#its been over a decade since i had my eyes checked

[musclem3m0ry]

I poured acetone on my acetate frame glasses because I wasn't thinking/thought it was ethanol for some reason? So I ordered new glasses and I'm going to wear the acetone stained ones only at the lab

[tonycries]

Why Can't I Keep My Fingers Off You? [Part 2] - G.S. 

Synopsis. “Besides, Toru, just because it worked for you doesn’t mean it’ll work for me.” “Wanna bet?” For Satoru, convincing you to take the aphrodisiac chocolate too wasn’t the hard part - the hard part was being shoved into that bathroom stall, cock throbbing, mind spinning - trying not to beg for mercy. 

Pairing. Gojo Satoru x Reader

Content. MDNI, fem! reader, unprotected sex, slight femdom, overstimulation (male), lots of cum, you absolutely ruin Satoru, semi-public sex, subby! Satoru, aphrodisiac sex, multiple rounds, shutting up Gojo Satoru by making him cum in his pants, pet names (darling, my girl), swearing.

Word count. 3.7k

A/N. Can be read as a standalone, but PART 1 HERE.

Bros this was mad hard to write oml. Art by @_3aem on X.

Satoru had everything he needed to absolutely ruin you tonight.

Overpriced Cartier glasses? Check.

Jet-black Hellcat freshened up, ready with a little surprise for you inside? Check.

You, all dolled up and brows furrowed adorably at him? Holy shit, check.

“Toru, if we’ve missed our reservation because you had beef with the neighborhood cat again…”

“He was looking at you wrong! I had to defend your honor!” Dramatic protests falling on deaf ears, Satoru speeds through the darkening city streets, still grumbling under his breath about “cats these days”.

With your fiancé being absolutely swamped with missions recently, you’d been anticipating this night for weeks now.

Little did you know, Satoru had just as much - if not more.

Soon enough, the neon lights of that upscale, new restaurant you’d been absolutely dying to visit recently come into view. 

Okay, it’s time. 

“Y’know…” he begins, glancing at you with that familiar mirthful glint in his eyes. Laughter bubbling to his throat at your knowing stare, he plows on “Remember that one night where I just so happened to come across your special chocolate?”

“You mean swiped from my secret stash?”

“Semantics” he waves off. “But anyway, I was thinking…” he voice trails off mischievously as he swiftly turns to grab the mysterious black bag sitting on the backseat that you’d been eyeing suspiciously ever since you got in the car.

Oh shit, so that’s what he was onto. Eyes widening, “Toru, no.”

He whines, a pout forming on his lips. “C’monnn, no one’s gonna know except me. I want to make this night unforgettable, my girl.”

You raise a brow, “Unforgettable? Toru, your idea of unforgettable will end up with both of us arrested.”  After the madness of last time, you’d ignored his sticky note for a reason!

Letting out an exasperated sigh, you try to justify - probably to yourself just as much as Satoru, “And just because the aphrodisiac worked for you doesn’t mean it’ll work for me.”

He wiggles his eyebrows, twinkling eyes still undeterred. “Wanna bet? I’ll do the dishes for all of next month. We’ll never know till we find out, darling.” 

You narrow your eyes at the hand already snaking its way inside the bag, faded finger marks from last time still searing into your skin. Catching Satoru’s gaze - behind the amusement, something else shines darkly. 

Shit.

Goosebumps erupt down your spine. 

A beat passes. One. Two. Only the revving of the engine filling the tense air. 

“...two months.” 

It’s all Satoru can do to not jump in joy in his seat right now - knowing his girl, you’ll probably take back what you said and immediately bonk him on the head for being so ridiculous. 

“Deal.” he mutters lowly, pulling up to the driveway.

 A flash of hot pink. In the short time it takes the valet to reach your car, Satoru has already split that too-familiar chocolate, holding out the bigger part to you, eyes gleaming with excitement. “I swear this’ll be a night you won’t forget.” he grins, biting into the chocolate. 

God, he was going to be the death of you. 

The decadent flavor washes over your tongue, a slight tingling on your tastebuds. But, it’s still just chocolate, right? You scoff - at least you won’t have to do the dishes for two months.

Now, Satoru knows he won’t have to do the dishes for two months. 

Ah, how heavenly you’d be, splayed out and begging for mercy underneath him. Heels clacking against the polished tile and your hand warm in his as the maître d’hôtel ushers you both inside, dick twitching in anticipation. Shit, was the chocolate working already?

He risks a glance at how you’re faring - nope, still normal. That’s okay, he’ll be driving you crazy in no time.

---

Okay, maybe he won’t be driving you crazy in no time. 

How dare you sit there so gorgeous and unbothered, sipping slowly on your wine while he’s here mind whirling around how he’ll fuck you right here right now on this table without getting arrested for public indecency.

Fuck, it was hitting him hard.

Cock aching, heat rushing to his cheeks, eyes bleary - he sighs in frustration, resigning himself to do the dishes for two months.

Why did he even think of this? Damn his big fucking ego, he should’ve never taken that chocolate again. Maybe if he eats you out just right he could lower it to-

A feathery touch on his thigh. Too light for any sort of friction - just enough to set his skin ablaze. So deft that Satoru thinks he must’ve imagined it.

Until there it is again. Soft caress dancing delicately up his thigh. 

You.

A shiver creeps down his spine, blood rushing straight to his dick. Probably for the first time in his life, Satoru is speechless - maybe because you’ve reached underneath the table, teasingly sliding a heel along the top of his thigh.

“…darling…”

“Hmm?”

He blinks away the haze in his eyes, raising them to meet yours. “Wha-”

Oh. Oh, fuck.

What has he gotten himself into?

Eyes half-lidded, brows furrowed, and looking into his soul with a predatory glint that jolts the great Gojo Satoru right to his very core - and to his throbbing cock. He’d be lucky to make it out alive. Maybe he should just beg for his life right now.

Minutes tick by - or maybe it was seconds - Satoru is clueless. Mind only focused on the heel inching closer and closer, dangerously near to where he needed you the most. A smug smirk curls your pretty lips as his mouth drops into a soft oh.

The air crackles with an unspoken tension - his hips trying to subtly move you towards the erection furiously straining against his pants. He needed it so bad. It’s fucking pathetic, he knows. But he couldn’t give less of a fuck as your sole grazes his aching head. Pressing down. Hard.

“Fuck!”

Stomach flipping - before Satoru could fully process what the fuck was happening - he cums embarrassingly in thick spurts that pool on his pants, soaking right through the fabric, probably smearing on your new heels.

Head spinning, he bites his knuckles hard enough to draw blood, muffling the desperate moans threatening to escape his lips. 

He grinds his hips in shallow, mindless motions in a desperate attempt for more friction.

Instead, he gets the opposite.

“Behave, Toru.” you warn, swiftly resting your heel back on the floor, voice strained with something that makes his sensitive dick quiver animalistically. 

You huff out a chuckle at the almost-inaudible whimper of disappointment that rips from his throat. It’s laughable, really, he was supposed to be the one ruining you. This was so not fucking suave.

Face burning - whether due to the chocolate or embarrassment at the warm patch on his pants, he doesn’t even know - Satoru wishes the Earth would swallow him up whole. Would it be overkill to just teleport outta here?

The only thing that snaps Satoru out of his little reverie is your pretty lips forming into a tut. “Now now, Toru. It’s rude to make a mess at a restaurant. Why don’t we go to the restrooms and get you cleaned up, hm?”

Oh. Shit. 

A firm grip on his arm, his hands desperately covering his crotch. 

He was not going to make it out of this alive. 

Honestly, it wasn’t hard to bribe the waitress into letting you follow into the restroom after your fiancé - and put up an Out of Order sign promptly afterward. The actual hard part was trying not to rip off his clothes and give into your desires before you two even made it there. But you couldn’t let anyone else see him like that, of course. 

You were sure that if you had Satoru’s powers then you would’ve hollow purpled everyone here and taken him already.

You were going to ruin him.

Mind running a mile a minute, Satoru wouldn’t even be surprised if he’d just teleported to the restroom. If he was in a better state of mind he might’ve even admired the decor.

“My girl.” he breathes out, voice ragged. It’s all that is said before your lips are on his. 

It was like a fever dream - the bruising urgency of your lips, your aching pussy, and the heat of the stall as your quickened breaths mingle in a desperate dance. Your tongue intertwining with his. 

Manicured nails ripping his shirt open, you don’t have half the mind to register the designer buttons hitting the floor.

Satoru’s lips hazily chase yours as you pull away delicate strings of spit snapping just as quickly as your sanity. 

Your mouth waters at Satoru’s chest in all its chiseled glory, creamy skin peeking out from whatever remnants of the shirt were clinging to his sculpted shoulders. You wanted to ruin him.

“You dirtied my heels, Toru.” you frown, mockingly innocent. A choked-up gasp leaves his throat as you snake a hand down to firmly grip the erection straining against Satoru’s wet pants. Unmoving. “What shall we do about that, hmm?” 

“Ah! Please, my girl.”

“Please what? Use your words, Toru.”

“Please. Wanna cum so bad.”

Satoru learned the hard way that he could never turn back after uttering those words. 

Though, he already had an inkling once you immediately slam him against the stall door, fumbling with his belt, nails digging hard into his prominent v-line. “If you say so, Toru. Better not stop till you’re shooting blanks.”

The only thing that registers in his mind is the deadbolt echoing throughout the empty bathroom and his still-rock hard cock throbbing in your hands. 

“Ah- hah! Fuck.” low groans leave his throat at each jerky movement down his length. 

Head thrown back, pants bunched underneath his heavy balls, your tits pressing against his body as your hands urgently move along his veined length - up, up, up. 

Your thumb harshly teases his flushed head, spreading the precum from his leaking tip lewdly. “Oh God.”

His knees buckle, hands slamming against the top of the stall hard enough to make the walls tremble, desperately trying to keep himself from collapsing. Mind spinning, he doesn’t even know if he’s on planet Earth anymore.

“Toru~ Gonna let me join in on the fun?” your dangerous purr sends his cock twitching, breath hot against his ear.

Your cunt quivers, slick soaking your panties and trailing down your legs at the pornographic moans spilling from his lips as you fucked his thick cock with your fist. You wanted him so badly it was driving you insane.

Straddling a muscled thigh, your clothed core meets the fabric of his pants. It was already ruined, so what was another stain?

You grind your hips down on him, hard. Humping him like an animal in heat. 

Your slick seeping into the fabric of his leg. Harsh texture stimulating your needy cunt so painfully good. Swollen folds parting, mewls of pleasure leave your swollen lips as your clit catches on the rough fabric of his overly expensive pants. Over and over. 

Distantly, you register a strong hand tugging roughly on the thin fabric of your panties - easily ripping it and letting it fall to god-knows-where. 

Your hand doesn’t let up either, milking Satoru’s cock mercilessly the way you’d been dying to ever since you stepped foot into his restaurant. Your head spins, hips moving so animalistically on Satoru’s thigh.

A hand reaches down to sensually massage his heavy balls, squeezing and pressing hard circles - just the way you knew he liked it. 

“Oh, my girl. Always so good t’me- Ah! Hngh, gonna-” 

Satoru doesn’t get to finish his sentence before he’s pumping hot ropes of seed that decorate your pretty hands. Hips fucking up into you desperately.

You’re not far behind, juices squirting all over that expensive fabric, pooling on the tiled ground with a drip! drip! drip! that bounces off the walls of the restroom.

You two were so fucking loud. 

But right now, you wouldn’t even mind if anyone walked in to see your Satoru so debauched - as long as they see you fucking the soul out of him as well. 

It wasn’t enough.

“You said you wanted to cum, didn’t you, Toru?”

A shiver runs down his spine - all the way to his dick. “What? W-wait, darling. Fuck- Oh!” the strained words tumble out of Satoru’s kiss-bitten lips as you push down his soaked pants, kneeling to leave a trail of hot, open-mouthed kisses down to his twitching, thick base. 

“I won’t be merciful, Toru.”

Ah, you could do this forever.

Nipping teasingly till you’re satisfied with the bite marks decorating his pelvis, you pool the saliva in your mouth, spitting a long stream into his furiously flushed head.

Once. Twice. Mixing enticingly with his precum, trailing down his length. “Ah! Hngh- oh, darling. So sensitive-” he bucks his hips into you, moaning loudly.

“You can do it f’me, Toru.” you murmur darkly against his twitching tip. Satoru keens as you take him until his fat head hits the back of your throat, pulsing around your warm mouth.

Your fiancé’s choking on his breaths more than you as you hollow your mouth, bobbing up and down at a ruthless pace. Gagging, you shove his throbbing dick all the way in with a desperation that eclipses the need for air, till you’re nose-deep in those tufts of snowy hair. 

“Oh, darling. Jus’ like that. Losing m’mind.” he whines.

Your pussy quivers at Satoru’s slightly salty taste, making you moan around his rock-hard length. Drool and precum dribble down the corner of your mouth, mixing with the mascara running down your cheeks. It was debauched. It was messy. And it was exactly how you wanted him. 

Tonguing Satoru’s sensitive slit in a delicate dance, you feel drunk off his sinful moans as you suck on him desperately. Breathless. Craving for more. 

Looking up to see a delicate streak of tears falling down his pretty face at the overstimulation, your cunt clenches around nothing. Fuck, you could just devour him.

“Cum, Toru.”

It was too much for him- 

Tight balls twitching sensitively, he cums onto your ready tongue. Fucked out whimpers leave his lips, tears clinging to his long, white lashes as he paints your pretty mouth with his thick, white seed.

Ah, he was always your favorite taste. Tasted so good - so good that you could cum untouched. 

And you do.

Eyes rolling to the back of your head and pussy clamping down on nothing as you reach your high.

You milk his cock ruthlessly, relishing in the thick cum flowing down your throat. But it still wasn’t enough.

Removing yourself off his dick with a lewd pop! you reach a hand to grab Satoru’s flushed throat, nails placed right over his thundering pulse. With a single tug, the great Gojo Satoru is on his knees before you, in the bathroom of some fancy restaurant. 

Walls still quivering, you stand over him, connecting your sweaty forehead - and your mouth - with his. 

Kiss-bitten and smeared with your lipstick, Satoru’s lips are soft - or maybe that’s the cum coating yours. A part of you delights in his half-lidded, fucked out gaze as your eyes bore into his - does he even know what he’s doing anymore? 

Hot seed flowing down his throat, Satoru can do nothing else but kneel there and take it. He feels lightheaded, all the blood in his brain rushing to his cock as you suck on his tongue. This was driving him insane. You were insane.

And he fucking loved it.

“You d-drive me insane, my girl.” his words muffled by your hand still around his throat. His voice cracks with sensitivity in a way he would definitely be embarrassed about if he were in the right mind. 

Yet, how could he ever be with the slow, feral smile that spread across your beautiful face?

Leaning down, you whisper lowly against his ear. “I’m the same, Toru.” 

Maybe it’s your words, and the hot breath that sends shivers down his spine. Or maybe it’s the way you lift your dress so alluringly - cunt dripping on full display, slick trailing down your legs. 

All Satoru knows is, he’s surging forwards. He’s got your front pressed against the cold wall, cock twitching to life and bullying its way through your swollen folds. 

Mindlessly, a strong hand smacks against the stall as Satoru tries to keep himself steady. Too drunk off of you - off of your whimpers of his name, and the feeling of your plush walls clamping down on his throbbing erection, struggling to accommodate his size despite being so dripping wet. 

He doesn’t give a fuck. 

“Hngh- S’tight. Oh, fuck! S-sucking my cock back hah- in s-so needily” 

Ramming in and out of your hole at a merciless cadence, Satoru’s balls smack your clit so animalistically. You two feel like a pair of fucking animals. 

Shudders of overstimulation and pleasure wrack his body. Chest heaving, his blown-out eyes roll to the back of his head at the rapid, desperate thrusts inside your warm core. 

Pulling out all the way to slam back in mercilessly, Satoru could pass out at the sight of your ass jiggling as it arches to meet the rhythm of his hips. 

“God, m’girl. Gonna- gonna cum ah! Fill this pussy the way you want-” he groans raspily into the heady air of the stall, exhausted cock shooting wispy strings of cum that fill you up - some missing as he pumps into you, spilling out to paint your swollen folds white.

Before he knows it, a low hiss leaves his throat as you remove yourself off of his furiously pulsing cock - only to shove him seated on the commode. 

You take a split-second to admire your gorgeous fiancé - face flushed as much as the prettily leaking tip of his throbbing cock, eyes dazed and miles away, curtained by his sweaty white locks. A delicate trail of drool made its way down the corner of his ruby, kiss-bitten lips. Exactly how you wanted him.

What a fucking picture. Maybe you should take that chocolate more often…

“Toru~ Remember what I said? You’re not tapping out, are you?” you hum, eyes narrowing at the way his erection twitches so ferally at your dangerous tone. 

“Ah- don’t know- Can’t, please.”

You loom dangerously close, a hand reaching out to mockingly push his cheeks together, drool pooling at your fingertips. “I’ve told you before, Toru. Use your words. Please what?”

“M-mercy, please!” pathetic pleas muffled by your hand.

“Mercy?”

“Mercy!”

“No mercy for you, my darling Toru.”

The great Gojo Satoru, begging for mercy, will face none at your hands. 

You straddle his muscled legs, shivering with sensitivity. “Ah! Hah- Oh god. Oh god oh god oh god-” he whines nonstop as his quivering tip teases your swollen, messy folds. In one, fluid motion, you sheath him fully in your dripping cunt.

Ah, you feel so full. 

You relish in the way he twitches instinctively inside you. Steadying yourself using Satoru’s shoulders, you drag your cunt along his length, his prominent veins grazing that one spot inside you. Pulling out till his thick head teases your entrance, you drop down - inch by inch - over and over.

Satoru thinks he could cry right now - or maybe he already is. He doesn’t know, nor does he care - not when you’re so beautiful and fucked out, nails digging into his shoulders and heart eyes palpable in your gaze as you ride his sensitive cock into insanity.

He can’t stop the ragged moans that escape his swollen lips, head thrown back and hips bucking up exhaustedly into you to meet your every bounce. A hand is at his throat, pulling your face to his, “Don’t run away, Toru~”

He felt so raw. More a feral beast than a man as he watches his abused cock get swallowed up over and over by your wet pussy.

If he thought his dick was broken after this time then it’s really unsalvageable now.

He wanted to run away. He wanted more. He wanted you to keep looking at him with that fucking predatory gaze that made a carnal part of him twitch so good. He wanted to cum.

“I wan’- I wanna cum, please, my girl.” Satoru gasps out, teary eyes blown and looking up at you so delicately.

“Cum?”

“Yes.”

“Cum, Toru.”

Maybe it was the glint of fondness in your eyes, maybe it was the piercing of teeth as you bit down hard into the crook of his neck. Or maybe it was the way your snug cunt clamped down on him so sinfully as you cum as around him. But Satoru is immediately bucking up into your hips - reaching his climax, if you can even call it that. Poor, exhausted cock cumming dry. “Ah- Cumming- M’cumming hgnh-”

Satoru doesn’t even know if he feels his orgasm, just waves of pleasure that overwhelm him as he rides it out on your cunt. 

Ah, he thinks if heaven was a person then it would be you. 

Maybe he’s died already.

“Toru? Open your eyes, darling.”

Slowly opening the eyes that he didn’t even realize he had furiously scrunched closed, Satoru slowly blinks his vision back.

An angel?

“No, Toru, your fiancé.” you huff out a laugh. Oh shit, he said that out loud? 

Head still reeling from, well, everything - the great Gojo Satoru can do nothing else but sit there, exhausted and fucked out of his mind as you slowly remove yourself off his twitching cock. He’s never felt so vulnerable - so ruined.

Ah, someone remind him to never let you have a bite of that chocolate every again. 

A low hiss leaves him, along with a few tears that later he swears were never there. 

As you tenderly clean both yourselves up in the humid stall, Satoru thinks he’s never been handled with so much care. Ah, he loves your gentle hands. He loves you.

“I love you too, Toru.” you whisper into the intimate silence. Oh, shit, he said that out loud again?

Your beautiful laugh, “Yes, you did, Toru.” Throwing away the used tissues, you grin “Y’know they’ve probably brought out our food by now.”

Absent-mindedly, “Mhm?”

“I was thinking I wanted chocolate for dessert.”

A/N. Oh Satoru, you poor, innocent fool…

Also this turned out longer than expected. Reblogs so so appreciated!

Plagiarism not authorized.

Taglist:

@sage-ove @mo0nforme @thirtykiwis @planetzetra

[karinasbaby]

ENHA HYUNG LINE — YOUR GIRLFRIEND’S DADDY ! (they all have daddy kinks. sorry.) part 1 !!

P. enha hyung line + jungwon x fem!reader (17+) | W. unprotected sex, infidelity (but it’s valid), mentions of cheating, lots of pet names, cervix & womb fucking, enha r jealous & feral, breeding kink, biting & marking, other members from diff kpop groups being assholes & getting fucked over (this is just fiction don’t come at me), lots of other filthy shit i forgot | WC. 12k (idek how that happened) | A,N. this one has been in the drafts since july. and i just finished it up while waiting for my doctor’s appointment, enjoy!

IN WHICH the hyung line (+ jungwon) get addicted to a pussy that doesn’t belong to them in the first place ?!

♡ PS this part contains heeseung, jake & jungwon !! <3

✷ LEE HEESEUNG ⋆ 이희승

the one thing that always stood out about heeseung, a striking trait that he carried was his exceptional ability to hide his emotions.

though this odd trait of his did have its own pros and cons that appeared and made themselves pretty evident throughout his life, heeseung still thought this was a good characteristic about himself.

it helped a lot to hide his emotions when he lied, when he tried to make an excuse as to why he forgot to do his homework. when asked from his friends if he was feeling down and the list went on. to put things short, he was the exact opposite of an open book that was easily read.

but heeseung started to slowly doubt this speciality of his, especially when it came to his bestfriend. and his little sister, you.

jeno has always been a great friend of heeseung, their small age gap making the two feel comfortable with one another immediately after meeting. the friendship had a click of some sort, almost making them feel like they’ve known each other for decades when they’ve only been friends for a handful amount of months.

and heeseung wasn’t stopping his grateful and happy emotions to spill out whenever he was with jeno, the kind hearted guy that he always saw as a solid, constant figure in his life and future.

the issue came for heeseung when you, jeno’s cute little sister that he always seemed to eye for a bit too long, got into a relationship.

your first relationship at that.

jeno, as your older brother was rightfully protective, giving you advice every chance he could after checking up on you and your boyfriend, soobin. whom always rubbed jeno the wrong way. but he didn’t have the courage to point it out to you and potentially break your heart, it was a risk he could never take.

but if there was someone that was even more concerned and even more protective— overly protective even, than jeno. it was heeseung.

there was something about soobin that always seemed to just not settle with heeseung. he couldn’t tell if it was his weirdly ‘forgetful memory’ as you liked to call it, or the way his eyes were constantly glued to his phone whenever you four decided to hang out. not giving you a singular ounce of the attention you deserved.

his behaviour towards you, his own girlfriend, was dry. cold. dismissive. and he couldn’t tell if jeno was purposefully turning a blind eye into this, but it was so clearly hurting you.

especially with the way your shoulders would visibly slump whenever you would excitedly tell soobin about an a new event that happened during your lecture, an interest that had your eyes sparkling while he would just nod mindlessly along to your words. vision obstructed and glued onto his stupid phone screen that irritated heeseung to no end. he could see the disappointment rising in you when soobin would pay you no attention. so passive in his responses, so visible that he did not care.

and it was angering heeseung so tremendously. setting him off like a ticking bomb that would explode at the guy any second but he kept holding himself back.

for the sake of jeno. for the sake of you. after all, he was just a friend.

and he couldn’t tell if soobin’s attitude towards you angered him more, or the fact that he was always going to be stuck under the ‘friend’ title in your life.

heeseung had developed feelings for you way before you got into a relationship with soobin, might even be a mere month after jeno introduced you to him. he had always had his eyes lingering on you. a soft, gentle glint in them whenever your presence was surrounding him in any way.

he believed that it was just him forming a soft spot for you in his heart in the beginning, but as time passed by, especially after soobin ruined everything in heeseung’s opinion, his feelings grew. becoming a solidified fact for heeseung instead of a mere reverie that he cooed about in his head.

yet for the longest time, he knew he had to keep his emotions hidden again. falling back into his old routine of covering, blanketing his feelings. hiding and cowering away in fear of your brother finding out and the dear connection that heeseung held so close to his heart ending.

so he bit his tongue. holding back any words, any opinions, any thoughts and of course any emotions that were related to you and soobin. swallowing back his anger that swirled sombrely in the pit of his stomach. though no one was taking notice of his hatred towards soobin, it was only growing more and more day by day.

like a foul stench that would blind your senses, an evil beast that festered malignantly. his distaste towards soobin became a hardened feeling. a prominent one that settled in the front of his chest. growing and branching between his ribs to only pulse in hatred whenever he saw the guy.

he wasn’t sure how long he’ll be able to hide these feelings though.

because not only was he now dealing with the fact that he had to fight himself back from punching soobin everytime he saw him, he also had his own completely opposite emotions that bloomed like the breathtaking petals of a flower when graced by spring sunlight, his undying and thriving pure love for you.

it made his heart ache in dull pain when he saw the damage soobin was causing to you. his own insides ripping apart whenever you would come crying onto jeno’s shoulder because of another argument with your jerk of a boyfriend, he was growing tired. almost as tired as you were becoming from holding his shaking fists back from marking soobin’s god forsaken face. tired from actually capturing his tongue between his teeth before vile words spilled past his lips towards him.

he was so tired with this routine. so sickened of the way you were struggling and struggling. stuck in a bubble of anguish and pain formed by soobin that no one was able to pop.

but heeseung always carried a needle around, for safe measures.

the rainy day you decided to frantically knock on his door, your sobs echoing in his house when you buried your face into his chest because you actually found another girl’s number in the same phone that soobin had his eyes stuck on. was the day that heeseung finally snapped.

fuck all of this.

fuck soobin. fuck jeno. fuck both of their feelings. he had you, who so clearly needed a massive amount of attention, of care and love to pour all over your fresh wound that ached in heeseung’s embrace. he felt his heart shattering into the tiniest pieces when you sobbed in his hold. the desperate grip your fingers had on his arms pulling at his insides as he felt his own tears aligning his waterline.

he hated to see you like this. so heartbroken and devastated over a guy that didn’t even deserve you one bit. he would’ve never treated you like soobin. not even for a single second. heeseung would’ve treated you so much better if only you had looked at him the way he’s always been looking at you for the past months.

if only you took notice of the longing in his eyes. the yearn that clawed at his heartstrings whenever he saw you in front of him. right within arm’s reach but so so far away.

but that didn’t matter anymore. you were finally away from soobin, that fucker was out of your life and you were in heeseung’s arms. heeseung’s embrace that felt so warm, so welcoming as you fit perfectly in his hold. so right.

so you stayed, feeling the safety and comfort that seeped through your body in heeseung’s presence. a peace of mind that you’ve never felt with anyone, not even with your own brother. that lulled you into calmness, heeseung’s gentle touch that brushed against the skin of your face and neck when he would tenderly caress you as he whispered sweet, calming words to your ear that made the raging storm inside of you sizzle down.

the hurt, the pain and all the agony was pushed aside. stuffed inside of a box discarded into the back of your brain. your head throbbed in pain at the excessive amount of crying you did in heeseung’s arms. a pulsing ache that travelled from the back of your skull to the end of your spine as you sniffled quietly in his arms.

“feeling better, precious?” he whispered quietly, voice barely audible. so soft and delicate as if he was scared that any unexpected move or sound will scare you. make you cower away in fear. he knew how to speak to you. how to touch you and handle you just the right way.

so affectionate, calm and delicate when handling you. touch as soft as a baby bird’s feather as if you were made of glass, the most precious material that could break and crumble with the slightest incorrect move.

he made you feel so seen, so understood and cared for. you weren’t too much for him as soobin claimed you to be. not attention seeking or annoying at all.

“not really..” you closed your eyes, wet lashes heavy with tear droplets that didn’t have the chance to roll down your face, he looked at you. in his eyes an unfamiliar glow. unable to pinpoint or understand exactly what he was feeling, all he knew was that he wanted you close to him.

“what can i do to make you feel better, pearl?” the new petname that rolled off his tongue so easily had your heart leaping in your chest, you opened your eyes. glossy vision landing on his own expectant one, he was implying something with his words. both of you aware of the sharp edge in his tone, an invitation that he had slipped towards you. waiting for you to pick it up and accept.

“make me forget about him..” your warm breath fanned over his face, the feeling of finally having you so close made his head spin. a carnal, hidden urge in him awakening after being discarded and thrown away for so long. stuffed deep inside of him for months, a crippling desire. a wicked desire to have you, has surged forward again.

his emotions, feelings, thoughts everything about you that were invalidated by his rational side. concealed in the name of his morals and beliefs that he’s wrong. he shouldn’t desire a taken woman, shouldn’t look at his own best friend’s little sister wrongly, were all springing back to life. enlivened at your mere presence. your mere existence and attendance in his hold. and heeseung was no longer holding himself back.

he didn’t care if what he was going to be doing aligned with his stupid morals and beliefs anymore. didn’t care if you were to wake up tomorrow regretting everything. didn’t care if he wasn’t going to be able to look at jeno in the eye again. he was finally given a taste of you.

not a whisper of you, not a piece of you, you were entirely served on a silver platter for him only to devour. to ravish. to feast on with ardour. to finally satisfy and satiate the hunger that always ached in his stomach for you.

you were finally here. between his fingertips. within arm’s reach, looking at him. staring into his eyes and not only looking at the devoted shine in them directed towards you, you were reciprocating it.

“yeah? that’s what you want, pretty?” he leaned down, brushing the tip of his nose against yours. you closed your eyes at the intimacy. a warmth spreading inside of you before settling into your core. dripping. that’s what you were. absolutely soaked.

“i want you.” you spoke, hit with an unknown urge to only speak the truth. removing each and every filter from your mind and mouth as you let your tongue speak whatever your brain formed at that current moment. and you wanted heeseung.

and who was he to deny you of that?

your sultry eyes that looked at him in pure lust asking him that? he was gone. your vixen like manners wrapping him in a chokehold. he was such a weak man for you. determined on pleasing you to the best of his ability, make you lose count on the amounts of times he’ll push you towards your high just so you can think about him and how good your pretty little cunt feels.

and so heeseung started, laying you on your stomach atop his satin sheets with your hands behind you, restrained by his fastened belt around your wrists while you squirmed on his bed. long, thick fingers that worked past your sopping entrance. leaking mushy walls tightened around his digits as if welcoming them for being inside of your needy pussy. fuck you were drenched.

