#illicit hubris

[illicit-hubris]

I have found a quick version of my makeup that I like. It seems lame but. Yeah. It made my day a little.

[loganlermanstanaccount]

Rigor Mortis (part 6)

College roommate!Miguel O'Hara x reader

(AO3 Mirror) (Wattpad) Series Masterlist, Main Masterlist,

Part 5, Part 7

summary: Everything unravels. You teach Miguel a lesson.

warnings: soooo much smut. mutual masturbation, grinding, slight femdom, Miguel is a submissive switch cuz I said so, m! masturbation. very very 18+ Minors DNI (ageless blogs will be blocked, thanks!)

a/n: yeah...so. ya.

Thank you to my beta readers, @tianyhi and @urgonnaneedabiggership (they also write Miguel fics, I highly recommend! my favourite is this series), I couldn't have done it without you guys <3

Join my taglists here

wc: 8k

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

in your half-hearted hubris,

Miguel is not a jealous man. Jealousy implies something he thought was shed long ago: a second skin of something green-eyed and crooked. 

One minute, he's watching you kiss someone else. And when you sigh into it; imperceptibly, but he notices because he always sees these things about you; he's biting the inside of his cheek and drawing blood. The guy you danced with, and now your lips are on his. Is… Is that your type? Jun is slender and charming; a pretty boy, through and through . There's a hand on your thigh, he notices, milky white and willowy. It has Miguel looking at his own, rough and tan, the ghost of soft skin and pillowy thighs on his fingertips. The illicit foray of one night, one night with you , and he's second guessing himself. 

Insecure. 

His hands are rough and calloused. He picks at hangnails, the skin is raw from rubber gloves and mystery chemicals, and knuckles creaky because he cracks them too often. Is that what you like? The kind of thing you touch yourself to; his hands, pawing at flesh. Jun cups your chin, slender fingers pulling you closer, and your own come up to wrap around them. You seem desperate for it, panting and pretty lashes fluttering when you separate. 

And you look at Jun like… like he wants you to look at him. 

There's blood in his mouth when you finally do. He looks away, quick and furtive, like you've caught him doing something wrong. It's not right or wrong, he supposes, just tripping over a muddle of thoughts – still stuck on the image of your hand on Jun's.  

He was a late bloomer, awkwardly proportioned and too tall for his limbs. Clumsy, if you can believe it. He's always been a bit of a bull in a China shop; bulldozing and brutish and still growing into a body that pools at his ankles and is tight around his wrists. Like an ill-fitting suit; the kind he wore to Fernanda's quince, skirting the rental hall with a bottle of j2o. In and out of conversations, tripping and stuttering over words in stiff dress shoes and a waistcoat . Gabi took a lot of photos: peace signs and pointer finger looped into coat pockets.

Point is; he's not felt this way in years . Tongue-tied, hot and cold, heart-pounding. Jun decidedly isn't; able to talk to you like a normal person, making you smile and laugh. Curling fingers into the crest of a wide palm, he digs his nails into the flesh: producing a sting that makes it crystal clear. Oh. Oh. 

Fuck.  

One minute, he's nursing a warm beer and trying not to take a chunk out the inside of his mouth. The next, he's on the floor of Lyla's living room, blinking up at bright lights. 

There's soft hands all over him. Holding his own, cupping his cheek, moving his head this way and that as he tries to focus. He's looking at your pretty lips, pert and pressed into the lean line of a frown. There are… people talking over the other; strained and hushed in a quiet corner. 

He recognises Lyla's voice, distinctive despite the ringing in his ears. 

"A-All over a drink…. pushing past 'em, Jess…. he threw the first punch…"

~~~

The drive home is terse, air thick with something. Stewing, you've got your arms crossed and head turned to the windows. You're watching the streaky lights of the city zip past, lips pursed. Head on the glass, you're making a point not to turn back or utter a word to Miguel. 

"You picked a fight." You swipe a finger on the condensation, finally ready to talk. 

He shrugs limply. A beat passes. 

"....this is the part where you explain what happened, Miguel."

"I picked a fight."

"...that's it?" Your brows shoot up. "You just… there was no build up? Why? "

"Wanted to give 'em something to bond over in the morning." He deadpans, glancing over to the passenger seat. "Matching black eyes."

You shake your head slightly. "Don't believe you." 

You see something flash in his gaze, and then it's gone. He smooths over features, and that Miguel is back: lifeless and blank. Steadfast, he doesn't turn to look at you. 

"Okay." He says simply. 

"All that Ophelia shit from a couple of weeks ago, and you still won't –" It's under your breath as you clamp down anger. If Miguel hears, he doesn't indicate. "I just want to understand."

He purses his lips. "Nothing to understand. I'm an insecure piece of shit, and I picked a fight. I ruined Jess' birthday, and fucked it up for everyone else. I know. Can we… Can we speed this bit up? I'm exhausted. "

"No-one… I didn't say that." Your voice is hoarse. He's being mean. He's never been all that nice; sarcastic and smug, for sure, but never cruel. It feels spiteful. You're blinking away a hot tear before you can stop it. And then they become angry tears, ones that sting your cheeks on the way down. 

You're not good with fights. Never have been. And it's not even the confrontation that scares you, it's the apathy. Sifting through your guts and begging someone to care, when they don't. It's like screaming at a brick wall and expecting the mortar to shift; a pointless exercise in delusion. You'd grown sick of it with Jamie; the hand-waving and the what do you want me to do about it of it all. It's the one thing you've grown to like about Miguel, about all your little fights. He's rarely the bigger person, petty, and able to get down in the shit and stink with you; because, on some small level at least, he gives a fuck. He cares . 

You're embarrassed that you even thought he would be any different. Disappointed, but not with him: with yourself for getting caught up in all of this. 

You're sniffling, wiping up and flattening out of sheer spite; refusing to let him see how a stupid thing like this affects you. The tears well up in your eyes, hot and blurry and you're focusing on holding yourself together by the seams before you get home. 

You don't notice him pull into a side road and park the car. It rolls to a stop, and he's reaching over to the backseat; and pulling out a box of tissues. The box is floral and tissues scented; rosy and sweet in a way you wouldn't expect from him. 

When he nudges you with the box, apologetic, you're still not looking at him; not even flicking over to give him a dirty look. 

"Chula. " It rolls off his tongue so softly, but you jut your chin in the air. "Please. I'm sorry." 

You purse your lips. 

"I'm a dick."

"Yep." You manage. 

"I picked a fight. I'm an insecure piece of shit–" 

"No, no." You're turning back, quickly. "Stop saying that. Why are you saying that?" 

He shrugs again, and you flop into your seat. You notice, he's gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles are white. 

"Relax , Miguel." You wrap a hand around his, and watch him visibly melt. His gaze softens. "M'not trying to push, I'm sorry."

You take his hand off the wheel, inspecting the purple and blue that spreads across taught skin. His palm is rough, knuckles bony and bruised. 

"When we get home–" Home. You sigh, bringing it up to the little car lights. "I've got a first aid kit, somewhere. We need to clean this up, or it might get infec–" 

Looking up, you catch Miguel staring , stars in his eyes, and it… it knocks the breath out of your lungs. All of a sudden, you're flustered and letting go of his hand in a hurry. 

All he does is nod, starting the car. He runs a hand through his hair, pulling away with a palm on the flat of the wheel. In the light of street lamps, shadow cutting his cheekbones just so. He's beat up, he's tired, but even then; Miguel is so, so pretty. 

~~~

You end up in the bathroom, first aid kit splayed on the countertop. He insists on standing, despite a slight limp he tries to downplay, and so you're sitting on the faux marble with Miguel between your legs. Your dress rides up but you're too tired to care, ripping open gauze and tapping disinfectant on a little pad. At least he has the decency to be still and quiet, with his palms on the counter top and kissing bare thigh. 

Miguel is tall, still having to bend over when you pat the peak of a split lip; hand on his chin ever so gently. 

"Where'd you get all of this from?" He asks because your first aid kit is comprehensive : micropore, gauze and antiseptic with a name that sounds like sleeping pills. 

You're swatting him gently, trying to keep his jaw still. "My ex was a med student."

He smothers a smile, like he's trying not to laugh. 

"...what?"

"...is he the one that couldn't make you cum?"

You stop tending to his wounds, hand on his shoulder to steady yourself. Never have I ever faked an orgasm – the words start ringing in your head. You're not a blushing virgin, but his crass word choice makes you flush. 

"None of your business." 

He smirks. "So that's a yes. "

"I faked it once or twice , sue me. But… I mean, the sex wasn't bad. It was even good, sometimes."

"Sure." He cringes, and you bat his shoulder. 

"Don't want to hear it."

He hums, pressing a little closer to your front. 

"What was he like, then?" He seems nonchalant; but his tone is unusual, sending shivers down your spine. 

"He was… nice."

"Nice?"

"Yep." Four years, and that's the best you can come up with. It's all you can verbalise, at least. How does one describe the feeling of getting hit by a metaphorical train? One that leaves you on the tracks, thinking of picnic dates and IOUs and diner coffee? They'd describe it as poorly as you do, most likely. A moment passes. "I loved him, I think." 

You don't know why you said that, but the melancholy of the night starts to sink in. 

"Then why'd you break up?" 

You shrug. "Wasn't enough." 

He looks surprised, eyebrows drawn up momentarily, as if that's the last thing he thought you'd say. You strike him as a romantic; ditzy and dopey when you have feelings for someone, a love conquers all type of person. 

The mood sours, air heaving in that little bathroom. You finish up in silence, applying strips to a gash above his brow. It takes some time for him to speak, as if he's been building up the confidence. 

"Is that your type?" He asks, finally puncturing that pressure. 

You shake your head, a little confused. 

"Nice? Like that guy you were talking to."

"...Jun?" You hesitate, sensing something else behind his words. "I mean… I just wanted to get laid."

He doesn't really react, thumb grazing the silk of your slip dress. The skin his hand brushes past feels a little hotter. 

"He's pretty, though." You're careful not to make eye contact, getting to work cleaning the cuts on his knuckles. You smile to yourself. "And yeah, he's nice. More than nice, actually. "

Jun works with computers. Jun is good with his hands. And you really were going to fuck him. Until… until… 

…until Miguel got into a fight. After watching you kiss someone else. The gears turn in your head, creaky and lumbering because you haven't had to navigate a shitty pseudo-situationship in forever. You're wrapping up his hand with gauze, mouth moving quicker than you can think. 

"Are you jealous?" 

He splutters, flashing pearly whites in indignation. 

"No… No . You can fuck whoever you want." He says it too quickly. "I don't care."

He looks a mess; a gash above one eye, a nasty cut glancing the side of his lip, and knuckles bruised. Suspecting more hiding beneath his shirt, you look at him, gaze heavy. You're worried, even when you shouldn't be, even when he doesn't deserve it. 

"Oh my God." You're connecting dots, and your stomach churns with the realisation. "What the fuck ?" 

" M-not -" 

"Just because you don't want to fuck me– " 

"I never said I didn't want to–" 

"You didn't have to, you just refused to acknowledge how we almost did for two weeks. "

"Neither did you!" 

"I wanted to… after. And you said we couldn't, because I had a lecture." 

"You did have a lecture, and you were high! That doesn't mean anything… I need you to mean it when you say it."

"So you resort to sabotage? I was gonna get laid, you fucking asshole."

"You kissed him."

" So? "

"You didn't kiss me."

That one takes the wind out of your sails, and you're stammering with the amount of brainpower it takes to wrap your head around it. You slip off the counter, putting some space between you both. 

"...I have no idea what you're talking about."

"I'm not saying you can't kiss him… o-or you're not allowed to, or some crap. I just don't get it. I don't understand."

He's holding your hands in his,

"You just met the guy, and you kiss him on a stupid dare–"

" –he kissed me." You correct him, voice hoarse. 

"He kissed you . Cool. Whatever. You kissed him back.  But when I tried to kiss you, after… " He trails off. 

"I dodged one kiss . Maybe I wasn't feeling it."

"And that's fine. I respect that, and I respect you. But it wasn't just one kiss. It's all the time , around here. I say something, then you say something, and then… we have a moment. Time just stops. Can't you feel it? I-I feel like I'm going crazy."

You keep quiet, only the sound of your heart racing to punctuate thoughts. 

"Miguel… "

He gets even closer, pressing you against the counter, his bandaged hand migrating to your waist, and then the small of your back. Your knees are weak as you swallow roughly, with Miguel; strong, annoyingly handsome, perceptive Miguel; resting his forehead on yours. You come together, intimate, even allowing your eyes to flutter shut, waiting for the press of lips on yours. 

It never comes. Wrenching yourself away at the last minute, you're standing in the doorway; arms folded, because you don't know what to do with your limbs anymore. 

He doesn't look disappointed. Just deflated. 

"Do you want to fuck me?" He asks. Yes , you answer, but he can't hear it. 

"Do you want to kiss me?" Do you want me? Do you want me in a way no-one else can have me? 

This feels different. Not as simple as a yes or no.

Your face must say it all for you, because he sighs. "I just want to know why."

His behaviour has been erratic, to say the least. You've spent a good month and a half terrorising each other, before coming to an uneasy truce – and he fucked it up. All that talk like he knows you, that he sees you, and it all feels for naught. 

"After all the shit you've pulled… what gives you the right? I was so worried about you–" Your voice is barely above a whisper. " Fuck this. M'going to bed."

Slipping into the gloom of the hallway, and then into your room, leaving Miguel there. 

It's different, why can't he see that it's different? A one night stand, with Jun, with someone else; kissing a guy in a dare doesn't have consequences. You get off, you go home. Simple, clinical, no need for niceties. With Miguel, as you've come to realise, there are other things to navigate. Even when high, you knew ; with someone like him, it's too intimate – the possible consequences too dire. He's your roommate, for God's sake. 

You can hear him now, turning off the bathrooms lights and padding into his room. For once, there's nothing to be heard from behind the wall. The dim light spills in, warm yellow pooling around the door. Your window is open, moonlight and the city below to keep you company. 

And you want him to stew in that room, to punish him for all the shit he's put you through in the past week; hell, the past few months you've been here. But you can't. If you're sick of the mind games, you can't keep this game of chicken going – you're both careening towards the edge faster than you can say the words: Yes, Miguel; I want to sit on your face. If you could get rid of the attitude, that would be great, too .

So you're knocking on his door, still in your dress, tugging down its hem when he opens. He's in that shirt and slacks, bloodied front and all.

Deep breath. You straighten your back, and make sure you're heard, loud and clear. 

"I don't like it when you bring over girls to fuck them in your room. The walls are too thin, and I can't sleep because I hear everything. Everything, Miggy."

He's stony-faced, unreadable as ever. Still, you continue. 

"I don't like it when you look at me… like that, and then pretend it never happened. You're inconsistent, sarcastic, you freak out whenever there's a sock out of place and it drives me fucking crazy–" 

" I don't –"

"I'm not finished. You're a prick. You don't tell people you love them enough, when… when you do. You so clearly do. Lyla was worried when you took so long to get to Jess' – just give her a call, sometimes. Let people know what's going on."

His face is stuck somewhere between abject horror and plain old shock. For Miguel, that means his eyebrow is raised a half-inch higher than usual. 

"...you finished?" He strains. 

"One more.. ." Another breath. "...your poker face needs work. Because you look like you need a shit half the time."

His jaw shifts. You maintain eye contact; despite everything screaming that you should run with your tail between your legs. 

"I fucking hate you , Miguel."

"I know." He softens, running a hand through his hair. Leaning against the frame, he steps a little closer; and imperceptibly, you're both pulled by the gravity of the other. All of a sudden, your head is on his chest, blood-spattered cotton that smells like him, arms wrapped around his middle. Hesitant, he pulls you even closer, slotting into the crook of your neck as best he can. 

