#i cant stop reading | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

andvys · 8 months ago

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Gareth was right. Eddie never wanted to own you. Keeping you, however, had been something he should have taken more care with. AAAHHHHAKSHDKHAKHFKAK

my heart HURTS.

I JUST WANNA HUG HIM, I JUST WANNA HUG HER, I NEED THEM TO FUCKING TALK AND HUG EACH OTHER.......

I would've gone crazy too if I was in his place 😭

SO SCARLET (IT WAS MAROON)

CHAPTER FOUR: CASTLES CRUMBLING

AND HERE I SIT ALONE, BEHIND WALLS OF REGRET. FALLING DOWN LIKE PROMISES I NEVER KEPT.

☆ pairings: rockstar!eddie munson x fem!reader

☆ warnings: no use of y/n, strong language, angst, mentions of RUMORS of workplace sex scandal, minors dni

☆ WC: 5.4K+

☆ A/N: if you would like to listen to the song that eddie is recording at the end - it is an actual, real life song. :-) it is called "blood sport" by sleep token (one of my favorite bands i get to see live next week!!), and i highly recommend listening to it during your reading. especially the latter half of this chapter.

thank you to my love @hellfire--cult for the divider!

masterlist

“Alright, so – anyone care to fill me in on what the Hell that was?”

Matt stands like a disapproving father figure as the band lines up opposite of him just outside the building. Eddie had hoped nothing would be mentioned until they were in the car, but the driver was clearly running a few minutes late.

Three of the boys glance at each other, worried expressions immediately giving up the hoax even as Eddie only shrugs and says, “What do you mean?”

“Cut the shit, Munson,” Matt had never appeared so livid, so undone by irritation. His usual patience with Eddie is nonexistent, “What’s going on between you and that girl? Is she a past groupie?”

The insinuation gets a scoff out of Gareth. Jeff side-eyes him in warning, but Eddie couldn’t care less, “No, she’s not a past groupie. This was the first time I’d ever-”

“Don’t lie to me,” Matt points an accusatory finger at Eddie, narrowing his eyes, “I am your manager. If you have any unsavory connections with that girl, I need to know so I can decide if we need someone else to organize the event. We are not having another repeat of the Lewinsky scandal.”

“I knew it! I fucking knew you called it that, too!” Gareth cheers, but he’s quieted by one look from their furious manager.

The Lewinsky scandal had been their code-word for when the tabloids had become convinced that Eddie was fucking an assistant at the label. A girl had even come forward and claimed to have had sexual relations with Eddie, and he had taken heat for it for a full month before the buzzing novelty worn off.

Eddie had only spoken three words to the girl. No, thank you when she’d offered him a mug of coffee during a late night at the studio. He wishes now he’d been less polite.

And he also finds himself wishing that’s all this was. He wishes you were just another scandal, another terrible rumor spread around. If all the accusations between you two were false, if all the hatred was based on misconstrued circumstances, it would be so much easier. He can talk himself out of that. He can confess to those sins and get off with no more than the order of one hail mary from Matt.

But you? The reality of all that had happened, both all those years ago and just thirty minutes ago? He can’t find the words. They choke him up, unwilling to leave the cavern of his chest and enter the world, just like all the songs gathering dust as demos.

“It’s not going to be another Lewinsky scandal,” Eddie scowls, feet shuffling against the concrete below him. Can’t be another Lewinsky scandal if she wants nothing to do with me anymore, “Maybe she just doesn’t like me. I am allegedly a very polarizing public figu-”

The car pulls up, and Matt is quick to grab Eddie’s shoulder before glaring at the boys, “Get in, I’m not finished with our polarizing public figure yet.”

Grant and Gareth only let out low whistles, following instruction without lingering as they clamber into the back row of seats in the SUV. Jeff takes his time, though, going as far to pause beside Eddie and place a hand on his back.

“Just tell him the truth, Eds.”

It’s the final nail in his coffin. Eddie is cursing Jeff’s retreating figure as he climbs into the vehicle and shuts the door, leaving him alone with Matt.

“Explain,” Matt demands, “Now.”

Eddie’s eyes focus on a gaping crack in the sidewalk, jagged and uneven, right down the center.

He has two options. He could continue to lie, insist he knows nothing about you until Matt just gets bored of not being offered the truth. Or he could admit it all, reveal the muse behind the art he had been fiercely protecting over these last few months. Every line, every chord, every broken note that had left his lungs during those witching hours in the studio.

On one hand, it’ll rip away the opportunity that has been offered to him on a silver platter – the opportunity for closure. Selfish, bloody closure that neither of you had gotten, it seemed. But on the other hand, it might grant him some sympathy. Matt, the label, the producers – they had all grown tired of the dance Eddie led them in every time they’d inquire about the music. But if Matt knew-

It’s a dead end trail of thought. He knows he won’t admit to the worst of his atrocities he’s committed. No scandal, no late night ending with him in handcuffs, no fraudulent headline is going to compare to what he did to you. What you did to him.

It’s a little too late for damage control, anyways.

“I went to high school with her,” the lie works well enough, easing some of Matt’s frustration, “I was just shocked to see her. All of us were shocked to see her. No big deal.”

Eddie knows the people around him have come to learn that they must pick and choose the battles they engage in with him. And he can see that decision flash across Matt’s face as he decides that this is not a battle necessary to the war.

“Alright. But if you’re lying to me-“

“I’m not lying.”

“If you are, that’ll be one of my last straws, Munson.”

It won’t be. Eddie knows it won’t be. Everyone, every single goddamn person in this world it seems, is capable of giving Eddie Munson unlimited chances — except you. You, it seemed, were the only person who had come to their senses.

You always were smarter than people gave you credit for.

—

“Run the track again.”

They’d spent a few hours in the studio already. It was an odd hour for them to be haunting the space, more used to visiting in the dead of night rather than the middle of a weekday, but it was down to the wire now. Vocals needed to be recorded, instrumentals fine-tuned, tracks properly mastered. Eddie could no longer hide in the night when it came to recording the haunting melodies stained with the blood of his past — no matter how wrong it felt to see a sliver of sunlight breaking through one of the windows, just through the top of the blackout curtains.

“I really think that was the one, man-“ the producer starts, probably just tired after repeatedly running in circles with Eddie’s perfectionism.

He doesn’t care. He’s paying them, they can stand to let him re-record as many times as necessary to satisfy Eddie, “Run it again.”

The silence only continues to buzz in Eddie’s headphones. He’s ready to cuss out the producer as he angrily shoves them down, off his ears and hanging loosely around his neck, the wire a leash as he whips to face the one-way glass wall. The lights are off at the main board, guaranteeing that they can see Eddie but Eddie can’t see them.

Until suddenly, the light comes back on, and the reason for the absence of the repeated track Eddie had requested becomes obvious.

Gareth.

He stands at the center of it all, a few paces from the seated producer with a deep scowl on his face.

“What the fuck?” Eddie says, mouth just close enough to the mic for them to catch his overflowing annoyance, “I said-“

“We heard what you said, Eddie,” Gareth interrupts, his voice just loud enough to be faintly heard even as the headphones curl around the nape of Eddie’s neck, “But I need to talk to you.”

It’s the strictest tone that Gareth has used on their lead singer in an unfathomably measure of time. Probably because it’s the most words he’s said to Eddie in a very long time, as well.

Eddie finally removes the headphones, hanging them carelessly on the mic stand and moving towards the door — surprisingly, without putting up a resistance.

The control room is warmer than the fairly large area that served as a ‘booth’. Smaller, as well. Cramped with a low couch and one too many chairs available to trip over, the control board spanses the entire wall that holds the oversized window into the recording room. A plethora of small lights twinkle like stars, and numerous switches that Eddie had come to know better than the back of his hand alternate positions to guarantee the clearest sound. Only Gareth and the producer occupy the room, the rest of the band having taken off around the fifth time Eddie had requested a redo of his vocal tracking.

“This better be good,” Eddie complains, furrowing his brows, agitated at the interruption.

But Gareth shows no remorse, “We need to talk.”

