#it might seem like pain but its the only time he gets to be in a room thats not a cell or a fighting ring | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ckret2 · 3 months ago

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who wants a prism break?

So, the Theraprism! The Theraprism sucks, right?

This is like, a good day.

The Theraprism clearly sucks.

Have a one shot of Bill escaping Theraprism with the most desperate escape plan imaginable: reincarnation.

(Warning for, as you might expect, psychiatric hospital abuse.)

####

There are fates worse than death. Like boredom, for instance!

####

Everything was black and numb and silent and cold so so cold but no he could only call it cold if he felt cold and Bill didn't feel coldness there was just the absence of a feeling the absence of heat the absence of light the absence of sound the absence of touch the absence of air.

The absence of everything.

Bill had loved a void once—a micro black hole. Every time they touched it slowly killed him, spaghettified his limbs, drained his energy. His energy was so vast that she never claimed a drop of a drop of a drop of his reserves—but it still hurt like nothing else to be crushed and stretched and ripped and consumed by her event horizon. The pain was wonderful. Being shredded was ecstasy.

This void was the opposite of her.

He couldn't even feel anything when he tried to scream—without air, he couldn't feel his vocal plates vibrate. He couldn't feel his hands, his face, his eye; he tried to bite himself just to feel something and he couldn't feel his mouth, he tried to rip open his wounds and couldn't find them; why couldn't he see his own light, why couldn't he see his blood, where had he gone, was he gone—

Reality returned like a light bulb being switched on.

The first thing he registered was a shrill sound on the verge of inaudibility; and then the pain in his eye, his sides, his wounds; and then the dull gray light, the hard floor under his knees, the antiseptic stench in the air conditioning.

He stopped screaming. The shrill sound stopped.

"Energetic as always, are we?"

Bill blinked blearily at the Orb of Healing Light hovering before him. He croaked, "I'll regurgitate you."

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that." A glowing translucent clipboard manifested in front of the Orb. "Well, you've gone through this enough times to know the drill! Do you need a moment to recover, or—?"

"No no, I'm fine, I'm fine." Bill slumped forward, trembling hands on the floor, waiting for the vertigo to pass. "I'm fine. Do your thing." He'd rather get the post-Solitary Wellness Void reorientation interview over with.

"Perfect. What's your name?"

"I'm ol' Vinegar Pete."

"No clowning, please."

He sighed loudly. "Bill Cipher."

"Good. Where are you?"

He considered saying hell, but decided he'd used up all the clowning he could risk for one day. He didn't want to go back in. "The Theraprism. Ward 333."

"Very good. When are you?"

"I was gonna ask you," Bill groaned. "How long was I in the hole this time? A million years? Ten million?"

The Orb checked its notes. "Eight minutes."

"Wh—no, no I know that time moves slower out in reality than in the prism. I'm not asking how much time passed in reality, I'm asking how much time passed here."

"Eight minutes," the Orb repeated. "Outside the Theraprism, one third of one second passed."

Bill groaned again and flopped flat on the floor.

"Do you know why you're here?"

"Why are any of us here?" Bill asked the gray linoleum tiles. "Usually because some dumb beast tripped into the booby trap that sets off its reproductive process. How's your species work, you pop outta nebulas, right—?"

"I meant, coming out of the Solitary Wellness Void."

"Oh." Bill tried to remember what his infraction had been this time. "Because I failed to escape."

"Because you tried to escape."

If he'd succeeded, they never could have punished him. "Sure."

"Good, you seem oriented to your surroundings. Let's get you to the nurse and then back to your cell." The nurse? What did he need a nurse for?

He only realized then that he must have succeeded in reopening his wounds in the SWV: the never-quite-healed crack across his exoskeleton was wider, the edges chipped and bent. It hurt. His eye socket hurt too; he tasted blood. With the way his whole body usually ached after leaving the void, he hadn't even noticed.

Through the crack in his exoskeleton, his edges had frayed into fine golden threads. The sight of silvery blood on his hands made him nauseous; he hastily looked away and reminded himself it was only his own.

####

As Bill wearily followed behind the Orb and two security guards followed behind him, he had to periodically turn to hover sideways to streamline himself. These days he was so weak that he could feel the air resistance pushing back against him when he floated; with his wound reopened, he felt like the air pressure could snap his exoskeleton along the crack and break him in half.

"You're not Emmy," Bill said. "You're, uh..."

"A-AOX4."

"Oxyyy," Bill said weakly. "Heyyy. S'been a while. Usually I get a personal welcome back from the void, why didn't Emmy show? Don't tell me it doesn't see me as a threat anymore!" He'd be offended if it didn't. D-SM5 was the closest thing he had to a nemesis these days. Even if he couldn't beat it, he wanted to think he still irritated the daylights out of it.

"Director SM5 couldn't make it. It's overseeing the preparations for Paingoreous's reincarnation."

"That's today? Good riddance." Paingoreous had started getting sanctimonious the past few hundred group therapy sessions—don't you have any compassion for your victims and it's possible to live a happy life without slaughtering all your enemies first and maybe I should ask for permission before I vivisect my friends' faces—passive, self-defeatist crap like that. Vivisecting your friends and seeing who complained was how you found out who your lame friends were! Now that the wet blanket was leaving, the rest of them could get back to spending their sessions reminiscing about the glory days and trying to set the donuts on fire when the therapist was distracted.

"Yes," A-AOX4 said pointedly, "it is good he gets to leave to go become a productive member of reality. We're all so happy that he's rehabilitated enough to earn a new chance at life." (Bill rolled his eye. A-AOX4 ignored it.) "Wouldn't you like a chance to rejoin reality, Bill?"

More than anything. He'd been in this crystallized brain's perpetual dreamscape for what felt like both a thousand years and a single day—time never passing, an eternal inescapable moment. He'd tried to break out, sneak out, or bargain his way out more times than he could count; sometimes he was locked in the SWV as punishment; and sometimes the staff gently stopped him, confiscated his supplies, and chastised him for the effort—and the reminder that he was as powerless as a child was worse than the void. He'd gone delirious from the boredom, hallucinating screams and burning faces as his mind struggled to stimulate itself (and he'd been medicated for it). He'd so despaired of escaping that he'd looked for a way to burn up the remains of his energy and vanish for good (and he'd been medicated for it). He ached with the need to see the stars again.

But not enough to sell his soul for it. If he took the staff's route—let them break him down, sandblast off his rough edges, erase everything that made him him, and finally physically transform him into some alien creature—then whatever left the Theraprism would no longer be Bill Cipher.

"What, and force you guys to find a new 'unique case'? I wouldn't do that to you! I know how much you love me," Bill said. "Besides, why would I go through all that just so I can reincarnate as a sentient snowflake, or Mi-Go antennae lice, or..."

"A butterfly," A-AOX4 cut in, an edge of impatience creeping into its tone. "Paingoreous has chosen to reincarnate as a butterfly. We all think that's a very productive way to channel his desire to digest his own skin."

"Unless it's one of those blood-drinking butterflies, lame." Bill scoffed. "Wait—hold on, you said butterfly? Like an Earth butterfly?"

They were, of course, not actually speaking an Earth language, but an interdimensional pidgin that borrowed words and grammar from dozens of worlds. When around the Orbs of Healing Light that held half the staff positions, Bill tended to speak a dialect of the pidgin that used flashes of light for 40% of its vocabulary. It was perfectly possible that the word Bill knew as "butterfly" was also used for some alien creature, but—

"Yes, an Earth butterfly. A Vanessa atalanta, to be precise."

Aw, boo. Not even a cool butterfly. "He's reincarnating on Earth?"

"Yes. Many of our patients reincarnate on Earth. As long as you're careful about which region and century you reincarnate into, it's at the top of our recommended list of Goldilocks zones."

There was another phrase that Bill recognized, but this time he was sure his definition was not A-AOX4's definition. "Whaaat do Goldilocks zones have to do with reincarnation."

"You didn't pay attention to the orientation session on our outpatient reincarnation program, did you."

"What! I didn't get an orientation session!" said Bill, who probably didn't remember any such session because he didn't pay attention to it.

"Well—we rank millions of planets and their dimensional parallels based on their potential to help patients reintegrate into reality. We do try to set our patients up for success," A-AOX4 said. "To qualify as a Goldilocks zone, a planet has to meet the Theraprism's rigorous list of criteria: its lifeforms, cultures, laws of physics, and position in interdimensional society must all be conducive to a patient's continued recovery. We want to ensure that our patients' new lives are neither so difficult as to retraumatize them, nor so easy as to let them coast by avoiding continued personal growth, but right in the middle, so that they're emotionally and spiritually challenged without being overwhelmed. The Goldilocks zone: a perfect compromise between two extremes."

"Yeah, sure, sounds great." Bill could feel his eye glazing over in disinterest. Fight it, Cipher.

"Do you miss Earth?"

Bill tilted to glance askance at A-AOX4, and was surprised to see it had turned to focus a spotlight on him. Oh—it thought it had finally found a carrot to dangle in front of him. That was a popular strategy here: they figured out what a patient wanted most, and then used it to coax them into good behavior and "rehabilitation"—better still if they could attach a sense of urgency to it. Don't you want to see your descendants again before the last of them dies out? Don't you want to see your homeworld before its sun swallows it? Don't you want to reconcile with your god before the heat death of your universe?

But Bill had no universe, no homeworld, no family; no lovers or friends or gods that hadn't betrayed him and left him to rot here; and he'd remained smugly steadfast in refusing to give D-SM5 and its minions anything else it could use to get under his chitin. He was proud that he was too broken for even the famed Theraprism to fix him.

A-AOX4 probably thought it had finally found an opening. It might be useful to let it keep thinking that.

"You kidding me? Earth? Pfff! I don't miss that overgrown asteroid one bit!" He waved off the suggestion, and winced when the gesture tugged wrong at his reopened wound. "But hey, you don't study a world for millions of years without finding a few things about it to like. The music's pretty good. And the movies and literature, though if you ask me, they peaked between the first two World Wars. I like trees, evolution did a great job with trees. And humans really went off with the architecture. The pyramids? 10 out of 10. And some of the locals aren't bad, I've got a few exes from Earth."

"Do you? How many exes?"

"Living? Just a hundred forty or fifty," Bill said dismissively. "Earthlings just have those pretty eyes, you know? I'm a sucker for a pretty eye! But outside of that, no, there's nothing on Earth for me."

"I see," A-AOX4 said lightly, and dropped the conversation.

Hook, line, and sinker.

####

The original definition of a "Goldilocks zone" came from astrobiology. The Goldilocks zone was the ring of space around a star in which an orbiting planet could support liquid water and thus water-based life: not too close to the star and too hot, not too far and too cold, but just right. Earth, for instance, orbited Sol in its Goldilocks zone.

It was from this definition that other, more metaphorical definitions of Goldilocks zones emerged. Such as the Theraprism's: a world that was neither too stressful nor too boring for a newly brainwashed—sorry, "cured"—patient. And apparently Earth was in that Goldilocks zone, too.

Which was very interesting to Bill—because in their search for a new home, the Henchmaniacs had come up with their own definition of a Goldilocks zone. For them, it was a dimension close enough to the Nightmare Realm with a thin enough barrier that they could easily punch through it, but not so close and so thin that puncturing the barrier would pop it like a balloon and cause the dimension to immediately prolapse into the Nightmare Realm—which was a problem they'd had before. More than once. They needed a dimension they could easily cut a hole into, but control it, so they could slowly pump the Nightmare Realm's contents in. A barrier neither too vulnerable nor too strong, but just right.

And wouldn't you know it—but Earth happened to be in that Goldilocks zone too. Right next to a point in the dimensional membrane so thin, the Nightmare Realm could almost stretch through and kiss it.

####

Since Bill Cipher was infamously known as the last survivor of a trillion-years-extinct species, and had until recently been capable of instantly repairing himself, there were no medical records on how his anatomy worked. It didn't help that at some point eons ago he'd somehow managed to graft a 3D exoskeleton to his 2D anatomy without breaking his own physics, meaning no one had seen his true body in recorded history. Bill knew how he worked, but refused to offer any hints. So the Theraprism staff had to guess at Bill's medical treatment.

But Bill was still made of energy, and even weakened he could eventually self-repair. So whenever his injury was exacerbated, the nurse tended to just patch up his exoskeleton to keep it stable enough to send him back to his room.

On top of his mysterious anatomy, the staff had no idea how to medicate his physiology. They knew he could be medicated—Bill's personal substance (ab)use experiments were notorious far outside the Nightmare Realm—but they had to treat him like a newly-discovered form of life in figuring out what affected him, how it affected him, and how much it took. He'd been on and off hundreds of drugs as they tried to chemically stabilize a mind for which they had no idea what baseline stability looked like. D-SM5 had told him that between the enormous doses needed to impact his energy-based physiology and the vast variety of drugs he'd been through, Bill's medication regimen was the most expensive in the Theraprism. He took some pride in that.

He had very few things to take pride in anymore. He clung to what meager victories he could.

If Bill got his way, he wouldn't be medicated at all. None of the substances they wanted him on were what he'd call recreational. (Although for a while he had gotten away with not telling the docs that one of his antipsychotics had given him a side-effect of kaleidoscopic hallucinations.) Plus there was the fact that he'd heard rumors that quite a few pharmaceutical execs were good pals with a certain director—not that Bill would name names, of course!—that's his motto, Don't Slander Maliciou5ly!

But when he resisted taking his meds, they could send in the guards to pin him down so a nurse could inject a sedative so strong he wouldn't remember anything that happened for the next few hours to months (hard to tell) until they started tapering it off... and although he'd rather die than admit it, after losing that fight five or six times, even he had to admit to himself it was a lot less scary to just take their rotten drugs. Better to go through his days with his mind dulled and hazy than blacked out altogether.

To retain what little pride he had left, he'd reached a compromise with his jailers.

When the nurse had finished attaching the reinforcing splints around Bill's injury, they grabbed a medication measurement cup, filled it halfway with syrupy eye drops, and double-checked Bill's chart as they dropped thirteen different pills (plus a fourteenth pill for a painkiller) in the cup.

As Bill redressed, he eyed the unappetizing cocktail of antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, and things he'd forgotten the purpose of but that probably weren't doing whatever the doctors hoped and definitely weren't doing anything Bill liked. "My straw?"

"Right, right." The nurse handed over one of the wide-diameter disposable white straws they kept on hand for patients who struggled to drink (or, in Bill's case, patients they struggled to get to drink).

Only a tiny fragment of Bill was actually locked up in the Theraprism—like pinching the glowing lure of an anglerfish in a trap while the rest of the fish thrashed outside—and because most of Bill's vast energy was elsewhere, he was nearly powerless. But he still had enough energy to heat up a finger, twist the straw around it, and hold it there until it had melted into a new shape.

The nurse sighed. "Do you have to do that every time? You ruin more straws than you get right."

Imperiously, Bill said, "Leave me to my whimsy." He tugged off the straw when it had cooled down to examine the corkscrew shape he'd made. The wall was a little flattened in one place, but he could pinch it back open. "See? It's perfect!" Cheerfully ignoring the nurse, he stuck the straw in his cup and slurped down his pills like tapioca balls. He tried not to remember what was in them.

A-AOX4 had left Bill with the nurse, but the two mall cops with medical kinks known as Bill's personal guards were still waiting nearby. The nurse's office was next door to the cafeteria—for ease of patients picking up their medications at meal times—in an anteroom that was connected to the rest of the ward by a set of locked double doors. A couple of guards were stationed near those doors at all times, and generally the guards assigned to Bill hung around with them while Bill was in the cafeteria or nurse's office. Bill floated up to them, regarding them with the disinterest of a king ignoring the servants he expected to open doors for him, and continued to ignore them as they escorted him back to his cell, one in front and one behind, while he sipped on his drugged cocktail.

The Dimensional Tyrant Ward was already one of the most heavily-guarded wards in the Theraprism; but to reach the maximum security cells, a patient had to pass several increasingly heavy security checkpoints with increasingly impenetrable security doors. The final door was warded against all magic, unhackable, unbreakable, and so airtight that even without his exoskeleton there was no gap Bill's 2D form could slide through. The doors to each cell—outfitted with tiny one-way mirror portholes, no latches or hinges on the inside—were a little less heavy duty, but packed with just as many failsafes. The Dimensional Tyrant Ward's max security hall had the most advanced security architecture of any psychiatric facility in the multiverse.

Bill had made a trillion year career of trying to break his way through a door nobody wanted him to go through. He could think of seven different ways to get through the doors. Sooner or later he'd find a way out of this place altogether.

A few of the doors had modifications: this one with a metal slab over the porthole to protect passersby from the occupant's petrifying gaze, that one with extra soundproofed padding coating the door. Bill was almost insulted his own door didn't warrant any special modifications.

His favorite door was The Beast's. A comfortingly yellow triangular sign on the door displayed a black symbol of a steak. Red signs above and below read "CAUTION! FEED UNSEASONED MEAT ONLY." "NO SUGAR ALLOWED." The Beast's heavy snuffing was audible through the door; his hot, sickly sweet breath seeped through the slot in the door that had been installed to deliver his food.

Bill's escorts automatically drifted to the far side of the hall to avoid The Beast. Bill, whose first medication was already starting to kick in, zigzagged lazily back and forth across the hall, heedless of how close he came to The Beast's cell.

Bill had never seen this door opened once in all his time incarcerated, and the dust settled on the additional chains and padlocks stretched across the door showed just how long it had been since the last incident. But some of the patients who'd been here longer than Bill still couldn't bring themselves to speak of the last time he'd escaped. Elder eldritch gods shuddered and gibbered nervously at the mention of his name.

Bill tilted over to try to peer through the food slot at The Beast. A quivering, sickly blue eye stared back at him. Honestly, Bill thought The Beast was adorable.

Outside Bill's door, the guards waited for Bill to finish his medicine, hand over his cup and straw, and open his mouth and lift his eye out of the way so they could check and make sure he'd swallowed them.

And then he was left in his cell.

####

A perfect cube of uniform dull grey tiles supernaturally lit by a uniform dull grey glow, no light source, no shadows; in a max security room in the Maximum Security Wellness Center, patients weren't even trusted around light fixtures. The staff had removed everything Bill had used thus far to commit violence or attempt escape, plus a few more things as punishments for various infractions: journal, paint, pens, books, magazines, puppets (he missed those the most), even the furniture. He'd never earned the privilege of a TV or radio. By now, all he was permitted were black, red, yellow, and blue dry erase markers to draw on his walls—and the red and blue had gone dry; the "Be a TRY-angle!" poster they'd replaced whenever Bill left the room until he gave up and stopped tearing it down; and the clothes on his back. He'd gradually gotten himself banned from every extracurricular and recreational activity the Dimensional Tyrant Ward offered. Whenever he was fresh out of the SWV, when his restrictions were highest, his schedule consisted of mandatory individual therapy, mandatory group therapy, med checks, and the cafeteria.

He spent the vast majority of his time in his cell, sitting curled up alone, day after night after day, barely moving, barely talking, barely eating, waiting for nothing at all.

####

The seamless door swung open and admitted an Orb of Healing Light.

Bill blinked blearily up at the Orb. It was hard to tell how slowly time passed here, but he was sure it couldn't have been more than a couple hours since he'd been returned to his cell: that was when his medications made his mind the foggiest. "Emmyyy. Where ya been? Didn't see you when I came out of the Solitary Dullness Void. Nice of you to, uh..." A second ago he'd had a clever quip about how D-SM5 had clearly dropped by because it missed Bill, but he'd forgotten how to word it.

"Well, I'm here now. I'm flattered you missed me, Mr. Cipher."

Bill blinked heavily. "You turned that around on me," he griped. "Not fair." Ugh, the room was spinning. He flopped on his back.

"A-AOX4 tells me you showed an interest earlier in our outpatient reincarnation program," D-SM5 said. "Since it looks like your schedule is light these days, I thought you might be interested in attending Paingoreous's reincarnation?"

It took him a moment to process the offer. "Really? That's something people can attend?" What was the catch?

"We usually only extend the offer to the departing patient's friends, and—exemplary patients. But... I thought you might benefit from watching the process for yourself. It may encourage you to take a little more interest in your future."

For it to push a possible lead so fast, it really was desperate to find some leverage they could use on Bill. It probably thought of this as a rare opportunity—a patient from Ward 333 wasn't ready for reincarnation every day.

"Wow. I sure am encouraged," Bill said. "You have no idea just how encouraged I am."

####

If an unambitious office building and a utilitarian hospital reluctantly got married out of a vague sense of heteronormative social obligation, had a depressed child, and the fae spirited it away to replace it with an even more depressed changeling child, the child's small intestines would look a lot like the Theraprism's interior hallways: it was windowless, it was labyrinthine, it was beige, and it was grey, and it didn't even care anymore. Monotonous commercial high-traffic carpet alternated with monotonous commercial high-traffic linoleum. The fluorescent lights buzzed just enough to be annoying, but not quite enough that you'd feel justified in snapping and screaming "I've had it!" as you swung a pleather-seated metal chair at the light fixture.

Even though Bill had been languishing in the Theraprism for hours and/or millennia (Bill couldn't tell; he couldn't feel the passage of time), he hardly knew his way around the Dimensional Tyrant Ward, much less the rest of the facility. As D-SM5 led Bill (and six guards) out of Ward 333 and into a lower security zone, he looked for any scant identifiable landmarks and tried to memorize which turns they took by coding the lefts and rights and ups and downs into a mnemonic word. The walk helped wake him from his medication stupor; but his mind never quite felt fully on.

Bill had only briefly glimpsed the Theraprism's reincarnation unit during intake, just one of many rooms he'd been whisked past as he was dragged to Ward 333 screaming and cursing the Axolotl's name. Entering the unit now, it looked like an occult sacrificial altar carved from marble that had been modeled after a 23rd century starship's teleportation platform, contained in a room that looked like a magic planetarium: glowing stars hovered around the dome of the ceiling. Against the back wall in pale pink marble was carved an impossibly long axolotl, swimming in a figure 8 so its vapid smile almost caught the tip of its ribbonlike tail. Bill glowered at it. Backstabber.

He, D-SM5, and the other observers who'd already arrived were in a connected observation room with an enormous, thick window and a sealed door. Next to the window was a large computer console encased in the same marble as the reincarnation altar. That probably controlled the process.

The audience consisted of three aliens who looked a little like Paingoreous might have with his face unpeeled, a few patients and staff Bill recognized, more he didn't, and Jessica with the shining spherical head and the thirteen fingers. Oh boy. If he'd known Jessica would be here he would have tried to polish. Bill straightened his bow tie and smoothed his rumpled orange jumpsuit.

Paingoreous himself was already in the next room, standing on the altar. At the sight of Bill, his exposed facial muscles twitched, as though trying to widen his eyes even though their eyelids were already long gone. "Bill? What are you doing here?"

D-SM5 answered before Bill could blurt out a witty retort. "I invited Mr. Cipher. I thought he would benefit from seeing what he can look forward to once he's improved. I hope you don't mind."

Paingoreous's face immediately smoothed out. "Yes—of course, director, if you say so. I remember how difficult it was in the early days. I'm happy to help my fellow patients in any way I can." Suck up. A dry note entered his voice, "Especially a more troubled patient."

Bill took one of the folding chairs lined up in front of the window and shot back, "I'm about to have one less trouble! Byyye!" (Did Jessica think that was funny? Sometimes she did. He snuck a sideways glance to see if she was laughing. Oh, right—she didn't have a face.)

Paingoreous didn't dignify him with a response. Too good for the likes of Bill, no doubt. Paingoreous wasn't obligated to answer anybody—except the staff, of course.

Bill had never met the real Paingoreous. By the time Bill was committed, the monotony, medication, and mandatory therapy were already well on their way to killing whoever Paing had once been. No way the offensively bland sap leaving now was the same one who'd come in with his face skinned and muscles pinned open.

A technician was already turning on the computer console, running through a whole list of checks as the machine booted up. A hum filled the room as the altar began to softly glow. To all appearances Bill was facing forward, slitted pupil aimed straight at Paingoreous; but his anatomy was built for watching things out of the corner of his eye and his real attention was focused on the reincarnation technician. "So how's reincarnation work in this dump?" Bill asked D-SM5. "I didn't get the orientation."