“what a greedy cunt.. sucking my fingers in like this, wonder how long you’ve been waiting for this, pearl.” he laughed behind you, busy taking in the way your slick was drizzling down his palm, the way your puffy swollen folds swallowed in his long fingers entirely. the wet sounds from his abuse against your sweet spot was the cherry on top for him.

he was so fucking hard in his pants. his briefs feeling unbearably tight. heeseung breathed out short huffs of breaths, working his way to stretch your tight pussy open before fucking you on his length that he was sure you couldn’t take.

especially not with the way you were moaning and thrashing in his bed just from his fingers.

but who could blame you? he felt so good. his elongated fingers brushing against all of your sweet spots so deliciously. you could only imagine how mouth watering his cock would feel when he finally decides to fuck you like you’ve always dreamed of.

you couldn’t deny the attraction you’ve held for heeseung. the twinge at your heart that hoped to tug you towards him, an unknown pull that always made you stay up late at night thinking about heeseung. wondering about heeseung. dreaming about heeseung.

and for the longest time, it made you feel so guilty. so ashamed of the fact that you were thinking of your friend more than your own boyfriend. yet at the same time you heard a tiny voice in your head justifying your actions, a small part of you knew that your boyfriend was really anything but a boyfriend.

you did notice his passive behaviour. his curt responses and cold attitude towards you. but did you actually have the courage to confront soobin about it? to bring it up as an actual issue that was clearly building a separating wall between you two in your relationship? of course no. you decided to turn into a blind eye and hold faith in false beliefs that maybe, just maybe soobin will change one day.

except that day never came. it was never going to.

and the rational, logical part of you knew this. knew this so so well that it decided to give up on soobin long before your heart realised the change in your desire. the change in your mind, the way your thoughts quickly turned from being clouded with soobin, to being thundered with your beloved friend heeseung.

you didn’t even realise you had such a drastic change of heart. only coming to the chilling notion of how when you were with soobin, heeseung roamed your mind. when you were talking to jeno. heeseung was filling the back of your head. when soobin was trying to make dry love that lacked any sense of passion with you, you were left to fend for yourself with your fingers, and heeseung in your brain. heeseung on your thoughts, the whisper of ‘heeseung’ on your tongue when you finally reached the climax soobin couldn’t bring you to.

and in the beginning you were scared, terrified even of the thumping in your chest that you were sure anyone could hear if they stepped close enough to you when you were around heeseung. scared of the way your eyes would stray too far away from soobin and remain stuck on heeseung for too long. scared of the way you were only staying in your current relationship not out of love, but out of attachment to soobin when you yearned for heeseung.

hence why the only relief that you found in your love life was in your dreams. your unconscious daydreams that would conjure up a love story, a love vessel that branched between you and heeseung. every night with no fail.

yet you didn’t have to worry about this anymore. no longer tied emotionally to the false, unrealistic images and feelings that only existed in your head about heeseung. not when you had him currently groaning out praises to you, showering you with so much love and attention that you missed out on as he fucked you through your first orgasm on his fingers.

“such a good girl for me.. cumming around my fingers so well. my obedient little girl.” he trailed kisses from the back of your thighs, wet smacks of his lips against your skin till he reached your shoulder, where he traced his long tongue along your neck. “think you’re ready for me, precious?” he whispered lustfully into your ear. and god did he sound so much better. so much hotter than in your dreams.

voice almost gruff, an entire octave lower than his usual tone as he pressed his warm body against yours. brushing the exposed, leaking head of his cock and separating your oozing lower lips after discarding himself from his clothes. he was so menacing. teasing you so much when all your body ached for was to be filled up to the brim with his length.

“so needy for me.. look at your cunt trying to suck me in, pearl.” he hissed, eyes rolling to the back of his head at the sight of the same hole that he just fucked open with his fingers gaping at him. dribbling more of your syrupy nectar down your inner thighs as if to seduce him. winking at him when you tightened around nothing just to entice him further. making a wave of thrill pass through his body just so he would fill you up.

and well, heeseung was a very weak, weak man when it came to you.

he pushed the head of his cock in. the two of you hissing in sync, your pretty plump lips falling in an ‘o’ shape while he bit on his lower lip, your gushing walls wrapped around him so tightly the first time he sunk his cock in you. as if greeting him, their new owner before moulding into his shape.

if heeseung stared at your form any longer, he would’ve came inside of you already, ruining both of your fun. but goodness was seeing you twitching in his bed, plush thighs pushed to the sides so he can stuff his cock inside of you so fully while your arms shook and jerked around his own belt was a divine sight. one he quickly imprinted onto his brain to always go back to whenever needed.

but something told him that that wasn’t going to happen, he doesn’t need to depend on his memory anymore. he felt like he was going to be able to experience the real deal after this.

he pushed his hips forward, thrusting in and brushing right against your g-spot that had you whining his name almost automatically. “found it..” he smirked in victory, “that’s your weak spot isn’t it, pearl?” leaning down just a bit to inch closer to your ear, “your sweet sweet spot, baby.” you felt tears aligning your eyes. glossing over when he continued to nudge his hips against your spot. the one corner in your walls that had you seeing stars.

legs already shaking under him, you mewled his name so adorably. each huff and puff of air past your glistening lips made his heart skip a beat. he was growing even more obsessed with you than he already was. “y-yes seung.. that’s— oh my god.. that’s it!” you whined and sobbed for him.

heeseung sucked a deep breath in, lips kissing his teeth as his body felt like it was lit ablaze. so many months of daydreaming about this current moment that he was in right now paid off. you felt so hot. so pliant. so malleable under him. body reacting to each touch of his so sweetly, like your body recognised his as its other half before either of you did.

“such a good- haah shit.. such a good pussy.. sucking me in so well. you feel fuckin’ divine, pretty.” his eyes rolled into the back of his head from the way your cunt just kept gushing and sputtering out wetness before wrapping around his cock and sucking him back in deep. so so deep he was bruising your insides.

“j-just for you daddy..” a broken, quiet sentence that was almost unheard. almost went unnoticed. but heeseung was so glad he caught it. as the second that endearing name fell past your parted lips, he felt an entire electric shock shoot through his spine.

his mind was reeling, breaths growing uneven as your voice played like a broken record in his head, so pretty. so small. so frail and so delicate. as sensitive and precious as an actual pearl you were. heeseung was sinking in so much deeper in love than he already was with you.

“yeah, little girl? daddy’s making you feel good, isn’t he?” he was so careful. each move of his made solely for the purpose of pleasing you. of pushing you closer and closer to your peak of pleasure. and before you realised it, your climax broke down upon you like a dam. tears rolling down your cheeks and onto heeseung’s pillowcases as he fucked you through your high.

god did it feel so relieving. so alleviating to have someone put your pleasure first, to push you to your pleasure first. to care for you, think about you and make love to you for you. it was so different. so delicious you couldn’t help but ravish in the ecstasy of it all. your first ever experience of pure, arrant love.

it wasn’t only heeseung that was getting high off of the pleasure of experiencing you for the first time, your mind was also reeling from experiencing such pleasure for the first time. “s’good daddy.. too good! you feel so warm.” hicupping and babbling on as heeseung only continued to thrust in more harshly.

he felt so feverish, the temperature of his body rising while his room turned steamier. it was almost as if he could no longer breathe. not that his mind registered that feeling in the first place, the only thing he could process was the way your pussy was trying to suck him back in more and more and more.

he leaned forward, allowing his hot exhales of breath to fan against your ear. hand sneaking between your shaking thighs and circling around your clit. “you can give daddy another one, can’t you pearl?” he whimpered next to your ear. his eyelids droopy as he held back on his own climax.

he rolled his hips in circular motion against yours, no longer thrusting his leaking cock in and out and only pressing his mushroom shaped tip onto your cervix, the sensation of him so close, so deep and so hot on top and inside of you made your eyes roll to the back of your head, his movements incessant as he worked and guided your body towards another release.

“f-fuck..” sobbing under heeseung as he coaxed another orgasm out of you, he cooed besides your ear as his hands quickly unclasped his belt from around your wrists, making your hands grip desperately onto the sheets while his laced around your shaking legs, tongue peeking out to lick against your tears as he felt relief in his chest at the sight of you crying from pure pleasure and not over your ex.

the feeling of being so intimately connected to you, having you entrust him with your body and pleasure made his head reel. you being so close to him was a dream come true for heeseung. and now that he had you in tears underneath him, he was never going to be able to let go of this moment.

every second of this night has already been engraved in his head. every emotion and every fast thump of his heart tattooed itself on his memory, and it made him feel so good. so accomplished, he felt complete.

he buried his face in your neck, relishing in the way your body was shivering because of him, the goosebumps that aligned your skin because of his touch, relishing in the feeling of having you around him in every way. “you feel so good, princess..” he drunkenly spoke, his orgasm creeping up on him as he continued to grind against you.

“wrapped around daddy so well, pearl.” he groaned, every sniffle and whimper that left your mouth due to his lewd words went straight to his throbbing cock, he felt like he was seconds away from releasing and filling you up entirely. the thought alone making his jaw clench in delirium.

“want daddy to fill you up, baby?” he whispered, his smirk evident in his whisper. luring you slowly into his trap that seemed so effective with the way you whimpered for him and tightened around him more. so pleased, ecstatic and needy of the mere idea.

“p-please, daddy! please fill me up.. give me your babies..” you begged, weaker hands wrapped around his forearms to keep him in place while your cunt squeezed around him, gushing around his cock just to urge him to not pull out and fill you up instead.

and fuck heeseung was losing it.

your words almost awakening something animalistic in him, a noxious urge to truly fill you up, give you his babies and keep you just for himself only. in that exact moment, all the worries from heeseung’s shoulders evaporated.

your brother no longer mattered, soobin no longer mattered, he himself didn’t matter anymore. he only needed to have you stuck with him for eternity. by his side forever, and you were asking him to do exactly that. asking him so desperately. how could he refuse?

after all, heeseung was a very weak man when it came to you.

“gonna take all of daddy’s babies, pearl?” he chuckled, sweat rolling off of his temples as the coil in his stomach tightened further, the feeling making his voice crack at the end. you nodded frantically under him, nails digging into his skin yet the pain made him hiss in pleasure.

“please give it to me..” you moaned as you felt another release wash over you, fresh tears rolling down your cheeks while heeseung bit your skin at the overwhelming waves of ecstaty that crashed on him. “i’m your good girl, daddy aren’t i? i deserve it.. please.” fuck you sounded so starved. the mere longing in your voice, you calling yourself his good girl made him lose his mind.

and before heeseung could even realise it, he was pumping you full with his warm ropes of cum, both of you groaning in vehement, blinding euphoria while he peppered kisses around your neck and jaw. “of course you’re my good girl, baby fuuuck— you’re my prettiest girl.” his own legs started to shake in pleasure as he rode out his high.

keeping himself so deep inside of you, pushing his load deeper with each slight thrust while he stayed above you. whispering praise after praise for you just to show you how much he truly loves you. heeseung was ready to die for you.

and once his high subsided, he carefully laid next to you, moving you gently to your side and staying rooted deep inside of you before covering both of your bodies with his blanket.

he placed a loving kiss to your temple, arms wrapped protectively around your weak and spent body. “sleep well, pearl.” he spoke, “don’t think about anything, daddy’s here.” you felt the way his hold tightened around you.

you felt too fatigued to reply, instead tilting your head just enough to kiss his hand that was close to your neck, the small gesture carrying your love for the man behind you, making his heart thunder in his chest as you fell asleep, feeling so protected and loved for the first time in so long.

★ SIM JAEYUN ⋆⋆⋆ 심재윤

sim jaeyun was great at many things. acing his physics exams, being the best captain for his university’s football team and being an absolute sweetheart to his teachers and friends.

the only thing that sim jaeyun sometimes lacked in was his ability to give a fuck. especially when it came to his childhood friend, his one sided enemy and shameless copycat.

lee anton, who’s also a close family friend of jake. has been living in his shadow ever since the two could even walk. countless comparisons between the two young boys drew a very fat, drastic line that only distanced them from one another without their parents’ realisation.

sure, anton and jake might’ve sat next to each other at family dinners, passed each other tissues or salt, but the second they were outside of the dining room or the house that pushed them to be in the same vicinity? it was over.

their so called ‘friendship’ was only a show the two of them had unspokenly agreed on in order to not have their families pry into their lives. and for the longest time, it worked.

jake didn’t care. jake couldn’t even bring himself to care about anything anton related while that clearly wasn’t the case for anton.

call it his insecurities or doubts towards everything, he always watched jaeyun from the sidelines with a glint in his eyes that not even he could decipher, whether it was admiration or envy. the only thing anton was sure he felt towards jake, was resentment.

years and years of all of his actions getting nitpicked and compared to jake’s made him only strive to be more. to be better than jake. to reach heights and places the older one could only dream of. but at the same time his dreams only stayed as that, dreams.

because jake— he was untouchable. a dude that had everything and anything really. he was perfect in every aspect. excellent grades, respected by all the sport coaches, admired by every teacher and fawned over by every girl.

and it sickened anton.

because he had multiple things that now he had to improve on, he couldn’t find the one singular thing that jake didn’t have that he could snatch. the one thing he could reach and claim before his enemy could even think about it. he had to figure out a way to make jake jealous, to pay for all of these years of one sided rivalry that only made anton almost lose his sanity.

and so he did.

he found exactly what would set jake off. the only way to turn the tables around and have jake eyeing him from the sidelines.

his crush. anton managed to date you, jake’s obsession and love that no one except his close circle of friends knew about. he had you wrapped around his finger.

you see now as mentioned before, jake didn’t care. he didn’t care what other opinions people had on him, who were getting compared to him or who he was getting compared to himself. he was content and happy in being present in his own bubble, surrounded by his own people he knew he could trust. and well just lived his life.

except he couldn’t do that anymore. not when anton, who was determined to climb up towards jake’s level by also becoming the co-captain of the university’s football team— walked around the halls with his arm wrapped around your waist and lips close to your ear as he whispered a stupid joke that made you laugh. right. in front. of jake.

jake was livid.

for the longest time in his life, he never felt the need to reach his hands out towards something that didn’t come for him first. his eyes never strayed too far away from things that were already meant for him. as difficult as this was to hear for others, jake was simply gifted in many factors in life.

he didn’t try too hard to study and ace all his tests. he was just very intelligent and paid a great amount of attention in his lectures, it wasn’t his fault that he was ridiculously handsome that (as cliche as this sounds) girls fangirled over him when he would pass by the halls. and it really didn’t cost a lot to not be an asshole to others.

so for jake to feel the need to have. the crave to own. the urge to desire something that he wasn’t already divinely gifted? was making him pissed.

he wasn’t even sure himself when his crush on you started, or how it developed to be something that gnawed at his heartstrings everyday. when the smart student of his physics class turned from someone that he only used to admire during his lectures into someone he thought about before falling asleep everynight. what he did know though was the fact that he wanted you.

and was jake someone that didn’t get what he wanted? pfft of course no.

that’s why he had you— anton’s beloved girlfriend who he seemed to forget multiple dates with because he spent too much time ogling jake— clenching down on his leaking length that thrusted past your sopping hole.

“f-fuck! jake— shit! he’s going to hear us!” you mewled his name, body feeling excessively warm, heart thundering against your chest in both anxiety and excitement at the thought of being caught with jake, sweat rolled down both of your bodies while you desperately clawed at jake’s open locker.

jake was currently balls deep inside of you in the football team’s locker room.

where anton was just a hallway away, calling out your name since he had to apologise for missing your fourth date this week.

“scared of letting that asshole hear us? haah— i have no idea why you’re still- fuck.. with him when you have me, angel girl.” he breathed out heavily next to your ear, eyes closing in pleasure as he thrusted into your walls that only seemed to suck him in further and further. he was feeling so ecstatic. so high on your touch and presence that he was holding himself back from filling you up entirely.

you pushed your hips back, actions completely contradicting your own words as you kept tightening around jake with each whiny moan that fell past his bitten lips, “you know i can’t leave him..” you whined, head pressing against the lockers while jake leaned down, hovering his chest above your back.

“why is that, baby? is he remembering all your dates? shit- is he buying you all the jewellery you deserve, angel? i-is he fucking you as good as i am right now?” he bit against the shell of your ear, voice growing desperate, needy, ravenous just to hear you say the words he wants to hear. his satisfaction bubbling in his stomach when you shook your head to everything he groaned to you, denying each and every action that jake would’ve done for you in a heartbeat.

“no! no no he doesn’t— hmm he d-doesn’t- fuck! only you do!” you thrashed under his hold, hips jerking forward from his grip as your abdomen only tightened and tightened further. you felt so good. the stretch of his thick cock splitting you open burned so well. you loved having him so deep inside of you, leaking tip of his dick pressing and kissing all over your sweet spots that had stars spinning around your head.

he laughed breathlessly behind you, reveling in your praises and the way each word was only a further push into his inflated ego, he already knew all of this. he knew how shitty anton was treating you as he was too busy trying to make him jealous. he knew every and each move anton was trying to pull but none of it was going to work.

as he was too busy to study jake’s reactions to even realise that he had his own girlfriend cumming around his enemy’s cock so prettily. falling apart in jake’s embrace as jake only cooed and encouraged you even more. to cum more. to make a mess over his cock. to claim him as yours just as badly as he wanted to claim you as his.

and that’s exactly what you did, with the way his cock kept bullying its way back inside of your walls that continued to milk him for all he’s worth. relishing in the feeling of his hot cum filling you up with warm and thick ropes of his load, you continued to do what he wanted. forming a sheen ring of your combined juices around the base of his cock.

jake kept fucking into you, whispering words after words of praise hotly into your ear while your eyes rolled into the back of your skull. his hand let go of your hip to push in between your sticky inner thighs, fingers working deftly in rubbing circular motions onto your throbbing clit that only pulsed in need under his touch. “telling me to stop.. when she’s sucking me in this well.” he groaned, breaths getting caught in his throat as he felt hot white pleasure spreading all over his body.

“asking me to not fuck you… only thinking about your stupid boyfriend what about her then?” he slapped against your cunt, the wet sounds of his fingers landing on your wet, glistening skin had your mind reeling. “always so selfish not thinking about her.. oh but i always do. i can’t get this pretty cunt out of my head baby.” he shivered behind you, getting lost in the way you kept sucking him in due to his words.

the two of your bodies were moulding into one at this point, your flimsy panties that were pushed to the side with your skirt pushed upwards and jake’s shorts that were pooling by his ankles were the last of your concerns, him fucking you this good and this deep in the public space of your locker’s room was also discarded into the back of your head that was getting gradually fucked into subspace.

your senses heightened, only processing the feeling of jake’s swollen, pulsing tip kissing and pushing against your throbbing cervix that begged to be filled up with his cum over and over again, filled up to the brim as many times as jake could give to you till the two of your bodies gave out.

“you don’t actually want me to s-stop do you, baby?” his voice became shaky, matching your own shaky breathes as he bit against the exposed skin of your neck and shoulders. his hips began to grind against yours, thick swollen balls pressed against the curve of your ass as he barely pulled out an inch or two before stuffing you full of his cock. “t-think about her, princess.” he starts to slap against your pussy again, gentle wet slaps that echo embarrassingly loud in the empty locker’s room.

“telling me to pull out when she’s so greedy f’me?” he moans, chest heaving in deep gulps of breath as he kept holding his orgasm back, reminding himself to not cum before you again. “tell me baby, will he ever breed this pretty little cunt like i’m about to right now?” his hand that was gripping your hip dug his fingers into your plush skin further, leaving indents of his sharp nails behind while you mewled in pained pleasure at the sensation.

you loved it when he marked you, admiring all his marks whenever anton wasn’t home and hiding them away from his eyes, it made you feel excited. a rush of joy sparking in your stomach at the thought of these marks being a secret only you and jake knew about.

“n-no no.. he won’t, jakey he c-can’t!” you hiccuped, his favourite pet name spilling out while you felt your used, swollen pussy aching in pain and need. you felt so wasted, so febrile as your cunt only spasmed around him needily no matter how sore you already were feeling. and jake loved it so much when your body began to respond to him, reacting to every touch and contact made by him and he knew each response like the back of his hand.

he doubted if anton knew how to get your body like this too. flushed and burning in his hold, saturated pussy walls milking and squeezing him, salty droplets of sweat that dribbled down the back of your neck that he had no problem licking up. there was no way anton knew your body like he did.

he knew exactly which buttons to push and which parts to pull, just like how he knew that thrusting his hips so deep to the point where your cervix felt bruised while sneaking one of his hands under your shirt to tug at your hardened nipple and slither his other hand to wrap around your neck, pressing lightly just to make your head spin will have you unraveling again on his throbbing cock.

“there you go princess..” he breathed out, his own eyes rolling to the back of his head as your walls calmped down on him. cunt wrapping around his thick cock like a vice as you creamed and made a mess over his dick just how he liked it. “feels good, angel?” he spoke against the skin of your neck, hands now moving to grip onto his own locker door to stabilise himself. you nodded dumbly to his words. eyes closed as electrifying waves of euphoria twitched along your body.

“good baby.. so so good t’me.. you can take more can’t you now? my pretty girl?” he spoke over the approaching yells of anton, your name spilling past his lips as his eyes darted everywhere in the halls to find your figure. though he didn’t know why his feet led him into the hallway of the football team’s locker room, he just decided to not wonder about it too much.

and you might’ve not been able to hear him over the incessant ringing in your ears as you came down from your high that jake fucked you dumb towards but oh he heard it so clearly. the tone of desperation in his voice was like music to jake’s ears. this right here, was his chance. and he was going to take it no matter what happens.

“think you can take a bit more, princess?” he began to move his hips again, nasty, loud and squelching wet noises echoing in the locker’s room as he pulled in and out allowing a glistening, clear mixed with white mixture of both of your arousals to dribble past your inner thighs, he looked down at the sight of his veiny cock glistening in your syrupy juices. the locker room’s lights reflecting off your pretty stuffed cunt and his thick cock that disappeared between your dripping folds. god he could cum right now if he wanted to. but he still held back.

his hand moved onto your lower back, pressing slightly to bend you down more. deepening the arch of your back to make his cock slip past your drizzling folds, each thrust of his against your hips almost splattering your filthy wetness over your ass cheeks and his pelvis. he pulled his hips slightly back before ramming them forward again. the ridiculously wet noise in combination with your sinful moan made his muscles tighten.

his abs flexing as he lifted his shirt, tugging the hem of it between his teeth to allow the gushing combination of your juices to climb up his stomach, revelling in the way your pussy spurted out more cum, more squirt and more of your sweet syrupy nectar combined with his own on his skin. in a way he felt like you were marking him, rightfully staining your own territory and it made him feral.

“baby?” the distant yells of anton became closer and closer. the stupid pet name that he dared to call you made jake scoff. his jealousy, envy and all nastily negative emotions that swirlied within him made him fuck you harder. harsher. his length pulling at your walls, tugging against your sweet spots making you sob and wail his name, jake’s name in the locker’s room.

“who’s fucking you this good, princess?” he growled, drool dribbling past the corner of his lips as sweat rolled down his temples, the salty droplets finding purchase on his glowing skin before falling atop your shining one. “y-you! jakey.. fuck! oh my god- you you you!” you babbled on, if jake’s mouth was covered in drool yours was a mess. you salivated more and more as he bullied his cock inside of you, marking and moulding your insides to only fit his length. only recognise his dick and veins that decorated his cock.

“what’s my name baby? say it. yell it. scream it, princess. let them all hear who you belong to.” his shaking hand turned to land a harsh slap against your right ass cheek, palm burning at the aggressive contact of your soft skin with his making you cry even more under him. face almost pressed against the cool metal of the locker, pearly tears falling freely onto the wet puddle that the two of you had formed on the floor right between your legs.

“jakey!” you gasped loudly, vision blurry with both overstimulated pleasure and your own tears. a hot pounding forming in the back of your head as jake continued to fuck you stupid on his thick inches that dragged along your creaming walls, clenching and clamping down on him in cadence to his thrusts.

“that’s not my name, princess.” he frustratedly groaned, he was almost able to hear anton’s foot steps as they approached the locker’s room where he had you bent over and sucking in his cock like the perfect slut for him that you were. the slut that anton didn’t even know existed but jake had memorised like the back of his hand.

“d-daddy!” you choked out, swallowing back sobs as another orgasm washed over you, cumming so hard around jake’s cock while he continued to fuck into you, each squirt of your sopping pussy only encouraged him to push back into your cunt. “pushing me out now, is she?” he moaned, head thrown back in pleasure at the added pressure of your cunt both pushing him out and sucking him back in. making his head reel in ecstasy.

“say my name, baby. say it. who owns this fucking pussy?” he thrusted back, attempting to piston his mushroom tip against your sweet spots to make you see stars. “you do, daddy! you do!” mewling under him as your own nails began to dig into your skin. jake felt so much euphoria rushing deep in his veins at your words. the sound of your whiny voice mewling and moaning so sweetly for him while your body squirmed under his hold made him so happy. he had you exactly where he wanted.

at the best position for anton to see right when he walks past the door of the locker’s room.

“am i fucking this pretty cunt good, princess? want me to fill your cheating pussy up? knock you up so you have no choice but to stay with me and not your asshole of a boyfriend, hm?” he egged you on, knowing so so well that anton heard everything. the loud screech of his sneakers against floor of the hallway telling him everything he needed to know and god jake was on cloud fucking nine right now.

“gonna let me breed you? make you pregnant with my baby. have you all round and pretty carrying my baby so you’re mine forever.” he leaned down to kiss against your neck, his balls squeezing more tightly as he finally let go. allowing all the cum stored in them to push against your pretty cervix and womb. filling you up with his hot ropes of cum, knocking you up just how he wanted.

jake didn’t even mind the shocked gasp the fell past anton’s lips at the sight, too high. too drunk and wasted on the feeling of the way your pussy was sucking him in as he triggered another orgasm from you because of his own, he hummed at the feeling, soft whimpers falling past his lips while he held you close to him. god he was cumming so so much. filling you up to the brim so well you could feel his cum flooding your insides, filling up your swollen pussy and uterus so well. there was no way it didn’t take.

your drool was dribbling past your chin as your eyes rolled to the back of your head, jake grinding up against your ass to ride both of your highs out, his hand pressed against the bloated bulge in your lower stomach while broken sobs and whispers of his name made it to his ears. your body was so weak. so used and so utterly exhausted from the continuous fucking and breeding. “feeling tired, mama?” he whispered lustfully against your ear, peeking one eye towards the locker room’s door just in time to catch the faint sight of anton’s sneakers quickly disappearing behind the walls.

he smiled, satisfaction and happiness bubbling in his insides at the thought of finally having you. with no worries or concerns of anton. he felt so joyous. so relieved that you no longer had to deal with that asshole. he finally had you all to himself.

he kept his softening cock buried inside of you, arms wrapping around your waist to pull you impossibly closer before nuzzling his nose into the crook of your neck. you felt so soft, so nice and warm in his hands when you moved your hand back to tug at his neck, you turned your head back and connected your lips to his.

and just that action alone had jake’s heart bursting with love, he finally had you wrapped around his finger just how you had him for the longest time.

☆ YANG JUNGWON ⟡ 양정원

for yang jungwon, life had always been on easy mode. as if playing an easier, more smoother game of life with less bumps and obstacles in his path. everything almost moulded to his liking and every unfavourable decision changed for the sweethearted guy.

his life was nothing short than average— he was a remarkably good student, great president of his class. trusted tremendously by the teachers, very dearly loved by all animals— well okay maybe his life wasn’t that average.

but he just liked to believe that it was fate, or luck, one of those two didn’t matter which one but he did know that there was some other higher power that played an important role in all of his life events. as surely there was a reasoning behind every single thing that happens in his world.. or maybe not somethings are just meant to be the way the are.

much like his confusing rivalry with his number one public enemy, the guy that he would actually have no problem with killing if he could, haruto.

the hatred, dislike and absolute loath the two shared against each other was a mystery to not only the people surrounding them, but to their own selves as well. jungwon couldn’t pinpoint exactly when his relationship with haruto had began to bend incorrectly but as far as he remembers— it’s always been like that.

the two couldn’t stand each other to stay in the same room. throwing nasty glares at one another before turning their heads to spew hateful words. “this fucking asshole” “this stupid bastard” and their friends were used to it. no matter how many times they attempted to understand, to really know the reason as to just why there was so much ill dislike between them— they just couldn’t reach anything.

“because he’s a cocky son of a bi—“ “yeah okay i think that’s enough.” jungwon got cut off by his younger friend ni-ki when asked about his unexpected distaste towards haruto, no one bothered to figure out the weird and unexplained hostility between the two boys after that.

and for the longest time, with no interaction points between the two. everything seemed to be fine. both of their hearts calming down from beating so much hatred, mouths empty from nasty words and a calm and collected peace of mind for all parties.

but that didn’t last that long.

you see, jungwon wasn’t the best when it came to maintaining relationships— not in a cheating or unloyal kind of way. he just didn’t feel like he was reciprocating the same amount of effort and dedication he was receiving in a relationship, hence most of the ones he’s went through had reached their demise before they were able to fully bloom.

blame it on his busy schedule and duty filled routines, he just sometimes couldn’t push an entire romantic relationship to handle and be apart of into his life at certain periods.

something that haruto was clearly able to do. and god he did not let anyone hear the end of it, especially jungwon.

the problem wasn’t the fact that jungwon couldn’t keep a relationship anymore. jungwon had always wanted to be in one, to be loved and appreciated and doted on by someone he wholeheartedly trusted and saw a future with. he wasn’t afraid to love either. it was just the time factor that he wasn’t sure about giving. not the satisfactory amount for a lover atleast.

but for haruto to rub all of this into his face when he sat at a lunch table with his arm slinged around your hips as you gazed at him with hearts in your eyes? was a bit too much.

“that’s why you can’t keep a fucking relationship!” this sentence coming from haruto during another argument a mere two days later after seeing you two in the cafeteria? oh jungwon was fuming.

this was it. if haruto was so concerned about jungwon being unable to keep a relationship, why not just snatch away his?

which explains how you currently landed in this situation, laying sideways on his bed. one of his hands gently held your leg, keeping an open entrance for him to plunge his cock back inside of your wetness. he felt so ecstatic. so deep as he shoved his thick inches inside of your gummy walls. length exploring and massaging your insides so wonderfully you couldn’t help but moan so prettily for him, small praises tumbling past your lips. you were so dizzy in pleasure.

“feels good, precious?” he would mumble behind you, his own eyelids shut tightly at the feeling of your tight walls sucking him in greedily. a ravenous grip around the base of his cock that had him seeing stars. “s’good won.. f-fuck.. t’ feels amazing..” you huffed, pearly droplets of sweat shimmering prettily over your body as he rolled his hips up against your ass.

his thrusts were short, not too much power behind him as he was so drunk off of your pussy already. they were just right. pushing and kneading against your sweet spots so deliciously and making you bite you lower lip harsh enough to draw a metallic taste into your mouth. he was stuffing you so well. fucking you so good you couldn’t even think about anything else.

especially not the date with haruto you were supposed to be on like right now.

and jungwon knew about it. he knew so well exactly what haruto was planning to do on this date, which flowers he was buying and to which restaurant he wanted to take you to make up for the fact that he was an actual asshole just like jungwon had always known.

because what sane man would be mean to you? no matter how many times you tried to hide it from everyone’s eyes, jungwon knows that you’re not happy in your relationship with haruto. hell— he even got into a relationship to make him jealous in the first place. it wasn’t out of love or whatever lie he was feeding you.

no one except jungwon knew about the disgusting and degrading comments and names haruto would make about you. about his horrible manners and actions that would only make you question the whole purpose of this relationship, because love— what was known as the basis for every relationship, was clearly missing in this one.

but you were too attached to realise that, too used to being around haruto to consider anyone else. so what if he was rude to you? atleast he was your boyfriend. or well.. that was until jungwon walked into the picture, more like waltzed into your life.

“you feel so good around me, doll. milking my cock with this pretty cunt— fuuuck you’re so good to me.” he praised you on and on. mouth and tongue never getting tired from showering you with compliments, something drastically different from you were used to and it felt so nice. different, but a welcomed different.

you shyed away adorably from him, whimpering in his hold as tears sprung into your eyes from both the sensitivity of your cunt and your heart, he felt the way your walls tightened around him at his words. the feeling paired with your body turning warmer and your cute mewls made him coo in your ear. how cute can someone be?

he couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that haruto had actually managed to score you. to date you out of all people. such a sweet souled woman that only deserved praise, love and affection. all things that jungwon couldn’t help but shower you with as you laid under him, taking his cock so well like a good girl. seriously how could haruto not treat you right?

though questioning haruto did become something jungwon gave up on ages ago. the only point he took away from that was if haruto is wrong about something, then there’s a very high chance that jungwon’s right.

and haruto was so so wrong about degrading you. treating you so poorly when all you needed were a few soft whispers of how well you were doing, what a pretty girl you were as you took his big cock in so sweetly to get you to glow more. to flourish right before his eyes when you bucked your hips back against his. eyes shutting in ecstasy while butterflies fluttered in your stomach. feeling so loved and appreciated in the arms of a man you knew would never hurt you.

jungwon was enamoured by you. drowning completely in adoration and love for you. you were so warm in his embrace, body so pliant and responsive to his every move. almost like you were made for his touch. made to allow his fingertips to burn along your skin as they trailed from your waist down to your leg.

so needy, so so desperate to feel him all over you. and he felt the same way. the urge to press his skin against yours, cover your body with his and mould both of them into one you couldn’t tell apart where he was ending and where you were starting, everything felt so hot. so warm so electrictifying as he fucked you open on his cock in a way you’ve never felt before.

