#nefarious skull

[rebornicartchive]

Hi there, just call me FT, and welcome to my archive blog dedicated to Rebornia/VOLTERGEIST's content on tumblr. Their OCs will be tagged, but fandom related stuff with be tagged as "#others."

I also run a blog that is meant to be a rewrite of the now cancelled Pilot Webcomic, where I am trying to mold it into something that could be potentially likeable, as well as another blog that's a genuine critique blog.

This is not intended to be hate blog, nor do I support Volt for their actions over the years. The reason why I am saying this is because Volt has been demonized by the FNAF fandom and most of their ex-friends for acting the way they did, when they were going through an incredibly shitty time period, and while I don't support Volt's actions, I can understand they were in a bad place mentally and physically.

Onto the topic of the hate/"critique" blogs, there is very obvious transphobia, acephobia, racism, along with other stuff. I do not support any of the blogs that "criticize" or those who demonized Volt over the years by misconstruing information about them, as they are no better themselves for sending threats, doxxing, ableism, and sending real life gore images.

(Rewrite Blog: @re-pilot-info)

(Critique Blog: @volterge1st-critical)

(Text Post/Character Info Archive Blog: @dapper-deoxys)

(Aesthetic Blog: @pilotverse-aesthetics)

Pilot Rewrite Discord server: https://discord.gg/QP4j6UuCX8

[re-pilot-info]

what about backstories for the characters? are they different?

Almost, especially with the main protagonists!

Taizo - Mostly the same with some major key differences to suit the story more.

Skippy - Same, but with some minor changes.

Greeze & Countdown - Not really much I know about Greeze, but in the rewrite, these two have losta history.

Artman - The same, but again, huge key differences, because he's not a sex depraved freak like in the original.

Pilot - Ohhhh boy.

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

this is unrelated but i am SO jealous of jared masion for being both a writer and a voice actor and working on ieytd2...... he gets to write a plot point in which he gets impersonated and then voice act his own impersonator?? what the fuck? if i was a writer and a voice actor i would get impersonated literally every game. ieytd would become a 'freak of the week' style series where you just have to find out who is impersonating the handler and when

[cubone-i-guess]

Many much more eloquent and experienced people have written about what makes a horror movie good or bad. Idk anything about all that, but I know that all I really want a horror movie to do, is trust me

[sbcdh]

On the morning of August 19th 1966, the merchant marine vessel Pelican unloaded its cargo into the port of Los Angeles. Recently declassified information about the Pelican’s ship manifest confirms that the ship was carrying experimental materials for a nascent project Clover. Of the 425 drums of material, only 424 were accounted for. 

While government officials have not confirmed exactly what was in the lost barrel, its contents are believed to be approximately 55 gallons of an experimental substance similar to LSD. 

To anyone with a passing interest in the 1970’s music scene, this will not come as news. Tall tales of a lost ship full of experimental drugs were as common as disco, though the stories have been exaggerated. The most common form of the story features a drunk crane operator loading a shipping crate onto the wrong train, though in reality it was only a single barrel that went unaccounted for. The more outlandish forms of the legend include everything from a daring heist by a crew of rocker-pirates to shadowy government entities vanishing the entire ship for their own nefarious purposes. 

The reality was a simple logistical mixup, a mistake that can be tracked back to a simple addition error on an inventory sheet, an ordinary yet deeply embarrassing mistake on part of the government. Additionally, The information that revealed the lost barrel came alongside a report detailing project clovers lost asset tracking protocol. Protocol that reads as comically naive in hindsight, with guidelines including “monitoring local jazz bars” or keeping an eye out for “feminist thought.” With the benefit of retrospective, it is no surprise that agents were not able to track the barrel. 

Declassification of the Pelican’s manifest prompted an unexpected crossover with another niche legend of the 1970s Los Angeles music scene: the disappearance of the Knights of Altonia. 

Even today, many consider the Knights of Altonia to be a myth, but scant references to their existence can be found. According to a review from a 1977 issue of Jam! Magazine, the Knights of Altonia were a “D-List psychedelic glam metal outfit with more style than skill, known more for their disappearance than their music.” Though a 1997 retrospective from Tempo calls them “A band too ahead of their time to be properly appreciated” noting their flamboyant stage costuming and its significant influence on the aesthetics of the genre. 

To the frustration of music historians seeking to separate fact from fiction, the band featured an elaborate mythology, with each member claiming to be a “Wizard-Knight of the Mystic Tower” who traveled from their world to ours “on a journey through the Nine Realms to find the secret stone.” This has been the source of innumerable urban legends around the band. A common joke among hobbyist historians at the time claimed that the Knights did not vanish, but simply “returned to the Nine Realms.” Information on the band is so muddled that many music historians doubt their existence entirely. In fact, the only confirmed, physical evidence of the band’s existence is a photograph at the bottom of the Jam! Review, it features:

Lead singer and guitarist Donald Hawkins as his stage persona “Zozimos the Wise.” He sports a mane of dreadlocks, and a classic blue wizard hat and robe decorated with yellow stars.The robe is worn open to reveal Donald’s bare chest, along with velvet short-shorts and a pair of thigh-high leather boots. The article states that the glittery bright purple guitar in his hands was named “Excelsior.”

Rhythm guitarist Jon Todachine as “Wan the Witch King.” He wears a deerskin jacket, also open at the front, decorated with what appear to be crow feathers and small animal bones. The theme of bones continues to his belt buckle, which features an as-of-yet unidentified animal skull. This figure is presumed to be Jon, although it should be noted that the broad hat he wears features a curtain of beads that obscures his face. 

Bassist Riley Knox as “Chulainn the Horned.” He wears a full deer skull, along with a lit candle that appears to be slowly melting down over the mask. Most of his upper body is obscured by what appears to be a cloak of leaves. Beneath the cloak he appears to be wearing a pair of Nike Blazers. 

Drummer Marcus Wilson as “Magnus Fire-Weaver.” He wears a viking helmet over intricately braided red hair, a chain-maille loincloth, a pair of medieval bracers on his wrists, and nothing else. 

Most notably, a speaker on stage left is placed upon a large steel drum identical to the ones used by project clover. 

Study is ongoing. 

[quarterlifekitty]

thinkin bout lightly angsty sex post-kidnapping. some nefarious organization heard that there was some sweet number one of the boys had gotten attached too (you), and they wasted no time going scorched earth to get you back.

So. I’m gonna make this crazy ass. Fair warning. By the way, what do you guys think of as the sweetest number? I think it might be 3 or 4. Idk why.

cw: violence, trauma, Ghost not being a qualified therapist, dubcon

Anyways, imagine Ghost getting you back in his arms. While you’d always known he was in the armed forces, you never really knew any of the details. Now you’ve seen a little too much of that world. He burned the world to get you back, but it didn’t burn fast enough for you to escape unharmed.

You’re told it’s been six months. Six months you were kept in darkness most hours of the day, six months spent ducking in and out of cement rooms with ceilings barely tall enough to let you stand up straight.

Six months of being made to kill other prisoners if you wanted to live. Being attacked by others who’d been kept in darkness longer than you. Weaker, but angrier.

Ghost used to feel guilt over it— always needing you for comfort from the things he’d seen, while it seemed you never needed him for the same.

But now you need him more than you’ve ever needed anyone. He knows you, and he knows what it’s like to have blood on your hands that never washes away. He knows how the stench of rot can fill your nose all the way up to your brain, and how it can feel like the sun has the power to melt your eyes from your skull.

Half the time you cling to him so hard you break skin, the other half you claw and kick because you can’t bear to be touched.

He doesn’t have time to feel guilty over getting you into this. You need him.

Maybe it’s not the right thing to do, but it’s the only way he knows how to get you to settle. To relax. To go limp like a kitten caught by the scruff.

He holds you down and makes you cum until you can barely lift your head. He just wants you to feel good, to let him worry about all this shit going on, just unclench your teeth and give up. You don’t need to keep fighting, not when he’s here to do it for you.

You’ve spent years taking his mind away from all he’s seen and done. He’s intent on returning the favor.

[katakaluptastrophy]

The ships … the ships were still full of people. I reached our hand out into space. I extended. I struggled. He said, I bit through the sun first. It’s human nature. That started things going.

Imagine being on those ships (and remember, not everyone in those ships was a nefarious trillionaire) zooming away from earth.

Maybe you've watched mushroom clouds blossoming across the face of the earth as you pulled away, the lines of communication fizzing out and going dead.

Watched...something...happen to the earth. Watched the sun flare and then flicker out.

I sliced through Venus, Mercury, Mars … by that point a couple of the tugs had already launched through the Kuiper. I had to kill Jupiter and Saturn in a fucking hurry. I reached … they blinked away from me … all I could do was hope that they’d watched what I was doing and all died from fucking terror. You and I went full fucking Hungry Caterpillar. We took Uranus … Neptune … crunched down Pluto … found every satellite and craft, reached in, crunched up all the humans, moved on.

You try to make contact with the installations as you pass - the small city on Mars, the helium-3 capture facility at Jupiter, the mines on Saturn's moons, the skeleton crew constructing the shell on Uranus, the Kuiper platform. Maybe the comms are eerily quiet. Or perhaps, you make contact for just a moment, enough time to witness what happens when god doesn't kill people "clean".

As you speed away, the rings of the gas giants burst asunder and the planets seem to desaturate, the readings go haywire as their magnetic fields suddenly destabilise. And something, oh god, something seems to slip away from each one, some absolute acid trip of horror, like some kind of writhing, fleeing ghost.

The moment I found the fleet spinning up to enter FTL, it was too late … I could only grab one of them … and you and I held it in the palm of our hand. I was in there with them. All those frightened people. All those runaway rats.

And then something physically stops one of the ships. Alarms are going off, sparks are flying, lights are flickering, and there's a horrifying sense of presence (if John feeling Alecto's presence was unremitting screaming inside his head, what does the presence of the newly combined John and Alecto feel like? Because I don't think that invovles less eldritch psychic screaming, somehow).

And then you break free, and spin off into some kind of warp of time and space, with the knowledge that you are the last humans left alive in the universe and that something truly terrible lurks on the husk of the earth.

Imagine 5000 years of that tale being passed down through humanity (that's equivalent to the time that passed between the stone age and the present day), as civilisations rose and fell across planets and systems.

And then imagine, one day, being the ship that encountered something they'd never seen before. A ship, of an entirely unfamiliar design, bearing an unfamiliar symbol: a skull. The whole ship is covered in bones. Sleek, designed, inlaid bones. Human bones.

When they hail you, you see humans, but not like you've seen before. They're dressed in strange outfits: military uniforms and robes that look like something from a textbook of the most ancient history. They're carrying swords. Swords! Many of them seem starved and sickly, as if their bodies are consuming themselves. They speak of their empire and their god in strange, archaic words - an impossibly ancient language from the earth that was - of the resurrection of the dead, of the Lord over the River, of necromancy.

And you realise that however horrifying the tales of the earth's death in fire, there are things worse than death.

[narfin-frood]

Hi! I'm a big fan of your art, and I just wanted to know, did you study the WOY art style? I'm asking because the way you draw each character, Hater especially, is so expressive! Do you have any tips with expressions? Thank you!

thank you so much!! and to kinda answer your question: while what i do is, technically, studying, that's not what it feels like. i genuinely just enjoy looking at character sheets. a lot of the time they'll include little notes about things you wouldn't think about unless you're told to, like wander's eyes typically angling towards each other at the bottom or sylvia's eyes obscuring the full width of her neck.

(i have any one of these open in my reference panel almost always! not only are these full of tips & tricks for your everyday sketching, they're full of rules for each character, which are meant to be broken in interesting and fun ways.)

[im gonna pack a bunch of other, tangentially related tips and tricks and thoughts into the readmore, including my personal breakdown of hater's expressions specifically, so feel free to give it a click. long post ahead]

a lot of stuff can be picked up by just watching the cartoon as many times as you want. i have watched every episode (minus big fucking baby episode, which i hate) like 6 times over, sometimes more (looking at you the rager), and that has definitely solidified my wander over yonder visual library.

also, wander over yonder's art style already fits in with the way i draw, because i LOVEE long curvy lines and super crisp & clear silhouettes!!

as for why/how i get hater so expressive.... that mainly has to do with the fact that i think he's So Cute. He's So Cute and i wanna Squash Him. and his character design reflects that!!!

his hood is his eyebrow and his eyes may or may not be rolling around in their sockets, and his nose is a little upside down heart. but all of the lord hater emotion is stored in the chin. lord hater has a bunch of specific and VERY malleable options for mouth shapes, depending on what makes the expression and lipsync look clearest.

you can keep it super simple, with a clear divide between his top and bottom jaw, and do several round bumps for teeth, which they do a lot when tweening, like this:

this kind of seems to be his default state, depending heavily on the episode and when it was made and who was drawing him the most, of course.

you can also keep his jaw and skull distinct, but keep his teeth straight and flush with each other, which helps for sharper expressions, esp. anger or frustration, but can also work for a good "squee". he also sometimes pouts so hard his chin eats his mouth, which is, again, cute.

if you're having trouble keeping an expression clear while also maintaining the distinction between his jaw and the rest of his skull, it's pretty common also to forego most of the overt skeleton bits, save for a few hatch marks to indicate teeth (sometimes squiggles or bumps, when he's yelling about it). in my head i affectionately refer to this style of hater expression as the "peanut sans"

none of these convey the intensity of emotion you're looking for? fear not, you can also always just go Full Skeleting. and give his teeth a full outline. this is great for Pain and Strain and Nefariousness.

and then there are a million expressions in between and possibilities within these parameters beyond your wildest belief. nothing should hold you back from a really fucked-up lord hater expression. not proportion. not structure. ESPECIALLY not symmetry. please. make his chin bigger. make his head bigger. make one eye bigger. make him look in two different directions. scrunch his nose up. whatever it takes. by all means. i implore you to have fun

(honorable mention. his W face. the face when he says the consonant W. sometimes OO. i'm. obsessed. with it . he looks. kity)

anyway. lord hater tangent aside. i could also share my own process for expressions, but it really just hinges on what looks appealing/what i like the most/what communicates the emotion i want to communicate the clearest, and it varies between characters and people.

it helps to, again, build your visual library, and look at lots and lots of funny faces, both in real life and in cartoons you like. make funny faces in the mirror and try to focus on what parts of your face change shape or interact with other parts of your face when you do something like smile really wide or drop your jaw. your skin is taut, and there's a bunch of muscle and fat attached to your bones, so when one big bone moves, a bunch of muscles and fat under the surface will shift around too, and understanding that relationship is really helpful in the long run, both for drawing real people and for drawing cartoons.

and the easiest way to retain information like that is to have fun while you study. stop thinking of it as studying and start thinking of it as gathering information on this thing you like a lot and want to do more of, like when you scroll through someone's account to look at all their art, and just. do more of that. do more exploring and observing. since animation is my special interest, this part is pretty easy for me, but it does still take practice to get into that mindset, especially when you convince yourself you have to be super strict and rigid to make it in the art world. focus on drawing and observing what makes YOU happy first, and everything else will follow.

and don't worry about taking notes. don't worry about remembering everything you look at. just look at things you like, and think about them for longer than you usually would. think about the shapes and colors. what makes that drawing so darn appealing to you, besides subject matter and the vague concept of an "artstyle"? you'll be surprised just how abstract what appeals to you can be. for me, with expressions especially, it comes down to random shit like "i like when the edge of a character's mouth creates a tangent with the outline of their head" instead of "pretty eyes" or other, vaguer elements. and that shit i like becomes a part of my artstyle, but only when it fits in and looks appealing, because you can't do stuff like this in every single drawing & retain a full range of expression

ANYway. i hope this made some sense/helped at least a little. i like lord hater a lot. and i also like to draw

[estrogenblast]

to this very day, mike is controlled by the nefarious skull

[magicalbats]

Kinktober 2024 Day 16: Seth x Reader

Rating: R-18+

Word Count: 6721

Warnings: Afab!reader, leopard Thiren reader, rut/heat cycles, femdom, pathetic sub boy behavior, cock and ball milking, onahole, dildos, puppy pads, prostate milking, multiple orgasms, ABO adjacent? ABO inspired? idk

A/N: I'm late, I'm late for a very important date - with a needy, desperate cat boy 😩 Part of what went into this is I thought it would be cute to pair a snow leopard with a jungle leopard, and the other part is because I just enjoy topping boys and playing with their butts xcvnnbdekds

⭐

The sound of your doorbell going off brings your attention up to peer down the short hall in your apartment. You hadn’t ordered any packages as far as you could recall, and your neighbors very rarely had any reason to bug you. It probably wasn’t anything important then, you quickly decide. 

And you almost ignore it in favor of returning to whatever you’d been looking at on your phone, but then the buzzer goes off again with a noted edge of desperation this time. Which was decidedly odd. How could a doorbell sound desperate? Perhaps even more pressing, who would possibly be seeking you out like this? 

Quickly realizing they weren’t going to go away until you answered the door, you drop your phone on the couch cushions and push up to your feet. A few barefooted steps later has you turning the lock and twisting the handle, swinging the hinges inward only to find Seth standing on your front doormat. 

Your brows shoot up in genuine surprise. Not only at his unexpected and sudden appearance, but also because of how absolutely miserable he looks. His usually pert ears are half folded over his skull, twitching slightly to accompany the faint shudder you can see making his shoulders lock up. Even more alarming is the fine sheen of sweat you can make out on his creamy skin and the rosy flush that stains his cheeks. It almost makes him look sick, and your frantic thoughts immediately go to hospitals, doctors and insurance forms. 

Except … he shouldn’t have any reason to come to you when he was feeling under the weather. 

Shaking off your initial surprise, you give him a closer look. “Seth? What are you doing here?” 

“I’m sorry,” He murmurs in such a faltering, broken little voice that you immediately start to understand what’s going on before he even finishes speaking. “I know we broke up but I - I didn’t know where else to go. You’re the only one who can help me. Please, can I come in?” 

You almost tell him ‘no’, because he was right. You and him had broken up. Well over a year ago now, in fact. 

But for better or worse you’re not quite that heartless, and your tail gives a listless flick behind you as you step to the side. “Yeah, come on. Before one of my neighbors sees you and thinks I’m up to something nefarious.” 

A wordless sound of relief rushes out of him as he quickly scurries past you to get inside the apartment, clearly glad to be out of the public eye where everyone knew him as Officer Seth Lowell. His current state of thinly veiled distress did not align with his usual persona as a capable policeman who was always happy to help with a great big smile at the ready, and you take a moment to surreptitiously glance around the hall to make sure none of your neighbors were watching you through a crack in their doors. If someone got suspicious about his behavior and your motives for letting him in there was a very good chance you’d soon find PubSec showing up at your doorstep next. 

This was probably going to be awkward enough without adding more fuel to the fire. 

Slipping back inside and locking the door again, you turn to look at where he’s partially hunched over the side of your couch now, clearly struggling just to stand. “God, you look like you’re drunk or something.” 

“I’m sorry.” He says again, quietly groaning under his breath. “I swear I didn’t want to bother you like this but … you were the only person I could think of. I have to be careful about, nnghn, keeping my personal and work life separate. Can you help me? Like you used to.”

You hesitate to move from your spot standing just inside the doorway, knowing good and well that this would be inviting trouble you didn’t need. Burn everything, but you could even smell him from here. 

It hadn’t been this obvious or quite so bad when he was still standing outside where the smells of city life could strongly intermingle with his scent. But in the closed space of your modest little apartment your keen nose practically floods with the sharp spike of arousal that is not yours, making your head feel fuzzy and inebriated. This was dangerous, and not only because he was your ex. 

He’d trigger your own body’s natural instincts if you weren’t careful. 

Even knowing that, you can’t bring yourself to watch him suffer and you slowly approach him with deliberately heavy footsteps to make sure he could hear you coming. You didn’t think Seth would ever fully lose control of himself enough to attack you or hurt you, but it was clear at just a glance that he was in bad shape. 

Coming up alongside him, you can see his shoulders still trembling with the effort of keeping his rioting urges in check so you carefully reach out to slide your fingers underneath the soft fringe of hair hanging over his temple. Your spine immediately snaps ramrod stiff, sucking in a quick breath the moment you press them into the skin.  

“You’re burning up. I haven’t seen you have a rut this bad in a long time.” 

“I know.” Pitifully moaning, he tips his flushed face up to pin you with one of the neediest, wretchedly helpless looks you’ve ever seen in your life. “That’s why I can’t - I can’t go to anyone else for this. If I accidentally hurt someone … I’d never be able to live with myself. It has to be another Thiren who knows what it’s like.” 

Your heart painfully wrenches at that, sympathy and old love for him making it feel like you’ve suddenly got a rock wedged in your throat, but you quickly pull away. 

Rather defensively crossing your arms over your stomach now, you back up enough to put some space between you and him so you could think for a moment. Far be it that you didn’t understand where he was coming from. As a fellow Thiren, yes, and the complimentary jungle cat to his snow leopard, it did indeed make sense for you to give him a hand in his time of need. And a great need it was, by the looks of it. 

