#roach : it's not that fun anymore watching you squirm; that's not the kind of squirming i want to see you do

[natelia-aldelliz]

"What if I fade?"

Soap lifts his head from his journal, looking up at Roach who is eerily floating near the ceiling. The slow movements almost make him look like he's in water. Kind of ironic given the way he died.

"What do you mean?" he asks, confused.

"What if I move on, what if I disappear," Roach elaborates, refusing to meet his eye. "Not everyone is a ghost, right? We'd be overly crowded. The fact that we're not also means that not every ghost stays."

Soap forces his dry throat to swallow. He honestly didn't want to think about that. He still needs Roach, he probably always will, but he hasn't even told him that he - he takes a deep breath in to calm himself.

"I don't know how it works," he admits quietly, bouncing his leg absent-mindedly. "You're probably right, like most of the time. Even if I really want you to be wrong about that."

Roach finally looks towards him.

"Maybe I should move on," Roach whispers. "It's not healthy, Johnny. You have no idea the things I want, what I wish for, that I'll never get."

Soap doesn't stand up, just keeps staring into Roach's eyes.

"I think I might have an idea, actually," he whispers back. Roach flounders for a moment. Soap really wishes he didn't get that wrong. He's pretty sure Roach meant that he can't have Ghost, and he himself can't have Roach. So... It's pretty similar.

"I've been feeling less like myself recently," Roach insists, deciding to ignore that comment for now. "I find myself wishing one of you would die so I wouldn't be alone. I never thought like that before, I fear that I may have stayed too long, that I'm starting to lose myself."

And he looks scared. It's written on his features so clearly and it breaks Soap's heart.

"You're not alone," he swears. "I'm here with you, and I'll make sure you stay you, however I can."

Roach looks at him, examining his face, looking for... something. Whatever it is, he seems to have found it because he exhales through his nose like a very soft laugh and averts his eyes, almost... blushing? It's a bit hard to tell from the distance and his left cheek being covered in burns while his right is covered in freckles, but he's pretty sure his ears are red.

"You can't look at me like that, Johnny," he says almost coyly. "I can't do anything about it, it's not fair."

Soap's face is burning and his eyes are wide. Was he too obvious? Did Roach understand or is he joking?

They probably look stupid, both of them redder than a fire truck, avoiding the other's eyes, regretting their words. Or at least he supposes that it's what's happening, because he's sure not looking up.

"If it makes you feel better," Roach finally says, sounding like he's smiling, "you were right for once : I am right most of the time. Judging by your reaction, you did indeed have no idea what I want."

[strangeradventuresofp]

protect you (geralt x reader)

warnings : language !

requested by : @wellfuckmyexistence​ -  I know you are probs swamped with requests! But I would be hella interested in seeing you write some Geralt X Reader stuff! Maybe reader is also a Witcher? Maybe some cuddles? Maybe some angst? Some arguing??? Idk anything really tbh!

a/n : i tried to do all lol maybe this was too adventurous. i loved writing this! i had so much fun!! thank you so much, i hope you enjoy this<3333

“No, don’t you fucking dare ignore me!” You spat with clenched fists.

The feelings you felt at this moment couldn’t be determined. Your heart felt as if it were shattering in your chest, like fine crystal china breaking, tiny fragments remaining that were finer that dust. It felt like your heart had been punctured a million times over by thousands of tiny pins; it stings at first, but now it leaves you numb – not even remotely painful, just numb. Your entire body ached with such an overwhelming vigour. For the first time in your life you had felt exhausted. And it terrified you.

Being a witcher surely had it perks, enhanced agility, healing abilities, augmented strength. But it also came with a huge stigma, that was completely untrue. ‘Witchers can’t feel emotion’. Boy, if you had a coin for every time you had heard those words. It frustrated you beyond frustration. Sure, you were pretty much created to be soulless beasts, but that wasn’t the case. You were still a human, only with these superhuman abilities. You hated that you were looked down upon to be entirely emotionless. If anything, you thought that you felt emotions more. Especially the strong ones. Arousal, anger. Love. And that was exactly what had happened.

