#dastardly doors

[farraday-yes]

I inflicted this in the discord so I will inflict it on Tumblr as well: SFTH Character Ghost Hunting Show AU

(Brought to you by a Phasmophobia stream I recently watched)

The working cast is

Titch (TUA) - the skeptic/host

Derek (TUA) - camera man

Samantha (Egbert’s Wife, TLW) - resident medium

Jimmy (TSP) - scaredy cat/intern

Older!Julian (PoH) - supernatural informationist/other intern

Titch gets away from the family business to run a local history/nature show but ends up turning into a ghost hunting show. He meets Derek as a camera man first. Julian was his first hire followed by Samantha and, recently, Jimmy who is doing a summer internship.

Julian’s play takes place and so does Jimmy’s. After the events of TSP, Jimmy was advised to take a leave of absence. He was originally hired to be a body guard/security specialist but that plan went off the rails. Titch still hired him though since the kid seemed spooked in his own skin.

Samantha’s play doesn’t take place but she still has her family’s weird family values and dynamics. Egbert’s is in the military and Samantha didn’t want the life of a military wife. She left everything and took the first supernatural-esque job because 1) it’s easy money and 2) she’s the most goddamn authentic “medium” then any other schnub they might hire.

Extra shit:

If I ever write this, it would open up in a tour of various haunts in (unspecified country so I can use both European and American sites since space is fake). They’re on episode 10 of this show and every other one was a dud.

Titch ensures the show is 100% honest and talks about things like “that previous house had a gas leak, people ate shrooms near here, this building’s wiring is way out of code.” He does play the skeptic after all.

Jimmy overreacts to everything but he’s also the fan favorite. It also adds a nice comedy to everything.

Samantha is pretty done with everyone. She makes sure Jimmy and Julian don’t get into trouble like the big sister she is.

Julian is a baby duck by Titch’s side and does want to pursue a career in supernatural television (mostly because I love the “TV Show” bit with Father Andrews haha).

Derek is the camera man/video editor. He’s 100% responsible why most of the scenes focus on Titch even if he’s not the main focus of the shot. That’s why he makes sure he’s the editor so nobody has to see all of that.

Now their show is nearly the end of its current run and no actual supernatural stuff. (Though Samantha was very insistent there were some in Episode 3.) Episode 10’s stop?

The Langbrook Manor, home to the mysterious deaths of the Langbrook family and the equally mysterious disappearance of the previous Lady, Annabelle.

Their “no supernatural” streak ends there.

This has been on my thoughts all night.

[kidsnextdoor-doodles]

could you do my negative 362 and gramps design perhaps?? i love ur artstyle sm ajdhisbddj

Girl wrongs

[fairy-writes]

Hi!! I saw that you write for Arcane and had a really cute idea for Vander. I don’t really see a lot of fics where you get to see Vander’s reactions to the reader either playing with the kids or comforting them, so I thought a fic centered around that might be cute? (I think also having a bit of slow burn would be sweet, like both Vander and the reader like each other but don’t do anything about it until getting a little push from the kids because they ship).

ONE LITTLE PUSH

Reblogs and Comments are greatly appreciated!!

__________________________________________________________________________

Fandom(s): Arcane: League of Legends

Pairing(s): Vander x Reader

Word Count: 1.9k

Genre(s)/Tag(s): Gender Neutral!Reader, Bit of a Slowburn, Fluff, Getting Together, Reader is Smaller than Vander (but who isn’t?), Sibling Bickering

Notes: VANDER MY FAVORITE

(No, but seriously, contrary to popular belief, he’s my 1st favorite over Viktor)

JUST IN TIME (kind of) FOR SEASON TWO, LETS GOOOOO

__________________________________________________________________________

Vander wasn’t quite sure why you stuck around for so long. 

In fact, he wasn’t sure why you stuck around in the first place. 

But… As Vander watches you with the kids. His kids. He begins to understand why. 

You were kind, unyieldingly so. Even as Mylo grew to start picking on Powder, even as they fought, you were kind and patient and offered them the unending gentle love they all so craved. 

The love he couldn’t afford to give them because who could be gentle in the Undercity? Especially in the depths of the Lanes?

You could. 

Vander was in the middle of pouring a drink when Powder tumbled into The Last Drop. She was covered in bruises and dust from something. Or someone. She barely met his gaze as she clambered to her feet and all but sprinted into the back where they all slept. Vander looked through the multitude of customers and spotted you. 

You had obviously seen Powder go bolting, worry twisting your face as you glanced toward the bar and met his stare. You arched an eyebrow, and he shrugged. You rolled your eyes and sighed before smiling in jest and getting up from where you had been tinkering with the jukebox. 

Vander finally manages to get away from his chatty clients and makes his way back into the back room nearly fifteen minutes later. 

Only to pause by the door. 

“—ylo hates me! He does, I swear!” Powder cries, and you hush her gently, dabbing what looks to be some of the antiseptic you have lying around on her cuts and bruises. Disinfectant was hard to come by, especially in the Lanes, but you were seemingly magic in the sense that you always knew who to talk to to get some. It seems you had worked your magic yet again. 

“Did Mylo say that he hates you?” You ask gently, whispering a quiet “sorry” under your breath as she flinched with the sting of the antiseptic. 

Powder pauses, thinking what had to be her earlier conversation over, 

“Well… No…” She mumbles, and you hum, 

“Can I give you my honest opinion?” You ask, and she stills, looking up at you with wide eyes before nodding. 

“Aren’t you always honest with us?” She asks. You chuckle at that. 

“I suppose I am. But I don’t think Mylo hates you. Does he find you a bit annoying? Maybe. But every big brother thinks that about their younger siblings. I know mine did.” You say, and Powder mulls your words over and over and over in her mind. 

She always did overthink things. 

“I didn't know you had a big brother.” She says eventually, and you let out a loud laugh at that. 

“You are a silly girl for focusing on that. But yes, I came from a big family. And guess what? I was the baby of the family. Just. Like. You.” You say, emphasizing your words with a pinch to her side. Powder squeals with laughter and wriggles away to escape your dastardly tickling. 

Vander hangs his head with a huff and a smile before turning to head back to the bar counter. He can hear your conversation continue as Powder escapes your grasp.

“Now, where did you get all these bruises from?”

“Um… Vi taught me parkour from Topside down…”

“Powder! You’re like seven!”

“Seven and a half! And she said I was ready!”

Ever since you began to stick around, you had become something of a parent figure to the four little children Vander had come into care for. 

To Vi and Powder especially. 

So when Mylo burst into The Last Drop with the words of a fistfight on his tongue, you were the first one out the door. 

Vander was close behind. 

Mylo led you and Vander deep into the Undercity. In fact, it was so far into the Undercity that Vander was worried they were getting into some dark territory. 

Like… Really dark territory. 

But soon enough, the sounds of a fight were heard, and soon after, you were deep in the throng of a multi-person fistfight. Everyone paused for a second when they saw you and then stopped altogether when they spotted Vander not far behind. 

You began to pull people off and shoved them out of the way. You did this again and again, ducking under a few stray punches until you managed to unearth Vi. 

She wasn’t looking too hot. 

Her face was bruised and swollen, and the fifteen-year-old spat out a wad of blood as she bared her bloody teeth and prepared to fight again. 

At least until she saw you. 

It was as if the tension had been released from her shoulders. 

She all but slumped into your grasp, and you stumbled back a step with the sudden weight. Vander yanked the last person away from you both and scooped up his adoptive daughter. She leaned her head into the crook of his neck and was obviously fighting back tears. 

Mylo was hunched over, hands on his knees, and wheezed from all the sprinting. 

“Vi? Violet, can you hear me?” You said as soon as you all returned to The Last Drop, and Vander set her down on the couch. Powder and Claggor had been found a block away, fighting off more thugs from whoever sent them after the literal children. 

He would've pummeled them to a pulp if Vander hadn’t hung up his gauntlets years before. 

Vi’s head lolled from side to side, and you shone a pocket flashlight into her eyes, watching as her pupils dilated and contracted. You were experienced at this, taking care of people, even more so than he thought. 

Were you a doctor deep in your past? 

As Vander thought about it, he realized he didn’t know practically anything about you. Your past, your likes, dislikes, he knew you were good with machines and medicine and that you came from a big family. But that was it. 

And that hurt his heart. 

You ended up ushering everyone out of the room while you worked on caring for Vi. Vander closed the bar early and was in the middle of putting chairs on tables when you emerged. Powder, Mylo, and Claggor dropped what they were doing. They scampered to your side, a chorus of “How’s Vi?” erupting from the kids. You offered them a tired smile and patted their heads. 

“She’ll be okay. She’s resting right now. You can go in and see her if you’re quiet.”

And then it was the two of you. 

Vander set the final chair on top of the table and meandered his way over where you were sitting at the bar, head in your hands. 

You looked tired. 

“Is she really okay?” He asked, and you grunted, rubbing at your temples. 

“She has a broken nose, fractured left arm, some bruised ribs, and a concussion. Which, all things considered, she’s very lucky. It could’ve been a lot worse.” You say, and he sighs, 

“Did she say why she got into the fight?” He replied, and you shrug, 

“She was protecting Powder. Then, more people started showing up until it was an all-out brawl. That’s when we stepped in.” You say, and his shoulders sag. 

Vi was going to be okay. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever said it. But thank you. For everything you’ve done. Taking care of them and all that.” He says, and you just hum. 

“You guys gave me a home after everything. I’m just repaying my debt. Well… that and I love those kids.” You say, and he arches an eyebrow,

“After everything?” He inquires, and you glance up sharply as if not realizing what you had said. 

Eventually, your gaze casts downward, and you run a hand over your head and through your hair. 

“I was a doctor in Piltover before the rebellion. I was caught trying to help the Undercity before they were officially citizens and cast out.” You say, and his arched eyebrow raises even higher. 

“A doctor? Were you any good?” You bark out a dry laugh at that,

“One of the best!” Your voice cracks as you speak, and he feels his heart splinter into pieces. 

Vander should’ve known that Claggor and Mylo were up to something when they came in with sneaky grins on their faces. 

The Last Drop was all but desolate. It was the wee hours of the morning before the people of the Undercity awoke to begin their day. But the door was unlocked, and the kids were allowed to run in and out as they pleased. 

Which they had been doing a lot in the last hour or so. 

“Vander!” Mylor clamored for his adopted father’s attention, waving an excited hand as he scampered up to the counter. Claggor hung behind, ever the stoic young man. But there was mischief in their eyes and curling the corners of their mouths. 

Vander slung the rag he used to wipe the counters down over his shoulder and leaned on the bar counter. 

“What did you do now?” He teased, and Mylo all but squawked. 

“When have I ever done anything?!” Vander just stared, 

“Do you really want me to answer that?” He asked, and Claggor snickered at Mylo’s deflated expression. Mylo quickly spun on a heel and jabbed a finger at his adopted brother, 

“Not a word outta you, Claggor!” He snapped before spinning back as something dawned on him.

“You gotta come with us!” He demanded, and Vander glanced between the two of them. 

“Why?” He asked, and Mylo let out an exaggerated groan.

“No questions! Just come on!” He grabbed Vander’s hand and tried tugging him around the counter and toward the front door. 

Vander relented, locking the door behind him as he followed the two boys. 

Only to realize very quickly what was actually going on. 

His first tip-off was hearing Powder and Vi’s voices, yours mixed in as you asked where you were going, why they were taking you, and what they were doing. 

Vi answered no questions. Powder just chirped excitedly. “You’ll see! You’ll see!”

The six of you met in the middle of the street, Powder dragging you by your hand as you followed behind patiently. You glanced up from listening to Powder, and your gazes met. Vander felt his heart skip a beat as he took in your appearance. There wasn’t anything particularly new, but you looked like you had cleaned up some. Your hair was pinned neatly back, and your clothes looked ironed. 

You looked… Really nice.

“Vander? What’s going on?” You asked, and Vi nudged you with her good arm. Her fractured left one was still healing carefully under your care. 

“We’re setting you two up.” She teased, and you stared dumbly. 

“Setting us up how?” You asked, and now it was Powder’s turn to blurt out an answer, 

“On a date!” 

Before the two of you could react, all four kids all but disappeared around the corner in a cloud of dust. Leaving you facing Vander and utterly alone. 

It was safe to say he was panicking just a little bit. 

“Vander? Do you have any idea what they meant?” You asked gently, and he scrubbed a hand down his face. 

“My guess is they want us to go on a date.” He said, fully prepared to hear rejection. Because who would want to go on a date with him? A middle-aged man with a stained past. His lungs twisted as he heard you take a step closer. 

A smaller hand slipped into his, and he looked down from where he had been staring at Topside. 

Your eyes were lit up, not with disgust at the proposition he was proposing. 

But they were filled with hope for the future this relationship would bring. 

[chelseeebe]

yours, forever

18+ mdni. smut. mean!exhusband!eddie;) breeding kink if you squint a lil

a/n: i was not expecting to post again so soon but this genuinely couldn’t wait lol. i have another parts to this little piece so lmk if you’d like to see it. someone posted a really really good exhusband!eddie fic like a month ago and ive lost it, but they inspired this entire thing!

^it was this post by @madelynraemunson !!!

˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗

eddie wasn’t expecting to find you standing on the other side of the door, nor had he expected you to barge right past him and into his kitchen. 

you seemed to show up with zero rhyme or reason, typically wanting something from him. 

that was fine, appreciated even. 

he just wasn’t a fan of you waltzing into his home with the sole purpose of talking about your pig of a husband. 

“david wanted me to ask you if he could take the kids up to washington to see his parents,” you stand awkwardly at the kitchen island, his apartment a shell of the house you once owned together. 

eddie pauses, launching the dish towel onto the counter and laughs, deep and gravely as he swings back around, “no.” 

“why not?” you huff, blinking expectantly at your petulant ex. he’d always been a sucker for your eyes, divorce couldn’t changed that. 

“because i said so,” leaning against the marbled counter, “he asked you to ask me and i said no, that’s it. done.” 

“you’re being stubborn,” crossing your arms over your chest, scolding in the way you talk to him. 

“i don’t care.”

“eddie,” stepping forward. 

“sweetheart,” his tone disapproving as he also steps up, closing the gap between you, “no,” enunciating the word in hopes that you’d actually understand now. 

“don’t be an asshole,” you frown, a couple years ago you’d pout and get your own way but now eddie found great satisfaction in telling you no.  

“i’m not being an asshole, you asked me a question and i answered, dave can go to washington, but you and my kids can’t,” his lip twitching into a dastardly smirk. any minute now you’d crack, really let loose on his ass. 

“oh, so now i can’t go? who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?” poking your sharp finger into his chest, a fury behind your eye that almost instantly made him hard. 

“the father of our kids? or have you forgotten about that?” 

“unfortunately not,” rolling your eyes, nonetheless you make no effort to leave, your bag already on the counter, signifying that what he assumed would happen next was definitely going to happen next. 

“you don’t mean that,” sidling closer, trapping your body between the counter and his chest, “because if you did, you wouldn’t let me keep fucking the shit outta you.”

eddie’s rock solid now, this was foreplay for him, getting high off of the way you argued with him, degrading him right to his face. 

“shut up,” rolling your eyes to the back of your head, fingers curling into the hem of his shirt, “you’re so pathetic,” glancing down at his boner now pressing against your cunt. 

“mmhmm,” he wouldn’t fight it, in fact, he’s proud of it, “only for you though,” finding your hips, palming at the doughy flesh. 

your lips twitch and he knows he’s won this fight, planting your lips to his, a firm hand on his chest just to remind him who was really in charge. 

sighing into your mouth as you move against him, his hands running beneath the seam of your skirt, feeling his way up the backs of your thighs to settle on your ass. 

“eds,” you hum, pulling away from his lips, “i’ve gotta go pick the boys up,” making zero effort to stop the inevitable, your chest flush against his.

“well better make it quick this time then,” he growls, walking your body into the countertop, manhandling your body to face you against the hard counter, pressing up against the swell of your ass. his belt clinks as his jeans fall down around his thighs, boxers following behind. 

“this is.. i have to go,” you gasp, rolling your head back to allow his lips room to find your neck, nuzzling right into his favourite spot just tucked underneath your jaw. 

“then why don’t you leave?” his gruff voice vibrates against your chin as his hands slide underneath your shirt, spilling your tits from your bra to get a full handed grope of them. 

your hand rests atop of his, the other gripping to the countertop for dear life. 

you’re not going to leave, that much is obvious. eddie’s also fairly certain that you’ve got at least an hour before you have to go. he’s not stupid, you play the game just as much as he does, pretending to leave just to pounce on him straight after. 

“that’s what i thought,” sarcastic as ever, threatening to score violet splotches behind on your neck, though his lips detach before he’s able to. 

eddie lets his thoughts slip back to the reason you’re even here, letting himself get frustrated by your blind audacity all over again. 

“you must be fucking stupid coming in here, asking me shit like that,” his large, calloused hand pawing at your tits, the other yanking your panties down to hang around your thighs. 

“no i’m not,” arguing back though you’re completely docile, allowing him to bend your torso over the marbled countertop, his hands groping your plush skin. “he’s my..” sigh, “husband now and you need to- fu-uck respect that,” fingers curling around his arm, pinching at the skin when he slides inside with no warning. 

“what was that?” eddie mocks, slamming into your cunt with little remorse, full of years of pent up frustration and a tiny dose of regret. 

once upon a time, this was his everyday. having you absolutely anywhere he wanted, and now it was solely reserved for times you really needed him to agree to something. or perhaps david had done something stupid, as he often did. sending you running back to eddie like a feeble little deer. 

“shut up,” sighing in time with his rough strokes, the sound of his hips slapping against your ass echoes through his barren kitchen, filthy sounds of sex wailed through his apartment far more often than they should. 

before you’d met david, he’d see you once a week while dropping the kids off, maybe he’d get to taste you a couple times a month, if he was lucky. it was only after you remarried that you’d come around unannounced, asking about something that most definitely could’ve been a call. 

eddie doesn’t care, you’re the only woman for him anyway, a couple divorce papers couldn’t change that. 

“you fuckin’ love it,” he growls, grabbing a fistful of your hair and fiercely tugging your head back, “y’gotta drive all the way over here just to cum, ain’t that sad?” speaking low right into your ear, his arms keeping a strong hold of your torso as your knees grow weak. 

“you don’t.. you’re- fuck you,” knuckles glowing white with your grip on the counter, other hand desperately nuzzling between your thighs, circling your neglected clit. 

“have to speak up honey, i can’t hear you,” the tip of his cock nudges against your soft spot, eliciting a strangled mewl from your pretty wetted lips. 

“i can make myself cum,” you speak proudly through gritted teeth, voice bouncing around with every slam of his hips, “i don’t need you,” rubbing your clit harsher, as if to prove a point. 

“oh yeah? show me baby.. let me see you cum,” slowing his strokes but keeping his cock firmly enveloped inside, jaw clenching with every squeeze and quiver of your cunt. 

eddie palms your tit, getting as much satisfaction from this as you were. your whimpers alone could make him cum, hell, just a look and he was rock solid in his jeans. 

“oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck,” gasping into the air, leant back against his shoulder, head turning to hide in the nook of his neck as you teeter over, waves of pleasure shocking your body. 

“shit,” he grunts underneath his breath, feeling you writhe around in his arms, “that was good sweetheart, my turn,” resuming his assault on your cunt, breath stuttering as his hips begin to rock again. 

his hand replaces yours, slipping between your thighs to find your clit, thrusts becoming sloppy and weak as the blood rushes to his head, sending his stomach into a series of somersaults. 

even in your separation, your pleasure came first. an important pocket of information wayne had awkwardly handed him when his voice started cracking and girls no longer had cooties. 

you’re putty in his arms, fully relying on the countertop to keep you upright, thighs quivering with the intensity of your orgasm and the anticipation of the quickly approaching next one. 

“oh.. my.. god,” whining with every thrust, your voice thick with lustrous air, too fucked out to stand or even think straight. 

“i’m gonna, sh-shit cum sweetheart,” pounding recklessly into your trembling pussy, dripping in a mixture of your juices. 

you clench around him, tipping over the edge once more, barely able to hold yourself upright with shaking knees and a harsh grip of his arm. 

eddie isn’t, nor had he ever been one for pulling out, he liked running that risk, the thrill of maybe knocking you up again. 

three kids don’t happen without at least one accident, that’s for sure. 

he doesn’t now, pumping the thick ropes of his release into your cunt, groaning belligerently as he does so. praying to god this was the time it stuck, pregnant with his child once again. 

you fall flat against the counter, heaving for breath with the last of his pathetic strokes, growling into the stuff air. 

he slaps a harsh palm to your ass for good measure, trailing his hand down your trembling thighs, “so you run along home now and tell him exactly what i told you,” fingering the lace of your panties as he hikes them back over your thighs.

“no.”

[shadowysiren]

these fucking SPIDERS in my domain VEX me so

[yeyinde]

dangle on the leash | Simon "Ghost" Riley x F!Reader

The flimsy sarcophagus housing all his wants, his desires, cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant. Ghost cocks his head in consideration. Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. But he's a rabid dog burning with the urge to bite. No one should really be surprised when he finally decides to sink his teeth into you. Unfortunately, that hail mary Price sent into the aether never reached you.

(your bird is too big for a cage— —but maybe a collar would do.)

this is a babytrapping fic lmao but please read the tags carefully. a companion piece to this (Price + babytrapping).

DEAD DOVE. SMUT. 18+

HARD WARNINGS—coercion. dependency. intentional alienation. unsafe, unprotected sex. this very much toes the line of noncon (that is still very dubcon even when consent is given) in many ways, notably: somnophilia, and condom/contraceptive tampering. intrusive, violent thoughts. mentions of violence. manipulation; slight gaslighting. implied kidnapping. references to past abuse (Ghost), brief mention of drugging/threats of drugging (ambiguous as to if it was ever followed through on or not, mostly just Ghost's internal monologue unfiltered). ADDITIONAL TAGS—smut. rough sex. unsafe sex. dom!Ghost. mean, obsessive, unhinged!Ghost. spit kink. dacryphilia.

he's feral, but he's yours. too bad for you, no one is really sure if that's a good thing or not.

One of the things Price often tells new recruits is to shove their old life into a box. 

“There's home,” he huffs, fingers twitching as if he's subconsciously flexing around the hilt of a lit cigar. “And then there's work. Whatever box you decide to put this, or your family, your personal life, into is your choice. But for fuck’s sake. Keep them separate.” 

Most of the new recruits are fresh off selection, shaded sickly chartreuse, and take his words as a literal gospel. Work, this; home, them. They don't start to unravel the second part of his gruff speech until much later. Until they can't wash the blood from their hands, and the scent of their mum’s eucalyptus hand soap is nauseating. Unfamiliar. When being in civvies feels like wearing skin that doesn't fit, and everyone around you is alien, foreign. They don't know. They'll never know. 

It's only when they find themselves gazing at the clock on the wall of their family home, counting down the minutes until their mandatory leave is over do they realise that home is the barracks. 

That's something Ghost has always understood. Maybe it was because his home life was already in ruins, tatters. Beer soaking into the knock-off Persian rug a cousin nicked from a flea market when he was nine. No fine china in the cupboards because it'll end up in shards on the floor. Plastic plates and forks and cups. Always. Howling in his head. Screaming from down the hall in his mum's room. His bedroom door creaking open at night. The anger, the curdling fear (shameful—be a man; punch him back, hit him before he hits you, you useless prick—), of not knowing whether or not it was his dad, high as hell and itching for a fight after busting their mum’s lip wide open, or Tommy sneaking into his bed at night because his is soaked in piss and he can’t sleep when they scream at each other like this.  

(Funny that, he always found; neither of them could ever sleep when it was silent, either.)

Blood on the linoleum. Trying to eat burnt toast and overcooked beans with a busted lip and a twinge in his jaw—

(Fractured, they'll say later, years later, during his mandatory medical checkup when he's first recruited. Healed all wrong. Son, didn't anyone take you to hospital?) 

He understands the separation between home and work—even if the former lost all relevancy nearly a decade ago. Back when he buried them all. Was buried himself—

What Ghost never really understood was the box. 

Shove it into a box. 

When he asks over cheap whisky somewhere in Siberia, Price tightens his fingers around his glass before bringing it up to his head. His index finger juts out. He knocks the tip of that bruised, scabbed knuckle against his temple. Once, thrice. Levels Simon with a pointed look he both can’t understand and somehow knows all too well. 

“Up here."

“Paid nearly fifty quid for that,” he grouses, shaking his head. “Think I've been ripped-off, Price.” 

Price scoffs, places the glass down with a hollow thud. “Don't be a fuckin’ muppet, Simon—” his real name makes his shoulders tense. Around the barracks, they know him only as the Ghost. “You put it away somewhere. Hide it. I don't fuckin’ know. But if it keeps you goin’, keeps you sane, and doesn't become a mess I gotta clean up, well—”

The implication is stark. Heavy. 

Price was always good at chiselling through layers of accumulated indifference to get to the madness within, but considering Ghost’s past and his mile-long rap sheet, the warning digging into his words like a dull blade isn't unwarranted. 

Old dogs, he'd called the pair of them when they first met. There was a sharp keenness in his eye when he lifted his hand, waved his cigar toward the tangled mess of scar tissue crisscrossing his face (made with a dull, rusted knife, one that gouged out deep pocks of skin, ugly fuck, looks like the badlands, don't he? like a postcard from the Grand Canyon, sweetheart. not so cute anymore, are ya, pretty boy—), and said, “well, you're fuckin’ rabid, ain't you? Better put a muzzle on that before it becomes a problem, mm.”

His problem, specifically. 

And Ghost gets it. Thinks Price might understand that particular brand of madness—despite growing up on literal opposite sides of the track, his Manchester to the others Liverpool; poverty and prestige—if only just. Because Price seems to be able to curb those baser impulses in a way Ghost hadn't yet mastered (and won't for quite some time yet). He's put together. Sort of. Respected. Normal.

The men in the barracks don't look at him and flinch. 

But he sees the way the man's eyes linger in the crowd, shrewd and careless, before falling on the pretty bartender in the back. The one with roses in her eyes and a smile full of dandelions. Soft, like butterscotch. It's here when they darken. When he reaches, almost angrily, for his whisky. Pats his chest with a heavy fist searching for his cigar. 

She's a sweet thing, he reckons. All pretty and trusting. Birds like her make his head itch—

“Don't even think about it, Simon,” Price grumbles, and it feels like territorial posturing, a challenge he almost raises to meet with his chin, if only to make Price fluster, but it's hollow. Empty. He denies himself, too. The prick. 

“How'd you do it?” He asks, and doesn't specify. Doesn't think he needs to. 

When Price swallows, it looks like a grimace. “Years of practice.” 

He considers the weight of it, his eyes straying back to the woman behind the bar. She's tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, wrist delicate like bone china, the kind they could never afford, and for a moment, the intrusive thoughts, the ones he gets sometimes about wanting to tear things to bloody pieces, rears—

It's stamped down in a swig of flat lager You stupid fuckin’ mutt, Price would say tomorrow morning, shaking his head. You always think with your prick? 

Simon cranks his head sharply to the side instead. The resounding crack seems to echo through the empty pub. 

Price just shakes his head. “Christ. No one ever house break you, yet?” 

“Yeah, they did,” he rasps, staring at the bartender who gazes back at him now. Skittish, unsure. Not so sweet after all. She looks away, cowed. Her hands tremble. He leans back, and hums. “And now I piss outside, like a good ‘ol boy.” “Ain't nothin’ good about you, Simon. Fuckin' Christ—”

And he's not wrong. 

