#dark continent of our bodies

[1800titz]

ᴋɪɴᴋᴛᴏʙᴇʀ — ʟᴇᴀᴛʜᴇʀ/ᴍᴀꜱᴋ ᴋɪɴᴋ

KISS ME | Stalker!Harry x Reader, purge au

You left him with a taste of you lingering between his teeth, after the first time. With his appetite, it’s only fair he comes back for seconds.

★18+

I don't know what possesses me to write a psycho sicko every time the pumpkins start rolling out onto the doorsteps (see Hitchhikerry) but there is simply something in the air, I fear. This is ᴋɪꜱꜱ ᴍᴇ for the KINKTOBER projects.

PLEASE read the warnings, and please put yourself and your comfort first and foremost. Consume only what you’re comfortable consuming. This one is not intended to be read as a love story, and has sensitive topics, dark themes, and *dubious consent.

If you enjoy this, consider checking out my patreon masterlist, constantly being updated, with loads of exclusive content. If you would like to see the other KINKTOBER projects and join the taglist for upcoming projects, do so here.

CONTENT/WARNINGS: dubcon. stalking. sexual assault. coping with sexual assault. under negotiated kink. unsafe sex (no use of condom, no negotiation prior). manipulation. mask kink. leather kink. daddy kink. breeding kink. p-in-v. oral (m to f). general manhandling.

WC: 12.3K

As always, Harry is just a faceclaim.

Spring is bleeding out onto the tarmac. 

Gold and liserian and bluebonnet. Midnight and cherry-red massacre, seeping into the gutter grate with the sky glowing like a peachring. 

Spring is bleeding out onto the tarmac. It’s unstilted, and smells like rust, and kerosene, and Summer feels a hundred miles away. A thousand, like sunrise on the twenty-second, milliseconds seeping like sand through a clogged hourglass. Like someone wedged their sticky fingers in through the top and stuck a piece of gum to the narrowed opening.

The miasma, even days later, when waste management hordes the lily-white cadavers into semi’s and street sweepers come out to pressure wash the asphalt, burns your nose like you’re huffing acid. 

And it feels like God cupping his hands around the continent and squeezing every ugly, brutish thing out. You wonder if the blood seeping between the asphalt slates sticks to the grooves of his palms. His fingerprints, casting massacre into the pitch sky, smudging asterisms together. You’re supposed to feel the holy spirit. 

(Feel it— don’t you feel it?) 

At the back of your tongue, in every empty room, like a nebulous haze of goodwill and unconditional love. When you were a kid, you wondered why feeling God didn’t make your skin itchy. It would, right? If the body of Christ stalled at your nape, looming over your shoulder. You were raised catholic, so it still lingers and sticks to the nook of your periphery like an oilslick, no matter how hard you knuckle at your eyes. 

You wonder if it’s that same holy spirit they’re tasting in the heme when they cough, supine on the sidewalk. If it’s God’s liquid love, righteous across every capillary, with the swing of a sword. A forefinger on a trigger. 

That’s what they say, anyways. Last Tuesday the blonde lady on Fox news said it was always God in our veins on the night of the holy purge— feel God (transubstantiation like a distant, muffled folklore ringing in your ears) cleanse your soul. Fox news always starts to lean on epistemic justification in Spring, and you wonder if people believe God is scrubbing them from the inside with a bathbrush. You wonder if they really even believe in God, anyways, when it’s all just a mangled apparatus for population control. 

(But God wants them to kill the poor people, right?)

Last spring, a man broke into your apartment. 

Charcoal bulk. Tapered obsidian. Wide shoulders, wide arms, wide, herculean thighs, in all black. Slate denim. Battered leather jacket. Those massive hands, coated in pure-nightfall leather. You remember them well, because you thought they resembled the thick, sheepskin gloves your grandfather would wear out in the snow—

Nothing besides black on him, besides the cruel arsenic white of a plastic doll mask stretched over his balaclava. Like those ugly, inexpressive porcelain things you’d find stacked up in antique stores. Your gaze lingered on the delirious scripture across the forehead. Kiss me.

He slunk in while you were in the bathroom. Cracked in your front door. You discovered a crater in the shape of his kneecap, days later, when you replaced the broken locks.

You found him on your couch like a stygian king, thighs split, like he belonged in your tiny living room in all his ominous, leathery heft, and for a second, you just stalled at the threshold with your heart at the base of your throat. Eyes wide. In stagnant impasse with this absurdly nonchalant intruder. Between a beleaguered rock and a hard place. He’d cocked his head at you. Dead silent, and your hindbrain prickled with parity of a slasher film clip— the kind you’d peep over your blanket, folded up to your nose with shaking hands, after bedtime. You weren’t allowed to watch the movie, at the time. But you always remembered that scene where the indifference rolled off the killer in lapping, tidal waves before he’d strike and carve a character open. 

Something scratched at your hindbrain. Some hysterical thread, clinging to the falsehood that this was a rancid illusion. A nightmare, limned in butter-yellow off the lamp on the side table. His dirty boots kicked up on your coffee table. Inkblots in the plastic cut-outs of the eye sockets, glimmering like hungry nightfall. Because it was the purge, sure, but it wasn’t you. 

Never you. It couldn’t happen to you.

Hindsight humbles the untouchable, crooked complex you wore on your shoulders. Your head, with your chin held high, behind the glowing string-lights tucked across your blinds and the bleeding street under your balcony.

(You remember you thought God prickled at your nape that night. May God be with you— that’s what they say.)

(God was cold, and it made your skin itch. Maybe he would have been warm, and kind, and you would’ve felt the goodwill and unconditional love if you didn’t ask so many stupid questions in kidhood during bible camp. If you didn’t bury your bible into the bottom of your nightstand when you realized they were justifying their gnarled agenda with the pages.)

You felt sick—

And he told you he didn’t have any interest in killing you. A purr, muffled by layers of stitched cotton and plastic. No interest in all that. Wouldn’t wanna hurt a pretty thing like you. 

Like a sarky paradox to all the formidable space he was taking up, in all his horrifying gear. 

Kiss me.

An irony to the ichor thumb-smudge across his forehead. An irony, you thought, to God with a bathbrush, and the date, and the time, and the uncomfortable, imperfect squeeze of you into the bracket of wrong-place-wrong-time. In your own apartment.

Aren’t you gonna thank me, he hummed, on his feet now, from across the room. Stalemate. Rotten stasis. Deadlock, at his discretion, with you, shaking like a leaf under the archway. 

For protecting you? That’s what he said. 

(If you weren’t frozen in place with the leftovers you had for dinner curdling in your belly— eye to eye with a facsimile of the reaper— you would have snorted. It was just so absurdly ironic that it nearly made your ribs ache.) 

He was so big, you thought, when his shoulders climbed and his chest swelled, under the animal skin. So rigid. You wondered if he was all bulk like that, under the layers, or if the loose coat, and the gloves, and the daunting mien of a predator just made him seem that much larger. You’re not a small thing, but he made you feel as much. Like a dolly. A maquette— a perfect marionette to toss around between his hands on the perfect night, the perfect date on the calendar. 

Lotta bad men around, tonight.

The floorboard creaked under his weight. One step forward. The carpet bristled under your heel. 

Aren’t you gonna thank me for protecting you? 

(Kiss me.)

You remember how you went along. Easy. Didn’t say no.

And you could chalk it up to survival— pure, self-preservational instinct— and the gunfire looming outside your window. No. You remember the swell of panic, the riptide of adrenaline tearing you into a deluge of auto-pilot. Something seeped into the hairline fracture across the line between saving yourself— and your dignity, your pride. 

(Something ugly, and wrong, and so out of place. So warm in a room so bone-chilling.)

You thought you were broken. The two choices, unequivocally, were always fight or flight. 

(So which synapse misfired, that night, that kicked your gears into neither?)

You remember ugly things from that night. It felt like your ribs were being pried open, and he was picking you apart, pinching some raw and deep to pluck it out between leather fingers, until you were squirming in a pool of your own spilled volition. Like milk knocked over on the counter. Left to rot. Curdle.  

Because it didn’t hurt. He didn’t hurt you. 

And maybe that was worse. Because you were supposed to kick, and fight, and scream, and you— 

Didn’t. 

And maybe at first, it was a form of endurance. Survival sense— shutdown, like a generator on its last limb, preserving its own continuance. Just go along, just survive, just—

It’s easier, you think, in retrospect, to justify that. 

What’s harder is that you remember you thought you were broken because part of you, eventually, didn’t want to kick, or fight, or scream. 

(Go for the eyes— that’s what they say— and where would you go, in those inky craters, under the shadows? Like polynyas brimful of tar. You’d drown.) 

You remember the way he called himself daddy— come sit on Daddy’s cock, tell Daddy how good he feels— and you remember the visceral burgeon of disgust swelling in your belly. 

The way it made you revolted, and shuddery, and white-hot. 

Wanting. Slick. 

Because he’s not your daddy. Wasn’t. Isn’t.

You knew it for what it was. A gross game. Meant to debase your conation. This scary man in his scary mask on this, scary night, in your home, here to take something for himself. A flinder of your rib— a cracked piece of bone, here to tuck it into the inside of his coat. To watch your face crease with the juxtaposing blend of repulsion and want, rolling down your spine like rainwater off a downspout, as your cunt fluttered. 

He fucked you stupid on his cock again, and again, and again, until the sun was scraping at the land with its hot fingers, and the corners of your room were white and blue. Took what he wanted, because he decided he could. 

And that’s the game. The brutal nature of humanity crumbling under the weight of anarchy, and unrestricted autonomy, even if only for a night. Bereft morals. Selfish whims.

(And you took it. Just took it. Didn’t put up a fight, not when terror started lagging behind pleasure.)

He ate your cunt, too, just the way you liked. For hours, with the plastic mask tucked up like the balaclava, to the tip of his nose. The hard edge, and the cotton, pressing into your mons when he rolled your clit with his tongue, pressed the flats of his white teeth against it. You remember that. 

His nice, clean white teeth, and his pink lips. 

He must’ve been a pretty man under all the unnerving guise.

By the time the siren screeched at seven, you were strewn on your sheets like puddy across the sidewalk. All worn, and tired, and malleable, which he seemed to like. Panting, sweaty, tacky. Covered in him. The sticky, pearlescent mimesis, like memorabilia. Your pink underwear dangling out of his pocket like a perverted token to pin up onto his wall like a poster, after. His hard, leather fingerprints, blooming across your soft love handles, where he held your bones in place (but you didn’t need him to— not when you were so willing to placate and assuage and give). The chiaroscuro made your ribs rattle when you breathed deep. 

You stared at the popcorn ceiling when his belt buckle clinked. Slotted himself back together, into unobtainable nightfall against the backdrop of daytime. 

There’s a lot of things that stuck with you from that night. He didn’t hurt you, and your skin stayed sealed, but according to everyone, a part of you maybe-died, or that’s how you should feel, anyway. So, you wondered if that gangrenous part of you was severed off, bleeding out onto the carpet. Between the floorboards, staining the ceiling of the apartment on the floor under yours. A nebula of rust red across plaster.

(You thought it was severed, because at first you didn’t feel it. Anything. Nothing. Numb. Pinpricks across your psyche like your hand when you slept on it the wrong way. Maybe he cut it loose when you weren’t looking— when your lashes fluttered, smogged in the haze of yellow string lights, when your cheek kissed the mattress, and sex.)

You remember a lot of things that make your chest feel tight, like cotton unspooling in the crevices of your lungs, and your head feel waterlogged, and your knees brittle. But you remember he told you, before he left, that he’ll see you next year. 

I’ll see you next year, sweetheart.

Like a portent. It should’ve been. In a way, it felt like a reassurance, and you hate that pulpy part of yourself. 

And what can you do? 

You’re a statistic. 

The label feels wrong. Permanent. Like a bumper sticker stamped onto your forehead with gorilla glue. You’re lucky, they tell you, after. What a close call, when you swallow preventive abortion pills and shiver at your own reflection passing in the mirror. You think, maybe, your guardian angel blinked, somnolence searing at the backs of its eyes. Because, maybe, angels sleep, too. You don’t know. They didn’t teach that in church. 

You go to therapy. The woman in the big, sable chair gives you this look. Crinkled countenance pinched in pity. How pitiful, you’re reminded, and how lucky you are to only be scratched by a freight train. You’re not smattered pulp on the railroad tracks, but in the cruel cosm, you feel like jam dripping down God’s hands. 

You ask her if it’s fucked up that it felt good. 

She tells you it’s not. 

But then, you ask if it’s fucked up that a crackled fragment of you, maybe-sort-of-in-a-way, wouldn’t mind if it happened again.  

That’s a different question. 

Because you’ve been mulling that thought over between your teeth, in the hollow gaps between mortified, pale-faced solaces, I’m sorry’s, I’m-sorry-that-happened-to-you’s. It’s been festering, and feels like a chunk of you rotting under the sun. But maybe, if someone tells you that it’s okay—

If you had to do it over— you put it that way, like emphasizing a crease in a sheet of paper, and she gives you another, long, reticent look this time, instead of a response. 

(Because, maybe, putting it that way makes the insatiable itch in your arteries more relatable. Easier to swallow. Easier to tolerate. Maybe you sound like less of a freak, with the tumult.) 

Guilt for feeling pleasure is, apparently, very common, as indicated by the PDF she emails you that night to look over. Rape Victims and the False Sense of Guilt. 

Rape. The word rape, across the screen, makes you flinch. It’s such a small word in the sea of the text, only four Lilliputian letters. Teeny-tiny. But it feels big. Like a big deal— rape, that’s a big word. It’s razor sharp when it echoes behind your skull. It’s ugly, and it ends on a blunt, hard sound. No elasticity. No give. This unyielding, little word that shatters around you in its hideous, mangled phonetics— is that what happened to you?

You’re lucky. What a close call. I’m sorry that happened to you.

Pleasure is a natural, physical reaction. A bodily reaction. That’s what it says.

You can cope with that. Comprehend that. The rest is— loaded. Like an assault rifle, in spring. You don’t know how to peel the pieces apart. You never learned how to take apart a gun.

You know what a bodily reaction is. 

But nothing explains the chimera you chase after— the fantasy, when you’re plugged around two of your own fingers, weeks, months later, chasing the phantom ache. 

Liking masks is okay, but liking masks is only okay if there’s something preliminary about them. Liking to feel small and scared is okay, but only if there’s a safety net, and safewords, and you trust the other person, and know them like the pores across the back of your hand. A stranger isn’t allowed to make you feel this way. 

But liking this— thinking about this, with your head fuzzy and your skin simmering— is wrong. Bad. 

It’s okay, but you need to heal. Something bad happened to you, and you need to sweep your pieces into the dustpan before you start to put them back together. That’s what you read between the lines. It feels accusatory.

(Only, you don’t think you could mold them into the same form, if you tried. Stick them back into their rifted crevasses, when they’re jagged and misshapen.)

The things you feel are, by all definitions— according to the internet, and everyone around you— wrong. Ugly. Sick. You shouldn’t feel anything but nausea scraping at the back of your throat, pooling briny under your tongue, when you think about that night. About him. That’s what you find in the vats of their eyes when you tell people what happened, the stricken shape of their faces. Like you’re broken. Because you are broken. 

Some part of you has a big indigo bruise stretched across it, smarting something awful. Some part of you is fractured ceramic. 

You’re a statistic. A number. A sliver on a bar graph. It feels like throwing yourself headfirst over a rock face. Into a yawning abyss. You splinter upon contact with the water, but it doesn’t ripple around you. Just lets your dissevered pieces wade and buoy.

You don’t go back to therapy after the third time, and you spend all summer burying your esoteric predilections at the back of the shelf. Let them gather dust, because they’re shattered anyways, and you don’t know how to make any sense of the smashed fragmentations. They’re so jagged, they’ll cut the soft skin on your palms up if you cup them too close.

You move when your lease ends in the summer. Not really by choice, but the decision has the weight of all those ruckled, condolatory looks. Those I’m-sorry-that-happened-to-you’s, like flour-sacks across your shoulders. Your apartment still reeks like him. It’s a phantom musk, whispering along your lungs. Cigarettes, and leather, and tangy sweat (it almost feels like it belongs— not unpleasant, like the brine across Poseidon’s abdomen). It’s uncomfortable. You long for it. You’re imagining it, you know that. 

Your new apartment is clean. It smells like bleach, and it has all different locks, and the promise spills in cobwebs behind your skull. You try not to get tangled in them.

And everything tells you it’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong— everything. A churning, gut feeling, when you sign the new lease, when you roll around your sheets in the middle of the night with your hand between your tacky thighs. 

You feel like you’re breaking an unspoken rule. You’re supposed to heal. This isn’t healing.

You consider booking that out-of-country trip in March. Week-long, just to stifle the premonition under the heel of your palm. The omen, that was still dripping heady, clotting the air alongside the stifling sound of the zipper closing its teeth together. Crinkling leather when he buckled his belt.

Your mom gives you a call. Tells you to come out to Maine for the weekend. You shrug the invitation off with your phone cradled between your cheek and your shoulder, and your laundry between your fingers. I’m fine, mom. I’m—

Fine. Cataclysmically. Okay. Bleeding out onto the tarmac with every step, like the incipient springtide. 

You cup a posy of daffodils between your hands with wistfulness speckling across your chest. 

You used to love spring. In kidhood, before the heavy, inordinate burden of purge-nights spanned across your shoulders, spring had the delicacy of a flower. The warmth of sunshine beading across your skin. The naivety of pastels. A callow touch of rose-tint.

You always knew living alone had its risks. In an apartment, no less, flimsy and unsheltered by security shutters and the bulwarks of a standalone. A danger, like a yellow warning sign. It’s the same precarious footing that warrants your mother’s calls back to your hometown every spring. 

(The same reason she called you last year. And you— stupid, stupid— didn’t go.)

You don’t know how to excuse yourself this year. Lack of self-preservation? Stupid, callow hope? You don’t know what you’re hoping for. 

(What you’re feeding.)

Maybe it’s the way you’ve been dusting the shattered shards on the shelf. 

Anybody else in your position would be halfway across the continent, and you’re shutting down your flower shop and turning in for the night. Pretending (that you’re pretending) you’re inviolable, like that headspace didn’t get crushed under his thumb last year. The clock ticks on the wall. 

The man who comes up to the register has a bouquet in his hand. A sprig of carmine carnations that crinkles when he lays it flat onto the countertop. He’s tall. Broad. Pretty— the first thing you think of, upon impression, mapping out the ridges of his face, the even slope of his nose, the burnt umber curl that spills over his forehead. Wordless. He stares at you. 

Just stares. Not quite boring into you, but lingering, inkpools fixed. Indescribably. Unremitting.

There’s a familiarity in his gaze. Something that weaves across you in unspooling, crepuscular cobwebs, something that prickles. And eye-contact feels like a stalemate. A competition; who will give first? Your mettle splinters in hairline fractures. 

“Is this,” your smile is flimsy. Brittle. Eyes dipping to the flowers he’s laid out. “…all for you today?” 

He smells expensive. Like amber musk, but something sticks to his scent like an afterthought. A note, in undertow. 

Smoke.

Like he washed his hands, brushed his teeth, but couldn’t kick the odor off his clothes, lingering in the stitches.  

Emotions dredge up from the pit of your psyche like his presence is the metal head of a shovel. Cold leather. A hot touch. Things you’ve left numb for too long, oozing, electric, alive. Your fingers flex on the stems, and the plastic clicks under your hand when you stare down at it. You can’t look. 

“Mm.”

You feel flayed. Raw. Like you’re going to come apart into tatters in the middle of the store. In front of a customer. You cast your gaze up. He isn’t looking at you anymore. Hands buried in his pockets, eyes listing across the melange of flower assortments you’ve got on display behind the counter. And you feel—

Embarrassed. Silly. Your cheeks heat, your heart thundering at your throat. It’s silly. 

“Oh,” you breathe as you roll the bouquet between your hands. Key in the numerical series to the system, “I like these. They’re very pretty. …Looks like today, it’s going to be… twenty-six.”

For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. Nothing at all, doesn’t make any motion towards procuring a payment method, and that nagging sense of worry spirals between your brows when you cast your inkpools up to find him staring again. Under your hands. There’s a judder to them. You watch his hand reach into the front-pocket of his jeans, and cull a cashfold. He licks his fingers before he separates the cash, and hands it to you. 

Your fingers brush. You swallow. 

You hand his change over with your fingers twitching. 

“Happy purge,” he tells you. Suddenly.

Your smile wobbles. Creases. Curls back up into a proxy of a cheery mien you have the resolve to upkeep. “Happy purge.”

His fingertips drum across the counter. “And may our souls be cleansed.”

It sounds droll. Wry. Like he’s making a mockery of every piece of propaganda the news channel paints across your screen, a week-long affair in snippets before commencement. You swallow. 

“Up for anything tonight?”

The question shouldn’t nick between your ribs. Scrape into the soft place— you’ll get loads of customers that ask. That participate, affluent folk. Young people, with grease smeared across their smiles when they tell you that they’re excited to exercise their God-given right. 

You shake your head. “No— no. I don’t… partake.”

The silence that congeals between you is suffocating. Heavy. You feel your poise withering. Shrinking back into you, under the weight of his gaze. It’s an eerie stagnancy, and you feel like you’re sinking to the depths. 

“You’re,” you tell him, trying to smile, but it doesn’t meet your eyes this time, “…all set.”

His eyes roam. Openly. Lash across you in bounds, slow, detail-oriented. It’s odd. Makes you feel strange. Finally, they fix on your face. No doubt, creased with discomfort. 

“Stay safe tonight,” he tells you, before he turns, bouquet in hand. 

“Right. You— stay safe,” you rock forward on your heels. The bell over the door jingles. 

You’re broken, but you’re not stupid. You twist the locks when you get home. Double-check every window. Turn off every light that you aren’t using. 

The announcement comes across the TV when you’re in the shower, and by the time you come out, the emergency broadcast has morphed off into a rerun of Friends. You don’t know what to do with yourself. Tuck your knees to your chest and stare at the clock? Roll into the fetal position and pray? 

May God be with you. 

The gunfire outside begins during the credits. You can’t stomach the harrowing scream that seeps across from the street below, so you plug your ears with your headphones, and you blast music until you feel like your ears are bleeding. Hole up in your bedroom.

You can’t discern the feeling that clots in your chest when you come out to your living room, eventually, to find him on your couch. In eerie stillness. Terror? Relief? 

He notices you. Swells when he breathes, all heft, just like you remember. The burgeon of fear that prickles at your nape, making your hair stand on end, you find, clots beside something you’re unable to dissect. For a long second, the both of you just breathe. Observe. 

He breaks the silence. 

“…Come tell Daddy hello.”

Daddy. Daddy— the titular moniker makes you bristle, startling you out of your stupor like whiplash. What are you doing? What are you doing?

You stall by the bathroom door. This game of cat and mouse is precarious. You’ll lose— that fact is brassbound. Undeniable. You don’t know what you were expecting. Why you stayed. You’ve got the short end of the stick, always. And still, you contemplate, lingering with your hand on the doorknob. The stagnancy in biding your time feels like staring at a snake coiling beside your feet. Waiting for it to lash forward. 

You take a slow step forward. Another. He doesn’t make any moves towards you, doesn’t give any indication that he’s keen to sit up. Content with the view of your dread snowballing. Mushrooming. Hands resting across his lap, his tree-trunk thighs split apart. 

Waiting. Watching. 

You don’t expect it when he sits up, grunting, to wrap his hand across your forearm. Lug you forward, into the alcove between his thighs. The brush of leather across your bare skin makes chills erupt across your skin. Manhandling you, like puddy between his hands. You’re supposed to fight, you’re supposed to kick, you’re supposed to—

Scream. You exhale when he twists you and forces you to sit on his knee. You’re stupid. What you’re chasing isn’t healthy.

You think he’s going to ask why you moved. Silly girl. Didn’t think I’d find you?

He doesn’t. 

“Been a good girl?” he drawls, instead, chest swelling in your periphery. It feels mocking, despite the casualness of his tone— unsanded around the edges. The irony of the position has your teeth set, like you’re a child on Santa’s lap, and not a grown woman on his. A petrifying— 

Half-stranger. Almost.

The revelation is uncanny to the way you’re searing under your skin. And there’s a thin line, you think, between coercion, and the way your heart batters a little faster, the way you clench your fingers together to avoid squeezing your thighs.

You don’t say anything. It’s rhetoric, because he isn't finished. He cups your knee under his palm, the dark leather, and says, “Kept your pussy to yourself, mm?”

Not your hands. Not your hands. 

Your pussy. 

The undiluted vulgarity trickles down your nape, makes you flinch, and you fist your hands a little harder, until the crescents dig into your palms. It’s still just as nonchalant, even-toned. But it’s crude, and it makes your face hot. 

Like he owns that. Like you belong to him, in some way.

(And maybe, in some way, some part of you does. That piece of your rib he still has tucked into his pocket from last spring.)

Your heart is in your throat. You turn your cheek. Away. Just enough, but the hand that was on your knee presses against the side of your face. Two fingers, gloved, that pry your attention back onto him. It’s almost effortless. Feels like he’s using hardly any strength at all, has your chin snapping back, and the weight of two fingers, against that groove under your cheekbone, has an ache radiating up into your temple. He’s feeling the ridges of your teeth through your soft flesh. Wrenching his fingertips into the hollow rift between the two rows, and your breath ebs your lungs in soft pants, free falling the gap between your lips. The slick, gummy inside of your cheek twinges under the pressure.

You stare back, and—

You don’t know what you find. What you’re looking for. There’s a hunger in the plastic cut outs, glimmering in the tenebrose, like a predator shimmering in the distance of the thicket. One that’s spent all winter hibernating.

He digs his fingers in a little harder. Makes your head tilt with an ease that makes your head spin. The sound that leaks out of you is embarrassing. So unlike you. So small, and vulnerable, and raw. 

It reminds you of feeling like you were being carved open, like you were having those pieces pulled out of you. Those fragments that you’ve buried deep behind your ribs, all yours. Delicate chattels between his fingers like a thread that he’ll tug to unspool you to the core.

His thumb grazes the corner of your mouth. Your lower lip. Rests there, all leather. It smells like charred tobacco. Tar. 

“Yes,” you breathe. Appease. The word comes out tangled with a frantic note, an exhale, and sounds garbled off your liquified, molasses-heavy tongue. 

Maintaining eye contact is difficult. Intense. Feels like wading a knee-deep morass with how treacly it makes your head feel, but it’s impossible to look away. With the angle he has your head, you feel snared into an unspoken standoff. Feels like you’re caught in a springe he’s laid out. You, with your rabbiting heart, and your ankle caught in a noose. And him—

Those deep-seated inkpools glimmer from the underbrush. 

“Is that right?”

It’s like a car crash, you think, stuck in limbo. A beatific maelstrom of metal scraping on metal. The beautiful, horrifying view, in the split-second of collision. Time in stasis. Slow motion.

You can’t look away.

He stops pressing to rap the pads against your cheekbone, instead, and the thump that echoes in your skull almost sounds hollow. Loud in your ears. The pang lingers in your jaw, like a dull ache, across your upper teeth, the inside of your cheek. 

There’s a split second there, where that bilious feeling slinks into your stomach and coils up, stretching between your lungs. That sick you find, buried under the galvanized cobwebs spooling your sense of self-preservation, like a haze of little, electric gossamers across your synapses. The incipience of a wave of nausea, softly lapping, at the thought that all of this, everything, is premeditated, and the gnarled root of it all sinks so much deeper than you’d ever expect. 

That he’ll know— knows— that you brought another man home last fall. 

It was stupid. A one off, scraped off a bar stool on a Saturday night after one too many whiskey sours, and the sex wasn’t even any good. You don’t remember it. 

But your head feels syrupy. You don’t know what’s worse: this burgeoning fear that you’ve disappointed him with— what? Free will? Autonomy? 

Or the slick ooze of the bone-juddering revelation that settles; he’s probably been watching you. Keeping tabs. 

(How else did he know where you moved? How to pin you under the pad of his thumb with such startling ease? You’re a thumbtack on a paper map, and a petrified part of you wonders if he’s got it— a chart of your whereabouts, your existence snared into a creased sheet— dangling next to the panties from last spring.)

If he knows about your liaison, he doesn’t indicate it. Opting to, instead, graze the shape of your lips with his thumb again, and push in to scrape the flats of your teeth with the leather. It’s gross. Feels strange— leather against the smooth inside of your lips, and when you breathe around it, you feel like you’re spinning out, headfirst, hurtling toward the ground. Something you don’t want to acknowledge rolls over, white-hot, in the pit of your tummy. 

“That’s good,” he settles on, and palms your breast so abruptly that it makes your lungs squeeze. Your throat clicks when you swallow. 