But you had so much history together, a past that couldn’t be severed from either of your identities just because you’d agreed to go your separate ways. It hadn’t even been a bad breakup in the typical sense where fighting with each other and screaming were involved, and yet both of you had walked away from it feeling like you’d left a piece of yourselves with the other. You and Seth had talked about it before so you knew his feelings on the matter were the same as yours, but that alone wasn’t enough to mend a relationship. He was dead set on following in his older brother's footsteps as a PubSec officer and you just couldn’t reconcile the daily dangers he was putting himself in to accomplish that. Maybe if he was a little less headstrong and reckless about everything but … 

Heaving a deeply bothered sigh, you grudgingly turn to look over at him again. He really did look unbelievably pathetic right now. And you’re aware of the exact moment your resolve starts to crumble as you watch his anxiously curled tail start to perk up slightly when he sees your attention is back on him. Dammit. 

“Alright, I’ll help you. But,” You rush to emphasize your caveat before he can get too excited. “No sex. I understand the position you’re in here so I’m willing to help as much as I can. I have to draw the line somewhere though.” 

“I understand.” He says on a terse, shuddering exhale that seems to visibly drain some of the uncertainty from his posture. “Thank you, thank you. I don’t know how I can ever repay you for this.” 

“Don’t thank me just yet. Start getting undressed while I grab a few things real quick.” 

Spinning on your heel, you don’t bother to check if he’s following your instructions or not before you disappear through the doorway that leads into your bedroom. Everything in the apartment is so compact that it only takes a handful of steps for you to reach your dresser where you kneel down to dig in the bottom drawer. Luckily you still had all the toys and supplies you’d kept on hand for moments not unlike this one, though you hadn’t exactly planned on using any of them on Seth again. 

There were other Thirens in New Eridu, you know. Plenty of them in fact. Just because you hadn’t found any of them quite to your taste and had instead resorted to using some of these toys on yourself that didn’t mean you’d been holding out for this particular man to change his mind about his career choices. 

Pausing halfway through the motion of pulling out his favorite onahole, you wonder what the hell you’re doing. 

You’d need something to carry this all in. 

Momentarily abandoning the dresser, you quickly dig in your closet for a tote bag you’d bought under the assumption of going green for the environment — what was even left of it after the Hollow Disaster — but had promptly forgotten about amongst all your other clothes and impulse purchases. You waste no time shoving everything you can grab into it, idly wondering where you’d even accumulated so many toys in the first place, before hurrying back out into the living room. 

You find Seth standing at the corner of the couch in a timid little pose that was clearly meant to make him look smaller than he was. It’s not hard to see he’s deeply embarrassed about standing there naked with his aggressively rigid cock standing straight up off his body, already dribbling a thick bead of creamy discharge that glistens faintly in the overhead light. Your own instincts go absolutely haywire at the sight as much as at the unfiltered smell of him, but you valiantly shove it as far back into your mind as you can manage. 

Cautiously walking over, you try to give him your best attempt at an encouraging smile but he refuses to glance up at you, much preferring to keep his eyes downcast. You think that might be for the best, actually, as you kneel down on the hardwood floor in front of the sofa to dig into the bag you’d carted out. 

Thank your lucky stars you’d still had some of these on hand. 

With a pointed rustle of thin plastic, you pull out a puppy training pad and make quick work unfurling it so you can lay it open across the floor. A second one follows, just to be safe, leaving a sizable square of your flooring protected from any accidents before you stand up to get resituated on the edge of the couch cushions. 

It feels like your heart is going to jackhammer straight out of your chest at any given moment. And that wasn’t even mentioning how hot you suddenly felt, but you pause to take a deep, calming breath and ground your nerves, hoping you weren’t making some monumental mistake in doing this. 

“Alright,” You finally intone. “Sit.”

Eagerly shuffling forward, Seth moves into the space you’d indicated with your finger where he gingerly lowers himself down to kneel beside you just on the corner of one of the training pads. He still insists on keeping his face averted from you though, and you think he would have looked the picture perfect definition of submission sitting there on his knees had it not been for the demanding flex of his weeping cock in his lap. 

Or did that actually add to it? 

Stop. You couldn’t think about that right now. 

Trying very hard to ignore the decidedly awkward atmosphere between you and him, you eagerly reach down to dig inside the tote bag for a distraction. “I tried to grab everything I thought might be of use for this but just tell me if you want a specific toy in particular.” 

“I’m sure whatever you picked is fine.” 

“Okay …” Rapidly piecing together a haphazard plan of action in your head, you decide on a realistic, flesh colored dildo that’s longer than it is thick, leaning down to decisively smack the suction cup base on the hardwood floor to make it stick there. And as you start to lean back, intending to reach into the bag again, you catch Seth outright staring at you in wide eyed, hungry fascination. 

“What?” You demand. 

“Nothing.” He quickly murmurs, fidgeting slightly there on his knees. “I really appreciate you doing this for me. Feels like my head is going to explode.” 

“Well, you certainly came to the right person for this. We ended up with quite the collection once everything was said and done, so at least I was prepared. Think you can give me a text first before you come over next time though?” 

Seth’s pointed ears self consciously swivel back to lay almost flat against his skull, looking truly abashed. “I’m sorry.” 

“It’s okay. Do you want the onahole or the dildo?” 

His head immediately snaps up. “Huh?” 

You can’t quite keep the sly little smirk off your face now as you pull the silicone pocket pussy out of the bag to ruefully wag it at him. “I said, onahole or dildo? Which would you prefer?”

Whimpering a series of pathetic, borderline sniveling sounds, Seth nervously flicks his gaze between one toy and the other as if he really wasn’t sure which was going to make him feel better in that moment. You have a sneaking suspicion which he’ll ultimately choose though, and just as expected he finally sets his sights on the cylinder in your hand. 

“Can I have … the pussy, please?” 

He really was cute, especially when he was like this, and you just can’t stop yourself from teasing him a bit. “What do you say, Seth?” 

A visibly violent tremor races through him, making the PubSec officer squirm at your feet as his tail wildly flicks out behind him in a jittery arc. “P - please, ma’am. Can I have the pussy, please?” 

“Good boy. Of course you can.” 

Thinking it almost a little odd how easily both of you were falling back into this old routine and these old roles that came with it, you lean to the side so you can brace your hand on the cushions and reach down with the onahole in the other. Immediately sucking in a sharp, over eager gasp at the sight of you bringing your hand close to him, Seth pushes up to fully balance on his knees in a stiff, halting pose that makes his cock jut out in offering to you. 

He looks especially good like that, you think, all lean muscle and sveltly compact with his rigid length bobbing expectantly in the air. His nearest hand anxiously grabs at the cushion where yours is resting, almost like he wanted to reach out and take it, but he makes do with simply leaving them close together. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with the other and he finally settles on placing it across his own stomach, fingers digging into the flesh when he squeezes down. So desperate and needy that he just has to hold onto something. 

In a past life it would have been your ankle he was clinging to while he impotently rutted his leaking cock over your stockinged foot. You’d also done the reverse on a few occasions, with you straddling his leg to grind your pussy over the bulk of one of his heavy boots until you came shuddering and whining low in your throat. It was only one of the many perks that came with dating someone who was happy to switch roles around. 

You’re fully in control now though and Seth doesn’t even hint at trying to upset that balance when he all too easily could. He was pretty damn strong, after all, but he just noises a high strung whimper at you as he plaintively nudges his hips forward in a supplication gesture. Oh, you hated how much this was actually turning you on.  

Silently reminding yourself to stay focused, you direct the opening of the faux pussy to his sticky tip and start to fit it over him at a leisurely, sedate pace. Despite how unhurried you are about it, Seth positively lurches there on the floor, his tight abdominals sharply flexing when he grunts a wounded little sound. He doesn’t move to pull away or protest despite the heightened sensitivity brought on by his mating drive, and you’re able to gradually take him into the silicone sleeve one inch at a time until you finally reach the base. 

You don’t even have to move beyond that to have Seth dazedly swaying there, his narrow chest rapidly expanding with the near frantic breaths he pulls in. Just the simple sensation of a soft, fleshy substitute hugging firmly around his cock is enough to send him dangerously close to the edge, gasping a ragged sound that is suspiciously reminiscent of your name. 

“Ooh, oohh, I’m gonna’ cum. Gonna’ cum. I’m - -“ 

Making no move to stop or help him, you merely hold the pocket pussy in place while he rapidly dissolves into a stiffly twitching mess of spasms right before your very eyes. He tips over almost immediately, narrow hips stiffly juddering while he throws his head back to softly yowl up at the ceiling. You can feel his cock wildly flexing inside the toy, even with a layer of firm plastic standing in the way, and you subtly squeeze your thighs together in response. 

Yep, this was certainly dangerous. 

“Oh god, oh god, mmmmnnnghn!” Reeling from the sheer force of his own release, Seth unsteadily bobs there on his knees as he starts to come down from that all too temporary high, drunkenly spinning his attention back around to you. “Thank you. Thank you, ma’am. Thank you!” 

“What did I say earlier, Seth? Don’t thank me just yet.” 

That’s all the warning you give him before you start to move your arm, pumping the pocket pussy from the base to the glans and then straight back down again. He outright seethes, trembling so fiercely it looks like he just might collapse right then and there, but he still doesn’t make any move to back off or shy away from it despite the no doubt painful rush of overstimulation. 

Instead he actually leans his pelvis into it to fully offer up his cock to your mercifully unmerciful attention, which you’re all too happy to oblige. And now that he’s cum once, the interior sleeve of the toy is sufficiently lubricated to allow a smooth, easy glide as you move it along him at a vigorous pace. Your attentive gaze doesn’t miss the way thick, creamy clumps of white smear along his length to make a mess of him but he doesn’t seem to mind it and neither do you. 

Other than the state of your floor, that is. This was a rental, you know, so you carefully reach over with your toe to nudge the crinkling puppy pad closer to him. 

“Be careful not to spill, unless you want to clean it up with your mouth later.” 

“Ohhhn! Aghh, aahh! I … nnghnn, oh god, I’m gonna’ - -“ 

And he does, just like that. 

Shuddering so wildly this time you have to readjust your hold on the onahole to keep pumping it over him, Seth beautifully writhes there at your feet while he shoots yet more sticky spend into the cylindrical toy. He quickly becomes overwhelmed like this though and, lurching with a soul vacating wheeze, he blindly reaches out to snag at your wrist. 

“Please, please, please,” He chants, screwing his eyes shut tightly enough to hurt. “Aaughh, it feels so good, just — give me a second.”

“But you’re still cumming, though.” You murmur, earning a deeply frazzled whine from him that seems to echo in the space between your ears, almost taunting you with it. 

And he does indeed keep pumping jet after jet into the silicone pussy until it seems to fill up to its limit and it just thickly oozes out around him to wetly plop onto the absorbent pad instead. This was what he needed to get through this rut. Fully milked and emptied until some of that natural, instinctive drive to breed dissipated and with it so too did the influx of hormones. He’d be able to return to his usual state of mind much more quickly than if he’d been left to his own devices to deal with it on his own and, given just how much he was shooting off into the toy, you suspected this back up of fluid was in part to blame for his ruts staggering potency. 

Wait a minute. A back up of fluid? Did that mean … he also hadn’t found anyone else he liked enough to date? 

It probably made a certain amount of sense considering he’d come to you rather than anybody else for help with this, but there had been a small part of you that was half convinced he’d just meant he didn’t have any other Thiren he could go to. A regular human certainly wouldn’t have known what to do with him like this, after all. But given the amount of spend coming out of him it didn’t seem likely that he’d had sex at all in recent months. Maybe even almost … a whole year? 

Watching Seth dazedly sway on his knees, still roughly gasping and groaning his pleasure into the apartment, you internally berate yourself for lingering on those kinds of thoughts. This was hardly the time. 

Maybe you should give your arm a break so you could focus on something else for a moment.  

Carefully releasing a wavering breath of your own, you slow the pumping motion of your hand to a gradual standstill, giving him plenty of time to savor the last few drags over his flexing cock. By the time you finally start to ease the pocket pussy all the way back to slide it off him, he’s made such a goopy mess of it that there were even clumpy beads of milky white clinging to the lips of the faux cunt to create a vague lather effect. You can see it faintly bubbling even from where you were sitting, and you softly click your tongue when he at last slips free of the toy with an obscenely loud, wet slurp that makes his hips give an involuntary jerk. 

As he whines an overwrought sound that makes his chest sadly hitch, you reach further down to set the pocket pussy on top of the pad he’s kneeling on so some of that excess cum can safely run down the sides of it. Seth carefully watches you the whole time, his ears anxiously twitching when you sit back to reach into your handy tote bag again. Obviously this alone wasn’t enough to completely drain him so you were going to have to kick it up another notch. 

“Turn around for me.” You murmur, feeling a pleased little spark light up in your chest when he just whimpers a frazzled sound before complying, getting himself spun around on the floor. 

Without needing to be told, Seth obediently leans forward to brace on his hands and present himself to you with his legs spread wide. You don’t miss the eager curl of his tail as it arcs up to stand almost straight in the air or the anxious flicker it gives at the very tip. And between his legs his cock still heavily dangles, oozing a slow stretching thread of discharge onto the puppy pad underneath him. He hadn’t flagged at all despite having already shot off two loads and the creamy evidence of that was plainly visible on his skin. 

With a generous bottle of lube now in hand, you lean down again to curl your unoccupied fingers under the fleshy sway of his ballsack and nudge up to gently cradle them. Even for as brief as the sensation surely must be, he still sucks in such a ragged, sharp edged gasp that you’d almost think you were hurting him. 

You knew better than that though, perfectly familiar with the heightened sensitivity brought about by a Thiren’s mating cycle, and you allow yourself a moment to thoughtfully bounce his testicles in the palm of your hand. “Hmm. These are still quite full aren’t they? Haven’t you been tending to your own needs at all, Seth?” 

Full on wheezing, he shudderingly arches his back while sliding his knees further apart to leave the full weight of his balls sitting firmly in your hold. “I’ve b - been busy …” 

You softly click your tongue at that before pulling back to uncap the bottle, leaving his testes to pitifully hang there. “You should know better. Both of us are well aware how you get when you’re backed up.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

Ignoring his plaintive whining for a moment, you bring your freshly lubed fingers down to slide them through the crease of his petite backside, making him jolt as if you’d just electrocuted him. It’s because he’s a male in the prime of his life, and that instinctive drive to breed, breed, breed could only be sated with the regular emptying of his balls — though he doesn’t exactly look like one right now when he’s hungrily pushing back on your hand like a bitch in heat. That had been you on more than one occasion, in the exact same spot and in the exact same pose, but as a woman your subconscious urges tended to skew in the opposite direction of wanting to be bred, bred, bred. 

It’s only your (mostly) clear head and the iron willed self control you’re desperately clinging to that keeps you from losing hold of yourself as you slip your pointer finger right into the center of his sticky pink hole and slowly slide it in. It’s getting harder and harder to keep your wits about you the more Seth’s potent cocktail of pheromones and adrenaline, sweat and semen floods your senses but you just keep reminding yourself that the two of you were no longer together. There wasn’t going to be any breeding done today. 

And his ass readily accepts the intrusion, granting your finger entry with only the slightest bit of resistance which the copious lubricant takes care of quickly enough. You dip into him straight down to the knuckle and he jerks his head up to keen a frantic sound. Upon giving the digit a brief wriggle to test the give of his inner sleeve you promptly deem him ready for another and carefully slip out so you can then push in with two. 

The faintly raised rim of his entrance greedily clings to you between the sporadic pulsing squeezes of his guts, trying to suck you in deeper and deeper. There’s only so far you can go though, and in an attempt to give him even some relief you curl the fingers down to insistently rub against the tender spot inside him. 

“Oohh! Aauughhn, aahh! P - please!” He gasps, immediately giving in to the full bodied spasms that tear through him as his shuddering hips weakly flex under your ministrations. 

Feeling hyper aware of just how sticky you were getting between the legs, you carefully set the lube aside on the floor where it wasn’t likely to get knocked over so you can reach your hand out to grab his bobbing cock. Giving it a tight squeeze that makes him mindlessly buck, you set in to attack him from both sides. While you work him open to ensure he’s sufficiently stretched with one set of fingers, the others drag down his stiff length in a demanding jerk to make his heavy balls bounce against your wrist. 

It hardly comes as a surprise that he cums embarrassingly quick, and you let out a trembling breath while you watch him shoot jet after jet of that milky white substance onto the puppy pad. It quickly starts to gather in a sticky, sopping wet puddle underneath him the more he keeps cumming, and as long as you continue to massage over his prostate he doesn’t show any signs of stopping soon. 

You can tell that it rapidly becomes too much for him though, his quaking shoulders dramatically hunching upward while his lower body twitches a wild, unsteady rhythm to match the hot pulses of cum that shoot out of him. His heaving gasps and groans soon take on a dire tinge as well and you finally decide to give him a moment to breathe, slowly sliding your fingers out to leave his puffy asshole needily clenching around nothing. You let go of his cock too, letting him tremble though the last of the spasms and dribble out whatever bit of semen he still had left. 

God, it smelled like a Thiren brothel in here. 

Struggling to shrug off the coaxing pheromones coming from him, you take a moment to glance down at the absorbent pad again. He really had cum a lot. 

“Here,” You murmur, stretching your hand out to grab a corner of the square and gently tug on it. “Let’s get these switched out before we have a spill, okay?” 

Swaying dizzily on his hands and knees, it seems to take Seth a long beat to realize you were even talking to him and another moment longer for him to understand what you were saying. 

Groaning a threadbare little sound, he gingerly moves to crawl off the training pad so you can slide it away from him and off to the side before replacing it with the clean one. You take care to position it directly in front of the dildo you’d suctioned to the floor, making sure it’s close enough before straightening back up to look over at him again. 

The pitifully flushed, bottom-lip-warbling expression staring back at you very nearly crumples whatever lingering bit of resolve you still had left. Not only was he going to be the death of you at this rate, he was also going to slowly wear you down until you finally gave in to the demanding pulse between your thighs. Worst of all, he wasn’t even consciously trying to do it. 

Your feelings for him as much as your instinctive urges compel you though, and you quickly busy yourself with squirting a healthy dollop of lube over the waiting tip of the upright dildo so you don’t have to think about it too hard. It was already much too late to start getting cold feet now. 

“Alright, come here. Let’s get you situated.” 

Seth doesn’t need to be told twice and he quickly drags himself closer to kneel between the spread of your feet. He stares up at you like a needy, hopeful stray the whole time but you decide you just can’t take much more of that at the moment so you reach out to nudge at his shoulder. 

“Spin around for me, handsome. It’ll be easier for me to take care of you this way, won’t it?” 

Head bobbing a delirious nod, he obediently complies and gets himself turned to give you his back. The puppy pad rustles softly every time he moves before going quiet again when he eases himself into the cradle of your thighs with a faltering exhale. 

You take a moment to lean over him and ensure the pad is where it needs to be before redirecting your hand to wrap around the base of the dildo so you can hold it steady. At your gently spoken command, Seth nudges himself up to balance on his toes so you can guide the silicone phallus to his loosened entrance. It catches in the fleshy wrinkle easily enough and as he starts to lower himself down, taking more and more of the stretch into his body, you eagerly watch the way his still achingly erect cock flexes at the penetration, swaying slightly before standing straight up again. You can even see a throbbing vein standing out along the side of his shaft, further tugging on your sympathy for him as you reach for the onahole again. 

Practically sobbing as he settles on top of the dildo, Seth somewhat awkwardly spreads his legs further apart to really leave the full brunt of his weight centered over the fake cock while he watches you bring the pussy toy close. And his tail restlessly whips around your leg to indicate his excitement but he can’t quite seem to find his voice anymore to speak. 

He just whimpers and seethes, chest stuttering with the hiccuping breaths he drags into his lungs. Sliding your unoccupied hand down across his shoulder, you locate one of his pert, pink nipples and start to flick it back and forth while you work on fitting the silicone cunt over his tip again. 

“Shhh. Just relax. Deep breaths for me, okay? I’ve got you.” 

The imitation slit spreads open for him at the insistent nudge of your hand and grants him entry to slide into the sticky, goopy mess he’d already made. He throws his head back, full on wailing a ragged sound now while his hips uncontrollably judder the deeper he slides into it. Once again torn between two equally unrelenting stimuli, he sways drunkenly between your legs and stiffly rocks back against the dildo wedged inside him to bask in the pressure on his guts. 

Your own breath starts to come a little quicker watching him writhe in place like that, almost as if there was a symbiotic bond present that was mirroring his pleasure right back at you, but you grapple with yourself not to get distracted. Gripping the cylindrical toy so hard the knuckles hurt, you begin working it back and forth over him to a wet, sloppy schlucking sound that instantly has his toes curling tight. 

