#everybody must get stoned

[weaselle]

it was too much i had to make my own post

line cook here. ACCURATE

if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.

it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.

The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.

So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.

(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)

Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.

More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.

So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.

all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.

while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays

Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.

Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.

The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.

Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself

you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)

If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.

Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there

Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in

oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?

water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.

Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!

The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.

You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)

THE POINT IS

by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.

For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.

if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.

you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.

See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?

those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...

And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...

Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.

In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO

open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.

Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.

It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.

but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.

[aurlthatyoufindfunny]

You know that those are the only three songs in the playlist because on SpotifyTM, if there are less than four songs on a playlist than only the first album art will be displayed on the playlist's graphic.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

I am not the asshole, and I think this whole thing is stupid, but I was promised that if I sent my side of things to this blog I could pick the hotel for our honeymoon, and I am marrying a man who once tried to take me BACKPACKING of all things, so this ask has become a necessity. In light of that:

AITA (I'm NOT) for planning the seating for our wedding in a logical way?

I got engaged in June, apparently in part because of my partner writing in to this blog (I don't know how to find or link to his posts, but I'm the man who got the cat to bite him, if that rings any bells?). At any rate, for the past ten weeks, I've been in the beginning stages of planning our wedding with my fiance, whom I have been secretly attempting to remove from the planning process as much as possible. I have ALREADY been given a list of his must-haves, and I AM incorporating as many of them as our budget allows. This has NOTHING to do with the emotional side of the event, and EVERYTHING to do with the fact that this is an idiot with no real planning experience or taste who thinks he knows more than me.

For the most part, this has worked very well. I'm the one who's been collating all the contact information for things, so I just replaced all the emails for the tacky companies with false addresses, responded to his inquiries as the companies to say the date was already booked or the price was outside our budget, and let him filter his way to the ones I DO like on his own. I also made a fuss about being "willing to compromise" on the few things he's picked I'm completely fine with in the hopes I can use it to make him compromise later, and have been humming portions of the songs I want on the playlist in the hopes he'll think he came up with the idea to include them himself.

None of this is the real problem. The PROBLEM is that he is deliberately ruining my seating chart, by moving our horrible friend's seat when I'm not looking.

The man in question dated both of us at one point in our VERY early 20s (both ended BADLY), is generally the messiest person we know, and will almost certainly get sloppy drunk and try to make a speech IF he does make an appearance. I'm banking on the fact that he won't, because he's also ridiculously wealthy, and will almost certainly send us some very lavish gift in lieu of coming.

He is SUPPOSED to be sitting beside my fiances aunt, at the same table as his grandmother, his work friend, and her girlfriend, because all four of these women are stone cold terrors who I believe are more than capable of keeping him in line on the slim chance he does come. My fiance INSISTS they won't be able to have any fun if they're running interference all night, and keeps moving him to sit at the head table instead. You know, where WE are. I finally caught him switching the label magnets on my planning board last night, and confronted him.

I tried leveraging how much I've been compromising already, that he's almost certainly going to RSVP no, and that I shouldn't have to deal with him on our big night. My fiance said he knew about all the fake emailing and such, and told me, and I QUOTE: "Look, the mind game shit was hot when it was just about the colour scheme or whatever, but I actually care about this. So you can suffer with everybody else, or you can do the normal thing and not invite a guy you hate to our wedding, you weirdo."

I said that if I did that, it would take out half his groomsmen, he called me an asshole and said I should go explain this to "literally any rational adult" so they could tell me I was in the wrong, and now here we are.

Would you recommend calling my fiance's bluff, since he doesn't want the man sitting near us either? Or should I focus on ensuring he'll turn down the invitation no matter what, so the matter of where he WON'T be sitting can be a moot point?

What are these acronyms?

Original post

The update

[inthedayswhenlandswerefew]

Cannibals [Chapter 1: Bruises and Bloodlines]

Series summary: You are his sister, his lover, his betrothed despite everyone else's protests; you have always belonged to Aemond and believe you always will. But on the night he returns from Storm's End with horrifying news, the trajectories of your lives are irrevocably changed. Will the war of succession make your bond permanent, or destroy the twisted and fanatical love you share?

Chapter warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), Aemond stressing everybody out, Aegon hating his life even more than usual, RIP lil Luke Strong, don't touch bats in real life or you will get rabies.

Word count: 6.3k

💙 All my writing can be found HERE! ❤️

Tagging: @themoonofthesun @chattylurker @mrs-starkgaryen @moonfllowerr @ecstaticactus

🦇 Let me know if you’d like to be added to the taglist 🦇

Cannibal, a noun: one that devours its own.

~~~~~~~~~~

He’s back, you can feel it: a sensation like falling, the impact of Vhagar’s claws against the earth. You get glimpses like this, unpredictable flashes of intuition, a window into the contents of his mind or the scenery he is draped in like how branches hang from a willow tree. You set Blueberry down on the windowsill, where he skitters to the edge and swoops out into the night, chasing white specks of moths and lacewings. Then you leave your bedchamber to meet Aemond in the hallway.

One of the maids is there, trying to be patient as she paces with Maelor in her arms. He’s just like you were at that age: a demon who never sleeps. His white-blonde hair is disheveled, his eyes rheumy and pink from crying in protest. But then they brighten.

“Red Red!” Maelor swipes at you with tiny, grasping hands.

“What are you doing awake?” you coo at him, beaming. “It’s nighttime. You aren’t a bat. Are you a bat, huh? Are you hiding a pair of wings somewhere?”

He giggles as you pretend to inspect him. The maid smiles.

“If you don’t have any wings, I’m afraid you’ll have to go right to sleep. That’s the rule for humans.”

Maelor trills in his toddler lisp: “Then I want to be a bat.”

“Okay! I’ll find some bugs for you to eat.”

“No!” he squeals, dismayed. “No bugs!”

“In that case, I guess you’re a human after all. If you go to bed now, you can help me collect seashells tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Maelor agrees grudgingly, and the maid ferries him away. From the Godswood, great horned owls hoot. One of the knights of Aegon’s Kingsguard, Sir Willis Fell from the Stormlands, passes by on his patrol and gives you a quick nod, polite but a bit avoidant, awkward truths he pretends he can ignore. He doesn’t ask if you need assistance or why you’re awake at this hour. He already knows. He vanishes again, his white cloak swishing behind him like the tail of a wolf or a jackal.

You lurk at the top of the Grand Staircase shrouded in shadows and shifting firelight, feeling night wind skate over your cheek like children playing on a frozen lake, and that breeze is not here but outside where Aemond must be trudging across the courtyard towards the royal apartments in Maegor’s Holdfast. You drum your fingertips impatiently on the stone banister. When at last he appears—first only a silhouette in the darkness, then rippling into color under the torches, black leather and silver hair—Aemond is drenched with rain and ascending swiftly, two stairs at a time.

You grin as you take a step down to him, slinking, conspiratorial. He told you all his plans before he left; he tells you almost everything. “How was Storm’s End?”

But Aemond doesn’t answer. He blows past you and stalks towards Criston’s chambers, rainwater dripping from his hair and littering the floor with tiny, transluscent pools.

You turn to watch him leave, mystified. “Aemond?”

He says without stopping: “Go wake Aegon and Mother. Tell them to meet me in the small council chamber. I’ll get Criston and Grandsire.”

“Why?” Again, Aemond ignores you. This is unusual. You bolt after him, closing the space between you until your fingers catch his wrist. “Aemond, what—?”

He grabs you and pins you to the wall, the stones cold against your belly through the crimson velvet of your robe, Aemond’s hips braced against yours, domineering, demanding, promising what he will do for you after. You close your eyes and sigh shakily—a savoring, a surrender—and then he is tender, turning your face so he can kiss the apple of your cheek. He murmurs, warm and low: “Do as I ask.”

You nod. “Okay,” you agree in a whisper. Aemond releases you and vanishes to rouse Criston. You break for Aegon’s chambers.

There is a woman in his bed, snoring softly and with long auburn hair spilling over her bare shoulders. He has endeavored to spend less time drinking and philandering since becoming king, and yet…it is so rare for a creature to change its spots or stripes or scales. Aegon has always been this way. Without his vices, you would not recognize him.

You kneel beside the bed and rest a palm lightly on Aegon’s damp forehead. You have to be careful when you wake him; he flinches, he startles, he has too many memories of being ripped from sleep by bruises and crescent-moon indentations of fingernails. “Aegon? I’m really sorry, I know it’s late.”

He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know it’s you. “Fuck off,” he groans into his pillow.

“Aemond’s back from Storm’s End, but something’s wrong. He wants you to meet him in the council chamber.”

Aegon looks up and blinks drowsily. Moonlight spills into the room through gaps in the curtains. He smells strange, like lavender; that must be from his companion. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“He didn’t tell you?”

You shake your head.

Now Aegon is alarmed. The dark, cloudy blue of his irises is rapidly clearing. “Alright. Give me five minutes.”

“Wash the girl’s perfume off you so Mother isn’t quite so disappointed.”

Aegon chuckles, rubbing his eyes; something about the way he does this reminds you of Maelor. They are both just boys; they are both so incendiary and yet so vulnerable. “Get out, whore.”

You tousle his hair roughly, smack a kiss onto his sweat-salted temple as he tries to shove you away, snicker as he hurls pillows at you. You are slipping through the doorway when you hear the woman in bed mumble: “Huh? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Aegon says. “Thank you very much for your company, your skills were more than adequate, now kindly find your way home…”

You hurry down the hall to Mother’s chambers. There are seven-pointed stars on the walls and the furniture, green tapestries everywhere. She will always be a Hightower, averse to Valyrian oddities and suspicious of that sinister, ancient magic. She does not understand it; she tries to overlook it in her children. It’s the only way she knows how to love them. You sit beside the indistinct shape beneath the blankets, sinking into the goose feather mattress, and nudge what you guess is her shoulder. “Mother?”

She stirs, and then her face fills with concern when she sees you in the dim light from her candles. “What’s happened, darling? Are you ill?” You are prone to headaches and chills and nausea, you always have been, maladies of the flesh that are either a blood inheritance or a curse from bad stars. Once when you were very young, Aemond pushed you into a cold stream during a royal progress to the Vale, and you had been laughing when Criston leapt in and dragged you from the water; but two days later, you began burning up with a fever so hot they thought you might die. Aemond had slept on the floor beside your bed, and when you shivered so violently your bones ached he climbed in beside you and held you until you could sleep again; and later when his eye was cut out on Driftmark and he was half-mad with pain, you did the same for him.

“No, Mother, I’m fine. It’s Aemond.”

She sits up and studies you. “Aemond?”

“He’s back from Storm’s End, and he wants to talk to you.”

“To me?”

“And Criston and Aegon, and Grandsire too.”

She doesn’t understand. “Now? Why? What’s wrong?”

“I have no idea.”

“What did he say?”

Everyone expects you to already know, but you don’t. “I think he wants to tell all of us at the same time. In the small council chamber.”

“Now?” she says again, puzzled, still half-asleep. “What is so important that it can’t wait until morning?”

“Mother, there are only so many ways for me to express that I don’t know. If I had any indications at all, I’d share them.”

“Alright.” She’s smiling; you have amused her. She throws off the covers and touches her bare feet to the floor. “Pass me my robe. It’s on that chair over there.” And of course, the swath of velvet you hand her to wear over her nightgown is a deep emerald green: the color of fertile fields, not blood or beasts.

By the time you and Mother arrive together, everyone else is already taking their places in the council chamber. Aegon is at the head of the table, spinning his stone—a black sphere of volcanic glass—and peering around boredly. Grandsire and Criston are greeting Mother and yawning into the backs of their hands. No one has woken Helaena, and yet she is here, settling nimbly into the chair beside Aegon. He gives her a brief, fond glance, noting that she is fidgeting with a small oak dragonfly he once made for her. Aegon carves wood, Helaena embroiders, you shatter seashells with tiny hammers and use the shards to make mosaics, miniscule yet unladylike violence. Aemond has books and swords in place of crafts. And Daeron…you assume he must have cultivated some artistic talents while away in Oldtown—he was always so imaginative as a boy—but you would not know them. You see him so rarely now. You sit across the table from Aemond. He is the only attendee not dressed in nightclothes. His black leather tunic is still layered with a sheen of rain.

Grandsire lowers himself gingerly into his seat, grinding arthritic bones that pain him. The nights have grown chilly, even here in the south. Winter is coming, the maesters warn. His gaze passes over you and Helaena—the two of you aren’t really supposed to be here, but you’ll be permitted to stay if you cause no trouble—then he smirks humorlessly at Aemond. “So you failed.”

“No,” Aemond says, and you think as you look around the table: No Orwyle, no Lannister, no Wylde, not even Larys Strong. What does Aemond not want them to know? “Lord Baratheon has agreed to marry his youngest daughter to Daeron in one year’s time. He was very enthusiastic about the match.”

“Great!” Aegon declares. “Although, personally, I am of the inexpert opinion that this could have been discussed over bacon and honeycakes at breakfast…”

Grandsire snorts, derisive; he disapproves, though perhaps he is not surprised. He says to Aemond: “You were sent to negotiate your own marriage, not Daeron’s.”

Aemond shrugs, as if it happened by coincidence. “That was Borros Baratheon’s preference.”

“It was your preference, you mean.”

Aemond is careful not to reveal any emotion. “Daeron is young, but he already has a reputation. He is known to be handsome and chivalrous and…” A wave of the hand as he searches for the right word. “Unmutilated. It is not so difficult to imagine why a father would believe him to be a more worthy son-in-law.”

“It doesn’t matter to me, one Targaryen is as good as the next,” Aegon says, and of course nobody pays much attention.

“Perhaps Borros Baratheon’s judgment has been contaminated by certain disturbing and disgraceful rumors,” Grandsire counters and glares at you. You don’t reply; there’s nothing you can say that would help. Everyone knows, but it rarely spoken of aloud, as if it is a ghost nobody wants to inadvertently conjure. All your life there has been this perpetual rebalancing of scales: someone mentions a diplomatic match for you, you stall and Aemond makes excuses, Grandsire and Mother try to convince him, Aemond is immoveable and they aren’t willing to invoke his wrath. Vhagar is the subtext of every dispute. They need her, they are terrified of her.

Criston attempts to deescalate. “Aemond’s task was to ensure the Baratheons’ loyalty to the crown, and he has accomplished that. Perhaps it would be wise to move on.”

“Fine, what else?” Grandsire snaps. “You assembled us here for some reason, I presume. It must be urgent to merit a meeting now. It better be urgent, or I’ll be paying people to shake you awake during the hour of the wolf for the next month.”

“It is urgent,” Aemond says softly, then pauses, gazing down at the ball in front of him, white quartz dappled with blue. Everyone watches him. You share a glance with Aegon; he is curious, but you have nothing to offer him. You turn back to Aemond with bewilderment in your face, furrows in your brow.

“Aemond?” Mother prompts.

He looks at you, only for a second, but you’re thunderstruck by what you see in his remaining eye. You have rarely known Aemond to be afraid, but he is right now. What happened? you think, horror making the blood in your veins cold and slow and heavy. What did he do?

Aemond begins: “Luke Strong was at Storm’s End too.”

“What?” Grandsire says, more baffled than worried. “That runt? Why?”

“He’s a weasel,” Aegon mutters, spinning his ball again.

“Rhaenyra’s son?” Mother asks. “She sent him there all alone? How peculiar. The way she was always hovering over him while they were here, I’m amazed she let him out of her sight for that long. How old is he now? With that plain, ever-anxious, pug-nosed face, he looks like a little boy—”

Aemond says: “He was sent to remind Borros of his old pledge to uphold Rhaenyra’s claim. But Luke had no incentives to offer.”

“And so Lord Baratheon rejected him,” Grandsire surmises.

Aemond nods, though perhaps halfheartedly.

“Well, good,” Grandsire says, surveying the table for agreement. “That’s good, right? With every house that refuses to aid her, Rhaenyra will be more likely to accept our terms, and we can resolve this question of succession without any bloodshed.”

“Meleys and the Dragonpit,” Aegon reminds him.

“Without further bloodshed,” Grandsire amends.

Mother and Criston concur, but you’re watching Aemond. He hasn’t responded yet. Mother’s gaze flits between the two of you. She is somewhat sympathetic to the affinity you share, but she doesn’t understand it. More than anything, you get the sense she believes it is something you must be saved from. The Hightowers could stomach Aegon and Helaena’s match—Viserys was still healthy enough to insist upon it, and the couple so seemingly platonic it was easy to forget they were married at all—but they have no appetite for a desire that defies political expediency, that burns scorching and wild.

“Aemond, did you quarrel with Luke?” Mother says, her tone patient in an I-won’t-be-mad-if-you-just-tell-me-the-truth sort of way. “I know…your eye…” She touches her own face, wincing at the memory of how he suffered. “Did you seek restitution of some sort from him? Did you make accusations?”

“We…exchanged some words,” Aemond admits. “And then…when Luke left on Arrax…” There is a lull, and everyone stares at him. “Vhagar and I followed.”

“What?!” Grandsire exclaims. “You threatened Rhaenyra’s son?!”

“I…” Aemond closes his eye, then after a moment opens it again and continues. “It was my intention to frighten him, that was all.”

“Idiot,” Grandsire hisses. “You know better. You’re too well-educated to act like you don’t. Now, that one…” He jabs an accusatory finger at Aegon, who is caught off-guard, what the fuck do I have to do with this?

Criston says, more gently: “That was very dangerous, Aemond.” Mother covers her mouth with one hand and shakes her head. Her long coppery hair hangs in uncombed waves, still tangled from sleep.

“So what happened?” Aegon asks. “Where’d you chase him to? All the way back to Dragonstone? You must have scared him to death.”

Aemond chooses his words with great care and agonizing slowness. “Everything was under control. Then Arrax…he unleashed his flames on Vhagar, and she…she attacked.”

Everyone is silent. After a moment, Grandsire says: “What do you mean she attacked?”

“She…” Aemond gestures vaguely with open hands, hands that have held you, caged you, dragged you, pleased you until you were forged to him like a blade to a hilt. Again, he looks at you, and what is he asking for? Help, empathy, compassion, forgiveness? “She bit Arrax.”

“She wounded him?” Aegon says.

“She devoured him.”

Criston blinks. “So…Arrax is dead, and where is Luke now?”

Aemond laces his fingers together on the table like he’s praying. “He’s…he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Mother echoes.

“Did you look for him?” Grandsire demands. “I mean, did you even bother to search for Luke, or did you just leave him in the Stormlands somewhere? Did he fall into the sea, could he be wandering around in a forest? If Luke is injured, we should send out people to find him. We could hold him as a hostage.”

“No, you don’t understand.” Aemond’s voice is frayed. And now for the first time tonight, you finally know what he’s going to say. Your eyes snag on Aegon’s, and he reads the terror there, and then it hits him too. “There is nothing to search for.”

Mother is gaping at him, the unwanted knowledge seeping in like rain through earth. “Nothing?”

“There is no body. Pieces, perhaps.”

Unspeakable, suffocating dread fills the room, and then Grandsire leaps to his feet and slams his fists down on the table. “Useless!” he roars at Aemond. “Worse than useless, a saboteur, a curse, a plague, you have ruined everything your Mother and I worked for, Rhaenyra was considering our terms and now you’ve condemned us all!”

“You killed Lucerys Velaryon?” Mother says, stunned. Her large dark eyes glisten with unpardonable betrayal. She’ll never look at him the same way again. “You murdered Rhaenyra’s son? A prince, the heir to Driftmark?”

“It wasn’t murder,” Aemond pleads. “It was…it was combat, it was a battle—”

“A battle with that child?!” Grandsire thunders. Helaena begins to cry, and Aegon places a hand on her wrist as his wide eyes dart around the table. “Everyone’s seen him, it’s no secret, and not a single person in the realm would be delusional enough to believe a clash between Vhagar and Arrax was anything but a slaughter!”

“Aemond,” Criston says quietly, appalled, astonished.

Aemond can’t meet his eyes. He peers down at the table, and despite everything—what will happen to us, what will happen to me?—there is an ache in your chest like cracked ribs trying to heal, a profound lightless distress, a ricochet of the pain he’s feeling. “It wasn’t my intention to harm Luke.”

Grandsire shouts: “Did you give Vhagar the order or not?!”

It feels like a long time before Aemond answers. “No.”

“Oh gods,” Criston says as he sinks down in his chair, turning to Alicent. She has hidden her face with both hands and seems to be weeping.

“So you can’t control Vhagar,” Grandsire seethes. “You ride the largest and most dangerous dragon in the world and you can’t stop her from eating people.”

“I never would have purposefully—”

“But you created the situation! You pursued Luke, you tormented him, and surely somewhere in your sick brain you considered that you were endangering his life! And now… now…now Rhaenyra will be merciless, she will never submit, she will endeavor to destroy us all!”

“It will bring more allies to her side,” Criston says. “They will believe she was wronged, and she will wield that weapon to great advantage. She is cunning.”

“What about your family, Aemond?!” Mother sobs, her face a hectic, bloody pink. “You and your brothers will have to go to war, you might be maimed or butchered, and your sisters and I…we could be taken as prisoners, we could be executed for treason!”

“That will never happen,” he swears; but his pale blue eye is misty, and he bites his lips together so they won’t tremble.

Mother is desperate, tears streaming down her cheeks “What can we do, Father? How can we salvage this?”

Grandsire points to you. “She must be wed immediately. We’ve already waited too long.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Aegon says, but no one is listening.

“Mother,” you beg. “Please don’t let them—”

“She will be married to whoever can help us in this,” Grandsire says. “The Lannisters or the Redwynes or the Swanns, perhaps the Butterwells or the Mootons if that will coax them to our side—”

“Then the realm will burn,” Aemond replies darkly, leaning over the table. “But I’ll come knocking on your door first, Grandsire.”

Grandsire looks at him, startled. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“Shall we find out?”

“Otto, please,” Criston says, holding up a palm. Then he considers how to dissuade him. “All things considered—the military strength that Aemond has brought to our side, the devotion that he has shown this family, present circumstances notwithstanding—he has never asked for much.”

“He asks for the one thing we cannot give him,” Grandsire replies, then turns to you. “What do you think about what Aemond has done? This recklessness, this monstrous error?”

He rarely asks for your opinion about anything. This is not a question but a summons: you are supposed to disavow Aemond. You are the one who can hurt him best. Instead you say, though it’s not what you truly feel: “Luke was an enemy. He perished in combat.”

Grandsire, Mother, and Criston all begin yelling at once. Helaena shrinks into herself, her dragonfly made of oak wood clutched to her chest. Aegon whispers something to her—you can leave, you believe he says—but she shakes her head no. You are stoic as the adults berate and implore you, and perhaps it’s strange that you still think of them that way since you’re an adult now too, and yet…their gravity seems so much heavier than yours, their tethers to the earth overgrown with weeds and moss.

“I’ll gut you myself!” Grandsire screams at Aemond, empty threats woven from helpless terror. “I’ll lock you in the Black Cells, I’ll have you banished to Dorne—!”

“I’ll throw a feast!” Aegon says suddenly, and the others go quiet.

“You’ll what?” Grandsire snarls.

“Little Luke Strong is dead and that’s a victory for our side. There’s no other way to look at it.”

“You intend to celebrate this calamity?”

“What else should we do?” Aegon asks. “Apologize? Go crawling on our bellies to Rhaenyra for forgiveness? No, she’d burn us alive. If it’s done, we must embrace it and use it to bolster our cause as much as possible. It was a battle and a victory. Aemond is a war hero. Onto the next objective.”

“What a disaster,” Criston mutters, rubbing his forehead. “Yes, that might be the only option we have.”

Mother clasps the small seven-pointed star that hangs from the gold chain at her throat. “I must go to the sept. I must pray for our survival.”

Grandsire glowers at Aegon. “You are a humiliation.”

“I am the king. I want a feast.”

Grandsire sighs deeply, pushing his chair away from the table. “I suppose I have letters to write.” And then, to Aemond: “When your sisters are captured and enslaved and married off to whichever Black loyalists will pay Rhaenyra and Daemon the most for them, I trust you’ll remember who’s responsible.”

Aemond gets up and storms out of the small council chamber. Mother mops the tears off her face with the sleeves of her green robe. Criston takes one of her hands and is murmuring promises, assurances, perhaps lies. You, Aegon, and Helaena say nothing. None of you can defend what Aemond has done, but you won’t denounce him either.

Then Grandsire grins at you, a cruel bestial flash of his teeth, an old grizzled animal tough from too many winters, icy wind shrieking through the chambers of its heart. “Oh, are you pretending that you’re not about to run after him?”

You don’t reply. But you rise from the table and flee as Mother watches you, her vast eyes swimming with misery.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s a game with five pieces: the green snake, the yellow butterfly, the blue wolf, the red bat, and the purple shadowcat. They chase each other around the board, and if one of the other pieces lands on the same spot as yours then you have to go all the way back to the start.

Daeron is the youngest, but he almost always seems to win; some people are like that, luck flows like a river in their veins. Helaena enjoys playing even if she finished last. Aegon feigns disinterest but never declines an invitation, sliding his snake across the spaces with his index finger between slurps of wine. And sometimes Aemond is ruthless, taking every single opportunity to land on your spot and send your bat hurtling back to the beginning, sawing your legs out from under you, shattering your hopes like glass again and again until you are so frustrated you can feel embers glowing dry and searing in your throat.

But other times, Aemond pretends to misread the dots on the dice so he lands either too close or too far away and you are spared, and if you win he lies and says you deserve it.

~~~~~~~~~~

He is waiting at your bedroom door; when you are close enough to breathe him in, you taste rain and soot. Perhaps—if it isn’t your imagination—you can even detect the coppery tinge of blood, splatters of little Luke Strong soaked into the black leather of his tunic or his coat. You remember that boy you barely knew, more a phantom than flesh, a wraith who stole Aemond’s eye and then was spirited away to Dragonstone to escape retribution, a tiny god who Viserys worshipped from afar the same way he never stopped loving Rhaenyra. All you knew of your father was absence, and this was a sadness but a relief as well, because you could not escape the sense that if he was there you would only disappoint him.

“What is wrong with you?!” you whisper savagely. Aemond smiles and reaches for your face, but you swat his hand away. “Don’t fucking touch me. You’re insane, you’re going to get us all killed—”

He drags you into your bedchamber, kicking the door shut behind him. He’s lean but wiry, all muscle, and when you fight him—although you both know you want him to win—it is in vain. He tugs your hair out of its braid and hauls you across the room, pushes you down on the bed, rips off his coat and tunic and then follows you onto the mattress. You clamber away until you hit the headboard, your spine flat against the wood. As he closes in on you, your palm cracks across the blind side of Aemond’s face, and he grins. You have often thought that it should have been reversed, you wed to Aegon and Aemond to Helaena. You would not be so scandalized by Aegon’s vices; Aemond would be chivalrous with a meek, compliant wife. But alas, Helaena was born first, and the arrangement was set in stone long before any of your natures became apparent.

Aemond unfastens your robe and reaches under your nightgown of white cotton. “Open your legs.”

“No.” It is always this way with him; it always has been. You fight and he vanquishes, and both of you enjoy it.

He forces your thighs apart and you moan, the resistance bleeding out of you, you muscles going soft and yielding, Aemond radiant with this clandestine conquest on a night when nothing else is under his control. He can only love you when you’re tamed and tractable. Sometimes you think he likes that you don’t have a dragon, that your egg never hatched, that all of the unclaimed beasts denied you. You will always be vulnerable, powerless, at his mercy.

You cling to Aemond, your arms around his neck. He knows exactly what you need because you’ve already done this, more times than either of you could count: everything besides what could get you pregnant, and not just because Aemond would rather slit his own throat than have bastards like Rhaenyra’s. It’s something you’re both saving until at last you are married, and no one except The Stranger can separate you.

You gasp and Aemond growls through your hair: “Shh. Hurry up.”

“I missed you.”

“I know.” He doesn’t have to say it back; if he hadn’t missed you, he wouldn’t be here right now, two fingers buried to the knuckles and the heel of his hand grinding against you, almost, almost, almost…

The bedchamber door bangs opens, and Aegon saunters in with a goblet of wine, emeralds gleaming on the rim.

“Stop,” you tell Aemond, but he knows you don’t mean it, not really; beneath your nightgown his hand works faster, more roughly. You sigh and kiss him, deep and messy, surrendering, very close.

Aegon takes a swig of wine, licks the stray drops from his lips, and frowns down at you both, slightly intrigued but mostly nauseated. He cannot fathom a hunger for his own.

Aemond looks to him and says casually: “Do you want something?”

“I do, actually,” Aegon replies. “Were you planning to thank me?”

“Thank you for what?”

“For what I did for you in the council chamber, obviously. For the feast.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Thank you, Aegon,” you say, and you are sincere.

Aegon raises his goblet in a mock toast. “That’s very kind, Red, but I wasn’t asking you.”

You whimper against Aemond’s throat, embarrassed but in ecstasy, not able to hold off much longer. “Aemond, just thank him.”

“Well I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment.”

“That’s okay,” Aegon says. “I can wait.” He sits at the end of the bed, then bounces up and down a few times. “Oh, this is a great mattress! Very soft, like sleeping on a cloud! Why isn’t mine this nice?”

“Probably because you’ve ejaculated all over it five thousand times,” Aemond says.

“Oh, right,” Aegon jests. “Not quite that frequently, I think.”

“Aemond,” you plead breathlessly. “Just say thank you. Get rid of him.”

Aemond sighs and, with his hand still beneath your nightgown, turns to Aegon. “Thank you.”

Aegon smirks, mischievous. “And how will you repay me?”

“By overcompensating for your shortcomings in order to ensure the enduring success of our family, as I have done since birth.”

“Of course,” Aegon says, though a bit distantly.

Aemond glances down at you and then asks his brother: “Were you hoping to join us?” It’s not a serious question; if Aegon ever tried to touch you with genuine desire, Aemond would break both his arms. Fortunately, Aegon is the closest thing you’ll ever have to a real brother, and thus his limbs are safe.

Aegon chuckles and stands. “No, this is a bit unsavory, even for my taste.” He gulps the last of his wine and says as he leaves: “Enjoy, freaks.”

“Bye, Aegon,” you call, laughing. He waves and then closes the door behind him.

Seconds later—twenty, thirty, time evaporates like mist burned away at dawn—Aemond is making you come, and then you are yanking off his trousers and taking him in your mouth, and when you do this he always has to be touching you, smoothing back your hair, telling you how well you’re doing, and even though he warns you so you can pull away if you choose to, tonight you swallow every last drop of him and think of the sea that Lucerys Velaryon’s scraps tumbled into, the mineral bite of salt and metal and blood.

But when he finishes, Aemond doesn’t collapse like a dead man as he usually does. He throws you onto your back, licks and nuzzles his way down your breasts and belly, parts your legs and murmurs against the inside of your thigh before he begins again: “I want you, I want you, I want you, I can’t wait much longer.”

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s one of your earliest memories. You are in the garden, and it’s a blazing hot day, and a million varieties of blooms cut through the greenery: goldenrods, orchids, lilies, irises, daisies, bellflowers, red roses, blue forget-me-nots. Butterflies whirl in the air and land on Helaena’s outstretched fingertips. Grandsire is slapping Aegon and calling him an imbecile for trying to pet a bumblebee, and Aegon is wailing: But it’s fuzzy! Why can’t I hold it?!

You must not be very steady on your feet yet, because Aemond is pulling you up by both of your hands and asking: If I ran, do you think you could catch me?

Yes, you had said, and then you’d staggered after him as he darted into the foliage. Under the shade of blossoms and shrubs that towered so much taller than you, you tripped and fell and scraped your palms, one of them bleeding from striking a pebble. You cried out, but no one was there to pick you up: no Mother, no Criston, no Helaena or Aegon. You wept pitifully, thinking—as children do—that you would be lost forever, that you would never see your family again.

But Aemond came back for you, and he studied your bloodied palm, carefully plucking out every grain of brown soil; and then he kissed it, held it against his cheek, painted himself with the scarlet ink of your arteries and veins.

