#post-war domestic husbands | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bitterrfruit · 10 days ago

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houndtooth [17]

[masterlist]

Ghost x f!Reader - tags: slow burn, enemies to lovers, abduction, bodyguard, forced cooperation, smut 18+ mdni - cw: see masterlist - 15.6k words

Ghost keeps his crosshairs on you like you’re his target. His infrared vision tracks you like prey, he follows your heat signal amongst the sea of cold-blooded vermin that infest your home.

He keeps his post as you instructed him to. Settled into character by following your orders, as obediently a member of your guard would have. In truth, it wasn’t as much an order as a meek request - that he remain hovering at the perimeter, hidden by shadow. Such a thing comes to him innately, ghost that he is.

His mastery of stealth is tested, though, as he watches you drift between your dead husband’s many comrades. You fawn at them with a well-trained domesticity, jittery hands politely interlocked in front of you as you accept their sneering condolences with saccharine gratitude. Pointedly ignoring how their pig eyes fondle you, how they exchange glances with each other as though sharing the same thought when you pass them by.

He knows what thoughts they share.

He can see it in their greasy smiles and their ruddy necks. Frothy-mouthed at the sight of you, so vulnerable and sweet. No husband in sight.

None of them are accompanied by their own wives. And they do have wives, near all of them do; Ghost knows each of them by full name and date of birth by virtue of his mission dossier. Instead their women have been left tucked away and out of sight, not here to survey how lecherously their husbands covet the fresh widow.

The thought alone makes his temples hot and his jaw tight. He remembers the words of your supposed ally; once the boys get their hands on her . Was this the very thing he was referring to? An army of war profiteers swarming the mansion of their late leader so they can take turns with his dowager?

You shouldn’t have worn that fucking dress.

He’s sure you chose it thinking it was unappealing; severe and structured, coating you in black fabric from clavicle to ankle. You couldn’t see it from behind, could you?

He could have demanded that you wear something else, when he found you stooped in front of your mirror. Ordered that you should shove on black slacks and a bulky coat, maybe a thick scarf for good measure. But the longer he looks at you, the more apparent it becomes that his instruction that you wear nothing pretty was inherently unachievable. No amount of hideous clothing could conceal an artless beauty as preternatural as yours. You are an ineluctable magnet for gluttonous eyes, and magnetise you do.

The men you aren’t talking to look at you still, even as they are engaged in droning conversation with one another, glasses of liquor and cigars between their turgid fingers. The entire affair strikes him more as a dinner party than a funeral, and he supposes he should have expected that. They’ll all be celebrating the usurpation of a leader who clung to his power far longer than he deserved.

The usurper himself is yet to arrive, and you seem as potently aware of that fact as Ghost is.

You’re petrified of him. Makarov. Whatever the cretin has done to you, or threatened to, Ghost needn’t know. He can guess well enough. Every utterance of the name turns your skin grey and your lips dry.

Your nervous eyes flit to the entrance of your mansion every odd moment, and occasionally you’ll meet Ghost’s glare between the gaps of your guests. You give him glittering stares, swollen with pleas he cannot grant you. Little thing. He can’t jeopardise the mission at hand to offer you comfort.

When a stern knock on the front door echoes out from the foyer, your chary head perks up and you freeze on your feet. He can see you trembling from here. You know who knocked.

The fucking bastard could just as easily open the unlocked door, march into the heart of your home unimpeded and announce his arrival to all of his sycophantic subordinates. Instead, he chooses to knock. To lure the grieving hostess away from the crowd that might witness him. Away from your only protector.

You hesitate before you retreat from whatever foul conversation you were trapped in, eyes wide and twitching. It takes you a moment to summon the bravery, and you offer an apologetic smile to the pig in front of you before retreating towards the exit.

You pat down your dress as you leave the room to let in the dog, and you disappear through the archway.

Out of his sightline.

In the humming quiet of the foyer, you can hear every machination under your skin.

The thunder of your arteries, the buzzing of the fire in your nerves, the squeaking of your grinding teeth. You can feel the panic in every muscle, the needles, the venom leaking between sinews.

The front door is solid black, though it may as well be transparent. You can see the silhouette of the man as clearly as you can feel him there. His coldness trickles under the gap in the door and makes you bristle. You don’t want to open the door.

You don’t want to open the door, but he knocks again.

Three gentle knocks, intentionally soft - because he knows you are standing there. He’s simply waiting. Maybe he wants to see how long it takes you to overcome the terror that keeps you there. Maybe, the longer you take, the wider his grin. The sharper his teeth.

He finds amusement in your terror. He always has.

When your numb fingers curl around the handle of the door, reluctantly peeling it open to reveal him, he is already smiling.

He stands with his feet apart in suede oxfords, his hands courteously held together in front of the buttons of his suit jacket. His head already bowed to address you, with the thick tendons in his icy neck pulled tight. The vein that bulges in the centre of his forehead passes through his curled brows, a marker of the feral rabidity that thumps under his skin and collects in the corners of his pointed mouth. He’s riddled with it. Sadism exudes from him like radiation. You can smell it, taste it; metallic and hard, as he tilts his head and awaits your greeting.

A henchman stands behind him, black bulletproof vest tight over his dark blazer. You can see the pistol tucked in a front strap, and he hovers behind his master with the stiff obedience of a muzzled doberman. You wouldn’t expect Vladimir to venture anywhere without his myrmidons, so it surprises you to see only one of them. He mustn’t believe he needs any more protection than that. You are no threat to him.

Your mouth is dry, full of chalk that grits between your teeth, and you can’t even part your lips to utter a word. You aren’t sure how to greet him, now. If you had Victor at your side, you’d have called him Vladimir, as he did. What is he to you, now? Should you address him as sir?

“Госпожа Захаева. Рада снова тебя видеть.” Mrs. Zakhaev. Lovely to see you again.

Your jaw tightens. His voice, still, turns you to ice - brittle enough to shatter, translucent enough to expose the trembling obeisance he exhumes from the deepest parts of you.

Mrs. Zakhaev. Not once has he called you that. No, you had always been Девчонка . Girl. Or simply you, with a snap of fingers or a gesture in his direction.

His politeness is as clear and sharp as glass - he is mocking you with it. Only now are you Victor’s wife, a missus, with your husband dead. Only as a widow are you granted that reverence.

You swallow. It takes a shaky breath before you can bring yourself to speak. “Добрый вечер.” Good evening.

He lowers his head in feigned respect. “My condolences, ” he says, rich with derision and a thick Soviet accent. “We lost him so suddenly. You must be devastated.”

Facetiousness drips from every word.

You nod tensely. “Thank you.”

A pallid hand crosses the space between you, then, and his palm lands unabashedly on your cheek.

You immediately flinch - his palm stings against your skin as though barbed, and the alarm it rings claws down the back of your neck, makes every one of your little hairs stand on end. His calloused thumb brushes towards the corner of your mouth, as if accidental - but the black gleam in his eyes makes plain his glee.

“Бедняжка.” Poor thing, he murmurs. “It must be so frightening to be alone.”

The tips of his heavy fingers press into the hollows of your cheekbone and temple, close to your ear, and you can hear his pulse through your skull. It is deathly slow.

You struggle between agreeing with him to appease him, or feigning confidence to spite him. He is right - it is terrifying. It is so, because of him; and he knows that as well as you do.

You only nod, again. Pleasant and quiet.

He gives you a pout, a mask of pity, before his rough hand slithers behind your neck and under your hair, and he reels you towards him. Your heart thunders to resist him but your body does not obey, and you acquiesce as immediately as he had grabbed you. He wraps his other arm around your shoulders, and with his chin atop your head, he holds you firm against his body. A hug, if you could ever call it that.

Even an act as innocent and well-meaning as an embrace is tainted by ridicule. He knows you abhor his touch with every cell that you consist of, as much as he knows how desperately you avoid displeasing him.

You feel his breathing in your hair, acidic, it makes your scalp sting.

“Ax, моя дорогая.” Ah, my dear, he says deeply. “You won’t be alone anymore.”

He says it like a threat, and it is one.

Eyes wide and dry, you stare into the individual fibers of his powder-blue shirt. He smells of cheap tobacco and gunpowder, with an edge of chemical sweetness, aspartame.

As you breathe him in, your dreaded fate begins to settle in the pits of you. Edges towards certainty.

Maybe he’ll claim you as your husband did. Maybe you are to be passed on to your husband’s successor as though you had been left in his will. An heirloom, too feckless to be left without reins, too precious to be left for someone undeserving.

You envision such an outcome if your efforts to thwart him are to fail, if Simon breaks his promise and abandons both you and his mission, and you are left to fend for yourself among the carnivores.

Vladimir would not play the same role as your husband; demanding but patient, hungry but restrained. He wouldn’t offer you kindnesses or feign any form of compassion, beyond the rotten affection that cloaks his depravity. He’ll play with you as though his toy until he grows bored, and it would not take him long to do so.

Perhaps you were foolish to ever imagine a reality where you escape. The world beyond the one you have come to know has slipped into obscurity, after all - so out of reach that you have begun to forget what it looks like.

He pulls back from you with a pleased sigh, and his hands settle at each side of your head, fingers weaved into the hair behind your ears. His stare is hard and intruding, heterochromic eyes bite at you wherever on you they land. Body, lips, eyes. Even the act of perceiving you is as violating as his touch.

“Grief doesn’t suit you,” he remarks, glower intruding. “Not with those eyes.”

An insult and compliment in the same breath, though you cannot fathom that he might be attempting to ingratiate himself. Worse, that he’s bemoaning your dour expression. Next he’ll ask you to smile.

“Do you miss him yet?” He asks coldly, after a beat.

The smugness in his expression tells you that there isn’t a correct answer to his question. It seems to you a trap, so you do not answer. But a blink, or a shift in your gaze, or a quirk in your lip, evidently answers it for you; because he grins.

“Mh, милая Мия.” Mh, dear Mia, he drones. “It’s no secret that you never loved him. You have nothing to prove to me.”

“Of course I loved him.” You dispute, briefly compelled not to let his ego be sated by such a presumption.

A huff of laughter escapes his nostrils.

“You did?” He questions candidly, though the vein that splits his forehead protrudes with the words. “Are you sure?”

You can read the shift underneath his smile. How it mutates from artificial pleasantry to true malice. The joy he takes in tormenting you oozes from his pores and between his teeth. You can see in his eyes exactly what he is thinking about, what he is ecstatic to remind you of; he needn’t even say it.

“Yes,” you utter, because you know that is the answer he wants.

“Even after all that you did for me?”

Your blood pools at your feet, and his thumbs stroke the prickling skin of your cheeks with tangible satisfaction. You want to look away from him, at your feet, at the sky - anything to conceal the grimace that knits in your face. Instead, you deferentially hold his gaze; eager to ensure he doesn’t feel compelled to elaborate, to remind you in any greater detail, of the whims you were given no choice but to indulge.

He opens his maw to speak, but something catches his eye, and his stare shifts upwards to something behind you.

You are as yet uncertain what or who has drawn his attention, but his rough hands slip from your cheeks and fall to your shoulders.

“Mh,” he grunts through pursed lips, as he straightens his back. “Она ведь все еще держит своих собак при себе, да?” Still keeps her hounds with her, eh?

It is apparent he is not addressing you, so you turn as much as his grip allows you to; to your surprise, a constraining hand drops from your shoulder, and you are free to see who had approached from behind you.

Your protector.

Masked and severe, he stands tall, arms locked militaristically behind his back. He utters not a word, but you see his chest rise and fall, controlled but bordering on detonation. His eyes catch the shine of the porchlight through the gap in his mask, but his glare does not fall on you. He keeps it pinned on the man whose other hand still lingers on you.

Vladimir only grins. A smile that twitches, tips between intrigue and genuine humour. His imposing touch abandons you, then, as he steps cavalierly towards your mercenary.

“Ты та самая тихая. Сергей упомянул вас.” You’re the quiet one. Sergei mentioned you.

Riley doesn’t nod, doesn’t waver, doesn’t move his boots from where they are planted on the floor. Offers no acknowledgement of the man approaching him beyond the pointed stare that follows his every movement.

“Спокойно.” Take it easy, Vladimir teases as he stands beside your guard, patting him with a firm hand on his opposite shoulder. “Я буду вести себя хорошо.” I’ll behave myself.

He holds Riley’s cloaked gaze for a noticeable beat. A second longer than would otherwise be natural. Your breath catches in your throat. Is he trying to get a better look? Might he recognise the soldier if he looks too closely?

With a dismissive nod and an affable pat on the shoulder, Vladimir struts past him and ventures towards the hallway, armed dog in pursuit. As familiar with your home as you are - if not more so - he disappears into the reception room to announce his arrival to his new subordinates.

Like a boot had been lifted from your ribs, a rush of air erupts from your chest the moment he is out of sight and earshot. Your blood turns runny with the transient relief, and you suddenly feel as though you had stood up too fast; knees and hands shaky, you see stars when you blink. Wiping your hair back from your face with clammy palms, you attempt to settle your ravaged heart by breathing deeply and staring knives into the tiled floor.

The skin he had marred with his touch burns and itches, and you wish you could peel it off from the flesh beneath it. You imagine burrowing your fingernails into your scalp and picking the leather loose from your skull, flaying your skin off by the seams. Maybe they’d leave you alone, once your exterior is shed. What would be left?

“You’re alright,” comes a grumbling whisper, from the shadow you had forgotten was standing there.

Your eyes flit to meet his, and you abruptly feel the ground beneath your feet again. His shoulders have softened, his hands hang relaxedly from his tactical vest, and you are alone in the foyer with him.

Not a query into your state of mind, but a stern reminder. You’re alright . You can almost believe it while you have him within sight.

Foolish of him to come to the door to check on you, because none of your husband’s mercenaries would have shown that level of devotion. But you were grateful that he had frightened off the wolf, if only for the briefest moment. You might have thanked him if he weren’t the one to force you into this predicament, into the arms of the very man who you’d rather cut your hands off than spend more than an hour with.

How much had he seen? How much had he heard?

You wonder how long he had been standing there, watching as your husband’s rival caressed you with his pretend affection, listening as he mocked you with his own transgressions. You shrivel up like a raisin at the thought of him witnessing any of it, sucked dry by shame and an overwhelming desire to hide from every pair of eyes that has ever looked at you.

“Yeah?” Your protector presses, and you blink at him.

You nod, and sigh sharply, attempting to regain some lost composure. You have an objective, you remind yourself. You just have to make it through the evening. You only have to fawn enough to get something, anything useful.

“I’m fine.” You insist, as you begin your march deeper into the hallway.

Ghost looks past you as you brush around him in a hurry, and he leaves a few bloated seconds before he brings himself to follow you.

There’s a line to toe in his donned role as a paid bodyguard, between loyal dedication and professional apathy. He finds it difficult to strike the balance, having only ever swung to either extreme of the pendulum. He knows that he has leaned too far towards the former, by stalking you, and only you. By unintentionally keeping his vigilant attention on you, and not on the many targets that surround you. By all but threatening the only target that matters to him for daring to lay a finger on you. Despite his decades of experience, of trained resilience, of pure stoicism - it is only growing more challenging to suppress the compulsion.

Worsened by your present company, threats around every corner and through every door, is the urge to fulfil the role of guard dog in every sense of the term - only he cannot bark, and he cannot bite. Muzzled by duty.

Your potent fear of Makarov is not without cause.

He is more verminous in person than through a screen or a scope. Somehow more feral, more crooked, more rat-like in his features than any blurry CCTV image could ever have accurately depicted. He reeks of malignant pride, and it filled the room like putrid smoke the moment you opened the door to let him in.

What sadistic conceit made him confident enough to touch you? Audacious enough to hold you?

His hands seemed to find purchase on your skin with a borderline familiarity, an intimacy that appeared habitual rather than a cautious venture into uncharted territory.

Ghost’s stomach wrings at the thought of it.

Organs twist and shudder with a fury only worsened by the need to force it down. It pushes against the inside of his ribs, rises in his throat - and all he can do is swallow it, and tighten his knuckles to keep himself stable.

How often had the cretin broken past that boundary? How many times have those filthy fucking hands touched you? Your face, your neck, your shoulders? Where else have they dared to venture?

The very end of your conversation bounces around the inside of his skull, on repeat, as he attempts to decipher what had been cryptically referred to.

Even after all that you did for me.

He creeps through the dark of the hallway, in pursuit of you, as the words ring in his ears. Perhaps it was a brazen and salacious reference to some sexual favours from your past, some lascivious orders he had made of you, some effort to make a cuckold of your husband.

Did you fulfill those demands? Were you given a choice? He won’t ask, and he doesn’t want to know - but the imagined sight stains his vision all the same. Sees you on your knees in a shadowy corridor, sees you locked in a bathroom, sees the very same visceral reluctance printed on your face that he himself has grown so familiar with. Sees too the rabid grin stretched in the warlord’s thin lips, as he makes an unwilling adulteress out of you.

Even after all that you did for me.

As he approaches the open door into the kitchen, and sees the back of you, he grinds his teeth. What if Makarov referred to something else? Some unspoken agreement between the two of you? He imagines any number of conversations you might have had with him in the past; the closest comrade of your husband, after all. It stands to reason that he might also be a comrade of yours. Had you gotten a message to him through your friend, Vasiliev? Did you make a plan with him before Ghost had ever found you in your glistening castle?

Had you lied to him? Are you in on all of it?

Perhaps your proficiency in artificial personalities was even more effective than he had come to believe. That you had effectively wrapped him around your finger, had him feeling pity for you, manipulated him into caring more about your wellbeing than the outcome of his mission.

Despite his ingrained scepticism, rooted in countless betrayals; he doesn’t believe that.

You tip your head back as he comes to a stop in the entrance to the brightly lit kitchen, and it takes him a moment to see that you have knocked back a glass. Of gin, he discovers, made evident by the bottle of Bombay Sapphire that sits with its cap off on the counter in front of you.

“Don’t get drunk, for fuck’s sake,” he snaps, under his breath, once he notices there is nobody else in the kitchen with you.

He sees you jolt in fright, before your head swivels hastily on your neck. Your body loosens when you see it is him and not one of your comrades, and you wipe your mouth with the heel of your palm.

“I’m not,” you whisper shakily. “Just - I just need a little.”

“A little?” He scolds you, having watched you take easily three gulps of liquid before you put the glass down.

Your eyes glisten with fearful shame as he approaches you. He can barely glance at you without being overcome with it, that guilt - you look at him with dewy eyes and his once rigid scruples crumble to his feet.

Pathetic .

“I can’t even-” You take a sharp breath and shake out your hands, as though treading water. “-I can’t even talk, I c-can’t even get words out around him. I need something. Just something to make me more, more-”

“Fine,” he hushes you, “It’s fine. Just that one glass, alright? Or you’ll fuck us both over.”

You nod obsequiously, and as if to prove you mean it, you grab the metal cap and screw it back onto the bottle.

He notices, then, the eerie silence that fills the bowels of the mansion where there had previously been the migraine-inducing chatter of more than a dozen men.

“Where are they?” He murmurs discerningly, and you point towards the direction of the dining room.

“They’re all in there,” you whisper. “He called them all in straight away.”

He immediately moves towards their meeting room, situated around the corner, and keeps his body out of sight of the towering glass door. He can hear them, quiet Russian murmuring, just loud enough to make out a few words.

With a gesture of his fingers he beckons you over, and you refuse, remaining frozen in place with wide eyes and a shaking head. Only with a second, more fervorous demand of his hand do you reluctantly tiptoe in his direction.

He hovers a gloved finger over his lips, shushing you, and holds out a barring arm to keep you behind the corner. You look up at him with your lips sealed, unblinking and awaiting instruction. He cranes his head and holds his covered mouth beside your ear.

“Listen,” he orders; a whisper so low it is barely a breath, directly into the cavern of your ear, and your warmth oozes through the knit of his mask. “Listen to everything they say, yeah? I’m going to check whatever they’ve left out here.”

You remain dead still, and without a physical response, he insists; “Alright?”

“Yes,” you breathe, with a feeble nod.

“Good. Stay quiet.”

He reels back from you, then, and turns away before the compulsion to remain and watch over you overtakes his drive to fulfil his mission. He almost succeeds, passing through the kitchen’s exit, before your soft whisper hooks him by the ankle and rivets him in place;

“Be careful.”

He releases a ragged sigh. You are a winsome liability, aren’t you?

He wishes, more than anything, that he could tuck you away - lock you in a cupboard, or a bunker, or ship you off in a helicopter - so that the risk of harm coming to you would cease from plaguing his every thought. He has one - one objective. His prescribed mission is not to keep you safe, not to hover behind you like a shadow, not to fight off the hounds that might want a taste of you. His task is to get his intel on the Ultranationalist’s imminent genocide, to prevent the deaths of tens, hundreds of thousands - and all he can think about, is you.

He turns his head, barely lets himself get a glimpse of you over his shoulder. He feels your eyes on his back, the claws of a cat scratching at the door to be let in.

“I will,” he grumbles, faltering before he breaks free.

You’ll be fine, he tells himself. He repeats it over as his distance from you stretches thin. You’ll be fine.

Your stomach drops heavy once your protector leaves your line of sight.

His return to the cold and clinical demeanour you knew best was jarring, but unsurprising. Perhaps it’s for the best, to imagine him a mercenary and not the man who has bared his face to you. His loyalties might be more plain, then. His motivations more in line with what you’d expect. You’ve paid him to protect you, and he’ll fulfill his contract as best as he is able. That’s the only level of devotion you have come to know.

You don’t shift your feet from where they are planted, from where he had ordered you to stay. There is some reassurance to be found in explicit instruction. Ever since the first man arrived at your door, you have been nauseatingly adrift; as though you had suddenly forgotten what to say, how to act, beneath the looming fear that every word might make obvious your espionage. The stakes are now higher than your own self-preservation, for the first time in your life. You want to do right. You want to be good.

You know these men. You know how rarely they mean what they say, how often they hide secrets between their words. You know who you are to them. What you are. You know how they look at you, what they think of when they do. What they see. What they remember.

You wait by the corner, as still and silent as a gravestone, with your ear close to the wall.

They speak in hushed baritones with one another, entirely in Russian, unaware of their eavesdropper. You focus your attention on each of the voices - most of which you recognise, and can distinguish - others, you cannot.

“We had Konni do a thorough sweep of the entire estate once we sent her off. They found nothing.” Sergei, you determine.

“Nothing? Fucking nothing, you say? Victor’s entire militia was wiped off the face of the earth - I don’t believe the men who did that left nothing behind.”

The venom in that voice is potent even through the wall that blocks him from sight - Vladimir.

“Nothing. No bullet casings that didn’t belong to the same guns the guards used. Even the boot marks were the same as their uniform.”

A different man chimes in. “What, so one of the guards did it?”