“p-please.. leave him for me bunny..” he stuttered out, throat closing up when your walls clamped down on him at the sound of his voice so distant, an entire pitch higher and so debauched in you. you shook your head mindlessly at his words, unable to agree to them, haruto still held a small precious spot in your heart. you were still attached.

“you know he doesn’t deserve you, precious..” his chest heaved in heavy gulps of air, his own waterline aligning with tears as he desperately clawed at your body as if he was almost panicked at the thought of you not leaving. begging you to leave his own enemy and become his. he wanted you so bad. to call you his so bad. to claim you, to please you and to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.

and he could tell you wanted him just as badly. if your body language was anything to go by, he would think you were in love with him already. you were so good to him. felt so incredible around him he couldn’t help but feel his body floating in utter euphoria, pure ecstasy with you.

“i c-can’t.. i can’t do that won.. s’too mean..” you hiccuped, tears rushing down your pretty face making him coo, he slithered his other hand down your waist, middle and ring finger teasing your throbbing clit that pulsed with need. you were so close to the edge of your climax your eyes rolled back when he began to rub slow circles on your aching bud. almost matching them along with the rolls of his hips against yours.

he was fucking you so well. so good. teetering on the edge of complete pleasure as his heavy balls pressed against the wet curve of your ass with every motion. the sound so lewd and sinful it made your head spin with each smack! smack! everything felt too good. too much.

“don’t you think him not fucking this pretty cunt good is too mean, bun?” he laughed breathlessly, eyelids fluttering shut when his raging hot tip that leaked tremendous amounts of pre nudged against your cervix, you sobbed out incoherent words. mind turning into a puddle of mush in your skull as you were unable to process or think about anything other than jungwon’s dick fucking you open like this.

he nudged his nose against your ear, hand and hips picking up in speed to ram inside of your snug cunt that only seemed to suck him in further. sticky, glistening ropes of arousal connected his hips and pelvis to your ass cheeks that were covered in a white mess. you had lost count about the amount of times you’ve creamed on him now, and jungwon didn’t mind at all.

with your hot breaths fanning against one another, warm, sweaty bodies moving in cadence and your insides feeling so sensitive and sore, neither of you were able to pick up the echoing sound of your phone ringing on the bedside table. the call coming from none other than haruto.

“come to me pretty bunny.. leave him and- haah— shit.. come to me.” he moaned by your ear, finger incessant in rubbing against your clit and to coax out another orgasm out of you and another and another.

you were feeling so delirious at this point. having jungwon— a guy that your heart soared for fucking you and dragging out so many highs out of you while begging you to leave your asshole of a boyfriend was so.. intense. it was so much. way too much for your brain to comprehend.

“you know i-i can treat you better right?… so much better than him..” he whined, so lost on you, so gone and drunk on the flavour of you atop his senses. overtaking his every thought, his every idea, his entire brain and whole heart completely. and he loved it. as if hexed by a spell you casted upon him, he relished in it.

and you revelled in his attention, his love that he continued to rain on you, possessed by his presence and enchanted entirely. as if stuck under his hypnosis, the movements of his body against yours, his whispers of sweet words, sweet promises and dirty nasty things he would do to you if you were his had you hexed so so deep into his own spell. tangled in a passion dedicated to him and formed by him only.

you nodded in a lucid manner to his words, eyes droopy as they opened and closed with your vision blurry. you could barely pick up the way you were unraveling around his length again. gummy walls clamping down around the base of his cock for the nth time in the past few hours as you came so hard.

“just like that bun… cumming around my cock so good doll.. needy cunt sucking me in so so well.” he spoke deliriously, his own consciousness slipping away before he finally heard your ringtone. the thought of it being haruto made his inside twinge in excitement. his hand moved imperceptibly, wrapping his fingers around the device while you were still lost in your stupor of pleasure.

he glanced at the small screen and couldn’t help the wide cheshire grin that spread across his features at the sight of ‘haruto ♡’ this was it.

he quickly answered the call, lowering the volume to not have you hear his worries and apologies that instantly began to spill out the speaker. you were so caught up in your own high, eyes closed as jungwon kept rocking his hips against yours making you get stuck on subspace as he remained restless. not taking a second to stop and trapping you in a constant state of ecstasy. and you were loving every second of it.

“feeling good, baby bunny?” he asked loudly, unnoticeably switching the phone to his other hand that kept holding your leg up and lowering the speaker right against your cunt. making the wet smacking sounds, the slaps of his heavy balls against your ass echo in haruto’s ears as he felt his heart drop.

that voice. was too familiar for his liking.

“s’good won.. shit— feels s’good..” you babbled on, soft hands gripping roughly at his ruined bedsheets as there was almost a puddle forming between the two of your bodies, more cum more wetness more arousal seeping out of your fucked hole when jungwon would pull slightly out. a mere inch that will make his cum leak outside of your gummy walls before squeezing himself back in and god the sound was so filthy. so nasty as it echoed for all three of you.

“who’s making you feel this good, hm? tell me who’s filling up this pretty little greedy cunt, bun?” he bit against your ear, licking the shell of it sensually as the need and urge to devour you was just worsening with every second. he needed to feel you everywhere, taste you everywhere and touch you everywhere.

“you are— fuck! you’re making me feel so good.” you mewled under his hold. writhing in complete pleasure and ecstasy as he kept pushing his cock between your puffy and glistening folds. “what’s my name, my pretty bunny?” he whispered lewdly into your ear, his mere voice almost acting like an aphrodisiac for you. making you more needier and wetter for him.

“daddy! ngh daddy you feel s’good!” gasping his favourite name for him so loudly, unaware of the fact that haruto choked on his own spit at how slutty you sounded. voice almost an entire pitch higher and voracious. he felt his own pants tightening at the filthy sounds filling his ears. you never sounded like this with him hell— your room never sounded like this when you were with him.

“good girl.. such a good obedient little bunny for me, screaming her daddy’s name like the good bunny she is..” he kissed along your skin lovingly, dropping the phone onto the bed without a care if haruto had hung up or not, you were right in front of him and he wasn’t able to not give you his full attention. not when you sounded so slutty and needy for him.

he wrapped his arms around your waist, relishing in the way your cunt tightened and tightened around his cock as another orgasm washed over you, you sobbed his name, pretty little tears falling along his stained bedsheets as he switched the position.

he gently laid down your aching leg, the soreness of your body making you wince with the combined pleasure before he situated himself onto his knees. holding your thighs open just enough to see your ruined gaping hole leaking in front of him. the sight making his pulsating cock twitch before he pushed it back inside of you.

the two of you groaned in pleasure, both of you way past being gone. you were completely cock drunk while he was entirely pussy drunk. his mind spun with the way you still tried to suck him deeper, tight mushy walls milking his length and greedily clamping down on him. “f-fuck i’m s’close bun.. gonna let me cum inside of your slutty pussy, hm?” he breathed out. sweat rolling from his temples down his chest and even reaching his glistening, muscular thighs.

you buried your head against the pillow, mind completely high and lost on the way jungwon kept fucking you into subspace. nodding against the wet pillowcases as jungwon was almost about to push past your cervix. “that’s my girl.. my pretty little bunny letting me breed her pussy like this.” he groaned, his abdomen tightening further before he finally released the cum stored in his heavy balls that slapped noisily onto your inner thighs.

hot, long spurts of his cum webbed along your insides, filling you up to the brim and pressing right against your cervix. your eyes rolling to the back of your head as you felt your lower stomach almost bloating with his cum. he was releasing so so much. warm cum making your insides turn hotter as he kept fucking it back inside of you.

his groans and moans, whispers of your name and how good you felt barely reached your ringing ears, hell he couldn’t even hear his own words himself. his ears popping as he finally released the final spurts of his unusually prolonged and intense release before he dropped on top of you. caging your body beneath his.

he cracked one eye open, moving to look at the phone screen that just now closed as haruto finally hung up from the call. he noticed the way you were trying to catch your breath, slipping in and out of consciousness and took this as an opportunity to open your phone.

memorising your password as haruto’s stupid birthday, he quickly went through your home screen to find your messages. where he could already spot multiple notifications from his enemy.

haruto ♡: you fucking bitch

haruto ♡: how dare you fuck my own enemy out of everyone else

haruto ♡: i should’ve never trusted a whore like you

jungwon felt his eye twitching at the way he was texting you. anger rising up like along with the fatigue in his body before he tapped onto your keyboard

my love ♥︎: never text this number again you stupid asshole.

read

haruto ♡ is typing…

and before he could text another nasty message, he blocked his number for good.

now discarding your phone back onto the bedside table, he turned towards you littering your shoulders and exposed skin with affectionate kisses before whispering how much he loved you into your ears.

and at the end of the day, jungwon still took the one thing haruto kept teasing him for and shoving in his face. his beloved girlfriend.

a,note. yay :D ! quick karinasbaby comeback while i’m busy w uni, hopefully ill be able to post more soon if not pls know that im trying my hardest 😞 hope u enjoyed !!! ♡

[netherfeildren]

FABLE OF THE DOG : 1. The Two Headed Calf

Series Masterlist;

Pairing: Joel Miller x FMC

Summary: Welcome home and buck up, cowgirl.

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Cowboy/Heiress AU; Slowburn(ish); Original Characters; Alcohol & Drug Use; Discussions of Grief; Daddy Issues; Graphic Descriptions of Vomiting; Description of a Dead Body; Death of a Parent; Parental Neglect; Older Man/Younger Woman; Jealousy; Past Teenage Crush; Unrequited Pinning; Yearning and Longing Galore; Boss’s Daughter; Complicated Family Relationships; A Home is a Place but ALSO a Person!; Found Family

A/N: Disclaimer, I know nothing about Wyoming and it’s geography, ranching, or being a cowboy and just made all this up. Any and all misrepresentations are fallacy of my laziness.

The FMC tag was decided because she has a last name. It was just too difficult for me to speak in depth about her father without giving him a name, and thus her one too. After that decision was made, she kind of went away from me and devolved into her own person who I have come to be quite obsessed with. It’s still written in ‘you’ format, anyhow.

I’ve been having a whole lot of fun with this, I hope you do too.

Word Count: 10K

Read on AO3

1: The Two Headed Calf

“She’s been shut up in that house goin’ on three days now, Joel,” Tommy says as the two brothers make their way across the lawn. 

The ride had been long and hard, and Joel is tired—he levels a dark look at him. “Just sayin’. Nothin’ you find in there’s gonna be pretty to look at.” He raises his hands in surrender at the brooding glare, that non-confrontational shrug that’s set Joel on edge since they were boys. 

“One of you’s should’a gone in there. Made sure she’s okay.”

“The housekeepers’ve been keepin’ an eye. And Frank tried to go in there and check on her himself, but she’s angry as a barn cat. Hissin’ ‘nd yowlin’, and just bein’ downright scary as hell, to be honest. You should be prepared is all I’m tryin’ to say.”

“Her father just died, Tommy. I’m not expectin’ pretty sights right now,” Joel gruffs, trying to swallow the panic that flutters in his throat as they crest the final hill up to the big house. 

The beautiful stone, oak, glass monstrosity that’s stood as monument to this place, this home that is not truly his, for over a decade now. The Kelly Ranch. The sky above is still a sultry, yawning blue, deep and tired, basking in the throes of dawn as the sun just now makes its way over the crest of the Tetons in the distance so that the house sits for just a moment longer in its pool of shadowed blues. 

Joel pauses on the border of that somber darkness, afraid suddenly of what awaits him inside; boots glued to the ground with the gum of cowardice. He doesn’t want to see her broken. He doesn’t want to see her hurting. But there’s no other recourse, he knows this. The death of the estranged father she’d fought with all her life, the inheritance of this world that seems suddenly too big for just one orphaned girl, all alone now. 

He’s afraid that he’ll walk into that house he’s always seen as other and home all wrapped into one—that Olympus that was so far removed and out of reach even when he walked through it’s halls to the man who’d given him sanctuary and salvation, to the man he knew mistreated her sometimes, didn’t love her enough—and not have the capacity to recognize her, this girl who’d always been familiar and stranger all in one also. 

Joel Miller suddenly feels afraid of the memory she exists as in his mind, in the face of the woman he knows she is now. 

When he lets himself in the back kitchen door, it’s still nighttime within. The cool dryness of the AC cranked up to inhuman temperatures makes him shiver once while sprouting a damp sweat along his nape. He should’ve showered before coming, should’ve washed the ride and the days of camp off his skin before walking into her presence, but all he’d managed were his hands and face. There’d been panic to make sure she was well, if not then alive, at least. But he should be more presentable for her. 

Hell, he should’ve been here for her when she came home for the first time in two years to the house where her father had died. He should’ve been here when the man died. 

But the herd had needed moving. He hadn’t thought it’d all happen so quickly, thought he had more time, that they all had more time. He’d hoped she wouldn’t return at all, if he was being honest. There was nothing here for her. Nothing except memories of a gilded and loveless, already motherless childhood. The reality of all she was set to inherit. The truth of an aloneness Joel didn’t know if she was prepared for. 

He moves through the house slowly, afraid to disturb the ghosts and the silence. The interior, immaculate and beautiful and solemn. Something out of a movie picture or the gloss of a magazine. Something covered not in dust but in sadness. The stairs are silent as his spinning mind makes up for the creak, the boots she’d sent him on his last birthday hit the richly piled rug at the top, and the hallway to the bedrooms yawns long and frightening in front of him. Two grand a pop, the boots—Lucchese, he’d looked them up on the iPhone she’d sent him the year before. A gift giver, generous to a fault, kind to a detriment. She sent something to all the ranch hands that’d worked for her father since she was a girl. Something for the entire ranch at Christmas. And all he managed each time was a perfunctory thank you card, like he did every year because he remembered, years ago, in her little voice, polite people send thank you notes, Joel, my grandmother told me so. Last year he’d written that they were too much, that she shouldn’t have, that he was grateful. There wasn’t much else to say. 

That was the extent of their communication, familiar and stranger in one, the far removed golden child of the Kelly. They’d all called him that, the Kelly, for as long as he’d known the man. As if he was some Scottish laird of old, ruling over his clan and half the world. Egotistical, was what it really was. He’d thought himself a god among men, in the face of his only child. Ridiculous was what Joel saw it all for, a put on play, a farce.

And wonder of wonders, she was entirely unlike him because of course she would be. Of course a man ruled by nothing more than ego and narcissism had been sent his polar opposite in the form of his only child. Kind hearted, was what she was—sending him a birthday gift every year. Remembering them all here always no matter how far she’d gone. He sent her a thank you note for each benevolence in return, a word of respectful gratitude for the fact that a person like her could ever remember a dog like him. 

Sometimes, Joel had wanted to go to him, the old man, Oswald Kelly, and ask him where his daughter was, why he wasn’t looking for her, keeping her closer, caring for her. He wasn’t the sort of man that could’ve ever understood such callous behavior towards one’s child.

The last time she’d been here, over two years ago: less than forty eight hours that had ended in screaming so terrible they’d all heard it down from the barn, sitting in uncomfortable, swollen silence, the spinning of tires ringing as she yelled at her father that he was never going to see her again, the man’s echoing laugh as she’d fled him. 

Joel hadn’t seen her on that visit, it’d been so quick and angry. Flying down on the jet from New Haven for her father’s seventieth birthday and not even making it long enough for the festivities. This was what her life was, as he’d observed it from a distance for all these years, the singular daughter of this great house, coming to her father, attempting joy and finding nothing but disappointment at the end of him. 

She’d been right, a knowing streak running through her. Kelly had never seen her again, and Joel didn’t know if the old man had regretted it or not, the anger and the estrangement and the lack of love. But the last time he’d spoken to him, hours before setting off on their move, the herd always came before everything else, the ranch was all that mattered is what the man had always said, with death scratching at the window, his frail and withered body licked down to almost nothing from the austere and imposing figure Joel had always known him as, he’d asked for her. His only child. Do you think she’ll come, Joel? The dying man had asked him. My daughter, do you think she’ll come see me? Joel had lied a lie he hadn’t known was one, said she would, that he’d call her as soon as he was back. 

In the end, he hadn’t even afforded her that decency, a personal call.

He comes to her open bedroom door now, pitch dark as grief within, and the stench of sorrow and liquor seeping from the living grave. He looks down the long and empty hall for a brief second, wishing it didn’t have to be him, that again, he didn't have to see her any way other than okay. And he realizes that there’s something about her, as she will exist now, that makes him cowardly. Something about this house without the man who’d granted him the absolution of a hiding place all those years ago, who’d understood and sheltered Joel in the midst of his own past grief, that makes him cowardly. The house feels wrong without Kelly within it, wrong with only her as its holder now. 

Joel steps into her dark, and it’s a battleground—

—You are silent and motionless in the blue room. 

Nothing of the gleaming splendor that dresses the rest of the home sleeps in here. There are clothes everywhere, an exploded suitcase lies open and massacred in the middle of the plush white rug, a turned over bottle of red wine bleeding into your clothes. Shredded pages with scratched on writing slashed across them, the dusted white mounds of crushed pills, as if you’d smashed each one individually beneath the thumb of your grief. The sight makes him more afraid, the scent of weed and cigarettes heavy in the air, as he takes the final step towards the wrecked bed, and a single small foot hangs limply from the edge.

He stares at it long and hard for a second, afraid, afraid again, still, of what he’ll find. He says your name once, short and gruff like a dog’s bark. It’s what he feels like. Animal, bestial, lacking any sort of cognizance amidst this minefield. His heart beats against his spine, and he thinks he should do something else, shake you, check for a pulse, his bones throb inside his skin. He needs to fucking move, but the smell of smoke is so cloying he’s choking on his own tongue. 

Your ankle twitches.

And Joel sucks in a sigh of relieved air without panic, saying your name again. His voice is level now, maybe gentle, no more barking dog. His eyes move up the length of one pretty leg, and then quickly, he averts his gaze when he gets high up enough he’s met with soft-creased asscheek covered in silk. Swallowing his tongue, his eyes roll in their sockets, looking for anything else to look at besides the sight of panty clad ass. He steps closer again, gripping the edge of the sheet to pull it over your scantily clad body, eyes flitting to the silver spun clock on the nightstand, the warm glow of the hall light shows that they have two hours to get you sober and presentable before the funeral. 

Joel should have been here. He does not feel that he is even here now. And the guilt eats at him like acid. The fear too. 

“Darlin’, you’ve gotta get up now,” he says softly, taking hold of your shoulder, scalded by the feel of fragile skin, realizing with the suddenness of a gunshot that you’ll be the Kelly now. He gives you a gentle shake, “We’ve gotta get you ready,” and his heart pumps blood like a machine. The sight of the dry liquor bottle toppled on the nightstand, the shattered glass glittering the floor in crystal, the empty pill bottles, it all taunts him. His guilt is a cacophony in his mind. He knows he’s going to have to stick his fingers down your throat, make you spit it all up, that you’ll hate him for all of this afterwards, but when his gaze meets streaked rust, dark and shocking against the white sheets, he’s kicked into terrified action. 

He turns you over, your head lolling sickeningly in unconscious stupor, hair a tangled mess strewn about your face so that he has to dig for your eyes, parting the curtains of your fringe to uncover you. He focuses on your closed eyes, the too long lashes clumped together, lips cracked and parched. 

He should’ve fucking been here. 

Smoothing his fingers along the lengths of your arms, he keeps his eyes on your face and averted from all the skin that keeps peeking out below, searching the divots and slopes of your arms for hurts. When he gets to your right hand, battleground of a long ago broken hurt, he finds the drying crust of blood, the ragged split in the soft, small palm, thankfully shallow.

 His eyes smart, looking down at the broken glass, feeling the tear in you. 

Gripping you gently below the elbows he pulls you into his arms, cradled like a child, light as loss. Your head lolls again, neck crooked at an unnatural angle as he carries you into the restroom, careful of your head, knocking the lights on and putting you down in front of the toilet bowl. He pulls your camisole to rights, making sure everything is covered, and gathers your mess of hair as carefully as he can, trying his best to not snag the fragile strands in his too rough hands, but gripping you firmly in position. And ignoring the sound of your awakening cry, he sticks two fingers into your slack jawed mouth and down your throat until he feels the hot rush of vomit. 

Crouching behind you, his thighs bracket you, keeping your form from slumping over as you empty the poison from your belly, flushing the alcohol soaked bile as you struggle. He wipes his messy hand on the leg of his jeans and rubs soothing circles on your back, his fingers woven through the soft silk of your hair to keep your head in place and your face clear. His heart thumps in rhythm with your heaves, your too quick, panicked breathing. There seems to be not enough oxygen for the two of you and your grief in the too small room of the commode, and Joel gasps like a dying fish, trying to swallow calm breaths. 

When you finally stop your heaving, you rest your arms at the edge of the gleaming porcelain, head hung low, defeated, wracked with shivers or silent sobs, he isn’t sure, a strange and horrible keening noise, so small he barely catches it, held in your throat. There’s the finest down of peach fuzz that covers the tender slope of your vulnerable nape, and it makes Joel feel suddenly, just as vulnerable, just as unprotected. At a complete loss for how to help you. 

“Finally decided to show your face,” you croak, voice ragged with your sick. 

His fingers tighten once around your shoulder, a panicked tick of reminder that he’s here now, that he’s him. “I was moving the herd. It had to be done. Your father, he—” he stutters, trying explain, tripping over his own guilt ridden words. “I didn’t think it’d happen now, so fast, that you’d get here so soon. I thought we had more time.” 

We. 

Your skin seems to cool by the second beneath his fingertips, and then you’re shrugging his touch away, huddling closer to the porcelain bowl, further away from him. 

“Get out.”

“Let me explain. I—” And he’s begging now. He can hear the note of it in his voice. Begging for forgiveness. For a chance. 

“I don’t want to see you.” You don’t say his name. “Get out.” It feels worse than anything. 

“I’m here now. I didn’t know— I didn’t think.” He reaches to grab for you again, but you turn to face him suddenly. Wiping the back of your hand against your mouth, pushing your heels at his shins to kick him away. Your eyes are red rimmed, the hollows beneath bruised with lack of sleep. But fire spits from the deep color, all anger and hurt. 

“Go deal with your fucking ranch,” you fling the words at him. “It’s all you care about anyways.” And they weren’t shivers, he sees now, they’re tears tracked as proof of all his guilt, all his lacking, along the slopes of your fine grained cheeks. 

Your, you say. As if this place and anything in it has ever been his. He’s never wanted any of it like that, only ever seen a thing that needed taking care of, and him, with the ability to care for it. 

“I needed you,” you whisper as if the thought comes along on a second wind of anger, a realization that sends your voice breaking, hitching, your chest caving in on itself as the tears come faster and faster now. “He’s dead, and I needed you.”

“I’m sorry,” he begs. “I’m so sorry.” His voice breaks now too. He thinks he’ll cry now too, for the man who he also lost, who despite it all meant something to him, as well. For you, who’s lost even more. For Joel’s own guilt. 

But he doesn’t think you see any of that, not his apology, not his regret, not his own grief. You turn away from him again, laying your temple down again on your forearm. “Get out. I’ll be ready soon.”

And so he goes.

-

Your father is made small and withered in death. 

One of the wealthiest men in the entire world. A stranger, a titan, a nightmare of a man. 

It wasn’t something you’d ever considered, that a human body could look so colorless and frigid and not alive. Like a shock or a ringing bell, it’s a realization that you’re an orphan now. That you’re all alone. 

You feel something like a memory of regret. Or something that’s like the idea that you should feel regret, that you should feel guilt for how it was between the two of you. But all that is overshadowed by the reality of what you weren’t. All you feel even more, or in actual reality, is the old loss of what you’d never been to each other. That, you realize, is the seed of your grief. That long ago wound, that child’s understanding that he wasn’t like all the other fathers, that he’d never care for you the way other children were cared for. 

Looking down at the frozen face that looks nothing like the one he’d worn the last time you’d seen him, the wispy thatch of hair that hadn’t been so jarringly white before sickness had ravaged his body, you realize that this is no new loss, it is only a continuation, a reopening of a very old one. 

The cavernous cathedral at your back is silent, vacated by the sea of people that had congregated here earlier. And with sickening curiosity, you uncoil an arm from where you’ve got it wrapped around yourself, reaching out to press a finger against the ice cold back of his hand. Shockingly not alive; he feels made of rubber. 

Everyone that’d been here to bid farewell to this behemoth turned slip of a man, to catch a glimpse of you, packed like teeth into Jackson’s grandest cathedral; business men and heads of state from around the world, the oldest family names in the country, figures of the highest echelons of wealth and society, vipers circling the barrel—half the world here to see this person who was supposed to have been your father but was really only a stranger. 

You take your hand back, and you don’t say goodbye as you turn away from his body. There’s no farewell to really tell. 

And at the back of the church, hiding in a bright ream of sunlight, Joel stands propped against the face of a saint. Dark and silent and maybe even more far removed than your dead dad. Watching sentinel. Oswald Kelly’s hovering man—come to watch over him one last time. 

The silk of your stockings slide against each other at the junction of your thighs, the hiss of your skirt around your calves as your reed thin heels click against the stone, and you pull your armor as tightly around yourself as you can. There’s a hollow echo inside of everywhere and everything, your mind like a gong, reverberating, and his gaze is so steady, hazel bright, deeply shaded by the lip of his dark hat, beckoning you towards him from beneath the brim. 

Large and strong and steadfast, your heart gives a painful, longing thump—stupid, writhing thing—and you can only bear to look him in the eye for a second, and if you were to really think about saying goodbye to that father that never really was, lying behind you, slipping further and further away, you’d say it to the man that always stood as his shadow before the world, before you ever said it to the man himself. 

-

The drive back home is cast in frigid silence and made all the more uncomfortable because you can practically hear Joel’s brain clicking and ticking away with worry. 

He’d sent your car and driver away with a harsh word while you collected your final goodbyes and words of respect from the last smattering of people congregated and waiting for the newly birthed heir to one of the greatest fortunes in the world. 

Hovering over your shoulder, he’d kept anyone from stepping too close or getting too friendly, so close you could feel the heat of his chest through the silk of your blouse, and then going suddenly full on aggressive when a reporter from the New York Times had approached, fishing for a quote on the future of the Kelly empire. Ushering you away with a hovering hand at the small of your back before the man could get half a question out, he’s opening the truck’s door for you as a haze descends over your eyes, the distant shutter and flash of cameras bursting in your peripherals, a latent hangover and sleep deprivation and not enough to eat in the last forty eight hours causing you to sag in his hold. Then it’s only his big fist wrapping around the span of your wrist as he lifts you into the truck, your eyes downcast and unable to take in sight or sound, vision all a blur. You murmur a barely there thank you with his hand fitting at the dip of your waist, big body blocking yours entirely from prying eyes trying to catch a glimpse or a stumble, and for a single second, your entire weight is suspended in his hold, allowing you to bypass the struggle of balancing your high heel on the step up, and then you’re sliding onto the leather of the seat, the whisper of your cashmere and silk rustling around you as he handles you like a child being spirited away from the scene of a crime. 

The door shuts gently behind you, face turned away from the flashing lights, the watchful eyes of the whole world, and worst of all, the assessment of his concerned gaze. All you’re afforded are thirty seconds of privacy to let out a single gasping sob. 

And now, an hour and a half of silent purgatory. 

You slip your heels off, flexing your smarting toes against the damp of your stockings and tuck your folded legs beneath you on the seat. Paying the frantic energy of his anxiety and lodged words no mind, you consider instead: your new reality. The burden of it all means very little to you now. The last of your worries is being readied for entombing as the two of you speed down the eighty nine, zinging past the bright Wyoming green. The thrum of his truck drowns out your thoughts, brand new, probably over a hundred grand, only the best for your father’s right hand man, and the Kelly Ranch insignia emblazoned proudly on the sides. A brand for the whole world to see just who exactly is being whisked away to her old home turned brand spanking new grave. 

You might be feeling a little bit dramatic. But then again— you’d just put your last remaining parent in an actual grave, surely that provides you some allowances. 

Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his big paw gripping the leathered steering wheel in a death clutch, knuckles white with his frustration at the dilemma you pose, his own discomfort. You’re sure if he thought you wouldn’t catch him, he’d be squirming in his seat. 

You do something to him sometimes, you know this. Not in any way you’d like, not in any interesting way, that of a woman affecting a man, but something respectfully harrowing. Maybe something a little bit like fear. 

There has existed between the two of you, always, that strange intimacy of two people who’ve known each other for a very long time, and yet, have always remained at a far removed, arms length distance from one another. 

A professional intimacy of sorts. Your father’s foreman, shadow, fixer. The man who guarded that treasure trove you’d inherit one day, today; the thing your father loved most in the world. Two people who’ve known each other a long time, and yet, don’t really know each other at all. 

There has always been, however, the fact of the birthday. 

The birthday. Your birthday.

The way you’d latched onto that small, immense, detail when you’d first discovered it at fourteen, when he’d newly arrived at the ranch and the true weight of your first real crush had really hit you, it was probably not entirely healthy. But you’d thought yourself in love with your father’s man, the first figure of the male species who’d ever drawn your attention in such a way. 

He’d never paid you any mind; you were the boss's daughter, a figurehead or a responsibility, maybe a nuisance, although he’d never ever treated you as one. But the day someone had let slip it was his birthday, on the same day as yours, your teenage heart had swelled with the naive hope of fate. It was meant to be, the two of you were connected, so on and so forth, swallowed by girlish innocence and made buoyant by fantasy. 

But you’d had something to share with someone, which was what really mattered. Something tangible, even if only in your inexperienced little mind, something to wield as comfort so that the first time your father had forgotten your special day, fifteen, and what a tender age it had been, you’d had something to cling to. That's when your gifts to him had started. It was your way of making sure there was at least one person in the whole world who’d remember that was your day too. That you were alive, that you mattered. A reminder of yourself. And as the years and birthdays passed, sometimes, when he sent those coldly gracious notes of his, you’d wished you could’ve written back with honesty. Said something like, I’m so lonely, wish you were here, wherever it was in the world you’d found yourself at the time. 

And of course, he was gorgeous and older, strong and patient and capable, entirely unattainable. Impossible to forget. You’d gone so far, traveled wide, gotten yourself an overpriced education that would probably serve you for nothing, had lovers and parties and splendor, and always, you remembered your gifts for him, you remembered him. It was the single most important detail of your birthday every year. 

The leather creaks beneath his fist again, chapped knuckles set to burst before he flexes his fingers out, long and straight. Thickly built hands, strong, made for working or hurting, on a man who you’ve never seen be anything but stoically patient. 

He was strange in that way, neither wholly impulsive nor precisely intentional in his mannerisms. More so, it was that there was something extremely neutral about him, a middle buoyancy of personality. Strict with the cowboys, exacting, wielding his title as ranch foreman with an iron fist and your father’s blessing, and yet still, quiet, serious, with that patient gentleness about him. You’d seen it in the way he’d handled Ellie when she’d first come to the ranch, young and skinny with that hollow look of trauma kids who’d seen things they shouldn’t have shamed adults with. She’d been a little older than you, and with an air you’d not understood, a sort of lived past you’d been naive to the existence of, frightened when confronted by it, and yet inevitably, the two of you’d become fast friends eventually.

You’d even experienced it yourself, on two treasured occasions, that gentleness that you’d held onto for years. Nurturing the memory of him in your mind like a delusional bloom. 

He stretches his hand again, wheel caught between his thumb and forefinger, cinching it there, back and forth. His nails are meticulously clean, cut to the quick, and you imagine he must spend a great deal of time cleaning himself up when he works so hard at getting himself so dirty most days. 

You can see him sneaking glances at you, and he coughs once, a clearing of his nervous throat. Averting your gaze, you turn your face away so that you’ll be able to watch him through the reflection in the window. He monopolizes the space in the cabin of the truck, broad shoulders and hulking form, all the fine leather smell washed away in the scent of him. That bay rum aftershave he’s always worn, the one with the distinctive notes of bay leaf, cloves and citrus. An old fashioned scent, masculine and crisp. 

