#body horror xx

[rafey-baby]

hidden

outlaw!rafe holding pogue!reader hostage in her own house after banging his fist on her door in the middle of a stormy night, demanding to be let in with a gun in hand and wild waves in the sea of his eyes…

c/w: rafe being manipulative, mentions of murder & violence, he’s also weirdly soft in the end? 18+ mdni!

wc: 2k

he’s been stuck in my head for a while so hope u enjoy xx

series masterlist

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There’s still sleep dust lingering in her lashes when she hesitantly cracks open the door at 3 am—revealing a tall, scary man with scarlet stains on his hands, white button up saturated in maroon and a scowl painted over his unsettling countenance.  

She stands there like a deer in headlights, unmoving while he looks down at her with arctic eyes as chilling as the frigid waters surrounding an iceberg. And at first, she thinks she’s still asleep, tired brain conjuring up some creepy murderer scenario where she’s the idiot who does everything the audience in the movie theater is screaming at her not to.

But as she properly blinks her sleepy eyes open, she comes to the realization that this is not a horror film and this intimidating stranger (with oddly appealing features) who’s definitely just killed someone is very much real.  

She’s about to open her mouth— unsure whether to scream for help or simply stare with her mouth hung open in shock, but she doesn’t get the chance to find out before he’s pasting his massive palm over her lips.  

“Don’t make a sound,” his low mutter makes a shiver run down her spine. And she doesn’t, instead she just blinks, too out of it to move a muscle— the reek of the dried blood on his hand hitting her nose and making her face scrunch up.

She doesn’t know why she’s not putting up any sort of a fight, blames it on the fact that half her brain is still swimming in the lake of her dreamland— soaking up the glittering sunbeams that never dull and dipping its toes in the grass that consists of misty nebula and twinkling stars. 

And he’s just so mean, manhandling her to his liking and ordering her around with a gun to her head; grumbling about needing a hiding place from the cops after dumping a body somewhere in the ocean and getting caught since apparently, his temper really just got the best of him at times.  

“Didn’t mean to kill the guy, alright? He jus’ kept bein’ a bitch ‘n pissin’ me off— I mean, I was, uh, I was provoked, what was I supposed to do?”

However, his explanation seems to do very little to soothe her overstrung heart that’s thudding in her ribcage; loud enough for him to hear and earning her an exasperated roll of his eyes.

“M’takin’ a shower now ‘n you’re not gonna move an inch, you understand? Cause if you do…m’gonna have to— m’gonna hurt you ‘n I don’t wanna do that, okay?” 

She merely nods her head, unable to string together a coherent sentence, and he takes note of the way her inhale gets caught in her throat when he takes a step closer. “You, uh, you live alone?”

She offers another nod of her head.  

“Dumb girl”, he tuts, shaking his head in disapproval. “When someone’s knockin’ on your door in the middle of the night you don’t— you don’t fuckin’ open, alright?”  

She’s making it entirely too easy for him.  

However, the second he’s in the bathroom, she forces her exhausted brain to think— hurriedly coming up with a rickety plan while she listens to the water streaming behind the door. She waits for only a a few seconds to make sure the coast is clear before she’s bolting towards her bedroom; trembling fingers grabbing her phone from her nightstand and trying to dial 911.  

Unfortunately, her shaky hands aren’t of any help when they clumsily drop the phone— the clattering sound of it hitting the floor echoing in the quietness of the room. And suddenly she can’t breathe.

Her brain short-circuits as she bends down in an attempt to reach for the wretched device that has somehow tumbled under her bed. However, when she finally catches it in an unsteady grip, she hears the shower turn off— an eerie stillness following. In her state of panic, she attempts to turn the phone back on and call for help, but it’s proving to be rather difficult since her lungs aren’t working and her heartbeat is ringing in her ears.  

“Boo,” a low whisper right behind her makes her flinch; a faint gasp leaving her while a shiver travels down her spine.

“Why’d you jus’ do that, huh? Told you I didn’t wanna— didn’t wanna fuckin’ hurt you ‘n then you go ‘n pull this shit,” a strong hand grips her by her throat when he turns her around to face him.  

“M’sorry, I— I don’t—” she’s paralyzed, respiration shallow while her blood runs cold.

“You don’t what, hm?” he stares into her horror-stricken eyes with an almost bored look, seeming to be entirely indifferent to her torment. 

“Can’t…can’t breathe,” her voice is nearly inaudible.

A grim chuckle bubbles from his chest in response. “Can’t breathe? Maybe you should’ve thought about that before, yeah?” he scoffs, cruel words mocking her.  

“You’re so fuckin’ stupid— want me to kill you? That what you want?” he grits out, squeezing her neck harder; making her feel dizzy.

“No! No, please. M’sorry…m’sorry, won’t— won’t do it again, promise, I’ll do anything—” she manages out, desperately gasping for air because he’s nearly crushing her windpipe in his unrelenting grip.  

“Anythin’ huh? That’s, uh, tha’s real temptin’ ‘n all but what I need you to do is not pull stupid shit like this, you get that?”  

“I won’t, I promise. You can, um, stay here for as long as you want and I’ll help, okay?” she thinks she’s going to pass out soon— little stars already peppering behind her fluttering lids and her weakened limbs beginning to feel heavy.

His coarse panting fills the room while he seems to contemplate her offer. “If you even think about runnin’ to the cops tonight, m’gonna fuckin’ find you, you understand?” 

She frantically nods and at last, his hold begins to loosen around her trachea, allowing for her greedy lungs to finally suck in air as she takes a step back in an attempt to even out her respiration.  

He doesn’t say anything for a moment— silently observing her while she clears her throat and swallows a few times, trying to pacify her racing heart and the thoughts running around her brain.

Then, she blinks up at him, noticing how he smells like her honey-scented body wash and orange blossom shampoo— nothing but a towel hanging low on his hips, leaving very little to her imagination as the room grows quiet.  

Once she feels the flat floorboards under her wobbly feet again, she tries a different approach; a nervous hesitation overlaying her creaky question. “What’s, um…what’s your name?”

“Don’t worry about it,” he dismisses her. However, when a small pout begins to mold her mouth the longer she stares at him, he lets out a discontented huff.  

“Rafe,” he finally responds, not bothering to ask for hers, seemingly not caring enough for it. She tells him, nonetheless, and he can’t help but laugh at her priorities— a literal criminal has broken into her home and she cares about fucking introductions.  

“So…have you— have you killed anyone else?”

She doesn’t know why she’s trying to make small talk with him but she figures that if she gets him to talk about something else, choking her to death won’t be at the forefront of his mind anymore.  

“You seriously wanna know?” he raises his brows. 

She thinks about it for a moment and then settles on a shake of her head, followed by a harsh chuckle rumbling from his chest.  

“So, uh— what do you do? Like besides…killing people and stuff?” she tries once more.  

“Listen, the less you know, the better, alright?” he states, causing her to let out a soft sigh in defeat when all of a sudden, thunder crackles behind her windows, an ablaze lightning illuminating her dimly lit bedroom soon after.  

She flinches at the sound and the nearly sinister way it momentarily lights up his face.  

“You scared of a little storm?” he feigns concern as he peers down at her. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe, yeah?” the mocking grin plastered on his face causes a shudder to travel through her as she swallows—wishing this was all just a really bad nightmare.  

- - - - - - - - - - - - 

After the little incident, Rafe thinks she’s just as sweet as sugar, offering to make him tea and asking if he wants a blanket or an extra pillow so he’d be more comfortable sleeping on the couch. 

And he can tell that she’s merely doing it because she’s terrified of him, which she should be. Nonetheless, he thinks it feels nice to be pampered and doted on— to have a pretty girl following his orders like a trained puppy. It makes him figure he’s gonna enjoy his stay just fine.  

The following morning though, he’s woken up by her shaky figure standing next to him— pointing his gun at him. 

He lets out a sigh, softened bones mellow from sleep while he rubs at his eyes and shifts to a seated position on the couch— teasingly lifting his hands up in surrender. “Puppy’s got a gun, huh? Tryin’ to be all tough now, are we?”

“I— I want you to leave,” she says, voice rickety and words unsure.  

And he’s trying to take her seriously, he really is, but it’s proving to be rather difficult when she resembles a scared little kitten more than someone who knows what they’re doing.  

“You want me to leave? Maybe you should, uh, work on your pitch a little more? M’not very convinced,” the lazy smile tugging at his mouth makes her brows crease.  

“Rafe, this is not a joke,” a scowl shades her face.

He thinks she looks rather adorable. “Come on, pup, you’re not gonna shoot me. You don’t even know how to use that thing, do you?” his voice is even, and it makes her hesitate.

“Well…it can’t be that complicated?” it’s more of a question than a statement and he lets out a humored chuckle in response. Her frown deepens.  

“Why don’t you give that to me, yeah? You don’t want death on your conscience, would break ya, you’re too soft for that shit.”  

“You don’t know me.” 

“Know you enough,” he says, finally standing on his feet, taking a slow step towards her, making her squeeze the weapon tighter in her trembling fingers.  

“If— if I give it to you…you’re gonna— you’re gonna kill me and I don’t wanna die,” her words are rushed, hysterical. 

His brows furrow. “Who said anythin’ about killin’ you? Listen, if you give me the gun right now, m’not gonna do anythin’. You have my word, okay?” he towers over her, solid chest grazing the barrel.  

“I don’t trust you,” her voice is a whisper.  

“I know, pup…but I also know that you’re not gonna use that,” his steady hands are a stark contrast to her own when he grabs for the firearm, slipping it from her weak fingers with ease.  

“There we go, no need to be so, uh, so fuckin’ theatrical, yeah?” he lowers his face in order to lock eyes with her. “See? Not hurtin’ you, am I?”  

She manages out a hum of agreement, and then her waterline is brimming with salty droplets as she chokes out a sob. “M’sorry. I don’t—”  

“Hey, hey s’all good. Mistakes happen, yeah?” he says before his strong arms are wrapping around her trembling form because he’s not a complete monster, and for some reason it only makes her weep harder. 

Her crocodile tears wet his shirt while his big paws rub against her back, but he doesn’t seem to mind. And she thinks it’s almost…comforting when he starts to sway her from side to side, like he’s trying to calm down a crying child. 

“There you go, just, uh, let it all out ‘n maybe you can chill out a bit, yeah? You pogues can be so fuckin’ dramatic sometimes,” he pats at her back, rolling his eyes as she takes in shaky inhale after shaky inhale until she’s feeling slightly more placid.  

“Shit, if I’d known you were such a fuckin’ crybaby I would’ve picked another house,” he grumbles, pulling away from her weakened form before pushing her back to stumble on her feet— setting the gun back onto the coffee table with a clank.

[ddollipop]

CURB THIS SICKNESS. . . ! — ( SOFT YANDERE!PLAGUE DOCTOR OC X READER. )

#. synopsis! — there's a virus outside that's snuffed out the lights of many. . . and lucian refuses to let you meet such a miserable fate .

#. contains! — f!reader , explicitly nsfw content , multiple orgasms , vaginal fingering , implications of paranoia , cum swallowing , oral sex , cunnilingus , blowjob , vaginal sex , obsessive behavior , frequent usage of endearment terms (love, darling, angel) , missionary position , bathing , established relationship , slight choking , slight hair pulling , creampie , biting .

#. word count! — 5.1k .

#. oc carrd! — click here to find more information on lucian + other original characters of mine that i might write for in the future! xx .

When the virus began to spread in all directions from its alleged location of origin, —you were certain you’d be dead before winter. If not from sickness, then certainly from another disease, or at the hands of some twisted maniac just searching for someone to slaughter that nobody would care enough to miss. You thought it was only a matter of time before you succumbed to hunger or thirst or the changing chill of autumn, or maybe something completely different: but something was bound to happen, and you were sure of it.

And it did. . . But it was nothing like what you had in mind.

Lucian may have seemed like something out of a horror story passed down through generations, still clad in his working attire the night he scooped you up in his arms from a shabby alleyway like a stray kitten, but he was surprisingly gentle (and perhaps unusually quiet.) He wasn’t very talkative, but he cared for you in a way you were completely unaccustomed to, —prepared you a warm meal, brewed you chamomile tea, ran you a hot bath, and gave you a place to sleep for the night. He said you were slightly fevered and a bit malnourished, but all things considered, it could have been worlds worse.

“You’re lucky,” he hummed, a gloved hand smoothing over your jaw, “the pestilence hasn’t taken hold of you.”

Even back then, that wasn’t why you felt lucky. . . No, much to the contrary, you felt lucky because this man had taken you in without expecting anything of you in return, and he sought to keep you safe from the rot of the outside world. Thus, little by little, you stopped caring much about going out there. 

His place is a bit quaint for two, but it’s homey, and it smells perpetually of lavender. Over time, he’s shifted the sleeping arrangements, and now you rest in his arms each night; about as close as one can get to being a lover without having the label.

A part of you is sure you could get it if you asked, but to you, it doesn’t matter much. At the end of each day, he comes home to you, and that’s what counts. You take care of the housework while he’s away (not that there’s ever much to do.) For as odd as he is, his living space is free of most things, —no trinkets unrelated to his work (which you are not keen on touching), and he’s meticulous about picking up after himself and keeping all his items in order, so your unofficial duties are few and far between. Otherwise, the rest boils down to cooking meals, washing clothes, and keeping yourself entertained while he’s away. . . Like some kind of glorified trophy wife.

And sure, this will probably get old eventually, but for now, this is what you’re working with. He likes to have you close and to know where you are, —to know that you’re safe and not out getting infected by anyone or anything. If you’re at his home, you’re safe from all the filth of the outside world, and heaven knows it’s so nice to come home and lie next to a body so utterly unmarred by the grime of society.

You’re sure once the virus has stilled, he’ll ease up.

But tonight is not that night. Lucian all but stumbles through the door, and you can hear his rapid breathing through the long, beak-like shape of his mask. He seems startled and frantic, and you rush over, a concerned expression crossing your features.

“Lucian? Are you alright?” You ask, reaching out to put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

In an instant, he snatches your wrist and grabs for the other, holding one in either hand. His grip is fervent, but far from painful, and you become more confused the longer he goes without explaining the state he’s found himself in.

“Lucian—”

“Darling,” he cuts you off, “you mustn’t get near the door.”

“Okay,” you nod in compliance, “but why?”

“The pestilence has taken hold of this city,” he replies. “The air out there, you wouldn’t believe the thickness of that putrid aroma. It’s suffocating.”

Before you can ask if there’s something you can do to quench his worries, he tugs you away from the entrance and into the bathroom. He removes his gloves and sets them aside, reaching down to begin running a warm bath. Then he looks to you, almost expectantly.

“Strip, please,” he encourages, —saying it like he’s desperate for the act, albeit not necessarily under the context you’d prefer of him.

“Lucian—”

“Darling,” he hisses, “please, do as I ask of you.”

His bare hands cup your cheeks.

“Please,” he repeats.

It’s hard to deny him when he asks like that and has been so good to you, and it’s not as if he’s asking for a lot. He’s just having a bad night, and if scrubbing yourself down will help ease his mind a bit, you’re willing to put in that sliver of extra effort for his sake.

Lucian sighs in relief as you begin to disrobe.

“Thank you,” he comments. “I really don’t have a clue what I’d do if you fell ill. . . I don’t think my heart could handle such a thing.”

You slip the last of your clothing off and step gingerly into the filling tub. It’s not long enough to stretch out in, so you bunch yourself up neatly to fit the space and look up at him once more.

“I feel fine,” you assure.

“I’m glad,” he replies. “Even so, it’s much better to air on the side of caution. The human body is a dangerously fickle thing, and it can be incredibly fragile. I’ve seen as much firsthand more times than I can count. In its infancy, this virus is little more than a common cold, but progresses into something fatal at a rapid pace.”

You simply nod as he kneels next to the tub, rolling his sleeves up.

“Your breathing is ragged, Lucian,” you state, “you should take that mask off and get some fresh air.”

“After,” he answers quickly.

He reaches for the half-used lavender soap bar and lathers it on his palms, then reaches out to smooth the suds over your arms and neck. His motions are a little rough and all too urgent. This is far from the first time he’s accompanied you for a bath, but it is the first time he’s ever done so and been this aggressive in his approach (if only as a result of his own anxiety.)

For the time being, he seems to avoid your breasts, instead reaching for one of your legs to hike it up out of the water. He repeats this process with the other, cleaning you until he seems satisfied. When he makes no move to revisit your chest, you take the soap from his hand and lather it yourself, placing it in its previous spot before leaning back slightly and allowing your hands to travel where you’d have liked for his to go.

Lucian watches but doesn’t touch. Your fingertips nudge at your nipples, feeling them harden under the minstrations, your bottom lip slipping between your teeth. If nothing else, he should be getting the hint by now.

Surprisingly, you’ve never had sex with him in all the months you’ve spent curled up in his arms, sleeping in his bed. He’s watched you take care of yourself on a number of occasions, has helped with his fingers another few times, —and allowed you to wrap your hand around him once a few weeks prior; but anything beyond that has seemed to be off limits. You’ve chalked it up to his shyness, or perhaps his distaste for human contact as a result of the pestilence; but tonight feels distinctly different.

Even in his previous state of frazzlement, Lucian seems all too content to sit back and watch you fondle your own breasts, soapy fingers clutching and releasing in tandem. You’ve always liked for him to watch you do things like this. Though his mask obscures the view of his face, you just know his eyes are trained on you, soaking up every movement, and you like to think he’s drooling at the way you grope yourself for his enjoyment (and for your own.)

“Lucian?” You prompt, half-lidded eyes glancing over to him.

His shoulders straighten as you say his name.

“You’re very beautiful,” he says, words almost too muffled by the mask to be made out.

“You think so?” You smirk a bit.

“I do.”

Ah, but that’s nothing new, and it’s nothing he hasn’t shared with you before. On the very night he took you in and washed your hair, he smoothed his gloved hands against your scalp and mumbled about how pretty you looked, even with dirt still caked on your skin. Even covered in filth from the alleyways you’d been sleeping in, he thought you were nothing less than stunning, —a real vision to behold, and he’s never skimped on such compliments.

You pause for a moment, reaching out to grasp for his hands. He allows the gesture, though he seems a bit confused, leaning in closer to the rim of the tub as you position him to your liking.

“Do you think I feel feverish?” You inquire, placing one of his hands on your neck and another on one of your breasts.

He makes no move to pull away, firming his grip up almost instantaneously, as if he’s been itching to feel you this way.

“Perhaps a bit warm,” he mumbles, taking a moment to roll your nipple between two nimble fingers, “but body temperature is known to rise during times of. . .” he trails off, clears his throat, then utters: “arousal.”

You trail your nails down his arm, letting your head tip back again. His hands are a bit calloused, but they feel so good against your skin, and you let a few moans slip past your lips. It’s not often he touches you like this without his gloves on, but the flesh-on-flesh contact is electrifying.

“Not to worry you, but I do feel a bit strange,” you huff slightly.

Through the slightly tinted bath water, Lucian can still watch your hand as it travels between your thighs.

“I’m just a throbbing mess,” you hum, giving him a pointed stare; “but you’ll take care of me. . . Right, Doctor?”

It may just be your imagination, but you could swear you heard his breathing shudder at that request. You’ve never been this forward with him, but something apart from the facial expression that’s still hidden away tells you that he likes where this is going. His fingers clamp down on the column of your throat, squeezing just enough to make taking in air a bit more of a struggle, but not anywhere near hard enough to be fatal.

The bit about being a throbbing mess was by no means an exaggeration on your part, so you take matters into your own fingers for the time being, drawing circles on your clit beneath the water.

“Of course,” he finally finds the voice to agree, “—I’d do anything to keep you from feeling unwell.”

That is what you like to hear.

“Anything?”

“Anything.” 

His grip tightens on your throat again, for emphasis, and with that, he seems to come slightly undone.

“Darling, that’s why I’ve demanded you stay here in my home, —our home. It’s safe here, free of contaminants and filth and anything that could cause you harm,” he says, the words spilling out like he’s been holding them back since he first set his sights on you.

“The world outside is ill, not just this rotten city. I’m working tirelessly to combat this pestilence, but as things stand now, the safest place you can be is here. With me. You understand that, my love. . . Don’t you?”

You’re only half listening, but you nod in agreement anyway. Whatever he’s saying, you trust his opinion on the matter.

“Of course,” you gasp, almost slipping a finger inside yourself to the tune of his melodic voice.

“I knew you would,” he continues, loosening the grip on your neck again. “You know I only want what’s best for you, that everything I do is to ensure your safety, —to eliminate the possibility of you ever falling sick.”

“Of course,” you repeat, head growing cloudier by the minute. “You’ve always taken such good care of me, right from the very beginning.”

God, he’s so elated that you’re seeing things his way. The way this makes him feel is almost too much to handle.

“I try so hard, darling, I truly do,” he says, both hands coming up to cup your cheeks.

“Please, Lucian,” you mumble desperately, “I need you tonight.”

He complies, shedding his long coat and draping it over your shoulders once you’ve stepped out of the tub. The chill of the air against your wet skin leaves your nipples hard and sensitive, and as he leads you to the bedroom, you hope he realizes just what it is you’re asking for. His fingers are a plentiful start, and you just know they’ll feel so good stuffed inside you, curling to hit all the right places, —but they’re nothing compared to the cock he’s stingily hidden away for all this time.

Tonight, you want him in all his glory in the glow of the lanterns on the walls. You want to strip him bare and gag on the length between his thighs, feel him twitch against the roof of your mouth, tease every vein that runs up his shaft. It’s not enough to grind against him while you’re half asleep or hump his clothed thigh until you’ve left his pants damp and your pussy sopping, just begging to be fucked by this man who might just love you more than he could ever fear any virus that lurks outside these walls.

“Don’t fret,” he tells you, though it sounds more like a command than a gesture to soothe any worries, “just lie back. I’ll be sure to give you. . . A proper examination.”

You could cum just hearing that.

With half your body pressed against the headboard and his coat nearly slipping off your body completely, he sets to work in his underclothes and mask. It’s by no means an uncommon sight, but there’s something distinct about him this late evening; the way his black attire contrasts so beautifully with the stark paleness of his skin and the mystery it shrouds him in that you’re just dying to sink your teeth into. Everything hidden beneath that cautious wardrobe and that long mask. . . You’ve gotta have it. It’s a necessity.

His fingers, ungloved, begin softly with your calves, tracing senseless lines.

“I’m not so fragile,” you remind him.

For as oblivious as he can be, Lucian takes the hint, and by the time he’s reached your thighs, he’s content to give them the same treatment as your throat.

The way he splits you apart is almost painfully clinical, a thumb on either side of your lips, peering through the eye holes of his mask to admire the way your folds glisten in the orange lantern light. A few prodding strokes leave you biting your lip again, body waning in anticipation for the moment he finally turns his hand over and sinks the longest of his fingers inside you, —slowly, but deliberately. It’s impossible to see his expression, but you hope his mouth hangs open a little at the way your cunt suckles on his finger, encouraging him to prod more and maybe stuff another few inside for you to grind against.

There’s something about the warmth of his fingers that gets you off almost in equal amounts to the way he moves. Another finger inside, and you whine, halfway to an orgasm from this alone.

He’s not particulary rough in his execution, but there’s a clean meticulousness in every movement that leaves every cell in your body craving more, begging for anything he can offer. Months upon months of wanting, of dropping hints, of hoping he’d catch on and finally see things your way, —and at last, you’ve made it. And now that you’re here, you’re content to simply lie still and let him have his way with you.

“Please don’t stop,” you beg, nearly choking on the words when the tips of his fingers brush just the right spot.

“Before you’re satisfied?” He sits forward a bit, resting his free hand on your stomach to press you down onto the bed. “Darling, I couldn’t fathom it.”

You will your upper body forward, grabbing for the hand on your stomach to move it up to your throat. He squeezes, scissoring the fingers inside you, watching closely as your body shakes and your eyes roll back a bit in ecstasy.

“I’ve tried,” he says to you suddenly. “I’ve tried so desperately to be gentle with you.”

You smile.

“I appreciate that,” you answer. “But I don’t want you to be gentle at the moment.”

“That’s a dangerous request, my love,” he warns.

God, you hope so.

You reach forward and grab at the beak of his mask, pulling it upward gently until it begins to slip off and reveal the handsome face underneath. Dark hair, dark eyes, but skin almost pale enough to be sickly, you meet his gaze just long enough to ask for permission, then lean in to kiss him on the mouth. It’s the first time, and it’s electric. He’s avoided this for months, —avoided your mouth, your unspoken pleas, all the passes you made for the sake of keeping himself at bay. But here you are now with two of his fingers stuffed inside you, his hand on your throat, and your lips slotted against his own.

“Please,” you murmur, fingers clutching at the fabric of his shirt.

And you can feel the restraints of his mind come unwound.

He’s no longer gentle in the way he fucks you silly with his fingers, hammering them over and over and over again into that delicious spot buried deep inside you, squeezing your throat hard enough to cut your breathing off. The way your pussy spasms as you cum is blissful, and he loves the way your arousal soaks his digits, loves the way your back arches, soundless moans spilling forth as he makes you orgasm.

“I fucking tried,” he says again.

It’s almost manic, so desperate and sort of pathetic in the kind of way that turns you on. This is the first time you’ve ever heard him curse, and it dawns on you that even the filthiest of words sound so unendingly elegant when they’re spoken by Lucian.

“I tried to be gentle. I tried to keep you safe here, —to shelter you from whatever forsaken wasteland remains out there,” he insists, his fingers still buried in your twitching cunt. “I just wanted to protect you.”

He lightens the grip on your throat as you lean in to kiss him again, cupping his face in your hands.

“You have,” you assure him.

“You take such good care of me, Lucian,” you mumble into his ear. “Let me show you how grateful I am.”

The fingers stuffed inside you slowly slip out, and reach for his hand, guiding them to your lips, taking his digits into your mouth to taste yourself on them. He watches with hunger and interest as you clean him with your tongue. He leans in to kiss you to get a taste of it himself, grasping your hair near the scalp and taking a fistful hard enough to make you gasp.

“I can’t let you leave,” he murmurs. “It’s not safe out there. When this pestilence has been subdued, I’ll do this all correctly. We can start from the beginning, and I’ll be a gentleman.”

“I look forward to it,” you answer softly.

“You’ll stay until then?” He inquires.

He’s clearly overreacting, but it’s hard to care when you just want him inside you. Lucian has seen death day in and day out, —so it’s no wonder it feels like it permeates everything around him. He just doesn’t want you to suffer such a fate, and you’re confident that you won’t, as long as he’s yours.

“Of course I will,” you answer.

It’s like something primal takes over. Suddenly his lips are on yours in a bruising kiss, and his hands are grasping roughly at your breasts, pushing you down onto the bed as he crawls between your legs. He pauses, hovering just above your dripping cunt, turning his head to sink his teeth into the meat of your thigh. It makes you squeal a bit, and he kisses the teethmarks he left behind as if in apology.

You can’t help but wonder how long he’s been yearning for this. It’s like every part of him is thrumming from the thrill of it all, and this man who has previously refused to even kiss you on the mouth is now stationed exactly where you want him, tongue lolling out to lick a solid stripe up your folds. He laps like a man starved, then spreads you apart with his thumbs to suck your clit mercilessly.

It’s good enough to make your vision go blurry, and you can’t seem to form proper words through the haze. Desperately, your fingers claw at the sheets of this mattress, and he moans against your hot cunt, sending a vibration rippling through your core that makes your back arch on instinct. You mumble something that comes out like gibberish, pussy convulsing against the flat of his tongue.

His arm comes round to press your hips down, forcing you to be still. It’s the kind of toruture you’re sure you’ll learn to live for. There’s only so much you can wriggle under his arm, which has a surprising amount of force despite his rather lanky stature.

From what little friction you manage as you attempt to grind against his tongue, you tip yourself over the edge and as the knot in your stomach unties for the second time tonight, he continues licking, lapping at the juices that spill forth.

He stands and reaches for the top button of his shirt, not bothering to wipe his face, chin and lips glistening with your aftermath. You watch him undress with lustful eyes, propping yourself up on your elbow, then slinking back against the headboard once again, resting your weary body against it. The quiver of your thighs doesn’t stop you from nudging at your swollen clit.

“I wanted to be a gentleman,” he comments, untucking the shirt from his pants and pulling the front open.

It’s not skin you haven’t seen before. In fact, you’ve seen every inch of him at one point or another; just never all at once, and now, you’re waiting with bated breath to see him completely exposed for your eyes only.

“I truly did. I wanted to give you comfort and security, —to love you as you deserve. And I knew from the moment I saw you that only I could give you exactly what you’ve always needed.”

You hum in acknowledgement as he continues to strip himself bare.

“But it’s so clear to me now that I’ve neglected you,” he continues. “This beautifully desperate display is all a result of my negligence. . . I failed to realize just how much you needed me like this. How much you needed the touch of a man. . .”

He sounds apologetic, but your eyes are fixated on his half-hard cock. The last time you saw it, he asked that you keep your mouth away; insisting it wasn’t sanitary to use it for such purposes, terrified that you might contract some sort of illness if you sucked his dick for the sheer enjoyment of doing so. This time, however, you have a feeling you’re well past that.

To test the waters, you let your hand fall away from your cunt, slipping off the side of the bed to kneel before him. He gazes down at you as you open your lips and let your tongue fall out, encouraging him to make what he will of it.

“My love,” he says, placing four fingers under your chin to rest his thumb against your tongue for a moment, “—I’ll make everything up to you. . .”

His free hand pumps his cock once, twice, thrice, —then he places it gently on the flat of your tongue, letting you feel the weight and the warmth of it. He sighs.

“Darling,” he groans, “ah. . .”

It takes very little for him to come close to cumming in your mouth, just a few minutes of sucking him off, listening to him moan, feeling him quiver at your touch. You hum with his member stuffed down your throat, and he cants his hips reflexively, an orgasm bubbling up beneath his skin.

Your non-dominant hand holds his cock steady while the other is stuck between your thighs, rubbing furiously at your clit, making you whimper along his shaft. When he notices, Lucian finds that wholly unacceptable and snatches you up to position you on the edge of the bed, relieving the pressure on your aching knees. You weren’t down there for long, but kneeling was hardly comfortable on the hard floor.

He spreads your thighs apart and smacks the pads of his fingers against your slit.

Whatever he’s doing, you’re sure you’ll enjoy it to the fullest, so you occupy yourself with his cock again from this new angle, bending awkwardly to mouth at the reddened tip. His fingers find their way inside you once more, working their delicate magic, brushing against all the right places. At this point, you’re more desperate for his dick to slip inside you like this, but you take what he offers in stride (and more of him into your mouth in the process.)

He’s vocal, and that’s utterly divine. His gravely moans and the pump of his fingers leave you cumming for a third time before his first orgasm arises, depositing a sizable amount of his seed into your mouth.

“I love you,” he huffs, —and if he were anyone else, you’d be certain it was just the oral sex talking, but no. . . Lucian wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t mean it.

Of course, he’s made similar confessions over the months, and has certainly treated you like it long before he ever expressed it so directly, but still. . . It feels nice to hear it, if nothing else.

“I love you too,” you answer honestly, urging him closer with your arms wrapped around his neck. “I’m yours tonight, completely. . . If you’ll have me. . .”

“Oh, darling, don’t be foolish,” he remarks, kissing you deeply. “You’ve been mine since the moment we met.”

Your back to the cool sheets, he lingers over you now, his shadow looming over you so monstrously. There’s a stark flush of red on his face that has begun to spread down the length of his neck, and one of his hands finds its way to your breasts as the other smoothes across your thigh. The head of his cock kisses your sopping entrance, sending a series of chills from the top of your spine to the bottom.

His breath on your neck makes your chest tighten, and he finds your lips with his own again as he sinks inside you, filling you up.

“Lucian,” you whimper, helpless to his touch as he pauses, buried down to the hilt inside your cunt.

He presses a few gentle kisses to your throat, murmuring something about how nice it feels to be stuffed inside you. He feels your nails dig into his shoulders as you adjust to his intrusion.

“You must understand by now,” he says, mumbling the words right next to your bitten earlobe. “Everything I do is for you.”

“I do,” you gasp slightly. 

As he begins to move, your walls clench around him, and he exhales deeply against the junction of your neck and shoulder. You roll your hips to match his pace, but as he goes faster, that becomes fruitless. Eventually, you resign yourself to the fate of lying there against the pillows, speared on his cock, him making a mess of you as you moan uncontrollably.

This was everything you’d been hoping for and then some, like some erotic dream come to life. Lucian’s lips travel where they please, —stopping to peck at your jaw, then to suck on your throat. Your breathing is haggard, and he smooths a hand down your side, resting it against your hip for a moment.

“Just a little more,” he whispers, as if to be reassuring.

“Just look how stunning you are, angel,” he murmurs, “how pretty you look like this.”

He kisses you once more.

“You take this so well, like your body was made for me.”

You’re delirious enough to believe that might be the case.

His cock pounds a little harder, and he hits the perfect spot, tearing a desperate yelp from your throat. You’re overstimulated and weak, but your high is itching just under your skin, and you couldn’t bear to see it disappear.

“Please,” you whimper to him, completely at his mercy, “—please, I’m so close.”

He loves the desperation that clings to your voice. The hand on your hip travels to your clit, pressing roughly against the abused little button, making you jerk slightly. He rubs a few heavy circles against it, and you come undone, cunt spasming around his cock as he chases his own release inside you.

Lucian is sloppy near the end, which may just be the only time you’ve ever known him to not be perfectly calculated and precise. His breath hits your neck again, over and over as he huffs through the hunt, finally sinking his teeth in when he comes to a finish. His cum sits hot inside your cunt, and he catches his breath for a moment, head resting against your throat.

“I apologize,” he utters. “I hope that wasn’t too much for you.”

You exhale slowly, his cock still buried in your heat.

“Don’t apologize,” you murmur, “I enjoyed myself.”

You feel him smile against your neck.

“I’m glad, darling.”

For the first time, he sleeps next to you without clothing, letting you touch every part of him, tangling your limbs together. Your face buried in the crook of his neck, breath fanning softly against him, as close to sleep as you can manage without tumbling over the precipice, Lucian reaches for his long coat and drapes it over your body, holding you closer.