“Yeah, you said that already.”

“We need to talk,” Gareth repeats, eyes flickering to the poor soul still seated at the controls, “Alone.”

Eddie hardly has to open his mouth, the man jumping out of his seat the moment the lead singer flicks his wrist to signal for him to leave.

Whatever Gareth was about to say had to be important, and it’s that thought rather than the difference in temperatures that has sweat building on Eddie’s brows.

Is he about to quit the band? Is he about to tell me he’s had enough? Maybe he’s done with my bullshit — I would be.

“Speak, Emerson,” Eddie flatly insists, grabbing a small water bottle out of one of the mini fridges in the room before he throws himself onto the worn leather of the couch, “And make it quick. We’re on a time limit, you kno-“

“We’ve gotta talk about her, man.”

Her as in you.

For a moment, Gareth sounds like a friend again. He’s dropped all the persistent perturbation he’s taken to defending himself with when it comes to Eddie, his voice pleading as he stands before the distant man. All the rueful power plays that had developed over the last year vanish. It’s just Eddie and Gareth, bandmates who started out in the latter’s garage in some small Indiana town. Not Eddie Munson, infamous rockstar with a chip on his shoulder. Not Gareth Emerson, passionate drummer overshadowed by the ego of his lead singer. Just Eddie and Gareth.

“We all know you didn’t tell Matt the truth.”

“I did tell him the truth-“

“Not the whole truth, then. There’s no way he’d let it slide if he knew that she was your ex-girlfriend.”

The defiance vacates Eddie’s body quickly. He doesn’t even attempt to prowl his mind for a quick quip in response. All he does at the words is drop his shoulders, the defeat creeping up on him as he deflates.

Ex-girlfriend. The title feels so pitiful to truly describe what you were to him.

But to be fair, even when he had been in your good graces, girlfriend had also never felt significant enough.

“Did-“ Gareth starts after a beat of silence, noting the way Eddie couldn’t quite hide his wounds on the topic, “What did you guys talk about? When you went after her, what did she say?”

“Nothing important.”

Eddie turns into a shell, a zombie as he stares straight ahead and tries to compartmentalize. That always worked; with meetings, with arguments, with lectures. Even before the fame, it worked.

It doesn’t work quite as quickly when it comes to you. His brain, it seems, is incapable of uncrossing all the wires you twist within his brain.

“You two were alone for, what, ten minutes? And you’re telling me she didn’t say anything important?”

“What the fuck is there to say?” Eddie laughs soullessly, “Oh, hey, stranger! Remember me? The guy you up and left without a word?”

“Yes!” Gareth shouts unexpectedly, “Yes, that’s exactly what you should have done! She left. Not just you, but all of us. We never even really knew why. And now- what? Are we just supposed to pretend we don’t know her?”

Eddie knew why. She’d never had to say it, and that was the issue. He always thought about all the answers he swore he craved, and always let every question he claimed to have haunt him during the waking hours. But when the day turned to night, when he was left to nothing but his own devices in a dark and empty apartment during the witching hours, he knew. The question of why had been answered since the first phone call cut short with you during that goddamn tour.

The songs knew, too. He supposes it had been an arrogant assumption to believe the band had read into his lyrics and put the pieces together.

“That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” Eddie nearly whispers, throat tightening and fighting him on the words. It’s the opposite of what he wants and needs — but it’s what you want and what you need. And so he plays the messenger, even as it kills him, “We are going to completely disregard my past with her. We are going to treat this entire situation as professionally as possible. I’m talking the full nine yards: you will not mention the fact that we know her, you will not question her about anything from the past, and you will not, under any circumstances, ask her why.”

His own set of rules he’d privately set for himself in his own mind during the car ride over.

Gareth squints his eyes in disbelief, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Are you serious?”

“Deathly so.”

“This isn’t just about your past with her,” the boy nearly passes, starts to reach up to tug on his hair before he thinks better of it, “This is about the way she left all of us. Not just you. She was a friend to all of us. She was the one who taught me how to tape my drums when I’d bust a hole in them, she was the one who helped us design our first merch, she was the only person any of us would let be in the room during practices. And not just the band stuff, either,” Eddie watches tears form in Gareth’s eyes, “She was the only one who had the patience to help me with my fucking math homework back in school, man. She was the one who nearly curb stomped Jason Carver the week he sent Grant home with a black eye. She was the first person Jeff called when his parents broke news of their divorce, for fucks sake. Not me, not you, not any of us — her,” Gareth’s breaths come out as pants as he stops his pacing and stands before Eddie. The tears continue to lace his bottom lash line as he heaved silently at the end of his rant, his pained expression completely unexpected to Eddie.

This is the part Eddie chooses to forget. He’ll let himself swim in the memory of you late at night, he’ll indulge in vices that always amplify his pain rather than succeeding in his attempt to numb it, he’ll stare down the mirror each morning and curse the reflection he finds with all the blame in the world he is capable of holding in the palms of his hands. But in all the ruptures of his own old scars, he fails to consider that he is not the only one burdened with loss.

They all lost you. When Eddie lost you, so did the band. You’d become a ghost to more than just your abandoned lover — you’d become a tired haunt to boys you’d known, boys you’d befriended and burrowed your way into the lives of, just as well.

“She was our friend,” Gareth chokes out, fists curling at his sides, “Jesus Christ, I- I get it. She was everything to you. Whatever. But she meant a lot to the rest of us, too. Whatever happened wasn’t just some isolated event — you two didn’t just hurt each other. You set off whatever bomb erased her from our lives, but it left the rest of us with some damage, too. Don’t forget that.”

This is the part where Eddie should apologize. This is the part where, once upon a blissful time, he would have said his repentance.

He doesn’t.

“I don’t care how hurt anyone is,” he lowly responds, eyes unable to meet Gareth’s any longer, “I’ve told you the rules, we’re going to follow them. End of discussion.”

Gareth throws back his head, and Eddie winces at his scoff, “She’s not your fucking property, Eddie! She isn’t solely yours to keep or whatever the fuck you think you’re doing!”

Eddie can’t even deny the action of keeping you. All the demos, all the songs laid to the grave because he couldn’t stomach the thought of releasing them for others to experience.

But that’s not what this was. This, the cataclysm that was sending Gareth to finally release all this pent up frustration, was him following your rules. You’d made your wishes for this project very clear, and he needed to at least try to respect them. They all did.

So he takes on the role of the bad guy. He lets them paint him as the villain if it means no red will stain your ledger.

“Oh, I think she’s made it very clear that she isn’t mine,” the mask slips on far too easily for Eddie. Cool demeanor, compartmentalizing. Not you, but his emotions towards his friends, if he could even still call them that. His bandmates that he had once seen as brothers. “Doesn’t change what I said. Don’t push it, Emerson, or there’ll be Hell to pay.”

“What are you going to do? Disappear on us?” Eddie finally looks back up to meet Gareth’s fiery gaze as he spits out hateful words, “Hate to break it to you, but you already left this band behind two years ago. And if you ask me, you should start leaving the vanishing act to her. At least she doesn’t make us pay for her mistakes.”

Eddie is by no means done with the conversation, more than willing to continue fighting with Gareth, but the other boy clearly feels differently. He leaves his words hanging in the air as he spins away, storming out of the door, the air in the studio now several degrees hotter now with the irate fuel of the fight.

It was all a blood sport. All of it. It didn’t matter if Eddie was fighting with the band, the management, with you. It was all bloody and fruitless, and it all left him the same awful type of hollow in the end.

He stares blankly at the wall as he makes a silent decision.

By the time the producer has timidly returned to the room, Eddie has already set up his laptop to connect to the studio's system, prepped so that any recording would automatically copy into his personal hard drive. A way for him to listen and ruminate in the privacy of his own apartment.

The sheet music torn from his notebook already lays at the table besides the entrance to the booth.

“Do you… want to run the track again?” the man, the stranger, asks. He clearly heard the fight. Eddie and Gareth hadn’t been exactly quiet in their screaming match. At least, Gareth hadn’t been.