The Ghost has a reputation of being a cold-hearted bastard. A Frankensteinian beast cobbled together with spare parts robbed from a jailhouse graveyard. Worst of the worst. An arm from a mass murder. The leg from a spree killer. Heart a patchwork mess of ichor and sulphur. Sutured together with barbed wire. 

It's all sort of macabre. Rather trite, too. 

The rumour mill in the barracks is insatiable.

But sometimes, he wakes up and he's still buried. Still dead. Dirt in his throat, lodged in his nose. He breathes in and feels pebbles scraping his lungs. Feels worms in his ears. Maggots in his head. 

They crawl through his grey matter. Leeches burrowing into his thoughts, sucking the good in him dry. 

Or, whatever's left of it, anyway. 

He thinks with his teeth because it's easier that way. Cold, calculative instinct. Just barely boxed into a neat package slapped on the desk of Price's higher-ups. 

A good man, they say, and turn him loose on the streets. One of the best we have, as he breaks jaws, and tears through jugulars. A force to be reckoned with. 

They hand him a gun, a rifle, when the bloodied footprints leading back to camp become too much of a hassle to clean. Shoot from a distance. He takes to it like the bulk of metal was made for his scarred hands. Scythe to a Reaper. 

It feels like bloodletting. Draining him of his anger, his fury, until a cold, gnarled indifference curls in the basin left behind. Icy, frigid. Down to the bone. 

Sometimes, he doesn't remember what it felt like to be warm, even buried under a thick balaclava and layers of military fatigues. 

Frankenstein’s monster. Patched together from the rotten remains of horrible men. 

And as he stares in the mirror at the patchwork ruins of his face, his body, he wonders if there's some truth to it, after all. He's pretty sure if someone cracked his skull open—again—they’d find rot. Tumulus. Infested with maggots and worms. Cobwebs behind his eyes. In his nose. His brain perfectly preserved: a zombified tombstone. And oh, how it hungers. 

Wants. 

But in a box it goes. One shaped like a coffin. Placed pretty in the back of his broken head. 

He stares in the mirror and thinks he sees something moving under his eye. Wriggling around. The temptation to claw it out rears, but the shredded tissue on his thighs reminds him of what happens when he listens to that insidious hiss in the back of his head (some amalgamation of his old man, and that bastard—) and goes searching for gold in bone marrow. 

He huffs. Fingers curling around the porcelain. His head is rotten. Putrefied. He can feel the decomposing sludge press against his temples. It grows teeth sharp like a razor blade and hacks away at jaundiced bone. Ghost lifts his hand, digs his fingers into his temple. Down boy—

(Simon doesn't even want to consider what his heart must look like, then.)

Cold-hearted, sure—

But he likes sweet things. 

The kind that will undoubtedly give him cavities. A spillover, perhaps, when candy bars were too expensive, and the only dessert he was given was a toffee by the neighbour when she wasn't moaning to his old man about all the shit he and Tommy got up to. 

(Bruises came afterwards, the colour of liquorice. Sour cherries.)

Unfortunately for him, sweet things don't like him much—a shame, really. Simon has always had a sweet tooth. 

His rough edges are too sharp for their liking, and Simon's—

Intense. Like a dog with a bone, he doesn't know when to let go. When to unhinge his jaw from the morsel between his teeth. He bites hard. Shakes his head. Tears into the things he wants until it's bloodied meat pinched in his incisors. 

And so, they keep their distance. Like they can smell the rot on him. The funeral dirt. The stench of an unearthed sarcophagi. 

Sometimes, though, the wiley ones will inch closer, looking to get messed up badly by a bad man, and it makes something inside his head howl when he turns them down. Following Price’s creed. Can't give in to the pretty ones, he'd said. Nothin’ but trouble. 

Trouble, like a pair of shackles. A noose. Trouble, like gentle, clean hands and fragile bones. Fine china. Fine powder. The marshmallow soft kind of trouble that will melt in the acid that leaks from his pores. Aqua regia. Attacking anything that gets close. 

(Breakable, is what Price means. Pretty chew toys that are beyond repair once he's finished with them.

He must think Ghost is some sort of psychopath—)

But still. He stays away. It's easier on base, in safe houses, too far out from the general public to have to worry about doe eyes and soft touches. He doesn't need it, anyway—

Then comes you. 

And the forfeiture of his self-control. 

You're trouble of a different kind. 

Trouble, like the end of a sledgehammer. Trouble, like the grill of a car. The barrel of a gun. 

In the shape of a battering ram, one strong enough to dislodge the madness in the back of his head. Where the corrosive acid should ruin you, eat you alive, it doesn't. Not with your tantalum skin. 

But oh, do you pack a punch—

At first, you think he's homeless. 

Some scruffed-up man sleeping on a park bench outside of your apartment. 

In another life, he might have been. He isn't a stranger to bad habits, and had the military not been his only choice in life for some semblance of good (laughable, considering what he does for a living), he could see the threads of his life leading him here. Drugs. Manchester is good for it, this he knows all too well. Especially the shithole neighbourhood he's from. 

He doesn't clue into this, though, until you glance at him, warily, and then shuffle into the cafè he’s holed outside of, the place where his current target gorges himself on steeped tea and crumpets. 

(Price's dry text sits, open, on his burner phone: and don't fuck this up—)

It feels a bit like an omen. Made worse when you meet his gaze through the glass, and—

Well. Shit. 

The impact is a collision. Hitting a pole at top speed. Metal bent around concrete. 

His teeth ache (so, so bad—).

You emerge from the small building a few minutes later—the faded eggshell with chocolate trim is nauseatingly sweet against your pastel yellow raincoat—holding a takeaway bag, and balancing a tray of coffees in your hand. 

He tenses. It's instinctual. There's nothing about you that's an immediate threat to his person—unless you plan on adding to his scars with the tip of your umbrella, the scalding coffee in your hand—but it's odd, isn’t it? No one approaches him. Not unless they have a reason to. 

And no one, in his experience, ever has a good one. 

“Hi,” you chirp, disarmingly sweet, as you come to stand in front of him. His jaw aches. Even sprawled across a bench, you're barely looking down at him. Sticky, cold fingers tap a strange rhythm down his spine. “I, um, hope this isn't weird, but I saw you sitting here, and—well. I got this—”

You wiggle the bag. He smells something greasy. A breakfast sandwich, he's sure.

It's an unusual assassination attempt. Price will be livid. 

“What for?” He rumbles, sitting up in the seat. The shift of his bulk seems to make you nervous. You take a step back, and he fights the urge to follow. To back you into a corner. No escape. 

You regain your footing, even if the smile on your face wobbles. Weakens under his flat stare. Some people can smell the rot on him. 

He wonders if you can, too. 

(Pity that. You're a pretty bird, ain't you?)

And the way you take him in lacks a distinct thrum of hesitation, fear that’s normally there. It occurs to him, then, that you see him as just another man. Just another person. 

(“deader than a doorknob, this one. such a goddamn waste, boss. he was a fun one, wasn’t he? should we burn ‘em?” 

nah. bury him out back—)

It's laughable, really. A joke. He has the urge to crack one—sick and awful enough to make that little smile on your face wilt. Wither away. Almost does, too, but it get tangled in his throat when he feels the weight of your stare on him. 

The easy sweep of your eyes is barely discrete, but it's clinical. Pitying. But the softened edges of that empathy dissolve as your pretty head adds up all the numbers on him, coming to a standstill. Your eyes linger on his wrist. The gold of his wristwatch peeks out beneath the black sleeve of his hoodie. An intricate web of complex timekeeping that only he's privy to. A little luxury he picked up in Italy when the cash he'd been given was getting too tiresome to carry around. 

Dead men, after all, don't need bank accounts. 

And then—

You fluster. “Sorry, I just thought—”

It clicks, then. The pity. The soft words. The goddamn coffee— 

His gums itch. He has the sudden urge to be mean about it. Pick you apart in this street until nothing but embarrassment and humiliation remains. 

“That I was homeless? ‘nd you brought me, what? A coffee? ‘ow sweet of you. Some breakfast, too. Well, aren't you a lovely girl?” 

You are embarrassed. It blisters across your expression. Has your hands trembling around the cardboard tray, spilling droplets of coffee down the side. Your head is bowed, cowed in shame. It reminds him of that bartender some years prior. Pulling away when the bad dog growls—

But there's a thin sheen of intrigue in your eyes, burrowing holes into the shoes in front of you; a tangled knot of want coiling in the heat of your embarrassment over this blunder. Over offending him. 

Well—

That's new. 

Some get off on it. On humiliation. Specifically, of the public variety. He didn't take you as the type. The way you twist, squirming in place, is odd, though. It doesn't fit as well as he originally thought. No. It's not the public shame, but—

Him. 

Ah. 

Sweet, sweet girl. 

(So naïve.)

He reckons he could get you to do just about anything to make it up to him. You would, too. You're soft enough to be submissive, to bow your head in contrition, but there's a flicker of defiance in the jut of your chin when you lift your head. 

This is a blunder and you're sweetly embarrassed, sure, but it isn't enough to break you. 

And now Simon just wants to ruin you. Teach you a lesson about bad, vile men—

(Something you'd welcome with open arms, wouldn't you?)

“Didn’t know Manchester was so charitable,” he rasps. His throat is dry. Parched. He reaches for the coffee—black, with extra creamer and sugar on the side, tucked neatly in a little bag; fuckin’ hell. Ain't you just adorable—and places it on the spot beside him. “I’ll be takin’ this. Will need it for later.” 

You look like you want to protest. Fight back. His hackles rise, ready for it—eager. Something anticipatory, dark, bleeds through the moulted mess of his head. Sickly. Terrible. He thinks about what you'd look like sprawled under him, shaking and begging for more, for him to stop—

Fuck. Birds usually make his head itch, but you make his fucking skin crawl. 

In the end, you just huff. Roll your eyes. He wants to chew them out of your head. Pop them between his teeth. He bet you'd taste divine. 

You walk away from him before he can. You don't look back once. 

Pity, he thinks. Someone's gonna snatch you clean off the streets like that—

Hours later, he sends Price a text message with the coordinates for where to pick up the package Ghost left. 

He considers it a blessing when the man sends him back, good job, now get a pint from me as a little reward. Can't say I don't treat my team well. 

A reward, huh? 

Well. With your stature in comparison to his own, Ghost easily can see you being considered a pint. 

So, he follows you home, and tallies this one as being on Price. 

It's easy. Too easy. He slips deftly behind you, tucked away from view, and masks his footsteps under the echo of yours until he's standing in the shadows outside of your house. This, too, feels like a blessing. It's a duplex. He waits for one of the lights to flicker on, and—

The window brightens. Room number two. 

He hums, and palms his pockets for the pack of smokes he nicked off the man. Needing something to take the edge off. To quell the urge to bite. 

It's even easier to engineer meetings. Random run-ins. All blamed on happenstance, chance. Of course. This towering mountain of a man with his thick manc twang—the sort of gallows humour that can only be found in the blue-collar streets of Salford from the nasty old men squatting on the corners—must have better things to do than stalk you. Surely. You're not special enough to be hunted, right? 

Still. You're a touch wary of him. Distrustful. You keep your distance—six inches for Jesus Christ, aren’t you a peach?—and try to skirt the line between neutrally polite to the strange man loitering outside of the shops you frequent (your schedule burned to his memory, naturally) and that fascinating skittish intrigue from before. All simmering heat. Blunt want. The kind wrapped up in silk threads. 

It's interesting to watch it play out when he steps closer and all those long-forgotten instincts in the back of your head flare up. The shaky step you take back. The inward frown of confusion when you're not sure why your body craves space, acting almost on its own. And then the sweet defiance that breaks over you. The intentional step closer. The feigned warmth in your tone as you talk to him.

It's easy to pocket the uglier aspects of his personality. The coldness. The indifference. The flat, droll insincerity that leaks into his tone. All of it shelved, locked away, and he's not sure if Price would be happy that he listened to what he said, followed his example, or furious that he's bastardising it to lure this pretty fish in.

)The latter, undoubtedly. But Simon gets a sick kick from it all.)

Especially when it brings you closer to him. Thaws you as you rationalise his reaction during the first meeting, gears spinning. Kicking up excuses. 

Anyone would be angry, offended. It's natural. He's alright now—

It makes you look at him differently as you forcefully fight the urge to flee. 

Silly bird. 

Wary eyes rake over his massive bulk. Brows furrow at the series of black medical masks he wears in public. Always. That, in addition to the heavy black of his wardrobe—black jacket, black hoodie, black leather gloves—sometimes makes you glance at him with a touch of worry. Fear. Probably wondering if you brought home a delinquent. 

But it changes when he rolls up his sleeves one day after you've been moaning about your broken beach cruiser (the, I don't know, chain—or something—keeps catching—), and crouches down to fix it. 

There's a hitch in your breath. A distinct swallow. A guilty tinge of something shy, deliciously so, shading your eyes ruby-red when you look down at him. 

And ah—

Sweet little treat snagged on the line. Ain't he a lucky lad? 

It's all the better when you do the work for him. Reeling yourself in, practically throwing yourself in his cooler when you ask about his tattoos, carefully—considerately—nudging the topic away from his ugly scars. 

He guts you clean as he tells you he's in the military. Top secret, pet. Don't ask because I'd hate to ‘ave to hurt a pretty face like yours—

You preen under it. Pet. Pretty. You don't even notice when he slides his knife over your scales, dices you up on his chopping board. 

You're the picture of sweetness when he unkinks the chain in your bike, and sets it straight. All happiness. Smiles. Appreciative glances. You flutter your pretty eyes at him as you say—

“Thank you—”

You're waiting for a name. His belly rumbles. He could eat, he thinks, and licks his teeth. 

“Simon. Simon Riley.” 

The risk-reward ratio is balanced when you breathe it out between plump lips, chasing the end of it with your tongue. He wants to eat it out of your mouth. Swallow it down. 

You touch his arm, hand warm, soft. “If there's anything I can do to pay you back—”

He takes you out for a kebab later on. Nudges you out of the way when you open your wallet to pay. Draft girl. Naïve, too, because he can feel the heat in your cheeks from where he stands, reaching over to snatch the bag from the man with a grunt. 

You must think him quite the gentleman. So trusting. 

Doesn't matter. He lets it take root. Especially when you shyly invite him back to yours to eat. 

He makes a feast of it, and fucks you on your mint green chaisse after he's finished. 

(Not on birth control, you say, and hand him a box of condoms, suddenly shy. It's unopened. He hums, and burns that to memory.) 

He keeps his distance—an easy feat when he's halfway around the world, and you're stuck in the gloom of Manchester. 

It's purposeful, of course. He made a promise to Price not to give him a reason to worry, but fuck—

You're proving hard to quit. He's never had anyone cuff him upside the head on his bullshit. Not anymore, anyway. Not as the Ghost. He likes the thrill of it, of this chase. 

You don't let him steamroll you when he's in a mood to fight. You punch back, hitting him right in the mess of his guts, and fuck. Fuck. He's a little bit obsessed with it. With you. This wily little fish that acts so shy when he's got three fingers buried in your cunt, but rides him after like you're starving for it. Clawing at his chest. Scratching his arms. It's raw. Primal. He wants to break you—this fiery little kitten that bites his fingers until they bleed, and then purrs in his lap as he drives a pickaxe through your head, shredding logic into pieces. Rummaging around until he nicks the optic nerve that lets you see red. 

You’re everywhere. In everything. In the back of his head, under the howling that hadn't stopped since you trailed your finger down the jagged topography of his bare chest, digging your nail into the crude x across his heart, and whispered, soft and sweet: you're all kinds of fucked up, aren't you? 

A bludgeon to his self-control—

He resists. Has to. Is mean about it, too. Doesn't tell you where he's going (it's need to know), or what he's doing (would ‘ave to bash your pretty ‘ead in if I told you), but keeps you strung on the line (keep thinkin’ about that pretty cunt of yours; can't wait to come ‘ome and ‘ave you sit on my ugly mug—). 

It's dangerous, this game of his. Thrilling for all the wrong reasons. 

But he’s a good mutt. Good—

Until the text. 

The one you send to him when you're out with friends. A picture. You're in a pub somewhere in Moss Side, a drink in hand. A gaggle of nobodies crowded around you. It makes sense, he supposes. There's that old idiom—you’ll trap more flies with honey—and he doesn't know anyone nearly as sweet as you. 

His sweet girl.

(you fuckin’ mutt—)

Ghost stares at you for a moment, teeth aching. The little ensemble—a crop top and jeans—is a vision, he reckons. But it's spoiled when he catches more eyes on you than pointed at the camera. Practically spilling out of your top, aren't you? 

He breathes heavily through his nose. Tastes guncotton in his throat. 

Ghost commits every face to memory, and then calls you. 

You're drunk. Too drunk to remember it tomorrow. Stuck in a pub on what's supposedly a bad part of town. Chatting away about going to your friend’s house. He gets the address, and something sour twits in his stomach. Shit council houses. 

“That safe?” He asks, leaning back in his chair. He's already chubbed up in his slacks at the slur in your voice. “And dressed like that? Didn't take you for a slag—”

It makes you sputter on the line. “I'm—I’m not—”

You're so quick to placate him. So hasty to make him happy. Please don't be angry with me, Simon. I'm just having some fun—

The claws and fangs are tucked away when you're drunk. He shoves the information in the cache, eyes burning. Head aching. He's feverish. Hot under the collar.

Odd considering he's dead—

“Sounds like you will be.”

“It's not like that—”

“‘ow would you know? Might meet a nice fellow. Might take him home.”

“I don’t—I wouldn't—”

The sniffle makes him throb. Fuck. “Yeah? Well, ain't none of my business, I reckon—”

“It is.”

“Oh? How's tha’?”

“I—I like you, Simon—” he can taste your embarrassment through the phone. He didn't even need to bring you flowers and you're already boxing him into monogamy, confessing to him. So sweet. So tender. If he were a better man, he might have told you to sober up. To talk about this tomorrow. 

Too bad for you, he isn't. And what’s worse is that he’s a loyal bastard, too. 

But that's later, and right now—

He's halfway across the world, and you're vulnerable. In the den of hungry mutts. 

It’s charr in his throat. Anger in his veins. “You like me? An’ you go out dressed like that?”

“There's nothing wrong with how I'm dressed—”

He sucks his teeth. “Dunno ‘bout tha’, pet. You look like you're achin’ to get fucked.”

You take a shuddering breath. “I just want you—”

“Yeah?” It's a growl. His cock spits prespend in his trousers. “Then be my good girl. Go home and wait for me.”

It's quiet on the line. He catches the hitch in your throat, the sharp exhale, like you can't really be sure if he's serious or not. He says nothing. Waits. 

Where there would have been a fight—fists and teeth and snarling words—you quieten in the silence. Docile. Submissive. It's in you, he knows. He saw the glimpses back when you first met, when he'd bent down and fixed the bike he broke. All it needs is a little—

“Jus’ worried about my sweet girl, is all.” 

And you relent. 

Corrosive oil spills out of the necrosed holes in his head. It curls over his thoughts, liquid sin. He takes himself in his hand, blood pulsing in his veins, white-hot, damning, and bares his teeth at the urge to come to you, to push you down on the floor, and mount you like a snarling beast—

“Good girl,” he growls when you tell him you'll call a taxi, that you'll go home and have some wine with your friend instead.

Friend. Friends. 

He'll have to do something about that. 

(The thing about deprivation is that it bleeds into a vicious sense of possession when it's finally obtained. Greed. His wants have wants, have wants—

A perfect ouroboros. One you feed into almost destructively.)

Because the thing is—

Simon wants to tie you to his bed. Keep you locked up in the safe house he has in Manchester. Chained, shackled. A prisoner with him as your iron guard. 

It isn't just fantasy, either. 

The flies that congregate around you are an annoying, incessant buzzing in his ears. Remora clinging to the biggest fish. 

But they're easy to scatter when he waves his hand. 

(Waves off. Threatens with bodily harm, with physical aggression—

Same thing.)

The sting in his knuckles and the blood on his shoes are worth it in the end when your tantalum skin cracks. An aggregate of beautiful lines, pretty in their fragility, their brokenness. He wedges his fingers between the splints, widening the chasm to pet at the sticky-soft centre hiding beneath all that rough rock. Sweet girl. Hard candy enclosing taffy-softness. 

His coos melt you to the consistency of mercury. Liquid silver pebbles along your lash line, spilling over in a dizzying display of raw vulnerability. 

It makes every predatory instinct inside of him bristle. Locking onto the sweet lines of crystalline sadness that run down your cheeks. It has his heart racing. Eager, anticipatory. The thrill of the chase, of running you down into the ground until you're fine powder under him. 

And it’s there, it's in his arms—the maw of a beast—where you seek comfort, lamenting the loss of your friends, your coworkers. No one wants to hang out with you anymore. They don't return your calls or answer your texts. 

What did I do? You sniffle, throat bared. Belly turned up. 

Flooded with tears. The lachrymal face that peers up at him makes his teeth ache. He rolls his head back, feels himself thicken in his pants. 

Simon loves it when you cry.

“Fuck ‘em,” he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. “If they can't see what a catch you are, then they don't even deserve to breathe the same air as you.”

It makes you cry harder, makes you mumble into his chest about how lucky you are to have someone like him. Someone who cares. 

His breath hitches. Warm floods his veins, fever-hot. 

“Thank you, Simon—”

And then you, smooth silver and wickedly sweet, cradle him in your palms as if you could hold all the broken pieces of him together. 

He thinks it's cute. 

Doesn't really have the heart to tell you it's a lost cause.

“Anytime, pet.”

And you're perfect, too.

You take this mangy mutt into your house, and let it eat your food, sleep in your bed. You let him fuck you stupid, and listen so prettily when he convinces you to let him spoil you. Let him pay your rent, your bills. Let Simon dote on you the only way he knows how—mercilessly possessive, and a touch cruel, mean—but you roll over, showing your belly. Submissive and sweet. 

It's even better when you try to lash out at him with a collar in the shape of his teeth branding your neck, spitting and hissing like a feral cat who doesn't know yet that's claws have been clipped. Only to then curl up in his lap, purring as he strokes your fur, and carves out a place for himself in your life. 

He wants to sink his teeth into you, and you think he's a big dog. Undomesticated. One who comes and goes as he pleases. A stray. A mutt. 

It's said fondly. Full of love—

His mouth is full of cavities. His teeth ache. His gums bleed. 

(do you know he's rabid? that the faded name on his dog tags once read cujo—)

Everything about you makes that sludge flood behind his eyes, pounding rotten fists against his temple. take, take, take; mine, mine—

The howling doesn't stop. It tells him to press you into the mattress and fuck you stupid. Tie you to the bedposts and never let you go—

He throws fists in the dark, trying to hit the madness in his head. Ends up with bloody knuckles and laughter in his ears. 

(a voice of reason says, your bird is too big for a cage—)

He clings to it. 

You're warm beside him. Burning hot. He syphons it from your veins when you're asleep, pulling you close just to feel something on his skin other than dirt. Other than blood. 

It's easy to pretend he's fine with these little nips. Leaving teeth marks in your neck. Bloody rings snaking up your thighs. 

He wraps one hand around both of your wrists, holds them high above your head, and tells himself it's enough. Shackled by him, under him, as he takes you apart, pulling at your sense of independence like the gnarled fingers of winter bringing defoliation to summer's bloom, but even with this, all of it, he still aches. Still wants. Needs—

Stupid fuckin’ mutt. 

Then you bring his hands up to your throat, letting him wrap his bearish paws around your delicate neck, and he knows these little bites will never satiate the hunger in his guts. 

He wakes up the next morning feeling warm. Full. Edges softened, if only just, by the sticky sweetness of your breath ghosting over his chest. 

Simon curls his arm around you, holding tight.  He won't let go. Won't—

Hide it. Put it away. 

Ghost does neither of those things. He buries it, instead.  

But in doing so, you find cracks in the foundation. Ones that are just big enough for your willfulness to slip through. To hand him back the cash he gave with a scoff, and a, i work, too, you know? i don't need your money, Simon. that's not why i’m with you—

(All he hears is, I don't need you.)

And then you send him a text. I'm going out with friends from work tonight. We're going drinking. I'll talk to you tomorrow! 

In the zombified remains of his head, a new howling starts. The hisses tell him you're pulling away, running from him—

It's a big world out there. It'll eat you whole—

Like Tommy.

The thing about want is that sometimes it grows teeth, hands. Claws. Without a body of its own, it tends to mould itself after its maker because that's all it knows how to do: devour, consume. Yearn. 

He shouldn't be too surprised to find that this need of his has dug itself out of the grave he buried it in. 

(he did, too—)

The flimsy sarcophagus cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant.

The howling in the back of his head stops abruptly. The pulsing ache in his temple abates. It's heavy, this weight. This absolute, utter emptiness—

No. It's not hollow. The chasm isn't drained, it's—

(In the silence, something growls. Feral. Possessed.)

—full. Perfect equilibrium. All of the patchwork parts of himself, the ones that don't quite fit, suddenly find synergy. 

Communion. 

Ghost cocks his head in consideration.

(your bird is too big for a cage—

—but maybe a collar would do.)

—after all, could you ever leave him with his name etched into your womb—

In leaving the key under the mat for him to come and go as he pleases, you've left yourself vulnerable. But—

Not anymore. 

He has a safehouse he'll take you to. You'll let him, too, because it'll be the best choice for you. The three of you.

He's never entertained any ideas of family, not when the closest approximation he has is drenched in gun oil and smells of smoke from artillery fire, but the howling in his head quietens at the idea of it. He can't shackle you to the bed—stupid fucking mutt—but he can tie you down all the same. Make you his. Wholly. Always. 

And the thing is—despite a pickaxe making figure-eights out of his grey matter; lead poisoning and rust giving him these sour, awful thoughts about locking you up in his house, leaving you a needy mess, dependent only on him—Simon supposes he knows right from wrong. 

Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. 

But in carving himself a place in your life, he failed to realise that the walls behind him closed in. No way out. And so, his only option is to go forward. To keep moving.

He'll be crucified for this, but that's fine. 

He doesn't intend for you to find out, anyway. It'll be an accident. He came home early, and found you drunk. Drank with you. Your drunken idiocy merged, creating a terrible, noxious cocktail of awful, bad choices. Permanent ones. Irreversible. 

(You're so sweet, so docile when you're drunk—)

It'll be easy to convince you. To play the part of a stoic man suddenly in turmoil. You'll offer to get rid of it, a suggestion that he'll flinch at—a cornered dog, a hand raising in the air. You'll whimper. Shake in his arms as you tentatively smooth over the wrinkles in his brow, murmuring out your options in a stilted breath.

You'll be a Riley before the end of your term. It's only proper, he'll mutter, stiff and uncomfortable, and you'll melt. Liquid tantalum in his palm. The fruits of his labour laid bare, seeping from the corners of his mouth. Tucked tight between his teeth. Mercury he can swallow down, keep in the bracket of his rotten ribs. Safekeeping from this world that just takes. Devours. 

But not if he eats you first. 

The mere notion alone serves as an anchor, locking him to the seafloor. The tumult in his head calmed at the promise of owning. Biting to claim. To have. Greedy for it. For you, and the strange sense of quiet your proximity brings him. The warmth, too. 

He's a rabid dog. This he knows—has known—for quite some time. Indisputable. It pools in his mouth. Liquid sin. Makes him ache for just a sip. Unquenchable, though, because he's wary of water. Hydrophobia, but only for how it washes his efforts away. Cleanses. 

The urge inside of him to bite, to infect, quietens when he gets closer to you. 