[littlexdeaths]

𝕝𝕖𝕥’𝕤 𝕘𝕠, 𝕕𝕠𝕟’𝕥 𝕨𝕒𝕚𝕥 (𝕗𝕚𝕧𝕖)

eddie munson x shy fem reader

warnings: 18+ ONLY MDNI, insecure eddie makes an appearance, eddie’s pov, tons of kissing, drug use (weed), grinding/dry humping and a whole lot of cheese, what can i say? (it’s a given with these two)

part four | part six

let’s go, don’t wait masterlist

word count: 4.9k

a/n: damn this was a long time coming. thank you guys for being so patient with me during this writing slump. also big shoutout to @strangerstilinski for gifting me that one porno title. but i really need to give the biggest thank you to my bestie @undead-supernova ! august, you have truly helped me improve my writing so much over the past year, and i hope you know how much i love and appreciate you. this chapter is dedicated to you boo xx.

“You cannot be serious, sweetheart,” Eddie deadpans, looking between you and the VHS tape clutched between his fingers.

You feel your face warm, his overly exaggerated tone causing another customer in the horror section to give you both a sideways glance.

“As a heart attack,” you mumble, grabbing a copy of Children of the Corn to read the back cover in order to avoid his piercing gaze.

“Never seen Alien, she says…” he huffs under his breath, “It’s a classic!”

When you finally dare to peek up at him under your lashes, he’s giving you a look of utter disapproval that wavers on the edge of teasing.

“Sci-Fi isn’t really my thing,” you shrug, putting the tape back and reaching for another.

“But Evil Dead is?” he muses, leaning forward over your shoulder to glance at the cover art.

The background is dark, with two grotesque-like hands reaching into the frame and toward a bloodied Bruce Campbell holding a chainsaw above his head. When Eddie leans in closer to get a better look, the tips of his fingers brush against your own in the process. The gentle touch sends your body into overdrive and you swear your heart is about to leap out of your chest from the proximity.

“Well…what about this one?” you ask, stepping out of his embrace to head further down the aisle, ignoring the rising heat in your cheeks as you nearly stumble. Damn heels.

“I would argue that this is a classic.”

But Eddie just slips in behind you again, resting a hand on your hip while you hold a copy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in your hands.

“Perhaps,” he shrugs, holding back a snicker as you gasp in mock offense.

“You doubt my judgment?”

“Of course not,” he insists with a small snort. “But…maybe you have a thing for guys who wield chainsaws.”

You catch the sly grin that stretches across his lips out of the corner of your eye, a loud laugh puffing out from his chest when you playfully smack his shoulder. Eddie grabs the tape from you, leaning in a little closer until his lips brush against your ear.

And he doesn’t miss the subtle hitch of your breath.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart…” he cheekily assures, “Your secret is safe with me.”

When you throw a playful glare his way, he merely winks in response. Then he turns on his heel to stride back toward the front counter, snagging a box of Reese’s Pieces on his way. You fumble a step behind him before glancing up.

The employee manning the counter is someone you know all too well.

His hair is a little longer than the last time you saw him, the ends brushing against his forehead and falling into his eyes. But he’s still just as handsome, if not annoyingly so. And when Eddie sets the tapes on the counter, Steve barely spares him a passing glance. His brown eyes quickly settle on you as his lips pull up into a lazy grin.

“Find everything you were looking for?” he asks, the cadence of his voice is low but filled with a sticky sweetness that has your cheeks warming.

And if you didn’t know any better you would think he was flirting with you.

“O-Oh, I, uh— ”

“Yeah,” Eddie cuts in, his voice a little strained. “We found everything just fine, man.”

Steve gives you another soft grin as he snaps open the first case, a small snort leaving his nose.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for the gore fest type.”

But that slight hint of disbelief in his tone has you wanting to shrink in on yourself.

“Then you don’t know her very well,” Eddie mutters under his breath.

Only, his snide comment isn’t as quiet as he initially intended.

But Steve says nothing, just clears his throat and runs a hand through his chestnut locks before sliding the movies across the counter. The clacking of the keyboard fills the uncomfortable silence as you tug at the worn vinyl on the counter.

“That’ll be $12.35.”

You can feel Eddie tense beside you.

“I thought the movies were 2 for $4 tonight?” you chime in softly, confusion scrunching your brows together.

Steve’s lip quirks up in a slight smirk as he glances between you and Eddie.

“Well, Munson here has racked up quite a lot of late fees…” he trails before whistling. The flash of amusement in his eyes has Eddie’s narrowing in warning.

But that look only seems to encourage him.

“Looks like we’ve got Erotic Night of the Living Dead, returned three days late. Munch Masters Vol. I…”, Steve pauses to scroll further down the list. “…and Vol. II, that was a week late.”

He flashes Eddie a condescending grin, “Must’ve really liked that one, huh?”

But before Steve can embarrass him further, Eddie fishes out his wallet and slams a couple bills down onto the counter. He grabs the tapes, tucking them under his arm and slips his hand in yours. The boy all but pulls you out of the store, his chin tucked toward his chest to try and hide the flames licking his cheeks.

Despite his ever growing irritation—fueled by the embarrassment of what just transpired—he still opens the door and helps you into the van.

Ever the gentleman.

“Harrington’s got some nerve,” Eddie mutters under his breath as he slides into the driver's seat. “With his nice smile and his stupid hair…” His voice drips with condescension as he slams the driver's door shut behind him.

“Embarrassing me is one thing. But blatantly flirting with my girl, right in front of me—like I wasn't even there?! That’s low even for him.”

Eddie doesn’t even realize what he just let slip, too busy fumbling to stick the key into the ignition.

A beat passes before you manage to gather the courage to speak, the jingling of keys echoing in your ears.

“Your girl?” you ask carefully, heart lodged in your throat.

Eddie’s whole body tenses, taking his time in setting the tapes down on the dashboard before finally turning to face you.

“Well…I, uh, shit,” he whispers, splotches of red beginning to creep up his neck while he exhales sharply through his nose. “I wanted to ask you in a proper, more romantic way—”

You suddenly turn in your seat, your grip on his collar firm while your lips manage to cut him off with a surprised hmph.

But he’s quick to recover, mouth molding over yours with an intensity that would make your knees buckle if you were still standing. And he keeps kissing you, slowly, deeply…until the windows begin to fog up from the heat of your mingling breaths.

“I don’t need romantic, Eddie,” you manage when he pulls away for some much needed air, your nose nudges against his own before you press another gentle kiss to his swollen lips. “Just you.”

And his answering grin is all the reassurance you need.

“Welcome to my castle,” Eddie says, gesturing toward the pale blue trailer with a tentative smile.

He barely let you push open the passenger door before he was running around the front of the van, almost dropping the VHS tapes tucked under his arm in the process. But the soft giggle you let slip when he bows and offers you his hand had his heart skipping a beat.

He keeps your fingers intertwined as you walk alongside him to the door. The uneven gravel makes the otherwise short distance in your heels a little more treacherous than normal. But Eddie is more than willing to catch you at the slightest hint of a wobble in your step.

The night air is far more frigid than either of you anticipated, and the shiver that ripples through you has him nearly dropping the keys in his rush to open the front door. He curses softly, breathing out a sigh of relief when the door finally swings open.

“Ladies first,” he grins, gesturing you forward.

Once you're both safely inside Eddie drops the keys on the table by the door, kicking off his shoes and switching on lights as he goes. He inwardly cringes when he spots the fast food wrappers scattered across the counter and the pile of dirty dishes in the sink.

What a great first impression, Munson.

But when he remembers the current state of his bedroom, his face pales.

“Uh, I’m just gonna…” he trails off, scratching the back of his neck before motioning behind him with his thumb. “Grab a new shirt, but go ahead and make yourself at home.”

Eddie waits until you’ve taken a seat on the sofa before starting down the hall. He’s frantic when he bursts through his bedroom door, immediately eyeing the pile of clothes strewn across his unmade bed. A disaster he left in the wake of trying to pull together a last minute Halloween costume.

He found the orange shirt that’s currently adorning your frame in the very back of his closet, a lost relic from the one time Wayne had managed to take him hunting. Eddie had fallen asleep up in the deer stand and almost shot a crossbow through his boot, and Wayne had vowed never again.

He had grabbed a discarded sharpie off his nightstand, the cap tucked between his teeth as he scribbled This is my Halloween costume across the front in his signature messy scrawl. While it wasn’t his most creative idea to date, it was either this or the god awful pirate costume he’d been suckered into a few years back. That most definitely did not fit him anymore.

Eddie scoops up an armful of clothes, tossing them onto the already cluttered floor of his closet. His movements are erratic, nearly tripping over one of his amps in the process. While Eddie isn’t the type to wear his emotions on his sleeve, he is unable to disguise the way his hands are trembling.

He’s nervous, so fucking nervous.

And when he dares to peek out of his room and down the hall, he immediately has to remind himself to breathe.

Because there you are, sitting on his couch, wearing his shirt. Looking almost heaven sent, your eyes alight with wonder as you take in the collection of hats and mugs adorning the walls.

“Get a fuckin’ grip, man,” he mumbles to himself, dropping to his knees to shove more of the remaining clutter under his bed.

Once he returns to his feet, he slips his jacket off his shoulders and tosses it over the back of the chair before rifling through the top drawer of his dresser for a new shirt. Despite what a majority of the town believed, Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson was no stranger to the sins of the flesh. He’d lost his virginity his first senior year in the back of his van to band geek, Polly O’Donnell.

Which was probably why her mom had failed him two years in a row. Not that he was keeping score or anything.

But even in that moment, Eddie hadn’t felt this nervous.

Maybe, it was because he didn’t harbor the same feelings for Polly that he did for you. Or perhaps the real reason was that he just didn’t trust people or their intentions. His tumultuous upbringing and treatment by his peers was testament enough of that. So Eddie kept most people at arm's length, not allowing them to see past his scary façade.

It was safer that way.

But one look from you was enough to have his carefully crafted walls crumbling down, laid to rubble beneath his feet.

And that’s the thing that scared him the most. That he would willingly throw himself (and his heart) into the crossfire if it meant you would continue to look at him like that.

Man, he had it bad.

He huffs out a breath, grabbing the first unwrinkled shirt that he can find and pulling it over his head. The male takes one final glance around his bedroom, deciding it’s good enough before he turns to leave. But something on his nightstand catches his eye, the joint he rolled earlier practically beckoning him with the promise of sweet relaxation.

And with the state of his jangled nerves, he could use all the help he could get.

So he slips the joint behind his ear, spinning the lighter between his thumb and forefinger as he pads down the hall toward you.

And while his nerves were ravaging his insides, you aren’t faring much better.

You had counted every mug and hat that lined the walls of his living room twice over, in a feeble attempt to distract yourself from the fact that you were actually here with him. All alone, with no prying eyes or listening ears to interrupt you. And despite the fact that he just put a shirt back on, it doesn’t stop your thoughts from wandering to not so innocent places.

The sleeves are cut off, showing off his surprisingly toned biceps. An array of dark ink flows over his arms, the black shirt making him appear almost paler in comparison. You tuck your lower lip between your teeth when you see the muscles in his forearms contract when he places his palms flat on the counter.

Your thighs press together as your gaze travels lower, where his jeans cling a little too tightly to his—

“You still up for some pizza?” he asks, picking up the phone and interrupting your thoughts.

“O-Oh, right!” you blink, averting your eyes. “Pizza sounds great.”

He quickly punches in a number before you can ask any further questions, holding the receiver up to his ear.

“Hey man, it’s Eddie,” he says after a few moments.

The male tucks the receiver between his ear and shoulder while he speaks, fingers drumming lightly along the countertop. The movement causes his hair to fall over his face, a stray curl eventually finding its way into his mouth.

“Yeah, yeah the usual.” he sputters, spitting the hair out and tucking the wild curls back behind his ear. “But uh, can I get olives on half?”

You can’t help but notice the way his eyes roll into the back of his head fondly. And it has you contemplating what other ways you could make his eyes roll back.

“No no no, I have not become an ‘olive enthusiast.’” He scoffs, fingers curling into air quotes. “I just, I have…” he pauses, dark eyes flicking over to you. “I have a guest over tonight.”

And the way Eddie has to hold the phone away from his ear has you stifling a giggle. You can hear a muffled voice on the other end, their enthusiastic lilt apparent even from where you are perched on the end of the sofa.

“Alright, alright, that’s enough.” He chuckles, tongue darting out to wet his lips. “But that should be it.” Eddie tucks the phone back in between his shoulder, reaching to grab his wallet from his back pocket.

“Oh wait, wait!” He exclaims, slapping his palm down onto the counter. “Add on an order of those cinnamon breadsticks too.”

You wish you could’ve been privy to their entire conversation, because the way Eddie flushes a deep crimson before he playfully tells the person on the other end to ‘kindly fuck off’ and hangs up the phone, has you beyond intrigued.

He takes a couple more bills out, tossing them on the counter and slips the wallet back into his pocket. The chain jingles against his thigh with each step he takes, your eyes unintentionally following the movement. He plops down onto the sofa beside you, the heat in his cheeks fading into a soft, rosy sheen.

“Nina’s is busy tonight,” he murmurs, setting something onto the small table beside him. “So, it might take a little longer than usual.”

“How did you know Nina’s Pizzeria was my favorite?” you ask, eyes narrowing in playful suspicion.

“Well,” he hums, leaning his head back against the cushions and giving you a lazy grin. “I just assumed you had much better taste than Domino’s, sweetheart.”

You playfully whack him with one of the throw pillows beside you, a stunned expression crossing over his features. Half of his hair is ruffled from where the pillow connected with his head, and this time you can’t contain the giggles from bubbling up in your chest.

“Oh you are so going to regret that, baby.” he taunts, eyes narrowing in a predatory manner.

And your whole body stills.

Baby. He just called you baby.

Eddie uses this moment to his advantage, pouncing on you with a wicked cackle. His hands find your sides, quickly pulling giggle after breathless giggle from you. When he finds a particularly sensitive spot, you squeal and begin to thrash beneath him as he continues to torture you with his fingers.

Your attempts to get him back are futile. Eddie is much faster, taking both of your wrists and pinning them above your head. Both of your chests are rising and falling rapidly from the exertion, your faces mere inches apart.

His curls create a dark curtain around you, his eyes flicking down toward your lips. His minty breath washes over you, causing yours to lodge in your throat. You just stare at each other, both of you fighting the urge to close the remaining distance between your mouths.

“So, uh,” he clears his throat, “Movie time?”

“Movie time,” you agree.

And just like that, the moment is gone as quickly as it came. Eddie clumsily climbs off you, almost falling off the sofa in the process. His curls bounce as he springs back up, offering a hand to help you sit back up.

“Now my fair maiden, what film dost thou choose?”

He holds up both cases, the choice of movie concealed by the large Family Video logo. You purse your lips, glancing back and forth between the cases as if looking at them longer would somehow reveal the title beneath.

“That one.”

You point to the one in his left hand, and Eddie tosses the other back onto the coffee table. He pops open the plastic case and chuckles before looking up at you.

“Texas Chainsaw it is.” He grins, removing the tape from its case and heading toward the TV.

Eddie crouches down, balancing on the soles of his feet as he loads the tape into the VCR. our eyes can’t help but wander across the expanse of his broad shoulders and down his back. The hem of his shirt rides up ever so slightly as he reaches to switch the tv on, exposing the band of his boxer shorts and the pale skin of his lower back.

“However,” he continues, glancing over his shoulder at you. His eyes are warm and full of mischief. “You are not leaving this trailer until you get to experience the cinematic masterpiece that is Ridley Scott’s Alien.”

The playful threat has your whole body warming, feeling thankful when he finally switches off the lamp. The darkness of the room is a welcome reprieve with only his silhouette visible, illuminated by the glow from the TV. He bounds back over and takes the seat beside you.

You allow yourself to sink further into the sofa while Eddie grabs something off the side table. The spark of the lighter ignites the handsome features of his face, and the slight stubble along his jaw. His plush lips carefully wrap around the end of the joint, cheeks hollowing slightly as he inhales deeply.

The sight alone sends a delightful shiver up your spine, shifting your gaze back toward the television as the smoke billows out from between his lips.

“Are you cold?” he asks, draping his arm over the back of the sofa in search of the old quilt that was previously thrown over it.

But said quilt had unfortunately fallen behind the sofa in the midst of your scuffle, well beyond his reach now. Eddie leans in closer, cursing softly under his breath as he attempts to locate the missing quilt in the dark. You can feel the warmth radiating from his chest, which causes another shiver to pass through you.

“Maybe a little,” you murmur.

And the male doesn’t complain when you nuzzle yourself further into his side, happily curling his arm around your shoulders. He takes another hit from the joint as the trailers continue to flash across the screen, the upcoming releases now the furthest thing from your mind.

“You want some?” He holds the joint out toward you, blowing some smoke out the corner of his mouth. “No pressure, of course.”

You carefully take it from him, your fingers brushing against his own in the process. Despite your initial reservations, you immediately lift the joint to your lips, feeling his eyes continue to linger on your features. In your nervous haste you inhale a little too quickly, the smoke evading your lungs in sharp fragments that has you immediately coughing it back up.

“Whoa, whoa. Easy there, killer,” he teases, gently rubbing your back, the touch a welcome distraction. “You gotta inhale slower.”

He takes the joint back from you, keeping it between his fingers while you continue to cough your lungs up. You’re very thankful he can’t see the way your eyes are watering as another cough racks through your chest.

“Have you ever smoked before?” he asks, only curiosity lacing his tone.

“Um, once,” cough. “In the ninth grade when I stole a cigarette out of my aunt’s purse.”

The memory is sparked, causing a smile to tug at the corner of your mouth. Your Aunt Bev had been visiting from Reno for Christmas, like she did every year. The eccentric woman was always decked out in colorful rhinestones and bright blue eyeshadow, spinning wild tales of her nights out on the strip much to the chagrin of your mother.

But you had never seen her without a trusty pack of Camel Turkish Golds.

So when one of your older cousins claimed you were too much of a prissy pants to join in on their smoke session (aka the infamous cousin walk), you took it upon yourself to swipe one from her purse and hoped she wouldn’t notice. But you received the lecture of a lifetime from her when you came back looking guilty and smelling like nicotine.

As you recount the tale back to him, you purposely leave out the part where you almost threw up in a snowbank because you were coughing so hard. No need to subject him to that visual. And while that experience had you swearing off cigarettes for the rest of your life, that didn’t mean you should deny yourself this one…right?

“Well your aunt’s absolutely right you know,” he says after a moment, that mischievous sparkle back in his eyes. “Cigarettes are terrible for you.”

You go to reach for that pillow again, ready to whack him in the head for good measure but Eddie chucks it across the room before you even have a chance to grab it. The pillow narrowingly misses the tv set by an inch, landing on the floor with a soft thud.

“Ah, ah ah!” he tuts, wagging a finger in front of your face. “Don’t mess with the mane, sweetheart.”

You giggle, rolling your eyes fondly before turning your attention back to the movie. But Eddie keeps his gaze on you, admiring how the soft glow highlights the features of your face. Your nose, which scrunches up in the cutest way whenever you’re annoyed. Your gentle eyes, that look at him as if he could do no wrong. And your lips—god, your lips. They’re slightly pouted, shiny with spit.

And Eddie's perverted mind can’t help but start to wander. He wonders how your lips would feel wrapped around him, or if those pretty eyes would roll back when he buried his tongue inside you.

Jesus H. Christ, was it getting hotter in here?

Eddie wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans, willing all the blood in his body to stop rushing South.

Popping a boner during a horror flick, that’ll really impress her, idiot.

God, he was too sober for this.

The male quickly tears his gaze away from you, picking up the lighter and relighting the forgotten joint. He doesn’t notice your eyes drifting back toward him, like a moth to a flame.

He inhales deeply, allowing the smoke to curl into his lungs and dull his sexually intrusive thoughts. But he feels you staring, your eyes transfixed on where the smoke billows out from between his lips. He glances at the joint, then back at you. Then Eddie gets an idea, an awful, sinful idea.

He whispers your name as the room is bathed in darkness again, giving him the final push he needs.

“I want to try something…” he mumbles, carefully removing your glasses and placing them on the coffee table. “Do you trust me?”

You nod automatically.

“Then come here,” he says, voice hoarse.

And when you crawl into his lap, your thighs bracketing his hips…

Eddie is a goner.

Miraculously, he manages to keep his composure, despite the way his heart is about to leap out of his chest. You’ve never been this close before, where he can feel the warmth of your thighs seeping into his jeans and smell the faint perfume lingering on your neck.

Even in the dark, he can see that flicker of bashfulness cross over your features, that sudden urge to avoid his heated stare. To tuck in on yourself, to hide away. But to his surprise, you hold his gaze, bold and unwavering when one of his hands falls to rest on your hip. He attempts to soothe you, his thumb circling up and under your shirt.

“Inhale slowly, alright?” he gently reminds you.

His other hand brings that joint back to his full lips, the cherry end igniting brightly as he inhales.

Only this time when he lowers the joint, he leans forward. His lips brush against yours until they part beneath his own, the smoke slithering out and into your awaiting mouth. You inhale slowly—just as he instructed and let the smoke curl in and around your lungs.

And when you breathe out, he’s right there, inhaling the dissipating smoke into his own mouth with a proud smile.

“See? You’re a natural.”

Eddie takes another long drag and leans in again, his thumb grazing the curve of your jaw. And maybe it’s the look in his eye or the weed beginning to lull your nerves, but you fist the collar of his shirt and pull him into you, crashing your lips together for the second time that evening.

The male barely manages to discard the joint before he’s reeling you back in, tongue gliding over your lower lip and into your awaiting mouth. You taste like Juicy Fruit and a hint of purple palm tree delight, a combination that sets every nerve in his body on fire.

Your fingers wind into the hair at the nape of his neck, gently tugging and earning you a throaty moan. Eddie swears he’s lost it when your sweet moans begin to echo his own. The sound travels straight down, where his cock is straining pathetically against the seam of his jeans.

An uphill battle he’s been fighting since you kissed him in the parking lot of Family Video.

And when you feel that hardness pressing against your inner thigh, it only encourages you to keep going. Giving an experimental roll of your hips that has Eddie’s head lolling back onto the cushions, a choked sound resembling a whine escapes his mouth.

This new position provides you with easier access to his throat, giving you a surge of confidence before your lips find a home there and teeth nip wherever they can find purchase.

Eddie pants as your lips only trail lower, a grunt of your name mixes with a slew of curses when you suck a large bruise onto the base of his throat. Your lips make an audible pop when they detach from his skin and you lean back to assess the damage with a satisfied grin. He looks beautifully wrecked, lips swollen and eyes glossy.

You trace over the blossoming shades of red and purple on his neck with your fingertips, humming softly when you feel a shiver pass through him.

“My turn,” he insists, gently tipping your head back.

When he leans forward, lips brushing against your collarbone, he can almost taste the spiked punch from earlier. A bitter, yet sugary sweet flavor that has him groaning low in his throat. The sound reverberates through your chest and has your hips grinding harder against his own.

The fabric of your panties are completely soaked, making a mess on the front of his jeans with each frantic buck of your hips. His fingers begin to trail lower, sneaking under your skirt and grazing over the elastic of your panties. Feeling emboldened, you take his wrist, pressing the heel of palm against your center.

“Oh shit,” he groans, fingers circling up and over your aching core. “You’re so fuckin’ wet, sweetheart.”

You can only manage a soft whine in response, allowing him to guide your head back down to capture your lips together.

An abrupt knock sounds just as a blood curdling scream erupts from the television. Both noises pull you apart with a sudden start, which has you nearly falling backwards off his lap and onto the floor below. But Eddie keeps a steady grip on your waist, pulling you flush against his chest as he huffs out a breath of frustration.

“Pizza’s here.”

series taglist: @sheneedsrocknroll92 @blckbrrybasket @your-nightmaredoll @missmarch-99 @fandom-princess-forevermore @mylovelycrazyworld @princesssunderworld @scarlet-bitch @thecreelhouse @vamp-bunny @notwantingtoadult @keeksandgigz @avobabe87 @kellsck @definitionwanderlust @ainelantv @bring-it-on-back

[theballadofharkness]

Going to the Globes

She’s with with the Director Masterlist

Pairing: Maya Mason x FemDirector!reader

Summary: When the Golden Globe nominations come in, your horror film doesn’t just make the list, it dominates it. Best Picture. Best Script. Best Director. Maya, your girlfriend-slash-marketing queen, is the first person to know. She’s never been invited to the Globes before, but when you tell her she’s your plus one, it changes everything.

Word Count: 8K

Warnings: Explicit smut so as always MDNI

A/N: Part 1 of my Golden Globes fic is here!! X it can be read as a stand alone but be aware the actual ceremony and after party will be the follow up! Xx

You’re still in bed when the phone rings.

Silk sheets twisted around your legs. The black-out curtains are drawn, keeping the room dim even though it’s nearly ten. You haven’t checked your phone, haven’t turned on the TV. You’re floating in that warm, suspended space between sleep and thought, your body still loose and boneless from last night, Maya’s hands, Maya’s mouth, Maya whispering something about “kissing her lucky charm” before slipping out the door in a bomber jacket and Balenciaga slides.

The phone buzzes again.

You reach out blindly across the nightstand, knocking over a heavy book and a glass of water in the process. Your fingers finally close around your phone.

<Maya Mason: Incoming Call…>

You answer with a sleepy mumble. “Baby?”

There’s a pause, like she’s trying to find breath, but then she’s there, crackling and frantic and utterly not composed.

“Can you come to the office?”

You blink, pushing yourself upright with a groan. Your hair’s a mess. You’re in one of her old oversized tees with the neckline ripped. “What? What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“No — I mean yes — fuck, yes, I’m fine, it’s just — can you just come to Continental?” She sounds like she’s pacing. Like she’s mid-coffee, mid-freakout, mid-something.

Your heart kicks. “Maya? What happened?”

You hear her sigh and then go softer, “please? For me?”

You swing your legs out of bed, all sleep forgotten. “Okay. Baby… okay. I’m coming.”

There’s a breath on the other end of the line, like she’s relieved just hearing your voice. “Just get here. As fast as you can.”

~

Matt’s mid-rant, his arms flailing, a mouth full of almond croissant, saying something about needing “more relatability” on the Kool-Aid movie, when the door flies open.

Maya doesn’t knock.

Matt jolts upright behind his desk, knocking over an iced coffee and a stack of scripts. “Jesus Christ! Maya?”

“WE’RE GOING TO THE GLOBES FUCKERS.”

He blinks. “What?”

Maya Mason, the designer whirlwind that she is, is already halfway into the room, breathless, glowing, hair wild from her frantic walk-run across the floor. Her phone’s still in her hand like she sprinted straight from the call.

She repeats herself, slower. “We’re going to the Golden Globes.”

Matt straightens. “Wait… what?”

She grins, all teeth, eyes sparkling like a woman who’s just pulled off the marketing coup of the decade.

“Don’t play with me right now, Maya.”

“It’s confirmed.” Maya presses both palms down on his desk, practically vibrating. “The Witch. Her film. My girl’s film. It’s nominated. For multiple categories. And she…” Maya chokes, then laughs, then says it again like she can’t quite believe it herself, “she’s nominated for Best Director.”

Matt goes silent.

Maya counts them off, fingers shaking with adrenaline. “Best Director. Best Picture. Best Score. Best Script. Best Actress for Tilda.”

A beat.

Matt screams. “I FUCKING KNEW IT!”

He’s out of his chair, knocking into his standing desk controls, sending it up at a weird angle. “This is it. This is our moment. This is my Rosemary’s Baby, you marketing GENIUS! This is our fucking moon landing!”

Maya snorts. “She’s going to hate you for saying that.”

“I don’t care.” He’s already pacing. “We need to do a full rollout. Press, social, that Variety piece she agreed to — fuck, fuck, we’re going to have a table, right? Like an actual table?”

Maya just laughs. She’s flushed. Breathless. Beaming. “She’s gonna be a wreck. She hasn’t even checked her phone yet.”

“She has to win something right?! All those nominations! Fuck horror films never fucking get this level of respect!” Matt was practically vibrating on the spot.

“And she’s the youngest woman ever nominated in both categories.” Maya adds smugly.

Matt grabs his phone, starts firing off voice memos. “Petra. Confirm a table. I want to be in the front. Score guy, Tilda, Patty, me, see who else from the main cast and production can be seated.”

Maya says nothing. She’s still standing by the door. Her hand is clenched around the phone.

Matt looks up, grinning. “You look like you just won something too.”

She shrugs. “It’s her win. And it’s a Continental win.”

“You should be there. Without you, we wouldn’t have this win Maya” Matt softened for a second to give credit where credit is due.

She smiles again, tighter this time. Familiar. A little sad. “No one invites marketing to the Globes, Matt.”

And before he can say anything else, she turns and walks out, already dialing.

~

The champagne’s already flowing.

Matt’s got a flute in each hand. Patty’s sitting on the edge of his desk, kicking her feet in sparkly mules and laughing about something Quinn just said. Sal’s slumped in the armchair, half-celebrating, half-scowling because it wasn’t his project that got five nominations and made the industry wet itself.

The door swings open hard.

Maya strides back in, sleek and flushed and thrumming. She doesn’t wait. She snatches a glass off the tray, tips her head back, downs it in one long pull.

Everyone stares.

“Jesus,” Quinn mutters, impressed.

“She’s gonna be here in fifteen,” Maya announces, setting the empty glass down with a little clink. “I’m telling her then.”

Matt spins. “Wait she still doesn’t know?!”

“Nope.”

Patty blinks. “How?”

Maya shrugs. “She doesn’t do the internet.”

“Seriously?”

“She’s like a cryptid. A sexy, blood-soaked cryptid who only comes out to direct a movie and then disappears back into the mist with a scarf over her face.”

“She’s literally nominated for five awards how the fuck does she still not know?!” Sal laughs.

“I know,” Maya says, eyes shining. “And she probably hasn’t even opened her texts yet. She still has a flip phone somewhere in our underwear drawer. She’s gonna walk in here wearing my t-shirt and Prada sunglasses and act like nothing happened.”

Quinn shakes her head in awe. “She’s a fucking icon.”

“She’s my icon,” Maya says, softer now. “And I get to tell her she just changed her life.”

The room quiets a little.

Even Sal manages a slow clap.

Matt raises his glass. “To the freak in the shadows.”

“To the witch with the camera,” Patty adds.

“To her,” Maya says.

They all clink glasses just as the elevator dings down the hall.

The elevator doors part with a hiss.

You step out like a specter: long coat over sleep-rumpled silk, dark sunglasses, hair long and unbrushed. One hand clutches a tray, iced coffee with too many pumps of vanilla, a warmed muffin tucked into a napkin. The other holds your phone, screen cracked, texts unopened.

You’re not online. You’re not part of the buzz. All you know is Maya sounded off, her voice too high, too breathless, asking you to come in “please, just for me.” So you came. Muffin and caffeine in hand. Worry coiled tight in your ribs.

The office hallway is loud.

You hear the champagne laughter before you even round the corner. A glass shatters. Someone yells. Patty shrieks something about her couture.

You pause, shifting the tray in your hands. “Oh no,” you mutter under your breath. “They’re drunk.”

You nudge the door open with your shoulder.

She turns the second she hears the door click. Maya’s eyes flick to your hands, and something breaks in her.

You don’t even get a word out before she’s striding over.

“It sounded serious so I got the coffee you like,” you say, holding it up stupidly. “And the muffin with the—”

She grabs your face with both hands and kisses you. Hard. Right there, in front of everyone. It’s not a show. It’s not for the room. It’s relief. Euphoria. Pride. Love.

You drop the tray.

The coffee hits the floor.

Nobody cares.

When she finally pulls back, her hands still cradling your jaw, you blink up at her.

“What… was that for?”

Maya’s eyes are glassy. Her voice is soft. “You’re nominated.”

You blink again. “For…?”

She laughs and kisses your forehead, your cheek, your mouth again. “Golden Globes baby. Best Director. Best Script. Best Picture. Tilda got Actress. Score too. Five nominations.”

The world tilts.

You sway slightly, and Maya’s arms are already there. Holding you steady. “Oh,” you whisper.

Behind her, Sal screams, “YOU’RE A FUCKING LEGEND.”

You don’t hear it.

You’re just staring at Maya, lips parted, stunned and still. “Why didn’t you tell me when you called?” you whisper.

“I wanted to do it in person,” she says. “I wanted to see your face.”

You blink once. Twice. Then bury your face in her neck. “Oh my god.”

“I know, baby,” she murmurs, holding you close. “I know.”

You’re still next to Maya. One arm looped around her waist. Your body is humming. Your spilled coffee is forgotten on the floor.

Matt’s in full award show mode. He’s pacing, phone in hand, rattling off strategy like a man possessed.

“Okay. Carpet first. You’ll talk to Vanity Fair mic, E! livestream, the usual outlets with Tilda and Dafoe. You’re gonna be the director they will want to talk to!”

You nod vaguely, still trying to process.

“Then there’s the luncheon thing, you’re gonna hate the luncheon but the food is surprisingly good,” Patty interjects, “and then the red carpet, obviously, then we end up at the table right up front. You, me, Patty, the score guy, Tilda, some of the cast and crew…”

You blink. “Where’s Maya?”

Matt looks up. “What?”

“For the Globes,” you say. “Where’s she sitting?”

There’s a pause.

Matt chuckles awkwardly. “Oh… marketing doesn’t usually go to awards stuff.”

“It’s a very exclusive event,” Patty adds. “It’s producers, talent, and studio heads like Matty. Not marketing.”

You turn your head slowly. Look at Maya.

She’s frozen. Just for a second. Then she laughs. That classic Maya Mason laugh, tight, breathy, self-deprecating. “Yeah, no, I’m not going. I mean, I never go. I’ll be running point from here. Social, press strategy, everything the next morning—”

“No.” Your voice is quiet but sharp.

Matt freezes. “Uh. No to what?”

You look at him like it’s obvious. “Maya has to be with me for all of it. My girlfriend goes or I don’t. It’s that simple.”

There’s a pause.

Matt blinks. “You mean, like… on the carpet?”

You just stare. “Yes,” you say. “On the carpet. At the table. At the fucking afterparty. Maya’s with me.”

Everyone turns to look at Maya.

And Maya? She lights the fuck up.She stares at you, eyes wide, lips parted. The kind of expression Maya Mason never wears. Not in meetings. Not in negotiations. Not even when she’s talking someone into a seven-figure deal with nothing but a smile and a slideshow.

She looks like someone just cracked open her ribs and kissed her heart.

“Wait, wait, wait… are you for real?” she says, eyes wide. “You want me, like ‘with you’, with you? Like, holding your hand on the carpet, getting glammed, ‘who are you wearing?’ energy, next to you at the table kind of with you?”

You nod once.

She gasps like someone just offered her equity in Valentino.

“Oh my god,” she says. “I’m going to the fucking Golden Globes.”