So caught up in gradually drawing him back to that hazy edge of oblivion, you almost don’t even notice your own tail wrapping around to curl possessively across his chest. It’s only when you feel the brush of fur against your fingers, still mercilessly flicking at his fatly swollen nipple, do you catch what you’re doing. It very nearly manages to surprise you, the rhythm of your wrist wavering for a split second, but you don’t stop long enough to question it. 

You just keep sliding the onahole up and down, up and down, again and again until Seth cums once more with a lilting, higher pitched moan than his usual. It’s easy to tell he’s getting uncomfortably sensitized and over stimulated by it all but you know you have to keep going. If you didn’t and then sent him on his way, there was a very good chance he’d quickly succumb to the mindless urges of his rut again, and probably be all the worse for it. 

This was only going to work if you completely drained him, which was exactly why the dildos you’d grabbed came in handy. His prostate needed to be thoroughly milked to ensure you got every last drop out of him to simulate a completed mating cycle and stop the production of his pheromones. It’s the exact same process that would have happened if it was your pussy taking him in deep and sucking noisily at his throbbing length. If you were the one he was shooting his load into, the two of you probably would have been tangled up in each other for at least another day given how backed up he is.

If it was you … 

“Oohn!” The sound that abruptly spills right out of your mouth catches you completely off guard and, uncontrollably shuddering, you scoot to the very edge of the cushions to press your cunt into his back. Your hand keeps working though and you stare at it as if you were transfixed, watching the bubbly clumps of semen run down his cock to tangle in his pubic hair. It felt like you were right on the edge of cumming too but that shouldn’t have been possible. You’d pointedly ignored every little twinge and aching clench in your body for a reason, and yet … 

Rousing himself at the sensation of you desperately rubbing yourself against his spine, Seth tips his head back to blearily peer up at you through the heavy, inebriated fall of his lashes. “B - baby?” 

“Oooh nooo …” 

Sucking in a wet, half stifled breath, you squeeze your arms tighter around him to desperately clutch Seth against you and screw your eyes shut while you stiffly grind yourself against him. It’s an incredibly awkward thing to do in this position, especially when your hand was still mindlessly pumping at his cock, but you couldn’t stop. You just couldn’t. 

Not one or the other, or any of it, and you finally tip over the edge with a savory stutter of your hips, dropping your face into his hair so you can seethe and groan your pleasure into all that silky soft excess. It doesn’t even really feel all that good when your pussy was pathetically clenching around nothing and yet it hits you so hard and so fast that it almost makes your eyes roll back into your head. 

This couldn’t be happening. Even when you know damn well that it is, you still try desperately to convince yourself that it’s not. 

But you feel a little too intoxicated, a little too high on the dizzyingly potent fog of pheromones and the overwhelmingly sharp smell of sex in the air to truly fight it. Rumbling one last reluctant sound of bitter pleasure, you finally give in and lean your weight into Seth from behind. 

He tries to fight it at first but he’s even weaker than you are at the moment, and both of you are soon sliding forward to sprawl out across the floor in a heaving pile of limbs, hardwood be damned. You really can’t bring yourself to care much about that when your cunt was screaming at you, begging to be stretched and filled, and relentlessly bred. 

You’d known perfectly well how dangerous this was and now look. You were starting to slip into heat because of him. Dammit Seth. 

“Okay, look,” You finally manage to wheeze, struggling to sit up on top of his back. “I promise this doesn’t mean anything but — I can’t take it anymore. I’ll let you fuck me if you want. Please fuck me. I want your cum, I need it.” 

Issuing a disoriented, foggy groan, he shifts underneath you to look back over his shoulder, panting just as heavily as you are now. “Wh - are … are you serious? You said - -“

“I don’t care what I said.” Hissing through your teeth, you reach down to grab a fistful of that enviously soft hair, fingers closing at the root so you can yank his neck back at an angle that can’t be comfortable. “Please, Seth. If you don’t fuck me right now I’ll — I’ll never forgive you. You caused this and now I need you to take responsibility before I … I - -“ 

You abruptly startle when you feel his tail come up to twine around yours, locking the two of you together for as long as you were willing to let it happen. And even for as brief as the gesture is, it has its intended effect of temporarily soothing you, giving you a chance to suck in a much needed lungful of air. It would have felt even better if the space inside your tiny apartment wasn’t completely inundated with the buzzing smell of him. 

“Alright,” He cautiously rattles out when he sees you stiffly relaxing into his touch. “We can do it but … nghnn, like you said. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just sex. Are you still on birth control?” 

“Of course I am.” 

“Great. Let’s go then.”

⭐

Crossposted: here

[stxrvel]

i don't wanna live forever (1)

summary: reader couldn't stop having deaths in her life ever since the Supersoldier serum came into her life. no matter how hard she tried to stay sane, it seemed that life didn't want to give her a break. until, one afternoon, she learned that one of her old friends was alive… (you guys know im bad at summaries, but please give this one a chance)

pairing: bucky barnes x f!reader

words: +4.5k

warnings: angst, major character deaths, canon deaths¿?, bad words, english is not my first language! thoughts of revenge and death, this is like an introductory chapter, so the buckyxreader interaction is low, but it'll get better, i promise!

note: holy fuck guys. i just spent like five hours writing and editing this and i fucking love it. its been a while since ive been this proud of a work, im actually scare the emotion will disappear, but i really want to rejoice in this one. i wanted to write something a little different from my usuals, maybe a little common in the fanfiction world, but i started and i simply could not stop (or maybe just approach this bucky fic from another perspective). so this is the first part and i'll try with all my heart to keep this going because it was fucking insane, at least for me. i really hope you all like this as much as i do! feel free to leave any comment! thanks always for all the support!! see you next time <3

part 2 ; part 3 ; part 4

When you went into the Supersoldier serum project with Steve, you thought you were going to change the world. Of course, at that time when technology was relatively new any invention felt like the beginning of a new era. That's how it was all sold to you and it was how you expected everything to turn out… Until you realized that it was all really a waste of effort and time.

They were just propaganda for war. Not to stop it, to promote it. To motivate it.

You tried, on several occasions, not to think too much about it. You tried to stay out of it as Steve sometimes asked you to, even though even he didn't want to, as Bucky asked you to when you lay on his shoulder to cry in the little time you had free between trips. It was a great burden of guilt and helplessness.

Until you and Steve, with the almost imposed help of Peggy and Howard, rescued Bucky from the evil hands of Johann Schmidt and his nefarious organization, HYDRA, that, unbeknownst to you, would haunt you for a long time to come. It was only after that, after spending several sleepless days on edge thinking about what might be happening to Bucky, that you and Steve were finally able to go out and contribute something. Destroy HYDRA and the Red Skull's plans.

Of course, you realized that not everything could go right when, the one mission you couldn't attend, Bucky didn't return. And then Steve didn't come back either.

“Do you think this will ever end?” you had asked Bucky the day before his last mission.

“Of course it will,” he had answered without hesitation, moonlight illuminating his clear eyes, squeezing your hand as if it was all he wanted to do for the rest of his life. “And after that we can begin to live as it should be.”

But there was no after that, because you never recovered from losing him. From losing them both.

“Are you okay?” Peggy approached, in the middle of the afternoon when the sun was streaming through the stained glass windows of the church, illuminating the spot where Steve's empty coffin had been, because they didn't even find his body. They didn't even think there was any of it left.

You barely moved your head to acknowledge her presence, moving the prayer slip they had recited throughout the mass between your hands. Your eyes were crystallized, in tears that no longer even made the effort to flow, because you had already spent too many days and nights crying. Peggy had been on the other side of the church, sitting next to Howard while the priest spoke, because you had refused to be near them in those moments. You didn't want to be near them.

“As well as one can be,” you slurred, finding that it had been a long time since you'd last used your voice for anything other than cursing and crying disconsolately.

The people had already left, probably an hour or more ago. The empty coffin had already been brought out, all the flower arrangements had been picked up, and the priest was preparing for the evening mass. You knew you had to leave, you knew Peggy and Howard were there waiting for you, but you felt stuck at that moment. You didn't want to leave, you didn't want to get ahead, you didn't want that life if it had to be this cruel.

You heard Peggy's sigh, before she took a seat next to you, a short distance away, averting her gaze to look at Christ on the cross.

You didn't know if you were selfish to be so closed off to your friends at this moments, because they must be grieving as much as you were, but you didn't know how to deal with the future possibilities. Bucky and Steve, great men and soldiers, one even with enhanced abilities, had not been able to make it through the punishment of war. What if Peggy and Howard were the same? What if they too had the cruel fate of dying at the hands of injustice? Could you deal with that? With everyone gone?

Maybe you could open up to them a little more because if not, who else? Turning away from them was not going to ensure their survival in this hate-filled society. Maybe you could protect them, like you couldn't protect Steve and Bucky. Maybe you could make a difference, because you had the chance to.

“You know,” Peggy spoke again, rearranging herself on the bench and crossing her legs, “Steve always knew this was how it would end.”

Her wistful, mournful, fragile voice sent a shiver through your body. Peggy didn't consider herself someone to show herself vulnerable in front of others no matter how close they were, even in those things that hurt her the most, in those things that affected her personally and made her eyes water instantly, she always tended to shut down. And at that moment you didn't dare interrupt her because you knew it would probably be the only time she would talk about Steve in a long time.

“Sometimes we'd talk, between tour trips, and he would tell me that wasn't what he wanted to do, even when he had to convince you otherwise,” her clasped hands would occasionally squeeze between words, blinking rapidly to fight back the tears. “He didn't know if he'd made the right decision.”

You could almost picture him, backstage at the foot of the stairs with that notebook he carried everywhere and wouldn't let go, Peggy at his side nostalgic, as helpless as the others. It reminded you of the times you'd had similar conversations with Bucky, desperate to find a purpose, a way through so much fog.

“The first time I saw him so sure of himself was when he asked us to help them look for Bucky,” she mumbled his name, as if trying not to scare you away by saying it too loudly. “Ever since then it seemed like he'd found that spark…”

“Until Bucky died,” you whispered, the words cutting through the cold and silence, Peggy shifting on the bench contritely.

“He lost something of himself from that day on, it wasn't hard to tell. The next time I heard him so sure after spending days lost, it was on that call from the plane.”

Peggy paused, raising her hand to cover her mouth as her voice faltered. You turned to look at her, wishing you could rip the pain from her soul and leave it in yours. She was trying to contain her emotions, breathing deeply, and in that moment you wondered what life might be like from now on, with the specter of grief following you around, waiting for the next time the dead knocked on your doors, unexpectedly, without allowing you to say goodbye.

“He had told me he wouldn't die in peace until he could get it all over with. And he took it all with him. And I hated him so much for it…” Peggy sobbed, her labored breathing standing out between words. She kept looking straight ahead at the stained glass windows, the expression on her face hard and scowling despite having tears rolling down her cheeks, as if she were trying to blame something for what had happened. Her reproachful eyes fixed on the Christ.

Her wails echoed through the walls of the church, the father on the dais sending them a look of sorrow. He had offered you water, thirty minutes after everyone at Steve's wake had left, when they kept walking, and you stood there.

Another empty casket.

“Ladies,” Howard's voice reached your ears amidst all the physical and emotional numbness. You could barely notice Peggy wiping under her eyes with the pocket square that was surely part of Howard's suit, as she took breaths to get up. “We should go now.”

You heard him walk, his slow, careful steps stopping just behind you. There, on his feet with his chest tight, he rested a hand on your shoulder and gave it a squeeze in support. He knew it was the most you would allow him at a time like this, deciding not to pass up the opportunity to let you know he was there. You sighed, feeling a heaviness take over your body as you stood up.

“Yeah, let's go.”

The next few months passed in a blur. Maybe too fast, maybe too slow, you weren't sure anymore.

Peggy continued to work at the Strategic Science Reserve for a couple of years, calling you from time to time to help her with some jobs. You kept a low profile, practically a fugitive from the state, while trying to live a halfway normal life in Europe. A lot of it thanks to Howard really.

Life had become a rather monotonous routine when you stopped getting so many calls from Peggy and Howard several years later. You knew they were fine, but not being able to return to the country filled you with anguish every day. And trying to lead a normal life became too complicated when you looked in the mirror and it seemed like not a single day had passed since you were in that capsule of Dr. Erskine's with Steve.

Until Peggy called one day asking you to come back. She told you that it was safe, that there would be no state officials waiting for you at the airport, but even if that had been the situation, you wouldn't have hesitated for a second to buy the first plane ticket and fly to see them again. To Howard and Peggy, to melt into an embrace, longing for the lost years.

You had thought that contributing to the fight in World War II had earned you a ticket to at least be recognized in the military, but all you gained was the government with their mad scientists looking for you to try to recreate the Supersoldier serum. Peggy didn't want to risk you and Howard gave you no choice by giving you a plane ticket to Finland with your bags packed.

You wasted many years not being by their side, unable to keep the promise you had made them in your head to be close by to protect them, to watch over their safety.

But when you left the airport there was only Peggy, and maybe that should've told you everything.

Her hair already looked gray, the effects of gravity and time present on her face. You hated to think that you shouldn't have looked any different from the way she saw you last time when she waved you off at that same airport. Her warm gaze was the same, raising her arms with held back tears to encircle you in a big hug. She tried hard not to sob against your shoulder, you felt the choppy movement of her breath against your chest.

She looked so different and the same at the same time.

You walked to her car a moment later, her trying to carry your suitcase and you telling her you were perfectly fine carrying it on your own. Amidst a smile, she walked into the driver's door and you frowned as you saw the empty passenger seat.

“Where's Howard?” you spoke as you sat down, after stowing the huge suitcase in the trunk of the car. The way you moved to buckle up, you didn't notice the way Peggy froze in place, her hands clenching the steering wheel so tightly that her breath hitched from the effort.

“We're going to see him,” was all she said, but she was very good at hiding that something was wrong. Only for a little while.

During the trip, even though you tried to ask things about them, about what they had been doing during this time, you didn't miss the way her shoulders were tense or her eyes very alert. Something bad had happened and Peggy was trying to hide it from you.

When she pulled up in front of a church, you already knew what had happened without her answering a single one of your questions.

Howard had died.

You two had sat next to Howard's son Tony, his spitting image, in complete silence as the prayers went on. At that moment you didn't know what had happened, hoping it had been a quiet and peaceful death, because you didn't know if you would be able to endure another violent death.

Peggy gave you all the details when the mass was over, after the coffin was taken away, and you hadn't felt such fury in so many years. Not since the deaths of Bucky and Steve had that adrenaline rush of anger returned to run through your body as violently as it did at that moment, when Peggy told you that he had been murdered along with his wife. All to steal some prototypes of Dr. Erskine's serum. The damned serums with which everything had started.

This time there was a body in the coffin, but there was also a culprit. Someone to point the finger at and take it out on for years of anguish and pain.

You were at Peggy's house, staying for a few days, when she told you that wasn't all.

Peggy had a suspicion that HYDRA hadn't disappeared when Steve crashed that plane into the ice. Her suspicions generated panic in you, because Bucky and Steve had died for that, now apparently Howard, only for it all to have been for nothing. The feeling of carnage that ran through your whole head made you nauseous, years of helplessness and pain pent up in such a small body had to find its way out somehow.

“It was a man, according to the information I've been able to gather,” Peggy spoke, taking a seat across from you in the dining room of her living room, after pouring you a glass of lemonade. “He didn't die from the crash. He had a concussion. He was hit in the head. His wife died from asphyxiation.”

“Does Tony know?”

“No,” Peggy shook her head quickly, one hand over her heart as if the mere thought caused her physical pain. “It didn't even occur to me to tell him something like that.”

“And he was looking for the serum,” you recalled, a bitter feeling planted in the back of your throat, the memories of the disastrous times during the war coming back into your head like a blinding flash.

“He took them. We don't know who he is or who he works for, but whoever they are, they must have been following us for a long time to know about them.”

“You mean years,” you arched an eyebrow, your fingers touching the cool exterior of the glass seeking some reassurance.

“Possibly. That project isn't recent,” Peggy nodded, drinking her lemonade with a grimace. You stared at the liquid almost finished from her glass, a wrinkle forming between your brows with each passing second and you kept wondering why.

“But what the fuck was going through that asshole's head?” you spat angrily. Rage at already the amount of lives that serum had taken with it and at Howard's recklessness. Rage at the reaper who seemed to be following in their footsteps for some reason, rage at that damn man and whoever his damn boss was.

“It was the only option, Y/N,” Peggy turned her gaze, meeting your eyes with a strange glint.

“What do you mean?” you were almost afraid to ask, your friend's gaze suddenly turning evasive. You watched her run her fingernails over the glass of the tumbler, lost for a moment in thought. The way her shoulders slumped forward in defeat caused a pressure in your chest that made it hard to breathe. Peggy shouldn't be going through these things at this point in life.

“Howard was working with the Pentagon, as a contractor or something. They had found you. Howard felt cornered and they made him sign an agreement.”

With your incredulous look on her face, Peggy didn't dare look back at you for a few seconds. So much had happened since you had left and it seemed that you had only been told about the things you weren't going to care about so much. But if you had known that you wouldn't have cared much about giving some of the state officials their comeuppance. You would've liked Howard to trust you enough to tell you, not live in as much fear behind his back as the last few years must've been. You didn't like the way Peggy's lips curved downward, as if she, too, would've preferred to make another decision had she known this was how it was going to end.

“Howard assured them that he could recreate the serum, and told them he would as long as they left you alone.”

“Fucking asshole…” you closed your eyes, scrubbing your face with your hands. The rough skin of your hands rubbed against the delicate skin of your face, years of combat and mistreatment foreseeing a harshness that reminded you every day of what you'd had to go through to get to that moment.

“I only found out about it after it happened. I didn't see it for like a whole week,” Peggy shook her head slightly, her eyes glistening in the pain of the memories. You shook your head hard, a more violent reaction than you could have anticipated.

“That stupid… stupid asshole! What the fuck made him think I couldn't defend myself?”

“He was trying to do the right thing,” Peggy finally searched your eyes, meeting the red rims that told her you were holding back too hard breaking in front of her, only using that pain mixed with rage to keep you sane.

“And look how that turned out!”

Peggy stretched her hand across the table, with a pleading look asking you to lower your voice, averting her gaze to the hallway. You followed her gaze, for a second forgetting where you were, forgetting that her family was with you behind the doors where you were plunged into darkness. It was past midnight.

You took a second to calm yourself, trying to drown out the uncontrolled emotions and taking deep breaths to calm your fluttering heart.

“And if what you theorize is true…” you regretted the moment those words left your mouth; you didn't even want to finish the sentence.

“Do you think it is?”

“I don't want to,” you shook your head instantly, closing your eyes, the thought sounding illogical inside your head. Your hands on your chest trying to contain the storm of feelings that was making chaos inside your head. “That would mean that everything we did, everything Bucky, Steve and Howard did and sacrificed, was in vain. It will all have been in vain.”

You spent several weeks with that thought in your head, working hand in hand with Peggy, and the organization you barely knew as SHIELD, to track down the whereabouts of the killer of Tony's parents and the one responsible because the Supersoldier's serums were, surely, in the wrong hands.

And yes, it was many years of fruitless missions and dead ends, with you running every field mission and Peggy calling the shots from the New York facility. Every time you felt close to discovering something, it seemed that the enemy rejoiced in your failures and still couldn't understand how they were always three steps ahead.

However, you had to leave the missions when Peggy became ill.

The silent, lethal Alzheimer's.

During the first months in the hospital, she still recognized you. She also recognized her husband and children. But after the first year, she frowned every time her children walked through the door. After a year and a half, her husband had to remind her that they had been married for about forty years.

After two years, she was still only remembering you, Howard, Steve and Bucky. Her whole life during her time in the army was all you talked about, sometimes you would tell her how much more time had passed than she remembered and always, without fail, she would ask you how much you had done in Europe for so long by yourself.

She cried every time she remembered Howard's death. She cried every time she remembered her children. Out of her mouth came a thousand apologies that no one would accept, because there was nothing anyone could do to prevent what had to happen. You wished she had been a serum test subject instead of you.

For several years, missions to find Tony's parents killer were sporadic because you spent more time around Peggy than at the SHIELD facility. She was the only thing you had left of everything you'd ever had, of when you held the world in your hands. She was the last thing keeping you tethered to that reality, keeping madness from flooding your reason. How could you have so many years ahead of you when that was all you had to live for? A life full of the dead, full of pain and suffering. What kind of karma were you paying for?

You were leaving the SHIELD facility, after another failed mission, when Nick Fury stopped you in front of the exit. You almost rolled your eyes right under his watchful gaze, tired of having to meet him anywhere, and exhausted from his comments about this vengeance project or whatever he wanted you to be a part of.

You still didn't know how, being such an exemplary agent, Coulson had fallen into his nets.

“Miss L/N,” the man stopped you with his words, his hands behind his back and a tense stance that caught your attention.