See? he had said, smiling so you knew everything would be okay. Now we’re both red.

~~~~~~~~~~

“How are the babies?” Aemond asks when he arrives, dressed for the feast in a green tunic embroidered with shimmering gold threads in the shapes of dragons, flying, shrieking, breathing fire. Helaena made it for him, of course. Each of you have wardrobes full of garments she’s sewn, a collection of Aegon’s woodcarvings scattered around your rooms, seashell mosaics hanging from walls: insects for Helaena, Sunfyre for Aegon, heroes from myths for Aemond.

You grin over your shoulder. “Come see them.”

It’s dusk now, so they are leaving the roost you keep in one corner of your bedchamber, covered with dark velvet to blot out light and sound as they slumber. Aemond kneels beside you and holds out his hand so River can scurry from your palm into his, clawing with his hooklike appendages. All of your bats are named after blue things—Blueberry, Sailfish, Clear Sky, Blue Jay, Misty, Dragonfly, Lagoon, Lightning, Kingfisher—just as Aemond’s hawks and war horses are given names like Fox and Rusty and Cherry and Pomegranate. He is the only one who defends your pets when Mother threatens to banish them back to the Godswood or the seaside cliffs. You have no dragon; you must find solace with some other creature that inspires dread and revulsion. But you think they’re beautiful, and strange, and fearless, and wrongly unloved.

“Let’s move things along,” Aegon says as he appears in the doorway, wearing all green except for the Conqueror’s crown. “No one can dig into the roast boar until the guest of honor enters the Great Hall. So I need Aemond to show up immediately.”

“Almost ready,” Aemond replies without looking away from River, who is now scrambling up his forearm. Lighting takes flight and attempts to land on Aegon’s shoulder; Aegon yelps and flings him away.

“No, you can’t!” you say, rushing across the room to scoop up Lightning and cradle him in your arms. Fortunately, he is unharmed. “I told you, Aegon. They have tiny bones, you have to be gentle or you’ll hurt them.”

Aegon shudders. “They’re fucking disgusting. Rats with wings.”

Aemond sets River on the windowsill, goes to his brother, shoves him hard; Aegon’s back hits the wall. His crown is knocked from his head and clatters against the floor.

“I’m not apologizing,” Aegon insists. “I’m a victim of grave injustice. I was attacked. That thing could have bitten me.”

You say to Aemond in High Valyrian: “Should we do this for a while to annoy him?”

Aemond smiles. “Yes. We should talk a lot. A great amount, we should talk. Very much talking.”

“Hey, hey, stop that,” Aegon says.

“Aemond, what else will they serve besides boar?”

“I heard something about pies.”

“What kinds of pies?”

“Who knows. Maybe apple, or cherry, or plum…”

“Oh, I adore apple pies. Perfect for autumn. I could eat them all day.”

“I could eat you all day.”

“Don’t tease me, or we’ll never make it to the feast.”

Aegon is distressed. “I mean it! Stop!”

“They aren’t saying anything important,” Helaena assures him as she swishes into your bedchamber wearing a butter yellow gown. In her hair are gold pins shaped like ladybugs.

“Okay, but what are they talking about?”

Helaena says matter-of-factly: “Sex and pastries.”

Aegon groans and rolls his eyes. “Why did I ask. Okay, time to go.”

You walk together to the Great Hall, where Helaena and Jaehaera and Grandsire will dance in the center of the floor, and you and Aemond will whisper in shadowy corners, and Mother will peer around worriedly with her large watery eyes as Criston yearns to console her, and Aegon will smile patiently and never scold Jaehaerys when he gets underfoot or spills his pomegranate juice.

~~~~~~~~~~

It’s another game, or maybe it’s a ritual; you are a little girl again, and every once in a while, without any warning, Aemond will shove you into a closet or a heavy wooden trunk and lock you inside. You will scream and pound on the door, but no one will hear, and you will spend what feels like hours alone in the darkness, wondering if this will be the time when you are not discovered until you have died of thirst and hunger, until there is nothing left but bones.

Then you hear approaching footsteps and Aemond lets you out, and when you strike and scratch at him he embraces you fiercely, like he’s a soldier who’s been away for a year or more; and he holds you until you stop fighting it and your heartbeat goes quiet in your chest.

[mehiwilldoitlater]

I literally grew up watching DBZ on Toonami reruns as a kid.. and it’s got me thinking…..

The Destined One (if you fight you know who to get the True Ending) receives Sun Wukong’s memories, but is clearly still his Own Self.. he gets to keep his individuality but now he has the knowledge and wisdom of Daddy OG Wukong’s previous experiences…

But what if….. it worked like a Namekian absorption fusion? Like with Piccolo and Nail?

like The Destined One literally Has OG Wukong chattering away in his head like a little subconscious Jiminy cricket.. but with more quips Less guidance and WAY more Shit talking. 

((Oh God, this thing is so breaking funny?! Like WHAAAAAA?Okay, okay, let me spice it up a little. Beware, slighty suggestive at some point))

After the Memories of Sun Wukong were bestowed on him, he became the new Sage (to the dismay of the Celestial Court). Everything seemed pretty fine with Yuán Fèn. He was strong; everybody accepted him as the new Monkey King, and his wish was to live happily ever after with you. 

At first, it was just a small thing—a small voice that he heard from time to time. Just like when you think that someone is calling you and then nothing! He blamed the successful events; he not even needed to let you worry about!

While he was stirring his own tea, sitting under the tree at your side, he heard it again.

"Young one!"

He stiffened his neck, looking around, but he came back to his tea. No one was calling him; it was the fifth time that day. How strange...

Then, things started to get REALLY strange. He started to hear full sentences, or after he had responded to them, he even received another remark!

"I can't believe you defeated my stone self with that stance."

"I can't believe that I'm turning into some kind of demented monkey with the old save powers."

"I HEARD THAT!!"

He suddenly loosed his own balance and started you and other young monkeys.

He thought he could handle it; he could handle a god as Erlang; he could handle this too!

He couldn't be more wrong. 

"You look awfully tried. Are you sure you're sleeping well?"

He just nodded, just hoping that the Great Sage could spare him some sleep in the afternoon from his continuous blabbering. 

At the end, he finally confessed everything to you. It was noble to know that he didn't want to obligate you to handle this thing with him, but instead you simply accepted it.

After all, you were soon to be King and Queen; you wanted to share his burden!

"Sooo...what does he say? About me, I mean..."

Yuán Fèn stayed silent, expecting something from the voice in his head.

"Umm...nice hips! She's going to bear a lot of kids, young one!"

"He said you're okay."

Things started to get strange when Yuán Fèn started to actually see him.

He almost had a heart attack the day that he saw him, and oh my, if he wished to get rid of him. 

You believed that it wasn't such a big deal; Wukong must have been a rational creature to leave your privacy alone! ....Wrong.

The sound of your sigh and panting emitted in your small abode. The only source of light is a small candel, near the end of it. 

His hands held your hips, while your lips kept on caressing his cheeks, leaving kisses and small bites. He tried to restrain a laugh, but the rumble in his chest took it away.

"Did you like it?"

He mewled, his tail moving restless around.

"I don't know him, but do I enjoy the view!"

Yuán Fèn suddenly screamed, making you fall from his hips, causing you to hit your head in the side of the bed, exposing in that motion your chest to the ceiling and to an invisible monkey that only the young one could see.

"W-WHAT THE -"

"DO YOU MIND?!"

"Uh, uh, uh, you should mind that boner in your thoughts! I think she would love to take care of that!"

And, while your lover tried to protect you from a pair of eyes that wasn't even there, you started to feel your desire and passion slowly fade away.

Things didn't get better, and now frustration started to get attached to you, like some kind of parasite. You were fed up, he was fed up, and Wukong... he couldn't find the situation more amusing.

"Am I in front of him?"

"Yes?"

"What does he do?"

"He's just...staring, just staring."

You clear your throat, while, only for Yuán Fèn, the old sage gave another bite to the peach, looking at the small human that was acting all big in front of him. You took enough control, and finally.

"Sun Wukong... I need to fuck, like for real. Leave us alone for... I don't know, 48 hours."

In his head, the poor monkey felt the great sage equal to Heaven laugh like never before.

@sleepingdramaqueen

@sun-jglim

@crimsonflameproxy

@everlastingmoonlightsworld

@biankanoir

@cromboloni

@miraclecherryblossomsblog

@masksandfeathers

@certifiedsimpinggalore

@cinnamonroll-anon

@justrandomlypassing

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@virtualexpertanchor

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@sleepydang

[harzilla]

So I got two asks related to the lost sibling AU and I decided to put them together. Nothing is set in stone in this AU.

In the famous words of Bartok the bat, Can only end in tears!

If we're talking the bioparents/bio family then a lot of them are shocked, thrilled, even in tears. The reactions vary depending on the family.

🌹Riddle struggles with actually telling his mother. His relationship with his mother is extremely complicated. He just had his entire world view turned upside down and coming to realize his mother has been abusive, and on top of that he finds out that he nearly killed his twin. It takes a long time for Riddle to finally tell his mother and Yuu's there to support him. The two hold hands as Riddle reveals the truth to their mother along with the DNA test that proves they're a match. Riddle's mother immediately going with the idea of Yuu moving back home and learning to be a proper Roseheart. Maybe even hating Yuu's adopted family and thinking they kidnapped Yuu. It's just snowballs into this huge fight between Riddle, Yuu, and their mother. It takes a long, long time before the relationship between parent and children is repaired.

🦁 The second ask specifically talks about Leona's family. While I think it was never stated if Farena was there(but let's just say he was), we know Cheka was. Cheka is, absolutely thrilled. "Who's this? You're a lion beastman too? Are you from the sunset savannah? You look a lot like Papa and Unca!" Leona pulling him off Yuu and grumbling at Cheka for overwhelming them. When Farena finds out he almost charges into the infirmary but Leona keeps him out. Yuu's been through enough already, they don't need to be dealing with Farena too. It isn't until Cloud Calling that Leona FINALLY introduced Yuu to his family in person and only because Yuu asks him to. He has no interest in dragging Yuu into the royal mess of his life and he's willing to ignore summons from his brother to do it. Farena's thrilled of course but Yuu's not exactly happy seeing the way Leona has been treated by the people he should be able to trust. Leona actually has to reel Yuu back from their anger towards Farena, Kifaji, and everybody else. Farena's feelings are mixed but he's happy to realize that Leona has somebody who genuinely sees him for himself. He realizes Leona's closer to Yuu in the short time he's known them, then he is to Farena.

Oh man. So I headcanon, at least in this AU, that mer mamas are fiercely protective of their kids and bigger then their male counterparts. I think Azul's mama and the twin's mama would both show up at the school because, hell or high water they are going to meet their long lost child! No noisy crowman is gonna stop them!

🦈🐬 The twins mama in particular is downright scary. Imagine this really tall lady showing up at NRC. She's really nice to the kids but when she meets Crowley she gets that look on her face and tone and ohh yes, now you realize that she's far more scary then the twins if she wants to be. She squeezes the twins excited to see them but they absolutely have to bring her to Yuu. I see it like when Sophie and her mom are reunited in Howl's moving castle. Excitedly yelling "my baby!" While practically tackling Yuu, crying her eyes out. Holding Yuu's face and bombarding them with questions. Were you taken care of? You look so small! Were you being fed enough? Do we need to send you an allowance? These clothes look dreadful we must get you a new wardrobe. Worried Mama mode activated. Mama bought ready to drag Yuu home but compromises by Yuu coming home during spring break. At least it gives them time to prepare Yuu's room.

🐍 Now, Jamil's family is probably the only ones who actually don't know. Jamil is willing to bury the fact that Yuu is his sibling because, he realizes that if he tells the truth, he's potentially locking Yuu into a lifetime of servitude. There's only a few people on campus who know the truth. Kalim absolutely knows but he promised Jamil he wouldn't reveal it, but it's like how he was willing to fight against Jade's UM because his conviction to keeping Jamil's UM hidden is that strong. Kalim would love to see the two being siblings openly, but he still tries in his own Kalim way

👑 Ohh, this one's interesting. So we know zero things about Vil's mother. So, in this AU, Vil's father Eric used a surrogate. The thing is, the surrogate hid the fact she was pregnant with twins(listen if Lilia can just find a baby and people are chill with it then we can headcanon how adoption and surrogacy works in Twst). Carefully orchestrating it so Eric only knew about one baby. Thus when the twins were born she handed over Vil and disappeared with Yuu. Nobody can track down this woman or the other baby. Eric and Vil never even knew another baby existed. So, imagine Eric's surprise when Vil calls him after book 6 asking if his father knew about a second child. Yuu finally getting to meet Eric in person, and he apologized to Yuu because he didn't get to see them grow up. Eric asking Yuu if it's okay for him to be part of their life. Probably one of the few times Vil has seen his father cry and possibly vice versa.

💀 Cue another excited mama. Oh Idia wants to not involve Yuu in the mess that is the Shroud family curse. But kind of hard, when their hair ignited into the signature shroud flaming hair during Idia's overblot in the middle of S.T.Y.X. She's so absolutely excited that she's trying to ask Yuu 100 different questions, you mean to tell me the Shroud curse didn't developed in Yuu until almost adulthood? Mama is very interested to know about Yuu and their life. Idia almost pities Yuu and Ortho's so excited because his family is all together again! Papa Shroud is much calmer at least.

🐉 Oh I've delved a lot into Malleus and Yuu. I was actually thinking what if... during book 7 when they're in the memories and meet Maleanor. What if she orders everybody to leave except for Yuu. Yuu's so confused because this woman before them feels so familiar, they just watched her nearly strike everybody down with lighting while she yelled at them but the vibe is completely different now. Maleanor being surprisingly gentle with Yuu. Through whatever magic it may be, Maleanor can tell. Yuu crying because Maleanor calls them her precious hatchling and tells them how much they've grown. It's after Malleus' overblot that Yuu finally gets to meet Maleficia. Maleficia who says that Yuu truly looks so much like Revern. Maleficia who welcomes Yuu home.

[munthersahweel1]

‼️Please Help Munther Sahweel Family 🙏

Help Munther to get him treatment

We are the Munther family, from Gaza, a family of 6 members.

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #256 )✅️

I have witnessed a tragedy in our lives in Gaza, where my family and I have survived many wars before. But today, we are facing the most dangerous and fiercest battle of the current war. The need is urgent for us, as we have nothing left and cannot secure our basic needs such as food, water, medicine and safe shelter.

Here is our story - On October 7th, our lives changed forever. My family and I left northern Gaza for southern Gaza, hoping to return soon, but that was not to be. Our home was surrounded and destroyed. Our home, once a bastion of hope, now lies in ruins, a stark reminder of our shattered dreams.

We left our home, and we left behind everything we had in our home: clothes, important official documents, literally almost everything - the magnitude of our loss weighed heavily on us.

Our home it was where we found hope, safety, and made precious memories. Losing it felt like losing years of our lives, leaving us adrift amidst the wreckage of our shattered existence.

I am Munther, I suffer from kidney problems (kidney stones) and chronic diseases (diabetes and high blood pressure). I face difficulty in obtaining the necessary medications.

My story with my sons, Karim 28 years old Information Technology major , Samir 26 years old, Bachelor of Accounting, Aseel 24 years old, studying business administration, and Layan 13 years old, a student.

We all feel psychological pressure and extreme anxiety. The war hasn't been limited to external attacks but has deeply infiltrated our daily lives. We search among the rubble for a little safety and the basic resources for survival. Every day comes with a new challenge that we must overcome.

As we sway amidst the rubble of shattered dreams, our souls wrestle and our hearts beat strongly challenging the ravages of war.

I need to build a better future for my sons, full of hope because we deserve life with all its meanings of comfort and peace.

Perhaps this fundraising campaign represents a light in the midst of darkness, it is indeed the only hope we cling to firmly.

I appeal to the world as a whole to hear my cry and the mournful cry of my family in Gaza. We need the helping hand that reaches out to wipe our tears and build a bridge to safety.

Your donation is not just a donation; it's an opportunity to rebuild life and brighten a better tomorrow. Be part of our hopeful story, for we need your hand to start anew.

The aim of this fundraising campaign is to save my family - we have no source of income to provide food, drink and medicine, this campaign is our only chance to survive, and I humbly ask for your help in this critical time.

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters, my number verified on the list is ( #256 )✅️

Donation link on GoFundMe

Thank you for your kindness and support.

[haunt3dh3art]

Born In Blood | Yandere Dexter Morgan x reader

i’ve been watching almost a season of Dexter a day now i’m on winter break!! i know you guys lurking in the Dexter community have been waiting for some more work, so this is for you <33 i'm also posting this on my ao3 page if you prefer that formatting - type in "haunt3dh3art" and you'll find me.

TW: Blood, slight gore, slight torture, mention of blades and rope, canon-typical violence, slight obsession hinting

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Chapter 1 - Silence

Miami is full of gorgeous, witty women, and plenty of them would love a piece of Dexter.

But, none of them have ever held his attention for more than a few months. He tries not to let his lack of emotions get in the way of relationships, but its like everybody he meets eventually gets the feeling that something is very, very wrong.

A sixth sense, like when a dog growls at the darkness. You can't see what they can, but go back the way you came anyway.

So, eventually, everyone leaves, as is the next logical step for their survival.

When Dexter first sees you, whether you are an "almost victim" of the Miami Metro's latest killer or someone he sees on the street, it’s like he forgets to breathe. His eyes squint, a darkness glazing them over and something changes. His Dark Passenger appears behind him, but Dexter pays no attention to the ramblings of his damaged subconscious.

For argument's sake, here, you present to him as a victim. Or you would have been, had Dexter not figured out the location of the killer's lair in time.

He's led to a decrepit church, stone bricks falling off the walls, thick ivy covering almost every surface he can see. He makes no sound as he creeps towards the entrance. Slowly, he pushes the door open - it makes a lowly creak and Dexter slips into the darkness.

There is no light here, no ceremonious candles for the next killing, no flashy weapons to be seen on many of the stone slabs Dexter passes. Then, he sees a soft glow in the back corner of the vast church.

A cellar. The trapdoor won't quite close, and a whisper of light is allowed to seep through the thin crack against the floor. Dexter lifts it with deft fingers, careful to not make a sound. His steps make no sound as he glides down the stone stairs down, down into the basement. It's cold down here, and the air is thick with moisture. His silence, although usually an upper hand on an opponent, was not necessary here.

Your guttering screams rang out through the entire lower level; as loud as they were, Dexter was left wondering how they couldn't be heard until down here. You sounded animalistic, clearly fighting for your life and barely hanging on. As he got closer to the awful sounds of clanging metal and splitting screams, a chill rose up on Dexter's skin.

Then, he heard the killer's voice for the first time.

"How stupid can you be? You're nothing but a sacrifice to me." A low voice cut your screams into nothing but whimpers.

The slow dragging of a metal blade rang out into Dexter's ears and he was glad he came more than adequately prepared for a fight.

The killer was one Joseph Butler, serial womaniser and priest. Clearly, God had abandoned this disciple. The victims were most often strippers caught in his charming web, or occasionally single women looking for human connection. They must have thought they had struck gold.

His call card had been arranging his victims' hands into a prayer stance, nailing nails through the palms to keep the pose in place, and deftly placing a barbed wire "crown" on the person's head. They were always sat upright, bound with rope to a chair and lathered in blood.

The blade was new - Joseph was on the cusp to evolve his method, but he would never get the chance.

Candles lit the basement with a warm light, contrasting the suffocating atmosphere. Dexter suspected Butler had been torturing you with hot wax, or something similar, perhaps flames and the heated blade?

There was only a cloth curtain separating you, the killer and Dexter now.

"These are your final moments on this demented Earth. I suggest you use them to say a prayer." The killer spoke.

Dexter pulled back the curtain with one finger and saw he had his back to him.

This was the moment.

Moving as a snake slithers, Dexter stepped towards your torturer, and injected him with a tranquilizer. He instantly collapsed to the floor, making a satisfying thud.

Dexter stepped over him, and reached for his pocketknife to cut you free of your binds. You began to scream again and writhed in petrifying fear in your seat.

It was now that Dexter, crouched to your level, could finally see your face. Butler had obscured his view of you before, but with him out cold on the floor, Dexter could take the time to look.

You, caked in dirt and filth.

You, a look of horror beyond comprehension etched on to your face.

You, born in blood, just as he had been.

The moment Dexter was to undertake his duty once again as the necessary evil of Miami, he paused. Each time he had a killer strapped to a table, he paused for a moment to collect himself and appreciate the serenity of the moment. Perpetually holding the blade above his subject's heart, the point positioned perfectly, quivering in the air for a second of peace.

It was this moment, as he looked at you, that the constant roaring and wailing inside his head fell silent.

His eyes were fixed on yours, searching for an avenue of the same peace. He saw oceans reflected in your eyes, deep and dangerous.

"Shh, shh, shh. I'm not going to hurt you, I'm getting you out." He pleads, leaning forward on his knees.

He places the cool blade of his pocketknife on the rope next to your skin, making a quick, efficient cut of each loop around your wrists. It's a welcome sensation, despite the distant threat of pain.

Your screaming subsides, replaced by hyperventilating. Dexter's eyebrows pull together as he quickens his pace cutting the ropes around your feet.

Butler was only beginning his spree, killing 3 women in only 6 weeks. You would have been his fourth, had Dexter not been 10 steps ahead of his own department.

'Clearly an amateur,' Dexter thinks. The rope was too weak to hold a victim who had fight left to give, but that's easier said than done.

Finally, you were free, and instantly pushed the chair back. It crashed on the floor with a loud bang, but Dexter paid no attention to it. His eyes were stuck to you, mesmerised by you, even in your condition.

"What are you going to do to me?" You whispered, rubbing your fingers over your aching wounds.

Some of the blood on your skin was still fresh, glowing a crimson red against the candlelight. Dexter shook his head.

"Nothing," He said. "But, you need to stay with me, here. I can protect you, keep you safe, but you have to stay."

Dexter never imagined this happening to him. He knew the chances of you trusting him were beyond slim, but he hoped that by seeing your torturer on the floor, knocked out by his hand, that you wouldn't see him as a threat.

Dexter watched you with bated breath, his hands tightly clenched into fists.

You didn't move, weighing your choices. Would you really survive if you ran? How would you know there weren't more of these psychopaths waiting outside, ready to pounce the second you walked out into the night?

You shook your head, pacing around the room.

The curtain was pulled in a circle around the chair and it waved in the air as you walked past it.

"What's your name?" You asked.

"Dexter."

Saying his real name out loud felt like a violation, a curse. Only people in his life knew his name. Were you going to be a part of that now?

You nodded and stopped pacing. Pointing at the killer, you asked another question. "What are you going to do with him?"

Dexter let his gaze break from you to the man on the floor.

He would be out cold for the next 7 hours at least, unless Dexter chose to wake him up sooner. However, on this occasion, he didn't have a plan. He had all the supplies needed for a killing in the boot of his car outside, but he hadn't anticipated for you to be here tonight. The timing of the killing wasn't quite right, and a sign that Butler was becoming a bigger problem than the Miami Metro could handle. The FBI would soon step in, and Butler would be out of Dexter's grasp.

"I'm going to make it look like you were never here, which is why you have to stay with me. I have to.. dispose of him, but it won't take more than a few hours." Dexter said, choosing his words carefully to not scare you even more.

He checked his watch. 10:47pm. If he was to kill Butler and get to the marina in time, the process would have to be quick.

The sun was beginning to rise earlier in Miami.

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[doyoulikethissong-poll]

Yes votes / Artist - Song title / Poll number / Showdown votes / * Showdown Winner / ¤ Ultimate Showdown Winner

95% A-ha - Take On Me #91 - 45.2% *

94,8% Boney M. - Rasputin #37 - 49,3% * ¤

94,7% Johann Sebastian Bach - Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 #405 - 13,1%

94,6% Beethoven - Symphony No. 5 #223 - 16,5%

94,3% Dolly Parton - Jolene #110 - 43,1% *

94,2% Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters #399 - 11,3%

94,1% Britney Spears - Toxic #04 - 51,9% *

94% Green Day - American Idiot #264 - 29,6% * ¤

93,4% Blondie - Call Me #373 - 31,7% *

92,8% The Rolling Stones - Paint It Black #236 - 20% *

92,5% Outkast - Hey Ya! #260 - 49,6% *

92,4% Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song #384 - 34,9% *

92,2% Ritchie Valens - La Bamba #381 - 13,2%

92,1% Coolio featuring L.V. - Gangsta's Paradise #414 - 19,2%

92% Fleetwood Mac - The Chain #116 - 44,4% * ¤ 92% The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army #268 - 19,7% ¤

91,5% Stevie Wonder - Superstition #261 - 15,9%

91,2% Scott Joplin - The Entertainer #418 - 7,1%

91% The Cranberries - Zombie #323 - 44,8% * ¤

90,9% Smash Mouth - All Star #336 - 62,2% *

90,6% Louis Armstrong - What a Wonderful World #301 - 20,9%

90,3% Michael Sembello - Maniac #227 - 6,2%

90,2% Dead or Alive - You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) #163 - 30,8% *

90% Andrew Gold - Spooky, Scary Skeletons #400 - 11,4%

-

89,1% Kansas - Carry On Wayward Son #171 - 51% *

89% ABBA - Waterloo #361 - 36,8% *

88,9% Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers - Monster Mash #401 - 14,9%

88,7% Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus #358 - 20,4% ¤

88,6% Bon Jovi - Livin' on a Prayer #307 - 25,1% *

88,3% Harold Faltermeyer - Axel F #289 - 18,4% 88,3% Rockwell - Somebody's Watching Me #394 - 8,3%

88,1% Shakira - Te Aviso, Te Anuncio (Tango) #425 - 6,9%

87,9% Madonna - Like a Prayer #313 - 34,6% *

87,8% The Weeknd - Blinding Lights #233 - 14,4%

87,7% Adele - Rolling in the Deep #351 - 15,5%

87,6% Gotye featuring Kimbra - Somebody That I Used to Know #267 - 15,1%

87,4% O-Zone - Dragostea Din Tei #353 - 23,3% *

87,1% AC/DC - Back in Black #423 - 17,1%

86,9% The Ronettes - Be My Baby #350 - 19,6% 86,9% Black Eyed Peas - Pump It #354 - 6%

86,8% Gnarls Barkley - Crazy #206 - 17,3%

86,6% Amy Winehouse - Back to Black #190 - 32,9 *

86,3% Chumbawamba - Tubthumping #82 - 24,9%

86,2% AFI - Miss Murder #306 - 16,8% 86,2% Backstreet Boys - Everybody (Backstreet's Back) #391 - 26,6% *

86,1% Mary J. Blige - Family Affair #308 - 5,5%

86% Chuck Berry - Johnny B. Goode #53 - 18,6%

85,6% Santana featuring Rob Thomas - Smooth #205 - 19,1%

85,5% Dido - Thank You #120 - 5,6%

85,4% Enya - Orinoco Flow #433 - 31,1% *

85,3% Ricky Martin - La Bomba #132 - 8,3% 85,3% Billy Idol - Rebel Yell #197 - 23,9%

85,2% Queen - The Show Must Go On #142 - 20,9% ¤

85% Green Day - Basket Case #47 - 27,6% *

84,9% Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop #41 - 15,8%

84,7% The Cardigans - Lovefool #135 - 24,2% *

84,5% Elvis Presley - Can't Help Falling in Love #136 - 18,8% 84,5% Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars - Uptown Funk #386 - 20%

84,4% Daryl Hall & John Oates - Out of Touch #67 - 31,4% * 84,4% Pet Shop Boys - It's a Sin #382 - 16%

84,3% Blur - Song 2 #222 - 18,6% 84,3% No Doubt - Just a Girl #369 - 20,8%

84,2% The Sweet - The Ballroom Blitz #226 - 15,8%

83,8% Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out of My Head #302 - 15,8% ¤ 83,8% Foo Fighters - Everlong #421 - 23%

83,6% Lou Bega - Mambo No. 5 #372 - 30,8% 83,6% Talking Heads - Psycho Killer #404 - 33,3% *

83,2% The Offspring - Come Out and Play #355 - 6,9%

82,7% Nightwish - The Phantom of the Opera #144 - 8,6%

82,6% Junior Senior - Move Your Feet #76 - 6,5%

82,5% Blackstreet featuring Dr. Dre and Queen Pen - No Diggity #249 - 37,8% * 82,5% Robert Miles - Children #270 - 2,9%

82,4% Myrkur - Tor i Helheim #54 - 7% 82,4% Tracy Chapman - Fast Car #145 - 32,5% *

82,3% Liz Callaway - Once Upon a December #449 - 20,9%

82% Backstreet Boys - I Want It That Way #105 - 19,2%

81,9% Blue Swede - Hooked on a Feeling #152 - 17,1% * 81,9% 3 Doors Down - Kryptonite #167 - 15,1%

81,7% Daft Punk - Around the World #231 - 18,2%

81,6% N Sync - Bye Bye Bye #52 - 26,9% * 81,6% Shakira featuring Alejandro Sanz - La Tortura #269 - 4,8%

81,5% Israel Kamakawiwo'ole - Somewhere Over the Rainbow #42 - 16,7%

81,3% Etta James - At Last #428 - 14,9%

81,1% Metallica - Enter Sandman #200 - 32,5% *

80,9% Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party #397 - 14%

80,7% Jamiroquai - Virtual Insanity #72 - 17,9%

80,6% Fatboy Slim - Praise You #237 - 6,5% 80,6% Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus - Old Town Road #357 - 11,1%

80,5% Pixies - Where Is My Mind? #148 - 13,5% 80,5% Roxette - The Look #225 - 5,7%

80,4% Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Heads Will Roll #395 - 16,5%

80,2% Oasis - Wonderwall #157 - 16%

80,1% Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun #119 - 14,9%

-

79,9% Dee Dee Sharp - Mashed Potato Time #326 - 0,7%

79,8% Christina Aguilera - Candyman #228 - 5,9%

79,6% Fats Waller - Ain't Misbehavin' #179 - 7,1% 79,6% Deep Purple - Smoke on the Water #238 - 7,2%

79,4% Falco - Rock Me Amadeus #185 - 23,2% 79,4% Enrique Iglesias - Bailamos #304 - 6,2% 79,4% October Country - My Girlfriend is a Witch #393 - 3%

79,3% Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - #Bonus Poll 79,3% The Amazing Devil - The Horror and the Wild #440 - 23,2%

79,1% Runrig - Gamhna Gealla #281 - 4,5%

78,8% Shakira - Ojos Así #75 - 7,5% 78,8% MUCC - Libra #263 - 1,7% 78,8% The Platters - Only You (And You Alone) #315 - 3,8%

78,7% The Jacksons - Blame It on the Boogie #220 - 15,8%

78,5% Kaoma - Lambada #57 - 4,2%

78,4% Danny Elfman - This Is Halloween #05 - 13,9%

78,3% Wham! - Last Christmas #445 - 41,3% *

78,2% Panic at the Disco - The Ballad of Mona Lisa #78 - 18,5% *

78,1% Fall Out Boy - Centuries #427 - 25,1% *

78% Panjabi MC - Mundian To Bach Ke #64 - 5,3% 78% Wang Heye - Windy #298 - 3,3%

77,8% Plastic Bertrand - Ça Plane Pour Moi #318 - 11,3%

77,7% Tenacious D - Tribute #201 - 23,6% * 77,7% Meat Loaf - I'd Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That) #325 - 11%

77,6% Jimi Hendrix - All Along the Watchtower #95 - 13.1% 77,6% Nirvana - The Man Who Sold the World #118 - 10,7%

77,4% Daddy Yankee - Gasolina #349 - 27,1% *

77,2% Psy - Gangnam Style #255 - 22,4%

77,1% Michael Jackson featuring Slash - Give In to Me #341 - 5,8%

77% Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road #22 - 29,4% * 77% Kesha - Blow #38 - 12,1%

76,9% The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony #271 - 32,5% *

76,8% Garbage - I Think I'm Paranoid #356 - 6,5%

76,6% Santiano - Gott muss ein Seemann sein #276 - 7,6%

76,5% Bee Gees - Tragedy #413 - 9,8%

76,4% Salt-N-Pepa with En Vogue - Whatta Man #134 - 15,1% 76,4% George Michael - Freedom! #219 - 17,2%

76,3% Johnny Cash - Hurt #81 - 35,6% * 76,3% Red Hot Chili Peppers - Otherside #92 - 8.2% 76,3% The Offspring - Gone Away #143 - 5,9% 76,3% The Longest Johns - Hoist Up The Thing #169 - 7,8%

76,2% Rob Zombie - Dragula #417 - 29% *

76% Foo Fighters - The Pretender #111 - 14,2% ¤

75,9% Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows #87 - 12,9% 75,9% Cab Calloway - St. James Infirmary #360 - 6,2% 75,9% Porno Graffitti - Melissa #376 - 5,9% 75,9% nobodyknows+ - Hero's Come Back!! #450 - 5,3%

75,7% Nothing but Thieves - Is Everybody Going Crazy? #113 - 3,7% 75,7% Warren G featuring Nate Dogg - Regulate #244 - 9,2%

75,5% Tarkan - Şımarık #94 - 3.1% 75,5% Lenny Kravitz - Are You Gonna Go My Way #246 - 24,6%

75,4% Jerry Lee Lewis - Great Balls of Fire #188 - 8,8% 75,4% Arash featuring Rebecca Zadig - Temptation #332 - 2,2%

75,3% The Doors - Light My Fire #319 - 15,3%

75,2% Eiffel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee) #147 - 14,2% 75,2% Duran Duran - Ordinary World #257 - 14,2% 75,2% Anastacia - Not That Kind #335 - 3,1%

