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yeyinde · 7 months ago

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STRAW HOUSE, STRAW DOG

Baby Trap + Soap x Fem!Reader : or, Johnny finds a wife in the woods and decides to take her home.

18+ | DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT: noncon, kidnapping, breeding/baby trapping. somnophilia. implied stalking. obsessive behaviour. forced reliance/dependency. non-con drug use (implied). vulnerable character (injured reader) being preyed upon by an opportunistic scavenger.

Somehow, getting hurt in the remote wilderness of Nahanni National Park without any immediate rescue is the least of your worries when a rugged man shows up and claims he's going to help. Out here, you've been told your biggest fear should be bears, steep canyons, and a swift death with fangs and claws.

But maybe you should have been more concerned about strange men with crowlike smiles and blistering eyes.

ADDITIONAL TAGS: descriptions of injury. implied head trauma. bearded Soap. smut. this is my love letter to NWT and a what not to do in a national park.

BABY TRAP MASTER LIST | AO3 LINK

It happens in an instant.

The trek up the fjord narrows suddenly. Chossy growing slick from rainfall the night prior. You pace yourself, stepping carefully on the wobbling slate, testing its resilience before you take another step. Climbing higher. Higher.

There's a storm brewing in the distance. Its burgeoning pace grows rapidly, nipping at your heels as cool winds whistle through the steep valley below.

The park wardens at the visitors centre warned you about it when you set out into the rugged wilderness of Nahanni this morning. Brows pinched, wary, when you'd come to them—all alone—and signed your name on the barren ledger collecting dust on the counter. A fact that drew your attention when you flipped through the empty pages.

Don't get too many visitors around here, the man murmured, eyes cresting in apprehension at your question. Not the most isolated or remote, no. That's probably higher up. Quttinirpaaq, maybe? Heard from some buddies up there that they had no visitors last year. We do pretty well. About one thousand a year? Usually filmmakers and the like. Adventurous types. Gets kinda lonely up here. Ain't no Banff, that's for sure.

They added that the weather was unpredictable this time of year. All year, really. Nahanni is known for sudden swells and white-outs, for weather that can turn in an instant, going from calm to cataclysmic within seconds.

(“Storms,” the man huffs, and you think the sigh was meant to be a laugh. One that falls flat when he takes in your hiking boots (too big, but the sales lady at the sporting goods warehouse assured you it was fine, that you would grow into them), and your cheap Lululemon knock-off tights. Your flimsy rucksack. The tinge of green around your ears; the stench of an overeager novice. “And, uh, it’s urban legends.”)

Valley of the Headless Men, he intones, squinting up at you when you ask about them. Adding: be careful out there when you turn to leave.

Dauntless, you still set out into the park, determined to at least make it to your campground before it set in. But the majesty surrounding you on all sides distracted you from your pace. Eyes caught on the Xanadu of an untempered wilderness slowing your trek to a crawl as you took in the steep, rolling batholiths reaching high into the aether, their sides sloping down in a dizzying, vertiginous drop to a lush valley below of scheele’s green below. It all looked so perfectly symmetrical from the high point in the valley where you stood, breathing in the scents that perfumed the air. With the rugged mountains cupped around a winding white line where the river sawed through.

A lone moose grazed at the bottom of a rolling fell. The sight of her stopping you in your tracks long enough that the plume of darkened clouds—all a terrifying burnt sage—had time to catch up to you, crackling overhead as thunder rumbled through the canyons.

Your campground is at the top of this ravine. Three nights spent inside a cabin with nothing but yourself and several paperbacks for company. Into the Wild amongst them—a morbid parting gift from a friend on what not to do—and its inspirational predecessor, On the Road.

You won't read it. You never do. But it sits, a humourous paperweight, in your rucksack as you clamber up the ravine. An anchoring comfort. A piece of home. Something that reminds you you're not completely alone even though you are.

The book, your friends, and the encroaching loneliness that you feel prickling behind your eyes, all weigh on your mind. Spooling out before you in loose, loop threads. You follow them eagerly, glad for something to abate the unnatural silence, and—

A sound.

It comes from the left, hidden in the thick tangle of furze. A click. It shatters through the eerie quiet of the sprawling boscage. An animal, maybe. Hopefully.

It must be, you think, heart hammering thunderously in your chest. There's a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. You hold your breath. Eyes glued on the thatch of green shrubs lining the base of the dense forest.

Nothing happens. You blink, shifting on your feet—

A red line pierces through the gap between the leaves, aimed straight at your ankle. It's thin, diaphanous. Slips over the scraggy rock like liquid.

It's so out of place here that it takes you a second to familiarise yourself with its unexpected presence. A laser—

An explosive boom fills the ravine the moment the thought connects. A rifle. Aimed right at you. It happens fast. The world turning over itself, spinning right off its axis. You fall against the ledge in a crumpled, heavy heap, legs so close to dangling off the precipice.

Gravity is a choking weight on your sternum, pushing you down, down, toward the jagged, rocky shoreline. A fall like that—

You curl into yourself instinctively.

“Ah, shite—” is all you hear amid the roar in your ears. “Y’alright? ah didnae see ye thare—”

In your tear-stained periphery, a man appears. He stands into the glare of the waning sun, limned in a halo of gold. There's a pinch between his dark, thick brows. A steep ravine. He's ragged. Wild. Tuffs of black hair hang loose past his ears and nape, curling slightly at the ends. It blends, almost seamlessly, into his thick, scraggly beard. He pushes a hand through the top, grabbing a fistful in his palm.

“Easn't expecting anybody oot 'ere. Nae this far intae th' woods.”

He seems to be speaking to himself more so than he's talking to you. There's anger writ in the fine lines of his face, but this ire isn't turned toward you. It's inward. Self-admonishment. His eyes darken when they flicker down to your ankle, as if reminding you of the hurt there when you'd been so focused on how out of place his accent is in the Northwest Territories.

The ache in your ankle brings you crashing back into reality. The pain seems to vibrate from within your marrow, riveting up your bones.

You chance a glance—

You swallow down the drum of panic. A trick of the light. It must be.

A dream. A nightmare.

But the man appears. His hand falls onto your knee, holding you steady.

“Ah will hae tae put oan a tourniquet. Will hurt a lot, doe.”

Absently, you nod. Keep nodding. Can't stop.

There's a hole cut through your ankle. Tore thro' yer Achilles, he's saying, words water in your ears. He instructs you to wiggle your toes.

"Ah know it hurts, but just dae it fer me, okay?"

You do. You—

Nausea buds in your guts, churning your stomach. The apple you ate earlier is choked out into the bushes dotting along the ravine. Insides purging themselves, replacing everything—food, water, coffee from earlier, bile—until nothing but shaky panic remains. It tastes like iron in the back of your throat.

“Ah know, doe,” he's saying, fingers knotting into your slick hiking trousers. Lululemon knockoffs from an outdoor warehouse in the city. A pocket knife follows, and cuts a seamless line inches below your hip.

Sad tae see ‘em go, he murmurs, accent thickening around the words. Saturating them in a drawl that's too liquid for your unpractised ears to catch. He makes a mournful sound when he slides the blade down your leg, adds, “hugged yer arse like a dream, doe.”

Another trick. The mountains do funny things to sound, you know. It must be all in your head. All—

“Don't worry,” he's shushing you now as he peels the fabric off your legs, groaning low in his throat. “Ah have ye. Ah will take care o'ye, tae, doe. Bonny thing, aren't ye? a' alone. Nae anymore, doe. Jus' me 'n' ye now. Jus' us —”

You always thought you'd have your wits about you in a traumatic situation. Be able to think clearly, rationally. Make appropriate decisions that befit the situation unfolding. Life saving ones. Practical.

To gear up for this trip, you watched survival videos on YouTube. How to make a fire. How to make drinking water. How to build a shelter. Tips on weathering down for a sudden storm. Tucked it all inside your head, and thought, I got this.

Had to, really, because everything you've read about Nahanni says it's unpredictable. Calm weather, gorgeous views one moment, and then a sudden deluge the next. Snow falling quicker than you keep up with. Animals blend in seamlessly with the landscape. Slips, falls. It's so easy to get lost, someone wrote.

But as he uses the scrap of your trousers to wrap around the wound on your broken, mangled ankle, you realise all that planning was for nothing. This was one of those moments when you discovered just how much you bit off. That panic made you mute, made you freeze up.

The pain is almost secondary to the surge of adrenaline. Fear.

You need to go home. You tell him this, slowly. Muttered through numb lips.

There's something almost like pity in his eyes when he glances up at you.

There was a mix-up, he says, slowly. Cautiously. You got yourself turned around in the opposite direction. There's no campground on the fjord above. All the lodges and cabins are in the opposite direction.

Y'got lost, he tells you. Turned the wrong way out. Ye'r in th' backcountry.

“I'll go back,” you press, urgent. Insistent. Panic is acidic in your throat. Corrosive. It burns when you swallow. “Please, just tell me which way to go, and I’ll—”

"Cannae dae tha'."

“Why?”

“Storm,” he points in the distance where a plume of cloud gathers. So dark, they're almost black. Ominous. “Gonnae skelp solid. Na choice but tae git oot."

“I don't have anywhere to go—”

He rakes his hand through his hair. “Ah kin take ye tae mines. Git a cabin in th' woods. Juist ootdoors o' Nahanni Butte.”

“No, I—”

His hand squeezes tight around your ankle. The pain makes itself known in a visceral, awful throb that travels up your leg, curdling at the base of your spine. Wrong, wrong. Something is wrong. Your body is trying to reject the agony. The breaking of your bone. It's foreign, it doesn't belong. But there's nowhere for it to go.

Pain pulses in tandem with your heartbeat.

You don't realise you're screaming until you hear the echoes of it rebound against the limestone walls. And then there's a whisper in your ear. You feel the scratch of his beard against your cheek.

"Shush, bonnie. Cannae let ye go oot oan yer own. Gonnae take ye home, yeah?"

Home. Home. You nod furiously, and it's only when the scraggly black curls covering his chin and jaw catch on damp skin do you realise you're crying.

He leans away from you, arm stretching toward the rucksack behind him.

The rifle leans against it. You feel sick all over again.

“Drink this,” he says, unscrewing the cap. “It'll make ye feel better.”

He presses the lip to your mouth, a hand slipping over the back of your head, tilting your chin up. “Drink,” he says again, and it's firmer this time. A command. “Ah promise ye'll feel better, doe.”

It tastes bitter. You swallow it down. Keep swallowing.

“Good,” he rasps, hand sliding down the length of your spine until it rests against your lower back. “Keep drinkin’, sweet thing.”

It pools in your belly, sloshing uncomfortably when you move, but it washes the bitterness from between your teeth. You keep drinking. Swallowing it down. You know you shouldn't, that you might get sick again, but it's a distraction from the mess that is your ankle—bloody, twisted, mangled—

Nausea swells. You choke it down until you can breathe without feeling as though you were going to be sick again.

“You'll be okay,” he's saying, moving around you with a practised efficiency for something so broad. It's almost graceful. Agile.

He patches you up as much as he can with the supplies he has, but you refuse to look again at your ankle. It's broken, that much is clear. You can feel your bones grinding, sliding against each other. The sensation is horrific. Wrong. You turn your head to the ledge you were standing on just to distract yourself from the agony of it all.

You're surprised you're not crying. Screaming. The urge is there, just beneath the surface. But for some odd, unfathomable reason you find you can't. Your chest feels heavy. Lungs sluggish. Slow.

It must be an adrenaline crash, you think. Why else would you feel so tired, so exhausted.

“I'm—” you start, but you feel dizzy. “‘m—”

“Shush, doe.” He mutters, and it sounds far away. Garbled. “You need yer rest. Had a traumatic accident. But don't worry. Ye can trust me. A wouldnae let anythin' ill happen tae ye ever again."

“Yeah,” you breathe, nodding. Nodding. You can't stop, can't—

“Lay back. Git some rest. A'm almost done, 'n' then ah will hae ye back home in no time—”

You come to on a groggy whimper, head buried in the messy locks curtained over his nape. There's a soft, pulsing thud in the back of your head when you try to lift it up. It feels heavier than it should. Leadened. You groan again, fighting against the currents dragging you back down to those soporific depths—

Your head is a slurried marsh. Thoughts ephemeral, broken. Fragmented. They slip through your fingers when you reach for them, diaphanous wisps you can't seem to catch.

“Don't worry, doe—” your world quivers when he speaks. Words vibrating through your chest, catching on the heavy rails of your ribs. The seismic vibrations rumble in your ear, coming to life as a mere echo in your head. “Ah will keep ye safe.”

It's comforting. A raft in squall, something to cling to as the waves make futile attempts to drag you under. Your arms, dangling loosely over his shoulders, sluggishly flatten to his chest, linking over his chest.

He grunts at your touch, palms slick on your skin.

“Thank you,” you slur, words thick in your throat. Sluggish. “Thank you for helpin’ me. Fer savin’ me—”

Your body shakes when he trembles. With your forehead against his nape, you hear his thick swallow. The air ghosting out of his lungs in a soundless whisper.

His hands flex around the backs of your knees. Squeezing tight. The man doesn't say anything for a moment. In the silence, the pursuing somnolence catches up to you. It digs heavy fingers into your eyes, dragging you back down into the sticky, thick tar.

Sleep finds you in an instant.

You try to read his words in the quiver of your bones when he speaks. Make sense of the tremble reverberating through the hollow gaps, tangling in the pulpy mess.

But there's a mistranslation somewhere. A missing decibel. A forgotten wavelength.

It almost sounds like he says—

“Wouldn't leave mah wife alone in th' woods like tha’.”

How funny, you think, and hide a giggle into the hardened ridge of his shoulder blade.

Cognisance is a transient flicker.

You're not sure how long he matches through the thicket with you on his back, navigating the unending chaparral with an ease that feels innate rather than practised. You stare down at the ground, world hazy around the edges, and think, suddenly, intrusively, that you ought to remember the steps. Every left, every right.

You get to seven lefts, three rights—a small ravine, a flattened coppice; a gnarled spruce sat alone in a valley of lush green and clumps of topaz podzol—before your eyes are too heavy to keep open. They slip shut. And you think, only for a moment. Just a second, I just need to rest my eyes, and then come to at the sound of a groggy engine growling to life.

The world morphs from a dense forest intercut with sheer cliffs looming, indomitable, in the grey distance, to the faded beige felt covering the ceiling of an old truck.

Your blink is a slow crawl, lashes weighed down by anchors dredging over the seafloor. Gritty, raw. It hurts, now, to hold them open. A furious throb jabs at your temple. It aches like a bruise. But it's nothing compared to the nauseating agony that floods your core each time your foot is jostled. Nerves being lit aflame in an endless throe of pain unlike you'd ever experienced before.

Your mouth feels sealed when you go to speak. Lips glued together. Sluggishly, you squeeze your tongue through the crack between your teeth, licking along the seam.

A plastic bottle appears in your periphery, nozzle tipped toward your mouth. A hand curls around the body of it. Fingers overlapping. It looks small in this big hand. Tiny. Long wisps of black hair cover their ruddy knuckles, spreading in a dense crop up their forearm, growing thicker at the wrist.

Their skin is pale, tinged slightly pink. Even through the brume, the lambent light of the sun catches on their skin. Illuminating small scars, cuts. Little scratches from the snagging furze.

Their hand shakes. The dark veins that branch off from the white-capped peaks of their bent knuckles pulse under the thin skin when they move.

“Drink, hen,” he murmurs, bringing the bottle to the jut of your lower lip. “Ye’ll need it.”

A plastic bottle is an odd choice to bring into the backcountry, but as you peer through the translucent skin, you find the water inside is cloudy. Chalky.

“Donnae worry—” he gives the bottle another shake, disturbing the sediment congealing at the bottom. “It's electrolytes, ken. Nothing fishy.”

Your teeth ache from the cold when he slips the rim between your lips, prying them apart. With your head already tilted back in the seat, the water slips in. A slow trickle. He feeds it to you, humming in appeasement when you swallow.

“Tha’s a good girl.”

It carves a jagged tunnel through the murk in your head. The praise slipping in, liquid, until it coats your burgeoning trepidation in a sudden swell of endorphins. With their unpractised, gauche hands, they paint a mockery of Sargent in the gaps of your synapses, stuffing the spaces between with oversaturated hues of teal, white, yellow, orange, and pink.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

But despite the shoddily crafted pastiche, it works.

Your eyes flutter, bones growing heavier, heavier, as they're forced to carry the weight of your liquified flesh. This molten heat in your chest turns your insides into putty.

Water dribbles down your chin. He sees it and coos.

“Ah, doe. Right mess ye are now. Ah will hae ye home in no time. Git ye a' cleaned up."

The idea of home melts you further. You sigh in the seat, soft and drawn out, and shake your head slowly when he wriggles the bottle in front of you again.

“Get some rest, doe,” his hand falls, heavy and warm, on your thigh. Thumb stroking along the curve of your leg, fingers curling into the seam, digging deep. Resting there.

It's too high to be appropriate. You know this. Went through lesson upon lesson in school of bad touches and what's considered friendly, polite. But when you try to open your mouth to say something about it, you catch the spread of his palm over your flesh. Wide, broad. Masculine. It catches in your throat, and gets tangled in the mush at the base.

It should be fine, you think, dizzy over the way his hand swallows you whole. He saved you, after all.

But it burrows. Digs deep. Some sense of wrongness permeates out from the firm grasp he has on you. It feels possessive. The sort of thing you might expect between people who are intimate with each other. A couple. You've known him for—

Hours, maybe?

Most of it was spent in a pain-induced hypnagogia.

It curdles in your stomach. Rotten, spoiled milk.

But—

He saved you.

You'll choke yourself on it if you keep thinking about it. So, you don't. You push it down. Cover it beneath the sediment, and bury it deep.

He's just a man.

Kind. Helpful.

As you dig a hole for this unease, he keeps his hand fixed on your thigh. The other is pressed against the steering wheel, the ball of his palm under the curve at the top of the wheel. Relaxed. Easy. You try to adopt his nonchalant disposition and glance out at the blurry world around you.

You feel exhausted. Unsettled. The sort of fatigue that comes with a raging fever. There's sand in your mouth. Your throat is dry.

You don't ask for water.

In the lull, he pitches the truck forward with a grave rumble. The silence is broken by the crunch of vegetation and gravel beneath the wheels as he ploughs forward.

There are public roads to get to Nahanni. The floatplane you entered into the park on was chartered by Parks Canada. And yet—

He commandeers the truck around a flatbed of rock and dirt. Muskeg dots the tops in some places, and he veers expertly to avoid them.

It's less of a traditional road and more so a forged desire path. You know the highway has to be close by, the link between Fort Liard and Fort Simpson, but as you peer out the window, the world around you looks overgrown. Wild. Alien.

Sloping hills in lush green stretch out into the distance, meeting with the dense montane forests dotted along the stretch of land. The grassy coppice under his wheels is matted down, and interspersed with clumps of brown, wet muskeg and crushed slate.

Over the grey peaks of the mountains in the distance, a thick, black cloud looms. The sky turns gunmetal, almost indistinguishable from the monoliths jutting beneath them.

At some points, he takes his hand off your thigh to navigate winding turns better, but it always ends up back on you. And always a little higher than it was before.

Your mouth is filled with lead. Tongue thick, malleable. Tensile like mercury. You can't speak. So you just ignore it. Dig your crown into the headrest, and breathe in the woodsy scent of him. Laurel, tree moss. Coumarin. Rotting pine. Sweet acacia. It tickles the back of your throat. Sticks there, glued in the syrupy mess.

You'd hoped it would get easier to ignore, but it stays there, a constant weight, even as the world outside fades into a hazy twilight.

In the hush of the cabin, he squeezes your thigh. “Cannae wait tae get ye home, doe.”

Against the staggering backdrop of a black, jagged mountain, a doe stands in the talus. Her fawn fur and tuffs of white spots stick out against the charcoal-coloured cliffs, and you watch, some distance away, as she bends down to fossick through the scree in search of food.

With the looming clouds of gunmetal and ash gathering around the craggy peaks, her presence here feels dangerously out of place. Jarring. She shouldn't be here. She doesn't belong.

But the beauty of this moment is breathtaking. Mesmerising. You stare in muted horror, awe, as she grazes in the rubble, slender neck bent in a graceful arch. The sloping handle of fine china. Her wet, black eyes are so open, so kind. Puddles of ignorance, naïvety, as she flicks her tongue out against the desolate rock, a fruitless search for grass in which to mull on.

Thunder crackles over the snow-capped ridges. Her ears flicker, but she doesn't run. You should warn her. Scare her away. But you can't move. Can't speak. You're a mute spectator, a piece of dross on the ground watching the approaching calamity without a mouth. Horror churns. You want so badly to tell the doe to run—

An impossibility, you know. It's much too late for her to do anything at all.

Around the doe’s leg is a shackle.

Your skin rips, tears, as you force your jaws apart, blood pooling in your mouth. If you can make a sound, she’ll—

A boom echoes through the canyon's cradle.

The scream gurgles in the back of your throat.

Agony rips through your leg—

—you wake with a gasp.

Sputtering, choking on the saliva pooled in your mouth. It tastes bitter, brackish. You feel something gritty between your teeth. It sticks to the backs, granular specks that dissolve, sour and chalky, on your tongue when you run it along the ridges of your gums.

You swallow it down, grimacing at the acidic taste.

“Awake, aye?” His voice chips through the dense fog. You blink the haze away, glancing sideways at him through bleary, heavy eyes.

His profile is lit by the harsh glare of high noon. The sharp jut of his ball cap. The curve of his nose set in the thick bushel of his scraggly beard and moustache. His broad chest concealed most of the view from the driver's side window. The lax bridge of his arm, knuckles loosely curled around the steering wheel.

He tilts his head toward you. “How're ye feelin’?”

Sluggish. Awful. There's sand in your eyes. Cotton in your head. You feel like you've been left out in the hot sun all day. Dizzy and sunburnt. Feverish. Heatsick. Your throat is dry, but you don't ask for water. You don't answer him at all. Can't. Your tongue is laden. Lips numb.

It takes you a moment to reorient yourself, squinting through the glare of the sun—

That reels you back. Breaks through the fog.

You know that the concept of day and night in the summer is different here. Twenty hours of daylight with twilight lasting all night. But even with the skewed perception of time and the heavy molasses thickening around the edges of your cognisance, you know that something is wrong.

When you left the park, it was close to five in the evening. It should be twilight, not—

Your gaze lists sluggishly to the clock on the dashboard. Through the haze, the unmistakable gleam of one-fifteen stares back at you.

It was the right time last night.

“Wha—?”

You're not sure what you're asking. It's not even really a word, but a garbled sound. A noise of distress, confusion, in the back of your throat.

He seems to understand it all the same.

“Park had a bad storm,” he answers, pitch far too light for the severity of your situation, of what you're feeling. It makes you frown, sharp and sudden. “Washed through th’ river. Where ye were—well. Wouldnae ‘ave made it out, ye see. Would’ve gotten all torn up in th’ storm—”

You read that storms in Nahanni are vicious, sudden. Weather can turn in an instant, going from moderate to devastating in a blink. But—

What he's saying doesn't make sense. You remember bits, pieces, from earlier. He said you got turned around. Wandered too far off the trail, lost in the deep wilderness of Nahanni’s sprawling valley.

“Where are we?”

“Nearly home.”

You push the wave of nausea down. “I need to go to a hospital.”

“Can't dae tha't'.”

“Why not?”

He doesn't answer for a beat, eyes fixed on the dirt path. Unblinking.

Finally, he mutters: “had tae leave th' park oan th' opposite side when th' storm came in. No roads take us tae town.”

“I have—” you're not sure where your bag is. You hope he had the wherewithal to snatch it up after you fell. Hope. “I have a satellite phone. I can just call—”

“Sorry, hen. Yer bag flew off th' ledge. Ah coudnae grab it 'n' ye. Ah dinnae hae a phone oot 'ere. Never needed one—”

Hopeless. Hopeless.

“How—how could you survive out here without one?”

“Nahanni Butte is a few hours awa'. Go intae town when th’ winter road is open. Inaccessible now. Th’ rivers flooded it. Cannae cross it. Can hunt, 'n' ah hae everything a'm needin' oot here.”

“So…” the reality of your situation is beginning to dawn on you. Helpless. Hopeless. “I'm stuck here until—winter?”

“Ah hae a friend flying oot fae Yellowknife. Comes tae drop off supplies 'n' th' lik'. He'll be 'ere in two months—”

“Two months?” This whole situation feels impossible. Wrong. You're so close to people—Fort Liard, Nahanni Butte, Fort Simpson. How could you be stuck here for two months? The idea of it is absurd. “You're not—you can't be serious.”

“Aye. I am.”

There's a pinch between his brow. You wonder if it's meant to convey the severity of the situation, but as it grows deeper, deeper, you have the sudden sense that it's not an emotional decree of his sincerity. That it's, instead, a sudden twist of anger.

It scares you.

“I want to go home.” You mean for it to be forceful, but it comes out in a whimper.

The man nods. The punch in his brow lessens. “Aye, me tae.”

“Where are you from?” You pry, needing the distraction from the endless trawl of green and slate and permafrost enclosing in on you. “You're not from around here, are you?” At the gentle raise of his brows, you add, hurried, rushed: “you just. Have an accent, and I—”

“Fae Scotland,” he answers, and there's a quick grin on his face. Roguish. Charming. The sight of it has your start thudding in an uneasy gallop. “Edinburgh."

“Oh. Far from home.”

“Aye—” the grin fades, twisting into something ugly. “Had an—accident,” he spits the word out, brows pinching once more. Anger is writ in the hard clench of his muscles, his jaw. His knuckles blanche around the steering wheel, and you think you should have just kept your mouth shut. “Sent me here.”

There's a multitude of questions you want to ask. Vying for the top is the most obvious—why did this happen? why isn't he letting you go?—but what comes out instead is, “why?”

Just that. Nothing else.

“Military.”

He adds nothing, either.

“Military?”

A nod. “Go’ hurt. Had rehab. Sent me here tae clear ma heid, and well—” his eyes flicker to you. You can't read his expression. “Got a fresh mission, dinnae I?”

“You don't—”

“I cannae leave ye. Both oo' us are stuck 'ere 'til someone comes tae pick us up, 'n' take us home.”

The idea that somehow he's just as trapped as you are hasn't occurred. Why would it when he has a rifle, a truck, freedom—

But what good is all of that when you're landlocked in a place known for winter roads. Permafrost. The forced shift in perspective doesn't quell the anxiety roiling in your guts, but it lessens it. Somewhat.

“Two months?”

He nods. “Aye.”

“And you have no cellphone? No satellite?”

“Ye can check it—” he makes a flippant motion toward the glove box in front of you. “Deader than ever.”

You hesitate only briefly. Long enough to level him with a searching look that yields no results before you reach for the compartment, gingerly pulling it open, and—

Sometimes, things get overlooked by their surroundings. Swallowed in the vacuum. Blending seamlessly into the muddle, the commotion.

This isn't like that.

It sits on top of a manila folder. Sleek black and cold silver. You're not terribly well-versed in guns—the extent of your knowledge stemming mostly from formulaic crime shows aired late at night; CSI, NCIS, Criminal Minds—but you recognise this one instantly. Some sort of handgun. Police issued, you think. It's bigger than you'd expected. Looks heavier, too.

Your heart stutters. The air galloping out of your lungs in a stammering rush.

He makes a noise, soft and nonchalant, as if keeping handguns in the glove box of his old, burnt orange truck is perfectly normal.

“Fer protection,” he mumbles. You catch the jerk of his chin in your periphery. “Forgot I had it in here. Been usin’ th’ rifle fer huntin’ mostly. Or th’ shotgun.”

Three guns. You swallow. “Why—” your voice comes out in a brittle whisper. You clear your throat. “Why, um, why do you need three?”

“Not fae around here, are ye?” He echoes your words with a wry twist of his mouth, eyes slanting in the sunlight. “Tha’,” he takes his hand off your thigh to jab his finger at the handgun. “Is fer wolverines.” His index finger falls, his thumb juts out. He jerks it over his shoulder. “Tha’ is fer huntin’. The shotgun back home is fer bears.”

You try to move out of the way when his hand falls back to your thigh, but the pain radiating up your leg immobilizes you. There's not much you can do in this situation but endure.

Military. Wounded in action. Three guns. Touchy.

You're not sure what to think. It would be easier if you couldn't.

“What do you hunt?” You ask instead, glancing out the window to the barren landscape rolling out around you. There doesn't seem to be much in the jagged hills, and towering mountains.

“Gettin’ hungry? Donnae worry, doe. Go’ tha’ pesky hare I was tryin’ tae shoot oan th' ledge fer dinner tonight.”

It's not much of a comfort. The idea of being injured—by accident, he claims—to such an extent over a rabbit makes you feel a little sick.

“That's it?”

“I can make a mean steak oot o' anythin'. Stews fer tougher meat. Fish—whitefish, arctic grayling, and lake trout. Learned how tae make a nasty fishfry from th’ locals in Nahanni Butte. Bannock, too. Got berries ‘round ma cabin. Caribou, Moose. Taste better in tacos or burgers. Mountain goat, Dall’s sheep. Been eatin’ better ‘ere than ah did at home.”

“And you're—just allowed to hunt them?” The website advised about a permit through some special outfit needed to hunt when you requested your pass into the park. Said that only aboriginals were allowed to do so. “You're not—”

“Aye,” he cuts you off with a small nod. “No huntin’ in th’ park. But. We're nae in th' park anymore.”

“Where are we?” You ask again, firmer this time.

“I told ye. Nearly home.”

“And where is home?”

The way he sucks his teeth makes you recoil slightly. Wet. Irritated. As if he's tired of this conversation already.

“Close.”

You don't let his flat tone deter you. “Are we—are we still in the Northwest Territories?”

“Thereabouts.”

It's not an answer. It doesn't reassure you in the slightest.

You open your mouth to say so, words curling on your tongue when he jerks his chin toward the handgun, brow furrowed.

“Thought ye wanted tae check oan th' satellite phone.”

His tone is severe. A growl curdling the ends, pitching it down, down. Displeasure, irritation, blooms in the gnarled petals of witch hazel when he narrows them into slits.

You swallow, wrenching your gaze from the storm brewing over fields of wheat, and set your jaw. Masking your fear for annoyance. Confidence.

But your hand shakes when you reach for the black box shoved into the corner. Palms slick with sweat. You try not to touch the gun, doing your best to curve around it. It feels—

Real.

A real gun. In the real world. In a place you came to get away for a weekend, experience something you'd never had before. Freedom. Reliance on nobody but yourself. And now—

Somewhere in the Northwest Territories. Injured. Locked inside of a truck with a man who wavers between warmth—an unending heat, a furnace; a beacon of light—and severity like a swinging pendulum. You feel safe with him. You commit every turn to memory. He's in the military. He's going to take care of you. You think he's lying to you. He'll—

He'll let you go.

You're sick. You're paranoid. You're taking all of your grievances out on this poor man who is just as trapped as you are, turning him into a monster for no reason at all. At the end of this, when he drops you off at the airport in Yellowknife, you'll have to grovel on your knees for his forgiveness. Sorry I thought you were a bad man.

It could be worse, you suppose. He hasn't done anything untoward to you—touching your thigh like he's owed the right aside—and you shove it down. A problem to deal with later even though the suspicion tucks itself into your head, folded up against your skull. Metastatic. It eats all of his expressions, turning them over and over again for hidden clues.

If he does something, you'll run.

You'll—

“Almost there,” he murmurs, and you hear the rasp of exhaustion glued to the hinge of his jaw. You wonder how long he's been driving for. And why didn't he just go back to Nahanni Butte. Flooded he said. Too deep into the park. Never would have made it.

If that's the truth, you suppose you should thank him.

It sits in the back of your throat. You swallow around it, reaching for the phone instead.

There's a small thread of hope in your chest that it'll work. That he's wrong, doesn't know how to work it, and all you have to do is press a button and it'll crackle to life. Freedom within reach.