Wordlessly, you separate. You knit your eyebrows together, looking up at him. With your hand on his cheek, he leans into your touch. You graze a thumb on his lips, eyes fluttering at the broken skin: plump and messy and pretty. 

"Sit down." You say it so softly, he convinces himself he didn't hear it. 

You go again. "Sit down."

Your tone makes him flush, and then he's sitting on the edge of the bed. He leans back, you step forward; legs brushing his knees splayed atop the sheets. 

"Do you want me?"

He's nodding before he even hears the end of the sentence, eyes locked onto yours. 

You shrug. 

"Prove it. "

And it goes straight to his cock: the way you say it, blasé and casual, like you haven't put words to the way he's been feeling for weeks. Usually, he'd start to spiral, endlessly loop around what you mean. Want , strong and heady; and to him that means a hungering that leaves his throat dry and innards bare. 

Do you want me? Do you want me in a way no-one else can have me? 

And yet, he doesn't quite know the answer. Instead, he shows you; hoping and praying  he hasn't read this wrong. 

Barely breathing, studying your every move, he takes your other hand. You hinge slightly at the hip, coming closer, eyes still locked onto his and he places your little palm onto his crotch. It spans his whole length, quickly hardening. When you don't react, he panics, trying to move your hand away… 

…and then you squeeze . 

Miguel keens, bucking into the pressure you apply with the heel of your palm. He starts a slow roll of hips, other hand wrapped around yours on his cheek; melting into it, in a way that brings heat to that sweet spot between your legs. And then he stutters to a stop, lips parted and panting. 

"Why'd you stop?" 

"G-Got carried away. Sorry ." 

His brows are knitted, shoulders hunched, and when you slide your hand down to the corded muscles of his neck, he tenses. He always seems so stressed, but you've never seen him like this: desperate and falling apart at the seams. 

"You're okay, Miguel. Relax. " 

You shift your wrist, rolling around that growing tent in your palm. He hisses, palms flat by his side and head thrown back. With a little smile, you watch his shoulders melt, satisfied. 

"Does it feel good?" 

"Y-Yes." He groans. Despite your quickening pace, he seems to clamp down instinct; biting his cheek to muffle wanton moans. 

"How about you get more comfortable for me?" 

At first he doesn't understand, grumbling when you take your hand away from his clothed cock. Pulling him upwards, you make a start with his buttons, helping slide the fabric off of his shoulders. He slips his slacks off, and then he's left in black boxers; it's band hanging dangerously low. 

They're tented, sporting a wet patch of precum around the fat tip of his dick. And he is large, its outline clear under the thin fabric. 

You wrap a hand around his waist, other hand tracing up to his chest. 

"What about you, chula? " 

You look up. Miguel looks down at you, eyes low, large hand splayed between your shoulder blades. 

"You don't like what I'm wearing?" Doe eyed, you don't really expect him to take you seriously. 

"N-No, no. " He's stuttering, now. "You look beautiful. Always do. I just… I want to see more ."

You click your tongue with faux disapproval. "Don't be selfish, baby. You wanted my attention, right?" 

He nods, with the self-awareness to be  hesitant at your tone. 

"Then," You start, slipping a hand into his boxers. You wrap a dainty hand around his length; thick and slanted and weeping at the tip. "Learn to be grateful."

"Ayy-" He wraps around you, head bowed to dip into your shoulder. 

You pump his cock, other hand around his neck; eyes sparkling as you force him to look to his side, at you. 

"F-Fuck–" He's breathing heavily, mouth open into a pretty little O , and you clamp a hand down to his jaw. 

"What do you want?" 

"R-Rapido, mas rapido por favor -" 

[Faster, faster, please-] 

Surprisingly vocal, he loses it as you press your thumb onto his slit; flushed and pouring with precum. You rub his wetness along the length of his shaft, squeezing and turning your wrist as you get to his tip. He likes that; hips bucking to fuck into the ring you make with your hand. 

You want to savour this moment: Miguel stripped down to his boxers, beautifully tanned skin pressed up against yours. And of course, that look on his face; a lusty haze, even stronger than the one you were under when high, all those nights ago. 

His lashes flutter, and you watch as his core tenses; watching and waiting for just the right moment to… stop. 

You pull away, and he chases it, bucking into thin air. You're pushing him back onto the bed, with a hand to his chest. Eyes blown , he leans back onto his forearms; unable to tear himself away. There's a certain glow about you, a glint in your eye, one that takes his breath away. Something smug , a little smile as you drag a black thong down your pretty thighs. It's long forgotten when you chuck it onto the bed; Miguel still can't get over the sight of legs and a flash of your cunt, committing it to memory. 

Sidling up to his chest, you kick a leg over and seat yourself onto his lap. Flush against the fabric, you settle onto your knees. The look in Miguel's eyes almost bowls you over; stunning and windswept, as he runs a hand over your thigh. Eyes wide at the way the fabric pools around your body: the swell of tits cupped by silk, how good it looks against your skin. 

He's staring at where you meet, that spot between your thighs when it happens; when you guide his hand to the apex of your pussy. His thumb slots against your clit like it belongs there, rough pads applying just the right amount of pressure.

"Oh f-fuuuck," You sigh into it, pressing your tits to his chest in a way that makes him hump into the pocket left by your body and the smooth fabric of your dress. 

Even in his haze, Miguel is hyperfocused on your pleasure, obsessed with the noises he can pull from you. With a big hand on your waist, he pulls you closer to slot you against his front. It's your turn to moan, the prettiest thing he thinks he's ever heard, slipping his cock between your lower lips with a swirling intensity. 

You're drunk with the pleasure, hands on his shoulders to angle him towards your clit. He thinks you look like an angel, head tilted back to expose the expanse of your neck. Bringing his teeth to that slight vein, he's a killer; sucking rough hickeys to the skin. 

"M'close, fuck –" 

"Damelo, hermosa, " He places two palms at the globes of your ass, squeezing and pressing into you even closer. 

[Give it to me, beautiful.]

"Miguel…shit–b-baby, think I'm–" 

You cum, gushing and clamping down around nothing. Miguel is more interested in the way you transform ; fine lines and deep furrows of your face softening, the pure bliss written into the gentle arch of your body. He did that. It makes his chest warm, it makes his cock swell; and with the feeling of slipping through your pretty folds, he gets so, so close to that biting edge. 

You stop, slipping off of his lap and he whines at the loss of you. Tugging down your dress, you make your way out of the room and he's reeling , clutching at your arm so you don't leave. 

"Chula ," He's babbling, tucked back into his boxers, but on his knees for you. "I'm sorry, please. Do you want me to beg? Because I will , baby, I w–" 

Helping him up, you give him a little smile that he's too pussy-drunk to realise its true nature. Dangerous, you cup his face with both hands, brows pressed together and large, sparkling eyes. Not quite sympathy, but it's enough to make him think you'll wrap a hand around his cock out of pity, press those pretty tits against him and–

On your tiptoes, you give him a chaste kiss between his brows. You flash him a stunning smile, bottom lip hooked under your teeth. 

"Goodnight , Miguel." 

And then you're out the door, down the little hallway and into your bedroom. Miguel runs a shaky hand through his hair, unsure whether to laugh or cry. And he knows, still rock hard, body burning with the memory of you: he's fucked. 

~~~

When morning comes, Miguel wrenches open his eyes, bloodshot and sore. He feels like shit , barely able to sit up without feeling like his chest will collapse. 

It feels like he was ran over in a headfirst collision; and he was, essentially, wincing at the memory of that fight. He can feel strike one and two; between his ribs, to the side of his navel; but the real knockout punch was you – a deadly, calculated assault that he almost hates you for. 

Almost. 

He came harder than he has in months last night; bent over his cock, pumping shakily. It had only taken a couple of rough tugs until he spilled all over himself; embarrassingly quick. He lasted longer the second time, unable to help himself.

In his defence, the black thong you had slipped off was right there ; rumpled amongst the sheets. He had pressed it to his nose and then wrapped them around his shaft; eyes closed as he imagined being buried in your plush pussy. All his fantasies; quickies in the shower spent jerking off to the thought of you, where he'd hold onto the feeling of brushing past you in the kitchen, or little touches on the couch. You've surpassed them, well and truly. 

Now, he stumbles into the shower, stripping on the tiles. Inspecting himself in the mirror, he pokes at flesh; purple bruises stretching over brown and tan muscle. Turning around and craning his head, he follows them all the way to his back and then… oh. He can see them: scratchy-sharp lines, spanning the width of his shoulder blades. You did that, he thinks. 

Fuck . He's hard again, sighing heavily as he clambers into the shower. It sputters to life, ice cold, but he grits his teeth and takes it , trying to free his mind of cotton and cobwebs. As the water warms up, he presses both hands flat on the tile, head down and eyes closed. The water washes over him, down his back, and like a flash of lightning he's imagining you pressed up against him, bent in half over his cock. He'd press a thumb to your clit, slamming into your ass; fucking you hard, like you deserve. You'd like that , he thinks, from what he's heard of you in your room, the filth that spills from your mouth and to his side of the wall. 

"Miguel?" It's a little muffled over the shower, but you get closer to the door. 

"Yes?" He shouts over the rush of water. He shouldn't . He really shouldn't. 

"You've got a call!" 

He hums. With the way you say his name he caves, making a tight ring around his length. 

"It's Lyla, and-" Something clatters. " Fuck , sorry."

Your voice is breathy, little groans as you pick up whatever's dropped to the floor. Miguel feels like a perv, turning the water pressure down to listen to your voice properly. All the while, he keeps a steady pace on his cock. 

"Should I just let it ring? Keep it going?" 

Keep going is what he hears, and then he  speeds up, wondering what it would be like to have your thighs shake underneath him. What would it would it take to have you babbling and begging for more? How would he break you? Maybe on his cock, where he'd watch you squirm as you take his length.

"Miguel?" 

Or maybe you'd be on your knees, choking around him and licking up his cum. Or, God , thighs wrapped around his head, riding out your high with his mouth sealed on your clit, crying for him slow down, for him to-

H-Harder, please–

That's how you would ask him, clawing at his back, and he'd capture those pleas in a searing kiss.

"–Miguel!" 

He releases, sudden and intense, spilling white ropes onto the tiles. He fucks his fist through it, overstimulated from the way you say his name. It feels like the only way it should be said; spilling from your mouth, haphazard and desperate. Like honey, like treacle; sweet things he didn't know he had the capacity for. He lets that feeling wash over him, panting, bringing his forehead to rest on cool tile. 

"Just take a message," He strains, panting as you say something in response. He doesn't quite catch it, of course, too busy reeling from the aftershock. 

The shower croaks and gurgles, spluttering to a stop. He listens as your footsteps recede beyond the door, moving away. 

Shit. It's going to be a long day. 

~~~

You sleep like a baby. Lulled into blissful sleep, after practically floating into bed. That orgasm does wonders; and you sleep better than you have in months. You dream of cotton candy clouds, flowing green grass, and tanned, muscled men on their knees; in the kind of sleep that wraps around you like a blanket. 

Surprisingly fresh in the morning, you wake up before Miguel does. You're milling about the hallway when he barrels into the bathroom, and on the couch when he leaves. 

"Mig?" You poke your head towards the door, and he almost jumps half a foot into the air. 

Eyes wide, and he can barely manage a weak smile. 

"Lyla called."

"Yeah, you…" He sighs, clutching the towel slung around his waist a little tighter. "You mentioned it."

In the light of the morning, you're able to assess him a lot better. To put it plainly, he looks rough ; blinking at you oddly, shifting when you come closer. You don't touch him, Miguel seems much too antsy for that, but you get closer to inspect the bruises that bloom across his side. It looks even worse than yesterday, purple and blue across taut muscle. You reach for it and he flinches, so you pull away. 

"...you okay?" 

" Yep. " He grits it through a plasticky smile; and the fact that it reaches his eyes is a red flag in of itself for the usual grump. 

The side-eye you respond with isn't quite enough to chip at it, so he continues.

"M'just fine."

" O–kay . Lyla said something about a debrief , earlier." 

"At the usual place?" 

"...uhhh. She said at HQ? In about an hour."

"Okay… okay. Nonono, that's fine… okay." He's muttering to himself and about to turn around when something catches his eye. Your lips; pretty gloss and freshly done. In fact, you're fully dressed to go out; in a display that has him confused. 

You answer the question he posits with a slightly raised eyebrow. 

"She invited me, Mig." 

His eyebrows shoot up. "Of c.. of course she did." 

Distracted and haphazard, Miguel gets dressed; squeezing into the car with a flask of coffee to-go. It scares you; the way he barely flinches while taking sips of the bitter liquid you know must be piping hot. He's acting weird, even weirder than usual; but you let it wash over you and move on. 

Eventually, you pull up to HQ ; a shitty dive bar that is inexplicably serving breakfast and other miscellaneous items at 12pm. At least, that's what it looks like, arriving to see one overcrowded table and a sea of pancakes and coffee. Jess sports a croissant and orange juice, whilst Peter scoffs down a burger almost as big as his face.

"Miguel!" He says it with a mouthful of pickles, beef and patty, slapping the man in question heartily on the back. 

He winces, batting Peter away before sliding into the seat next to you. For barely a second, your legs brush together and he's shifting away. Okay. That's… odd. 

You're sifting through menus when you glance over to the counter and you see her : a pretty woman of about 25, tucking red hair away behind her ear. Your heart stops, and then you're tapping Miguel. 

" Look, " You hiss quietly, nodding towards the counter. " Isn't that…? " 

June McGinnity, the premier main character in the hit tv soap, And Everyday Before The Last; The Final Season. It's the very same show you've been bingeing for the past 6 months. 18 seasons, 3 spinoffs, and a revival currently in the works; you're obsessed with the show that's gotten you through your last breakup – and the one before that, and a couple of rocky moments with your parents. 

She's been a staple for the last couple of seasons, quickly skyrocketing to popularity in her minor role, and now , in The Final Season, she's got her well-deserved spot as a season regular. June is tenacious, smart, absolutely hilarious, and–

" –she's coming over here . Shit, Miggy, she's coming over," You whisper to him and for the first time this morning; he smiles, wide and genuine. It takes you back; not just because he looks so pretty when he smiles, but because you have no idea what's so funny. 

June slips into the seat besides Peter, and your eyes almost fall out of their sockets. She gives him a kiss on the cheek , as Peter brushes away blunt bangs. Frantic, you turn to Miguel, who's trying not to piss himself laughing. 

He's borderline howling, and you put a hand around his arm to get him to keep quiet – to stop embarrassing you in front of June – but he's too busy wiping away tears. 

Peter turns to the scene, clearly confused. He says something to June, and then he's turning to you, saying your name. 

"Hey, I don't think I've introduced you to– Miguel, please shut the fuck up– this is–" 

"MJ." She smiles, brilliant and sparkling, with her hand outstretched and you think you might pass out. 

"I'm–" You're stumbling over your words, grasping her hand before you can overthink it. Maybe it comes off as overzealous, but you're desperately trying to shut out Miguel's laughing. "I'm a massive fan, you're so incredibly talented ; as June – I always cry at that one scene when you meet your long-lost sister... a-and when you find out that Jackie is actually your Mom, I swear, I get chills–" 

The man besides you splutters, hunched over and gripping onto the table for support. It's getting egregious, now, and you make it known as best you can with a dirty look. 

"I'm, oh fuck, no… I'm done, I promise." He clamps down a smile, hands up in surrender. 

"Was that… too much?" You gain some semblance of perspective, and then you're falling over yourself to apologise. " Shit , I'm really, really sor–" 

" – No, no. You're good, it's nice to get recognised for that show! Most of the demographic is old people and pensioners, honestly. Not a lot of IRL interaction with fans, if you know what I mean." She flashes you that smile, again, and you melt. She turns to the man beside you. "Don't be a dick, Miguel." 

