#it’s not even just the boys in my circle either…it is a pattern i see all the time sometimes you just can’t win!

[steelycunt]

living with boys when you are a girl is just like. everything is fine and fun but do not ever voice discomfort or ask someone to do something they should be doing anyway or remind someone of something that needs to be done because then you are a boring bossy nag and also irrational and unreasonable and hysterical and also kind of a bitch because it was never that deep in the first place and you need to relax and get off their backs and why are you so angry oh my god.

[ddejavvu]

would you be up to do bff remus with no boundaries?? i think that would be an interesting dynamic

maybe like after a full moon and she just like fully gives him a shower, or something where he’s just completely naked and the boys are so confused at what’s happening

"Arm up, Rem," You hum, but your fingers pry at his pale, scarred skin before he can even begin moving a muscle.

You lift his bicep away from his side, bringing the lathered loofa in your hand to swipe through the curve of his armpit. Suds slide down his sides and you hear him hiss as they mingle with his still-healing cuts and scrapes, but there's nothing to be done except cleaning them before they can be dressed.

"Easy, easy," You rub a hand over his back in a soothing circle that carefully avoids his injuries, "Just gotta get 'em clean, then we can dress them. You can sleep on your stomach, that'll help the ones on your back. How'd you even get scratches on your back?"

"It's all the ladies I occupy my time with," Remus drawls, but his pain is evident in the weakness of his voice, "Women love werewolves."

When you don't answer, leaving an purposefully awkward silence behind that swirls with the steam from the shower, Remus sighs, "Got all scratched up from the tree branches out there."

You drag the loofa from his side to his back, carefully ghosting over the caked dirt around his wounds. His knuckles turn white as he clenches his fists, but when he tries drawing one into his mouth to bite at it you take it in your own free hand.

"No biting. That's reserved for your better half."

"Are you talking about Sirius, or the wolf? Sirius bites me," Remus grumbles, and- speak of the devil, there's feet pounding obnoxiously up the stairs and towards the dorms.

"Moony, we've got all the chocolate we could carry," Sirius informs him, and there's the sound of wrapped goods being piled on Remus's comforter before James and Sirius step into the doorway of the bathroom.

James lets out an 'ooh' and turns away with a grimace when he sees you kneeled beside Remus's naked form beneath the spray of water, but Sirius stands stock-still, frozen by some mix of intrigue and horror.

"Uh, are we interrupting something?"

"Just a bath," You smile kindly at them, scrubbing gently at Remus's neck, "He has trouble getting his back sometimes."

"Sometimes- have you two done this before?"

"After every moon." You nod helpfully when Remus merely ducks his head to rest between his knees, "You two are usually either asleep or trying to get grass out of your pelts."

There's something green in Sirius's hair that proves the two were unsuccessful this time around.

"Oh. I'm sorry, Moony, I didn't know you had a caregiver," Sirius snickers, "Does she help you put your panties on too?"

"Don't let him get to you, dove," Remus murmurs, his eyes slipping shut as the warm water seeps into his skin and heals an ancient ache in his bones, "He's just mad he'll never get to take yours off. They're a real pretty pattern, y'know," Remus glances up at Sirius with the ghost of a smirk on his face, muffled by pain but persistent all the same, "Shame she's not interested in showing 'em to you."

"You've seen her panties, mate?" James cuts in, peering over Sirius's shoulder, "What are you two?"

"Friends," You shrug, "But it's stuffy in here at night, and my sleeping pants get too warm."

"You're telling me all the times you two have slept over in here all snuggled up in his bed, that you've not had any pants on?"

"Well I don't make it a habit to strip in his bed," You scoff, scrubbing at a particularly stubborn grass stain on the pale plane of his hip, "But I can promise you that my pants are never gonna be on your floor, either one of you."

"Oh please, we wouldn't dream of stealing Moony's girl," Sirius claps James on the shoulder, "But whaddya think about that, mate? Strippin' down to cuddle in bed together? They seem to think it's a friendly endeavor."

"I typically only ditch my pants for Lily, Padfoot," James informs Sirius with a sympathetic smile, "But I'll ask her if I can bring my dog to her dorm tomorrow night. You can sleep at our feet."

Sirius begins valiantly arguing for a spot higher up on the bed, every dog's hardest battle to fight, but you're no longer interested in their antics or the noise they're producing. You reach out your foot to kick at the door, and it swings shut with a satisfying click.

"Thanks, love." Remus groans, his face squished between his knees, "They were givin' me a headache."

"They always give you a headache," You dig your thumbs into a tense spot on his back and he twitches beneath you with a hum of appreciation, "We should get a flat together without them. They can be the feral deer and dog that live outside our cottage."

"We'll have to call animal control" Remus grins wryly against the rounded bend of his knee as you lean forwards to wash beneath his thighs, "How strong are their strongest tranquilizer darts?"

[peachdues]

COMPASS

bad boy!Sanemi • gang AU • NSFW

A/N: Peach?? Not having any self control when it comes to writing a fic?? It’s more likely than you think.

This was supposed to be a bad boy!Sanemi takes your virginity drabble that spiraled into a meta-analysis of Sanemi’s self hatred that then blew up into a fic with plot. All of those elements are still present but surprise!! Enjoy 24k words of my brain rot.

Inspired by @homo-homini-lupus-est-1701 ‘s wonderful meta analysis of Sanemi’s self hatred and his scars.

CW: 24k • explicit sexual content • MDNI • gang-related violence • mentions of blood and broken bones • mentions of murder/death • loss of virginity • creampie • vaginal fingering • some angst

I have plenty more of this AU written, so if y’all want more, just let me know ���

MASTERLIST HERE

There are three rules to surviving life in the Corps.

The first is simple: once you’re in, you’re in.

Never outwardly confirm or deny rumors; let others talk, but don’t even think about opening your fucking mouth about the things you see or the whispers you hear.

And don’t be stupid enough to think you can cling onto any vestiges of your old life. There’s no splicing your life within the Corps with the one you’d had before. No separation. You’ve whored yourself to their cause, and for better or worse, you’re there until either someone important says otherwise or you end up in a morgue.

This is especially true for someone like Sanemi, so hopelessly entrenched within the organization that he’d allowed himself to be branded at the age of seventeen upon his ascension from rank-and-file street member to full-blown Hashira — the elite of the Corps, just short of the higher-ups who ran it.

The hot sear of iron between his shoulder blades had hurt like hell, but it was a welcome pain. A reminder that he’d not only outlived his father, but had actually made an impact, enough to be noticed and entrusted with more strenuous duties.

Each Hashira is assigned to a particular field. Uzui, silver haired, boisterous and extravagant, deals in bodies — mostly women, but men too, and he runs all of the strip clubs and escort services west of center city. Kocho, a child prodigy in chemistry, leads an intricate narcotics network.

And then there’s Sanemi: the debt collector.

Largely monetary debts — collecting on behalf of loan sharks, gambling debts, or that which is owed to his fellow Hashira, when their customers forget that there are no friends in business.

But the brand seared into his flesh has nothing to do with money — it is a reminder that above all, he is to ensure debts of another kind are paid.

Life debts.

In the three years since his initiation, Sanemi has only had to carry out this oath twice. Both had been scum, responsible for the deaths of innocents.

Their executions had been quick and without fuss — or much mess. A quick trip to an overpass abridging the Wisteria River. A march to the barrier in the dead of night, when no other cars were out and about to see or hear pleading sobs and bargains for their pathetic lives. A bullet to the head would quiet them, and Sanemi would let the rapids below take care of the clean up for him. Job done.

But even though the spray of their brains hadn’t touched him, their blood still stains Sanemi’s hands.

He will never be able to wash them clean.

But this is the life he chose, so Sanemi will endure the consequences — for the sake of his brother, the only living person on earth he gives a damn about. For whom he’ll do anything — be anyone — if it means Genya does not have to pick up a gun and sell himself to the very gang that owns his elder brother.

The second rule is simpler: no patterns. Patterns signal comfort and comfort may as well be a target on your back, begging for someone to come and take their shot (or several).

And finally, the third and arguably the most important rule, is don’t get attached. Keep your circle small so there’s less collateral to be used against you — against the organization that owns you.

This rule applies to both Corps members and civilians alike.

For the longest time, Sanemi Shinazugawa found Rule Three to be the easiest one to follow. He has his brother and no one else. His parents are dead; he has no friends beyond those in the Corps with him, and he knows better than to get overly invested in any of them. His inner circle is as tight as it can get.

But then he’d chosen your bookstore to hide in and that’s when everything falls apart.

“Fuckin’ Christ,” Sanemi mutters, anxious eyes tracking the large hand on his watch as it ticks the seconds by.

They were late.

The job was simple, and well within Sanemi’s capabilities. Maeda, a local dealer in stolen goods, had run up a sizeable bill at one of Uzui’s joints that he’d yet to pay. And while the slippery lech was quick to come sniffing whenever news spread that Iguro, a fellow Hashira, had managed to hijack a semi-truck full of luxury items, he was surprisingly difficult to connect with when it came time for him to pay for company he couldn’t get elsewhere.

He glanced down at his bruised, swollen knuckles and smirked. Sanemi couldn’t say he loved that his worth was measured in the number of bones he could break, or the amount of teeth he could punch out, but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t relish the chance to smash the pervert’s face in whenever the opportunity arose. Nor could he deny the rush of satisfaction he’d felt when he’d thrown open the steel door of the Maeda’s small office, crowbar in hand, and watched the snot-nosed pervert piss himself, stumbling over his words as he’d begged for mercy Sanemi hadn’t been hired to give.

The stupid, greasy fuck.

By the time he’d finished, Maeda had been little more than a quivering, helpless lump curled in on himself on the sticky, slate floor. His office had been left in shambles, drawers yanked out and emptied, only to be thrown aside (or cracked over the vermin’s back as he sobbed). But he’d had found the money, right down to the last dollar, just as he knew he would.

And that’s how Sanemi finds himself standing in the alley tucked behind Maeda’s small warehouse, Uzui’s payment split into two rolls that he’d shoved down into boots. All that was left was for the two junior Corps members he’d brought along for watch to bring the car around, and then they’d return to the abandoned factory that served as their headquarters.

Normally, this would have been a solo job, and Sanemi would already be on his bike, speeding off to safety. But he’d received an order to take along two, new Hinoe so they could get experience with higher level jobs.

Conveniently, his instructions had omitted the part the fact that the two lugs were utterly useless, bumbling idiots, contrary to what their recent promotions otherwise suggested.

Because neither of the two juniors are anywhere to be found. Nor is there any sound signaling that his getaway ride is approaching.

Sharp, lavender eyes scan the alley before him, but to his dismay, it remains empty — disquietingly so.

Leave it to a couple of rookies to set his teeth on edge.

Sanemi’s eyes drop down to follow the large hand of his watch as yet another minute ticks by. It’s been six minutes and their window had only allowed for four.

He knows how to be patient when the circumstances call for it, but now is not one of those times.

One minute, he decides, shifting his weight between his feet. They get one more fucking minute and then he splits —

A sudden screech of tires at the opposite end of the alley makes his stomach flip. Sanemi looks up just in time to see his escape car grind to a sharp halt, its rear jolting up as the driver slams on the brakes.

The passenger door flings open, and one of the Hinoe stumbles out, his feet barely connecting with the pavement before the car guns away, the side door flapping open.

The familiar howl of police sirens accompanied by distant shouts is enough for Sanemi to know this simple little debt collection has now gone tits-up.

“Pigs!” The Hinoe who stumbled out of the getaway car calls to him. “Pigs!”

“Shit,” Sanemi growls. No doubt Maeda’s bruised ego sold them out. He should’ve taken the time to smash the asshole’s phone.

He’ll be dealt with later — and with relish. But right now, Sanemi needs to get the fuck away.

Part of following Rule Three means not worrying about your fellow comrades when the cops come. None of them are stupid enough to actually risk talking to law enforcement about the Corps’ operations, but the fewer of them who get caught, the better.

So Sanemi takes off, adrenaline pumping fast and jot in his veins as he hears the swine behind him split off. He can’t be sure, but he can make out two, maybe three pairs of footsteps trailing behind him.

He scowls; shaking one cop is a breeze; having to shake off three is a bitch.

He hurtles over a pile of wooden crates and shoves a stack of delivery pallets over behind him as he runs, darting down random alleys and side streets that he knows will eventually lead him to a safe house.

The backstreet he shoots down is a fork, but only the path straight through will lead him to a rust yard of abandoned warehouses and shipping containers that Sanemi knows like the back of his hand. He could lose them there, could vanish between freights and wait the bastards out, and once clear, he could slip back into the district marking the outer territory of the Silo and get back home.

Iron pumps hotly in his veins. Almost there, almost there —

A car skids to a stop at the end of the middle ting of the alley, police lights flashing and alarms blaring.

No good.

“Fuck.” It isn’t the end of the world, but the blocking of the alley meant he had to reevaluate his escape. While he’s familiar with the path now obstructed by the police cruiser ahead, he hadn’t the chance to fully scope out his only other two options — the side streets to the left and right.

Without much thought, Sanemi darts sharply left and prays to whatever deity is listening that he hasn’t fully fucked himself.

Only one shop remains open; a tiny hole in the wall, tucked in between two old apartment buildings at the end of the street — one that borders the city’s western wing.

It’ll have to do, he decides, especially as the police sirens grow louder with each passing second.

He explodes through the front door, wide eyed and panting. Vaguely, it registers to him that this is a bookshop — a thankfully empty, cluttered bookshop.

But his abrupt arrival does reveal that the shop is not totally empty. There is one other — the store’s lone employee, who startles out of her seat behind the clerk’s counter, nearly knocking over a small cup of coffee.

He regards her for a moment, and she him, with matching expressions of wariness and shock at the presence of the other.

Behind him, the police sirens grow louder; more urgent.

It’s now or never. And, because he’s desperate enough to try, he risks a move he knows better than to take.

“You got someplace I can hide?”

——-

You blink, stunned as you stare at the frantic, pleading man anxiously looking between you and the door behind him.

His name registers dimly in the back of your mind. Here. In your store. And, evidently, on the run, if the distant echoes of police sirens growing steadily closer to your store is any indication.

Sanemi Shinazugawa.

You know him; you’d known him most of your life, even if you’d never spoken to him. You’d gone to the same school in your youth — all thirteen years of it, in fact. He’d been an abrasive loudmouth in the hallways, but a quiet, even polite boy in the classroom.

You know he’s from the Silo — a worn down, derelict part of the City that housed only the poorest residents. A cruel nickname meant to mock the poverty of its population.

But the Silo was also well known for being the epicenter of operations for the notorious group known only as the Corps.

It was the Corps who owned a majority of the City, its reach extending from the Silo, through the West and East wings, and all the way into Midtown. And, as was the case with most leeches, the Corps relied on the most desperate and hungry to carry out its biddings, offering some level of protection and security for the poor souls who needed it most.

Hence, its presence in the Silo.

So you hadn’t been surprised when you’d heard Sanemi had joined the Corps. Most kids from the Silo did; what had surprised you were the rumors that he became a high-rank member by the ripe age of seventeen, before he’d even graduated high school.

You shudder to think what he had to have done — what he’d become — in order to achieve such status and notoriety.

If he’d been anyone else, you wouldn’t have helped; you would’ve screamed, alerted the police to his presence, maybe even outed him as a suspected Hashira.

But you owed him.

Years ago, before either you or your siblings could drive, you all relied on the city bus to get to and from school.

But one afternoon, when you’d had to stay late for a club meeting, your little sister accidentally got on the wrong bus. Rather than being dropped safe and sound a block away from home, she’d ended up in a bad part of town that just so happened to have been the stomping grounds of the scowling delinquent now shoved under your cabinet, contorted between boxes of blank receipt rolls and stacks of returns.

Had anyone else found your sister, there would be no telling what would have happened to her. The Silo was not a place known to be kind to lost little girls.

But it was Sanemi who discovered her, sniffling and red-faced at the dilapidated bus stop. And though he’d been nothing more than a scrawny ten year old, he’d put your sister on his back and carried her not just the six miles back to safe part of town, but the additional two that led right to the front doorstep of your parents’ home.

You’d watched him curiously from the stairs as your parents profusely thanked your sister’s white-haired savior. They’d offered Sanemi dinner, or at least some sort of reward for his efforts, but he’d only waved them off, briskly telling them it was “no big deal.” As though carrying a six-year-old nearly eight miles was par for the course, as far as he was concerned.

His eyes had flitted over to you once during the exchange, briefly lingering before he turned and left, a single hand held up in casual farewell.

You’d been ten at the time. And now, here you are, twenty years old, running a shabby bookstore, and the opportunity to pay him back has finally arrived. The chance to show your gratitude for sparing your sister of a fate he himself, had not been able to escape.

Quickly, you motion him to you and without explanation, you cram him under the clerk’s counter, holding the cabinet door shut with your knee just as the police burst through the store entrance.

There are three of them, and they do not bother announcing themselves to you. Instead, they begin to prowl through your aisles, flashlights out and guns drawn while they comb the quiet corners of the store, searching for signs of anything that did not belong; anything misplaced.

A bead of sweat slides down the back of your neck, but you keep your face and your stance casual. Below the counter you cross your fingers, hoping and praying that the criminal stuffed inside your cabinet isn’t stupid enough to try and shift.

One officer rounds back into the main part of the store and locks in on you, stiff and anxious behind the counter.“You haven’t seen anything suspicious?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what you mean.”

The cop grimaces. “You haven’t seen anyone who looks out of place? Maybe seems like they’re running?”

You feign an easy, sweet smile, even as the leg holding the cabinet door shut begins to tremble. “I’m afraid you’re my first customer of the day, sir.”

The officer grumbles under his breath something along the lines of not your customer, but he questions you no further. He only waves to his comrades and the three of them shuffle out through the door, one muttering into the walkie strapped to his shoulder.

Several moments pass, tense and thick. The silence is broken only by the sound of your heart hammering against your sternum. You remain still, fingers curled tight against the counter’s edge listening for any sound signaling the cops have returned, that their stiff departure had been a ruse to lull you into a false sense of security, as they waited for you to reveal your deception.

But all remains quiet. And you cannot stomach the silence any longer.

“They’re gone,” you mutter, finally moving aside to let the cabinet door below you swing open.

There’s a faint thumping and a few, muffled curses as the scar-speckled fugitive unfolds himself and spills free from the under-cabinet.

In a way, Sanemi still resembles the boy of your memories. His eyes and hair have always been distinctive: a shocking contrast of violet framed by thick, dark lashes that do not match the mop of silvery-white atop his head. But it’s the faint scowl he wears as he stands, the tinge of annoyance that tugs at the corners of his mouth, that scrunches his pale eyebrows, that feels familiar.

That expression, a portrait of vague irritation with the world around him, was one you came to know well — at least, at a distance. One that remained constant even as you grew; his default.

However, it is still not nearly as memorable as the shy embarrassment that had turned his cheeks slightly pink, had made him cast his eyes down as your parents showered him with gratitude.

But that earnest bashfulness is nowhere to be found now.

He wears a patterned, short-sleeved button down. Though rumpled and a tad dirty, you suspect the top three buttons were left open intentionally, rather than being the product of whatever scuffle he’d found himself in before he decided to make it your problem.

You try not to linger on the very obvious hint of the well-defined muscles revealed by his open collar. Nor do you let yourself consider the bulging mass of his biceps as he runs a hand through his cornsilk hair.

He has scars he’d not had in your youth — jagged, silvery lines that cut halfway across his cheek and forehead. Yet their presence does not dull his good looks.

A scrawny ten year old no longer; Sanemi Shinazugawa is now tall and roguishly handsome. But his infuriating good looks aside, your debt to him has been repaid; now, he needs to get the fuck away.

“Can’t thank ya enough,” he shoots you a devilish smile as he straightens his shirt. “You really saved my ass —“

“Get out of my store.” You order, your voice hard. “Take your trouble somewhere else and leave me out of it.”

Sanemi’s eyes narrow at your use of the word trouble, but he says nothing. Instead, he only rounds the counter with a loping, infuriating swagger, his hands shoved in his pockets.

“As you wish, Princess,” and you bristle at the sarcasm dropping from the word. He pauses to scan the shelf marked New Releases. “Just need somethin’ for the road.”

He snags a small novel — a fantasy story, judging by the cover - and he tucks it under his arm.

“Later,” he calls, waving a lazy hand over his shoulder.

You stare after him, slack-jawed and incensed. “You have to pay for —“

But the door bangs shut behind him, and Sanemi Shinazugawa disappears into the night.

—-

By the time Sanemi returns to his shabby apartment, it is well after midnight. He’d met up with Uzui and forked over Maeda’s payment. Though, the Corp’s head pimp hadn’t been particularly pleased that his money rolls had been shoved deep down in his boots, his nose wrinkling as Sanemi dropped the crumpled, slightly damp wads of cash into his waiting, magenta-nailed hands.

As it turned out, Maeda hadn’t sold them out. Rather, one of the Hinoe had stupidly gotten into a scuffle with some brash, young teenager and in his anger, pulled his gun on the kid.

Right in front of two, marked cop cars.

One of the idiots had been caught and cuffed, and was now spending his evening locked in the damp, cold jailhouse pending bond. The other — the driver — had managed to escape, though he’d been carted off to Iguro for punishment.

There’s a reason he prefers working alone, he thinks bitterly as he kicks his boots off. He fucking loathes incompetence.

He pulls his gun free from its place in his waistband and sets it gently atop his ratty kitchen table. Sanemi then trudges over to his futon, collapsing heavily on it with a groan. A shit day, he decides, pulling the stack of cash he’d received as his cut for the job free from his pocket, thumbing through it. A shit day with shit juniors.

He shifts against a lump that sits under his ass. Frowning, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls out the book he’d swiped from your store and turns it over in his hands. Surprisingly, it has managed to remain in pristine condition despite its rather unceremonious storage in his pocket.

Your face flashes in his mind, but before he can fully appreciate it, your words echo in his ears.

Take your trouble somewhere else.

Sanemi scowls, tossing the book onto his coffee table, annoyed. The implication underlying your use of trouble and the venom with which you’d spoken it is a thorn in his side he cannot ignore.

You know what — who — he is. In Sanemi’s world, that’s a liability.

Though, in fairness, he can’t really be surprised that you do. Gossip is a free commodity in this town, and it’s a coveted one. It wouldn’t be a stretch to conclude that you’d overheard one of the rumors about him and his ties to the Corps.

What concerns him is he doesn’t know what your connection is, if any, to his world. Maybe you’re really just a girl in a bookshop who paid back a decade-old favor.

Or maybe you’ve got an in with them.

The Corps isn’t the only gang operating within the city; there is another, crueler and far more violent that had arisen west of the Silo.

The Kizuki.

In the last six months, the Kizuki have managed to overtake the Western Wing, nearly expanding their reach into center city.

Their takeover had been swift; practically achieved overnight, following the systematic execution of every known Corps members in the area. And their violence hadn’t been limited to active members; the Kizuki had brutally maimed and murdered anyone tangentially connected to those Corps members.

Neither women nor their children were spared. And now, it seemed the Kizuki had set their sights on the Silo.

There are whispers that they’ve expanded into their operations into the neighborhood adjacent to the one in which the bookstore sits. That alone is enough to make Sanemi suspicious — perhaps you’re in league with them, and you’ll hand him over the moment it’s most convenient for you to do so.

Admittedly, that theory seems doubtful. You’re a bookseller. Not the kind of girl he knows is prone to becoming involved with the seedy underground world of organized crime. And your apparent disdain for him and his trouble only supports that theory.

But that’s an assumption, and in his line of work, assumptions are precarious; risky. Too much so for comfort.

Either way, he doesn’t know, and that uncertainty is a breeding ground for the parasite that is doubt. Toxic enough that were it to take root in his brain, his judgment could be compromised, leading him to mistakes he can’t afford to make.