Geralt of Rivia, perhaps one of, if not the, most famous witchers about. He was easily distinguishable. His pale face and white hair made it obvious to tell that it was him. You had met him in an inn one night.

Apparently, you had caused a ruckus, which you didn’t. It was a perfectly normal reaction to a drunk stranger grabbing your arse. Needless to say, he was up against the wall with a knife against his neck within the same second. It gave you so much satisfaction to watch him squirm and hear him plead for his life, all the while hearing the others in the bar shouting foul things to you. You had heard worse, so you didn’t exactly care. That was when this huge man stood up from his solitary corner and made his way over to you. He leant into your ear, words rumbling from his chest.

“Let him go.” He commanded and you chuckled.

“And what if I don’t? You’re gonna stop me, are you?”

“Let him go.” He repeated, more demanding this time. Rolling your eyes, you forced your knife further against his throat before letting go. The man scampered off and you turned to face whoever the deep voice belonged to with a scowl.

When your eyes landed on him, you recognised him immediately, but you refused to acknowledge that you knew him. He looked confused, stepped back a little as if to get a better look of you.

“If you want to stare, why don’t we get a room?” You teased, a smirk pulling at your lips.

His face didn’t falter. “You’re a witcher.”

“Lucky guess. What do you want?” He looked at you, puzzled. “I doubt you came up to me to save me from a situation that I clearly wasn’t struggling in. So, I’ll ask you again. What do you want?”

“So hostile.” Geralt took a lock of your hair between his fingers before flicking it from your shoulder. A small smirk washed over his lips and you found yourself staring. It wasn’t long after that that you were pinned against the wall by his frame, his face in your neck and his fingers fumbling to get your clothes off of your body.

From that moment, you had travelled with him and Jaskier, the bard that named himself Geralt’s companion. It was nice. You enjoyed Geralt’s company, despite him being a complete brood most of the time. It was nice to have someone understand your struggles and how fucked up you were. You were both turned against your will. It felt good to have someone understand that. As for Jaskier, he was kind to you. You had told him many times that you liked his voice. He often invited you to sing with him, since you had admitted that you often sang to help yourself through witcher training. It led to him subtly changing the words to one of the songs he sang on your adventures; ‘Toss a coin to your witchers, O Valley of Plenty.’

You and Geralt had a very complicated relationship. There were feelings involved on your side and distant ones on his. He had shared your bed many nights, much to the complaint of Jaskier. You understood him and he understood you better than you knew yourselves. You loved him.

One night, after sharing your bed in an inn, he had disappeared into thin air. Neither you nor Jaskier had the slightest idea of where he went. A terrible feeling started to grow in your stomach the longer he did not return to you. Many nights you and Jaskier ate alone. You were not yourself. Jaskier noticed.

“Y/N—”

“I have this awful feeling, Jask, in my stomach. It feels like knots are being tied with my insides. I don’t know what it means; I have never felt it before.”

He let out a small laugh. “You’re worried for him.”

“I am not.” You urged with a scowl. But when you thought about it, the feeling began the morning you had woke up and not found him. You searched outside for Roach, but she was nowhere to be found either. It grew more every day that Geralt didn’t come back.

Now, he had returned, and you were angry. Angry was an understatement. It took everything in you not to bury your knife into his chest the moment he stepped through the inn door.

You slammed the door shut, enclosing the both of you inside the room that you had been living in for months on end. “Where did you go?”

“None of your business.”

“Where the hell did you go?” The poison in your voice would’ve made any other flinch. It pissed you off how Geralt didn’t seem to take you seriously when you were angry. He lay on the bed, just looking at you. Your eyebrows drew further together.

“I can’t believe I told you I loved you.” He avoided your gaze. And in that moment, suddenly everything made sense. The morning that you had awoken to find him missing, the night before you had tiredly let it slip that you loved him. “Is that why?