"Yes you did," D-SM5 said. "I was there."

"Oh yeah? Well, I don't remember seeing you."

D-SM5 sighed. "First, Paingoreous's memories of his current life must be erased, to give him the best fresh start possible and to comply with Earth's soul sanitization regulations."

"Seems like a big waste of time. His head's already empty enough."

One of the Paing-ish aliens a couple seats over shot Bill a dirty look. "That's my son in there."

"Not for much longer, he isn't."

"Be respectful," D-SM5 said warningly.

Bill ignored it. "So once you've scrubbed his brain clean, what then?"

"Then, we reincarnate him. We've already carefully selected his destination and species; except for special circumstances, we generally don't customize the patient's body further, as the program is already set up to divinely design the body most well-suited to the soul about to inhabit it."

"If these bodies are so perfect, why customize them at all?"

"We wouldn't want, say, a recovering pyromaniac to be reborn with pyrokinesis." (Bill felt unfairly targeted.) "Once his species and destination are entered into the program, off he'll go to start his new life as an egg."

"An egg?! Sheesh, wasn't going through childhood once bad enough? I assume his childhood was bad, anyway! Nobody with competent parents ends up like him."

The Paing-ish alien beside Bill bolted out of their seat and lurched aggressively toward Bill. (Ha. Too easy.) The next alien over tugged them back by the arm. Bill was sure he heard a whispered, "Careful, do you know who that..."

D-SM5 said, "One more crack like that and you're going back to your cell."

"Fiiine. Why can't he skip straight to being a butterfly, though?" What he really wanted to find out was how to skip straight to adulthood.

"For starters, because spontaneous generation has been heavily restricted on Earth since the 15th century, and banned completely outside of special circumstances since the 19th century."

Spontaneous generation. The creation of fully formed life from unliving matter: maggots that emerged from flesh, geese that emerged from barnacles, snakes and crocodiles that wriggled out of the mud of the Nile. He'd always planned to legalize it again when he took over. So if the only reason the Theraprism couldn't do it was because it was banned, then they must have the technology for it, right?

Bill tuned D-SM5 out as it prattled on about the mental health benefits of restarting life and beginner's mind and boring therapeutic psychobabble, and ignored the flashing lights and divine music as Paingoreous's memory, personality, and identity were all wiped clean. He was only interested in what the reincarnation technician was doing. (Although when Bill briefly glanced at Paingoreous, his shape seemed somehow uncertain, as though his molecules had only just walked into the room and promptly forgotten what they'd come in for or who they were supposed to be. Ready to be reshaped into something else.)

The technician opened up the primary reincarnation program, checked a box confirming that the patient's previous incarnation had been erased, and began setting up the specifications for his next incarnation. Choosing the reincarnation world was easy enough: under the drop down menu, the "Goldilocks zone" worlds were sorted first. Earth was sixth on the list. Choosing a dimension was just as easy.

However, choosing the location and time period looked more complicated; rather than searching through a handy list of continents or geological epochs, the technician checked Paingoreous's patient file and typed a couple of long strings of numbers into the blanks for the coordinates and time. They didn't look like any date system or coordinate system Bill was familiar with. How the heck would he work with that?

And selecting the species, to Bill's horror, meant scrolling down a menu ordered by how frequently a species had been selected for reincarnation at this facility. That was insane! The Theraprism always discharged patients as unambitious species where one member was nearly incapable of making a meaningful impact on the local biosphere—anything useful like an octopus or a goat would be buried amongst the literal billions of species that had received zero reincarnations. Couldn't you just start typing the species's name to jump down to—? But no, the Theraprism's keyboard didn't have characters to type human loan words. The technician seemed to be scrolling manually.

That was fine! That was fine. Whatever Bill left as, he wouldn't be it for very long. He wasn't shopping for a makeover; just for an escape pod.

The technician located Vanessa atalanta (147 prior reincarnations) and kept moving, tabbing past a dizzying array of options—sex, size, coloration, visual clarity, caterpillar spine distribution, a whole list of health conditions and mutations the technician skipped—and every box she tabbed past automatically filled in with the word "DEFAULT". How many boxes could be filled in with defaults?

Bill leaned toward D-SM5. "So do you chuck these suckers out anywhere random on the planet or what?"

"Of course not," it said promptly. "What a thought! We take a deep interest in our discharged patients' well-being. We never leave where they spend their next lives at the whim of the computer's randomized decision."

But they could leave it up to the computer. Still watching sideways as the technician scrolled past an "advanced settings" button without touching it (was that where the spontaneous generation option was hidden?), Bill asked, "Do youalways choose for the patient, or can the patient make requests?"

Dryly, D-SM5 said, "Unless you make some enormous progress, I doubt you'd get clearance to reincarnate anywhere near that town you terrorized, if that's what you're wondering."

"What! Who said I want to visit that crummy valley! All those mountains and trees? Ugh! No, do you know what kind of place I like? The Greater Cairo metropolitan area. Dry! Sandy! Flat!" said Bill, who detested flat landscapes with all his heart. "Covered in pyramids! Sometimes with my face on them! Plus there's the Nile! I love the Nile! I love being in the Nile! I'd spend all my time in the Nile if I could! I've had some loser ex-friends say that living your whole life in the Nile is an unhealthy coping mechanism to avoid addressing problems in your life, but if you ask me they're just jealous of how amazing my life is—"

"Ready for reincarnation," the technician said. "Proceed?"

D-SM5 left its seat, hovering closer to the glass to catch Paingoreous's attention. "Are you ready?"

"Sure," said Paingoreous, who clearly wasn't certain what he was claiming to be ready for.

"Proceed," D-SM5 said. Bill fell silent, paying close attention to how the technician began the reincarnation process.

She clicked a button that said "EXECUTE" (gruesome), clicked through a couple more confirmation screens, and then the faint background hum grew to a rumble and the magical stars glowed brighter. "Ten seconds," she said. "Nine... eight... seven..."

"Hey!" Bill shouted through the glass. "Friendly tip for Earth! Humans love when you fly into their eyeballs! You should do that!"

D-SM5 rounded on Bill, glowing furiously at him. (Maybe it was Bill's imagination, but he thought Jessica looked amused. Worth it.)

The soon-to-be caterpillar formerly known as Paingoreous stared in confusion at Bill. "Okay," he said—and then there was a bright flash of light.

He let out an awful wail of pure soul-rending agony.

When the light faded, he was gone.

The observation room had fallen perfectly silent.

"That's fine," D-SM5 said. "That's—that's normal."

####

Every once in a while, the Theraprism got something right. It was one of the few big government-sponsored "respectable" institutions that didn't make a fuss about how Bill ate. They just let him go to the cafeteria, strip down, unpeel his exoskeleton, and hang out with the photosynthesizers for half an hour or so in the corner under the grow lights. No gasps of horror or screams of outrage—not from the staff anyway; some of the patients took a bit to get used to it when they were new. It was a refreshing change.

On the other hand, even though they were willing to turn a couple lights high enough to melt most mortals' eyeballs when Bill was feeding, he never left feeling truly energized. The grow lights were designed for species with leaves and solar panels; they weren't designed to fuel up a god made of energy. A few bright lightbulbs didn't measure up to raw starlight.

He figured there wasn't any point in complaining. As much as he hated feeling like a gas tank trying to burn a dust mote for fuel, he knew that they knew that long before he even reached 1% of his usual power, he'd be strong enough to vaporize the Theraprism with the snap of a finger.

When he'd had his daily dose of light, he folded shut, redressed, and drifted over to the actual food for dessert. He grabbed a bottle of an allegedly "lemon" nigh-flavorless clear soda—this would do—and hovered toward the exit.

The cafeteria monitor stationed in the door elbowed her way in front of Bill. "Ahem."

"What?"

"You know the rules. No food outside the cafeteria."

"What! This isn't food, it's a soda. Beverages aren't food, everyone knows that." The monitor didn't budge. Bill tried whining. "C'mooon, I got injured in the void today. Look at this!" He gestured demonstratively at his splints. "Look how much pain I'm in!"

The Solitary Wellness Void made this cafeteria monitor uncomfortable. She'd never said so directly, but she tended to turn a blind eye when patients who'd just come out of the SWV were more aggressive than usual or tried to sneak extra desserts. One time when Bill had come out of a week in the SWV, she'd wordlessly slipped him a couple of packets of low-sodium fear sauce, a condiment usually distributed exclusively to the obligate phobophages in the ward. "Besides, it's my birthday! I'm a birthday triangle! You wouldn't deny a birthday triangle a soda, right?"

"Is it really your birthday?"

"Heck if I know. It could be. I don't know it isn't."

She was trying not to smile. "Fine. Just one time. Don't let anyone catch you with it and finish it before you're back in your cell."

"You got it, toots." Bill glided past her.

He slipped from the cafeteria into the nurse's office before his guards could catch sight of his illicit drink. "Hey, bartender! I'm here for my nightcap."

The nurse prepared Bill's evening battery of drugs. He bent his straw into a fun zigzag—honestly it was really more of a sad N shape—slurped down half the eyedrops, and opened his soda to refill his cup.

The nurse looked over at the hiss of the cap opening. "Hey! Hey—"

"It's just soda!" Bill protested. "The cafeteria monitor said it was fine! Besides, what's a little soda gonna do? Nullify all seven of my antipsychotics before I reach my cell?" (Bill had overheard the nurse grumbling to a colleague about the amount of antipsychotics he was on. They thought it was utterly excessive, considering that they'd had no evidence the drugs were doing anything but making him more erratic—which was something, because Bill had seen patients near drooling catatonia from their meds without any of the nurses questioning their current dosage. Conversely, the docs thought Bill's odd biology meant they needed to give him more if they wanted any hope of impacting him.) "Come on. It's not even caffeinated!"

The nurse took the soda bottle to check the ingredient list, then relented. "Fine. I suppose it won't do any harm."

"You're a peach." Bill topped off his cup, poured the rest of the soda over his eye, crushed the bottle, and consumed it too.

"The plastic probably isn't good for you, though."

"I like the way it melts in the back of my throat."

As he drank his medicated soda and got escorted back to his cell, he lazily drifted back and forth in the hall as far as the guards would let him go, dawdling more than usual—he knew they hated it when he dawdled, but they knew he hated spending one second more in his cell than necessary and grudgingly put up with a little lollygagging to keep the peace. But their tolerance ran out in the max security hall as Bill slowed down even further near The Beast's cell. The guard behind Bill pushed him. "Hurry up."

"Hey!" Bill wobbled off path and stumbled into the wall, spilling some of his drink. "What's your problem!"

"You stopped moving."

"I did not! I'm just taking my time! Enjoying the weather out here."

"Well, take less time."

"Ugh, fine. Didn't realize you had plans I'm keeping you from." Bill rolled his eye and kept moving.

"Hold it!"

Bill froze. He turned around. The guard was pointing at a streak of clear fluid that had spilled from Bill's cup and rolled down the door. His bones frosted over.

"You dropped a pill," the guard said.

Bill's gaze focused on the circular soap-green tablet on the floor. "Are you kidding?! Aren't the other twelve enough?"

"No exceptions, Cipher."

"You don't expect me to eat it off the floor!"

"Do you want to go all the way back to the nurse's office for another?"

Bill groaned in frustration. "Fine!" He snatched it up, wiped it off on the guard's sleeve, and popped it in his mouth. The guard raised a fist; Bill bared his fangs; and after a tense moment, the guard backed down first. The Theraprism had taken nearly every other power from Bill, but it couldn't take his teeth—and though he knew the guards would win any fight, Bill could make it hurt.

They returned him to his room; Bill handed over his cup; they checked to make sure his cup was empty, inspected his mouth, and locked him in.

He hoped they wouldn't notice that half his pills had stuck in the zig-zag bend of the opaque white straw.

He hoped they wouldn't notice The Beast's tongue thrusting through his food slot to lap up the spilled soda that was running down his door and over the bright red "NO SUGAR ALLOWED" sign.

His entire plan hinged on it.

####

Bill was drawing on the wall with his scant art supplies when he felt reality ripple around him, like the wave in a still pool when someone new quietly slides into the water. He looked up from his work. It was happening.

There were several thuds; then a crash; and then the peal of a prison alarm piercing the air. The alarm melted into shrill dolphin-like laughter, and then the frenetic staccato of a hyper speed dance song that threatened to fracture Bill's internal organs. He shuddered as the sound tore at his wound like freezing ice crystals expanding a crack in a boulder.

But he rose into the air and turned to face the door, ready.

Just in time for the door to vanish. The Theraprism melted away like mist in the sunlight—and oh, the sunlight was glorious. The wide open sky pulsed maddening colors so vivid that the faraway rainbows looked monotone in comparison; the land consisted of rolling hills of candy-coated tongues and stomachs and muscles, the paws of enormous buried corpses thrusting up into the sky, the crevasses between burial mounds running with artificially-flavored saliva. It was Bill's kind of place. He wished he had time to hang around.

Before him, orange fur matted with a fine dust of powdery sugar, wild eyes contracted to pinpricks, stood The Beast.

"You did it, you beautiful monster!" Bill shrieked with laughter. "I knew you'd come through!"

The Beast rumbled, "Em deerf evah uoy."

"You're welcome! You can return the favor later! Me, I have somewhere to be." While The Beast was asserting his personal reality on top of the Theraprism's idea of reality, none of the Theraprism's walls or doors existed. Bill wasn't sure exactly how far The Beast's radius of influence extended, except that it was at least far enough to get him out of the maximum security hall—but he had to move now, before the guards rallied to sedate The Beast. Bill slipped a finger into the band of his ankle bracelet and found that under the influence of The Beast's physics, the stiff plastic stretched like a warm rubber band. He tugged it off and tossed it aside. "Seeya, pal!"

But The Beast held up a paw, blocking Bill before he could zip off. "Noob ym tpecca," The Beast said. "Hself ym emusnoc."

"Oooh. Woww." Bill looked at The Beast's candy paw. "Oh, man. Generous offer! You have no idea how tempting it is to take a taste, but I've really gotta get somewhere, and I've gotta be at least sober enough to pull that off..."

"Emusnoc," The Beast insisted. "Hsur ragus eht fo ssendam gnilims citatsce eht ni em nioj. Rehtegot srorroh letsap dna serusaelp kcis hcus wonk lliw ew. Evarg lufituaeb ym ni em htiw tor."

Bill stared again at the paw. The tip of his tongue slipped out beneath his eye to lick hungrily at his waterline. When was the last time he'd been on something that felt good? "Oh, what the heck!" He took The Beast's paw. "I can do this buzzed! How much damage can one little lick do, anyway?"

####

The guard heaved open the maximum security hall's door. The floor was covered in tacky pools of neon candy and removed ankle monitors. "It's just like we feared," the guard shouted into a walkie-talkie, glancing quickly through each cell door's window. "Every single max security patient escaped under The Beast's reality-altering field."

The guard stopped at the sight of neon yellow and orange, peering through the window at the triangle flopped flat on the ground and surrounded by powdery pink sugar.

"Well," the guard said, "all of them except Cipher."

Through the walkie-talkie, D-SM5 tiredly said, "He licked the paw, didn't he."

"Looks like it, boss."

D-SM5 groaned. "All right! Positive thinking! That's the second biggest threat in the ward already accounted for! Silver lining to Mr. Cipher's substance use issues. Assist in securing the others."

####

The good news was that The Beast seemed happy to frolic randomly around the Theraprism rather than head toward the exit, forcing the other escapees to follow along to remain under his reality-altering protection rather than get stranded in small rooms and locked-down halls. The bad news was that his meandering route let him pick up more and more revelers. After an hour, only a third of the max security patients had been re-captured and dragged back to their cells, and twice as many medium security patients had joined the riot.

A-AOX4 was on hand in the maximum security hall to supervise as the guards brought in super-powered escapees. Most of them came back loopy on either The Beast's toxins or on the sedative that had been injected to keep them calm. A-AOX4 was checking them for awareness of their surroundings—name, where are you, when are you, why are you here—as each one was locked back in their cell.

And each time it passed by Bill's cell, it glanced in, concerned.

Bill had been almost pleasant when he'd come out of the Solitary Wellness Void—maybe after all those sessions in isolation he was finally ready to be more of a team player. And D-SM5 had said that he'd been unusually well-behaved and attentive during the reincarnation. A-AOX4 had hoped their most surly patient was finally opening up. It would be a shame if this incident with The Beast resulted in his new progress backsliding.

Plus, it took a heavy dose of anything to impact Bill at all, much less knock him out cold. He'd already had to go to the nurse earlier today; what if he needed medical attention?

So after locking up the latest subdued prisoner, A-AOX4 said to one of the guards, "Take over monitoring incoming patients. I'm checking on Cipher."

It unlocked the door and hovered into the room. "Cipher?"

No response. He was plastered flat to the floor.

"Bill?" It floated lower to check his condition.

He was paper.

Paper meticulously colored in with yellow marker and folded into a triangle; scraps of paper colored black, carefully torn into hand and feet shapes, and shoved in the sleeves and pants of his prison uniform.

A-AOX4 lifted up the paper. On the other side was Bill's "Be a TRY-angle!" poster. He'd written across it, "IS THIS TRYING HARD ENOUGH FOR YOU?"

It turned toward the door—and discovered Bill had filled the wall with a drawing of himself making an obscene gesture, with a word bubble that read, "GIVE MY REGARDS TO THE AX! And tell Jessica I said bye xoxo"

It zoomed out into the hallway and grabbed its walkie-talkie. "Director SM5! Cipher's escaped his cell! He left a decoy! He's not with The Beast, we don't know where he is!"

There was a moment of dead air. And then the director growled, "I think I have an idea."

####

Trying to keep his giggles as quiet as possible, Bill looped through the Theraprism's halls, drifting between The Beast's rolling fields of hard candy corpses and the Theraprism's rigid monotone halls. What had he been worried about! Getting hopped up on astralplanar sugar before escaping his cell had been a great idea! It gave him instant shortcuts through half the walls! And he could handle a little buzz like this! He was totally in control of his actions and knew exactly what he—

How long had he been flying the wrong direction? He turned around. Wow was he high, he could barely focus on anything but all the colors. He wondered if The Beast's toxins had any weird interactions with his meds.

He was lucky The Beast had decided to dawdle around the Dimensional Tyrants Ward: here at the far end of the Theraprism, there were no signs of crisis beyond the sealed doors indicating the facility was under lockdown—and once he was outside a high security ward, there were plenty of cracks, gaps, and vents that Bill was thin enough to slide through. He hadn't even seen a guard since he'd left his cell. By the time he reached the reincarnation room, The Beast's landscape was fading out and the sugar crash headache was fading in, but the facility was still on lockdown and no one seemed to be looking for Bill. He slipped beneath the locked door and powered up the console to the reincarnation machine.

He skipped straight to the reincarnation program and checked the box that said, yes, the patient's brain had been washed. He paused when a warning pop-up blocked the screen. The technician hadn't gotten a pop-up. He had to read over the two-sentence warning three times before he understood what he was looking at. The soul sanitization routine hadn't been run recently, was he sure the patient's memory was erased—ugh, yes. He irritably clicked the confirmation and hoped that would be the last of it.

Bill quickly selected Earth and dimension 46'\; he tabbed past the coordinates and date, and they both automatically filled in "DEFAULT." D-SM5 had said the computer would make a "random" decision if you didn't plug in a time and place, but the staff didn't know Earth like Bill did. If he left the time and place up to the whims of fate, then something as weird as a trillion-year-old alien chaos god escaping a criminal insane asylum to spontaneously generate as a fully grown mortal would be sucked straight into the weirdest place and time on Earth. Gravity Falls: August, 2012. Weirdmageddon. He was willing to bet his life on it.

He was betting his life on it.

After that, with any luck, he'd be able to shed his new body like any other puppet and return to his castle in the sky. If for some reason he couldn't get out of it, he'd only need to pull a couple of magic tricks outside a normal mortal's capabilities to catch his past self's attention, find a way to prove his identity—heck, with any luck, they'd be seeing through each other's eyes and that would instantly confirm it—warn his past self about the Pines' treachery, prevent his own death, save Weirdmageddon, restructure the universe in his image, and rule his new party paradise as god-king for all eternity. Easy.

He scrolled down the list of available creatures, looking for something that would be easy to reach the Fearamid and prove his intelligence with—something with vocal cords that could speak eye-bat would be useful, it'd save him a lot of trouble if he could just shout at his sentinels in their own language and startle them into listening—but, to his surprise, the first useful species he found was humans, down amongst the species that had received a single-digit number of reincarnations from the Theraprism. Really, humans? They allowed that?

Over the blaring alarm, a voice made an announcement. He completely tuned it out—and only realized a moment after it ended that he'd heard his own name. They knew he'd escaped.

Bill didn't have time to search for anything better. He selected humanity.

He tabbed past dozens of features he could choose from for his body—default default default default—who cared what the body peed out of, he wasn't keeping the thing long enough to fill its bladder! He clicked open the advanced settings—there, spontaneous generation! He hoped this thing wouldn't drop him on the sidewalk as a baby, but usually when a human suddenly popped into existence, it was an adult sculpted from clay or something, right? He'd be fine! He checked the box for spontaneous generation.

He got another error message. He groaned. He wasn't sober enough for this.

Something about spontaneous generation being banned on Earth after 1859, is he willing to assume the liability if the patient generates after—yeah sure whatever, he clicked yes. Another pop-up prompted him for the digital signature of the person assuming liability. He typed in D-SM5's name.

As soon as he clicked enter, another error message popped up. "What!!"

He flinched at the sound of a muffled pneumatic hiss. Outside, somebody had unlocked the doors to this hallway. The alarm was still blaring; the Theraprism wasn't coming off lockdown. That meant whoever had unlocked the hall was coming for him.

"Focusss." He skimmed the new warning. Something about humans being on a list of species for which spontaneous generation was restricted—what loser had written a law about that! Who cared if a fully-formed, brand-new human popped out of thin air in the middle of town! What about Bill's wants?! He checked another box YES HE'S SURE HE WANTS TO SPONTANEOUSLY GENERATE A HUMAN YOU MONSTER and pounded enter.

Another pop-up. It wanted to know on which god's authority the spontaneous generation had been authorized.

Bill froze. Why did it need to know. Would it check? A machine that could reincarnate a soul was probably also a machine that could shoot off a prayer. Or was Bill supposed to have some kind of divine authorization code? Which gods were even allowed to authorize that kind of thing? He didn't know which stupid legislative body had made this stupid law or what their stupid definition of a god was! Gods weren't even real, they were just stupid, arrogant, stuck-up jerks who were powerful enough to trick people into thinking they were important! Like Bill! What name were they looking for?!

He heard voices in the hallway. He darted over to the door, slid his fingers through the seams around the doorframe to crush the latching mechanism so it couldn't be opened, and darted back. That wouldn't hold them long; he knew from experience that the guards could bust down the doors in these low security wings without much difficulty.

"Bill Cipher!" That was D-SM5. It had come personally? In any other circumstance, he'd be flattered. "Open up immediately!"

"Has that ever worked?" A god, a god, a god... his eye caught on the bas relief at the back of the next room. If there was any god this place would accept orders from... The guards were ramming the door; the bending metal groaned. He typed "THE AXOLOTL" and hit enter.

The button grayed out but the pop-up didn't go away. The screen froze. "What." Bill tried clicking again. The cursor turned into one of those little spinning balls that meant the computer was quietly having a stroke. "No no no no—"

D-SM5 hollered, "You know what the consequences will be if you don't—"

"I'm not listeniiing to yooou!"

"You're only going to hurt yourse—"

Dropping his voice to a demonic boom to drown out the director, Bill recited, "'I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby's house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited! People were not—" There was a shriek of tearing metal, and then a bright glow behind Bill as D-SM5 peered through the gap in the door. Bill started talking faster, "'Were not invited they went there they got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow—'"

The pop-up disappeared. The cursor returned to normal. The box next to spontaneous generation was checked. Bill stared for a split second, then quickly closed out the advanced settings, scrolled to the bottom of the page, and hit "EXECUTE."