Sanemi doesn’t tolerate blind spots. He will keep you on his radar until he determines the threat you pose and once he knows its severity, he’ll decide how to proceed.

He eyes the book he’d swiped from your store. He likes reading, though he hasn’t had much time for it lately (or, ever). But, if he’s going to hang around you while trying to identify the threat you pose, he might as well have a strategy for getting you to talk.

Sighing, he grabs the novel from his table and thumbs to the first page as he pads into his kitchen, in search of something to quell the grumble in his stomach.

—

His inquiries into you and your life reveal shockingly little.

You work at a bookstore. Your parents sold off your childhood home and retired to some beach down south. Your siblings are spread out across other cities and don’t visit home often, if ever.

Only you remain, abandoned by your family to fend for yourself in a crumbling city with only a shabby bookshop that sits on the furthest end of an otherwise safe street to keep you busy.

Truthfully, the bookstore probably is more interesting than you, at least on paper. But it’s that dirge of information that piques his interest; makes him look at you more as a mystery worth unraveling.

Besides, the smart thing for him would be to keep a tab on you until he can confirm you are in fact, as boring as you appear.

Or so he tells himself.

The image of a ten-year-old you peering at him from your parents’ stairwell flashes through his mind once more.

He’d felt your gaze burning a hole into his head, and shyly, he’d looked back at you, only to find himself unable to look away. Only your mother’s prodding about him joining your family for dinner had broken your temporary enchantment over him.

The memory of how you’d looked at him — a mixture of curiosity and awe highlighted by a faint blush in your cheeks when he’d met your stare head on — remained fixed in his brain for years after.

And though the two of you never spoke, you always smiled at him whenever you locked eyes in the school hallway or cafeteria. A real, genuine smile.

He wonders if he ever smiled back and finds himself irritated that he can’t remember if he had. He should’ve; especially now when it seems as though he’s unlikely to ever see that gentle, radiant smile again.

Sanemi’s phone pings and all thoughts of you come to a screeching halt. The message that flashes on his screen — instructions, only by way of an address and an amount — chase away the images of you and your sweet smile, like a hand scattering smoke.

With a sigh, Sanemi dials the number for two, lower-ranked Corps members to serve as scouts. With watch secured, he shoves his phone into his pocket and runs a tired hand over his face.

He wonders what will kill him first — whether it will be a bullet or whether it will be because there’s nothing left of him to whore out on the Corp’s behalf.

Ultimately, he knows it doesn’t really matter. He won’t die as himself; as Sanemi, the boy from the Silo who wants a life that’s anything but this. He’ll die only as Shinazugawa the Hashira. He’ll die under the mask he’s forced to wear so often, he wonders if it hasn’t yet bonded with his skin.

But as long as he remains in one piece, he must continue on as a puppet in this this tedious show. So, Sanemi grabs his gun from where he’d placed it on atop the cheap plastic of his kitchen table and he tucks it into his waistband.

And by the time his apartment door slams shut behind him, Sanemi has slipped the mask down over his face, and he is Shinazugawa once more.

—

Two weeks pass before he ends up back in front of your bookstore.

Sanemi doesn’t really remember how he got here. He awoke well before sunrise to his phone chiming with orders that he go collect on a sizeable gambling debt owed by one of Iguro’s regulars, an owner of some pawn shop.

The sun was already high overhead when he finally left the pawn shop, knuckles bruised and arm aching. He’d kicked his bike into gear in a familiar daze, one that always slipped over him after he completed a job. A kind of numb quiet that settled into his bones, a dull static in his brain that did not fade until the tremor in his hands subsided.

That paralysis needs to be broken. Contrary to popular belief, desensitization was not an ideal state of being for someone like him. It made him apathetic and careless to the world around him, and that was little better than painting a giant target on his back, begging his enemies to come and do their worst.

So, when the numbness still lingered by the time his bike roars past a rusted water tower that marks the outer limit of the Silo, Sanemi knows of only one cure. His go-to.

His bike is still hot by the time he lifts his phone to his ear, just outside his shithole of an apartment.

He doesn’t know her by name — only by description, as told by the series of emojis that accompany her number on his phone. But it’s surprisingly easy to charm her, though perhaps that’s because she’s looking for an escape just as much as he is.

Less than ten minutes later, the girl pulls up beside him in the parking lot.

Her hands are already roaming down his chest and playing with the buckle on his belt as Sanemi unlocks his door and pushes her inside.

At some point between the front door and his bedroom, the girl has stripped herself of her outer clothing, leaving her only in her undergarments as she tugs Sanemi down by his neck and into her kiss. She’s licking and nipping at his lips in a way he’s not sure he likes, but he allows it because his cock is painfully hard and throbbing where it strains against his pants.

And, after all, he’s the one desperate for relief.

“I’ve only got ten minutes,” she warns, kicking off her underwear as she falls back onto his bed. Sanemi only smirks as he slides his hand down the length of her leg, gripping her by the ankle and flipping her to her stomach.

He shifts away long enough to quickly wiggle free of his pants. He grabs a condom from his nightstand and rips the foil with his teeth. Fingers toying with the girl’s clit as she moans into his mattress, Sanemi rolls the latex down his cock. Protection secured, he reaches for her again, yanking her by her hips until her backside is flush against him. One hand pushes down between her shoulder blades while the other snakes up her neck, and Sanemi nudges the tip of his cock up against her entrance.

“Don’t worry, darlin’,” he winds the long tresses of her hair around his fist and gives her a sharp tug. “We’ll be done in five.”

—-

Even an hour after he tossed the girl her clothing and not so casually suggested she leave his apartment, Sanemi still feels restless.

He cannot shake the images of the afternoon from his mind, and so, Sanemi resorts to walking.

He does so without thought as to destination or the rapidly setting sun. Sanemi only focuses on the activity itself. One foot in front of the other; pace even and quick, each step accompanied by a flash of that day’s sins.

The crash of a garage door as it slammed back against the wall. Wide eyes that quickly filled with panic at the sight of him and the flash of metal tucked against his hip.

Step.

A plea; a desperate promise to pay, one that he’d heard a thousand times from a thousand different mouths. None of them ever seemed to understand their word wasn’t worth shit when they’d already defaulted on their obligations. Yet still, they begged.

Step.

The breaking of teeth beneath his fists.

Step.

The crush of bone under the iron pipe he’d found discarded on the garage floor. The agonized futility of trying to scoot back and away from him, despite a shattered leg.

Green; the color of the money he’d found stashed in a duffel, the debtor’s desperate attempt to hoard the wealth owed to the Corps.

Step. Step. Step. All the way down the street leading until he finds himself on a distantly familiar stretch of pavement that ends at the bookstore’s front steps.

For a moment, he lingers outside the shop, hesitant. He should turn around; there is no reason for him to be here. His investigation into you is not a priority by any means, especially where whatever poking he has done has revealed so little.

The book he lifted from the New Releases shelf is tucked carefully in his jacket pocket. He doesn’t know why he’s carried it around with him, all this time. Sanemi finished the novel the very night you’d helped hide him from the cops.

He should leave; but then his feet carry him up the walk leading to the store, and he’s pushing the door open.

His arrival is punctuated by a cheerful ring of the old bell nailed above the door. At first, the store appears deserted; but then you pop up from under the counter, surprise coloring your features.

That surprise melts quickly into cold disdain that makes something in his chest flutter as he strolls toward you. With every step, that numb haze of his disperses and instead, Sanemi feels himself returning to normal the closer he brings himself to you.

“This isn’t a library,” you chide when he plops his borrowed novel back down on your counter. “You have to pay for the books here.”

It’s incredible how easily he is able to slip back into the skin of the suave, smug playboy, and your adorable glare only makes him smirk. “I brought it back, didn’t I? Look — didn’t even crack the spine.”

“It doesn’t matter,” you reply coolly, snatching the book up and tossing it on a small cart marked Restock. “That loss came out of my paycheck — which is scant enough.”

That piques his attention. “Didn’t you say this was your store?”

His question makes you turn pink, and you’re quick to put your back to him, pretending to shuffle through new releases waiting to be shelved. “I work here,” you mutter quietly, but when you turn back around, you stick your chin out, defiant. “But I am the only employee, so it is my store, in a sense. The owner doesn’t ever come by.”

You wrinkle your nose. “So yes, lost profits affect me, and me alone, you thief.”

Sanemi cocks his head, his eyes running over you in consideration.

You’re beautiful; he’s always found you cute, even as a kid, but the transition between your teen years and adulthood have been kind. Even if you’re glaring at him like you would a crushed bug stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

But your words strike a chord in him. His job is to collect money from those greedy lowlifes who waste it; who use money to carry out their bad deeds, who use it to fuck over others.

He doesn’t take it from those who need it; from those who are barely scraping. by. Sanemi knows the agony of having to choose between keeping the lights on or feeding a hungry stomach far, far too well.

“Fine, here,” he tosses a random novel on your counter and a crumpled twenty dollar note. You ring him up, eyes flicking up to glare at him every so often as you count out his change.

He only continues to watch you, the heat of his stare ignites an itch under your skin that makes you squirm.

Your restlessness boils over. “What?”

“Nothin,” he shrugs. “Just think it’s interesting that you of all people are still lingering in this shit hole.”

Your head snaps up, your task of totaling out his change forgotten. “I live here, idiot.”

He snorts. “Didn’t you want outta here? Do somethin’ different?” He leans forward, elbows propped on your counter as he rests his chin on his fist.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” He’s dancing dangerously close to a sore spot of yours — that you are alone in your hometown, working at a failing bookshop, with no one and nothing to justify your stagnancy.

“This can’t be your dream life.”

You don’t have to answer; you know that. But his line of questioning is puzzling. Because, no matter how casual he manages to keep his tone, his nonchalance is betrayed by his eyes, sharp and inquisitive.

Like he’s waiting to dissect whatever answer you give him.

Sanemi continues. “It’s strange for people not to want for more — to not dream about somethin’ different.”

“And who are you to say I don’t?” You bristle, slamming your cash drawer shut with more force than necessary. “I have a dream of my own. Just because it’s not one you would pick for yourself doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

He blinks, taken aback. “Woah, woah, I never meant any offense.” He pushes back from the counter. “My bad.”

His response feels genuine but your ego is already bruised. Stiffly, you finish counting out his change and drop it into his waiting palm.

You slide his book across the counter. “Have the day you deserve.”

His surprise morphs into amusement at your iciness. So haughty, he winks. “You too, Princess.”

You turn aside in clear dismissal. He makes a show of taking out his wallet and stuffing his change inside, but your pointed ignorance of him means you don’t see him toss another note on the counter.

He’s already halfway out the door when you call after him, urgent. “Sir, you dropped your —“

“Nah, I didn’t,” he raises his hand in farewell as the bookstore door bangs shut behind him, leaving you to stare open-mouthed after him.

Clutched tightly in your hand is his crisp, one hundred dollar note.

—

His next visit is unplanned, but not in the way that Sanemi avoids routine. It’s unplanned in that he’s annoyed and it’s partially your fault, so that means the onus is on you to fix it.

You’re in the process of double checking delivery logs to ensure all your new inventory has arrived when a large thud against the clerk’s counter startles you.

You frown. It’s him again — all ivory hair and silvery facial scars that somehow are less imposing than the irritated scowl he wears.

“This book was shit,” he scoots the novel across the counter to you with distaste. “I want a refund.”

You level his pout with a frosty glare of your own. Wordlessly, you lean over the counter and tap a single finger against a laminated sign duck-taped to its edge.

Return-exchange only. No refunds.

“But it was shit,” he repeats, as though that will somehow spur you to change a policy you didn’t create. “You let me waste twenty bucks.”

“I did nothing,” you rustle the pages of your delivery log in pointed dismissal. “You’re the one who decided to buy a book before checking it out.”

You glance down at the discarded novel. “Figures,” you scoff. “He’s not even an author. He uses ghost writers and takes all the credit.”

“Woulda been nice if you’d told me that before you let me give him my money.”

You hum idly as you cross off the log’s boxes for new releases. “I suppose I was too stunned that you even knew how to read. Guess I wasn’t really paying attention to your shit choices.”

“Oh?” And you glance up to see Sanemi smirking at you. “The Princess has claws, does she?” He leans against the counter, propping his cheek under a loose fist. “So, what are your recommendations, gorgeous?”

“I’m not your Princess,” you snap imbuing the nickname with as much venom as you can muster. “Call me by my name or call me nothing at all.”

His eyes drop to your name-tag, pinned neatly on the front of your sweater. That insufferable smirk of his only widens. “Alright, alright. What are your recommendations, Y/N?”

The syllables sound rich and honeyed and suddenly, you wish you’d let him stick with Princess, as grating as it was.

Because your name should not sound so sweet, should not roll off his tongue so seamlessly, as it just did.

You’ve never been one to indulge in rumors. But in this city, as economically fractured as it is, gossip is a currency everyone keeps in their back pocket. And though you keep your head down and mind your own business, even you have heard the rumors swirling around town about the eldest Shinazugawa child.

Rumors that he has ascended the ranks of the same Mob that claimed the life of his deadbeat father long before the bastard was shived in the back for a debt he’d owed (their words, never yours).

Rumors that he holds a unique position within the gang, known clandestinely only as the Corps, and that position requires him to do things most won’t speak about.

But the rumor that screeches to the forefront of your mind has nothing to do with his alleged status with the Corps. It’s his reputation as a flirt; a rumored womanizer, through and through, that is a splinter under your skin.

Determined to pick him out, a wicked idea blossoms. “Fine, here.” You stalk purposefully to the section marked Literature. Your finger drags down a line of titles before finally settling on one. You pull it free with a soft grunt, the book sitting thick and heavy in your hand as you dump it into Sanemi’s.

“Read that.”

His eyes flick between its cover and you, incredulous. “This ain’t a book; it’s a brick.”

“It’s a classic,” you counter. “One that examines age-old question of destiny versus free will, generational curses.” Your head cocks to the side, a challenging smirk tugging at the corner of your mouth. “Love and lust.”

His eyebrow raises and you cross your fingers. If he falls for it and ultimately ends up hating the book, then perhaps he’ll decide your taste in reading material is indeed shit, and maybe then he’ll leave you alone.

Sanemi considers you for a moment but then he takes the bait. “If you say so,” he sighs. “But if it’s shit, I’m taking my refund.” And then he leans in close, so close that you can feel the warmth radiating off his body.

His breath is hot against your ear. “Regardless of your shitty little policy.”

You refuse to let him see how much he’s knocked you off-kilter. “So I can expect to be robbed? Will it be at gun or knifepoint? Just so I’m prepared.”

His chuckle, low and dark sends goosebumps skittering down your arms. “Worse,” he promises before he draws back. His grin is wolfish, all teeth and feral hunger. “You’ll owe me a date.”

He looses a low, appreciate whistle as he steps back and takes his eyes over your rigid form. “Though, I might just take you out anyway.”

“You assume I’ll say yes — or are you planning on kidnapping me? I’m sure you’re rather proficient at it, given your occupation.”

Something dark flashes across his face, and it’s enough to make you step back, a sudden fear creeping up the back of your spine.

Stupid, you chastise yourself. You never know when to keep your mouth shut.

But the shadows in his features recede as quickly as they appeared, and Sanemi’s mouth eases back into that same, cocky smile.

“You’ll say yes, Princess. You won’t be able to resist the temptation.”

“Temptation?” You force out a laugh. “And what makes you think I can’t?”

Sanemi’s eyes find your current read, open flipped over on the counter, marking your current page.

It’s a mystery novel. Your third of the month, born of a new hyperfixation on the genre.

You want nothing more than to wipe that smug grin of his clean from his face. He gives an affectionate snake of his head as he turns and makes his way toward the door. “Habits, Y/N. It all comes down to habits.”

You should throw it at his head, but Sanemi exits the store before your hand can find its spine.

——-

Over two weeks pass without so much as a whisper from the enigma that is Sanemi Shinazugawa.

Loath though you are to give him that sort of credit, you cannot deny that he utterly confounds you. He is everything you expected while simultaneously nothing at all what you’d imagined. He is brash and cocky, and he struts around with an insufferable self-importance that can only come from years of being at the top of his game (no matter how he got there).

Yet, he also reads. Enough to have opinions, even decent ones, about certain authors, and he’s open minded enough to accept your recommendation even if it feels as though he has an ulterior motive for doing so.

And, he’d been bothered by the dock in your pay as a result of his mischief; so much so, that he’d slipped you more than enough to make up the loss. That is the action that puzzles you the most, even weeks later. You’d assumed that someone like him, so used to ensnaring people into various schemes, wouldn’t have given two shits if he’d stolen money from some broke girl at a bookstore. After all, his business was all about money — and the lengths some would go to keep it.

Yet he’d paid you back — paid you more than you needed, if you were honest.

Since that day, you’ve had your ears tuned to any mention of his name, any whispers of the mysterious, scarred gang-member who has occupied nearly all the open space in your head. You’ve managed to glean small things here and there. That he’s a Hashira, and Hashira means he’s only one step below what is known ominously as the Master Family — the heads of the entire organization.

That he’s rather feared, even among seasoned Corps members; that he’s known for his swift brutality.

That he’s more than just a flirt; he’s a virile lover. Not picky in the slightest about who warms his bed, though no one has ever been able to pin him down longer than a handful of one-night stands.

You stop poking around after that particular revelation, embarrassed that you now know exactly what makes him so popular.

Apparently, his flexibility pairs well with his near inhuman stamina. And he’s said to be very well-endowed.

It’s more information than you care to know, but you can’t deny that your curiosity lingers.

You brush aside your inquisitiveness as nothing more than a natural side effect of your own inexperience. And you’ll be damned before admitting that your interest in Sanemi Shinazugawa isn’t limited to rumors of how good he is in bed. That, perhaps your curiosity stems from something deeper, from a desire to know if that bad boy persona is authentic or a mere facade, and boy on the stoop still lurks somewhere beneath his mask.

—

“You look like shit.”

You startle up from where you’d been resting your head on your arm, wavering between consciousness and sleep.

You know that gravelly voice before you lay your eyes on him, and your irritation is quick to flicker to life.

Nearly a month has passed since your last encounter, and for a moment, you’d thought you’d been freed from his nuisance. But now, Sanemi stands in your store, wearing a half-amused expression on his stupidly handsome face.

“Is that the only descriptor you know?” You ask miserably, hands working quickly to smooth down your mused hair. “Is everything either shit or not-shit to you?”

Sanemi shrugs. “Pretty much,” and he holds something out to you, waiting. “Here.”

It’s a to-go bag from a cafe two blocks away. One known for their almond croissants, for which you have a particular penchant.

Your stomach grumbles fiercely. You’d foregone eating breakfast when you realized you’d overslept your alarm, and had to rush out of your apartment to ensure you’d be here in time for the weekly delivery truck.

The sweet scent of butter and sugar wafting from the bag makes your mouth water.

But this is Sanemi Shinazugawa, and you should think to know better. “Is it poisoned?”

He rolls his eyes. “If I wanted to drug you, sweetheart, I’d pick a far more convenient way to do it — and one that didn’t involve me getting up at the ass crack of dawn for some overpriced pastries.”

Warily, you accept the paper bag, and Sanemi surprises you again by handing you a to-go cup of coffee. He watches as you, ever the dramatic, sniff tentatively at the lid and frown, apparently dissatisfied that you can discern nothing but the rich, aromatic scent of espresso.

Sanemi takes a deep drink from his own cup. “It’s a thank you. For that book you recommended,” He smirks. “It wasn’t shit. It was good.”

You fish a pastry out of the bag, and nearly drool as you behold its buttery, flaky goodness. “You sound surprised.”

“Maybe I was. Your success rate was only fifty-fifty. I had every right to be skeptical.”

“You’re the one who grabbed that last book,” you take a large bite out of your croissant and you fight to keep yourself from moaning. “That had nothing to do with me.” You swallow thickly before taking a large sip of coffee to wash down the pastry. “So, no date, then?”

The smile he gives you is almost apologetic. “Sorry, beautiful. I don’t actually date.” And you nearly double over at the bewildering taste of disappointment creeping sourly up the back of your throat. “Gotta keep things casual in my world.”

The once-over he gives you is razor-sharp. “And you don’t look like a casual girl.”

You resist the urge to cross your arms. “You seem awfully certain, Shinazugawa.”

“Experience,” he offers easily. “I know casual women.” He turns his head away before quietly adding, “And you ain’t one of ‘em.”

It’s odd; you know of his rather wild reputation among women, and yet he seems almost embarrassed by its acknowledgment. But as you’re slowly learning, Sanemi Shinazugawa is a conundrum you haven’t yet been able to pick apart.

You could throw it in his face; you could spew some barb about his experience, rub your salt right into his obvious wound. You have no reason to spare his feelings, not when he’s been such a consistent pain in your ass.

Your eyes drift to the empty pastry bag and coffee cup before they find him again, and suddenly, you don’t see the swaggering, cocky Corps member with a reputation for being just as dangerous and violent as he is flirtatious.

You see only the boy on your stoop; the one who’d gently removed your sister from her place on his back and handed her back to your tearful, relieved parents.

And it’s because you cannot stop seeing that boy, that you offer before you lose the courage to ask, “So, friends, then?”

Sanemi whips back to you, surprise coloring his features that quickly melts into a smile — a real, genuine smile.

And thus, Sanemi Shinazugawa, ruthless member of the Corps and a ranked Hashira, befriends a girl who runs a bookshop.

—-

In retrospect, Sanemi knows he’s probably fucked himself.

His only intention in visiting your shop after that first day had been to discern what level of threat you posed to him, if any, and to address it accordingly. Befriending you was never his goal. After all, he prided himself on his staunch ability in following the unspoken Rules of the Corps — number Three, in particular.

But he has always interpreted Three has a warning against forming bonds within the Corps. And though he knows it’s good practice to keep his circle outside its operations small as well, he rations he’s entitled to indulge his curiosity in you. He doesn’t have friends, not really. Just Genya, and his little brother lives well over an hour away, enrolled in a school in a far better — far safer — city.

It would be nice to have someone a little closer to home that he could relax around.

Yet, he can’t recall whether Rule Three would bar him from associating you outside work hours. Caution would dictate he shouldn’t, but Sanemi never claimed to be a careful man.

He never visits the same day or at the same time. Rule Two says no patterns, and though he’s steadily blurring the lines of Rule Three with each passing day, he convinces himself that as long as he abides by the first two, he won’t be in as deep shit as he, in theory, could be.

It starts out slow; tentative. Despite what he’d thought otherwise, you’re not nearly as prim and haughty as you’d tried to make him believe.

You’re sweet. Genuine, in a way that’s rare for him to encounter in his world.

Gradually, he begins spending more time with you. At first, your relationship is confined strictly to discussions of books. You swap favorites, debate which author is at the top of their genre, and you occasionally needle each other over your respective guilty pleasure: yours, bodice rippers. His, fairytales.

He spends a great deal of his free time at the bookstore, though he’s never consistent with his visits. You never ask him about it, and for that, he’s grateful. But eventually, your conversation turns to other interests — movies, shows, music — and each new mutual interest only further enamors him with you.

And when you invite him over one day after you close the shop to watch an old movie you’d swiped from the store’s limited collection, he can’t find it in him to tell you no.

The first time he visits your apartment, he is appalled.

For starters, the neighborhood you live in isn’t the safest. It’s not the Silo, by any means, but it’s an area he frequents as part of his job and that fact alone sets him on edge. He knows what kind of people linger here; knows that they tend to borrow cash that ends up in Uzui’s business — another Hashira.

And when he sees the shoebox you live in (a studio, you’d proudly boasted, as though the distraction of exposed brick and industrial piping made up for its shit location and shit security), Sanemi finds himself clutching his proverbial pearls.