“Fury,” you nodded in his direction, hoping he'd be quick because you were running late for your weekly visit with Peggy. “Do you need anything?”

“I'd like you to come with me somewhere,” Fury approached tentatively, his one eye fixed on your wary expression, which shifted to boredom the moment you thought you knew what he wanted.

“If this is about that project, I've told you a thousand times-”

“No,” he interrupted you, moving forward and removing his hands from behind his back. “It's not related to that. I really want you to come with me.”

“You look agitated, but I need-”

“I'll take you to see Peggy myself after this.”

You didn't like that he knew your routine, even though you weren't doing enough to hide it from the other agents. But Fury looked nervous, even though he was hiding it very well, trying to keep his cool as he looked for ways to convince you.

You figured it wouldn't be a big deal for you to go off the deep end for once. After all, Peggy never remembered you were going to see her.

You set off in Fury's armored vans, not quite sure where you were going, but sure that it was urgent, because he had taken it upon himself to let his driver know that you had to get there as soon as possible.

You took that time on the trip to come up with a new strategy for the next mission because what you were doing up to that point wasn't working and you felt too close to throwing in the towel, figuratively speaking. You could spend years following a ghost, but you wouldn't give up on finding Howard and Maria's killer.

Before the car pulled up to one of SHIELD's secret sections, they passed the giant, imposing Stark Tower. You never saw Tony again after that time at his parents' funeral, not even during his visits to Peggy because you always made it a point not to cross him. You didn't think you'd be able to look him in the eye while you knew his parents had been killed without being able to tell him. You had promised Peggy in her lucid moments that you wouldn't tell him anything until you could find the culprit. You didn't want to initiate that pain if it had to be kept repressed, as yours once was, and probably still is. You had learned, some time after the funeral, that he was living with Edwin Jarvis, and you were glad to know that he would have good companionship to keep him company in such hard times.

Fury, a handful of agents and you entered the vans through the entrance to what appeared to be the parking lot of an old warehouse. Upon entering, the first thing you noticed was the number of armed agents that seemed to be guarding the place, not at all discreet to how SHIELD used to do things. You weren't sure if Peggy would authorize something like that, but you couldn't question the Director's decisions. It wasn't your place.

“What's going on here?” you frowned, watching as every meter there was another agent and another agent. You got out of the car without waiting for an answer from Fury, moving directly toward the entrance where most of the agents were concentrated. You barely noticed their looks in contradiction, running their eyes over you and then over the man trying to catch up to you, dubious as to whether or not they should move. “Move.”

“Wait,” Fury's voice stopped the command in the agents, who turned back to look at you as you sent Fury a confused look.

“What's all this mystery, Nicholas?” the man startled almost discreetly at your tone of voice, the agents stirring uncomfortably, but kept the serene expression that was getting on your nerves. “What the fuck did you do?”

“We got a call from the Arctic.”

“From the Arctic?”

You tried to ignore the way the hairs on your neck instantly stood up, your body alerting you to something your mind still couldn't comprehend. You felt like a deer face to face with a predator, expecting the worst.

“The Colonel informed us of something that might interest us,” Fury's cryptic voice echoed in your ears, drowning out the flicker of uncertainty vibrating from your head to your toes. “They found a plane.”

You didn't even answer him. Your heart began to pound wildly, cornered, ready to have your head bitten off. The tension in your shoulders intensified, with the involuntary movement of your hands as you broke into a cold sweat. The mere implication of his words caused an emptiness in your stomach, a sense of longing and fear you hadn't felt before.

You looked at Fury, trying to find in his gaze the gleam of a lie, but there was nothing there but assurance. There was nothing but recognition and understanding in his gaze, but that didn't make the emptiness in your stomach and the tight chest go away. It didn't make the feeling of being outside your body go away.

You barely remembered to move in the direction of the door, the agents instantly moving out of your way, pushing it so hard that one of them flew out. You moved your eyes around every corner of the room, the cream-colored walls generating a great repulsion in you. And there, in the midst of all the confusion and the storm, a confused and disgruntled face looked back at you. A face you never thought you would see again.

Steve Rogers was standing a few feet away from you, barely comprehending what was happening around him and instantly recognizing you. Your chest compressed once again, the tears you held back for so many years even in your loneliness making their own way into your eyes, endangering to end that mask you wore everywhere you went.

Steve was actually there, looking back at you with his eyes shining in recognition. You didn't know if he was as surprised as you were to react or you looked so bad that he didn't know if he should approach you or not. You just knew it was him, it really was him right there in front of you. He wasn't dead. Steve wasn't dead. He was alive. Ah, he was so alive.

The broken sob that suddenly left you was loud enough to make your friend shed his stupefaction and stride over to where you were. You barely managed to cover your face, between sobs, wails and disbelief, feeling your knees give out, surrendering to the weight of the pain, when his strong arms grabbed your shoulders before you hit the floor. Preventing your fall, as you had wished so many times before.

You cried against his shoulder, when feeling him against your body you knew there was no doubt it was true. You moved your hands away from your face, wrapping them around his waist as tightly and lovingly as you hadn't hugged anyone in so long. Surely the last time you hugged someone like that was when you saw Peggy on your way back from Europe.

Steve wasn't far behind, his arms around your shoulders just as tightly, his chin against the crown of your head, moving from side to side trying to hold back the loud sobs that shook your body.

You couldn't believe it, but it was true, he was right in front of you.

Steve was alive. He had come back to your side. You didn't even want to ask why.

And there was nothing else you could think about for the rest of your life.

[rose-morose]

I was just thinking about the Gravity Falls 'Dungeons, Dungeons and More Dungeons' episode and it got me thinking about what D&D 5e class each of the characters would be

(spoilers under the cut if you still haven't seen this show)

(just go watch it, seriously, watch it)

Grunkle Stan: this one is pretty obvious, the man is a rogue thief, even though he relies highly on charisma checks, he rarely succeeds as it is his cunning and sleight of hand that serve him best, and his penchant for burglary and spotty criminal record are an added bonus

Ford: a warlock with the incomparable Bill Cipher as a patron, it was a deal he struck with Bill that gave him the knowledge and skills necessary to complete his project, all the while Bill manipulated him into furthering his own agenda

Gideon: another warlock with the same patron as Ford, the nefarious Bill Cipher, and although Gideon can perform magic on his own, it was his partnership with Bill that made him a major player, but nevertheless he may have multiclassed into another caster, most likely a bard judging by his flair for the dramatic

Wendy: some type of ranger, her natural instinct, rural upbringing, lumberjack training, and survivalist skills make her an ideal candidate for the ranks of rangers defending the fringes of civilisation, her aptitude for nature would serve her well in the hunt

Dipper: probably a wizard, he relies on his intelligence as he wasn't born into the arcane, he must instead study it alone, he is not granted power by a patron, a deity, or an ancient bloodline, he built his skills up overtime with research and training to manipulate the power already around him

Mabel: definitely a college of lore bard, she reacts to every assault with cutting words, and with a creative and flamboyant personality coupled with her affinity for stagecraft (puppet shows), she fits the narrative of the bard perfectly

Grenda: could not be more barbarian coded, with the rage, the muscle, the intimidation, and the ability to inflict physical trauma she's got it all, you can't get more barbarian than that, be cautious when approaching, lest your skull be caved in with a sofa

that's all I have for now maybe I'll do more later

[roryacker]

WereGhost Part 5

Surprise, part 5 :D

I will note Simon's unclothed for a while but there's little to no detail given and it's just for a perfectly SFW bath scene. It's not for any nefarious reasons I promise, he puts some clothes on eventually

I forgot to add this at first and considered if I even needed it but figured just to clarify, it couldn't hurt.

Imagine Simon's surprise, of course, when the very next morning he was awoken from his uneasy sleep hearing a familiar voice. That accent he'd grown far too used to, calling out the silly name he gave Simon on a whim, uttering something about him looking like a ghost story. It got him to wake up, at least, shuffling around to be able to poke his head out of the crevice he'd made a cold rock den out of, eyes wide. Sure enough, on the very edge of the small territory, the edge Simon made sure to rest close to in order for an easy escape, wandered Johnny, calling like he'd lost the family mutt and not what he thought was a wolf.

Except Simon isn't even a wolf, really, he never was. Hell, he only first started learning to shift when he was seven or so. Even now his body isn't lupine in appearance. Staying in that form for months on end while staying with Johnny meant that his body was tired and sore from it. And of course, the only way to offset that was to avoid shifting for a while, enough to remind the body that it's two creatures and not one. He can't help the discomfort that wells in his chest at that fact, glancing down at himself with furrowed brows and tugging an old deer pelt further over his body. It's rare he keeps the pelts, especially with wolfhunts, but they're really all he can get for warmth outside of his canine form.

Still, a greedy, hungry part of his mind grins at the thought that the (frankly stupid) human came to look for him. The dog got out somehow, and Johnny's gone out of his way to get him.

Simon bares his teeth in a grimacing snarl at the thought, nose scrunching as if he can scare it away the same way he might a competitor, if there were still any in the area. The hunts have killed most of his kind nearby off, if they didn't simply decide to leave before it got bad. Simon's only company outside of Johnny, as of late, have been the hares, rabbits, and occasional deer he makes a meal out of. Sometimes even a pheasant or the like if he can catch it, though he finds the meat to not match his tastes.

Maybe that's why he clung to the human like that. Maybe some part of Simon is lonely.

Maybe that's why he reluctantly decides to slip out of his sad excuse for a den.

Not to follow the call; he never did respond to Ghost, fitting as it may have been. He doesn't want to seem like a loyal hound now of all times.

It's mostly to watch Johnny; sit crouched in the grass, covered only in the deer's pelt and the wolf's skull that somehow follows him between the shift when the rest of his clothes become torn and ragged- the real reason he doesn't bother, truthfully, otherwise he'd happily bask in the warmth- watching intently as the human wanders about. It's bitter for a moment, a sour feeling that only deepens the frown etched on Simon's face.

But of course, if life were ever in his favor, Simon wouldn't have monthly hunts deciding which lucky man will be able to hang his pelt on a well, make it into a rug maybe, he would have never waltzed into that bear trap, maybe going by the humans' idea of good luck he would have never been a beast at all, but as fate so has it, he's Simon goddamn Riley, the town's chicken-eating ghost story-

-and Johnny meets his gaze even through the grass. He falls silent, dumbfounded, and it takes Simon a second too long to realize that fact and shift back in a hurry, scrambling backwards with his ears flat and a genuine snarl in his chest hoping that the sound of it might finally force the human's defunct survival instincts to kick into overdrive and not question it, but of course, he steps forward once, and then again, and then before Simon knows it the man's crouched down in front of the opening of his sad little cavern, staring at a familiar monster with raised hackles and bared teeth, tail tucked between his legs in a gesture Simon hasn't made (hasn't needed to make, truly) in years. There's recognition in Johnny's eyes, and he looks tired, like he hasn't slept for a while.

They're both silent, Simon shifting anxiously and trying to back himself further into his hole, hoping that Johnny might get the hint, but no. The idiot, the absolute numbskull he is, reaches his hand forward, knuckles up, to offer it for Simon to sniff. His expression looks so soft that he can't even bring himself to pretend to be aggressive. If Simon were an ignorant man he might just assume it to be acceptance, but he reasons with himself that even if he knows otherwise he can afford a risk, being close to Johnny's size even in this form. So, he hides his teeth once more, fur smoothing down, and leans forward to sniff as expected, grunting softly at the familiar scent.

It's the one he's used to- not flowery and sweet, but warm, given the wild of the forest around him to further add to it. It smells right. He huffs and shakes off, backing off like he might just be stung if he lingers longer, but Johnny isn't having it and reaches over to scratch behind his ear, much to Simon's surprise.

"Dunno what you are..." he murmurs, voice so quiet compared to the desperate, nervous tone it had before.

"I mean- I know you're no good. Townsfolk've done wonders spelling that one out." Simon bristles at the words, then, narrowing his eyes and growling lowly, but is quickly shut up by another hand settling on the ruff of his neck, that one joining in on the soothing scratching that he's only slightly offended by.

"But you could've eaten me, aye? Could've mauled me in my sleep. And you didn't." He finishes, a bit more firmly, gripping Simon's muzzle in both hands and shaking slightly as if to try and emphasize his point. It's enough to get Simon to keep quiet for good, meeting Johnny's gaze for a fleeting moment before he huffs, nudging his snout into the touch for just a split second, and pulls away.

He's been caught, but at the same time, this is the same man that went so far out of his way to make sure he'd heal up. The man who let him sleep in his bed, let him be a nuisance lounging about the house, who came looking for him when he disappeared without a word.

He shakes off, grumbling quietly as he shifts back, clumsy hands going to cover himself with his pelt-blanket once more instead of simply being draped over himself, and turns his gaze down not in a sign of nervousness or fear, but submission. It's been ages since Simon had to submit, the last time being his father before, still a young adolescent, he realized that pack hierarchy meant nothing, that he could challenge it and win if he used his claws and teeth cleverly enough. To do it willingly and not by force? That's new.

Even if Johnny doesn't understand the gesture, the changing is clear enough. Simon is weak in this form- weaker, anyways. His teeth are still sharp, but they don't pack quite the bite, and his claws are thinner and less of an aid. Simon tries not to let his expression shift hearing the hitch in his breath, but tugs the pelt tighter around his body anyways, muttering something more for his own ears than anything.

Eventually Johnny pulls away, and for a moment Simon's mind scrambles to try and figure out what the hell he does from there "you're screwed, it was a trick, run off before he calls the hounds" but again, the man simply stands, and reaches a hand out to try and help Simon up as well. He stares blankly, confused by the gesture, but snorts, shaking his head off, and begrudgingly takes it- stumbling and shaking on two unsteady legs, but eventually settled.

"Do they know your face?" Johnny questions, letting one of his hands drift to rest on Simon's back- to keep him up, no doubt, though he still bares his teeth on instinct, growling at him and lurching slightly. Shockingly, Johnny doesn't budge, only shifting his hand to rest against his shoulder, instead. At that realization, he relaxes just a bit, if only not to waste energy on useless threats, huffing instead.

"I'll take that as a yes, then. Careful it is. Not very chatty, eh?" He laughs, and for a moment Simon falters, glancing up at his face as his own relaxes just the tiniest bit, before his brows furrow again and his gaze drops, grunting quietly in reply as his nose scrunches. Johnny, ever the patient bastard, simply chuckles and rubs at Simon's shoulder, and he can't help the way he leans into the touch, really, it's not his fault.

"Don't even know your name... hope you don't mind if I stick with Ghost." He doesn't. It's familiar, by now- it's been years since he's heard "Simon" from someone else, even from himself, outside of the rare times he mutters it to try and remind himself of what his voice sounds like- of what a voice sounds like, when it's not yelling and whistling and shouting commands. He shakes off the bitter thought, growling softly and leaning up against Johnny. The human is surprised, he can smell it, but doesn't shove him off.

They walk for a while, and Johnny manages to smuggle him into the house without being caught, all while he talks Simon's ear off about the ruckus he caused and what's happened since he left. He doesn't mention the woman- the house doesn't smell like her, but stress and sorrow, instead. Something about the lingering scent, now fading out with the eagerness and happiness sticking to the man, makes Simon feel oddly comfortable. No, not just that- it's pride. The same feeling he gets after a hunt, after establishing his territory as his own, after winning a fight. He's won, here, even if he didn't intend for there to be a fight in the first place.

Johnny tries, for a bit, to find him fitting clothes, but Simon is huge, for lack of a better word, and none of them would really fit. So, he's allowed to linger in all his glory, only decent because of a pelt- not that Simon cares any. Wolves don't wear clothes. He's sure after all this time they'd feel about as comfortable as that trap.

Speaking of which... Johnny reaches for the leg, moving slowly and carefully in what Simon assumes is an attempt to not scare him or trigger his aggression. Reluctantly, he lets him, and the human takes the chance with a pleased little smile, rubbing his fingertips gently along what's now just a scar.

"Healed well, I see. Did you even need me? Never seen a wound that bad scar this fast... now I wonder if I've been tricked by a wolf."

"Would've taken another month without the help." Simon replies, his voice low, more of a growl than anything pleasant on the ears, and he can see the pure shock that crosses his human's face when he hears it. But he doesn't recoil in discomfort or disgust- just laughs and nudges at his knee.

"Well, good to know I wasn't just being used by you... hell, even if I was, I think you do deserve a bit of a chance to be lazy after all these folks have put you through, mm?" Yes, yes that sounds nice. Simon is uneasy for a moment, staring at Johnny's face, before he realizes the man's being genuine, and he allows a soft little snort to leave him.

"You do stink, though. Like mud and old blood..." He murmurs before Simon can give any response. He should probably feel bad or maybe insulted, but he can't muster up anything negative, really.

"Probably last kill. Got a fat rabbit." Simon hums, licking his lips at the memory, suddenly hungry once more, but the thought quickly leaves when he sees Johnny moving again, and he's quick to follow. He doesn't miss the little laugh or the shake of his head, but it seems the topic is done for now as they both set off towards another room in the house.

Johnny decides to set up a bath for him, still complaining about the smell, and Simon has the decency to pretend to be apologetic about it as he fills the tub, readying some soap that smells a bit too pleasant for Simon's tastes. For a moment he wonders if he should shift back, perhaps, if Johnny plans on scrubbing him down, figuring it would be less awkward if he took on his wolf form again, but Johnny simply guides him towards the tools he needs, offers some loose instructions, and says he'll be back with clothes for Simon- either through raiding the older man's closet (John, he learns his name is, though he decides that he doesn't like how close their names are) or through buying new ones. Simon doesn't like the idea of him leaving, but hums in response, hesitantly dropping the pelt and leaving it folded on a countertop before lowering himself into the bath.

The water is comfortable, he finds- not the warmest, per se, but far warmer than the river water he sometimes treks through if he's especially dirty- and it's still, meaning it doesn't tangle his fur... or hair, in this case. It's calming, really, enough that he decides to lean back and shut his eyes for a bit. It feels much safer in there than a little cave, after all, and his rest the night prior had been uneasy at best. It's only when the water's grown cold and he hears familiar footsteps approaching that he realizes he'd fallen asleep in the first place, perking up and lazily resting his jaw along the side of the bath as Johnny enters the room, fresh clothes in hand. They look new.

"Well, you didn't even wash up."

"Got tired. Besides, not used to having hands..." Simon mutters, stretching out with all the comfort of a fat housecat, rolling over so his weight's on his knees and he can rest his body up against the side of the tub. He's just giving Johnny a hard time, really, but finds himself tensing slightly when the man sighs, leaving the clothes on the counter atop Simon's pelt, and approaches, crouching beside the tub and reaching for a rag.

"I think you just like bein' a nuisance."

From another man, or maybe in another case, the words might sting slightly, cause some anxiety- but the amusement in Johnny's eyes and the pleasant feeling of the fabric scrubbing along his back simply has Simon sighing in something akin to relief, shutting his eyes once more and allowing his body to all but melt into the surface under him. The smell of the soap is diluted by the water, and really isn't all that bad, a hearty herbal scent that isn't too harsh on the nose. Part of Simon is tempted to sneak outside and roll around in the mud or something when Johnny's asleep just to feel it again, but that'd just be stupid, of course. Instead, he savors it while it happens, his eyes only opening when the human finally pulls away.

"Alright, you mutt. Up you go. Towels are in the cabinet, and I'll assume you know how to dress yourself..." he isn't given the time to make any smart remark or anything before Johnny's leaving the room, and he mourns the loss only for a moment before he begrudgingly moves to stand, shaking excess water off while he's still in the bath before moving to step out. His skin is clean, he finds, lacking possibly years worth of dirt and grime that had been there before. Scars remain and become slightly more prominent without the earthy coating over them, but he doesn't mind the look. Really, it's not that bad.

He almost looks normal.

It takes a while to dry off, but he finds it's much quicker than trying to get his fur to dry in the wind as he has in the past. From there, his last task is putting on the clothes Johnny had gotten him. They smell of another human, but only faintly, fresh enough- and lacking the scent of the older John- that he's sure they're new.

Simon doesn't like clothes one bit, it turns out. They're confining and uncomfortable and he doesn't like the feeling of the fabric on his body. It feels like a snake wrapped around his limbs, only with threads and seams and lord knows what else that just makes him want to scratch it all off like it's a colony of fleas.

Still, he can tell Johnny had been just slightly uncomfortable with a naked man in his home, so he deals with them even despite the urge to bite and gnaw until nothing itches anymore... he wanders around the house in search of the man, sniffing about in an effort to find him, and finally stalks into the bathroom, head lowered in an unconscious show of dislike for his threaded prison, but content with the smile that meets Johnny's face at the sight, anyways.

"There we go... could almost mistake you for a person, if I didn't know any better." He laughs at his own joke, while Simon only grunts in response. He stands there for a minute or so, before opting to move towards him and start crawling onto the bed. Johnny sighs, but makes no move to shove him off or anything of the sort, and from there it's just a matter of making himself comfortable. He finally ends up on his back, limbs stretched out lazily and one leg hanging off the bed, but cozy enough, anyways.