(a rabid mutt licking at the window you're on the opposite side of, dreaming of just a taste—)

A byproduct of that maddening virus in his veins, the one he must have picked up six feet in the ground. Bite, bitebite—

—and give you a collar in the shape of his teeth.

He finds you in bed. A bottle of wine on the end table beside you, courtesy of your friend. The one lingering remora he couldn't snap at—one who sends you messages about how you are being manipulated. Taken advantage of. Fuck that loser, the latest one says when he picks up your phone, scrolling through the dwindling conversations housed within. Just him now, and them. 

It preaches about empowerment. About how you shouldn't let a man pay your bills (textbook manipulation. he's putting you in a position of dependency. making you feel obligated to stay. it's all on Google, babes. like, fucking get a clue!!!!), or how it's moving so quickly (maybe you should come stay with me in Durham for a bit, hun. get away for a weekend. i worry about ya, is all). He hums, thumbing through the old chats. 

You told her to fuck off about the manipulation, but it came after a lot of, oh, yeah. well, he's just. you know. he's different, and you haven't declined the invitation. i’ll think about it, is what you write. 

It simmers under his skin. That independence he plans on stomping out under his heel. With his kin. 

(sick, sick sick, wrong—)

It's desperation, this. Clawing at the walls—the dirt—until his nails are torn off his fingers. Until his skin splits, peels. Broken under rock and rubble. That animalistic need for air. To breathe. Basic training tells him not to save the person drowning unless he's sure they won't kill him in their struggle to live. But what's he supposed to do when that person is his rotting body, sinking down to unfathomable depths? When all he has is you to cling to—

Damnation built by his own hands. 

You'll die together, he reckons, and tosses your phone on the hamper in the corner of the room. 

Ghost can't remember the last time someone made him feel anything at all other than impartiality. Indifference. Casual apathy. 

Price is the exception to this on the grounds of being consanguineous to him.

And you—

An outlier. 

One he intends on sinking as deep as he can with. Anchored, maybe, by this little plan that beats and pulses in the back of his head. That clogs his throat with a want so thick, he can already taste the brine from the ocean. Water in his nose. Down his esophagus—

Better than dirt, he supposes. And it spurns him forward.

You're malleable like this. Tensile. He bends you easily with just a touch until you're flat on your back, a pillow shoved beneath your tailbone, and stripped. The loose shirt you wear to sleep is hiked up under your neck. Panties are pulled off until your sweet, bare cunt is revealed to him. All pretty and soft, and his. Untouched, he notes, and gives an appreciative stroke over your clit with his thumb. 

It was something you were whining about the other day, panting in his ear as if he wasn't a continent away. Pleading with him on the phone to please, please let you come. 

Simon likes the way you cling to him when it's been a while since something has wrecked you as thoroughly as his cock. When your spoiled pussy was neglected for a few days, weeks, and starved for attention. You were so sweet to him then, cooing in his ear how good you've been, how much you want him and only him, need him. Begging so prettily for it. 

He's almost sad to spoil himself in your cunt when you can't weep for it. Can't bully him closer. Try to claw his eyes out. That delicious push-pull where you hiss at him for pulling away, but whine when he gets too close. 

Sad, but—

Not enough to stop himself. 

You're not wet enough for him to slide inside unprepared—his cock too big, something that makes his bones tremble—and he rectifies it by leaning down, letting saliva pool between his teeth and lips. He holds it there for a moment as he spreads your folds apart with his thumb and forefinger. 

And then he spits on your bare cunt. 

It hits your clit, the thick glob siding down your slit. He reaches between your thighs, pawing at you. Slides his fingers through the slick mess he made, teases around your tight rim. 

Simon usually likes to take his time with you. Lapping at your pussy for hours until you're a weeping, snot-nosed mess whining in the sheets. Spoiled rotten. Begging him to fuck you already, Simon, you can't take it anymore—

He's mean. Cruel. Edges you for hours until your legs shake, trembling around his ears. He never lets you reach that peak—doesn’t let you come until he's buried inside of you. 

Coming on his tongue, his fingers, is rarely a privilege you ever earn. Too much of a spitfire, a spiteful little kitten, to give in and do what he demands. So he keeps you on the precipice until he's ready to fuck you, ignoring your bribes, your bargains. Simon doesn't give in even when you beg, when you relent and tell him you'll finally be good. 

You never are. 

Spoiled, he always huffs. Down to the fuckin’ bone. 

Like now. Pulling away from him. Him, the only person in your life who stuck around. A little bullying (bones breaking, splintering under his fists; the wet, hot smear of blood on his hands, skulls smacking against the pavement—an’ if you tell anyone, he cracks his battered fists and it sounds like a snarl, a gunshot, your parents will be cryin’ over an empty grave—) shooed the gnats away. He took a more clandestine approach to others. Birds that kept circling you tight. Protective, shrill. They made his head ache, but—

(don't want to start nothin’, but i don't want to be alone wit’ ‘er. tried to kiss me, is all. ain't like that, pet—)

It was a test. And they all failed. All but him. 

Yet—

come to Durham. 

i’ll think about it. 

Ungrateful. It's his fault, though. Simon doted on you too much, cosseted by his affection, when he should have clipped your wings from the beginning. 

Ah, well—

Lesson learned. 

You're wet enough now. He pushes in two fingers, scissoring them apart. You'd be yowling at him, kicking up a fuss if you'd been awake. But you're not. It thrums through him. Thick, heady. He likes you like this—probably more than he should. The heat simmering in his veins bubbles. Pops. Sap on charring wood. It clogs his throat with his smoke until it burns, a dry forest fire. 

He needs you. Needs to be in you. He's tired of waiting. Impatience burrows into him like a maelstrom. 

Simon adjusts his hold on your leg, fingers curling behind your kneecap. Steadying himself. His fingers slip out of your cunt with a sloppy squelch that ghosts across his spine. Anticipatory. A touch anxious. He wants you. Wants you bad—

He takes himself in his hand, and slides the weeping tip over your slit. Taps it once, thrice on your clit. And then guides it to your centre. Your warmth bleeds into him. Eager, he shuffles forward. Feeds you his cock. Eyes drilling into the place where his head slips in, swallowed by your sloppy, wet hole. The glands make you stretch around him. Rim pulled taut. 

The sight alone must have been crafted by some Luciferian dream, dangled before him in the shade of nirvana. 

take a bite, it urges. and then take more—

Like this, passed out with your legs hitched over his shoulders, drooling into the pillow unawares, you're just a doll. 

Made for him, and—

“Fuckin’ hell—” He presses into you—cock splitting tight, warm heat—and tries not to lose himself to the sensation of being bare, raw, inside of you. 

—“A perfect fit.”

It's always been condoms. You're not on birth control. Ink blots in his eyes. He goes a little feral with it. Instincts unleashed. Unfettered. 

Simon bullies his fat cock into you until his hips tap the back of your thighs, buried as deep as he can go. It's molten heat cocooning him—a warm embrace. For the first time, ever, he thinks he understands the meaning of home. Sliding home, in particular. 

(Welcome home. Home. Home. He'll make a house out of your body. Sleep inside the brackets of your thighs, head pillowed on your chest—)

As good as you feel around him—slick, wet, and tight—and as much as he wants to saviour the sight of you, passed out on the pillow, cunt split by his cock, he has a goal, a mission, to see through. 

His hand falls, slick and tacky, to your lower belly. Palm pressing against the subtle bulge in your abdomen, the outline of his cock. You always whine and hiss that he's too big for you. That you can't take him to the root. 

Hurts, you complain, hand against your naval. Fingers knotting over the place that aches. 

He presses his fingers there instead, feeling himself under your skin. Changing your anatomy to make room for him to fit—

It lights him in fire. Spurns him on. He bucks into you, pace sloppy, clumsy. Selfish. He's unrelenting as he splits you apart, drilling the full length of himself into your supine body, supple flesh relaxed under him, practically melting into the sheets. 

The thread keeping his resolve, his self-control, sprung up tight begins to quiver. Each piston into you has delicate fingers drumming across the strings of a harpsichord. It reverberates through him, echoing in the stifling, suffocating, silence of the bedroom, overtaking it. Clouding it with the musk of his desire, his devotion to you, to this dream blooming in the prison of his mind. 

Everything narrows into a needlepoint. 

There's just your burning flesh beneath him, softer than it's ever been; pillowy. Welcoming. And the sounds of him fucking into you—lewd squelches, slick and wet; the sound of his cock finding home in the basin of your spread thighs; his heavy breaths, his groans and growls that seem to rattle the bed. The noise breaks, an incomplete requiem of sin in his head, and he loses himself in the lulling notes, dragged under in the bestial beat of taking what his—

A sudden noise shatters through the room. Beneath him, you stir, gasping wetly. The sound mangled in your throat. 

There's confusion in your sleepy, hazy gaze when you peer up at him, lashes clumping together. You moan, whimpering, as you struggle to latch on to the threads of cognisance that he's content to fuck out of you. Your hand lifts, falls to his wrist still pressed against your lower belly. The grip is lax, loose. You’re not pushing him away, but clinging to him. Centring yourself. 

It makes his blood thicken. Has him burning red-hot. 

“Wha’s a’matter, pet?” He taunts, grinding his cock into you hard enough to make your dazed eyes water. Your hand tightens around him, holding steady. “Don't like it? Not fuckin’ you hard enough?”

“Simon—”

His name tapers off into a keen when he angles hips, and starts pistoning into you with a mean, merciless fury. The desperate noises that spill, unhindered, from your slack mouth is the perfect accompaniment to the lewd sound of him fucking your sopping cunt; the piece he was missing when this started. His requiem, complete. 

It's a serrated blade to his self-control, already frayed and threadbare as it is. The pressure makes it snap.

“C'mon, sweet thing. Thought you wanted this?” 

There's a place in hell just for him. It's sealed when you blink your tired, sleepy eyes up at him, mind a slurry of lingering somnolence and the heady alcohol on your breath, and offer a shuddering whimper. Always so soft for him, so agreeable when you’re drunk. 

“So’ry, Simon—”

You can barely string words together. Poor, pitiful you—vulnerable under him. Breakable. Malleable. Anyone else could have tricked you into this same position when he was away. Got you beneath them like this, compliant and unawares, and took what belongs to him. 

(The only thing in this destitute existence he claims for himself—)

Not anymore. Not ever again. 

It's almost callous when he grinds into you. Hateful. Brutish. Furious. And dazed as you are, you barely even flinch at the snarls that spill, unfettered, from the back of his throat. The low groans of him making promises with devils unknown; constructing shackles from brass, iron. 

Entrenching his future in motion, cupped protectively between the parentheses your thighs make around his hips. It's almost a vicious sort of poetry, one laid bare in the odious ruins of that broken thing he calls a heart. Etched into his rotten pericardium. Necrosed devotion. He'll see it through—however noxious, and putrid, you might find the miasmal stench of it spun tight in his web. 

It's for your own good.

And as if you agree, you answer him in perfect euphony, moaning sweetly as you tilt your hips up for more. 

Ghost groans low in his throat, bestial and spinning rapidly out of his control. He feels everything spinning, slipping; the trudge to the finish line narrows into a pinprink. He needs something to cling to, to hold on to with broken hands—

The only purchase he finds is in your demise. 

His hand lifts, shaking yours loose. He reaches up, fingers dig into your chin, forcing your pouty mouth open. You blink at him, sluggish, but he catches the thin gossamer of awareness spooling thin cobwebs over darkened crevasses, covering the canyons in your eyes with cognisance. It makes him leer. 

“Stick your tongue out, pretty girl,” he rasps, words sticking together, muffled under the mask. Crushed aggregate stone under the weight of his own desire. “Tha’s it. Open up nice and wide—”

He lets spit gather again, pooling on his tongue. It's degrading, you always say. Gross. But you swallow it down like a good girl, anyway. Always. You come at him with fangs and claws, but somehow, you always merge in a perfectly dizzying polyphony. 

Ghost spits on your tongue. Lets it land right in the middle of fleshy pink. A sick, twisted pleasure thrums in his veins at the sight. 

There's checking the boxes of an established kink, and this. Horrifically proprietary. Ownership that ignites a fire in his marrow, setting him alight from the inside out. Turns bone into blackened char, cinder. He can almost taste it on his tongue. 

It's made worse, turned frenzied, when you—sweet, perfect, you—bracket it protectively in the curve of your tongue. Completely dazed, head filled with a heady slurry of somnolence and alcohol, but still aware enough to know, even if only through muscle memory, what you're meant to do when he spits in your mouth. 

If anything, you're more obedient like this. Little doll. Coddling it lovingly, this little piece of him that he gives you. 

And it might be the madness speaking—these fraying thoughts take on a vitriolic edge, corrosive aqua regia pooling in his throat—but Christ. He's been stabbed in the guts, repeatedly, and it somehow packed less of a punch than this. 

He wants, wants—

Family never crossed his mind, was never even on the table or something to be considered, but with you it brims. Blooms in rot. Roots in tenebrous. 

He has this insatiable urge to devour you whole so you'll always be with him. The waves of his desire are monstrous. The waters below are rapacious. A gaping maw eager to eat you up—

Pity it’s not an option. 

But he’ll make do. Buy a ring tomorrow. Something pretty that matches your eyes. The curve of your smile. Sanctioned ownership. A collar in gemstones and gold, glimmering and shining bright enough that should any light fade from your gaze, it’ll illuminate in the gloom; twilight made in sorrow. The prettiest blues—

Said eyes water. Ghost’s hold on your face relaxes when you give a muffled keen, cheeks bubbling up against the pressure. Tongue still stuck out even as he takes his pleasure from your supine flesh. Suspended in motion, stasis. Such a good girl for him—

He swallows. Tastes poison, rot, on his tongue. “Swallow.” 

You're a little sluggish, a little slow, but you follow his command all the same. He knows, then, that it could only ever be you. 

No one gets under his skin like this. No one makes him itch, want, crave, as much as you do—

You make a face, twisted up in some amalgamation of pleasure and confusion. It nudges the ruins of his chest and feels almost like a heartbeat when it pulses in his flesh. 

“Simon, Simon—”

His name is all you can say, and he's not sure if you're begging for mercy, or muttering it out into the scant air between your heaving breaths like an obsecration, an orison, but he eats it all the same. Bites down on your pleas, your cries, your prayers, and chews them up between fangled teeth. Takes them down into the swirling pits of his belly where they're eaten alive by what grows in the decay.

(belly full of dirt:

he heaves, and heaves, but nothing comes out even though he can taste humus in his throat, feel worms using his organs like a playground—)

“Somethin’ you want, pet?” He taunts, and shifts his hips back just enough to drag a few inches of his cock out of your drenched cunt. A tease—cruel and mean. He’d get lobbed upside the head for this had you been in your right mind. A tap to his temple, shaking the cobwebs loose. He would have bent down, and sunk broken teeth into your jugular. Merging violence with love until bloody knuckles feel like a kiss. “All you ‘ave to do is ask. Use your words, pretty thing—”

You whine, low and drawn out. A lazy whimper in the back of your throat. “Pl’se—”

You can barely speak. Tongue too thick. Sleep too heavy in your veins. Alcohol, too. A lesson, perhaps, for his willful little pet come the morning when you struggle to measure just how deep into his gullet you’ve let yourself fall. 

He can’t help rubbing salt into the shallow cuts, if only because he likes the way you pout. 

“C’mon, sweetheart. You can do better’n that.”

And damn him—damn you—you do. Your hand curls over his wrist, pulling it close to your mouth where you place a kiss against his palm. Tender. Chaste. Midnight blooms in your eyes, casts shadows under pale moonlight. His breath stutters in his chest when you lean your head back, letting his hand fall to your bared neck. 

Your heavy, lidded eyes gaze back at him, cutting through the shade of night that sews the air like satin. Etched in the file silk is threads of trust in stark white. The kind that bleeds for him; hungers. One that aches, always tender like a bruise. The throb of it echoes between mouldering ribs. Booms between his ears. 

Ghost doesn’t fall into pieces. Doesn’t shatter. No. Something in the splintered remains shifts. Settles. He wraps his fingers around the thick of your throat, thumb notched tight against your pulse, and he feels complete. Whole. Remade from the ruins. 

Your breath hitches. The sound is a gunshot in his ears. He squeezes down, a gentle press. Just enough to make the air spill out of your lungs, to let your eyes water. Lachrymose, eager. It does something to him when you cry. He feels tipped upside down, torn inside out. Left all askew, asunder. He wants to drown in the pebbling river growing against your lashline. Wants to drink it down until it quenches his neverending thirst. Wants, wants—

He feels his name spill from your lips. Brassy and broken, trembling against his palm. A plea—

More.

And he gives it to you. 

Simon hitches your ankle on his shoulder. Adjusts the grip he has on your throat. He settles over your body, blanketing you under his bulk. Stygian beast devouring the maiden whole. The thought amuses him even as it knocks the air from his lungs. 

He anchors himself into the mattress with his knees, steadying himself, curls his other hand around the iron ring of the headboard. All the while, you look up at him—glossy eyes burning coals in the dark, in the gloom. Wanting, hungry. Mouth held open as if you’re waiting for his scraps—

And then he bucks into you, the leverage giving his thrust a savage edge. 

The whines are snuffed out under his palm. Your eyes widen, tears now spilling down your temple, soaking the pillow below your head. 

He groans, head rolling back. “Fuckin’ hell—ain’t you a pretty sight?”

Tucked under him, throat swallowed by his palm. Split on his cock, slick and wet. The tears streaming down your face makes him feel wicked, foul; but the spit running down your slackened jaw quells any doubt. The hand on his wrist holds him tight, tighter still, to your flesh. 

You want this. His spoiled rotten bird.

So, he gives it to you.

Simon’s almost ruthless when he snaps his hips into yours, cooing viciously into your ear about how you feel, how you look, how you sound—so pretty wrapped around him, under him; his little doll—

“S’where you belong, pet—” guttural words spill, flintlike and savage, from his mangled throat. Reinforced with the hateful way he blugeons his cock into you. Times it perfectly with the firm squeezes against your jugular, never letting you catch your breath. Your eyes roll back, legs trembling. Shaking. But you don’t move, don’t struggle. The hand on his wrist is a shackle, and it makes him smirk, scars pulling up in a gnarled mess of mirth; ugly and mean. “Right where you belong. Ain’t tha’ right?”

He leans down, babbles nonsense into your temple. Promises you the heads of gods, the ichor they bleed. Swears he’ll build a shrine for you in Durham.

But for as mocking as these words he murmurs into your ear are, they’re tremulous. Raw. A current roars beneath; a steady stream, a plea, all full of need: stay, stay staystay—

(please)

He buries his nose into your hairline to stem the ravening ache in his guts, breathes in the heady scent of you—of sex, and wine, and sweat. Drags it into his lungs in harsh, angry gasps to stain his skin with the smell of you. Of him. 

It goes right to his head in a heavy rush until he’s dizzy, almost sick, with the swell of it flooding in. An animal, he thinks, drunk on merging pheromones that make him mindless. Unfettered. 

It’s as if he’s driven on instinct alone; his frenzied pace ebbs, grows sloppy. The air around him feels thick. Syrupy. Stifling. The balmy breath in his chest is nearly as unbearable as it is addicting. Sickeningly sweet. Still—

His chest expands, taking as much of the potent miasma into his lungs as he can, filling them up, up, until he feels the edges threaten to brust. It’s only then, when ink moults across his vision, that he lifts his head just enough to shove his mouth against yours, a broken snarl ripping free from his throat as he forces the infectious air into your mouth, down to your lungs. Polluting you with the same sickness. The same rot. 

Little hiccups tumble past your lips as you swallow it down, taking everything he gives you, and he catches them on his tongue. Plays with them between his teeth, basking in the salty tang of you—brine, loam; peatsalt. Ashes, guncotton. Molasses. He’s not sure if he wants to drown you in him, or crawl into the warm, wet cavern of your mouth that pulses around his tongue like a heartbeat. 

Both, maybe. Everything. All of it. 

Always—

But he’s chasing pleasure on fumes. Trying to run with broken legs. There’s nothing refined about this. About the way he cudgels the head of his cock into the places that make your mouth twist away from his greedy lips in a silent scream. His weight is crushing you, he’s sure, but you cling to him harder, holding him tighter. Almost afraid to let go. And fuck—the notion alone is a kick to the chest, harsh and heavy. He nearly gags on the litany of broken moans spiling out of his mouth, landing on your tongue. 

Driven mad, maybe (or pussy-drunk, and high off of his own poison); but in that madness, he discovers this:

Nirvana exists between your thighs. 

Home, too. 

(well—

not yet.)

Pleasure fissions down his spine. The paroxysm taking him deeper into the battle-worn depths of his demise until the walls narrow, closing in. Crushing. No escape. But—

He won’t climb out of his hole he dug. Not until he makes a bed from your flesh; shelter out of your bones. He wants to ingrain himself as deep within you as he can, arsenic subsumed down to your marrow. Poisoned with the fill of him, too sick to let go. 

(Bone nausea. 

A death sentence.)

It metastasises inside of him, filling the barren spaces up until it leaks from his pores. 

He wants it: this dream so tantalisingly close. 

Simon lifts his hand from your throat, and reaches out, grasps at it with a shaking paw—

All it takes is a few crass, careless swipes of his calloused thumb across your clit, cock angled toward that spot that makes you rake your broken nails down his back, yowling in his ear for more, there, please, Simon, please—

You clench like a vice around him. A pretty bow tied up at the base of his cock. He bows over you, grunts spilling from his chest as he sinks his teeth into your nape, splitting skin btween his teeth. The warm, ozonous tang of your blood flooding his tongue is euphoric, eclipsing his mind in a haze of pleasure that crackles and burns at the base of his spine, spitting smoke up his body and into his skull. 

The harsh whine you let out—all prey, all animal; wounded, stuck under his muzzle—has some part of him, basal and inborn, rearing up. Roaring in his ears, ripping talons across the jagged remains of his head. 

(mine, mine, mine—)

He answers your scream with a growl, one caught in the smoke clogging his throat. It sounds inhuman when its wrenched out of his mouth—more animal than man: the devastating howl of a forest on fire—but the feel of it vibrating between his teeth is connatural. Innate. It belongs between his incisors; fits like a puzzle piece in his broken muzzle. Unleashed now. Finally free from this ill-fitting cage he housed it, this goddamn box—

Cobbled together from palm ash and brimstone, ichor and salt. Sewed up with copper sutures in the shape of a man for a perfect fit. 

Every cell in his body screams that he was made for this. To be over you, in you. Maw filled with your blood. Pussy stuffed full of his cock. 

He might not have clawed out of the dirt for you, but this mossy, gnarled lump in his chest beats now only for you. Apodictic. Ironclad. His teeth in your jugular, your life pulsing wetly on his tongue. 

It’s his apotheosis. His end. 

His hips stutter. White noise in his head. It drowns out the shrill screams, the hisses. Everything is just—static. Pleasure of a silent kind, humming, buzzing, and molten. Ghost buries himself inside of you as deep as he can, until his cock is fit snug against the plug of your womb, and lays his claim by branding it with the potency of his name. 

Tidally locked, you’re dragged down the summit with him, tumbling to your demise. Too dazed, too wound tight in his arms, his embrace, to see the jagged rock at the bottom of the hungry chasm thirsting for your blood, you just cling to him. Refusing to let go. 

(silly girl—

His pretty little perigee.)

His body aches in ways that cruelly remind him of his age. Joints stiff, stomach quivering. His knuckles sting when he unfurls it from the headboard, skin pink and raw from the tight hold he had around the metal. 

It’s made worse when he heaves a harsh breath, and pulls away from you with a long, drawn out groan. He settles back on his haunches, eyes searing into the space between your thighs. Messy with his spend. It dribbles down your slit, your ass, pools on the sheets below. 

Your chest shudders, legs splayed out how he left you. He thinks, viciously, of gazelles, and wonders if the blood he feels drying on his mouth looks anything like the muddied mane of a lion after eating its fill. 

“Fuckin’ hell—”

He should clean you up, hide his crime, but he burns the image of you into his head (another tattoo over scar tissue), and drops to a heap beside you. The moment his back hits the mattress and all thoughts of moving are erased in silk, in smoke and clover. 

Chest heaving, slick with sweat, he feels the thrum of his victory in his veins. The high of the chase abates, and he nearly purrs with contentment. Hangs his pride on a pedestal, and doesn’t think about the absence of any guilt. Doesn’t even entertain the thought, not when victory dries between your thighs. When you roll over with a huff, reaching out for him. 

It's as if you're trying to bury yourself inside of him, crawl into the safety of his ribs. 

Ghost grunts, feels his sensitive, spent cock give a feeble twitch on his sticky thigh. The idea of you, blissfully unaware, seeking comfort from the man who writ your body with his virile spend, irrevocably changing your life and entwining it so deeply and so messily with his own that to severe either of you from each other is nearly impossible, floods him with satisfaction so deep, euphorically heady, that his chest seems to shudder. Resounding with some amalgamation of a purr, a grow, so utterly primal, that he sounds more beast than man. 

His roots run deep within you, now, and every misaligned piece of his patchwork body seems to sag and shiver in an almost perfect parallelism. Congruence ascertained with the cupping of you between its mismatched maw. Shackled in a baleen prison. Nestled, safe and sound, between white teeth. 

Ghost pulls you close, holding tight, and hums. As you drool on his shoulder, dripping with his spend, he knows he'll keep you there forever, until you're nothing but bones. 

There's a cloud of confusion hanging over you the next morning, a twinge of uncertainty gnarling across the gaps in your memory. The pieces of a puzzle that belong to a different set. He watches you scramble through them, filling in blanks. Oscillating so deliciously between wariness and discontent. 

“‘morning,” he greets, as if his spend hasn’t dried on your thigh last night. Tucked up nice and tight against your fertile, unprotected womb. As if he couldn't taste brimstone in the back of his throat when you wince as you walk, achy and battle-worn from the weight of his desire crushing you all night. 

“Morning,” it's a sticky rasp in your throat. He wonders if you taste him on your tongue. “When did you get in?”

“Las’ night.”

You nod, but it's absent. Flickering through the timeline of events that aren’t drenched in black, shaded over like a heavy bruise. Your expression is fractured. Raw. Pensive. Something untouchable, unchartable, and yet he reads you as plainly as the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. 

You don’t remember. Don’t know what to make of this chasm, this fissure, that looms, icy and deep, before you. There’s no anger, though. You don’t demand recompense for what he stole, what he took. The lashings he deserves are tucked quietly between your teeth. Hidden under layers of normalcy to prevent yourself from seeing him as is: a beast. 

“Well, um. Some homecoming, huh?” You joke, but it's hollow. Flat. Fragile like fine glass. You're digging for more. Rooting around to connect these vague, absent dots that linger, lost in the vacancy of your memory. 

He almost purrs. 

He wants to chew you up. Spit you in the palm of his hand. Maybe tuck you in his breast pocket, nestled against the lump in his chest—the one those silly enough to dream might call a heart. Keep you there forever. Hidden in the barrel of his loaded gun. 

“Bit rowdy.” 

It’s horrifically vague, but you cling to the prevacation he proffers to you; a lifeline in the turbulent sea, letting it overwrite the absence, the itching in your skull that must be clanging on the walls, begging for you to run. 

“Sorry,” it's sheepish. He knows the ferality in which you sometimes come at him when he's buried deep inside you is something that makes you twinge with embarrassment. Little kitten clawing at the old dog trying to get it to play. Rolling over immediately when it growls. Docile, sickeningly sweet.

But even naive kittens know to watch out for the frothing, foaming maw. 

