#cw: fic contains graphic violence

[ominouspuff]

Fanart for this magnificent fic

[shalomniscient]

BAD ROMANCE || acheron x reader [NSFT][MDNI]

I WANT YOUR LOVE AND ALL YOUR LOVER'S REVENGE, YOU AND ME COULD WRITE A BAD ROMANCE !

cw. DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT, snuff (but not permanently), graphic descriptions of violence, gore, violent sex, masochism on part of reader, reader is honestly just fucking crazy, no lube, creampie

notes. hyv was insane for that animated short frfr also the song for this fic is obviously bad romance but the cover by halestorm specifically. check it out, it slaps !!

VERY IMPORTANT AUTHOR'S NOTE, PLEASE READ !! ↳ This work contains dark content, to the point where I must tag this as DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT. I cannot stress this enough. ↳ There will be graphic depictions of gore and violence, and violence during sex. Please check and heed the content warnings. ↳ You are responsible for the content you consume.

Acheron first encounters you on a desolate planet bereft of life. You stand alone amidst withered trees and lifeless stumps, your feet bare upon grey, scorched earth. You don't react when the embers land upon your skin. Your gaze is cast to the melancholy sky as you hum to yourself, rocking back and forth on your heels. You don't even turn to her when you speak.

"We finally meet, oh harbinger of death," you hum, your tone light and airy, unbefitting this dead space. "I've been waiting for a while."

Acheron blinks, slowly, taking you in. There's something about you that's distinctly... similar, in a way. You are more than you seem. Something blessed—or perhaps, cursed—by a higher being.

"You know me?" she asks, taking a step towards you, and you finally turn to face her. Your eyes give her pause—fathomlessly deep and dark. Your sclera are pitch black, and your irises the colour of blood. An enigmatic smile stretches across your features as she stares.

"Of course," you say. "How could I not, when the voices of those you have slaughtered cry out so desperately for salvation?"

Acheron's eyes narrow. "What are you?"

Her question pulls a giggle from you. What are you, not who are you. She has a suspicion already, but she wants to hear it from you, first. You reach out towards her, caressing her pale cheek with your hand—were this any other situation, Acheron might even consider it lovely, free from scars or blemishes.

"The same as you," you whisper, your eyes half-lidded in a way that has Acheron's grip curling around the hilt of her sword. "My fellow Emanator."

Her hand shoots out to grip your wrist, pulling your hand away from her face. She squeezes, muscles in her arm flexing, and she swears she hears your bones creak. But you remain unfazed, smiling almost dreamily at her.

"Are you here to stop me?" she growls. Just a little more pressure, and she'd snap your pretty wrist like a twig.

"No," you say simply. "I care not for your mission."

"Then why have you sought me out?"

You hum, and with your free hand, trail a finger down her chest. The arm caught in Acheron's grip is starting to bruise. "Because there is something I want from you."

"And what might that be?"

You beam at her, and lean in, close enough to brush your lips against hers. It makes Acheron jolt, and distantly she can hear your wrist shatter, but the intensity of you so close demands all her attention. You speak your desire against her lips like a kiss.

"Death."

After that incident, you follow her around, much like a lost cat. Your mangled wrist righted itself within seconds, and Acheron pieced together whose Emanator you are.

Yaoshi, the Abundance.

She has heard about the favored of the Abundance, but has never encountered one—until you, of course. As she braces herself over you, your hands pinned to the floor of a dead duke's mansion, she wonders if your other Emanators are as odd as you are. Or as hungry for death.

She doesn't remember how many times she's killed you by now. How many times she's unsheathed that blade of hers and carved it through your soft flesh until all that remains of you are mangled pieces on the ground. But she does remember sitting by your side, or what's left of it, and watching as your flesh knits back together, cells multiplying and dividing and sowing sinew and muscle until you finally come back from whatever end you experienced ever so briefly, your chest jerking up as it floods with air. And despite herself, she's starting to enjoy it. Such a pretty little plaything you make, one she hasn't been able to break no matter how much she's tried.

You always look for her first when you return. And you always ask her for more.

Like now, as she has you flat on the floor, and you look up at her with the hungriest eyes she's ever seen. You had watched, delighted, as she ripped and tore apart that infernal duke, giggling all the while as his 'children' scattered to the winds. And once she was done you had pounced on her, wild and almost feral, throwing your arms around her neck and whispering into her ear, "me next."

She won't remember doing this, but right now it's difficult to think beyond the drumbeat of her pulse in her ears. She can hear yours, too. It's so fucking loud. She wonders what your heart looks like, pulsing away in your chest. She wonders what it'll do when she rips it from your ribcage and holds it in her hand.

She crashes her lips against yours like she wants to devour you. You groan into the kiss, if that's even what it can be called. Acheron's teeth scrape your lower lip then bite, drawing blood, and the taste of your blood on her tongue makes a shiver course down her spine. Your blood has a unique taste—metallic, certainly, but with a hint of sweetness kind of like peaches. She fucking loves it. You wrap your legs around her waist and grind up into her pelvis, against the growing bulge there. Acheron growls, manhandling your wrists above your head to grip them with one hand so the other can hold your hips still.

She trails her kisses lower, down your jaw and to your neck. She drags the edges of her canines against your jugular and you shiver in anticipation. She can feel your pulse against her lips, against her tongue, thump-thump-thump, and she resists the urge to sink her teeth into the artery and let the crimson liquid spill into her mouth. Instead she keeps going, lower and lower, until she reaches the collar of your clothing.

With one swift movement she tears the fabric apart, and it falls into tattered pieces around you. You jerk as the warmth of the surroundings settles on your bare skin, though Acheron offers you no reprieve. She scratches her free hand down the side of your ribs, drawing red lines as she goes. Her lips descend on your nipples, already stiff as she licks and sucks one before moving to the next. Everywhere her lips touch, dark marks bloom like brutal flowers on your skin.

You whine out her name softly, arching your back, and Acheron looks up the length of your body with electric, half-lidded eyes. Your expression is twisted into one of pure pleasure—the pain had always been something you loved, something you craved. And Acheron is all too eager to give it to you.

She moves back up, and uses her free hand to undo the buckles of her shorts. They’re almost constrictingly tight now, and she fumbles with the zipper until it comes loose and her aching cock springs free. She hears you make a pretty, breathy noise, and sneers down at you. Her hand slips down your body to your core, and her cock twitches when she finds that you’re fucking dripping.

“Getting off being used like this?” she hisses, dragging her finger through your drenched folds. “Dirty girl.”

“Please,” you moan, canting your hips into her touch. Acheron withdraws her fingers at that, then slaps your still-clothed pussy. You jolt and whine in surprise, those unnatural eyes of yours widening. “Wh—“

“I’ll do what I want to you,” she snarls, gripping your calves and manhandling your thighs open. She pulls you forward until her cock brushes along the soaked fabric of your panties. Her tip catches on your clit and you moan despite the dulled sensation. Then, her fingers hook into your underwear and tug them to the side, exposing your pretty pussy to her.

“So shut up and just take it,” she growls, before shoving her entire length into you with one smooth thrust.

You scream in both pain and pleasure as Acheron splits you open on her thick cock. She has both her hands beneath your knees, holding your legs wide open as she ruts into your clenching cunt, hardly giving you time to adjust. She’s vicious with it, each snap of her hips making the sound of flesh against flesh ring throughout the abandoned mansion alongside your shrill cries of ecstasy. Your fingers claw at the floor until they bleed, drawing red lines on the black marble.

Acheron grunts as she feels your pussy squeeze her—even here, balls-deep in your tight pussy she can feel your incessant heartbeat pulsing away. She feels like she can drown in it, in that rhythmic pitter-patter of your heart as it races like some sort of prey animal.

Yes, that’s what this all feels like—a hunt. She as the wolf, you as the rabbit. She the hunter, you the hunted.

It’s a god damn fucking frenzy. Lust and bloodlust fog her mind. Her hair is turning white. She fucks you into the floor, shifting her position so that gravity helps with each thrust she makes. She practically folds your lower half in ways that would snap a regular human, but only serves to deliriously excite you. Aeons, you’re fucking crazy, but she’d be lying if she said she didn’t feel it too.

But the end of the hunt approaches. She feels you tightening around her, and you scream out her name with each downward drive of her hips. Your heartbeat thunders in her ears now, and she matches her thrusts with each beat, sending slick flying from your gushing cunt and her own leaking cock. She leans up, nosing beneath your jaw, right where your pulse thrums.

But here’s a thing about hunts—there’s only one way they end. So her teeth sink into your neck, the taste of iron and peaches spills onto her tongue, and the world goes white as she reaches her peak.

She’s always never felt more alive than during the moment of the kill.

When she comes to again, she’s kneeling on the floor and there’s blood on her lips and chin, spilling down her neck and onto her chest. She clicks her tongue and wipes her lips with the back of her hand. Beyond that, her clothes are in fine condition, as if nothing ever happened. And maybe she might have believed so, were it not for one thing:

It’s quiet.

That pounding drumbeat is gone, replaced by calm silence. And that’s when she remembers—you’re still here. She looks down, and there you lie, motionless in a pool of crimson liquid, the flesh of your neck torn asunder, exposing the white of your bones and the attaching tendons and sinew.

Your face is frozen in an expression of bliss, eyes half-lidded and lips curled into a half-smile. Idly, Acheron thinks it’s a rather pretty look on you.

(You come back a few minutes later, chest heaving and eyes shooting open. The scarlet halo of blood surrounding your head on the floor makes you look like a bleeding saint.

And then you smile at her, sickly sweet, and your heart starts up again, slowly restarting the cycle once more.

Acheron can’t fucking wait.)

[fairyysoup]

the devil i know

♫ series playlist ♫ series tag

pairing(s): crossroads demon!eddie munson x fem!reader

summary: To summon a demon at a crossroads, simply cast a circle, make an offering, and recite an incantation. What happens from that point on is subject to your desire... and the demon's.

In which the reader makes a pact with Eddie, a crossroads demon, for power and protection. He takes it a little too seriously.

cw: explicit, smut, dubcon elements, monsterfucking!!, making a deal with a demon, inspired by american and european folklore, way more plot than you'd expect, sacrilegious themes, horror, witch!reader, reader is 21+ in modern day, eddie is immortal, coercion (a bit), sex pact, marking, possessive behavior, demonic possession, murder, there are MANY minor character deaths, animal death, trauma, depictions of physical and emotional abuse, graphic depictions of violence, bullying/harassment, reader is ostracized by her very religious hometown, dark comedy, tfw your accidental boyfriend is a demon who is obsessed with you bc he doesn't know how to be normal about anything ever, dead dove: do not eat

please check individual parts for content warnings before reading. this fic contains dark themes. your media consumption is your own responsibility.

ALL OF MY WORKS ARE 18+ MINORS DNI

CHAPTER ONE: GOD YOU'VE GOT THE BLACKEST EYES

CHAPTER TWO: LOOK HERE ALL YOU WANT

CHAPTER THREE: I SMOKE OUT YOUR DARKEST SIDE

CHAPTER FOUR: CAN'T TURN WATER INTO WINE NEVER ASKED YOU TO

CHAPTER FIVE: SO IS IT YOUR PLACE OR MINE

CHAPTER SIX: I DON'T NEED TO FEEL THE SUN, LET ME TOUCH YOUR SKIN

CHAPTER SEVEN: FILL MY MIND WITH DIRTINESS, I'LL INVADE YOUR DREAMS

CHAPTER EIGHT: BACK IN HELL AT LEAST IT'S COMFORTABLE

CHAPTER NINE: NEED YOUR BODY WHEN MY FIRE'S COLD

CHAPTER TEN: I'M GONNA STAY FAITHFUL TO THE DEVIL I KNOW

[miss-vanta-likes-to-write]

💖Call me Miss Vanta💖

Age: 31

Pronouns: She/Her

AO3: MissVanta

Main blog: @missvanta-xoxo

Country/Time Zone: Northeast U.S

I write mainly for black fem readers. I've been writing for fandoms for a long while (I had a LiveJournal back in the day). This is my side blog, so I follow back from my main blog.

I write Dark Content with mature themes.

Rules

I don't tolerate bigotry in any shape or form

Please be 18+ to follow and interact with my content. If you're under 18 I will block you.

Please read all content warnings. I write mature themed content that includes graphic depictions of sex, violence, abuse, kinks, and ect. Get familiar with Dead Dove: Don't Eat.

I don't write the following kinks: scat. vore. race play.

I feel like this shouldn't have to be said, but just because I write it, doesn't mean I support it.

Fandoms

Call of Duty

Naruto

JJK

MHA

I write for monsters too

Call of Duty

Long Fic: Loyalties

Rating: 18+.

Contains: A/B/O au. Not canon compliant. Poly!141 x black!fem oc x König

Status: on going (my main baby)

Tumblr Master List

AO3 link

Extras

Long Fic: Love on the brain

Rating: 18+.

Contains: SingleMom!au. Poly!141

Status: on going slow updates

Master List

Long Fic: He Canceled Hot Girl Summer

Rating: 18+

Contains: Secret Baby Trope. Soap x black!reader.

Status: on going

Master list

Long Fic: The Book of Yemoja

Rating: 18+ dead dove don't eat 🕊

Contains: a/b/o poly!141 not canon compliant please check cw

Status: on going with slow updates

Master List

CoD one-shots and H.Cs

Naruto

Long Fic: Put mochi on the altar (and pray for her forgiveness

Rating: Explicit 18+ will not be posting to Tumblr. Only available on AO3.

Status: on hiatus

AO3

Naruto one-shots and H.C

Jujutsu Kaisen

None yet

Marvel Avengers

None yet

My Hero Acadamia

None yet

Original Monsters

None yet

[wickjump]

HELLO INTERNET AND WELCOME TO [wickjump]: REDUX ...again

My name is Wick (she/they/star/it), also known as Wickskip (TikTok), Wickjump (Tumblr), or Hopwick (AO3*).

On all platforms my content centers around Undertale and the Undertale Multiverse, however I’ll also sometimes reblog/post about a few other fandoms.

What I post and reblog can contain themes of violence/abuse, mental illness, whump/fictional gore, suicide/self harm, suggestive themes, and more. For those reasons, this blog is intended for audiences 16+ in age.

Reblogs that may contain these themes often go untagged!

🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️ TRANS CROSS CANON 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

information zone /ᐠ - ˕-マ｡˚ᶻ 𝗓

[⁉️] byf/dni:

dni: pro/com/dark (i do not support harassment or doxxing), xvials, TERFs, zionists/pro-isreal, anti-semitics, bigots. aka obvious assholes

byf: i will sometimes post/reblog things of a suggestive nature, but none of said posts will be graphic nudity. nsfw content may be discussed, but not in detail. i will also post whump content which can include gore, torture, conditioning, dehumanization, etc.

i will occasionally talk about or reference my experience in being groomed, abused, formerly proship (and now against it), a victim of csa, or other traumas of mine, but posts containing those themes will always be tagged appropriately. i use 'cw' instead of 'tw' when tagging warnings!

to not see my whump posts, filter out the tags #evil wick hours (for general whump posts/reblogs) and #evil wick writes (for more graphic/explicit whump or writing snippets)

*my ao3 account is not intended for those under 18.

yes nsfw/18+ blogs can follow me i really dont care given i have one of my own

[⚠️] boundaries:

do not tag me in posts containing themes that apply to my dnis or general discomforts. that includes grooming, pedophilia, incest, proship content, bigotry, etc.

do not tag me in posts that are centered around the harassment of another individual or group of individuals.

don’t flirt with me or make sexual/romantic comments towards me, regardless of age or relationship status, including jokes!!!! conversations with graphic sexual themes are generally uncomfortable for me and i’d prefer not to have them. conversations about sex or sexual themes is fine as long as you’re 18+ and not being weird towards me (or in general) about it.

don’t drag me into fights/start them under my posts!!!!!!! id like to be informed of the base of what’s going on, but not included.

sometimes i can be wrong about things. if i am wrong about things, tell me so i can improve!! i never mean to make anyone upset because of something i said. on this note, also send an ask or dm if i reblog or mistakenly support a not-good person, it would be much appreciated!

aint a boundary but itd be appreciated if you didn’t use starself, only star/star's. not for any important reason it’s just a grammar pet peeve of mine

i am in a relationship :)

[⭐️] faves:

things that are bolded are my current hyperfocus

aus: xtale, handplates, dusttale, reapertale, aftertale

au sanses: cross, epic, reaper, lust, dream, passive!nightmare, dust, error, sci and fresh

canon ut characters: chara, frisk, asriel/flowey, toriel, alphys

other au characters: xtale alphys, xchara, xfrisk, xtale toriel, uf!toriel, uf!flowey, reapertale chara, handplates gaster, starlo (ut:y), clover (ut:y), outertale grillby, core frisk, storyshift chara, storyshift asriel

ships: crepic, kross, lustblue, hypersomnia, mtt + crepic poly, epickross/krepic, epiciller, mtt + cross poly, mtt poly, drinkberry, errorink, afterdeath, classicsci, kustard, dustard, etc. but im not a picky shipper :3

tropes: devotion, friends -> lovers, hurt/comfort, opposites attract, soulmates, whump

color, animal, movie, book: pink/red, cats/wolves/foxes, the little prince (1974)/the lion king, the forgotten warrior (wc)

coffee order: >60k word slow burn friends to lovers whump recovery fic rated M PLEASE

[🕯] other assorted info:

still no twitter, discord, or insta :(

cross is my liege and he is the focus of 90% of my posts. i also gore/whump him the most

i don’t have kids, but i have cats. two of them. but they might as well be my biological kids with how they act. i post about them like theyre human biological children and often dont clarify it's a joke in the tags. please get used to this

every time i talk about ink in a relationship it is always queerplatonic on their part, even if i don’t clarify!! i personally don’t ship them romantically.

i have diagnosed autism, adhd, anxiety, ptsd, and some others but that’s my personal biz. if i come off as awkward, ‘trying too hard’, unable to realize when a joke’s ended, or just weird/unlikable, that’s why. i’m seriously bad with that stuff but i’m trying my best!! don't be mean to me i'll cry

i’m an ace lesbian (i love women) and fem-adjacent non-binary :3

mapleshade chara and toriel #1 defender

[🐇] links to thingz:

Undertrap Sans/Milkbone Sans <- my son

Sona Reference Sheet <- me

Strawpage (carrd but cooler + u can submit drawings?!??!?!?!)

Ao3 / TikTok

18+ Sideblog <- pretty inactive mb

(pride divider by aquazero, cross stamps by lazyartost, error/dream/cross & warrior cats dividers by sister-lucifer, undertale graphics by e-resources, no clue who made the eeveelutions one lol)

[rlbbackup]

Rachel's SxF Ao3 Masterlist

Just to keep things kinda organized. Honestly, the easiest place to find all of this is on My Ao3 in the first place, but I'll link it here for convenience! ❤️

If you are curious as to how I feel about certain things pertaining to my work, please see THIS post! My inbox is also open for any questions (and you can do so Anonymously if you wish!)