He supposes he can see its appeal — you’ve certainly turned it into a home.

You’ve made a small living room out of a single couch, thrifted coffee table, and a faintly stained rug. Your TV is laughably small, but he supposes it gets the job done.

A small kitchen stands to the right of the entryway, and there is a bathroom to the left. You have a wall of closets with folding doors, and the wall directly opposite of him boasts three large, arched windows. Sanemi supposes during the day, they provide enough natural sunlight to negate any need for any overhead lighting, of which you have none. But he can’t tell if they open from the outside, so he resolves to furtively check once you’re distracted.

Your bed stands on the furthest wall, tucked into a corner and laden heavy with colorful pillows and plush throws. Books are stacked everywhere — in shelves, in corners, by plants and furniture. All well-worn and loved, their spines cracked and covers stained.

It’s lively; warm. And it has you written all over it. That alone is enough to slightly endear the place to him.

But it’s still a shit apartment in a shit neighborhood.

Worse, your door is little more than a flimsy piece of wood that latches with a single turn lock — the easiest to break, if someone was determined enough to try. He tells you as much and you roll your eyes, brushing aside his concerns as though he’s not precisely aware of what kind of filth might linger around the corner.

The next day, he brings over a deadbolt, a chain, and a drill. He bats off your indignant protests as he installs it on your door. And, because he’s petty, he forces you to sit through a painfully detailed demonstration of how to properly latch and unlatch the chain once he’s finished.

The weeks blend seamlessly into months, and Sanemi finds himself spending more and more of his free time with you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working at the bookstore or enjoying a night of brain-rotting entertainment on your shitty little television. He just wants to be near you, and he finds himself unable to stay away.

Four months into your friendship, you start a weekly movie night, though the date is always subject to change. Still, Sanemi finds himself craving more of that precious time with you. The hours spent in your store or at your apartment fill a void in his chest he hadn’t realized he’d been harboring, and it’s a fullness he quickly becomes addicted to.

It is an odd thing, this new ritual (never routine) of his. The alternation between visiting the scum indebted to the Corps, to feel bones crush and snap beneath his hands or the iron of a spare crowbar, or blood griming to his knuckles, only to return to your bookshop or apartment, cheap beer and greasy takeout in hand, isn’t the kind of switch he imagined he’d ever make. But you make taking off his Hashira mask so damn easy, and every time he leaves he finds it more difficult to slip back on.

With each passing day, he learns you more and more. He gathers information like a dragon hoards its jewels, each new tidbit a precious gem that he tucks safely away in a mental box labeled with your name.

He learns that, while he prefers tea, you prefer coffee, but you’re picky about your order. If it’s hot, you want it black or with only the faintest splash of cream. If it’s cold, however, you want every sweet syrup and topping known to man, even though it only makes you crash like a freight train once the sugar high wears off.

He learns you think cooking means pouring yourself a bowl of cereal and calling it a day, and it’s a revelation that makes him have to walk away and collect himself, lest he start lecturing you on the importance of proper nutrition, just as he does with his brother.

In exchange, he opens up about the more sacred aspects of his life — namely, Genya. He confides in you the great pride and adoration he has for his little brother, and admits his deep-seated fear that Genya will somehow be pulled into his violent, hostile world of his. And each time Sanemi begins to feel that anxiety rear its ugly head, threaten to settle into the marrow of his bones and send him into a spiral, you’re always there to pull him back.

Sometimes you ask questions, and Sanemi tries to answer them as best he can. But there are some subjects he can never touch. Never wants to.

He can’t tell you whose blood stains his knuckles or is splattered across his shoes. He can’t tell you where he goes when his phone vibrates late at night or at random during the day. He can’t tell you what his fellow Hashira do; the specialties they oversee.

Sanemi does make a point to assure you there is one sacred creed by which they all abide: no kids. This seems to put you at ease, as though this tepid moral line somehow absolves him of the other shit he’s guilty for.

It’s selfish, this thing he has created with you. He knows that. And his blossoming friendship with you likely breaks more than one of the sacred precepts of the Corps. But you’re the first person he’s met since his initiation who knows what he is and doesn’t cower in fear, and that makes him desperate to cling onto you. You know what an ugly, beastly creature he is, and yet you do not run away from him. Even when you probably should.

So, he makes a promise. He won’t show you the Shinazugawa who belongs to the Corps; a formidable member of the Hashira, known because of the things he can do to others to make sure they pay their debts. What he does to them when they don’t.

With you, he wants to be Sanemi; only Sanemi.

And so it goes, for the better part of a year, the two of you learning one another, pretending the ease you feel in the company of the other is merely the product of two people relieved to find a friend in a city that cautions against such ties, and not something in danger of becoming more.

As though the metamorphosis hasn’t already set in.

—

“You never told me what your dream was, y’know.” Sanemi says one night while you finish up inventory at the store.

“What dream?” You hum as you scan the shelves reserved for non-fiction releases, your lips pressed into a firm line as you run your pen down the entries of your log.

He leans against the bookshelf, arms folded across the considerable mass of his chest. “Your big dream — the one you bit my head off for insulting that one time.”

You look up long enough to roll your eyes at him. “Where’s this coming from?”

“Dunno. Curious.”

“Thought you’re not supposed to ask questions in your line of work.” And you shoot him a sly grin. “You ought to be careful.”

Sanemi snorts but he nudges your foot with his. “I’m serious.”

Your eyes dance back and forth between him and the log before you. There’s no real harm in it, you decide. After all, he’s the only friend you have. “I want my own bookstore.”

“Yeah?” He raises a pale brow and waves his hand vaguely around behind him. “Aren’t you practically running this one? That ain’t enough?”

“I don’t own it, though.” You frown, setting your clipboard down. “I just work here. You’ve seen my paycheck.”

And he had, having found a paystub when he’d gone snooping under your counter. You would’ve been furious at his invasion of your privacy had you not been so mortified at the way he’d stared in horror at the pitiful figure reflecting your earnings after two, grueling weeks of work.

His insistence on bringing you meals at any and every opportunity afterward only compounded your embarrassment.

“I want something that’s mine — that I own.” You continue. “I’ve begged the owner to let me organize author meet-and-greets as a way to promote the store for months, and he always says no. If I owned my own store, I wouldn’t need anyone’s permission.”

You pull your bottom lip between your teeth. “I wouldn’t have to live under anyone’s thumb.”

Something shifts in the way Sanemi watches you, a certain profundity creeping into his eyes.

Your cheeks heat. “I know it sounds stupid —“

“It doesn’t,” Sanemi says earnestly. “Wanting your freedom can never be stupid.”

You soften then, as understanding passes between you. Of course he would know all about that — arguably better than anyone you know.

Sanemi clears his throat. “So, a bookstore?” And he gives you a broad smile as he pulls out his wallet and tosses you a twenty dollar note. “Consider me your first investor.”

—

Sanemi spends the rest of the evening watching you work, fascinated by the way you meticulously organize your store shelves, and count the cash in your register. When it comes time for you to heave boxes of excess inventory to the back storeroom so they can be shipped back to their distributors, Sanemi plucks them from your hands, batting off your protests as he carries them for you.

By the time closing arrives, every new shipment has been unpacked and its contents have been shelved.

You flick off the overhead lights in the main store, relying on the backlight of the exit door to light your way out. You tug on your coat and find him watching you, expectantly. “Are you walking me home?”

“Tch. Don’t I always, when I can?”

You grin and it’s enough to chase away some of the sourness twisting in his gut. He shouldn’t do it, as often as he does. He’s risking enough as it is by constantly redrawing the lines around Rule Three to justify the way he’s beginning to bend the parameters around the rule against patterns. But it’s dark and late, and you don’t have a car, and he’ll be damned if he lets you brave the walk home alone.

Better he’s there to protect you from the dangers he can anticipate and see than to stick to his code and risk your harm from those he cannot.

Thankfully, the journey back to your apartment takes no more than fifteen minutes, even when he stops to thumb free a cigarette from the spare carton he keeps tucked in his jacket. You wrinkle your nose at him in mock-disgust as he lights it, the smoke curling out of his mouth reminiscent of a fire-breathing dragon.

He wouldn’t do it if he knew it truly bothered you. But you’d once shyly confessed you liked the faint smell of tobacco that clung to his jacket, especially in cold air like this. So he only shoots you a wink as he brings it to his lips and takes a long drag.

Besides, he thinks as he looses a slow exhale. He needs something to help him take the edge off; to guide him in making that transition between Hashira and Sanemi.

He escorts you all the way to your front door, the two of you trading quips and jokes. And Sanemi savors how utterly extraordinary something as ordinary as walking you to your door feels. Almost as if he’s ordinary, the way he so desperately wishes he could be.

You fidget with your keys, sliding them into your lock. “Did you finish that series I recommended?”

Sanemi grins. “Last night. I think it was your best suggestion yet.”

You duck your head, a bashful smile spreading across your pretty lips and its sight fills him with a golden warmth.

Your door gives way and you turn back to him. “‘Til next time?”

It was what you always said; you never asked him when you could expect to see him again, and he appreciated it. Appreciated not having to explain himself, when most outside his world would likely demand he try.

“‘Til next time,” he confirms, returning your smile with one of his own.

You hover in your doorway, fingers drumming on the frame, eyes roaming his.

“You never told me yours — what your dream is.”

He should leave. You’re treading in murky waters, ones made dangerous because he almost wants to tell you — tell you the truth, at that.

That he dreams of more. More life. More stability. More everything. He’d settle for anything, really; anything at all.

As long as it was more than this.

But Sanemi only responds with a wry grin. “To wake up in the morning, Princess. That’s all I can ask for.”

———

Sanemi’s answer lingers with you long after you emerge from your shower, warm and toweling your damp hair.

To wake up in the morning, Princess.

He’s full of shit and you know it.

Over the course of the last year, you’ve learned a handful of crucial details that make up Sanemi Shinazugawa.

You’ve learned he loves matcha, but he really loves the expensive kind. While you can’t afford to buy the high quality powder, you make do with what you can afford at the grocery, and you make it for him as often as you can.

He drinks it every time, bitter dregs and all.

More importantly, you’ve learned what it means to have a friend involved in the Corps. Not that he’s merely involved with the notorious gang — at least, not any more than the two of you are just “friends.”

Town gossip aside, Sanemi’s affiliation with the Corps is made obvious by his own actions. Like the way the two of you only ever hang out at the bookstore or your apartment; how he never invites you to visit his place, over in the Silo.

Or how he insists on scoping out your apartment every time he comes over, his eyes alert and sharp as his hand lingers at his hip, ready to pull out the gun you know he keeps tucked into his waistband at all times.

It’s evident in the way Sanemi never sticks to a consistent schedule. He varies the days and times of his visits at random, never allowing himself to settle into a routine, even if that means going an entire week or longer without seeing you.

But perhaps the most significant detail you’ve learned about Sanemi over the year of your friendship is this:

He wants out. Dreams of it, even.

This revelation does not come from the scarred Hashira himself. It is the product of months of observation, of studying how his face darkens when his phone pings! while you’re watching some sitcom on television, or when he sees a familiar face pass by your shop window, and suddenly he has to leave because he must be Shinazugawa again, and you won’t see him for the rest of the day.

It is evident in the way he talks of his younger brother, who, by all accounts is a star student and athlete, with a promising future in collegiate archery.

Sanemi is saving every penny he can to send his brother — Genya — to school, far, far away from the Silo. The conviction with which he speaks of Genya’s future, full of college and internships and promise, breaks your heart, because you know Sanemi hadn’t anyone to want those things for him.

Sanemi does not speak of any future of his. You suspect it’s because he doesn’t believe he will have one.

That has to be why he answered your question with his vague desire to wake up every morning. It was an easy answer. One that relied on you making certain connections between his life and his words and deduce that he truly had nothing more to live for other than life itself.

A cop-out, is what it is.

But his reading habits betray his darkest secret — betray the truth — and that’s exactly how you know his flippant answer is utter bullshit.

The book Sanemi carries around the most is a series of classic fairy tales, bought off your sale table a few months back. He’s read the whole thing cover to cover, but he keeps a bookmark on one specific page, and periodically, you catch him flipping back to it.

He made the mistake of leaving the book on your coffee table one night when he excused himself to use your bathroom. Realistically, you knew it was no big deal to flip through it, but somehow, the thought still felt like an invasion of his privacy.

But your curiosity got the better of you so you snatched it up, and thumb quickly to the bookmarked page, desperate to know which story has so captivated him.

You opened to the first page of of a tale — an old French story, about the daughter of a merchant who is sent to life with a beast in a distant castle, as penance for his theft of the beast’s rose.

You smiled to yourself; you were familiar with the story. You know how it goes — the beast everyone believes to be the villain is saved by the woman, and revealed to be a handsome prince. And the two live happily ever after.

Your smile faded as you recalled how the woman saved her Beast. True love’s kiss, or something along those lines.

True love.

And as Sanemi returned from the bathroom and plopped down next to you on your couch to watch a rerun of some old sitcom before he has to leave for the night, you mulled over Sanemi’s apparent fascination with the tale of the beast and the beauty.

And that’s how you drew the series of conclusions which enabled you to see right through his thin facade.

He wants out.

He wants a happily ever after. He doesn’t think he’ll get it.

And, above all, he dreams of love.

—

If any doubt lingered as to the magnitude of his ties to the Corps, it disintegrates one night, about eight months after he’d first burst into your bookstore.

It is well after midnight, but you are still awake, too engrossed in a new fantasy novel to pay particular attention to the lateness of the hour when your phone buzzes on your bedside table.

Sanemi’s name lingers above the notification, which reads simply, Outside.

You untangle yourself from your blankets and pad over to your front door, hastily tugging on a pair of sleep boxers over your underwear.

You open the door and the flutter of excitement you’d felt upon seeing his text is chased away by shock at the sight before you.

There is a bruise forming along Sanemi’s cheek that you almost would have mistaken for dirt if not for the swelling. His hair is rumpled, his clothes in disarray. Though it winks away the second he sets his gaze on you, you swear you were able a cold fury in his eyes; foreign, and violent.

The fury that belongs to a Hashira, not to the friend you know.

Wordlessly, you step back and allow him to limp past you.

“You got liniment?” He rasps, plopping heavily down in your kitchen chair. “And water?”

“You mean icy-hot?” You’re already filling a glass from the tap that you set on the table next to him before you retreat to your bathroom to rummage the cabinets.

You return a few moments later, tub of minty topical gel clutched in hand. You nearly drop it when you realize that Sanemi has stripped himself of his shirt already and is now bare from the waist-up, his forehead resting against his arms where they’re propped up on the back of your chair.

You’ve known for a long while that Sanemi is well-built (obscenely so).

Once, in the early days of your friendship, you’d snapped at him to button his shirt properly if he insisted on hanging around your store, dramatizing over how obscene it was for him to prance around with his chest half-exposed.

Sanemi had only grinned at you before he unbuttoned two more, revealing a generous glimpse of infuriatingly toned abs. Your open-mouthed, scandalized stare was met only with a wink.

He kept his shirt like that for the remainder of the day. You’d hardly been able to look at him without flushing a deep scarlet that only seemed to inflate his already generous ego even further.

But, you’re only human. And as the months passed by, and your friendship with the scarred mobster grew, you found yourself sneaking the odd peek every now and then. A glimpse of pectoral here; a hint of his rigid v-line when he stretched his arms over his head there.

And now, here he is, sitting in your small kitchen area awaiting the relief of the icy hot clutched in the tub that grew more slippery between your rapidly sweaty palms, every mouth watering inch of his upper body on display.

Beautiful. Your mouth goes dry at the sight of him. Sanemi is unbelievably beautiful.

“Need ya to rub it into my shoulder, if you don’t mind,” his voice is muffled against his arm. “I hate asking, but I dislocated the damn thing and had to reset it — fuckin’ hurts, now.”

You know better than to suggest he go get an x-ray. No hospitals, he’d once explained. Not unless you’re bleeding out.

You also know better than to ask how he dislocated it, and so you only pad silently over to him, grateful he’s turned away from you so he cannot see the tremble in your hands or the blush creeping across your cheeks.

Eager to give yourself something to do besides ogling, you focus on unscrewing the lid on the jar of liniment, your nose wrinkling under the burn of its stringent odor. You scoop a generous amount of the salve into your palms and warm it between your hands.

“Motherfucker,” Sanemi hisses as your hands spread gently across his shoulder, your fingers gingerly massaging the topical into his swollen joint. “Shit stings.”

“You’re lucky it’s not broken,” you chide, carefully prodding along the joint in search of anything that may be amiss — an odd lump or gap, signaling something hasn’t been reset properly. “At least, I don’t think it is.”

“Your medical expertise is astounding,” Sanemi drolls, but he winces again as your fingers press against a particularly tender spot. You step away from him with a huff and fish your phone out of your pocket, hands still slathered with ointment.

“I’m not a doctor,” you shoot back. “And since you refuse to go see one, the best I can do it give you the advice of the internet.”

You ignore his grumblings as you search for treatments for dislocated joints. You tap on the first link that appears and scroll, eyes narrowed as you read.

“You’re in luck. It seems like you won’t die,” you say dryly. “But you’re going to have a nasty bruise.” You purse your lips, eyes scanning the article on your phone. “And this says you’re supposed to rest — not overexert the joint.” You reach to tug playfully on a lock of his hair. “I don’t suppose you’re actually going to do that, though.”

He twists and flashes you a mischievous smirk over his shoulder. “You know me too well, Princess.”

You roll your eyes and snort, tossing your phone onto your table in favor of reaching for a discarded kitchen towel to wipe off the excess icy hot from your hands.

You’re about to tell him to put his shirt back on and stop flaunting the muscles he just can’t seem to help but show everyone he has when your eyes snag on a mark that rests squarely between his shoulder blades.

You wouldn’t have noticed it but for the shiny redness surrounding it, a clear contrast to the rest of his skin. But the longer your stare at it, the more clear its abnormality. The mark is puffy and raised, but there’s a distinct pattern to it that makes the hair on the back of your neck curl.

A brand, you realize with horror. Someone has branded him like cattle.

Your finger reaches to trace over the ridges seared into his skin before you can think the better of it. Sanemi twitches under your touch, a small shudder skirting down his spine as he tilts his head back toward you.

“Ugly, ain’t it?” His tone is unreadable. “Like a collar, ‘cept it’s permanent.”

Though he tends to err on the side of caution when it comes to discussing the Corps, you at least know what is role is within it. He told you: debt collector. Mostly monetary debts.

But the brand has nothing to do with money. No, the symbol burned into his skin — the one that stands for Kill — is a neon sign of a reminder that Sanemi’s duties can and do entail another kind of collection.

A chill snakes down your spine. You’d had your suspicions, of course, you’re not stupid. But seeing it confirmed by a brand of all things is a lightning rod through your chest.

Sanemi must sense your stare against his back, and you hear his rueful smile though you can’t see his face. “Guess it’s fitting, since I’m their dog.”

There it is; confirmation of what he is, as though it were possible to forget. You don’t know why you’d held out in letting its weight settle over you. Nor do you know why your brain had refused, for a moment, to reconcile the Sanemi who brought cheap beer and greasy fast food to your apartment for a night of trash television and book reviews with the one before you now, branded with inexorable reminder of what his duties are when he steps outside and debts go unpaid; when scores go uneven.

Your eyes slide to his gun, resting atop your table. It may has well have been smoking.

“It’s barbaric,” you murmur. You never offer much of an opinion on the tidbits of information about his life he shares with you, unwilling to make him feel as though you aren’t someone he can confide in.

But the sight of the brand scorched between his shoulder blades stokes something ugly and angry within you. You’re grateful his back is to you so you can furtively rub your hand over your prickling eyes before he can see you do something stupid, like cry.

He tilts his head back until it rests against your abdomen. “Thank you,” he murmurs, his eyes drifting shut.

You freeze for a moment, your anger temporarily suspended against your uncertainty of whether you should step back or remain. You’ve touched Sanemi a thousand different ways — you’ve grabbed his arm, smacked him upside his thick head, and elbowed him more times than you can count.

But this; this is something far different from your teasing nudges of the past. This small gesture feels infinitely more tender. Gentle.

Intimate.

Sanemi has never not been the picture of cocky brashness, especially around you. His priggish smirk was a constant, only ever dampened by the occasional alert on his phone — the one that meant he had to stop being yours for the night, and go be theirs.

But this Sanemi? This peaceful, eased, vulnerable version of your best friend is wholly uncharted territory. And perhaps it’s because he looks so unguarded this way, his face relaxed and his eyes closed, that you feel so flustered.

You brush his hair away from his forehead. At the first graze of your fingers along his scalp, Sanemi leans further into you with something akin to a moan.

Hot; everything feels so damn hot, the air in your apartment suddenly too thick. Too oppressive.

Yet, you don’t stop; your fingers keep raking through his hair, surprisingly silky.

You think he may have fallen asleep in your chair, but after another moment of your hands carding through his hair, Sanemi stands. You step away instantly, and you avert your eyes while he pulls his shirt back over his head, cursing softly as he works it over his injured shoulder.

Sanemi turns to you and clears his throat roughly. “Thanks again. Don’t know what I would’ve done without ya.”

You wave him off with an exaggerated eye roll, eager to conceal the redness in your cheeks. “Oh please, I’m just your neighborhood book supplier and occasional first aid nurse.”

A sudden sobriety passes over his features, clouding over that all too familiar smirk with something heavier.

“No,” he murmurs and his hand absently lifts to tuck a stray lock of hair behind your ear. “No, you’re more than that.” His palm lingers against your cheek and his voice quiets to a hoarse whisper. “Much more.”

For a moment, you wonder if he’ll lean in; if he’ll show you whether his lips are as warm as his touch.

His eyes drop briefly to your mouth and your stomach somersaults at the thought he might be considering it, too. But the clouds part and Sanemi withdraws from you with an affection flick against the tip of your nose.

And then he turns and leaves.

You sink back against your door after you close it behind him and slide to your floor. You remain there for a long while after, your mind little more than a gnarled tangle of brambles you can’t begin to pick through. But even despite the complicated mess of thoughts and emotions knotted together in your head, one thing stands clear: you’d wanted to kiss him.

And for a moment, you swear he’d wanted to, as well.

An old rumor, one you hadn’t considered since your very first interaction with him, resurfaces in your mind. The one that had less to do with him in the Corps, and more so involved his activities outside of it.

The rumor that he cycles through the bodies he uses to warm his bed more frequently than you change the sheets on yours.

Your cheeks heat, and you shake your head to clear away the sudden, intrusive images of Sanemi tangled in the throes of passion with some faceless stranger that fill your imagination. You don’t care what those blasted rumors claim; you know him. And what’s more, you know that what you feel for him is stronger than anything you’ve ever felt toward anyone.

You’re in love with Sanemi.

It is his face you see at night before you fall asleep; it’s his touch you imagine in those secret moments in your bed or in the shower, when you’re desperate and aching.

It’s he who makes you feel most at ease; the one person you feel truly sees you, thinks you’re actually worth something.

You’ve never really known love before. But it’s because you’re such a novice that you know your feelings are true; powerful. You know what he is — what he thinks he is. And you know that you will never want anyone else; you can’t.

You won’t.

—

Three rules. That’s all he had to do, was follow three simple fucking rules.

Don’t speak. No patterns. And don’t get overly attached.

It had been easy, so easy, to follow them. If there was one thing Sanemi believed he could pride himself on, it had been his steadfast adherence to the Corps’ rules. Number three, in particular.

Until you. Until the day he’d chosen your bookstore to hide in.

Because that was when Sanemi decided that those rules were really more like guidelines; malleable. He’d let himself cast them aside out of a desperation for human connection. And he’d justified his carelessness by convincing himself that as long as he maintained some semblance compliance with the unspoken code of the Corps.

