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soaringthroughthegalaxy · 1 year ago

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The Next Step

Being stuck on Mount Tantiss gave Tech plenty of time to think, and now that he’s been rescued, he wants to take the next step with you.

(Or the one where #TechLives and you both live happily ever after).

Pairing: Tech x f!reader

Word count: 5k

Warnings: tooth-rotting fluff and sweetness, first time/loss of virginity, consensual recording (it’s a hobby), a lil’ cheesy pickup line, use of sex toy, oral (f!receiving and m!receiving), unprotected PiV, praise, soft aftercare, some small mentions of Tech’s sacrifice on Eriadu.

A/N: This can be read as a standalone or follow-on from Trial and Error.

Translations: kotep verd’ner – my brave soldier

Warm water lapped over your toes, crystal clear and dazzling in the midday sun. The soft sand beneath your feet gave a little, shifting with the tide. In the distance, you could hear the birds chirping, the island’s fisherman pulling their boats up to the rebuilt dock, and the squeal of children enjoying their lunch break from school. Pabu was a little slice of paradise.

You couldn’t believe your luck. Years of running jobs for Cid, finding yourself in endless sticky situations, had all ended when she’d shoved you on a ship with four men and their little sister. You weren’t alone now – they’d made that abundantly clear after the first few jobs together.

And then you’d fallen for him. With those soft brown eyes and exceptional mind.

A smile tugged at your lips as you remembered the first time you’d kissed him, as he’d discovered how much joy could be garnered from pressing his lips to another’s – both softly and a little wildly.

It was always the nerds.

In the past, you would’ve raced through all the milestones of a relationship, but something about Tech made you want to take things slow. To savour every moment. He wasn’t shy, per-say, just inexperienced. However, it didn’t stop him from falling down holonet rabbit holes, some of which you’d had to pull him out of and correct the information.

It had been six months since your first kiss, and although he was quick to steal more from you whenever he could – chaste kisses before jobs and heavy make-out sessions afterwards – it hadn’t really progressed a lot more than that.

Sure, he reached for your hand more frequently when you were out together, knowing you enjoyed it, and some nights, those skilled hands of his would slip under your clothes for gentle exploration. But he hadn’t asked for anything more. And that was okay. For a short while, you’d worried that he wasn’t physically attracted to you, but he’d squashed those concerns the moment you’d raised them.

Slowly, you turned, leaving the ocean behind to snag a towel and dry off your feet before sliding your sandals back on. Grabbing your small bag and towel, you slowly walked up the island towards your home.

Well, it wasn’t just your home.

Shep had been kind enough to give you and the Batch a house – and the boys had their own rooms for the first time. Omega had more space than the gunner’s nest on the Marauder, too. You had your own room, but often, you ended up in Tech’s, sprawled on his bed when he tinkered late into the night or curled up at his side when he decided to get some rest.

A few of the island’s residents were starting to become familiar, and you offered them small smiles and waves as you headed back towards the house. The path grew steeper, the gravel shifting as you climbed higher, until you eventually reached the cosy home perched high on the island – with a stunning ocean view. You could also see the central plaza and the Marauder from the back windows of the house.

With no need to lock doors in such a small community, you stepped inside and sighed as the cool air cocooned you, sweeping away the heat in your skin from being out in the sunshine. Bags deposited by the door, you searched for the boys and Omega. Moving from room to room, you were surprised to find the house quiet. It was only until you checked the kitchen for the second time that you spotted a hastily scribbled note on the counter in Hunter’s handwriting.

‘Looking at rebuilding the community hall. Home later.’

You chuckled, leaving the note on the counter before snagging a bottle of water from the fridge. You had time to kill – time alone, which was a rarity. For a moment, you gazed out of the living room window, out at the endless stretch of the ocean, before making your way upstairs. There were a few bedroom doors off the hallway, but you made a beeline for one in particular.

It swung open quickly, the familiar scent of vanilla and the tang of burning pine flooding your nose, even with the open window and a light breeze rolling in. Casting your eyes to the messy workbench pushed against the far wall, you smiled – that pine smell, he’d been soldering something again. His kit crate lay partially open beside the bench, armour stashed inside while his helmet sat on the floor beside it.

The sound of the shower in the adjacent bathroom turning off made your smile widen. You weren’t alone, after all. Leaning back against the door, it clicked shut quietly, and you moved through the room. The bed was neatly made with a fresh set of clothes laid out on it – such a juxtaposition compared to the workbench – and there were new scribbles on the chipped chalkboard that had been commandeered from the island school when they’d been clearing out their supply closet. Marvelling at the equations and diagrams, you knew you wouldn’t have a hope in hell’s chance of deciphering them and could never compete with Tech’s mind.

Eyes roving across the workbench, the soldering pen was still out, but nothing that he could’ve been working on. Your brows furrowed. It wasn’t like him to hide away his projects.

The bathroom door opened, warm air breezing into the bedroom momentarily before you saw him. For a second, he froze in the doorway, surprise on his handsome features, which soon melted into a soft smile. “Hello, darling.”

Your stomach flip-flopped, just like it did every time you heard the affectionate pet name fall from his lips. You’d confessed what it did to you late one night, curled up in bed together. He’d chuckled, and ever since then, you’d noticed him watching your reaction each time he used it, the smugness that crossed his features when he saw how your breath caught.

“Well, this is a nice surprise…” You replied, watching as he stepped into the room. Droplets of water rolled down his body across tanned skin and defined muscle, skimming scars from his fall on Eriadu and his time in Hemlock’s hands. He might not have been as built as his brothers – certainly didn’t have Wrecker’s size or Hunter’s broad shoulders – but he was still exquisite.

Your eyes continued downwards, watching as the water rolled across the ridges of his abs and then disappeared as it reached the towel wrapped around his narrow hips. “A very nice surprise.” You added cheekily, gaze flitting up to find a light flush across Tech’s cheeks.

It wasn’t the first time you’d seen him in so little – nor was it the first time you’d openly admired him – but you’d never pushed it further.

“I was not expecting you home so soon,” Tech commented, his eyes roaming your body. That sweet little dress you were wearing did very little to hide your figure. “I shall have to move my timeline up and adjust my plan.” He stated, lifting a hand to push his goggles back up.

“Your timeline and plan?” You question, arching an eyebrow. Pinpricks of heat swept across your body as he admired you, but he made no move to change into his clean clothes. Instead, he leaned against the bathroom doorframe, crossing his arms over his chest. Following the lines of him, you were borderline drooling – mind swirling with thoughts of his strong arms and talented hands. The faintest hint of a smirk tugged at his lips.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

“Mhm.” Tech made a slight noise of confirmation, enjoying the way you devoured him with your eyes. He’d always been confident in his abilities, in his exceptional mind and skill, but compared to his brothers, he’d never been as confident about his body. He knew he looked good – a lifetime of training and fighting had him in top shape – but he’d often been overlooked by the fairer sex.

You hadn’t overlooked him, though.

The thought made Tech smile and reaffirmed his decision to pursue a romantic relationship with you. “I had devised a plan for today. And although I will have to adjust it, I hope you are still happy to participate.” He voiced.

You paused, brows furrowing a little. “Do I get to know what the plan is first?” You asked. Truth be told, you’d happily do anything with your genius.

Tech pushed off the doorframe, arms falling to his side as he approached you. “I had hoped to find you at the beach this afternoon.” He stated as he neared the bed, hand reaching down to skim his fingers along the soft fabric of the shirt he’d picked out.

You noted that it was a new addition to his wardrobe and was your favourite colour.

“I had a walk along the beach planned, a small stop at the ice cream shop I’ve noticed you staring at longingly a few times, and then a slow return here.” Tech laid out his plan, eyes drifting from the shirt to you, though his fingers remained smoothing the garment.

Your lips curved into a pleased smile. “You were planning a date.” Your voice hints at teasing, but you can’t mask how touched you are.

Tech’s fingers paused, his head tilting slightly as he steeled himself. “Amongst other things.”

Your brows furrowed again. What else could he have planned? “Other things?”

Pulling his hand away from his shirt, Tech closed the distance between you in two strides, leaving him towering over you. Hooking his fingers under your chin, he tilted your head up so you could meet his gaze. “Mhm.” He confirmed, stroking his thumb across your lower lip.

His eyes had something different – a new intensity, a heat. And the confident way he dragged his thumb across your lip sent sparks of warmth into your belly. “Oh…oh!” Realisation dawned on you, eyes widening as you put the pieces together.

Tech watches as you catch on, and while he’s the picture of confidence outwardly, his mind is working overtime, and his heart is hammering wildly. “Only with your enthusiastic consent, of course.”

“Oh, that won’t be an issue!” You chuckled, your surprise melting into delight that he was broaching this. Your hands found his flanks, sweeping down shower-warmed skin, making the muscles twitch. “But is this what you want?”

“Yes.” He stated with absolute certainty. “It is what I want. You are who I want.” The only company he’d had during his time in Hemlock’s hands had been his own, and his mind had often wandered to you, to thoughts of your sweet smile and laughter, the way you looked at him like he hung all the stars in the galaxy. He’d been filled with regret that your time together had been cut short, that he might never get to kiss you again. But then you’d rescued him – along with Omega and Crosshair – and now he wouldn’t waste a moment of the second chance he’d been given.

The warmth in your belly grew, cheeks heating up as you pushed onto your tiptoes, pressing a soft kiss to his lips. “Only if you’re sure. I’m still happy to wait.” You kept the door open for him to change his mind.

Tech slid an arm around your waist and pulled you flush against him. You were too sweet. “Whilst I appreciate the sentiment, darling, I have never been more certain of anything in my life.” He lifted you easily, gently setting you down on the bed’s edge.

Your hands splayed at your sides to stabilise yourself as you were placed down, your fingers finding the edge of his new shirt, reminding you of the date he had planned. “Wait…no ice-cream first?” You pouted.

Tech couldn’t help but smile, crowding into your space a little as he cupped your face, gazing into your eyes. He could spend eternity getting lost in them. “So greedy.” He murmured playfully.

“You adore it.” You replied, subconsciously leaning into his touch. You were careful not to use the word ‘love’ – you hadn’t gone there yet, worried about frightening him away even though you knew that’s the feeling swirling inside of you was.

It had only been three months after your first kiss when he’d sacrificed himself so you could all get away safely on Eriadu. The memory of him looking at you with such longing right before he’d shot the railing had haunted you the entire time he’d been gone. During that time, between bouts of rage and hysteria, you’d come to accept how much you loved him. It had been nothing short of a miracle when you and the boys had stormed Mount Tantiss and found him submerged in a bacta tank, somehow still clinging on to life.

Amusement danced across Tech’s face. “I adore you.” He corrected, gently dipping his head down to kiss your lips softly. His hands left your face, smoothing down your throat until he reached the straps of your dress. Carefully, he pushed them down, his lips finding your collarbone for a series of delicate kisses. He may not have Hunter’s heightened senses, but he was focused on your body and every little expression that crossed your beautiful face. “If you do not wish to go further at any point, please alert me.” He murmured against your skin.

“That won’t be an issue.” You repeated your earlier words, a sigh of contentment leaving you as more kisses were pressed to your shoulders.

His hands slid down your body, cataloguing every curve and dip, mapping you out as if he hadn’t run his hands over your body hundreds of times since that first kiss. He found the hem of your dress, and with your assistance, he pulled the garment up and off your body. You were a beautiful mix of fierceness and softness to him – he’d seen you take down TK Troopers with no remorse to protect him as you fled Tantiss. Yet, he’d also seen you cry at holo documentaries about small animals finding their mates. He’d seen you threaten criminals and pirates, unafraid to go toe to toe, and yet here you sat on his bed, all soft and sweet in nothing but a tantalising pair of panties and matching bra.

As your dress fluttered to the floor, the warmth of Tech’s palm pressed to your sternum, and you felt his other hand slide to the nape of your neck, cradling you as he slowly lowered you down flat onto the bed. Instinctively, your arms looped around his neck, bringing him down as your lips found each other again. The rough scratch of the towel against your bare thigh as his weight settled above you was enticing.

“Want me to lead?” You asked as the kiss broke, conscious he’d asked you to lead initially when you’d first kissed. And given this was another first for him…

Tech shook his head slightly, peppering kisses along your jawline and throat. “I would like to lead in this instance, please.”

A soft noise slid from your lips as he kissed his way down. “Lead away, kotep verd’ner.”

Tech groaned at the pet name, heart racing as he scattered kisses along your shoulder while his fingers slid up, hooking under your bra straps. He could feel the nerves settling in his gut – it might be his first time, but he wanted this to be perfect for you. Carefully, he slid down the straps, moving back ever so slightly so you could pull your arms free before his hands were on you again, reaching for the tiny front clasp on your bra.

He watched as you met his gaze, but then your eyes flickered to the side for a moment, and he paused, realisation slamming into him. He couldn’t do that to you. Not without permission, at least. His hand left your body momentarily, reaching for the camera attached to his goggles, and he pulled slightly to break the magnetic connection.

You watched as he started to pry the camera off, and before you could stop yourself, your fingers were wrapping around his wrist, halting his movement. “You can leave it there.” You whispered, unsure where this sudden streak of boldness had come from. You’d never been intimately filmed before, and while you couldn’t deny the nervousness bubbling inside you, you knew he’d encrypt it within an inch of its life and never let anyone else see it. “I trust you.”

Tech’s expression softened, warmth curling up with the desire he could feel building. He pressed the camera back into place, the magnets snapping it securely before his hands were back on you, undoing the front clasp of your bra in one smooth motion. Fabric pushed aside, his lips parted as he inhaled sharply. He knew you were beautiful, but Maker above.

Teeth sinking into your lower lip, you watched as he admired you, swallowing thickly as he explored your body. Tentative hands smoothed across your ribcage, fingers brushing over the swell of your breasts. The feather-light touches pulled a little noise of pleasure from you, back arching to chase the warmth of him as his confidence grew. His head dipped down, lips trailing over soft flesh, tongue following, swirling around your rapidly pebbling nipples.

A jolt of pleasure rushed through you, and you reached for him, threading your fingers through his hair, gasping as he laved attention to your body. More sounds of delight left you as you felt the firm press of his cock against your thigh. The warmth inside you grew. Yet, with your hands on him, you could also feel how tense he was. While everything he was doing was marvellous, he was calculating and worrying, and you couldn’t have that. This should be fun and driven by instinct and desire.

“That a blaster in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” You teased, knowing the line was corny but hoping it’d catch him off guard and make him relax.

It had the desired effect. Tech snorted, lips curving into a smile against your breasts. The tension eased from his shoulders. Somehow, you always know the right thing to say. “I am always happy to see you, darling.” He murmured, tongue flicking across your nipples again, chuckling at your squeak of surprise.

He kissed down your body, eyes roving up to meet yours, and you could see how much more at ease he appeared as he knelt at the side of the bed, hands at your hips to drag you to the edge. Deft fingers slid under the elastic of your underwear, and he slowly pried them down, your hips canting upwards to help as he eased the fabric off. His eyes stayed on yours for a heartbeat until he glanced between your thighs.

Tech prayed all the research he’d done – and the absolutely hypothetical questions he’d fired at Hunter – would help. He traced his fingers gently across your inner thighs, watching with delight as you shivered. His lips followed in their wake, brushing your soft skin until he reached your soaked folds. He’d barely touched you, yet you were so needy for him. It made his mind spin as he leaned in, finally tasting you, groaning lowly as your desire coated his tongue and lips.

Soft kitten licks, fingers stroking along your thighs, Tech took his time tasting you, exploring you. He pressed his tongue into you, slowly licking up before he flicked it over your clit, making you moan. Your hand slid back into his hair, the other grasping the bedsheets. The noises falling from your lips were driving him crazy, his cock hard and straining against the towel around his waist, but he refused to touch himself, focussing instead on your pleasure.

Hips rocked as you chased his tongue; you were desperate for more. With every lick, every kiss, the edge drew tantalisingly closer. Fingers tangled in his hair and the bedsheets, you didn’t register Tech’s subtle movements until his tongue disappeared just as you teetered on the edge – but your despair was short-lived as cool, vibrating metal was pressed firmly against your clit. The pleasure hit its peak, flinging you into your orgasm. Crying out his name with your head thrown back, your hips and thighs shook as you rode through it, the vibrations slowing until they disappeared entirely, and his warm mouth was back on you, lapping up your release.

Tech greedily took what he could, letting out a deep moan as he licked his lips, pulling back to look up the length of your body. You looked divine with a thin sheen of sweat on your skin, parted lips, and messy hair.

Pride bloomed in his chest at having made you this way, but he could see a question tangled with the wild look in your eyes. With one hand, he lifted the small device he’d finished only 30 minutes before you’d entered his room, his eyes darting to his workbench in answer, a smug smile on his lips.

Laughter escaped you before you could stop it, amusement creasing your features as you sank back into the mattress, catching your breath. Of course, he’d made something special for this moment.

Pushing yourself into a sitting position, you hook your fingers under his chin, not too dissimilar to his earlier action, and draw him onto the bed beside you. He complied, eagerness shining in his eyes as he watched you push him flat and straddle him, the most devastatingly pretty moan fleeing his lips as you ground down against his hard cock. Grasping at the towel, you undid it, shifting to let it fall open.

Lips latching onto his throat, you smattered kisses down his body, finding every spot that made him twitch and shiver, that pulled grunts and sharp inhales from him. You spent a moment longer kissing one of the particularly brutal scars on his body, left behind from his fall, and sent a silent thanks to the Maker for giving him back to you.

And then you reached your destination. You’d had your hands on him, albeit over clothes, but now you get the whole experience. His cock is achingly hard – thick and just the right length, with a slight curve to the left. You catch the flex of his hands against the bedsheets, the only outward sign that he’s nervous, and you ease his worry by wrapping your fingers around him, sliding your lips over the tip to lap up the small bead of pre-cum. The tangy taste of him explodes on your tongue.

It’s like being in heaven. Tech’s hips bucked as the soft wetness of your mouth enveloped him, gasping as your hand tightened around him and you gave a few slow bobs of your head. Nothing in the galaxy had ever felt this good – not the satisfaction of cracking a complex calculation or a challenging mission that had finally swung in their favour. Even the few times he’d taken himself in hand to work off some stress had never felt this good.

Glancing down his body, one of his hands scraped through your hair, keeping it off your face. He watched how your lips stretched around him, your cheeks hollowed, and your eyes closed as you moaned around him. Cursing under his breath as you looked up at him a moment later, lips and tongue sliding along his length, he knew this memory would be seared into his brain for the rest of his life – and would likely be his most replayed recording. “You’re so beautiful.” He whispered reverently, the words escaping him before he could even think to stop them. The surprise and delight in your eyes at the praise only added to his pleasure.

And while everything you were doing took him to new heights, ones he never thought he’d reach in his short lifetime, Tech reluctantly stopped you with a gentle hand on your cheek. “I will not last long if you continue, darling.” He admitted, feeling the heat in his cheeks.

With a quiet ‘pop,’ your mouth leaves him, the ache between your thighs growing. Your hands settled against his chest as he shifted you both, rolling you onto your back so he could rest above you, one arm holding up his weight. Desire and adoration curled inside you as he gazed down at you, head ducking to steal a sweet kiss. Thighs parting slowly, you made more room for him.

His free hand wrapped around his cock, and he adjusted your position to line himself up with you, brushing his tip through your soaked folds, making you both stifle a moan. He paused momentarily, eyes focused on yours, searching for any hint of you having changed your mind. Instead, he was met with your encouraging smile.

As Tech canted his hips, the stretch was almost immediate. A low whine left you as he slowly pressed forward, giving you time to adjust as he buried himself inch by inch inside you until he bottomed out, hips flush. You couldn’t keep your gaze off him the entire time, watching his eyes close and his jaw clench as he savoured the tight, wet heat.