Is it really a screaming match if only one side fights back?

“I want to lay a new track,” Eddie’s voice is deadpan as he clicks a few buttons, finalizing everything. He only needs the man to click record, “A raw piano and vocal demo. We can add the rest of the band later.”

“I-“

One look from Eddie, hardly passed over his shoulder with a glimmer of unbridled determination, and the man quiets as he takes his seat.

Eddie storms into the booth without another word, fist curled around the page of lyrics and terribly hand-drawn music clefts.

She isn’t yours to keep.

Eddie was aware of that. Painfully, painfully aware. But it had never been about his claim to you.

Gareth was right. Eddie never wanted to own you. Keeping you, however, had been something he should have taken more care with.

The chill of the small room to record in does little to lessen the flames eating Eddie up as he bypasses the assembly of various instruments all crowded in the space. Gareth’s drum set, Jeff’s guitar, Grant’s bass — he storms right past them, eyes locked on the grand piano in the fair corner. It took up the most space, far too large to have been forced to be contained within this compact room.

Eddie drags the mic from where it had been stationed previously with him, quickly and recklessly resetting it at the piano.

Once he’s seated on the bench, crumpled pages thrown up onto the music desk of the piano and headphones snug over his ears again, the producer finally clicks on his mic to speak.

“Hey, uh… Does this demo have a name by chance? Or do you just want to label it as an unknown for now?”

It certainly does have a name.

“Blood Sport,” Eddie spits out. “Just name the file Blood Sport.”

The hum that would indicate to Eddie when those on the other side of that glass window were speaking clicks off, and he takes it as his cue.

He’d written the song a while before. There were some gaps in the lyrics, some notes he’d played with on his personal piano scribbled over and never replaced. He’d never played it in its entirety before.

It starts slow. His fingers hold the ivory keys delicately, arranging for the first opening notes as if he were slotting his knuckles against your own for the first time over again.

She isn’t yours to solely keep.

Were you ever his to keep, ever?

Even the ivory keys of the Steinway are more solid than you ever were. You were nothing more than water, than blood, destined to slip between Eddie’s fingers. He never stood a chance in having you, in holding you, in keeping you.

Not just now, but before all the blood shed, as well. He should have recognized Cassandra’s curse the first day he looked into your eyes. He should have known the twist in his stomach was only Fate sinking its claws into the two of you.

A tale fit for a Shakespearean stage — a tragedy always meant to be.

“I want to roll the numbers, I want to feel my stars align again.”

Eddie’s voice is soft to match the steady beat of piano notes that emit from the crooked curl of his hand against the keys. A soft thump, a gentle lull. And instead of losing himself in the music, he finds himself wrapped up in one of the many memories he’d chosen to lock away for the last two years.

Something was off.

Eddie’s stomach had twisted with anxiety of something being wrong for weeks. You stopped answering his calls, his texts, every form of connection with him. But as he stood in front of the door to your shared apartment, the bile rose even higher in his throat.

He smelt the decay of what he had done before his key had even entered the lock.

“Would you invite me again? Won’t you pay for your arrogance? Won’t you show me your weakness?”

You were never his to keep.

His voice nearly cracks as he approaches the first chorus, not finding the strength behind the vocals he’d always envisioned for the song.

The click of the door opening echoed through the apartment. It felt empty the moment he’d crossed the threshold – you could have just been tucked away in the bedroom, or even in the bathroom, but he knew.

You hadn’t been returning his phone calls. You hadn’t been returning his texts. He knew something had happened, something had changed. Irreversible damage had been done, and he would now have to face the mess he’d created to return home to.

“I made loving you a blood sport.”

He repeats the line until it rings in his head, over and over. Until he swears the words could crack his bones, and the stars that will show in the night sky will do nothing but mock him for the self-inflicted pain.

At first, he convinced himself you just weren’t home. You’d gone to the store or to see friends. You’d be home soon enough and then, the two of you could scream at each other all you wanted. You were angry with him, rightfully so, but he’d rather you yell and scrap with him than the alternative. He didn’t care. Because he was here, back in the flesh and willing to take any and all cruel words you had sharpened for him. The two of you would fight, yes, but at least that meant there was still something there worth fighting for.

After the first three hours, he realized with a sinking stomach that the alternative might just be his reality.

“I want to be forgiven.”

He recalls the look on your face when you’d first seen him today. The fall of your act, the discarding of grace and composure.

The look that told him that he can want all he’s capable of. He can want, he can crave, he can yearn, he can tear himself apart bit by bit with his feeble yet shattering cravings — it won’t change a thing.

You were never his to keep.

After the clock struck the fifth hour of his return, he started his calling.

Over and over and over, he was met with your voicemail. Endless messages spoken and sent alike. Every single one trying to be gentle as they inquired where you were. Letting you know he was back. Going as far as to ask you if the two of you could talk.

He wanted to fight. He wanted to fight, because it meant you still saw something worthy within him.

But even more than Eddie wanted a fight, he wanted you to come home. He wanted you to be there, to welcome him into your safety and remind him he was human again. It was selfish – he was so goddamn selfish – but he needed to feel your skin against his and remind him that he was still a person beneath it all. Beneath the demand, beneath the unwarranted adoration from strangers, beneath all the fractures the sudden traction had left him with – he was still a breathing, living person. He was still your person.

Eddie’s fingers begin to slam against the keys with increasing urgency as his chest heaves out with every syllable. Repeating, and repeating, and repeating the chorus as if it changes a single thing. He loses himself in it all; in the music ringing in his ears and the memories now drowning him as he confesses all his sins to the microphone.

You never came home.

There was no fight, and after the hours reached double digits right along with his ignored phone calls, he had to accept the truth.

You weren’t just at a friend’s, or the store. You were gone. Truly, truly gone.

The drawers once filled with your belongings were vacant. The smell of your perfume was nothing more than a whisper across the pillows. Eddie scoured the entire apartment for signs of you, turning every single piece of furniture over looking for clues. He never thought to check the counter until he’d already ruined the space, terrorizing it in a frenzy before his eyes landed on the letter and the key.

He had approached them both hesitantly. All his denial drained from his body, like the blood pumping through his veins, as his fingers pinched that silver key so gingerly.

A past he can never return to. A home he will never hold the key to again.

The joints of his fingers ache and his lungs begin to burn for all that he lost — all that they all lost — because of him. His own foolishness, his own downfall. He did this.

The aftermath is blurry.

He read the first few words of your letter before promptly crumbling it with his tortured fist, knowing exactly what it said without needing to fully swallow all the words just yet.

He never fully read the letter. He skimmed it, a week later, but not that night.

Then came the flashes of the pain. The way he’d swung his fists at air and menial objects alike. A vase holding wilted carnations met its demise on the kitchen floor, a hole in the wall appeared that he later had to patch up, one of the coffee tables ended up across the living room with a leg splintered half off.

He never dropped the key.

Even as he dropped to his knees in the center of the broken glass, bleeding shins to match his bruising knuckles, he still held that small piece of silver fiercely. He pressed it so tightly, dug it so deeply into his palm that it later left a scar. And not even the way he had grabbed at the broken glass surrounding him had the capability to mar it away as he let it slice his skin, crying out, hopeless and devastated.

You were gone. He had lost you, and he had been arrogant enough to never even notice it.

“You say it doesn’t matter.”

The headphones had long since slipped off his head, and he makes no move to adjust them. He hadn’t even noticed that his body had begun to fall forward and curl into the piano until he’s weakly choking out the final lyric that he hadn’t even written down onto the page.

He hadn’t noticed the tears falling, either.

What were meant to be gasps for air as his fingers fly across the keys in a haunting melody are only sobs. Cries of pain as he no longer can see mere inches ahead of him, a scar of the center of his palm stinging as if brand new, his heart and head pounding in sync. He isn’t even sure if the producer he’s forgotten the name of is still recording. He lets the sobs slip out as he continues to play.

He can’t quite end the song yet. The moment he does, he’s terrified of the version of him that he will have to face once more. All those surface blemishes from the beginning of the end had run deeper beneath his skin. He was nothing more than rubble and fractures now, splintered every which way until he had become unrecognizable. When he looked in the mirror, all he could see was a creature of destruction.