Someone blasted the door out of its frame; based on the blinding glow that accompanied the blast, Bill suspected that wasn't one of the guards, but D-SM5 itself. He frantically clicked through the next two confirmations, flung a couple of folding chairs toward D-SM5 and its thugs, and dove beneath the door to the next room. Ten seconds.

"Cancel the reincarnation!" D-SM5 snapped.

A guard ran to the console. (What if they saw where Bill had gone? They could probably guess the planet, but would the computer keep records of his destination, what his new body looked like—) "I don't see a cancel! I don't think—"

"Then get him off the altar!"

Five seconds. Please spawn as an adult and not a baby, please spawn as an adult and not a baby, please— Bill hadn't broken the door between the observation room and the altar; the guards easily unlocked it. "No no no—!"

"Don't let him esc—!"

Three seconds. An impossibly bright light shone down on Bill. He reflexively peeled open his exoskeleton to accept it. LIGHT—oh, he felt even more alive than the time he'd stolen a bottle of stimulants from the nurse station, ground them up, and snorted them off Mrs. Mirrorcube's back. His eye widened, taking in as much free energy as he could—and then he focused his gaze through the window on the console, focusing the infinite light into a laser powerful enough to instantly melt through the window and explode the computer. The guards fell back, trying to shield their tender mortal flesh from the fury of Bill's fire. Enjoy the blisters.

D-SM5 bellowed, "Bill Cipher, you mo—!"

"CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, SUCKA!" He could feel his body ripping apart, cracking open at the wound. It hurt, but not the hurt of dying; it was the euphoric hurt of spaghettification, of being infinitely sucked beyond a beautiful event horizon. Bill's triumphant cackle filled the air—

—and then the room was silent and dark, and Bill was gone.

####

(If you're new here: I posted this as a one shot because I think we could all use a little Bill escaping from Theraprism, yeah? However it's ALSO part of my ongoing Bill-stuck-in-a-human-body fic I'm currently editing for TBOB compatibility. So, if you enjoyed this and want to see where post-reincarnation Bill goes, check out the fic!! And if you DON'T want to read the rest of the fic, I hope you enjoyed the one shot and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

If you do check out the main fic be forewarned it's only 100% TBOB compatible up to chapter 6. After that it is, bizarrely, 98% TBOB compatible, because somehow I accidentally wrote a fic that lines up with the book so well that I'm legit worried people could use TBOB to work out fic spoilers. But I still need to edit the remaining 2%.

If you're NOT new here: hey gang this is the new chapter 6!!! I finished editing this chapter about fifteen minutes before post time so it's not as polished as my usual chapters, but I hope it didn't read that way. Anyway, I look forward to hearing what y'all think!)

#bill cipher #theraprism #the book of bill #the book of bill spoilers #gravity falls #gravity falls fic #gravity falls fanart #fanart #my art #my writing #bill goldilocks cipher #(posting this like a oneshot because it basically is and i want people to be able to read it like a one shot)#(however it's ALSO the new chapter six)

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littlelamy · 15 days ago

Text

you were right!

a/n: okay, i know you guys might be tired of me doing these but this is my last one! i hope you all like it 😜 gifs from @rafeyscurtainbangs

The blazing Moroccan sun beats down on Rafe, its intensity mirrored by the firestorm raging in his mind. Dust hangs in the air around him, adding to the harshness of the moment as he stands over the well. Below, Groff coughs and groans, his face contorted in pain, but Rafe barely spares him a second glance. His rage overpowers everything else, even the satisfaction he should feel. He narrows his eyes, voice laced with anger and finality.

“Checkmate, bitch!” he yells down, his words slicing through the hot, tense air. The motorcycle engine he’d used to get out here sits idle a few feet away, rumbling like his frustration.

He turns on his heel, muttering a curse, fists clenched. As he stalks away from the well, he pulls out his phone and dials Sofia’s number, his chest tight with the realization that everything he thought he knew was a lie.

Sofia answers after two rings, her voice as casual as if he hadn’t just found out about her betrayal. “Hey, babe, what’s up ?”

Rafe’s voice is steely, cold. “Is it true? Is it true, what Groff just told me? Is it?”

The silence on her end is all he needs. He can practically hear her scrambling for words, but she never manages to answer. His face twists in anger.

“Pack your shit. Get out of my house,” he snarls, a final, unforgiving edge in his voice. “God, after everything I did for you? We’re done. Done.” He hangs up before she can say another word, shoving his phone back into his pocket with a bitter scoff. Betrayed, twice over—and he’d ignored the only person who saw it coming.

He stands there, baking in the Moroccan heat, his mind racing back to a month ago in Kildare, when you and he had argued over Sofia. You’d warned him that she wasn’t who she seemed. He’d brushed you off, accusing you of jealousy—knowing damn well that there was more to it. You were his best friend, but it was complicated; that line had already been crossed too many times, with late-night kisses and tangled sheets. But you two hadn’t spoken since that fight, since the way he’d brushed you off had hurt deeper than either of you cared to admit.

Taking a breath, he pulls out his phone again, fingers hovering over your name. He hesitates, swallowing his pride, before finally pressing call.

The phone rings, and you pick up after a few moments, your voice tight with annoyance. “What, Rafe?”

Your tone makes him pause, but the way you sound almost comforts him, even with the irritation clear in your voice. You’re there—back in Kildare, probably sitting cozy in your little apartment. Meanwhile, he’s out here under the scorching sun, alone, trying to piece together his pride.

He clears his throat. “Hey… princess,” he says, voice softened, the pet name slipping out before he can stop it. He can almost feel you rolling your eyes on the other end, but he presses on, the words weighing heavy on him. “I—uh… Look, I’m sorry. You were right.”

There’s a surprised pause, and he hears you shift in your seat as if you’re debating whether to hang up or let him speak. When you do answer, your tone is a bit softer, cautious.

“What happened?”

Rafe lets out a dry, humorless laugh. “Turns out Sofia was exactly who you said she was. A snake. And here I was, thinking you were just being… petty. But I guess I’m the idiot, huh?”

You breathe out, and he can picture you shaking your head, lips pressed together. “You wouldn’t listen,” you say quietly, as if the words hold more hurt than anger.

He sighs, running a hand through his hair, the frustration evident in his voice. “I know. I was so damn sure you were just jealous. I mean—” He pauses, grappling with how to say it. “Hell, I thought you were jealous because you… I don’t know. I thought you didn’t want me with her because we…” His voice trails off, but the implication lingers between you.

“Yeah,” you say softly, almost to yourself. “I get it.”

Rafe bites his lip, letting the words sink in. “Can I see you? I’m done here in a few days, and I could be back in Kildare very soon. I could stop by, explain… properly.”

A beat passes, and when you finally speak, it’s careful, guarded. “After everything you said last time, why should I?”

He laughs softly, almost self-deprecating. “Because I think you might be the only person I can trust right now. And… I miss you.” His voice drops, laced with a warmth he can’t help. “Even if you’re just going to gloat and rub it in my face.”

You chuckle, and he smiles, savoring the sound. “I don’t know if I miss you or if I just feel sorry for you,” you tease, but the playfulness is back in your tone, if only faintly.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, amusement lacing his words. “Act like you don’t care. But come on, you miss me. Admit it.”

A small silence follows, and he imagines the way your lips twitch into a smile. Finally, you relent. “Maybe a little. But you’re bringing wine. Good wine.”

“Oh, don’t worry, baby,” he says, the flirtation back in his voice. “Only the best for you.”

You scoff, but he hears the hint of a laugh. It’s the closest thing he’s had to a good moment in a long time. He takes a breath, savoring the thought of leaving this mess behind and getting back to Kildare—back to the only person who knew him well enough to call him out, and care anyway. As the call ends, he puts his phone in his pocket, a grin spreading across his face, motivating him to get that crown and go to his princess.

taglist: @namelesslosers @princessslutt @averyoceanblvd @iknowdatsrightbih @starkeysprincess @sixrosberg @anamiad00msday @ivysprophecy @wearemadeofstardust0 @kissrotten @rafesangelita @sstargirln @rafedaddy01 @soldesole @bakugouswaif

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tonycries · 9 months ago

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Dream A Little Dream - G.S.

Synopsis. For the strongest, it was a privilege to dream. Especially when his dream is you.

Pairing. Gojo Satoru x Reader

Content. fem! reader, established relationship, implied sex, fluff, soft and sleepy Satoru, very slight manga spoilers, just Satoru loving on you and your future together.

Word count. 0.8k

A/N. Probably gonna delete. Art by @_3aem on X.

It’s times like this - when the quiet morning sun is just peeking in through your window, in the still haze of your naked body peacefully intertwined with his that Satoru allows himself to dream.

He dreams of everything - from the strawberry lollipops he snuck into the Gojo Estate as a kid to the time when he forgot Megumi at the mall.

But mostly, he dreams of you.

Eyes still veiled with sleep, wandering the expanse of your face, a hand tenderly running along the features he’s mapped a thousand times over. Thumb softly catching on the corner of your mouth, slightly quirked up, he wonders what you’re dreaming of.

Do you dream of him too?

Because Satoru’s favorite dream will always be the one with you.

Your laughter in the morning light as he smothers you in kisses, how it rings in his ears and carries through his day. If there’s one thing Satoru knows, it’s that he would burn this entire godforsaken world down to keep it there. Even in the face of violence, his favorite song.

Reaching out to softly kiss your fingers, the hands which hold his heart and his future.

Unhurriedly, he caresses that empty spot on your ring finger. Soon.

Little black box burning a hole into that hidden corner of his dresser, Satoru absentmindedly wonders whether you would go for a flowing gown or more of a sleek design? He dreams of the delicate lace under his fingers, the gentle sway of the fabric and the blue bouquet to match his eyes.

A huff of laughter, followed by a melancholic twinge of his heart, finds its way into the still morning air as he imagines the way Nanamin would have been crying very reluctant tears of joy.

Long fingers deftly run along the expanse of your body, drawing patterns on the marks he’s left to remember him by, resting on your stomach. He dreams of a world where he is there to see you run around with a few white-haired bundles of joy. All of them with your personality of course - he couldn’t handle having to fight with some mini versions of himself over you.

And they may be closed for now, but he dreams of the twinkle in your eyes as they meet his, the promise of a beautiful day ahead.

He can only pray that they always look at him that way. Even when the shine of your eyes dim with age, the chapters of your story showing on your face. The dream where you two complain about your first gray hairs - him cackling about you finally joining the club.

It might not seem like it, but in the blood and merciless gore of jujutsu, a part of the strongest always thinks back to the heaven he’s found in you.

The heaven where you both cry over your kids leaving the nest, and later he’d fervently deny his teary eyes - secretly wiping the tears off his glasses.

Where you spend quiet evenings on the porch, wrapped in blankets and reminiscing about the adventures of your youth. Did he ever tell you that story where he lost the tickets to a movie and had to sneak into the theater with Shoko and Suguru? Boy, did he get an earful from Yaga that day.

The dream where he’s surrounded by you and all your warmth. In the cold pain that comes with being the strongest, he can only hope that a day will come where his strength - rather than being used to kill - holds your future with ready arms.

Ripping his eyes off of your face, they wander the room bathed in the soft morning glow. Mapping the empty spaces which you two would fill with pictures. The walls which would echo with laughter and whisper tales of serenity.

First days at school, graduations, all the friends and foes lost along the years - and one big picture of you in that beautiful white dress, right in the middle. All beauty and grace. His beautiful bride. A dream where his last name is a melody not a death sentence.

He dreams he’s there to fetch your walking cane to stroll through your little garden with a cup of his famous morning tea. He’d hold your hand as he always does, both trembling and frail with age. He dreams he would kiss the beautiful wrinkles on the corners of your eyes, only for you to push him away bashfully complaining about the grandkids seeing.

Blue eyes faded and the joy of the years showing on his face, not as strong or as vibrant as he once was, limitless nothing more but a trick to make his grandkids smile. Not a weapon, but just your Satoru. He hopes you’ll still be there to love him.

And he dreams he’s there.

He wants to be there.

“Satoru?”

Satoru’s heart lurches as those beautiful eyes crack open, still foggy with sleep. A glimpse of that smile he found heaven in, and you pull him closer. Understanding. Skin heated against his, no one but you two in this quiet world.

All is well in your little heaven.

Today, the strongest will face Ryomen Sukuna, the fate of the world burdened upon his shoulders. But for now, Satoru is held fragilely in your arms.

For now, he is yours.

He only dreams he can be forevermore.

A/N. Tony writing something that isn’t smut??? The world is coming to an end.

Plagiarism not authorized.

#gojo x reader #gojo fluff #gojo x you #jjk x reader #jjk smut #jjk x you #gojo satoru x reader #gojo smut #gojo satoru fluff #gojo satoru x you #jujutsu kaisen x reader #jujutsu kaisen smut #jujutsu kaisen x you #jujutsu kaisen fluff #jjk #jjk fic #jujutsu kaisen #gojo satoru #tonywrites

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immoral-stranger · 6 days ago

Text

𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫𝐬 // 𝐎𝐏𝟖𝟏

Summary: “Do guys from therapy usually hit on you?” – Or, the one where Oscar has to go to group counselling after a turbulent race incident and meets you, the quiet girl at the back of the hall.

Pairing: Oscar Piastri x fem! reader

Word count: 19k

Warnings: 18+ Minors DNI ❀ Angst: they meet in therapy, it's all angst, lying, guilt, implied former drug addiction and fraudulent behaviour. Smut: penetrative sex, oral (f! receiving), Oscar is a boob guy, very soft and vanilla, maybe a size kink? Fluff: they cuddle? and the ending is happy-ish? Other: takes place during a fictional 2025 season, an atheistic conversation about religion, smoking cigarettes.

A/N: This might be the gloomiest thing I’ve ever written, but it also has 5k words of pure smut, so yeah, there's that. I’m weirdly proud of it. Please tell me what you think ♡

Abu Dhabi, 2024. Oscar could still smell the smoke sometimes, in nightmares or if he zoned out for too long. The scent clung to his mind—burning tires, scorched metal, and marshals running around in panic. In his dreams, he could hear the crackle of flames, feel the searing heat against his skin, as they carefully dragged him out and placed him in the medical car. He was sure that it was already in some compilation on youtube about the worst crashes of the season. Hell, maybe even in history.

Verstappen had already claimed his title, but getting the last win of the season would be a dream for anyone. It was a matter of pride, ending the season on a high note. For Oscar, it ended with a crash instead, just as he was about to overtake for the win on the last stint of the race.

And of course, it had to be with Charles.

Everyone loved Charles. And everyone hated Oscar for being the reason their favourite driver lost out on a win. Hate was a strong word and he was used to people having varying opinions about him, but there was something about this that he couldn’t shake off.

The worst part was the screaming—screaming that he had later been told never even happened. He'd made it up in his head. When he was being pulled from the wreckage, he could have sworn he’d heard Charles crying out in pain. He’d replayed it over and over, only to learn that Charles had gotten out first—before the fire even started to spread. Sore from the impact, but otherwise unharmed.

Oscar didn’t realise in the moment that the crash would affect him. It took months for it to catch up to him. It all cumulated into a breakdown during the pre-season testing for 2025, where he had locked himself in a room to drown out Charles’ screaming, getting the attention of his trainer and people on his team that something was wrong.

He was supposed to be the calm one. This was the opposite of calm.

He had Murphy’s Law on loop in his head. Everything that can go wrong will. It had never been like that for him before—analysing every possible mistake. It wasn’t even the mistakes he actually made, but the ones that never happened. It made him paralysed to get in the car every single time, but once he actually started driving, all those thoughts went away.

It was the imaginative screaming that had led him to where he was today—the parking lot outside of St. Anne’s Church before a group therapy and support meeting. It wasn’t a grand building by any means. The stones of the church were worn, weathered with years of storms battering its exterior. It always seemed to rain in this fucking town.

His therapist, trainer, and team had decided that this was best for him. Mandated meetings once a week until he could feel calm outside of the car and not just while driving it. This wasn’t about talking to some high-paid therapist; he already had one of those. No, this was about learning to cope with normal people, people who had been through real trauma, people who didn’t live their lives in the fast lane.

“You need support,” they’d said, as if these weekly gatherings at a worn-out church with other equally messed-up strangers would patch up whatever was broken inside him.

He had talked on the phone with the man leading the group, explaining that it would most likely be best for Oscar to show up to his first meeting, take a seat, and just get a feel for how it worked.

The meeting was held in a hall on the side of the church, an annex built sometime in the seventies while the church itself was centuries old. He was hit with the smell of old wood and damp air as soon as he entered. The group wasn’t small—maybe twenty people scattered around the room, sitting on mismatched chairs. It didn’t feel like one of those alcoholics anonymous meetings he’d seen in movies, which had been his first preconception.

He found a spot on one of the middle rows, on the edge to not draw attention to him. The personalities he could see around the room were all different. There were the nervous ones, bouncing in their seats—maybe it was anxiety, maybe it was abstinence. The tired ones seemed to be the majority. He fitted into that group himself—tired of life. You also had the desperate ones, sitting in the front, almost leaning forward to better grasp whatever words of wisdom were being said.

Guilt seemed to be a theme for everyone.

One after one the facilitator let people go up and speak at a makeshift lectern. Some just gave little updates, giving Oscar the impression that they’d gone to meetings for a long time. Others were speaking up for the first time. One that stood out was a mother, maybe in her fifties, whose daughter had just passed away in a car accident. She cried as she spoke, searching for some way of dealing with the guilt she felt, having let her daughter borrow her car even though she knew it was old and unsafe.

This was around the time when Oscar thought to himself that he should just take the money he had, find a way out of his contract, emigrate to Iceland, and change his name to Fabio. Never ever have to think about a race car again.

People were going on about their lives, their regrets, their struggles with addictions, or just their attempts to survive whatever the world had thrown at them. But none of it really resonated with him. Oscar didn’t feel like he belonged here. His problems felt different. And he wasn’t sure if that was because they actually were different or because he just couldn’t find the right words to describe them.

At some point, his gaze shifted toward the back of the room, and that was when he noticed you.

A girl his own age. You were sitting there, apart from everyone else, half-hidden in the shadows near the exit. You looked like you didn’t want to be seen—shoulders hunched, sat far down in your seat. You stared at your hands, fidgeting with skin around your nails. Oscar could spot your chipped black nail polish from across the room. He had a hard time reading your face, mostly obscured by your hair and the collar of your jacket.

He couldn’t help but wonder why you were here. He wondered it about everyone else too, but you stuck out since you were similar in age—young enough that people didn’t automatically assume that you’d gone through hardship. You looked… different. Troubled, maybe. Definitely out of place.

Oscar forced himself to look away, trying to focus on the group facilitator, who was droning on about acceptance and healing. He felt restless, a creeping anxiety gnawing at the edges of his thoughts. Why had he even come? This place didn’t feel like it could fix anything.

By the time the session ended, he hadn’t spoken a word.

As the last of the attendees dispersed, Oscar lingered under the arched entrance, watching the downpour. He pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, offering him some warmth from the cold rain. A faint glow from distant streetlights illuminated the soaked pavement, creating an eerie atmosphere that somehow felt fitting.

That’s when he saw you again, as the heavy church doors closed behind him with a slight thud. You were the last one out of the building. Out of the corner of his eye, Oscar saw you light a cigarette. His eyes met yours briefly, but you were quick to look away.

You exhaled smoke, sitting down on the stone steps leading up to the entrance, letting single raindrops fall onto your leather jacket, while still being mostly covered by the awning.

For a second, Oscar thought about walking away. He didn’t know you—he didn’t know anyone here—but something kept him rooted to the spot. Maybe it was because he knew he would need to talk to someone here, not easily getting away from the mandated meetings. Maybe it was because you looked so damned lost.

Either way, he found himself speaking before he could stop himself.

“Uh,” he started awkwardly. “I like your stockings.”

You blinked, glancing down at your legs. Through the rips in your jeans, a pair of sheer black stockings peeked out, the floral lace pattern barely visible. You didn’t say anything right away, just stared at him with a look that was half-surprised, half-annoyed. Then, you blew out smoke from between your lips.

“Thanks,” you muttered.

Oscar shifted uncomfortably, unsure if he should leave or try to salvage the moment. Why had he said that? He wasn’t good at small talk, never had been. He had no idea why he thought this was the time to start improving that skill.

You let out a low chuckle, almost like you were laughing at him. Wordlessly, you asked him if he wanted a cigarette, lifting the carton up in his direction.

He shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

You took another drag, shrugging your shoulders, basically saying suit yourself to him. With your gaze turned back to the ground, the silence stretched on awkwardly, only broken by the sound of raindrops splattering against the asphalt.

“Aren’t white lighters supposed to be bad luck?” he asked suddenly, noticing the bright plastic you were flicking between your fingers. He’d heard that somewhere, an old superstition and coincidence—that a group of famous people who had died at a young age all had white lighters in their possession. It was a stupid thing to say, but it felt better than nothing.

You looked down at the lighter in your hand and then back at Oscar, a humourless smile tugging at the corners of your mouth. “Maybe that’s the fucking point.”

Oscar didn’t know what to say to that. He wondered if you actually meant it—that bad luck didn’t matter to you, like you almost welcomed it. He wasn’t sure he believed in luck in that sense anyway. To him, life felt more like a balance of choices and chances, not fortune’s favour. But sometimes, maybe when the stars aligned and all that palaver, he believed in luck and he believed in doing the right thing to experience that luck.

Call it superstition, if you must.

The both of you continued to stand there in silence. Well, technically, you were still sitting. Two strangers, clinging to the building that was supposedly about to fix them, all while not really knowing if they even wanted to be fixed.

After a few long moments, you stood up, stubbing out the cigarette on the wet stone. You stuffed your hands into your pockets, casting him one last glance before heading out into the rain. The water immediately soaked your hair, but you didn’t seem to care. You hopped into a car that had pulled up at the end of the parking lot, an older woman in the driver seat.

You left him without a word and a strange feeling inside of him—like this situation wasn’t already odd enough.

_______________________________

You put out your cigarette as you reached the entrance of the church, again. Just another Tuesday in your life. You’d lost count on how long you had been going to these meetings. Two hours every Tuesday and one hour every Sunday.

It was a bit of a lie, that you didn’t know how long it had been. You just didn’t want to know how long it had been and therefore told yourself to not think about it until you’d all but forgotten about it.

However, Oscar was a new addition to the meetings, for a month or so. Seeing him, seemingly waiting for you before going inside, was odd? But not uncommon by now.

You didn’t say anything as you walked up beside him on the church steps, only giving him a slight nod as a way of saying hello. You looked out over the parking lot, glistening wet from the rain that seemed to haunt this small town. You were practically lucky that it wasn’t raining at the moment.

Something about the parking lot was different today, though. It stood out like a diamond in a drawer of costume jewellery.

There, parked conspicuously at the curb, was a sleek McLaren. The kind of car that didn't belong in this part of town, especially not parked outside a church where people came to unload their emotional baggage.

As if reading your thoughts, Oscar caught you staring with raised brows. “What nobhead takes their McLaren to counselling?” you muttered under your breath, clearly not expecting him to hear. But he was close enough, and the corner of his mouth twitched up into a smile.

He chuckled, a low, surprised sound. “That would be me.”

You blinked, not expecting it to be him, let alone be so direct about it. “I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” Oscar chortled, shaking his head, like he found your frankness refreshing, if not amusing, as though he wasn’t often spoken to like that.

“Yeah, it’s a dickish thing to do,” you admitted, giving him a half shrug. You couldn’t help but smile a little, though. He had a way of taking the sting out of your sharp words, as if he didn’t mind your snark.

You’d quite frankly been rude to him at a few of the former meetings, yet he still didn’t mind sitting in silence next to you for two hours every Tuesday. You were both here, after all—both stuck, both dealing with whatever mess had brought you to therapy.

The last few sessions had been the same—catching each other’s eye as you sat in the back of the room, listening to people’s stories. Neither of you said much during the meetings, but you always seemed to find each other afterward, just outside the church, where the air felt a little less suffocating. You smoked, and Oscar just stood there, pretending not to be bothered by the cold weather.