Tech had thought your mouth on his cock was heaven, but he’d been wrong. Being buried balls-deep in your tight, warm body was actual heaven. Eyes opening, he looked down, breath catching at the sight of you sprawled beneath him, your chest rising and falling rapidly, desire swirling in your gorgeous eyes. “You look so beautiful taking all of me.” He murmured, giving a slow roll of his hips.

Your combined noises of pleasure filled the air. His sweet drag in and out of you was exquisite – thick enough for a delicious stretch and long enough to hit that glorious spot inside you when he pressed back in. Your head tilted back, a quiet curse falling from your lips as he started to thrust, setting a comfortable pace.

The hand Tech had used to guide himself into you moved to your hip, gently grasping you, keeping you in place. Every nerve in his body felt alight. You’re so perfect, and for a moment, he can’t wrap his head around you being his.

You’ve had lovers before – sometimes for a night and sometimes for a little longer – but you’ve never loved them. Not like you do the man above you now, who plans sweet dates and is always reaching for you, who spends his downtime tinkering and making things with your pleasure in mind.

The pleasure builds with every roll of his hips, every deep press of himself into you. Your hands scramble at the rumpled bedsheets, hips rising as you meet his thrusts.

“You feel so good, darling. Taking me so well.” Tech murmured above you, focused on holding back his release a little longer. He lets go of your hip, fingers burrowing between your bodies until he finds your clit, wanting you to come before he does.

A few firm circles and a couple more thrusts were all it took for you to fall apart, crying out his name as your release slammed into you, sweeping you up. Eyes shutting, you shuddered and gasped through the pleasure. Every thought in your mind was gone, warmth seeping through your body as you came down from the high, feeling Tech pressing urgent kisses across your cheek.

“I cannot…where?” Tech gritted out. Watching you fall apart beneath him had been magnificent, knowing he’d taken you there again. And the way your body had tightened around his…

“Inside.” Your decision was quick, knowing the small implant in your arm would prevent anything from happening. Tech was also aware of it, having discovered it one night while his hands mapped your body.

His forehead came to rest against yours as he gave a few more quick thrusts. And then he went still, pressing himself as deep inside of you as possible as his thighs shook, body going taut. His deep moan as he filled you sent a shiver skittering down your spine. It was such a rough, raw sound from such a mild-mannered man.

Foreheads still pressed together, both of you spent a second catching your breath, coming down from the high together. “Thank you.” Tech broke the silence, gently kissing your lips.

A delighted hum escaped you at the sweet gesture, and you returned his kiss happily. “You don’t have to thank me.” You insisted in a whisper, bringing your hands up to brush through his hair and across his shoulders, enjoying the contact.

His lips found yours again, a more sensual kiss this time, but still languid. With care, he eased out of you, murmuring for you to stay put as he disappeared out of the bedroom door – still completely naked, you noted with some amusement.

The moment alone allowed your mind to wander, a smile tugging at your lips as you caught sight of the small vibrator at the edge of the bed. Sitting up, you went to reach for it just as Tech returned, a damp cloth in one hand and…

Laughter filled the room, a grin breaking across your face as he handed you a small takeaway tub of ice cream from the little shop down at the seafront. Taking the spoon he offered, you stared at him and his smirk with unabashed adoration. The bed dipped under his weight as he sat, carefully using the damp cloth to clean away the evidence of your lovemaking. He tossed it aside once you were suitably cleaned, scooting next to you.

The first spoonful of ice cream was delicious, melting on your tongue, exploding with flavour, and chasing away the heat simmering in your body. Scooping up some more, you offered it to Tech, who leant forward and accepted the offering, joy dancing in his soft eyes as he swallowed. He’d swung by the shop earlier today, just in case.

As he watched you eat, he couldn’t keep his hands off you, running them up your bare thighs and across the softness of your stomach and breasts.

“You always think of everything.” You commented once you’d finished your latest mouthful, offering him another spoonful.

Tech gladly took it, enjoying the refreshing treat as his eyes wandered over you in his bed, sated and happy. He could get used to this. “I always think of you.”

#tbb tech x you #tech x reader #tbb tech x reader #tech x you #tech bad batch #star wars clone wars #the bad batch x reader #the bad batch #fluff #first time #soft smut #star wars tbb #star wars the bad batch

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countrymusiclover · 8 months ago

Text

1 - The Arrangement

Part 2

The Last Velaryon

Tag list @rise-my-angel @cdragons

When I was a child I wouldn't have believed you if you told me that one day I would find myself tangled in the claws of both a Lion and Wolf......

Monterys Velaryon, a name that every young child knew of our house before my grandparents died. He was declared the heir to Driftmark at only the age of six and got control of an entire fleet of ships and sea. The name doesn't truly live alive to this day...except for the fact that I exist as the only true born child. My father only was with one noble girl but she died giving birth to me.

But in this world women don't get any claim to a household

Walking through the castle hallways I was lost in my own thoughts about our current situation. It was declared that House Velaryon was to no longer have any high power when House Baratheon took the Iron Throne from the Targaryen. So we had a small castle that was near the same sea that brushed up against Dragonstone that was also claimed by the Stag house too.

Footsteps came running down towards me when I stopped to peek out one of the windows. "! There you are. I went into your chambers but couldn't find you."

"You know I don't care about being stuck up in the same rooms all the time." I responded leaning my back against the wall responding to my lady in waiting who was also my best friend, Chezney Ally.

She became close to me since she had lost her mother at a later age then I did. Unfortunately I never got to know who she was. Chezney had dark brown hair pinned up into two braids while she wore a light blue dress to match our house colors. "You're not trapped here, ."

"Really. Let's think about this shall we." I tapped my chin with my index finger in thought. "I live in a castle that is only surrounded by sea and the only way I will ever be forced to never see this place again is if I wed off to some snob lord far far away."

Chezney sends me a raised brow. "Don't say that you could be wed to a young lord who is actually nice to you."

"Pfft I doubt that. But anyway, what were you wanting me for exactly?" I questioned my friend.

She clasped her hands together. "Since you're not busy with ridiculous lessons can we go swimming off the castle."

"Absolutely you know I love the thrill." I nodded in agreement where we both ran through the hallways. I wasn't wearing flat dress shoes like she was. I was wearing riding boots with a knee length sea blue tunic shirt that was big enough on me it looks like a dress.

Chezney swings opened the door that led to one of the boat docks that was just a little high above the water. She ran to the edge not caring about her clothes get wet when she hit down into the sea. "Come on, !" She cheered, pooping her head above water.

Tucking a strand of hair behind my ear I ran forward and hugged my knees to my chest. I hit the water and felt my hair that was in a braid slightly fall apart. "If I ever have a husband they better be fun or I'm running away." I swam up taking a breath once my head is out of water.

"And I'll come with you if they allow that." She replied, grinning at me.

Splashing some water playfully in her direction I laughed. "Of course I'll allow it and if they don't then I'll find a way to make them."

"Yeah I know you will. Uh oh they found us." Chezney splashed some water back at me looking over my shoulder and her smile dropped.

Turning around in the water I glared at the young guard my father had assigned to me for my protection since he was always busy with being Lord of the Tides. "What are you doing here, Antler!"

"You're wanted by the small council, My lady." He bowed with the wind catching his dark brown curly locks.

Shaking my head I grumbled. "What could they want with me? And tell whoever is asking that I am spending time with my friend."

"I don't think that will fair over with your father, Lady Haelesa ." Antler gulped in a slight nervous tone. "For he is the one asking for your presence at the time."

"I better go. Can't keep daddy waiting I suppose." I swam away and Chezney followed after me. We didn't bother changing into dry clothes since he clearly wanted to see me right this second. Tying my boot laces back properly I sighed following Antler through the dark hallways. The castle was usually cold during nighttime but during the day the ocean wind wasn't unbearable. I honestly enjoyed the taste of sea more than most did and that's saying something since we're all raised to be able to handle sea life. The three of us finally halted outside a set of large double doors where Antler knocked three times signaling we were there.

The doors opened and I stepped inside seeing my father's lord advisors and him sitting around a circle table. The doors were shut behind me where I felt slightly nervous since Antler and Chezney were left outside in the hall. "Leave me alone to speak with my daughter now." My father Monterys declared getting to his feet.

"What did you want to talk to me about, father?" I questioned softly under my breath.

His eyes locked on mine. "It has come to my attention that our house is almost gone. Our heirs are either dying out or are Bastards by my only living son. That needs to change before we're gone forever."

"Change how?" I nervously asked him.

My father rounded the table and came to stand in front of me. He placed his hands on my shoulders before he spoke out. "It is past time you were wed, ."

"What...no." Immediately came from my mouth.

He lowers his gaze. "This isn't up for discussion, dear. It must happen to save our house and name."

"That's not right, father. Something shouldn't just be done because it's been done for a thousand years and no one else has had the balls to change the tradition!" I snapped at my father in disbelief.

He drops his hands from my shoulders. "Watch your tone. You are my daughter and you will serve your house like your mother did before she died."

"If the only way I will ever see the rest of the world is through a ridiculous marriage then I have one condition. Chezney comes with me to whatever house you're sending me to for the rest of my life." I suggested to him with my hands on my hips.

The lord of the tides paused in thought watching me closely then finally replying. "Fine. I'll inform Lord Tywin of the response.....just remember where you come from my dear girl."

"The Old, the True, the Brave." I mumbled back to him when he started to walk away from me until I realized what he had said to me. "Wait a second you said Tywin Lannister?"

My father looked over his shoulder. "Yes I did. Tywin of House Lannister. You are to wed his eldest son Jaime. You will be sailed to Kings Landing and from there the wedding should take place within a fortnight."

"But isn't Jaime a member of the Kingsguard? He took the oath. He can't marry or bear children with anyone. He would be exactly like my brother." Listing off my fingers, this wasn't making sense anymore.

Lord Monterys moved back and sat down in his lord chair. He ran a hand over his chin in silence. I knew that he had a lot of weight on his shoulders and I was probably making it worse. Yet I had all the time in the world to read up on all the houses and history that we had gotten from Dragonstone. "Tywin has assured me that he was removed of his white cloak by King Robert Baratheon. The man who now seats the Iron Throne. So you shouldn't be worried about such matters. Now go back and start packing your leaving in a few days."

"Okay...I still love you father." Pausing in my step just beside the double doors I eyed my father in his chair figuring this would be the last time I saw him.

He sends me a grin. "I love you too, ."

The day for me to leave my family home had finally come to pass. The whole castle staff had been gathering supplies and getting the ship prepared that would go to King's Landing. Gazing out the window I just sat on the windowsill listening to the sea hit against the castle as best as I could. There was no guarantee that we would immediately go to Casterly Rock so this comforting sound needs to be my last memory of home. ", can I come in?" Chezney's voice broke me from the silence.

"It's open, Chez." I answered her, seeing her peak her head inside.

She shut the door with her foot behind her. "Antler sent me to inform you that everything is ready. We just need to get you dressed to go."

"I'm not wearing a tight dress on that boat. It doesn't matter if I'm marrying the wealthiest family in the seven kingdoms, I will be comfortable for as long as I can." I responded to my friend watching her go over to my chest of clothes and shoes searching around for what we could pick.

Sliding down from the seel my bare feet hit the wooden floor until I snagged my boots on. Tying the laces I stood upright. "Okay so let's do one of your brother's old tunics that he grew out of." Chezney draws out some dark blue trousers with a sea blue tunic.

"Can you do the braid your mother taught you?" I asked her to sit down at the window once I had changed my clothes for the trip.

She nodded beginning on the braid. "I heard some of the kitchen staff gossiping about the man you're to marry. They said that Jaime is supposed to be so handsome and the best swordsman in the kingdoms."

"Looks and sword skill aren't all that should define a person. From what I read about the Lannister's they throw gold at all their problems. It's the decisions that someone makes that matters." I rolled my eyes when she finished the braid, letting my silver-blonde hair over my right shoulder.

Chezney shakes her head. "Maybe you'll get lucky and you'll find your right person before your wedding." We clasped hands and left the castle with my father accompanying us on the journey. I don't really remember much of the trip. It was just a lot of sea and not many nights of proper sleep before we were woke to see a much warmer climate and a large populated city unlike what I was used to.

One of the Baratheon guards helped me out of the boat when we ported it to land. My gaze shifted around recognizing the certain king and his queen that was Jaime's twin sister Cersei. "Lady Velaryon, here I thought that your house was gone for good. And all the material with your name had been forged into weapons." Someone remarked in my direction where my gaze shifted across the crowd of people.

I finally stopped searching when I met a second pair of green eyes and blonde hair that fell almost down to his shoulders. And a sword attached to his hip. "Jaime Lannister, I presume."

"The one and only, my lady." He smirked at me smugly.

Putting one hand on my hip I flipped my hair out of my face, getting the sense that I was right about what I read about this family. "Well, be careful, Lannister. My house may not be as known as yours. But I may surprise you and everyone here." Jaime smirked still down at me before I took a bow in front of him and Chezney just quietly smiled at our interaction knowing this was not going to be an easy arrangement.

Comments really appreciated ❤️

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see-arcane · 7 months ago

Text

Blood of My Blood: Never Loved

One more Blood of My Blood cinderblock for you @ibrithir-was-here and @animate-mush. Put on your most dramatic breakup song playlist.

Summary: Castle Dracula is abandoned. By son, by subjects, by its Master. The latter finds himself dwelling in the dirt and dark as he waits to strike the English shore once again. Thinking on traitors and thieves. And on his dear friend, who makes him bleed still into the grave earth.

Warnings for: Violence, coercion with and without hypnotism, and domestic abuse.

He woke with a draining ache behind his eyes. A worse one in his chest.

The surprise had gone out of this nights ago. Anger rushed over the sensation like a balm. More, he rushed toward anger. Spurred it, stretched it, wrapped it around himself like a gossamer membrane. It would thicken as the night wore on and his mind roamed its new gamut of bile and rage, snapping at itself until the sky overhead should have roiled in time with his internal tempest. But no. Only favorable winds here. Not that such winds were wholly necessary now. He and his grave earth rode a ship without sails. How fast the mortal mites and their innovations worked in this age.

Jonathan had spoken of traveling by one. An idle comment in their talks of England. One of many. The travel, the choice of estate, the precautions needed to counter the possibility of a second attempt to thwart the setting down of roots. Always in that measured way. Always with the mien of one laying out itinerary rather than laying the foundations of an invasion. Always looking his Master in the eye. Always with that sad grey shade in his pallor, the face of a man who hates his work and knows the alternative is worse.

Poor villain against his will. Poor martyr. Poor Jonathan.

Thunder grumbled high overhead. He heard voices through his box, warm bodies exclaiming and jumping. One of them was close. There was a spiced whiff of cigar smoke. A cheap odor.

Not like the ones you gave him. He dropped so many vices after the boy was born. Smoke and drink vanished from his lips overnight. Just in case they might have tainted him somehow. Spoiled the blood. You told him it was nonsense. Even she did. But he would not have it. Not until this year. He used his allowance for one single box of cigars; cheap, like the ones he’d had back in his shriveled nothing-life in Exeter. You caught him at it in January. Within the month he found the little box gone, replaced by a pack of Romeo y Julietas. One, maybe two a month since then. And what did he say when you asked him why? Why return to the habit now?

“Almost time,” he’d said. That’s all. “Almost time.”

He had pressed Jonathan on it. Oh, gently, gently. Barely a nudge of the mesmer; because he’d thought he already knew.

Jonathan had looked at him through the coiling smoke with those dead starlit eyes. The same glowing shade of the ghost-light on St. George’s Eve. And he had simply raised his hand to his chest, rubbing the place over his heart as if there were still a crucifix to wear there. Worry and sorrow had rolled off him like cologne.

“I may as well, Sir. I think I am saying good-bye to it this year. In whatever way.”

And oh! Oh, what an idiot child he had been in that instant! Later that night he had laughed aloud at himself. He had actually felt a pang of fear. Had even strained his ears to be sure of his friend’s heartbeat. It had drummed steadily enough, he thought. Mostly. Steady, but thin. Always thin, for the tide of his blood was necessarily fickle by his exsanguinations, but…

But you did not know for certain if there was some threshold near to being crossed. You’d never had a case like Jonathan Harker before you. Not even to experiment with. Why bother? You never thought in terms of keeping a single body as your reservoir when you were content to either starve or glut yourself at random. No one like Jonathan existed to you until he offered himself up as the living meal to you and two other hungry mouths for twenty years. And, childish thought, you’d wondered if he could do thirty. Longer. However long the charade could last before the inevitable came and you bled yourself back into him, feeding him from your heart’s blood to end the game of humanity and lock him in your thrall. And then, finally, you would get to see him drink. Master’s orders, my friend. Gorge yourself.

But that presupposed there would be no issue come the time of turning.

That this state, the ghoulish and gauntly haunting form that existed on the line between life and death, was not itself a spoiling factor in the process. Would the rules change if he died as this creature? Would he rise at all? If he did, would he be a Vampire or something else? Something still beholden to his Master only because he was chained by love and not the unshakable tether of being sired into undeath?

He did not know.

Having acknowledged that he did not know, he had almost ripped the cigar from his friend’s mouth so that he might force the man to drink from his veins that second.

Jonathan had seemed to read this in him. He tapped his ash into the tray with something very nearly like a smile.

“No, Sir. Not now. There is every chance I could be wrong. Perhaps it’s age alone whispering to me. Many men start to dwell on these things once they reach the 40-year mark. So I was always led to assume. For myself, I remain shocked that I have lived this long in the first place. I only feel as if there is now a clock ticking somewhere in all this. That it will end before the year is out because…”

He had paused to puff and shrug.

“…because it must end. Either because this state is finally preparing to collapse or because, with three adults to feed, I have begun to deplete too much to sustain the meals and myself.”

It was true. The boy was now a boy only in feeling. Somehow the calendars had piled up and the child was now a young man. Careful with his Papa—and no, even now he did not envy the boy learning his Lesson from his mother the night his adolescent hunger had slipped too far and left the man as pallid as his hair—but still taking more than he ever had in his boyhood. He and his mother had agreed in silence to feed a little less, alternating on their meals each feeding. Even he had stopped short of a full draught more than once. And it was not enough.

Still, Jonathan had been unperturbed. His Master had thought little of that calm. Time had not broken so much as smoothed him. An unfinished stone sanded and shined by a waterfall’s endless pressure until what had been his nightmare was reduced to mundanity. Ah, he woke to the New Year feeling that death was imminent? Hmm. A shame. May as well enjoy a smoke first.

Months passed since that scene. Though his blood did not change, his mien did. Each turn of the calendar’s pages brought some unknown weight down heavier and heavier on him. Distraction drew his attention away, his ghost-light eyes blazed like warning flares in the dark sockets, he lost himself for minutes or hours at a time at the desk, and once, in the far end of March, his Master had caught him weeping silently while eating. A tear would roll every few bites. Savoring and saying farewell at once.

Whether this unknown mortal clock really was ticking or not, his friend believed in it. Felt it was real enough to say his good-byes to human sensation. Such a fuss, his Master had thought. Tried to think.

You did try. Truly, painfully, you tried to make yourself laugh. Jeer. Hold to certainty and joy at the approaching finality. Humanity shed to give your friend his stalled eternity. Still, you caught yourself worrying. Wondering. What if something went wrong? What if something was wrong already? What if, ha, he was making plans to short you at the last? What if he had made plans with some conspirator in the towns to pierce his heart and take his head? What if the turning somehow did not take at all? What if, what if, what if?