“You set off whatever bomb erased her from our lives, but it left the rest of us with some damage, too. Don’t forget that,” Gareth’s voice echoes in the silence beginning to gather between the notes.

Another wrecked sob leaves Eddie as he finally finishes off the melody, playing entirely unaffected up until that point. Reality crashes down. His body shakes, shoulders hunched as his forehead connects against the freezing wood of the piano and he pinches his eyes shut tightly enough to be left in total blackness.

He couldn’t play another note if his life depended upon it.

The memory fades with the final note before his head rattles with a new image. The smile, the grimace, you had offered him before you two parted ways today. An effort at professionalism that Eddie had seen right through.

Pain. That’s what had twitched in the corners of your mouth. The same pain, if not worse, as the one that now radiated through every atom of Eddie’s broken figure on the piano bench.

He can’t fix it. Not your pain, not Gareth’s pain, not his own pain. The time for damage control, for sincere apologies and any reconciliation has passed. Just like watered-down blood through his fingertips.

Eddie hopes that the producer has had half the mind to stop the recording when he stands and slams the drumset behind him into the wall. Destructive, just as he had been the night he returned to an empty apartment. Just as he had been when he’d been the one to rot and wither away all that you two had once held between you.

They can replace the drum set. Surely, he has a person for that.

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#WHAT DID YOU PUT INTO THIS FIC #I CANT STOP READING

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cina-buni · 2 years ago

Text

circle the drain | Captain John Price x F!Reader

》 WARNINGS: SMUT 18+ — P-in-V sex; unsafe sex; gendered female reader, female gendered anatomy; implied power imbalance; no substance only smut SUMMARY: Somehow, you know his hands are the only things capable of keeping you whole. 》 WORD COUNT: 7,6k 》 NOTES: This was supposed to be a valentine's day gift, but it's super late on account of me being ridiculously sick. I'm also becoming the Patron Saint of "soon-ish" but this is the sequel to Caught p., i. Yeah. That fic that's been requested a bunch lmao. ANYWAY. It's FINALLY here. This was written in a day and edited under a feverish delirium in what feels like four months but was actually less than 10 minutes.

His hands are firebrands, fingers the lit end of a cigar. When he touches your skin, you hear the sizzle of your flesh burning away, and the pop of it cauterising under his blistering heat. He seals a little part of himself in the wounds he wrought: buries them deep in your dermis until they leak into your bloodstream. There is no victory in this. And yet— "Fuck me, captain—" —you just can't help yourself sometimes.

His eyes flash. "I didn't tell you to stop."

》 Caught p., i

MASTERLIST | JOHN PRICE MASTERLIST | AO3

It's the firm press of his front against your back that starts it all.

His hands, rough, firm. Scorching. They drop to your shoulders, one palm sliding down your bicep, fingers curling over the soft skin in the crux of your elbow.

You try not to tremble when his broad back presses flush to your spine. When he ducks his head down, bending a little at the waist to reach you—Price is a mountain, a tower—and you feel the coarse hairs along his jaw, chin, scratch against the soft curve of your neck, the back of your ears, your cheek.

"Steady."

Your teeth snap tight together when you feel the rumble through his ribcage before he even opens his mouth to utter the words. The rasping little groan—mmh—he makes rolls over your spine, the back of your ribs. It rattles through your bones, clotting in the fibrils of your tissue.

The fluttering wings of a hummingbird beat in the cavity of your chest when he speaks.

"One…two notches higher."

You scent burning sycamore when he breathes out, the rasp of his breath brushing your shoulder. Heat bleeds into your spine when he sidles close to you, hands firm on your body as he strings you into the position he deems best.

You wonder, then, how those broad hands would move you around in a different context. How the unyielding press of his chest would feel naked against your back—

"—y'right?"

Squeaking out a clipped affirmative is all you can do amid the roiling currents that batter through your chest—a dizzying concoction of want, need, for the man pressed against your spine.

He rumbles again, his pitch a guttural whisper that seems so opposed to his very essence—Týr in flesh and bone; a behemoth on the battlefield yelling himself hoarse—and the slow, smoky roll, the muted murmur, makes your toes curl. Fingers itch.

"Yeah?" He presses, unwilling—or unable—to let go until he's satisfied, until the worry in his chest over his men, over you, is abated. Shifted to some other place where it can't distract him. He leans in closer, and you find notes of Tobacco and malt nestled amongst the cindered Sycamore. Psalm ashes tickling your nose.

"Yes—," it's barely more than a breath. A ghost of something you can't place.

When it comes to Price, you never sound like yourself. Breathless, breathy. Voice a whisper amid the rumbling clatter of a rockslide careening down a mountain. His very presence seems to syphon the air from your lungs until you're gasping.

It feels like you've run a marathon—throat throbbing like an open wound; infected and raw. The taste of heme wells on your tongue. Your lungs burn. Ink blots clot over your vision.

"I'm—yeah, I'm good, cap." You say, and try not to focus on how his proximity makes you dizzy. Desperate.

He feels good against you, and you can feel the smoulder of his body even through the thick layers of his tac-vest, his military-issued jacket, and his long-sleeved shirt. The heat is dizzying. Liquifying your sense of propriety, decorum; it leaks over your threadbare resolve—that brassbound lockbox where you keep all of your hidden secrets tucked inside a place no one, nothing, can touch it.

It's absolute hot—one decillion, four hundred and twenty nonillion degrees celsius—and, well—

Who can withstand the hottest possible temperature matter can reach?

The box isn't just burnt or turned to ash—but erased. Swallowed whole by the flames that spark so hot, they don't even leave behind a scorch mark but burn the platform it laid on, too.

It frees everything you struggled to keep bound within you when he steps back, when there's more distance between his thundering heart and your liquified spine than ever before. A chasm.

Your chest is a hollow crevasse, an inexistent hole, and when he steps back, you feel threads of absolute zero snake over the scorched flesh.

You hear the sharp inhale through tobacco-stained teeth when you add sir, and wonder if he feels the same chill clot inside his marrow that you do.

When you swallow, his eyes drop, flashing to the smooth column of your throat. Liquid puddles in those sapphire pools—cenotes framed in burnt umber—and the burn of his eclipsing pupils makes you feel like you're choking.

Price clears his throat, his eyes skirting away from you in a mockery of something disquieted, demure. The loss of his eyes on you makes something sour twist in your guts.

You want it back, you think, and know, then, that it's far too late. That whatever tenuous hold you had over yourself had been carbonised and charred to cinders when he touched you with his molten hands, melting that gossamer of resolve you clung.

And—

Fuck.

His eyes are fixed somewhere on your forehead—either unwilling or unable to look you bare in the eye, and you worry for a moment that he knows. That he can see the want in your gaze, the heavy weight of sin that rolls over your shoulders until they quiver. The want in your hands makes your fingers tremble.

But it dissipates when he offers a facsimile of a smile.

"Good work," he says, the words sticking to the nicotine in his throat, and you wonder if you could become addicted to smoke just from the fumes he exudes.

(You feel the itch in your veins for the smooth draw of smoke into your burning lungs when he moves away from you.)

Fuck—you think, eyes fixed on his broad back, his taped waist, heavy shoulders—indeed.

You've never smoked a cigar before, and somehow you find yourself feening for a hit, for the smooth curl of tobacco smoke in your throat, sticking to your teeth.

Your eyes are drawn to the flash of orange in a perfect ring of controlled fire, to the stem of dark brown clenched between an even thicker thumb and forefinger; the lips pursed around the butt, the beard peppered with ash.

The craving hits you harder than ever when you look at him: the complete picture of your leader, captain, hunched over a bed of papers and files.

It's when the ashlar blue of his gaze flickers up, catching the end of something Soap says, that you know, without any sense of uncertainty, that all the cigars locked inside his case wouldn't be enough to quench the hunger in your chest. Rapacious. Greedy.

(Greedy hands, they'd say when you took too much.