“Did you use a—?”

He dips his chin. “I might ‘ave.”

And you take it as gospel. As truth. Why would Simon have any reason to lie to you about this? 

Relief shudders over your shoulders. You relax, inching toward the seat across from him. Gazelle making a home for itself in the lion’s den. 

The spell of unease is broken, now, and you quickly fill the chasm with chatter about your day. Your plans. Asking him how he’s been. 

You shove at the warning signs until they’re hidden away, and ignore the bones of your brethren scattered around you. All because you trust him. 

He aches with the urge to crush it between his teeth. 

And he will one day soon, he’s sure, because it’s just as easy to enact his plan as it was to get you to open the door. 

It starts with him convincing you to drink with him after dinner. Jus’ a glass. Got this fancy bottle. Reckon we should ‘ave some. 

But—

Can’t drink forever—no matter what his dogshit dad thought. 

So, he pokes holes in the condoms you hide in the bedside table, a little wary now. A touch fretful about your contraceptives in a way that makes him preen. You have good instincts, but rarely do you listen to them. Your head must be filled with sirens, but it's futile, he supposes. He's already stuffed cotton into your ears. 

It only feeds into that gaping chasm that bellows up from the depths that this world is not good for you. That it will tear you into pieces, into shreds. You need him. Need the Ghost to protect you. 

Case in point:

You’re needy beneath him, panting and mewling into the sheets as he teases your clit with his thumb. So wet, it almost feels like hot oil on his skin. Syrupy thick. 

In your desperation, you cling to him, throat bared. Fragile fine china. Belly up. Vulnerable. 

You barely notice when he pulls off the condom, crumpling it up into a ball and shoving it in the pocket of his slacks.. Don’t even react when he shoves his bare, raw cock into you. 

You don't even notice. 

(or when he slurs in your ear about how badly he wants to knock you up—breed his pretty girl until she’s stuffed full of him, making life with what he offers. salvation in the form of creation. ain’ tha’ a thought? he huffs into your ear, humid mirth curling over your skin. a stain. and the way it unfetters you—tightening around him, gushing slick—he finds his answer, one reinforced in the rolling of your eyes as your common sense, independence, trickle out of your ears and down your slackened jaw—)

And when that fails, he just slips you a sleeping pill. There's always an easier way to the finish line, he finds. 

(stupid fuckin’ mutt—)

Nothing bleeds from the cracks he wrought, or slinks from the shadows cast by his machinations until weeks later. 

Life just goes back to what it once was—Simon coming and going, letting himself into your home with the door you leave unlocked. You go to work, and chatter aimlessly about this vision you have about a home in the countryside, near the ocean. Saving up—uselessly—for sheep and goats, and the sought-after Highland cows. Chickens and ducks first, you say, and barely notice when his gaze drops, drilling holes into your stomach. Watchful. Leering. 

He can almost scent the change on you. Nose pressed to your skin; bloodhound sniffing the ground. 

Ghost keeps time in the slow, susurrus drawl of your voice sifting through the cotton in his ears, waiting for those precious decibels to catch on, to tilt up at the end as your eyes skim the calendar he keeps scratching x’s across in red, almost delicate, innocent even though it's from his sanguinary hand. A countdown to something you haven’t yet caught on to. 

And it’s all so sweet. 

—the waiting game, the subtle changes, the desperate way you cling to normalcy—

Sweet, like the way you carve this life out for yourself, filled with stuffed animals full of idealism. So much so, that it's almost bitter. Acrid. He watches the light glow in your eyes as your plans take shape, moulding putty between your hands, and like a pit viper, he coils in on himself. Frenzied. Fearful—

But only just. 

The excitation has run its course. He’s drifting, languid, into his scheme. Content. The notion of you slipping from his fingers is a thought that rarely crosses his mind these days, especially when that house on the prairie grows from an occupant of one to two—

“And, you know… when you're not out saving the world—” your eye roll and air quotes make his lips twitch, tugging at the scar tissue, the acid burns, splashed across his mouth. An ugly fucking Pollock. “—maybe you can come visit.”

“Never fancied myself a rancher,” he drawls, just to watch you squirm. Brow furrowing into a deep ravine as you struggle to make your intentions known without actually giving them sound. Skirting around the issue of wanting him there, of planning a home with him. 

(Too much, maybe? Or too soon—? 

if only you knew—)

He finds it charming, really. 

Still—

“It's just a thought,” you mutter, downcast. He wants to choke on your misery. Your sadness. Drown himself in your anger. Float in your happiness. 

Fuckin' Christ—

All this playing daddy in his head has thrown him off his rocker. Made him soft. Sentimental. It's probably why he yields to you. Offers a lazy shrug and another smarmy twitch of his lips. 

“Sounds like a plan,” and the way you brighten is a dagger to his chest. 

And the thing is. It does. It sounds like a dream, a perfect vision. Just—

Maybe not in the way you'd want. 

He's been looking into places unmarred by human hands. Ghost towns, uncharted territories. His home here isn't perfect for it, not like the vast geography of Mexico. The uninhabited wilderness of Canada, places so remote that it's almost untethered to modern civilisation. Islands of forest, mountains, all on their own. 

Vast corners and crevasses where someone can disappear and never be found. 

But those won't work in tandem with his flighty lifestyle. While he plans on keeping you barefoot and pregnant (common sense in the back of his head screams that he's foul, vile, monstrous—), he will continue to work. Has to, really, to avoid suspicion. 

So—

Home it is. 

But he gets inspiration from the Highland cows you coo on about and purchases a plot of land in the Western Isles. Gives this whim of his—yours, really—a concrete foundation made of the abstract. The filament provided by his newly christened Sergeant—an overeager mutt that bleeds warning signs from his pores. 

(don’t get close, reactive dog. will bite—

the little mutt is a great pyrenees, ain’t he?)

But bless Johnny’s bleedin’ heart, he thought as the man prattled on about this cabin he owns. A place of solitude. Could fire a gun and no one would even peek out the curtains. Beautiful, the way all of Scotland is. The highlands, he breathes in that shade of catholic madness only the dutiful soldiers of god's right-handed wrath can be, is where he keeps his home. A place chiselled from stone, surrounded by wilderness that eats tourists alive. 

(he didn’t ask at the time why Johnny was so keen on finding these places scattered around Scotland, ones with little traffic and a nearly negligible amount of souls within the vicinity, but he finds its best not to get too close to mutts crossbred with wolves.)

But Simon is nothing if not devoted, and so. 

You’ll get your fantasy ranch in the middle of nowhere. Your highland cows, your billy goats, your chicken, sheep, and ducks. A baby in your arms, too. One that shows its hand the next morning, dashing all your carefully laid plans. These paths of independence of yours run parallel to his whims but never converge. There’s the potential in this for these fraying threads to split, and diverge. Separate. 

(But it’s all put to rest at the sound of you heaving in the adjoining washroom. His path eats yours until it’s overtaken. Consumed. 

The evasive, unfettered little bird trammelled, caught. Wing-clipped, and all his.) 

Any misgivings the part of his gyri not buried under the frothing mess of his polluted grey matter might have is vitiated by the unwavering certitude that, despite his own gains in this, it really is in your best interest. 

And maybe it's something that should have come earlier in your relationship—however threadbare that word is in conjunction with the unhinged desire blooming in the pit of his chest; madness masquerading as love or some obsessive, desperate facsimile of it. Maybe a proper man, a better one, might have dug down and fully laid out the reality of intertwining your life with the living dead. That the idea of danger, death, and revenge are all everpresent threats scratching at the walls of this sickeningly sweet fantasy you wrap around yourself. 

He’s a dangerous man. A creature of devastation—manmade, bent into, or congenital is yet to be unearthed—which, in itself, brings about a certain lifestyle. One with fewer people around, and always shrouded in secrecy. Friends, family—none of that matters when death curdles gnarled fingers around his jugular. 

You’ll get used to it. Eventually. The only other choice is to let you, his now flightless bird, go. Released back into the wild vulnerable and reeking of his stench. 

You’ll be devoured before daylight, ripped into pieces—only if they’re feeling generous, that is. 

Simon has his own twisted remora. Ones with claws and fangs and a hunger that runs deep. Insatiable. Any scraps that fall from his mouth are devoured before they can touch the sea floor. They’ll crush you in their maw and dangle your mangled body from the gaps between their teeth. 

You’re not made for the wild. Not anymore. You’re meant to be protected. You—this fragile, delicate thing. He’ll hold you close, keep you secure and safe in a mausoleum of your own making. 

This little glass jar domicile. 

A billet in the mountains. 

He’ll fill it with the finest things—silk linens, fine china; mahogany and teak, pink ivory; a bed of soft, downy feathers, sherpa, Egyptian cotton; (sticks and stones and grass and moss). Buy you whatever you need. Chickens and ducks. Sheep and goats. 

They’ll keep you company when he’s away. 

(and if that fails, he can always plan playdates for you with whatever dirty secret Johnny’s been keeping tucked away in the woods.)

He draws an x in the empty, white box of the calendar, the tip of his red marker gliding silkily across the glossy surface. Something unfurls in his guts. Blossoms in his bones. There’s an almost indescribable sense of satisfaction—primal and animalistic—that grows from the upturned dirt in his head. Life composted from rot. 

Ghost hums to himself when he turns, the sound nearly a purr—bestial as it is, suffocated under sulphur. It reverberates through his chest, trembling across the brackets of his ribs that expand with his deep, heavy inhale—breathing in the sight that greets him like a lover’s kiss

The kebab he ordered lays untouched on the table across from the television—some trashy reality show playing in the background while you tried to eat; a dating show, you’d said when he merely shrugged, having other things on his mind over what to watch while you ate. It all seems to be preserved in time. Frozen in on the exact moment when you’d sniffed the döner kebab he got for you—the same thing you order each time—and then promptly wrenched yourself back, gagging. The sandwich was flung back in the takeaway box before you slapped your hand over your mouth, rushing into the washroom. 

If his phone wasn’t in the other room, he might have taken a picture. A little memento to remember this moment. Framed it in iron and perched it on the desk they gave him back in Hereford, the one just down the hall from Price. 

(ah, speaking of—he’ll have to send that caustic bastard a fruit basket, or something, won’t he? maybe some pretty flowers for his lady.)

His reverie is shaken when the door to the washroom creaks open slowly, and you emerge through the gap with sweat on your brow, knots across your forehead, and a shaking hand resting over your churning stomach. 

Shame, he thinks. He really should have brought his phone—

You lean against the wall, taking in deep, shuddering breaths to steady yourself, confusion and worry knitting over you like a thundercloud. It tastes of ozone when he inhales. An approaching storm. In the blue gloom of the living room, illuminated only by the light flooding out from the washroom behind you and the static glow of the television, you look etiolated. A wilting flower. 

His budding rose. 

He coos. “You alright?”

You glance sideways at the kebab on the table, mouth pinching into a grimace as if to stem the nausea still rippling through you. You stare at it for a long moment, seemingly trying to make sense of the reality sitting in front of you on scratched, old pine; confusion runs laps over the dawn cresting in your eyes. This puzzle is too unfathomable for you to piece together; the keys and slots all askew. 

The air around him grows still. Silent. Anticipatory. A tiger crouched low in the tussock. A little fawn roaming too close. 

There’s a heaviness in your eyes when they flicker back to the wall where he stands, drilling holes into the x. Something implacable frissons over your threadbare expression, fracturing across sallow cheeks. 

The air is electric. It pulses across his bare flesh, irritating scar tissue, acid burns, and scorch marks. His skin prickles at its whisper. 

“Feelin’ sick, pet?” He ponders, playing pretend. He’s viciously, deeply amused at the desperate denial splashing across your cheeks. The thin shade of askance that unfurls like the leaves of a flytrap when you look at him. “Mus’t’a been the kebab. Bad meat, I reckon?”

You offer a weak nod in response, pinching your lips tight together. The matter seemingly concluded, brushed aside. Pocketed for later. 

And you say nothing else for the rest of the night—gaze unseeing, turned inward; pensive—but he purrs in contentment as if everything was alright, sprawled across the couch with his head pillowed against your churning stomach as if he could hear the whisper of another heartbeat from within. 

In the saturated blue light, he catches your eyes listing toward the calendar every so often. Wary. Nervous. He thinks you might say something, might ask, but you don’t. It’s caught on a stilted breath. A harsh swallow. 

All you do is bring your hand to his shorn head, and raze the stumps of your clipped claws against his scalp. It’s almost as if you’re trying to soothe the madness from within. Scratching that itch deep inside until it goes away. Gentle hands play pretend and dress up as a panacea. Affection to scrape the illness away. 

He thinks you should know better than that, even as he leans into it with a soft exhale, more relaxed than he'd ever been his entire life. Content. Unassailable in his conquest. 

Simon has always been more scar tissue than man, and no place is damaged more than the upturned tumulus inside his head. 

But oh. How you try—

His sweet, sweet girl. 

The look you give him the next evening is, in parts, brumous. 

A polynya of dread, worry, guilt, fear that frissons across the deep valleys in your eyes, shaded in plumes of darkness, filled in deliciously with the weight of your beleaguered uncertainty. It yawns out before him, this heavy gloom. 

So close he catch the embers in his hand. 

“Simon… We should—talk. I, uh—”

You hold up a little rectangle, dismay, misery, etched in the blue tinge spreading across your face. It seems to steal the words from your throat, turn them into ash. What else are you meant to say, he supposes, when you look out at the world now from the gape in his maw? 

But there’s a veil of wonderment that hides below the tidal wave; this precious, deadly, undercurrent that rents the air, splits his chest in two.

The happiness, however meagre, thin, it is right now (just a sunken boat on the seafloor), is there. Ripe for salvage, and he sees that it’s handled with care. Cupped between his palms, nurtured by his own conviction to do what’s right, an’—fuck, pet—know this ain’t what we planned, but—

but:

The howling quiets, turns to a low growl, and then a susurrus hum, when you shakily utter the words he was waiting for. 

“Yes, Simon—”

You shudder when his fist closes over your wrist, pulling you into his purring chest. Shaking like a prey animal in the jowls of a beast, bested and ensnared. It has a profound, almost predatory, sense of satisfaction curling over his bones. He knows this was the right choice, and is sure, in time, you'll come to realise that, too. You’re in the early stages, he knows. Prodromal. You need to be handled with care to curb the lacrimation, the hyperesthesia. 

And there’s no one better than him to guide you through the throes of it. To lead you to the unequivocal end. 

He leans down, and whispers in your crown—

“Good girl—”

—and the sound of his voice is gravel encased in sticky, sweet honey. Dark, smokey molasses. The very same cadence as a key sliding inside of a lock; metal grazing metal. Turning—

“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Tommy.”

Click. 

(he gives you that ring he promised when he takes you to the mountains. you smile wide, and tell him it fits like a gyve.)

Simon stops shovelling his want under the cold dirt and starts burying it inside you instead. Makes a domicile from your flesh; a place where he can rest his aching head every night until the howling scraping down fractured bone stops— (paralytic)

[adelheidvonschicksal]

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPR3sKhum/

Just found out Zayne has a sensitive back….ideas are going wild…maybe a little Drabble of reader messing with Zayne back (kissing it, dragging their finger down his back…, etc)

Synopsis: You discover Zayne’s biggest weakness and have some demands. Or, the one where Zayne doesn't like having his back touched...unless it's you.

⋆｡°✩ Fluff, kissing, gender neutral reader

Zayne shudders when the slip of a fingernail traces the center of his spine from top to bottom, all the way to his lower back. Nearly dropping the paperwork in his hands, he reflexively holds a palm to his lower back to angrily stroke at the tingling sensation left behind.

“So, the rumors are true,” someone whispers. “You don’t like having your back touched.”

Zayne turns his head from the paperwork in his hand to find you standing behind him, with nothing but smiles and giggles. He didn’t even hear you come into his office this time; his back turned to the door as he stood in front of his desk. You use the position to your advantage to box him in as you playfully poke and tickle at the small of his back again.

Zayne tenses before swatting your hand away. “Yes. Now, that's enough.”

“Someone’s ticklish,” you sing out. Zayne is prepared for you to try to attack him again; but this time when you make contact, it’s with your hands spread over the width of his lower back.

Slowly, you climb your hands up his back to rest on his shoulder. It’s a gentle enough gesture that he doesn’t stop you immediately, choosing to let your actions play out for now. “This just in: it seems I have discovered Dr. Zayne’s greatest weakness.

“I suspect I won’t get a moment’s peace now that you acquired that knowledge.”

“You are correct, sir,” you tease. Then, there’s the softest sensation of your lips between his shoulder blades, kissing softly, as you tiptoe a set of fingers back down. You poke at his back as if holding him hostage. “Now that I have you at my mercy. I think I’ll make the orders around here, doctor.”

“What are your demands?”

“First! You’re going to leave work at a reasonable time, now would be good, and let me take you out to dinner,” you request firmly.

Zayne holds in a small smile, choosing to only shake his head at your antics as you continue.

“After dinner, I’ll have you get candied chestnuts with me.”

Your hands smooth out at his lower back again. Gently, you rotate your thumbs into the divot and layer kiss after kiss at the nape of his neck. This time the shudder he holds in is from the peace wrapping around him, forming a pleasant warmth in the center of his chest when your cheek finally presses against his back.

“Last but not least, my most dastardly of demands, you’re going to go home and get a full eight hours of sleep for once,” you mumble into his clothes.

“Is that all?” he replies, quickly finishing restacking his papers.

“Let me see..." You hum, gently circling a random spot with your fingertip. You never get to make another demand though as he quickly turns and grabs your hand.

Zayne presses you against the side of the desk, reversing your positions and causing you to lightly squeak as he corners you.

“I think there's one more thing between dinner and sleep,” he informs you, but you’re already too lost looking at the longing in his gaze to pay attention. You don’t regain focus until his hands move to lay flat on the desk and trap you between his arms. “You forget. I know a weakness of yours as well.”

Slowly, Zayne leans in closer. His breath is on your neck, teasing the fact that he’s so close to kissing you. It makes you shy and exhilarated at once: the idea that he might actually dare to kiss you in his office…

The idea you could get caught.

Just when you think he might actually do it, he pulls away, leaving you with eyes half-lidded and neck slightly tilted in preparation to receive him. Dumbfounded, you scrunch your face at him as he smirks at you. It may have been a little mean, but he can’t help it when you look this cute worked up. 

“You don’t play fair,” you whine.

“Life is repeatedly unfair I’m afraid,” he responds, lets you up from the desk, and goes to pull his jacket from the chair. “Now, I’d like it if you take me out to this amazing dinner you promised.”

Zayne doesn’t miss the way you pout at him before following him to the door. He holds it open and allows you to pass, but gives in to the sudden beat in his chest that tells him to reach out and hold your arm. You look at him with widened eyes, and it only takes one quick moment to connect the two of you with a kiss.

When he stops, your face is dazed and dizzy, as if you’re unsure why he did it.

“You don’t have to threaten me to get what you want,” he reminds you, wondering if you haven’t figured out just how easily he would offer everything he has to you, if only for you to keep being the person you are. “You're more than enough.”

[icarusredwings]

Be warned. I wrote this at midnight. I have no clue what im talking about. Do you get it?

"Why doesn't this wolverine teach history? Other wolverine did"

Well, because THAT Wolverine had a Charles. Let me remind you just how fragile Logan's mental state is and just how quickly his brain can throw him into a temporary amnesia due to shock and / or panic that is triggered by his CPTSD.

The thing is, this Wolverine has a Wade. Not a Charles. Sure, Jean could probably do something to him if things got too crazy but you know just how dangerous of territory that would be. Yes, Charles doesn't have a healing factor but it was his confidence and perfect reassuring words that helped him, plus If something did happen Im pretty sure he wouldn't blame him much anyway. He knows what hes dealing with. This isnt to say that jean doesn't but I can see her panicking too much and Logan would feed off of that fear and panic and become worse.

Wade, on the other hand, is neither calm nor says the right things, BUT he can't die :D Which is a massive YES when it comes to dealing with a panicking 3+ time war veteran with knife hands. And is known to attack first ask later.

Trying to teach the kids about 'Nam, a thing sets him off. He stares off into space for a bit, Backs up and his breath gets heavy. The hairs on his arms are raised up and his pupils dilate, they widden and its as if he doesn't even remember he's a teacher.

When he starts the whole "Who are you? Where am I!?" Thing, a student (probably the oldest or one that's been dubbed most responsible) slowly just gets up and leaves to tell a trusted adult.

"Mrs. Munroe?"

"Yes?"

"Mr. Howlett is acting funny again."

"Okay darling. Go fetch Mr. Wilson for me? There's a dear."

She, calm as ever walks into the class room, standing away from the door so not to make him feel trapped, and very clearly shows her hands as she gestures the kids to leave.

Backing himself into a corner, he watches them one by one leave, Gripping at the chalk boards ledge and the windowsil, trying to balance and ground himself.

"Come now children. Quietly and slowly please. Good job. Go next door to Mrs. Summers please." Sending them to the next class room so to leave this one empty.

She stands off to the side of the room. Hands in front of her, smiling softly. "Hello Logan."

"What? Who are you?" He almost hisses but can't help but to feel not so threatened. He always did have a sweet spot for women. Maybe its their scent difference, but like most reactive animals, he's a little calmer for women. A little more trusting.

"Im a dear friend of yours. My name is Ororo. You are in no danger here." She states this practiced sentence with the same whisper of a voice.

"Where the fuck am I. How did I get here!? Did you bring me here!?" At this point he's growling.

"Logan, I assure you that no one forced you here. This is a school. You're a teacher."

"A teacher..?" Just a tad he softens, as if you had just told someone who wanted to be a vet when they grew up that they actually would become a very good vet, except the look in his eyes was as if questioning why they would ever him do that. Be a teacher I mean.

"Yes. If you would like to leave that is okay." She slowly sits in a spare chair, her leg crossing, not knowing how long she will need to play baby sitter but she hoped someone soon would alert the other staff of this. It IS a safety risk after all and Ororo knew that if he hurt anyone at all he'd immediately regret it terribly so when he woke.

"You.. you told her to go get someone. Why? Who are you getting? For what!?" Another snap, as if he thought she was trying to trick him into letting his gaurd down.

She smiles. "Your husband."

"What the fuck do you mean my 'husband'!? What are you sayin' lady!?" The venom in the way he says this makes her giggle a bit. Oh, goodness. He really did lose all of his memories, didn't he? How was the same man who once was so dastardly in love with scott to the point of shredding his heart into a gazillion pieces and is married to the silliest man alive, so internally homophobic? The irony of the thought made her laugh.

"And that kids is how you slice someone into sushi. Rice not included-" His weapons tatics and saftey class is interrupted.

"Mr. Wilson?"

"Oh hey, squirt! You wanna learn how to disconnect someone's joints without even leaving a puncture wound?"

"Maybe later.. uhm...Mr. Howlett's scared again..."

You just see Wade running out on these kids like "I'M COMING WOLVIE!"

"What, you think it's funny!? I ain't got a husband lady! Now, Im leaving! And there's nothing you can do to stop me!" He goes to walk out the door only to run into said husband, who immediately hugs him.

"Babe!! Hi! They told me- OUCH- okay yeah I deserved that- no tocuhy I forgot."

And is stabbed.

"What the fuck is wrong with you!? Get off me! Freak!"

"D'aawww!! Did you see that? He called me a freak! I hate to tell ya cupcake, but you're married to this freak. Now, what's wrOOW- Mad kitty are we? Woah there tiger! Easy boy!"

Logan looks at him, confused, stabs him again, and is trying to figure out why Wade's not dying. He goes to slash him in the head and wades like "WAITWAITWAIT NOT INFRONT OF THE KIDS-"

Mrs. Munroe, by now, has gotten up and left, closing the door and letting out a big sigh, wondering what shade of red they were going to paint the room this time.

She does a little clicky on her walkie and infroms all the staff about the situation and so for the next half hour or so, Logan's kids get to skip class and said classroom now needs a deep scrub.

And this ladies and gentlemen is why this Logan doesn't teach history anymore.

P.E. is SOOOO much easier on his mental status, and sometimes Wade joins, and he puts the whole class against him to make them work on their team building skills. Plus- it's funny to watch your husband get slapped in the head with 20 dodgeballs.

[luveline]

If you’re doing requests could you do KBD during Halloween?

uncle Eddie makes sure Steve has the perfect costume. mom!reader

Steve smiles at himself in the mirror. Wren, in his arms, smiles back. 

“We look handsome,” he says, lifting her so her face is level with his own. “I look handsome. You look beautiful.” 

“Hi,” she says. 

Steve turns down to her. “Hi, baby.” 

Avery climbs onto a chair and waves at the mirror. Her fairy princess dress is shiny blue. “Hello.” 

Beth climbs onto the chair after her, wrapping her arms around Avery’s shoulders. “Hi!” she says, force of her greeting sending her pirates hat careening to the floor. 

“Are you ready?” you call from upstairs. “Everyone still has their shoes on?” 

“Dove doesn’t,” Avery says. 

“Tattle!” Dove cries, a picture of fury in her kitty cat onesie, her glued-on whiskers twitching fiercely.

“Well, you don’t.” 

“My toes are warm,” Dove whines, thrusting herself at Steve’s legs. “Daddy, she’s telling on me.” 

“I know, and now you’re telling on her. You’re my little band of tattle-tales, I don’t love it.” Steve smooths along Wren’s face with his finger and takes in a breath big enough to fill his lungs. “Can you let Beth put your shoes back on?” 

“No.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

You fit Dove into her shoes and get the kids to the car. Four car seats is tough work but nothing you can’t handle, and you’re still in chipper spirits when you arrive at the Munson house. It’s decked out in cobwebs and great big spiders made of tinsel and bendy framing, carved pumpkins leading up the steps with fleshy teeth and candles unburned in their maws. Wren gives a comical gasp when she sees it all, a tad scared but quickly soothed when you pretend to be scared too. 

Beth races up the steps first to knock. 

The door opens a slither. 

“Who goes there?” a dark voice asks. 

“Uncle Eddie, it’s me!” Beth says quickly. Her excitement again sends her hat to the stone patio beneath her cons, but she doesn’t notice it, vying to squeeze through the door and see her favourite uncle. 

“I don’t know any Me’s. You’ll have to come back another day, I’m waiting for my very favourite troupe of little girls.” 

“It’s BETH!” Beth shrieks, “Come on!”

“Bethany?” Eddie pushes the door open, unsurprised when Beth throws herself full force into his legs. “Why, you look dastardly. How very scary of you! You have a parrot!” 

The fake parrot glued to Beth’s shoulder waggles. 

“His name is Sherbet.” 

“Wow.” Eddie gives her a hug, his eyes blowing wide over her shoulder. “Oh, wow! Ave, you’re a princess with wings! And Dove, meow.” He grins at Steve. “And your dad is what, Frankenstein’s monster? A zombie?”

“Dad doesn’t have a costume,” Beth says happily. 

“Are you sure?” 

Steve encourages Dove over the threshold, four wrapped plates of sandwiches and finger foods balanced in the other hand. “That’s not funny. What are you supposed to be, anyways?” 

“I’m a vampire, duh.” Eddie slips a pair of fake fangs into his teeth. “I vant to suck your blood!” 

“Ew, Uncle Eddie,” you say. 

“Don’t think you’ve escaped me, second favourite Harrington,” Eddie says, frowning as you slip around him. “You owe me a hug.” 

“Creep,” Steve says. 

“With pride.” Eddie takes the plates from his arms and somehow, the Harrington troupe makes it safely indoors, no further costume parts fallen nor lost. 