It feels so mechanical. Calculating. Collected. Nonchalantly purposeful— nothing gradual, no build up— like he’s here to reap and take, intent on what he’s looking for. But it’s all a startling, unnatural paradox, considering you were left so overly-satiated last spring, that you almost felt like a mindless shell of yourself. Entirely sapped. The enigma left your head clogged up and heavy for days. Weeks. Months. Your lashes flutter, dusting unfitting bliss across your cheeks like the speckling heat. Like pleasure is bulky, and rounded, and doesn’t fit into the jagged slot your anticipation has chiseled. 

He squeezes the doughy flesh in his hand, and scuffs your pebbling nipple with a side-swipe of his thumb. Then, the other. Long, thick fingers spanning, and coasting across your diaphragm, climbing your waist, the chiseled, swelling rungs of your ribcage, cupping under one of your tits again. He only stops at the soft sound that crawls out of your windpipe. Eyes flickering at the reedy, wanton whine that gushes through the seal of your teeth. The self-awareness makes you wither into yourself. Shrinking. Ecstasy feels like an agrestal parasite, mushrooming between your nerves. Budding in that slope under your navel.

(Wrong, wrong, wrong— a broken mechanism, misfiring. Grinding. Your eroded mettle squealing under the pressure.)

You can hear him breathing. He sounds like an animal. A panting beast. Feral. Untamed, wild, huffs stifled by ribbed cotton and matte plastic. He notches a nipple between his thumb and forefinger, and pinches it. Tugs. A gust of your desperate breath escapes through that barren dearth between your teeth when he palms you by the front of your neck and pushes you against the back of the couch. 

It’s sloppy. Clumsy, an awkward angle from where you were on his lap— your limbs flail before you topple, and it requires more core strength on your part than you anticipate to sink back, but it isn’t violent. Aggressive. The coarse denim on his thigh abrades your naked skin when he twists to hover over you. Cushion denting under the weight of his knee. Your neck cranes back as he pins you to the back of the couch by the column of your throat. Head tipped back, nearly dangling over, neck straining. He looms over you.

Just—

Staring. Staring. You stare back and wonder if he feels your pulse hammering with the layer of the leather barricade between skin kissing skin. Like this, the mask is limned in shadows from the slant, and the crepuscular orifices under the plastic are even harder to make out. Harder to gauge. You want to gauge. You want to see—

You won’t have the upper hand. You know that, but prying for the threadbare margin of a hint, a motive, a reaction, feels like digging your fingers in for a last-ditch lifeline. 

His eyes are half-mast. Dark lashes spanned over the glint in pitch, mounted in white. You can’t see what he’s thinking. Can’t—

He reels forward, back hunched, leather jacket crinkling, and you feel the plastic mask tucked to your cheekbone. Your temple. Your hair. He reeks like santalum. Petrichor— the first rain spilling onto the pavement, scrubbing the bloodshed off into the grates— and the overwhelming scent of leather that clots in your nose. His mask scrapes your ear. He sniffs.

And you think, a little hysterically, that he’s smelling you. The recognition prickles in your skull, and climbs up your nape in a shiver. And it feels so— 

Animalistic. Primal. Indelicate. Like any sense of decorum flaking off and shedding like desquamate feathers, and it makes you feel so small. A frisson rides the ledges of your spine. Something shudders across his shoulders. Rattles them— you clock it in your periphery, stunned into subservience with your fingers twisting into the couch cushion. 

He sighs. Hums. Like he’s vibrating over you, buzzing, and the thought has that skein across your lungs tightening. The sound that seeps out of him is brassy. Low. Hungry. And the likeness that scrapes at your hindbrain, through the plume of reluctance and crushing desire, nearly makes you feel delirious— it almost sounds like a dog whining. Like he’s been holding himself back, and your scent is too much, chips an integral shard out of his flinty resolve. 

You don’t know why, but it makes you squirm. Makes your chest roll under him, hips shifting. Your eyes oscillate. Stutter from the ceiling fan to the corner of the room, because he’s smelling you and sounds like he’s falling apart. 

Your throat jumps under his hand. He drums his fingertip under your jaw, and it feels like the tick of a clock. He reels back. Slowly. Tipped over you, huffing with his head cocked. Almost panting. This harrowing monster, quivering in his skin, in all his heft, like he wants to eat you alive. Swallow you whole. His eyes slip. The feather-dust of his lashes kisses the pink-rimmed seam of his lower lashline, and he takes a deep breath, intumescent across the breadth of his shoulders. 

You swallow again, your throat still under his hand. The heel of his palm glued to your trachea. Your jaw arched back, under the press of his fingers. His eyes list. Stall across the apex of your denuded thighs, and the brief blip of pressure across your jaw, your throat, the fleeting restriction on your airway when he levels his weight and resituates, has your irises lolling and tainted gossamers stretching in sticky netting behind your skull. His freehand skates your abdomen. Prods your diaphragm, leather fingers grazing your belly button, the hem of your sleep shirt. Rucking it up. 

The boundary between arm-twisting and downright craving is negligible. It’s a foundation, under you— a poor excuse of a half-wall— crackled in fissures. When your hips hitch at the way he circles your navel, in a way, it feels like crumbled free will. Your own autonomy worn down and corroded by the chemistry spuming your veins (you tell yourself it’s artificial. A lethal injection of dopamine and melanocortin), because it feels like the hunger is pried out of you. Pulled out, tangled on his crooking fingertips. 

(And what do you have to say for yourself, when you need him like you need to eat.)

Your hips cant when he strokes his fingers over your waistband, across the sensitive, soft stretch of skin over your mons. You can still hear him breathing over the bloodrush, like spindrift, across the little, vibrating bones, deep in your ear. He sniffs, gaze pinned to the shape of your quivering thighs (juddering knees, swelling tummy)—

He knocks your legs apart with his thigh, until the plush of them spills around the shape of him. All broad, all muscle, all denim against your smooth skin, and he wrenches one of your thighs up with his fingers under your knee. Presses you back by the shin, with your sole planted on the couch cushion, and—

Like this, he has the perfect view. The perfect shape of your cunt, through your panties. They’re white this year. So unassuming, just a plain bikini-cut in ivory, but you wonder if he’s weighing the way they’ll look beside the other pair, like a sordid tchotchke. 

His eyes linger on it. You can’t see his inkpools, but they feel molten. Heady. Predatorial, and the shockwave riding the slanting arches of your ribcage makes it harder to take in a full breath. Lagoons spilling heat. They surge the soft shapes of your body like lavascapes, melting across your skin. 

You’re wet. You know that— feel the damp heat like you feel the want droning across your bones, lacing your muscles. And the sloppy, saturated shape of your dribbling pussy, behind the thin veil of a gusset, is no exception. You curl your toes. Dig them into the couch cushion. The carpet. Dangling onto the fragility of your self-possession (unraveling), and then he probes, with the tip of his index, right where your clit sits. A meager tap.

Your arousal is a tangible wad in your gut, and he plays with it between his fingers.

Desperation climbs to the base of your throat at an alarming rate. Echoes in your jugular as a thrum when his eyes sway between your face and the shape of your cunt. The shape of it under the entirety of his palm, swallowing you whole, between your legs, when he pastes his hand there. And he can’t feel the way it’s soaking, can’t feel how slick you are, but you wonder if the sheer heat leaches through the layers. 

If he can feel how hot and wanting you are, through the glove. 

He purrs like he can. Trails two fingers along the splitting fjord, your puffy lips. His thumb crooks into one end of your gusset just to let it snap back and watch the shiver roll up through your shoulders, huffing around a thick, rumbly noise that sounds amused. Drenched in humiliating mirth. A crater forms around his knee cap when he presses it onto the cushion. Between your split legs, thigh pressed flush to your cunt. Tight. 

“Gonna be a good girl,” he murmurs, face dangling over yours, and the words sound masticated. Starved. “—and let me eat that slutty cunt?”

There’s a fine line, you remind yourself, between being forced, and whatever the— you don’t want to admit it, won’t admit it, stuff it down— rapacious froth inside of you means.

He splits your lips with his fingers. Pries them apart like a butterfly to pin up and frame.  

Mental snapshots to encase on a shelf, mounted beside your underwear and a pushpin map with your face smattered in uneven, sawtooth cut-outs. All raw, and sloppy, and wet. Gushing down to the cleft of your ass— he can see everything, and his eyes rove like he’s mapping every bit of you to memory, your underwear balled and tucked into the pocket of his coat. Drinking in every delicate detail, your pebbled clit twitching under his thumb scuffing, and it’s so—

Humiliating. 

Embarrassing— shame clots in that interstice between your battering heart and your ribs, that soft spot it’s been dribbling into since he perched you on his lap like a little girl begging for a present. You screw your eyes, cup the heels of your palms over them. You can’t look— can’t—

He moans again. Gives you a heady hum, nearly as slick with want as you are between your thighs. Only, his is oil to your honey. Motor fluid to your syrup— a slippery smear of grease to sap. Rotten. Thick and coal-dark, like tar. Something gritty that catches like sand between his teeth when you try to close your knees. It’s a faulty maneuver, with your feet pried apart on his elbows, and you can only latch your knees, and—

It’s the wrong thing to do. 

A slipshod attempt to preserve your dignity, but what’s the use, when it’s porous enough for him to spew the virulent pollutant of longing for him? Noxious. Infectious. Enough to mill your pride from the inside into a powdered dust. Instead, he pries the folds of your cunt apart with one hand, on two fingers— an index and a thumb— and slaps the back of your thigh with the other. 

Your thighs quake. Plush flesh shaking upon impact, the searing heat wave that robs you of your ephemeral resistance— rolling the thought that this is gross, not what you want— and scorches it through to the core, until all that’s left for you to face is the overwhelming desire.

“Eyes on me,” he grunts. Dour. Unrelenting, until you peer through the spaces in your fingers like you’re watching a nightmare unfold, and let him wrest your knees back apart. “Yeah,” he tells you, hardly over the feather-light weight of a whisper, despite the way it feels like it’s crushing your skull from the inside when it swims your ears. “Just like that. On me, pretty girl.”

You can’t look away, so you chew on your fingers instead. Tuck them between your teeth, toes curling into the cushions. Your sleep shirt is in a discarded puddle of fabric on the floor, beside him. There’s something so uncomfortably potent in nakedness when he hasn’t even discarded his gloves. 

He won’t.

But an element of intrigue gets dredged up into the mist of your yearning when he sticks the pad of his thumb under the plastic chin of the mask to pry it to the bridge of his nose. Speckling the nebula, that clouds you, like stardust. Worse, yet, when he pries the balaclava to the same, angular slope, to show his bare chin, his full, pink mouth, his cupid’s bow. 

His nice, clean white teeth. 

His tongue, slinking out to smear across his lips. Like this, the cut outs aren’t over his eyes, and the pools of hunger are shrouded behind the plasticated layer. He feels with his fingers. Spreads your pussy apart, grazes his thumb pad across your throbbing clit, slick with your own sticky wetness, and you watch him purse his lips before a tacky, wet glob lands across your hood. Drool, dripping down, coagulating at your drenched hole. 

You shudder. Can’t look away— it’s—

Gross. It’s wet, and it’s rancid, and the feeling of it being smeared across your cunt, the feeling of a finger prodding at your rim, uselessly clenching at the air, makes your face crease. Brows pinching. 

(So why, then, do you feel so dizzy from the spiraling wave of your own lust fizzing across your veins?) 

You mewl. He tucks his fingers into his mouth. The same ones that have been smudging the amalgam of your slick and his own saliva, still tucked in that leather glove, and the sound he makes at the taste— pure hedonism, dripping around the plug of his own fingers— has your thighs hinging apart wider. Straining. 

It sounds so— shattered. So desperate. Frenzied. A sound like that, out of him, feels so unco that it nearly wrenches your head back. He groans around his fingers, sloppy, and grunts when he takes them out to feel for your hole, tease a breach with the middle digit, not quite bursting the threshold— 

And God, when he eats, it’s like he’s a man starved. Famished. All animal between your thighs, suckling on your clit, dragging his tongue across your hole, like it’s pure sustenance and he hasn’t eaten in weeks. Slurping around you, bullying your clit between his teeth like he wants to chew you up to spit you out. Rinse and repeat. 

He drags his tongue across you, so obscenely, seam to hood, like he wants you to see. Wants you to watch— wants you to know that you’ve got this horrifying brute on his knees between your legs, kissing on your cunt. Wants that ugly revelation to stick to the inside of your skull like knotgrass spilling across your bones— a twisted thought you’ll never be able to tame out of fruition. You let this happen; let him take. 

(And worse yet, you liked it.)

“Sloppy, little pussy,” he grunts, the words muzzled against your sopping cunt, spilling against his mouth, dripping. Sticking in strings to his lower lip, the corner of his mouth— and he crooks his finger. Notches it against your rim. 

It feels wrong. Strange. Leather against your cunt, instead of skin, when he prods and—

Pops the tip in. Stretches your gummy walls to the first, gloved knuckle. The soft, wet heat of you pulsing around him like a heartbeat is lost on the leather, the barrier between your skin, but he’ll make up for it. He’ll make up for it, he’ll—

“God,” you mewl when he crooks the finger and stuffs it to the hilt, stroking the wet squeeze of your walls enveloping it. 

The brutal ugliness in the concept of this man prying you open, stretching you taut when he wedges his ring finger in beside the first, with a glove on, douses you in shame. Has a white-hot heat spewing, geyser-like, at your underbelly. 

The sounds, though, the wet-squelch of those leather-coated fingers fucking into you, spilling slick and shoving it back in, makes your eyes screw. Has a heat nipping at the apples of your cheeks the way it nips at your cunt when he grinds harsh circles around your clit. It’s too much. Nearly too much when he nicks the razor-sharp mantel of your nerve-endings and hones there upon the horrid, wheezing sound you make, the way your leg flexes out beside his head in jarred reflex. Like he’s punishing it. You. For congealing up in his teeth like an insatiable sweet-tooth he’ll never scrape off his enamel. 

You cry out. Knock the heel of your palm into his forehead. Into the edge of that eerie mask, the kiss me, unsmudged, but he’s unperturbed. Unruffled. Unyielding, the same way the brutal crash of pleasure spooling tight behind your navel, your burning, flexed core. 

He catches your wrists in his hand. Like two limbs of a lamb, ensnared. The most perfect, decadent feast to carry out on a charcuterie board, and the sound he makes against your cunt nearly sounds inhuman. Like a rabid, territorial animal at its mealtime, mouthing off at a hand that tries to intrude. Encroach. Take. The vibrations make your head spin. Dizzy— you’re so dizzy, and you don’t recognize that you’ve been holding your breath until the shuddery cry that tears its way out of your mouth is silent. A hiss of a breath that melts into a long, wet gasp. 

He tucks your hands to your tummy, and takes. And takes, and takes. It belongs to him, right? The garbled slur that slips through the negligible gaps between your teeth sounds fucked stupid, and he hasn’t even split you apart on his cock. 

Your fingers twitch, pressed to your mons. Try to reach— to pry— hips canting back, forward, away, into. Against his slippery chin, and his tongue, and his unrelenting mouth. 

And oh, how you unravel, under his jaw, like you belong there. Under his hands, and the tip of his nose tucked to your mons, and the flats of his teeth, grazing—

He doubles down when he feels the pop— the release— your pretty, little cunt fluttering around his fingers, sucking them back in on every twist out, like a vice.

It starts on a long, wilting mewl. A desperate note that laces across your vocal cords and seeps out, not by your own volition, and ends on a gasp. The cord snaps. Too taut. Too much. The ripples of the aftershocks, lapping at your core, red-hot, sloppy, and spent, and overly sensitive, crescendo into a horrible ache when he suckles over your clit. Draws a searing stripe across your nerve endings with the tip, stifling groans into your puffy sex. 

You squeak. Tremble, toes tensing. Flexing. Hips arching back, trying to scoot away. Off. 

“I— came,” you bluster, but it sounds hoarse. Distant, in the thundering thrum of your vertiginous headrush. “I—“ you try again, hips canting, and he swipes out with his tongue, catches something raw and smarting on the fleshy edge. 

You jolt. Spine twisting, distorting pleas between your teeth you’re swishing them across your gums. You wriggle your foot, wheedling it under the space where his mouth is flush with your cunt. “I— please—“

He wrenches your foot back into place so aggressively that all you can do is make a pitiful, helpless squeak. Lashes fluttering, writhing, gnawing into your lower lip when he rolls his tongue across your pulsing clit. The sound that rumbles across your core rattles you down to the marrow. It feels like he wants to chew you to the bone. 

And when he pops off, finally— finally— panting like he’s had his fill, sucking at one of your lips until it’s tender and kiss-bruised— satiated this quenchless thirst that riles in the apertures of his skeleton, humming in his musculature— you breathe. Just breathe. Catch it— snag it. A soft repose in recompense for the throb in your guts, between your legs. Crystalline beads hover, sprouted from the corners of your eyes, streaking across your lash line. Your gaze is lachrymal. Pools of an unspooled bliss, mottled overwhelming, shimmery and red-rimmed. 

And the breath you’ve been catching—

Is forced out from between your lips when his hand lurches. Pins you, supine, to the couch, fingers spanning your nape. Heel of his palm at your jugular. The abruptness of the motion has your heart lurching to your throat. It nearly kisses the shape of his hand.

(But you suppose, if that cracked bit of your rib belongs to him, then maybe a sliver of your lung does, too.)

Somewhere between the dazed stupor of you, panting like you’ve run a marathon, and laying you out on the couch, he’s fixed the mask back on. The balaclava. And the crass, dirty thought that his chin is still slick under the cotton, making it sodden, and hot, and tacky to his skin, seeps across you and cakes like cement. 

He stares down at you through the cut-outs. Your heart is a hummingbird behind the rungs, trying to break free, and you feel it in your pulse, where his thumb strokes. You wonder if he can feel it. You’re still in that balmy, soggy headspace with your muscles pliable, your head heavy. A pastiche of heaven in a come-down, roping its way across your bones and smogging your hypervigilance. 

You’re less unnerved to be stared down at like that— like you’re a meal for him to chew apart between his teeth, like he’s contemplating every possible scenario and picking through to find the prettiest position to put you in, how to grind out the prettiest sounds— with your head feeling like it’s liquified.

Your lashes flutter. You trace the seams on the ceiling, where it’s been repaired for water damage. Maybe someone bled out on the floor above, you think. 

But the warmth of the evanescent fog doesn’t curb the note of nervousness that paints its way into your respiration— like bleeding watercolor— when you hear his hands on his belt buckle. See the way he hovers over you, so large, and indomitable, eyes potent and intoxicant. Hungry. 

(He’s sated his appetite enough to hold him over, bar him from tearing you apart, but he’s still hungry.)

“Think it’s about time you start to give back, sweetheart,” he tells you. Dripping ichor-thick with want. Like blood melded with syrup. 

Even with apprehension dancing across your mind, you want him to fuck you. You want him to stretch you fucking dumb around his cock, just the way you remember he did—

But his next words make that reluctance buzz a little louder in your hindbrain. Alarms. The blood-curdling croon of the siren.

“What do you think, mm?” he mulls aloud, tracing the pad of his finger across one of your pebbled nipples, then the smooth, unmarred skin of your tummy, pausing over your belly button. “Should Daddy make you a mommy this time? Make it stick?”

Your gasp sticks to your throat. Tangles between your tonsils. Your nostrils flare when you try to take a deep breath as indemnification, and you blink up at him, you find nothing but firm resolve in those voids. Abysmal, and unrelenting. 

“I— can’t… have a baby,” you croak, a touch incredulous, but you sound alien in your own ears. Like you’re drowning. 

He cocks his head, tipped down at you, with that ugly, ivory mask. “Sure you can. That’s what you’re built for, isn’t it?”

And the degradation, being stripped down to the metal cogs, the tender technicalities of your biology, makes your cheeks blister. It’s demeaning. You hate it. Hate him, you hate him— something molten rolls in your underbelly. 

(Something hot lingers between your thighs.)

You feel your legs dipping when under the weight of his crowding closer, between your split thighs. Bent at the knee, feet planted. The couch creaks. And when the coarse brush of denim kisses your naked skin, you feel the heat from it like a furnace. 

“No,” you tell him, eyes carved into narrowed slits, and the demand in your own voice makes your bones tremble when you hear. You suck in a breath. 

He blinks. Something flickers, congeals, in his eyes, almost like you’ve stunned him with your gall. Your unrestrained defiance. And there’s something uncomfortably stifling in his gaze, searing down at you, when he tips his head. Almost like he’s contemplating your response. Rolling it between his fingers. His thumb draws a feather-light line over your mons, across the stretch of skin where your womb is buried under the soft layers of muscle and fatty tissue. 

“How do you think,” he kisses his teeth behind the layers— a muffled sound, but one you pick up on with your heartbeat in your ears, “it works out if I take you now, and they find you later? Keep you all to myself. Cancels out, doesn’t it?”

The indirect threat, framed as a hypothetical happenstance, makes something curdle in your blood like sour milk. The bile rolls in the pit of your tummy, and you feel your throat squeeze. Your exhale is a weak hiss. A wheeze, because you feel like the breath has been knocked out of you, alongside the foolish temerity.

The finger that’d traced a line across morphs into a hand, and he presses the breadth of it to your underbelly. Big. All leather, broad, your belly button peeking from the wedge between his digits. 

He sighs, and takes the hand away. Works it back over his belt buckle, until the tails are free-standing, bifurcated, and his fingers work over his zipper. It’s a huff that swells his shoulders, and you’re reminded just how big he is, over you. How massive. How staunch to his ideas— you wouldn’t stand a chance. 

“But maybe,” his head bows to watch where he’s working, and his tone is thoughtful. Menacing. Saturated with condescension, the same way you’re drenched with the remnants of your gushing slick, between your thighs. He meets your eye. “They wouldn’t look at all. Awful lotta people go missin’ altogether, tonight.”

You blink. Squirm. Thoughts of you, swollen and pregnant with his baby— chain-linked to his wrist, to a dreary, foreign bedroom like a dog to a doghouse in a backyard— makes you vitriolic. Angry. 

Horrified. 

(So why, then, does it make your head fuzzy? Kindles crackle at your underbelly, where he pressed his enormous palm.)

“No— no. I’ll be. You can—“ you shake your head. Try again. Placate. This is a gun, broken china on a back shelf. You can’t dissect it for what it means. Your ribcage shakes. “You can do— anything. Please.”

You imagine he’s sneering at you from behind the mask. Under the balaclava, lips crooked, when he tucks a thumb into his waistband and frees his cock. One hand squeezing at the root, stroking up. The motion has a slimy glob of precum blurting from the tip. It’s thick in his fist. Heavy. Mushroomed ridges vivid pink, long, fat. A little lopsided, skewed slightly to the left in his hold, arching towards you. 

He didn’t make you suck it last time, but you wonder if he will, tonight. Gag the bold subversion out with the subtle flex of his hips, your insolence— you, stupid, little thing, telling him no— with his cockhead spewing against the gummy wall at the back of your throat. 

The view makes you dizzy. Like you’re staring up to the summit of a mountainside with him looming over you. The peak that crawls over you, so tall, and makes you feel so insignificant. 

Those liquid gemstones have shed across your temples, but you don’t recognize it until his thumb swipes at the corner of your eye. A pillow-soft caress. It’s almost tender. Almost. Deliriously, you watch him smudge the same thumb, brandished in your tear, along his cockhead. The wet thumbprint coagulates with the slick there, weeping from his slit. 

“‘Course I can,” he tells you. 

There’s no gentleness in the way he manhandles you, then. Wrangling you, by the scruff of your neck, into a hover across his lap. Positioning you how he sees fit, with him seated back on the couch, and you dangling over his cock, angled up in the seal of his palm. Your knees split across either side of his lap. 

“But mum and dad,” he grunts, and when his cockhead prods against your seam, you gasp, flinching up. “should stick together. Don’t you think?” 

He drags it forward, smudging it against your spent core, and it catches on your clit, the overstimulated nerve endings there, enough to make you shiver. It wracks up your spine. 

There’s nothing romantic about the way he holds you. He doesn’t cradle you close with this sense of softhearted adoration— despite your vulnerability— only pulling you close by the nape when his slick cockhead slaps your clit, your mons, with a wet smack. You gnaw into your lower lip, muscles clenching. Seeking. He smears the tip back to your pulsating rim. 

“What’s’a’matter?” he coos, probably at the rucks between your brows, creasing across your forehead. Your eyes flicker up. “You don’t wanna be my sweet, little wife?”

(You do, you do— you—)

“Oh—“ 

The press of his tip wrenching you open, taut around him, knocks your head back. Makes your shoulders rigid, spine arching over him, and his chuckle to the gasp that clots in your trachea is dark. Rich. It fizzles into a husking growl, though, when he presses down on the tops of your thighs and sinks you over him. Against him. Stretching the wet, sopping heat around him that throbs like a heartbeat with every tight breath you take, every inch lower. Your knuckles scrabble. Notch into his leather jacket, crinkling, burrowing, balling. 

“There you go,” he hisses. Groans. You’re not looking, but you know he is. Feel the molten pools of his gaze fixed where he’s feeding his cock, unwavering. He nearly sounds awed— splintering apart— when he tells you, “Such a pretty pussy. Look at this slutty, little cunt. Swallowing me right up.”

It’s raw. Bare— skin on skin— as close as you can get, and the pang that smarts at your rim permeates all the way up to your head, until that too, feels plugged. Foggy. 

It’s too much. Too—

He flexes his hips up sharply when you stall, just enough to wedge in to the hilt, and it wrests a high sound of surprise out of you. Nearly pained. Liked a kicked animal. It snags on something deep with the motion, something you haven’t been able to reach with your own measly fingers, and you mewl. 

He gruffs a slur behind the mask, tethers it with a groan, a breath that sounds caught in his mouth, but you can’t make out what it is. Not over the thrum in your ears. The assault on your senses, the unstilted stretch that feels like it’s prying you apart. Splitting you down the middle. Your thighs tremble. A sting. A dull throb that spills in your underbelly, lapping at your sex in sweltering, warm waves. Your clit twitches. 

There is something so cataclysmic in the way he hollows you out. Carves himself deep, scoring you in a way that’ll leave you begging for a piece of him, after, when you’re empty. A piece of his rib in return. It’s wrong— you shouldn’t want this man, crave him like you crave sanctum and stability. Your frenzied desperation, panting over him, seated to the throbbing root, feels chock-full of a festering longing you’ve been burrowing down since last spring. Spilling over. It sprouts— and spring, you think, bitterly, is all about revival. Rebirth. Flowering— the yearning you’ve been hiding behind your teeth germinates across your shuddering shoulders. 

He makes you ride him. Grunting, spitting how he wants you to bounce on his cock like the good girl you are. Soft, sloppy, half-hearted grinds you can manage over him, until he takes over, hitched on a huff that sounds nearly exasperated, and ruts up into you with the leverage of his feet on the carpet. 

He fucks you like he’s sedulous to make good on his words. Hard, fast, bludgeoning your rationale until it feels like you need the tang of cigarettes and santalum in every wheezing breath you take, writhing over the shape of him. His thumbs on your nipples. His fingers under the weight of your bouncing tits. 

Every pummel up into you feels like it kisses the seal of your womb. Feels like it’s battering a little closer to fruitions, to threats, and omens, and promises. 

And you like it. Love it. Can’t get away, can’t get enough, pawing at his chest, and then his collarbones, and then his chin, fingers knocking the border of the plastic mask. Kiss me— you think it’s cruel. So cruel, that you can’t kiss him. Can’t make out the shape of his bared teeth, the glint of them with his lips snarling. You want to lick across them. Bite. Taste blood for doing this to you. For making you feel this way. You want to tear him apart. Catch his tongue against your incisors. 

The thought is a distant chimera. A daydream you can’t chase, snared in a limbo— just take, take, take. But over the crests of your cheekbones, your dewy gaze watches him. Watches him, the way he’s watched you. Unrelenting. It’s hazy at the borders. Your sight flecked with wetness, shuddering, like a camera in hands that can’t stay still, but you’re unremitting. 

“Spit on me,” he growls. It’s an abrupt request— command, brimful of authority. Perverse. Then again, when you don’t oblige, it spills as a rasping grunt, “Spit on me.”

It wheedles into your threadbare sense of logic, registers. Your brows weave. Pinch, face creasing when he delivers a sharp plunge up, into you, tip to root. It’s gross. Disgusting. Lecherous. You think about your saliva blooming across his face, the way his heavy balls will throb. 

You want to spit on him. You want to bite him, claw at him, hit him— you pucker your lips. 

It lands as a tacky glob stretching across the bridge of the nose on the mask. Seeping into the inner-corner of the eye cut-out. Glistening, slick. The sight is revolting. Nasty. Your lips curl down, your brows crinkle—

He groans. It’s loud. Suffocated on desire, hunger, want, akin to the noise he made sniffing at your hair like a monstrous hound. A fucking creep. 