What if indeed. You fretted so much over those months, old devil. You worried about every little thing that might go wrong before you made your move. Before you ended the game and took your prize and burned the nuisance of mortality on the pyre it deserved two decades ago.

The prize you never thought was waiting at the end of someone else’s long game.

He made a noise into the soil. A coughing bark of a laugh. Out in the cargo hold, the smoker stirred.

“Hello? You down here, Mikhail?” He leaked himself out of the box. Fog to flesh. The smoker squinted in the half-gloom, coming closer. “Hello?”

“Hello,” he echoed. The smoker swung around to face him. There was not much to face, as he stood still in shadow. He watched the man’s brow furrow. Trying to squint his way toward recognition.

“Who are you? One of Arnold’s new boys?”

“No,” he answered, stepping into the glow of the man’s lighter. The squint turned to a gawking mask of horror bordering on disgust.

“Jesus,” came out in a gasp that reeked of cheap smoke. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Trouble at home,” he admitted with a flash of teeth. Within a blink, he was tearing into the man’s throat. He inhaled blood and cigar fumes until he was iron-grey, until he was at his prime, until he was a youth. Hating the taste with every gulp. Unable to glut himself further, he sighed and twisted the man’s head off. The heart he tore out with more relish than he preferred to admit. He crushed all three pieces of the body as if crumpling paper and did not rise to the deck until he sensed it was unoccupied. Up he went, tossing the balled up remains into the waves. “My thanks,” he whispered after it.

The corpse had provided him with something like a lackluster disguise. A jacket to match the rest of the seafarers.’ He hoped the sight of it might let him go unbothered on deck. Though it was an easier thing to simply slip back down to the cargo’s shade, he wanted the openness of the night and the sympathetic frown of the moon peeking through the clearing clouds. He looked up to it now the way a drunken man sulked up to his barman. A barman who had waned a few phases since he was last seen.

The moon had been so full the last time he saw Jonathan. Rather, times.

Once while alive. The other…

“Which one are you, then?” Swallowing a curse, he slid his gaze to his right. A man with a flask stood there, pausing mid-sip to scrutinize him. His lip curled as he gestured with the liquor. “Who said you could have hair like that and work a vessel, eh?” He did not pause for an answer before shaking his head and taking a full drink. “Arnold’s getting sloppy if he’s hiring from…from…” A cloud of hazy concentration came and went on the ruddy face. “What? The Nordics? The Slavs? One of those lots with hair to their knees.”

He did not answer. Only looked again to the moon. He imagined the wedge of it gazed back at him with apology. The man blundered forward a step, reaching to take him by the shoulder.

“I’m talking to you, boy—,” A callused hand passed through his shoulder like mist. For it was. The flask made a tinny sloshing sound as it struck the deck. “Oh.” It was a small sound. The frightened moan of a child in a rancid dream. Feeling the moment warranted it, he turned his young man’s head to fully face the man. Letting him see the maimed display of the left eye. The dried maroon crust that streaked his cheeks. The man made another noise, even reedier. “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Arnold never said anyone died on this one. It’s too new, he said.” His throat worked like a thin tangle of pulleys. Bloodshot eyes bulged. “The Persephone’s only been on the water three years and no one’s ever…”

“Newness is no guarantee against death any more than age is a guarantee against foolishness,” he grated out.

“Right. Right, of course, apologies. I’ll just—I’ll just—,” the man didn’t seem to know what he’d ‘just’ for several tediously agonized seconds. But, between the drink and the rarity of the moment—How often did one cross paths with a spirit, after all?—his feet remained anchored. Then, “…How did you die?”

Of idiocy. Here and now. Requiescat in pace.

“I was betrayed. Over a woman.” Sour needles pricked along his throat. “Over a child. The years made me blind. Soft. Comfortable. So certain that all was in order, that I held everything in my hands. But I lived among thieves without knowing it. I woke one night to find all that was mine was gone, stolen, and the one I had handed my heart threw it away as though it were the sole piece of filth that could not be bothered with. And then…” He gestured to the mark upon his face. His eye now a ball of blazing arterial red set in a spray of wild scarring from the lightning bolt. Even after a deep meal, he felt that the damage had scarcely receded. Had he not twisted in time, the blast would have struck him square through his skull.

The wretched woman had fine aim.

And that’s not all she has, is it?

“Sorry to hear it, son,” came from his right. The man had retrieved his flask again. It winked like tarnished silver in the moonlight. Though his face showed a bleary bafflement as to what exactly the manner of death could have been, he went on, “And here I figured the worst that could happen to a man at sea was drowning.”

“Terrible ends can happen anywhere. But if it saves you worry, I will not remain on this ship forever. I will disappear once it docks in England.”

“Reckon you’re off to haunt the bastard who did this to you?”

“Not yet. First I must go to my son, who they sent away all oblivious to their work. Then,” his hand drifted of its own accord to his chest, dipping under the hanging coat to feel at the lump in a high pocket. It sat cold and out of place there, like an elaborate little tumor. Touching it brought back the pain to his chest and eyes. “Then I shall see to the traitors.”

“Cannot say I envy them.” Another sip, nearing the bottom.

“Few would. They thought me a monster to slay together. But they have yet to meet the worst of me. For they grew comfortable too, seeing me docile, hospitable, giving them my home and my love and a thousand allowances that no other in my life has ever wrung from me. Yes, I will haunt them. I will hunt them. And I will deliver to them a recompense so much worse than death.” The man was trying again to drink from his flask and finding himself thwarted. “Empty?”

“Afraid so. Do you ever miss that, being dead? Getting to drink?”

“No. I still drink. But I am full for the evening.” He bared his teeth in a gleaming crescent. Some of the man’s crewmate still stained his fangs. He watched the man’s face abruptly lose all its tint. “I am glad you got to enjoy your own. It is a rarity not to face this part sober.”

So saying, he plunged his hand into the man’s chest. He twisted out the heart with the ease of one plucking a ripe apple from its bough. The man croaked out only a small noise at this. Nothing more than a damp little bleat, smothered by the steady roll of the waves. He was still gawking at his heart in one clawed hand while the other snared him and hurled him overboard. The sound of the splash was nothing. Sighing, he shrugged off the apparently useless jacket and cradled the heart in it to prevent a drip. Back to the cargo hold it was. Down to the dark and the dirt and—

He left it waiting for you. Even in the midst of all the confusion, the haste needed to get out, to be gone, he made sure to leave it right there in the sow’s coffin.

The cold lump shifted in its pocket.

He bit down a curse as his eyes stung, burned, boiled.

A roost was made in the furthest corner of the hold. The heart sat in his hands. Huge and dense with old smoke and liquor and fatty seaside meals. He’d lied to Jonathan before, about how certain consumed vices changed the blood’s quality. There was no alteration in what it fed, but the taste shifted. Between the crewmate he’d siphoned and the swollen muscle in his fingers, he realized he was indulging in the nearest thing he had to slovenly eating after a hard day. He took an experimental taste of a ventricle.

Immediately acrid. A rich and awful tang that ran to the back of his throat.

Nothing like the spigot that had flowed for him like careful clockwork for two decades. So meticulously tended by diet, by caution, by the vessel it sprang from. Twenty years of ambrosia meted out in scheduled mouthfuls and the occasional drop snuck between meals, as was his right.

“No, my friend, not the wrist. The boy would know someone was taking extra. And from his own plate! So to speak. Undo your collar, you know she will not complain…”

And Jonathan had. The brilliant eyes sliding away from his Master as he stole one, two, three, four or more little tastes from neck and shoulder, collarbone and breast. A single sip from each bite. He had not even winced. Not until Jonathan’s Master brought his mouth up to his face. Printing the blood there like a girl with her kiss’ lacquer. It had taken his Master’s hand around his jaw to make Jonathan turn and face the second one, pressed into his own lips. Eyes shut against the threat of a trance, mind fluttering frantically out and away.

He had let him then, back in those early nights. Always so shy, his Jonathan. Even after the whirlwind of that long-ago summer, the thresholds crossed and barriers erased for the sake of playing his Scheherazade, still he quailed from the gentler edges of his better. Hiding up in his head or in his Master’s teeth or under the flimsy shelter of his duties whether they were self-assigned or not. Anything to not accept what lurked and grew under the veneer of mere surrender to an enemy.

Had that too been a trick? Laying bait the way his Master had once drawn the hunting dogs back to his genius loci with the woman already tainted?

A Wolf did not chase if the prey did not run. And he did love to chase. To play. Up to a point. He had tried more than once to smother the overgrowing feeling in him as the years marched and his friend continued to drop his eyes and tense away from tenderness. When that failed, he told himself it did not matter. He owned his friend through the woman and their son, and whatever performance he sought—the rent owed to many a charitable landlord, really—could be ordered from him.

And he had ordered it.

In specific, he had, on a particularly maudlin night, ordered his friend to kiss him as he would her. He would know the difference. He’d leeched through her senses on occasion when they were, quote, ‘alone’ together. Sometimes he thought Jonathan even saw him staring out of her eyes. Or else the woman simply gave him away by some private sign or other. Whatever the case, Jonathan had never once withheld his love with her.

So, the order. Out of curiosity. Out of boredom. An order given without even a trance to smooth the act, just to see how he would muscle past the walls of indignity and a lover’s loyalty as he had back when he thought he had been charming for his life in their supple sabbatical once upon a time.

Instead, a magic trick.

Between one blink and the next, Jonathan had been the self he reserved for the woman. Even the smile kept for her had been there. A necessary prelude to the hands that bookended his Master’s face and pulled him level. Just like that, there were their mouths together. Not the press of a patient doll’s lips as its owner mashed themselves there in pantomime of intimacy. If he had not known better—

But Jonathan made sure he did. As soon as the kiss elapsed, he’d receded into himself. Less a tortoise into his shell than a closing fist praying not to be pried open lest the treasure in it be snatched away again.

“Was there anything else, Sir?” asked in the rug’s direction. Shame and a miserable whiff of apology yet-to-be had stamped him. He would throw himself into making amends to the woman, of course. Whether or not he wounded her with tattling on this little service, he would meet her with whatever kindnesses he could muster that were not already given. It was one of many moments in which he was convinced that his friend would give of himself until he was down to bones and then try with his last breath to gift someone his ribs. “Sir? Am I dismissed?”

He was not. All at once, his Master had a list of tasks for him to perform over the course of days. Weeks. Months. A year and more. And was that not where the mistake of it all had begun? The willing leap at addiction? Commanding his friend, his immaculate actor, his Scheherazade, into a hundred little indulgences. And not just in matters of sampling each other. Sometimes he would wring whole nights out of the man, without even the boy to perform for, trapping him by the fire or in a moonlit room or down in that half-secret glade by the stream where they played hunter and hunted and hid together from the walls of domesticity, spurring his friend into the easy and smiling talk of companions, of intimates, of…

Go on, old devil. You can admit it. Why not? What point is there in pretending he did not perform so well as to leave you reduced to this?

Fine.

Talk of those in love.

Yes, he had used the exact word. More than once.

Do this, do that, do any and all these things as if you loved me. Just as you do her.

And Jonathan had. Always with the bracing misery before and the shuddering withdrawal after. But he served his Master’s wants. He did so with such an ease that his Master had invented half the trap himself; he had convinced himself somewhere that he was giving his friend permission to do what he truly wished to do, freed from the yoke of duty and fealty to the woman, to his morals, to his sanity. Yes, that was it. He was giving his friend release. Lifting away the leaden weight of his beloved martyrdom and letting him know, yes, it was alright, he could want something other than what was ‘right’ or ‘good.’ What had such scruples brought him besides pain? God and humanity no longer had a place for him or his family or his love; that bottomless fount that had more to give than his veins ever would.

Here, my friend, I will take it. I will catch it all as it spills. Love me. Love and be happy. It’s alright.

The cold lump in his pocket felt heavy and frigid as a glacier on his chest. Scrubbing his hand clean on the jacket, he fished the hateful treasure out of its home and glared at it in his fingers.

A brooch the size of a dove’s egg. Antique gold ringing a garnet of such brilliance it might have been frozen claret. Splitting it was an ornate dragon, rampant, seeming to cling to the stone like the mythic hoards of legend. One of few mementos kept in his bedchamber from mortal days and nascent immortal nights that had gone sour in recalling their joy. He had taken it from its hiding place of velvet, shined it until it glowed, and, at the end of another race through their wilds, another capture, another victory drunk from the won throat…

“You have been here five years. Yet still I get word that you are not always recognized as being in my service.” This was fractionally true. At least in the sense that he knew there was a certain level of laxness that existed between Jonathan and a handful of those he did business with in the towns. Little mistakes or a dragging of feet on assorted exchanges and services that his friend would try to paper over with excuses on their behalf.

Once, only once, he had even tried to get away with hiding a newcomer’s attempt to swindle him outright. He had only seen a tourist of means with an Englishman’s lilt and tried to rob him over a new toy for the child and a novel for the woman. Jonathan had not pushed back, only gutted his allowance while the seller’s neighbors threw their shocked and silent looks. Perhaps that would have been the end of it but for Jonathan idly mentioning the encounter to the woman as they shared his bed post-feeding, thinking little of it. His Master, listening through her, had thought otherwise. Enough to find and inform the seller of his misstep personally. The next time Jonathan went to town he came back somewhat shamefaced with a burden of extra wares given ‘as a courtesy.’ The peasants were careful to point him out to new citizens ever-after.

All this in mind, Jonathan had looked at him oddly over the excuse.

“If that is the case, it has not hindered me in any way. The people have been nothing but gracious when I come through.” Gracious and afraid, he knew not to say. His Master had shooed the words away like flies.

“You remain ever lenient, my friend. You would apologize to the wheels of a carriage as they ran you over. It is for your own good that you must wear this, lest you and your goodwill are trampled by the opportunists among the chattel.” Out had come the brooch. “You will have this visible at all times. Be it to clasp on your coat or wear at your throat. Do you understand?”

“Yes, S—,” A look was caught. No, no. He knew the rule out here. Away from mother and child. “Yes, balaurul meu, I understand.”

Not well enough, of course. Not even when he was made to sit still, his chin up so that his Master could pin the thing in place. No, he had not understood then. Not until the next night when he took his place in bed for the family meal. There he had sat, undoing his shirt collar—with the brooch nowhere in sight. Not before the feeding. Not after he buttoned himself up with strengthless fingers. Not even on his nightstand.

The boy and the woman had looked up with curiosity and ire respectively when Father hadn’t taken his usual leave for the saccharine post-bleeding period with Papa. Papa himself had looked concerned and lost. No one had made a mistake, had they?

“Father? Did you want to stay too?” from the boy. A thread of worry in his voice, as was natural whenever Father deviated from his routine, but far more of eagerness. Father so rarely lingered overlong with the entire family in the room. And, he would admit it, it stung to deflate the child’s hope.

“I am staying,” he’d said, “But you and your mother must go for a time. There is something important I must speak with Papa about.” There had been some bristling at that. But he had yanked the woman’s leash and the woman had taken the boy away by the hand, thinking soft assurances and lies at him until they were out of the tower. Jonathan, dear oblivious Jonathan, had peered at him with genuine confusion.

“What is it? Has something happen—,”

His Master had flung the full weight of the trance into him like a boulder. A boulder that became a crushing fist around the flailing mote that was Jonathan’s ostensibly free will. Having hold of it, he wrenched his friend up to his feet and prodded sharply at his mind until he turned to where he’d stored the brooch. There, the wardrobe. Go. Fetch.

Jonathan had managed two steps before the weakness of his emptied veins dropped him to hands and knees. He crawled the rest of the way. Staggered back upright. Worked the doors open and shuffled with trembling hands through the hanging clothes. Here was the coat. There, fastened at the chest, was the brooch. He fumbled at it with twice the difficulty of fastening his shirt. So much so that it pricked his thumb bloody and slipped through his fingers. He made a small despairing sound before falling back down on his knees, searching in the shadows and shoes for it. When his hand finally closed on it, his Master tugged again at his mind, ordering him back the way he’d come. Across the floor, up into the bed. Holding the brooch.

His Master tugged again. Jonathan held the brooch out on his palm. The one now striped and smeared from the bleeding thumb.

“What did I tell you to do with that, Jonathan Harker?”

“To—to wear it in town—,”

“No.” He’d paused to watch Jonathan’s face. The shift of expression that sketched such a perfect epitome of dread, especially in a bloodless face. “I said, You will have this visible at all times. And where was it instead? Thrown away, out of sight, out of mind. Is it not so?”

“N-No. No, I did not mean to—,”

“Must I make it simpler for you? The boy still has the collar he never bequeathed to the trapped wolf. I am certain it would fit you. The emblem would never be misplaced again.”

“Sir—,”

“Do you think I gave it to you as a whim? Another token to cast aside, to ignore like all the rest you are showered with all unconscious to, stewing in your precious stringency, self-deprived as a monk?”

“Please, I swear, I only thought—,”

“What? What did you think? Do tell.”

“I thought,” his voice caught and rasped, trying not to be a cough. “I thought it was meant for strangers. As something official, part of a uniform. I’m sorry, Sir, I didn’t know it was…” But here the words dried and his face showed again that crumpled confusion. The pain of a kicked dog unsure of what mistake he’d made, only knowing he had erred. Jonathan’s eyes had found his Master’s, as much plea as fear.

What? the look begged. What is this? What did I do wrong? I cannot act without my lines.

There was no questioning of his Master’s anger. Such storms were known to pass and one could only brace and weather them. This was all he knew.

But you knew better, didn’t you, old devil? It took you a moment to catch up to yourself. To truly admit it to your own mind, even knowing from what happy old era’s dust you fetched the thing from. You made no ceremony of it. You buried the giving of it in a disguise. But the meaning was there even as you fastened it to him without fanfare, without warning. All you did was stitch an importance to the ornament that was invisible to him. And look where it led.

Jonathan hadn’t blood enough in him to hold rigid as he usually did before his Master’s moods. He shuddered even as he fought to be still. Afraid. Cold. Eyes of pale blue glass pinned to his Master, searching desperately for a reason to it all, for the thing he must make amends for.

Still with his hand outstretched. The brooch in a bloodied palm.

Just as it is now. Here in the brine-scented shadows. It looked more precious in his.

It had.

Jonathan had kept the hand out even as his Master joined him on the bed. As his Master plucked the brooch up, tasting it clean of the red stain, then kissing away the same from the bleeding thumb. As his Master gently tilted the quivering chin up and fastened the emblem in its proper place. As his Master did not move except to close the last of the gap between them, stroking the white curtain of hair from his brow.

“I am sorry, draga mea. You did not know because I did not explain. It is too easy to forget you are the only one here who does not go walking into others’ minds. So often you fool us all into believing otherwise.” The stroking hand traveled down to trace Jonathan’s jaw. No longer shaking. Not as badly, anyway. “You did not recognize that it had a mate, did you?” Jonathan turned his head an inch, frowning. His Master tilted up his own chin. For a moment, more confusion. Then realization.

The stone worn at his Master’s throat had no beast stretched across the stone. His was a coil that encircled it entirely, an ouroboros of a dragon.

“I know that rings are the tradition. But you are a creature of loyalty and I did not wish to test my Harkers’ ire in demanding you remove the gold band for something of mine, be it a signet or a stone. This is as close as we can come the way we are. At least until the night of consummation. Baptism. Whatever you prefer.” He trapped Jonathan’s eyes with his. “When that time comes, we can talk of more classic rites, insofar as our arrangement allows for such things.”