But when you press down on the button, the phone doesn't even whimper. Broke, as he said. Dead.

“Can you—can you charge it?”

“Tried. Must’ve blown somethin’ inside. Fried it.”

His words are a prison sentence carrying a punishment of two months. You knew this, of course. He said so himself. But the reality of it breaking over you is different from blind belief. The realisation of your predicament is a jagged knife cutting through tissue, letting corrosive panic entrench you as it spills out.

This is the sort of thing you’d only read about. Novels, and biographies. Memoirs. Movies. An extraordinary event that could never happen to you. Never.

And you're aware of it. Optimism bias. The not-me fallacy. But everything in your life thus far had been so unequivocally mundane that the possibility of it not happening seemed to eclipse any chance of it occurring at all.

The crux of the bias, you suppose. Though it does little to stem the disbelief surrounding it all. Even when you told your friends, and your family, that you were going on this trip, the most mordant of them said you'd get eaten by a bear or end up lost in the wilderness.

Injured, unable to walk, and stuck with a man you only marginally know (trust) seems like the plot of a lifetime movie.

But—

Two months.

You're sure in the meantime, someone will notice your absence. Raise the alarm. Call the police. They'll launch an investigation, and come searching for you. It's just a waiting game.

And—

(You glance at the man once more, his profile limned in a halo of gold. The rim of his hat casts shadows over his face, eyes concealed in the thickening tenebrous that enshrouds him down to his broad chest, dense with corded muscles. Athletic. Trim. Big.)

—staying alive.

Survival.

If only for just two months.

But the facts are cold, unforgiving. You are alone with a man you don't know. A man with three guns. Military. His experience in this wilderness vastly eclipses your own.

He's fine. Fine. Touchy, sure. But he hasn't asked for anything.

—his hand is on your thigh—

You'll be okay.

It hurts to swallow. “Thank you,” you murmur, hoping the conciliatory lilt eats the panic you feel. “For saving me.”

His gaze darts to you so sharply that the truck veers slightly to the left, tires crunching over thick beds of furze that line the forged road. The action is sudden—surprised, maybe, by your reedy gratitude. A deviation from the demeanour he'd shown you so far—calm friendliness. Affability. It jars you. Scares you. You grip the seat cushion tight in your fists as he mutters something sharp you can't discern under his breath.

It only takes him only seconds to correct, rippling his hand away from you to commandeer the truck back into the centre of the beaten path. Even keeled now. Almost as if nothing amiss had happened at all.

But it's undeniable. Congeals in the air, tense and unignorable. A vacuum that siphons the breath from your lungs. It sits in the whites of his knuckles, arsenic bones jutting from thin, rough skin, demanding to be seen; the terse set to his shoulders. To the grind of his jaw as he clenches his teeth.

You take him in with bated breath, swallowing whole each microcosm that buds to the surface of his demeanour. Wary. Watchful. Squeezing the satellite phone tight in your hands. But he doesn't meet your wide-eyed stare, choosing instead to keep his gaze fixed on the dirt road. Knuckles popping, brows furrowed. Silent.

But it's heavy. Oppressive. The same unrelenting chill as outside. You fight back a shiver in the blooming cold, wishing you'd packed more than just a pair of hiking tights (in tatters, now) and a thermal windbreaker for the trip.

The hum of the engine, and the cracking of rock and muskeg crushed under the wheel, are the only noise that fills the cabin. You stifle your breath. Hold it in your throat. Skewer your eyes to the landscape yawning out around you. The deep, thickening sense of unease grows in the pit of your stomach. Metastasizing.

Outside is a sprawling taiga forest. Emaciated spruce, balsam fir, jut out from the muskeg, dusted in a sparse layer of sphagnum. You can almost hear the trickle of a stream. The dirt road is wet under the tires now. A creek must be close by. A river. Flat River. South Nahanni. Further out might be Slave River. The Liard. Little Buffalo. Great Slave Lake, even.

Narrowing it down seems impossible when nearly the entire south corridor of the Northwest Territories is wet marsh and snaking bodies of water.

It both worries and reassures you at the same time. Getting to Nahanni alone was a challenge. With most of the surrounding area limited to a few year-round highways, there are not many places he could go without reaching dead-ends or winter roads closed for the season, inaccessible in the warmer summer months as the snow melts.

Though—these highways arch as high as they can. From Yellowknife to Tuktoyaktuk, right on the coast of the Arctic Ocean.

But he hasn't driven on any stretch of highway since you woke up. The road is unpaved, wild. You're confident you're still south, but the exact location eludes you. Northwest Territories. Yukon. Northern Alberta. It's overwhelming. Daunting.

You try to commit the geography to memory. Sifting through an endless trawl of nothing to find something familiar. A mountain range. A sign. Anything. Anything—

“Ye mean tha’?”

The sound of his voice draws your attention, raspy. Hoarse from disuse.

He swallows. There's something raw in his expression, fractured. Yearning, you think. For something. What that something is, however, you can't place.

It stays on as he slowly slides his tongue out, licking over the bristles of hair covering his lip.

You offer a shallow nod, unsure why this matters to him suddenly.

“Yeah, I'd be—”

You pause, words turning to smoke in your throat. Uninjured, is the first thought. Without him, your leg wouldn't be—

Whatever it is. Ankle broken. Achilles torn. A gunshot wound clean through tendon and tissue.

But at the same time—

All turned around, he said. Lost. He was hunting, too. You must have somehow wandered outside of the park limits. Must have because the sound of a rifle would have drawn attention from nearby wardens. They'd have come to investigate.

You swallow down the bloom of unbridled panic. The aftertaste is bitter in your mouth. The thought of being outside of the borders, all on your own—

“I’d be dead if it wasn't for you.”

The hush that falls is immediate. Your own mortality dangling by a thin thread. Happenstance keeping you alive.

He clears his throat again. Your fingers tighten around the metal until it hurts.

“Names Johnny.” He twists in his seat, facing you. “Johnny MacTavish.”

It's a bit late for introductions, but you take it in all the same. Johnny. Johnny.

(saviour—)

His eyes grow wide when you slowly, haltingly, breathe yours out. Letting it sit in the air where it dissolves into the silence, the weight of it somehow more damning than being alone in the woods. There's power in a name. In knowing it. Military. You're not sure why it matters, but it does.

You fight another shiver when he says it back after a beat, much too fond, adoring, for the sparse companionship you've barely begun to build.

“I'll keep ye safe,” he says your name again, accent curling in between the bridges of each letter. There's a heat in his eyes; pyretic. A sickness. “Don't hae tae worry aboot anything.”

He turns back slowly, angling the wheel around a sudden bend in the thicket. The path is clearer here, looking more like an established dirt road than a sparse coppice. It twists upward, cutting a meandering line through a dense cropping of spruce. The canopy above—as thick as it is—curls over the road, enclosing it in a bed of conifers branching overhead. Concealing it from view.

The sight fills you with a new bloom of unease. How quickly the wild swallows you whole, shielding you from prying eyes, prickles against the nape of your neck, dripping like hot oil down your spine.

“Where are we?” It comes out in a whisper.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat. In your periphery, you see him lift his hand off the wheel, but sit, paralyzed, when he brings it down to your thigh, giving what attempts to be a pacifying squeeze.

“Home,” he answers, making the turn.

A log cabin comes into view. It’s situated at the end of the clearing, covered by the same dense tangle of trees as the path. The forest seems to bend around the single-storey home, enclosing in a cradled embrace of intermixing wry jack pine, bold tamarack, dark spruce, and white birch. Trembling aspen peaks above the heads of the other trees, hiding the smoked black spruce roof from view above.

It might look homey under different circumstances, but the thick, stripped logs—made of varnished white spruce—jutting out half-crescents to form the walls seem brooding. Claustrophobic. It's small—just a storey and a half. A camper's cabin not meant for longtime use. It wears its age in wood rot and peeling varnish. The scent of wet wood clings to the air when he rolls the window down, coming to a stop a few paces away from the single step leading to the porch.

Firewood stacked high to the awning on both sides of the blue door, encased in metal to keep it dry. Moss-covered concrete foundations lift the house off of the ground, keeping it from melting the permafrost below. The remains of a snuffed, charred campfire is perched to the left of the winding path leading to the door. Felled lumber lays on its side, the top whittled down onto a seat. A wooden rack leans against a tree close by. The hide of an animal is stretched taut across the panels. Leather-making materials sit in a bucket beside it.

A metal box—bear-proof, you're sure—is half-buried in the soil. Storage, perhaps, for the unusable remains of the animals he hunts.

It's fairly standard for a cabin up north, you think. But something about this place makes you feel anxious. Trapped. You can't see anything at all through the dense cluster of trees, but you can hear the sound of running water. A river, maybe. A stream. It splashes against the rock, the current too quick for you to even think about swimming in it.

It only adds to your unease.

“This is home,” he says, jerking his chin toward the house.

Home is a cabin nestled somewhere in the unorganised wilderness of the Northwest Territories. Nahanni National Park is several hours in another direction. Too few communities exist on highway seven for you to even stumble onto them—

Assuming, of course, that you could walk there to begin with.

The lingering pain in your ankle, the heavy bandage wrapped around it—it's an immediate certainty that you can't walk. Broken, you know, from the glimpse you'd taken before. Milkwhite against raspberry red—

You don't think about that.

You don't think about much at all.

“Right.” You murmur. This place is the furthest thing from home you could imagine.

He moves in your periphery, reaching for you. You jerk back, driven by instincts. The need for distance, space—

The jostling of your foot makes you hiss in pain, and he offers a conciliatory hum.

“Ye’ll be alright, bonnie. Lets jus’ get ye inside now.”

The inside is made of varnished wood. A mix of black and white spruce. It's cosy, you suppose.

It opens up to a living room immediately upon walking in the door. A mat sits under your feet. A small closet to the right with the door slightly ajar. Along the length of the left wall is a doorway spilling into a small kitchen. From your vantage point, you make out a sink, and then another door to the right.

Along the back wall beside the arching doorway is a brick fireplace. Soft fur is spread out on the ground in front of it. An old, weathered couch is pushed against the left wall, a shawl tossed over the back.

There's no television. A stack of books and magazines sit above the couch—used more for an end table than entertainment, you note, spotting the glass of water resting on the pile. A pack of cigarettes beside it. An ashtray on the floor. Bottles of beer sit on the small table shoved under the window. One of the chairs is covered in clothes.

It's lived in, you note, but lifeless.

There are no pictures on the wall. No personal artefacts littered around. It's—

Perfunctory.

He comes home, shucks his boots off by the front door, and drinks warm beer on the couch until he falls asleep. An inference, of course; but as he carries you further into the house (his insistence—ye cannae walk oan tha’, doe, stop bein’ stubborn and lemme carry ye), your notion gains credence. It's sparse. Threadbare.

There's a single plate in the sink. The old stove, separated from the sink by a small countertop, is covered in a layer of dust. A fridge is pushed against the back wall.

The door you glimpsed in the kitchen leads to the washroom. It's tight. A shower, a sink, a toilet. No windows. A towel is hung over the curtain rail, still damp from his shower before. A single mat covers most of the tiled floor below. A tube of toothpaste sits in the porcelain basin of the sink.

Beside the washroom is the master bedroom. The bed is unmade. An untouched glass of water is left on the end table beside a worn leather book and a bible.

An open closet sits across from the bed. The window is open. The breeze flutters the old, jaundiced curtain.

He gives you his room and says he'll take the couch. Under normal circumstances, you might have fought it. Insisted that he sleep in his bed. You're a guest. You couldn't put him out like that. But the door has a lock.

“Thank you,” you murmur, and he seems to tremble at your words before nodding.

“O' coorse.”

Johnny places you on the bed before he sets to work rebandaging your ankle. You're all too aware of the fact that you need to know. You need to see what you're dealing with, and how bad the damage is, but the pain that cuts through you when he rests your ankle—as gingerly as he can—on top of an extra pillow makes you yowl in agony.

It's vicious. Whitehot. The pain rattles through your bones.

He shushes you as he unwraps the clumsy brace he put on in the park, murmuring incomprehensible things under his breath that you think must be Gaelic. Words of comfort, perhaps.

You feel none of it except an uneasy dread pooling in the empty pit of your stomach.

“How bad is it?”

He hums, brow pinching tight. “Th' hare took most o' th' damage,” he says, eyes tracing along the congealing blood on your ankle. Dark cherry red. You swallow down a gag. “Tore yer achilles, though. Clean. Doesn't seem tae be any fragments. Broke your ankle, though. But,” he taps your calf, just above the bend of your foot. It doesn’t hurt. “It’s a clean break. Maybe just a fracture. Shuid heal up in no time.”

“And what about infections?”

“Got some stuff oan hand if that happens,” he leans back, and gives you a wink. It feels out of place considering the severity of your predicament. Garish, almost. “But ah was a good nurse. Patched ye up nicely.”

You don't ask anything else, and silence trickles in as he refocuses his attention back to cleaning your wound and redressing it. The bed is soft under you. Giving. You lean back, staring up at the log ceiling, and will yourself not to think at all. Each slight jostle of the wet cloth running along your ankle feels like fire licking at your skin. If you had anything at all in your belly left, you might have thrown it up on the side of the bed.

This pain is consuming. Persistent.

Your fingers knot into the soft blankets below, gripping tight until your knuckles ache. A futile attempt to exchange this pain for a lesser one. Something you can ignore, forget.

Through the open window, you can hear the playful caws of a raven searching for food. You want it to distract you, to pull you away from the sickening sensation of your ankle separating from the heel, but it doesn't.

All you can think about is the fresh pain. Your flesh ripped apart. Torn achilles, he'd said. You feel it as he moves, washing away the dried blood, the viscera. The break in your tibia. It's a nauseating feeling. Visceral. It screams at you that something is wrong, reverberating through your bones.

The raven caws again.

“Gonnae ‘ave tae stitch yer heel up.”

You make a sound—a pathetic whimper choked in the back of your throat.

“Fine,” you rasp, tensing. “Just—”

Get it over with.

Johnny seems to understand, offering a consolatory pat on your shin. “Ye'll be fine. Ah know what am doin’.”

You glance back at him, avoiding whatever is happening below his elbows. Refusing to look.

He reaches up, fingers stained pink with your blood, and pulls the ballcap off his head, shaking the matted hair loose. His hair is thick, curling at the ends. Dark brown. Soft. You take in his expression, him, as he works, using it to churn your thoughts away from the prickling sensation of him pressing your torn skin back together, readying it for the needle.

He's intense, focused, as he works. Eyes lidded to half-mast. Long lashes fanning out over the dark circles beneath his eyelids. Bruises that speak of long, sleepless nights. The empty bottles of beer and the full ashtray within arm's reach make a little more sense as you see the extent of his fatigue.

It doesn't concern you. You rip your gaze away from the thin, twisting rivers of red that snake through the jaundiced whites of his eyes; the possibility of his vulnerability notches something inside your chest you don't want to think about. Can't.

Your saviour, you think again, veering sharply on the edge of too cruel—

“Might pinch a bit, doe,” he mutters low, soft. His thick, even brows pull together at the centre. You feel the prick of the needle pushing through your skin—

Down his brows. The oblique curve of his nose. Bottled to a point. The thick bed of hair beneath his nostrils. Thin, pink lips jutting from the thatch of black bristles. The wisps curl down the slope of his neck, thinning at the hollow below before thickening back into a dense crop on the scant patch of his skin visible from his unbuttoned shirt.

Another prick—

A thin, gold chain loops around his neck. Tucked against his sternum is a Latin cross. It's plain. Traditional. Solid gold, maybe. But not purely for decoration. Where the arms meet the body, the surface is smoothed down. Worn. In the reflection, you can see the thin, circular lines of a fingerprint.

The bible on his dresser makes sense. You glance over at it, taking in the folds and creases on the leather cover. Aged and well-loved. Used. Pages are dog-eared. Waterlogged. Scotch tape holds the spine together.

The Holy Bible gleams in faded gold lettering. Douay–Rheims is etched into the surface.

The sight of a worn-down book and thumbed cross shouldn't relax you, but it does. A good ol’ boy, then. You turn back to him, eyes caught on the gleaming gold flush against tanned skin. It's tight to his sternum. Hung delicately around his neck.

Seeing it now feels a touch voyeuristic. It wasn't intentionally bared to you. Wasn't offered up willingly for you to gawk at, mind looping around thou shalt not kill and do unto others as you yourself would want done unto you, and finding comfort in the ordered morality of its symbolism—however fickle that could end up being.

You know a man is not as moral as his religion demands of him, but he looks devout.

A good Catholic boy.

Still—

You peel your gaze away from his chest as the thread slides through. The sensation is uncomfortable. Ticklish. Forcing your attention back to him, well above the neckline. His nose. Nostrils flaring when your knee jerks. His hands close over your shin. Mouth parting slightly just to say, keep still, doe. Donnae want tae hurt ye.

His hair is slightly greasy near his scalp. Sweat from earlier dampens his locks, flattening it tongue head. It's longer at the top compared to the sides. An odd, asymmetrical hairstyle that doesn't feel like an aesthetic choice at all. Maybe he had a mullet. Or—

You see it when he tilts his head down, chin angled toward your foot.

A scar stretches from his temple back, thinning the hair that lines his scalp on the right. The flesh is jagged, uneven. Cratered. It forms a ravine. The canyon walls clumped scar tissue. The nullah in the centre is all pink and raw.

You think of a shooting star. Meteor showers in the indigo sky.

You think of his words from earlier—ah know what am doin’—and the depth of his medical knowledge. It stands out now. You suppose he would, wouldn't he?

The thought has shame dripping down your spine like hot, slick oil. Burning. Tarry. You remember what he said in the truck about being wounded in action, the misery in his words, the anger, and choke yourself on the regret that swarms your throat.

He looks up, then, catching whatever awful amalgamation of self-hatred, shame, and regret makes of your expression, and the words—sorry, I'm so sorry—tear through your throat until it's bloody and raw. Pulp. Unspeakable, now.

It dampens his brow, but there's no embarrassment in his eyes when he holds them to yours. Nothing except an intense, dizzying sense of curiosity. Of—

Intrigue.

It doesn't have a place here, and the sight of it is sobering.

Why is he looking at you like that when you're gawking at his injury? Confusion knots deep. Uncertainty coiling around your ribcage. Maybe he didn't notice. Doesn't care.

Is too used to it to worry about whatever conclusions you might draw from the jagged skin barely knitted back together. But his eyes flash. Understanding edging out the unfathomable greed lurking in hazel plains, nestled, restive, in the shade that falls over the sloping boscage.

You almost miss the shadow when it appears. Wrought with Leashed ghosts. Tempered anger. Wild, frenetic. The chains holding it at bay tremble. Shake—

And then it's gone.

Dissolve back into passive cordiality. All ire stayed behind a wall.

You want to apologize, but the words are ash in your throat. Unspeakable. Johnny doesn't address it. He dips his head down once more, silently refocusing his attention to your ankle, and offering no explanation for the scar on his head.

You don't ask. Don't pry. It's not your place. But your eyes are still glued to it.

It's a horrific injury. Survival from such a terrible wound seems like an impossibility. A gunshot, you're sure. Seeing the small chasm carved into skin, narrowly missing his eye socket, fills you with a blistering sense of pity for this man, and you quietly, quickly, peel your eyes away from the jagged surface, letting your gaze run across the room. A meagre sense of privacy, you're sure, but it lets you breathe a little easier when you can't see the way his temple split apart to make room for a bullet—

“Had a mohawk,” he says. “They cut it off when this happened.”

A mohawk. The asymmetry of his hair makes sense now, and you can almost picture it as you stare at him. The edges shorn, the top long. Unruly. His hair has a slight curl to the ends, but is mostly straight for the first few inches.

As wild as he looks now—untamed, rugged; the thick tangle of uncharted wilderness—the mohawk must have made him roguish. Boorish. With his broad shoulders, thick biceps, and piercing blue eyes, the mohawk would have added to the playful appeal. Boyishly charming with his cropped hair and puckish grin. The draw of a bad boy, a vandal.

But as you try and shape this around him, you catch the strain in his shoulders. The terse set to his jaw.

“You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”

“Was shot.”

It's said without a preamble as if he was waiting for you to ask. But the words are spat out like they're something foul in his mouth; like he's ridding the taste of it between his teeth. The anger, the aggression cows you slightly, but you offer a small, warbling smile you hope is conciliatory. Apologetic.

“I'm sorry,” you offer around a stuttering exhale. You can't imagine what that must be like. Shot in the head. The idea is unthinkable. Improbable. And yet, the evidence slashes across his temple; a meteor shower carved into his flesh.

He lifts his chin, staring down at you from the bridge of his nose. “Wasnae yer fault, doe.”

“I know, I just—”

Johnny gives a nod in response, ending the bubble of words and apologies building up behind your teeth. It is what it is, he mutters when you blink at him, flummoxed. This sort of reveal seems like it should necessitate a bigger conversation, a deeper one. Questions buoy to the surface—from prying (how did it happen, how did you survive) to intrusive (what did it feel like, does it hurt still)—but you trample them until they sit, a building mass lodged in your throat.

He seems content, then, to continue with what he was doing, and says nothing more about it. And it's not your place to pry. To chisel into his trauma.

You let it pass. Let it moulder.

The raven caws once more. You lean back in his bed, staring through the fluttering curtains, mind reeling at this discovery.

Stupidly, you feel more at ease in his presence. As if this show of vulnerability somehow negated the distress of your predicament, and the infeasible nature of how you ended up here, in his home. Gazing through the thick canopy of green to the golden sky above. A whole world away from your home. Broken. Injured. But the cross, the thumbed-through bible, and his human fragility seem to curl along the vicious dread curling inside your guts, soothing over the distrust with gentle, sweeping brushes.

Quelling a frightened child after a nightmare.

How strange, you think, but let yourself relax in his presence all the same, breathing in the scent of stale smoke, sweat. Coumarin. Tree moss. Fresh pine. It smells like the valley. Soft, waning detergent. Masculine.

You pretend you're watching for the raven as you sneak small glances at him. Taking in everything with a new perspective. The broadness of his shoulders. The thickness of his waist. There's power in his arms, in his thighs. Sculpted musculature, honed and refined. Despite the thickness of his fingers, he has a delicate touch. Deft and sure, as if he's used to working his bulk around small parts.

He's unkempt. The ballcap hid most of his dishevelled state, but he's not sloven. It reminds you of the outdoorsy explorers. The hikers you met on your trip out. Roughhewn and unconcerned about their overgrown beards and their tousled hair.

There's something potently masculine about it, and you can't deny that even with the garish wound on his head, all mangled scar tissue, he's handsome. Rougish. The scar elevating it somehow—a testament, perhaps, to his resiliency.

He catches your stare on the next glance, holding it as he leans back with a quirk of his lips. It's not quite the grins he aimed at you before, but the shadow of it lingers.

“Now,” he utters, the severity in his tone makes you flinch. Sobering quickly under the weight of his solemnity. “Th' bad part.”

“Bad part?” You echo, confused. “What could be worse than that?”

He taps two fingers against your swollen ankle, urging you to look. You swallow and force yourself to glance at where he rests his fingers.

With your split heel stitched up and wrapped in bandages, the sight of your leg doesn't make you want to curl into the fetal position and cry. But it's still horrifying to look at.

A mass half the side of a baseball juts out from your skin.

“Ankles dislocated,” he murmurs, sliding his fingers over the mound. “Gotta pop it back into place.”

“That's not—” you shake your head. “That's impossible.”

“S’okay, doe. I gotcha.”

“That's not the point. That's not—”

“Look,” his pitch lowers dangerously, firm now. “Gotta do it or you'll have problems later on. Much worse than a bit o’pain.”

“But—”

He inhales sharply. “Can't let it go, doe. Gotta fix it.”

You understand the logic in that. Leaving a dislocated ankle will undoubtedly cause problems later on. But—

“Will it hurt?”

Your fear quiets the irritation brewing in steeled hazel. “Aye. I won't lie tae ye, doe. It will hurt.”

You swallow around a whimper.

“But,” he leans over, his hand sliding over your cheek. Cradling your face in the palm of his hand. “I'll do mah best tae be quick. Ah won't hurt ye, doe.”

It must be the way he carries himself that puts you at ease, so assured in his abilities; confident in what he can do without any sense of grandiosity.

“Fine.” The word is juttered out of your chest. “Just—”

His thumb catches the tears that spill over your lashline, swiping them away with a tenderness that makes you shiver.

“Ah’ll be quick.”

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out two chalky white pills. Tylenol, he mutters, catching the furrow of your brow. It abates the unease somewhat, and you let him drop the pills into the flat of your palm, rolling them over with your thumb as he grabs the water on the end table. They're circular with a slit down the middle.

“It'll take the pain away.” He says, holding the water up to you. “Ready?” It's uttered so severely, so seriously, that your breath hitches in your lungs. Mirth blooming between your teeth.

“As I'll ever be,” you rasp out before popping the pills into your mouth, cradling them on your tongue protectively as you reach for the glass he holds out. They're bitter.

You wash it down with a mouthful of stale water before leaning back on the bed, letting the scent of his sheets wash over you once more.

Outside, the raven trills.

The pain of popping your ankle back into place leaves you a weeping mess in his sheets, but Johnny doesn't seem to mind the shuddering sobs. He pets down your back, shushing you quietly under his breath as he mutters something in Gaelic that you're sure is meant to be soothing.

“Ye’ll be fine,” he says, tracing figure-eights down your spine until the Tylenol kicks in, and the agony tapers off into an aching throb. “Jus’ breathe. Ah’ll get ye somethin' tae eat.”

He leaves soon after. You let the numbed, drowsiness of the pain medication lull you into a doze, listening to Johnny move in the kitchen. The squealing slide of unvarnished wood rubbing against old metal. The thud of a knife. The scent of hot oil. Muttered curses. A playful raven's caw.

You're not sure how long you slip in and out of this dreamless state, but Johnny appears in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest as he leans against the frame. He watches you with hooded eyes, a small, secretive smile tugging on his lips.

Blearily, you yawn, somehow still exhausted despite how long you slept between yesterday evening and today. Trauma, you suppose, and say nothing at all about it when he helps you sit up in the bed.

Dinner consists of leftover bannock—the fried dough soft in your mouth, the flavour buttery; smokey—and hare stew. He pulls a chair from the living room into the bedroom, eating on the edge of the bed with you.

He's sloppy about it. Slurps all the meat and potatoes out of the bowl before sopping chunks of bannock into the gravy, shoveling it into his mouth with a grunt. It dribbles down his chin, and dirties his beard. This slovenly display might have churned your stomach before, but you're just as ravenous.

And it's good.

The bread leaves grease stains on your fingers, but the toes on your uninjured foot curl when you bite into the crispy surface, teeth sinking into the pillowy dough below.

“This is bannock, you said?” You ask, dabbing the napkin he offered with a wink when you finish. At his nod, you continue. “It's good.”

“Aye,” he grunts around a mouthful. “S’the best. Make it every mornin’ so ah go’ fresh bannock tae go.” He swipes the back of his hand over his mouth, slurring out: “s’good wit’ jam.”

“Did the locals teach you how to make it?”

He nods. “Scottish dish, originally. Made wit’ oats. Drier, too. But—fuck. S’good—nae. Better like this. Ol’ couple taught me when ah first came. Paler ‘n’ shite, they said. ‘n didnae ken a fuckin' thing about surviving oot ‘ere. Big man, Jim, taught me ‘ow tae hunt. Where tae fish. An’ ‘ow to cook it. Made this cabin, aye. He, ah, and his son. Offered ‘er up tae me when they realised ah didnae come wit’ shite all but a bad attitude.”

“That was nice of them.”

“Most folk up ‘ere are. Quiet, ken? People take care’a ‘emselves, most. Take care’a others, too.”

You mull over his words as he leans back in the chair with a satisfied groan, legs spread wide. His hands folded over his belly. The picture of ease. Contentment. This freedom of motion makes you slightly envious.

“An’ wha’ about ye?” His eyes are lidded, leonine, and fixed on you. The intensity is always on the side of too much. Too dizzying. Consuming.

You stamp it down, running your thumb along the inseam of his gingham throw. “What about me?”

“Why’d ye come here?”

His question throws you off balance. “It’s a pretty park,” you offer with a shallow laugh. “Who wouldn't come here?”

“Lots of pretty parks. Why this one?”

“Dunno. It was—”

“‘ave ye ever been tae any other parks? Anything like this?”

“I hiked a bit, and, um—”

He sucks out a piece of meat from between his teeth. “A bit, aye?”

“Yeah. A bit. Why—”

“Ye came all the way here fer what? A pretty park? With no experience at all? And alone?”

The shift in his posture reads as angry, irate. You blink, bewildered by this sudden change.

“Well. It was supposed to be an experience.”

“An experience, aye? Survival skills of a lemming.”

It's derisive, cutting. You bristle through the sting of humiliation, grappling through the slurry of fatigue to cobble together some form of defence against this lambasting of your—admittedly—ill-thought adventure, but he's already moving on. Fingers tapping an off-rhythm beat against his belly as he levels you with a sober look. More serious than you'd ever seen him before.

“An’ yer family? They just let ye come here oan yer own?”

The mention of your family makes guilt well to the surface, buoying above the indignant anger at his mocking words. Cowed, you shrug.

“Sure.”

Something cracks in the severe mein he carries; fracturing through the blatant disapproval. Cutting it like a knife.

He sighs through his nose before reaching up and scrubbing his hands over his face. “Shite. Ye really needed me, aye?”

You blink at the odd choice of words, brows drawing together in a tight knot. It's indefensible, of course. In many ways, he's right. If he hadn't found you—

Well.

You temper that thought before it forms. You're too out of it, spatially unaware and unmoored, to let yourself fall into an existential pit of despair when you know you won't be able to climb out. Thinking of your assured doom out there, all because of a misstep somewhere along the path, makes dread bloom in the pit of your stomach. Nauseous, roiling. It froths over the basin, ready to spill over and drag you under.

Swallowing around the surge of panic—mortality a fickle thing in a place like this—you offer a despondent shrug in response. Unable to scrape together any sense of a defence that won't make you sound childish and idiotic.

You ready yourself for more mockery, having become the very thing the park rangers tried to warn you about when you showed, alone, in hiking boots much too big for you.

But then he's shifting, expression clearing. The anger folded back behind a quick grin.

“Pretty here, isn't it?”

You're not sure what to make of his mercurial temperament; emotions cascading by, quicksilver and sudden. The flashes of anger, intensity, curiosity, and this, all happening within such a short period. It's overwhelming.

It unsettles you. But—

“Yeah,” you mutter, unable to stem the awe from leaking through.

The change in conversation is freeing. Sometimes it's just easier to let sleeping dogs lie, and that's exactly what you do. Tucking his odd behaviour behind a plexiglass of indifference, pretending it wasn't there, lurking just out of sight. Something to unravel later, when your heart wasn't on the verge of buckling under the strain of your anxiety. When your chest didn't feel like it was slowly being crushed. Your stomach is all twisted up in knots too tight to untie with your bare hands.

It's easy to let yourself heave through jittering lungs, and pretend you couldn't feel the rot festering on the sides of them. Eating holes through delicate tissue.

The majesty of this place hasn't quite worn off, and you use that as an excuse to drift. To close the doors on the overwhelming deluge of hysteria creeping up on you.

You still think of the jutting fjords instead. The steep ravines, the moose in the distance—her colours sharp against the green backdrop—and let the untempered sense of reverence split you down the middle.

It comes out in a flood, then—as if you've been biting back the words this whole time.

You tell him about the valley. The waterfall. The white river. The marmot you saw poking its head out. No bears, you sigh; the forlorn lilt to your tone seeped with a touch of relief, an aspect he pokes at with a crooked smirk until you huff, rolling your eyes to the ceiling at his gentle ribbing. Huffily, you admit that as much as you want to see a bear, you're not quite ready to face them in the wild.

Lots’a bears ‘round ‘ere, he taunts, rolling his knees out further as he sinks deeper into the chair.