There are more people here than Steve expected, Eddie’s friends, their kids, even Eddie’s elusive boyfriend sits out in the open. 

“What are you supposed to be?” Dove asks him with a grin. 

He turns his head to show a painted bite mark on his neck. “Victim.” 

“He’s a dead guy,” Eddie tells her, helping her where she’s struggling to sit in one of the barstools. “Alright, babe, dad said last year we partied too hard, so here are the ground rules. No pixie sticks, no soda, and no climbing on the kitchen counters. If you follow these rules, I am being allowed to give you a Hershey bar the size of your dad’s massive head. Deal?” 

“How big?” Dove questions suspiciously. 

Eddie goes to the cabinet. Inside, there’s more candy bars than one person should ever have purchased in one go. He pulls out a huge one and holds it nexts to Steve’s head, laughing when Steve bats it away. “Huge.” 

“Dad, dad, can I go play with Milly and Joe?” Avery asks. 

Steve was hoping she would. “Sure, baby. Good manners, okay?” 

Avery whizzes off to find Gareth’s kids. Beth stays by Steve’s side and he forces himself to believe that it’s him she wants to be with, not Eddie. “You don’t wanna go play?” Steve asks her. 

“Not yet.” 

You appear again where you’d been missing with Robin in tow. Steve grins at the sight of her, though he’d spoken to her on the phone last night, and seen her the day before at home. “Buckley!” 

She’s wearing a black dress with a belt and her hair is teased into a short cloud. “You aren’t wearing your costume?” 

Steve moves Beth around unthinkingly. “Yeah, it still smelled like vomit. Wren had too much yoghurt. Rob, you really look like Madonna. Your makeup is–”

“It’s trippy, right?” Eddie asks. 

“Mora did it. It’s like, face sculpting.” 

“It’s weird.” 

“I like it,” you say, Wren on your hip giving an agreeable gurgle. “I like your real face more, but this is cool.”

“And where’s your costume?” Eddie asks. 

You frown down at your nice dress. “You can’t tell?” 

Eddie falls for the trip in your voice and attempts to backtrack, only realising that you’re kidding when Steve laughs. 

“The baby got sick on both of us,” you say, turning Wren so everyone in the kitchen can see her face. “But that’s okay. She’s so cute, she’s forgiven. Aren’t you, gorgeous? You didn’t mean to eat all that yoghurt, daddy just kept feeding you.” 

Steve holds his hands up in surrender. “I feed her every day, I know how much yoghurt she can handle.” 

“Clearly not,” you croon, shooting him a loving smile. “You did save us from those awful costumes, though.” 

“Oh, worry not,” Eddie says, “I figured something like this would happen, and I’ve prepared.” 

Awesome, Steve thinks, groaning as Eddie takes his wrist into his hand and begins to pull on him. Knowing Eddie, Steve’s end up dressed as a demon with giant horns, or a fairy. 

The reality is much, much worse. 

“Hey, look at that! It still fits!” Robin laughs. 

Steve looks down at his little sailor’s uniform and sighs. “Barely,” he says. 

“Say the slogan!” you demand. 

If it were anyone else, Steve would refuse, but you’re sitting at the breakfast bar with Wren tucked under your chin, so he takes a deep breath and straightens his white hat. “Ahoy ladies,” he sighs. “Would you like to… uh, set sail on this ocean of flavour with me? I’ll be your captain, I’m…” —his voice drags reluctantly— “I’m Steve Harrington.”

[munsster]

rockstar standards

A/N: PLS PLS PLS DROP SUGGESTIONS FOR HOCKEY STEVE/EDDIE im having a total brainfart but i need to break into the hockey au game bc i love it 😻 (gif creds: @cuntyarmand)

Pairings: Eddie Munson x Fem!Reader, 90s AU

Summary: Corroded Coffin starts to gain some traction, and you can't help feeling stranded. 1.5k words

Warnings: minor angst/hurt comfort, fluff, pining, pet names (bug, sweetheart, sweets, baby), jealousy, undressed cuddling,

You watch him parade around the stage every Friday night. Sometimes he's playing the home stage, other times he books random amphitheaters and dive bars. But today, he's drenched in purple light on the outskirts of Chicago. It's by far the biggest venue Corroded Coffin has played. You sit by the pop up bar, but bodies are packed like sardines in this place. It's hot and loud, but it's worth it to see him so elated.

Even through his streaky eyeliner, you can tell he's adoring the attention of the pit. You can see their red fingernails and shiny tank tops and free flowing hair. You never thought Eddie would be the kinda thing you were attracted to. You also know he's not the kinda guy to be attracted to something like you. You know guys like Eddie usually go for the Pam Andersons and Courtney Loves. The Party girls. Not the ones who have nothing better to do on a Saturday night than watch a romcom alone.

That Sunday, Eddie pulls onto your street. It's late and he has a ringing headache. He couldn't think of anything better to do after touching down in Hawkins again. You'd headed home the night before, and it made his gut wrench knowing he wouldn't get to see you the rest of the weekend.

Your door creaks open, and he's smiling on the other side. He's already leaning against your doorway with the bouquet he bought earlier from the woman selling them on the corner.

"Missed you, bug," he huffs, "Can I come in?"

You step aside without another word, and he hangs his leather jacket on the coat rack like always. Something feels off when he sits on the couch to find you're on the complete opposite side from him. Usually, you're not shy about cuddling up beside him to watch a movie or share snacks or just talk.

He frowns and scoots closer, leaning in to grab at your ankle playfully. You kick his hand away, brow set hard above your lethal glare.

"Sweetheart," he huffs, tilting his head in confusion, "What's going on? Where's my cuddlebug?"

"I dunno, somewhere in Hollywood?"

His eyes nearly pop out of his head at that. You're his favorite girl and you know that. So why're you grilling him now.

"Tell me what's goin' on. What did I miss?"

And you look serious, too. This isn't some running joke he missed out on while he was away. He's not sure who bruised your confidence, but he's sure he'd like to have a few words with them. He hates the way your lip wobbles and your eyes avoid him cause it gives you away. That's how he knows you're heartbroken.

"Eddie," you whine, swiping a hasty tear from your cheek. "I just don't know why you keep me around when you could have any of those girls at your bon vivant gigs."

"Fuck is that supposed to mean, bug?" He barks it out on accident, sitting back on his haunches with a scowl. "I'm sorry, but there's no way I'm gettin’ rid of you."

"Eddie, please... you're gonna make it big and get shipped off to Tinseltown, and I'll still be here, teddy. Probably being someone's lonely, suburban housewife. It's what I'm made for, and that's not what you want."

"You're wrong."

"And maybe you should go," you whisper, choking back a sob and standing from the couch.

"No, sweets, you're wrong," he says, standing and striding over to you, "You've got me wrong, and you've got you wrong."

You cross your arms over your chest and finally look him in the eye.

"'S that so?"

"Yeah," he tuts. And he has the most charming, most dastardly smile you've ever seen, flashing his canines like a gentle killer. "'Cause I'm gonna take you with me."

"Teddy."

"Nope, I'm takin' you with me wherever I go, and there's nothin' you can say to change my mind. Even if you hate my music forever, fine, I'll fix you up in a nice five star anywhere we go. You can sit and watch all the movies you like. You'll be nobody's housewife, baby, 'cause I'm keepin' you."

You roll your eyes, batting away tears when he grabs your hand to pull you back to the couch.

"And what if I said that's not what I want?" you suggest, testing his rockstar resolve with your big, wet eyes and stubborn quips.

"Then I'll give you somethin' else. Anything else. But you're mine no matter what." If only you knew how proud it made him to call you his girl. To know you support him even if you don't love his genre.  "Now, would you come closer? You're killin' me."

You obey with a frigid pout, letting him drape your thighs over his and brush his ring clad paws over your cheeks, down your neck.

"But what about your groupies and the pretty girls at the bars or in the front row?"

"What about 'em?" he says, just barely shaking his head, "I'll have somethin' way better waiting for me."

You chuckle. "You're crazy."

He cocks a brow. "Old news."

When he notices how close you've gotten, he smiles. Your manicured nails graze over his chest with the only light washing over you from the dimly lit kitchen. He can't resist his palm curling behind your neck, pulling you close for a sweet kiss.

"Where d'you keep your vases?" he mumbles, remembering the tulips resting on the little table.

"Kitchen. Above the fridge," you say with your fingers already slotting between his to pull him towards the warm light. He loves you like this: sickly sweet and tender, holding him all gentle in your hot pulse. You go to reach for a painted ceramic vase, but he wraps his arm around you and turns you away.

"Ah ah ah, drop it, sweetheart. That’s my job," he says against your temple, holding the lip of the vase and patting your ass. He takes the bouquet from your grasp and sets both on the counter by the sink. You hand him a pair of scissors and he carefully snips the stems jagged, filling the vase with water.

His stomach flips when you wrap your arms around his waist and clasp your hands at his belt. He sets the prepared arrangement aside and turns in your embrace.

"All done," he says wickedly, palming your face with his wet hands. You jump back with a squeal, pelting a dish rag at this chest.

"Use a towel, you slob!"

He chuckles and wipes his hands on his shirt, tossing the towel over his shoulder and leering at you like he's starved.

"Come here," he mumbles. You go a little shy under his gaze, dropping your head and shuffling towards his presence. He catches you by the hips, dipping down to catch your mouth in a prying kiss. You grin against him and he groans, tugging you tight against his body.

"Always love how soft you are, baby. Surprises me every time." He shakes his wild mane and purses his lips for you to kiss this time.

"Where d'you want the flowers?" he says.

"Bedroom?"

His eyes light up involuntarily, and he grabs the vase, bounding off towards your room gleefully. You jog to catch up with him, and when you enter the threshold, he's expertly positioning the vase next to a stack of books on your dresser.

"Much cleaner than mine," he says, gesturing around the room, "You keep it nice in here."

You shrug. "Could be cleaner."

"You can never see mine," he teases, knowing full well you already have. He slings his arms low on your hips, adoring you in the blue light of dusk. "Can I undress you?"

You bow your head and whisper, "teddy..."

"Not like that. Just wanna hold you."

You kiss his slanted mouth sweetly, nodding.

He reaches for the edge of your soft cotton dress, pulling it up and over your head. He whistles low upon seeing your undergarments, whipping his shirt off and onto the floor somwhere. You giggle, helping him with his belt buckle. He traces your temple with his lips leaving kisses along the way. He steps out of his jeans and lets you lead him around the bed.

His curls sprawl out against your pillows, and he welcomes you into his side with a lazy smile. Your reach to touch his waist and softly feel over the scar below his ribs.

"Little tender, bug," he hisses. You bat your eyes up at him scared, pulling your hand away.

"I'm sorry."

He shakes his head. "No, please," he whispers, cradling your wrist, his eyes locked with yours. He draws the hair away from your neck, replacing it with his fingers to dance down along your spine. You’re warmer than he’s ever felt before and thankful for it. His hands are cold, but he doesn’t have to worry about it for very long when you bring each fingertip to your lips for a kiss.

“You’re my girl, alright? Always,” he whispers and you nod, “always.”

masterlist

[running-with-kn1ves]

An Elven Winter

CW: None! Arranged marriage, very cozy very comfy, winter nights, grossly affectionate moments

Synopsis: You’re late for dinner with your brawny elf husband, again. Is he going to scold you this time, and live up to his name as a heartless elf?

A/N: Your favorite boy Cirdan is back! Here's the OG piece I wrote with him if anybody wants some more comfort and cuteness.

Snowflakes whipped from the left across your face, illuminated by dampened yellow street lanterns with an icy blue tinge to their miniscule edges. The cold stuck to your eyelashes, to the tip of your nose, to the bottoms of your trudging boots. 

When was the last time it snowed this hard? Not in years, certainly. Not since you began to share your home with another warm body, waiting to welcome you home away from the chills seeping into the openings of your sleeves. You could see your home only two doors down now, the front bathed by hanging porch lights, a trellis covered with dead vines propped against the dark, unlit corner of the cabin. Everyday he’d water that thing, and everyday it’d continue to shrivel under the coldening wind.

Your face creases with concern for what your spouse's reaction may be once you make it home. He might fawn over every trickle of water that was once snow on your shoulders, fraught by the coldness of your fingertips in his palms. It wasn’t his worry that was exhausting, it was the fear of making him feel anything other than glowing warmth, of adoration for you.

Your feet slid over one another racing to the front doors in a jog. Another wave of guilt washed over you for the tenth time tonight for being, what was it now-- an hour late to dinner? How your lovely, saint of a husband worked endlessly to make your homestead full of comfort and homeliness-- and yet you couldn’t make it in time for a meal he had spent endlessly curating. You would beat yourself over the head if you had a moment to spare.

But there was nothing you could do to turn back the time, to slide any quicker on the glassy, frozen ground. Tripping to race up to the door, you fumbled over stone steps in impatience.

The delicately carved door handle was just as cold as the tip of your nose was, hardly putting up a fight as you pulled it toward you. The door opened with a breeze of thick comfort blowing against exposed skin unveiled on your body. Warmth and the smell of a working oven flooded to the points of your cheeks, the door’s creaky nature betraying you as it let the other resident of the house know of your return home. 

This would be the part where you shout “Honey, I’m home!”

But you’re given no time, no time at all. A crackling fire fills your ears, the sudden appearance of a dastardly large silhouette clouding your vision of the kitchen table, plates upon plates decorating a tablecloth you knew so well.

“It’s nine.” His voice relented, the emotion detected and yet hard to describe as you look up to read his face. 

His cheeks are tinted a slight red, as if he had been outside in the cold, waiting for you. 

“It is; I’m sorry, Cirdan. I really thought I'd get here sooner, we were trying to wait out the snow. And, well.. That didn’t really do much.”

His eyes were full of thought, expression in their hardened lids and watery irises. Being late for things seemed to be your specialty. It broke your heart into desperate pieces when you saw the look on his face-- hardly concerned with the cold food, but locked on to you to see what had gone wrong, if you were hurt, what he could do to fix it all. 

“Don’t apologize. I’m just.. So glad you’re home.” He genuinely sounded relieved, a rough stutter you hadn’t heard in a long time, if not ever before. 

His body, so untraditional to what elves were expected to be, came forward to hold you just as gracefully as any normal, lean and tall version of the creature would. But he was all brawn-- a hard and heated rock that snug itself tight against you. A thick hand made its way into your hair to press the top of your head to his pointed nose. 

His taut inhale was shaky, white strands of hair much longer than your own crowding your view. 

“I was nearly about to go out there and find you myself. It’s no place for you to be, out there in the snow. Cold and alone.”

It sounded as if he had scared himself with anxiety-ridden thoughts about where you were in your tardiness. 

“I know.” You muffled against his chest, the wool of his sweater smelling like sweet potatoes and rosemary. 

If it were anyone else you’d be embarrassed to press your head deeper, to lean into the touch so clearly full of desire. But you knew no other way to make up for all that you had done. Your briefcase bag fell to the floor, crumpled and forgotten. 

The affection was so tender you nearly forgot about the sensation of frostbite clawing at your fingernails and the aching in your stomach. It resounded out in the room with an acidic gurgle, forcing your body to go rigid with a mix of exhaustion and embarrassment. 

You could feel the soundless laugh Cirdan let out through the shake in his body-- his warm, scarred arms your safe space. Even the apron two sizes too small on him smelled of sweets. It  hugged him enough for you to feel the ridges underneath his sweater. 

“Are you hungry?” He asked, gently releasing you from his stroking bear hug. 

“You have to ask?” You mumbled, still somewhat embarrassed by your show of weakness. You were supposed to be the strong one, carrying out the toughness of reality and endless meetings between the human and elven realm, while your unconventional elf husband finally had a chance in his brutality to rest, to be easy and let his heart and scars heal. But you were only human. 

“I kept it warm for you, wasn’t sure when you’d be back.”

 Your chest ached at those words.

You were tempted to let out another ‘you don’t have to do that’ or ‘you should’ve just left it in the fridge’, but it would only serve to dishearten him even more. 

“Thank you,” Was all you could half-heartedly murmur, looking up to stare at him. 

His hair fell sloppy along his face, snowy locks hiding his grey, blinded eye. He had started letting it show in privacy, when scrubbing the stove oven or reading in his colossal wine-red chair, black specs you called his ‘old man glasses’ falling off his nose. You pushed the heavy strands behind his pointed ear, letting your hand slide down the curve of his jaw. 

Cirdan merely smiled longingly, crinkling at his eyes and gazing at you as if you were all the stars in the sky held in front of him. He leaned just slightly into your touch, its coldness offering a stark contrast to his warm, honey skin. 

“Go, sit by the fire. I’ll bring your dinner.”

You were again ready to protest, but an intensely soft fleece blanket was draped over your head, covering from your forehead to your calves. It was originally made for your husband, twice any human’s size and still long enough to cover his shoulders. Cirdan had turned to the loveseat beside him to grab it, leaving you to buckle under the weight of swarms of fabric as he moved toward the kitchen. Blindly, you made your way to the orange glow in the middle of the room, bright flames caressing freshly chopped oak.

The corners of your home closest to the outside world had a chilled air of ice, but within the middle was where the heat resided, beckoning you to the fireplace onto a small elk hide rug. 

Cirdan’s footsteps upon the soft kitchen floor came toward you, steam rising from the plate held in his hands. He seemed so relaxed, shoulders drooped and yet posture enviously perfect, an effect of having an elven spine and ruthless upbringing. His loose sweater was soft on his carved shoulders, reminding you of your shared cozy bed-- of his body radiating glowy warmth against you, rustling sheets tangled as you push deeper against the crook of his neck.

But your stomach was too insatiable for anything other than food right now, even warmth. The herby, peppery scent brought drool to your mouth, looking at the elf with wide eyes in hungry desperation. 

“It’s hot, let it cool off for a second.” Cirdan blows on the mouth-watering food as he hands the plate to you with a potholder on its lip, protecting you from the heat. He is quick to grab a pillow and place it in your lap, gently letting the plate rest.  “I kind of went overboard; something in me felt like cooking tonight... We can give the leftovers to the neighbors.”

“No!” You shout territorily, covering your plate as if he were ready to steal it from you. “It's mine to eat, I mean.” 

You don’t leave room for the conversation to continue, shoveling a forkful of well-seasoned vegetables in your mouth. The moment a green bean touches your tongue you realize your mistake. 

“Haw, hawt!” 

Your open mouth does a dance as you try to fan the heat, so eager to eat that you forgot to heed his warning. 

“I told you!” Cirdan exclaims, a laugh escaping him as he reaches for a glass of water on the table behind him. “I guess my intuition knew you’d try something like that.”

You take the glass with unheeded swiftness, letting lukewarm water settle in your fiery mouth. 

A hesitant swallow leaves your tongue numb and your hunger yet to be filled.

You reach for another bite, this time for a heap of buttery mash potatoes, soft and fluffy like the piles of snow outside yet starkly contrasted in their steamy heat. 

You know better now, blowing on the fork before taking a hesitant, small bite. 

Cirdan merely gives you a watchful, entertained grin. He doesn’t have the pompous smirk of most elves you’ve met with, but instead a full, close-lipped smile that reaches to his sharp eyes, his uncharacteristically full cheeks rising, his face slim and etched like the rest of his kind yet with more ruggedness and expression in it, remnants of a jagged past etched into his skin. 

“I’th really good.” You cover your full mouth, singing his praises with potato and sweet, savory bread in between. 

“I’m glad you like it,” The comment he passes hardly utters any attention to what you say, instead busy watching you consume like a ravenous animal. Cirdan brushes back hair that falls close to your plate, stroking just gently a thumb over your cheek. 

You swallow a few more bites before you feel the ache in your stomach subside. The intense way the elf keeps looking at you is not unforeign, but you still have yet to be comfortable with it. 

“Thank you for the food,” You wipe your mouth with your sleeve, hoping you weren’t too many levels of disheveled. “but, I have another favor to ask.”

“Hm?”

You witness in his eyes the willingness, eagerness to see what you desire. 

“Let me brush your hair?” 

Cirdan’s lips part in an ‘o’, before returning to the usual gentle hardness of his face.

“That’s all? I thought you were ready for dessert.” 

The elf lets out a stifled laugh, deep and bouncing off the small cabin walls in pure delight.

You shoot a self-conscious gaze at him, lips half upturned in a hidden smile; you’re not sure whether to laugh or bashfully tell him nevermind.

“You know you don’t have to ask. I was waiting until you were done to clean myself up--” He turns to the side, opening a stool compartment stuffed with a myriad of little things from nail polish to old lighters. His gentle hands searched for a delicate hairbrush, elven in the intricacy of its design and dwarven in its robusticity. The curving vines against the brushes ivory skin along with its weighty hold made it a piece of craftsmanship worthy of generational pass-down. 

 He takes your plate fit for kings off of your lap, moving it to the floor closest to the fireplace. In this house, everytime you attempt to do something, it seems to be done at-hand immediately before you can think to move. 

Cirdan wordlessly hands you the brush, tender fire under his palm gliding over the icicles you called fingers.

You attempt to scoot behind him, blanket nearly falling from your shoulders to do so, but the elf catches you. 

“I’m not letting you freeze to death on my behalf first,” He grunts, grabbing your hands in a chokehold. “You're practically frozen my love.” 

The tendrils of his fingers wrapping over your own were akin to hot coils, oddly welcoming and conflicting to your body void of warm blood. 

“Your behalf? I’m the one who suggested the idea!” You shake your head in mild disbelief. “Besides, being near the fire is warming me up. I’ll be unfrozen soon.”

Your airy voice is sarcastic and not nearly as teeth-chattering as it once had been-- yet still, Cirdan huffed over your fingertips, letting out heavy breaths to warm the parts of you that were yet to be anything but icy. 

“You aren’t going to win this fight.” He looked up at you, a serious furrow of his brows, “I won’t lose you to such simplicities of frostbite, you’re too precious.”

Oof. Right in the heart. Everytime you see his resting brooding face like that your chest lurches in worry--- but then he’ll say something so sweet in sincerity that you want to collapse into a puddle.

You open and close your mouth like a gaping fish, unsure what to say to beat, or even match that. 

The elf deeply exhales once more against your trembling fingers, letting silence float between you with the sound of crackling flames flickering in between. 

With a final heavy breath against your knuckles, he straightens your fingers out, placing them over his heated cheeks. Even with the ridges of bone and scar on his face, he was squishy and pliant like a human. Your thumb brushed against the healed tissue leading from the bridge of his nose to his blinding eye, relishing in the slow blinks he gave. He looked… tired, and yet full of comforting bliss. You break the silence with an anxious swallow.

“I can't believe this.. you should be scolding me, making me eat cold leftovers in a dark room for being late, once again. Instead you're welcoming with open arms and a full stomach? I just don't get you; I don't know if I ever will.” 

You smile a little sadly, grateful and mystified.

“Maybe you won't understand it,” Cirdan moves his lips to your palm, nudging it with a kiss. “but it's what I'd want.”

You did understand that. All those nights he laid in the cold snow after throwing himself against battalions as a living shield, coming home to an even colder room, eating alone and wondering if anyone was thinking of him. If he meant anything more than a body to be used. He wouldn't let you feel that way, if he could help it.

You nuzzled so hard against his face it made you both scrunch up your noses. 

“Oh I just-- wish I could stick you in my pocket and never let you go-- never let you feel anything but warmth and softness and love again.”

Cirdan grinned, his expression practically basking in the adoration. 

“You don’t know how good it feels to hear you say that.” 

You kiss him rough, not caring if the temperature difference sparks you both, making your noses tingle with electricity and your lips buzz. With gentle encouragement your hands holding his face might lead elsewhere, but tonight you wanted to show him the chaste devotion, the love he deserved in any way you knew how. Cirdan was fervent with his kiss, though he still seemed concerned with your warmth as his hands searched blindly for the blanket slipping from your back. 

You roll your eyes, letting your lips fall away with a warm breath. You're quick to get back to what you want, the task at hand.

“We're getting off track-- will you let me brush your hair now? I promise I won't freeze you with my icicle fingers.”

You drum your fingers against the sides of his cheeks, watching as he reaches for the forgotten brush on the rug, slightly dazed. You leave the tepidness of his face to snatch it with playful ease, ushering him to turn around.

“All right, all right, my love,” He concedes with a sigh. “Whatever you desire.” 

You grasp the edges of his messy hair as he faces away from you, pulling out the slipping black elastic band to let the rest of it fall; It’s gently knotted at the tips, but the rest of it still holds a sleek shine created from fine, thick strands and patient washing. 

“It’s my turn to take care of you..” You mumble, holding a fistful of silvery white strands with a calm stroke of the brush. The rhythm lulls you into a peacefulness, listening to the flickers of fire in front of you, the gentle snowfall from outside your little world of warmth and coziness. The blanket falls to your elbows-- you don’t go to fix it, so enraptured with the task at hand. 

Cirdan begins to hum just the slightest, his eyes shut in a stoney, calm expression that you can see if you tip just slightly sideways. It was a solemnly elven tune, and yet it slowed your heart so simply that you felt a wash of nostalgia and ease run through you. 

You would trade anything to keep this December night going, to have the man in front of you, held in your arms forever. Cirdan’s warmth was inseparable from your own, your bodies impossibly close for comfort. 

[theaceofarrows]

Good parenting

[Jason and Damian walking out the manors front door, carrying a bazooka, a katana, and some grenades]

Damian: Goodbye, Father

Bruce: Bye boys, good luck with your dastardly plans

Jason: We won't need any luck

[aka-indulgence]

Soundwave fic? Yes. I love him. I want him to kidnap me. What who said that

Anyway here’s a fic where tfp Soundwave kidnaps you because he likes you and you’re alone on the Nemesis with him for the first time kdsjlfjds

(Soundwave x F!Human Reader)

—————

As soon as he arrives on the ship, Soundwave transforms, shifting you from the cockpit into his hands as he does so. You make a small cry, bracing on his thumb and holding on for dear life as you wildly look around like a frightened animal.

The door behind him closing and the sunlight disappearing from its cracks only furthered your panic- Soundwave could hear the sound of your little frightened breaths, quick and shallow. It was unbearably cute.

He walks with calm, even steps through the hallways. As much as he adored your mannerisms, he didn’t want your (permanent) stay on the Nemesis to be unpleasant. He scrolls through the camera feed on his visor and finds Megatron on the bridge and heads his way.

It was quiet. Even though Soundwave had quite literally stolen you in broad daylight in front of the Autobots that could do nothing but watch him fly away with you, you still found reassurance from him. You looked up at him from time to time; furrowed brows, watery eyes. He can’t stand it. He was the only thing on this ship that was familiar to you, and so he was the only person you would seek comfort from.

A few vehicons saw him on his way to the bridge. All have balked on the sight, but they deserve credit. They were smart enough not to interfere with him, nor to question his new ‘girlfriend’.

“Commander Soundwave,” one nodded as he passed. Only someone like Soundwave could hear the slight shake in his voice.

It must be so hard for someone as small as you. Everyone and everything was so much bigger than you, even the vehicons. Even Laserbeak.

So cute…

He reaches the bridge and the doors slide open. Megatron stands ever vigilant, watching the skies.

“Soundwave. You’ve returned.” His master angles his head before fully turning around, “have you acquired the data I have asked of you?”

Soundwave nods and his screen blinks, displaying pictures of artefacts and text. Megatron’s eyes brighten and a dastardly grin widens.

“Cybertronian artefacts the humans uncovered? Excellent Soundwave. I’m surprised the humans had the forethought to store them in different places, but they won’t stay in their vaults for long…”

Coordinates show on his face of their locations, before he shows one particular artefact.

