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bi-writes · 2 months ago

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anatomy of us (final) | alpha!ghost x f!omega!reader

type: limited series, final part (14.6k), AO3 in an attempt to tame an unruly alpha, you are given. he did not come with warning labels. but neither did you.

series cw: reader described as plus-sized/curvier, alpha/beta/omega dynamics + universe, dark!simon, mature language and content, suggestive language and content, graphic depictions of murder + violence, military criticism, protective!simon, dubcon (but reader does consent), possessiveness, dom/sub dynamics, size kink, praise kink, unprotected piv, cumplay, oral (fem!receiving), allusions to poly!141, this part contains minor physical assault against reader (not by simon) 18+

PART 1 ⏤ PART 2 ⏤ PART 3

You make a deal with the devil.

Simon was right, as much as you don’t want to admit it. You cannot fight your omega. She is stupid, and she is careless, but she controls some of the parts of you that you have never been able to reach. She can kill you with it. You’ve heard of these kinds of things, the places omegas can take you—a spiral so far into yourself, that the only protection your brain has for itself is to turn off.

Brain-dead. No signal. In an effort to conserve life, it turns itself off, but it doesn’t think about the fact that there will be no one there to turn itself back on. In the fight to save itself, it self-destructs, and there is nothing to do but cut the cord.

She can do that to you, if she really wanted to. Feral enough, she can tie a noose around your neck and pull it, and you will have no choice but to fall into yourself. You cannot fight her, but you cannot love her either; so you make a deal.

If she sweetens her scent to Simon’s pack, you will let Simon in. You won’t fight the ticking timer in your head. You’ll let yourself relax. You’ll give her the control to let herself indulge, since you never have before, and all she has to do is make sure every one of those alphas are at your heel. She needs to be good—she can’t half-ass this kind of thing. You need a leash around each of their necks, and you need it to cut off their oxygen when you pull on it. If someone gets loose, you’ll find a way to suffocate her for good. You swear it, promise it, tell her you’re going to drown her even if it drowns you, too—

I can do it, I can do it, I can do it.

Eager little thing, she is. Sweet as honey, but deadly like poison. She’s a carnivorous plant, and ever since you stopped taking your meds, her roots have grown into you—attaching to your veins, tainting your blood, weaving itself into your brain stem like a cancerous cell. You won’t let her take it all. If she gives you a little, you’ll give, too, and that is how the balance can be kept.

You’ll make a man-eater out of her. You think she’ll prefer the taste, and perhaps it will dull the sharpness of her teeth when they sink back into you again.

She lets go of you for now. When you feel her teeth pull back from behind your eyes, you’re gasping for breath, and there is a great weight hanging over your back. You’re dragging someone along with you, leaving behind a trail of blood and hard bootprints, and you can feel the adrenaline that’s been keeping you going slowly start to melt away. You have a pounding headache. There’s something in your mouth that tastes rotten. There’s something that you’re carrying that you’re going to drop any moment as your muscles give out on you.

You smell him before anything else. The stench of him hits your nose so hard that you flinch. You cough, spit dripping from your mouth, and you breathe a mouthful of his pain and his anger. It stings, his scent, but your omega recognizes him enough that you find it in yourself to keep your feet going as you hold him up with a heavy arm around your shoulders.

“Kitty.”

“It’s…I-I got it, Simon. Just hold onto me. We’re almost there.”

Your eyes water with relief when you see Johnny’s terrible hair and Gaz’s dark eyes. Their faces fall in tandem, and you cry with exhaustion when Gaz slings Simon’s other arm around him and grunts as he takes the excruciating weight off of you. You fall, your knees giving out, but just before you hit the ground, Johnny’s got his big arms around your waist, and he’s pulling you back onto your feet. You dig your nails into his forearms, finding your footing, and you lean back against him as you watch Gaz get Simon onto his back so he look at the blood that still wets his mask.

You don’t really remember making it back to the plane. Every time you blinked, the setting was new. Your nose buried in Johnny’s neck—shhh, it’s alright, bonnie, he’s right here, we’re here. Your hands finding Simon’s, squeezing, not stopping to cry until he squeezed back. The whir of a helicopter. The gravel beneath your feet, kicking up with all the boots, dust in your nose. A ramp closing behind you, and then the constant whir of the jet engine. Johnny drags you to sit, and you can still taste blood in your mouth.

Who’s the man-eater?

When you open your mouth and reach in, you pick out something stringy from between your teeth. With a tremble to your bottom lip, you realize it’s flesh. Viscera and muscle, blood and skin, flooded into the crooks of your mouth and notched between your molars, against your gums. Your vision goes blurry, and you realize it’s just more tears when they fall warm and salty down your face. You taste old pennies as it carries blood from between your lips as they come down your cheeks, and you lean forward to spit, splattering wet saliva and dark pink onto the floor of the plane. You cough, wiping your face with the back of your hand, but then your hands shake when you realize they are covered in blood. You look down and see much of the same—your shirt, your jacket, your tact vest, the entire front of your body has splatters of dark red.

“Oh—God—”

You feel sick. It’s all coming up, all of it, you ate something foul, and now you need to be rid of it—

“None o’tha’ now.”

You sob, jerking your head to the voice in front of you. Knelt down, Captain Price is bending to meet your eyes. Your hands tremble, and you shake your head, but he just kisses his teeth and reaches into his vest to retrieve a rag. He unravels it, reaching for your hand, and you give it to him easily as he draws you closer so he can wipe at your face. He uses a canteen to get it wet, and when he wipes your face again, the rag is soaked in red.

You’ve killed before, in some sense, but never in this way. Everything you have ever done in the service has always been tactical and removed—firing a weapon from hundreds of yards away, clicking a button and watching some screen as you blew a building to dust. Even a phone call, you think you made once, and although you weren’t pulling any triggers, the location you gave them would end up on some list somewhere. You never felt good about it, but you didn’t see the aftermath, not up close. You kept your hands physically clean, and in that way, you told yourself that it was acceptable. That you were good.

Forgivable.

It is the first time you see yourself as animal. Sharp teeth, a static mind, driven by aggression and the feeling of a threat. Someone stepped into your space, challenged your territory, and now that your omega has her teeth in you, you couldn’t stop her.

You killed a man.

But he tried to kill mine.

“I did that—” You hiss, and the agony on your face is palpable. It’s in your scent, and it clouds the small plane. You can see the scrunch of John’s face when it hits him head-on, and he shakes his head when you keep talking. Rambling. Babbling about I killed him, I killed him, what did I do—?

“Look at me, Kit,” John says. He says it with his chest, and your omega freezes when she hears the only thing she really understands. You blink, bottom lip still wobbling, but you quiet. When you meet John’s eyes, all you can read is his frustration. He looks tired. He looks doubtful. He looks worried. “What did you do?”

“I killed him.”

“That’s right,” John murmurs. “And if you hadn’t, he would’ve killed you.”

His explanation is clinical and matter-of-fact. You aren’t speaking to a man, not a normal one—you’re speaking to Captain John Price, who has enough confirmed kills to make any immediate superior nervous. The only reason John Price is not a rank higher is because that means sitting at a desk, and that just wouldn’t do for a man like this. Not for one this hungry. Not for one with eyes like that and hands that fidget the way they do. There is no way this man understands you; what you have done is what he does before breakfast. Licks his fingers afterwards even, just to savor the way it tastes.

You shake your head, “I mauled him. L-Like an animal, I—”

“You survived,” John explains. He tilts his head to the side, and he sucks you right in. “What the fuck did you think this was, Kit, hmm? Think we don’t get our hands dirty? Think the shit we do is easy, tha’ it? No—look at me.” Your eyes are wild. There’s something terrible going on in your head, and you can’t shake it. Something awful is happening to you. The you that you know is trying to understand how easy it was to do such a horrible thing. The other part of you, the one you’ve been ignoring your whole life, will sleep just fine knowing her mate is alive and well. John snarls a little, and your trembling hands find his vest and hold onto it for stability. You try to ignore the fact that the broadness of his chest dwarfs your hands, but your omega notices.

Your hands curl there, latching on, and while your omega knows this isn’t your alpha, she sighs a little at the feeling of him anyways. Stability, authority, the way he takes control—he feeds her well. Even if you cannot do what’s necessary, she can, and John and his alpha know this feeling well. It’s why he’s still alive. It’s why he’s still here.

Justified murder. Sanctioned killers. The lesser evil. Joining their pack means you are one of them now—does that mean swallowing these half-truths, too?

“You did what you were trained to do. You were backed into a corner, and you used every last weapon you had. You saved yourself, and you saved Simon, and you did exactly what a soldier is supposed to do. Repeat after me—Look at me, Kit! Keep your fuckin’ eyes on me, and repeat after me—I did what I was trained to do.”

You dig your nails into the flesh under his shirt. It barely gives, and John doesn’t flinch. Your eyes on his are so intense. This is a man that has been in your place often, for longer. He wears his experience in his eyes and in the careful movements he makes in the field. There is no hesitance when John Price makes a decision. He’s fought too hard and seen too much to ever do anything with half his heart, half his mind. The lines on his face tell a story—he isn’t this old because he hides, he’s this old because he knows exactly what to do and when to do it. He wears his alpha like armor, and they work together, in parallel, to get each other home.

Your fingers shake a little less when you feel his thick hands resting on your thighs, tugging you just that much closer.

“Say it. That’s a fucking order,” John says again. His scent is warm. It softens your insides. His eyes will never give you the forgiveness you seek, but they will forgive you anyways, and maybe that’s all you really want. Maybe it’s all you really need.

Tell me what I’ve done isn’t wrong. Absolve me. Put your teeth to my neck and tell me that everything I’ve done was going to happen anyways.

“I…” Your voice falters. Your foreheads touch, just for a moment, and your breath comes out with barely even a stutter. “I-I did what…I did what I was trained t-to do.”

“Again.”

“I did…I did what I was trained to do.”

When John stands, your eyes follow. Your head tilts back, and you blink up at him with watery eyes, and there is no mistaking the hand that comes up to cup the side of your face. You look just like the feral thing you fear you are. The cracks of your lips are still dark with blood. It’s still stained along your skin, a thick kind of war paint that you wear apprehensively, but John knows what he sees.

It’s been a long time since he’s had an omega this close. They are distractions. Giving Simon an omega meant needing to accept her into their pack. A pack of four alphas is unusual. No betas, no omegas, just four dog-like alphas that followed each other anywhere. They had an unspoken, silent agreement to keep their pack this way. Betas waste time, and omegas complicate things. They are self-sufficient, John is sure of this fact. They have never needed anyone but each other.

The moment you set foot on base, John felt it—the balance tipping. Simon had seemed indifferent to Kate’s proposition. He had never voiced his desire to claim an omega or to have a mate; his life had been a reflection of how wrong even the most natural of relationships could go, and he was not eager to try it his own way. As soon as you arrived and were tucked into your room, the change in Simon was immediate. You were here, and you would be his mate, and while Simon had never been privy to what it meant to really court an omega, his instincts took over.

John knows why. Nothing in Simon’s life had ever really been his. His entire family was dead, and even his life was not his own—he followed orders. He lived because they allowed him to, and he would die when they told him to die. The simplicity worked for him, and John never questioned that. Having nothing to lose made Simon fearless and smart. He trusted Simon to do what was necessary, and even when Simon knew he was the sacrificial lamb, he never said anything—all that came through on the radio was a curt copy tha’.

Kate gave him something, something soft and pretty, with a bite. Kate mentioned something about her being special, but John is having trouble remembering why. Something about this is the one I can’t have, but it’s white noise in his mind now. He used to think it was about control—if Kate could take you away and give you back, it might give her leverage over Simon, but he knows that’s just a fleeting idea.

No alpha in their pack would let them take you away. Not now. Not anymore. John wasn’t sure before; he had half a mind to tell Simon that this new dynamic wasn’t working, but then he heard your voice breaking over the radio, and then he saw you hauling Simon’s giant body covered in someone else’s blood with nothing but instinct driving you forward. The look in your eyes—he knows what that is, he recognized it as soon as he saw it. Someone tried to take Simon from you, and you did not let that happen. Visceral, that kind of killing. Tormenting. Immutable. It will be with you forever, but so will Simon now.

Just like that, you are accepted. Even John won’t turn you away. Couldn’t. It’s not possible. Fate has fuck-all to do with this kind of pairing.

There is a popular belief that mates are not chosen carefully—when you see them, when you smell them, it is known. The hierarchy of society that is chosen by the presentation of your own self, decided by nothing but your DNA, is divinely driven when it comes to how you pair. Your mate was already decided for you at birth, and you will discover them in your own time, because fate will have it so.

That is a lie. John won’t believe it. Simon certainly will never call this that. Kate propped a door open, and Simon simply decided that yes, he gets to have his cake and eat it, too. The waiting game is over. The chosen misery of not having an omega to knot ends. Simon knows when an opportunity presents itself, and he knows exactly when to take it. It’s pulsing under John’s fingers—a strong pulse you have, the gland just under your ear beating hot and thick under his thumb like it taunts him.

What if he leaned over and sunk his teeth there? What then?

She will never be warm enough. Her food will never be good enough. She’ll always sound distressed. The water in the showers will always be too cold. There are too many lights. She will never have enough pillows, enough blankets, they will forever torture her in a space too small, she’ll never be truly happy. They will always look for the void, for the empty spots, and they will forever try to occupy them. Fill them. Make you happy.

John understands. Maybe even from the moment he met you.

The smell of you. The sight of your doe eyes, your soft skin, the clear distress you were in—fuck, he had forgotten why omegas were kept so far apart on bases like this. Just one whiff, and John fought hard not to break right through his grip on the doorway. Enough to tempt a man; to stuff her away in some box, tuck her somewhere dark, keep her safe, sound, fed, warm, fat, happy, pleasured. A good man would be rightfully tempted by it, even with the claim over you, even with Simon’s scent sticky against your skin.

John’s alpha is not immune to that innate desire. He might not be your mate, but the cry for help is all the same, and so is the itch that his alpha wants to scratch. There is an omega in need—we have to help her.

Looking at you now, he couldn’t stop himself. Those big, wet eyes of yours, the sound of your cries. Your omega is smart. She curls your tears and your whimpers in just a way that makes every alpha in your vicinity stiffen. They all can hear it. They all can hear the clawing of her blunt nails. They all can smell the need to be comforted. Your omega is a magnet, and she’s strong; stronger than John is used to, and he thinks it’s because you don’t know how to control her.

When Simon shuts the door on his room later that evening, John isn’t the only one lingering. He sees their shadows, his sergeants, watching the door until that lock clicks. They all meet eyes, but they say nothing to each other. Perhaps it’s just another unspoken rule.

Not yet. Patience is rewarded.

Simon refused medical, naturally. He slumps onto the floor, back against the wall, and you won’t sit on the bed in your clothes, so you sit down next to him. Your knees wobble a little, and you have to hold onto the wall to sit to keep yourself from falling over as you slide down against it. You lean your head back against the wall, blinking up at the ceiling. There’s a fluorescent light that flickers, making you flinch, and then it goes eerily silent in the room. You feel nothing; it’s blissfully still, only the sounds of barely-there breathing, but then it hits you like a crashing wave. When you start to cry, Simon moves, shaking his head. He huffs, low sounds of disapproval as he shifts next to you.

“I can’t listen to you. Cryin’ like tha’.”

You don’t think he means that. From your peripheral, you can see the way his gloved hands curl into tight fists against his thighs. It’s taking everything inside of him not to reach for you. The need to touch you is something that must be burning under that thick skin of his. You hope it fucking hurts. You hope your omega is making it itch and sting so badly—you hope the discomfort makes him dig his nails so hard into his palms that it makes him bleed even more.

“I hate you.” It comes out of you too fast. You say it without thinking, but it comes out shaky and quiet. You feel defeated. You were someone else only hours ago; you were prepared to do anything for him, and all he can say is that he doesn’t want to hear you cry?

“Didn’t ask for you to do tha’. To do those things. I had it.”

You turn your head to look at him. Your guilt turns to anger. Your face drops into a tearful scowl, and your bottom lip trembles with it.

“What?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself.”

The fucking audacity of this two-faced asshole of an alpha—

“No, I need to h-hear you say that again. I need to hear you say you fucking had it. I need to hear you say that you had it after getting shot in the fucking head!” You cry. You lean towards him, glaring up at him. He refuses to look at you, just keeps his eyes on the ceiling. “Look at me if you’re going to lie to me.”

He doesn’t. He just breathes deep, angry purrs that you don’t believe. You sit up on your knees, facing him.

“Coward,” you spit. “Is that what you’re gonna put in your report? That you had it, and an insubordinate rookie put your life in danger? I can’t wait to see it, Lieutenant, I cannot wait to see what kind of bullshit story you come up with. You make me so fucking sick. I can’t believe I even saved your life, cause what good does it do me?”

Simon finally turns to look down at you. Even sitting, he’s still much bigger, much taller, and he narrows his eyes. Deadly. Hateful. You are caught in a line, but you are prepared for it.

“Careful,” he warns. You gather up some saliva and spit onto the floor next to you. You wipe your wet mouth after, running your tongue over your teeth. Simon eyes the blood that still stains your mouth. Instead of horrifying him, there’s a rumble that happens deep within his chest that he cannot control.

“Don’t test me, Simon,” you throw right back at him. “He’s only dead because he doesn’t get the satisfaction of killing you. If anyone’s gonna kill you, it’s gonna be me.”

A flame that becomes a torch. That’s what you and Simon are. You do not complement each other, you set each other ablaze. That’s what it feels like, anyway.

Your faces crash together in a hard, nasty mess. His mask is first, shoved up over his nose, and then his mouth is on yours. You scramble to get undressed, fumbling to get your tact vest off as Simon’s hands paw at your cargos. You hear fabric tear, but you don’t register it. All you can think about is getting naked enough to get close enough to him so you can feel the pulse of his heartbeat against your skin.

He’s eating you; as close as he can get, anyway. His teeth anchor into your throat, scraping the delicate flesh, and then his tongue is wetting the blood that’s still on your skin and sucking it into his mouth. The taste of torn-apart alpha wasn’t apparent to you, but it must be to him—the way he’s snarling, biting, slobbering as he makes you his dinner plate.

“My pretty omega,” Simon growls. It comes from deep within him, a drawl that makes your pupils dilate. Whenever his alpha shows his face, it’s never for long, but it makes your entire body shake. You don’t really remember taking all your clothes off, but Simon’s gloved hands are on your tits, and he’s thumbing at your nipples, licking over his teeth, snapping his jaws as if he wants to bite you again. “Mine. Mine to fuck, mine to protect, mine to play with.”

“Fuck you.”

“Your heat…I can taste it,” he continues. It’s in your sweat, in your scent, he can feel it boiling under your skin, begging to come out. The way your eyes shift in and out of something, it’s the cloudy haze of it hanging over your head. “Is that how you got your leverage over ‘im? Did he get a whiff of you and forget who he was?”

“No,” you pant, slipping your hand down his pants. You cup the underside of his cock, and he hisses, putting his hand over yours and pressing you harder against him. He squeezes, and your fingers wrap around him, tugging gently. He’s pulsing hot under your touch, and you move to shove his pants lower as your knees fall open. “I saw his gland. It was so…” You falter, whining. “I didn’t think. I just did.”

“My omega,” he sighs, shaking his head. Simon grips the side of your head by your hair, and he shakes your head as he forces you to look at him. Dark eyes. Blonde lashes. A face so terrible and so beautiful and so horrifyingly yours. “You must be mine, you know tha’.”

The quickness to violence. Your unapologetic nature. Because I will do anything for him, because nothing is too much, because death is inevitable if someone gets in my way—

You do. You know it. It’s as true as your nature, as true as the voice in your head, as evident as the bones under your skin and the hair on your head and the beating heart under your ribs that feels like it’s about to break right through. Simon will put his teeth on your gland, and he’s going to bite there, and he’s going to steal everything you are and tuck it inside. You have this disgusting image of the puffed skin around his scars opening up and attaching you to him, bleeding you of any life you still have until you are nothing more than a shriveled, dry cavity.

I won’t let that happen. He might have you, but I have him, too.

When you kiss, you dig your nails into his scalp. You feel him in your guts when he slips inside, pussy opening up and squeezing right back down to keep him in. You whimper, drool spilling out of your mouth, and Simon is there to lick it right back up as he hikes your hips up and grinds into you. It’s not the worst place you’ve ever fucked, but the hard ground under your head won’t feel nice in the morning. He must know, somehow, because one of his big hands cups the back of your head, pillowing his harsh thrusts as he gives it to you good. He’s there, right there, right against your sweet spot, and you drag your nails down his back as he finds it so easily. Simon knows you—he knows you so well. His alpha knows your body, knows how to make you speechless and stupid, and you hate him and love him all the same. The emotions are so hot in your throat, wanting to come right up. You want to scream at him, you want to tear the flesh right off of his face, but you will always stop yourself with delicate hands. You will always want to save him. You can beat him and curse at him and cry all you like, but when there is a bullet that goes flying, you know you will throw yourself in front of him.

There is little safety in this world for you. You will always be nothing more than your body to others, but here, underneath him, clinging to him as he fucks you right into that plane of existance between pleasure and pain, you are you. You are more yourself than you have ever been. Half of yourself doesn’t belong to you, and yet he’s brushing your hair back and kissing you hot, and he’s saying your name, and you feel more like yourself than maybe you ever will be.

You love him. You love him. You love him.

Do you love him because you love him? Do you love him because she loves him? Do you love him because there is nowhere else to go? Because he is your only means of survival? Because if you don’t love him, you might fall into yourself like a dying star and let her finish you off?

Maybe that’s why you hate him so much. You hate him because not loving him is impossible. You hate him because you want him to prove how horrible of an alpha he really is, and yet his hand is taking the brunt of the pain, and he kisses like he’s sorry, and the scent of him relaxes you like nothing ever has before. You’re safe here with him. You always will be. It makes you so fucking sick.

“Please,” he groans. He whispers it against your cheek. His cock feels so good, hips grinding against your clit, and he’s so warm. “Let me ‘ave it. Give it t’me, omega.”

“Beg me for it.”

“Don’t be difficult.”

“Bite me.”

You cry when he sinks his teeth into your jaw. It stings, in a good way. It nearly comes out, when you come for him. You nearly say it. You would mean it, if you did, but it takes everything in you to keep it down, to swallow it back inside, to keep it mashed under your tongue and sour between your teeth.

Your back bows when he comes. He always comes so much. You love the way it feels. You love how it can’t stay inside, too full, dribbling between your thighs. You love the sound it makes when Simon keeps moving—nasty, messy, lewd, a slick, slick, slick that makes you dizzy all over again. You could come again just listening to it, you could come again just hearing his choked breaths in your ear. He smells so good. You put your face into the crook of his neck and take a deep breath, and you whimper as it curls into the tendrils of your brain. Intoxicating—like you’re high. Right from the source, Simon smells delicious. You think love makes him smell better. You think love makes your omega even more feral, more than she already is, and the heat that stays in your chest tells you all you need to know.

You’re at the edge of that cliff. You’re about to fall over.

“S-Simon—”

Your voice pulls his eyes back to yours. He uses his hands, brushing your hair out of the way so he can look at you better. You cough, still a little delirious from your orgasm, but you’re coherent enough to communicate with him. You don’t need to say anything, you know that. Simon will look at you, and he will know.

“I have you,” he says. You knew he would say that, and yet you weren’t comforted until he did say it. “It’s happening, innit?”

I’m here, so close, I’m coming—

You just nod. He sits up, picking you up off the floor. All the blood in your head rushes down, and you hold on around his neck as he hoists you up around his hips. You press your face to his, cheek to cheek, and he carries you to the bathroom. When he turns the shower on, he sits you onto the toilet, and you watch him strip from there. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen him, all of him.

He’s a canvas of war. Your breath stops in your throat as he turns to shuck his trousers off all the way and steps out of them. He’s covered in marks. Fleshy, pink spots that must be from third degree burns litter his left leg. They make a map of rivers along it, spreading out to his ankle. His other leg must have been slashed to bits. There’s long lines of it all, deep flesh wounds that run along the length of his thigh and his calf. Someone made a knife sharpener out of his skin, and there are dips where the flesh could not be replaced. Your eyes scan over his torso. Simon is the picture of strength. He’s big and beefy, with a solid stomach, and he just looks heavy, but even that isn’t enough to fill out the mess of his skin. Gunshots, knife wounds, cigarette burns scattered along his arms. Simon’s body wears his history like a bright neon sign. He doesn’t cover up because he’s ashamed of it—he covers himself because he doesn’t want people to ask.

He doesn’t want people to know what used to be.

You stand up on wobbly legs, putting your hands on his lower stomach, pudgy to the touch but rigid against pressure. Your fingers wander, smoothing over the lines and taking in the landscape of his body. Simon stiffens just a little, but his breaths even when you lay your cheek against his bare chest. You shut your eyes, and the only sounds are the water from the shower and the beating of his heart. It pumps strong—Simon’s blood sounds thick, tar and honey.

Under the hot water, you watch as the water runs red. You watch it carefully until it runs clear, and then you look up at Simon. He’s already looking at you.

“I’m scared,” you tell him honestly. You are afraid. You try so hard not to be, and you know deep down that your omega’s true nature is to protect you, but you’re afraid. Trusting her means giving up control, real control. Even if it’s only for a period of time, it’s long enough that you are so fucking terrified. You don’t know what to expect. No one ever taught you what to expect, no one ever told you what would happen, what you would feel. You’ve been drowning your omega so long, you are afraid of what she will do once she comes out—kicking, screaming, clawing, burning, biting. You’ve been doubtful and spiteful all your life, and now you have to just hand yourself over?

It’s mother nature; and she is such a bitch.

“Do you trust me?” Simon asks lowly. You touch his face, and he bends to keep his eyes to yours. You see nothing but honesty in them, and that terrifies you even more.

“I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

“That’s not wot I asked. I need ta hear you say it.”

“Yes,” you sniffle. “Yes, Simon. I trust you.”

When Simon tucks you into bed, you fluff the pillows. You keep doing that, picking up pillows and shaking them, tucking them into new corners until it looks…right. You stop when you’ve got the blanket scrunched up in your arms, and you blink up at Simon who’s standing by the side of the bed.

You’re making a nest. A God-awful, terrible, messy shitload of a nest, but you’re making it. You put the blanket down gently, pushing it into the corner, and then you play with your fingers in your lap, twisting your hands over each other nervously as you look around the bed. The shadow comes over you before you feel him at your back. Heat like no other, and then you feel his fingers on your arm, tracing a line from your shoulder to your elbow.

“Wot is it?” He leans over your shoulder, and you feel his lips touch the side of your head. “Wot’s wrong?”

“I need more,” you say softly. “More things. Uh…” You look over your shoulder, and his lips brush over your cheek. “Some of your clothes, maybe?”

He drops them beside you. A couple shirts, a couple hoodies, and when you hold them up for him, you hold each other’s eyes as he scents them for you, rubbing the fabric against his wrists and along his neck before you find a spot for them in the pile. It’s haphazard and not at all neat, but it’s the first time you’ve done anything of the sort. It doesn’t feel perfect, but it feels like yours, and you will always remember the look in Simon’s eyes when you invited him into your nest.

It’s shockingly intimate. There’s something so warm, something so lovely, about tugging on his arm and pulling him into the space you’ve made. He climbs over you, sinking into the blankets, and you lay back with him into the warmth. You curl up into his side, closing your eyes, and when he hooks his forearm around the small of your waist, you go with him.

It is close. You can taste it. It will be easy with him here, with her.

I know what to do. It’s okay. When you wake up, you’ll be new again. I promise. I’ll make you new. I’ll make you better. I’ll have them, I swear it. It’s okay.

It’s okay.

Okay.

You dream in a haze. The visions spill like water, crashing and moving, but you never get to focus on them long enough to see what’s really happening. You feel dirt under your nails and between your fingers, can feel the rocks cutting up your feet as you try and climb a high mountain. When you come to the top, you feel your feet slip, but someone grabs onto your wrists at the last second and pulls you upwards.

When you blink awake, all you can feel is the heat. It licks up your spine and curdles there at your back. You’re drenched in sweat, and it’s hard to breathe. The world looks like your dreams, but you can blink into focus. When you do, Simon is there, leaning over you. You whine a little, and when you rub your thighs together, you nearly choke at the feeling of how damp they are, sweat and slick staining your skin and the mattress beneath you. You didn’t expect to feel coherent. You do feel out of your body, but not in a frightening way. Maybe it’s your omega, or maybe it’s Simon, but all you feel is this immense pressure in your chest, something telling you to find and seek.

Alpha. Alpha. Alpha.

“I’m ‘ere,” Simon murmurs. He passes a thumb over your forehead, pushing some of the sweat out of your eyes. Your throat is dry, and you croak a little as you smack your lips together and arch your back up into him. “Right ‘ere.”

“Hurts,” you whisper. It does. There’s a pain in your belly that aches, and when Simon presses a hand there, you whine, immediately sensitive. There’s something missing inside of you, and your omega is singing for it to be filled. “Simon, it hurts—”

“Gonna make it better,” he says against your lips. When he kisses you, it feels like drinking fresh spring water. His saliva hydrates you, the taste of him satiating some deep-seated hunger that you’ve never felt before. It isn’t enough, but it’s good, tastes good, and you grab at him from all angles, trying to bring him closer. “Fuck, my pretty omega…” He gets between your legs, prying them apart, and you moan when you see the strings of slick that follow the motion. He seats himself there and pushes you backwards. “Present for me, kitty. Show me.”

You’ve never heard the phrase, but your omega knows what to do. She draws your hand down and uses your fingers to spread your puffy folds apart, and Simon sighs through his nostrils, hard and heavy, when he sees you spread open for him. He bends down, nudging your hands away, and when he closes his mouth over your pussy, you cry with relief. He groans. You are so warm, and you are positively sopping. He swallows mouthfuls, and it is still not enough—he bends your knees and hugs your thighs and tries hard to taste more, but it’s difficult.