One-Shots

The Art of Lipstick Complete (TwiYor)

Amnesia Full Fic In Progress (Forger Family)

Ledgers and Reports Complete (Sylvia Sherwood & Forger Family)

White Roses Complete (Matthew McMahon & Yor Forger)

Strawberry Ice Cream Complete (Franky Franklin & Anya Forger)

What D'You Say We Make It True Complete (Anya Forger/Ken)

In The Downpour Complete (Twilight/Thorn Princess)

Oblivious Complete (Twilight & Yor Forger)

Coming Home Complete (TwiYor)

Deer in the Headlights Complete (TwiYor)

Fading Ink Complete (Loid & Yor Forger)

Glad You're Here Complete (Damian Desmond & Anya Forger)

Just This Once... Complete (Twilight & Yor Forger)

Heroes Always Get Married in the COOLEST Ways! Complete (Loidman/Yorticia, Anya & Becky)

Just a Kiss Complete (TwiYor)

The Way to a Man's Heart (Not through his ribs) Complete (TwiYor)

Side by Side and Locked in Tight Complete (Anya Forger/Ken)

All For Naught Complete (Yor Forger & Yuri Briar companion to Complicity)

Complicity Complete (TwiYor companion to All for Naught)

Don't Forget to Lock the Door Complete (Loid/Yor/Franky)

Little Black Number Complete (Yor Forger & Melinda Desmond)

Inferno Complete (Chloe & SSS First Lieutenant & Yuri Briar)

Throwing Away Fate (Just to Keep You Safe) Complete (Franky Franklin/Original Male Character)

Freestanding Multichaps

In the Rain Complete (Forger Family)

A Moment of Weakness Complete (Loid Forger & Melinda Desmond)

Floodgates In Progress with the lovely @creativwit CW: Graphic Violence (Franky/OC, TwiYor)

Hanahaki Series CW: vomiting

7 Minutes in Heaven Complete (Cecil Hall Gang + Bill + Ken) written with @sister-cna-reader @cambot77 @strangeduckpaper and @creativwit

Flowers and Thorns Complete (TwiYor)

Pink Sakura Complete (Anya/Ken)

Bruises Series

Yor's Bruise Complete (Yor Focus)

Loid's Bruise Complete (Twilight Focus)

Dreams of Staying Series (Reveal)

Out of Routine Complete (TwiYor + Forger Family)

His Cuts, Her Cuts Complete (TwiYor)

Get My Heart Soft Into Sinking Complete (Yor Forger & Matthew McMahon)

Fighting the Heart Series

Snake with Blue Eyes Complete (TwiYor)

We Never Knew Complete (Anya & Yor + TwiYor)

Sleeping With The Telephone In Progress! (Forger Family + TwiYor)

Love Found, Love Lost Series

Just Another Day (in Learning How to Love You) Complete (Twilight & Yor Forger)

Oh Your Smile (Brightens My Life) Complete TW: Contains Major Character Death (Anya Forger & Ken)

Gone Rogue Complete (Sylvia Sherwood & Fiona Frost)

Briar Rose On Hiatus (Thorn Princess & Twilight, Yor Forger & Matthew McMahon)

Weapons Series (Reveal/Post Reveal-Pre Relationship)

Hypothetically... Complete (TwiYor)

Calibration and Titration Complete (TwiYor)

Weapons (On You, On Me) Complete (TwiYor)

Your Spare Blade Complete (TwiYor)

Rendezvous Complete (Sylvia Sherwood & Matthew McMahon)

Crosslegged in the Dim Light Complete (TwiYor)

Starlight Sky Series (Myth Au)

The Soldier and His Sun Complete TW: Contains Major Character Death (Roland & Loid Forger)

Beyond Sun and Moon Complete (Misc friendships + TwiYor)

Doubt Creeps In Complete (TwiYor)

Soothing Rays Complete (TwiYor)

New Moon Blues Complete (TwiYor + Anya)

[greetingfromthedead]

Tempest Wind Masterlist

Through a destined meeting, Vash found you, a lost soul much like himself, under the weirdest of circumstances, and he made a promise to follow you across any desert. That turns out to lead both of you down a path of self-discovery, love, and hurt. Vash's unlucky shadow drives the two of you from one crisis to the next, but there's nothing you can't overcome together.

Tempest Wind is a 18+ Vash x F!Reader fic with some spice, some gore, a bit of action and a lot of fluff, for added flavor there's angst too ofc.

The rating of 18+ comes mainly from the occasional dark themes and not so much of the smuttiness (as those parts are labeled and can be skipped without it really affecting the story).

NB: The content is mostly Trimax canon-typical violence/gore/themes, but I give warnings and summaries for the heavier chapters and smut so you can skip them if you want!

Tags/CW below the cut!

Tags/CW: Romance, Fluff, Angst, Action, Adventure, Slow Burn, Hurt, Emotional Baggage, Reader-Insert, badass female character, Eventual Smut, Healing, Immortality, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Implied/Referenced suicide, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, powers, Mentions of impregnation, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Experimentation, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Canon-Typical Violence, Gun Violence, Blood and Violence, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Established Relationship, Pre-Relationship, Friends to Lovers, Pining, Tragedy, Protectiveness, Pre-Canon, Canon Universe, Injury, Not Beta Read, POV Alternating, Tenderness, Illnesses, Scars, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, Caretaking, During Canon, Creature Vash, Angel Vash, Body Horror, Body Worship, i'm shit at tagging, idk what im doing

COMPLETED: 84 Chapters / 165k words

C1: In Death

C2: Tracking Through the Desert

C3: Acts of Kindness

C4: Night Watch

C5: Birdbrain

C6: A Heavy Heart

C7: Midnight Run

C8: Odd Job

C9: A Wild Beast

C10: Wounds

C11: Laundry Day

C12: Language of Flowers

C13: Unlocked Horrors

C14: Sweet as Sugar

C15: Resemblance of Normality

C16: Taking Out the Trash

C17: Unfamiliar Experiences

C18: Moving On

C19: A Gut Feeling

C20: Gods and Angels

C21: Perfect Morning

C22: Renewed Conviction

C23: Dusty Memory

C24: Unexpected Visitors

C25: Guardian Angel

C26: Calamity J

C27: Playing Doctor

C28: Otherworldly Lullaby

C29: Patchwork

C30: Burn

C31: Towards New Horizons

C32: Stormy Emotions

C33: Tempest

C34: Desert Night

C35: Mayfly of Love

C36: Sign of Appreciation

C37: Plotting

C38: Execution

C39: Hands

C40: Storm Clouds

C41: Truth Unfurled

C42: Ray of Hope

C43: Lucky

C44: Sandstorm

C45: Back in a Lab

C46: Signals

C47: Glimpse of the Past

C48: Nature of Your Being

C49: Irises

C50: Frozen Dream

C51: Spring

C52: Worship

C53: Breakfast

C54: Experimented

C55: United Again

C56: Rest of Eternity

C57: Subject 0325

C58: Project HUMAN

C59: Comfort in Knowledge

C60: First Day of the Future

C61: Puzzle Pieces

C62: Day and Night

C63: Daylight Robbery

C64: Journey to December

C65: Snatchers

C66: Last Calm Breaths

C67: Dark Underworld

C68: Rescue Mission

C69: A Bloody Demon

C70: Time Catches Up

C71: Blame

C72: On to the Next Crisis

C73: Last Night

C74: Goodbye

C75: Fragments

C76: Talk of Love and Peace

C77: Uncanny Valley

C78: Lover's Face

C79: Ghost of You

C80: Happy Birthday

C81: A Paradise for You and Me

C82: Breaking of a Will

C83: Life and Death

C84: Epilogue

Demo Chapters modified into oneshots:

Womanizer - confined spaces affects Vash in a strange way and he has turned on his charm to try and seduce you.

Perfect Morning - domestic fluff, intimacy, mild smuttiness, shy Vash

Festivities - delusional bliss on an unfamiliar planet with weird traditions, ice skating and sweet Vash

Happy Birthday - You find yourself on a furry side quest and it turns into a very special birthday celebration that Vash puts on for you.

Mayfly of Love - Vash is tormented by a nightmare of losing you and his guilt for causing the Great Fall.

Starlight Dancing - Contains some minor spoilers for the main series. You've been spending a lot of time with Luida in her lab and Vash has felt left out because of it. To make up for it, you spend a magical evening in the biodome.

🔞 Burn - basically smuttiness with little actual plot

🔞 Desire - no plot, just porn. Often the quiet and shy ones surprise you...

🔞 Worship - Worshiping each other's bodies (Vash more so), just soft intimacy

You can also read it on other platforms: AO3! Wattpad! Quotev!

Check out my other stuff: MASTERLIST.

[stopper-my-heart]

"Nick/Charlie & Arthur/Merlin (AU Past Lives) – [Taylor Swift's] 'Timeless'" by @imagine-dragonlords

This is a Heartstopper blog and will remain a Heartstopper-only blog 99% of the time.

But this video really hits me hard.

Imagining a hypothetical historical Merlin-and-Arthur trying to be together and the meta level of remembering what it was like with the BBC / world and Merthur as recently as 2012, compared with having Heartstopper on Netflix and Nick & Charlie now.. There's so much further we have to go, but I have a lot of feelings about the progress we've made, too.

Also: "I'd like to think we'd find each other in any universe".

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

This post was originally going to end there but then I discovered this Merthur fanfic by @queerofthedagger and it's a perfect antidote to the video and goes towards healing my Merthur-broken heart.

The fanfic shows what Merlin and Arthur could've been if they'd had the time and freedom to talk about the things that matter. They become so "Nick & Charlie" in it and it's glorious. Also, Merlin's mum = Sarah Nelson. I think you'll need to have watched and cared about BBC Merlin to appreciate it, but recently isn't necessary (10+ years is fine).

The author has their own summary that you can find on the page, but I think this sums it up very well:

Happiness is bubbling in his chest, his blood singing with it and this, this is what they’re supposed to be. Carving their own way and finding alternate routes to be themselves, without being tied down and crushed underneath some distant destiny* that cares nothing for them.

*or the BBC, society, etc.

Below the jump are content warnings for the fic plus some quotations from it that remind me of Nick & Charlie, which are more for my sake than anyone else's.

CW: violence, murderous intent, 1 non-graphic sex scene (near the beginning of ch. 13, easy to skip)

Quotations:

“You don’t have a weapon,” he says because Merlin might’ve turned him into a lovestruck fool, but he’s never going to stop poking and prodding him to make up for it. Of course, it would be far easier if one symptom of said lovestruck condition wasn’t that it clearly makes him as much of an idiot as Merlin loves to claim he is.

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

“You’re brilliant,” he breathes into the safety of Merlin’s hair, revelling in the way Merlin tightens his grip on him. “It’s brilliant.”

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

“I—yeah no, I’d rather not,” Merlin agrees, though there’s something resigned lurking in the black of his eyes. “I’m—” “If the next word is 'sorry,' Merlin, I advise you to stop right there.”

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

“You’d miss me!” Arthur calls, having to raise his voice for Merlin to hear him over the distance as he’s walking away. He gets a rude hand gesture in response, and he can only be thankful that there’s no one else around to witness the grin splitting his face.

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

“Maybe it is,” he cuts in, shrugging. “But not so much that you have to sacrifice your own happiness for it. You’re—can’t you see how important you are, simply because you’re you? Because of what you mean to me and how you make my life better?" [...] It’s so much more than he meant to say, but he doesn’t regret a single word of it. He would say it a hundred times over if it got Merlin to finally believe it.

AKA Sports Day speech -----------------

The clarity of what, truly, is the root of the problem hits Arthur like a punch. “Gods, you—Merlin. Merlin, you don’t have to make up for it,” he croaks out, his voice cracking and breaking. He shifts closer, pressing his forehead against Merlin’s, and he can feel Merlin’s shallow breathing against his chest. “It’s not a burden, alright? It’s not a burden, and you aren’t a burden, and I will fight anyone who dares to tell you otherwise.”

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

His whole body is singing with it, his skin feeling too small to contain the magnitude of emotions rushing through him, and he has to break the kiss before it overwhelms him entirely.

Insert Nick gasping for dear life breath -----------------

Arthur keeps his eyes closed, their foreheads still pressed together, trying desperately to not unravel at the seams. He’s almost afraid that this is a dream, that he’s going to wake up any second now, with Merlin still close but not like this. Not like Arthur has been craving for aeons.

In which Arthur is also Charlie -----------------

Arthur splutters, though he doubts that it sounds anywhere as indignant as he’d like it to. “How could I not know? If you recall, I was the one who kissed you first, all those months back when we were travelling to Ynys Gybi.” “Yes, and then you never brought it up again.” “Because you never brought it up again. I thought that you simply wanted to forget about it, or that I crossed a line!” Merlin huffs out a laugh, but his eyes are still brimming with affection. “I thought you regretted it,” he says quietly, lips quirked at the corners. “I thought you were just panicking, and that if you had meant it, you would’ve said something.”

A.k.a. conversation in Charlie's bedroom after their first kiss (except it's later on here) -----------------

Hunith takes one look at them the next morning before she smirks. “Finally figured it out, did you?” Arthur promptly chokes on his food, coughing and spluttering as his face grows warm. Merlin isn’t much better off, even the tips of his ears turning red, though at least he’s spared the coughing fit.

In which Hunith continues to be Sarah Nelson (or the Sarah Nelson Charlie expects, anyway) -----------------

Snow starts falling in big flakes about an hour in, and Arthur didn’t count on how much of a distraction it would be. It catches in Merlin’s hair and his lashes, a stark contrast to the black of it, and his eyes appear even brighter than usual. It’s a struggle to not drag him off and kiss the crystals of ice off his face, and Arthur can’t remember when he’s become such a terrible, utter sap. That is, until he steps out of Hunith’s house after lunch, just about warmed up from the thick stew she made, and a snowball hits him straight in the face.

If Nick & Charlie's Snow Day came slightly later. Or maybe this is just the same -----------------

[timetravellingpaperbag]

Erythema Kiss (59218 words) by Timetravellingpaperbag Chapters: 17/17 Fandom: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale Rating: Explicit Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Relationships: Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha, Higurashi Kagome & InuYasha Characters: Higurashi Kagome, InuYasha (InuYasha), Miroku (InuYasha), Sango (InuYasha), Original Demon Character(s), Kouga (InuYasha), Kaede (InuYasha) Additional Tags: inukag - Freeform, inuyasha - Freeform, Kagome - Freeform, Inspired by InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale, Romance, Angst, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Protective InuYasha (InuYasha), Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Complete Summary: (Set after the Final Act). Kagome receives a strange bite during battle, revealed to be a demon mating mark - catalyst of the yokai mating process. Until the demon who marked her is destroyed or another consummates the mark, the effects of the bite cause Kagome to suffer and attract those seeking to finish the mating process, one Inuyasha vows to stop before it's too late. Nominated for 1st Term 2024 Inuyasha Fandom Awards by FeudalConnection on Tumblr in the following categories: Best Dark Best Angst TW/CW: This story contains graphic depictions of violence, adult language and sexual content. Chapters will be appropriately tagged with warnings at the top. All characters depicted in this fic are 19+

Out with some mildly lemon flavoured fluff and a wrap up to one of the fics I've spent the most time and attention on since starting last year; Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, and supported this story! Thank you to @brain-rot-hour for your wonderful work on chapter art for the epilogue, which is now live <3

[patchworkgargoyle]

🩸 A Steddie Big Bang Fic 🌙

Chapter 1

story by: @patchworkgargoyle || art to come by: @mcdadarts || playlist to come by: @steves-strapcollection Rating: E || Words: 3.9k || CW: graphic depictions of violence, blood drinking || Full tag list on ao3! || Posting: weekly Fic title from Wolf Like Me - TV On The Radio AAAAA HERE WE GO, FOLKS!! Chapters 1 & 2 are here!!

Steve could hear it already, the pop music blasting too loud to be healthy for anyone’s ears, let alone his and Robin’s. He let out a contained sigh.

“Yeah, yeah. C’mon, you grump, you know we should,” Robin said, unbuckling her seatbelt. “Into the fray?” She raised her eyebrows expectantly.

Jaw muscles clenching and relaxing, he rolled his eyes and said, “Fine.”

The Bimmer’s doors shut behind them with finality as they walked up the long driveway of Penny Brady’s house, a group of teens spilling out of the front door and laughing loud enough to make Steve wince. He felt a bit of petty jealousy that Robin could handle it all just fine, the overwhelmed senses. It had been a year since Billy’s attack and he still struggled to tune them out, so this was part of Robin and Dustin’s plan: exposure therapy. Sounded like a shit plan if you asked him, which, of course, they didn’t. Steve was sure it was only going to expose him to a migraine but they wouldn’t relent until he agreed to go to Penny’s Halloween party, so, here they were. At least Robin agreed Dustin couldn’t come. The little twerp would draw too much attention, his pen and notepad out and pestering Steve with questions all night.

Robin led the way into the house, not even pausing, forcing Steve to keep up for appearance’s sake. The music, the people, everything felt like a viscous wall of sound as soon as he passed the threshold, clinging to and muddling his hearing. His shoulders rose as if to block it out. A few people greeted him, only the familiarity of his own name cutting through, and all Steve could manage was a thin smile and a nod, following the bobbing, scraggly white wig Robin wore to complete her Doc Brown costume. Finally she stopped in the kitchen, the door closing behind them and blocking out only some of the racket. Some couples dispersed as they entered, but another group stuck around, chatting to themselves in a corner.

Robin bumped him with her elbow. “You look like you ate a whole lemon.”

“I’d rather do that than be here,” he complained quietly, reaching for a solo cup and grabbing a generous ladle-worth of the spiked punch. He probably would have smelled the vodka even before this, and Steve hoped the strong fumes would distract him from the music at least. When Robin wiggled a cup at him, he filled it for her too.

“It’s not gonna get better unless you get used to it, Steve,” she said, at the same volume, leaning into his space. 

“I know,” he grumbled. And he did. She’d gone through all of this already, years ago and way too young, and as much as he hated to admit it, she was right. She was his self-appointed Werewolf Mentor, as much as the title made him roll his eyes. At least he had someone to help him through all this werewolf shit.

Transforming into a wolf-human hybrid for the full moon as well as the day before and after, drastically intensified senses, heightened strength and speed even in human form, an increased diet of meat, and a seemingly endless well of energy; Steve had known all of this from a young age too, younger than Robin, even, but from a different perspective. Being born into one of the longest, most respected, and traditional hunter lineages, Steve Harrington had known all about werewolves and everything else that went bump in the night since he was old enough to read. His parents had trained him to hunt the supernatural, keeping it controlled and away from unknowing civilians. He was the heir to the Harrington line. And as of last year, he was also a werewolf.

It sorta put a kink in the whole hunter thing – though the heightened senses and strength did help – but while Robin taught him her werewolf ways he taught her how to avoid and fight hunters off, and went about hunts with a lot more compassion than he’d had before. Hunter code required them to only “exterminate” targets who were a danger, and Steve was already too soft-hearted by most hunters’ standards, so he stopped giving a fuck and did what he felt right instead. Steve put himself between the humans of Hawkins and its population of supernaturals, trying his best to keep a balance instead of burning and salting the earth.

Unlike the Carvers, whose son just barged into the kitchen. Jason plastered on an obviously fake smile as soon as he caught sight of Steve and Robin huddled together and Steve felt Robin stiffen beside him.

“Hey Harrington. Haven’t seen you around in a while,” Jason said, holding his hand out. Steve shook it once.

“Carver.”

“We were beginning to worry about you, if it weren’t for the stories I’ve heard around town I would’ve thought you’d skipped town.” Crossing his arms, Jason leaned on the counter closest to the door, effectively blocking their exit. Steve stifled an irritated huff. He didn’t miss this stupid posturing. The Carvers weren’t worried about him, he could guarantee that. It was more likely that they wanted the title of the only hunters in Hawkins, since Steve’s parents were gone on consultations all the time.

“Yeah, well, I’m still kicking,” Steve said with practised nonchalance.

“Good to hear!” Jason clapped Steve on the shoulder just this side of too hard, gave Robin an assessing look, and left the kitchen with a, “see you around.”

“‘See you around,’” Robin mocked, and Steve hummed, agreeing. “Was he always this much of a douche?”

“Oh yeah. A total kiss-ass too. Followed me around during hunter and basketball practice begging for attention.” Steve was glad that his fall from Hawkins High royalty had stopped Jason’s off-putting hero worship of him; he'd been tired of it since their parents forced them to socialise as kids.

Robin snorted. “That’s not surprising.”

They stood and drank their pungent drinks, trading gossip idly, until Robin asked, “Ready to brave the living room?”

Instead of answering, Steve downed the last of his punch, braced himself for the noise, and joined the party proper. Waiting in the kitchen while his senses adjusted had made a difference, he only felt like his head was being smashed by a rubber mallet instead of a sledgehammer, so he let Robin push him into the living room where most people mingled and danced.

“Alright. Tip one: distractions,” Robin whispered. “Focus on my voice, not anyone else’s, not the music.” She began to ramble, picking out costumes she recognized, or thought looked bad or lazy, occasionally picking out a girl she thought was cute for Steve to either agree or disagree, drawing him into telling embarrassing stories about the popular kids he used to hang around with. Listening to her voice was simple, easy, and before he realised it the noise faded a little more into the background.