It had become something of a routine. You weren’t friends, exactly, but there was a strange sort of understanding between you. Tonight was no different as the meeting started.

You slipped into your usual spot near the back, watching as Oscar settled in a seat nearby. The room was filled with voices, people exchanging quick pleasantries before it started, just like every week, with people telling their stories.

You’d gone to meetings for such a long time that you knew the backstories of most people. It had been so long that some regulars had even stopped going, claiming they were fixed. Or at least fixed enough. You guessed that was the real goal—to not completely overcome trauma but to learn how to live with it. Then there were the people who were mandated to be there, by their workplace or by a court order. They were more hesitant than the people who went by their own free will, but their stories were always better when they finally got to talking, more interesting to listen to.

“Have you ever gone up there?” Oscar whispered at one point, curious.

“Nope,” you replied without hesitation, not looking at him. “They can force me to be here, but they can’t force me to talk.”

He looked at you for a moment, head tilted slightly, like he wanted to ask more but thought better of it. You could practically feel the question hanging in the air—who the fuck were they?—but he didn’t press. Instead, he glanced around the room again.

You liked that he didn’t push. That meant you didn’t have to lie to him.

There was an unspoken rule in these circles. Speak, or don’t, but never fake it. It couldn’t be about pretending, and for now, silence was as close as either of you seemed willing to come to honesty.

When the session ended, you found yourselves once again standing on the church steps, the night air brisk and cutting. You fumbled with a cigarette, attempting to light it against the persistent wind. Oscar lingered nearby, hands in his pockets, as he watched your futile attempts, half amused.

“Not getting picked up today?” he asked.

You shook your head, giving up on the cigarette and putting the lighter and carton back into the pocket of your jacket.

Oscar hesitated for a second, unsure whether to say anything. He was starting to feel that familiar awkwardness creep back in, the same feeling he’d had the first time he spoke to you. But before he could stop himself, he blurted out, “I could give you a lift.”

You shot him a sidelong glance. “I’m not sleeping with you, Oscar,” you said flatly.

Oscar’s eyes widened, and he spluttered, “W-what? No! That’s not—” He stumbled over his words, horrified.

You raised a brow, watching as he struggled to find his words. He was blushing, his ears practically glowing red under the streetlight. “You offered to drive me home without ulterior motives?” you asked, sceptical.

“Yes, I was just trying to be nice,” he said firmly, but flustered. “Do guys from therapy usually hit on you?”

You let out a dry laugh, almost feeling guilty for your wrong assumption about him. “You’d be surprised at how many men find head-cases attractive.”

He only became more embarrassed, his mind flashing back to the first thing he’d ever said to you—a compliment on your stockings, of all things.

There was a vulnerability to him you hadn’t expected—something behind the stubborn façade and expensive car. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who was used to rejection. Or awkwardness. Or therapy, for that matter. But his loser personality made all of those things very possible.

“Well… I just wanted to make sure you got home safely,” he said, shifting awkwardly.

You studied him for a moment, weighing his words. Then, with a sigh, you jerked your head toward the McLaren. “Fine. Start the fucking car.”

Inside the car, the quiet was different, somehow more suffocating than outside on the church steps. Maybe it was the notion of having to actually talk to each other now that hadn’t felt as forced outside of the car.

“So, where to?” Oscar asked, his hands gripping the wheel a little tighter than necessary.

You glanced out the window, your fingers tapping idly on the door handle, almost scared to touch the absurdly shiny car. “Do you know the council houses behind the post office?”

“By that one pub? With the—”

“The Swan, yes that’s the one,” you interrupted. “My aunt lives right there.”

Oscar nodded, pulling away from the curb and heading in the direction you’d indicated. You kept your gaze fixated out the window as the car began to move. The streets passed by in a blur, the rain-slicked asphalt reflecting the dim glow of the town’s yellow lights.

“Aunt?” he asked after a beat of silence. “Parents not around?”

You didn’t answer immediately. For a moment, Oscar thought he’d overstepped, thought you were going to turn to a rudeness that he couldn’t joke his way out of.

Then, quietly, you muttered, “I think I am the one who’s not around.”

He heard you clearly, but he didn’t press further. He didn’t try to fill the space with meaningless chatter, and for that, you were both grateful. For a moment, it was peaceful, almost as if you were just two people out for a casual drive instead of a pair of strangers bound by a not-so-positive common denominator.

As the car approached the run-down council houses, you unbuckled your seatbelt but didn’t immediately move to get out. Instead, you turned to him, studying his profile in the low light, something unreadable in your expression.

“Thanks,” you said after a moment.

“For the ride?” he asked.

“For not being a complete dick,” you replied as you pushed open the door and stepped out into the cold. You didn’t look back, but you knew that he was smiling behind you.

_______________________________

The following week, you were late. Not late enough for it to actually be a problem, but late enough that Oscar felt the awkward tension of deciding whether to wait for you outside like he usually did or go inside. He definitely could have waited, but he was particular about time, so he went in.

Oscar glanced around the room, sitting somewhere in the middle now that you hadn’t decided seats for the two of you. He noticed the faces that had become a strange sort of fixture in his life over the past months.

The season had started and it was going fairly well. He had thoughts of disaster almost every weekend, but he didn’t hear Charles’ screaming as often. It was usually worst during qualifying, when the short amount of time made the anxiety build up quicker. But he was stable. Even his therapist had said that. He wasn’t a danger in any way, but he still just wished to get an answer as to why this crash had affected him in the way that it did.

Your heavy footsteps interrupted his thoughts, your Doc Martens making a thumping sound against the old hardwood flooring. You looked like a drenched, unhappy cat, caught in one of the town’s relentless downpours. For a moment, Oscar smiled; he hadn’t thought he’d ever see you sit anywhere but the back row, yet here you were, sliding into the empty seat next to him with a huff.

You took off your wet leather jacket and threw your bag on the floor, almost curling into your seat on the uncomfortable chair, a paper cup of hot water warming your hands. There was a station outside of the room with tea and coffee and you would grab a cup of tea for yourself before every meeting. Oscar had learnt that by now—also knowing that you brought your own tea bags since they only offered black tea and you drank rooibos. Oscar had lived in England for a long time, but the science behind drinking tea was still something that confused him.

You rubbed your face dry with the sleeves of your oversized sweater, not caring that your mascara smudged around your eyes. Oscar thought about offering his own hoodie, or at least a tissue, but you didn’t seem the type to want help with something so small. Instead, he kept quiet, simply watching as you tried to shake off the rain.

A beat of silence passed between you both. Then, you spoke first.

“You never come to the Sunday meetings.”

You tried to sound casual, but the question was deliberate; it was thought through. He glanced at you, surprised. It wasn’t often that you were the one to initiate a conversation, and when you did, they were short and edged with sarcasm.

“Didn’t even know they had meetings during the weekend,” Oscar replied with a shrug. “I work most Sundays.”

“So do I, but I manage to show up here anyway.”

He noticed the way your eyes held his gaze, challenging but curious. You weren’t shy to look him straight in the eye, unlike himself. The light from the nearby windows cast a muted glow over you, softening the lines of your face, your smudged makeup giving you a look of tiredness that felt familiar to him.

It was like you were waiting, expecting him to talk again, and he felt that familiar twist of unease, a reminder that vulnerability wasn’t something he navigated easily. A hint of a smile crossed Oscar’s face as he looked away, not sure how much to say.

Today’s meeting wasn’t much different from all the others. There was the mother who dealt with guilt after losing her daughter in a car crash. There was Anthony, a local restaurant owner, who was there as part of his probation plan after an assault charge. There was Jenny, a girl in her thirties who was mandated by her therapist to be there as exposure for her agoraphobia. It was definitely ironic that the girl with a social anxiety disorder did more talking than you and Oscar combined.

During a brief five-minute break, Oscar looked over at you again, seemingly lost in your thoughts.

“You think you’ll ever get up there?” he asked, nodding toward the lectern.

Oscar knew he had asked similar questions before, but this one was more to ask if you thought this group counselling thing would ever lead to you opening up—if you saw an end to these countless meetings by actually letting them help you, letting them make you feel better.

“No,” you answered flatly. “Opening up to strangers is weird.”

He smiled at that. “I think this is supposed to have the opposite effect,” he said, crossing his arms. “That it’s easier with strangers because we won’t feel judged in the same way.”

You looked up at him, amusement flickering in your eyes. “Keep talking Oscar, and we won’t be strangers by the end of this.”

He laughed, shaking his head. There was a subtle humour to your banter, like you both enjoyed pushing boundaries without really crossing them. Oscar settled on the idea that he didn’t want you two to be strangers after all.

As the meeting came to a close, people began to shuffle out, some lingering to chat with one another, others heading straight for the door. You, as usual, made your way outside without a word. Oscar followed, as he always did, keeping a respectful distance but close enough that it didn’t feel like a coincidence.

He never knew why he lingered. He wasn’t even sure if you wanted him to. But the silence you shared after group therapy felt easier than the forced vulnerability inside.

Outside, the air was crisp, the rain from earlier having tapered off, leaving the ground damp and slick, the sun breaking through the clouds. You leant against the stone wall of the church, lighting another cigarette with the same white lighter he’d seen you use before.

Oscar frowned slightly, feeling a strange sense of unease creep into his chest as he watched you. He wasn’t entirely sure why he cared, but before he could stop himself, he spoke up. “Can you stop buying white lighters, please?”

You raised your brows, almost mocking him. “Why? Are you superstitious?”

“No,” Oscar replied, shaking his head. “It just feels like a weird thing to jeopardise.”

“What do you know about the 27 club anyway?” you asked, taking another drag. You were mindful enough to turn your head in the opposite direction as you blew out the smoke.

The 27 Club—a bunch of musicians, mostly rockstars, who had died at the age of 27 due to rough lifestyles. Rumour had it that they all used white lighters for their cigarettes and other smokeable substances. Oscar didn’t know anything about their music or the club they were in. He just knew of the rumour.

“Literally nothing except that they died carrying white lighters,” Oscar admitted, rubbing the back of his neck. “And that you deserve to live way past the age of 27.”

You blinked, taken aback, and for a moment, the armour you wore around yourself seemed to crack. You stared at him, cigarette halfway to your lips, processing what he’d just said.

“Who knew you could be so sweet?” you teased, trying to be your usual sarcastic self, but there was a warmth in your voice that hadn’t been there before. That tiny hint of warmth made his chest feel strangely tight.

A few moments passed in comfortable silence before you broke it; your voice quieter now. “Why do you keep coming here anyway? You don’t talk much either. So why show up?”

Oscar hesitated, unsure how much to say. He wasn’t a stranger to lying about his job to people, often times just because he couldn’t be arsed to explain or have people ask if he was rich and famous. It wasn’t like that with you, but he still decided to lie—or opt out of telling the entire truth. He wanted you to think he was normal.

“I’m mandated to be here by my workplace,” he began, choosing his words carefully. “I caused a car accident with a colleague of mine, and I kind of need to be able to drive to keep my job.”

You frowned in confusion. “But you drove me home? Are you scared of driving?”

“It’s… different,” he admitted. “Driving long distances for work or just around in this little hellhole.”

You studied him for a long moment, as if weighing his words. Then, in a surprisingly gentle tone, you asked, “Do you like… get flashbacks of the crash and blame yourself all over again?”

Oscar nodded, exhaling softly. “Yeah, I guess it’s like that. I keep replaying it, even though my colleague was fine. It’s like this… loop in my head, where I keep imagining every possible way it could have gone worse. Murphy’s Law, you know? Like, I can’t help but think of every possible mistake I could make.”

“Murphy’s Law is about engineering, though,” you pointed out. “You can’t just apply that to your everyday life. It’ll turn you into an impossible perfectionist, constantly waiting for everything to fall apart.”

Oscar smiled, appreciating the unexpected insight. It reminded him of how little you knew about him, since, y’know, he hadn’t told you the truth—that engineering actually was involved in his everyday life. And yet, somehow, you still seemed to understand. The irony wasn’t lost on him, and he found himself wondering what other surprises you might be hiding.

You stubbed out your cigarette, bending down and reaching into your bag for a piece of chewing gum. He watched as you unwrapped it, slipping it into your mouth, the familiar scent of artificial strawberry filling the air. It was a ritual he’d seen before, almost like you were trying to erase the smell of smoke as quickly as you’d created it. The action was so practiced, and he found himself charmed by the small, sort of endearing quirk.

“You’re not gonna ask me why I keep on showing up here?” you asked, looking wondering up at Oscar, mumbling slightly as you chewed to get the gum soft.

He glanced at you with a faint smile. “You’ll tell me when you feel comfortable enough. I know that.”

A soft, almost approving nod was your only response.

“There’s my ride,” you murmured as a car drove into the parking lot—the same car he’d seen many times before, the same old woman driving. He could now assume it was your aunt. “I guess I’ll see you next week, then.”

Oscar stumbled on his words as he tried to say goodbye to you, caught off guard by how you almost skipped down the church stairs, looking happier than ever. It was a weird juxtaposition, because you obviously weren’t—happier than ever, that is. You actually dared to look back at him, smiling as you walked over the parking lot. The mascara still sat heavy under your eyes as light shone down on you from the clouds breaking above, and in that moment, you looked like the saddest thing under the sun.

After the car had driven away, Oscar stood still with his thoughts outside the church for a second. He had to look into the weekend meetings. Even if he could never attend them himself, he needed to know why they were important enough for you to mention them to him.

With a last glance toward the parking lot, he went back inside, his eyes drifting toward the bulletin board in the hallway. Various flyers covered its surface. The community really tried its hardest, offering support groups for just about anything—newly becoming parents, cancer survival, dealing with grief and death.

Oscar looked at the schedules, most of them being on weekdays. However, anonymous groups for recovering alcoholics and narcotics were on Saturdays, respectively, Sundays.

It didn’t take long for Oscar to understand.

He also understood why you had asked him. You wanted to know if you had another thing in common other than the group meetings. You hadn’t known he was there because of a car crash, so in your mind he might as well have been there for other issues, like drugs or alcohol.

Oscar didn’t know your full story. He didn’t know why you were here, why you kept showing up week after week, or what had led you to seek out meetings. But he did know one thing: you weren’t as unreachable as you pretended to be, and he was willing to wait until you felt ready to show him the parts of yourself you’d kept hidden.

_______________________________

The soft clink of glasses and low murmur of voices filled the pub as you wiped down the counter for what felt like the hundredth time that day, your hands moving out of habit, eyes scanning the sparse crowd. Picking up an afternoon shift instead of the night shift wasn’t something you normally did, just for that reason. It was the same amount of hours, but it felt a lot longer since the customers were fewer. Thankfully, the evening crowd was starting to build up.

A woman sat at the counter, maybe ten years older than you, her fingers tracing the rim of an empty glass, her gaze flitting between the door and her phone. She had a nervous look and was dressed too nicely for the pub. You knew the type—the first daters—planning nights to the last detail, hoping for it to go well but preparing for disaster.

“Waiting for someone?” you asked, offering to take her glass.

“Yeah, a first date. I needed some liquid courage in advance,” she replied with a tight smile.

“Well, you look gorgeous,” you assured, showing her a genuine smile. “If they turn out to be a wanker, just come up and order an angel shot and I’ll help you out of here.”

Her smile widened, a bit more relaxed now, as she thanked you.

You made a point to watch over her as your shift went on. Her date arrived shortly after. You let yourself relax; at least he wasn’t a no-show, and he didn’t look like the type to catfish someone. In fact, he looked almost as nervous as she did, and you found yourself rooting for them.

Working in a gritty pub had never been your dream, but it was what your CV got you at this point in life. You had tried living in London, making ends meet by working at a cocktail bar, but you had crash-landed back in your hometown, like big time crashing.

Thankfully, the owner of The Swan hadn’t looked too closely into your past, or he at least didn’t care. You knew how to pour a pint, you knew how to clean up, and you knew how to deal with rowdy drunk people. That made you a top employee.

You moved on autopilot around the familiar bar with its familiar patrons. Some old, who frequented the bar even on weekdays, and some young, who you mostly saw on weekends.

You had learnt to listen to some and to eavesdrop on others. Like, you knew all about Denny’s divorce and custody battle because he sat by the bar and went on and on about it as he downed London Prides. But you had to eavesdrop to know that the group of girls who came in after work on Fridays had finally staged an intervention for their friend who put up with too much shit from her boyfriend.

Little things like that made bartending enjoyable.

Other things—like loud groups of lads your own age—almost always made it less enjoyable. That was why you felt a tiredness fall over you like an anvil in a slapstick comedy when you, even with your back turned to the door, could hear them enter. You let out a resigned sigh, knowing that the evening was about to take a livelier turn, and maybe not for the better.

However, they weren’t the usual group that gave you and your colleagues trouble. This were customers you’d never seen before. Strange for being such a small town with only The Swan and two other pubs. Sure, the boys were loud as they came to the bar to order from your colleague, but they were patient and not overly rude.

You froze in surprise.

You felt your grip slip from the glass you were holding, almost dropping it. While his friends filed up to the bar with an eagerness for drinks, Oscar lingered, his eyes darting around the room before landing on you. The shocked look on his face was almost priceless. He looked as startled as you felt, his eyes widening briefly as they locked onto yours.

He seemed out of place in the gritty atmosphere of the pub—too put-together, too polished. You knew he wasn’t British from his strong accent, and you knew he wasn’t the most outgoing type from his well… personality. He didn’t belong in here, but for some reason his friends had waltzed right in to The Swan, never having done so before.

You were scared to think about why, but deep down you knew.

Before your colleague could ask him for his order, you stepped forward. You wiped your hands on a towel and raised an eyebrow. “You lost?” you teased lightly, leaning against the bar.

Oscar’s friends were still gathering their drinks, a couple of them glancing your way with open curiosity. Your colleague doing the same, knowing full well that you would have to explain this to them afterwards.

Oscar smiled back, a bit shyly. “No, just… here with some friends.” He gestured vaguely behind him, looking mildly uncomfortable.

“So,” you said, folding your arms. “What can I get you?”

Oscar chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. “Not drinking tonight. Just…moral support, I guess.”

“You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

For a moment, you both stood there, the noise around you fading into the background.

His friends soon called after him to join them at their table and you had a job to do. As you moved around the bar, greeting regulars, wiping down counters, and handing out drinks, you couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Oscar was still there, his presence lingering even when he was out of view.

Each time you glanced over at their table, you caught him glancing back. The first few times he seemed nervous to be caught, but when he realised how often you looked at him, he really had nothing to be ashamed of if he stared back at you.

After a while, the place grew livelier, and you lost sight of him in the ebb and flow of customers, the noise picking up as more people filled the seats. The usual rowdiness of a Saturday night began to take hold.

Eventually, you saw his friends begin to gather their things, settling their tabs, pulling on jackets, and nudging each other as they headed out. You felt yourself get stuck in your steps behind the bar as you watched Oscar stand up from his seat. He exchanged a few words with his friends as they left, but he stayed, earning what you assumed were amused laughs and some crude comments.

Oscar waited a moment, watching them go, before he turned his gaze toward the bar. You tried to make yourself seem busy, cleaning a counter that wasn’t even dirty. You felt a flicker of nerves as he approached, unsure if you should be the first to talk. He sat down on an empty bar stool next to Denny. He didn’t have to dare to look at you because you already had all of his attention.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you this long without a cigarette before, y’know,” he said, breaking the silence.

You rolled your eyes, smirking. “I only smoke when I’m stressed, which is less often than you’d think.”

Oscar’s smile lingered, a warm glint in his eyes that hinted that he understood that the only time he saw you was at the group meetings and that they were the thing that caused you stress to the point where you felt the need to smoke. You wouldn’t even consider yourself a nicotine addict. However, of all things, nicotine wouldn’t be the worst thing to admit that you were addicted to.

Your conversation was briefly interrupted by your other patrons, like Denny, who flagged you down for another pint. You poured his drink wordlessly, and Oscar waited, his presence somehow calming amidst the usual chaos of the bar.

The couple you’d served earlier—the first-daters—approached to settle their tab.

“That looked successful,” you remarked with a friendly smile, referring to their date.

“Yeah, honestly green flags all around,” she replied, throwing her date a soft smile as he took out his wallet. “Thanks for the angel shot advice, though.”

You smiled. “Glad you didn’t need to use it.”

The woman chuckled, her eyes twinkling as she looked from you to Oscar, as if piecing something together. She tilted her head toward you. “Do… you need an angel shot yourself?”

“For this bloke?” you asked in surprise, pointing at Oscar. “Nah, I can handle him myself.”

The woman nodded, smiling in amusement as she gave Oscar another once-over before heading out with her date, holding hands. Oscar, who had been listening to the entire exchange with a bemused expression, raised an eyebrow.

“What’s an angel shot?” he asked.

“It’s a code we use for people on bad dates,” you explained with a shrug. “If they order one, it means they need help, and I step in. It’s a subtle way for someone to signal they’re uncomfortable without making a scene.”

Oscar’s eyes widened slightly in understanding, and he nodded. “That’s pretty smart.”

“Yeah, it can be useful. When I worked at a cocktail bar in London we had to use it almost every night. This place is a lot calmer.”

You knew it, Oscar knew it too—that rich people drinking Negronis at a rooftop bar in London were more troublesome once they got drunk than what people like Denny did once they were in on their seventh pint of the evening in a small town pub.

There was a brief lull in the conversation, the uncomfortable kind where you just waited for someone to break the silence. Oscar’s fingers tapped lightly on the bar, and he seemed lost in thought for a moment before, as if summoning courage, he spoke again, his voice a bit hesitant.

“So… when are you off?”

“In…” you stopped to check the clock on the wall behind you. “Three minutes.”

Oscar shifted, clearly nervous. “Do you want to maybe hang out? Get dinner or something?”

You blinked, taken off guard. He looked so uncomfortable. It was endearing in a way you hadn’t expected. He was as unsure of himself as anyone else was.

Oscar, meanwhile, felt as though he was the world’s worst at this. It was no wonder he never had casual things like Lando seemed to have every other weekend, one night stand after one night stand. Not that Oscar necessarily wanted that, but to even feel like he had the possibility to ask someone out would’ve been nice.

“I mean, if you’re up for it,” he added quickly, tripping over his words. “Like, we don’t have to or anything. I just thought—”

You cut him off with an uncharacteristic giggle, the sound breaking through the tension. “Only if I can use your shower. I smell like cheap beer and fryer oil,” you said, lifting your t-shirt with the pub’s swan logo on it to your nose, grimacing at the smell.

“Oh,” he breathed, his face lighting up in relief. “Absolutely.”

You tossed the towel onto the counter, giving him a playful smile as you stepped around the bar to join him. “But I’ll let you know,” you said, lowering your voice, “you shouldn’t hang out with someone like me. I’ll defile you.”

“I’m not as innocent as I act,” he said teasingly, but he wasn’t even sure if he believed his own words, let alone did he fool you.

_______________________________

Oscar sat like a sociopath on the sofa waiting for you to finish showering. He was not sure his posture had even been this good. You’d made your way to his flat after your shift had ended. He’d offered you his shower and clothes while he said he’d fix the rest. However, every film he could think of watching seemed pathetic. Every type of food he could think of ordering seemed disgusting. He hadn’t exactly thought this through when he asked you to hang out. He hadn’t expected it to be so… casual? Or maybe easy? Like you actually wanted to be here, in his flat, spending the evening with him.

He was probably overthinking this—no, he was overthinking this. But how could he not? He tried so hard to not think of the fact that you were wet and naked just a wall away, but he was pretty sure his brain broke in the process. Every detail was suddenly monumental, as though he was a teenager again.

The faint sound of the shower stopped, and he quickly sat up straighter, mentally scolding himself to look less… tense. He wasn’t sure he was pulling it off. He could hear the bathroom door open, and then you were padding down the hall, and he practically whipped his head around to see you.