“Simon,” you whimper. “Simon—” You choke on a moan as he tightens his grip. His fingers dig into you, bruising and hard, and you cry big, salty tears as he slips his tongue inside of you and fucks you with it. Soft, snarling licks, a devouring that you know is nothing short of primal. Your omega is stepping through the door, and his alpha is clawing at its fence, and soon they will meet, and you can do nothing about it but hope that they don’t kill each other.

Never. I can do it. You’ll see. I’ll make it so good.

“Alpha.”

The word resets him. He finally removes himself from between your thighs, dog-like expression on his face as looks up at you. Tongue out, drooling, that dead, loving look in his eyes. You cup his cheeks, drawing him up, and when you kiss, you note how sweet it is. How sweet you are. Natural pheromones that your body emits, something so luscious that her alpha cannot refuse it. It really is brain-swelling. You start to feel the spiral, a buzzing in the back of your head that is starting to get louder and louder and louder. Once you come for the first time, it’s like tinnitus. She’s here. She’s in your head.

She is not going anywhere.

It’s my turn now. I’ll give you back after I get what I want.

It must be revenge that she wants. Revenge against you—for every time that you’ve taped her mouth shut, every time you’ve scruffed her by the nape of her neck and forced her to quiet down. Revenge against Simon—for acting like he could do anything but submit to you, for being a right asshole just to fall at your feet for a taste of your cunt. Revenge against everything—for being underestimated, for being ignored.

You don’t know how long it’s been. A few days must have passed by now, but time slips through your fingers like water. You close your eyes to sleep, and when you open them again, it’s to fuck your pretty alpha until you need to sleep all over again. You wake up in increments of lucidness, feeling Simon tip your head back and feed you small bites of something savory or a few sips of water. You lick into his mouth after, purring as you rub your nose against his jaw, and he always presses back tenderly. Smiling as he fixes his fingers under your jaw, murmuring something soft into your ear, slipping a few thick fingers inside of you to make you relax for him.

He’s underneath you right now. Your hands are wrapped tight against the headboard, and you’re straddling his face. His thick arms are hooked over your thighs, and you whine as you draw your hips back and forth against his tongue. He eats hot and heavy, his nose and mouth wet with slick as he alternates between flattening his tongue for you to ride and forcing you to sit still as he pushes his tongue inside of you and swirls it all sloppy.

You suck it out of his mouth after, like you always do. You sink down until you’re straddling his thick middle, your mouth against his as you kiss with gritted teeth, all giggly and wet. Simon is a good kisser; the mask shouldn’t fool anyone. You reach down as he does, feeling around until you cup the underside of his cock and guide it inside of you. His knot swells as soon as you sit on it, and Simon grips you under your thighs, spreading your legs a little more until his balls are nestled between them. You whine when his knot catches, already pulsing as your mouth drops open and your eyes roll back into your head.

Simon’s always been big—but the hormones he’s been producing in response to your heat only make him thicker, and his knot nearly splits you in two. You love it, and you chase it all the same.

He hasn’t claimed you yet. You don’t remember how many times you’ve taken his knot, or how many places you’ve fucked in this room, but he won’t do it. His teeth have just grazed the spot, teasing, but he never seals the bond. You cried about it a few times, in between rounds, but he just stuffed you full again to distract you. It doesn’t always shut you up, but then he’ll hook his forearm around your neck and nearly suffocate you as he comes deep, and you’re so delirious, you forget about it for awhile.

Your omega doesn’t though. Your gland protrudes, swelling, and she wants him so badly to claim you. Half of her job is to get him to do it—she’s supposed to take his knot and entice his claim, that’s what she’s made for, and she doesn’t want to come out of this empty-handed.

I’ll give you back after I get what I want.

She fixates on his mouth. She draws you to it, making you cup his face and lick over his teeth. She makes you shove his face into your neck, makes you smother him in your scent, but Simon, to no surprise, holds his composure. He’s too capable and too aware, even in his moments of staticky pleasure, to give into her all the way.

It’s a few days later when you start to feel less out of control. Your omega still tugs at the strings; slick still pools between your thighs, the heat of your body is still making you sweat, but Simon is in focus, and you are aware as he ruts into you. Your hands cup his cheeks, and you kiss tenderly as he grinds into you with shallow thrusts, low grunts from deep within his chest making you whimper.

“I-I love you so much, Simon.”

It’s instinctual. You couldn’t stop yourself. You’re crying, so overwhelmed with sticky pleasure and soft insides.

Simon knows it’s the same when he falters. His elbows give out, his mouth grazes your jaw, and before he can think twice, his teeth sink right into the skin under your ear.

Now that is fate—Simon had set his sights on you. There was never going to be any other ending.

You cry out. Your eyes widen, bugged out, and your pupils dilate. You dig your nails into his back, right up against his other scars, and you feel blood under your nails as he presses his hips to yours and comes, more than he has before. Your toes curl, your back arches off the bed, and you choke on squeaking gasps as he shakes his head a little, sinking his teeth in deeper, holding himself there.

Animal. Bear. Hook, line, sinker—there was something that once belonged to you, but now the seal has been broken, and the golden ichor inside bleeds, and Simon takes it into his mouth like its the essence of life. Maybe it is. There will be no one else. There will never be another omega. There will never be another person that tastes the way you do, that fucks the way you do, there will never be another cunt that opens up like yours and swallows his knot just like this.

Simon’s been at death’s door far too many times. It is only now that he thinks he’ll be afraid to see it again.

You go blind for a few moments. You see spots, glittering ones, and something trickles from the base of your spine all the way to the top of your head. It feels like you’re floating—as if your blood inflated, picking you up, taking you somewhere warm and safe.

A cocoon. A protective blanket. The space against Simon’s chest, the place you’ve made under his skin.

When he pulls back to look at you, your blood between his teeth, you feel your omega come right back. You thought it was over; you thought the days of dreamy fucking and scalding sweat and mindblowing orgasms was done.

Not even close.

You’re alone when you wake up. Your eyes blink, adjusting to the soft yellow light of Simon’s desk lamp. You can smell him—he’s nearby, you hear some noises, but he’s not in your line of sight, and that makes your insides clam up.

“Simon?”

Your voice comes out more broken and sadder than you wanted it to, but your emotions feel like they are all over the place. You feel happy and sad at the same time, elated and entirely too depressed. You feel overwhelmed and also too empty. Your body aches, and you feel like there’s something wrong with you, but also that nothing is wrong at all.

“S-Simon?”

You blink through warm tears, and then you feel a hand brushing your hair off your face. Simon bends down to meet your eyes. His mask is back on, but he’s without a shirt, and you swallow at the sight of the intense bruises, hickies, nail scratches, the bite marks. The relief you feel once you know he’s here deflates your insides so warmly. You hold onto his wrist, keeping him close, and there’s a rumble that happens under his chest that makes you whine to get him even closer.

“Good morning, kitty,” Simon murmurs. He must be smiling under the mask; you see his eyes squint a little, and you hear it in his voice. “Feelin’ olright?”

You sputter and shake your head. “No.”

Simon snorts, thumbing at your cheek. You chase the feeling, following his thumb, not satisfied until he cups your cheek with his big hand.

“Tha’s olright. Y’r just hungry.”

The bath Simon leaves you in melts your bones in the best way. You sink into the hot water, humming, watching from the open door as Simon changes the sheets and cleans up the leftover food wrappers and empty beverages lying around. You remember Simon feeding you between rounds, letting you lick his fingers, suck on them—

You clench your thighs together, gripping the edge of the tub.

“Simon…” You call for him. He drops the trash he’s holding, running a hand down his bare chest as he comes into the bathroom. He kneels down beside the tub, tilting his head to the side, and you guide his hand into the water and between your thighs easily. He chuckles lowly, tipping your head back, and you sigh with relief when his fingers slip inside of you.

“You are insatiable,” Simon hisses. “Fucking for nine days ain’t enough for you, kitty?”

“N-Nine days?” You gasp, grinding against the heel of his palm. You cling to his thick bicep, the water sloshing as you squeeze your thighs around his hand. Your nipples touch the cool tub, and you hiss at the sensation, leaning up to press your face to his. He grunts as he pumps his fingers, kissing his teeth as he leans his forehead against yours a little harder.

“Nine fuckin’ days,” Simon echoes. “Nine days of fucking my best girl.”

“Mmm—” You giggle, but it’s cut off as you gasp when he adds another finger.

“Nine days of you,” Simon clicks his tongue. He sounds starved. He sounds intense. He sounds determined, and you feel it in the curl of his fingers and the way his thumb swirls over your clit. He knows just how to make you shake. “It’ll never be enough, kitty.”

“N-Never.”

“Ahh—fuck—” Simon groans when he feels you tighten up and come. You’re so sensitive, it only took a minute or so, but he slips his fingers out and keeps stroking your clit with a thick thumb to keep you whimpering. You blink up at him, and Simon feels a deep satisfaction in his chest. He knows that look in your eyes, he knows it now.

You want to go again.

Simon has never been an affectionate person. You think it’s a sound assumption for how he behaved before you met him, but it was certainly not true anymore. When you were near him, he tended to stand close to you or guide you with a hand a few inches away from your back, but Simon kept to himself. He was not romantic. He took care of you—he made sure your meals were good, ensured the water for your shower was warm, but he didn’t hold your hand. He didn’t hug you or touch you beyond what was necessary.

Things are different now. Things have changed.

He’s warm behind you as you walk. His hand is fixed on your waist, occasionally hooking a finger around your belt loop and pulling you back when you walk too far ahead. You giggle when he yanks you back, stumbling in your boots before he rights you with a firm, gloved palm against your belly.

Touchy. Possessive.

The boys are all seated and enjoying their lunch when Simon opens the doors for you. You make your way towards the table, taking a seat, and the entire group goes quiet as Simon walks past to go into the kitchen. You adjust your hair, resting your chin in your hand, and you smile knowingly at John when he meets your eyes. He sizes you up; it’s been a few days since he’s seen you, and you already look different. Looser. Warmer. Thicker.

“Ye hungry, bonnie?” Johnny finally asks. You turn your head to look at him. You really look at him this time—you notice his eyes, bright and blue, and you take in the sight of him after morning training. His cheeks are a little flushed from the workout, his arms are bulging as he sips from a paper cup of coffee, and he’s smiling like he knows a secret about you that no one else is privy to. His hair has grown out since you last saw him; the mohawk takes up the curls of his natural hair, and you reach over absentmindedly and twirl your finger around the curl that falls over his forehead.

He holds his breath with your hand so close. Your scent is strong, sweet as he turns his head just a little to take a deeper breath from where your wrist lays. You follow the swirl of his hair before letting it go, smiling wider. Johnny is terrible at hiding what he’s feeling; his eyes obviously glance around your face, lingering a little too long on your lips, until they brighten a little at the sight of the mark that peeks out from your shirt.

“Mmm…” You lick over your top row of teeth. The action is too wet to be anything but enticing. “I’m starved, Johnny.”

His knee gives out and bangs against the table at your response. You giggle, and Simon places down a tray of food in front of you just as John grumbles under his breath as he picks up his cup of water that’s spilled over the edge of the table.

“Fuckin’ hell,” Simon mutters, taking a seat next to you. You take the fork from his hand and look down at your plate. Pasta. Garlic bread. An ungodly amount of parmesan cheese on the side. Your stomach growls looking down at the food, and Simon seems to hear it. He scoots just that much closer, and it’s nothing but instinct that draws him close. His mask brushes against your shoulder and the side of your head, and his fingers trace the scabbing outline of his teeth just peeking out from the high collar of your shirt.

“Bloody hell,” Gaz hisses, leaning back in his seat. You blink away the fog in your brain, feeling your face heat. “You both reek of it.”

“Of what, Sergeant?” Simon bites, and John is the one to curl his fist around his cup and crush it with a scowl.

“Don’t play stupid, Simon,” John murmurs. “You both need another hosing down.”

“Anyone wanna join me?” You purr, and Simon curls his fingers around your hair and yanks your head back with a huff.

“Oh, you’d like tha’, wouldn’t you, kitty?”

“You have no idea, baby—”

“Bleedin’ Christ!” Johnny groans. He’s gone before you turn your head to look at him, and you smile to yourself, amused, but Simon tugs you back to him, pressing his nose to the side of your head.

“What are you doing?” He whispers in your ear. You twirl your fork before pushing his hand off, taking a bite of your food. You chew and swallow before taking a few more pieces of pasta and holding it up to his masked mouth.

“Nothing. You want a bite, Simon?” You ask. You meet his dark eyes, raising a brow as you hold up the fork a little more. He narrows his eyes a little before hiking the mask up, and you feed him with a little laugh. You wipe his mouth gently before tugging his mask back down. “You know, I’d really like some iced tea, Simon. Do you think they might have some in the back?”

Simon’s eyes twitch a little. He looks over your face for a moment longer before standing, and you bite your lip as you stare a little too long at him in those cargos before he disappears into the back again. Your omega warms you, all down your spine. It tickles—her fingers curl around your bones, licking at your insides, purring—bite him, bite him, bite him—

“Real subtle, Kit,” Gaz comments. You take another bite of your food, leaning forward a little. You point the fork at him, tilting your head to the side.

“You know, I remember having this conversation with you not that long ago,” you tell him. “Something about how much you stink even this far away. You got something in your pants, Gaz, or are you just happy to see me?”

“Piss off,” Gaz snaps, and you smile. You know you’re getting under his skin when you smell ash in the air, something bitter and eye-watering.

“Is that a kink of yours, honey? Real subtle.”

“Knock it off, you two,” John sighs, shaking his head. He leans back, running a thick hand over his beard, and you go back to eating. “Gaz, you’re gonna be late. Get a move on.”

The air feels a little tense when it’s just you and John. You move your food around on your plate, frowning a little, and John shifts where he sits.

“How…” He clears his throat. “How are you feeling?”

You look up a little at him. He’s staring at you curiously, arms crossed over his chest. You shrug lightly. It’s humorous seeing him behave so awkwardly.

“I’m okay,” you tell him. “Sore. Really tired.”

“You been to medical?”

“No.”

“Consider it an order,” John nods at you, looking at the collar of your shirt. “Those things can be nasty if you neglect it.”

You put your fork down, and when you and John look at each other, you have to swallow your omega back down your throat. She’s salivating—look at him, he likes us, he’s worried—

“Oh, yeah?” You smile a little, coy, demure. “You know a lot about that, Captain?” The use of his rank makes his jaw clench, and you wet your lips with your tongue. “Claiming omegas?”

If the air was tense before, it’s scorching now. John is white-knuckling his own arms, and his entire body is stiff. You blink, not looking away. You hold him there, and his nose twitches at the way you pin him against some invisible board. You’re already acting so differently—so confidently. There is nothing to fight for anymore. Your omega won her prize, and now she can reap her rewards.

Your omega is greedy.

Four is just so much better than one, isn’t it?

“You seem lonely,” you say softly. He sniffs a little, laughing dryly, and your boot moves just enough to touch toes with his. “Are you lonely, John?”

Are you lonely, John? Do you need me, John? Do you see me when you close your eyes, John?

You barely contain your jump when an ice-cold glass is slammed down on the table in front of you. You blink up at Simon, who’s standing there beside you breathing hard. He sniffs, looking between you and John, but you’re quick to pick up the glass of iced tea and nearly drink the entire thing in one sip.

If Simon notices John following the drop of tea that traces along your jaw and down your neck, he doesn’t say anything.

Your omega purrs, and you nearly do, too. When Simon grips your wrist, you follow him out, but not before catching John’s eyes right before you turn the corner. He watches you the entire way, until you disappear behind a wall.

You think you smell anger on Simon. It makes you cringe a little when you get a deep breath of it, but when he presses you up against the door back in his room, you realize it isn’t anger. You smile up at him, hands behind your back, and Simon fists your hair and kisses you hot. Nope, not anger.

Fuck, he’s horny.

It’ll never be a level-playing field. From the moment you first presented, you didn’t think there’d ever be a real future for yourself. The social order that exists has always been well-maintained and aggressively understood. You exist all the way at the bottom; your kind is meant to get on their knees, be weepy and soft, and submit. You’ve always been told that is the easy life—you aren’t like betas who have to find their way, and you aren’t like alphas who have to continuously prove themselves. All you have to be is be quiet and obedient and gentle, and everything you want will come to you.

Even wants for omegas are understood. You aren’t supposed to want anything other than a cozy nest, a locking knot, or fat babies. You aren’t supposed to want anything at all other than the alpha that claims you and whatever they decide is right for you.

Your family abandoned you. Your caretakers lost you. Kate gave you away. Simon is the only one that has never asked you what you want, not because he doesn’t care, but because it’s not what matters. All he asks is what you need—everything else will follow as it’s supposed to.

He’s staring at your mark again. He does it often; he gets lost in his thoughts, and his eyes fixate on the faint bite mark that’s there behind your jaw now. It’s since healed nicely—all that is left behind is a faint indentation that would match Simon if he hinged his jaw open and bared his teeth. He has a strange obsession with it; not only does he stare, but he likes to touch it, too. He likes putting his gloved hand on the back of your neck and stroking it with his thumb, warm circles that make your entire body relax for him.

Simon’s not so bad. Things could be worse. Simon’s purebred, that’s for certain, but that also means his relationship with your omega is a bond unbreakable. All she does is flutter her lashes, and Simon’s alpha is on a leash, pulled taut, choking him of air. She likes that the most; she likes when he stumbles, when he falters, when his alpha is huffing and puffing because he can’t contain himself when she wags a treat in front of him.

You let her have it. It’s the least you could do.

Simon’s pack is no better. Sometimes, you think your omega feels guilty, but you push it down just like you’re used to. They deserve none of your pity. Entitled shits, they all are, and if it wasn’t for the fact that you are in their pack, you would never give such fragile egos the time of day; but they are in Simon’s pack, which means they’re in yours, which means you at least try to play nice.

Sometimes, though, it’s real funny watching Simon’s sergeants covering their crotches and waddling out of a room.

You can’t figure out John. He’s difficult to pin down. He has a special bond with Gaz and Simon, but every time you think you and your omega have figured out his wants and needs, he surprises you or oddly turns you down. While you already have an alpha that satisfies you entirely, it still stings, the rejection. Your omega whines. She is a part of their pack now, and the cold shoulder from even just one makes her upset—it does not help that John takes the place as head of this pack, either. She wants his approval, and she begs you to get it.

“Does John like me?”

Simon pauses at his desk. His pistol is disassembled in front of him, parts laid out carefully in a pattern only he might understand so he doesn’t lose any of the pieces. There’s gun oil and a rag to accompany him, and he’s methodically running that rag over the barrel when he stops. You turn your head from your place on the bed to look at him.

Simon shrugs. “Dunno,” he says finally, continuing with the rag. “Would think so.”

“I don’t think so,” you say softly. “Not like Johnny does. Or Gaz.”

“Tha’s cause they wanna fuck you, kitty,” Simon snorts, and you draw your knees up a little, squeezing your legs together. You think about Johnny’s wagging tongue or Gaz’s wet lips too long, and you’ll drag Simon over, even knowing his gear is filthy.

“John doesn’t?”

“John is…” Simon shrugs again, sighing deeply. “Him and omegas. It’s…complicated. Wot do ya care, anyway? Three alphas not enough for you?”

Three. The thought makes your omega giddy. You have yet to have them, but just knowing you can makes her so lightheaded. Since meeting her, you’ve come to know her as selfish and entirely too greedy. She’s a fiend for Simon’s attention the most, but you know she aches for all of it. She wants all four of them to fuss over her, to follow her like dogs.

“Maybe for me,” you agree, but your voice longs. It carries weight to it, and that makes Simon pause. “But not for her.”

Simon drops his things, standing up from his chair, and you smile wide as he comes towards the bed and grips you by your jaw with a shake. You blink up at him with a shaky breath, and his eyes crinkle, like he’s smiling, too, under his mask. Your omega will never be afraid of him. She adores him, far too much for your liking.

“Well, then. Maybe I should let my sergeants have a taste, and then we’ll see what’s not enough for her, eh?”

Your omega sighs. She just loves getting what she wants.

But it’s not enough. It’s not enough.

One reprieve you do get now, however, is that your heats are predictable. Like clockwork, every ten weeks, you can plan for those seven to ten days of complete bliss underneath Simon. You can lock him away, pull him out of any obligation or any mission, and he’s in your nest, staring down at you, feeding you between intervals of intense sex to keep your omega happy and satiated. John just bites his tongue when you take his lieutenant away—even if he wanted Simon not to go, he would never command it. He couldn’t do that to you, not to their omega.

She gets whatever she wants. No questions asked.

The balance is certainly well and tipped. It is no longer a clean-cut ladder with John at its stead. Now, it’s a foot on the tightrope, with each alpha fighting to make sure it does not tip over. As long as you are happy, their footing holds. They feel it steady and still, and they breathe easy.

There is still something that has the ability to disturb the equilibrium your omega has maintained. You just never thought you’d see it again—or smell it.

Your omega knows what it is as soon as gets the scent—who it is. Familiar. Edgy. Dark chocolate and herbs, a scent that used to comfort you, and now one that makes you hot with disdain.

She looks older. Tired. Stressed. You see it on her face, and you smell it on her, too. She wants to take them away from you. Not one, not two, all of them—and she doesn’t want you with them when she does.

She waves her hand like she always does. She throws her orders around, expecting everyone to move as soon as she says to. She’s not prepared for the tension, and she’s not prepared for the reluctance she’s met with. Instead of four bloodthirsty dogs, she stares down at outright disobedience.

She’s disturbed a den—and she doesn’t understand what stands in her way.

You remember the first time you saw Kate Laswell. Freshly 18, nowhere to go, no family. The streets weren’t suitable for you; omegas are vulnerable on their own, and if you didn’t choose the pack you got swallowed up in, it would get chosen for you. The doors for the service were always open. That’s what they do, that’s what your country does—they break their people down to the bone, down to their knees, and then the only way to build themselves back up is to put shackles on their ankles and cuffs on their wrists. It is the circumstances your country thrives on. They build the walls that cage you, and then barely wrench the door open enough for you to breathe.

You will always be kept at the same level—you always beg them for more, and Kate is just one cog in the wheel that keeps the machine running. She saw your face, saw you for what you were. She promised you a life worth living, and then she pulled the rug out from underneath you. She put you in her pocket; she tucked you away for a rainy day. Her precious 141 was slipping away from her, and she played her cards.

You want her to hate the hand she is dealt.

You’re outside when she finds you. You’re sitting outside the mess hall, where the benches are plentiful, and you’re staring down at the pack of cigarettes you stole from one of Simon’s jackets. The lighter is in your other hand, but you can’t get yourself to try one.

“Didn’t peg you for a smoker.”

You keep your eyes down on the cigarettes. You smooth a thumb over the label, licking over your teeth. Despite everything else, her voice hasn’t changed.

“I’m not,” you say softly. “Just…”

When you look up, you meet Kate’s eyes, and those have not changed either. They are still looking right through you, just as they always have. You used to think you loved her, at one point. She always would check on you. Visit your base herself, call if she couldn’t—ask how things were, if your CO had given you the accommodations she ordered him to. She made you feel like you were her favorite, as if she cared for you differently in some way. Surely, she did not check up on others the way she did you. She had other soldiers she must have kept her eye on, other places her guidance was needed, but surely, you were someone special to her.

You had been around plenty of alphas before her, but she was the only one that used to make you feel like you couldn’t rightly breathe. The first time you felt your omega bobbing her head to the surface of where you stuffed her, it was when Kate stood just this close to you. There was a time when you thought maybe Kate was reserving you. When the time was right, she might you ask the question you always thought she would—the terrifying world she tried to protect you from, she’d really do it, she’d take you away, take you with her.

Grass is always greener, you suppose.

You swallow hard when she takes the pack of cigarettes from you and brings one of them to her lips. She steps closer to you, jutting her chin out, and you raise a hand to flick the lighter on and burn the end of it until she puffs out a breath of smoke.

“Nasty habit,” you say softly, and Kate just laughs bitterly.

“Got nastier vices, kitty.”

Your eyes flick back up to hers, and you narrow them stiffly. Maybe she thinks she’s being cute, but all you see when you look up at her is someone alone. Someone reaching. Someone desperate. There’s an edge that Kate Laswell is known best for, but you don’t really see it anymore.

You tilt your head up a little, relaxing your face. You smile, but it doesn’t reach your eyes.

“How’d your meeting go?” You ask. She takes a long drag from the cigarette, blowing it out just to the side. You reach over and put a hand to the collar of her shirt, straightening it out. “Hope you got what you needed. I imagine you don’t wanna be here long.”

“Interesting you asked,” she says lowly. “I, in fact, didn’t get what I needed. I’m not leaving until I get it.”

“That’s too bad,” you tut. “I’m sure you’ll figure something out. You always do, don’t you?”

You have to lean back a little when she steps closer. Kate has always been someone who was more or less affectionate with you. Soft touches, shoulder squeezes, comforting words. You don’t remember what you used to see in her. You can no longer recall an instance of ease, a time when she was kind. You can only remember her words of rejection and her dismissiveness of your fear. Every warm memory has been replaced with her abandonment of you and her autonomy over you. Building you up just to knock you right back down.

You used to want her to want you. You used to pray that she would wake up one day and realize you would be content to live out a quiet life somewhere secluded, even if your relationship would be nothing but platonic.

You were wrong about her, and she was wrong about you.

“I don’t know what you’ve said to them,” Kate murmurs. “But I need this. You wouldn’t understand, but this isn’t…I’m not dealing with trivial matters, Kit. This is life and death. International security, and I’ve never expected you to understand where I was coming from, never wanted you to—”

“They said no,” you whisper, laughing a little. “They said no to you, didn’t they?” You tip your head back even further, staring up at the night sky, and you laugh again as you close your eyes.

“John said no.”

When you open your eyes again, Kate is sitting down, leaning her head back against the brick wall of the building behind you. She takes another drag of the cigarette, her face scrunching as she breathes it in deep. She flicks the ashes off the end of it, looking down at her feet.

John said no.

“John said no,” you echo, crossing your arms over your chest. “And Simon?”

“I expected that,” Kate shrugs. “A given. You did good there, Kit.” When you sit next to her, you notice her knee spread a little wider, just barely touching your own.

“But you weren’t prepared for John,” you finish for her.

“If anything, I can always count on John to separate…” Kate scoffs, “wants and needs from what needs to get done.”

“From what you want to get done.” You turn to look at her. “Did you ever think that…maybe this wasn’t meant for them? That they wouldn’t do this forever?”

“That’s a dangerous way to think for men like that,” Kate snaps. “You don’t want them out of here, living a civilian life.”

“The only person this is dangerous for is you,” you throw back at her. “Who else is going to clean up your fucking messes if not them?”

“Watch yourself, Kit.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore.”

You don’t realize you’ve said it until it’s been said. You nearly cover your mouth, horrified by what you couldn’t stop yourself from spitting at her. You can feel your omega’s fingers in your mouth. She’s feeling around your gums, drying out your tongue, cackling as she shows her newfound teeth. She never thinks any harm will ever come to her—the hollowness of your scent gland is proof of that. She’s been claimed but something foul, by something mean, and now she’s not afraid to do whatever it is she wants to do. You thought she’d given you back, but she’s still here, still causing trouble, and now Kate is forcing herself onto you. Her fingers are tight around your throat, and now you’re pressed up against crumbling brick, gasping as she crowds your space and attacks your nose with the bitter, poisonous concoction that her anger emits into the air around you.

“Don’t forget yourself,” she spits. Her lips nearly brush against yours, and you breathe in mouthfuls of her scent. It’s achingly heady, and it tastes like it’s filling your lungs with smoke. There’s something else there that you can taste, however—something warm, spicy, something a little less sour. Acid turns to sweetness, and you laugh between gasps of breath as you grip her wrist and dig your nails into her to try and get her to loosen her grip. When she finally lets you go, you take in a deep, shaky breath of fresh air. The tension never leaves her shoulders, but she steps back, away from you, and you smooth a hand down your own neck and brush yourself off.

You adjust the collar of your shirt, looking down at your feet.

“You owe me,” you say, throat scratchy. “I’ll do it. Whatever you’re here to ask me to do, I’ll do it. But you…owe me.”

You slam the doors behind you as you leave her there. Cigarette still burning on the floor, light flickering overhead—when you turn to glare at her from over your shoulder, she’s still staring after you.

You wonder if she looked at you this way when she left you the first time.

You remember when you used to be wary of Simon—when just the sight of him made the blood under your skin heat and bubble just under the surface. What you can’t remember is why; he’s standing between your legs right now, head bent forward, forehead brushing against yours occasionally as you gear him up. You pick up a few rifle magazines from beside you, trying to ignore how warm he is even under his gloves as you fill up every pocket of his vest. You pick up a pair of scissors and tuck it into another pocket, tugging to make sure everything is secure before you start to load the first aid kid that’s on his front.

You close your eyes when he juts his head forward just enough, his masked face pressing into the side of your neck. Your hand slides up, over his chest, just to cup the back of his neck and hold him close. His nose touches just under your jaw, and you make a small sound as his big hands grip you under the thighs and tug you forward. Your knees widen to accommodate him, and you scrunch your face at the feeling of his gear digging harshly into your middle.

“What is it, Simon?” You whisper, and he just huffs. You lean your head back a little, giving him more room, and you squeeze your legs around his hips when you feel his tongue from under his mask, wetting where your scent gland is. “Simon—”

“Smell nice,” he tells you. You laugh a little, and when he stands up to stare back down at you, you give him a nervous smile. “But I know how y’r feeling. Can’t hide tha’ from me.”