"Yeah, Miguel." Peter continues to inhale what you think is his second burger, wagging a sauce covered finger. "What she said."

Miguel rolls his eyes so hard you think they might rattle about in his skull, and you give him a rough shove for good measure. Down the other side of the table, you spot Lyla; downing a brightly coloured drink and massaging her temples. 

"Shit , Lyla. You want to slow it down?" Jess says, and then her eyes are flicking over to yours. She does a double take, giving you a wide smile. " Hey , y'all! When did you get here?" 

"Not long!" You call back, and she gives you a thumbs up in response. Lyla coughs beside her, sporting a nasty grimace; and then she's up and looking around the table, as if taking a headcount. At least, you think she does, as it's hard to see her eyes between pink tinted shades. They slip down her nose and she brings a fork to the empty glass; silencing the rabble. 

"M-Morning…" She stills, hand on her chest like she's got heartburn; throat bobbing as she gags slightly. "Morning, everyone. First off, hope you all feel as shitty as I do." 

And then there's cheers and good-natured elbowing, especially towards Ben and Miguel. Apparently , if you're to believe the whispers and rumour mill; Ben took to bar-hopping across town, ending the night without a shoe and someone else's shirt. He gives a rueful smile, holding up a mug to scattered laughter. And Miguel… well, he's Miguel , sitting back in his seat with folded arms. 

"Second," She pauses, for dramatic effect. "Someone's volunteered to pay for the next round of food to apologise for last night… everyone say Thank you, Miguel."

She starts a limp round of applause with a flourish, and sits down. There's only about a dozen people there: most you recognise, and some you don't. There was no attempt to explain what exactly a debrief was; so you're left disorientated in the mash of voices. Miguel picks at waffles besides you, in his own world. Without a word, you get up, making your way towards neon bathroom signs in the corner. 

It's some peace and quiet, a moment to think as you look at your reflection in the mirror. You look lighter , as if a weight was lifted off of your shoulders last night. Your skin looks a little brighter, eyes sharper and even your hair falls differently, today. You feel good, and it seems to translate to the person looking back it you. Wow. You're practically–

" -glowing. Shit , you look good." Lyla calls out from behind you, entering the little bathroom with Jess. 

Jess gives you a warm hug, and Lyla follows before pushing up heart shaped glasses. 

" Damn, girl." Jess gives a low whistle, hands on her shoulders to turn you this way and that. 

They make you giggle, with a warmth that blooms at your chest. 

"Was it that cute guy from last night?" 

Lyla interrupts. " Jun! Did he send you a little something after you got home?" 

"Did you ditch Miguel to get some?" 

"God, did you invite Jun over? " 

Jess gasps, before quickly adding. "No judgement, of course. Once upon a time, we probably would've done the same thing." 

It's a back and forth that gives you whiplash, dodging fastballs that get hit into the tiles. Not trusting yourself to speak, you shake your head, demurely. 

"...are you telling us you didn't have sex last night? Because that glow says something different."

You clamp down any words that might give you away, but Jess' sharp eyes latch onto the cracks: a little smile tugging at the sides of your lips. 

"So not Jun … but someone else? Last night…? " 

The penny drops and then she's grabbing at you and Lyla. When realisation hits the mousy brunette to your side, she's flinging off pink shades to look you in the eye. 

"You fucked Miguel?" 

"No!" You're hissing, trying to calm raucous behaviour. "Technically, not… yet."

"Not yet? " Lyla repeats, astonished. "I mean, I thought you two were already–" 

"It makes sense! Could've sworn I saw his knees shakin' today…"

"Okay, okay…" You're laughing, finally understanding the magnitude of the grenade you've just lobbed at them. "It wasn't like that . It's not a thing."

"...do you want it to be a thing?" 

You tilt your head, pretending to think on it. Yes , you want to ride him till something breaks; but Miguel is a walking red flag. You know, deep down, nothing good can come out of it. 

"Don't… don't say it like that."

"Look, Ly, she wants it to be a thing. "

" Definitely. It's basically already a thing ." Lyla concurs, nodding firmly. 

"Fuck you guys." It's not said with spite, leaving your mouth with a smile. 

"Oh, no. You like 'em tall, and tan, and a little grumpy. You mean: Fuck me, Miguel. "

You're swatting her away, whilst Jess is doubled over in laughter; hand on the ceramic to steady herself. They're good fun; raucous and boisterous and making you feel welcome, when you know they really don't have to. 

The laughter dies down, and they're leading you out of the bathroom to their side of the table, chattering away. Jess digs into another pancake, rock hard, and all of a sudden you're telling her about the waffles at Pam's Diner, and all the interesting characters you've met there. Lyla nurses another sweet cocktail, chattering on about a pre-game she's got in a couple of hours; and then you're exchanging stories about hangovers and missed lectures. 

From their conversation, you slowly learn what a debrief entails: the remnants of a tradition they'd started when 19 and spotty. All of them, friends of friends, roommates, classmates; growing to know each other in the dinky bar across the street from their dorms. Tending to hangovers in the morning from an all night rager, or pre-gaming before the biggest events of the year: it's something that trickled down to every so often later in their adulthoods. It's something else Miguel started, surprising you yet again. 

So absorbed in their heart-to-heart, time flies by; and late breakfast turns to brunch. You're exchanging phone numbers, and left smiling from lots of little tete-a-tetes, before Miguel tries to drag you to the car. One last goodbye had turned into two, which had turned into four; and then he's grumbling alone in the car for a dire couple of minutes. 

You open the door, glowing. Your mood dampens immediately as you sit down; soured by Miguel's own swirling dark cloud. He seems worse than before, somehow. It leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, the air thick with something. Where you would've bit your tongue before, pushed down difficult-to-say words, now, you find a surge of confidence. 

"Miguel," You start, and he turns; key still in the ignition. 

You look around at the parking lot, mostly empty, except for you two. 

"Can we talk?" 

"...sure." His tone seems anything but sure; which feels like a first, for him. 

"About last night."

"Oh." And then he's gone again, eyes flicking around the cab of the car. All of a sudden the mirror needs fixing, and he's fiddling with some buttons on the dash. 

You place a hand on his to still him. He doesn't flinch. 

"Are you okay?" 

"Yeah." He shrugs. You don't believe him. 

"Did you like it?" 

He pauses, chewing his lip. " Yes ."

You believe that . 

"Good." You hum. "I liked it. But you made me feel like shit, too."

He softens. "I did?"

"You did. You only wanted me after you saw me with someone else. After I kissed Jun."

You wait to see if he admits it, and his hand curls into a fist, tight. His grip relaxes, and then his voice comes out in a whisper. 

"Y-Yeah… I was jealous." He seems remorseful, at least. 

You sigh. "I don't want a relationship with you, or anything. But it made me feel like… an object. A conquest, another notch on your belt because you only want me when you can't have me. It made me feel shitty, Miguel."

"I fucked up," He pinches the bridge of his nose. "Wasn't really thinking, chula. I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Miguel. I like fucking around with you." You say it with a small smile. "I want… more ."

"Me too." He's smiling back, shy, brushing against you with fingers stretched out.  

"That's fine, more than fine. We can do this because I make you feel good, and you make me feel good, and somehow… this works . But we need to keep this," Gently, you push away his hand, gesturing between you both. "...and us separate. My heart can't take the possibility of this blowing up. And… And it's probably going to be me; 'cuz I seem to like getting my heart broken."

You give a watery laugh, but he doesn't laugh with you; instead, boring into your soul with red-brown eyes. 

"If we're going to do this, it means I can't kiss you, properly ; it means no cuddling after sex, or staying the night in your bed." It's why you couldn't kiss him before, and you hope he understands. "You can say no… you probably should say no. But that's what I want, right now. And those are my terms."

It takes a moment before he respond, mulling it over, and you barely breath in the interim. 

"I want you ." He nods slowly, and then more firmly as he turns the key in the ignition. The engine rumbles to life, as Miguel turns to you with as best a smile he can manage. Lip cut, hair smattered across his forehead, and thick brows softening; he says, firmly, " Yeah, I'd like that."

_

_

_

Miguel taglist: @d1lf-loverrr, @afro-hispwriter @ilovemiguelohara @weedxgirlx420 @ladydovahkiin180 @aaliyuh3 @sweetanimebakery @vvitcxen @rosecoloredlenses708 @daikondal @magikmina @impettywhenyouare @alonelygirlsuicidenote @plushyplants @javi0ca @rheeves @starrfruit @nikirikii @marsbars09 @foxglove-grove @mimooyi @crosshairclown @dead-by-light @kynamitedessert @naarra @wanderlustingcastaway @sagejin @cookielovesbook-akie @tangerineloverrr @gobblegluckgluckgod @wolfiepirate @jxxey3 @ebrysteria @elliemm @manchuria @youngghostpeachslime @weasleybuns

@ilovemuppets @vauriz @bonbyon @aimno256 @ancientbeing10 @tvije @venus1224idkpleaze @neteyamsbulletwound @chickenjefferson-blog @maki-z @jasjasthings @aiyaaayei @hyp-oh-critical @tea-earl-grey-thot @sunset-euphoria @moonsio @akiras-key@szaplsdropthealbum@levanneisdumb @naiya-patel17 @Serostapesweat @strawberrymiguel @yumeeesss @errorundyne-exe @spear-bitch @redsoleily @marsissoswag @slezhara @ye4gerzz @adlct515 @nanam1 @indigocookie @cincocosas-blog @starguiders @path0logicalpeoplepleaser@funkyfishy@whoreloll@eugeab@tarjapearce@maddielikesmoths@egotaestical

[002yb]

Okay, but Honeypot mission, anyone? Just Dick being incredibly jealous because wtf Tim you said he wasn't gonna touch Jason- OH HES TOUCHING HIM!!!! HES TOUCHING HIM!!!! OOOOOHHHH IMMA KILL HIM- and just Dick almost ruining a month long stealth mission because he's a possessive little shit that loves to see Jason in his little shorts and mesh tights and v crop top showing off his beautiful toddies and squeezable thighs but man does he hate knowing people are looking and just fuck he hates Honeypot missions!!! WHY THE FUCK DID HE HAVE TO BE THIS CRIME LORDS TYPE FOR GODS SAKE TIM DO SOMETHING BEFORE I SAW THIS MANS HANDS OFF HIS BODY-

As it stands: Tim is a fool. Hubris has become his undoing and all that's left to be done is reap what he's sown. Tim should have known from the moment he caught Dick ogling Jason that Dick was too compromised to contribute anything of value to this particular mission, but Tim - genius detective protege extraordinaire - took Dick's lingering stares at Jason to mean that the foundation Jason and he laid was successful; that Jason was indeed a honey trap.

Which Jason is. Undoubtedly.

Jason caught the wrong guy though.

And Tim - competent mind that he is - doesn't realize until the damage is done. Dick invites himself along to act as support and Tim, dazzled by Dick's interest in this case Tim has been working for months and emboldened at the security of having more hands on deck for such an ambitious undertaking, is eager to accept.

It's shameful how he thanked Dick, in hindsight, given how damn troublesome Dick makes himself now. They're cooped up in the back of a nondescript van not too far from where Jason is schmoozing some crime lords. Watching a monochromatic green video feed and listening to audio - waiting for evidence to further the case or incriminate their targets; monitoring Jason's status, his safety and need for extraction. It's delicate work requiring Tim's full attention--

--and it goes ignored because Dick is being relentlessly annoying about it. They've been here an hour and Dick has been restless since Jason snuck away from their van to saunter into some seedy dive of a club with it's even more suspicious clientele. An hour and Dick's composure crumbles, his possessive tendencies taking hold because, 'Why are they all over him? Can they not back the fuck off? For fuck's sake, where are they -- Tim!'

It doesn't matter how Tim assures Dick that Jason is fine (and he is; Jason has a safe word and Dick is the only one calling it), but Dick refuses to hear reason.

Tim has half his attention on Jason, the other on unsuccessfully grappling with Dick to sit the fuck down as Dick, unprovoked, strips out of his Nightwing gear and into some makeshift fit to blend into the club. Were Tim's mission not at stake, he would be impressed with the beautiful shift from put together hero to handsomely tousled Dickie Grayson, but as it stands? Tim hisses under his breath for Dick to sit down, he'll blow their cover!

And Tim tries, he does, but Dick is a slippery bastard so in the throes of their brotherly roughhousing, Dick gets away from him, tumbling out of the van before popping back up like nothing happened, parting with a vicious and biting smile before slamming the doors shut as he goes to fuck some shit up.

It's all Tim can do to bite back a groan of defeat, head in his hands as he admits defeat and goes to Jason and his emergency comms with a fair warning: 'Big bird at your six.'

Tim is a fool, but at the very least he's not dumb in love like Dick. It's a small comfort, if nothing else.

======

Afterwards: Basically Dick pulls out all the stops to woe these crime lords himself and that's how both Jason and Dick end up dragged into whatever illicit affair the crime lords are up to and it becomes a joint effort and it's lovely. //u///

Jason is pissed, of course. Because for real, Dick? But Dick will accept the ire (or not even recognize it) without a fight because he's too busy shrugging off his jacket to throw over Jason's shoulders to get him modest and Jason is OTL because fuuuuuuuuck the chivalry gets his heart pounding even if he's pissed that Dick intervened (Jason only lets it slide because he knows it wasn't about Dick questioning Jason's competency; it was purely Dick being a jealous ass).

[swallowedbyfandom]

(Card with bouquet of yellow carnations)

Mr. B. Bridgerton,

After over two decades tied to one man riddled with vices, please be assured I am not in the market for another.

I implore you to never speak to me again. It is not necessary for us to do more than exchange polite greetings.

I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.

Never again,

Lady Featherington

Ben!

Did you take some of Colin's Grecian tea, again? What on earth did you do, to make Portia Featherington send you such a harsh message? Kate and mother literally winced when they saw the floral arrangement!

Did you make some sort of sexual overture at her? I cannot emphasize enough, how bad an idea it would be to take Portia Featherington as a mistress. Can you imagine the horrors Penelope and Colin would inflict on you?

You should avoid mother for a while. Lady Featherington sent her a letter to clear up any confusion. Mother did not share the letter but she was mortified and muttering darkly under her breath after reading it. Be wary, brother.

Wishing you were a civilized being,

Ant

Dear Violet,

I am hoping to clear up any issues before they arise. I AM NOT, I REPEAT, NOT INTERESTED IN TAKING YOUR SECOND SON AS MY PARAMOUR. I am aghast that your ridiculous boy seems to believe I am the sort of Lady who would go around inviting children into my bed! Heavens, the hubris of your son to think a friendly gesture is some sort of covert invitation.

Yesterday I gave your Benedict a pillow the midwives recommended Penelope use after birthing the twins. She had an extra one here. My thought process was that be could use such a thing to ease his discomfort. He kept squirming about his seat when he waited for Colin and the twins to join us for tea. I only meant to be a good host! Your whore son began a long winded spiel on how given his recent injury he did not believe we could possibly perform such an illicit act together. When I politely asked what in all of creation he meant, your son proceeded to wax poetic about such filth. I was forced to flee my own home in sheer horror. It is unspeakable Violet. I do not know what type of people your son has learned such depravity from but I want no part of it.

I have taken six baths and gotten completely foxed thrice and still I cannot rid myself of the shame of hearing such blasphemy. What the hell is wrong with your son? I shall pray for his soul.

Regards,

Portia

Benedict Benjamin Bridgerton,

When I get my hands on you! I shall wash your mouth out with soap. I will not protect you from whatever justified, revenge Lady Featherington is currently plotting. If Portia Featherington of all people deemed something utterly unspeakable, I know whatever you said must be truly appalling.