He dodges your next question of where, exactly, is here with a silky grin and a need tae know rolling off his lips before they tug downward in a sudden frown.

You must be acclimating to the strange ebb and flow of his emotions because the lour grimace on his face doesn't deter you as much as it did moments ago. You pick up the slack when the conversation lulls, telling him about the places you've been and how they compare to Nahanni.

“They just—don’t.”

It's hard to encapsulate the scale of it all into simple words; digestible pieces someone else can swallow. The park isn't too far from Yellowknife, and yet it feels like a world on its own. The remoteness, the vastitude of it all, is hard to describe, but Johnny seems to understand.

He listens with a slight quirk to his lips. A smile you'd almost call fond. He gets it, you know. The words you can't say. The ones that feel too lacklustre when you do.

“That really why ye came?”

You hesitate for a moment, looping a loose thread around your finger. Contemplating. Mulling it over. You've never told anyone the reason for the trip outside of a new experience for yourself. Testing your mettle. But with Johnny—

There's a sense of kinship, you find. An understanding.

“It seemed so—” he waits for you to find the words. “Lonely, I guess.”

“Lonely,” the way he says the word is ruminative. Rolling it around between his teeth; testing the weight of it. “Ah suppose it is.”

“You don't think so?”

“It's—” he pauses, eyes listing to the side as he mulls over what he wants to convey.

He does this sometimes, you think. Gets lost. Loses himself. Retreats inward. You can't help but wonder if this is a manifestation of his trauma—a head injury such as this would be classified as a traumatic brain injury, wouldn't it? You're not well-versed in this area, and it feels a little mean, cruel, to have this thought, but it blooms as his eyes fog over. As he struggles, almost, to find the words he wants to say, to give voice to what he feels, thinks.

“Lonely, aye,” he grinds out after a beat, but he looks frustrated about it, and glares down at his lap, silently fuming. Annoyed. “Big.”

The word is ripped out from between his teeth, and you nod, hastily, to both quell the looming anger brimming in the terse set to his shoulders and to let him know you understand. Can read between the lines—if only just.

“Is that why you came?”

The shrug he offers is noncommittal but you can see the tension pooling in his brow despite your efforts to quash it. “Couldnae go home after this—” he lifts his hand, tapping his fingers against the scar tissue on his temple. “Wasn't safe. Had tae give up everything after. Maw. Da. Sisters. Cannae ever see them again.”

It doesn't make sense. None of it does. The innate understanding between you is shattered by the impossibility of this moment, and his half-formed words. What you gave up seems paltry in comparison to what he's confessing to. His family. His whole family—

“Might see them one day. Once that fuckin' prick is in th' ground, but 'til then—” he shrugs again, easy. As if the look on his face wasn't cataclysmic in its anger. It's rage. Sorrow. Hatred. You flinch back as if the blackhole of these awful emotions will eat you alive.

Johnny sees it, and reaches for you, making soothing noises under his breath as his hand wraps around your thigh. “Ah, doe, don’t worry. He wilnae find us—”

You're not sure what to say to that, but the grip he has on you is firm. Unyielding. There's a scowl etching over his lips, as if the mere thought of such a thing fills him with disgust, fury, and you shake your head slowly.

“I'm not—I’m not worried.” You don't know how to tell him that this phantom prick from his past isn't what made you reel back, but the intensity of his wrath. The sudden infliction of his ire. So you don't. You give in with what you hope is a conciliatory smile. “I, uh, I trust you.”

It's loose. Shaky. Your conviction wanes around the edges, falling flat and hollow when it trembles out. If Johnny notices the brittleness around it, he doesn't show it. If anything, he seems to take it as a sudden gospel.

“D’ye—” There's a crack in his voice. He swallows, then. Adam's apple bobbing harshly against the skin of his throat. You wonder if you've upset him. Angered him. But he's leaning down, eyes widening. Feverish. Blue lagoons. “Ye trust me.”

It's not a question, but he poses it as such. You nod slowly and unsure.

Johnny ducks his head, then. Lifts one hand to rub at the bristles around his chin and upper lip. Lost in thought, maybe—

It's when he reaches around, scrubbing at the nape of his neck, do you see the flush peeking out from beneath the thick bed of hair covering his cheeks. The sight is jarring. Unexpected.

You're not sure what to make of it. Of this strange reaction. But it passes almost as quickly as it started. The red is replaced by a wide, blinding grin. He squeezes your thigh.

“Hah, doe. Ye really know what tae say tae cheer me up—”

You haven't said anything at all, but this, too, goes unacknowledged. And before you can even try to draw attention to it, he breathes in deeply as he sits up in the chair.

“Ye finished?” He motions to the bowl and plate on the bed. You nod. “Alright. Ah'll put ‘em away. Get ye some tea.”

“Oh, I'm fine—”

“Nah, hen. Tea is good for ye. Will help ye heal.”

He leaves without another word, carrying away your dirty dishes. The unfinished conversation lingers in the air around you, but beneath the loose strands of everything unsaid, you feel something tangle inside your chest as you replay his words in the back of your head.

All alone in Nahanni, unable to see his family. You're sure the prick he's referring to is the one who gave him that horrific scar, nearly taking his life.

Somewhere in the loop, a knot of pity begins to take shape.

Johnny brings you Labrador tea—a speciality he learned how to make from Ethel and Jim, the couple from Wrigley who took him in. It's good. It tastes sweet, earthy. Honey and pine. You sip at it as he grabs sleep clothes from his dresser, watching him with a muted sense of listlessness.

You can't imagine the next sixty days that loom before you. Restlessness, claustrophobia—it coalesces into this strange, itchy feeling that sits, uncomfortably, atop your chest; an increasing pressure. You wish you could pick it off like a loose scab. Dig your nail under the hard clot and tug—

Peel it all off until just silken new skin remains.

Johnny looks antsy when you finish the tea. Eyes bright. Wide.

As you contemplate the surrealism of your predicament over Labrador tea, he grins like a shark and tells you he only has one toothbrush.

“Dinnae mind sharin’, doe,” he offers, too jovial, eager, for the notion of lending his toothbrush to a stranger he met less than twenty-four hours ago. Ah ‘ave good hygiene, he adds, as if that might make this any better.

Putting away the disgust, the idea of sharing a toothbrush feels much too intimate to you. Something befitting a long-term partner, or kin, before a man you know only the bare bones of.

But like most things lately, what choice do you have?

Johnny grins brightly at your acquiescence. All teeth. He hands you an old sweater—his favourite football team, he adds with a wink when you blink at it—and then moves toward you with a wicked gleam in his eyes you try to pretend is just overeager hospitality.

“Wait—” you start, jerking back instinctively as he looms over the bed. “What are you doing?”

A dip forms between his brows, and he cocks his head quizzically at you. “What're ye talkin’ ‘bout, doe? Need'tae brush yer teeth, don't ye?”

“I—I can walk—”

He snorts. “Oan yer broken ankle? Will only hurt yerself more.”

Despite the truth in this statement, the flippancy in his voice stings. Prickles under your skin. Your loss of mobility, of being wholly dependent on another person, is a bitter thing to try and swallow. Especially when you're here for the literal antithesis of it. To be free. Self-reliant.

Not needing anyone at all except the grit in your bones and the determination to see things through.

Having all of that ripped into pieces in front of you, by a man who says it with such nonchalant disregard—as if your efforts were meaningless, insubstantial for what it got it—is humiliating.

You can't remember the last time you needed someone for something so simple as walking to the washroom to brush your teeth, to wash up. The loss of this minute freedom makes you want to cry; to break down. Rage. Break things with your bare hands just to show the world you still can. To fight against these shackles locking around your ankles, and run—

Johnny's hand falls on your knee, thumb brushing the torn edge of your tights, grazing the skin beneath the loose threads with each pass.

“Don't worry. Ah'll take care 'o ye.”

That's the problem, you think, chest burning. This awful feeling inside is churning. Frothingly acidic, corrosive. You don't want him to. You don't want to need this man at all. Ever. For anything.

But—

“Thanks,” you choke out. It tastes like iron. Like defeat.

He carries you to the washroom, cooing the whole time about how ye ‘ave nothin’ tae be embarrassed ‘bout while you blister from mortification, from shame.

You came here to be self-reliant. To grind your mettle against the wilderness and come out on the other side victorious and better for it. But what you've accomplished so far is getting lost, getting hurt, imposing on a man you barely know—

One who has to sit down on the ledge of the bathtub with you cradled in his lap like a child, injured foot elevated on the lid of the toilet seat. He cups his hand under your mouth as you scrub at your teeth, trying to catch any of the foam from the toothpaste that spills from your mouth.

It's mortifying.

You've never felt so vulnerable in your whole life.

“Sorry,” you choke out around the brush—his brush—as he slowly commanders the weight of you around enough to spit in the sink.

He waves you off with a noise. “S’alright, doe. Ye can lean oan me all ye like.”

So he says. But you feel the rapid inhales behind you. The soft pants spilling from his lips, lungs expanding, broadening his chest into your back. Exertion, you think, slightly cowed and humiliated. Desperately trying to hold some of your weight on your uninjured foot.

“Nah, ah,” he breathes, arm slinking around your middle, tugging you firmly into his lap. “Ye jus’ worry about gettin’ ready tae go tae bed now. Ah got ye.”

He soothes his palm up and down the length of your arm as you finish up in a fruitless effort to calm your nerves, but it doesn't work. Can't. Because you know what's coming next.

“Can I, um—” your tongue is thick in your mouth. “I need to use the washroom to–to, uh, washup, and stuff—”

His thigh jerks beneath you. When he speaks, his voice is rougher than normal. “Okay.”

But he stays where he is.

“I think I can do it on my own—”

“And if ye step oan yer leg?” He tuts, arm tightening around you. “Only gonnae hurt yerself more, doe.”

“I'll be careful, but I really have to—”

“S’okay,” he coos. “S’only me.”

That's the problem, you think wildly. Hysterical. That's the whole problem, isn't it?

“No, you don't understand. I need to, um, go.” He makes another noise, soft. Agreeable. Fuck. “I need to pee.”

It comes out in a hiss. Feral, like a cat. Embarrassment turns you into more animal than man.

Again, he hums. “I know, doe. Donnae worry, ah’ll hold yer leg.”

“Can't I just keep it, um, on the ledge?”

“No, no. If ye put weight oan it, doe, ye’ll be in serious trouble. Dislocated. Broken. Jesus, ye cuid slip the bone out of place—”

No. No.

The idea of him holding your ankle as you piss is beyond any measure of shame you've ever felt before. You like your privacy. Crave it, sometimes. You don't think you've ever done this in front of someone since you were a child.

You need—

A moment.

Time. A pause.

But he doesn't give you a chance.

Johnny's other arm loops under your knees, and with a small huff he stands, holding you aloft with an arm anchored across your belly. It's quick. Mercilessly so. He steps back and lifts his foot to toe the lid off the toilet seat, unbothered by the loud clang it makes when it hits the tank.

“There we go,” he mutters, and sounds almost breathless for it. “Let's get ye ready.”

It should be awkward. Clumsy. But he moves with a surprising agility that belies the firmness of his muscles, the bulk. He lets your uninjured leg drop to the floor, murmuring for you to put some weight on it as he cradles your shin in his hands, careful not to let your foot move more than it needs to.

The strange dance ends with him holding your shin in his hands, stretching your thighs out more than they'd ever been before. An image that might have been comical under different circumstances but just makes you flounder at the suggestiveness of the pose. Added, in large part, by the firm hold he has on you. There's not an ounce of give. No threat of falling.

You gasp when he moves, shuffling backwards to pivot you around until the back of your shin meets the cold porcelain.

“Alright now, doe,” he motions toward the seat as he slowly bends down to a crouch on the floor, your foot still held in his grasp.

You follow him down until you meet the seat, trying to avoid his gaze as you clumsily paw at your tattered pants, slipping the down your thighs in a hurry. Your panties follow after a moment of hesitation.

When his breath catches, you say nothing at all. Pointedly avoid whatever face he might be making as you stare, fixed, at the panels on the wall behind his head. Wallpaper. Probably moisture-resistant. It's peeling in some places. Decades ago, it might have been a soft canary yellow.

His breathing is shallow. You ball your hands into fists and press the flat of your knuckles against your thighs.

It's hard to focus when you can feel the scorching heat of his body bleeding into your leg, your knee. Close enough that all he has to do is bend down a little more, and his face would be pressed against your thighs.

There's no room, no privacy.

You close your eyes and pretend you can't hear how his breath seems to fill the entirety of the small washroom, ghosting over your skin. Virginia Falls comes to mind—a roaring rush of water—but even in the solitude of your mind, you can't ignore the way his stare drills through your skin.

You swallow. You can't do it. Can't do this.

“Can you—” back off, go away. Stop breathing so heavily because you might get the wrong idea, like this whole thing excites him somehow—

His voice is rough when he speaks. Ragged. “Cannae ah what, doe?”

“Turn the tap on? I can't—I can't concentrate.”

“S’only me, bonnie girl,” he murmurs, but does what you ask. Leaning over you, broad torso swallowing you up entirely under his bulk. You can feel the soft give of his belly on your knee as he presses it into you, but it only lasts a second before you meet a wall of solid muscle beneath. He braces a warm, rough palm on your naked thigh, leaning in as he reaches over to the sink above.

It's barely a fraction of his weight but the drag of it makes you blink in surprise. His skin is burning. Redhot.

Opening your eyes brings you close to his chest, nose only a hair away from the tanned skin stretched over his collarbones. The metal chain gleams in the flushed light hanging overhead, sitting in a golden contrast to his sunkissed flesh. Its reflection casts beads of glittering lambency over the slope of his neck.

Pretty, you think, watching as it coruscates in a mesmerising dance each time he moves.

The faucet turns with a metallic squeak, breaking you from your reverie. Water gurgles up from the pipes, spitting into the basin with a hiss. You pull back, twisting your head to the side as heat floods your chest.

“Thanks,” you mutter, unable to meet his stare.

His fingers tighten around your flesh. His voice is raw when he mumbles, “anytime.”

The trickling rush of water reverberates around the room, and it's easy to close your eyes and pretend you're alone.

So that's exactly what you do.

His palm grows slick on your skin. Damp. But you ignore it, focusing on nothing but the urgency of getting this over with as quickly as you can. It works, marginally—

(Johnny makes another noise in the back of his throat.

That, too, you ignore.)

“Finished?” His voice is thick, wet. You nod slowly, peeking out from the sliver between your lashes to paw at the wall for the toilet paper roll. “Here, ah’ll help ye out of fer pants—”

Your head feels heavy. Limbs laden. The embarrassment crushes you into a fine powder; malleable, putty. You let Johnny take the lead after. Let him slip your tattered tights down your thighs, and say nothing at all when too much of his palm glides along your skin as he pulls. Needlessly, of course, when just two fingers would do.

But it's fine. Fine. Maybe he's never taken off tights before. Maybe the material is too thin and he's worried about it catching on the scrapes over your knees, the bandage wrapped up to mid-calf.

Your shirt, too. When he slips his fingers under the hem, splaying them wide over your belly before dragging them up until it bunches around his wrist. Tugging, tugging. Hands gliding over your skin, fitting along the contours of your body.

He keeps one hand moulded to your neck, fingers brushing your jaw, as he gingerly pulls the shirt over your head. The ragged pants in your ear, the soft groans when you slip into his old shirt—

It's exertion, really. Must be. He's tired from holding you up the whole time you brushed your teeth, washed your face in the sink. It's all fine. He's being gentle. Doesn't want to hurt you.

He's just being nice.

(And when you notice that your panties are missing from the pile of dirty clothes he shoves into the corner behind the door, that, too, you ignore.)

Exhaustion takes you soon after Johnny tucks you into bed, dragging you under once again. He tells you he'll be on the couch. To holler if you need anything. Sluggishly, you nod. Thank him when he places a glass of water on the bedside table for you.

(Bite your tongue when he brushes his fingers over your cheek as he bids you goodnight.)

Through the gossamer of sleep, you can hear the floorboards creak in the doorway, but when you look, there's nothing there. Just an empty kitchen. The soft flicker of the fireplace smouldering in the living room.

Nothing, you think. It's nothing at all—

There's a weight on your chest.

Warm, searing. It dampens your skin where it sits, heavy, on your breast, cold air ghosting along the sweat building up each time it moves.

You stir. The pressure takes shape. A hand. A man's hand. Rough, calloused, and hot. In his palm, he holds your breast, thumb brushing along the curve of it. Sliding, sliding—

You come awake with a gasp.

There's a twinge in your ankle when you move, and the pain grounds you, silences you. His thumb twitches on your nipple, but he, too, stills. Quietens. An impasse.

And you suppose this would be where you'd scream. Rage. Slap him across the face, rip his hand off your breast. Curse at him for being a creep, and a pervert, and nasty, disgusting man because there's nothing at all that could justify the reason for why the shirt he gave you to wear to bed is tucked up over your chest. The bruising press of something hard digging into your hip negates any excuse he might try to give. This is unmistakable. You should scream, cry, and—

Leave.

This is what glues your lips together. Keeps you from moving at all, from making a sound. Where would you go? How would you even get there to begin with?

It's this—the uncertainty, your vulnerability—that paralyzes you. Keeps you still, silent, as his hands brush over your skin, touching, fondling. His palms are rough, calloused. Pyretic. He squeezes, kneading your flesh in his sweat-slicked hand like he's owed the right to touch you. Like he's allowed.

He pants against your temple, breath warm, humid on your skin. Heaves like a dog in your ear, grunting low as he ruts his hips into your side, smearing something hot, tacky across your skin. Something you try not to think about, to inch away from. But he catches you quick, and stops your meagre protests before they form.

His thumb and forefinger close over your pebbled nipple, pinching softly at your budded flesh. The shock of pleasure is unwanted. Awful. It churns your stomach, and you fight the urge to weep—

He leans up, ragged exhales growing heavier as he moves until milk-warmed breath shudders over your bare breasts. His excitement throbs against your hip. You swallow down around the sudden wave of disgust, the sickness knotting itself together in your belly. It devours the lingering pity you'd felt earlier. The safety, the comfort, that brimmed inside of you for him.

(bleeding heart—

he gorges himself on it.)

Stay still, you think. And maybe he'll go away.

But he doesn't. Of course, he doesn't.

Johnny leans down, mouth closes over your nipple. It's all searing heat. Wet, soft. A sudden jolt of pleasure shoots down your spine when he sucks in tandem with the soft, rolling pinches he doles out on your tiger nipple, and you hate your treacherous body a little bit more for it. For how good it makes you feel when he flicks his tongue over your hardened peek, laving it sloppily. Messily. Drooling all over you—the big fucking dog—

You wonder how long he's been doing this. Touching you in your sleep. The thought sits like hot oil in your guts; sloshing against the soft lining of your stomach until it aches. Burns. You blame it on that when he grunts against your breast, the vibrations send a shiver down your spine. Have to, don't you? Because the alternative is to admit that you're slick, soft between your thighs already; folds soaked, inner thigh damp. Wet. Blame it on him, and the burden in your chest eases when you feel the stirrings of desire, lust, thicken in your lower belly. Bodily reaction becomes your clutch, your lifeline when he lays his upper body against you, the weight, the heft, of his bulk forcing the air from your lungs.

Johnny lifts his head suddenly, eyes drilling into yours before you can feign sleep to avoid looking at him. You don't want this. Your body thrums with reluctance, with fear, but you can't drag your gaze away from him. The rapturous look in his eyes, burning in the low simmer of a never-ending twilight, is paralyzing. Electric. You can't remember a time in your life when another person has ever looked at you with such raw want. Desire. Need. It's covetous. Ugly. Marbled with heady streams of hunger, of awe, as if he's not sure whether or not he wants to eat you alive or savour you for aeons. Taking bites, nibbles, when this urge becomes too burdensome to bear; when the ravenous chasm in his guts threatens to devour itself, bones and all, like a man-made black hole. Under this heavy, unrelenting stare you wither. Submit. Your head rolls until your cheek is pressed against the pillow, neck bared. Offered up to him.

(anything, you think, to run away from the naked want on his face. because with his mouth slack, lips slick, glistening with spit, he looks predatory like this. animal. bathed in gloam and flushed a deep roseate.)

He props himself up on his elbow, watching you. Feasting. Your quiet submission makes him moan; hips juttering at the slow reveal of your vulnerable neck. A paroxysm. As if he just can't help himself to hump against you like a beast in rut.

He swallows. You watch his throat work from the corner of your eye, Adam's apple bobbing up and down, up and down—

Then:

He lifts himself up higher, angling his body until it's bracketed over you. Sliding between your legs until your slit is pressed against the coarse hair that covers his thighs. He keeps his elbow propped on the pillow, sliding up, up, until his forearm comes to rest beside your face. It boxes you in completely under his weight, and the position forces your legs to spread open to accommodate him. Not given up freely, of course; but your compliance in this is inessential, it seems. He moulds you how he likes, mindful of your injured ankle the whole time. A kindness that makes something molten thicken in your throat, stifling the scream that claws its way up your esophagus.

You try not to stare when he clambers over you, chest bare against yours. Hips chiselling a gorge between your thighs wide enough for him to fit. To press his fattened length on the insides of your sticky thighs; groins drawing together. Your legs slung loosely around his tapered waist. A dreadful pastiche of lovemaking. Intimacy.

But even as a mockery—bastardised as it is—it’s embarrassing how easily you open up for him. Legs falling, spreading further apart. Hot, sticky at the apex of your thighs. Wanting.

Blame it on sleep, on this endless hypnagogia you've been feeling since he leaned over you on the cliff edge, and said, pretty thing, aren't ye? All alone. No’ anymore, doe. Jus’ me an’ ye, now. Jus’ us—

You swallow, fighting the urge to cry. Blinking rapidly against the tears that pebble against your lashline, but you're helpless to stop the flood even though the levee doesn't break, doesn't spill over. It just sits, a sorrowful lagoon with nowhere to go.

In your attempt to hold back the deluge, you let your gaze wander away from the piercing blue that drills into your face—seemingly unbothered by the tears in your eyes, the ones that clot over your irises, stinging and hot—and stare down at his broad chest. A mistake, maybe, because you catch sight of the gold cross dangling around his neck. Like a pendulum, it swings. The motion is mesmerising. Hypnotic.

It distracts you for a moment. Or maybe you've just grown accustomed to his touch, to the heat of his hand on your skin. Whatever the reason, it's enough to pull you away from the feverish trail his fingers leave as they make a steady drag downward. It's only when they dance over your belly button do you realise the muted tickle is Johnny, and by then—

“Shush, s’alright, doe,” he's cooing, warm breath ghosting over the plains of your face. It might be comforting if he didn't rest his weight on his elbow, freeing his other hand just to bring it over your mouth, thumb brushing under your eye. A warning maybe. Don't scream. “Ah go’ ye. Ah’ll make ye feel so good—”

There's a fever in his eyes. Wildfires spreading through the yawning boscage, burning everything in sight. The heat is hot enough to char bone; to blacken meat into a dessicated husk. Eating away at everything in its path.

You know, almost immediately, that Johnny's beyond reason. Or, rather—

He's gone, turned inward; delusional enough to think that this is something he has to do.

You'd seen all the warnings of the kindling fire before. Something you'd decided to ignore even as the hunger in his eyes surged; as the shape of it morphed into a frothing devotion that felt ill-fitting for two strangers stuck together like this.

Stupidly, you thought you could outrun it. That he was a good man beneath it all, and wouldn't succumb to touching you in your sleep, to lulling you into a false sense of security—

Except. He hadn't, had he?

He'd been blunt about it all since the beginning. My wife—

How silly, you thought.

But the humour fades when he teases over your hips, resting his palm over your mound, middle finger perched above your clit. Just holding. Touching. The possessiveness of the action is unmistakable, unignorable.

It shouldn't send a shiver down your spine when you'd rather he didn't touch you at all, but it does. There's something about him, you think. Electric. A lightning storm. It crackles in the air around you, humming low in the atmosphere; this unavoidable surge, natural phenomenon. Maybe that's what he is.

More storm than man. A force you can't outrun, but can only endure—

His eyes flash when he slides his fingers further down your slit and finds your skin soft, hot. Drenched. When he groans your name out, it sounds like a prayer. An orison.

“So wet, doe,” he's heaving out in a whisper, eyes nearly rolling back into his head as his touch grows bolder, more insistent. As if the softness of your flesh, the wetness that sticks to your inner thighs, is all the consent he needs. “So fuckin’ wet fer me, aye? Been waitin’ fer this, haven't ye?”

You want to shake your head no but it's futile. He drops his head to look down the chasm between your bodies, watching his hand slide along your skin. Legs spread around his waist, inviting. He curses foul under his breath when he sees how wet his fingers are from just a touch, words mangled in the back of his throat. They sound less coherent as he roams your body, parting your folds and stroking through the slick spilling out of you, dragging it up to your clit.

His voice is closer now. Lips bruising against the shell of your ear. Butchered English. Gaelic. An amalgamation of low whines, and rasping grunts. He sounds more animal than man. A booming thundercloud groaning above you, as if touching you is enough to please him, too. Siphoning it from your body as he presses his fingers against your clit, circling, stroking.

It’s good. So good. And that's the problem, you think. It's easy to give in like this when he pets your pussy like the feeling of your fluttering heat on his hand is enough to make him cum. No one has ever touched you like they were starving for it. Needed it as badly as you did.

The sensation is almost too much. The notion of it getting tangled in the back of your head, looping around the part of you still screaming to run. To go home. To push him away.

(your arms are laden. your tongue is a puddle of mercury in your mouth—)

But just as the pleasure blooming in your belly raises with each pass of his thumb, he pulls away. Slides down, down—

Circles your hole with the tips of his slick fingers, petting with the same desperation he showed your clit until he deems you soft enough for him. He slowly sinks his finger inside of you to the knuckle, stretching your walls around him as he moans into your ear about how good ye feel around him, all tight. Hot. So fuckin' wet, do. So wet fer me—

He pulls out just as slowly, shushing the soft gasp you make when the ridge of his palm catches on your clit.

“Ah told ye, didnae ah? Ah’ll take care’a ye.”

He presses two fingers inside of you as he peppers kisses over your cheek, cooing low about how badly you need him. Only him.

Johnny fucks you slowly on two fingers. Gently. Deeply. Sliding into the last knuckle, petting against your slick walls, like he's owed the privilege and not touching you in your sleep.

He brings you to the edge, takes you right there, and—

Pulls away. His fingers slide down as your hips flit, lifting to make them catch on your clit again. It's embarrassing how badly you want him to touch you. Shameful.

He leans up and catches your mouth in a messy kiss. It's all tongue, wet, no finesse. The wild, unkempt tangle of hair abrades your skin, rubbing it raw as he devours you. Scoops out your tongue with his own, enticing it into his mouth. His teeth close on the thick of it, lips pursing. Sucking on the tip.

His kisses are doglike and obscene. Leaves drool dribbling down your chin, soaking into your neck. He can't seem to decide what he wants to do, so he tries to do it all. Everything. Biting your lips, trying to choke you on his tongue. Slurping up the taste of you until his mouth is stained with it. Beard matted down, drenched.

Despite it all, he's a good kisser. His pace is fast, breakneck. You can't keep up, but you try. Struggling along as he seems hellbent on eating you alive. But it's sporadic. He pauses just long enough to settle into an easy rhythm that makes you arch into it, silently begging for more as he fucks you on his fingers. Nips your tongue as he slides in a third, swallowing the gasp you let out, savouring your moans between his teeth.

Johnny ruins you with just a kiss. Leaves you panting, unmoored. Mouth slack, open wide for him to do what he pleases because the taste of him is divine.

“C’mon,” he urges, spreading his fingers inside of your cunt until you keen, whining his name. “Suck my tongue, bonnie.”

It's disgusting. You do it, anyway.

Your quiet acquiescence makes him moan, hips rutting against you. The hard press of his cock into your skin is bruising. It aches. Your inner thighs are tacky with your slick and the smears of pre-cum he leaves behind as he humps against you.

He sounds mournful when he pulls away, mouth messy with spit, and whispers, “fuck, wish ah could taste ye again, doe—” You don't know what he means until his eyes drop down to his hand, working insistently between your thighs.

Your stomach drops. Plummets. You thought this started when he was touching your chest, when you woke up to his hand on your breast—

“Ye didnae wake when ah did it before,” he says, as if sounding mournful, sad, over the fact that you didn't wake up to him eating your pussy while you were asleep, was normal. “Must’a had too much tea—”

You wish, so suddenly, so viciously, that he'd stop talking. You can't hear this. Can't bear to listen to him confess to all the needling worries that bloomed in the back of your head, ones you stamped down with a heavy foot and a potent sense of guilt, shame, for condemning a man who was just trying to help.

It makes you want to cry.

“Oh, doe, don't cry—” he coos the words out, contrite and conciliatory, but you can feel the way his cock twitches against your thigh. The unmistakable heat mushrooming in his eyes as the sight of tears streaming down your face.

He seems to take it as misery over not feeling his mouth on your cunt, a plaintive assertion he whispers into your ear (poor thing, jus’ wannae feel ma mouth on you, aye? wannae feel me lick yer sweet pussy again?), and decides to rectify your sorrow by kissing his way down your body.

His fingers slip out when he moves, resting them on your knee as he kneels back on his haunches.

You spare a glance toward him, nervous with trepidation, and—

This whole time, his cock had been this phantom sensation against your skin, bruising and hot. Leaving wet smears over your thighs. Hidden from view. But like this, it's the first thing you see as it hangs, heavy and thick, from between his thighs.

The sight is—

Something.

You don't want to think about the heat in your belly. The nervous flit of your heartbeat.

A pearlescent strand dribbles down the weeping, slick head, dropping to the sheets below. The shaft of his cock is similarly drenched, smeared with what seems like a copious amount of precum. It gathers at the base, a startling contrast of thick, black hair and globs of milky white.

Something about it makes you recoil. Almost instinctively, primal.

Your flinch just makes his cock twitch, spitting more out.

The motion seems to unveil more of it to you, adding to the growing unease you feel because his cock is the furthest thing from pretty.

It's flushed a daunting vermillion and purpling like a bruise around the engorged glands. Thickening at the base. Streaked with dark veins that run the length of it, like rivers intersecting and jutting up from his skin. Blotches of red, pink, purple, and peach make up the colouring of it. Marbled like a black eye. A busted lip.

It bobs when he moves. Ugly, garish. You don't want it anywhere near you—

But Johnny’s wet hand on your knee keeps you from moving. Holds you in place as he bends down, resting on elbow to bring his face as close to your pussy as he can get.

Johnny stares—unabashedly—at your bare cunt when he finally settles between your thighs, widening them further to fit the broad stretch of his shoulders. Eyes lit with a heady greed, a hunger, that knocks the air from your lungs.

“Missed ma mouth, didnae ye?”

For a moment, you think he's talking to you. Confusion colours the panic you feel, dampening the dread down until it's flattened by sheer bewilderment when you realise his eyes haven't left your slit.

“Such a bonnie girl,” he purrs, breath ghosting over your cunt. “Been so lonely without me, aye? Poor thing.”

It heats you up from the inside out. The mesmerised, almost unfettered look of pure adoration shaded alongside the raw want on his face twists a sense of desire inside of you. Has anyone looked at you with such naked need on their face? As if the idea of not having a taste was somehow the most agonising thing they could experience? The way Johnny looks at you is enough to make you ache. And with anyone else, having him address your pussy instead of you would be awkward, humiliating, but somehow, him doing it makes you burn white-hot. Makes you want—

“Johnny,” you whisper, paper-thin, and his head shoots up, brows inching high on his brow. You're acutely aware that this is the first thing you've said since this started. Since you woke up to him groping you, touching you, in your sleep. And it's his name. Johnny.

Not no, don't. Stop. Please. Just—

“Johnny.”

It's not consent. You're not sure you're fully capable of doing so right now, if ever. But it's the closest you think you could come to saying yes. Admitting that you want his mouth on you, even though the situation leading up to this still makes something ugly and awful twist in your guts, is as much as you can give. He seems to see this. To know.

