, legs tightening around his waist, knees now hiked up the sides of his ribcage.

He hisses teeth gritted teeth when you wriggle on his lap. "About what?"

Your palm sides down his slick chest until the thud of his heart sits in the cup of your hand. "About this."

Your words draw a low hum from his throat, and you feel it reverberate through your joints. "That so?"

That cold night in Cairo rears again. No substitute for the real thing.

The thing is: with your head buried in the proverbial sand, you missed the way his eyes never wavered from your face when he said it. How the corners tightened with something that felt like irritation, but now feels like restraint.

Why you had to hunt for Cleopatra's, anyway.

(—losin' some bloody cigars' is hardly the same as losin' you, love. Don't you ever do that to me—to us—again—)

In some ways, you think you lost the battle—many of them, in fact—but when he winds his arms around your waist, keeping locked in his embrace, you know you somehow won the war. The unwinnable victory thudding steadily against the palm of your hand.

You glue your forehead to his, and murmur: "been waiting a long time for this."

"Well," he rasps, voice ghosting over the shell of your ear. "Hell of a way to get my attention."

#captain price x reader #john price x reader #captain john price x reader #this was edited in a feverish daze so if you find any mistakes #don't @ me about it #i did my best #ahhhh #it feels like it's been forever since i wrote for Price??#but it really hasn't???#anyway #captain john price #captain price #john price #cod mw2 #cod fanfic #john price x you #captain john price x you

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