You’d snuck into the bunk once with Ellie, before he’d moved into the foreman’s cabin, before Switzerland, when the two of you were still girls running rampant and free through the ranch, clutching desperately at the last vestiges of any sort of happy childhood you could scrounge up for one another. You’d peeked in his things, found a whole world of Joel shaped curiosities. The glass etched bottle of aftershave, a hole spotted t-shirt with a burnt orange longhorn across the front, Flannery O’Connor’s The Complete Stories—something you found comforting, knowing he could read about the small, the freakish, real life; thinking that perhaps he was homesick for the comfort of the South, hungering for a taste of the life he’d had then, through books. And then, in a spine cracked copy of Suttree, the pages almost falling apart beneath your fingertips, dog eared and well loved, her picture tucked between the pages.

It had been the first time you’d done something you knew you shouldn’t have and actually regretted it, looking down at that green eyed photograph. 

You’d run back to your room after that, ashamed and something a little bit like jealous, desperate to know who she was, desperate for someone to keep a picture of you like that—as if they loved you. And years later, you’d found the scent for yourself. The little molasses glass bottle you still have and pull out on occasion, when you’re feeling extra bad, extra lonesome, extra far away from the whole world, just for a reminding of home. 

Beside you, he sighs again, coughs again, brings you back to himself and the present. Just spit it out already, you think exasperatedly, say something, anything else besides how sorry you are. 

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he starts, and you roll your eyes, scoffing quietly. 

“You already said that.” Sullen. Mullish. You wish you were a child who could still throw a tantrum and get away with it. Letting your eyes go unfocused from his reflection in the window, you brood at the sight of everything that’s yours now as he turns off the highway, passing below the iron eave of the Kelly Ranch entrance. Eight hundred thousand acres of pristine Wyoming land nestled into the deep valley surrounded by the Grand Tetons mountain range. 

“Well, I’m sayin’ it again.” He’s driving too fast, and you refuse to turn and look at his face. Your heart beats blood in your ears, and you screw your eyes shut to the dizzying blur of green legacy, not wanting to see any of it—him. 

Your belly swoops, going slightly nauseous and gurgling. 

“I didn’t think you’d get here so quick.” He swallows, “Hell, I didn’t think it’d all happen so damn fast.”

“I was already in New York,” you tell him, voice clipped with breathlessness. “I left Paris last week.”

“What? I didn’t know— I—”

“Why would you?”

“I would’ve called you. I would’ve gotten you out here quicker.”

“Ellie called. It’s better like this, Joel.” Finally letting yourself say his name out loud, it feels wrong and molten on your tongue, a heaviness being spit up from the depths of your stomach. “We don’t have to pretend anymore. He’s dead now.”

“There’s no pretending. He wanted to see you—”

“Please, stop.”

But he urges on unheeded: “He told me so before I left. Told me—”

“Stop,” you snap. Finally turning to look at him and hating him for it. For how gorgeous he is, for all the things he’s always made you feel for as long as you can remember what it was to feel something for a man, for all he did or did not have with your father when you had none of it or so much of an entirely different thing. “Stop. I don’t want to hear any of it. It doesn't matter anymore, Joel.”

“But you should know. You deserve to know that—”

“What?” Because that one hurts. “I deserve to know what?” That he actually had loved you but had just never been able to show it? That now it was too late? That the only person the great Oswald Kelly had ever been able to speak to of the supposed care he had for his only daughter was the hired help? You’d read once that one should never let their parents anywhere near their real humiliations. You’d tried your damndest to follow that as soon as you’d grown up. “It’s not your place,” you seethe with teeth bared, an animal shoved into a corner and made to fight for its life, deciding you won’t ever let Joel near them either.  

He spits a cursing, growled sound of frustration, but doesn’t continue. The two of you find yourselves at an impasse, and you turn back to your windowed mirror of him, eyes pinching hot, filling with tears. One of the things your father disliked most about you, your easy tears, and a single salt marred inadequacy tracks down the slope of your cheek, dripping off the edge of your jaw into the bandaged cup of your palm, and you breathe slow and measured through your open mouth, watching the fog cloud grow and shrink against the glass obscuring your vision of him. 

-

The last time you’d missed your mother, the one you’d never known, in any sort of real and true way, you’d been eighteen. Returning to an empty house after celebrating your high school graduation in a far off school, alone. 

In the midst of your sophomore year, you’d been sent away to a Swiss boarding school. It had been something worse than devastating, losing your life in Wyoming, the only home you’d ever know, Ellie, the other people on the ranch… But it was far removed enough that you couldn’t bother, where you couldn’t ask for things like attention or consideration. The education had been excellent, the upbringing desperately lonely ending on a whimpering sigh despite your many accomplishments. You’d wanted her very badly then indeed, your mother. To have been there, to have helped you pick your dress, kissed your cheek after watching you walk across the stage. To have wiped your tears when she told you that your father wasn’t there because he was busy managing the whole world, but that he was proud of you, that he’d have been there if he could. You’d wished she could’ve been there to lie to you so that you wouldn’t have needed to lie to yourself. 

Peering down from your balanced perch atop the deck’s bannister, you survey the deep bed of Lily of the Valley, destroyed beneath the vindictive soles of your bare feet. He’d planted them for her all around the house after she’d died, her favorite flower. 

You’d always hated them. 

And that was the thing of it all, which you’d learned when you grew old enough to recognize such things like disdain. He couldn't stand you because you reminded him of her. Clichéd and old and tired. An excuse for being a neglectful father. The daughter who was too much like her dead mother, and thus did not deserve to be loved. 

You tip your head back, nursing at the lip of fine aged Macallan, and the sky is a glass mirror of blackened silver streaks. You’re almost positive that all the stars in the Milky Way are visible from right here at this very spot in the heart of Wyoming. The sight makes your broken heart feel full and falsely mended. 

You’re certain you’re painting a pretty picture right now: tipsy on a bottle of your dead dad’s sacredly hoarded whiskey that probably cost as much as someone’s house, staring up at the stars in your newly inherited home with a whole unappreciated life full of possibilities ahead of you. Basking in the title of your newly minted— orphan-hood? Orphan-ness? A peer of the orphans. 

You snort softly, sucking on the bottle again, letting the heat of it settle in your belly, smolder in your heart. Your head feels full of bubbles and sugar and sad. 

There’s a part of you that feels a little ridiculous, despite the circumstances. You’re good at compartmentalizing, good at being objective of your realities. Obviously: sad because your father is now dead, and it’d been nine months and eleven days since you’d last spoken to him. Sad because he’d never given a shit about you. Sad because you’re alone, dumped by the stupid French jockey boyfriend who you’d not even liked very much, just a few days before this whole pathetic ordeal of acquiring your orphan-hood, yeah, that’s what you’re sticking with, had occurred. Not to mention the army of looming lawyers and financial advisors and various heads of business vying for your attention, waiting for the what next?

And Joel.

A one man army of looming Joel. 

So you’re feeling morose, blue, maybe a little spoiled, but brought low and cut short. Depressed and unsatisfied with your life thus far. 

Poor little rich girl. Poor little orphan. Poor little me.

What you want? 

Someone to care. 

Someone to love you. 

Hard to come by. Impossible to buy. 

The stars gleam purple silver, winking at you. The bracketing black so dark it swallows the eye. Another taste of the nutty bouquet of smoked apple oranges, and soon you’ll be tipsy enough you won’t be able to balance your butt on the bannister’s ledge anymore. Maybe you’ll go humpty dumpty over the edge and crack your skull against your mother’s valley of destroyed Lily’s. 

You laugh again with sound now, not crazy, only an orphan, ha, but you think that it’s only that it feels shockingly as if you’ve fallen through the surface of your life. As if you are still falling with nothing and no one to grab on to, to help stabilize you. A really terrible, shit-out-of-luck feeling. 

Your eyes continue their infernal leaking, and you blow your nose loudly on the inside of your sweater. You’ve given yourself three days to do whatever the hell you want, be as disgusting as you may. When the three days are up you’ll plan to get your act together, take responsibility and hold of your life and become the woman you should be. 

Who that is? Still being decided. 

You think that maybe you’ll buy another jet before that time’s up. Or an island. Something ridiculous. Maybe you’ll sell the goddamn ranch. 

You eye the dark rolling hills of the valley with seething suspicion. Let’s see what Joel says about that. You, marching up to the highway entrance and spearing a For Sale sign in the dirt of the largest privately owned cattle ranch in the continental United States. Way more than that God forsaken surly frown is what you’d get. 

So long, Joel, it’s been swell. I’m done with this place. It’s time to pack it up and find some new hunk of land to care about more than you care about me or anything else. 

Maybe you’ll be real funny and put up a Craigslist ad. 

And it isn’t that you don’t love this place, the only home you’ve ever known. You do. In a way that is passionate and consuming and irreconcilable. Everything about it, the serenity, the guarding mountains and the deep woods, the home you’d been born in, that both your parents had died in. You do love it in your way. 

It’s only that every man you’ve ever loved—loved—had always cared more about the place than he’d ever cared about you. 

For the longest time, most of your youth until you’d decided that you officially felt an adult, you’d thought you’d hated your father. There was just so much anger and resentment and the resound of his ever furious words and insults and endless disappointment. The echo of no mother ringing so loudly in your ears that the confounding feelings had all been mistaken for hatred. But with age and distance and life, you’d realized you didn't hate him. You never had. You thought, actually, and this was a very good and mature thought of yours, that you were the only person in the whole world that had ever seen him as only a man and not a god. 

He was only a man, full of greed and grief and missing the mother of the child he’d probably never wanted. Nothing more or less. 

Maybe it was that you felt sorry for him. Not in the way of pity, but in the way of one person feeling empathy for another in a clinical and helpless sort of manner. And a numb, detached sort of sadness. A longing for something that you’d never had and had always wanted but eventually learned to live without. 

Ultimately, his disappointment had turned on him, and now it was all you felt you had for him at the end of it all. 

But, for some reason, and an annoying one at that, you do think that, if you try very, very hard, you could bring yourself to hate Joel Miller. There’s satisfaction in that possibility, vindication—resentment that even now, as practically strangers, you know he’d be able to pull that sort of feeling out of you which could result in hatred. Something strong and overwhelming and not easily escaped. 

Your stomach rumbles, and you smile blithely at all your inherited legacy, filling the hollow with more drink. Three days to behave very badly, as badly as you can. The whiskey is so good, and swishing it around in your mouth, you tip your head back further, gurgling it loudly at the back of your throat. 

“What the hell are you doing?”

You jerk, scrambling to keep your balance, choking a little on smokey apples and your own spit. A trickle of the golden amber liquor drips out of the corner of your mouth as you find him hiding in the dark across the deck. Accustomed to drooling over him, you wipe it away with the back of your hand. 

“Having a party. Would you like to join?”

“Are you drunk again?”

Tough crowd. Ugh.  “Never mind. You’re not invited. Go away.”

“You need to go inside and go to bed.”

You tip your chin at him, putting on doe eyes. “Alright. And are you going to be my new daddy also?” You say in a baby voice.

Fucking Christ, you hear him whisper under his breath, turning away to run an exasperated palm over his mouth. Frustration seethes off of him like sulfur. He’s tired. Of you maybe. Of the whole circus this place has become in the past few days—and rightfully so. 

“What do you want? I’m extremely busy, if you can’t tell.”

“Just thought I’d check on ya.” Courteous, always the gentleman, bullshit. You roll your eyes at him. 

“I don’t need you to check on me.” And you, ever the child. One day you swear you’ll grow up. 

But it can’t be said that you’re entirely selfish either. You have considered the fact of Joel’s own grief at the loss of your father. After all, they’d been much closer than you’d ever been to him for many years. And maybe, in his own cold and removed and superior way, your father had seen this man who you’ve thought yourself in love with since you were a teenager, as something like a son. 

Probably, that’s just your own wishful thinking: that Oswald Kelly had ever been capable of such tender feelings.

Maybe the fact of Joel’s own grief is the thorn beneath your nail bed that’s making you so angry with him, so needing of his attention. Maybe it’s that he’d failed to fulfill your silly and girlish fantasy that upon receiving the news of your only remaining parents death, he’d have been here waiting for you, at this home he’d guarded for you for so long, ready to take you into his arms and console and care for you. 

When instead, he’d been off doing what he’d always done for as long as you’d known him. Protecting your father’s interests, his legacy. 

“Is this how it’s going to be?”

“How?”

“You, being difficult.” Driving me fuckin’ crazy— he adds again under his breath. 

“I’m an orphan now, Joel.” You’re becoming quickly addicted to the word. “I think I should be afforded a tiny bit of leeway to drive people fuckin’ crazy,” you mock his Southern drawl. Enough of your time had been spent in Europe over the past two years, kissing Europeans, that you’d sloughed off the last of your American twang; something of a vaguely European lilt peppering your words every now and then that Ellie likes to tease you for whenever the two of you speak on occasion. 

A muscle under his left eye twitches at the jab, and you take another deep swig of the bottle, provoking him with your gaze. Wishing you had whatever it is a woman needs to entice this man. Like the fucking vet. Fucking world renowned, brilliant, highly coveted, beautiful veterinarian. You know about her. You’re sure he thinks he’s been discreet over the years with their whatever they’ve had, Tess, but you know. 

Maybe you’ll be insane and irrational and possessive, taking advantage of your three crazy days, and fire her with your new found power. See what he has to say about that. Ha.

Ha. Ha. Ha. 

Obviously not. 

Despite your current hysteria, your goal is not to send the ranch head over heels into a tailspin.

But the imagining is soothing. 

“Want some?” You hold the heavy crystal out towards him in a peace offering, held precariously between two sweaty knuckles. “It’s probably worth as much as your truck. Would be a waste for me to finish on my own.” You eye what’s left of it, about half, and give him a sheepish grin. It really is very good. 

He looks at you for one long, solemn moment, always so silent and pensive, this strange enigma of a man. You get to watch in real time as he loses whatever fight it is he’s trying to fight against you, victorious when he shrugs and comes over slowly, resting his butt against the bannister—a carefully respectful distance away from you. 

When he takes the bottle from your swinging clutch, gripped from the base, careful not to touch you in any way, you see the real sad in his eyes. The dim lights bleeding out through the big windows of the family room without a family shine on his face in strips and bursts. A shadow here, golden warmth there. He’s got more lines around his eyes than you remember from the last time you’d been this close to him. Smile lines made bright white in the center and gold burnished at the edges from too much sun. There’s little bursts of silver threaded at his temples now too, a gleam here and there in his dark beard. Forty four years old, he’d turned on your last birthday. 

You dig your nails into the soft meat of your palms, and your belly smolders as he brings the bottle to his lips, tasting the exact place your own mouth had just been moments ago. You press your knees together as hard as you can, head a little woozy with the color of his eyes; the most gorgeous green, caramel hazel. 

You’d graduated two years ago with a degree in art history and had done absolutely nothing with it since. It was just that everything appeared boring and pointless and shallow. Your whole life had one day suddenly seemed just a little silly. Useless, overpriced degree, nothing to be done with extensive knowledge in color theory when your world is expecting such different things from you now. 

But you sure as hell can appreciate the color of his eyes in extensive and meticulous detail. There is that. 

Watching the slow slide of the amber liquor down the bottle-neck, the long pull of his lush mouth, the ripple of his strong throat, and the way his eyes go a little wider, shocked at how good it is. You laugh soft: “I know, right.”

He takes another pull, another swallow. That’s what you want to be—swallowed just like that. “Damn, that’s good.” His mouth is a little wet, bottom lip shiny with thousands of dollars worth of your father’s favorite whiskey, and his eyes are sad. 

You’d said you were going to be bad, but you don’t want to be bad to him. “I’m sorry,” you whisper.

He swallows again, tipping his head towards you, trying to catch your too soft words—he’s got a bad ear, you know why—and turns to peer at you from beneath his low pulled brow, the tip of his tongue peeking out to swipe at the drop of liquor you wish you could suck off his tongue. 

“You’ve got nothin’ to be sorry for.”

The first time he’d shown you that gentleness of his: You’d fallen from your horse at school in your junior year. Something had frightened the beast, and she’d bucked you, sent you flying ten feet in the air, ragdoll-like, before you’d landed badly on your right arm, a comminuted fracture in your radius that you’d needed surgery to fix. At your insistence, and with only a few weeks left to spare, you’d been sent home for the remainder of the semester. Your father had been incensed but eventually allowed it. He’d been away from the ranch on business, after all, at no risk of being truly disturbed by you. But when you’d been readying to return to Switzerland at the end of the summer, arm healed, courage not, you’d not been able to get back on a horse no matter what you tried. Joel had helped you, before they’d shipped you off again. Trotted the corral with you for hours and hours before you’d finally been able to relax and sit on your own without tears and vertigo. No questions or admonishments, nothing but the quiet burr of his deep voice, guiding you and the mare along. 

It had been a kindness unlike any you’d experienced in maybe your whole life. 

“I’ve been bad.”

“Nah. You couldn’t ever be.”

The second time: “Did today make you think of Sarah?” Years after you’d found that green eyed photograph, he’d shared her with you. 

His gaze turns suddenly sharp, but you’re not worried you’ve stepped in unbreachable territory. “Yeah.” The echo of her name rings around the two of you. 

“In a bad way or a good way?” He takes another long swig, a low whistle through his teeth and a shake of his head before he’s handing the bottle back to you—again, carefully. 

“Both.”

You take your own swallow, slicking your tongue all around where his just was, and you’re drunk for real now. Drunk on a man. 

“Do you ever regret telling me about her?”

“Nah.” He tips his head back, looking up at the thick beams of the deck’s awning. He’s got the longest lashes you’ve ever seen on a man, thick and curling. The deepest voice you’ve ever heard too, sultry, a bedroom voice. A voice for fucking. Your belly swirls and dips, and you want so much you’re dizzy with it. 

Heart beating like it’s about to burst, out of breath on the verge of hyperventilating, you can taste his mouth in your mouth, the imagination flavor of it. This is what it must feel like to die. This is what your father must have felt like three days ago, this agony. 

His Adam’s apple bobs, and it’s so pronounced, the skin of his throat sun pebbled. There isn’t an inch of him that isn’t all rough-hewn man. “You needed to hear about her then, I s’pose.” 

Yes. “You told me when I needed you to.” After that lonely graduation, the last time you’d missed her really very badly, longed for a mother. Alone, alone, alone little girl. 

“You were missin’ your momma somethin’ fierce. Needed to know you weren’t the only one that felt like that sometimes.”

You laugh a not-laugh, butt scraping against the railing, slipping off your perch, socked-feet thudding beside his gifted boots. The pleasure you feel whenever you see him use one of the things you’ve given him is indescribable. 

“Silly,” you say with barely any sound, his bad ear reaches for your voice again. “At the time it felt like I was the only person in the whole world that had ever felt like that.”

“We all feel like that at one point or another, I reckon.”

“Will you miss him a lot?” You ask looking up at him, the beautiful profile, the strong jaw. You’ve always wondered how he sees you. If he’s ever thought you were beautiful. Other men do, it’s a common thing, a nothing sort of thing. There are always men, there will always be men. But this singular man—this one is not like the rest. 

“Maybe. Can’t tell yet, don’t think. But it felt wrong earlier, walking through his house without him in it.” His house, not yours. 

“Do you wish he’d been your father?” And he turns to look down at you at that, gaze snapping, and you can tell you’ve shocked him with the question. But you’d always wondered. 

“No. Never,” he says with such assuredness, an uncompromising shake of his head. 

And the answer doesn't necessarily shock you in turn. You don't think anyone could have ever wanted a father like that. But it also doesn't help you understand what it was that lived between them either. 

He sighs, perhaps reading the confusion in your gaze. “He helped me at a time when I needed it real bad. Gave me a place and a purpose and a thing to do and take care of. You get me? It was gratitude—maybe. He saved me in a way, after Sarah. Nothing more.” He thinks for a moment, and then, “Perhaps it was that we understood each other about certain things.”

You gaze across the sprawl of dark land as far as the eye reaches, that point of no return where the earth shoots up into the sky, purple blue behemoths in the shape of mountains. 

From this spot, rooted to the deck of your family home, it seems like the whole world is yours to keep. Also, like you’ll never be able to touch any of it with fingers or taste or meaning. 

Your love for this place is complicated—tied up in the people, the memories, the could’ves and should’ves, the whole dreamscape idea of the monument of childhood and all it’d really never been. The time away had felt eternal, like you’d never really been here to begin with, like the young girl who’d grown up on this land had never really existed. But you’d not forgotten them, this, despite your distance. Your home, the father that wouldn’t want you, Wyoming and all its splendor, the people you’d left behind, Joel and Ellie and shared birthdays that meant a secret world to you. Morsels of small happinesses interloped amidst a largely lonely and sad childhood. That’s what it was at its core. 

“Would you be angry with me if I gave it all away?”

He thinks for a moment, maybe you’re making him sadder, but then finally says with a swallow, “No. It’s yours to do with as you please.”

You eye the quarter of whiskey left, but your belly isn’t hungry for its warmth anymore. You want something heavier now. 

“Could you even do that—legally—sell it or somethin’?”

“Probably not. He probably tied it to my fucking life. Sell and die.” You mime your name in an imitation of your fathers deep voice, frowning at yourself the way he’d always frowned when he looked at you, but it pulls a laugh from him, and the painful memory is worth it. “But I have a billion dollars to spend now. More?” You tap your chin—you want to make him laugh again. “Gotta think of something interesting to do with it all.”

His mouth slides into an easy half grin. Like the moon—that beautiful. And he turns to face you fully. “You’re gonna be just fine. You know that, right?”

You turn to face him too, gripping the bannister for dear life. “What? Will you make sure of it?”

“That’s my plan.”

“How’re you gonna do that, d’you reckon?” The American twang bleeds back into your voice, and you’re all swollen lush on the inside, heart a beating fist in your chest. 

“Haven’t gotten that far, if I’m bein’ honest with you.” God. His eyes, the strong bridge of his nose, his mouth. He’s so tall your head has to crook back to look up at him. “I’ll figure something out.” And after another pensive second, and still with that soft, sloped eye smile, he asks, and nicely, “Will you stop drinking now—for me?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” you say with the same sort of smile in return. 

And then suddenly, like vomit again but maybe more humiliating this time: “Did you respect him?” Because you don’t know all the things about him that there are to know, but you do know that Joel Miller’s respect is a thing hard earned. 

He clicks his tongue, and you hear the pop of his jaw as he shifts it like he’s chewing on an honesty. His eyes, his eyes, they’re serious, mercurial, warm and deep also. You worry he won’t answer, that he wouldn’t want to disappoint you or something, but then: “No,” said real simple like.

“Why not?”

And the way he looks down at you, you know already, and it makes that falling through the surface of your own life feeling rise up inside you again, makes your ears pop with embarrassment. Ah. “He never did a very good job of hiding the way he treated you, sweetheart. I couldn’t ever respect a man like that.” 

This is reality right here, this is you falling through your life, this is the realization that it wasn’t only you imposing yourself, your existence, on someone with gifts they didn’t want or ask for. Joel had seen. Joel had understood. 

Someone else had noticed that you exist, and it had been him. 

What else had you ever wanted?

And in the blink of a desperate, yearning eye, drunk on a man still, you’re throwing yourself at him, pressing your mouth hot and heavy to his, kissing him full on the way you’d dreamt of since you knew to dream of such things.

Chapter 2; Sugar, Not so Sweet

Netherfeildren's Masterlist

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[cyn-write]

"I Feel Her, I See Her"

Summary: Rollo has been eyeing you since your arrival, seeing you as the diamond amongst coals. At the Ball, he corners you into a dance, but your BF is not going to let this slide...

Pairings: Riddle, Deuce, Ruggie, and Jamil x F!Reader (Separately)

For Idia, Azul, and Malleus, check out Part 1!

For Rollo, Check out "Heaven's Light"!

Warnings: Possessive behavior, suggestive, manipulation and obsession (Rollo), established relationships, Secretive relationship implied on Riddle's part, swearing in Deuce's part, Jamil refers to readers Rohi (Arabic for "my soulmate"), romantic ~

Note: Thank you to everyone who enjoyed section 1 ("She Blazes Me")! The idea for this came while playing Glorious Masquerade, and I hope you all enjoy reading this as much as I have writing it!

Prologue

"Who might you be miss?"

Y/n gave a kind smile and nodded her head in greeting "I'm y/n, it's nice to meet you," she stayed next to Trein as she was there as his assistant.

"Yuu is our magicless perfect of Ramshackle. She will be working as my assistant throughout the trip," Trein added.

She felt Rollo's eyes scan her and, unlike his greetings to the rest, he held out a hand. Being poilet, she offered her hand as well, and he lifted it to his lips, grazing her knuckles quickly. "It is a pleasure to meet you, y/n. I understand it must be difficult, being surrounded by mages every second of the day. I hope you get a chance to relax this trip."

Y/n blushed at the motion and bit her lower lip. All the while, she could feel her boyfriend glaring daggers into her and Rollo.

"I-I'll do my best..." Y/n replied.

Throughout the entire trip, Rollo seemed to gravitate towards y/n and used every excuse to isolate her from the group. They chatted about her difficulties at NRC and of the festival. Due to her being Trein's assistant and the constant reminders to behave, she and her boyfriend had little time together.

This all accumulated at the Masquerade. Rollo had given Y/n a proper dress for the occasion instead of the attire his counsel had chosen. The (color) fabric decadently adorned your figure and stunned the NRC boys with its beauty. But before her boyfriend could ask for a dance, Rollo stole y/n away. He whisked her to the dance floor, and they started chatting.

At this point, Y/N's boyfriend has had enough of the student counsel president, but what sent him over the edge is when he takes you to the balcony and dare suggest the worst:

"Y/n, stay here with me." Y/n turned quickly on her heels to Rollo in confusion, "The fools at NRC do not deserve your purity. You belong here. with me." He has her pinned against the balcony, "This is your sanctuary."

Y/n pushed Rollo away slightly and spoke up, "Thank you for the offer, but I have not intention of leaving NRC. It is difficult at times but I wouldn't have it any other way. Now if you excuse me, I want to go back to the ball."

Rollo grabbed y/n's wrist and pulled her against him. "It's because of him, isn't it? He has bewitched you!" He pinned her between the balcony wall and him. "Those fiends have enchanted you, but I will free you from those chains and show you salvation! No matter the cost!"

Riddle Roseheart

Riddle had been watching the scene through a crack in the door. He felt his blood run cold at the mention of her leaving NRC. He knew it was a possibility, and for a second he thought she would be better off at NB. Then Rollo dared lay a hand on his rose.

His blood went from frigid to boiling.

Riddle slammed the doors open, causing them to clang against the walls. Rollo spun on his heels to see who dared to disturb him and the perfect.

"Roseheart. What are you doing-"

"Don't play daft with me. I saw everything." Riddle went straight to y/n and, with all his strength, physically removed Rollo's hand from her wrist, placing himself between Rollo and his rose. "You call yourself a gentleman, taking advantage of a lady and forcing yourself upon her! You have failed as a Host, as a Gentleman. And you dare threaten MY Rose." Riddle raised his pen in preparation to cast his signature spell, "I will have your head for this-"

He felt the hands of his rose on his back, a reminder to bring him back to reality. Riddle lowered his pen and took a deep breath. He was not the man he once was. He could control his temper.

"Y/n, let's go." He took her hand and guided her away from the cursed balcony. He never let y/n out of his sight for a single second. He ignored the mutters of the Student Counsel President and put all his focus on her.

He led her into a hidden part of the ballroom. Once safely away from the prying eyes of the crowd, he delicately checked her for bruising. "Are you alright? Did he hurt you anywhere?"

He gently caressed her face as she silently shook her head. He pulled her into a gentle embrace and whispered, "It's okay, I got you... he can't hurt you."

He felt y/n tighten the hug and he reciprocated. "Thank you for stepping in... I was so scared."

"I'm so sorry I didn't see it sooner. I should have been more assertive or-r told him off. I-I could have-"

"Riddle." Y/n leaned back and placed her hands on either side of his face, "There isn't anything else you could have done. Rollo is the one at fault, not you."

"But if I held you, or was more showing with our relationship, maybe he would have been fended off from pursuing you-"

"Riddle, I know you're not a fan of PDA. You are a little more reserved when it comes to PDA, but you show your love in other ways." Y/n caressed Riddle's cheek as she spoke, "You're chivalrous and I love that about you."

Riddle blushed as his rose complimented him, "Thank you rose, but I think... I think I am ready to be more forward, I want everyone to know that you are mine and I am yours." He leaned in and gave her a passionate kiss. He moved his hand to the back of her head and held her close to him.

After a minute, they parted and he could tell the pleasant surprise on the perfect's face. The music swelled and he heard faint voices call his and y/n's name.

"We are being summoned," Riddle peaked out of their hiding spot and gave himself a moment to compose himself. He turned to his rose and fixed his coat, "I am a man of his word," Riddle held out his gloved hand and took the stance of the knights of old, "Shall we dance, my rose?"

Deuce Spade

"What do ya think you're doin'." Deuce's voice was cold. A tone he hasn't used since his delinquent days.

Rollo turned and saw Duece holding out his magic pen to the third year as if it were a rapier pointed at his chest. His eyes were no longer that sparkling blue, but frigid cold as he glared daggers into this predator.

Y/n's look of pure fear fueled Duece's rage, as he held himself together by the seams.

"We are simply having a conversation," Rollo still had a grip on y/n's wrist and brushed off the boy, "Now if you excuse us, we have more things to-"

"No." Deuce said simply and approached carefully. Deuce may not be the brightest, but he knew when his girlfriend was uncomfortable, and this man made her very uncomfortable. "Y/n, let's go."

Y/n tried to move towards Deuce, but Rollo yanked her back. "Are you really going to let him order you around?"

"Please let-" "LET HER GO YOU BASTARD!" Deuce interrupted. His pen aided his fist as he punched Rollo right in the jaw. The Student Council President wretched back and released his grip on the perfect. She darted for Duece's arms. He enveloped her in his arms. Before he could even ask her if she was okay, he saw Rollo regain his composure so he moved her behind him.

He faced Rollo who was enraged. That filth punched him. The Host. "How dare you. Your professor will hear of this-"

"You won't say a word." All three turned to see Riddle. He saw everything. "If you don't want to be reported for harassment of the only female student from NRC, then you will say nothing."

Rollo's impenetrable expression had a hint of fear in it. Riddle approached the preditor, passing the couple. He briefly paused next to Deuce and said in a low tone, "Get her out. I'll take care of this."

Deuce was still filled with rage at Rollo, but he saw how shaken his dearest was. He nodded to his housewarden with a whisper of thanks, then whisked y/n away from the scene.

As they walked out of the balcony, he kept his arm around y/n's shoulder. He felt his heart pounding in his chest as his rage turned to worry for his dear perfect. He blamed himself for what happened. If he had paid more attention to you and how Rollo interacted with her, he may have subverted this. Once they were in the hall between the balcony and the ballroom, he pulled her aside to a hidden bench. The two sat and Deuce just held y/n close as the situation washed over the both of them.

Deuce felt his eyes water as he quietly said "I'm sorry." He patted her hair and pulled her into his chest "I'm so sorry I wasn't there, If I was then I could have stopped him or protected you or-"

Y/n cut off his ramblings with a kiss. A light yet purposeful kiss that he melted into. He cupped her face and leaned into it. When she parted from his lips, she placed her hands on either side of his face.

"Deuce, you saved me. I-I am not sure what would have happened if... if you hadn't come by I am not sure what would've happened." Her eyes started to well again, "You were my knight... you are my knight in shining armor. So stop beating yourself up. Rollo is at fault, not you."

He placed a hand on top of hers. "He was right about one thing though," he leaned his head into her hand and lightly kissed it. "I don't deserve you. You do so much and get no recognition, and I have been part of that."

Deuce sits up straighter and takes both of the perfect's hands in his. He moves off the bench to kneel in front of her, mirroring the knights of old kneeling before their love. "I know I can be dense at times and my old self may creep out, but I promise you, I will work ten times harder to become a knight worthy of standing beside you. You bring out the best in me and I want you to know how much you mean to me." Following his gut he took a deep breath, "I will start right now."

With the moon illuminating him, he stood, removed his hat to place it above his heart, and held out a hand, "y/n, may I have this dance?"