One of his hands leaves your chest, his thumb wriggles under the plastic white mask. It gets discarded, tossed off onto the couch. 

The view of him in, only in a balaclava, is new. 

No less unnerving, but it’s different, and it makes your inhale tangle in your throat. Something clicks in your lungs. You hover over him, with his neck craned up at you, and his eyes are green. Two pools of epidote, eroding under the swell of his pupils. Hornblende inkblots. A long, winding wild forest. You could get lost in it. 

(And pitifully, part of you already has. Melting apart like gum under the sun, between his stupid, thick fingers.)

“Fuck. Again. Give me another,” he tells you. It rumbles, but it sounds like a plea. You feel it vibrating in his chest, under your fingers, first, then watch the divot of the balaclava wavering into his mouth when he takes in a breath between his teeth. The way the cotton is stretched, tucked, across the bridge of his nose. 

You spit where he breathes. Where he’s huffing with every brutal thrust of his hips. It speckles the ribbed cotton with shimmer, then melts into the black where his lips lay. You can’t see how it saturates the mask, but you watch the way it affects him. Watch him unravel— the way he breathes through his nose, long, deep, lashes fluttering and dusting along his cheeks as his irises loll, and you’re faced with the view of their pure ivory frames. The pink rim across his lower lash line. 

He hammers into you, mercilessly, with his leather fingertips against your clit. It’s too much. Too harsh. Pleasure and pain coagulate into a lagoon that sloshes your head, pulses between your thighs, under his incessant fingers. 

And when he comes apart, under you, you nearly tip over the precipice at the experience alone. He makes a ragged sound, a groan, hips stuttering, and spurts ribbon after ribbon of his cum against the spongy walls flexing around him. Into you. Against the seal of your womb— oh, God— you burrow your hot face into his shoulder, hips canting, and bite at the leather. 

“Fuck,” he slurs. Heaves— and you feel him melting under you. Thawing. 

Your spine ripples. The molten heat of his cum, sticking to you, plugged up by his throbbing cock, makes you feel feverish. Aching. Charred all over, from the inside. You take a deep breathe and taste his musk at the back of your throat. Lingering along your tongue.

It’s almost comforting. But the reminder of who this man is, and what he does (has done to you, is doing), crawls along the serenity of your haze like a poisonous treacle. You muster the strength in your core to rock up onto your knees, make to clamber off. 

“Okay,” you breathe, “Okay—“

The thought of repose is a bittersweet mirage, though, sparkling in the distance, when he nudges his hips back up from beneath you. 

It knocks into something that makes your lungs seize. You feel his tacky spend coated across the undersides of your ass cheeks, spilling against the inside of your thighs. Pooling in the thicket of dark, wiry hair that nests around the root of his cock, dusting his balls. He grunts, and when he jostles you over his lap again, you have to catch your balance with your hands against his pecs. 

His eyes are shimmery when you blink up at them. Expressive enough for you to clock the derisive mirth that curdles, in shavings, along the chrysoberyl flecks in the tumultuous seas, when he hums. “You didn’t think I was done, did you?”   

He’s not done. Not for a good, long while. But you suppose, that a year of self-denial, precipitous self-restraint, is bound to spill over, eventually.

(It’s just too bad for you that you ended up in the path of the hurricane, front and center.)

He fucks you again over the arm of the couch, with your ribs smushed to the ledge and your knees on the cushion. Arms behind your back, head dangling, tits aching with the press of his weight, every drag against the fabric. Fingers in your mouth, straining the corners wide, riding the grooves of your clamped, slick teeth. Pawing at your ass, squeezing the flesh, prying your cheeks apart humiliatingly wide.

He makes you cum again. And again, until you’re sobbing. Legs hitched over his shoulders, chin twisted, gnawing into your own shoulder to stifle your mewls. 

“Tell me your name,” you slur under him. With his chin over tucked your shoulder, his hum ripples across your eardrum like a humid gust. Rolls between your shoulder blades. 

“Tell me your name,” you beg, again, mottled with frenzied desperation that climbs your throat. You know those eyes. You know that face— the one that lies underneath. The misty contours of it scratch across your skull in the smog of a memory. You know—

Your lower lip wobbles when he cups over your sternum, takes your breast in a doughy handful, squeezing around it, drowning you in every wet squelch, every slap of his hips against your ass. 

“Daddy.”

When you wake up, he’s not there. Ephemeral. The night nearly feels temporal, if not for the slick between your thighs, dewy at your cunt, where your seam is still aching. Crusting along the insides of your thighs. 

You feel like every bone is out of place. Like everything needs to crackle and slot back. Worn, tired, when you kick your feet over the edge of the mattress and stand. It pangs between your legs, first. And then across your chest. 

Your underwear is gone. You know you won’t find it. 

When you check the clock it’s midday. Late, too late to even be considered sleeping in. You’ve wasted the twenty-second off into somnolence. There’s still a haze across your head. This balmy, misty thing that keeps you sluggish. Tired. You’d chalk it up to oversleeping, but. 

It’s short-lived. Hollowed by the vacancy. Something stirs in the back of your head— you should probably send a life signal out to your family. Let them know you’re not splattered across the sidewalk, somewhere, or worse yet—

You think about his words. Keeping you all to himself. The thought makes your shoulders shudder. 

On the way to the bathroom, you find carmine carnations in your kitchen. Mounted in a vase that belongs to you, plucked out of the cabinet over your fridge. Beautiful, beautiful carnations.

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TAGLIST: @aprlmuse @babegoals @cinnamonone @flubblubbb @ivegotthecinema

@bxtchboy69 @iloveharrystyles04 @littlenatilda @witch-rry @watermelonsugarslut

[zomyoo]

⠀𝗝.𝗪𝗪 ━ the vampire i loved, pt. 2 。

it had been a few days since you were magically teleported into a realm of vampires and witchcraft. you deeply missed the feeling wonwoo brought to you. as you were studying for exams, you saw a familiar face...

𝗖𝗢𝗡𝗧𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗪𝗔𝗥𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚: smut included! public sex, vaginal, fingering, oral, teasing, masturbation and pet names.

⠀ ⟢ vampire!wonwoo x collegestudent!reader ⠀⠀—⠀⠀𝗪𝗖: 1,834

read part one here.

“you can’t possibly go into the human realm, wonwoo. it’s too dangerous.” the woman spoke, looking into her crystal ball as the tall man hovered over her, a look of desperation in his face as he requested for her assistance. “she came into our realm and nothing happened, why would it suddenly be dangerous for me?” he questioned, taking a seat as he looked into her eyes, hoping to see something that would confirm he was right.

she sighed, staring back into his dark eyes as she prepared herself to list the consequences. “well, your powers could be weakened, or worse, completely gone, you’d also have to protect yourself from the sun since it’s currently summer over there and there’s absolutely no chance that you find her. there’s over seven billion people over there and they are scattered around five continents.”

wonwoo didn’t react to her words, he was fully ready to assume every single one of them. “if you end up far from her, you’d never be able to meet her. you only have 24 hours up there.” the woman added, earning nothing but a sigh from the man.

sat at the library owned by your college, you sighed as you stared at your computer, not able to concentrate on your essay. you had to leave your dorm room as seeing his face plastered everywhere caused your mind to trail off. however, you found yourself in the same situation at the library. you imagined his fingers tracing down your body, his hands cupping and squeezing your breasts whilst he whispered sweet nothings in your ears.

you squeezed your legs together and bit your lip, your cheeks tinting red as your thoughts went wild. you were a complete mess and only one person could get you out of it. remembering you were in a public space, you quickly composed yourself and looked around to make sure nobody saw that embarrassing moment.

as you did so, your gaze stopped at a familiar figure. you could recognize his tall appearance, black locks, chiseled jawline and pale skin from afar. you raised an eyebrow before packing your things, walking towards the man who made his way to the upper level of the library. you found it quite strange that you were following someone you weren’t even sure was the person you hoped it would be, but you felt attracted to them.

as you took a corner, you found yourself in between two bookshelves but the figure had disappeared. were you just imagining things? as you were about to turn around and walk away, convincing yourself that everything was just a dream, you were suddenly pulled back and pinned against a shelf. you looked up at the person and your gaze immediately softened as your eyes fell upon the man you had been waiting for.

“wonwoo...” you whispered, and before you could say anything else, he had already smashed his lips against yours, savoring your strawberry chapstick, and his hands made their way to your waist, pulling you in closer before he placed them inside your jeans, squeezing your butt. that alone was enough to turn you on, you missed his touch and your body showed just that.

as you melted in his grasp and savored the taste of his lips, you reached out for his shirt and unbuttoned it, your fingers trailing down his chest, feeling the abs he had most likely gained from working out. then you wrapped your arms around his neck and he did the same, wrapping his arms around your thighs as he lifted you up, separating his lips from yours and placing soft kisses on your neck.

oh... how he adored that specific area of your body. the way its scent completely took over his senses and drove him crazy. he proceeded to lick it, using the bookshelf to support your weight as he used his right hand to lift your shirt, exposing your bare chest. what a lucky man, you had always hated bras.

“were you waiting for me?” he jokingly questioned but you knew you were. you looked for him everywhere, tried sleeping in every position in hopes to be brought back into his realm and even reread the books to feel closer to him but all came in vain. you bit your lip as you felt your cheeks reddening, refusing to answer his question.

not taking your silence so lightly, he quickly placed your left breast in his mouth, sucking it whilst occasionally curling your nipples with his tongue and softly biting it. meanwhile, he used his right hand to squeeze your right breast, not forgetting to give it attention to. as he did so, you tried to contain your moans, remembering you were both fucking in a library and anyone could walking in on your lewd action.

you lifted your head up, soon burying your mouth in the palm of your hand to muffle the sounds that desperately wanted to come out. you adored his lips on your body and the way it made you feel. you wanted more, but you knew that getting more at this moment wouldn’t make it last longer. you wanted him to stay by your side for as long as you needed, even if it meant getting separated in natural ways.

“wonwoo.... i missed you so much.” you breathed out, his lips suddenly crashing against yours and your exposed chest pressing against his bare one, your nipples hardened at the sudden contact. his fingers trailed down your body, from your breasts to your stomach, all the way down until they stopped at your clothed clit. he then began rubbing the area, causing you to let out a sigh of impatience.

“wonwoo p—”

“answer my question first.” he spoke, suddenly stopping his motions, “were you waiting for me?” you whined, avoiding eye contact with him as you bit your lip once again. you had to answer the question now, there was no escape.

“y..yes. i was...” you whispered, still not looking into his eyes as you knew you would instantly melt underneath his strong gaze. he knew and adored the effect he had on you, which was why he placed his hand on your chin, turning your head over to face him. “i didn’t catch that, say it again?” he teased, a smirk plastered on his lips as he watched your cheeks heat up.

before you could utter a word, he had already unbuttoned your shorts, sliding them down your legs before he placed his fingers on your clit, making sure his hand had enough space to fit in between your thighs before he began rubbing it, soon inserting them inside your clit, a soft moan escaping your lips as he did so.

“did you touch yourself whilst looking at the poster you placed above your bed?” his sudden question causing you to shut your eyes open. it was very specific and you wondered how he knew so much information, how he knew about the poster and its exact position. “how the hell do you know that?!” you blurted out, a bit embarrassed as you recalled doing his exact words.

“i know a lot of things about you, love. just like you know so much about me.” he said, leaving you even more confused than you previously were. thrusting his fingers into you, sliding them in and out at a fastened pace, he crashed his lips against yours to muffle your sweet noises. he was a bit disappointed he couldn’t fully listen to them but he didn’t want anyone else to see the state he put you in.

as you allowed yourself to give in to the taste of his lips, he quickly unbuttoned his pants, tossing it alongside his boxers and revealing his cock. soon, it came in contact with your clit, delicately rubbing against your tissues, the sudden pleasure sending chills down your spine. you pulled away from the kiss and rested your back against the shelf before lifing your head up and biting your lips to contain your moans.

feeling restless and impatient, your hands wandered around his body, not sure where to stay. you began moving your hips alongside his movements, a groan escaping from his lips as you did so. “fuck...y/n.” he breathed, taking both of your hands with his left, pinning them above your head as he buried his face on your neck, placing sloppy kisses on it. he wanted you, but he also wanted to remain by your side for as long as he could. he didn’t want this moment to end, so he made sure to cherish every single moment of it.

“wonwoo... i... please...”

“i know baby, just a give me a moment.” he said, his words vibrating on your skin before he inserted his cock inside you, a loud moan escaping from your lips. he was quick to put his hand over your mouth, “not so loud, we’ll be heard.” he whispered as he thrusted inside you. it was slow, but deep enough to drive you crazy.

as you were both having the best time of your lives reuniting with one another and sharing a moment of intimacy, in the very corner of the aisle you were both in, someone was watching. with his pants down and his right hand around his itching cock, he watched as you melted underneath wonwoo’s merciless thrusts. he enjoyed watching your breasts jiggle every single time his hips hardly hit against your pelvis.

“w-wonwoo...” you breathed out, and though you knew the effect it had on the man that was fucking you with everything he had, you had no idea that the one watching felt the same way. wonwoo turned you around, your chest facing the bookshelf whilst he took your hips in his hands for support, moving faster and harder whilst his groans sent chills down your spine.

“i’m so close...” you added, resting your head on your arms as you held the shelf and your gaze plastered on his pretty face. you still weren’t sure how he was real, afterall, he was still a fictional character you had fallen in love with. “cum for me baby.” he said, turning you around once more before he smashed his lips against yours, his cock still moving deep inside you, causing you to finally let go.

the man kissed your forehead, holding you close as you catch your breath. you looked up to him and placed a gentle kiss on his lips before placing your head on his shoulder. as you did so, you spotted an unfamiliar figure looking towards the both of you. as he got caught, he quickly put on his clothes before running away, which caused you to smile.

“we had an audience. unfortunately they ran away so i’m not sure who it is.” you whispered in wonwoo’s ears, a plastered grin on his face before he looked at you. “oh yeah? maybe we should write a book together. i’m sure it’d be a best seller.”

dividers by @/cafekitsune and @/saradika-graphics the ending was kind of rushed as i’ve been struggling with writers block but i hope you enjoyed! i will not be writing another part of this and if i ever do, it’d not be a smut <3 thank you sm for reading mwa

[bluecollarmcandtf]

M O O N L I G H T ™

Pulling into the lonely gas station, my eyes quickly find what I'm looking for, a pair of blue lights emanating in the darkness. The glow is coming from the gas attendant's skull: clear indication that he's a Moonlight™ employee.

"Good evening, sir," he says with the overly-endearing tone of a gracious host, "How may I be of service tonight?

I don't hide my distaste for the pathetic menial worker, leaning on his mop and waiting for my reply like he's got the best job in the world. He doesn't actually believe that. He doesn't even know what he's saying, let alone doing!

"Just fill her up," I grunt.

"You got it, sir!" he beams, tending to my car with a pep that's out of place for the late hour.

Moonlight™ was the app that revolutionized working culture forever. It allows the user to sign up for a job while they sleep. All they have to do is doze off and some insufferable AI from Moonlight™ will resume control of the body via remote connection. People like it because they get paid work without experiencing all the boring hours and insincere customer interactions. Subsequently, they always get the same unbearably eager personalities stuffed in their bodies. Even without the glowing eyes, their idiotic grins would make them stand out a mile away!

"How has your day been, sir?" he contines mopping as the gas slowly pumps.

"Don't try to chat," I snap.

"Of course, sir," he doesn't miss a beat, smiling as he returns his neon gaze to the sidewalk he's swabbing.

I just roll my eyes and wander inside. The app doesn't record memories while it's in control, so this guy has no idea how humiliated he should feel. No one should have a shit-eating grin on their face working the night shift as a gas station janitor! I'd die before I gave up my dignity to Moonlight™ like this fucking loser!

On the TV behind the register, an ad plays...

The costumed man on the left steps forward and announces, "Join the revolution. There are over forty-two-million Moonlighter's taking advantage of their sleep! That could be you!"

The statistic makes me cringe. It's nearly doubled since the last time I checked...

The man on the far right of the screen happily taps in, adding, "We're constantly expanding our scope, so check with your employer! If your job doesn't already have a Moonlight™ option, then ask your boss to give you one!"

God, they're pressuring people now? Some jobs should not be done by an AI puppeteered Moonlighter...

Finally, the man in the center steps forward to deliver his lines, "Remember, Moonlighting is a safe and healthy way to not only make money but also get a good night's rest! Why work all day, when you can do it in your sleep!" his head turns, making it seem like he's smiling at either of his coworkers, "After all, we are!"

The three men laugh in unison, like true colleagues chumming up at work, but I know the truth. These three are worse than actors, they're empty marionettes for the Moonlight™ corporation. I doubt they'd ever even met each other in real life...

"Shut up!" I groan, smashing the power button to turn it off.

This world is going to shit. Moonlight™ has grown too large over the past year for there not to be some conspiracy or ulterior motive. I don't know what it is: the elite keeping the working class in their place, our government influencing our decisions, a foreign country converting us into their slaves! It all sounds crazy, but I don't think a single theory is impossible with an app like Moonlight™.

I'm the only one probing into this mess. I may have only worked as a detective for a few years, but I never did any of it fucking asleep!

A few days later, I track down my first lead...

"Good morning, sir," the garbage man says in that unnaturally smooth cadence they all have, "Is there any trash you need collected?"

"I just have some questions," I snort.

One hand pulls the hem of my shirt over my nose while the other swats at the flies. These garbage trucks are absolutely filthy. I doubt the garbage companies even bother washing them out anymore, but why should they if their workers are soulless husks without the ability to care? The man in front of me seems completely oblivious to the mixture of rotting smells and accompanying bugs. His glowing eyes don't even blink as a fly lands on his face, crawling through the hairs of his beard. He's probably lucky that he goes home with no memory of this downright awful job.

"Are you looking for employment with Moonlight™ incorporated?" his smiling lips stir the bug on his face, but it quickly buzzes into the moist retreat of the man's dark armpit, "I'd love to help you install the app and-"

"No," I cut, "Just open the truck. I accidentally threw out something I shouldn't have."

I study the man's frozen grin for anything. It's a test. The Moonlight™ AI is designed to accept demands from free-willed customers, but I have a suspicion that the building nearby is an undocumented base for the company. If I'm right, the company would hate for anyone to root through the garbage of their secret lab...

"...I apologize, sir, but the garbage has already been compacted, and it is unsafe for non-employees to look inside. Please let me know what it is you are looking for and I will search for you."

His artificial glee didn't wane, but the blue light in his eyes did flicker just barely. This guy might be asleep, walked around by remote AI tech, but I could still tell he was lying. I'd like to see one of the Moonlight™ detectives figure that out. As I said, some things are better done the old-fashioned way...

"Well, thanks anyway," I snark, planting a slap on his sweat-soaked back. He says something about it being his pleasure as he resumes handling the garbage, flies eternally buzzing around his smiling head and glowing eyes.

Continuing my investigation, I pop down in the sewer, looking for an underground entrance to Moonlight™'s secret lab...

"Are you lost, sir? Let me help you."

I've had to breathe through a mask to put up with the heavy cloud of steaming sewage, but the Moonlight™ septic worker seems fine, smiling with an open mouth, specks of God-knows-what dried on his teeth.

"No, I'm where I should be," I dismiss him and march past.

Suddenly a muddy glove sticks out and holds my chest. "I'm afraid you cannot pass, sir," his smile is as strong as ever, but the trademark glow of his eyes intensifies.

I've never felt more sure about my suspicions. This mind controlled worker seems ready to fight rather than let me pass. I wonder if this poor soul knows he's being used as a guard as well as being a Moonlight™ sewage worker.

"Why don't you show me the way out then," I relent.

"Of course, sir," his hand removes itself from my chest, leaving a dirty print, "The sewer is a dangerous place for civilians."

I follow as he marches me out of the sewer. It's better to leave and come back later with a plan. Today, I confirmed my suspicions, but tomorrow, I'll finally see what secrets they're cooking up in that lab. I return home and end the day with the satisfaction of being close to a major discovery. Sleep finds me quickly...

Waking up in my bed, I check my phone and find an unsettling message waiting for me...

"Congratulations on finishing your first shift with Moonlight™!" the text reads, "Here is a photo of you hard at work last night!"

"What the FUCK!"

I jump out of bed, but instantly everything feels off. My back aches and my legs are more tired than they were last night! My pajamas are uncomfortable, pinching in areas like someone else dressed me in them! My mind is racing with confusion, and an overwhelming sense of self-consciousness rushes over me. My face burns from the violation, but most of my fear is focused on the strange feeling lingering in the back of my private area.

"What did they do to me?" I try to be pissed, but all I can do is whimper.

Suddenly my phone rings...

"Hello," I growl.

"Good morning, sir," a familiarly gracious man's voice rolls through the call.

"Tell me who the fuck this is!"

"Someone who noticed you snooping the other day, sir," his voice sounds like it's smiling.

Suddenly it clicks. Whoever's calling me from Moonlight™ would never use their own phone and voice. They must be using some poor schmuck that thinks he's working an honest job right now. How am I ever supposed to find who's behind all these layers of lies?

"You can hind behind your brainless puppets," I sneer, "But I will not stop looking into this fucked up company!"

"But now you're one of our puppets, sir. I'm not sure how much credibility a detective has if he spends his nights working the room at the dirtiest club in town..."

"That's sick..." I whisper, thinking about the picture on my phone. The idea of me gleefully stripping for a room of disgusting old men makes me shiver.

"Good luck with your investigation, sir," the voice continues, "But just understand that every time you sleep, your body will get up and report to that club. I have to admit that you're hiding a rather tight body under that trench coat of yours."

"You were there?" I mutter.

"Oh I had to meet the man poking his nose where it didn't belong, sir. I got very familiar with you. You were very friendly last night, so I poked something of mine where it didn't belong."

The voice on the other line laughs, and all I feel is utter humiliation. I hang up the call and stare at the photo he'd sent. It was me alright, smiling like a maniac in the gayest outfit I've ever seen. I didn't like my body being dressed like that. I hate that I was happily busting my ass for the enemy. He had to have been getting off at my humiliation last night. I'm sure he relished every second of what he did to me. I don't even want to think about the sensation left in my ass.

I need to push this investigation faster.

Because tonight, when I go to sleep, I'll be helpless to prevent this from happening again.

[zombiequeenblog]

The Promise

I wrote some dumb Papa Emeritus IV smut lol

There are no Ghovie spoilers here, I hope you enjoy it! Papa x Sister of Sin

Explicit ~ 5,500 words ~ ao3

Summary: Papa Copia catches you sneaking in way past curfew, and gives you a lecture. You respond cheekily.

It must be well past 2 am, maybe 3, I thought, as I tumbled guiltily back into my room. So late! A giggle, most likely fuelled by a gin and tonic or two I wasn’t used to, escaped me as I shed my coat and fled over to the comfort of my bed, feet aching. Sitting on the edge with a graceless bounce I didn’t intend, I flicked on the little lamp beside me and bent down to work my heels off, head still a bit dizzy. 

“Where have you been?” 

My body went stiff as soon as I heard his voice from over in the corner. My long and tangled hair, still smelling faintly of the perfume I had used to combat the mustiness of the local dive bar, had fallen down in my face, and I stayed hidden behind its safety as I made my reply as light and chipper as I could. “Oh Papa! Hmm, I… ahh, I didn’t see you there…” Obviously.

“Where have you been, Sorella?” I heard the slight tap of his shoe as the sole hit the floor, and a creaking noise like he was leaning forward in my austere little armchair. Sitting over there in the dark, like a cranky old cat. 

“I was just… out, Papa…” I had finally fumbled my heels off, and now I sat up to lean back on my hands, rolling my stiff neck back along my shoulders to shake my hair out. “I had a drink down at the bar, watched a band play. It was fun.”

“It’s past curfew.” He sounded displeased. Well, of course he would be! I knew the rules, but in this juniper-flavoured moment I didn’t much care. I had had fun, and I didn’t regret it. Still though���

“I’m sorry, Papa. I lost track of the time.” I let myself flop back on the bed, tired, and I thought I heard him rise up to his feet in the shadowed corner. 

“You cannot lose track of the time, eh, mia Sorella preziosa? This is dangerous. I cannot lose track of you.” He sounded very displeased, indeed. 

I just scoffed at him. Ever since I had come here, I would say we’d been flirting with one another, but isn’t that just what Papa did? What all the Papas do? Papa Copia was charming, intense, and sweet, and utterly devoted to enjoying the passions of the flesh, as the living embodiment of lust here on earth. He slept with many, and many more wanted to sleep with him. Hell, I wanted to sleep with him; we just hadn’t really come to find ourselves in that situation just yet. We hadn’t even kissed, and I resented him acting like he was some kind of handler of me. 

“I cannot allow you to behave in this way,” he continued with severity, coming closer, “running all around in that town, which you should know is crawling with Christians who don’t give one shit about you on account of that grucifix you have pinned there…” Papa gestured to the little symbol of our dark faith I had dutifully displayed on my shirt collar. “Without a single care for your safety, and sneaking back in here like some kind of little rat!”

I turned my head so I didn’t have to look at him, and I found that the long night of careless freedom had loosened my tongue, apparently terribly. “Well, hell… you’re not my dad!” I muttered up into the ceiling with a glib shrug of annoyance at his scolding. 

A shocked pause within the room, and then his sharp steps were coming right on over to me. “I. Am. Your. Papa,” his voice seethed down, “And I am responsible for you.”

I darted my eyes over to see his handsome face, still painted up, with his odd eyes blazing and his greying hair all mussed over his forehead in the most charming way. Had he really been sitting in here all night, waiting… worrying about me? As if to ruin it on purpose, he straightened up and ran his previously clenching hand back along his hair, smoothing everything down with a tense sigh. I thought he looked stunningly attractive, and it gave me a certain kind of little thrill to continue irritating him.

“What are you gonna do, spank me, Papa?” I threw out, carelessly turning over onto my front to let my body sink down further into the bed.

Another pause, and I felt the mattress shift when he sat down beside me. 

“Do you… Do you want me to spank you?” He sounded serious.

I felt myself blush immediately, grateful that he couldn’t see. “No!” I almost shouted, kicking my leg up a bit.

He didn’t say anything.

“Not… not right now, Papa…” Well, now I had gone and made everything awkward… Satan damn it! “Maybe later,” I added, muffled into the comforter. I wriggled my butt a little in a fiddling attempt to be coy, and I thought perhaps I heard him make the slightest sound of a chuckle. I couldn’t be sure. 

“Is there anything at all I may do for you, mia cara?” 

“You… you could help me out of these clothes, Papa,” I confessed to him, “Please.”

“With pleasure,” he said, his voice astoundingly kind now, and I felt the gentlest touch of his glove on the back of my thigh. He gave me a little squeeze there, and then his fingertips ran up to catch on the hem of my mini skirt. I felt him tug at it a little, and I mumbled something about the zipper. 

“Ahh yes, of course,” he said, and his fingers traveled up to the small of my back, finding the little clasp there to unhook it, and sliding the zipper down with care. I was not unaware of the way he was grazing the full curve of my ass as he did this, unnecessarily. He brought his gloves to either side of my waist and paused for a moment, his firm hands feeling warm on me through the leather, and then he started to roll my skirt down, encouraging me to lift my hips a bit, in a soft tone.

Halfway down my ass I remembered that I was wearing perhaps my skimpiest thong. The cool air of the room hit my skin and I heard Papa hum appreciatively, making me blush anew. As he slid my skirt off completely, all the way down my bare legs like he relished the task, he spoke low. 

“Were you meeting someone special down in town? Bringing some favoured errant soul into the fold?”

“No, Papa,” I answered honestly, “I just wanted to go out and relax in a crowd, you know? Look a bit pretty and get lost in some music…” I tried to turn over subtly but his hand was now firm on my lower back. “Avoiding panty lines, you know?” I explained further, with a soft laugh, turning my head only.

Papa laughed too. “I do not often have to contend with panty lines, my dear Sorella,” he replied, and I remembered his reported distaste for wearing knickers himself. I had been thinking often lately about what he had there in his pants, and I found myself rubbing my thighs together at the warmth forming now in my poor little empty cunt. As if to prove his point, he skimmed a gloved finger along the scant fabric of my thong to make me shiver.

“May I kiss you?” he suddenly said.

“Yes, Papa,” I chirped, but before I could turn around I registered him moving down and I felt his warm lips pressing a firm kiss against the cheek of my ass. 

“A kiss now, a spank later, eh?” he remarked, and I twisted my head to look back and see a black kiss mark left there on my exposed skin. He patted my butt affectionately, then stopped as if he’d forgotten. “Oh! My apologies, Sorella…”

I couldn’t help but grin at his silliness, and he finally let me roll over. 