Did you even plan on coming back?” Quite quickly your eyes were pooling with tears, threatening to fall if he ignored you once more. The tremor in your voice was something that caught his attention and he sat up, looking at you with concerned eyes.

“It was a temporary trip. I came back.” Geralt showed no other indication of his feelings.

“I’m so stupid.” Your breathing was raggedy as you buried your head in your hands, begging for your tears to stay put.

“Witchers can’t feel.” A lie. Why was he trying to lie to you? He didn’t even know himself.

“Come on, Geralt. You and me both know that’s horseshit.” When he didn’t respond, you took the initiative and moved to the bedside table, snatching your knife from it and a small sack of money. Spinning around, you swung the door open, rushing down the inn stairs. You heard him call out your name, but you ignored him. As you tossed the money to the innkeeper, you opened the door that led you outside. Quickly, you mounted your horse, grabbing the reigns.

You felt a hand on your knee.

“Y/N, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Jask. I can’t stay here anymore, not with that brooding prick about. I’m sorry.”

“But Y/N—”

“I hope we meet again, Jask. You’re a good friend. One which I don’t deserve.” You gave him a half smile before riding off out of the village. Jaskier called your name with a frown as you set off.

~~~

You were a few days ride out of whatever village you were staying in before. It was dark. You unsure of what day it was exactly, and whether it was night or early morning. There was a fire to keep you warm and your cloak, but you used it as a pillow. You had tried the first night to sleep without something to support your head but woke up with a crick in your neck. Supposedly, spending months in an inn that had pillows had meant that you had built quite a tolerance to having one. In complete honest, you had no idea where you were. But you were away from Geralt of Rivia, and that was all that mattered. It was not easy to let the one you loved go, just like it is not easy to fall in love in the first place. This was something you had yet to learn, for Geralt was the first that you had ever truly loved. Sure, you had had harmless flings, but they are harmless. They mean nothing. It was supposed to be the same with him. It turned out to be a lot more harmful to your feelings that it had meant to be.

A snap in the wood behind you captured your attention from your thoughts and you stood, placing your hand firmly on the hilt of your knife on your belt, facing the danger.

“Who’s there?” You cautioned, teeth gritting whilst your eyes adjusted to the darkness beyond the trees. You waited. When you heard another noise to the left of you, you grabbed the lurking body, pushing it hard against a tree. At least you thought you did. The cold of the tree gave you goosebumps up your back and you blinked, attempting the make out the face of the shadow that held its blade against your throat. You stuck your chin up, giving them more access to the skin of your neck. If they were going to cut your throat, they best do it well.

But they released you.

“Shouldn’t you know better than to try to attack me?” The familiar voice made your heart ache.

“I didn’t know it was you.” Pushing his body further away from yours, you sat back down beside the fire, warming your hands by it and rubbing them together. You felt his eyes on you. “If you’re going to just stare at me, fuck off.” Just as you finished your sentence, you shivered. You let out a breath.

Suddenly a pair of large, strong hands wrapped themselves around your figure and pulled you back against a warm, firm object. You could feel his breath against your skin, and you frowned.

“Why did you come looking for me?”

“I was worried.” He said, and your heart fluttered in your chest, though your scowl deepened.

“I am the only female to have ever survived becoming a witcher, and you were worried for me?”

“Hm.” He mumbled.

You sighed deeply. “I can’t keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Being near you. Indulging in my fantasies.” A small chuckle left your lips. “I can’t be around you, Geralt. Not while I still care about you.”

He huffed. “I care about you.” Your heart skipped a beat and your breath hitched in your throat. He buried his face in the crook of your neck, pulling you closer into his chest, his arms firmly wrapped around you, as if he would never let you go.

“But, if that’s true, then why—”

“It was dangerous. I couldn’t risk you getting hurt.”

“So instead you left me for months on end after I admitted that I loved you?”

“I was protecting you.”

“You needn’t protect me, Geralt. Don’t you know this by now? I can hold my own. Stop trying to protect me.”