Matt stares. “Okay well I guess we need another seat.”

“She’s sitting next to me,” you say. “Center.”

Sal whistles. “Fuck. Okay.”

And Maya, still blinking, still breathless, leans in and kisses you, messy and fast and grateful, like she’s trying not to cry but maybe doesn’t care if she does.

She turns to you, a little out of breath.

“I get to stand next to you. While you win. I’m gonna be the first person to touch you when you come off that stage. That’s so… I mean that’s so fucking hot.”

You blink, then smile.

She smiles too.

You reach out, hook a finger through her belt loop, and pull her back toward you.

“I want you there,” you say. “You’re the other half of my soul.”

Maya exhales, soft and wrecked. “Damn right I am.”

The next hour passes like a blur. You’re curled on the couch next to Maya, your legs over hers, stealing lazy kisses while she tries to act composed. Matt begins pacing as the calls start rolling in, congratulating him on the nominations, questions about Oscar buzz, various brands reaching out for sponsorships, representatives of the Award Show itself talking logistics. Sal’s taken to sulking upon learning he’d have to fork out $30K for a seat at the back of the room. Patty is regaling tales of her first Globes night to Quinn.

Then Tyler walks in, holding his iPad like it’s a message from God.

“Okay,” he says, breathless. “Maison Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Prada, and Gucci have all reached out. They want to dress the whole ‘The Witch’ team.”

There’s a pause. The room buzzes.

You glance up from your spot curled on the couch, still half-tucked into Maya’s side. Voice low, calm.

“Maya likes dressing up,” you say softly. “She can choose. As long as they agree to dress her too.”

The room freezes.

Maya turns to you slowly.

“Wait. what?”

You blink at her. “You’re coming. With me. So they have to dress you too. If they want me.”

Maya stares at you like you just rewrote the laws of reality. “… I’m sorry, what the fuck did you just say?”

Quinn mutters, “Oh fuck, she’s gonna lose it.”

You meet her eyes, deadpan. “Well if they want me, then they have to dress you too.”

Her mouth drops open. “ON GOD?!”

Patty snorts.

Sal chuckles, “Here we go.”

But Maya is gone. She’s up. She’s pacing. She’s vibrating.

“Shut the fuck up,” Maya snaps, eyes still on you. “Are you being serious right now? Are you… you’re telling me that I get to pick any of those designers I spend half my paycheck on, walk the carpet in full glam, next to you, and actually get photographed and credited and tagged and asked who I’m wearing?!”

You nod, amused. “Well yes, that’s the plan.”

“On fucking GOD?!”

She screams. She stands. She immediately circles the room like she’s trying to walk it off but can’t. “Shut UP. Shut the fuck UP. I’m gonna be hot at the Globes?! Me?! In Margiela?? With the winning director of the night?! I’m gonna be someone’s Pinterest board. I’m gonna be on every gay moodboard in the country—” she began to waffle on in pure unfiltered joy.

You smile softly, eyes lowered. “Honey, I haven’t won. I’m nominated, there’s a difference”

Matt watches her spin out and says, “She’s not gonna make it to the carpet.”

Maya turns back to you, breathless. “Are you really serious?”

You nod, smiling at her unbridled joy. “Deadly.”

Maya melts. Fully drops her phone, rushes across the room, and kisses your face, your cheeks, temple, and all the way up your jawline in a blur. “You are the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” she mutters into your hair. “And I work in marketing.”

You blush, becoming shy. “Love you.”

“I’m gonna fuck you in a McQueen bustier,” she announces.

Quinn cackles.

Patty groans. “Jesus Christ, Maya…”

“No. You don’t get it. You don’t get it. I feel like I’m being proposed to. I’m gonna cry and then ride your face in couture.”

You raise your brows, soft and steady. “So… can we go back home?”

Maya grabs your wrist like she’s about to drag you into a supply closet. “I need you. Now. Or I’m going to black out.”

You can’t help but laugh, letting her pull you toward the door.

Matt yells, “Maya, think of HR … Maya? MAYA!”

~

The door of Maya’s office slams shut behind you.

You barely have time to register the sound before Maya’s mouth is on yours—hot, open, starving. She’s kissing you like her hands are on fire, like she’s waited her whole life for this moment and just realized it’s real.

You stumble backwards with her, tangled in her grip, until your back hits the sleek marble of her desk. Papers scatter. Her laptop slides. You don’t care. Neither does she.

“Baby,” she gasps between kisses. “You just, fuck, you broke me.”

You smile against her lips, smug and breathless. “You like designer dresses that much?”

She moans and kisses you harder.

“You’re going to the Golden fucking Globes,” she pants, hands sliding under your shirt, gripping your waist like she wants to crawl inside you.

“We” you corrected breathlessly, “we are going to the Golden Globes”

“And you just told four fashion houses to fight for the right to put me in a free fucking gown?! Are you, god, are you trying to kill me?”

You murmur cheekily, “Maybe.”

She groans, attaching her mouth to your throat. “I’ve never been this turned on in my entire life.”

You arch into her, neck tilted, letting her press you flat against the desk.

“You’re gonna win,” she whispers, voice shaking with pride. “You’re gonna win Best Director and look like a fuckin spooky goddess or something doing it. And I get to be there. Next to you. In fucking Prada.”

She kisses you again, messy, desperate, and worshipful, like she’s trying to eat the words off your lips. “I swear to god,” she breathes, “you say one more thing nice to me and I’m gonna—”

You cut her off with a whisper: “You deserve all of it.”

She whimpers. Actually whimpers.

“Okay,” she says, hitching your skirt up to your hips, “I need you now. I’m about to climax just thinking about a Maison Margiela custom glove moment. I’m going to come just from being tagged in a Getty caption next to you.”

You laugh into her mouth. “Maya—”

“No. Shut up. My girlfriend’s a genius auteur witch who gets nominated for Globes and tells Gucci to dress me like I’m a fashion icon. I’m fucking feral, do you understand?”

You nod.

And then you gasp as she drops to her knees.

Your breath catches, your hands automatically go to her shoulders, fingers curling in the soft stretch of her tee. “Maya…”

“No. No talking.” Her voice is low. Dangerous. Reverent.

She looks up at you like you’re sacred. Like you’re art. And you are, pressed against her desk, blouse open, breath coming shallow, eyes glassy and dark.

“You think I’m gonna let you walk in here,” she growls, “casually say ‘Maya can pick the designer,’ like that’s nothing, and not ruin you?”

You tremble. Her hands slide up your thighs, slow and possessive.

“Maya, please…”

“Say it again.”

You blink, breathless. “Say what?”

“What you said that made me drop to my fucking knees.”

You swallow, your voice barely above a whisper. “You deserve all of it.”

She groans, like the words physically affect her. “Oh my god,” she mutters, pushing your skirt up, “I’m gonna be good to you for weeks.”

And then her mouth is on you.

You cry out, a sharp, broken thing, and clutch the edge of the desk like it’s the only thing keeping you upright.

She eats your pussy like she’s starved. Like you’re a goddess that demands worship through orgasms alone. Like you belong to her.

Her tongue is fast, her grip unrelenting. She moans into you, arms wrapped around your thighs, hands sliding under your ass to pull you closer. She’s possessed, like your pleasure is the only thing anchoring her to this plane of existence.

You whimper. Your knees buckle. “Maya… baby, please, please—kiss me?”

She pulls back, lips slick, panting. “You want kisses, baby?”

You nod frantically, eyes wet. “Please. Need you.”

“Oh my fucking god.” She’s up, grabbing your face, devouring your mouth like she’s claiming it. “You sound so pretty when you beg.”

You’re gasping into her kiss, your fingers gripping the hem of her pants, trying to pull her closer, anything, everything.

She kisses you harder. Slower. Deeper.

“I love you,” she breathes into your mouth.

You whimper again. “I love you. I love you Maya…”

She presses you back against the desk again, her hand sliding between your thighs, fingers slick and steady.

“That’s it,” she whispers. “Be good for me. My girl. My babygirl. Gonna come for me?”

You nod, desperate.

And when it hits, when your body breaks open under her touch, she kisses you through it, kissing your cheeks, your lips, your neck, like she’s tasting every part of you, like you just made her immortal.

You slump against her, dazed. Shaking.

She holds you there, her fingers stroking gently over your thighs, her mouth pressed to your hair.

“You just gave me the best gift of my entire life,” she murmurs.

You blink up at her, eyes full of tears. “What, the Globes?”

“No,” she whispers, eyes full of something dangerous and devoted. “You want to tell the world you’re mine.”

~

You wake up sick. It’s not the flu. Not food poisoning. Not anything you can name. Just that slow, steady churn in your stomach. Dread curling under your ribs. Your body feels tight and hollow all at once.

It’s still dark outside.

And you’re still wrapped in Maya.

She’s asleep, limbs tangled in yours, bare skin pressed to bare skin. One arm flung over your waist. Her hand resting just beneath your breast. Her face tucked into your neck like she doesn’t want to miss even a breath of you.

You should feel safe.

But your throat is tight, your skin itches with nerves.

You can’t stop thinking that today is the Golden Globes. Today you’re going to walk a red carpet. Today you might win. Today you’ll be paraded out like a show pony. Fully. Publicly.

And all you want is to disappear.

You bury your face deeper into Maya’s neck, your breath shaking. You try to be still. Try not to wake her. But your hands shake where they grip her waist. You feel like a ghost in your own body.

You whisper, “I don’t want to go.”

She stirs. Not fully awake, just half-dreaming, but her grip tightens around you.

“You cold?” she mumbles, voice wrecked with sleep.

You shake your head.

But you don’t speak again. You just bury closer. Tangle your legs around hers. Press your face into the curve of her shoulder and try not to cry.

You need her. Today. Now. More than ever.

Because if she lets go, even for a second, you’re afraid you might float away.

Maya stirs again.

A soft grunt in the back of her throat as she shifts, adjusting to your closeness. Her nose brushes your hairline. She mumbles something incoherent, fingers flexing over your waist.

Then she stills.

She feels it.

The tension. The way your breath is caught in your throat. The way your body’s curled into hers like a girl trying to disappear. Her brows twitch. One eye opens.

“Hey,” she whispers, voice scratchy and deep, barely awake. “What’s goin’ on, baby?”

You shake your head into her chest, arms clutching her tighter. You don’t answer.

She blinks herself more awake. “Are you—?” She pauses. Then, gentler. “You feel sick?”

A nod. Small. Barely there.

Maya lets out a soft exhale. Both arms curl around you, wrapping you up like you’re something precious. Her lips find your hair. She kisses your temple. Your cheekbone. The top of your ear.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay. I’ve got you.”

You press your face into her skin. You can’t stop shaking. It’s not cold. It’s just everything.

“I don’t wanna go,” you murmur, voice trembling. “I don’t wanna be looked at. I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”

Her mouth finds your jaw, slow and steady. “You don’t have to do anything yet,” she says. “You’re not on a carpet. You’re here. With me. You’re just a sleepy little cryptid in my bed and I’m gonna hold you till you remember how fucking brilliant you are.”

You make a broken little sound.

Maya kisses it away.

“You’re allowed to be scared,” she whispers. “You made something huge. You told the world who you are. And now they’re celebrating you for it. That’s terrifying. But I’m here. You’re not alone.”

Her hand drifts down your back, drawing soft circles into your spine.

“You’re my genius. My scary, spooky little auteur,” she murmurs. “I’m gonna zip you into that dress and stand next to you all night and remind them all who they’re dealing with. But right now? I’m just gonna keep kissing you until you fall back asleep or start complaining about how I can’t wear latex on the carpet.”

You let out a soft laugh. A real one. “It just feels too impractical for an event where we’re will be predominantly sat” you explained softly

Her smile presses into your skin.

“That’s it,” she says. “There’s my baby.”

You don’t say anything.

You just cling tighter.

And let her hold you until the world feels a little less loud.

The sunlight is creeping in now.

It catches in the fine strands of Maya’s hair, paints gold across her cheekbone, her collarbone, the curve of her bare shoulder where the blanket’s slipped.

She’s propped up on one elbow, trying to be gentle about it. Trying not to pull away too fast. “Baby,” she whispers, brushing your hair back. “We have to start getting ready.”

You shake your head, face buried in her neck. “No.”

“They’re gonna be here in, like, twenty minutes.”

“No.”

She laughs softly. “Glam team’s gonna break the door down and find us naked and fused together like a two-headed banshee.”

“Good.”

Maya strokes your back, slow and soothing. “Come on. You’ve got a dress that could raise the dead. You’ve got Tilda waiting to take shots with you. You’ve got a nomination for Best Fucking Director.”

You cling tighter, “don’t remind me”

She kisses your temple. “You can do this.”

You just kiss her neck.

Then her shoulder.

Then her mouth.

Soft, needy, warm. Not trying to start anything. Just needing to feel her. Just needing to stay close.

“I can’t breathe when you’re not here,” you whisper. “I know that’s pathetic.”

Maya’s hand finds your jaw. Tilts your face up.

“Not pathetic,” she says. “Human.”

You blink at her, eyes glossy. “Can we just… stay like this?”

She smiles. “We can stay like this for exactly seven more minutes. Then you have to let me put fancy shit on your face and help you into a dress that’s going to make people cry.”

You press your forehead to hers. “Promise you won’t leave me tonight?”

She pulls you closer. “Baby, I’m gonna be on you like a second skin. I am not letting go. I’ll hold your hand on the carpet. I’ll kiss your shoulder if you get nervous. And if anyone even thinks about asking who I am, I’ll say, ‘I’m the bitch she wakes up next to.’”

You let out a broken little laugh. “That’s romantic.”

“I thought so.”

You kiss her again.

And again.

And again.

Until your fingers stop shaking and your heart starts to believe her.

You keep kissing her. Lazy, insistent, endless.

Maya’s half-laughing now, propped up on her elbow as you shift to press your mouth to her collarbone, then her sternum, then her jaw. Each kiss is soft and clinging, more plea than seduction. Your fingers trace her ribs like she’s something fragile. Like she’s your last warm thing.

“Baby…” she breathes, somewhere between a moan and a warning. “If you keep kissing me like that, I’m gonna cancel the Globes.”

You smile into her skin. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Oh my god.” She falls back onto the pillows with a groan. “You’re such a menace.”

You crawl after her, half-draped across her chest, eyes shut, lips brushing her throat. “I just want to stay here. With you. That’s all I want.”

Maya sighs, curling an arm around your waist. “You say that like it’s unreasonable. You say that like I’m not also living for this.” She turns her head, kisses your temple. “But we do need to go. Eventually. Like, very soon. Very awards-season soon.”

“No,” you growled against her throat.

“I love you, but you’re literally the reason they make schedules. The glam team is gonna riot.”

“They can wait.”

Maya laughs. Full-bodied. Real. Her hand rubs your back, fingers lazy. “They’re probably outside trying to break into the house.”

“I have protection spells around the property, I’m not worried” you shrug and kiss her again. And again. Your leg hooks over hers, your nose presses into her neck, and your whole body sighs like it’s finally safe.

“I don’t want to be anyone else’s today,” you whisper. “I just want to be yours.”

Maya’s hand pauses on your back.

Then she flips the blanket higher over both of you, tucking you in like something sacred. She kisses your hairline, long and lingering.

“You’re always mine,” she murmurs. “Whether you’re in a gown or in this bed. Whether you win or not. You’re mine.”

You nod, not trusting your voice.

“I’ll be right next to you the whole time,” she adds. “Cameras or not. You just keep looking at me. I’ll do the rest.”

You finally lift your eyes to hers. “Swear?”

“On Margiela. On the Prada. On fuckin Valentino. On your haunted little heart.”

You lean in and kiss her again, longer this time. Less desperation. More knowing.

You’re going to go.

Eventually.

Maya doesn’t force you. She just starts moving slowly, like she’s done it a hundred times before. You feel her shift beside you, warmth leaving your chest as she rises, but her hands stay on you. One trailing along your hip. The other brushing back your hair.

“Come on, baby,” she murmurs. “Let me get you ready.”

You make a soft noise. Protest. Not quite no, but not yes either.

She leans down and kisses your shoulder. Then your neck. Then the spot just behind your ear. “You don’t have to do anything,” she whispers. “I’ll do it all. Just come sit up for me.”

You blink slowly. Your chest feels full. Heavy. But you nod.

She coaxes you upright with warm hands, murmuring gentle things into your skin as she helps you swing your legs over the side of the bed. The sheet drops away, and the room is cool, but she’s already reaching for the robe draped over the armchair, wrapping it around your shoulders like it’s armor.

“There she is,” Maya says softly. “My scary little director. Sweetest thing in the world after noon.”

You don’t answer, you just look up at her from where you’re sitting on the edge of the bed. Eyes glossy. Lip trembling.

Her teasing dies the second she sees your face. “Oh,” she breathes. “Baby.”

You try to look away, but she’s already kneeling in front of you, hands on your knees.

“I’m okay,” you lie.

She reaches up, brushes a thumb under your eye. “You don’t have to be.”

Your throat tightens. You stare at her, really stare? and it hits you all over again. How she’s always there. How she never makes you feel too much. How she shows up, always, without asking for anything back. And now she’s kneeling in front of you in a silk robe and nothing else, kissing your knees like you’re a holy thing.

“I’m gonna take care of you today,” she promises. “You don’t even have to think. You just let them glam you up, let them put you in that gown, and you keep holding my hand.”

You nod. Barely.

She kisses your knees again. Stands. “Let me do your hair.”

She leads you gently to the vanity, settles you in her lap like you weigh nothing, and starts brushing long, careful strokes down your back, her lips brushing your shoulder every few seconds, just to remind you she’s still there.

“You’re gonna ruin them,” she whispers. “You’re gonna walk in and every exec who passed on you is gonna spontaneously combust. It’s gonna be so hot.”

You let out a broken laugh. She smiles into your neck.

You hear them before you see them.

Laughter. Heels. The rustle of garment bags. Someone’s yelling about steaming silk like the world is ending.

Maya kisses your cheek, still in her robe, her hair pinned up with golden clips. “They’re here.”

You nod, still sitting quietly at the vanity. The robe clutched tight around you like it’s armor. You’re doing better, your hands have mostly stopped shaking, but you still flinch a little when the door opens.

Tyler walks in first. “Okayyyy ladies,” he calls, grinning like he lives here. “Let’s get glam, baby.”

He’s in a blazer over a vintage silk shirt, juggling two iced coffees and an iPad. He hands one to Maya, kisses the top of your head without asking, and offers the other to you.

“Oat milk, two brown sugars,” he says. “I doubled checked with Maya yesterday that this was your order”

You take it. “Thank you, Tyler.”

“No problem, queen of horror.” He leans in, voice soft, conspiratorial. “You doing okay?”

You nod, small.

He squeezes your shoulder. “Cool. We’ll keep it chill.”

And he does.

Even as the glam team floods in, stylists, dressers, a makeup artist with fangs on her necklace, Tyler runs interference like a champ. You sit still, sipping your coffee, letting them work around you. He distracts the loud ones. Gently redirects energy away from you when he sees your hands start to twitch.

But Maya?

Maya is in her element.

She’s standing by the mirror in nothing but her robe, bare leg peeking out, sipping coffee and scrolling through her phone like she’s the main event. Every few seconds she flings off a line like—

“Wait, if I wear the gloves, do I need earrings or is that redundant couture?”

or

“Is it bad if I bring a purse just for lip gloss and a single Xanax? I want to look like I don’t need it but still have it.”

You catch yourself watching her in the mirror.

Lit up. Confident. Buzzing.

And somewhere deep in your ribs, something unclenches. You’re still nervous. But she’s here. She’s glowing. She’s yours. And she’s making sure the world sees it.

Every time she catches your eye, she winks. “Looking good, babygirl,” she purrs. “They’re not ready for us.”

You’re back on the couch, fresh-faced and wrapped in a robe, while the stylists float around you like shadows. You’re not the focus right now.

Maya is.

And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

She’s standing in front of the full-length mirror, robe half-open, skin glowing under soft ring lights. Her hair is already pinned in place, voluminous, glossy, old Hollywood waves with a modern, streetwear slick edge. Her skin is golden. Lips subtly and strategically glossed.

“Okay, I need the cuff on the left arm, stacked rings on the right,” she says, gesturing toward the tray of jewelry like she’s conducting an orchestra. “No necklace. This neckline’s doing the work.”

Tyler hands her a tray. “Margiela said the gloves are optional but—”

“Gloves are non-negotiable,” Maya cuts in.

You smile behind your coffee cup.

A stylist holds up two clutches.

Maya points. “The smaller one. I don’t need a purse, I need a statement. I’ll shove my ID and a breath mint in my bra like a professional.”

She turns suddenly, locking eyes with you. “Baby, are you watching this? I’m literally manifesting myself into becoming a fashion icon.”

You nod, soft. “You’re doing amazing honey.”

Her grin is crooked, cocky, a little breathless. “I feel like I’m finally able to realise my true potential.”

She steps into the dress, stylists zipping it up in the back. Maya smooths the fabric over her hips, breath hitching. “Okay. Okay. Oh my god, this is dangerous. I’m gonna get arrested. This is red carpet porn.”

Tyler chimes in, totally deadpan. “Your ass should have its own IG.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Finally, someone respects my craft.”

She turns again, checks her profile, lifts one brow.

“You think it’s too much?” she asks you, suddenly quiet. “I mean, I don’t want to outshine you or—”

“No,” you say, and your voice is clear now. “It’s perfect. You look like everything I’ve ever wanted.”

Maya stops.

Softens.

Then gives you that smile. The one that means she’s about to either cry or climb into your lap.

But instead, she straightens her gloves. “Okay. I’m ready to make the Globes my bitch.”

Now it’s your turn.

The team moves around you with quiet precision, zippers whispering, brushes sweeping, powder settling like dust on old bone. You sit still. You let them paint you pale, line your eyes dark, twist your hair into something loose and long and dreamlike.

No sharp angles. No harsh lines.

You are not Maya Mason. You are something softer. Stranger. The goal is not to look hot but older than time.

Your gown is dark, sleek in some places, sheer in others, as if the fabric had been conjured rather than sewn. There’s something witchy in the cut, the drape, the way the hem moves like fog over the floor. You look like someone who should arrive at the Globes in a hearse pulled by a murder of crows.

And Maya?

Maya’s staring. From her spot on the bench, already fully dressed, gloves on, lip gloss perfect, she watches you like she’s being haunted.

“Holy shit,” she says, under her breath.

You glance up at her. Your makeup artist gently adjusts your chin. “Too much?” you murmur, self-conscious.

Maya laughs like you’ve just asked if the sun’s too bright. “You look like a bride of Dracula.”

You tilt your head. “Is that a compliment?”

Maya stands. Walks over slowly. “Baby,” she says, low and reverent, “you look like the most beautiful creature I have ever laid eyes on. You look like you’re gonna win Best Director and then ascend into mist.”

You smile, small and shy.

She steps behind you, hands careful on your waist. Her fingers skim the edge of the fabric, her chin resting lightly on your shoulder. “Let them talk,” she whispers. “Let them stare. You’re gonna take their breath away.”

She kisses the space just beneath your ear. “You don’t even have to say a word. They’ll still know who you are.”

You reach up, place your hand over hers. And for a second, the glam team disappears. The camera flashes, the nerves, the noise, it all fades.

It’s just you, her, and the quiet, staggering love between you.

The room is buzzing.Hair is done. Gowns are zipped. A shoe emergency has been narrowly avoided. Tyler is packing backup earrings into a clutch like he’s handling explosives.

And Maya, your goddess, menace, and marketing warlord, is perfection.

She stands by the mirror, hands on her hips, giving angles to no one in particular. Her dress fits like it was born for her. Her gloves are on. Her lip gloss is dangerous. She is peak Mason.

And you? You’re watching her like she’s prey.

“Maya,” you murmur.

She turns, distracted. “Yeah, baby?”

You reach out and tug her hand, just slightly. Just enough. She comes closer without thinking. She always does.

You wrap your arms around her waist, pulling her gently toward you. Your voice is a whisper. “I wanna make out.”

Maya raises an eyebrow. “Now?”

You nod. “Right now.”

She glances over her shoulder, Tyler’s muttering something about boob tape to a stylist. The rest of the team is sorting lashes and lint rollers.

Maya leans in, lips already parted, ready to give it to you when one of the stylists shrieks.

“No no no no NO—” she protests, diving forward with a powder brush. “LIP GLOSS!”

Maya pulls back fast, blinking. “Oh shit.”

“I just finished her mouth,” the artist wails. “She’s flawless. She has a perfect lip. You’ll ruin it!”

Maya stares at you. Then at the mirror. Then sighs. “Okay yeah no I do look hot as fuck right now. Baby we have to wait”

But you’re already grabbing at her waist again, pouting. “Just one kiss,” you whisper. “I’ll be good.”

She groans. “Fuck. Don’t do that face.” She leans in an inch. “You’re gonna make me throw this whole look away just to crawl on top of you in custom couture.”

Tyler yells from across the room, “IF YOU MESS UP YOUR FACES I WILL TELL VOGUE YOU USED DRUGSTORE CONCEALER.”

Maya barks out a laugh. “Okay, okay! Baby, you get one kiss. A chaste kiss. Like we’re in a fuckin Austen novel.”

You nod sweetly.

Then pull her down and absolutely ruin her. You kiss her hard, hot, a little greedy. One hand in her hair. Her lip gloss smudges immediately and she lets out a whimper into your mouth.

You pull back, breathless. Smiling.

Maya looks wrecked and radiant. “Oh my god,” she mutters. “You’re a menace. And I’m obsessed with you.”

Tyler walks by, muttering, “I swear to god, next time I’m bringing a squirt bottle.”

~

You’re in the backseat of a luxury black SUV.

There’s soft music playing. Everything smells like leather and floral setting spray. Maya’s phone is buzzing with texts from Tyler, updates from PR, a Vogue intern begging for a quote.

You don’t care about any of it.

Because Maya’s sitting next to you in full couture. Hair glossy, lip gloss reapplied to perfection, gloves smoothed up to her elbows. She’s crossed her legs, her slit high and skin golden, and her head is tilted ever so slightly, scanning her texts like she doesn’t know what she’s doing to you.

You squirm in your seat. Not dramatically. Just… a shift. A subtle exhale. A whine caught in your throat.

Maya glances over. “Baby...”

“I can’t wait.”

She raises a brow. “Can’t wait for what?”

You look at her, actually look at her, and you’re down so bad. The gloves. The gown. The smug little smirk she doesn’t even know she’s wearing. You’re not okay.

“I need you.”

Maya blinks. “Oh no.”

You shift again, pressing your thighs together. Your hand lands gently on her knee. She looks down at it like it’s a threat.

“Baby,” she says, voice hushed but sharp, “I am in custom Margiela. You can’t just squirm at me in archival silk.”

You lean closer. Breathe her in. “You look so good. It’s making me crazy.”

She clenches her jaw. “Fuck.”

You nuzzle into her shoulder. “Want you so bad.”

She laughs, nervous, aroused and a little desperate. “I cannot finger you in a moving vehicle on the way to the Golden Globes, babe.”

You pout. Whisper against her neck. “Don’t need that. Just your mouth. One kiss.”

“No, because you say ‘one’ and then suddenly we’re dry humping in designer dresses. You’re literally twitching. You’re like a Victorian ghost who caught a glimpse of bare ankle.”

You groan softly, dragging your fingers up her thigh. “You smell like a hot rich woman who I want to ruin me in a guest bathroom.”

“I am that,” she mutters. “But not in this dress.”

You shift again. She lets out a strangled sound and grabs your wrist.

“No. No no no. You need to calm down. This outfit is structured. There is boning. If you wrinkle me before Getty Images even sees me, I swear to god—”

You press your face into her shoulder, laughing softly, desperate. “But you’re so pretty.”

She leans over, kisses your temple, quick, firm, and breathy. “Five minutes, babygirl,” she says. “Hold it together. When we get through the carpet, I’ll find us a bathroom and ruin your mascara.”

You exhale. Shiver. “Okay,” you whisper.

She pulls your hand into hers, holds it tight on her thigh.

“Deep breaths,” she murmurs. “You’re gonna kill them all. And then you can climb me like a tree.”

The SUV door opens and the sound hits you like a wave of cameras flashing, fans screaming, press shouting names through a blur of lights and microphones.

For a second, you freeze.

And then Maya squeezes your hand. “Hey.” Her voice is low, just for you. “Breathe. You’re here. You’re doing it.”

She’s glowing. Glossed and gilded and impossibly beautiful, like she was made for this night. Her gown shimmers under the lights. Her gloved hand is still wrapped around yours.

You nod. Inhale. And step out of the car. The moment your foot hits the carpet, the shouting begins.

“Over here!”

“Turn this way!”

“Look here!”

You blink under the flashes, but Maya’s there. One step behind you, one arm slipping gently around your waist. “They’re not ready,” she murmurs. “You look like a goddess.”

You let her guide you down the carpet.

She doesn’t try to outshine you. She doesn’t pose too hard or talk over you. She just stays. Steady. Warm. A presence at your side.

Someone asks what you’re wearing. You falter.

“She’s in archival McQueen,” Maya answers smoothly, eyes never leaving you. “And I’m in Margiela. Custom. Obviously.”

The reporter stammers. Laughs. “You look incredible.”

Maya kisses your cheek right in front of the flash. “She is incredible.”

You nearly melt on the spot.

The cameras catch it. Of course they do.

The witch. The marketer. The moment.

You lean in and whisper, “I love you.”

And she says, with no hesitation, with the lights burning down, “I know. Now let’s go burn this shit down.”

You’re halfway down the carpet and the world has noticed.

Not just you, you two. The flashes intensify. Reporters are turning to each other mid-interview. Paparazzi are whispering to assistants. Publicists are scrambling to Google you again, properly this time.

“Who is that?”

“Oh my god, that’s the director of The Witch. And that’s… wait, is that her girlfriend?”

“Are we looking at the lesbian power couple of awards season?”

Maya’s smiling so wide you think her cheekbones might crack. “Oh my god,” she whispers in your ear, “I just heard someone say ‘Sapphic Succession energy.’ Baby we’re going viral.���

You nod once, eyes slightly glazed. “Can’t feel my feet.”

She presses a kiss to your temple. “Slay through it.”

Another reporter approaches. “Can we get a quick quote for Variety?”

You’re about to panic but Maya jumps in, already glowing. “We’re just honored to be here,” she says smoothly. “It’s been such an incredible year for horror, and I’m just thrilled I get to stand next to a genius who’s changing the genre and looks this hot in black lace.”

You blink. “I just want to go inside for the bread.”

The reporter laughs, not realizing you’re dead serious.

Maya’s still riding the high. “We’re doing afterparty rounds. I want to be on at least three lesbian moodboards before midnight.”

“I want mashed potatoes,” you murmur.

She grabs your hand and kisses your knuckles dramatically. “You’ll get potatoes. You’ll get everything. But we have to serve first.”

“Have we not served enough?”

“Not until someone live-tweets your cheekbones and tags it #SapphicSeduction.”

A flash goes off. Someone calls your name.

You try to smile. You think it looks like pain.

Maya leans in. “You are so close to a bread roll.”

You exhale shakily. “Promise?”

She presses her gloved hand to your heart. “On couture.”

[leqonsluv3r]

just thinking about…

masterlist taglist

leon kennedy being a good boyfriend despite all his trauma. despite all the horrors he’s faced that he has found something in you. that he actually trusts you more then anyone, probably one of the hardest things he’s ever done. that he loves you unconditionally. sure, it takes time, more time then it probably should but you don’t mind giving him that. you can see how much he’s been through just by the look in his blue eyes.

so you give him all the time he needs, you just be yourself and trust that its enough for him to open up to you and keep you close. you slowly and carefully see a change in leon that you didn’t before. you start to see his emotions peek out a bit. when he wakes up in the morning next to you in your shared bed, pulling you close to him instead of him rolling over. he buries his face in your neck, starting to instantly let the scent of your shampoo lull him into a state of relaxation.

like his body and mind even though in a heavy state of sleep, know its you.

he starts taking you out more when he’s not out on missions, taking you out on small dates. getting coffee down the street from your apartment. he even drives you around, letting you pick the music.

he’s finally understanding what everyone around him is talking about when they told him to find someone he could be around and be comfortable with.

he knew he wasn’t an easy guy to love but you…you were different. you were very persistent in a way he’s never experienced.

you latched onto him when he needed it the most, you probably could tell that without you he would be hanging on by a thread. the small shred of you had infected him and made him fall in love with you.

he started trusting you more, having figured out that by now you weren’t going to abandon him and leave. you were going to stick around and be a part of his life.

and he owed you his for simply being alive.

for continuing to date him when he came home with too many injuries from his last mission or when he woke you up from another nightmare. you didn’t judge him or ridicule him, you were there to clean his injuries and coddle him back to sleep.

something he would never admit out loud — but what his actions would show is — he needed your love and affection more then anything else.

and he knew he wasn’t a perfect boyfriend, he had his flaws as did everyone. but he was a good boyfriend and he did his best.

he took you out, bought you things you didn’t need and showered you with as much affection as man like him could muster. he brought you your favorite coffee every morning from a cafe on the days he was out running, he always heated up a bath for you.

he did things that made him a good boyfriend, things that you had never experienced before.

you both worked for each other in separate ways, but you fit. you worked. like fucked up puzzle pieces that somehow seemed to fit together.

he was damaged and broken, but when you found him, you gave him love and took care of him. you gave him something he had never experienced before and he did the same for you.

even if both of you subconsciously knew it, you didn’t say it out loud. you just lived and he continued to treat you as you deserved to be treated.

you would give him the world if you could and he would do the same in return for you. for all the times you’ve helped him and proven to him that he is worthy of love. something that seemed like a dream once upon a time.

but you made it a reality, you let him prove his love. you let him show you that he could love someone and do the same in return. he didn’t know if he could ever repay you for something like that.

he probably couldn’t.

so he would just love you instead.

and that was good enough for him.

an: this isn’t what you guys probably wanted this week but it’s what your getting bc i’m tired and i just worked 40 hours HASHSH. i love you all so much, pls reblog and like. kisses, xx.

[skzstarl0ver]

⊹₊ 𝙿𝚎𝚊𝚗𝚞𝚝 𝙱𝚞𝚝𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝙺𝚒𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚜 ₊ ⊹

Han Jisung x reader / friends to lovers / fluff / love confession / one shot

♡ I usally write smut but I lowkey want to try something new so here is a fluff fanfic, hope you like it (no warnings this time hihi) ♡

enjoy xx (request open)

★.•☆•.★★.•☆•.★¸.•☆•.¸★ skzstarl0ver ★⡀.•☆•.★⡀.•☆•.★¸.•☆•.¸★

It started with a crash. Like... a full-on, kitchen-warzone-level crash.