“Papa…” I groaned, moving to sit up and unbutton my shirt. 

“No, no,” he insisted, taking my hands away, “Lay back, Sorella mia, and let Papa finish, si?”

“Si,” I agreed, laying back like a doll, and watching him get back to work through my torpid eyes. I saw him grin now, sweet and sly. 

My top was obviously next, and I marvelled at the way his gloves seemed to have no trouble with the tiny buttons, working nimbly from my waist right up to my cleavage. I wanted to feel that supple leather on more parts of me, and when he looked down into my face with intention, pausing before he opened up my shirt, I nodded up at him. 

“Sei squisito,” he breathed, slowly revealing more of me to his heavy gaze. 

“What are you saying?” I asked him softly. I had learned much Italian in my time here, but not enough. 

“I am telling you,” he said, looking up at my face now and brushing my hair back with the lightest touch of his glove, his fingertip running down to my chin to tilt me up to him slightly, “that you are exquisite, tesoro mio.” He tilted his own head as he looked down at me, his strange eyes darkening with devotion, and perhaps, also, with need. 

“May I have another kiss?” I asked him.

“On your ass?”

“No, Papa!” I could have hit him, he was so being so facetious. A complete ass, himself.

I endured the roguish twinkle in his eye for a moment, and then I pointed at my mouth. “Here.” I watched his hungry eyes hone in on my softly parted lips, and I knew he wanted me too. “I want you to kiss me here.”

Without another word he brought his mouth right down on mine. His lips, soft but insistent, giving me a taste of his papal paints when our kiss quickly deepened. So focused was I upon those lips, and his tongue, that I almost didn’t notice his gloves holding me up to him, tearing my opened shirt down along my shoulders. 

“More,” he muttered, breaking away only for a moment, “give me more… Sorella…”

Desperately, I shrugged off my top as he helped me, lurching forward to continue kissing him, tasting this irresistible man as if I were parched. Too soon he dragged his lips along my cheek, smearing himself all down my neck to come to my chest where he could use his tongue further, and his teeth, giving me little licks and nips along the top of my breasts as he let loose his hunger. 

By this time I was gripping the lapels of his suit jacket, and my fingers slid inside, trying to find a closer purchase along his shoulders, noticing his skin was dampening with sweat underneath the smooth fabric of his shirt. “Give me more,” I whined, and he obliged eagerly, shedding the shiny irksome thing and coming forward again to push me right down beneath him. His hand came up to knead my breast, pulling my bra down as he kissed my pouty lips again and again, his leathered thumb flicking and circling my nipple. When I couldn’t hold back my gasps of pleasure into his mouth, he abandoned mine, coming down again to taste my breasts each in turn, pulling my sensitive peaks in between his smudged lips, and swirling his wet tongue to drive me mad with desire.

Through my struggle not to lose my head, I had been fumbling about blindly with the buttons of his dress shirt, and I finally got it open enough to slide my hand down along his chest, to feel the glorious swirls of hair there. I ran my fingers along his beautifully greying head too. 

“Papa,” I begged, “I want to see you… please…”

“Can you be a good girl for me?” He was taking off my bra, rather easily.

“Yes.”

“Follow the rules?”

Rolling my eyes in frustration and pleasure both, I grabbed his cravat and pulled him back up to kiss me once more. With him distracted so with my lips, I thought I’d find out if he really was so easy to access inside his pants, and so I ran my hand down his solid body to find his distractingly large bulge straining within its confines. Papa groaned against my cheek as I let out a gasp of anticipation. I couldn’t wait to get his cock out. 

But first, just to tease him, I brought my hand back and around to cup his ass, squeeze him there and pull him against my thrilling cunt before I locked my legs up and around his waist. No panty lines, I thought to myself, and I grinned against his lips for a moment, feeling him rut against me down below.

He was growing impatient too. “I want you, tesoro,” Papa growled, gloved hands groping, fingers dragging down my body, my ass, to hook underneath the scant fabric keeping him from my pussy. His hot mouth came to my ear with a harsh whisper. “I want to fuck you.”

“No,” I said, and he let me go immediately, pushing himself up and off of me and looking straight down into my face, his eyes concerned. He went to speak, breathless and flushed underneath his smudged paint, but I was quicker. 

“Take your shirt off first,” I finished, and he looked so relieved and cross I thought he might bend me over his knee and spank me right there.

“You are a little brat, trottolina…” he threw out at me, sitting up and giving me one flash of the darkest look of desire I thought possible, before furiously undoing his cravat and bending his head to pay careful attention to the buttons of his tailored shirt, opening it up slowly. 

I hummed wickedly, and nodded, though he didn’t see, backing up to recline against the cushions and squeezing my knees together in my excitement. And yet I’m well rewarded, aren’t I? I thought to myself, bringing my fingertip up to rest flippantly between my teeth as I watched my Papa. 

Satan, he was so beautiful. Flustered hair he’d let get longer fell into his lined face, painted so sinister, yet with a learned tenderness about his darkened sockets and the curve of his mouth which he couldn’t quite hide. Every day I could see it; Copia was so full of adoration for his flock, a steady affection he kept quiet underneath a carnality of care. I couldn’t believe how privileged I was, both to be here and to be of any concern to such as him. I wanted him; I revelled in the thought of him wanting me. And I was grateful for our liberated faith, which laid out the way for this. 

His neck and shoulders, so kissable. His chest adorned in fine hair begging to be touched, the textured whisper of a few greys amongst them calling to me. His skin pale, scattered with faint freckles, his stomach soft and comforting and so utterly fallible it belied his exalted status. The trail of hair leading down underneath the waistband of his pants drove me absolutely raving inside with want, and so I asked him for more, bluntly. 

“Your pants too,” I said, finding that my mouth was suddenly dry. Was I nervous? It was just that he was so completely perfect, amplified by the way he lacked any true hubris, and I suddenly felt a little unworthy in my Papa’s presence. What could he possibly see in me, really?

“Of course, Sorella,” he replied measuredly, “Have patience, your Papa has waited for you long enough…” The shirt was quickly shed, and then he rested his gloves upon the fastening of his pants, looking over at me. “Come here and help me, si?”

I crawled to him, but when I got close enough I sat back on my heels to mirror his posture, and I let myself touch his forearms instead, lightly scraping my nails up to hold onto him by his warm shoulders. Copia just watched me, head tilted a bit with a puzzled smile. My fingertips slid over, grazing his clavicle to rest with shyness in the hollow of his throat. “I want you, Papa,” I told him, “I want to be here, with you, forever.”

Arms full of reassurance to match his desire came up and around me, and he held me so very close, his fingers nestling up the back of my head. “I’m not going anywhere, Sorella mia,” he murmured into my hair, “I feared perhaps you wanted to leave this place… leave me…”

I pulled back and silenced his nonsense with a kiss, which he held me in, and I let my hand wander blindly down his body, his soft stomach, following the treasure trail to something harder. I was trying to suavely slip my fingers into his pants, open them up to free his frustrated cock to my attentions.

This proved difficult, even when I brought my other hand down to assist.

“What is wrong with your pants, Papa?” I finally broke away to exclaim. I looked down to observe the securely knotted lacing. “They’re ridiculous!”

Copia laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t want an embarrassing mishap, on account of having nothing on underneath…” 

I laughed with him. “Take them off…” I finally whined.

Papa motioned for me to scooch back on the bed, and expertly began to undo his pants in front of me. The poor man must have felt a great relief at finally freeing his swollen cock, and he did groan a bit, in pleasure, as he took himself in hand for a few lazy strokes. He was big, and I felt insane looking at it. At all of him.

“Fuck me, Papa,” I breathed, laying back.

“No,” he said, and I sat back up in a little shock.

“First,” he said low with a grin, looking pointedly down between my legs, “Take those off. I want to taste you, dolcezza mia.” I wanted to kill him. Copia got up from the bed to peel off his pants completely, and I lay back again, sliding my thong down along my hips and my trembling legs to leave my pussy pleading, as I observed his perfect body and the way he carried himself. “You will not deny me this,” Papa said, coming back on the bed to crawl towards me. I fully agreed. 

But before I could let my knees drop open for him, Papa was doing it, his gloves gripping my thighs and yanking me down a little closer. I could feel his warm breath on my pussy, and I shut my eyes and waited for him to begin.

But nothing happened, and I looked back down at him after a moment. “What are you doing?”

“I’m just looking, dolcezza…” His face was full of a lustful suspense, gazing upon my cunt and practically licking his paint-smeared lips in anticipation, so close. “You are so beautiful, ragazza mia, do you even know that? I cannot believe I get to enjoy someone so perfect.”

I blushed, but I answered him honestly. “I was just thinking the same thing about you, Papa.”

“Well, let’s get started on enjoying each other then, si?”

“Si— oh, Papa!”

He was attacking me with his mouth, surging forward to lick up along my seam and to jut his chin forward, delving his tongue inside. It felt so nice, warm and forceful, and I would have been much too sensitive for it if I wasn’t so wound up already. My hips were bucking up, but he had slid his hands up underneath my ass and around to hold them, to hold me down for his carnal feast. 

Papa may have been enjoying me, but I could not believe how good his mouth felt on my cunt. A warm tingly pleasure was rising, stoked deep inside by his wet tongue exploring my most intimate areas, and when he started to circle and suck my clit in a kind of rhythm the jolts of delight this afforded me made me gasp out. 

“That’s so good! I…” Coherent thought escaped me. “Oh, Papa… fuck…”

Hums of pleasure rumbled into my pussy as Copia revelled in my wetness, the taste of me. After a bit of his perfect pleasuring, cruelly, he told me so. “Bellissima… Sorella,” he broke away to say, face darkened with lust, “Your pretty little pussy, so fucking sweet, Satanas…” He began to tease me with only the tip of his tongue now, as if he fretted about missing any drop of the sweetness he was coaxing out from my slit. Gradually he applied more blessed pleasure, his tongue igniting ecstasies I didn’t even know I had down there. 

His words were thrilling me, but I wanted him to keep going, don’t stop, please don’t stop, keep going Papa that feels so good so good so fucking good I’m so close I’m… My fingertips reaching down to brush against his gorgeous locks, I almost pulled him closer in my desperation, but Copia grinned up at me quickly and went right back to it, seeming pleased at the way he was keeping me tottering there just beyond all sense. He licked and lathed his tongue against me with a lazy indulgence, holding me at a simmering torture until he went back to my clit at just the right pace, as if he had been taking his time, enjoying what he did to me, and learning what I needed best to be thrown right over the edge. 

When I finally felt that racing thrill begin inside, my thighs tightened against his ears, and I almost kicked out, my heels coming to rest upon his bare back as I twitched and convulsed up against his face. My nails were digging into the skin just underneath his gloves, my hands holding on to his wrists for dear life as I bucked up and moaned aloud, and he didn’t stop, continuing to eat me out ravenously as if he could taste my orgasm, and couldn’t get enough. I felt like I could hardly breathe.

“Fuck, Papa,” I cried when I was able, my eyes on the edge of tearing up. 

“Mmmm…” Copia licked up my twitching cunt and gazed down upon me with pride, his paint ruined. “Oh yes, my sweet Sorella, we’ll do that next…”

“Fuck,” was all I could barely repeat, like an idiot, out of breath and wanting him more than ever. I reached down for him. 

Copia’s body surged up and over me, on all fours, but instead of giving me his cock he gave me his fingers, two I was pretty sure. Gloved fingers, smooth and warm, sliding slow and exploratory into my dripping wet cunt. If I had been moaning before, now I made sounds much more urgent, the feeling all alight around my pussy walls still tingling, incredible. 

“Papa!” I cried out, writhing beneath him.

“Papa needs to make sure you’re nice and ready…” Copia huffed out, circling gently, and stroking deep in my pussy, curling his smooth leathered digits up, “Nice and ready for me, eh?”

“Fuck I am ready,” I pleaded with him, “Please please fuck me, Papa… Please I need it…”

He needed it too; I could see his cock hanging flushed and heavy, precum almost dripping from the darkened tip. I was clenching around his fingers, and he groaned. I could make him feel so good, I knew it, he just had to make me take his cock; I wanted him so badly I could scream.

Only when he judged me sufficiently wound up did he position me the way he wanted, supine underneath him with my knees apart, and he brought the head of his cock to my weeping cunt, sliding up and down my seam slowly just to tease. Copia really was a devil; he had a dark mischief inside him he loved to let out to play sometimes. I could see why his lovers went so crazy over him. 

But Papa’s most veritable calling was to love tenderly. “Come here,” he said, softly, reaching up to stroke the sweaty strands of hair out of my face, and keeping his hand there, cradling me nice and firm. His thumb wandered over to my lips and I could smell the leather; I moved and bit the tip a little, heavy-lidded, stifling the gasps I knew were coming as I could feel him begin to finally push inside me below. 

My eyes widened; I was glad he’d taken the time to warm me up because Lucifer in hell, he was large and oh so hard… I felt like I could barely take it.

“Are you okay?” Copia asked me, his brow sweating off the paint he had remaining. I think he was only halfway inside, and my leg twitched against his waist as he pushed in a little deeper, unable to help himself. 

“Yes, Papa!” I told him in a hushed whisper, the stretch of him divine, “Oh, yes… don’t stop… fuck…”

“La mia dolce, cara, Sorella…” he was murmuring, sliding inside my tightness, his face a lined and messy vision of pure delight. I felt that wonderfully conflicting feeling of need and completeness deep inside, and I saw him look down to watch my pussy take all of him in as I hitched my hips up feebly to meet him.

There was nothing in the world quite like this, to have him inside me. “Do you… Do you like my pussy, Papa?” I managed to gasp out.

“Fuck, yes… dolcezza…” Copia choked out, already starting to pull back, “You’re so tight, am I hurting you? Satanas…” He hissed out his pleasure and I saw his eyes roll back a little before he focused down on my face, his odd eyes searching mine in some concern.

Reaching up to smooth his eye paint into the darling crow’s feet he had there, I met his gaze and marvelled. “No, it feels so good, I… I want you to fuck me, don’t stop, Papa… please…”

Papa didn’t stop, sliding his cock back inside me, aided so by my wetness and making me moan out loud at the incredible pressure. I watched him bite his own lip to stifle himself, paying close attention to my body as he held me, stroke by stroke, like I was the most precious thing. When he saw me press my head back on the mattress, becoming delirious with pleasure, he smiled, becoming more relaxed himself, and gave me a thrust to make me grip onto him harder. 

“Yes Papa! That’s so fucking good…”

Copia hooked his hand underneath my knee and opened my thigh up further, thrusting a little deeper into my pussy, and he settled more atop me, kissing and licking all over my décolletage, before bringing his head up to murmur low and sweet into my ear. 

“I like it when you call me that, fuck! Eh, ahh… Papa,” he told me, “I like it when you call me Papa…”

“You are Papa,” I said, and he snorted into my neck mid-thrust.

“You are delightful, Sorella,” he said, “Bellissima… ugh, fuck… I think I am going to be fucking you a lot, eh?” Copia was pumping his cock into me in the best way, warm and hard and steady. “If you’ll have me?” he continued, leaning down to pant against my cheek as he thrust.

“Yes, Papa, please!” Every drive of his cock hit those parts inside me to make me shiver, and the brief absence of him with each pass made me yearn for it again and again and again. “Ugh, I need you, you fuck me so good!”

He really was. Copia knew what he was doing, and he fucked me ecstatically now in a perfect rhythm of lust, his hips snapping against the backs of my thighs to make the bed shake. I took his cock again and again, scratching my nails along his shoulders and letting his tongue into my mouth when he sought my lips to kiss me sloppily. Our bodies were beginning to work up a sweat, joined so carnally in our mutual pleasure, and I couldn’t get enough of him.

“You can fuck me whenever you want,” I purred up to him wickedly, “you’re Papa here… I’m here for your pleasure…”

Copia groaned, approaching the throes of that exact pleasure, but he slowed down, seemingly trying to focus again. “That’s true, isn’t it, Sorella?” I saw his lip curl into a mischievous grin. “What is it that all Papas may say, ah?”

“What?” I whisper-gasped, my eyes shut tight, overwhelmed by his cock, the feel of his gloves on me.

“I, ahh… ahh… I brought you into this institution, yes?” Copia gave me one jolting thrust to make me squeak underneath him and then he was fucking me, so fucking good, but his thrusts were becoming more erratic as he seemed to try and focus on his thoughts for a moment, “and I can take you out, so…” Another sweet thrust… He was speaking to me in a mock tone of gruff authority, and I lost it at his silliness even as I felt our mutual pleasure rising.

I laughed out loud, trapped so underneath him, and he joined me in sweet laughter himself, continuing to fuck me as he hung his head down into my shoulder with a grunt. 

“Shut up, Papa,” I giggled through a moan, “Oh, just shut up… and fuck me…” I ran my fingers up through his hair, getting it more and more disheveled with the sweat beginning to run off the back of his neck, between his shoulder blades, down his spine. He smelled so fucking good on top of me, the weight of him addicting, and I never wanted this to end. “I’ll never come home late again, I promise… If you just keep fucking me…”

But I could sense my poor sweet Papa approaching his end, and I wanted him to feel so fucking good, let everything go and achieve the sweetest release possible. 

“Fuck me, Papa, really fuck me… fill me up…”

Copia held me close, thrusting faster and harder for a minute as he groaned into my flushed skin, and then he reared back, his dark gaze piercing into me with pure desire as he began to fuck me hard, holding me down so I couldn’t writhe away from his thrusts, my body jostling, the heat of his body and his lust palpable in the scant air between us.

I opened my legs further for him, taking his cock to the point of pain so he could get his fill of me. “Good girl,” he huffed under his breath, and I could almost come again just from that.

He’d never looked better than this, I thought in awe, chasing his own pleasure and using my poor pussy to do so. Copia drove his cock into my cunt like he just couldn’t help himself near the end, and then he finally came, choking out a shout before he collapsed on top of me, muttering what I guessed was filthy Italian into my hair.  I could feel his thick cock throbbing deep inside as he ground his hips into me, pulsing out his spend to fill me completely up, and I clenched my thighs and my pussy around him in delight, holding him tightly as he trembled in my arms.

I felt him come down from his high, breathing heavy. “Satanas, Sorella… that was…”

“Good?” I giggled.

“So fucking good, you’re going to kill your poor old Papa…”

I only hummed wickedly, but soon I was making louder noises. Copia had pushed himself up, still deep within my cunt, and he was dragging his gloved hand down my body, getting a few gropes in before settling his fingers on my clit. His cum was already leaking out of me, the slickness only aiding in that ecstatic circling sensation to drive me wild.

“That’s it, my good girl,” I heard him purr, “Come for Papa… si…”

I was so close already from our fucking that it didn’t take long; I came hard again with cries of pleasure as he hissed in triumph, sliding his spent cock out of me in satisfaction.

“I mean it, Papa,” I managed to say after, “I am never coming home late again.”

Copia flopped down beside me and gathered me to him, sighing out in his exhaustion. “My dear Sorella…”

My mussed up head on his shoulder, I nestled in close, breathing in his scent and wrapping my free arm around him. He felt so warm, his heartbeat only beginning to slow, and I watched his gorgeous face rest, his smudged eyes closing in bliss. My body was covered in smears of his paint, especially my lower half, mixing now with cooling sweat and the sticky remnants of him still seeping out. 

After a moment, Copia sought my hand upon him with his gloved one, and brought it up to his lips. “You know, amore,” he murmured between soft kisses to my knuckles, “I cannot stop you from doing as you please… but maybe…” Copia turned over on his side to look down into my face, earnestly, still playing with my hand. “Maybe you’ll allow me to accompany you next time? When you stay out much too late?”

“I’d like that, Papa.” Disentangling from his fingers, I reached up to guide his chin down so he could kiss me on my lips again, and he lingered there for a sweet while, only breaking away to say one thing more.

“And then, I promise, dolcezza… I will spank you.”

[sinnerpalace]

𝖞𝖔𝖚

summary: what could happen when you involve jealousy, a crush, and alcohol?

pairing: daniel ricciardo x best friend!fem!reader

explicit content warning!

 ─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Y/n’s Point of View: 

Yellow. Summer. Wide smiles. Optimism. Hope. Bikes. Oversized clothing. tattoos.  

All innocent things that remind me of Daniel. I was there when he drove those little electric cars around our neighborhood. I was also there when he eventually traded that little car in for a kart. I was raised around his high-energy, adrenaline-filled, and smile-filled childhood. I lived through a long-distance friendship when he moved to a different continent. I joined and followed him around the world on his hunt for a world title. I will always be there to support him 100% and that will not change anytime soon. 

Midnight. Clubs. Hands. Wine. Toned. Choking. Scarlet Red. Candles.

All sinful things I have associated with Daniel. I remember when Daniel first lost his virginity. He was so eager to share the details of that night with me. We laughed until our bodies screamed for oxygen and talked about how he could improve his “performance” for next time. I didn’t feel any emotion but happiness for him at that moment, but now 17 years later, the slight notion of him hooking up with someone lights my body in jealousy. My mind betrayed my head as I imagined what Daniel is like in bed. Is he sweet and caring? Rough and daunting? Kinky and adventurous? I can’t help but envy those who have seen him euphoric in pleasure. lost in another world yearning with a pure need for more. Animalistic with the need to cum.

I apply a thin layer of clear lip gloss before spraying setting spray and using a fan to dry my face after I finish my makeup. Stepping back, I admire my body in the black skin-tight and sheer dress I am wearing. I am hoping to maybe bring someone back to my place tonight seeing as it’s been a month since I’ve gotten laid. I grab a pair of black mules before heading downstairs to slip them on and head out to the club. 

I enter the club and allow my eyes to adjust to the darkness and strobing lights. I walk toward the VIP section and meet the looks of half of the grid. Once I arrive at the gate, Daniel unlocks it and offers his hand for me to grab to make sure I don’t slip. Once I get settled into a seat he leans down to my ear before whispering “You look great tonight.” A slight shiver goes down my spine and I stop myself from showing him how much he was affecting me. God if only he was mine… 

I turn my head towards him and offer a smile before shooting back “Thanks. You don’t look too bad yourself.” He laughs before grabbing one of the shot glasses off the tray sitting on the table in front of us, and offering it up to me. I take it from his hand as he reaches for another, we clink the small glasses together before we throw them back. I struggle to get it down for a few seconds, but I manage to slide it down before I spit it back up. 

Somewhere between another shot and a glass of red wine, I end up with some guy named Jake on the dance floor. His hands roam my body before settling on my hips as some weird club mix plays in the background. About 2 songs later, I look toward VIP to see if Daniel and some mutual friends were still there and I make eye contact with him. His look intensifies as I grind my ass back into Jake. I feel what I can only assume is little Jake. 

I flip my body around, throwing my arms around his neck before leaning my lips towards his mouth. Time doesn’t seem to pass as I continue to make out with him on the middle of the dance floor. Moments pass before my body begins to crave oxygen and I stop kissing Jake. A thin line of spit connecting our lips before I feel someone staring at me. I begin to separate my body from Jake’s and look towards the VIP section once again. 

Daniel's eyes bore into me. Is he angry? I move away from Jake and try to walk back to my friends when Jake grabs my wrist. 

“You are breathtaking.” He says while throwing me a shy smile. I return his gesture before responding.

“Thank you.” I continue to walk, allowing his hand around my wrist to slip. I make it back to where I was sitting and allowed Daniel’s hand to fall upon my thigh. He leans his head against my ear before whispering into my ear. 

“Was he a good kisser?”

“Are you jealous, Dan?” His hand strokes up and down my thigh while his hot breath hits my ear. I want him. 

Daniel’s hand trails higher up my thigh while he seductively whispers, “No. You’ve always been mine”. I need him. He grips my thigh a little harder than I expect and pulls a small whimper out. He places a small kiss under my ear before pulling back slightly. 

“Prove it.”

—-

As soon as we enter my apartment Daniel pushes my body against the door while he kisses down my throat. Little sighs leave my mouth as he begins to suck marks into the area below my neck pulling moans out of me. My hands grip onto his shoulder before sliding down to the front of his button-down shirt. I try to unbutton the shirt before getting frustrated and just pulling the shirt apart, ripping the button off the shirt. 

Daniel gasps before grabbing my hand and pulling me towards my bedroom, pushing me against the nearest wall. He grips my throat leaving me gasping for breath as he leans down to place a kiss against my pliant lips. “You’re just so eager aren’t you? You just couldn’t wait could you?” He questions into the air before guiding and pushing me onto the bed while still controlling my oxygen. 

“Please Danny Please” I beg between little gasps of breath. He begins to rid my body of the mini black dress. I kick my heels off and reach for Daniel. I wrap my arms around his neck and tangle my hands into his hair. Our lips meet again before I yank on his hair, he gasps and I take this moment to shove my tongue into his mouth, controlling the pace of the kiss. He begins to grind his hips into mine and I moan into his mouth. 

We break apart and I allow my eyes to travel down his body before he flips my body over. Daniel takes the opportunity to trail kisses down my spine before stopping right before my ass. I feel his large hand pull at the band of my underwear before he lets it go and snaps at my waist. A small groan leaves my throat as he tugs them down and discards them with the pile of our clothes. I feel him grip my ass before pulling them apart and for a moment, I struggle to breath. It’s only when he decides to flick his tongue against my hole does a moan escape my parted lips and steal my breath away. 

“Dan,” I moan. “Please. I need more.” Daniel just gives a brief “mmhh” before sliding his tongue over my asshole down to my clit. He flicks his tongue against it before placing his whole mouth on it and sucks. My arms tremble and my legs shake as I feel the inevitable orgasm coming closer and closer. “More,” I whine. Daniel doesn’t hesitate to follow instructions as he sucks harder and lets his tongue lap at my clit. I let out even more moans and I am so close to coming when Daniel stops. 

“What are you doing? I was so close,” I say. I wanted to scream and cry. 

“Awww. Don’t worry, baby. You’ll come on my cock.” he responds. I hear Daniel unzipping his jeans and coming near my body again. He places his hands on my upper back and pushes down. I let my body follow the guidance of his hands. My chest pressed completely to the bed while my ass is pointed upwards. He traces around my pussy with his index finger, teases around my clit and hole before pushing in. Daniel slowly fingers me with his index finger before adding his middle. The way they are sliding against my walls is driving me crazy. 

“Daniel please. Fuck me,” I beg while pushing my ass against his hand. The sharp slap on the lef cheek of my ass shuts me up quickly. Moments later, he adds a third finger and now I can really feel the stretch. He struggles to fit it in and applies more pressure which has me rolling my eyes back. 

“Listen to you begging for my cock. Hmm? You want it so bad don’t you,” Daniel teases while continuing fucking his fingers in and out. He pulls his fingers out my pussy and joins me on the bed. He lines his body up with mine and I feel his cock bounce against my leg briefly. Oh god. He is hugeeeee. 

As I internally freak out, the tip of his cock brushes up and against my pussy. “Fuck, that feels so good. More,” I moan out. Daniel presses the tip against my hole and wowwwww his cock stretches me out even more as he slowly pushes into me. Once I feel his hips press against my ass, I tighten my pussy around his cock and lose my mind at the groans he lets out. He presses his head against my back while speaking to me. 

“You are going to kill me,” Daniel mumbles out before sitting up again and pulling his entire cock out of me before rapidly thursting into me. I barely have time to breathe as my face is pushed into the mattress and he goes crazy. Moan after moan is heard in the room between his gasps of breath. 

“I am about to come,” I shout as Daniel's pace begins to lose its pattern. He removes his hands from my head and his fingers begin to swipe over my clit and bring me over the finish line. He doesn’t stop though, he continues to fuck me through the orgasm and into the point of oversensitivity. Tears begin to fall as I beg Daniel to slow down. He paints my walls white as he comes in my pussy and I clench rythmically on his cock. I groan and turn my head to the right to let out a few deep breaths. He leans his head down and places a few chaste kisses against my lips before he begins to slowly slide out of me. Once out, I collapse my lower half against the bed and roll over onto my back. 

I look up at Daniel and he has this kind of shy smile covering his face. I let out a small chuckle. How does a man who has just given me the best orgasm ever seem so reserved right after the fact? He joins me on the bed, pulling me onto his body slightly and pulling my comforter over us. His hand rubs up and down my back as the comfortable silence fills the room and washes over us. 

Daniel breaks the silence as he says “Dinner. Tomorrow night?”

“Of course,” I respond as I trace small shapes on his chest. “It’s always been you. You know that right?” 

“No, I didn’t, but I want to,” He says slowly before turning his head towards me and locking eyes. I give him a small smile and leave my head up for another kiss. His large hand rests on my cheek as he leads the kiss. I lean my forehead against his, sharing the oxygen trapped between us. I enjoy this moment before removing my head from his and laying my head against my pillow.

a/n: so I am giving this another try lol. i am trying to find time to for this blog since i am now in college and my schedule is really busy. - sinner

p.s. - if there is an errors please let me know. i do not have beta reader

[b00kdiary]

A Ballad of Flame & Shadow | Azriel

Alex was falling between worlds- falling through worlds- until she landed with Bryce someplace that was definitely not Hel.