Jonathan had nodded at this. Perhaps tried to speak. A ‘yes, Sir’ seemed to snag on his tongue. The shock was too much to work around on his own, so his Master hoisted him over it with a final hook of the mesmer and gave him words to say:

“Of course, balaurul meu. I look forward to it.” His mouth had snapped shut around the last word, pallid eyes huge and almost teetering in their sockets. He was shaking again. Ah, it was too much as he was, poor thing. His Master had left him swaddled in another blanket, asking if he was prepared to see mother and child now. Jonathan could only nod, his hand rising and falling away from the space before the brooch. As though he feared the thing would bite him.

Good.

Good enough, you reasoned. He would grow into it. He would accept it. He had accepted it already. Enough that you had to deal with a particularly entertaining round of aftermath from the woman’s mind. For all her collaring of herself when she had to grovel for something—and was her own peasant’s past not fine training there?—the Vampire of her could not be smothered when it came to theft. Not even sharing! This, when you could have ordered the ring off him. Could have had him write up divorce papers for the dead, if only as a prop to hang in the office. But then the boy would have questions. Perhaps even tears. Was Papa not allowed to love more than one parent? It would not do. To think you offered to let her be Maid of Honor.

Amusing fireworks had ensued.

They had cooled, he thought, as the years continued to stack. On and on until the end of their second decade made its way to them. Jonathan never misplaced the brooch again. The woman appeared resigned to joint custody of both her Loves in her sullen way. And the boy, his little diavol, barred from full knowledge and unhappiness, had grown to manhood under their care.

A fine excuse the latter had made.

He thought back to it now. That last scene with the grey and ghastly shape of his friend in his surreal mortality. Another cigar lit, the smoke curling out the library’s window. What a strange image he’d made. He had looked like…

A month or so ago he had found his friend thumbing through an American magazine of all things. Some publication or other that had made its way across the Atlantic and the Channel to join its English siblings. It had been one of his few vices over those latter years, catching up on the newsworthy pulses that beat outside their mountains. The American one had shown an advertisement at the back. A rather charming illustration of a man in what had to be a modern eveningwear suit. Arrow Collar and Shirts for Every Occasion the image declared.

Jonathan had seemed to be a macabre translation of the man posed in the picture.

Seeing this, an abrupt needle of mourning had pierced his heart. Twenty years of feeding had made his friend into this wasting enigma. Twenty years of allowing the arrangement to unspool on and on without end, simply for the fact of Jonathan continuing to breathe and bleed unimpeded, as if his will alone were enough to hold his half-life existence together. Twenty years of letting his friend’s incessant need to give of himself down to the marrow get in the way of sense. Of what was right. Of what was long past due.

How did you allow this? How did you agree to let this carry on so long? Look at him, look at the calendar. So many years lost in which he could have already been what he was meant to be. Why? For your agreement? For the charade of the bitter conqueror taking his consolation trophy? It made sense at the start, perhaps. Those early years of gloating. It was your due. But once the sting was gone, once it became clear what he was to you under the vitriol of old, what excuse was there to drag this on, to make a living ghost of him? What excuse is there now? Look at him, old devil. Look at him and think of what he could have been, should have been, for the last quarter of a century.

And he had. He’d stood in the doorway, staring, overlaying the haggard reality with what should have been. Here was Jonathan Harker, forever young, the flesh back on his bones, his eyes free of shadows and crimson as an opened throat. Jonathan Harker, still and strong, a beautiful killing thing like a spider waiting in its silk.

Instead, he was this. A ghoul waiting to find out the when and how of his death before the year concluded, seeming far deader than the thirsty revenants he called his family. The unfairness of it wrenched in his Master’s chest. Worse still was the hindsight of its pointlessness. As if this arrangement of the household had done anything but ruin his friend and cripple their son against the reality of the wider world waiting for them. He had even felt a twitch of pity for the woman, if briefly. She had lost her Love to the needs of their hunger and their Master’s whim, watching every year as that Love was shriveled and shifted into a wretched grotesquerie of what he ought to be. Her prized possession spoiled by mishandling and a refusal to simply tear their Jonathan free of his scruples and do what needed doing.

“Was there something you needed, Sir?�� Jonathan had asked without turning. His eyes were on the moon. Full as a pearl.

“There was. Is.” His friend did not jump upon seeing him abruptly at his side. Nor did he turn his head. “You are almost replenished.” It wasn’t a question.

“I am.” A tap of ash. Still not taking his attention from the sky. “Did you wish to steal a drink ahead?”

“It is not stealing. Only taking what’s owed.” There was a soft sound of fabric pulling away. Jonathan had turned and froze. His Master had removed his own clasp and the cravat under it. Vest and shirt hung open. The skin above his heart was already cut open. “And giving what is long overdue.”

“Sir, that’s not necessary. Not already.”

“When, then? How much longer will you reduce yourself like this? They are beginning to go hungry even with your sacrifice, my friend. Mother and child both. But he is not a child anymore, is he? He is grown. He must feed as such. Yet he tries to feed only as a boy, just as his mother feeds in her little halved tastings. Even I have taken less than my share. All to bow to your craving for self-destruction. No more of it.”

“This seems somewhat—,” Jonathan first tried to sidle away from the sill, only to have himself caged back against the stonework by his Master’s arms, “—abrupt.”

“You have until you finish the cigar.”

“Case in point.” Another drag was taken, neither rushed nor prolonged. Jonathan blew his stream of smoke out into the breeze. Then, “Was that why you had so many of these on hand before? The food and drink and assorted sensory comforts?”

“Before?” Jonathan looked at him. Waiting for him to—, “Ah. Then. No, not precisely. There was an act to perform. Had it been Peter Hawkins there in your place, he would have had the same to consume before his…dismissal.”

“That’s what I mean. You were always planning to either ‘dismiss’ or ‘retain’ your solicitor of choice. You went out of your way to provide the equivalent cuisine and indulgences of a noble’s home, even when the reality of things had set in. I might have had, say, a week’s worth of fine dining and then bread and water from then on. But you kept at the kitchen regardless. Why was that?”

“To drop the quality would be to ruin the masquerade,” his Master said, wondering at the turned subject. Knowing not to be swayed. “Had you proven to be a lowly churl not worth my time beyond the completing of paperwork, you would not have eaten at all. The wolves would have had your bones for toys in the same week.”

“Mm,” another puff. Jonathan was halfway through. “My mistake, then. I had assumed you were interested in giving your pawn a long last meal before his life ended, permanently or otherwise. That or fattening the metaphorical calf. It was hard to imagine you enjoyed playing the role of host and staff without it being part of some standard habit.”

“So it might have been when you returned home.” Oh, only twenty short and endless years ago. Still with their enemies’ blood under his nails. Begging sanctuary for his Loves, bartering his own throat. Memories, memories. “For some reason, you seemed hesitant to trust my culinary skill a second time.”

“Yes, well. Blame that on a joke too many made about the wine and red meat on the menu. I’d not expected you to throw aside pretense to the point of…” Jonathan nodded at his Master’s bleeding chest. “…this.” More ash tapped over the stone sill. A third of the cigar was left. Jonathan’s eyes floated from the oozing cut to the moon. The effect erased all but the furthest edges of blue from his irises and made them into coins of silver. His brooch glowed like fire. “Do you know what I ate on my wedding night?”

Stop. Plug your ears. A trick. A trap. Laying bait again, old devil, do not listen, do not let him talk, do not hesitate, this is how he works, how he has always worked, how he has been the only one in all the infinite hell of your unlife able to steer the storm of you. In pain, in suffering, in servility or supplication, the silver of his tongue did more to tame you than any holy relic, and you knew it and you did not care, did not think to care, because he made himself satisfied with crumbs, with vapor, even when you tried to force bounty into his hands and down his throat, do not listen, do not wait, take him, own him, seize his mind and soul and senses now now now before it is too late—

But this was the bellowing of the present into the past.

All he could do in the ship’s dark was muffle his curses by biting into the bloated heart as the memory unfolded in all its hopeless reality.

“No,” he’d half-whispered to his friend. “You never said.”

“I had what I’d been having since I was taken in by the nuns. Broth and bread. Small simple soft things. I was half-dead then too, albeit in a different direction. Mina and I married and made love on my sickbed, in a rush of joy and tears and illness. I left our wedding venue with one hand in hers and another on a cane. Now I am here, twenty years on, with another marriage to begin in haste. The marriage that will also be my death knell. Lenore again, but without any hope of resting in peace.”

Jonathan watched his Master through his lashes.

“When I am drunk from a last time and I drink in turn, it will be the moment I say farewell to what is left of the good man who existed before I turned the kukri on those I trusted with my life and who I would have died to shield, had it not been for God putting my Loves on the same altar He set before Abraham. The last of that good man will die to the blood baptism, to an unbreakable chain of connection with what is reviled by the divine. Fickle thing that it is. But before I was a Christian, before I was taught the lie that God is absolute love, I already held Love as holy. I held kindness unto others as a mission. It hurt me then as it hurts me now to envision pain wrought on another without cause but profit or cruelty.

“But that feeling will be sunk into a spiritual chasm once I turn. Already I dropped a piece of it into the dark when I bloodied my hands. The rest will follow and I shall become a Judas not only to a select few, but to the whole of humanity. While I can see the logic in throwing myself into consummation for fear of turning back at the last second, I do not think I can stomach yet another threshold where I do not get to walk, but must hurl my way across. Another sprint, another crash into one world out of the last. I would ask—,” his throat had caught, eyes gleaming, “—I would like to have the day.” He cracked a sad smile. “St. George’s Day. A fitting hour to say good-bye to the good of me. And for our son’s birthnight, we shall have our last family meal. No meager shares. No restraint. I shall be too weak by then to hold off. And it will not be done behind closed doors. Behind my Loves’ backs, like another secret. Please.”

The eyes, the eyes, no power in them but what his Master put there, but they held and they drowned and pleaded for this, this last meal, this final allowance, and—

And you swallowed it. Inhaled it. Drank it from him like he’d slit himself open over your mouth. You did, old devil.

He had.

He’d looked his friend in the eye—eyes still vulnerable, still susceptible, still able to be hooked and pinned like the rest of him, ready to be stolen away into his thrall without another puff of the cigar left between them—and said, “Very well. But know that I will accept no hesitation tomorrow. No rescinding, no stalling, no last-minute dawdling. You make your good-byes to yourself tomorrow. Make your peace and apologies to the world if you must. But then I will eat the martyr out of your blood and fill the space with something better. Understood?”

“Yes, Sir.” This he said before taking his handkerchief from its pocket and wiping the dark smear from his Master’s heart. For almost a minute said Master held still enough to pass for a waxwork as Jonathan righted the shirt, the vest, the cravat. He took his Master’s brooch from a clawed hand that had turned suddenly feeble before pinning it to the silk. It wasn’t until Jonathan tried to pull his hands away that they were caught. “Was there something else?”

“Yes. You finished,” he’d nodded to the smoldering nub of the Romeo y Julieta, “and I will not go without something for my patience.”

“I need my hands if I’m to open my collar.”

“Everything I want is above the neck.”

“As myself? Or is this a commission, balaurul meu?”

“Surprise me.”

“Only if you do not bite your tongue.”

He’d not understood. Not until his face was brought down and he had seen the flash of parting lips and teeth and then—

You should have bitten your tongue. Should have trapped his head in your hands as he played at catching yours, should have bitten and fed yourself into him while he was snared. If he would dare lie to your face your deserved to bleed yours into his. Bastard. Delilah.

He thought these and a thousand curses even as he warred with the recollection of that taste, that consumption in two directions. What he had thought was a mere prelude to all the ages yet to come for them. Never thinking for an instant that it was only the last helping of honeyed poison. Even the sheepish fraction of a laugh that had left his friend was another dose of venom to numb him with.

“Forgive me. I just now imagined how we must look. An old man preying on the youth.”

“Indeed. You are still all but a gamin, draga mea. In any case, this is hardly novel for us, is it? Merely a change of position. A slow dance.”

“We must all be cautious about said dancing in England, you know. The laws are still—,”

“I am aware. Just as I know what lawmaking parties are at the top of my list to be invited to dinner once we secure the new estates…”

And they had talked. And talked. On and on toward the sunrise. Jonathan had insisted on taking himself to sleep lest he spend his grand farewell to humanity passed out the whole day. Away, Master, away. Shoo.

Off he had gone. Dense and careless.

Did you smell coffee on the way down? Did you? If so, did you think it only imagination or just shrug it away? Your friend, ever disdainful of wasting an hour. Fine, fine, let him wring St. George’s out in his way. What did you care? Fool.

The boy had still been up with his books and, he saw, some his Papa’s magazines. Odd. No less odd than seeing him return to the coffin rather than exercise his ability to doze where he liked; his miracle of a child, born alive and undead at once, able to sleep without a grave earth as bedding. Odd, odd. But he had not cared, had he? What reason was there to care when he had tomorrow night already dangling before his eyes?

The woman was already in her coffin, either sleeping or feigning sleep. He had not bothered to check. Had not cared whether she knew of her husband activity or not. If she now mulled the vision of her Master tasting what was hers, his, theirs, making plans for the future while she gathered dust in the chapel. How pleased he’d been. How sure.

“Father? Are you alright?”

The boy, the child, the son. His son. A young man who’d looked now so agonizingly like his fathers it sent a shamefully fond dart through his chest. Bless the fluke of the woman’s own features, kin of his kin, blood of his blood, by design or accident. He had smiled. Not grinned, not leered, but smiled with an ease he had forgotten he was capable of for so long. The look had made the boy’s face go even slacker with wonder.

“Yes, I am. Why do you ask?”

“You look different.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. You look…I don’t know. Not younger, but,” the boy had fumbled for a word, “lighter, I guess. Did something happen?”

“No. But something will. Ah-ah, no prying,” when the boy perked up in his coffin, “Go back to your books. You will know more tomorrow.”

“Alright,” came the half-false sulk. “Good-day, Father.”

“Good-day, diavol.”

And he had gone to bed in his tomb fattened on bliss and craving more.

And then.

Bastard. Delilah. Thieving scheming viper of a traitor.

So much accomplished and destroyed within a day and night. Oh, his treacherous Harkers. Had they only been loyal, been wholly his in mind as much as will, he would have drowned them in praise and prizes for such work against a foe. The patience of it all. The skill. The performance. It surpassed the immaculate and made him ponder for one dumbstruck instant in the midst of his rage whether they had ever been human and not some stealthy pair of incubi come to prey on him.

Such a theory was only an excuse, he knew. It would not do to whittle down their ability to that of mere imps. No, they were but a man and a woman, however altered now, and they had proved themselves to be of such sterling cores of concentrated resolve that their Master had laid barely a scuff mark upon their joint machinations all these years. Their labors had born an unthinkable fruit; one it would have doubly shamed him to behold had he been victim to anyone less canny. But no, no. He had harbored his Harkers for a reason. They were uncommon creatures. Singular. Rare pets he’d thought he could tame. And given another century, perhaps he’d have managed it.

But like the fool who mistakes a tiger for a housecat, he had let his guard down too soon. Too quick. A mere two decades. And now his beasts had bitten and torn and robbed him.

His boy, his son, gone inside a day. Shipped away and on toward the teeming masses of England. This alone had been enough to spur him on. Or would have been.

If not for the impetus that the clever sow and her stolen Lessons from the Mountain had brought down on his head. He had fled before the next bolt could strike. Running, running. Just as he had been running since missing the boy’s departure, since realizing he was the only one left in the castle.

What had actually come first? His mind still spun when he tried to concentrate things into a clear order. The entirety of that period was still a swimming blur in the way the events of a nightmare will reach the waking mind as disjointed pieces.

He had awoken to the nettling pressure of the wild rose upon his coffin lid. The annoyance, the struggle, the hard toss and soul-deep agony that had come with booting the thing off. The blossom crushed. A resignation letter crumpled under the cracked ebony of the lid.

He had known his son was missing.

He had thrust his mind throughout the castle and known he was abandoned in full even before he tore away the lid of the woman’s box.

He had seen the glint of Jonathan’s brooch left on her pillow.

He remembered a vision. Sent from her. Brief. Teasing. Baiting.

Jonathan looking upon her with exhaustion and exultation, with relief, with want, with Love. Drinking from her like a man in the desert finding his oasis. Just the two of them in that boxed dark of her coffin. Mere hours before he found them gone. Eloped. So to speak.

She had left a message for him too, though it had come later. The one that came firing out of the roiling sky he’d thought was solely his. Once again the bait had been too much to ignore, even in his hunt.

It had been him.

How long had it been since he’d first tried to claw his way back into the woman’s mind, into her senses? He could not say. Only that he had been shocked to find himself barred except when the moon was high. She had been hardening herself up from within. There was more of a fortress around her will within two decades than his first trio of Loves had built up in centuries. She had been playing lame all this time. Preparing. Working in the shadows cast by her the distraction of her husband. Sharpening herself all along.

What irony, that they had left Jonathan’s old toy behind. The forgotten memento left in its hiding place in favor of being out and away before their Master fell upon them. Before he thought to whip them into the chase after their child. He’d had the kukri on his hip when he came upon the mist. A tell-tale wisp made visible only by the flash of lightning.

You recognized the essence in it. You knew it and you knew what it would lead to. And still, old devil. Still you threw yourself after him, maddened as a Wolf outran too long by his prey.

Only now it was not a Wolf and a hare, a Wolf and a hart. This was the bitch’s dog, her hunting hound, made to race and tear and follow commands—but not his. Not directly. No lashing of his will into Jonathan Harker’s mind would slow him. No order, no threat, no curse found traction upon the spectral rush of him. Cloud and man and spirit and beast flitting away, away, away, a parody of the hunts of old down their hill. It seemed his friend had been playing lame too.

He knew the speed of the Vampire, as was natural. Man or woman, fit or ill before their change, would have roughly the same gait.

But where he and the woman held that equal speed, Jonathan Harker was lightning on the ground. What had he truly been before he was turned? What blight or miracle had he kept hidden under a guise of constant frailness? He had not cared enough to mull it then. It was simply another frustration for the pile. Another nettle, another spur. The whole of it grated to the point of torture as, idle as a child at play, Jonathan had slowed long enough to throw a look back over his shoulder.

Grinning. Mocking. And there, at last, his own internal voice flying back into his ex-Master’s face:

Have you truly grown so slow, Count?

Through trees, over hills, onward, away, steering him off course, away from where the coast waited. The ships. The boy on the other side of the Channel.

Again, you did not care. Once in bliss, now in wrath. You went blindly after. Never learning your Lesson, old devil.

I see you wear my knife. Is it for my head? Or is it just to let you pretend something of me will still hold you against my will?

His own mind had leapt out after the fleeting shape, all champing teeth and thunder. Not in words. There was too much anger to fashion into coherence. Only the intent made its way out. Hate-fury-hate-fury-hunt-catch-punish—

Mine!

It had slipped from him. Flown. Bright and cutting and horribly naked in what was both a craving and a declaration. Had his eyes stung? It did not matter. The thought-snarl came again.

Mine mine mine mine mine mine you are Mine as the boy is Mine as the woman is Mine and you You YOU were Mine first by right by claim MINE and I will not be robbed by her by you thief traitor bastard Delilah—

Here came an echo from the deepness of the past, that cruel Lesson that Jonathan had once taught them all as his preying family warred over the greater claim to him, tugging at his mind like spoiled children over the same plaything, and Jonathan had thought those horrid sharp thoughts, the woman think-scream-ordering…

You can't, Darling, no, no, no, never. Don't you take yourself away, no one can steal my Jonathan, not even you.

But now here he was. Jonathan stealing himself out of reach. Just out of reach. His claws had scraped the back of his shirt, a lock of his hair. Close. So close.

Never yours, Jonathan had thought back. Never. You knew it then, you know it now. If you were ever so oblivious as to think otherwise, my Darling would have been slain the moment the Conqueror became the Coveter. When it stopped amusing you to see us huddled together and instead began to fester. Red eyes turning green. Because you knew. For all you made us do, all you ordered from me, it was only possible because I belonged to my Love. First, foremost, always. While you were only ever the thief stealing from her bed.