You shot upright in bed, heart hammering against your ribs, hair sticking to your forehead. For a terrifying second, you thought someone had broken into your apartment. Flinging off your blanket, you stumbled into your slippers and padded down the hallway, every horror movie you'd ever seen flashing through your mind.

But when you skidded to a stop at the entrance of the kitchen, you found something arguably worse.

Han Jisung—your roommate, your chaos incarnate, the absolute menace you somehow loved to death—was crouched in the middle of a wreckage: three cereal boxes toppled over, rainbow puffs skittered across the tiles, a rogue banana squished and forlorn by the fridge.

"Oh," he said brightly, looking up at you like he wasn’t sitting in the center of a crime scene. "Hi."

You blinked, rubbing your face. "What. Happened."

"I was trying to make a late-night snack tower. It betrayed me," he announced with full sincerity.

"...A what?"

"Cereal base. Banana core. Peanut butter peak," he explained, like he was some world-renowned chef. His eyes shone mischievously. "It was gonna be beautiful. Like me."

You tried—really tried—not to laugh. But a snort escaped anyway. "You're unhinged."

"And yet," he said, grinning as he grabbed a spoon from the mess and held it out like a peace offering, "you're still standing here."

You sighed dramatically, eyeing the chaos around him. "Give me the damn peanut butter."

Jisung whooped victoriously as you dropped onto the floor beside him. Ten minutes later, you were both sitting shoulder to shoulder, backs against the cabinets, sharing scoops of peanut butter straight from the jar. Giggles echoed off the walls, your earlier panic now a distant memory.

His knee kept bumping yours every time he laughed, like even his body couldn't help but reach for you.

"You're funnier than I expected," you said, licking peanut butter off your spoon.

He smirked. "Did I seem mysterious and brooding when we moved in together?"

"Honestly? You seemed like a crackhead."

Jisung gasped, clutching his chest dramatically. "I'm wounded. You’ve crushed my fragile ego."

"You’ll survive," you said, nudging him with your elbow.

You expected him to fire back another joke, another ridiculous quip. But instead, he turned to you, expression shifting into something softer. Something real.

"You know," he said quietly, almost too quietly, "I make people laugh because I hate silence."

Your smile faded, heart squeezing. "Why?"

He stared at the peanut butter jar for a moment, fingers drumming lightly against it. "Because silence gives people time to think. And thinking’s dangerous when you're used to hiding."

The air between you changed, thickened. Your chest ached for him—this boy who wrapped his sadness in jokes and bright smiles and late-night snack towers.

"I don’t think you hide very well," you said softly. "I think you're braver than you give yourself credit for."

Jisung blinked, and for once, words seemed to fail him. His lips parted like he wanted to say something, but nothing came out.

"You’re the first person to say that," he whispered eventually.

Something warm bloomed between you. Something grounding. Solid. Trust, stitched together between spoonfuls of peanut butter and terrible jokes.

You smiled at him, so big and genuine it made your cheeks hurt.

Of course, in true Han Jisung fashion, he ruined it within seconds.

"So..." he wiggled his eyebrows, his grin returning, "you are falling for me, right?"

You laughed, shoving his shoulder playfully. "Go to sleep, Jisung."

He laughed too, but then... he leaned in.

Not far. Just enough that his head found your shoulder, resting there so casually your heart thudded painfully in your chest. He stayed like that, his breath warm against your skin, his hand brushing lightly against yours on the floor.

"Only if you stay right here," he mumbled, voice already drowsy.

You bit your lip, torn between teasing him and melting into a puddle.

The kitchen was a mess. You were a mess. He was definitely a mess. And yet... nothing had ever felt more right.

So you stayed.

Minutes passed in comfortable silence, the chaos forgotten. You thought he might've drifted off, but when you shifted slightly to get more comfortable, he stirred, lifting his head just enough to look at you.

And he was so close.

You could see a slightly blush across his nose, the faint curve of a smile still tugging at his lips.

"I meant it," he said, so quietly you barely caught it. "I'm falling for you."

Your breath caught.

For a moment, neither of you moved. The world outside the little bubble of your kitchen didn't exist.

And then—you leaned in.

It was tentative at first, a soft brush of your mouth against his, testing, asking. He answered immediately, his hand coming up to cup your jaw with a gentle certainty that made your head spin.

The kiss was slow. Sweet. Like the two of you had all the time in the world.

When you finally pulled back, noses still brushing, he grinned at you in that lopsided, boyish way that made your heart do somersaults.

"You taste like peanut butter," he whispered, almost accusingly.

You snorted. "Whose fault is that?"

He laughed, pressing another quick, giddy kiss to the corner of your mouth. "Ours. Definitely ours."

And sitting there, on a kitchen floor littered with cereal and banana guts, you realized that somehow—somewhere between the chaos and the quiet—this boy had become your home.

[arieswritez]

puppy love

puppy love | yandere!mark grayson x afab!reader | MULTI-CHAP: 1

cw; DARK CONTENT!!! MDNI!!! reader is neurodivergent, ableism, growing up is messy & adults suck, angst, niceguy™/slight incel mark, childhood friend/bully!mark, mark gets his powers sooner, teeny tiny implications of pseudo incest (blink and you'll miss it), violent rape, threats of violence, & canon typical violence, stalking, implied murder, gender & body dysphoria, mentions/implications of disordered eating, mark teases reader about their body once, overall asshole mark, implied grooming (mark handles it but he's a lil bitch about it later), so, victim blaming, misogyny, the inexplicable horrors of being afab, objectification, sexualization

about; snapshots of you and mark growing up together. neither of you make it to the other end of the spectrum - budding adulthood - unscathed . . . but at least you have each other. what is it they say? Sandbox love never dies.

a/n: alt title [vignettes of a life: growing pains]. here's something to make you wish you were never born xx. this came out wayy longer than i expected & i figured the only way to properly digest it was by breaking it up into chapters. this one’s pretty intense so please heed the warnings. they'll be included in every chapter forward. enjoy! ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨♡୧⋆ ˚｡⋆

1 .

you still remember the fog of childhood innocence.

the fluffy pajamas that were both comfy and scratchy all at once. the stickers on your bedroom wall, on your wooden headboard. plastic restaurant playground mazes, fishing out toys from greasy boxes. the feeling of chalk staining your fingers and gravel digging into your soft knees: chubby legs soon to be scarred.

and amidst the fog, you remember mark. the sporty, hyperactive kid who’d run across the school yard with a sweater wrapped around his neck like a cape, arms spread wide pretending he could fly.

you remember him.

vibrant, loving, quick witted.

it was glaringly obvious all the kids in your grade wanted to be friends with mark grayson. he had a posse: his very own group of 'superheroes', as the teachers used to call it. and before you learned to multiply, something inside you brewed like a poison. you wanted to be like him but you weren't, and so, your stubborn, little kid mind decided you didn't like him.

you hated him, actually. you hated the way he knew all the right answers in class. you hated his laugh. you hated how he was the fastest during sports. you hated how he was fun and smart and good at everything you weren't.

but dislike or not, that didn't stop your fixation. you continued to watch him from afar. and in your journals - to the best of your ability - you drew yourself striding across the playground with a sweater tied around your neck.

you kept to yourself. painfully shy and practically non-verbal: despite your daydreams of someday being a 'normal' kid like mark. your teachers held conferences with your parents about your struggles. despite the fog that blanketed the memories of your childhood: the feeling of dread settling deep in your tummy during the meetings is something that makes you wince to this day.

while you traced patterns into the table in front of you, they'd talk about you as if you weren't in the same room. your teacher did most of the talking. . and, like most of the time, your brain blocked out the sound of her droning voice. instead, your parent's voice was who you heard. and despite struggling to keep up with the onslaught of information, too, all your parent offered was a hushed, “I don't know what's wrong with them.”

you couldn't pay attention. you didn't talk to the other kids. you clung onto your teacher while in class. . and onto your parent during drop-off.

you were different.

intelligent.

but different.

the former a more pressing concern than the latter.

after countless tedious meetings, you soon associated being different with being singled out. being different meant spending an hour sitting in a boring office, listening to teachers repeat the same information - over and over and over again.

a mention about a doctor your parent(s) always refused.

regardless of the calming - sympathetic? - smile of your teacher, it always felt like you were in trouble. even if you couldn't quite put your finger on what you were doing wrong.

on the way home, your parent(s) would eye you through the rearview mirror. you pulled at the loose strings from your sweater and pretended not to notice.

the front door of your childhood home would creak open. your parent(s) would sit at the dinner table, silent, immobile, and - quiet as always - you'd go to your room until you were certain they were asleep to sneak either dinner or a midnight snack.

you were in trouble.

you just didn't know how to stop getting into it.

your teachers grew evermore desperate.

when suggestions of socializing would cause you to clam up: they decided to bite the bullet and break you in by force, hoping your behavior was caused by childhood timidity. one you’d soon outgrow instead of. . something else.

they’d grouped you with myriad of students in hopes you'd socialize or at least participate in something that wasn't independent school work. soon, your tears of frustration when you couldn't communicate correctly no longer held it's child-like charm. your teary, red eyed protests were ignored.

or met with indignation.

until finally - as a last ditch effort you assume - they sat you next to mark grayson.

you protested. not because he made you nervous - which he did - but because you wanted to dislike him. because being in the proximity of everything you wanted to be would be too much to bare. because mark would only make you look even weirder in comparison. but none of it mattered because as soon as the two of you met everything just. . fell into place.

much to your pleasure, he did most of the talking and didn't seem weirded out by your social skills - or lack thereof.

you found your tummy didn't hurt when he spoke to you and he didn't ask you something along the lines of why are you this way? why aren't you like the rest of us?

for the first time while in school, you were comfortable. the overwhelming pressure of having to perform was nonexistent in mark's company.

he'd ask you about your favorite cartoons and movies, and books, and “oh! do you read any comics?!”, and ranted on how unfair it was that the two of you would soon be forced to read books without pictures in them.

his excitement barely let you get a word in. his energy was contagious, all consuming, and the attention he gave you felt like the praise you'd hardly ever receive. you forgot all about your dumb vendetta, wondering why you had one in the first place. and you morphed into a mini version of him.

the two of you were attached by the hip by the end of the week. much to the dismay of your teachers, who you were sure began to rethink their decision when the two of you wouldn't behave in class.

and, perhaps, it was a mistake. they wouldn't want you to potentially stunt mark’s growth - what if it was contagious?

unbeknownst to you, your teachers did think about separating the two of you. but the risk of you reverting to your old ways and the possibility of invoking debbie grayson’s wrath must've been far too high for their liking.

ultimately, a unanimous decision was made to grit their teeth and bare it.

in the meantime, his posse reluctantly welcomed you in. mark even gave you your very own superhero name! and you tried your hardest to keep up with him. for his sake. for your own.

god knows you tried.

but you were never good at performing.

you weren't as fast or as agile as him. you couldn't jump high enough and your sound effects were nowhere near as good. and in an attempt to overcompensate, you overestimated yourself, took a leap you knew you couldn't make, and scraped your knee.

and like a true hero, mark was the first to come to your aid. he'd sat you down on the plastic playset of the playground while you sniveled - part due to embarrassment instead of the stinging, throbbing pain of a scraped knee. he'd dabbed at your injury with crumbled tissue and placed a colorful seance dog band-aid over your cut.

when you finished rubbing your eye with your tiny fist, you didn't see beading blood and irritated flesh, instead, you were met with big, dark brown eyes that glimmered as they stared into yours.

he was close enough to count his eyelashes.

“see?” he patted a chubby hand against your knee gently. “all better!”

and, yeah - heat spread across your cheeks with newfound emotion - it was all better. all evidence of injury, the throbbing pain and blood, was long gone save for the aid he’d given you.

he’d patched you up. he'd made you better. in more ways than one. and what remained was a fuzzy feeling inside your chest.

he’d grinned at you with missing front teeth.

and you found yourself grinning back.

CHAPTER 2

[thelostclassics]

Just found your blog - it’s so lovely! I love how you write soft!Henry and the reader. I like to imagine the reader as a bit of an antithesis to the ‘cold marble’ that is the Greek class; so a soft, gentle, affectionate, calming and soothing type of person bewilders Henry at first. Until he starts developing a need for it xD

Love the request! Thank you so much, lovely! xx

The softness in the cold marble.

Summary: Henry ends up finding comfort in Y/n kind and gentle affection.

Pairing: Henry x fem!reader

Warnings: use of Y/n, mentions of death and murder (Bunny’s), conflicted Henry, soft!Henry, comfort.

Part 2

He hated her.

She didn’t fit. How could she? She was the light when everything he saw was dark.

He didn’t understand how someone could be so kind and calm, how someone could be so innocent about the cruelty of the world.

She didn’t fit and he didn’t liked that. He noticed it from the start, there was something about her that was out of tune with the rest of the group, not in knowledge or intelligence-for in that she equaled, if not surpassed them- but in the way she existed. While the others moved with the rigidity of ancient statues, with the aloof elegance of Greek gods sculpted in cold marble, Y/n was something else. Something softer, warmer.

It unsettled him. She was the messiness in his life.

It puzzled him how she looked at him, with a tenderness without judgment, with an infinite patience that no one had ever had with him. It confused him how her hand reached for Francis's in automatic gestures of affection, or how she arranged Richard's coat on his chair without even thinking about it, making sure it didn't get too wrinkled.

It stunned him, most of all, the way she touched him.

Henry was used to touch, yes, but always with a purpose. A handshake, a casual nudge, the pressure of a hand on his shoulder to get his attention. Nothing more. Nothing that couldn't be logically justified.

But she… she did it without an apparent reason.

Once, while he was reading in the library, she passed behind him and slid her fingers gently down his back in a distracted gesture, without even pausing. Another afternoon, while they were discussing Catullus in Latin, she took his wrist in her hands without warning and turned his watch to check the time, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She offered him contact without demanding it. She offered him gentleness without expecting anything in return.

At first, Henry didn't know how to respond.

He stood still, rigid, waiting for her to realize that this was pointless. But she didn't. She never did.

And then, without realizing exactly when it had happened, he found himself looking for it.

Looking for her. He hated that even more.

He found himself looking for -missing- her comfort and soft smile.

He would linger beside her more than necessary, allow her hand to brush his as he walked, pretend not to hear when her voice softened as she spoke to him. There were times when Y/n would look at him with her unwavering gentleness and Henry would feel something inside him break and rebuild at the same time.

He hated that he felt like that with her, and hated how he would think about her every day, every hour.

Then, everything went downhill.

There was something about the way the silence stretched through the trees that made everything seem denser, more unreal. As if the world had been suspended in an endless instant before shattering into a thousand pieces.

Bunny's body lay at the bottom of the ravine. A jumble of flesh and bone, almost unrecognizable amidst the blood-stained snow.

Henry watched him motionless.

He felt nothing at first. No horror, no relief, not even guilt. Just a strange stillness, as if time had stopped at the exact moment Bunny ceased to exist.

He turned around to look at the group, then he hated himself. She was standing there without moving, anyone would have thought that she was serene, that this didn’t affect her at all, but Henry, Henry had spent way too many days observing her, spending time with her. She was scared, he could see it in her eyes.

That day, she went to his house, something about borrowing a book. In any other circumstance he would have been somehow happy that she visited him, but not today, he didn’t want her to be involved in what they were going to do, didn’t want her to see what they were going to do.

He offered to drive her home, of course she said it was okay, and one thing lead to another and know she had just witnessed the death of Bunny.

Henry hated himself for that.

He didn't come home that night.

He couldn't.

The air inside the car had become stifling, and though the others were talking quietly, organizing alibis, rehearsing answers, he could only hear the dull echo of Bunny's fall echoing in his head.

When everyone returned to their homes, he parked his car in front of Y/n’s house. He wasn't sure what he expected to find there. He just knew he needed it.

He waited a bit inside the car and then walked towards the house.

When he knocked on the door, it took her a few seconds to open it. She was wearing a light robe and had her hair in a messy updo, as if she had just woken up. Her eyes met Henry's and her expression changed instantly.

“Henry...” she whispered.

He said nothing. He just stepped forward, crossing the threshold as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Y/n closed the door behind him and stood watching him, as if trying to figure out what to say to him, how to comfort him without breaking down herself in the process, how to make him see that she was there for him and always would be.

He didn't know how to start.

He had spent weeks planning every detail, every possibility, every consequence. And yet, at that moment, in front of her, everything seemed to fall apart.

Y/n took a step toward him.

She didn't ask any questions.

She didn't press him.

She just lifted a hand carefully and rested it on his cheek, a barely perceptible brush.

It was then that Henry felt something crack inside him.

An imperceptible tremor ran through his body, and before he knew it, Y/n was already embracing him. Her arms closed around him with unexpected firmness, her hands running up and down his back in an instinctive gesture of comfort.

Henry didn't move at first.

But then, almost without realizing it, he allowed himself to lean into her, to drop his weight into her warm body, into her familiar perfume, into the one thing in the world that didn't feel broken.

“I’m sorry” he finally said, in a low voice. He was sorry, sorry for what he did, sorry for how he did it, sorry because she was part of it too.

“I’m scared” she responded. Her voice was a murmur against his neck.

He wrapped his arms more tightly around her, as if to say that he knew she was scared and that he was even more scared.

For a long while, there was nothing but the sound of their breathing, the slow, heavy beat of Henry's heart, Y/n's warmth wrapping around him like a shield against the cold of the night.

“Do you want to stay?” she asked, after a while.

Henry closed his eyes.

“Yes.”

Y/n nodded and took him by the hand, leading him to his room as gently as one would lead a frightened child. In that moment, he was so grateful of her comforting and gentle presence.

That night, Henry slept for the first time in a long time.

———

A/n: hey angels! This took me more time to write because I wasn’t sure how to approach it, but I ended up really liking the result. I was going to continue writing how they started to date and etc but realized it was already pretty long, but if anyone wants to read that I will gladly do a second part.

Let me know if you want 2 part. Have a nice day, my loves!! 💙

[hazelfoureyes]

The SafeWord is RadioApple (a tidbit epilogue to part 3)

@readergirlstuff

You rested your cheek on the bar, hangover in full effect but the cool wood was calming the headache.

“Sooo, who wears the pants in this triangle of horrors.” Angel leaned back against the bar, watching Lucifer and Alastor glare at each other from separate armchairs.

“Now that’s a dumb question.” Husk shook his head.

“Okay if it’s so obvious then you tell me.”

Husk put his hands up defensively, “Not stupid because it’s obvious, but because only an idiot would piss off the cruelest overlord and the king of hell with one sentence.”

“The king is always going to come out on top.” Luci smiled directly at Alastor.

“Funny, you spent your night on your back.” Alastor rose his newspaper to block out the view of Luci.

“Who am I to deny one of my people the chance to serve their majesty?”

Alastor cackled, wiping tears from his eyes, “Serve? You were literally begging for my-“

“YOU ASKED ME TO!” Horns fully grown, on his feet.

“You sounded like you meant it.” Alastor’s body grew to twice his size, antlers hitting the bar’s overhang as static cut in and out of his voice.

“Enough! Shh. Quiet.” You pulled a napkin over your head to block out the bright lights. “I need you both to shut the fuck up for like, 5 minutes.”

Both men stilled, returning to their seats. Lucifer scrolled on his phone, sheepish. Alastor returned to his paper.

Angel tapped the bar, “Not so obvious, was it, whiskers.”

“Damn.” Husk shook his head.

“Kiss kiss love you sorry,” you offered, a pang of guilt for being so rude to them. Especially in front of others. You knew you’d have to make amends later.

Lucifer perked up, eyes wide and shining, “did you say-?”

Alastor’s smile nearly dropped, an unseen audience awwing over the radio static as he accidentally ripped the newspaper in half, “what was that now?”

Fuck.

A little tidbit of:

⟢Lucifer x Reader x Alastor - The Safeword is RadioApple smut💦

Alastor would give you anything, all you had to do was ask. When you asked for Lucifer, he delivered. But after seeing just how much you enjoyed Alastor’s rough handling, Lucifer takes a turn and gets a little lost in the pleasure.

Part 1 ꒰აMaleReader✧FemaleReader໒꒱ Part 2 ꒰აFemaleReader໒꒱ Part 3 ꒰აAlastorxLucifer໒꒱ tidbit (cute, not smut) Part 4 ꒰აFemaleReader໒꒱✨NEW✨ ₊⊹⁀➴ Lucifer wins⟡Alastor Wins

3/30 Just realized I didn’t tag the cult and this will be referenced in the next part soooo

∰ Summoning the Horny Little Deer Cult (general tag list):

@cxrsedwxrlds , @nonetheartist , @tsunaki , @janchei , @wettiny-in-smutland , @moonmark98 , @hoebihoeshi , @pansexual-opera-house , @polytheatrix , @lorddiabigmommymilkers , @backinthefkingbuildingagain , @harley2223-blog , @coffee-colored-hopeless-romantic , @poinappel , @midnightnoiserose , @spookieroz , @missmidorima , @ivebeenthearchersstuff , @downbadforfictionalppl , @xx-all-purpose-nerd-xx , @sleepylittledemon , @aether-th3-enby , @dontfuckbutimfab , @breathlessaura , @aperfectidiot , @certainlygay , @jth12 , @star-kujo-platinum ,

@ivebeenthearchersstuffn, @rubyninja1 , @simphornies , @alleystore , @readergirlstuff , @berry-demon , @chirimeimei , @fairyv-ice , @olive-frog , @thonethatflies620 , @tiredkiwiii , @ilikemyteawithmilk , @whateverlololo , @psipies , @howabouticallyou , @roxxie-wolf , @ive-no-idea-what-to-call-this , @fizzled-phoenix , @fjorjestertealeaf , @phobophobular , @surusurusuru , @mariaclarade-la-cruz1 , @whateverlololo , @simplyonehellofanotaku , @xixflower , @i-am-nonbinary-bean-deal-with-it , @roxxie-wolf , @a-case-of-attachment , @multifandomfanatic02 , @watereddownmilk , @raynerrold , @crazii-saber-wolf , @valkyrie-expeditions , @bontensbabygirl , @sillyb0nez , @oo0lady-mad0oo , @jazzmasternot , @pseudobun , @fraugwinska✨, @alitaar , @straows , @alastorssimp , @angelicwillows

🏹Alastor stalkers: @celestial-vomit , @amurtan ,@valkyrie-expeditions

[hypnobeauty]

a chance encounter - a cho hyun-ju x reader fic (part 13)

summary: a story about how you and hyun-ju met and the following years of your relationship. masterlist cw: no use of y/n, reader is afab, squid games, blood, violence, gunshots, hurt/comfort, dtr. a/n: hello lovelies! don't have much to say today lol day 2/game 2, their silly little group getting together. i hope you like it! might be a loooong while before i post again. i’ve started teaching in a new school and im still getting the grip of how things work there, and also am preparing for a big exam - aiming for my mandarin hsk 2 certificate pls wish me luck—alsooo my inspiration has been running thin tbh—if you have any ideas or suggestions, do tell me. i fear the story might have gotten too long :B enjoy xx taglist: @strayteez3staner @dekiruxxx @jeongteen @sunnysurvives @3leni @etta-huracan @honeyhyunju @basoressia @antisocial-aina @googie-jeon @christinamadsen @deernat @vvlwvvy @psychobitchsthings @dikeu-yoiz

part 13. team up

the night had been a brutal, merciless torment, your mind trapped in an endless cycle of terror, the same nightmare replaying over and over again like a cruel loop from which you couldn't escape. no matter how many times your body twisted, no matter how much sweat broke out along your brow despite the cold air of the sleeping quarters, your subconscious refused to let go of the horrors you had witnessed. 

the first game had left its mark, burrowed deep into your bones, into your senses, into the fragile space between sleep and waking. the gunshots rang in your ears, the dull, wet thud of bodies collapsing onto the ground reverberated through your skull, the thick, metallic scent of blood suffocated you. the fear, the helplessness—it all clung to you, poisoning even your rest.

hyun-ju barely slept either. the weight of the situation alone was enough to keep her mind alert, her body poised for anything, but it was you who kept her from slipping into even a moment of true rest. every time she closed her eyes, your soft whimpers, the restless shifting of your body, the way your fingers clenched and unclenched in distress, pulled her from the edge of sleep. she had tried waking you gently at first, brushing the back of her hand against your cheek, whispering your name—but you were trapped, too deep inside the nightmare’s grip to hear her. and so, instead, she did what she could—watching over you, wiping the dampness from your forehead with careful fingers, whispering reassurances even though you couldn’t hear them. at some point, she had simply pulled you closer into her arms, holding you against her chest, hoping her presence alone could tether you back to safety.

but in your mind, there was no safety—only darkness at first, suffocating and endless, before the nightmare bled into clarity, forcing you back into the sandy field of the first game. it was exactly as it had happened. hyun-ju, breaking away from you, rushing back into danger to help 456 carry the injured man. your screams, the raw desperation in your voice as you tried to break free from the arms restraining you, the feeling of your own body betraying you, held back while she risked everything. then, the relief when they made it across, the frantic way you had scrambled to the ground, to her, pulling her close—just like before.

but this time, the nightmare twisted the memory into something worse, something unbearable.

the gunshot rang out, a sound that rattled through your very being, and you felt the warm splatter of blood against your face. but when you looked, it wasn’t the injured player who had been executed—it was hyun-ju. the breath in your lungs vanished, replaced by a piercing, soul-crushing scream as her body slumped against you, her weight suddenly unbearably heavy. her head lolled, eyes glassy and unfocused, and the hole in her temple wept crimson, the blood trickling down her cheek, pooling onto you. you shook her, screamed her name until your throat burned, but she was already gone.

and then, a voice—cold, detached, uncaring.

"yes. one less to compete for the money."

your mind shattered.

the world went black.

and then it started again.

over and over, an unrelenting cycle of horror, the moment replaying itself without mercy. each time, you tried to stop it, to change something, to move faster, scream louder, but the ending never changed. hyun-ju always died, and you were always left holding her lifeless body in your arms, drowning in grief, in rage, in helplessness. it could have lasted minutes, hours—you had no sense of time, only the suffocating repetition of loss.

and then, suddenly, you were ripped from its grip, gasping, a silent scream dying on your lips as your eyes flew open. the room was dark except for the dim yellow glow of the piggy bank overhead. your heart pounded violently against your ribs, your entire body rigid with the lingering echoes of the nightmare. for a brief, disorienting moment, you weren’t sure what was real—if you were still trapped in that hellscape or if you had finally broken free.

but then you felt her.

hyun-ju’s arms were wrapped securely around you, her steady breathing warm against your skin, her chest rising and falling in the rhythm of sleep. she was here. she was alive. the relief hit you so hard it nearly crushed you, and before you could stop them, silent tears slipped from your eyes, dampening the fabric of her shirt as you buried your face against her. you inhaled deeply, grounding yourself in her scent, her warmth, forcing yourself to believe it. she was okay. she was here. she was breathing.

everything would be fine.

at least, that’s what you tried to convince yourself of as sleep slowly pulled you under again, this time free from the nightmare’s grasp—though peace was still far from reach.

when morning came, hyun-ju stirred before the lights even turned on. even after everything, after the exhaustion weighing her limbs, her body remained tethered to its strict routine. her eyes opened at precisely 5:50 a.m., her mind instantly alert despite the haze of weariness still clinging to her. but as she turned slightly, what she saw made her pause.

at some point during the night, after she had finally drifted into sleep herself, you had shifted closer, curling into her warmth as if seeking safety in the unconscious state. the tension that had lingered between you since the vote seemed to have melted away, at least for now.

hyun-ju exhaled softly, adjusting her hold on you, her fingertips brushing lightly over your back. and though she didn’t say it out loud, she was grateful. grateful that, for the first time since this nightmare began, you had finally found even a sliver of rest.

you woke up the same way as before—blinding lights flashing on without warning, classical music swelling through the speakers, and the ominous glow of the enormous piggy bank above, now even heavier with stacks of money.

the only difference was that hyun-ju was beside you today.

she lay on her side, facing you, one arm draped protectively over your waist. her eyes were already open, alert. it was definitely past six—hyun-ju never slept past that. her internal clock was annoyingly precise, honed by years of routine. most mornings, she was up even earlier, quietly stretching beside the bed or watching you with that small, knowing smile as you clung to the last remnants of sleep.

you shifted slightly, intending to murmur a groggy good morning, but a yawn hijacked your sentence midway, stretching your mouth wide. hyun-ju chuckled at the familiar sight—this happened every morning. you were not a morning person.

“morning,” she murmured, her voice soft as she ran gentle fingers across your cheek. “how did you sleep?”

you let out a small, tired sigh. “as well as anyone can sleep in a goddamn death trap.”

she gave you a soft smile, though something in her expression tightened ever so slightly at your words. she shifted, propping herself up on one elbow as her fingers trailed absently along your arm. “i’m sorry about yesterday,” she said after a beat. “for the vote.”

there was a sincerity in her voice, a gentleness, but you only sighed, stretching your arms above your head. “there’s nothing to do about it now,” you said, keeping your tone neutral. then, attempting levity—albeit bitter—you added, “let’s just hope the next game isn’t russian roulette.”

it was meant to be a joke, dark humor to cope with the horror of it all, but the moment the words left your lips, you saw something in hyun-ju’s expression shift. it was brief, a flicker of something wounded in her eyes before she masked it, her lips parting slightly as if she wanted to respond but thought better of it. instead, she simply nodded, sitting up fully and stretching her arms over her head.

you almost said something—almost acknowledged that look, that pause—but instead, you shoved it aside, dismissing it as nothing. you were both on edge. it didn’t mean anything.

the sound of doors unlocking snapped you both out of it. pink guards marched in, their presence swift and efficient as they wheeled in carts filled with neatly arranged bento boxes and water bottles. “let’s grab some food,” hyun-ju said, standing and offering you a hand. you took it, squeezing briefly before letting go, and followed her down the stairs, standing in line among the other players.

as you made your way down the stairs, hyun-ju naturally fell into step behind you, assuming her usual “bodyguard” position. it wasn’t anything new—this was just how she was in crowded spaces. at concerts, city festivals, even at the grocery store on a busy weekend, she always positioned herself slightly behind you, her presence solid and reassuring, ready to shield you from a pushy crowd. you loved when she did that. it was dominant, protective, and entirely her. once, you had joked about it, singing a bit of "i will always love you," and it had been the funniest thing when the reference went right over her head.

you smiled faintly at the memory as you grabbed the food, hyun-ju picking up hers right after. together, you settled on the bottom stairs, bento boxes balanced on your laps. the food was surprisingly... fine. it wasn’t home, but it was edible. you hadn’t realized how thirsty you were until you downed the entire water bottle in one go, the cool liquid soothing the dryness in your throat.

you were halfway through your meal, idly scanning the room, when movement caught your eye—a small crowd was gathering around player 456.

you swallowed your last bite and stood, curiosity overriding caution. hyun-ju noticed immediately. “where are you going?” she asked, her voice low but firm.

you waved a hand behind your back dismissively. “just listening,” you murmured, weaving through the players toward the group.

“you know what’s next, don’t you?” player 001’s voice cut through the murmurs. his tone was almost… teasing. oh, you hated him. “oh, yeah. you won this whole thing before, so you must know what game two is.” murmurs of agreement rippled through the players. 

your gaze flickered to 001, taking him in—his presence, his unreadable expression. he had pressed o last, single-handedly making sure you all stayed. you hadn’t liked him since the moment you saw him. there was something off about him, something cold.

and yet, you found yourself staring. and as if he felt your eyes, he turned to look at you. his gaze was empty, unyielding. you tried to hold it, tried to match his stare for a few seconds, but it was too much—or maybe it was too little. he wasn’t challenging you, wasn’t engaging with you. he was simply watching.

it sent a shiver down your spine. you looked away first, back to 456 as he finally spoke.

“the second game last time,” he said carefully, “was dalgona.”

you didn’t waste another second. you spun on your heel and made a beeline back to hyun-ju, weaving through the crowd until you reached her side.

“the game,” you murmured under your breath. “it’s dalgona.”

hyun-ju, who had been watching you with a mixture of mild amusement and worry, immediately straightened. “are you sure?”

you nodded. “i heard it myself. and the easiest shape is the triangle.”

she exhaled through her nose, nodding slowly. you hesitated, glancing down at her. 

“are you any good at it?” you asked.

she hesitated for a fraction of a second before replying, “not really, but i’ll try my best.”

you exhaled, standing in front of her, your hands on your hips. “me neither,” you admitted. “i was never patient enough for it, always broke the candy.”

she listened carefully, her gaze unwavering, absorbing every word, then, without a word, she set her empty food box aside and gently tugged you forward by the hands, guiding you so that you stood between her legs as she sat. automatically, your arms came to rest on her shoulders.

her soft brown eyes gazed up at you, the remnants of her makeup from yesterday completely gone, leaving behind nothing but the bare, unfiltered warmth of her expression. she exhaled softly.

“i’m sorry,” she murmured.

you sighed, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. “don’t start that again,” you warned, trying to keep your voice amused but the way she kept bringing it up was starting to make you feel annoyed. “otherwise, i’ll remember i’m supposed to be mad at you.”

she smiled—small, but genuine, then she rested her head against your stomach, letting out a deep, quiet breath as you ran your fingers through her hair. her shoulders relaxed slightly, some of the tension draining from her frame. she tilted her head up to look at you again.

“i love you.” the words came soft, steady. a quiet confession and your heart squeezed.

you bent down, pressing a gentle kiss to her lips. “i love you too,” it was brief and tender.

you sat back down beside hyun-ju, the warmth of her lingering touch still humming against your skin. without a word, she reached for your hand again, lifting it to her lips, pressing a soft kiss to your palm, then another to your wrist. a quiet reassurance. you sighed, leaning into her shoulder, letting your body relax against hers. the room was still too cold, the air too heavy, the fluorescent lights too harsh—but in this moment, pressed against hyun-ju, it was bearable.

but… you needed to talk.

“yesterday,” you started, voice barely above a whisper. “when we played red light, green light… i—” you hesitated, exhaling shakily. hyun-ju didn’t rush you, simply shifted closer, thumb rubbing soothing circles over your knuckles.

“i was terrified,” you admitted. “not just because of the game, but because…” your throat tightened. “because i thought i was going to watch you die. i had nightmares through the night, i… i spent the whole night watching you die.”

hyun-ju tensed beside you, but she didn’t interrupt.