“No, fool. Someone with enough intel did this. It was well planned.”

“It makes no sense to me. If all they wanted was to assassinate the bastard, why would they go to the effort of slaughtering an army of security?”

You hear an irate groan from Makarov. “There was something else they wanted. Killing Victor does nothing. They’ll be as aware of that as we are.”

“We found nothing to suggest Victor’s digital assets were compromised. It didn’t look like they even touched the vault.”

“They didn’t kill every person on the property to get to one man. Your Konni friends found nothing because they are fucking inept. We’ll have the premises swept again by somebody competent.”

“Fine. I’ll talk to Arkady.”

“What, then? Who do you think it was?”

“I have guesses,” Makarov seethes, and you can hear the signature drumming of his knuckles on the table.

Another man, a voice you don’t recognise, addresses Sergei; “You got nothing else out of the girl?”

Your ribs tighten at your mention.

“She said they sounded Ukrainian. I don’t know. I don’t believe she has a clue.”

“You’re soft on her, Sergei. You let her lie to you and you’re too stupid to tell.”

“I made sure-”

“She knows you’re stupid, too. You saw the state of her. They were with her for a while. She will have heard more than their fucking accents.”

“What do you want me to do? Torture the poor girl after she watched her husband die?”

Then, a sudden yell. “Mia!”

Your blood turns to lead, and you immediately back away from the door. Did Vladimir see you? Hear you? Was he calling you to enter, or expressing that you were to blame?

On the tips of your toes, you silently retreat into the kitchen, lean against the counter so that it might appear to a spectator that you were busy with the dishes and not listening in on a confidential conversation. Your heartbeat shudders in your ears. Your knuckles turn white.

The bellow thunders out once again, in English - for you. “Mia, come in here, now!”

You feel fragile. You might faint. You stare at the knives in the knife block and imagine it might be easier for you to slice one of them through your own throat, than to be trapped in a room with those men again. You might have even gone through with such an ideation, if you hadn’t reminded yourself of the stakes that supersede your survival.

It takes every weary synapse in your brain to force the movement of a single muscle, before you can begin to inch yourself in the direction of the dining room in earnest. Your body resents it with every fibre of its being. Your knees shiver with every step.

You see them through the glass door before you open it. All leaned back in their chairs, surrounding the vast dining table in the centre of the room; Vladimir at the head, where he always wanted to sit. He glowers at you through the glass. Spots you even when you try to hide in the shadow.

Meekly opening the door, the shrill squeak of the hinges echoes across the silent room, and all the heads turn on their necks to face you. Every set of beady eyes lands on you at once, and you can feel each of them; hot brands, sizzling and mean, on every part of you.

The air of the room is heavy and warm, reeks of cigar smoke and corked wine. You suck in a quivering breath, arms pinned to your side, as you wait for someone to speak. You can’t bring yourself to say the first word.

“Shut the door,” Vladimir orders dryly, cigarette in his lips.

You do as you’re told, and close the door with a heavy clunk.

“Come here.”

He beckons for you with two fingers. He watches you as intently as the others do, and their heads follow you as you carefully float closer to the table. You remain on the opposite side to the man who called for you, and hope he doesn’t demand you any closer.

“The men who killed your beloved husband,” he begins, a tug in the corner of his mouth as he says the word. “Sergei tells me you think they were Ukrainian?”

You chew your lip, near the point of drawing blood, before you can croak out a response.

“Or Kastovian,” you utter. “I couldn’t - it sounded like Russian but I couldn’t understand what they were saying very well.”

“Very well?” He interrogates, unrelenting. “Or not at all?”

It takes you a moment to think of a lie on your feet. Who could the imaginary assassins have been? What do you imagine they might have said? What can you tell the men in front of you to goad them into spilling some information that they shouldn’t?

“They - there were a few words I understood, but, I d-didn’t know what they meant by them.”

“Like what.”

“They kept referring to, um, флешка - I think, is what they said. Like, a USB drive?”

With every lie you utter, your adrenaline picks up threefold. You feel it buzzing in the tips of your fingers and prickling in your scalp.

Vladimir shoots a pointed glare at Sergei, who adjusts his blazer instead of acknowledging the wordless accusation.

“What else.”

“I don’t - I’m not sure. I thought they might have said something about a - a warehouse. But I don’t know if I have the word right-”

“What was the word?” His vicious impatience cuts through the air like a knife, you feel the blade at your skin.

“Завод.” Factory .

You know the word. You’re pretending to be clueless.

Vladimir slams the surface of the table with both hands - the startling bang makes you jump and sends a shockwave of fright from your chest to your extremities.

He addresses Sergei in Russian with a renewed fury, and his eyes bulge with it; “Fucking idiot. You could have asked her this and we would have known forty-eight hours sooner.”

Sergei rolls his eyes. “Give me a break. She was concussed when we found her.”

“So they know about Mialstor?” A man whose face you recognise asks, and your ears perk.

“How the fuck would they know about that?” Someone else.

“Maybe we’ve got a leak to plug.” Another opines.

Vladimir’s eyes return to you, then. Fixed and curious. “Remember anything else, девочка?” Girl?

You exert every muscle to maintain some level of confidence in your character. A mournful widow, forced to remember the night her husband was slaughtered in her bed. At the notion you remember the true moment you lost him - the bullet shot through the back of his head, the seizing of his limbs once his skull was split open, the expression that remained in his vacant eyes once he was gone. You let the tears well. You let your feeble body tremble with its horror and grief.

“Not - not much else,” you croak. “One h-hit me in the head - I didn’t wake up until they were all gone.”

“Mh,” he ponders, dissatisfied. “Did he hit you hard?”

The blatant delight behind his question almost makes you wince, and you stumble on any words you try to give him. “I- I don’t - I suppose so-”

“More than once?”

“I don’t know,” you answer eagerly, flustered, you feel the burning in your cheeks as the intensity of his barrage only tumefies, a blister ready to burst.

“What do you think they did while you were out?” He drills.

“I wasn’t-”

“Were your clothes on when you woke up, Mia?”

A snort blurts out from another man at the table, another whom you recognise. “Fuck’s sake, Vlad,” he chides, with a deeply ill-placed humour. “Victor’s only been gone a day.”

Vladimir chortles, taking a drag of the stub of his cigarette, and it becomes evident he was hounding you more for his amusement than any hunt for information.

“Didn’t stop him last time,” another says.

The floor quakes beneath you. It might open up and swallow you whole. You hope it does. You hope they can’t see how you shake, how your eyes twitch, how your knees threaten to buckle as you listen to them joke about it - you must conceal it, because as far as they are aware, you cannot understand them.

There’s a chorus of acrid laughter between the dogs as they reminisce on it. The few that weren’t there must have heard about it from the ones that were, because they laugh too. You wonder how detailed their descriptions were. How vivid their storytelling.

Your eyes sting.

“Give him another vodka and he’ll have her up on the table again.”

More chuckling.

“We don’t have the props for it this time.”

“I’m sure we can find some. In the kitchen, I bet. You going to grab the cucumbers again, Vlad?”

“No, look at him. He’s still bitter he couldn’t get her to use the knife.”

“No Victor to worry about this time, eh?”

Your body is numb, your tongue is dry. Vladimir hasn’t taken his ferine eyes off of you for the duration of their perverted raillery. He simply wears a fading smirk, takes the odd puff of his wet cigarette, watching the minutiae of your expressions as if you’re as entertaining as a television. Glares at your terror and shame like it is pornography.

You can see it in the pits of his predatory stare, that he knows you can glean the topic of their conversation. He wants you to know. He wants you to remember what you had devoted yourself to forgetting in the years since it had happened. What you had done before you knew you could refuse their demands, before you had the well-established status of a wife, before you understood you’d be stuck in their country for the remainder of your life.

There was no refusing them, but they hadn’t needed to force you - nor to order you, nor to touch you at all. Not a hand was laid on you. No, you were so uncertain of your fate, that you did it willingly.

Therein lies the root of Vladimir’s mirth. He calls you a whore with his mouth shut. He makes you remember all of it, at the funeral of the very man to whom you had feigned fidelity. The man who remained blissfully unaware that you had debased yourself in front of the comrades he worked with daily until his dying breath.

The bile rises in your throat, and you spin urgently on your heel - rushing out of the room in hasty stride, retreating in the midst of their degenerate laughter.

“She figured it out!” One hollers, and you leave the door ajar as you hurry into the kitchen.

Panic and resentment swells hot and fiery under your skin, you feel close to bursting with it - every limb, every sinew of you writhes with the vicious humiliation that they have pumped you so full of. It is all such fun for them, endlessly entertaining to see how terrified they can make you, hilariously satisfying when you succumb to it.

In your urgency you sweep the bottle of Bombay Sapphire from the counter, gripping it by the neck, and carting it with you as you march out of the kitchen. Flick off the cap as you storm down the corridor. Shove the open top between your lips, and suck down a hard mouthful. It makes you cough, but the harsh burn of its crawl down your throat is the only source of comfort you can find in your frenzy. You swallow another, and another. Maybe if you drink enough of it you might go to sleep and never wake up.

You have to tell your guard dog what you’ve learned, first. You have to do something right, anything to make up for your complacency in your husband’s dreams of genocide, before you even think to check out early.

You have to find him.

Once you reach the foyer, though, you hear the beating of footsteps fast approaching, and your heart drops to your feet.

A growl. “Where are you running?”

Vladimir followed you. Sniffed after you like the bloodhound he is.

Your body screams at you to run from him, but you only manage a few steps backward as though trudging through knee-deep tar - and before you can turn, he is two paces from you.

There is no option but to surrender, then, and your bones turn soft.

His hooks are in you before you utter a noise, thumb and forefingers digging into your cheeks as he drives you by the head - wrangles you against a wall, in the dark and silent hallway, out of earshot from anybody else in the building.

You pant into his palm, eyes watering at the severity of his grip, brows knitted as you hold back the sob that nudges its way up your throat.

“Why are you alive, Mia?” He snarls, his eyes as black as the shadow he hides in, as manic as a rabid dog.

“W-what?” You groan, near a cry, dizzied by his question.

He jolts you, a violent shove into the wall he has you pinned to, if only to make you squeak. “They killed everyone on that estate. Every single man. Even the dogs. But not you?”

The sob you had been struggling to suppress leaps out from your teeth, you feel yourself begin to shrink. “I don’t unders-”

He moves his grasp from your face to your collarbone, hooking rough fingers into the slash neckline of your dress. With a violent yank he stretches down the hem, close to tearing the fabric - and reveals the plum and yellow bruising on your sternum, the ambiguous scrapes that speckle your skin. Utterly unnecessary, for whatever point he is attempting to make - there are plenty of visible bruises sprinkled over the parts of you not covered by fabric, and yet, he sought to reveal that one.

“You want me to believe they kept you alive for what, for fun?” He seethes, and you feel the splatter of his saliva on your face with every consonant. “That they wouldn’t have finished you off once they were done with you?”

Every lie you might utter in your defense turns to mist in your mouth. You feel every tear he pulls in your story, excruciating as if it were your own skin.

He stoops closer to you, mere inches between your face and his. “What did you do for them, hm? What did you bargain with?”

Nothing you can say will do anything to help you, now. He isn’t interested in whatever excuse you spit out. He doesn’t care whether or not you are innocent.

He is just playing with his food.

He makes plain his appetite when he holds his face against yours, his carnivorous teeth grind against the shell of your ear.

“What happened, Mia?”

You shut your eyes, a reflex, some subconscious effort to hide from his bombardment of questions and his nauseating proximity - until a sudden release of pressure forces a torrent of air from between your teeth, and the claws that had nestled into your flesh you no longer restrain you.

A shriek escapes you as your assailant is forcibly torn away by his collar, and he is tossed backward like a kicked dog.

In the blurry dark you struggle to see who had broken you free, but you know who it is. You can hear his ragged breathing, you can hear the cracking of his knuckles as he reels back his elbow and wrenches his gloved hand into a stone fist.

And while he still holds the Russian by the lapel of his jacket, he jettisons his clubbed hand into the centre of his face with such a force that the thwack of the collision cuts through the air like a gunshot, echoed by the splintering of bone under skin. A strike so brutal that your guard dog must have broken his own knuckles upon impact, and he almost follows his victim on his way down.

But he catches himself with a boot, and towers unruffled over Vladimir, who tumbles hard into the opposite wall and only just prevents himself from collapsing onto the tiled floor. The black of his blood splatters the white wall behind him, and oozes from his nostrils, coating his lips.

A turgid silence then settles like smoke.

It fills up your lungs as you wait, deathly silent and pressing your back against the wall, for the impending eruption. A gunshot, a roar for backup, a retaliatory strike with a fist or a knife. You know well what the man is capable of. The lengths he will go to to punish any perceived profanation. A knife would be the most gentle, most charitable penalty, regardless of where he put it.

Instead, Vladimir sniffs as he stands himself straight, propped up by the wall, swallowing the blood that pools in his mouth with a foul gulp.

He glowers at you. Burrowing. Torture in itself, for many moments too long - to you, an eternity of silence within which he can wordlessly threaten you. You know the many fates that have befallen others, each more harrowing, more gut-wrenching than the last. Acid, fire, gas, steel. He makes you shrink, your eyes dry, and you look down from him on instinct.

His glare then shifts to the man that had so violently come to your aid. There’s a glimmer of recognition in the hollows of his eyes. A quirk in the corner of his mouth. An unspoken understanding.

He says nothing. You feel the weight of it in the pit of your stomach.

A brief grin stretches in his lips; blood filling every gap between his teeth, smile painted red. “Милая Миа.” Dear Mia, he coos. “Что ты наделала?” What have you done?

“Get out,” you croak, voice breaking; the command tumbles from your mouth and surprises even yourself. Emboldened by the masked shadow that stands between him and yourself.

His twitching smile returns for a single snicker, as though pleased with your brief retaliation. He waits, for a pregnant pause, before he decides to give you a single nod.

“Victor left a lot of important things behind, mh?,” he says pointedly, with an uncanny smirk, as though he had said it to purposefully confound you.

You do not blink as he steps around your protector, and brushes past you on his way to the front door. His gait utterly unaffected by the blow to the head,he stands tall and proud as always, as though he had not been struck at all, as though his nose weren’t shattered by a deserved fist. He adjusts his jacket as he opens the door, and cold air floods into the room.

The clamour of the others crowding out of their meeting room echoes from down the hallway, too late to intervene, and you stay furtively silent, unmoving so as not to draw their attention.

“What the fuck happened?” An approaching voice calls out, in Russian, and Vladimir looks up as he coolly sticks a cigarette in his teeth.

He offers nothing but a shrug, and a dim smile. “We’ve outstayed our welcome.”

You remain tucked against the wall behind you as the rest of your dismissed guests file out of the front door, murmuring spitefully after being ordered to leave by their superior.

Ghost keeps his post steadfast, standing in front of you, a barricade; eyes following every one of the pigs as they are herded out before he follows behind the very last one.

He slams shut the door the moment the last hoof is clear of the frame, and he locks the deadbolt with a clunk. Through the sliver of a window beside the door he watches them fill their black cars, listens to their engines churn, before they finally pull off in a convoy down the driveway, and their headlights disappear among the trees.

He hears your mousy breathing in the subsequent silence.

His back remains to you while he finds the right words to say, and it doesn’t take him long to determine there are none. An apology would fall on deaf ears. A check on your welfare would be salt in the wound. He left you alone with them, after all. Alone with the very creature you had warned him about so vociferously. What might he have done if Ghost had taken a minute longer to find you with him?

Do you blame him as much as he blames himself?

Once he turns to look at you, though, you have already wandered off down the hall; your faltering silhouette disappears into your empty kitchen.

He could leave you be. He could, if he chose to, let you recover in solitude. He considers it as he unbuckles the straps of his cumbersome vest, pulls it over his head and dumps it on the tiles. As he unstraps the velcro bands of his gloves, plucking them off by his fingers and leaving them on the console table. Maybe you want nothing more than to be alone, than to curl up and hide from everyone who has assailed you. Himself included.

What happened the last several times he left you by yourself, unguarded?

He isn’t ignorant of his selfishness when he chooses to follow you.

He hears you pacing before he passes through the open door, hears your frenetic panting echoing from where you bite your nails by the island counter in the centre of the kitchen.

You catch his eye and freeze in place.

Before he can utter a word, you cock back your bottle of gin behind your head, clutching it by its neck. You catapult it at him without warning - it whistles as it barrels through the air, before it explodes against the top jamb of the doorway in an ear-splitting crash . He holds up a defensive arm and turns his head away, to protect himself from the shards of blue that spray out from the collision and the spiced liquor that rains down on him with it.

He stills, utterly agog - you only glare at him, the dim downward light above you illuminates the bulging mania in your eyes. You radiate a fury that he never imagined you capable of, and he can feel the shuddering heat of it from where he stands.

“You fucked us!” You roar, so ferociously that your once soft voice breaks in the strain. He can see it thundering in your temples, twitching in the tendons of your neck, red on your chest - a rage so harrowing it makes your eyes wet.

“Did you hear me?” You shout. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

There’s nothing he can say, and nothing he wants to. He feels no compulsion to calm you down.

You storm towards him with heavy feet - plant both palms into his chest, and shove him backward with all of your might. He stumbles back a step, he offers you that, but he stands his ground.

“You - you promised!” You wail, your broken expression shifting from wrath to heartache and back again. “You told me I could go home if I could get what you needed. You told me I could go home, and now you’ve fucking taken it away again. For fuck’s sake, you hit him! He knows, he knows , I have no chance, no chances left. You told him everything he needed to know and you didn’t even say anything!”

It is clear to him that his lack of reaction is only engorging your anger, but he doesn’t want to dampen it.

He can’t bring himself to take it from you.

“Are you fucking stupid? Are you? You - you - you’ve fucking killed us both! You gave away everything. You gave it away. You gave me up! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

In the midst of your tirade he watches your arm wind up, and you swing it with a force, open palm smacking into the side of his face - hard enough to knock his head to the side, vicious enough to sting even through the knit of his mask.

Your violence is almost a relief, to him - he cannot justify it. Have you ever, ever been given the chance? The space? The opportunity to erupt as viciously as you do now, without the dire retaliation that would inevitably follow?

How many years worth of torment, hatred, agony, wrath have been packed so deep into you that they’ve been embedded into the very fibers of your being? How many years have you been forced to withstand the ever-building pressure, bursting at the seams with it?

“You’re as pig-headed as the fucking rest of them. It was all your idea and now you’ve ruined it! I - I told you. I told you what fucking animals they were and you dragged me here anyway - now what? Are you going to punch every single one of them?”

In your fury you reach upwards and take the forehead of his mask in a tight fist - tearing it off his head in a single pull before savagely throwing it across the room. He remains stone-faced, he keeps his lips sealed, his hands by his side. He watches your every movement with heavy eyes.

Your fiery glare scratches about his face now that you have forcibly exposed it, and after a blink, you truly succumb to your apoplexy. You slam your fists into his chest, another attempt to shove him, and he gives way to you with a step back.

“You never think , are you even capable of forming a fucking thought? No, you just attack whoever or whatever gets in your way - anything you don’t like - just maul everything like you’re a fucking dog. You’re dogs. You’re all dogs!”

Another shove, more flailing hands, he cedes to you under every attack. You force him backwards until his back hits the wall behind him, and you berate him still.

“You - they - everything you fucking touch, why does it always hurt? You just can’t fucking stop yourselves from biting, can you? Always scratching and grabbing and fucking hitting and breaking - never once, not once - do you ever think it might hurt? Always so hungry for more, and more, do you ever think I might be fucking hungry, too? God - that I don’t want to scratch you and grab you and hit you and break you? No - you - you all just fucking laugh when I tell you to stop or to shut the fuck up, for once . It’s always so funny to you, to think that I might want to fucking maim as badly as you do.”

Is he still the one you are referring to?

Does the pith of your rage lie beyond him? Is he merely the receptacle of it? The catalyst?

In the blast radius of your onslaught, he finds himself rapt.

The rest of the room, of the mission, of the country, of the world beyond it - it all dissolves into fog. You, an ember, the only thing lambent enough to see. Speechless, because you have finally burned away any image of you he had cloaked, smothered you with since he found you.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” You thunder, though your rage has begun to barely cool into indignant exasperation. “Fucking say something!”

Is it your real self, now? Unfettered, unaltered, raw? Has it always been?

“What do you want me to say,” he murmurs hoarsely, head tilted down to meet your eye.

Out of breath, you let out an incensed groan, wiping down your face with red hands. “I want - I-”

Your brows knit in frustration as you seem to hunt for the words, reluctant to let them out - you chew on the inside of your lip, glaring at him, eyes forlorn despite the anger you radiate.

“I want you to tell me everything will be okay.”

You grow humiliated in the silence he leaves after your answer.

Your eruption has left you ragged, shaking with the tsunami of adrenaline that flooded you from your neck to your feet, that poured your soul out through your teeth.

Once it began, there was no swallowing it. The wrath in your bones controlled every movement, the spite in your tongue, every word. It drips from you, still, in the quiet - you can almost hear it landing on the floor, soaking into the slate.

You weren’t sure who you aimed to hurl it at. Who you envisioned as the target of your bombardment. You fired at the skullhead who kidnapped you, at the American soldier who stripped and tortured you, at your genocidal husband, at the ophidian cunts at your dinner table, at the apotheosis of your fear, the wolf who goaded them into defiling you. At your father, at your secondary school teacher, at your johns and your bookers.

Even at the man under the mask, who has only existed to you in moments of his humanity - Simon, whose face is only unveiled when he deigns to be compassionate.

You didn’t expect his apathy. You climbed to the peak of your rage and girded yourself for his retaliation, anticipating that he would reflect your abuse back to you tenfold, your outburst quashed. Instead, he absorbed it like a scream into a pillow. Siphoned all the anger out of you and let it pool at his feet.

His face is bare, now, and expressionless - yet, laden with infinitely more to say than you have so far seen in it. His lids hang low over his amber eyes, and they do not leave you. Do you see apologies in them? Pity? Familiarity? They flay you with their candour, and you cannot break away from them.

“God - even if it’s a lie,” you grimace, resenting every second of silence he forces you to fill. “Just say it.”

His lips remain shut, but barely held closed. You follow the pink scar that splits them up his cheek, where it stops at the bone. You look at the shallow crow’s feet that spider out from the corners of his burdened eyes, more likely from a life of squinting through scopes than a life of laughter. At the concentration of freckles on the bridge of his nose, and under his eyes - the parts of his face most often exposed to the sun, the rest hidden under his skull-faced identity. At the bend in his nose, fragile bones within it once broken, maybe twice, and never truly healed.

The armour of fury sloughs off from you, in pieces, as you wait for him to speak. To say what you want him to say. To do what you asked. Is he staying silent as retribution for your tirade? Or is it too much of a lie to even utter?