Ruggie Bucchi

Ruggie never trusted Rollo. From the moment he smelled the man he knew he couldn't be trusted. What was worse was that Rollo seemed to glue himself to her and that made Ruggie's skin crawl, but due to Trein and Grim dragging you from place to place he couldn't keep you by his side. Now you were missing. Rollo stole y/n away from the ball and he couldn't find her anywhere. He would have never found her if it weren't for her signature scent cutting through the plethora of perfumes.

He followed her scent to the balcony just outside the ballroom and saw his worst nightmare. Rollo had you pinned to the balcony and was leaning way to close for comfort. He heard Rollo's shpeal and felt his fur stand on its ends. He knew his girl would tell off the bastard, but when he wouldn't listen, Ruggie stepped in.

"The lady said she wanted to dance," Ruggie stepped out from behind the door and walked over to y/n, "I thought you righteous types would be more gentlemanly." Ruggie slipped his hand around y/n's arm and pulled her towards him.

"Bucchi." Rollo gripped his neckerchief and raised it to his mouth to cover his scowl. "Y/n and I were just having a conversation."

"Really? What were ya talking about?" Ruggie played dumb as he snaked his arm around his beloved's waist, holding her close.

Rollo glared at Ruggie, but this only made his smile grow and move behind y/n to hug her from behind, nestling his head into the crook of her neck. He could feel her heartbeat racing as she leaned into his hug, placing her arms above his on her waist.

"Nothing of your concern..." Rollo's face screwed at the sight.

"Really, 'cause you were getting real close to her, and she looked real uncomfortable," Ruggie said and his grin morphed into a frown, "And I don't like it when people talk to my girlfriend like that."

He seemed to halt his breath for a moment, and then Rollo glared at Ruggie in disdain. "I was merely offering her an opportunity to be actually appreciated by her community, rather than taken advantage of."

"Well. Offer declined." Ruggie said coldly then held his girlfriend's hand and looked at her with warmth, "Why don't we go have that dance, princess? I think Prechy needs a moment to process things."

Y/n looked at Ruggie with small relief, "Yes, please." She then whispered a silent thank you.

Y/n looked at Ruggie with her e/c eyes that sparkled like gems. He couldn't help himself as he kissed her softly before he led her away from the gawking Rollo.

As they re-entered the ballroom, Ruggie never let go of y/n's hand. He felt his animal instincts still singing in his gut as his desire to protect his lover and make sure everyone knew she was taken still driver his emotion. He held y/n incredibly close as they danced. He brushed a strand of hair behind her ear and smiled at her.

"Sorry for speaking for you. I didn't mean to, I just got all riled up and-"

Y/n pressed another kiss to his lips. One that was a lot more passionate than the one he gave her before. When she broke the kiss, it was Ruggie who was left breathless.

"You have nothing to be sorry for," She said, "I should be the one thanking you. You swooped in like a knight and rescued me from Rollo. I honestly have no idea what would have happened if you didn't come when you did..." He could see her mind wander to the worst, so he, being her knight in shining armor, spun her around and dipped her to the music. His sudden movements caused her smile to find its place again on her face.

Bringing her back up, he held her tight as he said, "I will always be there for you. It's a knight's job to protect his princess after all." This caused y/n to blush furiously and his heart to race. She looked ethereal in the candlelight of the ballroom.

Hearing the music change tones, he danced over to the side and whispered, "Ya know, it is a knight's job to take care of his princess, so how about I go show you my devotion? shishishishi~"

Jamil Viper

Life had taken much away from him, but he was not going to let this creep take his girlfriend.

"It's fascinating to see what brings out the true intentions of people." Jamil broke the villain's soliloquy with his cold voice.

He could see the relief on y/n's face as he appeared from behind the door. He had been listening in this entire time. He never let his Rohi out of his sight from the moment she entered the ballroom in that magnificent f/c dress to when Rollo stole her away.

"Viper, what are you doing out here?" Rollo asked, standing in front of y/n as if to hide her from him.

"Looking for y/n, I promised her a dance. But it seems I came here just in time," Jamil approached the two and held out his hand to y/n. Getting the signal, y/n started towards Jamil but was stopped by Rollo's arm, outstretched to halt her.

"Y/n and I are still discussing a delicate matter. We will return to the ballroom in a moment." Rollo started to turn towards y/n when Jamil placed a firm hand on Rollo's arm.

"She has made it clear she is done talking to you. I suggest you leave her be before I make you." Jamil looked to Y/n and made way for her to escape Rollo's grip as he turned his attention to Jamil.

Y/n quickly scurried to Jamil's side and he stepped in front of her as Rollo glared at the two of them. Jamil laid his hand on his magic pen as Rollo assessed him.

Seeing the situation and wanting to save face, Rollo looked to y/n and said, "I hope you consider my offer. We will discuss this later."

Rollo took his leave, regaining his composure before returning to the ball, leaving Jamil and y/n on the beautiful balcony overlooking the city.

With Rollo gone, Jamil turned his attention to his Rohi. His expression turned from threatening to worrying as he embraced his dearest, feeling her trembling from the endeavor she just experienced.

"I'm so glad you're okay," he whispered into her ear. He caressed her hair and did his best to comfort her.

"I was so scared, Jamil. He wouldn't let me go... he-he-" She couldn't get the words out and Jamil just held her for a long time. He let her cry into his shoulder as he whispered reassurance to her.

"It's okay Rohi, I'm here. No one will hurt you." he said, "I won't let anyone hurt you, never again."

After a while he pulled back and whipped away her tears with his gloved hands. He kissed her forehead and then leaned his own against hers. "Rohi, if anyone makes you feel like this again, please tell me and I will protect you." He cups her cheeks and caresses them with his thumb, "I will always protect you, no matter what. I love you y/n."

He kissed her with all the love he had. The music swelled and he heard some of the others calling their names.

Y/n must have heard this too as she turned her head towards the door. "We don't have to go back in if you don't want to," Jamil said softly.

Y/n shook her head and took a deep breath, "I think we should attempt to salvage the evening, it's not every day we get to attend a ball without you worrying about Kalim."

Jamil smiled softly and kissed his beloved's forehead, "As you wish."

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

Note: Please Like, Reblog, and Follow for more! If you are interested in seeing an NSFW part 2 or want to see more characters in this scenario, please let me know! (Do not Steal)

Also if you get the "Princess Bride" Reference let me know :)

[permanentswaps]

Hello, Dad

Read Part 1 by @possessionbodythief.

Two years have passed since that fateful night, and I’ve settled into my new life as Jake with surprising ease. Watching the residents of the house over the years has proven invaluable in adapting to the modern world. My mannerisms have changed, but since the real Jake had always been uncertain about how his dad would react to being in a new body, it didn’t matter much. People around me simply chalk it up to growing up and finding myself.

After some time living with "my dad" - or Jake now in Robert's body - in the old house, I realized I needed my own space to truly embrace this new life. Moving out was a big step, but one I knew I had to take. I found a small apartment downtown with a view of the city skyline, a far cry from the haunted house I was confined to for decades. This place, with its modern amenities and vibrant surroundings, felt like a breath of fresh air. The sense of freedom and independence was exhilarating, something I had never known in my previous life.

"It's so good to be free," I whisper to myself, a smile spreading across my face.

My phone buzzes, pulling me out of my reverie. It's a text from "my dad."

"Hey Jake, you wanna grab dinner tonight? Been missing you."

My smile widens. I quickly text back.

"Sure, Dad. There's a new spot near here I've been meaning to try, wanna meet at 7?"

"Perfect. See you then, kiddo."

I put my phone down, thinking about how much has changed. Lately, I've been working out a lot. I feel a bit bad for Jake; he was just kinda impatient. It would've happened for him eventually if he had kept with a routine. I mean look at the transformation from then to now:

But hey, his impatience is my gain. I'm still more lean than buff right now, but that's how I like it. There are a bunch of cute guys checking me out all the time. I've even managed to get a hot boyfriend.

But it seems Jake has noticed the changes the most. He even jokingly muses, "Damn, what I would've done to have a body like yours at that age." He's kidding, of course. He never experienced this age. In fact, we still have never mentioned the swap – thank God, 'cause I don't want to risk him finding out who I really am in this body. Jake seems to be completely comfortable in his new body, never showing any signs of sadness or jealousy. He truly embraces his role as Robert and appears genuinely happy.

But sometimes, he throws in these playful comments that catch me off guard. Like the other day, I was stretching after a workout, and he walks in, giving me an exaggerated once-over.

"Look at you, all limber and toned. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to impress someone," he said with a wink.

He smirked, leaning against the doorframe. "Well, you're definitely turning heads. Just make sure you don't break too many hearts."

I grinned back at him. "And look at you, Dad. You're in fantastic shape. You've got those muscles everyone dreams of."

Jake's eyes gleamed with pride as he flexed his bicep. "Damn right. I know I've got it going on."

Another time, we were out for dinner, and I mentioned I was thinking of getting a new wardrobe.

"Oh really?" he replied, eyes twinkling with amusement. "Trying to show off those gains? I can't blame you. If I had your body, I'd probably never wear a shirt."

I chuckled, feeling a flush creep up my neck. "Maybe I'll take your advice and start a new trend."

It's not just my body that's improved, though. Jake has also been hitting the gym hard. He's in fantastic shape, even better than when I first took over this body. His muscles are more defined, and his confidence radiates in every movement.

As I step into the upscale restaurant, the blend of modern design and rustic charm immediately catches my eye. String lights are draped across the space, casting a warm, inviting glow over the wooden tables and cushioned benches. The walls are adorned with lush greenery and vibrant flower arrangements, creating a serene and picturesque ambiance. The gentle sound of a nearby water fountain adds to the tranquil atmosphere. The tantalizing aroma of freshly baked pizzas and herbed garlic bread fills the air, making my mouth water.

Jake is already there, waiting at our table. He looks up and grins when he sees me.

"Hey, kiddo," he says, standing up to give me a hug.

"Hey, Dad," I reply, embracing him warmly. "This place looks amazing. Ready for a feast?"

"You bet," he says with a laugh as we take our seats.

We start by ordering a variety of appetizers: bruschetta topped with fresh tomatoes and basil, crispy calamari, and a charcuterie board that looks almost too good to eat.

"These bruschettas are amazing," Jake says, biting into one.

I nod. "Definitely. This place is awesome."

As we work our way through the appetizers and move on to the main course, a handsome waiter catches Jake's eye. He can't help but flirt, turning on the charm with every word. The waiter, clearly interested, flirts back, and by the time dessert arrives, Jake has the waiter's phone number scrawled on a napkin.

I can't help but laugh. "Wow, Dad, you're really on fire tonight."

Jake grins, waving the napkin. "What can I say? When you've got it, you've got it."

We finish our meal with splitting a tiramisu. As we're wrapping up, Jake leans over, a serious look in his eyes. "Hey, why don't you come back home tonight? I've missed having you around recently. I'd really like it if you stayed over."

"Sure, Dad," I say, smiling. "I'd love to."

When we get home, he catches me looking at myself in the mirror, admiring my progress. The muscles I've worked so hard to develop are finally starting to show, and there's a newfound confidence in my reflection. Jake walks up behind me, his presence warm and reassuring.

"You know, you've got this whole 'boy-next-door' vibe going, but with an edge. It's... intriguing."

I chuckle, a bit embarrassed but also pleased by his words. He steps closer and grabs my waist, his hands firm yet gentle.

He looks at me in the mirror, a knowing smile playing on his lips. "See, I told you," he says with a twinge of irony, "You just needed to wait for your growth spurt."

I turn to face him, our eyes meeting. "I guess you were right," I say, with a knowing smile. "It just took a little time."

A look of lust flashes over his eyes, and I feel a thrill run down my spine. He moves closer, his hands sliding up to my shoulders, giving them a firm, appreciative squeeze.

"And now you’re all grown up," he murmurs, his voice low and husky.

Before I can respond, his lips are on mine, capturing me in a deep, passionate kiss. My body reacts instantly, pressing against him, the heat between us igniting something primal and intense. It's been two years since we last shared this kind of intimacy, and the hunger in his eyes tells me he’s been waiting just as long.

He guides me to the bedroom, our kisses growing more urgent, our touches more desperate. The anticipation builds as we shed our clothes, revealing the bodies we’ve both worked so hard to perfect. The air is charged with electricity, the desire between us palpable.

Jake pushes me gently onto the bed, his eyes roaming over my body with a mix of pride and lust. "You're perfect," he whispers, his voice thick with emotion.

He joins me on the bed, his hands exploring every inch of my skin, rekindling the flames of our past encounters. I gasp as his lips find the sensitive spots on my neck, my chest, my inner thighs. The pleasure is overwhelming, each touch sending waves of ecstasy through me.

When he finally enters me, it’s like coming home. The connection between us is deeper than ever, our bodies moving in perfect harmony. Every thrust brings us closer to the edge, the intensity building until it’s almost unbearable. I grip his shoulders, my nails digging into his skin as I match his rhythm, our breaths coming in ragged gasps.

"It's been too long," Jake groans, his breath hot against my ear. "I’ve missed this."

"Me too," I gasp, my hands clutching at his back, urging him deeper. "God, I've missed this."

His pace quickens, each thrust more powerful than the last. The room is filled with the sounds of our passion—the slap of skin against skin, the low moans and gasps, the whispered words of desire. I can feel myself getting closer, the tension coiling tighter and tighter in my core.

Jake's hands grip my hips, pulling me closer, deeper. "You're mine," he whispers fiercely, his eyes locked on mine. "Always."

"Yes, Daddy," I moan, the words slipping out naturally, a thrill of submission coursing through me. "I'm yours."

The intensity of his gaze, the possessiveness in his voice, sends me over the edge. I cry out, my body arching beneath him as pleasure crashes over me, wave after wave. He follows moments later, a guttural groan tearing from his throat as he finds his release, collapsing onto me, spent and sated.

We lie there, tangled in each other’s arms, the afterglow of our lovemaking still shimmering around us. His weight is comforting, his presence a soothing balm. I run my fingers through his hair, feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest against mine.

"That was incredible," I murmur, my voice soft and breathless.

He leans down to kiss me again, slow and sweet, a promise of more to come.

[galacticnova3]

Since she has now flown off I am obligated to post the order of potato fairy extra large that I looked after for several days. Aka a gloriously chumby Polyphemus moth— the second one I’ve seen alive in over a decade— that decided to hang around our porch for most of its adult life. I saw the first live one on the same day, but he flew away when I tried to get close. But still, that’s a great sign that their population in my area is finally starting to recover! Anyways, here’s the wonderful big little creacher where I found her, which should probably make it clear as to why I moved her. Ants don’t mess around and I wasn’t gonna just leave her inches away from danger.

I was pretty glad I did, as even after her wings were fully dried and extended and everything she couldn’t actually take off. See: her first “flight”.

Big fan of the loud impact PLAP sound, really added to the already very good demonstration of gravity. Worry not, she was totally fine afterwards. Here she is that night and the day after! Very cute and fuzzy, 1000/10.

The next day I thought she had flown off, but then the day after that she was back on the porch! I could tell she was the same one because of her damaged antenna. She started laying eggs on the house and I realized that wasn’t going to be good for the caterpillars that might hatch, since it was a relatively long distance to any host plants even without including the vertical climb to reach branches of leaves. Since she clearly felt safe where she was, and I was also worried about ants and birds and possible insecticides, I ended up making a little “baby box” for her out of a thoroughly rinsed plastic container that initially held salted honey-roasted peanuts. I gave her a stick to hold on to which also gave her a route to climb out of the box if she wished, and provided various fresh oak leaves to lay her eggs on. Figured it would be a good setup because I could easily move it to a safe place once she was done, and keep an eye on the eggs until they hatched. I might even try to raise a few caterpillars if the eggs are fertile. However, during the process of me setting that whole deal up, she decided I looked like a good egg laying spot.

You can see the “glue” that sticks the eggs to surfaces! It was cool to see up close: she’d lay an egg, wait for it to dry, and then lay the next right by it. She ended up sticking four on me before I was able to gently nudge her to the egg laying box. The stick was eventually deemed an acceptable substitute, and over night she… made an egg stalactite of sorts on it? Very weird, I think, I dunno; most of what I read online said their eggs would be laid in spread out clusters of two to three on suitable host plants. I know it wasn’t because she couldn’t get out, as when I went to check on her she had already made her way to the top of the stick and was hanging off of it outside the box. I didn’t think to take a picture of that as I needed to drive to college, but source: dude trust me. Here’s a picture of the egg sculpture I took when I got home.

When I was done with that I went to move her off the porch where she had been staying safe for the last 5 or so days to the more wooded area of the yard, but she ended up flying off to the treetops on her own after I brought her into the open. I guess laying a bunch of eggs made her finally light enough to fly. Maybe she was feeling upset at me for not being able to pay child support and making her lay her eggs on a stick instead? Or she was just doing normal moth things or whatever. It was bittersweet to watch her go, but I’m glad she had the chance to soar the skies at least once before her time was up.

@onenicebugperday

[strulovitches]

first move (?)

cbf!lance x f!reader

summary : basically you and lance are childhood best friends and one day when he was sitting spread eagle it makes you h*rny and some suggestive stuff ensues.

a/n : inspired by lance sitting spread eagle in that one video. you know which vid i’m talking about. this has been in my notes for so long and it really isn’t written very well but i just thought i should put this out there in case anyone would enjoy it lmao. so,,,, if you’re a lance enjoyer,,,, have fun!

you locked your phone, staring at your reflection as the screen turned dark. qualifying had just finished about half an hour ago and from where you were standing in lance’s motorhome you could still hear the distant cheers outside, undoubtedly celebrating a rare occasion where pole position was a car that wasn’t a red bull. lance had invited you to this race, just like all the other dozens of times you have attended a grand prix weekend. the relationship you have with lance is kind of cute, both of your fathers were long-time friends which meant that you knew lance ever since he was a little boy racing go-karts around montreal. growing up together, you were there when he first won his go-kart championship and he was there to comfort you when you first failed your maths test. a childhood best friends trope at its finest.

more than a decade has passed which has seen both you and lance grow to become a man and a woman. you thought about how lance was no longer a scrawny boy with a bowl haircut. he grew to be a handsome young man, his job requiring him to train religiously and as a result gain muscle. his skinny arms, ones which you used to compare with chicken legs grew thicker, his chest wider, and he soon towered over you. throughout these past few years, you always found yourself staring at his shirtless torso a bit too long during both of your family’s annual yacht trips together. you wanted to cup his face in your hands and at the same time his broad back made you wonder what it would feel like your dig your nails into it. you chastised yourself, how could you have thoughts like that about your childhood best friend? despite that, you weren’t oblivious to the glances lance would give you as well. lance too, noticed your physical changes.

his cheeky teases turned into flirtations and once innocent hugs lingered a bit longer as you both savoured being held by each other. so were both you and lance sort of pining for each other? well, yes. has anyone made a first move? nope. (but maybe that’s going to change now)

lance walked in plopping down on the couch with a huff. his legs were spread and arms on the couch rest throwing his head back

you felt like you were in a trance. your eyes trained on his neck watching his adam’s apple bob trying to catch his breath from his sprint. the sweat on his face was dripping on to the towel he had on his neck. he was always so sweaty after sessions in the car for some reason. your gaze trailed down his body seeing how his fireproofs perfectly hugged his biceps, chest and torso. the longer you stared at his thighs made thoughts made your mind wander about what was beneath his pants. slowly, you felt your face flush. the heat pooling in your stomach was starting to intensify the longer you spent gazing at him.

you broke your trance to find a pair of cheeky brown eyes already staring back. a stupid cocky smirk plastered on his stupid handsome face. obviously, you’ve been caught checking him out.

‘like what you see?’ and so, the teasing game begins

you give him a once over again, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘definitely’ you paused. ‘close your legs before i do something stupid’ you continued, fumbling with your phone to calm down your racing heart.

he let out a laugh. ‘i’m intrigued now. come on, nothing will be too stupid.’ you hear him persuade.

moments pass. were you really going to be the first one to make a move?

fuck it. you placed your phone on the table and walked towards him, never breaking eye contact. stopping in between his legs you gaze down at him. he still has that stupid smile on his face.

staring into his eyes, you slowly start to kneel. your hands place themselves on his knees as you feel the plush carpet underneath your knees. you could see his eyes turn dark and his smile falter. his relaxed posture becomes apprehensive, slowly sitting up at this turn of events. you smile as your hands slide up his legs and place your cheek on his thigh, lips dangerously close to somewhere he would rather them be. clearly, there’s no need to explain what something stupid is.

‘happy now stroll?’ you lilt, seeing his jaw clench at your precarious position.

‘no, show me what you’ve got’ he continues.

giving him your best doe eyes, you bring your lips to the canadian flag printed on the navel of his racing suit. hands still on his thighs, you start kissing each letter of his name printed. you could feel your chin brushing against his crotch every time you shift.

‘how about now?’ you tilt your head looking up at him.

he doesn’t look too happy when he cups your jaw with his hand. ‘teasing isn’t nice you know.’ he says, brushing your bottom lip with his thumb.

you catch his thumb between your teeth as you give it a lick. a teasing glint appears in your eyes, opening your mouth to release his thumb. ‘then don’t start’ you finish, pushing his legs wider as you use the momentum to stand up as you move to amble away.

what a fucking temptress. he curses in his mind. ‘1-0 stroll! it’s your turn to make a move!’ he hears you yell out. just you wait baby, just you wait.

[spooky-pomegranate]

Eyes on Fire (pt 6)

*Enemies to Lovers inspired by the Year Zero music video*

Papa Emeritus II x Reader (18+) Word Count: 9.3k Read on AO3 Get caught up: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Summary: Your daily life is upended after becoming Secondo's assistant. Meanwhile, Secondo comes to a startling revelation as he struggles to keep his emotions in check.

*apologies for the delay. literally fell down a flight of stairs and broke my hand. but we're back baby and better than ever. (Dividers by @wrathofrats)

Out beyond the summer gardens, there is a seldomly walked path. It twists and turns around broken trees, large boulders, and the placid waters of a glacial lake. There’s nothing important on the path anymore, or at least that’s what the upper clergy tells its youngest siblings, but the footpath is dangerous. It’s been decades since the ministry diverted funds away from maintaining it to build a straighter and safer walkway from the Abbey down to the lake’s oftused beachfront. Any markers that used to stand along the old route are long gone and the only indication a path used to exist at all are the faint traces of gravel that peek out from blankets of fallen leaves and overgrown grass. 

Most sane people avoid the old path. It’s not worth the risk they say. But every morning two creatures, one man and one ghoul, walk that crooked and crumbling path and neither is afraid…because they both know a secret. That at the very end of the path lies the most magical place on the Abbey’s grounds. 

The sun was still asleep as Secondo and Alpha walked along the forgotten pathway until they reached a chapel. Although it should be noted the chapel didn’t look much like a place of worship. It much better resembled an ancient ruin. Only three stone walls remained standing. Two were at half their original height and the third somehow still towered over Secondo’s head. There was no door. It had rotted away centuries ago, and the floor made of stone, was covered in a layer of dark green moss that was so thick it felt like a heavily weighted carpet underfoot. The only piece of furniture left in the ruins was an altar that had been crafted long ago from beautifully marbling petrified wood. But despite its well-worn appearance, when Secondo found this place years ago he immediately knew it was special. He could feel it in the air.  

Anyone who enters the Abbey, whether they are a follower of the Dark Lord or not, can feel dark magic around them. It’s often been described as an incorporeal haze. Although unseen, it lingers in every corner of the building and sits a bit heavy around you. In certain places, like the crypts and the ghoul dens, the haze is stronger. You can feel it physically. It brushes against your skin like a soft summer breeze or the flutter of silk bedsheets. But in all his years living in the Abbey Secondo never found anywhere where the haze was as strong as it was in the old chapel. 

So it’s here that every morning Secondo comes to start his day, to offer his thanks, and to hope that maybe today will be the day the Dark Lord finally speaks to him. Normally each morning in the crumbling chapel is the same. Secondo kneels before the altar repeats a round of prayers and offers any confession he deems necessary. Alpha kneels quietly beside Secondo and speaks only when spoken to. Any prayer the fire ghoul makes to his Lord is a silent one. This routine never changes. Every day is the same. 

But the morning after your stunt in Secondo’s bedroom, things went differently. Before Secondo could kneel Alpha was apologizing, spilling out words faster than Secondo could acknowledge them. 

“I’m so sorry about last night Papa. I didn’t want to disobey you. I should have never allowed it. I didn’t mean to offend-” Secondo held up a gloved hand and the fire ghoul caught his tongue. 

“It’s fine, Alpha.” 

The ghoul’s eyes snapped from the mossy ground up to his master, “Really? You’re not upset?” 

“Really,” Secondo answered truthfully. “I asked you to make sure she wanted for nothing and you did as I asked. I cannot be upset with you for that.” 

“Thank you, Papa,” Alpha sighed before bowing his horned head and inhaling deeply. Secondo eyed the ghoul carefully, looking over every inch of his guard. Alpha looked tired. Worn down. Exhausted. His shoulders rolled forward and his orange eyes looked more dull than normal. 

Secondo wondered if the fire ghoul was as burnt out as he was. 

Since his summoning two decades ago Alpha had always been a quiet ghoul. He hardly ever initiated conversations with humans and if the whispers around the Abbey were to be taken as truth, Alpha’s silence was born from his deep-seated distaste of human nature. Secondo knew that wasn’t really true but he saw how siblings often gave Alpha a wide berth when they passed him in the halls. He heard the names they called him. Most siblings avoided ghouls. But they practically ran from Alpha. 

Secondo never understood the cruelty. He had never really minded the fire ghoul’s reticence. He’d actually asked Primo for care of Alpha because he liked the ghoul’s quiet nature so much. It didn’t hurt that Alpha was more reliable and trustworthy than any sibling Secondo had ever met. 

And they had an understanding. 

Or so he thought. 

Secondo had always assumed that Alpha enjoyed their quiet moments together and lack of idle chit chat, but looking at the fire ghoul now he was starting to wonder if Alpha’s care was another item to add to his list of failures. Had he ignored signs that Alpha was struggling? Should he have been checking in with him more? Was Alpha suffering in silence like he was? Did he even like being by Secondo’s side? 

“Alpha?” 

“Yes.”

“Are you happy?” 

In all their time together Secondo had never asked Alpha that question. He wondered it many times but self-preservation had always held his tongue. Secondo had faults. He knew that. He wasn’t completely blind. But if Alpha hated him. If he hated his daily life then Secondo might just fall apart. He couldn’t be Papa alone. 

“What do you mean, Papa?” 

Santanas. 

He was going to have to spell it out. Secondo wanted to dig a hole in the moss under his feet and bury himself alive. 

“Are you happy by my side? Do you enjoy your life,” Secondo paused, swallowing against the self-preservation that had somehow turned to ash in his throat, “Do you enjoy your life with me?” 

Alpha blinked.

Secondo knew Ghouls were terrible liars. Something in their design made them brutally honest. It had something to do with being born from the brimstone of His fire. Or maybe it was because they were formed by the make of His hands? Secondo could never quite remember how the story went. Primo had told it to him so long ago when he was just a boy. But Secondo knew that while ghouls could joke and play around… for the most part they spoke plainly when asked direct questions. Normally that was something Secondo admired. He liked honesty. He liked people and creatures who spoke the truth. But right now Secondo wished Alpha was more human than hellspawn. He wished he would lie. He wished for anything but the truth because he knew it would sting. 

“No.” There it was. The answer he knew was coming. The sting hurt more than he’d expected. “No, most days I am not happy with you Papa.” 

Secondo turned away from Alpha and looked at the crumbling chapel wall. He felt like a fool. After so much failure the fire ghoul had been the only thing keeping him grounded. He’d been the only one who’d stood by his side. But now Secondo was realizing that maybe that was a bad thing. Maybe it was selfish to hold on so tight. Maybe he should set Alpha free. After all, why should two people drown in misery when one is far less cruel? 

“Would you like to return to Primo?” 

“No, Papa.” 

“Are you sure?” Secondo asked finding the courage to turn and look at his ghoul. “He will welcome you and your place in the band won’t change unless you want it to.” 

Alpha blinked again and Secondo tried to brace himself for another sting. “I don’t think my life here is about being happy. I know you’re doing important work and I want to be a part of your legacy.” 

Secondo didn’t know what to say. 

He didn’t know if he liked that answer. 

“But I was happy yesterday…” 

…with her. 

Alpha left the final two words unspoken and Secondo was thankful. His self-preservation was already teetering on the brink of collapse and he couldn’t bear to be pushed any further otherwise he’d have to die right here in this run-down place.

Secondo hummed in affirmation before closing his eyes. 

Alpha had been happy with you. 

You. 

Secondo thought of you. 

He thought of your eyes and how differently they had looked at Terzo last night. He thought of how happy and relaxed they’d been, pupils for once not blown wide from anger but instead sparkling with joy. Their iridescent color simply shining. He thought of your hair and how he’d finally seen it free from your veil. He thought of how soft your curls looked falling in waves around your bare shoulders. He thought of your face and how your lips had twisted up into that saccharine smile. A smile he’d never seen before and wondered if he’d ever see again. 

You had been happy. 

Alpha had been happy. 

Everyone in his entire damn room had been happy. 

There had been so much laughter, dancing, and joy. There had been so much happiness so much glee…and then he’d ruined it. Snuffed it out like depriving a flame oxygen. Secondo took a deep breath and tried to push away his own self-loathing. 

He thought of you again and the ache in his chest started to burn. It spread moving from deep in his lungs out until everything burned. Then suddenly Secondo started to cough. He coughed so hard that his eyes watered and Alpha immediately came to his side. A clawed hand gripping his shoulder. 

Secondo waved him off, trying to compose himself but the haze… it had never been this thick in the chapel before. Secondo could feel it sticking to his throat and sliding down into his belly. And then for the first time in his life, Secondo tasted dark magic. It was sweet like honey and floral like roses. 

If only he could have known how he would be chasing that flavor for the rest of his life. 

Apparently, you weren’t just Secondo’s Imperatrix. You were his assistant now too. 

You showed up to Secondo’s office at six am as he’d asked and were greeted with the biggest stack of paperwork you’d ever seen. The daunting thing dwarfed the tiny desk you’d been given and spilled onto the floor and over the carpet in Secondo’s office. There wasn’t much of an order to things and Secondo’s instructions on getting through the pile had been curt. Sign these. Edit this. Transcribe that. 

But truthfully you were thankful he didn’t have much more to say to you. You didn’t want to talk about what happened last night. You’d done enough of your own cross-examination, staying up half the night replaying it over and over and over again in your head while trying and failing to fall asleep. 

You’d nearly let him kiss you. What in the actual fuck had you been thinking? Papa Emeritus the Second. You’d actually let him corner you, and touch you, and tease you, and for some ungodly reason when it was all happening, you had wanted it. You had wanted him. Something in you had shifted and you became an animal motivated solely by the lust of their heat. Warmth had coiled in your belly like a snake and even a cold shower hadn’t been enough to quench what he’d started. Embarrassingly the only thing that eventually helped you get to sleep was the little battery-powered toy you kept in your bedside table. 

In the daylight of his office, knowing that you had made yourself come thinking about Secondo made you squirm. All that teasing had probably meant nothing to him anyway. You were probably just another sister in a long line of siblings he played games with. You felt toyed with like a mouse batted about by a house cat. Embarrassment was creeping in, especially since he hadn’t spent more than a few seconds looking at you since sat down at your new desk. 

Secondo was focused on his own stack of paperwork. While it wasn’t nearly the same size as yours he never seemed to take his eyes off it. He barely even took a second to blink. The man worked like a dog. 

If Secondo wasn’t signing papers he was on the phone. And when he wasn’t on the phone he was writing sermons and speeches and internal documents that were somehow all passed due. He never took a break, stretched his legs, or stopped for a sip of water. With everything expected of him, you started to realize there wasn’t time. There was always more to do, someone to answer to, or something that needed to be fixed. But Secondo was like a machine. He never ran out of steam. All you could do was try your best to keep up and before you knew it half the day was gone. 

Your head was pounding from so much reading and writing that you nearly cried tears of joy when the lunch bells rang. 

“Should I call the kitchens and tell them you’ll be in the dining room shortly, Papa?” 