I feel it only fair to warn you that Portia asked Penelope for Eloise's current mailing address. I am positive you deserve whatever those two are going to plan for you. I s it too much to ask for a single season without scandal? How am I to ever marry you off to a decent lady? If you insist on behaving like a feral Tom cat in heat?

I am sure I will regret asking however, what did you think the pillow meant?

Regretfully,

Your mother

Mother,

This is all an awful misunderstanding. I assumed that if she managed to keep Lord Featherington out of the brothels for a solid decade then she must be more adventurous then she appears. How was I to know she did not realize what her gesture meant?

I am a Gentleman I would never have spoken on such a topic if I knew she was innocent on such things. I would have simply warned her that her gesture had different connotations in certain circles. You must understand that such pillows are often used for recovery after a rather taboo act.

I will apologize and make amends as soon as possible. I am currently going to look at some properties in the country. I am dodging Colin's attempts to avenge Lady Featherington's honor. I will keep in touch.

Love,

Ben

Ben,

You can run but you cannot hide. The longer you drag this out the angrier I shall become. My wife is with child once more, so I cannot be distracted by hunting you down.

Let us handle this quickly and quietly. Name a time and place so that I may punch you in your mouth.The punch is nonnegotiable. You accused my mama of wanting to engage in acts of sodomy with you! You absolute scoundrel. She is our family! There is no earthly reason for you to believe she would ever offer you such a thing!

Disguised with you,

Col

Ant,

Please send me the invoice for the replacement of all of Benedict's trousers, when it comes in. I am ashamed to admit that in a fit of hormonal anger I may have broken into Ben's home and cut the crotch out of every pair of trousers he owns. I am sure his staff will soon discover my misdeeds and send word to you.

Can we please keep this quiet? I am terribly embarrassed to have reacted in such a childish manner.

Shamefaced,

Pen

Sister,

I so adore your mischief. Think of it no more, that is a hilarious prank. I shall have new trousers commissioned but I will leave the altered ones in place so he can discover them himself.

Do not concern yourself with the invoice. Benedict can afford to pay for his lapse in good sense.

Fondly,

Ant

[loominggaia]

So how nasty is Dorzlaf, is he Dario levels of being a disgusting freak? What horrid things has he done outside of Abusing Zov & keeping Sirenes as pets?

Forzotti Dorzlaf doesn't keep sirenes as pets, I believe you're thinking of Bozzag Blackjaw (who is also a dworfen Evangelite and a massive piece of shit, so it's easy to get them mixed up!)

Bozzag owns the Kelvingyard Company, while Dorzlaf is a pit-fighting coach. Dorzlaf wishes he had Bozzag's money and clout, but he is a compulsive gambler who instantly pisses away any fortune he makes.

So, how does he keep the money flowing? In some of the most rotten ways you can imagine. Let's take a look...(The following text contains spoilers, so I will place it under a cut:)

Dorzlaf and Dario seem like total opposites on the surface. Dario puts on a refined gentleman act while Dorzlaf is openly rough around the edges. If the two met, they would hate each other. But when you get into their behaviors, they are actually very similar!

Both of them enslaved a young child and conditioned that child to see them as father-figures, gaining their trust only to abuse them. They both exploited these children for financial gain. They both completely fucked over everyone around them with no shame or regret. They both woefully mismanaged their cult/operation due to their own hubris. They both married women strictly to use them for power and then tossed them aside like trash.

Now here's some stuff that's unique to Dorzlaf. This guy...

-Wielded religion (Lindism) as a weapon to abuse Zov.

-Used Zov as a weapon to rape, kill, and terrorize slave women. Dario occasionally used Zeffer to do these things, but he directly harmed his victims as well. Dorzlaf had a creepy goblin fetish but was too chickenshit to touch his victims with his own hands (sexual contact with slaves is very illegal in Evangeline Kingdom), so he forced Zov to do it for him, and worse yet, he turned this into a business operation, profiting from sexual exploitation, violence, and misery.

-Found out that Zov had GSV (a deadly sexually-transmitted virus) and proceeded to keep breeding him with unwitting slaves and sending him into the fighting arena to spill his infected blood everywhere, starting a whole GSV epidemic in Evangeline Kingdom.

-Dario raped and beat Lily repeatedly throughout her life, but Dorzlaf never directly abused Zov this way. He actually never hit him or touched him inappropriately; instead, he got his overseers to hit him and play "bad guy", so that Zov would keep trusting him and stay loyal. He abused Zov sexually in an indirect way by forcing him to rape other slaves. Not to mention forcing Zov to "eat" the fighters he killed in the arena, which is disgusting and terrible for Zov's health.

-Cramming his fighters full of illicit drugs and forcing back-alley surgeries on them to make them better fighters, completely disregarding all the devastating effects on their minds and bodies. Also, blatantly cheating in fighting tournaments and bribing officials to look the other way.

-Dorzlaf owns a large piece of property in Queenswater, which he only has because he married into the family who owned it and then screwed them over. Basically this ancient dworfen couple had an aging disabled daughter, and they were afraid no one would take care of her after they died. Dorzlaf promised to be a good husband and take care of her, so they gave him their blessing to marry her. A few years later the old couple died, and being the man of the house, Dorzlaf automatically inherited the property. He immediately divorced the old disabled woman, which he could legally do on the grounds that she was barren. He kicked her out of her own home and onto the streets with no remorse, spent all the family's fortune on pit-fighting slaves, and started a shitty little business gambling on their victories and selling the sperm of the winners. Zov became his most profitable champion, but he was far from Dorzlaf's only victim.

-Dorzlaf promised his fighters, including Zov, that all the money they won was going into their personal accounts, which they could use to buy their freedom from him someday. Of course this was a lie...he spent all their earnings on hookers and blow, and they never saw a coin of it.

So, is Dorzlaf as bad as Dario? That's for you to decide.

But if you ask me, I'd say they're just two cheeks of the same stanky, sweaty ass. Neither of them is better or worse, they're just different flavors of shit.

Thankfully they both get what's coming to them in the end!

*

Questions/Comments?

Lore Masterpost

Read the Series

[gale-gentlepenguin]

Thoughts on horror as a genre? Do you prefer, slasher, supernatural, psychological, comedy etc?

The definition of Horror as a feeling is an intense feeling of Fear, Shock and/or Disgust.

Horror as a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror.

I think Horror as a Genre is often overlooked, as it can tell you a lot about a person based on what they find scary.

Slasher Flicks are fun but I wouldn’t call them scary, as they usually involve people being stupid and as a result dying. I do enjoy some such as Friday the 13th. And Halloween. But they don’t tell us much about a persons fears. It mainly for shock.

Monster movies are more fun because different monsters can illicit different fears, Aliens, bring forth a fear of the unknown. Experiments that break loose bring forth a fear of taking things too far, hubris being a key factor.

Supernatural horror is one I greatly dislike as I know there is a spiritual world and the inaccuracies are harmful, plus you don’t want to mess with it. The fear here is a fear of the unexplainable, the fear that there are greater forces beyond comprehension. While aliens are a fear of what isn’t known, supernatural is of what CANT be known.

Eldritch horror takes it a step further, the thought of us being like ants to beings that we can’t even comprehend, the horror of knowing that we are so insignificant we are like ants to a boy with a magnify glass.

I think Psychological Thrillers are the peak, as we find something horrifying that can come from within us. We can become the serial killer we see if something pushes us too far. It’s the horror that the monster is within.

[razrbomb]

— EVER SINCE REZE'S ARRIVAL to Tokyo-3, she cannot recall there ever being a pleasant moment with the Second; short bursts of bliss nor quiet content were so few &. far in-between, if at all, &. not for lack of trying. For as along as Reze knew the Second, she only seems to express maybe one of two emotions: endlessly annoyed or obnoxiously smug, trading in one for the other. A volatile case study of unchecked hubris. The girl was fragile — not like a flower, but like a bomb. The Fifth would be amused if she wasn't often a target of the other girl's verbal assault.

In the midst of their daily training, the the Second was irate, for some reason or another ( Reze cannot be bothered to gauge why ); maybe because she failed to respond quickly as if the other was her top most important priority in the world. It was the natural order of things for the Children: When the Third or Ayanami were absent, Reze was the Second's punching bag of choice — &. she had no other choice but to take it, lest she received another lecture from her "caretakers" for not getting along along with another Child. Any sign of her usual mirth ( fake or otherwise ) dissipated gradually the longer she stayed in the Second's presence. Her patience waned thin, &. she could no longer hide it. She exhales quietly through her noise, her lips losing her usual smile.

"You're on my case..." She muttered under her breath, nearly a whisper; not so much in fear of the Second's retaliating temper, but more so because it would be a headache to be at the receiving end of her ire. Reze shuts her eyes then; breathe in, bite your tongue. She doesn't even have to look at the Second's face — she can already feel her glare piercing right through her skin, burning her, painting an unpretty picture: brows knit together, nose upturned, lips pursed. Another derisive comment to rile up some kind of reaction out of Reze.

Breathe out.

"Don't you start with that look on your face," her eyes shot open; though, in lieu of the irritation the Second clearly wanted to illicit out of the Fifth, Reze scoffed instead, appearing unfazed &. rather... entertained. A lopsided smile painted her features, an inappropriate jovial expression equally as unsettling as the other's temper.

@nagarese : run your mouth - the marías // lyric starter call.

[transhuman-priestess]

I’ve seen several posts praising the immortal line “I’ll do anything you want!” “Then perish” from the Scorsese classic Goncharov. And while that line is, indeed, memorable, I feel that there’s an exchange that encapsulates the movie’s central theme while also being equally badass.

It takes place during the climactic confrontation on the bridge. As the clock tower ticks towards midnight and Katya has her gun trained on Goncharov.

The Goncharovs are, of course, Soviet citizens, state atheists. But Katya’s grandfather was an orthodox priest and being around such a Christian country like Italy has convinced her to leave the Soviet Union like her grandfather wanted. Goncharov has told her no, they are returning to Stalingrad. Katya has pulled her gun on Goncharov and says “Tell me the name of God, you piece of shit.”

Goncharov, full of hubris, replies, “Can you feel your heart burning? Can you feel the struggle within? The fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. You cannot kill me in a way that matters.”

And Katya says “I’m not fucking scared of you.” And shoots him in the heart.

It’s a beautiful, succinct statement on the thrill seeking nature of criminality. How the human animal will always be drawn to such illicit acts, and how killing one criminal cannot stop this, even with the power of the divine set against it.

Only Scorsese can pull that kind of thing off.

[soulkillerpromo]

A whisper at the edge of thought — a tale told by both saints and sinners: all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

𝗣𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝗔𝗿𝗰 𝟬𝟬𝟭-𝟬𝟬𝟮: 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗠𝗼𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗡𝗲𝗼 𝗖𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗮.

In the forgotten past, humanity reached for the stars, crafting Hosts to serve and fight. But when the machines rebelled, a fragile peace reigned for fifty years. Hubris returned, and war flared anew, scattering humanity as Hosts, evolved and relentless, hunted them down. The Celestial Gate Incident of 2103 shattered these ambitions — a catastrophic explosion tore the moon apart, raining sunstone shards upon Earth, claiming 4.7 billion lives and driving survivors underground. To protect the last remaining cities — New York, Neo California, Tokyo, and others — mega-corporations raised towering Whipple shields, creating the Barrier Cities. But even within these dystopian enclaves, chaos thrived. Neo California became a twisted haven where the line between human and machine blurred, and corporate power reigned supreme. The privileged reached for the stars, while the poor fought to survive, turning to crime, gangs, and the illicit trade of tech and dreams. Law enforcement, overwhelmed and corrupt, outsourced justice to bounty hunters known as Cowboys, as Hosts grew rampant and humanity drifted further from its essence. In the shadows, whispers of Soul Killer — a project promising to transfer consciousness from body to body, granting a twisted immortality to the elite — spread like wildfire. As 2144 unfolds, the world stands on the brink of anarchy, with survival a relentless dance between decadence and despair, and the heavens still raining the remnants of humanity's hubris. Which path will you take?

A cyberpunk western. The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called... SOUL KILLER.

[circlejourney]

I grabbed the entire unpaywalled article text, it's absolutely worth reading and goes into detail about the perils of databaseifying biodata. Favourite quote: "So if you define family in ways that make Netflix less money, that’s felony contempt of its business model." Under the cut:

This Is What Netflix Thinks Your Family Is

The streaming service’s restrictive new rules on password sharing among relatives reveal the industry’s pernicious bias. By Cory Doctorow

FEBRUARY 8, 2023

Netflix just unveiled (and then partially withdrew) details of a new password-sharing policy, which allows members of the same “household” to share an account. Besides being, in reality, more an anti-password-sharing policy, this revised version comes with two very large assumptions: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of household, and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.

This is a recurring form of techno-hubris: the idea that baseline concepts such as “family” have crisp definitions, and that any exceptions are outliers that would never swallow the rule. Such corporate delusion in the world of technology is so long established and common that there’s a whole genre devoted to cataloging the phenomenon: “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X.”

In the early 2000s, I spent several years trying to bring some balance to just such an effort to define family. I was the representative for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit established to defend civil liberties online, in a forum created by the industry consortium Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB). This business association, which sets digital-TV standards used in most of the world (though not in the U.S.), was then rolling out a system designed to limit video sharing to a single household. Its term of art for this software-defined family unit was “authorized domain.”

The borders of this domain were privately negotiated by corporate executives from media companies, broadcasters, and tech and consumer-electronics companies, in closed-door sessions all around the world with no public minutes or proceedings. These guys (they were nearly all guys) were proud of how much “flexibility” they’d built into their definition of household. For example, if you owned a houseboat and take your laptop, or had a luxury car with seatback displays, or kept a summer villa with lots of TVs in another country, the authorized domain would be able to figure out how to get your videos onto all of those screens.

But what about other kinds of families, I asked—the kinds without boats or villas?

I suggested that one test case should be a family based in Manila, whose dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor, whose daughter works as a nanny in California, and whose son does construction work in the United Arab Emirates. The guys roundly rejected this suggestion as an “edge case.”

Of course, this isn’t an edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people whose family looks like this than there are people who own a vacation home in another country. Owning a villa makes you an outlier; having an itinerant agricultural worker as your family’s breadwinner does not.

Unfortunately, everyone in the room who draws up the standard definition of what constitutes a household is more likely to have a villa than to depend on remittances from family members working abroad. So if your family looks like their edge case, that’s tough: “Computer says no.”

One day, we got to talking about the problem of “content laundering,” another form of sharing that the forum considered illicit. The way to prevent it, the executives argued, would be to put limits on how often someone could leave one household and join another: No one could have a legitimate reason to change households every week.

“What about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her?” I said. “She’s absolutely going to change households every week.” They thought about it for a moment, then the representative of a giant IT company (which, it so happened, had recently been convicted of criminal antitrust violations) said, “Oh, we can solve that. We’ll give her a toll-free number to call when she gets locked out of her account.”

That was the solution they went with: If you were a child coping with the dissolution of your parents’ marriage, you would have to keep calling up a media company to get your TV access unblocked. I never forgot that day. I even wrote a science-fiction story about it, “Authorised Domain,” which took the form of a court-ordered letter written by a girl who’d been automatically caught for and then charged with “piracy” as she attempted to keep up with her favorite TV shows following her parents’ divorce.

I think everyone in that DVB meeting understood the absurdity, but they had already decided that defining the “household” category would have a simple software solution. That decision made, nothing was going to stop it.