You don’t say anything. There isn’t anything you want to say. He’s right; you are nervous. The last time you followed Simon out in the field, he nearly died, and so did you. Sometimes you wake up thinking your saliva is someone else’s blood; and when he isn’t in bed when you wake up, you think you’ll see him again, sprawled onto his back, a bullet too close to his head.

You feel his fingers on your throat, blinking up at him, and when you meet those dark eyes, you feel your bottom lip shake. You’ve never been scared, but you feel so out of yourself when you join them. The 141 aren’t called in when the job is easy—they only do the things that no one else has been able to do. Your training is tested every single time you join them. You’re not like them; you cannot turn everything off. Simon is someone else on the other side. Johnny is fucking crazy. Gaz goes somewhere else in his head, and you don’t always recognize his voice. John—always level-headed, that one, but his gentleness with you is nothing short of an exception. These aren’t good men. They’re war criminals with badges.

“Ya don’t have ta come,” Simon says lowly. “I could ask Price, you—”

“No—!” You sit up straighter, your hand gripping his wrist to keep him close. You shake your head adamantly, squeezing his arm. “No, that’s…it would be worse.”

“Worse?”

“Who the fuck else is gonna watch your six?” You ask. “You suck at it.”

Simon laughs, from deep in his chest, and you press your lips against his from over his mask.

“Oi—kitty,” he murmurs, tilting your head back. He kisses you from under the mask, a soft peck through the fabric that leaves you with a light stomach. His attention is always too much and not enough. “Tha’s never gonna happen again, ya hear me?” He shakes his head. “Didn’t do my fuckin’ job tha’ day. Won’t be like tha’ anymore. I have you.” Simon kisses you again, pinching your chin, and you don’t let him move away. “My omega. Mine.”

“Wheels up in 15, lovebirds.”

Simon stops you from going too far when you hop down from the table. He tugs on your tact vest, making sure it’s tight enough, and then he picks up your helmet to fit it over your head. He picks up your sidearm next, releasing the magazine to make sure it’s full before hitting it back inside and loading the chamber. He bends to secure it in your thigh holster, and then he’s tugging on the straps of it, making sure it’s not loose around your leg. You can’t hold in your smile anymore when he stands and reaches under your chin to buckle your helmet.

There’s no reason to be scared. Not around him, not underneath him, and certainly not under his command. Maybe you’d step in front of a bullet for him—maybe you’d throw yourself in front of whatever someone tossed his way, but he would do the same for you. You don’t doubt that. You don’t think there’s anything someone could do to you that he wouldn’t give back to them much worse.

Simon’s love isn’t typical. It’s not sweet, nor does it fit inside its confines. He isn’t violent at his core, but it’s a response ingrained in him. Possessive, sick, overbearing to a fault—he’s too much all the time, but maybe it’s because Simon’s never been allowed to ever love anything without terms.

Everything has always been decided for him. How long he got to play as a boy. How tight he could hug his mother. How high he could raise his voice, how big he was allowed to grow, how he must behave once he presented. He’s always been too much, and he’s always been told what to do, so to have this thing, this one thing that could belong to him—who the fuck are they or you or anyone else allowed to tell him how to feel? How could anyone tell him the pedestal he puts you on is too high? Too warm? Too comfortable?

He’s died twice before in his life, but it wasn’t enough to keep him buried. Now he’s here, and he’s with you, and it wasn’t a coincidence. Fate handed you over, but by sheer will, he will keep you, and you will stay here, rooted to this spot, to the space between love and hatred and what overwhelms you and what lives inside of you between the hollow of your ribs. There’s a heart that beats there, too fast, too hard, knocking against the bones, and whenever Simon is near, it aches. You are bonded for life. Even if you lose him, you’ll never want another, not in the same way. It’s only ever been Simon that’s ever told you that it’s okay to be what you are; you cannot change your anatomy, you have to understand it at its most basic level and learn the rhythm of every song it sings.

I am not your enemy. I am your best friend. I will do things for you that no one else can do, I can hear the things you can’t tell anyone else, I’m the thing between what you really are and what you’ve always wanted to be, I know you, I know you, I know you—

“You trust me?” Simon asks. The ramp of the jet lowers, clattering against the tarmac, and he fits his thumb under your chin to bring your eyes back to him.

“Yes.” You smile up at him, and his thumb falls to touch the imprint of his teeth that’s there, right under your shirt. Only when he feels the dip where his canines have marked you does he look into your eyes again. Dark. Honest. Content. “Yes, I trust you, Simon.”

Simon drops his head, and you flutter your lashes when his helmet hits yours.

“On me, then, kitty.”

Simon is the thing that hides in the dark. The dark figure at the wrong end of a gun. He is the silhouette that takes the shape of your own shadow, and he is the terrible monster that hides under your bed; and yet, here you are, falling into step with him. It is not your omega that carries your feet—it is yourself, you, the one you’re hyper-aware of, the side of yourself that you have known for too long and neglected because you were taught the very worst enemy was the one inside of your own head.

If she was so bad, you don’t know why Simon’s hand would feel so warm in yours. If she was so terrible, you don’t know what makes his eyes so difficult to look away from. If she was so horrible to you, you don’t know why Simon is standing over a man that pointed his gun at you and forcing a blade so deep into his throat that the tip dents against the concrete.

It’s not that bad. Simon’s name will forever live in you, in the shape of his teeth under your ear.

Simon looks at you when he wrenches his blade back out, blood against the sharp edge. He lifts it to his face, and your lips part when he wipes it against the mouth of his mask, painting the skull teeth red.

No, it isn’t so bad. She’s smiling. No, you are. You’re one and the same, and you know her the same way you know yourself. She’s home, tucked into the warm places you know you’ll keep her, and you—

Well.

You’re right where you’re supposed to be.

#simon ghost riley #simon riley #simon ghost riley x reader #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #ghost mw2 #ghost cod #ghost call of duty #ghost mwii #ghost x reader #cod #call of duty #simon riley smut #simon ghost riley smut #dark!ghost #dark!simon

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marvelsswansong · 2 years ago

Text

melting snow

summary: the subtle, obvious, sweet, and at times - dangerous - ways Coriolanus shows his love for you.

tags: coriolanus snow x fem!reader, possessive and lovesick!Snow, mostly fluff with light allusions to smut, significantly off-canon from movie (no lucy gray and no sejanus betrayal), CW possessive/dark behavior, graphic descriptions of murder, violence (it's only the last bit of this fic that's quite dark/violent, so feel free to read up until then. Please take care of yourself!!!)

☆ word count: 4.6K+ words ☆

⚠️ 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠: 𝐈 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐨 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐲, 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐮𝐫𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐦𝐲 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐞.⚠️

one: subtle praise

At the beginning, he would mask his true feelings and physical urges towards you with a tight lipped grin and a reserved compliment. Something that acknowledges something you've done objectively well, with a genuine softness that didn't apply to any of his other classmates, but seemingly delivered in a nonchalant matter to feign indifference.

"Great dodge." he'd say to you, both of your chests heaving from adrenaline during fencing class. You'd nod gently, a shy "thank you" leaving your lips.

But when Clemensia wins the next round against him, Coriolanus doesn't go above simply shake her left hand in courtesy before leaving the arena briskly.

"Well played." he'd joke, when it was revealed during the final student appraisal that you'd beaten Coriolanus' marks by a few points. Despite Archane and Felix throwing subtle jabs at his way for "losing" the star student title, you'd just shrug off the compliment profusely, praising him endlessly.

"A mere fluke, really. You're the brilliant student. I reckon I just study hard and get lucky." you'd reply, straightening the cuffs of your jacket nervously. The blonde always found it so endearing how bad you were at taking compliments.

So different from the rest of the scum in Capitol, he thought.

Eventually, he'd start to turn his verbal compliments towards things unrelated to your capabilities and work. And more towards things that were of a personal nature, like your looks and dress.

"Your hair looks very nice today." he comments one afternoon late after school, his shoulders brushing against yours as you both await your rides home. Your hands fly up to your hair, to the small crown of daisies adorning your head, as if you've almost forgotten what you were wearing.

"You think so?" you shyly ask, looking up at him nervously. "I wouldn't have worn it to the academy if we hadn't been called down on immediate notice. It's just that the family I babysit for on the weekends, their daughter just turned six and... well, she was very insistent on making me a flower crown."

He finds your embarrassment awfully cute.

"But I swear, when Dr Gaul turned to look at me today, I thought she was going to kill me."

Coriolanus only rolls his eyes playfully at that, knocking his shoulders against yours.

"And what would she know about first rate fashion? You look amazing."

It's the nicest compliment you've gotten over a silly crown of flowers, your heart warming and your breath stuttering at his words. It's what motivates you to lightly squeeze his right arm before you get into the car, your touch lingering in his mind long after you depart.

A month later, Coriolanus runs into you at the farmer's market on a Sunday. His instructions by Tigris to "buy some bread and oranges for tomorrow" are almost forgotten in one fell swoop when he sees you. Free from your usual academic attire, you're wearing a flowy lilac dress which sits right below your knees, the silky fabric glowing in the yellow sunlight.

"This color really suits you." he decides to whisper in your ear after discreetly sliding into the space next to you, the action so sudden that it causes you to jump. Your shoulders soften when you recognize his striking blue irises, and then you pout, punching him right in the chest.

"You scared me, Snow." you jokingly scold him. "And where are your manners? You should always introduce yourself first to a lady."

He pretends to be wounded by that, hand on heart whilst leaning backwards.

"My deepest apologies. Would this help?" he asks, effortlessly pulling a white rose from his back pocket. He revels in how your gaze lightens up in awe and amusement at the gesture.

"Perhaps so." you reply back, fingertips brushing against his.

The blonde takes it as a sign to slide it behind your ear, the memory of your etheral form with his flower tucked behind your right ear etched into his mind before you're called away by your friends.

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

two: soft touches

Once he's sure that his feelings are reciprocated, Coriolanus would start to step the line over into something more serious. He's not willing to open up immediately nor is he necessarily a man of romantic prose. A large part of him is scared, even, of the way you make him feel.

After all, what is love if not vulnerability?

And how he could be vulnerable with you, a woman so far out of his league, widely adored and your family amongst the wealthiest in Panem?

So it would start off when the class seating arrangements are changed and you're seated next to Coriolanus for the remainder of the year.

He'd start to purposefully spread his legs a little bit wider than usual, his knees always brushing against yours.

He'd take every chance he could to lean over to explain something to you, his face a few inches away from yours, if you ever seemed stuck on a question.

He'd open the classroom door for you in the mornings and offer to carry your heavy textbooks back to your family's car after school, insisting that it was because he wouldn't want you to trip on your heels. And if you'd ever insist on carrying the books on your own, he'd keep a gentle hand on your upper back to keep you upright "in balance."

Once, whilst presenting a speech at your father's fundraising dinner that you'd stayed up all night preparing for, you accidentally lose track of your speech. You stumble on your words, voice cracking in panic as you start to scan the page of thick text, all of which suddenly seem jumbled up and nonsensical.

Sensing distress, Coriolanus' hand quickly moves under the table to squeeze your left hand (hanging by your side) in a reassuring manner.

It's only then, somehow, that you find yourself able to re-focus on the printed text and continue your speech. Afterwards, you squeeze his hand back and whisper your gratitude.

"I owe you, Coriolanus."

Another time, it's a formal ball being hosted by the academy to mark the holiday season. After a few drinks, you're tipsy and manage to drag your friends up towards the balcony, despite it snowing outside and being below zero degrees.

Cautiously watching your every movement by where he's leaning by the bar, Coriolanus quickly makes an excuse to exit the conversation he found himself trapped in, before walking outside towards your shivering figure.

Your dress certainly isn't helping your situation, it being a satin slip dress with sleeves and a conservative cut out by your shoulders. It exposes your chilled skin as you rub the naked space with your arms, your staggered breaths coming out in white puffs of smoke.

"Corio! What're you doing he-" you start to walk towards him but nearly trip, his arms coming to supporting your body last second to save you from falling completely on your face.

"You shouldn't be outside in this weather." he comments, amused, as he helps you find your balance once more. But you refuse to re-enter the ballroom, choosing to instead excitedly ramble about how wonderful winter in the Capitol is and how you can't remember where you've placed your bag.

Listening earnestly to your ramblings with a smile on his face, he quickly shakes off his blazer.

"May I?" he asks. You blink slowly, heart fluttering at the gesture.

"O-okay."

The boy then carefully drapes his blazer over your shoulders, the act immediately enveloping your senses in his signature smells - oakwood and rose. Your fingers clutch the lapels of the jacket, your nose burrowing in to the softness of the fabric.

"Are you sure you won't be cold?"

He's freezing, of course, but he keeps his posture straight and tuck his hands into his pockets.

"I'm just fine. Don't you worry about me."

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

three: nicknames

Once you two become an item, Coriolanus moves on to calling you affectionate names.

Of course, he'll prefer to call you by your name in professional settings - like during a presentation, in front of the Academy staff, at formal galas and dinners - but when it's just the two of you, or around people you both trust, or when he's jealous -

He almost never calls you by your name.

Darling is the classic, lovestruck expression he uses when he's being his most vulnerable. It's what he whispers into the gap underneath your neck when he's waking you up in the morning, landing kisses across your collarbone during sunrise. It's his greeting when he surprises you with a bouquet of flowers on your birthday, right before he whisks you away to a trip to district 1. It's what he cries into your hairline when you are hospitalized following a rogue rebel explosion on your trip home.

"Darling... darling, can you hear me?"

Coriolanus' voice is foggy, your head still ringing from the loud explosion earlier, but your heart still races at the sound of his voice and the touch of his hand on yours. Throat croaking, you try to respond with an affirmative "yes", to which your boyfriend responds by quickly grabbing a near by cup of water.

Gently guiding the glass to your lips, he treats you as if you're a fragile porcelain doll: smoothing down your hair gently and fluffing up your pillows to lay you back down. It's only then that you get a good look at him under the flickering lights - the bags under his eyes look heavy, his usually neat hair a complete mess, his blue irises blood shot.

"Have you been sleeping, Corio?" you ask, worried, your thumb rubbing circles onto his palm. He chokes up at that, shaking his head sideways with a sad smile.

"How... how could you ask me that, darling? You've been in the hospital for days."

"I hope that doesn't mean you haven't been sleeping for days." you quip back, raising your eyebrows. Your boyfriend opens his mouth to lie, but the twitch of his lips gives him away. So you instead shift towards the left of your bed, making space for him on the mattress.

"Come on you silly man."

He smiles a guilty grin before snuggling up next to you, letting out a heavy sigh of content at your warm body against his.

Petal is his sweet, infatuated name for you when he's referring to you in conversation or calling out for you in front of friends and family. Tigris never fails to tease Coriolanus for the name, but he doesn't mind it - you're his flower, his precious petal.

"I can't believe you think this is ugly." Tigris sighs at the dinner table one night, shuffling through the myriad of designs on the desk. "This was going to be the design I send off to the boutique tomorrow."

"I didn't say it was ugly, I just think this design is far nicer." Coriolanus responds, pushing forward the blue design in front of him. His cousin pouts at that, clearly unsatisfied with his answer.

"Petal-" Coriolanus calls out for you, where you're cooking with grandma'am in the kitchen. "Could you come in for a moment?"

When your confused face pops into the room, Tigris quickly calls you over, dramatically stretching out her arms to grab you.

"Mr Snow seems to think this design - the gold sweetheart dress with lace trimmings - is uglier than this blue version. What do you think, (Y/n)?" she earnestly asks, pushing over the two designs to your direction. You shuffle through the papers intently, studying each drawing up close, before ultimately taking Tigris' side.

"I'd say your eye for design is impeccable, Tigris. And that Coriolanus should perhaps stick to things other than fashion."

That makes both grandma'am (who is listening in from the kitchen) and Tigris, burst out in laughter, with the latter throwing her arms around your waist in a sideways hug.

"Ah, I knew you were my favorite for a reason." she jokes.

"Petal, you wound me." your boyfriend jokes, a small scowl on his face for show. Though, when you lean down to kiss him, the scowl easily melts away.

My doll is what he calls you when he's driven sick by jealousy and possession. As, much to Coriolanus' distate, you have many admirers - due to you coming from a wealthy family and being a well known socialite in your own right.

Coriolanus has never liked Felix Ravinstill, but he swears his hatred for the president's son only tripled after you and Coriolanus became an item. Felix was never shy about his attraction to you - the forward compliments, the invitations to his house after school, the rush to sit next to you during lunch periods. But now, the blonde thinks, it's getting full on desperate.

As you sit reading a book in the hallways of tha academy, waiting for Coriolanus to finish his talk with Dr Gaul, the dark haired boy decides to chat with you. When your boyfriend opens the door discreetly, upon hearing your voice mingle with someone else's outside, his vision nearly turns red at how close the other man is to you.

You're pointing out something in your book to Felix, your innocent eyes fixated purely on the black and white text and thus completely missing how shamelessly the man next to you is eyeing you up and down. It takes Dr Gaul's shout - "actually, Ms (Y/n), could we have a word regarding your last proposal" - for Coriolanus' rage to slowly fade.

Instead, he starts to feel cold, hardened logic putting a plan into motion.

And once you're inside the classroom, Coriolanus doesn't hesitate to slam Felix up against the wall, making sure to angle the boy's head to hit directly against a marble statute. The impact isn't hard enough to crack the man's skull, the last minute measurement in Coriolanus' head ensuring that he wouldn't be punished for injuring the president's son.

But he makes sure that the impact hurts enough to leave a mark.

It makes Coriolanus' heart twist in pleasure.

"You better leave my doll alone, Ravinstill. She's not interested in you. She's never been interested in you." he spits, snarling like a ravenous dog.

"You're delusional, Snow, if you think she'd ever want to stay with you." Felix manages to spit out, trying to wiggle his way out of the taller man's hold, but Coriolanus is too strong.

"You're the only delusional one here. It's pathetic, really. All that money and social connections in the world, and it'll never be good enough for my doll."

Coriolanus can tell that hit a nerve with Felix, so he lets go of the shorter boy, nearly throwing him away to the side in the process. Pride and ego surges through his veins when you appear and call out for Coriolanus, so the blonde makes a concerted effort to kiss you fiercely for show.

His arm snaking around your shoulder to pull you right up against him, a devious smile on his lips.

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

four: lavish gifts and deep marks

Things only escalate once Coriolanus' tribute ends up winning the hunger games and he's crowned the winner of the Plinth Prize. Now saddled with money, reputation and a full ride scholarship to the university funneled by the Plinth family - he finally finds himself able to spoil you in all the ways possible.

Fresh flowers adorn your windowsill every morning. The finest jewellery and newest luxury bags are delivered to your doorstep at random. Perhaps most impressive of all, he buys a two bedroom apartment near the center of the Capitol for you two to move into.

"How'd you..." you can't even finish your sentence when you first see the place: the prime location, the high arched ceilings, the stainless marble... He hadn't even allowed you to pitch in any of your own - or your family's - money to buy the place, insisting that it was to be a complete surprise.

His arms come around your shoulder to hug you close, swaying you from side to side.

"Generosity of the Plinth family and the spoils of being the victor, darling." he drawls in your ear.

You're still in awe, hands tracing the intricate patterns of the roman columns supporting the ceiling, when he starts to tug you up the stairs.

"Would you like to see the view from our bedroom? It's magnificent."

Of course, Coriolanus' new elevated status and recent memory of acting as a mentor in the hunger games - planning, guiding, and having a role in the extended play of human lives - it all makes him quite obsessive and possessive of you. Given that you're one of the few people in his life who has known him for years now, before he was a mentor and before had all this money and status...

He has to make sure to keep you in his life. He's made a lot of enemies, after all, many of whom would like to harm him. And with his undying love for you, hurting you becomes an attractive option for his enemies.

So Coriolanus gets more possessive by becoming more shameless in public. He'll gladly call you his love in front of crowds of hundreds. He'll kiss you breathless and squeeze your lower back if he thinks a man is staring a bit too long at you. And when he knows you two will be separated for a few days - usually due to him having to travel out of the Capitol on business matters - he'll leave bite marks on your neck.

You didn't even think about how noticeable the marks might be when you rush out of bed one morning, having promised to attend an engagement dinner of a fellow classmate, Clemensia's. Your rude awakening comes when, mid-way through the rehearsal, Sejanus leans over to quietly ask if you've brought your foundation with you.

You scrunch your face at the odd question.

"Uh, yes... I have a powder compact in my bag, why?"

Your friend smiles at you apologetically, before motioning to your neck.

"Because, (Y/n), it looks like a vampire has bit you."

And when you look at your reflection in your wine glass, it's clear that you have odd, dark, bite shaped marks littering your collarbone and neck.

Later in the week, when Coriolanus has finally returned from his business trip, you try and scold him for it.

"I nearly died of shame, Corio. Seriously, you should've seen how Arachne was looking at me the whole night." you sigh, just as he laughs.

"You're over thinking it, darling. Besides, you weren't complaining when I was leaving those marks on you on Tuesday."

You open his mouth to scold him again, but find yourself unable to mutter a smart response, your thoughts flying away when he's back to attacking your skin with his mouth.

After all, you're like a drug to him - he can never get enough.

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

five: killing for you

Once Coriolanus is sure that you're not going to leave him, he finds it appropriate to take it to the next level: marriage. He drops a few thousand dollars on a large diamond ring, a ring which he makes sure you never take off (except in the shower).

At this point, the thought of losing you nearly equals his fears of losing everything he's built so far: becoming wealthy, powerful and well known amongst the Capitol's elite. He's terrified of living in a world without you and so he considers anyone who is deemed a threat must be dealt with in a secure, efficient manner.

No mercy, no hesitation.

After all, Coriolanus thinks one night, whilst sharpening a spare knife in the kitchen: if you give a rebel an inch, they'll run a mile.

The first person he kills is a security guard who fails to do their job correctly in protecting you.

He'd been hired by Coriolanus to protect you in your daily transport from the mansion to anywhere outside the Capitol (most often, to districts 1-3 to support your family's business dealings). But the bodyguard had failed to protect you one fateful winter day, leaving you to stumble back home with a twisted ankle and a busted lip as your bodyguard was only able to neutralize the threat after a few minutes of tussling with the gang's leader in the snow.

Your fiancee was fuming, sending you off to a near by hospital with grandma'am, before he motioned for your bodyguard to come downstairs to the empty garden.

The blonde didn't even feel an ounce of sorrow as he pulled the trigger, simply ordering the next bodyguard he'd hired to do the messy job of disposing of the body.

The second person he kills is a rebel who attempted to sneak a bomb underneath the car transporting you to the Capitol, following Coriolanus' announcement as candidate for the presidency.

The rebel was apprehended by the security detail team pretty quickly, so fast in fact that you weren't even made aware of the threat on your life. All you're told that day by Coriolanus' subordinates is that "there had been a change of plans" and you were to go to a fundraising dinner at an art museum instead to raise funds for the campaign.

And whilst you're off at the dinner, making a passionate speech for his presidency, Coriolanus makes an order for the rebel to be dragged out into the fields.

"You dare threaten the love of my life?" he sneers into the rebel's face, which is already bloodied and broken beyond recognition. The animalistic rage pumping through Coriolanus' veins is unlike anything he's ever felt before, and the gun in his hands suddenly feels like too much of a merciful ending for the rebel's crime.

"Just kill me." the rebel spits, but that only makes Coriolanus let out a sinister chuckle.

"Don't worry, I will. But I think a gun shot will be far too quick."

Instead, Coriolanus orders the man to be placed into a cage - a prototype that was being designed as a trap for the next year's games - and for a tub of venomous snakes to be released.

Whilst the other workers in his campaign look away from the horrific sight, Coriolanus just stares in great interest and pride. Once the screaming dies down, he calmly disposes of his bloodied shirt and hails a ride to greet you at the museum entrance.

"All good?" you ask, noticing an odd expression on your lover's face. But he just kisses you lightly on the lips, chuckling.

"Of course, petal. Why wouldn't it be?"

And so on and so forth. Whether it's directly or indirectly, Coriolanus becomes ruthless in securing your safety and your love. And he's so good at hiding it, he thinks, until one day he becomes a bit sloppy.

It was supposed to be an easygoing dinner at the mansion, a wealthy donor - his top donor, his campaign manager had informed him - named Robert Hemingworth had requested a private dinner. Coriolanus intially wanted to refuse, hating the thought of inviting a stranger to his home, but both you and his campaign manager agreed that it was best to play nice given the money at stake.

"For your troubles." Robert had said on his way in, a snarky smirk on his lips. In his arms were a basket of wines and grapes worth a pretty penny, but Coriolanus couldn't help but think that there was something about the brunette's gaze that he didn't trust. But with pursed lips and a fake smile, he forced out a thank you and invited the man into the foyer.

"What a... charming little abode." the oil tycoon had drawled, his gloved hands tracing along the walls. The sly comments and odd compliments (in truth, backhanded compliments) continued through out the night, all the way from appetizer to the main course. Sipping on copious bottles of red wine in an effort to keep himself grounded, Coriolanus was managing to keep his temper down until the older man asked about your whereabouts.

"Will your charming fiancee not be joining us?"

He froze at the man's questions, the hungry look in the millionaire's eyes and the underlying threat weighing down the atmosphere. The desserts had now arrived, two maids scurrying in with small plates of bread pudding, both of whom Coriolanus quickly dismissed with a wave of his hand.

"She's out with Tigris. Dress shopping." he'd decided to leave it at that, his left hand squeezing his glass so tight the glass started to crack. Coriolanus had hoped the man would leave the discussion there, as he wasn't sure what he was capable of doing if the older man didn't.

But the man continued. A disgusting moan escaping his lips in satisfaction after biting into the pudding, a devious smirk on his lips to match.

"Ah. Well, what a shame. I was hoping she would be part of the dessert."

No sooner than those words leave the millionaire's mouth, Coriolanus' left hand grabbed the knife laying on the board in front of him, where moments ago the maids were cutting cheese and ham. He then brings the blade to swiftly meet the older man's stomach, white dress shirt staining crimson red, all the while Coriolanus refuses to break the man's gaze.

"You fucking disgust me. Everyone in the Capitol fucking disgusts me one way or another, but you? You dare invite yourself to my home?" he retracts the knife, before stabbing it back into the suited man's flesh, each pause accentuated by another driving force.

"You dare speak about my love in such a vulgar manner?"

"You dare insinuate such sinful acts with my beloved?"

"You dare try and buy your way into her body?"

The marble floors are now flooded in a sea of red, the man's dying chokes and Coriolanus' heavy breaths overwhelming the room. The room stings of the smell of copper when you enter the space, quietly closing the door behind you, as you were only able to see the man on the floor and your boyfriend standing on top of him from the entrance.

"Corio? Love?"

The blonde turns around at the sound of your voice, face etched with annoyance.

Annoyed that you'd have to be subject to a vulgar sight like this. Annoyed that he'd stained your new kitchen set with an unworthy man's blood... And most of all, annoyed that he can't tell what you're thinking: your face kept completely neutral as you slowly approach him.

"You're back early." is all he decides to say, testing the waters.

You look down at his hands, soaked in hot blood, then down at the man who is writhing on the floor.

"Found what we wanted quickly, I suppose." you reply, stopping next to Coirolanus before leaning down to get a better look at the dying man. "Right, what was his deal?"

"Hm?"

It's only then that your plain expression breaks, your usually light eyes swimming with sinister charm, a coy smile breaking out on your face.

"Come on, Corio. You don't seriously think I didn't notice the amount of odd stains on your cufflinks? Or the terrified looks the house servants give you since the beginning of our engagement?"

He blinks, surprised. Coriolanus had always assumed he was covering his tracks well. Or that, at the very least, you'd have something to say about it all.

"He was making rather vulgar comments about you, darling. The bastard seems to have been making donations in an effort to get closer to you." he slowly explains as you stand back up, nodding slowly.

"Hm... Yes, that is rather concerning. And I suppose you've gone too far ahead for us to save him, always the temperamental lover you are." you tease.

Your humorous response and your unwillingness to run away from the darkness of the situation, it awakens something fierce in Coriolanus that he hasn't felt for you before.

"I suppose."

The euphoria he feels when your delicate fingers lace his to grab the knife instead, before you finally drive the blade down and end the man's life, is indescribable.

"I think you owe me a new dress." you say quietly, dropping the knife onto the floor.

The blonde wastes no time gathering you up in his arms, kissing you so fiercely that it almost hurts your neck.

"I think I owe you more than that, darling. How about the entirety of Panem?"

He'd do anything for you. The entirety of Panem be damned.

a/n: omg this has got to be the darkest piece of writing + fucked up ending I've ever written in like years of writing on tumblr 😅😭 but idk I'm obsessed with an idea of Corio's partner being someone who embraces him wholeheartedly and surprises him by being darker than she seems on the surface.

please leave a like/comment/reblog/ask if you've enjoyed, your support is what motivates me to write!

ALSO I've just re-opened my requests bc I would love to receive some corio fic ideas, so please send in your corio thoughts if you have any 🥺🥺🥺

#coriolanus snow #coriolanus snow x reader #coriolanus snow x you #coriolanus x you #coriolanus x reader #tom blyth x reader #tom blyth x you #coriolanus snow fanfiction #thg x reader #the hunger games #1k #2k #3k #4k #5k

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butyoudidthis4what · 5 days ago

Text

I hear you.

Andrew Pope Cody x F!Reader

Based on this ask for the 1k celebration! The prompt was "show me that bruise please."

6.1k || All my content is 18+ MDNI || CW: Discussion of reader being very briefly assaulted in the form of her arm being grabbed hard; diverges from canon; a fairy bad bruise but no heavy graphic description; canon typical violence in the form of the guy who assaulted you being taken care of by the Cody boys™️; reference to use of a bat as a weapon; mention of a shotgun; super vague reference to drugs if you've watched the show and/or know Craig; mention of a bar; Pope struggles; heavy allusion to sex; emotional-ish but I think still quite fluffy; no use of y/n or related.