You stood up for the first time in hours and walked around the desk, feeling the stiffness in your legs from sitting for so long. Secondo finally looked up from his work and his mismatched eyes met yours.

“No, I’m not hungry. Just bring me a cup of coffee and some water from the dining hall,” he replied coldly before turning back to his papers. You nodded and scurried out of his office thankful to finally look at anything besides the horde of papers. 

As you walked through the Abbey toward the dining hall you spotted Mountain as he tended to some of the Abbey’s ficus trees in the main hall. With a pair of sheers in his hand, he looked up and offered you a warm smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. 

“Hey, little flower. How’s your head?” 

“Ugh,” you groaned posting up against the cool stone wall as you watched him primp and prune the small tree. “I don’t know why Alpha likes absinthe. I felt like there were bees in my head this morning.” 

Mountain chuckled before setting down his sheers and picking up a water canister at his feet. “Well, I had a great time. Dew won’t shut up about it either. Says he wants you to throw him a birthday party next week.” 

“Wasn’t his birthday last month?” 

“Yeah,” Mountain said moving further down the hall to another cluster of trees that needed watering, “but he said the one we threw him was lame.”  

“What?!” you cried following Mountain as he inspected the soil, digging his large fingers into one of the ficus’s pots. “He literally rode a bear!”

“I know! That’s exactly what I said. Little guy’s never satisfied,” he said shaking his head. “But anyway, how are you? Or maybe a better question is how much trouble are you in with Papa?” 

You paused for a moment and watched Mountain work. His fingertips idly traced the soft petals of a ficus tree inspecting it for rot and insect damage. It was amazing how such a large creature could care for something so fragile. 

“None,” you answered.“ I think Papa promoted me.” 

Mountain’s fingers froze over the leaves before he turned to look at you fully. “He what?” 

“I’m his assistant now I guess. He asked me to come to his office this morning and I’ve just been doing paperwork since. I was headed to get him some coffee now actually.” 

Even though Mountain was masked and the only sliver of his face you could see were his emerald eyes you could tell he was shocked. His dark green pupils blinked at you slowly, like he was trying to calculate the speed of the earth’s orbit divided by its distance to the sun. 

“You’ve got to be the only person in this place who can get away with what you did last night.” 

“Yeah maybe…” you trailed off before suddenly remembering something important you’d been meaning to ask Mountain. “Hey. While we're here I have a weird question for you. It’s about Primo’s garden.” 

“Shoot, little one.” 

“Have you seen any snakes out there lately?” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen any actually. Pretty sure Primo does some sort of magic to keep them away. Looking for a new pet?”

Apparently, you were going to have to take a trip out to the gardens and ask the old Papa some questions. But that was fine you were overdue for a chat with the eldest Emeritus anyway. 

“Nah. It’s a long story. There’s a lot I need to tell you. But I really need to get going,” you said picking up Mountain’s watering can and handing it back to the big ghoul. “I probably shouldn’t test Papa’s patience anymore after last night.”

“Why don’t you come to the dens tonight? Aeth is cooking and I can make you a batch of the new tea I’ve been working on.” 

“Sure Mount,” you called out over your shoulder already walking toward the dining hall, “See you then.”  

The dining hall was busy. 

Siblings and clergy members piled in from all corners of the Abbey, settling down at the long wooden tables for their midday meal. The room smelled of hearty stew and freshly baked bread. Summer was ending quickly and the kitchen staff had already started to transition from lighter fare to heavier, colder-weather meals. You’d miss the strawberry salads and cold gazpacho but fall was your favorite. Spiced cider, fresh apples from the orchard, warm shepherd's pie, those were the best. 

You grabbed a large tray from the end of the buffet and waited in line. With every minute that passed a quiet pounding started to grow against your temples. 

Thud. Thud.  

Thud. Thud. 

Thud. Thud. 

You could feel it. A migraine was starting to build. The warm food couldn’t come quickly enough. 

As you approached the front of the line, you selected a portion of the hearty stew with chunks of tender venison and root vegetables, a slice of warm crusty bread, and a generous helping of crisp apple slices drizzled with honey. 

“Is that all Sister?” One of the kitchen staff, an older brother with dark hair greying around his ears, asked. 

Thud. Thud.  

Thud. Thud. 

Thud. Thud. 

The pounding in your head grew louder. 

“Actually uh…” you stammered, looking down at your tray and smelling the delicious food. “Can I have a second serving of the same thing?” 

“Sure thing,” the brother replied with a kind smile, ladling another portion of the stew into a second bowl. 

Secondo might get pissed but you were going to bring him back food. If he was anything like you, or even remotely human, you wagered he was sporting a similarly splitting headache. 

You carried the loaded tray before collecting two cups of coffee and two glasses of water from the drink station. Balancing the stacked tray, you navigated through the bustling hall and carefully avoided any wandering feet and stray elbows. But just as you were about to walk out the door a high-pitched voice called your name. 

“Sister… sister wait up.” The corners of Sister Luciana’s lips quirked upward, but her twisted and forced smile didn’t reach her eyes as she jogged over to you. 

“Sister Luciana,” you replied, setting your heavy tray down on a nearby table. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh aren’t you so sweet,” she cooed and you had to bite your lip to keep from rolling your eyes. “I just wanted to see if you’re okay. No one’s seen you in two days and I’ve been so worried about you.” 

Satanas. How fake could one person be? 

“Thank you for your concern, Sister Luciana,” you replied politely, masking your annoyance. “I was under the weather but I’m better now.” 

It’d be a cold day in hell before you’d tell Luciana the truth that you’d blacked out in the catacombs after talking to Lucifer and were held hostage by Papa in his suite for 24 hours. 

“Glad to hear you’re feeling better,” Sister Luciana replied. Her eyes scanned you from head to toe like she was trying to catch the lie on you. “I gotta tell ya I heard some of the younger sisters talking, you know how they like to gossip, and some of them seem to think you’ve been promoted to Secondo’s assistant. There’s no way that’s true right? He wouldn’t choose you for that.” Luciana’s eyes darted from you to the tray and the two servings of stew steaming on it. 

It was people like Luciana who reminded you why you avoided friendships with siblings. Anyone overhearing your conversation probably thought she was a concerned friend. Merely a sweet sister who was worried about you after your prolonged absence. But you knew better. This conversation had nothing to do with you. Luciana only ever looked out for herself. If she was here in the dining room at lunch it meant she wasn’t in Papa’s dining room. She was just worried that someone was taking away her access to Papa. And for a sibling like Luciana power and status were everything. 

“You know how rumors spread like wildfire around here,” you said, forcing a casual laugh. “But who knows what goes on behind Papa’s doors right?”

The skepticism was obvious in Sister Luciana's eyes, but you tried to keep your expression neutral. She smiled at you again and wished you better health. Luckily you were able to slink away without her pestering you further. 

You briskly walked through the halls of the Abbey, the tray heavy in your hands as you made your way back to Secondo's office. The pounding in your head had only gotten worse after talking with Luciana, and with each step, you could feel your pulse beat through your skull. 

When you opened the door to his office, Secondo was in the same place you’d left him, seated at his desk with the big stack of papers in front of him. His brow was still furrowed deep in concentration. 

“I brought you some lunch,” you said, setting the tray down on the tiny open corner of your desk. “I know you asked just for coffee, but they had stew today and it just smelled so good I thought you might want some.” 

For the first time all morning, Secondo looked up from his work. His eyes darted between the tray of warm food and you. 

He stood from his desk and you braced yourself for a reprimanding. You closed your eyes and waited for the fire and fury to rain down on you. 

Thud. Thud.  

Thud. Thud. 

Thud. Thud. 

The pounding in your head shifted to your heart. 

Thud. Thud.  

Thud. Thud. 

Thud. Thud. 

It was going to burst. 

You shot your hand to your chest and rubbed tiny circles trying to massage away the pain. 

But then the cool slide of leather brushed against your chin and you opened your eyes. Pain forgotten, Secondo tilted your face to meet his gaze. You stared into marble white and mossy green. You had expected his eyes to darken the way they did when he was angry, the green becoming nearly black and the white more piercing than an arrow. But Secondo wasn’t looking at you like that. 

He looked thankful, pleased, and dare you say it… glad. 

There was a moment before you remembered to breathe. 

You could smell him. Cologne, spice, and incense. The swirling muddled scent clung to everything. You swallowed it all down but the beast from last night returned and it wanted more. 

To taste… would it be so bad to push forward and just have a taste of him?  

Your lips parted and you breathed in deeply. 

“Thank you,” he said simply, his voice barely above a whisper as his thumb brushed against your cheek. “You didn’t have to bring me this.”

Then without another word, Secondo’s gloved hand slipped from your jaw, he picked up his bowl of stew and returned to his desk. 

Thud. Thud.  

Thud. Thud. 

Thud. Thud. 

As Secondo walked away the pulse in your heart returned to your head. 

You’d almost let him do it again. 

You idiot. 

You foolish and reckless fucking idiot. 

What the fuck was he doing? 

Had he lost his damn mind? 

Between this morning's incident in the chapel and whatever the fuck was happening to him now Secondo needed a minute to just… be. He needed to collect himself. 

He was thankful for the stew. The monotonous motion of simply lifting his spoon from the bowl to his mouth and back again gave him some cover. And he was thankful for it because he was spiraling. His mind was all over the place and if he’d even pretended to go back to his sermon he was sure you would have seen right through him. 

He’d touched you. 

Again. 

He had touched you. 

The same way he had last night and it hadn’t been some kind of power play or show of dominance this time. He’d touched you simply because he’d wanted to thank you but words hadn’t felt like enough. But why… why didn’t words feel like enough? You’d just brought him soup. You hadn’t brought him the moon. 

Last night he had meant to tease you. All he’d wanted was to get you worked up again but somehow he’d ended up touching you. He’d cupped your jaw and slid into your space before even realizing what he was doing. And you looked at him the same way you had just now. 

Your lips had parted, your breath had held, your eyes had softened, pupils growing and darkening, lashes fluttering, cheeks turning red, and you had looked… you had looked just for a moment… just for the smallest sliver of a second like you didn’t hate him. Like he wasn’t a monster. And you had…

No. 

Stop it. 

Focus. 

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Secondo cleared his mind and forced himself to concentrate. You weren’t supposed to be a distraction. You were here to learn from him and to serve Him. Whatever tricks his mind was playing on him he would squash. He would bury them inside just like he did so many other of his emotions. He had to remember what was important. What was at stake. 

The catacombs. 

The book. 

His voice. 

His guidance. 

His legacy. 

You were another test. He couldn’t forget that so Secondo ordered himself to focus. He finished his lunch quickly and tried his best to avoid looking at you as he returned to his work… but the ache in his chest persisted, a gnawing hunger that had nothing to do with the stew he had just eaten. 

You sighed as you stared down at a particularly confusing text and Secondo couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed back from his desk. His papers now forgotten and stood abruptly. His chair screeched against the stone floor, echoing loudly in the room. 

He needed air. He needed space. He needed to get away from the suffocating walls that seemed to close in on him every time you were around.

“Papa?” you called out softly. 

Secondo ignored you and stormed past your desk, throwing open the heavy wooden doors to the hall. 

“Hello, son.” 

“Fucking hell!” 

Secondo jumped back from the door. In his jumbled mess of a mind, he’d forgotten about the meeting with his father. He glanced over at the clock above your desk.

Shit. 

He’d forgotten about the meeting he was supposed to have thirty minutes ago. 

“It’s rude enough that you didn’t come to my office on time. Now you’re going to just stand there and block the door. Move boy!” 

Secondo stuttered for a moment before stepping aside, allowing Papa Nihil to enter. Sister Imperator trailed closely behind him, pushing his oxygen tank as it creaked across the floor. In the corner of the room, Secondo saw you jump up from your desk and close the door behind Imperator. He’d forgotten to tell you about this meeting too. 

Shit. 

He hadn’t planned for anyone to be here for this. Meetings with his father never usually went well, and he’d like to spare himself the shame but it was too late to send you away now. 

Nihil and Imperator shuffled past Secondo and sat in the two tufted armchairs by the fireplace. Secondo moved to follow them, standing in front of the fire, and resting his elbow on the mantle. The heat from the flames licked at his back as he looked down at the elder pair. 

Nihil had always been a rotten bastard and a poor excuse for a father. How he’d managed to hold onto so much power in the Clergy, always amazed Secondo. He’d assumed, as did many others, that he would have been cast out of the church many moons ago if it weren’t for Imperator. It was she, he would need to placate today. She was the real power player in the room. 

Through the corner of his eye, Secondo watched as you sat back down at your desk and opened a little black notebook, readying yourself to take notes. He wanted to tell you not to bother. He’d never read them anyway. 

“Your lack of punctuality is concerning, my son,” Papa Nihil rasped, his voice muffled through the mask he held against his face. “Let’s hope you haven’t forgotten what we’ve come to discuss.” 

“I haven’t forgotten. I’ve been working hard on it. Last night I finished a new song. It’s called-” Imperator raised a hand silencing Secondo. 

“The clergy has concerns Papa. Have you reconsidered their offer?” 

If anyone else in the Abbey besides Imperator had asked that question Secondo would have barked out a list of insults so vile Satan would have blushed. 

“I understand,” Secondo said, forcing his tone to remain composed. “But I think the album is headed in a much better direction than the last time we spoke. Last night I-” 

“I don’t understand why he even needs to write a new album. Why can’t he just sing my songs and a few of his brothers? Wasn’t that the whole point of sending him out on that little tour last month? To see if this stronzo’s could even sing?” As Nihil prattled on Secondo glanced over at you, hoping to catch your eye, but you were too busy scribbling away in your notebook to notice him.

Imperator sighed loudly and Secondo looked back at the elder pair sitting before him. 

“You know why we need a new album, Nihil,” she scolded. “We need more followers. And new music is the best way to do that. It’s also why we have concerns over your album, Secondo. How will we attract more people to join us if your album is full of morose and macabre dronings? The clergy simply thinks a little outside collaboration will help spice things up. Help lift the veil a bit. Do you understand?” 

Secondo clenched his jaw and tried to swallow the boiling rage that threatened to spill over. The nerve of them to suggest diluting his art with outsiders, people who weren’t even members of their congregation. His music was sacred, a vessel for the Dark One's message, not some commodity to be watered down for the masses. 

“Honestly son, no one wants to hear it. Sathanas your lyrics aren’t even in English! Per Ad Ass whatever. See, I can’t even remember the damn title. How do you expect anyone to-” 

“I liked it.” 

Secondo’s eyes snapped to yours. 

You’d set your notebook down and were staring back at him, a meek little smile spread across your face. You pushed away from the desk and crossed the room, stopping beside him. Secondo swore the flames behind him jumped when the fabric of your habit brushed against his robes. 

Imperator raised an eyebrow, looking between you and Secondo with mild interest. Papa Nihil rolled his eyes.

“Sister if you're trying to get in this stronzo’s pants you don’t have-”

“Nihil enough,” Imperator growled, before turning toward you. “Please. Go on sister. What did you like about the song?”

Your eyes drifted from Secondo’s to the floor. Whatever had emboldened you a moment ago was slipping away. Your voice was soft as you started to speak. 

“I thought it was beautiful. I… I couldn’t get it out of my head after I heard it. There’s something… I don’t know something ethereal about it.”

As you shook your head Secondo balled his fist by his side. He wanted to tell you that you didn't have to do this. You didn’t need to stick up for him. Nihil would always have something negative to say and for as long as he’d known Imperator she had never been his biggest supporter. But your eyes flickered from the floor to his and all his thoughts went out the window.

“No, maybe ethereal’s not the right word. It feels like… well it feels like that moment when we all gather together for Black Mass on All Hallows Eve. Everyone’s excited. A little nervous. Lust. Devotion. Passion. All those feelings we share builds that electricity in the air. You can feel it in your chest. That night it… it feels like the best of us. Like the best of our church, I mean. Everyone gathered together on the one night of the year we all looked forward to most. When the veil is thin and for most of us it’s the closest we’ll ever get to Him.” 

“Sister,” Nihil whined impatiently, taking a drag of his oxygen, and tapping his long fingernails against the armrest of the chair, “get to the point.” 

“I just mean. His song. Per Áspera Ad Inferí. It reminded me of why I’m a member of this church. It reminded me of why I’m here. Even if I didn’t understand the words I think it’s beautiful.” 

A TIDAL WAVE. 

A TORNADO.

AN AVALANCHE.

All three are natural disasters that consume. They claim every square inch of calm and bring complete chaos. Disrupting all that was. 

People can rebuild. They can lay out new foundations, frame new homes, and pave new roads. But life is never the same. It can’t go back. The world will never be the same once the snow tumbles down, the wave crashes in, and the winds wreak havoc. 

As Secondo looked at you he felt like one of those towns he’d seen on TV destroyed by such nature. His world would never be the same. Every thought that he had held was squeezed out. His world was disrupted. Interrupted. Changed. By you. 

Sathanas. 

He thought to himself. 

You’re beautiful. 

You’re so fucking goddamn beautiful. 

In was in that moment that Secondo realized you were the most stunning creature he had ever seen. He had denied it, pushed it down, and tried to bury his attraction to you and focus on other things like his papacy, the rituals, and the Dark Lord himself. But how could he ignore it now? How could he push it down and bury this feeling somewhere deep when you’d gone and said something like that? 

You went ahead and talked about the music… his music, like it meant something. Like it moved you. Like you had understood the very thing that moved him and motivated him to write it. He didn’t know when you’d heard it but that didn’t matter. You’d stormed into his mind now and there would be no rebuilding it to how it was before. He couldn’t ignore it. 

Maybe he should have seen it coming. Secondo was only a human. And so far humans haven’t figured out how to stop storms before they start so maybe he should have realized he wouldn’t be able to keep this feeling locked up forever. But he was here now, wrecking his brain. He saw you now. 

And you were so beautiful. 

His attraction had been there since day one, just simmering under the surface waiting for the right moment to boil over. But now it was happening at the most inopportune time and Secondo couldn’t put it off one more fucking second longer. 

He knew when this started. 

It had been the moment Imperator laid your photo out next to the others. He remembered it clearly. He was supposed to pick his first batch of Imperatrix’s. It was a high honor and an important duty as Papa but he hadn’t been able to pull his eyes off your picture. You were smiling, standing in the warm summer sun down by the lake. Your hair was undone, long, and flowing beautifully past your shoulders and you were wearing that sundress. The sweet little yellow thing with white flowers and a hemline landing just above your gorgeous thighs. 

You’d stolen all of his attention in that moment. So much so that he hadn’t even cared to look at photos of the others. He’d picked five more sisters at random. It’d been you he wanted. It’s been you he couldn’t wait to see in the dining room that first day. It’d been you he made sure was given the nicest suite. The one with the largest bath and the prettiest view of the summer gardens. He’d been disappointed when you’d told him you wouldn’t participate in the rituals but he’d tried to move on. The ritual was supposed to be only an offering after all. He’d been selfish to think of anything else. 

But Santhas how he wanted to kiss you right now. He could just wrap you up in his arms, yank off your veil, grab a fistful of your hair, and leave you breathless. He could have you panting, whining, begging for more. He could do it right here in front of his father and Sister Imperator. Or better yet he could kick them out, pick you up, and push you down against his desk and show how good he could make you feel with just his hands and mouth before he even used his cock. 

Fuck he could just-

“Why are we listening to this girl when she can’t even speak Latin?!” Nihil's ancient voice sliced through Secondo’s thoughts. “She doesn’t know what would make a good performer. Sister,” Nihil turned to face Imperator in his chair, “he is not ready.” 

“I may not speak Latin,” you snapped, taking a step toward Nihil and lowering your voice until it became an angry growl, “but I know that Papa commands every room he walks into. So why should a stage be so different? Why wouldn’t he be ready?” 

You took another step toward Nihil, positioning yourself in between the old man and your Papa but Secondo couldn’t let you throw yourself to the wolves. He reached for you, grabbing your wrist and gently pulling you back to his side. He could feel your pulse throb with fury as his gloved fingers held you back. 

He wanted to pull you even closer and hold you against his chest but Secondo stopped himself. He was thankful for your defense but couldn't let you provoke Nihil any further, not when the consequences for you both could be dire. He needed you near. He needed you close. He wouldn’t let Nihil send you away for your insolence. 

Not now. 

Not now that you had finally consumed him. 

Imperator leaned back in her chair and observed, watching the exchange between you, Secondo, and Papa Nihil. She rested a finger on her chin, deep in thought. 

“Papa Nihil, your concerns have been duly noted. But, I believe the sister's perspective holds merit. Secondo you may continue with the album as planned for now. We will meet again in one month to discuss your progress.”  

Nihil grumbled under his breath but eventually nodded in reluctant agreement. “Fine,” he said. “But he needs to prove himself. We can't afford any more fuckups. Capisci?”

“Sì,” Secondo answered, biting down on his cheek until the taste of copper filled his mouth, “Capisco, padre.” 

A week had passed since your promotion to Secondo’s assistant. 

The job wasn’t easy, but you’d learned his routines quickly enough. A cappuccino in the morning. Reading glasses cleaned and on the left side of his desk before his arrival. A fire hot and roaring before he entered and freshly-cut firewood kept stacked in the rack by the door. 

The work itself was usually the same. Every morning Secondo started with the pile of papers on his desk. Signing, editing, and transcribing. As Papa, it was his duty to understand all the traditions and rituals of the church while guiding his flock toward or against the known and unknown dogmas. 

All important clerical duties were done by lunch. In the afternoon, Secondo dedicated himself to his music. He wrote, sang, and played his guitar, a beautiful acoustic thing with a solid Sitka spruce top and touches of emerald green around its body. Most days Secondo didn’t leave his office when he worked on his album, preferring to play by the fire. But sometimes he did wander down to the music room, where the walls are padded and he could mix tracks when he felt so inclined. On those days his most trusted ghouls usually joined him. Alpha. Omega. Aero. Crust. 

The nighttime was reserved for sermons. Secondo wrote and practiced them over and over again until his message was clear and memorized completely. You never realized how much detail was packed into each line he delivered at mass until that week. Every word served a purpose, every phrase held a deeper meaning. 

Through it all you helped Secondo the best that you could. You learned that he was meticulous about his robes and paints, both of which he wore every single day, so you started keeping lint rollers in his office and a pot of his special facial paints in your pocket at all times. You learned inspiration could strike him at any moment so you also carried a little black notebook and a pen in case he ever needed to jot something down. 

Alpha was around most days and you were so thankful for that. You enjoyed your time together when he did play bodyguard, posting up inside Secondo’s office like a sentinel. He occasionally would slip you little cartoons he’d draw of you or Papa. He was a talented artist and you wondered if all ghouls were born with such creativity. You wanted to ask him but for some odd reason, Secondo kept giving him time off saying things like “go enjoy yourself” or “make sure to rest.” It was strange, seeing Secondo pretend to care about someone else. 

Most days you didn’t speak to Secondo and the two of you worked side by side in total silence. Although on more than one occasion you did catch him staring at you, you tried your best to stay out of his way and anticipate anything he needed.  

Neither of you had taken a single meal in the dining hall in the past week either. There was too much to do and too few hours in the day to do it all. It’d become clear that Secondo’s last assistant was less than organized and the backlog of work she’d inadvertently created felt neverending most days. 

Every night when you dragged yourself back to your suite you felt the same. You were tired. You were body-aching, head pounding, feet burning, doggone tired. You’d never worked so hard in your entire existence and your social life, as modest as it was before, practically vanished overnight. Your world became absolutely consumed by Secondo’s. 

It’s been a week since you’d been able to see your friends in the ghoul dens. You never made it down for Aether’s cooking or Mountain’s tea the day he had invited you. You’d apologized for missing out when you bumped into Mount days later. He’d been kind and understanding, offering you a hug that you needed more than you realized. And since then he’d taken it upon himself to leave little snacks and energy drinks in your suite every night. 

“You need the energy, little flower,” he had said when he’d delivered you the first round of goodies.

The other ghouls helped out too. Aurora and Cumulus surprised you with little pink Post-it notes on your bathroom mirror full of encouraging messages and adorable drawings. Aether also brought you your favorite wine. And Dew brought you his favorite weed. Swiss, the chaotic little sweetheart that he was, lent you two piles of his favorite records. 

“Music to put you to sleep and music to get you going in the morning,” he had said when dropping them off at your door. 

At some point, you’d eventually figure out a way to thank everyone. You just needed a minute away from Secondo before that could ever happen. But today wasn’t going to be that day. 

It was Saturday evening and while most of the Abbey was preparing for a night of sin and revelry you were with Secondo, holed up in his office and staring down a stack of receipts that needed approving. Alpha had left several hours earlier and the sun was setting outside, casting a warm orange glow through the open window behind Secondo’s desk and a cool breeze swept through the room. 

Secondo had set aside his latest sermon and was plucking away at his guitar. You stole glances at him every now and then, watching the way his ungloved slender fingers danced over the strings with effortless grace. 

The song was different from the rest he’d been working on. This one was slower. Softer. If anyone else had been playing it you might even dare say it was sweeter. 

“Ghuleh… Ghuleh…” 

Secondo sang, his voice rising over the crackling fire and gliding over you like the breeze from the open window.

“Ghuleh… Ghuleh…” 

You set your pen down and watched him. For all the vial names you wanted to spew at Secondo, you couldn’t deny him two things. The first was that the man had the voice of a fallen angel. You could easily imagine falling down again into the black void and meeting one of His princes. Maybe Belial or Beelzebub. You could imagine how they would probably sound the same if they sang. Confident, verging on arrogant but soft enough to corrupt any innocence they crossed. 

And the second thing you couldn’t deny Secondo was just how much you liked his voice. You could listen to him sign anything. The Macarena. Happy Birthday. God damn Barbie Girl. Honestly, it didn’t matter what Secondo was singing you’d listen to it all just to hear the way his voice could flit between light and delicate to those guttural deep growls that made your cheeks warm and red. 

You subtly reached up to your cheek and tried to hide the shame that they were indeed flushing red again. 

But luckily Secondo wasn’t looking at you. His gaze was elsewhere. His mismatched eyes were busy staring into the fireplace’s flames as he sang. 

“Putrefaction. A scent that cursed be. Under coat of dust. From the darkness. Rise a succubus.” 

On the last word, Secondo stopped, turned his head, and stared at you. If your cheeks had been tinged pink before they were bright red now. 

You had to say something. 

“That was beautiful.” 

Secondo’s gaze lingered on you for a heartbeat before he looked away. His fingers stilled on the guitar strings. Then Secondo did two things you never thought possible. He thanked you and he smiled. 

The deep-set corners of his eyes that were so often set in a frown shifted upwards. And his lips followed course. Moving big and wide. You were surprised at how nice it looked on him. How handsome his chiseled face was when he twisted it this way. Not that you ever thought you’d see it, but when you had imagined Secondo’s smile you’d thought it would be awkward, forced, and uncomfortable. But nothing about the way he looked at you now made you feel any of those ways. 

You don’t know why. But his thanks his smile…it felt like a truce.

Even if he didn’t know why you hated him and even if you didn’t know why he hated you something about the moment felt like a ceasefire. A break in the lingering feud between you both. You still hated him for what he’d said to you. And probably still despised you for your disobedience but right now… right now you could just co-exist. Right now that hatred didn’t feel important. Something else mattered. You weren’t sure if you could name it. But you felt it, fluttering in your chest and flickering on the tip of your tongue.  

Maybe the moment was getting to Secondo too, because he set his guitar aside and stood up, walking over to the window to watch the sun sink lower in the sky before rubbing his temples. 

You’d learned over the week that despite the front Secondo tried to put on he was indeed human. And he was a human being who suffered from pounding headaches just like you. 

“Headache, Papa?” 

“Nothing that won’t go away on its own, sorella,” he said despite mixing the white and black paint at his temples into a grey mess, as he moved his fingers in tiny circles. 

“Maybe you should take a break. Is there something you do to relax?” 

Secondo turned from the window and blinked at you. He looked surprised.

“I don’t have time for that.” 

You pushed away from your chair and reached into the pocket of your habit, pulling out a cotton handkerchief before handing it to Secondo and pointing to the grey smudges on his fingertips. 

“Well how about you take your guitar and I’ll take some of these,” you pointed back toward the stack of receipts on your desk, “and we’ll just go somewhere that’s more relaxing.” 

“Somewhere more… relaxing?” He repeated, eyeing you curiously.

“Yeah, maybe a change of scenery could help clear your mind.”

The idea seemed to intrigue Secondo. His gaze flickered between you and the window where the last rays of orange sunlight were fading fast. After a moment, he let out a sigh and nodded. 

“Lead the way, sorella.”

Secondo had lived in the Abbey his entire life and while he knew plenty of secrets about the old place he had never been here before. 

You had led Secondo through the Abbey into an abandoned classroom on the top floor of the eastern wing and climbed out its window. Then you’d scampered up onto the roof, where a black and red plaid blanket had already been waiting. A tin bucket sat next to one of the brick chimneys and Secondo peaked inside, noticing half a dozen smoked-down joints. 

You sat down on the blanket, deftly crossing your legs at your ankles, and waved at Secondo to join you. Secondo couldn’t help but think what a pair you two must make. What would people think if they saw you? A young Imperatrix, dressed in her most conservative black habit, not an inch of skin showing, and him…Papa Secondo, clad in all the finest regalia of his station donning black robes, mitre, and all. Even though the sun was almost fully set Secondo doubted that any sibling wandering the grounds below would be able to see either of you. But still, he felt subconscious about his dress. He normally didn’t mind people staring. But up here with you, he’d rather not draw stares. So he pulled off his mitre and gently set it on the roof before joining you on the blanket with his guitar. 

While the plaid blanket was decently sized, Secondo was forced to sit relatively close to you. Just a handful of inches separated the two of you. So he kept his eyes fixed on the horizon in an attempt to distract himself from the proximity and began plucking away at the strings of his guitar. Normally, keeping his hands busy was enough to distract himself. 

But tonight it wasn’t cutting it. Secondo couldn’t focus. 

Being here with you was so much different than his office or the music room. This felt too intimate. Two people, lying under the stars, with music in the air, this felt more like a date than the tail end of a long working day. And while Secondo was ready to admit that you were beautiful he wasn’t ever going to be the kind of man that took sisters like you on dates. He was missing that thing in him that sought out companionship, or the type of love that made people weak and vulnerable. Secondo was determined never to let himself be so at the mercy of another person. 

“I’ve never brought another human up here before?” Your voice cut through his idle strumming.

“Human?” 

“Yeah,” you said fidgeting with your habit. “I’ve only ever brought the ghouls up here.” 

Secondo raised an eyebrow. Most siblings were terrified of ghouls. But you were apparently comfortable enough to lay with them under the stars. Who were you? 

“The ghouls… they are your friends?” 

“They’re my only friends.” 

For two people who have spent every waking minute together over the past 7 days, Secondo realized then he knew absolutely nothing about you. He shifted on the blanket, moving his long under his thighs. Then he turned his broad shoulders in your direction so he could look at you fully. He hoped you look back at him. 

But you avoided his eye contact and stared up into the sky. 

The moonlight glistened on your face, casting shadows in the hollows of your cheeks and Secondo was struck by how ethereal you looked, like a beautiful unholy being bathed in silver light. 

“You are beautiful, sorella.” 

The words were out of Secondo’s mouth before he realized it. They’d simply escaped, like taking a breath, without any consciousness. 

But Secondo didn’t want to take them back. They were the truth and he couldn’t rewind time. All he could do was wait for you to say something… anything. The minutes stretched like hours. But you weren’t going to answer. You had frozen in place and the only thing that emerged from your lips were shaky and nervous breaths that puffed out into the cold night like little clouds. 

Then Secondo did something stupid. He spoke again. 

“You don’t like me do you?” 

This time your eyes snapped quickly to Secondo’s and nothing could have prepared him for how much angry fire was burning behind them. 

“Fuck you.” 

“W-what?”

“I said fuck you, Papa,” you spat out Secondo’s title with ugly disdain and dug a pointed finger hard into his chest. “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met in my life. I bet you don’t even remember what you said to me do you?” 

Secondo tried to rack his brain. He tried to think of any interaction. Any possible bump in the halls, or faux pau in the dining halls. He’d only known you for a week. He’d never spoken to you before seven days ago. What the hell could he have done in that time to make you hate him so? 