Sanemi had built his own set of rules around the foundation of his friendship with you, a wall of stone around the glass castle meant to ensure you would not be cut by its shards should it ever shatter.

He would not be your liability, nor would you be his.

But now, he’s too deep; Sanemi knows he’s gotten in way too fucking deep with you.

Until this moment, he imagined he’d managed to toe the line of this internal code that applied only to his relationship with you, save a handful of instances when he’d let himself blur it.

As it turns out, he’d been dead fucking wrong. Because he’s pretty sure you just asked him to cross the last major boundary he’d set for himself when it came to you.

So, Sanemi only gapes at you. “What?”

You huff, impatient. “I want you to fuck me.”

You say it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world — as though you haven’t just ripped the floor out from beneath him and sent him falling directly on his ass.

If he didn’t know you were dead serious, he would’ve laughed in your face. And that’s how he knows he’s fucked.

You’re a virgin; he knows that, because you’d drunkenly confessed it to him two weeks prior, tipsy on the cheap beer he’d brought over for your weekly movie night together.

Admittedly, he’d been surprised. You were beautiful — not that beauty was a requirement for a good fuck, but you didn’t seem the type to go for random hookups, unlike him. Still, he would’ve thought you’d had some prior relationship where the opportunity would have arisen.

As it turned out, you’d never been in a relationship, either.

Between long gulps of your drink, you’d asked him to fix it and he’d turned you down — his tolerance for watery beer far surpassed your own, and Sanemi Shinazugawa wasn’t the type to sleep with someone who couldn’t fully consent.

So he’d let you down — but not before he kissed you. It was only once; soft, the way you deserved to be kissed. His lips met yours and suddenly, the gaping hole in his chest felt smaller; fuller. Kissing you felt like coming home, even though Sanemi was sure he’d never fully known what home truly felt like.

And then he parted from you with an affectionate flick on your nose to cover the way his heart clenched at the visible disappointment in your eyes.

He’d boldly kissed you twice more after that night — one a quick, cheeky peck when you went in to hug him, an act done more to fluster you than to sate any desire of his, no matter how he craved more of you.

The other happened only three nights prior, and it was anything but soft and sweet.

One of Sanemi’s fellow Hashira, Kanae, hadn’t been seen in several days, and no one had been able to get in touch with her. When she’d missed a scheduled patrol of one of the neighborhoods in the Silo, he and another member, Iguro, had been sent to check on her.

They’d found her in the kitchen of the small home she’d shared with her two sisters with a hole in her head and her brains splattered across the floor.

Curled under the protective stretch of her limp arms, had been her two sisters, both bearing matching bullet wounds to their skulls.

Kizuki, most likely. They were the only ones brave enough to target someone as high ranked as Kanae.

Their blood had still been fresh, and the stench of decay and rot hadn’t yet set in, which only told them that the girls had been held for several days, forced to endure unknown horrors at the hands of their murderers.

He hadn’t been particularly close with the woman, but as his rank equal, she’d had his respect. But now she and her adolescent sisters were nothing more than smears of brain matter and skull fragments to be scraped off the linoleum of their kitchen floor and quietly buried. Forgotten.

The hours passed by in a blur once Kocho’s death was called into the higher-ups, and Sanemi didn’t remember cleaning up the scene anymore than he remembered the solitary trek back. His mind and his body disconnected, and he only snapped back to reality when he realized he was standing in front of your apartment, unsure of how or when he’d begun walking in its direction.

He knew he should turn around and go home; there was nothing you could do for him right then, he shouldn’t bother you —

His fist was pounding on your door before he could think better of it.

Despite the late hour, you’d greeted him with a broad smile and a shy hi. Your hair had been damp, and he could smell the floral sweetness of your shampoo still mixed with the steam from your shower as it spilled into the hall.

Safe; you were safe.

Your door had still been hanging wide open as Sanemi surged forward, trapping your face in his hands to crash his lips down against yours, his kiss heavy and hot.

You’d broken away long enough to ask, “S-Sanemi — what —?”

“Shut up,” he’d snarled, slanting his mouth back over yours, his teeth nipping at your bottom lip. He’d half expected you to shove him away, perhaps to even aim a knee right at his crotch, yet you’d only buried your fingers in his hair and tugged him closer.

He backed you up against the wall opposite of your entryway, though he’d moved his hand to cup the back of your head to keep it from banging against the exposed brick.

You moaned into the kiss and Sanemi lost whatever shred of sense he’d managed to cling onto. His tongue swept along your bottom lip, and the hand cupping the back of your head loosely pulled at your hair, tugging your head to the side and signaling you to open up — to let him in.

And you did. And the first brush of his tongue against yours as he licked into your mouth ignited an inferno within him that he did not know how to tame.

His hands pushed under your sweatshirt, seeking out the comforting warmth of your skin. Higher and higher they rose, until they came to rest against your ribs, and Sanemi realized you were bare — completely bare — beneath your hoodie.

That you’d allowed him to toe so dangerously close to a line neither of you could cross had clouded every bit of his judgment. The thought that he’d only have to move his hands mere centimeters to touch you in a way no other had before had sent him reeling, and his hips were beyond his control when they pinned yours against the wall and ground into you.

But your single gasp into his mouth broke the spell, and with more regret than Sanemi knew he should feel, he broke away, leaving you both breathless and panting.

Without a word, he’d turned around and stalked right back out of your apartment, closing your door firmly behind him.

He’d sent a text only a few minutes later — a single, ominous reminder to you to lock your door, deadbolt and all.

He hadn’t the stomach to explain his cryptic warning; not as the sight of Kocho remained burned into his retinas.

So, yes, he’s blurred a few lines when it comes to you. But those had only been kisses; heavy touching aside, he’d never allowed himself to go further than that.

No matter how much he wanted to.

And it’s because he knows he can’t cross this last line — can’t open you up to risk more than he already has, that he meets your expectant stare with a rueful smile.

“You’re better off asking someone else, Princess. You don’t want to get tangled up with someone like me.”

Never mind that you’re already tangled up with him — but he’s managed to uphold this last boundary, and Sanemi has convinced himself that as long as it remains in place, he can’t ruin you the way Kocho and her young sisters were ruined.

“I don’t want to ask someone else,” you fold your arms across your chest and cock your hip out, defiant. Normally, Sanemi finds your stubbornness endearing, if not adorable, but not now; not when you should know better.

A low growl of your name is his warning. “You don’t know what you’re asking —“

“It’s you I want. I don’t care what the rumors say, I don’t care what anyone thinks — including you.”

The sincerity in your eyes nearly scalds him. “And I am not asking as a friend. You and I both know this is more than that.”

He wants to throttle you. Not literally of course, he could never — but he wants to shake the sense you’re so clearly lacking back into you until you see; until you understand.

Of course he wants you. He has wanted you for months — so much so, he hardly can focus on anything else. And he’s pent up. He hasn’t had the stomach to fuck anyone else. Not since he began falling asleep and waking up to thoughts of you and your touch, of how you might look under or above him, wanton and desperate. Or how you might feel in his arms; on his tongue.

Really, it’s been quite a blow to his rather wild reputation throughout the Silo. But God knows he has tried to fill the you-shaped void in his heart, but nothing — no one — has come close.

More than anything, he wants you to be his, and for him to be yours. He longs to be the Sanemi who takes you out on dates, who kisses you freely without the compulsive need to check over his shoulder, to make sure there aren’t any enemies watching and plotting to strike him right where he’s weak. He wants to be the Sanemi you come home to after a long day at the bookstore. The one with whom you plan a future, utterly and completely yours.

But he can never be just Sanemi. He is nothing more than the property of the very organization he’s sworn allegiance to; the group whose brand he bears on his skin.

He is not good. He is a curse that will infect you, a poison to your life.

He will rot you from the inside, out.

His friendship with you is selfish. He knows that — he’s always known that, and yet he did not stop. It is selfish because he deluded himself into believing he could actually be someone else when he was with you. Someone worth befriending; perhaps someone worth a little more.

You were right to call him a thief, that day. All he does is take your time and affection when he knows damn well he won’t give you anything in return, no matter how he wishes he could.

Sanemi won’t label that thing he holds deep inside his heart which is formed in the shape of your name; not when it could so easily doom you both. But he knows his feelings for you are dangerous, and he cannot allow you to sniff them out.

Because if he does, then this only ends one or two ways: either he lets you in only for you to abandon him once you realize the truth of what he is, or you’re used as a weapon against him.

In either event, he loses you. So it is better to cut this off now, to force you away before either of you become more invested than you already are.

He will not hurt you, but neither will he allow himself to be hurt by you.

You take a step toward him, and the soft whisper of his name sounds like a holy prayer on your lips and that’s how he knows this is wrong.

Your obstinate refusal to recognize him for what he is is a needle digging into his skin, one that whittles away at every wall he has managed to build around his heart, that damnable, soft, dangerous thing that he will not allow you to find; he cannot.

You’re confusing your roles. He is the vulture and you are his prey, not the other way around. he is not here to give. He is here only to take, and you will let him and then he will leave.

And he will not be the carcass you pick clean only to discard once you’ve had your fill.

(A lie, but it’s one Sanemi almost believes. Almost.)

But Sanemi knows you; he knows you better than he knows anything else. You are a constant he has become far too dependent upon, and you are precious — far too precious to him to continue to indulging.

He knows you are too good, too loyal in your feelings to forget about him, even if he disappeared from your life entirely.

A clean break. it is the only thing that will force you to forget him and move on, find another, someone good and whole and not a broken, misshapen thing like him.

He will show you who he really is. He will show you that he could never be just Sanemi, and he sure as hell can’t ever be yours.

Better; you deserve better, so he will become worse.

He advances on you, his step heavy and imposing, and you have enough sense to scurry back from him. But he is too quick and soon he has you caged against the wall of your studio, literally backed into a corner.

“You want me?” He is scathing and he loathes himself for it, but he can’t stop. Not when he’s desperate to save you from the blight of himself.

You shouldn’t; you can’t.

But you nod, damn you. Wide-eyed, you nod and he resents the certainty reflected in your gaze.

His mouth twists into a cruel sneer. “You want to say you’ve had a taste of the lowlife, huh?“

Your eyebrows knit together. “Sanemi, that’s not —“

But he can’t stop his venom. “Bragging rights, that’s all you’re after, right? You want to be like one of the characters in your stories — the good girl who makes an honest man outta the good-for-nothing villain.”

“Stop it,” you bite, and your eyes harden. “You’re acting like an asshole.”

You’re angry. Good. Sanemi knows how to deal in anger.

“Hate to break it to ya, sweetheart, but I’m not acting like an asshole. I am one.”

Your hackles raise, and you step away from the wall and toward him, bold in your fury. “I know you want to believe you are, but you’re not —“

Sanemi’s hand shoots out to grab a fistful of your hair. “Is that so?” You yelp as he wrenches your head back, your neck straining. “Then maybe I oughta bend you over and fuck you like I would any other cheap whore. Then you can tell me what you think I am.”

Your eyes water as the grip in your hair tightens.

Good, he thinks savagely. Let you see the monster he truly was, let you know he was his bastard father’s son, and that he’d be no different, no different at all. He’s a brute, and you don’t want that, you don’t want him —

“You can do whatever it is you want,” you manage, you throat tight. And Sanemi’s eyes blow wide at the soft, watery smile that forms on your lips despite the tears that escape the corners of your eyes. “Do to me what you like; I don’t mind, as long as it’s you.”

All at once, his ire with you and your bewildering devotion to him melts away, leaving nothing behind but a deep well of guilt, bitter and acerbic.

It isn’t that you think he might take you forcefully and harshly; after all, he’s only shown you he’s entirely capable of doing so.

It’s that you would let him. Without a shred of doubt, he knows you would offer yourself to him to use however he wants, and that you’d do it with a smile not unlike the one you’re wearing right now, soft and earnest.

Fuck, you just did.

And it’s that realization that has Sanemi’s hand loosening from your hair, his eyes softening. An errant tear escapes down your cheek and he moves to brush it away, but you close your eyes the moment you spy his knuckle nearing your face.

You do not flinch, but you are steeling yourself in anticipation of expected cruelty, and the front he’s put forth crumbles to dust.

He is a monster, but not for the reasons he’s used to justify this ugly display of his. He’s a monster because he has made you believe that this treatment is acceptable — an unavoidable cost of intimacy, no matter how fleeting.

Worse, he’s done the one thing he’d sworn never to do to any woman, let alone someone as good and as dear as you.

He’d only wanted to disgust you; enrage you, so that you would kick him out of both your apartment and your life, right out on his sorry ass like he deserved.

But this is worse. He has frightened you.

He recoils from you like a kicked dog. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

He stands awkwardly as you stare at him, wide-eyed and uncertain, and each second that ticks silently by only amplifies the oily well of guilt in his stomach.

He clears his throat. “I’ll go,” he says roughly, too ashamed to meet your eyes. “‘M sorry, I didn’t —“

Your hand grabs his bicep, anchoring him in place. “I want you to stay.”

“You don’t owe me anything —“

“It’s not about owing you,” you interject, lifting your hands to take his face between your palms. “I want you. I want this.”

You prove your point by taking his hand and guiding it to your waist. You hold it there, mouth set in a determined line as you inch closer to him.

“You deserve someone else,” Sanemi can’t stop the admission from rolling off his tongue. “Better.”

But you’re already shaking your head, as though you somehow know different. “There is no one better; I only want you.”

Idiot, he thinks as you rise up on your tiptoes, your arms winding around his shoulders as the distance between your bodies grows narrower. You’re an idiot.

You can’t possibly believe he’s as good as it gets. He’s used you as a distraction this whole time, a chance to forget the things he’s done and what he’ll be required to do in the future. Surely, you must know that.

He will hurt you; it’s in his nature. It’s unavoidable. He can’t be what you deserve.

But then your lips brush gently against his and the last of his resolve crumbles.

Sanemi melts into your kiss. He brings one hand to cradle the side of your face as the one braced against your waist shorts, until he wraps his arms around you and tugs you closer to him.

This kiss is gentle in every way the last was not. Sanemi’s lips are soft moving against yours, his hands almost hesitant in how they hold you. For a moment, he imagines himself not as the selfish, hard brute he knows he is, but instead as the gentle, giving lover he wants so desperately to be. One who is worthy of someone as kind and vibrant as you, and not the trash you’d be better off leaving out on the street.

The tentativeness with which he kisses you tempers some as his tongue flicks out against your bottom lip. You answer his silent request with enthusiasm, your fingers burying themselves in his hair as you haul yourself closer. The moment Sanemi’s tongue sweeps into your waiting mouth, you buckle against him with the sweetest sigh he’s ever heard. One of pure relief, as though you’d been burning and he was your balm.

Ironic, considering he’s only adding gasoline to this fire between you.

But there’s nothing he can do now except allow the flames to consume you both.

Soon, the shy curiosity with which he explores your mouth gives way to a mutual hunger, evident by how he feels as though he’s boiling alive while you gasp and sigh into him, your fingers tugging pleadingly at his hair.

You want more, and he needs you, too.

His nose nuzzles against yours as he bends down, his hands running along the bare expanse of your legs. The ground beneath your feet disappears as Sanemi gathers you up easily into his arms.

One of your arms is looped around his neck while your other hand cups his face, turning it toward yours as he carries you to your bed. Your thumb smooths absently over the scar that cuts across his cheek and then your lips seek out his once more. His kiss is as gentle as the hand squeezing your waist, his fingers slotting into the gap between your sweatshirt and the top of your sleep shorts, stroking your skin.

He lays you out upon your mattress, grateful you’d at least purchased a full bed rather than some shitty twin. Your hands untangle themselves from his hair and instead seek out the waistband of your sleep shorts, but Sanemi covers them with his, halting you.

“Don’t,” he murmurs between quick, messy kisses. “Let me — please.”

Before you can respond, Sanemi sits back and grabs a fistful of his own shirt, yanking it over his head.

Your pupils blow wide at the sight of him and he feels himself hesitate. Sanemi has always felt an easy self confidence when it came to stripping in front of his partners for the night. He’d always been quite proud of his physique, relying on his considerable muscles to mask his deep loathing of his scars.

But in front of you, all sense of self-assuredness goes flying out the window, and suddenly he feels too exposed. His eyes drop to scour the planes of his chest — have his scars always been this prominent? This thick?

“Holy shit,” your soft sigh snaps his attention away from the howling inside his head. For one, petrifying moment, he thinks that you are as disgusted with his body as he is, but then he sees the pink flush staining your cheeks.

Your eyes roam hungrily over him and your tongue darts out to wet your lips. You meet his gaze and your pupils are blown wide with desire — rich, hot need for him.

Your voice is little more than a sultry whisper. “Come here.”

He moves eagerly to cover your body with his, his hair rumpled and his eyes bright as his lips press hurriedly against yours. Your hands smooth over his pectorals and tease down his abdomen until he’s panting, but the moment your nails rake along the skin on either side of his navel, Sanemi moans.

More. He needs more.

He hauls you up from the bed, straddling you across his lap, his hands notched behind your knees as they press into the mattress. You reconnect your lips in a heated kiss, one hand playing with the ends of his snowy hair, the other dropping down his back, settling over the brand seared between his shoulder blades. Covering it.

Yes, he thinks as he nips your bottom lip, urging your mouth to open so he can slide his tongue in to dance with yours. Yes, this is fitting. Because in his ideal world, his life with you would come before any other — including his with the Corps.

Sanemi’s lips begin trailing hotly down your jaw, pausing when he reaches your neck. He finds a particularly sensitive spot with a nip of his teeth that he soothes with his tongue, and he hums in approval at the faint, breathy whimpers that squeak past your lips as you tilt your head, offering more of yourself to him.

The ache burgeoning in his groin in response to your display is enough to drive him insane; he has never wanted anything in his life as badly as he wants this — you.

As his mouth continues its heated path, his hands find the hem of your hoodie. With a gentleness that surprises even him, Sanemi begins charting your skin with his fingers. With every new plane of your body he explores, he pushes your sweatshirt up, up, up, until he guides it over your head.

He tosses it to the side, not caring for where it lands. His attention is focused solely on you as you fall back against your bed, now bare from the waist up.

“Beautiful,” he marvels, eyes running over the slope of your shoulder and tracing the curve of your breasts. “So fuckin’ beautiful.”

He savors every hitched breath, every chill that ripples over your skin as he explores your body with his mouth and hands. Over the years, Sanemi has become well acquainted with the magic of the female body. He’s always liked how soft women were compared to him. He isn’t a picky man; he’ll celebrate them all, regardless of their shape or size.

But you? Celebration isn’t enough; you deserve nothing less than outright worship.

“You feel so damn good,” he mutters against your breast before closing his lips over your nipple and sucking hard. You bow off the bed with a keening moan that gutters out into something more ragged as his hand covers the other, pinching and rolling your stiffened bud between his fingers.

He could spend all night like this, lavishing your soft mounds with his mouth. But Sanemi knows that won’t be enough to satisfy the hunger gnawing at both of you, so with a tinge of regret, he forces himself to move on, descending your body in alternating kisses and nips.

He reaches the waistband of your shorts and his eyes flash to yours as he tugs on it with his teeth. The hot exhale of his breath below your navel sends goosebumps across your skin. Sanemi’s fingers inch below the hem of your shorts until he loops his hands around the waistband, and he yanks them down your legs in a single, fluid motion.

His eyes rake down your body, taking in every beautiful inch. A blush forms on his cheeks as he realizes all that separates you from him is your simple pair of black underwear.

He sits back, eager to join your near-nudity. His hands are quick, if not a little clumsy, as he finds his belt buckle. The instant the metal clicks and the leather around his hips loosens, Sanemi shoves off his pants, eagerly kicking them off your bed until he is left in nothing but his briefs.

Your eyes fall to where the evidence of his desire protrudes stiffly from between his legs. Sanemi watches your throat pulse as you try to stifle your small gulp, your thighs tensing beneath him in an effort to press together.

He can sense your nerves; can see by the way your eyes dart anxiously between his and the rigid tent in his briefs.

With a gentle smile, Sanemi leans in and soothes your unease with his lips. “We’ll take it as slow as you want. I’m not in any rush.”

“N-now?” You murmur between kisses, and he nearly seizes at the hesitant, questioning brush of your fingers against the underside of his shaft.

“Not yet,” he groans against your mouth. “I gotta make sure you’re ready first.”

“I am ready -“

“Not like that,” he cuts off your protest by ghosting his fingers up the covered seam of you. Sanemi circles his finger around where he thinks your clit is, and he smirks when your head tips back against your pillow, your mouth widening in a silent o.

“Found you,” he croons, repeating the movement again until your legs begin to twitch beneath him.

He makes quick work of your underwear, tossing them over the side of your bed without much thought. The sight of you bare beneath him nearly stops his heart dead in his chest. His eyes drop to the neat thatch of curls resting at the apex of your thighs, and his mouth waters.

You blush under the intensity of his appreciative stare, and your legs twitch, as though you mean to close them.

A hand sliding between your thighs restrains you from doing so. “Uh-uh,” he tuts. “Can’t hide from me now, sweetheart’.”

He smooths his hand down the length of your leg until it hovers just outside where he’s most eager to explore. The heat radiating from sends his pulse skyrocketing.

One, tentative finger circles your entrance, testing. Sanemi leans in to capture your lips with his as he pushes in, swallowing your soft gasp with his tongue that he slides into your parted mouth.

A moan vibrates in his chest in time with a faint whimper that sounds in the back of your throat as Sanemi begins exploring you. You’re tight; almost impossibly so, clenching and pulsing around the single finger he gradually sinks inside you, pushing deeper with every gentle pump of his hand.

The thought of your tight, wet heat constricting around the aching length of him just as you were around his finger makes him dizzy with want.

He won’t go down on you, he decides. Not tonight. Not when he’s throbbing this badly after just a couple of fingers; not when your breasts are so plush and soft pressed against his chest where you’re already arcing up into him, sending his mind wild with thoughts of how you’ll move under him; how you’ll moan.

His lips are hot against your neck, trailing down past your collarbone. Left behind are a series of purplish-maroon whorls blooming beneath his mouth, your skin quickly becoming a tapestry for him to display how badly he wants this. You.

You cling to him, one hand buried in his hair, pulling and tugging at him as the other clutches wildly at his shoulder, your fingers digging hard into his muscles. Your teeth are buried into your bottom lip in an effort to stifle your whimpers, but a needy whine slips out as Sanemi sucks one, soft breast into his mouth, his tongue flicking out across your pert nipple.

Another finger slides into your entrance as his thumb works your clit, and before long, you’re vibrating beneath him, unrestrained in how you moan and cry out for him so beautifully.

“Sanemi! I think — oh, I think I’m -“ but then he crooks his fingers, brushing against a rough spot deep within you that makes you writhe. You thrash back hard against the bed, your hips grinding against his hand with abandon.

He smothers a curse into your skin. You’re close and he knows it; can feel it in the way your walls flutter and pulse around him. And as desperate as he is to study how you fall apart, it’s too soon.

“Not yet,” he pants against your breast, circling your nipple with his tongue before imparting a final nip at the soft flesh and drawing back.

Remorseful, he pulls his fingers away from you, leaving you panting and flushed under him. But the hot, searing flames of desire burning beneath his skin intensify still, as he takes your hand and guides it between your legs.

“There. Feel how wet you are?” His voice is husky with want. You peer up at him through heavily lidded eyes as you nod, a whimper vibrating in your throat as Sanemi grinds your hand against your sensitive flesh.

“For you,” your voice is syrupy and warm, and damn if Sanemi doesn’t feel like he could get drunk on it. “It’s all for you.”

His tone sharpens into something possessive; hungry. “That’s right,” and he pushes your hand firmly against your clit and rotates it, eliciting a deep moan from you. “Because you’re mine.“

It’s not fair. But he wants to pretend like it’s true, if only for a while.