Summary: You come home to Pope with a bruise.

AN: My first time writing for Pope. He is a tough one to nail down in all aspects, voice, characterization, movement. So I'm very nervous and concerned about whether this reads and feels like him in those ways. I'm also only about half way through season 4 so I haven't seen all of him quite yet. I didn't get into too much into either Reader or Pope's internal thinking and feelings how I sometimes do. I was trying to keep it lighter and shorter. 😂 Anyway, I hope it reads and feels like him and is nevertheless enjoyable if it doesn't. I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments and thank you so much for reading!

You’re still thinking about how you’re going to tell Pope as you turn down the street of your house.

You suppose it doesn’t really matter in the end. His reaction will be the same no matter how gently you tell him or how much you play it down. Because it’s you. And so it’s visceral for him. Instinctual.

Especially when it’s you being injured by someone else.

The two of you met shortly after Deran bought and opened the bar. He hired you as a bartender. To the surprise of everyone, Pope included, the two of you hit it off. He’d come in and sit at the bar before opening while you prepped. You’d talk, he’d listen, would talk some. He talked more over time as he became comfortable with you. You started going to parties at the house which gave you more time together, got him more comfortable around you. Particularly because you generally spent about five minutes in the backyard before slipping with Pope to whatever free room was available and shutting the door.

You only ever talked. You’d lay on the bed side by side and stare at the ceiling while you talked and during the periods of comfortable silences. You never made him talk. Never made him try to be something he wasn’t. Never tried to push for more while in a bedroom with him.

He let you help with Lena. It was you he turned to when he had to let her go. He spent considerably more time at your place after, both because he wanted to be there and because you saw what Smurf was doing to him.

Your relationship was a slow progression. But he finally asked you out like you hadn’t been dating in a way already and things grew from there. You probably moved in together a little too quickly but you had to get him out of that fucking house and away from Smurf. The progression wasn’t linear. Nothing ever truly is. Both of you had things to work through, pasts that made relationships difficult. You stuck together though. And here you are a few years later. You just bought a house together and are both thinking about more in your own heads.

Pope’s on the couch waiting up for you and watching another nature documentary when his phone rings. His brows furrow a little when he sees it’s Deran. “Yeah?”

“Hey, so listen… little physical altercation at the bar tonight-”

“Involving her?” He’s already up and grabbing his keys.

“Yeah but she’s fine, man,” Deran sighs in that vaguely impatient and resigned way he does. “She already left and is on her way home. It really wasn’t much. Some guy grabbed her arm and that was really all he was able to do before it was handled. I just didn’t want to get yelled at for not telling you, so I called.”

Pope’s voice is even lower than usual, seething. “You better hope she’s really okay.”

He hangs up, turns all the living room lights on, sits back down, and turns the TV off. He’d love to know why the fuck you didn’t call him.

He hears the garage door opening, your car pulling in and it closing again. He’d taught you that when you guys moved in. To keep the car in reverse and close the garage door before parking, unlocking your car doors and getting out. Safer. Thirty seconds or so later the door leading from the garage into the house opens and you walk in, set your stuff down with its usual clatter. “Hey! I’m home.”

You toe your shoes off and kick them onto the bottom shelf of the shoe rack how Pope likes. The second you step into the living room and find the TV off, all the living room lights on, and Pope sitting straight up in the armchair you already know. His eyes find yours immediately and stay on you.

“Deran?” you confirm as you walk further into the living room. You stand near the armchair, close enough that he could stand and reach you or grab your hand as he sits but far enough away to give him space and not be looming over him.

“Called.” Pope’s face would be unreadable to anyone but you. Everyone would just see anger and his scowl. And yes, he is angry. But you see the slight softness to his eyes, the way his eyebrows furrow just a little differently than when he’s angry, and the way his head isn’t bowed in anger but rather lifted just a little with the slightest tilt. Worried. Pope is worried about you. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

It’s acerbic. It’s Pope being worried and struggling with the vulnerability that worry brings. He’s not sure what he would be without you. Not sure he would continue to be for very long without you.

You tilt your head at him a little, keep your tone soft and volume normal. “Of course I was.” You nod as you say it. “I just thought doing it in person would be better so that I’d be here and you could see I’m okay.”

After a few seconds of consideration your answer earns you an almost imperceptible nod. He likes that thought process, the way you were trying to make this even a little easier on him. “Are you hurt?” You shake your head at him and he accepts it for now. “What happened?”

You shrug. “I was walking back from a table and some guy stopped me and started talking. When I tried to excuse myself to get back behind the bar he grabbed my arm. I got away quickly enough. Left a bruise but it’s really not bad.”

“What?” It’s low, eerily calm and all gravel. And there’s anger, you think. Real anger. Not anger that’s in part masking worry. You can see it and you can hear it.

“Pope, I’m okay-”

“He left a mark on you. That’s not okay.” His breathing has gotten heavier as his anger grows. It’s not at you and you know that. He’s just livid at the thought of someone leaving a mark on you. He’s glad he can’t see it, that you’re wearing one of his shirts and the sleeve is long enough on you to just about hit your elbow. Glad he has time to try to prepare himself to see it.

“It’s not that bad, it’s just a bruise.” You offer him a small smile to see if it’ll help show him you’re okay. It does. Just slightly. Your smile helps him. Always helps him regulate and come back to center even if just the slightest bit. “I give myself them all the time.”

He shakes his head a little. “Doesn’t matter how bad it is or isn’t. And if it’s already visible it’s bad enough.”

“Pope, I’m okay. Look at me.” You offer him your hand and after a few seconds he takes it and stands up. You take one of his hands in yours and press his index and middle finger into your wrist, his fingers automatically adjusting until they find your pulse. You cup his face, keeping looking into his eyes. “I’m here,” you murmur. “I’m here with you and I’m okay.”

His jaw grinds a little but he nods and lets out a breath. It’s helped him come down a little. “Show me that bruise please.” His tone has evened back out. He’s not demanding. It’s a statement, but there’s just enough of a slight upward intonation at the end of the sentence that you know you could refuse.

You don’t want to refuse though. And there’s no point in refusing. He’s going to see it at some point tonight unless you change in the bathroom with the door closed and wear one of his shirts or something long sleeved.

“Okay.” You nod at him. Pope lets go of your wrist and your hands move from his face, one hanging at your side as the other grabs your sleeve and pulls it up, bunches it at your shoulder before coming down so he can see. You hold that arm out a little for him.

Pope’s breathing picks back up as looks at your arm, uses his finger to ask you to hold it out more and turn it for him. He’s a little lightheaded and a lot nauseous at the sight, red and purple blotches are already settling into your skin. But it’s not so much the red and purple that makes him lightheaded and nauseous.

“That is not just a bruise,” he grits out, his breathing picking back up again. “That’s his fucking handprint on your skin! That is his fucking handprint bruised onto your arm!” He doesn’t raise his voice or yell though he says the words with force behind them. The words are strained too. A man trying to keep himself collected. At least for now. At least for this conversation with you.

Pope thought he was livid before, thought he was full of rage. At whoever did this to you. At himself for not being there to protect you. But one look at the handprint shaped bruise on your upper arm has him thinking he’s never truly been livid before. Hasn’t come close to hitting true rage before.

“I’m okay. It doesn’t really hurt and it’ll fade.”

“Who was it?” Pope finally pulls his eyes off the bruise and back up to yours. “Is he a regular?”

You shake your head and let out a concerned breath. “Deran and I already took care of him, Pope. Please. I don’t want you to leave tonight or put yourself at risk while you’re this upset about it.” Your eyes grow a little glassy and the corners of your lips pull down.

Both your words and the look on your face make Pope pause for a second. He can’t let his anger go. But he can at least try to set aside for now. For you.

“You took care of him?” His eyebrows raise slightly.

“Yeah.” You nod. “Pretty sure I broke his nose. If I didn’t, Deran definitely did. He was there within seconds of my punch to take over for me.”

“With?” You know he’s asking how you might’ve broken the guy’s nose.

“My fist.” You smile a little at the way the quickest little smirk of pride flashes on his face.

“Does your hand hurt?”

“A little maybe.” You open and close it. “Nothing I’d be desperate to take ibuprofen or tylenol for.”

“Let me see.” He holds his hand out and you place yours in his. Pope looks down and doesn’t love what he sees. Your knuckles are very clearly bruised. “It’ll be worse tomorrow,” he releases your hand and looks at you, “it always is.”

You shrug. You don’t really care. “But hey, it’s not broken because I had such a great self-defense instructor who taught me how to protect myself for the times when I can’t be with my boyfriend.” Something about ‘instructor’ gets to Pope a little, makes his heart beat a little faster. You pull your sleeve back down, covering the bruise. “Probably the most handsome man I ever laid eyes on.” You hold out your hands for Pope and pull him gently and start walking backwards towards your bedroom once he takes them.

“He can be taken care of again.” He’s talking about the guy who did this to you. You give him a little nod, shrug in admission and acquiescence. The guy could.

“Auburn curls,” you continue, squeezing his hands. He goes to squeeze back but stops, doesn’t want to make the bruising worse. “The most beautiful hazel eyes. Big hands that enveloped mine. Soft yet firm tummy I could feel whenever he was right behind me helping me position my hands or something. Muscular arms.” You cross the threshold into your bedroom, warmth flooding through you when you watch the corners of his lips twitch up, his eyes crinkle a little as your words make him give you the smallest smile. “Sharp jaw with some stubble that made me shiver when it would scrape lightly over my ear and face when he leaned in from behind to give me instructions.” You stop walking when you and Pope are standing face to face at the end of your bed, stepping close to him and resting your hands against his chest.

“You were supposed to be paying attention.” He tilts his head slightly as he slides his arms around your waist. “To what you were being taught.”

You smirk at him. “Evidently I was.” You pull your bruised but not broken hand from his chest and wiggle your fingers at him.

“Maybe you need to take a refresher course from this instructor.” It seems teasing. Or the closest to this kind of teasing Pope will probably ever get. And perhaps it is in part, slight part. But really it’s a type of vulnerability Pope only gives you. It’s a veiled ask and expression of concern. He wants to teach you again, assure himself that you know how to defend yourself when he’s not with you.

“I’d be more than happy to do that.” You nod at him.

He swallows. “Thank you.”

“Always,” you murmur. You press your lips together and up, ask him for a kiss. He leans down and in to give you one. More than one. Brings a hand up to hold your jaw gently. Like you’ll break. Another silent ask, though you’re not entirely sure for what. You’re not sure he knows. You pull away a little at a natural break in your last kiss. “What do you need?”

He shakes his head a little. “I don’t…” His eyes wander around your face, jaw rolling as he tries to find the answer. Not because he feels he needs to give you one but because he wants to find the answer for himself. A few quiet moments pass, but you’re patient. You’re always patient with him. He finally gets what he needs articulable, brushes the thumb of the hand still holding your jaw over your lips, just enough force to tilt your head a little. “To look at you. To feel you.”

You nod as you study him, his eyes. There’s really two ways to give him both of those. But there is only one way he’s using his eyes and body to ask for, consciously or not.

If he wanted to strip you and lay you on the bed and look over you by kissing every inch of you his free hand would be playing with the hem of your shirt or the waistband of your pants and his eyes would flick to the bed at least once. But neither of those happen.

Instead his eyes stay locked with yours the entire time. His free hand squeezes your hip gently, gives it the slightest tug to the right. It matches with the way his thumb tilts your head slightly to the right. The bathroom is off to the right.

It’s obvious.

“Shower me?” Your words are important. Especially now, especially to Pope. Shower me. Not shower with me. You want him to do this for you. You’re giving this to him. Giving yourself to him. “Wash him off me. Please. I only want you on me.”

“Yeah,” he nods, “okay.”

You smile at him as he lets his hand fall from your jaw and take yours. He leads you to the bathroom, closes the door so the steam will heat the room, turns the shower on and lets the water get warm as he strips you, pants and underwear first, then himself completely, and then his fingers play at the hem of your shirt for a few seconds as he tries to brace himself to see it again before he takes it off, makes quick work of your bra.

His anger hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s right there beneath the surface. It flares when the bruise is revealed again, rings in his ears. But you’re more important than it. You need him right now. To take care of you and wash the guy who did this from your skin as much as he can.

And he needs you. Now and always. Needs to know you’re okay. He feels like his emotions, his worry and resultant need to see and feel you might be out of proportion with what happened, especially to an outsider. Because at the end of the day you are right. It is just a bruise. It’s not life-threatening. You don’t need any medical treatment. But for Pope it might as well have been. It was life-threatening to him because you were in danger and he wasn’t there. The situation was life-threatening even if the bruise it left you with isn’t.

The whole thing is a reminder of something he knows all too well, how fragile life is, how easily it’s taken away. How easily the woman he loves could be taken away. It makes him breathless if he thinks about it for too long. So maybe his emotions and his reaction feel out of proportion, would seem that way to an outsider. But they aren’t to him. He’s had too much ripped away, seen too much violence and death, and so every threat to you is life-threatening in his mind.

Pope grabs your hand again before he uses his other to feel the temperature of the water. You bite your lip at it because something about it is just adorable and precious. He wants to hold your hand here in your bathroom. Doesn’t want to be not touching you.

Once he’s satisfied with the temperature he gets you in first, makes sure you get completely wet and are warm before he lets you spin the two of you so that he’s under the stream of water. When he’s done he moves you back, has you get your hair wet again before grabbing your shampoo. He’s thorough, massages your scalp a little before rinsing and applying your conditioner. He holds you while it sits, hugs you to him, his head turning to rest on your shoulder. After enough time has passed he rinses your hair, makes sure all the conditioner is out.

The breath of air he lets out as he takes a step back to grab your body wash would be just that, him letting out a breath, to anyone else. But you see it for what it is, a small sigh of relief that he can now finally do what he’s been aching to do. He can wash you, can run a soaped up washcloth over you, follow behind it with his other hand so he can feel you as he looks you over, go over every inch of you to reassure himself. To comfort himself.

You grab the washcloth and start to get it wet as he grabs your body wash. But you stop him. “Yours, please.” He’s still for a few seconds before grabbing his and turning around to take the washcloth for him. You love smelling like him. And you know that smelling like your shampoo and conditioner and his body wash is going to be perfect for him in bed tonight. Because he loves the smell of you but also loves the possessiveness of you smelling like him. Best of both worlds.

The shower has been quiet and continues to be as Pope washes you, kneeling to wash your legs to make sure he feels all of you, looks at all of you. It’s not unusual. It’s Pope. He doesn’t need words to express himself right now. His hands and eyes and lips say everything. He’s worried about you. He’s scared. He’s angry at the guy who did this. He doesn’t like you getting hurt. He hates it. It’s unacceptable. He’s sorry he wasn’t there. He’s going to take care of you. He’s got you. You’re safe with him.

He loves you.

You don’t speak because you know how focused he is and wants to remain. You talking might interrupt or distract him. He might not get everything he needs from this. So you watch him wash you, run your hands through wet curls when he’s on his knees in front of you.

Pope occasionally presses kisses after the hand following the washcloth. To your hip, your collarbones, your knee, your inner wrist, your tummy, the back of your calf, your lower back, up your spine, your shoulder, your hands, your fingers, your neck. He doesn’t care about the taste of soap on his lips, he doesn’t even really register it.

He avoids it though. That one upper arm. But once the rest of you is finished and it’s the only unwashed part of you he turns his attention to it. You watch the maelstrom of emotions behind his eyes as he looks at it, watch his jaw clench and unclench. Pope looks at you, waits for the soft smile and nod you give him before his eyes turn back to your upper arm.

He’s exceedingly gentle as he runs the washcloth over the bruise, the hand that follows behind it feather light, fingertips dragging over your skin lightly enough to bring goosebumps to your skin even with the heat of the shower. The washcloth hitting the floor makes a slapping sound that neither you nor Pope really hear. He’s too focused on you and you’re too focused on him.

He leans down, drops his head enough to bring his lips to your arm, shifting as he needs to in order to kiss every single square inch of the bruise. His eyes stay on it once he’s done, fingers tracing over it again.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers as he brings his eyes back to yours. His scowl has tightened enough to reflect how sad he is, how responsible he feels. They match his slightly glassy eyes. Shame clouds his features and he has to look away, afraid of what he’ll see on your face once his apology processes even though he knows your face isn’t going to change.

And there’s the fear you knew was coming for him.

The fear that he fucked up, that he wasn’t there and let this happened and failed to protect you so you’re going to revoke your love. Break up with him. Leave him. Or maybe just punish him with the silent treatment and put downs and little snide comments designed to inflict maximum damage until you decide it’s enough. He knows you won’t do any of that but that type of treatment is all he’s known and even with the years between you where you’ve never done anything of the sort, it’s still almost impossible for the fear to not take him over for a little when he feels like he’s messed up and let you down. It’s a Pavlovian response. And he knows you know that. That you don’t hold it against him or think it’s reflective of what he thinks about you.

“You have nothing to be sorry for.” Your voice is warm and even. It’s normal, how you always talk to him. You have to fight to keep it that way not because you’re mad at him or upset with him but because seeing him like this, being this hard on himself, feeling this guilty, makes your heart ache for him and hurts worse than the bruise or when it was left.

“I should have been there.” He shakes his head and you can see his scowl relax back into anger at himself, jaw setting.

You move your hand within his field of vision so that he knows it’s coming when you slide it into his and squeeze. “I know it feels that way, and your feelings are valid and your guilt makes sense, I promise. But we can’t be together every second Pope. And even if you had been there unless you were following me from table to table it would’ve happened all the same.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe he’d have seen us together and not tried.” You tug on his hand a little, try to get him to come closer to you so that he’ll be in the stream of water. You can see that he’s cold. But you’re not surprised when he doesn’t move, knows he thinks being cold is just part of the penance he feels he deserves. So you step out of the stream and drop his hand so you can wrap your arms around him and rest your head on his chest. “And I’d have been there. I’d at least have been there.”

As you expected, Pope slides his arms around you and walks you both back into the stream of the shower. You stand there quietly with him for a few moments until he relaxes enough to truly hug you back, lean over you and rest his head on your shoulder. You rub his back, try to give him as much comfort as he’ll accept before you pull back and lean in to kiss him.

You break the kiss and let your hands leave his body to hold his face so that he’ll look at you again. “I know I can’t take it away from you or convince you that you don’t need to feel responsible or guilty or like you let me down or failed me. But I can tell you that I don’t feel like you’re responsible for it, I don’t feel like you let it happen or that you weren’t there for me or that you let me down or failed me. This doesn’t change anything between us. I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going silent.” You give him another couple of kisses before smiling at him, watch him fight to accept your words. “I still love you more than I know what to do with and I still feel loved by you. There hasn’t been a single second since you first told me that I haven’t.”

“There hasn’t been a single second I haven’t.” He’s urgent in the way he says it, like he needs you to know, needs you to believe him.

“I know,” you murmur. You steal a lingering kiss from him and then settle him back into you. It doesn’t upset you that he doesn’t really verbally acknowledge the rest of what you said. You know he was listening and taking it in and is trying to process it all.

After another minute or so Pope pulls away from you so that he can quickly wash his hair and body. Normally you’d ask to do it for him but you know it would be too much for him right now, that he’d let you but grow even more tense with how much he’d feel like he didn’t deserve it. So you just watch, step out of the stream when he needs to rinse. And when he’s done he pulls you into him so that your back is against his chest, positions you just right so that the water falls on you both but keeps your heads out of the stream as you soak together.

Eventually you start to talk softly, chatter at him like you do. It’s something he loves about you. That you’ll talk to him and not expect him to talk in return. But you don’t talk constantly either. You know when to and for how long. You’re not afraid of the silence that often falls between the two of you, it’s always comfortable, always feels safe. Sometimes you just like to break it. Sometimes the energy shift within him as he starts to get in his head is so palpable you can feel it and start to talk to bring him out of it before he gets too far in. Sometimes it’s some of both.

He comments from time to time, gives you hums of acknowledgement to make sure you know he’s listening. He doesn’t need to because you know he’s always listening. Always remembering. He’ll bring up something you randomly spoke about as you guys make dinner a month after the fact. Sometimes you don’t even remember.

You bring a hand up and back and run your fingers through his hair for a second as best you can. “I love your curls when they’re wet,” you sigh happily.

“You always love them.”

You giggle a little at him and the way he says it so simply, like he’s saying water is wet or some other obvious fact, almost a little distracted, voice stoic in a way and low enough to be all gravel. “True.”

From there you tell him about other things that happened at the bar. Give him a little more info on just how well Deran took care of the guy.

“And as Deran’s hauling him over to the door Craig leaves the bathroom,” you pause in a silent we both know why, “and is like ‘yo, what the fuck?’ and starts yelling for Kai to hand him the bat and when she wouldn’t he started to go for the hidden shotgun. Luckily Deran had the guy out by that point, but then Craig found out what happened and was asking for the bat again and saying he was just going to find and have a talk with the guy and make sure he knew I was yours and that he was lucky it was him and Deran there and not you.”

“Fucking Craig,” Pope huffs. But you know his lips are upturned at least a little, know that he loves it, his brothers protecting you, that he loves them. “Deran should’ve let him.” You hum in acknowledgment and stand in comforting silence for a bit. “I’m glad they had your back.”

You don’t comment on those words, know he doesn’t want you to. Instead you tell him the rest of the night was uneventful, let there be a few minutes of silence before you start talking again, this time about whatever pops into your head. Things you need at the grocery store, somewhere you think you guys should go on vacation, another random story someone at work told you, how you need the oil changed in your car.

The entire time you chatter at him Pope holds you close, kisses at your neck and just below your ear, occasionally letting his lips pull up just a little at something you say or how animated you get, content to listen to you and let you drown out the thoughts in his mind trying to take over.

“Leave your car tomorrow and take mine. I’ll change the oil.” He gives your neck one last kiss and then moves his hands to squeeze your hips gently. “Let’s get out. The water is getting cold.”

“That would be very nice of you, thank you.” You spin to give him a kiss quickly before you wait for him to turn the shower off and step out, dry himself and wrap his towel around his waist. He holds his hand out for you and you take it, let him grab your towel and dry you off.

Pope wraps your towel around you to help keep you warm while he sorts out your wet hair for you. You both hang your towels to dry before heading back into your room.

“No.” He says it softly but it’s loud enough to hear and you turn to him, abandoning the pair of pajamas you were about to pull from the dresser. His eyes flick to the bed and then back to you. “Please,” he whispers. He needs you skin on skin, no fabric between you. He needs to feel your warmth seep into him. Needs to know you still want his skin on yours.

“I’d love that.” You smile brightly at him. It makes his heart seize a little. He’ll never get over you wanting him in every way, of you looking at him like that. Like he’s your world.

Nor will he ever get over sliding into bed next to you and laying on your side, you seeking him out, tangling your legs together and resting your arm across the side of his waist as your heads lay on the same pillow and you look at each other.

There’s a couple moments of silence as you both settle in.

“How’d your day go? Anything you want to share?” The smile you wear reassures him he can say no if he wants.

He shrugs with his top shoulder. “It was fine until that phone call from Deran. Didn’t really do much.”

You hum at him. “Well I’m glad it was otherwise fine.”

He gives you a single nod and the peaceful silence returns. The two of you just rest together, looking at each other, hands running up and down your sides. You watch his face slowly tighten. He has something to admit.

You give him time to work it out in his head, don’t prompt him or ask him anything. And eventually the silence is broken.

“I’m finding him,” Pope admits.

You let out a small laugh, smile at him and nod. You squeeze his hip. “I know.”

“Does that make you mad?” That question is quieter, like he’s afraid of the answer and feels like shit for the way he’s not sure a ‘yes’ would be able to stop him.

“No.” You shake your head.

“I don’t want to make you mad.” He swallows thickly, like he’s trying to take his next words down with it. “But he bruised his handprint onto your skin. I can’t let that go, I can’t let that go.”

“It doesn’t make me mad, my love. I promise.” You run a hand through his hair. “Just be careful, yeah? Can’t have you getting hurt on me. Or anything else.” You don’t need to specify you’re talking about him getting caught and going back to prison. He knows.

There’s a brief pause as he accepts your words. “You like taking care of me when I’m hurt,” he mumbles like it doesn’t mean everything to him.

“Well yeah!” you huff a laugh. “But I’d gladly accept never getting to take care of you in that specific way again if it meant you were here with me and never got injured, or sick for that matter, again.”

Pope nods. More silence. He shifts in bed, just a small wiggle. But he has been the whole time. He’s restless. He knows you’re okay but he needs more to quiet his mind.

“You’re okay?” He breaks the silence again.

“I’m okay.” You smile at him and nod. Your eyes roam his face and then settle back on his as you hear what he wants. “It’s okay if you need more.” You grab Pope’s hand and roll on your back, tug on his hand to get him to follow you so that he’s on top of you. “If you haven’t felt me quite enough to really believe that I’m okay.”

“Yeah?” he breathes with a nod.

You lean up and kiss him, run a hand through his curls and use it to guide his head down with yours as you kiss. “Yeah,” you whisper against his lips.

He kisses you this time, gives you a tiny grunt of appreciation when you open your mouth for him so he can taste you. As you kiss you grab his hand, guide it over your body to remind him that he can touch you, that you’re his, all of you. He doesn’t need much of a reminder, hands roaming all over you as he kisses you breathless. His hands are softer than usual, gentler. He doesn’t squeeze quite as hard. It’s not that he doesn’t want to mark you, he loves marking you. But not tonight. He can’t tonight.

You whine in discontent when he breaks the kiss and pulls up to look down at you, hazel eyes blown and chest heaving slightly. “Thank you. For not making me ask.” He gives you another lingering kiss and pulls up a little and looks at you again like you’re unreal, a figment of his imagination. But he could never imagine something as good as you, no matter how hard he tried. “You never make me ask.”

“You do ask.” You sigh softly as he moves one of his hands closer to where you want it. Where he wants it. “Just not with words. You ask with your eyes. With your hands, your body. And I learned quickly how to listen. How to hear you.” You widen your legs for him letting his pelvis drop down and settle against yours more as you continue to look him in the eye. His hips and yours roll and his hand falters as you both find friction another way. He gives you a soft groan as his hand starts moving closer again, though for a different purpose this time. The pleasure Pope’s sending through you has your voice breathy and low as your hands tangle in his hair and pull him closer again so that your lips touch. “I hear you. I’ll always make sure I can hear you.”

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moyazaika · 2 months ago

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yandere! childe (genshin impact) x fem! reader

cw; (1.9k wc) darling wears glasses, obsessive + possessive themes, allusions to violence, implied non-con, nsfw themes, mdni 18+

genie's notes; commissioned piece by @lucienbarkbark who was an angel to work with! it's always fun to dive into fanfic so thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so; have fun reading! ♡

the snezhnayan winters are deathly cold, but even then, they are not nearly as chilling as your husband’s ire.

rarely are you ever the object of his interrogation, but there are those inevitable few moments you’re reminded of how old habits really do die hard—you slip up, in spite of all your best efforts—and hell freezes over.

take, for instance, right now.

because although his lips curl into something akin to a smile, you know childe far too well to believe this is anything but a deception, returned in favour of your own omissions.

the heat of the nearby fireplace’s flames lick at your feet and are, you recognise, the last remnants of warmth in the room. even the heavy fur coat draped over your shaking shoulders does little to protect you against childe’s blue eyes, cutting into you like shards of dark ice.

“ajax,” you plead. “i’m—”

“a liar.” childe finishes for you; his voice is deceptively gentle, soft as a lull. it devastates you when he laughs. “you’re a liar, my love.”

he’s got all of your letters in his hands. already, you know you’ve lost. the envelopes have been ripped open and the codes deciphered. how stupid of you to believe you could make a fool of the eleventh harbinger.

the silence that follows; settles down into the space between the two of you, is long and languid. your husband is in no rush to speak, seemingly content in merely taking in the way you’re squirming before him. he is eager, yet impassive, in his appraisal. it’s not the reverent sort you’ve gotten so used to, for there are no sweet nothings whispered against your skin as he lets his eyes linger on the softest parts of you.

tonight, his observation is more akin to an examination. an analysis, perhaps. like he’s looking for something—finds it, you realise with a sinking feeling, as his gaze snags on your hands, curled up by your sides, and marred by deep, black, ink.

damning markers of your disloyalty.

instinctively, you let the sleeves of your coat fall past your wrists. it’s a futile attempt at delaying the inevitable, and it makes you feel like nothing more than a guilty little girl having been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. you can’t stand the silence anymore. you really need to just—

archons—

the hair on your skin stands on end when he finally deigns to meet your eyes. beneath the weight of his cold gaze, you think anything would be better than this. it’s difficult not to walk right into the fireplace; lie down amidst the welcoming warmth of the flames that burn so brightly.

“i tried to trust you, y’know? i let you send your family little letters, and i never opened any of them even when all i wanted,” he confesses, “was to tear those pretty envelopes apart. i’ll admit, i even thought about breaking a finger or two a couple of times, did you know that? nothing to post if you can’t write.”

he looks to you for an answer, and it’s all you can do to stare back. he shakes his head, then. “no, no. of course you don’t know. how could you? you thought you had me all figured out.”

you have to force yourself to speak, because the words don’t come easy when you’re on the verge of a meltdown. you don’t even recognise the strangled sound of your own voice. “i’m sorry. i’m so, so sorry. please don’t hate me.”

“sweetheart,” he chides, fingers pulling the corners of his lips down into a melodramatic frown. “i could never hate you. i’m just, y’know, curious.” he lets his hand fall back to his side, pale mouth splitting into a sharp grin as he takes a step closer. “only wondering where i went wrong with you, that’s all.”

“nowhere. you didn’t.” your eyes are burning, though his are still crystal clear. lucid. sharp. he is immovable. you feel like the yielding force of weightless waters that split apart before a glacier’s path. “it’s all my fault.”