Your joints burn with the urge to cling, to hold.)

Price looks up, catching your wanting gaze. He holds it for a moment, just long enough for you to forget how to breathe, how to function. Something shudders over the thin veil of indifference he wears, sealed over his face like a scab. It splits, peels back until the oozing wound below is once again exposed to the open air.

Raw, pulsating.

You wonder what would happen to your mortal body if you syphoned the ichor of Tyr, let it pool on your earthly tongue.

Your mouth is dry. Lips chapped and numbed. Your tongue lashes out, wetting them. A distraction—an unconscious action. You've studied enough to know that chewing on your lips, nails, the inside of your cheeks until the skin splits and bleeds is a self-soothing mechanism to abate the flood of anxiety that rips through you. Still. You do it, anyway.

It's a trick of the light, you think, when his eyes dim, lowering down to your blood red mouth, narrowing at the tease of your tongue flicking across your trembling bottom lip.

A manifestation, a delusion.

When you want something so badly, your mind is startlingly, debilitatingly, adept at playing pretend.

Your gaze drops to your unfinished plate, and you struggle to pretend you're not losing your mind to the whims of your desire because for a moment there—a brief, almost imperceptible second—it almost felt like he wanted you, too.

You bum a cigarette from Soap, and try not to think about that cold, windy night in Cairo when Price dropped his cigars to save you.

The barking laugh that hacked from his soot-stained lungs when you found a pack of Cleopatra Lights in the warehouse you were hiding in.

"Ain't the same, love." He huffed, white teeth flashing in the blue-green light of the Azbakiyyah quarter spilling in through the smeared windows. "No substitute for the real thing."

You take a drag, and sputter over the side of the balcony, gasping and coughing through the thick musk of tobacco that chokes your lungs.

It does nothing to abate the hunger inside of you.

With tar-stained lungs, and nicotine glueing to your aching throat, you think: no, not the same at all.

(Once you get a taste of the perfect vice, love, no imitation can compare. Keep the cigs. They'll only make me anxious if I start smokin' 'im now.)

The itch in your joints becomes too much.

You slide your fingers over your flesh, and wish it was him—

Your head lifts, glancing once more at the entranceway to the changing room.

Liquid sapphires. Brow drawn tight.

Your heart stutters. "C—captain, I—"

His eyes flash. "I didn't tell you to stop."

It's curt. Direct. Blunt. Everything he is—all narrowed down into this claustrophobic space that fogs with steam; the walls bleeding with condensation. It's sticky, balmy. Feverish heat that prickles hot and cold against your skin.

He says: I didn't tell you to stop.

And you say: I didn't tell you to watch.

An impasse. Stalemate. No victor, no loser.

(Except you. Always, always you.)

This promises nothing but your ruin should you let your arms drop from the tight clench around your bare breasts, nipples hardened, prickled and sensitive from when your delicate, small fingers rubbed at them and dreamed about his mouth.

An invitation.

One you can't bring yourself to open. The envelope is ripped, torn. But the card is folded neatly on the table in front of you.

(Take a peek, it beckons when he shifts, the unmistakable outline of his thick, hard cock bulging through the fabric of his trousers. Just a little look. A little taste.)

But it won't be, will it? Just a little. Laughable. Don't be stupid.

You never learned how to say no to yourself, how to hold back.

(Your moon is fixed in Cancer.)

You give, give, give—and, in equal, if not a little more, measure: take, take, take.

Want, want, want.

You think of his heat searing your back, liquifying your spine, turning your calcified bones to polymer, and know, deep down within your aching marrow, that what you crave is blue.

You can't let yourself want this—want him.

It's dangerous. Wrong. It's a gaping maw of hurt and agony just waiting to sink its teeth into your fleshy body, to tear you apart; ripping you limb from limb until you're a pulpy mess of tendon and crushed bones, barely human, but alive. Stuck in anguish.

He's heartbreak in smoke, in Maduro brown with a golden logo on the stem.

—means dark. Ripe. Used to only be made from the highest leaves, 'cause they spend the most time on the plant.

Dark. Ripe. Price.

Dangerous. Addictive. Inescapable.

His eyes—l'heure bleue—gaze at you through the dense fog. Waiting. Waiting. It's in your hands, now. The option to march forward and commence, to push yourself into his palm, in the worn hands that touched brushed the small of your back one day, and ignited a fire in your veins.

Or to retreat.

To walk back, to end this. To call it. Mentor, mentee. Captain. Disciple. Distance will split between you, stifling like the air that clogs the tiled, tacky room. Heavy, oppressive, and—

Inescapable.

Fuck.

You either take, take, and then deal with the aftermath of a bloody battle that will leave false starts on your bones, cutting deep to bleed marrow into your bloodstream, or you—

Forfeit.

There is no future in this. No grand declaration of romance or togetherness. It's the artificial merging of bodies in an offering to Hēdonē; an evanescent dance. It leaks heartache in the seams, and carries the tang of disillusionment should you dip your fingers in glacial blue. It'll stain you. His fingertips are drenched in agony—molten red, a hot poker—and will brand your flesh, scar your body with the perfect imprint of his touch. Of him.

It'll rear, in those soft, lonely moments when your thoughts are too loud and the room is too quiet, and the phantom press of his skin will become a burden.

Yearning.

You hate how it tastes oh so familiar.

Perpetual. Never-ending. Stasis.

You look at him and see blue: blue eyes, blue blood, blue heart, blues.

(Ache.)

But if you don't:

Stagnancy.

(Is it so different from stasis, really?)

It's nautical twilight somewhere, surely. The centre of the sun is six degrees below the horizon. You have six more degrees to go before it ends.

Six.

And then—

(It's not a jump, but a leap.)

Your fingers dig into the skin of your forearm. Piercing. Painful. The bite leaves crescents behind. Blue moons. You pry them apart, and—

Drop.

Into the sea. Into blue.

He says your name when you bare yourself to him again, consenting to this—whatever it is—and giving yourself over like an offering to some whimsical god of lust and poor choices.

The rasp of it makes your spine prickle—a low simmering heat sparks in your belly: satiated by your own fingers but never satisfied. Him standing before you, eager and wanting, strokes the flames until they burn in a frenzy of wildfire; consuming everything in its wake until you're raw, charred husk on the verge of collapsing.

A fragile supernova.

Your core is molten; liquid heat—absolute hot—and when he moves, you feel the foundations wobble, and start to fall apart at the seams.

(Somehow, you know his hands are the only things capable of keeping you whole.)

Price, still dressed in his sweatpants—tented with the obvious outline of his turgid arousal—and tight t-shirt crosses the threshold in seven easy steps. The soft squelch of his feet against wet tile echo in the room, somehow louder than your gasping breaths.

He doesn't walk to you, he stalks. His gait is measured, purposeful; each step brings him inches closer to your trembling, bare form, and the heaviness of his lidded gaze, liquid blue in a chamber of pearlescent white, cudgels into your ribcage, breaking your resolve apart as it pries the protective ivory wrapped around your delicate, fragile heart apart.

"Price—"

The grey of his pants is splattered with the inkblot stain of the water sprinkling from the looming showerhead. The darkening patches draw your eye to the jut of his hips, wide and expansive, and then further down to the damp outline of his thick, heavy cock still housed in a cotton polymer.

There's a fever in your veins—a sickness echoed in the folds of ever blue that pierce through the smog clouding around you. A blunt weight, a burning heat.

His shirt moulds to the contours of his chest when he finally, finally, stands in front of you. The burnt umber of his chest hair bled through the logo of his faded, worn tee. Liverpool Football Club in bright red against stark white. It glues to his pecs, his biceps.

Your mouth waters at the sight.

"You want this?"

His hands lift, biceps bulging, flexing under the tight cotton when he presses them against the slick, humid tile. His hair clings to his forehead, dark and wet. Droplets bead in his beard.

He presses forward, eyes brimming with want; a palpable sense of desperation that shouldn't frisson over his rigid lines.