When a guy walked by reeking of body spray Steve dug his nails into his palms to keep from recoiling, nose wrinkling, and he tried to swallow past the affront to his sinuses. Robin also winced. “Tip two: breathe through your mouth. Though I doubt that’ll help much against that.”

“Pretty sure I’d choke. That’s chemical warfare. One spray is enough, for christ’s sake,” he complained, giving the guy a nasty glare.

“We should tell him he’s violating the Geneva Convention.”

They watched from their patch of wall as he stepped up to a group of girls, trying to chat them up with a smarmy grin. When the girls each made similar queasy expressions and dispersed, Steve and Robin snickered a little meanly.

Crossing his arms with a smirk, Steve asked, “Anything else?”

Robin shrugged. “If all else fails, go outside or find a quiet room. Just don’t use it as an excuse to smoke or anything, I’ll know.” She narrowed her eyes at him.

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved an unconcerned hand at her and she glared harder. He held up three fingers and said, flatly, “Scout’s honour.”

“You weren’t a Boy Scout, you ass. Now, go, spread your wolfy wings and fly from the nest like a very strange bird.”

Confused by the bizarre analogy, he let Robin shoo him into the crowd so he could mingle. Mostly, he let people come to him; old classmates, customers, kids whose parents knew his own (exclusively outside of hunter circles), still drawn in by his old reputation. Penny herself came up to talk to Steve at one point, asking how he was and what he’d been up to. Like Robin instructed, he focused on her voice instead of everything else.

The attention was nice. His dry spell had lasted longer than he wanted to admit, and he’d given up trying to pick up customers at Family Video when he struck out every time. She was pretty, he thought, with long, straight dark hair and hazel eyes, wearing some kind of subtle vanilla perfume, and when Robin waggled her eyebrows at him across the room he brushed her off with a smile that was only a little bit smug. Leaning into her space a little, Steve could hear Penny’s heart rate pick up over the bright poppy music, saw the slight pink blush in her cheeks and let himself feel just a bit accomplished. He’s still got it, he thought. But then something crashed upstairs, and Penny had to race off with panicked apologies.

Damn. He stood in the room by himself for a moment and watched, hands in his pockets, until he caught Robin’s eye and jerked his head towards the back door. When she waved him off he waded through the thinning crowd and escaped into the much calmer backyard. Skunky smoke wafted through the air, but that was something Steve could handle. He dug out his secret stash of cigarettes and lit up as he leaned over the railing of the small deck, exhaling with a heavy sigh.

The small backyard was enclosed by the forest of thin trees that surrounded half of Hawkins. Most had lost their leaves by now, littering the ground instead, and the lawn was meticulously cleared of them. A shed sat closer to the house, and a small fire pit burned a few feet away, crackling and watched over by drunken teens.

By the shed, though, two figures caught Steve's eye. A girl with a high, bouncy, blonde ponytail and Carver's letterman – Chrissy Cunningham. He often wondered why such a sweet girl was with Jason, she was always friendly with the basketball team and managed Jason's mood swings with ease, not that she should've had to. But beside her, half hidden in shadow, stood her total opposite.

Eddie Munson flicked the ash from his joint and laughed at something Chrissy said while he leaned against the metal shed with her. The distant fire caught, just barely, on the shine of his dark eyes and the curls of his hair. Steve wondered how he wasn't cold. Chrissy clutched her jacket close while Eddie's leather jacket and denim vest fell open to the cold autumn air, revealing some tee for a band Steve didn't know. He hadn't seen Eddie around since midway through his own senior year, Eddie's second attempt. But he hadn't come back to school after winter break.

The rumour mill churned out every kind of story about it – that he'd dropped out or gotten sick, or he'd died, or he stole a car and ran to the coast (whichever one seemed more dramatic). Seeing him here at Penny's party was surprising, either way. Must be back to dealing.

Steve's gaze lingered. He looked pale, but… good, smiling fondly at Chrissy as she kept speaking, something about the newest cheerleader. He had a dimple in his left cheek when he grinned, just above some intense scarring on his jaw Steve didn’t remember from school, but there was something with his teeth– 

Eddie's eyes flicked up, and met Steve's instantly. Something swooped low in his gut, he couldn't name it but it made his heart kick up a couple beats faster. Adrenaline? No. All the warmth in Eddie's face faded as soon as he saw Steve staring, chased away by a hard, emotionless expression. Catching on quickly, Chrissy glanced back at Steve, then to Eddie again, leaning in to whisper. Eddie kept staring back at Steve, who couldn't look away. He felt pinned, his cigarette turning to ash, and Steve thought that maybe he shouldn't look away, like this was some kind of battle of wills. Robin would mock him for trying to be macho, but he couldn't help it. Didn't want to.

Maybe it had something to do with his heart beating faster, tricking his body into fight or flight, but Steve could feel his senses honing in on the pair. The music from the house was still too loud to hear what Chrissy was saying, but Steve could still smell something. Beyond the weed, fire, and cigarettes, the beer and sweat, cologne and perfume, there was a familiar warm, metallic tang. It was subtle, woven between and underneath the rest, and Steve had to resist sniffing at the air like a bloodhound to suss it out. Before he could place it, though, Chrissy took Eddie’s ringed hand and began to pull him away.

The muscles in Eddie's jaw jumped and his chest rose and fell with a slow, deliberate breath before, finally, he tore his magnetic gaze away and released Steve from whatever that was. Steve swallowed. He tracked Eddie and Chrissy while they walked to the side of the house. Chrissy cast one last look at Steve, giving him a small, hesitant smile before following Eddie's dark figure out of sight. Refusing to parse out whether he was disappointed or relieved, Steve stubbed out the cigarette butt and tossed it into the short bushes that bordered the deck with a quick mental apology to Penny’s parents.

That was… weird, right? He thought about what had happened, still hunched over the railing, absently digging his thumbnail into the wood grain. It was also a little strange to see Chrissy with Eddie, since he and Jason had been at each other's throats in school more often than not, and as far as Steve knew he and Chrissy were still an item. Sure looked it, since she wore his members only jacket.

Robin found him still standing there some time later, staring into the middle distance until she kicked his calf. “Ow, what the hell?” he said, glaring.

“That’s what you get for hiding out here.” She scowled. “Also you stink of smoke. I told you not to, I thought you’d quit anyway.”

“You know I didn’t.” He tried. It didn’t last, clearly.

“Yeah, well, I was waiting for you to admit that, you coward.”

Steve scoffed. “You can smell it, Rob. Figured that was enough to clue you in.”

“Still a coward,” she said loftily. “Anyway, I’m bored, drive me home.”

“Right away, your majesty.” Rolling his eyes and stifling a smile, Steve pushed off from the railing and followed Robin back through the house, only a little disappointed that he didn’t see Penny again before getting to the door. Steve did, however, fill Robin in on who he’d spotted in the backyard once they stepped outside.

“Oh wow, Jason must hate that friendship,” Robin said.

“Right?” he replied with some satisfaction, “I’m no fan of Munson’s but I’ll get behind anything that ticks Carver off.”

Robin looked thoughtful for a moment as they walked down the dark street. The Bimmer sat parked under a streetlight, burgundy paint faintly sparkling. Somehow, after all the hunts and mishaps Steve had taken her on, she was still pristine. Eventually, Robin said, “As long as he doesn’t get the shit kicked out of him, though.”

Steve shrugged at first, but an image of Eddie’s face covered in blood and bruises similar to the ones Jonathan and Billy had given him flashed through his mind’s eye and he winced internally. Yeah, he wouldn’t really wish that on someone who didn’t deserve it. “He’s survived this long, he’ll probably be fine,” he said instead.

“Maybe, but-” she cut herself off, head tilting towards the car. “Steve? You hear that?”

He did. A faint voice, crackling over the walkie Dustin gave him that he’d stuffed under the passenger seat. “Shit.” 

They jogged to the car, Steve fumbling with his keys and whipping the door open, diving for the walkie under the seat as he heard Dustin loudly announcing, “Code red! Steve, goddamnit, where are you!? Code red!”

“Dustin! What’s wrong?”

“Werewolf! In the woods! It’s dead, over!”

Steve met Robin’s shocked expression, her blue eyes wide with worry. “Where are you?”

“We’re behind Forest Hills. And you have to say over, Steve! Over!”

Groaning, Steve resisted the urge to smack his head against the car door. Instead, he reached over to unlock Robin’s door so she could get in. “Why the fuck are you in the woods at night, Dustin? Over.” He emphasised the last word with every bit of frustration he felt at the moment.

“Just. Get. Here. Over!”

“Fine! Jesus christ, over and out,” Steve snapped, slammed his door shut and started the car, peeling away from the curb.

They got to the trailer park in record time, despite Steve ranting at Robin about how the brats shouldn’t even be out this late at night while Robin kept reminding him to please concentrate on the road and save the chewing-out for the kids themselves. He parked at the end of the road, which was barely more than cracked asphalt and a toppled over concrete divider, the Street Ends sign long since stolen. The dark trees loomed tall and slender, a sparse barrier at the end of the small field that was only half lit by a flickering yellow street light, but Steve could already tell that’s where the kids had gone. He could smell them in the air and saw the trampled spots where they’d walked their bikes through the tall grass. A dog barked in the distance, agitated. He nodded at their trail and looked at Robin, said, “Let’s go,” and took off.

Robin kept pace with him easily as they loped through the trees. Even with the moon almost new they could see their way without difficulty, lacking most colour but seeing every detail; each scuff in the dirt from a tire and their muddy footprints standing out in the quiet forest. Their scents grew stronger too, and alongside it, something else. Something Steve had smelled earlier. He ran faster.

Voices began to filter through the woods. The kids were, unsurprisingly, arguing. By the time Steve and Robin crashed through the underbrush and ran into the Party, who screamed.

“Holy shi– be quiet! It’s us!” Steve shouted. While the kids did shut up – thank god – they all glared at him.

“What did you think would happen, Steve?” Dustin yelled back, arms flailing, “Warn us next time! That’s what the walkie is for!”

“I forgot it in the car since you idiots told me you were in the woods with a dead werewolf. How do you even know they’re a werewolf anyway, they–” Words caught in his throat as Robin choked back a scream. Finally, Steve turned his attention to the body on the ground behind the row of kids. “They’re human when they’re dead.”

They were supposed to be, at least. Steve hadn’t killed a werewolf before, hadn’t had to. Even when Billy went feral he refused to do it. They were still people and it was the one line Steve refused to cross as a hunter. He knew, though, that when a werewolf is killed in wolf form, they shift back into a human. So why was this one still a werewolf?

The body looked like every other werewolf Steve had seen when shifted: elongated limbs tipped in blunted claws, distinctive feet, brown fur everywhere, a clear mix of human and wolf. A ripped white shirt and torn blue jeans still clung to the body in spots, like they didn’t have time to get them off before they shifted. The only difference was the head. Or lack of one.

Steve shoved the nearest kid behind him – Lucas, who he could feel was shaking slightly – and stepped forward, unable to take his eyes off the stump of a neck. Dark blood, almost dried to blackish-brown, spilled down the werewolf’s chest, worsened by gashes left by, Steve guessed, the werewolf’s own claws, which were bloodied too. The cut was disturbingly clean. Level. Whatever weapon had done this was sharp. Bile rose in Steve’s throat.

“Turn around,” he said, somehow managing to not sound sick, looking back at the Party. Lucas and Will already had, the latter standing with his arms wrapped tight around his chest, but Mike was still half-turned, like he couldn’t take his eyes off it, and Dustin stared at the body with an analytical gleam that would unsettle Steve if he didn’t already know what these kids had gone through. Still. “Dustin, turn around.”

“We’ve been looking at it for ten minutes, Steve, it’s fine,” Dustin retorted, but Steve grabbed him by the shoulders and forced him to face a very pale Robin, who still had her hands over her mouth.

“You shouldn’t have seen it in the first place! What the hell were you thinking, coming out here at night?”

Mike spoke up this time, sounding like he’d swallowed something disgusting. “We were patrolling.”

With a sigh that felt much too heavy for his age, Steve dragged a hand down his face. “You’re children. You don’t patrol.”

“We’re fifteen! You were partying! We couldn’t leave the town unprotected–”

“I was at a party because you told me to go to,” he interrupted Dustin sharply, “and I told you to stay home.” These kids were going to drive him into an early grave through stress alone. When Dustin opened his mouth again to argue back, Steve hissed, “Zip it! You’re in the wrong here.” The kid crossed his arms and scowled at Steve, but gave in.

Now that they were silent, Steve cast his gaze around the scene. He couldn’t see any sign of the missing head. There were signs of a struggle, though. Claw marks scored into tree bark to the left, large paw prints and faint shoe treads that could have looked like a dance. Next to the body, though, Steve saw scraps of fabric and bent down.

They were soft and black. Nothing like what the werewolf wore. A flash of a logo, some kind of yellow-and-red lettering, stood out on the corner of a larger scrap. Steve heard Dustin whisper, “Shit.”

Steve's head whipped around. “What?”

“Nothing!” He answered too quickly, too high-pitched. Steve could hear the skip in his heart, and though that wasn’t a reliable tell it wasn’t nothing.

“Dustin, you have to tell him,” Lucas said.

“Tell me what?”

The Party didn’t speak. Eyes flitting between them, Steve caught sight of Dustin’s clenched fist stuck deep into his pocket. He raised an expectant eyebrow.

“It’s Eddie’s. Eddie’s shirt.” Will’s voice was quiet and empty.

That’s when it hit Steve. The smell. He’d known it was blood when he and Robin had run into the kids, saw the corpse. But now he knew he’d smelled it earlier – at the party. From Eddie and Chrissy.

Read chapter 2 now on ao3!!

[jeniffercheck]

hot & heavy (underestimated and overprotected)

shivlina paris au: pre-canon, karolina does not yet work at waystar, all shiv canon applies. CWs below the cut.

words: 19k

read here or on ao3

cw: drug abuse for shown/referenced cocaine use throughout the fic, domestic violence is referenced throughout with one conversation that goes into minor details, there is nothing graphic. please let me know if you think i've missed anything!

--

It starts before Karolina’s even realized it has.

Breathless and nameless in the warm-toned bathroom of an old colleague’s brand new speakeasy, a passcode-secured hole in the wall that Karolina thinks is better fit for Astoria than Paris, and her eyes shut tight as her shoulder blades dig deeply into the wall behind her, shoved between a doorframe, a red velvet ottoman that probably costs more than her monthly rent, and a pale-skinned girl with a vicious hunger for Karolina’s lips. Her soft hands grab at Karolina as if they’re the last two women on Earth, and for a second Karolina worries that they actually might be.

Then she remembers that it’s just another Thursday in France.

When they’re finished, it’s lingering eyes with quick hands fixing messed up hair and their displaced clothes, slightly shameful at the sound of a toast happening beyond the thick, dark mahogany of the bathroom door; two wallflowers skipping the party. While washing her hands, Karolina realizes she’s still wearing her ring. Vic had given it to her years ago, something like a promise that neither of them intended to keep, and on a whim, she takes it off. As she dries her hands, she finally asks for the woman's name.

“Shiv.”

“Like a knife?” Karolina asks, unable to contain her surprise.

“Like a shiv,” Shiv corrects, her eyes slightly rolling. She pulls out a small bottle, recognizable white powder filling the inside. She opens it up and brings the spoon to her nose, but she pauses before she does anything. “Want some?”

Karolina waves her off.

“Not my poison,” she says, and Shiv just shrugs, as if it’s her loss. She sort of makes Karolina feel like it is, what with the high society elegance of the silver canister, and Karolina thinks it’s a sort of upper-class gauche; the old money secret that you can be trashy as long as it’s behind closed doors. She briefly thinks if she were a hot, twenty-something spending time in Paris she might keep her blow in a five-thousand-dollar tube as well, and by the time the powder is snorted and the door is open, Karolina realizes Shiv never asked for her name.

  —

  Karolina accepted the job on a whim. Or, at least, that’s what she’d said. In reality, it’d been in the pipeline for months, if not years. It wasn’t her endgame, but it was always in her line of sight, and the only obstacle was in her own home, a sobbing, living person, begging her not to go. She can’t remember now if she even batted an eyelash when she chose the job. In that moment she felt like she’d had nothing left to cry about. Whether it was the dead conversations or the dead bedroom or dead, stale fucking air, she wasn’t sure, but she just knew staying in that place felt like a dead end, and doing this? It felt like the rest of her life could be in front of her.

(That’s what she told herself when she packed up her bags and got a storage unit for nearly ten years’ worth of coexisting with someone, and shipped her cat off to France, and then she wrote in her journal that sometimes things have to fall apart to come back together. A lame excuse for someone who always seems to find things falling apart.)

  —

 She sees Shiv again.

Except this time, it’s not under the cover of a hidden bathroom––it’s a wide-open rooftop, and it’s only a matter of time when she finally lands in Shiv’s line of sight, for the second time in her life. Shiv’s having a hushed argument that Karolina desperately attempts not to eavesdrop on, but with Shiv’s growing volume and Karolina’s growing inability to follow the French in the conversation in front of her, she doesn’t think it’s her fault when she hears Shiv snap, “I don’t want you here.”

It’s then, that Shiv’s eyes land on Karolina’s, and it’s a sharp enough glare that Karolina doesn’t know whether Shiv’s scowling at her, the situation, or if maybe perhaps the entire world, but Karolina tears her eyes away anyway, slightly embarrassed that she’d been caught staring at all. She can’t miss out of her peripheral though, when Shiv all but runs away from the man, nearly clipping Karolina’s shoulder as she escapes. Karolina’s gaze moves back to the man, eyes following Shiv with something wistful in his gaze, and she almost feels bad for him, the way you’d feel bad for a puppy who’s running around without an owner.

It’s the kind of scene she knows, recalling all of the parties she’d dragged Vic to, chatting up businessmen who’d inevitably flirt with her and then Vic would get mad and Karolina would remind her that it doesn’t mean anything if she entertains a little misogyny to get fucking ahead and Vic would make her feel guilty for apparently not having any morals, and they’d end the night early and pissed, Vic in the bedroom and Karolina sleeping on the old couch that she was never allowed to get rid of even though it made her wake up with an aching back and half of her limbs asleep, and she’d slink out of the apartment before the sun was even up just to hide out in a coffee shop until it was reasonable for her to enter the office without getting looks, and she’d let everyone think she was just that dedicated to her job.

The group surrounding her pulls her back in with their laughter at what she assumes was a joke, and she plays along, but she really has no fucking clue what’s going on in this conversation.

She’s halfway through another vodka Red Bull when she can feel her phone vibrate multiple times through her purse, and she’s grateful for the interruption as she’s able to finally sneak away, having had her fill of business talk for the night. That’s when she finds Shiv again, beyond the open bar and the DJ, where the sound is muffled and the view is obstructed. The perfect place for Karolina to answer some e-mails, and for Shiv, the seemingly perfect place for a smoke break. Right in front of a sign that says, interdit de fumer. Karolina’s unable to contain her quiet, “Oh,” and her slight laugh at the sight, and then she recalls the death glare from earlier.

“Sorry—” she starts, a mess of an apology already brimming at the tip of her tongue, but Shiv just quirks one of those perfect eyebrows, and returns her gaze to the skyline.

“It’s fine,” she says, leaning on the railing. “You can stay.”

Karolina sends her a small smile, then realizes she can’t even see it, and she shakes her head at herself, eyeing Shiv one more time before leaning against the wall behind her. She sifts through the emails, skimming through what seems to be a vendor switch-up, meaning she’s going to have to make sure all the logos are swapped on materials they’ve already approved of. Typical.

“Jesus,” she huffs, before she’s even realized she’s speaking. She attempts to look apologetic as Shiv looks back, Karolina picking her eyes up from her phone to apologize for the disturbance. “Sorry—work.”

Work. The dreaded thing she can never escape. Shiv doesn’t say anything though, returning to her cigarette and her fucking demure gaze into the city. Karolina eyes her out of curiosity. She looks so familiar, but Karolina would remember a name like Shiv. Then Shiv’s voice rings out, and she doesn’t have much time to consider it anyway.

“It’s not as impressive as I’d hoped,” Shiv says, looking out into the skyline. “Even with the Eiffel Tower.”