“i thought we put all this behind us. that you’d finally gotten it through your head.” he stalks closer, even steps far too measured to be casual. “imagine my surprise when i read these letters my wife begged me to let her send to her family and, ohh! would you look at that?”

“my little wife,” childe's voice falls completely flat, “thinks she can leave me.”

you cast a quick glance around your bedroom, scanning the space in your immediate vicinity for anything to hold onto. the vacant eyes of porcelain dolls and ornately carved figurines from your favourite novels all stare back at you emptily. a typewriter gathering dust by the windowsill. how it used to delight you at first, filling your monotonous days holed up within the walls of your husband’s prison by decorating it with pretty things.

they’re all useless to you now.

you wonder why childe chose not to cut off your fingers. he should have, you think. then you would never have ended up here. then maybe you would never have had any hope.

but you know the answer to your own question. after all, you’ve known him long enough to understand that childe finds great amusement in the way you still manage to carry that quiet hope within you.

oftentimes, he’ll catch you roaming the halls of this maze-like palace, attempting to mentally chart your way out. and every time he catches up to you, he’ll laugh, and press a kiss to your cheek, as if he knows exactly what you’re up to. as if it’s some sweet, private jest the two of you share.

“please, ajax.” you try again, “tsaritsa’s soul, i never meant to—”

“yeah, yeah. save it, love. there’ll be plenty of opportunities to beg for forgiveness later on.” you know it’s all for show when he pretends to think something over; nothing more than a performance when he suddenly snaps his fingers with an eager grin. “oh, that reminds me! i actually have something i needed to tell you.”

you watch as he thumbs through the stack of opened letters in his hands. you catch glimpses of your familiar scrawl; the desperation painfully obvious in your every etching onto the papers, begging your family to send a saviour, to reach out to the adventurer’s guild or the archons and send a cavalry to come knocking down the doors of the tsaritsa’s palace.

“you’ll love this one, sunshine.“i mean, well, you kinda have to. don’t have much of a choice, huh?”

all of it is a performance. from the ease with which he tosses the envelopes into the fire down to the very cadence of his voice as it takes on a familiar, sickeningly sweet lilt. you know this because you remain acutely aware of the fact that childe knew exactly what he was going to do with you the moment he finished reading those letters.

that doesn’t mean you’re ready for it.

“we’re going to liyue, lovely. i’m going to let you see your family again. i mean, isn’t that so much nicer than sending a letter? we’ll even catch the lantern rite whilst we’re there.” you sink deeper into your furs, stumbling away from him for every step he takes closer. “figured it’d be good for you.”

childe’s voice dips an octave lower, and the curl to his lips is a mockery of the usual smile that sits there just for you. “good for the baby, too.”

“tartaglia.” it’s impossible to see his face through the tears; everything in the room takes on the haze of a distant memory, and you wish, so desperately, that this moment would be over sooner. you could tuck it away within the recesses of your mind and never visit it again. let it be another lesson. “what baby?”

“your mother was overjoyed at the news.” he hums absently, “she said something about your haircut? mentioned already working extra hours to commission new baby clothes.”

your back hits a wall. and finally, with nowhere left to go and no saviour here to help you, childe takes his sweet time in catching up to you; and when he finally does, it’s all you can do to keep your neck painfully craned and looking up at him without falling to your knees.

“aren’t you excited, sweetheart?” he tilts his head, lifts a palm to cup your face. he’s smiling so earnestly, but his eyes are completely dull. you try searching for a sliver of the sunny man childe can sometimes be, and find, in place of the sunshine, the cold rays of light that hit shimmering snow and dissipate into nothing, instead. “finally, a family of our own making. it’ll be nice to go back to liyue, too.”

“i don’t understand.”

“it's simple, my love,” childe’s lithe fingers creep beneath the heavy fur coat you’re wearing. with deft hands, he slides it off your shoulders in one fluid motion. it falls onto the floor, dangerously close to the fireplace. a shiver rolls down your spine as you instinctively inch closer to your husband, seeking any semblance of warmth within the freezing halls of the palace. “it’s only tradition. it takes a village to raise a baby.” he laughs. “trust me, i know. my sisters were the sweetest little girls, but the boys have been a handful since birth. we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“…ajax? i never—”

“i’m trying, y’know?” he takes off your glasses and presses a lingering kiss to your cheek. sighs against your skin as he folds up the frames and tucks them aside. “i’m trying very hard to be a good man for you, sweetheart.”

"listen to me, i—"

"you missed your family, sunlight. i get it, i’m a busy guy. i clearly wasn’t giving you as much attention as you needed. you obviously had too much free time on your hands. i figured if we had a family to tend to, that’d keep you busy. plus,” he grins. “i wouldn’t need to take your fingers! you’d never turn to anyone outside of zapolyarny. maybe, finally, you would also have something to love.”

you can barely breathe. “no, no i don't want—”

“you’ll learn to,” childe smiles. this time, finally, it reaches his eyes. “you’re going to adore our little one. trust me, sunlight; we’re going to be the only family you’ll ever need.”

you search his face for something, anything—and your heart breaks at the sight. you turn to the side, can’t even bear to face the man before you for a second longer, when all you find is a terrifying absence of anything but the deepest depths of conviction.

in the distance, as childe works to shed your body of all these elaborate furs between flittering kisses, you can already hear the sound of fireworks. when he sinks into you; a baby’s wailing cry.

the fire crackles cruelly, as your letters of desperation turn to ash, going unanswered for eternity right before your eyes.

#tw yandere #yandere x reader #yandere genshin impact #yandere genshin impact x reader #yandere genshin x reader #yandere genshin x you #yandere tartaglia #yandere childe #yandere childe x reader #yandere childe x you #yandere x darling #commission

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prentissluvr · 11 months ago

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breathe, baby — sam winchester

cw : gn!afab!reader, smut, no plot, fluff, brief mention of canon typical violence & demons at the beginning, making out, clothed grinding, fingering, swearing, pet names (baby, honey), praise, sam calls reader pretty/beautiful, light dom/sub dynamics in the later half (softdom!sam), allusions to oral (r!receiving) 4.1K words.

summary : after a close call on a hunt and a confession, you and sam have sweet, desperate sex. MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS DNI WITH MY NSFW CONTENT. YOU WILL IMMEDIATELY BE BLOCKED !!!

MOVED BLOGS TO @sammyluvr !! no longer active on this blog! all fics can be found there!

this is the second time that you find yourself gasping in sam’s arms in one night. just two hours ago, it was an unpleasant sensation; he held you close as you tried to catch your breath after nearly being choked into unconsciousness by a demon. the part where he held you close was not the unpleasant part. despite the fact that you were having difficulties breathing, you very much so savored the feeling of having him close.

but this… this isn’t just pleasant, it’s pleasure itself. you decide that there’s nothing finer than sam winchester kissing you. he kisses you so hard you can barely breathe, so hungrily that his nose scrunches up and his lips swallow yours and when you part, you’re gasping for breath.

“sam,” you pant out, his big nose still pressed against your cheek and the feeling of his tongue in your mouth lingering so strongly it’s almost buzzing.

“yeah? you okay?” he asks, his own voice just as breathless as yours. the large hand he has resting on the side of your face glides along your cheekbone, fingertips soothing against your skin and wide palm brushing past your ear. his touch dips, lightly ghosting over the bruises on your neck, but it doesn’t hurt, not with how soft he is.

“i’m good,” you assure him, still catching your breath, mind still reeling over the fact that you’re straddling his lap on a motel room bed and his big arm is wrapped around your waist. “really good. just… just wanted to tell you that i’m never gonna let you stop kissing me,” you murmur. his face is so close that you feel the movement of his lips stretching into a smile. he parts further from you, still cupping your cheek. he wants to look at you.

“yeah?” he asks again, voice pleased and tinged with this roughness that isn’t just lust. with sam, it’s always so much more. he’s smiling and his eyes are dark in the dim light of the room and you press a sweet kiss to his grin because you can’t resist it. he kisses back, only a little because he’s busy smiling.

“yeah,” you whisper, pulling away again so he can see that you’re smiling too. that gets him going. really everything about you gets him going, but to have you on his lap, your chest pushing him back into the headboard and your soft smile as you say sweet, almost sappy things? that’s more than enough to drive him crazy.

he wants to be gentle. so, very gentle, but he can’t help himself when both of his hands grab at the sides of your face and pull you back to him. it’s not like he’s rough by any stretch, but there’s a certain desperation thrumming through him, transerfing from his firmly placed palms and almost trembling fingertips to the warm skin of your cheeks.

the force with which he kisses you pushes you backwards, and one hand flies from its spot on his waist to steady yourself on the mattress behind you. the small sound that escapes your throat is muffled by his greedy mouth, and he wants to hear more. all of your sighs and sweet sounds, thusfar quiet and somewhat controlled, have been driving him truly crazy.

almost regretfully, he allows one hand to slide down from your face to your waist, his hold there strong as he hoists you further up into his lap. he’s hard underneath you, and you moan at the feeling. your mind goes blank for a moment, long enough for him to attach his lips to the spot where your jaw curves up to your ear. you sigh aloud at that too, and sam is feeling very satisfied with your reactions; your lips staying parted and your eyes glazing over when you finally feel a semblance of just how big he is.

he gives your sensitive skin a little suck and your hands fist at the fabric of his white undershirt. he feels your knuckles against his side through the thin cotton, your grip pulling the fabric taut around his back. that’s all the encouragement he needs to keep going.

his tongue is just as greedy as his soft lips as it swipes over the skin of your neck, savoring your taste. the sweat and grime of the hunt had been washed off in the shower not too long ago, but your skin is just a little salty from getting all worked up in his lap. sam is utterly obsessed with that taste, his tongue flattening against your pulse point when you tip your head back to give him better access. the loud breath that you let out is halfway to a moan, and both of you are thinking about his tongue being somewhere else.

you push your hips into him at that thought and sam lets out a low groan at the pressure. now you’re feeling greedy. there’s no way you’ll survive without hearing more of him. you grind into him again and he grips your hips tight, letting out another gruff sound.

“shit, baby,” he groans, hot breath fanning against the skin of your neck. you huff at the sound of his voice, gone all husky and desperate. “what do you– what do you want here? you okay to keep going?” sam sounds like the only thing he’s doing right now is holding back.

“yes,” you gasp out, “god, yes.” you slip your hands all the way down his sides until you can grip the hem of his shirt. “can– can i?”

sam’s chest heaves at the sound of your voice, your sweet question, and the way that you look right into his eyes with such a caring, pleading gaze. he realizes that you’re being careful with him, just like he is with you, and he just has to kiss you for it. you kiss back without question, fingers still gripping his shirt. when he pulls away, he has to keep himself from ripping the shirt off himself, but he wants to see and feel you do it yourself.

“‘course you can,” he says, voice hushed. the small wait is more than worth it when your eyes turn excited and your hands fumble to pull the fabric up his sides. your knuckles brush against his bare skin and once you reach his chest, he lifts his arms and pulls it the rest of the way off. his hands are back on your hips in seconds, and you’re too busy raking your gaze over the exposed skin of his torso to see him swallow thickly as he takes in the way you look at him.

you completely forget that you planned to rip off your own shirt too, and instead lean forward to kiss his collarbone with a heavy fervor. his head tilts back a little as he sighs and you grab at his waist, thumbs eager and brushing against his warm skin. you kiss and lick and suck and sam moans for you. his fingers slip under your shirt and you welcome the sensation, kissing him harder in response.

you dip your head lower, hands beginning to roam, up his muscled arms, over his belly, somehow soft and toned all at once. your mind and body are at war. you want to keep kissing, getting lower, dragging your hands up and over his chest. but you want his hands to move, to feel you all over. then you suppose that you could certainly get both. you part from him for just a moment to pull your shirt off, your hands brushing against his as they hold your waist tight.

his jaw clenches and his eyes turn hungry as he watches you intently. you waste no time in taking off your bra too, watching his face as you do. his tongue swipes over his bottom lip as he sees your bare chest rising up and down and he holds back a pleased groan.

he raises his hand up and you think he’s going to touch you there, but he reaches for your face and brushes his knuckles over your cheek bone.

“you’re so fucking beautiful,” he whispers. there’s a rasp to his voice, rough and sweet as he takes you in. your cheeks grow hot, but you bask in the praise anyway.

“and you’re fucking unreal, sam,” you say earnestly, voice equally as husky. he grunts and grabs at your sides, pulling you back into him and kissing your hard. his thumbs push a little into the plush of your breasts and his palms press into your ribs. you arch your back into him, pushing your chest against his and you feel his lip curl up against yours as a guttural sound forces its way out of his throat. a sigh of pleasure leaves your lips and you grind against him in earnest. his hips buck up into yours and the vague thought that he must be uncomfortable in those jeans floats through your mind.

he groans into your mouth and you just need him to touch you more. you pull away, chest heaving, hands roaming. on instinct, sam reaches further up, but at the last second he grips your shoulder instead.

“can i?” he chokes out.

“yes,” you whine, nodding impatiently and sliding your hands up to his chest, asking for your own permission with your eyes. he catches the pause and look in your eyes and he feels all soft for you again. he leans in close, nuzzling his nose into your cheek and pressing a sweet kiss to the corner of your mouth.

his voice is still hoarse, but loving too. “you can touch me wherever you want, honey. promise.” you swallow a moan and reciprocate his sweetness with a kiss to his cheek.

“you too, sam,” you huff. “promise i’ll tell you if i need you to stop, but please… don’t stop.”

“okay,” he breathes, “okay, i won’t. i won’t, baby.” with that, he just paws at you, taking and grasping and groaning when you brush your thumbs over his nipples. “shit,” he gasps, his nose still digging into the soft skin of your cheek. he reciprocates, flicking over your hard nipples with his big thumbs, pinching a little and making you whine into his mouth.

it all feels so good, but all you can think about is the ache between your legs. his bulge under your clothed core has you wet, and you need more. you need his fingers.

you dip your head and his lips meet the crown of your head as you squeeze the flesh over his ribs and gasp for breath.

“oh, god. sam, please, i need… more, please,” you croak, dropping your head all the way down to his shoulder and pressing a messy, open mouthed kiss to the skin where his shoulder meets his neck.

“okay, okay. i can give you more,” he whispers fervently, grabbing your hips and lifting you up. you follow his lead, scrambling off of his lap. “go ‘head, lay down, honey,” he urges softly, eyes dark and hungry. you heed his instructions eagerly, settling into the pillows behind you as he unbuttons and unzips his jeans, just to ease the pressure. they hang loose on his hips and his black boxers show off his bulge even better.

you’re about to ask him to just take his jeans all the way off when he carefully grabs your legs from under your knees and drops them open, stunning you into silence. he settles between your legs and slips his hands under the waistband of your sweatpants. he starts to tug at them and he doesn’t have to ask for you to lift your hips for him to shimmy your pants down your ass and onto your thighs. you lift your knees to your chest so that he doesn’t have to move down to get them off.

“so good for me,” he murmurs once they’re fully off, his big hand running down your thigh while the other keeps your knees tucked up. you groan a little at his words, at the sensation, and squirm without thinking. “shhh,” he hushes gently, “‘s okay, ‘m gonna help you out, sweetheart. can i take these off?” he asks, big fingertips playing with the hem of your panties.

you nod your head quickly. “please, yes.” you don’t think you could have him quickly enough.

with your permission, sam doesn’t waste any time. there’s no need for you to lift your hips; he just pushes your knees further into your chest with one hand and slips the waistband down. his knuckles brush against the skin of your ass and you think about how big his whole hand would feel there. but you choose to focus on the look on his face when he pulls your panties all the way down and lets your legs fall open around him.

his pupils are blown out and lips curved up in awe as he runs his hands up your thighs. when you shudder at his touch he applies light pressure, pushing your legs into the bed and humming, all pleased with your reactions.

“please, sam,” you whine, voice breathy and begging as you try your hardest not to squirm so much. but having him over you, his eyes just staring at your bare cunt and big, big hands gripping your upper thighs after more than just months of pining for him… it’s not easy to stay still or quiet or be able to think, really.

sam is holding back from looping his hands under your thighs, pulling you to him and just shoving his face against your pussy. it’s wet and shiny for him and just begging for attention and he needs to taste you more than anything in the world. but he wants what you want and he wants to be soft and careful about it all, for you.

“how do you want it, baby?” he asks hoarsly. under your breath, you swear softly, unbelieving that you’re so lucky to have him.

“y-your fingers, sam, please,” you whine out, eyes glued to the way they look over your thighs, digging lightly into the flesh. they’re so long and thick and you can’t even imagine how much better than your own. sam can’t even be disappointed that you didn’t ask for his mouth; the way he can so clearly see how much you want his fingers, how much you’ve thought about them, gets him going perfectly well enough. and there’s nothing stopping him from eating you out right after he’s made you cum on his fingers. that sounds like heaven.

“okay, honey,” he whispers, rubbing his thumbs over the sensitive skin right where your thighs melt into your outer lips and your eyebrows knit together in desperation. he can’t help himself when he drifts just one hand over your heat, ghosting your skin and making you shiver and moan. his fingertips brush over your lower tummy and the heel of his palm picks up a little of your slick. “so pretty,” he murmurs. you toss your head to the side and into the pillow and breathe heavy.

“please, sam, please,” you gasp, trying not to buck your hips up into his hand, but twitching up anyway.

“alright, alright,” he exhales softly, pressing his hand all the way over you and reveling in the way your eyes squeeze shut and your hips cant up, trying to add more pressure. he lifts his other hand to your hip and presses you back into the mattress gently. just that makes you moan softly. really, sam just wants to keep looking, feeling, exploring. he wants to put both thumbs on the sides of your outer lips and pull them apart and look and feel you shiver against him and tease up and down your slit.

but he really wants to make you feel good, so he shifts his hand and starts rubbing your clit with two fingers gently. you sigh out, long and loud and pleasured. your hips move up into him again as your hands fly up to grip the pillow by your head. sam groans at the sight.

he dips his fingers lower for a quick second, gathering some of your wetness and rubbing it into your clit. you cry out this time, one hand loosening its grip on the pillow in favor of fumbling for the hand that sam still has pressing your hips down. he obliges happily, holding your hand against your hip bone and goddamn smiling at you.

the pressure builds quickly and you moan and whine and squirm for him, all while he looks at you with awe and love and determination.

“you’ve been so polite for me,” he notes, pleased. “always saying please without me even asking you to.” his tone is hushed and a little gravely before he leans down to place a kiss to your lower stomach. you hum out a sweet moan. “and you sound so lovely, so pretty, honey,” he murmurs.

you grip his hand and the fabric of the pillow and push your face into your upper arm, whining out at his words.

“sa-sam, please, baby,” you groan, “m-more, i need more, i want your fingers in me, please!”

sam grunts at your words. “fuck, you’re so good. asking for exactly what you want, using your words for me, god. i’ll give it to you, ‘f course, i’ll give it to you.” he’s got to be fucking obsessed with you. he starts with one finger, gently prodding at your entrance before easing it in.

“shit…” you moan, stretching the word out and letting your voice break in pleasure. “s-so good,” you mumble, gripping his hand even tighter.

“yeah?” he whispers, pulling his finger out just a little before pushing it back through your folds.

“a-ah! yes,” you pant out. “f-fuck, sam, i–,” you cut yourself off with another moan when he sets a steady pace, just his one finger working wonders. but you’re growing just a little desperate, so worked up and so fucking in love with him that it’s driving you crazy. “m-more, please,” you whine.

“okay, i got you,” he mumbles, rubbing the back of your hand with his thumb as he gently pushes in another finger.

“gahh– god!” you gasp. “shit, sammy. so good, that’s so good.” you writhe under him as he pumps his long fingers into your begging cunt, making such a lewd, wet sound. “a-ah, fuck! right there, sam. oh my god, right there,” you babble, hips pushing into his hand. it’s not as if no one’s ever hit your sweet spot before, but fuck, it’s different when it’s sam. everything’s different, better, more intense, when it’s sam.

“yeah? right there?” he presses a kiss to closest place he can reach, bending down and catching the skin of your thigh between his lips. he’s more than just pleased that he’s found your sweet spot so quickly, and as he continues pushing the soft pads of his fingertips right against your gummy walls, he soaks it up, memorizinng it all.

the way your moans change, your voice jumping in pitch and getting louder, they way you buck up into his hand and the way that you clench around him. and your face, god he could look at it all day, maybe cum in his pants just from seeing you like this. all desperate and needy and blissed out; pupils blown, eyebrows knit together, and mouth hanging open half of the time to let your pretty sounds out. or he gets to watch you snap your jaw shut, bite and lick at your bottom lip, hold a groan back only for your lips to part again to pant and gasp and moan. it’s almost like you forget how to breathe through your nose, and it makes you sound all the more worked up.

as he pushes you closer and closer to the edge, he squeezes love into your hand, making you think about his palm against yours and somehow making it all more intense. his thumb rubs the back of your hand soothingly, such a stark contrast to the strength and fervor with which he fucks his fingers into you.

“breathe, baby,” he reminds you sweetly. god, it’s hard to comply as you watch the muscles of his arm tensing as he pleases you, the veins of his hands and arms popping out with the rush of his blood. but you take in a long, deep breath and let it out. it shudders and ends in a whine, but your muscles relax for a moment and you melt a little into the mattress for just a moment.

“h-haahh, sam, i’m– mm, i’m close!” you whine, thighs tensing up again. you lift your knees and push your feet into the mattress on either side of his thighs, trying hard not to close your legs as the pleasure becomes so intense that you can’t keep still at all.

“fuck, that’s good. you gonna cum for me?” he asks, getting eager. he can’t wait to see you tip over the edge, to feel it. but he doesn’t get greedy, just in case this is the perfect pace for you.

you answer his prayers in the form of a dirty moan. “huh-harder, please!”

sam is more than happy to oblige. he already knows that he loves to be soft with you. he loves to have his fingers stuffed up your pussy while he holds your hand and kisses your thigh sweetly. he loves to speak to you all gentle and loving and dirty too. but he does love the way you react when harder means just a little rougher, deeper, and faster. your jaw falls all the way open and you can’t close it. your eyes shut tight, then fly right back open because you don’t want to miss the sight of his fingers pumping into you like this. you don’t want to miss the way his face looks as he does it.

and it makes you loud. you’re used to keeping yourself quiet when you take care of yourself, but that’s not an option this time around. not with sam.

and of course, it makes you cum. it sends you reeling, keening, and it pulls his name from your mouth with a force that you’ve never felt before. and sam swears he’s gonna make you cry out his name like that every fucking day, if you’ll let him.

“fuck, fuck, fuck, ahh– sam! feels s��good,” you slur. “sam…”

you clench around him so hard that it’s not necessarily easy to fuck you through it, but he does so good anyway. you shudder and pant and whine, and his name said again, all breathy and slurred is just as good as the first shout. and finally, you fall against the bed with a huff of breath, the sheets beneath you wet and messy.

you tense and whine when he pulls his fingers from you, and he’s quick to hush you gently.

“oh, you did so good, baby,” he murmurs, settling his still slick-covered hand on your hip and it makes you shiver just a little. he shuffles a bit closer to you, dropping his head down to kiss your sweet lips. you can barely kiss back when you’re so breathless, but you try, so he settles for sucking a little on your bottom lip and letting you sigh against his hot skin. your hand drops down from where it gripped the pillow, settling hungrily on his broad shoulder and running up and down the skin.

“felt so good,” you mumble against his lips, still blissed out. his smile interrupts the lazy kiss, and he feels greedy again. insatiable, really.

“will you let me make you feel good again?” he whispers, making sure you know that you can say no if it’s too much. it’s clear to him that you need to catch your breath, so he certainly won’t start right away. not until you ask him to.

“god, you’re too good to be true,” you say, wondering at him. “but i wanna make you feel good, too.”

he smiles wider, then kisses you again with a little more passion than the last. “trust me, honey. this’ll make me feel real good. i wanna taste you, so fucking bad, baby.”

you can’t help the groan that escapes your throat at his words. “yeah?” you ask breathlessly.

“uh-huh,” he nods, nose tickling the skin of your cheek. “you gonna let me make you cum on my tongue, honey?”

“fucking yes,” you pant, “yes, please, sam… make me cum on your tongue.”

it doesn’t take long to learn; if you let him start, he’s never gonna be able to stop. he’s completely obsessed and in love with you, and you can expect his mouth on your pussy until the day he dies.

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bitterrfruit · 5 months ago

Text

houndtooth [17]

[masterlist]

ghost x f! reader. 15.6k words cw: violence. allusions to sexual assault. heavy smut. 18+ mdni

you finally break open.

Ghost keeps his crosshairs on you like you’re his target.

His infrared vision tracks you like prey, he follows your heat signal amongst the sea of cold-blooded vermin that infest your home.

He keeps his post as you instructed him to. Settled into character by following your orders, as obediently a member of your guard would have. In truth, it wasn’t as much an order as a meek request - that he remain hovering at the perimeter, hidden by shadow. Such a thing comes to him innately, ghost that he is.

His mastery of stealth is tested, though, as he watches you drift between your dead husband’s many comrades. You fawn at them with a well-trained domesticity, jittery hands politely interlocked in front of you as you accept their sneering condolences with saccharine gratitude. Pointedly ignoring how their pig eyes fondle you, how they exchange glances with each other as though sharing the same thought when you pass them by.

He knows what thoughts they share.

He can see it in their greasy smiles and their ruddy necks. Frothy-mouthed at the sight of you, so vulnerable and sweet. No husband in sight.

None of them are accompanied by their own wives. And they do have wives, near all of them do; Ghost knows each of them by full name and date of birth by virtue of his mission dossier. Instead their women have been left tucked away and out of sight, not here to survey how lecherously their husbands covet the fresh widow.

The thought alone makes his temples hot and his jaw tight. He remembers the words of your supposed ally; once the boys get their hands on her . Was this the very thing he was referring to? An army of war profiteers swarming the mansion of their late leader so they can take turns with his dowager?

You shouldn’t have worn that fucking dress.

He’s sure you chose it thinking it was unappealing; severe and structured, coating you in black fabric from clavicle to ankle. You couldn’t see it from behind, could you?

He could have demanded that you wear something else, when he found you stooped in front of your mirror. Ordered that you should shove on black slacks and a bulky coat, maybe a thick scarf for good measure. But the longer he looks at you, the more apparent it becomes that his instruction that you wear nothing pretty was inherently unachievable. No amount of hideous clothing could conceal an artless beauty as preternatural as yours. You are an ineluctable magnet for gluttonous eyes, and magnetise you do.

The men you aren’t talking to look at you still, even as they are engaged in droning conversation with one another, glasses of liquor and cigars between their turgid fingers. The entire affair strikes him more as a dinner party than a funeral, and he supposes he should have expected that. They’ll all be celebrating the usurpation of a leader who clung to his power far longer than he deserved.

The usurper himself is yet to arrive, and you seem as potently aware of that fact as Ghost is.

You’re petrified of him. Makarov. Whatever the cretin has done to you, or threatened to, Ghost needn’t know. He can guess well enough. Every utterance of the name turns your skin grey and your lips dry.

Your nervous eyes flit to the entrance of your mansion every odd moment, and occasionally you’ll meet Ghost’s glare between the gaps of your guests. You give him glittering stares, swollen with pleas he cannot grant you. Little thing. He can’t jeopardise the mission at hand to offer you comfort.

When a stern knock on the front door echoes out from the foyer, your chary head perks up and you freeze on your feet. He can see you trembling from here. You know who knocked.

The fucking bastard could just as easily open the unlocked door, march into the heart of your home unimpeded and announce his arrival to all of his sycophantic subordinates. Instead, he chooses to knock. To lure the grieving hostess away from the crowd that might witness him. Away from your only protector.

You hesitate before you retreat from whatever foul conversation you were trapped in, eyes wide and twitching. It takes you a moment to summon the bravery, and you offer an apologetic smile to the pig in front of you before retreating towards the exit.

You pat down your dress as you leave the room to let in the dog, and you disappear through the archway.

Out of his sightline.

In the humming quiet of the foyer, you can hear every machination under your skin.

The thunder of your arteries, the buzzing of the fire in your nerves, the squeaking of your grinding teeth. You can feel the panic in every muscle, the needles, the venom leaking between sinews.

The front door is solid black, though it may as well be transparent. You can see the silhouette of the man as clearly as you can feel him there. His coldness trickles under the gap in the door and makes you bristle. You don’t want to open the door.

You don’t want to open the door, but he knocks again.

Three gentle knocks, intentionally soft - because he knows you are standing there. He’s simply waiting. Maybe he wants to see how long it takes you to overcome the terror that keeps you there. Maybe, the longer you take, the wider his grin. The sharper his teeth.

He finds amusement in your terror. He always has.

When your numb fingers curl around the handle of the door, reluctantly peeling it open to reveal him, he is already smiling.

He stands with his feet apart in suede oxfords, his hands courteously held together in front of the buttons of his suit jacket. His head already bowed to address you, with the thick tendons in his icy neck pulled tight. The vein that bulges in the centre of his forehead passes through his curled brows, a marker of the feral rabidity that thumps under his skin and collects in the corners of his pointed mouth. He’s riddled with it. Sadism exudes from him like radiation. You can smell it, taste it; metallic and hard, as he tilts his head and awaits your greeting.

A henchman stands behind him, black bulletproof vest tight over his dark blazer. You can see the pistol tucked in a front strap, and he hovers behind his master with the stiff obedience of a muzzled doberman. You wouldn’t expect Vladimir to venture anywhere without his myrmidons, so it surprises you to see only one of them. He mustn’t believe he needs any more protection than that. You are no threat to him.

Your mouth is dry, full of chalk that grits between your teeth, and you can’t even part your lips to utter a word. You aren’t sure how to greet him, now. If you had Victor at your side, you’d have called him Vladimir, as he did. What is he to you, now? Should you address him as sir?