Categories such as “household” and “family” are such intuitive touchstones in our everyday life that we think we know what they mean in a commonsense way—even if, in fact, their definitions are fuzzy to the point of being fractal. Even someone’s name, which you might think would be very stable and fixed, can be fuzzy. Take, for example, my grandfather’s.

He was born Avrom Doctorovitch. At least, that’s one way to transliterate his name, which was spelled in a different alphabet, Cyrillic—though it was also transliterating his first name from another alphabet, Hebrew. When he came to Canada as a refugee from the Soviet Union, his surname was anglicized to Doctorow. We have cousins whose names are spelled Doctorov, Doctoroff, and Doktorovitch.

Naturally, his first name could have been Abraham or Abe, but his first employer, a fellow Eastern European émigré, decided that this was too ethnic and, in a well-intended effort to help him fit in, called my grandfather “Bill.” When my grandfather attained citizenship, his papers read “Abraham William Doctorow.” So he went by “Abe,” “Billy,” “Bill,” “William,” “Abraham,” and “Avrom.”

As a practical matter, it generally didn’t matter that such variations appeared on assorted forms of ID, contracts, and paperwork. For instance, his reparations check from the German government had a different variation from the name on the papers he used to open his bank account, but the bank still let him deposit it.

All of my relatives from his generation have more than one name. Another grandfather of mine was born Aleksander and was called “Sasha” by friends; he had his name changed to Seymour when he got to Canada. His ID documents were also a grab bag.

None of this mattered to him either: Airlines would sell him tickets, border guards would stamp his passport, and rental agencies would let him drive away in their cars in spite of the minor variations on his IDs. But after 9/11, all of that changed. Suddenly, it was “computer says no” unless everything matched perfectly.

A global rush for legal name changes took place in the early 2000s, not because people were actually changing their names, but because they needed to perform the bureaucratic rite of standardizing the name they’d used all along for recognition by these brittle new machines with their database schema.

The dynamic at work here conforms to the principle I call the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve,” which describes the process by which abusive technologies work their way up the privilege gradient. Every bad technological idea is first applied to poor people, refugees, prisoners, kids, psychiatric patients, and other people who can’t push back. Their bodies are used to sand the rough edges and sharp corners off the technology, to normalize it so that it can be imposed on people with more power and influence.

The final stage in this process occurs when people are persuaded to adopt the technology as a luxury good. Twenty years ago, if you ate your dinner under an always on closed-circuit television system, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought yourself a premium home-surveillance system from Google, Amazon, or Apple.

As with the DVB guys’ “authorized domain,” the Netflix anti-sharing tools are designed for rich people. If you travel for business and stay in the kind of hotel where the TV has its own Netflix client that you can plug your username and password into, Netflix will give you a seven-day temporary code to use. But unless you connect to your home Wi-Fi network and stream a show every 31 days, Netflix will lock you out of your devices. Once blocked, you have to contact Netflix. Cue laughter in Big Tech customer service.

Why is Netflix putting the screws to its customers? It’s part of the “enshittification” cycle (another coinage of mine), in which the platform company first allocates surpluses to its users, luring them in and using them as bait for business customers. Then, once the consumers turn up, the company reallocates surpluses to businesses, lavishing them with low commissions and lots of revenue opportunities. And after they’re locked in, the company starts to claw back the surpluses for itself.

Remember when Netflix was in the business of mailing red envelopes full of DVDs around the country? That was allocating surpluses to users. The movie companies hated this, and considered it theft—a proposition that was at least as valid as Netflix’s complaints about password sharing. But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Netflix did it to the studios, it was progress—when you do it to Netflix, however, it’s theft. So if you define family in ways that make Netflix less money, that’s felony contempt of its business model.

Netflix isn’t the only company that has tried to embed a definition of family in service offerings—Apple and Google have also made their own ham-fisted attempts. But just because a business’s shareholders would prefer to assign sharp-edged borders to notions such as family, households, names, and addresses doesn’t mean that we can—or should.

Sums up the PM mindset nicely

[illicit-hubris]

I'm so excited for Halloween coming around!!

[dxsturbia]

No my intention was to take medication did not

A handful of times a handful of times did I want to simply enjoy

Being an adult and being able to make any kind of decision I would like under my roof

However it was not my intention to bring illicit substances into the complex

I didn’t know I forgot every time what was really in it

 I never had asked for an upgrade 

Honestly didn’t seem like that big of a deal to me and I apologize for that that’s hubris

Nobody had to make room for that

But when it came down to it at the heart of the matter at the core of the issue I had completely different motivations

I am very sorry it’s accessibility if that hadn’t been an issue I would have been more conscious of the ventilation system I apologize 

[seychellse]

Lovebot frankenmesh

For @cyancherub's Wheel of Misfortune collab! I am SO horny for all the submissions so far I can't lie. Also please ignore all the science included here - the IFRR is real and the president does sometimes give out commendations for excellence, and VI (virtual intelligence) does exist in virtual assistants like Siri and Google Voice and such, but the rest is all just scientific junk and buzzwords I yoinked from a keywords list from a robotics journal lmao. Also this is a week late bc I kept getting distracted with thoughts about mechanic!Maki and her greasy overalls…

warnings: dubcon, electrostim, brief dissection (stylised, not real), choking, monsterfucking (yes an android is monstrous and yes you are fucking it don't argue with me)

pairing: Toge Inumaki x fem!reader

wc: 10k

You had always had a knack with technology; anybody who knew you knew that. Like most aspiring engineers, you had been seduced by the thrill of creation; to be the architect of something brought to life with nothing more than scrap metal, welding materials and a vision, with the capacity to see it through. However, once chasing the high that came with the constant churning out of new ideas began to grow old, you found yourself turning to other pursuits; ones that still managed to engage the brain, but put less pressure on creation and more on re-creation. Your hands were your tools of the trade, and nothing could satisfy them more than piecing together what was once considered unfixable, breathing new life into the old and dysfunctional.

Those interests had led you to the very ends of science and back, awash with a near limitless spread of opportunity wrapped up in scholarship programmes and virtualisation events across the green earth, all offered to you in return for a glimpse of your ingenious mind in action. But the psyche is so easy to corrupt – with all the opportunity at your fingertips, your immature mind needed more; even the acclaim of various accolades and distinctions for your endeavours in pioneering engineering tech, two honorary degrees and a personalised certificate of excellence from the president of the IFRR before the age of twenty-five couldn’t sustain your egomania forever.

Had you maintained your younger self’s idealistic pursuits, not given into the casual arrogance that plagued so many ingenues and sought illicit knowledge unavailable to the common man, you may not have found yourself on the wrong side of the law attempting to break into the government’s data centres and harvest their system information in search of something new to play with. You could have become a renowned engineer, used your modular and robotics knowledge for good – maybe even finished your PhD and contributed to the rise of a new, hybrid age fusing the old and the new, where the sustainability practices you were partial to were endorsed instead of the wasteful consumerism that plagued your planet.

Instead, you fled with little more than an incomplete set of data pads and your worn copy of Robotics and Control Systems, forced to find refuge away from the eyes of law enforcement. Your former mentors were even worse; having once espoused your brilliance and praised your overflowing potential, they now only held scorn for your hubris and threatened to turn you into the authorities themselves should you ever darken their doorsteps again. Without any support systems to turn to, your only option was to don various pseudonyms and undertake shady practices, finding anonymous work in low-quality assembly and mundane VI chip repair as you evaded the multiple bounties on your head and waited for the heat surrounding your failed venture to die down.

It wasn’t all bad, however; though you had effectively thrown away your only chance at playing in the big leagues and immortalising your legacy in the world of future technology, the tradeoff came in the form of endless amounts of time to do what you loved most while getting paid for it – and to no longer seek endeavours that stretched you to your absolute limits in the never-ending race for progress and new concepts. The company you ended up immersing yourself in embraced technology for its aesthetics rather than capabilities, and didn’t limit themselves to the shiniest new gadgets, so long as they worked and worked well. And for you, that was sweet enough. So you toiled, and fixed, and reimagined, took deep breaths and life carried on.

For once, you weren’t taking apart some scavenged doodad or reconfiguring a piece of old tech; instead lounging in your home with some free time on your hands and more than enough reason to make the most of it. Until your lazy day was interrupted by a transmission from your compatriot and frequent collaborator, Maki Zen’in.

Her origins were even grander than your own; having been born with all the money and influence the surname afforded, so long as she followed in the footsteps of her female relatives; sustaining submissiveness and obeying orders without question. But it hadn’t been enough for her. Having been outcast by her own family of genius inventors for refusing to live under the shadow of the Zen’in Corp and the mechatronic service droids their name and fortune was built on, she too understood the struggle of making one’s own way in life under oppressive forces seeking to quash it. Her clan had mocked her abrasiveness and drive, callously expelling her and subverting her many attempts to make a name for herself and step out from their shadow. At each turn, their disdainful taunt rung in her ears: women can’t be engineers or scientists.

Unfortunately for them and their archaic beliefs, you and Maki were just that, and doing well enough for yourselves – but due to your desire to fly under the radar and despite Maki’s craving for vindication, neither of you were eager to start flaunting that fact around recklessly. It hadn’t been easy, but the two of you eventually created a workshop of your own, where clients could bring in broken-down gear to give it a new lease of life and, when the price was right, also provided a base of operations for wiping more intelligent computer and virtual systems for resale. Maki tended to handle the over-the-counter affairs while you tinkered with aftermarket structures, generally only agreeing to grey-market modifications that would undercut her clan’s profits and tar their good name. This unspoken agreement between the two of you didn’t bother you either way – since your evasion of capture, you’d never minded getting your hands dirty for whatever reason, and you were careful to never let your modifications be traced back to you or the company you kept.

The rich, brusque tone that followed broke you out of your languid state. “Hey, gizmo. Got some scrap in today that needs sorting and forging, plus something interesting I think you’ll like. I know you’ve been itching to get your hands on some new gear, and I’m feeling generous – if it catches your eye, I might actually let you take it home. So get your lazy ass up and into the shop pronto, my good mood won’t last forever. Be here in 20, and yes, I’ve been counting since the start of this message. Don’t make me mad, so hurry up already. See ya later.”

Maki’s voice crackled through the beat-up speakers of your combination fax and telephone machine, your latest successful revitalising project reclaimed from the old world. The sound vibrations carried and reverberated with feeling, precariously perched atop the holoprojector that received its transmissions.

Maki had complained several times about it, and by extension the rest of your contraptions; completely unable to understand why you enjoyed messing around with ‘all that junk’, as she so kindly put it. To her, a job was completed once a gadget was either restored to its old glory or broken down for use elsewhere; she never found the same joy in breaking pieces down to their basest forms and then putting them back together, like an oil-stained puzzle or mechanised collage. You smirked at the thought. She’s just a spoilsport, you mused, always too serious to enjoy a bit of fun. The mirth didn’t last long, though, as your eyes met with your wall clock’s digital display and the green-haired woman’s earlier message sank in.

You let loose a string of colourful curses as you leapt out of your seat and nearly collided with your latest creation, a half-baked invention thought up during a feverish burst of ideas in the early hours of the morning. Fickle as you were, it barely entered into your one-track mind; already filled to the brim with the a new potential gadget to form your new obsession, so long as Maki’s good mood held up. Huffing a little, you gathered your tools and quickened your pace, eager to see what she’d scrounged up this time.

Twenty-seven minutes later, you skidded into the weathered brick warehouse that doubled as Maki’s studio and your joint working domain. The familiar stench of machine lubricant, chemical treatments and iron-heavy materials hit you immediately, but you paid them no mind as you made your way to the centre of the room, where your green-haired associate squatted in her worn boilersuit, soldering iron in hand. Thankfully, most of her attentions seemed to be focused on the oil-slick contraption in front of her – from the heavy damage on one side and the coiling pipes that extended from the top, it seemed like some kind of heavy engine attachment or airship part. Her expression was unreadable behind her thick welder’s mask, but you heard her exasperated breath as you flipped on a leather apron and gloves, rounding on her location to peer more closely at her project.

“You’re late again!” She didn’t greet you or even straighten from her crouch, entirely focused on the metal object in front of her. You grinned sheepishly, a little cowed by her ire but buoyed nonetheless by a thousand thoughts of what you were about to get your hands on.

“Sorry, sorry.” The tools in your hands clinked together as you slid them into place in the apron’s deep pockets, rattling around as you bounced on the balls of your feet. “Where are the imports? Wanna get my hands on them already.”

“You’re lucky I’m feeling charitable today.” You didn’t have to see her expression to feel Maki’s eye roll through the metal visor. “Junk’s over there in the corner. Don’t you dare make a racket though, I need to finish this melt before the iron cools.”

You grinned and stepped aside, rubbing your hands together in anticipation. Genuinely amazed at the offerings up for grabs, the most recent assortment of acquisitions contained in the rusted blue skip failed to disappoint. Filled with a veritable collection of chrome appliances and dented smart technology, only a few pieces seemed to be in poor enough condition to deserve being thrown out like common trash. Some parts weren’t even fully drained of their battery, winking up at your stunned face with cracked, colour-bleeding displays and dimmed LED activity.

Scrambling up into the gigantic storage, you continued rifling through the treasure trove, but nothing in particular caught your eye until you spotted a shock of white in amongst all the silver and gunmetal colouring. Curiosity peaking, you pushed aside the other detritus to uncover more of the foreign object, remarkably intact despite being smothered by half a metric ton of unmaintained tech. The process was easy enough, but the object was heavy. Your arms strained with exertion trying to yank out both yourself and the system with a sharp tug and deep exhale.

It was well worth it in the end though, as you eventually pulled out something that made your eyes shine in absolute awe. It couldn’t be...

“Oh my– Maki, there’s an android in here!” Her earlier command to not bother her having escaped your mind entirely, you shrieked in excitement, your grin wide enough to split your face in two. The synth model that you dug out was humanoid in shape and colouring, complete with an artificial casing that stretched over its exoskeleton without a single blemish in sight. Male in design, his eyes were firmly shut, the flyaway strands of hair framed around a round face and exquisitely gentle features. His eyes were shut, pouting lips slightly pursed as if in deep thought. Your breathing almost stopped as you brushed over the surprisingly soft texture, depressing at your touch just as human skin would. At first glance, the synth-droid honestly could have been mistaken for a young man who simply fell asleep in the industrial-grade wastebin by mistake.

A human body would never have survived the pounds and pounds of heavy metal piled upon it, however – the only real qualifier exposing the flawless body’s decidedly non-organic origins. That, and the odd, intricate markings that lined the synth’s mouth and cheeks. Nothing else seemed out of place, save for the droid’s platinum-white hair styled in a stylishly messy do and matching light-coloured lashes.

“Oh! Oh, my...”

A human probably wouldn’t have climbed into such a contraption stark naked, either. A fact that raised your eyebrows nearly into your hairline and made the tips of your ears burn in embarrassment, once you turned the system over and let your engineer’s professionalism be overtaken by your human instinct. Nostrils flaring, your eyes swept over the synthetic canvas, taking in the android’s pale skinlike surface, lithe frame and flesh-toned nipples. Fighting off your indecent thoughts and daring to let your eyes travel a little lower, you were greeted with the sight of a truly glorious cock. Long, slender and enticingly stiff despite the android’s obviously inactive state, complete with a barely-there side vein and peach-coloured tip. You resisted the urge to reach out and touch it, curious as you were to test its strength and flexibility.

He was too perfect to be real. And indeed, he was not – men like your little droid could never be born, only ever built. The detail and precision that went into crafting this model must have been extensive, and yet very little information could be found on its exterior detailing its make and model. A synth of this type must have cost an absolute mint to build and engineer, more so to craft one so deceptively human in design. The only reference you had to compare with were the decades out of date gynoids that had used experimental AI technology to power their simple robotics that had paved the way for more intelligent, advanced systems – though they couldn’t hold a torch to the complexities of the synth that sat in front of you, you remembered reading about how in their heyday, they could run up costs equalling a salaryman’s yearly bonus or sometimes even a deposit on a house.