Karolina looks ahead. The Eiffel Tower peaks out above everything, illuminating the city with its lights alone. She remembers a time when Paris was a daydream for her, a small cut-out from a magazine that she kept inside every planner from middle school through college. She realizes she can’t even remember whether her first visit here had been for a work trip or a vacation, but she remembers being disappointed.

“The Eiffel Tower makes everything look smaller,” she says. “The rest of the city kind of pales in comparison.”

Shiv cocks her head at the statement, as if she’s inspecting the balance of the buildings. Once you notice it, it’s hard to look at Paris the same. All the hype for one structure. It’s like going to New York City for the Statue of Liberty. You get there and realize you’re not even allowed to climb to the top, and then you find out that it’s in fucking New Jersey.

“I guess you’re right,” Shiv says. Karolina doesn’t think she’s right, but Shiv says it as if it looks true, so it must be. Or maybe other people don’t have time to sit and think about why the Parisian skyline is so much worse than other cities. They have partners and kids and lives. Karolina has her cat.

“I’m Karolina,” Karolina says, and it causes Shiv to turn around again. “Since you never asked.”

Shiv smirks.

“Who says I wanted to know your name?” she asks, and the words themselves are harsh, but the teasing smile remains.

“I wanted you to know,” Karolina says, bouncing her phone against her palm.

“Okay,” Shiv says. “Karolina.”

It’s then, that Karolina decides she likes the way her name sounds coming out of Shiv’s mouth. For a second, she tries to tell herself that it’s too soon, that she doesn’t need to get involved with anyone else while the corpse of her and Vic is still cold, but then she remembers that too soon would’ve been years ago. That things had been over long before they actually were, that she and Vic were choosing security over happiness. They’d settled. This, Karolina thinks, feels far from settling. It feels like fun.

“Was that your boyfriend?” Karolina asks. She watches the way Shiv’s eyebrows immediately flex at the word boyfriend, but she recovers quickly, that easy smile barely faltering.

“Nope,” Shiv says. “I barely know him.”

Karolina frowns.

“He wasn’t bothering you, was he?” she asks, because even if she’s not looking for trouble, this is still technically her event, and she’s willing to throw someone out if it’s making a guest uncomfortable. She’s chivalrous like that.

“No,” Shiv says again. “He’s just hopeful, and—fucking relentless.”

“That’s a kind way to say desperate,” Karolina jeers, unable to stop the retort. She’s about to apologize for being brash but Shiv laughs, and by God, if it isn’t a glorious sound.

“He is fucking desperate,” Shiv says, taking a drag of her cigarette. It’s on its last life, barely clinging to the butt, and she puts it out, then fully turns to face Karolina, leaning her back against the glass railing. It’s held together by various scraps of metal and bolts, and it makes her skin crawl, watching someone put all their trust into a sheet of glass to stop them from plummeting twelve stories to their death. Shiv looks entirely unconcerned.

“You feeling desperate?” she asks.

“This is a work event,” Karolina immediately says, because it is, but she knows the argument is weak, and it’s possible that she doesn’t really care either. It’s possible that she’s having fun adding in a little chase.

“And the other night wasn’t?”

“That was social,” Karolina says, or so she’s been telling herself.

“Yeah,” Shiv says, sounding very unconvinced by Karolina as well. “Why don’t we go somewhere else and be social, then?”

Karolina’s phone buzzes in her hand again, and she resists the urge to check yet another email that she knows she won’t be able to solve until the morning anyway. She doesn’t consider herself a risk taker, but this doesn’t feel like a risk so much as feeling desired, and she can’t remember the last time anyone desired her. So, she makes a decision that she hopes doesn’t haunt her.

“Your place or mine?”

  —

  The apartment in Paris feels like a breath of fresh air. She hasn’t lived alone since her early twenties, back when she still thought a daily commute from Queens to Manhattan was something she could stand to do every day. Her last apartment had become suffocating. It was a pit of festering resentment that burned like cheap candles, leaving invisible soot on the walls; something you can’t notice until it’s too late and the damage has already been done. Like her childhood home, the scent of cigarettes settled so deep into the carpet that it followed her everywhere, even sometimes thinking she can still smell the residue in her hair if tries hard enough. One day they were happy and the next they were caught in the world’s slowest-acting quicksand, unable to dig themselves out of the trap they’d wandered into.

Karolina often recalls their final fight, her using the word we and Vic always using you.

But this apartment is all hers. She can rearrange the furniture as many times as she wants until it feels right, and she can leave the windows open overnight because there’s nobody there to complain about the noise. She can leave her mugs in the sink or on the coffee table or on the nightstand and she can clean them when she wants. She works into the early hours of the morning, and nobody’s pissed off because it’s what she wants to do. Fucking freedom.

  —

  The calls start.

Karolina had elected to get a new SIM card when she got to the country. For the longest time, her only contacts were from work, the veterinarian, and her mother. Now, Shiv’s name sits clear on the bottom of the list. It was a moment of weakness, trading numbers, because Karolina doesn’t know what Shiv’s intentions are beyond late-night summons, and Karolina knows it’s risky territory, getting involved with someone when she feels hot off the press of emotional encumbrance, but Shiv keeps calling. 11pm on a Tuesday, 3am on a Saturday, an egregious 8pm on a Monday and Karolina knows she’s in trouble because she says yes without a hitch.

“The Americans in Paris,” Shiv jokes, and Karolina wants to tell her that she’s not American, not really, but they don’t know each other beyond what gets them off and even though this is the most intimate she’s been with a new person in years, and because of it, Karolina thinks the rest of it, the things about her that aren’t visible on her body, are far more intimate than taking her shirt off. She almost thinks the whole ordeal lacks intimacy.

It’s procedural. Shiv asks if Karolina’s free, Karolina says yes, and then they decide whose apartment they’re going to. Shiv will offer her a bump that she’ll say no to every time, and Karolina will pretend that it doesn’t unnerve her that this girl does coke every time they fuck, and then Shiv will go down on her and she’ll forget that she was nervous at all. Then, once Shiv’s high has kicked in, they’ll switch, and Karolina will try to be careful, will try to please, and she’ll touch Shiv slowly, asking, “Is this okay?” and Shiv will just grab Karolina’s hand, guiding her to go harder, never having said yes at all.

  —

  Karolina gets attached.

And maybe attached, isn’t the right word, but she starts to like Shiv. She starts to like Shiv a lot more than just wanting to fuck a couple of times a week. At first, Shiv is hesitant.

“Coffee?” Shiv repeats, and she makes it sound like the craziest idea in the world. Karolina wonders if it is a crazy idea, getting involved with some apparent socialite with a coke habit and a penthouse in the middle of Paris.

“It doesn’t have to mean anything,” Karolina quickly asserts, “I’d just like to know who I’m getting into bed with.”

“Isn’t the mystery part of the thrill?” Shiv asks, but it sounds forced, not at all like her usual pension for teasing foreplay, so Karolina takes a risk.

“Maybe…I like spending time with you,” she says, and she waits, breathlessly for what feels like hours but is really only seconds, for Shiv to say anything, but the line just goes dead.

It stings a little, but Karolina thinks she’s faced worse rejections in her sometimes-sorry life, and she tries to move on. She leaves her phone in work mode the rest of the day, seeing only emails and team chat notifications, and tries to focus on why she’s in Paris at all. Tries not to let it feel like the end of the world, because it’s not, and she isn’t some unlovable creature that was put on this planet to always be within an inch of absolute contentment, no.

When she gets home, she fears her phone like it’s radioactive, and she sits next to Oliver and listens to him purr and she nurses a big glass of wine. She turns off Do Not Disturb in one swift click, eyes nearly closed and hands out in front like preparation can actually stop anything from hurting less, but there’s a notification from Shiv. Delivered nearly two hours ago, and she opens it up, and feels stupid, first and foremost, but also relieved.

Shiv sent one word, when?

That’s how Karolina finds herself at a cafe, morning blocked off with important “meetings” because she’s ahead of schedule with work and Shiv said she’s already busy this weekend. It’s an expensive place, one she wouldn’t tolerate going to for any extended period of time, but it was Shiv’s choice and anyway, Karolina’s never been the best authority on caffeine sources anyway, what, with her war-stock of 5-Hour Energy.

When Shiv arrives, Karolina attempts to not look as surprised as she feels. Shiv looks different in the daytime, hair pin-straight, and accessories purposefully understated, her outfit is a decidedly European collage of neutral tones with an obvious American aftertaste at the comfortability of it all. Big sunglasses cover her eyes, and her purse looks large enough to carry an entire fucking clown car, and Karolina thinks she looks like a walking ad for The Row.

“Long night?” Karolina asks as Shiv sits down, gesturing to the sunglasses. Shiv ignores her, grabbing the coffee cup that had been waiting for her instead.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“What I’m hoping is your usual,” Karolina says.

Shiv looks at the ingredients marked off on the label, and she lets out an amused laugh, “You sneaky little bitch.”

Karolina wouldn’t say that’s not one of her personality traits, but she didn’t have to sneak too hard to figure that one out.

“You have a habit of leaving receipts next to your key bowl,” Karolina says, having half a mind to look a little sheepish. “I might’ve taken a look.”

“Well, remind me not to leave state secrets out on my nightstand,” Shiv says, taking a sip of the coffee.

“Do you have any?” Karolina asks, to which Shiv just leans back in her chair, shrugging slightly.

“Maybe a few,” she smirks.

“Is that what you do for work?” Karolina asks. “State secrets?”

It’s apparently the wrong question, because the smirk falls, and Shiv shifts in her seat like the state secrets are actually real and Karolina’s just caught her sitting on a big one.

“No,” Shiv says, voice tight. “I’m on a sabbatical.”

This doesn’t shock Karolina, given the way Shiv’s eyes are always a little glassy and her nose a little red, the way her hands always shake slightly when she’s not paying attention to what she’s doing, and the way her body is always under a specific amount of control, as if losing control of anything would mean losing control of everything.

Karolina won’t mention it though, not here, not now, and it’s obvious she shouldn’t push the subject further, so she nods. She changes the subject to something that’s been bothering her.

“Are you sure we’ve never met before?”

Karolina tried asking her, a couple of weeks ago when it was late and Shiv had given her at least two glasses of wine, and Karolina just couldn’t put her finger on it. Shiv vehemently denied it then, but Karolina can’t let it go, especially now, seeing her out in the daytime.

“I can guarantee you, we haven’t,” Shiv says, and she sounds so sure.

“Weird,” Karolina mutters, returning to her coffee.

“Shiv isn’t—it’s not my full name,” Shiv says then, almost sounding nervous. “It’s more of a nickname.”

“What’s your full name?” Karolina asks, leaning forward.

“Siobhan.”

Karolina tries to rack her brain for any memories of a Siobhan. She thinks that’s definitely a name she’d remember, but the only Siobhan she can even think of is—wait.

“Siobhan Roy?”

“In the flesh,” Shiv says, sounding especially unenthused.

Karolina wouldn’t say she’s starstruck, because she’s rubbed elbows with billionaires before, but fucking the billionaire heiress of the largest media conglomerate in the United States? That’s a little more than she’s used to.

“Don’t make it a thing,” Shiv says preemptively, like she can see all of the different outcomes of this scenario working their way through Karolina's head.

“I’m not,” Karolina says, even though she’s definitely lying because this most certainly is a thing, but they’re in Paris and everyone who gives a fuck about Siobhan Roy is across the ocean, so she can act calm for however long this date lasts and then murder board herself to death later in case there’s some crazed paparazzi somewhere that’s desperate to get Shiv in tomorrow’s issue of Page 6. “I guess it makes a lot more sense now, knowing your parents didn’t name you after a prison weapon.”

That does crack a small smile out of Shiv, and Karolina’s happy to have eased at least some of the growing tension.

“I still wouldn’t say that wasn’t their intention,” Shiv says.

Karolina thinks it’s supposed to sound like a warning—a slight, careful, now, don’t get cut—but Karolina and warnings are friends. She knows how to heed warnings and navigate through them. Warnings themselves don’t scare her. It’s what comes from the things that have no warnings. The things you can’t see coming.

“So, now that you’ve interrogated me—what are you doing in Paris?” Shiv asks. Shiv can’t ever seem to get away from the topic of herself quickly enough. She figures now, that Shiv is just a Google search away, and Shiv doesn’t have the same luck with Karolina unless she wants to read the most standard LinkedIn profile in existence, so Karolina entertains her.

“I’m leading a PR team for Fashion Week,” Karolina says. “Ad campaigns, interviews, press releases—”

“Wait—a PR team, or the PR team?” Shiv asks, something like impression on her face. Karolina suddenly feels bashful, like bragging in front of a billionaire is some kind of fruitless endeavor that’s just going to leave her embarrassed and humbled, but Shiv looks interested, and she asked Karolina not to make her name a big deal, so that’s exactly what Karolina’s not doing.

“Well, I suppose it’s the PR team, when you put it that way, but it’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” Karolina says. “In my position it’s mostly phone calls and emails, appeasing the higher-ups so they think everything is running smoothly. The boring stuff.”

“I mean, still,” Shiv says, and she seems genuinely impressed. “Didn’t realize I was hooking up with fashion royalty.”

Fashion royalty. She remembers Vic’s, “Are you fucking serious, Karolina? Paris? Really?” and it’d felt more like a curse than anything.

“Paris Fashion Week can’t be the most extravagant thing you’ve been around, Siobhan Roy,” she deflects, and Shiv rolls her eyes at the sentiment.

“I mean, it’s no Met Gala, of course,” Shiv says, playing along.

“Well, I’ve worked the Met Gala too,” Karolina then says. “But I’m sure there’s something.”

“Fuck you,” Shiv says as she laughs, raising her sunglasses back into her hair, and Karolina finally has the opportunity to take all of Shiv in. Beyond the sleek hair and the jewelry that’s worth at least a few months of Karolina’s salary and the perfectly fitted clothing, she understands why Shiv was hiding behind sunglasses, because she can’t control the image of her own eyes. They’re bright and alert but still adorned with that never-ending irritated glimmer, a red ring of death that warns onlookers of her decaying. They also remind her that Shiv is just a person, not the heiress to a crime empire like The Washington Post tries to convey or the untouchable debutante that Karolina’s own publications perpetuate; she’s just a person. Karolina releases a breath.

“Who’s the worst celebrity you’ve met?” Shiv asks, and Karolina smirks.

“I didn’t meet him personally, but I remember a certain Roy was on the cover of GQ some years back and my staff had some choice words about the experience,” Karolina says, and before she has the chance to elaborate, Shiv laughs loudly.

“His alpha male days,” Shiv muses. “That cover was­–”

Karolina quirks an eyebrow, “It was what?”

“It was awful,” Shiv says, throwing her arms up in surrender but still smiling in amusement, “I’m sorry, it was!”

Karolina can’t bite back her own smile, because really, she has no emotional investment in GQ.

“A lot of readers wrote in after that issue thanking us for having a real man on the cover,” Karolina says, and Shiv scoffs.

“That real man is now into the art of microdosing on meditation,” Shiv says, throwing air quotes around the words, and Karolina hums.

“Maybe they should do another cover story,” she says, and Shiv feigns disgust at the thought.

“How long have you been working in fashion anyway?” Shiv then asks.

Too long, is Karolina’s first thought, but even if she’s not totally obsessed with the clothes and the celebrities and the parties, she’s enjoyed the path, and the money.

“My whole career,” Karolina says. “I started at a publication right out of college, and it just stuck. I’ve been working my way up since then.”

“And now you’re here,” Shiv says, smirking into her coffee again.

“Now I’m here,” Karolina laughs. “Having coffee with someone from fucking New York.”

“Not the Parisian romance you were expecting?” Shiv asks.

“This is a romance?” Karolina asks, and Shiv’s eyes narrow slightly.

“I mean, you practically begged me to come,” Shiv says. “Kind of felt like you were asking me on a date.”

Karolina tries not to let her panic show at the word date. It very well could be a date if either of them wanted it to be, but despite Shiv’s pension for flirting, she’s not exactly forthcoming with her feelings, and Karolina has no clue what Shiv could possibly be feeling in this moment.

“I just thought, you know, if we were going to be benefiting from one another—we might as well be friends too,” Karolina says, taking the easy route.

“Friends?” Shiv asks. She says it as if the concept is foreign, like friends is a thing that never quite works out, but Karolina thinks she’s just keeping her cards close to her chest, the same way that fucking in the dark is supposed to somehow make Karolina see her less or the way that wearing sunglasses that block half of her face is supposed to make Karolina understand her less.

“Why not?” Karolina says, knowing she’s won when Shiv just shrugs.

“Fine,” Shiv says. “Friends.”

  —

  “I can’t believe you have a fucking cat.”

Karolina watches in amusement as Shiv and Oliver have a stare-down in her foyer. Stare down is probably the wrong phrase, because it’s more like Oliver is sitting there, looking sickeningly adorable with his short grey fur and his bright green eyes, and Shiv is glaring at him from in front of the doorway, like a tabby that’s just wandered into the wrong alley.

“Shiv, this is Oliver,” Karolina says, picking him up. He meows as she does so, and she can’t help but laugh at what seems like pure disdain on Shiv’s face.

“Oliver?” Shiv asks, bewilderment clear. “You named your cat after a fucking singing orphan?”

“No,” Karolina immediately fires back, not even having it in her heart to distinguish the fact that Oliver Twist was from a book first. “He’s named after an Agatha Christie character.”

Shiv takes a very long breath, like she’s contemplating agreeing to try this friends thing at all, and then she steps forward.

“You’re a dork,” she says, holding her hand out. Karolina turns so that Oliver can see Shiv better, and he sniffs her hand for a second and before retreating, and curls his head back into Karolina’s arms.

“I don’t think he likes it when you insult his mother,” Karolina says, petting him fondly.

“Well, I don’t like when his mother edges me because she forgot to feed him,” Shiv says, and it’s Karolina’s turn to roll her eyes as she heads into the kitchen.

“You can get yourself off, Shiv,” she throws behind her shoulder. “Oliver can’t even open the fridge.”

Shiv follows her, footsteps hurrying.

“You keep his food in the fridge?”

“That’s where cat food is kept,” Karolina says, setting Oliver down on the ground, and Shiv pulls a face when he immediately jumps onto the counter.

“And you let him on the counter?”

Karolina pulls out his wet food, and a bottle of kitchen bleach, making a point to place it in front of Shiv.

“I’ll wipe it down when he’s done, fair?”

Shiv just huffs, a sound of disbelief.

“You’re a crazy cat lady,” she mutters.

“Shiv, I have one cat,” Karolina exclaims, still unable to contain her laughter.

“Yeah, and that’s fucking insane,” Shiv says. “And you brought him to France!”

“Should I have left him in New York?” Karolina asks. “Given him up to the feral cat colony on Rikers Island?”

“The what on Rikers Island?”

“Oh my god, Shiv, here—” Karolina grabs Oliver’s treat bag, pulling one out and handing it to Shiv. “Hold out your hand to him.”

Shiv does as she’s told, and she holds out her palm, a single treat at the center. Oliver rushes over to her and sniffs it inquisitively until he picks it up, Shiv shuddering as he does so.

“What was that?” she asks, clearly disgusted.

“His tongue?” Karolina says, but she’s laughing. “You’re a hopeless case.”

“You’re the hopeless case,” Shiv says, sitting down on a stool. “God.”

They make eye contact and they both start laughing, and Karolina forgets for a moment that they’re just supposed to be fuck buddies. That they’re not dating and this isn’t a normal occurrence, and even though Shiv has agreed to be friends, that comes with limits. Still, Karolina basks in the light, not wanting to let go of what it feels like to share a life with someone again, even if it’s for a small moment, and even if she doesn’t like Karolina’s cat as much as Karolina would like her to. By the time Karolina has finished feeding him and has wiped down the counter with enough bleach to satisfy Shiv, Karolina’s convinced her to stay for wine.

They’re talking about everything and nothing, random books that they’ve both read that Shiv hated and Karolina loved, movies that they’ve both seen that Shiv loved and Karolina despised. Their knees are almost touching, and every time one of them shifts they both bolt into action to separate, as if the fact that their hands have been inside one another is leagues different than the fabric of their pant legs come together. Karolina watches as Shiv, cheeks rosy from the wine and smile easy from a joke that Karolina’s successfully recounted, pulls her hair back, and that’s when Karolina notices a scar, a little pinkish and normally covered by the fall of her side part, poke out from under Shiv’s hairline. It’s barely visible, only moving past the hair by a few centimeters, and she doesn’t think she’d have noticed it at all if she weren’t sitting so close to Shiv.