But Johnny takes it between his teeth as an unequivocal yes despite that, groaning low in his throat, midnight eyes rolling back into his head. The hands on you tremble. Shake.

He breathes in deeply through his nose, the sound whistling as a great plume of air is forced through small channels, filling his lungs. Perfuming them with the heady scent of you, of sex, clotting in the air.

“Fuck, doe. Gonnae give ye what ye need.”

And then he bends his head, eyes lidded still, half rolled, and without any preamble, glues his lips to your drenched slit, forcing it between your soft folds.

The first touch of his tongue is molten. Soft, tensile, he laves it over the whole of your slit from the sensitive skin beneath your hole, to the crest of your clit. Digs his tongue in, swirling it over and under your folds leaving no part of you untouched. Feasting. Devouring.

It makes you mewl. Your back arches off the sheets, ankle throbbing in a heady, pulsing pain at the sudden movement, adding to the shrill whine in your voice.

He notices, and pets your knee once before sliding his bicep under your leg, looping his hand around to secure your thigh in the crook of his below. Locked in tight. Immoveable. The other he pushes down with the flat of his palm, until your joints ache from the stretch. Your knee is almost flush with the mattress. Widening you further for his searing, eager mouth.

If his kisses are dogish—wet, messy; sloppy with drool—then the way he eats your cunt is foul. Slobbering down his chin, slurping up the mess he makes with a series of chewed-off moans and muffled whines. He paws at you as if he was denied the pleasure of drink for aeons, feasting like a man half-delirious and starved. There's no finesse. No skill to speak of. Just a desperate man lapping at you like a beast. Worshipping you.

He nuzzles his chin and cheeks against your cunt, drenching himself until his beard is matted to his skin. The feeling of his coarse hair grazing your sensitive flesh is overwhelming. Too much. Too ticklish. But—

It feels good.

The contrast of his fleshy tongue rolling over your clit, and the rough brush of his hair when he nuzzles you with the point of his chin, cooing softly about how pretty this little pussy is, getting him all wet, is cataclysmic. The heat floods your belly, and you clench around nothing. Achingly empty. Moaning at the feeling of him bringing you right there, right to the brink, with nothing by the hair on his cheek. It's unreal. Inescapable. Your head drops, mouth lax, open wide as you pant and whimper through the madness of Johnny MacTavish trying to find a way to suck your clit and fuck you with his tongue at the same time. An impossible goal, you know, but he doesn't seem to care about logic or reason with his head buried between your thighs, mouth never leaving you once. He merely nods his head up and down, refusing to pull away.

It's divine. It's worship. It's—

He pushes two of his fingers inside of you, lapping at your taut rim to stem the sting of his sudden intrusion, and you think, for a moment, that you see Nirvana behind your eyelids.

It's embarrassingly how quickly he brings to you the brink, slurping messily as he drills his fingers into your hole, petting against your walls in a mockery of what he'll do to you once he's had his fill. Satiated his hunger with the taste of your pussy.

Something he can't seem to get enough of.

Your thighs draw together, crushing him between your legs. Arching into his mouth, nearly smothering him as you rut clumsily against his face, moaning at the rough scrape of his beard against your skin. You're not normally so aggressive, but he loses himself in it, eyes rolling as he grabs your hips and pulls you closer to his wanting mouth, encouraging you to use his tongue, his lips, to meet your end as you see fit. Riding his face as much as you can with your leg locked tight between his shoulder and bicep.

And it's in between his loud grunts, his whines—almost caterwauling into your slit—where you shatter. The sound of his pleasure, the feeling of his mouth on you—it’s all too much. You break when he sucks your clit into his mouth, keening in the back of his throat as he works another finger into you. It feels good. Too good.

Johnny works you through it. Lets you take, and take as your muscles spasm with the force of your release. Fingers digging into his shoulders, fisting the sheets. He moans along with you, eagerly lapping at your cunt until you whine, begging him to stop. You've had enough. Can't take anymore—

He only pulls away when you melt into the sheets, shuddering with the aftershocks bubbling through your body. Leaning back on his haunches once more, the hair around his mouth slick and wet. The evidence of your pleasure dripping down his chin, droplets still clinging to his beard.

He crawls over you once more, eyes boring into yours. Pits of coal. An endless black hole.

In this strange space, liminal, you lose yourself. Shed pieces of who you were before when he slots his hips between your thighs, cock heavy in his hand, and presses it to your slit.

This is happening. He's going to fuck you.

You wish the thought didn't make your knees fall apart a little wider for him. Make your hips flit, lifting slightly into the air. Eager. Hungry for it. For him.

It's loneliness, you think. Desperation.

Madness is addictive. It feeds itself and infects those around it. Noxious. An all-consuming black hole that eats, and eats. It must have bitten you, too. Dug infectious teeth into your skin, severing flesh to imbed its jowls in your marrow. Clinging. Poisoning you from the inside out.

There's no other reason for why you reach for him, hands sliding over his sweat-slicked skin as he falls into the open brackets of your arms, grunting when the head of his cock catches on your rim. He's a wall of heat. Firm muscles. Your nails dig into the thick cords of his shoulders just to feel the reluctant give of his skin.

Nothing about this man is soft. His waist, his thighs, his chest, his arms, the hard ridge of his cock. It's all unyielding muscle. Burning. Searing into your skin when it drags against his.

“Gonnae fuck ye, doe,” he whispers, words pitching low. Damp wood, felled timber. Rough. You shiver from the heat of it. The warning, the plea; both extremes coalescing together to make truism more potent. Weighty. “Gonnae fuck this pretty pussy, and yer gonnae beg me fer it.”

Despite the surety in assertion, he doesn't wait for you to plead with him to split you apart, taking the initiative instead to sink the head of his cock into you. The stretch stings already, and only his glands have sunk in, a fact he grunts into your ear as he drives forward another inch. Another—

You don't think you've ever been this unmoored before. Rendered this docile. A mere domicile for him to burrow inside of; to carve a home from the sanctum of your walls wrapped tight around him. And carve he does. Splitting you apart as he grunts with the efforting of forcing his cock into you, feeding it further with blunt jerks of his hips, his hands feverish on your skin. Sweat slicked already even though he's barely halfway inside of you.

“Feels so good,” he slurs into your ear, face pinching. Twisting up as pleasure blooms over his brow. “So fuckin’ good, doe, fuck—”

It does. Beyond the blunt pressure of him forcing his cock inside of you, the sting of the stretch, there's an intense, dizzying pleasure in the fullness you feel. In the press of him notching against something inside that makes heat bloom in your belly, turns your bones liquid. It might be the previous climax rendering you oversensitive, but the feeling of him splitting you apart is euphoric.

It's aided by the moans he lets out as you take more and more of him, as if the sound of his pleasure is funnelled into yours. By the look on his face, eyes widened, feverish, as he darts his gaze between your face and your pussy, unable to decide if he wants to watch his cock disappear into you or watch your face, pinched up in pleasure, in flickering pain, as you take him fully.

This sort of bliss, this pleasure, is addicting. Narrowed down to the sharp nudge of his cock grazing places inside of you that light your nerves on fire, burn through your synapses until your thoughts are muddled, mush. No coherency, no logic—just the fat length of him bludgeoning into your walls; the tap of his heavy, full sack slapping against your ass as he finally, finally, roots deep.

He must feel it, too. This strange, overwhelming pleasure loops around your lower belly, twisting itself into knots because when he pushes the last few inches inside of you, he nearly collapses on top of you, his whole body shuddering. Trembling. Presses his damp face to your cheek, matted, slick hair tickling your skin, and groans from deep within his chest at the feeling of you wrapped around him. The noise shivers through you. His pleasure is enough to make you clench down, tightening up around him. Already on the verge and all he did was slide his cock inside of you.

A fact he seems to luxuriate in, huffing shakily into your ear as he quenches himself on the soft, fluttering pulses of your walls around him. Content to grind his hips into yours in shallow gyrations that make your eyes roll into the back of your head. The tension in your belly coiling tighter and tighter, the pleasure ameliorating the shame you'd felt before, burning it into cinders.

As long as he keeps his cock inside of you, as long as he keeps pushing the blunt head into that spot that makes your vision whiteout, you think could cum just like this. Right now—

He doesn't.

Johnny lifts himself off of your chest, elbow coming to rest beside your head, taking the brunt of his weight. His eyes are bright, burning. He stares down at you, and the look of sheer adoration on his face is daunting, overwhelming. It threatens to eat you alive. Devour you whole. Pure rapture. Devotion.

You flush, face stinging with embarrassment. Prickling with unease. No one has ever stared at you like this, so hungrily, and the fact that it's him makes your head spin. Looping endlessly in circles of disbelief and fear.

He might be omnipotent, you think, with the way his lips tug sharply downward, brow bunching together as if he can hear your thoughts, taste your disquiet in the air.

Johnny rolls his hips back slowly, inching out of you with a hum until just the tip remains. The loss has your hands scrambling down his chest, fingers tangling in the coarse, drenched hairs at the soft incline of his belly. The other sliding around the thick breadth of his ribs, nails digging into the slick skin covering his spine. Pressing. Biting.

More, you don't say. Please.

The knot in his brow dissipates. Eases into something almost playful, impish.

“Want ma cock, doe?” He whispers it waggishly, like a cloy secret, and you pretend the tease in his voice doesn't make your heart lurch in your chest. “Didnae anyone teach ye some manners? Gotta ask politely.”

You won't. You won't.

Your reluctance makes him sigh. The chain around his neck swinging when he moves. His hips pull back, and he reaches down with his free hand, and grabs his cock, pulling it out of you, and sliding it against your slit. The head bumps into your clit, and you nearly choke on the gasp that's ripped from your chest. The pleasure is too much, too—

He pulls away, denying you the euphoria of release.

“No, no, please,” you babble, resolve crumbling into ash. “Please, Johnny, please—”

“That’s more like it,” he coos, and lets his cock dip back inside of your fluttering hole, rim stretched taut around him once more. The sting is lessened now, but still there as the thick glands force you open for him. “Sound so pretty when yer desperate for ma cock.”

He leans down, catching your mouth in another sloppy kiss as he slams his cock back inside of you hard enough to bruise. To make you see stars. Cockhead bludgeoning into your cervix in a dizzying amalgamation of pleasure and pain that makes you whine, the whimper snatched up between his teeth as he burrows them into your lip with an echoing groan.

He fucks you hard, working his cock into you at a maddening pace. Bestial, now. All animal. The tenderness from before dissolves into an choppy desperation. An eagerness to seek his own end as you fall to pieces beneath him, shaking from the force of taking him over and over again, each piston, each hard thrust driving the thoughts from your head until all you have left is sensation. An absence of everything except the way he feels above you, inside of you.

Sweat builds up along your hairline, gathers at the base of your spine, and soaks the sheets below. You feel liquid under him. A ragdoll for him to sink his jowls into, to toss around as he likes.

Johnny is all sensation and a cacophony of sound.

He ruts into you clumsily, groaning in your ear. Moaning out how good you feel around him. Pretty pussy made just for him.

“Oh, fuck, doe—” he moans, arching into the next thrust. Drool dribbles down his chin when he curves his spine, dropping his forehead onto your temple. “Feels so good. Feels like my cock is meltin’ instead ye—”

The lewd squelch of his cock pistoning into you seems to echo through the room, louder somehow than the ragged moans that spill from his mouth.

“Been so long,” he shudders against you, rooting his cock deep. Burying himself inside of you as his cockhead bullies into your cervix. The flash of pain is whitehot, blinding, but the bloom of pleasure eats it whole before it can pollute the puddle of bliss pooling in your belly. “Been savin’ it all jus’ fer ye—”

His hand slides from your hip, burrowing between your bodies as rubs at your clit. It feels so good that it nips sharply into pain, into agony. Too much, too much—

But he doesn't relent. Fingers toying, circling your clit in time with each jarring thrust, tightening the coil inside of you until it whines from the tension, the pressure—

It snaps when he growls into your ear—cum fer me, doe; wannae feel this pussy squeezin’ ma cock—and releases in a flood, a deluge of molten heat. Back arching, toes curling. You're barely cognisant of the ache in your injured foot, the throbbing pain. It's swallowed by the surge of endorphins roaring through you, ringing in your ears. Blotting everything out except the way you pulse around the thick of him still lodged deep inside of you.

You barely have time to come down before he starts again, forcing you to take him as he thrusts in harder than before, mindlessly seeking his own end as you gush around him, nails raking across his flesh.

He's babbling above you, spitting words into your ear about how he's going to take care of you. All of you. Take you back to Scotland with him so you can raise your children—

It slices through the haze, ripping a hole through the fog clouding your mind.

“No,” you whimper, devastation flooding your chest alongside the vicious pleasure still rolling around inside of you. “No, please—”

Children, he breathes like you hadn't spoken at all. Lots. Lots of them. Brothers and sisters. Two, maybe three, of each. But he's not picky, bonnie, he'll take whatever you give him. And keep fucking you over and over again until he gets what he wants. A whole family to raise. To surround himself with. Been lonely, you think he says. Needed something to keep him busy.

You don't want this. Can't. But he doesn't stop, doesn't relent. He breathes life into the picture he paints with the soft flutter of your cunt clenching tight around him at words, once again betrayed by your own body.

Despite the nausea that bleeds to the surface at his words, your eyes roll back into your head once more, driven mad with the thunderous pleasure that rips through you as he forces every last inch of his cock into you.

Johnny grinds his hips against yours, moaning, loud and untethered, muscles jerking, twitching, as he cums deep inside of you.

The aftershocks of his pleasure make him tremble, body spasming as he drives himself tight against the seal of your womb. A new heat grows inside of you as Johnny slumps against you, panting in your ear.

“Ah’ll be so good tae ya,” he promises in a rasping growl, shoving his head into the crook of your neck. Gyves close around you as he nuzzles his mouth into your flesh, licking at the sweat that beads on your skin.

“All mine. All fuckin’ mine—” The confessional is tainted with the sickness that leaks from the craggy hole chiselled into the side of his head. Obsessive devotion hewing ruinous dogma into the fibrils of your head. Tenderised, softened, by the blunt, unyielding touch of his hand. A slurry that this polluted notion slips inside, tainting your resolve until it's thickened into his whim. His wants.

You sob into his chest as he wraps you up in his arms, shackled against the man who carved a place inside of you just wide enough for himself to fit. Who spat poison in the hollow crevasses, and called it absolution. Love.

All you can do is heave through corrupted lungs as he smothers you under the weight of his madness.

“No’ gonnae let anyone touch ye. Ah'll kill anyone who tries to tae take ye away from me, doe—”

The conviction in his tone is bound in steel. In feverish blue.

“Ah’ll take care’a ye,” he rasps, voice thick in his throat. “Donnae worry about a thing, doe.”

“Will you let me go?”

He doesn't answer at first. Just digs his nose into your hairline, breathing in deep until the wide breadth of his chest expands across your back. Mulling it over, maybe. Coming up with an excuse for his behaviour. Something to negotiate with on reasons why you shouldn't call the police the moment he does.

And for a moment, a startling, terrible moment, there's hope. The assurance wells on your tongue. Some unfathomable amalgamation of please and i’ll never tell. Maybe you were going to tell him he was an honest man who did something bad. That there was still good within him. All of those hideous clichès bubble up through the cracks—

But it's all dashed when his hand drops down from its perch beneath your bare breasts, sliding over your skin until it curls possessively over your lower belly.

He breathes out and the hope inside you is snuffed under the gale of delusion, his obsession. “Why would ah do a thing like that?” He prompts, and the genuine confusion in his voice makes you shiver, as if the idea of it is so outlandish, so absurd, it negates everything he'd done to get to this point. You feel hollow. But not—

Not empty.

As if he hears the thought thundering in the ruins of your mind, he presses a tender kiss to your temple that you think is meant to be soothing. Shushing you softly when you begin to shake. “After it took me this long to find ye, doe. Am no’ lettin’ ye go fer the world, ken. Yer mine. All mine.”

And then he closes his jowls around your throat.

Time feels artificial here.

You wake up several hours later, groggy and disoriented, but the sun doesn't seem like it moved from where it was perched last night at all. Fixed in place. Lost in some strange, eternal twilight zone where the sun is a warden, watching you tirelessly through the window.

Cardboard cutout hung amongst the stars.

Your ankle aches horribly—an agonising throb. You must have turned in your sleep, jostled it. You're further away from the spot you were last night, too. Rolled over in your sleep, maybe. The burn brings tears to your eyes that you swallow down with a groan.

As you awkwardly settle your leg in a way that hurts slightly less than it did before, you let cognisance slip back in to keep your mind off of the horrible ache that tremors through your bones. Your neck.

Between your thighs—

It's then that you hear Johnny.

He's whistling in the kitchen. You peer out through the crack in the door, catching the broad expanse of his naked back as he works over the stove. Flexing. Muscles bunching. He hums a tune you can't recognise as he scrapes the spatula over the cast iron pan.

His grey sweats sit low on his hips. The divots above the hem—dimples of Apollo, you recall—are stark against the hollow ravine of his spine. You can't help but stare. Gawk. Limned in the soft light of the morning sun that spills through the open window, he looks almost ethereal. Unreal. Like something out of a magazine and not the middle of nowhere in Canada where the sun doesn't set this time of year.

He feels surreal. A man too good to be true. All sculpted musculature that looks like it could just as well be handmade by an amalgamation of both David’s by Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. All sharp, angled lines; beautiful in their fluidity.

It's unfair, you think suddenly. To be stuck with a man you feel nauseous thinking about but can’t seem to take your eyes off of. Some paradoxical madness. Retribution for a time in a past life where you swindled fate and got away unscathed. All of your karmic sins pile down on top of you as the events last night flicker past, drenched in seafoam. Ghosts linger in the cracks; in memories.

The phantom weight of something slung over your waist, knotted tight between your breasts. Scorching heat glued to your spine. A heavy hand cradling your lower belly. Words whispered into your nape—

He turns, then. Catches your eye like he knew it was there the whole time. Stands there like the picture of ease, of a satiated man puttering around a small space while his sweetheart lounged in the bed, lazing the day away.

Like this wasn’t illegal. Immoral. He treats you like a lover even though you’d only met less than a day ago—

And already his cum was drying on your inner thighs, thick and sticky. His madness pooling in your head, words uttered into your ear about this cabin he has back home, back in Scotland. He’ll take you there, he said. It’s time he came home, he thinks. His head is on straight again, and he finally feels like he can breathe without shattering into a million pieces—

(He put your hands on his head last night, palm cradling the ugly scar on his temple, and whispered, fervent and insane, ye keep ma head together, doe. Ye make me feel whole again—)

Knows a man, he told you. A good bloke who’d help him get you home, too.

His smile is bright. Blinding.

“Mornin’, doe. Ah made breakfast.”

#johnny mctavish x reader #soap x reader #baby trap anthology #the kinks in this are just #wow #UM proceed with caution lmao

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five-thousand-loaves-of-bread · 2 months ago

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autism in china

if you been here for long enough you probably know that even me fucking explicitly naming country of origin & ethnicity instead of vague around something east asian, huge deal.

so.

as chinese person who born & part grew up in mainland china n been though HORRIFIC trauma from it... cannot talk about anything related to it.

but in mean time. there important things desperately wish non-chinese, or people who lived) in china in general (including diasporas), would know n understand.

because it been extra traumatizing & isolating n lonely, be only person in big metaphorical or literal room, who know these trauma exist, n horrific extent of it. some of which have live experience with. some of it looming threat for my future. some of it not my own experience but my friends (aka my community. my autistic n disabled community).

so, going share some stuff written by other chinese people in this post. that. oh gods. it so accurate it hurt.

there may be some parts not fully agree or would word different if am write. but. think overall message important enough.

especially if you non-chinese. hope you read through all of it (if accessible). even if it make you deeply uncomfortable. n then imagine autistic chinese people living in this reality. because many parts SHOULD make you deeply uncomfortable.

EDIT: image description link for those need ID or not have instagram

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fact is, most prevalent, majority—n by majority don’t mean 51% majority, but enough to feel like it hopelessly whole entire country—understanding of autism in china is that. there real autism (真自闭症) that rare n severe n hopeless n should die, n majority of cases fake autism (假自闭症) that can be cured / taken off hat 脱帽, that caused by environment like bad parenting, n you should be glad it fake, n kid n parent should then dedicate entire life to taking off that hat to finding cure, even if it mean , via old school gold standard (read: abuse) ABA. all professionals say it all professionals endorse it n who would question professionals? look this grande new intervention came from great United States Of America, that proof it top quality it works n am going charge ridiculous money for it. but why you saying USAmericans n “the west” saying [things that humanize autism], they wouldn’t know real struggle, their diagnostic criteria super wide it all fake, why would you listen to them, you traitor you boot licker. —but either way, both real n fake autism drain on public resources n should be kept away should be locked up in chains (no, literally. seen documentary where high support needs autistic get chain in closet for majority of day, “for his benefit.”), should never be born should all die. keep it away from my normal children my normal children should not have to share same space same classroom same world as it, its behaviors its symptoms its screams its existence rob teachers attention away from my normal children. they all should die n will proudly explicitly admit eugenics good.

(don’t actually believe this. but pretending write what have seen people talk about.)

n finally, post about general (visible) disability—because in my however many year grow up there, before (temporarily it seems) left, have never seen visibly disabled person in public. ever.

ever.

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n generally anything from this instagram account. need stop linking now or else link entire account.

so please. reblog this. share this. read this. don’t let me be only person bear this. because my god it breaking me

#am tired. am so fucking tired. no fucking wonder am want to [redacted]#actually autistic #actuallyautistic #autism #autistic #race #china #chinese #autism in china #loaf screm #long post

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catlvrmax · 11 months ago

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LOST IN THE PADDOCK.

MV1 X FEM!READER

summary getting lost in the paddock and bumping into the current world champion was definitely not on your bingo card.

cw amara is the only oc, no use of y/n. this is my first time writing rpf since middle school, so bear with me. ALSO, this is a work of fiction: i don't know these people irl, i don't know how they act. NON-DESCRIPTIVE READER.

face claims girls on pinterest but you can obviously disregard them, and imagine whoever you want.

masterlist | taglist

—

"Ah, fuck," you mumble to yourself, panickedly walking away from the direction you came from while also looking for your best friend.

You call her name a few times in hopes of her popping her head out of the Ferrari building's corner but to no avail. The group and guides you had been with are nowhere to be found, and you have to avoid bumping into employees wearing the entire rainbow as they hurry around you.

You curse the moment you decided to enter the giveaway for those tickets. Although you weren't a Formula One fan, simply because you never fully listened to Amara's ramblings and analysis, when you stumbled across a giveaway of otherwise very expensive tickets, you didn't hesitate to enter it. Despite entering for her, you kept it a secret. The list of entries was long, and the odds were not in your favour, so you didn't want to get her hopes up. You couldn't contain the bubbling excitement when you got the e-mail verifying your win for two Paddock Club tickets for the Spanish Grand Prix.

After announcing it to your obsessed-with-cars best friend, you decided to make it a five-day trip, planning to sightsee Barcelona before the race weekend and spend a free day after it. The first day had been great, albeit tiring, but you had woken up the next day buzzing with anticipation to walk around the paddock. You were the assigned photographer, as you knew Amara would want to listen to everything the guide said. You were content with taking pictures of the place and her.

Until now. You were definitely not happy with being the camera guy. Because of that, you'd just lost your group in the middle of God-knows-where, with no idea where the building you came from was. So immersed in your grumbling and reading the map on your phone- you collide with someone. Your phone and water bottle slip from your fingers, and the tote bag slips from your shoulder to your elbow. You hiss at the sudden weight shift.

The smell of rich cologne enters your nostrils, but you don't dare look up. Your cheeks burn. "Sorry." You bend down to grab your things.

The man seems to have the same idea, as seconds later, he's on his knees and gathering his things before you can reach them. "No, it's alright! I wasn't looking where I was going."

He extends his full hands with a smile, and you return a sheepish one before grabbing your things. You take a second to look at him. He wears a Red Bull cap and T-shirt, looking like everyone who hurriedly passed you with papers and phones in their hands. I should ask him for directions. He looks like he knows the place.

"Uh...Is there any way you saw a group of people with guides walking around here? I'm supposed to be with them, but I kinda lost them." You lift the camera, further explaining why you're separated from them.

He can't help but chuckle at your flushed cheeks. "Unfortunately, no," he pauses. "Are you here for the weekend?" You nod. "Haven't they given you a map, then? They usually do, to avoid people getting lost."

You show him your phone. Your fingers brush as he pulls it closer to look at the map. "Yeah, they have. But I can't figure it out. Kind of my first time coming to something like this."

He looks at you briefly before returning his gaze to the phone. "Really?" He sounds surprised. He shouldn't.

You looked out of place compared to the rich-as-fuck members of your group. You had no idea how people dressed for these occasions. Even Amara didn't really know what to pack, so you both agreed to wear comfortable clothes. With the race being during June and in Spain, you would rather be comfortable than sweaty. The only thing tying you to the group was the Paddock Club pass you wore around your neck.

"My best friend is really into this. Loves the sport. I won us the tickets, but I'm barely grasping the basics." You laugh, and he joins. You like the way his eyes crease when he smiles wide.

"Oh, you're the ones that won the tickets! Someone told me about that, I think. Congrats!" You thank him. "How's your weekend so far?"

You shrug. "T'was really fun. Until I got lost while taking pictures of the Ferrari building." He snorts.

Leaning next to him, you try to follow his finger as he scrolls around the zoomed-in map. "You figured it out yet?"

"I think I have, yeah." He shows you the phone. "We're here. The garages are right there. You'll be watching the race on the floor above them." You nod, slowly grasping your surroundings. Turns out it's easier to figure it out when you're not panicking and a handsome stranger is helping you. "You got it?"

You flash a bright smile. "Yeah, actually, I think I do!" You look at him. "Thank you!"

He shrugs. "No problem. I know it's easy to get lost, especially with so many people running around."

"Still. Thank you. You probably have to be somewhere, and I took up a lot of your time." You step back, turning in the direction he'd shown you.

"Don't worry about it." He fixes his hair under the cap.

"Thanks again." You wave and turn to leave.

"Hey, I forgot to ask you." You turn, confused. "What team are you supporting tomorrow?"

Oh, shit.

It's like a deer caught in headlights situation. You suddenly forget all ten names of the racing teams, desperately racking your brain for an answer. You swear you know all ten.

"Uh..." you nervously clench and unclench your water bottle. "Ferrari?" It's more of a question rather than a statement.

He laughs, and your cheeks return to their warm state. Bad answer?

"Ferrari?" He asks as if saying really? You shrug, and he huffs a laugh.

"I told you I'm not good at this!"

You hear a shout and simultaneously turn to see a man in a Red Bull shirt beckoning him over.

"I have to go. But you should watch out for the Red Bulls. I hear they got the better cars!" He winks and waves before walking away from you.

You roll your eyes and smile wide on your lips. Of course, he'd tell you to cheer for his team. The back of your hand touches your cheek. It's incredibly warm. You blame it on the hot weather.

—

"I'm telling you, mate! She had no idea who I was!"

Lando rolls his eyes. "And I'm telling you there's no way. Your face is plastered everywhere."

It's Charles's turn to roll his eyes. "Or maybe she was more worried about finding a way back than asking for pictures."

"Yeah, maybe she was being polite. Didn't want to attract any attention to you." Albon adds.

Max shrugs. "I don't know."

"Was she pretty?" Oscar elbows Lando's ribs, as the latter can't contain his giggle.

Max's neck flushes. He shrugs again. "Yeah, I guess."

"Ohhhhh!" George and Lando pat him on the back teasingly, and Charles laughs at Max's expression.

Before they can tease him about this mystery girl more, a woman wearing a headset informs them they have to part ways and get ready for qualifying.

—

"And Fernando was so bloody nice, too! He was more than happy to sign the cap for you!" Amara waved her hands excitedly as she recounted everything you missed while lost.

You sat near the windows overlooking the pits, watching as the teams got their cars ready for qualifying, far away from the TVs and the crowded tables, not wanting to converse with anyone but your best friend. You chewed on your extremely expensive pasta, intently listening to her meet-up with some of the drivers.

"I can't believe you met the only driver I know," you whined, lips pouting sadly.

"I swear I didn't realise you were gone until they stopped us to greet the drivers. I was fully into that tyre explanation the guide was giving."

"Gee, thanks." You smile, giving her the middle finger.

"Oh, you know I don't mean it like that. Without you, I wouldn't even be doing the stuff we did today." Amara pulls on your middle finger, and you both giggle.

"So, tell me what you did when you were alone," she urges, sipping her drink.

"You mean when you left me wandering like I was looking for my mother?" She gives you a pointed look. You shrug. "I stopped a Red Bull guy to give me directions. He was helpful and cute. Also took some pictures while I was making my way back here."

"Oh, was he a mechanic or what?"

"I don't know. Didn't catch his name." You smile as you recount his advice. "He told me to look out for the Red Bulls because they have fast cars."

"Well, he's not wrong."

You finish your food and drinks, chatting until qualifying is about to begin. You sit on the balcony, watching the cars drive on the track. You get settled, watching the small screen in front of you, commentary loud in the headset you wear. Qualifying goes by quickly, with Amara explaining things you don't understand and you nodding along.

It's no surprise—in Amara's words—that Max Verstappen came first in his Red Bull. He's the one dominating this season, after all. Second comes Carlos Sainz, and third place takes Lando Norris. Your best friend cheers a little more for him. You shoot her a look, and she just shrugs. "What? He's fast, and he's handsome." You laugh.

You decide to leave before others, not stick around for post-qualifying interviews. Although there's a great chance you can catch drivers, take pictures and get them to sign autographs, you're both far too exhausted to stay. There's always tomorrow, Amara says, and you agree.

You're looking through the Uber app to find a car available to take you back to your hotel when you hear Amara all but screech beside you. You look up, watching as she runs towards a wall decorated with a gigantic poster of three drivers. You recognise Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc and...Oh, shit.

"Can you take a picture here," she calls your name pleadingly.

Your eyes are wide and glued to the tall poster, even as you pull the camera up to your face. You snap a couple of pictures before Amara walks back to you. Her wide smile falters as she watches you stare at the poster intensely. You rack your brain for his name and know that you should know it. Amara has mentioned it before, but you just can't put your finger on it. He's in Red Bull, so it's either Checo Perez or—

"Is that Verstappen?" You point to him.

"Yep. Two-time world champion." Amara looks at the poster and then back at you, eyebrows furrowed. "Why are you looking at him like that?"

"He's the guy from earlier."

"What?!"

—

yourusername

liked by amaraiscool, yourmom, and 167 others.

tagged amaraiscool

yourusername chatted with a guy today, turns out he's the current world champion.

view all comments

amaraiscool i can't believe you met max verstappen

> yourusername amaraiscool i cant believe you let me get lost

amaraiscool and i can't believe you didnt recognise him.

> yourusername amaraiscool hes cuter in person, too bad you didn't get to see him :))

yourfriend1 THE DRESS IS SO CUTE, AMARA WTF DROP THE STORE!!!!!!

liked by yourusername

yourfriend2 johns freaking out rn lol

> yourusername yourfriend2 AW, i bet hes not being as dramatic as amaraiscool was when i told her :,)

> amaraiscool yourusername met THE max verstappen.

—

"You should totally text him," Amara says between bites.

She offers you a piece of chocolate, and you offer her a bewildered look. The hotel room's TV is playing a random spanish show, but with no subtitles, you can barely grasp what they're saying. Amara is scrolling on TikTok beside you.

"Text who?" You already know who.

"The two-time world champion. Duh." She rolls her eyes.

Amara hadn't stopped talking about the Max interaction since you'd pointed at his gigantic poster. The more she spoke on it, wiggling her eyebrows, the more you blushed. She had gone over a thousand scenarios, all of which you ended up hooking up with him. You had to remind her that despite his popularity, he was a stranger to you.

"I don't have his number, 'mara. I told you he just helped me find my way."

She flicks your forehead. "That's what Insta is for!"