He's not asleep when he feels Johnny reach over to bury a hand in his hair and rub lightly at his scalp, but he does a damn good job at playing dead, anyways, not moving an inch and letting his breathing stay settled. It's good enough to lull him to sleep, anyways, a warm, nice feeling in his chest that he doesn't really want to shake.

[hellowoolf]

on strawberries and masonry: chapter v

series summary: you atone for your sins, now, in a jackson garden, learning to care for soft things and yourself. joel miller is a lethal sort of similar, and misery loves company

OR

you live in jackson and meet joel and you’re both damaged little babies and fall in love (but i’m drawing this shit out🫶🫶)

warnings: angst, age gap (reader late 20s/early 30s, joel 50s), maria is pregnant, the dinner party trope™️, joel picks reader up (but its actually been foretold that he can hold any weight ever, so don’t even worry about it), jealous!joel, possessive!joel, SMUT !!!!!, fingering, oral (f and m receiving), unprotected piv, breeding kink (don't...even start), creampie, FEELINGS !! (as always, let me know if i missed any !!)

word count: 7.9k

authors note: an epilogue will be (probably) on the way but this is our last full chapter !! gag !! this is my first ever series and i'm so elated i decided to write and release it. this last chapter drained me mind body and soul and i don't know how i feel about it but i really hope you enjoy <3

series masterlist | masterlist

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the realization of your feelings for joel, that against all better judgment you’re tumbling somewhat unceremoniously in love with him, nestles itself between your ribs to scratch at your bones. it’s a tolerable ache, at first, and because you refuse to give into anything, you let it remain while joel fucks you on his tongue and fingers. you let him cover your skin in his spit and your slick and the marks of his fingernails, and inch closer to the doom of loving him, believing yourself capable of handling it, willing yourself to handle it. and you do. mostly.

what comes first is a need for him you’re unequipped for. his refusal to fuck you properly again (a promise he has continued to hold himself to) becomes increasingly unendurable, and you’re pushed beyond even the lust for him you’d fought against months earlier. you need him, daily, at least, pulling him behind the stables or coming to slam on his door so you can live another day. you want to please him, to mend him, to save him, even though you know you are incapable, and you try what becomes embarrassingly often to get on your knees for him, but he always denies you. yes, this is the first symptom of your almost-love, a wanting that reaches your innermost self and expands beyond the edges of you.  

the second symptom is anger, a nefarious deviousness against him, a spiteful resentment for the small ways he rejects you. you are less cautious with him, nipping at him on patrol or in the dining hall with your own sexuality, constructing heavily unsubtle innuendos and whispering them in his ear. you’re looking to punish him, so irrevocably that he’s compelled to kiss you again, to fuck you again, but until now you’ve failed at ensnaring him fully. you barely recognize yourself this way; you have never been one for this wild sort of flirting, the obvious kind, but you succumb to it regardless. 

the softness of him is the worst part. you skim your hands up his thighs and pull on the loops of his belt to tempt him to you in the ways he still refuses to give, and he’ll deny you orgasm as punishment, but still he materializes on your porch, or sits you next to him in the aftermath of the pleasure he does allot you, wet with your arousal, and lets you tell him about your life, leaves you breadcrumbs of his. he likes that spot he found on your neck that night when you cut the strawberry, wraps his palm around the base of your skull to feel the warmth of it, and with his callouses circling your skin you know that this is the most awful thing, the most terrible. it’s shameful, really, that he should show you this kindness when you’re this close to complete devotion to him.

“what d’you think, little wolf?” 

little wolf. maybe this trumps even his hand on your head. last week, with three fingers in your dripping cunt joel had stilled his hand in you, let you thrash against him while he smiled into your hairline, and you bit hard into the flesh of his shoulder, leaving the marks of your canines there. easy, little wolf, he’d grunted into you, and he felt you pulse when he said it, so he’s kept the name, uses it often.

“hm?” you lift your head from his thigh, bare legs curled up along the couch while he sits back on the cushions. he’d tugged you from your walk to your garden into his home, licked into you while you pulled on his hair, made you come on his sofa like he’d savor the stain. his hand comes from around the back of your head to your face, thumb sweeping across your chin and along your bottom lip. you take it in your mouth and suck, eyes on his as his own mouth drops open.

“bout the jam. you want me to show you how to make it?” he repeats, voice low and broken as you swirl your tongue along the pad of his thumb. you’d brought the strawberries up again, how many you have and the white fuzz they grow; noah helped you remove the heaters from inside the greenhouse as temperatures rose outside, but a chill remained, and so your plant began a slow death. you’re left now with a small batch you like the idea of preserving in sugar and heat. you like the idea, too, of joel teaching you things, of him watching you learn. you nod slowly. “when?” he tilts his head as he asks. you pull from his finger and trail little unhurried bites along his palm, down the inside of his wrist. you want to suck his blood.

“tomorrow? evening?” 

he nods, eyes hooded over as he watches you. slick drips between your thighs and sticks them together, wetting over the dried come he’d pulled from you minutes ago. you smile against his skin, teeth grazing his pulsepoint. 

“you a good teacher?”

he grins and grips back at your head, tilting your chin up to his face as he leans down to you. “a real delight, i swear it.”

your noses bump and you want to kiss him (the whole of it is you’d like to suck his tongue into your mouth and hold it there, feel behind his teeth, let him spit onto your tongue), another vice he’s denied you since that first time. he sees it in you, this wanting, so he threads his fingers through your hair to hold you in place. the tug at the roots makes you rub your thighs together and he inches closer, close enough to whisper onto your lips “go home, little wolf,” and pulls himself off the couch. he’s practically limping with how hard he is, the strong outline of his cock casting shadows as he walks away from you, and it only serves to make you wetter, but because you’re certain he won’t let you help him (you tried in the stables this morning, hay softening your fall to your knees, but he’d hauled you back up with a gruff quit it) you pull your pants back on and retreat to your home. 

stepping down his porch you bring a hand to your stomach, joel’s refusals of you burning green and orange there. the flames heat your skin and lick through your fingers, and the warmth indulges the part of you that hates him, but the rest of you (the part that loves him, lord help you) bends under the pressure. you drop your hand as you approach your house and find tommy leaned up against the fence post. panic seizes you for a moment, but you tamp it down sharply; surely, he can’t know where you’ve come from, surely he can’t smell him on you.

“isn’t this a little past your bedtime?” 

he looks up at you with a smile as you come to stand fully in front of him. “yeah, well, i figured you’d be comin back from the garden right about now.”

something sparkles across your cheeks and you hope he doesn’t notice. “mhm. how’s maria doing? she’s in the, what, second trimester now?”

tommy nods, that boyishness and the pride of fatherhood puffing his chest. “that she is. she’s a wonder, i tell ya. don’t know how the hell she’s doin it. but the nausea’s gone away now, so she’s just restin up.”

“i’ve been wanting to come by and visit, but i didn’t know if she’d want me there.” it’s the truth; you’ve seen very few pregnant women in your life, and the magnitude of it frightens and delights you. besides, as little as she seems to enjoy your company, you suspect it’s a lonely existence, cooped up by the windowsill growing little arms and fingernails, and you’re self-aware enough to know you owe yourself to her. 

tommy scratches the back of his neck. “well that’s what i wanted to come ask about, actually.”

you tilt your head. “me coming to visit?”

he hums. “maria’s been wanting some socializin, some…” he waves his hands around, looking for the word, “interaction. i figured you could come over for dinner.”

“just me?” you can’t help the surprise in your voice.

“...no. noah, too. and my brother.”

your throat dries out and you stifle a sputter. yes, indeed, dinner by candlelight with your most long standing existing friends, of which you have only two, a pregnant woman who sees you as you have been (a knife, with a girl on the end), and the man you’ve been fucking but not fucking (and you think you may be in love with him, also, but you try to keep this bit irrelevant). yes, yes. a fantastic idea! what a delight!

“i don’t…i don’t know, tommy. maria’s never been my biggest fan.” please, don’t make me come.

“come on, don’t say that.”

“i don’t mean any offense, i just don’t want to disturb her.”

“you ain’t disturbing her! i’m telling you she’d like it if you came!”

“tommy-”

“she barely tolerates my brother as it is, at least you’ll be there to occupy him. please?” and he asks with such sincerity, such unknowing of the things you’ve done to joel, and you know there is no way out.

“yeah, okay. okay. i’ll be there.”

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

“so you’re goin to this…what is it? dinner party?” 

joel’s halfway through a bite of something red and meaty when he asks, and you clamp on his moving jaw with your palm.

“don’t talk with your mouth full, sting, it’s not very southern gentlemanly.” he flips your hand away with a grunt and you bite your tongue between your molars to keep from smiling. “yes, i will be there.”

he shakes his head and leans back in his chair, looking out at the milling people filling the dining hall. “i still don’t understand the point of it anyway. the hell we playin family for?”

“joel, you are family.” his eyes flit to yours. “tommy’s family, i mean,” you clarify. he nods, some sort of relieved, the disappointed sort, you feel. you do your best to shake the stick of it, of that feeling, off.

“then why are you goin?”

“well, as it happens, i was invited. besides,” you snort, an unattractive thing but you let it pass, “i think your brother hopes i’ll keep you entertained.”

“entertained? you bein serious?”

you’re golden and beaming with how he looks at you, so incredulous and muscled and stiff with restraint from touching you, you can feel it. “i think his exact verbiage was occupy. he wants me to occupy you.”

“jesus.”

“buck up, cowboy, i’m a delight.”

“uh huh.” you think it’s meant to jab at you, that little grunt, but one end of his mouth turns up as he says it, an imperfect cover of his grin. “he ever do this kinda thing before? before i came?”

you bite the inside of your cheek and look to the ceiling. yes, he did, once. he’d been patrolling with pete mcneilson (a scrawny thing, squirrelish and panicked, but as young as you are) and decided you were fated to be wed, worked his hardest for weeks to set you up. he’d planned the dinner in hopes it would serve as a first date, but your halfway abnormality and owlish inspection of him—tommy’s words, really; he said you looked straight through the poor thing—had frightened him, you suspect. you consider lying, though these days such attempts rarely come out right with joel. you sigh. “yeah, once. maybe two years ago.” joel raises his eyebrows, urging you on. you sort of mumble, “it was a ploy to set me up, really.”

he drops his fork onto the plate, lets it rattle, and you nearly flinch. you’re somewhat surprised to find yourself expecting him to be angry, not that he’s under any obligation to be. really, you might like him to be angry, but he chuckles, instead, biting and smug as he is. “set you up with who?” 

“don’t laugh.”

he raises his hands in surrender, grinning, still. “i ain’t, only askin for a name, baby.”

how often he uses it hasn’t dulled the sharp spasm of want that word seizes you with. “no laughing.”

“what did i just say?” he leans closer. “gimme the name, darlin.”

“pete mcneilson.”

joel does not keep his promise. he chokes on his laughter, heaves with it, tenses his ribs to keep it in the box of his chest, but it tears out between you anyway. oh, how gorgeous he is this way. “christ almighty, pete?” and then, shaking his head to himself, he adds “he’d be fuckin helpless.”

you scoff. “the fuck you mean by that?”

joel continues eating again, self-satisfied with some glorious victory that lays itself over his face. “helpless with you, darlin. you’re too damn vicious for him.”

you think for a moment. “little wolf, and all that?”

he clears his throat, laughter dead in the back of his throat but eyes still pinched a little in the tension of his smile. “somethin like that.”

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

you think it’s a mistake, going to this dinner, as you walk out your door, smoothing your jeans down your legs. you know it’s a mistake when you walk in and see them all, the whole lot, milling about tommy’s home, your varying degrees of relation to each clashing violently. tommy rushes through the kitchen, mashing boiled potatoes and checking on meat that pours steam from the oven when he vents the door, and maria watches his frenzy with a pleased sort of smile. you know she’ll tense when she sees you here, and so you allow her another moment of secluded safety with her husband, and look around for joel; you’re almost embarrassed at how desperately you search for him, but all of it drains from you when you find him standing next to the dining table with noah, being what could only be described as talked at. you’re filled instead with a gripping warmth, pink and new, at the sight of him, so big and disinterested. he may remain mostly secretive of his feelings with you, but joel is intrigued by you, this much you are certain of, and the picture of him this plainly un-intrigued makes you feel singular, selfish, important to him. yes, tonight is a mistake.

“i can’t believe my eyes, the town ghost has appeared,” noah calls out from across the room. you give him your best attempt at a grin, eyes pulled like gravity and lust to joel but working to keep them ahead.

“in the flesh,” you dip your head in a bow, and noah pulls you into a hug. over the slope of his shoulder you see joel, hip cocked and brittle, and you both have the same thought simultaneously, that he’s never held you like this, not once. for all his increasing softness, he has never held you like this. he’s already angry, you think, gnawing on the figure of you in noah’s arms. you pull away and position yourself between them, nodding to joel, mainly for show. “i haven’t seen you in ages, noah, how are you?” and your sincerity is barely there, so slippery with joel so close, but enough to convince noah.

“haven’t you heard? i’m a mentor, now,” he smiles with sarcasm and a little pride, too. “been showing jesse how we run the patrols and all.”

you’re trying, so hard you are trying. joel is watching you precisely, hawkishly. “so i’ve been told. you started on our patrol route your first day, i think,” and you gesture to joel, but you can’t look at him, knowing you’ll twitch too damningly in his direction.

“ah, yeah, yeah that’s right.” with a playfulness he continues, “of course, we’ve moved onto much harder routes now.” 

in the compendium of near-family you’ve concocted in jackson, noah serves as the spirited sort of brotherhood you imagine was normal decades ago. when you met, skittish and cut open as you were, noah found great joy in poking at you; your hardness grated against the easy youth he’s clung to, and you think he liked the challenge of it. as you melted more into the jackson scenery, though, became more earnestly open to friendship with him, he learned instead to lend you this ease, the sarcasm and good humor. there’s something lovely about taking it up when you speak to him, though it’s difficult now, what with the distraction at your side.

you cross your arms. “oh have you? you’re that good a teacher?” 

joel coughs next to you, nearly chokes, and you feel the gentle thrum again of a shared thought between you, of yesterday on his couch, of his thumb in your mouth, of the jam (oh fuck, that was meant to be tonight). noah pays no mind, a sweet thing but dull around the edges. “you know it, baby.”

with a squeak of his boots and a grunt under his breath, joel storms into the kitchen and out of sight. you and noah watch him go, your stomach leadened with his absence, and you pull a breath in to lighten the weight, but it’s no use. baby, baby, you know it’s baby that’s driven him away. you feel noah step a little closer to you.

“speaking of, how’s your patrol been? i can’t believe maria finally let you do it.”

you shift: joel, his hands, his voice, the man you killed for him. “they’ve been fine, i guess.”

noah bumps his shoulder into yours. “details, details! you spend every morning with the big bad wolf over there, i mean how does that feel?”

you tilt your head at him. “noah,” you scold.

he brushes off your tone, craning his neck to get a look at joel in the kitchen, continuing, “he seems fucking scary to me. doesn’t he scare you?”

you huff and shove him back, but he looks back at you like he really means it. you’re startled with the sudden urge to tell him the truth, blood and spit and all. it rises in your throat like bile, but you swallow it all back down. “no, not anymore. not…not really.” your voice is heady with the history you and joel have carved with lips and tongues, and you wonder how gory it would all become if you had indulged yourself fully, let the acid of your feelings spill out. as you think it, noah scans your face, looks through it, and you worry for a moment you’re caught, that the whole of it is spread plainly on your features, but tommy comes barreling out of the kitchen with food cradled in his arms, maria in tow, and you’re spared from any further investigation. tommy laughs out your name from the head of the table.

“jesus, i didn’t even see you come in, come sit down!”

you nod, give maria a smile, glance at the globe of her stomach. she’s glowing with it, hand along the curve of her tummy, and she does her best to smile back at you, as soft as she is capable of. noah pulls the remaining empty chair next to him out from the table and you sit, finding joel across from you, biting on his tongue and furious, quietly, desperately furious, looking between you and him. fuck.

like the love, joel’s fury fissures you in two. you are, most viscerally, delighted that joel should be so angry at noah’s arm around the back of your chair. he watches the space between you, daring it to close further, shoulders strung taut like you’re his to fuss over. your heart expands and knocks on your ribcage, arteries singing with the pleasure of it, and arousal pools between your thighs and sticks there.

toe to toe with this delight, though, contends your own boiling rage. how desperately his gaze claws at you serves as a reminder of the ways he denies you of him, of his cock and his tears and his lips on yours. you would gladly give him this, let him bark and snarl like a wild animal in some unhealthy possession of you, if he let you possess him back. but, as it is, the edge of his eyeline cuts you irreparably, marks you with an indictment of you as a lover and him as something less. it makes you fucking furious.

“ellie helps you a bunch in the garden, don’t she?”

you look up to tommy. you haven’t been listening. “hm?”

“ellie. i’m always seein her in the greenhouse.”

you nod, grin at the thought of her. “mhm. she’s been a real help, actually, and it’s nice to spend the time with her. i think a lot of the other kids are sort of afraid of her.”

joel’s eyes gleam over for a moment. he loves her, you know, and whatever rift exists between them has persisted. noah grips your shoulder and shakes it a little, and the shine dries on joel’s brown eyes.

“sounds like a bit of you.”

tommy barks out a laugh and you push noah’s hand away. “yeah, yeah.”

maria lays a hand on tommy’s bicep. “i think it’s good for her. she needs to get acclimated here. she’s not like the other kids.”

you all look to joel. he hasn’t said a thing since you all sat down, actually. he clears his throat, and the rasp of it goes down hard. “no, she ain’t.”

“from what i’ve heard she’s got a real sailors mouth, big brother. that your doin?”

joel’s face pulls into offense. “no.”

“well she musta learned it somewhere,” noah sings. so very sweet, so very dull. joel looks like he might skin him.

“she came like that.”

“came like that?” noah repeats.

this is so very off limits. tommy and maria give each other a look, and they glance across the table to share it with you. stop him, for the love of god. you turn to noah, plead quietly, “just drop it, noah.”

“what? i’m asking him about himself,” and then to tommy and maria, “i can’t ask him about his daughter?”

what began as a wholly good hearted attempt at conversation has morphed, you realize, into the same sort of bear poking noah used to do with you. he’s calling joel’s prickliness and raising him a teasing interrogation. but for all your similarities, joel is not like you now, he will not absorb it as you did. he stares, lethal and still, at noah, elbows on the table. 

“come on, we know nothing about the man. i want to hear your stories! give me something.”

joel scoffs and you ask again, “noah, please.”

“how am i doing anything wrong here?” his words devolve into childlike mumbles, unused to being denied this way. “i’m trying to make some fucking conversation.”

voice resigned from subtlety, all desperation, you call across the table, “maria, how’s your pregnancy coming along? tell us a long story about it.”

tommy snorts with your bluntness, but all three millers soften with a breath. maria rubs along her tummy, smiling down and speaking, but you go deaf to it as noah brings his arm all the way up, slinging it across the line of your shoulders. and you know, like all the other touches and like his antagonizing of joel, that he means nothing real by it. but joel takes the world in as meaningful: all of it, including noah. you can’t bear to look at him, but even still you burn with the steaming point of his gaze, frenetic and livid.

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

“joel, jesus, slow down,” you call out as you hurry after him. tommy and maria had let you all loose to the jackson twilight, and with a smiling salute noah pranced off home, brushed already of the dust he knocked loose from joel at the dinner table. but joel eats up the ground in front of him with large, pacing strides, muscles corded in the back of his neck. you want to ride him, punch him in the stomach.

“go home.”

you catch up to him, grip a hand on the sleeve of his coat. “i will not go home. i want you to have a conversation with me first.”

joel doesn’t stop, drags you with him through the front door of his house by the fabric of his jacket. the door slams behind you and as the sound rings out joel whips around, boxing you against the wood. he heaves, little hurricane in his chest, casting shadows on you, even in the dark. “i’m not in the mood for a conversation.”

“yes, sting, i gathered that, but you’re being a fucking asshole.”

he huffs and looks to the ceiling, praying, you think, for divine intervention, or perhaps a lightning bolt to set the house ablaze. he can’t look at you when he asks it. “have you fucked him before?”

“jesus christ, no!”

he laughs, a little insane and swinging like a church bell. “seemed damn cozy in there to me.”

“yes! i’m sure we did! he saved me from bleeding out in the middle of winter joel, i told you that.” he adjusts his stance and peers back down at you, looking almost sorry with the thought of you red and unmoving, but because your fury is insatiable you poke him in the chest, adding, “besides, what if i had? what’s it matter to you anyway?”

he grips your wrist, asks incredulously, “what’s it matter to me?”