And in her own wine-drunk nightmare, Karolina can’t stop the question from stumbling out of her mouth.

“How’d that happen?” she asks, and she regrets it instantly as Shiv’s smile falls and her posture stiffens.

“Uh—it’s a childhood scar,” Shiv says. She swallows harshly, and Karolina knows she’s lying. “My brother, uh, Roman, he—he threw one of his toys at me. I don’t remember what it was now. Probably the red Power Ranger or something fucking stupid like that.”

“I’m sorry–” Karolina says. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You’re fine,” Shiv says, taking a sip of her wine, and then like she flicks a switch somewhere Karolina can’t see, her spunk is back, and she’s cocking an eyebrow, “I showed you mine.”

Karolina wonders if it’s some sort of test and she feels slightly uneasy about the pretense under which it’s falling under, like Shiv didn’t almost just freeze up at the mention of a forehead scar, but Karolina plays along because she bit Shiv, and even if it was an accident, she can handle Shiv biting back.

She rolls up her sleeve, holding out her right forearm to Shiv. There’s a jagged scar along the side of it, one that still makes her previously bolted bones still ache on rainy days.

“Back in high school I did whatever I could to piss off my father,” she explains. “There were these guys at school that liked me, and they had these cool motorcycles so, I’d go riding with them sometimes—I think you can guess how that ended.”

Shiv grimaces.

“I think you have me beat,” she says, and Karolina knows Shiv’s trying to deflect and that Karolina should be trying to let her, but she can’t stand that kind of sentiment.

“It’s not a competition,” she says.

Shiv eyes her, and she can only hold the contact for a few seconds until she looks away. Karolina just pulls her sleeve down, watching as Shiv readjusts her hair, scar no longer in view.

“You should tell Roman that,” Shiv says. “When I started losing my baby teeth the first thing he did was break an arm.”

When Shiv looks back at her, it’s like she’s begging to change the subject, and Karolina complies.

“Roman’s your other brother, right?” she asks, and Shiv nods.

“He’s the middle child,” Shiv says. “So, you know how it is.”

But Karolina doesn’t know how it is. Vic was an older sister, and she would get so mad when Karolina just couldn’t understand that apparent burden. You’re an only child, you don’t get it. She always thought it was a low blow, because, for her, only child wasn’t some sort of crown to claim her spoils with. It meant only successor, only option, only target.

Karolina wonders now if that is a sibling thing, saving your pain for important moments, letting it all blow up at once; breaking an arm when your sister loses her teeth. Maybe Vic did have that part right—Karolina never had to compete for her pain, it was given to her freely. Served with a silent, festering breakfast and a drunkenly belligerent dinner, every day: at least your dad didn’t hit you, Vic. Karolina had thrown up after that argument, the thought that he’d given her some sort of badge to throw in people’s faces when she needed it feeling more like a thorn that was stuck in her side, just so she could rip it out and say—See? I’m bleeding too!—when it felt convenient. That’s what pain is to Karolina. Convenience. To try and compete with it just feels greedy.

“I actually wouldn’t know,” she admits. “I’m an only child.”

She wonders if Shiv can tell that she accidentally bit her back.

“Really?” she says. “You’ve got the feel of, like, an older sister of seven, or something absolutely criminal like that.”

“My parents barely knew what to do with me,” Karolina says, forcing a laugh. “Thank god they never got up to seven.”

Shiv laughs as well, but she eyes Karolina as she does so and it feels not at all dissimilar to the way Karolina so often looks at Shiv, wondering what’s going on beyond the surface of her words. Shiv seems to push past the instinct to dig though, something she’s a lot better at doing than Karolina.

“Well, props to you,” Shiv says raising her wine glass slightly. “I fully would’ve blown my brains out if my brothers didn’t exist, so—congrats.”

Karolina doesn’t say that it’s a miracle she didn’t, and she holds up her glass anyway even though it feels less like a cheers and more like a commiserating tap, but there’s an understanding tone to it. There’s no, “God, you’re lucky.” It’s a, “Damn, that fucking sucks,” and she thinks maybe she’s misjudged Shiv in that moment because she’s not seeing this as a competition, she’s trying to take herself out of the race.

“Parents—they do what they can, right?” Karolina says, but she flashes her eyes sarcastically and Shiv chuckles hollowly.

“Right,” she exaggerates, and it’s then that Oliver jumps up on the couch. Karolina observes as Shiv stills, but she surprisingly doesn’t move away, letting Oliver go where he pleases. “What made you want to become a parent to…this?”

“You mean my cat?”

Karolina watches in amusement as he slowly crawls the small space in between her and Shiv, and he sniffs Shiv’s clothes. Shiv just watches as well, still seemingly frozen in her position, and Karolina stifles a laugh as Oliver picks up a paw, gently pressing it into Shiv’s leg.

“Why is he doing that?” Shiv asks.

“He’s inspecting you,” Karolina says.

“What am I, a fucking bomb threat?” Shiv replies. She slowly brings one of her hands up to him and pokes him in the forehead, and Karolina isn’t quite sure what Shiv’s intentions were, but Oliver takes it as a sign to ram his head into her hand and Shiv pulls it back quickly.

“He wants you to pet him,” Karolina says, and Shiv rolls her eyes.

“I’ve met a cat before,” she says, but the way her hand hesitantly returns to his body and runs across his fur doesn’t have Karolina convinced.

“Are you sure?” she asks, hiding a smile behind her wine.

“I must have,” Shiv says. “Who hasn’t fucking met a cat?”

He seems to like Shiv’s scent or something, because it’s certainly not her energy, and he moves closer to her until he’s lying in her lap. Shiv continues to pet him, and Karolina can hear the loud purrs as they leave his body, and she sneaks a look at Shiv, who’s become solely focused on Oliver. Karolina suddenly wishes she hadn’t left her phone in the kitchen, because she thinks it’s the sort of scene she’d like to look at a million times over, Oliver’s peaceful face and Shiv’s in quiet awe.

“I think he likes you,” Karolina says. Shiv doesn’t look up, but Karolina thinks she can see something of a smile coming out of Shiv, and she doesn’t stop the petting.

“I’m sending you my dry-cleaning bill.”

  —

  She doesn’t see Shiv for a little over a week.

Karolina had gotten a little busy with work and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t missing Shiv, didn’t miss her sharp glares and the charged banter, and she knows Shiv would never admit to as much, what, with all of her French exploits that Karolina makes explicitly clear she wants to know nothing about, but she thinks she can hear it when Shiv calls her out of the blue, and Karolina can feel the nervousness seep through the phone receiver.

“Do you want to, uh, hang out—again?” Shiv asks. “Like, not what we normally do, um—dinner, maybe?”

And it’s wrong of Karolina to tease, but it feels natural as the words come out.

“You asking me on a date, Roy?”

Her own heart pounds a little as she waits for Shiv’s response.

“Would you want it to be?”

Karolina doesn’t even have to question it.

“I think I’d like that, yeah,” she says.

“Good,” Shiv says. “I’ll send you the details.”

And then Karolina has to wait.

Has to painstakingly wait, and it feels like she’s nineteen again, going on a date with a girl for the very first time, except this time she’s thirty-nine, and it’s probably something like her millionth date with a girl, and she’s fresh off the tail of the longest relationship of her life. She’s not quite sure which thought is worse, but then she remembers going home for college break and facing her father with an un-hidable hickey on her neck, and she decides that she’s overreacting.

And then suddenly they’re on the date and Karolina forgets why she’d been nervous at all. It’s just Shiv. Ridiculously beautiful but indisputably infuriating Shiv.

“You’re sure you can’t get Oliver a pen?”

“The answer hasn’t changed since the last ten times you’ve suggested it,” Karolina says. “And like I said, he’d just jump it.”

“Whatever,” Shiv mumbles, stabbing her salad. “I’m just saying, the cost of one cat pen would surely save you on all of those lint rollers. It’s just basic economics.”

“How about the next time you come over, you try putting Oliver in his carrying case,” Karolina says. “Then let me know how you think he’d feel about a pen.”

Shiv eyes her suspiciously until she narrows her gaze, giving up with a light-lipped sip of scotch. Which, by the way, Karolina said did not impress her.

“That feels vaguely like a threat,” Shiv says, putting down her glass, and Karolina just shrugs.

“Want to find out?”

Shiv has half a mind to give it a rest, still shoving her fork into her meal with the ferocity that could only come from a woman who’s just lost an argument about a cat three separate times in a row, and Karolina tries her own hand at a question that she’s asked before.

“Will you tell me what you actually do for work?” she asks. “When you’re not on a sabbatical?”

Shiv doesn’t look happy to answer the question, but she doesn’t look like she’s going to go running this time either.

“I’m a political strategist,” Shiv says. “I manage election campaigns.”

This catches Karolina off guard. Not that she’d ever been big on keeping up with the Roy dynasty anyway, but she sort of assumed they’d all just have bullshit jobs. Political strategy seems, real, for lack of better words.

“Trying to get in the White House one day?” she asks. She’s half-joking, but Shiv seems to consider the serious side of the question.

“Maybe at one point I would’ve hoped,” Shiv says. “Now…I don’t know.”

The words hand in the air, and Karolina gives them the space settle. Before she can get a word in, Shiv is sharing more.

“I’m thinking of getting out of the business,” Shiv says, meeting Karolina’s eye. “I don’t know if it’s for me anymore.”

“Hence the sabbatical?” Karolina assumes.

Shiv shrugs as if that’s partially it, but Karolina figures she won’t push that line of questioning any further.

“What was the last campaign you worked on?” she asks, but that seems to be the wrong direction as well, Karolina noting the way Shiv’s posture stiffens in the way it always does when Karolina asks something that unsettles her.

“Uh, just—it was a congressional candidate,” she says, her words stilted.

“State secrets?” Karolina asks, and she feels bad as Shiv looks away, knuckles going white as she grips her glass.

“Something like that,” Shiv says.

Karolina sighs. Talking to Shiv sometimes feels like she’s solving dozens of tiny puzzles at once, saving information and storing it for later, pulling out old facts when she finally thinks she’s found the missing piece. She wants to tear the puzzles apart, to tell Shiv that it’s okay to be scattered, that she doesn’t have to keep things so close to her chest, but Karolina knows how hard that can be. Because that’s cheating, right? If you give someone all the answers to your heart? You’ve made it too easy for them, and then they get greedier and greedier until they hold all of your cards and you have nothing.

So, Karolina gets it; trusting is hard. That doesn’t mean she can’t leave the line open.

“You know––there’s a shorthand we use in my line of work—maybe you use it too, but it’s for when you need a filler name, like maybe you can’t say it now, but you might want to say it later,” Karolina explains. “It’s just, TK—to come.”

Shiv nods, just the slightest bit, and Karolina continues.

“Just—if you ever wanted to talk about any, state secrets, or something,” Karolina says. She quirks a teasing eyebrow at the last part as Shiv looks back up, and Shiv reveals a begrudging smirk as she does so. Karolina doesn’t think of it as any kind of battle won, but it does maybe make her feel like somewhere deep down, Shiv can accept more between the two of them. A date is just a first step. Trust is a whole new game.

“What about you?” Shiv asks. “What does a woman do after Fashion Week?”

“I don’t know,” Karolina says honestly. “I only thought as far as taking this job. It was risky, but, it would’ve been stupid to pass up, right?”

“I mean, I for one, am glad you took the job,” Shiv says.

“Oh?” Karolina muses. “And why is that?”

“I guess…I just like having you around,” Shiv smirks, and Karolina can’t help from smiling as well, because Shiv is trying. Maybe she doesn’t want to share the big stuff, not yet, but she wants to share, and that’s more than Karolina thinks she can ask out of her.

“Yeah?” she raises an eyebrow, waiting for Shiv’s inevitable but to drop, because Shiv might be showing earnestness, but Karolina knows that honesty can’t come without a little protection.

“And it’s nice having someone around who can order all of my meals in French,” she adds.

“There it is,” Karolina says, still smiling. “Using me for my services.”

“Trust me,” Shiv says. “Those aren’t the services I use you for.”

Karolina blushes. She fucking blushes.

“And what services are those?”

Shiv gestures to the waiter for their tab.

“You wanna go find out?”

  —

  Karolina doesn’t need to find out. She already knows. That every time they get into bed, tangled limbs with the lights off, Shiv wants her rough and Shiv wants her fast. She wants just enough, never more, and never less. Karolina knows that when they’re finished, she can stay, but not too close, and when they wake up in the morning and Shiv needs to get amped again because the alternative is not leaving her bed for three days, Karolina can’t say anything. She does wonder if this is the only reason that Shiv keeps her around, that for whatever reason, Karolina acts as a bystander to it all. A happy medium disposed to bend at her will.

Karolina obliges, maybe because she’s so lonely that it doesn’t matter, or maybe because she thinks Shiv is so lonely that it does matter. Regardless, she’ll wake up with Shiv in her arms and Karolina will pretend to shift in her sleep, give Shiv enough time to wake up and escape her grasp before she thinks Karolina will even know it’s happened at all.

But that night, after Shiv’s satisfied and Karolina can feel the growing knot in her stomach get even larger, Shiv extends a hand. Karolina takes it, and wakes up the next morning still connected.

  —

  It’s in the small things. The way Shiv texts to ask how work is going, or the way she sends Karolina a delivery from her favorite lunch spot if she knows it’s been a busy day. It’s in the way she invites Karolina shopping with her, asking for her opinion on which top she thinks will piss off the snobby Francophile who lives on the floor below her more and the way Shiv can never help but to smile when Karolina just asks her which top she feels better in. It’s in the way Shiv will pull Karolina behind the curtain when the store associates aren’t lurking, and she’ll kiss her with a giddy look in her eyes because Shiv knows Karolina hates worrying about getting caught but loves how much Shiv enjoys it.

It’s in the small things. Which is why the big things hurt so much more.

The second Karolina is through the door, she can tell something is off. She’s caught off-guard by Shiv’s forwardness, and even though it’s not unwelcome—it’s not like she doesn’t know what Shiv called her over to do––something feels different.

“Can we slow down?” Karolina asks, trying to ignore the sensation of Shiv’s mouth inching up her neck.

“Why?” Shiv asks. “It took you fucking forever to get here.”

“It took—fifteen minutes,” Karolina says through stilted breaths, hands involuntarily gasping at Shiv’s hair. “Shiv—can I fucking take my coat off?”

Shiv sighs and leans away, resting a hand on the wall beside Karolina’s head. Karolina shrugs her coat off, sending Shiv a pointed look, and she lightly presses it into Shiv’s chest.

“Hang it up for me?”

Shiv rolls her eyes as Karolina smirks, but Shiv grabs it anyway, disappearing into the hallway. When Shiv returns, Karolina’s smirk immediately flips into a grimace.

“Shiv, your nose is bleeding,” she says, immediately looking around for tissues or anything. Shiv brings the back of her thumb to her nose, cursing as it comes away coated in fresh blood.

“Fuck,” she says, barreling past Karolina and towards the bathroom. Karolina follows her, watching with worried eyes as Shiv attempts to get the bleeding to stop. Under the bright fluorescent lights, Karolina can actually see how worn-down Shiv looks. The more time she’s spent with Shiv, the more time she’s spent looking at that silver vial. The knowledge of it taunts her now, and she’s starting to regret answering Shiv’s call.

“How much have you taken today?” Karolina asks. She tries to keep her voice even, like it’s curiosity at play and not an accusation, but Shiv’s already high on the defensive.

“Just a little extra,” Shiv says, removing a bloodied tissue from her nose. “That’s all.”

“What’s a little extra, Shiv?”

She watches as Shiv dabs a clean tissue around the area, looking satisfied when no more blood comes away from it.

“Does it matter?” Shiv asks, washing her face.

“Of course, it matters,” Karolina says then, eyes closely following every one of Shiv’s movements. Now that they’re up close, she can see it clear as fucking day. The extra-shaky hands as she dries them, the black of her pupils taking the place of that usual crystal blue, the way she seems extra hungry for Karolina. “You’re acting like a damn rail station.”

“Very funny,” Shiv says. She grabs Karolina’s hand as she exits the bathroom, attempting to lead Karolina toward the bedroom, but Karolina shrugs her off.

“Stop,” she says. “I’m not finding this amusing, Shiv.”

Shiv’s eyebrows furrow then.

“I’m just having a little bit of fun,” she says, her frustration seeping through her voice. “Fuckin—lighten up.”

Karolina rolls her eyes. She thinks it’s a juvenile blow, one that she’s heard too many times before. It’s not so different than the frigid and the anal and the uptight, and sometimes, Karolina thinks, she’ll take those. She’ll take the criticism when it’s necessary or it’s fair, because sure, sometimes Karolina does need to lighten up, but not when Shiv’s version of letting loose is going to the bathroom and doing as many lines of cocaine that her heart can take before trying to fuck Karolina into the next morning.

“What did I tell you when we first started doing this?” Karolina asks, Shiv just rolls her eyes in return as well.

“I’m not even fucked up right now,” Shiv argues, and Karolina takes that as a challenge she needs to prove wrong. She scans the apartment for anything else, and immediately an open liquor bottle hanging out on the coffee table.

“You drinking in between lines?” Karolina asks.

“Jesus Christ,” Shiv mumbles, rubbing her forehead. “I’m fucking fine.”

Karolina thinks it has to be some sort of sick joke, Shiv standing in front of her with God knows what absorbed into her body, bloody and sleep deprived, just begging to be fucked. Karolina isn’t even sure where to begin on the list of reasons why Shiv clearly isn’t fine.

“I can’t know that, Shiv,” Karolina argues, because it’s true. This girl will tear herself inside out, on her knees, bruised and bleeding like some prisoner of her own war, screaming––damnit, I’m fine!––just to keep the truth away from herself.

“Oh my god, Karolina,” Shiv groans. “I’m not gonna go cry rape just because I let you hit it while I’m high.”

The words feel so appallingly harsh that Karolina doesn’t even know where to begin, so she doesn’t. And maybe it is Karolina’s fault, just a little bit, because if she were being truly honest, the consent is only a small part of it. The bare minimum.

If she were being honest, she’d tell Shiv that it makes her feel used. That it makes her feel like she’s some ethical weapon of self-destruction to Shiv, because it’s not self-destruction if it’s coming from a different person, right? Shiv doesn’t only keep her around for moments like these, right? She can hear Vic, somewhere in the back of her mind having the last laugh. Maybe this is Karolina’s penance, for fucking everything else up too.

“I’m going back home,” she says. “Enjoy your fun.”

She doesn’t turn around as Shiv begs her to wait, and doesn’t respond to the texts that begin piling up as soon as she walks out the door. She lasts two days––both of which take everything in her not to behave in a way that would guarantee the entirety of her team quitting by the end of the week––before caving, sending a one-word yes when, for probably the twentieth time, Shiv asks if they can talk. She comes home from work that day to find Shiv waiting outside her apartment, a bag of Karolina’s favorite takeout in her hand.

Karolina approaches her tentatively. She knows the silent treatment was wrong, but Shiv was wrong too. And Karolina’s not big on saying things she’ll regret.

“Hey,” Shiv says.

“Hey,” Karolina echoes.

“Look, Karolina—I’m really sorry about the other night,” Shiv says, cutting right to the chase. She thinks the apology sounds unnatural coming from Shiv, and she knows Shiv must not hand out concessions often.

“Yeah?” Karolina says. “What are you sorry for?”

Because if Shiv wants to act immature, then that’s how Karolina will treat her. She’s surprised when Shiv continues to comply, and she nods to herself as if this is what she deserves. She’d half expected Shiv to fight back, not come running home with her tail in between her legs, and Karolina doesn’t feel any satisfaction. She just feels like shit.

“For being an asshole,” Shiv says, and Karolina raises her eyebrows, as if to say, “That’s all?” and she watches Shiv fight the urge to roll her eyes. At least she still has some bite. “And for—violating your boundaries, or whatever. It wasn’t cool of me, I know that.”