Once your fingers are sufficiently shiny with your own wetness, he brings your hand to his mouth, his tongue peeking out from between his lips. Slowly and languidly, he drags it up the side of your digits, and his eyes burn into yours as he slides your fingers into his mouth and sucks them clean.

It takes everything in him not to moan at the sweet taste of you that floods his tongue.

He’d made the right decision in not going down on you. If he had, he’d never be able to pull away; not until his face had become so adorned with your essence that he could not comprehend anything that wasn’t you. Not until you were trembling under him and begging for a break.

The first time you cum will be on him; with him. So as much as it pains him, he resists your temptation.

But not before you know; not before you understand exactly how wild you drive him. How much you threaten his sanity.

“Jesus Christ,” he rasps as he pulls your hand away from his mouth. “Here.”

His hand his gentle but firm as he grips your chin, squeezing your jaw until your mouth parts. The question in your gaze dissolves, your eyes instead rolling back into your head, as Sanemi slides the two fingers he’d just had between your thighs, still covered in your wetness, past your lips.

“Go on,” he orders, his other hand brushing your hair from your face. “Taste how fuckin’ perfect you are.”

The moan that slips free from your lips is one he wishes he could bottle up as your tongue caresses his fingers, your cheeks hollowing so fucking perfectly around him as you dutifully clean yourself from him.

Fuck, you’re trying to kill him.

But some of the burning he feels ebbs as the sobering weight of what’s to come settles over him; the magnitude of what he is about to do. Because no matter what happens after, nothing between you will be the same. Whatever else you are after tonight — whether that’s something or nothing — you will never be just friends again.

Sanemi supposes the punishment fits his crime; this is what he gets for getting in too deep with you, even if it means losing you entirely.

He chases away those thoughts by running his hands down your sides before he pulls back, leaving you in favor of shucking his briefs down his thighs.

Finally bare, he’s quick to drape his body over yours once more, his hands smoothing up and down your sides, unable to quench his need to feel your skin against his. But a foreign uncertainty stills him, and his eyes flash to yours, hesitant.

“Are you sure?”

You answer only by reaching to grip the back of his neck, tugging him down to meet your lips, your kiss feverish and urgent.

He doesn’t have a condom but he’s in too deep now to stop. In a way, what is about to happen is new to him as well. He’s never fucked anyone raw before. No matter who he’d had in his bed, no matter how much they begged him or assured him they were on birth control, he’d always been sure to have protection on hand.

Children are a gift, but he’d be damned if anyone tried to come after him and demand he raise one in his fucked up world. Either Sanemi got out or he never became a parent; there was no middle ground.

But once again, he is blurring boundaries where you were concerned, and Sanemi doesn’t think he knows how to stop himself from having the full taste in the indulgence that was you.

“It might hurt a moment,” he admits against your mouth, his voice raspy. “But I promise I’ll be gentle — as gentle as I can.”

You stretch to kiss him again, your lips soft and warm and everything he loves. “I trust you.”

You shouldn’t, he wants to say. You shouldn’t, and you should run far away from this — from me.

But Sanemi knows you won’t just as much as he knows he doesn’t have it in him to try and chase you away, and so he only kisses you back, slow and indulgent.

He breaks away from you with a soft groan and sits up on his knees. His back straight, Sanemi’s hands curl around your hips and he tugs you forward until your backside is flush against his thighs.

The heat radiating from you pulls him in like a magnet as he lines the tip of his cock up with your entrance. A vein above his brow ticks, the only outward sign of the battle raging within him as his self restraint wars with his tantalizing urge to impale you on the thick, throbbing length of him, desperate for the sweet relief only your body can give.

Every inch of him trembles as Sanemi presses his hips forward. “Fuck,” he exhales shakily, pushing his tip past your entrance. “Fuck.”

His head falls back and the muscles in his throat strain. Some small, needy sound leaves him and the fingers on your hip tighten nearly to the point of pain.

The noise registers in the back of your mind, and vaguely, you recognize it as a whimper. You wonder whether he makes that sound for the others; somehow you doubt it, given that he does it again, only now in the shape of your name.

The rumors always said he never asked for names; he was a one-and-done kind of man. A great fuck, but not someone to go to if you were looking for comfort; softness.

Once again, Sanemi is nothing but a collection of contradictions, especially where you’re concerned.

Sanemi hisses as he slowly eases into you. Despite your wetness, you’re impossibly tight, and your body is a live wire hell bent on pushing out his intrusion.

With a deep groan, he falls forward, one arm shooting out to land near your head to catch himself before he can crash into you. His weight carefully braced above you, Sanemi shifts, widening the stance of his knees. Your legs slide up his waist, locking at your ankles at the base of his spine.

His cock is barely a quarter of the way inside your heat when he pulls out. A whine of protest mounts in your throat, but it quickly flickers out when he presses his leaking tip to your clit and grinds. A soft moan slips out of you when he repeats the movement again, and your thighs widen, your hips tilting up to allow him easier access.

Sanemi circles the head of his cock once more against your sensitive nub, coating himself in more of your sticky wetness, before he slides back into your entrance. This time, your body parts more easily around him, sucking him in rather than trying to squeeze him out.

“There you go, that’s it,” his breath is hot against your ear, his lips trailing silkily across your jaw. “That’s my girl.”

Halfway in, Sanemi brushes against that thin barrier that separates him from the rest of you, and he stills.

He pulls his head back from your neck, and moves his hand out from between your legs to cup your cheek.

“Ready?” His thumb strokes over your cheekbone, tender and soft.

There is a tightness building in your abdomen, a foreign pressure that isn’t entirely unwelcome, but neither is it wholly comfortable. You brace a hand at your side, balling your sheets into your fist as you steady yourself, flushed and panting beneath the scar speckled man holding rigidly still above you.

Your eyes flick up once, and you see the tightness in his jaw; the tremble in his limbs as he fights against the urge to relief the friction mounting where you are joined.

You swallow around the lump of anticipation lodged in your throat. Your breath is shaky, but at last, you manage a single “Please.”

With a groan, he grips himself around his base and slowly, he presses forward. There is a sharp prick that shoots deep in your lower abdomen as Sanemi surges past that thin inner wall.

You cannot stop your cry of discomfort from ringing out anymore than you can stop the surprised tears which escape the corners of your eyes as the sharp pain between your legs intensifies.

But then Sanemi’s lips are there, kissing away your tears, and the hand he’d used to guide himself into your body skims along the outside of your thigh, hiking your leg higher up his waist before it drops to rub gentle circles into your hip.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs between soothing caresses of his lips against your cheeks and across your eyelids. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

He coos his string of apologies as his cock continues to push into you. On and on he sinks, his length endless, and you begin to think your body will split in two before you find the end of his.

Just before you reach your limit, Sanemi stills, fully embedded in your heat. He pants through gritted teeth, his jaw locked against the way you’re constricting around him so tightly it’s nearly painful.

It’s unreal; not only does Sanemi realize how much fucking better sex feels without the restriction of a condom, but he’s also bashed over the head with the realization that you were made for him. For nothing, no one has ever felt as incredible as you.

Nothing in his life has ever felt so right.

Sanemi has always been someone who fucks fast and hard. He’d had no objective other than to escape for a few, blissful moments in the body of another as he pretended not to feel the hollowness in his chest, or the throb of his own self-loathing.

With you, however, he wants nothing more than to relish every movement of your body against his, to savor your every gasp and sigh; to learn what makes you lose control.

You are no temporary distraction; he wants to know you.

He drops his forehead against yours and waits, allowing you to adjust to the intrusion of him.

He trails his lips across your collar bone and down to the twin swells of your breasts, sucking softly at your plush skin as you fidget and squirm beneath him. One broad hand skirts down the outside of your thigh until he finds your knee, and gently he guides your leg around his hips. The other he leaves relaxed against the bed, your foot resting somewhere against his calf.

When your eyes flutter open and find his, he knows you’re ready. So he moves his arm out from between your bodies and winds it instead around your waist, deepening the arch in your back until his chest is flush with yours.

His lips press to your forehead, a silent warning that he is about to move.

And then Sanemi begins molding your body to the shape of his.

He starts slow. He doesn’t withdraw far from you, instead focusing on rolling his hips against yours. Each churn of his groin pushes his cock deeper into your warmth, and soon, your timid whimpers melt into soft moans as your initial discomfort gives way to pleasure.

Encouraged by the way your body starts to relax in his embrace, Sanemi tests drawing his cock out a few inches before plunging back into you.

Before long, the room fills with the lewd sounds of skin slapping against skin, and Sanemi’s moans join yours as he rapidly becomes lost in the euphoria of your wet, tight heat.

One of your arms jumps to lock around his ribs, your nails sinking into his skin as you anchor yourself to him.

His hand snakes across the sheets in search of yours. When he finds it, fisted against your sheets, he pries your fingers loose, winding them with his and he wraps your arm around his shoulders.

“Tighter,” he gasps. “Hold me tighter. Please.”

Your fingers dig into the muscles of his back and Sanemi groans his approval.

And then he’s rolling to his side, pulling you along with him until you’re stretched out across the length of your mattress, chest to chest.

His hand grips under your thigh, tugging it over his hip as he rocks harder into you. “Talk to me, angel,” the hand under your thigh moves to splay across your rear, pushing and pulling your hips in time with his as he grinds. “Tell me how you feel — tell me what you want.”

You cry out, mournful, as Sanemi draws out his cock nearly to its tip before he plunges back into you.

The fullness you feel is overwhelming. You can’t stand that empty feeling, even for a moment. So you hitch your leg higher around his hip, and dig the heel of your foot into the firmness of his ass, limiting his movements.

“Closer!” You gasp. “I — I need you closer.”

He needs that too, he decides; craves it. He doesn’t want to feel any space between your bodies. He wants — he needs — to be so enraptured with you that there is no point in trying to separate. That way, he might get to keep you for just a little longer.

Sanemi’s hand massages your backside, his cock throbbing with every push into you. “Deeper,” he confirms between throaty groans. “You want me deeper?”

You bury your face into his shoulder. Your teeth sink into his skin and with a moan, you nod.

He can do that; is more than happy to, as a matter of fact.

So, with a faint snarl, Sanemi grips the fat of your ass and spreads you wide, and he begins thrusting, hard.

The new angle allows the tip of his cock to bump up against a sweet spot deep inside you. Sanemi’s eyes narrow at the way your head drops back, a loud cry tearing from your throat.

Determined to hit that point within you again and again, he shifts his hips under you while hiking your leg higher up his hip, his fingers digging into the curve of your ass.

It’s a success; soon, your wails echo throughout your studio, punctuated by every punishing slap of his skin against yours.

Really, he can’t give less of a damn at how thin your apartment walls are. The sounds pouring from your mouth are the prettiest fucking thing he’s ever heard.

Something hot and electric mounts quickly in your stomach with each of his frenetic movements. You’ve come before with your own hand, but this — this is something different. Something far more intense, something that threatens to rip you apart from your very sanity until you know nothing but him.

You try and tell him you’re losing control but all that comes out is a pitiful whimper.

But he knows; he knows exactly what you need.

“I’m here, baby, I’m here. I’ve got you.” And with that, Sanemi rolls you back underneath him, settling into the cradle of your thighs and pushing his cock faster and deeper into you. His arms gently unwind yours from his shoulders, and he brings them up over your head, one large hand pinning them down.

“I’ll take care of you, sweet girl,” he promises, and he weaves the fingers of the hand keeping you pressed against the mattress with your own. “Just keep your legs around me.”

Your thighs squeeze his waist in silent answer, your mind far too suspended in the throes of your pleasure to do anything else.

With his lips trailing along your neck leaving hot, open-mouthed kisses in its wake, his free hand slides between your sweat-slicked bodies. He wedges it between where his groin is pressed to yours, and he searches along your sensitive, swollen folds, seeking the spot between your thighs that made you tremble and whine for him earlier.

You jolt under him as his fingers find you again, that foreign, electric sensation sparking deep in your abdomen. “Sanemi —“

“It’s okay,” he murmurs sweetly, pressing down on your clit until you arch further into him with a gasp. “It’s gonna feel so good, baby, I promise. Just focus on me.”

Each rotation of his hand against your sensitive bead matched the deep, pointed roll of his groin, with Sanemi capping the end of every powerful thrust with alternating pulses of his thumb. The pressure he uses mounts with every churn of his hips, and the moan vibrating in your chest as another surge of sticky wetness gushes from your thighs is the sweetest sound he thinks he’s ever heard.

A broken chant of please please please stutters its way out of you, spurning him to go faster; hit deeper.

And Sanemi only knows how to oblige you.

“You’re doing so fucking good, sweetheart. Just keep letting me take care of you —- that’s it.” He curses as you clench down around him, crying out in approval at his praise. “Yeah, yeah. You’re my fuckin’ girl, aren’t you?”

A single wail of his name is your only response, but it’s enough of a confirmation to damn you both.

“You are,” he affirms, his voice taking on the timber of a growl. “Mine. You’re fuckin’ mine.”

His thrusts grow sloppier with every second, though each is punctuated by a silent, recurring chant of mine, mine, mine. Though your eyes are closed, Sanemi can spy a faint sliver of white peeking out from between your eyelids.

You’re close; he can feel it. And he knows, as the walls of your cunt flutter and tighten around him, that your climax will be his undoing.

The hands he has pinned against the mattress over your head flex as you twist and writhe beneath him. your head tosses from from side to side, and the vibrato of your cries rises octave by octave. Every muscle in your body is tense; you are a live wire thrumming with a need to come apart that he knows you do not fully understand.

Sanemi grunts as he fucks you harder into your bed, no longer concerned with keeping his weight off you. He will show you; he will show you how to shatter, and then he too, will break.

But he needs to see you, first.

“Look at me,” his voice beckons you back from the precipice of ruin. “Look at me, Y/N.”

Your eyes open to meet his and suddenly you’re right back at that edge, only this time, you’re falling freely over it, plummeting down a drop that has no end.

“S-Sanemi —!” It’s all you can manage before the knot steadily building in your stomach unravels. Your back arcs sharply away from your bed, and Sanemi ducks his head to smother his own cry against your breast as he takes its tip into his hot mouth.

Your hips jerk and twitch against his, your cunt seizing around him with force that threatens to squeeze the life out of him. Above you, your arms strain and pull against his grip as you writhe and sing for him.

“That’s it baby, that’s it,” Sanemi’s praise is muffled against your sternum, though it is strangled as he nears his own end. “Fuck!“

He’ll have to buy you the morning-after pill tomorrow, he realizes as you continue to come apart so beautifully on his cock, a soft chant of his name the only thing on your lips. He will not force you to bear the consequences of his own selfishness; he will not saddle you with his burden.

But he’s also not strong enough to pull out; not when your body feels like it was made for him, not when your sweet cunt is gripping him this hard, is this wet — all because of him.

He is selfish and he is weak; it’s a toxic combination, and yet he knows cannot stop.

Sanemi’s hips snap a final time against yours, pushing them up and away from the mattress, pressing deeper than he thought possible. His eyes roll back as his own orgasm rocks through him, powerful and blinding, and the growl that built in his throat melts into a strained groan.

He holds you in place, his cock pulsing in time with your cunt while the two of you ride out the waves of your climax together, his cum steadily filling you with his warmth. Your hands skirt down the length of his arms, blindly searching for his hips. When you find him, you pull and tug, a faint whine sounding from the back of your throat. Sanemi answers your plea with a broken moan of his own and he rocks against you, your hips circling with his until he finally lets you collapse against your mattress, limp-limbed and exhausted.

He follows you down, smothering you with his weight as he clings to you like a lifeline, his face buried in the crook of your neck.

“Fuck, you did so good, sweetheart. So fuckin’ good.” He moans into your ear before he pulls back, his eyes searching your face as he pants.

One hand cradles your jaw and his thumb strokes repeatedly over the flushed curve of your cheek. “You okay?”

You don’t answer right away, your eyes shut tight, and Sanemi feels panic bubble hot in his stomach. The hand cupping your face tightens with his worried call of your name, his fear rearing its ugly head, ready to rip him apart, to turn him into the horrid monster he’s always known he was —

“I love you,” and then you’re peering up at him, eyes round and shining with emotion he does not deserve to feel. “I love you, Sanemi.”

It would’ve hurt less if you’d shot him.

Whatever wall remained around his heart cracks and crumbles under the weight of your confession. Sanemi does not answer, cannot find the words to adequately capture the depth of his feelings.

Instead, he snatches you up into his arms, crushing your body against his.

He kisses your lips and then your cheek. One hand cups the back of your head, his fingers burying into your hair as he presses your face into his chest. His arms tremble as he holds you close, every hard ridge of him cradled against your soft curves. He feels your smile against his collarbone, and the way your fingers dance up and down his spine that makes him melt.

It hits him, then. You aren’t waiting for an answer — you said it only so he would know, and you’d not expected anything in return.

All you’d done was give while he took and took. Your body. Your love.

He doesn’t deserve any of it.

Whatever or whomever came after this would never compare to you. Truthfully, Sanemi doesn’t think it would be worth trying anything different. Everything now began and ended with you — including him.

He twists his head to kiss you again and again, your lips meeting his with a sleepy enthusiasm.

He pants as he breaks away. “‘M gonna pull out — might be uncomfortable for a second.”

You wince at the sudden stab of cold left behind by Sanemi’s retreating warmth. He shifts back onto his knees and slides his hands down your thighs, parting them.

A low whistle blows past his lips. “Damn, I made a mess outta you.”

For a moment, Sanemi can’t tear his eyes away from the sight between your legs; the sight of him trickling out you, staining the sheets below. But some of that hot, possessive pride that wells in his chest tempers at the small smear of blood staining your inner thigh.

His fingers massage your legs in silent apology. “Let me clean you up.”

Your hands shoot to grasp at his shoulders, a pleading whimper on your lips. “Don’t leave — not yet.” You bite your lip, your eyes wide and anxious. “Please, can you just hold me for a bit?”

Sanemi’s eyes soften and his heart throbs painfully in his chest. He can’t imagine leaving you; not now, not ever. No matter how stupid and selfish that makes him.

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t know the source of your anxiety — or that you didn’t have reason for it. Sanemi isn’t known for lingering.

But this is different — you’re different. You’re not some temporary distraction. You’re everything. His everything.

“Shhh,” he maneuvers you easily atop him, settling you in against the length of his torso, his hands smoothing up and down the column of your spine. “I’m staying right here, sweet girl. I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

He seals his promise with a gentle kiss against your forehead before laying his cheek against your temple, cradling you to his chest.

Finally, you relax against him, convinced. He lays with you for a long time after, one hand on the back of your head, his fingers rubbing against your scalp until you fall asleep on against him, safe and sound and warm.

Minutes pass, or maybe hours. But Sanemi’s head does not quiet, not even under the soothing sounds of your deep, slow breaths as you dream.

He must have lost his mind. There is no other explanation for the way he’s disregarded every rule, every boundary he’s ever made sense of, all in the name of you. In a single evening, you managed to obliterate every last defense, every barricade he’d safely cowered behind, and now that the castle has fallen, he isn’t quite sure what he’s supposed to do with the rubble.

What he does know is that there’s no putting things back to how they were.

His eyes search your sleeping face because if you were able to make him question nearly everything that made sense in his life, then surely you must also have the answers he needs to re-strike balance in his tilted world. Maybe they lie among the lashes that tickle your cheek, or in the occasional twitch of your mouth between your deep inhales.

But Sanemi is only left feeling more confused the longer he watches you. Because, despite the way he feels vulnerable and exposed at how easily he has been stripped of his guard, he can’t quite bring himself to believe it was entirely your doing.

His eyes widen. There’s his answer.

Perhaps you are not trying to sink your nails into his flesh to peel it back, to demand he be stripped to the bone for you to inspect, to scrutinize and use as you please.

Perhaps that is what you’ve done to yourself, and you’re waiting to see if you will join you; to know if he can volunteer his vulnerability, rather than wait for someone to come and force it from him.

He cannot make any promises. He has spent so much of his life cowering behind the armor he crafted out of his scars and his sneers and barks that were always more ferocious than his bite, that he does not know how to take it off. He does not know how to navigate the world without its weight, both his safety net and his chain. And there is an understanding in your eyes that signals you know that, too.

But he can try.

He mouths I love you against your hairline — he does not voice it, not yet, though it’s what he feels. But your love is a compass that just might point him down the road the leads to a life he so desperately wants; to you.

And he’ll get there, maybe.

In time.

LIKES, REBLOGS, COMMENTS APPRECIATED!

[readychilledwine]

Flight Patterns pt 4

Summary- After years of hushed whispers and leads, Azriel has finally found Cassian's lost sister, Aerilyn. What he found with her was unexpected, though.

Warnings- character injury, miscommunication, mutual pinning

A/N- I had originally planned on this ending at a different point, but I liked how where it ends now flows into what is going to happen in the next chapter. If you all remember my poll from earlier, you may know where this is going. You aren't getting smut, yet, but you will get some romance, and some dragon time, in the next chapter.

Series Masterlist

Aerilyn needed this to stop being the norm.

In the mornings, she would eat breakfast with her favorite trio of winged idiots, train, then find herself changed into a pretty dress and curled up in Rhysand's office while he worked.

It never took long, and it appeared today it wouldn't either. Rhys would come to the couch sitting close to her and using the glass coffee table as a desk instead of the large rich mahogany one. Sometimes it turned into him laying with her between his legs, reclined back deep into a report while she either read or slept. Sometimes soft brushes of skin would haunt her in her sleep until the next day when the cycle began again.

The relationship, if she felt bold enough to call it that, between them had started to head into a direction Aerilyn knew she didn't understand. When Rhys touched her, if felt like she was alive for the first time. Even just his hand brushing her thigh as he'd reach for the expensive wine she'd begun to associate with the smell of him had her soul dancing.

And, Aerilyn, despise all the languages she spoke, all the places she had traveled, her knowledge of beasts thought to be extinct, and her, unknown to her, powers did not understand what was happening.

She didn't understand the sudden shift in her heart rate when she'd see him in the mornings.

She didn't understand the sudden need to be around him, the desire to be close to him.

She didn't understand a thing about love.

Nor how to act on those feelings.

Rhysand was rarely accused of being a patient male. He'd heard no from his father many times, but rarely from a female. To his credit, though, he was trying.

Trying to be calm when her scent hit him.

Trying to be calm when she'd fall asleep between his legs, head resting in his chest as if his heartbeat was her personal lullaby.

Trying to be calm when they'd find their faces inches apart when they would tease each other and playfully argue.

Rhys dodged a well timed punch from Azriel. The three brothers were enjoying a mid-afternoon training session. All three of them had grown tired of reports, of being trapped inside, and were all eager to blow off steam.

They smiled at each other, a knowing look shared. “Get your head back into training, lover boy,” Azriel circled him. “Thinking about Ari a bit too much lately.”

Rhysand's eyes glanced to where she currently sat, a book in her hands that she had not been able to put down the past day or so. Her long dark hair had been fishtailed to the side with a few loose curls falling and framing her face. She was wearing one of his sweaters and black leggings, her cheeks and the tip of her nose slightly pinked from the cold.

Rhys was so distracted by his mate, by her beauty, that he hadn't noticed Azriel going for a leg sweep that caught him in his knees. He felt his back hit the ground, and then his breath leaving his lungs. Cassian's booming laugh could be heard the second he realized what had happened. Aerilyn had stood, concern flooding down the bond, as Azriel celebrated.

Rhys blinked a few times, pulling himself up and glaring as Azriel flipped him off, a rare large smile on his face.

Rhys was not a patient male, but Gods he was trying. He just wished trying didn't come at the expense of his pride.

Aerilyn closed her eyes, relaxing into Rhysand as he flew her to the dragon pit. He had started taking her once a week. Enjoying the 15 minutes he had her in his arms and her enjoying them silently as well.