“A magnetic destabilizer. Did you retrieve it?”

His screen changes to a video of multiple army men shooting at him before the autobots arrived.

“Humans.” He sneered. “For such small creatures, their little guns can feel like scraplets when they are numerous. Even more reason to terminate these pests,”

Soundwave feels a twitch in his hand.

“Which begs the question… why have you brought one back with you?”

His liege sounded curious rather than chastising. His head dips down to where you sat. Poor thing- you were shaking now, your lips parted and gripping his finger tighter than before, unable to speak, wide-eyed staring back at Megatron.

He wraps his fingers around you in the hopes of comforting you, but it only makes you gasp in alarm, swinging your head to look back at him. You’re anxious. He pets your head and prods your cheeks for a moment before turning back to his master. To Megatron, he simply goes over pictures and footage of his encounters with you he managed to capture, then he holds you closer to his chest.

“I see…” Megatron nods. “Very well. I trust you can keep it in check. Although you were unable to retrieve the artefact, the data you brought was most valuable- we will certainly retrieve the rest. You are dismissed, Soundwave.”

Soundwave nods, and both he and Megatron turn to their next objectives; which, for Soundwave, was to have a private moment with you.

*****

Your heart is beating a mile a minute. You’re still having trouble wrapping your head around it. You were going on a human mission to meet with Fowler’s guys one moment, then taken aboard the Decepticon warship the next. And you still don’t understand why Soundwave took you in the first place, when you assume he already took all the information he needed from the unidentified objects database. Now you find out not only did Megatron not ask him to bring back a human, he specifically targeted you. What could he possibly want from you?

A door opens to an empty, barren room with a single shelf-like desk and a huge window that spans from the floor to the ceiling. Oh, and there was a bed on the desk too. Pillows, blankets, white linens and all. It looked rather plush and high quality.

So that’s what happened. You manage to think in the middle of your fear induced paralysis. Everyone had been so confused when Agent Fowler came in with the reports of Decepticon activity at a mattress store, of all places. And after a thorough checking with Ratchet, you’d found nothing else sinister has happened with mattresses. Until now, of course.

You’re placed gently on the table, far gentler than you’d expect a Decepticon to be capable of. Soundwave doesn’t look to be expecting anything from you right now, so you look around. You walk to the bed and feel the sheets; soft, slightly cold, and crisp compared to the beat up bedding you had back home. It reminds you of a hotel bed. You lift your head to look out the window: the perfect view of earth above the stratosphere. It was still day, clear from the bright blue the earth was practically glowing with- but you were so high above ground that there wasn’t enough atmosphere to scatter the light. You could even see the earth’s curvature.

The gravity of the situation, how far away you were from everything, how crazy this situation was that it didn’t feel real- it finally hits you like a ton of bricks and you were broken out of your disconnected paralysis. You were alive again. Your head feels hot, your heart is thumping, and it didn’t feel like you could breathe deeply enough. Fear and uncertainty rises in you like bile.

It’s too much.

Overwhelmed, you hiccup, and the tears start flowing.

You jump at feeling something on your side, and you’re turned around to face the one who captured you. Your hands are shaking, your lips are trembling, sobbing uncontrollably despite your attempts to hide them. You didn’t want him to see you cry, you knew Decepticons were cruel creatures. You wish you knew what he was thinking about, his emotions impossible to read considering that he’s faceless. He simply looks at you, in the silent way Soundwave always did, head tilted slightly down.

Was he judging you? Was he showing disdain? Did he think you were a pathetic, crying thing?

You couldn’t move again, with his hand bracing your back, watching his other hand approach, fingers extended. You sniffle and squeak as it gets closer but- then, very precisely for someone as enormous as he was, he wipes your tears away with his fingers.

“Huh..?”

As he caresses your head, he leans in closer, and you’re suddenly reminded of when children played with their dolls. Coddling them, playing with their hair, that unwavering stare. It makes you nervous, and you squish into his hand more trying to make space from him. You’re confronted with your own reflection in his visor, your eyes reddish and wet.

“Wh-what,” you swallow, mouth dry. “What is it that you want from me,”

Your voice was small and pitiful, shaking with the sobs that still racked your body. He tilts his head, as if he was asking isn’t it obvious?

One slender, extended finger pokes the center of your chest, on your sternum.

Static sounds from his face, and the voice you hear is yours.

“You.”

Me? What do you mean you ‘want me’?? You thought in distress. You’re not sure if that’s a good thing, or if you liked that answer.

“I still don’t… know what you mean by that. Do you want me so y-you can hurt me? Torture me? Put me through some Decepticon experiment? Wh–?!”

The last word turns into a high-pitched squeal as Soundwave lifts you off the ground and brings you close to his face. He isn’t viewing you like he did before, instead steadily bringing you closer and closer. His faceless appearance frightens you, and with alarm you feel like he’s about to squash you against his face- like he was trying to eat you, if he had a mouth. Your panicked breaths turn into a yelp, covering your face and your body seizing up.

You jolt when you feel his visor pressing to the entire side of your body, keenly aware of how much you’re trembling when you’re pressed against this wall that was his face. You kept your eyes shut, feeling him press you further into him, whimpers escaping you.

… But nothing happens. Instead, Soundwave starts moving his face against you, up and down in a rhythmic motion. It’s gentle, careful- he isn’t trying to hurt you. The pressure his hand is putting on you is only just enough to slightly squish you against him, and you feel like a plush toy with your cheek smooshed on his visor. A soft, smooth, deep sound emits from within him, strong enough that it shakes you, but low enough that it isn’t overwhelming. Like an engine revving.

Is he. Nuzzling you?

You open one eye, the other shut from the decepticon’s face rubbing. “Whuh- what’s happening,”

You try to push off his face to make room for yourself, but this only makes Soundwave press you back into his face, this time nuzzling you from left to right.

You sputter, your nose and mouth pressing against him from his motion, before he finally pulls his face away from you, his shoulders bouncing with what might’ve been laughter.

Your puzzled face was clear on his visor.

“I like you.” He says. “I like - Y/n.”

Now that really confused you. You could accept him wanting you for nefarious reasons, even for personal ones but- was Soundwave liking you the reason he took you? You can’t believe it, even as the man in question has his fingers on your cheek again, tickling you and making you close your eyes again from his obsessive petting.

You get a moment to speak when his petting finally stops. You could feel the redness and heat radiating from your cheek from where Soundwave pressed his face on you.

“S-so… you don’t want to hurt me,” you clarify. You had to make sure.

Soundwave shakes his head. “No.”

Phew. That was a relief. You were still on the Decepticon warship of course- but at least your kidnapper wasn’t here to harm you.

There were others on the ship though, who you’re sure aren’t fond of humans.

You simmer in that thought, looking away from Soundwave, who patiently waits for you to say something. You let him thumb you, stroking your hair down placatingly. You have to admit to yourself, it was working more than you thought it would.

You sigh out the heaviness in your chest, and turn back to Soundwave. You open your mouth, hesitating for a second.

“Promise,” you say, “promise you won’t hurt me? Promise you won’t let anyone hurt me,”

You knew there was no way you could really demand something from a Decepticon, your difference in size astronomical, not to mention in strength. But you hoped Soundwave liked you enough that he would honor your request.

Soundwave stares silently, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. But you notice his head tilting imperceptibly downwards. You aren’t sure if it was a nod, or just a small movement indicating he was thinking about it.

For now, it was enough.

[moonstruckme]

have a bonfire - send a character + a trope (one bed, fake dating, etc.) and I’ll write a drabble

AHHHHH CONGRATS CONGRATS CONGRATS

how about like secret royalty, like very princess diaries-esque, with sirius???? he's basically royalty anyway, so either him or reader suddenly entering his world would be so cute

Thanks lovely <3

prince!Sirius x princess!reader ♡ 1.2k words

With the early arrival of the visiting king, the uproar the palace (You’re actually not sure what you’re supposed to call this place. Castle? Mansion? Home? (You really hope you’re not supposed to call it home, that seems awfully quick.)) has been in since your arrival triples in severity. Your grandmother completely disappears, the nice older man who’s been showing you around goes with her, and when no one wants to take on the problem of the new and completely untrained princess, you’re shooed into the nearest sitting room to wait things out. 

“Well, this has to have been a mistake.”

You give a start, turning in place to find a young man stretched out like a cat on a settee by the window. He has longish, dark hair that spills like ink over the green upholstery and cunning eyes that are narrowed curiously on you despite his disinterested countenance.

“Or I suppose maybe your team’s just stashed you here the same way my father’s stashed me,” he says, and the voice that emerges from that small, pretty mouth is just as smooth he looks like it would be, self-assured and infused with an accent that speaks to a privileged upbringing. “I don’t imagine they’d like knowing their new pet is cavorting with her equals so early on.” An untrustworthy smile curves his lips. “Could be fun. Should we ring for food?” 

You have half a dozen questions, but what makes it out is, “Pet?” 

The boy tilts his head, giving you a knowing look. “You’re an unhousebroken puppy, sweetheart.” His eyes dip to the dress they’d put you in this morning, skimming their way back up to your face and leaving goosebumps in their wake. “A very pretty one, but as far as royals are concerned, an embarrassment. From what I hear, that’s hardly your fault, though.” 

You sit a cautious distance away from him, on a parallel couch. The afternoon sunlight spills over the top of his settee and hits your eyes, but you bear it rather than move. 

A week ago, a couple of days even, you wouldn’t have been able to make eye contact with someone like this. But though this boy is prettier and speaks more brashly than nearly anyone you’ve come across, you’ve grown remarkably used to novelty since being sat down in front of relatives you didn’t know to be told that you were heir to a country you’d never heard of. One upside to the chaos of the last few days is, you suppose, it might be making you braver. 

“Who are you?” you ask. 

“Oh, my god.” He smiles, seemingly delighted. “You really are brand new, aren’t you? I’m not trying to sound arrogant,” he says at your flustered look, “it’s just we’re usually trained to know important people before we ever meet them. It’s not every day I come upon someone who actually has no idea who I am.” 

A little laugh trips off your tongue. You tell him, “You’re not making your not-arrogant point very well.”

“Well, I never said I wasn’t arrogant.” That dastardly grin again, slicing across his face like a weapon. “I said I didn’t want to sound arrogant. I’ve been told it doesn’t make a very polite first impression.” He stands, graceful limbs unfurling, and starts for the door. “I’m Sirius. Are you hungry?” 

You nod dazedly as he crosses the room, and it’s only then that you realize he’s wearing a suit. Or, parts of one. The jacket and tie have been cast off, hung over the arm of the settee, but he’s still wearing the pants (thank god) and a dress shirt that appears blue in the light but otherwise is so dark it might be black. 

Sirius opens the door, murmuring to someone outside. When he’s done, he heads for you instead of the settee. Kicks his shoes off and settles in across from you, legs crossed underneath him like you’re at a sleepover. You decide to follow suit, turning to face him and trusting the length of your dress to protect you from scandal as you tent your knees in front of you. 

“That’s better,” Sirius says, and his eyes look different with the light cutting across them. Before, they’d been in shadow, but now they’re the color of heavy clouds, a faint bluish hue brought out by his dress shirt. “You looked stunning with the light on your face, but you’re even lovelier when you’re not squinting. I asked for someone to bring us chicken nuggets, is that alright? You’re not vegetarian, are you?” 

You’re surprised at the choice, but that quickly gives way to relief. You feel a smile tugging at your lips at the banal normalcy of it. After the five-course dinner you’d had the night before that had tormented your unrefined stomach for hours afterwards, chicken nuggets sound like a dream. 

“That’s good,” you reply, and Sirius returns your smile with feeling. “Who were you talking to out there?” 

“A member of my detail is just outside the door,” he explains airily, as if security details are something everyone has and talks about on a routine basis. Your astonishment must show on your face, because he raises a slender eyebrow. “You don’t have one? I suppose not every kingdom does. Or, if you haven’t left the palace, you might not have met yours yet.” 

“You said your name was Sirius.” 

“I did.” 

“But you didn’t say your last name.” 

Sirius’ lips twist wryly. “I did not.” 

Maybe it’s his own audacious manner, but you feel like you can be straightforward with him. “Why not?” 

He shrugs and lists sideways, leaning his shoulder against the back of the couch. “Maybe I’m still enjoying the novelty of you. I don’t often get to talk to people without all the genteel manners and button-up-ed-ness.” 

You tilt your head. “You’re one of the Black family, aren’t you?” 

Sirius nods, looking unsurprised you’ve figured it out. It’s obvious he’s royal, so it really wasn’t that far a leap. He doesn’t look like any of the family you’ve met so far, and the only other royals are the ones visiting.

“So does that make you the king’s son?” 

“There are two of us, actually.” He mirrors you, tilting his head so it’s resting against the couch. “But I’m the oldest, so I get to go on all the fun trips.” 

You feel your lips twist again. “Yeah, you seem like you’re having a blast.” 

“Oh, let there be no misunderstanding, doll.” He straightens, looking you in the eye. It feels like being under a spotlight, and it’s all you can do not to look away. Sirius grins. “This is my fun face. I’m having a far better time with you than I have at any of these things in years.” 

“Oh.” You can’t help it now, and your gaze flees down to the skirt of your dress. You take a bit of the fabric between your fingers, distracting yourself with the extraordinary silkiness of it. “Well, happy to help. Maybe while your family is here our paths will cross again.” 

You look up, and his expression has softened into something nearing genuine. “I’ll be sure that they do,” he says.

[stevieschrodinger]

Part One ThirtySeven

prompt from @l1lpip

“Stevie love!”

“Yeah?” Steve calls back through the house.

Eddie’s at the front door, having just got back from work. He looks pleased with himself, suspiciously so, and he has both his hands behind his back, “come here.”

Steve eyes him. Could be anything back there, and Steve considers the possibility that it’s a handful of snow or something equally dastardly, “not sure I trust you.”

“You’ll like it,” Eddie tells him, all sincere, “trust me.”

Steve hums non-committally, but does go to where Eddie is standing, so he figures whatever happens now, he’s brought it upon himself. Eddie’s hand shoots up above their heads with startling aggression, a vague blur of something plantlike sails passed, and then Steve is receiving a kiss so sharp his lip is caught against his teeth a little. It hurts a bit, “what-”

“Winning!” Eddie shouts, sprinting off into the house, waving little bush of what can only be mistletoe above his head.

“Oh my god Chrissy why are you like this,” Steve mutters under his breath, before yelling, “not everything is a competition!”

Eddie gets him again in the kitchen doorway, Steve is a little more prepared this time, in that he knows it’s happening so he knows what to expect, so he compensates and the kiss is quick but...nice this time. Or at least, not painful. Eddie’s laughing manically as he darts through the arch into the living room, bouncing onto the couch and then half climbing and half falling over the back. “This isn’t fair if I don’t have my own mistletoe!”

“Sounds like a you problem!”

“Sounds like a…” he’s definitely learned that from Max, “oh it is on,” Steve ducks back behind the archway. Eddie is incredibly impatient, there’s no way he won’t come to investigate if Steve doesn’t follow him. It really doesn’t take long for Eddie to break, and Steve can here the shushing of Eddie’s socks on the carpet. Steve uses his weight advantage, getting Eddie in a bear hug and straight up lifting him. The mistletoe scrapes across the side of Steve’s face as Eddie flails, “hey watch it,” but he soon has Eddie pinned to the couch and the mistletoe wrestled off him, it’s a little snapped and worse for wear by the time Steve launches it over the coffee table.

Eddie pouts, glowering up at Steve, “that was mine.”

“Uh hu, and what, exactly, did Chrissy tell you about mistletoe?”

Eddie frowns, “if it’s above your head, you have to kiss.”

“You have to kiss?”

Eddie nods, “yeah. You have to.”

“Right so if me and say...Chrissy were under the mistletoe-”

Eddie’s face scrunches up, “that’s horrible.”

Steve snorts a laugh, letting his weight collapse onto Eddie, nuzzling against his neck and into his curls, “so mistletoe is kind of dangerous, really.”

“You’re crushing me,” Eddie groans, voice all breathy.

“Are you quitting on the mistletoe?”

“Yes. Burn it.”

“Oh thank god,” Steve shifts sideways, pulling Eddie on top of him instead. They shift around until Eddie’s comfortable, splayed out on top of Steve, Steve’s hand absently playing with Eddie’s curls, “you don’t need mistletoe to kiss me baby.”

“I know Stevie.” Steve rubs his tongue gingerly on the sore part of his lip, investigating, he sucks it between his teeth; it’s a little tender, “did I hurt you?”

“Only a tiny bit. It was an accident.” Then, smiling, Steve tacks on, “small ow.”

Eddie snorts a laugh, “not ow, it doesn’t hurt,” he says absently, leaning in to kiss Steve softly on the lip.

“Kissing it better?”

“Yup,” Eddie kisses him again, “is it working?”

Steve hums, “not sure, we probably need to investigate,” Eddie interrupts him with a soft kiss, “more thoroughly, you know?”

Eddie wriggles down a little, “maybe kissing in other places will help too?”

“Definitely needs thorough testing, I can see that working,” Steve tells him, angling his head back to let Eddie get at his throat for more kisses. Eddie’s learned a lot over the last year, considering he’s picked up a language, an entire new way of life...and a completely new body. Reading and writing, absorbing all the nuances of...everything. Even learning to play an instrument. It’s...he amazes Steve just how quickly he picks stuff up, so Steve doesn’t know why he’s so surprised that Eddie’s gotten so good at this too.

There’s the slightest suggestions, just a gentle scrape of Eddie’s teeth, no where near enough to break the skin, but more than enough for Steve to let out a groan of pleasure.

“Love you,” Eddie whispers, sucking against that spot he knows Steve likes.

“Is this a sorry I attacked you with affection kind of deal or..?”

Eddie hums, “not sorry for kisses. I am sorry if I hurt you,” Eddie wriggles lower, lifting Steve's shirt, scratching gently at his tummy, following the sensation with more kisses.

“You never hurt me baby, not really. Or at least, not on purpose.”

Eddie makes a noise, half sigh, half huff, that Steve immediately recognizes as something Eddie has picked up directly from him. Eddie sits up grabbing Steve’s ankle and pulling off his sock, lifting Steve’s foot he ever so gently kisses the small scars Steve has been left with. It’s an apology Eddie makes regularly, “this hurt, and it’s a lie if you say it didn’t.”

“I’m not saying it didn’t...but it was worth it, and I don’t mind it. That makes it okay.” Eddie pulls the same face he always does; they have to agree to disagree. He kisses the spot again, then kisses along the underside of Steve’s remaining three toes. Steve sticks up the other leg, shoving his socked foot almost in Eddie’s face, “you can’t show favoritism.”

Eddie doesn’t, he pulls off Steve’s other sock, kissing along those toes too, before falling back between Steve’s legs, going for his belt, and then pulling his jeans and boxers off together. Steve lifts his hips to help, and Eddie discards his clothes on the floor. Eddie kisses the inside of Steve’s calves, working his way up, nipping carefully at the delicate skin inside Steve’s thighs.

The couch isn’t long enough for them to lay out fully, so Steve wriggles up a little, half sitting against the armrest, Eddie settling himself between Steve’s thighs. Steve’s half hard from Eddie’s attention already, but Eddie licks his palm and grasps Steve’s cock, resting on his elbows, one of Steve’s legs trailing on the floor, the other trapped against the back of the couch.

“Okay?” Eddie checks, waiting for Steve’s nod before lowering himself the rest of the way.

“Careful baby,” Eddie lifts his head just enough so that Steve can see his roll his eyes, “I’m sorry, I just...it’s reflex, you know?”

Eddie hums, leaning down to lick at the head of Steve’s cock, before sucking gently at just the head and prodding the point of his tongue into the slit. Steve groans, letting his head fall back. He gathers Eddie’s hair by feel, bringing it into one big handful so it’s out of Eddie’s way. More importantly, not in Steve’s way when he looks down, the end of his cock is obscured, but Steve watches as Eddie fists the remaining length of his cock, getting a steady rhythm going. “That’s really good baby, just like that.”

Eddie doesn’t try to take any more, just suckles at the head, occasionally pulling back to lick his way around the head, letting his spit and Steve’s precome make the slide of his hand a little slicker, “still good?” Eddie checks in.

“Yeah baby, yeah, I really like it when you suck me,” Eddie does, carefully taking just the head into his mouth, there’s absolutely no hint of teeth. They took this slow, when Eddie finally got to try it, and Steve knows Eddie would never want to hurt him. Eddie’s always so careful with him. Eddie works his hand on the bottom two thirds of Steve’s dick whilst suckling and licking at the end. He releases the head with a pop after every keen suck. Steve sighs, then groans in pleasure, “doing so good baby.”

Eddie hums, stopping for a moment and releasing his fingers so he can lick a thick stripe up the full length of Steve, “can I just get undressed a second.”

“Sure, sure baby.”

Steve releases Eddie’s hair so he can sit up, quickly stripping, “sorry it was getting uncomfortable. You know how he gets.”

“I know I know,” Steve’s hand gravitates to his cock, jacking himself slowly while he waits, splayed out on the couch, watching Eddie strip off his shirt and pants. His cock is already out, and Steve knows it can get really uncomfortable really fast if the head of his dick starts mouthing at the inside of his pants, the rough surface getting caught up in the material, too eager for freedom.

Eddie lies back down, Steve takes a handful of Eddie’s hair to keep it out of his face and to guide him forward, Eddie opening his mouth, happy to let Steve feed him the end of dick into Eddie's mouth, where he cups it with a waiting tongue. Steve continues to jack himself off, “that’s so nice baby.”

Eddie works a hand under himself and Steve knows he’s cupping his own dick to stop it nuzzling against the couch, probably rubbing at the head himself.

Eddie soon shifts his concentration back to Steve, closing his mouth on the head of Steve’s cock to suck, letting himself be held gently by Steve’s hand buried in his hair, “getting close baby,” Eddie pops off immediately, Steve letting him go. Eddie would never forgive him if he came in Eddie’s mouth; he absolutely hates the taste. They trade off quick, Steve sitting back again, Eddie’s hand firm and sure on Steve’s cock, jacking him quickly as Steve pulls his shirt up out of the way, “I’m gonna’ come,” Steve warns before his hips buck, Steve throws his head back, the orgasm pulsing through him, only vaguely aware of it splashing over his own stomach. Eddie slows his hand, working Steve through to the end with a firm squeeze. Steve relaxes with a sigh, “you want to come baby?”

Eddie nods eagerly, clambering up Steve’s body, not really caring that he’s smearing Steve’s come everywhere. His cock is completely out, wriggling eagerly in the air, it’s thick body firm, the end grasping and searching, writhing back and forth. Steve opens his mouth, the black head of Eddie’s cock finding it’s target immediately, darting forward with it's petals spread wide. It immediately latches on, grasping at Steve’s tongue. Steve holds Eddie’s hips, knowing they’re going to kick as Eddie comes.

Steve closes his mouth, sucking at the end of Eddie’s cock as it suckles and pulses on Steve’s own tongue. Eddie cries out, his hips jumping as he rides out his orgasm, Steve pins him as best he can so neither of them get hurt. Steve feels it when Eddie's slit starts to leak onto his chest.

Eddie collapses on top of Steve as his cock slips free. The end is shiny wet, and Steve watches as it drunkenly flops over. Just like Eddie.

He curls up to snuggle on top of Steve, and Steve sighs, contented, pulling him close. But his legs are already getting a little chilly, and he's very aware of being bare assed on the couch, “we should get cleaned up.”

Eddie grumbles, “in a minute.”

Part ThirtyNine

[nvuy]

hands on — sunday

summary. sunday feels eyes on him from everywhere, yet he still seeks your gaze despite how much he loses himself in your eyes.

notes. wrowwww confit part 2 is here i DID post it on ao3 like 5 mins ago but i think ao3 died in my country for the 74th time this year soooorrrrr hello tumblr!!!!!!

i'd strongly suggest you read confiteor here (or on ao3) before reading this one, otherwise this entire fic just sounds like an acid trip.

warnings. mdni, 18+, gn reader but you have fem anatomy, long ass 12k post, mild degradation, little bit of horror themes if you squint?, alternative summary: sunday receives head and has an existential crisis, sunday literally loses his mind (in a sexy way), religious guilt, religious themes & symbolism, sunday needs therapy, you're a weirdo (in a sexy way), y'all get it on in a church.

The church had always been beautiful. A place of worship, fairness, mutual happiness. It’s partly the reason Sunday was always so enamoured with its pieces on the walls; Robin used to trace her hands over the paintings, and he was sure he could spot her fingerprints from when the paint was still drying.

Sunday had never felt so disgusted with himself.

The murals watched him, one thousand unblinking eyes following him as he walked down the aisle, with muted clicks from his shoes against the red carpet with gold trimming. 

He was so angry. 

He’d trudged home the night prior seething, and Robin had rested a hand on his shoulder and whispered to him until he gathered himself. He hated to present himself in such a way to her, and although she begged for him to shed a light on his problems, she was met with silence. 

He was so angry at his traitorous hands when they wandered below the waistband of his pants. He’d been trying to sleep, tossing and turning for hours, desperate for some sort of distraction. He’d retrieved a glass of water, he’d stayed up to read, and nothing was helping. Nothing soothed the ache between his thighs; the thought in the back of his mind that you were in that same rut. 

He felt awful feeling himself up again, this time alone, and he was so ashamed when he muffled his cries and came into his hand. 

Vile. 

There’s a statue in the church. One erected from only the most exquisite sculptors of the era, crafted meticulously over gruelling hours to perfect the shape of THEM. Xipe stands behind the pulpit, larger than anything in the church, and silent. THEIR arms remain still, outstretched and gestured towards the empty pews. THEIR eyes are not open, but there is a gentle smile carved onto a perfectly whimsical face. 

It is a beautiful statue, sure, but Sunday would have preferred another God to watch over instead.

Perhaps it was for the best. 

In the preparation of the morning service, Sunday was unusually quiet. Staff piled in silently, bidding their greetings, and even Robin—and, bless her gentle heart—was reticent, her lips pulled together into a thin line. The choir practised, and it was the only sounds he heard that morning. 

The wine the church offered was of pure grapes. The chalice the sacramental wine rested in was golden with a thin stem and a wide base. A single golden spoon laid within the red. 

It’s supposed to be blood. It feels dastardly eerie to offer a piece of THEM to those undeserving of such. 

Instinctively, when his gaze met the statue’s, his gloved hand raised and clasped the golden charm at his chest tightly. 

Sunday felt a tap on his shoulder. 

“The congregation is prepared,” Robin said to him. She tucked a piece of her hair behind her ear. “As per usual.” 

He hadn’t taken his eyes off of the statue. “Good.” 

“And there are people coming in now,” she continued, nodding towards the door that led out to the lectern. “It’s almost eight.” 

“Thank you.”

She stopped, eyeing him warily. 

“There’s something bothering you,” she commented quietly. “You’ve been on edge since last night. Did something happen?” 

Sunday finally turned to look her in the eye. His face remained expressionless, though his tone held a hint of warning. “I’m fine, Robin. Please. Don’t worry about me.”  

“Brother–” 

“Robin.” He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, though that smile he always pulled onto his lips when he was trying to deter her mind from him. His heart was pounding in his chest. “Please. Enough.” 

Defeatedly, her shoulders sagged. She wanted to tell him, as she had so many times before—so many times—that she was there for him. She’s always been there for him. 

Robin’s lips twitched into a soft, but crushed smile. “Okay.” She stared down at her shoes. They were slightly scuffed at the sides. “Okay, I… I’ll get the choir started.” 