As Secondo looked at you, it was obvious he didn’t remember. There was no flicker of recognition. No flashback running through his mind. 

And somehow that felt so much worse. How could he not remember when you’d never forget? 

“Sorella,” Secondo pled, “Tell me please. What did I do to you?”

Go back: (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3) (Part 4) (Part 5)

(Read on AO3)

[vickdrake]

Do i know you?

Jake opened his eyes finding the annoying glow of his computer, with those codes that had been left undeciphered after he inexplicably fell asleep on the table.

He didn't remember the exact moment when he had fallen into the world of dreams, but he knew that it was due to an oversight that should not happen again. Tiredness took its toll on him after months without sleeping properly, or rather without sleeping at all.

He cracked his neck, letting out a grunt of relief before looking out the hotel room window. It was autumn, the leaves were falling withered from the trees, indicating that winter was approaching and that everything old had to disappear to make way for a new beginning.

His pursuers seemed to be getting closer, always straining his patience and making him change hiding places more often. When he woke up his first concern had been to check where they were, but he was surprised to see that they had not yet picked up his signal, that they were still quite far away from him.

“Strange” he thought.

He leaned back in his chair, arms crossed and staring into the corner of the room as he remembered a dream even stranger than the fact that his pursuers had not already knocked on the door (although they would never really knock, they would broke it).

Have you heard of people who don't dream? Jake was one of them. Dreams were not recurring in his life since he was little.

And I'll tell you something else, as a child, Jake feared his dreams because they were always too real.

This time it turned out to be a dream within a dream.

There he had also been sleeping as if he had no worries in the world other than rest, but the difference was that this time he was not alone.

A girl who radiated as much light as beauty caressed his hair as he opened his eyes.

—Good morning, sleepyhead. I've never seen you sleep as much as you did today —she said, smiling with amusement and tenderness as she tangled her fingers in the locks that covered Jake's eyes—. Do you want to tell me what you were dreaming? I almost thought you weren't going to wake up.

He himself had thought that it would be weird to find a strange woman at his side, speaking to him as if they had known each other for a long time, but his body, his mind, had reacted in a different way, ending up putting his arm around her waist and approaching to kiss her.

"Wait, wait, i haven't brushed my teeth yet," the woman protested, laughing as he left kisses on her neck and cheeks as he sought her lips.

"I don't care," Jake heard himself say at the same time he managed to make her stay still so he could kiss her hungrily.

She had complained that it was disgusting, but he didn't care at all.

In his dreams he had a life with her, they were both happy and Jake remembered laughing like he hadn't heard himself in years.

Through the tricks his head played on him, he managed to feel the human warmth of someone else for a period of time that felt like decades. It seemed to him that it was someone else's life, someone completely oblivious to him but at the same time had everything to do with himself.

He remembered her delicate fingers on his face, drawing paths across his chest, playfully running over his neck and tracing the shape of his eyebrows in a reassuring way.

He discovered that an engagement ring was on her ring finger and a feeling of pride, joy and overflowing love invaded him as soon as he saw that image. His girlfriend, his girl, his fiancee. Or rather, the fiancee of that Jake who did have a happy and free life.

His own mind playing with him, reminding him that he would never have a life like that, that he would rather end up rotting in prison or dead, buried and forgotten.

After a while he forgot the dream.

He completely forgot about the girl's face, the scent of her hair, and her smile that became Jake's favorite thing for at least five minutes after he woke up.

He continued to run away because it was what he knew how to do best, the only thing he could do, and he didn't allow himself to go back to sleep.

But... One afternoon, almost a year later.

A fragrance invaded his nostrils when the door of the Rainbow coffee opened.

An essence of roses, jasmine and… sea salt.

It seemed like a strange mix, although it made sense as he began to remember every detail of his dreams.

The rose petals that she put in her books so that they would be dissected, the jasmines that she loved so much and that Jake left next to her pillow every time he had to run away again, and the sea salt from that beach where he decided that he wanted to spend the rest of his life being by her side, that place where as soon as he saw her come out of the water with her clothes and hair wet, laughing and throwing water at him, he was so hypnotized that the words came out of his mouth on their own.

"Marry me".

It had been a while since the iron mine had caught fire with Richy Rogers and Jake inside, Hannah was slowly recovering after they had managed to rescue her and the rest of her friends were trying to be strong for her but at the same time they couldn't ignore the pain of Richy's death.

The woman, who had helped the group and the hacker, decided to distance herself although she did not lose contact with any of them. She didn't go where she wasn't called, she comforted those who came to her and one day she finally decided it was time to say goodbye.

Jake watched from a table as she entered the cafeteria. Everything about her seemed so incredibly familiar even though he had never seen her in his life and also he could feel deep inside that he knew every mole, scar and mark from her body.

He didn't care about looking crazy as he looked at her, he had no interest in being careful as he found himself immersed in the lost expression on her face as she looked out the window, in how she drummed her fingers on the table and then how she took the cup of coffee to her lips.

He wanted to touch her, call her, say all those words that he had only spoken to her by message, discover if her hair was really as soft as in that dream, if her hands really radiated that comforting warmth.

Then he noticed that she was no longer looking at the cup of coffee or at the people passing by on the street but directly at him.

His heart began to accelerate and he felt the beat reach his ears, also causing his breathing to become agitated.

"I know you"

His legs moved on their own, making him get up to go after her as soon as he saw her grab her things and go to the cashier to pay. He didn't approach, not wanting to draw too much attention from her, but it was inevitable for the woman to get scared when she found him a few meters away from herself. Of course she must have guessed it was him at some point.

Jake heads toward the door to open it, but he turns his head in her direction just to let her know that he's waiting for her. He sees her doubt, observe him, analyze him, and he understands that she is wondering if she is wrong about who he is. She begins to approach, without taking her eyes off him, she watches him carefully, patiently, and Jake has to control the impulse to put his arms around her waist and press her against his body as soon as they face each other.

Nobody says anything. They communicate through looks. Jake thinks about what he wants to tell her and it seems to work, she seems to understand, because her frown softens.

“I love you,” a corner of his mind whispers and he smiles slightly.

No one else in the cafeteria is important, she overshadows anyone else and makes him forget that they've been looking at each other for a while, what wakes him up is her voice uttering a soft “thank you” before she walks through the door and leaves.

Jake watches her walk away, but he knows that she expects him to follow her so he doesn't waste time and with a more noticeable smile, he closes the door of the cafeteria and while he puts his hands in his pockets he decides that from the beginning she was always his destiny.

PS: This story is slightly linked to “With or without you”.

[lewkwoodnco]

guardian angel - lockwood x reader

As a Visitor lingering in 35 Portland Row, you can’t help but worry over Lockwood and his reckless ways

He caught a familiar Visitor trying to wrench open a warm can of beer left on the kitchen table. So far, it seemed that she had only been successful in vigorously shaking it up. She had been too engrossed to notice Lockwood walking in, so she was just startled enough for him to swipe the can out of her barely-there grasp.

"Nice try. Maybe when you turn 18."

She groaned. She had been so close. "Technically speaking, I'm 87 years old."

"Technically speaking, you're dead."

a/n: might fuck around and make this a series idk idk also halfway through I realised the reader would be classified as a type three i think? but lockwood can’t talk to type threes so let’s just pretend she’s the only one he can talk to

tropes/warnings: angst, a lil fluff, slight slight hurt/comfort, descriptions of injury, visitor!reader

word count: 3.8k!

MASTERLIST | TAGLIST

Anthony Lockwood had one rule and one rule only when it came to psychical investigations - there was no such thing as a friendly Visitor. And for the most part, he abided by it. But every rule has its exception, and this one came in the form of a sharp-eyed Type Three not much older than himself.

On this particular evening, the trio had just returned from a particularly draining case. George padded down to the basement to put away their iron chains while Lucy headed for the kitchen to put the kettle on. Lockwood winced as he peeled his coat off, heavy with decades-old dust and soot. He shuffled into the nearly pitch-dark living room, visibly unwinding as he sank into his favourite armchair. But he knew better than to hope for some peace and quiet just yet. Almost immediately, the hair at the back of his neck prickled not uncomfortably as he cast his eyes around. The air shifted, and he looked up just in time to see a familiar face materialise.

“Butter-fingered Locky nicked himself?”

He smiled weakly, carefully pulling his shoes off with his good arm. A shallow gash ran through his left bicep where something had ripped through his coat and shirt. The Visitor fiddled with some trinkets on the mantle above the fireplace with a carefully crafted air of nonchalance, occasionally glancing at his face expectantly.

“Broken window. Some of the glass ripped through my coat.”

“Ooh. How dramatic,” she teased playfully. He reached for the first-aid kit on the coffee table, pulling out the disinfectant and bandages he needed one-handed. He tentatively dabbed at the wound, twisting his torso uncomfortably as he struggled to bandage it up.

“Shouldn’t you be getting someone else to do that for you?”

He looked up and arched an eyebrow. “Why? Are you offering your services?”

She grinned, her face creasing into a light-hearted expression he found oddly relieving. She opened her mouth to reply when the living room door creaked, and the warm light of the hallway flooded the living room. Lockwood jerked his head up as she flattened herself against the fireplace, much less opaque now. George was standing at the door, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the living room.

“How’s the arm?”

Lockwood grimaced, carefully checking how sore it was. “Could be worse.”

George nodded absent-mindedly, wandering towards some files haphazardly stacked on the coffee table. Lockwood turned back to see her watching his wound thoughtfully, a gentle frown marring her face.

"That’s got to hurt. I think. It's been a while since I…you know.”

"How did you die?" Lockwood asked in a low voice. Instantly, her concern evaporated. Her eyes darted towards George, pouring over those files only a few feet away from them, with mock severity. 

"Hmm. Pneumonia, I believe."

She batted her eyes at him coquettishly and, as was routine, vanished into thin air. She didn't like giving him straight answers in general, and never for that question. One day it would be typhoid, the next frostbite, and then the Plague, and so on. Still, maybe one day she’d blurt it out without thinking, and so Lockwood kept asking.

She had been haunting 35 Portland Row from before Lockwood's parents had moved in. As a child, before his Sight had fully developed, he always had an inkling that something was there, hiding in the shadows. She had watched his mother mark out his height on the wall year after year. She had watched him scrape his knee barrelling down the front porch steps when he was five. She had watched his father chase him around the front yard on Saturday mornings. She had watched him grieve the family stolen from him. She had watched him stumble around, figuring out what to do with himself, night after night.

And so began her little acts of kindness. It was only because she was bored, she had told herself. A flare burn on his coat mysteriously mended seemingly overnight. The kitchen table flowers never seemed to wilt despite his forgetful watering habits. The orange juice carton was always put away in the refrigerator, even on nights when he was too exhausted to remember if he did. She had never meant to get this emotionally invested. Eventually, when he started noticing things were rarely where he had left them, he began to pick up more on her presence.

The first time she had materialised in front of him was when a 14-year-old Lockwood had yelled into the abyss that was an empty 35 Portland Row in the middle of the night, threatening to snuff her out for good if she didn't show herself. However, as far as 14-year-old boys went, Lockwood was not particularly menacing, so it was more pitiful than frightening. 

Still, the Problem had been relatively new when she had kicked the bucket, and she was nothing if not curious to a fault. He hadn't seemed to have expected her to actually show up, given the deer-in-headlights look on his face when his nervous brown eyes met her shining, lifeless ones. She had an inkling that the threat had been an empty one, because as much as he pretended otherwise, Anthony Lockwood never hurt anyone or anything as long as he could help it.

“I don’t understand,” he had whispered, looking terribly vexed, a strain to his pale features. “I’ve never felt any malaise from you. I don’t even feel it now. How could you -?”

She had shrugged. Her guess was as good as his. Probably worse, since she hadn’t had access to half of the numerous books written about the Problem in her time. 

After the first time she had materialised, he had resolved to find her Source and end the whole affair. But as their friendship blossomed, his resolve weakened, until eventually he decided it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to let a harmless Visitor like her lurking around. That isn’t to say they never slipped up around the others. If George himself wasn't so prone to talking to himself, he might have picked up on Lockwood seemingly muttering to no one in the pitch-black darkness of his room being odd. 

Since then, she started showing up more and more frequently, as early in the day as she was able to. This one evening, she had shown up as Lockwood had been cutting a slice of treacle tart to go with his cup of tea.

"Tony." Lockwood flinched. The air near him shimmered as she materialised, laughing, perched on the kitchen table. She enjoyed startling him more than any decent person should. Lockwood eyed her warily, mildly peeved.

"I've told you, it's Lockwood now."

"Yeah, yeah, but I've got nothing better to do for the next, hmm, I don't know, forever. This is my only entertainment, you know" she said, staring dolefully at the treacle tart. He followed her line of sight.

"I thought you didn't like treacle tart."

"I don't," she sighed exaggeratedly, unfolding her legs from beneath her, "but if I were still alive, I'd be able to give it a second chance, wouldn't I?"

He rolled his eyes and tossed a fork at her, and she gave a playful shriek of laughter as it flew through her.

Occasionally, it had crossed his mind that perhaps he was being selfish by keeping her here. He didn't know any more than the next person about what 'the next world' was, if it even existed, but in the psychical investigation industry, it was generally agreed upon that putting a Visitor to rest was the closest they could come to moving on. Despite the blades and gunpowder involved, freeing Visitors from their eternal agony was almost humane.

He didn't mind however she addressed him after that evening.

There was an old mansion right on the outskirts of London that was infamous for being impossibly haunted, earning it the nickname “Hell’s Manor.” Many agencies, including Fittes and Rotwell, had tried their hand at ridding the place of the supernatural phenomena, with little luck. It was only a matter of time before it was their turn.

“The main problem with Hell’s Manor,” George was saying over lunch after spending the morning at the Archives, “is how much the Visitors interfere with the investigation. More than half of them are Type Two’s, and according to the few survivors, they could barely see their teammates, let alone speak to them.”

The three of them glumly picked at their ghormeh sabzi, weighed down by the complexity of the case. “So what do we do?” Lucy finally asked.

“We could…” George glanced cautiously at Lockwood before continuing. “We could always turn down the job.” 

Lockwood didn’t look too appreciative of that suggestion. He set his jaw, stabbing at his lunch with a bit more force than necessary.

“Fine,” George relented. “Let’s give it some more thought. We’ll pick this up again next week.”

As George started on the dishes after lunch, Lockwood wandered over to the living room where George’s extensive, meticulous notes were scattered across the coffee table. Hell’s Manor was no joke, and George’s extreme attention to detail was a testament to that. 

Lockwood scanned the notes thoughtfully. A nagging, reckless idea began to take root in his mind. He doubted any agency in their right mind had considered sending in only one agent, not with the horror stories chronicling the place. But what if…what if it was such a terrible idea, that it just might work? Lockwood was not one to doubt the power of sheer dumb luck, not when it had gotten him this far. 

He heard the kitchen floorboards creak. He surreptitiously snuck a few of the sheets up to the library, where he started drawing out some plans of his own.

A few hours later, he caught a familiar Visitor trying to wrench open a warm can of beer left on the kitchen table. So far, it seemed that she had only been successful in vigorously shaking it up. She had been too engrossed to notice Lockwood walking in, so she was just startled enough for him to swipe the can out of her barely-there grasp. 

"Nice try. Maybe when you turn 18."

She groaned. She had been so close. "Technically speaking, I'm 87 years old."

"Technically speaking, you're dead."

She pulled a face. "Boo." She turned to get a proper look at him and frowned at the sight of him nearly fully decked out in equipment. “Hang on,” she said, “I thought you didn’t have any cases tonight.”

Lockwood tried to appear engrossed in whatever he was reading. “Lucy and George don’t have any cases tonight,” he said far too casually without looking up.

“This better not be about Hell’s Manor,” she said in a flat voice, no trace of humour in her voice now. He didn’t reply, avoiding her gaze.

“Lockwood. Promise me you’re not going to Hell’s Manor tonight. Alone.”

When he still didn’t reply, she laughed humourlessly, as if she refused to believe it.

“Are you completely mental? Did you not listen to a word George said at lunch? Even I’m too nervous to hang about riff-raff like them, and I’m just about as dead as it gets.”

“It’s easier this way. Trust me.” She watched him stuff more flares into his gear belt than it could comfortably allow. “You can’t miscommunicate with anyone if there isn’t anyone to communicate with.”

“Lockwood,” she said mournfully, “they’ll eat you alive.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said tersely. “I’ll be in and out in a jiffy. And if you know what’s good for you,” he hurriedly added, recognising the defiant look brewing on her face, “you’ll stay away.”

“Loc-“

“I mean it, Y/N. Stay out of this.” Lockwood stared hard at her as her mouth pressed into a thin, flat line. He was impossible to reason with when he had his heart set on doing something like this. 

He turned, heading straight for the front door, pausing only at the rapier stand while her protests fell on deaf ears. In a haze of desperation, she slipped in between him and the door, as if she had enough substance to bodily block him from leaving. Without thinking, she stuck a translucent hand out to stop him. A translucent hand that, if Lockwood hadn't reflexively flinched, would have passed straight to him, and stopped his heart.

They stood there frozen for a moment, paralysed by shock and the terrifying almost-tragedy. Regret washed over her like waves crashing against a shore as she internally berated herself for being so careless. She was the first to break the silence, sharply sucking in an airless breath as she squeezed her eyes shut. "Crap. I didn't mean to -"

"So that's how it's going to be." Lockwood's voice was as wooden as his face.

"No." She bit down on her tongue, which was itching to go off on him and his injured expression. Logically, she knew he was only trying to emotionally blackmail her into letting him leave. So why couldn’t she bring herself to truly believe it? "Don’t be like that. It was - it was a mistake. You know I didn’t do that on purpose."

"Do I?" He glanced downwards to where her hand was still poised, mere inches from his chest. Immediately, she lowered her hand, putting as much distance as she could between the two of them as she flattened against the door. The lump in her throat made it hard to swallow.

She glared at him. "God, Lockwood, it was a mistake. You know I wasn't trying to -" She struggled with her words for a moment. "Trying to off you."

"Whatever," he muttered darkly under his breath. He reached around her to open the door as she moved out of the way, momentarily too flustered to stop him. He took advantage of her hesitation as he briskly walked out before she could recover.

"Anthony John Lockwood, you'll be sorry if you leave like this!"

Lockwood had never seen her this livid. He had made it all the way to the garden gate but she could only follow him up till the front porch steps, and even now her image was beginning to dangerously shimmer. Visitors couldn't manifest in the physical realm if they were too far from their Source, especially this early in the day, and both of them knew it was only a matter of seconds before she disappeared entirely. Her eyes flashed with anger as her mouth twisted into a vicious snarl, and she had never seemed more non-human than she did in that moment.

What did she know, Lockwood found himself thinking. She's been dead for nearly a century.

He paused long enough to watch her and her wrathful stare fully dematerialise. Then he turned and started walking, as if he couldn’t feel the leaden weight in his chest.

Hell’s Manor was a blur of anxiety and nausea. Lockwood had come up with a flimsy sort of plan where he had shortlisted the rooms most likely to contain the Sources, but he hadn’t anticipated the struggle just to get to them. His hands trembled, his stomach churned, and sweat beaded across his forehead as he fought against the overwhelming malaise beating down on him.

As he crept up yet another winding flight of stairs, he felt himself shiver as the air grew colder and thinner. He forced his eyes open wider, trying to block out the howling of some far-away draft and the creaking of the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye, he spied the ephemeral silhouette of a Wraith slowly advancing towards him through the shadows. Shadows, or other Visitors? His heart thudded unsteadily as he reared an arm back and lobbed a flare at the Wraith.

The Wraith flickered and howled as it burnt up, its agonising shrieking filling Lockwood’s ears. He stumbled gracelessly, latching onto the railing for support, his legs nearly too weak to hold himself up. As suddenly as the screeching had started, it ended. His head spun, ears ringing with the quickly disappearing echoes of its cries. Although the Wraith was momentarily incapacitated, the other Visitors were not.

Lockwood realised far too late that what he had erroneously registered as dizziness was the stairs beneath his feet ripping off the railings, twisting this way and that. He had the wind knocked out of him as he flailed, falling backwards and hitting his head on something very hard, the bitter taste of copper filling his mouth.

Bloody and bruised, he finally gave in to the overwhelming urge to close his eyes and pray for a quick death, the blood roaring in his ears muffling the rest of the noise. He took in a shuddering breath. Some of his ribs were definitely broken. The side of his face stung where a falling piece of wood had struck him, narrowly missing his nose. 

He ached and hurt all over. He imagined not leaving Portland Row that evening. He would have been home - warm, alive, and mostly pain-free, curled up in an armchair with a magazine, listening to whatever inane prattle Y/N chose to fill his ears with that day.

Oh, how he wished they hadn’t fought.

Unfortunately, the quick death he was hoping for refused to come. The chaos of the manor had reduced, as though there was a lull in the destruction. In fact, it was almost too quiet. Distantly, he heard some shuffling, then the sound of wood being dragged. Dragged, as though by someone alive and solid. The piece of debris that had been pinning his leg down being moved out of the way. Hands reaching out and pulling him up. But no one knew he was here. Only one person did, but it couldn’t be her. Could it?

That question was the last thing hovering on his mind before he slipped out of consciousness.

When he came to, the assault on his senses was overwhelming. He could hear his associates arguing over the beeping of some machine. The strong scent of antibacterial soap grated on him. The bitter taste of oral anaesthesia burned his tongue. He groaned softly, head shifting on his pillow. Almost immediately, the voices ceased. With a tired sigh, he reluctantly cracked open an eye despite the pounding in his head.

“What the hell were you thinking?” His eyes fluttered close as they started going off on him, only half-listening.

“- it was only by sheer dumb luck that we knew you were gone, otherwise who knows when somebody would have-“

He hadn’t been listening too closely, but he perked up considerably at the last bit. “Wait, wait. What do you mean, ‘sheer dumb luck?’”

He could see George seriously considering outright refusing to explain himself, but he finally gave in. “Your bedroom windows. You left them open, and your closet doors were making a racket slamming open and closed. That’s what tipped us off that you were gone, and the papers on your bed told us where. Great plan, by the way,” George’s tone shifted into something more sarcastic, “Why bring an entire team down when you can get yourself killed all on your own?”

He knit his brow, certain that he had shut his windows that morning. He hadn’t even taken any of his plans to his room; he had left them in the library. He cast his eyes around the room where they landed on Y/N hovering in a corner, intently watching him worriedly. As soon as a look of recognition crossed his face, the tension in her face softened and she winked at him, turning her attention to an anatomy chart behind her. With considerable difficulty, he tore his eyes away from her.

“Yeah. Sorry.”

It was evident from their perplexed looks that they hadn’t expected such a ready apology. Usually, it took much more threatening and scolding to get Lockwood to express any kind of remorse. They stuttered for a minute, truly taken aback, until Lucy suggested that they go find the nurse. 

"You snitched on me?" Lockwood cried out incredulously as soon as the door closed behind them. This, apparently, was far from the right thing to say, if the way she glowed brighter was any indication.

"Hey. I don't want any lip from you 'till you can breathe without wincing. Plus," her lips twitched despite herself, "I can see you've done a pretty excellent job of busting it up yourself."

"Ha-ha. A regular comedian, you." She extended a hand, her ghostly fingers hovering above the cut on his lip, only this time, he didn’t reel back. Her fingers skated over the other bruises and scratches on his face as if she secretly wished to erase them. He watched her impassive face with half-lidded eyes and, despite his annoyance over her interfering, drunk in the sight of her like a man starved. 

A sense of awkwardness hung in the air from their fight earlier. Lockwood might have wanted to talk it through if he wasn’t in so much pain. Instead, he was bad-tempered and sulky, and god did his ribs hurt. He sank into his pillows, burying half of his face into them, like a petulant child throwing a tantrum.

"I had it under control," he whispered through gritted teeth. 

Her eyes roved over his battered form disinterestedly. “Yes. I can see that.”

They fell silent again.

“You’re welcome, by the way.”

He mumbled something less-than-complimentary into his pillow. 

"Lockwood?"

"What?" he bit out. Only, it wasn’t Y/N who had spoken. Lucy was standing in the doorway, her forehead creased and her eyes fixed right where Y/N had been floating just a moment prior. She seemed too distracted to have noticed the unexpected venom in his voice. A good amount of Lockwood's frustration dissolved as he tried to keep his face blank of any panic, sitting up the best he could. Lucy frowned around the room for a minute, and he was sure the jig was up, until she shrugged casually. Lockwood relaxed visibly.

"Oh, nothing. Thought I heard some voices."

“Hmm. Must be the, uh, other room.”

“Probably.” Lucy paused for a moment, eyes dragging over the cuts and bruises on his face. Did he really look that terrible? “Try to get some rest.” She gave him a small smile as she turned to leave, quietly closing the door behind her.

He didn’t like how empty the room felt. For the first time in a long while, he felt well and truly alone.

"Y/N?" he called out in a soft voice, much more in the mood to make up now. He hated how pathetic and vulnerable it made him sound. But there was no reply. The air remained still, his surroundings free of any Visitor-like haze. There was only the beeping of the hospital machines left in her wake, which lulled him to a fitful sleep.

TAGLIST: @neewtmas @midnight--raine @ahead-fullofdreams @how-to-stuff-and-things @cielooci @mohinithoughts @snoopyluver20 @ell0ra-br3kk3r @elenianag080 @avdiobliss @houseoftwistedspirits @mischivana @dangelnleif @mitskiswift99

[petriwriting]

French Poetry & Chocolate. - Regulus Black X Reader

A/N: First request woo! anyway. enjoy! (Requested) She/her pronouns for the reader as requested. Though I typically use they/them for my writing.

Anonymous asked:

A Regulus black x Slytherin reader where they are best friends and the reader gets her period and he helps and comforts her? No worries if not!

The Slytherin common room was only this quiet on weekends when most students were out socializing, and partying. Though for y/n, they'd spent most of the day in bed in her room, curled up in bed with a comforting novel her best friend had brought from home.

Y/n was busy, nose buried in this novel, too engulfed in fiction to even notice that Regulus was standing in the doorway. He knocked on the door that was open gently to alert y/n of his presence.

"Hello," Regulus said, moseying about with his hands in his pockets after setting his satchel down near the dresser. Y/n was a bit embarrassed, her hair was a bit messy, and she was wearing comfortable clothes, even her room was a bit messy in the absence of her roommates. "Hi," Y/n said, gesturing for Regulus to sit at the end of her bed. he followed suit, taking note that Y/n looked unwell.

they had been best friends since before their first year, so they had seen the best and the worst of one another over the years. It didn't bother Regulus, but it did raise some concerns.

"I haven't seen you out and about today, So I thought I'd check in." Y/n leaned up, shrugging slightly. "Yeah, I haven't been feeling well," she admitted.

Regulus frowned. "I can take you to the hospital wing now if its-"

He was promptly cut off. "no, no reg, I'm fine really. I just started my period. That's why I haven't felt well today."

Regulus nodded, sitting there. for a boy who reads so much, this was probably one of the only topics he didn't have any knowledge about. "Well if I can help in any way do let me know." Regulus wasn't sure of what to say. He only grew up with a brother, and his mother kept herself incredibly private. So it was no wonder the poor boy found himself useless. Y/n chuckled slightly. "I do appreciate it. I've been reading this."

Y/n turned the novel over to show him the cover. It was a dramatic fiction novel about two muggles. something regulus had recommended. "Oh, how are you liking it?" his eyes lit up, he was excited that y/n liked the book he had suggested to her and brought around.

"Oh, I think it's lovely." Y/n went on. "It's been keeping me on the edge of my seat. Who would have thought muggle fiction would be so interesting?" Y/n chuckled slightly.

"Well if you're interested I could read you some of my favorite poetry, I have another book with me today," Regulus said.

Y/n's eyes lit up, "that would be awesome." she said, patting the edge other side of her bed for Regulus to sit by her. The boy grabbed his satchel, rummaging through its contents. "I actually also have this." Regulus pulled out a small black velvet box, handing it to Y/n as he sat next to her with a small poetry book. Y/n reached over, gently opening the box to reveal some very fancy and decadent chocolates. "my mother sometimes gives them as gifts to people she wants to impress, they are very delicious- but, very sweet."

Seeing that y/n was excited, despite not feeling well made Regulus feel content. "Thank you reg, seriously." the two shared a glance, and the boy pushed his dark curls out of his face clearing his throat.

As he began reading, settled beside him, head resting on his arm as she tried the small chocolate truffles he had offered, instantly feeling a lot better than she had been all morning.

Regulus began reading his poetry, it was all in French, but he translated for her. A French poet, Charles Baudelaire was one he had been reading recently.

Always be drunk. That's it! The great imperative! In order not to feel Time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, Get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk. And if you sometimes happen to wake up on the porches of a palace, in the green grass of a ditch, in the dismal loneliness of your own room, your drunkenness gone or disappearing, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, ask everything that flees, everything that groans or rolls or sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will answer you: "Time to get drunk! Don't be martyred slaves of Time, Get drunk! Stay drunk! On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

As Regulus spoke the words, he peeked over at y/n who was sleepily listening. By the time he was halfway through another poem, Y/n was fast asleep, and Regulus was content.

[neteyamslovrr]

RETURN - PT3

summary: five years ago he left you. left you alone with nothing but memories of your love. so how dare he come back now?

contents: 2.8k words, depression, angst, slight conflict, not very well proof read but that brings authenticity lmao

authors note: thankyou all for being so patient with my upload <33 ALSO LOOK AT WHAT MY BAE @cinetrix made omg (its the header pic) THATS GROWN UP NETEYAM THATS OUR BABY hes so handsome and bae is so talented and kind

previous / next

It had been over a month since they Sully’s had returned to the clan. While they slid back into their forest way of life, like a lost puzzle piece that was finally found you felt like you were back to being a bunch on scrambled up pieces with no way to connect yourself back together again.

Seeing him was a constant reminder of the despair that took over your life for years. The rotted you from the inside out leaving you as a shell of a woman as he took your soul with him when he left.

Those closest to you noticed your decline. Especially Mo’at. Someone you had to start seeing regularly due to your mothers pestering.

“Child…it is not hard to see the way your spirit has left you.” She spoke softly yet with so much truth it felt as is she had stabbed you with a dagger.

You were sat on the floor of her large medical tent that was set up in High camp. It was cold, the cool breeze making the fine hairs in your body stand up as you consciously avoided any gaze that Mo’at threw at you.

“He took it with him.” It felt like a deep dark secret that you had ripped out of your throat as it sliced its way up. Admitting that Neteyam had broken you so much that he had managed to start cracking you away with his return made you feel weak. Made you feel defeated.

“Maybe…he is here to give it back.” Mo’at sighed softly, a kind hand pushing your hair out of your face as she crouched in front of you. “Dear child your heart cries out. You must listen when your body talks to you.”

“I am afraid, so afraid.” Mo’at nodded letting you fall into her arms, a much needed hug that you craved for.

“Fear is never unreasonable child, but do not let cowardice infect your heart like it infected his.”

Neteyam had desperately tried to even get you to look at him after the last time you both conversed. It ended in him running away. As soon as he walked off he wished he could have socked Va’tep. Knocked him hard enough that his grubby paws would never caress your precious skin ever again.

He would try and talk to you only to be shut down by a harsh glare or excuse to leave. However whenever he even entered the same room as you he would immediately watch you excuse yourself and leave.

And Eywa did it crush him. To see how opposed he was to your presence. To see how his face repulsed you so much. He knew it was naïve to think he could return to you running into his arms so he could spin you around and hold you close. It was stupid for him to think you would ever wait for him. Not when he abandoned you.

A habit he had as a child was always to go to his grandmother for wisdom. Something he had sorely lacked the past half decade. He knew you were close with her. He knew she was the wisest woman this tribe had. But he was also terrified of a reality check that would hit him so harshly he wouldn’t know how to react. That’s why he was so resistant on approaching Mo’at.

But when he looked over to the top levels of High Camp where you and Va’tep had sat yourselves as you weaved expertly. He saw the way Va’tep’s smile was not as wide as it could be, he noticed that your eyes never met his even as you talked. He stared closely, squinting his eyes to focus on how Va’tep’s hands would crawl up your thigh and your body would stiffen and squirm instead on relaxing into the touch. As if his hands were grating your perfect skin.