“Госпожа Захаева. Рада снова тебя видеть.” Mrs. Zakhaev. Lovely to see you again.

Your jaw tightens. His voice, still, turns you to ice - brittle enough to shatter, translucent enough to expose the trembling obeisance he exhumes from the deepest parts of you.

Mrs. Zakhaev. Not once has he called you that. No, you had always been Девчонка . Girl. Or simply you, with a snap of fingers or a gesture in his direction.

His politeness is as clear and sharp as glass - he is mocking you with it. Only now are you Victor’s wife, a missus, with your husband dead. Only as a widow are you granted that reverence.

You swallow. It takes a shaky breath before you can bring yourself to speak. “Добрый вечер.” Good evening.

He lowers his head in feigned respect. “My condolences, ” he says, rich with derision and a thick Soviet accent. “We lost him so suddenly. You must be devastated.”

Facetiousness drips from every word.

You nod tensely. “Thank you.”

A pallid hand crosses the space between you, then, and his palm lands unabashedly on your cheek.

You immediately flinch - his palm stings against your skin as though barbed, and the alarm it rings claws down the back of your neck, makes every one of your little hairs stand on end. His calloused thumb brushes towards the corner of your mouth, as if accidental - but the black gleam in his eyes makes plain his glee.

“Бедняжка.” Poor thing, he murmurs. “It must be so frightening to be alone.”

The tips of his heavy fingers press into the hollows of your cheekbone and temple, close to your ear, and you can hear his pulse through your skull. It is deathly slow.

You struggle between agreeing with him to appease him, or feigning confidence to spite him. He is right - it is terrifying. It is so, because of him; and he knows that as well as you do.

You only nod, again. Pleasant and quiet.

He gives you a pout, a mask of pity, before his rough hand slithers behind your neck and under your hair, and he reels you towards him. Your heart thunders to resist him but your body does not obey, and you acquiesce as immediately as he had grabbed you. He wraps his other arm around your shoulders, and with his chin atop your head, he holds you firm against his body. A hug, if you could ever call it that.

Even an act as innocent and well-meaning as an embrace is tainted by ridicule. He knows you abhor his touch with every cell that you consist of, as much as he knows how desperately you avoid displeasing him.

You feel his breathing in your hair, acidic, it makes your scalp sting.

“Ax, моя дорогая.” Ah, my dear, he says deeply. “You won’t be alone anymore.”

He says it like a threat, and it is one.

Eyes wide and dry, you stare into the individual fibers of his powder-blue shirt. He smells of cheap tobacco and gunpowder, with an edge of chemical sweetness, aspartame.

As you breathe him in, your dreaded fate begins to settle in the pits of you. Edges towards certainty.

Maybe he’ll claim you as your husband did. Maybe you are to be passed on to your husband’s successor as though you had been left in his will. An heirloom, too feckless to be left without reins, too precious to be left for someone undeserving.

You envision such an outcome if your efforts to thwart him are to fail, if Simon breaks his promise and abandons both you and his mission, and you are left to fend for yourself among the carnivores.

Vladimir would not play the same role as your husband; demanding but patient, hungry but restrained. He wouldn’t offer you kindnesses or feign any form of compassion, beyond the rotten affection that cloaks his depravity. He’ll play with you as though his toy until he grows bored, and it would not take him long to do so.

Perhaps you were foolish to ever imagine a reality where you escape. The world beyond the one you have come to know has slipped into obscurity, after all - so out of reach that you have begun to forget what it looks like.

He pulls back from you with a pleased sigh, and his hands settle at each side of your head, fingers weaved into the hair behind your ears. His stare is hard and intruding, heterochromic eyes bite at you wherever on you they land. Body, lips, eyes. Even the act of perceiving you is as violating as his touch.

“Grief doesn’t suit you,” he remarks, glower intruding. “Not with those eyes.”

An insult and compliment in the same breath, though you cannot fathom that he might be attempting to ingratiate himself. Worse, that he’s bemoaning your dour expression. Next he’ll ask you to smile.

“Do you miss him yet?” He asks coldly, after a beat.

The smugness in his expression tells you that there isn’t a correct answer to his question. It seems to you a trap, so you do not answer. But a blink, or a shift in your gaze, or a quirk in your lip, evidently answers it for you; because he grins.

“Mh, милая Мия.” Mh, dear Mia, he drones. “It’s no secret that you never loved him. You have nothing to prove to me.”

“Of course I loved him.” You dispute, briefly compelled not to let his ego be sated by such a presumption.

A huff of laughter escapes his nostrils.

“You did?” He questions candidly, though the vein that splits his forehead protrudes with the words. “Are you sure?”

You can read the shift underneath his smile. How it mutates from artificial pleasantry to true malice. The joy he takes in tormenting you oozes from his pores and between his teeth. You can see in his eyes exactly what he is thinking about, what he is ecstatic to remind you of; he needn’t even say it.

“Yes,” you utter, because you know that is the answer he wants.

“Even after all that you did for me?”

Your blood pools at your feet, and his thumbs stroke the prickling skin of your cheeks with tangible satisfaction. You want to look away from him, at your feet, at the sky - anything to conceal the grimace that knits in your face. Instead, you deferentially hold his gaze; eager to ensure he doesn’t feel compelled to elaborate, to remind you in any greater detail, of the whims you were given no choice but to indulge.

He opens his maw to speak, but something catches his eye, and his stare shifts upwards to something behind you.

You are as yet uncertain what or who has drawn his attention, but his rough hands slip from your cheeks and fall to your shoulders.

“Mh,” he grunts through pursed lips, as he straightens his back. “Она ведь все еще держит своих собак при себе, да?” Still keeps her hounds with her, eh?

It is apparent he is not addressing you, so you turn as much as his grip allows you to; to your surprise, a constraining hand drops from your shoulder, and you are free to see who had approached from behind you.

Your protector.

Masked and severe, he stands tall, arms locked militaristically behind his back. He utters not a word, but you see his chest rise and fall, controlled but bordering on detonation. His eyes catch the shine of the porchlight through the gap in his mask, but his glare does not fall on you. He keeps it pinned on the man whose other hand still lingers on you.

Vladimir only grins. A smile that twitches, tips between intrigue and genuine humour. His imposing touch abandons you, then, as he steps cavalierly towards your mercenary.

“Ты тот самый тихий. Сергей говорил о вас.” You’re the quiet one. Sergei mentioned you.

Riley doesn’t nod, doesn’t waver, doesn’t move his boots from where they are planted on the floor. Offers no acknowledgement of the man approaching him beyond the pointed stare that follows his every movement.

“Спокойно.” Take it easy, Vladimir teases as he stands beside your guard, patting him with a firm hand on his opposite shoulder. “Я буду вести себя хорошо.” I’ll behave myself.

He holds Riley’s cloaked gaze for a noticeable beat. A second longer than would otherwise be natural. Your breath catches in your throat. Is he trying to get a better look? Might he recognise the soldier if he looks too closely?

With a dismissive nod and an affable pat on the shoulder, Vladimir struts past him and ventures towards the hallway, armed dog in pursuit. As familiar with your home as you are - if not more so - he disappears into the reception room to announce his arrival to his new subordinates.

Like a boot had been lifted from your ribs, a rush of air erupts from your chest the moment he is out of sight and earshot. Your blood turns runny with the transient relief, and you suddenly feel as though you had stood up too fast; knees and hands shaky, you see stars when you blink. Wiping your hair back from your face with clammy palms, you attempt to settle your ravaged heart by breathing deeply and staring knives into the tiled floor.

The skin he had marred with his touch burns and itches, and you wish you could peel it off from the flesh beneath it. You imagine burrowing your fingernails into your scalp and picking the leather loose from your skull, flaying your skin off by the seams. Maybe they’d leave you alone, once your exterior is shed. What would be left?

“You’re alright,” comes a grumbling whisper, from the shadow you had forgotten was standing there.

Your eyes flit to meet his, and you abruptly feel the ground beneath your feet again. His shoulders have softened, his hands hang relaxedly from his tactical vest, and you are alone in the foyer with him.

Not a query into your state of mind, but a stern reminder. You’re alright . You can almost believe it while you have him within sight.

Foolish of him to come to the door to check on you, because none of your husband’s mercenaries would have shown that level of devotion. But you were grateful that he had frightened off the wolf, if only for the briefest moment. You might have thanked him if he weren’t the one to force you into this predicament, into the arms of the very man who you’d rather cut your hands off than spend more than an hour with.

How much had he seen? How much had he heard?

You wonder how long he had been standing there, watching as your husband’s rival caressed you with his pretend affection, listening as he mocked you with his own transgressions. You shrivel up like a raisin at the thought of him witnessing any of it, sucked dry by shame and an overwhelming desire to hide from every pair of eyes that has ever looked at you.

“Yeah?” Your protector presses, and you blink at him.

You nod, and sigh sharply, attempting to regain some lost composure. You have an objective, you remind yourself. You just have to make it through the evening. You only have to fawn enough to get something, anything useful.

“I’m fine.” You insist, as you begin your march deeper into the hallway.

Ghost looks past you as you brush around him in a hurry, and he leaves a few bloated seconds before he brings himself to follow you.

There’s a line to toe in his donned role as a paid bodyguard, between loyal dedication and professional apathy. He finds it difficult to strike the balance, having only ever swung to either extreme of the pendulum. He knows that he has leaned too far towards the former, by stalking you, and only you. By unintentionally keeping his vigilant attention on you, and not on the many targets that surround you. By all but threatening the only target that matters to him for daring to lay a finger on you. Despite his decades of experience, of trained resilience, of pure stoicism - it is only growing more challenging to suppress the compulsion.

Worsened by your present company, threats around every corner and through every door, is the urge to fulfil the role of guard dog in every sense of the term - only he cannot bark, and he cannot bite. Muzzled by duty.

Your potent fear of Makarov is not without cause.

He is more verminous in person than through a screen or a scope. Somehow more feral, more crooked, more rat-like in his features than any blurry CCTV image could ever have accurately depicted. He reeks of malignant pride, and it filled the room like putrid smoke the moment you opened the door to let him in.

What sadistic conceit made him confident enough to touch you? Audacious enough to hold you?

His hands seemed to find purchase on your skin with a borderline familiarity, an intimacy that appeared habitual rather than a cautious venture into uncharted territory.

Ghost’s stomach wrings at the thought of it.

Organs twist and shudder with a fury only worsened by the need to force it down. It pushes against the inside of his ribs, rises in his throat - and all he can do is swallow it, and tighten his knuckles to keep himself stable.

How often had the cretin broken past that boundary? How many times have those filthy fucking hands touched you? Your face, your neck, your shoulders? Where else have they dared to venture?

The very end of your conversation bounces around the inside of his skull, on repeat, as he attempts to decipher what had been cryptically referred to.

Even after all that you did for me.

He creeps through the dark of the hallway, in pursuit of you, as the words ring in his ears. Perhaps it was a brazen and salacious reference to some sexual favours from your past, some lascivious orders he had made of you, some effort to make a cuckold of your husband.

Did you fulfill those demands? Were you given a choice? He won’t ask, and he doesn’t want to know - but the imagined sight stains his vision all the same. Sees you on your knees in a shadowy corridor, sees you locked in a bathroom, sees the very same visceral reluctance printed on your face that he himself has grown so familiar with. Sees too the rabid grin stretched in the warlord’s thin lips, as he makes an unwilling adulteress out of you.

Even after all that you did for me.

As he approaches the open door into the kitchen, and sees the back of you, he grinds his teeth. What if Makarov referred to something else? Some unspoken agreement between the two of you? He imagines any number of conversations you might have had with him in the past; the closest comrade of your husband, after all. It stands to reason that he might also be a comrade of yours. Had you gotten a message to him through your friend, Vasiliev? Did you make a plan with him before Ghost had ever found you in your glistening castle?

Had you lied to him? Are you in on all of it?

Perhaps your proficiency in artificial personalities was even more effective than he had come to believe. That you had effectively wrapped him around your finger, had him feeling pity for you, manipulated him into caring more about your wellbeing than the outcome of his mission.

Despite his ingrained scepticism, rooted in countless betrayals; he doesn’t believe that.

You tip your head back as he comes to a stop in the entrance to the brightly lit kitchen, and it takes him a moment to see that you have knocked back a glass. Of gin, he discovers, made evident by the bottle of Bombay Sapphire that sits with its cap off on the counter in front of you.

“Don’t get drunk, for fuck’s sake,” he snaps, under his breath, once he notices there is nobody else in the kitchen with you.

He sees you jolt in fright, before your head swivels hastily on your neck. Your body loosens when you see it is him and not one of your comrades, and you wipe your mouth with the heel of your palm.

“I’m not,” you whisper shakily. “Just - I just need a little.”

“A little?” He scolds you, having watched you take easily three gulps of liquid before you put the glass down.

Your eyes glisten with fearful shame as he approaches you. He can barely glance at you without being overcome with it, that guilt - you look at him with dewy eyes and his once rigid scruples crumble to his feet.

Pathetic .

“I can’t even-” You take a sharp breath and shake out your hands, as though treading water. “-I can’t even talk, I c-can’t even get words out around him. I need something. Just something to make me more, more-”

“Fine,” he hushes you, “It’s fine. Just that one glass, alright? Or you’ll fuck us both over.”

You nod obsequiously, and as if to prove you mean it, you grab the metal cap and screw it back onto the bottle.

He notices, then, the eerie silence that fills the bowels of the mansion where there had previously been the migraine-inducing chatter of more than a dozen men.

“Where are they?” He murmurs discerningly, and you point towards the direction of the dining room.

“They’re all in there,” you whisper. “He called them all in straight away.”

He immediately moves towards their meeting room, situated around the corner, and keeps his body out of sight of the towering glass door. He can hear them, quiet Russian murmuring, just loud enough to make out a few words.

With a gesture of his fingers he beckons you over, and you refuse, remaining frozen in place with wide eyes and a shaking head. Only with a second, more fervorous demand of his hand do you reluctantly tiptoe in his direction.

He hovers a gloved finger over his lips, shushing you, and holds out a barring arm to keep you behind the corner. You look up at him with your lips sealed, unblinking and awaiting instruction. He cranes his head and holds his covered mouth beside your ear.

“Listen,” he orders; a whisper so low it is barely a breath, directly into the cavern of your ear, and your warmth oozes through the knit of his mask. “Listen to everything they say, yeah? I’m going to check whatever they’ve left out here.”

You remain dead still, and without a physical response, he insists; “Alright?”

“Yes,” you breathe, with a feeble nod.

“Good. Stay quiet.”

He reels back from you, then, and turns away before the compulsion to remain and watch over you overtakes his drive to fulfil his mission. He almost succeeds, passing through the kitchen’s exit, before your soft whisper hooks him by the ankle and rivets him in place;

“Be careful.”

He releases a ragged sigh. You are a winsome liability, aren’t you?

He wishes, more than anything, that he could tuck you away - lock you in a cupboard, or a bunker, or ship you off in a helicopter - so that the risk of harm coming to you would cease from plaguing his every thought. He has one - one objective. His prescribed mission is not to keep you safe, not to hover behind you like a shadow, not to fight off the hounds that might want a taste of you. His task is to get his intel on the Ultranationalist’s imminent genocide, to prevent the deaths of tens, hundreds of thousands - and all he can think about, is you.

He turns his head, barely lets himself get a glimpse of you over his shoulder. He feels your eyes on his back, the claws of a cat scratching at the door to be let in.

“I will,” he grumbles, faltering before he breaks free.

You’ll be fine, he tells himself. He repeats it over as his distance from you stretches thin. You’ll be fine.

Your stomach drops heavy once your protector leaves your line of sight.

His return to the cold and clinical demeanour you knew best was jarring, but unsurprising. Perhaps it’s for the best, to imagine him a mercenary and not the man who has bared his face to you. His loyalties might be more plain, then. His motivations more in line with what you’d expect. You’ve paid him to protect you, and he’ll fulfill his contract as best as he is able. That’s the only level of devotion you have come to know.

You don’t shift your feet from where they are planted, from where he had ordered you to stay. There is some reassurance to be found in explicit instruction. Ever since the first man arrived at your door, you have been nauseatingly adrift; as though you had suddenly forgotten what to say, how to act, beneath the looming fear that every word might make obvious your espionage. The stakes are now higher than your own self-preservation, for the first time in your life. You want to do right. You want to be good.

You know these men. You know how rarely they mean what they say, how often they hide secrets between their words. You know who you are to them. What you are. You know how they look at you, what they think of when they do. What they see. What they remember.

You wait by the corner, as still and silent as a gravestone, with your ear close to the wall.

They speak in hushed baritones with one another, entirely in Russian, unaware of their eavesdropper. You focus your attention on each of the voices - most of which you recognise, and can distinguish - others, you cannot.

“We had Konni do a thorough sweep of the entire estate once we sent her off. They found nothing.” Sergei, you determine.

“Nothing? Fucking nothing, you say? Victor’s entire militia was wiped off the face of the earth - I don’t believe the men who did that left nothing behind.”

The venom in that voice is potent even through the wall that blocks him from sight - Vladimir.

“Nothing. No bullet casings that didn’t belong to the same guns the guards used. Even the boot marks were the same as their uniform.”

A different man chimes in. “What, so one of the guards did it?”

“No, fool. Someone with enough intel did this. It was well planned.”

“It makes no sense to me. If all they wanted was to assassinate the bastard, why would they go to the effort of slaughtering an army of security?”

You hear an irate groan from Makarov. “There was something else they wanted. Killing Victor does nothing. They’ll be as aware of that as we are.”

“We found nothing to suggest Victor’s digital assets were compromised. It didn’t look like they even touched the vault.”

“They didn’t kill every person on the property to get to one man. Your Konni friends found nothing because they are fucking inept. We’ll have the premises swept again by somebody competent.”

“Fine. I’ll talk to Arkady.”

“What, then? Who do you think it was?”

“I have guesses,” Makarov seethes, and you can hear the signature drumming of his knuckles on the table.

Another man, a voice you don’t recognise, addresses Sergei; “You got nothing else out of the girl?”

Your ribs tighten at your mention.

“She said they sounded Ukrainian. I don’t know. I don’t believe she has a clue.”

“You’re soft on her, Sergei. You let her lie to you and you’re too stupid to tell.”

“I made sure-”

“She knows you’re stupid, too. You saw the state of her. They were with her for a while. She will have heard more than their fucking accents.”

“What do you want me to do? Torture the poor girl after she watched her husband die?”

Then, a sudden yell. “Mia!”

Your blood turns to lead, and you immediately back away from the door. Did Vladimir see you? Hear you? Was he calling you to enter, or expressing that you were to blame?

On the tips of your toes, you silently retreat into the kitchen, lean against the counter so that it might appear to a spectator that you were busy with the dishes and not listening in on a confidential conversation. Your heartbeat shudders in your ears. Your knuckles turn white.

The bellow thunders out once again, in English - for you. “Mia, come in here, now!”

You feel fragile. You might faint. You stare at the knives in the knife block and imagine it might be easier for you to slice one of them through your own throat, than to be trapped in a room with those men again. You might have even gone through with such an ideation, if you hadn’t reminded yourself of the stakes that supersede your survival.

It takes every weary synapse in your brain to force the movement of a single muscle, before you can begin to inch yourself in the direction of the dining room in earnest. Your body resents it with every fibre of its being. Your knees shiver with every step.

You see them through the glass door before you open it. All leaned back in their chairs, surrounding the vast dining table in the centre of the room; Vladimir at the head, where he always wanted to sit. He glowers at you through the glass. Spots you even when you try to hide in the shadow.

Meekly opening the door, the shrill squeak of the hinges echoes across the silent room, and all the heads turn on their necks to face you. Every set of beady eyes lands on you at once, and you can feel each of them; hot brands, sizzling and mean, on every part of you.

The air of the room is heavy and warm, reeks of cigar smoke and corked wine. You suck in a quivering breath, arms pinned to your side, as you wait for someone to speak. You can’t bring yourself to say the first word.

“Shut the door,” Vladimir orders dryly, cigarette in his lips.

You do as you’re told, and close the door with a heavy clunk.

“Come here.”

He beckons for you with two fingers. He watches you as intently as the others do, and their heads follow you as you carefully float closer to the table. You remain on the opposite side to the man who called for you, and hope he doesn’t demand you any closer.

“The men who killed your beloved husband,” he begins, a tug in the corner of his mouth as he says the word. “Sergei tells me you think they were Ukrainian?”

You chew your lip, near the point of drawing blood, before you can croak out a response.

“Or Kastovian,” you utter. “I couldn’t - it sounded like Russian but I couldn’t understand what they were saying very well.”

“Very well?” He interrogates, unrelenting. “Or not at all?”

It takes you a moment to think of a lie on your feet. Who could the imaginary assassins have been? What do you imagine they might have said? What can you tell the men in front of you to goad them into spilling some information that they shouldn’t?

“They - there were a few words I understood, but, I d-didn’t know what they meant by them.”

“Like what.”

“They kept referring to, um, флешка - I think, is what they said. Like, a USB drive?”

With every lie you utter, your adrenaline picks up threefold. You feel it buzzing in the tips of your fingers and prickling in your scalp.

Vladimir shoots a pointed glare at Sergei, who adjusts his blazer instead of acknowledging the wordless accusation.

“What else.”

“I don’t - I’m not sure. I thought they might have said something about a - a warehouse. But I don’t know if I have the word right-”

“What was the word?” His vicious impatience cuts through the air like a knife, you feel the blade at your skin.

“Завод.” Factory .

You know the word. You’re pretending to be clueless.

Vladimir slams the surface of the table with both hands - the startling bang makes you jump and sends a shockwave of fright from your chest to your extremities.

He addresses Sergei in Russian with a renewed fury, and his eyes bulge with it; “Fucking idiot. You could have asked her this and we would have known forty-eight hours sooner.”

Sergei rolls his eyes. “Give me a break. She was concussed when we found her.”

“So they know about Mialstor?” A man whose face you recognise asks, and your ears perk.

“How the fuck would they know about that?” Someone else.

“Maybe we’ve got a leak to plug.” Another opines.

Vladimir’s eyes return to you, then. Fixed and curious. “Remember anything else, девочка?” Girl?

You exert every muscle to maintain some level of confidence in your character. A mournful widow, forced to remember the night her husband was slaughtered in her bed. At the notion you remember the true moment you lost him - the bullet shot through the back of his head, the seizing of his limbs once his skull was split open, the expression that remained in his vacant eyes once he was gone. You let the tears well. You let your feeble body tremble with its horror and grief.

“Not - not much else,” you croak. “One h-hit me in the head - I didn’t wake up until they were all gone.”

“Mh,” he ponders, dissatisfied. “Did he hit you hard?”

The blatant delight behind his question almost makes you wince, and you stumble on any words you try to give him. “I- I don’t - I suppose so-”

“More than once?”

“I don’t know,” you answer eagerly, flustered, you feel the burning in your cheeks as the intensity of his barrage only tumefies, a blister ready to burst.

“What do you think they did while you were out?” He drills.

“I wasn’t-”

“Were your clothes on when you woke up, Mia?”

A snort blurts out from another man at the table, another whom you recognise. “Fuck’s sake, Vlad,” he chides, with a deeply ill-placed humour. “Victor’s only been gone a day.”

Vladimir chortles, taking a drag of the stub of his cigarette, and it becomes evident he was hounding you more for his amusement than any hunt for information.

“Didn’t stop him last time,” another says.

The floor quakes beneath you. It might open up and swallow you whole. You hope it does. You hope they can’t see how you shake, how your eyes twitch, how your knees threaten to buckle as you listen to them joke about it - you must conceal it, because as far as they are aware, you cannot understand them.

There’s a chorus of acrid laughter between the dogs as they reminisce on it. The few that weren’t there must have heard about it from the ones that were, because they laugh too. You wonder how detailed their descriptions were. How vivid their storytelling.

Your eyes sting.

“Give him another vodka and he’ll have her up on the table again.”

More chuckling.

“We don’t have the props for it this time.”

“I’m sure we can find some. In the kitchen, I bet. You going to grab the cucumbers again, Vlad?”

“No, look at him. He’s still bitter he couldn’t get her to use the knife.”

“No Victor to worry about this time, eh?”

Your body is numb, your tongue is dry. Vladimir hasn’t taken his ferine eyes off of you for the duration of their perverted raillery. He simply wears a fading smirk, takes the odd puff of his wet cigarette, watching the minutiae of your expressions as if you’re as entertaining as a television. Glares at your terror and shame like it is pornography.

You can see it in the pits of his predatory stare, that he knows you can glean the topic of their conversation. He wants you to know. He wants you to remember what you had devoted yourself to forgetting in the years since it had happened. What you had done before you knew you could refuse their demands, before you had the well-established status of a wife, before you understood you’d be stuck in their country for the remainder of your life.

There was no refusing them, but they hadn’t needed to force you - nor to order you, nor to touch you at all. Not a hand was laid on you. No, you were so uncertain of your fate, that you did it willingly.

Therein lies the root of Vladimir’s mirth. He calls you a whore with his mouth shut. He makes you remember all of it, at the funeral of the very man to whom you had feigned fidelity. The man who remained blissfully unaware that you had debased yourself in front of the comrades he worked with daily until his dying breath.

The bile rises in your throat, and you spin urgently on your heel - rushing out of the room in hasty stride, retreating in the midst of their degenerate laughter.

“She figured it out!” One hollers, and you leave the door ajar as you hurry into the kitchen.

Panic and resentment swells hot and fiery under your skin, you feel close to bursting with it - every limb, every sinew of you writhes with the vicious humiliation that they have pumped you so full of. It is all such fun for them, endlessly entertaining to see how terrified they can make you, hilariously satisfying when you succumb to it.

In your urgency you sweep the bottle of Bombay Sapphire from the counter, gripping it by the neck, and carting it with you as you march out of the kitchen. Flick off the cap as you storm down the corridor. Shove the open top between your lips, and suck down a hard mouthful. It makes you cough, but the harsh burn of its crawl down your throat is the only source of comfort you can find in your frenzy. You swallow another, and another. Maybe if you drink enough of it you might go to sleep and never wake up.

You have to tell your guard dog what you’ve learned, first. You have to do something right, anything to make up for your complacency in your husband’s dreams of genocide, before you even think to check out early.

You have to find him.

Once you reach the foyer, though, you hear the beating of footsteps fast approaching, and your heart drops to your feet.

A growl. “Where are you running?”

Vladimir followed you. Sniffed after you like the bloodhound he is.

Your body screams at you to run from him, but you only manage a few steps backward as though trudging through knee-deep tar - and before you can turn, he is two paces from you.

There is no option but to surrender, then, and your bones turn soft.

His hooks are in you before you utter a noise, thumb and forefingers digging into your cheeks as he drives you by the head - wrangles you against a wall, in the dark and silent hallway, out of earshot from anybody else in the building.

You pant into his palm, eyes watering at the severity of his grip, brows knitted as you hold back the sob that nudges its way up your throat.

“Why are you alive, Mia?” He snarls, his eyes as black as the shadow he hides in, as manic as a rabid dog.

“W-what?” You groan, near a cry, dizzied by his question.

He jolts you, a violent shove into the wall he has you pinned to, if only to make you squeak. “They killed everyone on that estate. Every single man. Even the dogs. But not you?”

The sob you had been struggling to suppress leaps out from your teeth, you feel yourself begin to shrink. “I don’t unders-”

He moves his grasp from your face to your collarbone, hooking rough fingers into the slash neckline of your dress. With a violent yank he stretches down the hem, close to tearing the fabric - and reveals the plum and yellow bruising on your sternum, the ambiguous scrapes that speckle your skin. Utterly unnecessary, for whatever point he is attempting to make - there are plenty of visible bruises sprinkled over the parts of you not covered by fabric, and yet, he sought to reveal that one.

“You want me to believe they kept you alive for what, for fun?” He seethes, and you feel the splatter of his saliva on your face with every consonant. “That they wouldn’t have finished you off once they were done with you?”

Every lie you might utter in your defense turns to mist in your mouth. You feel every tear he pulls in your story, excruciating as if it were your own skin.

He stoops closer to you, mere inches between your face and his. “What did you do for them, hm? What did you bargain with?”

Nothing you can say will do anything to help you, now. He isn’t interested in whatever excuse you spit out. He doesn’t care whether or not you are innocent.

He is just playing with his food.

He makes plain his appetite when he holds his face against yours, his carnivorous teeth grind against the shell of your ear.

“What happened, Mia?”

You shut your eyes, a reflex, some subconscious effort to hide from his bombardment of questions and his nauseating proximity - until a sudden release of pressure forces a torrent of air from between your teeth, and the claws that had nestled into your flesh you no longer restrain you.

A shriek escapes you as your assailant is forcibly torn away by his collar, and he is tossed backward like a kicked dog.

In the blurry dark you struggle to see who had broken you free, but you know who it is. You can hear his ragged breathing, you can hear the cracking of his knuckles as he reels back his elbow and wrenches his gloved hand into a stone fist.

And while he still holds the Russian by the lapel of his jacket, he jettisons his clubbed hand into the centre of his face with such a force that the thwack of the collision cuts through the air like a gunshot, echoed by the splintering of bone under skin. A strike so brutal that your guard dog must have broken his own knuckles upon impact, and he almost follows his victim on his way down.

But he catches himself with a boot, and towers unruffled over Vladimir, who tumbles hard into the opposite wall and only just prevents himself from collapsing onto the tiled floor. The black of his blood splatters the white wall behind him, and oozes from his nostrils, coating his lips.

A turgid silence then settles like smoke.

It fills up your lungs as you wait, deathly silent and pressing your back against the wall, for the impending eruption. A gunshot, a roar for backup, a retaliatory strike with a fist or a knife. You know well what the man is capable of. The lengths he will go to to punish any perceived profanation. A knife would be the most gentle, most charitable penalty, regardless of where he put it.