“Just say it,” you exhale, resigned, as you keel forward.

You don’t spare a moment to second guess yourself, to think better - as you lean into him, and drop your forehead to his sternum. You rest your weight in him. You need the solace of human warmth, too weary to stand on your own. You hope he’ll hold you upright, at least, for a moment.

His heart beats directly into your skull. The fleece of his jersey is soft on your skin, the thick padding of his chest so gentle, so cushiony to sink into.

You anticipated more rigidity, that he’d turn to stone upon your touch - but, instead, a warm and wide hand settles at the back of your head, and your eyes flutter shut.

You rise and fall with his ribs as he draws deep a breath, you feel him sigh, as he rocks his head back against the wall he leans on. You can feel it in his touch, hear it in his breathing; he doesn’t know what to do with you. The whiplash of your outburst has confounded yourself more than it possibly could him.

“It’ll be okay,” he grumbles, the words barely make it past the gravel in his throat.

The vibration of his voice reverberates directly into your head, makes your mind buzz, and you turn your head to press your ear to his chest.

Whatever line you have crossed - torn through - is long behind you, now. Whatever rationality you had left has long since crumbled through your fingers. You untuck your hands from beneath you, slide them up his chest - you slither your arms over his shoulders, around his neck, and you stand on your toes to reach.

His reaction is delayed, almost hesitant - you can hear, feel the arguments he wages with himself. But you feel his breathing in your hair, warm and hazy, and his thick arm hooks reverently around your waist, forearm nestling in the small of your back.

“Are you lying?” You breathe, your nose brushing the skin at the crook of his shoulder, where the collar of his fleece meets the zipper.

Your fingers drag up the back of his neck, the skin there burning hot; you brush through the buzzed-short hair at the base of his skull, and your other hand grabs at the back of his jersey. There are no justifications for your actions; merely the machinations of a disillusioned machine, aching for some unfindable comfort. Maybe you’ll find it in him.

He bends downward to meet you, and you needn’t stand on your toes anymore - both of his mammoth arms wrap around you in earnest. His broad hand glides up the nape of your neck, fingers weaving with the hair that remains in a collapsing bun at the back of your head. He doesn’t yet pull you in very tightly, though - as if fighting to allow you room to escape, convinced you’ll change your mind and break free at a hair trigger.

His lips graze the shell of your ear, feather down the side of your neck, and your stomach drops.

“Don’t know,” he murmurs into the skin of your shoulder, gooseflesh prickling out from where his mouth ghosts over your skin.

His arms tighten, only just; the button of his trousers scrapes against your belly as you weld yourself to him. You snake a hand down his torso, fingertips traversing the hills and troughs of his pectorals, catching in the small folds of fleece, scratching the length of his zipper.

Once you reach his stomach, though, he is quick to cuff you by the wrist with a firm hand.

“Don’t do that,” he huffs, his lips retreating from where they almost found purchase in your skin, but didn’t commit to taste.

Disappointment deflates your fervour, and you cannot take it. You feel compelled to explain yourself, but any desperate excuse you can muster is too pathetic to utter aloud.

You want it. You need it - just once, the embrace of somebody who doesn’t get off on hurting you. Who doesn’t hate you, who doesn’t leave the bruises of his hatred behind when he is done with you. You can’t even rightly claim that the man you now cling to won’t do the same, but your longing belief that he won’t is enough to spur you into craving him.

Perhaps he thinks it’s immoral, to touch, to feel, to taste his prisoner of war. Is that really where he’d draw the line?

“I want to,” you insist; it emerges as a trembling whisper, scarcely a breath, and you bunch the thick fleece of his jersey in your fists.

He lets out a hounded breath, pent up within his ribs, and his grip on your wrist only grows tighter. He reels his head upward, his stubbled chin grazes your cheek before he widens the gap between his face and yours and leans his back against the wall.

“What,” he grunts, tone tender yet goading. “What do you want.”

Is he really going to make you say it?

Do you even have an answer?

You don’t know what you want from him, not in any way that you can adequately explain. Asking him to fuck you would be too crude to articulate what you truly, deeply crave. You don’t want him to bend you over, you don’t want him to simply fill you up and leave you empty. No, you want him surrounding you, against you, inside you - you want the sensation of soft skin, of praising hands, of indulging mouths. You want to be corporeal again, a tender human and not an animal, a woman and not a spayed bitch. You want to be adored, not consumed. Needed more than wanted.

The thought of speaking any of it aloud forces you to reckon with the unadulterated lunacy of what you are doing, of what you want to do. Clawing for the man, the soldier, the war criminal, that abducted you and slaughtered your husband.

But, in your thirst, you mould your reservations like soft clay.

Maybe the man he executed wasn’t your beloved husband, but a manipulative, perfidious sociopath, who kept you around as a pedigree showpiece and a hole to fuck. Maybe you were more pleased at the sight of the corpse than you had let yourself believe.

Maybe your abduction was in fact a rescue, offering you the only breath of freedom or hope of escape you had ever been granted. Maybe the mission of espionage he forcehanded you into was not purely a death sentence, but an opportunity to do something that actually matters, for once, to make right the horrors you had been blindly complicit in.

You aren’t certain how much you believe any of your excuses, but, the longer you hold your tongue, the louder they ring true.

Your eyes fix to the thrumming of his arteries under his tense jaw, the movement of his adam’s apple as he swallows. The satin sheen of sweat on his skin, despite the cold air of the empty kitchen.

Your misgivings spill like milk, and you take a sip of air.

“I just-” You hesitate, quiet words knotting your tongue. “I just want to feel good.”

He stills for a beat, before the hand he had shackled around your wrist loosens - he grazes it up the length of your arm, settling into the crook of your neck, his thumb brushing the underside of your jaw. His dusky eyes inspect you down the bridge of his nose.

“Y’want me to make you feel good?” He murmurs richly, voice low.

The surge in your chest turns your blood thick, and hot; you feel it flood into the apples your cheeks, into the tips of your fingers, into the crux of the pulsing bead between your legs.

Your lips barely part, your heavy eyes flicker about his face, your fists open flat on his stomach. You can’t bring yourself to meet his eye when you nod, barely moving your head, too diffident to bravely admit it.

He wedges the tip of his thumb under your jaw, and hinges your head backward, insisting you look at him. A warm shiver trickles down your spine as he cranes his head, his breathing tickles your lips.

“Say it.”

He’s tormenting you. Your tongue is too fevered to form the words for you, it takes a tremulous breath to gather them.

“I want you t-”

Your confession is cut short, when he closes the narrow distance and presses his open lips into yours, too impatient to await the full sentence. It sucks the air from your lungs, but it doesn’t startle you - no, you sink into him the instant you taste him, opening your mouth to him with an ardour you have never been so consumed by. He clutches your head with both hands and almost lifts you by it as he kisses you, thick fingers weaving into your hair, rooting keenly in your scalp.

His tongue tastes of cinnamon chewing gum and the smoke of your Benson and Hedges, decidedly softer than you would have expected, when you lave yours against his in your mouth. Your eager claws climb over the sides of his torso, digging into his back - pulling yourself as deeply into him as your bodies allow it, you want his warmth so firm against you that you might absorb it from him.

His lips drag from yours to plant wetly on your cheek, trailing to gnaw at the underside of your jaw, to taste your jugular with an open mouth - his teeth graze the tendons of your neck, but he doesn’t bite. Only lavishes your skin with a fervour that leaves you flustered and short of breath.

You offer him no such tenderness - you mouth at the skin behind his ear, taste the salt of his sweat on your tongue, teeth burrowing into the fleshy muscles of his neck like you might take a bite out of him. Your avaricious fingers scratch up the back of his scalp, combing through his cropped hair, burrowing your nails into his skull as you clutch him so covetously.

His right hand runs downward from your shoulder, sweeping the hollow of your waist, over your hip and down the side of your thigh. With his fingers he rakes the heavy silk of your dress up, up, up, and deftly gathers the fabric in a fist at your hip.

You gasp as he grapples you by the thighs with both hands and hoists you smoothly upward, parting your legs so that they wrap around his hips. He carries you three fluid steps forward, before planting you on the edge of the marble island counter in the centre of the kitchen. The countertop is biting cold against the bare skin under your skirt, and he wedges your legs open with his torso. In your impatience you clutch his head by the jaw with two eager hands, dragging him downward to kiss you again, teeth clacking together ungracefully in your ferocity.

You feel his thick fingers slither up your thighs, to your hips - they hook into the waistband of your underwear, and your heart jumps to your throat. He plucks them downward, lifting you just slightly to pull them over the swell of your ass, shimmying them down your thighs with an urgency that dizzies you.

He pulls away from your mouth with a ragged breath, and your hungry hands lose grip of him - he shifts back to drag your panties to your knees, and he sinks downward as he pulls them to your ankles, off your feet. You don’t see where he drops them, and he doesn’t come back up.

No, he remains on his knees beneath you. Doesn’t even take a breath before he plunges between your legs, doesn’t spare a second to admire your cunt for his own satisfaction, doesn’t waste a moment teasing you, nor preparing you - he parts your shamefully sodden lips with an overindulgent tongue, laving from your fluttering opening to your puffy clitoris in a single taste. You choke on air in the shock, flurried and light-headed, catching yourself from buckling over with hands atop his head.

He eats you like a hound, messy and greedy, sucking your clit between his teeth and then releasing it with a smear of a flat tongue. The noises you make are embarrassing, unfamiliar - you have only ever performed them, sweet and delicate moans, music tailored to the man pretending to please you. Instead you choke, squeak, whimper like you are drowning in rapture as thick as honey, and the sounds spring from your throat despite your efforts to contain them.

He rivets you to the counter with two expansive hands, fingertips bore into the pillow of your hips, holding the skirt of your dress up and out of his way. His coarse stubble chafes against the inside of your thighs, you feel every movement of his jaw as it opens wide and clamps shut. Your talons rake through his hair, scratch into his scalp with nearly enough force to break the skin. Your clit burns hot under his ravening, tender and hypersensitive - you gasp for air with every graze of his tongue, bite out a whine with every suckle.

Neck growing weak, your head falls back from your shoulders; with it, you collapse backward and land against the countertop, knocking over a stemmed wine glass that shatters loudly and sprinkles glass over the marble and the floor. You do not notice it, back arching as though in a fit, spine contorting as you unwittingly buck your hips away from his mouth, but he follows you.

He keeps the impetus of your pleasure under his tongue despite your writhing, reminding you of his strength when you involuntarily try to evade him. He does not restrain you with brutality, though - his hands are simply demanding, guiding, and as your squirming eases they soften their grip. One loosens and glides along the outside of your thigh, languid and tender across your skin, settling at your knee and steadying its position hanging over his shoulder.

The knowing gentleness of his touch, the caution in the caress of his fingers, the overindulgence of his tongue - emulsify into a surge of liquid heat, unctuous and boiling. It floods scalding from the core of you, through the vessels and nerves of every extremity, pumping into the centre of your spoiled clit and setting it alight. You come in his mouth with a fervency that suffocates you, and you choke on a keening cry as he sucks more out of you - it charges through you in waves as you tumble over the edge of it, forcing you to jolt as though electrified, over, and over, until you finally plant a heel on his collarbone and push him off of you.

You whine as you exhale, no air left in your lungs, as his mouth finally peels from your cunt. You take a moment to recover, back flat against the cold stone, eyes fluttering shut as the aftershock of your orgasm keeps you twitching.

His rabid breathing echoes yours in the silence of the room, and you tilt up your head to look at him down the length of your nose. His murky stare catches yours over your mound; his eyes stygian in the shadows as he glowers at you from under his brow, reflecting a faint glint of light in their centre. His mouth hangs open, your liquid and his soaking his lips and dripping from his chin.

He pants like a dog.

You’re still hungry.

The taste of you lingers in his mouth, and he refuses to swallow.

He savours it for as long as he can, letting your heady syrup soak into his tongue, he wants it imbibed by every taste bud. Your sweet breathing is music, spent whines almost as euphonious as the sounds of your orgasm, velvet in his ears - he relives the feeling of your needy clit spasming against his tongue, how eagerly it twitched when he persisted in spoiling it, and resists the urge to take it in his mouth again.

Your lethargic eyes cling to him, blinking slowly, lips wet.

Did that feel good, little thing?

Did he surfeit you?

Was he soft enough?

He tried to be. Christ, he tried - he exerted every ounce of his strength to subdue the savagery that roiled within him, that threatened to forcibly breach the cage he muzzled it with. It doesn’t come naturally to him, touching without forcing, lavishing without teeth. It goes against every fibre of his being, in fact - he is a carnivore by nature, he hunts and he snares and he chews, he overpowers with strength and fear, he controls with the threat of his aggression.

He had never practiced restraint until he met you.

It was far easier, when you kept your distance, when you avoided his eyes, when you resisted his touch.

Now, you run your fingernails through his hair. You wrap your thighs around his neck. You blink at him winsomely, supplicating, awaiting his next move. Unaware or uncaring of the predator you tempt so pointedly, how much effort he employs to tame it in your presence.

The animal in him has its own hunger - starved, in fact - its stare flicks to your cunt, inches from him, shuddering under the heat of his breathing. Pink and pillowy after his avaricious praise, glistening with its stickiness; your nectar seeps in a rivulet from your slit, clear and glossy. His cock is heavy, only growing heavier, thrumming rich with the blood you fill it with.

He does not deserve it.

He catches your eye again, as you push yourself upward to sit straight, and he forces himself to stand. His nose brushes up your silk-cladded stomach as he rises from his knees, and once he stands tall, his face is a hair’s breadth from yours.

Your cheeks are rosy, shiny with the glow of the paroxysm he ate out of you. Lips bitten red, shimmery with your saliva, part gently to breathe. Hair mussed, askew, falling out of the updo you had pulled it into, pieces of it cascade in waves and frame your face.

Fuck, you’re beautiful.

He could say it aloud, but he doesn’t. Is that what you want to hear? Does it even matter to you?

Your gaze lingers on his lips, he watches your eyelashes as they flutter. You shift forward to press your mouth to his, lips barely open; you are reserved, shy about it, as if kissing him now is a crossing of a boundary, as if he could ever mount any boundaries against you. You need only blink at him and they crumble.

Can you taste yourself in his mouth?

Does it make you as ravenous as it does him?

He feels your fingers on his stomach, scratching at the fleece - and like you tried to before, you trail them downward, past his navel, catching in the stiff waistband of his trousers. He lets out a grunt, a sigh, as he looks down to see your diffident fingers hook the button of his fly, pushing it through the eye with a dull pop. You move slowly, cautious about it, as if he can’t see, can’t feel where you venture. As though he might catch you in the act of your transgression, and you’d be in trouble.

Do you feel that you owe it to him? That he did it for a reward?

Tasting you was a reward in itself. One he could never have deserved, one he cannot yet fathom you deigned to grant him.

Maybe it’s habit, all you have come to know - sex as a transaction, a contract you need to fulfil. That if you don’t open your cunt or your mouth to repay the favour, they’ll be opened for you, whether you like it or not.

He can’t have that. He won’t let you offer yourself out of obligation, nor out of dread. Not with the knowledge of what he has done to you hanging heavy from his neck. Not with your wrathful words ringing poignantly in his skull. Because, you were right - he does scratch, and grab, and hit, and break, he spends every waking second hungry, and the compulsion to maim is written on, embedded in the flesh he consists of. His very being is anathema to you, and he should be.

He refuses you, again, taking both of your little wrists in one hand, shackling them together and tugging them away from him.

“Stop,” he grumbles, and you look up at him through your lashes.

He can’t decode you. Your expression reads to him as both nervous and discontented, embarrassed and yet frustrated.

Do you even know what you want?

With a pent breath you lower your head, pressing your forehead under his collarbone, and he feels your leg shift up his side. He hopes you have given up. That he has left you depleted of the lust that drove you to make the mistake of indulging him.

“Please.”

A whisper, so muted he thought for a moment that he had hallucinated it.

“What?” He presses, under breath, and you sink deeper into him, mouth against his jersey.

“Please,” you repeat, a whine, muffled by fleece.

Your supplication turns him to putty, and his cuffs slacken. He doesn’t believe you - or, just as likely, he doesn’t trust his own ears to be hearing what he thinks you have said. Your slippery hands escape him, and unbridled they return to their objective; fingers catch the zipper of his fly, you watch your work as you pull it down.

“Please,” you insist, unprompted, each utterance more desperate.

His cock grows as solid as iron; straining against the boxer briefs you release from behind his fly, twitching with every slight movement you make in its proximity. His war not to touch you is lost, and he ghosts a hand across your shoulder, up the back of your neck, combing into your hair as he presses his nose and mouth into the top of your head.

Do you know what you are pleading for?

Do you want him inside you?

Do you need the fullness he can give you?

He could oblige you, if that is what you truly want. He could sink his cock into you deep enough to make you dizzy. He could stuff you full enough to slake the turmoil-induced concupiscence that has possessed you.

But he won’t do that for you, little thing. Not unless you beg him to.

You pluck at the elastic waistband of his boxers, another unspoken appeal.

“Say it again,” he growls, into your hair, doing his level best not to dig his teeth into you.

With a quivering breath you tilt your head upward to face him, your lips brush lightly against his. The tips of your wary fingers brush the underside of his length through the fabric of his boxers, and he bites down on a grunt.

“Please.”

You whisper it into his mouth, and his scruples turn to smoke.

He dives downard, lips colliding with yours, kissing you with a resurgent zeal, his manacles broken and his conscience smothered - your little hands hold him by the cheeks, softer than he is worthy of, and your tongue strokes against his as though drinking your own juices from him.

He grants your pleas, tugging down the front of his boxers and releasing his burdensome cock with a grip around its curly base. Your needy legs hook him by the hip, and you tug him forward - the underside of his shaft grinds against your slit, soaking in the nectar that pools there, and you spill a yearning whimper into his mouth.

“Again,” he snarls, against your lips; he kneads the crux of your labia with the base of his head, frenulum rubbing against your swollen clitoris, and your brows curl with the whine he pushes out of you.

“Please,” you mewl, fingernails nearly puncturing his cheeks.

Fuck, you’re insatiable.

It liquefies him when you hurt him. When you bite. When you maim. His scalp still stings from where your claws had all but broken the skin, the side of his neck throbs where your bite marks sink deep. He wants you to wound him, he wants you to take it all out on the body that he offers you. He wants to bleed for you.

He drags the soft head of his steel cock down your slit, burrowing between the lips so slick he needn’t pause, needn’t prepare you by spitting on his hand and smearing it on you. He wedges his tip against your opening and it almost sucks him in with its voraciousness, but he halts there. His free hand finds your waist and clutches at its hollow, tugging you minutely closer, your ass perched precariously on the very edge of the counter. You look up again, with a little gasp, neediness etched in your stare.

“Again,” he urges, just to hear you beg for him.

“Please-”

You gag on your entreaty as he obliges you; he pushes his weight forward and sinks his cock into you, reaming open your taut yet eager pussy as he gradually burrows it deeper. He sees white as you stretch to fit him, and he lets out a broken grunt; the ridged and gooey walls of your cunt engulf him snugly, blindingly warm, you fit his cock like a glove.

With a breath caught in your throat, you squeak on it - he stills, only half-way deep, for your own good. He refuses to hurt you, even if you want him to. Your cunt clamps down on him as he pauses, muscles rolling up the length of him, and he wrenches shut his eyes; your hands rake from his cheeks to the collar of his fleece, and you reel him desperately closer.

“You’re not hurting me,” you breathe, lips under his ear, warm on his skin.

Can you read his mind?

Is he that transparent?

He wonders if you have been able to see through his veneer, peer under his mask since the moment you laid eyes on him. As if you can guess his thoughts, decrypt his every motive, predict every decision. As if you can decipher his feelings, better than he can, almost as well as you can manipulate them. He has always boasted his ability to conceal himself, has always considered his truest centre too deep to be retrieved, long gone - but you peel off every layer that coats him, every cover that obscures him, and you expose him without effort.

It might have made him defensive, cold, being unmasked so brazenly. But, it doesn’t. Not when you’re the one peering under the hood.

He smooths his hands up your thighs, lifting your skirt, finding purchase in the meat of your hips - he uses his grip to anchor you to the edge of the counter as he thrusts forward, plunging his cock so deep into you that you take him to the hilt.

He bites back a groan, as his blunt head nudges against the spongy pillow of your cervix, and your fingernails carve into his burning neck. He stays there for a beat, buried as deep as you can take him, swimming in the abundant honey that soaks him from base to tip.

He reels out of you, indulging his cock with the friction of your walls, gripping his shaft on its way out - before he drives back into you, ramming into the gummy plug of your womb and forcing a succulent cry from your throat. Your cunt swallows him like it was moulded to fit him, and he grits his teeth as he succumbs to rutting in earnest; drags his cock out of you and plummets in deep, relishing in the melody of every little squeak he fucks out of you.

With the arms over his back you yank at the fabric of his jersey, pulling it up from where it was tucked into his trousers, exposing his back to the cold of the air. He yields to your unspoken request without dispute, fleetingly separating from you to reach behind his back and shuck off the fleece and the t-shirt he wears under it in one go. He knows you like the sight, little thing.

You hook an arm around his neck with a frayed breath, and slither the other over his ribs, rooting your fingers in the muscles that wrap his scapula. He fucks into you after the transient reprieve, and you burrow your face into his bare chest. You kiss him there, tongue gliding over the scars of burns and gunshots like you can taste the blood that once spilled from them.

With another impetuous thrust your sanguinary fingernails carve through the meat of his back, as though you want to break the skin; you claw deeper, crueller with every rut, and your mewls grow wetter and sweeter.

He shifts his right hand to the top of your thigh, and he glides his thumb down the crease of your groin; he nestles the tip of it at the nexus of your pussy, still slick from his appetite, and he burnishes your clit in circles with the pace of his thrusts.

Can he get another one out of you, little thing?

It sounds like he can - your whines hitch in your throat with every upward swipe of his thumb, with every ram of his cock, and your legs coil tighter and tighter around his torso. He feels your cunt constrict around the length of him, resistance where there had been none, tightening and letting go in rhythm. He’d like to see your pretty face as he takes you over the edge, again, a sight that could never pall - but you are engaged in your own vices.

Your unquenchable mouth is busy - gnashes at his neck, his trapezius, his collarbone, leaving wet nibbles in your wake. You settle for a pectoral, and he feels your teeth grazing his febrile skin, over where the tattoos of his sleeve spread over his chest. Your heightened whimpers are muffled by his pelt, as he brings you closer, as he fucks you deeper - you hold your breath, clamp your thighs around his waist as you climb to the apex.

And when you come, when your pent breath escapes your chest in a ravished whine, your jaw finds purchase; you take the flesh of his muscle between your teeth and bite down as he stuffs you full, chewing on his meat like a carnivore, and he groans harshly through a clenched jaw.