“Never.” A deep chuckle rumbled in his chest and you smiled. You were still angry at him, obviously, who wouldn’t be? “…Do you still…?”

“Do I still, what?” He cleared his throat awkwardly. You chuckled. “It’s not easy to fall in love. It’s harder to fall out of love.” Spinning yourself around in his arms, you looked at him.

“I love you.”

“Say it again.”

“I love you, Geralt of Rivia.” He hummed contently at your confession and slid his hand to the back of your neck. He pulled you forward, and you found that his lips were on yours. It wasn’t like the other times that you had shared kisses. This one had an innocence to it. You were being authentically unapologetically yourselves and you were happy to accept each other like that. Like lovers. You were in love with each other.

The two of you spent the night in the forest, cuddled against each other by the fire. And Jaskier was stuck at the inn, with no knowledge of where either of you were.

masterlist

[bennysiegcls]

I don’t usually post these kinds of things, but considering how quiet I’ve been on here lately I figured it wouldn’t hurt to toss this out there for the fun of it to say I’m still alive. Not much context besides a post-full moon wake up call with the werewolf oc I posted art of a bit back- I wanted to try and delve a bit more into his headspace after having a ‘bad night’. Hope you enjoy!

-

He doesn’t pass out immediately after the shift this time around. There’s no reprieve, no solace to take in an endless void of black. His bones crunch under the weight of his body forcing itself back into a smaller frame, muscles rippling and clenching and spasming until he hits the floor on his knees with a strangled yelp. His body jerks like a puppet on strings, bows his back as his insides writhe and squirm around below his flesh, and his jaw is barely locked into place before he lurches forward with the force of his stomach emptying itself all over the hardwood. 

He chokes, gags, retches again. It brings tears to his eyes; they sting like the back of his nose and his throat, and he claws his fingers over the floor and prays to whoever can hear him that it'll be over soon. 

A snap- that’s his femur- and a crunch- that’s his spine- and he gasps a rough, ragged noise and almost instantly goes limp. He just barely manages to catch himself on his elbow when he teeters to the side to keep himself from hitting the floor like a sack of rocks. His head hangs, bobbing with each stuttery pant that leaves his lungs, and he stays like that for a long while. Everything hurts. Even in the aftermath it’s nothing but pain, this vicious ache in his muscles that leaves him feeling like he’d been backed over by a steamroller. He swallows, coughs, and slowly brings a hand up to rub at his eyes.

It’s sticky and wet when he touches it to his skin, slips and slides across his forehead and it makes him pause and pull it back. 

Red. Squishing between his fingers, caked under his nails like he’d dug his hands into a chest and 𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘥. He breathes in- it’s shaky and weak and full of every ounce of trepidation he feels crawling over his skin like a hoard of roaches- and brings his fingers back to his face. Red. Red, red, red everywhere, smeared over his cheeks and dripping off of his chin. He can taste it behind his teeth underneath the bitter bile and acid on his tongue, and it nearly makes him heave again. The beast under his breast shivers excitedly, like it’s proud of what it’s done. 𝘓��𝘰𝘬 𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐'𝘷𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰, 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘥. It’s satisfied at the same time that it isn’t, and the blood in his mouth reawakens something inside of himself that nearly sends him into a frenzy again. He wants it. He wants it, fuck, he needs it, he-

He cuts off that train of thought with a pained noise in the back of his throat. Shut the fuck up. 𝘚𝘩𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘶𝘤𝘬 𝘶𝘱. 𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴. 𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙨? The question is asked like he doesn’t already know the answer. The monster that has become him agrees.

Moving his hand away to the floor, he pushes himself up to sit and finally, after blinking the haze out of his blurry eyes, takes a moment to look around.

It’s a mistake. But it’s unavoidable. No way to run and hide his head in the sand without the blinding reminder of what he’s done.