Instead, Vladimir sniffs as he stands himself straight, propped up by the wall, swallowing the blood that pools in his mouth with a foul gulp.

He glowers at you. Burrowing. Torture in itself, for many moments too long - to you, an eternity of silence within which he can wordlessly threaten you. You know the many fates that have befallen others, each more harrowing, more gut-wrenching than the last. Acid, fire, gas, steel. He makes you shrink, your eyes dry, and you look down from him on instinct.

His glare then shifts to the man that had so violently come to your aid. There’s a glimmer of recognition in the hollows of his eyes. A quirk in the corner of his mouth. An unspoken understanding.

He says nothing. You feel the weight of it in the pit of your stomach.

A brief grin stretches in his lips; blood filling every gap between his teeth, smile painted red. “Милая Миа.” Dear Mia, he coos. “Что ты наделала?” What have you done?

“Get out,” you croak, voice breaking; the command tumbles from your mouth and surprises even yourself. Emboldened by the masked shadow that stands between him and yourself.

His twitching smile returns for a single snicker, as though pleased with your brief retaliation. He waits, for a pregnant pause, before he decides to give you a single nod.

“Victor left a lot of important things behind, mh?,” he says pointedly, with an uncanny smirk, as though he had said it to purposefully confound you.

You do not blink as he steps around your protector, and brushes past you on his way to the front door. His gait utterly unaffected by the blow to the head,he stands tall and proud as always, as though he had not been struck at all, as though his nose weren’t shattered by a deserved fist. He adjusts his jacket as he opens the door, and cold air floods into the room.

The clamour of the others crowding out of their meeting room echoes from down the hallway, too late to intervene, and you stay furtively silent, unmoving so as not to draw their attention.

“What the fuck happened?” An approaching voice calls out, in Russian, and Vladimir looks up as he coolly sticks a cigarette in his teeth.

He offers nothing but a shrug, and a dim smile. “We’ve outstayed our welcome.”

You remain tucked against the wall behind you as the rest of your dismissed guests file out of the front door, murmuring spitefully after being ordered to leave by their superior.

Ghost keeps his post steadfast, standing in front of you, a barricade; eyes following every one of the pigs as they are herded out before he follows behind the very last one.

He slams shut the door the moment the last hoof is clear of the frame, and he locks the deadbolt with a clunk. Through the sliver of a window beside the door he watches them fill their black cars, listens to their engines churn, before they finally pull off in a convoy down the driveway, and their headlights disappear among the trees.

He hears your mousy breathing in the subsequent silence.

His back remains to you while he finds the right words to say, and it doesn’t take him long to determine there are none. An apology would fall on deaf ears. A check on your welfare would be salt in the wound. He left you alone with them, after all. Alone with the very creature you had warned him about so vociferously. What might he have done if Ghost had taken a minute longer to find you with him?

Do you blame him as much as he blames himself?

Once he turns to look at you, though, you have already wandered off down the hall; your faltering silhouette disappears into your empty kitchen.

He could leave you be. He could, if he chose to, let you recover in solitude. He considers it as he unbuckles the straps of his cumbersome vest, pulls it over his head and dumps it on the tiles. As he unstraps the velcro bands of his gloves, plucking them off by his fingers and leaving them on the console table. Maybe you want nothing more than to be alone, than to curl up and hide from everyone who has assailed you. Himself included.

What happened the last several times he left you by yourself, unguarded?

He isn’t ignorant of his selfishness when he chooses to follow you.

He hears you pacing before he passes through the open door, hears your frenetic panting echoing from where you bite your nails by the island counter in the centre of the kitchen.

You catch his eye and freeze in place.

Before he can utter a word, you cock back your bottle of gin behind your head, clutching it by its neck. You catapult it at him without warning - it whistles as it barrels through the air, before it explodes against the top jamb of the doorway in an ear-splitting crash . He holds up a defensive arm and turns his head away, to protect himself from the shards of blue that spray out from the collision and the spiced liquor that rains down on him with it.

He stills, utterly aghast - you only glare at him, the dim downward light above you illuminates the bulging mania in your eyes. You radiate a fury that he never imagined you capable of, and he can feel the shuddering heat of it from where he stands.

“You fucked us!” You roar, so ferociously that your once soft voice breaks in the strain. He can see it thundering in your temples, twitching in the tendons of your neck, red on your chest - a rage so harrowing it makes your eyes wet.

“Did you hear me?” You shout. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

There’s nothing he can say, and nothing he wants to. He feels no compulsion to calm you down.

You storm towards him with heavy feet - plant both palms into his chest, and shove him backward with all of your might. He stumbles back a step, he offers you that, but he stands his ground.

“You - you promised!” You wail, your broken expression shifting from wrath to heartache and back again. “You told me I could go home if I could get what you needed. You told me I could go home, and now you’ve fucking taken it away again. For fuck’s sake, you hit him! He knows, he knows , I have no chance, no chances left. You told him everything he needed to know and you didn’t even say anything!”

It is clear to him that his lack of reaction is only engorging your anger, but he doesn’t want to dampen it.

He can’t bring himself to take it from you.

“Are you fucking stupid? Are you? You - you - you’ve fucking killed us both! You gave away everything. You gave it away. You gave me up! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

In the midst of your tirade he watches your arm wind up, and you swing it with a force, open palm smacking into the side of his face - hard enough to knock his head to the side, vicious enough to sting even through the knit of his mask.

Your violence is almost a relief, to him - he cannot justify it. Have you ever, ever been given the chance? The space? The opportunity to erupt as viciously as you do now, without the dire retaliation that would inevitably follow?

How many years worth of torment, hatred, agony, wrath have been packed so deep into you that they’ve been embedded into the very fibers of your being? How many years have you been forced to withstand the ever-building pressure, bursting at the seams with it?

“You’re as pig-headed as the fucking rest of them. It was all your idea and now you’ve ruined it! I - I told you. I told you what fucking animals they were and you dragged me here anyway - now what? Are you going to punch every single one of them?”

In your fury you reach upwards and take the forehead of his mask in a tight fist - tearing it off his head in a single pull before savagely throwing it across the room. He remains stone-faced, he keeps his lips sealed, his hands by his side. He watches your every movement with heavy eyes.

Your fiery glare scratches about his face now that you have forcibly exposed it, and after a blink, you truly succumb to your apoplexy. You slam your fists into his chest, another attempt to shove him, and he gives way to you with a step back.

“You never think , are you even capable of forming a fucking thought? No, you just attack whoever or whatever gets in your way - anything you don’t like - just maul everything like you’re a fucking dog. You’re dogs. You’re all dogs!”

Another shove, more flailing hands, he cedes to you under every attack. You force him backwards until his back hits the wall behind him, and you berate him still.

“You - they - everything you fucking touch, why does it always hurt? You just can’t fucking stop yourselves from biting, can you? Always scratching and grabbing and fucking hitting and breaking - never once, not once - do you ever think it might hurt? Always so hungry for more, and more, do you ever think I might be fucking hungry, too? God - that I don’t want to scratch you and grab you and hit you and break you? No - you - you all just fucking laugh when I tell you to stop or to shut the fuck up, for once . It’s always so funny to you, to think that I might want to fucking maim as badly as you do.”

Is he still the one you are referring to?

Does the pith of your rage lie beyond him? Is he merely the receptacle of it? The catalyst?

In the blast radius of your onslaught, he finds himself rapt.

The rest of the room, of the mission, of the country, of the world beyond it - it all dissolves into fog. You, an ember, the only thing lambent enough to see. Speechless, because you have finally burned away any image of you he had cloaked, smothered you with since he found you.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” You thunder, though your rage has begun to barely cool into indignant exasperation. “Fucking say something!”

Is it your real self, now? Unfettered, unaltered, raw? Has it always been?

“What do you want me to say,” he murmurs hoarsely, head tilted down to meet your eye.

Out of breath, you let out an incensed groan, wiping down your face with red hands. “I want - I-”

Your brows knit in frustration as you seem to hunt for the words, reluctant to let them out - you chew on the inside of your lip, glaring at him, eyes forlorn despite the anger you radiate.

“I want you to tell me everything will be okay.”

You grow humiliated in the silence he leaves after your answer.

Your eruption has left you ragged, shaking with the tsunami of adrenaline that flooded you from your neck to your feet, that poured your soul out through your teeth.

Once it began, there was no swallowing it. The wrath in your bones controlled every movement, the spite in your tongue, every word. It drips from you, still, in the quiet - you can almost hear it landing on the floor, soaking into the slate.

You weren’t sure who you aimed to hurl it at. Who you envisioned as the target of your bombardment. You fired at the skullhead who kidnapped you, at the American soldier who stripped and tortured you, at your genocidal husband, at the ophidian cunts at your dinner table, at the apotheosis of your fear, the wolf who goaded them into defiling you. At your father, at your secondary school teacher, at your johns and your bookers.

Even at the man under the mask, who has only existed to you in moments of his humanity - Simon, whose face is only unveiled when he deigns to be compassionate.

You didn’t expect his apathy. You climbed to the peak of your rage and girded yourself for his retaliation, anticipating that he would reflect your abuse back to you tenfold, your outburst quashed. Instead, he absorbed it like a scream into a pillow. Siphoned all the anger out of you and let it pool at his feet.

His face is bare, now, and expressionless - yet, laden with infinitely more to say than you have so far seen in it. His lids hang low over his amber eyes, and they do not leave you. Do you see apologies in them? Pity? Familiarity? They flay you with their candour, and you cannot break away from them.

“God - even if it’s a lie,” you grimace, resenting every second of silence he forces you to fill. “Just say it.”

His lips remain shut, but barely held closed. You follow the pink scar that splits them up his cheek, where it stops at the bone. You look at the shallow crow’s feet that spider out from the corners of his burdened eyes, more likely from a life of squinting through scopes than a life of laughter. At the concentration of freckles on the bridge of his nose, and under his eyes - the parts of his face most often exposed to the sun, the rest hidden under his skull-faced identity. At the bend in his nose, fragile bones within it once broken, maybe twice, and never truly healed.

The armour of fury sloughs off from you, in pieces, as you wait for him to speak. To say what you want him to say. To do what you asked. Is he staying silent as retribution for your tirade? Or is it too much of a lie to even utter?

“Just say it,” you exhale, resigned, as you keel forward.

You don’t spare a moment to second guess yourself, to think better - as you lean into him, and drop your forehead to his sternum. You rest your weight in him. You need the solace of human warmth, too weary to stand on your own. You hope he’ll hold you upright, at least, for a moment.

His heart beats directly into your skull. The fleece of his jersey is soft on your skin, the thick padding of his chest so gentle, so cushiony to sink into.

You anticipated more rigidity, that he’d turn to stone upon your touch - but, instead, a warm and wide hand settles at the back of your head, and your eyes flutter shut.

You rise and fall with his ribs as he draws deep a breath, you feel him sigh, as he rocks his head back against the wall he leans on. You can feel it in his touch, hear it in his breathing; he doesn’t know what to do with you. The whiplash of your outburst has confounded yourself more than it possibly could him.

“It’ll be okay,” he grumbles, the words barely make it past the gravel in his throat.

The vibration of his voice reverberates directly into your head, makes your mind buzz, and you turn your head to press your ear to his chest.

Whatever line you have crossed - torn through - is long behind you, now. Whatever rationality you had left has long since crumbled through your fingers. You untuck your hands from beneath you, slide them up his chest - you slither your arms over his shoulders, around his neck, and you stand on your toes to reach.

His reaction is delayed, almost hesitant - you can hear, feel the arguments he wages with himself. But you feel his breathing in your hair, warm and hazy, and his thick arm hooks reverently around your waist, forearm nestling in the small of your back.

“Are you lying?” You breathe, your nose brushing the skin at the crook of his shoulder, where the collar of his fleece meets the zipper.

Your fingers drag up the back of his neck, the skin there burning hot; you brush through the buzzed-short hair at the base of his skull, and your other hand grabs at the back of his jersey. There are no justifications for your actions; merely the machinations of a disillusioned machine, aching for some unfindable comfort. Maybe you’ll find it in him.

He bends downward to meet you, and you needn’t stand on your toes anymore - both of his mammoth arms wrap around you in earnest. His broad hand glides up the nape of your neck, fingers weaving with the hair that remains in a collapsing bun at the back of your head. He doesn’t yet pull you in very tightly, though - as if fighting to allow you room to escape, convinced you’ll change your mind and break free at a hair trigger.

His lips graze the shell of your ear, feather down the side of your neck, and your stomach drops.

“Don’t know,” he murmurs into the skin of your shoulder, gooseflesh prickling out from where his mouth ghosts over your skin.

His arms tighten, only just; the button of his trousers scrapes against your belly as you weld yourself to him. You snake a hand down his torso, fingertips traversing the hills and troughs of his pectorals, catching in the small folds of fleece, scratching the length of his zipper.

Once you reach his stomach, though, he is quick to cuff you by the wrist with a firm hand.

“Don’t do that,” he huffs, his lips retreating from where they almost found purchase in your skin, but didn’t commit to taste.

Disappointment deflates your fervour, and you cannot take it. You feel compelled to explain yourself, but any desperate excuse you can muster is too pathetic to utter aloud.

You want it. You need it - just once, the embrace of somebody who doesn’t get off on hurting you. Who doesn’t hate you, who doesn’t leave the bruises of his hatred behind when he is done with you. You can’t even rightly claim that the man you now cling to won’t do the same, but your longing belief that he won’t is enough to spur you into craving him.

Perhaps he thinks it’s immoral, to touch, to feel, to taste his prisoner of war. Is that really where he’d draw the line?

“I want to,” you insist; it emerges as a trembling whisper, scarcely a breath, and you bunch the thick fleece of his jersey in your fists.

He lets out a hounded breath, pent up within his ribs, and his grip on your wrist only grows tighter. He reels his head upward, his stubbled chin grazes your cheek before he widens the gap between his face and yours and leans his back against the wall.

“What,” he grunts, tone tender yet goading. “What do you want.”

Is he really going to make you say it?

Do you even have an answer?

You don’t know what you want from him, not in any way that you can adequately explain. Asking him to fuck you would be too crude to articulate what you truly, deeply crave. You don’t want him to bend you over, you don’t want him to simply fill you up and leave you empty. No, you want him surrounding you, against you, inside you - you want the sensation of soft skin, of praising hands, of indulging mouths. You want to be corporeal again, a tender human and not an animal, a woman and not a spayed bitch. You want to be adored, not consumed. Needed more than wanted.

The thought of speaking any of it aloud forces you to reckon with the unadulterated lunacy of what you are doing, of what you want to do. Clawing for the man, the soldier, the war criminal, that abducted you and slaughtered your husband.

But, in your thirst, you mould your reservations like soft clay.

Maybe the man he executed wasn’t your beloved husband, but a manipulative, perfidious sociopath, who kept you around as a pedigree showpiece and a hole to fuck. Maybe you were more pleased at the sight of the corpse than you had let yourself believe.

Maybe your abduction was in fact a rescue, offering you the only breath of freedom or hope of escape you had ever been granted. Maybe the mission of espionage he forcehanded you into was not purely a death sentence, but an opportunity to do something that actually matters, for once, to make right the horrors you had been blindly complicit in.

You aren’t certain how much you believe any of your excuses, but, the longer you hold your tongue, the louder they ring true.

Your eyes fix to the thrumming of his arteries under his tense jaw, the movement of his adam’s apple as he swallows. The satin sheen of sweat on his skin, despite the cold air of the empty kitchen.

Your misgivings spill like milk, and you take a sip of air.

“I just-” You hesitate, quiet words knotting your tongue. “I just want to feel good.”

He stills for a beat, before the hand he had shackled around your wrist loosens - he grazes it up the length of your arm, settling into the crook of your neck, his thumb brushing the underside of your jaw. His dusky eyes inspect you down the bridge of his nose.

“Y’want me to make you feel good?” He murmurs richly, voice low.

The surge in your chest turns your blood thick, and hot; you feel it flood into the apples your cheeks, into the tips of your fingers, into the crux of the pulsing bead between your legs.

Your lips barely part, your heavy eyes flicker about his face, your fists open flat on his stomach. You can’t bring yourself to meet his eye when you nod, barely moving your head, too diffident to bravely admit it.

He wedges the tip of his thumb under your jaw, and hinges your head backward, insisting you look at him. A warm shiver trickles down your spine as he cranes his head, his breathing tickles your lips.

“Say it.”

He’s tormenting you. Your tongue is too fevered to form the words for you, it takes a tremulous breath to gather them.

“I want you t-”

Your confession is cut short, when he closes the narrow distance and presses his open lips into yours, too impatient to await the full sentence. It sucks the air from your lungs, but it doesn’t startle you - no, you sink into him the instant you taste him, opening your mouth to him with an ardour you have never been so consumed by. He clutches your head with both hands and almost lifts you by it as he kisses you, thick fingers weaving into your hair, rooting keenly in your scalp.

His tongue tastes of cinnamon chewing gum and the smoke of your Benson and Hedges, decidedly softer than you would have expected, when you lave yours against his in your mouth. Your eager claws climb over the sides of his torso, digging into his back - pulling yourself as deeply into him as your bodies allow it, you want his warmth so firm against you that you might absorb it from him.

His lips drag from yours to plant wetly on your cheek, trailing to gnaw at the underside of your jaw, to taste your jugular with an open mouth - his teeth graze the tendons of your neck, but he doesn’t bite. Only lavishes your skin with a fervour that leaves you flustered and short of breath.

You offer him no such tenderness - you mouth at the skin behind his ear, taste the salt of his sweat on your tongue, teeth burrowing into the fleshy muscles of his neck like you might take a bite out of him. Your avaricious fingers scratch up the back of his scalp, combing through his cropped hair, burrowing your nails into his skull as you clutch him so covetously.

His right hand runs downward from your shoulder, sweeping the hollow of your waist, over your hip and down the side of your thigh. With his fingers he rakes the heavy silk of your dress up, up, up, and deftly gathers the fabric in a fist at your hip.

You gasp as he grapples you by the thighs with both hands and hoists you smoothly upward, parting your legs so that they wrap around his hips. He carries you three fluid steps forward, before planting you on the edge of the marble island counter in the centre of the kitchen. The countertop is biting cold against the bare skin under your skirt, and he wedges your legs open with his torso. In your impatience you clutch his head by the jaw with two eager hands, dragging him downward to kiss you again, teeth clacking together ungracefully in your ferocity.

You feel his thick fingers slither up your thighs, to your hips - they hook into the waistband of your underwear, and your heart jumps to your throat. He plucks them downward, lifting you just slightly to pull them over the swell of your ass, shimmying them down your thighs with an urgency that dizzies you.

He pulls away from your mouth with a ragged breath, and your hungry hands lose grip of him - he shifts back to drag your panties to your knees, and he sinks downward as he pulls them to your ankles, off your feet. You don’t see where he drops them, and he doesn’t come back up.

No, he remains on his knees beneath you. Doesn’t even take a breath before he plunges between your legs, doesn’t spare a second to admire your cunt for his own satisfaction, doesn’t waste a moment teasing you, nor preparing you - he parts your shamefully sodden lips with an overindulgent tongue, laving from your fluttering opening to your puffy clitoris in a single taste. You choke on air in the shock, flurried and light-headed, catching yourself from buckling over with hands atop his head.

He eats you like a hound, messy and greedy, sucking your clit between his teeth and then releasing it with a smear of a flat tongue. The noises you make are embarrassing, unfamiliar - you have only ever performed them, sweet and delicate moans, music tailored to the man pretending to please you. Instead you choke, squeak, whimper like you are drowning in rapture as thick as honey, and the sounds spring from your throat despite your efforts to contain them.

He rivets you to the counter with two expansive hands, fingertips bore into the pillow of your hips, holding the skirt of your dress up and out of his way. His coarse stubble chafes against the inside of your thighs, you feel every movement of his jaw as it opens wide and clamps shut. Your talons rake through his hair, scratch into his scalp with nearly enough force to break the skin. Your clit burns hot under his ravening, tender and hypersensitive - you gasp for air with every graze of his tongue, bite out a whine with every suckle.

Neck growing weak, your head falls back from your shoulders; with it, you collapse backward and land against the countertop, knocking over a stemmed wine glass that shatters loudly and sprinkles glass over the marble and the floor. You do not notice it, back arching as though in a fit, spine contorting as you unwittingly buck your hips away from his mouth, but he follows you.

He keeps the impetus of your pleasure under his tongue despite your writhing, reminding you of his strength when you involuntarily try to evade him. He does not restrain you with brutality, though - his hands are simply demanding, guiding, and as your squirming eases they soften their grip. One loosens and glides along the outside of your thigh, languid and tender across your skin, settling at your knee and steadying its position hanging over his shoulder.

The knowing gentleness of his touch, the caution in the caress of his fingers, the overindulgence of his tongue - emulsify into a surge of liquid heat, unctuous and boiling. It floods scalding from the core of you, through the vessels and nerves of every extremity, pumping into the centre of your spoiled clit and setting it alight. You come in his mouth with a fervency that suffocates you, and you choke on a keening cry as he sucks more out of you - it charges through you in waves as you tumble over the edge of it, forcing you to jolt as though electrified, over, and over, until you finally plant a heel on his collarbone and push him off of you.

You whine as you exhale, no air left in your lungs, as his mouth finally peels from your cunt. You take a moment to recover, back flat against the cold stone, eyes fluttering shut as the aftershock of your orgasm keeps you twitching.

His rabid breathing echoes yours in the silence of the room, and you tilt up your head to look at him down the length of your nose. His murky stare catches yours over your mound; his eyes stygian in the shadows as he glowers at you from under his brow, reflecting a faint glint of light in their centre. His mouth hangs open, your liquid and his soaking his lips and dripping from his chin.

He pants like a dog.

You’re still hungry.

The taste of you lingers in his mouth, and he refuses to swallow.

He savours it for as long as he can, letting your heady syrup soak into his tongue, he wants it imbibed by every taste bud. Your sweet breathing is music, spent whines almost as euphonious as the sounds of your orgasm, velvet in his ears - he relives the feeling of your needy clit spasming against his tongue, how eagerly it twitched when he persisted in spoiling it, and resists the urge to take it in his mouth again.

Your lethargic eyes cling to him, blinking slowly, lips wet.

Did that feel good, little thing?

Did he surfeit you?

Was he soft enough?

He tried to be. Christ, he tried - he exerted every ounce of his strength to subdue the savagery that roiled within him, that threatened to forcibly breach the cage he muzzled it with. It doesn’t come naturally to him, touching without forcing, lavishing without teeth. It goes against every fibre of his being, in fact - he is a carnivore by nature, he hunts and he snares and he chews, he overpowers with strength and fear, he controls with the threat of his aggression.

He had never practiced restraint until he met you.

It was far easier, when you kept your distance, when you avoided his eyes, when you resisted his touch.

Now, you run your fingernails through his hair. You wrap your thighs around his neck. You blink at him winsomely, supplicating, awaiting his next move. Unaware or uncaring of the predator you tempt so pointedly, how much effort he employs to tame it in your presence.

The animal in him has its own hunger - starved, in fact - its stare flicks to your cunt, inches from him, shuddering under the heat of his breathing. Pink and pillowy after his avaricious praise, glistening with its stickiness; your nectar seeps in a rivulet from your slit, clear and glossy. His cock is heavy, only growing heavier, thrumming rich with the blood you fill it with.

He does not deserve it.

He catches your eye again, as you push yourself upward to sit straight, and he forces himself to stand. His nose brushes up your silk-cladded stomach as he rises from his knees, and once he stands tall, his face is a hair’s breadth from yours.

Your cheeks are rosy, shiny with the glow of the paroxysm he ate out of you. Lips bitten red, shimmery with your saliva, part gently to breathe. Hair mussed, askew, falling out of the updo you had pulled it into, pieces of it cascade in waves and frame your face.

Fuck, you’re beautiful.

He could say it aloud, but he doesn’t. Is that what you want to hear? Does it even matter to you?

Your gaze lingers on his lips, he watches your eyelashes as they flutter. You shift forward to press your mouth to his, lips barely open; you are reserved, shy about it, as if kissing him now is a crossing of a boundary, as if he could ever mount any boundaries against you. You need only blink at him and they crumble.

Can you taste yourself in his mouth?

Does it make you as ravenous as it does him?

He feels your fingers on his stomach, scratching at the fleece - and like you tried to before, you trail them downward, past his navel, catching in the stiff waistband of his trousers. He lets out a grunt, a sigh, as he looks down to see your diffident fingers hook the button of his fly, pushing it through the eye with a dull pop. You move slowly, cautious about it, as if he can’t see, can’t feel where you venture. As though he might catch you in the act of your transgression, and you’d be in trouble.

Do you feel that you owe it to him? That he did it for a reward?

Tasting you was a reward in itself. One he could never have deserved, one he cannot yet fathom you deigned to grant him.

Maybe it’s habit, all you have come to know - sex as a transaction, a contract you need to fulfil. That if you don’t open your cunt or your mouth to repay the favour, they’ll be opened for you, whether you like it or not.

He can’t have that. He won’t let you offer yourself out of obligation, nor out of dread. Not with the knowledge of what he has done to you hanging heavy from his neck. Not with your wrathful words ringing poignantly in his skull. Because, you were right - he does scratch, and grab, and hit, and break, he spends every waking second hungry, and the compulsion to maim is written on, embedded in the flesh he consists of. His very being is anathema to you, and he should be.

He refuses you, again, taking both of your little wrists in one hand, shackling them together and tugging them away from him.

“Stop,” he grumbles, and you look up at him through your lashes.

He can’t decode you. Your expression reads to him as both nervous and discontented, embarrassed and yet frustrated.

Do you even know what you want?

With a pent breath you lower your head, pressing your forehead under his collarbone, and he feels your leg shift up his side. He hopes you have given up. That he has left you depleted of the lust that drove you to make the mistake of indulging him.

“Please.”

A whisper, so muted he thought for a moment that he had hallucinated it.

“What?” He presses, under breath, and you sink deeper into him, mouth against his jersey.

“Please,” you repeat, a whine, muffled by fleece.

Your supplication turns him to putty, and his cuffs slacken. He doesn’t believe you - or, just as likely, he doesn’t trust his own ears to be hearing what he thinks you have said. Your slippery hands escape him, and unbridled they return to their objective; fingers catch the zipper of his fly, you watch your work as you pull it down.

“Please,” you insist, unprompted, each utterance more desperate.

His cock grows as solid as iron; straining against the boxer briefs you release from behind his fly, twitching with every slight movement you make in its proximity. His war not to touch you is lost, and he ghosts a hand across your shoulder, up the back of your neck, combing into your hair as he presses his nose and mouth into the top of your head.

Do you know what you are pleading for?

Do you want him inside you?

Do you need the fullness he can give you?

He could oblige you, if that is what you truly want. He could sink his cock into you deep enough to make you dizzy. He could stuff you full enough to slake the turmoil-induced concupiscence that has possessed you.

But he won’t do that for you, little thing. Not unless you beg him to.

You pluck at the elastic waistband of his boxers, another unspoken appeal.

“Say it again,” he growls, into your hair, doing his level best not to dig his teeth into you.

With a quivering breath you tilt your head upward to face him, your lips brush lightly against his. The tips of your wary fingers brush the underside of his length through the fabric of his boxers, and he bites down on a grunt.

“Please.”

You whisper it into his mouth, and his scruples turn to smoke.

He dives downard, lips colliding with yours, kissing you with a resurgent zeal, his manacles broken and his conscience smothered - your little hands hold him by the cheeks, softer than he is worthy of, and your tongue strokes against his as though drinking your own juices from him.

He grants your pleas, tugging down the front of his boxers and releasing his burdensome cock with a grip around its curly base. Your needy legs hook him by the hip, and you tug him forward - the underside of his shaft grinds against your slit, soaking in the nectar that pools there, and you spill a yearning whimper into his mouth.

“Again,” he snarls, against your lips; he kneads the crux of your labia with the base of his head, frenulum rubbing against your swollen clitoris, and your brows curl with the whine he pushes out of you.

“Please,” you mewl, fingernails nearly puncturing his cheeks.

Fuck, you’re insatiable.

It liquefies him when you hurt him. When you bite. When you maim. His scalp still stings from where your claws had all but broken the skin, the side of his neck throbs where your bite marks sink deep. He wants you to wound him, he wants you to take it all out on the body that he offers you. He wants to bleed for you.

He drags the soft head of his steel cock down your slit, burrowing between the lips so slick he needn’t pause, needn’t prepare you by spitting on his hand and smearing it on you. He wedges his tip against your opening and it almost sucks him in with its voraciousness, but he halts there. His free hand finds your waist and clutches at its hollow, tugging you minutely closer, your ass perched precariously on the very edge of the counter. You look up again, with a little gasp, neediness etched in your stare.

“Again,” he urges, just to hear you beg for him.

“Please-”

You gag on your entreaty as he obliges you; he pushes his weight forward and sinks his cock into you, reaming open your taut yet eager pussy as he gradually burrows it deeper. He sees white as you stretch to fit him, and he lets out a broken grunt; the ridged and gooey walls of your cunt engulf him snugly, blindingly warm, you fit his cock like a glove.

With a breath caught in your throat, you squeak on it - he stills, only half-way deep, for your own good. He refuses to hurt you, even if you want him to. Your cunt clamps down on him as he pauses, muscles rolling up the length of him, and he wrenches shut his eyes; your hands rake from his cheeks to the collar of his fleece, and you reel him desperately closer.

“You’re not hurting me,” you breathe, lips under his ear, warm on his skin.

Can you read his mind?

Is he that transparent?