"No."

"But why!?" Amara whines in your ear loudly, like a child when you take their candy away.

"It's weird! He's cute and all," you sit up, pointing your finger up," but he doesn't know my name," you put another one up, "he'll think I'm creepy," you point a third one, "and that is if he sees the requested message."

"Uh, you're ruining my scenario-building process."

"That's what Tumblr is for. Leave my quiet, boring life out of this." You dramatically sigh.

"Isn't that how all fanfiction starts? Boring and quiet life turned upside down?" Amara tilts her head.

"I don't know, 'ave never read any." You shrug, lips pursing.

She huffs a laugh, and you hold in yours. "Liar."

There's a pause. You think over Amara's suggestion. Max Verstappen is cute. And it wouldn't hurt to try and get his number. You'd never see him again after this weekend. And the worst he could say is: "Security, please get her out of here!"

What the fuck am I thinking? He's a literal superstar. Me bumping into him was a one-time thing.

Ah, fuck it. It's not the end of the world.

"You know what?" Amara turns to look at you. "If I get the chance tomorrow, I'll talk to him. Try and get his number."

Her eyes almost pop out of their sockets. "What?"

"I mean, I'm never seeing again? Right? It could go either way. He doesn't call for security to escort me like I'm crazy fangirl, or he does, and we pray no cameras recorded the moment."

Amara shrugs, trying to appear nonchalant, but she can barely hold her wide smile. "Sounds like a plan to me."

"Not much of a plan. I'm just indulging in your delusions."

You share a laugh before you fall back in bed beside her. You shuffle closer to your best friend's side, eager to watch the TikTok edit she is staring intensely at.

"Oh, look, it's your future boyfriend!"

"Shut up."

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thatbadadvice · 10 days ago

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Help! I'm A Private Person!

Neil Gaiman, Journal.NeilGaiman.com, 14 January 2025:

Over the past many months, I have watched the stories circulating the internet about me with horror and dismay. I’ve stayed quiet until now, both out of respect for the people who were sharing their stories and out of a desire not to draw even more attention to a lot of misinformation. I've always tried to be a private person, and felt increasingly that social media was the wrong place to talk about important personal matters. I've now reached the point where I feel that I should say something. As I read through this latest collection of accounts, there are moments I half-recognise and moments I don’t, descriptions of things that happened sitting beside things that emphatically did not happen. I’m far from a perfect person, but I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Ever. I went back to read the messages I exchanged with the women around and following the occasions that have subsequently been reported as being abusive. These messages read now as they did when I received them – of two people enjoying entirely consensual sexual relationships and wanting to see one another again. At the time I was in those relationships, they seemed positive and happy on both sides. And I also realise, looking through them, years later, that I could have and should have done so much better. I was emotionally unavailable while being sexually available, self-focused and not as thoughtful as I could or should have been. I was obviously careless with people's hearts and feelings, and that's something that I really, deeply regret. It was selfish of me. I was caught up in my own story and I ignored other people's. I’ve spent some months now taking a long, hard look at who I have been and how I have made people feel. Like most of us, I’m learning, and I'm trying to do the work needed, and I know that that's not an overnight process. I hope that with the help of good people, I'll continue to grow. I understand that not everyone will believe me or even care what I say but I’ll be doing the work anyway, for myself, my family and the people I love. I will be doing my very best to deserve their trust, as well as the trust of my readers. At the same time, as I reflect on my past – and as I re-review everything that actually happened as opposed to what is being alleged – I don't accept there was any abuse. To repeat, I have never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone. Some of the horrible stories now being told simply never happened, while others have been so distorted from what actually took place that they bear no relationship to reality. I am prepared to take responsibility for any missteps I made. I’m not willing to turn my back on the truth, and I can't accept being described as someone I am not, and cannot and will not admit to doing things I didn't do.

Dear Neil,

You, sir, are nothing other than fundamentally misunderstood — indicated in every sense by this, a smart and good post that you published on the whole-ass internet for literally the entire world to read.

The important thing is that you're learning! And you deserve infinite credit for that. Not nearly enough people appreciate how much you've learned about yourself in the course of ~ allegedly ~ committing sexual assault against multiple, probably crazy, women and the aftermath thereof. Less enlightened men would disregard the experiences of women who have highly specific and detailed accounts of being sexually abused, but you are open to the idea that the women who foolishly believe you assaulted them were simply mislead by your interminable charm! For which you cannot be held responsible! What a gift you are, friend; your generosity and open-mindedness are unparalleled.

Truly, whomst among us has not been where you find yourself now? Come, enjoy the company of friends who understand the brutal loneliness that results from being misunderstood by hysterical bitches who fail to appreciate the privilege of having your masterful fingers shoved up their asses without notice!

Again and again, women love men like you too much. They want you to be emotionally and sexually available! And that is just so, so much to ask. You have a lot going on! It's not a ding on them — of course they find you irresistible, being as you are an intellectual titan — and they may find themselves confused and intimidated by your sexual prowess, unaware that you exist in a world beyond pedestrian notions of consent. That is what makes your work so particularly meaningful and powerful.

You write about a man who does a bad thing, but you do the other good thing! You do a good thing, but in your work, a man does a bad thing! This is the stuff of sheer brilliance, capturing the sturm unt drang of the human condition — or, at least, of the humans whose conditions matter most, which is to say, men of your creative stature.

The sorry truth is that despite your best efforts, no one understands you, the author of 40-plus years of written work in which you had every fucking opportunity to emulate literally any character of your design who was not an unrepentant rapist. Whomst among us has not struggled with such quandaries? Whomst among us has not wondered: Should I rape women in the presence of my child, or should I just the fuck wait a minute and destroy my marriage by other means? Should I order a cinnamon bagel, or an egg sandwich? These are the questions men such as us must grapple with in a world where cancel culture has run rampant, and where people are liable to believe anything they hear from over half a dozen unbridled harpies (story idea! make sure Katee Robert doesn't see this, she seems like a bitch with designs) whose indeterminate fantasies have been aggressively fact-checked by risk-averse media legal departments.

You're right and everyone else is wrong, and that's exactly the take-away that everyone will have from reading this thing that you posted! Great work, great instincts, great writing. It's like Stardust, but hotter. You know what I mean.

A+ all around, no notes other than: you should share this with more people directly so they have the clearest possible idea of where you're coming from. Don't hold back, bud!

#advice #bad advice #neil gaiman #stardust #good omens #katee robert #this mf #honestly fuck this man #leave him #dtmfa

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directdogman · 8 days ago

Note

What kind of class would the cast of Dialtown be in DnD? (Ie, Druid, Rouge, Paladin… etc)

Oh, I did a whole DnD Dialtown thing ages ago that conveniently mentions some classes in it with some rewritten backstories for the characters in this new universe. I'll paste it below (preamble is important for the character descriptions, so sorry for the lore:)

The story is set in a fictional landmass, with parts of it based on a fucked up Alaska, parts resembling the Swiss Alps, a desert zone and nuked carnival wastes. In the present era, an evil empire rules over the whole map, ran by an evil necromancer, Callum Crown. Him and his partner, Milton, took over the entire continent in a bloody conquest together that ended with Crown dropping an arcane nuke on the clown territory, ending the war, but turning Milt against him, leading to a civil war, in which Crown destroyed Milt.

Crown has a phone head made from scraps of the metals of the heroes who've failed to vanquish him, and has a lich body, which he reinforces with the same metal he used to build his head, gaining a gradual suit of armor in order to stop himself from physically falling apart. He has a powerful arcane gauntlet which he uses to cast devastating spells. His undead empire sells death to people with a snazzy sales pitch. Basically, you sign a waiver that gives you benefits within his empire while you're alive, but once you die, your corpse is resurrected to serve Crown until your remains degrade beyond use.

The plot of the game is that Crown is trying to unravel reality to remove an ancient arcane law of magic from the fabric of reality as old as life itself: necromancy cannot resurrect a life that has taken itself. Crown, despite presiding over the whole world and everything in it, cannot bear the loss of his friend, Milt, who he beat in the civil war, which ended with Milt drinking poison before Crown could reach his throne room in the final assault of milt's base.

Crown would tell you that he wishes to resurrect Milt so he can finally have Milt answer for his betrayal, but in reality, he just really misses Milt. To revive Milt, because he specifically took his own life, would require the fabric of reality be altered... something that could potentially end the world. Gingi is a non-human monster (not considered a person, starts the game as a low level enemy) who gets caught up in a complex socioeconomic conflict/conspiracy by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and has to travel with a band of companions in order to resolve the conflict and eventually, once powerful entities begin to take notice of you, in order to survive.

The plot involves Crown's pursuit of the final piece of the puzzle: gaining the ability to rewrite universal law, and eventually, Gingi either has to choose to help him achieve this power, prevent the power from being accessed by anyone, or taking it and using it however they decide to. Basically, Crown wants to rewrite universal law because he can't accept that he owns everything, is all powerful, but cannot revive one specific person.

Now onto the companions with classes mentioned:

Randy Jade: You meet him in one of the cities in Crown's empire. He approaches you to ask you for a cigarette, and if you give him one, he then asks you for a lighter too. He explains that he had a string of jobs in Crown's empire, but kept screwing them up and getting fired, and at this point, he's stealing to eat.

If you recruit him, Randy will fight for you. Randy's a rogue, uses small blades (starting item are some house keys he found poking out through his knuckle), he's a glass cannon (good DPS, low health) and is politically neutral.

Oliver Swift: He's a traveling bard/performer who's going on a journey to raise enough money so his old mentor, Mr Dickens, can gift a sword to a young hero in his village and order him to go forth and vanquish Callum Crown (a yearly tradition for the village that always ends with crown getting another scrap of metal for his head/armor)

If you agree to give him a share of the loot to send home, he will join the party. He attacks with blunt weapons (metal lute, wrench). Ironically, despite Randy being the rogue, Oliver has the better lockpicking skill. Politically, he dislikes Crown, and without a high speech skill, will leave the party if you align with Crown.

Karen Dunn: A bureaucrat in Crown's empire. A talented mage, she works in Crown's deathdealers headquarters. She's the person at the line for mages looking to sell their souls to Crown. She really doesn't care for this job, allowing the player to convince her to ditch it + join the party. Karen uses fire magic offensively but starts with a few healing spells too.

Karen is politically neutral, though she has a personal distaste for Crown's empire as an employer.

Bigfoot: Can be admitted into the party. He's a melee tank, but has a few forest magic spells that buff himself and other party members, giving him support capabilities. Bigfoot will become frightened and leave the party during some cutscenes when loud noises/conflict occurs, if you do not equip earmuffs onto him.

Norm Allen: A former sheriff (now fugitive) in the annexed desert territory. Formerly an avid supporter of the order that Crown brought, and one of Crown's enforcers in his home town of [desert zone], Norm is hellbent on putting a bullet in Crown's head and dismantling his empire.

If you become friendly with Norm, you find out that the thing that Norm specifically bolted from Crown over... was the overreach of justice, and selling tyranny to his people as justice. Norm's a tank. His defense stat is middling, but his attack accuracy is locked at 100%, which is valuable in bad weather conditions or if the team gets blinded.

Norm will turn on the player if they do anything BUT prevent universal power from entering anyone's hands.

Mingus: Mingus is Crown's key enforcer/assassin. At the start of the game, she's trying to track down and execute Norm for betraying Crown, and as the plot progresses, eventually targets the player.

A stealthy cat woman, she strikes from the shadows, always, and usually after wetting the tips of her claws with a devastating poison. The poison she uses has no known antidote.

Politically, she's a fanatic, found abandoned as a kitten by Callum Crown many cycles ago. While Crown is cold with her, speaking to her like a tool, he keeps her in his service with his false promise to rewrite reality so other people like Mingus and to erase her abandonment from the timeline. Mingus secretly pines for his approval/kindness above all else, believing that helping Crown achieve her goals is the only way she'll ever feel loved. She's a potential late-game companion, being recruitable during the lategame, if you're doing Crown's ending.

There's more, but that's the gist of it. Hope this was interesting!

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yandere-daydreams · 1 year ago

Text

Title: Meat.

Pairing: Yandere!Ayato x Reader (Genshin).

Word count: 4.5k.

TW: Non/Con, Fem!Reader, Branding/Burning, Prolonged Imprisonment, Forced Marriage, Possessive Behavior, Descriptions of Gore, Implied Stalking, Mentions of Pregnancy, and Suicidal Ideation. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.

You always thought you would wear red on your wedding day.

It was a family tradition – passed down with dutiful care for as long as anyone could imagine. Your grandmother had given her dress to your mother who had gifted it to you, her only child, on your eighteenth birthday, years before you would so much as think about getting something as permanent as marriage. Still, you safeguarded it with a religious devotion, never going more than a week without laying it out to check for signs of moths or mold. When you found yourself on a boat set on a course for Inazuma and could bring nothing but what could fit in the space underneath your bunk, her dress was the only item you truly could not bear to leave behind.

It was one of the few things Ayato let you keep, when he first brought you to his estate. He hadn’t wanted to, but he’d known that you’d throw yourself off the nearest cliff if anything ever happened to that dress. You still would, if he so much as touched it without your permission.

The kimono you were being fitted for now was not red. The fine silk was pure white, the detailed embroidery along the hems and sleeves dark blue and bright, shining gold. The symbol of his archon glowed violet on the swell of the train – meant to appease the other factions of the tri-commission who protested when Ayato announced his intent to not only marry a commoner, but a foreigner. You hated that embellishment most of all, more than the sickly way his colors crawled over your body, more than the irritating smoothness of his favored silks where they hugged against your form and groped at your skin. It marked you as a tool, something to be used to one end or another. It marked you as a sacrifice – and an unwanted one, at that.

“Just as exquisite as I knew you’d be,” Ayato announced, his voice strong and unabashed. You’d begged him not to, but he’d insisted on sitting in on your appointment, making sure you couldn’t correct seamstress or overrule any of the choices he’d made on your behalf. The tailor hummed as she fastened a temporary sash around your midriff, tight enough to press uncomfortably against your ribs. If you needed to cry on your wedding day (which, in all likelihood, you would), it would have to be loosened. “How do you like it?”

You hated it. You despised it. You wanted to claw it apart with your own pristine nails, separate each thread and seam with your very own teeth. You would’ve set yourself on fire just to see it turned to ash that much sooner.

“It’s perfect.” Your own voice sounded distant, distorted. There was no façade of sincerity. He knew as well as you did that there was nothing he could force onto you that you wouldn’t loathe, and you knew that any word uttered as to your hatred for him outside of the privacy of your shared bedroom would result in a collection of fresh rope burns to decorate your wrists, the better half of a night spent bent over his knee. “So long as it pleases you, my lord.”

You dropped your eyes to the floor, attempting to spare yourself what suffering you could, but your resistance didn’t matter; you could hear the sharpness of his smile, picture the way his head tilted to the side as he basked in his own self-satisfaction as he went on, addressing the tailor. “If there’s a veil, you can get rid of it.”

You didn’t think you would ever get used to the way his voice seemed to grate when he was happy with himself.

“I think my heart might give out if I’m not able to see my beautiful fiancé’s lovely smile.”

After meeting Ayato, you began to dream in red.

It was more of a pink, at first – during the first few weeks of his courtship, when the extent of his intrusive affection was a few dendrobiums left on your doorstep and a lingering glance as the handsome young commissioner passed your stall during his weekly stroll through the city market. For a short while, after his possessive habits began to rear their head and you were able to catch his guards in your peripheral more often than not, your subconscious was tinted a near-violent shade of scarlet, the kind that would leave you drenched in your own sweat and half-suffocated by the time you forced yourself to wake up. Recently, since he announced your engagement, they’d taken on a darker shade; choking velvets and deep crimsons blurring the distorted setting as Ayato’s faceless body moved on top of you, as his mouth unhinged and his lashing tongue dragged you down his waiting throat. On your worst nights, he’d tear you apart with his hands, first, divide you into neat, orderly pieces that he could slip past his lips and savor one at a time, one after another, until there was nothing left of you. He’d always preferred you in your most consumable form.

It was ironic, really, considering just how little red he let seep into your waking life. Maybe you had a deficiency; like a pregnant woman craving fish to make up for a lack of calcium. The closest you got to red from the doorway to his study were a few cherry blossoms fluttering past the window, their color dulled by age and their tree nearly stripped bare by the approaching winter. He looked away from his paperwork as you shrugged past the screen door, his pale eyes lighting up as he saw the tea tray in your hands. It was Thoma’s handiwork, but you doubted Ayato cared. He wanted to see you in the role of a caretaker, playing out the part he wrote for you to the best of your limited acting skills. What happened behind the curtain was none of his concern.

“To what do I owe the honor?” he asked as you set the tray on his desk. “I can’t remember the last time you visited me on your own.”

You flashed him a small smile. “Can’t I dote on my soon-to-be husband freely?”

He visibly straightened at the word ‘husband’, a familiar zeal infecting his expression. There was a quirk to his grin, a light tap to his thigh, and the tea went ignored as you obediently fell into his lap, your legs hanging over the side of his chair as his arms wrapped around your waist and pulled you snug against him. If he was a monster, he’d be one with a thousand hands and a million fingers; he couldn’t seem to go a full minute without clutching at your hips, groping at your chest, burying his face in the crook of your neck with a deep, relieved sigh. “Husband,” he repeated back to you, all spellbound awe and deceiving wonder. “Archons, I can’t wait to be your husband.”

You wondered, sometimes, if it was his childhood that made him the way he was. After so many years of loneliness, so many tiny disappointments and frigid betrayals, you could only imagine he’d be eager to grab the first warm body he could and refuse to let you go. But, he let Ayaka come and go as she pleased, and seemed to take a certain delight in sending Thoma off on long-winded, far-flung errands. Whatever cruelty his upbringing had bred, it was clearly reserved for you.

His hand slid underneath the slit of your yukata, his breath turning hot and unpleasant against your collarbone, and you drew back with an airy laugh. “I do have an ulterior motive,” you admitted, hoping his curiosity would offset his insatiability, if only for a few seconds. “It’s about my wedding dress.”

“The breathtaking and priceless dress I’m having made by the nation’s most talented tailors so that all of Inazuma will know that I’m marrying the most beautiful person in Teyvat?” He raised his head, clicking his tongue. “What about it?”

“It’s not that I don’t like it,” you said, because he wouldn’t listen to you if you didn’t and you needed him to listen to you. “It’s just— I’m such a long way from home, and I know my family won’t be able to come, but—” You cut yourself off, swallowing back the bile that threatened to spoil your sweet smile. “I was hoping we’d be able to incorporate my mother’s dress, somehow. If it’s not too late.”

It wasn’t. You’d been tracking the progress of his tailors meticulously, counting down the days until your wedding like a prisoner waiting for their execution date, and if it was one of his whims, another row of bedding added onto the sleeves or a new embroidery pattern worked onto the train, you knew that there’d be all the time in the world to make any adjustments he asked for. Still, his smile wavered, a brief sigh slipping past his lips as he shook his head. “My love,” The petname lulled off of his tongue as if it’d been coated in sugar and syrup and all the worst things you could think of. “That’s quite the risk to take. The poor thing’s so old, it might fall apart as soon as the tailor’s needle touches it.”

He'd been crueler, before – called the dress a rag as he looked at you with disdain-tinted pity, swore that your reliance on the filthy relic must’ve been caused by some inherent failure of your homeland – but your heart still clenched just a little tighter in your chest at his veiled disdain. “I’d like to try, at least.” Your hands curled around his collar, your frown taking on a more pleading note. “Please, my lord?” A pause, a tightened hold. “Please, Ayato?”

It was his given name, loving and tender and so rarely spoken in your voice, that did him in. He relented with an airy groan, letting his head roll forward in faux exasperation. “We’ll see.”

You beamed, but he was too lost in you to notice, already preoccupied with pressing open-mouthed kisses into your shoulders, your neck. The sash of your yukata was drawn loose, your sleeves pulled down to your elbows and your body shifted onto his desk, where he could spread your legs apart and bury his face between them. Your eyes drifted back to the cherry blossoms trickling past the window, but whatever tree they’d been falling from had finally been stripped bare. All you could see was the bright, cloudless sky – blue enough to leave you burnt and begging for a storm.

Two springs ago, the Kamisato Estate had been overrun with finches.

It’d been a comedy of errors, in hindsight. Ayaka had taken up a fondness for a new kind of flower – one native to Sumeru, introduced to her by an outlander with golden hair and knowing eyes. Thoma, the miracle worker that he was, quickly found a way to propagate it in the estate’s garden, and within the month, little violet blossoms had consumed all that they could reach despite the best efforts of the gardeners to keep them in-check. It would’ve been a delightful problem to have on its own, but the peak of the infestation happened to align with an annual migration of a type of finch that happened to hold a particular shining for a plant with a similar shape and color and— well, anyone could’ve guessed what happened next.

It was a nightmare for Thoma and the other groundskeepers and, since Ayato was staying in the city on business, paradise for you. You spent your days in the courtyard, showing the servants’ children how to braid crowns out of vines and press flowers between the pages of books stolen from Ayato’s personal library. You and Ayaka fed seeds to the red-crowned invaders and coaxed them close enough to pet and sketch, as little talent as you had for the latter, and she listened as you rambled excitedly about the crane-headed whistles you used to make every summer for a very wealthy ornithologist with very slippery fingers. She was just as lonely as her brother, albeit significantly less deranged, and you – trapped, isolated, desperate you – were the perfect victim for her. The two of you were never quite friends, but you came close that spring.

And then, Ayato returned. The flowers were uprooted, the children sent back to their chores, and the finches driven away with nets and stones and salt. You sobbed for hours the day the final flock left, and by means of consolation, Ayato presented you with a blue-speckled wren in a cage of pure silver, silk flowers bound to the bars with yellow ribbons as a reminder of your lost haven. To this day, you still aren’t sure if he meant it to be as cruel of a gift as it was.

You made it all of two days before risking another month spent shackled to Ayato’s bed and sneaking past the guards posted at the estate’s frontmost gates, the golden cage tucked against your chest. You released it in the woods, somewhere with plenty of tree cover and places to hide while it remembered how to be a wild creature, and watched with a smile as it fluttered past the cage’s door and into the open air, eventually landing on the leaf-littered ground.

It hopped all of three tiny steps before a fox emerged from the underbrush and swallowed it whole.

“Are you still with us, love?”

You should’ve gone limp. You should’ve acted as if the pain had gotten to you. You should’ve pretended you were dead to the world and that you couldn’t feel his cock languidly thrusting into you and that you’d gone numb to the searing iron slowly cooling into against the small of your back but, for as resentful as your mind was to him, your body was entirely subservient to Ayato. You tried to respond verbally, and when your voice caught in your throat, you forced yourself to nod, the motion small and shaky. Ayato rewarded you with a breathy chuckle, a fleeting touch to the curve of your spine. A hundred pinpricks of purified agony accompanied his touch.

The silver brand had been commissioned from the finest metal crafters in Inazuma City, made to resemble the warped camellia that was the Kamisato Clan’s crest, and you let out an agonized scream as Ayato drew it back and pressed a calloused thumb into the tender patch of burnt skin. “You always do make such pretty noises for me.” He circled the shape of the white-hot bloom, drawing out another ragged whimper. “It’s a shame I only get to hear them when you misbehave.”

You wanted to apologize, to beg for his forgiveness, but try as you might, you couldn’t seem to remember what you’d done wrong. You hadn’t tried to run away. You hadn’t talked to any of the servants. You hadn’t done anything aside from smile and sit beside him as he spoke with the head of another clan – an older man whose eyes burnt into you for the entirety of their brief conversation. As far as you could tell, he was just a particularly shameless nobleman trying to decipher the curiosity that was the Yashiro Commissioner’s reclusive bride, but Ayato hated letting other men gawk at you at the best of times. Such prolonged exposure would’ve surely brought out the worst of his possessive habits.

You felt something tighten in your chest, catch in your throat, but you only realized you were crying when Ayato’s lips ghosted over your cheek, the gentleness of the gesture quickly replaced with the brutality of his fingers tangled in your hair, your head forced down and into the plush of his bed. You body threatened to collapse, but his free hand fell to your hip, keeping your back arched and your ass raised as he ground lazily into your cunt, in no rush to put you out of your suffering. “I think,” he groaned, lust heavy in his voice. “We’re going to have a big family. Half a dozen kids, at least.”

You beat your fists against the mattress, shaking your head violently, and he twitched inside of you. “They’ll have your eyes,” he went on, a sadistic delight in his voice. “And my swordsmanship, and I’ll love them as much as I love you.” He paused, the head of his cock scraping against something deep and vulnerable inside of you. “Well, almost as much as I love you. As much as I can.”

You tried to struggle, to get away from him, but Ayato held you close, his grip as unrelenting as his slow, aching tempo. With a calculated sort of grace, he leaned towards you, slotting his chest against your back and bringing his mouth to the shell of your ear. “You don’t think it’s too soon to start, do you, darling?”

All you could do was try and fail to scream in response.

The first gift Ayato ever gave to you was a necklace the color of freshly split sapphires.

He insisted that you not think of it as a present, that you consider it little more than justified repayment for an item from your stall broken by the clumsy fingers of one of his couriers, but it was a present, it couldn’t be anything else. His courier had paid for the ruined pottery days prior, and yet, he’d sought you out in person to apologize with that sun-bright smile, to let his fingertips brush against yours as he passed you a satin-lined case with a perfect, ocean-blue velvet choker tucked safely inside. It was a beautiful thing, embellished with silver and dripping with transparent crystals, but you’d liked the color most of all. It’d reminded you of Ayato, and there’d been a time when you treasured any excuse to think of him.

You’d worn it the first time you saw each other properly, too. The occasion wasn’t formal enough to warrant something so needlessly extravagant, but you couldn’t seem to stop smiling for the entirety of your brief-meal-turned-seven-hour-conversation, and as your night came to an end, perched on the edge of a cliff underneath the Raiden Shogun’s palace and breathless from laughing, he told you that if you weren’t careful, he might just fall in love with you. You’d told him that, if he waited a few more days, you might fall in love with him, too.

You’d been wearing the same necklace when he broke your heart for the first time. It’d been an overcast day, the sky a clouded blueish grey and the shogun’s fury just barely audible in the far distance. He told you, with that perfect grin and those lonely eyes, that it really was terribly improper for the lover of a commissioner to run some meager stall in a sweat-soaked market, that he owed you better than a cramped room on the outskirts of the city where you had to wade through hours of farmland to reach anything of importance. When you said that you enjoyed your work, that you adored the back-breaking labor of your craft and loved having neighbors who would leave baskets of cabbage and lavender melon on your doorstep in exchange for misshapen cups and off-pattern bowls, he laughed as if you’d said the funniest thing in the world and cupped your face in his hands, pulling you into a kiss deep enough and sweet enough to make you forget whether or not you’d agreed with him.

You were brought to the Kamisato estate less than a full month later and had yet to leave since.

The final garment was delivered two weeks before your wedding day. You watched from your pavilion as Ayato met the courier at the estate’s gates, accepting a large package wrapped in scarlet silk and brushing off the guards’ attempts to carry it on his behalf. You were embroidering, that day – a delicate, time-consuming art that Ayato praised in comparison to the messy, unpredictable medium of clay. You loathed the monotony of it, the strictness of the patterns, but it meant Ayato was less likely to break your fingers when he found you scrounging away spare mora in the hopes of some perpetually eventual escape and so, you embroidered.

“My mother’s dress,” you said, as soon as he was close enough to hear you. The wooden hoop was forgotten in your lap as you stared up at him, hope written clearly across your expression. “Do you know what they did with it?”

His grin widened. “Eager, are we?” You nodded frantically, and he added, “If I’d didn’t know better, I’d say you care about a dress more than your own betrothed.”

He settled next to you, the package laid across his thighs. He moved to unwrap it, then pivoted – his attention shifting as his gloved hand took hold of your wrist. He’d been touching you more delicately, lately, something you couldn’t help but link with his long-brewing but only recently materialized desire for children. It was a problem you elected to deal with later on, after the wedding, if only for your own inability to process just how horrific of a problem it was.

(There was a part of you which knew, even before your conscious mind could bear to accept it, that you would never be able to love something he put inside of you. Ayato’s obsession was enduring, able to feed off of nothing and contort reality to suit its needs, but your love had always been a rational thing, bound to end the moment it became inconvenient to house. Your love for your homeland died with your mother. Your love for Ayato died with your abduction. And, whatever love you could’ve had for a child— no, a shackle would die the moment the foul creature was born. You could hold no affection for a child that was made in Ayato’s image, that would be cleaved from your flesh for the sake of his happiness, and if by some miracle you did love the monstrosity, then you could only assume it would be because you’d abandoned all hope for yourself. Both futures seemed equally grim.)

“Ayato,” you simpered, leaning against his side. “Please?”

He rolled his eyes, playing soft as he handed you the oversized package. “It should be wrapped separately. I said I didn’t want to see the finished product until the day-of.”

Your hands shook as you undid the many knots. A smaller bundle sat within, separate from the tumor of ivory fabric you forced yourself not to linger on, and you took it up with a desperate sort of keenness, practically trembling as you tore it open with no regard for the integrity of its packaging. The crimson silk was torn away to reveal—

Blue.

Dark, never-ending blue.

“The color came out so beautifully. I’m glad you protested the way you did – otherwise, I might’ve never known we were missing something on our wedding day.” This time, you didn’t fight as he tore the remains of your mother’s dress out of your hands, holding out a sash the shade of apathetic night. You searched for something familiar, for something you could use to ground yourself, but it was absent of all recognizability, desecrated to the point of being all-but alien to you. “It had to be dyed, of course, but I’ve been told the process only cost it a moment of its integrity. The tailors—”

You blinked, but your vision remained black when you opened your eyes. Your body was lurching forward, and then you were in Ayato’s arms, limp and buzzing. Ayato was laughing, as shocked as you were drained, and you made no effort to pull away from him. “My poor little wife. I know – the anticipation’s almost too much to bear.” He pressed a kiss into your forehead. “Why don’t we spend some time together, like we used to? I think I can push my obligations aside for the day, considering the occasion.”

You didn’t respond, but he gathered into his arms regardless. He had always seemed to prefer you as dead weight.

You did end up in red on your wedding day, but you doubted you’d be getting married, anymore.

His own sword slid and out of his back with a wet, gripping noise – only interrupted when the blade slipped in your hands and hit bone rather than viscera. Blood splattered against the white of your kimono with every plunge, staining the susceptible fabric easily and leaving you struggling to keep your feet underneath you as the puddle of scarlet grew deeper, as the screen walls began to drip and your lungs filled with copper and iron. Ayato, the ever-worried lover that he was, had come to check on you before the ceremony, fussing over your blank eyes and the tear-tracks that had ruined your make-up twice, by then. He’d been concerned, but giddy, unable to keep himself away from you despite his many promises of tradition and decor.

He'd made it three, maybe four minutes before beginning to toy with the clasps running down your chest.

You’d taken up the first thing you saw – a hand mirror gilded with shining rose gold – and brought it down on his head.

That, on its own, would’ve left him with a scar and little else, but you’d worked quickly, drawing the sword from its sheath on his belt and bringing it down into anything that seemed vital, anything you could reach, anything that bled calming, soothing red. He stopped moving on the fifth strike, his uncalled upon Vision going dull on the sixth, and on the seventh, you heard someone call for the guards.

You waited until you could hear their footsteps before falling to your knees, bringing the point of your blade to your stomach and clenching your eyes shut, praying to any archon who would listen that you’d hit something they couldn’t be healed, that they’d lend you a more merciful fate than another jail cell, another lifetime of entrapment. You plunged the blade into your stomach and—

And were met with little more than a cold, blunt sensation and a bottomless pit of despair.

You opened your eyes, your gaze flickering from your ice-coated blade to the doorway of your dressing room, now occupied by Kamisato Ayaka, one hand raised and her Vision pulsing at her side. Guards rushed in on either side of her, grabbing at your shoulders and wrists, but your stare never left Ayaka, her parted lips, her flushed cheeks.