He wanted to negotiate snowfall in Velaris this year with Enlil and Eirwen. He had purchased Eirwen two beautiful spools of a soft fabric with hand sewn in bead and gem work. Aerilyn had warned him Hestia may have become jealous, so the High Lord had also purchased Hestia, a large raw cut diamond. For Enlil, he had Azriel travel to Day, asking Helion for help collecting one of the sharp strange flora that bloomed there. He had put it in a pot that was enchanted to ensure it always had what it needed. “Do you think they'll give us extra snow?” He tried to hide a smile at the idea. “Just a few inches, of course. It will help with our yearly snowball fight.”

Aerilyn popped her eyes open, admiring his full-blown smile as a nervous butterfly feeling set in her stomach. “Snowball fight?”

Rhys smiled into her hair. “Every year, Cassian, Azriel, and I have a snowball fight for solstice. Azriel has won the past several years, and I'm thinking extra snow may throw him off.” He looked down at her as he landed. “Thoughts?”

She knew he already knew her thoughts and feelings on it. He was in her head constantly. On accident, on purpose, for fun. It should have annoyed her, but his occasional sass filled responses to her thoughts were a constant comfort as she continued to adapt to being around civilization.

“I do not believe additional snow is going to affect Azriel's ability to throw a snowball. It may, however, increase the amount he throws.” Rhysand's smile dropped, having not thought about that aspect, but it was too late to turn back. The noise of content growls, and chirps could be heard as Aerilyn entered the pit.

He'd never get over seeing her like this. The overwhelming sense of peace that'd wash over her when she'd place her head on Enlil snout. The way the two of them glowed with power and love.

He moved away, giving them their private greeting as he looked to Eirwen. The beautiful dragoness had herself curled into several spools of fabric his own mother would have fought for while she was alive. They were heavy cottons. soft, silky, warm, and clearly from somewhere overseas based on the deep royal purple and red hues. She opened an ice-like eye at him, huffing slightly as he opened his pocket world and pulled out those glittering fabrics. Enlil and Aerilyn had moved, his mate riding on her mounts claw instead of walking.

“You have her attention.” And Aerilyn had his. His mind went completely blank as he watched her being so carefree, so untouched by fear that she wasn't even holding on as Enlil walked with her towards the opening of the pit.

She was a goddess. Long dark hair, her skin faintly glowing.

Aerilyn shifted under his gaze, “Are you okay?”

Clearing his throat, Rhys went back to the task at hand. Snowfall, snowball fight. He kept repeating to himself over and over again. Snowfall, snowball fight. He watched as Eirwen gently put a claw out, and Aerilyn moved towards them. She laid the fabric on the claw, allowing the dragoness to look it over. “It's hand-made,” Rhys began explaining. “Each diamond and crystal is stitched one by one. It reminded us of snowfall, of you.” Rhys paused as Enlil huffed, and two dragons began to exchange looks and noises.

Rhys moved to Aerilyn as they watched the two have their discussion. “She's beautiful,” the High Lord observed. “I understand now why so many of her kind were hunting for their scales.” Aerilyn hummed. The sad noise hitting Rhysand square in his chest. “She is safe her-” he paused a brow, raising as Enlil gently put his head to Eirwen, the two drakes both shutting their eyes. “They're-”

“Mates,” Aerilyn finished. “That's why she will never have another rider. He wouldn't let a fae or human near her.” She paused head cocking To the side and eyes going white. “They will consider allowing Velaris more snowfall this year. He appreciates your efforts.”

She came back to him seconds later after a small smile. “I believe today is Achlys turn to play. Is it not?”

Rhys had already begun moving towards the large male dragon. “It is. What do they eat, by the way?”

Aerilyn just smirked, fingers mindlessly lacing into Rhysand's as he pulled her towards the glistening scales and starlit cove Achlys had made for himself. “Whatever they want.”

The table was quiet as Rhys read the report Azriel had given him over and over again.

Aerilyn had felt the flash of anger coming down the bond and was giving him the simple comfort of her hand in his. She was ignoring the occasional squeeze. The soft grip and release was almost rhythmic following his eyes as he read the same paragraph over and over.

“We can't delay it,” Azriel’s voice was soft and cold. “If the rumors are true, and they appear to be, we need to be there when she arrives.”

Cassian almost growled. “There's no damn reason for her to be going there, and going without approaching the High Lord or General of the army is an insult.”

Rhys nodded, turning to Aerilyn, “Will you be okay here, alone, for a few days?”

Aerilyn made a face, eyes wide. “Mor and Amren?”

“Will be coming with. If you would like to go to Windhaven, that is fine. I just figured-”

Cassian interrupted, voice hard and cold. “We are not taking my baby sister to Windhaven. We just saved her from those woods. We aren't dragging her back there because Amarantha can not follow court protocols.”

Aerilyn watched as Mor and Amren came in, taking their seats. Mor tossed a letter to Rhysand. It had a seal Aerilyn knew from her travels and a soft sprawling writing that indicated it was from a female. “Oh, I can already tell you know who that's from,” Mor's tone was far from the playful manner Aerilyn had grown used to. Her face showed no sign of amusement as she poured herself a heavy glass of wine. “She's up to something. She has to be.”

Amren nodded, taking the seat next to Azriel. “We should probably discuss this without certain ears here.”

Aerilyn felt the gaze shift to her. She stood, taking her wine, and left the room, allowing hushed whispers to restart. She had no clue who Amarantha was, no clue why she was here or why the Inner Circle was worried about her, but she knew one thing.

That string that connected her to Rhysand had gone cold.

Whatever Amarantha was, whatever she was here to do, is what Rhys was trying to protect her from.

And all knowing they were keeping this from Aerilyn did was cause her to feel both left out and very, very angry.

She entered her room, shutting the door softly and locking it. Walking out to the balcony, she whistled and waited.

The seal was from Hybern.

This Amarantha was heading to Illyria.

Aerilyn had spent years hiding in the Illyrian woods, unseen, untouched, unknown other than to small children who would whisper legends of a ghost haunting the trees. It would not be hard for her to find an out of place Hybern female in the Steppes.

Enlil hovered at the balcony, getting as close as he could, and Aerilyn jumped. “Home,” she patted him softly. “Take me home.”

It had taken much longer than Rhysand had hoped for the Inner Circle to reach a plan on what to do when Amarantha arrived.

The Hybern general had planned on visiting Illyria first, hoping to meet with the camp leaders alone, then coming to the Moonstone Palace and the Court of Nightmares.

No matter how loudly Cassian protested, how much anger he put into his debate, the decision had been unanimous:

Aerilyn would come to the camps and to the Palace.

They all agreed, the young female needed to know who they were dealing with, what she looked like, and be able to make her own plan of attack and safety for herself and her drakes with that information.

Rhys knocked on her door. “Aerilyn Darling, can I come in?”

Silence.

Dead silence.

He knocked again, “Ari, I know you're upset. Let me explain,” he opened the door, hoping to force her to listen.

Only the room was empty and dark.

Her scent barely lingered, meaning she hadn't been in there for a while. Panic hit him quickly when he saw the open balcony door. He took a few quick breaths, hoping she had just gone on a quick flight and would return home.

He went back downstairs, holding eye contact with Azriel, who had put on his leathers and weapons. “Aerilyn-”

“Is back in Illyria. She just got back to the cave we found her at. I've had shadows watching in case this happened. I'm going now.”

Rhys shook his head. “I'll go,” he moved to the doorway. “The plan stays the same. Be in Illyria tomorrow. Amren will stay and handle the court.”

Azriel and Cassian nodded.

“I'll take her to Mom's cabin,” the statement was directed to Cassian. “She will be safe.”

Rhys winnowed directly to the cave, finding Aerilyn sitting on the ground, her mount long gone. “Darling, why did you leave?” Her eyes went to him wide with shock as she poked the fire she had made with a stick. He motioned around the cave where shadows were dancing and very alive. “Azriel had his shadows watching in case you ran.”

She glared at the shadow that approached and touched her nose before running back to its sibling. “Tell your dad he's a fucking busy body.”

Rhys sat across from her, taking in the cave where a single thrown together bed sat. It had a single fur blanket on top of fabrics laid on the rocks for cushion and no pillow. It reminded him of a war tent. Ready to be moved and sacrificed at just the right time. “No wonder you had trouble sleeping in your bed for a week,” he continued looking around, his heart shattering as he realized the conditions his mate survived under. “What did you do for food?” He almost didn't want to know the answer, avoiding her eye as she sighed and stretched.

“Stole from the Camps in the dead of night or hunt and gather,” her voice was distant. “Did someone follow you?”

Rhys rose a brow, looking towards where Aerilyn was. “No, darling. I came alone.”

She shook her head, eyes staying locked on the entrance before grabbing a throwing knife that was next to her. “No, dearest, you didn't.” Aerilyn moved, blocking Rhys as the snap of a bow was heard.

She flinched as she was hit, blinking slowly to process what was happening. An arrow had embedded itself into her right shoulder, and Rhys instantly reached for her, winnowing her to his mother's cabin right as another hit her in the leg.

Aerilyn felt like her skin was on fire, ash and faebane beginning to seep into her bloodstream as she laid panting. Wherever Rhys had taken her was warm and felt safe. She used the last of her magic to push that down the bond to Enlil, begging him to remain in the dragon pit.

Rhys scrambled, calling for Azriel and Cassian as he gathered supplies to heal his mate. He could feel her drift off in the bond, her body falling into a deep state of sleep as he began removing the arrows. To his shock, they weren't Illyrian. He shook the gut feeling, pushing it down as far as he could while he held a cloth to the bleeding wound.

Azriel appeared with Cassian seconds later. “What the fuck happened?”

Rhys shook his head. Focusing on his mate. “I was followed. She figured it out before I did somehow. She blocked me.” The last part had Rhys knitting his brow, confusion setting down deep as he pulled the second arrow out, trying to instantly erase the sounds of her pain from his mind.

Azriel took the arrow, looking it over. “I'll go look into it.”

Cassian kneeled down next to his sister, stroking her sweat soaked hair back. “I'm coming with you.” He took a heavy breath, eyes locked on Aerilyn's unconscious form. “You better ask your questions quickly when we find them, Az. Because I'm going to kill them.”

Rhys didn't even respond. Aerilyn's shields had dropped completely. She was unknowingly sending everything down the bond to him. Her confusion, her fear, her pain. All of it began to lace together with her thoughts.

Thoughts that soon were turning into a dream.

A dream that had Rhysand promising to himself he would make it come true.

He would just have to bring himself to be the one to break their current never-ending cycle of tension, and Rhys never had an issue being the one to make the first move.

Taglist : @kemillyfreitas @jesssicaparlon @elijahssuit @biancabldss @hellwantfuckme @justdreamstars @sidthedollface2 @mis-lil-red @lovemesomevesey @coisas-da-dani

(Currently working on the few struck out usernames. I have you on my list, but for some reason tumblr won't let me tag you)

[olderthannetfic]

Per the conversation about how people use suicide or self-harm threats as manipulation and you have to give up that you can “save” them in order to get over it: I think it was “crisis friends” who did this in situations where I fundamentally could not do anything that helped me with that. I had a friend who seemed to always have her “I think I’m going to kill myself” and then if you didn’t respond immediately “and see, no one cares” when I was traveling in a situation that (at that time, in the early 2010s) I couldn’t get WiFi or even a mobile connection on my phone — for instance, she’d always seem to do this when I got on an airplane, or on a long subway ride where it went underground. Along with that I eventually realized this pattern was no accident, like, what can I do when I was literally not available to get in contact with her in any way? (And she was also in a different time zone from me, too. If she needed genuine support she probably would’ve asked someone closer to home.)

She legitimately did have serious mental issues — so did the horrible roommate who also gaslit me, so do a lot of these people — but that still doesn’t mean that you’re at fault because you can’t suspend your whole life to take care of them. People can be genuinely hurting and also be abusive shitty people.

I think that those extreme experiences help you really to understand how the mental health struggles of people in your social circles are not your responsibility— they CAN’T be — and help you realize you aren’t a bad person for just preemptively muting vent channels or keeping your distance from people who pull that shit on the regular. It’s the same as how you often have to get picky about which charities you donate to bc you probably don’t have infinite money. You don’t have infinite care or time or energy to go around either, and it’s fair to get tired of spending it on people who are constantly demanding it, and instead reserve it for true friends in a genuine once-in-a-while crisis. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is such a popular story for a reason.

Your mental health problems are not your fault, but they are your responsibility.

--

[ordinaryschmuck]

Full Family AU Part 25

It was recess time for Luz's grade, all her classmates running around on the playground equipment, screaming off the top of their lungs, pretending to eat wood chips, and being too much for the supervising teachers to keep up with. Luz, in particular was walking around, holding a notepad and a crayon she borrowed from inside. She then walked over to three boys on the jungle gym, literally hanging around.

"Hello!" Luz chirped, hiding her nerves. "I'm pretending to be a news reporter. Want to answer some questions?"

The boys all either nodded or mumbled a, "Yes." Luz smiled as she flipped open her pad to a page. At the top were the words "Having a sibling," with a line going down the middle, one side labeled as "Good" and another labeled as "Bad."

"First question," she said. "Do any of you have siblings?"

Two of the boys raised their hands.

"I don't," the third said. "But I can do this."

He then proceeded press his hands against his cheeks and blow a raspberry. It got his friends to laugh, but Luz wasn't in a laughing mood.

"For you two, would you say it's good or bad to have a sibling?"

"Bad," both said, making Luz look up from her notepad in shock.

"Really? You both think that?"

"Yeah," one said. "My little brother gets more toys than me on Christmas. I barely got everything on my list last year while he got literally everything."

"And I have an older brother," the other boy claimed. "He's always so mean to me. Sitting on top of me, farting in my face, calling me a 'Buttwipe.' I don't even know why, he just does it."

"That's...interesting to know," Luz told them. "Thank you for your time."

She walked away from them, adding two notches to the bad side of her paper.

'So, it's not good to have a young or older sibling,' Luz thought. 'Is Vee older than me? Or am I older? Does that mean I have to be mean? But I don't want to be mean...'

Luz eventually made her way over to a girl sitting in a patch of dirt, drawing circles with a stick.

"Hello," Luz said, getting her attention. "What'cha doing?"

"Drawing circles," Bobbi responded. "What are you doing?"

"Playing reporter. Can I ask you what having a sibling's like?"

"Oh."

"But my cousins do," the girl spoke up, more attentive. "They're twins."

"Oh!" Luz held up her notepad in anticipation. "They have to get along, right?"

"Not really," the girl said with a shrug, causing Luz to frown. "They fight a lot. Every time I see them, in fact."

"Oh...good to know..." Luz trudged off, adding two extra notches in the "Bad" side.

'There has to be someone who has good siblings...'

So, she set out to talk to everyone in her playground, hoping to find at least one notch in the good side of her paper.

Only to be met with a similar pattern of answers.

"My sister got an ice cream for getting hurt, but I couldn't get any! Even though I cried a lot for one!"

"My brother won't stop screaming when Mommy tries to feed him. How is it so hard to eat?"

"I can't even play with my brother without Mom saying I'm being too rough. Kevin was rough with me, why can't I be rough with Dylan?"

"She won't stop crying!"

"I wish I was an only child..."

Kid after kid after kid had the same thing about how awful it is having a sibling. Each answer was worse than the other, with Luz sitting up against the monkey bars, staring at the several notches she made on the bad side. The only ones that were on the good side were just notches that carried over from the bad because Luz ran out of room. Tears started to fill in Luz's eyes as worry began to grow in her heart.

'If having a sibling is this bad...what are me and Vee going to be like...?'

[annalu86]

I do details.

“What was yours and Isabel’s wedding like?” The question is so casual. The immediate response is a toothbrush clattering into the sink.

“What?” Lucy was ready for the level of surprise in Tim’s voice when he managed to reply.

“We were called to a fight at a wedding reception today, the father of the bride had had far too much to drink and got into a fist fight with the best man over some comments in his speech” Lucy was clearly enjoying recounting the drama “apparently the bride had dated a few of the grooms friends before they decided to settle down together and her father wasn’t happy with that being joked about!” Lucy looked at Tim but as always was disappointed that he wasn’t as invested as she was in the lives of complete strangers. “Anyway, it got me thinking. You’ve never mentioned your wedding, now I’m curious”

Tim was now stood in the doorway, eyebrows raised. He was ready for bed in an old T-shirt and shorts, bags under his eyes, very ready for their shared day off the next day.

“You’re surprised I haven’t told you about my wedding. To my ex-wife?” He remained in the door way, watching her sat on the bed rubbing in hand cream. She looked curious, but calm. He felt This could only go badly but he didn’t want to come across secretive.

“I’m just surprised I don’t know anything about it, other than your age. I don’t know the date, the location, the style. Anything!”

“And you want to know these things?” Tim really couldn’t understand why. Lucy had supported him through the very end of his marriage, she knew all about the toughest times they had been through but only a smattering of the good.

“I do” Lucy grinned at her own pun. Tim rolled his eyes.

“Ok. We got married in May, the exact day doesn’t matter. Near Isabel’s home town, a church and then an elderly relatives garden for the reception. Style? We were young, we didn’t want to spend much. It wasn’t fancy but it was..” he paused, was it wrong to say perfect. It had felt it at the time. Was it a disservice to describe it any other way, but how would Lucy feel?

“It sounds perfect” Lucy finished for him. He walked over and sat on his side of the bed, not getting under the covers, ready to answer more questions. “What was Isabel’s dress like?” She was smiling and he felt himself relax a little more.

“Traditional? Big, white and fluffy. I think Isabel would have like more of the glitz” he looked Lucy in the eye, knowingly “but that’s not really me.”

She laughed “no, it’s not”

Tim reached over and pulled Lucy, already dressed and ready for bed, over on top his side. Her head on his chest and his fingers tracing patterns onto her arm.

“What about you?” It was definitely easier to ask her this without her looking at him.

“Hmm?”

“What do you imagine your wedding will look like” he swallowed heavily.

“My wedding?” She turned her face to look up into his.

“If you could have anything you wanted” he gazed back down at her. Taking her hand in his and circling his long calloused fingers around her ring finger slowly.

“I’m not sure, it’s not something I dreamed about as a girl. I wouldn’t want a big wedding, I’d maybe be happy to elope” she glances up to see a slight look of surprise on his face “I’d want Tamara with me of course, she’d never forgive me. But I think I’d be ok to leave the drama of my mother behind” Tim kisses the top of her head as she continues. “A beach maybe, or even vegas! A dress with flowing sleeves, maybe some

Colour and sushi!” She was starting to enjoy this “we definitely have to have sushi. We could invite some of the guys from work Angela, of course, Nyla, Nolan. Genny and the boys.” She stopped suddenly. It had not escaped either Tim or Lucy that she has switched from ‘I’ to

‘We’. Tim had stopped moving his hand in hers.

To Lucy it felt like hours passed, she was just about to open her mouth to attempt some damage control when

“Nolan? I don’t dislike him but you want him at our wedding?”

“I thought I could have whatever I wanted?” She smiled against his chest

“But Nolan?”

They talked like this for a while longer, until Lucy heard Tim’s breathing start to slow, his hand dropped from her back where it had been drawing patterns.

“Tim?” She whispered. No response, instead of waking him she climbed off the bed and found a blanket to drape of his before climbing under the covers herself.

She felt proud of them. Their relationship was anything but traditional, they knew each other so well and their connection was so strong that when Tim had finally asked Lucy out it had felt like they had agreed to a

Whole life together. Not just a date. It was easy to just assume they were on the same page but tonight they had managed to confirm it.

As she was drifting off to sleep she smiled thinking about the last think he had said to her before falling asleep him self.

“I’d go to the court tomorrow, all That matters is you”

[indiaalphawhiskey]

Hi there. I was not a fan during LHH so I found your tags (agreeing with Gina's reply to an anon) interesting. I didn't realize that phase represented a rebellion for him. What else did he do to show his femme side during that period? Thanks!

Hey, love. I don’t have too much energy tonight, so I’m going to try and answer this as concisely as possible, but still give context.

Just to give a bit of personal background, I came into the 1D (not yet Larry, until about 4-5 months afterwards) fandom in 2015, right before Zayn left, so most of my observations are retrospective, vis-a-vis how I’m seeing the GP/hets react to LHH now.

So, at that point, Harry was already in his LHH era, but it had only gotten long enough that the GP were starting to notice it was purposeful and that he clearly was not planning to trim it/cut it back to Prince Hair. Since I was about 80-20 still in the GP, but was starting my 1D obsession, I had no one talk to about the boys except my IRL friends. And I remember distinctly that they were all convinced Harry was gay because of:

- LHH

- the patterned, unbuttoned polos

- his pretty “loud” affinity for YSL

- painting one nail or leaving one nail half painted

And to the lucky few in the know, also because of:

- the rumors that he was begged to wipe off his lipstick before a live taping of GMA, or so a CDAN blind said

As I delved further into fandom, I saw a broad and shallow part of discourse around all these things, but the loudest voices at the time (because I was on Twitter) were hets who were either: i) vehemently insisting he was ABSOLUTELY NOT gay or feminine or ii) being very vocal about how they were no longer attracted to him because of one or all of the reasons above.

Now, I know looking at both Harry and the world at present, none of the things I’ve listed seems remotely “femme” or earth-shattering, but again, this is where context matters.

It was 2015, so discussions regarding gender nonconformity were, in my humble experience, largely still limited to the LGBTQI+ community and had not made it into everyday, mainstream conversation yet. On top of that, Harry’s image was only just inching its way past the hyper teenage heartthrob frat boy phase but was only allowed to veer far enough that his style still “fit” with the rest of the boys and was designed to look more like the groups’ style maturing all together.

No one saw him as a fashion icon yet, because his image had been so carefully curated. So, when he came out wearing that black and white floral suit, standing next to the other boys, the statement read like rebellion, as opposed to him pushing the fashion envelope the way it does now.

Coupled with the fact that he was still, very much, seen as a member of a boyband, the GP didn’t see him growing his hair as any kind of homage or nod to Jagger or Lennon or Slash, because Harry’s image wasn’t at all in the realm of rock; he wasn’t even seen as a proper musician.

So if you put all those things together, you begin to see that growing his hair and painting his nails and dressing the way he did (as conservative as it may seem, compared to him now) was a big, big risk, considering how he was marketed, whom to, and the conversations that image of him was inspiring in those circles.

And that’s why, to me, LHH is one of the loudest, banging-on-the-glass-closetest eras of Harry there is, so it makes it very, very odd to see LHH characterized in Tiktoks as “Dark Harry”/the new “Fratboyrry”/het Harrie fantasy era.

[raayllum]

So we are sure as anything that is going to be Callum that releases Aaravos at the end of the day (being terrified of being possessed again? Now the gang literally HAVE THE PRISON? Yeah he’s gonna be possessed and forced to open it for SURE! Poor boy what will that do to him..?)

But one thing that hasn’t happened yet is Rayla losing Callum. Callum has lost Rayla once and nearly lost her twice now, but we are yet to see Rayla do something to get Callum back (maybe we can include the ship scene but I don’t feel like it’s quite to the same extent that Callum has nearly lost her, if you get what I mean)… how do you think this is going to happen?! If at all? I LOVED season 5 and can’t wait for what happens next!!

I forget if I thought Callum would free Aaravos post-S3 or S2 (maybe, ever since the Key was introduced)? But definitely post TTM I thought he'd have a role to play there. I've always leaned towards it either 1) not being under possession, but coercion, or 2) if it is under possession, it's because Callum took a risk (and knew what he was risking being possessed by doing it). The writers always like force characters into being aware of the choices they're making / retaining agency even in the terrible choices they're making (i.e. Harrow being aware of and agreeing to Viren's plan to kill Zym in 3x06's flashbacks, rather than being ignorant and therefore blameless in it, which they easily could've done). I don't think Callum can just have a "whoopsie daisie I'm suddenly possessed again through no reaffirmed fault of my own decision making" since that kinda feels like it's letting him off the hook too much for whatever he does, but if they just want to go full throttle on the "no agency" angle, that would be a valid route of its own kind of horrific (even if it may not be the one from a theorizing standpoint I currently prefer but hey, canon could change my mind).