“i know you’ve seen worse,” you continued, voice raw. “you were in the military. you’ve held a gun, you’ve probably—” you stopped yourself, shaking your head. “but i haven’t. i don’t know what it’s like to see someone get shot right in front of me. i’ve only been to a handful of funerals in my life, and every single one felt unreal. like grief was something distant, something i could keep at arm’s length.”

hyun-ju remained still, though her grip on your hand tightened.

“but yesterday,” you murmured, “there was no distance. it was right in front of me. the blood, the bodies, the gunfire. the way people screamed.” you swallowed hard. “i’m afraid, hyun-ju. i don’t want to go through that again. i don’t want the next body to be yours.”

or maybe, it would be yours. the thought settled in your chest like a stone, heavy and suffocating. you turned your head, searching her expression. “does it even make sense? you winning all this money, only for me to—”

“stop.”

her voice was firm. she didn’t look at you, instead staring down at her hands, fingers curled into tight fists.

“hyun-ju—”

“i said stop,” she repeated, sharper, a little louder this time. “don’t say things like that.” her reaction was immediate, instinctual. a kind of raw, unfiltered denial.

you exhaled softly, reaching for her, placing your left hand over hers, your right gently cupping her cheek. “i’m not being pessimistic,” you whispered, coaxing her to look at you. “i’m being real.”

her gaze finally lifted, meeting yours. and for a moment, there was nothing but silence. a quiet, trembling kind of understanding. then, her jaw clenched, and her dark eyes hardened with something fierce. “i will protect you,” she said, voice unwavering. “we’re leaving this place together.”

you wanted to believe her. god, you wanted to believe her.

so, you nodded. “let’s hope so, but… you know you can’t guarantee that.”

she looked away, shaking her head slightly, and you two stayed like that for minutes, just looking ahead, in silence. after a while, hyun-ju spoke.

“you know,” she began, her voice steady, but with an edge of something careful beneath it, “i understand why you’re upset. and i understand that you’re scared. but…” she exhaled, shifting her body so she was turned slightly toward you. “the way you talk about it sometimes—it hurts.”

you froze, caught off guard. she hesitated for only a second before continuing. “i don’t want us to tear each other apart in here. i don’t want to hijack what we have so easily.” her brows furrowed slightly, voice dipping softer, more vulnerable. “i don’t want this place to do that to us.”

a wave of guilt coiled in your stomach. you hadn’t thought much of your words before, hadn’t considered how she might interpret them, how they might sound coming from you—the one person she had always relied on, just as much as she was your anchor. you had been so wrapped up in your fear, your exhaustion, your anger, that you hadn’t realized you were taking it out on her.

you turned to fully face her. you opened her mouth to reply, but she shook her head, offering you a small, tired smile.

“i get it,” she said. “i do. but just… don’t push me away while we’re here. please.”

she wasn’t looking at you. her eyes were on her hands, fingers wringing together in her lap, restless and anxious. "i don’t know how to say this without sounding selfish," she admitted, barely above a whisper, "but i need you. i need you to believe we’re going to make it. because if you stop believing, then i don’t know how i’m supposed to keep believing either."

your throat tightened, a sharp sting burning behind your eyes.

"hyun-ju..." you murmured, guilt swelling in your chest.

she gave a small, breathless laugh, one that didn’t hold any amusement. "i don’t want this place to take everything from us," she said, voice raw now, unguarded. "i don’t want it to turn us against each other. i don’t want to be scared of losing you and scared that you’re already slipping away from me."

your breath hitched and reached for her hands, stilling them with your own.

"i’m sorry," you whispered, and your voice cracked under the weight of it. "i didn’t realize… i didn’t mean to make you feel like that." you swallowed hard, gripping her fingers a little tighter. "i’m not giving up. i swear. i’m just... scared. and i know you are too, even if you don’t want to say it."

hyun-ju exhaled shakily, finally meeting your eyes.

"i am," she admitted. "but i can’t—" she broke off, shaking her head. "i won’t let this place take you from me. i can’t even think about that. and when you make those jokes, when you talk like it’s inevitable, like we won’t make it out together, it feels like you’ve already made peace with leaving me behind."

the words crushed you.

you reached up, cupping her face, feeling the warmth of her skin beneath your palm. "i could never make peace with that," you said, your voice firm even as your throat tightened. "i don’t know what’s going to happen, hyun-ju, but i do know that if something ever happened to you... i don’t think i could survive it."

hyun-ju's breath caught, her eyes shining with something unspeakably fragile.

"i need you too," you continued, thumb brushing over her cheekbone. "i need us. and i need you to know that even if i’m scared, even if i don’t always know how to handle this, i’m not giving up on us. i’m sorry for making you feel like i was."

hyun-ju let out a breath that sounded almost like a sob, her fingers trembling as they cupped your face. "i’m sorry," she whispered, her voice breaking. "i’m so, so sorry."

you shook your head, placing your hands over hers. "i know," you murmured, closing your eyes for a moment, letting yourself feel her. "i know." you exhaled, pressing a kiss to the inside of her wrist before looking at her again. "just… no more decisions without me. no more trying to carry this alone. we do this together, okay?"

she nodded, her thumb brushing over your cheek as if memorizing the feeling of you. "together," she promised, her voice trembling but sure.

you let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding, then pulled her into you, wrapping your arms tightly around her. she held you just as fiercely, her face buried against your shoulder, breathing you in.

for the first time since this nightmare began, you felt something close to peace settle over you. whatever came next—whatever horrors this place threw your way—you would face it together. and that was the only thing that mattered.

but before either of you could say anything else, the fragile moment shattered. a sudden commotion erupted from the center of the room, sharp and violent, the unmistakable sound of fists colliding, bodies hitting the ground.

you jerked your head up just in time to see two men throwing wild punches at another, their movements fast and aggressive. hyun-ju’s arm shot out in front of you instinctively, a barrier between you and the scene unfolding. it wasn’t necessary—the fight was contained, the men too caught up in their rage to pay anyone else any mind—but still, her protective instincts kicked in.

your eyes darted across the struggling bodies, catching a flash of bright purple hair. you recognized him instantly—player 069, the rapper thanos, as he called himself. you had always thought he looked like an asshole, and clearly, he was proving you right.

the scuffle intensified, the two men ganging up on the third, fists landing hard, breathless grunts filling the air. the violence of it made your stomach churn. but then, just as suddenly as it started, it stopped as player 001 stepped in.

one moment, the fight was wild, uncontrolled—the next, it was over. 001 moved with precision, stepping between them, intercepting blows, disarming the situation quickly. actually, he didn’t just step in. he moved like someone who had done this before, someone who had calculated the perfect moment to strike. his technique was sharp, efficient. he wasn’t just breaking up the fight—he was winning it.

you watched uneasy, however hyun-ju looked impressed. she had always been drawn to skill, to discipline, to technique, it was part of her nature. she murmured something under her breath, something about his form, speed or strength, but you weren’t paying attention anymore, because something about him unsettled you.

you didn’t like him, you never had. from the moment you saw him, from the moment he pressed the o button, keeping all of you trapped in this nightmare—you hadn’t trusted him. and now, watching him, seeing the ease with which he dismantled the fight, the way his gaze remained cold, empty, unaffected—a chill ran down your spine. you didn’t say any of this to hyun-ju.

*

the heavy main doors creaked open, and a flood of pink-clad guards entered the room in perfect formation. their faceless black masks made them look inhuman, mechanical, as they stood in eerie silence, waiting for the players to fall in line. a tense hush settled over the room as everyone understood what was coming next.

you felt hyun-ju’s fingers tighten around yours as she pulled you up with her, her grip firm but comforting. without a word, the two of you fell into step with the others, joining the slow-moving crowd heading toward the exit. the same winding staircase loomed ahead, leading you through a maze of pastel corridors—bright, almost playful, but suffocating in their endless turns.

when you finally emerged into the game area, it was different from before. the same sandy floor stretched beneath your feet, but this time, the center of the vast space held two circular, colorful tracks painted onto the ground. it almost looked like an oversized children’s play area. the tension in the air, however, was anything but playful.

a woman’s voice echoed through the space, cool and detached.

"welcome to your second game. this game will be played in teams. please divide into teams of five in the next ten minutes."

you turned to hyun-ju immediately, brow furrowing. “dalgona isn’t played in teams.”

she shook her head, her expression serious. “it’s not dalgona, then.”

hyun-ju straightened, her hand squeezing yours just briefly before she shifted into something more focused, more determined. “we need to find people,” she said firmly. “three more.”

you both turned toward the rest of the players, scanning the crowd, trying to find anyone who wasn’t already locked into an unspoken alliance. people were moving fast, pulling each other into small groups, securing their chances before time ran out.

but as you and hyun-ju approached different clusters, the reaction was the same. some people had already formed their teams and dismissed you quickly, barely sparing a glance. others looked you both up and down—eyes lingering too long on hyun-ju’s appearance, or your joined hands—and turned away without a word.

you gritted your teeth, frustration curling in your stomach. you weren’t surprised, but that didn’t make it any less infuriating. i hope you all fucking lose.

hyun-ju, ever composed, let out a slow breath beside you, the only sign of her own frustration being the tightening of her grip on your hand. “we’ll find someone,” she murmured, and you could tell she was saying it more for you than for herself.

you were about to turn to hyun-ju, to suggest splitting up just to form a team faster, when a small weight bumped into you, snapping you out of your thoughts. you turned, expecting to see someone pushing past in a hurry, but instead, you found yourself looking down at a girl.

petite, wiry, her frame smaller than yours—she looked no older than a teenager. she had wide, almost too-big eyes, framed by unruly curls of frizzy hair. her uniform bore the number 095, with a large x printed on the front.

she hesitated before speaking, her voice soft, almost hesitant. “excuse me…” she murmured, fidgeting slightly under your gaze. “would you like to team up with me?”

something in your chest eased.

you didn’t think twice before offering her a reassuring smile, the warmth genuine even in the middle of all this chaos. “of course,” you said, looping your arm through hers like it was the most natural thing in the world. the tension in her shoulders melted slightly, and you could tell that she hadn’t expected kindness here.

with her, now you were three.

"team selection will end momentarily." the pa voice jolted you into urgency. time was running out.

“we need two more,” hyun-ju reminded you, her voice low but firm.

“i know,” you murmured, scanning the dispersing players. most people had already formed their teams, clumping together in tight circles, talking in hushed voices, some sizing up their teammates with open skepticism. others had their backs turned, purposefully ignoring the stragglers still searching for a group.

hyun-ju was taller than you, giving her the advantage of a better view, so you turned to her. “aein, do you see anyone alone?”

she was already looking, eyes narrowing as she swept the field with practiced precision. “no… there’s no one i can s—oh wait, there.”

she lifted her chin, subtly gesturing toward two figures standing near the edge of the group. you followed her gaze, and the moment your eyes landed on them, your breath hitched.

your eyes followed her direction and landed on the old woman from the first day, the one whose voice had cut through the murmurs like a blade, asking why people like hyun-ju existed. standing next to her was her son, player 007. you had never told hyun-ju about what the woman had said. it hadn’t felt necessary; you had long since learned to bear the weight of ignorance in silence, sparing her when you could. if hyun-ju had heard it herself, she hadn't let it show. but now, faced with the decision of approaching them, your stomach twisted slightly.

for a split second, you hesitated, fingers twitching against 095’s arm. still, it wasn’t time for that. “do you think they’ll want to team up with us?” you asked, voice hushed.

“only one way to find out,” hyun-ju said, already moving toward them. you followed, with 095 close behind.

“excuse us,” hyun-ju said smoothly, her voice polite but firm as she stopped before them. “we need two more for our team. would you like to join us?”

007 barely hesitated before responding. “of course!” he said, a note of relief in his voice, as if he had been waiting for someone to extend a hand. he seemed eager, cooperative. you almost sighed with relief—it was done, your team was complete.

but you didn’t miss the way his mother’s brows furrowed, the way she exhaled sharply, her mouth barely parting as if she wanted to object but thought better of it. nor did you miss the way 007’s gaze lingered just a fraction too long on hyun-ju, his eyes flickering with something you couldn’t quite place. it made your spine straighten involuntarily. but right now, it didn’t matter. what mattered was that you had a team, a real chance at winning whatever this was.

you turned to hyun-ju and let out a slow breath, offering her a small, relieved smile which she returned without hesitation, just as the pa system came to life again, its impassive voice cutting through the last murmurs of team selection.

“team selection has ended. all players, please sit in a line inside the designated circles.”

with a final glance at each other, your newly-formed team made their way toward the marked area. you took a seat between hyun-ju and 095, your body still thrumming with leftover adrenaline. the others settled in around you, and silence fell as anticipation weighed heavy in the air.

“the game you will be playing is six-legged pentathlon,” the pa voice continued. “you will start with your legs tied together. each member will take turns playing a minigame at every ten-meter mark, and if you win, the team can move on to the next one. here are the minigames: number one, ddakji. number two, flying stone. number three, gonggi. number four, spinning top. number five, jjegi. your goal is to win all the minigames and cross the finish line in five minutes. please decide players for each minigame.”

a low murmur spread among the teams as everyone quickly assessed their skills.

“what are you good at?” 007 asked, eyes flicking between you all, his tone eager, as if he thrived on strategizing.

you exchanged glances.

“i’m good at jjegi,” hyun-ju offered. “i used to be able to kick more than twenty times.” there was a faint note of pride in her voice, but it was laced with humility.

“more than twenty?” 007 sounded impressed. “that’s solid. you should definitely take jjegi.”

you nodded in agreement. “then i can do ddakji,” you said. “i won more times than the man who recruited us. is that okay with everyone?”

095 nodded immediately, eyes shining slightly. she had been quiet so far, observing you closely, hanging onto your words like you knew more than you really did. there was something about the way she looked at you—not just trust, but admiration. it made your chest feel strangely tight.

the old woman, 149, spoke next, adjusting her posture. “i grew up playing gonggi,” she said with a quiet confidence, her voice carrying the wisdom of years. “i’m really good… though i haven’t played in a long time.”

“you’ll be great, mom,” 007 reassured her, placing a firm hand on her shoulder. his words were encouraging, but there was something else underneath them—something personal.

“i can do flying stone,” 007 added. he seemed sure of himself, and no one objected.

that left one game. you turned to 095, who had been sitting quietly beside you. “are you okay with spinning top?”

her big eyes flicked up to yours, hesitant. “…yes,” she said, though the lack of conviction in her tone didn’t go unnoticed.

you lowered your voice slightly. “we can switch if you want,” you offered.

she hesitated for a split second before shaking her head. “no, it’s fine,” she said, forcing a tight-lipped smile. “i can do it.”

you studied her for a moment, sensing the nerves beneath her resolve, but you decided to trust her. you nodded. “alright. then it’s settled.”

“let’s do this!” 007 pumped his fist in the air, grinning. you all gave a small but determined cheer, sealing your fates together.

the pa crackled again. “all players, remain seated as game instructions are finalized.”

you took a deep breath, feeling the weight of the moment settle over you. there was no turning back now.

*

shortly after, the game began. the first two teams had their legs strapped together, their bodies swaying slightly as they adjusted to the restraints before they found their rhythm. in unison, they started chanting, "one, two, one, two, one, two," their steps carefully synchronized, the sand beneath them shifting as they moved forward.

you watched intently, eyes locked on the team competing on your track. the first challenge—ddakji—was completed flawlessly, and they advanced to the flying stone segment. the player assigned to the task picked up the stone, throwing it towards the target. it missed. groaning in frustration, he hurried to retrieve it, but with every second lost, so was their hope of finishing in time. his second throw connected, but his foot was over the line, disqualifying the attempt. he hesitated, hands shaking, sweat glistening on his forehead under the artificial lighting. you leaned toward 007, voice low but urgent.

"you need to watch the line when you throw," you murmured, keeping your gaze on the struggling player.

007 nodded quickly, eyes wide with understanding. "got it," he whispered back, determination settling into his expression.

the man continued to try, each failed attempt making his movements more frantic, more desperate. and then—humiliation. his body trembled, his breath hitched, and you saw the dark stain bloom across his pants as he pissed himself, sheer terror taking hold. your stomach twisted. you could feel the team unraveling, frustration and panic taking over, sealing their fate.

the room buzzed with nervous energy. only ten seconds remained. in a last-ditch effort, the man hurled the stone with every ounce of strength left in him, and this time, it hit. his voice cracked as he stammered, "i did it, i did it!" the relief in his voice was unmistakable. but it wasn’t enough.

the buzzer sounded, and the tension in the room snapped, replaced with something much, much worse. you saw the pink-masked guards approaching before you fully registered what was about to happen. they moved with eerie precision, their guns cradled against their chests. dread pooled deep in your stomach. "oh no," you whispered, fingers digging into hyun-ju’s arm. "they're gonna shoot them."

hyun-ju said nothing, but the solemn nod she gave you confirmed the unspoken truth. you turned away before you could see it unfold, eyes snapping toward 095 instead. she looked paralyzed, her small frame shaking. instinctively, you reached for her, pulling her close, shielding her from the horror that neither of you could escape. and then, hyun-ju’s arm wrapped around both of you, solid and unwavering, her presence, as always, anchoring you in the storm.

but nothing could muffle the gunshots.

the sound ripped through the air, sharp and unrelenting. you squeezed your eyes shut, hands clamping over your ears, but it was useless. the echo rang inside your skull, each shot landing like a blow to your already frayed nerves. how many times did they fire? it felt endless, a merciless execution stretched into eternity.

when silence finally fell, you forced yourself to look.

bodies lay sprawled on the track, twisted together, their lifeless forms unnervingly still. blood seeped into the sand, staining it dark. the guards moved mechanically, untying the cuffs from the corpses with the same indifference they’d show clearing an obstacle on a course. and then, as if that wasn’t enough, a guard stepped forward, lifted his gun, and fired twice into one of the black coffins with a large pink bow.

each shot made you flinch violently.

a man nearby broke first. "we should have left!" he screamed, his voice raw with grief and fury. "now we're all gonna die! we're gonna die because half of you said you wanted to keep doing this!"

you agreed with him. oh, how you agreed with him. but it was too late for regrets. too late for rebellion. you could only move forward.

the voice on the pa rang out again, calm and unwavering. "will the next two teams please rise?"

you felt the weight of it settle over you, the moment sinking in as you stood up on unsteady legs. your hands moved automatically to help 007 pull his mother up, your fingers gripping the sleeve of her tracksuit as you steadied her. keep a clear head. no panic. no animosity. if you let emotions take over, you’d lose.

hyun-ju turned to 095, crouching slightly to meet her gaze. "hey, look at me." her voice was firm but gentle, a quiet command rather than a question. "my name’s cho hyun-ju." she motioned toward you. "this is my girlfriend."  you introduced yourself with a smile. then, softer, she asked, "what’s yours?"

095 hesitated for a fraction of a second before finally murmuring, "young-mi. kim young-mi." her voice was small, but it didn’t waver.

hyun-ju held onto young-mi’s hands, her grip steady and sure. "listen, from the moment you asked to play together, we believed in you. i could feel how brave you were, young-mi." her voice was warm, reassuring. "now i need you to believe in yourself the same way we do. can you do that?"

young-mi glanced at you, her eyes flickering with something vulnerable, searching. you nodded, rubbing a comforting hand up and down her arm.

"i’ll try," she finally whispered.

you smiled. "that’s good enough."

the old woman, 145, let out a breath that sounded close to a chuckle before straightening her spine, her voice cutting through the tension. “that’s right. i’m jang geum-ja, and i lived through the korean war. so i know a few playground games won’t kill me.” a wry smile followed before she turned to all of you, her dark eyes filled with an intensity that almost startled you. “all right, come on. let’s do this. together, we can win this.”

there was a quiet but unanimous nod from the group.

007, standing straighter now, adjusted his glasses with a little too much force, as if trying to anchor himself in the moment. “yeah,” he added quickly. “and i’m the son of jang geum-ja, who is a survivor. park yong-sik.” his voice carried a strange mix of pride and apprehension, as if he wasn’t sure whether to honor his mother’s strength or fear for her all the same.

hyun-ju took a deep breath, and just like that, her posture shifted. her shoulders squared, her chin lifted just a fraction higher. the transformation was subtle, but it was there—the sergeant in her stepping forward, taking command. “team, listen up.” her voice, rich and unwavering, drew all of you in immediately. was she like this in the military? the thought flickered through your mind as you instinctively leaned in, drawn by her certainty.

“we can get through this together. okay? let’s show all the other players here that these games are nothing to us. i know we can do it.”

she extended her hand into the center of the huddle, thumb pointed upward, and one by one, you all followed, gripping onto each other’s thumbs in a chain of silent agreement. a moment of quiet passed before, in unison, you all bounced once, raising your hands in a cheer—not loud, not overconfident, but filled with determination.

then, just as you were moving toward the track, assuming your places, young-mi’s voice cut through the air, sharp and unexpected.

“wait, wait! i need to change.”

you froze, turning to see her shifting nervously on her feet, her fingers twisting into the fabric of her sleeves.

“what?” hyun-ju frowned, concern flashing across her face.

young-mi swallowed hard. “i won’t do well at spinning top,” she admitted, her voice trembling as she turned to you. her eyes, wide and pleading, locked onto yours. “change with me, please.”

shit. shit. you pressed your lips together tightly, forcing yourself to suppress the immediate curse words threatening to escape. the weight of your team’s gazes burned into you, waiting for a response, for a decision.

you exhaled slowly through your mouth, your heart pounding against your ribs. “all right,” you finally said, nodding stiffly. “let’s change.”

it was the right call, the only call, but still, doubt curled at the edges of your mind. ddakji was supposed to be your game—the one you knew you could win. but now? now you were going into something uncertain. you have to be good at this. you can’t afford to fail.

the switch happened quickly, young-mi moving to the front while you took her place, wedged between geum-ja and hyun-ju. hyun-ju reached for your hand immediately, squeezing it tightly. “are you okay with this?” she asked, voice low, only for you to hear.

you hesitated, swallowing back the lump in your throat. “i—i have to be,” you admitted, the words barely above a whisper. her fingers tightened around yours for a brief second before letting go.

“i can do spinning top,” you continued, as if saying it aloud would make it more real. “yes. i can.” you breathed out slowly, steadying yourself.

the guards moved in then, their boots heavy against the ground as they began securing the cuffs around your legs, locking them into place. you flexed your fingers, willing yourself to stay calm. your left leg was tethered to hyun-ju’s right, your right leg bound to geum-ja’s left. it was real now. no more planning, no more adjusting. this was it.

a gunshot rang through the air—the signal to begin, and just like that, your team surged forward, a tangled collection of bodies and determination, pushing toward the only thing that mattered now: victory.

[littlexdeaths]

i called her on the phone and she touched herself - e.m.

ghostface eddie munson x fem reader

18+ ONLY MDNI

warnings: voyerism, mutual masturbation, phone sex, eddie’s a perv but we’re into it, alluding to a knife kink, lots of scream references

i ended up taking a look at this fic today and making some little tweaks and i love it so much more now. this is another repost from my old account but i promise new content will be coming soon. enjoy xx.

word count: 1.5k

The phone rings, loud and shrill in your ear.

It sound causes you to flinch in surprise, heart thudding in your chest when you reach for the receiver. The cheesy horror movie playing on your small tv set now forgotten as you pick up the phone.

“Hello?” Your voice sounds a little breathless, a deep chuckle resounding in your ear.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

The voice on the other end was husky, smooth yet confident.

“Who is this?” You feign a bored tone, your thighs squeezing together unintentionally.

You’d never been so attracted to someone’s voice before— and he’d only spoken two words to you. But something about it felt oddly… familiar.

“Were you expecting a call from someone?” The male asks and you shift slightly to glance at your bedside clock. 8:43 PM.

Steve would still be working at the video store, or he was supposed to be. Unless he decided to prank call you during a lull in customers. Which could very well be a possibility.

“Maybe… why do you wanna know?” Your tone is overly flirty as you decide to play along.

The call now much more exciting than the movie playing out on your tv screen.

You’d never take a suggestion from Keith ever again.

“Hm, a pretty girl like you must be waiting on a call from a boyfriend?”

You can’t help but laugh at that notion, serious relationships weren’t your thing. Despite how attractive and persistent Steve was, a relationship is the last thing you wanted to tangle yourself in right now.

But he clearly was still trying too hard.

You breathe out a heavy sigh, “Nope, no boyfriend.”

Despite being a usually observant person, you still weren’t aware of the eyes trained on your half naked figure. The dark cloaked figure watching from the tree that faced your bedroom window.

“Mm, lucky me then.”

You glance back at the screen when the music begins to swell, hinting that one of the teenagers would be killed off at any moment. A loud scream fills the room as the killer takes one of the camp counselor by surprise.

“What’s that sound?” He asks, unable to see the television from his vantage point.

“Oh, just a movie.”

The male hums deeply, the sound causes you to squirm against your bedsheets. Heat pools in your lower belly and you mindlessly let your fingertips dance along the edge of your lace panties.

“What kind of movie?” He probes, his dark eyes now drawn to the silky skin of your thighs.

You begin shifting, lying back fully against your pillows. You rest the receiver between your ear and shoulder as you spread your legs open. Unintentionally giving him the perfect view as you dip your fingers past the flimsy material. The sight causes his cock to stir beneath his dark jeans.

“A scary one,” you reply, despite this being the least scary thing you’ve ever seen.

Eddie grins beneath the white ghostface mask, sheathing his blade before he reaches for the zipper on his pants. He tugs them down to free his hardened cock, pulling his mouth away from the phone to spit into the palm of his hand. The male wrapping it around his thick length whilst your fingers begin to circle over your clit.

While the brunette had come here with the intention to scare you… this turn of events was far more interesting.

“Oh, you like scary movies?”

He grins, enjoying how your voice seems to shake over the line, but not for the reason he initially expected.

“Y-Yes…”

Only pleasure laces your tone.

Eddie inhales deeply, watching as you twirl your fingers around the phone cord with your other hand. The light of the television illuminates your body with an almost ethereal like glow.

“Hmm, tell me… what’s your favorite scary movie, sweetheart?”

Your breath hitches in your throat, now shoving your soaked underwear completely down your thighs. You kick them off the edge of your bed before dipping a finger inside yourself. You chew on your lower lip to hold back a moan you so desperately wanted to let escape, eagerly slipping another digit inside.

This wasn’t the first time you’d touched yourself like this with Steve on the other end of the phone, but this was by far the most exciting.

Little did you know the male on the other end was definitely not Steve Harrington.

Dropping the twisted cord you grip the receiver in your unoccupied hand, eyes fluttering shut when you begin pumping your fingers even deeper inside yourself. Letting your thumb brush over your swollen clit as you curl your fingers up.

“Halloween,” you breathe, a low grunt sounds on the other end of the line as the male strokes his cock in tandem with each thrust of your fingers. The slick sounds reverberate softly through the receiver.

“Is that the one with the guy in the white mask who walks around stalking babysitters?” He asks, despite already knowing the answer himself.

A soft ‘mhm’ leaves you as you revel in his throaty moans.

“I liked that one… it was scary.” His voice drops an octave, Eddie unintentionally slipping into his dungeon master voice.

Keeping the cell phone tucked into his shoulder as he adjusts himself between the tree branches. Increasing the pace of his fist as he continues to watch you pleasure yourself through your window.

The movie playing out on your tv screen is now long forgotten as his deep voice is the only thing you can focus on.

“I like that thing you’re doing with your voice, Steve. It’s sexy.” You whimper, already feeling yourself teetering on the edge of bliss. No longer able to keep up the oblivious act anymore.

Eddie chuckles darkly, sending a shiver up your spine. “Oh sweetheart, this isn’t Steve.”

As much as those words should frighten you, it only seems to increase the tightening in your lower belly. The jealous edge to them causes a high pitched whine to leave your lips, pumping your fingers even faster into your dripping heat. Increasing the pressure on your clit, as the male’s deep moans fill your ears.

“God you little slut, you gonna cum f’me?” He growls, feeling his own orgasm drawing near.

His cock twitches in his rough palm as he observes your lower half lifting up off the mattress. Thighs trembling as your orgasm washes over you, milky white spilling over onto his ringed fingers.

Heavy breathing is all that is passed back and forth between the two of you for a moment, your body falling limp against the mattress.

“Fuck, you look so pretty when you cum, baby…” while it was whispered into the phone, you still heard it.

You recognized the husky voice instantly— the pretty but rugged metalhead who always gave you a discount on your weed.

Eddie Munson.

Your eyes instantly snap open, dropping the phone as you sit up. Letting your fingers slip from your drenched core as you rise to your feet. Padding over to your bedroom window and gazing out into the dark night.

You catch sight of a white ghostface mask in between the branches opposite your window. Your eyes meet as you reach back over for the phone, your juices smearing over the handle as you grab onto it. Amusement dances over your features as you tilt your head at him.

“Do you spy on all the girls you deal to, Munson?” You pause, clearly catching the male off guard, “Or am I a special case?”

Eddie doubles back, stuttering out a reply while he attempts to disguise his voice once more but it was too late— you caught him.

“I promise this isn’t what it seems, sweetheart.”

A small giggle leaves your lips as he fumbles his way down from the tree, removing the mask so he can see properly. His bangs stick to his forehead, pale skin flushed pink under the bright moonlight.

He drops the phone and his knife in his haste, the glint of the blade catches your attention. The way the sharp metal reflects in the light makes your heart race, arousal coursing through your veins. You lick your lips when he picks up the discarded items, his brown eyes meeting yours through the glass.

“I think I know why you came here, Munson…” you hum into the receiver once he returns the phone to his ear, your sultry tone causing his cock to stir in his jeans again.

“Why’s that, sweet thing?” He bites back, his dark eyes not leaving your silhouette.

“Someone wants to play psycho killer… but it looks like you need a helpless victim.”

You lean your forearms on your windowsill, noticing the way his adam’s apple bobs when he swallows down a moan. His ringed fingers grip tightly onto the handle of the blade, the male now desperately hanging onto your every word.

“And I’m more than happy to oblige.”

Eddie curses, your words going straight to his now throbbing cock. There was no way he was passing you up on this offer.

“Now… tell me Mr. Ghostface, what do you want?” You feign a frightened tone as you pose the question.

His shallow breaths mingle with the static on the line, anticipation bubbling up inside you.

“I wanna know what your insides feel like.” He groans, his words sending heat straight between your legs.

You squirm when you watch him slide the mask down over his face, glancing back up at you with an almost predatory look.

“Come and find out then, freak.”

Click.

[moonselune]

hey hi! this one might be a bit too dark, but could you do one for the bg3 girlies where tav dies because of them? because of a decision they made for the party that backfired or something along those lines? xx

Ooo so sad, I only wrote teeny weeny drabbles for it but I hope you like it !

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Karlach

Karlach’s eyes widened in horror as she saw your lifeless body on the battlefield. She had urged you forward, her confidence in your abilities unwavering. The realization struck her like a warhammer: you were dead because she had pushed you too hard.

“I told you to move forward… I thought you’d be fine,” she whispered, her voice breaking. Guilt clawed at her heart, and tears streamed down her face as she knelt beside you, cradling your head in her arms. “I’m so sorry, love. I never meant for this to happen. I'm sorry..”

The fire that usually burned so brightly within her seemed to dim as she wept, mourning the loss of the one person she truly loved. There were no flames, no fire, nothing left within her.

���── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Minthara

Minthara stood frozen, her usual confidence shattered as she gazed at your lifeless form. She had told you not to worry about the male drow assassin, convinced that he was of no threat, dirt beneath your boots. But now, here you were, an dead testament to her misjudgment.

“I told you not to worry,” she murmured, her voice uncharacteristically soft and filled with regret. Her voice rising in a panic of unknown emotion.“I was wrong. I failed you.”

Her eyes, usually so cold and calculating, were now filled with a sorrow she had never felt before. She knelt beside you, her fingers gently brushing your cheek. “Forgive me, my love. I should have protected you.”

The fierce warrior who had always seemed invincible now felt the weight of her failure. She had lost you, and nothing in the world could ever make that right and the world would burn for it.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Lae’zel:

Lae’zel’s heart sank as she realized what she had done. In the heat of battle, her focus had been solely on the enemy, and she had accidentally caught you in her crossfire. The sight of your still body brought her to her knees, her weapon clattering to the ground.

“No… No.. this can’t be,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “I didn’t mean to…”

Tears streamed down her face as she crawled to your side, her hands shaking as she reached out to touch you. The proud githyanki warrior was now a broken woman, her grief and guilt overwhelming. You had died by her blade, her hand. “You were my heart, my strength. How could I have done this to you?”

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Shadowheart

Shadowheart’s heart ached as she saw you fall, the dark power of Shar’s smite still crackling in the air. She had always known that serving Shar came with risks, but she had never imagined it would lead to this. You lay lifeless before her, a casualty of her devotion to the dark goddess.

“No… not you,” she whispered, her voice choked with emotion. “Shar, why?”

She knelt beside you, her hands trembling as she tried to heal you, but it was too late. The tears she had held back for so long finally spilled over, her grief and guilt consuming her. “I’m so sorry, my love. I never wanted this to happen.”

Shadowheart realized the true cost of her allegiance. She had lost you, and the pain of that loss would be far greater than any other pain Shar could inflict on her.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Jaheira

Jaheira’s heart broke as she saw you succumb to the shadowcurse. She had warned you about the dangers, but in the chaos of the fight, you had gotten caught in its grasp. She ran to you, her magic flaring as she tried to heal you, but the curse had already taken its toll.

“No, please,” she begged, her voice filled with desperation. “Stay with me, love.”

Tears streamed down her face as she held you close, her hands glowing with healing magic that could no longer help. “I’m so sorry. I should have protected you better.”

The grief and guilt overwhelmed her as she realized that she had lost you to the very thing she had fought against. She had failed you, and the weight of that failure would stay with her forever. She reluctantly pushed you away, realising that your transformation would cause you to turn on her. She couldn't kill you, not again.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Oof this was angsty, I couldn't help but add that last line for Jaheira, I was feeling especially cruel hehe - Seluney xox

[eff4freddie]

After She Left | Fourteen

Words: 5.3k

Joel and Tommy search the town for Ellie just as you are facing down the clickers that threaten you and her both. With Shauna having taken off with your rifle you watch in horror as Ellie screams for their attention.

Chapter warnings: Canon-typical violence, Shauna gets her own warning, weapons, a pretty solid attempt at gaslighting.