Do you enjoy hurting him, little thing?

Or do you simply like the taste?

Perhaps it is both, because you only bite down harder as you roll down the other side of your climax; your nails lacerate deeper, your legs trap him tighter, and your pussy constringes around his cock with the aftershocks of your orgasm.

The pain you inflict in him is just as blinding, just as shattering as the euphoria engulfing the length of him - his cock rakes against your suckling walls, rooting into the pillow of your cervix, bathing in the flood of your liquor - he feels his stomach sink, his vision goes hazy, his cock engorges in waves from base to head.

“Fuck-” he bites out, wolfish in his grunting - you are either oblivious to or unperturbed by his looming climax, because you keep your ensnaring legs tight around his torso, your arms hooked rigidly around his neck, your canines in his shoulder.

He stifles a hoarse groan through gritting teeth, decisive hands seize you by the hips in an effort to unsheathe his cock from the depths of you. But your thighs only contract, grapple him closer; you drive his length back into you, and you squeak insatiably into his skin.

“Mia-” He grunts, voice ragged.

Your greedy hands slide to either side of his inflamed neck, and you finally unlatch your mouth from his skin - you hold your forehead to his, languid eyes fluttering across his face, he feels your breathing cool against his skin.

He’s too close - it wracks him, surges through him with a voltage that turns his vision sparkly and his cock as heavy as lead.

Do you want him to come inside you?

Do you need him beholden to you?

“Please,” you croak.

Fuck.

His orgasm rips through him and leaves him blind, floods out of him in a torrent that sucks the air from his lungs - his cock lurches in the snare of your cunt, spilling a spate of thick come against your cervix and pumping you so full that he feels the overflow drool down the base of his shaft. He groans into your mouth and you swallow it, your own spent whimpers echoing his, as his cock continues to spasm inside you.

The cold water rinses him once he takes a breath, and he lowers his head; he rests his open mouth against your shoulder, panting into your feverish skin. You listlessly run the soft tips of your fingers up his spine, as winded as he is, his head rises with your torso as you draw in a breath.

His mind is paradoxically empty and teeming - warring between shame and pride, between guilt and reverence.

He didn’t deserve it. He shouldn’t have obliged you.

He doesn’t regret it.

“Thank you,” you breathe, a torpid whine in the sigh that follows.

He presses a praising kiss into the crook of your shoulder.

“Don’t thank me.”

#call of duty fanfic #cod fanfic #simon riley x reader #ghost x reader #cod smut #cod mw2 #simon ghost riley x reader #ghost x female reader #ghost cod #bitterfruit fics #houndtooth

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torchwood-99 · 2 months ago

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Eowyn and Romance

Something I truly appreciate about Eowyn is that she, from the start, a romantic being, and (although not explicitly so) a sexual one, as in she obviously feels both romantic and sexual desires.

Often the rebellious female lead will chafe at the prospect of marriage, only to change her mind when the "right man" comes along. I tire of this narrative, not because I begrudge female characters who dislike the idea of romance and marriage and sees hem as the antithesis to freedom, but because I loathe the narrative of them "learning a lesson" and "mending their ways".

Marriage and romance, when both are unwanted, are a denial of freedom and autonomy, and in patriarchal societies where wife is subservient to husband, particularly so.

Eowyn however associates romantic love and marriage not to a lack of freedom, but an escape to it. And this makes sense when we consider the cage that Eowyn is kept in.

Eowyn already takes on the "domestic" burden of the wife, running her uncle's household and acting as his nurse. As his niece, his adopted daughter and his subject, Eowyn is in a position of utter subservience to him. Yet as his nurse, he is dependant upon her.

This does not balance out their relationship and result in some sort of equality, it means that Eowyn has to endure all the submission of being a dependant, without the relief from obligations or duties, and all the labours and responsibilities of being a provider, without any of the authority or power.

Although Eowyn is mistress of the hall, she is not mistress of her own hall. She is not a queen, and if Theodred, later Eomer, were to wed, her rank as leading lady would be supplanted.

As Theoden's nurse, she is also carrying the burden of being the family caretaker in the family, tending to Theoden's needs, and also stifling her own unhappiness before her family in order to fulfil her duty. Emotionally she is trapped, stuck by tending to the feelings of others, as much as she is physically.

All of this has resulted in Meduseld becoming a cage for Eowyn.

To be married would be to take her away from Meduseld. To be married would be to lift her from an estate she finds demeaning. To be married would be to be mistress of her own home.

And when we look at the men she is attracted to, and the qualities that attract her, we see how different the sort of love and relationship she hopes to have are to the one she has with Theoden.

Aragorn and Faramir are strong, and powerful in a way that Theoden has not been. Eowyn's sense of identity has been tied up in Theoden, so Theoden's infirmity and, by her understanding, his "shame" has become her own, helped along by Grima's manipulation. On a more practical level, Theoden's dependency on her is extremely limiting to her own freedom and opportunities.

Eowyn is immediately attracted to Aragorn because of his power, and Faramir's strength of a warrior is one of the first things she notices about him. To be joined in a union with them would be to be associated with their power. To be married to them would be to have a function and existence beyond that off dry nurse.

While Aragorn and Faramir are noted to be fierce warriors, they're gentle too, Faramir in particular is defined more by gentleness than he is warrior prowess. He is a warrior by necessity, a nurturer by nature. As the assigned caretaker of her family, to be married to someone who would take equal (if not outright greater) responsibility for both of their physical and emotional welfare is pivotal for Eowyn to gain her freedom.

Whereas marriage is often seen as the alternative to ambition, romance an alternative to fighting, when Eowyn offers her love to Aragorn, acceptance would not have taken the form of marriage, but of joining him on his ride to the Paths of the Dead. For Eowyn, to be a warrior is to be free, and her vision of life with Aragorn is that of two warriors, side by side. That is how she envisions marriage.

Although post war Eowyn turns towards healing as opposed to slaying, Faramir acknowledges Eowyn as a warrior, and celebrates her for her deeds and her valour. And while Eowyn no longer wishes to be a shieldmaiden, taking joy "only" in the songs of slaying (that "only" suggesting that she will still take joy in them, and will maintain a part of her shieldmaiden identity), the desire to heal, to grow things, is a wish shared with Faramir, and when they embark on that journey, it's one they do as equals.

Eowyn has been pigeonholed into the role of family caretaker, and her family sees her entirely through that lens. As a result, they not only fail to see her true desires and ambitions, they not only fail to acknowledge her as a warrior, but they also fail to fully appreciate that she needs care, emotional care, in turn.

It is Eowyn's duty to give care, not receive it. It is Eowyn's duty to facilitate their deeds, not achieve her own. It is Eowyn's duty to celebrate their feats, not be celebrated in turn.

And Eowyn performs this role, she allows them to maintain this view of herself by internalising her unhappiness, her frustration and despair, because she sees it as a her duty to do so.

She finally drops the performance in front of Aragorn, and reveals to him just how as despairing she is. Aragorn does not fail to see beyond Eowyn's mask, and in his speech in the Houses of Healing shows he acknowledges both her suffering and her courage, but he does not free her.

He instructs her to resume the performance, and to try to content herself with one more doing all the labours that no one remembers, the valour that goes without renown.

Faramir meets Eowyn, and he sees she is wounded, she is sorrowful, he sees she is proud, he sees she is beautiful, he sees she is a maiden, "young and sad".

When Faramir is falling in love with Eowyn, he notices she looks "queenly", suitable for one whose deeds have put her, in Aragorn's words, on an even standing with the queens of old.

When Faramir asks Eowyn to marry him, he tells her he does not pity her, because she is a "lady high and valiant" and has performed deeds that will not be forgotten.

When Eowyn says she wishes to become a healer, and love all things that grow, Faramir eagerly agrees, and says, if she wills it, they will go to Ithilien and grow a garden there, and all things will grow with joy in Eowyn's presence.

Faramir sees all aspects of Eowyn. Eowyn the sorrowful. Eowyn the beautiful. Eowyn the queen. Eowyn the valiant. Eowyn the legend. Eowyn the healer. Eowyn the gardener.

Faramir sees all these parts of Eowyn, and one is not diminished by the other. Her valour isn't compromised by her vulnerability. Her need for care isn't compromised by her ability to lead.

This is reciprocated on Eowyn's part. Beregond bemoans that people fail to appreciate Faramir's capabilities as a warrior, because he is b nature more of a scholar and a nurturer. Eowyn immediately notices Faramir's strength and his gentleness, she is able to see the multitudes in him that she wishes to have seen in her.

It is notable she meets Faramir at a time when both of them are injured. Faramir is in a place of vulnerability as Theoden was, but Faramir is under the care of the healers. Eowyn's company helps to heal him, he wishes her to walk with him because he thinks it will be a comfort to be with her, but the bulk of his care is shared out by trained healers, for whom treating the sick is a profession, a calling perhaps, but not a familial duty that defines every facet of their existence.

Eowyn does not choose to be with Faramir in the place of choosing freedom. She chooses Faramir because the love he offers, the understanding he offers, the capabilities he possesses, will free her, in a way that Eowyn has been desiring and longing for.

#LOTR #Lord of the Rings #Eowyn #Theoden #Aragorn #Faramir #Farawyn #meta

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peachetteprice · 8 months ago

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Call of Duty - Masterlist:

The Complete Masterlist of: peachetteprice.

Asks and submissions are open!

Feedback Policy

External Links | Ao3 | Wattpad: Peachette_Price

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Key

× NSFW content - ranging from sexually suggestive themes to explicit smut. This content is not to be interacted with by minors. I give you my partial trust to adhere to this, but I will regularly check the age of the blogs following me and block when necessary.

// This is an ongoing work.

< / > This work is unlikely to be completed now and/or in the future.

(REQ) This work is published as a request by a user.

TF141 Headcanons:

Driving Habits - How would the boys usually drive? What are their habits when in the hot seat?

Cheating Partners - POV: I let an anon down by not fulfilling their request and still posting it anyway. Ft. Phillip Graves. ×

Captain John Price:

42-Year-Old John Price - He isn't as sprightly as he used to be. ×

Eighth Date - John reveals to you about his profession, but you're much too taken by something else!

Speak Up, Love - Uh-oh. John's lost his voice. Wouldn't it be such a shame if someone teased him about it? ×

Stern Captain John Price - He really... really... becomes accustomed to the life of a cat owner despite his penchant for dogs. ×

How it Should Be - John's a hardened war veteran... but he still gets flustered every time you call him handsome. ×

A Deal of Cards - (REQ): How might Price deal with his gorgeous, talented partner: a spiritulist, working in the creative field with a rather earthly aesthetic? With love, of course.

What a Bargain - John is a man who loves bargains. That's it.

Jeweller!Price - Uh... John's a jeweller. That's it. Pretty straight-forward, innit. Pt. 2 ×

Accountant!Price - He's an accountant. You get it by now, right? ×

The Gloves are On - The gloves stay on, even when he's finger-fucking the ever-living daylights out of you. ×

Neuroscientist!Price - Price is a neuroscientist with a dark present. ×

Coworker!Price - don't get it twisted. This isn't 'accountant' Price. ×

Domestic!Price - He's just a little guy with fuzzy socks on.

Agent!Price - He's only ever been an Agent: what are you on about 'Captain'?

EmotionallyUnbalancedWriter!Price - He reminisces on a love lost.

The Uniform - John lets you have all the fun 'playing Lieutenant'. Don't worry, he knows his place, too. ×

CultLeader!Price - Oh, how we rejoiced!

(REQ) Neighbour!Price - John is your bird-watch loving neighbour!

Husband's Best Friend - John Price is your HBF.

Simon "Ghost" Riley:

Strangers in the Night - Simon has a waking nightmare; you're always there to provide comfort.

A Hand for Radio - You're not just on the team to dilly-dally, something that everyone, including Soap, finally needs to understand. ×

Some Days - (REQ): Simon and Reader have a spat. Reader feels invalidated and rightfully tells him so, because what a bitch, honestly.

Fisherman!Simon - it's Simon... but as a fisherman. I don't know what more you want from me.

Full-length works:

27 Hawthorn Court - Simon "Ghost" Riley finds himself in hot water after the Greater Manchester Police suspect him of murderering his family: his brother, his brother's wife, and their son. < / >

Kyle "Gaz" Garrick:

Could Have Been - Didn't you know, Gaz could have been a professional footballer?

One of Those Nights - It's your favourite thing about him, truly. ×

Born For It - Oh, but he's just so rich and handsome, whatever shall you do? ×

Morning Brew - Kyle likes his coffee like he likes his coffee, and his mornings, entirely unlike his coffee: full of lazy sex! ×

Backshots with Kyle? - The one thing he loves to do more than anything ×

Bar Meet - You meet Gaz in a bar. Even after the night is over, he isn't done. ×

Crawley - Kyle is your flatmate in a two-bed flat share. Things are predictable, right up until they aren't.

John "Soap" MacTavish:

The Ever-forgetful John "Soap" MacTavish - Poor bastard never remembers not to use the water when you're mid-shower!

A Dream to Build a Life On - It's tough to have almost everything you've ever wanted right at the tips of your fingers, but have one thing... just one thing... that seems entirely out of reach. ×

Days of Old - It's never easy to watch something drag the life out of a loved one's eyes. ×

The Highlands - A short drabble about Johnny coming back to Scotland every once in a while to re-live the simplicity of rural life. Ft. Part 2

Charity Dinner Ball - Soap relieves his OWN Charity Dinner Balls... pause... after being drawn to you the entire evening. ×

Needy Soap - I need him biblically, I fear. ×

Phillip Graves:

Full-length works:

Mister Commander - (DBF) Winnie Collins knows better than anyone that a homestead requires up-keep. When she returns home to Texas, following the dissolvement of her engagement to the man she thought she loved, there's a stranger on her parent's ranch, during the height of May heat, in a town where nothing but dirt and sweat remain. Phillip Graves. He's her father's best friend - and he's here to stay. × //

Ghost x Soap

Two Men in a Boat - A boat bobs along the ocean. Within, there are two men.

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littlerequiem · 2 months ago

Text

we mourned the sea ˚⁎⁺ chapter 3

> Crossposted on AO3

Levi hasn't seen you in a year, and he wonders how you will find him. Changed, perhaps. Lost, definitely. Or: After the war, you and Levi learn to live in this new world.

𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 - Levi Ackerman / Female Reader (Attack on Titan)

𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓 - Rated Explicit (18+). Post-Canon, Post-War, Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Domestic, Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Grumpy/Sunshine, Friends to Lovers, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Chronic Pain, Panic Attack, Depression, Ambulatory Wheelchair Use, Irregular eating habits mentioned specifically in this chapter (WC: 5.5k)

( Previous chapter / Next chapter / WMTS' Masterlist )

You spot him alone in the library. Months have passed and winter has made its presence known.

Levi is staring at the fire. When his eyes lock with yours, you think they lack their usual cutting edge. Instead, he just looks tired.

“You gonna gawk much longer?” he asks.

“Well…” Your grip on your book tightens; you stay rooted to your spot. “You don’t mind if I intrude?”

“This is a public space, isn’t it?”

It is, but it doesn’t mean you won’t ask.

Levi doesn’t leave when you sit on the sofa opposite him. The two of you stay like this, letting the crackling fire be your guiding light into the night.

It isn’t that Levi always preferred being alone, it’s just that it’s had a way of finding him.

Growing up, Levi remembers seeking affection—craving it, in fact—like a moth seeks a flame. Levi worshiped the ground his mother walked on, loved to listen to her speak, imitated her, anything to hear a “Well done, my Levi”. He imagines it made him a needy brat, that he was probably a burden to his mother.

When she died, he thinks that's when it happened. When he began to close in on himself, when he started to keep his emotions close to his heart.

Because emotions weren't safe. Emotions got you killed.

"My boy, what wonderful craftsmanship!" Mr Jakowski's joyful voice assault's Levi's ears, plugging him out of his wandering thoughts.

Levi looks up at the sight of his boss.

Mr Jakowski is leaning over Levi’s shoulder, spectacles shining under the dim amber light. A large grin creeps on his rosy face, a contrast to the blue paint smeared on his white shirt. "What are ya making, hm? Is that something—"

"—personal," Levi cuts him off instantly, shifting in his seat to conceal his work.

His boss lets out a loud bark, pulling back from Levi. “Hah, mysterious as always, our Levi!”

Levi has been working here, at Mare Lumber Co., for a little more than a year now. His boss, Adam Jakowski, is the sole carpenter in town.

Levi likes working here. Most days, he tends to the till, manages the inventory, and assists the Jakowski family with customer orders. All routine work, really, but it feels good to be working with his hands, with his mind. It strangely reminds him of Furlan, of the odd jobs him and Levi used to do in the Underground, before they established a reputation for themselves.

“And how are ya?” Mr Jakowski asks with a jovial tone.

Levi looks up as Mr Jakowski props his back against the edge of the counter, facing away from Levi.

“Fine,” Levi answers.

"Are ya sure? You seem distracted today, dear boy."

Mr Jakowski got in the habit of calling Levi ‘dear boy’ shortly after he took the job. At first, Levi told him off—sure, Mr Jakowski was older than Levi, but Levi was nearing his forties at this point. Levi was not a boy—never had been, perhaps.

And yet, he soon noticed something strange: every time he corrected the man, Mr Jakowski would correct himself, a distant glaze in his stare… only to make the same mistake the next day.

One day, his wife took Levi aside.

“You musn’t be cross with him, Levi,” Mrs Jakowski had said with a gentle voice. “My Adam and I… we lost our son ten years ago. Marleyans butchered him. And ‘dear boy’… that was Adam’s nickname for our son. Sometimes, I think… I think in his heart, my husband never quite got over it.”

After that, Levi never corrected Mr Jakowski again.

“Levi, are you listening to me?" Mr Jakowski laughs, pulling Levi straight back into the shop. To the smell of wood, saw dust, and paint. "You’ve got that glaze in your eyes of a dreamer, the way my daughter be sometimes. Ain't never seen it on ya 'fore.”

Levi clicks his tongue. “I think you need to clean your glasses, old man.”

“Is it that missy staying at your place that’s got you lookin' so—”

“No.”

“Sure 'bout that?”

At that, Levi stays silent. Of course, he’s sure.

And yet, Mr Jakowski's eyes glint knowingly all the same, as if catching wind of something Levi isn't aware of. It almost makes Levi want to speak up (though, to say what?), but before he has the opportunity to say a thing, the man leaves him be. Levi listens to his receding footsteps, to the tinkering noises soon coming from the workshop area of the store.

Levi reverts his attention onto the wooden figurine in his hands, casting it an altogether unimpressed look.

What he’s making… it’s fucking stupid, isn’t it?

For the last week and a half, Levi has been using his lunch breaks to work on it. Right now, this wooden creation is simply a great blob of nothing. And yet, Levi can’t stop from continuing it. It started with your arrival, this idea, when something spurred deep in him to create and he doesn't know if it will lead to anything.

Perhaps he's wasting his time, perhaps—

The bells on the door chimes. Levi's eyes swerve up.

And he promptly places the figure on his lap, concealed right under the counter.

Because you've just entered the shop, greeting him with a pleasant smile. “Afternoon, Levi!” The door closes, light pooling around you, dewy and delicate. "Are you on your lunch break?"

Levi lifts a brow but gives you a slow nod.

"Oh, good, I was scared I got your lunch time mixed up..." You lift a basket that was hidden behind your back, showing it off like it was some prized thing. “Ta-da!”

Levi just stares, not understanding what he's supposed to be seeing.

“I brought lunch.”

Oh, that's a first. You've never come all the way into town to visit his place of work, let alone have lunch with him. Is this because he accidentally let it slip that he sometimes skips lunch on his work days? You seemed particularly affronted last night; you'd washed the dishes grumbling something beneath your breath...

“Miss Adler, is that you?” As if on cue, Mr Jakowski appears to Levi's left side, safety glasses still lodged on his head. He lets out a full-belly laugh, scratching the back of his neck sheepishly. "I reckoned I heard that sweet voice of yours! It's good to see ya! I’ve been tellin' Levi to bring you around for some time now, but he surely been keepin' ya all to himself."

"Has he, now?" you muse. "That's not very polite of you, is it, Levi?"

Levi keeps his expression blank.

Mr Jakowski steps around the counter, interest laced in his voice. "Well, lookie here, is that lunch I spy? You know, Levi rarely eats much in here."

“I know, that’s why I’ve come. I'm on a mission to change that, sir. I've brought lunch and even my secret trump card… cake!”

“You sure know the way to a man's heart, Miss Adler!” You pinch your lips, seemingly flustered, but Mr Jakowski is already shifting his attention to Levi, something almost devious splitting in his boss' expression. Levi's gaze narrows instantly, suspicious of whatever is to come next. “Now, you heard the lady, dear boy. You wouldn't want to reject the hospitality of such a good-hearted gal, would ya?"

Levi considers Mr Jakowski's words. His offer sounds tempting enough, but Levi's already shirked his duties by working on his project. His lunch time is practically over.

His boss seems to read his mind. "Take an extra hour." Mr Jakowski walks over, squeezing Levi's shoulder—not painfully, but not lacking zest. The man leans closer, the smell of paint mingling into Levi's space once more. "Shop's quiet today, anyway—I'll handle it. And don't forget to hide that little secret of yours. Wouldn't want her to see your gift before it's finished, hm?"

Levi's eyes flicker from Mr Jakowski, then onto you. His shoulders rise... then fall again. He gives in with a sigh. Fine. You came all this way, after all, and Levi was never one to waste food.

“You're not running a charity, old man,” Levi tells Mr Jakowski. "I'll make up the time.”

“What are you reading?” you ask him one night. The two of you are at it again—sitting on different armchairs, reading in front of the fireplace. It's been a routine these last evenings.

“History books.”

You raise a questioning brow—that wasn't what you expected Levi to be interested in.

Levi seems to pick up on your question before you even voice it. “I want to understand why you upsiders do it.”

Upsiders, the term coined by those living in the Underground for those living above.

You tilt your head. “Why we do what?”

“What you live for.”

Levi feels like he’s about to outright melt.

The park at this time of the day seems to gather heat like a damn magnet. Sitting on a picnic blanket under a large willow tree isn’t enough to stop sweat from coating his neck—summer is in full swing, and even the yellowing grass blades around them seem to feel its effects.

Over the last minutes, you’ve been telling him all about your morning: how you went into town to continue your search for a new job.

“… I asked around for any shops looking for employees, but there's no vacancies." You sigh, one hand outstretched as you caress the grass blades with the tip of your fingers. "Still, one of the bakeries I went asking was nice about it; they even gave me a discount on this cake here. It’s a specialty from the Southern part of Marley, apparently.”