A thunderclap above. A pounce upon the quarry below. Just slow enough. Just as they made it to the clearing.

They had tumbled and Jonathan had thrashed until he was pinned in the grass. His grin had curdled then, deforming into an expression barely an inch removed from that of a bat’s grimace. He did not look at his captor, but bared his teeth in feral loathing at the hands locked around his wrists. There was a hiss as the grips tightened; enough to have broken bones had he been human. Jonathan’s face contorted into a horror of twitching muscle, his fangs crowding with the spires of sharp neighbors that jutted out and snapped so close they might have torn a swatch of flesh from his ex-Master’s face.

“Off me,” came a glottal excuse for a voice. The quintessence of revulsion.“Off me get off me off OFF—,”

“No,” he’d grated back, daring the nearness of the rabid jaws simply to press himself nearer. The closeness itself seemed to repel another bite as Jonathan twisted under him. “I am Master of your Mistress, thief. I am lord of your lady. If she is above the Son, I am above All, and the moment I loop my thrall through her blighted skull, I shall make a noose of the collar your soul donned for her and drag you screaming by it.”

Thunder had rolled again. Louder, louder, until it had irritated. He could not hear himself aloud and was barely better in his mind.

Why so coy now, draga mea? You have missed the wedding night and your funeral! Not to worry. I have what you left for me. It will stick so prettily in your throat.

The sky roared. And its Master, its Weathermaker for over four-hundred years, puzzled at that. He was not ordering the tempest to make such a din. Under him, another change. Jonathan was still. The monstrous face smoothed. Still unhappy, but abruptly devoid of any emotion greater than disdain. Perhaps with a hint of disbelief.

“Even now you insist upon the act. I had thought you would finally drop your mask entirely for the sake of rage, but no. Still you insist on pretense as though sincerity were as great an anathema to you as Him.” The grimace shifted briefly to an upturned rictus. In a lilting voice, brittle and musical as tinkling glass, “You yourself never loved. You never love! Ha. Twenty years of playacting fooled me no more than it did them after half a millennium.” Jonathan’s face hardened again, the grin turned to a razor. “I will never return to your stage again, Dracula. No more acts. No more charades. No more using me and the imitation of affection as another thing to steal from her. We are all but finished with you.” His fangs bared to the gums with a smile. “Now comes the denouement, balaurul meu.”

Then, fired into his head:

This is the last time you will touch me.

And like that, Jonathan Harker was gone. Dissolved and slithered away with such speed he might have been a puff of smoke blown away by the storm. The thunder boomed again. Not by his will.

There was a sound almost lost under the noise. An animal’s cry. A bird?

He looked up, feeling the skim of something familiar—

Her, her, the woman, thief, wretched bi—

—and had only a heartbeat in which to notice first the silhouette of a great owl outlined against the clouds, then the bolt of lightning racing down to find him.

He had dodged. Not quite fast enough.

Not before the pain landed and made its home from face to neck to arm to everywhere, everything, every possible niche of being that could feel agony. A blast that would have killed a mortal man. Had it taken both eyes, the second bolt may have landed too. But he was not blind and so outpaced that one. And the next. The woman was trying to track his motion once again, the old reverse turned on her Master, but he threw up the wall of fire between them and shot away toward the waiting coast. Running from his own sky. His own creatures.

Now here he sat in the present. In the gloom and the sea-salt air, crammed hastily away with a bed of thin earth in a stolen crate, hunting after his own son while his subjects herded and hounded him, dancing through the gaps they had found in his grip upon them. The old tricks of his perished Loves who had known that his hold was not as complete upon a mass as he would have wished. Animal minds were simple to coerce. The Vampire was its wants before all else and that very nature could war with a Master or Mistress if the focus was split enough.

And his focus was in splinters now.

You would have laughed to see another suffer it, wouldn’t you, old devil? You took all that was hers once upon a time. Now she takes away all that is yours. Even your storm. Even the shapes of the animals. And him, of course. But then, he gave himself away. Is it not so?

“Silence,” he hissed to the cold mound of the heart. The blood was already starting to congeal within it. “Silence, damn you.”

If you have resorted to talking to yourself, you may do well to keep a diary of your own. Record your last nights for posterity.

He sat up quick enough to crack his neck.

I do apologize for the interruption, Jonathan hummed on. I can only assume you are terribly preoccupied. Either trying to pry into her head or trying to keep her out of yours. Even now, I remain banished to the outskirts of the conversation.

He felt himself smile for the first time in too many nights.

Oh, dear. His poor unschooled friend, who had not had needs or means to build up the walls as his wife had. Well. Let this be a Lesson for him then.

His own mind sprang upon Jonathan’s like jaws snapping shut. He felt the younger psyche spasm and raise phantom hackles at the intrusion. Scrabbling with an unpracticed grip at the Presence that bulled its way in, clawing, breaking, crushing his way across the waters that he could not pass in flesh, and then they were—

How do you like flying now, my friend? Everything you hoped it would be?

In the theatre of the mindscape he was launching himself and his catch back across water and shore and hill and mountaintop, wind whistling around false bodies. He was the Bat, Jonathan pierced a dozen times in his teeth. They were—

This is enough for me.

In the snow, the sun frozen an inch from setting, dead men watching as Jonathan brought down the kukri. Head, heart, limbs, over and over, carving and splitting. There was no collapse into elemental dust here. Only the mincing of a carcass. Even here, even wearing the skin of the living man he’d been, his eyes ran red. They were—

Ah, for a thief, still you go after too little. Let us at least be comfortable.

In Jonathan’s bed, each bite into his throat another night, and all those nights were his ex-Master’s. Kissing, mauling, drinking, sinking teeth to the gums. Only now his friend fought in his jaws. Jonathan’s teeth and claws tore at him as if he meant to shred him out of existence. To no avail. He was the practiced mind, the greater mind, greater will, and in mind and flesh his will was Law. But now he heard the whistle of air overhead, metal and timber swinging down. They were—

You still feel this one, don’t you? Mina feels the one in her throat on the same day it cut her. Does yours come like a blow at the end of each June? Again, Count, my apologies. You’ll not suffer the headache of me once your head is gone.

In the morning of departure. The shovel was in Jonathan’s hands, the edge bloody. No basilisk gaze pinned him now and his ex-Master’s brow was not merely scratched, but cracked like a grisly egg. The spade came down again. His ex-Master’s hand came up. They were—

But my friend, you know from experience how much I love to suffer you. To suffer for you. Saving—

In the ladies’ chamber, Jonathan torn out of three different suckling jaws as the dead Loves of old shrilled and grasped at him—

and sheltering—

In the grim first night, the woman in a deathly Limbo in Jonathan’s arms, the boy barely more than a twitching thought in her belly, on his knees, knife cast aside, bartering and pleading for the safety of his Loves, thankless and ungrateful already in his traitor heart—

and supporting you all this time. Even now! Do you think me angry for your little trick? Your theft? Your lies? Why, it is nothing but heartening! To think I ever worried you were too soft for the eternity ahead of you! You, so cunning and patient, laying your tripwire over twenty years’ worth of convincing me—me!—that you were a thing worth trusting. Once we clear up this mess with the boy and your pending penance, I could see you eating holes through whole countries with your sweet venom.

Jonathan was in his hand now. A cursing, struggling mote trapped in a fist the size of a small house. The hand tightened. Jonathan howled. Not with pain, for there was no real sensation here. But the revulsion was true enough. He fought and pried at the knuckles of his ex-Master’s grip as if trying to break free of a cesspit.

The fist broke into other hands. A hundred thousand flashes of as many memories, cold clawed touches finding him wherever they felt like landing. Not injuring, of course. Would he hurt his dear friend? No! Only come closer, draga mea, the better to see you, feel you, count your pulses, that is all.

Jonathan bayed and swung and shuddered in the flurry. Every forced turn of the head with a hand on his jaw. Every talon of a nail tickling along chin and throat. Every idle raking of hair or stroke of his shoulder. Every seized arm, caught hand, grabbed hip, rubbed back. All of these blasted Jonathan’s unvarnished hate and disgust through the shared plane of their mind. And the worst of them all had been—

There.

The window in the library.

Their last night as man and monster. When he had spoken his last lying promise and slipped it into his ex-Master’s mouth like candy. Only hate had been there. Hate, disgust, shame. The weight of it staggered.

He staggered.

Jonathan broke free, but did not run, pausing to bare psychic teeth.

I can feel your scandal from here, Count. Even had you been short all the hundred other evils I had to ignore, I think your hypocrisy alone would have nauseated me. How do you sit there stunned at the obvious? Did you seriously believe my mind so pliant a thing that it would ignore the cruelty you held over our heads at every hour and fool myself into think you capable of love? This, when we both know you only consented to the terms for the sake of my payment in pain. Another performance, meant to last all of eternity, as you reveled over how I sunk to nightly agony behind every measured word, every smile, every taste of me ‘freely given.’ Our precious little summer together made infinite.

Here was the crackling fireside, a client and his solicitor beside it, white hair and dark switched around again. One of the early nights to judge by the healing cut on Jonathan’s cheek, the newness of the shadows under his eyes. Eyes whose fear had been so carefully reined in as he’d goaded his host into talk of the land, of its history, of himself in the guise of ancestors. Rapt young thing. After, he had sat then as he sat now, trapped against the arm of the couch, his host almost crushing him into the tufting as the old devil purred incessant questions about what there was waiting for him in England. Were there others like Jonathan there? Ah, he should not build up his hopes too much, souls such as his young friend were a rarity in any place…

Now the pleasant-pleading eyes flamed. Running red again.

This here. Even before the Weird Sisters laughed the truth in your face and you insisted on a lie of a rebuttal. This game was the core of all the years to follow. And now you complain because I played it too well and ran away while you were having fun? Over four-hundred years old and still a petulant child throwing tantrums over a lost toy.

The castle fell away into the heart of a storm. Veins of lightning wound through the black of it as the ex-Master loomed over his subject, his vassal, his traitor, his—

A toy? This alone?

Jonathan was seized in thunderbolts. Marionette strings that burned scarlet.

This is what you think would earn my interest? My protection?

Jonathan bowed and danced and split his face with grinning as the strings pulled.

I could have that from anyone, Jonathan Harker. I could have had that from you for twenty years, no longer leaving the sword hanging above your head, but walking and talking you through every night while your mind sat bound and mute behind your eyes. I could have laughed in your face that November night after I had twisted your head off your shoulders and burned what was left of your wife on my fire. I would have too. If you were anyone other than yourself.

The strings were a net were a web. Jonathan strangled in it, unable to die, to move, to look away as the parade of that prelude to his life in Castle Dracula came and went before him. The deaths and undeaths, the pains and the promises. Mother and child, Master and vassal with the blood never clean from their hands.

All of this, my friend. All of this is because of you. You, who came to make the sale of Carfax. You, who refused to stay in your proper place among my lost Loves, waiting for my return and all the future I would bring. You, who set the hunting dogs upon me and so forced my hand with the woman. You, who faced the consequences of going among good men, pretending you were a mere hound instead of a jackal, striking them down for a Love you put above their mandates and their cherished divinity. You, who brought that Love to my door, groveling for the sake of your selfish heart.

You, Jonathan Harker. You are my equal in this ‘game’ you say I played. It is one impossible to play alone. If you had not baited me, not teased and strung me along, not made yourself into a vital thing to my heart rather than a mere curiosity, all would have ended swiftly.

Something shifted. He couldn’t say what. A tipping, a sliding. The fraying of some final tether left straining in his friend’s mind. Jonathan had despised his touch and shown it well enough. Jonathan had raged on behalf of his Loves and the slain and their life that would never be. Jonathan had even managed to offer wrath on his own behalf.

This was not that.

This was an incandescent, a righteous, a Holy conflagration of fury that turned the clinging threads to ash and boiled away the storm into a flaming void. For a moment, Jonathan was not Jonathan at all. He was only a blistering red light. The fire trailing behind him spread like wings, either those of Eros or one of the Fallen. Whichever he was, he seared in his ex-Master’s mind like a torch.

Your heart? YOUR HEART?

A hand of flame pierced him, cooking the centuries-old heart before it was torn out as a cinder.

Even now! Even in your own skull! Even with the stage forsaken and the audience of our son finally free, still you must shroud yourself in this act!? STILL YOU FEIGN KNOWLEDGE OF LOVE BEYOND USING IT AS COLLAR AND CUDGEL!?

Jonathan fractured then, an inferno of indignation and devotion, flaring with the memory of all he had cherished and loathed in his life. Mother and child for the former. His ex-Master for the latter. All smiled for, all made happy as he could endeavor. Yet only mother and child were given all of himself in earnest, their own love reflected back into him, keeping filaments of joy alive even as he brutalized himself with the conviction of his being a worse monster than they could ever be in potentia, deserving of nothing, of worse than nothing, of—

Flashes of his ex-Master, of his voice and embrace and the steady grinding away of his sanity and will and soul under the lord of the castle’s heel, crushed by the weight of self-loathing, dragged up and eaten again and again by the bottomless pit of his ex-Master’s want, of the threat that he must play the game or leave his family to suffer, of a conviction that all of this, every minute of every night, was no more than entertainment, a distraction to grow bored of and smash to pieces should he fail to cozen and serve and be a good Scheherazade ever-after. His penance for the dead men. For his wife. For their son.

That was all it was. All it ever was to Jonathan Harker.

The shock of it came on too quick and too heavy for its owner to catch before it tumbled into the mindscape. It shattered open as it fell and showed all that had been true behind its owner’s eyes. Twenty years’ worth of truth. What he had taken for truth.

The woman, no longer even dreamt of as a companion, but a brittle-bitter comfort. A sibling he had never asked for, but could not deny for her use in keeping his own barbs sharp and for the guarantee of what she anchored to him.

The boy, so suddenly grown, his love uncomplicated and real and awed, an experiment fostered and festering, burrowing into his Father’s heart as blithely as an insect left to gratefully build its nest in the home of a welcoming corpse.

Jonathan Harker.

The keystone against which the sheltering of mother and child, the performance played for the boy, the willingness even to entertain the farce in the first place, all leaned. Why? Why, when he would not have suffered any other victim, any other enemy, any other dear friend to wring such a feat from him like blood from a stone? Why, unless..?

He could not hide it. Could not bury it. Could not raze or deny or shred it into dust. It was too loud, too vivid, too strong. Too starved.

It lunged at Jonathan like its own living thing, an excited Wolf gone mad with hunger, seeing the only thing it wished to eat. Raced, leapt, pounced, dissolved into a frantically grasping wraith of red tears and a heart, unburned but hanging open and raw in its cleaved chest, coiling around Jonathan’s mind and forcing the reality of itself down his throat. Choking on it, the fire of Jonathan Harker went out. Only the man—what had been a man—was left. Staring.

Now would come the laughter. The insult. The dismay. The sour-mocking questions. Oh dear, old devil. Had he really tripped and fallen so? Had he really dared to think that the feeling was returned?

Jonathan, no longer flame or fury, only stood in the black of their shared mind. Still staring. Still…

The shock was not just his ex-Master’s.

The void cracked and splintered. Now. Now the laughter would come. Now another act. Now a sardonic bat of lashes, a false swoon, a coo of cloying flattery, or else the woman herself would dare to graze his mind with her own, the better to jeer alongside her Love, yes, yes, any moment now. Now. Now.

Count. I did not know.

The laughter did not come. No act. No sneer. Not even a ripple of disgust. Nothing. Nothing but—

I’m sorry.

The sentiment was attacked with a thousand tearing teeth. Shredded down to psychic atoms in the hunt for the disingenuous core, the hidden chuckle, the lie, the trick. But Jonathan was no less bare than himself in this space. There was no more to find in the sensation than the feeling itself. It repeated:

I’m sorry. And, just as sincere: I never intended to break your heart. Only to impale it.

The whole of it saturated with an honesty and apology that cut deeper than any bludgeoning of hate.

Sorry is not good enough, my friend. There is no taking it back.

Jonathan, a pillar against the abyss, nodded.

I know. Not for either side. I did tell you. This will end before the year is out. We shall kill you or you shall kill us. It is all that’s left.

Now came a laugh; a familiar hideous sound that unfolded into a trail of chuckling. Giddy, almost.

No, Jonathan Harker. You misunderstand once again. Yes, you and the woman mean to slay me at last. But I remain nothing but loving in my design. All that is left is that you kill me, or—

The void was gone.

They stood in the castle’s chapel. With the certainty of a dream, they knew that the boy was returned. Their only witness as he clung and wept over his mother’s coffin. She had been willed into paralysis by her Master, moving only to maim herself in the box or to gorge herself. Her meals’ dried carrion lay piled and broken around the coffin. The infants’ heads lined in rows while the tiny hearts were left to shrivel.

‘Please, Papa, you have to, please…’

And Papa was, of course. The woman’s Master had slipped the noose of himself through her at last, and now her orders were his orders, and the order was being carried smilingly out by their dear Jonathan. Pardon, his dear Jonathan. The picture of bliss despite his running eyes. Under his chin, the brooch shined. On his knuckle, the gold band had been replaced with a matching stone and clutching dragon. His vows, leaked through the permanent stamp of his grin:

‘I will never look at her again. I will never respond to any word from her. I will speak of her only as if she were dead. And I will love you as you are owed. I will be yours alone. Always. This I will do, or she shall never leave the box or know a moment without pain again. Te iubesc, balaurul meu.’

‘Te iubesc, draga mea.’

And then they were together, in the snug gloom of the great coffin that had been built and delivered in secret months before, undetected in the same chamber as the kukri. Two Grooms lay within it, one joyous and one merely smiling as he wept a stain into his Master’s breast and eternity finally began.

This is how our game ends and the next begins, draga mea. There are consequences to becoming what a monster loves, by accident or intention. He crushed Jonathan to him in their box, hissing. You stole our son. You stole my heart. You stole yourself. I will have all back in time. And you will never slip free again.

For just a moment, he felt it. Fear breaking through Jonathan’s miasma of shocked anger and distaste. But it was not the whole of him. Horribly, cruelly, crawling up and out from the center of his friend, was that unbroken condolence.

Again. I am sorry, Dracula. This will not come to pass. And even in the dreams where you paint this future as reality, you will still have my sympathy in this single thing. Your love is only a chain. Never an embrace. Only a noose, not a held hand. Our son is perhaps the first and only soul to love you without coercion, and he does so only because we spent his life hiding the worst of you from him. You will shatter that illusion if you think to steal him back. And then what will be left? Only this?

Jonathan’s hand was on his cheek, sweeping away something damp.

I had thought your pretenses only another knife to twist in us. But the performance was for you as well, wasn’t it? It was as close as you could get.

Jonathan was crushed again. Tighter, closer. Enough to snap an ordinary man in half. The arms, illusory though they were, trembled.

Do not dwell like this. You have your conquest to think of, don’t you? Your march on the Living? Return to that, if it helps. You are four centuries deep in this existence. Twenty years should be nothing to scrape aside. We were a distraction, all of us. Let us go. Let us be enemies. It will hurt less.

There was no need for breath here. No more than there had been a need for breath for anything but speech since the day he ceased to live as a man. Despite this, he buried his face in Jonathan’s neck, his mouth opened to bite, but releasing only a choked and shaking sound. It was followed by more. Then:

I will—I will conquer. I will slaughter. I will rule. But I will not be alone. If I must have you all on tethers, so it will have to be. You should not have made me happy, draga mea.

There was no true contact in the mindscape. No touch, no sense. He shivered just the same as Jonathan’s arms slipped around him.