A/N: Sorry it took me a hot minute to update, but an old injury is playing up a little and I needed to rest my wrist. But nevermind that, penultimate chapter here we goooooo.....Will Ellie and Teach's lives hanging in the balance finally give Joel the kick up the bum he deserves? Will Shauna get what's coming to her? Let me know what you think in the comments, I'm very keen to see what you make of this one! THANK YOU xx

Thirteen | Series Masterlist | Fifteen

Walking beside his horse, Joel pulled on the reins only gently. He could feel that the horse was with him, didn’t intend on bolting now that they were in the town proper. Having doubled back to pick up the horses, they had turned and come back around to the main street, trying to find a house close enough that they could monitor movement without being seen.

It was growing steadily darker. Joel could feel the stone shifting heavy in his belly as the dusk slid over the mountain to his left. He couldn’t figure why it had been so quiet. It set his teeth on edge.

‘You should head back,’ he said to Tommy, ignoring the way his little brother shook his head. ‘Head on back to Robin and Maria. You got a family.’

‘So do you, Joel…’ he said, and Joel felt the little trickle of fear dripping along his ribcage. He had been trying not to think about it, of you and Ellie, out here in the cold.

‘Can’t risk anything happenin’ to ya. For your wife, for your kid…’ he said, and Tommy stopped short, pulling his horse up beside Joel and making him stop alongside. Joel stumbled a little, the soft ground slippery under foot.

‘You imagine it was me,’ Tommy spat out. ‘It was me out here trying to chase down Maria, trying to chase down Robin. You reckon you’d leave me out here on my own?’

Joel considered it for a moment. He would break Tommy’s legs if his younger brother tried to stop him riding by his side.

Tommy watched the realisation dawn over Joel’s face. ‘We can keep goin’ at first light,’ Tommy said, and Joel nodded.

‘It just doesn’t feel right…’ Joel said, and Tommy was about to protest before he cut him off. ‘Here, I mean. Something’s not right…here…’

Both men looked back to the butcher, almost expecting the self-sacrificed corpse to appear in the window, watching them pass.

Every time he stopped, the hooves of the horse settling into the mud, he could swear he could hear whispers on the wind. He couldn’t decide if they were real, if they were just his panic finally leaking out of his brain and seeping into the air around him. If he was hearing the ghosts, the decades of bodies lost to the fungus, lost to themselves.

‘Reckon we can hole up in one of these houses…’ Tommy was saying, but something was catching Joel’s attention, something shifting out of the corner of his eye.

‘Tommy?’ he asked, squinting to see several blocks down the main street, to where he could have sworn he saw movement. ‘You see anything? Up there…on the corner?’

He felt his brother still behind him. For a moment both men held their breaths.

Just at the end of the street, far enough that you could miss it if you weren’t paying close attention, something jerked. Swivelled. Shuffled a few steps back.

‘Jesus…’ Tommy muttered, dropping his voice under the wind. ‘Just out in the open like that…’

‘Means there’s likely no-one left,’ Joel whispered. ‘No-one out here left for them to pounce on.’

He gripped the reins in his hand harder. If he had turned his head, he would have seen his knuckles almost entirely white.

‘We gotta…’ Tommy started, but Joel was already pulling his rifle in front of him, was already inching forward. He didn’t even notice he was pulling is horse along with him too, so transfixed on the sight of the clicker two blocks up the street.

‘Stay back,’ he whispered, over his shoulder. Tommy faltered before stepping forward, his older brother shooting him a disapproving glare. If he hadn’t been so terrified, Tommy would have grinned at him.

Joel’s eyes started to stream from holding them wide open in the cold air. As they inched closer they watched as the clicker swivelled, reacting to something around the corner, cocking its head to the side to angle the bloom obliterating its eye towards the sound. It didn’t seem to have clocked them yet, approaching quietly from behind, but Joel still found himself having to remind himself to breathe.

Half a block forward another clicker emerged from across the street, wobbling its way towards the corner. This one was moving quicker, the blooms emerging from its skull smaller, less formed. It was possible that it still had some vision underneath, that it still had the benefit of both its senses, and that was why it was moving with slightly more purpose than its counterpart.

Joel felt his heart racing in his chest, wanting to stop to steady himself, feeling the urgent pull to push forward. Two clickers were as good as an army if you were a teenager out here on your own. He wasn’t sure if Ellie had taken any weapons with her, could only pray she’d had the presence of mind to take something other than her measly little flick knife. He could feel the bile rising in his throat and longed, ached, to clear it. He swallowed down the burn instead, felt the back of his tongue too thick and too dry in his mouth.

For the first time, Joel realised he was pulling a horse beside him. He cursed under his breath, hearing the thump of its hooves as it made its way through the muddy street. He looked around for a place to hitch it, hoping neither would spook if they had to shoot. Keeping an eye on the scene in front of him he studied the buildings to his left, to his right. The town wasn’t so old that it had hitching posts, and he wondered if he could tether his horse to a twenty-year old decaying parking meter instead.

And just as his gaze travelled the gutters of the shop fronts in front of him, as he lets his eyes traverse the lampposts, the rusted trash cans, something moved just up out of his eyeline. In a moment that would play on loop in his nightmares, he watched as Ellie’s head appeared from the roof of the doctor’s office, a rifle held awkward in her arms.

Joel stopped, panic gripping his throat. If she made even a single sound they would be on her, both of them able to corner her, trap her where she stood. He knew immediately that she had tried to seek higher ground, had followed his instructions as best she could, and he couldn’t be mad at her for that. But she hadn’t considered exit points. She’d been too eager or too scared, and he hoped it was the former, to properly plan. He wanted to scream, wanted to howl, wanted to sink his bare hands into the neck of that clicker and rip the bloom from its flesh as it dared to threaten his little girl.

This was intolerable. He felt the impotent terror grip him, the same that took him by the sternum the night a solider pointed his gun at his daughter and her twisted ankle, supposed to be kept safe in his arms.

He saw Ellie take aim. For a second the world stopped, the shuddering echo of the globe falling off its axis so clear that he was surprised he wasn’t knocked off his feet where he stood.

He’d stood still, waiting patiently for the soldier to collect himself before he shot and murdered his daughter. Had behaved, had obeyed, and had his whole universe ripped out from under him for it. Had let the panic grip his legs, tie his ankles and his tongue. He had stumbled, fucking dropped her in the dirt like a ragdoll, had ignored her pleas for comfort and let her slip away while he pointlessly fought it, let her last moments be his tear-stained, desperate face. Let his last words to her be lies. That he could save her, when even she could see that he couldn’t. That he could get her up, when she wanted only for his arms to hold her close.

Of all the times he had failed that night and since, that was the worst of it. That in her final moment he wasn’t with her, not really, railing instead against the inevitable pull of her death. He let her go scared. He let her go hurtin’. He let her go while he looked away.

Not again. Not now that he was moving, swinging up onto the back of the horse and counting on the sound of the hooves pounding the wet ground to draw the clickers to him, give him enough time to fire before they trapped Ellie. Joel was dimly aware that Tommy was behind him, riding up along his right side, as their two horses crossed the first block in what felt like moments. Joel rode with his eyes on Ellie, his rifle in his hands. He could shoot the first one, launch himself at the second. Distract it, give her enough time to get to Tommy, for him to pull her away.

He watched as she turned at the sound of them, watched the relief bloom on her face. She pointed, frantic, to something around the corner as Joel kicked his horse into a gallop, swearing an apology to it under his breath if it could just close out the last of the distance in time.

The clicker nearest to him was turning, its bloom angling towards the sound of his horse. He glared into its unseeing eyes. He wouldn’t look away this time.

‘HEY YOU FUCKERS, COME AND GET ME!’ Ellie screamed above him and Joel gasped, his heart in his throat as the clicker turned to her, immediately starting to lurch towards the clinic. But Joel was on it, aiming his rifle as he gripped the horse with his knees, slowing up enough to steady a shot that clipped the clicker on the shoulder and pivoted it, spinning it around to howl at him as he stared it down.

--

For a moment, all you could hear was the thundering of your heart in your chest, the sound so loud it obliterated any thought, any possible rational explanation. You swallowed, your head turning to Ellie where she stood on the roof of the clinic, her back turned to you now and her arms waving over her head.

You couldn’t feel your body, could barely account for the noises you made as you opened your throat and howled, screaming to try and win back Wren’s attention. You watched, horrified, as Wren pivoted, lurching at full speed towards the corner right underneath where Ellie stood. He was going to climb up the old rickety porch, was going to clamber up over rotted wood and peeling paint and rip her from her perch, tear her limb from limb as you stood, rooted to the ground in horror, the last part of the world to make it worth living in torn from you, like everything else.

‘No, no, no! Me, you fucker!’ you screamed after him, but there was other noise now, something that was getting his attention. Everything was happening all at once, the noise and the colour and the thumping of your heart in your ears so loud that it was impossible to think, your throat raw as your legs seized up underneath you, as you found yourself rooted to the spot, screaming and howling for Wren to come back to you, still desperate to give Ellie her time.

You had been trained to look. All that time on gate duty in the QZ, all that time on the wall in Jackson, your eyes trained on the perimeter, waiting for danger, trained to alert. Your eyes your greatest weapon, your wits your biggest shield. That was how you served your community, how you protected all that you still had to hold dear.

And all that time you had felt like you weren’t doing enough. That safely ensconced behind steel and concrete you were somehow safe, knowing that the real work was out beyond the wall. The real danger lurking well beneath your feet, you had always considered yourself a coward for never being amongst it, for never getting your hands dirty like you should have. Now, though, in this moment, you realised for the first time the quiet bravery in looking. In witnessing the terrors, even if you all you could do was stand between them and oblivion.

Because now. In your fury and your sadness and your horror, you did the only thing you could think of. You closed your eyes.

--

Joel was on the first clicker in moments, the horse barrelling into it with enough speed, with enough force, that it was knocked off its feet and under the hooves. Joel heard the crunch of the decaying fungus meeting metal horseshoe, knew instantly it was crushed without even having to look. That only left the smaller one, the one he saw now running from the middle of the street for the clinic.

He pulled his horse back, readying another shot, when he heard it. The voice he would recognise in an instant, the melodic tone now drenched in terror, in fury, in regret.

He turned his head, saw for the first time that you were stood in the middle of the street, saw from the tracks in the mud that the second clicker had been barrelling towards you before it doubled back.

‘No, no!’ you were howling, almost doubled over, your eyes shut tight like you didn’t want to see. ‘Not her, not her…’

He swivelled his head to Ellie, her eyes wild and on him even as she was climbing up higher, swinging herself up on loose roof shingles to get a better shot, and he knew, then that she had saved you, that she had called them off you knowing he would arrive, just in the moment that you had been trying to save his girl. 

‘Get her!’ Ellie screamed, but Joel was already turning his horse to you.

‘Tommy!’ he yelled over his shoulder, and his brother was right behind him, his rifle on his shoulder and his eye squinting into the sights as the second clicker paused a moment to survey the scene.

‘Got it,’ Tommy grunted but Joel was already on his way to you, already leaning over in the saddle, a hand reaching out to your trembling form.

--

The thudding of your heart grew louder, closer, enough to make you cower, to squeeze your eyes tight. You were dimly aware that you were moaning, pleading, for Ellie. Hoping that despite everything you could still call Wren to you, that he would choose you, instead.

You lifted your hands to your ears. The sound of your pounding heart grew only louder and you gasped at the sheer volume of it, listened as it raced up beside you even as you groaned to block it out. You thought of Rose on the day she died, of your parents and all the different ways you imagined they passed. You thought of Joel, knew that this would break him. Wept for him and the loss he was about to suffer, that had you so feeble you couldn’t bring yourself to even see, let alone stop.

And then you were lifting, momentum knocking you off your feet as you felt a strong grip around your torso, squeezing the air from you, forcing it out of your chest in a gasp. Your body being pulled in warm and hard, an arm wrapped tight around you as you were tucked, neat, into a thundering chest. Beneath you, the galloping of a horse you now realised had been the thudding you’d been hearing, that it had not in fact been your heart beating wild in your chest. You opened your mouth, flannel and warm skin between your teeth.

‘I got ya, baby, I got ya,’ Joel said above you, pressing you harder into his body as you whimpered, cold fingers reaching out to claw at his shirt. ‘I know, I know…’ he said again, his voice straining as the horse carried you both. ‘You’re OK. Ellie’s OK. Stay with me, baby,’ he muttered into the crown of your aching head.

--

You stayed, shivering and silent, tucked into his chest. He could feel the heat of your tears on his neck as he held you to him, his other hand on the reins as he watched Tommy stand guard at the base of the clinic, Ellie climbing gingerly down a drainpipe that didn’t have any business still being upright but nevertheless held her weight long enough for her to get down.

He cooed to you, told you everything he was seeing, commentating for you as you kept your eyes shut tight, your face tucked away under his jaw.

‘She’s down, baby, she’s on the ground,’ he whispered to you, his lips still pressed to your temple. Every once and a while he stopped to press a kiss there, the warmth of your skin on his lips reminding him you were alive. He felt the ache in his chest abate, just enough that he could finally breathe. He blinked away tears, willing away the tremors in his hands.

‘Tommy’s pulling her onto his horse now,’ he informed you as you sniffled. ‘They’re coming this way. Look, baby, look…’

He held you tight around the middle as he pulled your face from his neck, turned you to observe them on their way to you. Sat side-saddle as you were, your legs pressed to the side of the horse’s flank, it took you a second to wriggle free of him, nearly slipping from his grip as he lowered you, as you landed softly on unsteady feet. You were sobbing, them, running to Ellie as she slipped down from behind Tommy and let you pull her into you, let you collapse into her, the weight of your combined relief the only thing to keep you both up and out of the mud.

Joel felt the tickle of a tear tracking its way down his cheek and he brushed it away, his mouth turning down to try and beat back the sob that threatened to rip out of him. He caught Tommy’s eye, who was watching the both of you with a watery grin.  

‘Thank you…’ Joel whispered to his brother, who shrugged.

‘You woulda done the same for me,’ he replied, and Joel nodded. ‘But we gotta get out of here, there could be more of ‘em…’

Joel nodded, recognising that now the darkness had set in you were more exposed than ever, that the cold was starting to bite.

‘A house, and then we ride back to Jackson in the morning,’ Joel agreed. You pulled your head up, your eyes finally open to him, as you gripped Ellie.

‘Wait, Shauna’s out there still,’ you said.

‘Fuck her,’ Ellie grunted, wiping away her own tears. ‘She sent me out there, told me some bullshit…’

‘I know,’ you cut her off, glancing at Joel as though you thought if he heard any more, he would thoroughly lose his shit. He suspected you were right. ‘I know, she lied to you about this place.’

‘She took the rifle, and she ran! She saw Wren coming for you and she ran!’

Joel felt the burning cold of a knife slicing clear through his gut. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tommy turn to him, worry on his face.

‘Brother…’ he said, but Joel ignored him. He cleared his throat, ready to pronounce Shauna as good as dead.

‘She will have headed back to the horses,’ you said, gesturing over Joel’s shoulder. ‘We can’t leave her out here, she’ll hurt herself.’

Or someone else, Joel thought.

Tommy shifted, uncomfortably, in his saddle. ‘We could use the horses to get back,’ he said. ‘If she rides one, they can share the other.’

‘Knowing her she’ll take one and let the other go just to be extra fucking annoying,’ Ellie muttered, and you let out a little gasping giggle, the adrenaline suddenly making everything hilarious in an -end-of-the-world kind of way.

‘We tied them to the trees just off the road leading west,’ you gestured broadly. ‘I can take us back.’

‘No,’ Joel muttered, steadfast. ‘No, you two are gettin’ inside, gettin’ warm. I’ll go and get her, I’ll bring her back.’

‘Joel…’ Tommy started to protest, but Joel wasn’t having any of it, swinging himself off the horse and gesturing for you to get on top of it.

‘You look like shit,’ Ellie supplied, helpfully. ‘You sure you wanna be out there in the dark old man?’

Joel rolled his eyes, not letting on that he would take her sass for the rest of his life if it meant she was still living hers.

‘Up,’ he gestured to Ellie, as Tommy reached down and pulled her back up and behind him. ‘You…’ Joel said as he walked towards you, his mouth set in a frown but his eyes warm, betraying him. ‘You get safe, you’ve done enough for us today.’

‘I can come with you…’ you said, but he was pulling you to him again, easily overpowering you as you realised you were actually pretty cold, and that your body was starting to ache. ‘I can show you where she’ll be.’

‘No, baby, I’ll find it. Town ain’t big,’ he said, as he walked you over to his horse.

‘Joel…’ you whispered, but you weren’t sure what you wanted, weren’t sure what you would say other than to beg him to keep his arms around you, to let you rest on his chest.

‘Go on,’ he said, pushing you to slip your foot into the stirrup, hoisting you up into the saddle. He had so much to say to you, more than he had the words for, but it would have to wait.

‘We’ll be in that one,’ Tommy gestured to a house on the corner. The windows were dark, but Joel could see it didn’t look like it was going to fall over. Not tonight, at least. ‘I’ll take first watch, until you make it back,’ Tommy said.

Joel nodded at him as he watched you steady yourself in the saddle. He ran his hands down the horse’s neck, felt the muscles pulling hard and tight under its hide.

He stood back, watching carefully as his brother led his girls to safety, to some kind of warmth. He didn’t move until he saw the three of you disappear into the confines of the house, the horses stowed out of sight in the garage.

He’d been so preoccupied with his loss of Sarah that he’d almost lost everything all over again. He held the feeling of you in his arms close, tried to imprint it on his memory in case you recovered, came to your senses, rightfully never wanted to be near him again.

He cleared his throat, turning his gaze to the stars that seemed so bright now, so many of them up over head without the streetlights to blot them all out. He felt like he was seeing clearly for the first time. He would get to setting things right. Promised himself and the stars.

He swung his rifle around to grip it hard and cold in his hands, heading out on the road leading off to the west.

--

It wasn’t that he was trying to sneak up on her, even though he knew his feet were quiet now that he had come off the pavement and onto soft earth. It wasn’t that he wanted to scare her, although he thought about it. It was just that she wasn’t very observant, that a marching band and a full-scale parade could sneak up on her when she was so preoccupied with her own, and only her own, survival.

‘Come the fuck on, for fucks sake,’ she was muttering as she tried to loosen the knot tethering the horse to the tree. The other had backed away from her, was pushing at the ground each time she tried to get close. Joel reckoned it was a good judge of character.

‘Shauna,’ he said, and she jumped nearly three feet in the air, swivelling around to him and fixing him with a hollowed-out, terrified stare.

‘Joel!’ she gasped, dropping the reins and nearly running at him, collapsing into his chest where he held her loose, let her gasp and paw at him as he waited, his face grim, for her to collect herself. When she eventually realised he wasn’t holding her back, wasn’t tearfully thanking the Gods for reuniting them, she stopped, pulling herself back upright.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked, checking him over.

‘M’fine. Ellie’s fine, too. And Teach.’

Shauna nodded, but Joel could see no real relief there. In his mind he saw you, cowering in the street, your eyes shut tight, groaning for the clicker to turn on you instead. He swallowed, hard, blinked it away to stay focussed.

‘How did it come to be that they were one rifle down facing two clickers, Shauna?’ he asked, and she stilled. He could see the weapon leaning against the tree. It appeared to be in pristine condition. ‘How was it that my girl was up on the roof and Teach was in the middle of the street, unarmed with a clicker barrelling down at her, and you were…nowhere?’

Joel watched the cogs turn in Shauna’s head, could see her calculating. He held his hand up to her. ‘Don’t. Just tell me,’ he said, the adrenaline starting to give way, the fatigue and the cold settling into his bones.

‘There wasn’t anything I could do,’ Shauna said, her voice quiet but steady. She sniffled, gathering herself.

‘You left them to die,’ he said, simply.

‘I left them so that I could come and find you,’ she argued, and he shook his head.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘You took the rifle, and you were damn near about to take one of the horses ‘cept Teach is too good at knots.’

She opened her mouth to protest, before she looked properly at his face in the moonlight. She could see the rolling tic of his jaw as he tremored slightly. She recalculated, settling in the end for truth.

‘I’m a survivor, Joel,’ she said, after a while.

He scoffed, feeling acid across his throat. ‘No, Shauna, you’re a fuckin’ leech. You take. You took the rifle, you were gonna take the horse. You damn near took the house out from under my girl and pushed her into the garage. You took Teach, her friend. You took my…’

‘Your what, Joel? What is she to you?’ Shauna hissed, actual fury on her face, but Joel wasn’t too vain to assume this was jealousy. Competition, maybe, but not borne out of actual want for him. In the face of it he felt a calm fall over his shoulders. He almost smiled. Shauna just didn’t like to lose.

‘And Sarah,’ he went on, ignoring the question. He watched as Shauna at least had the decency to let a look of remorse pass over her face. ‘You took her mother, you took her Christmas mornings, you took her Friday pizza and VHS nights. You took her little heart and you fuckin’ broke it, Shauna.’

He saw, even in the low light, that her eyes were shimmering a little. He ignored it. He went on. ‘I’ve been such a fool. All this time you’ve been in Jackson all acid and corrosion, all this time I let you.’ He looked again to the stars, watched them twinkle as he blinked away his tears. ‘That’s what gets me the most. All this time I let you.’

‘Oh, fuck you, Joel,’ Shauna said, trying anger to see if it could make him relent. ‘You needed someone to protect, just the same as when we were 22. You loved it when I come on all sad and weepy. Made you feel like a strong fucking man.’

‘That may be true, Shauna, but what’s it say about you that you decided to use it against me like ya did,’ he said, even. Calm.

He stepped around her, reaching for the rifle and she stumbled away from him, her hands in the air. ‘Hey, hey, wait…’ she said, but he was snapping the rifle open, clearing the bullets all except for one.

‘Sarah used to comfort me, when I was missin’ ya,’ he said, letting the metal land 1, 2, 3 in the palm of his hand. ‘Sarah used to say to me, “you gotta forgive her, Daddy, she was sad. She wanted what was best for us.” That girl knew, even then, Shauna, that what was best for us was for you not to be around.’

He slipped the bullets into his pocket, snapping the barrel back in place. One bullet still loaded.

‘But Sarahs’ gone, and you nearly took my girls tonight, Shauna, and I ain’t ever gonna forgive you for it.’

He turned his back to her, fixing the rifle to the saddle. He felt the certainty of what was going to happen next, down in the marrow of his bones. He wouldn’t pause, wouldn’t flinch.

‘You ain’t comin’ back,’ he stated. ‘Jackson ain’t safe with you in it.’ He stepped towards the horse, pulling on the left rein so that the simple bowline knot he knew you had tied for her shook loose. He handed her the reins.

‘You’re leaving me with one bullet and a horse?’ Shauna deadpanned, arching her brows at him. ‘Isn’t that a little…cliché?’

‘Don’t care what it is, it’s what you’re gettin’.’ Joel replied. He wanted to head back to the house, to wrap you and Ellie up in whatever blankets he could find, put her down safe on a twenty-year old couch so he could plant his lips on yours and not let up until dawn.

‘Tell me one thing…that Steven and Wren stuff, were they ever going to blow up the mess hall?’ He watched as her face shifted, trying to work out the most advantageous answer. He nodded. If he’d been honest with himself at the time things might have been different, he reasoned. Added it to the list of things he’d have to find a way to set right.

‘Joel, we could run that place…’ Shauna tried.

‘No, Shauna,’ he said. Reaching forward to grab her by the arm and pulling her, nowhere near as gently as he had you, to loop her foot into the stirrup. ‘You could never run that place, cuz there’s no way on this dead fuckin’ planet I would ever let ya.’

‘Joel…’ she said, and she looked down at him now, genuine fear in her eyes now that she had realised how serious he was, that he was actually doing it. ‘I don’t know where to go.’

‘You come within strikin’ distance of Jackson I’ll tell Billy to shoot ya on sight. Other than that, I don’t give a shit.’

She stared at him, her hands still shaking as he looked, impassive up at her.

‘You can’t…’

‘You’re a survivor, Shauna,’ Joel interrupted, parroting her. He reached out and slapped the horse once on the flank, enjoying it just a little as it whinnied and took off at a canter.

He wasn’t sure what he had expected to feel. Maybe angry, maybe a little vindicated. For one second he’d imagined himself getting down on his knees and kissing the ground beneath his feet. He didn’t expect to feel nothing, to feel a gentle kind of relief.

He watched as she disappeared into the darkness, waited until he couldn’t hear her gasping breaths. Turning back to the town he felt the warmth of you, washing up against his insides, even before he had you in his arms.

He knew it was a long path, but he would happily walk it. If you’d have him, he would come home to his girls.  

Taglist:

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@wand-erer5

[the-scandalorian]

like a moth to the flame, part IV

Pairing: monster!Din Djarin x Female Reader Rating: E, 18+ Word Count: 11.1k Content Warnings: dark!Din, predatory/obsessive/possessive behavior, body horror/painful physical transformations, injury/gore, blood and hunting and monstery shit, oral (m-receiving), p-in-v Note: Endlessly grateful to both @frannyzooey and @ezrasbirdie for lending me their big beautiful brains xx

DIN Din had woken, disoriented and hurting, that morning after he’d found the Armorer on Glavis.

He came-to curled in the fetal position on the hard metal floor of his tiny compartment on the humming public transport. Before he’d even opened his eyes, he knew his body felt wrong. Uncomfortable and unwieldy, heavy and strange.

When he did open his eyes to the harsh, artificial light, the first thing he noticed was the sharp clarity of his vision. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, but it felt like he was looking through one of the strongest filters of his visor. He blinked hard. No change.

He unfolded his arms and studied his hands, splaying too-long fingers, and his thoughts tangled and snagged as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. 

The glint of cruel silver claws. 

In his periphery, he caught the movement of a dark shape over his shoulder.

He tried to scramble away from it. It followed, a shadow.

Wings.

The word felt absurd. But it was…right. Silver that matched the half-moons of those claws, a structure of bone sprouted from both of his shoulder blades, a hooked joint forming the apex of each inky black, bat-like wing. Colossal and dark.

Piece by piece, in a haze of disbelief, he discovered new parts of himself.

The sheer size of this body, the power coiled in his changed muscles. 

He ran a finger along the edge of his teeth, catching the pad on an elongated canine. Blood welled.

The wound on his thigh, where he'd burned himself with the saber the night before, was largely healed. There was only a trace of it, a fading pink scar.

Din stopped there. He couldn’t bring himself to look in a mirror, to see himself like this. He wasn’t ready for it to be real, to know if his face was still his own.

Instead, he picked up his chest plate to start collecting his armor, and his claws bit gently into the perfectly smooth surface. He was stunned.

What scratches beskar?

Beskar.

Of course.

The silver of his claws, of his wing joints was beskar. Virtually indestructible.

Din sank back to the floor and closed his eyes. He sat against the cold metal wall with his clenched fists pressed against his eyelids, the tips of those talons cutting into his palms. He wanted to escape the prison of this body, of this new reality; to wake from this nightmare; to blink himself out of existence altogether. 

He forced himself to slow his breathing, holding it at the top of each inhale, until some of the tension in his chest eased. He let his thoughts go, focused on the cadence of his breath. Preparing himself as he did before a fight.

A slow, creeping sense of relief spread through him gradually, growing so palpable it turned physical. Like a cool wash of water over his aching muscles, a full-body shiver racked him. The tremble and quake of his broad frame was fleeting but intense. A release. His bones shifted in a pinch of discomfort. His mind drifted.

And then, stillness.

He’d opened his eyes minutes later, and his vision was blessedly, beautifully blurred—just barely. As it always was. As it was supposed to be.

Sitting there, staring at his hands and his blunt, human nails, Din might have been able to convince himself he’d imagined all of it. A fever dream. A delusion. An exhaustion-fueled moment of insanity, his mind addled by the fight and the pain and the life-altering dismissal from his covert. 

Except, etched into his chest plate…those damning marks.

A mechanical voice announced the imminent arrival of the transport, interrupting his moment of existential crisis. Tatooine. The local time and weather blared through the speaker.

Tatooine. He couldn’t go back there. Not like this.

He made a choice. He dressed and readied himself, deboarded and found his way to the baggage claim. A droid unlocked his case, and Din methodically reattached each of his weapons. He reached for the dark saber last. The metal hilt felt hot, even through the thick leather of his glove. Nothing else had—not his blaster or his charges. Just the saber, warm under his touch. Warm like something alive. Like something warm-blooded, something with a thrumming pulse. Like something pleased to be back in his grip.

Like it knew.

He clipped it to his belt and let it drop, relieved to not have it in his hand.

Din turned, looking for the closest screen of departures, and scanned the list for the least populated destination.

*** Now, months later, he wakes to a fantasy.

He hadn’t meant to sleep. He didn’t want to risk it, even in the armor—not after he felt his body start to shift under his beskar last night. He didn’t think that was possible. Then he’d sucked your taste off his fingers, and his head had snapped to the side, his spine straightening. He’d felt the pop of vertebra and the sudden tightness of the skin across his back, the warm tension in his muscles straining for the change, but he’d managed to stave it off. 

Just barely.

No, he hadn’t meant to sleep last night, but he had. And he wakes now, well rested, to the feeling of your warm body curled into his side, your head nuzzled into his neck, your breathing slow and deep. Watery morning light, as light as this dark forest ever gets, is visible through the trees outside the window.

He’d tried to move away from you during the night, to give you space, sure that you’d be more comfortable without the hard edges of beskar digging into your soft body, but every time he’d started to extract himself gently, you’d grumbled and tightened your fingers wherever they happened to be—caught in the folds of his duraweave, gripped around armor, tangled with his own. The leg you had hooked over his thigh had tensed too, your foot tucking itself under his other knee. You twined yourself around him, like a tenacious little climbing vine, and refused to let go.  

He likes it. You’re possessive too.

The realization hurts a soft spot under his ribs—you want what he wants. To belong to someone. To claim and be claimed. To know that closeness. Skin-to-skin, joined and sweaty, without all these fucking layers between you. That hopeless, dangerous thing he can never give you.

That thought is unbearable when you’re asleep on his chest, your hand still curled over the top of his chest plate, fingers clinging to the sharp cut of metal. When he can smell the faint tang of your blood as it pumps idly through your veins, detectable even under the layer of your delicate floral scent, even from beneath his helmet.

His mouth waters.

It’s the catalyst that finally gets him moving. He carefully but forcefully unfastens your hand, inches your leg off his, and slips out of bed. You readjust but don’t wake.

As soon as he’s standing, looking down at you, he regrets it. The space between your bodies is intolerable, and he has nothing to do but wait for you to wake. So he waits. He waits, and he seethes.

He thinks about the mistakes he’s made.

*** He’d spent yesterday angry at himself, fuming at his own idiocy. He’d ruminated on how to proceed, how to scare you off again after he’d all but courted you the previous night when he’d given you a com link. Had invited you to use it. Fucking encouraged it. He’d been drunk on you—on your presence, on your forgiveness, on your smile. On the headiness of your scent as you’d stood so close to him outside your house. And it had messed with his fucking head, made him do stupid things. Dangerous things.

He’d worked through the steps of his drills while he thought, slashing the saber through the air as he’d tried to decide what to do. How to retract his offer of the com. He didn’t think he could bring himself to be cruel to you, to reject you outright. He’d imagined your face, imagined the hurt there, and he’d just…known he couldn’t do it. He’d have to leave. He wouldn’t let himself see you again. He'd jam the frequency of the com link. A clean break.

It was the only option.

He’d decided he’d let himself change early then, before the sun had dipped below the green horizon. One last hunt before he found a way off this planet. 

He’d been minutes away from letting himself shift, minutes away from heading out completely uninhibited, when he’d caught your scent. You were close. The timing of it had made him want to break something. That was exactly the problem with all of this: one misstep, one instance of bad timing…and you could end up dead.

Why hadn’t he thought about you finding the bodies? How had that not occurred to him? 

He’d left a perfect trail from your house to his. His animal brain had thought protect and nothing else. He’d gotten sloppy, comfortable. Maybe some part of him had wanted you to find it, to follow.

This was how it would end, then, he’d thought as he waited for you. Not in the easy way he’d planned, not a quiet exit—a coward’s exit. He’d have to face you, to turn you away and tell you he was leaving. 

Then you were in front of him, and all of that was gone—the struggle and the resolve, the determination and decency. He’d fought to get it back for a few minutes, scrabbled against his own desire. Had tried to deny himself—to deny you. It was futile.

You’d asked him if he thought you were weak, if all of this was somehow your fault. And that was it.

He’d refused to punish you for his sins. 

*** And now you’re in his bed. Warm and soft under his comforter, your head pressed into his pillow. A dream. Something he could wake up to tomorrow and the next day, if he wanted. A string of perfect, untouchable days stretching before him like a beckoning temptress.

He can’t let himself think like that.

Your life, he reminds himself. Your life is what matters most. Keeping you here wouldn’t just be selfish, wouldn’t just be a temporary balm, it would be a gamble. Your life pitted against his own self-restraint. Your life pitted against the self-restraint of a monster he doesn’t trust.

If he can just get you out—out of his bed, out of his house, out of his head—he’ll be able to think straight, and then he can go.

He watches you stir, aware suddenly that a fully armored Mandalorian looming over you might not be the most comforting sight for you to wake to. But you crack open sleepy eyes before he can move, and a lazy smile spreads across your face. His heartbeat stumbles.

“Morning,” you yawn, stretching your arms over your head.

“Morning,” he replies, clipped as he tries to expedite this process.

“It’s early,” you muse, your gaze trailing to the window. “I think you should come back to bed.”

Din’s thoughts stall immediately. You look so cozy, so comfortable snuggled in his bed. In his bed.

“Please?”

Din’s helmet follows the path of your hand as it begins to wander: as it slides languidly down the column of your neck, molds over the swell of your breast, lingers along your waist. You know you’ve snared him right away. You always know.

He just stands there, silent and yielding, as you kick the blankets away and shimmy out of your clothes. He wants to tell you to stop, but his mouth isn’t responding to his brain, his jaw dropped open slightly behind the helmet as he surveys the bare lines of your body. He didn’t get to enjoy this yesterday, didn’t get to luxuriate in the view, to drink in every detail. To commit it to memory.

His visor catches where your fingers stroke the curve of your hip.

“I can’t—” he starts.

You slip your hand between your legs, run your fingers through the soft hair there.

He was going to get you out. To regroup. That was his intention.

One of your fingers slips lower, dips into the seam of your sex. His cock responds.

He barely knows his own name, let alone any sense of reason when you’re looking at him like that—touching yourself like that. Begging him to touch you. His nervous system jolts from freeze directly into overdrive, and immediately he can feel himself brushing up against some physical limit, teetering on the edge of his control.