Her bright eyes, just as blue and just as lonely as her brother’s had ever been.

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere imagines #yandere oneshot #yandere genshin impact #genshin impact #genshin x reader #genshin imagines #yandere genshin x reader #yandere genshin imagines #yandere kamisato ayato #yandere ayato #ayato x reader #kamisato ayato x reader #yanderecore #yancore

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ebsmind · 9 days ago

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My Little Treasure | president!Nico Hischier x fem!reader

summary : being the presidents mistress isn’t easy. even when another woman comes out saying she’s having an affair with him.

word count : 8.5k (the longest ive ever written BE PROUD OF ME)

warning(s) : this is purely based off of shonda rhimes SCANDAL sjiwiejdj, angst, longing (kinda? idk), cheating/infidelity (nellie deserves better), reader pushes her feeling aside, timo being called nico’s personal bitch AHAHAHA, murder (mentioned in case), non accurate descriptions of politics and law stuff, like 2-3 mentions of vomit , use of Y/N (I tried not too but I just couldn't), tbh there’s not a lot of nico x reader IM SORRY part 2 will make up for it, heavy makeout session, smut kinda? idk but next part will be smutty TRUST, getting caught by timo (what the hell Timo), VIOLENCE aka just a slap in the face, one flashback spicy scene and i think that's it!

a/n : LISTEN LISTEN before i say ANYTHING i just wanted to say that i know nico isn’t american but im currently hyper fixated on him and only him and i just started watching scandal again SO I HAD TO so please if you don’t like the “accuracy” don’t read it! this is FICTIONAL but yeah here we are! this closely follows the first episode from season 1! this is a long oneeeee! i’ve also changed the names of Abby, Quinn, Harrison, Huck, AND Cyrus (you’ll see who I change him with 😏) I also go along with the case that’s happening so this is semi like a mystery but not? idk how to explain but you’ll see as you read. send me something in my inbox if you want me to elaborate on anything about the side characters! i definitely want to turn this into an au so send me something so i can write about it or talk about it! here’s the mood board! this is also my second time writing anything spicy so please bear with me, this whole fic idea really had me out of my comfort zone so it isn't my best writing but I still wanted to get this out!

The clicks of your So Kate’s are heard throughout the law firm. Everyone knows it’s you, just by the way you walk. It’s swift and carries determination, you are on a mission. You present yourself with a sense of purpose to your colleagues. Scratch that, they’re family. Despite them technically being your coworkers, you would do anything for the four of them. From saving Gwen from her violent ex-husband to Kurt, a soldier who had served in the United States CIA’s top secret, off the books, B-613 program who ended up being dumped on the streets to beg for food, you saved them and they were all you had.

You step into the standard-sized conference room, and the extensive window along the back wall displays an orange-to-blue hue. The sun is setting and making it known that the end of the day is near. You first make eye contact with Blair, the senior associate at the firm. She stops her conversation amongst everyone and before she can greet you, Kurt, who is sitting at the very right end of the table, utters, “Perla Schmitz killed herself, channel 5.”

You make no time to strut to the table and grab the TV remote, which had been sitting next to Blair. You don’t need to change the channel once you press the power button on the remote, it’s all you watch in the firm—across the 55’ inch screen, displayed in bold lettering ‘Perla Schmitz (26) found dead in her home’. You take a second to yourself. Perla had been caught cheating on her husband, who was a very conservative congressman, but that wasn’t the icing on the cake. The guy she was having an affair with? He murdered her husband, brutally. 27 stab wounds to the chest, his head almost decapitated because of how much force was used to slit his throat. If someone were to ask you, you’d say she had it coming.

You turn to the group and raise a finger in the air as you start to speak. “We knew this was coming, let’s not pretend that she wasn’t the one cheating on her husband.”

Perla came into your office late last Friday night, around 11:25. You had stayed longer than you originally wanted to, needing to finish up some paperwork that had to be done for one of the previous clients you had. What a way to bring in the new year, but you weren’t complaining.

“Exactly! I knew she didn’t have enough willpower to continue her life. She took the easy way out, man.” You take a seat at the left end side of the table, parallel to Kurt while Neil, another associate and close friend of yours finishes his veracious remark. You decide it’s best to tell Neil and everyone else to drop the topic, but before you can open your mouth, the firm doors open. The 7-foot ebony-colored wood doors reveal a man with black hair and blue eyes, maybe mid to late 20s. The first thing you notice is how his eyes tear up before he speaks, not how he’s covered in blood.

“I-…I didn’t kill her I swear! She was my best friend, we were gonna get married!”

Your irises scan over the pinned evidence on the whiteboard, it had been approximately 18 hours since the 6’2 blood blood-covered man had walked into your firm. Sully St. James comes from an extremely well-respected family. His father was a Veteran from the Vietnam War. Sully himself had done two tours in Iraq and received the Medal of Honor. Having someone as well respected as him, show up to the front door of your firm, asking for help wasn’t new but you were determined to help the man not get convicted as the killer in his girlfriend’s murder case. You needed time, but the US attorney general David Rosen was stubborn.

“Okay! So, according to Sully, he had just come home from the bar down on 9th St, called SOST, he then walked into the bathroom where the crime scene is, saw Paige’s body on the ground,” Blair points out and before she can finish her sentence Kurt cuts her off.

“Paige suffered from 2 bullets to the chest and 1 to the head. This wasn’t a freak accident, someone wanted her dead.” Kurt crosses his arms and moves up from the far end of the table. He was correct, but your gut couldn’t help but wail that Sully was not the cause.

Blair continues to explain the approximate details, “Here’s the weird part, Sully calls the police but before they can get there he flies, and he flies here.” She takes a step away from the whiteboard and makes eye contact with you. She can sense what you’re already going to say. Blair knows you, and she knows you like the back of her hand.

“My gut tells me that he didn’t do this. Something is missing. I need more, all of you need to try to find something, anything! Anything that can clear this man’s alibi. He said it himself that he loved her and that she was his best friend. I believe him.” You step up from the chair you were sitting in and start heading towards the conference room doors when your cell phone starts to ring. Grabbing it out of your left pocket, the name “Timo Meier” is displayed across the screen. You huff in response.

He needs you right now and you know if Timo were to tell you to head to the White House as soon as possible you would and it wouldn’t end in a way you would like. Yet, you still manage to press the green button, confirming the call.

“What do you want.” You’re busy and Timo knows it. This isn’t some ‘Oh hi! How are you doing? I haven’t heard from you in a while phone call. Timo didn’t have time for that, being the White House’s Chief of Staff to Nico Hischiers personal bitch, he never had time.

Timo sighs, you can already picture him, sitting at his desk, elbow resting on it, his thumb and pointer finger trying to relieve his throbbing headache. Timo did so much for the President of the United States and somehow that included calling you on a random Tuesday afternoon.

“He needs you to come in. Something happened and we need you to make it go away.” Timo lets you take a second to respond. Already sensing that the situation was substandard, it had been months since you had last spoken to Timo and maybe even half a year since you’ve seen Nico. Physically. It wasn’t that you hated him, you could never. It was the fact you left your position as the White House Communications Director for yourself. Everything you did was always for Nico and never not you and when the realization of that hit you, it was time to go. It’s time to separate yourself from some fantasy that only ever works out in the books. The feeling of two hands wrapped around your throat finally caught up to you.

“I’ve got a client sitting in my conference room Timo.”

“Look, I know, I know, but this isn’t something that needs to be out in the public. Make it go away. Please. If not for him, for me.” He’s desperate and you know it. If you were to tell him that the only reason you were about to agree was because you held him in such high regard, you’d never hear the end of it. So, you keep your reply as simple as needed.

“Okay, I’ll be there in 45 minutes. I need to let Neil know.”

You spot Timo before he spots you. He’s sat on a bench, perhaps getting some proper vitamin D. You watch the way his foot taps every other millisecond. Being cooped up in a mediocre-sized office in the White House can make someone feel insane, you’ve been there.

As you get closer, you examine the navy blue suit that he’s dressed in. It’s his favorite one, he has 3 more pairs of it because he wears it so much. His tie has gold accents on it, it’s from his wife. You had helped her pick it out for him since you had seen him a lot more than she did. His eyes are heavy, he’s needs a vacation, a long one to be exact. You’ll let Nico know if you ever see him again, maybe he can pull some strings for him even if it’s a nice (long-awaited) expensive dinner.

You walk up the concrete steps before reaching Timo, the only thing grabbing his attention is the click of your heels. Once he realizes that you have walked up to him, you open your mouth to greet him.

“What.” Timo giggles, he’s knows you mean business but he can’t deny he misses your presence around in the White House even if you were telling him off half of the time.

“Well, hello to you too.” He stands up and gestures to start walking with him. You obey and within a second you guys stride across the walkway that overlooks the White House.

“What do you need me for Timo? I don’t work for him anymore.”

“He needs a favor.” You scoff at Timo and choose not to say anything.

“You still came. You came when I called.” His words hit you like a bus. It stings. Both you and Timo know that whenever the President needs anything from you, you’ll be there in a heartbeat. You’d do anything for everyone you love. You were loyal. That’s how it always had been and why Nico wanted you there every step of the way. He knew that he could turn his back and not expect a knife to be plunged into it.

“Her name is Vanessa Wyatt. She works in AIDE. She claims to have had an affair with him. I need you to make it go away and fast.” Timo places his right arm on his abdomen, in response you hook your left one into his right and walk side by side with Timo.

“Is it true?” You try to show no reaction but green envy begins to boil in your stomach.

“No, of course not, but I need you to shut it down.”

“I need to see him.” You don’t think about your reply until after it leaves your mouth. Both you and Timo come to an abrupt stop. He takes a step back and faces you.

“No, I don’t think that’s possible.”

“You want me to shut her up? Then I need to look at him in the eyes and know he’s not lying.” Timo knows that you're serious. You always are.

“The President’s schedule is packed. He has no time to see you.” He’s straightforward, Timo doesn’t have time for negotiating but luckily for you, you’re a persuasive person. You tend to always get what you want even if it means overstepping some boundaries.

“He wants my services but here’s the thing Timo, I do not work for him anymore! So, tell him to make time to see me if not you’re just gonna have to find someone else to do it for you. You know where to find me.”

After giving Timo a faint smile, you turn to walk away. As one foot goes in front of the other, you can’t help but feel that some part of this story is true making your heart ache.

By the time you get back to your office, you get a phone call from Timo, confirming that Nico managed to get out of a meeting so that he could talk to you. With that, you grab your coat off the coat rack and start heading towards the conference room to let at least Gwen know about your abrupt departure.

“Hey Gwen, duty calls at the White House, I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Anything new?” Gwen knows you’re talking about the case and before she utters anything new she’s found, she strides to the door and closes it.

Knowing that Sully is just in the room next door, she lowers her voice, “Kurt managed to get into Paige’s email and I’ve been reading. I found one where she emailed a friend. She was supposed to meet up with a friend at the embassy party together but never showed.”

You nod your head to show that you understand but it’s not enough information to be able to explain why Paige was murdered so, you request more information.

“Who? and Why?” Keep it simple.

Gwen takes about a second before she replies, “A girl named Ariel, and I don’t know why.”

“Find out why. ‘I don’t know’ is not an answer I’m gonna take.” That sentence leaves your mouth as fast as lightning strikes the Earth’s outermost crust.

To other people, your reply would’ve been seen as impolite but to you and everyone at the firm, it was just that ‘I don’t know’ wouldn’t get you anywhere in a case. Especially when so much is at stake.

“I won’t be long Gwen. Tell Blair and she’ll go interview the friend.”

Once you arrive at the White House you are led to Timo’s office. It’s nice and spacious, with a window that overlooks a garden. Nellie’s garden. A sour taste forms in your mouth. The garden is small, not as big as Jacqueline Kennedy’s garden but Nellie insisted she needed her own. You were told moments ago that she’d be attending this “meeting” and as much as you dislike it, you can’t help but feel empathy for Nellie. She was nothing but nice to you when Nico hired you as the manager for his campaign. It sucked most that you went not even a month later you started sleeping with her husband.

The combined noises of clothes rustling and heavy breaths consume the aura of the small hotel room. It’s unbelievable how an innocent dinner between two ‘colleagues’ can turn outright sexual within two hours, but you weren’t complaining. Maybe it was the two glasses of cabernet sauvignon that your unconscious level of operation had convinced you to drink.

Nico places open-mouthed kisses from behind your ear, down to the spot on your breast that the black lace push-up bra doesn’t cover. The white ironed shirt, that had been covering your bra, had been tossed over your head about 15 minutes ago and the black midi skirt was currently being tugged down your hips. As for Nico, all to go was the baby blue dress shirt he wore, and the black tie. Which had been taken off right when the two of you entered the room. His dark navy blue pants remained on the list of clothes that needed to be discarded.

You take a second to admire Nico’s disheveled hair. The thought of pulling it with your fingers when he whispers sweet nothing’s into your core flashes across your mind. Nico cuts off that thought once his lips make contact with yours. It’s messy and filled with need. The months of longing stares, mainly from him, were finally catching up. You take notice that your black skirt is now pooled at your feet. You take a step out of them, in a haze, the action bringing you closer to Nico. He steadies you by placing his hands on your hips. His fingertips graze the matching black lace panties you paired with your bra. He smirks into the kiss at the thought of you planning it out.

Nico takes small steps, notifying you to do the same but backward, and guides you to the small light wooden desk against the wall opposite of the bed. The back of your thighs hit the desk and with a swift motion, Nico grabs you at the waist and sets you to sit on top of it. A quick gasp escapes your naturally pouty lips and with that, Nico gets on his knees.

Timo snaps you out of that thought fairly quickly, “Well hello, long time no see!”

He’s being sarcastic, but you waste no time to get to the point.

“I was told Nellie was going to be here. She knows about this?”

Timo nods, acknowledging your words, and replies, “It’s not like how it was during the election. The isolation of the White House bonded them, their marriage is as strong as ever.”

Before you can react to Timos statement, Nellie comes barging into the room.

“Y/N!”

You fake a smile, deep down you could never hate Nellie. No matter how hard you try. “Nellie, hi! How are you doing?!” Faking your enthusiastic response, you can’t help but feel guilty. It wasn’t hard to read Nellie, so you could tell she missed your presence around in the White House. Once Nellie reaches you she engulfs you in a heartwarming hug. She rubs your back and soaks in the moment, reminiscing an old friendship.

You’re the first to step away and once you create a small fragment of distance, Nellie answers your question.

“I’m doing well! It’s taking some time getting used to you not being here but I’m managing. How’s the firm?”

“We’re doing well over there. It’s been busy but I like being occupied…can never get enough of it.” You chuckle at the tiny comment you make and Nellie goes to carry the conversation but comes to a halt when the double doors to Timo’s office open once again.

You told yourself, on the drive over to the White House, that you would keep things strictly professional but Nico always managed to make that very hard. Not only that, you still deeply cared for the man and he did the same as well. But the moment you saw his face everything you had prepared yourself for had expeditiously faded away. You can’t even process the moment, that he’s here and physically in front of you until he’s shaking your hand.

The last time you saw Nico was at a charity gala in late June. Five months after you left. You only managed to stay for an hour until everything felt overwhelming. Your chest felt like it was being compressed by an unseen entity, and bile was rising in your throat. Nico had tried his best to talk to you but with Nellie by his side and her pregnancy rumors, he couldn’t. It broke his heart when he saw the tears in your eyes. You’d felt betrayed but also knew that being the President’s mistress meant that you never came first. Even if he lied to you and said that you did.

“Y/N, It’s good to see you.” He’s keeping it simple. He can’t show too much vulnerability, there are still two people in the room.

“Likewise, Mr. President.” You drop your hand first from the handshake and look closely at Nico. He shaved two days ago, you can tell by the stubble sitting on the lower half of his face. It has just grown enough to the point where if he could get on his knees in front of you, you’d feel it scratch your inner thighs.

“Shall we take a walk?” Timo kindly suggests.

The three of you decide to chat in Jacqueline Kennedy Garden. With the company of two secret service members but you don’t mind.

It may be January but the pansies are still in season. You walk up and admire the some that are purple. You notice that in the outer part of the petal, they’re royal purple, but towards the center, they’re light purple - almost a lilac color. That would be a nice color for a wedding. You’re too busy admiring the flowers that don’t notice the sound of footsteps approaching until the person has already reached you. It’s Nico. You don’t even need to look to know it’s him. He clears his throat before starting the conversation with you.

“I know you have your hands full with the Sully St. James situation so, thank you for doing this, for me.” He turns to look at you. God you’ve missed him.

Timo walks up behind you and the president, the two secret service agents aren’t too far behind. He pulls out a beige file folder and speaks.

“Her name is Vanessa Wyatt.” You take hold of the folder and open it up.

“I know.”

“Well if you let me finish- anyways, she’s 25. I’ve heard rumors that she might be talking.” Timo states and looks off into the distance. It’s nice and sunny outside, but not even for it to take the edge off the cold. You take a look at what she looks like. She must be new, or at least got hired after you resigned. She’s cute but looking at her makes you feel nauseated. You push that feeling aside, it’s best at what you do.

“But you can’t fire her. At least not without a shit show going off.” Both Timo and Nico nod. Nico has yet to say anything. You find it odd but push that thought aside. You know Nico wouldn’t do this.

“Look, she hasn’t gone to the press, so best shut it down before she opens her mouth.” Timo’s phone rings and he excuses himself to take the call. It’s just you and Nico. A part of you doesn’t want to ask him the long-awaited question but you still do it anyways.

“I have to ask, did you do it?” You look up at him for the first time after reaching the garden. All you see are his eyes, they’re identical to the color of the way he takes his coffee.

“No. I would never do that.” Nico pauses but doesn’t break the eye contact. You’re starting to feel light-headed. Your heart wants to believe him but there’s someone in your ear screaming that he isn’t telling the truth.

“You’ve known me for a long time. Most of my time has been spent with you. You know I would never, ever fall for some girl. You know there’s only one girl I truly love.” He accentuates the last sentence. Only you know he’s talking about you. It’s a secret embedded between the two of you. You feel warm, not the bad kind, but the warm and comfy kind. He knows you need reassurance, he knows you think he’s lying, and he knows that if he did do it, it would be unforgivable. It feels like time is passing by slowly, you’re lost in his pools of melted chocolate-like irises. He never once, looked away. He’s telling the truth.

“We’re due to be back now!” Looking back, you see Timo. He’s about 15 feet away, but he’s walking towards both Nico and you.

“I’ll handle it. Consider it handled.” You look away. A burning sensation hits the back of your eye sockets. You feel like crying but you won’t let the tears fall.

Once Timo reaches you he wraps his arms around you and the President’s shoulders.

“The band is back together!”

One hour. One hour is how much time you had given Gwen to find anything and everything about Vanessa Wyatt and boy did she find something.

Gwen walks beside you, to your left. The pace you’ve set is fast, it wasn’t like you had all day. You had a firm to run and a man’s destiny in your hands. Vanessa Wyatt was just a fork in the road. You had a plan and with enough convincing, she’d end up on a bus to Wisconsin in the morning.

“You’re acting as my witness. Just shut up and listen to what I say. Do not engage with her.” Both you and Gwen had been following Vanessa around Easy Potomac Park for approximately seven minutes. You took immediate notice that she was accompanied by her dog, a golden retriever. Gwen had whispered something about it being adorable, to you it was an amazing conversation starter, a way to get in, and a vulnerability point for Vanessa.

Vanessa’s quick to take a seat on a bench, overlooking the Potomac River. You waste no time to walk up to her and Gwen follows suit. “What a cute dog! Golden Retriever?”

Vanessa takes the bait like a fish dumb enough to take a worm that’s on a fish hook. You’ve already got her right where you want her and you’ve only spoken six words.

“Yeah haha! His name is Thomas Jefferson, like the President, it’s lame I know! But it suits him surprisingly.” The thought of how naive she is crosses your mind. Was she like that with Nico? You take a seat next to her before carrying on the conversation.

“Vanessa, it would be a mistake to think that there will be no consequences to you telling lies about the President.” Her face falls almost immediately. Gwen gives you a look. Almost like she was surprised herself, she was least expecting you to mention the so-called “affair” this early on in the conversation. To your dismay, Vanessa doesn’t make an effort to start running away yet. Stupid girl. Rather instead she questions you.

“I never told you my name. Who are you?” She finally turns to get a good look at you. Vanessa notices the pale, off-white pantsuit that’s on your body. It fits you to a tee.

“My name is Y/N.” You pause for a brief moment then continue your lecture to the younger girl, “And I want to make it clear that I’m not here in an official capacity. I’m here because I’m a

concerned citizen.” Vanessa looks away, tears threatening to fall on her plump, pinky cheeks. She isn’t wearing anything to keep her warm besides a thin coat.

She mutters another question. “What do you want?”

Your response leaves your mouth rapidly. “I came to warn you. A girl like you can’t win something like this. In, employment your face will be everywhere. And by everywhere I mean tabloids, newspapers, social media, local news. People are going to associate you with a sex scandal. All kinds of information about you will become available to the press in a heartbeat. For example, the 22 sexual partners you’ve had? What about that case of gonorrhea? Oh and let’s not forget your mothers two year stay at Bedford Hospital.” Everything you say comes out nonchalantly. You pause and take a look at the younger brunette, waiting for a response but she says nothing. You take it as a sign to continue.

“That’s what I thought. It’s information like that, that could ruin everything for you.” Both you and Gwen take notice of Vanessa. The tears that were threatening to fall, are now halfway down her cheeks. Gwen’s heart breaks for the girl but deep down knows it’s for the best. You, however, could care less. Situations like this, never end up good for the woman involved.

“He said he loved me. He gave me this dog.” Vanessa manages to utter while shaking her head. Her world feels like it’s falling apart and you stand at the altar watching it happen.

“You see, it’s lies like those that could hurt you when said to other people. People not as nice as me. Here let me give you some advice, hand in your resignation, pack a bag and your dog, get out of this town, maybe in Wisconsin, and start over. Never look back.”

You’ve managed to move closer to Vanessa. It’s not a lot but you’re still testing the waters. If you were to ask Gwen, she’s still surprised that Vanessa’s still sitting there. Personally, Gwen would have fled a long time ago. The younger brunette to your right, takes a deep sigh and begs, “Why are you doing this to me?” I’m a good person!” You get the urge to laugh in her face. It doesn’t matter if you’re nice or not, people love to ruin people. She should’ve known this by now. A girl this naive should not be in a town like this.

“You want to know who was also a good person?” You question her and continue, “Monica Lewinsky. And she was telling the truth. But she still got destroyed.” You say it casually and Vanessa doesn’t appreciate it, in the next millisecond, she grabs her dog’s leash and hurries away. Gwen is still standing, she’s shocked, to say the least.

Turning to Gwen, you start to state, “If you get subpoenaed in front of a grand jury, you can testify as an officer of the court that I was working on my own. I didn’t blackmail or threaten her. If you don’t get subpoenaed, then this never happened.” You walk in the other direction from Vanessa. Gwen takes a moment to follow suit and once you hear Gwen’s footsteps, you take your cell phone out of your coat pocket to dial.

“It’s handled.”

You are typing away on your keyboard, answering some emails when the doors to your office fly open. It’s Blair and she’s rushing in. You can tell her her brain is going 100 miles per hour when she cheers, “Paige is a whore! She’s a whore!” You shake your head and smile in return, expecting her to say more, and that she does.

“I had Kurt hack into her message log and she had HUNDREDS and I mean HUNDREDS of text messages with this guy named Tom Henderson. And I know what you’re going to say ‘Go interview him then’ We’ll that’s what I did while you were gone doing god knows what!” She’s starting to get off track but you don’t mind. Blair was a chatterbox at heart.

“Good news is that Tom spilled his guts the minute I went to ask questions, but he has an air-tight alibi. He was working as a bouncer at a club at the time of the murder. There has got to be like 100 witnesses.” You nod your head and before you can tell Blair anything she continues, again.

“Oh my god! How could I forget?! Henderson claims that Sully knew that he was sleeping with his girlfriend.” With that, you waste no time to get out of your chair, and before you can even take a step Neil comes strutting into the room.

“Even worse news, the gun found in the murder has Sully’s fingerprints all over it. It gives him means.” A small “fuck!” leaves your mouth and you dash towards the double doors that connect your office and another. Pushing open the door, you waste no time to start interrogating Sully.

“Did you know Paige was sleeping with Tom Henderson?!” You point your finger at him like a mom scolding her child. Sully replies stupidly, “What?”

“Did. You. Know?” Accentuating every word in the question causes Sully to get irritated.

“I hired you! You can’t come in here and talk-” Sully’s cut off by Neil almost immediately. You let him overpower the situation by walking away. Your mind is running, trying to think what the possibilities could be.

“Yes, she can! She can do whatever the hell she wants! Without her, you would be in jail right now!” Things are starting to escalate quickly between you three. Blair is just observing what’s happening. You decided to ask one more time even though you hate repeating yourself.

“Did you know Paige was sleeping with Tom?” The tone that you ask him is softer, things are starting to get real and if you don’t get to the bottom of this, Sully could be going to jail for 20 years to life.

Sully answers your question, “Yes, but I didn’t kill her!” Your mind shuts everything out once he answers your question. Neil and Blair start conducting a plan that you have no care for right now. Deciding to walk away from all the chaos, you manage to bump into the one person you least expect. Vanessa, with Gwen following behind.

“Oh, what the hell!”

“I want you to give him a message!” You stare Gwen down, scolding her with your eyes for even letting Vanessa in, in the first place.

“That is not appropriate.” You take ahold of Vanessa’s upper left bicep, Gwen the other, and quickly guide her out of the firm. She tries to go with a fight but your grip doesn’t let her escape. You open the front door to the firm, giving Vanessa access to leave but she makes it clear that you hear what she has to say. “Not appropriate? You came to me and I know he sent you! I know you can give him a message! I’m telling the truth! I am!”

“This conversation is over. Please leave.”

You’re barely coming down with your high from the previous chaos when David Rosen, the US attorney general walks into your building.

“Times up, Y/N. I have a warrant.” He’s holding up white papers, stapled together. He’s here to take Sully into custody but luckily for you, David arrived earlier than expected.

“I still have 40 minutes.” You bark at David, taking a look at your watch. Turning your back to him, you reach the conference doors.

“You can wait in the lobby by all means.” You suggest to David. Maybe he’ll listen to you once and for all.

“Fine, but in 40 minutes I want Sully St. James in custody.” He huffs out.

Meanwhile, you try to find Gwen. Once you see her in the conference room you have her call Blair, to let her know that you’ve officially been invaded and time is running out to find Sully a viable alibi.

Blair, Neil, and Kurt walk through the front doors exactly 7 minutes before David is supposed to be arrested. Blair comes in hot, Neil and Kurt trailing behind her. She’s holding a flash drive and gives you a rundown of what that flash drive material contains. You take no longer than 3 seconds to head your way to the conference room where Sully St. James is currently seated. You tread the water lightly, not wanting to anger him when approaching the situation.

“We don’t have much time, Sully,” you start with, “the police are here so I need you to listen.” Blair, Kurt, Neil, and Gwen slowly enter the room with you. Most of the time, when debriefing with a client, there’s always someone else with you. In this case, all of them.

“We were able to verify your alibi.” Sully’s reaction doesn’t surprise you. Confusion shadows over his face. Almost like he didn’t even know how or who verified his alibi.

“You were?” He looks around the room after he questions you. All eyes are on him and everyone can tell that he’s realizing that his secret is no secret anymore. You nod in response to his question.

“That’s.. that’s a good thing, right?” He’s playing dumb and you’re catching along. You open your mouth to start a lecture.

“Sully, you’re the most decorated hero since the Vietnam War, you come from a family of well-respected soldiers, you make your living giving speeches for the conservative right, and you’ve said over and over, that Paige was your best friend. Not your lover.” Your eyes never leave him during the duration of your speech, but when they do you signal Blair to turn on the TV and plug the flash drive into it. Once she does, a video starts to play. It’s from a security camera at an ATM, that so happened to be next to the bar Sully had been seen at before the murder. In the video, Sully St. James is seen standing on the sidewalk, hands in his pockets, pacing. He’s waiting for someone. Just on cue, a man in his mid to late 20s is seen approaching Sully. Once he gets his hands on Sully, he kisses him with passion. Almost like lovers who are reuniting for the first time after months of being apart. The room is silent up until the video shows the two grown men kissing. Sully’s breath starts to pick up, he’s infuriated.

“Paige knew, didn’t she?” You already knew the answer to that but still needed the clarification. You were never one to go based on assumptions. Sully doesn’t respond so you continue, “She knew you were gay, the two of you had a deal.” Sully speaks up for the first time in 3 minutes.

“You can’t show anyone that.” Disregarding what he said, you ask, “I need the name of the man that you were kissing.”

“Over my dead body! I serve my country. I honor the uniform! I am a conservative man. Everything I stand for is anti-gay. I am the deacon of my church! They’re talking about me running for Congress one day. I’m a hero. I can’t be gay.” His demeanor starts off hostile but then shuts down and he manages to whisper the last remark.

“But you are. This is who you are.” You point to the TV which had been paused at a time frame where Sully and his secret lover were engaged in a kiss. “This is your alibi. Let us help you.” You walk over to the couch that Sully is seated at and crouch next to him. You and Sully are the only two who have spoken a word so far. Everyone else is watching the scene unfold in front of their eyes.

Sully stands up straight and looks ahead of him. With one small word, he answers you.

“No.” You stand, but before you can mutter a word he turns around and heads out the conference room doors. You don’t pay attention as to whether everyone follows you but you follow Sully out. Demanding him to wait but to no avail, he doesn’t listen. Once he opens the firm’s front doors, he is met with David Rosen.

The bright ceiling lights are the cause of the forming headache across your temples. To say that everything that happened in the past 28 hours is ridiculous would be an understatement. Neil and Blair are at the police station with you. By the time Sully St. James had his mugshot taken, you got a text message from Gwen. You managed to mutter an ‘I have to go’ and frantically left. Having left instructions for Neil and Blair just in case anything happened with Sully.

Being told, by Gwen, that Vanessa Wyatt was in the hospital and she was going to see her was just the cherry on top. You wasted no time to get there as fast as you could. It was 7 pm by the time you entered the hospital door, exhaustion hitting you like a ton of bricks. Getting into bed sounds much better than having sex.

Gwen is standing outside of Vanessa’s hospital room when you get there. You greet her then immediately ask, “What happened?” You take a look at Gwen and she genuinely seems worried for the girl who’s in the hospital bed, clearly sedated.

Gwen explains, “She slashed her wrists. There’s no press lurking around but one of the nurses told me her dad’s flying in from Michigan.”

You double-check with Gwen, just to make sure that there is no possible threat. “No nurses or doctors, about anything?” Gwen shakes her head, her ponytail moving along with her head, and responds shortly.

“Just to me.”

“Good stay with her.” You turn to leave, regretting to have even come in the first place. A simple phone call would have been fine. Before you take a step Gwen takes ahold of your upper arm and blurted your name.

“Y/N! You told me to trust my gut when I first got hired, and now my gut is telling me that she is telling the truth-” You cut off Gwen to share what you think.

“She’s not.” You keep it short and sweet. Nico told you that he didn’t do it and you believe him. Your heart believes him. He said he loved you and you were the only girl he’s ever loved.

“I know the President, Gwen. He wouldn’t do this.” You’re starting to become stern since Gwen is being persistent about something that could never, ever possibly be true.

“I just find it weird that she was going on and on about how there’s this secret room off the Oval Office where they’ve met, and I’ve read about the White House. There is a little room.”

You waste no time to state the obvious. “If you read it, she read it. People are crazy Gwen. They love to get fixated on famous people and stalk them.”

“But I don’t think she’s crazy.” If you didn’t have any love for Gwen you probably would’ve smacked her for continuing to run her mouth. Since you do care for her deeply, you demand her to tell you why she thinks that. “Why?”