Levi squints, the eyelid on his bad eye trembling from the glare cast by the sun. Laid out between the two of you is nothing short of a small feast, what on Paradis would be fit for nobility: sandwiches, pie, fresh lemonade, and a takeaway box that contains what Levi can only guess is this infamous cake you're so excited to make him try.

Vegetables, cheese, sugar. Levi still isn’t used to having these ingredients in such abundance. Maybe he never will be.

"Hey, didn't I tell you to take it easy? You've barely arrived and you're already running around like a madwoman." Levi mutters, picking up a cheese sandwich. "Don't waste your free time and savings on crap like this.”

"You mean getting you lunch?"

Levi shrugs, scrunching his nose.

"Come on," you huff, "after my big freakout from last week, it's the least I could do."

"I told you, it was nothing—“

“But it wasn’t to me. I wanted to do this,” you cut in, weighing each word like it held its value in gold. Levi notices you reeling your hands into fists... only to be ushered out of existence as you shrug off the uncertainty. “Besides,” a bright smile brackets over your face, "all of this is keeping me busy. If I don’t keep busy, well... I've found that I just want to sleep all the time. At least, like this, I’m too occupied with thinking too much. Know what I mean?”

Levi thinks he does. It's why he always enjoyed cleaning so much, to some extent; it kept the edge off of things.

He isn’t sure what that says about either you or him.

"I'm glad I could see where you work," you continue absentmindedly. "The shop has a certain aura to it, doesn't it?"

"It's the smell of saw dust and paint. You get used to it."

"I meant there's warmth to the interior." You snort, rolling a particular grass strand between your index, tugging at it without ripping it out. "But I like the smell, too, now that you mention it. I've only dabbled in oil paintings here and there, but it reminds me of that. I imagine adding color to something—anything, really—for a living must be rewarding. You get to style furniture according to someone's wishes, make sure it's dear and personal to them. That's pretty amazing, right?"

If he were someone else, this might be the moment he might smile. Count on you to spin what some might consider mundane work and describe it as something magical. You've always had a knack for doing that.

"And that boss of yours sure seems eccentric," you muse as you lean back, the curve of your neck bending back, "bet he makes every day feel extra special.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

Your eyes drift up to the sparse clouds. “Special’s… good. Special’s fun.”

Levi's lips twitch. Yes, he supposes that's true. Many things can be said about Mr Jakowski, but boring is not one of them.

A gentle breeze soon picks up the front section of your hair; it makes the happiness on your face more noticeable, somehow more in the spotlight. For a moment, a delicate silence settles in, one filled with the sound of tree branches swaying above, its shadows moving across your face. Levi catches himself staring at you—again. It's not the first time today he's ogling you, he knows, but it's hard not to when there's nothing else to stare at. Before he knows it, he's watching as you draw your attention on the food options laid on the picnic blanket. Your eyes stop onto a particular plate.

Almost on instinct, Levi raises the plate towards you.

You grin, grabbing a slice of spinach pie. "Thanks."

As Levi retreats his hand back, placing the plate back on the picnic blanket, he notices you pausing. His eyes meet yours; your eyebrows knit together.

"Hey, what's that on your hand?" you ask.

Levi feels the heat of your attention as he glances down at his palm. Ah, the plaster. Levi forgot all about it. Earlier, while working on his project, Levi accidentally cut himself, leading to an outflow of blood which felt excessive. Like his body was being dramatic for no good damn reason.

Unsurprisingly, your reaction blows out of proportion, too. "Are you alright? Did you hurt yourself?"

You lean closer.

"S'fine." Levi grips his sandwich with both hands, trying to shield his bandaged hand so you don't reach for it (somehow, he thinks you will). He's not sure how to handle your care right now, so he turns away from you, pretending to be interested in a patch of yellowing grass blades nearby. "I patched it up."

“Still, you should disinfect it when we’re home…”

(Levi still isn’t used to that term of possession. We. Like it's his home, as much as much it's yours. Something shared.)

"I can make an ointment that'll speed up the healing process, perhaps, so you're not encumbered for very long,” you continue. Levi glances back at you. You're holding your chin thoughtfully. “I’ll need to go buy some tea tree oil for that. Maybe I should also stock up on ethanol and other essentials while I’m at it...”

The sight of you all pouty causes Levi to scoff. “Thought you weren’t a doctor no more?”

He takes the last bite of his cheese sandwich.

“For you, Levi, always.”

Levi chokes. He begins to cough, the half-eaten bread hammering at his chest.

Your hand is on his back just as soon as his coughing fit starts. "You okay?"

Levi nods with a blank expression, swatting your touch away. He stares at you from the corner of his eyes, disbelief lodged behind his gaze. Shit. Why do you have to say stuff like that? It's like you're trying to make his heart explode or some shit.

“Cutting yourself at work and almost choking to death.” You whistle lowly. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re losing your touch, Ackerman.”

“I choked because of you, smart-ass.”

“Because of me?” You blow air with your lips. “Why, what did I do?”

“You—“ Levi feels himself growing hot—too hot. Blast this damn heat. “Forget it.”

You lean back, looking at him curiously. “Is this the fate that awaits me in a few years when I reach your age? Choking and half-finished sentences?”

Levi’s eyes narrow. “Well, aren't you full of jokes today?”

“Thanks. I’m trying real hard, in case you couldn’t tell.” You bite back a full-teeth grin; Levi hates how adorable you look, even when you're teasing him—especially when you're teasing him. “Maybe that’s what I should pursue next, huh? Comedian… that'd be quite the career change.”

Levi shakes his head. “I’ll have to support you financially for the rest of your days.”

A burst of laughter rolls out of you.

It makes Levi feel queasier still.

“Hey," you say once your laughter has dimmed down. Your gaze holds his, bright and true. "What were you working on anyway, that you ended up cutting yourself?”

“Nothing.” Levi doesn’t supply you with more information, the memory of the unfinished figure flashing in his mind. It's trivial, the sort of work he's been doing, especially compared to what Mr Jakowski builds. “Just keeping busy.”

Because Levi’s life is just that now. He has to keep himself busy, to fill it with things so he doesn’t stop moving.

“Hey, Levi?” Levi looks back at you, and you shoot him a lopsided smile. “Do you ever think your past self would believe you’re out here now, carving wood for a living?”

Levi considers your question. He’s not the sort of person to wonder about these questions, but he’s not surprised that you still are.

The answer is simple. No, his past self wouldn’t believe it. His past self wouldn’t believe most of it.

He tells you as much, aching to change the subject. “Picked up a pencil yet?”

“Hm… not yet. Haven’t been feeling it, to be honest." There's something a little sad hanging on your face for the shortest moment, only to be replaced by wide eyes and parted lips. “But, oh, I promise, that doesn't mean I don't like your gift or anything. The supplies you bought—I'll make sure they don't go to waste! I just—”

"Hey, breathe," Levi interrupts, his eyes charged on you. "It's fine if you don't. There's no pressure.”

Your shoulders deflate. You give him a tired smile. “Thanks.”

In the distance, a school bell rings. The sound of children chattering soon follows.

“Anyway,” you say, reaching for the sealed container. “Enough of that. It's time for my favorite part of any meal: sweets. I’m eager to know your thoughts on this lemon tart.”

(The answer? Levi will discover he has a taste for lemon desserts.)

After that day, it becomes a routine of sorts. You show up some days to have lunch with Levi. On the grass under the willow in Mare, you and Levi watch the sea drift from afar, cake laid out between the two of you.

“Oi, what’s this?”

You look up from your notes on your desk. Levi has barged into your office, holding the silver tin you asked to be delivered to him.

"That's Valerian root,” you answer.

”Valerian root,” he repeats, eying you suspiciously. “Why?”

"Um... think of it as a gift, I guess?"

"Why? We’re not friends."

A grimace flashes on your face—ouch. So, Levi doesn't see you as a friend, even if you're starting to consider him as such, anyway.

"Well., I noticed you seem to have insomniac tendencies, so I...” You clear your throat, swatting a dismissive hand in the air. “If it makes it easier to accept it, think of it as a medical order. A decree by yours truly."

"A medical order," Levi repeats, unimpressed. "What does Valerian root do, anyway? "

"Valerian root is tea. Or well, not tea. It's an infusion. But you can brew it the same way and it helps... it helps to fall asleep."

When Levi comes home that night after work, the sun is setting low over the sea, a red dot over the horizon. There's a gentle breeze in the air, one that carries with it the smell of salt and sand from the beach just below the valley.

As soon as Levi is home, he slips into his usual patterns. He switches the corridor light on, the unnatural glare of electricity making him squint temporarily. He takes his shoes off, swapping them for the soft slippers Gabi and Falco once gifted him. He grabs his indoor cane by the entrance, just where he left it. Then, like a rite of passage, he makes his way to the common room, expecting to see you.

You're not there. Instead, the quaint room that serves as a kitchen, living room, and dining room is empty, while a distinct smell of herbs clings in the air.

Levi recognizes the scent immediately. It's the same fragrance that hung around the Survey Corps infirmary on any given day. Frankly speaking, Levi equates the smell with, well, you. It's been years since he smelled it.

Peppermint, chamomile, tea tree oil... there was always a particular mixture of herbs you favored to treat ailments. Funding within the Survey Corps was sparse, all the more within the medical wing, so you had to get creative: you created balms with what the Survey Corps could afford. The same herbs Levi now smells in the air.

And Levi suddenly gets a sense of...

Home.

It's corny, really, that all of a sudden, he feels more at home than the home he's inhabited in the year of living alone. But maybe that's the thing about getting older; there's just smells and sights and details that remind of the past, that open up memories long since forgotten.

In a way, Levi is grateful that those scents are what he associates with your infirmary, with your hands. Later, when his leg was wounded, and he became accustomed to the stomach-flipping stench of strong antiseptic solutions so prevalent in Marleyan hospital tents, the memory of you—of his fucked-up sense of home—remained untainted.

"Oh, fuck!"

A crash assaults his ears. Levi turns, only to find you half-bent down, picking up a pile of books from the ground. You straighten back up, looking flustered at the sight of him.

"Levi,” you huff, “y-you scared the living out of me!"

Your blaming tone isn't lost on him; he lets you collect your breath before he speaks up. "Then you should pay better attention, Adler." Levi shoots you an unimpressed look, brows drawn low. "If these were the streets back home, you'd be a dead woman by now."

His words cause you to roll your eyes at him, though a playful tug of a smile graces your lips not a second later. "This isn't the streets, 'Vi. There's no one out there to hurt me, least of all within the confines of this house."

Levi knows you make a point, but his nature has always been to be suspicious of everything, and that much hasn't changed here. He wishes you'd be a little more careful, at least for his sake.

"I suppose this was just my way to greet you home, hmm?" You move past him, gently placing your pile of books on the kitchen table. "Anyway, how was the rest of your day?"

"Same as always." The rest of his day was, in fact, just as Mr Jakowski had predicted. Quiet. "What's all of this, then? You starting a bookclub or something?"

"Not quite. I spent my afternoon at the public library. Have you been?" Levi shakes his head. "Walls, Levi, it's even bigger than the one we had back hom–I mean, back on Paradis." You pick up a random book, flip through it and show him a page that's all about flower propagation. "I'm gonna make sure your garden's perfect."

Ah. Your garden project. A fixation of yours this last week, this ambition to fill the space around the house with flowers of all kinds.

Levi doesn't know why you're so pressed on it. Sure, he's got the space for it but Levi thinks that if he had to commit to a crop, it would be some kind of vegetable. Or tea. Flowers, on the other hand, just seem to take up place.

"Hey Levi, are you listening to me?"

(He hasn't.)

"Yeah, I'm listenin'."

"That so?" you say, tone all defiant, brows drawn high like he was some puzzle to be solved. "What was I talking about then?"

Levi crosses his arms over his chest, face impassive as he stares back at you. "Some crap about flowers."

"Not precise enough, mister." You snort and shake your head, placing the book back on the table. "If you must know, I was asking you if I could get your opinion on where to plant what in your garden. You've got the next two days off, right? Spare a moment of your time, pretty please?"

Levi doesn't work Saturdays and Sundays. The weekend, as Marleyans call it, is for rest.

"Fine," he concedes, "I'll help."

With that decision out of the way, Levi leaves you to it. He stops in his bedroom to grab a clean change of clothes and then heads to the bathroom you and him share.

The bathroom is tiny, boasting only the bare necessities—a shower bath, a toilet, a sink—but it is more lavish than what most people could afford on Paradis. It certainly is more than enough for Levi and his needs.

As he turns on the faucet of the shower and water cascades down his back, Levi moves the bar of soap across every body part. He rubs at every part of his skin until is flushed and pink. He massages his scalp and hair until it is lathered and thick, going as far as using the soapy solution beneath his nails. By then, the scent of lemon soap is everywhere, and Levi rinses it all off with blissful satisfaction. As he does, he feels every muscle, every sore spot in his body, come undone, one limb after another.

The feeling of showering with endless warm water is one of those feelings Levi considers to be unmatched; if there is one Marleyan luxury Levi has grown greedy for, this might be it.

Still, even here, even now, Levi is conscious not to waste too much water.

And so, as soon as he's done cleansing himself, Levi steps out and towels himself dry, ignoring the goosebumps darting across his skin. He moves towards the sink, laying out his shaving kit carefully. Then, using the back of his hand, Levi wipes the fog off the mirror.

The sight of his reflection—of his half-working gaze—makes him pause. Amidst the steam, he almost doesn't recognize himself.

For the first time in a long while, Levi steps closer to look at himself—to really look at himself. Not just to shave, but to inspect details that somehow had slipped past him over the last months.

Since his retirement from the Scouts, time has caught up to Levi, in more ways than one. His hair has gotten longer, yes, but it's the strands of silver now framing his face that Levi lingers on. There are wrinkles on the sides of his eyes, on his forehead, on his smile lines. When did they get so deep? Levi doesn't remember the day he first noticed them, just that they've been there for a while. He's even accrued a collection of tiny freckles speckled on the ridge of his nose; somehow, Levi thinks the warmer weather in Marley is responsible for that.

In some strange ways, Levi thinks that with every day that passes, he's starting to resemble Kenny, minus the facial hair. That son-of-a-bitch got his way with him after all, it seems, and despite this, Levi suspects Kenny would still call him a runt if he were here standing next to him right now.

"Still can't grow facial hair, huh, kid?" Kenny would say, "and you're still just as short."

Yeah, that sounds like Kenny alright.

Knock, knock.

A sudden rasping sound comes from his right, pulling him back to the lemon-scented room. Moisture clings to the corner of his eyes, lumps over the thick of his eyelashes. Levi turns towards the door, blinking it all away.

“Hey, Vi'?" comes your gentle voice. "I forgot to give you the balm I made for your cut. Do you want me to bring it now?"

"No," he mutters all-too-quickly, swallowing down the knot he didn't realize had formed in his throat. " Too humid in here. Just... gimme a moment. I'll be right there."

Levi pushes his imagined thoughts to the back of his mind. He turns to practical matters, instead: he shaves his face with meticulous care; he massages his leg; he slips into something comfortable for the night.

By the time Levi steps into the common room, he finds you sitting on the sofa, flipping through one of your books while stroking Scout. It seems you've already started the preparations for dinner; there's simmering onion soup that's replaced the smell of herbs over the stove.

This time, upon hearing him approach, both you and Scout look up, almost synchronically. It makes Levi's heart a little warm—why does it feel so strange to have an audience waiting for him?

Before Levi can contemplate on this very question, you've swung to your feet. "Here, sit down; I’ll get the balm."

Levi does as he's told, taking a seat on the free spot—on the other side of the sofa, next to Scout. His peripheral catches you first washing your hands over the kitchen sink, then retrieving something from the ice-box.

As you do, a meowing sound comes from his other side. Levi glances down at Scout, who's made her presence known. Levi doesn't need to guess what she wants; by now, they've got a routine going. And so, like clockwork, Levi lifts his unwounded hand towards her, scratching the spot just under her chin.

Soon enough, the kitten's purr vibrates against his fingertips.

"She missed you today," he hears you comment in passing. You're moved on his other side, bending down and looking at his palm laid flat on the arm of the sofa. "May I?"

Without saying a word, Levi nods.

Carefully, you take his hand into your own, flipping it to remove the old, soaked bandage and analyze the cut. Levi scrunches his nose as soon as he spots the result of his clumsy mistake.

The wound runs across the tender flesh of his palm, ending with his index. It's not a deep cut by any stretch of the imagination, but it is on his five-fingered hand. Just his luck.

“Did you know that Scout sometimes goes into your bedroom, meowing into the void?" you comment, eyes still trained on the wound. "It's like she's looking for your ghost or something.”

"That cat does strange things."

"She's just attached to you." You shrug absentmindedly, eyes flickering onto him briefly, only to move away not a moment later. "Anyway, I hope she grows used to me being here, too. For now, she still refuses to enter my room when it's just the two of us, but I think we may bridge that gap soon." Your voice turns into a coarse whisper, leaning closer to Levi like Scout might somehow overhear—and understand you. "I may or may not have bribed her with some leftover tuna."

Levi clicks his tongue. "You mean you’re spoiling her."

"Hey, all's fair in love and war." A knowing smile tugs at your lip, delicate like the first bloom of spring. "Besides, there are worse things for a cat to be."

After that, you focus on tending to Levi's wound—disinfecting it, adding a layer of balm over it, wrapping a clean bandage by the careful press of your hands. It brings Levi back to the old days, when he'd watch you either tend to him or his comrades. There was always this intensity, this non-bullshit attitude, that would always wash over you at any given time. It made Levi aware just how seriously you took your job, how dedicated you were to your craft.

Now, as Levi watches you at it again, there is something else, too. Something changed about him. Something that speaks volumes of just how touch-starved he's become, surely, how lonely this past year has been on him. He tries to ignore the warmth that blooms under your touch, tries not to think about how long it’s been since anyone that wasn’t his doctor touched him like this.

He fails; before long, he feels his heartbeat quickening, his belly constricting in a series of painful knots.

It might be why, when at last you seem satisfied with your work and rise to your feet, Levi finds himself doing the same. He stands, moving with no objective in sight, the scent of herbs beckoning him closer.

As he does, he ends in your personal space, shoulder almost grazing yours.

He freezes.

Fuck... what the hell is he doing?

You seem just as surprised to find him in your space. Levi watches as your lips subtly part, the smallest shift in your expression that narrows into your eyes widening. He listens to your breath catch; it makes the tip of his fingers tingle.

"Um... Levi?"

Levi blinks, panic swelling in his chest. But before he can say a thing, a sudden "mrrrp" vibrates below. What happens next is a blur: Scout has somehow jumped off the sofa, intertwining herself between you and him, and the sudden feeling of fur on your bare legs must have taken you by surprise.

Because the next moment, the back of your calves bump against the edge of the sofa, causing you to almost tripping back.

Luckily, if there's one thing that hasn't changed, it's Levi's instincts. He instantly latches onto your elbow, steadying you and drawing you closer, your warmth blooming beneath his grasp.

“Walls,” your voice vibrates against the shell of his ear, breathless. "... Thanks."

You straighten and take a subtle shift back. Levi lets go and moves further away. At his sides, he flexes his hand, trying to rid himself of the tickling sensation lingering where he held onto you. He looks at anywhere but you.

Instead, Levi focuses on Scout. The kitten has skittered away, hiding in between the dining chairs, just behind the sofa. Levi exhales harshly as he stares at her. "Tch, have a care, you damn cat. We're practically titan-sized to you; don’t creep around like that or you'll get trampled on."

Thankfully for Levi and his sudden series of unfortunate slip-ups, the rest of the evening is spent in the calmness of routine. Like every other evening since you moved in, you and Levi share a meal (onion soup and leftovers from lunch). Seated at the dining table, facing the window with a viewpoint on the sea, you share tidbits of information you've learned about the village and its inhabitants, while Levi comments here and there. You discuss Gabi and Falco’s upcoming visit for the equinox, and everything you plan to do with them.

Everything is just as Levi remembers it being. The setting is different, there are people missing… but there is something soothing that he is here now, with you, with scents that don't feel foreign, with foods that feel familiar.

One thing does loom over Levi's mind, though.

Levi swears you drew closer when he stood.

One night, you fall asleep in front of the fireplace.

Come morning, Levi's gone, but there's a blanket draped over your body.

That night, Levi can't sleep. That in itself isn't shocking; Levi's always been a chronic insomniac. So, when the telltale signs of a sleepless night make themselves known and Levi realizes he's in for one of those nights, he doesn't waste time. He gets up and goes to make himself a fresh cup of valerian root tea.

Half-way there, however, something stops him in his tracks.

It's your the door to your bedroom, half-ajar, warm light pooling out.

And Levi sees you.

You're on the floor, crouched over something. Next to you, it seems that your bribing paid off; Scout is by your side, staring at you with keen interest, tilting her head as she looks at your every movement.

That's when Levi notices what you're doing, what you're twirling around one by one, as if to show the cat.

Your drawing materials, his gift to you. You've taken them out of the desk he built, laying them all on the floor to inspect them.

Pencils, an eraser, a notebook.

Huh.

( Next chapter / Join my taglist )

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dixons-sunshine · 11 months ago

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Spot Of Tea | Daryl Dixon x Fem!Reader

*GIF isn't mine*

Summary: Marrying Daryl was one of the best decisions you ever made. He was no longer the hot-headed, rude hunter from the quarry who you couldn't stand. Instead, he was someone who you'd come to love above all else, someone who you bled with and shared a beautiful baby girl with. And just when you thought you couldn't love your husband more, he just had to go and have a cute little teaparty with your daughter.

Genre: Fluff

Era: Alexandria, post Saviour war, pre the building of the bridge.

Warnings: None.

Word count: 1.5k

A/n: Back at it again with another Dad!Daryl fic, and this one was inspired by @louifaith's amazing idea! This was so cute and I just had to write this. Domesticity with Daryl is my favourite genre. I hope you like this!

As always, my requests are open for any TWD requests, as well as Scud Frohmeyer requests.

—

The sun was just starting to set. Everyone was starting to retreat into their homes for the night and the people on guard were switching shifts with the people on night shift. You were done for the day, a successful day's work in the infirmary adding a bounce to your step as you walked up the porch stairs and into your shared home with Daryl, locking the door behind you and shedding your coat.

The house was eerily silent. Daryl had sustained an injury while on a run and had been given the week off by Rick to heal. Although your husband had initially been against the idea, one look from you had shut any protests down—being the community's nurse and his wife gave you that advantage. It was already day three and he'd been spending all of his time with Hazel, your daughter. Each night you'd come home to find him watching some old cartoons he'd found tapes of with her in the living room, all cuddled up under a big, fuzzy, comfortable blanket.

So where were they that night, and why was it so quiet?