He watches you drop your knees open, and a low, pained sound passes through the modulator when you use two fingers to part yourself, putting yourself on display for him. You roll the pad of one finger over your clit, and your head drops back onto the pillow, your eyes closing in pleasure. Need claws at the inside of him. 

“Stop,” he commands, but there’s no bite in it, his mouth watering at the sight of your stroking fingers.

You smile and widen the spread of your thighs, moving your hand lower.

He tries to sound firm, but his words come out like a plea: “Don’t—”

“I wouldn’t have to touch myself if you’d do it for me.”

You keep your eyes on his visor as you press two fingers inside yourself, frictionless as they sink inside the warm clutch of your body. He’s fixated on the flex of your wrist as you fuck yourself gently—his rapt attention suddenly a shivering, living thing throbbing under his skin. When you ease them out, he can see the shine of your arousal coating your skin up to the knuckle, a clear thread strung between your fingers for a brief moment when you slowly separate them.

“Your fingers feel so much better,” you breathe.

His blood pulses loudly in his ears, a too-slow beat. He knows what you feel like, clenched around his thick fingers—how slick, how hot. He knows what you taste like, licked off his own skin. Din would like to say that some greater primal force takes over, hijacks his body, that the monster in him doesn’t give him a choice, but that would be a lie.

He decides to let go.

Without changing forms, Din silences the part of his mind that’s protesting. He lets the animal of his hindbrain take control, a predator submitting to the call of its prey drive. It feels good to give in—a rush of blissful quiet overtakes him. He looks at you, and it’s simple. He wants you.

Time slows, but his hands move quickly—going to his belt buckle. The weapon-heavy leather thuds when it hits the ground at his feet.

You watch him disarm himself, poised like a willing sacrifice on his bed with your hand caught between your open legs, a naked eagerness on your face that pleases the possessive, hungry thing in his chest. His vision is tinged red, the severed thread of his control a distant memory as he thinks of all the things he wants to do with you.

To you.

He condemned himself to this the moment he let himself touch you. There’s no going back. He’s going to taste your nectar from the source. He’s going to fuck you with his tongue and gently suckle your clit between his lips until you sob. He’s going to eat you out until you come on his face, your hands tangled in his hair.

And then he’s going to do it again.

He tries not to think about how much easier that would be with his other tongue, his tongue when he’s transformed—long and dextrous as it is. He could get so deep inside you like that. Taste you from the inside out.

Later. He appeases himself with the promise of later. The promise of tomorrow and more more more.

His gaze settles on your mouth. There’s something else he wants now.

He approaches the bed and stands at its side, waiting patiently. That desperate sense of urgency drops away, and his shoulders relax. He can decide to have all the time in the world with you if he only lets himself. 

When he hunts, when Din really truly hunts these days, he finds that he likes to draw out the indulgence of it. The tease and the chase. The kick of adrenaline before the slaughter. He understands why a predator plays with its prey before it makes the kill. 

Because it can.

Because it feels good.

You’re expecting him to join you on the bed. He can see it in your expectant gaze.

“You want it so bad?” he asks, dipping his helmet down. “Come here.”

A wicked look flashes across your face at the change in his voice, at the invitation. There’s a beat of anticipation as you decide to play along, and then you crawl to the edge of the bed on your hands and knees. He watches, an imperious tilt to his helmet.

You perch on the edge, looking up. Waiting.

“Go ahead,” he nods. “Take it out.”

Your hands move to the button on his pants, but you don’t pop it open right away. You let your hand mold to the hard bulge there, feeling the heft of him.

He tilts his helmet the other direction, impatient, and you go for the zipper. 

Before you’ve even pulled his cock out, before you’ve even touched him, Din thinks the sensation of your hot breath on the expanse of skin exposed by his open fly might be the most erotic thing he’s ever experienced. 

He rips his gloves off and locks a hand around the nape of your neck. 

He thinks for a fleeting moment how obvious it must be—his obsession with your mouth. The edge of mania he’s shoved toward when you let your tongue drag up his hip bone. That he’d slit his wrists at the altar of your perfect lips if you asked.

Your eyes drag upward slowly as you lick across his skin, gaze catching on the armored lines of his body before it meets his visor. You peer up at him as you inch the fabric of his pants down just far enough. And then your eyes flick down to watch a pearly bead of precum slip down the length of his shaft at your closeness.

“You want it?” he rasps. “Open your mouth.”

He grunts in satisfaction when your lips part immediately. Again when your hand curls around the base of him and your tongue darts out to circle his head, a touch so infuriatingly delicate that it makes him want to hold you down and fuck your throat raw.

He doesn’t, of course. He lets you set the pace even though your teasing lick across the underside of his cock and another over his slit feel as much like torture as they do like pleasure. 

Finally, finally, you take him fully into the heat of your mouth. You start up a steady rhythm, and he’s more than satisfied to let you take the reins. 

You’re less satisfied with that though—you settle a hand over his on your neck and press down, your eyes skirting upward as you nod subtly, your other hand urging his hips forward, urging him to fuck your mouth. 

Use me. 

He wishes you could see his face in this moment, what you do to him. Din’s eyelashes flutter shut at the perfection of your request. But immediately, he snaps them open again, needing to see.

He thrusts forward, and you whine in approval, your fingers tightening on his hip—taking him deep again and again, until he watches a line of saliva slide down your chin. Until your lashes grow wet, eyes watering at the effort of taking him over and over. 

It’s too much. It’s too good. 

The tight, hot constriction of your throat as you swallow around the head of him, the hard suck of your cheeks hollowing out around his shaft. His helmet rocks back, and a growl reverberates through his chest. But he’s not about to let himself come without knowing what it feels like to fuck you.

His hand drops away from the back of your neck; he forces his hips to still. “Enough,” he grits.

When you surge forward again, taking him deep, he closes a hand gently around your throat and eases you backward, off him.

“I said stop.” He thinks the words would be menacing if the fractured restraint in his voice weren’t so apparent. If you couldn’t see the steady leak of precum from his cock, the drizzle of opaque liquid on his dark pants. He’s teetering right on the painful edge of orgasm, and you know it. 

“Need to fuck you,” he says, his hand still settled over your throat.

“Then fuck me,” you reply, your voice hoarse as you shift backward on the bed. 

“You want my fingers first?” he asks, his hand drifting down the inside of your thigh. “You want to cum on my hand again?”

“No,” you say, catching his wrist and pulling him onto the bed, over you. 

“No?” he says. “You want it to hurt?”

“Yes.”

His fingers tighten on your thigh. Too hard. “Turn around.”

You flip over and settle on your knees in front of him, and Din can see how much you enjoyed sucking his cock in the glossy spread of your cunt. 

He catches a drop of your arousal with two caressing fingers. “You want to be fucked hard? Is that what you want, you greedy little thing?”

You press your hips back, rubbing yourself into the cup of his hand. And for a moment, his mind buzzes with blankness—with the thought that he could be tasting you instead of just touching you. He satisfies himself for now by lining up his cock with the soft heat of your pussy, by pressing his sensitive head against your arousal-slick flesh. 

But when you whine and start to shift backward into him, he waits. Savors. “You need my cock that bad, huh?”

“Please, I need it. I want it—”

It’s that thing he fantasizes about—the daydream he strokes himself to in the shower after he hunts, when he’s sticky with blood and the leash on his desire has long been snapped. Your whined plea for him, your need so stark and bright that he couldn’t ever possibly deny you. Your need for him so heightened it threatens to match his for you.

“Take it then,” he pants. “Take what you asked for.”

He sinks his cock into the welcoming heat of your body, pressing slowly against the tight resistance of little preparation—hears the soft, drawn-out oh of your pleasure—and he knows there’s no coming back from this.

*** So he doesn’t fight it. He keeps you.

Days turn into a week. Into two. You bring life and sound to this desolate place—the creak of your steps on the hardwood floor, the sound of your humming, the quiet clanks of your movements around the kitchen in the early morning light. The quiet, steady tick of your heartbeat. All those pretty little noises you make when he has you in his bed—the moans and the whimpers and the pleas. His pillow smells like mellow spring flowers, and there are rose colored skirts and silky blue pajamas in his dresser.

He likes it.

He likes the noise and the tightness of the space and the company.

When he heads outside to chop wood for the fireplace, you follow to watch him roll up the duraweave sleeves of his flight suit and swing the ax—again and again until a thick log splits down the middle with a crack—and the attention pleases him. 

The weeks stack up, and there is a bar of soap speckled with lavender flowers in his shower. There are sweet strawberry preserves lined up in his cupboard, a colorful wool throw blanket tossed over the back of the couch that you insist is a necessity. For sitting in front of the fire, of course. You poke fun at his ascetic choices, at the lack of coziness in his house, but you don’t seem mad at all to be the one to provide it. 

He thinks you know instinctively that home isn’t a place or a concept he’s familiar with. He thinks you love being the one to show him what it could mean. 

He can tell you don’t mind that you have to face opposite directions when you eat. He thinks you like the sound of his voice even more when it’s not passed through the modulator. You draw out every meal with questions. He draws them out with his answers.

He tells you about the little green bounty that changed his life, the soup his mother made for him when he was sick, being adopted by the Mandalorians, the fact that he used to love swimming as a child. That sometimes he thinks about how good it would feel to strip off his armor and swim now. You tell him about your dreams, your childhood, your plans, everything.

When he slips his helmet on again and you turn to face him, he can see that the gulf between what he does tell you and the whole truth is obvious, though.

There is a question—are many questions—swimming in your eyes. The intention to get answers too. He’s not sure which exactly questions they are: Why the armor? The helmet? The Creed? Why this place? Where is he going next? When? What happened to him? What is he? Why the isolation and the fear and the hesitation and mile-high walls and why why why?

What the fuck happened to the wall of the shower?

Valid questions, every one. Many are things he asks himself regularly. All are questions he doesn’t know how to answer without shattering this perfect moment, without ruining the lovely domesticity you’re cultivating together. So when he sees that look and your lips part, Din speaks before you can. He’s not ready, yet, to go there. He reaches for your hand or strokes a gloved finger over your cheek and deflects. 

Just a little longer, he thinks, please. And you’re not fooled—he knows that. You understand the request and allow it for now, and he’ll take what he can.

“You want to learn how to shoot?” he asks instead. 

Your eyes light up.

He helps you pick a blaster from his collection—“How many blasters does one man need, Mando?”—that’s well suited to you, that fits your grip. He sets up targets outside, scattered on trees at varying distances, and stands close behind you, a solid wall against your back. He adjusts your stance and the placement of your hands, letting his touch linger on your waist in a way that makes your heart rate readout on his helmet spike. 

“Are you going to let me focus or not?” you quip, peering at him over your shoulder. “I thought you were trying to teach me something here.”

He raises innocent hands and steps back. “I didn’t realize I was distracting you.”

You smile slyly at him. “Sure.”

He lets himself enjoy it, the ease between you, the way you can read him even through the armor. Standing a short distance behind you, he talks you through the process: how to aim and shoot, how to breathe.

Hand-to-hand, next, he thinks to himself as he watches you practice. Then blades. Tracking.

He’ll teach you anything and everything that will protect you.

For when he’s no longer here to do it for you, he doesn’t let himself think. 

He watches you practice each day, watches you focus on the target, your lip caught between your teeth in concentration, until you nail the bullseye. You run to the tree where the target is hanging—a hole singed through the middle—letting out a triumphant cry, and he follows.

“Look,” you grin, so proud it makes his heart trip. You point at the perfectly placed burn mark. 

“Good,” he praises. “Do it again.” 

You roll your eyes, but you do. You return dutifully to the line he’d drawn in the pine needle strewn ground and shoot until you get the hang of it, until a miss is rare. And then he fucks you up against that tree, your dress bunched up around your hips, the blaster abandoned somewhere by your feet. 

You leave for a day, maybe two, here and there to check on things at home, that little fawn you love. As soon as you’re gone, he spends a couple hours getting as far in the opposite direction as he can, changing, hunting whatever he can find in the shortest time, and then after he’s washed every trace of blood away and donned his armor, he waits for you to come back. He tells himself it’s a perfectly workable arrangement.

It’s fine. It’s safe. Safe enough.

With his attention elsewhere, it takes him a few weeks to notice that those prints, the ones he’d been tracking so obsessively, have started to show up closer to his house, to yours. They mark a quiet, slow encroachment into his territory—inching just barely past that boundary he’d been so careful to hold until recently. Their bravery is returning, their local numbers rebounding, because he hasn’t been pushing them back by culling their pack with regularity.

He makes a mental note to keep a closer eye on things, reassured by the fact that there are miles of buffer between their progress and you. And, more importantly, that more often than not, he’s by your side these days—like the times you ask him to come with you when you leave. He’s not going to say no to you.

Every night, he gets to undress you and pull you into his bed. To touch you and fuck you and make you come. He gets to learn what makes you cry, what makes you scream, what makes you beg.

All in the armor, still. In the beskar prison that keeps you safe from him. That line he manages, somehow, to maintain. The monster in him hasn’t wrested it from him yet, and he clings to that last safety net, that final border between risky and reckless. 

He wonders every day when you’ll hit your threshold. When it’ll all become too much—the secrets and the questions and the armor. Every day you don’t ask or push or leave, he breathes a sigh of relief, knowing full well it just means the next day is more likely. That worry is so dwarfed by the pleasure of having you that he barely notices it, though.

It helps, too, that he’s well rested for the first time in a long time.

Din doesn’t dream when you’re in his bed, isn’t haunted by the nightmares. He slips into sleep, and it doesn’t fight him like it usually does. He sleeps soundly with your warm, soft form tucked against his side, your face pressed into his cowl. Your presence, your touch, your scent—they soothe him.

He’s always known—even before he admitted it to himself—that there would be no halfway with this. No measured approach to having you. And he was right, of course. Here you are, living with him… and happy, he thinks. He doesn’t like to think about what would happen if that changed, if you left. What he'd do. What he'd have to stop himself from doing.

Din loves hard, with teeth, and all of his are sunk deep in you. If he really thinks about it, though, the opposite is true. Yours, sunk deep in him. You have a bone-deep hold on him, a fatal bite that severed something vital upon first contact. If you decided to let go, he’d bleed out.

And he feels lighter than he has in months. Maybe years.

It scares him so much he doesn’t want to think about it.

So he doesn’t.

YOU

It’s not intentional. You don’t sit down together and make a decision, but you don’t want to leave and he doesn’t want you to go. So you just…don’t.

Slowly, with time, your most essential things migrate from your place to his. You bring a bag of clothes here and your favorite blanket another time. Your shampoo comes along with other bathroom essentials, and some kitchen supplies find their way into his drawers and cabinets.

Within a few weeks, you all but live with him.

You know instinctively that the opposite arrangement—staying together at your house—isn’t possible. Whether or not it’s actually necessary, Mando takes his self-imposed exile seriously. It’s another of the many things you don’t push him on.

Yet.

You visit home on a regular basis, of course, to keep an eye on things. Town, too, for supplies. You make the long walk alone—or sometimes together when you can convince him to put off whatever mysterious, imperative thing he has to do when you’re gone, and it feels shorter then. He’s not so hard to persuade.

You check on Luna, who is happy and well fed in the warmth of the barn, kept company by the chickens and the handful of braying goats. 

You find that she’s terrified of other people—or at least of Mando. You’ve never brought anyone else around so it’s hard to know if it’s something about him specifically. Maybe it’s the armor or his size. The first time she sees him, she goes rigid, the picture of freeze, and it takes twenty minutes to calm her down after you nudge Mando back out of the barn and close the door behind him. Even after several visits, she remains wary of him, barely willing to tolerate his presence.

A detail, like so many others, you file away for later.

It's one of many that you don't mention—anything that might prompt impossible conversations. Instead of souring the moment, instead of asking the hundreds of questions that are piling up in your head, you tacitly agree to avoid those things, skirting around any topics that elicit unanswerable questions or suggest an expiration date. Again and again. For weeks.

Then months.

It’s easy enough to rationalize. Might as well make the short time you have together pain free. Only good.

And, fuck, is it good.

You wake in his bed each morning and fall back into it each night. You wait for your lust for him to abate, for the initial need to be sated. Two months in, though, it hasn’t so much as begun to subside. If anything, it’s grown. It’s fed, you think, by the fact that you still don’t get all of him—what you do get just makes you want more. 

You get his hands, his cock, the expanse of his lower abdomen and upper thighs when he unbuckles his belt and fucks you. The sound of his unfiltered voice when you eat together. The sight of his thick, veined forearms when he chops wood. Snatches of golden skin dusted in dark hair.

Never his mouth, his eyes, his chest, the rest of him—his face. His face, that you think you might already love without having ever seen.

The why of it all—of the pace, of his nature—doesn’t feel so urgent any more, now that you’ve had the opportunity to soak him in, in more than just brief interactions. You can sense the why on him when you start to appreciate the weight of his past and his creed. There’s a layer of pain and loss calcified under his armor: you can all but feel it when your fingers work past an edge of beskar. He starts to tell you about it, too; he starts to untangle the complicated knot that is Mando. It’s usually during a meal when you’re faced away from each other and you get to hear his real voice that he starts to open up. You untease his past question by question, answer by answer.

When you do almost slip, almost ask a question that is too present, he helps you put it back. Offers a distraction that you gladly accept. An unspoken agreement of not yet.

He just needs time. You just need more time together.

You try not to think about the fact that you might not have time. No, you package that thought up with that list of forbidden questions, the ones that would threaten to crack the ice you’re standing on together, and tuck them all away. 

You take the things that he does offer, accept his baffling limits. You satisfy yourself with the reminder of progress. If you think back to a few months ago and draw a line from those cordial interactions at the Saturday market to the current reality of living with him—to watching him welcome all the ways you insinuate yourself into his space, to witnessing the way he seems to soften for you—you can’t help but feel hopeful about what the next few months will hold.

*** Winter comes early this year, sneaking in on quiet feet. It descends around you slowly—in brisk mornings and frozen dew drops strung along twigs like pearls—and then it comes all at once in a sudden blanket of white. You wake up to a thick layer of snow on the ground, the tree limbs and roof frosted and glittering.

He teaches you how to protect yourself—how to shoot and fight and track. You think there’s a part of him that’s certain if he only teaches you enough, you’ll always be safe. You can feel it in his palpable sense of relief when you master a new skill. As if he has a mental list of things to impart on you before he runs out of time.

When you’re consistently nailing the center of his targets again and again, Mando outfits you with a blaster of your own, tells you to keep it on you at all times—that it’s yours. That day, he drops to one knee in front of you. 

“Lean,” he says, patting his pauldron.

You listen without really thinking about it, bracing a hand on his shoulder.

“Up,” he says, gesturing to your foot and offering his armored thigh.

You comply, and he slips two loops of leather up your leg, the fabric of your skirt catching on his forearm as he inches them up, until the tips of his fingers brush your inner thigh. A holster. A holster he made for you.

He tightens the straps and then slips the small silver blaster into the leather sheath. 

You graduate to hand-to-hand combat next—well, not so much graduate as add it to the schedule. He’s visibly pleased when he discovers that you already have some skills with a knife, when you know how to disarm him of his vibroblade in certain holds, how to make an attacker bleed freely with one well-placed slash. How to sever a tendon or an artery. But he finds plenty of ways to stump you, ways to overpower you, and you practice those until you know how to get out of them too. 

A few weeks in, you’re more than satisfied with your skill level, ready to move on. Mando, on the other hand, is ever insistent on more. He holds you with your back against his chest, caught and pinned, a purring vibroblade at your throat. 

You’re exhausted, sweaty and sore from breaking out of his grasp again and again. You’re supposed to be doing it once more right now. But you’re limp in his hold.

“Go on,” he grunts.

“I’m actually fine with this,” you decide, letting your weight go even more leaden in his arms.

He scoffs low in his throat. “Is that right.”

“That’s right. I surrender. Do with me what you will.” You drop your head back, looking up at his impassive visor.

He considers. “Anything?”

The word slithers up your spine. “Anything,” you repeat, letting your eyes go heavy-lidded.

He closes the blade and tosses it away, releasing his hold on you. When you lurch forward at the unexpected freedom, your knees buckling slightly, he catches your waist to steady you. 

You spin to face him, pointing a finger at the diamond-like center of his chestplate, staying far enough away that he can’t encircle you in his arms again. “Technically that counts as me getting out of that hold.”

He plants a hand on his hip. “Disagree.”

“Emotional manipulation is a weapon. You’re just mad I’m better at it than you are. Maybe I should give you lessons. You know what, yeah, I think it’s only fair that we also start practicing scenarios where I’m the one in control.”

He cocks his head suggestively. “Are we still talking about training?” 

“Yes.”

He stares at you silently, adjusting his weight from one foot to the other. It speaks volumes.

You scoff. “Are you implying that I could never have the upper hand in a fight? That there’s no chance in the galaxy of that ever happening?”

A damning beat of silence and then: “No.”

“You are!”

He gestures at his chest, shrugs. “Beskar.”

You roll your eyes. “I’d just need to catch you at the right moment—sleeping or showering—and take you by surprise. Or have the right weapon. Like poison. I know plenty of plants that would kill you—plenty of plants I could find out here or maybe…yeah…those.” 

You gesture at the row of detonators lined up on the side of his belt as he reattaches it around his middle. He always takes it off before you practice hand-to-hand, along with the vambrace that apparently emits flame.

“Yeah, they’d be effective,” he admits, clipping the buckle together. “The problem is you don’t have any.”

“You don’t like me enough to share your detonators with me?”

“To kill me? No.”

“How about this one?” you ask, reaching toward the mysterious hilt that’s always clipped next to them.

He steps out of reach before you can touch it.

“What is it? Can I see it?”

“I don’t use it,” he says. You know him well enough now to read the lie in his level voice.

“Then why do you always carry it?”

“It’s…a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” you press, curious.

He looks away. “I can’t.”

And you realize it isn’t just stubbornness or stoicism. It’s pain. A bruise he isn’t ready to address, and you’re prodding it.

You wonder how many secrets can simmer between you before they boil over.

“Alright, come on,” you say, grabbing his hand and turning for the house. “I’m starving.”

*** It’s deep winter when Mando starts to take you into the woods, away from his house, to teach you the basics of tracking. Each time, when the forest lightens around you and you can hear the titter of birds overhead, he tells you to pick the tracks of a deer or a fox to follow. It’s easier now that the snow is thick on the ground, a continuous blanket of white.

He instructs you, as he always does, to disregard the larger prints—the clawed ones—that you come upon occasionally. Too often for comfort.

“I’ll take care of those,” he says, unconcerned. 

Each time, you think back to that bloody trail and know he’s more than capable. And then you wonder when he’s away from you long enough to actually do that. 

Never, it turns out.

You’re on the tail of a stag when he holds out an arm unexpectedly, stopping you in your tracks.

“What is it?”

He turns his head slowly, scanning the quiet forest. Listening, waiting. You can’t hear a thing—not a rustle of leaves or whisper of wind. The stag isn’t close.

“They’re coming.”

“The sta—?”

Mando drops his arm and grabs your hand, hauling you back in the direction of home. You follow on instinct when he breaks into a jog with you in tow, heavy boots crunching through the snow. He twitches as he moves; he groans and presses his shoulders back, rolling his neck, his hand too tight around yours.

He’s in pain.

“Mando—” you say, trying to slow him down, to understand.

“Run,” he interrupts, pushing you ahead of him, urging you toward the house. “I can’t stop it."

You halt in front of him, a hand raised to his chest plate. “I can’t— I won’t—”

He growls when you hesitate, the sound not entirely human. His hands are shaking.

“I can help—” you start, not even entirely sure what you’re offering.

“I won’t risk you.”

“But—”

A gloved hand settles over your mouth, the other gripped tightly around your bicep. “We don’t have time for this. I won’t let you—I can’t—just go home and lock the door. And promise me you’ll stay there until I come back.”

He drops his hand and starts stripping off his gloves and vambraces. “What are you—?” The pieces click together belatedly in your head. Those colossal prints, the clawed ones.

They’re coming.

“Promise me,” he says, forcing them into your hands. “Take this too.”

He reaches for his helmet and rips it off his head, pushing it into your arms. Your jaw drops open in surprise. You don’t even have time—or the free hands—to cover your eyes or the sense to shut them tight.

“It’s okay,” he says, responding to the fear in your eyes. “I wanted to—been wanting to.”

You only have a moment to take him in. He’s just as handsome as you imagined—maybe, impossibly, more. His dark hair is wavy and tousled, falling across his forehead. His eyes are brown and wild with fear, his sharp jaw peppered with gray-flecked stubble. His perfect lips are set in a half-smile. He looks a little bashful for a moment, a little boyish as you study him.

He holds your face between his warm hands. “Promise you won’t leave the house until I come back.”

You nod.

“Say it,” he prompts, his dark eyes serious. He knows you didn’t really mean it the first time.

“I won’t leave the house until you come back,” you repeat, a little dazed.

You’re looking into his eyes. Your brain is struggling to process it.

There's fear there that doesn't just belong to the threat to your safety. It's more: the fear of being seen. Wholly.

You’re waiting for more words to come to you—something that will express the feeling that’s blooming in your chest without relying on words it’s too early to say.

“Be careful.” It’s the best you can manage.

He presses his lips to yours in a quick kiss. It’s too fast, not enough. If your arms weren’t full of beskar, you’d grab him to keep him close, to kiss him deeper. Instead, he’s pulling back and turning you on the spot with an iron grip.

“Go.”

He urges you forward with a gentle push, and you break into a jog, glancing over your shoulder as often as possible without running face-first into a tree or slipping in the powdery snow underfoot. He’s stripping off his chest plate, his pauldrons, his thigh guards. Leaving them haphazardly on the forest floor.

The last time you look back, his back is to you, and several pairs of yellow eyes are emerging in the dark spaces between the trees.

One, two, four—too many to count.

You’re tempted to stop. To turn back. To bring him the rest of his beskar. It feels so wrong to leave him out here, alone and unarmored. He’s stripping down from metal to man, and it feels unbearably vulnerable. Maybe you could help—

But just as you’re thinking that, Mando turns his head and bellows, “Go!”

You’re far from him—too far to truly make out the details—but you swear, even across the vast distance, that the whites of his eyes look black.

*** You drop the pile of beskar onto the kitchen table, unholster your blaster, and drag a chair to the window. You study the intricate line work of ice on the frosted pane, tracing cold veins with the pad of your finger. You fidget and shift, but you don’t dare leave your spot.

You stare at the place between the trees where you emerged, straining to hear any sound, knuckles white where they’re wrapped around the edge of your seat.

It’s silent.

Minutes pass like molasses—they stretch and sprawl, leisurely and unhurried, while you wait.

You steal glances at the clock on the wall. You swear it’s been hours since you slid the dead bolt shut behind you, but the clock tells you you’ve been sitting here for eight minutes.

Ten.

Twelve.

Seventeen.

He’s out there, outnumbered and alone.

Fuck it.

You get to your feet.

You wrench open the front door, but before you can break into a run, you catch a subtle movement between the trees. The blaster slips out of your hand. He’s staggering back to you—stripped and injured. His flight suit is unzipped to his waist, the sleeves tied around his hips. One hand is gripping his ribs, the other trapping pieces of his armor against his side. He’s barefoot and limping through the snow.

You run to him.

His hair is sticking to his sweaty forehead, and there’s blood on his face—so much blood—coating his lips, smeared across one flushed cheek. Lines running down his neck. It covers his hands, forearms. It’s splattered across his muscled chest. When his lips part in a pained grimace, you can see the inside of his mouth is bloody too, red lining his white teeth. 

You don’t have time to process it, to think about what it means because he’s hurt.

He must see the terror on your face when you register the state of him because he shakes his head and says, “Not mine. Just this,” jerking his chin down to gesture at his side. 

A row of deep lacerations is seeping blood down his ribs, over his tense fingers and down his stomach, where it’s soaking into the dark fabric bunched at his hips. You shudder at the sight of it—even through his spread fingers, you can see that his flesh is torn open in a way that makes your stomach pitch.

Behind him, there’s a sporadic trail between the trees, red dripped on virgin snow.

You want to hold him, to pull him into your arms, and, most of all, to fix him and put him back together. You start by taking the pile of armor from him and slipping under the arm of his uninjured side, pulling it over your shoulders to support his weight. He accepts the help wordlessly, leaning on you as you stumble forward together.

“They’re gone,” he pants. “Dead. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” you scoff. “Are you?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

He grunts.

You limp the rest of the distance to the house together and pull open the front door, kicking it shut behind you as you help him inside. He reaches behind you to lock it, his shoulders dropping in relief when it clicks.

You drop his beskar on the floor as gently as you can while you’re half holding him up. It clatters.

“We need to get these closed up,” you say, gesturing toward a kitchen chair. “You need bacta. Sit down.”

When he doesn’t move to sit, you look up at his face, and he’s staring at you with an intensity—a soft, quiet intensity of creased brows and bright brown eyes—that takes your breath away. 

“I’m fine,” he protests, gently gripping your shoulders and pushing you back in the direction of the bed instead. He fumbles with the hem of your shirt, trembling fingers slipping under the fabric to caress your skin. “I’ll heal. Just let me touch you.”

His hands are hot on your waist.

"You’re not okay,” you protest, trying and failing to redirect him. “You won’t heal if you bleed out.”

“I just need to hold you.” His words are starting to slur, running together. The blood loss is tipping him into delirium.

“After—just let me—”

He ignores you and curls himself around you, crushing you against his body, a heavy hand holding your head to his chest, the other arm locking yours to your sides.

“Mando, please—I really need to stop the bleeding—”

“Din,” he says, nestling his face against your neck sweetly. His forehead is sweaty and feverish. He brushes gentle lips over your fluttering pulse. “My name is Din.”

You’re speechless.

“I want you to call me that,” he says. “Please.” There’s a heartbreaking vulnerability behind his words, like he’s worried you won’t accept the offering of something so precious.

“Of course. Of course, I will.” His grip slackens, and you wrap your arms around his middle reflexively. The heat of his throbbing wound and the hot slip of blood against your forearm make you recoil.

“Shit—sorry—”

But Din doesn’t react to the pain.

“Din—hey—”

You try to pull back, to extricate yourself from his hold and get a better look at him, but the arms draped over your shoulders go leaden, and he sways on his feet, forcing you backward a couple faltering steps. The backs of your calves hit the bed.

“Din—” You try to steady him, but he’s getting heavier by the second, his weight shifting unexpectedly as he tries to keep his balance, half-conscious and fading.

Your knees threaten to buckle when he grunts and goes completely boneless, slumping against you.

“Fuck—”

You’re just barely able to angle your body so that you can gently—and awkwardly—use his momentum to guide him face-first onto the bed. It’s a miracle you both don’t end up in a crumpled pile on the floor. You hoist his legs up too. It takes all your strength to haul his dead weight over to flip him onto his back so you can access the slashes across his ribs.

Your heart jumps into your throat when you see how rapidly a crimson stain is spreading on the comforter underneath him. You run for the med kit, dumping it on the bed beside his prone form and digging out all the necessities.

He doesn’t flinch when you clean, close, and dress the wounds. Not even when you prick him with a bacta shot. You work as quickly and carefully as you can, keeping tabs on his breathing all the while. Any time you have a free hand, you rest it on his chest, soothed by the shallow but steady rise and fall. 

The whole time, you think about all those questions, those details, those secrets. You turn them over again and again in your head in a feverish loop—all those things you’ve been stacking on top of one another all this time, a teetering pile of essential pieces of him, ready to topple with a gentle nudge. Kept at bay by distractions and diversions and half-truths. All the ways you’ve both been keeping your relationship in stasis to postpone…what? Loss? Something that’s inevitable, something no one can ever truly prevent. It feels undeniable when your hands are covered in his blood. When you almost lost him anyway.

It seems obvious now. Obvious that in the end, it will be more painful to have only stayed in this place with him than to have at least tried to give yourself wholly to whatever this is.

Before you secure the final bandage over the wounds, you check your work once, twice—terrified the simple expansion of his ribcage as he breathes will force them open again. You press edges of the bandage down and watch closely, dreading the red seep of blood on clean white. It doesn’t come. You breathe a sigh of relief.

You clean him up with a moist towel, wiping the blood from his skin, his face, his rumpled hair. 

If he hadn’t chosen to take his helmet off before any of this, you’d feel like you were invading his privacy by being able to see so much of him. It still feels that way, just a little, as you admire the taut lines of his biceps, the broad spread of his shoulders, and thick muscles of his pectorals. As you gently swipe over the soft expanse of his middle, feel the hard abdominals underneath. As you study the slope of his nose and the grays threaded through his stubble, his long eyelashes fanned over his cheeks. The soft pink of his lips. 

You rinse that stained-red towel until the water runs clear, until there’s no trace of blood left on him. 

The bloodied sheets and blanket and pillow underneath him will have to wait; it doesn’t even occur to you to be bothered by them when you climb in next to him, when you sweep his damp hair back off his forehead and press your lips to his warm skin and settle against his non-injured side.

You fall asleep like that, your head on his sternum, the subtle rise and fall sweeter than a lullaby.

*** He’s healed by the morning.

He’s healed.

When you wake after a fitful sleep, you scramble out of bed to pull back his bandages and find that the wounds slashed across his ribs look like they’ve had several weeks to mend, the skin knitted back together seamlessly. You run your fingers gingerly over the tender flesh in wonder, in relief.

Another one of his secrets. Something else to ask.

He rouses at your touch, starting as he blinks open bleary eyes. He must be immediately aware of the absence of his helmet because his whole body tenses as he recoils, his eyes panicked as he tries to decide to attack or to flee, jerking away from your hand on his arm. 

“It’s okay,” you say, holding up your hands in placation. “It’s me, Din. It’s just me. You’re safe—you’re home.”

He calms somewhat as he meets your gaze, as he registers your face and his surroundings, settling his head back against the pillow. The tension in his body remains.

“How are you feeling?” you ask, resisting the urge to reach up and brush his tousled hair off his forehead. Touch, you think, is his to initiate in this moment.

“Fine,” he croaks. He’s visibly uncomfortable like this, still not used to being so unguarded around someone else. Holding eye contact for longer than a moment seems almost unbearable for him, his eyes shifting around the room so they don’t have to stay settled on yours. 

You hand him a glass of water, and he sits up against the headboard to drink it. He winces a little as he maneuvers, his jaw ticking. He’s sore.

“You’re the worst patient, you know,” you gripe, trying to lighten the mood, to give him something to focus on. 

He scoffs, lifting an eyebrow over the rim of the glass.

You give him an unimpressed glare. “I couldn’t take care of you until you fainted from blood loss.”