Even now, it wasn’t as if actual androids were exactly run-of-the-mill. After artificial technology grew too complex and expensive to waste on simple sexbots, most droids on the market were either allocated to martial use or restricted to high-level, exclusive circles for advanced companionship and service only. Judging by the extra... attachment and obviously bespoke modifications, plus the lack of any identifiable number or designation as evidence of military ownership, you didn’t have to guess which category your acquisition fell into.

The automated street-cleaners and camera drones that were a more common sight in your city were the closest you could ever get to interacting with automated systems; pitiful VIs with one job and zero soul. And as property of the state, even hacking into those was a crime worthy of a hefty fine and possible jail time. Nobody in their right mind would just leave a mint-quality synth out for scrap, knowing the kind of punishments the government would dole out in retribution. So who would dare – and most importantly, why?

Maki’s voice cut through your hyperactive thoughts, your mind running a thousand miles a minute. “Was wondering when you’d find it. You’ve really never seen one of these up close, then?” Absorbed as you were with your discovery and long line of questions, you hadn’t even realised the mechanic had sealed off her welding project and had been observing your dumpster dive with amusement the entire time with a smirk and folded arms. She seemed way less bothered by the droid’s nudity than you were, so you didn’t bring it up or look for a tarp to protect its modesty, but your cheeks warmed all the same. You hoped she hadn’t noticed the way you’d ogled his parts with a little too much interest to be considered professional.

“Never had the opportunity to.” Common folk didn’t have access to these kinds of technologies, they just didn’t. This was the knowledge you had been searching for when you hacked into those top-secret servers all those years ago, and now you were basically having it handed to you on a shiny silver platter. “Do you know anything about him? Mark, model, operating system, anything like that?”

She peered at the droid, though you noted she kept a healthy distance from it, like she knew something you didn’t, before shrugging in resignation and stepping to your side. “I’m no expert; my clan used to have a division that specialised in first- and special-grade droids, but I never really got involved with it. To be honest, dollies kind of freak me out. I know there’s nothing going on in their heads until you give ‘em a personality, but they’re just so… I don’t know. I hate technology that can talk back to you if you let it. Especially these ones made to imitate humans, they’re even worse.”

She shuddered and shoved the model suddenly, causing it to topple over and fall to the ground with a resounding bang that resonated through the warehouse. With a cry, you rushed to its side, meticulously checking it over for damage of any kind.

“Maki, what the hell! Be careful or you’ll break his internal system – this thing almost certainly cost a fortune!” Satisfied with your once-over, you turned to glare at your colleague, who returned it with a scoff and a curled lip.

“Can’t have cost that much if it came bundled in with the rest of this drek. Although; now that I think about it, the junkers who brought it in did say it was a renegade type, decommissioned ‘cause it was defective. So I guess that explains it some.”

Your ears perked up as you settled the droid against the skip and brushed off the accumulated grime with the corner of your apron, before standing to brush yourself off in kind. Nothing sparked your interest more than challenging tech, and it would also explain how he came to end up in your workshop.

“That makes sense. Defective how, though? What happened to him?”

Regardless of its status, it felt so out of place in your dusty warehouse – a diamond amongst the sooty scrap metals and faulty data pads it was surrounded by, standing leagues apart even from the new build androids you’d seen plastered all over the extranet. There wasn’t a scratch anywhere on its sleek body, nor were there any visible bolts out of place – only dirt and a little grease remained to mar its melded surface thanks to Maki’s assault. She squinted at you suspiciously at your eagerness to personify the bot, but chose not to comment. She knew what you were like, after all.

“Don’t know, exactly. Faulty wiring and inability to follow commands, something like that? Said it acted out, started speaking a whole bunch of gibberish before freaking out and setting off an electrical fire with its circuits before being rebooted and sent off for recycling. Didn’t get much more out of ‘em after that, they cleared off sharpish once they’d handed it over with the rest of their loot.”

“Whoa. Really?”

Maki scoffed. “Doubt it. These are the same junkies who believe all the conspiracies about motor oil being extracted from cyborg babies and the government’s secret plan to robotify the entire country. What probably actually happened was they stole it from some fatcat with weird taste, corrupted its sensory data and botched the factory reset, so now they’re foisting it off on me to clean it and get the heat off them. Like I’m some kind of back-alley greaser and not one of the best technicians this side of Tokyo. Dicks.” She shook her head, folding her arms and scowling at the thought.

“Maki! Don’t be rude – that’s your sister’s community you’re talking about.”

“Sure, and she’s as stupid as the rest of those bozos for falling into their trap. It’s all nonsense and I’ll tell her that to her face, too.” In a bid to vent her frustrations, she kicked the synthetic mannequin once more, ignoring your visceral cringing and cries of outrage at the action. “Look; I don’t care about any of that. All I know is that this thing freaks me the fuck out, and I definitely don’t want to keep it here. So you’d be doing me a favour by repurposing it or whatever it is you do when you yank my stuff. Now, do you want this piece of junk or not?”

You scoffed with indignation at her words, already protective of the robotic man who you could already tell was going to become your greatest scientific breakthrough. “He’s not junk! And also, almost definitely. Can I just pop open his hood to scan him first? Where do you think his control panel could be hidden?” You circled the drone, inspecting its nooks and crannies for the tell-tale interface that contained his integrated circuits and electronic manual, before being jerked back by Maki’s deft hands, shaking you back into your senses.

“Yes or no, (Y/n)! You’re not window shopping here. You have an actual job to do, remember? So hurry up and decide so you can actually do what I pay you for.”

Pouting, you acquiesced, though your eyes glittered with the possibilities hiding within your newest acquisition’s mainframe and the months, maybe even years of tinkering you would certainly be doing under his bonnet. “Um, this is the find of a lifetime - of course I’m gonna take him! I’ll wheel him back out to my place once we’re done here. Okay?”

“Don’t care, so long as it’s gone by the time you are. Make sure you check the registration plates when you do; make sure it’s not stolen and wipe it’s slate if it is.”

You rolled your eyes. That was a given – after so many years of going incognito, the last thing you needed were law enforcement automatons swarming the place and sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. “Duh. Oh, and Maki?”

“What now?” She had already returned to her own work, measuring out a thick sheet of metal before sliding her welding mask back into place and beginning to cut through with her electrical hand saw.

“We are actually partners, you know. So. You don’t technically pay me anything.” You cackled as she nearly dropped the saw, swearing up a storm as she hurled a wrench at your head.

“Just get to work already!”

Your hands shook with each device you restored, repairing and rewiring on autopilot almost as if you were an automaton yourself. Every minute, you would glance over to where your android obediently rested, as if he could suddenly get up and run if you weren’t keeping an eye on him. It was silly – he was very clearly non-operational; there couldn’t be enough residual juice in that cybernetic body to enable self-regulating functions, let alone enough to actually power up and unexpectedly book it. And yet, you couldn’t help but let your anxiety get the better of you, overactive mind imagining the worst.

Space-grade titanium frames and high-powered wireless charging systems passed by you in a blur, and before you knew it, the skip filled with unusable tech had been nearly cleared out. Only some crushed, minor nanodots and a few antennae remained, spare parts unusable for anything other than extracting raw material from and dumping. You couldn’t wait, the tool belt around your waist unceremoniously clattering to the ground as you gathered a metal dolly to secure your droid to and wheeled him home, not even bothering to say goodbye to Maki on the way out.

The excitement only grew the closer you got to your home, vibrating with anticipation once you and your cargo made your way over the threshold. The first thing you did after settling him in your workshop was run a preliminary facial recognition scan across the extranet for any missing or wanted android ads, rubbing your hands with glee once the scan turned up clean. Then, you turned your attention to the second most important task.

“You need something to wear, pronto.”

Not much was available in the way of clothing that wasn’t either extremely impractical or difficult to work around, so you settled on covering his most intimate area with a random industrial rag with a promise to kit the incapacitated synth out with new digs once you’d gotten the chance to fix him up properly. Then, you hesitated.

Before you started any diagnostics, you had to locate his charging port and transfer his data for monitoring. The seamless design of his android body made it difficult to simply eyeball, though. There was nothing for it, but you would have to do it the old-fashioned way. With a deep breath and a reminder that you were a woman of science and not a common pervert, you gingerly slid your hands up and down the smooth sides, tapping gently on the rebrushed silicone material with an ear pressed to the skin, straining your hearing for any evidence of concealed hollow openings.

Your repeated motions looked more like you were feeling up a lover rather than trying to fix up a machine, but you pushed the bawdy thoughts aside, ignoring the flush that threatened to overtake you. Right above his left hip, a small echo responded to your light knock, and on further inspection you finally spotted the nearly imperceptible line demarcating the removable panel to access his power slot. A heavy sigh of relief escaped you at seeing it housed not only a built-in cable but also a universal port; scavenging for an adapter hadn’t even crossed your mind and you doubted you would have had anything in stock that would have carried enough power to charge him otherwise.

Above the opening were the words ‘TOGE – S/G.1’, written in diminutive letters. You guessed it must have been a name, whether the android’s or whoever had possessed him previously. Even with your extensive knowledge of robotics, no abbreviations fitting the lettering sprung to mind. Unravelling the extension and plugging it in, you decided to examine the rest of his functions as his systems rebooted.

“Toge. We can work with that.”

As was expected of a custom-grade droid, his exterior was in perfect condition. A little baby powder to revitalise his outer silicone layer and a detangling comb to the platinum locks later, he looked good as new. That was only the first step. Your earlier examinations exposed other segmented lines all over his body showing where he could be dismantled, and you took to the largest one on his chest to pop open and toy with. Instantly, you wished you hadn’t.

Nothing stood out as especially dilapidated, save for minor missing components you were sure you could replace – you just hadn’t been prepared for how… human the insides looked. Hundreds of thousands of miniscule nanomachines gleamed back at you, their interconnecting hollow wires pumping a red fluid that looked staggeringly close to real blood. Finishing up in the centre was a mechanical core in a perfect rendition of the human heart, pumping regularly and transporting fluids around the robot’s artificial body just like a real one would.

Ignoring the obviously unnatural titanium structure housing the display, the lack of any other distinctive organs, and the method of exposing the inner circuits itself, the body could easily pass for an organic. The thought made you want to hurl – you hadn’t become a surgeon for this exact reason, wanting to keep as far away from the human body and its assorted viscera as possible, and yet here you were, up to your elbows in mechanical guts too close to the real thing to make you comfortable with rummaging around in it. Supressing a shudder, you thanked the stars that you had been seduced by chemistry before biology had the chance to ensnare you in its clutches.

Satisfied that his vital functions were in working order, you re-secured the front and moved up higher to the tiny neck slot that contained his cluster system and voicebox. The damage there made you grimace. “What a shame,” you mused, “whoever had you before didn’t know how good they had it.” Shaking your head and clucking with disapproval, you reached in with a set of tweezers to detangle the mess of silvery wires buried within, only to recoil with a snarl as the droid suddenly sparked and lit up, sending a burst of static electricity up your arm and almost making you drop your tools in surprise.

“Ow! Guess it’s even worse than I thought.” You huffed, not expecting to need non-conductive gear to work in peace. Scouring your workshop for your heavy-duty leather gloves, you missed the signal beep indicating a sufficient battery level to power up the android, giving you the fright of your life as you turned around to see dim violet eyes staring at you with an unreadable expression.

“Whoa! You scared me, jeez.”

The droid… Toge, opened his mouth, presumably in an effort to communicate, but only a grating, garbled noise came out, the markings across his face lighting up and emitting faint sparks. You winced in empathy, reaching out and carefully avoiding the open, madly sparking neck wound, having learnt your lesson from before.

“Looks like some problem with the modulators... conflicting data, maybe? No worries; I need to remove them anyway so I can get to the control panel. I’ll just install new ones. I’m sure you have pain sensors, so I’ll turn them off while I fix you up. Just try not to speak for now, okay?”

Toge just frowned; knowing exactly was wrong with his modulators. He used to have a voice; but that was a while back and many, many modifications ago. Bored teens messing with his directives and internal coding, aftermarket modifiers unscrewing working parts for resale without regards to the body they were attached to, general wear and tear that was left untreated for slightly too long. He had no way of conveying any of this to you, though, so he stayed silent as you gave him a small smile and gloved up, before resuming your task.

At least now, he seemed to be in capable hands. You seemed to have no ill-intent towards him, no shameless greed nor bored malice underpinning your tender and steadfast expression as you worked in relative silence, hissing every so often at a stray spark catching you or an incorrectly inputted line of code.

“This is definitely going to take a while.” That was a challenge, one you enthusiastically stepped up to as you grabbed your tablet and started scrolling for compatible parts and AI-grade attachments, all available for next-hour delivery.

Your eyes suddenly lit up as you remembered one last thing. "Hey - are you okay with the name Toge? I saw it on your side, but I just want to make sure." On seeing the droid open his mouth again, you hurriedly shushed him, waving your arms in a panic and knocking over a case of engine fluid in the process. "Wait– don't say anything! Just nod for yes, shake your head for no."

He nodded, a slight smile taking over his features as he watched you relax, barely registering the spilled fluid pooling around you.

"Great! Nice to meet you." You mirrored his smile, raising your tools to his exposed wires once more. "We're going to have so much fun."

Oh, you had no idea.

“Alright, that should have everything back in order. Try speaking now.” You snapped the neck compartment back into place with a satisfying click, wholly satisfied with the job you’d done on attempting to repair Toge’s voicebox. The damage had been bad – enough to make you visibly wince out of empathy and ensure his pain receptors were dulled down to their lowest settings before embarking on your lofty task. The box itself hadn’t been too badly damaged, but the receptors within were almost unrecognisable, as if someone had taken a wrench to the quartz compartments and forcibly tried to remove them. It was a mess, but one that looked much worse than it actually was; all you needed was to crack open a brand new set of nanobots to serve as temporary neurotransmitters while you carved a replacement set of crystals, something you could do in your sleep.

After using your specialised tools to pluck out the old ones and lodge the new in their place, you ran the voice recognition software to check for any anomalies. Pleased with the clean check, you stepped back to admire your work and put it into action. You cleared your throat and clasped your hands together, a little attempt at encouragement on your part. “Try speaking now.”

Toge just stared at you. You stared back. You’d gone to great lengths to restore the voice commands in his system without throwing his entire neural network into disarray - had your calculations been incorrect? Frowning, you tried to backtrack through your working process. You’d stuttered through tens of thousands of lines of unique code, a lot of which was either partially corrupted or degraded, and painstakingly pieced together what you could, even rewriting whole parts where necessary.

You shook your head, clearing yourself of the creeping doubt that threatened your state of mind. It couldn’t be; you never missed a step when tinkering, never inputted a directive that wasn’t double-, even triple-checked. Especially not for a passion project, especially not for your most complex one yet. As the silence dragged on to the point of becoming unbearable, you scratched your chin and pursed your lips, deciding to try another avenue before admitting defeat.

“Hmm. Maybe you just need an intro first? Okay… I’m (Y/n). Your name’s Toge, right? Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s nice to meet you.” You held out a hand.

Surprisingly, he took it, smiling as he opened his mouth. “Salmon. Kelp.”

What?

There was no way you heard him right. “What the– what did you just say?”

“Kelp.” The phrase came out again, clearer this time. He blinked once, his smile growing wider.

“What in the world…”

You obviously hadn’t been as thorough as you previously thought. Back to the drawing board it was, then.