“Daryl?” you called out after searching the first floor of your small home with no sign of the archer or your daughter. You started descending up the stairs, but stopped when you got to the top. You could hear your three year old's voice coming from her room, soon followed by Daryl's own.

You walked down the hallway and into her room, stopping in the doorway at the sight that you met; your daughter sitting down on the ground in front of her bed, surrounded by her stuffed toys with the plastic tea set Daryl had found for her in the middle, with the archer himself sitting on the opposite side of her. The big, gruff man was "drinking" from the plastic teacup, sporting a plastic tiara. Hazel was happily babbling on, and Daryl was looking at her fondly, a small smile on his face as he hummed in agreement to whatever she said.

You leaned against the doorway with an amused smile on your face, silently observing your husband dutifully playing out Hazel's storyline. They hadn't noticed your presence yet, and you jumped at the opportunity to admire the two most important people in your life.

“Do you want some more tea, Daddy?” Hazel asked, pouring the imaginary tea into the cups of the stuffed animals surrounding her.

Daryl nodded and extended the plastic cup in her direction. “Yeah, 'course I do. Ya make the best tea in the land.”

Hazel giggled and poured the imaginary tea into Daryl's cup. “There you go, Daddy.”

“Thanks, Princess Hazelnut,” Daryl thanked her, taking a sip from the plastic cup and humming in approval. “Tastes good. Wha'd ya put in this?”

“My secret recipe,” Hazel responded with a giggle, placing the plastic teapot down on the ground, picking up her own cup. “You look pretty, Daddy. Like a real princess.”

Daryl chuckled and patted at the tiara on his head. “S'the crown. S'makin' me look like royalty.”

“Yeah, the look suits you,” you voiced, finally making Hazel and Daryl aware of your presence.

Hazel dropped the plastic teacup in her hands and hastily got up, rushing over to you. “Mama!”

You crouched down to catch her in your arms, picking her up and placing sweet, soft little kisses on her face. “Hey, baby,” you greeted her, an affectionate smile on your face. “Were you and Daddy having fun?”

“'Course we were,” Daryl chipped in, slowly getting up from the floor due to the injury on his leg. He walked with a noticable limp over to you, ruffling Hazel's hair. “We always have fun. Ain't tha' righ', Hazelnut?”

Hazel giggled and buried her face into your shoulder. “Yeah. Daddy played princesses and tea parties with me.”

“Yeah. 'M Princess Dana of the Forest Kingdom. This lil' one is Princess Hazelnut of the Fairy Kingdom. We were jus' meetin' up to form an alliance to fight against the dangerous Fire Tribe, who wants to destroy the forest and all the animals in my kingdom. We need the help of Princess Hazelnut and the Fairy Warriors to defeat them once and fer all,” Daryl explained, using a deeper voice for dramatic effect.

“Well I'm sorry I interrupted your meeting. Do you want me to leave?” you asked teasingly, sending the archer a playful smile over your daughter's head.

Hazel shook her head. “No. Daddy and I will finish tomorrow.”

“Well, I've got the day off tomorrow. Would you mind if I joined you two?”

“Yay! Mama's gonna join us, Daddy!” Hazel exclaimed happily, hugging you tighter.

Daryl smiled fondly at Hazel, leaning forward to place a soft kiss on the top of her head. “Yeah, I heard tha', Hazelnut. Mama's gon' help us defeat the Fire Tribe. They will no longer hurt the animals in my kingdom.”

“Yeah! Mama's gonna help us win!”

You laughed lightly at their theatrics, shaking your head. You placed another kiss on Hazel's forehead before placing her back down on the ground. “Why don't you go wash your hands and wait for me and Daddy downstairs? If you promise to be good, there will be a surprise for you after dinner.”

“A surprise? Yay! Thank you, Mama!” Hazel exclaimed, hugging your legs tightly before bounding out of the room excitedly.

You chuckled affectionately at the little girl that brought so much light into your life. It amazed you how one small human being could fill a hole in your heart that you hadn't even realised existed before. Hazel was your pride and joy, your baby girl who you'd go to great lengths to protect, as would Daryl.

You turned back towards the archer and gave him an amused smile. “Hi.”

“Hey,” Daryl mused, stepping forward to place his hands on your hips, pulling you closer to him. “How was yer day?”

“Not as eventful as yours, I'm guessing,” you teased, laughing lightly. You gently took the tiara from his head, inspecting it. “Gotta say, though, the whole "Princess Dana" thing suits you. Never would've guessed it was you with this tiara on. You looked really pretty.”

“Stop,” Daryl said with a chuckle. “Hazel asked me to wear the tiara. It made the story more believable.”

“It sounds like a good storyline. I'm actually invested now, and I wonder how the two of you are gonna work me into the story.”

“Hazel will figure it out. She's a real creative kid. She has a big imagination,” Daryl replied, absentmindedly rubbing his thumb over your hip in a gentle caress. “She's amazin'.”

“Just like her daddy,” you responded, gazing up at your husband lovingly.

Daryl scoffed and ducked his head, but you didn't miss the way his lips twitched up into a small smile. “Nah, she got it from her mama. She's a mini ya.”

“I don't think so, but okay,” you relented, dropping the tiara on the bed before wrapping your arms around his neck. “She's perfect.”

Daryl hummed. “Jus' like her mama,” he whispered before capturing your lips with his, kissing you sweetly and lovingly.

The kiss ended all too soon for your liking, but you remembered that you had a toddler waiting for you downstairs. “We should probably get her fed and ready for bed.”

“Yeah,” Daryl agreed, taking a step back. “Wha' surprise do ya have fer Hazel?”

“Cookies.”

“Who made them?”

“Carol. She dropped them off earlier before she went back to the Kingdom,” you explained, before leaning up to whisper something in his ear. “If we get Hazel to bed early enough, I'll show you what surprise I have for you.”

Daryl Dixon loves his daughter. She is his little girl and he would do anything for her, including dressing up as a princess for tea parties. He enjoys her company and wished to be in it 24/7. He'd kill anything that tried to hurt her and he'd die protecting her.

But at that moment, Daryl wanted to get her to bed and asleep as quickly as humanly possible. As much as he loved her, he had another idea of fun that involved only you, the love of his life, a bed, and no tea sets.

#krys writes .ೃ࿐#daryl dixon #daryl dixon x reader #daryl dixon imagine #daryl dixon x female reader #the walking dead #daryl x reader #twd daryl #norman reedus #norman reedus x reader #dad!daryl #dad!daryl dixon #domestic!daryl #daryl dixon fanfiction #daryl dixon fanfic #the walking dead daryl #daryl fanfiction

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gold-onthe-inside · 3 months ago

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masterlist

spencer reid x oc:

dr piper bishop <- track tag #oc: dr piper bishop for updates Dr Piper Bishop is the newest addition to the BAU after Elle Greenaway's departure as a consultant appointed by Aaron Hotchner. She quickly rises to Senior Supervisory Agent after a series of courses and successful cases. But what she didn't see coming was the growth of a new family with new people to protect, finding love and with it, trauma, hurt and ghosts haunting her every move. (currently on season 7)

hemkärlek | spencer reid (s6) x oc (piper bishop) | fluff agent seaver catches spencer and piper in a moment of domesticity.

ataraxia | spencer reid (s5) x oc (piper bishop) | comfort piper suffers a bout of insomnia from overly philosophising at 4am

deck the halls | spencer reid x oc (piper bishop) | fluff, domestic caving in to the norm of the street, piper and spencer decorate the house, but their neighbours are total assholes about it.

comfortember 2024:

laws of thermodynamics | spencer reid x f!reader | fluff spencer and reader spend a rainy afternoon in, and he explains thermal equilibrium over a cup of cocoa.

just stay with me | derek morgan x f!reader | childhood friends, references to buford, hurt/comfort after carl buford is arrested, derek morgan seeks comfort from an old childhood friend.

ralvez:

ice cream never tasted so sweet | spencer reid x luke alvez | college au, meetcute, fluff spencer reid picks up a job at an ice cream parlour during the summer break but that job is quickly derailed by a cute stranger who seems to be addicted to ice cream.

spencer reid x reader:

a pearl | spencer reid (post-prison) x fem!reader | hurt/comfort spencer's fighting a war in his head, and it takes your presence to bring him back to the moment

adam's ribs | spencer reid (pre-s1) x fem!reader | codependency, 18+ mdni when spencer meets you right after admitting his mother to a sanitarium, all he wants is to be loved, no matter the cost.

bau!reader:

hey, december | spencer reid (s2) x bau!reader | fluff on a snowy day in chicago, spencer's terrible aim lands him in hot water with his crush.

tongue-tied | spencer reid (s2) x bau!reader | borderline smut, mostly fluff the bau notice spencer being quieter than usual, the resident genius pressed to reveal an embarrassing injury

gingerbread kisses | spencer reid (s4) x bau!reader | smut with plot if you squint, 18+ mdni your first christmas as a couple with spencer involves baking, construction, and lots and lots of kisses.

santa's little helper | spencer reid (post prison) x bau!reader | fluff after finding out henry no longer believes in santa after he missed last christmas, spencer dedicates this year to bringing the magic of christmas back to his godson's life... with a little help from you, of course.

count the odds | spencer reid (s8) x bau!reader | established relationship you reflect on the past year at rossi’s annual nye party, which brings you back to your relationship with spencer, and all the different ways your lives could’ve gone, and the odds of you both finding each other.

blake!reader:

blind date | spencer reid (s8) x blake!reader | set-up, flangst the one where you finally agree to let your godmother set you up, except this one might actually become the love of your life.

new year's resolution | spencer reid (s8) x blake!reader | sprinkles of angst and smut, 18+ mdni the end of the year brings your life in perspective, the trajectory of your life inverse to the champagne you drink. the morning after, spencer brings you around to the idea that when one door closes, another opens.

wrong person... | spencer reid (s8) x blake!reader | wrong recipient, hurt comfort (?) spencer sends a message to the wrong person in a fit of anger... and then does his best to make up for it.

smells like infidelity | spencer reid (s8) x blake!reader | songfic, reader heavy convinced that her friend has been murdered by her husband, reader confronts him on his own... she's so sure he did it.

tough!reader:

a shot of whiskey | spencer reid (s6) x tough!reader | mild angst, domestic reader contemplates whether she's sweet enough for spencer

frostbite | spencer reid x tough!reader | case-fic spending christmas on a case is hard enough without you tracking down the unsub on your own, and tough as you are, you're not invulnerable.

postgrad!reader

make the yuletide gay | spencer reid x postgrad!reader | hurt/comfort the year's been hard, and the holidays hurt, and spencer realises maybe this christmas, comfort precedes joy.

analyst!reader

pair programming:

part one: driver | spencer reid (s1) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers, casefic you invite yourself onto a case to help penelope after an unsub runs a blackhat operation onto her set-up, getting to know your best friend's team in the process.

part two: navigator | spencer reid (s3) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers, casefic, angst what happens after your roommate and better half is shot on the doorstep of your building by her date. turns out, your support network seems to have more nodes that you'd thought.

greylist | spencer reid (s6, post-JJ, pre-Doyle) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers when your celebratory drink with penelope is disrupted, you end up at a bar with the person you famously cannot get along with even if you were paid... until you do.

corrective maintenance | spencer reid (s6, post-JJ, pre-Doyle) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers, lovers' quarrel your complicated and suppressed feelings for spencer result in an argument, the blowback of which leads to a fight with penelope.

contingency operations | spencer reid (s7, post-doyle) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers when a former navy SEAL threatens your base of operations, your safety is the only thing on spencer's mind.

critical asset | spencer reid (s7) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers, pining the one where you and spencer finally get closer, even if it's just because penelope's too busy.

debriefing | spencer reid (s7) x analyst!reader | annoyances to lovers the one where you finally confront the thing between you and spencer

medic!reader

amelie, where'd you go? | spencer reid (s2) x medic!reader after you save spencer from his overdose after the hankel kidnapping, he's haunted by the glimpse of you.

mayor!reader

diplomat | spencer reid (s6/7) x mayor!reader | hurt/comfort after a schoolbus full of kids goes missing, right near the end of your first term as mayor, an old flame is called to help, and he intends to make things right.

hamelin | spencer reid (s6/7) x mayor!reader | hurt/comfort spencer's the first person you think to call when the kidnapper attacks your home. part two to diplomat.

emily prentiss x reader

no grave can hold my body down | emily prentiss (s7) x teacher!reader | angst, suggestive our grief over losing emily is forced undone when she re-appears seven months later outside your apartment

i crawl home to her | emily prentiss (s7) x teacher!reader | angst, smut, 18+ mdni a continuation of no grave

aaron hotchner x reader

flu season | aaron hotchner (s7) x fem!reader | sickfic, fluff when you catch the same bug that's been going round at jack's school, your favourite person returns the favour to take care of you.

coming soon:

#masterlist #my fics

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avonne-writes · 1 year ago

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Post-war AU headcanon: Bucky has sleep problems and wakes up at ungodly hours. He sneaks out of bed and just broods as the sun rises, then makes breakfast. When Gale comes down from the bedroom all soft in a bathrobe and with his hair tousled, he pretends he got up just to make Gale breakfast. The first time it happens, Gale actually buys the lie and gets very affectionate in return, which adds a layer of guilt to Bucky's issues.

#mota #buck x bucky #john egan #gale cleven #post-war domestic husbands #my writing

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streets-in-paradise · 3 months ago

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Weaving Hope - Maximus Decimus Meridius x Wife!Reader

Gladiator (2000) Oneshot

Warnings: Talk of cheating ending with reassurance ( reader feels insecure and starts fearing he may cheat when he is away.)

Summary: Your husband's intelligence is not limited to military strategy. He knows emotions and he can tell when you are upset regardless if the cause remains out of his control. Even if the doubts come within yourself despite of his impeccable behavior, he needs to let you know you are his one and only.

Notes: Special gift for @wildsaltair hoping to cheer her up. ( This is how I constructively deal with my post Gladiator ll feelings regarding the Maximus mentions on the sequel.)

Glossary: Lucina - Roman goddess of childbirth, equivalent of the greek Ilithyia.

The sacred bliss of your domestic life was a shelter for your victorious and exahusted warrior. Maximus had returned home as happy and full of love as he always did, but his feelings didn't numb his perceptions. He found you checking the horizon warily, as if you were expecting some kind of unpleasant surprise and your heart was relieved not to find it when you got to be in his arms. Despite he didn't do any direct comments about it, that strange feeling didn't abandon him as he kept paying attention to your reactions.

When he began telling his stories about the latest conquest he adquired for the emperor, he could tell you weren't your usual self interrumpting him to ask questions or mock the senseless choices from some of his companions. Not only you were abnormally silent: that cheerfull sparkle in your eyes he adored to observe was replaced with the coldness of a circunstantial listener. Your mind was somewhere else, lost in something he couldn't easily decipher.

Bedtime of your toddler had him happy of finally being the one that could tuck the child and you observed in adoration for the beautifull scene. Its tender beauty contrasted with the bitter uglyness of the doubts haunting you. Tears of happiness and fear began to flow, spontaneous reaction you attempted to hide pretending you were going to clean the dinner table. The kid was excited, but very tired, so it didn't take long untill your husband returned to you and got struck by your first reproach.

" Excellent story! I only noticed you missed a detail ... The women of the North, Maximus, ... you said nothing about them."

Advancing cautiously, he began to understand what had been keeping you distant all along.

" I found nothing remarkable to say ... "

You chuckled with skepticism, trying hard not to sound angry without proper reasons.

" Really? Because I have heard some interesting things about them."

Harshly piling up the plates in an enumeration of descriptive phrases, you released your hidden jealousy pretending to be merely speculating.

" Pale skin, white as the snow in their cold lands. Tall, slim figures ... Eyes like the sea and blond hair so beautifull that it became an object of greed for roman ladies. When they get their hands in one, they chop it all off to make wigs for themselves ... Women so beautifull even the refined ladies from the capital find something to envy!! What is left for the wives of the province to think then? "

The pointless bitterness in your implications was amusing to him. Who told you all of that? He had no idea, ... most likely another woman who found in that real reasons to worry when her own husband left following him. One of his soldiers, or some officer under his command on a position comfortable enough to get a reward as such.

"Have you been fearing that this time you would see me arrive with a concubine? ... What have I ever done to awaken this doubt in your heart?"

It was unfair, and you knew it, but you couldn't help how you have been feeling.

" It's different now: you are their general. Men honor each other with the spoils of war: given how they love you, soldiers themselves could be picking one for you."

Maximus was not blind to the typical behavior of men arround him and what you said was true for many others on the higher ranks of the army.

" My men are always loyal to me and I serve the same emperor from the last war. This is not my first campaign as a general, ... there has to be something else troubling you and I must know what is it. "

He was right, but the underlying issue was not something easy to bring up. Would a man, even one as wondefull as your Maximus has always proved himself to be for you, capable of understanding such worries?

" I am not the same woman you married: childbirth has changed my body and my youthfull years will soon be gone. Any other man in your position would be considering to keep with him a younger woman whose hips weren't yet aided by Lucina, or enjoy of her away from his wife. Nobody would judge you for it, even less considering the long time you spend alone moving from one militar camp to another. "

For as sensical as your reasoning tried to make it sound, that idea would have never crossed his mind. Even if in extremely strange circunstancies, Marcus Aurelius himself would seek to prize him with a girl, or his hedonist younger son would suggest it, he would politely reject the gift and increase the rumours about his humble nature. All he always wanted from his superiors was getting granted a soon return to you, the only one he wanted. His beloved wife, mother of his child and woman of his dreams.

" Nobody would dare to suggest it, because they hear me count the days I spend away from you. "

Surprise made your hands tremble and an empty vase fell from your grip, but didn't reach the ground before he reached to pick it and you smiled for him.

" Can I be like Penelope, weaving hope because I remain the only wife of a commander in the army that can forever trust her husband? "

Securing the pottery in a different surface, his hands were then free to grab your waist from behind.

" The prized locks of those girls' hair are no match for a single hair of yours."

His touch travelled down, to your hips and lower abdomen. Firm grip of one, soft caressing from the other.

" ... And this body, that you so harshly claim to find decaying, feeds the burning flame of my desire like no other ever will. Alone in my tent, I can only dream to feel the body of my wife against mine in feverish delusion ... mad with want for you ... How could I ever feel otherwise? Despise your hips for no longer being those of a maiden, when I am the man that made you a mother? "

Finding ecstasy in his touch and the passionate comfort of his words hushed the wrong feelings keeping you distant.

Maximus began to kiss your neck and you couldn't keep punishing him in vain.

" Forgive me, my love … Long distances are hard for me as well, and last week my sister came visiting. I appreciate her company, but she isn't the wisest advisor. "

Guessing exactly what you meant with that, he chuckled against the skin of your left shoulder and pressed a few pecks there.

" Will you let me prove myself to you tonight?"

He didn't need to ask, but it was so sweet that he did. You were his, always were and forever would be.

#gladiator #gladiator 2000 #maximus decimus meridius #russell crowe #maximus x reader #russell crowe x reader

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angelsfics · 4 months ago

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Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter fic recs

i've recently started reading drarry, so here are some of the very favorites i've found. it's not a comprehensive list but just some i enjoyed! feel free to send me more recs.

Aevitumer written by MarshmalowMilkshake ♡ 95k words, rated M. Tags: Time Travel Fix-It, Found Family, Hurt/Comfort

Another Heart Whispers Back written by slytherco ♡ 53k words, rated E. Tags: Friends to Lovers, Pining Draco Malfoy, Oblivious Harry Potter, Casual Intimacy, Sexual Tension & Romantic Tension, Humor, Blind First Dates, Idiots in Love, First Time, Cuddling

Dwelling written by aideomai ♡ 83k words, rated T. Tags: Friends to Lovers, Curses, Boy-Who-Lived Neville Longbottom, Twists & Turns

Hothouse Flowers and Hot Hot Showers written by azalea_larae & boshspice ♡ 101k words, rated E. Tags: Porn with Plot, Hogwarts Eighth Year, Muggle Studies, Studying Muggle Abroad, Roommates, Cuddling, Sexual Tension, Fluff

My Fucking Flatmate written by toxik_angel ♡ 82k words, rated E. Tags: Canon Divergence, Good Draco Malfoy, Draco Defects, Hogwarts 7th Year, Roommates, Harry and Draco in the Muggle World, Youtube, Tension, Fluff, Humor

Now I Know In Part written by dodgerkedavra ♡ 39k words, rated E. Tags: Curses/Curse Damage, Cursed Harry Potter, Curse-Breaker Draco Malfoy, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Recovery, Cottagecore Draco Malfoy

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darlingofvalyria · 1 year ago

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❝I am the Heir's Wife. I bore the Heir his lineage. I will not be swept aside.❞

[ The Prince Jacaerys Velaryon should have known his wife better— or at least, her ire, for when his trysts with the bastard Snow reached the Spiders and soon, the ears of his Princess Consort, rage and war drummed for Winterfell, demanding heads.

—Maestre Kevan, Volume IV of The Bastard Eater, passage chapter under 'The Flame that Sung for the North'. ]

[ +18 MDNI ] [ 10,062 ] [ series masterlist ] | jacaerys velaryon x targaryen aunt!reader (aegon's twin sister), one-sided aegon ii x reader, jace x sara snow

contains— canon divergence - manipulative reader, targcest, smut, angst - post-vizzy t death, rhaenyra is queen - mentions of children, pregnancy, childbirth - allusions to infidelity & character death(s) - targaryen madness, revenge, domestic violence (not jace), unhinge behaviour, intense use of 'bastard', profanity, gaslighting, guilt-tripping - this is basically gone girl, you gone girl jace - dark fic - mentions of depression (aegon ii), allusions to suicide (not reader) - nsfw: oral (f receiving), breeding kink, creampie - no kings, no martyrs, no betas.

a/n— i didn't think i was going to do the sara snow thing, but herewe are. also i just wanted an excuse to go absolutely ape shit. reader gets very intense, like thoroughly unhinged. this is literally me supporting women's wrongs. it is also quite insane that this reached 10k and it's still just the first part lmaooo + comment, reblog & like at will!

"THAT FUCKING BASTARD! THAT GODSDAMNED, WHORE-FUCKING STRONG HALF BREED!"

Your shrieks echo stone and shadow, interrupted only by the things you pick up and hurl. Anything your hands grab, you throw and spit obscenities against, rage and tears ruin your pretty visage. The fury swept past your cherub features, a dragon breaking through the Hightower seams, upending fire and roar from the pits of your being.

"HOW DARE HE?! I GAVE HIM AN HEIR! I BROUGHT HIM PEACE! I BETRAYED—" you roar, pulling your pearl dagger— a gift from your Strong Bastard of a Husband — and throwing it to your vanity mirror, glass shards exploding. "— MY KIN!"

"DAUGHTER, PLEASE!"