75,1% Kent - Kärleken Väntar #202 - 4,3%

74,9% Måneskin - Off My Face #151 - 7,9%

74,8% Måneskin - Zitti e Buoni #16 - 33% * 74,8% Fiona Apple - Criminal #329 - 9,6%

74,7% Army of Lovers - Crucified #377 - 8,1%

74,6% Nat King Cole - Nature Boy #09 - 7,2% 74,6% Within Temptation - Stand My Ground #165 - 6,4% 74,6% Pink - Who Knew #166 - 8,4%

74,5% Crazy Town - Butterfly #275 - 8,8% 74,5% Bing Crosby - White Christmas #446 - 10,8%

74,4% Go_A - Shum #177 - 18,7%

74,3% Arash - Tike Tike Kardi #137 - 2,6%

74,2% Nelly - Hot in Herre #278 - 11,5%

74,1% Nirvana - Drain You #367 - 6,5%

73,6% Paula Abdul - Straight Up #156 - 6,2%

73,5% Tina Turner - GoldenEye #195 - 10,1% 73,5% Shaggy - Boombastic #262 - 4,5%

73,4% Babymetal featuring F.Hero - Pa Pa Ya!! #322 - 7,8%

73,3% Beck - Loser #124 - 16,4% 73,3% Massive Attack - Teardrop #187 - 17,4% 73,3% Ozzy Osbourne - Mr. Crowley #407 - 5,9%

73,2% The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist #232 - 8,2% 73,2% Slade - Merry Xmas Everybody #447 - 5,3%

72,9% Britney Spears - Break the Ice #300 - 13,6% 72,9% Prince and the Revolution - Raspberry Beret #328 - 7,2%

72,7% Iggy Pop - Lust for Life #199 - 7,6% 72,7% Whitney Houston - I Have Nothing #218 - 11,9% 72,7% Michael Jackson - Is It Scary #410 - 1,6%

72,6% Evanescence - Imaginary #44 - 13,5% ¤

72,5% Gackt - Vanilla #282 - 16,8%

72% Robbie Williams - The Road to Mandalay #129 - 3,9%

71,8% Billie Piper - Day & Night #173 - 5,6%

71,7% Lil Green - Why Don't You Do Right? #34 - 1,8%

71,6% Bad Lip Reading - Seagulls! (Stop It Now) #209 - 18,5% ¤

71,5% Savage Garden - Break Me Shake Me #352 - 3,3% 71,5% Fatboy Slim - The Rockafeller Skank #363 - 8,9%

71,3% Leila K featuring Papa Dee - Rude Boy #288 - 3,6% 71,3% Billie Eilish - Bury a Friend #409 - 9%

71,2% Mötley Crüe - Dr. Feelgood #309 - 4,9%

71,1% Cab Calloway - Minnie the Moocher #130 - 14,4% 71,1% Ladaniva - Jako #259 - 2% 71,1% Devin Townsend - Boogus #435 - 1,9%

71% Udit Narayan - Bholi Si Surat #141 - 1,5%

70,9% Nine Inch Nails - Closer #93 - 22% ¤

70,8% Eric Clapton - Tears in Heaven #295 - 8,2% 70,8% Snoop Doggy Dogg - Who Am I? (What's My Name?) #420 - 3,1% 70,8% Frank Turner - Punches #441 - 3,3%

70,7% Ryan Gosling - I'm Just Ken #159 - 12,4%

70,6% The Lightning Seeds - You Showed Me #59 - 2,7% 70,6% Savage Garden - To the Moon and Back #83 - 7%

70,5% Queen - Mustapha #29 - 11,4%

70,4% Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow #26 - 22,3% 70,4% Metallica - Wherever I May Roam #77 - 8,6% 70,4% Johnny Cash - Don't Take Your Guns to Town #298 - 12,9% 70,4% Franz Ferdinand - Fresh Strawberries #324 - 3,3% 70,4% Alphaville - Sounds Like a Melody #347 - 4,1%

70,2% Fever Ray - If I Had a Heart #432 - 8,9%

-

69,9% MUCC - Ryuusei #19 - 7,4%

69,6% Michael Crawford, Barbra Streisand - Put On Your Sunday Clothes #311 - 6,2% 69,6% Eagle-Eye Cherry - Save Tonight #321 - 7,2%

69,5% Spooks - Things I've Seen #104 - 0,8%

69,4% Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton - Islands in the Stream #385 - 7,1%

69,2% Flo Rida feat Kesha - Right Round #02 - 6,2%

69,1% Dogstar - Breathe Tonight #251 - 1,4% 69,1% Tanita Tikaram - Twist in My Sobriety #291 - 6,7%

69% Dead Man's Bones - Lose Your Soul #396 - 3,3%

68,9% Era - Ameno (Remix) #24 - 4,8% 68,9% M.I.A. - Paper Planes #229 - 19% *

68,8% Nat King Cole - When I Fall in Love #215 - 9,4% 68,8% Maroon 5 - Makes Me Wonder #216 - 8,5% 68,8% Aaliyah - Are You That Somebody? #344 - 7%

68,5% Linkin Park - Bleed It Out #63 - 23,9% 68,5% Snow - Informer #139 - 4,7%

68,4% Iggy Pop - Real Wild Child (Wild One) #305 - 2,5%

68,3% Run-DMC featuring Aerosmith - Walk This Way #127 - 10,9% 68,3% Alice Cooper - The Black Widow #406 - 1,2%

68,2% Limahl - The NeverEnding Story #60 - 9,8% 68,2% Nelly Furtado - Maneater #160 - 17,1% * 68,2% Abhijeet - Ole Ole #193 - 1,7% 68,2% Three Days Grace - Now or Never #337 - 6,9%

68,1% Stromae - L'enfer #89 - 9,8%

67,9% Urban Symphony - Rändajad #90 - 2,2% 67,9% Papa Roach - Getting Away with Murder #339 - 8,3%

67,8% Muse - Endlessly #107 - 9,4%

67,7% Poornima - Channe Ke Khet Mein #253 - 1,3%

67,6% My Chemical Romance - Sing #80 - 17,3%

67,5% Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead #411 - 15,4%

67,4% Guns N' Roses - November Rain #416 - 9,2%

67,3% “Weird Al” Yankovic - White & Nerdy #43 - 16% 67,3% Klaatu - We're Off You Know #378 - 2,1%

67,1% Ice Nine Kills - Welcome To Horrorwood #280 - 7,6% 67,1% Mary Elizabeth McGlynn - Room of Angel #403 - 4,1%

67% Avicii - Hey Brother #164 - 13,9% 67% P.O.D. - Youth of the Nation #368 - 4,6% 67% Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Red Right Hand #402 - 13,4%

66,8% Jamiroquai - Deeper Underground #258 - 5,3%

66,7% The Hives - Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones #58 - 2,7% 66,7% Magnetic Fields - Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring #437 - 4,1%

66,6% Antique - Opa Opa #213 - 2,5%

66,4% Kiss - Heaven's on Fire #338 - 2,9%

66,3% System of a Down - B.Y.O.B. #128 - 26,2% *

66% Texas - Summer Son #154 - 2,6% 66% Tarkan - Şıkıdım (Hepsi Senin Mi?) #292 - 3,6%

65,9% Otis Redding - Cigarettes and Coffee #279 - 4,9% 65,9% Måneskin - Mammamia #283 - 22,2% *

65,8% Cliff Edwards - When You Wish Upon a Star #85 - 2,2% 65,8% Pātea Māori Club - Poi E #286 - 9,3% 65,8% Wamdue Project - King of My Castle #346 - 3,9%

65,7% Modern Talking - Brother Louie #50 - 4% 65,7% Ivan Campo - Dice Man #181 - 1,2%

65,6% Gong Gong Gong - Notes Underground #422 - 1%

65,5% All Seeing I - Beat Goes On #256 - 1,7%

65,4% Harry McClintock - The Big Rock Candy Mountains #131 - 6,7% 65,4% Jessica Folcker - Tell Me What You Like #247 - 2,1%

65,3% Onuka - Zenit #443 - 2,7%

65,2% Eimear Quinn - The Voice #32 - 2,5% 65,2% 2Pac featuring Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman - California Love #121 - 8,3% 65,2% Radio Company - Drowning #172 - 2,2% 65,2% Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso #208 - 7,1% 65,2% Kiltro - All The Time In The World #224 - 2,4%

65,1% Samantha Mumba - Gotta Tell You #242 - 4,1% 65,1% Timbaland featuring Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake - Give It to Me #310 - 2%

64,7% Bloodhound Gang - The Bad Touch #162 - 9%

64,6% Gorillaz - Stylo #61 - 15,8% 64,6% Duran Duran - The Chauffeur #133 - 7,1%

64,4% Alice Cooper - Poison #01 - 10,5% 64,4% Depeche Mode - It's No Good #101 - 9,1%

64,2% Ace of Base - Happy Nation #192 - 3,8%

64,1% Destiny’s Child - Jumpin’, Jumpin’ #51 - 12,7%

64% 2 Unlimited - No Limit #182 - 3,2% 64% 30 Seconds to Mars - Battle of One #183 - 3,9% 64% Jack Johnson - Banana Pancakes #330 - 3,3%

63,8% Kongos - Come With Me Now #17 - 15,9% 63,8% A. R. Rahman - Jai Ho #40 - 4,6%

63,7% Eminem featuring Nate Dogg - 'Till I Collapse #239 - 2,1%

63,6% Björk - Army of Me #214 - 19,7% * 63,6% Aaliyah - Try Again #217 - 7,6%

63,4% 50 Cent - Candy Shop #320 - 12,2%

63,3% Dua Lipa - New Rules #126 - 10,6% 63,3% Smashing Pumpkins - Zero #327 - 5,1%

63,2% Linkin Park - Nobody's Listening #365 - 11,3%

63,1% Olly Murs - Heart Skips A Beat #106 - 2,2% 63,1% David Bowie - Life on Mars? #235 - 16,9% 63,1% Janet Jackson - If #364 - 2,1% 63,1% Blur - Parklife #431 - 15,8%

63% Moby - Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad? #123 - 3,8%

62,8% Mad Season - Long Gone Day #439 - 1,9%

62,6% Métisse - Boom Boom Bâ #287 - 4,2%

62,4% 30 Seconds to Mars - Fallen #30 - 5,5% 62,4% Beastie Boys - Intergalactic #153 - 16% 62,4% The Castells - Some Enchanted Evening #207 - 1,3%

62,3% Childish Gambino - This Is America #71 - 18,2% 62,3% the Chemical Brothers - Galvanize #191 - 7% 62,3% Fela Kuti - Zombie #430 - 2,6%

62,2% Nemo - The Code #362 - 3,6%

62% Billie Eilish - No Time to Die #168 - 5%

61,7% Korn - Did My Time #194 - 6% 61,7% Ginuwine - Pony #297 - 12,8%

61,4% The Prodigy - Breathe #112 - 4,5%

61,3% Blue Stahli - One Last Breath #99 - 1.8%

61,2% Verka Serduchka - Dancing Lasha Tumbai #284 - 14,5%

61,1% Wham! - Everything She Wants #108 - 6,5% 61,1% The Bug Club - Fully Clothed #436 - 1,4%

61% Skunk Anansie - Weak #196 - 4,3% 61% Robbie Williams - No Regrets #383 - 1,8%

60,8% J. Y. Park featuring Conan O'Brien, Steven Yeun, & Jimin Park - Fire #429 - 1%

60,7% Gyllene Tider - Sommartider #274 - 2,2%

60,6% Lordi - Hard Rock Hallelujah #70 - 9,9% 60,6% Kwoon featuring Babet - King Of Sea #115 . 0,5%

60,4% No Doubt - Sunday Morning #265 - 4,1%

60,3% My Chemical Romance - Bury Me In Black #294 - 19% *

60,2% Toni Braxton - You're Makin' Me High #155 - 1,4% 60,2% Stephanie Mabey - The Zombie Song #408 - 3,5%

-

59,2% Reol - The Sixth Sense #266 - 1,7% 59,2% Puscifer - Rev 22.20 #334 - 5,4%

58,9% AC/DC - Hail Caesar #158 - 3,2% 58,9% Linkin Park - Waiting for the End #272 - 16,9%

58,7% Duran Duran - The Wild Boys #21 - 9,6%

58,5% Nova Twins - Antagonist #68 - 4,5%

58,4% Ava Max - Torn #331 - 2,8%

58,3% The Beloved - Sweet Harmony #379 - 1,3%

58,1% Madonna - Live to Tell #184 - 3%

57,6% Coldplay - Hymn for the Weekend #234 - 4,4%

57,3% Red Hot Chili Peppers - Give It Away #343 - 16%

57,2% Enigma - Return to Innocence #380 - 5,9%

56,8% Mendez - Adrenaline #23 - 1,2% 56,8% Sash! - Ecuador #73 - 1,7% 56,8% Anouk - Nobody's Wife #176 - 2,2%

56,7% George Michael and Mary J. Blige - As #62 - 3,2% 56,7% Kelis - Trick Me #175 - 4,2% 56,7% Céline Dion - Pour Que Tu M'aimes Encore #370 - 2,2%

56,6% Nikka Costa - Like A Feather #48 - 0,6% 56,6% Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds & Kylie Minogue - Where the Wild Roses Grow #103 - 5,7% 56,6% Bette Midler - The Rose #342 - 4,6%

56,5% Ahmed Saad Ft. 3enba & Double Zuksh - El Melouk #359 - 0,7%

56,3% Beyoncé - Work It Out #340 - 5,2%

56,1% Margaret Berger - I Feed You My Love #117 - 0,8%

55,9% Blur - Coffee & TV #56 - 9,7%

55,8% Kool & the Gang - Too Hot #277 - 3% 55,8% Chris de Burgh - The Lady in Red #314 - 4,2% 55,8% Pink - Dear Mr. President #415 - 4,1%

55,7% Big Brovaz - Nu Flow #65 - 0,9% 55,7% K’s Choice - Everything For Free #79 - 1,2% 55,7% AISHA and Jamison Boaz - Love the Subhuman Self #211 - 4,2%

55,5% System of a Down - Fuck the System #293 - 16,1%

55,4% Moby - Natural Blues #07 - 2,5% 55,4% Janet Jackson featuring Q-Tip and Joni Mitchell - Got 'til It's Gone #146 - 2,2%

55,3% Ardis - No Man's Land #389 - 0,6%

55,2% Rammstein - Engel #35 - 7,3%

55,1% Maximum the Hormone - What's Up, People?! #138 - 10,6% 55,1% Eros Ramazzotti - Più Bella Cosa #290 - 3,6%

55% DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - Summertime #273 - 4,9%

54,6% John Lennon - Imagine #203 - 5,3%

54,5% Billie Myers - Tell Me #86 - 0,9% 54,5% Lana Del Rey - High by the Beach #186 - 4,4%

54,4% Hanson - If Only #419 - 1,3%

54,3% Chthonic - Takao #285 - 2,9%

54% Aqua - Turn Back Time #28 - 8,2%

53,9% Ardis - No Man's Land #88 - 0,9% 53,9% Shakespears Sister - Stay #366 - 3,1%

53,6% The Chemical Brothers - Hey Boy Hey Girl #392 - 3%

53,5% Kylie Minogue - Confide In Me #13 - 5,2%

53,4% Apashe - Lord & Master #170 - 1,5%

53,2% Sugababes - Overload #312 - 4,3%

53,1% Rammstein - Wollt ihr das Bett in Flammen sehen? #375 - 4,8%

53% LL Cool J featuring Boyz II Men #243 - 3,4% 53% Maxim featuring Skin - Carmen Queasy #245 - 3,2%

52,8% Madonna - Who's That Girl #18 - 9,8%

52,7% Aerosmith - Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees) #84 - 3,5% 52,7% MUCC - Daikirai #161 - 2,1%

52,2% Marilyn Manson - The Fight Song #49 - 2,1%

52,1% DJ Shadow - Six Days #180 - 2%

52% Metallica - The Memory Remains #371 - 6,5%

51,8% Megan Thee Stallion featuring Yuki Chiba - Mamushi #345 - 10,5%

51,6% Bomfunk MC's - Freestyler #14 - 6%

51,5% Foals - Tron #210 - 1,6%

51,4% Faithless - God Is a DJ #388 - 3,7%

51,3% Mariah Carey - The Roof (Back in Time) #46 - 1,4% 51,3% Mori Calliope & Reol - 虚像のCarousel #55 - 5,6%

50,6% Slipknot - Wait and Bleed #426 - 7,1%

-

49,9% Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At #31 - 6,9%

49,8% Shaggy - Hey Sexy Lady #122 - 4,1%

49,7% Warren G & Sissel - Prince Igor #20 - 2,2%

49% Billie Eilish - NDA #10 - 2,6%

48,7% Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas? #444 - 3,1%

48,6% Shania Twain - Ka-Ching! #374 - 3%

47,9% Electric Callboy - Pump It #438 - 10,8%

47,7% Massive Attack - Angel #39 - 5,9%

47,5% Adam Tensta - My Cool #11 - 1%

47,4% Slipknot - The Blister Exists #100 - 2,6%

47,3% The Lonely Island featuring Michael Bolton - Jack Sparrow #221 - 9,1% 47,3% Burna Boy featuring 21 Savage - Sittin' on Top of the World #248 - 1,9%

47% Seether - Fuck It #74 - 2,6%

46,9% Rhiannon Giddens - Way Over Yonder #102 - 1,2%

46,8% Spiritbox - Rotoscope #66 - 2,6%

46,6% Sabrina Carpenter - Feather #25 - 4,6%

46,5% Stray Kids - Slash #316 - 4,1%

46% Prince - The Greatest Romance Ever Sold #69 - 2,6% 46% Duran Duran - Danse Macabre #398 - 2,6%

45,6% Jimmy Cliff feat Lebo M - Hakuna Matata #06 - 2%

45,3% Youssou N'Dour and Neneh Cherry - 7 Seconds #212 - 3,3%

44,9% Alcazar - Physical #254 - 0,9%

44,3% 3T and Michael Jackson - Why #114 - 0,7%

44,2% Tones and I - Dance Monkey #178 - 6,1%

44,1% Scooter - Friends #230 - 0,8% 44,1% Darren Hayes - Hero #252 - 1,2%

43,9% The Prodigy - No Good (Start the Dance) #08 - 2,6% 43,9% David Bowie - I'm Afraid of Americans #33 - 8,5% 43,9% Faithless - Insomnia #109 - 2,9%

43,8% Jonas Brothers - Only Human #204 - 2%

43,7% Ada Jones and Billy Murray - Come Josephine in My Flying Machine #442 - 1,2%

43,6% Laleh - Some Die Young #424 - 1,3%

43,1% Atari Teenage Riot - Speed #317 - 4,1%

42,7% Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice #12 - 16,3%

42,6% Eminem - Rabbit Run #27 - 2,9%

42,1% Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - One Sweet Day #296 - 3,8%

41,7% Rednex - Wish You Were Here #348 - 1,4%

41,5% Destiny's Child - With Me #198 - 3,2%

41,2% Diana Ross - If We Hold On Together #241 - 10,8%

40,6% Michael Jackson - Will You Be There #45 - 2,3%

-

39,8% Alanis Morissette - I Was Hoping #96 - 1.6%

38,8% Wyclef Jean - Gone Till November #36 - 1,1%

38,5% Bright Light Bright Light featuring Mark Gatiss - Next To You #174 - 0,8%

37,9% Ariana Grande - Yes, And? #140 - 1,8%

37,6% Babylon Zoo - Spaceman #189 - 2% 37,6% Human People - Phantomhead #434 - 0,9%

36,5% Jedward - Luminous #125 - 1,4% 36,5% Elton John - I Want Love #240 - 2,1%

35,3% Noporn - Geleia de Morango #150 - 0,3%

35,1% 30 Seconds to Mars - Midnight Prayer #333 - 1,1%

34,6% Ena Mori - Fall Inlove! #149 - 0,4%

33,3% Ryan Gosling - Put Me in the Car #15 - 3,2%

33,2% Camellia - WYSI (When You See It) #387 - 2,1%

32,4% Take That - Babe (Return remix) #303 - 0,3%

30,6% Jordan Adetunji - Kehlani #390 - 0,6%

30% Darren Hayes - Spin #03 - 0,6%

-

29,4% Christopher Lee - Jingle Hell #448 - 6%

29,1% Addis Black Widow - Goes Around Comes Around #250 - 3%

29% Dreamcrusher - In Due Time #98 - 0.7%

28,2% BTS - Life Goes On #97 - 1.8%

24,9% Throbbing Gristle - Hamburger Lady #412 - 2%

[inside-lees-mind]

Hello! Small request here~ can you possibly do a Dr,stone headcanon where reader has severely bad memory? They’re memory is so bad to the point they would start to call everyone by fruits, vegetables, plants. You name it. Just so they could remember their faces properly? This has been in my mind for so long..but of course no rush and always take care of urself! <3

Idk if you take emoji anons, but can I be 🌒 or 🪻anon? You can choose which one if both are free!

Hi🪻anon (I picked this one cuz I like flowers and it’s different from the emojis I already have anons for, hope that’s okay) (oh and this request is about plants so it fits!)

I decided to do Senku, Gen, Tsukasa, and Hyoga. (I’m finally writing for Tsukasa, THE WORLD REJOICES)

Senku Ishigami

You called him a Leak.

He’s confused, but then looks in the mirror and… holy shit you’re right.

He’s offended, but like brushes it off.

“Focus” he says, turning you back to your work.

He thinks it’s strange thought when you don’t call him by his name even to others.

Eventually, he realizes you must not remember his name.

He couldn’t care less tbh. Maybe you are bad with names? Thats common enough he really doesn’t dig.

Gen Asagiri

You called him “nightshade”

It’s his favorite flower so he’s not fazed.

Oh, not the mention it means “liar.” And he’s the world’s best.

Eventually, while watching you, he realizes you don’t call him anything but it, so he subtly tests you.

He works to push you towards saying his name, and you really just don’t seem receptive.

Eventually, he’d subtly pry your reasoning out of you when he notices you call everybody plants and vegetables.

He finds out that the amount of different plants in the nightshade family reminds you of his two faced nature and helps you remember him.

He finds it interesting.

Tsukasa Shishio

He was confused when you called him “Rosanne”

Did you think he was a woman…?

From Gen, he finds out that you might be referring to a Rosanne Brown Lisianthus since you call everybody by plant names.

Gen says he doesn’t know the reason and shrugs, shaking his head as he walks away.

You later tell him it looks like a rose and it’s got a beautiful brown color sometimes.

He gets it now… his hair color!

Takes it as a compliment because the flower sounds pretty the way you describe it.

Hyoga Akatsuki

You called him “cauliflower”

He’s confused?

He’s not… a vegetable?

Are you calling him as weak as a mere vegetable? He’s not, so???

Genuinely, he’s confused.

Takes it the wrong way.

Gives you an eye smile and nods, but then straight up walks away from you.

He over hears somebody talking about your odd nicknames for every one and it clicks that you must be remembering him that way. Cauliflower is white… so is his hair. Okay…

[just-my-latest-hyperfixation]

Glory Hallelujah

Written for day 25 of the @steddieholidaydrabbles and the 12 Days of Christmas bonus card of the @steddiebingo

Prompts: Christmas & Glory Hole

Rated: E

Tags: Post-Vecna; Everybody Lives; Rockstar Eddie; Sex Clubs; Glory Holes; Blowjobs; Reunions

Notes: I did a poll to determine which prompt from the bingo card I should combine with the Christmas prompt of the holiday drabbles. Merry Dick-mas, you filthy heathens, I love all of you! ❤️

Eddie isn’t sure what the correct word for someone like him is. He’s been pondering it over four beers now, watching the bored-looking girl at the center of the room spin around her pole, but without any success. 

Pathetic springs to mind, but that isn't strong enough. There must be a stronger word than pathetic for someone spending Christmas at a goddamn sex club. But he was lonely, and he had nowhere to go, so it seemed like a good idea. 

It wasn’t. The place is glaringly empty, even Indy’s kink scene having better places to be on this most magical of nights.

He should’ve gone to Kentucky with Wayne. 

Except this is the old guy’s first time meeting his girlfriend’s family, and Eddie can just imagine how this would’ve played out if he’d tagged along.

Hi, I’m Eddie, Wayne’s nephew. Yeah, I might look familiar. Yeah, I was on the cover of Rolling Stone last month. Thanks, I’m happy your grandkids like my music. Yeah, no, I didn’t commit those satanic murders, that was- Listen, can we talk about my uncle? 

So, instead, here he is. 

Fuck, he hasn’t felt this miserable and mad at himself since that one time he told Steve Harrington to get back with his girl while inconspicuously ogling the guy’s sweaty chest hair under his own battle vest. 

Eddie sighs, getting up from his chair. He might as well head home while he still has some self-respect left.

He's almost at the exit when something catches his eye. There's a row of stalls in the wall, each with its own lockable door. 

The light over one is on. 

There's no fucking way, he thinks, even as his feet carry him right over and into the adjacent cabin. Someone probably forgot to kill the light. There's no fucking way anyone is in there. That would be at least as pathetic as a fucking rock star going to a fucking sex club on fucking Christmas day because he's a depressed moron. 

Still, he goes in, locks the door and pulls down his pants. The hole in the wall stares back at him like it's trying to mock him. Eddie tells himself to stop being silly. 

Worst case scenario is he stands here with his limp dick poking through a hole in the wall like an idiot. Nobody will know, because nobody’s there. Best case scenario is he gets to blow off some steam. 

Nothing happens. 

Eddie sighs and is just about to pull out when suddenly, there's movement. His heart leaps into his throat. He hears it all through the thin wall. A sharp intake of breath, like whoever is on the other side is just as surprised as him. They probably are. They've probably been in there a while. Then, the thud of knees hitting the floor. Eddie has just enough time to think that the mystery person must be really eager for this before he feels soft, warm lips wrapping around his tip. 

Whoever the person in the other stall is, they sure know what they’re doing. They start out gently, slowly sliding Eddie’s swelling cock in and out of that deliciously warm mouth, tongue teasing the length of him. Once he's fully hard, the tongue is joined by a hand, alternating soft licks with firm strokes, and Eddie feels something urgent and hot build at the base of his spine. He moans, fingers grasping the top of the stall for leverage as his hips buck, trying to get closer to that mouth even with the wall between them. 

They keep this up for several minutes. Eddie tries to keep his voice down, but it seems like each of his groans and whimpers spurs the other person on. And then, they scrape their teeth over his tip, and a startled curse escapes his lips, and they swallow him all the way down, as far as the wall allows. 

Eddie comes with a hoarse shout, spilling hot and wet into that mouth. The other person doesn’t pull away. Eddie feels their throat constricting around him as they swallow.

“Fuuuck,” Eddie groans, forehead sagging against the wall. His arms feel like jelly from supporting his weight. “Shit. Jesus. Shitshitshit.” 

And that is when the other person pulls off. 

“Eddie, if it’s you, please come out?” 

“Wait a sec,” says a voice. A voice garbled and wrecked from sucking his cock and swallowing his come. A voice that Eddie hasn’t heard in ten years.

Eddie’s heart stops. On the other side of the wall, a door opens.

“Eddie?” Right outside his own door. “Shit, is that really you?”

This isn’t real. It’s some bizarre, orgasm-induced pipe dream brought about by too much beer and seasonal depression. There’s no way the person outside is who Eddie thinks he is. 

He does. At least he remembers to pull up his pants first.

The door swings open, and there he is. Steve Harrington, ten years older but no less gorgeous, clad in skintight denim and a silky purple shirt, lips turned up into a delighted smile. They’re still swollen and shiny. 

“I knew it!” he cheers, pulling Eddie into a hug. “Nobody else babbles curses like that.”

Eddie grunts. Steve pulls back, holding him at arm’s length. 

“Looking good,” he smiles. “Even better than on that Rolling Stone cover. How have you been, man? Dustin said you talk sometimes, but you never-” 

“What the fuck is going on here?” Eddie blurts. His knees are wobbly and his head is spinning. “You aren’t- … You just sucked my- … You’re straight!” 

Steve laughs, and it’s every bit as breathtaking as Eddie remembers. 

“Yeah, no, I figured that out a while ago. Which you would know, if you’d just kept in touch.” He winks right into Eddie’s gobsmacked face, then takes him by the shoulder and steers him towards the bar. “How about you buy me a drink? We can celebrate this little Christmas miracle, and I’ll bring you up to speed.” 

More holiday drabbles

More Steddie Bingo

[i-cant-sing]

What are your thoughts on the yandere haikyuu teams x their manager?

Boring. I need some spice in it. How about-

Yandere Daichi as a cop and his darling is a civilian and now he's so obsessed with her that he murders her husband, frames him as a criminal and will literally stop at nothing to get darling in his arms because again... who will suspect good old, everybody's best bud COP Daichi to be able to do heinous crimes???

Yandere Sugawara as a psychiatrist because come on- he gives major "master manipulator" vibes and now he's obsessed with his darling patient and will continue to do malpractice and gaslight her and prescribe her all the wrong meds until she loses it and he gets to admit it her under his "special care" and now he can play with her mind all day long🤍

Yandere Oikawa is now a pro volleyball athlete and he just saw Ushijima's little sis, the same one he used to bully and even rejected (and ofc, HUMILIATED) when she confessed to him back in highschool. But now Oikawa's obsessed with her and also still hates his nemesis Ushijima, so what's better than killing two birds with one stone??? And Oikawa still has a very devoted fanclub, only now it's larger and more powerful than ever so now he uses them and his socials to peer pressure you into dating him and eventually, marrying him because he ain't getting any younger honey and he needs some cute babies out of you ASAP.

Yandere Kuroo who is the smart IT tech guy at your office but in reality, he has his own cyber security company that he uses to spy on you, controls your entire life through your socials and don't even get me started on your online banking shit. If its any consolation, he's very rich so... yeah. He may not look like a million bucks, but he does have them. In several offshore accounts.

Yandere Kita who somehow ended up as a mafia leader, probably inherited it as family business and he has like severe OCD so he wants everything done to perfection or so help you, you will 1000% end up 6 feet under. Mafia Kita who has this vision of you being the perfect wife, solely based om the one time you offered him your handkerchiefs because he had a nosebleed from stressing too much and now Kita thinks you're an absolute angel and he wont let you destroy that fantasy of his. Seriously. He will pick out your outfits, tell you how to act and all, punish you if he must, but he does love you.

Yandere Ushijima who is a farmer and has decided that the reader whose car broke down and came to his door asking for help, will now be his wife and be a countryside mom to many kids (u can't say no, okay? He wants a big family) and animals! But hey, he's a very caring husband and will massage your feet, give you baths and feed you his homegrown veggies and meals daily once you are round with his babies🥺

Yandere Bokuto who is now a popular politician and he needs an obedient wife to keep up appearances and play the "family man" image up. So he decides to threaten reader who had a one night stand with him, and Bokuto somehow has very intimate images and videos of you and he uses them to get you to marry him. And now he controls every aspect of your life and tells you to do exactly as he says, and he abuses this privilege more as he gets more powerful and you could only imagine the horrors he would inflict on you if he does actually win elections, but you can't run away because again- he has eyes and contacts everywhere.

[iskandersmuts]

Diplomat's Party

Male Reader x Yuna

Tags: Smut, Yuna Smut, Sex, Blowjob, Creampie

My first attempt. I will be thankful with some feedback with anything.

1

Breathe in. Breathe out.

You see the man on the mirror. That’s you inside the bathroom talking to yourself for gaining courage. “You can do it.” You say. “You did this for the last year.” Finally, you hide again in one of the bathroom’s cabinets. One more time breathe in and breathe out. Is just matter of endure this feeling three more hours.

You leave the bathroom and start counting the hours. Right now is nine o’clock. You can leave freely this party at midnight. As your boss always says “Your job at parties is like being a Cinderella. You arrive show the best you have and before the worst parts of you appear you leave. Nobody wants to know how cool or shitty you are when you are bored or even worse drunk. So no one of you, the diplomats, can show that side. Remember we are representing a country.” He is right we can’t show some parts of ourselves.

But these parties are actually a pain in the ass. The most of the people are here for work. They are not resting. They are not having fun. They are trying to get some confidential information that will help their own interest or the interest of their countries. Is like an international convention of ass lickers, brownosers or whatever you call it. They gather together and start talking about nonsense: “Did you hear about that African president lecturing Macron about colonialism?” or “Did you see what this Bukele did with the cryptocurrency?” You just can’t say. “Of course, dumbass you know that every ass licker here read the same Foreign Affairs subscription that you read.” You just say whatever thing they also know “Yeah and it seems that IOSCO now has a project bill for cryptocurrency.” And then the questions start. “Do you have any notices on the votes of the draft resolution of the injunction… and blah blah” Just things that nobody cares about. Two years ago, you pleaded your boss to let you assist to this kind of events. And now is your third time a week in these events. You would prefer getting a massage with hot stones in your balls right now. But not everything is bad. In this field: the diplomacy. You must be really lucky to find a friend. And you were really lucky, your honest friend is Diego an Argentinian diplomat.