“no really, why give a shit? i promise i’ll still let you stick your fucking ring finger into my–”

“not another fucking word.”

the diseased part of you laughs with the irony of this moment, at the anger and jealousy you’d hoped for in the dining hall this afternoon; it isn’t exactly what you’d pictured. you sag with that thought. “please, baby,” his grip on your wrist tightens when you call him that, “throw me a bone. you seem entirely disgraced by the fact that we do…what we do, god forbid anyone found out, you won’t even,” you push a quick breath from your nose, “you won’t even waste the fucking energy to fuck me, kiss me. so tell me, please, what is your problem with–”

“you wanna know my fuckin problem? you drive me fucking crazy. i am clinically fuckin insane, darlin, and it’s your fuckin fault. beggin me to fuck you, fuck your face, i mean jesus, the things you ask of me.” and then, mainly to himself, “i ain’t strong enough for this shit. the hands and the eyes and the,” he remembers you in front of him, faces you again, “and the looking, i mean what—shit—what kind of fuckin look is that? you look at me like–like–”

“like what?”

“like you love me. you look at me like you love me. do you know how fucked up that is darlin? and i’m doin my goddamn best to keep you at arms length and it’s damn near impossible but i knew that first time that i–” another heave, “that i’d fuck you again and i’d love you too. be in love with you. and i couldn’t be that selfish. how could you ask me to be that selfish?”

his fingers around your wrist have formed more into a desperate sort of hold, thumb reaching up into the cup of your palm. the weight of his admission presses through your diaphragm, that i’d love you too, but the rift in you, the love and the anger, is growing savage, and you lash with it. 

“i’ve never asked a fucking thing of you. i’ve wanted, jesus joel i’ve wanted, but i never asked you to go on this emotionally stifled quest to prove—prove what exactly? that you’re good? i mean, christ, we’re both awful!” you poke him hard in the chest. “you’re awful and i–i’m awful, and,” the momentum of your fury is slowing, you can feel it dragging its feet, “and you won’t let me get close to you. i’d let you in anywhere. and you won’t,” the loving is thawing from you, and like snow in your hands it drips into water and dirt, down your front, and you’re crying suddenly, caught up in the great tragedy of what you’re about to say. “you won’t let me do it, you won’t let me love you even a little bit. but i can’t help it.” you flatten your palms on his chest, gentle, nearly losing it at the hummingbird winged hum of his heart. “if you can’t do it, i’ll leave you alone. i promise you, sting, i will leave you alone, i won’t ask again, i won’t beg it of you. tell me you don’t feel it and i’ll go.”

he takes a stilted breath in and looks down at your fingers on his front, runs his rough hands up them slowly, feeling you here with him. “i–i…” 

you nod, tears hot and fat running lines down your cheeks, and move to pull away. you open his door behind you, facing him still, but he jerks something frantic and closes it again. his hands come up next to your head on the door, and the both of you are so silent you can hear the wood creak with the press of his palms. you wait.

it comes out with a great pain at first, a terrible ache you see in the grimace of his face, but it eases as it goes, eases as he tells you, “i love you, little wolf, i do, i do.”

and then there’s a moment of stillness, of unsureness. what do you do now? what does anyone do now? oh, but he loves you, he loves you, you have to write it on a wall somewhere, burn a forest and bottle the ashes, wreak some irrevocable havoc. he loves you. 

you drag a hand from his chest up to his face, and with a shudder he leans into the warmth of it, nods against the skin, affirming some wordless agreement, and leans down to press his lips to yours. and it’s been so long you can’t help the whimper that escapes you, squeaky and wet still with the damp residue of your tears, but he’s soft and hot against you, pulls his hands down around your waist and squeezes into your spine. you say his name against his lips and he nods again, presses harder, groaning when you pull the hair at the nape of his neck. you open your mouths to one another, hoping to suck each other’s souls out, you think, and he licks into your mouth with a moan. you’re still whimpering his name somehow, over and over, meaning nothing by it other than you like the taste of it along with his tongue, joel, joel, joel, and he replies with the heated moving of his hands along your body. 

joel grips under your ass, pulls you against his cock as he ruts you into the door, speaks gruffly against your lips, “tell me again.”

and you do, somewhere between your moans, “i love you, i love you,” and he seizes with the sound of it, ducking his head to suck marks into your neck. you hitch a leg over his hip and he takes it as an invitation, dragging his cock through his jeans again along you. 

with his face still in the crook of your neck and a muffled up he hoists you fully into his arms to take you up the stairs, and if you were more lucid you would notice you’re in the same spot you were months ago, the first and only other time he let you have him, but as it is you swirl your hips as best you can against him as he walks, biting the skin that beats with his jugular. you’re drunk on the scent of him, on the pressure of his body. he lays you down on his bed and leans over you with wild eyes as he drags the fabric of your shirt up. he mouths along the skin as he bares it, mumbling into your skin, “so pretty here, baby.”

you raise your back from the bed to pull your shirt and bra off fully and he groans, hands flying to grab at your tits, tracing a line between them with his nose. “and here.” you lift your hips and he pins them with his own, the heft of his cock dragging against your clit through your pants and you mewl with it. joel moves back up to your ear, still pulling at the flesh of your breasts and rolling your nipples between his fingers, to whisper, “i’m gonna take you slowly. can you do that, darlin?”

and no, you’re not sure you can, but you nod breathlessly anyway.

“good girl.”

that drives you fully to madness, you think, and you tilt your head back into his bed, writhing into a moan. he smiles into you as he moves his face back down, down, past your sternum, hands moving to pull at your jeans. “can i take these off?”

“yes, please.”

he nods and pulls them from you, and runs his hands back up your legs. you can feel your own dripping, the gusset of your panties soaked through with arousal, and his smile drops as he looks at it, a single finger coming to run down the fabric. you shudder, and so does he, you think, hand still on your thigh tightening as the pad of his finger wipes along the dampness. “fuck. this for me?”

you’re already nodding. “yes, yes, you, please, touch me, please.”

and with that joel is pulling them down your legs, leaving a trail of glistening slick where the fabric sticks to your flesh, and joel heaves you to the edge of his bed, kneeling with a grunt to the floor. you hum around a whine as he bites and licks up the insides of your thighs, his own moans reverberating back to you. his fingers, wrapped around the crease where your legs meet your torso, will leave bruises, you’re sure.

“joel,” you plead, but he doesn’t really hear it, heaving open mouthed around your cunt now, breathing you in.

with a long inhale he drops his forehead to your navel, squeezes you between his hands. “so good, baby, this pussy is so good.”

your eyes slip shut and you feel yourself pulse with his words. joel sees it, too, and finally, fucking finally, closes his plush lips around your clit, slurping and sucking as you all but scream into the space of his room.

“fuck joel, fuck, oh my god.”

“yeah?”

you thread your fingers through his curls and tug, and his groan makes your hole flutter. he circles his tongue around your little button, flattens it, flicks over it with the tip, and the drool of his own spit mixes with your slick as it slides from your hole to his sheets below you. you’re fucking aching now, so empty as he sucks around you, but before you can even plead for them, you feel his two fingers slip inside you, gliding in easy around the wetness he’s pulled from you and the slip of his saliva. he curls them, petting against someplace only he has ever reached, and you keen.

“that’s it, huh? there?” and it’s only halfway smug, all the rest earnest, and you pull harder on his hair. your nerve endings flare up and catch fire, his scissoring fingers within you, his taste buds on your clit, his sheets bunched at your head, it all tears at you with unbearable feeling, you feel with an intensity that blurs your vision. with the pulse around his knuckles, joel can feel how close you are, raising his lips from you with eyes hooded. “oh, you’re close, darlin, i fuckin feel it,” he rasps, and you nod again, delirious and mouth open, as he circles his thumb in the path of spit his tongue left. the noises you make would be humiliating in front of anyone else, you think, but his brows furrow with each of your blasphemous little whines, and so you let them claw out as he watches his fingers thrust in and out of you. “c’mon little wolf, let it go, let me have it.” and you do, you throw it at him, really, pulsing around his fingers and gushing down his hand, moaning wildly something that sounds like his name as he groans with the squelch of it.

he pulls his fingers away only as you relax, spine released and flat again on his bed. he drags his eyes up and down your body, spent but not yet satisfied, as he rids himself of his own clothes, and your pussy shudders with her own heartbeat again as you take him in. his cock reaches stiff between his legs, blushing and pearled with precome, and you lick your lips with finally, finally. he pumps himself once, twice, stalking towards you again, but you stand from the bed with shaky legs, sit him in the wet spot you made together. as you sink to your knees he curses and squeezes the base.

“jesus christ, baby.” but you only smile as you run your nose up the underside of his shaft, tentatively pressing the flat of your tongue along his head to collect what’s escaped him there. the salt and musk of it makes you whine and you fit your lips around him, laving along his skin and watching his hands bunch in the sheets. you smooth your lips down his head, lower, lower, and suck, cunt fully dripping again at the noises he makes. a broken version of your name leaves him as you start to bob your head, spinning your chin as you come up, letting your teeth graze the vein along the underside. 

“oh fuck, you—shit—your mouth is so fuckin good,” and he brings a hand, now, to collect your hair and wrap his fingers around it, anchoring himself more than you, “yeah, yeah, that’s it baby, fuck.” you moan into him and his hips twitch as it moves through his skin, and fuck you want him to fuck your throat. you bring your fingers up to move his other hand, clenched taut at his side, to your head, pushing it down to show him. his fingers tighten in your hair as he starts to move you on his own, pulling you into him as you gag and swallow around his head. “oh fuck, oh fuck,” he grunts, hips starting to rut up to meet your face, and your hand finds its way to your clit, rubbing in tight circles as he thrusts deeper, sputtering as he grits out, “fucking gag on it.” you hum, so gloriously pleased with yourself and the taste of him, feeling him twitch in your throat, but with one final drag of your tongue on him he pulls you off. you start to whine but he’s heaving you up by the elbows to straddle his lap, grabbing you by the jaw to bring your face to his. your tongues meet and circle, the both of you groaning at the taste of the other, and he drags his wet cock along your seam. you angle your hips so he catches on your opening and his hands tighten on your waist.

“you still want it, darlin?”

you almost laugh, maybe you do, nodding with your hands on his shoulders. “yes, yes, please.”

and when he pushes in it is not like last time. he’s slow, agonizingly so, as he lets you sink down, your forehead dropping to his as you groan in unison. you clench and throb when your thighs meet, fully seated, and he pulses inside of you, but he doesn’t move yet, brings a finger from your waist to between the wings of your shoulder blades. as you breathe together, chests meeting in full flex, he drags the pad of his finger down, your body open and seizing with feeling of him. 

“you like to touch me there,” you whisper.

joel nods. “it holds you up.” and something about it makes you wail. when his finger reaches the bottom, he bands his whole arm around your back, pulls you impossibly closer against his chest and moves his head next to yours, asks into your ear, “can i move now?”

you twitch as his breath fans over the side of your face, whispering back some sort of please, please, and he starts to thrust into you, slowly but deeply, so deeply that his tip kisses your cervix, and you both hold each other tighter as he drags back out.

“fuck, joel, so good.”

“yeah?”

“yeah.”

“you’re fuckin—ah—soakin me, baby.”

between the whispers in your ear joel takes your lobe into his mouth, biting and releasing, kissing the spot beneath it. your body tenses in his arms as his cock ruts in and out of you, still so slow and still so much, and his bicep around your back flexes to keep you in place. 

“what is it?”

“fuck me faster, please,” you whimper. you feel his little smile into your skin.

“you said you could take it slow.”

“and i—fuck—i’m trying.”

he groans, long and with the movement of his cock in you. “one more second like this, just like this.” you try to roll your hips again but his grip stills you. “you have no patience, do you?” you shake your head. without a word, he reaches up to push your elbows up and over his shoulders, and you wrap your arms down his back. he nods a little, whispers just like that into your skin, and you throb around him.

the slap of his skin on yours rings through the room as he speeds up, thrusts meeting you, and you scream like this is salvation (you think it might be). neither of you can control your noises now, not that there was much control to begin with, and joel grits out agonized moans into the arc of your ear. your nails scrape up and down the skin of his back as he pounds up into you, clawing marks and holding there. again you’re on his name, repeating it with a fever and a cry, joel, joel, joel.

“fuck, i fuckin love the sound of my name like that, baby. you sound like you’re mine.”

you do your best to nod, head bobbing at his shoulder, i am yours, i am yours, but still it’s only his name coming out. he fucks you harder, holds you harder, moves like a zealot into your softness. he brings a thumb to your clit, circles it tightly, eats up your noises with a gluttony that pulls you right there, right there. 

“i’m so close, joel,” you whimper.

“fuck, i know, i fuckin feel it. come on, darlin, come on my cock.”

again, you do, you do as he asks, pulled tight into him as you pulse and thrash, ecstasy washing over you.

“yeah, that’s—oh god—that’s it, that’s it,” he rasps, thrusts unrelenting, slapping against the wetness dripping between you. as the rigid pleasure runs through you and your body relaxes again, he picks you up, knees his way up the bed to place you down beneath him. you watch his face pull together as he forgets his plan for a moment, fucks you into the bed with a hand on the headboard, but he collects himself again and heaves you over by the crook of your knee so your stomach is to the mattress, keeping the head of his cock inside you. you hold yourself up by your knees and elbows, feel his hands spread down your back and around the globes of your ass before he picks up his pace again, hips meeting your ass in harsh bumps that make you scream into his pillows. the kick of him inside you is coaxing your body again towards orgasm, and you arch your back for him. 

“such a tight fuckin fit, ain’t it?” you whine in response, pushing your hips back against his. he pulls you up, back flush against his chest, spreads his knees a little to rut deeper up into you. with what sounds like waning sanity, he grits into your ear, “you make it fit for me, darlin, i know you do.” your bag arches off his chest as you go stiff, so startlingly close again. you’re defying your own anatomy now, gone from the confines of your body, submerged fully in a rapture that beads like sweat down your skin. “fuck me, you gonna come again?”

“yeah, yes, fuck” you heave.

he nods against your shoulder and slides the paw of his hand down your front to rub you, using the flat of his hand to press into your clit. “i’m gonna—oh fuck—you’re gonna make me come, where do you want it?”

and you know you shouldn’t, but you’re so fucking close, and you want it. “inside, joel, please.”

his thrusts are stumbling now, losing rhythm. “yeah? you want me to fill you up? fuck,” and he laughs breathlessly, “tha’s how we’ll tell everyone, i’ll fuck you full of my fuckin baby.”

the both of you vibrate with that notion, buzzing together, barely human anymore, and suddenly you’re falling into climax, a third and quick and jolted one, pulling him with you as you clench and flutter, and the pump of his warmth inside of you feels like the most wonderfully selfish thing you’ve ever done. and as his cock softens inside you, a mix of your come sliding out, he’s really just holding you, wrapped up in his arms on his bed. he kisses you in the silence, up the line of your shoulder and to your ear. “stay here, baby,” and he pulls out as you lie all the way down, wipes you both with a rag before climbing up behind you and cradling you in the crook of his body. 

night has fallen fully now, but the moonlight peers through his window and marks the wall ahead of you. joel’s hands are warm as they run up your sides, draws his name on your hip. you smile.

“sting.”

J–O–E–L. “hm?”

“will you tell me again?”

he stretches out his fingers and leans his head over yours. you turn to meet his face. and you think it hurts him, still, to say it, but he does, forehead creased with sincerity and a will to tell you anyway. “i love you, little wolf.”

“i love you, too.”

joel thinks a moment. “are you…” you sit up a little to see him fully, and even in the darkness you can see the flush of red around his ears. “do you still want me to show you how to make the jam?”

oh god, he is so tender for such a violent thing. “mhm,” you hum, but turn all the way over to situate yourself into his chest. through the hair spattered there, you add, “later.”

his thumb finds your spine again, traces it like he’s done before. in his arms here, you can admit that this, now, is your greatest achievement, the closest you’ve ever been to sacred. the puffs of his breath on the top of your head, the slowing of your heartbeats as you both drift towards sleep, yes, this is holy, a sanctified thing, the loveliest thing you’ve ever grown.

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

aaah !! i can't believe this story has come to a somewhat-end !! i can't thank you all enough for the support on it. as my first fic it was fucking terrifying to put out, but i'm so glad i did 🍓🤍🤍

taglist: @koshkaj-blog @limerence4u @shotgun-shelby @5oh5 (let me know if you wanna be added or removed !!)

[dramavixen]

Love and Redemption: A Fantasy Epic About How Prejudice Destroys Worlds, and How Love Pieces Them Back Together

**major spoilers for: Love and Redemption

After wrapping up a watch-through of Mysterious Lotus Casebook, my mom had the brilliant idea that we should rewatch the work that launched Cheng Yi to fame (or at the very least solidified him as the man to hire if you need someone to spit blood): Love and Redemption. 

I’m certain she only found this idea appealing because she doesn’t remember a TV show after it’s over. Credits rolling? Aight, time for the woman to clear up space on her brain’s memory drive. Meanwhile, my life flashed before my eyes as I recalled the anguish that’s synonymous with the show’s plot. But you know how things go when your mom wants something. If she says you're sitting through 44 hours of emotional torture with her, then you plant yourself on that couch until it’s over.

Ironically, Love and Redemption fares even better on rewatch. Though other xianxias have come close to its place in my heart, I’m now concerned that my palate won’t be so easily satiated again. It’s got your conventional reincarnation, warring realms, and a star-crossed romance while throwing curveball after curveball to shatter your expectations. Complex characters, too? An endgame villain who will haunt you in your sleep? You can’t ask for more. 

Just because you didn’t ask, doesn’t mean that the show won’t deliver something extra. I like to think that nothing reflects a society’s unsightly reality like a well-done fantasy, and this one hits closer to home the more time that passes. A thinly veiled commentary on human flaws and how difficult it is to be a good person, Love and Redemption is a drama for the ages.

This is going to get lengthy, so to prepare you, here’s how I’m divvying up this piece:

Part I: All of Them Are Classist

Part II: All of Them Are Sexist

Part III: All of Them Are Racist

Part IV: Love Wins All

---

Part I: All of Them Are Classist

It’s not my intention to disgust anyone right out of the gate, but we need to talk about Wu Tong. Do you hear what I hear? Yes, it’s the distant echo of Wu Tong’s nefarious laughter, resounding between the walls of my skull.

Quite simply, Wu Tong is the worst. (Or at least he would be, if it weren’t for that other fellow named Bai Lin. That dude will get a glaring spotlight later in this essay, trust me.) But it’s not for no reason.

Coming from a background of poverty, Wu Tong spends most of his young life trying to prove himself to upper class cultivators who don’t have any interest in who he is, only in what he has to offer them. He earns his place in his sect through relentless hard work. He utilizes unsportsmanlike methods in his attempts to win the battle tournament in opening episodes. It's not just a competition to him—he's directly told that if he gets anything other than first place, he can forget about keeping his place in his sect.

When he and the protagonists first meet, his prideful personality results from his inferiority complex. There’s no doubt that he’s a powerful cultivator, but the issue is how he finds that to be his only real value. He doesn't bother to be likable, because what's the point in doing that? Being likable doesn't fill an empty stomach. But the more he disrespects others in an effort to make himself appear important, the more others look down on him, and the more he overcompensates by fighting back even more. It’s a vicious cycle—one that never ends because no one involved wants to take the first step back.

Knowing what type of person he becomes, it’s hard to pity him in any capacity. However, it would still be unfair to ignore how others mistreat him before he even turns into a true enemy.

One scene that sticks out to me happens early on, where Wu Tong nearly injures Xuanji during a 1v1 battle against Minyan. The protagonist crew insists on getting payback. Okay, I’m with it. You can’t let such reckless violence slide. I guess they’ll get their revenge in a later stage of the tournament by beating him into the ground? 

Nah. That would be too reasonable. What they actually opt for is tricking him to fall into a trap by putting up a “have you seen my lost snake?” poster with a financial reward, knowing that he’ll be fooled because…he’s poor.

Sifeng: I asked around. Wu Tong was born to a family of lower status. He lives frugally. The reason he trains so hard is because he hopes to become someone powerful one day. […] Now he needs the money urgently to buy medicine and recuperate his inner strength before his next battle. Minyan: When you put it that way, doesn’t that mean he has no choice but to come for the ten night pearls?

Sifeng…oh no. Not you too.

The way Wu Tong behaves doesn’t warrant anyone being amicable toward him. I, too, have a nonexistent tolerance for obnoxious, violent egoists. But if later episodes are any evidence, this scene foreshadows that two wrongs won’t make a right. If they want to teach him a lesson, they shouldn’t stoop so low as to take advantage of his poverty. His family background is the one thing about him that isn’t his fault, yet it’s the one thing they choose to use against him. That’s what I call “going too far.”

Now that he's been hit where it hurts, Wu Tong feels justified in going too far himself. In a fit of desperation and contempt prompted by his master abandoning him, he stabs Xuanji. Not great. Things get extremely not great when you remember that Xuanji is the daughter of a sect leader. That quickly transforms Wu Tong’s attempted murder/almost manslaughter into the evilest act known to mankind. All five sects turn against him to hunt him down and kill him. I��m no law or philosophy expert, but I’m pretty sure the punishment for almost manslaughter is not the death penalty. 