Arms wound across your torso—hardened and chain-mail — as you fight against your bounds before a pain flashes to your cheek. Your rage quiets, hard breaths from your lungs. You turn your tear-stained anger to your mother and her palm, fright and terror on her regale visage.

Death of a spouse becomes the Queen Dowager in her pale blue robe and unbound spirals of auburn hair. Peace had begotten a realm that is balanced on the lineage you had produced for the Queen, her heir, and your own, as the new Princess of Dragonstone. With Otto Hightower for evermore banished to Oldtown, Kings Landing had been brought to a flowering kindness.

Queen Rhaenyra's ascension had been a wondrous affair, fit the for the first crowned Queen of the Seven Kingdoms. Not a Queen Consort, not a Queen Regent. An heir who rose for the crown always meant to be hers.

But the calamity that brewed in her ascension... no. You paved the peace. T'was you who wrangled the Great Houses that proved allyship to your twin brother's banner, you who blessed her with tranquility of a rule that will be known for ages that will precede you all.

And now her son... her son dared to destroy everything.

A conversation floats above your head, by your Queen Mother and her sworn shield, the Ser Cole, but you barely hear anything past the ringing in your head.

The Targaryen Madness the sheep so call it, an idle voice, faint and familiar, whispers in the niches of your brain. It has infected you so. It breathes, fuelled by the air wrought by your husband's betrayal. It sings, sweet love. It sings.

"—your grace, I urge to hold her—"

"—she is my daughter, Ser Cole, I am not in danger. Release her."

Justice, the voice shrieks? Screams? But it is so soft in your head, a wail of a memory, a woman or a man? must be had. No dragon falls in such disgrace.

The tight wound over your torso is unleashed but the knight is not far, tensed to cage you, when your mother grasps your elbows as you grab hers, nails digging into the thick fabric of her hem that she still winces, your grip steel-tight.

"My darling, please. I cannot help you if you do not speak what ails you." She brushes her hand desperately across your face, smearing your tears, trying to find the daughter she bore past the savagery and madness that beholds you now. "What has happened?"

You draw a tightened, harsh breath to your lungs, rattling your bones that you quiver in your attempt for sanity.

"I am being shamed, mother," you whisper. Stark, violet eyes meeting the worried round, brown of hers. "The Strong bastard is whoring himself to another, a Northern bastard."

A cackle falls your lips as alarmed gazes are exchanged above your head.

"Y-You cannot say such things aloud, sweet girl," your mother hushes your madness, pulling you close to her chest as she shoots a glance at the door.

Criston checks outside, but only your maids linger. Dyanna presses a finger against her lips, catching the knight's eye, and the rest scatter, surely to make sure that no one that need not know of their mistress' words is within reach. A shiver still runs his spine. He will never get used to the quiet, almost non-verbal way your connection worked and reached. Your Spiders weave webs all around, even as their mistress sunders with rage.

"Mayhaps you are mistaken, for sure the prince is loyal, and he adores you—"

You pull back against her, teeth bared. She flinches and Ser Cole steps forward, wary. "It is the third missive now that I have received. Did you think I would not have confirmed twice— thrice? I didn't believe it the first time! But three people have now confirmed that all this time, in the guise of rallying his mother's cause in the North, he is spending ample time with the Lord Stark's bastard sister. His bastard fucking sister!"

Your mother's horror catches that of Ser Criston's, but your fury is your own, you are a dragon trapped in the ruin of your own making, of the webs you had spun so cleverly to get to this point, and you cannot stop.

"I am the Heir's Wife. I bore the Heir his lineage, my blood spilled the birthing bed for it." A cry leaves your lips as your grief and rage pools like ichor from your chest to the floor. Alicent is torn away from you— your nails had gone through her robe and she had cried in pain, a mimick of your own, a mother to a daughter to a mother to a daughter, a cycle, an Ouroboros — and you fall to the floor, grasping at your chest.

"I will not be swept aside. I will not be ignored."

A gasp falls from your lips as your mind moves to a quiet, still place. The tremble fades, your rage and grief whirls, collects, as you push it all back inside your chest.

Your madness must be sharpened for it be used as a sword.

And you cannot let him be happy in another's arms.

If you cannot drag them to the Hells, sweet dragon, the idle voice hums, hisses? Screeches. Your ancestors— all of those who have succumbed to dreamy madness — appears in the corners of your vision like soldiers. Awaiting for you to join them. Awaiting the blood that you will spill.

Then you must raise the Hells unto Winterfell.

"...my daughter?" Alicent calls, hesitant. Cole hovers but does not approach, standing guard in protection of the Dowager. It breaks her heart to see you this way, a young woman still, much older than she was when she married but only because you had always sought your future. You had always had a hardened scale, far stronger than she.

Even when you made your entrance to the world— the unmeasurable pain of bringing not one, but two heirs into the world, her firstborns, all at once — you had never cried. The maestres, maids, they worried for you, as your twin brother had not stopped crying, so alive and red, raw from the wound of being fresh.

But you... you had not made a sound.

The entire weight of your being— your mind, your emotions — even then, you wrangled them close to your very centre, never letting them stray too far from the edges of your fingertips. As if any release must be made with a perused thought. An incentive of reason.

Even then, you plotted every step you took.

Now, Alicent watches as her firstborn daughter suctions all her emotions— that Targaryen madness that plagued the blood of her husband, his ancestors — and made her ploy.

Against the husband that dared make a fool of her.

The silence beckons nightmare. Old fear flickers inside the Queen Dowager.

"Where are my daughters?"

"What?"

"My daughters," you repeat, a hair's breadth louder than the first time you spoke. Your eyes flutter upward. The deadened gaze curled Alicent's heart in fear. "Where are they?"

"In the nursery, with the twins and Maelor. Helaena and Aegon are watching them."

You offer your hand up mutely, and Cole exchanges one last, lingering look with the Dowager, before offering his own. You stand up, thank him softly, and brush and clean up your face to the best of your ability. An utter calmness over your visage.

"Tell no one of what I had told you," you say, fixing your hair and rubbing the red from your cheeks. One minute there is madness, the next there is nothing. There is only a girl. A woman. A princess. "No one knows apart the three of us, and if you ever decide, Ser Criston, that nigh is the glorious time for you to betray my mother or I, know that the last thing thing oyu will fear is the Stranger's hand when I am through with you."

Your mother shouts your name, horrified. "What are you thinking? What are you plotting?"

You cup Alicent's face, smiling ever sweet. "Your innocence will keep you safe, mother. All I ask, for the heart you keep for your children, that you keep this between sealed lips and tilted chin. You know nothing, yes?"

"... Yes. Nothing."

You place a tender kiss on your mother's head. "Keep Daenera and Aemma safe for me. Aegon and I are flying to Dragonstone promptly. Sweet Helaena does ever so get overwhelmed by watching all of the children by herself."

"D-Dragonstone?"

Your sweet smile touched with poison, stretches. "It is high time I take a dragon for myself, don't you think so?"

While an insecure obsession had fraught your younger brother about claiming a dragon, you had met it with indifference.

For how can you not mourn the loss of Aemond's sight, staring in quiet horror the entire time as the maestre did his best to salvage the muck mess of blood and nerve endings, before the old man had shaken his head, and you turned to the small bowl that contained your brother's eye, unable to look at anything else.

Not even when your mother's rage was met with apathy and anger, her demands for justice nothing more than a woman's insanity, a mother's grief that must be swept away, tucked under a chin and a sadness she will never get rid of.

"Do not mourn me, mother. It was a fair exchange. I may have lost an eye, but I gained a dragon."

Your soft-hearted, darling, baby brother. None of his words had thawed the freezing of your heart, the grief under the swell of your breastbone.

Your own mourning was kept between teeth and tongue, as you had slept with your siblings that night. The four of you, tucked under the wing of the other, Aemond close to your chest as possible, as quiet, hot tears ran down your face. Every moan of pain or whimper he made in his sleep tore at each new vein inside of you.

"Dragons are the symbol of our House's power," Aegon had once said, windswept hair you tried to tame with your fingers, smelling fresh of Sunfyre and winds.

"And yet, there were no eggs in our child beds." He stiffened while you smiled sadly, curling your twin's hair away form his face, making him presentable and dusting the bout of sand that managed to find his leathers. You had been scolded long before by your grandsire of how you coddle Aegon, how you defend him, mother him more than your mother ever could, but you cannot stop. You were meant to care for him, tethered you once were inside your mother's womb together, you hold him steady now.

Whenever he was lost, whenever his sadness overtook him, wrung your brother dry of life, you bat the Stranger's hand and bring him back.

"But we have proved them wrong," he insisted. "All of us, even Aemond with Vhagar— the war queen, Visenya's dragon — we have claimed ours. Daeron all the way Oldtown has Tessarion, even Helaena has Dreamfyre. And yet you insist..."

You wound your arms over his torso, keeping him close in a silly hug where you sway and dance him around. A laugh escaped him while you inhaled the scent of smoke, soot, and that grime stench of beast.

Aegon on his good days lacked the bottle-edge of wine, of cheap salts from the waft of the soiled, Silk Streets.

This was your brother. No one else.

"I fare better without one," you whispered in his ear. "I appear innocent, sweet almost, without a beast in my command. They look at me with nothing but pity and the urge to protect me. Our father likes me like this, his poor, lovely daughter without a dragon of her own, listening so intently to his histories of Old Valyria. Our sister is eased, as one daughter is plagued by dreams and struggles with the real world, while the other cannot even claim a dragon of her own. Poor princess, Hightower blood must have thickened in her veins. She too, is no threat."

You pulled back, smiling at him. "They like me better like this. Pitiful, compliant, nothing but a sweet and pretty flower that sways in the Spring breeze. A beautiful decoration but no more."

He rubbed a thumb on your arm, a worry knot on his forehead. Aegon adored you but he struggled to piece together where your plot lies. You are a web-spinner, forever dancing out of reach, catching prey and lengthening your intricacies. "Is that why you hide your training with Aemond alone? Ser Criston is mother's sworn shield, he would not mind—"

"I will not place my secrecies to a knight with a soiled cloaked," you snorted. "No matter how tall he stands beside our mother. I trust no one but my kin. And I know that no matter how heavy you drink, sweet Aeg of mine, my secrets are your own."

He took your hand, kissing the back of it, stare impregnable. "As your blood is my own, our fire is one flame. I go where you tell me to."

You kissed his cheek, a reward, laughing. He smiles proudly at the sound. At this time, you dangled yourself to your brother as bait as the pressure from your grandsire to make him King started rising. You had been given notice that he had been talking to House Lannister, Wylde, even some Riverland lords.

You did not mind becoming Aegon's second wife. Just as his namesake, he will have his Rhaenys and Visenya. Unlike the Conqueror however, he would adore his Visenya more than a true flower. Helaena would enjoy that far better.

"And if I tell you to jump?" you half-purred.

"I will ask you how high."

Memories and choices break and tide as you scramble for hold on the rocky cliff face. Dragonmont in the dark is a behemoth beast, a screech or two breaking like lightning crackles, or the familiar drum beat of wings before the silence consumes once more. The stench of fire, of beasts and carcasses helps cloak the darkened night.

"Udligon ñuha brōzagon, Answer my call," you hiss into fraudulent emptiness, hands gripping rocky edges until your blood beads, "you fucking lizards."

"Have you gone mad!?"Aegon shouted, trying to pace with your run to the dragonpit.

A rocky laugh broke out from your being, not deigning that with a reply. Aegon huffed angrily.

"Alright, tell me this then. How are you so sure I'm not just about to put you on a bleeding volcano to die? We claim your dragon in the morn, sister. First thing before we break our fast. I'm sure by then, Vermithor or—"

You whipped your head around, pulling halt. "I leave tonight to claim my dragon. Whether it is you and Sunfyre who gets me there, or Aemond and Vhagar, is no matter to me. I will claim one tonight. It is up to you to decide now if we tell Aemond or not."

Aemond, whose anger is wounded tight, the barest excuse for war always at the edge of his hum. The misstep at Storm's End had cost him everything. Had cost your mother everything. Queen still, Alicent Hightower had bent the knee and offered her life in exchange for mercy. Before Rhaenyra passed judgement, Viserys I had passed.

It didn't matter that you had ensured a higher dosage from the Harrenhal witch in his usual milk of the poppy. Your spiders moving with ease through the silent channels you had established long before your own flowering.

The Red Keep had scrambled, the Heir with it. It was enough time for Lucerys to have come out of the red, confirmed to live through the worst of it without as much as a broken bone. Arrax however, had been badly maimed, and would no longer take flight. But he and his rider would live. Aemond would live. Alicent would have her son. Rhaenyea will have hers, and the crown.

Kevan had done his duty unto you while you settled the storms in Dragonstone. You rewarded him handsomely.

Aegon sighed. He too, would like your honour avenged, but not for the sake of war. "As you wish, sister. I hope you know what you're doing and I am not about to send you to your death."

Just like what you did to your mother, you reached forward and cupped his face. If before, your touch stills his heart and floods his cavities with warmth, a flash of fear strikes the twin son at the eerie smile on your face.

"Skoros morghot vestri? What do we say to the god of death?"

Aegon blinked. "Tubī daor. Not today."

You smiled. "Trust me, sweet Aeg. It is not my death the Stranger will take. Not until the fjords of the North are at my mercy."

"Iksan kesīr sir naejot māzigon ñuha sikagon pakto! I am here now to claim my birth right!" Your scream echoes and falls, repeating back to you. There is a hum, like an electric current that sizzles and pops inside your blood and marrow, and you scramble higher and higher on the rock. Your blood does not sing for the dragon lairs, but above. Up and up, jagged edges cut your skin and dress, the wind whipping with sea mist, but nothing, no one, can clamour you as you reach the peak.

At first you see nothing but darkness and hollow sounds. But you let your eyes adjust, a hiss breaking out of your dry lips as you stumble. You look down. What you first thought were rocks and wayward bones of cattle is bigger.

Whale? No.

Dragon. Dragon bone.

You look and will every sense that your eyes do not. The smell that is drowned— iron. Bones bigger than a person. Than cows and whales. Bones of fearsome beasts. Darkness moves, taking form, more than shadow. Scales hewn rough and jagged, as if stone themselves. Midnight black moving with the gentlest of sighs.

As soon as you realise what— or who — is in front of you, the eyes open with an intelligent gleam. Your heart jolts at the emerald irises that gaze back at you, slitting at the appearance of a human.

'The stench of death follows him', the voice of an old keeper hums into your ear. You no longer remember who told this to you, but the words ring true in your memory. 'Scales of midnight, as if hewn from darkness and death. A harbinger, your grace, an omen of the darkest nightmares.'

"Rytsas. Hello." You smile, ever sweet, ever charming.

This is a thread you had never felt before. Not one of your own making, but something older. A golden thread that led the eyes of Daenys the Dreamer. That spun the ties of Aegon the Conqueror. The voices that herded your madness had gone quiet in the mad rush to get here, but now their presence thickens. Words you cannot hear, nor understand, flood the silence as dragon met rider for the first time.

Keepers and historians have called him he, but every bone in your body tells you that the being before you is a she.

And wouldn't that make sense? A cannibalistic being is a woman?

She opens her maw, only ever slightly, smoke and fire crackling out of it. Molten lava in the belly of her insides tease the cool, night air and warms you.

Her version of a smile. Hello, she seem to say.

"Māzīs. Come," you say, giggling. "Dohaerās. Serve."

That night, you took your first flight.

That night, the Cannibal took her first flight with her first— and only — rider as well.

❝ . . . It is said that the formerly named "The Cannibal" had been entranced by the hunger of his new— first and evermore — rider. Prince Aegon the Elder who had escorted his twin sister that very night with Sunfyre, had looked up in alarm and fright to a maddened screech. Excitement and laughter pouring out from the newly bonded Dragon and Rider had soon turned fear into awe.

Gaelithox, she had been named as they had ridden until dawn broke by the rider who loved her 'till the end of their days, was said to have seen a mirror in Her Grace. The fathomless hunger for blood and organ from the same bodies of their kin. For Gaelithox ever hungers and satisfies for the same meat as her, at the height of her grief and ire that fuelled the Queen Consort to climb Dragonmont by hand, she too hungered for the throats of her traitorous blood.

Gaelithox will only have one rider in her whole life, as she found no same twin soul as akin in the Bastard Eater Queen. Their bond moved as if two bodies beheld one soul.

She shied from humans, and oft found too rough with other dragons. Vhagar was an exception, oft seen acting as an elder sister to the Queen's dragon when neither royal rode them and played in the skies. Smaller dragons were forbidden to approach her however, nor was she allowed in the dragonpit after almost devouring the flightless Arrax.

She died two moons after the Queen's death, delivering her final flames for her rider and would never more breathe her infamous green flames akin to Wildfire, ordered by the Crowned Heir, Princess Daenera Velaryon. It is said that the princess attempted to bond with the cannibalistic dragon but it refused.

The dragon spent her last moons in heartbreak, oft seen in Dragonstone and the Red Keep, circling her rider's most favourite places. Her final resting place is at the very top of Dragonmont from whence the Queen claimed her. It is said that the Queen's crown, the one the King Jacaerys had gifted her after the birth of their first sons, the Princes Laenor and Gaemon, is said to be placed there, as well as a portion of her ashes.

It is said that the King and the Queen's twin brother, the Prince Aegon, personally made the trek in remembrance.

It is widely suspected that Aelyx, Princess Daella's dragon, the youngest child of the King and Queen, may have been Gaelithox's only existing hatchling for he too is made of rough, midnight scales. The dragon that bred with her remains to be unknown. ❞

—Maestre Kevan Noratz, Volume X of The Life and Lies of the Emerald Flame, passage chapter under 'The Time of Hunger: Gaelithox'.

You leave Gaelithox to a mournful goodbye on Dragonstone, pressing your forehead against her hard, scaly head, promising to come back, of exchanging her diet for fat, juicy whales, for more wind-whipped rides, before riding back on Sunfyre with Aegon. The younger dragon would not rise from the beaches in fear of the cannibalistic elder, but you made ensuring promises to teach Gaelithox not to chew your dearest brother's dragon.

You had gone most of your life without the feeling of a bond beneath you, warm and alive and wild, and the roar and stench that though new, felt so familiar in your ribcage— you will fly again. And with your brothers beside you. With Helaena and her lovely Dreamfyre.

To think they had taken this from you too, to placate them. To play into their hands like a mewling kitten.

No more.

It is paces before fast is about to break when you both touch back down to Kings Landing. The Keep busying with its occupants, servants and maids bolstering with quickened feet to ensure the lords and royals are awakened with full, poached meals, dresses and coats readied for their lords and ladies, a new, glorious day under the Reign of the Black Queen.

"What now?" Aegon asks, trying to keep with your pace but he is fatigued, failing to stop his yawns. The excitement of last night had come upon him like a fog, and he is missing his bed. Hells, he is missing the bed he stays with his wife if it meant he would get a full night's sleep in the hours of the day.

"Now, we speak nothing of what happened."

He turns to you, frowning. "Just like that?"

"Just like that." You beam, nodding in favour of soldiers and maids who bow in reverence to the Crown Princess. You know you smell of dragon and night, and you need a bath. And to talk to Dyanna before you seek your daughters. "I will need time and people. The board must still be set for me to perfectly execute what I have in store."

"Alright." He yawns again. "I'll be in my quarters, passed out, if you need me. Please do not need me until sup."

You laugh breathlessly, grabbing his hand and giving it a wet kiss. "I will give you your rest, be assured. Kirimvose, dōna lēkia, Thank you, sweet brother."

The words are simple, said in a quiet murmur heavy with love and meaning. Aegon presses a loving kiss to your head, unable to stop himself winding an arm around you.

"Syt ao, va moriot, ñuha prūmia. For you, always, my heart."

As you break to each other's chambers— his, to sleep, you, already meeting Yna and requesting for a bath — you don't notice the lurker that watched the intimate moment between twins, humming in amusement before it moves to follow you.

Back in your quarters— your marriage quarters as Jacaerys had requested that you forgo having your own, not wishing to part with you — the maids are already busying themselves airing the room, moving to follow your usual routine. The only thing breaking it is the tub now in the centre.

"Thank you," you say to Yna as she picks out the pins from your hair, shrugging off your dress in the process as soon as the maids had untangled the lace behind you.

"Call for Dyanna," you tell them as they bow and leave, the door clicking softly behind them. Plans must be made. Bath for now.

With the world stifled for a second, left with only you and your thoughts, you plunge your body under too-hot water, sighing against the aches and pains in your body. Dragon-riding is a new endeavour to your muscles, and though enjoyable, was still too new.

You sigh as tears fall from your eyes, blinking exhaustedly against soft, humming daylight. You had always known that love, as it is, is a maiden's folly. A foolish, hapless play meant to fool young girls into thinking the world is kind; a pretty place.

It was an even farther thought from you, a princess of the realm. At a young age, it has been drilled to you that your womb is a rare commodity. Your body has never been your own, a piece meant to be moved in a bigger game that you are used for, not play.

You weren't stupid.

If there's a few things Otto Hightower had ever granted you, apart from gifting you his keen prowess in moving power beneath your fingertips, in hungering for more, for better— it is understanding what each person is, who they can be, how you can move them. A flatter, a flair, a push. As a man, there is much to be desired about your grandsire; he used people, used family to pursue power, but you can't truly fault him for that as you were the same.

You just took better care of the people under your wing.

And for Jace, you had banished him.

The worst part, you knew there was a good, fat chance you would care for the princeling. He was a kind man, a sweet man, and with a guiding hand, you could forge yourself the best husband for yourself as much as you can mould a great king and a wonderful father. Women's hands are ever carved to mould and prod men. We stand behind, a presence or a hand, an echo of power.

But your Jace had surpassed it all, and in the moons leading up to your present day, to giving him his heirs, two beautiful daughters, the promised full Valyrian colouring in the silver hair in Daenera, your eldest, the wide, violet gaze in Aemma— the name of his mother's mother, a request of him that you had kindly, graciously fucking agreed to — of course there is a part of you, the girlish, tender heart that you long thought you had buried to get here, would fall for the brown-eyed, wondrous man.

You sink deeper into the tub, sighing as you let yourself unravel—

When you feel it. A presence in your room. It's soft. Silent. Not a lot would feel as such, but as paranoid as you are, as you keep your spiders clean and pretty with your dewy-eyed webs— you know better.

Your mind runs with ideas on who it might be, and come to a few people. No true name rises. The Red Keep is flooded with spies and traitors. You test your luck, sitting up on the tub, raising an arm over the lip of it and flicking water with your fingertips.

"If you are here to kill me, I'm afraid it will be a lost cause."

He laughs, sardonic and edged and familiar, jetting a tingle down your spine.

Well. There's getting a calm bath.

"Perceptive as always, niece," he says, heavy footfalls approaching now that he has been caught. "I'm just here to say hello."