Price won't repeat his words—not when his voice is thicker than tar, and stripped bare—and you arch against the cool porcelain pressing into your back, the duality of his unrelenting heat, and the chill of ceramic making every synapse in your head misfire.

Trembling, shaking, and desperately trying to hold on to some sense of cognisance amid this turbulent reality, you force a nod. A jerk of your chin.

He breathes through his nose, the breath wisping over the bridge of your nose. Frustration, you think, and—

Impatience. Uncertainty.

"Do you—"

Your facsimile of consent isn't enough for him. He's not a man known to repeat himself, and this—the words that are ripped from the smouldering depths of his chest should be a warning, if not a bare-faced testament to just how much he wants this—makes your heart flutter. A thrumming beat that seems to echo in the scant space between your bodies, the crevasse pitched at an intentional distance by his stalwart sense of control, propriety.

He won't touch you unless he's absolutely sure you want this, him—

Frustrating.

Verbalising your assent, your eagerness, makes something churn inside of you. As if uttering the words aloud will somehow break the spell you cast over him by your pithy voice ringing his name in the shades of your pleasure, the sight of your delicate fingers threading between your swollen, drenched folds.

You want him—haven't wanted anything nearly as much in your life than to feel his damp, naked chest flush against yours, his hips prying your thighs apart, his massive hands grasping your flesh like each pound was owed to him, and he was collecting his dues.

But—

That leap, the precipice you balance yourself on, is daunting. A touch won't be enough. A taste would just be a tease. A morsel.

You don't want a crumb—you want it all.

"Price," you whine instead, biting back the words he wants to hear. "Just—give it to me—"

It makes him groan. His head tips forward, eyes burning pits of sapphire-stained coal.

"Need to hear you say it."

It borders that illicit equinox of being both too much and not enough: that dangerous precipice where you either climb to higher, deadlier altitudes or fall down to certain death.

You wonder if there is a win somewhere in that. A choice when you come out unscathed, whole.

Price leans in, hair wet, matted to his forehead, beard slick with droplets of water that bead against the auburn, and immediately you think: no.

There is no victory in this.

And yet—

"Fuck me, captain—"

—you just can't help yourself sometimes.

. . .

It's wicked. Intense.

The clothes he wore were shed from his body like a second skin under your quiet, hungry acquiescence. They sit in a sopping pile that keeps drawing your eye.

He's naked—just like you—but there is something marginally more intimate, vulnerable, in seeing your stolid leader in such a state of disarray. His hair is clumped from the humidity and moisture—matted on the top, but moussed on his side when he stepped away from you, and peeled the drenched shirt from his body. It sticks up in pieces near his ears, and your fingers ache with a longing to smooth them down.

Make him presentable, somehow.

Or maybe it's a distraction. A way to skirt around the tangibility of him standing before you, touchable and real, and—

And wanting.

The same shades of your desire are echoed in the rucked crevasses of cenote blue when he gazes down at you, head bowed, and catching the spray like your own personal protector. The water hits the nape of his neck, and glides down his broad shoulders, his chest.

You want to sink your teeth into the puddles caught by the jut of his clavicles. Want to taste the briny water running in rivulets across his skin.

Want, you think, and want, want, want—

Price's hand knots in the fine hair at curve of your neck, a perfect fistful in the thick of his palm, and he uses it as an anchoring point, a steer, to bend your chin in whichever way suits him best to slant his rapacious mouth over yours, and devour.

His kisses are blistering—contained: controlled, powerful, and measured; and desperate: soft gasps, gentle hums, and needy noises spill from the parted seam of his teeth, muffled by his nicotine-soaked tongue that dips in each crevasse it can find.

It's addicting—just like you knew he would be.

His touch is better than anything your nimble fingers could ever conceive; broad strokes of his rough hands run down the inches of skin available to him. Calloused thumbs catch the mooned curve of your nipple, grazing the soft tissue until your mouth drops in a gasp of his name. He rolls the blunt pad of his finger over them until they tingle from his touch, until each brush sends a shock of pleasure to your core.

Price's hand slides down, fingers ghosting over the wet skin of your side, your hip, your thigh. Each whisper of a touch drags out a whimper from your throat. It's too much. Your skin prickles with goosebumps in his wake, and leaves you feeling feverish and chilled at the same time. A war, then, starts as your body tries to oscillate between stemming the ache inside of you, the emptiness in your cunt, and the delicious drag of his flesh over yours. A droplet of intimacy and tenderness in a sea that collects the ashes of Gomorrah when it rains.

It is a shade softer than what you've come to expect from your captain, and far more delicate than you deserve.

The unexpected tenderness of this moment is a stab to your chest. Blunt, brutal—it's a sharp juxtaposition to the ginger way he touches you; the soft reverence in his gaze when he looks down at you.

Just sex, you think. Lust, want. Greed, hunger.

It isn't supposed to mean anything outside of unexpected happenstance; the melding of two willing bodies in a sign of ritualistic devotion to Hēdonē.

And yet—

You want. Full stop.

Everything. All of what he has to offer, and more, because you're never satisfied with just one. Never content until you've consumed, devoured, everything. Every iota of whatever it is that ensnared your attention.

And it's terrifying.

It's not a jump, but a leap. A careening descent down an embankment that has no ledges for you to sink your fingers in, and cling to. It's a treacherous fall to the bottom.

And still. Still. You won't regret the plunge. The drop.

How can you when you know what his skin feels like under your palm—warmer, softer, than you could have ever imagined. What he smells like when he leans in close, head dropping to suckle on your pulse point—vetiver and smoke; thick and musky—and the scent of his damp hair, cigar and malt, that darkens when it's wet, and curls slightly at the ends.

He's hairier than you'd imagined he would be—a thick bed of black curls on his chest that taper off into a line down his stomach, his navel, before thickening around his pelvis. A bed of curls, untrimmed and wry, that frame the jut of his thick, uncut cock. It curves a little to the left, and what he lacks in length—though you'd hardly call nearly six inches lacking—he makes up for in sheer girth. He's fatter than anything you'd ever felt in the palm of your hand, than you'd ever taken before. Your mouth waters at the sight, and you wonder if his cock would taste the same as the skin of his neck, his red nipples that peak through the coarse curls.

Wonder, then, if you'd even be able to take him all the way down to the base or if he'd stuff you full, and make your jaws ache just around the head of his fat cock.

When you gasp it out—wanna choke on your cock—Price shudders. The hitch in his breath, humid on your neck where he buried his face, nipping the skin around your jugular, is punched out of his chest, and accompanies a low snarling noise that sounds more animalistic than it does human.

"Fuckin' hell, love," he heaves through clenched teeth. His gaze flickers up, staring at you through the dusting of brown lashes cut over blue ashlar. His mouth is red from the trail of peppered bites, nips, he laved against your wet sternum. It's sin, you think, when he shivers. When his nostrils flare. "You can't just say shite like that—"

"Played with your pretty little cunt earlier, thinkin' of me, mmhm? Made yourself cum, didn't you?" Price stands to his full height, head bowing over yours. His hand wraps around the thick of his cock, eyes cresting in pleasure at the touch. There is a moment, then, when his gaze flickers to you, catching the burning anticipation that greets him like a kiss. "Gonna fuck you now, yeah?"

The look on his face, the hunger lingering in the cut of cerulean that gleams through the thin mist that clouds around you, is magnetic. Captivating. You can't tear your gaze away from the almost primal way he stares down at you. Wanting. Needy.

You taste heme in the back of your throat, and feel something knot inside your chest—something animalistic, possessive—when his eyes drop like an anchor to the smooth curve of your throat when you swallow the ichor down.

There's is the faintest flash of teeth from beneath his wet beard. A gnarled grimace. A botched grin. He bares the whites of his canines and moves closer to you. The blunt press of his throbbing cock steals the last vestiges of air from your quivering lungs.

"Teasin' me, eh?" He rasps, eyes dropping further to catch the sight of him dragging the silky head over your wet flesh until it's notched at the apex of your sex, kissing the divot above your aching clit.

With your lungs collapsing, you can't find the words to refute him, and settle instead for a meek nod.