2

In this party at Lotte Hotel Diego does a sign asking you to leave the building and go to the yard. Both of you get outside and start talking.

“Dude, did you hear the big news?” Says Diego.

“Diego if is a diplomat thing I really don’t want to talk about that right now.” You say with your voice showing boredom.

“No is not that kind of thing. You know me. I don’t like to talk about that stuff too. Is about the party of tonight.”

“What? Someone find out about those two gay diplomats that are in a relationship?” You ask.

Diego laughs. “No not that. Something interesting. Korea has changed the main event of tonight!”

“That means that I’m not going to hear the fat lady singing AGAIN the fucking Madame Butterfly.” You say.

“Yes. And also, as they were looking for something new. Moon Jae In used his trick up his sleeve and contracted a kpop group.”

“WAIT WHAT? WHO? TELL ME!” You say almost shouting.

“Is a girl group. JYP…”

“Fucking Twice is coming? Oh my god! Really?”

“No not Twice a bit younger.”

“NMIXX? But they have few songs!” You say complaining.

“Not that younger.”

“ITZY? ARE YOU FUKING KIDDING ME?!”

“No. No. It’s for real. They are coming.”

You guessed correctly.

And now you are thinking: Finally, something good happened on these useless parties. And you are smiling in a weird way. You know is weird because Diego told you. And then you use your experience of these years to act the best you can. As a diplomat you can’t be a crazy fan even more as you are here actually “working”.  

3

The girls finally arrive. All guests are invited to gather and enjoy the show. Itzy is on the scene they greet everybody. You notice that they are not cheerful as they are in concerts of world tours. They are trying to be mature. They start with “Dalla Dalla”. You resist the urge of fanchant with the song. When they end nobody claps. For the awkward situation they start immediately another song. It happens the same nobody claps or even cheers.

This situation reminds you the footage of Red Velvet presenting at North Korea. The public were all quiet. This was the same. These boring diplomats don’t celebrate anything. Yeji as the leader announces that they are going to perform the last song. “Cheshire”. You want to fanchant so bad. But you can’t. They nailed the last song; the others were good too. But in this song, you see that they are trying their best as is their last song and till now they didn’t get any response from the public. When the song ends you don’t resist the urge and you start clapping. The people around you look at you as a weirdo. But then Diego joins you and other Koreans too. Then everybody is forced to do it. You look at them. All the girls are smiling. You keep clapping and you stand up.

“That was nice, girls” you shout.

This time just some of the other guests joins. And the rest of them just look at you and the others as weirdos.

This moment was definitively the most memorable. Because you see the girls looking at the few ones clapping while smiling. They finally thank everybody and leave the scenario.

4

You start walking around the party just remembering the faces of the girls when they saw you clapping. Their expressions. They are shocked at first. They look at you and then start smiling. It was a rough night for them. But you did the night a little bit easier for them.

Now just some minutes till midnight. You made your job and you saw Itzy you deserve a fucking drink. So, you start walking towards the bar.

“Look that old geezer is trying to dance” Says someone.

You notice that this is the voice of a woman.

You laugh.

Someone appears in front of you looks you directly inside the eyes and says. “Are you laughing at us?”

You are caught off of guard. “No sorry I didn’t mean that. Is just that no one here uses that kind of word ‘old geezer’” You look at her face trying to know his name. “Omo. Sorry Chaeryeong-shi. I really didn’t mean to make fun of you.”

Chaeryeong looks at you. “Do you know my name? Finally, I thought nobody here knew who we are.” She pauses and continues. “And don’t worry I’m pretty sure that Ryujin-unnie doesn’t care if you laugh or not, right, unnie?”

“You are pretty damm right, Chae.” Says Ryujin. “Is just that the old geezer…” You start to laugh again while she continues. “looked really hilarious when he started dancing.”

You see that behind both, Ryujin and Chaeryeong, are the other members of the group. You are internally jumping so hard that maybe your head will hit the roof. But you try to keep your composure. “Nice to meet you all of you.” You look at your watch is just past midnight. Fuck it you are not “working” anymore. “I’m really a big fan of yours.”

The other girls gather around you when they see that you are talking with Ryujin. They stand up beside you. There it is Yuna with her scenary outfit.

While you are looking at her you try to avoid looking at her chest. Or at least pretend that you are not doing it. She is using baggy pants. You wanted to look her legs too. That’s too bad. But you are lucky enough to look her perfect flat belly. When she sees you, she just smiles at you. The other girls as Yuna are wearing also an scenary outfit all of them have a blue or sky blue piece. But Yuna is the one that caught your eye.  

“You are not from here, right?” Asks Ryujin. Yeji gives a little slap on Ryujin’s arm. She is the leader indeed.

You are thinking. Thanks Ryujin. You saved me. I owe you one. It was getting weird because I was looking Yuna for too long.

“Yes yes. I’m not from here. I’m a diplomat assigned here at Korea, Ryujin-shi.”

“You are a diplomat?” Asks Lia. “I always thought that diplomats were old men.”

You answer. “Well the ones that appear on television they are. And maybe as they are the most known for the public you think that. But actually in my country if you do the right things. You can start as a diplomat at 23 years old.”

“Yeah you look kind of young. But here the most of them are old geezers.” Says Ryujin. You laugh. “I thought that the reason why nobody clapped was that they are old geezers. But maybe is because they do what you do.”

“Well. Yeah the most of the times the show is a snob thing. Like opera or traditional theather.”

Ryujin interrupts you. “What thing? What did you say?”

Yuna starts laughing. You answer Ryujin. “See your maknae here knows what I said. Yuna-shi would you mind explaining her?”

Yuna looks at you. Doubtful starts speaking. “Snob is like people that likes fancy things just because they want to be different. Right?” She looks at you.

You are melting. The eyes of your Itzy’s bias are looking right at you.

“Yeah… Is just like that, Yuna-shi.” You answer. “The people here like that kind of things. Kind of unique or least popular. The people around here think that the things that they are discussing are the most important things ever. They are so full of themselves.”

“And… You are here... So, you too?” Asks Yuna looking you again.

You smile. “I hope I don’t. Maybe I would be just like them if I answer that. How about you discover if I’m like them.” You look at Yuna.

In your head you ran the entire place 10 times. You are flirting with Itzy’s Yuna. You are nervous as fuck.

“We’ll see. Then.” Answers Yuna and grins.

Yeji looked what happened. Actually, the whole girl group watched you flirting with their maknae. Yeji stands between you and Yuna and starts shaking your hand. “You are the one that clapped for us, right? Let me thank you for that. We’d like to stay around but we actually just came here for a personal matter. We are going to the bar. It looks like you are about to leave this party, right?”

Her words weren’t even smooth. You were clearly kicked out. “Is that true? I see. Well, thank you for greeting me.” You say trying to sound as polite as you can. “Well maybe I should go…”

What you were saying is interrupted by Yuna holding Yeji’s arms with her hands. She starts pouting. “Unnie, please.”

Yeji’s answer is silence pretending Yuna said nothing. Yuna starts pouting again. “Yeji unnie, please. Besides he is a Midzy, right?” Yuna looks at you.

“Yeah. As I said I’m a big fan.” You add.

When Yeji says nothing again. And you think this is lost. Yuna uses his final technique her little kitten face. He is pleading looking directly at Yeji. Just as Pussy in boots in Shrek. You don’t receive fully the little kitten face but you see it by the side.

Fuck. You are willing to give your house if she asks you doing that face. And you start wondering why the governments and international organizations spent so much money training people like you to end wars. When probably all they need is the Yuna’s little kitten face. Dam even if she asks Putin to end the war. Will he say no?

Yeji tries to avoid her face or maybe just look at the others trying to find an answer. Ryujin just shrugs like saying I don’t care. Lia and Chaeryeong that were looking Yuna’s little kitten face just nod. Yeji sighs and says. “Fine. He can come.”

“Yaaaaaay” says Yuna. She takes your arm and pulls you to start moving. Then she releases so you can follow them.

That expression that she just used was the bubbliest yet the most attractive you’ve ever seen. And she touched you. You can die right now. You start walking behind them. You just can’t help and you take a peek at their asses. Ryujin has a really bubbly ass. Chaeryeong has the largest one and seems like is not that soft because has muscles around. Lia has the softest one like you can sleep there. Yeji has a cute butt. And finally, Yuna has a bubbly cute ass. She is using baggy pants but her butt can be noticed trough them.

While walking Yuna turns lightly her head to you to ask you. “Hey Mr. Diplomat how old… are you?” She paused because she noticed you looking her ass. You were caught in fraganti so you just looked at her and smile. “Well mmmmm… I’m actually 25 years old. International age I mean.”

After you answer Yuna says something to Yeji. Yeji also turns her head to you. Look at you and nods to Yuna.

All of you finally arrive at the bar. Ryujin asks for champagne for everybody including you. She didn’t ask any of you. She just ordered. Yeji slaps her arm. “Ryujin yaaa. Why do you always do that?”

Ryujin answers. “It doesn’t matter. All of us were going to drink that anyway. Right?”

You see around and everybody is nodding. It seems that the dominant Ryujin you see trough tv screen is actually a dominant Ryujin in real life.

“Let’s make a toast. Raise your glasses” Says Yeji. And by looking at the girls and you she is ordering you to do it. Everybody raises their glasses. “Our schedule didn’t let us to celebrate properly the birthday of our beloved maknae. Yuna we all love you.” At the end of this sentence. You start nodding hard. Yeji got quiet and looks at you. All the girls look at you too and then laugh. You blush. “Anyway…” Yeji continues. “Apparently everyone gathered here LOVES you Yuna. Happy Birthday.”

The girls take turns to hug Yuna. First Yeji, then Ryujin. You notice that everyone gets closer and say a few words in Yuna’s ear. When is your turn you gather all the courage in your body and swallow the nervousness and try to look cool.  You hug her and whisper in her ear. “Is true indeed that everybody here loves you. Happy birthday. I wish you have a good time tonight.” She grins and whispers in your ear. “Well, you can help me to have a good time tonight.”

Shit. You think. I felt her chest during that hug. And now she says this I really can’t control my excitement.

And actually, you got hard down there. While you were hoping she didn’t notice it the hug ends and she looks down like looking for something.

It seems like she felt it.

Then the girls sited around the bar and ordered drinks. You took place beneath Yuna. She leaned on you.

“Oppa…” She says and you got surprised.

“Oppa?” You ask inmediately interrupting her.

“Yes you are older than me you are my oppa, right?” She questioned.

“Well yeah I can be your oppa if you want.”

“Nice. I want to ask you something. Can i?”

“Okay. But if is something that I can’t say because of my work please don’t use your little kitten face against me. I will give in and next thing will be that I’m fired.”

She laughs. “My what?”

“Ah I named your pleading face to Yeji-shi before as ‘little kitten face’”

“Because of Shrek?” She asks.

She gets me.

“Yeah. I just love that movie. But continue. Go ahead”

She continues “Anyway I’m not going to ask you something difficult, oppa. I just want to know what should I drink? I don’t have too much experience with that.”

“You are 19 now, right? What have you drinked before? and what did you like or not?”

“Well obviously soju. At first, I didn’t like it. But then I was into that. But tonight, I want something fancier.”

“You are lucky. As this is diplomat’s party. I think this bar has international beverage too. Have you heard about pisco?”

“What?! What is that?”

“Is alcohol is made from grapes: the green ones. And well is nice when you drink it with lemon and other stuff. The beverage is called pisco sour.”

“Well why not. Today I’m celebrating my birthday. If I pretend today is my birthday. This is my first time having 20 years. So today is the day of first times!”

“That’s the attitude!”

“Two pisco sours, please.” You ask to the bartender.

The bartender hands you two glasses. And you hand one to Yuna.  

She sips. “This is like lemonade, right? Just at the end I can taste some alcohol. Is not that strong.”

You nod. “So did you like it?”

“Yeah, kind of.” Answers, Yuna.

5

A couple of glasses later you and Yuna are talking.

“You know what?” You start “I think diplomat’s life and idol’s life have something in common.”

“Why do you think that?” Asks Yuna.

“Well, your life is kind of controlled by someone: your company. In my case the embassy. I’m living here in this country just to work. And also, our opinions can’t be radical. Do you remember that time where Tzuyu waved her flag? The… Taiwanese flag?” Yuna nods. You continue “She apologized then. That means that no idol can give political opinions, right? Well, I can’t neither. I can’t say Taiwan is a country or say what I think about any president or government out loud.”

“Well… Yeah, It makes sense. So, you can’t hang out at parties too?”

You are so into this subject. “Well, if something happens like a drunk fight or something like that. I’m fucked up. Because in the headline will appear ‘The diplomat of this country got drunk and…’”

Suddenly Ryujin hugs you from behind and asks you. “Hey, since when Yuna is your bias? Have you fapped to her photos?”

You blush and start stuttering. “I-I-I D-d-d-didn’t do that!”

Ryujin laughs. “Mr. diplomat knows how to be cute!” She pinches your cheek. Then she says looking at Yuna. “Hey if you don’t achieve nothing with him. I’ll ask his number.”

Yuna hit Ryujin’s arms. “Ryujin-yaaaaa.”

You look at Yuna. “Achieve something?” You ask.

Yuna blushes a little bit. “Well did you remember before when we were walking to the bar? When you were… mmmm… looking my ass?”

You almost spit the pisco sour. Ryujin laughs. “It seems like Mr. Diplomat likes to stare asses. Did you peak mine too?”

Fuck Ryujin is so straight when she talks. This can’t be a mess. You must apologize. You think.

“Ammm… I do. Sorry.” You apologize.

“So who has the best one?” Ryujin asks you.

This brat knows how to make you nervous.

“Y-y-y-yuna” You answer stuttering.

“Well, I give up, Yuna. Mr. Diplomat is in love with you. I don’t get him. Everybody’s favorite is my ass or Chae. I’m leaving it to you.” Ryujin says while walks out to join the other members.

“Really?” Asks Yuna looking at you.

“Yeah. You are my favorite in everything! My ultimate bias.” You shout.

Fuck. It seems I’m really drunk.

Yuna stares at you and doesn’t say anything.

You blew up. She probably isn’t looking for a fanboy. You shouldn’t have drunk too much.

But she caught your arm and walks with you. You just follow her. “What happened, Yuna?” You ask.

She looks at you and keeps walking. “Today is the day of first times.”

She is leading you to the bathroom. She enters and locks the door.

You are in disguise. What to do now is pretty obvious but is Yuna so you are doubtful.

Before you decide anything Yuna kisses you.

Fuck. Is the best kiss you ever had. So this is how it feels when you kiss someone you really really like. Is like an explosion. Like there was nothing and then a big bang.

The kiss breaks. “Did you like it?” Asks Yuna.

You don’t answer just kiss her again. The sensation is something different. Like you can be here forever. But the night was just starting.

Yuna starts touching your back while kissing you. Then your chest. Your neck. She stops. “You don’t want to touch me?” She looks directly in your eyes.

“No, no. Is not that. Is just I didn’t want to ruin the kiss.” You say.

“Oppa. You know what are we doing next, right? I know you are not so innocent!” She says. And starts kissing you again.

Now you touch her. Her neck, her back you go down. Her delicious ass is being groped by your hands. You lean her closer to you by pressing her butt.  

You start kissing her neck. “Yuna. You are so beautiful and cute. Your mouth, your face, your ass.” You press your hands in her butt harder. She just moans “Mmmmmm….” But then she speaks. “I can feel your dick poking my abs. Just like before when you hugged me.”

You press her butt stronger. So, she can feel it more. Then you lift her up by grabbing her legs and kiss her neck again. “Mmm… I want to see your tits, Yuna.” While being in the air she manages to take off her blouse. You see her lingerie and anxiously you start kissing around her tits. While she is trying to untie her bra. Finally, you receive in your view her heavenly boobs. Her nipples are totally pink and are like inviting you to suck them.

This is the best feast I’ve ever had.

You kiss and lick her tits while the only response from Yuna is “Mmmm.” When you left her legs touch the ground, she kisses you again and she kisses your neck this time. Now she is trying to get your formal shirt off. You start undressing yourself. She kisses your neck and starts going down till she is in front of your crotch. She is in her knees.

“Mmmm… I want to know if you are a big fan as you said.” She touches your crotch. And starts undressing your pants. Then she just puts down your boxers.

Your dick is hard as never was. When she puts down your boxers your cock jump off and slaps Yuna’s face. She looks at you and then stares your cock.

“It looks that you were right. You are the biggest”

Then she starts stroking. You just moan.

“I thought you said it was first times’ day.”

“Yes oppa. This is my first time with a foreign guy and my first time sucking cock big like yours”

She starts licking the tip of your cock.

“Oppa I’m starting to doubt if this can fit in my mouth.”

“Let’s find out.” You say. She nods and starts putting it in her mouth.

First the tip and then she tries to push deeper. Her mouth is full but there is plenty of dick left. She starts moving. You can’t deny that you had better heads before. But… She looks at you while sucking you. Then you are aware again that the one sucking you off is Itzy’s Yuna. So, you start to feel better. Fuck you could say that you are even about to cum. You caught her head with your hands and start pushing.

“Fuck Yuna. I can feel your throat!”

She just says “Mmmm mmmm” as she can’t talk.

“I’m going to cum. Fuck. Fuck.”

You start cumming and you relax the grip on her head. And she frees. Some of the cum goes in her face.

“Mmmm… You are rough, oppa. I like that.” She picks some toilet paper of the bathroom to clean her face. “But you know what this is only starting. I want that big thing inside me now.”

She starts unbuckling her pants and puts it down and also her underwear at the same time. She has a shaved cute pussy and is already wet.

“Oppa, fuck me.” She says and then she bends and you have a total view of her ass. That beloved ass.

“You want me to fuck you?” You spank her.

“Aah. Yes, oppa. Fuck me with your cock!”

You grin and start to play with your dick around her pussy. “Oppa, just fuck me already!” She says.

You put your cock inside her. And you feel tightness. You haven’t feel something like this before. “Yuna you are so tight!” You say. And try to go deeper. “Fuck Yuna really I’m not lying you are too tight!”

“Mmmm… No oppa is just that you are too big. Just keep going. Mmmm…”

You start going deeper in a slow pace. Finally, you get to get your full dick inside. Yuna is moaning already. “Yuna, prepare yourself”

“Whaaaaaaa… aaah… mmm… mmm” She starts moaning. You are slamming her in a rapid pace. And then she says “Cumming aaaah” You don’t slow down. And then she shouts again moaning again but this time her legs start to shake. But you don’t slow down.

Fuck you’ d love to see Yuna’s cumming face. But right now in exchange you have a full view of her cute butt and her pussy while your cock enters and disappears. She is moaning so hard.

“Aaaaah… Oppa. I love how you fuck me. You are really deep into me.” She says.

And is true is almost like your tip is kissing her womb. This tightness is almost like her walls are never letting you go. Like their insides are sucking you up. Is this heaven? The pleasure right now is out of this world.

While dreaming off, it happens you cum inside her. Fuck you really fast up the pace because now you are out of breath. Yuna stands up looks at you smiles and kisses you. “That was one of the best orgasms I’ve ever had. And really orgasms because it happened multiple times” Yuna says. “You are special and fuck you cummed so much”. At the moment white liquid starts to drip from her crotch.

Suddenly the door sounds. There are lots of knock knock and then a voice: “Yuna we need to leave now. They found out about the manager bribed. We will be waiting for you on the car outside.”

You look to Yuna. And she starts explaining. “Have you heard anytime about Itzy joining a party where they were having a show. Or have happened ever that the last entertainment show joins the party in your diplomat events?”

“Well… Being honest I never heard of that. And that never happened. I don’t remember that the fat lady singer ever joined the party after her show.”

“Yeah. That’s what’s normal. But we bribed our manager to tell JYP we were already at the dorm and we sneaked into the party.”

“So you weren’t invited to the party? And wait did you lie to Jyp?” You ask.

While this conversation was made Yuna started dressing up. As you see it you start looking for your clothes too.

Yuna answers “Yeah, that’s why we were just in the bar. I mean we didn’t want to catch too much attention. And also, we were with our stage clothes if we were invited, we probably were wearing some fancy dresses or something like that. And yeah, we lied to Jyp. He is nice but sometimes he is just a pain in the ass. You know if it was for him, I’ll be virgin even now.”

“Well yeah if you had gone to the main saloon, you probably had caught more attention. Then I must be really thankful for that bribe because if that wasn’t happened, this wasn’t happened.”

“Yes, oppa. And also, is thanks to Yeji. When you looked my ass, I was asking Yeji if I can be with you and she nodded. But sadly, I must say bye now. I really want to have another meeting with you and that big thing of yours.” She kisses you and continues. “and maybe we can try other things. You know Ryujin says that anal sex is way better than normal sex. But I don’t know maybe I need to experience it by first hand.” She hands you a piece of paper.

“Is your number?” You ask like pleading.

“Aww you can be a cutie pie too. Yes, it is. I must be going. Is better if I leave alone. Wait inside here and after a couple minutes leave. Ok?” She says.

“Yes. I’ll be expecting our next meeting.”

“Me too.” She kisses you and then leaves the bathroom.

That actually happened. You think. I had sex with my ultimate bias.

And now you remember all the things the view of her precious ass. Her eyes while she was sucking you off. The taste of her lips. Her essence. Her ass in your palms. Her surprised eyes when she saw your cock. The sensation of his tongue in your cock and her throat.

The sound of your phone wakes you up. Some text messages.

“Hey Oppa is Yuna. It seems like you weren’t the only diplomat getting fun. Ryujin also had fun with an argentinian diplomat. And he knows you, so the girls and I got his number and yours. Let’s have another meeting soon”

You smile. What is even better that you fucking your bias from Itzy is that your friend could do it too and maybe he even had anal sex with Ryujin. It seems that this kind of parties are not so bad.

[ant0nsfirstluv]

Riize Romantic Headcanons (2)

A/N: part twooo of my last posts + expanding on certain headcanons ♾️

Warnings: None

More under the cut

Shotaro:

lovesss to hype you, if you ever posted on insta he’d comment so much, repost it on his personal story, text you about how pretty you looked

he’d shamelessly compliment you so often, literally he’d see you for the first time in the day and would just shower you in so much praise and affection

always. taking. photos of you just for him to look at while he’s away or just because you look so goodt

Sends you video clips of him dancing and gets all smiley when you compliment him even though he knowsss he did good

holds you on his back especially if you two have been walking for a while and want to take a break

aggressively supportive !!! literally cheers you on no matter what interest or hobby you decide to take on

Thanks you allll the time and gives you a small kiss each time he does, you could literally just hand him a tissue and he’d be “thank youu 😙”

The least conflicts could ever happen with him tbsh, even if there was a disagreement between you two he’s level headed enough to where you two will somehow someway find a solution

Eunseok:

doesn’t have a specific nickname for you because he’ll just call you his “little [insert random thing]” or “my [insert random thing]

I like to think he’d call you his flower but that’s just me 🌚 leave it up to your imagination

messes with your hair often, sometimes he’ll literally just wordlessly play with it until you snap him back into reality

verrry sudden compliments, out of nowhere he’ll drop the most sweet blush inducing compliment ever and then go back to being stone or messing with you 😭

randomly appears at your house without saying anything, you’d literally be walking around your home and he would just walk in like “hey 🙋”

you two will be in the same place and he’ll still text/facetime you instead of just walking to where you are to tell/show you what he needs to say

he loves staying in with you even if you two do practically nothing he’d be fine with you on his lap while watching tv and snacking

protective but in a very calm sense. helps you avoid things he knows you’re particularly uncomfy with or just borderline keeps you out of harms way by being right by you

Sungchan:

has soft launched you two like 5 million times everybody knows you two are together atp he is NOT slick bro 😭

as I said in the last post he loves kissing your face and I feel like he’d wake you up by giving you some kisses on your cheek while whispering your name

eating together is a must he will literally just text and ask to eat together at your fave restaurant just because and let’s you order wtv you want

has his hands on you in someee type of way literally he finds a way or reason to touch you no matter what he just can’t keep his hands to himself ☹️

would buy matching or similar gym wear for you two if you ever do or want to come to the gym with him, ugh the matching sets would be SO CUTE

will literally have you sit on his back while he does push-ups or see how many times he can squat while holding you

alwaysss reminiscing about moments between you two throughout the relationship the amount of cute convos that happened because of him starting with “babe do you remember when…”

loves being praised by you like your compliments literally make his whole entire day PLEASE DO ! send him sweet motivational goodmorning texts

Wonbin:

let’s keep it real for a moment…he would most definitely call you his pretty girl

has his moments of just staring/adoring you, whether you two are on opposite sides of the room or if he’s right by you while you’re doing something

if you guys don’t know, wonbin has mentioned that he has a habit of doing things 7 times in a row, so ofc in my mind,, he probably kisses you 7 times before you leave his place :( or before you gts

there’s been so many times where he’d be hanging out with the members and will just DISAPPEAR as soon as you ask to hang out, the members will ask where he went and he’s already at your house 😭

if someone made you even slightly visibly uncomfortable or upset he would glare at them until they went/looked away

if a girl tried getting his number or something he’d probably blankly look at them for a good…3 seconds and then just “no 🫤”

no matter where you’re laying down he’ll curl up right next to you or on top of you and he lovesss taking a nap with you

absolutely geeks when you two accidentally match or wear similar outfits he will find out what you’re gonna wear just so he can secretly wear the same thing 🌚

would paint a nail with your initial 🌚 but would get sooo shy when anybody outside of the members asked what the letter meant LOL

Seunghan:

you could be wearing… a plastic bag…and he’ll still be like “you’re so beautiful” like man hello

touching your face is a habit of his, he’ll literally be smiling down at you while stroking your cheek and jawline with his thumb and pointer

whenever you sit on his lap while he’s gaming whenever he has a free hand he’ll take advantage of it to stroke your back or squish your face for a kiss

loves to hear your voice..will call you literally just to hear it you don’t even have to be directly talking to him as long as he can hear you

you’ll be sitting down with the members and he’ll get a tiny bit jealous once you laugh at eunseoks joke a little too hard and he’ll run by, pick you up and run off with you

helps you with your hair whenever you’re struggling with it, as long as you guide him and give him instructions he’ll try his best !!!

I’m sorry but if you ever were irritated or grumpy and accidentally let it slip while with him he’d grab your face and kiss you to shush you 😭

he eats up whenever you’re shy he relishes in it so much he can’t help but want to watch you look away because you can’t keep eye contact

wouldn’t let you be insecure in the slightest you could literally have just woken up lips dry face puffy and he’ll still make you feel so pretty

Sohee:

likes to cuddle with him laying back and you on top of him resting your head in the crook of his neck while he draws patters into your back :(

whenever he tells you goodmorning he always gives you a hug with a good squeeeeze and a quick kiss on your nose or cheek

trust he likes to be babied and spoiled but sometimes he wants to be the gentleman for you too like let him take care of you and nurture you okayyy 💔

sohee’s cute demeanor can make him seem like he’d be shy which could be the case but I can see him being bold or more straightforward when it comes to his affections towards you

like he’ll ask YOU out, he’ll ask if he could kiss you for the first time, he’ll hug you, hold your hand, and ask you on a date first

gloats about you to everyone, the members included, as soon as you post yourself on your story he’s quick to say “ugh my gf is so pretty guys look look look” while mushing his phone in their faces

he is soooo sweet and truly so lovely..but sometimes…you will be a victim of the sassy man apocalypse while you’re with him I’m sorry LMFAOO

like if you forgot to text him before you got back home or if you fell asleep forgetting to call him before you did he’d be so quick to text you “I see how it is 🙄”

or he’d avoid kissing you but as soon as you give up trying to kiss him he’d be SO quick to switch up wanting a kiss IMMEDIATELY begging you for one

Anton:

he would most definitely see cute pics of two animals like some ducks or rabbits snuggling together and will text it to you and be like “us”

hugs from behinddd allll the timeeee even if you two are just standing there he’ll hold onto you from behind and rest his head on your shoulder

pretends to bite you, especially on your shoulder but if he ever did accidentally actually bite you he’d make it up by putting a small peck wherever he did it

kisses your hand and down your forearm because he just likes to tbsh

has you do the most foolish tiktoks with him and yes you guys will have like 300 drafts and yes he makes you two do like 12 takes 😭😭

particular compliments, will call you gorgeous overall but has moments where he tells you a certain color makes you look radiant or when your hair looks extra good

spoils you to oblivion, you have a wishlist frm your fave clothing brand you say 🤔 BOUGHT, he sees some cute matching couple necklaces..SOLD ! you lost your favorite makeup brushes ? HERES SOME NEW ONES !

whenever he flirts and starts getting bold he’ll fold so quick like he’ll build up his courage to be super straight forward but will literally crumble and be a tad bit embarrassed later especially if you repeat what he said LMFAOO

[johannestevans]

Strange Liberty

Dark fantasy fiction. A young man convicted of manslaughter is sent to a magical prison. 

Rated M, 27.5k, dark fantasy with some M/M dark romance on the side. 

Salvo Caine, cursed with a magically sapping touch, is convicted of manslaughter and dispatched to an island prison. Once there, he’s offered limited freedom — and affection — by the cold and manipulative prison warden, Guillaume Villiers. 

Read on Medium / / Read on Patreon / / Leave a tip.

Good bit of age gap sexiness, and some medical and care-giving kink as well. Note CWs for the expected violence of the prison system; past chronic illness and child neglect; threats of, discussion of, and attempted sexual violence; traumatic death; power struggles and fucked-up dynamics. 

----

He arrives in the middle of the fucking night, and Redford leans up against the open trap, watching as the guards come in. They’re all soaked through from the fucking rain, must have had a bad boat trip over – he looks fucking tiny in between all the guards coming in with him. Half a dozen guards would normally be the standard to transport a whole coach of new meat, but they always put a whole unit alongside this sort of inmate.

When the guards part, Redford gets a good look at him, slim and slight with a thick cloud of hair and very big eyes. His ankles and his wrists are cuffed, chains running between the four points and making him move slow.

He stumbles and collapses to the floor on his knees and elbows, making the chains rattle, and Redford can’t even hear the names the guards call him or the things they snap at him over the roar of everybody else watching him come in.

Already, he’d been able to hear the quieter talk and laughter up and down the rows of cells, prisoners talking about him – now, on the floor with his ass in the air, that’s too much not to react to.

“That arse looks like it’ll bruise nice and easy!” he hears Rand call from the floor below, and he hears other jeers and compliments – about the lad’s ass, about his thighs, how tight his boycunt’ll be, how pretty his lips are, how they’ll be happy to show him what real men get up to behind bars.

It’s always like this, with the cuffed mages.

Half the men in this prison have suffered at the hands of magic-users like them, and even if they hadn’t, the attitudes they come in with are enough to hate them over. Even the big, more muscular ones get this sort of intimidation – they’re usually arrogant sorts, used to relying on their magic instead of any strength or agility, and with their magic dampened, they end up pretty easy to push around, and they deserve it, too.

Haughty, over educated, always acting like they’re too good to be in here with the rest of them.

Redford is the first to get at him in the morning when he comes out of the new arrivals’ cell. He doesn’t look like he’s slept, dark bags under his eyes, his lips chapped and bitten bruised, and he doesn’t meet a single man’s eye as he nervously steps out of his cell.

Red shoves him up against the wall, and he drags in a hitched breath, his big eyes going wide – Red’s belly is flattening him back against the stone, and he can feel him trembling, feel how warm he is. Red leans in and breathes on the side of his neck, blows air over his ear, but he doesn’t say anything.

“How long are you in for, sweetheart?” Redford asks softly. “You even know what deep shit you’re in?”

The new meat’s gaze is fixed on Red’s upper chest instead of his face.

There’s a clicking of a tongue behind him, and Redford steps back from the new inmate, making him drop like a weight. He stands back and straight to attention as he glances back at the warden, who’s standing in the centre of the corridor, leaning on his cane.

“Warden Villiers,” Red says.

“I wish you weren’t so quick to make new acquaintances at times, Mr Redford,” Villiers says mildly, and Red grins at him. “In my office, Mr Caine, if you would.”

Caine cringes, looks anxiously between Redford and Villiers both, and when he looks up to meet Red’s eyes for the first time, there’s something pleading in them. It only lasts a second, and then he’s trailing after Villiers down the corridor.

Redford watches them go, and hums thoughtfully to himself before he heads to eat.

* * *

Salvo shivers as he follows up the stairs to Villiers’ office, feels the chill on the back of his neck, insinuating itself under his skin. Villiers moves slowly, leaning heavily on his cane for the support it can give him as they ascend – he speeds up a little once they’re on even ground. Salvo risks looking up at the older man as they move, looks at how thin he is – even thinner than Salvo is himself, pointy and angular under his black suit, which is narrowly tailored.

He wears boots instead of shoes, although they’re not like the guards’ boots. These barely make any noise at all on the smooth lacquered floors, and they come in tight to the ankle and the foot.