He has the audacity to shrug a little.

You blow out an exasperated breath, distracted, maybe, by the movement of his throat as he swallows. By every detail of his face that you can’t seem to memorize quickly enough—a privilege you’re more than willing to relinquish if it means easing the tension in his shoulders, the wrinkle of concern etched between his brows.

When he sets the glass down on the bedside table, you retrieve his helmet and offer it to him wordlessly, a show of nonjudgmental understanding, a willingness to back-pedal if that’s what he needs right now. His eyes soften when he takes it.

The urge to say something before he disappears behind beskar jumps up your throat.

“I was scared, so scared,” you admit quietly. “Din, I thought—I thought you…”

He sets his helmet beside him on the bed and jerks his chin. “Come here.”

You make to settle next to him, but he pulls you onto his lap instead, guiding you until you’re straddling his thighs. 

You try to wriggle away. “I’m going to hurt you like this—just let me—”

“Shhh,” he breathes, hands locking down on your hips. “I’m fine, okay? I’m not going anywhere.” He hesitates for the briefest moment before he leans forward and presses his mouth to yours.

His lips are soft, tentative. His first, you realize. Of course.

Your mind snags on the way he tends to be in bed—directive, commanding, sure—and holds the two up side by side. This hesitation, the halting press of his lips, has something in your chest going soft. Between your legs going molten.

You cup his jaw and lick into his mouth when his lips part—an it’s okay, I want you to take—and his breath goes ragged against yours. He leans into you, an arm slung low around your back to keep you close as he starts to tip you backward.

“Don’t move,” you say, attempting to ease him back gently.

He ignores the command, responding to your open mouth with the slip of his tongue.

“Or I’ll stop,” you threaten.

He sits back, chastened, a subtle pout to his lower lip. It disappears when you lean back in. 

He makes a low noise of protest when you don’t meet his lips, but it turns into something pleased when you move your attention to his neck. You lick over his thrumming pulse, across the faint saltiness of his flushed skin. Your hands roam the planes of his chest, over his pounding heart, and down the swells of his muscled arms—greedy for so much warm skin, for so much of him you’ve never seen or touched or tasted.

Even with the helmet set beside you, the fear that you’ll have to go back—to concede gained ground—that he’ll revert back to full armor again, rankles at the back of your mind. You dig your nails lightly into his shoulders, and he growls.

You can tell it’s taking all his restraint not to move, to keep totally still aside from his wandering hands. You know he’s hard underneath you, that he’s aching to wrest control from your hands, to put you on your back and fuck you like this, with no layers between you. And he knows you won’t let him when he’s still healing.

You try not to let it escalate, to keep things from getting out of hand. But then his mouth is on yours again, your lip caught gently between his teeth, his hand locked possessively around the nape of your neck, and you can’t help the quiet moan or the subtle grind of your hips in his lap.

Din jerks back, hands braced on your shoulders to keep distance between your bodies, his head tipped back against the headboard and eyes closed as his panted breath gradually slows.

And you know it’s not just the injury. He isn’t humoring you or in too much pain. He’s fighting it—the transformation, the change that keeps him in his beskar. What he wouldn't let you see in the forest.

“It doesn’t bother me,” you say—quiet, serious. 

He pauses, understanding despite the sharp turn. The energy in the room shifts as he waits for you to continue.

“Your…you—?” you stumble over the words, struggling to find the right ones. It comes out badly. “What you…are.”

His eyes are downcast, fixed on the silver shine of his helmet.

He doesn’t ask how. Of course you know—it’s an open secret between you, has been for months.

“I want to see,” you press. An honest plea. “To know. Just let it happen.”

A tight, subtle shake of his head. No.

“Please, Din,” you say, laying a hand on his chest. “Show me.”

He looks away, his eyes full of some unnameable emotion, something soft and fragile, a sharp edge that might be anger. He slips away so easily, even without the helmet.

“Please,” you beg, framing his face with your hands to guide his gaze gently back to yours.

He still won’t meet your eyes.

Suddenly, you know this was a mistake. That this is the thing that’s going to break what’s between you. He’s given you his face, his name—they should be enough. Yet, here you are, pushing him for more. There’s no coming back from it, no swallowing the words, though. You find you don’t want to anymore, even when you can feel him slipping out of your hands.

“It’s not safe,” he says.

“How? It’s you.”

“No,” he says, “it’s not.”

“I don’t understand, Din,” you say, a hint of desperation laced between your words. “And I need to. I need to understand. We can’t avoid it any more—look at what happened. I just—I can’t do this when I know I don’t have all of you. I can’t do this anymore. All these walls, all these secrets between us.”

His head snaps to you, a flicker of panic kindling in his eyes. But he doesn’t deny it, the skirting and avoidance, the game you’ve both been so willing to play. His eyes settle on your joined hands. 

“I want all of you. I need all of you. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” he says, his voice low, and the panic in his eyes is swallowed by a deep, hollow want—a yawning blackness that expands and disappears so quickly you think you must have imagined it. “I do understand that.”

“Then let me see you.”

His brown eyes flick upward to meet yours, and he nods.

[lilyswrittenworks]

XX| Close Call

Warning(s): Blood, Angst, Cursing, Comfort

Word count: 4.1k

Synopsis: One more week until Piccolo had to pay Korin a visit to retrieve the senzu bean he had been promised. All was well... until it wasn't.

━─┉┈★┈┉─━━─┉┈★┈┉─━━─┉┈★┈┉─━━─┉┈★┈┉─━

This couldn’t be happening.

It couldn’t.

Everything had been fine. It should’ve been fine.

It had been an ordinary evening. The two of you sat comfortably in your home, surrounded by the familiar clatter of steel and the faint scent of oil and sharpening stones. Piccolo sat on the living room floor, legs crossed, the flickering lamplight casting long shadows as he methodically ran a whetstone along the edge of one of your training swords, while you sat across from him, polishing another with practiced ease.

You were talking again.

Rambling, really—bubbling with excitement about returning to your dojo, as if the injuries that had nearly taken your life just four months ago were nothing more than a distant memory.

“I can’t wait to see their faces,” you had said with a bright smile, brushing a strand of hair behind your ear. “I bet they’ve all slacked off without me there to whip them into shape.”

He had grunted in response, but you knew him well enough to recognize the soft amusement behind it.

Piccolo didn’t speak much—but he listened. Always listened. Your voice had become something familiar, something comforting to him, something that he came to love about you.

He liked the way you filled the silence. He liked the way your eyes sparkled when you talked about the people you cared for.

It had been so normal. So safe.

Until it wasn’t.

You had stood up, mid-sentence, pausing only to retrieve something from the kitchen. A cloth? A bottle of disinfectant? He couldn’t remember. 

Because in the next moment—

You coughed.

It was sharp, sudden. Violent.

Piccolo looked up immediately, brows furrowing.

You staggered, clutching your stomach. You coughed again—harder. And then, to his horror, you hurled.

Dark red splattered the wooden floor beneath you.

Blood.

You stared at your hands, trembling as you saw it coating your fingers, dripping from your lips. Then your wide, horrified eyes found his.

“P… Piccolo…” you barely managed to whisper before your knees buckled.

Piccolo moved before he could think.

His arms caught you before your body could hit the floor, cradling your unconscious form against him as panic exploded through his chest.

“Hey—hey! (Y/n), look at me!” Piccolo shook you gently, his voice louder than it had ever been. Desperate. Urgent.

But your head lolled back.

Your eyes didn’t open.

A cold, suffocating fear gripped him—

No. No, no, no—

This couldn’t be happening.

It couldn’t.

Not to you.

Not to the one person who made him feel—alive.

His eyes focused back to the present—soaring through the night air, the wind howling in his ears as he tore through the sky with everything he had.

You were limp in his arms, a streak of blood trailing from the corner of your mouth. His cape whipped violently behind him, but all Piccolo could feel was the weight of your body, and the thunderous pounding of his own heart.

His only thought—his only destination—was the Lookout.

Dende. Popo. Someone. Anyone.

They had to fix this.

They had to save you.

Far below, Korin was enjoying the cool breeze atop his tower, his paws wrapped around his staff as he gazed at the stars. It was a rare, tranquil moment.

Until a sonic gust of wind nearly knocked him over.

“Wh-WHOA!” the old cat yelped, tumbling back onto his tail as something—someone—blurred past him in a streak of green and white.

Blinking in stunned confusion, Korin sat up, his fur on end.

“Was that… Piccolo? What the heck is he doing here?”

He squinted at the shrinking silhouette disappearing into the clouds above, heart skipping a beat.

For a moment, he could’ve sworn—

He saw Piccolo clutching someone in his arms.

Someone limp.

And that person’s energy was barely hanging on.

Korin’s ears flattened.

“…Oh my.”

Piccolo burst through the clouds, his cape snapping behind him like a banner in the wind. The dark sky parted, revealing the sacred platform above—the Lookout, floating in tranquil silence against the night.

But there was no peace in Piccolo's heart.

He pushed harder, a sonic hum trailing behind him, and in seconds he descended into the center of the courtyard with a thundering force. The moment his moccasins’ hit the tile, he didn’t waste a second.

“Dende! Mister Popo!” he shouted, his voice uncharacteristically strained—raw with panic. “I need your help—NOW!”

The tremble in his tone was impossible to miss. Piccolo never pleaded—never raised his voice out of anything but irritation or battle fury. But this? This was something else.

From the entrance to the temple, footsteps echoed, fast and urgent. Dende appeared first, his green face pale with concern, and beside him, Mister Popo’s usually composed expression was etched with worry.

“Piccolo? What are you—” Dende's words fell flat the moment his eyes landed on the unconscious figure in Piccolo’s arms.

His breath caught.

Your aura… it was flickering—thin and fading like a candle about to die out.

Without hesitation, Dende rushed forward. Piccolo dropped to his knees, cradling you close, allowing the young Guardian to kneel in front of him and begin his assessment. Dende’s hands hovered, glowing faintly as he checked your vital energy.

And then he looked up. His eyes met Piccolo’s—and what he saw there startled him more than anything else.

Piccolo looked broken.

There was anguish carved into the lines of his face. A deep, desperate pain—his usual mask of stoicism shattered.

“What happened to her, Piccolo?” Dende asked softly, but urgently.

Piccolo swallowed hard, his breath catching. He couldn’t look away from your face—not for long. His hands trembled slightly, holding you tighter, as if you’d vanish if he let go.

“I… I don’t know,” he choked out. “She started coughing, and then…” He closed his eyes tight, the image of the blood on the wooden floors, of your bloodied hand flashing behind his lids. “She passed out. Just like that.”

When his eyes opened again, they shimmered—dark with emotion, his onyx gaze barely holding back the tears swelling at the edges. But one escaped, tracing a silent path down his cheek.

“Dende,” he said, voice dropping low—almost a whisper, but heavy like the weight of a mountain. “You have to save her.”

He didn’t care how it looked. He didn’t care that he was showing weakness.

You were the only one who made the silence bearable. The only one who softened the edges of his guarded world. He had just started to understand what it meant to love—to truly care, not with duty, but with his soul.

He couldn’t lose that.

He couldn’t lose you.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice cracking under the sheer weight of it. “Save her. I’m begging you.”

And as that lone tear fell, dark and silent against the pale tiles of the Lookout, Piccolo didn’t care who saw.  

He had never felt so powerless.  

And he had never wanted something more in his entire life.  

You had to live.

Dende nodded, his young face hardening with resolve. “Please lay her down.”

Piccolo obeyed without hesitation. He lowered you carefully onto the cold tiles, treating you like you were made of glass. Every movement was gentle, every breath he took shallow—as though he were afraid that even the sound of it might disturb you further.

Dende knelt beside you, his fingers spreading apart as a soft golden light began to pulse from his hands. He hovered them just above your abdomen, and soon that healing energy enveloped you in a shimmering cocoon of warmth. The blood staining your lips vanished first, absorbed into the light like it had never been there.  

But then… your face twisted.

Your brows furrowed. A small, broken whimper escaped your throat.

Piccolo’s head snapped toward you instantly, every cell in his body screaming to do something. Anything. His hands twitched, aching to hold you, to protect you from the invisible pain. But he wasn’t a healer—he didn’t know how to stop this. All he could do was watch as you suffered.

“Dende…” he growled, his voice tight with helplessness.

“Something’s not right,” Dende muttered, his brow beading with sweat. His left hand slowly moved, hovering over your chest, his expression shifting into one of intense focus. “There’s something… blocking her heart. It’s small—but it’s foreign. A solid object.”

Piccolo blinked in disbelief. “What?! What do you mean there’s something inside her heart?!”

“I can see it—a fragment, lodged deep. It’s lead, I think… a piece of shrapnel or maybe even a bullet. Whatever it is, it’s interfering with her heart's rhythm,” Dende explained, his voice trembling slightly, though he kept his hands steady. “I can get it out… but I have to be careful. One wrong move, and…”

He didn’t need to finish the sentence.

Piccolo’s breath caught in his throat.

Slowly, meticulously, Dende guided his healing energy deeper. He visualized the obstruction, wrapping it in a net of light, drawing it out inch by inch. It was a painstaking process, his hands glowing brighter as he pulled the object upward—until finally, a small piece of blackened lead floated into his open palm.

Piccolo stared at it, stunned by how something so small had nearly taken you away.

Dende didn’t stop. He kept his hands over you, sealing tissue, mending nerves, and purging every trace of impurity that had followed. When the golden glow began to fade, silence fell across the courtyard like a thick fog.

And then—

You stirred.

Your eyes slowly fluttered open, the color returning to your face as confusion painted your expression. A fog clung to your thoughts at first, but then the memories hit you like a crashing wave. The coughing. The blood. The pain. Your eyes widened in terror as you shot upright, your hand flying to your chest, expecting the same unbearable pressure to greet you.

But…

There was nothing.

Just the steady rise and fall of your breath.

You looked down at your hand in disbelief—searching for blood, for pain, for something to prove that what had happened was real. But all you saw was your skin, trembling slightly.

“Wha… what the hell…?” you murmured.

“You’re okay now.”

You turned toward the voice—young, calm, and kind. Beside you stood a small Namekian, no older than a teenager by human standards, a gentle smile stretching across his features.

“Thank goodness,” Dende said with a breath of relief. “You had us all worried for a moment there.”

Your gaze lingered on him, blinking. “You’re… you’re a Namekian, right?”

Dende beamed and nodded. “I am! I’m surprised you know that—most humans don’t, unless they’ve met one before. But I’m guessing Piccolo told you all about us, huh?”

Piccolo…

The moment his name echoed in your head, your heart seized again—but this time with a different kind of panic.

“Where is he—?” you asked, eyes darting around, voice cracking.

Before your anxiety could spiral further, you felt a warm, grounding pressure at your back—a large hand, familiar in every way, resting between your shoulder blades.

You turned quickly, your breath hitching as your gaze met his. Piccolo. He was on his knees beside you, his face shadowed but unmistakably there—right by your side, like he never left.

You didn’t even think.

You threw yourself into him, wrapping your arms tightly around his neck, your body trembling as you collapsed into his embrace. And without hesitation, he caught you—his arms closing around you with a force that made it feel like nothing in the world could ever pull you away again.

A choked sob escaped you as the dam finally broke, your tears soaking into the thick fabric of his weighted shoulder pad. Your fingers gripped his cloak desperately.

“I was so scared…” you whispered through your tears, voice cracking. “I didn’t want to die—I didn’t want to leave you.”

Piccolo buried his face into the crook of your neck, eyes shut tight as the weight of your words shattered whatever composure he had left. His hold on you tightened.

He had never known fear like that. Never known such vulnerability until now—until you. And he never wanted to feel it again.

“I’ve got you,” he murmured, voice barely above a breath. “I’ve got you.”

And in that moment, the rest of the world faded away.

You were alive.

And he wasn’t going to let you go.

The first one to pull away was you—just slightly, just enough to see him. Piccolo didn’t stop you, though a subtle reluctance lingered in his touch. Your eyes met his, and despite the deep relief etched into the usually stoic planes of his face, you could still see it—the anguish that hadn't yet left him. It clung to the edges of his expression like a shadow that refused to fade.  

Your hands reached up on instinct, fingertips brushing his jaw before gently cupping his face. The moment your palms rested against his cheeks, his eyes fluttered half-shut and he leaned into your touch, almost like he couldn’t help it. His skin was warm beneath your hands—rough in texture, but grounding. His eyes stayed locked on yours, so intense, so open, it made the breath catch in your throat. 

You were drowning in him.

Until someone cleared their throat.

The sound was polite but purposeful, and you flinched—just slightly—turning your head in surprise. Still in the safety of Piccolo’s arms, you shifted to glance at the two figures standing nearby: the young Namekian who had healed you, and a short man with dark skin, round eyes, and a distinct turban—his presence calm, yet commanding.

“I apologize for interrupting the moment,” the man spoke gently, folding his hands in front of him, “but we would like to ask a few questions, if that’s alright with you.”

You blinked, lips parting as your mind scrambled for a proper response. You turned back to Piccolo instead, wordlessly asking for guidance. Your hands were still cupping his face, and he hadn’t moved an inch. He met your gaze with that same steady intensity, then gave you a slow, reassuring nod.

That was all you needed.

Trusting him came easier than breathing.

You lowered your hands, placing them over his chest instead—your fingers splayed just above his heart—and he mourned the loss of your touch in silence, his eyes lingering on you for a heartbeat longer before turning to the others.

You faced them fully now, still leaning back against Piccolo’s chest like it was your anchor. “Sure,” you said softly, offering a small, tired smile. “Ask away.”

The younger Namekian, still on his knees, bowed forward slightly and gestured to himself. “Allow me to introduce myself first. My name is Dende, and this is Mister Popo,” he said, motioning to a short, plump humanoid beside him.

You nodded. “It’s nice to meet you both. I’m (Y/n).” 

Dende returned your smile, though concern remained in his eyes. “You’re very lucky Piccolo brought you to me when he did. Any later, and… well—”

“You would’ve died,” Mister Popo finished calmly. “You were on the very brink. Fortunately, Dende’s healing abilities are exceptional. He was able to remove the obstruction that was slowly killing you.”

Your brows drew together. “Obstruction?”

Dende raised his hand and carefully uncurled his fingers, revealing something small—very small—resting in the center of his palm.

You leaned closer, squinting. “Wait… that? That little thing almost killed me?”

The object was no larger than a pebble—dark, metallic, and unassuming. You looked up at Dende again, and he nodded solemnly.

You let out a short breath, frowning. “God… I really can’t catch a break, can I? First I die for three minutes and now this?”

There was a beat of silence. Dende and Mister Popo shared a startled glance.

Then Dende blinked. “I’m sorry—did you just say you were dead for three minutes?”

Oh.

Shit.

A single sweatdrop slid down the side of your face as your body tensed awkwardly. You gave a stiff little laugh, eyes darting to the side. “Uhm…”

Before you could blurt out some kind of backpedal, you felt it—Piccolo’s arms tightening around you protectively. He drew you in closer against his chest, as if shielding you from the memory itself.

You glanced down at his hand resting against your side before continuing, more carefully this time. “Four months ago… I was shot. I threw myself to protect this little girl—my student—who was about to get shot by this random guy at a festival. I… I took the hit.”

You swallowed hard, gaze distant for a moment as you recalled the blur of panic, pain, and the darkness that had crept into your vision.

“I bled out—badly. So much that my heart stopped. For three minutes, I was gone,” you murmured. “The paramedics revived me… got me into surgery just in time.”

A small silence fell over the courtyard. Dende looked stunned. Mister Popo closed his eyes, his expression unreadable.

Piccolo didn’t say a word—but his grip around you spoke volumes. His hand was splayed over your ribs now, directly over where your heart beat steadily beneath the skin.

Dende was the one to finally cut through the heavy silence, his voice gentle but full of respect. “You did a courageous act in protecting that girl. I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”

You let out a dry chuckle, shaking your head with a tired, crooked smile. “Hell no. I was terrified. But I just… I couldn’t stand by and do nothing, you know?” Your gaze drifted downward, fingers brushing against the fabric of your sweater. “Ever since then, I haven’t felt the same. I can’t fight like I used to. I get winded just from standing too long. Standing. Can you believe that?” You gave a bitter laugh, more to yourself. “Guess it’s the price I pay for doing the right thing.”

Your voice trailed off, the smile on your lips now touched with quiet resignation.

But Dende’s expression suddenly brightened.

“Actually,” he said, sounding pleased, “you should be fully healed now.”

You blinked and looked up. “Huh?”

Dende shifted forward a little, his hands folded neatly in front of him. “I didn’t just heal your injuries. My ability lets me restore the body to its original condition, before trauma or illness. So you won’t have to worry about that weakness or fatigue anymore. Your strength—it’s back.”

You stared at him, stunned. “Wait… seriously?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “You’re as good as new.”

Your lips parted, but no words came. You looked down at your hands in disbelief, turning them over, curling your fingers into loose fists. Now that he mentioned it… your limbs didn’t feel heavy anymore. Your breath was steady. Your muscles felt light and warm—rejuvenated.

Like your body had finally caught up to your spirit.

“…I feel strong,” you whispered. “Like I could punch a wall right now.”

Piccolo gave you a look.

“…I won’t,” you added quickly with a grin. “But still.”

You were still reeling from that revelation when Dende tilted his head slightly, clearly curious. “If you don’t mind me asking…” His eyes flicked from you to Piccolo, a subtle but knowing light in them. “You two seem awfully close. Are you… friends?”

There was a beat.

Then, like a switch flipped, both you and Piccolo flushed.

You smiled shyly, eyes darting off to the side as your hand came to rest lightly over Piccolo’s forearm. His arm, still loosely wrapped around your waist, tensed slightly—then relaxed, like he didn’t quite know what to do with himself.

Piccolo, on the other hand, averted his gaze so hard that it looked like he might burn a hole in the sky. His ears darkened with a hue of violet, and even his cheeks tinted with that unmistakable Namekian flush.

You answered, your voice soft and warm. “Actually… Piccolo and I are together. I’m his girlfriend.”

Thud.

Both Dende and Mister Popo collapsed dramatically, gasping in unison like it was the most scandalous thing they’d heard all week. They sprang upright a second later, gaping.

“You’re dating?!” Dende blurted.

“I did not see that coming,” Mister Popo said, hand to his chin, looking genuinely thrown.

You couldn’t help but burst into a breathless laugh, the sound bubbling up before you could stop it. The expression on their faces was too good. Meanwhile, Piccolo was still looking away—not out of shame, but because he could already see the avalanche of consequences from letting this little secret out into the open.

Damn it.

It was happening. The acknowledgement. The intermingling.

They knew now.

And with them knowing, there was a chance everyone else could find out. Goku would definitely tease. Gohan would try to act mature about it but would give him that smug “I-knew-it” smile. Krillin would not shut up about it. And Roshi—

No.

No way in hell he was letting that old perv anywhere near you.

Piccolo’s jaw tightened subtly. As much as he hated the idea of keeping his life in compartments—one for you and one for the rest of the world—he would do it. If it meant protecting you from the chaos, the scrutiny, the unfiltered idiocy that came with his circle of allies?

He’d keep you in your own sacred place. Away from their nonsense.

Even if that meant hiding the best thing in his life.

Still, he found himself glancing down at you again—and even just looking at you, so alive, so close, so his… it softened the knot of tension in his chest.

“Um… is it that surprising that we’re together?” you asked, brows furrowed in genuine confusion.

Sure, Piccolo wasn’t exactly Mr. Social Butterfly. He had his moments—serious, intense, often too quiet for comfort. You still remember when he first started attending your martial arts classes, standing silently in the back with his arms crossed and that unreadable expression on his face. Students were terrified at first. He didn’t say a word unless absolutely necessary, and even then, it was always something sharp, observant, and usually enough to silence the entire room.

Still, he’d offered good advice—great advice, actually—and over time, the students came to appreciate his insight. Even if he still looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than in a room full of people.

But now?

Both Dende and Mister Popo nodded solemnly in unison, as if you’d just asked whether the sky was blue.

Dende glanced at Piccolo again, his expression caught somewhere between awe and amusement. “Well, Piccolo wasn’t always fond of people. At all. Not until Gohan. But even then, this… this is a pleasant surprise.”

Piccolo exhaled through his nose, his expression neutral but not annoyed. He finally looked over to meet their eyes, the faint violet still lingering on his cheeks. “Alright, that’s enough. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone else about my relationship with (Y/n).”

You tilted your head up from where it rested against his chest, eyes narrowing slightly. “Wait—what? Why would you keep me a secret?” There was no anger in your tone, but you were clearly hurt. “What’s so wrong about meeting your friends?”

Piccolo looked down at you, his frown deepening just a bit, but it wasn’t out of irritation. More like… concern. “Trust me. It’s safer if you don’t meet them under any circumstances.”

You raised a brow, unimpressed. “Piccolo…”

He stared right back, visibly unmoved. “Look, all I can say is… they can be overwhelming.”

You squinted. “Define ‘overwhelming.’”

“Goku will invite himself to dinner and never leave. Krillin will ask too many questions. Tien will be polite but deeply suspicious. Yamcha will flirt with you—openly. And Master Roshi will…” He visibly grimaced. “...well. You don’t want to know.”

You blinked. “...Wow.”

He gave a slow, affirmative nod. “Exactly.”

Mister Popo looked like he wanted to say something but wisely kept it to himself. Dende just smiled awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck.

You let out a slow sigh, your hand finding its way over Piccolo’s. “Okay, fair enough. But just so you know… I can handle a little overwhelming.”

Piccolo’s gaze softened. He didn’t say it aloud, but you could tell he appreciated that. Still, he wasn’t convinced the others wouldn’t cause chaos the second they knew about you.

He'd just have to keep his two worlds separate for now.

For your sake.

And maybe—just maybe—his own sanity.

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(a/n)

I bet you didn't expected to have a surprise encounter with the guardian of earth and Mister Popo, eh? 😏

And the gang has been mentioned!

Hehehe 🤭

I hope ya'll are ready for next weeks chapter, cause it's like... the longest freakin' chapter I've ever written and so much will happen.~

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Part XIX

You are currently reading Part XX

Part XXI Coming soon...

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It Turned into Love Masterlist

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Tag list:

@utakamo

@nerdy-girl-named-pumpkin

@dovah-bee

@thatsbunnysmind

[sweetcollywobbles]

my yandere!leon headcanons so far MDNI

hello! these are just a few headcanons i had about leon as a yandere and a person in general. there is nsfw below the cut, so MINORS AND AGELESS BIOS FUCK OFF ‼ also feel free to send me your thoughts on yandere!leon and your personal headcanons if you have any!!

xx

sfw

⟢ he's self-aware that what he's done to you is horrible. he knows you have every right to hate him, but that doesn't stop him from wishing you would love him back. he never meant to hurt or deceive you, but he's lost and given too much. leon wants someone to come home to, share a meal with, and feel needed and wanted. to receive a sliver of what he's given out. so forgive him if he's being selfish when it comes to you, but he deserves happiness too. so why not help him play house?

⟢ smells of bergamot and lavender. it’s nice and relaxing, but also musky and woodsy. he read somewhere that lavender calms the nerves, so he just absolutely lathers himself in the scent. Sometimes you swear he smells like sleep personified. unfortunately, he’s still a man, so he uses old spice lavender body wash. for cologne, he uses sauvage by dior. 

⟢ normalcy is hard. how can anyone go back into society as if the amount of  horrors you’ve seen, aren’t there? like you’re fine and everything is fine? so, leon has found a pretty good remedy, company. each friday, a sit down dinner with claire, chris, and jill. pizza, wings, and beer every sunday with chris watching whatever football game is on. sometimes they may not know the current standings of teams, but it’s fun to pretend that they do. yet friends can only fill the void so much, maybe with you, the world won’t feel so lonely. 

⟢ he has a major sweet tooth! likes his coffee with cream and sugar, won’t drink his coffee black unless he really needs it. leon will always have room for dessert lmao. has tried to bake, but he just doesn’t got it 💀something just always goes wrong. a big ice cream/frozen yogurt guy. once a month, leon will make a “everything under the kitchen sink” sundae. he’ll dump whatever pints of ice cream into a large bowl and top it off with whatever candy, syrup, and whip topping he has. leon is usually on a very strict diet, so why not splurge?

⟢ leon on his off time has taught himself how to smoke/grill meat. only knows how to make small side dishes to go with the meat that he’s made. mashed potatoes and grilled veggies are usually his two favorite go-to sides. 

⟢ i'm a firm believer that leon's receiving love languages are quality time and words of affirmation with a hint of acts of service. leon works a lot, whether at the office or away on another mission, this poor, tired man is always working. so when he's home be prepared to be attached at the hip. leon also has a lot of self-doubt and guilt about what he's done to you, so by telling him how much you love and appreciate him, it feeds his growing delusion that what he's done is necessary. you need him just as much as he needs you. it also adds to the reassurance when you do small things for him to show your love and appreciation, whether it’s real or not. like cleaning and folding his laundry, making him a cup of coffee in the morning, back rubs after a long day, or even packing his lunch for the day. 

i’m giggling at the thought of leon keeping all the small notes you add to his lunch, reading them when the day gets tough. or maybe he has one or two in a go-bag when he has to take small out-of-state trips for work. 

⟢ building off the one before, he won't admit it but he's clingy. he prefers showers, but will choose a bath if it means he gets a small intimate moment with you in the morning. not in a sexual sense, more in a “let’s bask in each other’s presence”. never sits across from you at a table or booth, always next to you. same thing for the couch. there could be a thousand pillows on the bed, but he always chooses yours. leon will also never lets you sleep facing any windows/doors for security reasons. there is no such thing as personal space with this man.

⟢ since leon is a yandere his reciprocating love language is all of them. he wants you to stay with him, so he is willing to drown you in his love until it's the only thing you'll ever know. i'm going to break this down a little in sections.  

⟡ leon isn't the best when it comes to choosing the words that relay how he feels. the words feel wrong and it leaves him awkward. so any sort of verbal praise from him is rare. the most you would get from him is a thumbs up and a "sure" or a pat on the back with a nod.

(😀👍🏻 <— leon fr) but, put a piece of paper infront of this man and all of a sudden he's writing words that’ll make shakespear blush. it's words so sickly sweet it gives you a toothache. leon really hates himself for not being able to verbal relay this to you, but maybe you can feel what he wants to say?

⟡ leon is just really good at showing you how he feels than telling you. I KNOW THIS MAN WOULD GIVE THE BEST HUGS BECAUSE HE SO DESPERATELY NEEDS ONE. just imagining leon giving you a bear hug, fully enveloping you, and he can't help but hold you a little closer. maybe even holds your head a little more to him. his eyes are closed, soaking up the loving moment, he might even do a little sigh of relief. because with you, he's safe. with you, he's loved. and he just wants you to feel the love he has for you through every action. to feel what he can't say. (SORRY I GOT OFF TRACK!!) leon also always has to be touching you in some way. his favorite places for kisses; nose, cheek, neck, or hand. every morning, when he's holding you close, he'll leave small repeated kisses on your neck until you wake up giggling. not really into lip kisses, but will sometimes start a lazy make out session. just loves holding you whenever he can and making sure you feel loved at all times.

⟡ leon will also do the most for you. having a hard time sleeping? he's awake with you, lightly scratching your back in small circles or holding you close while he's running his fingers through your hair. leon just can't sleep knowing that you're having a hard time sleeping. hungry but don't want to cook? he's in the kitchen cheffing it up. putting love in every plate that he makes you, even if it isn't restaurant quality. i feel like leon will also leave you small notes around the house in places that you would find, but it's little drawings instead of words. in the slow cooker, a picture of a flower. in between the dryer sheets, a bad stick figure drawing of what you think is of you and him. at some random page of the book you're reading, a simple heart. 

⟡ leon loves spending time with you. it doesn't matter what it is, even if you're doing nothing. he wants to do nothing with you. his favorite thing to do with you is listen to you. whether you’re rambling about the latest tv drama he knows nothing about or it’s late at night and you’re reading whatever book you’ve picked up. he loves being in the kitchen when you’re cooking/baking. he’s your dedicated sous chef, so feel free to boss him around like your gordon ramsay. although, i’m so sorry for the amount of “my name is sue” jokes he’ll make. loves watching movies, putting together legos/ doing diy crafts, and playing mario kart. 

I NOTICED THIS WAS GETTING LONG AND IDK IF I EXPLAINED THIS WELL BUT IM HOPING I DID. THIS WAS SOOOO SELF INDULGENT.

⟢ when it comes to pet names, leon will add a “my” to the start of it. he’s possessive and it shows in his actions. will often say: my girl, my sweetheart, my baby, my angel, etc.

nsfw (i’m not good at smut sorry)

⟢ the praise problem does not equate to what happens in the bedroom. i'm sorry, i just simply refuse. a complete 180, he's a talker. whether it's saying something so outlandishly lewd like he wants the whole world to hear or sickly sweet nothings in your ear, this dude will NOT stfu. (and it makes me giggle and kick my feet) I WILL PUT MY LIFE ON THE LINE AND SAY THAT THIS MAN IS ABSOLUTELY FERAL IN BED. he's always stressed. from his job, from the lack of self care, from the past that just never seems to leave him. he's on edge. he has healthy ways of releasing it, but sometimes the gym or extra training isn't enough. 

⟢ which can lead to leon being a little mean in bed. he’s absolutely degrading the life out of you while also giving you whiplash with the praise that he gives you as well. leon is a lot more aggressive and at some point you’re just a fleshlight to him. spanking, choking, biting, spitting, you name it, it is on the table. also licking whatever drool comes out of his mouth makes him lose his mind fr.

⟢ i'm not good at writing smut, but i do have an idea of what i think leon's favorite sex positions would be. the first one would be mating press. it's extremely intimate and it allows him to be close to your face and neck than the regular missonary position. again, he really gets off knowing that he's the one getting you off. another postition would be cowgirl, it gives him full view of your chest and face, except you're not really riding him. again, he just using you as a fleshlight like giving you the perception that you’re in control. another would be you on your belly and him basically putting you in a headlock. IDK WHAT IT’S CALLED BUT IF YKYK. and leon just saying the most down right atrocious things in your ear would make me go crazy. 

YOU’RE GONNA SIT THERE AND TELL ME YOU DON’T WANT HIS HUGE ARMS AROUND YOUR NECK, YOU’RE INSANE. 

⟢ last but not least, ✨moaning✨. i like to think that he’s a grunter and whiner at the same time. idk if that makes any sense? he’s loud but not obscenely loud. but sometimes when he overstimulates himself, he’s a complete whiner like lovi (again if ykyk).