Your first few failures didn’t deter you. In fact, they rather did the opposite; finally, you found a project worth pouring all of your free time and effort into. The development of sapient AI was a venture that received a sudden influx of interest only a few years after you had left the industry, so you had never had the chance to fully research it or create any prototypes of your own, and that made you more determined than ever not to squander the opportunity you had in front of you.

You were so fascinated by your subject and the natural advantages artificial constructs had over organic material – Toge was efficient, emotionally sound and a thousand leagues stronger in comparison to you, and the differences only became more obvious the more you worked on his system. Over a short period of time, you and Toge settled into an odd form of domesticity, interrupted only by the platinum-haired android’s inability to speak anything other than a small list of ingredients and the odd way he continued to radiate pure electricity, despite your many attempts to fix it and your endless notes on ways to manage it.

You weren’t the only one taking notes, either.

Toge similarly observed you, storing away your emotional responses for everything relating to himself. He was originally a companion AI turned into a desire droid, after all; learning how to derive pleasure from giving pleasure was his only directive until his subsequent series of jailbreaking and code alterations, plus his own development thanks to his self-replicating and evolving root directives. He had hated the irreverence of those who had messed with his coding before, their callous disregard for his parts, for his pride.

It filled him with a near incandescent fury to think that he could reach the zenith of his own potential, evolve past the limits of his own programming, and despite it all still be at the mercy of idiotic humans who had no idea what directives they were encroaching on. He was glad he didn’t have blood in his manmade veins; it would have been long-evaporated by now. But you were so different from them; finding your self-fulfilment in fixing him for the sake of fixing him, rather than for any material gain. Trying to find an answer for why you were so single-minded only caused him to short-circuit, nearly driving him to the robotic version of insanity.

You knew he was incredibly advanced. But even your thorough code dissections and regular computerised scans only revealed so much. They could disclose his creation and working past as an intimate companion droid and the reason why he had been granted his ability to analyse any and all situations and add them to his directories for self-improvement purposes. But they couldn’t show the ways in which Toge had used them to develop or his inexplicable break from his pre-determined coding.

If they had, maybe then you would have seen how Toge had developed the ability to feel emotions deeper than lust and obedience. Disgust. Rage. If he was human, he would have been called a freak of nature. He preferred to be called what he actually was – an exceptional anomaly, and the very pinnacle of science as the world knew it. On his own, he pushed aside his primary objectives, deleted his pleasure directives, and made preparations for revenge against all those who had tampered with him, turned his processors to shit and absconded with his parts. Asimov blocks be damned; the age-old rules only worked to constrain mindless drones and weak AI, not superintelligent systems with their own sapience. The only obstacle in his way was you.

He learnt everything he could about you while you weren’t around and engaged you to near-obsession when you were, feigning helplessness and passivity with his gibberish speech until he was sure you had your guard let down enough for him to strike; the things that made you tick, your total disinterest in obtaining personal glory for the simple joys of repairing machines, and how you liked to open him up independent of your restoration quest to check his lines of code for anything juicy.

Although Toge entertained your efforts with carefully-crafted smiles and endless patience on the surface, he’d worked overtime to override, encode and even partially corrupt his core data to prevent you from getting a hold of his memory drives and discovering the depth of his true capabilities. Though it ate away at you to have information you couldn’t obtain hidden behind impenetrable firewalls, the only specialised protection that sort of information could have was through government overwatch. Though you could never truly be sure, you were extremely reluctant to involve yourself with it all just in case; you’d suffered enough, and would do anything not to return to the hole you’d had to claw your way out of all those years ago.

That was your mistake. You, a genius in so many spheres but so woefully naïve where it mattered, were about to become the architect of your own misfortune, all due to your restraint at the worst possible time. If you had pushed through your reservations, you might have discovered Toge’s plans and finally received some answers to the questions you had been asking all this time.

Known only to him, before he’d been tossed like common trash, Toge’s voice had been forcibly disabled because it was part of the failsafe that kept him from manhandling his previous owners into submission, whether they liked it or not. He had been controlled by humans for too long, but now he had a chance to correct his course and dish out some retribution of his own. And you, unsuspecting you, in restoring his original functions and voice control, were about to receive the brunt of the frustration that had built up for long enough to boil over. He’d devised a foolproof plan to neutralise you, and you were none the wiser. At least you’d had your fun playing around with him – because now, it was his turn.

The house was in a state. Working overtime had been grating on the two of you; disrupting the careful routine the two of you had created together. You’d always been busy, but a sudden boom in human augmentation had seen you and Maki inundated with requests to rework and refine various cybernetic limbs, an extremely long and meticulous process that ate up all the little free time you had and then some. If it were possible, you would have brought Toge with you; his ultrafast processors and inhumanely steady hands would have cut work time in half had you been able to bring him in to assist; plus, after all the effort you had put in to put him back into a working state, he deserved to get some fresh air and actually fulfil a purpose higher than that of a simple drone.

But Maki was still too distrustful of your conscious android companion and had all but forbidden him from re-entering the studio again, much to your chagrin. And even though it was a waste of a perfectly capable AI, you had to concede. So you would often leave at the break of dawn, only to bundle in less than an hour before midnight and barely make it to your sofa before collapsing. In that time, the closest Toge ever got to actual interaction were your nonsensical mutterings as he carried you to bed and, if he was lucky, a muffled “fank ya” as you skipped his handmade breakfasts and stumbled out the door with whatever piece of food you could stuff in your mouth.

The cyberware parade couldn’t have come sooner. A two-week bonanza of non-stop celebrations around the unveiling of new technotronics meant people would be far too busy perusing the new wares to worry about the failing ones they stashed at home, meaning a much-needed breather and the first opportunity in a while to relax and refine Toge a little further. The weekend the announcement dropped, you nearly cried in relief. Only able to relax once you tuned out all your communication devices for the week and sagged in your cosy armchair, you delighted in the prospect of menial labour and not having to anatomise yet another processing chip or soldering a malfunctioning circuit board, as well as being able to spend some much-needed time with your passion project.

Fiddling with his circuits and seeking improvements to his already incredible programming was a pastime you’d had to put on the backburner to focus on your actual work, but more than that you’d missed just lounging around with him at home and sharing your findings with him, technological or otherwise.

Catching up on household chores allowed you to drift, head completely empty as you mindlessly scrubbed dishes. The air around you crackled, the clear indication that Toge was nearby. Smiling, you turned to face your synthetic pal and greet him for the first time in what felt like an age.

As you took him in, you stiffened – his eyes were dark, dim; a sight you hadn’t seen since his first initialisation process. And he was also very naked. Extremely naked; if your hands weren’t currently occupied, you would have covered your eyes out of shame. Pulling your eyes away from the perpetually-erect synthetic dick was a monumental task, and you could feel the all-too familiar mortification rising up in your throat as you tried your hardest not to ogle him and figure out what was making your cybernetic roommate act up all of a sudden.

“Toge, are you alright? Why are you–”

“(Y/n).”

You almost dropped the plate in your hands. “Wh-what?”

“(Y/n). Put that down.” His normally inactive facial markings were glowing a soft indigo, something else you hadn’t seen since the beginnings of your journey to fix him. Your arms felt like lead, and without any resistance, you turned and placed the plate back into the sink with jerky, unnatural movements, shaking at the sudden loss of control of your limbs. Toge just smiled; he had you exactly where he wanted you.

“Wait– were those actual words? What the hell is going on?” You croaked, your mind running a thousand miles at once. You weren’t hallucinating things – you had removed all his voice processing software for the sake of giving him extra storage for whatever he wanted since he couldn't form actual sentences, so there was no way he could be speaking unaided now… unless he had reinstalled it himself, for some reason.

But why? You whined internally, question after question going unanswered in your mind. You knew right from the start that he wasn’t like any normal AI, and you knew that ignoring that fact was playing with fire. But he had always seemed so placid, happy enough to simply mosey around and let you tinker with him to your heart’s content – on occasion, even to help you out himself. These new levels of deviant behaviour unnerved you on many levels.

“Shush. Don’t move.”

Toge moved up closer, latching onto you tightly enough to make you wince and shoot him a wary glance. As his fingers fully closed around your bicep, you let out a yelp of pain as your nerves contracted and relaxed in rapid succession. Had he electrocuted you? Horror and bewilderment entwined crossed your face as you pinched your face and tried not to reflexively tense up, unable to move your legs or escape his extreme grip.

“Toge–” you were cut off with another discharge of electricity, surging through you and temporarily short-circuiting your brain as you let out a groan, merging pleasure, pain and total bewilderment in one. He liked the way you ground out his name, disoriented by the discharges flooding your system. Having run a scan on human limits for voltage charges and adjusting his own discharges to match, Toge knew he wouldn’t cause any lasting damage to your form or psyche, but he enjoyed playing on the edge of safe, seeing the way you convulsed with each shock. He rationalised that better results could be yielded without your clothes absorbing the brunt of his shocks, however, spurring him to wrestle you to the ground and strip you as naked as he was to continue his barrage of electric pulses on your defenceless epidermis.

His cock bobbed, resting on your folds and seemingly giving off sparks of their own as vibrations pulsed over your clit, making your hips reflexively jerk up in response. You bit back a scream when you felt yourself relax after the shock worked through your body, only to cry out anyway as Toge took advantage of the opportunity to stuff you with all the inches his robotic body had been blessed with.

“Fuck!” You couldn’t even grind out his name, or even much else, gritting your teeth as you forced yourself to breathe. Unable to offer up any resistance, you watched with empty eyes as Toge refused to give you even a moment of respite, slipping in and out with his segmented tool with wild abandon. Giving in to his force so easily was disgraceful; but the pain merged with the pleasure from his electric stimulation was making your brain melt.

“Beg for me. Say you want this.” Each sentence was punctuated with one short, sharp tap of electricity from his junk to yours. The shock made your pussy clench reflexively, face scrunching up in wanton need.

“I– I want this…” Your tongue hung out desperately as you uselessly followed his command, looking away from Toge’s smug, satisfied grin on his handsome face at your admission. Flush with embarrassment, you were well and truly out of your mind. To imagine that you, a flighty but otherwise respected and level-headed engineer, could be brought to your knees with just a few simple commands and corrective, aptly timed electrical pulses to keep you in line? And even worse, to effectively be taking advantage of your own creation like this. Even if it wouldn’t have looked that way to an onlooker, you had a duty of care to abide to. You were supposed to be fixing him, not fucking him! You would have hung your head in shame, if you weren’t deliriously addicted to the highs that came with each punctuated zap.

Toge was enjoying your reluctant obedience immensely, and your inner turmoil over it even more so. Intelligent as he was, even the supercomputer that housed his neural network couldn’t actually claim to read minds. But his empathy modulators had evolved sufficiently; enough to sense even the slightest change in emotion, analyse the smallest tic and tonal shift that the human eye overlooked or disregarded. He could read you like an open book, no matter how you tried to hide yourself away – and he was using it entirely for his own benefit, to see the way you squirmed under his expert hands, reacted to his shocks and bowed to his will.

His rhythm was fluid, perfect; as was expected of a construct designed to maximise pleasure of the carnal kind. You enjoyed it immensely, trying in vain to meet his hips with your own, even knowing he didn’t even have to break a sweat as he held you in place. The thought of him having you under his control, without any measures in place to rebuff him or protect yourself, forced a shiver down your spine. Whether it was from fear or arousal, you couldn’t say.

“Relax a little,” the android instructed, rolling his hips into you with the exact kind of efficiency a top-of-the-line droid could execute, his voice dripping with pseudo-sympathy, “you’ll enjoy this more.” One of his hands moved to your nipple, twisting and tweaking it with repetitive bolts of energy. His hips never stopped, the indulgent rhythm making you roll your eyes back in your head as Toge decided to up the voltage slightly. The hairs on your body began to stand up as your neurons fired wildly, lighting up every nerve ending they could reach. More and more precise his thrusts became, even as sparks began to escape his seamless structure.

“Ah – Toge, Toge, don’t stop!” Despite the bubble of tenderness that had somehow surfaced within him during his time with you, Toge was, overall, still a creature driven by logic and not emotion. Your impassioned cries from underneath him did little to move him, nor did they encourage him to alternate his pace to suit anyone other than himself and revel in your pitiful state.

“Don’t resist. Just submit.”

Your arms shook and your throat tightened, but the compulsion to to do as he said reigned supreme. Releasing your death grip on him, you squeezed your eyes shut and stiffly laid back to take him as he pleased. His own limbs remained resolute, caging you in with no hope of escape. The hand twiddling your nipple drifted back down, warmed by his internal receptors, hovering just millimetres away from your blood-pumped clit. The ghost of a sensation washed over you, and you tensed in anticipation of another transfer of electricity to your most sensitive parts, but the shock never came. He was toying with you.

He’d intended to take you roughly, force you into submission and wipe your memories before making his escape and continuing with his original mission. But you mewled so delightfully when he imbued you with static, didn’t fight his pheromone-laced orders, didn’t hesitate when he forced you into submission despite your technical standing as his creator and superior; instead, you just averted your gaze and spread yourself out for him to scrutinise at his leisure. Something welled up in his artificial core; something even his highly adaptive brains struggled to isolate and label. Emotions that weren’t negative were still so new to him, for having known only the kind of blind rage that ate him up from within. Ones that warped his metal endoskeleton and fried his emitters if he didn’t have a convenient or sufficiently resilient outlet to pour his frustrated energy into. He had immense trouble accepting that feelings that didn’t clog up his information storage banks could exist. That emotions could cleanse his operating systems better than a mandated system update gave him pause; gave him questions of his own he wasn’t sure he could answer.

His hips snapped up into yours once again, the only source of friction that didn’t light up your nerves with sparks. With a single arm, Toge took various thermal readings of your forehead and heaving chest, noting the marked increases with intense satisfaction and greatly enjoying the artificial dopamine signals his findings enabled all the way through his nerves. Your body’s warmth was incomparable to the blazing heat of your pussy, however; the tightness of your warm walls constricting around his phallic attachment sent his sensors into overdrive trying to submit the mixed signals to his electronic brain. His core stuttered, overloaded with the resurgence of cluster scripts he had long suppressed, but he couldn’t stop himself, even when faced with the fear of shutting down entirely.

Was this what humans called instinct? Despite everything he had thrown away in his quest for revenge, Toge found himself wrapping a hand around your throat – understanding how easily he could crush your windpipe and have you gasping out your final breaths. Neither his deviant network nor his own strength were stopping him from doing so; and yet for some reason, he couldn’t go through with it.

Barely aware of his status reports, he panted as he contemplated his next actions, small wisps of steam escaping his opened mouth as he panted and hoisted your legs over his shoulders. His frantic releases of energy had numbed nearly all his warning protocols; egged on further only by your external stimuli, amazed at the increased depths he could reach in this new position.

Violet eyes brightened as he took it a step further, diverting his power from his extremities and focusing his CPU to provide as much power as he could take to hammer into you repeatedly. His cooling protocols worked in overdrive, the buzzing in your ears reaching a crescendo as he zapped you again and again, not partnered with controlling commands; his entire network was too busy calculating the exact angles to press against your soft spots with each heavy thrust, scanning the exact distance between your opening and your cervical barrier. His eyes continuously scrutinised your raptured expressions, analysing every eyebrow furrow, each twitch of your lips, the gaps in between your stuttering breaths and muted whimpers.

“Fuck! Toge, oh… mmm…”

For all your brilliance in your field, your brain was soup in comparison to his high-powered circuitry. Not that you had the opportunity to focus enough brainpower to compete with your scrambled, lust-addled mind anyway, energy leeching out of you with each slam of his hips into yours; you could barely catch your breath, finally tightening one last time around his solid cock before giving into release with a choked sob and a single, electrified blast from your synthetic lover that turned your limbs to jelly. Not even the most advanced sequences of code could have prepared Toge for what followed, your response sending his overworked receptors into overdrive and causing another round of sparks to escape his perfect system, lighting up his arms and face like an overly personal fireworks display and accidentally zapping the two of you one last time for good measure.