When he saw how miserable you were when you looked away from Va’tep to wipe your eyes subtly. His heart sunk. He could not go on without you, he couldn’t continue without being able to get you back.

Neteyam hesitantly opened the curtains of his grandmother’s tent as he sucked in a nervous breath.

Her ears perked up immediately to the sound. “Neteyam…I expected you sooner child.” Her eyes were always sharp, enough to slice the strongest man in half.

Neteyam let out a soft chuckle. “I assume you know why I am here.” He sat beside her, shuffling awkwardly on the mat so he could watch his grandmother mush together fine pastes that turned into her medicines .

“Is she troubling your mind?” Even the mention of your cut his soul, like a sweet melody that sudden struck the wrong chord.

“Grandmother… I know I messed up. I know I abandoned her… if I could take back everything I did, I would in a heartbeat.” His voice was pained, head hung low in shame. “I just… I just want her back.”

Mo’at nodded as she laid an empathetic hand on his back. “You must give her time…”

“But I have already been here for so long! I know I was gone for so…so long but I thought she may have at least… warmed up to me slightly. I don’t expect her to change completely. I just want to be able to talk to her, look into her eyes. I miss the warmth I felt when I saw her smile…I never see her smile anymore.”

Neteyam tried desperately not to cry, but oh how difficult it was when he felt the weight of your absence lay so heavily on his chest.

Mo’at let out a sigh, one that felt heavy, one that changed the atmosphere as she exhaled. “She is scared child. She was…she was gone once you left. Your absence was sorely missed, but it truly broke her. There was nothing left of her when you left.”

Neteyam said nothing, though his eyes begged for some sort of explanation, his pupils pleaded as his entire focus was centred on the words exiting his grandmother’s mouth.

Mo’at sucked in a sharp breath, repeating your despair was always hard, to think you experienced such depression. “The day you left she didn’t stop crying. For days she replaced the strongest waterfall in the forest. Her sobs racked through the village as she cried your name out. She screamed it in her sleep, she sobbed it as she woke. She was completely broken. But that was not the worst of it.”

Neteyam already felt his heart sinking. It floated down as he thought more about the anguish he had caused you. His ears hung low in shame as he attentively listen as Mo’at continued to speak.

“It was after the tears. The acceptance. The betrayal. She was no longer her, she was a shell, a corpse. The poor child…she didn’t move for months. No one could get her to leave her hammock, she laid there for days, she didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t speak. She was nothing.”

Neteyam let out a whimper. One that tried to cover up the sob that was aching to escape him. Guilt racked through him as he could barely look in Mo’at’s eyes as she continued to speak.

“Some days I look back and remember the state she was in, the way her body was so frail, so weak. She was so sick, riddled with the disease of heartbreak. My child I know you left her here because it was safe. Child I know you thought were saving your lover. But Neteyam…she does not want to remember her anguish, but every time she looks at you she is remembered of those times.”

“What could I possibly do” His voice is raspy and quiet. Barely able to let out a noise as his throat betrays him.

“Create new memories, let her remember new days with you, why she loved you so much. Enable her to let go of the sadness she holds in her heart that filled in the place you took from her.”

Neteyam nods. His mind swirling as a million epiphanies hit him at once. There was no way he could ever forgive himself for causing you sorrow, but he only prayed that you would be able to feel enough forgiveness to let him put back the missing puzzle piece in the jigsaw of your heart.

Va’tep was Tarsem’s brother, the Olo’eyktan. So Va’tep was his right hand man, right beside him through every decision and every battle. Which meant as Va’tep’s promised mate, had a large amount of expected participation in war party meeting such as this.

“If we attack from the east we will get a clear shot towards the demons.” Va’tep said as he drew out a map with a stick onto the large plot of dirt that everyone was circled around.

You couldn’t help but notice the flaws in his plan. East was directly in front of the base the demons had there. While we would have clear a view…there would be significantly more danger.

“Va’tep…I think we should maybe approach it from the south.” You hated speaking up in these meetings, as all the warriors’ beady eyes locked onto you. It made you queasy, as if you were going to spew instead of saying the words you were thinking.

Va’tep’s eyes sharpen as he looks as if you had slapped him across the face with your suggestion. “The south has many sight obstacles…it will be harder to navigate” His voice was deep, and husky. It was obvious he was starting to fume.

“But the base is right there. It would be dangerous to approach that direction!” You raise your voice slightly, only in a way to show how desperate you were to get your point across.

Neteyam watched this interaction closely. Studying every single inch of your body language. He always knew how wise you were when it came to stuff like this. You were always calculating the best solution for anything that may spring up in the battlefield. When Jake was Olo’eyktan, you were one of his greatest assets because of your knowledge.

The back and forth goes on for a while as no other warrior dared to speak up. Until he did. Neteyam of course.

“She’s right…there would be much more danger if we were to take the East route.” As soon as you heard his voice it felt like a spotlight of hope was shun onto your heart.

Va’tep grunted at the unwanted input. “The South route is a cowardice route. Something I guess you can sympathize with.” His words were like venom, scorching Neteyam as he stared daggers into him.

“The East route is brazen, unsafe and uncalculated. Something you definitely can understand. Isn’t that right Va’tep?” Neteyam rarely stooped to a level this low, but with the overhanging threat of you being shut down by your ‘mate’ was enough to make Neteyam seethe.

“I’ll show you something you’ll understand-”

Va’tep fumed as Tarsem decided it was his time to step in, changing the subject and postponing the decision for further analysis. But you didn’t forget the way your heart-beat as Neteyam supported you. Something you hadn’t felt in a long time. Supported.

The day turned to dusk as you sat by the river, kicking your feet in the cool water as you listened to the world around you. Each sound was perfectly tuned together, a perfect song of the world.

You heart-beat is slow, resting on your hands as the dirt meets your soft palms. Your eyes closed to protect themselves from the harsh rays of light that shun down onto your body. It was peaceful, it was calm.

The unfamiliar sound of crunching leaves grew behind you. Ears perked up tail swishing in alert you turn to see Neteyam approaching.

You can’t deny the dread you feel when you see him. And you can’t deny the way your heart beats like crazy whenever you are close enough to see how much he grew. How much he changed.

You wonder if he thought about you. If he ever noticed the changes of your mature figure or if he couldn’t notice if you looked different to how he remembered you.

“Hey you.” His voice was sweet and musky, enough to send shivers down your spine as you refused to meet his golden eyes.

“Hi there.” Your voice was always quiet…but these five years made it dull. As if there was nothing much else for it to be excited  about.

“I thought I would find you here.” Your brows moved in curiosity, body facing him as he sat beside you, waving his defined legs in the water.

“Why’s that?”

“This was our river…do you remember.” Oh you remember. How could you forget. This river was the one thing you held into when he left. As you slept on the riverbed pretending the rushing water was his soft voice hushing you to sleep.

“Yes…I do.” Neteyam felt a rush of joy run through him. Maybe it was hope. Hope to get you back. Hope to show just how much you mean to him, that you are his treasure. He let out a soft chuckle, fighting the urge to let his fingers slip over your knuckles. He knew it was too soon.

“You were wise in the meeting today.” He said earnestly, looking at you with nothing but sincerity as he watched a blush form on your face, as you turned away from him. Avoiding his intense stare.

“It was just common sense.” You shrug, trying to not seem flattered. “I am at the meetings for a reason.”

“Well…it was still impressive. Was your mate as impressed?” The subject of Va’tep left a sour taste in his mouth and a sour look on your face.

“Please do not speak of him.” You say defeated. Va’tep was a sore reminder in your mind of how you were nothing but a trophy to your parents. A woman to marry off to gain rank.

You were lucky enough to be fated with Neteyam. But it all crumbled when he left. Everything did. Like an earthquake that broke the foundation of every single building in your soul.

Neteyam gave a curious hum, nodding. “Why not?”

“Neteyam. Stop.” He freezes at the tone of your voice, his mind begging that he did not mess up the harmonious moment you were both sharing together.

“W-What?”

“Neteyam…please have mercy on my heart.” You sucked in a sharp breath as you looked into Neteyams watery eyes. “Please.”

He frowned at your plead. “Have mercy on yourself… please… please have mercy on me. And I will never hurt your heart again.” Neteyam gasps after he talked, his sentence being so vulnerable it took the breath out of him.

“I can’t do this…Neteyam you know I can’t” And oh how you wanted to run away with him. To escape your dull life with Va’tep and be able to freely be who you were. To find yourself once again. But it was all too much, his absence took your hope. But he was adamant on giving it back.

“…We can… trust me. Please we can start over… I know. I know I have hurt you, I have scarred your heart. But on the great mother’s name, I will never leave you again… you were my everything and still are. Please don’t think for second I ever stopped loving you.”

The tears started running down your cheeks, but you barely noticed as you stared into the ripples of the water. His words seeping into your skin like a tender kiss.

“Neteyam I’m afraid.” It was barely a whisper. A soft confession that made your lips quivered. “I’m afraid of losing you and myself again.” Neteyam frowned, his brows furrowed as he took his rough fingers to turn your face towards him. His thumb wiping the tears off delicately.

“you have every right to be afraid… but please let me prove to you… that its okay to let go of your fears. Let me... please.”

And in that moment it was as if a switch flipped in you. Every worry washing away as you felt his warmth once again. The years of built up wishes and cravings for him were finally met. As his gaze melted into you, a sad smile across his face as he held onto you tenderly. Every ounce of love pouring into you.

“…please show me how to let go…”

thankyou so much for reading my lovelies!! reblogs + replies extra appreciated!!

series taglist (closed): @notsaelty @mommyneytiri @hannabanana-09 @gloryavila @peachinsominac @jaidalise @neqeyam @hello222sthings @tsuteysyawntu @neyetams @yhern05 @emjeez @adaiasafira @kiri-tuk @yaya6765 @biscuitbeater15 @iwannahaveaprettyaesthetic @plooloo @savvysscandles @dilucslilmeowmeow @69cocktimusprime @newjeansbonnie @chatoicboy @pinkpantheris @plzfeedmebread @afro-hispwriter @lollife1617 @goddesslilithmoriarty @cinetrix @grierpilots @melsunshine @valentineheartzz @tsveria @mikeyswifie @junnniiieee07 @wifeyofeveryone @baebinana @thatonegirlwiththebeanie367 @neteyamssbaby @taleiak @cheyehc @shoyos-sugarbaby @be3flow3r

everything taglist: @8resa @ilovejakesullysdick @neteyamsblog @live-laugh-neteyam @reyalvr @trashfox @darkacademictrash @scntfrhs @dreamyescapesfromreality @fanboyluvr @neteyamzmate @neteyamyawne @neteyamssbaby @oceanstar19 @sharkybabe9 @laylasbunbunny @s-surreality

[brummiereader]

"Don't Fear The Reaper (DARK!TOMMY)" A sneak peak...

A sneak peak from the first chapter of my new series "Don't Fear The Reaper" inspired by "Don't Fear The Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult. If you haven't already heard this classic 70's rock song then I would definitely go check it out. Not only is it a lyrical masterpiece but you may just get an idea of what's in store for this devilishly dark tale set to start next week.

They couldn't see him, why couldn't they see him? He was standing right there, right fucking next to you. You thought to yourself as your chest heaved up and down from the sheer panic rapidly coursing through you, your breaths coming in ragged shallow ripples as his black tailored coat grazed along your arm sending a burning shiver down your spine. A dumb game, a stupid dumb game. Why did you agree to this? You had unknowingly invited him back, summoned him after all the years you had painstakingly tried to keep his presence at bay. You panicked as you looked in the corner of your eye to see him rubbing his thumb over his forefinger, enticing you to look up, taunting you to meet the piercing glare you was certain you'd be met with if you dared to look his way. But yet you stayed motionless, frozen as your eyes slowly settled on your hand resting over the intricately detailed planchette as your friend beside you giggled at its erratic movements on the board below it, which either one or both of the idiots she had brought along with her were undoubtedly doing.

" Alright, which one of you wankers is moving it?" Your friend Helena demanded to know as you looked across to the prick that had been hounding you since the moment he laid eyes on you, a faint smirk playing on the corner of his mouth when a leather gloved hand crept across the table placing itself over yours, slowly lacing it's fingers between your own. Your whole body trembling, you desperately tried to pull your hand away when the sinister figure standing beside you grip tightened, keeping your from escaping his inevitable presence as the wooden triangle started to move. " Y/N…" Your friend said looking to you as the planchette stopped, your name having been spelt letter by letter in a gentle dance of toing and froing that swept across the board until all those present eyes widened not only in fear but confusion. If they weren't moving it, who was? Releasing his hand from yours he reached up, brushing away a lone tear resting on the top of your reddened cheek that had settled in the midst of the spine-chilling ordeal. "Babe, what's wrong?" your friend asked, your frightened, shaken demeanor concerning her enough to pull her hand from the game as she placed her arm around your shoulders in attempts to comfort you when you felt the very figure you had been evading for near a decade rest his thumb gently on the end of your chin, the sound of his leather gloves creasing sending a nauseating chill throughout your body as he turned your head to face him. And there he was. The man, the presence you thought you'd never see again, his face masked by the shadow of his peaked cap now visible to your eye, his ghostly pale skin brightened by his piercing blue eyes boring Into you as a smile formed on the edge of his lips…

" Hello darling. I've been waiting for you"

[heart2beom]

colon and a parenthesis

pairing: bestfriend!beomgyu x f!reader

genre: fluff, light hearted angst/comfort, best friends to ...lovers? drabble (an attempt), best friends who live together!!

synopsis: getting played has got to be the worst feeling ever. for you, you go through that heartbreak every other month. and now you're wailing on your best friend's shoulder again, for the hundredth time, ruining his hoodie. again.

a/n: "he doesn't deserve you" i'm such a basic bitch because the way i squeal over this line...was watching this show that is totally devoid of any romance subplot but i was okay with it because its a good show!! then this cute guy playing the best friend role just says this and im folding. like im being serious, i would've asked what we were. anyways ahahahahahaha, enjoy this as i slave myself into finishing my other bf2l beomgyu fic.

"Why do you look like that?"

You blink, processing his words before turning around, cereal box in hand. "What? What do I look like?" You pat your free hand around your face in attempt to figure out what incited that reaction. If it's an unwanted pimple, you're going to go insane.

Beomgyu huffs out a laugh through his nose, still eating his cereal. "I don't know, it's like you didn't get sleep for the past three decades."

He doesn't catch the roll of your eyes since he's focused on his phone, eating his breakfast but you still make sure to do it anyway. You pour the lucky charms in the bowl, the mention of your tired state gets you fighting the large grin overtaking your face. Reason?

You haven't slept a wink last night, inevitably a bad choice since you have morning classes, but digressing, it had to be the most magical of all nights. You recently got Mingi's number, the cute boy in your Music Comp class, who you've been notably crushing on for weeks.

Beomgyu knows this, obviously since you practically tell him everything, but what he doesn't know is that you've done some progression with your pining.

Other than the fact that he's cute, you find out he's also quite funny and witty, all throughout yesterday's overnight chat. Mingi's absolutely perfect. Like a prince charming. You don't even care that you have to spend extra time covering up your under eyes, it's what comes with the package that is Song Mingi.

You set your cereal on the kitchen island, sitting on the stool next to Beomgyu. Checking your phone for umpteenth time today, reading through the texts from last night still makes you smile a little too hard at the realization that yesterday night was in fact real.

You catch Beomgyu turning his head to you, brows furrowed like he was thinking of what to say, still chewing his food. "So?"

You lay your phone face down, "So what?"

"What happened?"

You realize he's talking about your dark circles. "Nothing, nothing happened. Was just studying all night," your eyes look up from your bowl of cereal to Beomgyu's doubtful eyes. "You know, pointing these things out to a woman is very disrespectful."

He laughs, and turns away shaking his head. Beomgyu was equally as tired looking so it wasn't like he had the right to make a comment. His ginger hair had strands poking out everywhere, dark circles even more evident under his eyes. It made sense, he worked late night shifts, and when he didn't, he'd stay up all night anyway, playing video games.

Yesterday he didn't have work, so you were very graciously blessed with having to hear his usual shenanigans through the walls of your room. He had an issue with keeping his emotions on the low when it came to games, which proved to be a nightmare. But thankfully, you were able to filter out his yelling with every response from Mingi.

"I heard you."

You furrow your brows, glancing to Beomgyu. "Huh? Heard what?"

He gets up, done with his breakfast, heading to the sink. "You were giggling all night. It was really weird," he mentions and your eyes widen, slowly chewing your food. Were you really that loud? How embarrassing. "Even weirder now that I know you were studying."

You throw your head back, groaning—of course he didn't buy your lie. "Beomgyu," you drawl.

"No, no, if you wish to keep your life private, keep it private." He was faking his hurt, but you also know there's some truth to it. Sharing things with each other, with no filter, has always been a staple to your relationship. And it's not like you were the type to be private anyway, so it worked out in the end.

"We were texting all night," you start, the dreamy vision of his face clouds your mind as your eyes sparkle at the thought, "Me and Mingi."

Beomgyu halts, his back faced to you— you don't read too much into it before he finally turns around. "Mingi as in... Music Comp Mingi?"

You flutter your lashes, nodding, barely biting down your smile. "He's a total A-plus heartthrob." you swoon.

Beomgyu lays his forearm on the countertop, standing across of you, tilting his head and a scrunch of his face like he’s willing to debate on that. "Yeah, but didn't Yeonjun happen like, two months ago?"

Yeonjun. The upperclassman you dated for six entire months, probably your longest relationship ever. Which is a little sad, at least for a sophomore in college. The added duration of your relationship made the breakup sting a lot more, as well as the fact that you wholeheartedly believed you'd end up marrying him at some point in the future.

Your smile droops, gaze fallen to the sad looking soggy cereal. "Hey, no, I mean, Y/N I'm just worried, but if you're—if you're over him, Mingi is good for you!" You slowly look up at Beomgyu, and you manage a smile on one end of your lips.

"You think so? Mingi's pretty nice, right?"

He huffs out a laugh through his nose again, he's been doing it a lot more often. "You stayed up all night talking to him, you're in love with him."

You break into a smile, eyes back on your spoon. "Shut up."

He points an accusatory finger, "Your ears just got red, oh my god, you are in love with him!"

You roll your eyes, quickly adjusting your hair to cover your ears. He shakes his head in awe, "You're actually hopeless."

"I'm sorry that he's literally the reincarnation of a prince charming. I can't help it."

"You say that about everyone." That was half true. You never said it about Sunwoo. "Anyways, you guys made plans, right?"

You fall quiet, eyes widening before quickly breaking eye contact with Beomgyu, clearing your throat. A few beats of silence and before you know it, Beomgyu grabs your phone, and is typing in your passcode.

You jump off your seat, "Beomgyu! Don't text him! I swear to god—" You have always made a mental note to change your passcode, but your memory fails you each time. And now you're bearing the consequences.

It quickly turns into a game of cat and mouse the more you go after him—each time, he's directly across from you as he focuses on typing as quickly as he could. Even when you calculate to run the opposite direction, Beomgyu is faster, quickly having the kitchen's island in between you both again.

"Mingi, the love of my life, I proposition you with a date at Gorae's—" he announces aloud, reading off the screen.

You rush to his side in his moment of weakness, reaching to grab your phone but Beomgyu's quick to react, raising his arm high enough for you to struggle to get your phone. God darn his height.

"Give me my phone you ass!"

"—and I want to marry you and have nine babies with you in a cottage far away from the world, my love!"

If he sent that, you'd jump off the balcony of your flat. No doubt. So, you attack him with your most effective weapon.

"And—shit. Oh my god, oh my god Y/N—" He wheezes, he's calm drowsiness dissipating, and he's quick to retreat, hands shielding themselves from your evil fingers. But you don't stop, a mischievous smile breaching your lips, because god is it fun to be the one to tease for once.

You aim for his sides, unprotected and perfect for your fingers to start tickling. His giggles are boisterous as he weakly attempts to stop your hands, but you don't let, "Punishment for being a little bitch."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry— oh my god, have mercy!" he manages to muster between his fit of laughter.

His contagious laugh bubbles one up from you until you hear a ping, and you realize that he might've actually sent that in! In horror, you grab your phone from Beomgyu's loose hold, who was still attempting to calm his laugh down, wiping under his waterline.

You check your messages, and it's in fact one from Mingi. "Beomgyu! Did you actually send him something?" you yell anxiously, eyes wide.

You don't give him time to respond, deciding to rip the bandaid, clicking on your chat. Hesitantly you read the messages after the 'goodnight' you've sent yesterday.

Your brows crease flatten as you read the two messages Beomgyu sent.

"I had fun talking. Maybe we should hang sometime?" you look up from your phone, "Who says that?"

He shrugs, wiping his hand on his sweats, "Probably, I don't know, sane people. What'd he say?"

You smile, looking back at the text Mingi had sent in response. "I'd like that. He'd like that. With a smiley face."

A conflicting smile is on his face as he says, "He'd like that with a smiley face?"

You roll your eyes, it's a terrible attempt at a joke, "A smiley face. Colon and a closing parenthesis."

He lets out an oh of realization as if he truly did not know, nodding. "Good luck, thank me when the wedding happens." he comments, walking into the living room you think— you don't really care. Too far gone as you re-read three simple words. And a colon paired with a closing parenthesis.

You really wish it'd work out this time.

—------------------------------

You don't exactly remember when you started to consider Beomgyu to be one of, if not, your closest friend.

The time he had stayed on a call with you throughout the entire night, on a school night, falling asleep after the spell of drowsiness won against both of your wills to continue talking? It magically seemed like you could endlessly talk, about anything, everything and nothing at the same time, with Beomgyu.

The time your eyes miracally found each other, in heaps of awkward situations? Like when you both ended up being third wheels to your pining friends, or when a party seemed too much for comfort.

Or when Beomgyu confided to you that he spent days learning makeup through lengthy youtube tutorials to help you out with applying it for prom?

Maybe the time you celebrated your graduation by choosing to invite over Beomgyu's family? No, you think it's probably the time you realized the only person you thought of when meaning to ask someone to move in with you—possibly the biggest next life step— was none other than your goofy, sort of odd, friend.

Or maybe it's now.

When you open the door, a heavish Beomgyu with his chest rising and falling, like he just ran a marathon, iris darting quickly going over your state before crashing you straight into his embrace, a hand gently on the back of your head. "I'm here."

You were holding it before he showed up, really holding it. But the warmth of Beomgyu's body against yours is enough for you to break. Your shoulders shake as you silently sob onto Beomgyu's, and his hold on you loosens, the previous panic slowing as he pat your back soothingly.

You knew Beomgyu, he's always been hyper aware of feelings, his own and others. This time, he set aside his own to make it easier for you to let out yours—you always notice when he does this.

His breathing is unstable against your hair, still attempting to catch it. "Why are you here? Don't you have work?" your words come out as a muffle, especially with the way your head is buried against his hoodie.

"You called, idiot."

"I called to ask if you could get milk on your way." You were in the mood for hot chocolate, your comfort drink, but to your absolute dismay, there was no milk. And you strongly preferred your hot chocolate with milk.

Beomgyu only hums in acknowledgement as if to say, yes, you're correct. You did only ask him to get milk.

Your emotions are one of a rollercoaster, once again sobbing like a child, before you pull your head away slowly, sniffling as you look up at him, your hands still wrapped around his waist. "You called in sick?"

His silence makes you feel uneasy, he could just say yes. Or no. Your brows raise. "Did you just ...run out?" you yell, almost pulling away from him completely, but he has senses for things like this —quickly pulling your head into his chest again. You groan.

"Now's not the time to lecture me." he mumbles into your hair.

After a little thinking, you decide to not fight him, giving in to his embrace. You could talk to him about his rash decision skills later, now, you want to be a little more selfish.

You're not sure where it went wrong with Mingi, and you don't really want to think about it. Your lips tremble against the soft fabric, more tears spilling down your cheeks, snot running.

"Can I blow my nose?" you ask. Beomgyu's a tinge hesitant before he just sighs. "Be gross all you want."

It felt like eternity standing there, in front of your door, Beomgyu's hand wrapped around you, and yours around his. He doesn't ask questions, he only stays silent unless you said something first. Usually saying incoherent things about Mingi, how you thought it'd end well, how he was everything to you, your moon, the sun that shone brightly. All through the occasional hiccups and sniffles of your crying session.

"I swear, Mingi—"

Suddenly Beomgyu exhales, his hands falling from your back to pull your head away from his chest. You guess it isn't a pretty look, with your bloodshot eyes, and gross snot messy on your face. But he doesn't hesitate to rub a thumb over your cheek.

"You know he doesn't deserve a minute of your time, Y/N. He doesn't deserve you. Like at all."

You furrow your brows. You don't believe a word. "You've barely met him, how would you know that I don't deserve him? And he realized that, which is why—"

He cuts your self wallow of deprecation off with a violent shake of his head. "Stupid. I've met you. I know you. That's enough information for me to make judgement."

"That's..." tears well up in your waterline again before you bury your head in his hoodie again, "That's so cheesy Beomgyu. Thank you."

You can feel his smile, somehow, it's like you're both connected by a string. "I'm serious, you're the best person I know. Flaws? Everyone has them, you do too, but you're ...still somehow the best person I know. If Mingi can't see that— if, impossibly, no one else can see that, then they don't deserve you. You know that?"

You nod meekly, soaking up his words. Millions of things could be said in response, something that could tell him how much highly you think of him too, but the dry of your throat prevents you from so.

"Tell me a joke." you say instead.

He ponders a bit before landing on one. "Can I be the parenthesis to your colon?"

You look up at him, silent, before you weakly hit his chest, laughing. When Mingi asked you to be his girlfriend, he said those exact words, and you had came home, raving all about it to Beomgyu, even though deep down, you found it a little ...too cheesy for your taste.

Beomgyu held the same opinion, except he was vocal about it. Making fun of the line for an entire weeks worth.

"Too soon."

He scratches the back of his head, a sorry smile on his face, "Yeah?"

You don't know if this breakup would be worse than the one you had with Yeonjun—only time could tell. All you knew was that no matter what it'd feel like—hell, like you were walking on pins and needles, like drowning in hot soup; Beomgyu would be by your side. That alone is enough, something that reminded you that this feeling would go away eventually.

ending a/n: you're done!! this might have to be considered the longest proclaimed drabble ever lol (2.6k words this is not a drabble) but anyways, like always, thoughts are appreciated.

[veritable-trash]

maybe it's never truly over

Pairing: Miguel O'Hara x Fem!Reader(nickname used but no descriptors!)

Summary: It's been a long time since you've seen each other. For you it hasn't been long enough but for Miguel things are a bit more complicated.

Word Count: 1K

Rating: E - for eventual smut, friends to enemies to friends to lovers i think??? this chapter is tame just seeing if people are interested in what i might decide to cook up <3 :)

A/N: alright alright alright like literally everyone i watched spiderverse and have now descended into the black hole of being obsessed with every character from that movie but this one right here????? yes yes i like him very much. anyways wrote this for fun think i might try another series and see what comes of it. this is not sticking to any canon(lol miguel would be PISSED but this is my multiverse bitch!) because there's such a depth to his character that i want to just play with in this story potentially.

anyways if you like this little intro and want to read more and see where these two little weirdos spin their way off to reblog, send me thirsty thoughts about this man, comment to your heart's content about how his body is shaped like a dorito and i want to eat HIM!

also @dameronscopilot wrote an absolute SPICED piece for Miguel so go read that now if anyone sees this!!!!!

enjoy :)))))))))

masterlist weeeeeeeee

~~~~~

There was something different about today. 

Air shimmering like it was about to crystallize and crack at any given moment. 

Like the world was gonna stop all of a sudden and dissolve into some weird cosmic puddle. 

But not for you. Never for you because even when things felt like they were about to snap, crackle, pop, your life tended to stay a bit boring. It had been a long, long time since you’d felt any kind of twinkle in your life, and you didn’t mind it. The last time things had fizzled like that you’d been left a bit shattered yourself. 

Even still, the niggle at the nape of your neck wouldn’t let up. even the sidewalk seemed to wobble under your feet as you traversed the packed streets of Nueva York. Your palms can’t help but start sweating, heart kicking up its pace as the people around you seem to crowd and crowd and crowd. 

Alley. You need to find an alley and fucking breath. 

You turn in fast on the tight corridor, the smell of garbage helping to clear the dizziness in your head but it still isn’t gone. The feelings still there. Why won’t it just fucking leave you-

“Lyla I got it. Just check the other dimensions and report back to me I haven’t seen any signs of them here.”

And now you know why this an entire day has been like walking through jelly.

Because the second Miguel O’Hara turns around and sees you, everything absolutely shatters.

It’s been years, maybe over a decade since he’s seen you, but you’ve seen plenty of him. The magazines, the news, online, every god damn street corner of this godforsaken city conveniently reminds you of this Dorito-shaped dip shit man. 

Nothing changes in his demeanor, to an unseasoned eye, but you remember Miguel from before. Gabe’s older brother Miguel, mama’s boy Miguel, your best friend Miguel, and his eyes can’t hide the things you know deep in his heart. 

You don’t even know what to say. There’s nothing left in your brain, just him, still staring, but now from new heights, with new scars, and it scares the shit out of you.

And pisses you the fuck off.

“So what? You go radio silent for over ten years and now you’re gonna stalk me in some alley like creep? Very on brand Miguel but I thought you would have fucking grown up by now.”

His shoulders tense and you can’t stop the way your lips curve as you sense you’ve gotten to him, even if only a little. But then he’s turning away, slowly walking down the alley towards the brick wall and you realize he’s not going to say anything to you. That he’s going to just leave again without a single fucking word.

“Miguel if you don’t turn the fuck around right now and say something to me I will beat the shit out of you I swear to god. I know your weak spots don’t make me fucking use it!”

(it’s just under his ribs, but only on the right side)

“Bichito, pleas-“

“Don’t you dare fucking call me that. Don’t you fucking dare. You lost the right to call me that when you disappeared on me. Fuck you Miguel, honestly I don’t even have anything left to say to you just fuck off.”

This time his face face does crumple just a little bit and you preen at his pain. Suck it into your lungs as the boy who trampled your heart finally gets a taste of how you bled. 

You turn back to the chaos of the street and throw yourself into the people, away from Miguel and all the bullshit, earth shattering happening behind you. It’s been a long time since you’ve needed Miguel O’Hara and it’ll be an even longer time before you come back around to his antics.

Probably never.

~~~~~

He fucked up. 

Miguel didn’t know how he’d dropped the ball this hard, but he’d fucked up big time and for once it didn’t involve some stupid fucking multiverse drama. 

It involved you. 

You, the girl from down the block who used to wrestle Gabriel and make flower crowns out of the flowers growing between the cracks in the concrete. 

You, the girl who stayed up till the sky started to turn pink again listening to him rant on and on about his shitty dad and his shitty life.

You, his Bichito, his little bug, his best friend, the center of what he thought was his tiny little universe so many years ago. 

But he’d left that behind. Thought that he could find something else, find something better, finally be happy in ways he’d never even dreamed of.

And look at where it had gotten him. 

He wasn’t ever supposed to run into you again. He was supposed to be vigilant, cautious, knew that running into you would derail him a thousand times over and he had bigger things to be focusing on. Multiverse-altering, dimension-destroying things to focus on.

Yet the universe had dropped you both in that alley and something deep in his chest rippled with feelings he couldn’t seem to find a word for. It was fucking terrifying and he wasn’t going to let it fester. 

He had things to do. Universes to fix. An ever growing mantle of responsibility hanging of his shoulders.

A constant reminder of his fuck ups and the reality that he wasn’t going to let himself slip up again. 

And yet as his claws carry him up and onto the rooftops of Nueva York, Miguel O’Hara has a terrifying suspicion that he may no longer be able to stay away. 

~~~~~

hehehehAHAHHAHA god i love this twisted little sad sack man who just wants to be all rough and tough. anyways haven't written in ages and this character has gotten me at least sorta interested in writing so i just wanted to throw this out there, get something moving, even if i go back into dormancy for another millenia.

well heart eyes for you guys and forehead kisses for anyone who reads i hope your day is a dream <33333333333