A guard opens the door for Villiers, and Villiers nods his head for Salvo to step into the room ahead of him.

After crossing the threshold, painfully aware of Villiers’ gaze on the back of his neck, he goes to stand in the middle of the room, in front of Villiers’ desk.

It’s warmer in here than in the prison proper, a fire crackling in the hearth, which has a firmly bolted set of guards around it and a very small trap on the front with only just enough space to reach in and move coals and kindling.

“Thank you, Rusk, you’re relieved.”

“… Sir? But he’s, um…”

“I have a firm handle on our new addition, Rusk, I don’t need your assistance.”

Villiers closes the door behind the guard, and Salvo hears his bootsteps recede down the corridor.

Salvo swallows as Villiers slides the lock across and then moves into the room. He sets his cane in a bucket with an umbrella to one side, and Salvo watches the way he favours his good leg as he moves across the room, laying his hands on the side of a bookshelf, then on his desk, to support himself.

“Are you frightened?” Villiers asks.

Salvo doesn’t know what the correct answer is, and says nothing.

Villiers goes on, as if he’d said yes, “I would be too. You heard the baying of those jackals out there as you arrived – fresh meat, they called you. And those men are passionate carnivores.”

Salvo presses his lips together, gripping his fingers against one another in front of his belly, and he risks a glance up at Villiers’ face. It’s a somewhat handsome face, although severely featured – his eyes are a dark blue, his eyebrows thick and dark in colour, his upper lip very thin, his lower lip thicker. He’s got very thin skin, and in places Salvo can see the blue show through of his veins, especially on the side of his neck and where his throat adjoins his head.

His face droops on one side.

“You had a stroke?” Salvo asks. He doesn’t mean to ask the question – it comes out of his mouth unbidden, and when Villiers smirks at him, the smile is lopsided, stronger on the left side of his face than his right.

“That’s right,” he says quietly. “You were a nurse, yes?”

“No,” says Salvo. “I’m just a care assistant.”

“You didn’t want to pursue nursing?”

“Didn’t have the marks for university. I was looking for an apprenticeship, but it’s hard to get a place.” He frowns, and looks down at the rug beneath their feet, an antique thing with a dark green and blue pattern. “Won’t be able to get one now.”

“Why not?”

“DBS check.”

“Magical crimes aren’t always included on mundane criminal records,” Villiers says mildly. “It’s decided on a case-by-case basis upon your release.”

Salvo doesn’t say anything, but he does exhale, feeling at the same time relieved, and also as if a trap is being laid for him.

“Why am I here?” he asks.

“I think you should know that by now,” says Villiers snidely, and Salvo presses his lips together, clenching his jaw to keep from snapping back, because that is a trap.

“Why am I in your office, sir?”

“Well, that’s rather up to you,” Villiers says, his voice softer now. His boots still don’t make any sound as he comes out from behind his desk, and Salvo doesn’t move as he watches the shadow of the other man in his peripheral vision, feels him come closer. The older man’s breath is warm on the back of his neck, making Salvo shiver and have to resist leaning back into him – he smells very faintly of coffee, mostly smells of shaving foam and camphor oil. “Why would you like to be in my office, Mr Caine?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Young man, this is a prison filled to the brim with hardened criminals. Many of them, despite being so inclined, haven’t known the touch of a woman since they were incarcerated – pretty thing as you are, I’m sure you’ll do in a pinch.”

Salvo doesn’t say anything, but he can’t stop himself from letting out a short, abortive sound when Villiers lays his hands on his shoulders, grips them, presses his narrow thumbs into the tension on the back of his neck. He’s so unused to being touched, and it feels painfully good, makes his skin feel like it’s singing – he leans back into it, and he lets out another small noise, this one of loss, as Villiers steps away and releases him.

“Your fellow inmates will make use of you,” Villiers says, “and short of fucking you, I expect they’ll push you about a bit, bruise you, hurt you here and there. You’re an easy prospect to bully, with your magic dampened and that protection stripped from you. Do you want that?”

“To be bullied? No, I don’t think so.”

“And to have them fuck you?”

Salvo thinks of the noise it had made when he’d come in and they’d all been shouting and banging on the walls, laughing, how loud it had been. It had been… overwhelming.

He’s spent a long time avoiding crowds, groups of people, avoiding anyone who might be forward in trying to touch him, speak to him, want to fuck him. His whole body aches with want, but not for that.

“Are the guards meant to let them?” Salvo asks.

“No,” Villiers says. “Any guard I caught abusing an inmate, I’d have punished – any guard permitting it, I’d punish myself. The so-minded inmates tend to hide this sort of thing, of course, and guards rarely advertise it either.”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“It is – but a true one. I don’t have enough guards to watch each man twenty-four hours a day, though, or even just the pretty ones who might prove a temptation.”

“Am I pretty?”

“In here? You’re a vision.”

“You’re suggesting something. An alternative.”

“Offering something, rather. Protection, if you’d like it.”

“From other inmates?”

“You’ll be with the general population through most of the day – work duties, recreation outdoors. But I can arrange particular bathing and bedding arrangements for you.”

“Bedding,” Salvo repeats.

“Quite,” the warden says. “A bed to lay your head on, no cellmates, no risk.”

“Except from you.”

“From me? Young man, what risk do you think I pose you? Look at me – an infirm old man, no risk to anybody at all.”

Salvo looks up at Villiers’ face again, at the sly expression there, the amusement writ in his glittering eyes and lopsided smile.

“What do you want, if not sex?”

“I’m offering out of the goodness of my heart,” Villiers says with utter insincerity, so transparent about it that Salvo almost marvels at it. “We both know you’re not a criminal like the majority of my other charges.”

“I’m a murderer.”

“A manslaughterer,” Villiers corrects him. His tone is surprisingly kind as he says, “I actually tried to refuse you, insist you go to a more appropriate institution than this one, but the decision was out of my hands.”

Salvo looks down at his own hands, gripping tightly at one another, tighter now. His knuckles hurt, and are going white from the clenching in his hands. “You’re not going to fuck me?”

“No. Have you had sex before?”

Salvo nods.

“Consensually?”

Salvo hesitates, not certain how to answer, but then he nods.

“Hm, well. Nonetheless, no.”

Salvo shifts his hands, and he feels the weight of the two metal bands around each of his wrists. When he’d been brought in last night, a chain had run between them to keep him halfway bound, but they’d taken that away when they’d left him to his cell. Now, the cuffs just sit around each of his wrists and ankles, simple bracelets of silver. He can see the sheen of the magic in them when he looks at them directly, watch the pulse of it through the metal in rhythm with his heartbeat – in rhythm with the magic inside him.

“You didn’t have to come to prison to have those fitted,” Villiers tells him. “You wouldn’t even have had to have them commissioned – any good doctor would have provided them free of charge.”

Salvo opens his mouth, closes it. “There is a gnawing hunger in me,” he whispers after a pause. “These cuffs prevent me from harming anybody, true, but they also prevent latent magic from flowing through me. I eat, but I starve; I drink, but I thirst. Ever since they snapped shut around my limbs my bones began to ache.”

“That hunger is part of your penance, then,” Villiers says, and Salvo closes his eyes, but nods his head. “I read the statement you gave at your trial, that you wish you’d chosen differently.”

“Wouldn’t you have?”

Villiers limps around the table and sinks down into his chair, making it creak, and Salvo automatically sits to keep his downcast eyes from being so close to Villiers’ face, to keep from keeping his stare.

“I thought it would be enough,” Salvo murmurs. “Separating myself from magical life, magical society, living and working with mundies. That I could keep myself intact, and still live.”

“You crossed paths with your victim by happenstance, I take it?”

“He wouldn’t have touched me, only he recognised me,” Salvo says. “Recognised my father’s features in mine. He caught my hand, and it was…”

He thinks of it often. Every day, every night, when he sleeps, when he wakes – it’s impossible not to think about. He thinks of how it was as though his flesh came suddenly alive after being halfway to comatose for so long, as though lightning were alive under his skin, sizzling out of his veins. He recalls craving more of it, the reflexive need to be closer, much closer, to sate the painful hunger in him.

“He didn’t know to— he didn’t think to push me off or away. He didn’t know that… He laughed, was delighted, and he kissed me back when I kissed him. I had effectively been fasting for years, near to a decade. I leeched from him all he had before I knew what I was doing.”

“A horrible way to die, I’m informed,” Villiers says. “To have the magic wrenched from you, sapped from your very cells – like having the blood bled from you all at once.”

“He didn’t have time to scream,” Salvo says. “But yes, it hurt him a great deal.”

“At least it was quick.”

“I fail to see a silver lining.”

“A guard will collect you when it’s time for lights out,” Villiers says. “Off you go.”

Salvo silently nods his head, and as he leaves the room, can’t help feeling he’s made some sort of deal with a devil, going along with the offer as given.

* * *

Redford watches the new mage as he comes back from the stairs, not with the warden this time – Villiers is a freak of some proportions, always likes the strong mages, always likes the trim and pretty ones.

“He used to be an assassin, you know,” he says when Caine finally comes down onto the main floor, and Caine glances his way, but doesn’t let his gaze flicker all the way up to Redford’s face. He stands there with his hands clasped in front of him, silent. “Villiers.”

“How the fuck was he an assassin with a bum leg?” asks Rosen next to him, and Pike grips the back of his neck as Redford laughs.

“He used to be an assassin,” Redford repeats. “Killed people the world over – then he had a stroke, couldn’t hack it anymore.”

“’Cause of his leg.”

“It’s not just the leg and the facial droop,” says Pike. His gaze is on Rosen’s neck as he keeps rubbing his thumb into the base of it. Redford can see the mark higher up on Rosen’s throat where Pike must have bitten him last night.

Caine has drifted closer to them, albeit without saying a word.

“Strokes on different sides of the body damage different parts of the brain,” says Pike. “Difficulties with language, or with writing, mathematics… But that can include differences in personality. He was a wild man before – he’s cold now. Collected, but cold, cautious.”

“You speak as though you know personally,” says Caine, but he doesn’t lift his eyes up. “You don’t look old enough for all that.”

“I’m not so old,” says Pike, and Redford watches the way he looks at Caine, the way his eyes rove over the new meat’s body. He’s not interested in sex, of course – he likes a man for the blood inside him, and with a skinny little thing like Caine, there’s not much blood to spare, even without the taint he’d complained before that the cuffs leave on the stuff when you tap the barrel.

“He was killing into his forties,” Redford says. “He’s fifty-six now, had the stroke years back. Came to be warden here after getting out of rehab.”

“His personality used to be different?” Caine asks.

“Why?” Redford asks mildly. “You like his personality now?”

Caine might not speak much, but he’s got a nice voice. It’s stronger, warmer, than Redford would have thought from the looks of him, so slim with his big brown eyes, the fluff of his dark curls around his head.

Caine doesn’t answer, so Redford reaches out and grips him by the hair, slides his fingers through the curls and tightens his hold experimentally – Caine goes loose and breathless immediately, his lips parting, his eyes widening. A blush darkens his cheeks and his knees look loose. He doesn’t try to drag away, doesn’t seem to be following Redford’s hand out of reflex, either – he’s up on his toes, pushing up into more of the touch.

“Leave the kid alone, Redford!” barks Cornell from the other side of the hall, and Redford lets him go.

“You have a heartbeat like a mouse’s,” Pike says. He’s a freak, and doesn’t make any attempt to hide it – Caine, to his credit, doesn’t let it put him off. “Quiet and fast.”

“What are you in for?” Rosen asks, and Caine’s eyes flicker up to him. Rosen’s smaller than he is, and he looks Rosen in the eyes.

“You first,” he says.

“I killed a guy,” says Rosen, and Caine stares at him, his eyes widening further, his lips parting.

“You did?” he asks, and Rosen laughs before Pike slaps him upside the head.

“Theft,” Rosen says, chuckling. “Cars. A bus. A train, they charged me for, but I didn’t steal that.”

“Only ‘cause you couldn’t drive it off the tracks,” Redford says, and Rosen laughs. “Now you.”

“I killed a man,” says Caine, and Rosen laughs again.

Caine doesn’t. He stands there with his hands still clasped in that way he has, still. He looks like a little statuette of a saint.

“Oh, shit,” says Rosen. “He have it coming?”

Caine’s gaze flickers to Redford’s chest, but not all the way up to his face. “No,” he says. He looks like he’s sad about it, like he regrets it, but then his eyes shift upwards and he meets Redford’s gaze, something in Caine’s face goes hard. “Do you?”

Red grins down at him, and as soon as he shows his teeth, Caine retreats, turning away – one of the guards takes him through his paces, shows him around the place, tells him the schedule.

The evening time, through, he disappears.

He doesn’t stay in the new transplants’ cell and doesn’t get moved in with someone else’s either – Redford wonders if he’s been put in confinement on his own, all the better to keep him “safe”, but when he’s passing Beck Virgo’s cell a little before lights out, Beck tells him.

“Saw him out of the window,” he murmurs as Red passes him a cigarette through the trap. “Trailing behind Villiers like a fucking puppy.”

“Huh,” Redford murmurs, and thinks on that as he continues down the corridor.

* * *

The guest bedroom in Villiers’ lodge, separate from the prison proper, is modest, warm, and comfortable.

It’s nothing like the cell he’d been in, nor the cells that he’d seen in the prison – each has rather narrow bunks, thin mattresses, thin blankets, battered pillows. The sheets are cheap, made of crisp white cloth, and they’re all laundered en masse in the basement, but not with particularly forgiving products. A prison bed is not meant to be a place of comfort or ease, after all, nor the cells themselves.

This guest bedroom is made to serve one man, a lush double bed in the middle of the room, the bedspread red and silken, the fabric smooth under his fingers. There’s a chair and a desk to the side of the room, and Salvo stands with his hands rested on the desk, looking out over the hill.

The window doesn’t open, is just a set of wide panes, but at least there are no bars. Salvo can see the old stone sprawl of the prison over the island, can see the forestry either side; in the distance, he can see the pier, a boat tethered and waiting. The waters are choppy this evening, and although he can’t hear the wind through the thick glazed glass, he can see the trees whipping one way and the other.

“Comfortable enough for you?” asks Villiers, standing in the doorway.

He’s undressed, and Salvo stares at his body – he’s still wearing his suit trousers, but instead of his boots he’s wearing crushed velvet slippers, and belted over his chest he’s wearing a fine silk brocade smoking jacket, green and gold. If he’s wearing a shirt underneath, it has a low collar or none at all – where the smoking jacket is open, Salvo can see the edges of Villiers’ collarbone, the hollows in it; further down, he can see the curls of hair on his chest.

Salvo’s hands twitch at his sides, and his mouth feels dry.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, thank you. Is there some hidden consequence about to be sprung on me?”

“Am I going to clamber into bed with you, you mean?” Villiers asks, arching one eyebrow. “No, young man, I’m going to sleep in my own bed, where I belong. This door will be locked as I depart – you have your own bathroom, where you might pursue your evening ablutions, take a shower, and so forth. Any items you purchase from the commissary, books from the library, items you receive by post once your approval comes through, you might keep all these things here in your bedroom.

“In the event prisoners are confined to their cells during day time, you will be escorted to my office, whereupon you will either rest there with me or be brought here and locked in. Beyond such extenuating circumstances, however, you will not be able to return to your room here in the course of a day – you might want to keep that in mind when you consider what to bring out with you, your books, writing implements, and so on.”

“Yes, sir,” Salvo says. “Do you want me to be raped, sir?”

“What a curious question,” Villiers says, his blue eyes dark, his smile still dangerously sly. “Why ever would you ask it? I’ve made rather unorthodox choices if my desire was to have you victimised, bringing you here, isolated from the other prisoners, or even the guards.”

“I’ve never been at home with unorthodoxy,” Salvo says honestly, looking cautiously at the other man. “It strikes me as unpredictable.”

“I’m predictable enough,” Villiers murmurs. “I’m sure you’ll have the way of it quite soon.”

“They said you used to be very different, the other prisoners. Before you had a stroke.”

“What would they know of it?”

“Only hearsay, I suppose.”

“Hearsay, yes. Hearsay, and rumour.”

“Is it true?”

“Does it matter?”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“If I am different than I was before my stroke, the change is now permanent. What does it matter to you, young man, if I was different before now?”

“Aren’t you interested in how different I was, before I became an inmate here?” Salvo asks.

It’s the right question, and posed right too – Villiers stares at him, his expression retaining exactly the same slightly smug expression it had before, and then he exhales, smiles, adjusts his grip on his cane. He seems satisfied.

“We’ve plenty of time to get to know one another, Mr Caine. And many evenings ahead of us to do so.”

“Is that the purpose of my being here?” Salvo asks, and Villiers chuckles quietly, pulling the door closed and locking it behind him.

Salvo takes to his bed and sleeps well despite it all.

* * *

Salvo Caine is a funny sort.

Red doesn’t see any problem some mages being raped when they come into the nick, the ones that deserve it – there are men in this place who’ve spent all their years chained or controlled by very powerful or just quite sadistic sorcerers, and it’s more than a little catharsis for them to take out all that pain on whoever the fuck comes in chained and manacled. They go all their days able to hurt anybody they like, able to get away with all sorts, and when they finally get done for it, the tables are turned on them, and suddenly the scum under their feet get to turn around and give them the same shit back.

It’s not nice, no, and maybe it’s not really moral, but he couldn’t give a fuck.

Morals and ethics are limited in a place like this – when you live out your nights and half your days in a little grey box with bars on the door, there’s no fucking space for them. Red himself has never gone in much for rape – it doesn’t turn him on like it does some of the others, and he’s got a job concentrating on keeping his cock hard if he’s wrestling with whoever’s underneath him in the process, but it’s not because he cares that it’s fucking wrong, any more than punching a man’s lights out is wrong. If he deserves it, if he’s fucking earned it, who cares?

But in all honesty, he doesn’t much go in for men at all, although there’s as little room here for choice as there is morals and ethics – when he fucks a lad in here, it’s typically the ones like Salvo Caine. Round in the face, with a bit of plumpness to them, enough softness to sink into – his hair is soft too, all fluffy with thick dark curls, and with his big fucking eyes, he looks girlish enough, even without turning him around.

In all honesty, soft as it might fucking make him, it’s not the sex he misses – he wasn’t married, no, but he had a few regular women he’d take up with depending on where he was working, and it was the sharing a bed he missed, the feeling of someone sleeping beside him, smelling her perfume, touching her hair.

Caine is an odd duck, and it’s not like he could be mistaken for a girl to glance at him, at the shape of his shoulders or his body, the way he moves. He’s not a very big lad – he’s plump and has good flesh on him, but there’s a delicacy to him, pear-shaped and short, most of the plushness around his middle and his thighs, less on his chest and about his shoulders. He walks very carefully, like he’s nervous of making any noise at all.

Red’s not surprised when he hears someone talking about it, about what he’s in for – it’s not as if Caine’s going to be the only lad in the nick for something that wasn’t his fucking fault, something that basically amounted to a twist of fate or an accident, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it, has to approve of it.

All his life, he’s made certain trade-offs – as a lad when he was training up for the glass trade, he remembers learning how to fiddle the books from the out, remembers laughing conversations as they bought sand or panes or whatever else, about how much one thing was and how much they’d write down it was. Smuggling had been a pretty natural extension of it all, once he was running his own business, bringing things in from abroad and secreting the illicit alongside the legit.

It had been getting into the latter that had got him fucking pinched, working in with the Pikes out of Lashton and trafficking too much in drugs and highs for it to be ignored or overlooked.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t cared, per se – that’d be fucking stupid, it’s not like he enjoys it here – but he had felt the weight getting bigger and bigger, felt the other shoe getting too heavy not to drop, felt the shadow of it all over his head. When he’d come home to find the coppers going through his house and the pig leaning against the wall with the warrant in his hands, at the same time as the pit had gone out of his stomach and nausea had come clawing up his throat, he’d even felt a bit of relief.

Not out of guilt – who’d feel guilty for stealing from the fucking king? Cunt’s in a fucking coma, he’s not missing any of the tax – but just because he couldn’t bear the anticipation of it, of waiting for when he was going to get caught, and then the anticipation was gone and done and dusted.

And this is punishment enough – the fucking boredom of it, every day the same, no activity to take up your time except chat, books, and working the body in between working shifts. It’s not what people think the punishment will be in prison, but it fucking is.

Caine often filters over to them in the course of his days ahead for all Red threatens him, and he seems decently at home with them, at home with Pike and Rosen and all.

Red’s known this junior Pike a few years – he’d seen him about for years even before he’d taken on the smuggling jobs himself, and more than once on the outside, he and Pike had gone out for pints together, or at the least, Pike would find Red where he was at the bar and insist on paying for his drinks, always flush with cash.

“What do you think of him?” Pike asks now as Caine shuffles obediently off after Cornell to be escorted up to Villiers’ house, laying his chin on his hand and watching thoughtfully as Caine’s shadow disappears after the rest of him. “I bet he’d taste fucking great if it weren’t for them cuffs.”

“You like ‘em with a bit of meat on them, don’t you?” Red asks, and Pike laughs, laying his arm around Rosen’s shoulder.

“Clearly,” he says.

“Mind your tongue, or else you’ll not be drinking from me again,” says Rosen, flicking Pike’s hand, but he’s smiling all the while, and Pike chuckles, nipping at the shell of his ear.

“I’m waiting anyway,” Pike says seductively. “Keeps you from getting anaemic.”

“Prick,” mutters Rosen, but he’s gone from smiling now to grinning, and Red smiles at him.

He likes Rosen well enough – he’d come in a month before Pike had, and Red had stepped in to keep some of the lads on 10 from roughing him up for being a Jew. It’s all very well roughing a lad up for having done something, it’s another for doing it because he’s had his cock clipped and says his prayers on Friday nights instead of Sunday mornings.

“He’s lived a fucked-up life,” Red says. “But you’d be hard-pressed finding a man in here that hadn’t. I don’t think he should be in here, anyway.”

“Why not?” Rosen asks. “He did kill that man.”

“Not on purpose,” Red says, shrugging. “They only take a hard line on it ‘cause they can’t do anything until after someone gets hurts, lads like him, and they wish they could do it from the out. He’s just another sort of vampire, really – he can’t help the way he is.”

“He can live without it,” Pike points out, his hands twitching – he wants a cigarette, Red supposes, but he can’t have one until tomorrow unless he wants to set off one of the fucking smoke detectors. “Then again, technically, so I can I.”

“Can you?” Rosen asks, raising his eyebrows, and Red looks at him in surprise as well, but Pike shrugs his shoulders.

“Wouldn’t be comfortable by any means, but I could probably get by on an iron-rich diet, a lot of raw and rare meat, shit like that. Vampirism is a bit different in a fae body than a human one – we get a bit more sustenance from magic than you sorts do, depending on the families we come from.” Pike exhales the way he might if he had a cigarette to hand, blows out air and obviously doesn’t find it quite satisfactory. “I think Caine did the best thing he could. Lived amongst mundies, worked with them – made sure anyone he might touch wouldn’t be too affected by it in the event he sapped anything from them. That man reached for him, he said, touched him without thinking – some family friend or the like. He should have fucking remembered who he was, what touching the man would do to him.”

“You’d think the guilt would be enough punishment,” Rosen says quietly. “I think it’d kill me, that sort of guilt – to know I’d killed a man, a man I’d known, liked, loved, even. Without even realising it was him, without a cause. Without coming in here as well.”

“You have enough guilt just by living, seems to me,” Red says, and Rosen laughs, then comes over looking a bit more thoughtful, pensive.

“And him,” he says quietly. “Him too.”

* * *

Salvo receives his work duty after a few days in the prison – basic enchantment work. He has to sit an exam to show he knows how to write out the symbols, to show that he knows how to properly draw them or carve them into a piece of material. His cuffs remain in place, of course, and none of the prisoners are permitted to charge their enchantments themselves anyway to keep people from enchanting weapons or explosives – they simply lay out the runes and they’re enchanted later, off the island.

Some of the prisoners are enchanting furniture and larger pieces of mechanism and machinery, but judging by how they talk to one another, how they chat, several of them were tradesmen or wizards on the outside – they’re at home with magical plumbing and complex warding structures, some of them with licenses under their belts and specialist training. Salvo is not given anything so complex or large: he paints the enchantments into little gift items, charming welcome mats to clean off shoes, charming keys and small signs to create small lights, even enchanting a few toys here and there.

Every day is the same: he goes down to the prison for breakfast, eats, attends his work duty, eats lunch, finishes his work, has some free time, which he often spends reading or sitting quietly, listening to others talk. Generally, he gravitates toward Rufus Redford – he prefers “Red” to Rufus, and Salvo doesn’t fault him that – and his friends: Callum Pike and Ira Rosen.

Red is a confident man, tall, square, and thick with muscle – he’s one of the tradesmen that works in enchantment, although he doesn’t use precisely the same skills he had on the outside. He’s a trained magical glazier, apprenticed when he was fourteen and left school early to take up the work – he’s worked for years with huge panes of glass, fitted windows in all kinds of public buildings, even in some of the royal palaces, even in Camelot Castle itself – but here on the prison work detail he mostly enchants craftsman’s tools or complex pieces of magical machinery, scaffolding, and things like that.

According to chatter around the prison, Red is in on tax fraud on a large scale, and a lot of organised theft that he’d done through his work, never doing the stealing himself, but organising for others to do it – Salvo gets the impression that he and Pike were already familiar with one another before meeting in prison.

Pike is in for some violent convictions – not murder, mostly aggravated assault and battery charges – alongside a long history of drug trafficking offences, and has been inside for short stretches twice before; like Red, Rosen is in prison for the first time, although Rosen’s sentence is a good deal shorter.

Rosen’s only going to be inside for another twelve to eighteen months – Red has close to a decade left on his sentence.

“How long you got?” he asks one afternoon at lunch, and Salvo looks up from his plate to meet Red’s brown-eyed gaze. He has a few scars on his face, and on the backs of his hands – one, on his forehead and cutting through his eyebrow, is from an enchantment he messed up when he was scarcely eighteen, the pane of glass exploding outwards and the shard only narrowly missing his eye.

Rosen and Pike aren’t paying attention, engaging in a very flirtatious game that Salvo can’t determine the precise rules of, but seems to involve a lot of trying to finger one another’s wrists while kicking each other under the table.

“Six years,” Salvo answers.

“That’s a long time for an accident,” Red says disapprovingly. “Half my sentence, that, and I did what I did on purpose.”

“No one died from what you did,” Salvo points out, and Red sighs, shaking his head. “The point was that I was irresponsible, I think. That I should have taken better precaution, should have worn cuffs like these.”

“They hurt, don’t they?” Red asks, raising his eyebrows, and when Salvo doesn’t say anything, he says, “I’ve seen a lot of mages wear those – here inside, sure, but in my line of work too, seen cloistered mages have cuffs like that, to keep them from going mad from the amount of magic around them, or to keep them from harming others. One thing to wear them for a quick outing outward, or to opt into wearing them out of some fucked up religious sadomasochism – one man’s torture is another man’s kink and all that – but it’s another to wear them every day just to fucking live, isn’t it?”

Salvo looks back at him, and then asks, “Is this you showing compassion for my perspective, the better to catch me by surprise when you turn on me?”

“And when am I gonna get the opportunity to turn on you, when you’re Villiers’ special little lad?” Red asks dryly, tilting his head and looking back at him with his lips twisted in a grin. He’s got uneven teeth – his jaw’s slightly uneven, Salvo thinks, from when he boxed as a teenager and a young man – and Salvo finds that he likes that. He likes how they look, like how much his teeth show his expression when he smiles. “Follow you back to the old man’s house after dark?”

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous of the warden’s special attention,” Salvo says.

“Something tells me I’m not his type,” Red says.

Salvo wonders what Red would say, if Salvo told him. If Salvo told him Villiers hasn’t touched him yet, nor seemed even to want to – if Salvo told him that he sleeps in his own very comfortable bed, in his own room, that Villiers barely even sees him most days, let alone speaks to him, with him.

Most nights, he’s escorted back to Villiers’ house by a guard, doesn’t walk back with Villiers at all, and Villiers has already retired to his office or his own bedroom for the evening. Would Red believe him, if Salvo said that Villiers hasn’t touched him yet, and he’s not sure the old man ever will? Does Salvo even believe the latter part himself?

“Does he frighten you?” Salvo asks.

“Villiers?”

“Yes.”

“He’s a frightening man,” Red says. “Scary sonuvabitch, he is.”

“You’re a good deal bigger than he is,” Salvo points out. “He hasn’t a size advantage on you as he might on me – quite the opposite, in fact. And he’s elderly, and… infirm.”

“That the word he used?” Red asks wryly, insightful in a way that Salvo might like, if he let himself like men much –if he let himself like anyone who wasn’t a mundie, any longer. “Infirm?” When Salvo doesn’t reply, Red says, “He likes that people think of him that way, people that don’t know what he is, don’t have an idea of who he is. He might be crippled by that stroke of his, but that doesn’t make him any less fucking lethal. It’s injured dogs that’ll harm you the worst, when it comes down to it. They’ve got less to lose.”

“Only when you have them cornered,” Salvo replies, setting his fork down on his plate. “An injured dog is only a threat once you start trying to corral it – d’you really think the old man is dangerous to you now, here?”

“He knows who I am, knows my name, has my file, holds the key to my lock-up,” Red says. “To everyone outside of this fucking place, I’m a bastard with a laundry list of things to punish me for, on an island far away from everybody – here, I’m nothing, and he’s God.”

Salvo considers this, considering too the fact that Villiers is more his god than Red’s, has more power over him – has even more privacy to do to Salvo as he pleases than he might Red, where there at least are, if not other prisoners as witnesses, there are other guards. Salvo has nothing, alone in Villiers’ house with him, but his word and Villiers’ own.

“I’m an atheist,” decides Salvo, and that makes Red laugh – he has a good laugh, barking, sort of rough and throaty – before he turns back to the others to talk to them.

On Thursdays, the allotted day of his prisoner number, Salvo goes into the prison library and withdraws three books – the limit – and throughout the week returns them through the slot before waiting impatiently for his opportunity to retrieve new books.

He has no one to call on to transfer money to him for the commissary, and he’s on a long waiting list for a prisoner assistance program on the mainland to get back to his letter to see about transferring some money from his own accounts, so he doesn’t buy anything there – the prisoner wages for their labour are low, though not as low as they are in mundie prisons, he’s fairly certain. A day’s labour can actually buy you something, anyway.

“You have a very fine hand,” Villiers remarks one Thursday evening as they walk back to Villiers’ lodge together. It’s raining, but the rain isn’t especially heavy, just falls in a very fine mist that sticks to his hair and the back of his neck and his hands. He’s carrying his books inside the leather satchel Villiers had handed him for the purpose, to keep them from getting wet. “I examined your handiwork from today. How long has it been since last you pursued enchantment?”

“Not so long,” Salvo murmurs. “I used to whittle when I was a child – it was supposed to hone my concentration, keep me calm. I wasn’t very good at animals – I was a bit better at architecture, at carving lighthouses, cabins, castles, towers. Enchantment was a bit more concentrated still, carving very small figures in place – I’d carve buildings and make them light up, make windmills turn, water flow, similar to the kind of stuff I’m doing now.”

“Those skills will serve you well here,” Villiers says. “Would that schools were upfront about what education will best serve a young person when they’re inevitably incarcerated.”

“Inevitably?” Salvo asks, and Villiers makes a quiet, amused sound.

“Something of an inevitability with you, young man,” he says, and the two of them step into the corridor, Villiers leading Salvo not to the bedroom that serves as his cell but through to a small sitting room, some armchairs beside a fire, a chess table set up and waiting. “Do you play?”

“Not really,” Salvo says. “I whittled some sets, but never liked to use them.”

“I’ve never been much of a man for the game myself,” Villiers says, sinking into one of the armchairs and gesturing with one long-fingered hand for Salvo to take the other seat, which Salvo does. This is only the third time he and Villiers have sat down together once they’re in the house – the first time, when Villiers had first brought him up here, a cold night a week back where Villiers had invited him to read beside the fire where it was warmer than in his room, and now. “It’s the sort of thing expected of a man my age, a penchant for chess games and long hours whiled away with a broadsheet newspaper.”

“You must resent it,” Salvo says as he picks up a pawn and moves it forward. “Getting old – being disabled.”

“Of course I resent it,” Villiers says mildly, moving a knight. “You would resent it too, and will do, as you grow older – you chose to remain intact, after all, no matter the risk it posed others. You only accepted this condition of chronic pain when it was forced upon you. Age forces such things upon us all.”

Salvo says nothing, reaching forward for the next piece. “You were an assassin, before. That’s what they say about you.”

“I was,” Villiers says, his lips twitching. “Although outside of a blunt and straightforward place like this, various polite epithets are applied to the profession instead – attaché, intelligence agent. I served the crown a good many years – from the age of fifteen onwards.”