And now there was a male before her, the most beautiful male she had ever seen and something other than fear sparked in her heart.

Wattpad & Ao3

CHAPTER ONE:

One moment Bryce and I were running toward the Gate, leaping through the Gate into the chasm of darkness beyond, Rigelus screaming at our backs.

And then the next we were falling.

Not through the worlds but across – as if some God had gripped us by our hair and yanked us sideways, pulling, pulling, pulling, our screams greeting nothing but stars and darkness and emptiness.

There was a pressure in my brain like someone had wrapped their hands around my throat and squeezed, a tightening that felt like fingers pressing down on my eyes to cave them in.

And so much screaming.

And then... grass.

I panted, a burst of pain lancing through my right shoulder as it collided with the ground, as it collided with the green grass below me. Though my head spun so wildly that for a second, I wondered if it was even real.

But I felt it, under my hands, beyond the Harpy's blood coating my palms and fingers, crusting under my nails- grass, dense and damp with condensation.

Hel had grass.

"Hel," I breathed, and it was pure panic that overrode the spinning in my mind, the pain in my body. Pure and undiluted panic as I realised where we had appeared, what likely prowled these lands. "Bryce-Bryce!"

My knees shook as I rose onto them, and I could feel my body begging me to stop- stop moving, stop fighting, just stop. But I didn't, couldn't, not as flashes of Hel's pets passed my mind's eye, those horrific creatures that had attacked Lunathion that day.

Deathstalkers, Kristallos demons- they would rip us to shreds before we even found Aidas.

"Bryce!" I called again- not too loud. I lifted my chin and I saw the Starsword, a few feet in front of me and then I glanced back- to where Bryce lay groaning on the floor. "Shit, shit-"

The air felt different here, thinner, and as I scrambled over to Bryce, half-crawling, half-stumbling, it took all my strength to make it those few feet before I dropped to my knees at her side.

"Alex," Bryce gritted her teeth as I rolled her onto her back, her tan skin ashen her body convulsing. Running from Rigelus's power, opening the Gate with the Horn, getting us both through to Hel- it was all too much for her.

"We need to go," Her amber eyes darted frantically, to and from my face to the darkening sky above. But even her hand clasping mine felt weak, and I knew that she was on the verge of passing out. "Death-deathstalkers, they'll kill us, Alex, we need to go."

"I know, I know," I rasped and something helpless burned behind my eyes as I held her hand, and watched her sneakers dig into the ground for leverage before giving out a second later. "We're not going to make it far with you like this Bryce, we need shelter, we need-"

The mists before us parted and the words died on my tongue as I beheld the land before me- beheld a sight of beauty. A flowing, crystal blue river, a lawn of verdant green grass, kept green grass, and beyond.

"A city," I gasped, and Bryce must not have heard me, not as she tried and failed to bend her knees under her. But I saw it, saw a city of stars and moonlight and prosperity, the kind that Ruhn had shown me pictures of when he had travelled across the Continents.

But there, through the mystified fog and past that winding river- movement. Demons of Hel.

"Bryce, I know you're tired, but you need to get up," I grab her limpening arm, tucking it against me and something twists in my gut at the wet feel of the Harpy's blood on her clothes and mine, the smell that thickened as I grabbed Bryce by the waist to haul her to her feet.

Her amber eyes opened; her head tilted back against my forearm blinking up at my face. And then her eyes widened.

"Alex-"

Too late.

Steel slid against my throat, cold and sharp and I froze.

A male spoke, like death incarnate against the shell of my ear, so close that I felt a tremor ripple across my skin. I didn't recognise the language, but with the hushed tone and the press of that blade against my carotid, I knew not to move.

I didn't even dare breathe.

Bryce grunted as she slipped from my grip and back to the grass, and as her eyes flashed to whatever demon stood behind me, I saw it in her face- her calling to her powers, just as I did now. But it splintered and cracked, shards slipping through my fingers.

I had nothing left to defend with, and if the dull star at Bryce's chest told me anything, it seemed we were out of luck.

That male voice spoke again, demanded something in that foreign tongue and when I still knelt on the ground, palms exposed, begging any who listened for even a flicker of magic to ignite in me, he growled.

Bryce gasped as his large hand clamped down on my shoulder, and I saw her fighting to rise as he hauled me up and twisted me to face him. "Don't fucking touch her."

But I didn't react. Not as I was met with something, unlike any demon I knew existed.

A male- the most beautiful male I had ever seen before. Golden skin, carved bone structure, raven hair. And those eyes were hazel, a sunburst of honey and whiskey, even if they seemed to gleam with violence.

The sight of him surprised me enough that I stumbled back a step and like the warrior he seemed to be, he reacted, his hand falling to my curved waist and gripping me. Something sparked, like a match being lit, at the touch.

And for a second, I think he felt it too, it seemed like those hazel eyes cleared and his tall, muscular form shivered at that spark. Just for a second and then it was gone.

He released my waist, instead wrapping his hand around my wrist, a glint of a blade shining in my peripheral. He spoke again, a quiet voice that seemed to hold no mercy. But I was dumbfounded as I stared at him.

The scale-like obsidian armour, crafted over acres of lean, corded muscle, and so tall I craned my neck to meet his eyes. And those wings, nothing like Hunt's, no, these were vast, black, leathery, tipped with talons that peered over his broad shoulders.

Hunt.

Ruhn.

Something squeezed in my chest and that beautiful face twisted, brows knitting and soft lips tilting down as tears filled my eyes.

"Take us to Aidas," I begged, and I couldn't stop how my body was shaking now. I glanced back at Bryce, braced on her palms and mascara running down her face- as if she too remembered all we had left behind. "Take us to Aidas, Prince Aidas!"

I couldn't stop the tears as they fell and when I jolted forward, curling my hands into the solid, intricate armour he wore, his eyes flashed in warning. But he didn't pull away. I leaned against him, knees near giving out and he seemed to recognise how desperate I was.

He spoke again, softer this time, that rough hand still holding my wrist.

"What the fuck is he saying?" Bryce choked, and I could hear rustling as if she was fighting with everything, she had in her to get up. I could practically hear her screaming in her mind get the fuck up.

"I don't understand, please, just take us to Prince Aidas. We came to Hel; we came for his help-"

"Hel?" He echoed the word sounding jumbled on his lips. I nodded frantically, my nails breaking against his armour, half my body flush against him now and he held my weight up with ease.

"Yes, yes, Hel!" I looked around, gesturing at the misty surroundings, the sky-scrapping trees, the darkening night sky, "What level? What Pit? What Chasm?" But my words seemed to just confuse him even more, dark brows furrowing.

My eyes screwed shut with frustration and I opened my mouth again, to repeat those same words, hoping this time something would click- and then I felt it, felt them.

"Fuck," I gasped, launching back, my fingers untangling from the male before me as I scrambled away. His hand- brutally scarred, I realised- squeezed, but when he saw the fear and panic sullying my eyes, he reluctantly let go.

And I inched back and back and back until I felt Bryce beside me- and she was shaking just as much as I was. Because stood behind that male, were three more... demons? No, no, Fae, two of them were Fae.

We were surrounded now, outnumbered.

"Shit, shit," Bryce hissed and when my eyes met hers, half-risen, legs knocking together as she tried to stand, I saw it on her face- we were fucked, royally fucked. "We can't fucking take them all."

I sucked in a shallow breath and with it, I steeled my spine and forced the alarm to clear from my face. The first male's eyes scrutinised me, observed as I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin, refusing to cower- and I swear his lip tilted at the corner.

"Prince Aidas, we're looking for Prince Aidas," I looked past him, to the two Fae females, beautiful Fae females and another handsome male with wings standing beside them. "Is this Hel?"

One of the females stepped forward, petite in every sense of the word, her dark, cropped hair so at odds with the gleaming silver in her angular eyes- eyes that seemed to look over me, over Bryce, and narrow.

I didn't blame them. We were covered in blood, seeping through our clothes, sticking to our skin, coating our hands and neck, and speckled against our faces. Blood that was not ours.

The other male spoke, just as tall, if not taller than the first with those same hazel eyes and those dark, foreboding wings. He shook his head, long raven hair shifting from his bun, and I watched as the female beside him, pretty and fawn-haired, pursed her lips.

Bryce bared her teeth, red hair swinging in her ponytail as she stepped forward and I fought against my instinct to help, to grab onto her to stop her tumbling over. But we were the prey here, they were the predators and we had to do everything in our power to not become food.

"Is this world Hel?" Bryce asked and something shifted in the air at the sound of the Old Fae Language on her tongue, that petite female flinching at the words. "We need to see Prince Aidas."

The others gaped at the smaller female as if her shock was the most alarming thing about this situation. But I sagged in relief- finally, someone who fucking understood us. But that seemed secondary to her, as that female glanced from the Starsword on the floor at her feet to the first male's dagger at his side.

He slid it free, and it was as if someone had ripped the ground out from under our feet.

"Oh my fucking Gods," It was a twin to the Starsword, a mirror with its dark hilt and engraved blade. And Bryce's hand found mine, tugged me back with her as the Starsword began to glow, vibrating with white magic.

And almost as if in answer the dagger pulsed black.

It fell from the male's hand, alarm breaking through the pure ice hardening his eyes and I would have laughed under different circumstances- laughed at seeing these fully grown, powerful creatures flinching from these weapons.

Except I was fucking terrified too.

"Gwydion," The dark-haired female gasped, red-painted lips parting in shock as she stared down at the Starsword- known by a different name here, a name I had never heard before.

"Please, is this Hel?" I stumbled slightly over the language, unused to the mother tongue of the Old Fae, but still, I locked my intreating gaze onto that female and demanded again, "Is this Hel? We need to find Prince Aidas."

She pursed her lips and Bryce's nails dug into the skin of my palm, her body stiffening under that stare. She looked over us- the mess of make-up smeared across our faces, the clothes and shoes caked in blood, and the bruises and cuts looming over our skin.

So at odds with them, with their outdated attire. For some reason, I thought back to the old fantasy movies Danika used to drag me and Bryce to, just so she could laugh and throw popcorn kernels at the screen.

My heart burned in memory of her.

I saw a blare of blue, bright enough that it had me blinking through the tears that lined my eyes in memory of my friend. As the haze cleared, I locked onto that beautiful male and saw something solemn in his face- like he had felt my grief at that moment.

I didn't have the time to contemplate how.

"No one has spoken that language here in over fifteen thousand years," She spoke, tone clipped and chin high, "I do not know any Aidas here."

"Apollion then," I swallowed, and I felt Bryce sway beside me, hands rubbing at her face, muttering incoherently under her breath. "You must know the Prince of the Pit."

"I do not know of such people," She shook her head, her eyes weary and something in my chest caved, "This is not Hel."

This is not Hel.

Not Hel.

Where the fuck where we?

"Oh Gods," Bryce gasped and this time when she swayed again, I did hold onto her, wrapping her arm over my shoulder and baring her weight. I didn't let the calm mask I donned slip, didn't let them see me as anything other than strong. I couldn't afford to.

"Then where are we?" I asked, voice shaking as I looked between the two females, then the other swaggering male and then finally to the first. And my eyes now noticed the blue jewels embedded into his armour, blazing like sirens.

I locked my gaze on him and for some reason, whatever reason, I felt like he of all of them might take pity on us, have mercy on us. And I let him see that in me, that hope, strong enough that something unreadable whirled through his eyes.

"What world is this?" I breathed, just looking at him and I saw his throat work, that powerful body going unnaturally still. His lips parted as if to speak, but then something happened. I felt it again, that shift in time and space and air.

And then there were two more of them, two more Fae as if they had just appeared- from thin fucking air.

"How fucking many of them are there?" Bryce scoffed, and something like a chuckle rose in me, at how ridiculous this was, how unbelievable. Did the Gods truly hate us so fucking much?

I eyed the female first and watched her wade through the others to the front- lovely, fawn-haired, and her eyes a cloudy blue. They widened slightly at the sight of us, but they held little threat, only weariness.

And then two black, ominous wings erected high behind her, and the breath ripped from my lungs as a third male stepped out- midnight hair, and violet eyes, breathtakingly lovely.

"Ruhn?" My voice broke, and it was Bryce who had to hold me up now, had to keep me from falling to my knees at the sight of that male, so much like the Prince I had left behind on Midgard.

He blinked at me, likely as confused as I was.

And then he turned to the first male, the one with the scarred hands, and they spoke between them. Something almost akin to worry flickering through those hazel eyes as he watched me, the tears now leaking down my face, the haunted expression I wore.

"He-he looks like Ruhn," Bryce gasped, voice barely above a mutter and I heard the emotion clogging her words- for her brother, in the hands of the Asteri, so similar to this male that it physically made us hurt. "Why does he look Ruhn?"

"I don't know, I don't know-" Once the tears started it became hard to stop and Bryce, was beginning to sag in my arms, she was starting to drift in and out of consciousness now and I couldn't hold her for much longer I knew that.

"Please," I looked to the dark-haired female again, and I would be the prey, I would be food, I would chattel if it meant getting them to help us. "My sister is weak, she needs help and-and our world, our home... Midgard, it's in grave danger-"

Hunt, Bryce's mate. My friend.

Ruhn, Bryce's brother. My family and yet so much more.

"Don't- don't tell them anything, Alex," Bryce rasped into my ear, and I was starting to buckle now, teeth gritting as her body got heavier and heavier. "Don't tell-"

"Bryce!" She crumpled to the floor, and I fell with her, knees giving out, slamming into the grass hard enough that I felt the pain through every inch of my body. The Fae before us seemed to startle, but only the first male stepped forward, grass crunching under his boots.

Scarred hands reaching out as if to catch us. Catch me.

"I don't have any magic left, it's-it's depleted, more than depleted," Bryce rested her sweating forehead against my shoulder, and I bit my lip hard enough to taste metal as her eyes fluttered.

"Mine too," I whispered back, and the muttering amongst the others told me they were confused, that us speaking in our native tongue did not sit well with them. They didn't like not knowing what we were saying. "It's going to take a long time for it to come back, we need them to not kill us before then."

"C'mon Alex," Bryce lifted her eyes to mine, dry amusement in them, "Flutter those lashes and throw them a pretty smile, works with the males back home."

Their muttering got louder, and more voices joined in.

"These definitely aren't the males from home," I scoff- only Bryce could make a snarky quip at a time like this. "We don't have this kind of eye candy back home."

"Speak for yourself," Bryce's lip tilted. "Hunt Athalar happens to be my mate."

Her mate. I felt her chest seize in memory of him.

And it's that, that awful hurt in her eyes that makes me exhale with resolve. I draw on every ounce of exhaustion and pain and suffering we had endured these last few days, these last years- and I look back to those Fae with unveiled desperation.

"Please," I say again, and when I picture Ruhn and Hunt, when I picture our parents and our friends, my tears become real, "You have to help us."

The dark-haired female seemed to translate my words to the others, and something almost softened across their faces- kind, these people, they seemed kind. The fawn-haired female, who I noticed had a tapestry of dark whirls tattooed up her right arm, smiled sadly at me and spoke.

"She wants to know your name," the petite one relayed.

I could taste the salt of my tears in my mouth and my throat worked as I searched across all those lovely faces. I stopped at the first male, something tugging at me, an incessant throb that only settled when my eyes found him again.

There was a tense silence as we stared at each other, my arms wrapped around Bryce, holding her weak body to mine, no longer able to open her eyes much less speak. The male saw that, saw that we weren't a threat, at least not right now, and he dipped his head in the barest nod.

As if to say- we won't harm you.

"I'm Alexis Quinlan," I met those violet eyes and tried not to shudder at the thought of Ruhn. I cleared my throat, looking down at Bryce in my embrace, her chest rising and falling- just barely. "This is my sister, Bryce Quinlan."

"Hello, Alexis Quinlan," He stepped forward, a small smile tilting at his gorgeous face and the sound of the Old Language on his tongue was as glorious as night and space itself. "I'm Rhysand."

One moment, Rhysand was smiling and then the next something wholly dark and terrifying eclipsed us.

And then there was nothing but oblivion.

***

Alexis Quinlan- that's what Rhysand said she introduced herself as.

Even the sound of her name made something in my chest spark, a call in answer to her.

I felt as if I knew her somehow, felt as if we had met before- it was that feeling that stopped me from sliding Truth-teller into the junction of her throat when I found her earlier. It was the shiver that ran down me when I grabbed her waist that made me stop.

Made it impossible for me to harm her despite every instinct in me screaming that she was a stranger, a threat against this Court, against my family, against everything I held dear.

Even if another instinct in me whispered that she was anything but.

"Azriel," Rhysand's voice broke through the wall of confusion and intrigue that had erected the moment I laid eyes on her, and it took all my power to slide my gaze to his and look unfazed. "What are you thinking?"

I glanced at where the two females lay, nestled together on the small cot, faces calm as they slumbered. My lips pursed at the first female, Alexis, and the blood that caked her- matted in her long, chocolate hair, crusting against her tawny skin, staining the tight, unusual clothes she wore.

Not a threat and yet she was covered in blood that was not hers.

"They said they came from another world- Midgard- how?" I forced away the incessant thoughts of her, jaw locking as my shadows danced across my form- whispering, whispering, whispering, just about her. "They possess Gwydion but seemed surprised by Truth-Teller."

My hands clenched at my sides; the dagger sheathed at my hip no longer pulsing with that dark, unnatural energy in answer to Gwydion. It was alarming, seeing the blade I had cherished and wielded for so many years suddenly become unfamiliar to me, become other.

"She said their world was in grave danger, that they needed help," Amren mused, her slender arms folding over her chest as she stood beside me and Rhysand, her eyes assessing those females with lethal scrutiny. "Who's to say whatever they fear hasn't followed them straight to us, if the danger even exists."

I thought back to first discovering them- weak, no power left in them, if they had any at all and she had cried- amber eyes welling with tears as she held onto me. I felt it as sure as if it were my own, her grief, her desperation.

It had felt real.

"They did not seem disingenuous," Rhysand's violet eyes moved between Amren and me, the cavernous walls so at odds with the stars in his eyes but seemed to match perfectly with his deep-set frown. "And if they were going to attack, would they not have taken their chances against Azriel, before reinforcements arrived?"

"Whatever they endured has left them defenceless, they couldn't have taken Azriel even if they wanted to," Amren examined her sharp, glistening nails, her tone almost bored, "Wake them Rhysand, all these assumptions are pointless. We need them to tell us the truth."

It seemed unlikely they would tell us anything, not willingly, not if the way Alexis had steeled her spine and raised her chin as my court surrounded her was any indication. And her sister, Bryce, had bared her teeth, enough ire in her eyes to translate the curses that fell from her lips.

These were not weak females, not feeble by any account. My power seemed to rally at that reminder, that they were the enemy until proven otherwise. And as Rhysand let a wave of his magic brush over them, pulling them free from their unconscious- I let my mask slip back into place.

Shadowsinger. Spymaster. Darkness incarnate.

The females stirred, dark lashes fluttering and the three of us braced ourselves as they both sucked in sharp, lungfuls of air and shot up. Bryce, red hair swinging violently, and teeth bared, reached back- for Gwydion- and her painted nails met nothing but air.

But the other female, Alexis, sprung out of the cot and to her feet- but she didn't reach for a weapon. No, my brows rose as her hands curled, palms exposing and- nothing. Nothing came from it.

"She reached for her magic, but there isn't anything left," Rhysand muttered, interest lacing his tone and I nodded gravely in agreement, watching her breath stutter from her in realisation. "They have power, enough that it's her first instinct to call for it."

"And they're trained," I said lowly, watching their eyes flicker over themselves, over each other, and the cavernous walls that surrounded them. "The sister went for Gwydion first, and now they're assessing the space- these are no novices."

Their eyes slid to us as if knowing we spoke about them. And rightfully so fear crept up their faces as they took in the scene, the three of us, the cell they were trapped in and not a weapon or a speck of magic left in them.

The grate behind us hissed and Alexis groaned, muttering something in her language, amusing enough that the female behind her cracked a dry smile. They shifted to stand before the cot, their eyes unflinching upon us.

Rhysand stepped forward and I didn't miss how Alexis stiffened and shifted in front of Bryce- her protector perhaps? Or maybe whatever they were, she thought her sister's life more valuable than her own.

Rhysand spoke in that Old Fae language, translating mind to mind. His hand extended, wreathed in stars and moonlight, two small beans lying in his palm. "Here, swallow this and it will translate our mother tongue to you, allow you to speak it too."

Bryce scoffed, looking at the bean as if it were a vial of poison. My head cocked when Alexis folded her arms across her chest, her dark brow raising at Rhys and she spoke, something sardonic crossing her lovely face.

Rhys laughed- and I glanced at him in surprise. Even Amren's lip quirked at the corner.

"She said," Rhysand's eyes met mine and danced with enough amusement that my shadows hushed, "That she doesn't swallow- no matter how nicely a pretty male may ask."

I chuckled quietly at that, and something akin to approval hummed in my chest as my gaze shifted to hers. And it blared brighter when she tilted her chin in challenge, every inch of her soft body turning still at my attention.

"If we were going to kill you, we wouldn't need to use poison," Amren drawled, Rhysand translating again. The females met each other's eyes and Bryce said something, something that made Alexis flash her a smile- a devastating smile.

Bryce's hand trembled barely as she plucked the beans from Rhysand's palm, careful not to touch him and there was silence as they slipped it between their parted lips, grimacing as they swallowed it dry.

They gasped- in pain I realised, and it became increasingly difficult to stay rooted in place as they bucked, as she writhed, body convulsing, eyes screwed shut. I gritted my teeth as Bryce slumped back onto the bed, reeling, Alexis now bracing her palms against the cave walls to keep herself steady.

"If you were trying to hurt us a fucking knife would have done the job just as well," Alexis scowled, panting as she held the wall. My shadows skittered at the sound of her voice- soft and melodic to my ears.

"Poison might have been better than... whatever the fuck that was," Bryce said, husky voice half-muffled by the hand at her mouth as if she was forcing down bile - an answer to the pain that had thrashed her insides apart moments before.

"My apologies," Rhysand smiled, sounding anything but apologetic and their eyes narrowed as if they knew that. "But the language barrier was growing tedious, wouldn't you say?"

Bryce mumbled something incoherent, and we watched as she rose to her feet again, both their faces tight with discomfort as they steadied themselves, standing side by side as they had before and faced us.

They wanted answers as much as we did it seemed.

"You said your names were Alexis and Bryce Quinlan," Amren took a step forward, and her gaze slid over them, unimpressed. But to their credit they didn't baulk, if anything Alexis mirrored that look, taking in Amren's clothes with veiled humour. "You say you came from another world- if you are to be believed, how did you come here? Why?"

"Where is here?" Bryce swallowed, gaze flickering over the space again, "What world is this?"

"Why do you speak the Old Language?" Amren argued, eyes narrowing.

"Why do you?" Bryce countered, jerking her chin and Alexis rolled her pretty eyes, already tired of the back and forth- it nearly made me smile.

"Why are you covered in blood that is not your own?" Amren's red lips tilted into a cruel smile and- silence. They didn't speak for several moments.

And then something else overtook them. Panic overtook them. They looked down at the blood, covering them and whatever had happened, whatever they endured at home, those memories came back with a vengeance.

Bryce began to hyperventilate, her breath sawing in and out and she looked around the room, eyes wide, as if the walls were beginning to close in.

"Bryce," Alexis grabbed her sister's hand, silver-lined her eyes as she looked at her, "Bryce, don't think about it, don't think about them, please Bryce-"

"We won't harm you," Rhysand frowned, and they seemed to realise the comfort in the words, and the warning too. My throat worked, my head spinning with so many thoughts as she grabbed her sister's hand, anchoring her, and met our eyes again.

"What world is this?" Alexis demanded, and I could see it, as she looked at us one by one, the power she might wield, the magic lying dormant in her veins. She looked to Amren, unafraid. "You said no one has spoken the Old Language here in fifteen thousand years. Why?"

"How did you come to be in possession of the lost sword Gwydion?" Amren countered and this time Alexis bared her teeth, sharp canines exposing with a soft snarl. That sound glided down my spine and over my wings.

"I thought we agreed that we didn't want to have tedious conversations?" She said, and Amren's smile broadened- as if recognising a worthy opponent. "Or should we keep asking each other questions while giving no fucking answers?"

"You mean the Starsword?" Bryce rasped, giving a hint of an answer- but none of us spoke. Her eyes rolled, a mirror to the face her sister had made minutes ago, and she sighed. "It's a family heirloom, It's been in our world since our ancestors brought it over...fifteen thousand years ago."

Alexis met Amren's eyes, and something whirled in them, something sarcastic- as if to say see, that's called answering the fucking question.

My shadows crooned at that look.

"How did you find this world?" Rhysand asked, and rightfully so, they both seemed uneasy in his presence, seemed to recognise that he was in charge.

"We didn't," Alexis sighed, "Like we said: we wanted to go to Hel. We landed here instead."

"How?" Rhysand's voice sharpened and they both grimaced at the sound that came hissing from the grate, as if sensing their High Lord's anger and pleading for a taste.

"How much do you wanna bet they're gonna feed us to whatever the fucks hissing in there?" Bryce mused, wincing at the sound and Alexis nodded, looking at the grate with dread.

"We're not exactly the most palatable females, Bryce," Alexis tucked her long, dark hair behind an arched ear and chuckled wryly, talking as if we weren't even here, "Maybe it'll taste the sarcasm in our blood and be uninterested?"

She quirked a brow, teasing her sister- at a time like this they were teasing each other.

"I can assure you that that they don't discriminate," I flashed my teeth in a wicked smile, and Alexis's eyes locked with mine at the sound of my quiet tone, hands clenching at the cruel amusement in my eyes. "They like the taste of a pretty female, sarcastic or not."

She sucked in a shallow breath at that, her shapely chest rising and falling in waves as she stared at me. There was silence, and I knew the others were looking at us, between us, sensing the battle of wills that raged.

"Look, I just watched my mate and my brother get captured by a group of intergalactic parasites," Bryce snarled, and I straightened at the anger in her voice. "We have no interest in doing anything except finding a way to help them."

Her brother. Not our brother.

I narrowed my eyes and looked between them then- they didn't look remotely alike that much was obvious, nor did they smell alike, their blood completely different. Sisters, but not by blood, sisters in the same way that Rhysand and Cassian were my brothers.

"Explain." That's all Amren said. And they looked at each other, seemed to read the words on each other's faces and then turned back to us and said nothing. Amren sighed, "Just look into their minds already, Rhys."

"Don't even think about it," Alexis hissed, angling herself before her sister again and she glared at Rhysand with true terror in her eyes. A mirror to how Bryce looked at him.

"I do not pry where I am not willingly invited," Rhysand said quietly, his face not yielding even an inch of how he felt. Bryce's eyes narrowed, and Alexis showed another sarcastic smile.

"Gods be good, there are some decent males left in this galaxy," She drawled, utterly unimpressed, "However may we thank you for not invading our minds and rifling through them. Should we bow in the face of such virtue, Bryce?"

"It's definitely something to revere," Bryce looked at her sister, and chuckled, "A male with a code of mind-speaking ethics."

Rhysand paused, entertained if the constellations in his eyes told me anything. And even I fought back my astonishment, my smile, surprised by these females.

"Then we'll have to rely on your words," Rhysand grinned, snapped his fingers, and then settled onto one of the three chairs that appeared behind us, crossing an ankle over a knee.

"I was wrong before Bryce, these males are just like the ones back home," Alexis muttered, rolling her eyes at Rhysand's dramatics, before dropping onto the cot behind her with a sigh. "Beauty and arrogance, nothing new here."

Bryce fought a smile, sitting beside her sister, so close their thighs brushed, as if needing the other for comfort, for support.

"Amren," Rhysand smiled lazily at the frowning female, gesturing to the chair and then to me, "Azriel." I dropped onto the chair, tucking my wings behind me, and bracing my arms on my knees.

Her eyes were on me. As if hearing my name had the same effect as when I had heard hers.

"You say your sword has been in your world for fifteen thousand years?" Rhysand asked, and if I knew Rhys then he was more than pleased that she thought him beautiful, liked that she considered him arrogant.

My stomach lurched at the thought for some reason, her thinking him beautiful. I shoved it down, deep within me, not daring to think of it again. Think of why I even cared.

"Brought by our ancestors- Queen Theia or Prince Pelias, depending on what propaganda you hear." Bryce said a shade hesitantly, but upon seeing Amren stiffen, seeing her react, her brow rose, "You know of them?"

"No one has spoken those names here in a very, very long time," Amren swallowed, and Rhysand had gone still- if Amren was worried, then we all should be. "They once dwelled here."