Karolina does think it’s a decent apology, as far as Shiv’s standards go, but she’s still upset, because if she and Shiv don’t have trust then they don’t have anything, and maybe what’s more upsetting is that it showed her the trust still isn’t there. That she’d been building it up in her mind for nothing.

“I had one rule, Shiv,” Karolina says, stepping closer. “One fucking rule—don’t call me over when you’re like that.”

Like that. Karolina knows they’re dancing around words now. Dancing and dancing until they get so tangled up that they both come spinning out. Shiv’s eyes dart around, but the street is empty. The cool weather reminds Karolina of a quiet afternoon back home, when she’d have time to leave work early and get to walk the streets of her neighborhood while all the kids were still in school, and she lived far enough downtown that she never saw any tourists. Then she’d get home and she’d feel like Vic was disappointed to see her. Like she’d ruined the afternoon by just returning to her home.

Enter Shiv, begging Karolina to let her in.

“I just—I wasn’t thinking,” Shiv says.

“Obviously,” Karolina can’t help but fire back, and she doesn’t trust herself to say more. A breeze goes by, and she watches as a chill runs through Shiv. She holds her hand firmly in her pocket, wanting to reach out but fearing what would happen if she did.

“Can we go inside?” Shiv asks.

And Karolina’s still mad, of course she is, but there’s a small part of her that just wants to let it go, wants to say fuck it and just give Shiv another chance. She ignores the scary thought that she’s already given Shiv chances, but she’s not sure if chances are something she likes to quantify anymore. She’s certainly burned through enough chances to last a lifetime.

“Fine,” she says, and Shiv follows her silently into the apartment as Karolina does her best to stay relaxed, to remain calm. When they get inside, she leaves Shiv in the kitchen as she goes to change and tries to breathe through the uncomfortability at being angry with someone she cares about. She hates being angry. It makes her fingers twitch and her skin crawl, and it makes her feel all too close to her father in the way that she can’t be certain if it’s the ghost of his touch grabbing her from behind or inching up from somewhere deep within her. Or if maybe it’s just her, inescapable and lurking in her own mirror.

They’re both silent as she returns, pulling out plates and silverware and the food that Shiv’s brought which, really, does smell fucking amazing even if Karolina is a little upset with herself for falling for a bribe, and Shiv attempts to talk to her, but Karolina just shoots her down with one worded answers until Shiv gives up, crestfallen like a kid who keeps trying to get their voice in at the dinner table until they realize that nobody in the room cares about what they have to say. But Karolina isn’t disinterested. She’s fucking upset. Majorly upset.

“You know––I’m not afraid that you’re going to accuse me of something,” she eventually says. Shiv’s head shoots up at her voice, but quickly falls back down, and Karolina’s shocked when the movement looks something like shame.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” Shiv says quietly. “It was fucked up.”

Karolina looks up at her, and her heart pounds a little because she doesn’t want to say what she’s going to, but she needs to say it, because Shiv needs to hear it.

“It felt like—” But Karolina cuts herself off. Shiv’s looking at her again, eagerly awaiting the words, like she’s ready to absorb the critique and the reprimand and the disappointment and carry it with her forever, ready to mold herself into whatever Karolina could possibly ask her to just so long as Karolina doesn’t leave. Karolina pockets the words for a rainy day. “Just—don’t do it again, Shiv. Please.”

And Shiv nods.

“I won’t.”

And then Karolina lets Shiv stay over, because she’s mad but she’s not a monster, and she doesn’t think she’s much of a match against Shiv’s sad fucking eyes anyway.

They’re lying in Karolina’s bed, so close together yet somehow worlds apart, and Karolina’s watching Shiv pet Oliver, his small frame nestled in between them.

“He likes you,” Karolina says, her voice still thick with upset.

“He’s soft,” Shiv says.

“Most cats are,” Karolina tries to joke, but it falls flat between them. Shiv is silent, contemplation swimming through her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says again, eyes still on the cat. Karolina looks away as well, doesn’t want to see the sadness on Shiv’s face.

“It’s fine, Shiv,” Karolina says. “I already said it was.”

She thinks Shiv might leave it there, and she’s about to close her eyes when she hears Shiv’s voice again.

“What were you going to say earlier?” she asks. “About—how it made you feel?”

Karolina watches Oliver shift, twisting his body so his head lands directly where Shiv’s hand is.

“Like—” she swallows. “Like you were trying to use me to hurt yourself.”

The air in the room quickly becomes thick with the words, and she waits for Shiv to deny it, to pick a fight, cry, to do something, but she just lays her hand near Oliver and settles into the bed, her voice dense with a heaviness that Karolina wishes weren’t real.

“I won’t do it again.”

  —

  They try their best to get back to normal, and whatever normal is, it’s definitely not in the voicemail Karolina receives only days later.

“Hey, Karolina, it’s me, um—I know this is an odd request, like, really fucking odd, but—my dad—he’s coming through on a business trip and wants to get dinner, and, look—say no if this is totally fucking insane, but, I don’t know, do you—do you want to come? Just as friends, obviously, this wouldn’t mean anything, but with your career and his business I think you might have shit to talk about and I—I just don’t know how I can let him see me like—uh, yeah, um—if someone was there to just take the heat off then, I don’t know. Let me know.”

Karolina doesn’t think that she sounds desperate as much as she sounds scared, and while it is an absolutely nutty idea, Karolina feels compelled to help. She’d also be lying if she said she wasn’t a little bit enticed by the idea of getting a personal sit-down in front of Logan Roy, but really, who in their right mind wouldn’t be? So, she says yes.

She ends up at a restaurant with bottles of wine that cost more than her fucking life insurance policy, settled at a small and intimate table with her fuck-buddy, and her fuck-buddy’s dad, who also happens to be the king of Manhattan. He doesn’t seem impressed when Shiv shows up with a stranger, at least not at first, but Karolina’s attractive, and she’s smart, and she knows how to craft a statement, and so she makes a joke about Sky News and the BBC and how she should’ve appreciated traditional American news media when she was still back home, and that cracks him open wide, a prideful man, unable to resist the temptation of competitive praise.

“Dad, Karolina is the Head of PR for Fashion Week,” Shiv says. “Both seasons.”

“Oh?” Logan hums, narrowing his gaze onto Karolina. “They’re working with an agency in the States?”

“No,” Karolina says, gripping the base of her wine glass. “I was previously working with Condé Nast and developed some professional relationships in Europe. One of my previous clients is on the board here, and they had an open position. Lucky timing, maybe.”

She tries to smile at Logan, but his personal demeanor is unflinching. Still, she doesn’t falter.

“Well,” he says, as if that’s that, “It’s good they’re letting women lead these days.”

Karolina sneaks a glance at Shiv, who’s trying to stifle a laugh into her drink as her father continues. It’s a performative politeness, Karolina can tell, but, hey, at least he’s being nice, right?

“You know, I always told Shiv she ought to aim higher,” he says. “It will be good for her to be around a professional.”

“Uh-huh. Sure, Dad,” Shiv says, rolling her eyes.

“And Shiv?” he says. “What are you up to?”

He sounds curious at best, but there’s an edge to his voice, and Shiv certainly doesn’t seem to like the sound of it. Karolina still wonders if for some reason, Shiv purposefully poked the bear.

“You know,” she waves her hand flippantly, “Meetings with different contacts. Keeping my options open.”

Karolina waits for a cue to jump in, to put out the fire that’s surely building in front of her, but Shiv looks determined to keep it under her control.

“And the Washington situation?” he asks, and for a second, it’s as if Karolina isn’t there at all. An intruding third party, eavesdropping as Shiv shifts in her seat, yet still taking the scene in, watching the way Shiv purses her lips and staunchly avoids looking in Karolina’s direction.

“It’s handled,” Shiv says stiffly.

Logan eyes her and Shiv meets his gaze with an unflinching sort of conviction, until Logan nods to himself and suddenly, like he’d cast some spell to lift a dark curse, the table feels light again. He looks at Karolina with a very easy smile, and she suddenly understands where Shiv gets it from, her ability to just switch. To hit some button and transform herself into whatever the situation has called for.

“How do you two know each other?” Logan asks, and Karolina scrambles, because she realizes she has no idea what Shiv had told him.

“Um—through a mutual friend,” Shiv says. “You remember Lisa Arthur, right? She heard we were both in Paris and said we should connect.”

Connect is a good word for it, Karolina thinks.

“Uh-huh,” he says to Shiv, then turning to Karolina gain, “This one staying out of trouble?”

She can’t miss the frantic eyes Shiv throws her as he asks, but it’s a no-brainer.

“Oh, I’m afraid she’s nothing but trouble, sir,” Karolina says, and there’s a slight pause before Logan’s laughing, and Shiv nervously joins in with a slightly relieved laugh of her own, meanwhile Karolina’s just thanking God she wore black so that nobody can see the sweat dripping down her spine.

“This restaurant was a good choice, Siobhan,” Logan says to Shiv, and Karolina can’t be certain, but it seems to her like they’ve won Logan over for the night.

  —

  They’re lying in bed, separated by mere inches, but Karolina can feel the ghost of Shiv’s breath on her bare shoulder. She’s closer than she usually is, and Karolina pushes her luck. It’s not something she likes to test very often, and she doesn’t think the universe looks down kindly on those who take more than their fill, but she can’t but feel like the universe has often given her more than her fill. So, she’ll take, just this once.

“The Washington situation,” Karolina says out loud, “is that about—why you’re taking a break?”

Shiv is quiet, but Karolina’s still keeping the windows open at night, so the room is a little cold, but the moonlight is shining through just enough to illuminate them in the darkness. She can see Shiv’s eyelashes batting as they both lay awake.

“Yeah,” Shiv says. “But it’s nothing. Just a—a low-hanging fruit. Dad shouldn’t have brought it up in front of you.”

Karolina swallows thickly. She has a million more questions that she won’t ask, because that was her push. That’s all the luck she’ll test for tonight.

“Okay,” she says, turning onto her back. “Consider it forgotten.”

Shiv doesn’t respond to that, and it’s quiet for a moment until Karolina hears her voice again.

“When we first met, you asked if my parents named me after a knife,” she says into the darkness.

“I did,” Karolina mutters. She remembers thinking the name Shiv more closely resembled a comic book character than a socialite. Siobhan made a lot more sense. Siobhan Roy made the most sense.

“My dad named me,’ Shiv says. “I don’t think my mom really had a say.”

Karolina tries to check-in to the mental game that she and Shiv always seem to be playing. The reading between lines, the talking in circles, and she thinks maybe she can tell what Shiv is trying to get at. That in some, fucked up way, Shiv’s dad is important to her. Regardless of what Karolina knows, or thinks she knows. Shiv gives a little, so Karolina gives a little as well, because despite whatever Shiv thinks, or thinks she knows, she and Karolina are seeming more alike than not every day that passes.

“My dad always hated my name,” Karolina admits. She breathes out deeply, not having thought about it in a long time, the way it seemed like he’d spit her name every time he had to say it. Like he couldn’t get it out of his mouth fast enough.

“Why?” Shiv asks.

Why. Karolina sighs softly, pondering the same question she’s asked herself so many times before. There’s really only one answer that she ever came down to.

“Maybe because it was mine.”

Shiv doesn’t say anything, but Karolina can feel the bed shake and the sheets rustle, and she realizes that Shiv is moving closer to her, fitting her head in the crook between Karolina’s shoulder and her neck, and wrapping a hesitant arm across her torso. Karolina immediately meets Shiv’s hand with her own, because she doesn’t want Shiv to feel unwelcome in her space for any longer than the half a second of hesitancy Karolina feels as Shiv nestles in, and she feels a special kind of calm wash over her as they both settle into the contact.

When Karolina wakes up, Shiv is still there.

  —

  “What do you think the artist is trying to say?”

Shiv is leaning down, talking lowly into Karolina’s ear. She says it in a teasing tone, clearly making fun of the pretentiousness of it all. They’re at an art gallery opening, another event Karolina’s gained the privilege of attending through her client connections. It’s above her social league, that much is apparent, but Shiv had seemed interested when Karolina mentioned it in passing, and so Karolina RSVP’d herself and a plus one, the thought of Shiv willingly joining her as a date too good to pass up.

Karolina eyes the painting. It’s a minimalist gallery, certainly not Karolina’s favorite for deciphering beyond what would look good on her walls, but she attempts to humor Shiv. The piece they’re in front of is a fully blacked-out canvas with a series of neon orange circles taking up the space inside. She imagines someone who likes this style of art might have something to say about the crispness of the circles or the contrast of the colors, and she thinks the technique must have something to do with why the painting has a charitable price tag of over four hundred thousand, but even still, she actually finds the nature of it pleasing.

“I like this one,” she says. “Something about the way the colors are presented, it’s nice.”

“Sure, it looks nice,” Shiv says, still looking unimpressed. “But it just seems too easy. I’m pretty sure this is what Roman used to make before eating the mac and cheese colored crayon when he was eight.”

Karolina fights against the urge to ask Shiv why her brother was still eating crayons at age eight, and she just marvels at Shiv’s relaxed state, no regard for whether the artist could be lurking behind her, or whether a gallery investor could be in the sea bodies in front of them. She doesn’t have a care in the world, and it’s like Shiv seems to revel in the discomfort of it all. Karolina’s come to realize that Shiv can walk into a room and immediately decide whether the people within it are worth her time, and the moment she walked in, she decided this gallery was bogus and that switch flipped in Shiv. She’s walking around with her hand on the small of Karolina’s back, whispering insulting quips about the guests and the artwork every so often. There’s a mischievous giddiness to her, an American heiress in a room full of French people who have no idea who she is.

“Does it have to prove something?” Karolina asks, turning to Shiv. “To be worth looking at?”

Shiv seems slightly taken by the question, but then she raises her eyebrows, the emotion only fleeting.

“I didn’t take you for a connoisseur,” she says, and then she looks at the painting again. “I guess you’re right.”

Her eyes glaze over the painting, and Karolina wonders if it’s actually doing its job, making her feel. Shiv seems to be someone who is always trying to prove her worth, as if that’s something that needs to be proven at all. Shiv squeezes Karolina’s hand and tells her that she’ll be right back, and Karolina doesn’t have to wonder why the painting suddenly made Shiv so upset, because it’s not about the painting at all. Shiv just needs another fix.

So, Karolina holds Shiv’s champagne and tries to undo the knot in her stomach, but it only grows with every tormenting second that Shiv takes, and Karolina hates that this is a condition of their affair. Hates that she’s just supposed to pretend this is normal, and hates that she feels powerless in stopping it. Shiv eventually comes back from the bathroom with watering eyes that she knows there’s no use in trying to hide anymore, and Karolina meets those eyes with angered ones of her own that she really tries her best to hide, but can’t, because they were having a good night, and now they’re not.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Karolina ends up saying, because it’s true and she means it, but Shiv doesn’t get mad. She just shrugs her shoulders and gazes at the painting again.

“I wish I wouldn’t either.”

  ––

  When they get back to Karolina’s apartment, shoes kicked off and bodies tentatively heading for the bedroom, Karolina waits for an okay that never comes. Shiv’s sitting on Karolina’s bed and Karolina’s lingering in the doorway, and they come to a standstill, Karolina like she’s waiting for permission and Shiv like she’s waiting for an order. Karolina leans against the doorframe as she eyes Shiv. She looks smaller in the yellow light of the room, patiently waiting for Karolina to take the lead. She’d been silent in the car back, and Karolina suddenly worries that Shiv thinks she’s upset with her.

Which, maybe Karolina is, but not in the way that should worry Shiv.

“Want to watch a movie?” Karolina asks, cocking her head slightly. She doesn’t let herself react to Shiv’s surprise, or the hesitancy with which she looks back at Karolina, doesn’t dare give Shiv a reason to believe that Karolina wants anything more than what she’s asking for.

“You’re, um—you’d be fine with that?” she asks. She sounds like she’s waiting for the other shoe to drop, like she’s holding her breath because Karolina’s testing her and it wasn’t an exam that she’d had the time to study for; but it’s not a test. Karolina doesn’t need a headboard apology, she just wishes she knew the magic formula to making sure Shiv never has to do anything that she doesn’t want to do, even if that’s despite herself.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Karolina asks.

Shiv looks away, trying to hide the way the question hits her, and Karolina elects to ignore it, grabbing the remote and climbing into her bed, far from the end where Shiv is sitting. When Shiv looks back at her, Karolina holds out the remote as if to say, your pick, and after a moment of hesitation, Shiv grabs it. She scrolls through the options for a while, pausing on a few enlightening selections before absolutely blowing Karolina’s mind with what she does choose.

“Practical Magic?” Karolina asks.

“What,” Shiv snorts, “Karolina Novotney isn’t into Practical Magic?”

She has to feign offense at that, because her DVD collection (currently most likely covered in layers and layers of dust in her storage unit back home) would be highly insulted by the thought.

“I am,” she says. “I just didn’t think you would be.”

“I guess I’m full of surprises,” Shiv says, smiling sweetly.

“You just have the hots for Sandra Bullock,” Karolina says.

“Something tells me you have the hots for Nicole Kidman,” Shiv says, twirling a lock of her hair. “Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Shut up,” Karolina says, and she crosses her arms, because fine, maybe she’s always had the hots for Nicole Kidman in Practical Magic. Shiv and her frustratingly beautiful red hair don’t have to have anything to do with it.

She looks over to Shiv and it takes about two seconds before they both burst into laughter, and the tension is broken as Karolina reaches out for Shiv and pulls her into her chest. Shiv collapses into her willingly, and the ever-present graveness of everything feels a little bit lighter.

It can only last for so long though, and it’s not until the credits are rolling and the evil boyfriend is long-dead and they’re just lying there, Karolina running her fingers through Shiv’s hair while thinking way too much about why Shiv would’ve chosen this movie, that Shiv takes charge of the conversation.

“You know when you said that the Eiffel Tower—that it’s so big the rest of the city pales in comparison?”

That feels so long ago now, almost a few months of Shiv filling up Karolina’s mind since that night.

“Yeah,” Karolina says. “I remember.”

“Do you think that can happen to people?” Shiv asks, voice peaking. Karolina looks down, but all she can see is the top of her head and her wringing hands.

“Maybe,” Karolina says. Because people can become consumed by things and never return. They can get chewed up or swallowed whole and be spit out all the same, and it can define them, the thing that took them. But that wouldn’t happen to Shiv. There are already pages and pages of things Karolina can say about Shiv that have nothing to do with the thing that consumes her. Karolina doesn’t even know what that thing is, and it’s then she realizes that there’s something paradoxical to it, because how can Shiv become overshadowed by something that she won’t let exist?

Still, if it did come to light, Karolina doesn’t believe it could tower her. Not when she knows how bright Shiv’s presence is, “But not to you.”

“How can you know that?” she asks.

“Because I’ve seen you in front of the skyline, Shiv,” Karolina says. “All I could see was you.”

She can feel her heart pounding, and she knows Shiv must feel it too, the rhythmic beating vicious from inside her ribcage, but she finds that she doesn’t care. If Shiv doesn’t know how she feels at this point, then it’s a lost cause anyway. Shiv doesn’t immediately respond, and when she does, it’s not what Karolina is expecting.

“I’m sorry that I’m such a mess,” she says, and Karolina’s erratic heartbeat turns to something more like aching, because Shiv actually does sound sorry. Sorry that this is her life, sorry that she’s dragged Karolina into it, sorry that she can’t feel the same way Karolina feels about her.

“You’re just hurting,” Karolina says, and Shiv stills, because Karolina knows it’s not something she was supposed to know, not something she was supposed to figure out, but she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to look at Shiv and not figure it out. Even still, Shiv hasn’t let it consume her. She stands tall among the wreckage.

“Maybe,” Shiv eventually says, confirming weeks of observation in just one word.

  —

  Sometimes, Karolina really just wishes everyone in the world would do her a favor and keel over.

“I don’t care what we have to promise them,” she says, holding up a finger to an expectant Shiv, fresh coffee in hand. “Just put whatever they want in the scope and we’ll deal with it, okay?”

The employee on the other end agrees, some Junior Manager named Jacques—as if it couldn’t get any more fucking French—and she hangs up as fast as she can, setting her phone down roughly onto her kitchen counter.