You were wearing one of his favourite shirts, the maroon fabric hanging over your frame, the hem brushing the tops of your thighs. Your hair was still damp, small droplets darkening the shirt where they fell. The sweatpants you’d borrowed were too long, so you’d tucked them into your socks—baby pink, fuzzy socks with little red hearts on them. The socks were definitely not Oscar’s. He couldn’t believe that was what you were hiding under your Doc Martens.

Oscar blinked, trying to reconcile the idea that this—this ridiculously adorable version of you—was the same person who’d honestly scared him during your first conversation.

“Cute socks,” he chuckled, unable to stop himself.

“Shut up,” you muttered, hiding a smile, before flopping down on the sofa next to him, already more casual than Oscar could ever be. “What are we watching?”

He opened his mouth, but no words came out. He was acutely aware of how close you were, your leg brushing against his as you made yourself comfortable. You didn’t hesitate to grab a blanket that was thrown over the back of the sofa, cuddling into it as you wrapped it around yourself.

“We could watch… uh, anything you want,” Oscar finally managed.

You rolled your eyes, sinking into the sofa cushions. “If you let me pick, it’s going to be something dumb.”

“I’m okay with dumb.”

Your lips curled into a smile, but you didn’t say anything as you leant forward to grab the remote. Oscar sat there, watching as you navigated through streaming options. You were on the hunt for something specific, he noticed. Right in on Disney+ and quickly you searched for…Brother Bear?

Oscar’s brow lifted in surprise, but he didn’t question it. In a way, it felt perfectly fitting. He let out a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding and settled into the cushions, letting himself ease into the film, into the quiet comfort of the moment.

You both ordered pizza that arrived sometime in the middle of the film. You liked pineapple on pizza, but he guessed he could overlook it. Especially if it meant you were here, sitting beside him, taking a bite with a content look on your face.

You’d grown soft around the edges, for him. This was domestic, bordering on romantic. The girl he had first met—cigarette and white lighter in hand—would’ve never admitted to liking Disney films and to wearing pink fuzzy socks.

When the pizza was finished and the movie neared its end, you laid down in the corner of his L-shaped sofa, blanket fully surrounding you. Oscar wanted to scoot over, closer to you, maybe put your feet in his lap, but he hesitated, scared to cross boundaries. He chewed the inside of his cheek, lost in thought, hoping that his nerves would miraculously disappear.

And then you made a sound—a soft, involuntary awe that escaped your lips during the scene where Koda, the little bear cub, was reunited with his deceased mother through some sort of glowing spirits in the sky. Oscar had to admit that even though he’d seen this film as a kid, the plot was now completely lost on him because of you.

It was cute. Like, painfully cute, and Oscar felt that weird mix of cute aggression, where something is so adorable you just want to squeeze it. Instead, he let himself simply watch you, taking in the way your eyes glistened and your mouth parted slightly, as if you’d forgotten everything around you, wrapped up in this world of animated magic. He mentally cursed himself when you caught him looking.

“Why are you staring at me?” you muttered.

“You look like you’re about to cry,” Oscar teased and smiled boyishly.

“Shut up, I do not,” you shot back, rubbing your eyes with your fingers. You were sharp enough to draw blood, and he was somehow always left unscathed.

He couldn’t help but smile wider, watching as you tried to hide your embarrassment. In a brave moment, he moved closer, daring to take a hold of your wrist so that you couldn’t hide from him. Your eyes were shining and a couple of your eyelashes had clumped together from the moisture.

“It’s okay to cry to movies,” he said, nudging you gently. “Especially one’s about animated animals.”

“I am not crying. Not even close,” you insisted, laughing, sinking further into the sofa, pulling the blanket up to your chin.

You moved to the side and somehow, Oscar felt himself fitting naturally into the space behind you. He felt something shift inside him, a strange warmth settling in his chest. This was soft, quiet, almost painfully domestic. Yet it was real. You were here, cuddled up on his sofa, wrapped in his blanket, wearing his clothes, and laughing at something he’d said.

Neither of you said another word as you moved to lay together like you’d done it a million times before. He found his arm moving to wrap around you, pulling you in closer until your back was touching his chest. You lifted the blanket to cover him partly too. The movie rolled through its final scenes, and Oscar found himself paying even less attention now that you were literally touching him.

“You’re gonna stay there?” you whispered as the end credits rolled.

“Yeah, we’re watching the sequel.”

But neither of you moved to get the remote.

After a still moment, with a deep breath you moved to lay on your back. You glanced up at him, your gaze holding his for a long moment. Oscar didn’t dare look away, even if his confidence told him to do it. At least it was easier to look you in the eye than to take in the rest of you.

His heart picked up when you adjusted yourself, the blanket slipping from your shoulders and the maroon fabric of his shirt shifted slightly, revealing the outline of your body beneath. Your breasts moved gently, and he couldn’t help but notice the lack of anything underneath the soft cotton. His throat felt tight, and suddenly, every molecule of air around him seemed saturated with the scent of you.

Then, he realised that the scent of you was actually the scent of his laundry detergent and the soap he kept in his shower mixed with something that was uniquely you. And oh, how Oscar hated being a man. Was he really pathetic enough to pop a boner because you smelled good?

His body reacted before his brain could process it, betraying him in ways that were anything but subtle—warm and spreading, settling quickly. He shifted uncomfortably, moving his legs in a feeble attempt to hide the evidence of just how much you affected him.

“Oscar…” Your voice was soft, questioning.

He shook his head, looking anywhere but at you as he managed to respond. “I know, I’m sorry,” he said, mortified. His face burned with embarrassment. He couldn’t believe this was happening—couldn’t believe he was that guy right now.

“You don’t have to apologise,” you whispered, and you still weren’t scared to look him in the eye. Oscar for once wished you were.

“Yes, I do. It kind of ruins the mood,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

Your expression softened and then you shifted to give him a bit of space. In the process, you nearly tipped off the edge of the sofa, and instinctively, Oscar reached out, his hand steadying you by your arm. The warmth of your skin under his touch sent a spark up through his palm, grounding him, but he couldn’t help feeling a pang of guilt if he’d made you uncomfortable.

“Ugh… it’s just…you just smell good, and you’re wearing my shirt, and your skin is the softest thing ever, and I can’t think straight—” he stopped himself abruptly.

A laugh escaped your lips, soft but warm, and Oscar froze, unsure if he’d actually said all that aloud or if his brain had finally imploded.

“What are you doing?” you asked, tilting your head as you watched Oscar suddenly move away from you, sitting up in an awkward half-way position with the limited space he had behind you. It probably looked like he was about to bolt out of the flat out of sheer embarrassment.

“What am I doing?” He frowned. “I just—I don’t want you… I mean, you shouldn’t have to, y’know, feel it.”

At that, your smile deepened, and you moved your legs, spreading them just enough to make space for him to settle between them, throwing the blanket off the sofa.

“Oscar, can you… just calm down for a second?” you said gently, meeting his gaze with a reassuring look. “I’m not appalled by it, y’know? But you’re acting like I should be.”

His heartbeat thundered in his chest as he looked at you, processing your words. You didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. It was in this moment that Oscar also realised the position you were in, with him between your legs, fighting with his arm propped up to not fall flatly over your body. You weren’t scared to brush his sides by shutting your thighs just the slightest.

“You’re okay with this?” he felt the need to ask.

“I am.”

Oscar let his eyes linger for the first time, deciding for once to let the awkwardness melt away. And just like always, your eyes were on him, almost shamelessly scanning his broad shoulders and the way the fabric of his grey sweatpants stretched.

The shirt you’d borrowed had ridden up slightly, revealing your soft stomach and the hem of your underwear—a black cotton thong, the thin material peeking out. What was the frontal version of a whale-tail called? When the elastics sank into the soft parts of your hips and showed on either side above the waistband of your sweatpants.

Yeah, Oscar’s brain was definitely broken.

His mind spun, grasping for words, but all he managed was a shaky breath as he leaned in, like he couldn’t believe that he was seeing it, that he was this close. The air brushed against your skin. His mouth was as dry as a desert. You inhaled so sharply that he could hear it and see your stomach rising. He was eye level with your belly button and he decided upon… kissing it. Or right next to it, on the softest part of your stomach, the world narrowing down to just that patch of skin.

He looked up for reassurance, and you just smiled. A perfectly content smile where light sparkled in your eyes. Oscar’s hands found your waist as he kissed you again, his lips trailing gently across your stomach. Your skin was impossibly soft, practically melting into his hands.

Oscar’s next step was unplanned—like this entire thing—and maybe a bit silly, but when he was down there, kissing your stomach, he couldn’t help but want to venture higher up. So, like any other unreasonable person with hormones clouding their judgement, he stuck his head under your shirt, starting by kissing your ribs.

You let out something between a gasp and a giggle as your breathing picked up the higher up Oscar’s mouth wandered. Where your ribs connected in the middle of your chest, right where the skin was the thinnest, was where he started to gently suck and he earned his first moan. You could feel him start to smile as it escaped you.

When you looked down at him, all you could see was how his head stretched the fabric, and it was simply just humorous.

“I could just take my shirt off, y’know?” you teased, though you were out of breath.

”No,” he mumbled, lips brushing against your skin, an audible mwah leaving his mouth as he moved higher, planting a soft kiss in the valley between your breasts. “It’s warm under here.”

You let out a small laugh, your fingers resting on top of his head, the shirt still acting as a barrier as you felt his hair through it. “Wouldn’t have taken you for such a boob guy.”

Oscar closed his eyes as he felt your quiet laugher vibrate through your chest against his lips. Your breasts were practically lodged against his cheeks and he was definitely flushed red all over so it was actually convenient for him to be hidden under your shirt.

“Shut up,” was all he could manage to mutter.

He couldn’t hide anymore when he felt you pull the shirt up by the hem, first over his head and then swiftly over your own, it landing somewhere on the floor. Oscar was left laying there, chin resting against your sternum, feeling totally exposed as your eyes met his again. He didn’t dare to take in the sight of you shirtless, even though he was literally on top of your breasts.

And while he probably looked like a flustered mess, you looked totally unfazed.

“You motorboated me,” you exclaimed, laughter in your voice, “and you haven’t even kissed me on the mouth! Feels a bit backwards, don’t you think?”

Oscar chuckled, not having the time to think that he should be ashamed because of what you just insinuated. His hand moved to gently cup your cheek as he lifted himself to look at you.

“What I’m hearing is that you want to kiss me.”

He hated to sound cocky. He promised he really did. But with your jaw slacked and disbelief plastered on your face, he felt like he had said the right thing. You weren’t pushing him away, weren’t closing off the moment like he half-expected.

Instead, you were pulling him in.

If he thought your chest had been soft, your lips were like fucking velvet. It was like he was scared to touch you with how delicate you felt; with how softly you met his own lips. The initial connection was quick before he pulled away an inch or two to gather your reaction. With pure lust in your eyes, you were back to kissing him again before he had the chance to overthink what had just happened.

The kiss deepened slowly, a tender exploration of new territory, a silent acknowledgement that this—whatever this was—wasn’t just a one-off moment.

Oscar’s heart hammered in his chest as he shifted, his body now hovering over yours. His lips brushed against yours in a series of soft kisses. Then, before he knew it, your tongue was fighting his own. Your arms wrapped around his shoulders, pulling him in closer, and he let himself be totally absorbed by you.

And oh my god, you were shirtless beneath him. He struggled with where to place his hands, feeling strange holding your face for too long but scared to grip your bare waist with his wandering hands. But when he felt you push up towards him—your nipples rubbing his shirt, the soft flesh of your breast squished against his chest—Oscar felt like he could indulge fully.

With his forehead pressed against yours, Oscar pulled away and asked, “Do you want this to go further?”

You nodded first, swallowing your breath, before verbally saying a low and desperate yes too.

He wasn’t sure if he answered anything coherent or just let out a loud huff when he leant back down to kiss you. As his hands travelled up your body, you could feel goosebumps form under his fingertips. He stoked the underside of your breasts, taking in the way you reacted, before fully cupping them in his palms.

You tipped your head back between the sofa cushions as his lips moved down your jaw and neck, littering you with open-mouthed kisses. He towered over you, his lower body fitting perfectly with how your legs spread for him.

Oscar smiled as he grazed his teeth against your nipple, hearing you gasp at how he purposely teased you. And while he hadn’t thought about it like that before, you were definitely right with calling him a boob guy. Because fuck, could he spend his time adoring and fondling your soft tits, malleable in his hands and stimulating on his tongue. The way they perked up and became more sensitive with his touch was about to make him delirious.

And the sounds you were making—the gentle breathy groans—were better than any sound he’d ever heard before, practically deafening to his ears by how much he was concentrating on it. God, was he glad to have not turned on the sequel because having sex to Phil Collins wasn’t really on any bucket list. Especially not with how overwhelming he found your noises.

He released your nipple with a smacking sound, gazing at the attacked skin of your chest and neck. It would leave bruises, which made him feel even more like a horny teenager.

“Can you take your shirt off?” Your voice felt airy and small.

While your hands had already crept under to rake down his back as you were kissing, Oscar hadn’t exactly thought about the imbalance. He’d do just about anything to make you comfortable, meaning that his t-shirt soon joined yours on the floor.

He was an athlete, yet he hadn’t personally ever thought he looked like one. He’d never been one of those guys to confidently parade around without a shirt on in summer or post pictures of himself flexing in the gym. He just couldn’t do it.

But your eyes on him, the way you nestled your lower lip between your teeth, and how your hands immediately reached out to touch him… yeah, that was maybe the closest thing he’d felt to confidence in a long time.

“Do you feel okay?”

He wasn’t sure how his own voice would sound when he spoke again—dry and muffled, distracted by a million different things.

“Mhm,” you sighed out. “You wanna take off the rest of my clothes or should I do it myself?”

Oscar gulped at your forwardness, but he guessed he already knew that you wanted to take this further. So did he, like insanely. With fumbling fingers, he untied the drawstring on your sweatpants and worked them down your hips, until you laid there in front of him in just your thong and fuzzy socks.

He had sat up to take off his shirt, but he now nestled down between your legs again. There was no way in hell that he would last long inside of you, so he would need to please you beforehand. A gentleman, after all.

Oscar felt like he was about to die at the thought of going down on you, his blushing cheeks almost hurting from how warm they were. His hair was messy, his lips were kissed raw, and his pupils had dilated until all you could see in his eyes was darkness.

“Y’know you don’t have to—” you tried to tell him.

“What if I really want to?” he questioned, almost rhetorically. You didn’t fight him on it.

He kissed down your stomach until he came to the hem of your panties, absentmindedly rubbing soft circles on your hips and then down your thighs. There, his thoughts were simply reduced to the need to have you, in whatever way you allowed him.

You were impatient, while Oscar took his time to enjoy you. He tortuously dragged his lips across your thighs; the faint pattern of your skin looked like thin, pale lines spreading like lightning strikes. Once he dared to touch you over the fabric and feel the wetness that had soaked through, he could hear your breath hitch.

Slowly, he hooked his fingers in the sides of your thong and dragged them down your legs, leaving them discarded on the floor with the other clothes. Fully naked, except the socks, but those were staying on, Oscar decided.

“Have I told you that you’re gorgeous yet?”

You were looking down at him with an expression akin to frustration—mouth slightly open and heavy breaths spilling out, almost scoffing at his cliché words. He couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride as his own breaths hit your skin, blowing against your exposed heat. He pecked the stretched skin on your inner thigh to soothe you, stopping your writhing.

At a loss for what to do with your hands, they found their way down to his hair, weaving through his soft curls, tugging gently to get his attention.

“Osc…” you said with a simple breath.

That was really all Oscar needed—to hear you want him. That stupid little nickname was also something special. He hummed against you, feeling your reassurance as he kissed gently over your clit. And before you were able to complain for more, he latched his lips around it, suckling in a way that made your vision momentarily blank. His movements were tentative at first, unexperienced and lacking confidence.

“Oh, you’re so good,” you exhaled, praising him.

And there was something about the way you say it that just drove Oscar mad. It wasn’t that it felt good—it was that he was good. He got off on your reaction. It was as simple as that. It made him determined, building something with precise dramatics.

You felt his left hand grasp at the skin of your thigh, slowly inching upwards before he carefully sank a finger into you. Your hips twitched and you moan out loud as he played with you. He worked you open before adding another finger, his mouth never leaving your clit in the process. Even when your thighs fought to stay open, caging him between them, he didn’t falter. And every once in a while, when his eyes looked up to meet yours, you only felt yourself falling apart quicker.

His voice was low, the tone soft, when he mumbled something against your swollen cunt; something about how you tasted good. His free hand gently pressed down on your stomach to make you focus on the sensation—to feel his fingers ripping you apart from the inside out.

“God, fuckfuckfuck—” You were barely making sense of your own words as you bucked up against his mouth, completely buried over you, nose bumping your clit with his repeated motions.

Automatically, your hands grasped your breasts, fingers toying with your already sensitive nipples. Moving from your stomach, Oscar’s right hand was placed on your tits too, clasping his fingers over your own as he squeezed.

When you inevitably fell apart, he didn’t stop—not until you were a complete mess beneath him. Arching, white-hot, and expanding with intensity before his very eyes as he continued to softly lick. The way he was making out with your soaked core and babying your clit with the tip of his tongue would make one believe that this was a man who had never been shy or embarrassed over a single thing in his life.

And he wasn’t going to stop until you begged him.

With a pleasured and defeated “Oscar, please…” you were letting him know that he had done his job—that he had won you over in more ways than was necessary, that you were spent by him.

“I know,” he cooed, kissing your stomach. “I know.”

He moved to lay beside you, gently sliding his fingers out of you before tap, tap, tapping at your puffy clit, keeping his eyes steady at how you reacted. A slight hiss left your mouth before a hoarse laugher slipped out too. Your legs were still trembling from how intense your orgasm had been.

“You’re a mess,” you chuckled, raising a hand to brush his hair back then wiping his mouth with the back of your hand to clean him. “And a menace.”

“Well, so are you,” he smiled, kissing you on the mouth, neither of you caring about said mess.

You took a moment to breathe, and Oscar took a moment to think. While he couldn’t think straight, he could still come to the conclusion that this was such a good feeling—an overwhelmingly good feeling that he hadn’t felt in a long time, maybe never before.

By now, his cock was painfully hard beneath his sweatpants, definitely having leaked pre-cum through his boxers. If it had been bad before, it was so many times worse now with you heaving next to him, naked and looking at him through your eyelashes. He was practically seeing stars, and you hadn’t even touched him where he ached the most.

It was almost unjustifiable the way he was feeling—someone should just tape a sign to his forehead that said practically a raging virgin and call it a day. He wasn’t one, just to clarify, but you made him feel like one.

Your hand trailed gently down his chest, your nails painted black like always. Oscar wasn’t sure he was breathing anymore. He wished he could react normally to your touch, but instead it was like his skin raised like a mountain range wherever your hand wandered, his eyes following your movements with a pitiful desperation.

And when your hand moved below the waistband of his sweatpants, resting gently over his boxers, and therefore his erection too, he wasn’t sure what exactly would happen to his body—something new, a biological error, or a supernatural phenomenon.

You were so close to him, pulling his trousers down in such a fashion that your legs almost clashed together while it happened. Then he was naked, and you turned quiet.

Abashedly, he tried to think about what he looked like from your perspective. He wondered if he was too thick or too thin, if he should’ve groomed better, or if his upper body was disproportionate to his legs, or if he smelled bad, if he was just plain weird, or—

“Holy shit,” you whispered.

“W-what?” Oscar stuttered.

While Oscar was busy analysing himself, you were gawking. Maybe people on TikTok would call it a ’sleeper-build’, but there was nothing subtle about it. His pale skin looked pretty in a flushed pink tone, easily scratching under your sharp nails. Broad shoulders, toned stomach, thick thighs. Your eyes couldn’t help but look lower and lower. The pure size of him sank in a second later.

“You’re… big,” you said like a matter of fact. “It’s been a while, so you’ll have to go slow.”

“W-what?” Oscar stuttered, again.

His eyes widened to the point where it strained them. Of all the things you could’ve said, that was probably the one he expected the least. He tried to read your face, waiting for more of an explanation.

With your brows furrowed, all you asked were, “You’re surprised that I haven’t had sex in a while?”

“No!” he hurried to say, not thinking about other implications his reaction could’ve had. He’d curse himself for eternity if you thought he meant to slut-shame you. “I’m surprised about the other… thing. No one’s ever said that before,” he gesticulated with his hand, unsure what to call the thing that had just happened.

You glanced up at his face to see that he was now sporting a smirk, letting you know that your words had gone completely to his ego. Motherfucker, was he pretty.

“I’m not sure I believe that,” you mumbled, kissing him again. Laying side to side next to each other on the sofa, both of your hands had grown eager to touch. It was waists and chests, up bare backs to tangle fingers in hair.

“I promise you that it’s the first time I hear that,” he mumbled back.

Your hand sneaked down between your bodies, and any cockiness that Oscar gained from his newfound ’big dick energy’ was washed away in seconds. A whimper. A fucking whimper was ripped from his throat as soon as your fingers were wrapped around him. He couldn’t stop himself. Your movements were slow and languid, spreading the beads of pre-cum around his tip with your thumb. Oscar closed his eyes as he tried to not fall apart instantly.

“How’s your pull-out game?” you asked between placing kisses on his neck and jaw. He had beautiful freckles and birthmarks all over his skin.

And, fuck, how Oscar couldn’t think when dirty words left your mouth.

“I—, Uhh… Not good?”

He let out a moan mid-sentence. He felt both pathetic and tortured as your delicate fingers kept stroking him up and down.

“I’m on birth control anyway.”

“I could go and get a condom,” he fought himself to say.

“Do you have one?” you questioned, and Oscar’s lack of an answer told you what you already knew. “I thought so.”

And while Oscar knew that he came across loser-like, he didn’t also need it to be so transparent to you. Even though he sort of liked the dynamic built between you. He had always liked that you were quick-witted and a little mean.

Oscar exhaled, concealing another moan with a breathy chuckle. “You need to stop making fun of me when I’m naked. It’s going to affect my self-esteem.”

“Can’t help it, you’re an easy target.” You quickly pecked his lips, a little laugher slipping out. “You’re also a very pretty target.”

He wasn’t used to being called pretty. His mum called him handsome. His instagram comments called him a polite cat. Pretty was entirely new territory. But he liked it, and impossibly, he blushed even harder.

“Are we really doing this?”

He just had to be sure, still in a bit of disbelief.

“Please,” you said. “Fuck me.”

Oscar propped himself on his elbow, placing it beside your head, caging you beneath him. He took himself in his hand, giving his cock a few slow stokes. He looked tortured, the tip pink and engorged as it curved up towards his stomach, a thatch of hair connecting to his faint happy trail.

The head of his cock sat heavy against your entrance as he aligned himself, and you felt yourself desperately clenching around nothing. His free hand rubbed circles on your hip comfortingly. He was hesitant, and maybe that was your fault for asking him to take it slow, but the last thing he wanted was to cause you pain. With an eager nod, you gave him the green light.

“God, you’re tight,” Oscar murmured, his voice breathless as he pushed forward.

“No,” you gasped, gripping his bicep for something to hold onto. “You are massive.”

A low, strained laugh escaped him. “You really wanna argue right now?”

No, you didn’t. Not when you felt him slide inside you completely.

“I’m okay,” you whispered, breathing heavily, unable to help the way you tightened around him. “F-fuck, you can move,” you told him, voice muffled against his neck.

Oscar inhaled sharply, softening to the touch by your reassurance, as he pulled his hips from yours before slowly moving back, tentatively creating a steady rhythm, stretching your around him.

It was intoxicating, and warm. While he knew that he liked you, he had never imagined it to feel like free falling. You still smelled like a mixture of him and yourself, and your soft skin was touching him in ways and places he couldn’t describe. It was gratifying that you were just as desperate as he was.

He lifted your leg up by gripping under your knee, thrusting at a deeper angle. The sounds of your bodies crashing together filled the room as your moments only got quicker and needier.

Looking down at you, he saw your eyes struggling to stay open and your jaw dropping loose with the whimpers and moans you were letting out. Your tits bounced in pace every time he came to the hilt inside you.