Salvo frowns, furrowing his brow. It’s one thing for a man to be apprenticed as a glazier as a teenager – as an assassin seems a bit much. “What, you were in the army?”

“I was enrolled in a private school,” Villiers says. “A military school in Scotland, Sons of Cumhaill. I was born in London, not in a particularly affluent area, but I earned a scholarship as a young boy, and boarded from then onwards. Sons of Cumhaill, upon its founding a millennium back, was originally a school for the children of knights and high-ranking battle mages, or for titled youths in need of blooding before they might lead their family lines. The reason for dispatching one’s children there has changed, but much of the syllabus remains the same – training in traditional weapons, battle magic, poisons and venoms, battle tactics, and so on, alongside a rather robust focus in other valuable subjects. History, literature and culture, magical sciences, languages, politics, economics…” He gestures vaguely with his weaker hand – he can’t lift the arm as high as he can his other, and the hand is a little limper on the wrist than seems entirely right, the fingers unable to complete the easy movement the ones on his other hand can. “A feeder school today for the army, for certain areas of the civil service, for the Knights’ Circle.”

“Wow,” Salvo says, and he’s unable to hold back his curiosity as he looks repeatedly between the board and Villiers’ face. Villiers isn’t as old as those he’d worked with in the care facility, many of whom were in the later stages of dementia or struggling with other debilitating and degenerative conditions, but he’d always enjoyed the aspect of the job that concerned making conversation, listening to older, wiser people talk about their lives.

Salvo’s never been an adventurous sort and doubts he ever will be, lacks the natural appetite for such things, but despite not being very interesting himself, he’s always enjoyed showing interest in other people, talking to them.

“Wow?” Villiers repeats, arching his eyebrows, the very word coming out dripping with irony, not fitting his accent and his careful enunciation. “Does it truly seem so lofty?”

“Maybe a bit. Are you, um…” Salvo doesn’t know how to ask the question exactly as he moves his bishop. “How posh are you, exactly? Like, for you to get this scholarship, you’ve got a posh accent, but is that… yours, or did they train it into you?”

Villiers laughs. It’s a reserved laugh, compared to how some men laugh, his head turned to the side, and Salvo is fascinated at the stillness on one side of his face versus the other, the way the paralysed muscles can’t mirror those on the other side. He likes it, actually, sees a strange sort of handsomeness in it like he does in Red’s uneven teeth and jaw – like in some art, where people use asymmetry.

“I’m not as posh as I sound, no, though it’s too ingrained in me now to be an affectation,” Villiers says. “My father was a mundie, a drunk, walked out on my mother. In her youth, she was a dancer, a performer, and then became a teacher. She developed a magical intolerance after an injury, had to carefully measure her direct exposure to active magic and enchantment, so we lived in a non-magical area of town.”

“I knew a girl like that,” Salvo says. “Hers was part of an immune condition, but we went to the same magical therapy centre – for her, it was regular controlled exposure to help her body not go overboard with the allergic stuff, for me, I was meant to be trying to train in my power.”

“She had more success than you did, I hope.”

“I think a bit more,” Salvo murmurs, shrugging. “They tried her with a fleshturner, to see if they could reach in and basically just make her nervous system a bit less sensitive, but that didn’t work, and then they tried different steroids and stuff. When we were really young, you’d see she was sick with it, like she’d have hives and stuff always, and her skin was really bad – for me, going through puberty made my problem much worse, but for her, I think it really helped and made it more manageable.”

“These conditions aren’t as well-understood, and thus aren’t as predictable, as we would often like,” Villiers says, shrugging his shoulders.

“Were you resistant to magical treatment for the stroke? Same genetics?”

Villiers looks mildly surprised, and Salvo likes that look, as well, likes the slight wideness of his eyes, the way he leans in just slightly. “Quite right,” he says softly, and his gaze roves now over Salvo’s body, over his chest, his neck, before back up to his face. Salvo feels warm, and he wishes it was just arousal, wishes it was just him wanting to fuck the old man, but Villiers isn’t exactly his usual type, older, thinner, angular.

The hunger he’s feeling, the intimacy he wants, is… different.

“To return to my anecdote, it was nineteen eighty-three, two days after my birthday. My mother had sent me the new David Bowie on vinyl, and I snuck away from evening rec to listen to it up in the music tower. We weren’t meant to go up unaccompanied, cretins that we were, all of us, liable to damage instruments or try to dangle one another out of the window.”

Salvo blinks, trying to imagine it, Villiers, angular and awkward limbs in the way of a teenager, upside-down with some other boy gripping his ankles. “You got dangled out of a window?”

“More of a dangler of boys than a danglee by them, for my sins,” says Villiers, and Salvo hears himself laugh. When he moves his pawn, Villiers is quick to take it – so quick that their fingers brush against one another.

Villiers’ demeanour might be naturally cold and flat, but his fingers are warm, and Salvo feels the bone-deep ache inside his guts, the craving to get these bracelets off him and soak that warmth and the life that powers it into himself. Ever since poor Brownie died underneath him, ever since he felt the crackle of his magic into his fingertips, he’s hungered for it, wanted it. He’d never tasted it before – the power had been latent until he’d started puberty, and it had been weak at first. He’d sapped a little from people, but not enough to hurt them, just to make them a little tired and drawn. About the same time as he’d had a significant growth spurt, when he’d gotten taller and started to gain more weight and muscle, his absorption rate had changed too.

Augmented – significantly.

Overnight, it had gone from something of a joke, an unfortunate side effect of his company, even a party trick from time to time, to a genuine risk to everybody around him.

“So you listened to the record?” Salvo asks, and Villiers exhales.

“Not that night, no. His majesty, the king regent, was sitting at the music room’s piano when I made it up the stairs.”

Salvo doesn’t know that he’d be able to cope with it if he went out somewhere and came back to Myrddin Wyllt sat in front of him, or any knight, or any kind of famous person, really. He’s never really felt at home with fame and influence. “Would have figured him for the drums.”

Villiers chuckles. They’re each making their moves fairly quickly, black and white pieces lining up on each side of the board.

“And what, he asked you to kill someone?”

“Wanted me to kill the music teacher, in fact.”

“So you did it?”

“Gladly – I’d never liked him much, and he hated David Bowie.”

“Is that why the crown wanted him dead?”

“No, he was a spy, apparently,” Villiers says, although he frowns as he says it, furrowing his brow. “Something like that, anyway – you may well think ill of me, young man, but I didn’t ask many questions. A very attractive and powerful mage was offering me money and his permission – his approval, even – to kill a man in cold blood. I was hungry for the chance, and quite eager for it.”

There’s something chilling in how easily Villiers says it. Salvo couldn’t even call it a confession, he doesn’t think, because there is no implication of regret or shame, no play at secrecy or modesty – he says it openly and with a remembered relish, and his tongue comes out from his mouth to wet his lower lip. Salvo looks down at his knees, trying to make sense, or to somehow organise, the tumultuous emotions tumbling over one another inside him – the craving and the hunger and the desperate, greedy want; the shame and the horror and the disgust at the fact that he wants it; the faint wish that it was a regular lust, a normal person’s lust and desire; the jealousy at the ease Villiers finds, for being the sort of person he is.

“You didn’t…” he starts, and the question goes dry and dusty on his tongue.

“Hm?”

“You don’t sound guilty,” Salvo says. “You don’t sound— you killed him. And you talk about it like it was easy, like you always, like you always wanted it. Didn’t you have, don’t you have a conscience?”

“No,” says Villiers smugly, making his move. “I’ve never been burdened with such a thing. Since I was very young, what I craved, what I wanted, was blood, death, feeling another man’s life in my hands, and having the power and the privilege to snuff it out.”

Salvo feels a mix of sick and desperately, almost painfully hungry. His fingers twitch as he looks out over his pieces, at where Villiers has moved his king to. “Do you think it would be a burden, if you’d had one?”

“It burdens you, doesn’t it?” Villiers asks snidely.

“Check,” Salvo says, moving his queen, and Villiers looks critically down at the board, then sighs with a lopsided smile that genuinely is quite handsome, Salvo thinks.

He considers what it might be like to kiss the old man, wonders what it would feel like, if he’d be able to feel the weakness on one side of his mouth rather than the other – and then all of a sudden he imagines the rest, imagines that it might be like to sap the magic out of him through his mouth, imagines feeling that hot, desperate tingle in his own lips, in his tongue, sinking down his throat and suffusing him. He imagines the electric, overwhelming thrill of it all, imagines that hot, giddy flow of someone else’s power in him, someone else’s life in him.

He hasn’t kissed anybody on the mouth since he was fifteen himself, at the same age Villiers was killing a man, and back then it had been just a warm tingle against his lips, a sort of heady rush around his ears and heating his face – he knows what the real thing feels like, now, knows what it feels like to sap the force from the whole of someone’s body, to be suffused with stolen energy. He knows what it feels to have someone else’s soul subsumed into his, and it’s the best feeling in the universe, and he hates himself for wanting to taste it again.

“You dastardly little thing,” Villiers says, not without pleasure or satisfaction as he takes the head of his king under his fingertip and tips it over. “You set quite the little trap for me, didn’t you?”

Salvo smiles faintly. “You’re bored here,” he says quietly. “With the prisoners, with… this.”

“Often, yes,” Villiers agrees.

Salvo studies him for a few moments, and there’s a distant ache inside him, a faint compassion that pangs against the inside of his rib cage. Is Warden Villiers spared that as well, the same as he is a conscience? “Why work here as a warden, if it’s so boring, if you want for company so badly that you’re taking a prisoner out of the main lot and bringing him here to lose to him at chess?”

“It’s quite simple,” says Villiers in mild tones, and then he moves so quickly that Salvo almost doesn’t see him, that he’s not cognizant of what’s happening until Villiers is on top of him. The older man’s weight is incandescently warm in Salvo’s lap, straddling his thighs and pinning him back in the winged back armchair, and half of his cane has been drawn back from the rest, showing the blade sheathed inside it.

Salvo can’t breathe, can barely even think with the heat of Villiers in his lap, his bony knees digging in against the sides of Salvo’s thighs, and compared to the warmth of the older man’s body, the blade of his secret sword feels very cold against the underside of Salvo’s chin.

He feels dizzy, because he’s terrified, certain that Villiers is about to slit his throat, is about to bleed all the life out of him for real, no metaphor and no magic about it. Villiers’ expression is cold and haughty and he smells of a subtle cologne, one that’s just a little bit sweet, makes Salvo want to lean in for more of it. Red was right. An atheist he may be, but here is Villiers demonstrating how godly he is, how absolute his power is over Salvo here, without witnesses, without an audience, without any protection at all.

Paradoxically, as frightened as he is, there’s arousal too, heat sinking down and tingling between his legs, heat between his thighs.

“I have complete authority over each and every one of you,” Villiers says in a very quiet whisper, and Salvo breathes in very carefully through his nostrils, but when he swallows, an involuntary reaction, he feels the twitch of the blade against the skin, probably cutting off one or two hairs. “I could kill you right here, young man, and little fuss would be made of it – it isn’t morality or fear of surveillance that keeps me from bringing you into my bed, chaining you to it, if I wished to.”

“And when my sentence was up?” Salvo asks faintly, feeling dizzy, and Villiers laughs. “Would they ask where I was, to have me released?”

“Such terrible behaviour,” he says faux-seriously, pouting out his lips and stroking the thumb of his bad hand, mostly limp, against Salvo’s chin. It still feels as warm as the other, even if he can’t move it as well. “We had to add a few years to your sentence.”

“Oh,” says Salvo. He wonders what Villiers would say, if he was to tell him that he and Red used the same words as one another, describing Villiers’ position. He wondered if Red and Villiers had had this conversation before. “You— Why did you have to stop being an assassin, when you can still move like that?”

“You’re very good at flattery, boy, did you know that?” Villiers asks, tilting his head to the side and looking more than a little amused, his lopsided smile almost indulgent now. With his good hand, this time – it only takes the flick of a wrist to put his blade back into its sheath and set the cane aside – he spreads his hand on Salvo’s chest to brace himself, then eases himself up and out of his lap, onto his feet again.

Maybe it’s just because it’s not as fast, but this movement is a little clumsier, and Villiers has to be careful about which side he’s putting his weight on, has to lean his good hand on the chair to steady himself as he stands again, and then gets his cane beneath him again.

“I’m not good at flattery,” Salvo says. “I’m not really good at socialising, to be honest – I was okay when I was working, talking to people, letting them talk, trying to make them feel good, make them feel safe, make them feel human even though they were sick, or disabled, or just really, really tired, and in a lot of pain. But I’ve not been able to go out, basically, since…”

“The core of effective flattery is always the appearance of sincerity,” Villiers says mildly. “Being truly sincere is just another way to go about it, I suppose. You don’t seem very frightened for a man who’s just had a blade held to his throat.”

“My life’s in your hands either way,” Salvo says, adjusting himself subtly in his seat, because his cock is hard and it’s not as well-hidden in his loose prison tracksuit trousers as he’d like. He tries to shift the head of his cock against his waistband to keep it from pressing forward too much, but the way that Villiers’ eyes flicker downwards makes it clear it doesn’t matter how subtle he makes his erection appear.  “The blade was just an example.”

“Quite right, of course,” Villiers says, and then the blade is bared again, and this time the very tip of it is resting on his shoulder, the silver of polished metal catching the light. Salvo stares down at it, at how sharp it looks, and very carefully, very slowly, glancing up at Villiers – for what? Permission? Approval? Just to see the older man’s face not change? – he touches his finger to the side of the blade and immediately draws it back with a quiet hiss.

“Thought it would be blunt, did you?”

“Not really,” Salvo says, and tries to make sense of the multiple wants and lusts inside him, the way they tangle with one another, the way they twist about each other like vines. There’s something almost like a whine, almost like a moue, in his voice – which he doesn’t let out on purpose – as he asks, “You’re really not going to fuck me?”

“Never,” promises Villiers, and he slides the blade in closer, drags the tip over the line of Salvo’s collarbones through his clothes before it comes to rest in the hollow of them. “If I pierced here, through this little hole in the bones, useful little target on a thinner boy like you, I could cut right through your trachea. You’d aspirate on blood, unable to draw oxygen into your lungs, and what leaked out of you would froth and bubble.”

Salvo’s cock gives a desperate twitch between his legs, and he doesn’t make a noise, but it shows in his face, he thinks – Villiers laughs at him, and makes a show of sheathing his blade his time, sliding it back into its place with a quiet shkkt of noise.

“What a curious boy you are,” Villiers says. “Satisfy my curiosity, won’t you – would you rather I kill you, right here, enjoy the powerful eroticism of a cruel and nasty bastard like me threatening you just like this, perhaps with my boot against that precious little cocklet of yours for you to grind against,” (now Salvo does let out a helpless, embarrassing noise, and his trackies feel a little bit wet at the pre that dribbles from the head of his prick), “or would you rather slake your thirst and drink all there is from me? Sate that hunger of yours, gorge yourself on my magic until I’m dry?”

“You’re part of the way intolerant to magic, you said,” Salvo says to avoid the question, although he’s so full of want that his prick throbs – he’d been horny after drinking poor Brownie dry, no matter that the man was never attractive to him, a friend of his dad’s. He’d been stunned on the floor in the street, Brownie laid out and pale and still and going cold beside him on the cobbles, and for all his fear and horror and guilt, at the same time he’d felt blessed and beautiful warmth and satisfaction and satiation… and his cock had been the hardest it had ever fucking been, on the verge of coming even as the mage cop had come to cuff him, even as the magical police had cordoned off the area and taken away his corpse, and begun to take his details down.

The high hadn’t dissipated for hours, until he was alone in his cell, and only then had he felt cold enough to start sobbing over what he’d done.

“You might not even make a good meal,” he adds.

“Perhaps not,” Villiers allows. “But any sustenance at all is nectar to the starving man, isn’t it?”

“I’m going to go to sleep now,” Salvo says, getting to his feet.

“Go to bed, at least,” Villiers says dryly.

The door hasn’t even had time to lock behind him before Salvo has his hand around his cock to pull desperately on it, to get himself off.

* * *

Later that week – a Friday – Salvo is caught as he makes his way to his work detail, grappled and hauled into a cell, and he tries to shout out a protest, call for help, but a palm is already pressed tight over his mouth. He’s terrified of it, obviously, terrified, and yet a part of him sings for how much he’s being touched, how the hands are grabbing at him, at his thighs, around his waist, up at his shoulders, even though the hands touching him are a bit clammy.

“Where have you been going at night, eh, you pretty little muzzled pup?” asks the voice in his ear, and Salvo doesn’t recognise it, tries to raise his frantic eyes to get a glimpse at whoever it is in the cell mirror, but they’ve obviously smashed it and had it taken away. There’s a gap on the wall where the mirror is meant to be, a different colour to the rest, and while there’s newspaper bits pinned up, some animated pin-ups of actresses and models, Salvo can’t glean anything from them.

He tries to squeal out a protest as a shoelace is strung through the gaps in his cuffs and used to hang his wrists over his head, up over one of the top bunk’s posts, but this bloke is obviously old hat at this, keeps his palm pressed fast against Salvo’s lips. He’s dragging down Salvo’s bottoms with his hooking thumb and his hand is a little cold and clammy where it slides down between his arse cheeks, thumbing at his dry rim, and he whimpers, but he can barely hear it, jolting when the same hand squeezes his bollocks and plays over his soft cock.  

He’s at the wrong angle, his arms behind him and hooked above his head, his shoulders wrenching and feeling like they might well be dislocated any moment. His don’t tear up but he can feel the blood rushing through his veins, feel the adrenaline pumping, and he tries to kick, but it’s painful to let his shoulders take any of his weight in this position.

“Think I’m getting the first go, aren’t I?” asks the man behind him. “Haven’t heard anybody else bragging about it, and I know everyone’d be crowing at having had the privilege.”

“Let him go, Mason,” drawls a Brummie accent from behind them, and Salvo looks desperately back at Callum Pike standing there, Rosen hovering behind him like a wide-eyed shadow.

“Fuck off, Pike,” hisses Mason – Daf Mason, he guesses, the ex-miner in for rape who was in the papers, and Salvo watches Pike make a big show of sighing and adjusting his sleeves.

Where Rosen is small and round, plumper than Salvo is, and has sort of anxious, eager movements, often seeming like he’s vibrating from the inside, Pike is often inhumanly still. It’s not do to with being a vampire, Salvo doesn’t think, but maybe more to do with his being part-fae, or maybe just personal to him – when Pike goes still you can’t even see him breathing, barely see him blink, and that’s how he settles whenever he’s not talking or playing a game.

He looks like his dad, people say, some northern mob man who’s famous enough for people to know what he looks like, not that Salvo’s ever heard of him, though people say his dad doesn’t do stillness like Callum Pike does. He’s big and tall, lanky with a runner’s muscle on him, and he does parkour, apparently – people have said that the reason he goes inhumanly, inorganically still like that is because he blends in with the gargoyles when he climbs tall buildings, but Salvo doesn’t know that he believes that.

Pike isn’t still now: he moves as fast as the warden had the other night, is nothing more than a flickering blue before Salvo’s eyes, and then the weight of Mason behind him is gone, and he hears the other man groan.

Rosen has to climb up on the lower bunk to reach and undo Salvo’s bindings – the double knotted lacing is deceptively hard to snap, even without Salvo being hung at a painful angle, but Rosen undoes the messy knot with quick, skilled fingers.

Salvo rubs at his sore shoulders as he stands up straight and turns to look at Mason. Pike has him sat on the floor, leaning back against Pike’s chest, looking like a spider with a fly what with how long his legs and arms are contrasted with Mason’s stouter, more contained form. Mason’s eyes are glassy and his body has gone limp, and Pike is wiping his mouth with the inside of his wrist as he pulls back from the bloodied marks on the juncture of his shoulder, where he’d dragged back the man’s shirt to sink his teeth in.

Releasing his grip on Mason’s shirt collar, the bite is hidden as the fabric snaps back, and Pike drops Mason unceremoniously to the ground with a dull thump as he gets to his feet.

“You alright, Caine?” he asks casually.

“Yeah,” Salvo says. “Prick.” He kicks Mason hard in the ribs, and Mason’s so out of it with Pike’s vampiric venom that he doesn’t even jump, though he does groan quietly after a second’s delay. “Thank you.”

“Thank Ira,” says Pike, nodding to Rosen who – seemingly out of reflex – is rifling through the top drawer of Mason’s side table. “I didn’t hear you, I was sucking off Lee Havers down the hall.”

“Sucking off his neck, or…?”

“His cock,” Pike says helpfully, and Salvo huffs out a quiet laugh.

“Thank you,” he says as Rosen comes away from Mason’s things looking mildly disappointed. “You didn’t really think he might have the keys to some kind of vehicle?”

“I suppose not,” Rosen admits immediately, and Salvo feels his lips twitch into a tired smile as Pike laughs, gripping the back of Rosen’s neck in that effortlessly easy, possessive way he does, squeezing. “A man does live in hope – I just forget, I suppose, where I am.” He sighs, full of soft yearning. “I won’t be able to get my hands on a vehicle until I’m out again.”

“Did they take away your license?”

Rosen lets out a dismissive noise and waves a hand. “Never had one.”

Salvo’s pleased to have read him right, but as he trails after the two of them he looks at Pike’s hand on Rosen’s neck, wonders what it feels like. Vampires’ skin is cold, he’s heard – heard Rosen good-naturedly complain about it, even, but what would it feel like, the energy of him?

Pike splits off from them, loping back down the corridor to finish off Lee Havers, Salvo guesses, and he and Rosen fall into step beside one another.

“You on enchantment detail as well?” he asks.

“No, no,” says Rosen. “Embroidery, me.”

“Embroidery?” Salvo repeats. He’d said when he was going through the list of work options that he sewed at school, and the guard doing his assessment had actually laughed and told him no, that he wouldn’t be able for the sort of needlework they did here. He’s even peered into the room where they’re at it on his way back, and he’s never noticed Rosen in there, but the guy’s usually late for everything – who he has seen at work are very, very old fae, the ones that don’t speak English and won’t make any effort to learn, the ones that simmer with magic he can feel even with the cuffs on, that make his mouth water and his vision swim.

“Yeah, thanks to my granny, it’s seven faeries older than sin and then me. They’re nice enough, even if they try to use Hebrew with me sometimes and end up mixing it up with fucking Aramaic, not to mention that as you can imagine, their idea of Jews is, uh, a little old-fashioned. Fuck, it’s ancient-fashioned. I can’t do enchantment – too dyslexic – and I can’t sit still long enough to do some of the other crafts stuff. You can’t get bored doing this kind of sewing, though, ‘cause you have to work in sync with one another and go fast, layer magically charged threads over one another, the fabrics, all that.”

“You like it?”

“Not really,” Rosen says, “but it’s better than bouncing off the walls, I suppose. Does he fuck you?”

Salvo looks sideways at Rosen, who looks politely interested, but if he thinks he’s asked something rude, he doesn’t seem worried about it.

“Villiers?”

“Yeah,” says Rosen.

“No,” says Salvo, more to see how Rosen reacts than because he thinks he’ll really believe it – he’s only young, really young, about twenty, twenty-one. “Why, would you fuck him?”

“Probably not,” Rosen says, shrugging. “I think his face is creepy, the way his mouth droops on one side, and I don’t like how he talks.”

“His accent?”

“No, the, uh, what is it, a slur? From the stroke.”

“A slur, yeah,” says Salvo. “Though it’s rather mild, I expect it was much worse in the recent aftermath.”

“I don’t really like old guys,” Rosen says. “I’ve fucked them, obviously, to get my hands in their pockets for their keys or their phones, but I wouldn’t fuck them for the sake of it. No offence if you like to fuck old guys, it’s just not my thing.”

“None taken,” says Salvo. “I don’t really have that much experience.”

“What, you’re a virgin?”

“Not quite, but I’m basically celibate,” Salvo says.

“’Cause you’d kill people by fucking them?”

“Not mundies,” says Salvo.

“Why not fuck mundies then?” Rosen asks. They’re lingering in the corridor now, and Salvo knows he might be late for his own work detail, but Rosen obviously doesn’t care – he’s teetering back and forth from his heels to his toes, looking up at him with astonishing, kind of unsettling attentiveness. “Is it like, you can’t be open with them or whatever?”

“I don’t know,” Salvo says. “I worked a lot, and I would be tired, and I tried a few times, um… Apps. Or going to bars. And I just wasn’t good enough at it to make it happen, to actually get a guy to come home with me, or take me home, and it’d be months or years in between me actually trying, because it was just… It was excruciating. I don’t know why. It made me feel horrible.”

“Shame?” Rosen asks. “Do you hate your body?”

“Um,” Salvo says. “I don’t think so. Why, do you hate yours?”

“Sometimes,” Rosen says, with the same incredible frankness with which he asks questions, and Salvo actually feels breathless with it. “Sometimes I only really feel okay ‘cause I’m behind the wheel of something, and then it’s like that’s my body instead of this. All this flesh – not just ‘cause I’m fat, but I guess that’s part of it. All my family used to pinch at me, at my cheeks, my arms, anywhere you could pinch, really. You can’t pinch metal or fibreglass, and even if someone tries, you don’t feel it – and you’re going too fast for them to try anyway.” Rosen laughs, a scattershot sound that matches perfectly with his rapid fire, kind of clumsy way of speaking, but there’s something about the laugh that doesn’t match up with how he talks, a sort of tonal disconnect. “Anyway,” he says, and instead of saying “bye” or “see you later”, he just turns on his heel and walks away.

Salvo rubs the back of his neck, smiling faintly, and goes to work himself.

It was good to talk to Rosen right after – it’s twenty minutes later that he remembers Daf Mason nearly fucking raped him, and then he throws up in the workshop sink.

* * *

Red walks with the lad back to the main block after they’re done working. He’d asked if the lad was ill, but he’d dismissed both the guard looking over him and Red, and then just worked in even more palpable silence than usual. He’s never chatty during his work detail, but at least he’ll sit closer to other people and smile or laugh along with the conversation going on, listen more attentively if someone tries to give him advice, whatever else.

Most of today he’s in his own fucking world, and he’d barely eaten anything at lunch, had mostly just sat there with his tray in front of him, barely touching what was on it before drifting back to work.

“You need to eat something,” Red says behind him when they’re in the queue. “Just get the rice if you can’t stand to taste anything, but get a full portion.”

Reluctantly, Caine takes a bowl of rice, half-heartedly putting some boiled carrots in it at the last minute, and he sits and eats in silence across from Red at the table until Rosen and Pike come to join them.

“You feeling okay?” Rosen asks, and then adds, “Start to sink in, did it?”

“Yeah,” Salvo says hoarsely.

“Mason tried to fuck him this morning,” Pike says when Red doesn’t say anything, but looks across at them askance. “Had him trussed up when Ira got me to come in and rescue him. Speaking of, it seems my consequence for that has arrived.”

“Fuck’s sake, Pike,” growls Cornell as he stalks across the bar, and Pike is stone-still as the guard grabs him by the collar and drags him up from his untouched tray. “You could have fucking killed him.”

“I’ve never killed a man in my life,” Pike says unconvincingly as Cornell hauls him away, and Red watches as Caine half-stands to his feet, looking like he wants to protest.

“Because he helped me?” Caine asks, looking horrified. “What are they going to do to him?”

“Solitary for a few days,” Rosen says. “It’s not like they can take his fangs out.”

“Or cuff them,” says Red.

Caine looks even greener now than he had earlier, but after a little quiet coaxing from Rosen he does sink down onto the bench again, and he reluctantly begins to eat again.

“They’ve put him in solitary before,” Rosen says. “It’s not as though it bothers him any. He wouldn’t have stepped in if he wasn’t willing to make the trade-off, a few days of extra boredom in exchange for stopping Mason raping you. You’ve never been raped before, have you? I don’t recommend it, you’re better off without.”

That makes Caine blink a few times, not seeming to quite make sense of Rosen’s tone. Even before he’d been brought to the nick, he’d known more than a few lads with personalities like his – more than a few lads who’d had blows to the head like Rosen had had as a lad and all, the sort of head injury that douses out a man’s impulse control like a fucking church candle, and makes him talk like bullet fire.

Surely, working with old folks and the demented, he’ll have met people that talk a bit more frankly than others, but unless you knew already, he supposes, you’d never know Rosen had an extra impact on him one way or the other. He’s said to Red that he was always more impulsive than his siblings even before he took a brick to the side of the skull, and that you never know what’s natural and what’s from concussion.

Daf Mason’s a victim of repeated concussion and all, though he’s the more traditional headcase, Red thinks, the one that people might imagine. Angry, and a raper.

“I know I’m better without it,” Caine says slowly. “Just— Just that it’s not right, Pike being punished for stepping in in my defence. I’ll talk to Warden Villiers about it.”

“Oh, do you think maybe if you offer to suck him off or something, he’ll let Pike out early?”

Red can see that initially Caine is just straight up taken aback by it, by the way that Rosen just comes right the fuck out and says it, but then he sees the wires connect and cross in Caine’s head, the way he connects the idea of Villiers shoving his cock into Caine’s throat with wherever Daf was gonna shove his earlier, and Red grabs Rosen’s already-empty bowl from in front of him and slides it in front of Caine to catch the bulk of the vomit.

“Oh,” says Rosen, not without sympathy, and pats his shoulder, which makes Caine, in a flop sweat under his tracksuit, jump and shudder, and then lean into the delicate squeeze of Rosen’s pretty little hand. “Oh, it’s okay. Villiers will probably take it out worse on Mason anyway – what with you being his special case and that.”

Caine retches harder, and Rosen makes a face but awkwardly exchanges his now-full bowl for one another lad passes them from the next table over.

“Oi! Guard!” Red shouts over his shoulder. “One of you screws come be of some fucking use, would ya? Bring a mop and all!”

* * *

“He was only helping me,” Salvo says for the third time, feeling out of sorts and strangely unbalanced, because he’s in his bed and has a blanket over him, a glass of water next to another glass of flat lemonade on the bedside table next to him, a slice of very thinly buttered toast on the plate beside it. It has a few bites taken out of it, but more than half of the slice is still left – Villiers had stood over him and ordered him to take each bite, ordered him to chew, to swallow, to take a sip of water to ease it down, at the same time he confined him to his bed. “Warden Villiers, please, he only—”

“I understand your protest implicitly, Mr Caine, you need not repeat yourself again,” Villiers says coolly. His cane is hooked on the back of Salvo’s desk chair, and the man himself is leaning back against Salvo’s desk, looking down at him in his bed.

He hadn’t fainted, fully, but he’d been so stressed and sweaty and nauseous from throwing up on top of barely eating all day that his knees had gone weak when the guards had gotten him up, and Villiers had ordered him up to the house immediately.

“Mr Pike is under express instruction, as all vampires in this prison are,” Villers says, “not to bite his fellow inmates. A vampire cannot be easily milked of their venom because they typically produce it too quickly, and Mr Pike, like so many of his unfortunate provenance, has rather powerful venom in any case. Were Mr Mason a diabetic, or otherwise under the weight of some condition that makes him particularly vulnerable to such venom, Pike might have killed him as easily and quickly as having snapped his neck. He is given a measure of blood each week to sustain his appetites, and he isn’t to augment that diet.”

“He drinks from other inmates during sex,” Salvo mutters, reaching reluctantly for his lemonade and taking a sip of it. He’d felt fucking wretched, watching Villiers drizzle a little sugar into the glass and make it fizzle, stirring it until all the carbonation was gone, “that it not spur on your nausea any further”.

“He isn’t to do that either,” says Villiers, his arms crossed over his chest. You’d not know one was weak, with him supporting them like this against his breast like this. Salvo doesn’t really understand why it bothers Rosen so much, the slur – it’s so mild, you’d easily think it was just from his posh accent rather than from the stroke. “Although he’s good enough not to render his willing cohorts fit for the infirmary. Intimate contact between inmates is itself prohibited, I might remind you, but regardless of how Pike penetrates his cohorts – or indeed, is penetrated by them – we avoid official evidence of the fact so long as his partners are not hospitalised.”

“And what about Mason?” Salvo asks bitterly, putting the glass down on the coaster before reaching reluctantly for the toast and forcing himself to take a bite of it, to chew it, to swallow it down. It’s cold, and it feels too thick and heavy in his mouth, and he hates it, but he sees Villiers incline his head slightly in visible approval, and he doesn’t hate that.

It’s the only thing today after Mason, except for Rosen babbling at him when he’d forgotten about it, that he hasn’t hated completely.

“Dafydd Mason is recovered from his stupefaction, and will be fine come morning, I’ve no doubt.”

“He tried to rape me,” Salvo says. “He tied me up and he stripped my trackies off me and he was going to rape me. He touched me. He touched my—” He squeezes his eyes shut as he feels his stomach turn over, trying to swallow down the nausea, feeling the toast wanting to come back up on him.