“Jesus—fucking, Christ,” she huffs sharply, leaning her hands on the counter. She knows setbacks are par for the course in an event like this, but they’ve been dealing with absurd requests from talent and vendors all week, and there’s only so much that she actually has the time to make happen. Not to mention that it’s a Sunday, and she can’t remember a single moment in the last ninety-six hours that she wasn’t either sleeping or putting out a fucking fire.

She takes a deep breath, trying to evaporate the ugly adrenaline of anger that’s forced its way into her system, and then she feels a weight against her back and two arms snaking their way around her torso.

“If only this was London Fashion Week,” Shiv says lightly. “Then you could just call them all wankers and get on with your weekend.”

“I don’t like cursing at my employees,” Karolina says, ignoring the joke.

“Okay,” Shiv says, drawing out the word. “Then how about you just ignore them for an hour so that doesn’t end up happening?”

Shiv squeezes at Karolina’s side a little bit, a reminder that she’s still here, that human life beyond client scopes and emails.

“I have to take care of a few more things,” Karolina says, trying to escape Shiv’s grip.

“It’s nine in the morning on a Sunday,” Shiv says, lightly fighting against her. Karolina gives up, not that she’d been trying very hard anyway, and she turns around, leaning against the counter. Shiv quirks an eyebrow. “I think they’ll survive until ten.”

Karolina isn’t sure that’s so true, since they clearly couldn’t survive until nine, but she relents, leaning forward into Shiv’s chest with a sort of purposeful reluctancy, not all that dissimilar from the way Shiv likes to act when she’s pretending she doesn’t want Karolina around. She wonders if they’re less of a match and more of a reflection, constantly catching each other in the act with nonjudgmental eyes but consequential curiosity all the same.

Shiv brings her arms up higher, swallowing Karolina in her embrace, and for a moment, she lets herself imagine that this is real. That she’s back home and it’s a time in her life where she still knows the Bodega guy’s name and she still keeps cat treats in her purse for the tabby that lives in the pasta aisle at her supermarket, and she hasn’t chosen capitalism over love. She imagines a Shiv that doesn’t scare her, one whose face isn’t so chiseled, and hands aren’t so unsteady, whose cheeks still carry the same, sweet pink but whose eyes don’t look so constantly at odds. One that she met in a way she could tell her mother about—a mix-up at the dry cleaners or a small talk at the crowded DMV—so the dull throb of shame for never having brought home a man might hurt a little less. She wonders if there’s a world where she can have that again. Where she can have Shiv in a way that doesn’t feel like everything is always seconds away from total destruction.

She wraps her arms around Shiv as well, and briefly wonders what would happen if she just never let go.

“You okay?” Shiv asks.

Karolina doesn’t know if there’s a right answer. Things have never been better, but there’s still an emptiness. What are you supposed to do when you think you might be falling in love with someone who doesn’t even seem to understand what love actually is? Karolina’s no expert either, but she knows enough to understand that Shiv’s experience is obscured, and she knows enough to understand that Karolina’s absolutely fucked.

“There’s just a lot going on,” Karolina says, and she tries not to let it sound how she means it, which is that work is a lot, and Karolina’s life is a lot, and Shiv is a lot. She can feel Shiv’s nails lightly graze her back as her hand curls slightly into the fabric of Karolina’s shirt.

“Is it too much?” Shiv asks, and Karolina knows they’re not talking about her job anymore.

“No,” Karolina says. “I’ll handle it.”

Because she will. She’ll get the vendors the extra two partners they’ve requested even though the pre-parties start in five days, and she’ll find twenty extra park benches (that certainly don’t exist) to splatter their logos across even though they’ve never needed that many park-bench signs before because, really, pigeons don’t go to fucking Fashion Week, and if in the middle of all of it, Shiv calls her in the middle of the night skiing down a slippery slope and too drunk to realize that the bed she’s asking for is in Karolina’s apartment, she’ll be there. She’ll handle it.

“You know you don’t have to be perfect around me,” Shiv then says. “You’ve eaten my shit, right?”

And Karolina guesses that she has. That she’s shown up for Shiv night after night and Shiv just wants to return the favor. Because in some sense, Karolina is asking Shiv to trust her. To let down her defenses and believe that Shiv won’t chase her away just because things aren’t currently built for a white picket fence, and Shiv is asking Karolina to do the same. To trust her, just a little bit, to handle some of the hard stuff. Karolina isn’t so sure that the Shiv she knows has that ability, isn’t sure she’d pull the lever on the trolley if it were coming straight for her, but she knows that Shiv must exist somewhere, that at some point she had to, so Karolina gives it to her. Gives her the reigns for just a singular thirty seconds, an inconsequential test trial that can’t result in bodily harm or sudden death.

“Fine,” Karolina says, maybe with a little more attitude than she’d wanted, but Shiv wants to be trusted with the real her, and sometimes the real Karolina is snippy. Shiv’s hand relaxes and Karolina focuses on the pressure of Shiv’s fingers on her body, and it does feel good, letting Shiv be the bigger person.

“I have to run some errands,” Shiv says, grip not loosening, “so, why don’t you go answer those emails and curse out whoever you need to, and I’ll be back with lunch?”

Karolina bites her tongue, not wanting to ask what those errands are, because she’s pretty certain it has something to do with the low stash she saw when Shiv asked Karolina to grab her phone from her purse the night before, and she just nods into Shiv’s chest. Lets Shiv feel like she’s doing something right for once, because in a way, she is, and then she lets Shiv go, trusting her to come back in one piece.

(She only ends up cursing out one person.)

  —

  Karolina continues to pretend. She pretends like Shiv agreeing to be her plus one to the week of events doesn’t make her heart skip a little, and like when Shiv texts her and asks what jewelry Karolina will be wearing to make sure their metals don’t clash it doesn’t feel more romantic than anything else she’s ever experienced before, and that when Shiv is standing next to her, hand on the small of her back, strategizing about all of the ways to maximize the business potential in the room because Karolina still doesn’t have her next job lined up rather than grumbling about the snobby rich people and begging her to leave early, it doesn’t somewhat feel like maybe they’re the two most powerful women in the room. That maybe, she’s met her match.

It’s a double-edged sword though, and Karolina can’t pretend that Shiv’s mood doesn’t shift at the end of each night. That the second the lock clicks in either of their apartments she’s taking off her earrings with a rigid spine and pensive eyes and Karolina can’t ignore what that means, can’t stand the thought of Shiv just playing along to make her happy. So, Karolina pushes again, hoping that it won’t be too much.

Shiv’s standing in front of the mirror, switching out her necklace for her everyday chain.

“You’re beautiful,” Karolina says, hovering in the doorway. She smiles as Shiv meets her gaze through the mirror, and Shiv gives her a small smile of her own, before changing out her earrings. Karolina walks into the bedroom, stopping in between Shiv and the bed, still looking at Shiv through the mirror.

“You know, you really don’t have to keep going to these events,” Karolina says, sitting on the bed, “if you’re tired of the charade.”

Shiv meets her eyes through the mirror and Karolina can see the moment she turns herself back on, as if she’d forgotten was a machine supposed to be willing and able for any bidding.

“I don’t mind,” Shiv says, closing her jewelry boxes. She turns away from the mirror and when she faces Karolina, she’s replaced her face again, this time with something distracting. She moves forward, not stopping until she’s leaning into Karolina, one hand placed precariously over Karolina’s chest. “Besides, it’s kind of hot when you get all, oui m’dame, to your boss.”

Karolina nearly takes the bait, wants to thank Shiv for sticking by her side in the best way she knows how, but it gives her pause, because that’s what it’s about, is it? Karolina doesn’t want Shiv to come just because it’s going to win her points. She wants Shiv to come because she wants to be there,

“Hey, wait—” Karolina says, lightly pushing Shiv back. “I just—I don’t want you to feel obligated, you know? I’m not going to be mad if you want a night off.”

Karolina thinks she’s struck a nerve at the way Shiv’s lips twitch just a little and her eyebrows dig a little deeper into her forehead. She’s touched a sore spot that perhaps had been lingering all along. She wonders about the TK of it all and worries that maybe she has gone too far, but Shiv’s face returns to neutrality almost as quickly as it’d left, and Karolina thinks the attempts at hiding her uncertainty would work if she just didn’t know Shiv better by now.

“I’ll tell you if I don’t want to be there,” Shiv says, brushing Karolina’s stray bang away from her face. “Yeah?”

Karolina wants to take the sentence at face value, but she’s not so sure she can trust that from Shiv. She wants to, but can she?

“Will you?” she asks, and she searches Shiv’s eyes. Shiv stares back, likely going through all the things she can say to dissuade Karolina from the image of Shiv she’s built up in her mind, but it’s no use, Karolina knows who Shiv is, and Shiv knows that. Still, it doesn’t change anything. Shiv nods, and Karolina has to believe her.

“Believe it or not, I sort of enjoy the company,” Shiv says, a small smile returning to her, and Karolina knows that’s her cue to drop it. Knows that’s all Shiv will give her, a promise of honesty that they both know she’s not intent on keeping.

“Sort of?” Karolina says, leaning back expectantly.

“Well,” Shiv says, following her movements, “Maybe a little more than sort of.”

Karolina doesn’t stop her this time, letting Shiv give what she wants to give, and although she can’t shake the feeling that the tender hands and the roaming lips are supposed to be more like compensation than they are desire, she still accepts them, and when they’re finished Shiv lays Karolina’s arms and she remembers that it wasn’t so long ago that Shiv couldn’t even bear to touch her afterward.

“Shiv?” Karolina says, and a quiet, “Hm?” reverberates on her chest. Karolina presses a featherlight kiss into Shiv’s hair and Shiv just burrows herself deeper into Karolina. Karolina imagines this is real.

“I like the company, too.”

  —

  “I’m going to have to go back to New York soon,” Karolina says. Her eyes are half closed, enjoying the warming weather on her balcony as Shiv smokes a cigarette. Their hands are loosely connected, Shiv dragging her thumb lightly across Karolina’s palm. The runways have started, and Karolina’s job is almost complete. Things are slowing down for her, just wrap up meetings and after-action reports.

“Why?” Shiv asks.

“Because it’s where I live,” Karolina jokes, but neither of them laughs.

“Do you know when?” Shiv asks.

“A few weeks,” Karolina says. She opens her eyes, squinting at Shiv in the sun. Shiv taps her cigarette harshly over the ashtray.

“Can you stay longer?” Shiv asks, quietly, and Karolina frowns, because Shiv never asks for anything, not out loud at least, and if she did, Karolina can’t think of anything she wouldn’t do. But this is something she has no control over. Something she can’t deliver on.

“My visa is going to expire,” Karolina says. “They need to kick me out so the next group of tourists can come in and be disappointed by French espresso.”

She fights again to find some amusement on Shiv’s face, but she finds nothing even close to it. Shiv looks away from her then, but her grip on Karolina’s hand becomes tighter.

“I hadn’t realized how long it’s been,” she says.

Karolina hadn’t either. Months of entanglement, from a chance meeting in a random club to this.

“Just because I’m leaving—” Karolina says, “—this doesn’t have to end.”

She watches Shiv’s face for even a hint of what she’s thinking, but Shiv just stares out into the view in front of them, a couple of rooftops that have their own inhabitants enjoying the freak warm weather. Karolina wonders if things for them always feel this grave as well, or if they’ve reached a point in life where everything’s stopped being so dire. She really thought she’d be there by now.

“That’s a pretty long distance,” Shiv eventually says, and Karolina puts down her book and reaches over to grab Shiv’s arm, lightly grazing her thumb across it.

“It doesn’t have to be,” she says.

Shiv looks at her and then looks away again, sighing.

“I’m not going back.”

“Why not?” Karolina asks. Shiv’s bouncing a leg now, and Karolina knows they’re getting into dangerous territory, but they both need to know what’s going to happen after this. Karolina doesn’t know if she’d survive the cold turkey, and Shiv might act like she can, but Karolina doesn’t want to find out whether or not that’s true.

Shiv takes another sharp drag of her cigarette and her eyebrows furrow.

“I can’t,” she admits. Shiv says it like even the thought threatens to break her, but Karolina wonders if it’s too late for that. That despite her best efforts, Shiv is already long shattered.

“What are you afraid will happen?” Karolina asks, her voice calm.

“I don’t know,” Shiv says. “There’s nothing left for me there.”

Karolina knows why Shiv would say that. That her family legacy and the big fancy parties and the distant father who favors her overbearing brothers aren’t anything she’d want to go back for. That whatever happened in Washington carved a wound so deep that she needs uppers to get out of bed and downers to slow her heart enough to get into it, and that it’s easier to ignore and forget than to remember and let go. But Karolina still doesn’t think there’s nothing for Shiv there.

“I’m not nothing,” Karolina says, and Shiv finally looks over again. Karolina thinks she can see a twinge of pink over Shiv’s nose, a little extra glossiness in her eyes, and it’s a gut-wrenching thought, the idea that Shiv is fighting a battle in her mind that she won’t let Karolina into. She’s throwing her own body in front of the archers as if that’ll save either of them from destruction when in reality, it’s the thing that hurts them the most.

“No,” Shiv says. “You’re not.”

Karolina hates seeing Shiv feel so alone, especially when she’s right next to her, touching her, existing with her. She thinks Shiv feels her emotions like she’s the only person on the planet who has ever had them, and Karolina wishes she were more tactful, because anything Shiv is feeling, Karolina’s certain she’s felt before.

“I don’t really have anything to go back to either,” she says, and Shiv immediately shakes her head.

“You have a great life,” Shiv argues, as if it’s supposed to mean that Shiv doesn’t, as if it’s supposed to mean that Shiv is dragging her down, somehow, and Karolina wants to laugh. Her life has become hollow. Hollow work for a shallow industry, distant friends that she doesn’t check up on enough, too many lost lovers to count with the most recent feeling like her culminating failure. She considers that maybe she’s just been hollow from birth, and she wonders if Shiv can feel that shared between them, that absence that can linger in a child forever if parents aren’t careful enough.

She realizes then, that maybe it isn’t about tact at all. If she wants Shiv to give, then she has to continue to give as well.

“I chose Paris over my relationship,” Karolina admits. “Before I left, she gave me an ultimatum—and I chose the job. Nine years, gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Shiv says, and it sounds like she means it. Karolina shrugs, hands still linked with Shiv’s.

“I’m just saying, I don’t have a life to go back to,” Karolina says. “I’m starting over.”

Shiv seems to get that message, the idea that they could start over together, and she roughly wipes at her face, Karolina assuming it to be a tear that she can’t see from where she’s sitting.

“Why’d she give you an ultimatum?” Shiv asks, ignoring the sentiment.

“She thought I loved my career more than I loved her,” Karolina says.

“Did you?”

Karolina will never forget when Vic asked point blank, “Do you?” and Karolina hesitated. She hesitated, and that was it. In that split second, they could both fill in the blank.

“Maybe,” Karolina says instead. “Or, maybe in the end I just wanted to love her more than I actually did.”

She hates the way remembering makes her feel so cold, how instead of comforting each other through the end, Vic had just told her to get out, and she did. She left without a fight. She just gave up.

“Love is fucked anyway,” Shiv says, but Karolina stills, unsure if that’s true. She decides to bite, praying that it doesn’t send Shiv away.

“Were you—you and TK, were you in love?” she asks nervously.

Shiv drops their hands at the mention of the codeword, and she crosses her arms, folding into herself. For a second, Karolina thinks Shiv isn’t going to give her an answer, but she’s surprised when Shiv does.

“I thought we were,” Shiv admits. “But when he—”

She cuts herself off, and Karolina just waits for Shiv to fill the silence again.

“The way it ended,” Shiv eventually says. “It didn’t feel like love.”

Karolina doesn’t let her mind wander. She’s silent as she tries to come up with something to say that doesn’t feel like she ripped it out of a get well soon card in the pharmacy, but then Shiv steals a glance at her, a very quick one, and her voice rings out again.

“What do you think love should feel like?” she asks.

Karolina looks at Shiv, carrying more pain than she’ll ever truly know, yet here she is, being honest with Karolina. Asking her the big questions, letting herself be vulnerable with someone new, and Karolina realizes that maybe she has done something right for once. That love and trust and a career and happiness might not be as far out of reach as she’d thought. She closes her eyes and faces the sun again, letting her body soak up the warmth.

“Maybe like whatever this is.”

  —

  Shiv won’t say it, but Karolina knows they’re exclusive. Knows that Shiv considers Karolina hers and that if Karolina strayed, Shiv would care. That if Karolina left, Shiv would care. That Shiv cares. She also knows it’s too soon for Shiv. That old wounds aren’t yet old, and that she still can’t trust Karolina not to accidentally rip them open, that Shiv just needs time. They both know that they’re running out of time.

What Shiv doesn’t know, is that Karolina is prepared to wait.

  —

  Sometimes, it feels like Karolina is still catching up. Things go well for so long that she forgets exponential growth can stutter and stagnate and sometimes even fall, despite her efforts, despite how much she wills for things to be smooth and perfect. But even in stagnation, there are lessons learned, there are things that change and that still constitutes growth, right?

Shiv calling her panicked and breathless at two in the morning and asking if she can please just come over is horrifying and heartbreaking but also very different than a Shiv who a few months ago couldn’t even hold Karolina’s hand, right?

When she gets there, it’s not quite the scene she’d been expecting. Shiv’s call had her fearing the worst, but the apartment is calm and clean, and she can’t quite figure out what the issue is until she finds Shiv, curled up on the couch, an American news channel on her TV. Shaking hands carry her nail beds to her teeth, and her slightly angered face is partially hidden by the way she has her knees pulled into her chest, listening intently to the soft hum of the television. Karolina’s eyes travel towards the TV; on it is a special report, some greasy bastard with enough pomade in his hair to supply an entire class of pre-tween boys who’ve just discovered the world of manscaping and shifty eyes that look like the secrets he’s sitting on could take his entire campaign down in one fell swoop taking up the screen, and Karolina thinks she puts the final puzzle piece together.

She sets her bag down and walks over to Shiv with cautious legs, cautious arms, and a cautious mouth, and she sits down on the couch, listening to the report. It’s a fluff piece about an after-school meal program in DC.

“Did you work on that initiative?” Karolina tries asking.

Shiv doesn’t move, the only sign that she even heard Karolina’s question being her cheeks sucking in as she shifts her jaw, and her eyes drop from the TV, as if she can’t speak while looking at him.

“Uh—” she sniffs, and digs a hand into her hair for a second before her hand rubs harshly on the back of her neck, “yeah.”

Karolina nods, steeling herself before asking her next question.

“Is that him?”

The silence is suffocating. If she couldn’t see the tight rise and fall of Shiv’s chest, she wouldn’t be sure she was even breathing at all, and Shiv’s face immediately twists, as if the question itself was the last straw in her ability to hold back the tears. She watches as Shiv fights against the instinct to blink, fights against the instinct to let herself cry, to fall apart and to let Karolina see this, and eventually, something gives, because Shiv may be great at pretending, but she’s not superhuman.

She blinks and the tears run down her face slowly, and then, so slightly that Karolina would’ve missed it if Shiv weren’t the entire center of her world currently, Shiv nods.

Karolina releases a deep breath and steals another glance at this man’s smug face, still not even knowing exactly what he’d done, but feeling a familiar rage course through her system. It’s one she keeps on reserve, one she doesn’t often pull out because it’s so red-hot that it feels like she can’t come back from it. The kind she’d used the first time she stood up to her father. It’s then that Karolina notices the small ATN on the corner of the screen, and she knows that if she were anywhere else but alone in an apartment with Shiv, she’d allow the anger to be blinding; but for now she’ll just have to let it be sadness, and protection, and reassurance, and whatever else Shiv could possibly need from her right now.

She doesn’t think she can stomach the sight of him any longer, and doesn’t think Shiv can either, so she grabs the remote and that’s what finally springs Shiv into action, latching onto Karolina’s arm as if it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.

“Wait—” Shiv says, and her eyes tear away from the remote and back to the TV, then to Karolina, and they’re full of such a timid desperation that Karolina wishes she could just open Shiv up and find the faulty wiring, wipe whatever horrible memories seem to be trapping her in this moment and just fucking fix it, but she can’t. What she can do is get this prick’s shadow out of Shiv’s living room before it does consume her. Before it swallows Shiv whole in a way that she feels like she can’t come back from.