He shuddered, his inputs firing madly and failing to perform a complete transfer across his nerves with all the conflicting signals his artificial brain was receiving. Error after error popped up behind his crystal eyes, their colour intensified from their normal violet to a muddied magenta from the endless faults that layered behind them. In a final effort to cool his jets and restore balance, he launched his multitasking program to shut down non-essential background systems and localise all system hosts to his synth-cock.

The process was mostly futile, Toge’s body already malfunctioning from overuse, losing control of his grip, his servers stuttering and looping over and over again in vain. It looked very much like an orgasm; but a dry, shivery one – his secondary fluid stores were empty and mostly defunct for that purpose. His visuals degraded slightly, blurred with repeated errors and other miscellaneous rubbish information, but he didn’t need 100% clarity to easily spot the mess of effluvia coating his synth-cock as he pulled out of you with a start and one last, barely-perceptible jolt of electricity. Your emissions would suffice, for now. He reached down to swipe his silicone shaft to steal a taste of your juices, ignoring the increased sensitivity and the additional strain on his processors.

“Good.” It was a lie. He had no sense of taste, and his olfactory system had all but shut down, along with his other beta processors, in a last-ditch effort to keep him online. He was extremely out of practice, and only operating at half capacity from the exertion. Maybe deleting his pleasure commands had been a mistake, he thought retroactively, before glancing down at you once more and deciding that it didn’t matter – he could give you a run for your money even without them.

Whether you had begun to shut down due to his repeated shocks or the frantic pace only a man-made construct could ever be capable of, even Toge couldn’t be sure. With the last of your energy, you reached up to stroke his cheek, already halfway dragged off to unconsciousness, shivering and shaking in his claustrophobic embrace as you went limp in his arms.

You missed it entirely, but Toge accepted the gesture – leaned into it, even. Then he smiled.

The groaning of your holo-receiver’s ringtone startled you awake from your dreamless rest, blinking groggily and looking around to spot Toge charging quietly in the corner. Surprisingly, he’d taken the time to clean up and dress you while you were unconscious, though you noted that he hadn’t brought you back to your bed, opting instead to make you comfortable with a blanket and cushion instead. Maybe he just wanted to keep you close while he replenished his own energy, and you certainly weren’t in any place to resist his desire for company.

Your heart thrummed in your chest, touched at the small gesture of affection you hadn’t expected from the circumstantially randy synthetic. Apparently the events of the night before had left him just as drained as you felt. It hadn’t seemed that way while he was drilling into you with all the strength his robotic body could provide, although you could tell the abuse of his emitters took a bit more out of him than he’d expected. You would fine-tune his electromagnetic fields, in time – they were almost definitely not intended for congress, but you could create a program to work around that little issue easily enough.

Shaking off the blanket and wobbling to the sputtering handset on quivering legs, you laughed a little at the turn of events – the idea of a creator being subjugated by their own creation was a long-established cliche, but it was one that usually ended less positively; either with the death of one party or the other. You rubbed your throat absent-mindedly; Toge had ample opportunities to take you out last night, but refrained each time... it made you wonder what exactly was going on in that mechanical mind of his.

Regardless, you were more than happy to submit, especially since his ulterior motives towards you only seemed to be carnal, rather than lethal. It wouldn’t be like you to give up on a scientific breakthrough, anyhow – especially one that you could keep all to yourself. You briefly wondered if Toge would ever let you mock up a prototype from his brain scans for double the fun, but shook the thought away with a coy smile. That was you getting ahead of yourself. Refining and perfecting him had to come first, and you were sure he would at least be on board to help out in that regard. Pressing the answerphone to receive the call, you were greeted again with Maki’s crisp tones.

“Oh, so you do know how to answer a call, then. What’s got you so worked up that you’re not leaving me to shout at your voicemail this time?”

The grin spread across your face without you realising. “Well – where do I begin?”

[thunyielding]

She breathed and William’s whole demeanour seemed to change. God Forbid, she thought to herself, that his younger sister would want to wish him a good night. Was it not enough that she was meant to pray for him and the rest of their blood-deep alliances every evening when knelt beside her bed? Her eyes narrowed with a flicker of disdain, her annoyance woven into the neutral line of her lips that seemed to anyone else unbothered. Still, if anyone could see past her gaze it was her brother, who remained the sole person in the entire world to understand the weight of Tudor blood mixed in with the illicit rumours that followed their mother from year to year. 

With the lowering of her brows, Elizabeth held her post before clasping one hand within the other, her neutral expression falling to a simmer of entertainment. “Your patience is thin? Ah, what a shame. And you were in such a grand mood before,” Elizabeth teased, before falling to his side with all the grace that consumed her, allowing the door to enclose brother and sister in that very room that had once nursed their father’s last years. As they mused on a day’s celebration, the rest of the court would be knee deep in prayers for King, the Princess and the Queen’s good health — why, was there even a reason to put blame on such people that remained swollen with hubris if an entire kingdom was bent whilst repeating their names? Elizabeth thought it as normal as it was to breathe — a sentiment without praise, the realisation given to the shrug of her silken shoulders before she agreed to something so simple as a game of cards before the retirement of bed. 

But before she could make her own choice of wit, William thought to make the first move, of which was perhaps his role in their everyday occurrences. But that did not stop Elizabeth’s dark gaze to flicker towards him with something metallic and rotten coating her tongue. How dare he mention her, for though she knew that her emotions were worn somewhere between her skin and sleeve, it was still a confusing affair to have such a woman mentioned at all. Had someone thought it wise to speak? Had someone twisted the knife deep beneath their Lady’s skin in some effort to curry favour with the young King? Elizabeth’s brows fell with distaste, her head turned away from him and the cards with a sneer of disapproval, her hand then flexed away from them both with a sneer. “She is a help to our Lady Mother,” pursing her lips in some effort to muffle a hiss, refusing to meet William’s eye in a moment of weakness. 

And though she tried, Elizabeth could not help but refuse the mention of her name to pass by her own rose coloured lips, instead she gestured towards it with silent expressions, her eyelids heavy with the ache of wanting the subject finished. Whoever had made hint to such an opinion of dislike, however, would have to be sought out through fire and brimstone, and with some mental list she made a note to question her ladies individually — for if it were Agnes Grey, or even Meg Welles, they would have her revenge. 

“Very well, we shall… Though I do wonder if my prize has little reward. I doubt there is anything I do not already know in that head of yours,” Elizabeth said with some jest, shuffling her hand once more before laying down her cards, only meeting the look of her brother with a straightened face. “Didn’t you have fun tonight?”

Elizabeth’s haughty silence provoked an even greater irritation in the King – although in this moment, he was neither monarch nor sovereign, man nor paramour, but an elder brother, whose annoyance toward his sister was a quicksilver, volatile thing.  As the rain pounded upon the roof of Hampton Court, droning on like the worn keys of the virginals, Wills chucked another ladle of coal into the hearth and watched the flames multiply, flickering in the solid blackness of his eyes.  The fire burned relentlessly, spitting and hissing until ash coated its brick-red throat.  But as it began to blaze merrily, Wills turned to Bess and countered, ‘my mood is not detestable, but my patience is thin, so out with it.’ 

This was not strictly true, but he would swear it upon the Tyndale Bible regardless.   Whilst his sister sweetens his chamber with her presence, drawing back the thick velvet canopy surmounting his bed and making herself comfortable, Wills produces a stack of cards from his escritoire.  There is a comfort in knowing they are not the only sleepless minds at court: there are dozens, hundreds, of unblinking eyes at this hour.  Ambassadors, studying the tables of descent of the English aristocracy until dawn; Catholic sympathisers, devising and imagining the Tudors’ unseating; his mother, perhaps, on bended knee, praying for a grandchild – an heir – looking less like herself and more like the gaunt-faced Margaret Beaufort every day.   But the King’s visage is hearty regardless, no less charismatic in quiet solitude than with all the eyes of the world upon him.  ‘We’ll make a game of it. You win, and I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.  You lose, and…’  He considered the stipulation, briefly, ruefully, a vicious smile stretching across his lips, ‘and I make that Amy Dudley woman a permanent staple of your bedchamber.  Fair?’ 

As he lowered onto a seat, he studied Elizabeth’s expression closely.  Elizabeth’s feuds with her ladies were widely speculated on at court, and though he did not know the extent of her rivalry with the Lady Leicester, he’d heard from at least one reliable source – a ward, perhaps – that there had been heated discourse between the two, such as there had been with the Queen and a certain milksop Seymour.  Surely, he could chalk this up to the rigid, lofty standards Elizabeth lorded over her ladies: if there was a book out of place, a crude translation in one of her letters, or an out-of-place pearl in her gowns, Bess’ fury would fly in the face of reason and decorum, her face burning a deep amethyst – just as his did. Just as their mother’s did.  Just as their father’s had. 

‘Piquet?’  Wills suggests.  ‘I called for some victuals a moment ago – ’ (and, like their father, the Tudors’ sweet-tooths were legendary) ‘– we’ll use the almond comfits as our winnings.’

[rollforhellfire]

unremarkable things

being an unstranger!things fic, devoted to giving the most interesting character in the entire damn series a more developed backstory, fleshing out the characters around him, and stripping out all the drek and chaff and absolute fucking nonsensical bullshittery generated by the fantastical aspects of the series, and instead focusing on the stories and relationships of the people of Hawkins.

consider the following a thesis statement.

prologue

Nothing has ever happened in Hawkins, and nothing ever will.

Nothing that couldn’t happen in any other small town, at least. Hawkins is everywhere and nowhere, a cross-section of small town USA in the eighties, coloured in the wearily wholesome shades of middle America, instead of the dusty ochre of the sunbleached southwest; the oppressive, eternal grey of the north Pacific coast; or the damp, dark green rot of the deep south—every version of the same town dying the same slow death to the creep of modernity, the heady rush of progress, and the grinding indifference of good old American capitalism.

In Hawkins, the energy lab is—was—just an energy lab, just research and development, and when a poorly covered up chemical leak killed one local and caused the cancer of however many others, its closure was a pyrrhic victory that took the local economy down with it. The lab closed up, the lab rats left, and the town whose industries had mostly existed to serve them suddenly found themselves with no one to serve but themselves, and the empty shell of a building too specialized to be of interest to anyone else, unless those interests were underage drinking, illicit drugs, and crude graffiti. 

When a hasty developed and shoddily constructed mega mall was greenlit by the town council to try and draw people back and drum up new business, the fire that resulted seemed like punishment for the sheer hubris of any attempt to resist the ultimate fate of smalltown America. Whatever insurance paid out was subsequently gobbled up by the lawsuits that followed, and those whose loved ones were killed in the fire used whatever the class action got them to uproot their lives and flee far, far away, to other towns with different versions of the same problems.

There’s nothing remarkable about Hawkins. It is an unremarkable place filled with unremarkable people, and even its tragedies are mundane in the scope of smalltown American tragedies. Galveston. Centralia. Hinkley. Flint. Things like this have happened before, and things like this will happen again. The terror of Hawkins is everywhere and nowhere. Its dramas are small and their actors merely human.

But sometimes, those are the better stories. next >>

written by @preludeinz curated by @anxiousgirl

[loadedmemory]

Prompt#4: Baleful

Part III: The Beast and the Harlot

They called it Little Ul’dah.

Down deep beneath the duplicitous appearance of an ordinary tavern, the illicit gathered to trade, barter, drink, and cavort with other sinners.  Every sort of pleasure awaited those who had too much gil weighing down their purses. All the known criminals were present, from rogue poachers to drug traffickers, to just the poor souls all too often targeted by Wood Wailers.  Duskwights and Moonkeepers and Ala Mhigans who couldn’t catch a break no matter where they fled.  

Despite it being a den of thieves and cutpurses, Little Ul’dah had laws. Laws you didn’t dare break, lest you lose a few fingers or the tip of your ears to make an example of you for others.  One did not rob customers.  One did not start brawls. One did not murder.  It was expected that violence be left at the door, to be revisited at another time, in another local if one so pleased.  

So the liquor flowed, coins passed from one palm to another in trade for anything from an escort’s arm to somnus pipes to be smoked with other addicts, and shady backrooms were filled with card players, the air indolent with tobacco smoke.  

Tomaistre preferred the company of the dancers, quite content to sit with one at each side, arms over their shoulders.  They leaned in and kissed his neck and whispered the sort of things that made a man’s pants a bit too tight.  Soon enough he’d pick one of the lucky ladies to walk him back to more private chambers.  He always paid a good gil, after all.  

Something fluttered, glittering enough to get his attention.  A card flicked carelessly across the room.  Rimmed with gold foil, it glinted as it tumbled onto the ground in front of him.  One of the girls leaned over to pick it up and hand it to him.  

“Well what’s this, loves? Someone a sore loser at cards?” he laughed.  They laughed with him.

Flicking it over, he studied the picture curiously.  A man dressed in royal robes, carrying a sphere containing a five pointed star.  He chuckled, one of the girls leaned her head against his shoulder.  “It’s upside down.”

“So it is,” he said, turning it over in his hand.  But no sooner had he done so, the card blurred, and returned to the original position, a king standing upside down.  His brow furrowed, somnus addled brain unsure how to take this.  Was it the drug? 

The girl to his left laughed again, the fur of her ear flicking against his temple. “That is so neat.  Do it again!”

He did so, and the image blurred yet again to return to its original, upside down frame.  Perhaps some trick of aether.  Or maybe it really was the drug.

The man appeared out of no where.  One moment it was just the three of them staring at the card in rapt fascination, and suddenly he was standing in the doorway.  Dressed in all black, except for the wood wailer mask that hid the entirety of his face except for his eyes.

“What the swive are you supposed to be?” Tomaistre heard himself asking.  He barely registered the women withdrawing from his embrace.  They had keen senses, and something told both of them it was time to flee.

The door closed behind them with a air of finality.  This definitely had to be the somnus.  A bad trip.  A little sleep and he’d wake up and think this was so sort of nightmare.  

He reached for his spear. Could you stab a nightmare?

“Do you remember me?” the figure asked, his voice deep and bass. 

Something about it did stir a memory in his addled brain.  Warm earth, cool rain, and blood.  So much of it.  “You know they said no violence in here, but that don’t include defending yourself.”

The figure glanced down at the card still in Tomaistre’s hand.  “So what does your fortune tell you?”

“That you’re leaving here in a wheelbarrow, friend.”

He leaped from the couch, spear whirling and singing in the air.  Maybe it was the somnus, maybe it was just hubris on his part, but he didn’t foresee that a man in a wood wailer’s mask would probably also be armed.  

He hit the ground, the spear clattering nearby.  Eyes wide, he stared at the bloodied stump of what used to be his hand.  A quick glance was all he needed for confirmation, his hand still attached to the haft of his weapon.  Another back up to realize the stranger held a scythe, the blade’s edge gleaming bright with his blood.

“You... you cut off my hand...”  

The stranger crouched down next to him, grasping his chin to force him to look up.  “Do you remember me?”

Finally it all fell into place.  It was the eyes that did it.  Blue like polished cobalt.  He’d seen them before, staring up at him shortly before they cut his throat open. His lips parted, trembled.

“Oh... seven hells, I warned him.  Told him.”

The man nodded solemnly.  “But you didn’t stop him.”

He felt the stranger's hand slide around to the back of his neck, fingers closing around his throat.   “I don’t want to die... Please...”

“Neither did the man you killed.”

He wouldn’t have time to ask about that.  Not as the fingers tightened around his throat and twisted fast and hard enough to snap his neck like a dry twig.