“More lemonade,” Villiers orders, and Salvo’s hand trembles a bit as he drops the plate in his lap and picks up the lemonade, swallowing a bit more down. He thinks the sweetness of it will make him gag, but it overwhelms the nausea, actually, the acidity of it and the sugar at once, and it fucking annoys him, actually, because Villiers is looking at him kind of smugly from his place on the other side of the room. “Why did you not call for a guard?”

“He had his hand over my mouth,” Salvo says. “He grabbed me in the corridor and pulled me in, and as he tied me up and stripped me and— He had his hand over my mouth the whole time. I couldn’t say a thing, I was making noise but no one could hear except Ira, who went and got Pike.”

“Who pulled Mason off you, knocking him out with his bite, yes?”

“Yeah.”

“And then?”

Salvo stares at him. “What do you mean, and then?”

“You didn’t call for a guard then,” Villiers says. “You left Mason on the floor of his cell, a puddle of drool collecting under his gaping jaw, and took the effort to bruise one of his ribs before you left him there.”

“How’d you know it was me did that?” Salvo asks, looking at his plate instead of meeting the older man’s eyes. “Not Pike? Or Ira?”

“Mr Rosen is not violent – to the point of pathology, he avoids violence, in fact, though I must say his vegetarianism makes providing healthy and satisfying kosher meals rather easier whilst avoiding potential interference from other inmates, so I suppose I ought render no judgement on it. And had Mr Pike kicked Mason in the ribs, he would have broken one, not just left a bruise.”

“I don’t like you,” says Salvo, and Villiers laughs richly and quietly, supporting his weak arm with his other as he unfolds them, and then leaning back further against the desk, rolling his shoulders.

“I’m wounded, I’m sure,” he murmurs. “You did not call for a guard, young man. Mason was not discovered until two hours after, and he could easily have died. Mr Pike would be spending more than three days in a solitary cell had he brought that about, I must say.”

“So? He’d just tried to fucking rape me,” mutters Salvo, tearing into the toast with his fingers and finding that it’s strangely cathartic, tearing it in half, so he tears it into quarters, and then eights, and then tries to tear it into sixteenths, but mostly by this point he just has crumbs all over his hands and on the plate and a little bit on the sheets. “Why the fuck should I have called for a guard?”

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Villiers asks, arching an eyebrow. “I know that Mr Rosen likely did as soon as he left the room. He’s forgotten his shoes more than once before whilst wandering the halls – his sewing companions consider him quite the queer little thing.”

“Maybe Pike forgot.”

“Mr Pike is well-familiar with the drill, by this point. He didn’t forget a thing.”

Salvo glares at him, and Villiers smirks his cold, lopsided smirk. “It didn’t occur to me,” he admits, shaking out his crumby hands and putting the plate back on the counter, and Villiers walks forward and takes hold of the top sheet in his good hand, supporting himself on the side table with his weaker elbow and sweeping the sheet back with a surprising speed and strength, letting out a sound like a sail filling with a gust of wind. He shakes out all the crumbs before he passes it back, and Salvo smooths it over himself.

“You were never a nurse,” he says.

“Never,” Villiers agrees. “I’ve always been rather more comfortable ushering someone toward death rather than out of its clutches.”

“You’d be handfeeding me if you could,” Salvo accuses him. “Would have brought in the plate and glasses, would have tucked me into bed. Bet you’ve tampered with an IV – have you ever put one in?”

“No,” Villiers says softly.

He’s standing very close, now, leaning on the end table instead of the desk – he’s so much closer, and it’s more intimate, like this. Salvo has to lie back on his pillows and look up at him, and it’s even more unequal, even more imbalanced, the dynamic between the two of them. Salvo can’t stand the idea of touching himself, not at the moment, but there’s heat between his legs, and his cock is half-hard even before he breathes in the sweet scent of Villiers’ cologne, and he loves it, craves it. He wants to bury his face against Villiers’ belly and feel the touch of his cold, slim fingers in Salvo’s hair, touching his fingertips against his scalp, wants Villiers to hold Salvo’s body to his.

“We’re not meant to put them in, care assistants – we’re not trained for it,” Salvo murmurs. “Not accredited, anyway, and you’re meant to be. Inserting IVs and taking them out, that’s an invasive procedure – I got sent on a training course to take and process blood samples, but I should never have been doing IVs or catheters. Understaffing being what it is, though, if I wasn’t doing it, or one of us doing it, there’d have been a Hell of a wait, sometimes, so they just showed us, and taught us how, and unless we were getting inspected, it was…” Salvo exhales, tapping his fingers against the sheet, against his knees. “It’s delicate work, the tourniquet, the needle, finding the vein. There’s so much power in it. There’s so much, um, vulnerability in it. It’s just this portal right to their insides, to their heart. You can put anything in it – too much medicine, too little. Insulin to really fuck somebody up, but not even that, though. All you really need is a little bubble of air.”

“You needn’t inform me of that,” Villiers says softly. “As I said, I’m more familiar with those latter points than I would be any actual nursing.”

“That’s what I mean, though,” Salvo says. “I always wanted to help people, care for people, yeah. I always craved it, I always… My dad had a pacemaker put in, and two different women on my street were nurses, and one of them minded me after school, and that was even without all the check-ups I had to have, as a child, the extra attention. I liked it. I liked the way nurses talked, and I liked how people paid attention to them and how they gave instructions and orders and help and I liked how physical it was, the, the knowledge. Like they could go into a cupboard and look at all this equipment, all these weird little devices or bits of tubing or whatever else, and just know how to use all of it to help you, to heal you, to fix you. But it was the power of that, really. I’ve always felt a bit bad about it, but it’s not like you’re going to judge me, like you’re going to fucking care. I liked nursing because it was authority – more authority than a doctor, sometimes. You never hear the doctor going, “Actually, nurse,” and correcting what they’ve said, but nurses are always stepping in when the doctor’s fucked up.”

He looks up at Villiers, whose expression is not so obvious in its smirk now, but whose attention is fixed on Salvo’s face, studying him intently.

“You’d like to be feeding me,” Salvo says. “You’d like to be bringing the glass to my mouth instead of trusting me to do it myself – you’d like to force each bite, each mouthful of water or lemonade. You’d massage my throat to make me swallow, even, if you had the chance.”

“Teasing me with such seductive talk will not convince me to release Mr Pike any earlier, young man,” Villiers says, his voice a little bit hoarser, a little more resonance in it. Arousal, that is, arousal, and want. Salvo swallows.

“What will it get me?” Salvo asks, and Villiers laughs quietly, then picks up the plate with his good hand and walks away.

“Go to sleep,” Villiers orders him. “No work detail for you tomorrow – you can take your choice of confinement here, or in my office.”

“How cold is your office?”

“Quite.”

“Here, then.”

“As you will,” Villiers says, and after setting the plate down in the corridor, he pulls the door shut behind him.

* * *

Caine doesn’t come down from the warden’s house at all that day. The screws won’t say anything about what’s up with him, but when Red asks Kim Adder, he says that there was a little dispensation, that he was confined to bedrest in his own quarters, but was noted down on the infirmary log as being unwell.

Not much of a surprise, that.

“Hello, Red,” says Rosen when Red steps out from the workshop, and Red raises his eyebrows at the sight of the lad, reaching out and touching his knuckles to the back of Rosen’s forehead, because he’s pink all over, and sweating.

“Seems like you’re red,” he mutters. “The fuck happened to you, you jog down the corridor?”

“Oh, there was a fight in the embroidery hall,” Rosen says, reaching up and wiping his face with his sleeve. “I had to run – the old faeries can do all sorts to each other, but it’d fuck me up, I’m not two thousand years old and with skin as thick as tree bark. The magic that would give them a little burn would go right through me.”

“Right,” Red says, raising his eyebrows, but he puts his hands in his pockets and walks alongside Rosen down the corridor, toward the canteen. Rosen hadn’t eaten lunch with Red – he’d been chattering away with some recent new transplant who’s in from London for arson, and is apparently an old schoolmate of his. “D’you mind if I ask you something?”

“No,” says Rosen.

“Why’re you in a magical nick, not a mundie one? Was it a magical train you tried driving off?”

“Not that I got caught, but they knew I had done,” Rosen says mildly. “And they decided they couldn’t trust me not to blab away to mundies and not keep secrets – I’m no good at keeping secrets.”

“Fair enough,” Red says. “That what had those old tree fuckers going mad at each other? You blabbing secrets?”

“Didn’t fully follow a lot of the conversation, to be honest, I normally don’t,” Rosen says. “The way those old pricks talk to each other is fucking weird – it’s not just the language they use, I’ve kind of been starting to pick up some of the, um, I think it’s too old to even be Welsh, it’s some kind of Brythonic. But they talk in verse and riddles and stuff with each other, so even if I can make out the words or recognise names and things they’re saying, it’s well beyond me to understand what they actually mean. They were doing some sort of poetry thing today, a bit, um… I don’t know, they were roasting each other. Something about someone’s daughter, maybe? And fucking her? I don’t know. But old Bleiddgwn flipped his fucking lid, and he was properly screaming at Cadllew, and they were already angry at each other, and then Toutorixs said something else, like, commenting, or a joke, and then they were all trying to rip each other to shreds. I had to run out, and then French had to flip that switch, you know the one that locks the room down and chokes all the magic out? They’ll be in there for days until they’re either calm enough to come out or until they fall into hibernation, so either way, I don’t have work detail for a while.”

Red blinks a few times, because it takes him a little while to actually comprehend that Rosen’s stopped talking – how the fuck he makes sense of what those ancient cunts are saying, let alone what the protocol is around them, he has no idea. Most of the inmates keep a wide berth from the prisoners that have been imprisoned at his majesty’s pleasure long before this prison island was even built, and have sentences that last centuries or millennia instead of being decades at the most, for their own fucking safety, not to mention their own sanity.

“Hibernation?” he repeats. “What, like fucking bears?”

“If they’re starved of magic for long enough, yeah,” Rosen says evenly. “But apparently they normally tire themselves out fighting and arguing before they get to that point. Fingers crossed, though! I wouldn’t be able to embroider on my own, so they’d have me doing something else. No Caine today?”

“Apparently he’s ill,” Red says.

“Oh, right, okay,” Rosen says, and furrows his brow. “Yeah.”

“You want to help me with a job after dinner?” Red asks, and Rosen lights up.

He doesn’t ask for any details at all, of course, before he says, “Sure!”

It’s not like Red wants him doing anything particularly risky in any case – Rosen chats up a fucking storm to the trustee mopping the floors in the infirmary, the doctor’s already gone off for the evening, and Red knows that the infirmary nurse, a little prick called Julian with eyebrow piercings, will be off getting high at this time of day.

All he wants is to pay Daf Mason a little social call – and funny enough, he doesn’t find the prick in situ.

“Is there a reason yourself and Mr Rosen are wandering the corridors with no-doubt pilfered sets of keys?” Warden Villiers asks in withering tones, and Red straightens up, his hands behind his back.

Rosen’s eyes widen, his lips parting, and he says anxiously, his gaze flitting back and forth, “Erm, hello, Warden, uh, we’re not, we haven’t been, I’m—”

“Don’t trouble yourself attempting deception, young man, we both know it beyond your capabilities,” Villiers advises, and Rosen blows out air from plump lips, and he looks reluctantly at Villiers’ outstretched good hand, palm up, before he drops the tools from his pocket into the warden’s grasp – a bobby pin and two half-melted embroidery needles. “Mr French said you weren’t injured in this afternoon’s fracas between your fellow needleworkers. He is correct, I hope?”

“Yessir.”

“Why were you loitering about the infirmary, then?”

“Where’s Salvo Caine?” Red asks, and Villiers’ uncanny gaze flits to Red’s face, his thin lips twitching. He’s a scary cunt, and there’s no mistaking that, but it’s not like it’s Red’s first time dealing with scary academic-seeming types, the ones with more power and danger simmering under the surface than you can see in their muscles or feel in their magical fields.

“Ill from yesterday’s escapades, still,” Villiers says.

“And Daf Mason?”

“Mr Mason?” Villiers repeats, and tilts his head to one side, then smiles a coolly satisfied smile. “You really thought Mr Pike would face punishment for stepping in, but Mr Mason would face no consequences for his actions at all?”

“Is he in solitary?” Rosen asks, and Villiers nods for Red to open up the door for them to go downstairs, which Red does, Rosen going ahead of him onto the landing.

“No,” says Villiers, and shuts the door after them.

* * *

“Dress yourself for dinner, if you would,” Villiers had said when he came back from the prison proper, and Salvo thinks about it when he shadows, plays it over and over in his head, turning it over. In Villiers’ posh, stupid accent, made up and learned to make him scarier as an assassin or as a spy or whatever the fuck else, it sounds like it’s a bigger thing than it actually is.

For dinner, like it’s an occasion, like they’re in some period drama, like he’s gonna put on a tail coat and fancy trousers and nice shoes and a bowtie, and like there’s gonna be all lords and ladies sitting down around the dining table and prawns in a dish and a butler pouring drinks.

He puts on his issued trackies, and a t-shirt, and his sweatshirt, and he walks out into the corridor through the unlocked door to his room and down toward the little sitting room where they ordinarily eat together, if they share a meal. It’s never an inmate that serves them, not like how inmates work down in the kitchen – Salvo’s actually never seen whoever it is that serves them in Villiers’ house, and he’s not sure if there’s even a person doing it at all, or if it’s all enchantment.

He knows that the place gets swept and cleaned – he tries to keep his room tidy because he’s just that sort of man, but sometimes if he doesn’t fully make his bed if he’s in a hurry to go in the morning, or if he spills something on the desk or spills shampoo or something on the bathroom floor, it’s always cleaned up by the time he’s back. His sheets get changed once a week, and a lot of the time, he can see that someone’s hoovered or scrubbed the floors or done something like that in the sitting room or in the hall.

Normally when Villiers calls him to come eat dinner, there are plates already on the little table for them, but there aren’t tonight, and the chess board isn’t laid out either.

“Ah, there you are,” says Villiers, and he walks forward, sliding past Salvo and back into the corridor, then gesturing with two fingers for Salvo to follow him down the hallway, which Salvo does. “Feeling better, I hope?”

“Yeah,” Salvo says. “I was a bit bored, to be honest. Finished all my books.”

“Those Lawrence Kidd romances again?”

“Two of them,” Salvo says. “The other one was an Agatha Christie. Where are we going?”

“Oh, through here,” Villiers says in smooth, easy tones, and leads him through the door and into Villiers’ home office. It’s a much warmer affair than the one he has in the prison proper, a fire burning in the hearth, and there’s a fancy brocade wallpaper on the wall. On the other wall is another door, this one slightly ajar, and Salvo peers through it, because that’s Villiers’ bedroom.

He has dark violet bedsheets made of cotton, not silky at all, and Salvo gets a glimpse of the brass bar beside the bed that’s obviously there to help him up and down, and—

Villiers closes the door shut.

“Not what I brought you here for, young man,” Villiers tells him, and limps across to his desk, where he slowly spins his chair around. It’s a big, leather-backed thing, so that until it’s turned around, Salvo can’t see what’s in it – who’s in it.

His mouth goes dry as he looks at Daf Mason, his hands cuffed behind his back, his ankles chained together, a gag like a horse’s bit stuffed in his mouth, forcing his teeth apart. Salvo stares at him, uncomprehending, unable to breathe, his heart beginning to speed in his chest, sweat beginning to gather on his skin, beading on his forehead.

His stomach clenches tightly like a squeezed balloon, and he’s glad they haven’t eaten dinner yet, glad that he was left with a plate of sandwiches for lunch that he ate before it was even one o’clock.

“What the fuck?” Salvo demands, the words coming out in a whisper, as if he’s scared of Daf Mason hearing them. He’s not really frightening, now that Salvo sees him like this – he’s been thinking about him on and off today, trying to remember glimpses of him he’s seen about the prison, thinking of him on the floor. He’s not a big man, by any means – solid and stout, but not really big, not that intimidating. “What the fuck, Warden, you can’t just—”

Villiers has stepped close to him, close enough that Salvo is distracted by the scent of his cologne, so distracted he doesn’t realise that Villiers is reaching for him, touching him with his surprisingly warm fingers – so distracted he doesn’t realise why Villiers is actually touching him until the cuffs fall aside, dropping into Villiers’ hands, the left, then the right.

Salvo actually feels dizzy for a second, magic rushing through him like he’s just been dropped into a river of magical flow, and he feels the hot bleed of it through his veins, under his skin, feels the incredible sing of pure energy in his head, between his ears, on his tongue, in his heart, his belly, in his very core. He whips back and steadies himself on a wall as he adjusts himself to it, his eyes closed tightly, his heart pounding.

It's like the world temporarily ceases to exist, like it’s just him and all the magic around him instead, and it’s surprisingly very intimate, feels good and comforting and warm. It’s like magic itself is cradling him in its embrace, enfolding each of his limbs, cradling his body, stroking through his hair, even.

He’d forgotten.

Salvo had forgotten how good it felt, sometimes, all the magic in the world – he’s been wondering of late how the fuck he used to manage it, how he used to stand it, not being touched, the awful skin hunger, the awful starvation in his muscles and in his flesh for other people touching him, not just for hugs or squeezes, not even for kisses or whatever else, but even just the casual touches of other people. Brushing shoulders with people in a corridor, feeling the weight of others in the crowd around you, wrestling, shaking hands, high-fiving, even.

Not like Mason’s touch, no, not the grip of him, the violence of it, the fucking invasion of it, but everything else, everybody else.

The magic isn’t a substitution, but it’s good. It feels right, natural, satisfying, and he slowly breathes in through his nose, steadying himself and standing up straight as he looks across to Warden Villiers and Daf Mason.

He can feel the magic in the room. He never used to feel it much in the care home or in his own apartment – he could reach out and feel the electrical circuits sometimes, the flow of the wiring around his flat, separate from the concentrated magic in enchanted items of his own, in warded or enchanted furniture.

It had never been like this.

The whole of the island is singing beneath his feet, the soil rich with magical salts and proteins, magical root systems from trees and flowers, the ground rock heavy with magic from whenever this island was constructed a few millennia ago. He can feel every brick around him, taste on the air the order in which they were laid, can even imagine the ghosts of the men who’d laid those bricks – fae labourers, many of them, indentured to the crown for resisting the march of King Arthur’s army.

He can feel the age of Villiers’ huge, mahogany desk, feel the solid wood of it and the magic that gathers and settles in its grooves and secreted knots, in its enchanted brass knobs and handles; he can feel the enchantment on each of the furnishings and devices in the room, everything from the privacy charms on his in- and out-trays to the anti-pest ones stitched into the rug beneath their feet and inscribed on the bottom of his bookshelf.

He can taste them, all these magicks, discrete from one another, feel how scattered and chaotic the older magic feels, how untethered and sprawling it is; he can feel the straight lines and rhythms of the newer charms and enchantments, the magic channelled and controlled by careful inscriptions of symbols and writings; he can feel the life in it all, the energy.

Daf Mason burns brighter than the fire does.

Villiers does have a pulse to him, a font of magic buried in his chest and letting more magic flow through his body, but he’s a lighter, less saturated grey where Mason is a hot burn of white energy, pure and wholly concentrated and radiating outward, and Salvo has never felt so incredibly and unspeakably hungry.

He can barely breathe, staring at Mason, unable to separate the detestable man in his vest and trackies and careful bondage, doused in a flop sweat and struggling helplessly against the leather seat beneath him, from the sweet fucking nectar that flows through him. Salvo can see it, feel it, taste it – magic gathers in the very core of a person, runs up and down their spinal column and out from their heart and their brain, flowing through the bulk of their nervous system and their arteries and capillaries, but Mason has been in magic all his life. Was raised in a magical home, learned enchantment as a child, worked in a magical mine, is now kept inmate in a magical prison, probably even raped magical victims – every ounce of magic in him, Salvo knows as intimately as he knows his own heartbeat.

Magic clings in caps around the tips of his fingers, where he’s been enchanting all his life, and gloves his palms leaving gaps where the enchanted wooden heft of his pickaxe wasn’t in contact with his skin; his hair and fingernails aren’t as doused in magic as his skin is, seeming paler and less saturated than the rest of him; if Salvo stripped him naked and then stripped the top layer of skin off his back, he might even be able to read the old ghosts of the runes inscribed on the inside of his armoured mining vest, where the enchantment has left its ghost within Mason’s body from so many decades of use.

Salvo’s thighs touch Villiers’ desk, and Salvo blinks, laying his hands on the wooden surface, staring down at it before he looks back at Mason. He hadn’t even realised he was walking forward, hadn’t realised he was even approaching him.

Daf Mason looks fucking terrified, tears on his cheeks, snot on his top lip and shining yellow in his stubble.

He looks at Villiers, who is watching him keenly, hungrily.

“You’re letting me,” he says, and his voice sounds strangely hollow in his own ears as he slowly moves around the desk, advancing closer. “You’re— you’re letting me? I can… There’s so much in him, it…” He tries to remember what it felt like to be nauseous, but there’s too much of a roar inside him to remember what the fuck something as awful as that felt like – he can’t remember what it felt like to be nauseated and ashamed and horrible with Brownie’s corpse on his conscience, and he can’t remember either what it felt like to be terrified and scared and on the verge of throwing up at the memory of Mason’s hands on his body, Mason’s bondage holding him in place, the thread of Mason behind him. All he can feel, all he can really concentrate on, is the hunger, the need, and better than that, the knowledge of what the satiation will feel like, what wonder it will be to taste him. “It’ll kill him,” Salvo says weakly. He can barely hear that last part.

He can hear Mason’s useless, pathetic begging, even through the gag in his mouth – he can’t really make out the words, but he can hear his desperate fumbling in English and then in Welsh, which Salvo doesn’t even speak. How many people have begged Mason like Salvo didn’t have a chance to yesterday morning, have begged him not to hurt them, not to rape them, not to tie them up? How many people have plead for mercy and haven’t had it from him, or haven’t had the chance to do so because he gagged them first, like Villiers has gagged him?

“And what are you robbing him of, if you take his life?” Villiers asks in a silken voice that weaves around Salvo’s heart and feels like it’s making itself at home inside his skull, inside his heart, inside his fucking soul, and he likes it. He likes the sound of Villiers’ voice, the taste of it. “The chance to ravish another unwilling party, to emasculate another prisoner? To bash in a fellow’s brains, embarrass himself, be cruel, be ugly, be…?” Villiers trails off, and then gestures to the struggling, sweat-soaked Mason, pushes out his lips in a mocking pout, and Salvo looks at the slight weakness of his lips on one side of his mouth, and wonders what Villiers would do if he kissed him there, on that loose corner. “Look at him, Mr Caine,” Villiers says. “Is it even the moral choice, to spare him?”

Salvo could touch Villiers instead.

He could reach out and grab Villiers instead, grab his wrists or his throat, touch his cheek, even kiss him – he could touch Villiers and sap from him, and show him exactly what he deserves, give him what he’s asking Salvo to do to Mason…

But Mason burns so much brighter, and maybe he doesn’t deserve it more – but Salvo deserves it more. He doesn’t want revenge against Villiers, doesn’t crave to take anything from Villiers, because Villiers has never taken anything from him.

He closes his hands around Mason’s neck, moans aloud at the sudden shock of lightning-fast power crackling up through his palms ad up his arms, and Mason chokes and stiffens up and stops struggling and fidgeting all at once, frothing at the mouth as he chokes on air around the bit.

Oh, but it’s ecstasy.

He can feel the stutter and shudder of Mason’s swallowing throat under his thumbs, but it’s nothing compared to the sensation of the feed, of the way all the magic gathered under Mason’s skin, running through his veins and coiled about his bones, held in his every cell, transfers to Salvo instead. He feels as though he’s flying, as though he’s soaring, feels the rush in his ears, crackling over his skin, a whipcrack of wonder—

It's not like how it happened with Brownie.

With Brownie, he hadn’t even known it was coming, had gone from nothing to everything in one moment and not truly been cognizant of what was happening, had never experienced the like of it before. He’s more in control of himself this time, more attached to himself. He’s aware of the moment that Mason’s body, cold, his eyes dead, falls back in the chair, Salvo’s hands releasing him.

Mason’s cold sweat is clinging to his palms, and Salvo flexes his fingers, feeling the pulse of energy under his skin, and feeling strangely satisfied, strangely… whole. He stares down at his own hands as he clenches and stretches out his fingers, slowly rolling his head on his neck, his shoulders, his elbows, feeling oddly like a glass that’s been filled to the brim, but not poured over.

He looks to Villiers, who is watching him intently, and he sees and feels the energy that runs through Villiers, too, the magic in the core of him and that flows through the conduits he’s made up of, but what he doesn’t feel, he finds, is hunger. Want, yes, desire – want for the older man to touch him, hold him, want him, but not to drink from him.

“I don’t feel cold,” Salvo says. It comes out in a soft and mystified whisper, and Villiers hums a sound of comprehension, or perhaps of understanding, or maybe just acknowledgement. He’s holding out a tray, and Salvo obediently takes the two bracelets back off it, sliding them onto his wrists and clicking them into place.

It’s as if the room goes suddenly dark again where before it had been drenched in light, his connection to the magical flows around him abruptly cut off by the enchantment in the cuffs, but he doesn’t feel like he’s drenched in darkness, doesn’t feel as though he’s been dropped into some dark pit.

He can feel his heart beating, is aware that his breaths are even, that his blood must be flowing through his veins, that his organs are at work.

“A hunger sated, yes,” Villiers says. “I’m not surprised that warms you. Come, I have a bath run for you.”

It almost doesn’t occur to him that he could protest, let alone that he’d want to, as he follows after Villiers not, disappointingly, through to his own bedroom, but into the corridor and then to the master bathroom, which is very warm. A few candles are lit around the darkened room, and Salvo strips off his clothes as indicated, sinking then into the bath.

This is Villiers’ own bathroom, more brass bars around the room to support him standing and moving, and Villiers draws over a brass-legged stool before stripping off his cardigan. He’s wearing a dark brown wooden vest over his shirt underneath, and after hanging the cardigan up on the back of the bathroom door, Salvo watches as he rolls up the sleeve on his bad arm, and before he can start with the other, Salvo reaches out with his still dry hands and rolls it up for him. He neatly folds the shirt cuff up and over, trying to mimic the same angles Villiers had used on his other side, up to the elbow.

There are more scars on Villiers’ forearms, the insides of his wrists and elbows – places where the hair on his skin has been burned or altered, marks where he’d been cut, even a messy, fatter wound that he thinks was maybe from a bullet, or was from something else with a straight path, like a sharp pike or stick.

Villiers keeps his weaker hand in his lap as he reaches for a glass jug and fills it from the water, pouring it over Salvo’s head and wetting down his hair as he obediently tips his head forward. There are no bubbles in the bath, but it’s fragranced with salts and smells faintly of flowers and a fruit, he thinks maybe peaches or apples.

“Your father was ill when you were growing up, you said, a pacemaker. Your mother?”

“She worked,” Salvo mumbles, grateful for the curtain of hair hiding his face from Villiers’ gaze. He doesn’t feel any compunction about being naked in front of the other man – a part of him is frustrated that he’s not looking at Salvo’s body with any particular desire or hunger, but that doesn’t sting so much feeling Villiers’ hands on him, moving over his body.

“Who bathed you, as a child?” Villiers asks.

Salvo is quiet, leaning closer to Villiers’ hands as he pours cool, creamy shampoo through Salvo’s hair and massages it into the curls, squeezing and combing his fingers through to ensure he gets as much coverage as he can with his one working hand, the other remaining rested on his knees.

“Does your sapping effect impact a pacemaker?”

“Not as a matter of course,” Salvo says. “I can, um, be aware of electrical fields and stuff, but I don’t really impact them. But he had other stuff wrong with him, and he was ill a lot, and tired a lot. So he couldn’t touch me much, because it’d take so much more out of him than someone else.”

“And your mother?”

“She was already tired from work.”

“And grandparents? Other family members?”

Salvo doesn’t say anything, leaning his cheek into the gentle scrub of Villiers’ narrow fingers as they rub behind and at the underside of his ears, massaging down the back of his neck. It feels good, sends thrills down his spine, and he likes how strong Villiers’ approach to it is – he likes the authority with which Villiers moves his head one way and then the other, how he tilts Salvo’s head for him to pour water over his scalp before smoothing it out.

“I suppose I can imagine it,” Villiers says mildly. “Relatives sitting back from you, coaxing you and tutoring you through combing your hair, brushing your teeth, how best to wash yourself, not touching you and demonstrating as they ordinarily might for a small child. Were you aware of the casual touches your childhood was robbed of by your condition, hm? Cognizant of the way other parents and relatives reached out and touched children of the same age as you – stroked their hair, patted their cheeks, held their hands or gaze them affectionate squeezes and half-hugs? Did you understand why you were an island, even before you were old enough that your touch was a death sentence, and not a promise of mere discomfort and exhaustion?”

“They touched me at check-ups,” Salvo says, although he doesn’t know why he says it – is it a defence of his family, an excuse? An assurance he’s not as stunted as Villiers must assume he is? An explanation about why he is the way he is about care? “Making sure I wasn’t adversely affected by it, that I was still growing, that I was…”

“Were you a rich boy, of course, or from some more established magical family, your condition would have been treated very differently. You’d have been dispatched to a boarding school with as rich a magical field and history as they might find for you, appropriate sources of sustenance brought to you.”

“Victims,” Salvo says.

Villiers shrugs. “Perhaps. But were you trained from youth to control this need of yours, not to mention regularly fed, perhaps you wouldn’t sap so strongly from those you touch. No boarder was suggested, no alternative school?”

“I didn’t have the grades,” Salvo says, vaguely remembering the way his mothers’ smile had faded as she’d excitedly torn open the envelope with him watching, the way it had slowly dripped from her face and faded into the ether like evaporating steam.

“They wouldn’t have seen you as having anything to offer, I suppose,” Villiers says. “No money or storied blood, no especial academic or magical ability. Only a hungry mouth to feed, and to what benefit?”

Villiers massages conditioner into his hair, and then he has a washcloth in his hand and he’s scrubbing in slow, rhythmic circles over his shoulders, his neck, the top of his chest, his arms, and then his belly, between his thighs. He’s not remotely horny about it, isn’t sexual about it, and Salvo’s own arousal isn’t actually that overwhelming, isn’t as satisfying as the pure intimacy of it, and not just the warmth and comfort of Villiers’ hand on his body, the scrub of the soap and the cloth and his fingers, but the control of it. He feels like he’s just so much more hot water, like he’s part of the bath he’s stewing in, he’s so relaxed, not having to think at all, not having to put any of his thoughts or feelings in order – all wants and needs and anything he might think about dissolve into the water as well, and all there is, all there needs to be, is Villiers’ hand guiding Salvo’s body to where he wants it, and then Villiers’ hand making him clean.

“This is what I was talking about,” Salvo says when Villiers reaches over and pulls out the plug of the bath on the chain. “The power of it, care. Complete authority.”

“Indeed,” Villiers murmurs, standing up and reaching for a towel from the heated rail. Salvo looks at it, the way he holds it out, obviously higher held in one hand than the other, looks at the tight clutch of his weaker hand around the lower corner of the towel, and Salvo stands up and steps onto the bath mat, exhaling as Villiers wraps the towel around him – and at the same time, wraps Salvo in his arms.

Salvo smells his cologne and smells the pomade he uses in his hair, feels the soft wool of his vest, feels the heat of Villiers’ body.

“Do you think I’m pathetic?” Salvo asks.

“Hardly the correct question, young man,” Villiers murmurs. His breath smells faintly of coffee, and looking up into his face, Salvo stares into the terrifying freeze of his icy blue eyes, their noses brushing against one another. “A more suitable question might be – if you are pitiable, as is your concern, is it pity I feel for you… or something else?”

Salvo feels like he’s been drenched in hot water for a second time, searing over his flesh, and this time he is aroused, is keenly aware of the heat between his legs and the fact that his body is tight up against the warden’s, and the warden’s breath is intermingling with his, and is close enough to kiss.

“Take the towel from me, if you would,” Villiers orders him quietly. “Bathing you I might attend to sitting down – drying you off would be a dangerous gamble against my ability to keep my balance.”

“Sorry,” Salvo says, taking the towel, and Villiers laughs.

“What on earth are you sorry for, stupid boy?” he asks, raising his eyebrows, and grips Salvo by the jaw and squeezes. It’s not painful by any means, is a firm grip but a gentle punishment, and fuck, but he’s hornier in this moment than he’s ever been in his fucking life, Villiers laughing at him, holding him like this. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

Salvo’s breath hitches in his throat, and he feels his lip quiver, leans forward. “Yes,” he whispers.

Villiers leans in, gripping the side of the sink to better support himself as he does so, and their noses brush against one another again, and he can feel the heat of Villiers’ breath as much as he can smell his coffee. He squeezes his eyes shut, waiting for Villiers’ lips to touch his, but they don’t – they glance over the side of his cheek, and then his breath is hot against the shell of Salvo’s ear, and his knees go weak at the thrill it sends down his spine.