"Use your words, love." It's a snarl punched through the clench of his teeth. "I want to hear you, yeah?"

"Yes," you gasp, back arching, aching for him. "Yes, captain—"

His broad shoulders tremble, lashes fluttering when the head of cock meets your cunt. The slide of him, iron-hard and velvet soft, has you mewling out some broken whisper of his name. Price responds with a groan. A wet, rasping noise spills out from his heaving chest.

"Fuck—," the curse is sawed out from between clenched teeth, the brush of his cock parting your slick folds, pressing taut to your leaking hole, has something wanting and possessive simmering in those cerulean pools. A gnarled hunger.

It makes you wonder, then, how often he'd leaned back against the same tile, his hand wrapped around himself just like this, and whispered your name into the steam.

"Look so pretty like this," he rumbles, fingers leaving indents in the thick of your thigh when he grasps you tighter. "All desperate for my fuckin' cock. Want it, don't you?"

The whimpered yes is ripped from your throat and shredded between the small gap of your jaws before his words take any tangible shape in your mind.

Your captain asks you a question—want my cock, don't you? So fuckin' desperate for it, ain't you?—and you respond immediately. No questions asked.

Pavlov's dog, you think, mouth watering when his cock slips against your cunt.

Price stops with just the head of his cock kissing your entrance, movements halting abruptly.

The protesting whine is cut off when he leans down, lips slanting over yours in a soft kiss, a brush. His beard scraps over the sensitive skin of your cheeks and chin, but the wet drag of his coarse hair feels good.

"Price—"

"Are you ready for me?"

No. It's immediate. Quick and decisive. A firm, assured thing that echoes in the scant spaces of your ribs.

You should say no. No, because then you'll want more. No, because once will not be enough to satiate the hunger inside of your chest. The growing chasm that growls out its need with each soft utterance of your name, each touch of his hand.

You're greedy.

You don't, though.

The hunger is stifled under the waves of desire that roll through you when his cock notches against your clit.

Instead, you nod. Whispering, I want it.

His gaze is blistering when he levels it on you. Gyre blue; arsenic white. His mouth knots into an even line, thick with anticipation. Determination. He echoes your nod once, and then presses his forehead against yours, holding it there.

His eyes bore into you when he steadies his hand on your thigh, trapped in his firm hold, and pushes himself against you once more.

"Breathe for me," he rasps, the word a low command, and then he rocks forward.

His cock stretches you with each inch that slides into your cunt. It's a white-hot heat that licks up your spine—the edges of too much and not enough, and how could there possibly be another inch when he's already so fucking deep?

The doesn't stop until his hips are flesh with yours, filling you to the brim. When his cock presses against the plug of your womb, you expect him to stop. He's bottomed out, filling you so deeply that you can almost taste his bitter tang on your tongue, but he doesn't. He doesn't.

His cock notches into your womb: a pulsing grind into the very end of you. The slide of it makes you hiss, makes your nails rake over his flesh, leaving rivers of red when you claw at him, struggling to keep yourself from being swallowed by the waves of pleasure, pain, that roll over you.

He pauses his slow rolls for a moment, just long enough to catch your lips in a searing kiss, and lift his hand up, pressing his palm flat against the wet tile. Distracting you, maybe, from the drag of his cock pulling out of your pulsing, gripping him tight as if to keep him locked inside of you forever. With his mouth on yours, fingers threading through the wet, clumped locks of his hair, you barely have time to brace yourself when he plants his feet on the floor, and rocks into you.

The air is forced from your lungs with the even cant of his hips, the slide of his cock back into you. It burrows deep, hitting something behind your naval that makes you keen, head reeling from the phosphenes that blink, coruscating in front of your eyes. An illicit lure in bioluminescence.

The blunt, bludgeoning thrust rattles through you, hard enough to make your bones tremble, and your head spin—dizzy and heavy with the blow of his hips fucking into the tight clench of you around him.

His hand drops from the wall, falling to your thigh.

He doesn't give you a moment to ready yourself before slips his fingers around your flesh, and hefts you up. Your back slides against the slick wall, thighs pushed tight around his marrow waist, held tight in the grip of his hands.

"C–captain—!"

Price shushes you with a searing kiss full of teeth, tongue. It tastes of charcoal and Sycamore bark when his tongue rolls over yours; a heady, smoky tang that makes you dizzy off the pure nicotine nestled between his teeth.

Comfortably situated in his grasp, legs wrapped around his waist, he starts a new rhythm. The stretch of his cock sawing into your pussy stings, edging sharply against your mettle as he fills you deeper, wrenching you open wider, than you'd ever experienced before.

But it's a good pain.

The kind you don't think you could ever live without now that you had a taste. No substitute for the real thing.

It's a scorching heat that ebbs, notching higher and higher as Price holds you tighter against the slick wall, fucking into you like a man starved.

His pace is hard, fast. Unrelenting.

Pleasure blooms inside of you and feels like a bruise when it brims in your nerves. Sparks of pain, ones that edge into that dangerous precipice of feeling somehow good despite the ache, weave together with the bliss. A quit of too much knotted into an overwhelming sense of euphoria.

Maybe it's the taste of success, of victory, when Price drops his head to your temple, mouthing across your damp skin. His tongue is scorching when it laves over your flesh, chasing the droplets that leak from your hairline to your cheekbone.

The graze of his beard running over your skin feels like everything you wanted, and more.

Your fingers curl over his broad shoulders, holding him close to your trembling chest. He's an anchor, a beacon—a buoy in the middle of the ocean. You can't help yourself from thinking six degrees when his chin lifts, and his mouth swallows the gospel of his name as it's choked out between your bruised lips.

The noises he makes, deep, rasping growls of your name; grunts of pleasure; hisses when you clench tight around the thick of him, desperate to keep him locked inside of you, are better than any fantasy you could have conjured up. The weight of his body on yours, the tight grasp of his hands, the rasp of his tongue, the whisper of your name—it piles and piles; the heavy weight falling on you like an anvil.

Velvet softness, and heat. Each drag of him over your sensitive walls makes you keen, toes curling, back arching in pleasure.

You're already sensitive from earlier, from when you played with yourself thinking of him, and the fullness, the slight sting of taking him into you, make a knot form behind your navel. A spooling thread of bliss pulling taut with each deep plunge of him seating deep behind your belly button.

"Touch yourself," he demands, words rucked through the clench of his teeth, bared in pleasure as he syphons bliss from your willing body. "C'mon, love—want you cum around my cock. Wanna feel you—"

You had expected blunt brutality—it had circled your fantasies the moment you pressed your back against the tile, and slipped your fingers through your folds. It's a staple of him, you think; who he is. Ferocity in flesh and bone. He'd touch you with the same rough hands, and regard you with rougher words.

"Mm, spread your legs for me, dove."

"You want it bad, don't you?"

Words reeking of the same smoke on his breath. Heavy commands fell from his blistering lips. It brought you to the brink, to the ledge of that white-hot pleasure until the thought of his hands branding your skin shoved you over.

Hearing it uttered aloud now nearly has you weeping. Frenzied with desire, and that unignorable sense of victory when he leans down, hands roughly hiking your thighs higher up his waist as he fucks into the molten centre of you. Accomplishment when your skin smarts long after his hand drifts away, knowing there will be a mark left behind—blood pooling under your bruised flesh when he gripped too hard.

It's enough to make you delirious.

"Come on," he husks, pressing the flat of his teeth against the underside of your jaw. "You made your pretty cunt cum on those fingers earlier, mmh? Do it again. Make yourself cum around my cock. You wanted this, didn't you? Moaned my fuckin' name with your fingers buried inside your sweet pussy. Well, now you have it, love. So, fuckin' cum—"

His words make you moan loud, your belly quivering at the heat in his voice when hisses the command into your skin.

Your hand slips from the vice grip around his shoulders, dropping to the apex of your spread thigh. Your cunt is burning to the touch, and hotter than the steam billowing around you like a thick cloud. Condensed sin. The lips of your pussy are slick, and swollen from the brutal way he fucks into you. The tips of your fingers ghost over the chafed, raw skin of your pussy, feeling the thick slide of his wet cock, sticky and drenched in the mess of your arousal, as it pounds into you.