“Holy f-fuck, you feel good,” he stuttered right in your ear. “You feel like you were fucking made for me.”

He was being lewd and you giggled. God, you giggled—like Oscar didn’t have enough of a hard time keeping it together. You were teasing him, but it was gentle and honeyed, like a beautiful song to his ears.

He forcefully dug his fingers into the soft fat of your thigh, spilling out between his fingers, doing just about anything to ground himself, but it was impossible. Admittedly, Oscar had never felt this good before in his life.

His living room was ablaze with your movements—an incoherent mess between two bodies, all skin and bone, at each other’s disposal to use.

“Fuck…” Oscar moaned, grinding his cock into you. “I’m already so fucking close.”

“Me too,” you whined out, voice strangled. “Let it all go.”

Oscar buried his face in your neck to try and hide his desperation, moaning and biting down into the soft skin. He was moving frantically, feeling it all approaching rapidly.

With a soft cry, Oscar was cumming, stuttering and needy, groaning everything from your name to all the curse words he could think of. He twitched inside of you, coating your walls with his cum. You moved one of your hands to his cheek and you held his face, staring intensely into his eyes, as he rode out his high.

Damn you and your damn eye contact.

He continued to slowly thrust, doing whatever he could to get you off while being totally spent. The hand on your hip drifted to your pubic bone before delving between your folds, his pointer and ring finger running steady halos over your clit. Thankfully, you weren’t long after. He wasn’t sure he could take the embarrassment of not making you cum when it had been so easy for him. You arched your back as it hit you, throwing your head back in blind pleasure.

And then it all slowed. The moans disappeared, and all that was left were heavy breaths in an eerily quiet living room. He felt warm air hit his neck as he laid down and you cuddled up against him. Mindlessly, you ran your fingertips along his skin, soothing the marks your nails had left. He’d gone soft inside you, his release mixed with your own leaking out the sides.

“I’m gonna slide out, okay?”

“Mhm, slowly,” you whimpered as he did it, going from feeling full to achingly empty. A single tear ran down your cheek out of exhaustion and pleasure, and Oscar stopped to kiss it away, tasting the saline on his lips.

“Talk to me,” he whispered.

You let out a deep breath, your body feeling heavy but sated. “I’m good,” you murmured, your cheek pressed against his chest. “Can feel you dripping down my thighs though.”

“We should probably clean up.”

He didn’t move, and neither did you. You were perfectly content with the mess if it meant that you would stay cradled in his arms. He wrapped his arms tighter around you, legs intertwining. His pec was soft against you, and you could hear the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, a soothing backdrop to the quiet intimacy of the moment.

“I was going to let you wait annoyingly long before sleeping with you. I can’t believe I caved in so easily,” you said suddenly, your voice soft but teasing. The words hung in the air for a moment, light and playful, but you could feel the way his chest rumbled as he chuckled.

Oscar raised an eyebrow, his curiosity piqued. “Oh, really?”

You nodded, hiding your face in his chest. “Yeah. Like, painfully long. Months, at least.”

“What changed?”

You hesitated for a moment, your face still pressed against him. But then you tilted your head slightly, sneaking a glance up at him through heavy lashes. “Can’t help the fact that I’m insanely attracted to you,” you admitted shyly.

Oscar took in your smile before embarrassment made you hide it into his chest again. You were so… soft, like he couldn’t actually believe it.

“Glad we’re on the same page,” he exhaled, sinking down further into the sofa cushions. He ran a hand through his hair, trying and failing to contain the pleased grin that spread across his face.

You kissed his chest gently, the steady rise and fall of his breathing lulling you into a sense of peace. For a while, neither of you spoke, the comfortable silence stretching between you. You were glad this hadn’t turned awkward.

Then, his voice broke the quiet, low and soft. “Are you staying the night?”

You didn’t look up at him, sort of scared to say a right-out yes to his question.

“If you want me to.”

His arms tightened around you slightly, and you could feel the smile on his lips as he pressed a soft kiss to the crown of your head. “I’d love that.”

_______________________________

Oscar wasn’t sure how long he spent starring at himself in the bathroom mirror afterward. He moved through his routine on autopilot—brushing his teeth, rinsing his mouth—only for his movements to slow as his reflection pulled him back in. His messy hair was still tousled. The love bites on his neck, faint but unmistakable, stood out against his pale skin. His fingertips grazed over the scratches on his shoulders, his cheeks warming as he recalled how they got there. He didn’t think he would ever stop blushing tonight.

When he finally mustered the courage to step back into his bedroom, he found you there: bare feet on the hardwood floor, wearing only his maroon t-shirt. You stood in front of his dresser, looking intensely at something placed on it.

The trophies.

You had fucked his brains out so good that he had forgotten about the intricate web of omissions and half-truths he had woven around you. And now, his lies were staring back at him, literally and metaphorically.

This was about to be awful.

“So, this is where you keep them?” Your voice was calm, deceptively so, as you turned to face him.

Oscar stood frozen in the doorway. He opened his mouth but no words left it, his body rigid as he grappled with the realisation: you already knew.

He hadn’t wanted to keep these things out in the open. Unlike some drivers whose homes were practically shrines to their achievements, Oscar preferred subtlety. Most of his trophies were tucked away, gathering dust in storage. But these— mostly medals and pictures from his childhood, tokens of his early racing days—remained on his dresser.

“I’ve known for a while,” you admitted, as if offering him a way out of the confession he hadn’t yet made. “Since I questioned you driving a McLaren to counselling.”

Oscar blinked, the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place with an awful, grinding clarity. It wasn’t like he had tried to be undercover or specifically careful about concealing his identity.

“I thought you just worked for McLaren at first,” you continued, gesturing vaguely to the trophies. “But then I googled your name and the brand… My brother used to be a big Hamilton fan, so I made the connection.”

He exhaled slowly, his shoulders slumping slightly as the tension drained out of him. “Why didn’t you say something?” He didn’t mean for his voice to sound defeated, but it did.

“Figured there was a reason as to why you didn’t tell me,” you shrugged, taking a seat on his bed. “I won’t force you to talk about things you don’t want to. We met in an unconventional way and I fully understand that you don’t want a stranger to know everything about you.”

“Don’t say that,” Oscar interrupted, his voice sharper than he intended. He stepped further into the room, his hands flexing at his sides. “We’re not strangers, we know each other.”

You tilted your head, your expression softening as you studied him. His sudden reaction surprised even himself, but he couldn’t let the word “strangers” hang in the air between you. Oscar guessed he was more emotionally involved than he had let himself believe, but that he now couldn’t deny it. He sat down beside you, the bed shifting under his weight, and your eyes searched his for something—an explanation, perhaps

“I know you,” he argued. “I know that you only smoke after counselling since it stresses you out and you think that because you smoke Marlboro Silvers, it won’t affect you as badly. know that immediately after, you chew strawberry gum to get rid of the taste, because you don’t actually like it.”

He started at you intensely as he kept talking, finally not scared of your eye contact. But he could see that you were crumbling.

“You only drink rooibos tea because it’s naturally sweeter than black tea. You carry white lighters to appear fearless, but in reality it’s because you’re sad and you don’t care if something bad happens to you.”

“Oh, and you cry to Disney movies,” he lastly added, “because you are in fact not fearless. You’re scared shitless of the emotions you harbour inside and never tell anyone about. So, yeah, I know you. ”

You blinked, his words hanging in the air between. “That doesn’t sound like you know me,” you said after a long pause. “That sounds like you’ve observed me.”

“We also quite literally just had sex,” he reminded you, a shy smile tugging at his lips. “And I think we’re alike in that sense—that we don’t casually do that with random people.”

“Fair point,” you conceded, unable to suppress your own smile.

And there it was again—the strange, undeniable truth between you. There was truth in what you had shared with each other, always. Even if he had skipped the specifics, his feelings had never been false.

You exhaled loudly, your back hitting the mattress. It was like a balloon had popped, the tension in the taut latex having exploded into nothing. You were so tired. You always were.

Oscar knew not to push further. Not right now at least. He fell back on the mattress too, hiking further up to rest his head on his pillow. He lifted the covers to invite you underneath, cuddling you closer as your arms and legs were now slightly cold to the touch.

He also came back to the realisation that you knew him too. That you knew why he went to the group meetings. That you knew what he did all those weekends he spent working. That the car crash he blamed himself for wasn’t exactly average.

“Did you see the crash?” he asked quietly after a moment, his voice murmuring between the sheets.

He felt you shake your head. “No, I haven’t seen a race since Hamilton last won the championship.”

“Right, because of your brother,” Oscar remembered. “Is he no longer a fan?”

“I don’t know if he is. Haven’t talked to him in over a year.”

Oscar nodded slowly, taking in the weight of your words. You hesitated for a moment, your fingers tracing the edge of the covers. “Do you want me to see the crash?”

“No,” he answered quickly. “Not really.”

“My first impression of you racing probably shouldn’t be a crash anyway.”

The corners of his mouth lifted in a small, grateful smile, and he reached for your hand, lacing his fingers with yours. The weight of that topic seemed to drift away, and you found yourself sinking into the comfort of his embrace again, your head resting on his bare chest. He could feel your warmth tucked against his side, your breathing steady like a rhythm. You traced little patterns along his palm and fingers.

For a moment, it felt easy again. Soporific, even.

He could’ve easily fallen asleep, for once without thinking about nightmares. Oscar also didn’t want this to end, for the night to be over and for him to have to say goodbye to you in the morning. Not that he imagined it to be a dramatic goodbye, you’d see each other soon enough again, but still, he didn’t want to.

“You should come with me to a race,” he said softly, breaking the peaceful silence, looking at you almost succumbing to slumber.

“I can’t—” you began and Oscar could immediately sense your hesitation.

“I’d pay for everything. I just want to have you there,” he added quickly, tilting his head to gaze down at you. It wasn’t about the money. It wasn’t about showing off. He just needed you near him, in whatever way he could.

Your body tensed up against him. “I can’t leave the country Oscar.”

The words didn’t make sense at first. He frowned, confused. “I’m sure you can get time off from work,” he said, worrying that was the reason.

You turned your gaze away, your cheek no longer resting against him, and the absence of your touch sent a quiet ache through him. You couldn’t meet his eyes, and the pause that followed felt agonisingly long. The words felt stuck in your throat, your chest tightening.

“I mean—,” you paused, swallowing hard. “I’m not allowed to leave the country.”

The room fell silent, save for your faint whisper.

“I’m on probation.”

Oscar’s mind went blank. Probation. That was for criminal offences. You’d done something deserving of a court sentence. Silence stretched between you, and Oscar pulled away slightly, just enough to look at you more closely. His brow furrowed, but he didn’t speak.

“So, I’m sorry for calling us strangers,” you said finally, “but you don’t know the half of what I’ve done.”

You sat up fully now, a cold weight settling in the bed. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice steady, watching as you untangled yourself from the sheets, kicking the comforter off your legs.

“I’m leaving.”

“No. You’re not.”

His voice was firm, almost commanding, as he reached out and grasped your arm before you could move further. His grip wasn’t harsh, but it was resolute. He wasn’t going to let you walk away—not like this.

“You’re going to stay and tell me about this. I feel like you owe me that after what we just did.”

You froze, whole body going rigid, but Oscar didn’t let go.

“I need to know if I’m falling for a serial killer or not,” he added with a half-smile, trying to lighten the mood, “because then I’ll seriously need to reconsider my life choices.”

Your heart ached at his attempt to make you laugh, but the knot in your chest didn’t loosen. The humour didn’t land, not fully, and the weight of what you were about to confess pressed down on you like a heavy stone.

You bit your lip, your voice trembling as you said, “I c-can’t tell you.”

“Why?”

Your body trembled beneath his touch and he loosed his grip, thumb rubbing soft circles on your arm.

“Because you’re a good person,” you whispered. “You’re going to find me repulsive and never want to see me again.”

Oscar could see it in your eyes—the battle raging within you, the fear that once the words left your lips, he would be gone. But he wasn’t going anywhere. You cared about seeing him again. That alone gave him something to hold on to.

“Unless you’ve actually murdered someone—I don’t think that’s possible.” His voice was soft, almost coaxing.

“I don’t think you get probation for murder. I promise no one got hurt physically.”

And even in this state, you still kept that sarcastic edge that he’d grown to adore.

“Okay,” Oscar said softly. “Then tell me.”

You sighed, your hands trembling as you ran your fingers through your hair. Your eyes squeezed shut, as though blocking out his gaze would somehow make it easier to speak.

“When I was 19 I got into a relationship with a guy who was a lot older than me,” you began, your voice uneven. “He had a very… destructive lifestyle that I became a part of. I let him use me.”

Oscar’s stomach twisted, but he stayed quiet, letting you continue. He could see how much it was costing you to admit this, and the last thing he wanted was to make it harder for you.

You slowly opened your eyes, not to look at him, but to look at the ceiling, blinking to fight tears from running down your cheeks.

“The reason as to why I haven’t spoken to my brother in such a long time… ” Your voice broke, and you paused, taking a shaky breath. “…is because I committed fraud with his identity. I took out a loan using his name because I was desperate for money.”

Oscar couldn’t hide his shock, but he didn’t pull away. You were laying it all out, raw and exposed, and he wasn’t going to judge you. He couldn’t. He stayed rooted in place, his hand still on your arm, grounding you.

“When he found out, he turned me in. I confessed to doing it and agreed on accepting help which is the only reason I’m not currently in prison.”

“And the boyfriend?” Oscar managed to ask.

You laughed bitterly, shaking your head. “He took the money and fled the country. Haven’t seen him since. But I paid my brother back. Every penny.”

Oscar nodded slowly. “What did you need the money for?”

Your lips trembled as you looked down at your hands. “Don’t make me say it. I feel like you already know.”

And he did. He’d known since he realised what those Sunday meetings were for.

“Are you clean now?”

“14 months,” you quickly said. “Ever since he turned me in. I have a badge on my keys if you—”

“I’m proud of you,” Oscar said, cutting you off gently.

Your breath hitched as he said it. It had surprised you. “See?” he whispered. “You didn’t scare me away.” Oscar gathered his courage to hold you in his embrace again, laying you gently down on the mattress, letting your body relax on top of his.

“Besides,” he added with a wry grin, “I’m in an industry where if you haven’t committed tax fraud, you’re probably the odd one out.”

You blinked in surprise, a startled laugh escaping your lips despite yourself. “What?”

Oscar chuckled, the tension between you easing ever so slightly. “I know drivers who’ve had people go to prison on their behalf because of embezzlement,” he said, clearly exaggerating, but the humour in his voice was infectious. “You’re practically a saint compared to some of them.”

“Fucking corrupt rich people,” you muttered.

“Well,” Oscar said, his hand moving down to hold yours, “the point is… you can’t scare me away.”

He heard you exhale loudly. He even felt it against his shirtless skin. Your arms tightened around him, clutching both yours and his chest. It was adding pressure to stop you from panicking.

And then you started crying. For real this time. It wasn’t you fighting the tears from falling or shyly getting watery eyes from Brother Bear. You were sobbing. He hadn’t thought he would ever see you cry.

Oscar’s heart broke a little as he watched you finally let go, your body shaking with the weight of everything you’d been holding in. He immediately pulled you closer into his arms, holding you close, his hand gently stroking your hair as you cried against his chest.

“I’ve got you,” Oscar whispered softly. “I’m not going anywhere.”

You clung to him, your tears soaking into his skin, but he didn’t mind. You were essentially a stranger—even though he hated the word—crying in his arms, and he’d do anything in his power to never see you like this again. He had fallen for your softness, not the jagged edges you put up around yourself in protection. He’d accept you unconditionally if it meant you didn’t see him as something you needed to protect yourself from.

As your sobs quieted and your breathing got steady, you remained tucked against Oscar’s chest, resting over his heartbeat. You could feel his hand tracing soothing circles on your back. He almost thought you had fallen asleep.

“Thank you,” you whispered after a long silence, your voice hoarse from crying.

Oscar pressed a kiss to the top of your head. “For what?”

“For making me stay.”

_______________________________

A couple of weeks later, on a Tuesday at St. Anne’s Church, you did something you’d never expected yourself to do. You found yourself standing at the lectern in front of the room of strangers that you had spent the past year of your life with. And Oscar, but he had never really been a stranger.

It felt stupid at first, when you walked up there and said your name, the people in the room saying it back to you like a choir. Some clichés from movies really were true.

You started off by giving a brief background as to why you went to meetings. It was supposed to be a guilt-free environment, one where you wouldn’t be judged for anything. But opening up about betraying your own brother and getting probation because of it wasn’t guilt-free no matter how you twisted it.

“Some of you might recognise me from NA meetings as well, but the drugs were never my main issue. I mean, I was— or am an addict, that’s how they want you to say it in NA at least. There is really no denying that, but the real problem was how it made me treat the people around me.”

You didn’t like how your voice sounded in the echoing room, but it didn’t stop you from trying. You knew that the people listening had their own issues so present that yours wouldn’t bother them.

“I understand that my brother never wants to speak to me again,” you continued, your gaze falling to your hands, a cuticle bleeding from unconsciously picking at it. “I think I almost feel the same way. But then… I’ll go to Sainsbury’s and buy green apples, even though I hate them, but he loves them, and I used to buy them for him.”

It was true. You’d have vivid flashbacks about apples every time you saw them. You’d get them from the store as if you were moving on autopilot and hate yourself for it when you got home and unpacked the groceries. Your aunt would always question why you bought them but never ate them, and you couldn’t put that into words.

“I’ll have a mental breakdown over some stupid apples and realise that… we are connected in a way that can never be erased. That’s my fault, my guilt to carry—that I ruined it, that I get to argue with apples instead of arguing with him,” you said with an almost laugher.

You fixed your gaze on Oscar, whose eyes had never left yours for as long as you spoke. He held a tight smile, like understanding the humour in how trauma tended to materialise.

The facilitator asked you a question, like he normally did when he saw people trying to find the right words but struggling to get them into actual sentences. He asked you how time had changed the guilt you felt and if your probation still felt fair to you.

“It’s just so… fucked up that you can convince yourself that you’re evil and unfixable,” you answered, your voice growing steadier. “But it turns out you’re just young. And you’ll make mistakes because of it. I’m paying for those mistakes, but I can’t let them define me.”

You decided that you were done there. You could say more, and you could’ve said less, but you’d done it now. That was the important part. And even though you’d never admit it, it really did feel better to have said it out loud.

As you stepped down and walked back to your seat, a small wave of applause followed you. You felt Oscar’s hand slip into yours as you sat down, his fingers squeezing gently, a wordless assurance.

It took a bit longer for Oscar to finally walk up to the front of the room, a month or so. But he did it in the end. You understood that he felt like his problems weren’t like everybody else’s, because no normal person could really understand his job. And feeling guilt over a car crash where no one was hurt wasn’t easily explainable either.

Oscar’s movements were deliberate, almost stiff, as though he was trying to keep himself together with every step. He stood at the lectern, his hands gripping the edges tightly, and you could see the tension in his knuckles.

He talked about the crash in broad terms, but most of his focus was on Charles, and Oscar’s messed-up idea about how he had hurt Charles. When the facilitator asked him to base his guilt around something real, something factual, you saw the struggle in his expression.

“It’s just… guilt,” he said finally, his voice low. He paused, searching for the right words, but they didn’t come. “I’m not sure I can explain it or give it a likeness. Not everything feels like something else.”

Not everything felt like something else. Issues were allowed to be unique and entangled. It wasn’t about understanding them as much as it was about accepting them. You watched him closely, and you raised your arm to ask him a question, waiting for him to acknowledge you with a silent nod.

“If Charles felt like he never needed to forgive you because he knew all along that this was an accident and no one was actually hurt—why can’t you forgive yourself?”

Oscar’s gaze dropped, his shoulders slumping slightly. He stood there for a long moment, the words sinking in.

He realised then and there that his main issue wasn’t the crash or the possibility of it happening again. It was that he blamed himself for hurting someone else—a hurt that granted hadn’t even happened, Charles was fine—but his mind hadn’t cared about that. He had the lives of others at risk with the turn of a wheel, and the crash had made him mentally unprepared for that risk. He guessed he knew now what to bring up the next time he met up with his therapist.

After that meeting, Oscar talked for a moment with the facilitator, before he walked out to find you standing by the big doorway into the actual church, looking down the isle to the altar. He stood quietly behind you, placing his arm around your waist. The quiet of the church was profound, almost unsettling. The rows of pews stretched out before you, bathed in a soft glow of candlelight.

“I don’t think I ever understood religion,” you said, whispering in the stillness. “Or God, for that matter. It’s too quiet. Too much about self-reflection and not enough about the old men in the Bible for me to grasp it.”

Oscar didn’t respond right away, his chin resting lightly on your shoulder as he followed your gaze to the altar.

“I see it as a last ditch effort for when you have no one else to talk to, but all you end up doing is talking to yourself,” he explained.

“Sounds a lot like self-reflection to me,” you huffed a little.

Maybe that was the thing people needed most—to get to know themselves. Bad people don’t wonder if they’re bad people. A truly evil person wouldn’t feel guilty for something bad they’ve done. You were both paralysed by guilt, but standing there with Oscar, it felt just a little less heavy.

“Oscar…” you began again, turning to meet his gaze. “Please don’t tell my secrets to anyone else.”

“We literally had to sign an NDA to join the group, babe.”

“You know what I mean,” you said, rolling your eyes but unable to suppress a small laugh.

“I promise.”

When you left the church that evening, it was abnormally sunny. Early summer, colouring the nature around you green. You walked across the parking lot hand in hand, that silent show of affection a normal occurrence between you now.

“Oh,” he said suddenly, stopping by his car. “I got you something.”

From his pocket, he pulled out a lighter, its surface bright orange. He held it out to you, his expression almost shy. You blinked, caught off guard. You hadn’t expected anything like this, the small, unspoken care behind the gesture. No more conscious bad luck.

“It’s a myth, y’know?” you said, taking the lighter and looking at him softly. “Most of the 27 club died before Bic started making the white version.”

Did Oscar feel a little stupid for not thinking to google the superstition before buying you—granted, a very cheap gift—but also something so laced with thoughtfulness? Maybe. Did he also deeply want you to stop being reliant on nicotine to feel calm? Definitely. But that was too late to say right now when you already had the lighter in your hand and he was blushing from how exposed he felt.

“Well, I think orange suits you better anyway.”

_______________________________

Oscar had insisted, of course—gently but persistently—until you’d finally agreed to come to a race. Silverstone wasn’t out of the country, which meant it didn’t violate any of your probation rules. A technical loophole, but a loophole nonetheless. Your 18 months were nearly over, but Oscar hadn’t been able to wait.

Now, standing among the sea of spectators in the garage, the weight of his world began to settle. The sheer scale of it all was overwhelming. You couldn’t deny it was exhilarating, but it also made you feel small, like an intruder. It was fucking Silverstone, after all—on a Sunday afternoon just minutes before the lights would go out.

You glanced down at your phone, trying to distract yourself from the growing tension in your stomach. That’s when a message appeared.

Eli: “Are you at Silverstone?? I swear I just saw you on TV.”

Your breath caught in your throat and your fingers tightened around your phone. Eli. What happened to hello? What happened to how are you? You stared at the message for a long moment. Before you could even process how to respond, another message appeared.

Eli: “Are you with Piastri?? What the hell?”

A startled laugh escaped your lips, nerves bubbling beneath the surface. You glanced around, as if half-expecting Eli to appear out of thin air. Of course, he wasn’t here. He’d gone once to Silverstone with your father when he was young, but nowadays it was cheaper to try and go to Hungary or another European race.

So, right now you knew exactly where your brother was—in the living room at your parents’ place because even though he’d moved out a long time ago, he still went home every Sunday to watch F1 because he leached off of their streaming services.

You took a deep breath and typed back.

You: “Yeah, I’m here with Oscar.”

For a moment, you stared at the screen, your thumb hovering over the send button. Then, with a rush of courage, you pressed it. The three dots indicating Eli was typing appeared, disappeared, and reappeared again.

Eli: “Why didn’t you tell me? You’re at an F1 race with a driver, and I have to find out on TV?”