“Earn it, then,” Villiers almost growls into his ear, and Salvo is humiliated by the fucking noise that squeaks out of his throat, involuntary and desperately eager. “Get yourself dry and return to your room, young man,” Villiers tells him as he pulls away, throwing his cardigan over his shoulder as he grasps hold of his cane and opens up the door. “Your dinner should be waiting for you.”

“Fuck me,” Salvo mumbles, and Villiers laughs again.

“That, I will not do,” he says, and limps off down the corridor.

* * *

When Caine is allowed back down from his special little holding cell up in Warden Villiers’ house, whatever the fuck that looks like, he comes down with a smile on his face. It’s a dreamy smile, distracted, and Red wonders if the lad’s gonna be distracted from his work detail, but he isn’t at all. He writes like a demon, moving a lot quicker through his little toys and small things than he normally ever does, carving runes into place or painting them onto wood panels with confidence and ease.

He’s pleased to see Callum Pike and all, and when the four of them sit down to lunch together, Pike gives Caine a grin.

“What, you thought they’d fucking lock me away forever?” he asks.

“I just feel bad you were put in solitary on my account, that’s all,” Caine says.

“Where is he, Mason?” Pike asks, casting a look around the hall – it’s a question Red’s interested in hearing the answer to, and he looks at Caine’s face for an answer, but his pretty brown eyes don’t show any sign of guilt or regret. He, like Pike, casts a look around the room, tracing the lines of the long tables looking for Daf Mason’s face. “You seen him about?”

“Went looking for him in the infirmary yesterday, but there was no sign of the prick. What’d you tell him, the warden?” Red asks, and Caine does look a little uncertain now, pressing his lips together and twisting his mouth just a little.

“I told him what happened, what Mason did,” Caine says. “That it wasn’t your fault, that you shouldn’t be in solitary for defending me. But he didn’t say anything about punishing Mason any extra, or putting him in solitary, or…” He looks down at the canteen table, nervously fingering the edge of his fork. His voice is very quiet as he asks, “Do you think he hurt him? Warden Villiers, do you think he hurt Mason in defence of me?”

“I bet it wasn’t just to defend you,” says Rosen pleasantly, patting Caine’s hand in the most comforting way he’s capable of. “I bet he goes looking around for excuses to kill people, sometimes. He probably gets bored that he’s not allowed to any longer.”

Caine stares at him blankly, seeming distantly horrified and not going exactly how the fuck to cope with that, and Pike laughs.

“You should come work with us when you’re out,” he says, reaching across the table and patting Rosen on the side of one plump cheek. “Sort of lads I could refer you to’d be more than happy to have you nicking cars and trucks for them.”

“It’s no wonder recidivism rates are so fucking high with you recruiting, lad,” Red says, and he looks across at Caine, who slowly begins to eat his meal.

“I don’t think my family would be very pleased if I became a drug-runner on top of stealing cars,” Rosen says.

“Why not?” Pike asks. “My da’s just another kind of florist, he and your da are two sides of a penny.”

Rosen sniggers, and Caine looks across to him as he keeps eating from his plate.

“Your family are florists?” he asks.

“My dad and his two brothers, and a few cousins,” Rosen says, nodding his head. “My mother’s sort of the opposite – less of a green thumb, more of a death touch, you know. Liable to make a flower wilt just by touching it.”

“I have something like that myself,” Caine says, and Red stares at him – it takes Rosen and Pike a few moments for them to register that Caine’s actually made a joke, especially given that the lad doesn’t smile or grin or wink or do anything like that. Rosen laughs uproariously, tapping his little feet on the floor as Pike wheezes, slapping the side of the table, and Caine smiles a thin-edged smile, and seems to… Not get bigger, exactly, but fold out from himself a bit, not so small in his place.

“You never killed someone, before you killed that fella?” Pike asks.

“No,” Caine says. “When I was small, it wasn’t enough to harm anybody – make people tired, make them irritable, more than that. They wouldn’t realise what it was, often enough, wouldn’t realise why it was bothering them, if they touched me casually. I had to go to a mundie school – magical schools, even knowing what I was, teachers would touch me, lean on the back of my chair or tap me on the head or… And they’d start snapping, me gruff, annoyed. Like people who are ill, you know, it’s not controllable. A history master nearly slapped me once for scratching a scab before he got hold of himself and remembered who he was, who I was. I never had that once I was in with mundies.”

“I got slapped around at school,” Pike says. “Mind you, it was normal back then.”

“Why, when’d you leave school?” Rosen asks.

“I left early, I was fourteen, I think. ’81.”

“’81?” Rosen repeats, aghast. “So, what, you’re sixty-seven?”

“Sixty-six,” Pike corrects him, apparently offended. “Not sixty-seven ‘til November.”

“There was me thinking you were younger than me,” Red says, laughing and shaking his head. “All the time you’ve said fucking “age before beauty” to me about buying the first round!”

“Well,” Pike says, shrugging his shoulders. “You look it, don’t you?”

Caine laughs at that hard enough to choke on his overcooked potatoes, and Rosen pats him hard on the back as he coughs and swallows down a mouthful of water to try to ease it down.

“I’ll remember you fucking laughing at that, lad,” Red promises him, injecting all the bass he can into his voice. “There may well be consequences.”

Caine’s eyes flash with a bit of energy, and as he wipes away the choking tears from his eyes and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, he says, “Alright,” with a note of challenge in his tone. “Consequence away, old man. How old are you, sixty-five?”

“You little prick,” Red growls at him, half-laughing himself, but Caine only beams at him, all easy smiles.

Daf Mason doesn’t turn up, in the next few days, but things get back to normal.

After another two days, the ancient fae that make up the rest of Rosen’s fucking sewing circle tire themselves up, and Rosen reluctantly returns to his work detail instead of dossing about in his cell all day, although at least he stops complaining about being fucking bored when everyone else abandons him.

Caine keeps up the fast pace at work, often finishes up a little earlier than he used to, and one evening as Red finishes up for the day, he finds Caine lingering in the corridor outside of where they’re embroidering. The door is slightly ajar, and Red swallows hard, clutching at his own chest to try to cope with the unholy fucking vibrations that sing through it.

He fucking hates it when the old fae sing together, the noise of it putting the fucking willies up him. They’re all twice the size of most fae you’d see today, those old cunts, as tall as the trees they’ve sprung from with skin like tree bark, so that Rosen looks even smaller than usual when he’s in there with them.

The sound radiates out from the embroidery workshop and into the corridor and right down the halls, bouncing off the tiled floors and the undecorated walls, and it makes Red’s ribs feel like they’re vibrating, and he feels it on the inside of his ribs, the inside of his skull, the inside of all of him.

It’s a waulking song, or something like it, a song to keep them in rhythm with one another as they work, Red guesses, although when he hovers behind Caine and looks into the room over his shoulder, he sees that they’re done working for the day. They’re trying to teach Rosen the song, judging by how they’re all sitting in their chairs and have their faces angled toward him, one of them moving fingers that look like tree roots in rhythm to keep Rosen on beat, and he’s nodding along.

Red can’t make out Rosen’s voice in amongst the noise they’re making, a collective sound louder than a choir of fucking thousands, louder than a church organ if you had your ear right to the pipes, and it should hurt, it’s so fucking loud, but it doesn’t hurt, exactly. What it does is make his bones feel like they’re shivering, makes all his nerves fucking jangle, and he looks to Caine.

His expression is one of soft and quiet awe, his thumb tugging and playing repeatedly over one of the metal cuffs around his wrists, his lips parted, his eyes as big as fucking plates. When the fae stop – oh, God, fuck, it’s like if trees could sing, it’s like if they were singing right from the core of the fucking Earth – it’s an unspeakable relief, and Red leans against the wall, exhaling.

One of the fae stands now, and he says something in his unearthly and ancient voice, the language guttural. Red’s no big Welsh-speaker himself, but he can hear the ghost of the Welsh in it, he thinks, or the roots of it, although it sounds closer to fucking Latin to him.

“Um,” says Rosen. “He said, um… Something like, asking if you’re imagining what he tastes like?”

Caine smiles at the fae – Red can’t even tell them apart, but he thinks this one is Toutorixs, because a crown of bramble thorns, complete with blooming white flowers, is sprouting around the crown of his tree-trunk head – and puts out his hand.

“Oh, erm, Salvo, they don’t, they don’t shake hands,” Rosen starts to say urgently, but Toutorixs reaches out and winds his root-like fingers around Caine’s outstretched fingers, around his palm, around the base of his wrist.

Caine gasps, but instead of pulling away or shouting out loud, he leans in closer, and his eyes shine gold for a moment, the cuffs around his wrists flashing so brightly they look ready to fucking melt, before the screw in charge of the embroidery crew, French, barks, “No contact between inmates, you know that! Stop— doing whatever you’re doing!”

Toutorixs pulls back and lets out a gut-wrenching sound that must be a laugh, because all his friends join in, and Caine and Rosen follow after Red toward the canteen, Rosen soon beginning to chatter on about something or other – horse-racing, Red thinks, although he can’t make himself tune into it properly, still trying to work that awful sound out of his head.

He’s quiet as he eats, as quiet as Caine had been before – and just as quietly, apparently, Caine follows after him to his cell when he goes there instead of playing a game or watching TV or anything else.

“You’re bottom bunk?” he asks softly as Red slides into his bed, which has two blankets on, one that Sandra had sent in for him when he complained about the winter chill his first year in, and another Patience-May had brought in when she’d visited for his birthday earlier that year, sewn together of all different flannel shirts she’d gotten from the scraps bag at work.

“Nah, Churn is more than young enough to jump up there himself without having me do it,” Red says, and he watches as Caine steps slowly around the room, looking at Red’s books and Churn’s, looking at the pictures Churn has up on the wall of his daughters and his wife, and at the painted picture Sandra’s daughter had sent in for Red of the flowers in their garden.

“You have children?” Caine asks.

“No,” Red says. “But the women I take up with, some of their kids like me.”

“Even though you’re in prison?”

“They don’t know the difference between me being in the nick and being away at work.”

“I suppose not,” Caine says, and toes off his shoes.

Red leans back in bed and lifts up the blanket, and the lad apparently needs no more invitation to slide between the blankets and in close, and Red exhales at the feeling of Caine’s body warm and soft against his. He doesn’t know what shampoo the warden’s giving him in his house, but it smells very nice, of nectarines. When he slides his hands underneath the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, he finds that the flesh of the lad’s thighs and arse is just as generous as it looks, and he sinks his fingers into the warm yield of it, squeezes.

Caine sighs luxuriously, leaning in closer and burying his nose against Red’s chest, banding his arms around Red’s middle, and as Red keeps pressing and massaging at his buttocks and thighs, kneading at them like bread dough, he feels Caine’s prick against his thigh, feels the lad grind against him.

“I hope you don’t think I’m going to fuck you,” Red murmurs into his curls, “unless you feel like going door-to-door down the corridor and seeing what you can trade for a tab of sildenafil.”

“Is every man in this prison fucking impotent?” Caine asks in a grumble, although it sounds pretty fucking sleepy to Red, and Red laughs.

“Only the fucking old ones you keep throwing yourself at,” Red tells him dryly, and he waits for the lad to argue with him, for him to debate, for him to keep grumbling, but he doesn’t do any of that. Red keeps squeezing the flesh under his fingers, rubbing back and forth, and with his other hand he reaches up and combs lightly through his hair.

“Feels nice,” Caine says quietly. “No one’s ever touched me as much as since I came here.”

“No touching between inmates, remember,” Red tells him. “And I don’t think the warden’s meant to be touching you either.”

Caine doesn’t answer.

He’s fast asleep, breathing quietly in and out, and Red enjoys the heat of him and the softness of him and the scent, too. Not like a woman, no, but almost like being at home with one, until one of the screws comes along to break them apart. He wouldn’t mind fucking him, by any means – he might well ask one of the other lads about trading him something for his ED if Caine likes the sound of it – but this is nice on its own, just sitting here and soaking in the lad’s heat, the magic of him.

Red closes his eyes and lets himself doze until Cornell comes along to get them out of bed again.

* * *

In the observation room that adjoins Warden Villiers’ office, Salvo stands at the window and looks down over the canteen, where most of the long tables have been folded away for the evening, and a few of the lads are sat around, playing chess or basic boardgames, or reading books, or sitting around and watching TV.

It’s frosted on one side, the glass, and he hadn’t even realised it was an observation window – he doesn’t think he ever realised it was actually a window at all, and wasn’t just a big pane of frosted glass behind the metal balcony with emergency stairs coming down, separate to the wall.

Red is playing cards around a table with Rosen and Pike, and from this angle he looks to be a bigger man than he is, in contrast to Pike’s gangling limbs and Rosen’s round but confined little form, broad as he is. Salvo thinks of how warm he is, when he’s under the blankets and pressed up against Red’s broad, hairy breast, very different indeed to the warden’s spindly but muscular form, all joints and flat, hard edges of muscle.

In the past few weeks, he’s been touched so much.

Touched by the warden, not just when he’d given Salvo a bath a few weeks ago, but in the intervening period as well – reaching out to adjust his clothes or his hair, touching him as he passes him by in the house, brushing his hands as they play chess together. Once, yesterday, leaning over ostensibly to take the salt from the table at dinner, and taking the opportunity to breathe in Salvo’s ear.

Touched by Rufus Redford, petted and touched here and there, touching or chucking his chin or his cheeks or the back of his neck, and where they’ve been able to sneak it without being told off by the guards, Salvo curled up to doze in bed with him, or sit with his head against his lap or his belly while the TV is on and it’s deniable enough that Salvo is sat on the floor in front of the sofa or the bench.

Touched by others, too. Toutorixs, of course, had gripped his hand a few weeks ago and sent magic flooding through him even through the cuffs – they’re no match for the old fae and how much magic flows through them, and the others of the ancient fae have made a game of it, Rosen seems to think, reaching out to touch him when he walks by, zapping him with bits of pure magic that ripple right through him, no matter that the guards bark at them whenever they catch him at it.

Other touches, too. Brushes in the corridor, standing in line, and on Wednesday, when they’d been outdoors for exercise, Pike had taught him some wrestling grapples and holds. His hands are cold, his palms rough, but it had still felt good, had made him feel somehow real, feeling the weight of Pike’s thigh against his chest or his arms around his chest, or feeling the solid weight of Pike’s body under his own as Salvo tried to keep him pinned or still – especially, the whole time, feeling Pike’s laughter and Salvo’s own running through both of their bodies.

“Feeling hungry?” the warden asks as he enters the room, and Salvo turns back to look at him as he approaches, his cane making only the tiniest noise on the ground, his footsteps utterly silent. Salvo can only make out the noise of the cane’s grip against the floor because he’s so used to listening for it by now. “Even with those would-be dryads supplementing your diet.”

“I thought dryads were meant to be pretty young women,” Salvo says.

“I’m sure they’d present themselves as such, if they felt like it,” Villiers says dryly. “But that would rather lead to unwanted attention in a prison like this, as I’m sure, by now, you’re aware.”

The warden is warm behind him as he comes closer, and Salvo quietly exhales and leans half an inch backward, feeling today’s pin-striped waistcoat against his back.

“I’m told you were dozing in Mr Redford’s cell once again yesterday,” the warden murmurs in his ear, and Salvo shivers at the warmth of his breath tickling over the lobe of it. “Has he fucked you yet?”

“He can’t get it up without a pill,” Salvo says. “Same as you.”

“Vasodilators are contraindicated for previous victims of stroke, as I’m sure you know,” Villiers says, his voice quiet but his tone amused, and Salvo can feel his smile against the back of his neck as he reaches past Salvo to rest his cane against the wall. “In any case, it isn’t dysfunction that prevents me from fucking you, young man, but disinclination.”

“Am I meant to believe you don’t actually want to fuck me?” Salvo asks, feeling as though hot water is beginning to flow under his skin as Villiers tugs up Salvo’s shirt with a finger and bands his weaker arm tightly around Salvo’s middle. He opens up his hand, but he can’t grip very well with it or easily manipulate his fingers – it’s mostly with the strength of his elbow and his arm, and the tuck of his chin against Salvo’s shoulder, that keeps him upright. “The way you touch me. The way you look at me.”

“I’ve never found myself vulnerable to the siren’s call of penetrative sex,” Villiers says as, with his good hand, he slides his fingers up under Salvo’s sweatshirt and plucks at one of his nipples with a graceful, artsy movement like he’s playing a string on an instrument, and Salvo whimpers at the sudden sear of sensation it sends through his chest and rocketing down his spine. His cock is hard, and his knees threaten to go weak. “Ah ah,” Villiers starts sternly. “You’re the only thing holding me up, boy – keep those legs strong and solid, unless you want us both clattering to the floor.”

“You’ll clatter, maybe, being all bones,” Salvo mutters, heat rising in his cheeks as he squeezes his eyes shut, feeling Villiers laugh against his neck, his thumb and forefinger teasing and tugging over his nipple. “Or shatter. What do you mean, siren’s call? What, you’re like, asexual?”

“A side, I believe is the modern parlance,” Villiers says, and before Salvo can grumble about that, Villiers drags his teeth down the side of Salvo’s neck, making him whine. His eyes shoot open, terrified for a second that everyone downstairs will be able to hear him through the glass, that even if they can’t see his face, they’ll see the two shadows of him and the warden, and know it’s him, know what the warden’s doing to him, that they’ll be watching. “How does it feel, when those fae touch you? Comparable to your feast on the soul of Dafydd Mason?”

“I don’t believe in souls,” Salvo says breathlessly, then groans softly as Villiers plucks at his other nipple, flicks over the tip of it with his neatly-groomed nail, his other hand sliding slower and gripping at Salvo’s hip. Villiers’ hands are so warm and his fingers are so clever and it feels good. He tilts back his head, turning it to the side and moaning when Villiers shows his approval by licking a stripe up the side of his neck, nips the edge of his jaw, then the lower part of his ear.

It's not the same – it hadn’t been the same. The way the fae touch him tastes different to when he’d touched Mason, for want of a better word – their magic is older, richer, comes more from inside them than it flows through and gathers in them as it does in human beings. Even through the cuffs, even at a glancing touch, it overwhelms his senses and the core of him, but it fills him and leaves him fizzing over with it.

Mason had… sated him. Wholly and entirely, and a little bit more than that, but it had felt natural, though perhaps he shouldn’t think of it that way.

“Do they suspect his demise is down to you?” Villiers asks, sliding a hand up to grip the base of his throat as he bites down harder now on the side of Salvo’s neck, as if he’s some kind of fucking vampire instead of Salvo, and then Villiers shoves him forward, against the glass. He’s able to put more of his weight on Salvo like this, his hand going from Salvo’s neck down between his legs instead, his fingertip tugging at the ring of Salvo’s arse and making him squeak out a sound. “Do they know you to be a killer twice over, and hungry to lay waste to a third victim?”

“No,” Salvo groans, reaching clumsily back for Villiers, one hand reaching back to squeeze his narrow arse, making Villiers let out a short, sharp, breathless laugh. “Why, d’you think I should fucking advertise it?”

“Temper temper,” Villiers says, and uses the waistband of Salvo’s tracksuit bottoms to ease his way onto the floor, and Salvo stands up straight, whipping his head around to stare down at the older man aghast.

“You can’t be on the fucking floor, what about your knees? Sir, you can’t—”

“It’s not as though I’ll be down here long, is it?” Villiers retorts – that’s all the warning Salvo gets before he licks a hot, wet stripe from the back of Salvo’s bollocks up to his hole, and the sensation wrenches through him, right up his hard and aching, dripping cock. All of a sudden, he’s coming, white spattering the frosted glass of the window in front of them, his eyes tearing up, and he tries to stop himself from going wholly limp, bracing himself on the bar.

He’s breathing heavily, unable to catch his breath, somewhere between hotly satisfied and a little embarrassed.

“Told you so,” says Villiers.

“Fuck off,” Salvo says, and Villiers laughs.

“Help me up, would you?” Villiers asks. “I am so very old and very infirm, and my thoughtless young lover has abandoned me to the floor.”

“I could kick you.”

“I invite you to try.” He really does, too – Salvo would never, could never, he doesn’t think, but when he looks down at Villiers on the floor, braced on his better knee more than the weaker one, he sees that the old man is more than braced for it, that he’s hungry for it, wants to scrabble with him, wants Salvo to try to hit him, just so that Villiers can pin him down to the floor instead.

“Not today,” Salvo mutters, a little too flustered to actually sound at all stern, and offers the old man his arm to help him up – as soon as his knees don’t feel so much like fucking jelly.

* * *

It’s Rusk and French that grab him just before lights out and knock him out with something like fucking chloroform. They don’t frog-march him up the fucking hill, and they don’t let him make his own way either. He just wakes up in a leather chair in an even fancier office than Villiers has in the prison proper, his ankles tied together, his wrists cuffed behind his back, a gag in his mouth.

Red sits back in his seat, looking around the room, at the fancy floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with leather bound and gilt books, at the astronomy equipment next to the window, an astrolabe and an armillary sphere, and more shit he’s seen in plenty of fancy offices like this one, but has never learned the name of. There’s a fancy rug that’s probably centuries old rolled out on the hardwood floors, and all the furniture is good, heavy, antique stuff, and he can feel the enchantment in all of it, feel how old the subtle magic is, even if he can’t feel the age of the wood.

Up on one wall are a bunch of frames: Villiers in a line of other bureaucrats or maybe other assassins, receiving some kind of medal or award from the king regent; a portrait of a young Villiers alongside a severely featured but happy-looking woman he guesses must be his mother; a few calligraphed certificates covered in more bits of gilt and fancy ink for his various degrees, declaring him Guillaume Copernicus Villiers, BSc, MA, MSc, MMSc, PhD.

He's been in a lot of offices like these over the years, talking about how they’re going to fix the windows, what sort of glass or framing would suit best the architecture and mimic the original style, what sort of enchantment they can put in, what carpenters and joiners, what masons, he’s going to be working with.

He’s never felt at home in them, exactly, but Red’s gotten used to them, almost comfortable with them. He’s learned the names of the old-fashioned astronomical equipment, or vintage navigational tools, or basic entomology and demonology, learned to recognise certain bits of taxidermy. He’s learned the basics of these fancy posh cunts’ hobbies and interests, so that he’s more comfortable talking to the bastards, and they’re more comfortable giving him a big fucking tip.

He never thought he’d die in an office like this one. Figures.

“Fuck off,” says Salvo Caine as he crosses over the threshold, staring at Red in his chair, and Red marvels at the expression on his face, at the way he shoots a fierce glare at Villiers and seems very surprised at the fact that it’s Red, but not surprised that it’s fucking somebody.

Lied through his teeth about Daf Mason, and Red never even suspected he was lying.

Caine isn’t wearing his bracelets, Red sees – when he casts about to look for them, he sees them on a tray next to Villiers, and Villiers himself who’s standing up straight and wearing a fucking green and gold housecoat over his clothes, like some fella in a vintage advert, all settled in his pyjamas.

“You aren’t hungry after all?” Villiers asks, gracefully arching an eyebrow.

“Not him,” Caine hisses. “Not h— he has a family.”

“I can assure you, he doesn’t.”

“He has women he goes to see, women who love him – kids who love him.”

“And you?” Villiers asks in mild, dry tones, sounding for all the world like he’s about ready to laugh in the lad’s face. “Do you love him? This trafficker and embezzler, hm?”

“Easier to love him than a fucking, a murderer and a creep!”

“Maybe so,” Villiers says, delicately shrugging his narrow shoulders. Keeping his weight braced on his cane, he holds out the tray with his other hand, Caine’s cuffs rested on them. “By all means, then…”

Red looks up at Caine as he slowly approaches, his pretty hands held awkwardly in front of his belly. It’s been nice, the past few weeks, having Caine in his bed, feeling the softness of him, the warmth of him, smelling the fancy scents the warden apparently bathes him in for his own fucking pleasure, it seems. Strangely, ridiculously, he wonders in the moment how Caine dresses himself when he’s not in the nick, what scents he likes to wrap himself up in.

Caine’s gaze lands on Red’s face, and Red meets it. They’ve not been talking much, really, not about the things that matter, not about the things that catch in the chest or in the mind – if anything, Caine seems pretty content to be petted and played with more like a cat than a young man.

He’s overheard him talking to Pike, though, once or twice, the past few weeks, about the hunger he feels, about the need inside him – he’d been downplaying it, obviously, if he’d fucking killed Daf Mason.

He doesn’t struggle.

He’s not fucking stupid – he knows damn well he won’t be going anywhere, up here in the warden’s office, tied up in his chair, the warden being an assassin with however many titles and qualifications after his name, the lad with a fucking death touch in front of him, not having his bracelets on. There’s no sense in struggling, not now.

The only man with Red’s life in his hands is Caine – and it’s only in his hands because Villiers has put it there.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Caine whispers to Villiers. “Why’d you fucking gag him? He’s not like Mason.”

“If you don’t wish to sate that hunger gnawing in you, boy,” says Villiers in tones as dry as dust, but again, the bastard is still visibly on the verge of fucking laughing, “by all means—”

Caine swallows as he comes closer, his hands up close to his chest as he meets Red’s gaze, biting the inside of his pretty plump lips – Red’s not even fucking kissed them. That’s what he gets for beating around the bush, isn’t it?

“Sorry, Red,” says Caine, and then his hands are whipping out, and Red closes his eyes as tightly as he can so he doesn’t feel it coming.

It doesn’t come.

The tray clatters to the floor, the magic cuffs jangling before they hit the rug and go quiet, and Red opens one eye to see that Caine has one hand gripping at Villiers’ hand and the other wrapped around his throat.

* * *

“Oh,” says Salvo, because Villiers’ skin is beautifully warm under his hands, as warm as it ever is, and he can feel the magical flow beneath the older man’s skin, is cognizant of the glow of the other man compared to the rest of the room.

He’d noticed, before, that Villiers’ magical glow was lessened compared to Mason’s, and it’s lessened compared to Red’s. Some people have thicker skin than others, thicker skin or thinner veins, so that you don’t see their blushes as much when the blood comes to the surface, and this is like that, he thinks. Villiers has magic in him, but it’s deeper under the skin, harder to get at – like Pike or another vampire would be hard to cut or bite your teeth into, because their flesh is harder, denser.

“It might behove you to know,” says Villiers, utterly unaffected by the touch of Salvo’s hands against his skin, even as he turns his hand up to playfully tickle the underside of Salvo’s wrist, “that apart from building up self-defence techniques and immunities to various poisons, I was trained to resist draws like yours as a matter of course.”

“You fucking cunt,” Salvo whispers, and Villiers laughs, his thumb sliding warm against Salvo’s palm, pressing against it. It feels nice. Salvo’s never been able to touch another magical person since he was a kid without killing them – and never without hurting them, without tainting their feelings for him.

He wants to stay angry, wants to stay pissed, but a part of him is sparking to life inside because Villiers is touching him, and it feels nice.

“You can’t win every chess game, dear,” Villiers says, and tugs Salvo’s hand to enclose around Red’s throat instead. “Checkmate.”

Salvo sees Red’s eyes bulge and his expression of relief explode into panic and fear and pain, hears his choking sound of terror, and he can’t focus on compassion right now, because all that matters is the rush of Red’s magic into his hand, into both his hands when he puts the other on Red’s cheek, draws from him entirely.

He should feel terrible, should be beside himself with guilt, but he doesn’t – it feels wonderful. It feels wonderful, feels sublime—

“Good man,” says Villiers, and kisses his fucking cheek. “You’re free to come for dinner whenever it suits you.”

“Free, am I?” Salvo asks, and Villiers chuckles, patting his arse as he limps away.

“As much as you’re good, young man,” he says, and goes out into the corridor.

Red’s body is already going cold, but the room is warm, and as he feels the pulsing spread of stolen magic all throughout his body, rippling under his skin, Salvo feels very warm as well.

FIN.

[mymanyfandomramblings]

Any headcanons for toh?

Oooooh. I have several, including an entire section dedicated to my love of the terrible Blight family dynamics. Here we go:

Luz and Gus both love Hamilton. Amity does not love Hamilton, but she tolerates it.

Amity's music taste is either 'the softest, lightest, saddest pop music' or 'heavy metal'. all happy songs on her playlist were added because she associates them with Luz or her friends, not because she listens to them.

Luz is convinced that Elvis is alive somewhere on the Boiling Isles.

All of the Hexsquad are the type to call each other in the middle of the night because an idea occurred to them. it's usually Willow who ends up being called.

Willow has tried--and failed--to understand the hype with either The Good Witch Azura or Cosmic Frontier. She however does know so much lore about both, and is so good at pretending, that her friends have yet to figure out that she doesn't care about their fandoms beyond 'you're really happy talking about it'.

Edric and Emira see Gus as their unofficial little brother

Darius makes Willow's wedding dress, when she gets married.

When Hunter and Willow get married, Gus is a combination of best man/man of honour and Luz is a combination maid of honour/best woman. Amity's just a bridesmaid, but her feelings are unhurt by this.

Hooty writes terrible RPF

Lilith likes Raine just fine but she will not let them know this.

Luz and Gus will corner Hunter at some stage and be like 'listen, we know you like Willow. If you're going to date her you have to treat her like a princess. Spare no expense, leave no stone unturned. when you ask her to Grom you must do a big romantic gesture."

Willow does not like big romantic gestures nearly as much as Luz and Gus do.

Gus helps Luz and Amity plan their big dramatic Gromposals, so that they both ask at the same time, with equally massive fanfare.

Amity is not naturally a big romantic gestures person, but Luz is, so she has adapted to a big romantic gestures person.

Eventually Gus and Luz will figure out that neither Hunter or Willow are 'big romantic gestures' people. it will take too long for them to figure this out.

Camila and Darius are appreciative of each other for raising Hunter. Beyond that, they don't actually mesh all that well. She doesn't understand his dramatics.

Darius is occasionally prone to calling Raine and Eberwolf in the middle of the night to drag them on sidequests.

Back when Lilith was head of the Emperor's Coven, Eda used to go to wherever the coven heads would meet, and she'd sit under the window with a boombox and blast the Boiling Isles equivalent of 'You May Be Right' and 'Everybody Loves Me Baby'. This stopped after Lilith left the Emperor's Coven, but a little while later, Scooter Crane resigned, Raine Whispers ascended to head of the bard coven, and Eda and her boombox returned.

When Hunter starts attending Hexside, he isn't sure what he wants to study, and with the track system being far more flexible--and him being very traumatized and not very well-socialised--Principal Bump lets him have a blank schedule and go to whichever classes whenever. This often ends up with him spending much of the day in Plants, where it's peaceful. or at least he says it's because it's peaceful.

Grimwalker physiology is pretty similar to witch and human physiology, however it has some strange and inexplicable quirks. One of these things is a complete and utter lack of a detectable heartbeat.

Eda and co. would not all have survived high school without Raine there to keep the peace, and rein in the more stupid ideas.

Also, my incessant headcanons about the Blight family:

Odalia's family used to be one of Bonesborough's richest and most eminent families, however either thanks to a bad business deal or a scandal they lost most of their fortune and repute while Odalia was a child, and by the time she started Hexside, she's been living in genteel poverty for years. This has given her high-class trappings, memories of having wealth, and a desperation to regain it.

Darius was the one to originally introduce Odalia and Alador. he eventually regretted this.

Odalia wasn't always a terrible person. She was always unscrupulous, sharp-tongued and a social climber, but she is also capable of genuine pleasantness.

Odalia and Alador once did like each other--or at the very least were attracted to each other originally. This soured over years of an unsuccessful marriage.

They got married very young. Odalia was keen to lock down the last heir to the Blight fortune as soon as possible, and Alador thought she was pretty, and a good business woman.

Everything started falling apart when the twins were born, and properly fell apart when Amity was born.

Odalia's pregnancies have never been easy on her, and she experienced bad bouts of post-partum depression after both.

Alador is most definitely autistic. and also undiagnosed. among the things he finds overstimulating are a) children and b) Odalia when she's in a bad mood.

so when Amity was born and suddenly there was a crying baby, two chaos twins, and a very irritable post-partum Odalia, Alador's response was 'spend as little time in the house as possible.'

This is about when any last love between Odalia and Alador left the marriage.

Back to general headcanons, Edric gets bad asthma attacks

Emira is like a very immature mother to her siblings. they'd be lost without her.

Amity is unambiguously the favourite child. not that this gets her preferential treatment from her parents, but it does foster resentment among her siblings.

it took the twins much too long to figure out that Mittens has other emotional needs beyond 'an ego check'.

Alador just...gives them their inheritance when they asked for it. Amity put hers into saving, Emira uses it to be the hot rich single aunty to her nieces and nephews, and Edric spent his all at once on something like a waterslide for his house.

Edric needs budgeting lessons ASAP. he's not very good at it.

Post-divorce the twins joke incessantly about the fact that their mother is in jail.

That's all I can think of right now.