For Rayla and Callum, I think their arcs (intersecting and circling each other as always) are going to be opened and book ended, most likely, by Massive acts of love for each other for arc 2 (up till S6, most likely). Currently for both of them, they've done their initial, unhealthy "going to dark places is an act of love" for one another:

1) Rayla leaving during the timeskip / through the moon

and Callum doing dark magic about a season later to save her life

The fact the choice is something they both cover up and know the other person wouldn't like, the shouldering it alone, the "I have to. I love you too much not to," etc. I don't think it's a coincidence that a few episodes after Rayla reflects on what inspired her to leave — "I left without him because I couldn't bear to put him in danger. I knew I had to be strong alone" — and trying to be what she didn't want to be (a lone assassin) that we see Callum making a similar decision after he was forced back into a path he also didn't want to take (a dark mage), that Finnegrin got his head enough to warp him: "All that talk about how love makes you stronger" and Rayla making him 'weaker.' And, like Rayla, he keeps a secret to try and shoulder it alone, at least at first.

Which is in line of how he and Rayla were already starting to switch in S4, with Rayla acting more like him upon her return and Callum acting more like her because of her absence, and nicely leads up to them both reaffirming that they are each's strength and each other's weakness, eventually. (Good and bad, light and dark, pain and love. Two cakes!)

I always figured Callum would do something ultimately self destructive in order to save her, just because they tend to be very reciprocal (and he tends to hit her plot beats a season after she does, anyway) so it seems, due to the symbolism and framing and patterns, that Callum doing dark magic for her is his Narrative counterbalance for her leaving him in Through the Moon. (This is very in line with their S2 and S3 patterns as well, where Rayla saves him and Ez in a way from Soren and Claudia in S2, and then Callum saves her from Soren and Claudia over the dragon fiasco; as well as in S3, with Rayla risking her life to keep Sol Regem away from him, and then Callum jumping off the Pinnacle to save her, etc).

So what, you ask, is Rayla's big gesture moment - and what could Callum's reciprocal moment be? Well...

2) Rayla breaks Callum free of the brainwashing + identity reconciliation arc

This has been foreshadowed and set up for a variety of reasons — Rayla showing up in a halo of light and always reaffirming Callum's agency in S4; Callum asking her to be the one to kill him in 4x07, and this according quote exchange from the Book One Novelization ('"Wow. So they look identical, but they might kill you or they might save you,” Callum said. "Exactly," Rayla smiled. "Just like me"); Rayla's role being highlighted in the actual possession scene in 4x04 and Aaravos mocking her for being unable to kill; Rayla's epiphany in S5 about being "stronger together" at all. If you want more details on all of this I would heartily recommend this meta I wrote regarding Rayla's duality as Callum's salvation and destruction, written pre-s4, and then updated post-S5. Now moving on...

Book 6 is gonna be stars, and stars are associated with Destiny. So is dark magic with control. Thus, Callum confronting the destiny Aaravos has given him (and being possessed again by proxy) seems the most likely for this season. We also know we're going to learn about Rayla and Stella's history eventually (and given that Stella means star, and is connected to the Star primal) and it would make sense to get that backstory in S6 as well. We know we're learning more about the Key of Aaravos (rune cube) and most likely Leola (and her last wish) next season as well. Last but not least, S5 reveals that Rayla's parents can presumably be saved by using star magic / quasar diamonds, and that Callum is even more dedicated to freeing them to some degree than Rayla is, at least in terms of Prioritizing it.

Okay, but what does this all have to do with anything? Well...

It seems pretty certain that Rayla's Big Moment, as you've indicated, has to happen, and will be her refusing to kill Callum and instead breaking him free of the brainwashing. The strongest evidence is actually things I haven't touched on yet, which is that this dilemma and plot beat would resolve both of their character arcs that S4 set heavily into motion.

For Rayla, she's been struggling for seasons feeling like a failed assassin / that she can't kill someone, and that this is a weakness. The fact that it's Callum's life on the line vs the world ("my heart for Xadia") is just the icing on the cake and is a trolley problem she's faced before ("You let him live, but you killed us all!" / "No, you have two choices: you all die, or just the wretched, evil human dies"). So her not killing Callum, and instead saving him, would resolve her arc in a variety of ways:

Prove that her good soft heart is a strength and not a weakness

Reaffirm her love, devotion, commitment to Callum and promising to Not leave again

Prove to her that she can save people (4x05's "we can't save everyone") and that she won't always inevitably mess things up

Rayla refusing to sacrifice something, for once, for the good of the world

Her path in this is so straightforward there is little doubt in my mind, like, come on. It's not subtle and I love it

This isn't even touching on Rayla's parallels / thematic opposition to the other person vying for control over Callum, Aaravos, which if you're interested in you can read more about here. <3

Alternatively, Callum's side of things is far more complicated / less clear. This is for a few reasons:

There will be a choice, presumably, that leads to him getting brainwashed. The most obvious of these is him doing (dark? Star?) magic to free the Moon fam and Kpp'Ar from the coins, but it could be something else. Being willing to take a chosen risk opens up the door for him to feel responsible if/when he plays his role in Aaravos' plans (bc he presumably Has to, since S6 can't end well under any circumstances).

If he is randomly brainwashed, he will have to make a conscious choice to play into Aaravos' hands after breaking free from the brainwashing. This will probably be under coercion or due to a loved one (either Ezran or Rayla) being in danger or threatened. I've always leaned towards Rayla because they've had primary conflict for longer and her weird associations with the cube and its foreshadowing, and for a few other reasons I'll discuss here briefly below.

What's not in doubt, to me, is Callum - willingly or unwillingly - continuing on his dark path within Aaravos' clutches. Whether this would include breaking him free under coercion (but not brainwashing) is debatable, but we'll see when we get there I suppose (if we get there). What does need to be answered, here, is what Callum's Reciprocal Act of Love would be. It seems that he'll have to save Rayla back in turn from something, after all.

Likewise, there's a few options in no particular order:

He saves Rayla from having to make a terrible choice regarding her parents, either to have a life without them or for her to do dark magic to free them by taking that on himself.

A lot of Callum's identity changes have been because of her absence and subsequent shut down. Rayla reaffirming her identity by saving him is also the process by which Callum reaffirms his own identity by choosing her / being able to be saved. A mutual identity reconciliation happening simultaneously, if you will. And throwing off Aaravos' control certainly would be an act of love!

He frees Aaravos to save her life after she breaks him free of the brainwashing, since choosing Rayla and defying Aaravos could be choices that cannot be reconciled.

I lean towards something beyond the mutual Identity Reconciliation because I think 1) Callum being able to express his feelings for her is also very important to his growth for this arc and they've teased him saying "I love you" again quite a bit thus far and 2) I think Rayla, as a character and her core of sacrifice (what does it matter to her, after all, if she gets majorly injured saving Callum) would really benefit from being literally, reciprocally saved, but these are the various avenues I think are the most likely. But I do think their S6 (or whenever the possession plot line is resolved, maybe it is only in S7, who knows) arc is resolved, it'll be with a Big Act of Love from Callum as well, with Rayla's being saving him from said brainwashing.

Anyway, I hope this answered your question and that said answer wasn't too long! Thanks for asking & for reading <3

[v1nsmoke]

𝑮𝑼𝑵𝑺 𝑵' 𝑹𝑶𝑺𝑬𝑺 // 𝑪𝑼𝑳𝑻 𝑳𝑬𝑨𝑫𝑬𝑹!𝑳𝑨𝑾 𝑿 𝑹𝑬𝑨𝑫𝑬𝑹

spooktober week 3 - cult leader law part 3

tw: blood, guns, explosives/explosion, depiction of violence, murder

summary: there's far more beyond the dimly lit interrogation room, and now it's up to you to escape the underground base filled with armed cultists, but unbeknownst to you, somebody is watching - meanwhile, a group enters the county

a/n: i didnt expect this story to go this far, it was supposed to be just a quick oneshot for his birthday, but here i am, ill make a part 4 soon

tags: @lawsmommymilkerwife

wc: 2.1k

you are now reading... chapter one chapter two CHAPTER THREE

"There's no escape for you." Law's deep voice rings from a loudspeaker that you tried to locate as soon as you heard it. "You thought I'd just let you murder and injure all my men? Even if you do manage to get out, I'll always find you. Didn't you notice what I did on your chest? You're marked. You are cult property now."

Your eyes widen at his statement. You quickly look down to see a pattern under your collarbone, etched into your skin by his blade. It was a circle, straight lines branch off from it in several directions. It was the same logo you saw sewn into the clothes of the cultists you came across. It was likely the logo of Law's cult, and now it was on you, and there was no way of getting rid of it.

But that didn't matter to you, because you will get out of this place and escape either way. You still didn't know anything about your sister's location, but it looked like she had to wait. You were this close to escaping, you won't turn back. You had to inform everybody about this cult, get the authorities involved instead of fighting it off all alone.

~●~

The van is bumping along the road, which no one seems to have taken care of renovating ever since it was built. The landscape is relatively empty, one or two trees on the lawn next to the road, the grass of which began to dry more and more as the team gradually approached their destination.

They had been traveling for several days, but luckily none of them were too fussy. The driver would have liked to give up, but he drove tirelessly for the pleasure and request of his captain. The navigator in the mother-in-law seat also held his will up.

There was chaos in the back seats, if there was noise, you could bet it was coming from there. This is exactly how the driver lost thirty thousand Berries to the navigator. Maybe they should have come up with a different seating arrangement before they set off on the multi-day trip, but the navigator is better off sitting in the front, and no one else in the group was qualified to drive except the tired man sitting in front of the wheel right now.

They have already wondered several times whether it was really a good idea to listen to their captain and come here. However, the boy was determined and stubborn, nothing could stop him from this adventure. Calling his grandfather to see what's going on in this small town because it's his job? Oh, no. He wanted to see it himself, with his own eyes, and if the news was true, he wanted to act himself.

And there was no turning back now as the van passes by the sign on the side of the road, the words "Welcome to Dressrosa" written on it.

~●~

You can feel your heart pounding faster, placing the remote explosives around the base as you head towards the exit. The plan? Once you're outside, you just push the button, activate the explosives, and hopefully destroy the base. Your sister was likely elsewhere, this was closer military base, you could bet the interrogation room was the only place that wasn't a control room or a weapon storage room.

When a cultist appears, you're quick to react, sending a bullet to their chest. You rush to the stairs, leading to an upper floor, but still not outside. By now all the alarms were ringing, the red light flashing like crazy.

Law can hear the sounds outside the security room, footsteps, sound of boots, gunshots, and piercing screams in anguish. He was spectating the situation from this room, able to see most hallways and access all loudspeakers around the base. He didn't expect you to actually escape, people usually just accept that they are now part of his cult. You didn't.

He was surprised at how you had built yourself up to this point from nothing, armed and all in less than an hour. However, it really bothered him that a nobody, a lady from another town who only came for her sister, was currently fleeing and murdering his people. You may not have realized this, but you can cause huge damage to his forces with this operation.

Through the security cameras, he saw you sprinkle the corridors of the base with explosives, but no matter how many people he sent to defuse them, none of them succeeded and no one returned. He believed that if he confronted you with the fact that you were now the property of his cult, you would abandon your plans, but as he saw, that was not enough.

Law sees you knock out another member, then your steps slow. It looks like you just realized that he was watching your every move with the cameras. You look up, straight into the camera, gun in hand pointed straight at it, then one of the screens goes black in front of Law. As you moved on, the signal left the monitors one by one.

Law knew he had to stop you before you caused even more chaos and madness. He just didn't know how. He would try to send more people after you, but it hasn't worked so far, so why would it work now? He personally had no plans to go out, no matter how good he was with a weapon. He couldn't know when the explosives you just scattered might explode to his face. Was it a proximity bomb or could it be activated from a distance? He didn't want to find out.

He knew that you came for your sister, and that you would not go back to the city where you came from - because he has been terrorizing the residents of the city for almost two months, and he had not seen you until yesterday - without her. You might not destroy everything and go looking for her, but you'll still be around, hiding somewhere, calling authorities.

Lucky for Law, nobody will come to your rescue. He had the authorities, either brainwashing them into joining the cult or paying tremendous amount of money to keep them away. You were alone, and he had hundreds of men under his command, so even if you escape this base now, he will have many chances at getting you back.

He knew that letting someone like you to just leave would be a great loss and a wrong choice. You now knew about the existence of this cult, if you get more people involved it might cause trouble. You knew too much, and Law didn't plan on just abandoning you.

You step into another control room, wired phones and some monitors placed next to the walls. None of the security cameras showed anything except a black screen, which meant your plan worked, and wherever Law was hiding he was not able to see you now. You had no idea if there was any signal outside, they likely blocked all means of communication.

This might be your last chance at getting help from outside, you had to act, right now. You turn a monitor's camera to your face, starting a live broadcast right there. Apparently it should reach all nearby cars with their adio active, maybe some TVs.

"The cult is taking over, if you hear or see this message, SEND HELP! I-" you desperately try, when somebody shoots your way, breaking the device. This was your only hope, and if nobody heard it, you're fucked. You raise your pistol towards the man who shot, aiming at his legs and firing. He lets out a scream in agony, falling to the ground as blood seeps trough his jeans.

~●~

"Damnit! The radio does not work well here... there are barely any stations!" The blonde in the driver's seat sighs. The music stopped the moment they passed by the welcome sign. The navigator next to him turns the knob, hoping that she will be able to find a station that isn't just static noise.

She was about to give up and forget about it, when she suddenly heard a feminine voice.

"The cult is taking over, if you hear or see this message, SEND HELP! I-" the line cuts off, static noise taking over yet again.

The group in the van is shocked, nobody saying a word for a few moments.

"Can you track where this came from?" The driver asks, the question directed at the guy sitting behind him, already coming up with a plan.

"Uh, not sure, but I can try I guess." He replies.

This one message confirmed their fear, the news turned out to be true. This only proved the fact that the town was now under the control of a cult. The driver steps on the gas pedal, thereby exceeding the speed limit. Who would punish him for it, the police, which is not even here? If there was, then this cult would not be here long ago.

The moods calm down in the rear periphery, the other part of the team also getting serious, now that everything has been proven.

"I know where the broadcast came from!" The man shouts, instantly gaining the attention of everyone in the van. He passes his device - likely homemade, knowing him - to the navigator, who extends her hand and takes it from him.

She reads the map, examining it, and immediately directing their driver to the desired location. It seemed to be in a tree-surrounded area, bit further from the road going trough the city of Dressrosa. It was like a smaller base, bit she was sure that there was more to it, hidden underground from prying eyes.

~●~

After losing the last means of communication, there was nothing left to do at the base, so you headed straight for the exit without stopping. Using the floor plan of the building prepared in case of fire, you found the only main entrance leading outside.

You didn't know where Law could be right now, but he was going to explode along with the whole building anyway in just a matter of minutes. You started to get tired, but let's be honest, it was still a big, even huge achievement. You may have used an air rifle a couple of times before, and here you are, now you've killed a base of cultists.

It took you a few shots to get into it, but eventually you got the hang of it. Aiming became easier, and you were firing better and faster.

You huffed as you ran up the stairs that theoretically lead to the exit. You were so close now. Law likely ran out of men, because there was barely anyone after you at the moment. Was he hiding? Likely. But he saw you trough security cameras, which means he knows you you loaded the base with remote explosives.

If he's smart, he gets out before you do, knowing that you won't blow the base up until you get outside. If he's not smart, he stays inside thinking it's nothing. But even though you didn't know him well, he seemed and acted like the smart type. The other tools back at the interrogation room even hinted that he was a surgeon, or at least knew a thing or two about it.

Here it is. You burst trough the door, literally throwing yourself at it. The bright moonlight illuminates the star-filled night sky, pine trees surrounding the base built on top of a hill, next to a mountainside. From here, you were able to overlook the whole county, the town, fields, roads, a perfect panorama view. Too bad this base is about to cease to exist in moments.

This was not the time for you to enjoy the mesmerizing view. You turn back once more, stealing one last glance at the building before running down the dirt path between the pine trees, and activating the explosives. Your ears ring after the loud noise coming from the explosion, the orangeish cloud-like formation behind you giving a slight tint to the grey mountainside and the surrounding area.

This was it. You did it. But who said it all ends here? Your sister is still missing, and Law might have escaped. Nobody's going to do anything about it anyways. Nobody, except you.

trafalgar law and one piece belongs to eiichiro oda

© v1nsmokes 2023. Do not modify, translate or rewrite.

[fbfh]

OOOOOH BOY chat we are COOKED!!!!! my insurance is being a little fuckin bitch about covering my adhd meds so I'm out and I have to self medicate with caffeine so espresso!op is back!!!! /lh

anyway almost done with season 3 of young royals and I'm thinking about August falling SO hard and fast for adhd!reader. you are the only person at hillerska who sees through his bullshit and calls him out on it and he HATES it and he can't fucking stay away from you. after you've been together for a while (people still marvel at how weirdly good you are for each other) you seem a little off, and finally fess up to him that there's a shortage of your adhd meds bc assholes keep abusing them or faking adhd to get it as a study drug (you are unaware that august is one of said assholes) so of COURSE he plays it off like "omg how could someone do that!!! that's just awful!!!!"

so despite his historical patterns of self centered douchey behavior and decisions he actually DOES care about you. there's this tiny little redeeming part within him that wants to be good. like lilo and stitch. dating august is like lilo and stitch and I will not elaborate further. anyway he genuinely does his best to help you out until your meds are filled again. he helps you with chores and laundry and stuff (calls in a cleaning service) makes sure you have grab and go meals (orders you a meal prep service and catering from your favorite restaurants) and helps you find your stuff (follows you around and keeps your keys wallet and phone on a shelf high enough for you to not reach that way you don't misplace them again). he listens to you ramble when you're feeling hyperactive and chatty, he lets you lay on his lap and watch bits of dust float through the air for hours on end when you're feeling inattentive. if you need to stim he'll take you to some indoor gymnastics trampoline park thing and let you go nuts, and if you use caffeine to self medicate when you're off your meds by GOD he will have espresso and energy drinks on tap for you. he won't mind when you wake him up at night because you can't sleep or keep moving around because you can't get comfy, he'll make sure you get where you need to go on time and act as your personal human planner. even if he needs to pick you up and carry you (which he will if necessary), he won't let you start stressing out about forgetting stuff. if you feel bad about it at all, if you feel like you're asking too much of him or being a burden, he will shut that shit down so fast. it's hard work, but he wants to do this, he wants to take care of you. he still won't tell you that he had a faking adhd for meds phase, but after seeing what you go through, he vows never to take prescription stimulants again. he'll make sure no one else in his circle does either - except vincent, who's actually diagnosed and has to regularly remind August that he is in fact supposed to be taking adderall whenever it comes up. August has so much more respect for you and for neurodivergent people in general after that. he didn't think karma really existed before, but he sure as fuck does now, and he might think a little more about tempting her by doing something douchey next time. even if he doesn't, he has you to keep him in line.

[trkstrnd]

Ya know, i find interesting that once Carlos realized TK was "the one," he really just fully assimilated into the 126 crew and TK's circle and just kind of checked out whatever and whoever was left of his past personal life. It's almost like he was searching his entire life for the life line that he had and then that was it for him.

It's just real interesting to me, because it kind of actually really unhealthy to do that (or it is in real life)- BUT, I do think with TK, it's the only time he has EVER been truly happy.

i agree with you nonnie

and this may not be something that you might be looking for, but i feel like this is a perfect example of why i am pretty positive that carlos reyes is autistic.

i guess tw fan headcanoning mental illness but i have done such a dive into this as an autistic person myself.

i don’t know how it happened, but i’m pretty positive that carlos is my special interest, so when i look at him, i like to break down and analyze every facet of him and his character.

this means who he is how he dresses how he acts what he does, and this current canon plot (even though i hate it), really hammers it home for me.

carlos always grew up different, too “soft” for gabe. he was constantly outcasted by his family, and now by canon standards we are pretty sure he only had one friend in school (that we know of). so when we look at all of the things that went into this (shitty ass) plot point, we see the following.

-outcasted

-low support system

-loner

-people pleaser

-one really good friend

-acting out in ways that will make him fit in.

when you look at these together: they form a mask.

carlos has been masking his entire life, trying to be big and strong for his dad, trying to be the perfect son for his mom. he had one single friend who knew everything about him and he never really branched out because he was afraid of inconveniencing or burdening other people. his entire past life was one big neurotypical comphet mask that he lived until he found tk.

he’s absolutely terrified that any small minute shift in that mask will ruin things with everyone he cares about. it’s why he told his parents tj was his friend, and why he deflected when to got upset and asked why. he didn’t know what his reaction would be, so he took the only way where he knew the outcome. he knew tk was going to leave either way, but if he refused to tell him the truth, then the truth couldn’t disappoint him.

furthermore, he’s hyperexpressive (another learned trait in his masking) and he sometimes lets it slip for just a second, and something comes out (2.08: “but you seemed so happy.”). he tries his best to react normally in high stress situations, but it’s a lot more difficult in their personal life because he feels safer with tk and feels like he can be himself around him (2.13, the specific expression he has when tk tells him that copper is at the door), but when he’s in work mode, the only thing you’ll get from him most of the time is a jaw clench.

and he’s not fully unmasked around tk all the time. he’s getting there, but the rage punching was a perfect example of him not necessarily knowing how to regulate or process his emotions, so they manifest into rage and he takes it out on the punching bag.

and HOO BOY he stims. he rubs his hands together, rubs his knees, tends to clasp his hands in public or cross his arms.

he also hyperfixates on things to a point where it can get unhealthy at times (3.05, watching that nanny can until the /sun was up/, not sleeping?). it’s why he’s a good cop and possible detective. he’s pushy and not easily distracted and he doesn’t let anything get in the way of what he wants, because he’s chasing the dopamine.

he hates when his plans are derailed or ruined. he knows when something is wrong because he’s good at picking up patterns in people since he is so hyperaware. it’s a defense mechanism.

he also has a hard time understanding nuanced situations like cooper and the whole friend from work debacle. he tends to over or under react because he’s not sure how to navigate the situation and his feelings.

and finally, relating back to the ask, i agree that carlos never was truly happy until he found tk, because tk kind of helps him navigate the world that is good for both of them. the perfect example of this is in 3.18, while he’s trying to give the speech, and paul and marjan and nancy interrupt because they know where it’s going. carlos looks like he’s about to murder someone for a split secind and he whispers something to tk, but tk is giddy and squeezes his hand because the message was received regardless of the heartfelt speech.

tk is his lifeline. he helps him navigate and understand the world around him, and carlos is able to be his fullest and truest self with him.

i think you’re right, nonnie. he wanted to get rid of his life before because he finally found something worth living for.

tl;dr: carlos reyes is autistic and never fit in until he found tk and realized he doesn’t need to fit in to be loved.

[honeyhobi]

For the ask game you know who I'm gonna do...Spider, sixteen.

Put That Guy In a Situation™️ Ask Game

Crossposted on AO3

16. Meeting past/future self + Spider Socorro

A/N: What are the plot redefining implications of the RDA somehow getting their hands on time traveling technology, you ask? Shrugs, try not to think about it too hard. Enjoy!

Content warnings for implied abuse and non-con.

“Ready or not, here I come!” Spider calls, jumping down from his perch in a tree where he'd been counting with his forehead pressed against the trunk.