He definitely didn’t mean to guilt-trip you—you knew that. It was his way of breaking through the awkwardness. In a way, you supposed it was better to feel guilty about not telling him about Oscar than about the bigger things. The real things.

Before you could reply, you felt a tap on your shoulder. Turning around, you saw Oscar in his race suit, his face flushed from the adrenaline of pre-race preparations. He looked out of breath, but his smile was unmistakable, the sight of you clearly easing some of the tension in his own chest.

“Hey,” he said, leaning down to kiss your cheek. “You good?”

You nodded. “Yeah. My brother just texted me.”

Oscar’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. You bit your lip, holding up your phone so he could see the messages. Oscar leant in, glancing at the screen, a small smile tugging at his lips.

“He recognised you on TV?”

“Apparently,” you said with a soft laugh. “He’s freaking out.”

Oscar’s expression softened, his hand squeezing yours reassuringly. “That has to be good, right? That he’s talking to you?”

“I hope so,” you whispered.

Before either of you could say more, someone called Oscar’s name from across the paddock. He sighed, his thumb brushing lightly over your knuckles. “I have to go. National anthem and all that.”

You nodded, your fingers reluctantly slipping from his grasp as he stepped back. “Good luck,” you called after him.

He grinned over his shoulder, his confidence infectious. “Thought you didn’t believe in luck.”

And while in the past you hadn’t minded your own bad luck and superstitions, you definitely didn’t want to spread that mindset to Oscar. You would start carrying wishbones, four-leaf clovers, and horseshoes if it meant that just a smidge of luck would be transferred to his life.

As he disappeared into the crowd, the nervous energy around you seemed to intensify. The minutes ticked by, stretching into what felt like hours. Your phone buzzed again, pulling your attention back.

Eli: “I’ve missed you. We should talk whenever you can.”

Your breath caught, and for a moment, the chaos around you seemed to fade. You read the message twice, three times, the words sinking in slowly. For so long, you’d been afraid that you’d lost him for good, that the damage you’d done was irreparable—that you were irreparable. But here he was, reaching out.

You: “I’ve missed you too. I’m back in town tomorrow.”

You hit send just as the formation lap started. You were not sure for how long you held your breath after that.

Oscar was good—so good—and as you watched him race, you couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride. He was in his element, completely focused, completely in control. You were glad to not have seen the crash that still haunted him at times, because this proved that it was just a fluke, a temporary stumble rather than a career-defining event.

As the checkered flag waved, you felt a sense of relief wash over you, knowing he had made it through safely. By the time the race was over, Oscar had finished in fourth place—a strong result considering weak qualifying. Most positions gained by anyone in the race. As the crowd erupted in cheers, you found yourself smiling, the tension in your chest finally easing.

Afterward, you found yourself standing in Oscar’s drivers room, waiting for him to return. Your phone buzzed in your hand, and you glanced down to see another message from your brother.

Eli: “That was an insane race. Piastri is a beast. Proud of you for being there.”

You smiled, feeling lighter than you had in months.

Moments later, Oscar appeared, his hair slightly damp from the helmet, his face flushed. He spotted you immediately, his eyes lighting up as he walked over, his smile wide despite exhaustion.

“How’d I do?” he asked, his voice breathless.

“You were amazing,” you grinned, stepping closer to him. “How are you so calm? That was nerve-wracking as hell.”

“I’ve done this a couple of times before,” he teased. Oscar laughed, pulling you into a hug, his arms wrapping around you tightly. “I’m glad you’re here,” he whispered into your ear.

You buried your face in his shoulder, holding him close, and felt the last remnants of tension melt away. “Me too.”

Pulling back slightly, he looked down at you, his smile soft. “You haven’t been sarcastic with me all day, y’know? Is there something wrong?”

You smirked, tilting your head. “I can always start—”

Before you could finish, he leant down and kissed you, cutting off your words. Smack dab on the mouth, messy and rushed. When he pulled back, his eyes were bright and his grin was infectious. You guessed you didn’t need to resort to sarcasm and snarky comments when you were happy. Simply happy.

I'd like to thank Strangers by Ethel Cain, Strangers by Sarah Klang, and Stranger by Blanks for all inspiring this fic. Apparently, I really like songs about being strangers.

╰ Join my taglist or check out my masterlist <3

Tags: @alexxavicry

#my writing 🪐#oscar piastri #f1 x reader #oscar piastri x reader #f1 #f1 fanfic #f1 fanfiction #f1 fic #f1 imagine #formula 1 #f1 smut #oscar piastri imagine #oscar piastri fanfic #op81 #oscar piastri x you #formula one

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anantaru · 4 months ago

Text

— when he kisses you

including. zhongli, cyno, diluc, kinich

genre. making out & slightly suggestive, gn! reader

— zhongli

alongside zhongli, you feel his presence instantly, it reminds you of a comforting and reassuring constant— a cradling you wholly worshipped as the bustle of the harbor behind you faded away.

"thank you for showing me this place," your eyes glow as you said softly, glancing up at him, "it's beautiful."

with you, zhongli can leave his stern demeanor behind for once and actually smile, wholeheartedly, his golden eyes warm just by the mere sight of you, "it is a place i often come to for reflection."

"i thought you might appreciate its tranquility."

feeling a sense of peace wash over you, you took in the serene surroundings— the gentle rustling of leaves and the soft trickle of a nearby stream creating a soothing melody as zhongli held you in his arms.

the moment felt perfect, almost surreal.

his gaze was intense, dragon eyes yet so tender when he looks at you.

before you could say anything, he leans in, his hand gently cupping your cheek to feel you on his cold skin— within this subtle second, the world seemed to pause as he fully leans in, his lips meeting yours in a slow, purposeful kiss.

it was unlike anything you had ever experienced before— his lips were soft, his tongue deep, and filled with a profound sense of reverence as he captured you.

your mind swirled with a mix of emotions as his kiss was turning measured, each movement precise and purposeful, as if he was savoring every second— almost as if he was scared you'd one day, disappear from his lonely, immortal life.

the experience he held in life and the time he's conquered was evident in the way he guided the kiss, controlled it, drew you in and made you feel cherished beyond words.

as he deepened the kiss, a heated curl crept up your cheeks, your shyness growing with each passing moment.

you couldn't help but feel self-conscious about your own inexperience compared to his practiced, almost ancient touch— yet, zhongli's gentle and patient approach made you feel safe and valued, as if you were the only person in the world.

— cyno

"ugh— today was exhausting," you exhale shakily, bound within exhaustion, yet your voice was barely above a whisper, not wanting to break the serene silence as you rested against cyno's shoulder.

and well, he? he simply looked at you, his eyes intense yet gentle, "indeed, it was," he agrees with a small smile playing at his lips, "but it was worth it, having you by my side Iimean."

the butterflies finish filling your stomach, and the spinning in your mind begins— fuck, you adore him so much, and the sincerity in his tone made your heart race, "i'm glad i could be with you," you replied, your smile tight to your teeth like you're holding back a grin, "thank you for taking me,"

before advancing, he takes your hand in his, his thumb gently caressing your skin, "there’s just something about you i cannot discern," he begins to ponder, his gaze never leaving yours, "that makes everything we do together feel special."

you knew what was coming— was this finally it? cyno has never kissed you before and beneath your nervousness, your breath hitched in anticipation.

his hand moved to the back of your neck, his touch firm yet controlled as he pressed you closer.

his lips met yours in a kiss that was anything but gentle— it was messy and raw, filled with a demanding passion that took your breath away— it's as if he was waiting, storing this bubbling energy and deep want inside his heart for the longest time.

it pained him, fuck, he wanted to kiss you a million times already.

cyno kissed you as if he couldn't get enough, his mouth moving against yours with an urgency that left you feeling dizzy— truly, you could feel the heat of his desire inside each kiss and lap of tongue, in the way he seemed to pour all of his stored up emotions into every movement.

you moaned softly against his lips, your hands gripping his shoulders for support as he continued his fervent assault on your plush lips.

cyno's kisses were unrestrained, a chaotic mix of tenderness and hunger that sent shivers down your spine, no, it was beyond that— well into the confines of your flesh, he took over as he nipped at your bottom lip, teasing you before deepening the kiss, his tongue exploring your mouth with a possessive fervor.

— diluc

the tavern was quiet after closing hours, even quieter after the last customer have left minutes ago as the dim lighting created a cozy, intimate atmosphere.

you actually favored this time of the night, especially when you helped your boyfriend diluc clean up the tavern, the clinking of glasses and the soft hums of the wind outside the only sounds that were almost as serene and familiar as his tender exhales.

in all honesty, he never wants you to help him, rather does he love watching you wait for him as he does all the work— yet he cannot lie, it makes his heart ten times faster when you really want to help him, just because you love him so much.

"thank you for staying to help," the master of the dawn winery says, despite a little awkward, yet his voice gentle as he wiped down the bar covered in wine, "you really didn't need to,"

"of course, diluc, no need to thank me," you reply, smiling at him. "i enjoy spending time with you, no matter what we do as long as we're together."

he glances at you in an almost shocked expression, like your little confession was struck inside his heart and carved there for eternity, a soft look in his eyes making your heart flutter, "there’s something about these quiet moments that i cherish too,"

you felt a warmth spread through you at his words, they're always so carefully selected, so passionately exuded, and you keep sneaking little glances over to him while he finishes off his task.

as you finished your own, you too noticed how diluc was watching you with a contemplative expression and before you could ask what he was thinking, he stepped closer, his presence magnetic, his smile intoxicating.

he exhaustedly huffs out before nuzzling his head in your neck while wrapping one large arm around your waist.

you giggle, welcoming him and stroking over his silken hair as his lips brushed against the sensitive skin of your neck, sending a shiver down your spine.

the touch was soft at first, almost hesitant, but as he felt you relax into him, his kisses grew more confident.

diluc’s lips moved with a slow, unhurried precision, each kiss a perfect blend of pressure and tenderness— beyond that, he seemed to know exactly where to place them, as if he had memorized every inch of your neck.

the sensation was eye crossing, a mix of warmth and electricity that left you breathless and at his total mercy.

you close your eyes, your fingers gripping his shirt as he continued— each kiss seemingly lasting an eternity when in reality, not long enough.

his mouth explores with a patience and care that enveloped you, all of his senses filled by your scent, the temperature of your body and your traces on his scalp.

the way he kissed you spoke volumes, a silent declaration of his feelings as the way you welcomed it made him feel safe.

when he reaches a particularly sensitive spot just below your ear, you couldn’t suppress a soft moan— and you're a sweating mess by now , yet diluc abruptly paused, his breath warm against your skin,

"did I hurt you?" he asks, concern lacing his voice.

"no," you whisper and tug him closer to you "it feels… incredible."

— kinich

"kinich," your breath hitches the moment you open the door to your bedroom and find yourself looking at the mysterious man you've barely known for a week, a hand over your heart signalizing your surprise.

"you scared me."

"apologies, my dear," he drawls, smirking, his voice smooth and calm, " i didn’t mean to frighten you, i would never intentionally do such."

"—although, i needed to see you,"

you smile at him, slightly awkwardly but granted, he did break into your home.

up till now, the tension eases as you placed your jacket on the drawer next to your bed, "uh, it's alright, it would be better if you could tell me next time."

kinich's gaze softens, a playful glint in his eyes, "so— you don't like when i surprise you?" he says, stepping closer, "the quiet of the night is a perfect time for surprises, no?"

you roll your eyes, feeling a warmth spread through you at his sudden nearness— he's so close, but what was he thinking? what games was he playing and were you even able to participate?

fuck, there was just something different about kinich tonight, a confidence in his demeanor that made your heart skip a beat.

and as he moved even closer, you could feel the intensity of his presence and his signature musk, his eyes immediately locking onto yours.

"you want me to show you my actual reason for coming here?" he toys with you, pinching your cheek.

shortly after, he closes the gap between you, his hand gently but firmly pressing against your lower back as with a swift, smooth motion, he guides you until you felt back against the soft mattress of your bed.

the suddenness of it took your breath away, catching you off guard and as you looked up at him, his eyes glow wide.

"I couldn't help myself, —couldn't get you out of my head," he whispers, his lips a hairbreadth away from yours, "you draw me in like no one else, you put a spell on me or something?"

without another word, he captured your lips in a kiss that was both confident and playful, a perfect blend of passion and control that marked the obvious in his personality.

his mouth moved against yours with a practiced ease, exploring and conquering with a fervor that left you wish for more, thighs clenching— not to mention the intensity of his kiss which was simply overwhelming, in fact, you found yourself surrendering to it, letting him lead you.

kinich's free hand found its way to your hip, holding you firmly against the bed as he deepened the kiss in no time.

for the first time, you could feel the strength in his grip, the possessiveness in his touch, and it made you both a little scared and excited.

beyond second thoughts, his lips were hungry, his kisses demanding and full of a restrained desire that seemed to build up with every passing second he wasn't able to see you.

you melt against him, your hands finding their way to his chest, feeling his abs tightly as his tongue lapped around your own in a masterful dance that left you yearning for more.

"you're irresistible," he admits bluntly before releasing his grip on your hips and sliding his palm lower, "—and every time i see you, i have to fight the urge to do this."

#genshin impact x reader #genshin x reader #zhongli x reader #cyno x reader #diluc x reader #kinich x reader #genshin x you #genshin impact x you #genshin fluff #genshin impact fluff #kinich x you #diluc x you #zhongli x you #cyno x you #diluc fluff #cyno fluff #genshin impact drabbles #genshin drabbles

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pucksandpower · 1 year ago

Note

can i request charles leclerc x singer!reader when reader is basically taylor swift and their relationship is like her and travis kelce 🥹🥹 also charles telling his fellow drivers but they dont believe him until THE taylor swift!reader is in the paddock kissing him

IF ITS NOT TOO MUCH HASSLE OFC

Charles Leclerc x pop star!Reader - Social Media AU

kymillman

Liked by charles_leclerc, y/nupdates, and 492,815 others

kymillman Y/N MAKES HER PADDOCK DEBUT

Miss Americana arrives at the Circuit of the Americas and receives no less fanfare than the drivers themselves. Y/N Y/L/N will be singing The Star-Spangled Banner before the race later today!

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leclercbae this was only posted two minutes ago and charles has already managed to like it? must be a new record even for him

enchantedtifosa the devil works hard but charles “y/n y/l/n’s biggest fan” leclerc works harder 🫡

leclercupdates did anyone else see the video of charles spotting y/n walking into the paddock as he was exiting the ferrari motorhome?

f1girlie he turned around to go back inside so fast that the automatic door didn’t even have time to open and he slammed his forehead into the glass 😭

scuderialeclerc charles is trying (and failing miserably) to hide that he’s fangirling harder than anyone has ever fangirled before

y/nupdates

Liked by f1wagupdates, ferrarinews, and 683,294 others

y/nupdates Y/N Y/L/N attending the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as a guest of Scuderia Ferrari today

View all 3,758 comments

lightsoutleclerc crossover of the freaking year

fearlessferrari decade

tifositwilight century

leclercmidnights millennium

f1wagupdates how crazy would it be if the rumors are true and y/n really is at the race because she’s dating charles?

mirrorballeclerc being delulu is the solulu but even my delulu has limits ��

f1wagupdates well it seems that my delulu is actually trululu

f1wagupdates

Liked by charles_leclerc, yourusername, and 1,085,793 others

f1wagupdates This week one year ago, Charles Leclerc attended The Eras Tour as a fan just like the rest of us. Today, Charles Leclerc proudly kissed Y/N Y/L/N after winning the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. King of our hearts and king of manifesting 👑

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charles_leclerc what if i told you i’m a mastermind? and now you’re mine

yourusername what if i told you none of it was accidental? and the first night that you saw me i knew i wanted your body

charles_leclerc once upon a time, the planets and the fates and all the stars aligned

yourusername you and i ended up in the same room at the same time

f1wagupdates i have managed to run this account for five years without getting jealous but this might be my breaking point

tifositears god really saw how much pain ferrari was putting charles through and decided to make his biggest dream come true as an apology

formurrari he deserved it after 2023

charles_leclerc and i would suffer through another season of driving the SF-23 and every single horrible strategy call again if it meant getting to call y/n my own

yourusername i love you 🥹

charles_leclerc i love you more ❤️

yourusername i love you most 🫶

charles_leclerc i love you mostest 😘

landonorris OKAY WE GET IT

charles_leclerc be nice to me or i’ll tell y/n to take away your tickets to her next show

landonorris … carry on

pierregasly also king of never shutting up about his girlfriend

charles_leclerc and proud of it

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nouearth · 1 month ago

Text

candy-wasted.

john krasinski x male reader.

𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘. with halloween coming to a disappointing end, what's a better way to end the holiday than to get candy-wasted on john's offer of his king-sized candy bar?

𝐒𝐌𝐔𝐓. one-shot [ 6.7k ].

𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒. male reader 〳 domestic!au 〳 halloween!au 〳 husband!john 〳 established relationship 〳 kissing 〳 sexual content: top!john, bottom!reader, anal penetration, rough!sex, no prep, breeding, spitting, blowjob (r!giving), pain kink, slapping, spanking, armpit fetish, humiliation, degradation, body worship, cock worship, over-stimulation, extremely hung!john.

“Think that might be the last of ‘em,” John said, shutting the front door and turning off the porch light. “Not a single Lydia Deetz, Ennui, Deadpool, or Wolverine costume in sight.”

It was Halloween night.

Declaring Halloween as your favorite holiday would be unjust to the true fanatics. More than anything, you loved the celebration for the atmosphere. You loved the smell of autumn coming into full bloom by virtue of artificial cinnamon and apple in soy candles rather than the fresh leaves withering outside. You loved driving by neighborhoods to see all the houses that had been decorated, fictionalizing a house-decorating competition in the process. You loved how spooky TV would get, from horror movies to reruns of old sitcom episodes that had a Halloween theme.

Most important of all, you loved taking your kids out to trick or treat with John, watching them outgrow their costumes every year and growing teary-eyed at the likelihood that they’d eventually stop having you and John come along with them in favor of their friends.

Even though you mentally prepared yourself for the moment, you weren’t expecting this year to be the time where your son and daughter would tell you that they would be sleeping over at a friend’s for the celebration. As if there was any option for you and John to protest too, it suddenly struck you how quickly they were becoming their own person, because they had already packed their bags the night before.

But also—damn you, for raising them to be so direct.

When John returned back to the couch, you glanced at the bowl.

“Do kids these days not go trick-or-treating anymore? We’re doing less refills than usual,” You took the half-empty bowl from him and rummaged through the assorted candy bars. “When I was a kid, I used to circle my neighborhood multiple times because I was determined to not end the night with a barren bucket. I also knew my parents would steal from my stash whenever I was asleep, so that was another incentive to prolong the pain in my little kid legs.”

You knew you were babbling and were beyond caring. From the smile John gave you, he seemed more entertained by the endless vault of childhood stories than the horror marathon you two had started since six o’clock in the evening.

“All those candy runs seem to be paying off considering your calves are the size of bowling balls,” John laughed, arranging your legs to lay them across his lap as you resumed lounging. To prove his point, he began unzipping your costume’s pant leg one-by-one, ventilating your ankles and calves finally free from the tight spandex.

You breathed a sigh of relief when the draft in the air chilled the sweat on your skin, then another, when John’s large hands began stroking and kneading at your legs. You probably should have guessed that John had other intentions in mind since his hands only traveled north, in which your calves were nowhere to be found.

But what would be the fun in calling out your lover’s extremely apparent advances? For a brief moment, you two sat in silence, putting the TV on mute because the marathon had run its course, but also to hear the sound of John’s hands, calloused, warm, and large over the plane of your body, exploring you and the ribbed costume like he was learning texture for the first time.

It had been quite a long time since it was this quiet in the house. You had to have accidentally said it out loud, or John’s telepathic abilities were only awakened on Halloween night, because he was looking at you like you had whet his appetite, hazel eyes cataloguing your body like it was a dirty magazine, lips bitten in secrecy.

“What’s on your mind, Captain America?” You let your legs wrap around John’s waist when he pulled you to sit on his lap, fixing his tousled hair with a smooth swoop of your hand, and affectionately squeezed his large shoulders after.

God, John filled out his costume so well. No wonder you couldn’t stop glancing at him throughout the night, the tactical suit made him look much larger and imposing—you couldn’t help but run your hands all over his body and his tight muscles beneath the fabric, the contoured lines of the costume was practically inviting you to do so.

“I’m thinking… the neighborhood is quiet. I’m thinking that the kids are preparing for bed, and that the parents are drunk off their children’s candy stash, which means you can finally take it easy for tonight, Spider-Man.” John’s smile was terribly broad. You could feel him fiddling with the pull tab on the back of your costume with one hand while the other was caressing the side of your thigh, nearing dangerously closer to your rump.

It was a cheap costume that ran for no more than forty bucks, which meant you could feel the heat radiating off of John’s palm.

“Take it easy? I’ve been taking it easy. I got my popcorn, some king-sized candy bars, a scary flick, a rather inquisitive man holding me…” You shivered when his hand paused on your right buttock and squeezed. “Nothing’s beating this right now.”

He began kissing your neck, his beard ticklish and feathery over your flesh. “Really? Nothing at all?” Both of his hands were on your rump now, massaging tenderly at the handful of thick flesh in his palms.

You must have indulged in the warmth and strength of John’s grip on you for far too long, because out of the blue, he began knocking the silence out of you with strong smacks to your ass, drawing out a collection of moans and grunts from you as he fixated on marking up your neck until your mouth was in vicinity.

When his strong palms came down onto your cheeks again, your lips parted at the right moment he would seize them, capturing your mouth for a slow, languid kiss. John’s lips tasted like a celebration. You could feel the crumbs of sugar from the fruit ropes he was eating prior roll off his lips and onto your tongue, flavoring the kiss of green apple. You moaned, gently holding at both ends of his jaw, while your hips grew conscious of how your body was reacting to John’s tongue invading your mouth, pressing your growing tent against his pelvis with slow rolls, pushing your ass out to meet his hands.

“Nothing at all, unless…” You groaned when the stinging over your covered ass was only heightened by the unrelenting grasp John had on your ample skin. If he wasn’t so busy tonguing your mouth open, you wouldn’t be surprised to find him tearing your costume into two within the next second. “You have something to bestow upon me?”

“Ever heard of a monster-sized candy bar? I got one that’s filled with vanilla cream for you, specifically curated to your taste buds. What do you think? I’ll trade ya’.” The spirit of Halloween affected him as he laughed into the kiss, the tip of his nose crinkling in effect and swiping over yours when he resumed in exploring your mouth.

“I think it sounds like a trick, you a con-man?” You lightly pushed at his chest to break from the kiss, then lingered to silently admire his well-built pecs. You weren’t sure if you were more turned on by John’s hard-work and dedication, or the fantasy of him as a superhero—saving you from your ultimate demise.

Regardless, your hips only rutted harder, swooping low to brush your erection against his, then raising them high, to grind your rump over his arousal.

“Keep moving your hips like that, and you’ll find the answer soon.”

An inquisitive hand of yours reached in between John’s thighs. It didn’t take long, hardly a millisecond, to find what you’d been searching for.

The mass in your palm was overwhelmingly large and thick. You felt your throat go dry when the weight of John’s bulge was heavy enough to unfurl itself within his suit, across his right thigh, and reach to a point of hardness where one hand of yours found it impossible to tame it alone.

You stroked the enormous print, focusing on the apparent head with your thumb, and then squeezed. Hard.

“Fuck, (M/N). Upstairs, now.”

As you sat on your knees, the scent of arousal filled your nostril. There was something enthralling about this position, being bare and naked on the carpet, while you were looking up at John’s hard cock through your lashes. He was already monstrous enough, but the angle from below provided insight just exactly how jaw-dropping his size was.

“I’m sorry I doubted you, Captain. What would you like in exchange?” Bracing your hands on his strong calves, you nuzzled the underside of his erection. You sucked in a breath at the smell of it. The heat and musk built from a long day of work, finally released out into the air, tickled your nose pleasantly and made your mouth water. “‘Three musketeers?’ ‘Butterfingers?’ ‘Hershey’s?’” You slapped his heavy cock over your lips, mouthing over the tender spots of his glans.