The five sects can treat him as their prey because he doesn’t have a support system to counter them. If he were the son of another sect leader, the thought of killing him would never even have entered their minds. Targeting him so relentlessly has less to do with justice and more to do with exerting power over a lower-class young man who hurt someone infinitely more “important” than him. 

That imbalance between crime and punishment is what pushes Wu Tong over the edge. He goes on the run for several years before officially succumbing to the call of evil, after which he becomes truly irredeemable. Still, you’re occasionally reminded of his struggle—is he destined to be a villain? Or is throwing aside his remaining morality just his best chance at survival? 

Do you have any idea how I survived these past several years, when you were all trying to kill me? What did I do back then that was so unforgivable? Did your sister die? Was it warranted for all five sects to team up against me, an average disciple? Was it warranted to back me into a corner over and over again, to force me to claw out of hell? Open your eyes and look at me! These past four years, I’ve already died countless times. Every time, I clawed my way back out of hell. Five hundred taels? You want to take my life with a measly five hundred taels? Don’t look down on me. Touch here. I have a fake leg. That’s what your five sects have left me with. What’s that look of yours? Guilt? Pity? I’m not telling you this for you to pity me. I, Wu Tong, survived this far because I must have my revenge.

Something my mom likes to say is if you find yourself going against someone—but especially a dangerous person—you must leave a path for their survival. It’s less for their sake than it is for yours. Should you eliminate all their options, they’ll have no choice but to bite. And they’ll make sure it hurts like hell. 

As an impetuous teenager, Wu Tong is in the wrong. He needs to be taught that his actions are unacceptable. But that can’t be accomplished by putting a bounty on his head and demanding that he be murdered. That’s how you turn a scoundrel into a monster.

Minyan, Wu Tong’s foil, similarly doesn’t come from an optimal background. An orphan, he was taken in by the Shaoyang Sect without the obvious pressure that Wu Tong suffers. Even so, he can’t escape the innate inequality that seems to exist between him and his fellow disciples. It especially affects him because he’s in love with Linglong, Xuanji’s sister but more importantly…also the daughter of the sect leader! Poor guy.

When I was little, kids in the village would surround me every day and call me a bastard child with no parents. I could only pretend that I didn’t hear them. Because if I took it to heart, they would only ridicule me more. We can’t shut the mouths of people who want to slander us. But we can choose not to listen.

He may think that he’s past it, but later episodes see Minyan being manipulated using that exact insecurity. It’s easy to impersonate his master and nudge him to become a “spy” in the enemy base because he’s compelled to prove himself worthy of the sect and worthy of Linglong. Fake Sect Leader Chu Lei tells him:

When I first met you, you were only eight years old. You were homeless on the streets, starving and shivering. Still, you clung to your family dagger and refused to pawn it. In that moment, I knew that you were a child with an iron will. That’s why I’m here to find you today.

I can agree that Minyan is really stupid to immediately believe that his master, a guy well-known for pretending to do important things more than he actually does them, would tell him to do something as reckless as invade enemy territory. However, he also heeds the impostor’s instructions because realistically, his master asking him to prove himself is something that could happen. Any good disciple would naturally want to repay their masters for their favor, let alone a disciple who would otherwise have nowhere else to go.

The contrast between Minyan and Wu Tong shoves itself in your face as you watch, primarily through their respective relationships with Linglong (well, one of them has a relationship. The other is a creep. Can you guess who’s who?). Without family backing, the two men both struggle to find their place in the world, but they’re complete opposites purely because of their upbringing. Thankfully for Minyan, he found a family amongst people who don’t treat him as “another,” even if he may think of himself as such.

Wu Tong isn’t so fortunate. You can say it’s his own doing, a result of his terrible personality, but he certainly wasn’t born like that. And now someone will pay for it.

---

Part II: All of Them Are Sexist

As a caveat, I’ll mention that the main cast really could have used a woman who isn’t some combination of foolish, lovestruck, and/or loud. But I’m willing to overlook it just this once because the writers excel in highlighting both the ladies' flaws and how we as an audience exaggerate those flaws through our own preconceptions. 

Working backwards in terms of plot importance, we can start with Xiao Yinhua. Sifeng’s snake familiar in a human form, Xiao Yinhua is like most female leads from the turn of the millennium in that her only real strength is throwing temper tantrums. She’s also like most second female leads from the turn of the millennium in that she constantly prefers using underhanded tactics and harming others to achieve her goals—in other words, a snake. Oh. I guess that makes sense.

Her affections toward Sifeng cloud her already nonexistent judgment and prompt her to make some of the worst decisions made by anyone, ever. At first, I thought I was being unfair toward her because of my own internalized misogyny. But no. I can say with absolute confidence that I would abhor this character no matter what gender or creature or object she may be. She has no redeeming qualities aside from teaching us that someone foolish, lovestruck, and loud is doomed to self-sabotage. From that perspective, she’s still a valuable character to have because now we know that before we act, we should think: would Xiao Yinhua do that thing? If she would, do not do that thing. 

If Xiao Yinhua were willing to grow up, she could become more similar to Zi Hu. Zi Hu almost acts as a parallel to Sifeng—hopelessly in love with someone who doesn’t return the affection for a literal thousand years. Also, both are very pretty. Ahem.

Zi Hu’s thousand years’ worth of experience gives her the skills to back up her unrelenting feelings for Wu Zhiqi. She’s a rarity in that her driving force is a man—a motivation that's typically a reputation ruiner for female characters—but you find her lovable instead of thinking that she lacks self-respect. The key is that her love isn’t blind and rash like Xiao Yinhua’s. Zi Hu has a plan to save Wu Zhiqi from his prison and she carries it out with intention. In other words, it’s okay to focus on love, but only if you can take responsibility for your feelings. 

Ting Nu: Why go so far? When did Wu Zhiqi ever tell you that he loved you? Your affections are merely one-sided. Zi Hu: When did he tell me he didn’t love me? Look, once I rescue him, he’ll have to be with me to thank me. 

Because Zi Hu is a literal fox, people suspect her both for being a demon and for being the demon notorious for seducing men to consume their souls. The latter is quickly debunked and becomes less of an issue than her just being a plain demon. I nonetheless find it hilarious how everyone balks when she shows them her harem of men gleefully living in her backyard. Yep, she’s a cunning vixen. You can just keep wishing you could join that harem.

Zi Hu: You're trying to shoo me away. You think I’ll storm out because of your petty tricks? You’re underestimating me. I’ve already decided, starting today, I’m going to follow you everywhere. Even if you don’t want me to, I’m going to cling to you. This old spirit isn’t going to let those thousand years of waiting be in vain. Wherever you go, I’m going with. If you dare sneak peeks at other pretty women, I’ll dig out your monkey eyes. All in all, if I’m around, no pretty woman can enter your vision. As if you could bear to leave me behind if I hang around for another thousand years!

Xiao Yinhua and Zi Hu aren’t overly victimized based on their gender within the show itself. For the better too, because whoever dares to do so would probably end up dead by a fox's claws and a snake's teeth. These two characters' existences test your innate view of female characters instead. What is it that matters to you in a female character? What standards do you hold against them?

(**Content warning for the below segment until the next purple break: brief mentions of sexual assault and suicide.)

And that's where we come to Linglong. Linglong is a loudmouthed spoiled brat. She's overbearing, and while she wants to protect Xuanji, her method of doing it is by crying crocodile tears and throwing temper tantrums in front of their father. No wonder she and Xiao Yinhua clash—two childish people who both have a compulsion to win arguments? Forget it.

A bulk of the drama sees Linglong’s primordial spirit being taken and held captive by Wu Tong. Wu Tong puts half of her primordial spirit into the body of a flower demon, whom he also forces to take on Linglong’s physical appearance. No other reason, he just wants to have his way with someone who looks and acts like Linglong, the person who jeered at him all those years ago. By the time the real Linglong recovers her primordial spirit, Wu Tong has done enough damage that she’s haunted by nightmares and memories of someone who assaulted her when she couldn't even fight back.

The lead-up to this arc is incredibly disturbing and takes root in the very first episode. On my first watch-through, I thought their relationship would take a classic enemies-to-lovers path. The directors and writers pull you in this direction with no subtlety, showing a smitten Wu Tong when he first lays eyes on Linglong. They then keep the scam going by having him act out in awful ways as he attempts to gain her attention. That’s right, it’s the brainwashing girls receive when they’re on the playground: “he pulls your hair because he likes you."

During their first meeting, Linglong is surrounded by a halo filter from Wu Tong’s perspective. Knowing what he’ll later do to her makes the seeming innocuousness of this scene revolting, but it's necessary. It's the first of many steps to prove that someone’s “affections” can’t be used as an excuse for harming whomever’s on the receiving end of them. 

Linglong can be an extremely annoying person. Her outspokenness and difficult temper shape her into an unlikable character, which then ensures that by the time Wu Tong captures her, the audience almost instinctively wants to say that it’s her fault. We all know the talk track: “he liked her, so why couldn’t she just have been nicer to him? She asked for it by being mean to him.”

When Linglong first offends Wu Tong, it isn’t for no reason: she’s angry because he endangers her sister’s life over and over again. Admittedly, she goes overboard in her retaliation against him. So what? Linglong being mean to Wu Tong and Wu Tong later targeting her are indeed connected events, but the former doesn't justify the latter. If we say that the five sects hunting Wu Tong down isn’t a fair punishment, then isn’t it also unfair for him to turn the tables on her in such a way? 

Essentially, Linglong isn’t the “ideal” victim. That’s what makes her arc all the more heartbreaking. To this day, society wants to find any excuses for the assailant. Any mistake, any flaw of the victim's will be used against her. As humans, maybe it’s instinct for us to hope that bad things only happen to bad people, and victim-blaming is our twisted way of making that an impossible reality. 

Overcome with depression and trauma, Linglong is unable to come to terms with what Wu Tong did to her. Men gossip about her and her “relationship” with the enemy, sometimes harassing her straight to her face. Wu Tong himself finds great delight in taunting her about her “sharing his bed,” not only relishing the memories but also enjoying how much it torments her.

Linglong: It was my fault that I was captured by Wu Tong, wasn’t it? [...] Everyone thinks so. I didn’t want to be captured by Wu Tong. But after Wu Tong said all those things, everyone thinks so. Minyan: Linglong, why care about what everyone else thinks? Just pretend that you didn’t hear any of it. Linglong: But I did hear them. Why do I need to pretend I didn’t? It’s something that actually happened, so why do I need to play dumb and trick myself into thinking it didn’t? Are you going to be like them too, and mock me?

All the accusations brainwash her into thinking everything is her fault. To Wu Tong and all the people judging her, she’s nothing but a pawn to be used for their own entertainment. And once she and Minyan leave the protection of the sect, everyone finds her an easy target to push around. Hoping that her death will mean freedom for both herself and her loved ones, she attempts to drown herself before being yanked back to life and reality by Minyan.

Linglong’s struggle is many women’s worst nightmare. It’s also a diligent representation of PTSD, something that I normally wouldn’t expect from a xianxia drama. Even after she's rescued and everyone tells her that her suffering is over, it never feels over for her. At night, Lingling is awoken by harrowing dreams of Wu Tong returning to kidnap her once again:

Nightmare!Wu Tong: You’ll always belong to me. You can’t escape.

The conclusion to her arc being Wu Tong’s death and his literal letting go of her may be quite idealistic. But I prefer to think that giving Linglong her happy ending is the writers’ way of trying to assuage our fears, of showing us that there will always be another sunrise regardless of what happens.

(**Content warning end.)

Linglong becomes the drama’s strongest woman-centric plot, and I really love that the writers did it with a character whose personality isn't the most appealing. She's the imperfect woman we can find in every corner of the world, a representation of women overall instead of the minority who are considered "deserving" of justice.

Next to her, Xuanji also gets a short end of the stick. She's constantly being pushed to marry Hao Chen. Every excuse in the book is used against her: they're a fated couple, he's the only one that can take care of her, doesn't she agree that this is a part of her duty? No matter how logically she objects to it, no one really cares what she thinks. If she objects, she’s being headstrong, and that’s the end of it. (More on Xuanji to come in Part IV of this essay.)

And aside from Bai Lin’s more obvious transgressions (we're getting to those), what really irked me is just how twisted he makes the God of War’s rebellion appear in others’ eyes. The logic turns quickly from “Bai Lin must have done something wrong” into “the God of War must have been in love with Bai Lin and grew resentful that he rejected her.” I guess it’s very believable that the God of War would want to destroy the entire universe because some guy wouldn’t date her? That’s right, you can be the most accomplished woman in your field and someone will still want to attribute everything you do to being motivated by romance.

Naturally, the next question is—why is Bai Lin such a weirdo? Why does he insist on turning his friend Luohou Jidu, a man, into a woman when creating the God of War? Hmm. I smell a waft of homophobia...

---

Part III: All of Them Are Racist

And except for a small minority, I really mean "all of them" this time. Humans and celestial beings are racist toward demons. Demons are racist back toward humans and celestial beings. If you asked both sides who started it, they'd point at the other without hesitation. "They started it. By existing."

I don’t even know where to start with this topic. Part of me believes this entire section of analysis could be extraneous—do I really need to do a deep dive when you could just click a random timestamp of a random episode and have a 50% chance of finding a character saying something incredibly racist? No case studies necessary. The drama is the case study.

Obviously, while I may say that all the different races are racist toward one another, some are notably more egregious in their discrimination than others. The five sects, being in power, are the worst offenders. Every other second, someone is reminding another that they need to wipe out demons. Just the utterance of the word “demon” makes them froth at the mouth. In their possession, they have treasure troves of weapons and magical devices whose collective main purpose is to identify and kill demons. Perhaps you know someone in real life who thinks that hating something is a personality trait—that’s the five sects in a nutshell.

Zi Hu and Ting Nu are continuously snubbed for not being human even after they’ve long proven that they’re more help than harm. Ting Nu is a doctor, but even saving Hao Chen doesn’t make them think of him as anything but a demon who is evil in his very bones. Demons can do everything right, but the high and mighty humans are too pure and innocent to associate with them…aside from killing and torturing them, of course.

Highlighted Exhibit A: Sifeng almost being tortured and whipped to death based on the mere suspicion that he’s a demon. The fact that he is one doesn’t matter. His assailants operate on the doctrine that they’d rather kill an innocent person than let a demon roam free. Every action to rid the world of a demon is a virtuous one. It's a reenactment of the Monty Python witch trial but they're being completely serious. 

Highlighted Exhibit B: the other sects band together to wipe out Lize Palace without solid confirmation as to whether they’re all demons. They’re operating on the same principle as in Exhibit A, so at least you can praise them for being consistent.

Highlighted Exhibit C: before Sifeng is revealed to be a pretty bird, Xuanji’s repeated defense of him consists of "Sifeng isn’t a demon." The main purpose of these lines is to instill further fear into Sifeng and give him more reason to keep lying to her, all while Xuanji's trust in him deepens. But is it also some of her lingering innate judgment seeping through? A subconscious understanding that her family and sect will never accept a demon as her boyfriend? Well, joke’s on them because he’s one hot bird.

So how are you supposed to survive as a demon? Lize Palace results from the humans’ desire to eradicate an entire race of demons. Just as Wu Tong is driven only by revenge, the demons of Lize Palace just need to survive for long enough to one day remove their masks and live as themselves. Humans’ endless thirst for blood does nothing but fuel demons’ fire of rebellion and keep the wheel of tragedy turning.

As for the “bad guys” of Tianxu Hall? At least when they commit the same acts of evil as the other five sects, they’re willing to admit that being evil isn’t beyond them.

Yuan Lang is an extremely successful villain for this very reason. All of us love Yuan Lang, so much that we start grinning whenever he comes on-screen with his fan and sarcastic mouth. So much that when it's revealed he's been consuming people's souls, all my mom had to say about it was: “Oh. That's mean of him.”

He plots and he lies and he murders, but he doesn’t put up a facade of holding himself to a lofty moral standard. It’s also quite telling that while Yuan Lang machinates behind the scenes, 90% of his time is spent standing by and calling others out on their bullshit. Everyone around him creates their own downfall. He just happens to benefit from their stupidity.

Man with a fan and a plan. I like. 

Even so, Yuan Lang isn’t invulnerable to emotion. One of my absolute favorite scenes is where Di Lang sacrifices himself so Yuan Lang can make a getaway. It’s the only instance of Yuan Lang being subject to the pain of caring about someone else. Those short moments contrast so starkly against the sects’ inhumanity that suddenly, a revolution doesn’t seem all that bad.

Behind the bulky mask, his despair is apparent. Man. This actor’s come a long way since his F4—I mean, H4 days. If you've never watched Let's Go Watch Meteor Shower Together, don't.

Finally, we arrive on the topic of Bai Lin. Oh, boy. I still haven’t watched Blood of Youth because seeing the actor’s face triggers my fight-or-flight response. And it’s been years.

Bai Lin, the one racist to rule them all. The guy must have a handbook on “How to Be Racist” or something—how else could the contempt that spews from his mouth, the spark of repugnance in his eyes, and the brazen obstinacy in his opinions be so immaculate?

The entire drama consists of setting the stage for the full reveal of Bai Lin turning Luohou Jidu into a weapon of war to be used against his own people. By the time all the pieces fall into place, you’ve already witnessed the tragedy created by discriminatory practices between mortals. You've seen how Sifeng is targeted and Xuanji forced to move her hand against him. You've seen how the sects use their power to harm instead of help. You've seen how demons plot their revenge for centuries. Once Bai Lin is confirmed to be the genesis of all that, there’s nothing left for you to feel but utter revulsion.

Bai Lin: Celestial beings and demons cannot coexist. How could my Heavenly Realm possibly hold a marriage with the Devil Tribe? Luohou Jidu: Celestial beings and demons cannot coexist...Then why do you drink with me today? Why are you friends with me? Bai Lin: Naturally, Brother Jidu, you’re different from other demons and devils. Out of all the demons and devils in this world, Brother Jidu is my only friend.

Can’t believe he even pulls the "you’re one of the good ones" card.

Bai Lin, practitioner of unethical tactics: his ultimate decision to trick and use Luohou Jidu results from racism-induced paranoia. He simply can’t believe that his friend will remain his friend, not unless he becomes "one of us." He thinks the God of War should appreciate that he's given her power and invested his time and energy in her tenth reincarnation, going so far as fool her into thinking that they loved each other once upon a time. Once Xuanji shows herself capable of independent thought, he doesn’t hesitate in turning against her and manipulating her to destroy her own self. He eventually sacrifices the entire world for the Heavenly Realm's survival. After all, what's the value of an entire planet's human and demon population in the face of his power?

He's the representation of what happens when those in power, those who have the best chance of righting wrongs and preventing more from happening, decide to perpetuate the problem. At the same time, he presents the predicament that those we rely on to give us justice are also victims of their own emotions and fears.

I venture to say that Bai Lin is the best-written antagonist in modern xianxia. He’s ruthless but has a moral compass, albeit one that only points in one direction—toward himself. His hubris aside, you have to admit that he genuinely believes he's acting for the greater good. The ends justify the means because he thinks he’s bettering the world.

Bai Lin makes awful decisions that involve genocide and cruelty because he operates on a strict utilitarian philosophy. "I do what I think will bring the best results, even if it means sacrificing something huge in the process." He’s the most dangerous character and the person we should also fear in real life because he’ll stop at nothing to create his definition of a paradise.

It would be easy to dismiss him as simply being a bad person. However, this show draws from reality in that every person exists in a gray area between good and bad. You can lean one way or the other, but you don’t fall completely into either. And that’s the foundation of the show's conflicts. Everyone's so busy trying to define what’s right and wrong that they’ve lost sight of basic compassion.

When he’s finally faced with the consequences of his actions, Bai Lin is driven to despair. He feels true remorse over what he’s done, but only because he’s fortunate enough to actually witness how the thousand-year conflict wouldn't have existed without him. We as people aren’t so lucky—those “what if”s will forever remain in the shrouded realm of impossibility.

Heavenly Emperor: You always thought that evil had sparked in the hearts of the God of War and Luohou Jidu. But the one in whom evil truly sparked was you. All things and happenings in this world are originally empty. From emptiness comes meaning. Yin and yang reverse; they support and restrain one another. The Heavenly Realm was originally empty. The Asura, too, was empty. If all is empty, then how could the Heavenly Realm be superior; and the Mortal Realm, Demon Realm, and Devil Realm be inferior? Your excessive concern for the safety of the Heavenly Realm prompted evil to take root in your heart, unable to be undone.

Seeing him in such despair almost makes me feel bad for him. Maybe I do have too much sympathy.

At this point, it's already too late to repair the damage he's caused, a realization that causes him further anguish. He rids himself of his divinity to show his remorse and accepts death. But he's already caused so much pain to everyone else. Who can put back together the world that he's destroyed?