Karolina gently brings her hand over where Shiv’s is still latched onto her arm, biting the inside of her cheek when Shiv jumps at the touch, but she doesn’t stop, just guiding Shiv’s fingers to uncurl and then she connects their hands together. She holds on tightly, rubbing her thumb across the top of Shiv’s hand.

“I’m going to turn it off,” Karolina says softly. “Okay?”

She waits for Shiv to react, not daring to break the eye contact Shiv is maintaining until eventually, Shiv is the one to break it, and she nods; hesitantly, but she nods. Karolina immediately turns it off, cutting off his arrogant voice in the middle of some sentence about education reform and the thought of him makes her feel sick, the theatrics of this pedestal he’s posing on when she can see Shiv right in front of her, the consequences of his pedestal in her peripheral, touching her hand. The consequences are real, not some bullshit bill that he’s only getting passed as some sort of mutually beneficial hush deal.

She turns to watch Shiv closely, waiting for any sign of what her next move should be. She doesn’t let go of Shiv’s hand and Shiv doesn’t make a move to let go either, and Karolina is almost ready to speak up again when what little is left of Shiv’s resolve cracks fully open, and Shiv drops her head into her free hand, letting it all out as if this is the first time she’s allowed herself to feel the depth of her emotions since this whole thing had started. Karolina takes deep breaths herself, not wanting to get swept away in her own emotions, and she rests her free hand on Shiv’s back, waiting for any sign that Shiv might not want the contact. Shiv doesn’t react, and Karolina wonders if Shiv even remembers she’s there.

She doesn’t know what to say to even begin trying to make it better, and she feels entirely out of her depth. She just resorts to being there, because Shiv had asked for her, and if this is what Shiv needs, then fuck, Karolina would sit here for months. The French police will have to drag her out of the country kicking before she leaves Shiv, that’s for damn sure.

She draws the same pattern over and over across Shiv’s back until eventually, Shiv leans down, laying her head across Karolina’s lap. As she does so, the tears lessen some, not quite all-encompassing but still burdensome, nonetheless. Karolina is surprised when Shiv speaks, her voice gruff and guarded, and Karolina knows just from the sound alone that she would give anything to take away an ounce of the pain.

“I thought coming here would make things better,” Shiv says. “Like maybe the distance would stop it from feeling like so much.”

“Treating the symptom,” Karolina says, moving her hand to play with Shiv’s hair. Shiv doesn’t say anything to that, and Karolina takes the turn to speak again, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Shiv sighs, her breath shaky.

“He just really hurt me,” Shiv says, her voice cracking slightly, and it’s so simple that it makes Karolina want to scream. She can feel the sting of tears in her own eyes, and she blinks them away. There’s no complexity to it. He hurt her bad enough that she raced to an entirely different continent to numb her days with booze and blow, in a country where she barely speaks the language and nobody would ever notice her, to whittle herself into nothing. To carve herself hollow with sex and drugs until there’d be nothing left to take from her. Nothing left to lose.

Karolina’s fingers move towards Shiv’s hairline, both her and Shiv stilling when she brushes against the scar she’d asked about what feels like so long ago now.

“Did he do that?” she asks, though she isn’t sure she wants the answer. At first, she doesn’t think she’s going to get another one, every question she asks feeling like a deeper hole that she and Shiv might not come out of unscathed, but she has to try, and it seems Shiv does as well.

“The handle of a kitchen cabinet,” Shiv says, clearing her throat. “He said he opened it too fast. That he forgot I was there.”

Karolina hates how clinical the answer is. He said it was an accident. He didn’t see me. He said. He said. He said.

“Is that when you left?” Karolina asks, and she doesn’t want to ask it, doesn’t want the confirmation of whether or not it’s the last scar, if it’s not the only scar—somehow worse if it’s the only visible scar— but it doesn’t look new. It looks old and angry and most of all, it looks sad.

“Uh—no, that was…it was the first time,” Shiv says. “I guess I believed him, or—or, I wanted to, maybe…”

“It’s confusing,” Karolina jumps in. “When you love someone, and they do that.”

“Yeah,” Shiv whispers.

Karolina removes her hand from Shiv’s hair and drapes her arm over Shiv. She’s trying to figure out what her next move should be when Shiv’s fingers run along the surgical scar on her forearm. She remembers she decided to start sharing more. That she owed it to Shiv if she expected the same from her.

“Do you remember when I told you about that?” Karolina asks, and Shiv nods.

“Motorcycle accident,” Shiv says.

Karolina nods even though Shiv can’t see her, and she eyes the scar, less faded than it should be for something almost twenty years old.

“When I broke it, I had to get surgery—a plate and seven screws,” Karolina says. “After it healed, my father, he’d um—grab my arm in that spot. Never hard enough for it to hurt, but just hard enough so that we could both feel the screws under my skin. I don’t know if he even remembered they were there the first time, but every time after that, it was with purpose, you know?”

Shiv grazes the scar again, as if she’s afraid to touch it.

“He wanted to remind you,” Shiv says. “Of your weakness.”

“Yeah,” Karolina says grimly. Not that she needed reminding, and not like she didn’t continue to test him anyway.

“Are they still in there?” Shiv asks. “The screws?”

“No,” Karolina says. “I had them removed once I could afford it. That’s why the scar hasn’t faded so much.”

It was a day of freedom. Something tangible that she could rip out of her body and be rid of, but she knows Shiv doesn’t have that same luxury.

“TK—” Shiv says, even though Karolina knows his name now, “When we got back from the hospital—he told me it was a good thing I wouldn’t be the one on TV, and he held that over me, every time we got into an argument in public or somewhere he couldn’t—somewhere he didn’t have power he’d find a way to say it. And now, every time I look in the mirror he’s just fucking there. He’s always there.”

Shiv’s voice cracks again and Karolina just holds her tighter.

“It’ll fade, Shiv,” Karolina says, because there isn’t anything else Karolina can assure her of.

“I just wish I could erase him,” Shiv says. “Pretend none of this fucking happened.”

Karolina won’t pretend like she knows everything, but she thinks she knows this one thing. She’s banked her entire life on it being true.

“He’ll fade too,” Karolina says. “It won’t always feel like this.”

Shiv just grabs Karolina’s arm and holds it close to her chest, and as Karolina feels Shiv’s heart beat fiercely into her bones, she knows she is telling the truth. She listens to Shiv’s quiet breaths, and looks around the living room, the sweat from the early morning dew on the windows making the glow of the room much warmer than it currently feels. It’s a big apartment, too big for one person, and she doesn’t know how she’s going to leave Shiv in a week. She doesn’t know that she can. Even still, this is bigger than her.

“Shiv?” Karolina asks, hesitantly.

“Yeah?” her small voice croaks out.

“I think––I think maybe you should see someone,” Karolina says, and she can’t stop her own voice from cracking as the words come out. “You can come back with me, and we’ll find someplace private in the city, or maybe somewhere upstate and I––you know, I wouldn’t be that far, then.”

Shiv’s response comes in the form of the smallest, most defeated sound that Karolina thinks she has ever heard, a quiet, “Okay,” with an affliction that Karolina hopes she’ll never have to experience come out of Shiv again.

“Okay,” she whispers back.

“Will you stay tonight?” Shiv asks, and Karolina just runs her free hand soothingly through Shiv’s hair once more.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

[theravenmuse]

Guide for content warnings on fics

Robust content warnings are something that I take very seriously as a dark content creator. I’ve had many many compliments on my tagging and content warnings so I thought I’d give a few tips.

First, I’d like to mention content warnings (CWs) vs trigger warnings (TWs).

Functionally, these serve very similar purposes, but they have different connotations. Listing trigger warnings would indicate that everything on that list is a potential trigger, as in something that could cause severe emotional distress and or/or a medical episode. Content warnings have a milder connotation, which also means they can be more indicative of what a work actually contains. These things may be potential trigger warnings, but they may also indicate types of content that just doesn’t appeal to everyone.

An example of a content warning might be knotting from omegaverse. That’s not likely to trigger most people, but it may be content that certain people want to avoid. It may also be content that other people look for.

Another example of a content warning might be CNC (consensual non-consent, typically as in role play). This content absolutely can be triggering for some people, but again, it may be content that other people seek out.

I choose to label my warning list as content warnings rather than trigger warnings both because it’s less work for me to try and determine if content is triggering enough to include and because it helps alleviate some of the “I like things on the trigger warning list” guilt that some people may have in seeing one of their kinks listed.

When I list my content warnings on AO3, I try to include everything in the tags in the most effective way for people to both filter out and filter in that content. A lot of this comes from looking at how others tag their works as well as my own personal practice in tagging.

I also list my content warnings in the beginning authors notes on my fics. Sometimes these are listed only on the first chapter and sometimes I will divide up content warnings and place them on the relevant chapters. When I list these out in the notes, I try to give more information than I give in the tags, to let people better decide if this is content that they are interested in and can safely engage in.

An example. This is the tagging and CWing from Fire in His Veins, my ongoing sex venom fic.

Major Archive Warnings: Graphic depictions of violence, non-con

Tags: Dead dove: do not eat, sex venom, sex pollen, forced orgasm, made to watch, torture, sexual torture, explicit sexual content, orgasm denial, kidnapping, Aziraphale rescues Crowley, BAMF Aziraphale, Aziraphale loves Crowley, Crowley loves Aziraphale, Lucifer loves no one and is loved by no one, post almost apocalypse, eventual happy ending, sort of

CWs (from the author’s note): DEAD DOVE; Non-con between both Crowley/Lucifer and Crowley/Aziraphale; non-con sexual acts both before and during the effects of the sex venom; Aziraphale is forced to watch Lucifer rape Crowley; sex venom causes unwanted sexual desires; Lucifer both forces and denies Crowley's orgasms at different times; non-consensual sexual torture which may include things like bondage, whipping/hitting, edging, and psychological elements (I have not written all of these scenes yet so can't give details at this point); Lucifer kidnaps Crowley and takes him down to Hell. This fic DOES end with both Aziraphale and Crowley safe and as happy as they can be after going through this.

You can see how I include everything in the tags in my lengthier CW, in case someone who skims missed something, and also expand on certain things to explain them better. For example, I clarify that the non-con tag is applicable to both Lucicrow and Aziracrow. This is something that you might assume only applied to Lucicrow if you were left with only the tagging, and something that might turn this work from a yes to a no for some people. I also explain the “happy ending, sort of” tags, another thing that many people factor in when deciding if a fic with this type of dark content is one they want to read.

Ultimately, my goal as a dark content creator is to have readily available all of the information needed for someone to determine if my work is safe for them. I am not alone in this. The creators and consumers of dark content are the loudest proponents for thorough content warnings, and that’s because we want people to be safe.

[inukag-on-ao3]

Plight or Pledge

by Timetravellingpaperbag

UPDATE! CHAPTER 20 NOW AVAILABLE HERE!

Rating: Explicit Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Categories: F/M

Fandoms: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale

Relationships: Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha

Characters: InuYasha (InuYasha), Higurashi Kagome, Kikyou (InuYasha), Sango (InuYasha), Miroku (InuYasha), plus 2 more

Additional Tags: inukag - Freeform, Romance, Drama, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, plus 2 more

Summary: Nominated for Best Drama - 2023 Term 3 Inuyasha Fandom Awards via FeudalConnection on Tumblr! TW/CW: This story contains depictions of attempted non/con and non/con scenarios. This story contains violence and explicit sexual content. (chapters will contain header warnings) All characters depicted in this fic are 18+

Words: 45,398 | Chapters: 20/20 | Language: English | Private: No

[fairyysoup]

sever the blight

series masterlist

two separate stories, two separate reader inserts, one overarching universe

pairing(s): werewolf!steve harrington x fem!aristocrat!reader; werewolf!eddie munson x fem!milkmaid!reader

summary: The wolves in the woods beyond Havensfield are said to be more than wolves. It's in your best interest not to cross their path; unless, of course, they want to cross yours.

cw: explicit, smut, monsterfucking!!!, loss of virginity, graphic depictions of violence, blood, gore, minor character death, animal death, horror elements, dark themes, historical au, fairy tale au, some sort of historical fantasy period, idk which one you tell me, forbidden romance, mutual pining, possessive behavior, misogynistic views on sex and marriage, animalistic behavior, marking, scenting, knotting, breeding kink, werewolf transformation, werewolf bites, again the boys are werewolves the reader is fucking a werewolf and all that entails, dead dove: do not eat

please check individual parts for content warnings before reading. this fic contains dark themes. your media consumption is your own responsibility.

ALL MY WORKS ARE 18+ MINORS DNI

SEVER THE BLIGHT (STEVE'S VERSION)

IT WILL COME BACK (EDDIE'S VERSION)

part one

part two

part three

[fmaoldficarchive]

Ratings & Warnings

Navigation | Ratings & Warnings | Welcome Post | Find a Fic | Submit a Fic (tba)

When viewing fics on this blog, you might notice something strange - some fics have two different ratings listed, one in regular print and one in bold italics. And those with a single rating may have a word like 'accurate' or brief descriptions written alongside them. So what gives?

This blog uses a 'secondary rating' system. It roughly follows ao3's format, which is most familiar to readers today, modified to be a bit more detailed. It's made to help navigate old fanfics across many fansites which may or may not comply with a modern reader's understanding of ratings and content warnings.

The original, author-given ratings and warnings are given first in plain text, to the right of which I add, in bold italics, either an agreement that the fic meets it's modern-equivelant rating, or an annotation explaining what I believe the modern expectation would be and to an extant why (avoiding spoilers where I can). In addition, I add warnings and tags where necessary which people can block as needed

Ratings

What's acceptable by order of: swearing, horniness, violence, deaths, gore, torture and sexual violence topics General Audiences - Up to: mild swearing, romance without or with very little horniness, mild violence/fight scenes, offscreen deaths, no reference to gore, torture or sexual violence (everything that doesn't check any additional boxes below goes here) Teen - Up to: swearing, horniness without excessive details, violence, onscreen deaths, minimal gore, reference of topics such as torture and sexual violence without graphic details or visuals (for example - an 03 fic in which Rose's assault is mentioned but not explicitly described or flashed back to would get a teen rating) Mature - Up to: swearing, non-detailed smut and excessive horniness, graphic violence, onscreen deaths, gore and mild body horror, topics such as torture and sexual violence with limited graphic details (basically if Dante herself was a rating) Explicit - Up to and beyond: swearing, graphic or detailed smut, graphic violence, onscreen deaths, graphic gore and/or body horror, topics such as torture and sexual violence may be explicitly shown (where you can find both your royai pwp 150,000+ word count post canon kink meme megafic and your lizard envy mpreg BDSM mindbreak flowershop au at the same watering hole)

Warnings

I have added additional warnings to the original four offered by ao3 to aid you in dodging your squicks:

(aka a list of tags to block if you don't like something. Filter liberally and rejoice)

Graphic Depictions of Violence - self explanitory, graphically depicted violence. #graphic violence Incest - Save yourself the trouble of blocking every varient of Ed/Al, Ed/Hohenheim, Trisha/Al, etc. Just block #cw incest Major Character Death - the one tag I'm mostly leaving alone, what constitutes a 'Major Character' is nebulous and largely up to individuals to decide. #major character death is for fic whose authors specifically tag it, when or where else it's used will be based on my discretion or by request.

Medical tags:

| Emetophobia - so you don't have to miss out on all the other good sickfics just because you don't like vomiting: #cw nausea and vomiting

| Miscarriage and/or Abortion - Largely in relation to fics about Izumi, tags are #cw abortion, #cw miscarriage or #cw miscarriage and/or abortion to block fics containing either

| Pregnancy and/or Childbirth - #cw pregnancy and #cw childbirth respectively

Rape/Noncon tags:

|#cw noncon refers to depictions of sexual assault.

|#cw implied noncon covers the discussion or reference to noncon, without it's direct or explicit depiction, which may be triggering to some people more than others. (Like the ratings example: There is a difference between 03 Rose discussing what has happened to her and it being shown 'onscreen')

|#cw medical noncon is for graphic depictions of forced medical and or alchemical procedures and/or experimentation (such as the chimeras' creation).

Smut - Only interested in the violent side of the mature/explicit sections? Block this tag. #smut Underage - Instead of needing to block every ship tag associated with this, block this one instead #cw underage. This tag currently applies to underage age gap ships of all ratings (e. g. Royed gen fluff will still be tagged underage if Ed isn't an adult for it) and sexual fics in which both characters in the ship are underage (e. g. a Ling/Lan Fan smutfic will get the warning, but a fic about them kissing will not). Although you'll still need to block individual ships if you don't like them aged up either.

Fics posted prior to Jan 1st 2025 will be updated to match this soon and this notice removed.

You can suggest additional tags or edits in the comments or reblogs and I'll consider adding them :D

[thetentaclecommander]

The Devil's Slumber

TDS: Prologue (part 2 of the Devil's Saga) I'm gonna just post the first chapter of already compleated parts of the series and when I get to the ongoing parts (OaDWs, Domesticity and Ghandon's Reports) will link chapter by chapter. ________________________________________________

((Header Pic for the series done by Lil-Chilo)) The Devil's Slumber Rated M; has adult/heavy themes Fandom: Resident Evil Main Ship: Nemesis/Jill Valentine Chapters: 9/9

CW: has early impled rape in first chapter, graphic depictions of violence, unhealthy relationships (implied growing codependency), psychological trauma, implied medical torture, implied/referenced torture, attempted rape/non con (full tag list on AO3) Summary: "all sin arises from love – either perverted love directed towards others' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered love of good things"

The second arc in the Devil's Saga.

Based off of Dante's Purgatorio.

An AU fic set a year after the events of RE5. This fic is like what Capcom did with the story lines of RE2/3: this and Teaching piggy back off each other taking place at the same time. It is Nemesis' take on his time with BSAA but with a twist - it explores the realm of his dreams and memories.

Events from the immediate, to events in RE3 (lightly re-imagined), to further in his past are brought to light showing where his thought process came about.

He is not written to be a hero or well-liked (he was created for the express purpose of killing after all): he'll have his moments ranging from the tragic to the more unforgivable. But in the end, the parallels will become more and more clearer as the fic progresses on.

This fic will explore darker themes and topics: it will basically not shy away from nor sugar coat the violent or suggestive situations within. ________________________________________________ Excerpt from TDS: Prologue- Like a caduceus, fates twine and twine again unable to disentangle, unable to separate and live without the other. The two could only snarl at each other, their fates forcing them into this painful embrace. Over and over again.

Tyranny of the worst kind. ………………………………………………………………………………………………

The White Room looms; a stark white cage filled with only the most dangerous of prisoners. The one who currently sat within was no exception. If anything this one wasn't wanted wasn't accepted – the room was it powerful enough to cage him? He has been in various cages before, many of concrete, of glass, of drugs, of mind – all of them with a layer of gilding to distract from the truth of their purpose to contain.  But the White Room was the most gilded of all. For it not only contained his body but the mind. The White Room was the gilding, a pretty location that made him feel he had a place. The room was a shell of what truly contained him; like the parasite that roamed in the shell of a Tyrant, the White Room wasn't his true cage.  She was. Jailer, owner, tyrant.  And he could do nothing but rail against it. Nothing but fight and fail each time. Fight and flee into dreams. Unlike the other cages he lived, sat in, this jail did not require prodding, or violence, or examination. It just required him. And her. And this made it all the more uncomfortable. Do monsters sleep?

He twisted on the too small cot, still awake, still staring up at the wall. His eye wandered to the door, the only way out and into his small white prison. Her scent came through the padded door; he knew she was there. But what use is to run over there when in the end she's still out of reach?  Out of reach in mind and body. Not that it should matter. It shouldn't. Eventually, he'll have the strength to tear this toy off of him. Eventually… But her scent, it's so cloying, so close. He could taste her. He tossed again facing back to the wall. He shouldn't want her like this. Killing a pig is the only option. Humans deserve no more, no less. Too weak, unworthy. This one, this one doesn't command, shouldn't command…This lone female actively fights him. He should hate this. He should. He should be the master, not the dog. Then how come I… like it? (Continue reading the prologue of The Devil's Slumber on A03)