He had his arms behind his head, exhaling slow and steady, sporting an expression that told you he was the luckiest man alive, not that you needed that affirmation, as you held his cock tight around the base and suckled at the plump, pink tip. “How about ‘(M/N)’s Pieces?’ Yeah? Is that up for grabs?”

You could feel his hairy thighs tense up when you taunted him with the tiniest licks over his heavy, full balls. It was amusing, watching his cock jolt over your face—like they were envious of such half-hearted actions.

“You mean, the candy that would make a kind and handsome dad, such as yourself, turn into a ferocious beast of a man?” Holding John’s lustful gaze, you took a long and slow lick at the underside of his shaft, the girth of it thicker than the width of your tongue.

You felt complacent when he let out a hoarse moan upon pressing your nose deep into his cock-slit, inhaling deep. “Yeah, that one…”

You traced the prominent veins on his cock with your tongue—thick, pumping blood vessels that made him throb over your mouth with rage. “You know, you’d have to work really hard…” Between fondling and suckling his full sack into your mouth, you stroked his shaft and muttered, “To break me into pieces.”

It was difficult enough to maintain some semblance of order, but the taste of John’s sweat, blooming delicately and stimulating your appetite like an hors d’oeuvre, made you nearly submit as your knees felt inclined to spread wider, and wider, letting you enjoy your last moments before you’d yield.

You hoped you were distracting John enough, being caught in the middle of humping the air and fucking yourself back on some imaginary dick would’ve gave him the upper hand.

“I do—oh, fuck…” He choked back on a moan, the heat of your mouth as you suddenly slid his cock inside melted the composure off his face. His thick shaft strained, stretching your wet mouth uncomfortably. The chances of you taking all of John inside of your mouth was slim to none. You’d done this so many times, tried everything, from practicing with a dildo to enduring the tears welling, to get him down your throat, but your body wouldn’t give in—it simply couldn’t.

He was much too big for your own good.

John was large. Tall. Always has been, and always will be. His muscular legs were open wide, his face was slack-jawed from your tantalizing tongue, and even though you could barely fit half of his cock inside of your mouth, you were still in control.

You pulled him out with a gasp, nearly choking back on the spit pooled in the back of your mouth, and sniffled. “You do? You sure about that?” There was no doubt that the inevitable was going to happen. Gagging on John’s large cock was a given, but it was the messiness of it all, that made your cock leak. “I don’t think you can handle it.”

His cock was coated thick and heavy in a glorious sheen of spit, translucent pearls shining on the veiny skin. One hand was massaging his balls while the other was adamant in slicking him up until the weight of your own saliva was enough to weigh him down.

You temporarily freed John from your fist to slap his wet and large cock around. It was delectable, watching his giant tool swing from the impact of your smacks. Webs of thick spit occasionally flung to your face, as if his dick was fighting back against your horrendous taunts, but all you needed to do was tame it with your mouth again, and the reign on John’s body resumed.

“I am, and I can…” John grunted, his abdominal muscles flexing. You could see his toes curling into the carpet at the corner of your eye, swirling your tongue over the swollen pink head while the rest of his monster cock was being man-handled by your quick hand, tightly grasping to keep your hand from slipping.

“You absolutely sure?” Your words turned him on, his cock maddening in course as it spat out drips of pre-cum from the squeezing grip you had around his shaft.

The substance wouldn’t stance a chance against your urges, you eagerly went on to lap it up, forcing more of the viscous fluid to come out with competitive strokes to aid.

“I’m sure—baby, come on, enough—“ He struggled to contain his moans, arching his hip forward to push himself further into your mouth, but you wouldn’t have it. Instead, you reeled yourself back, slapping his cock once again as punishment, and remained at tip’s length.

You could tell he was getting frustrated, you knew of his mannerisms for years now. For God’s sake, you were his husband. His jaw tightened and his eyes leered down at you with sudden alert—like a silent warning. He exhaled sharply as if the draft in the room had infected his strong body with frostbite.

Nonetheless, you continued entertaining yourself, knowing the consequences—anticipating them, rather.

You tongued the urethra of his dick, welcoming every drop with greedy sucks, all while you hadn’t left John out of your sight for a single second. You could make John orgasm right then, you were so sure of it.

“You really, really, really sure?” Your smile was smug, feigning innocence while you mouthed on his thick piece of meat, stroking yourself to the copious amount of pre-cum leaking from his tip.

John’s gaze immediately darkened.

He loved watching you slap his dick across your face. He loved being in awe at his own size, especially when you’d shower him in praises as you compared his big cock to your forearm.

I’m going to break my ass taking you, John. Holy fuck…

He loved having his dick sucked, point blank period. How sloppy it could get, how nice his cock felt when it was being slimed up with such pent-up arousal. You were confident that you were over-delivering in that department too because the lower half of your face was dripping in your own saliva.

“What’s the matter, big man? You don’t want to fuck me anymore? Break me into pieces like you originally wanted to? Think you won’t satisfy me enough?” You pursed your lips over the plump head, provoking John by the sudden languid pace of your wrist. “Answer me,” You slapped his large cock again, your own erection throbbing from watching John grit his teeth in sudden refusal to give in.

“Are you sure or not? Huh? Answer me,” John sucked in his teeth every time you smacked his cock, and you proceeded to hound him harder, narrowing your tone. “Your cock’s useless. Can’t satisfy me. Can’t satisfy a fucking flashlight with how big it is.”

“Ghoul got your tongue, or what?” You smacked his cock hard. “Your big fucking cock—” His cock swung. “—seems to be doing—” Pulsed in a fit of pique. “the speaking for y—“

A harsh slap cut your taunts short.

You let out a gasp, your hand instantly coming up to hold your cheek and tranquilize the stinging pain. Shock crossed your face, bewildered as though you hadn’t been anticipating his catharsis the entire time.

“Enough,” He pulled you up by the jaw to meet your lips hungrily, his large hands clamped tight around your neck like you were fresh carp farmed for hatchery. “You’re really testing me today, aren’t you?”

The kiss was searing, your lips volunteering themselves to be bitten and sucked to be forgiven upon the increasing pressure around your throat. Maybe you were still coming to terms with the slap, but it swallowed you whole nonetheless, rendering you incapable of producing a single coherent thought.

You whimpered softly, his resentment was beyond recall as his hands remained solid, one thumb looming over the center of your throat, “Hit me again—“

He stabilized you with one hand around your throat, squeezing tight, and let his other hand swing across your cheek, harder than previously.

“F-fuck!” You could feel your cheek blooming with heat, stinging as if a million of rose thorns had prickled your skin to poison you with its color, and you couldn’t have asked for more.

It was too good. John’s large hand imprinted hot on your face, and it felt too fucking good. You were branded, an extension to the wedding band around your finger, a reminder of your undying love for him.

“Get on the fucking bed,” John growled, tugging on your lower lip with his teeth, slow yet imposing, before sending you away with a gentle kiss on your stricken cheek, a much-needed relief you had been silently clamoring for.

The metal clanking behind you sounded like church bells, but you resisted the temptation of looking over your shoulder, fearing that whatever John had in mind, he’d strip it away upon your lack of diligence. You crawled onto the bed on all fours and anticipated nervously

At long last, you felt your royal throne crumble into a million pieces.

You suppressed an urge to swear. The heat emanating from a strip of leather when he struck your ass was bartered directly with the devil himself. Another peep out of you, and John would’ve banished you to hell to pay your dues to the fallen angel.

“It was cute, I have to admit…” Your body jolted when John muttered near your hear. In the time his hand was soothing your whipped ass cheeks, the other had a fistful of your hair, yanking your head back for you to look at him. “Seeing you think you had control over me, even going as far as to humiliate me and my cock—did that make you happy? Huh?”

“I-I don’t know—“ You struggled to find the words, your mouth parting instead to lean in for a kiss in hopes to distract him, but John quickly caught on. He knew you, very well in fact, yanking your head back harder to coax a gasp out of you. As John had expected, he then pushed a thick wad of spit into your mouth before pulling you by the back of your neck into your original position.

You shuddered, smacking your lips at the arousing taste of John’s saliva spreading in your mouth. You savored him, wanted John to last forever on your tongue. You didn’t want to swallow. You wanted to simply let his spit pool with your own and mix into the perfect elixir that would work perfectly as a muscle relaxant, something that would greatly aid you in taking John’s cock—knowing the likelihood that he wouldn’t be easing up anytime soon.

“Answer me.” Your eyes widened in a silent plea when John taunted you with the belt in his hand. Before you could moan out so much of a beg, the leather in John’s hand came down swinging at your buttocks and seemingly cut through flesh. In turn, your four limbs gave out from the electrifying bolts of pain, making you collapse onto your stomach from the arresting strength of John’s resentment as you cried out in pleasure.

“Oh, fuck! F-fuck, fuck, fuck…!” You writhed in bittersweet glory, choking back on swears and instead, what came out were delicious straggled sounds that made John’s cock uncontrollably pulse. Your hands roamed the bedsheets, clawing at the silk material in search for a physical outlet to release the tension in your body. “I-I’m s-sorry—“

His cock was near you, lubed up in a thick, alluring sheen. Maybe John wouldn’t mind if you held him. Plead for him to stop with lazy, but abiding stroke. You bit your lips and stretched over to grab him.

He lifted your head again for you to face him. You sniffled, letting the tears roll down your flushed face before another wad of spit would accompany them in their journey. “You’re not answering my question. Were you happy?”

Upon barely brushing your fingers over the head of his cock, you reeled yourself back when the belt came striking down on your ass again, breaking skin as repercussions to your hedonistic behavior. Your legs came up to kick back at the air violently, grinding out the pain by digging your swollen cock into the bed.

You had enough.

You needed John.

Now.

“Y-yes! I was fucking happy! Watching your large cock swing like that. Degrading you to the point where you were too ashamed to answer me. Abusing your pathetic tool because it’s too immersed in its own girth to know that I actually despise your cock. Should’ve seen the look on your handsome face—god, I could’ve came right there. All because I was in control. You fucking let me, you fucking delusional self-obsessed cuck—”

At breakneck speed, John curtailed you of your vigorous speech by shoving your face into a pillow, mounting on top of you with one foot pressing hard to the back of your head, and grunted, “How do you like me now?” Pushing all of his body weight to vault you out of an escape route, you felt his cockhead suddenly breach your hole.

“Holy—shit!” You sobbed at the discomfort, kicking your legs back as John pushed more of his large cock further in, adding onto the painful stretch of your unsuspecting hole. You felt his a palm on your ass, spreading one cheek open to aid the slide. “Fucking, more—Johnny! More, more, more—“

“There we fucking go, fuck. Look at that hole. Fucking swollen around me, and I’m only halfway in,” he licked his lips, wiping the sweat off his forehead with his forearm as he loosened your raw hole with shallow thrusts, his cock pushing deeper at every rut.

Your body’s natural reaction was to propel yourself up for some air, but after the first turn, John instantly took both of your wrists and bound them behind your back, your back muscles squeezing in effect. When you pushed your ass out, his foot pressed harder like it had the power to bury you six feet under if John had no concept of restraint.

It was painful, all of this, your neck was hurting, but especially your hole, his unrelenting thrusts—but, be that as it may, you were so happy that you didn’t have to remind John to leave you unprepared. Otherwise, the pleasure of John’s large cock gutting you raw wouldn’t have overstimulated you, not to this profundity. Your wriggles only made John hold onto your wrists tighter, his heel press deep into your nape, you were sure it would be bruised by the next morning.

You felt so used, your body at his disposal. Your cock was painfully rubbing between your pelvis and the bed from the impact of his strong thrusts, but you were leaking and throbbing nonetheless, staining the sheets from the thrill of it all—of being John’s personal fuck-toy.

“Feels fucking incredible. Shit, baby—“ His cock was digging into you like an excavator, slow in its journey, but you could feel him sowing excitement deep into you, nearing the crown of your prostate with the grind of his hips. You clenched tight, gripping your aching walls around the girth to provide John an incentive to go at you harder.

Not loose enough.

He had to fuck you open.

And you were desperate.

The perks to being married was that pleasuring one another came second nature to both parties. Luckily, you led a charmed life, and John was here to bestow upon you your weekly demands.

He released his foot on you, but you groaned when he pressed his remaining weight on top of your writhing body. “If you’re good…” John panted hot on your shoulders, accompanying the abruptly slow roll of his hips with chaste kisses to the shell of your ear and the moist parts of your neck. “Maybe I’ll let you play with your cock.”

“Please…” You flexed your toes into the sheets when John nearly pulled himself out, thankfully leaving only the swollen tip in.

“No, I had a change of heart. Maybe, I’ll let you jack off until you explode all over your sweaty body,” you pushed your ass back to slide more of him in, but a hard smack to your ass nipped your oscillation in the bud. “Don’t push your luck.”

“I’ll be good—promise…” you looked over your shoulder at John with glistening eyes and a sniffle, finding yourself frowning when he pulled himself completely out, and insisted on rubbing his wet cockhead over your raw, blossomed pucker.

“See? This is how it’s supposed to be—the natural order between you and I,” he sighed, giving into your desperation, and pulled you in for a sweet, lingering kiss after releasing your hands. A sigh of relief, you braced yourself half-way up with an elbow, the other hand reaching back to rest on John’s nape, and locked his lips deeply into yours, pacified by the soft fur of his beard on your chin.

His tongue messily swiped over yours as you both had intended to explore each other’s mouths. You two met in the middle, bridging each other’s spit from one mouth to the other. When a dribble of drool dared to leak from the corner of your mouth, John had incredible foresight and was already lapping it up before it could trail to the bottom of your chin.

“Say you love my cock…” John whispered, swaddling you into his arms from behind and carefully maneuvering your body on top of him as he switched positions, reclining himself onto his back.

Interlacing his legs with yours, John then pushed them apart with the spread of his knees, twisting his ankles over your own to lock you in place. He angled his hips to slide his dick over your taint, letting you wallow in the sight of his plump tool nearly curve over your throbbing erection.

“I love your cock…” You muttered softly, nuzzling the side of his kempt beard. The smell of bourbon vanilla lingered delightfully in your nostrils as you watched him from the corner of your eye, drooling when you caught a glance of his large cock spit thick drips of pre-cum over your balls.

It was fruitless to even try to attempt to close your legs, John’s calves overpowered your own by tenfold. In spite of your wish, John compensated by reaching below, trailing his warm hand over your ribs and stomach in passing, and wrapped his hand around your cock, slowly pumping.

“Say, you’ll be a good boy for me…” Brushing your hair back, John claimed a hold over the back of your head, raising his left arm to welcome your face into his armpit.

You moaned at the warm, musky odor. The thick hairs reeked of sweat. Salty and slightly spicy in your nostrils, yet you couldn’t help but inhale for more, breathing in the natural pheromones and making your cock dribble out ample amounts of pre-cum when the aroma of John’s masculine scent fogged your passing judgement, and had you licking at his pit.

John cradled the back of your head, quickening the strokes on your cock seemingly as a token of his appreciation while you buried your face in the bush of dark hairs, nuzzling and licking long stripes over the plane. It was addicting, yet embarrassingly filthy as it registered how easily John had reign over your freewill. Your spit gathered in the center of John’s armpit, where the hairs were grown the thickest. They were beads of your devotion, and you couldn’t have felt prouder marking your territory.

Your mouth watered and tingled at the ripe taste lasting on your tongue, then, when John suddenly tipped your chin up and spat inside of your mouth—you felt like you were in heaven, like your body wanted to crumble in front of him from the intimacy of it all.

He captured your lips again, and you muttered softly, “I’ll be a good boy…” You watched him with lustful eyes, anticipating his next move. His right hand had stopped stroking your cock in favor of massaging your tight balls, making you squirm with desire. When his other hand released his hold over the back of your head to toy with your perky nipples, the simultaneous pleasure carried a hoarse tune of desperation out from your throat.

“You’ll be daddy’s good boy?” He nuzzled your ear, kissing the shell of it.

“I’ll be whatever daddy wants me to be,” you slowly rolled your hips when you could feel John line his cock over your hole, lubing your pucker with the thick fluid leaking from the crown.

“And you want daddy’s big cock?” He rested one hand on each thigh respectively, spreading your legs farther by the aid of his knees.  “I’m aching inside…” Your cock twitched upon feeling so completely vulnerable and bare for him.

“Then, let’s turn that ache into pleasure, shall we?”

That was all it took. A heartbeat, a single push of John’s hips, one strong stroke, and he claimed his territory. It was beautiful. Your silky flesh fluttered and clenched on his cock, and your eyes popped open wide when he slammed upward.

John ripped a glorious moan out of you. Your neck strained with beautiful veins as your attempts to bite them back were powerless in comparison to the spark of passion in John’s hips. You could see the very moment the fire flared in John’s eyes, his fingers gripping a mound of your thighs until they had turned white.

You were filled to the root, uncomfortably-so as John’s biceps bulged with strong veins on account of the bend of your legs. He capsized them, holding them back at the crook while he deliciously hollowed your hole deep with his monster cock, your feet dangling in the air from the pure drive.

It was a reminder. That you were his. That you were his only. Nobody could ever own you like he owned you now. John made sure those thoughts wouldn’t dissipate by making sure you felt every inch of his plump, meaty cock burrow in and out of you. John was adamant in making this more than a memory. He wanted you to wake up and sleep thinking about him. Thinking about his cock. Thinking about how brutally stretched you felt right now, and that you didn’t mind at all—because it was John, your loving husband. He would do anything for you, and right now, he was living up to his many vows of loving you fiercely, of completing you, of loving you forever and every day.

“T-too much, John—“ It wasn’t, you were lying—it was fucking perfect, but god, did you love making your husband feel powerful. You loved feeding his cock with arousal, feeling him throb harder while he pummeled himself faster into you at your spoken truth. “Cock’s too big—“

“I’ll make a cunt out of you, wear out your tight little hole until it’s leaking like one,” He growled. You cried out from unabashed lust, holding your legs back to expose yourself further, and John set the animal free at the depiction. He held your waist, dragging your unsullied hole through his hardness until only the tip was left before connecting the drop of your weight with a powerful thrust, punching into your prostrate.

“That’s what you are, right? My good little cunt? Just a good boy who can do nothing right, but take my large cock.” John gutted loud moans out of you, his gaze locked on your wrecked expression because watching you take his cock was equally as gratifying as sinking himself of you, down to the root. “Say it. Say you want daddy to make a cunt out of you.”

You were falling in love with this animalistic side of John. With the sensations he was supplying and overwhelming you with. Your cock was sure to agree, throttling as if there was a phantom hand stroking its shaft.

“I want—a fucking cunt. Want daddy to make a cunt out of my hole, please—“ You felt deviant, like those words shouldn’t have left your mouth, but it was all the worthwhile because John kissed you hard on the mouth, groaning.

Up to the hilt, John thrusted into faster—harder as you choked back on a moan and nearly gagged on his tongue. “I’m going to fill you up with so much of my cum, you’d be leaking for days.”

“Oh, God—“ You gritted your teeth, exhaling loud and hard because it was coming. Your stomach clenched and your balls tightened without the need of your hand.

“You’d be lucky to walk tomorrow, (M/N). You’d need my help walking you down the stairs. Even then, I wouldn’t be so sure if we’d make it to the floor. Knowing the prospect, I’d just take you right then and there, on the fucking stairwell, making your ass gape once again.”

“John, s-stop—I’m going to—“ Your eyes rolled back until John could only see whites. His words supplied you with the mental picture of the filthy smut coming out of his mouth. It came to you naturally—the smile on your face. You were broken in your state of reverie, dazed by the fantasy of taking John’s cock anywhere and anytime he pleased. Using you however his mind and body desired like he was now. Balls-slapping against your taint, sweat sticking your body to one another, pants and groans loud in your ear, the air thickening with the act of pure lust, pounding into you with no intention in letting you recover your breath. “S-stop, fucking coming—“

“Look at me,” John ordered you, panting.

Your eyes were heavy when you looked up, mere slits from the weight of your desires, heavily drugged by John’s poisoning rapture on your wrecked body. You pressed a smile against his mouth, making no attempt to kiss him, but to simply be in close proximity, pressing his nose against yours. He grappled at your hips, digging your insides with the weight of his large cock, piercing into prostate harder and faster as he took a bargain on your orgasm coming to a near.

You were stunned, the gutting you were enduring from John hitting you like a ton of bricks. You emptied your throat of sounds, the inner walls dry and scratched like the desert. All you managed for John was vigilant whimpers, any more forewarnings were fallen on deaf ears as you’d been knocked into a trance that melted your speech into meek garbles of incoherency.

It only took a few more seconds before your brain rewired itself and had your body floundering within John’s loving embrace, alerting you awake. With the help of John’s cock continuously assaulting deep at your prostate, you felt your body tense up, your hole clenching around pillar John’s pistoning staff to stop him, but he prevailed, breaching through the resistance, and slammed hard into your prostate once more, splitting your ass open and knocking the orgasm out of you.

John held your gaze, marveling over the ecstasy in your otherwise blown-out expression. His brows furrowed in utter fascination as your mouth parted open, only for your moans to adhere to your throat instead, blowing your load in agonizing silence. Thick ropes spurted powerfully out of your throbbing cock, splattering messily over your chest. With the buck of your hips, you graced your face with your cum-shots, additionally provoked as John used the strength of his heels to lift himself to meet you at an elevated height, fucking the cum out of you.

The sound that came out of you was guttural, transporting you into another dimension where you were caught in a whirlpool of toe-curling sensations. Rubbing a hand over your stomach, he could feel it sink in as you liberated yourself from your high, uncontrollably spilling over your pelvis in midst. Yet, despite your dazed state, your eyes never left his, provoking him to come inside of you with desperate, but gentle murmurs on his lips, as well as the addition of the ring of muscle spasming around his shaft.

“Fill my cunt up, make me fucking leak…” You showered his lips in soft whispers, finally releasing your grasp on your legs to stroke at his cheek. Squeezing, caressing, urging—for him to seal your hole.

On the drop of your legs, you squeezed them close together until your knees touched, confining his shaft between the clamp of your inner walls. You clenched hard when he was buried to the root, foiling the pace of his hips, and let your swollen insides bring him closer.

“Oh… shit…” John’s eyes rolled back, and finally spilled with a shudder.

His large cock jerked deep inside of you, and soon, you felt his warm seed fill you to the brim. You felt your bond with John transcend, higher, beyond space and time, with every pulse of his thick veins pumping cum deep into you.

Upon capturing John’s lips for a kiss, he circled his hips, making you moan languidly into his mouth. You swallowed every breath of his, swirling your hips against his own cautious thrusts in retaliation, gratified by the warm, thick coating of cum your insides were receiving, soothing your spellbound hole and stirring his connection to you.

“Didn’t hurt you too bad? Think I slapped you too hard.” John asked softly, gently rubbing a palm over your stricken cheek. You could see guilt in his expression as he brought you closer to claim your lips The moment was soft, the complete opposite of previous events, silent apologies to your mouth as John’s mouth was lingering, yet electrifying all at the same time as he sucked on your lower lip.

“You. Were. Perfect.” You warded off the guilt with a smooch after word, rubbing his chest. “I asked for it, you know that. It was fun, wasn’t it? Something different to spice up the bedroom.”

“Hm…” He laughed at your sudden eagerness, as if you hadn’t been debilitated from his cock moments prior. Tucking one arm behind his head, his other hand idly began petting at your head. He retired for the night with the shut of his eyes, contemplating on their newfound kink. “Let’s see how I feel when you’re the one slapping me next time. Then we can judge it accordingly.”

“Holy shit…”

“Mhm.” “I’m pulling out the dumbbells. Too late to go back on your word now, John.”

“Wait, now that you—“

“Not a single word, or I’m making you call me ‘Doctor’ as an early punishment.”

“We both know how this will turn out. I just need to pull my dick out, and you’ll be back onto your knees, no matter how much you try to resist.”

“I… plead the fifth?”

nouearth. please do not repost, plagiarize, or translate my works. if you like this story, please reblog and leave a like!

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