Sunday had turned back towards the statue with an approving, idle hum. His shoulders had stiffened as he watched THEM closely, fingers interlocked in front of his stomach. It was a nervous habit Robin recognised all too well.

His hand was bleeding around the golden charm now. 

She said nothing. 

ೃ༄

When Sunday sang prayers into the microphone with a bandaged hand beneath his gloves, he wondered if he was ever truly a good person. Was he… ever fit to see the Heavens once he passed? It was all down to the judgement of one final being; unbiased, unjudged, honest. 

He always valued honesty. 

“Grace be to thee, and to your kinship.” The sunlight was burning into the back of his halo. “And, weary sinners, hold your heads, as THEY will shine light down upon you, and forgive all of your transgressions.” 

The chalice filled with wine sat idly on the table. There was an embroidered white table runner draped over the top to cover the chipped and old wood. 

The pattern was eerily similar to the stockings you wore that night. 

He dreamed of you. 

How could he? To betray himself, The Family, his own flesh and blood. He felt repulsive, like swallowing strong liquor. His saliva was thick in his throat as he spoke, hands pulled tight around the edge of the pulpit, mere inches away from shedding the program that rested in the centre. The wood creaked beneath the pressure. 

He remembered your voice as if you were truly whispering in your ear at that moment. 

You’re haunting him. He hears your heels in the hallway at home; he can smell your perfume when he passes down the aisle every morning. The script in his hands has tears from how firm he’s been gripping the paper. 

He had to remind himself he is good. He is good, and loved, and obedient, and his God is so benevolent and thoughtful to watch over someone as pathetically weak as he is. THEY will forgive him. 

He knows, he told himself. He knows what he did all those nights ago. 

Sunday felt unworthy to hold the golden chalice in his hands. The other staff had positioned themselves ready for the wine service. One had stopped to look strangely at the man. Sunday’s hands were trembling around the handles. 

“Reverend Sunday?” one of the priests asked gently. “Are you alright?” 

Briskly, he nodded his head once and pulled as much of a reassuring smile on his lips as he could. Then, he turned, careful not to spill the wine in the chalice and moved forward. 

There was already a line forming down the aisle. 

He is loved. 

“Go…” He hoped his voice was steady. It should be, for he’s said these exact words everyday for almost a year now. “Eat your food with gladness.” 

He is good.

The spoon shook in his hands as he offered it to one of the churchgoers. 

The next person stepped up. The priest on the right grasped their chin gently with the red cloth. Sunday offered another spoonful of wine. 

They were replaced with the next person. 

He is loyal.

“…And drink your wine with a joyful heart.” 

The next. And the next. And the next. 

Routine. Stagnant, maddening, routine. 

He glanced down to dip the spoon back into the wine again. The chalice was half full now, and the line was beginning to dwindle. He could see the end of it now. 

He is faithful. 

“…For THEY have already–” 

His heart faltered when he looked up again. 

The wine spilled from the spoon. He almost dropped the gold onto the floor. 

The breath that escaped his lips was shaky. 

It seemed that everyone in the church was transfixed with the smile you directed at the Head Reverend. Even the priests to his left and right had stopped. 

The choir had paused. A quick glance to the right would reveal Robin with her lips slightly parted. The organ player had pressed the wrong key and had halted the singing. 

When you shifted, he was reminded that you were not a perfect statue carved from the Gods hands. Not like the statue of Xipe that stood behind him. Your eyes flitted downwards, and he noticed your fists clenched at your sides. Discomfort pulled across your face like ink bleeding onto a canvas. 

Perhaps it was the distasteful attire you’d chosen for the ceremony that had garnered the staring. 

Maybe it was the unearthly beauty that sculpted your face, as if you were a being that had been picked from an inch of the Gods skin and blood, and brought to life on land, so full of love and saccharine bittersweetness. 

He could taste it on his tongue. 

Sunday quickly dipped the spoon back in the wine when one of the priests moved to hold the red cloth beneath your chin. 

He swallowed. “–Have already approved of what you do.” 

The spoon slipped between your parted lips. 

The other priest wiped your mouth with the cloth. It was like velvet on your lips. 

Hesitantly, out of time with the conductor, the church organ continued where the player had paused.

You pulled away from the cloth before the priest could remove his hand himself, and you offered one more warm smile—and sharp canines poked over your bottom lip—before you moved to let the next person replace you.

As you left, Sunday promptly ignored your hand that traced the leather of his belt beneath his coat. 

His heart was racing beneath his chest, like a bird hitting its wings against the confines of its cage. 

Heat clammered and sweltered up his neck. He ignored that, too. 

ೃ༄

He can’t. 

When Sunday stepped out of the confessional booth and locked the door with the key, he leaned against the door and shut his eyes tight. 

He felt too big for his clothes. His skin doesn’t feel like it’s his. It’s hot. It’s just so hot and his skin felt as though it had been rubbed raw with sandpaper. His breathing was shaky and uneven. 

He cannot bear to look at the images and murals plastered over the walls. If they had a choice, the unstaring eyes would, too, look away in shame. The statue is still. 

Sometimes, he was convinced it moved when no one was looking. 

Maybe that’s just paranoia. It all is, isn’t it? He’s always been scared of little things. Things with eyes, like dolls, and portraits, and people, and Gods. Not THEM. Never THEM—deep down, he did fear THEM. But he knows he is loved. Otherwise, he would have been abandoned. 

The murals are watching him. 

The walls are warping the longer he stares. The halos behind the figures’ heads are fading. He feels his own doing the same. He is unworthy of it. It is more like a weight of lead, than a ring of light. 

He’s still thinking of you. 

It’s horrible. It’s wrong. His eyes sting, though he’s not sure if it is exhaustion, or if he will cry again. But he can’t cry. He had wept silently in his bed the night prior because he couldn’t sleep. And it’s hard to sleep when the house is silent, but there’s a distant clicking of your heels down the hallway outside of his room.

It does not stop, nor does it draw closer or further away. It is a rhythmic click click click, and it is suffocating. It’s even worse when he feels you breathe into his ear and urge his hand between his legs. He feels your hands trace over his shoulders to his chest from behind—and of course you’re behind, because if he were to turn around, he’d see something ugly. 

He’d see nothing. 

It’s all in his head. 

But it feels real. How hot your breath is against his neck, how your lips follow the throbbing veins in his throat, how your fingers wrap around his wrist and guide his hand between his legs. 

The feeling weighs on his chest like gold. 

He draws close to pulling off his clothes when he is in bed. He fights his will, because it is you in his ear whispering that he is most beautiful in his rawest form. And he believes you, but the idea of ruining himself any further makes him feel sick. 

And one night, with what he feels are your teeth buried in his throat, he sings that he loves you, and he grows cold. 

He cannot sleep, and when he can sleep he dreams of you. And even as he lays wide awake in his bed, his hands wander, and he can feel your skin on his. 

He can’t love you. 

It’s not love. Love is warm, unfamiliar, and new, and he hears tales of how comfortable it is. 

It’s wrong to feel this way. 

He removed himself from the confessional. His legs felt weak when a hesitant breath left his lips.

“It’s like a weight… isn’t it?” 

Sunday froze. He’d never felt so cold before. His spine snapped straight like it’s was crafted of metal, and something horrible hooked within his stomach, hard and aching, like he’d swallowed lead. 

He heard you swallow. 

He didn’t dare turn around, fingers trapped on the pages of printed hymns he was about to put away. 

“It’s persistent.” He heard the telltale sign of your clothes moving. “You feel it, too.” 

He was afraid of what he would see when he turned around. 

He does. “I don’t know what you speak of.” He then turned, eyes glaring and face alight with anger. “If you know well, you will turn and leave. Don’t come back here.” 

His shaky inhale gives himself away. 

He isn’t sure if you’re real. For his sake, he hoped you weren’t. 

Sunday held the key tight in his bandaged hand. 

“You should feel guilty.” 

His heart stopped. The teeth of the key were digging into the hole in his palm. The bandages strain against his flesh, and he bites his tongue before he can let out a bark of disdain at you. 

Ungrateful. 

He won’t voice it. He will say nothing. This is not his fault; it can’t be his fault. 

And he still feels it is his fault. But this all happened because of you. And he’s been trapped inside his head for all these nights because of you. It’s all you. 

“Should I?” he asked quietly. He watched your face twist. “Or should you?” 

“Is it not your job to help people like me?” you tried. You felt blood rise up your neck and settle in your face. You weren’t sure whether it was because he was still the most beautiful man you’d ever seen, or if your frustration was climbing further and further towards your heart. “I thought you could help me.”

You had promised to fix him as well.

If anything, he felt even more broken than he had ever been. 

Sunday breathed out shakily. 

The bandages around his hand were beginning to dye a dark red like the wine he had fed you. 

He swallowed hard. You saw his throat move. 

“Fix this, Reverend. Fix me.” 

His voice faltered when he whispered, “I cannot fix what is beyond repair. I cannot give you anything more than I already have.” 

“Then take me.” 

There was silence.

He felt his heart drop into his stomach. 

Sunday glanced towards the door of the church and tried to control his breathing. “I can’t.” He shook his head slowly. He can’t bring himself to look into your eyes. “We can’t do this again. It will fix nothing. It will make everything worse.” 

Your legs trembled. You felt your heart stop in your chest, and it hurt. 

And you were so angry. 

So, so angry. You wanted to spit in his face, or maybe you wanted to fall to your knees and kiss his shoes and beg for forgiveness. 

Whatever you felt for this man, love, attachment, some sort of long winded delusion that he could be yours if you tried hard enough, surged inside of your head. 

You wanted to touch him. You wanted to feel his skin on your hands, and you wanted to hear him again. 

You swallowed your pride, and then you uttered, “please, sir.” 

Sunday exhaled sharply through gritted teeth. 

“Not only are your hands sullied with filth, but you are also disobedient.” He still cannot bring himself to look at you. He didn’t want to. He was afraid he’d succumb to your whims if he did. His hands were trembling, fingers weak and almost as if they would snap off from the knuckles. “I told you to never come back here.” 

You almost looked offended. 

“I don’t come here willingly–” 

“I know what you are.” 

Sunday’s fists clenched by his sides. The wings beneath his ears had stiffened, feathers bristling like cacti. 

“I know what you do.” 

You said nothing. If anything, your eyes were transfixed on the statue behind him. 

“You find reverent men, and you ruin them.” He turned, then, but his eyes didn't meet yours. “Tell me: are you proud of yourself?” 

“Never proud, sire,” you admitted. Then, you bowed your head. “Though I will say, I do hope you enjoyed yourself last night.” 

He inhaled sharply, and the corners of his lips twitched upwards. 

There, you dared to reach forward and trace your thumb along the bandages of his wounded hand. 

And he let you. 

He did not flinch away, nor did he tell you to leave again. 

He simply stared down at your fingers as they smoothed along the expanse of the scratchy material along his palm. Your fingers slotted between his. 

Sunday sighed, defeated. 

Your hand was so warm. And despite the disgust and the swamp he felt bubbling in his guts, he felt as if he’d known you his entire life. 

There was something so foreign in your skin, and yet he wanted nothing more than to melt into you like a burning flame upon a candlestick. 

Sunday, at that moment, felt no shame in what he had done to himself that same night. 

If anything, it pleased you, and that lit his skin on fire. A nice warmth buried itself in his stomach. 

“How dare you come back here.” The whisper was without malice, though he wished it did hold some sort of bite. Instead, he sounded pathetic, and lost, and he felt only you could help him. 

You don’t seem the slightest bit apologetic. 

Instead, your lips stretch into a small smile. 

“I blame you,” you said to him. Your lashes fluttered against his cheek. You didn't dare let your hand wander. Cautiously, you squeezed his fingers around yours, and silently prayed that he could let you indulge one last time. 

He blamed himself, too. 

His heart raced in his chest when your lips pressed to his. The poor muscle bashed helplessly against his ribs, like a small defenceless bird trying to free itself of its enclosure. Perhaps his heart knew better and attempted to leap from his throat.

You were gentle. So gentle he was convinced you were a different person; a different being to what he initially presumed you were. And it hurt. His chest hurt, like one thousand feathers weighed down upon his bones. Your lips were soft, and his own trembled against yours. 

Sunday’s other hand was still curled by his side, shaking with the urge to touch the expanse of your skin, and to also remain glued to his thighs at the same time. 

One of the wings beneath his ear tickled your jaw. The feathers trembled against your skin. You pressed deeper into hus mouth, so much so he almost startled back when your chest pressed against his. 

Sunday could feel your heart clammer against his own, and he felt as though you couldn’t have been any closer to him. 

A tick in time, a short moment of weakness, and one he’ll regret when he goes home and struggles to sleep again, but his hand abandons your grip. He tries his hardest to resist. He shouldn’t have ever let this happen again.  

Your arms daringly swung around his neck, one hand holding his cheek gently to keep his lips on yours. You could feel his hesitation, but something wrong urged you forward; urged you to ruin him even further. 

His hands rested on your hips. They did not move. They did not wander. They were frozen on your skin like ice. 

You tasted of the wine he’d given you.

It was strange, sweet, and it made his face flush the same colour as the blood on his hand. 

“Blessed Reverend,” you whispered against his lips. “How will you sleep tonight?” 

Your nose brushed against his. His feathers rustled when your breath and the scent of wine curled around his cheek. 

“I won’t,” he admitted. It’s quiet. You barely heard it. “I will toss and turn.” 

You fluttered your lashes at his answer. He felt your lips stretch into a smile. 

His heart frantically raced in his chest when your lips touched his again, and he stiffened when he stepped backwards with you and his back pressed against the pulpit. 

The hand on his cheek traced down the throbbing veins of his neck, and he had half a mind to pull away from you. His own hands held firmer against your hips.

He was growing dizzy. 

When he fluttered his eyes open, sick from the taste of wine on his lips, he saw one thousand eyes staring down at him. 

On the walls, on the ceiling, from the stained glass windows. His heart hurt in his chest, the thudding so loud he could barely hear anything else as it echoed in his ears. The swarm of guilt, still, was not enough to tear him off of you. 

The statue behind him, however, burned holes in the back of his head. He knew the sculpture was carved with its eyes shut, but he felt it he turned around, he’d notice the crack of a pupil beneath the stone eyelids. 

Your hand was on his stomach now, thumb following the central curve of his belly down beneath his navel. 

When your thumb hooked beneath his belt, his fingers wrapped around your wrist before you could dip any lower towards his thighs. 

“Not here,” he pleaded softly against your lips. 

He swallowed hard. 

“Where do you suggest we go?” you asked. He almost didn’t hear you. There was implication in your voice. 

He hated how warm he grew in his chest, but he knew it was wrong. So wrong, and it’s horrible. 

“You will not clamber into my bed tonight,” he whispered to you. That he knew for sure. 

You shook your head slowly. “I want you to take me here.” 

His stomach churned. It was as if he’d swallowed unjust liquor in one giant gulp. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to think as he did. His mouth tried to form words, some type of rejection, or some form of a nicely worded insult, but nothing came out. 

Instead, he stupidly gaped at you. 

His eyes flitted up to the statue of Xipe. THEIR eyes remained closed, all six of them, and the expressions held still. 

Sometimes, he was convinced the statue was alive. 

Perhaps that was just paranoia. 

He found it fitting to pull you towards the hall and down a flight of steps. He held onto you tight by your arms, afraid you’d disappear, as he once again, grew uncomfortable in his own skin and clothes.

Fitting to be furthest away from the sunlight. 

As his fingers fumbled with the keys to the cellar, your hands wandered around his waist. and your warm lips pressed to the back of his wings. The feathers twitched and flinched. 

Sunday’s breathing grew heavy as the door unlocked and creaked open. 

The cellar was… just that. A cellar. There were an abundance of barrels laid down beneath the benches on either side of the room. They were most likely full of wine for the services. There wasn’t much out on display. 

Fittingly so, it was dark, and there were no windows. 

Your shoes clicked against the tiled floor. 

It’s dark. So dark you can barely see him, but he keeps a firm grasp on your wrist as you step into the room. It’s not too cold, surprisingly. It does not smell of mould or abandonment; perhaps they take good care of this place. 

You almost knocked into a table in the centre of the room. The glass sitting on top clattered and shook as you startled back into him. 

“It is safer here,” Sunday whispered in your ear. You knew he locked the door. His hands squeezed your shoulders. 

“I believe you,” you told him. 

Sunday hummed at your words, and his lips brushed against the side of your neck. His breathing remained unsteady. 

You turned around to feel blindly for his waist. It was probably best that it was dark down here. It was appropriate for the both of you, and so far away from the sky, and the leering eyes of the murals painted onto the walls. 

His body is warm against yours. 

He finds it in himself, wherever he hides himself away, to kiss you then. Maybe because it’s dark. You can just make out the outline of him, and whatever light creeps through the bottom of the door is enough. 

“I came for you, sire,” you said. “Use me as you wish.” 

Sunday’s lips bumped against your neck. “You cannot whisper depravity into my ears.” 

“You brought me down here for a reason,” you answered him. Your fingers slid down his throat and you thumbed over the top button of his shirt. “I say what I want.” 

“You are filthy.” And he kissed you again. Fury flared in his stomach like fire. 

You freed the first two buttons of his shirt, and while you were busied following the smooth skin of his neck, he pushed off your coat. 

You managed to pull the white blazer off of his shoulders, and though he couldn’t see it, he heard the heavy fabric crumple to the floor by his feet. He internally cringed; the wrinkles he would have to iron out would be too telling. 

You hummed pleasantly as you drew him back against your lips. 

The wings around his waist were a nice surprise. You hadn’t expected them to be any larger than your arm with the way he tucked them beneath his coat, but although the feathers were flattened from the material, they stretched out wide in relief. 

He knew the blackened feathers were ugly and uneven and clipped to the very edge, but you didn’t seem to mind. In fact, your fingers flitted over the base gently, a soft caress of your hand that made the feathers bristle. 

Your lips were so soft. Despite wandering hands, you were so gentle. It made his stomach churn, but his heart stammered in his chest. 

The feathers rustled. You heard them. They reminded you of a pigeon shaking out its wings. 

The table was just next to your hip. 

You moved away from his lips for just a moment. 

And then, you reached forward blindly and swiped the glass off of the table. Jars and glasses and bottles of wine smashed onto the tiles, and Sunday’s grip tightens on your hips. 

“What are you doing?!” He asked with horror strewn about his face, though you couldn’t directly see it. It was very well and obvious in his voice. “Why would you–”

You silenced him with your fingers pressed to the cupid’s bow of his lips. “Lay on the table, Reverend.” 

“Are you–” 

“Lay down.” You guided his hips softly, cautious of the poor and frantically beating heart in his chest, until the bones bumped into the edge of the wood. 

Sunday’s breathing shook with disdain. The table pressed against his back, and he could feel your hands sliding up his chest to push him backwards. The exposed skin of his chest met the slight chill of the air. Your thumb moved along the line of buttons before it raised again to push at his jugular until he was forced back onto the table. 

Sunday trembled for a moment. 

It almost hurt how quickly the guilt in his stomach vanished when you crawled up on the table next to him. His vision, although useless in the lowlights of the cellar, fogged over with heat and the thick air that filled his lungs. 

His skin prickled when your lips grazed his neck.

This is wrong. So wrong, and–

His fists clenched by his sides when your lips drag down his chest, following the buttons on his shirt. The plastic was cool, and it collided with your teeth as you travelled lower and lower. 

All the while, anxiety stirred in his stomach like some roaring beast. This was wrong, to be beneath you like this, where he’s not taking what he wants, where he’s not in control. This is wrong, wrong, wrong– 

Where his shirt pulled untucked from his pants exposed a lining of skin and his stomach, and he felt teeth set into his flesh. The skin below his navel stirred a bright red, and his veins were set ablaze. 

He stiffened, and his hand instinctively came forward to pull his skin free from your teeth. 

He felt his eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. So, so slowly. 

Sunday inhaled, and his voice trembled, so he kept his lips shut. 

You spoke, “don’t resist. Enjoy it.” 

He felt the telltale tug of his belt, and the jingle of the buckle as it finally loosened. He sighed in relief from the feeling. Still, his hands curled even tighter by his sides. “How can I–” 

Your fingers ventured beneath his unbuckled belt. You then firmly rubbed your thumb up and down and up down his side of his cock twitching in his pants and Sunday had half a mind to squirm on the table. 

“Do I make you anxious?” He heard you giggle close to his ear, and your lips smoothed over the base of one of his wings. 

He wanted to say you did, and you made him shake, and you made him dream about you, and you made him touch himself when he couldn’t sleep, and– 

Nothing but a moan pulled from his lips when your hand finally freed his cock from his pants. 

His chest heaved in disgust and pleasure and everything for that was your sullied and dirtied skin touching him. That was you, and those terrible shameful words that spilled from your tongue that made him shudder and caused his heart to quicken. 

His face grew impossibly hotter than before. 

You hooked your legs around his thigh, pressing your knee between his legs firm enough to still him. The dryness of your hand tugging the warmish pulled skin of his cock sent his mind into a haze. 

The horrible rhythm of your hand against his was so good, and he wished he could just disappear right then and there. 

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he was so relieved there were no eyes watching him here. He was so relieved the cellar only had one door locked now. He made sure of it. 

If you commanded him to take, then he would ensure you wouldn’t leave this very room until you’d given him everything you had to offer. 

Heat sweltered between his legs, surging like flames licking up his skin. 

He wanted to speak. He wanted to order; he wanted to bend you over the table and take what was his. 

His ankles weakened when your fingers slipped over the head of his cock. Just at the thought of ruining you, a drop of cum squeezed from his slit, and your thumb smeared it all over him as best it could. 

His stomach heaved, basically convulsed, as you stroked him firmer and firmer until his limbs grew weak and burned from squirming and wriggling beneath you. He gave up barely minutes after you’d started, and now he only found it in himself to moan and moan over and over again beneath your hand like some dog. 

Wrong. 

He felt your lips trail down his neck. 

Oh. His hand rested behind your head and he tilted his head so your lips could drag against his flesh. It was awful. So, so awful his jaw clenched and his fingers twisted into your hair. 

Your teeth pulled at the taught skin below his jaw. 

“Don’t leave marks,” he breathed. He swallowed, and you followed the shape of his jugular with a graze of your teeth. 

This is awful,

His stomach churned. He feared he’d throw up with shame. 

Sunday was panting now, nails digging into your scalp. His teeth gritted and grinded behind his lips. He can’t do this. He can’t, he can’t, he can’t– 

Sunday managed to sit up shakily. 

“Put–” Another moan escaped his lips, followed by a trail of laughter at how ridiculous this was. “Put your mouth on me.” 

“Is that what the High Priest wishes?” Your lips followed along the soft skin above his collarbone. “He wants his dick sucked by a ‘whore’ on the streets? Will that satisfy you, Reverend?” 

Anger flared in his chest. His hand moved from behind your scalp to grasp your chin firmly. “You will do well to remember you are here to please me.”

And you would.

A dreamy sigh escaped your lips as he gripped your face hard enough to almost hurt. His nails dug into your cheek. “Of course, Reverend. Thank you.” 

 He let go of you. 

As obscene as it was, his hand twisted into your hair again and pushed your face towards his lap. 

This was only slightly better. How he could pull and tug you where he wanted. He was here to take; isn’t that what you said? 

Still, it was obscene. Grotesque. Disgusting and muddied and it’s so, so hot down here. For a moment, he feared Hell, for maybe the world below the soil had risen to take him and you into the earth. 

It would be what you both deserved. 

He felt your tongue first. Awful thing, your tongue. If he’d had it his way, it would have been torn from your mouth the second you stepped into his church this morning. 

It didn’t feel as awful as he knew it was when the wet muscle dragged along the head of his cock. The tip of your tongue nestled upon his slit, and it was so hot, and he almost lost his mind trying to remove what was left of his clothes on his person. 

He did not. 

Though it was dark, and he could see the outline of you clearly, he refused to let him feel more of your skin on his. 

Your lips pressed a dainty kiss to the tip of his cock before they then wrapped around the head. 

Hot. That’s what it was. Sweltering, sweaty, sickening humidity crawling up his neck, like one thousand bugs twitching and writhing upon his skin. 

His stomach stuttered, and he felt your palms rest on his hips as you positioned yourself more comfortably to the side of him. You draped your stomach over his soft thigh to splay your hands over his torso. 

Sunday raised his fingers to bite down on the side of his hand to silence himself. There was no coming back from this. Exiting the confessional yesterday with filthy hands already destroyed him, and now something sour was pooling at the back of his throat at the idea of unlocking the cellar door and leaving. 

He couldn’t imagine how dishevelled and improper he looked. 

His wings fluttered when your mouth lowered further on him, and one of your hands abandoned his stuttering hips to thumb along the sensitive skin beneath his cock. 

You were consistent, licking up and down with your tongue in wet passes. It drove him mad. He preferred it that way, floating out of his mind, as your warm tongue covered the skin of his cock in your saliva. 

You tasted salt as his slit dripped pathetically, but you kept your lips zipped at teasing him any further. You could hear him above you, a panting mess, breathing all slow and heavy, of whatever he was an hour ago with a tight and twitch grip in your hair, so much so his nails had embedded themselves into your scalp. 

His hips stuttered forward when you pushed your mouth further down his cock.

You drooled around the skin, slicking his thighs with spit and his own cum, as you willed your breathing through your nose. Surprisingly, instead of what any vile man would do and move his hips forward and fuck the back of your throat without a care in the world of your ability to breathe, Sunday waited. 

He waited patiently. Perhaps he was searching for signs of discomfort, or maybe he was adjusting to the heat of your mouth and your tongue stretching past your lips to run along the swollen veins of his cock, but either way he waited. 

He was more or less hesitating. 

He felt so disgusting and hot, but your mouth was so warm and his breathing shook more and more and the air felt trapped inside of his lungs. 

It’s so hot. 

Your tongue dragged up a swollen vein alongside his cock again and Sunday hissed, holding your hair tight as a warning. Watch yourself. He was afraid of how difficult it was to allow your mouth to do its own thing; how desperately he wanted to feel the back of your throat. 

You would let him. You had promised him you’d let him take and take and take until there was nothing left of you. 

The hand in your hair served more as a gentle encouragement than a forcing manoeuvre. He was swollen. He could feel himself bursting at the seams. 

Instead, he searched for a distraction. “Come–” His breathing stuttered. “Come here.” 

You pulled off of his cock. 

You hummed curiously. 

One of his hands was following the gentle curve of your spine, dipping lower and lower towards the back of your thighs. Instinctively, you moved closer towards him. 

But still, you managed, “you don’t have to touch me, sire.” 

“I want to hear you,” he whispered. 

His hand snaked around your front and steadily undid the button at your waistband. The zipper followed next before his gloved fingers disappeared beneath your underwear and delved between your thighs. 

He wouldn’t take the gloves off. He couldn’t. 

The feeling of the scratchy cotton against your clit sends you into overdrive. 

You part your thighs to allow his fingers to tease up and down your slit as you trace the underside of his cock with your tongue. 

His hips remained still. 

You felt he wanted to. How he desperately wanted to grab your face through how his hips tremored and twitched around your mouth. How he wanted so badly to bury his cock in your throat and feel you choke and splutter around him. 

You moaned around him, and Sunday hissed again, this time lower, and it almost served as a warning. Your pleasure, for this moment, would come after his. 

Still, you grinded down on his fingers as he rubbed your clit in quick and light circles. Your breathing stuttered, and he dared to guide your head just an inch lower around his cock. 

His thighs began twitching. 