I promise to make you very unhappy once we cross paths in person. My hate is rivaled only by my Love’s and her endings for you are as imaginative or worse than my own. In the interim, I shall do my best to gain your hate, Count. But that shall be another time.

There was a change. A softening in the phantasmagoria of the dark as the characters in it began to lose their edges. He grasped at Jonathan all the tighter.

I have not dismissed you. It is a long way to England yet. I hope the woman is satisfied with riding the rest of the way with you in a coma.

The thoughts leered, but the intent begged. It wound around Jonathan in a serpent’s coils, holding, clutching, trapping—

Let me go, Count.

No.

Tighter and tighter on the disintegrating form, becoming a cage, a coffin, a clutching fist, a dragon winding around and around its treasure, no no no, mine mine mine—

Before it’s too late.

No!

Within the mind and above the Persephone, thunder cracked and lightning struck. A great, blinding, devastating bolt. It had her voice and a single message to share.

MINE.

And with that, he was back in the cargo hold. The sailor’s heart had been crushed to pulp in his hands. His fingers and eyes ran with the same scarlet runnels. Above deck, he felt the riot of a storm that was not his battering the ship. He cursed and threw himself out to it, wrestling until dawn to hammer the weather smooth again.

In another patch of water, under the same voyeur moon, the Aurora cruised on under a starlit sky. A girl and her young man stood on the deck, her hand over his as he gripped the railing so hard it bent to the shape of his fingers. The young man’s eyes snapped open, lungs jerkily refilling with a gasp they’d not yet learned was reflex more than need.

Jonathan?

“I’m fine. …How long was that?”

Less than two minutes.

“It felt longer.”

It’s like that. Even when conscious, it will try to drag things into dreaming. Ever a showman.

“Did you trace him? Do you know which ship?”

Yes. The Persephone. Our ports won’t be far apart.

Her smile curved, red as rose petals, thorn-sharp.

And I believe their vessel has hit some stormy weather just now. Though it is endeavoring to ease the worst of it.

“Do you need..?”

No, Darling. I only press when I feel it slacking. It will be wrung out by the time it reaches shore. I will merely be peckish.

Her smile dimmed a shade as she searched her husband’s face.

Are you certain you’re alright?

“I am, Mina. Even if I weren’t, we could not risk it being you. Not while he’s still scrabbling to take your reins again.”

It showed you, didn’t it?

“Showed what?” Mina looked at him. Read him. Turned over the stone that her husband had freshly laid over the revelations bled out into his mind. “Ah. That.”

That. Was this what hurt you in there?

“I am not—,” Her hand went to his cheek. A rust-colored drop was swept away. “Oh. I thought I felt lightheaded.”

Do not distract. Was learning it what hurt you?

“It did not hurt. Only shamed me, somewhat. It casts a different light on his pending demise.”

A slaying made into euthanasia?

“…That is certainly a word for it.”

There are few others to choose from. Extermination. Justice. Recompense. Safety. But, in its thinnest terms, yes, euthanasia. I would not be surprised if he welcomed it in the end. I think I would.

His hand seized around hers.

“Why?”

She smiled back. The ghost of the living girl made its edges soft.

You would not understand. You do not know what it is to love and be loved by you, Jonathan. To imagine the latter was a lie? Worse, a lie you assumed was known by the one who loved you? I do not know if I could suffer it. More, you remain Love himself. Coveted and giving and, even for the Thing we hunt, pitying. For you champion the feeling in its own right, even as you did not guess that you were more to the Thing than a trophy.

They were silent for a time. Feeling the creep of dawn coming for the horizon. Jonathan looked to her again. Searching.

“Mina. Did you know?”

The possibility occurred to me. It did not mourn the Weird Sisters for more than a year, despite their time with it. Lucy it was bitter for losing only because she was the first conquest of a new land, slain before she could be enjoyed. I, the supposed new companion, was relegated within months to an afterthought. No more or less than a necessary evil in its mind—the hostage there to keep you there. With it. And it speaks volumes that it kept even a fraction of its word to you at all.

It could have taken you at any time, Jonathan. Pounced and bit and fed and turned, all with no one to stop it. But it didn’t. Not merely to see you suffer through the performance as you had before, but because it wanted to hide in the fact that you had free will. That you were immune to all but the most superficial pulls of the mesmer rather than the permanent leash upon my mind. It wanted you free and human and in its company, ‘of your own choosing.’ Or near enough. I can think of no reason for it beyond the Thing hoping for the act to become real.

“I cannot tell if that’s a mark of insanity or sadness.”

Perhaps both. And you do not have to cover yourself in barbs here, my Love. There are things we do not wish on enemies, even if they are deserved. That being said—,

“My plans have not changed, Darling.” He leaned his face into her palm, smiling. “We will dance on his ashes for what he’s done. For what he means to do.”

When we finish, we can pour what’s left of him upon a garden of wild roses. Perhaps it will carry some peace after him.

The rest of their conversation was not in words. It carried on even as they pressed their lips into the perfect mold of each other’s, the tableau of them spied only by another couple who thought they must be their elders as they went along to their own room.

“Now when was the last time you kissed me like that?”

“Oh, hush. I’m sure it was only yesterday I did. Sometime after the banquet, wasn’t it?”

“Mm.”

“And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing for our age, dear. These young people are growing ever brasher out in the open.”

“Yes, in public, on a boat. Most brazen. Lord knows there’s scads of witnesses…”

Daybreak came and the storm departed with it. The one in the sky, at least.

Down below, in the dark, in the dirt inside a box, a smaller tempest raged. Tried to rage. Tried to hold to thunder and lightning and hail. But the death-sleep melted it down into its truer shape, freed from the whipping of desperation in the guise of anger. The grave earth became rosy mud as new tears rolled. Between this and the toll of keeping back the storm, even nursing from the crushed heart had barely helped in stalling the change. Black hair had turned to iron, iron to ancient white.

Dreaming dragged him down and away from his own will. Through the foam of futures yet unborn, through the penalties and precautions yet to be inflicted, all the way to a moonlit window in the library. His friend stood before him. Alive and undead. Wasted and hale. Blue-eyed and red. Cold lips smiling and pressing into his. Joy frozen in place.

In the world outside his mind, the cadaver of an old man moved just enough in his bed of soil to hold the brooch tighter. Enough so that the clasp split his skin and poured ichor over the golden dragon and its treasure. He did not feel it.

But wept just the same.

#this AU has wrung four novellas out of me #I pray this is the last or my hands will be reduced to nubs #anyway #for maximum ambience imagine Dracula rocking back and forth in his dirt box listening to Annie Lennox's “Love Song for a Vampire”#but this time with the (grudgingly) appropriate Harker swapped in #he's about there #blood of my blood #dracula #dracula bad ending au #jonathan harker #mina harker #quincey harker #my writing

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baddybaddyadardaddy · 2 months ago

Text

a knife in the dark

[adar/oc]

This is a slightly unhinged WIP AU for my longfic, Awake, Arise or Be For Ever Fall'n. Highly recommend (ask/beg/implore) you to read at last the first like, 8 chapters of that first or you'll be... um... maybe a lil confused? PREMISE: Erenyë is reembodied in Valinor, but Mandos shrouds her memories of Utumno, hoping to spare her pain in her new life. But she is restless in Aman, sensing that something is missing... She boards a ship heading for Middle Earth, hoping to discover just what that is. [DON'T @ ME ON REINCARNATION MECHANICS, THIS IS PURELY A NONSENSE DRABBLE THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY EVENTUALLY LEAD TO SMUT BUT MORE REALISTICALLY WILL JUST BE A LOT OF RIP-YOUR-HEART-OUT ANGST BECAUSE APPARENTLY THAT'S ALL I DO HERE. 🫠 ]

She makes her voyage on an elven ship that is nearly empty.

Why would you go across the sea, the other elves ask her, mouths agape, in the days before her departure. Bliss lies here in the West—you will find little comfort on the shores of Middle Earth.

Erenyë cannot answer them, cannot explain why the eastern expanse calls her so. She has heard many among the eldar who made passage home from the Hither Lands speak of the sea-longing that precipitated their journey—but this feels like something even stronger, a yearning for a place, yes, but something more… something that she cannot name.

Whatever it is, she surmises it must be the reason she has never felt quite at home in Valinor, even surrounded by her Noldoran kindred, the ones who had remained after the terrible kinslaying of old.

As she watches the waves pound against the sharply angled bow, wind whipping through her hair, she speaks a silent promise to the waiting horizon: I am coming.

...

The tides of fate flow, and the sea is treacherous.

Their vessel is beset by perilous storms that rage by day and night, and no prayer to Ulmo seems capable of assuaging them. Their instruments fail, and the gale proves too powerful to hold their northward course to Lindon.

She asks how far off course the storm has flung them.

Toward the Southlands is the answer.

...

They make port in an abandoned Numenorean harbor that the captain calls Pelargir, and it is here that Erenyë takes her first steps into Middle Earth.

The landscape is lush and green, and different from Valinor—for it strikes her as more rugged and wild than the place from which she’d come. The climate is temperate and the air is moist, the trees here are massive, with thick trunks and sprawling branches, growing as they do only in Oromë’s woods across the sea. The forest calls to her—as all forests do—and she wanders eagerly toward the treeline, ready to lose herself in this new world.

But she is stopped by raised voices as a party of men emerges from the woods with warning. They are downtrodden, starving and traumatized, bearing the scars of war and disaster. In due course she learns that they have fled their homeland, several leagues to the east and over the mountains.

With terror-laced voices, they speak of a fire mountain, lately awakened, belching fire and cloud so high that it swallows the sunlight, rendering the land a waste, overrun by orcs. They answer to a single leader, the men tell her—a villain who calls himself Adar.

....

Adar.

It is a perplexing name for a servant of darkness, an elvish word.

She ponders the mystery late into the night, after the newly established encampment falls still. The elves had wasted no time in offering aid to the refugees, and Erenyë had done her part, though the forest still calls to her, insistent.

She considers going off alone, but the threat of orcs roaming the hills seeking captives to return to this Adar gives her pause. She knows enough of orcs to understand that the safest time to move through their lands is in daylight, and though she has never encountered one, memories of the stories that had reached her ears in Valinor, and the accounts of the Southlanders strike a deep chord of fear within her breast. She passes the night restless, yearning to roam.

At dawn, a small party of elves from the ship sets off toward the mountains, and Erenyë accompanies them eagerly, taking up a sword and dagger from one of the men who had not survived the night. The elven leader, Telemnion, tells them they must discover as much as they can about Adar and his legions so that a report can be sent north with all speed to High King Gil-glad.

They set a northeastern course that takes them up steep hills as they near the borders of the Southlands. As the day wanes, she catches the scent of smoke upon the air—ash and scorched pine, the smell of instantaneous destruction. Without warning, she doubles over, bracing herself with one hand against the nearest tree, retching.

“Are you well, Erenyë?” Telemnion hurries to her side, his eyes wide with concern.

In truth, she cannot say why the smell affects her so—she only has the keen sense of having experienced it before.

Her mind is filled with visions of ruined land—even before they emerge from the trees on a high precipice just before nightfall and see the blackened remains of the Southlands for themselves—and she knows that the visions are not simply abstractions. They feel like memories.

But it does not make sense—there had been no destruction of that kind in Valinor. Yet as they stop to rest, she cannot shake the sensation of touching ruined ground: of trailing her fingers over blackened, hollow trees, over the bleached bones of dead animals, over ash-laden earth.

As day gives way to night, she watches the skies above turn color. It is not the natural, blue-black of a peaceful night, but a wicked orange glow, cast by flames and smoke. It is yet another strangely familiar sight, and it fills her with blackest dread.

...

Several nights later, they are attacked by a band of orcs.

They are far outnumbered, and Telemnion cries out to them, telling them to run. With a pounding heart, Erenyë flies as fast as she can through the trees. When she’s confident there is enough distance between herself and the skirmish, she climbs, seeking for the safety of the upper branches of a great oak tree.

In the distance, she sees torches gleaming, and the sound of orc horns pierces the night air. She hugs the trunk of the tree, pressing her body close as though hoping it might open and absorb her into the safety of its bark as the orc army presses closer.

They are chanting something in unison—something that sounds victorious—and it is not long before they are close enough for her to understand it.

Adar… Adar… Adar…

The orcs continue their advance toward her tree. She considers climbing down and fleeing, but the chant soon falls silent, and the flickering torches stop moving.

A new voice fills the air.

It is low and husky, speaking the guttural language of the enemy. She cannot understand a word, but she tips her ear toward it, for there is something, some phantom quality about it that she cannot place. The trees are close in the glen, and with great care, she makes her way from one to the next, sidling toward the voice.

The orc army comes into view, and she can see their leader standing before them. His back is toward her—she can see only his silhouette against the torchlight. He is tall and slender—strangely elven, compared to the other orcs, the majority of whom are stooped and stocky. His presence is commanding, though he does not raise his voice beyond what is required to adequately fill the clearing.

He finishes his address with what is clearly a command for the uruks to set up camp, for they break out into groups, busying themselves with assembling tents and unfurling bedrolls.

Adar, for his part, watches the flurry of activity, then retreats into the shadows of the treeline. He is outside the torchlight now, but Erenyë follows his shape in the dark as it moves deeper into the forest. Keeping a safe distance, she scrambles down from her tree, closing her hand around the dagger she carries. Her heart begins to thrum again, pounding with a mixture of intrigue and terror.

He weaves gracefully through the trees, making no sound. There is something about his bearing that seems ancient, as though he is a part of the old forest itself and she creeps closer, fearing that at any moment, he might be swallowed by the trees, absorbed into them.

Dawn is breaking when he pauses in a clearing, and she realizes that the trees around them have started to thin, their leaves charred. The scent of smoke is stronger here, and with a soundless gasp, she discovers that they have reached the line of the fire-mountain’s destruction.

He kneels down, and she is struck by how suddenly small he appears. The sight of his silhouette stirs something in her—something that originates from that same place of strange recollection.

Why, her heart cries in anguish, does he seem familiar?

Without a thought, she steps closer.

He is crouched beside a green sapling that the fire had somehow spared, fingering the delicate leaves with a reverent—almost loving—tenderness.

She takes another step, disturbing the ground in her wake. A twig snaps beneath her foot; his head whips around toward the sound, and she flies at him, unsheathing her dagger with a cry.

They collide, tussling in the ashes. Erenyë scrambles and struggles with all her might until she lands on top with a dagger to his throat, gasping to reclaim the wind that was knocked out of her in their skirmish. His face comes together in her field of view: grey, mottled skin, covered in scars, thin lips, and shockingly deep, green eyes. She loses herself in them for a moment, as she steps seemingly out of time itself, spellbound by their depths. Her heart accelerates, threatening to batter itself out of its cage within her chest. She leans closer, bearing down on the dagger that is still pressed against the flesh of his neck.

He draws in a sharp breath as the blade bites into his skin, drawing a few drops of black blood. His eyes close, and his exhale is a soft moan, she presumes of pain, but she recognizes it as excitement, somehow. Pleasure.

She squeezes own her eyes shut, striving to steady herself, for it seems as though the ground itself is now swaying beneath her. She feels it again—the familiarity, the certainty that she has heard that sound before—no, not just heard it, she has been the cause of it.

He is no longer struggling—his body is languid beneath her, boneless. She clenches her teeth, confused, weighing her next move. He is the enemy; he and his army are responsible for the fire-mountain, for the destruction of the forest, for the torment of the Southlanders. She should let the dagger finish its work—drag it across his throat, spill the rest of his black blood here upon the ashen ground.

He murmurs something, something in a language that sounds like elvish, but it is older: an archaic form—one that she has only ever seen preserved on ancient scrolls. A dream, this is a dream, he rasps over and over, in that same low, husky tone that sends a shiver rolling down her spine, but not one borne entirely of fear.

The sound of the ancient language comforts her. Inexplicably, she thinks of stars, and the sound of water falling gently over stone.

She feels him shift and opens her eyes, preparing to defend herself. But he does not attack—instead, his hands seek for her hips, sinking softly into her flesh as he drags in another quaking breath. He wears an iron gauntlet on one hand, and it digs into her side, stopping just on the edge of pain.

Her stomach roils at the sight of this creature, this thing, this orc touching her, but her skin tingles beneath his fingers, even through her tunic.

She lets the dagger drag another quarter of an inch across his throat—she isn’t sure if she intends it to be a warning or an invitation—and he groans again. Tremors roll steadily through her body now; she feels she is dancing on the edge of a dangerous precipice, and she does not know whether to seek for safety or let herself fall into it.

He opens his mouth, and breathes a single word:

“Erenyë…”

Fear wins out—the sound of his name upon her tongue sends an earthquake through her body and she moves automatically out of shock and terror. With a strangled yell, she yanks the dagger into the air. He tries to rise, but she is too quick, slamming the butt of it against his temple—hard.

He falls back, unconscious, and she clamps a hand over her mouth to stop the scream that threatens to break free.

tagging @catz4ever @toddthekiwibird @eowyn7023 HERE YA GO MY FELLOW BADDYDADDY BRIGADERS

Read part 2 | part 3

#adar #adar fic #i cannot believe episode 5 unhinged me to the point of AU-ing my own damn AU but HERE WE FUCKING ARE I GUESS #anyway this is more or less the PG backstory #spice to come #hopefully #anyway it's your standard issue memory wipe fic with a side of knifeplay #enjoy it if that's your thing #i absolutely did zero editing on this #YOLO #posting it before i lose my nerve #in honor of KnifeKink week

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odditycircus-2002 · 1 year ago

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What if with MK1 Medusa Reader Part II

A/N: A continuation of this what if plot I thought of. I was inspired by @professionalranter31 to write this one from the perspective of the Mortal Kombat characters reacting to Medusa!Reader summoning the Kraken.

Credit goes to Giong2296 from Deviant art.

Ashrah, Kung Lao, Raiden, Johnny Cage,and Kenshi.

You are on your hands and knees and the edge of a cliff facing the ocean that just had an armada of ships sailing towards the shore. In an instant, the Dragon King, Onaga, wiped them all from existence with an infernal ball of fire. Leaving nothing behind but smoldering remains and husks. On those ships, was supposed to be Empress Mileena and her Supreme Commander and sister, Kitana, and their father, former Emperor Jerrod. Along with your close friends, Zaterran Emissary, Syzoth, and Tarkatan Colony leader, Baraka. Your dearest loved ones. Gone.

“There’s nothing left to loose.” You whisper as tears start to pour from your face, the scorching sun above soon evaporating them with its heat. Behind you, Ashrah approaches you to place a hand on your shoulder. "Please Y/N, you know that's not true." You shake off Ashrah's hand as you begin to rise on your feet. A dark and determined look sets itself on your features. You then reach into your robe's pocket to pull out some yellowed and weathered composition sheets. "I didn't want it to come down to this. I really didn't, but the choice is now obvious." "What are you-" Ashrah is caught off guard when you threw your head back and belt out the first few notes, but she's able to get enough of a glance at the sheets you held to cause her stomach to drop. The demoness recognizes the writing to belong to some of the darkest magicks. Ashrah glances up at the sky as dark storm clouds begin to brew. "Y/N, STOP!" But you don't heed her warning, instead sending her back a safer distance with the others with a flick of your water magic. You're then surrounded by a torrent of darkness and bioluminescent green before it engulfs you.

The seas began to bubble as if being brought to a broil, as your magic reaches the sky to bring in more storm clouds followed by a torrent of rain falling hard. Shang Tsung stops mid-fight watches with Quan-chi and Rain with surprise written on the latter's face. The former High Mage then snaps out of his stupor to grab Shang Tsung by the front of his tunic.