"So, this is it, this is where we- the Midgard Fae- came from," Alexis was breathless, like the piece of the puzzle they had been missing slid into place. "Our ancestors left this world and went to Midgard, but we forgot where we came from."

Rhysand looked at me and I shook my head, lips pursing, never before heard of such stories involving our people migrating through worlds. But then he looked to Amren- and Cauldron, she looked shaken.

"It's murky, I went in before-" Amren glanced to the girls and didn't continue that sentence, "But when I came out there were rumours- many people vanishing, some said to another world, others said they'd moved to distant lands, rumours that they had been chosen by the Cauldron and spirited away."

Something cold lit through me at her words, getting colder still when Amren lifted her eyes and sharpened them upon the females. "What I want to know is why you came here when you meant to go elsewhere?"

"Join the line, Amren," Alexis said, biting down on her name sharply. She wasn't afraid, stupid, or brave, I couldn't tell but my shadows seemed to enjoy it all the same. "We want to know the same thing- we have no desire to be here."

"You wish to go to Hel," Rhysand said, not a shift in his tone, "To find this Prince Aidas."

At his question, they again glanced at each other and knew just from each other's faces, their eyes, what to do. It was intrinsic, just as I was with my brothers, on killing fields, in council meetings, in situations of peril, I could see exactly what my brothers thought just from something as simple as a blink.

"Allow me to lay out the situation for you, Bryce and Alexis Quinlan," Rhysand leaned forward, and they both met his stare- warriors, fighters, survivors, that's what I saw in them. "We will not torture you or pry into your mind. If you choose to talk or not, is indeed your choice."

"Let me guess," Alexis cocked her head, silken hair sliding over her shoulder as she met those star-flecked eyes, "Just like it's your choice to leave us down here to rot. Until these four walls drive us fucking crazy and we have no choice but to tell you whatever you want."

"That's torture, isn't it, Alex?" Bryce mused sarcastically, her brows furrowing in faux perplexion.

"Yes, it is, Bryce," Alexis drawled, locking her ankles and meeting Rhysand's gaze again, "Chivalrous torture though- because you know, they have a code to follow after all."

Cauldron, under different circumstances these females, I think I would rather like them. Rhys seems to share my sentiment, a rumble of laughter dancing through my mind. Rhys smiled- and snapped his fingers. In an instant, they were clean- of blood, of gore, of whatever else they had been coated in.

Beautiful. That's the word that sprang to me first at the sight of her, just beautiful.

"To incentivise you," Rhys gave a half smile, more menacing than anything else. Another shared glance between the girls and then a defeated sigh.

"The Asteri are ancient, tens of thousands of years old and they arrived in our world fifteen thousand years ago," Bryce said, and something sullen flashed through her eyes, as if in memory.

"What do you mean by arrived?" Rhysand pushed.

"Honestly, we have no idea how they first got to Midgard." Bryce shrugged and Rhysand's face softened at the agony in her eyes, her scent turning cold, as if she could still feel them, whatever they were.

"The history has spun them as liberators, they found Midgard little more than a backwater planet inhabited by humans and animals and they created a perfect empire- a place where creatures and races from other worlds came to through a giant hole called the Northern Rift." Alexis continued, frowning, "It now only opens to Hel, but it used to open to everywhere, anywhere."

"What happened when these creatures arrived from other worlds?" Rhysand asked, his voice tight now.

"The official history is that Hel tried to invade Midgard but the Asteri in all their glory unified these people under one banner and banished the Princes back to Hel. The Northern Rift was fixed, with its destination set on Hel. A massive wall was built to keep out any demons that come through the cracks and the Asteri's indomitable empire lives happily ever after."

"And the unofficial history?" Rhysand asked, a shade more quietly.

Alexis looked at her sister, saw the question in those eyes- and then nodded, solemnly. Bryce turned back to us, bracing herself with a shaky inhale and exhale.

"The Asteri are ancient, immortal beings who harvest off the magic of a world, of its people and then eat it. We call it firstlight, it fuels our world. We're required to hand it over when we reach immortality, we seize our full power through a ritual called the drop and they siphon off pieces of it- like a tax on our magic."

"A tithe," Amren gasps- I've never heard Amren gasp before, even Rhysand looks alarmed by the soft sound. They furrow their brow but when Amren doesn't continue, Alexis swallows, continuing the tale.

"Midgard is one of many in a long line of worlds invaded by the Asteri. They have an entire archive full of planets they've conquered or tried to conquer- we saw it before we came here." Alexis clenched her eyes shut, haunted by the memory, "There were only three planets that managed to kick their asses to the curb- Hel, a planet called Iphraxia, and a world occupied by Fae, the original Starborn Fae."

"My sword- you know it by a different name," Bryce looked to Amren, who nodded slowly, "I think it came from this world- was forged here. It was a part of your history and then vanished, right? Hasn't been seen in fifteen thousand years? It lines up with the timeline of the Starborn Fae arriving in Midgard."

Worry- it bloomed over us, all of us like a phantom touch. And something uneasy furled in my gut, the way these females had appeared, the light and dark call and answer between Gwydion and Truth-teller- it was not right.

"We learned that long before the Asteri found Midgard, they were here- but you kicked them out, you defeated them," Alexis's face turned pleading then, desperate, "How? How did you defeat them?"

"Our history doesn't include any such event like that," Rhysand said- but the look he gave Amren, spoke of something more.

"The Asteri remember you- and they're pissed off," Alexis scoffed, and my shadows lurched at her words, at the threat these Asteri posed. "Rigelus, their leader, basically said it's his personal mission to find this place and fucking destroy it. You're number one on his list."

Alexis trembled as she said his name- Rigelus, and her scent darkened in fear, in repulsion. And something awful rose in me at the smell, at whatever he had done to make her shake that way- something dark and terrible and deadly.

"It is our history, Rhysand," Amren said gravely, and we both went still, "But the Asteri were not known by that name- we called them the Daglan." I jolted, wings rustling, and Rhysand's face turned ashen, golden skin leeching of colour.

Cauldron fucking spare us, the Asteri are the Daglan.

"How did you defeat them?" Alexis tried again, hope beaming in her eyes now, "Do you have any record about how they fell?"

"Nothing beyond old songs of bloody battles and tremendous losses," Amren frowned, and that hope, fuck, it dimmed and dimmed and then completely vanished from her eyes.

"You think that these Asteri want to come back here for revenge?" Rhys asked, shaking his head like he didn't quite believe it. "After fifteen thousand years?"

"These are petty, arrogant bastards, fifteen thousand years is like five minutes when it comes to Rigelus when it comes to his revenge," Alexis said, her face twisting with ice, "He has infinite time and resources to-"

"What resources?" Rhysand cut in, and now, there was not an inch of amusement to be seen on his face. No, his High Lord's instinct had taken over.

"I don't even know where to start explaining it," Alexis shook her head, looked at her sister, frowned and then turned back to us, reaching out a small, shaking hand to Rhys. "I'll show you."

That darkness twisted in my gut again, at the thought of his hand touching hers. I thrust it down with the other ludicrous emotions and thoughts that plagued me.

"One moment," Rhys frowned, knowing better than to fall so easily into a trap. He vanished, and an emotion akin to relief filled me, as she lowered her hand back to her lap with a dazed blink.

"You can teleport here?" Bryce asked, but not really asking.

"We call it winnowing," Amren said, and my lip tilted at their reactions. "Can you two, do it?"

Another short glance- and two heads shaking no. My smirk widened.

"No," Alexis squared her shoulders, meeting my eyes and raising a brow at me, "There are only two Fae who can."

"On your entire planet?" Amren started, "Only two?"

Liar- I let her see that word in my eyes, even as she bared her teeth slightly at me, before turning away, dismissing me.

"Let me guess," Bryce smiled barely, "You have more?"

"Only the most powerful, but yes. Many can here." Amren's words cut off as Rhysand appeared between us again and I lifted a brow at what he held between his hands. "The Veritas Orb?"

"Hold it, think of what you want to show us, and the memories shall be captured within for us to view." Rhysand nodded to the orb at his feet. The girls frowned, muttered something, a word I didn't understand- camera- I think and then nodded in resolve.

Alexis rose on stiff legs, tugging at her clothes almost subconsciously, and no one spoke as she waded forward on silent feet. She paused before it, glanced at Rhysand, then Amren and then me- I tried not to appear like I wanted to kill her.

She bent down, short fingers curling around the orb and my throat worked at the slip of flesh that was revealed as she leaned forward, my eyes averting away from the display of golden skin and full breasts.

She rose, top mercifully slipping back into place and my eyes met hers- they danced with humour, knowing what I had seen, knowing that I had chosen to look away. My shadows flanked me excitedly, even as my face remained a sheet of darkness.

"Here goes nothing," She muttered, stepping back and then she closed her eyes and held that ball. It was a few seconds, if not more, before she fluttered her dark lashes, and then rolled the ball back to Rhysand.

He picked it up, touched the top and everything, all the horrors within began to play out.

Dread, pure fucking dread lined us all.

"Guns," Bryce said pointing to a human man holding some sort of weapon in his hands, hitting a target from miles away. "Brimstone missiles." A furious explosion, a flash of blinding white light and then... everything was in ruin, rubble. "Omega-boats." Some sort of underwater ship, with more of those weapons within.

"Asteri." Alexis breathed and when the male came onto the screen, dark-haired and gangly, she looked away, couldn't face him even in her own memories. And as a white-hot power blasted from him, shattering stone and glass and everything in his way, I could see why.

"You live in such a world?" Rhysand swallowed thickly, and they just nodded. "And they wish to bring all those things here?" Another grim nod.

Her eyes were on me, observing me but I didn't meet them, pushed the feel of them away. I stared at that orb, at the horror shown within and I knew that we were fucked, that against those monstrosities, Prythian would stand little chance.

Guns, missiles, omega-boats, the Asteri- it would be a catastrophe beyond anything that the Hybern war had seen.

"Bryce-" Her voice shook suddenly, panicked and my gaze tore from that orb. To where the other female hunched and groaned- to where her back glowed- "Bryce- Bryce, stop!"

Rhysand's magic pulsed and so did mine- and before they could strike, I lunged.

"Stay the fuck away from her!" Alexis snarled as I stood before them, Truth-teller in my hand, poised to attack. I inched closer- but then that darkness began to leak from the blade again, and I stopped at the sight.

"Put it away," Amren hissed, "It sings for her, and by bringing it close-" It was gone whisked away by my shadows within a blink.

Alexis glowered at me but then she turned and met her sister's pale face and concern softened her expression. But that light still pulsed- bright, shimmering, iridescent- and the panic in both their eyes, told us everything they had tried to hide.

"The glowing letters inked on her back," Amren muttered, Rhys stood by my side now, watching those closely, "They're the same as those in the Book of Breathings."

They seemed to notice the shift in the air, the power rumbling through the stone and the way they stared back, the way she stared back, told me that they wouldn't go down easy.

"Explain or die." 

____________________________

A/N:

HERE WE HAVE IT, CHAPTER ONE OF MY AZRIEL FANFIC!

This is a little sneak peek into what's to come but if you want to read the rest of this fanfic I am uploading it on Wattpad and AO3 (linked) My Wattpad handle is @itzwhatever and my ao3 handle is @b00kdiary

So excited to continue this story, I've been thinking about it for MONTHS.

@hellodarling1357 @charlineraven @starrystarkey93 @mockingjaytributes @nelapeach14 @alessiazeni @bishhh2003 @impossibelle @firebreathingbishqueen @lovely-susie @sarawritestories @hellowinterlane @minnieoo @charlineraven @acotarfics-mharmie009

[millie-multifics]

Though I Yearn • Part 1

Masters of the Air

Secret Admirer x Reader

A string of anonymous letters causes a stir at Thorpe Abbotts. Who could be the author of the tender correspondence you have been receiving?

Warnings: Secret Admirer (could be cute, could be creepy, depends on how you see it.), Reader is part of the Red Cross Girls, Spoilers, possible mentions of injuries, death and warcrimes.

Word Count: ~1.2k

Masterlist Next Part

x x x

Thorpe Abbotts was abuzz before the sun peeked above the horizon. Many of the personnel had been busy throughout the night while the men who would be in the planes got as much rest as their minds and bodies would allow. You were amongst those who had been working through the early morning hours, preparing the Clubmobile to serve fresh donuts and hot coffee that were intended to carry the men through their dangerous and lengthy mission.

Helen stepped into the truck, a small stack of letters piled on top of the supply box in her grip. She set the box down on the chair in the corner, seperating the letters adressed to you from the ones adressed to the few other Red Cross ladies. “Early mail delivery.”

“Must be for morale, first combat mission for many of the men today.” You easily recognized the printing on the first envelope, a letter from back home just like the ones you had recieved every week since arriving to Thorpe Abbotts. The second envelope was unusual, void of a return adress and stamp, only your name was scrawled across the front. You gently peeled open the envelope, unfolding the sheet of paper to read the message inside.

“During our first encounter your presence washed over me like the English rain, soothing and all consuming. You have captured my attention and selfishly, I must admit that I don’t want you to ever let it go.”

The letter had no siganture or name to identify who had written it, only a creased bottom corner and a small coffee stain in the middle of the mostly empty sheet. You didn’t recognize the handwritting but admittedly, you had not seen the writing of the majority of personnel at Thorpe Abbotts. Your brain spun, shuffling through as many first encounters as your mind would allow but it was overwhelming, there were so many possibilites… too many possibilities.

“Everything alright?” Helen asked, her eyes glancing to the letter clutched tightly in your hands, worry creasing her brows. She hoped everything was okay at home, it was everyones nightmare to recieve bad news from home while being on a whole other continent, so close to a raging war.

“Oh,” You quickly folded the letter, tucking it back into its envelope. “Yes, everything is fine.”

You were sure Helen was skeptical, feeling her eyes following your movements as you tucked both letters into your coat. The men trickling out from their quarters was enough to distract both of you from the coffee stained paper.

“I don’t recall such a welcoming committee when I arrived.”

The sudden voice behind you had been startling, you turned to find the handsome Major leaning against the open window of the truck.

“I do recall being in this very spot while you rushed right passed, Major.” You sent the man a polite smile, adding to the stack of paper coffee cups, “Surely you were focused on the business at hand.”

“That must have been it, I’d like to think I would have introduced myself otherwise.“

You were thankful for the roar of planes flying overheard, the arrival of his men drew his attention away from the heat pooling in your cheeks. “That is my cue. Enjoy your day, ma’am.”

The soldiers came in waves, stumbling across the clubmobile on their way to settle in. Many men lined up for the provisions you offered; hot coffee, fresh donuts, cigarettes, the newspaper and even the occasional magazine.

You sent the next in line a smile, one nearly tripping over his own boots as his friend nudged him forward. “Gentlemen, what may I offer you today?”

The dark haired soldier leaned on the window ledge that seperated you, sending you what you could only assume to be intended as a charming smirk. “If a ‘gentle’ man is what you are looking for, then that is what I shall be.”

It certainly had not been the first attempt at flirting you had experienced in the day, but generally the men had kept it tame, calling you pretty in some way or asking to take you for a harmless drink. You let your distaste for the comment show on your face, choosing to adress the amused man at his side.

“May I offer you anything?”

“Just two cups of coffee and cigarettes, thank you.”

You placed only one cup of black coffee on the ledge along with the requested cigarettes, offering a polite smile. “When your friend learns how to speak to women respectfully then he may make requests. Welcome to Thorpe Abbotts.”

Your eyes briefly found those of the dark haired man, his mouth slightly agap with your words before he was pulled out of the line by his now laughing friend.

The line faded quickly, the men moving along to find their Quarters to settle in as soon as they were served. The coffee urns were empty, only a single cup of black coffee leftover from the gallons that had been brewed. Helen had just began to clean when the last few men to arrive wandered through. You had heard through whispers that one plane had been seperated from formation, missing in the clouds. It had flown overhead a short time ago and you assumed these were those lost men. Most passed without stopping for a treat, settling in on the forefront of their minds but one staggered up to the open window.

“Anything left?”

“I’ve always got extra cigarettes or the newspaper on hand, one last cup of coffee if thats what you’re looking for.”

The solider accepted the lone paper cup, sniffing the bitter liquid before taking a large gulp. The boldness helped relieve the putrid smell of vomit from his nostrils. It was fragrent on the plane because his navigator was unable to control his air sickness, but the scent seemed to stuck in his nose as it was still the only thing he could smell, until the coffee anyway.

“You got any gum?” He asked, glancing over his shoulder at two men who were busy chatting amongst themelves. You slide a small package of mint gum across the ledge, watching as stalked toward the two soldiers, throwing the gum to the dark haired one without more than a simple ‘Heads up’.

Your first encounters with many of the men circled your mind as you lay on your bed, the letter once again clutched between your fingers. Major Egan, Douglass and Blakely, Hambone, Crosby and Bubbles, Curt and Dickie. Your first interactions with many of the soldiers were friendly introductions, none had stuck out to you as anything other than kind or mildly flirty.

He had never intended on you reading the letter, it had been written in a futile attempt to rid you from the forefront of his mind. He surely wasn’t a fool, you were far too good for a man like him but he had been completely taken by your warm presence. Unable to ease the yearn he felt for you, anchoring deeper every morning when you happily served what the military had insisted to be coffee.

It may have been a presumptious move on his part but he just couldn’t help himself.

He had snuck the letter into the mail carriers bag when he was delivering letters to the men as they ate was being labelled as ‘breakfast’.

x x x

Tags: @canyousmelltheflowers

[nutty1005]

Xiao Zhan | The simpler is more complex

Original Article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/Zkps0vHvP89ZrMWQIUZ3NA Original Author: JIAWEI This article was originally published on 10 August 2024 on ELLE’s Weixin Official Account 世界时装之苑ELLE.

Xiao Zhan believed that truth brings simplicity. But in performance, he is starting to like multi-sided and complex characters more, or rather, this is the true and real state of human existence. At a time when everything is being simplified, to be willing to admit the difference between people, to seek the possibility of communication, to be sensitive and defend complexity, this definitely requires passion, as well as courage.

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Two black curtains reached the top of the studio ridge, neatly separating the shooting area from the surroundings, there was a need to go through a maze of them to enter the small core space. Pure white, plenty of air conditioning, and the camera shutter sound was high-frequency and continuous.

Xiao Zhan wore black clothes and rarely made any unnecessary movements. For a while, the lights broke down and photography was suspended, so he maintained standing in the dark with one foot on the wooden box; when the staff and the photographer were discussing the photographs, adjusting the styling, he stood alone in front of the display screen, and the weak screen light enveloped his body. Very occasionally, he swayed slightly to the background music, his legs lean but muscular.

#01 I’m afraid of becoming dull

After entering the entertainment industry, these things quickly became part of his daily life – cameras, spotlights, monitors, and barriers. Because of his career and popularity, he had fissioned into countless “Xiao Zhans”, such as giant portraits on the facades of high-end shopping malls, the projections of an astonishing number of fans, or the appearance of characters in successive movies and TV series.

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Currently, in the dressing room after the shooting, Xiao Zhan was carrying his box of whole grain salad, vividly imitating the scene of meeting director Zheng Xiaolong.

“I was a little bit hesitant, so I asked the director if he wanted me to be thinner or stronger? He said, thin, of course thinner, so good looking, sharp.” After a while, Zheng Xiaolong saw him again while taking final costuming photographs, “He said, hey, you’ve done well.” From then till now, he has lost more than five kilograms.

Xiao Zhan, the source of all of this fission, was presentable and relaxed, to him the glamor seen by the outside world was a supplementary value. Sometimes he even forgot about it and said, “No one really cares about you.” Then he continued to talk about his work.

Recently completed was the 5-month filming of “The Legend of Zang Hai” in Hengdian. The previous film, also shot for 5 months, was the film “The Legend of the Condor Heroes: The Great Hero” directed by Tsui Hark. This was often the case for large-scale movies and long-running television dramas, it took four or five months once you joined the group. In 2022, his filming work was mainly “Where Dreams Begin / The Youth Memories” and “Sunshine By My Side”, in 2021 it was “The Longest Promise”, in 2020 it was “Ace Troops”, in 2019 it was “Douluo Continent” and “The Oath of Love”.

Endless filming appointments. Hence, it was sometimes impossible to decide whether the interval between filming should be lengthened or shortened.

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In the second half of 2019, during the filming of “The Oath of Love”, Xiao Zhan was filming during the day and recording the variety show “Our Song” at night. Both sides were very challenging. The former was his first time playing the male lead in an urban drama, so he had little experience and was under great pressure; the difficulty of the latter lies in the harmonizing, “I had to memorize all the harmonizing that were different from the song’s tone, and not to be led astray. “

“Then, I thought it didn’t matter. I slept for an hour or two and woke up a good man again. But now, while my mind says it doesn’t matter, my body will make some protests.”

This year he was filming in Hengdian. Later, one day, he discovered that his tonsils were inflamed and it was painful to swallow, but he went to work as usual. Until the director came over and asked him, what happened to your eyes? Only then did he see his own swollen eyes in the mirror, held on until the afternoon, “completely like a frog.”

He had to go to the hospital, the symptoms themselves were very common and could be stopped by taking medicine. What can’t be done was exactly what doctors advised the most: you need to rest.

More importantly, “Perception will become dull. I am really afraid of this, afraid of becoming very mechanical and formulaic.” When saying this, the emphasis was on the word “really”. When he chatted with seniors, “They also said that you have to live life, you need to experience life.”

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The fact is that the life in the limelight is somewhat contrary to the life of ordinary people, but the profession of an actor requires him to be in touch with as many folds of life as possible.

A while ago, he watched a one-man show on a variety show, describing the current workplace situation of contemporary young people. Xiao Zhan had opened a studio and worked before entering the entertainment industry. He could understand the gloom caused by going to work, but the new vocabulary and tools that appeared in the workplace made his sense of resonance weaken. He found himself gradually uncoupling to a certain extent.

#02 The flavor of life lies in the details

In early June, Xiao Zhan took a short vacation and returned to his hometown of Chongqing. He loved walking very much, and one night he walked for several hours, visiting old streets, People’s Liberation Monument, and even around the place where he used to work.

In 2014, the 23-year-old Xiao Zhan graduated from university and worked as a designer in a design studio. Every weekday morning, he transferred from Line 2 to Line 3 at Niujiaituo Station, pushing through the crowds and squeezing onto the light rail, and several times he had been squeezed so hard that his face was pressed against the glass windows.

He simply stuck against the glass and looked at the Jialing River below, seeing the strange rocks exposed in the dry season and various people, including winter swimmers, joggers and fishermen, with a rather optimistic spirit.

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He still loved to observe the people around him——

“Why are you still here so late?”

“People walking in a hurry must be people who have just gotten off work and are rushing back, their behavior is just like when I was trying to catch the subway, when it’s the last train and you want to run, in a panic. Some food delivery guys are rush forward undauntedly. There are also some very leisurely people, sitting there drinking beer, then going home and starting a new day.”

“Everyone has an exciting story happening, and it is everyone’s life that makes up our society. So it is wondrous, everyone is the protagonist, we are all filming our own biographies, how will tomorrow’s story develop?”

At that moment, mixed in, he was like all those who have been busy working in a foreign land for a long time and finally had the time to go home, and discovered that “it had been a long time since I came here, and there had been quite a lot of changes.” “Actually, I’m not particularly happy or have any other feelings. I’m living, that’s all.”

Two and a half days later, Xiao Zhan left Chongqing and returned to Beijing due to work, then rushed to Shanghai, and then in turn to France. This time he brought his parents too. This was a long in coming family trip, within a week, they traveled from France to Switzerland and back to France. Every detail of the trip was magnified, they were happy, bickering, or just walking for a while, “it was all very vivid.”

On the day they parted, they had dinner at a restaurant in the south of France, the car to pick him up arrived and he had to leave first. Before leaving, his mother hugged him and told him to take care of himself. In a rare move, his father also hugged him awkwardly.

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The flavor of life lies in the details.

“I used to think that work was everything and life was not that important, it was nothing more than having a place to sleep, then getting up, going to work, finishing work, and resting. But now, when my parents have grown older, and I have not been with them for a long time, you will feel as if each other’s lives, even your family’s, would become further and further apart. “He especially did not want this to happen.

The way to avoid suspension and regain the real sense of life is not difficult. “When you have time, go out and see more. The important thing is to feel life and feel the world. Even if some of the things are bad and cruel, they are all life, and will burst out with energy when you need it.”

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#03 Stay innocent, stay complex

Halfway through the interview, Xiao Zhan suddenly said that he was ambivalent about long interviews. On the one hand, he was worried that he had not grown up enough and would show ignorance in the conversation, but on the other hand, he wanted to explore some subtle feelings through the conversation because he felt that he was not good at using words to record them.

Observation, feeling, understanding and expression are the essentials of why actors can bring creativity.

“Dialogue is also muscle memory.” Xiao Zhan said, “Although I am very introverted, I am not antisocial. Because I think actors need to learn to express, express your inner thoughts, and digest the content conveyed to you by the other party.”

Before the filming of “Sunshine By My Side” started, he met with the main creators and held several script meetings to deepen his understanding of one another and the characters. In the early stages of “The Legend of Zang Hai”, the producer also mentioned that he would discuss the script in detail and talk about a scene with a lot of his own understanding.

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Xiao Zhan is not an actor with a professional background, when he first entered the industry and filmed “Battle Through the Heavens” and “The Wolf”, he had strong doubts and asked himself, am I suitable? The constant negativity and self-refuting made him lose self-confidence.

Sometimes he would be asked what he would be doing now if he had not participated in the talent show, debuted, or entered the entertainment industry at the age of 23. He had thought about it, but did not look back.

If he was not good at acting, then he needed to spend extra time taking acting classes, review more in the monitors, and ask more advice from his seniors. He put his head down stubbornly, and with hard work, he slowly found the knack.

Later the filming of “Where Dreams Being / The Youth Memories” started, Xiao Zhan played Xiao Chunsheng, a young man from the military courtyard in Beijing, who was completely different from him, and even his accent was completely distinct. He felt insecure. Before filming started for many scenes, director Fu Ning would run over and whisper to him, “Don’t be afraid Zhanzhan, just speak bravely, if you feel it, just say it, the audience actually can feel your emotions and what you want to express.” .

He also gradually gained more self-awareness: “Techniques may not be my area of ​​expertise, I rely more on feelings. Only when I feel it myself then I can have the confidence to interpret it. If I rely solely on some techniques, I don’t think it is sufficiently moving.”

It had been 8 years since Xiao Zhan first acted, and his resume included leading male roles in films and television dramas of various themes. But he still felt that he is a newcomer and hopes to cooperate with more experienced production teams if there is an opportunity in the future.

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He would not think too much, he actually did not know his work plan divided by year. He only cared about the work arrangements for the next stage, rather than “asking about things that are too far away.”

“I still feel like a child now, but in fact I am not anymore. It seems like I am still in high school, but in fact I have grown up.” The nature of a child means curiosity, desire to explore, and power of imagination.

He placed the curiosity and desire to explore into his characters, “I mean, for myself, when I dig into the character’s background and past, I explore the complexity and contradiction of the character as a person, and present it. Only in this way can some of his choices and motivations be understood by the audience, and the work may then be good, and only then can you have the audience you have now, right?”

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#(Q&A)

ELLE: During the break, will you think about anything on the set? Xiao Zhan: Of course, I remember that just a few days after filming was completed, I was still dreaming that I was still filming, and the director and I were still discussing how to say that phrase on set? How to handle that scene?

ELLE: Do you actually miss the atmosphere on the set? Xiao Zhan: I like it very much, because I like the feeling of everyone creating together and working together to get something done.

ELLE: When you first entered the entertainment industry and your popularity grew very quickly, you said you felt it was a bit unreal and magical, but now you seem to be quite relaxed. How did this change occur? Xiao Zhan: Rather than being unreal or magical, after so many years, I feel that I hadn’t had time to adapt to such a fast pace at that time, so when I woke up from sleep, I was like where am I today? What am I doing? I think it is a process, just like when you first enter the workplace, you will be very excited, “Work here I come, please take good care of me”, “My highness is here, everyone get out of the way”, “I can do it, I will do it”. (Laughs) But after experiencing a lot of things, you will feel that it seems that everything needs to be considered in the long term.

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ELLE: In several interviews, you mentioned that you like to play roles that “can convey energy.” Why do you have such a preference? Xiao Zhan: Because I think this is the life of the character. The kind of energy I’m talking about is not just a single, generally understood positive energy, I’m talking about nourishment that can subtly influence and moisturize. I believe that every character has a complete storyline inside, this is what I like very much, and as long as you dig deep, you can move people. I don’t really like to call the villain a “villain”, as it seems to be a bad character from the beginning, but in fact it is not, he may have his own difficulties.