“Oh…” It’s breathy and light and warm, what spilled from his mouth. His fingers pushed back what strands of hair had fallen in your face. “You–” Words didn’t escape his lips properly, and all that tore from his throat was a dreary and miserable whine. 

You keened over his fingers. The cotton was good, though now his palm was soaked. 

You whined stupidly when his hand abandoned your clit, before your muffled disappointment was replaced by a pleased hum when he pushed a finger inside of you. The glove slid in with embarrassing ease, and Sunday flushed at the feeling. 

You squeezed around his finger, drawing him in further. 

Your lips were growing desperate around his cock, tongue flitting out again and again to taste the cum that streamed from his slit. 

“I–” Oh, God. The room was spinning. “I can’t–” His stomach heaved when your tongue grazed along the swollen vein before you drew backwards and licked harshly along his dripping slit. “I can’t–” 

He dragged his cock forward into your mouth again and again. Not enough to touch the back of your throat with the tip, but enough to knock the air from your lungs with every push. 

You learned quickly that Sunday preferred your mouth and tongue remain relatively still and open for him. 

He preferred to control how he fucked into your throat, holding onto the back of your head as gently as he could—you dutifully ignored how his nails stabbed into your scalp. 

It was easier for him now to take what he wanted. 

You’re so wet. He could hear it, even if he hadn’t even bothered to strip you of your pants. It’s obscene, and his cock hardened even more at the sound. 

His rhythm remained the same. He’s quick, much unused to the wet heat soaking around his cock, and more so worried about how the head rubs along your tongue. 

But you’re so obedient like this. So pliant and warm with his hand between your legs teasing that gaping and soaking hole. And it’s so warm and hot and yes, yes, yes, come on–

“This is–” 

Your eyes fluttered open to acknowledge him. 

His thighs twitched around your head. 

He let out a shaky gasp. 

His hand loosened around your skull. You drew back only just and mused a simple, “take what you need.” 

He needed you. 

He smelt wine from how you’d smashed the bottles onto the floor. Sacred, important wine that you’d tossed aside like you’d thrown his blazer to the floor and the golden medallion on his breast. 

It filled his senses, blurred what little he could see, and he slid his cock on the curved line of your tongue again and again and again and again and again. 

Two fingers, soaked in your slick, abandoned in teasing your hole to ghost over your clit again. 

You’re so good. So good to him. So hot and heavy. So pretty. And you sound beautiful. Your muffled groans were like music. Like the music he’d listen to in the privacy of his home. 

He felt bliss. Heavenly bliss. 

His stomach lurched at the debauchery. How awful you were, how you made him feel alive in his own skin. 

And nobody had ever made him feel this way. And he loved it. Every second, even if his flesh warped and his organs twisted in loathing. For himself, for you, and those pretty lips wrapped around his cock. 

His hand carded over your hair with care. 

His fingers teased at your clit in horrible horrible circles that made your hips twitch towards his hand. You were grinding over his palm now in steady back and forth lines. 

So good. 

He couldn’t even think. Nothing but stupid moans pushed past his lips, and he was almost deep enough to reach the back of your throat. So, so close now. 

Your tongue was so hot it almost hurt. The noises, and the dripping of your saliva down to his thighs, made his hips squirm beneath your hands. Filthy. It’s all dirty here. 

He felt after this he’d have to scrub himself until his skin withered and only bone was left. 

You hummed. You pulled off of him again. When he mumbled a string of disappointed gibberish with his eyes squeezed shut in frustration, you whispered, “are you close, Reverend?” 

Heat crept up his thighs and down from his stomach. 

You thumbed the swollen veins and cooed at his slicking cock. “Are you?” 

“Finish this,” he whispered harshly. “Finish me.” He tugged on your hair gently, guiding you down toward his cock once more. 

Excitement bubbled in your stomach. 

Your tongue flattened against the head of his cock. Your spit slid down his skin as you buried him deep in your mouth. Maybe you pushed too far, because you gagged around the skin close to the base. 

Your nose just barely grazed the supple flesh of his lower belly. Your hand wrapped firmly around what skin you couldn’t reach. 

He’s delicious. He was so heavy in your mouth and warm and his cum smeared thickly over your throat. 

Sunday’s hips rocked forward as deep as he could possibly bury himself. You take him in and suck. The wet slurps of your tongue make his skin burn hotter. He feared he’d faint, or melt, soon. Like a candle. Like the votive candles upstairs in the–

His mind kept trapping himself of the main hall upstairs, and the thousands of eyes peering down at him. 

Drool and cum dyed your lips with a shimmer. You were growing more and more desperate and there was a concerning and lonely ache between your legs somewhere deep inside of you. Your lips sucked a tighter seal around his cock while you kept your tongue flat for him to slide his cock over it. 

Sunday’s fingers tightened in your hair. 

“You–!” He tried to tell you you were awful. This was wrong. This was disgusting, and vile, and you were just a wretched streetwalker tempting him for a thrill. 

He said nothing. He couldn’t. 

He stiffened up again, and his thighs locked around your head. 

And then, his cock jerked in your throat, and he came. 

A long and broken sob echoed in your ears. 

You held his hips still as he squirmed and wriggled beneath you, salt coating your throat in streams as his chest and stomach heaved with his heavy quickened breaths. 

His head was swamped with a haze, like a thick foggy mist clouding over his senses. 

His skin almost melted off of the muscle in his body. He felt like the countless votive candles still burning on the floor above, with the statue of Xipe, and the hundreds of eyes painted on the walls– again. His mind reeled back again. 

 Sweat dripped from his flesh like wax. 

Sunday held a vice grip on your hair. His other hand between your legs had stilled for the moment, though he could feel you still grinding onto the soaked material of his glove. 

“Good,” he mumbled. He was petting your hair. He swallowed hard to ignore the ache between his legs. “So good.” His words were slurred, and amidst the darkness, what he could see swirled into a muddied watercolour piece. 

He was drawing in sharp inhales that whistled through his teeth while you cleaned him up. Your tongue traced the angry red flushes and patches along the sensitive skin, following every drop of cum that had fallen past your lips. 

Sunday let go of your hair in favour of feeling his racing heart beneath his chest. It ached and thumped with need. 

He was sensitive. He’d been wriggling the entire time, but now his hips couldn’t keep still, and he couldn’t stop himself from following your tongue with his cock. 

His breathing stuttered loudly as he dragged the skin over your tongue. He wasn’t sure if he wanted you to open your mouth again, but at the same time, he was afraid he’d grow tremendously addicted, and you’d both remain there a lot longer than he would’ve wished. 

So, he pulled away, as difficult as it was. 

Guilt steamed in his stomach like a hot iron sliding over his belly and scorching his flesh. 

He felt you swing over between his thighs as your mouth, sticky with cum and spit, abandoned his cock and trailed kisses up his torso. 

Sunday’s free hand grabbed your chin when your lips bumped up against his jugular, pulling your mouth towards his. 

He tasted himself on your tongue, but he avoided it as best he could. His hand between your legs pressed firmly against your clit, and your body twisted and grinded and squirmed on his gloved palm. 

He almost felt bad. 

Almost.

A string of bubbled gasps and whispers of worship escaped your lips, but they fell on his deaf ears. The smell of wine was stronger here with your heart pressed to his. His thumb teased your clit as best it could with how you moved against him, and his glove was soaked in your slick. 

He was furious with himself, and yet he also found himself not caring as he did. Maybe it was you; maybe you were muddying his senses. Maybe he’d go home tonight and stab a blade through his chest and ruin the awful guilt-stricken beating muscle beneath his ribs. 

For now, as you had wished him to, he’d indulge. 

He’d take. 

Your fingers tightened their grip when they flew to his shoulders. The linen of his loosened shirt crumpled and wrinkled beneath your hands. There was a strain behind his arms as you pulled harder on him, pleading beneath your breath. 

“Was that enough for you, Reverend?” you whispered to him. Your lips were pressed against his. That same squelching sound between your legs, and Sunday could feel his cock hardening as it did the night prior. 

He said nothing. The air was thick with the scent of his skin, and yours. 

You felt the flutter of feathers brush along your cheek. 

“I’m–” 

Sunday swallowed when he felt your stomach jolt against him. “I know.” 

“I want your devotion, Reverend,” you admitted. How debauched to whisper things like that against his lips. He knew you wrong, and yet his heart raced at the thought. At the idea of disobedience. “I need you.” 

It was very well possible down here. No prying eyes, no other members of the church. 

Just you, and him, in the mellow darkness, rocking against each other. 

His fingers quickened and you almost cried. 

He feared then, and now, that you did receive devotion. 

Instead, to hide the burning shame in his stomach, which only grew between his legs, he rested his forehead against yours and sighed shakily. For a moment, there was the faint glow of his halo, and the distant sound of a bell toll. You just saw the outline of his hair. 

Your fingers brushed past his wings blindly.

They passed through the ring of light behind his head. You felt nothing but warmth on the pads of your fingers. 

“Go on,” he breathed. “Let go.” 

And you did. 

Your stomach pressed to his in a harsh arch and your nails raked upon and wrinkled the back of his dark shirt even further as you came. 

Bliss and sugar clouded your head like fog. 

His wings fluttered behind him in a panic when one of your hands hooked around the base of the clipped wing of the pair. You whispered his name like a prayer, and it hurt when he kissed you. It burned on his lips like flames, and he loved it. 

Too much. 

And yet not enough. 

Sunday felt you weakly try to crawl on top of him, but he pushed on your shoulders gently until you rocked backwards. He held you up as best he could on shaky legs as you both rose from the table. 

The wood was covered in sweat and condensation and heat, and Sunday couldn’t bring himself to tear his mouth off of you. Wine. Wine on your tongue like blood, and he couldn’t stop himself. 

Heat burned in his chest, and his stomach, and it steamed to his head and rushed up his neck in bubbled waves. 

He grabbed you by the collar of your crumpled shirt and pushed you against the table. He felt weak, his bones rattling beneath his skin and his blood boiling, and there was anger there, but also something else and it scared him. 

Perhaps you picked up on it. 

He heard you laugh, even as he forced your stomach further into the edge of the table. 

“Blessed Reverend, did you fall in love?” 

His blood ran cold. 

He couldn’t possibly call it that. He knew it wasn’t true for you, either. The way you looked at him threatened more than love. 

It can’t be love. He’s not allowed to love. 

His heart frantically raced in his chest. His fingers trailed from the back of your collar to the small of your back, and he pushed and pushed until he had easily bent you over the expanse of the table. 

He was panting. You could hear him somewhat close to your ear. 

“No,” he answered, but he sounded unsure. “But you did, didn’t you?” 

Another breathless laugh. You heard the jingle of his belt, and his gloved hands slid up the back of your thighs. He’d managed to wedge one of his legs between yours, but it didn’t nothing to quell your squirming. 

His touch was soft. Too soft to the point it tickled your skin with feather-light strokes against your legs. 

One of his hands wrapped around your front to feel blindly along your cheek. He grabbed your face tight, and he felt your heart thrum in your throat. 

You felt him roughly tug off your pants and they fell to a pathetic heap on the floor. You kicked them away, and they fell into the pile close to his discard clothes.  

“Spread your legs.” 

You were panting, laughing, as he squeezed your spit covered chin in his gloved hand. The soft and soaked cotton was rough, pinching against your flesh. His breath was so hot down your neck.

You let out a droning whine. 

He clicked his tongue, and the firm hand pushing you into the table pinched the back of your thigh. You cried out, and your leg twitched instinctively. 

“I will not ask twice,” he whispered into your ear, lips hot on your skin. 

Weak in the knees, and your stomach pressed hard and flat into the edge of the table, you shakily did as he said, hesitant with the warm hand that remained on the back of your thigh less he reel back and bruise it. 

He did not. 

He seemed pleased, though he did not voice it.

A gloved thumb exposed the sensitive skin between your legs, and you outwardly flinched forward on the table when his finger grazed over your sensitive hole. 

Cold. It’s so cold, and he’s slowly drawing circles around your entrance. 

You could feel yourself clenching, trying to entice him inside again. 

His thumb pushed into your cunt, and you let out a hum. You almost squealed when the tip of his finger brushed against your walls. 

“Is this not what you came here for?” Sunday asked. “To ruin yourself?” 

“I’ve already ruined myself,” you said meekly. His thumb pushed deeper to his knuckle, and you mewled. “Thank you, Reverend.” 

Ever the gracious Bronze Melodia, and despite your willingness to be pliant for him, he still asked for your wellbeing. To seek in your pleasure, because he knew no better. 

“And have you found the relief you’ve sought?” 

You didn’t want him to care, but there was a burning in your heart, because he did. 

You let out a throaty hum. “Almost.” 

You heard his teeth grind behind his lips, and his thumb abandoned your hole, smearing slick along your cunt. The soaked cotton caught on your clit and you moaned. “Filthy.” 

He’s so angry. Heat flared in his chest. 

You felt him burning, his thighs slick and trembling on the back of your legs. 

Impatiently, you canted your hips back into him, and he gasped out of shock and a shameful delight when your slickened cunt dragged against his cock. 

Your hips rocked against his again, skin sticking with sweat to his hip bones and he throbbed. His teeth gritted hard enough to almost crack his teeth. 

His hand moved from your chin to press flat on your stomach. 

It’s so hot. He could feel your skin radiating off of him. And it was overwhelming, like he’d been thrown into a sauna with no water for relief.

He wanted to fill you with cum. 

It hurt to think. He shouldn’t think. All he should do is fuck you until there’s no other man out there for you but him. 

And you can never have him. 

So he can keep you here and watch you pine and chase after him, and he’ll deny you every time. And make you ache and suffer for what you’ve done to him. 

But for now, the aching and twitching in his cock made his head spin every time he slid himself upon your slit. Back and forth and back and forth and–

It’s so hot. 

He felt his mind twisting and melting beneath his skull. 

Desperately, Sunday gripped the base of his cock and shakily guided the tip to your aching hole. His other hand abandoned the warmth of your stomach trapped against the table. 

You mewled when he stretched your hole as wide as he could with splayed fingers. A dribble of slick escaped you, and he could feel you clenching already. 

Your toes curled in your heels. One of your shoes comes off, and he feels the slide of the embroidered stockings against his leg. 

Those same stockings with that pattern he saw in every single embroidered table runner in the church, and at home, and it made his skin crawl. 

“You’ll let me enjoy myself, Reverend?” you whispered behind you. 

Sunday pressed you further into the table and rocked his hips against yours. “You’ll lay here and take me.” His tip kissed the entrance of cunt. And then, with one hard exhale, he slowly canted his hips forward towards your thighs. “That’s what you wanted.” 

You hummed and slackened against the table. 

Hot. He’s so hot inside of you as his twitching, creaming cock splits your hole wider. The veins run along the stretchy walls and slip further inside of you. 

He throbbed when you felt his hips press against your ass. 

Sunday was already panting, holding your hips in a tight grip that loosened as he bottomed out. You felt him bend over you, his stomach jolting against your back as he tried to hold you still. 

He was squirming, wriggling like a fish caught on a hook. You were so warm, and you dripped and squeezed around him, and he couldn’t possibly pull himself any closer to you. He wanted your skin to fuse with his in a tangled mess of grotesquery. He wanted you to assimilate and merge beneath his skin. 

This cannot be love. 

Possession flared inside of his stomach. 

He was trembling. His cock twitched with need inside of you, and you let out a moan.

“I’m–” He shakily exhaled against the nape of your neck. His face was burning with shame. 

You could feel it on your skin. “I’m right here.” 

He pressed inside of you deeper. Deeper, deeper, deeper. He wanted to press all the way to your womb and leave a permanent imprint of his cock that left you with an empty ache for as long as you lived. “This is wrong.” 

You hummed in acknowledgement. “But you love it.” 

And he does. 

Sunday slowly pulled his hips away from your ass. So slowly, and he felt one of his traitorous awful hands reach blindly for yours to hold it. You squeezed his hand in response. He held on tight. 

Then, he slammed back into you. 

He grew breathless almost immediately, and the air was knocked from your lungs. Your hips smashed into the edge of the table. 

The ache was good. 

You murmured praise, and his cock grew impossibly harder as he reeled his hips back and filled you again. 

He’ll take good care of you here. He knows as much. Your skin is so, so hot, and his cock is so warm and snug inside of you, and he felt his mind growing muddy all over again. 

Sunday rocked his hips quicker, his knee almost knocking against the table by your hips. 

So good. 

His bottom lip quivered. One of his hands dragged up from your hip and slid up beneath your ruined shirt. He pressed you down against the table as flat as he could. 

So wrong. 

He’s wrong. You’re wrong. You’re both sick, and ungodly, and corrupt. And you both belong to each other. He belongs to you. As depraved as you are, he feels he is worse. He wants to drag you to his bed and satisfy himself again and again, but he knows he can’t. 

So he takes you here, again and again and again. 

His cock buried itself impossibly deeper with every imprint he left inside of you. His tip kissed as far against your walls as it could, and his hips tremored with every grind of his hips against your ass.

He felt like a dog. Like some pathetic mutt mounting its mate. 

But that’s what he felt he was in that moment: pathetic, weak, and some mindless man with his brain in his cock. 

The bones of your hips were aching, snapping back and forth into the edge of the table, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care for the fire surging in your veins. 

Your body felt numb, like you’d been burned one thousand times over, and then had ice poured over you. 

It’s awful, and yet you felt so alive. 

Your hand was shaking in his when you murmured, “let go. Let me touch myself, sir.” 

His cock squeezed against a particular spot inside of you, and you couldn’t see straight. 

Your ears were ringing a tune you couldn’t place your finger on, and your clit throbbed with every brush of his cock against your walls.

In response, he held that hand he held still against your back. He silently allowed you the reprieve of his touch when your fingers curled around his thumb, and he did not pull away. 

The scratch of his shirt against what parts of your spine peaked through your pulled shirt. 

You shivered, even more so when his lips delicately lingered beneath your ear, and his hot breath fanned over your cheek. 

This is wrong. It’s wrong how good he feels. 

It’s wrong how you clenched around him, sucking him in impossibly deeper to the curl of your warmth around his cock. 

He fucked into you again. 

His tip was burning with need, and his stomach twisted and turned at the thought of it. Wrong, and filthy, and–

You let out another plea. “Le’ me touch myself, Reverend.” To hammer the nail in the coffin, you then murmured, “oh God.” 

It’s the need that made him crack. It’s the idea of just how tight you could be if you were to cum all over him. How he could watch that gorgeous spine unfurl in front of him, how a melody would spill from your lips only for him to hear. 

The sounds are disgusting, but somehow so invigorating. Wet and loud and so grotesque. 

Sunday breathed out, and he sounded excited. 

“You sought relief in me, you wretch.” he breathed into the nape of your neck. Sweat dyed his lips with salt. “Do it, then.” 

When he removed his hand from your wrist, he felt your knees buckle. He pushed your hips further upwards into the table, for if you both fell any closer to the floor, away from the sky, he was sure he’d never wake from this horrible dream ever again. 

Your hand slipped down your front towards your swollen clit. 

His cock fucked into you harder, chasing the feeling of your cunt squeezing around the sensitive flesh, struggling to pull tighter. So filling. It’s so good. It’s so good it’s shameful, and he understood in that moment why sinners confess to him in the booth, go home and use their wives, and then repeat this endless cycle of debauchery. 

As guilty as he felt, he sank his teeth into the exposed skin of your shoulder where your shirt fell. 

You’re so beautiful like this. 

Moaning and begging for more of him and covered in sweat. 

His halo was glowing. 

He swallowed the saliva building in his mouth when he pulled his teeth away from your skin. “You’re disgusting.” It’s weak, it’s pathetic, it doesn’t even sound like he believes it. 

Because you’re not. You’re like an angel, laid flat on the table, offering your very being to him. 

All you were missing was a halo—distantly, he knows you’d never receive one. 

You let out a squeak of laughter, breathless. Your hand stirs between your legs. You manage to crane your neck and make eye contact with him. His halo lit up his pretty, flushed face in a shimmer of gold. “Are you close?” 

His feathers fluttered at the question. His face grew brighter. 

Your cunt squeezed around him again, and he let out a gasp at the tightness. “Very.” He was embarrassingly close, and all you’d done was squish him tight inside of you. 

Your cunt squelched around his skin, and Sunday whimpered. 

You squelched against his cock as he drove in further, desperately chasing that heat the coiled tighter and tighter in his guts. 

He was afraid he would grow addicted to this. He was already growing addicted. He squeezed his eyes shut, and he gripped your hips tighter. 

Sweat stained his neck, and heat trapped beneath his ruined shirt. He’d have to burn his clothes. Plead for a new uniform entirely, and perhaps for salvation. 

If anyone found out about this. 

His stomach turned. 

His cock slipped out of you and he grunted. Sunday fumbled with himself trying to slot back into your twitching hole. “Stop wriggling.” 

Your cunt trembled as he stretched past your walls again. Your fingers tremored over your sensitive clit. “Haha. Of course, sir.” Breathless, slurred, beautiful. 

He could listen to you moan in his ear all day. 

His skin stuck to yours like glue, sweat and slick soaking his thighs as he pushed into your guts as deep as he could. 

As dangerous as the thought was, he wanted to fill your womb with his cum. His cock throbbed and throbbed and as he drew closer and closer to the edge, he fucked you harder and harder. 

He felt the heel of your shoe slide up against his thigh soaked in sweat. It was exciting how you treated him like a prince, and also like the dirt you stepped in with these expensive shoes. 

Sunday shivered behind you, his hands trailing over the curve of your ass up to the base of your spine. Pretty, pretty skin. So soft and dainty, and so warm and supple beneath his fingers. 

He didn’t deserve to feel like this.

He buried his lips into the nape of your neck again, gently brushing kisses along your sweaty skin. His tongue pushed past his lips, and he tasted salt and the lingering scent of your perfume. 

Sunday slammed his hips against your skin again. And again– and he felt he was losing his mind. His hands gripped your hips so tight you were excited to see the bruises he left on you in the morning. 

You were moaning and moaning against the table. 

One of your hands had balled into a fist and viciously smashed against the table. “Harder, priest. Make me yours.” 

“You are mine,” he reminded you coldly in your ear. Still, his hips made a resounding smack against your ass. 

Sunday moaned when he felt your walls twitch around him, so tight he felt as though his blood circulation was being cut. It made his head swim. He pawed at your back desperately. 

So close. 

You purred praises again as his cock head kissed that sweet spot inside of you, and your fingers drew sloppily around your clit. “Just like that, Reverend.” 

Sunday’s halo almost blinded you with how bright it was glowing. 

He wanted to mumble that he loved you. He wasn’t sure if it was the true, or if he was stumbling over his tongue with these disgusting falsities and delusions.

Like the delusions that played in his head of waking up next to you, crawling between your legs and tonguing at your cunt, pleading for relief while his cock stirred in his pants. 

“Let me fill you,” he pleaded quietly. “Please.” His tongue was watering, and he wiped drool off of his lips with his shoulder. 

He heard you sigh dreamily, cut off suddenly with another harsh thrust of his cock inside of you. 

He was twitching. 

So fucking close. 

Come on. 

Shame. Shame poured from every pore in his skin like pus. 

“Of course, sire. I’m yours.” 

In your final confession, Sunday’s chest heaved. His gloved fingers gripped your hips enough to still them entirely, staining the unmarred skin with dark bruises and blood. 

His cock twitched deep inside you, his mind twisted, and he came. 

He filled your womb, just like he wanted to, and he moaned so pathetically against your neck you cried out for him. His breath fanned over your sweaty skin as he trembled above you, hips smacking weakly against your ass as he emptied himself. 

“God.” It spilled from his lips. 

Blasphemous. Awful. He’ll never see the light of day the same again, 

He clawed at your hips, pressing you down into the table. 

His heart lurched when you squeezed around his sensitive, aching cock still buried deep into your cunt, drooling around the skin as you came again. 

He felt slick dribble past the rim of your hole, sticking to the soft supple skin of his thighs as he kept himself snug inside of you. 

Warm. 

He exhaled shakily. 

The praise you had whispered had gotten to his head. Heat swelled in his face, and Sunday swallowed thickly. 

After a moment, you sighed, just as wobbly as he was, and raised a hand to pull his chin down just enough for you to crane your neck to the side and kiss his cheek. 

You could feel his heart bashing against your back as his chest rested on your spine. Truthfully, you could’ve stayed this way with his slowly softening cock deep inside of you. 

He pulled out slowly, almost unwillingly, and he heard you hiss lowly. His cock slipped from your cunt, and his slit was still aching as the remaining cum bubbled and dribbled down the side. 

Sunday did nothing. 

He removed his hands from your hips and you finally pushed yourself up from the table. He heard the creaking of your bones and a sigh of relief as you stretched your skin. 

His heart was still racing. He felt nauseous. 

His gloves were sticky and tacky, but he still refused to touch your properly. 

He heard you shift, sitting up on the table and gliding a gentle, but firm hand up and down the stretch of his spine. His wings fluttered at the attention. 

His halo was still glowing, just enough for you to see that he was masking his guilt and staring far too long at the wall of the cellar. After what seemed like hours, he fumbled to pull his pants back on at the very least and attempted to straighten his rumpled shirt. 

In that time, he’d heard the clicking of your heels as you’d fussed to dress yourself as best you could without moving from the table. 

Devotion. 

Your hand was now soothingly rubbing his shoulder. 

His knees buckled. 

As he slowly lowered himself to the floor, he turned to face you and slotted himself in between your legs. This was devotion, right? His gloved hands slid up your thighs as you watched him curiously. His knees hit the floor first, and his lips trembled when he leaned forward, pried your thighs further apart, and kissed your clothed cunt until your hips twitched and you giggled. 

You playfully shoved his head away with a push to his forehead. 

Sunday rested his head against one of your thighs and continued to tremble. His face was still

coated in sweat. 

When your hand gently reached down to pet his hair, he shakily smiled. 

He’d find later after he finally pulled himself from the cellar and locked it, and trekked back up the stairs to the main hall, that the murals were not looking at him. The statue was still, just as silent as it had always been, with six eyes shut to the world with their unhearing ears and unspeaking mouths. 

All that would watch silently was a bird. A small, deep purple nightingale that watched from afar. 

For now he walked down the aisle after you silently, holding onto his coat and his white overthrow. The golden badge that usually rested on his breast weighed heavy in his hands like led. 

He did not dare to gaze at the walls. He held onto the key for the front door as if it would disappear from his grasp. 

It was cold outside, and the wind blew steadily as he shut the door behind him before securely locking it tight. 

He heard your heels stop. 

“Reverend?”

Sunday wanted to bark at you. What more could you possibly want from him? You’d taken everything, and now he knew he would go home like a ghost trekking a lonely path, fall into bed, and tremble all night as his fingers felt blindly for the waistband of his pants. 

Instead, he only hummed. He kept his hand firm around the giant brass knobs of the church. 

“Don’t fear Hell.” 

The words did not assure him, but for that moment amidst the wind, Sunday listened. 

He felt a hand rest on his shoulder, squeezing the sore muscles tight. 

He stiffened at how warm your skin was. How he desperately, desperately wanted to feel your lips on his again. 

He refrained. 

Sunday barely turned his head to look at you. 

“I will be there with you.” And that, you could promise. 

Daringly, you pressed a chaste kiss to his hair before you let go of his shoulder, and left. 

He only glanced away for a moment, but when he peered back down the street, you had disappeared, along with the faint clicking of your heels. 

Sunday’s shoulder remained warm long after you had let go. 

And that warmth remained present for every day that you did not return to him. 

But, distantly, with every service that he swears he sees your face, or the pattern of your stockings in the embroidery, he knows the fleeting feeling of your warmth is enough.