You raise your eyes, mouth curled but unsmiling at the man who acts as the biggest thorn to your plots. Daemon Targaryen has never fallen through your webs, on guard against your flatter, your push, or your flair. Of course, taking the position of his daughter might have forever burnt that road, but you would think he'd ease up just a little bit when his wife, the Queen, had warmed to you considerably.

Unlike your mother, you had never been hostile to your bitch of an elder sister. Just like your plots for Aegon and Jacaerys, and nodding along to thread your father had started but abandoned, foolishly thinking the realm would follow without him fully ensuring your sister's claim to the throne— you carefully maintained a polite farce with Rhaenyra.

Ultimately, this became a boon to you, as she had responded positively to your abrupt marriage to her son, even reminding her deranged guard dog of their own marriage. The cream to your lemon cake had been when you birthed Aemma, the Queen's most favourite grandchild thus far. When she was a babe, Rhaenyra was never far; almost, always holding your daughter, cooing at her cheeks, remarking her likeness to her namesake with pure fondness.

But Daemon Targaryen knew, in the deepness of his marrow, that there is something wrong with you.

"Hello," you answer primly. He laughs, leaning against the passage to your open balcony. "We could have had this elating greeting at fast, if you wish to break it with me and my own."

He scoffs, unable to hide his disdain at the thought. It breaks his stare of your naked visage. Men. "I would rather jump to the fighting pits, good daughter."

"How rude. Is that all?" You meet his gaze steadily, tilting your head. "If it is not obvious yet, good father, I am bathing."

An amused smirk. "I can see that." Lecherous fucking geezer. "No matter. I just have a... curious thought, a wonder I suspect you may be able to answer. See. Truly odd it is, for the keepers to alert me this morning that Sunfyre had taken a ride past the Hour of Owl." Your heart thuds in your ribcage and you do your best to keep your expression mildly irritated. "Not with one, drunken rider, but with another. It had taken them hours, only coming back when morning had already presented in the air."

He steps forward, slow, menacing, until he reaches the edge of your tub and crouches. Your gazes are still unmatched in height, defiant as yours might be.

"The distinct smell wafts them, a Keeper said, and one suspects that though one dragon left last night, two might have come back this morning for he had seen another fly away." His fingers dips into the water, swirling the steam without breaking eye contact. "I wonder if you know anything about it, darling niece of mine."

The mocking emphasis is not lost on you. If the Queen is the Realm's Delight, you were Darling of the Realm. A sweet, merry girl, the secondborn daughter of Viserys I who frequently fought for the plight of the small folk, who gathered friends of all kinds of lords and ladies no matter the standing of their houses to her own, visiting far lands and charming every person in any room. Who made any feast brighter, always sparkling, always the darling.

Less of a dragon, more of a fairytale.

You sit up, leaning, baring your breasts completely to him as you pull yourself up on the ledge he is crouched from. He leans back, only slightly, as you smile demurely. Sweet. Tart. On the edge of pulling his head and hitting it against the copper tub.

"I am unsure of what you suspect, or is accusing me of, kepus, uncle," you purr and there's a twitch in his mouth, a widen in his irises— men are so fucking simple — "I had been feeling down last night, as my husband, as you know, is beyond my reach at the moment as he rallies alliances for the good of the realm. My brother had simply offered to take me out riding, trying to quell my loneliness with an excitable flight I had never been afforded."

You tilt your head. "Even if there had been a dragon binded to my own, why why would I not regale the realm with news of my success? I have longed for a dragon of my own, but alas, I have not quite succeeded where most of the family have." You pout. His eyes flicker. "Mayhaps I am more Hightower than I am Targaryen."

A huff leaves his lips, the amusement in his smile arching to his dark, dark gaze. Before you can react, his hand had comes forward to hold your chin in a tight grip, your jaw aching soon enough at the fingers that dig against your skin, wanting to bruise, to break.

Though a tremble passes your body, you keep his stare, gritting your teeth as the pad of his thumb brushes your lips. Moments and desires thrum between a charged hatred.

The lust is twisted from wanting to fuck you to wanting to kill you. The line is not simple. Maybe that is your fate together.

But he can't. You are well too ingrained in his family now, loved by the people he cared about. You are untouchable. For now. This is a warning, waiting for you to stutter, to show your hand. Any show of your true intentions... he is more than happy to swing Dark Sister across your throat.

He releases you without another word, standing up and leaving through the front door, the door clicking shut.

You sink back into the bath, letting the water engulf you.

Your daughters are moons apart in birth, and there are only a few differences between them that people oft remarked they could be twins. Daenera is taller, spindly. Built like Aemond when he was younger. Her hair is spun moon and eyes of mullish blue. It reminds you of Daeron's eyes. You had named Daenera yourself, a gruelling birth that took the entire night. You promised Jacaerys he could name the second. He had chosen Aemma for a girl, Laenor for a boy.

Not a few moons later, you were with child again. Your husband pinked at the cheeks at the chiding from his family. When she cried into the afternoon sun—Aemma was born mid day, during a council meeting — he pain did not stop the laugh that came out of your mouth from the horrified expression from the Master of Coin as your water broke.

Aemma had a sweetheart face, cheeks much fatter than her older sister's, with a yellowish tinge to her hair, curlier too, reminding you of Aegon. And Aemma laughed more, her deep, violet eyes always half closed as she exploded in giggles and bright, sunshine happiness.

Sons they might not be, but you had given heirs for the throne. And for them, you would do anything to keep their futures intact. Bond with a dragon, face the Rogue Prince, upheave Winterfell. Anything.

You flounce to the nursery where you know the two would be, smiling sweetly at every person you pass as they bow in reverence. Most wore sights of confusion, their greedy eyes and wagging tongues drinking in the deep, emerald glisten of your gown.

It's an old dress, one you keep in the corner of your collection. It isn't as if you had forgo the colours of your mother's house, but playing court meant every movement, even the clothes you wear, can be meaningful. And since your marriage, your Jace liked you in Velaryon colours.

"A goddess come to bless," he gasped against your collarbone, keeping your legs high on his waist as he rutted into you before his teeth sunk on your skin. As newlyweds go, there is not a lot of teasing to be had for your husband to curl against you in a darkened alcove. Merely wearing his favourite colour on your skin has him panting like a dog. His favourite dress is a seafoam blue that dragged longer against the ground in a soft, almost-gossamer material with a silver belt.

Enticing him never took long, but you enjoyed the dance presented. You enjoyed the dark hunger that filled him until he grabbed you to take you because he just had to take you.

The fresh wound slices deeper as you imagine all the things Jacaerys is doing to the so called Sara Snow. The emerald green of your gown shimmers with your anger.

"Fucking bastards," you can't help but say aloud, nodding at the guards posted on the nursery as you hear the squeals of your daughter and the calm, even voice of your brother.

"Muña! Mother!" Aemma squeals, untangling herself from being pressed against Aegon's side as the children— Daenera and Jaehaera — cuddle around him, before running to you. Helaena is on the floor, entertaining baby Maelor. Your mother, hands twisting against her own, stands vigil by the window, staring far ahead.

You catch your secondborn, giggling as you pressed kiss after kiss on her face.

"I see everyone has started without me. Where is Jaehaerys?"

"You were late, sodjisto, aunt," Jaehaera grins gummily. Jahaera is only a year older than Daenera. Your daughters, five and a half and five respectively. "Jaehaerys is with kepus, uncle. They are training."

"Smart girl." You meet your brother's gaze, whose eyes had notably been staring at your dress, mouth turned down. "Why don't you three play with Helaena? I shall speak about Name Day gifts for your Uncle Joffrey for a bit, hm?"

As Aemma shrieks something about cakes, and Daenera dutifully kissing your cheek in greeting before she takes Jaehaera's hand, you turn to your brother and mother.

"Aemond?" you ask softly, keeping your voice out of earshot. Alicent shakes her head. You nod. "Good. We don't want him inciting a war before I have mine properly planned."

As the Dowager draws in a sharp inhale, Aegon grabs your hands, the worry pulled taunt in his eyebrows. "Are you seriously contemplating war, sister? Isn't there a better way to punish them?"

"What punishment does a man regale in?" you hiss, stepping close to him. "Or the Queen's heir for the bloody matter? When Aemond nearly killed Lucerys, and he confronted me as if I had ordered Vhagar to tear through his brother, I thought I had put to bed any doubts in our marriage. It seems that men stray, regardless. My daughters may be his heir now, but what is to say that bastard wildling he's found himself cock deep in produces a son? Will he shame me with a mistress? Or will he shame me with a second wife?"

Your mother's lips tightens, her fingers paling at how tight she is gripping her nerves.

"Bastard or not, if he takes her to wife, I will be nothing. Make that babe a son, and the realm will rally for it. Daenera is his heir. My daughters will not be forgone. I will not be pushed aside. This is mercy, brother," you say softly, tucking a stray curl behind his ear. "My last one. It requires time, moons, to unfurl. It requires seeding doubt and unfathomable inadequacy. Better if Aemond is none the wiser, Helaena the same. But I will need both of you for this to work. It is the only time I will ever ask. For me. For my daughters."

"And you will punish Winterfell with a war?" your mother asks, frown pulled deep. "That is the plan?"

"I will not. I won't do such a thing so blatant, mother, you know me better than that. But this is my last mercy, and it will be the last. For the next time he offends me so, I do not care if Rhaenyra feeds me to Syrax. I will put a dagger through his heart, heir or not."

The Prince Jacaerys comes back not a week later. Though he comes back to the same castle with the same occupants— your shiny new threads gleam. The stage has been set, a play ready to act. You had sent more spiders in the North, keeping a close eye to every blasphemy your husband has been enjoying in the absence of his duties, and as the rage in you quietly grew with each new whisper, your determination hardens.

You mark each indescretion. You keep a tally.

You count for each fall your blow will land on him.

Vermax lands with a screech and a heavy thump, your husband leaping off him with a grin on his face, matching the one you own, waving your arm joyously with Aemma in your arm and Daenera beside you, holding to your skirt as she grinned at her father.

Aemma wiggles under your hold, and you let Jace get close enough before you set her down, laughing, "Okay, okay!" Her laughter carries through as she scrambles like a bull to her father. A squeal peals out of her as Jace picks her up just in time and tosses her in the air.

"Want to meet kepa, father, sweet girl?" you whisper to Daenera, running a hand down her hair before she nods, breaking out into her own sprint, hugging her father as he greets them with laughter and kisses.

You let them have their time, and this, at least, eases your heart truthfully. A kind reminder that Jace adores his daughters.

You stay at the edge of the entrance, your too-wide grin softens into a smile. You were dramatic, nothing new about that, but even in the pale, pearl blue of your dress in silky, Myrish lace, the emeralds in your heavy, golden belt winks. Green ribbons twisted in your hair alongside fresh flowers. When the trio of your family treks toward you, silver-haired babes clinging to your dark haired prince, you serve a wink at the girls and they untangle themselves from their father while you stepped forward.

A choreographed dance, not giving him time to think. To pause.

Every step is calculated, every item on your body— the silk, the small seahorse that locks your dress behind you, the tint on your lips to the oil in your hair and body — is made to perform. You engulf him in you as if you want to suffocate his senses, your arms wrapping around him with sweet kisses pressing on his face, his neck.

Most in the dragonpit looked away, others, scandalously amazed and enchanted, watch as the princess is undeniably enthralled with her lord husband.

His laughter rumbles across his body, infecting your own, smelling of dragonback and crisp winds. You wonder if your nose is more heightened, you would be able to smell his whore in him, but you don't. It's just him. Your Jace.

Your body moulds against his as his arms tightens around you. When you lean back, you sweetly press a chaste kiss on his lips, grinning.

"What is this?" he huffs a laugh, meeting your doeful gaze. Your fingers curl around his chin, his cheek, idly tapping and touching as if you are committing so much newness to memory.

"Kostagon iā ābrazȳrys daor jaelagon zirȳla valzȳrys? Can a wife not want her husband?" you ask softly, pressing a few more kisses before sucking the last one just under his ear. His body shudders. You hide your smirk. "Skori ēza issare qrīdrughagon tolī bōsa? When he has been away too long?"

A yearning look tints your gaze from under your lashes, and you have to stifle the winning smirk as guilt pinches his face.

"My apologies, my wife. I did not mean to be away from you for long. From the girls." As his eyes flick to his daughters, your mask momentarily sharpens into clear distaste. The urge to dig your fingers into his eyes until he is bleeding and screaming under you is one you tamper with great distress.

Did not mean...

Did not mean to have a dalliance with another woman?

Did not mean to fall into bed with a fucking bastard, you insidious cunt, while I await here with your heirs?

Your anger thrums, nestled deep in your heart, it breathes. You school your face the moment he turns back to you, bringing your hands to his lips, kissing each finger with reverent tenderness. His brown eyes smoulder, rubbing your bare— irises widening — back.

"If you wish it, I can be on my knees for my apologies, my princess."

Your mouth curls. "I'm afraid that might have to be quite later, my prince."

"Huh?"

"The Dowager Queen hoped to congratulate you on your successful campaigning. Reaching as far as the North so frequently, we planned a feast for your return." Eyes shinning, you cup his face. You hope the guilt eats him raw from the inside out. Like worms. Like termites. Hungry, hungry, hungry. "We have never been more proud of you, I have never been more proud of you."

You laugh brightly, ignoring the way he squeezed you just a bit harder that mere second the same time his eyes tightened. "The moment I told the girls of it, they had begged to dance with you." Then you bit your lip, frowning slightly. "I... I understand if you are tired, 'tis a long journey after all, I did try to tell them you might want to rest, we can sneak you—"

"No, no, my heart, of course I would be happy to, I— I want nothing more." He brings you close, face disappearing into your neck. "Thank you. I love you."

You hum, carding your fingers through his hair. "As I love you."

For the rest of the feast, you dance just at the edges of his fingertips, ensuring that you permeated his sights and senses despite it. A game. A dance. When he thanks revelries who congratulate him, who ask him of his adventures, you proudly stand beside him, dutiful as the wife that you are, spearing him with compliments as much as you can. Hands squeezing his arm, your oils swallowing him with your smell.

When dinner came, you take chances massaging his thigh, sliding a salacious grin that had him blushing, ever so sweet, green— making you wonder what kind of fucking bastards do that he finds your attention so swallowing.

You don't let up.

Whenever he, in turn made a move, you sidestep, flutter a smirk, a wink; always escaping, letting him grow frustrated as the night went on.

Your one respite from taunting him had been when he danced with his daughters, making a gallant show of asking them, even Jaehaera. Giggles and spins, the ladies of the court fawn and coo.

Even now, you're making him to be the perfect man. The endearing husband, the wondrous father, the brilliant prince, the perfect lord.

To execute your plan, it must be made with a surgical precision. A slice that guts him to his knees, that breaks his spirit and quenches the whispering, wicked madness nestling with your ire. On another cheek, he must remain upright and upstanding, as to keep your daughters' future in perfect order.

You catch the domineering gaze of Daemon Targaryen, idle as he is, on the side of his distracted Queen, talking to a highborn lady. You don't look away as you toast him your cup of Arbour Red before you pucker your lips for a taste. Your eyes move to where your husband is already looking, flushed red and sweaty from all the dancing, your girls, preening and giggling around him.

You tilt your chin at him, a challenge in your gaze, before you slowly pull your lips away from your wine, stained red.

His throat bobs.

It will be a long, arduous game. Full of pitfalls and tightened webbing. One trip can kill you. But once the machinations are in order, once everything and everyone is in their proper places... oh, you cannot wait for the dance the dragons will make.

A flutter, a simpered footstep. Then a rustle of a dress as one bows.

"My lady," Dyanna greets behind you.

"Hm?"

"The spiders in the ice have met the pup in the snow."

"And?"

"The pup is not suspicious, in fact, they might go as far as to say that the pup is lonely. Though others largely understand her existence... no one likes a bastard."

You snort. "No, they don't, do they?"

"The wolf cares for the pup though, and is largely protective of his only sister."

"Hm. Complicated, but not impossible. Have Meera change the tone of my missive. A softer edge. Sweet but not overtly. Ensure the prerogative of politeness. Then have it sent to the Rookery. The proper channels."

You sigh, taking the edge of your braid and twisting through the ribbons your maid tangled between them. Tonight, you had elected Targaryen colours. A black dress akin to scales and a low, exposed back and dipping front, held together in red ribbons and silver chains. One that might be too on the nose, but the constant, feverish stares from your husband made it worth it.

"We have to ensure a good relationship with the Warden of the North, don't you think so?" You have not looked away from your husband since your maid came, and as he whispered something in Daenera's ear, nodding off to her grandmother with Aemma towed, he turned towards you, one stride after another.

"Precisely what I thought, milady."

"Go," you order her for the last time, giving her your cup, just before Jacaerys reaches you.

Game, set.

Worshipping you has always been something Jace excelled at. At the least, his cock was much larger than most, and without the preparation of his tongue and mouth, it burned. At most, he oft found himself holding your shaking thighs, your head and shoulders left on the bed as he feasted on you like a man starved, hungered for your nectar, the sounds you make, and the shaking of your body as you reached your peak on his tongue.

"J-Jace, please, I—" Your breath stutters, a hiccup escaping your mouth, but he is not letting up. On his knees as only a lordling can with his back straight, he is holding your thighs, your lower back, eating your cunny for the third time of the night.

As soon as he had reached you, he grasped your waist, whispering against your hair in a rumbled groan, "You are torturing me so, my wife. We leave. Now."

"Now?" you echoed, amused. "This is a feast in your honour."

"My honour is already hanging by a thread. The revelry will go on without us. I want to have my fill of you."

And fill he had. He didn't even wait to get you out of your dress before he had pushed your skirt upward, gone on his knees, and got his tongue inside of you.

Now, you are overwhelmed, overstimulated as you are hazy, gripping the wrecked sheets as your peak reached you once more. A strangled, breathy cry of his name falls between your lips as your back arched impossibly so, and instead of letting up, this seemed to fuel him harder, the muscle of his mouth working harder inside of your cunt, hands digging into your flesh to keep you steady.

It builds with a stimulation unending, and just as you're on the throes of your last high, it builds again, quick and fast this time, shuddering gasps of, "o-oh gods, g-gods, Jace!" is the last thing you are able to shout before your fourth peak breaks against the shudders of your last one, your wetness exploding, and you start crying before he lets up.

Your blubber becomes laughter, and he is soft as he lies you down, massaging your thighs as you twitched. He hovers above you, running gentle hands across your arms, kneading through skin, before he reaches your face. He's still in most of his clothes, his long white shirt and breeches, but his mouth is covered in your wetness before he wipes it, obscene in the prettiness of his face and messy locks from where you had tugged and grabbed.

He presses a gentle kiss to your cheek, so close to your body, all too tangled in your soul, and can feel his hard cock upright and wanting against your belly, but he pays it no mind. Concern mars his features as he brushes down your hair.

"Are you alright, my love? Too much?"

You shake your head, brushing your hand down his chest. "N-no, I am well. I just never did that before."

He smiles, kissing your closed eyelids before he brings you close to his chest, cuddling you deep. "You deserve all the pleasure I can give you," he says against your hair. "I have been gone far too long. Consider it my apology."

You hum, eyes open. "Apology for what? You were doing your duty, nothing more, ñuha zaldrīzes, my dragon." You feel him stiffen as you keep your voice soft, caring. "I understand duty far better than you. It is what I love most about you."

You look up, taking his chin between your fingertips as you stared at those warm, brown eyes. "You, who carries your honour like a shield and your duty like a sword. I feel as if the gods had blessed me a husband far better than I should have had for I know I do not deserve you."

"H-how can you say that? You are—" He swallows. "— You are the most excellent woman. The mother of my children. You... You are the one I do not deserve."

Your head falls back against his chest, gripping his shirt. Only by your teeth had you stop yourself from screaming.

You curdle, you keep, you poise.

"My love?"

But you pay him no mind, pushing him on his back as you straddle him, your hands working quick to unlace his breeches until his cock slaps against his stomach, end red and swollen. A sharp hiss falls from his lips as your hand tugs on it once. Twice.

He calls your name, spits it really, eyes blown with lust as he holds your waist, unsure if he should lift you off him or grind you against his aching cock.

"I want you inside me," you whimper, plead, feeling his cock twitch at your words, your false, yearning gaze. He mistakes the burned tears of anger in your eyes as unbridled want. "I have gone so long without your warmth, your cock, swelling inside me, your seed nestling deep, taking root—"

"Yes," he gasps, fingers digging into your doughy sides, pulling you up, moving you around whilst you grabbed his length and directed inside your wet, hot cunt inch by inch, filling you so thickly you can feel him in your throat. It takes time, patience and grit, but you're wet enough and you're determined. Once he's fully inside of you through a choked moan of your own, his neck arches, head thrown back. "Fuck! Yes, y-yes, there you are, my g-good fucking girl."

You move slow at first, taking him, bracing one hand on his knee, almost testing the feel him of back in the familiar contours of your cunt. Veins pop between each groan and choke that shudders through him whilst praise, your name, the possessive titles— my love, my wife, my princess — is spit in between.

When the heat tightens in your belly, you shift positions, placing both palms on his chest, and riding him without abandon, bouncing up and down as you watch with a sharp eye as his release builds. His hips move on their own, fucking up in you as you meet his thrusts with equal vigour, and it's delicious. It's heated. You grind your swollen folds against his mon and your cries make him thrust up harder into you, calling your name, denting your doughy hips.

You don't stop, your pleasure at the back of your mind, wanting him to unravel, to break— a final cry of your name dissolving into a choked moan, spilling his seed deep inside, the continuous snap of his hips digging it deeper into your womb.

But your last peak is still tightening, so you press a quick kiss on his chest, a bite really, before you continue to chase your own high, a hiss slipping his lips but moving your hips with his iron-grip, stutters of, "d-do it, reach your high, f-fuck! fuck!"— Your head throws back, nails digging his skin as your cunt clenches his cock in a vice grip, forcing his hips to snap up once more, twice, until you fall, slumping against him.

When he kisses the top of your head, murmuring words you ignore, you close your eyes.

Your plan is in motion. The missive will be sent to the Lord Stark, in pursuit of an innocent friendship. The spiders you have placed on the Northern bastard are set, and a dragon flies in Dragonstone with your bond in its blood.

Your Jace is home. He will fall in love with you all over again. His wonderful daughters and darling princess, he will regret the events that have transpired in the cold. In his head, he will make promises to do better, to be better, that whatever happened is a blip. A mistake that will not happen again. but you know, he will trip. He will wander once more.

But you will make sure that the next time he does so, he will regret it for the rest of his days.

Because it is not you who will burn Winterfell to the ground.

It will be him.

Your plan moves, your web is perfect.

Now, the spider waits for the idiot fucking flies to feed on.

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