"What did you do, Sorcerers?" Raine demanded, after all, the island they're on is Shang Tsung's. The latter gives a deep scowl. "I tried to warn her against this, I hoped she would be wise enough to never try to summon it. "And you did not think to inform me about this?" Quan-chi raises a none existent brow as tentacles began to sprout from the sea before wrapping themselves around the Dragon King. Onaga lets out a mighter roar that shakes the ground beneath him.

The forementioned sorcerer glances over at you as you raise yourself even higher on a pillar of sea water, with your magic dancing and twisting around you as if they were made from the element you commanded. You yourself danced with your hands in the air and wings spread out, all while your appearance began to drastically darken to reflect your now tainted soul. If Quan-chi didn't know any better, he would think that you came straight from the Netherealm itself.

Onaga and the Kraken's battle becomes so tumultuous that tsunamis the size of mountains form, and would've engulfed everyone if it weren't for Rain stepping in to literally hold back the tides. Essentially leaving a giant wall of water to tower everyone on the shore. However he couldn't hold back all of it as some waves still managed to slip through his grasp, but less severe to the tsunami in comparison. Rain's entire body strained from the amount of magic he was exerting. The former High Mage pushed back against the waves, wondering if the force and power in these waves were your doing a byproduct of the monster you summoned, or some twisted combination of both.

Shao and Reiko are watching with surprise at the monstrosity you summoned to defeat Onaga. Both the rebel and imperial army stopped in mid-battle at the horrific spectacle, with vultures and sea birds alike circling above them to either flee or pick at the fallen.

"What sorcery is this, General?" Reiko inquires, as he watches the Dragon King he nearly died trying to semi-tame crush whatever is under the waves with his feet, only for more tentacles to arise from the ocean to wrap around Onaga's limb. Both them and the gigantic whirpool threaten to pull in the Dragon King and never let go. General Shao pulls out a telescope from his belt before directing his second in command to look through it. "Who else but that sea witch?" Contrary to Y/N and most misinformed fools `would believe, General Shao did not receive the rank he did by brute strength alone. No, it took a good amount of strategizing and his knack for reading his enemies to rise through the ranks. This is why Shao's blood-red gaze falls on to your distant figure that's faced towards Onaga and the other creature. You make grabbing motions and the beast wraps its tendrils around the Dragon King, you swipe with your arm and so do the tentacles. Onaga retaliates by letting another devastating blast of fire to the clinging tendrils, which causes whatever lurks under the ocean to let out an earth-shattering shriek that could only be rivaled by the late Sindel.

With Shao having figured out that you're the one controlling the Kraken, the former General concludes with Reiko that you had to be taken down. So they send half of their remaining forces to your location, who soon run into trouble as the tentacles from the Kraken breach through the suspended tsunami to crush, smash, and wipe away the approaching rebel army as if they were ants. As if that wasn't bad enough, the fallen including soldiers from the imperial army, are absorbed into these tendrils to disappear under the surface.

This did not deter either General Shao or Reiko as they sprinted through the battlefield, flooded with blood and the torrent sea. They clawed, scrapped, and fought their way through the ocean tainted with blood and cut down any tentacles that dared come near them.

Meanwhile, your group, headed by Ashrah, attempts to get through to you and beg you to stop from finishing the forbidden ritual. Yet, their cries are lost in the howling winds as you raise your darkened arms to the sky and voice loudly. You didn't even spare them a glance when Ashrah and Raiden attempted to fly to your position before you used your magic to create doppelgangers made of water to stop them. You essentially force everyone to fight against their watery reflections that copy them move for move.

Your plan worked as the Kraken, in all its terrible terrible horror, rises from its maelstrom. The entire island seems to tremble from just the Eldritch horror's full awakening.

The Kraken lets out another shriek, as if in victory for being summoned again before it then attempts to tear into Onaga. The Dragon King literally locks horns with the Kraken with smoke bellowing from his mouth, not ready to admit defeat just yet.

On the shores, a good distance from the battle and out of your line of sight, those you thought perished finally make their way to shore. Although, their entrance wasn't quite smooth or easy as they nearly crashed on the jagged rocks lining the shore.

If it weren't for Jerrod's telekinetic ability creating a protective bubble around them, he, his daughters, Tanya, Syzoth, and Baraka would've been claimed by the waves. It's also what saved them all from becoming burnt corpses at the bottom of the ocean from Onaga's fire.

Although this miraculous save may not be so much of a miracle, they watch the catastrophe unfolding before them. Baraka's eyes instinctively scan to find you, almost unable to recognize your warped appearance resembling a creature from the deepest parts of the ocean. You were still dancing and singing, the eye of storm unfolding.

"Y/N, what did you do?"

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accidentally-in-fictional-love · 4 months ago

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📖 ⛵️ 🩹 + something to do with his hair? I’m obsessed with his hair and decided he should be too (I love the sailor boy now damn)

Morning Tide - Wojchek/Reader

Warnings: Hurt/comfort, bit of drinking, the sad sailor is even sadder.

Wordcount: 2697

Summary: When his crew walks in, all of them garner your attention with their stories and toasts, but it's him who makes you leave your place behind the bar when you spot him drinking alone.

Notes: This is the second fic where I get him into bed for softness, I just can't help it 😌 Thank you for your patience! I know it's been a whiiiile since my last request, but from now on I'll be writing these at work when it's not super busy so I can keep up~ It'll be slow work, but I'd rather do that than wait for the weekends when my shifts are shorter, so as I get back into the swing of things I hope you enjoy 💗💗💗

It was a busy night tonight, all the ships seeming to come in that weekend as your work was flooded with sailors, some there for a drink, some there to borrow company, all of them there for a good time. You liked sailors, they tipped very well generally, your pockets full of coins of all shapes and sizes by the end of the nights when they crammed themselves in from wall to wall, and tonight was just as successful as the old clock outside ticked over into the early hours of the morning.

You were washing off the bar from a rowdy spill with his crew walked in, all of them tired and downtrodden as they pushed through the doors and looked for an empty table; this wasn't new, you'd seen your fair share of sad sailors after bad hauls or near wrecks, but this was different as one of them, an Irishman with a loud voice, tried to cheer them up and bring them over to grab some drinks, his energy clearly forced even as he hopped onto the barstool and slapped down a handful of coins.

‘A round a’ pints fer the lot a’ us,’ he declared to you as the others started to join, your co-worker coming over to help fill the order now that his own patrons were heading out. You filled mug after mug of the foaming liquid, each one sliding down the bar to outstretched hands, the mood rising as they downed them all back and reminisced about good times. You smiled as you listened, getting to know them through their stories, how close they all were after many years on the seas together. Their captain had retired years ago so he could buy a cottage and let his grandson experience life on land for once, you'd learned as they raised their glasses to him for bringing them together, tears in their eyes as they grinned wide and drank it all down, cries for more getting you to cry out right along with them as you raised your arm high and hit the tap.

You loved happy sailors most of all, but one of them caught your eye as you noticed him sitting by himself, no longer with the others as he sipped at his beer and stared out the door like he was waiting for someone else to walk in. He was captivating, nothing like the other men with their loud singing and stories, and you felt something settle in next to the greed for another good tip as you signaled to your co-worker that you wanted a break. You filled up another mug and brought it over to him, his eyes glancing up at you through his bangs, his expression hardening from longing to annoyance at you disturbing him.

‘On the house,’ you said as you pushed the drink towards him, and he eyed it before grabbing onto his current one and pulling it a little closer to himself.

He muttered something you didn't understand, and your smile faltered a little as you tried to recall the few words you'd learned from your patrons to see if you could guess what he was speaking. ‘I'm fine with this,’ he repeated in English, his tone alone warning you to go back to work and leave him be, but never in your life had you ever seen a sad sailor turn down a drink, not in all the years you'd worked there, and you looked back to the bar before grabbing onto the cold handle.

‘Mind if I sit, then?’ you asked as you pulled out the chair, and even when he shook his head slightly you still let your tired legs rest as you hit the old wood. ‘Your crewmates are having fun without you,’ you told him as you watched the condensation roll down the glass, and he looked at them before focusing on the table.

‘My crew, I'm the captain,’ he corrected you with a grumble, and you felt your cheeks redden because he certainly didn't make that obvious at all.

‘My apologies, sir,’ you quickly said, the beer offered to him again before he waved it off, he really didn't want it. ‘Well, they seem to be in good spirits now,’ you led, turning to face them as your eyes looked back at him, but he didn't notice as he stared at the door again.

‘They needed something to enjoy,’ he still agreed with you despite not looking, that forlorn expression returning as he gripped his mug a little tighter. You turned back to him, that something pushing the greed more out of the way as he took a deep drink then, your quest for tips falling to the wayside as you spun the mug back and forth a little, the foam rolling over the side and dripping down to the table.

‘Bad voyage this time, Captain?’ He glanced at you, trying to find the reason why you were still there, still trying to get him to speak, and you just flashed him your best bartender smile to get him to open up; he looked from you to his men and sighed, he was tired, weathered by too many storms, and for a moment you thought he might take the mug from you when he took another drink from his own.

‘We ran aground coming to port, hit some rocks we didn't see in the storm when we veered too far south,’ he told you seriously as he kept looking at the door, and as you followed his eyes you realized that he wasn't waiting for someone to walk in, he was gazing past the wood to watch the docks outside. ‘Been years since I took over the Demeter, she's been good to me for decades now, but the damage is too much for her… for us to pay for…’

So that explained their moods, they were here to drink the night away since they were all losing their jobs.

‘I know plenty of shipwrights, maybe I can help broker an arrangement?’ you offered, and you were a bit surprised with yourself as soon as you'd said it, since you actually wanted him to get his boat fixed, no strings attached.

He considered it a moment, a bit of hope showing on his face, but then a resigned misery took over instead, he'd already accepted he was going to lose his ship, they all had.

‘She had a good many years, it might be time to let her rest,’ he mumbled into his mug, and you felt a genuine sadness at his loss as his crew loudly toasted to the Demeter behind you. You watched him go to take one last drink, and your hand moved on instinct as you held up your own mug in a matching toast; he stared at it before clinking your glasses together, and you could feel the sadness radiating off of him as he gulped down the final drops. When he was done he slammed down the glass and went to stand, he was done already, his hand in his pocket to count the coins he owed you, but you stopped him before holding onto his wrist and giving him a small tug in the direction of the stairs.

‘I'm not just a bartender, Captain,’ you let him know, and he eyed you before starting to pull away, ‘and… borrowed time can be anything you need it to be.’

He looked down at your hand, and you felt the way he shook as he gave the door one last glance. ‘I can hardly afford to pay my crew for their final voyage,’ he admitted softly, he was ashamed that it'd gotten this far, but you just shook your head and held on a little tighter.

‘On the house, since you didn't want the drink,’ you offered gently, and a small bit of life came back to him as he stood. No one noticed that their captain was leaving as you signaled your co-worker again, and he just shouted for some assistance from someone else as another round was demanded.

This part of the building was for paying customers only, no one was allowed up without being escorted by a, well, escort, and it'd been a while since you'd been up there since patrons were more likely to pick one of your prettier and promiscuous fellow servers. You unlocked the first door at the top of the stairs, the captain following you in and looking around. You went to light the lamp nearby but he stopped you, he wanted it kept dark, and you were okay with that as you shut the door and walked up to him. You placed your hands on his collarbone, pushing aside his tattered sweater to touch his heaving chest, but he took your hand and simply kissed it before letting go.

‘No,’ was all he said, this wasn't the company he needed, and you nodded before climbing onto the bed and holding out the hand he'd kissed. He took it and climbed up after you, laying down and resting his head on your lap, and you brushed his windswept hair out of his eyes before getting caught slightly, it was a little too windswept.

‘Can I?’ you whispered, and he nodded before sitting up just enough for you to brush his hair carefully with your fingers.

‘She was only mine a few years,’ he confessed to you as you worked, and if you hurt him at all he never let it show. ‘I've been part of the Demeter's crew since I was a boy, picked up right off the docks of my home back in Poland, and ever since I stepped foot on that deck I knew I was home.’ He spoke so quietly, almost like he'd forgotten you were there, and you just kept brushing while he let it all out to you. ‘I knew better, but the storm was coming in stronger and the shore was in sight…’

He shuddered and you didn't say anything, just cooed comfort to him as you brushed out the last tangle and got him to lay against your chest. He was tall, curled up between your legs and still reaching the end of the bed, strong from working every day out on the sea, his facial hair scratching your arm as you kept brushing; he was intimidating, anyone else might've been too nervous to approach him based on looks alone, but you saw the real him, how much he was hurting over losing not his job or his ship but his home, and you couldn't help but press a kiss to the top of his head when he trembled again.

You didn't know how long you stayed there with him as he told you the same stories the others reminisced about downstairs, all of them from his point of view sounding so much more full of life if that were even possible, his voice so quiet and holding even more emotion than the others as they shouted and laughed so loudly you could still hear them through the floor. He was passionate about his time on the sea even when he was telling you about not just the good times but about all the bad times as well, the voyages that went wrong, the close calls, all of them dear to him just as much as the good ones.

The clock outside chimed loudly to signal the hour, you'd be closing soon, and you finally stopped brushing his hair as you shifted and got ready to finally speak; you stopped when you noticed that he'd dozed off, his tired eyes looking like he really needed the rest as he gently snored into your chest. You gave him another kiss, something so soft you were sure it wouldn't wake him, and he didn't even stir after so many years being rocked by the sea. You couldn't wake him, couldn't bring him back to his reality, and the longer you stayed the more you couldn't let this be the end for him.

Your co-worker unlocked the door and peeked in to look for you, obviously worried when you'd never returned, and you just placed your finger to your lips and shushed him as your captain lay there blissfully unaware. You motioned for him to come over, keeping your voice down as he leaned in. ‘Write to O'Brian, tell him I want to trade in that favour,’ you whispered, and he just nodded before running to find the quill and ink you kept in the office for end of the day tallies; you wouldn't let him give up after everything he'd been through, not when the others downstairs were counting on him.

You let him sleep for another ten minutes or so, long enough for you to almost join him, before waking yourself up and giving him a little nudge. ‘We have to close for the night, your crew might be waiting for you,’ you let him know softly, your voice still just barely above a whisper, and when he opened his eyes and gazed up at you you could've sworn he looked a little less lonely.

‘One more night to call me that, need to see if anyone needs a strong pair of hands tomorrow.’ He was still resigned to it, and you crossed your arms over his chest to keep him from leaving just yet.

‘Maybe good luck will come on the morning's tide,’ you promised as you brushed his bangs aside, and he held your hand in place, soft against his rough cheek and stubble, and for a moment the thought of him going back out there made you understand why people flooded to your bar after the boats left.

‘Maybe…’ He let go of you then so he could sit up, and he held himself so proudly you could finally see why he was made captain as he stood and looked down at you. ‘Thank you, for your time,’ he said as you also stood, the sounds of his crew heading out onto the street and calling for him the only reason you were both able to turn away from each other. You cleared your throat and gestured towards them, and you saw his eyes glance at the sea beyond the pane before he reached into his pocket and pulled out what little he had on him to hand to you.

‘I already said it was on the house,’ you reminded him quickly, but he shook his head and pressed the money into your hand.

‘A tip,’ he explained, and then he was gone, the gold weighing you down as you looked at all the money you usually strove after during your shifts. Your fist clenched as you then raced downstairs, the letter waiting to be signed by you on the bar, and you set down the coins before going to the stash you'd been collecting the entire day. You didn't answer as you were asked what you were doing, all of the money sliding into an envelope along with your letter after you'd added more details, and the entire crew was gone when you raced out onto the dark street.

He wouldn't be up but you could at least leave him this as you slipped the packed letter under O'Brian’s door, a talented but very thirsty shipwright who frequented your bar and often built up his tab with the promise of paying you back later, since he'd known you for so long. The letter promised his tab gone and free drinks for the rest of the year if he accepted your job, as well as all the money you’d made that day along with your final tip, and you hoped he would as you walked back to the bar and saw them all still celebrating what they thought was their final night on deck on what had to be the Demeter.

‘May you find good luck with the morning's tide, Captain,’ you wished him from the doorway, and you swore you heard his voice join in with the shanties before you headed inside for the night.

#Ray's Readers #Ray's Requests #david dastmalchian #Wojchek #mr wojchek #wojchek x reader

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splosh-crime · 6 months ago

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Death of the Moon AU

Zhao successfully kills the Moon Spirit Tui and incapacitates Yue before she can fix it.

The tides and weather are so thrown out of balance that ATLA becomes an almost fully-submerged planet, with only the tallest mountain peaks remaining as islands; most notably, the Air Temples, Omashu, & Crazy Herbalist Greenhouse.

Yue is both waterbending and the Avatar Cycle’s only chance to return. Until then, the return of the moon is the Gaang’s new mission.

Northern Water Tribe is one of the first communities submerged due to being the coastal city and epicenter of La’s grief. La wishes to protect Tui’s corpse under his waves.

The majority of Fire Nation territory, including the capital (Caldera City), is completely submerged. What remains of the Fire Nation’s citizens lives on rare mountainous colonies, the navy, mercantile fleet, fishing industry ships, and the elite’s literal showboats.

Fire Navy ships undergo catastrophic amounts of bad luck, so many sinking that it may be a curse from La. Civilians are encouraged to join merchant and fishing ships instead.

The Herbalist’s Greenhouse, Gaoling, and Eastern & Southern Air Temples are the planet’s main sources of food besides aquatic life.

Refugees learn quickly to survive off fishing and farming aquatic plants, learning from Water Tribe members and Coastal City residents.

The Northern Air Temple’s tech-enhanced citizens remain free as always, their gliders becoming an even more valuable transportation method with so little ground to walk on. To be safe, they gain a focus on naval technologies, building the whale submarines early and spreading their borders with floating docks.

Toph is warned of the incoming disaster by the spiritually connected Badgermoles. She, along with her fellow Earth Rumble Competitors are able to raise Gaoling and part of its surrounding forest high enough to create a mountainous island before the floods arrive. Tall enough for even the Badgermoles to remain underground.

Sokka fails to contain his smugness when his sister asks for boomerang lessons to supplement her waterbending.

Ba Sing Se, Eclipse Invasion, and Boiling Rock Prison Break storylines are either postponed or erased since all those places are underwater.

If you are inspired enough to write or draw this, please tag me! I’d love to see your work!

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theminecraftbee · 2 years ago

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cleo and el are so cute this episode by the way. a high tide raises all ships. cleo was handed an enemy and they became friends again. the coven expands, this time with someone who is less of an edgy sadboy uh I mean this time with an illusionist, which should compliment them nicely. witches should stick together……

#wcsmp #zombiecleo #that made me happy :)

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layla4567 · 10 months ago

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Take off the sails

Summary: After losing everything on the high seas you will have to reluctantly find a new crew and start a new life. Word count: 4.585 Warnings: language, female reader, she's kinda rude(?,angst, the reader has some slightly self-destructive thoughts about crying (she thinks it's for weaklings) and represses her emotions :D, not proofread, slightly canon divergence

You were a badass, the rudest of the four seas. Captain of your own ship the "Crimson Tide" sailed the calm waters of the ocean heading towards a golden horizon. Your crew "The Intrepid" were freshwater sailors, pure men just as tough as you and others a little dirty. But you kept complaining that they were clumsy and couldn't do anything right without you. The life of a pirate was already difficult in itself and even more so if you were a woman, you had to adapt and fight to position yourself where you were now and you were still fighting not to lose your title as captain.

Your boots clicked on the wood of the ship until you stopped near the mast looking at your friend.

"Ahoy sailor! Do you see anything over there?"

The sailor took the spyglass out of his eye and tilted his head down.

"Nothing at the moment my captain!"