He wonders if you have been able to see through his veneer, peer under his mask since the moment you laid eyes on him. As if you can guess his thoughts, decrypt his every motive, predict every decision. As if you can decipher his feelings, better than he can, almost as well as you can manipulate them. He has always boasted his ability to conceal himself, has always considered his truest centre too deep to be retrieved, long gone - but you peel off every layer that coats him, every cover that obscures him, and you expose him without effort.

It might have made him defensive, cold, being unmasked so brazenly. But, it doesn’t. Not when you’re the one peering under the hood.

He smooths his hands up your thighs, lifting your skirt, finding purchase in the meat of your hips - he uses his grip to anchor you to the edge of the counter as he thrusts forward, plunging his cock so deep into you that you take him to the hilt.

He bites back a groan, as his blunt head nudges against the spongy pillow of your cervix, and your fingernails carve into his burning neck. He stays there for a beat, buried as deep as you can take him, swimming in the abundant honey that soaks him from base to tip.

He reels out of you, indulging his cock with the friction of your walls, gripping his shaft on its way out - before he drives back into you, ramming into the gummy plug of your womb and forcing a succulent cry from your throat. Your cunt swallows him like it was moulded to fit him, and he grits his teeth as he succumbs to rutting in earnest; drags his cock out of you and plummets in deep, relishing in the melody of every little squeak he fucks out of you.

With the arms over his back you yank at the fabric of his jersey, pulling it up from where it was tucked into his trousers, exposing his back to the cold of the air. He yields to your unspoken request without dispute, fleetingly separating from you to reach behind his back and shuck off the fleece and the t-shirt he wears under it in one go. He knows you like the sight, little thing.

You hook an arm around his neck with a frayed breath, and slither the other over his ribs, rooting your fingers in the muscles that wrap his scapula. He fucks into you after the transient reprieve, and you burrow your face into his bare chest. You kiss him there, tongue gliding over the scars of burns and gunshots like you can taste the blood that once spilled from them.

With another impetuous thrust your sanguinary fingernails carve through the meat of his back, as though you want to break the skin; you claw deeper, crueller with every rut, and your mewls grow wetter and sweeter.

He shifts his right hand to the top of your thigh, and he glides his thumb down the crease of your groin; he nestles the tip of it at the nexus of your pussy, still slick from his appetite, and he burnishes your clit in circles with the pace of his thrusts.

Can he get another one out of you, little thing?

It sounds like he can - your whines hitch in your throat with every upward swipe of his thumb, with every ram of his cock, and your legs coil tighter and tighter around his torso. He feels your cunt constrict around the length of him, resistance where there had been none, tightening and letting go in rhythm. He’d like to see your pretty face as he takes you over the edge, again, a sight that could never pall - but you are engaged in your own vices.

Your unquenchable mouth is busy - gnashes at his neck, his trapezius, his collarbone, leaving wet nibbles in your wake. You settle for a pectoral, and he feels your teeth grazing his febrile skin, over where the tattoos of his sleeve spread over his chest. Your heightened whimpers are muffled by his pelt, as he brings you closer, as he fucks you deeper - you hold your breath, clamp your thighs around his waist as you climb to the apex.

And when you come, when your pent breath escapes your chest in a ravished whine, your jaw finds purchase; you take the flesh of his muscle between your teeth and bite down as he stuffs you full, chewing on his meat like a carnivore, and he groans harshly through a clenched jaw.

Do you enjoy hurting him, little thing?

Or do you simply like the taste?

Perhaps it is both, because you only bite down harder as you roll down the other side of your climax; your nails lacerate deeper, your legs trap him tighter, and your pussy constringes around his cock with the aftershocks of your orgasm.

The pain you inflict in him is just as blinding, just as shattering as the euphoria engulfing the length of him - his cock rakes against your suckling walls, rooting into the pillow of your cervix, bathing in the flood of your liquor - he feels his stomach sink, his vision goes hazy, his cock engorges in waves from base to head.

“Fuck-” he bites out, wolfish in his grunting - you are either oblivious to or unperturbed by his looming climax, because you keep your ensnaring legs tight around his torso, your arms hooked rigidly around his neck, your canines in his shoulder.

He stifles a hoarse groan through gritting teeth, decisive hands seize you by the hips in an effort to unsheathe his cock from the depths of you. But your thighs only contract, grapple him closer; you drive his length back into you, and you squeak insatiably into his skin.

“Mia-” He grunts, voice ragged.

Your greedy hands slide to either side of his inflamed neck, and you finally unlatch your mouth from his skin - you hold your forehead to his, languid eyes fluttering across his face, he feels your breathing cool against his skin.

He’s too close - it wracks him, surges through him with a voltage that turns his vision sparkly and his cock as heavy as lead.

Do you want him to come inside you?

Do you need him beholden to you?

“Please,” you croak.

Fuck.

His orgasm rips through him and leaves him blind, floods out of him in a torrent that sucks the air from his lungs - his cock lurches in the snare of your cunt, spilling a spate of thick come against your cervix and pumping you so full that he feels the overflow drool down the base of his shaft. He groans into your mouth and you swallow it, your own spent whimpers echoing his, as his cock continues to spasm inside you.

The cold water rinses him once he takes a breath, and he lowers his head; he rests his open mouth against your shoulder, panting into your feverish skin. You listlessly run the soft tips of your fingers up his spine, as winded as he is, his head rises with your torso as you draw in a breath.

His mind is paradoxically empty and teeming - warring between shame and pride, between guilt and reverence.

He didn’t deserve it. He shouldn’t have obliged you.

He doesn’t regret it.

“Thank you,” you breathe, a torpid whine in the sigh that follows.

He presses a praising kiss into the crook of your shoulder.

“Don’t thank me.”

#call of duty fanfic #cod fanfic #simon riley x reader #ghost x reader #cod smut #cod mw2 #simon ghost riley x reader #ghost x female reader #ghost cod #bella-writes

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easy-there-leftovers · 1 year ago

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A Question Unasked

Written with season 1 Spencer in mind

Summary: In which your ambitious, workaholic nature makes Spencer wonder if you've got a crush on Hotch. This slight hitch in his plan causes him to miss a few signs.

[A/N]: Can be seen as a filler from Spencer's perspective of certain scenarios from "Mixed Messages" and a prequel to "As Cool As I Think I Am", but can also just be a standalone

Pairing: Spencer Reid x fem! (mentored by Hotch!) reader | cw: slight spoilers for s1e04, allusion to inappropriate workplace dynamics (it's not true, relax lol), slight description of canon-typical violence, mildly inaccurate timeframe | word count: 4k

Spencer looks up from his endless stacks of files on his desk to look at the girl on the other side of his desk. Only a single carpeted walkway really separating them.

He could easily just get up and walk right to her. Ask the burning question that's been on his mind since the Arizona case, but he can't.

Why is that?

He's been your friend for a while, and he's known you for a while longer.

With his eidetic memory, he remembers so clearly when you first started working together. He remembers your starched blazer and pressed blouse, a stark contrast to his swimming-in-sweaters look, and how that alone let anyone know that you were serious about uniform and protocol.

You were, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen, and a fresh graduate just like him.

You were smart, beautiful, and started working at the BAU as early as he did.

And because you were new and young, one of the senior agents had been assigned to supervise your progress. So much like how he was mentored by Gideon, you had been mentored by the unit chief himself; Aaron Hotchner.

He'd like to think that he learned a lot from Gideon. He wasn't the type to hold his hand throughout a case, which he is thankful for, but he had been there to encourage him to think more outside the box. To let his mind be more flexible and creative. To see things from every conceivable angle. Leaving no stone unturned.

He supposed you learned a lot from Hotch as well. With your calm exterior, polite demeanor, and calculating mind that occasionally colored your less polite vocabulary-- He didn't know what Aaron must've been like in his junior years, but he supposed that having you as his colleague was essentially the same experience.

What he does know, however, is how close you are to your boss. Or is it your work?

Either way, you being glued to your work almost always meant that you were glued to him by proxy. You two being the first ones in and the last ones out showed that you spent three-percent more of your time with each other than the rest of the team, and two-percent more than with him.

Granted that had changed as of late, but still!

That didn't leave him a lot of time to ask you if---

"Dr. Reid, if you keep staring at me, I don't think you'll be able to finish your action reports on time." You had said without lifting your eyes from your folder.

Having been caught, he cleared his throat with a small 'sorry,' and directed his head back down to his still endless stack of files. The action earning a couple of chuckles from the bullpen where the rest of your colleagues had certainly seen, or at least heard, the exchange.

Not long after however, he saw Hotch from the corner of his eye lean over the railing outside his office. Calling for you both to meet him inside with his usual stern expression.

Spencer noticed how you got up, eyes still zeroed in on one of your files, and continued on your way up and into the unit chief's open door.

A clear sign that you had been invited there often enough that you didn't need to see where you were going.

You expected it.

He sighs and makes his way into the office as well. Dreading what the meeting could even be for, though he's confident he hasn't done anything wrong.

***

"As you might have noticed in our previous cases, I've paired you two to work on the more analytical aspects of it together. With these changes, we've been able to work twice as fast, and we’re thankful for the help."

Whatever Spencer had been expecting, it was not this. His raised eyebrows evidently agreed with him.

It wasn't everyday that Hotch complimented someone like this, much less in the proper environment. And if your respectful posture, but shining eyes in slight pride were anything to go off of, this was something new for you too.

As he was about to voice his thoughts, you had spoken up.

"Sir, Dr. Reid's knowledge in a wide array of subjects has certainly helped with our investigations. Though I'm afraid I haven't done much aside from ensuring it's accuracy and-"

"No! I mean--," He looked to see you already looking at him in slight confusion before continuing.

"She's been a huge help so far and has allowed me to exchange ideas with her to build a more accurate profile. Not to mention that her ability to mediate between departments has been beneficial to gaining access to pertinent information! So I think she's done plenty for the investigations as well." His voice dwindles as he realizes he's rambling on praises and he suddenly feels warm under the scrutiny of both his boss and his colleague.

He just didn't want anyone thinking you weren't doing anything by being humble. Especially since you're both so young.

Thankfully, it's Hotch who speaks up again after a beat.

"So what I'm hearing is that you're both satisfied with this arrangement?"

You both nod carefully and he smiles a small smile at that.

"Then we'll be carrying on with this pairing into the foreseeable future. Should there be any concerns about this arrangement, see to it that it goes through me. We can't afford to lose either of you." He says it with a finality that prompts both Spencer and you to leave with a nod, but the thought is instantly corrected when he speaks again.

"Oh and agent?" He looks only at you, but Spencer looks back as well out of instinct. "A private word, if you please."

Spencer sees you nod without a second thought and he takes it as his cue to hurriedly leave.

***

It hasn't been that long, Spencer argues with himself, since he left the unit chief's office. The blinds aren't drawn, he would know since he'd been looking at them periodically, so he also knows that nothing untoward is happening.

Yet something is bothering him about it.

From his position on his desk, he can see you and Hotch discussing something on his table very seriously, but he also sees how your eyes rarely leave the face of your superior. He can't quite see your expression due to the distance and the light, but he has this sinking feeling that it's a lot like the one from earlier.

He scoffs at the thought. If he wasn't thinking so rationally, he would've thought-

"Does she like Hotch?"

"Who likes Hotch?"

The new voice makes him whip his head back so fast to see Morgan with a confused face. Upon further examination, he sees him holding something that was definitely supposed to be flicked at him if he hadn't been caught so off guard.

He internally debates to voice his opinion, but he does anyway.

"Do you think that she likes Hotch?" He gestures with his eyes to their supervisor's office.

"You're asking me if I think 'little miss perfect' has a crush on a man that's hitched?" Derek echoes back with the use of your nickname. One that he coined as a playful jab at your no-frills behavior.

Spencer cringes when he hears it back though. He didn't ask this to get you in trouble, but it might come across that way now.

"Who has a crush on married man?" Elle joins in, and he only shrinks into his seat more.

"I'm not asking if she has a crush on him! I just want to know if she might like him and--what it is that she likes about him..."

The two exchange looks before looking back at him. Fully knowing that that's not the reason why he's asking, but they humor him anyway.

"Reid, what makes you think she likes him and not literally anyone else?"

"Well. there's her preference for prolonged eye-contact, a common indicator of interest for one. Her being in constant proximity to him, a sign that shows comfort in certain contexts, and then there's the amount of time they spend together."

The last one might be a bit of a reach, considering how you all work in the same area, but at this point he just wanted someone to tell him that he was either absolutely right, or crazy.

"Kid, that's crazy."

Duly noted.

"I'll say.” Elle chuckles out her response. “I haven't thought about it all, but those signs don't really mean anything. It just sounds like she has a habit of looking at whoever's talking to her." She notes, sharing her experience of being on the receiving end of your rather intense gaze.

His other friend adds onto that.

"And the whole closeness thing? You've seen her, she's like a computer with the way she works. She's a workaholic. And Hotch is another. It's just math, Reid."

Spencer furrows his eyes at the man's statement but before he can ask further, he sees you coming out of the office and staring at the small crowd that has now formed at his desk.

"Is something going on here?" You ask with tense brows. Eyes flickering to and fro.

He couldn't really think of something on the spot, but thankfully Derek had one at the ready. "Was just caught trying add my stack on to pretty boy's plate."

He sees you let out a small 'hm,' and you eventually turn your back to them to reach your desk.

He sighs in relief as he feels a firm pat on his back from Morgan.

"Next time, try looking at what she does when you're the one talking." He says before leaving to go to his own desk as well.

Spencer doesn't know what good that would do, especially now that he's worried one of his colleagues have caught wind of him liking you, but he at least takes note of it.

--------

He does not, in fact, take note of it until very later.

The team had been called to San Diego to deal with someone they had been calling, "The Tommy Killer." An unsub that had a preference for gluing his victims' eyes open.

As they were reviewing the scene in the jet, they had noticed a few stanzas of a literary work had been left behind at the scene.

"It's a ballad from the late 1600s. A Dialogue Betwixt Death and a Lady." Spencer had mentioned from where he stood.

"A 17th Century ballad?" Morgan had asked him incredulously from his seat, but it’s you who answers.

"One where a woman tries to bribe Death with all that she has in exchange for a little more time to live. Naturally, he doesn't allow it. Claiming that she was undeserving of an exception that even kings were denied of."

Spencer looks up from his own copy to see you still looking at your own from beside Hotch. With your brows furrowing in thought, he almost sees the actual gears in your brain turning.

"So what, are we looking at a literature professor of some kind?" Elle asks which immediately perks him right up.

"Well, actually anyone with access to the internet today. You should see what comes up when you type in the word, "Death" into a search engine." He laughed absentmindedly.

"Reid, no wonder you can't get a date."

Morgan's words made him frown, but he brushes it off.

Hotch, as previously discussed, then called on for the both of you to look deeper into the messages. To see if there was anything new that could be inferred.

He nods at him, and looks up. Expecting you to still be looking at Hotch as well.

Instead, your eyes meet his, but you quickly look back onto your file.

Reid thinks it's just a coincidence.

***

"Creepy, huh?" JJ had asked you two as she approached where transcripts of the written messages were tacked onto a board.

Spencer had been focusing so hard that he was caught off gaurd by her sudden appearance. Fully expecting the area to just be for you and him so he told her what first came to mind.

"Actually, conversations between Death and his victims was a fairly popular literary and artistic theme throughout the Renaissance."

Though perhaps the delivery wasn't as as good as he thought it was as JJ only stared back at him with an unreadable expression.

He thought it was interesting, really, but he supposed his slight stutter and breathy laugh at the end must have distracted her from his point.

He turned to look at you for help, but you too had been focusing on the messages and wouldn't be available to do that. So he just agreed with JJ’s sentiment, which seemed to be enough for her to leave.

He sighed out in relief.

"The lady never answers. Have you noticed it yet, Dr. Reid?" You turn to him as you ask.

He immediately refocuses on to the case and tries his best to reply after his prior blunder. "Oh uh-- Right, the dialogue in the ballad seems to be fractured. Well, it's more of a monologue than a dialogue seeing that there is no exchange of information."

A small smile graces your lips at that, and you gesture with a nod to go report your findings.

"So it is. Let's get going."

He follows you to where Hotch and Elle were discussing the sexual aspect of the crime and sees you take your place next to your mentor. The same position you were in when he was blowing out his birthday candles, as he also inserts himself into the discussion.

"Sir, we believe what the unsub has written at the scenes are most of the first three verses of the same ballad." You deliver, prompting your mentor to raise his brow at that.

"Most of?"

"Yeah, it's only one side of the conversation." Spencer adds. "There's no betwixt." He takes pride in your shared effort, which makes itself known by the smile that adorns his face.

Unfortunately, his satisfaction, isn't met with a positive reaction either as he sees Elle desperately trying not to make eye-contact, and your supervisor staring at him very pointedly.

He's thankful though at the little chuckle that you quickly try to hide behind a cough and a cover of your mouth to appear more professional. Quickly looking down at the ground.

He's happy that at least someone thought his joke was well-placed.

He continues to explain your theory about how the Lady in the narrative never answers, and that's enough for both Hotch and Elle to at least think about it.

Their attention is quickly stolen away however at an incoming call about a failed attempt nearby the precinct.

Quickly excusing themselves to get onto the scene as soon as possible, you see them call Gideon on their way out. Watching them as they leave the department doors.

But Spencer keeps his eyes on you as the thought just dawns on him.

You were the first one on the team to laugh at his jokes.

***

The more cases he works for the BAU, the more he realizes how much of his work isn't theoretical anymore. He feels it in the weariness in his eyes, the weight on his chest, and the shake of his hands.

Or maybe the shake is from the cold.

After all, he had dressed for the warm, California air. So now that he was in the cool, air-conditioned jet, he was seriously regretting not packing a sweater, at the very least.

He makes his way to the back of the aircraft after another successful investigation, and that's where sees you.

You had opted to shed your typically structured blazer on the seat beside you, leaving you in a softer blouse, both in color and form, that made everyone around you know that you were officially off duty.

It's a nice look on you, he thinks. A slight departure from your usually stern and hardened exterior. He wouldn't mind seeing a more relaxed version of you every once in a while.

A version of you that looked more your age and not constantly under the pressure of doing well.

He momentarily wonders if that's part of your mentor's influence as well.

He freezes a bit, as if catching himself in some depraved daydream, and takes a few steps back to return to the more vacant areas of the craft.

Before he can get any further though, you see him and beckon for him to come over with a tired wave of your hand.

"How's the flight treating you, Dr. Reid?" You ask, drowsiness lacing your tone as he sits on the seat opposite of you.

"Oh, it's the same as always, I guess. A little colder than usual, but that's to be expected. By the way, we’re actually lucky that we haven't experienced some semblance of turbulence yet on our flights, considering that the likelihood of it has increased by seventeen-percent in the last decade."

You laugh at that. "You really know just what to say, huh?"

He doesn't see it as funny as you do, so it seems. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you or--" "There's no need to apologize, sir. I find everything you have to say interesting, whether you mean it to or not."

He stays silent at that, suddenly nervous, and tries to make himself comfortable. He does so in the hopes that he can finally steel himself to ask you that question.

He talked to Elle earlier when they were waiting for the unsub's call. Asked her if she thought it was weird that he knew what he knew, and if it had anything to do with his inability to get a date. She had reasoned with him that it was because he didn't ask, but it couldn't be that simple, could it?

He mulls it over in his head before sighing. Opting to give up and just wait for a more opportune time.

Besides, jury’s still out that you could very well be pining over his boss.

The action, however, seems to remind you of something.

"Before I forget," You look into your baggage, rummaging around before finally finding what it was you were looking for.

You ask him to close his eyes, which he obediently does, and you place a thick rectangular box into his awaiting lap.

The sudden shift in weight causes his eyes to open, and he is certainly surprised to see what was on there.

"What is this?"

"It's your birthday. There wasn't a good time to give it to you, so might as well."

He takes the box into his hands and shakes it a little.

From the sound alone, or near lack thereof, there could be a multitude of things inside it. He looks at you questioningly and you only smile and gesture for him to open it.

He takes his time in doing so, and he doesn't know how or why, but he finds your reactions to his movements much more amusing than whatever could be in the box. As if you were more excited for him.

He finally peers into the now open box to see some sort of purple cloth. A ribbon of geometric designs cutting through its middle and he stares at it in wonder.

"It's a scarf!"

You smile at him, and he was thankful that the rest of the team were either asleep or just not paying attention as it allowed the both of you to savor the moment with at least some semblance of privacy.

"I've noticed that you had a tendency to wear a lot of layers. I wasn't sure if it was because you were cold, or you just liked dressing that way, so I made an educated guess and got you something practical."

And just like that, he's over the moon.

He immediately goes to put it on with a wide smile, paying no mind that it paired so badly with the short sleeves of his button up.

Not that he would know, nor care.

And just when he had been feeling cold earlier too! "Thank you so much. This means a lot to me, especially since you don't usually give gifts."

You shake your head. "I don't, but it's not everyday one spends their twenty-fourth at the BAU."

He continues to observe the cloth that now hung around him. Smoothing his hands over it as he does with an expression unreadable to you.

You worry a bit and hurriedly mention, "I'm sorry if it isn't your color. I see purple show up on your mismatched socks more than any other color, so I just assumed. If it's any consolation, purple is a great color to contrast the warmer hues in brown eyes?"

He flushes at your admission, but matches your urgency to set you straight. "No! Please, I actually really like it-- It's beautiful."

You breathe out a sigh in relief and nod slowly at that.

"Speaking of the color, did you know the origin of purple dye is actually quite fascinating?" His voice filled with enthusiasm. With his eyes, bright, and filled with a child-like fascination that makes your chest feel warm at the sight.

"Historically, purple dye was incredibly rare and valuable, which is why it became associated with royalty and nobility. The earliest known purple dye, known as Tyrian purple, was produced by the ancient Phoenicians around 1200 BC. It was derived from the secretions of a particular type of sea snail, the bolinus brandaris, found in the Mediterranean Sea."

He paused for a moment, wondering if he was boring you, but sees that you're still very much paying attention to him.

"The process to obtain this dye was incredibly labor-intensive and complex. It required thousands of these sea snails to produce just a small amount of dye. The snails would then be collected and left to decompose in large vats. After several days, a gland from the snail was extracted and crushed to produce a purple mucus. This mucus would then be exposed to sunlight, undergoing a chemical reaction that transformed it into the deep, rich purple dye we commonly associate with our modern day equivalent."

As he kept going, he suddenly remembered what Morgan had told him all those weeks ago.

"Next time, try looking at what she does when you're the one talking."

So he does just that.

He observes the way that your shoulders are more relaxed, how your eyes never stray from him, and how the small upturned curve of your lip makes itself known as you rest your cheek onto your propped up fist.

How he has your undivided attention and yet you don't even look the least bit bored of what he has to say. Only silently appreciating and subtly nodding along with the slow blink of your eyelids.

All clear signs of unguarded comfort, and or interest, in his presence.

Had you really been looking at him like that all this time?

Now the idea of you liking your boss seems silly. Especially when you’re looking at him the way he imagines himself looking at you.

"I did know that, actually, Dr. Reid. At the time, Tyrian purple wasn't only desirable for its rarity, people said it was also incredibly lightfast. That it was resistant to fading under the sun and the weather. Not to mention all that hard work that just to get a single gram of it. Then again, modern studies do claim that its lightfastness was, in fact, not an accurate feature as it's color diminished when it was exposed to light and UV radiation."

You laughed a little again, as if remembering some anecdote, and that sound was steadily becoming one of his favorite sounds. Following only after your speaking voice.

"Fortunately for you, doctor, I could only afford a synthetically purple-dyed scarf. Though that means that you won't ever have to worry about it fading under the sun."

Hands up in faux surrender, you give him a tired smile that he returns with one of his own.

A calming silence enveloped the both of you as you continue to bask in each other's presence.

At some point you doze off, draping your blazer on top of yourself to shield yourself from the cold, and that's when he starts considering Elle's words again.

"Do you ever ask anyone out?"

"No,"

"That's why you can't get a date."

He nods to himself, and reclines a little more into his seat. Snuggling into his new scarf that still has the faintest smell of you.

Maybe he will ask you out on a a date later.

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almostfoxglove · 4 months ago

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THE LIBRARIAN

a jackson!joel one shot as requested by anonymous

RATING: Explicit (18+) | PAIRING: Joel Miller x f!Reader WORD COUNT: 7k CW: Mild allusion to canon-typical violence and danger, but this is fluff. though tbh joel in glasses should probably be its own warning.

SUMMARY: You're on a mission to build a library in Jackson. A secret admirer is on a mission to help.

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SNEAK PEEK:

Later, it will be funny. The way you shrug and think nothing of his offer as you agree. You’re too busy thinking about the crooked screw in the wall to catch fate’s hands moving you into its path, happily.

READ THE LIBRARIAN ON AO3.

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dividers by @saradika-graphics!

#joel miller fanfic #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #joel miller fic #tlou fanfiction #pedro pascal #joel miller #almostfoxglove #myfics #fic: thelibrarian #mine: request

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wildfiig · 3 months ago

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┆ rafe saves you from your stalker ex ✶

.ᐟ cw: angst! minor violence (no one actually gets hurt). allusions to stalking. breaking and entering. ex boyfriend cliche. .ᐟ notes: please send reqs or even just say hi! i fear i can feel writers block trying to sneak up on me... even req smut! idm!

you didn’t hear the door open.

just the sound of something too soft to be real, something you told yourself was the wind, or maybe the pipes, or maybe nothing at all. but then you heard your name. not sweet, not kind—his voice like it used to be when he was drinking, like it had teeth.

you didn’t have time to think. just your hands shaking as you locked the guest bathroom door and sat on the floor, knees to your chest. the light overhead buzzed. your breath sounded like screaming in the quiet.

you called rafe.

you didn’t even remember doing it, your fingers just went. your heart in your throat. your ex still calling your name in that sing-song way, like he owned you still, like you were something he'd misplaced and was sure he could take back.

“where are you?” rafe’s voice. low, steady. it cut through the static in your head.

you swallowed, couldn’t even speak at first. your voice came out cracked, barely there. “downstairs bathroom,” you whispered. “he’s in the house. i don’t know how he got in.”

a pause. not silence—just breath on the other end. then: “don’t move. i’m coming.”

he didn’t hang up. kept the line open, like he could hold you through it. you stayed on the cold tile, phone clutched so tight your fingers went numb. your ex wandered through the rooms above you, muttering, laughing under his breath. he tried your bedroom door. tried the back door. he wasn’t hurrying. he thought he had time.

and then, a crash upstairs.

not him.

rafe.

he must’ve taken a bat from his trunk, you’d seen it before—metal, dented, kept there like he knew someday he’d need it. you heard his voice now, shouting, deep and raw. doors slamming. footsteps too fast.

you didn’t know what exactly happened up there, you just knew the second your ex realized he wasn’t alone anymore. you heard the screen door creak open, then slam shut, and then—nothing.

just your own breath in your ears again.

the handle jiggled. for a second your heart stopped until rafe whispered your name.

“baby, it’s me. open the door.”

your hands shook as you unlocked it. the door swung open and there he was—hair messy, jaw clenched, still breathing like he hadn’t stopped running. his shirt stuck to him in places, his knuckles scraped, like he’d already found the guy and gotten halfway to what he wanted to do. but his eyes were on you. soft, in that way they only ever were when you were breaking.

he didn’t say anything at first. just reached for you.

you folded into him without thinking, arms around his waist, face pressed to his chest. he held you like he was trying to patch you back together with just the weight of his arms.

you weren’t crying anymore, not out loud, just shaking. he ran a hand through your hair, then down your back, over and over.

“did he hurt you?” his voice was tight. too quiet.

“no,” you whispered. “he just… he kept calling my name. taunting me.”

rafe’s jaw flexed hard. he pulled back just enough to look at you. “i should’ve killed him.”

“rafe—”

“i should’ve. i almost did...”

you shook your head. your hands found his, still red from gripping the bat. you held them like they were fragile things, even though they weren’t. nothing about him was.

“i don’t want you to do something you can’t come back from,” you said. your voice wasn’t steady, but it was real. “not for him.”

he looked at you like that hurt worse than anything. like not killing the guy was the thing that might finally split him open.

“hey, i’ll always come back to you,” he said, and it sounded like a vow. like something old and blood-bound.

you leaned into him again. he didn’t let go.

the two of you sat there on the floor for a long time, the room still, the only sound the slow, ragged way you both were breathing.

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vileidol · 3 months ago

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play the game here

The battle is over. You have lost. You do not know what is left.

You were a knight in a world that did not want you. And now you are even less than that, lost in the remains of a war and aimless. Above all, aimless.

But maybe, just maybe, they're still alive. Your mornach, your liege, the one person you have sworn your entire life to protecting.

Perhaps something can still be salvaged.

featuring:

- customisable MC

- some dramatic purple prose (tm)

- toxic codependency

- romance one of four ROs

cw: war, injury, general gore and violence, allusions to homophobia and transphobia

#oath if #this too is abt oath (to me)#interactive fiction #twine #twine wip #twine games #LMAO not me finally making a semi-passable post to pin after two years #the first version of a post like this was so trash and then I just didn’t wanna deal with it #it’s still pretty messy and slapdash but at least I’ve updated the info LOL #🫁#maybe one day I will format the whole thing and the itch.io page lmao. we will see

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samsblades · 9 months ago

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breathe, baby — sam winchester

cw :gn!afab!reader, smut, no plot, fluff, brief mention of canon typical violence & demons at the beginning, making out, clothed grinding, fingering, swearing, pet names (baby, honey), praise, sam calls reader pretty/beautiful, light dom/sub dynamics in the later half (softdom!sam), allusions to oral (r!receiving) 4.1K words.

summary : after a close call on a hunt and a confession, you and sam have sweet, desperate sex. MINORS AND AGELESS BLOGS DNI WITH MY NSFW CONTENT. YOU WILL IMMEDIATELY BE BLOCKED !!!