He listens to the breeze whistling through the branches; runs his hands along the tall greenery and giggles as a kenten takes flight in a colorful swirl, away from his curious fingers. Hide and Seek is his favorite game to play in the forest. He likes seeking more than hiding, because no matter how still he is or how quiet he tries to be, the others always seem to find him first. But when he’s the one seeking, it’s like he is an equal. He is the hunter, ears strained and eyes hyper focused for any signs of his prey.

Neteyam’s been teaching him how to track using displaced soil and the positions of the plants. It’s hard work, but it comes in handy for games like this. Spider gets close to the ground, studying the grass that's at eye level with him. Movement in the corner of his eye has his head snapping up, but it’s only a couple of syaksyuk swinging from the branches above him. The moment of distraction is what causes him to spot the group of wilted ferns a few feet away. They list heavily to one side, like something bigger has kicked them away. Spider grins triumphantly.

“Lo’ak~” he sing songs, bounding over to the trail and following it as the pattern weaves through the forest. Now that he’s spotted it, it’s almost ridiculous how obvious the tracks are. Someone has been this way, and recently, too. “You’re getting sloppy, bro!”

The trail leads him right to a thicket of vines before disappearing beyond them. It’s a great hiding spot with the way the vines are half-obscured in shadow. He peaks through a gap and sees a tall tree in the center of a clearing. It’s hard to see at this angle, but there’s a figure kneeling at the base of the tree. Gotcha. Spider shoves through the curtain of vines, the words already halfway off his tongue.

“I found—”

His voice dies as the figure comes into full view.

It’s not Lo’ak. It’s not Neteyam or Kiri, either. No, the figure that turns to face him looks just as shocked to see him as he is to see them. A human boy. He’s wearing clothes similar to the humans back at Hell’s Gate, but Spider doesn’t recognize him as any of the scientists that work alongside his foster parents. His mask isn’t as bulky, either, and the exopack is quieter when the boy inhales sharply.

“Shit,” The boy hisses.

Spider doesn’t warn him not to curse. There's no adults around to catch him, anyway.

“Who are you?” He asks. Even as he does so, he gets closer to the stranger. Maybe he should feel more cautious, but he has no reason to fear any human in the forest. None of them have ever cared enough about Spider to want to hurt him before.

“I'm, uh, a friend. Of Norm's,” The boy says.

That has Spider perking up. “Oh, me too!”

Now only feet away, he can see the boy's face clearly. It's almost familiar, the dimple in his chin and set of his cheekbones makes Spider feel like he’s seen this boy before in passing. His blonde curls are cropped close to his head, and his sleeveless shirt reveals arms tight with muscle and broad shoulders. He must wrestle a lot, Spider thinks, when he sees all of the bruises on the boy's body. They crawl up and around his biceps, circle in purple and green blotches near the base of his throat and peek out from under the seal of his mask. There are some bite marks, too, red and fresh looking.

“Are you out here by yourself?” The boy asks.

Spider shakes his head. “I'm playing with my friends.”

The boy smiles a small, subdued smile. It's a little sad, and doesn't quite meet his big brown eyes. “Where are Lo'ak and Kiri? Is Neteyam with you?”

“I dunno, we're playing Hide and Seek. Do you know the Sullys?” Spider asks, a little surprised. This boy might not be a total stranger, no human at base really is to him, but he'd think he would know this one better if the boy knew Lo'ak, Kiri, and Neteyam by name.

“Sure do. You're all kind of hard to ignore when you play around in the labs.”

Spider dips his chin bashfully. That's definitely true, the scientists only let him go outside as much as they do because the only other option is to let his chaos be unleashed within the compound. And that can lead to lots of headaches and any number of broken tech.

“Sorry.”

The boy clicks his tongue and brushes a hand under Spider's chin to make him look up again.

“Don't be. Norm secretly thinks it's funny when you get up to trouble. Don't tell him I said that, though.”

Spider mimes zipping his mouth shut and throwing away a key to show that the secret is safe with him. It's the right move, because the boy's smile widens.

“How old are you now, Spider?” The boy asks.

“Seven.”

A beat. The boy stares at him with a faraway look, and for some reason it fills Spider with a lonely type of sadness. He gets the sense that the boy in front of him doesn't get a lot of hugs.

“We went back too far,” the boy mutters under his breath. It's quiet enough that he probably didn't mean for Spider to hear it. Not that it matters, because the words don't make any sense to him.

There's the sound of snapping twigs and crunching leaves, and the boy's body language shifts. His expression turns grim, almost scared. Spider turns in the direction the sound came from, expecting to see a viperwolf or something.

“Miles?” A voice calls from beyond the clearing, getting closer.

The voice is unfamiliar. It must belong to another person Spider hasn't met yet. Is he calling for the boy? Surely he isn't calling for Spider, no one refers to him by his birth name anymore. Then the boy grabs him by the shoulders and spins him around so they are facing each other again.

“Spider, you gotta go, alright? Lo'ak is probably around here somewhere.”

The urgency in his voice scares Spider a little. Something has changed in the last minute that they've been here together, and he doesn’t know what. But he wants to reach up and smooth the crease that has formed between the boy's eyebrows.

“Do you and your friend want to play with us? You can be seeker in the next round, if Kiri lets you.”

The boy sighs, bringing a hand up to cradle Spider's head. “Maybe next time, okay, buddy? For now you have to go. Don't want the others to think you gave up seeking, right?”

That spurs Spider into action. If there's one thing he hates more than anything is people thinking he's a quitter. Even though he’s the smallest of his friends, and not as fast or strong as the other kids in the Omaticaya village, he is not the type to just give up on something.

“Right!”

He turns around and darts through the vines from which he came, only sparing a moment to wave goodbye to the boy still kneeling by the tree. The boy waves back and watches him go, shoulders hunched in on himself. A little bit of that sadness from earlier washes over Spider at the sight, but he doesn’t dwell on it for long. He passes through the vines back into the forest and almost instantly finds another set of tracks. These ones are smaller and indicative of somebody who is barefoot. They run all the way up to a bunch of trees with thick branches obscured with leaves as big as Spider's torso. A great spot for a Na'vi to blend in.

Spider cracks his knuckles and starts to climb. All thoughts beyond seeking take a backseat in his mind. He can ask Norm if there are any other humans named Miles at Hell's Gate later. For now, he has a game to win.

[bitchdafuqyousay]

an old friend (maybe older than I thought, but I halfway refuse to believe it)

When I was really little mama would take sissy and I to visit our great grandmother (her dads mom) fairly often at the end of her life. She was bedridden and had in-home care. Everytime we were there she was in one of those hospital beds in the living room. Grandmama wasn't able to make it to her room alone at that point so it was easier for her. More often than not, my papa's sister would be there too while we were.

She lived in an apartment; it was a pretty old one and used to be company housing for the people who worked at the old mill and their families way back a whiles (the mill was built in the 1820s, the apartments cropped up in the 1860s). It was set up like a line; you walked in right into the kitchen which went directly to the living room. You could see straight to the back of it, all the way through to the end of the hallway where the rooms were. As I remember it that hall had five doors: two on the left which were the bathroom and then the master bedroom, then three on the right which were a linen closet, the two bedrooms. The third door on the right was the only one little me cared about. That's the room my friend came out of while we were visiting.

The first fifteen minutes were spent having as many pieces of candy corn mama would allow sissy and I (grandmama always had a full bowl of 'em on the coffee table for some reason) and then sneaking more tiny fistfulls when we thought she wasn't looking and I'd drag out the megablock containers from between the couch and the wall while the adults talked and sissy played on her DS. I'd empty out the containers and start building lil things; towers and cubes and whatnot. I liked mixing up all the colors- didn't care for patterns or monochrome all too much at that age. Then sometime during that, I'd hear that third door creek open then click shut. Followed by fast paced steps. Little clicking heels down the hallway. He was always wearing shoes. I always judged him for that, you ain't supposed to wear shoes in the house, after all. But if grandmama and papa's sister (who I assumed was his mom, she's younger than papa is) didn't say anything then I wasn't gonna say anything, either. Wasn't my house wasn't my house's rules so even though we all took our shoes off I couldn't dictate what my friend did.

Anyways, he'd walk out the hall and make the itty bitty turn to sit next to me and the laid out megablocks. He always looked like he'd just come from church, real fussy, even to me who considered herself something of a princess. Still do, but I digress. It's been a long while since I was at that apartment, since grandmama died and I last saw that boy; but I still remember exactly what he looked like. Skinny, more so than me, with a circle shaped face. Big eyes that were so brown they were almost black and his eyebrows were hidden by thick blunt bangs. His hair was sorta like a bowl cut, but the back didn't hang flat but sorta fluffy. He wore a white button up shirt, light brown shorts that stopped a bit before his knees that were held up by suspenders, knee high white socks, and these brown leather shoes that always let me know when he was coming down the hall even if I'd missed the sound the heavy door made when opening cause of the way they clacked.

He'd scoot closer to look at what I was making, and usually grimace at the lack of organization and start building his own tiny towers- carefully selected blocks and well considered patterns. But no matter what, he always had to have one tower that was completely red. Every block in that six stack tower had to be red; no ifs ands or buts. Sometimes he'd even take blocks from me (brat) if there weren't any free red ones so he could make his tower. Never asked, or spoke at all really, closest he'd get to vocalizing anything were these real small, breathy giggles he'd let out when I'd playfully nudge one of his building, pretending I was gonna knock it over, or when I'd poke him in the side as retribution for taking a red block from me. I didn't care though, that he never spoke, I mean. I didn't either. We never even introduced ourselves, he just sorta started creeping out his (?) room, down the hall, to then come play with me in the living room. I'd just accepted it, I mean hey why not? To little me, the visits were boring. I wasn't quite old enough to really understand what was up. I knew grandmama was sick, I knew that's why we visited her. But beyond that I didn't quite get it. I also knew I was bored, and I felt awkward and shy with my great aunt, my papa's sister, and watching sissy play on her DS was only entertaining for so long. So my new found, small fellow was a very welcome addition to the visits.

So, we sat together, took blocks from the other, and I'd sneak candy corn that he never took when I offered. Guess he didn't like it. Lotta people don't. I ate it mostly cause it was there and also mama didn't let us have sugar super often so it felt exciting to have it.

Couple minutes before we left, before mama even announced we were gonna be heading out, he'd push all the blocks back to me, smiling with pink cheeks. Then he'd get up and walk back down the hallway where'd he'd open that third door and shut it behind him. Mama would tell sissy and I to tell everyone bye and put our shoes on so we could go home. Visit done, see you all later.

Grandmama died, we never went back to the old mill apartments. No reason to, and I haven't seen my great aunt since, obviously haven't seen that boy either. Bit ago mama and I were talking about those visits for some reason or another, don't remember why, and I remembered my playmate again. So I asked her about him. She didn't know who I was talking about. I described him and got a confused stare in return. Explained he'd always hang out in that third room, the last one at the end of hall. The one on the right. A guest bedroom probably, I didn't know. Never went in there. The one with the creaky wooden door.

"There wasn't a third room on that side." She described the apartment layout to me; small, skinny, you could straightshot it. See all the way through it soon as you stepped in. The hall had four rooms off it. Bathroom and master bedroom on the left, linen closet and second bedroom on the right.

And the third, I insist.

"No third. There was four, not five."

My great aunts kid, I stress.

"She didn't have any kids. And the only kids that were there when we visited were you and your sister."

No third room on the right. She didn't have a kid, much less a son my age. Mama says there were never any other kids there while we were there. There weren't even any kids that young on her side of the family at that time. At least none that lived near, none she'd met. None that were at the old mill workers' accommodations while we were. But I played with him, he took stuff right out my hand, he giggled wheezily when I poked him and his shoes went clack clack clack when he walked.

"It was only ever us." Sissy agrees with mama, papa had no idea who I'm talking about. He says there were never any lil boys about when he visited his mother, his sister didn't have kids. He didn't remember me playing with one, only playing by myself.

But he physically took stuff from me. I touched him. I felt him. He'd sit right next to me and scoot real close to lean over and look at what I was making to judge my lack of color coordination. He would breathe on my shoulder. And sometimes we'd hold hands- hands linked between us while our free ones would make little structures. He'd make six stack red towers.

No other kid, everyone still tells me, certainly no boy they all say. No third door on the right. No little shoes clack clack clacking up the hall to play and then back down when it was almost time for me to leave, everyone else who was there insists.

[gaywiththesauce]

Wait one more thing oh my god I’m so sorry I was rereading your thoughts on my fic remembering Giyuu doing CPR on Sabito while I was writing I was like “wait his whole head got. Mega Smooshed. Why would he be doing CPR what is he stupid (yes)” but then. I pictured little Giyuu like dragging Sabito(‘s body) away from the battle and he isn’t an idiot he can tell he’s long dead but he just can’t accept it and tries and tries and tries and tries anyways bc he didn’t even GET to try with his sister so he has to try he has to and when he gets home to Urokodaki (alone) Urokodaki just takes one look at him sees all the blood on the sleeves of his little training robe thing and KNOWS because his eyes are so far away he’s just completely catatonic and doesn’t speak for like. Weeks probably.｡ﾟ(ﾟ´Д｀ﾟ)ﾟ｡

Anyways. IM ANIME ONLY I DONT EVEN KNOW IF THEY EVEN WENT THROUGH FINAL SELECTION TOGETHER AT ALL so this is all just bullshit but. I’m so sorry please ignore me I just had to put that out into the world so it wasn’t torturing my brain anymore ok bye again I’m so sorry

I KNOW I WAS LIKE "did he??? did he actually?!!??!??" and I'm anime only as well but like they have the same pattern so that's my excuse. I say they went through Final Selection and now Giyuu cries alone :) also THANK YOU for sending me this bullshit, one person's trash is another person's food and oh boy is this the Good Bullshit!

I'm inspired for the angst after my long day today sooo

(No graphic description of violence or gore.)

Giyuu knows that it was useless to try. It was completely useless. Urokodaki's technique was only for people whose heart stopped beating and their chests stilled with the lack of breath. It didn't work for people who were bleeding out. It didn't work for people missing body parts. It wouldn't work for Sabito.

But, he couldn't give up. Sabito never gave up, so he couldn't either. The sun dawned on them for the sixth day, meaning things should get better now. The sun was a good sign, wasn't it?

His little hands couldn't move faster than the rate of the song he hummed to himself through broken sobs. The song Urokodaki taught him for the correct rhythm of a beating heart. Sabito's heart didn't beat like that right now. Sabito's heart didn't beat at all.

He couldn't give up despite his rational mind screaming at him the truth. It was right in front of his eyes, so he closed them and counted in his head until he had to force air into Sabito's lungs. Gently, he did so, but gentle wasn't in Sabito's vocabulary. He doubted if it would even work for him if he had a chance to save him.

Soon enough, his hands- entwined like he practiced on straw dummies- wouldn't go as deep as he urged them too. He didn't know what else to do. This was his only chance to try, he would never get another after this. He had to do something. The sun moved positioned and he could barely breathe with his efforts. He slumped forward, struggling to keep his eyes open as he passed out from exhaustion.

It was midday when he awoke again. Flies circled around both of them. Giyuu only had one thought in his mind. Sabito's body would not be eaten. He didn't have any tools other than his sword, so he went to digging a small hole in the ground. It was almost sunset when he made it deep enough to keep him level with the ground.

The shallow grave was covered with loose dirt and leaves. Giyuu did his best, he really did, but it was quite obvious that something was hidden underneath. He kneeled down, said a short prayer for him to rest in peace and to keep his body hidden, and turned around to face the moon.

Revenge wasn't his to enact, but one day, someone would be strong enough to decapitate the hand demon...

[hoonieswhore]

XXIII. Lover

Previous / Masterlist / Next

Written part under the screenshots, make sure to read it!!

Word count: 1,7k.

Warnings: FLASHBACK CHAPTER. Slight angst. Mentions of cheating. Fluff. The usual curses. Making out. Mention of parents and a minor inconvenience at the hospital. YNHoon calling eachother perv. Pet names. One spank.

Taglist: @donghoonie-3 @venusssmoon @moonlighthoon @hooniessslvrss @silkenthusiasts (if you want to be added, send an ask<3 Make sure that your age is visible on your profile)

Your relationship with Sunghoon couldn't be more perfect. You loved to spend time together and everyone knew that if Sunghoon wasn't at his place he could be either training or at your place.

Sometimes, when you both were too busy to see each other, you made sure to text the other as much as you could and you'd always end up spending the night together at your apartment or his.

By the fifth month, everyone could see that you were the perfect couple, complementing the other in so many ways that it felt like you've been dating for many years when it was less than a year.

On Sunghoon's busy days, you always went to his house, cooked for him and cuddled him to sleep. He knew that you had his back and he was so thankful for you. In your case, when you had a bad day, he'd run to your place, ready to shower you with words of encouragement and sweet praises, along with his kisses and hugs.

The boy really knew how to cheer you up when you were down and so did you, making him smile even on his worst days.

It was a lazy Sunday for both of you, cuddling in your bed as you lazily made out, forgetting the sitcom that you were watching on the TV. You were too lost in each other's mouth, feeling Sunghoon's hands on your waist as he drew small circles on your skin with his thumb.

You smiled into the kiss as you played with his soft hair, feeling the boy getting closer to you as he tilted his head, deepening the kiss. You were too busy, focused on each other until a buzzing sound interrupted you.

Your phone was vibrating repeatedly, every time you got a text specifically. You pulled away, sighing and rolling your eyes, annoyed by the sound and the person that was texting you. You reached your phone and unlocked it as you started to read.

“You gotta be kidding me,” you whispered as soon as you saw the spam, it was the same unknown number that has been spamming you with dumb texts for a week.

“What is it, baby? Are your parents okay?” your boyfriend asked softly, remembering that the last time that you got so many texts was because your father was at the hospital for a minor inconvenience.

“Hm? Yeah, they're fine,” you replied, locking your phone again and returning your hands to your boyfriend's hair and playing with his soft locks.

“Is everything okay, my love?” he was getting worried as you still looked annoyed. Sunghoon leaned closer, pressing a soft kiss on your nose before he kissed your cheeks, still drawing invisible patterns with his thumb on your waist.

“I'm okay, baby boy,” he raised his eyebrow, knowing that you were hiding something from him. “Alright, I keep getting messages from an unknown number and they're pissing me off.” you took one of your hands away from his head as you reached out, grabbing your phone again from the nightstand. You unlocked it, opening the chat before you showed the texts to your boyfriend.

“What the fuck?” he furrowed his eyebrows, he looked angry as he read the texts and shook his head. “Who's that loser? Don't they have a fucking life or something?”

“That's what I said,” you sighed as you kept playing with his hair, trying to calm him down. “I don't know what they want but it's obviously a lie.” you shrugged.

Sunghoon looked at you, smiling at you as he nodded, “Just like you said, I'm your simp, baby,” he kissed your cheek again. “Only yours,” Sunghoon took one of his hands up to cup your cheek before pulling you into a lovely kiss, trying to put all his love into it and show you how much he loves you without words.

You kissed him back, smiling against his lips, tilting your head as you kissed him passionately, letting your phone fall on the mattress as you took your hand to his nape, trying to pull him even closer.

After a few minutes, you pulled away for air but your boyfriend didn't want to stop kissing you, so he followed your lips, leaving small kisses on your lips and making you giggle at his cuteness.

“Why- are- you- laughing?” he asked between small kisses.

“Because- you're- cute-” you kept giggling as he wouldn't stop pressing his lips against yours. Not until you pulled him away, earning a pout from him. “Why are you so cute, my little pervert?” You teased him.

“Shut up, you're a pervert too,” he teased back, rolling his eyes playfully. “But seriously, block that number,” your boyfriend was now serious but you could still see that he was worried.

“I already blocked them but it seems like they keep getting different phone numbers or something.” you rolled your eyes. You saw your boyfriend frowning as he seemed to think about something.

“Can I see the number?” He asked, Sunghoon was worried that he knew the person behind those messages. He hoped that he didn't have more issues with that person but deep inside, he knew.

You nodded, feeling the cold breeze on your cheek as his hand left its position on it to grab your phone from the mattress. The figure skater read the number, it was strangely familiar, he remembers it from somewhere, he remembers seeing those digits before.

Your boyfriend suddenly sat next to you, pulling his hand away from your waist as he reached out for his own phone. “Hoonie? What are you doing?” you asked curiously as he opened his contacts, looking for the number.

“Fuck,” he whispered, his hypothesis was confirmed as he saw that it was exactly the same number. “She's getting fired, she cannot do this,” you've seen him mad a few times but this time, he was furious. His face got red out of the madness running through his veins, he could feel his blood boiling as he felt it coming.

“Hoon, you know the number?” you sat up, placing your hand on his back as you started to rub it gently.

The figure skater sighed, nodding. “Remember when we went to the ice rink together?” he blocked his phone and threw it on the bed before he grabbed your legs, making you sit on his lap facing him as he wrapped his arms around your waist.

“When? We've been there like a thousand times, my love,” you said teasingly, taking a hand to his nape and playing with his hair.

“The first time we went together, when a girl reached us and thought I was teaching you to skate,” he laughed as he remembered how you fell on the ice and tried to drag him with you.

“Yeah, the one that called you Hoonie in a very annoying voice?” you felt his grasp on your waist getting tighter as he giggled.

“Yeah, that girl… that's Miss Kim,” he said before gritting his teeth, “and that's her number.”

You blinked twice, slightly dumbfounded as you connected the dots. The night that you met him, when Mr Park scolded him for leaving her alone, her death stare every time you went to the ice rink with Sunghoon or when she saw you at the competitions. Everything made sense now.

“I thought she just looked at me like that cause she had a bad day,” you whispered, feeling a little stupid even though she gave you a bad vibe.

“Baby, I'm so sorry,” he apologized, pulling you closer to him and hugging you tighter. “It's my fault, I'll talk to her.”

“No, don't blame yourself sweetie, you didn't do anything Hoonie,” one of your hands traveled from his nape to his face as you cupped his cheek. “It's not like something happened between you and her, right?”

Sunghoon quickly nodded, “Yeah, no, you're right, nothing happened.” He felt bad for lying but he also felt ashamed of that time when he actually kissed her but he was just a boy and he'd take that secret to his grave.

“See? We've got nothing to worry about, I'll just block her and if she keeps messing with me, I'll just throw her one of your skates,” you said with a sweet smile, making him laugh.

“You're so cute~” he cooed before giggling, “but you can't even lift my skate,” he laughed, pressing his forehead against yours.

“Of course I can, it isn't that heavy,” you rolled your eyes and pinched his cheek softly.

“The other day I gave you my skates and you complied cause they were too heavy,” he teased, trying to bite your hand playfully. You pulled your hand away from him, laughing at his childishness.

“Shut up, and don't bite me!” you whined, making him smile widely.

“Why not? You love when I bite you,” the boy's smile turned into a smirk as he leaned closer to you, “especially here,” he whispered as he captured your lower lip between his teeth and pulled on it seductively.

You giggled against him until he got close enough to kiss you softly as he pulled you closer on his lap. His hands slid down to your ass, a playful smirk against your lips before he crashed his palm against your ass, making you whine.

“Sunghoon!” you whined as soon as you pulled away from him and hit his chest playfully. “You're a fucking menace, you know?” you rolled your eyes, making him laugh harder as he caressed the place that he just hit.

“Thanks for the compliment, my love,” he pressed a soft kiss to your lips, “you're a cute menace and the best thing in my life.”

“I like you so much, Park Sunghoon,” you kissed his lips softly before it turned into another makeout session.

The hours passed, you watched movies with Sunghoon and teased each other as you always do, forgetting about the annoying girl that kept messaging you until you blocked her. By the end of the day, you both had dinner and then fell asleep in each other's arms, feeling safe and sound even though Sunghoon still felt bad for his little lie…