“Okay, she tried to take her life but she didn’t want to die. She called you right after she did it because she wanted him to find out she was hurt and come see her. She thought he would do that.” Gwen rambles everything out in one go as if she’s already rehearsed this conversation in her head.

“Gwen-”

“She was going on and on about how she thought he’d come to see her and call her some stupid little German word.” You start to doze off but your ears perk up like a dog that hears a siren from a mile away when she mentions the word German.

“What?”

Gwen’s face scrunches up and tilts her head to the side at your remark. She’s questioning you and doesn’t even need to open her mouth.

“Repeat yourself.” You try to tell yourself that you heard something completely different. How pathetic.

“Oh! He’d call her a German word, she said it means treasure or something. Why does it ma-” You cancel out the rest of Gwen’s sentence and scurry away. Your legs start working independently and lead you down the hospital corridor. Gwen calls out your name in response, but you pay no mind to it. The pit in your stomach is probably the size of a football and it doesn’t help that bile is rising in your throat and everything feels hazy. Betrayal wasn’t something new to you but coming from someone who expected the same loyalty from you was gutwrenching.

Sometimes you think it’s crazy how much authority you still have in the White House because you simply do not work there anymore. Nonetheless, it comes in handy, in instances like these. Rose, the President’s Secretary, leads you the way into the Oval Office in a matter of seconds. It didn’t take much convincing, just a quick “It’s an emergency”. Once Rose opens the first of 3 doors that connect the Oval Office to the White House, you step inside. Walking up to the set of couches that sit in the middle of the room, to set your purse down, you notice Nico isn’t at his desk. Matter of fact he isn’t anywhere in the room. With that, you question Rose about Nico’s whereabouts.

“Where is he?” You expect her to go into detail, whether it’s a meeting or at dinner with Nellie. But Rose never does. Instead, she gives a simple answer.

“It’ll just be a moment.” With that, Rose walks out and shuts the door behind her.

It doesn’t take long for Nico to come walking through the door, Timo trailing right behind, but when he does, you notice his attire. He’s wearing a bowtie. Which only means he has something important going on.

“Y/N? What are you doing here?” Disregarding his question, you plea to him with your eyes. He notices the quiver of your lip and how tears threaten to leave your eyes. Nico senses something is up.

“We’re gonna need the room, please.” He demands Timo. Nico’s eyes never leave yours. Almost as if there is a magnetic pull to the two of you. Timo stands there dumbfoundedly and questions the President.

“But, Nico you have to give that toast to the President of Mexico in 10 minutes. Maybe this could wait until after?” Nico’s eyes finally leave yours. He turns to Timo and repeats himself.

“I said we need the room,” Nico demands almost instantly. That being so, Timo lowers his head, and his hand reaches to the door handle so he can close the door behind him. Once Nico hears the click of the door shutting fully closed he whispers your name. You take no time to finally repeat the word you know Gwen was talking about.

“Schatzli, huh?” The word rolls off your tongue as if it’s venom. It makes you want to curl up into a ball and never be seen again. Nico turns to you and you repeat the word of endorsement like it’s a chant. You’re angry and Nico knows it. With that, Nico points up ahead. There sits a security camera that overlooks the majority of the room. Watching your every move. Nico knows he can’t have a conversation about Vanessa knowing he’s being recorded. Good thing he was a smart man. During the first week after his inauguration, he managed to find out that the camera doesn’t record past his desk. So the pair of you had rendezvous against the large crystalline window that overlooks Nellie’s garden and a patio. Countless times.

Nico guides you to stand in front of the window with a simple, “Come here.” To that, you obey. As to why? You don’t even know the answer to that considering all you see is rage. You reach him, keeping your distance but still out of the security camera’s view. Disgust and humiliation still sits on your face, never intended to leave soon.

Nico is the first to speak amongst you two. “You left me.” He can’t even look you in the eye when he finally admits the truth. A man who lies is always a coward.

“Because you are married! You said you wanted to dedicate yourself to your marriage! I wanted you to be a better man and be the man that I campaigned for-” Nico cuts you off by slowly taking steps towards you. You don’t need to be a genius to know what he’s doing.

“Do not touch me.” You planned for it to come out stern but ended up sounding like a hurt duckling. But that you were. The look in Nico’s eye confirms that he was not listening to you. Instead of him pleading for you to hear him out, he steps even closer. Once he reaches you, his hands rest upon your hips. His body aching to make contact with yours. Your body is pressed up against the large window with another step. Nico’s eyes stare down at you, faces only mere inches apart. The pair of you already know where the next thing leads to but you’re not letting him go that easily.

Before his lips can make contact with yours, you push at his chest to get him off of you. Putting all force you can conjure into the shove. You turn around and before you can think your right hand makes contact with his left cheek with a hard smack!

“I believed you! You clouded my judgment! I wanted to believe you because I love you and THIS is what you do to me? She tried to kill herself! Did you know she’s lying in a hospital bed because she slashed her wrists open? I destroyed that girl-” Everything happens too fast and you can’t even see through the tears that started falling just moments ago. Nico finally dared to walk up to you and kiss you. His right hand has ahold of the back of your neck. While the other is on your upper arm, keeping you in place. It takes less than a second for you to come to terms with what’s happening. As mad as you are at Nico, you couldn’t help but feel the need to return the kiss. Your internal dialogue screams at you to stop. To step away and never talk to him again.

The kiss is slow and passionate, Nico doesn’t want to rush into anything further because he knows you won’t hesitate to take a step back and slap him again. You had the balls no one ever did. Before Nico can gain access to your mouth with his tongue, one of the doors is swung open.

“I just want to let you know that we can hear you yelling.” By the time Timo shuts the door, Nico and you have created a small fragment of distance away from each other. The satin pinky nude lipstick you wore, transferred onto Nico’s lips. Your hair is a bit disheveled and the pair of you are out of breath. Timo was a smart man so it didn’t take much for him to recognize what was happening behind closed doors. Timo clears his throat before he speaks.

“Mr. President, I recommended you go wash up.” Timo puts his hands in his pockets and refuses to look you in the eye.

“Timo-”

“No. You have lipstick on your mouth. You have a toast to give. Go. Now.” With that, Nico obeys and leaves the room, not even looking back towards you. Timo and you bask in a moment of silence. You stand there like a doe who has yet to learn how to walk. The feeling of embarrassment is an understatement to say at least. In times like these, where Timo puts his foot down, it makes you feel like a child being scolded for writing on the wall with markers.

Timo walks up to the President’s desk and admires the picture he has of the three of you. It was the day of Nico’s inauguration, the picture was taken right after Nico’s speech. Timo wishes things could go back to the way they were.

“Oh mein gott,” Timo mutters under his breath. After the past two years of knowing Timo, you’d expect that he knew about the affair.

“You didn’t know? He tells you everything.” You scoff. Nico and Timo are close. Like brothers, who manage to piss each other off all day every day but that doesn’t get in the way of Nico telling Timo every personal detail that goes on in his life.

“He didn’t tell me this.” He shakes his head and looks down at his feet.

You wipe a tear that cascades down your left cheek and quickly mutter, “Because it didn’t matter.” In disbelief, you walk towards the couch, reaching for your purse. Feeling the sudden need to get out of the one place you do not wish to be at. Timo tries to grab at your wrist, tries to talk you into staying but you’re too fast enough for him to get a good grip. Once you reach the door, you adjust your purse and push the straps up against your shoulder blade. You take a deep breath, fighting the urge to stay. Alas, your right hand makes contact with the gold door knob and you twist and push the door open. With every last bit of courage you have, you step out of the Oval Office with your head up high. You’ve got a man to get out of jail.

#nico hischier #nico hischier x reader #nico hischier imagine #nico hischier fanfic #nico hischier x oc #nico hischier smut #nh13 #new jersey devils #ebs writes things!

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wri0thesley · 1 year ago

Text

lion tamer - jing yuan x reader (12.4k)

it's taken for granted you'll take the job that nobody else wants, whilst the general is indisposed. you just didn't expect things to turn out like this.

cw: not sfw, minors dni. chubby reader. reader is afab but no gendered terms are used. descriptions of raw meat (animals eating), food, pining, fingering, cunnilingus, coming inside. pet names including little bird, darling, little thing. reader is implied to be shorter than jing yuan.

This was a commissioned work.

It’s a quiet whisper, at first - gossip among the lower-downs of the Luofu. You hear it on the fringes and the edges, but you dismiss it as really none of your business; you’re already working harder than most everyone else thanks to the small matter of your far shorter lifespan, and you don’t intend to set yourself back by listening to idle gossip. You have other things to concentrate on; the busywork that you’ve been assigned to as a junior (very junior) member of the Seat of Divine Foresight.

Really, though they call you a ‘non-administrative support specialist’, you know what you really are; a general dogsbody, somebody to pick up all of the pieces that others sweep by. Still; just getting a position here means you’ve outdone most people, and you hold in your heart the idea that you could get even further up this ladder of success if you simply tried hard enough. You’ve heard tell that even some of the long-life species haven’t managed to make it as far as actually working within the Seat itself, so really . . . you can’t help but feel a little proud of yourself.

Which is why you choose to ignore the swirling rumour about your esteemed Arbiter-General until you’re called into a meeting with Yong Hai himself.

(The General is sick, the rumours say. The General may not last another day. The General’s laziness has caught up with him, the General may not make it, and what will we all do then--)

“So,” Yong Hai says, all business. “You’ve probably heard about it already.”

There’s a flare of disquiet in your gut; that the gossip and the rumours you’ve been so steadfastly avoiding are true. You don’t know what the Luofu would do with General Jing Yuan; you cannot imagine the ship and the world without him, when he has been such a stolid presence - and the way that the general public will react doesn’t bear thinking about--

“Stop that,” Yong Hai says, with an amused look in his eye even as he fights to keep his mouth in a firm, commanding line. “It’s not as bad as people are saying. The General has simply . . . contracted something that he isn’t bouncing back as quickly from as we’d hoped. We’ve had to send him off to the Alchemy Commission for a few days, just to see if we can work out how to help . . .” The secretary catches himself, clearly remembering he’s talking to someone who amounts to little more than custodial staff. He coughs. “Anyway. It’s left us in a bit of a conundrum, and after some discussion, we think you’re qualified to handle it.”

You tilt your head to the side as you try and think what you could possibly do to assist in this matter.

You’re no healer; you’re no nurse. You can’t help them figure out how to cure the General, you’re not equipped to sit at his bedside and mop his feverish brow (your cheeks go hot and your face burns at the very thought of it). You certainly can’t take over any of Jing Yuan’s actual duties. The idea of you as any kind of military strategist is laughable--

“How can I help, Sir?” You ask, partly because that is what’s expected of you and partly because you really have no idea what use you’ll be in the situation.

“Ah,” he says, and then he coughs again - he looks into the corner of the room, as if he’s begging someone to help him, and you remember that he and his sister are most often found together. But here, it’s just the two of you, and he has nobody to help him to break whatever news he’s going to break to you. You hope it’s not going to involve cleaning up a sick-room; you’re really not good with that kind of thing--

“We need somebody to tend to his home affairs,” Yong Hai says, eventually. “He . . . Ah, look, I’m going to come out and say it. General Jing Yuan has a penchant for taking in stray animals and the like, and he only even agreed to let himself be looked at on the caveat we had to promise to find someone to look after them.”

You think of the statues of lions that decorate the place, and you feel a trickle of cold sweat down the back of your spine. You hope desperately that the secretary isn’t implying that you’re about to quite literally be fed to the lions--

“Stop looking like that!” He says, exasperated. “All of them are perfectly tame, and you’ll be in no danger. He has a . . . lion that he’s incredibly fond of. Several birds. And . . . ah,” he looks embarrassed again. “He’s informed us he usually leaves out a veritable feast for any other neighbourhood strays on his balcony, and he was very worried that they weren’t going to be properly nourished whilst he was away.”

Finches. You can do that. Neighbourhood strays - cats and dogs, you suppose - are all very well. But the lion . . .

That doesn’t matter. Yong Hai seems to have reached the end of his meeting with you, to his tangible relief. He’s already bustling about his desk and looking longingly towards the closed door.

“A new schedule’s been drawn up for you and sent to you already,” he says. “All of the relevant information should be in the attachments! Have fun, won’t you? The General is so very fond of his pets, you see--”

Your phone beeps as if it is punctuating his point; the secretary beams at you, and you get the distinct impression you are being told to put your best foot forward and roll with the punches. ‘Get on with it’, as someone without any manners might say.

“Understood,” you say, and you force yourself to smile and look on the bright side of things even if you’re sure you’re going to have nightmares about being eaten alive by a lion tonight. This is a post that the General wanted filled personally! This is almost as personal as someone can get to the General, actually; it appears you’ll be working in his actual home! It’s a . . . a step up! A stepping stone!

You force yourself to ignore that it is actually very much a case of sticking the lowest ranked person (and someone well-known for taking on as much as they can with cheerful aplomb, due to your fear of ever really saying ‘no’) onto the job that nobody else wants to do.

“I’ll do my best,” you say, and Yong Hai beams at you even as he gestures for you to go and get to grips with your new role.

Well.

You have no other choice then, really, but to Get On With It.

You are quite frankly terrified the next day, when you turn up to your newest duty. The documents sent to you had instructed you to pick up raw meat for the lion from the General’s most trusted supplier before you went up to his chambers; apparently, birdseed and cat-and-dog food was kept there, but the lion’s appetite could not so easily be sated. You have to give yourself a pep-talk before all of it; have to convince yourself that running away from this new responsibility would be both awful for your career prospects and terribly cruel.

“Ah,” says the supplier, when you turn up and tremulously hand over your phone so he can see the attachments displayed on the screen giving you this new Meat Power, “So you’re looking after the waifs and strays and Mimi, then?”

“Mimi?” You ask, your voice tremulous, and he laughs as he hands over two incredibly full buckets of raw meat. It’s a good job you’re not squeamish.

“That’s the lion,” he says. “The General tried to name her Snow Lion after he realised she wasn’t just going to be a pretty little white housecat, but . . . Mimi fits. You’ll see!”

The concept of Jing Yuan attempting to adopt a pretty little white house cat and being saddled instead with a huge lion, and having to continue to refer to the powerful beast as ‘Mimi’ despite his best efforts, keeps you entertained right up until you’re outside the door to the General’s chambers and you remember that a carnivorous predator awaits you on the other side of it.

“Well,” you say to yourself, hoisting the buckets up and taking a deep breath, “there’s no point delaying the inevitable. If I get eaten today . . .”

And you let the pass-key you’ve been given float against the sensor, until the ornate doors to Jing Yuan’s chambers slowly part and admit you into the Arbiter-General’s inner sanctum.

The first thing that you’re struck by is how it seems that the General left in a rush. The entire place, whilst not dirty, has an air of untidiness. You hear the cheeping of finches from the first room; excitement that their Master may have finally returned to play with them. You can’t help but feel sorry for them - from what Yong Hai has said, it may be quite a while before Jing Yuan is well enough to return to his home.

There are touches of the General everywhere, now that you’re looking. Delicate flowers (you’ve heard he likes small, delicate things, and you can’t help the nervous tug at your clothing as you consider just how indelicate you find yourself). Ceramics and porcelain that you fear are so fragile they may shatter even under your gaze. An unfinished game of star chess, a coffee cup left half-drunk . . . That last one could fetch a fine price in the black market. You’ve heard those traders hawking ‘tissues used by Helm Master Yukong’ or even ‘a book enjoyed by General Jing Yuan’s protege!’.

Before your mind can lead you too far down that dangerous path, though, the lady of the hour appears.

She’s beautiful.

You have to stop yourself gasping aloud. Any fears you might have had seem to fall to the wayside, unimportant, compared to the majesty of the lion before you; the pure white fur, the wise face, the mane that fluffs out from her. She’s pure white; lean, but perhaps with a little pouch at the tummy. Not a single snarl or tangle mars her fur, not a single speck of dirt upon her, like the false moon looking down upon the Luofu--

She sees that you’re holding two big buckets and seems to recognise them, because it’s barely a breath before her ears twitch and she pounces like a kitten, seemingly not realising that you are smaller than her owner and she is far larger than the average kitten is. All of the wind is knocked out of you as you cry out her name and are tackled to the ground.

You find yourself beneath the warmth of her body, a sweet scent emanating from her fur as if the esteemed General regularly bathes and shampoos her. Delighted, she sticks her snout right into one of the buckets. A low, pleased rumble emits from her throat as she works her teeth over the meat--

You reach up, hesitantly, with the one arm that isn’t pinned by the great weight of her. Your fingers hover for a moment, unsure of what to do - is she like a cat? Does she prefer chin scratches or ear scratches?

You settle for a very light pet at the side of her mane, just by her face. Her fur is just as soft as you had thought she would be - a lady who is clearly incredibly spoilt. Well-cared for. You have another flash of a vision of Jing Yuan - combing her mane, tying a shiny ribbon about her neck to match the ribbon he wears in his own hair.

Mimi pauses in her enjoyment of the food. Your breath catches in your throat, all of your senses on a sudden high alert - what if she didn’t like being touched like that? What if she’s about to mistake your hand for a part of the buffet you’ve brought her?

A moment that seems like an hour passes.

And then she leans into your hand with a pleased rumble-squeak-growl, her eyes closing in pleasure, and despite how your heart is beating and your legs are aching from the way she’s twisted them and trapped them beneath her . . . you smile.

For the first week, every time you let yourself into Jing Yuan’s space, you are alone aside from the animals he keeps there. Mimi launches herself at you, but you’ve learnt to sidestep and laugh and ruffle her mane, offering her choice little tidbits to curl up and gnaw on her food whilst you see to the strays that congregate on Jing Yuan’s balcony. They had taken a little longer to warm to you, but after the second day when it became clear if they wanted the same food Jing Yuan usually prepared they would have to come to you, they had thawed considerably. You leave them to their devices, and finish off with the finches.

They hop from place to place in their cage, cheeping brightly. Sometimes they hop onto your finger or your shoulder, looking at you like you’re the most wonderful being in the universe. Once one had hopped onto your head and you’d stayed stock-still for five minutes, afraid of disturbing it.

After all of the pets and animals are fed, you’ve gotten into the habit of sitting with them for a little while. Curling around Mimi and stroking her mane and her tail (you’ve braided it, actually, and told her how pretty she looks with little red ribbons in her fur as she blinked at you her slow, lazy blinks). Listening to birdsong. Letting the strays rub about your feet and imagining the Arbiter-General himself doing all of these mundane tasks.

It’s strange, to think of him as so . . . so much a real person. General Jing Yuan has always seemed a man of mystery and just a touch of romance to you; a long life species who has outlived almost everyone he’s ever worked with, who has steered the Luofu into glories and battled bravely and heroically against Abundance abominations for longer than you’ve been alive. The first time you’d met him, when you’d gotten your place at the Seat of Divine Foresight (before you’d quite found out how meagre your duties really were), you’d been utterly tongue-tied.

He’d been charming, naturally. Smiling and charismatic and low and pleasant-voiced, saying how glad he was to have you aboard and how he hoped you would enjoy your time here. There’d been, perhaps, a flash of sadness in his eye at the knowledge you were a short-life species-- but you’d quickly tried to dispel that notion, scolding yourself for your own romanticism. Jing Yuan is your colleague, your boss - better to not harbour such idealism, to make him into a storybook character instead of a man.

Still. It’s rather hard to imagine him out of breath, puffing and wheezing, after pulling the bucket Mimi had gotten her paw stuck in off of the silly lion’s foreleg before she sent herself into a panic.

You think that the menagerie that he keeps in his private quarters have grown fond of you in turn. The task that everyone had seemed to find so onerous quickly becomes one of your favourite parts of the day; there is something to be said about the healing properties to the soul of having a lion roll over to show you her tummy and wiggle enticingly until you give in to her and give her all of the rubs and tickles that she so clearly desires.

So for about a week and a half, everything chugs along; you fall into routine, and the animals recognise you in turn. They sometimes still crane their necks and heads hopefully around you to see if Jing Yuan is around (Mimi especially occasionally looks dejected at his absence, though her ears perk up once again as soon as she remembers the buckets you come bearing are filled with delicious morsels for her), but when it is just you they still seem somewhat satisfied.

Nobody gives you any warning that Jing Yuan has returned to his own rooms.

Which is why you walk into the main room with your buckets swinging on your arms, singing a silly little song you’ve composed for Mimi about how the meat is soon to be ‘delicious and yummy’ in her ‘full-up-tummy’, you’re so surprised to hear a velvet soft chuckle floating from the big circular sofa in the centre of it that you almost drop all of those delicious-and-yummy steaks and thighs all over Jing Yuan’s ornately tiled floor.

You stare at the sofa, your cheeks going all-over hot, as a mass of blankets moves and shifts and a slightly ruffled pale head emerges from them.

The General himself.

It’s obvious, looking at him, that he hasn’t been feeling his best. His normally tied up hair falls over his face in unstyled sweeps, there are dark circles beneath his eyes and a sharpness to his cheekbones that you have never noticed before. Instead of the armour you have grown so used to seeing him clad in, he wears civilian clothes; a loose shirt that shows off the lines of his throat, his collarbone.

Despite all of that, though, he is still the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. Your heart still skips a beat. He takes you in for a moment, his face scrunched up as if he is not quite awake; and then, a small smile spreads over his handsome face.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he says, in that low, musical voice. “I’d like to know where the song has to go, after her tummy has been filled.”

“I’m so sorry,” you blurt out, awkward, nervous, unsure of what to say. “I-- nobody told me you’d be back, I can leave, I didn’t mean to--”

He holds up a lazy hand, the smile still on his face. His eyes are half-lidded, his overall look almost indulgent.

“Please,” he says. “I’m . . . better, but not fully recovered. I’ve been given strict instructions that I'm not to lift heavy objects or do anything more than relax for at least another week. I’d be much obliged - if it’s not too much trouble on top of your own duties, of course - if you could carry on seeing to my . . . what did they call it?” Another small, secret smile. “Ah yes. My little zoo.”

“I-if you’re sure . . .” You say, surprised to find when you say it aloud that you’re relieved. You truly have gotten attached to all of the animals, even in this short time.

Mimi butts your leg, impatient for her food, her huge paw petulantly tapping upon the floor. Jing Yuan laughs again, and you feel your stomach clench at the warm sound as it fills the room.

“Oh, she likes you,” he says, in delight. “I’ve never seen her be so patient with anyone but myself, you know.”

“She’s been friendly since I met her,” you reply, reaching down to scratch her behind her ears and to place the buckets somewhere she won’t make such a mess (though she’s actually a fairly fastidious eater, for someone with no thumbs; you suppose she’s so proud of her lovely white coat that she doesn’t want to risk staining it).

Jing Yuan hums in consideration, his smile not leaving his face, as he watches you pet Mimi and her affectionate head bump before she dives back into her food. As you move into the other sitting room - the one that the finches reside in - you hear more rustling, and as you gather the birdseed you’re surprised to see that Jing Yuan is following you, sloping afterwards determinedly. There’s a definite tilt to his walk - the walk of a man who’s been in bed for a week - and you can’t help but say something.

“Sh-should you be out of bed, General?” You wince at the slight admonishment in your tone, fearing he will think you’re scolding him - but Jing Yuan simply smiles.

“I need to check on my sweet little charges,” he says. “Come now. I’ve been in bed for days. Let me wander about my own rooms without worrying your pretty head too much about it, alright?”

It takes all of your grace not to turn into a pathetic, embarrassed mess at the easy way he says ‘your pretty head’ - somehow, you manage to keep your composure, keep some measure of poise, even as inside you feel yourself turn to mush.

He sits down upon a chaise by the birdcages as you reach in to fill the small bowls and scatter the feed, his eyes not leaving you for a second. He smiles when he sees a finch or two hop upon your hand to peck at the seeds and bits left in the crevices of your palm.

“A true animal whisperer,” he says, watching one of the more inquisitive finches hop up to your wrist and your forearm to tug teasingly at your elbow-length sleeves. “They’re not too fond of strangers, either.”

“I have been feeding them for a week, Sir,” you say to him, with a smile at the finch as you urge it off of your arm and back to the rest of its friends. “They’ve gotten used to me.”

He shakes his head, his hair falling about his shoulders, and you’re struck with the thought that he and Mimi even look similar. You’ve heard the old adage about how pet owners and their pets grow to look the same, of course, but you’d never realised quite how true it was until that moment and the sight of Jing Yuan doing a motion you’ve grown used to Mimi doing.

He follows, too, as you take food and water onto the balcony. As cats wind around first your ankles, and then his - as dogs wag their tails and lick at your hands.

“If I were a jealous man . . .” He says, laughing. “They must see something truly special in you.”

“Me?” You ask, aiming for a tinkly laugh but landing on ‘incredulous’. “No, they’re just sweet creatures. All of them are.”

He’s unerringly patient with the animals; his big hands tender as they scratch ears and tickle chins. Seeing the great General being so delicate makes your heart turn over in your chest; his big, scarred hands in direct opposition to the delicate bones and the soft fluff of all of the creatures that mass here.

“Don’t be so modest,” Jing Yuan says quietly in reply. “I’ve known some of these animals for years. If they didn’t think you were something special . . .”

Your cheeks are hot again. Somehow, in the course of this conversation, Jing Yuan has gotten closer and closer to you. Out here on the balcony, under the warm false sun of the Luofu, there’s nowhere for Jing Yuan to sit and watch - so he’s stood close to you. Close enough that you can see the warm gold amber of his gaze, the fan of his lashes, the mole high up beneath his eye. You swallow, and the sound is almost indecently loud even with the background mewls and barks and purrs.

“I’m glad that they found someone so able to do this for me,” he says, his voice still quiet. That single word, those single two syllables, somehow manage to be imbued with more meaning than you’d ever imagined they could be. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing you.”

“Just until you’re feeling a bit better,” you reply, cheeks still hot, throat still sore, heart still beating far too fast in your chest. You wonder what Jing Yuan is thinking as he looks down at you - if he has noticed your anxiety, the way that he seems to set you all aflutter. You hope he thinks it is merely because he is your superior, and not because it’s so very hard not to dwell on his looks and his warm voice and the surprisingly different persona that he shows when he’s doing this--

Jing Yuan is still smiling at you, from back on the sofa covered in his blankets with Mimi spread out protectively over his feet, as you foolishly wave goodbye and leave his chambers.

You get to witness Jing Yuan’s recovery firsthand. The first few days, he is still unsure of his own limbs; he still slowly lopes around the rooms. Once or twice, you come in to feed the animals and he stays wrapped within his blankets, Mimi only leaving his side to demand some cuddles and some meat from you.

Despite his illness, though, he always has time to talk to you. He always asks you how you are feeling, what you have been doing; he teases you for how the animals seem to recognise you just as well as him now. When one of the finches pecks at your cheek, he chuckles and says;

“Ah, wouldn’t we all like to give our little bird a kiss like that?”

You don’t know how to respond to that, ducking your head, muttering something unintelligible that wins another of his laughs. His words err on the edge of being flirtatious. Once or twice he compliments your outfit, your hair - how lovely you look today. You never know how to react to such things; you force yourself not to dwell on them, reminding yourself of Jing Yuan’s own looks and his position and trying to tell yourself not to get attached and that the General is merely trying to be polite.

One afternoon, he asks you to sit with him and have tea.

It would be rude of you to say no; not when he has placed two teacups before him, anticipating your acceptance, a plate of sweet treats in an amount that would be gluttonous even for him arranged with the tea service. So you try and gracefully position yourself across from him. You try and remember your manners as you take the cup by the handle, as you choose the least ornamented and sugary of the delicacies on offer--

(It’s hard not to remember being told not to indulge at all. You feel conscious of eating in front of him--)

“Have this one,” Jing Yuan says, as if he can read your mind, and he pushes towards you an intricately decorated little cake resplendent with sugar roses and ruffles. “It’s one of my favourites.”

Your mouth waters. You give him an embarrassed smile as he encourages you further, reaching over to pick it up himself and place it upon your plate instead of merely pushing it.

“Really?” You ask, trying to pick it up neatly. “It’s a bit more delicate than I thought you’d like. I suppose I imagined you liking things a little rougher--”

Your face goes hot as you realise what you just said, but Jing Yuan ignores the innuendo and simply smiles at you.

“Ah,” he says. “I like things that are . . . delicate. Smaller than me. So lovely to observe and enjoy, don’t you think?” His gaze doesn’t leave your face. You have never considered yourself delicate - the curves that you display have put an end to that - but under his eyes, you can’t help but think of the breadth of his shoulders and his height and think how a man like him could make even you feel small and breakable. “What do you think?”

The little cake is sweet on the tongue, flavoured with a hint of something you can’t quite name. Your eyes widen in surprise.

“It’s wonderful,” you tell him, swallowing the bite and enjoying how the taste lingers. “Truly.”

“I’m so glad you enjoyed it,” he says - and then, he reaches over the table. “You have something--”

You go stock-still, embarrassed and shocked at the intimacy of the gesture, as he uses his thumb to wipe a smudge of icing from the corner of your mouth. He keeps your gaze the whole time. It is something a lover does - it is not something you’d ever expected General Jing Yuan to do for you--

“There,” he says, returning to his cake as if nothing has happened. “It would be a terrible shame if I couldn’t see all of your lovely face, after all.”

He is always saying things like this; off-the-cuff remarks that, if he were not the General of the Xianzhou Luofu, you would interpret as being flirty. He mentions them when you have tea together, when he ropes you into playing a game of star chess (“Don’t think I will go easy on you because you are nice to look at,” he says, as he places the counters into their starting positions), when he watches you and Mimi and you and the finches and tells you that he cannot decide which is cuter.

You see him get gradually stronger and stronger. No more limping. He is almost always dressed, now. His hair no longer falls in shaggy waves about his face. His dark circles dissipate, his voice getting somehow even deeper and more velvety.

The unspoken reality that soon, Jing Yuan will be well and you will no longer have to take on this extra duty hangs over your head.

You find that the idea makes you feel sick. You are not only enjoying caring for the animals, now, but you’ve also started to look forward to seeing the General.

Well.

That’s not quite it.

You have to be honest with yourself, don’t you?

You’ve developed a crush on him.

You can’t imagine not seeing him. Not being greeted with Mimi’s butts and her batting paws; not hearing the pleased chirps of his finches whenever they see you. Not enjoying tea with him any more, simply existing in this lazy golden time when you do not have to think about work or his position above you or anything other than the four walls that surround you and the multiple hearts beating within it.

Jing Yuan brings it up first.

“I’ve been thinking,” he says, coughing one day after the two of you have played a game of star chess that you were thoroughly destroyed during. “Well. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m getting better.”

“I’m glad to see it, Sir,” you say, forcing a smile to your face even as your heart falls into the region of your feet. “We were all very worried about you. Everyone is always asking me how you are and when you’ll be returning to work--”

His face clouds, a flinch so quick you almost miss it.

“Yes,” he says, a mournful tone to his voice. “I’ll soon be returning to work.”

You tell yourself sternly not to cry. This was never supposed to be permanent.

“Then I suppose you won’t need me any longer,” you say, forcing a smile on your face. You are going to be gracious if it kills you.

“Ah,” Jing Yuan replies. “That’s what I’d like to talk to you about. I . . . we are all very fond of you, you see.” He motions to Mimi, who has come to curl beside you, her head laid against your knee. “I fear Mimi will riot if you were to stop bringing her all of those steaks, you understand. And who knows what she’d do, deprived of your song about her tummy?”

You squeak in embarrassment. Mimi lifts her head and gives you a slow, displeased look, much to Jing Yuan’s amusement.

“Well. I’m very aware that it’s not part of your duties, and I’d be willing of course to pay you more for all of the trouble, but--”

You see Jing Yuan falter for one of the first times; as if he is afraid that you are about to reject him outright. He coughs, trying to hide his anxiety, but it is an emotion you’re intimately familiar with and as such you recognise it for what it is.

“We’re all so very fond of you,” he repeats. “Won’t you keep coming?”

You barely leave a breath before you’re happily agreeing.

It’s not quite the same.