ELLE: It sounds like “transmitting energy” is just a general term, but is it actually about understanding different people through performance? Xiao Zhan: Yes, if you break it down to each character, what they convey is different. But if you want to talk about “good people” and “bad people”, then I don’t think it’s interesting.

ELLE: So do you think performance is a form of communication? Xiao Zhan: Yes, you can say that, I think it’s great to say that, (performance) is a bridge to communicate with the audience. Just like when a drama is broadcasting, I will read some of the audience’s comments and impressions after watching it, and I feel that they have a very rich feelings about the work. When I see some comments that are exactly the same as my thoughts during the filming, I will feel very amazed, as if the bridge is really connected, we don’t know each other in life and have never communicated with each other, but he suddenly understands my thoughts then, I’ll just feel that, oh, acting is a beautiful and magical thing.

ELLE: Do you watch some science fiction movies, TV series, and literary works? Xiao Zhan: Yes, I used to like watching “The Three-Body Problem”, I have actually watched some science fiction movies recently, the American drama “Constellation”, and recently I am watching “Dark Matter”, which is about infinite flow and parallel time and space. Because I think maybe there really is a parallel time and space. Every choice you make will split out a different parallel time and space.

ELLE: Then will you imagine Xiao Zhan in parallel time and space? Xiao Zhan: I will really wonder, for example, is he still an actor? Maybe yes, but is he still filming now? Is he still singing now? Or is he also a designer? Is he an employee or is he his own boss? (Laughs) Really, I will.

ELLE: As for the future, what do you think it will be like? Xiao Zhan: Wow, I feel that the world may return to its original nature when the time comes instead, maybe the world will become a better place, and people will return to very essential communication.

ELLE: This is very interesting. Why do you think so? Xiao Zhan: Anyway, at least now I have a little aversion with this kind of ubiquitous Internet, when we were young, there were no mobile phones, everyone just chatted during meals, my friends would all come downstairs to play, hide and seek, and play various games, I feel that that time was very precious instead.

ELLE: Will there still be an actor career by then? Xiao Zhan: I think there will be. I believe that as long as life goes on, drama will continue. Because everyone needs an outlet, emotional resonance and sustenance, be it images or sounds. So I feel that even if the world is destroyed, as long as there are still people, drama will definitely exist.

[delulu-is-the-soluluh]

Scars of Flames and Wind | Chap 1

Previous Chap: Prologue

Next Chap

A Dark!Rowaelin x afab!Reader

(Temporary) Summary:  Aelin and Y/N shared a deep bond since childhood, growing up together in the royal courts of Terrasen as their innocent crushes hinted at a future romance. However, the invasion of Adarlan shattered their world. Aelin was forced to become Celaena, while Y/N stayed behind, joining the rebellion and becoming their most lethal spy, never ceasing to look for the princess. That is until she accidentally meets with a famous assassin who’s eyes she knows for so long.

Author's note: This chapter is set one month before the events of AB.

Warnings: death, bar fight, daggers, mediocre writing.

Chapter 1 | Echos of the past

y/n pov:

After that fateful night, King Orlon and his court were slaughtered. Princess Aelin was presumed dead a few days later, as survival from her fall into the Florine River seemed implausible. The once vibrant magic of the land vanished entirely as Adarlan declared Terrasen under their dominion and the land was marred by despair; hundreds went missing, and thousands perished. Countless faes lost their minds without their magic, poverty gripped the families who had relied on their abilities for sustenance and hundreds were now trapped in their animal forms, gradually forgetting their true selves. 

For eight long years, Aedion had to rise through the ranks of Adarlan’s army, gaining their trust, securing a position of power, orchestrating battles, and inflating body counts. All this to aid the rebels hiding in the Staghorn mountains. I trained as a soldier, after relentless begging for Aedion and Darrow. Soon, I proved myself as a military strategist and a well trusted spy, with “lethal combat skills despite being human” to Darrow’s headache and “a specialty on being annoying” according to Aedion.

All this to find her. 

We often bluffed about her being alive to give hope to the rebels. And even if it was a dangerous gamble, it helped to ignite the spark of resistance. But I have never believed otherwise. Some part of me was certain that she was alive, that she’s surviving in her own way. Darrow often called me delusional and I often blamed him for his lack of will on tracking her. And even when Aedion tried to dissuade me, I couldn’t stop searching for clues. Looking for a familiar face in every woman I know. She could have changed her entire appearance, but you can’t hide those eyes. Those turquoise eyes with golden hues.. 

And working as a spy for them had me traveling around the continent: gathering information about the court, to recruit more allies, leaving favors to use in the future, tracking some groups to see if they’re doing any improvement, and to...seize threats, whenever needed. 

Sometimes I wonder if she would feel disgusted of me, of Aedion, after so much blood in our hands. Some of them were innocent who accidentally got involved.. Just thinking that she might be repulsed by this path I took, terrifies me.

I just never thought my path would lead me to the most hideous and filthy part of Rifthold. 

The smell of waste and sewage burned my nose, making my eyes water. Not even the night or the salt air could mask that stench. Each step through the narrow alleys and dimly lit streets painted a picture of despair and disgust.

I pulled my hood lower, trying to blend into the shadows as I navigated through the labyrinth of decay. The muffled clamor of a filthy bar nearby reminded me of my goal. The distant shouts, the clinking of bottles, the occasional scurrying of rats through the streets... Fuck this was disgusting, with all the blood money this kingdom has, I expect them to afford a little bit of soap or something. 

Finally, I reached the abandoned house, the wood rotting and the stones cracked as I entered. Hunter and Louis were already there, their faces tense in the dim light. Hunter was pacing while Louis leaned against the wall, arms crossed.

“So,” I greeted, pulling down my hood. “Any news?”

Hunter stopped pacing and looked at me, relief flickering across his face when he saw me. “Someone is trying to ditch us.”

I winded my eyes slightly in alert waiting for to continue  but it was Louis, who pushes off the wall and nodded “One from the Finn’s group got caught by the guards talking to Lady Balanchine and was.. bribed by to be their informant on us” 

“Bribed as beaten up, huh?” He nodded as I furrowed my brows “And Archer thinks the little fella knows about our contact on Eyllwe and wants her gone?

Louis went quiet as Hunter sighed “We just want to make sure nothing goes wrong. Having a royalty in the castle will be more efficient than a healer”

He was right. Sorscha has been doing a great job, but if we get a princess in there..

I bit my cheek in annoyance “And deciding, alone, to kill off the problem, will solve everything? Without giving a flying damn about how this will affect the other’s trust in the rebellion?” 

Louis walked to me, handing me a dagger “Just make it look like a bar fight.” He shrugged his shoulders “Nicky was always volatile anyway.” 

I looked at him in disbelief. What kind of people Archer has been recruiting? How can he be so nonchalant with this?

“It’s a life, Louis. A person. And, yes, she fucked up and I agree on this” I said pointing to the dagger with my head “but pull this shit and again I’ll show how volatile I can be.” I said, grabbing the bladed weapon and adding into my sheath. “Anything else?”

“It’s said Celaena Sardothien is around” Louis said walking past me

“Ah, the Adarlans Assassin” I smirked as I fixed hair into my hood. “She’s quite famous isn’t she? Love her style. Gotta be lucky to stumble on her, though.”

“I’m serious YN. She didn't get this title by nothing. She’s deadly, and if you get hurt, Aedion will kill me” Hunter said in annoyance.

I rolled my eyes, a smirk tugging at my lips. “I’m perfectly capable of surviving,” I said, striding to the table and grabbing a bag of coins. “Sardothien or not.”

Hunter sighed, his eyes serious as they met mine. “Y/N, this isn’t just about your survival. If Nicky says anything about this princess being involved, it could jeopardize everything we’ve worked for. We need solid intel, and we need it without drawing attention.”

I nodded, understanding the weight of his words. “I get it, Hunter. But we’ve handled tough situations before. We’ll get through this too.”

Louis crossed his arms, his gaze steady. “Just remember, if you encounter Sardothien, avoid her. Gather information and get out. She’s lethal, and we don’t need unnecessary risks.”

Adjusting my leather vambraces, I tightened the straps of my boots and pulled my hood lower over my face. My garments were dark and form-fitting, designed for stealth and quick movement. “Yeah, Got it. In and out, no heroics,” I said, my tone light but my resolve firm.

Hunter placed a hand on my shoulder, a rare gesture of camaraderie. “Be safe, Okay? I like breathing but I would be sad to lose a colleague” he smiled softly

I returned the smile and gave him a nod, “I’ll be back before you know it,” I promised, slipping out of the building.

The bar was as dirty as I had anticipated. The stench of stale beer and unwashed bodies permeated the air, and the floor was sticky with fluids that I really don’t want to know what they were. My eyes scanned the room, seeking out for Nicky: Beaten up women, brunette, medium height, and a scarface. Easy target.

I located her by the final table on my right, defeatedly drinking her beer. Poor thing, already knows what to wait for. I bit my lip, thinking how I could rile up this place towards her. Maybe stealing drinks on her behalf or bluffing to the bartender that she caused me a huge default and would do the same here.. it wouldn’t be suspicious if she ended up stabbed. 

I was about to put my plan into action when my attention was drawn to a commotion at a table with five drunken men and women,who were dressed entirely in black, masked and hooded, standing out among them. They were accusing her of cheating at their card game,their voices grew louder as I stood from afar.

 Perhaps I won’t be the one to rage up the bar, then.

"You think you can just waltz in here and cheat us?" a burly man with a scruffy beard shouted, his face flushed with alcohol and rage. "We don't take kindly to thieves!"

The woman, her masked face revealing nothing but the level of her eyes, remained calm and collected. She leaned back in her chair in feline grace, crossing her arms over her chest. "I didn’t cheat. You’re just upset because I’m winning," she replied coolly, her voice carrying an overly sweet edge.

A second man, tall and lanky with a sneer plastered on his face, slammed his fist on the table. "Don’t lie to us! We saw you slip that card from your sleeve!"

The woman's eyes narrowed, and she stood up slowly, her movements controlled and deliberate. "I don’t need to cheat to beat you," she said, her voice dripping with contempt as she leaned onto the table. "But if you want to make a scene, be my guest."

The tension at the table was palpable, drawing the attention of the entire bar. I leaned back against the counter, smirking in awe, my plan momentarily forgotten, as I watched as the situation escalated. Damn, she was looking for ‘fun’ tonight. 

"Enough of this!" the burly man growled, reaching out to grab her arm. But she was faster. With a swift movement, she twisted his arm behind his back and shoved him face-first into the table. The impact sent cards and drinks flying, and the bar erupted into chaos. The tall man lunged at her, but she sidestepped gracefully, delivering a sharp kick to his midsection that sent him crashing into a nearby patron. 

Another one, bald with full beard, likely a regular at the bar, staggered towards her with a determined yet unsteady gait. The idiot raised his fists, clearly intent on joining the fray. But the woman barely seemed to notice him. With a flicker of disdain, she sidestepped his wild, clumsy swings, delivering a swift, expertly placed jab to his ribs. He crumpled to the floor, gasping for breath, utterly outmatched. It only added to the mesmerizing display of her skill and power, deepening my fascination with her.

There was a primal elegance, a wild, untamed energy on her that seemed to ignite something deep within me. It was quite hypnotic as if she was dancing on the edge of a knife. Admiration mingled with a hint of something darker, that thrilled me as much as it intrigued me.

The masked woman smirked beneath her hood. "Come on, guys, this is too easy. What does it take for someone to have fun here," she taunted, her confidence unwavering, her blue eyes gleaming with savagery and rage. Blue eyes that seemed..

A bottle was thrown and smashed above my head, quickly bringing me out of trance.

The fight erupted into a full-blown brawl, as I shook my head to ground myself and seized the opportunity to move through the chaos undetected. I crossed the bar avoiding the people who were now fighting among themselves, ducking and dodging bodies and fists, eyes locked on Nicky, who was retreating towards the corner of the bar. Nicky's eyes were fixed on the growing fight, her body tense and ready to slip away unnoticed. 

I moved swiftly, coming up behind her and, with a precise motion, plunged my dagger between her fifth rib. “Sorry about this,” I murmured in her ear, my voice laced with sarcasm and a hint of pity, as I twisted the dagger and pushed even more inside her. “But it’s necessary. We can’t afford any risks.” Nicky’s eyes widened in shock, tears streaming down her face as she looked at me, her mouth forming a silent scream.

I felt my eyes soften a little. No matter how many I kill, this never gets easier. I’ll always remember them. Agreeing or not, won’t change the amount of blood I have in my hands. 

I took the dagger out of her and turned away without looking back. The soft tremor under my boots was the confirmation that she collapsed. The fight was still raging,  with the bar’s patrons, already on edge from too much drink, joined in. bottles flew, chairs were overturned, and the air was filled with the sounds of shouts and breaking glass as walked towards the secondary door 

The bartender still yelled for order,voice drowned out by the cacophony, when someone slammed into me from the side. Instinctively, I shifted my weight, performing a swift maneuver to regain my balance and avoid falling. As I pivoted, I found myself face-to-face with the person who had collided with me.

The masked woman. And her eyes were turquoise and gold. 

Even with smeared black kohl, it was unmistakable.

The world seemed to stop as her eyes widened, as if she recognized me.

Before I could react, she bolted for the door. I sprang to my feet, weaving through the crowd in pursuit. The night air hit me as I burst outside, the woman already disappearing into the shadows. But I won’t let her go, not again. I ran after her, with my heart pounding with the need for answers.

[astridhoff03]

My thoughts on Season 2 of the greatest Chaos in the World of DreamWorks TV…

Oh my gosh, did this season yet again not disappoint, even if it has a bit of a slow start, it is still a great story. I definitely can see past the little flaws, because it’s still a good show with emotional moments and thrilling adventures. Also at the end of the season it will get really dark, darker than the Jurassic World Trilogy ever could’ve gone. I got goosebumps just like watching the Jurassic Park movies. And more emotional than every movie in the Jurassic Park/World franchise. Such compelling, complex characters with well developed backstory’s. I honestly was speechless when I finished season two and thought again, wow they scored again with this show,

My favorite episode is definitely two because how they showed us, how Brooklynn reacts to the loss of her arm and the fact that everyone thinks she’s dead. Kiersten Kelly does a great job in executing Brooklynns emotional journey in this, I think she has took a bit inspiration of herself loosing an important part of the body.

And Soyona Santos is an incredible villain, her backstory is also really interesting and how she interacts in the whole show with Brooklynn is just amazing. My favorite scene of her is when she draws Brooklynn, she never was so intimidating and seems extremely intelligent and dangerous. Together with the Raptor Lady she’s now one of the best villains in the Jurassic Park franchise. Also I just noticed that the thing with the lazer makes actually a lot of sense, even if I think it’s not as scary as the whistle of the Raptor Lady. Also Soyonas animated version is prettier than her live action counterpart. It’s just funny how much more intimidating and dangerous the JW: Dominion villains are in the series.

What Brooklynn does is not good for her but I can also understand her, she wants to protect her friends and family. But it was sad to see that Ben was near at a panic attack when Brooklynn called him. Also Yaz and Sammy are still the cutest and heathliest relationship in the entire camp fam but I like that Darius and Kenji finally get along again, I missed their friendship and dynamic so much. Kenji has gone through so much, he’s the most tragic figure in the entire cast of how much he experienced loss in his life. And Yaz and Sammy have grown stronger together. I love how Sammy tries to decorate the container and Yaz watches her with so much love and admiration.

And don’t let me start on the dinosaurs this season. They were incredible. The Suchomimus or as Billy would said it Suchimimus has a beautiful design and many incredible action scenes, my favorite is when he fights the hippo. I also like the the communication between the Albino Baryonyx and the Atrociraptor Red, was very scary and also how he walked behind Brooklynn was bizarre. Leucotistic Baryonyx is also the perfect combination of the idea of the hybrids and the normal dinosaur from Jurassic Park. It’s like they’ve found a perfect compromise where every fan gets something out of it. The chase in the dark with the eyeless Baryonyx was scary as hell, I can’t find words for it and also with what calmness Soyona Santos guides Brooklynn through the darkness, while her friends get chased. Geba was also pretty cute and funny, I feared for her life in the last episodes. It was actually a really good Idea to show how humans, animals and the dinosaurs get along on other continents. Was very interesting to witness and also helped to understand the world better our heroes are now in. The Majungasaurus was also very cool to see finally in the Jurassic Franchise and I am happy that my favorite dinosaur of all time, the Allosaurus has a final hurrah in episode two. This magnificent beast was going through a lot, blindness, serval fights who could’ve easily ended deadly, she was blamed for killing Brooklynn, was hunted and serval times imprisoned. I feel very sorry for my favorite predator of the Jurassic Park franchise, hopefully she can find finally peace in her future as our Camp Family. But I guess we have to wait until season three. I am happy when I see DODGSON again and the biosyn valley.

[humanpurposes]

I Have Always Been A Storm, Part 1

Read the full chapter on AO3 // Main Masterlist

Aemond Targaryen x Floris Baratheon

In the year 128AC, Floris Baratheon weds Aemond Taragryen, a daughter and a son both driven to duty, now bound to each other when the realm is on the brink of war. Floris is enamoured by the Prince, but love is something she can only hope will bloom once her vows have been said before the eyes of the Seven- AU where Aemond and Floris marry before the Dance of the Dragons.

Warnings: 18+, smut, pregnancy, arranged marriage, canon divergence, angst, possibly quite a lot of angst, hurt/comfort

A/n: Surprise!! It's the Florismond fic no one asked for :) Planning on this being a 3 part mini series.

“A terrible coincidence,” my husband says.

Head bowed, he kneels before me where I sit on the end of our bed. Thunder and lightning rage beyond the windows but he has brought the storm inside with him. The rainwater that has drenched his hair and his riding leathers soak through my nightgown. I keep my jaw tight and my teeth pressed together to stop myself from shivering.

He has discarded his gloves to hold my hands in his, leaving a trail of kisses and tears on my skin. He circles the pad of his thumb over my fingertips, over the callouses left by my years of devotion to the harp. His hands are calloused too, from his sword, from the reins on Vhagar’s saddle.

He lifts his chin to look at me. I scarcely recognise him. My husband is a proud young man, always poised, never loud, often cold and stoic, gentle around the right people, his mother, his sister, me.

His single eye is glistening and glassy, the blue of his iris vibrant despite his distress. His breaths are laboured, his lips parted. I see nothing but hopelessness in him, but even like this, I wonder if the gods will ever manage to create a person quite so beautiful as Aemond Targaryen.

I slip a hand out of his grasp and, as gently as I can, pull on the eyepatch that covers the left side of his face. He lets me do it, as he has done many times before. A burst of lighting catches in the uneven edges of his sapphire eye. The twisted flesh that frames it is red, I wonder if it is hurting him.

I asked him once, why he was so reluctant to display this part of himself, why he wanted to hide it from me when we were first married.

His reply was always that he did not wish to frighten me.

What reason would I have to fear a scar? I’ve seen plenty of blood in my life, hunts, tourneys, accidents in the training yard. I see my own blood every moon. How could I fear my own husband?

He’s stuttering, sobbing, choking on his words. “I didn’t– I– I tried to stop her– but I was so– I just wanted him to…”

Heat rises behind my eyes. My skin is cold, my limbs frozen, but the shock is starting to wear off. I cannot listen to any more or I will surely break. 

I hush him, curling my whole body over his head. If he sees my face he will think I fear him, he will think I am horrified by him. I run a hand over his damp hair and he rests his face against the swell of my stomach.

Before he left, only a matter of days ago, after he had kissed my lips sore and stolen all the air from my lungs, he had come down to his knees to kiss my belly. By Maester Orwlye’s estimation, I only have a month left of my term. By tradition, I should be in confinement, but Aemond had ordered against it. He could not bear the thought of being apart from me, and I him. He has his own books and correspondences with Maesters across the continent. In Dorne, expectant mothers are encouraged to exercise as much as they can, to breathe fresh air and feel the sun on their skin. This would be best for our child, Aemond decided, rather than keeping me a dark bedchamber with only midwives and septas for company. 

Queen Alicent had said from the start that Aemond would make for a devoted husband, that he has always been a man of duty.

An awful sense of dread runs through my blood.

I should be glad that he has returned to me, and I am, I am .

“I wanted the boy to fear me. I did not imagine that I might…”

What can I say to him? What can I do to ease his suffering when I cannot stand the feeling of his body so close to mine? 

I am bound to him, through vows, through witnesses. I have given him my body and he has given me his. I carry his blood in my womb, my child as much as it is his. Most irreversibly of all, my heart is twined with his. I love him, and yet...

When he places a palm against my stomach, over the space where our babe grows, all I can think is that this is the hand of a kinslayer. Whatever fate the gods have for him now is my fate also. If he has cursed himself, then I too am cursed.

Full chapter on AO3

Tags (commented to be added)

Series taglist:

General taglist: @randomdragonfires @theoneeyedprince @targaryenrealnessdarling @jamespotterismydaddy @tsujifreya @blackswxnn

[runby2]

"Our Constellation" is a homebrew tabletop session run by my polycule and I. I am the DM, and this game is a little passion project for us. To help others join the experience by listening in every Wednesday and watching the world grow, we've started a small little discord server to host our sessions live!

In this modern fantasy, a party of 3 retired and now rehired heroes work for an elf named Calavash Spiece, who runs his family company at his manor with his brother Coriander. It's sort of like a fantasy Buc-ees. For some reason he's hiring adventurers now, and not just chefs to work at the in-manor tavern. I hope those weird portals opening up around the world have nothing to do with it. Those are scary! Listen in to our live little podcast, and become immersed in this world with us!

Sessions are 8:00PM weekly EST, and in the session channel, listeners will be muted to give a non-overwhelming experience. We even have a little chat room if you'd like to say something while listening! Hope to see you there, and safe travels through the continents of Arbor!

JOIN OUR humble little server below! Feel free to share your own fantasy tabletop OCs as well! We love to hear from other creators! <3 You must be an adult to join, as the topics in the session may be disturbing to some listeners.

we're only accepting up to 25 members with this link - and if everything goes well, we'll remake the link so more of you can join in! so hop in the tavern while it's hot! tomorrow 9/25/24 will be our first live session with an audience! <3

TRIGGER/CONTENT WARNINGS BELOW! [they're in the server rules channel too but just in case!]

in-character yelling [if a character is angry, we scream as the character. I know this may be common knowledge that tabletop fantasy roleplay has drama and loud scenes as we act them out, but some may not know! we love each other irl, and we are not actually angry. we're at the same table with each other as we play!]

substance use [characters and npcs in game may use stimulants or ingest alcohol]

fantasy violence

body horror

abusive relationships [manipulation, sibling enmeshment - all that usually comes with conflict or dark fantasy/media.]

mentions of injuries

trauma recovery

humorous mlm divorce drama [two party members are divorced]

fictional children in dangerous situations [there may be kid NPCs that have to be rescued!]

cult mentions / interactions [run by a DM who is a cult survivor.]

overall, despite these warnings, Our Constellation is an adventure comedy, and we strive for a happy ending for every character.

[autumnslance]

A Tale of Two Sisters

From early in ARR, the WoL has run into members of the intrepid Ironheart family, beginning with Millith in Gridania and appearing early in each expansion since. The family follows in their famous ancestor's footsteps and explores the world, kindly marking items of interest in the WoL's own sightseeing log.

And it's no different in Tural, as we first meet Elsebee Ironheart, who gives us sightseeing records for Yok Tural. It seems we have to seek out her twin sister, Emeline Ironheart, for sights of Xak Tural with which to fill our log book.

But even the familiar sightseeing log entries get their own twist in Dawntrail...

Elsebee Ironheart: A fellow Eorzean, am I right? Do you fancy yourself much of a sightseer? Elsebee Ironheart: Dear old Millith gave you her journal? My, what a small world. It just so happens that I'm her cousin! Elsebee Ironheart at your service. Elsebee Ironheart: Well, if you've met Cousin Millith, I'm sure you can guess why I “crossed the salt,” as they say. This continent is positively brimming with sights unseen by Eorzean eyes, and I'm here to discover them all! Elsebee Ironheart: My twin sister and I, that is. You see, I had more interest in Yok, while she was drawn to the vistas of Xak. So it was that we parted ways at the bridge, each of us touring half of Tural. Elsebee Ironheart: …So give me your sightseeing log, then! Elsebee Ironheart: Let's see, let's see… Oh, how beautiful! I should like to see these places myself someday. Ahem, er, sorry, I was going to just scribble down… Elsebee Ironheart: …my notes on Yok Tural! I included what my sister shared with me of Xak Tural, but I'm afraid it isn't much. Elsebee Ironheart: My twin's name is Emeline and she's still wandering about over there. Given your natural affinity for Ironhearts, you'll doubtless run into her someday. Elsebee Ironheart: Well, I'm sure you've got places to be and vistas to behold. May your journey throughout Tural be bright and unforgettable!

When first doing this on Dark Autumn, I really didn't think much of it; business as usual, right? Noted the comments about the sister, and as the log only went to zone 4, well, guess we'd deal with that when we found her twin.

And honestly, with so much else happening in the MSQ and all the sidequests, the Ironheart sisters fell out of mind...until I reached Solution 9 and saw, upon arrival, a single blue-marked sidequest available immediately...

Emeline Ironheart: That tome…that wouldn't happen to be a sightseeing log, would it? Emeline Ironheart: Millith! Now that's a name I haven't heard in a good long time. And dearest Elsebee… Emeline Ironheart: She's my twin sister, you see, and I haven't seen her for thirty long years. Not since I was trapped during my exploration of Yyasulani. Emeline Ironheart: It brings me great joy to know she is well. Pardon me for asking, but…might I see the notes she added to your log? Emeline Ironheart: She always did make such bold strokes of her lettering… Here. Emeline Ironheart: I've added my own notes. Some of the information may seem improbable at best, but I believe there is truth in every entry. Emeline Ironheart: Were I younger, I would set out in search of these fantastic sights myself, but alas, my body can no longer endure such travels. Emeline Ironheart: Though thanks to you, I feel lighter than I have in an age. If there is one thing I should wish, it is to see my sister again before I die. There is so much I would share with her… Emeline Ironheart: But you have better things to attend to than an old woman's musings. Take care, kind adventurer. And may your journey lead you to vistas both bright and unforgettable. Emeline Ironheart: Whenever I lay eyes on a traveler like yourself, I think back to the days I roamed the land as a young lass. Such fond memories…

When I first reached this quest, it took me out at the knees. They're not the only set of twins we meet in this expac, but they are the only ones separated by the time shift of the dome.

Returning to Tuliyollal, you can speak to Elsebee again:

Elsebee Ironheart: What? My poor sister's trapped inside that strange dome!? Elsebee Ironheart: Thank you─this is precisely the lead I've been searching for. Now I just need to find a way inside!

It's not clear whether WoL lets her know that her beloved twin is now as old, or maybe even older, than their parents may be...

I do somewhat hope we get more about this, as post-MSQ Elsebee has no new lines, and Emeline only says:

Emeline Ironheart: I gather that the world outside is now accessible─though leaving Everkeep may be a feat too far for these weary old bones. I just pray that my twin sister is hale and healthy…

Usually the Ironhearts don't get their own stories; they're there to facilitate the sightseeing log and that's it. But in this case, Dawntrail's story creates a heartbreaking scenario for this famous family, separating two of its closest members not with distance, but time.

[tara-the-quiet-bookworm-2016]

Home Alone Yandere! Simon 'Ghost' Riley x Female Reader Chapter Two

Author note- Here we are back again with chapter two of Home Alone. Now as you can gather I like to mention any and all trigger warnings in the authors notes before we proceed. If that's okay with everyone. Anyways this chapter will feature such things as stalking, violence. and non-con touching, non-con drugging almost non-con SA as well as more obsessive thoughts from our boy, Simon. And more paranoia from our poor reader.

Now that we got THAT out of the way here is Chapter Two. I hope you enjoy.

Chapter Two.

You were exhausted. Having spent most of the night tossing and turning, and now you were on your third coffee of the day. The good news was that you didn't have to work today. The bad news was you were meeting your sisters for lunch soon and all you wanted to do was sleep. And to top it off? Was you were so sure you had closed your window last night, the one that didn't lock, the one you had meant to talk to your landlord about but it always slipped your mind. Normally it wouldn't bother you but you could swear that someone had been watching you.

And during the night you could have swore you saw a large figure concealed in the shadows of you room, wearing a mask with a skull on it. But as dawn broke you brushed it off as a nightmare. And in all honesty nothing seemed out of place, though if you really looked you would noticed that a couple pairs of panties were missing, thankfully not the ones that were your favorites, but if you really looked you would notice a pair of pink and red panties with a bow on the butt had gone missing, as well as a pair of maroon panties. No big deal you bought panties in bulk it would seem, considering how often you lost panties. Oh, if only you knew...