---

Part IV: Love Wins All

(We love IU for her perfect song that also gave me the best possible final section title.)

As I seek to be conscious of my own biases, I once wondered: why is it that shaking my head at a female character for being dedicated to a man comes so naturally to me, but I can’t be more gleeful to see Sifeng put his heart out on a platter for Xuanji? Perhaps I’m also sexist. Perhaps I have double standards.

Then I thought about it some more and realized everyone loves Sifeng because he’s so blatantly unrealistic that you’re immediately able to sink yourself into his fictional beauty. He transcends gender norms because there is no person of any gender who would go to the extent that he does for Xuanji, nor is there anyone who could remain as levelheaded when faced with some of the most shameless people known to mankind. Forget all the people flying on swords and uttering magic spells. The biggest absurdity in Love and Redemption is its male lead. Yes, I'm a skeptic. But we're so lucky to have him.

Sifeng grew up in a bizarrely backwards environment where—instead of girls needing to cover up to not attract men’s attention—all men need to protect themselves by wearing masks and not associating with the opposite sex. Brainwashed for years to believe that Lize Palace is the only safe space for golden fire birds like himself, he keeps cautious around people while still harboring a subconscious longing for their warmth.

In my entire life, I never knew what a "friend" is. I finally understand now, the meaning of "fervent friendship."

Sifeng is established as the loyal lover extremely quickly. He's whipped—figuratively and literally—for Xuanji, his sheltered childhood leaving him defenseless against her unintentionally flirtatious mannerisms. He teaches her about her lost senses without judgment, nurtures limitless patience with her and others by proxy, and isn't afraid to question the status quo.

We love Sifeng for his wisdom and levelheadedness. He sees things for what they are and is commonly the voice of empathy and reason within a world of selfishness. The entire show is Sifeng going, "I might as well do it myself" in every situation because no one else cares, is capable enough, or both. He's the guy in group projects who quietly does everything and doesn't even get mad that you're the most useless team member ever. What a saint.

In the xianxia universe, he's distinct husband material (which isn’t saying much since the bar there is so low that you'd need to dig yourself a grave to reach it—which is also great because then you already have a place to go once your xianxia spouse gets you killed. I digress). His loyalty to not only others, but also who he is and what he wants, leaves him able to counter the complacency with hatred and evil permeating the world around him.

With his endless empathy, he's able to understand Luohou Jidu. While Sifeng's earliest motivation in facing the greatest devil is only to save Xuanji, he later views Luohou Jidu as an individual with his own sufferings. He's the only one to truly view Luohou Jidu as himself, not someone to eliminate, not just an extension of Xuanji. To Sifeng, everyone deserves a chance to be heard before a verdict is passed over them.

Not to mention, these two’s interactions are absolutely hilarious. I wish I could've seen the extensive conversations that must’ve went on in the censorship agency over them. 

Fellas, is it gay to clasp a guy’s hands within your own and stare deeply into his eyes while reminiscing about your loving relationship if he’s technically got a woman captive in his brain? 

But perhaps what shines the brightest about Sifeng is how he suffers. He's so pretty when he suffers. Wait. That's not my point.

When his Lovers’ Curse triggers for the first time, Xiao Yinhua speaks the gospel that a lot of the audience probably has in mind: "you did so much for her, you were so good to her, but she doesn’t love you back." And it sounds kind of right? But also kind of not? Then Sifeng opens his mouth and you think, "oh, crap, I've been brainwashed by misogyny yet again."

She never asked me to like her. If someone wants to kill another just because she doesn’t reciprocate their feelings, then that person will never be loved. They also don’t deserve to love another.

Again and again, Sifeng puts himself in harm's way to keep loving Xuanji. Sure, he wants her to love him back, but that's secondary to his desire to be honest with his own feelings.

With the bright beacon of light that is Sifeng’s blinding love, I feel most viewers overlook Xuanji’s capabilities as a female lead. Her comparative passiveness in the relationship makes it seem as if she doesn’t love him enough. I attribute this to the same reason as our previous conclusions, that female characters in romance dramas have a harder time garnering the audience’s approval than their male counterparts. Are we innately more judgmental toward women, or is the standard for men still so low that we’re already impressed when a guy surpasses the bare minimum? Probably both.

It's easy to forget that Xuanji is the one who's nice to Sifeng first. When they first meet, Xuanji literally falls into his arms. Then he just…drops her. (And they say chivalry is dead.) But Xuanji doesn’t care.

The rules of his sect push Sifeng into being a bit of a porcupine in his demeanor. He puts up a wall against everyone, but especially Xuanji. After all, as an innocent boy, Sifeng needs to protect himself from evil women. Or something.

Xuanji is the one who can't take the hint tries to befriend him and tears down his wall with the gentle, graceful nature of a sledgehammer. She insists that she'll retrieve his lost mask because she knows it's important to him. When she discovers that Sifeng is punished over it, Xuanji is the one to point out how unfair it is. Her straightforwardness and sense of principle are the reason Sifeng begins to open up at all.

Xuanji: I’m the one who took off his mask. If you want to hit someone, hit me. [...] Not to mention, he almost died trying to get his mask back. So I'd like to ask you, Palace Leader, is Sifeng's life more important, or is that mask more important?

She knows no fear, so she doesn't consider emotionless rules to be worth anything if they cause pain for the people she cares about. In many ways, Xuanji is the one who teaches Sifeng to stand up for what he believes in.

That Xuanji lacks her six senses makes her the least susceptible to the prejudicial habits of her surroundings. She accepts what they believe, that demons are bad, but only because that's all she knows. Whereas most of her peers are content remaining in their ignorance, this supposedly heartless gal is curious about the world. She can easily abandon her preconceptions in favor of what she witnesses the world to be.

It takes constant practice and tests for Xuanji to completely shed her old beliefs. The introduction of Zi Hu marks the beginning of her growth. Xuanji, concerned and angry that Zi Hu is holding her friends captive, fully intends on killing the fox until Ting Nu reasons with her:

Ting Nu: Zi Hu isn’t a malicious demon. You shouldn’t threaten her life. Xuanji: But she kidnapped my friends. How can I spare her? [...] No. She did bad things, so I have to kill her. Ting Nu: [...] Zi Hu has never actually harmed anybody. She’s simply misguided by her anxieties. You should spare her life. […] If you discover that she’s actually committing malicious acts, you could kill her then, no?

If it were Minyan or Linglong in her position, you could bet that they'd ignore Ting Nu. For one, he's a merman, so of course he'd protect another demon. To Xuanji's credit, she really does give Zi Hu—and Ting Nu—the benefit of the doubt. Does she have to? No. But she does anyway.

If Sifeng’s love comes naturally, then Xuanji’s comes through determination. Who's to say that one is inherently better than the other? It takes ten lifetimes for her to understand a semblance of love. She wants dearly to understand what it means to "like" someone, even though she's already the least unafraid to show how much she cares about others.

After she successfully grows the heart light for Sifeng, I don't think anyone is more excited than Xuanji herself. Look how proud she is. Obviously, she's happy she can use it to protect him, but I imagine that she also views it as the clearest proof that she’s as human as anybody else and as capable of loving as anyone else. Sifeng may be stunned when the heart light disappears, but Xuanji falls despondent—she really wants Sifeng to be someone important to her.

People sometimes struggle to see past Xuanji’s initial naivety. They're especially harsh toward her for not seeing what Sifeng has sacrificed for her until it’s almost too late. It's true, the drama primarily favors Sifeng's perspective, so it's easy to only see what he’s done and ignore Xuanji’s efforts.

In spite of warnings from Sifeng himself to not do so, Xuanji emerges to save him from the third lash of the demon whip. You go, girl.

Love isn’t a competition. But for the sake of the discussion, let's say proof is needed that Xuanji’s effort in the relationship matches Sifeng’s. In that case, the important part is looking at what they sacrifice in a relative scope instead of an absolute one.

The things that Sifeng sacrifices are astronomical. He climbs a tower blustering with an eternal blizzard and puts on the Lovers' Curse mask. He stands right in the middle of the conflict between humans and demons even though there’s no way humans will spare him. He gets stabbed…a lot. But everything he does is a result of his own will and careful calculations—they’re all things he knows he can take responsibility for.

Sifeng's major flaw is that he's a massive liar. He's not right to lie, but he's also right to be scared about what would happen if he doesn't. As a demon, he knows what happens to anyone who isn't distinctly human. That's why he conceals his identity from Xuanji.

Then, once he discovers that Xuanji is also the reincarnation of the Star of Mosha, his fear is ignited again for her sake. Xuanji has almost always been defined by what she is, not who. She's berated for being useless when she doesn’t have her six senses. The moment she’s revealed to have the God of War's power, suddenly everyone finds her more than useful. If she's publicly revealed to be the Star of Mosha, then she'd be killed without question, and the person that is “Xuanji” will also cease to exist. Just as he doesn’t want Xuanji to view him and as anything other than himself, Sifeng doesn't want anyone else to view Xuanji as anyone other than herself. That's also why out of everyone, the one person he must keep the Star of Mosha secret from is Xuanji herself.

When Sifeng's lies begin to unfold, Xuanji is left to handle the mess he's inadvertently created. Suddenly discovering that he's a demon and also protective of the demon that possibly murdered her mother, Xuanji is torn. Her wavering faith in him isn't because of his identity, but because he lied to her.

Zi Hu: Do you dislike it that much, that [Sifeng] is a demon? Xuanji: Should I not? Zi Hu: Well, you healed my wounds. And you’re friends with me and Ting Nu, a merman. As for little Sifeng, he’s not a malicious demon who harms people. I don’t think he was aware of what went on with Tianxu Hall and Lize Palace. Xuanji: That’s different! He shouldn’t have lied to me. He’s the person I trust the most. But he even kept from me who he is. Then, all the things he told me and did with me in the past…what part of it all was real and what was fake? Zi Hu: What’s real and what’s fake? Can’t you just drag him over here and ask him? If he’s a scumbag, just kill him. But if there’s any misunderstandings, the two of you should clear them up. Resolve them and see what solutions there are. When two people are together, the scariest thing is misunderstanding one another for no reason. If you lose each other, that might be the end, forever. You’d regret that. 

And then she eventually does try to kill him. Good going, Zi Hu.

Xuanji's main conflict in the latter half of the drama is that she wants to find a solution that satisfies everyone, an impossible dilemma. Everyone starts pressuring her to lead the charge against the demons. It's her duty as the God of War, isn't it? Oh, but if she doesn't want to, it's because she's in love with the enemy. But she can't be in love with the enemy. She's the God of War, after all.

That’s the duplicitous world that Xuanji lives in. Yet, without knowing why he's been dishonest or what else he could be lying about, she still chooses to believe in Sifeng—even if it means being treated as a traitor herself and being further guilt-tripped. She's bound to her duty, family, and the expectations that come along with that. Going against them in any capacity is a challenge to her entire livelihood and the moral standards imposed on her. If you take that into account, suddenly the things that she risks don’t pale in comparison what Sifeng does for her.

As an omniscient audience, it's easy for us to say that she doesn't do enough, that she should know better. It's an interesting thought experiment to wonder what else she could do in such a situation. Her boyfriend lies to her. She believes he has a reason, believes in him when he tells her to trust him. She defends him repeatedly to people who don't even care to listen unless it's to interrupt and call her crazy. She lies to her father that she'll devote herself to killing demons like Sifeng so they'll stop calling her crazy and threatening her. Then, when she goes to rescue Sifeng from Mingxia Cave, he's suddenly getting passive-aggressive with her: “oh, what does the mighty God of War need from a lowly demon like me that she deigns to talk to me?” Bro…if I were her, I might just ditch him in a fit of rage. That's how you want to play? Have fun turning into frozen poultry in this cave, then.

Obviously, more is going on behind the scenes that Xuanji is completely unaware of. Sifeng almost dies from her fire magic that Hao Chen stole. The broken hairpin. And okay, I'll admit that her saying that she'll kill him while he's eavesdropping outside is not a great look. But come on, Sifeng. Where have your critical thinking skills gone? If you can lie, don’t you think Xuanji can too? And after all that, she still instinctively shields him from her father’s sword.

Sifeng. In this case, I do have to criticize you in a serious manner. Do you have any idea how hard it was for Xuanji to finally try to get herself stabbed for you, only for you to go “no, me” and get stabbed again? Do you have a sword-magnet in your chest?

Then Sifeng tells her that he’s never loved her and was only using her because he’s Luohou Jidu, the world's biggest villain. And she still can't bear to hurt him. When Xuanji discovers that Hao Chen has tricked her into using a so-called “Purifying Vase” to doom Sifeng to a painful death, she's furious:

Xuanji: For my own good? You want me to practice the Method of Love, but you also want me to be heartless. I can’t be so contradictory. Hao Chen: I told you to practice the Method of Love through feelings between you and me, not for you to continuously absorb yourself in your fixation on Sifeng! Xuanji, don’t forget. Our marriage is one determined by the heavens. It’s destiny. Xuanji: The heavens determine nothing. If they do, then why did they make Sifeng and I meet in our past nine lives? What a joke of the heavens. Hao Chen: So, you’d rather resign yourself to your doomed fate with that demon than stay properly by my side? Xuanji: Fate isn’t split into a virtuous or doomed one. I hate myself for loving Sifeng before, and we won’t ever be together again. But since I already gave him my love, I won’t take it back.

But of course, Hao Chen has more tricks up his Mary Poppins sleeves. He pulls out all the stops and uses his last breath to manipulate her into stabbing Sifeng. Oh my god. Look at all these trust issues, just making themselves readily available.

Her stabbing him is, how do you say, very bad. But let’s be honest, she’s seen him survive worse. I don't have a nifty conclusion is here, but basically, she subconsciously knows he'll get over it (physically, at least).

Of course, Sifeng is heartbroken. It's intensified by the tragic fate of his father. His father’s goal was always to protect Sifeng from the dangers posed by the racist five sects, led primarily by fabricated memories that his lover Hao Feng was driven to suicide by her own family. When Yuan Lang reveals the truth, that Hao Feng's fear of demons trumped her love for her husband, it’s intense foreshadowing of Sifeng and Xuanji’s relationship. Maybe Xuanji isn't like Hao Feng and she can cross the rift between humans and demons, meeting Sifeng in the middle. But finally, she still retreats, away from him. Her betrayal, now the tenth in all their lifetimes, leads Sifeng to leave behind some of the most truthful but hurtful words for Xuanji to deal with:

I finally understand why my fate turned out as it did in all my past nine lives. From beginning to end, you have always been a heartless person.

It’s not fair to ask Sifeng to keep considering Xuanji’s feelings under the brunt of her violent wrath. But just as she has no idea what he’s been doing to protect her, he has no idea what she’s been doing to protect him. Zi Hu is right again: nothing poses a greater danger to a couple than misunderstandings. And racism.

The ultimate resolution only occurs once Xuanji recovers the memories of their past lives. Congratulations, Sifeng. After a millennium of pining, your love has finally touched the heart of your beloved. Indeed, it might take a long time getting there, but love will find a way.

I love the short scenes that show the God of War and Xi Xuan's quiet but gentle relationship. Xi Xuan is the only one who cares that the God of War wants her own identity, then gives her a moment in which she doesn't have to wear her armor, just as Sifeng does everything in his power to let Xuanji be "Xuanji." Through all their lives, Sifeng is the one who recognizes her for who she is and wants to make her happy, even if she doesn't have a heart.

Activate: Xuanji, shameless mode. After Xuanji tracks down Sifeng in his solitude, they return to their days as teenagers. Xuanji acts like a fool in front of him, demanding his attention, and Sifeng only wants to get her the hell out of his house. It's not only a reminder of the times when things were a lot simpler, but also of how far they've come.

She intends on marrying Sifeng. Even if her father doesn't approve, she no longer cares. There's not enough time left in the world to hesitate about the people you love to satiate someone who can't be satisfied. Just as Sifeng upends his whole life for her, she's willing to do the same.

And as Sifeng is dying, Xuanji makes the ultimate decision to become the Star of Mosha. This isn't a reckless move done just to save him. Rather, her faith in Sifeng has strengthened into steel after all they've been through. Even if the world ends, she knows that a little bird with unshakable resolve will come get her. For two people who have spent most of their time as a pair of parallel lines, never to coincide, this is their point of intersection—a challenge that they'll face together, even if they're apart.

Sifeng: Xuanji, stop! I'd rather die than watch you become a devil for me! Xuanji: Sifeng, I can't consider all that now. I have to save you! Whether I be the Star of Mosha or the God of War, I don't care. I just need you to be okay. Sifeng. If I become Luohou Jidu, you absolutely can't forget me. Remember to bring me back! I cry during this scene. Then I immediately start laughing at Sifeng's gobsmacked expression once Luohou Jidu shows up. It just reads "but...my girlfriend..."

And Xuanji's right. Sifeng is the solution. No one else can save Luohou Jidu, the God of War, and the world by extension. Luohou Jidu's pain results from being betrayed purely because of his identity as a devil, but Sifeng becomes the confidante that Bai Lin pretended to be. The God of War's pain comes from having no self-identity, but Xi Xuan gives her the ability to seek one and accompanies her for a thousand years to help her find it. The suffering that Bai Lin set into motion would lead to a ceaseless cycle of revenge and a destruction of the world’s good due to its sins, but Sifeng alone convinces Luohou Jidu and the God of War that there's something in life worth keeping. But you have to fight for it, and persistently, because good things only come to those who are willing to chase after them.

Xuanji to Bai Lin: I won’t mess with someone else’s life so simply due to my own matters, even if that person is someone as despicable as you. Sifeng once said that using hate to obtain vengeance is an endless cycle. In this life, I already have something that matters more to me than that. I have no space to keep my hatred.

I know it can sound cheesy to say that the best revenge is living a happy life. But Love and Redemption can convert even the most insistent of cynics—me, for example. People will practice evil whether or not there’s a reason for it and whether or not those consequences will ripple out into a tsunami that will engulf the world. Only true, honest love can hope to settle the uneasy sea. It’s why Zi Hu gives Wu Zhiqi something to live for other than war. It’s why Linglong and Minyan have a reason to persist alongside one another. It's why Luohou Jidu gives his heart and life to Sifeng. It’s why Sifeng is able to save Xuanji. It's why the three realms are blessed with the chance to keep finding a reason to persist.

Sifeng and Xuanji’s story is a journey of overcoming all odds; of learning to love someone unconditionally not because it’s easy, but because you want to; of letting that love grow into a ray of hope in the world. Yes, if we let it, love wins all.

Sifeng: Your heart has become one of flesh and blood. It couldn’t bear to destroy the three realms. Because…it’s a heart that I held and warmed in my hands, bit by bit.

[little-annie]

✏️ WIP Wednesday

Because why not add another couple to the pile.

●Metalhead!Steve 4+1

Only within recent weeks has the thrill of thievery become something of Steve Harrington's liking. There’s no need for it of course. Sure his allowance recently got cut down to nothing, and his mother has been keeping a closer eye on the change in her purse, but his fathers credit card is always within easy reach. The cash flow in the Harrington home knows no bounds and, if Steve skims a little off the top it's not like it's going to hurt anyone.

There’s no need to steal, but there’s a want. A need for the rush, for the thrill. For the blood boiling desire of pursuing shelves and sliding his next cassette into his jacket sleeve with just the single slip of the finger. He's done it enough times now to have amassed a decent size collection. Ozzy, Sabbath, Anthrax, Dio, Motorhead, Zeppelin, John Denver.

● Camping Au/ No S4

“Munson? Really?” Steve sighs down the phone line, thunking his head against the wall near the jack and wincing when the action causes a small bloom of pain in his skull. He doesn't even hear Dustin's continued nattering as he sings the praises of one Eddie Munson. Hawkins Freak, known metalhead, presumed satanist and assumed ga-

“Steve, come on!” Dustin interrupts his train of thought and truthfully for the better, he doesn't need to let his mind wander there, or the other scrawlings of the man's assumed nefarious activities on the bathroom stalls. He rubs his now ringing ear as Dustin continues, “He's a good guy. You'll like him, you just have to give him a chance.”

A chance. 

“A chance?” Steve eventually answers. “Is that what you call spending a week in the woods together?” The only entertainment of which being the gremlins and the constant hijinks they seem to ensue. Which yeah, he loves the kids, he'd put his life on the line for them, has many times in fact but… But camping? With the entire monster hunting squad, minus the adults, plus Munson? And apparently company? Some cheerleader Dustin said, you'll know her, Steve, Dustin said.

What's Munson doing hanging around with a cheerleader anyway?

He sighs again. Loud and long, thunking his head against the wall until blackness blooms in his eyes. “Fine. Fine! Sure whatever.” 

Here's to a week of whatever the fuck this trip is going to be.

“Shit yeah!” 

Before Steve can berate the kid for his language, the dial tone of a deadline rings in his ear.

What has he gotten himself into?