You knew it wouldn’t be; you knew that you wouldn’t see Jing Yuan anywhere near as often, as he resumed all of the many duties that the Arbiter-General has to take on. Despite how unenthused he had seemed to be returning to his work, you knew that Jing Yuan took his responsibilities terribly seriously).

Still.

You had thought you might see him more. Might still be able to drink a cup of tea with him, even if it could not be the same kind of slow, languid time the two of you had taken over it before. You’d thought that there’d still be time for a conversation or two.

The reality is that you almost never see the General now.

At work, your paths had crossed only rarely; now, hyper-aware of his presence, you realise that you see him almost never. Not at work, and not at his own home.

You’re still excited to see the animals - for the finches to happily chirp at you as if they’re telling you about their day. One of them rides about on your shoulder, now, even when you go out to feed the strays. You’re still excited to tell Mimi what a good girl she is and rub her tummy and play with her (she’s inordinately fond of ribbons and the chasing thereof, like an overgrown housecat).

But without Jing Yuan there . . .

There’s something missing.

You still do your duties as well as you can - Jing Yuan has negotiated a hefty raise for you, all things considered - but you can’t help sometimes leaving his home feeling a little empty at the lack of seeing the General. You can’t help being disconsolate as you think about him - as you remember his flirty little asides, the way he’d looked at you across the room, the smile that played across his mouth whenever he did. You know he couldn’t really be interested in you, that he was probably like that with most people - but a secret little flame cannot help but burn in your heart even so.

Days pass, quiet, lonely. You work, and feed the animals, and go home to your own empty quarters. You work, feed, go home, work, feed, go home--

Until one evening, when you’re just about to leave Jing Yuan’s chambers, when the door opens and the General appears. He looks a little red in the face; his breath comes in short little pants. You’ve never seen him so obviously flustered; usually, Jing Yuan fits perfectly up to his reputation as the Drowsy General.

“Are you alright?” You ask him, rushing over. You’re touching him before you’ve thought through consequences; finger hovering over his pulse point, reaching up to feel his forehead to make sure he’s not running a temperature. Through the panting, he looks at you and smiles.

“I’m afraid,” he says, still breathing heavily, his voice rasping. “I made up a little lie to be able to get back here on an errand that doesn’t really exist.”

“General,” you scold him. It’s not like him to shirk responsibilities. He laughs.

“Yes, yes, I know, little thing-- but I had to see you. I wanted to see you again.”

You think he’s misspoken.

“I have to get back,” he says, and he reaches down - his hands upon your cheek again. You don’t know how to reply, what to say, what is going on. All you know is that you are there, and Jing Yuan is there, and something is happening. Fizzing on the air is a promise that something is going to change. “But . . . I couldn’t-- I needed to finally--”

Jing Yuan kisses you.

It’s a kiss as messy and rushed as he is right now. A kiss that says that he has to hurry back, despite how much he doesn’t want to. You, unused to being kissed and even more unused to being kissed by handsome military leaders who feel a hundred times out of your league, do not kiss him back. He’s messy and wet, and his teeth clash against your lips as you stand there, feeling foolish and wrong-footed.

He realises you’re not kissing him back, and he stops - he draws back, his eyebrows furrowed. He opens his mouth to speak.

He’s going to say it was a mistake, you realise. He’s going to say he thought you were someone else, that he was carried away in the heat of the moment. You and Jing Yuan? No. It couldn’t be. It’s absurd, it’s silly, nobody could ever believe it - and yet.

And yet.

Your heart couldn’t take his rejection.

“I’m sorry,” you blurt out - and you push past him and out of the door and back towards the comforting ordinary normality of your own empty rooms.

Despite your embarrassment, fear and all of those other emotions keeping you up all night, when you wake up the next morning you know that things will be worse the more you put them off. So you get dressed for work and you thank Lan that, when you walk into the Seat of Divine Foresight, Jing Yuan is nowhere to be seen.

You hope he is hard at work, far away from you. You cannot quite face him yet. You haven’t properly said goodbye to your foolish dreams.

You can’t shirk your other duties either, so at the ordinary time you stand up from your desk (you’ve somehow been saddled with the job of reviewing paperwork for grammar inconsistencies. You feel certain there ought to be software of some sort that does this job for you, but it had been laid here on your desk when you’d gotten to it and you were not in the habit of arguing about your duties), and you head to the designated supplier of raw meats for Mimi’s consumption.

“Oh,” says the supplier, the evening after Jing Yuan had finagled a way to see you. “He told me to let you know to go straight up today.”

You frown, not quite sure why; you hope Mimi is alright. It feels strange to be going towards Jing Yuan’s home without your arms weighed down with buckets of meat, but you push forward even so. You hope last night - the awkward kiss, the way he had looked at you - does not sour things between the two of you. You hope that he isn’t about to tell you to never come back. Your heart makes a new home, somewhere in the vicinity of your throat, as you hesitantly knock upon his door.

A beat passes. Your mind helpfully provides you with all of the ways in which Jing Yuan could be about to fire you - or worse, let you down gently and admit that he had a moment of weakness. In that moment, you suddenly seem so much more aware than before of yourself - of the unfashionable curves, of the amount of space you take up, of how a man like Jing Yuan could surely not have really wanted to kiss someone like you - and then, he has opened the door and he is smiling at you and he doesn’t look angry.

Instead, upon seeing you there, a smile passes across his face; tugs at the corners of his lips, crinkles the corners of his eyes.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come,” he says to you - and he reaches across the threshold and his hand brushes your cheek, as soft and tender with you as he is with his finches. “I’m sorry if I frightened you last night.”

“I’m sorry I ran,” tumbles out of your mouth. “I just . . . I didn’t think you-- and somebody like me-- and I was afraid--”

He lays a finger over your lips, still smiling.

“It’s alright,” he says, in that low, smooth voice. “I’m sorry if I caused you undue trouble, little bird.” The pet name falls from his lips as easily as any other trifle, though it makes you feel hot and aware of yourself and flattered all at once. “Please come in.”

He takes your hand to gently urge you across the threshold, his touch still feather light. You think, as he does it, of all of the other things those hands have done; all of the battles they have waged, all of the strength that must be contained within them despite how gentle his touch is now.

“I’ve asked someone else to take care of the animals,” he says to you, not letting go of your hand as he leads you through the front room. You realise with a start exactly where he is taking you as he approaches a door you have never had reason to open before. He looks at you, eyes keen and golden. “I wanted us to be alone. I would hope, little bird, if you do not want this . . .”

“I do,” tumbles from your mouth. It is nothing but the honest truth. You let the crush that you’ve been trying to deny, the fear of Jing Yuan not liking you or finding you attractive, the anxieties of not being good enough, all wash over you, in favour of the beating of your heart and the feel of his hand on your face and the sight of his hand upon the doorknob of his bedroom.

He turns fully so he stands before you. Hands come up, cradling your face; thumbs brushing the plump apples of your cheek, fingertips upon the soft flesh. He is smiling still, even as he dips his head lower, so low you can see the multitudes of swirling shades of gold in his eyes.

“Promise me,” he murmurs, low and soft. “Tell me you want me the way I want you. No expectations, little one. Your career, your position, your everything - nothing will change if you do not want me as badly as I desire you. Honesty.” You realise a tear has escaped from the corner of your eye. You have never felt so . . . seen. So very much wanted. So sure of anything in your life. He wipes that tear with his thumb, tilting your face closer to him so that if you just angled your head differently you could kiss him. “Promise me.”

“I promise,” you whisper, and Jing Yuan’s lips meet yours.

This kiss is entirely unlike the one from yesterday; this kiss is slow, luxurious. Jing Yuan starts off gentle with you, his hand still cupping your jaw - his lips moving against yours in slow, indolent waves. He nips at your bottom lip with his teeth and wins a gasp from you, a hitch of your breath, as your own hands come up to rest lightly upon his chest. You feel his mouth curve into a smile against your own.

“You’re adorable,” he rumbles, pulling back just enough that you can still feel his breath on your face. “Truly - you don’t know how long I’ve wanted to do this to you.”

“I--” You helplessly stare up at him. You can barely believe this is happening, as he pushes open the door to his most private of domains. “Really?”

He laughs again, gently taking your arm and urging you into the room. You are helpless to do anything but follow him - to let him slowly, slowly, slowly pull you beside him and onto his bed.

“You really have no idea how . . . desirable you are?” He asks, voice low and husky, humming with want. His hand skims over your cheek, the nape of your neck, following the line of your jaw and your throat to linger over your collarbone. His eyes follow the path his fingers take, not moving from your form for an instant. “You really didn’t notice me staring at you, little bird?” He leans in, close enough for his breath to tickle your ear. His lips brush over the pulse point in your neck, making you squeak in surprise again even as it sends a bolt of heat to the space between your legs. “Imagining what you would feel like under my hands? Imagining what you would look like, divested of that maddeningly conservative uniform they make you wear?” Another kiss, this one with a hint of teeth. You realise with a hot flush of embarrassment mixed with want you have cried out at the sensation of the almost-bite. “Imagining how you would react to every touch I gave you?”

“Sir,” you pant, dazed and amazed and hot and needy. “I-- I thought about you, too--”

“Oh,” he murmurs, as his big fingers slide over your body, feeling the ample shape of you through that same conservative uniform. His big palms brush the soft chub of your upper arms, the meat of your chest, the shape of your waist and over the curve of your hips, basely appreciating your body even beneath the fabric. “I’m sure they were no match for the utterly filthy things I imagined doing to you.”

His thumb digs into the indent of your waist, tugging you closer to him so that you’re pressed tighter against his body. He smiles down at you, every inch the conquering general, and your heart beats in time with the pounding between your legs. He looks at you like he wants to devour you. Wanting and hungry and lustful, like you’re the most delicious thing he’s ever seen. It’s not a look you’re overly familiar with receiving - but oh, does it feel amazing to be on the receiving end of it from Jing Yuan.

“Such a fragile thing,” he murmurs down to you, and you almost laugh, for you do not feel fragile - but Jing Yuan continues speaking, and you get lost in the dulcet tone of his voice. “So very mortal. So very ephemeral . . .” He sighs, dips his head and kisses you again, a flurry of pecks upon your lips as his thumb draws circles where it rests. “Will you let me make the most of having you, little bird? Let me show you how beautiful you are?” He smiles. “I have always had a weakness for delicate things.”

He means it.

Any time you have ever felt too big; ungainly, or ill-shaped - all of it falls to the wayside under the warm haze of being looked at and admired and wanted by Jing Yuan. You find yourself smiling up at him, aware you probably look as though there is not a thought in your head, but the General doesn’t seem to mind as he looks at you with hunger colouring his gaze.

“May I undress you?” He asks, voice low and cajoling. His fingers tease beneath the neckline of your uniform, and it feels as though they leave a trail of fire everywhere they linger. You do not trust yourself to speak; you nod at him, your breath coming out in short little pants. He makes a soft noise of approval, before his fingers are working at buttons and fabric. Cool air hits your bare skin; your uniform is gently cajoled off of your body, tossed aside to be worried about later as Jing Yuan’s hungry eyes drink in every new inch of your exposed skin.

He does not stop praising you as he does it.

“Look at you,” he murmurs, as your top half is bared, as his eyes roam over your chest and his hands come up and squeeze the generous curve of them, palms rough against delicate skin. You shiver as his thumbs find your nipples, as they rub over them again and again until the buds stiffen beneath his touch and a soft whine escapes the back of your throat. “You’re beautiful.”

His tone is nothing if not worshipful. By slow, luxurious degrees, Jing Yuan helps divest you of your garments. As your underwear and bottoms are rolled down, as fabric bunches at thighs and knees, he does not stop murmuring sweet nothings about how soft you are, how beautiful, how lucky he is to be able to see you like this.

About how he has been thinking about having you like this since the moment he saw you.

“You looked so beautiful then too,” he murmurs, as your underwear is pulled from your ankles. He briefly gazes at it, the gusset saturated with your slick, and he smiles. “Ah . . . that little song, the nervous, shy reaction to realising I was there - the sight of you all soft-eyed and adoring with Mimi . . . I’ve never wanted to have my wicked way with somebody quite so much.”

You’re bare beneath him, Jing Yuan slowly urging you to lay down upon the coverlets of his large bed. You suppose that it’s so large so that if Mimi desires to sleep with him, she can, but it alongside Jing Yuan’s own size simply helps you feel small and delicate and breakable in a way you never have before.

“I wanted to know,” Jing Yuan murmurs, leaning down and brushing his lips over yours, teasing and feather-light. “If you would be quite so adorable, squirming and nervous and vulnerable, if I were to have you like this.”

Your cheeks are hot. Jing Yuan has not lost a single garment of his own, but you are entirely unguarded to whatever he wants to do to you now - bare of every scrap of fabric. His gaze lingering on your body almost makes you want to draw in; to curl around the exposed flesh of your stomach, to cover the pudge.

Jing Yuan notices something in the way you hold yourself. He smiles down at you and cups your cheek.

“Don’t hide,” he breathes. “I want to see all of you, little thing. I want you to know how beautiful I find you.”

“I--”

He takes your hand in his, shifting so he is on his knees between your legs. Gently, he guides your unsure hand to the space over his own crotch. Even through the layers of fabric, you can sense the heat of him; the stiffness pushing against his trousers.

“If I did not want you,” he says, “why would you make me so needy, hmm? Feel what you do to me.” He presses your hand a little harder against it, a soft hiss of breath escaping him, encouraging you to not simply take his word for it. Your face hot as ever, you do so; give a gentle squeeze that makes him groan. “Ah-- be careful, sweet thing. I want to take my time over you.”

He lets go of your hand, gently urging you to place it back beside you. Your fingers find purchase in his sheets. You still cannot quite believe where you are; that it’s the great Arbiter-General leaning over you, looking down at you like you’re the most beautiful thing that he’s ever seen.

“I-it’s not fair,” you say to him, your voice dry. “I’ve lost all of my clothes, and you’re still fully dressed--”

He chuckles. This time, when he bends down, there’s a slow, deliberate quality about him. He kisses your neck again; trails wet butterfly kisses over your collarbones, lower and lower to the swell of your chest. His hands come to cup the generous weight of them, even as his mouth floats closer and closer to your nipples, tightening and stiffening in anticipation.

“I told you,” he says, murmuring in between flicks of his tongue against the buds. “I want to take my time over you.” He looks at you, eyes half-lidded. “Ah, you short-life species . . . You never learn patience. I have all of the time in the world to give you ecstasy over and over--”

People call Jing Yuan the Dozing General. As he applies his tongue to your nipples, though - as he suckles and nips and bites, as he kisses and squeezes until you feel dizzy with the attention he’s lavishing upon you, you realise that they are misinformed. Jing Yuan is not lazy or dozing - Jing Yuan merely likes to take his time over things.

And oh, is he enjoying taking his time over you.

You whine under his touch. You whimper and squirm, your cheeks flooding hot, your entire body prickling with tension and pleasure as his attentions upon your nipples send shockwaves of pleasure down to your sex. You feel wetness fair seeping out of you; slick rolling down your thighs, making a mess of Jing Yuan’s bed sheets.

“Please,” you manage to get out, dry-voiced and wanting, after what seems like an eternity. “Please, Sir--”

“Jing Yuan,” He corrects you, a smile on his face as he continues to trail wet kisses over your bare skin. “What kind of man would I be if I allowed you to call me ‘Sir’ buried knuckle-deep in you, sweet thing? We are on even ground here.”

It’s hard not to think of him as the General. You are currently barely able to string a thought together, and he hasn’t even touched the place between your thighs yet. Still - you need him to touch you somewhere else. You need his attentions to give your chest a break (your nipples are sore, stiffened points - your skin slick with the wetness of his licks and kisses) and move to somewhere else. You force out, through your desire to genuflect to his status, his given name.

“Jing Yuan--”

“Hmm?” He asks, raising his head. His lips are swollen and pink, his eyes amused. “Do you need something, little bird?”

“Please . . .” A soft exhale, trying to work through the mass of sensations and needs that your body seems to have become. Jing Yuan does not stop touching even as you try and get out your words; still gently squeezing and toying with the weight of your chests. He’s smiling, enjoying watching you desperately work through the haze of your desire.

“Your words,” he says, a maddening smile pulling at his lips. “Tell me what you want, and I promise I’ll do all in my power to give you it.”

“Please,” you say again, your brain fuzzy. His hands move from your chest now; big palms travelling over the curve of your stomach, your hips, resting there in a way that makes you almost lose all of your senses. “I want you to touch me . . . there--”

“Where, little thing?” He’s still smiling. “Here?” A gentle squeeze to your hips. “Here?” His palm roves over your stomach, the soft pouch just above your mound. You whimper again. “Ah. Come now--”

“Between my legs,” you whisper, voice tight and breaking with desire. “Jing Yuan, please--”

“Ah,” he laughs, dips down and kisses you once on the mouth. “You need only to ask. Spread your thighs for me, lovely thing.”

You do, utterly helplessly. Jing Yuan sighs reverently, moving further down so that he can bend his head to look at you. Your face burns under his scrutiny, fearful that he will find something lacking in your body even as his eyes greedily drink you in like you are the finest wine. He breathes deeply, and you hope that your scent is not off-putting - and then, his fingers are sliding slowly and surely up the soft plush of your legs and closer and closer to the space between your thighs and your heart is beating too fast and your breath is coming in short pants.

“Calm down,” he murmurs, and you keen as his hands reach your sex; as he uses his thumbs to spread the plump lips of your labia apart and the cool air hits your slick, heated core. “Ah, darling . . .”

There is so much in those two syllables. Hunger and desire and adoration, all mixed together as one. In another world, with another person, it might have made you feel self-conscious; but Jing Yuan looks down at you as if you are the most beautiful treasure he has ever had the good fortune to witness.

He leans down, down - and you squeak as you realise what he’s about to do, surprised, but it does not deter him at all as he lets his tongue take a slow, luxurious lick down your sex. The base of his tongue presses against your clit, the pressure on the swollen hitherto ignored nub almost enough to make you come right there and then - but then he pulls back again, chuckling.

“Mm,” he says. “If I allow myself to sample too much of something so sweet, I’m afraid I’ll lose my composure.” He moves his hand instead; lets his fingers explore the length of you, fingertips brushing against your clenching entrance and dancing about your swollen clit. There is little pressure exerted on your sex; merely Jing Yuan’s slow, considering explorations. You clench your own fingers into the bedsheets in order to stop yourself writhing.

“Lovely,” Jing Yuan says to himself. “Ah, you feel like velvet. Such a pretty thing; so perfectly made . . .” He sighs, even as the tip of his longest finger nudges against your entrance. Your hips move of their own accord, trying to suck him in and get him to put his finger inside of you, but he clicks his tongue with an amused chide; “Impatient,” he says. “Ah. You’re lucky you’re so irresistible--”

He slides his finger inside of you, slowly but certainly. You sigh, your lashes fluttering closed - his touch stokes all of those fires inside of you, of course, burning to fever pitch . . . but the sensation of finally having something inside of you has also made you realise how empty you felt before. It feels good, to have something to fill that pulsing space. Jing Yuan watches with rapt attention as he slides his finger half out, and then half inside of you again.

You have had some experience, but you have never felt the way Jing Yuan makes you feel.

“You take it so well,” he murmurs. “Look how pretty you look with something inside of you. Ah. I could spend hours doing this to you . . .”

You make a soft whine of discontent at the idea and he laughs, clicking his tongue even as he’s letting his second finger dance at your entrance ready to join the first.

“No, even I do not have the patience for that right now,” he agrees. “Not when you feel so wonderful, little bird. Not when I cannot wait to see you come apart.”

The second finger; a slight scissoring motion as it enters you, getting you used to the size and stretch of two of his digits instead of one. The heel of his palm presses against your clit with every wet pump, sending frissons of pleasure to the tips of your toes; but he still does not rush himself. He still lets himself enjoy the feel of you clinging tightly to his fingers, the sight of them disappearing inside of your slick, drooling hole.

“Does that feel good?” He asks you, deciding you haven’t spoken recently enough. “Tell me if you want me to go faster, sweet thing--”

“Please,” you say, ragged, breathing heavy. You can feel a tight hot ball of tension between your legs, rolling in your gut, threatening to overwhelm you. “Please, Jing Yuan, faster--”

“Very well,” he smiles, and he crooks his fingers inside of you to find your g-spot - causing your back to arch involuntarily, a whine of pure enjoyment to loose itself from your throat. At the same time, his thumb moves to play with your clit - to toy with the bud, to roll and to circle and to press against the swollen bundle of nerves. What already felt like electric shocks of pleasure move on; instead, they are lightning bolts, ricocheting up your spine and stopping just short of striking earth.

“You’re close,” Jing Yuan says, and you are staring at his mouth. How a strand of your own gossamer-thin arousal is still glimmering at the corner. How his eyes are so focused on you that his gaze feels almost scorching. “That’s right. Let go for me, sweet thing--”

His soft entreaty pushes you over the edge, and the lightning strikes home as your peak hits you with all of the force of a storm.

His fingers work you over the crest of your orgasm, the two inside of you constantly rubbing against that spongy spot that makes you see stars, the big pad of his thumb roughly sliding over your twitching clit in circles and lines. As the waves come to a head and then slowly begin to dissipate, he slows his attentions too - until the slow strokes of his fingers fade out into nothing. He does not seem to care that you’ve soaked his fingers and his palm and the fabric he wears and his bed too - merely keeps looking at you, smiling, like you’re giving him the most precious gift imaginable.

“Good,” he praises you. “But . . . I’m afraid that just that taste from earlier wasn’t quite enough, little bird. May I use my mouth on you?”

Who would ever believe this? Who would ever imagine little old you, on the Arbiter-General’s bed, as he looks at you and waits for your permission to fuck you with his tongue? You feel rather tongue-tied yourself - but you recall what Jing Yuan said earlier, about using your words.

“Please do,” you say, aloud, and Jing Yuan gives you that same smile that makes you feel like the only being in the whole universe.

“Thank you,” he says, sounding entirely like he means it - like it’s truly an honour for him to be able to serve you on his hands and knees. And then he has moved his body further down the bed, elegant and graceful and leonine, and his mouth is heading towards the slick-soaked place between your legs and his tongue is glinting wet in the bedroom and then he is on you, licking at you, hungrily devouring your sex like it is his last meal before an execution.

You’re still oversensitive from his earlier attentions, and the sensation of the wet muscle of his tongue working over you almost pushed you into another early orgasm. Your fingers move from where they’re still clenched into the bedsheets to cling to his hair instead, pulling on the silvery pale strands as your back arches and you blindly cant your hips forward towards his mouth.

He groans aloud at having his hair pulled, and the groan sends vibrations all through your body that make you feel weak at the knees, your toes curling. His tongue continues its assault; back and forth, back and forth. Wetness drools from your sex and onto his face; you can feel the heat in his cheeks, the fan of his lashes against your bare skin.

He twirls his tongue about your entrance, teasingly dips into it, as the channel of your sex constricts and pulses in an attempt to pull him even further in. He groans as your hands knit further into his hair, fucking you for a moment with his tongue before he seems to try and work his face further into your sex.

It’s like he wants to engulf you; soft noises of pleasure keep falling from his mouth, interspersed with rumbling groans. He’s almost gyrating against the bed, you realise, your cheeks hot - grinding his crotch into the mattress as if he’s desperate to have some attention of his own.

That sight makes your mouth go dry; all of the moisture in your body instead congregating between your legs to make a new home in Jing Yuan’s mouth and smeared across his cheeks.

His tongue flicks across your clit and the noise that escapes you is almost animal; Jing Yuan says something, perhaps, or at least makes some kind of muffled noise from his position happily buried in your sex before he shifts his tongue just so and his mouth fastens around your clit fully.

Sucking and licking, suckling upon the pearl like his life depends upon it; tongue occasionally just brushing under the hood, where you’re most engorged, and you can do nothing but cling onto his hair and pull at it as the most intense orgasm you’ve ever felt rips through your body.

You cannot put into words the way that you feel as Jing Yuan devours you. Your entire body feels, suddenly, as if it weighs nothing; as if sparkling lights suffuse your fingers and toes and you float into the stratosphere, white lights dancing behind your eyes in time with your whine (a whine so loud you’re sure everybody on the Luofu must have heard of it).

You come down, eventually, to the sound of Jing Yuan panting. The wet noise as his mouth separates from you, the pleased grin on his face as he uses his thumb to wipe his mouth of some of your slick. It’s a pointless endeavour, really; his face is so saturated with it you’re not sure if he’ll ever be dry again.

“Darling,” Jing Yuan repeats, looking you in the eye, smiling like the cat who has gotten the cream. “You have no idea how much I enjoyed doing that.”

The words almost make you go over shy - but you push that to the side. There is no point, you decide, being nervous of a man who has now known you so intimately.

“In which case,” you say, breathlessly - your voice is still a little scratchy from the moaning and whimpering you’ve been doing - “Will you let me make you feel just as good?”

He looks at you for a moment, before he throws his head back and laughs.

“Why,” he says. “Of course I will.”

“Come,” Jing Yuan is murmuring, and he is finally removing his own clothes. Armour drops to the side of him, shirts unbuttoned and fastenings unhooked. His body is muscular and dotted with scars, befitting his status as a military hero; a light dusting of pale hair upon his proud chest, down into a trail to the vee of his hips. You swallow, your throat dry, trying to blink back the waves of pleasure that are still lapping gently at your shores in order to concentrate on what’s going on. His face is still wet with your slick, his hair damp with sweat and falling in messy strands over his flushed face. He looks well-fucked even without you touching him back, as if merely getting you to feel good was enough for him.

His cock. It’s stiff against the hard planes of his abdomen, a thick, pretty specimen bubbling with precome at the flushed tip. He sighs, running his hand over it once, and your mouth practically waters at the way it twitches. It looks stiff and hard enough that you wonder if it hurts, to want so badly - but Jing Yuan looks at you and smiles, as he rearranges himself on the bed. Pillows are moved, and before you know it he has sat against them, propping himself up like an emperor upon his throne. His cock stands proud and wanting, and he gently pats his thigh as if he is calling an obedient animal to him.

“I don’t wish to hurt you, little bird,” he says - and again, you think of how it feels to be smaller than him. How he does not care about the flesh that spills from straps or curves over fabric. How he looks at you like the most beautiful thing in the world and calls you ‘delicate’ and ‘little’ and ‘precious’ and means them. “Come. Take a seat. As slowly as you need.”

Despite how he has seen you so intimately, you cannot help but feel a little flare of fear as you approach him. He smiles, entirely at peace and at comfort with you going at your own pace, and you could kiss him for it.

“Touch,” he murmurs. “Don’t be afraid.”

With trembling fingers, you reach out; let your hand encircle his cock, get used to the width and the feel of him and imagine it inside of you. He pulses beneath your palm, a soft hum of pleasure falling from the back of his throat as you give it a cursory pump. He curses softly as your thumb rubs across the slit of his cockhead, the bubble of precome wetting the pad.

“Touch,” he says, with a smile. “But don’t get me too excited, little bird. I don’t want to come anywhere but inside of you.”

Your cheeks go hot at his easy profession; your tongue darts out to trace your lower lip. You’re used to the feel of him now; the heat that seems to stir beneath the surface of his cock, the veins that marble the side of his shaft, the ruddy pink of the head. Taking a deep breath, you spread your legs and let yourself readjust, straddling him. His own hands come up to cling to your thighs, sinking into the soft flesh there.

“You’re so soft,” he murmurs, as if in devotion, as if praying to an Aeon. “You’re beautiful.”

His cockhead brushes your clit as you fit it snugly between the lips of your sex; you shift your hips, until it catches against your entrance and your eyes flutter closed.

Your eyes are still closed as you begin to lower yourself down, so you feel every inch of him as he makes his home within your body. Your eyes being closed, of course, you miss the softness and the warmth that fills Jing Yuan’s gaze as he looks at you. The brief moment of sadness that passes behind his eyes as he remembers that you are a short-life species; that he cannot have all of the time in the world with you, to teach you pleasures the likes of which you do not yet know. The sadness he cannot spend his lifetime learning you by heart--

But you hear the soft murmur of your name, as he bottoms out inside of you and you take a moment to simply rest there with him buried as deep inside of you as he can go. You feel the way one of his hands slides up your spine to grip the back of your head and to pull you into a kiss as deep and adoring as anything else he’s done so far.

Teeth and tongue and lips, whimpering and gasping into one another’s mouths until you do not know where he ends and where you begin, Jing Yuan somehow manages to murmur;

“Move whenever you want, sweet thing. Set the pace.”

It does not, in the end, feel like either of those things happen. Instead, it feels as though the universe sets the pace for you; as if you simply know when to begin to move your hips, how to bend and angle yourself just so in order for Jing Yuan to hit all of the most sensitive spots inside of you.

One hand remains on your hip, helping you with the pace - the other remains on the back of your head, to allow him to kiss, as if he doesn’t want to let his mouth separate from yours for any longer than necessary. It’s a romance that you didn’t expect of the General, but it’s hardly one you’re going to complain about when his mouth feels so good and the constant nibbling of your lip and curl of his tongue against yours is distracting you from the mounting pleasure already starting to coalesce inside of you.

There is nothing in the world for a while except Jing Yuan’s body underneath yours. His hands, his mouth, the feel of his shoulders beneath your own palms where you cling to him for leverage. You sweat and breathe and kiss and fuck as one, until the call inside of you becomes too much to ignore.

“I’m--” You pull back from the kiss to whisper, voice hoarse. “I’m going to--”

“Shh,” Jing Yuan says, kissing again. His own voice climbs in pitch, and you hear a shiver and a shudder in his syllables that makes you aware that he, too, is not far from his own release. His teeth nip at your lower lip as he half-begs into your mouth. “Please. Come again for me, sweet thing, little bird, pretty-- let me feel you--”

Your third orgasm crashes over you, your sex spasming around his cock, tight and hot and pulsing - and Jing Yuan groans into your mouth as you push him over the edge too, and you feel his cock spasm in turn. Ropes of hot release shoot inside of you; you had thought, earlier, that having his cock buried all the way inside of you was the extent of how full you could feel.

You were wrong.

You bite at his lips, whining and half-sobbing, as the please encompasses you like a cloak of warmth. Jing Yuan groans in return, his hips making needy fast circles to chase the dregs of his own release. It feels right, for the two of you to peak together like this. For the two of you to chase every last drop of pleasure, entwined together and sweating and kissing and as close to one being as it’s possible to be.

Eventually, your breathing slows. Eventually, the kiss turns tender instead of frenzied. Eventually, you pull back from Jing Yuan with a foolish smile on your face and your cheeks hot and tears of pleasure (that you hadn’t even realised you had cried) rolling down your face like sparkling diamonds.

You stare at each other, the enormity of what has happened washing over you. Jing Yuan’s face is calm and serene, but his eyes are bright still, his cheeks still high in colour.

You fear for a moment that he is about to dismiss you; that what the two of you just shared will mean nothing now that it is over. You fear that you’re about to go back to what you were before; a colleague and an employer, a General and a subordinate. But then, Jing Yuan lets out a deep rumbling sigh, pleased, as he collapses back upon the pillows. He opens his arms for you to dismount, his cock sliding slippery and wet outside of you, his come trickling down your thighs.

“Come here,” he murmurs, sounding tired but terribly pleased; the cat who has gotten the cream. He’s like a lion once more. You are helpless to resist his indication that he wants to cuddle, and so you let him pull you into his arms, let him manoeuvre you to lay against his chest until you can hear his heart beating. His fingers stroke your head, like you’re a sweet-tempered animal yourself. “Mmm. Rest with me, little bird.”

You let yourself. Your body is aching and sore from the orgasms and the sex, and you let your eyes drift closed, lulled by the comforting rhythm of his breathing.

A sleepy kiss is dropped onto the crown of your head.

“Enjoy it whilst you can,” Jing Yuan hums. “Before we start having to make room for Mimi every night.”

#writing #not sfw text #jing yuan smut #jing yuan x reader #chubby reader posting #commissioned work #hsr x reader #hsr smut #honkai star rail x reader #honkai star rail smut #hsr posting

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