Heaving a tired sigh that turned into another yawn you went to your bathroom intent on grabbing a shower, not knowing that during the night the seaweed scented body wash you had been using, that you loved had been replaced with a new bottle, or how your razor, one that had been replaced because your old one had looked rather rough. Not that you'd really notice the difference you never did, brushing it off as something you did but had forgotten about.

Turning on the water you heaved a sigh as hot water cascaded over you, tilting your head back you tried to push the odd thoughts from your head, surely there was no one following you, right? Shaking your head you turned off the water, and stepped out of it, wrapping a towel around yourself you stepped into your bedroom, getting dressed for the day. Unbeknownst to you of the man clad in black sitting outside your apartment, staring up at the window of your apartment.

One day Simon would find the courage to speak to you, to actually meet you, not as Ghost, but as the real him, the real Simon Riley. Taking a drag of his cigarette he turned away from your apartment and walked off. He would be back tonight. But for now he would be watching, always.

***

"Are you okay?" You older sister, Lynda asked.

You nodded, before stifling another yawn. You, Lynda, and your younger sister, Amy sat in one of your favorite cafes catching up on your day to day life. Lynda had told you about her job, and her current boyfriend that she had been dating for a few weeks now. And your younger sister had told you about her job, and school. Claiming that she was having trouble with one of her classmates, but things had worked out in the end.

"And you?" Amy asked, looking to you.

You bit down on your bottom lip and shrugged your shoulders. "Works been okay, but it's funny..." You trailed off, glancing out the window of the cafe, your eyes widening when you caught a glimpse of a large man staring right at you. Dark brown eyes that were almost black stared right at you. The rest of his face covered with a black balaclava with a skull emblazoned on it. A chill running down her spine.

"Y/N?" Lynda asked, jerking you from your thoughts. "You okay?"

You continued to stare when Lynda tapped you on your shoulder, jerking you from your staring contest, when you looked back he was gone. "I think I'm going crazy." You told your sisters.

The both of them looked to you. "Old news." Amy joked, and was rewarded with a laugh from Lynda.

Okay, you couldn't help but muster a chuckle at that, however your smile soon disappeared.

"No, seriously." Any spoke, placing a hand on your shoulder. "What's going on?"

Taking a sip of your tea you took a deep breath. Maybe you were being silly, maybe you were being paranoid. But maybe telling your sisters what was going on, how you thought you were being followed, how you thought someone had been in your apartment, had seen some guy at your work, and now outside the cafe.

Both Amy and Lynda looked to you as you spilled your guts, looks of worry etched on their faces. "Have you done anything about it? Asked your manager? Or called the cops?"

You shook your head. You knew they had a point, if someone was stalking you it would be best to get others involved. But whenever you noticed the stranger he was gone in a blink of an eye. So quickly you thought it was just your imagination. But maybe it would be best to get someone involved. The the big question was, what would you tell the cops. 'Help, there's a strange man stalking me. And I have no idea what he looks like.' Yeah, that would go over so well. Aside from his eyes and the fact that he was a big dude you really didn't have much on him.

Shaking your head sigh, you're at a loss for what to do. Downing the rest of your drink you get up from your seat, wishing your sisters a good day before leaving.

***

You knew I was watching you, didn't you? Simon thought, dark eyes tracking you as you left the cafe and headed home, Simon trailing behind you. Occasionally you would glance over your shoulder, and every time you did he would dart down an alleyway, occasionally you'd catch a glimpse of him and quicken your pace. Until you finally reached your apartment, glancing over your shoulder as you did. And as he watched you Simon couldn't help but wonder if there would ever be a day when he would be able to talk to you, touch you.

Shaking his head he walked away.

***

Days had passed since you had spoke with your sisters, and now you found yourself in your work breakroom, a cup of bitter black coffee in you hands as you talked with your coworkers, listening to them discuss their plans for the night. When one of them turns to you, Stacy.

"So, Y/N what are your plans for the night?" She asked.

You thought for a moment, if you were being honest you really didn't want to go home. Didn't want to be alone. So maybe hanging out with your friends after work would do you some good.

"No really, why?" You asked.

"Well me and Kayla are going to this new club downtown, want to come?"

That sounded like a good idea. Smiling you nodded. Perhaps this would help you forget about what was going on, there was no way your stalker would follow you to a crowded place like that, right?

"Great! We'll pick you up around eight. Wear something cute, there are going to be a ton of cute guys there, you might meet someone there." Stacy said.

If you were being honest you weren't really looking for anyone but you weren't going to tell her that. You liked Stacy and Kayla but they always seemed to be trying to hook you up with someone. So you said nothing. And before long your shift ended without incident. And were now wandering around your apartment trying on various outfits, before finally picking on a short black dress. And were now fixing up your make up, painting your lips a dark red.

Placing the lipstick in your purse, before looking at yourself in the mirror, smiling, satisfied with how you look before turning away from your mirror as you hear a knock at the door. Opening it you were greeted your friends, a wide smile on your lips.

"You ready?" Kayla asked.

Smiling you nodded, before closing and locking the door, before following after your friends. Unaware of the eyes on your retreating back. Unaware of the large man following you as you laughed and joked with your friends, as you got into the car, Simon following suit, following you into the club you and your friends had gone to, him following after. And soon disappeared into the crowd and drunken and probably high club goers.

Eyes on you, always on you, watching as you danced, the tight black dress you wore hugging your curves, and perhaps to him was a tad too short if the hungry glances other men shot were were any indication. Anger swelled in Simon's chest as he moved closer to you, when from the corner of his eye he caught movement, seeing a man with spiky black hair and torn jeans saunter up to you while you were dancing. Alarm bells began to ring in Simon's head at the hungry look on the mans face as he placed his hands on you, clenching his fists he moved closer to you, watching as you and this man, no, not a man, a boy danced, a sultry smile on your painted lips.

***

God, you needed this. You thought as you stepped into the club, eyes widening as you looked around at all the dancing people, before following your friends to the bar, and ordering a few drinks, before glancing at the over crowded dance floor, Kayla and Stacy glancing around at the men, who looked at the three of you, and you would admit it did make you feel kind of uncomfortable, but you quickly brushed it off. You would have fun tonight, whether you went home with someone or by yourself.

Downing your drink you looked to the girls, and blinked as they were nowhere in sight, obviously having melted into the throbbing mass of people before you. Great. Hopefully you would be able to find them by the end of the night. And if you couldn't you had your phone to where they were at when it was time to call it a night-

You didn't have your phone...

"Fuck..." you muttered, looking through your purse once more, and found it gone. Obviously you had left it on your nightstand as you busied yourself with getting ready to go out. Great.

Hopefully you wouldn't need it, or run into trouble where you'd need to call someone. Shoving that thought from your head you moved towards the dance floor, letting the music take you away from all your problems, occasionally going to the bar to buy a few more drinks, and as the night went on you felt yourself getting more and more tipsy. When you felt hands on your swaying hips, followed by the feel of someone pressing up against you, looking over your shoulder you saw a man around your age looking down at you, and offered him a smile as you looked him up and down.

He wasn't too bad looking, but perhaps that was the alcohol talking. But hell, you had come here to let loose and have fun. So why not dance with this guy? Turning around in his grasp you place your hands on his shoulders. Smiling seductively at him as the music continued on and you and your unnamed friend continued to dance until the song ended.

"You got some pretty sweet moves." He said, smirking down at you.

"Thanks." God, you never knew what to say in these situations. But this unnamed gentleman only chuckled. "Names Danny, and you are..."

"Y/N." You answered.

"Well, Y/N, can I buy you a drink? You look like you could use it after all of that." Danny said.

You should say no. Something about him seems...off. But maybe it's the alcohol maybe it's the fact that something seems off, but still you accept. Smiling when Danny went off to get you another drink. Unknown to you that Danny had slipped something into your drink before approaching you once more.

You thanked him, smiling at him. Danny watching as you took a sip, a dark look on his face as you did so. Little did he know was that a certain someone was watch him and was seeing red.

***

A low, animalistic growl escaped Simon as he witnessed this all happening before him, fists clenched he stalked to where the two of you were. Eyes glued on you as he saw that whatever that guy slipped into your drink finally took effect, and the guy wasted no time putting his hands on you, muttering some reassurances that you would be okay, a slimy smile on his face as he guided you towards the exit, Simon trailing behind.

While it was true you would be okay, the man that had drugged you, wouldn't live to see tomorrow...

***

Something was wrong. You felt wrong, all the colors were swimming together and you felt dizzy, were you sick?

"You okay?" Danny asked you, placing a hand on your shoulder, steadying you. Concern in his voice.

"I-I don't... know?" you murmured, your words slurring. Stumbling into his arms.

"Let's get you home then."

"B-but..." You tried to get out, he didn't know where you lived, so where was he taking you? Fear gripped you as he guided you towards the exit as you struggled to get away, to no avail as Danny lead you outside towards what you couldn't only assume was his car.

"Please, I just want to find my friends." You whimpered, trying in vain to break free of his grip.

"Relax, beautiful. Everything is going to be all right." Danny drawled, a slimy grin on his face, eyes looking you up and down, his cock twitching at the thought of all the things he would do to you when he got you to his home. Completely unaware of the large looming figure creeping up behind him, a figure clad in all black.

Not until he found himself slammed against the brick wall of the building the two of you stepped out of, the air knocked out of his lungs.

"What the fu-" Before he could even finish his sentence a fist connected with his face, breaking his nose in the process, blood spilling down his lips. Crying out he stumbled, blinking back tears as he managed to push himself away from the wall, and the walking pillar of death that was one Simon Riley, towards where you lay on the dirty ground. Having finally passed out, and were completely unaware of the danger you were in.

But he didn't get far as Simon grabbed him and drove his fist into his stomach, making him vomit up the contents of his stomach. The punch was soon followed by a kick to the ribs, dropping him to the ground. Poor Danny tried emphasis on tried to ward off the blows that rained down on him in rapid succession, he screamed and cried as he felt his bones snap, as he spat out his teeth. Oh, he tried to scream, to beg, to get whoever was beating him to stop but he was too busy spitting out his teeth and vomiting blood to get a word out. And sadly, he was pretty certain whoever this guy was, and he was beginning to suspect that this guy was one of your friends wasn't going to stop until he was dead.

And he was a right, as the last thing he saw was a size twelve boot stomping down on his head, then nothing.

Simon saw red, anger like he had never felt before consuming him as he grabbed that scum that thought he could hurt you, take advantage of you. An animalist growl escaping him as he threw the guy against the building as that was the last thing he remembered as he slowly calmed down, looking down at the bloody body, he had beaten the guy to an unrecognizable mess, his face was a mess of blood, his teeth laying scattered on the ground. Simon heaved a deep breath as he looked down at his hands, noting that he had beaten the guy so damned hard he had split the skin on his knuckles.

Nothing he hadn't endured before, something he could take care of later. But for now, he needed to take you home. Wiping his hands on his jeans he picked you up, dark eyes looking you over, looking for any sign of injuries and noted your skinned knees. Obviously from when he had grabbed the guy, forcing him to drop you. He would take care of those when he got you home. Nodding to himself Simon headed to where his truck was, placing you in the passenger seat before driving off to your apartment. Even though all he really wanted was to bring you to his home, to keep you locked away, safe from people like that man who drugged you, and from your friends that left you all alone at the club. Leaving you vulnerable.

But no matter, when he was sure you were safe he would take care of your friends and then he would work on turning his home into the perfect place for you.

The drive to your house wasn't very long, Simon was silent as he carried you to your apartment, fishing through your purse for your apartment key, and unlocking the door. Simon wasted no time carrying you to your room, and undressing you before putting you in your pajamas, before moving to your bathroom where he would assume you kept your medical supplies and found some disinfectant as well as some band aids. Cleaning up your skinned knees he bandaged them before looking down at you once more as he pulled the covers over you.

You had no idea who he was, to you he was just another face in the crowd, one of many. But to him you were everything, there was just something about you that drew him to you. And he knew he couldn't just walk away this time, not yet. Pulling his mask over his nose he brushed his thumb against your bottom lip, relishing the feel of how soft your lips were against the rough pad of his thumb. Licking his lips he leaned down and placed a gentle kiss to them before pulling away somewhat reluctantly.

Trailing his fingers across your cheek he turned away from you. You would be his one day, but for now Simon had some work to do getting rid of those that would harm you. "Goodnight, Y/N." He whispered, before melting into the shadows.

***

Authors Notes- Thus concludes Chapter Two. Sorry it took forever, life you know. Also I apologize if Simon might be a little OOC. Couldn't help it.

[radiance1]

The Destroyer and his just as Great Apprentice

In a land on the continent of Beast Yeast, where strength ruled supreme and all lived in fear and awe of Destruction. Sat a temple that stood still in time since aeons past, through the rise and fall of various civilizations, untouched by the Tide of Change and the single largest surviving piece of history since the primordial past.

Sat upon a throne that once laid empty yet forever unclaimed, sat none other than the one once regarded as the great Herald of Change.

The Great Destroyer.

“Bored…” The Destroyed grumbled to himself, head resting on his hand as he looked down upon his throne room. “So bored…”

“Great One.” Nutmeg Tiger Cookie, general of the Spice Swarm, stepped forwards, bowing her head as she spoke. “Whatever ails you so?”

Burning Spice Cookie scoffed. “Tell me, Nutmeg Tiger Cookie, how goes the preparations to begin our bird hunt?” 

“Saffron Buffalo Cookie is assembling his army as we speak.” Nutmeg Tiger Cookie stated. “Though it will take some time to prepare the transportation to Crispia, I assure you Great One that we shall find the thief and bring her before you soon.”

“Oh?” Burning Spice Cookie hummed, raising an eyebrow. “And just how soon is ‘soon?’”

“At the very least, a few weeks-”

“Too long!” Burning Spice Cookie shouted, slamming his fist down against his throne. “I have waited eons within the Silver Tree, months for Dark Enchantress Cookie to grant me a new body, and now you tell me I have to wait even more just to have a good fight!?”

“Apologies, Great One-”

“An apology is not enough!” Burning Spice Cookie stood up from his throne, stalking over to Nutmeg Tiger Cookie. His hand wrapped around her throat as he lifted her from the ground, a literal fire in his eyes as he stared into her own. “Go to Saffron Buffalo Cookie and tell him to hurry up, or I shall crumble both him and his pathetic little tribe!” 

“O-Of course, Great One!” Nutmeg Tiger Cookie coughed out, a grunt leaving her lips after Burning Spice Cookie threw her onto the ground. She quickly got up to her feet and bowed her head. “I shall inform him right away!”

“Hmpf.” Burning Spice Cookie huffed as he watched her leave, walking back to his throne and sitting back down. “Pathetic. So many cookies and none can offer me a good fight, ‘Spice Swarm?’ Don’t make me laugh!” He leaned back on his throne, a frown on his lips.

“When will the little thief make her way heeeere?” He groaned out. The boredom was killing him. “Daring to claim my Soul Jam and daring to make me wait? The absurdity of that fallen Sovereign!”

He itched to destroy something, to have a good and enjoyable fight. 

Yes, a good bit of destruction always sent his jam boiling!

But what to destroy indeed…?

Perhaps that little Kulfi tribe? No, no. Too weak to offer him the fight he craved. Perhaps the Pepper Pangolins? Breaking through their armour would be easy, but if he wanted to play around a bit they should last him a while. Hm… No. He wasn’t feeling it. How about the Cilantro tribe? They have been growing a bit numerous compared to the others as of late, culling their numbers could prove fun… But then again, destruction without destroying all of it was always unsatisfying.

And the Saffron Buffalos were preparing to head off to Crispa to capture the fallen sovereign.

“Ugh!” Burning Spice Cookie threw his head back against his throne, hitting the arm of his throne once more. “There’s nothing to destroy! If I didn’t need that pathetic storm to bring me Golden Cheese Cookie I could have destroyed everything and cure my boredom by now!”

Honestly! Years of imprisonment and boredom, now finally free to walk Earthbread once more, and he was only met with even more boredom!

Perhaps he should pay a visit to those little Faerie-

Oh?

What was this?

He brought a hand up to touch against his Soul Jam. It felt as if it were… Resonating. How odd…

Was Golden Cheese Cookie already here!?

Haha! Wonderful! A little threat and they were already working fast! Fast indeed!

He closed his eyes, peering into his Soul Jam to see through Golden Cheese Cookie’s own, just to get a look at her. To once more see the thief that dared to claim half of his power before he got to see her with his own eyes.

So he was impatient, whatever.

Except for the fact that-

“What.” Burning Spice Cookie growled, snapping his eyes open as they leaked with flames.

-Golden Cheese Cookie was still in her ruined kingdom.

“How dare they!” He got up from his throne and grabbed his axe. “Those pathetic little bulls dare to try and deceive me! They’re looking to be crumbled, I see!” Burning Spice Cookie smiled, stalking out of his throne. “Ohoho, if that’s what they wish for, then I am happy to oblige!”

Before he paused.

If Golden Cheese Cookie wasn’t in Beast Yeast, then who or what, exactly, was his Soul Jam resonating with?

The Beast’s brow furrowed, momentarily forgetting his anger in place of his confusion. Was this another trick of the Witches? No, most likely not, those blasted creators were most likely still unaware he was free from his imprisonment. 

Did they bake another Cookie with the power of the Soul Jam? If so, then why on Earthbread was it resonating with his Soul Jam in the first place?

“Hmm.” Burning Spice Cookie crossed his arms, a thoughtful expression on his face as he thought over the matter for a moment later. Before a savage grin overtook his face. “Well then, I suppose I’ll just have to go and see for myself!”

If there truly was another Cookie baked and bestowed with Soul Jam in his realm, then he could finally have the fight he craved while waiting for his little thief.

—

This was outside of his expectations.

He expected a worthy adversary baked and blessed with Soul Jam, a Cookie he could throw beneath the Tide of Change to see if they could overcome it or be swallowed whole!

Yet what he got was not what he expected.

“You dare to mimic my appearance, small fool?” Burning Spice Cookie scowled down at the tiny imposter, the one that his Soul Jam resonated with as if they were actually someone of note.

“I want to grow up to be feared and powerful just like you!” The Cookie exclaimed, lifting up their imitation of his own axe as they looked up at him with such clear admiration and adoration that lit up their face. “So yes, I did!”

Burning Spice Cookie froze.

How long ago was it, since a Cookie had dared to look at him in such a way before? To dare make such a boastful claim to his very face? To imitate him of all Cookies. Children looked at him with naught but fear and apprehension, as did all of the Wild Spices under his domain.

Except Nutmeg Tiger Cookie, but there was something wrong with that one, so she didn’t count.

“Well…” Burning Spice Cookie crouched down, still towering over the small Cookie who looked so similar to him that it was almost praiseworthy. His Soul Jam was still resonating, though at a lesser degree than it was before, a gentle thumping compared to before. To have a child look at him in such a way was… “You have guts.”

It seems he had gotten soft.

—

“Keep your eyes open, my apprentice!” Burning Spice Cookie shouted over the roaring of the Spice Storm. “You wish to be just as fearsome as I? Then you cannot allow yourself to fall victim to something as paltry as this!”

“Yes- achoo!- sir!” His apprentice shouted back, letting out a series of coughs as he struggled to keep his watering eyes open. 

Burning Spice Cookie lunged, raising his axe before bringing it down on the smaller Cookie. Who quickly raised his own to block the (very much held back) strike.

“Good!” Burning Spice Cookie laughed, the fire in the child’s eyes was adorable. He brought up his knee to crash into his apprentice, sending him flying for a short distance before he managed to get his wings under him. “Keep that energy, my young destroyer! That fire shall serve you well!”

His apprentice flew towards him with a cry, swinging his axe down the exact same way in which Burning Spice Cookie had done a moment prior. “Ack-choo!” He sneezed, missing his strike entirely from his shifted focus. Burning Spice Cookie stepped to the side, bringing up his knee once more and crashing it into his apprentice’s stomach, knocking the air from his lungs before batting him away with the flat of his axe.

“Come now, you can do better than that Golden Spice Cookie!” He shouted, resting his axe on his shoulder and his hand on his hip. “You hold but a fraction of the Light of the Change, yet even that should be more than enough to overcome this! Do better, young destroyer!” 

Golden Spice Cookie coughed, looking at him through one watering eye before sneezing. He slowly got up to their knees, using the shaft of their axe as a crutch to get up on their own two legs, wings low to the ground.

“Yes, that’s it!” The Beast encouraged, raising a fist. “Don’t you dare just lay down and accept defeat! If you are able, get back up again! Fight until your last breath, even if your very dough begins to crumble, keep fighting until you are able to no longer!”

“Yes sir!” Golden Spice Cookie shouted, wings spreading out to their full extent behind him before he rushed forwards. Closing the distance between him and his mentor before flapping his wings and taking to the sky, before crashing back downwards like a meteor.

A metallic clang was muffled by the Spice Storm as their weapons clashed, the ground beneath Burning Spice Cookie cracking into a small crater from the weight of the attack as the Light of Destruction and a small fraction of the Light of Change resonated between wielders.

“Good, good!” The Beast of Destruction laughed, manic and proud as he easily held his ground before the clash. “Just like that, my apprentice! The power bestowed upon you should be used in its entirety! You hold power leagues and bounds beyond that of pathetic Cookies, now use it and entertain me!”

Burning Spice Cookie swung his axe, knocking the far younger Cookie away and ending their clash. He ran after them, following up with a two handed, overhead strike.

The ground cracked, a clear line splitting it open as soon as it and his axe met.

The young destroyer avoided the attack by taking to the skies, wings carrying him the furthest they were able (and dared) to within the Spice Storm before folding against his back. Gravity quickly took hold once more, sending him on a downward descent towards his mentor with both hands around the handle of his axe.

Burning Spice Cookie grinned. His Soul Jam roared, his jam was boiling.

This was going to be fun!

—

“Ah, Great One…” Nutmeg Tiger Cookie began slowly, tentatively, as she stared at the sight.

“Hm?” Burning Spice Cookie dipped his thumb into a cup of gathered lassi, bringing it up to wipe at the spice in his apprentice’s eyes. “What do you want, Nutmeg Tiger Cookie?”

“Forgive me for asking, but who-”

“Achoo!”

“Cease your squirming or we’ll be here forever!”

“-Is that…” She said, staring at the winged Cookie that, for some reason, was being cared for by her master. Alongside that, looking like a carbon copy of him.

If she didn’t know any better, she would have believed-

Burning Spice Cookie snorted, a snarl coming up on his lips as he glared at the general. “Do I need to explain myself to you, Nutmeg Tiger Cookie?”

“Of course not, Great One!” She said hurriedly, to which Burning Spice Cookie simply huffed and rolled his eyes.

“How much longer?” Golden Spice Cookie whined, causing Burning Spice Cookie to click his tongue.

“Patience, my young destroyer.” He said, gently rubbing some more lassi onto the child’s eye. They had been fighting in the storm since it had begun (Burning Spice Cookie’s idea, of course) and to its very end, so to say that his apprentice was covered in spice was an understatement. “Good things come to those who wait.” 

“Hmm.” The Cookie whined, but said nothing more.

Burning Spice Cookie paused briefly, very briefly, before continuing.

When was the last time he had ever uttered those words to another? It was most definitely a very, very long time ago.

What was he even doing, sitting here and rubbing the spice from the eyes of a child as if he were his guardian? Burning Spice Cookie was not, of course. A mentor was far different from a guardian, but still. Why was he being so… Lenient? Soft? Gentle, with a child he barely knew for less than a day?

A child that held but a shard of Destruction and Abundance, yes. But if anything, he should have just crumbled him right then and there and reclaim the fragments of his power. Yet instead, he had taken him under his wing.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Hm.

Perhaps it was something he was to think of later.

He got up to his feet, throwing the cup of lassi behind him and hearing it shatter on the floor. He then strode past his general. “Clean that up.” He commanded, before beckoning the young destroyer with a hand. “Come, Golden Spice Cookie.” Then he walked out of the room.

“Oh, coming!” Golden Spice Cookie said, quickly getting onto his feet as he ran after his mentor. “Bye miss tiger lady!” He said, waving at Nutmeg Tiger Cookie before a shout of “Hurry up!” Made him turn away and run out of the room.

Nutmeg Tiger Cookie crossed her arms, slowly looking towards the shattered cup and spilled lassi before glaring at it in disgust.

She was not cleaning that.

She then walked out of the room, looking for a Kulfi.

That was all they were good for, after all.

///////////

Not even going to lie, this inspired by this post made by @totallygray and this comic made by @mixierupperc20 to be honest. Check em out and allat.

[short-black-diamond]

OMG I THOUGHT OF THIS AND I KNEW TO SSK INSTANTLY BEFORE I FORGOT!! 🩷

OM! Brothers reactions to mc who they dont know them too well and they sleep in longer than Belphie tehehe (then it turns out the slept that long because of jet lag? Jet lag? Relem hopping lag? Tehehe)

Sorry for so many requests ;^;

- 🍓

Oh noooo😭😭😭

I feel sorry for all the people who have that, I hope you guys are alright and that your sleeping rythm is alright...

---

MC who sleeps in longer than Belphie?

Lucifer was a little puzzled when he found you in your room. You were sleeping soundly, with a cozy blanked over and around you, and hugging one of your stuffed toys.

Your face however, showed some dark circles under your eyes, your brows furrowed, and your skin was rather pale. You looked very tired, even though you've been sleeping for more than ten hours.

He had to believe Mammon more now. It was the avatar of greed, after all, who said: "If ya don't believe me, then look for yourself! That human sleeps just as much as Belphie!"

It also didn't really help that you were not really a talkactive person as you rather kept to yourself, and the brothers didn't know you that good because of that.

Now, he sighed as he thought of a plausible reason as to why a human like you could even sleep that long without having to use the restroom or eat something.

Asmodeus stepped in because he needed some money from his sugar daddy oldest brother, and stumbled upon him examining you. The avatar of lust chuckled. "Oooohhh, does our little Lucifer have a feti- Ouch!", he yelped when Lucifer hit him with a rather hard pillow.

"Silent. I am thinking of a reason as to why MC is not awake yet. I mean, we don't know them very well, but still. I'm sure the normal human body can act just perfectly with just 8 hours of sleep."

Asmodeus rubbed his temple in pain as he thought as well. "Maybe they are doing some beauty sleep?"

Lucifer sighed. "I don't know...maybe? But let's have them sleep for a little longer before we wake them up."

...

Mammon grinned internally when Lucifer subtly apologized. Satan stepped into the kitchen where Mammon and Lucifer conversed. "Shouldn't MC be awake by now?", the blonde muttered, and Mammon looked at Lucifer.

"Yes, they should, but they are still asleep. I don't know why though."

Satan looked at the book he brought with him. "I don't know if this could be of use...but the book I'm currently reading tells something about some people who sleep in because of jet lag. It is when the sleep-rythm gets bothered when a person is in a jet, flying between continents and thus different time-zones, which messes up the rythm.", he explained and Lucifer made an "ah" sound in understanding.

Then he stepped into your room.

...

"...h-huh?", you grumbled as you stretched yourself. Lucifer stood before you, and he looked at you as you raised your arms. He had a concerned expression.

"Are you alright, MC?", he asked in a gentle tone, and you felt weird for some reason.

Lucifer was actually still a complete stranger, and it just...well, it made you feel weird, but you liked the feeling.

"Yes, I guess I just dozed off from swapping from the humanworld to Devildom.", you said softly, still a bit drunk from sleep, and the eldest brother nodded in understanding.

Just then, Leviathan stepped in with an excited grin as he pointed towards you. "I knew it! You're living the life of (insert a very long manga name which describes protag with jet lag)! ...I-I hope that you're okay though...", Levi muttered shyly when he felt Lucifer's stern glare on him.

It felt nice having people worry about you. You wish you could say the same to the people from your home...

"Thank you. I feel a lot better after my nap. I hope I didn't sleep too much?", you asked, as you yawned.

Lucifer looked at the watch on his hand. "You slept for nearly fourteen hours.", he stated, and your eyes widened.

"Whoah...", you chuckled with a concerned face, and Beel stepped in with some food. "I brought some snacks. I thought you might need it after nearly sleeping for more than half a day.", he murmured, and you thanked him with an excited grin.

"Really?! That's so nice of you! Thank you, Beel!", you exclaimed happily, and grinned even wider.

Beel gave you a close-eyed smile as he began eating a hamburger while you bit into a healthy salad. Leviathan ate some sushi while Lucifer dismissed you guys to attend to his duties.

'Living with you might be a little worrying, but at least you weren't loud...', Lucifer mused to himself as he thought about your behavior and lunged into his paperwork with a small smile.

---

Heyyy I hope this was okay! I didn't put in Belphie because as I said in my last Obey me! post, he's a lil shit and I don't like him.

so please don't reuqest stuff where he's involved, or I'll intentionally ignore it. <3

Read you guys in the next post!