You nodded with a frown and went to the helm, looking at the horizon somewhat annoyed, for months it could be said that you had been wandering without a fixed direction hoping to find something new than just salt water and wave foam. The soft sea breeze hit you and made your unruly hair wave. You were deep in thought when suddenly the sailor at the top of the mast shouted something.

"Land in sight!!"

The sailor pointed a finger and you were startled to see something on the horizon, at first it looked like a simple mountain but the closer they got you saw clearly that it was a large island. All the sailors shouted with joy and waved their hands to the sky, excited like the rest, you smiled proudly and headed to the bow to see the approaching island.

"Listen water snakes, raise the sails! Let's anchor!"

You were happy, you could finally touch dry land and rest from the constant movement of the boat through the waves, you could sleep in a normal bed and not a hammock, you could even eat better food from the leftovers you had on the boat, which by the way were already in short supply. The island was big and beautiful full of low houses and palm trees, you couldn't ask for anything better. Soon the ship docked at a medium pier and your sailors deployed the wooden ladder. Two of them helped you down by grabbing your hands, you went down with sure steps with your black boots echoing on the wood.

The sun was shining high and you looked at the sky, holding one hand over your eyes acting as a visor. In the port there were people and vendors, everything seemed happy and busy. Who says adventures only exist on the high seas? You were sure that you would find pleasant surprises here. You took off your hat and gave it to one of your sailors who was next to you.

"Hold my hat Jack, we have to explore this place don't you think?"

You walked through the stalls admiring the jewels or exotic fruits that they sold but it was nothing that you had not seen before, on your boat there were plenty of jewels and so many years of experience at sea and visiting different places have shown you that there were different fruits that were better than the others. that they sold, and some poisonous. Your gaze was directed upwards, towards the Mediterranean-style houses and their white stairs. Suddenly a noise in front of you took you out of your daydream, there were people together complaining and looking at something but you didn't know what. The people separated as if they were ants in tune and a boy with curly brown hair and a straw hat ran up and asked the people for permission.

Behind the boy was a pretty girl with orange hair and behind her a boy with short green hair with a threatening face. The boy in the straw hat ran past you and accidentally pushed your shoulder hard, you almost fell back if it hadn't been because you already saw what would happen coming and because of your high resistance.

"Oof be careful where you walk!"

The boy with the hat and red vest turned to look at you sadly without stopping running.

"I'M SO SORRY GIRL!!"

You adjusted your jacket, angry and exalted, his friends hadn't even asked you if you were okay, no, they just kept running without looking back. You wondered what or who the hell they were running from until you soon had the answer. Some muscular guys led by a clown man with a huge, ridiculous red nose were running after them. You didn't think much about it and decided to trip one of them while he was running. The surprised man fell face down on the ground growling angrily.

"HOW CAN YOU BE SO STUPID!! DON'T LET YOURSELF WIN BY A WOMAN!!"

The clown screamed as he crumpled his hat in his hands, looking like he was about to eat it with rage. Since you saw them, those guys didn't give you a good feeling and now the clown's misogynistic comment just confirmed your suspicions, those people were not clean wheat. You unsheathed your sword and stood in front of them.

"Very well, gentlemen, I will give you 5 seconds to leave peacefully or you will suffer the consequences."

The men looked at you and burst out laughing, with a hand on your hip you simply watched them seriously counting mentally.

"4,3,2,1 perfect, then don't say that I didn't warn you"

With a scream you rushed towards them, taking them by surprise. Some drew their swords but you were faster and with an accurate cut you removed them from their fingers, causing severe injuries. You turned a deaf ear to the cries of pain and fought with the only one who was left standing and had not fled like a coward. Your wrist movements were fast and agile and it was difficult for your opponent to beat you.

Meanwhile Luffy, Nami and Zoro had stopped running realizing that their enemies were staying behind. Luffy turned around looking at you surprised but a happy smile quickly formed on his lips.

"Who is she?"

"What does it matter? Let's go now that they're distracted." Zoro growled.

"No, no wait, I want to see this."

You jumped and dodged fast like a cat and you began to notice the fatigue in your opponent. Finally you took the sword from your enemy and with yours you brought it closer to his neck.

"I'll spare your life and if you think it's worth anything, you'd better leave. Now."

The pirate ran away and his clown leader, shouting to retreat, also fled. You put away your sword satisfied as you turned around, when you did so the 3 people who were running before began to approach you.

"Hey! That was great! Where did you learn that?!"

The boy with the hat looked at you full of admiration and with a big smile.

You furrowed your brow at his sudden enthusiasm and then laughed sarcastically.

"Well in case you haven't noticed, I'm a pirate."

And you took a slow turn so that they could admire your outfit in case it wasn't clear to them.

"Presumptuous…" Zoro said under his breath, earning a blow to the back of the head from Nami.

"Yes, I already know that, but not even we could have done that."

"Wait, you're pirates too?"

"That's right, the straw hats at your service"

The three of them made a heroic pose as if they were cartoons, it was adorable but try to hide your laughter. There was no way those three were full-fledged pirates and even had a ship.

"Oh that's cute, but shouldn't they have more crew?" You said sarcastically

"There are two more waiting on our ship." Said the girl who until now had not said anything.

It must have been a joke, so there were 5 in total? You didn't know whether to laugh or cry for them. You wondered how they had survived.

"5? Are you serious? I'm sorry but I don't think that even counts as a full crew." You laughed

Luffy ignored your mockery and without losing his enthusiasm commented

"Maybe you're right, that's why I offer you to be part of my crew."

"Excuse me? Join you? No thanks, I already have my own ship and sailors"

Zoro, who had his head turned looking towards the port, commented ironically.

"Oh are you talking about the ship which is setting sail towards the sea?"

You opened your eyes in horror and ran towards the dock followed by the others. From afar you saw that your sailors had boarded the ship and were leaving without you. Treason.

"GET BACK HERE YOU DAMN DICKHEAD!!!"

You screamed at the top of your lungs as you watched your sailors walk away laughing and raising the sails. Your beloved "Crimson Tide" was no longer more than a blurry point on the horizon where the sky touched the ocean and where the sun died.

You knew it, you knew that this would happen sooner or later. You couldn't trust the men, a hunch told you that at some point those stinking cods would stab you in the back and flee with your precious boat. You began to utter the dirtiest insults you knew while having a small tantrum that would frighten and embarrass Davy Jones himself into waking up from the grave.

CHILDREN OF SATAN! FUCKING SEWER RATS!

"She even has the mouth of a sailor.." Zoro scoffed

You didn't want to lose your cool so you took a deep breath, counting to ten in your head and exhaled softly through your mouth. You closed your eyes and turned around slowly, trying to appear calm. When you opened your eyes, Luffy's optimistic and smiling face appeared before you, followed by Nami's curious face and Zoro's frown.

"Well now that you don't have a ship or a crew anymore.. do you want to join mine now?"

You sighed in annoyance. That boy's enthusiasm and optimism were irritating, although you admired his ability to persevere. You took one last look at the ocean now empty of ships.

"Alright I guess I have no choice. I'll join your crew of… what did you say their names were?" You said with reluctance

"The straw hats!"

"Yeah, that.." You sighed

"By the way, my name is Luffy and this is Nami and Zoro." He said pointing to his friends

“I’m Y/N.”

After the brief introductions and with your encouragement across the floor, you followed them towards where their boat seemed to be. You couldn't believe that in a matter of seconds you had lost everything: your belongings, your boat (basically your home) even that imbecile Jack had kept your hat! You had waited so many months to be on dry land for this… perfect happiness did not exist.

Seeing you downcast, Luffy pulled you towards him, wrapping his arm around your shoulder.

"Hey, I'm sorry about your boat, but what you call bad luck, I call a miracle! You'll see that you'll have fun with us." Luffy shook you lightly, smiling.

With a slight grimace of disgust you growled under your breath, you weren't used to physical contact or such cheerful optimism from someone. You didn't know how this could get better…or worse. When you arrived at the ship "Goin Merry", as Luffy had later told you. It was almost as big as your previous ship and seemed comforting.

"Welcome! Please make yourself at home"

Luffy opened his arms to cover the entire space and then held out his hand to you to climb the ladder while Nami and Zoro followed behind you. When you went up you couldn't help but look up and find the huge, white sails fluttering in the wind as if they were giant sheets where you could wrap yourself up. Without thinking you smiled, a feeling of freedom and comfort invaded you but then you remembered your "Crimson Tide" and your face became serious. Luffy cleared his throat and introduced you to a boy who was sitting on a barrel drinking beer.

“Y/N this is Ussop.”

Ussop was a boy with tan skin and brown hair. On her head she had an orange scarf tied back. The boy had a cheeky attitude but in a good way, it was obvious that he was a confident person and that he liked to joke with others.

"My, my, and where did this girl come from?" He said getting up and approaching you.

"Ussop don't start.." Nami said through gritted teeth.

Ussop ignored the comment and took your hand with a big sly smile, he was about to kiss your knuckles when you quickly withdrew your hand in disgust.

"Apparently I'm the new member of this crew."

"Ho ho ho, you have attitude, I like you" He winked

You rolled your eyes irritated by his boldness, to calm things down Luffy looked around wondering where the missing member of the crew was.

"Has anyone seen Sanji? Where is he?"

"You're seriously asking that when you know that guy lives in the kitchen." Zoro said

"SANJI! COME COME UP TO THE DECK, WE HAVE SOMEONE NEW" He screamed leaving everyone deaf

Hearing Luffy's call from the kitchen, a handsome blonde boy with blue eyes and a shirt and tie came out. A kitchen towel had been hung over his shoulder. You turned to look at him and were surprised to notice that he seemed to be the only one dressed more elegantly, even though it wasn't appropriate attire for sailing. The boy approached with a confident smile and met your eyes, you were good at reading people and that Sanji guy seemed like the typical flirtatious and womanizing man.

"Hello, nice to meet you missus" He bowed his head slightly.

You finally made a small sideways smile, the man at least seemed friendly.

"Sanji, this is Y/N, she will be our new member of the Straw Hats."

"Well I hope you can feel at home here darling"

Sanji's ocean-colored eyes never left yours as he smiled flirtatiously. A corner of your lip stretched slightly and you had to look away so your ears wouldn't turn red. Come on Y/N, you're too old to blush for any poor devil who talks nice to you, you're not a hormonal puberty, you thought.

"Well! I think everyone knows each other now! Come Y/N, I'll show you around the ship" Luffy exclaimed happily.

You gave Sanji an incredulous look as if asking for an explanation as to why your captain was always so cheerful. The blonde boy laughed happily at your expression.

"I would love to accompany you ma'am but I need to get back to the kitchen, excuse me"

With nothing else to say and before you could open your mouth to protest, Luffy grabbed your arm and practically dragged you towards the deck of the ship while the others watched you walk away laughing and smiling. The boy with the straw hat was quick on his feet, he looked like a squirrel that had drunk too much caffeine. With a lot of effort you could barely keep up with him and more than once you were about to stumble.

"Could you please go slower!! Geez you look like a damn hummingbird" You spat, frustrated.

Suddenly the brunette boy stopped in his tracks and you crashed into his body. He turned to look at you with that optimistic smile that was already starting to make you sick.

"Here it is! First stop, the tangerine trees!"

You adjusted your clothes, sitting up better and looked at the trees with a grimace. Why would someone have tangerine trees on a boat? They were certainly nice but you didn't have those on your old ship and it felt strange.

"These trees are Nami's, she loves tangerines. We let them plant them but you have to ask her permission before touching them! They are hers after all"

You felt a certain envy, you never had trees of any kind on your boat, I didn't even know that was possible…

"Alright! Let's continue with the tour, there's still a lot to see, you'll see, you'll love it!!"

Luffy was going to grab your arm again when you stopped him just in time.

"Ah ah ah, back off! Don't drag me around like a sack of potatoes again"

Far from being offended, Luffy laughed out loud, amused, and put his arm around your shoulder and hugged you tightly. You almost missed running after him like a man possessed.

The captain went up the stairs without letting you go for a second while you growled under your breath and tried to hide your displeased face. So many years on the high seas had made you tough, the life of a pirate was tough. You didn't have time for hugs or displays of affection, so you didn't understand this boy's excessive enthusiasm and his eagerness to want to hug everyone. He took you to the top showing you the mast where Ussop stood watch over new lands. You watched Ussop focus on the horizon as he looked through his spyglass and you couldn't help but feel a little nostalgic. I smiled slightly as I remembered the afternoons when you went up alone to observe the calm sea, even though that was not your task as captain, but it made you feel free, so free. Luffy next to you saw you with his lost gaze upwards and passed a hand in front of your eyes.

“Hey Y/N, are you okay there?”

You shook your head and closed your eyes, returning to reality. You turned to look at him surprised.

"Sorry, what were you saying?"

"I asked if you were okay, can we continue with the tour?"

"Oh yes of course, sorry I got distracted…a little"

Luffy smiled understandingly and continued showing you around. The next place was the kitchen, when you entered you noticed Sanji's broad back in front of the stove. His muscles were still visible through the shirt. But what caught your attention the most was how spacious that kitchen was, in the Crimson Tide there was barely any space to store food. Your old kitchen was much smaller, it was almost always messy and the cook (who wasn't really one) was incompetent. Again a twinge of jealousy mixed with sadness hurt you. Sanji, whose hearing was finer than that of a cat, turned around smiling and looking at them both.

"Oh what a pleasant surprise, I didn't expect you two here" He said winking at you.

You raised an eyebrow, crossing your arms. If he thought of conquering you with a few simple compliments and winks, he was very wrong. Furthermore, you already knew the tactics of that type of man, first they flirt with you and then before you realize it, they have already set their sights on someone else. You hadn't missed that he had also given Nami knowing smiles. Pathetic.

"Oh and Luffy, if you think you can get your hands on the food I'm preparing today, it won't be your lucky day" The cook said smiling and turning his back on you two again.

"I was just showing the new crew member the kitchen."

Sanji laughed softly "Then welcome to my place, I'll be here whenever you need a snack at any time"

You thought that was his job and there was no need to clarify it, even so a pleasant warmth grew inside you and you were grateful for his kind gesture. The captain continued showing you around the ship until he reached the bathrooms and then to your shared room with Nami. When you came in she was lying in her hammock drawing a map. When Luffy opened the door with a slam, Nami turned her head with a slight frown, but when she saw you she smiled shyly.

"Ok this is the end of the tour, here you will sleep with Nami. I hope you like it!" He said hopefully.

The smiling one left and left you alone with the red-haired girl. You felt a little uncomfortable since it was the first time in a long time that you had come across another woman like you. Living with so many men had hardened your character and you didn't know how to start a conversation with her. You sighed and walked a few steps, she sat in the hammock and looked at you for a long time waiting for you to say something.

You cleared your throat uncomfortably "I uh.."

"Don't worry, I won't bite. Come a little closer"

You obey her and Nami pointed to a barrel where you could sit. The barrel was a little wobbly but it was better than sitting on the ground. You looked at her face, she had beautiful light eyes and her hair shone with the sunlight that came through the window behind her, your gaze slid to the map that she held in her lap. She smiled

"I see that you are interested in my map. Do you know how to draw any maps too?"

You shook your head sadly "Simon was in charge of that, a former member of my crew…" You said nostalgically.

Nami smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry, I can teach you if you want. But my maps are mine, you'll have to get your own paper." She warned seriously.

You nodded, placing a hand on your heart as an oath. Then the conversation turned to "girl things." You had never had these conversations before, not that you remember, but it felt comforting to talk to a person of the same sex and also have them be so nice. You trusted that soon you two would become great friends, you sensed that she would also feel lonely surrounded by so many men.

A while later, when the sun was setting, the cook announced dinner. Everything was delicious. You couldn't remember having eaten something so tasty for a long time. You slowly savored each bite you put in your mouth, closing your eyes and sighing happily. There was no need to give your congratulations to the chef since just by looking at you Sanji knew that you had loved his food and he smiled proudly. While they ate everyone talked and told anecdotes or jokes. Everything felt as warm as a real family. Family. Could it be possible to feel like family with an unknown crew? Not even in your old crew had you felt this way. Damn it, but why did you have to constantly compare Going Merry with the Crimson Tide? Obviously they weren't the same and that was the worst. You suddenly felt a little melancholy but you tried to hide it as best as possible. Suddenly, Ussop, who is fond of stories from the high seas, asked you if you had any funny anecdotes.

"Well, yes…there is one. I was on my boat.." you said shyly

And you began to tell how once you were almost a shark's lunch. The others looked at you attentively and listened to you in amazement, holding their breath.

"In the end I was saved and the one who ended up being a delicious lunch was him" you laughed amused.

Everyone accompanied your laughter and you smiled blushing. But you thought about your old boat again and you became serious, sad. The others noticed and got up from the table giving you space. Sanji came to pick up the dishes and noticed your downcast face.

"What's wrong dear? Did that brute Zoro say something bad to you?" He said worried

You gave him a sad smile without looking at him "It's nothing, I'm just a little tired, I'll go to my room. Excuse me"

You stood up, avoiding eye contact, and trotted to the room, feeling your eyes sting. Luckily Nami wasn't there, you needed a moment alone. You rubbed your eyes trying not to cry as you leaned your back against the closed door. You didn't want to let a tear fall, you couldn't appear weak in front of your new crew, what would they think? They would probably just make fun. But why was it so difficult? Yes, it was silly to cry over a stupid ship that you had known for a long time and had named it yourself, right? But for a pirate his ship was much more than that, it was a companion and a home. You were even beginning to miss those idiotic sea mollusks that you had once called your crew and now they had left you adrift. What was happening to you?

You hissed angrily and slammed the top of your head against the door trying to push away the bad thoughts when you felt tapping on the wood, it was Nami who wanted to come in. You opened it since after all that was mainly his room and not yours. Seeing you so serious and downcast, she asked you what was wrong, of course you answered evasively without giving her a logical answer. You were going to lie down on your bed when she grabbed your wrist.

"Listen Y/N, you don't have to be ashamed of anything, it's normal for you to miss your old life and it's not a bad thing, okay?"

You nodded without looking at her, feeling your eyes water again. You quickly got rid of his grip and lay down on the bed with your back to him. You could hear her sigh behind you and the noise of her bed squeaking when she got into bed too.

"Good night Y/N"

You didn't answer him, you couldn't. You felt a lump in your throat. Even so, she didn't seem to wait for an answer because a few minutes later she was already sleeping soundly. You could hear his regular breathing, and you couldn't hold back any longer. You broke. You began to sob bitterly, letting the salty-tasting tears soak your cheeks and the pillow. God you felt so alone and lost. You didn't know how your life would go on from now on or if you would like it. You just wanted to go back to what was before but you knew it couldn't be done. You remembered the moment at dinner and the warmth you had felt, the warmth of a happy family. Everyone seemed comfortable and you were so lost there, isolated, almost marginalized. Of course they would never make you feel bad on purpose and would gladly include you in their plans, but it was that beautiful emotion of belonging somewhere that hurt you. Just a few hours ago you belonged to a place, to a ship with enormous and beautiful sails with its red Jolly Roger. And now? Now you were a drifting boat, a leaf in the wind guided by the current without knowing how far it would go. You consoled yourself by thinking that at least with a little time and luck you would gain his trust and could be part of his family.

Trying to imagine good thoughts gave you courage, you had been in worse situations, this was not going to discourage or scare you. You could do it. Feeling better, you fell asleep soundly, ready to face the days ahead with courage and determination, after all, you were the toughest pirate of the four seas.

Ok, this is probably some kind of series, I still don't know how many parts. I hope I can finish it and not leave it on standby like other of my series (in fact I should finish them and not start a new one whoops)

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