Everything feels somehow heightened, real, when you feel the stretch of your flesh around the molten heat of him.

It makes you moan—a noise you'd never heard yourself make before: low, needy. A desperate whine, broken at the first vowel of his name. Jo—John—!

"That's it, love," he gasps, low and desperate, lashes tickling the skin of your jaw. "Cum for me—uhhh, fuck—gonna—gonna fuckin' cum—"

Your fingers pass over your throbbing clit, circling in tandem with each blunt piston of his cock kissing the seal of your womb. Oversensitive from your earliest orgasm, it doesn't take much for you to march toward that precipice once more, dusting over your nerves where it stings like a bruise, and rips through you like a gale.

The building crescendo of your pleasure ends when Price snaps his hips against yours, hitting deep, and finding a spot inside of you that seems to be a direct link to Nirvana, to bliss. He throws you over the ledge until you're once again falling down with nothing but him (him, him, always him) on your mind, and his name slipping off your tongue.

"C–captain—!"

Your cunt throbs around him, fluttering like the rapid pulse beating against the thin skin he nips with his teeth. It floods your veins with liquid bliss, and the euphoric haze that congeals in your head, a mushy slurry of chemicals and victory, is soporific, heavy. It falls on you like an anvil, an anchor around your neck, and you cling to him, murmuring his name into his crown as his thrusts grow sloppy, clumsy.

Price lifts his head, hands holding you tight to him as he fucks the tight clench of your cunt. His lips slant against yours in a messy, wet kiss, broken by gasps of your name spilling from his mouth. His tongue lashes across your teeth, rhythm stuttering into a desperate series of thrusts.

He groans in your ear, a hushed noise cudgelled in the background of everything else—the slap of his balls slapping against your sopping cunt as he plunges into you, pushing in as deep as he can go, and then deeper still, the heavy pants that tumble from your lips.

"Yeah, fuck, love—," another brutal snap has your mind whiting out in pleasure. "Jus' like that. Takin' it so good. So fuckin' good, ain't you?"

He batters against the seal of your womb like he was trying to bludgeon his way inside.

"Fuck—gonna cum—gonna—"

You spasm around him, tied tight at the base of his cock like a pretty little knot, a bow, and he groans low and dazed when he pulses deep inside of you, filling you up with his cum.

"Fuck—!"

He snarls your name, mouth sliding across your skin; wet and messy. His hands are hot on your skin, heavy and branding as he clings to you, riding out the last smouldering vestiges of his release that paints insides pearlescent with the stain of him.

Branded, you think, inside and out.

Your lips sting when he rubs the coarse hair of his chin over them, mouth trailing sloppy, open-mouthed kisses up the bridge of your nose.

He comes to himself in increments, and you catalogue each notch as they unfold before you. Heaving gasps against your neck; messy, wet kisses; murmurs of devotion into your hairline, your temple (fuck, love, fuck, feels so good, so good, good for me, perfect little thing, aren't you? So fuckin' perfect, can't get enough of your little cunt around me, gonna taste you after, gonna bury my face between these pretty thighs and make you ride my face, kitten, gonna make you cum on my tongue—); and finally, finally—his head lifts.

The sight of him, cheeks stained roseate from the heat of the still running shower, from the exertion of spreading you open, and fucking you against the wall—

It's breathtaking.

His eyes are dark, cindered ash and crushed basalt around the edge of a liquid blue cenote. A lunar mare—Oceanus Procellarum dusted with fine azure.

Thunderclouds of blue.

Something intense brims in the arsenic gyre when he stares down at you, lidded eyes heavy with the weight of his lingering pleasure; subdued and far more docile than you'd ever imagined he was capable of.

He blinks slowly and languidly; liquid strokes of a pale curtain suffering over the glacial canyons cut into ashlar—the motion is almost hypnotic when the thinning fog from the cooling shower sweeps across the scant space between your bodies. A veil of diaphanous white.

The haze makes him seem almost ethereal. Incorporeal. It almost feels like a dream—a manifestation of your wants taking shape in your subconsciousness. An illicit tease from the depths of your endless desire.

But the thud of his heart under your palm, the feeling of his cooling flesh glued to your skin like gauze, and harsh breaths ghosting across your flesh are too good to ever be a dream.

You're not imaginative enough to conjure the phantom feeling of his softening cock seated deep within your aching, tender cunt.

Or the sting of your flesh.

Your body feels like one massive contusion. The throbbing sting of strummed rubber bands snapping across the places he touched, gripped tight between his fingers.

It feels like the aftermath of a battle, and the comparison makes your mouth split, unfurling into a satisfied grin as the quiver in your muscles begins to remind you of that time you sprinted through the bustling streets of Cairo together. The heat blooming in your chest, your core, as hot as the sun that scorched your exposed skin.

The burn in your thighs is the same throbbing pain you felt when you slid on loose sand, and skinned your bare knees on the cobblestone of a hidden alleyway, tucked behind an alcove.

Price is a firm mountain holding you steady—just like then, when he picked you up off the ground despite your protests (just a scratch, cap, I can walk—), and carried you through the maze of winding tunnels on the outskirts of the city centre. Solid. Stalwart. Your dependable leader.

You've looked at him the same way for the last four years. Respect, want. Admiration, desire. Greed. You crave him in ways that always, always, felt unattainable. One-sided.

Silly.

And that was it, you think, staring into the naked blue of his eyes. Bare. Raw. Vulnerable.

You've been so busy running from your own feelings, your own ways, convinced without any proof that they were one-sided. A one-way path without any parallels, any concurrents. All this time, with your head buried in your chest to avoid getting caught staring at him so wantingly, you've missed the look in his eye, bent by refraction—your own avoidance.

The way Price looks at you is rapacious—a twin flame to your own covetous desires.

There's something so unfathomably fragile about how he stares at you, now. Head bowed, catching the brunt of the chilled spray as it rains down on him, shielding you from the cold. He keeps you warm, and tucked safely in the fold of his arms. Unwilling, you think, to let go just yet. To slip back into the same impasse as before. The same forced stalemate forged by hesitation.

It drags something out of your chest—a laugh, maybe: broken and frayed at the edges, a vocal fry of derision, and disbelief.

His chin lifts at the sound, brow furrowing together in a knot of confusion between his nautical blue eyes. Six degrees. You feel every notch when he slowly lowers the two of you to the ground, falling in a clumsy heap to his knees, and still buried within you.

"What?"

The word is drenched in the thick tang of the bloom of his dormant hesitation shucking the tendrils of sleep away as the spell around you splinters at the broken laughter that tumbled from your lips. It makes you coo—a soft, soothing noise to placate the dent between his brow, and the knot of his mouth souring into an even line.

"Just thinking," you hum, legs tightening around his waist, knees now hiked up the sides of his ribcage.

He hisses teeth gritted teeth when you wriggle on his lap. "About what?"

Your palm sides down his slick chest until the thud of his heart sits in the cup of your hand. "About this."

Your words draw a low hum from his throat, and you feel it reverberate through your joints. "That so?"

That cold night in Cairo rears again. No substitute for the real thing.

The thing is: with your head buried in the proverbial sand, you missed the way his eyes never wavered from your face when he said it. How the corners tightened with something that felt like irritation, but now feels like restraint.

Why you had to hunt for Cleopatra's, anyway.

(—losin' some bloody cigars' is hardly the same as losin' you, love. Don't you ever do that to me—to us—again—)

In some ways, you think you lost the battle—many of them, in fact—but when he winds his arms around your waist, keeping locked in his embrace, you know you somehow won the war. The unwinnable victory thudding steadily against the palm of your hand.

You glue your forehead to his, and murmur: "been waiting a long time for this."

"Well," he rasps, voice ghosting over the shell of your ear. "Hell of a way to get my attention."

#i #i cant stop reading #everytime you post #fucking perfection #mhm mhm good shit #captain john price x reader #captain john price #buni☆recs

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