He’s not even sure he can call them bodies anymore. They’re too far gone, piles of viscera and gore with the occasional limb or tatter of clothing. It freezes him where he sits; he stares for a long, hard few minutes at the remains of a woman closest to his side, throat working, jaw trembling, eyes searching again and again like he’s waiting for the whole thing to be a fever dream. Some sick joke of the mind- any second he’ll awaken to the woods and go on with his life while the beast stays angry and caged below his skin. 

Seconds pass, minutes, maybe hours. The scene never fades. The smell of rot and innards and shit stings at his nose in an undeniable accusation of what he’s done. His whole chest hitches and catches when he tries to breathe in, and he tears his eyes away to the floor. There’s half of a face lying there, one eye and a bit of a nose staring up at the ceiling cold and foggy and blank. 

It’s blue. He doesn’t know why he notices it so vividly, but it crawls under his flesh and gets his nails digging into the bloodied floor beneath him. 

A turn of his head, and everywhere he looks there’s hunks of meat and bone and tissue. Two other bodies besides the woman, one male, one something he can’t make out. He sits there among them, a dead man surrounded by the dead, and he doesn’t get up until the rays of sun peeking in through the shattered windows have moved themselves halfway across the room.

He needs to- he needs to get clean. Shower. Something. He needs to focus on that, make it his one task to accomplish and occupy his mind. 

His eyes flicker back over the mess around him a few more times- he feels numb. Carved out and hollow and charred like a fire ate away at him from the inside out and left him with nothing. 

Maybe it’s shock. It’d be funny if it was, he thinks- he’s seen so much death, 𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 so much death, that it’s become as much of a part of him as the beast since before the beast had even made its presence known. But there’s something about the carnage that lies at his feet now. He doesn’t know what it is, what makes staring into what’s left of the eyes of these unfortunate strangers send shivers of unease up and down his spine. But he looks to them and it pangs something deep and raw in his gut- a type of guilt he hasn’t felt before. A monster of a thing gnawing away at what’s left of what he tries to call his humanity. Carve another chip off of that block, one more point on the side of the wolf.

He goes to heave himself upright, but the floor is stained with red and slippery and nearly sends him careening back onto his side; he catches himself with both hands and pants, shifts his legs and tries again. He gets to his feet on the second try, and he keeps his eyes ahead as he stumbles and trips off down the hallway in search of the nearest bathroom he can find. 

There’s splatters of blood painting the walls like some morbid facsimile of the art hung here and there in picture frames. He finds a fourth body with it’s belly missing and a hunk out of its neck on the floor in front of a door. The door leads to a closet when he opens it, so he shuts it back and continues on his way.

The bathroom finally reveals itself to him at the end of the hall. It seems to be the only room so far untouched by his bloodlust; the walls are a clean, crisp baby blue and the floor an unstained white tile. He ruins it the second he puts his foot through the doorway, leaving bloody prints of red in his wake. The door gets closed behind him despite him being the only living creature inside the house. He needs the space to himself. He needs somewhere to hole up for a while that doesn’t reek of death and corpses. 

His reflection in the mirror catches the edge of his attention when he moves to pass it by, and he pauses, backtracks and takes a moment to look over himself even when everything in him is screaming to let it rest- some part of him wants to calculate the damage. Maybe he just wants to look himself in the eye so he can remember who it is to blame.

He looks like shit. 

Eyes swollen and bloodshot, ringed with dark circles of purple and blue. His skin is sallow and pale beneath the exterior of red; he looks like he’s been fucking bathing in it with the way it coats his flesh like it belongs there. He stares at himself. Maybe it does. 

A droplet beads at his hairline, slinks down the side of his face until it falls off of the edge of his chin to land against the rest of the blood caked to his chest. He watches it, and all he can think about is the rivers of red flowing out of the throat of that woman as she screams- he can see it plain as day, can feel the warmth of her body as he rips into her like a paper bag, and the man stands behind him and screams and cries bloody murder before he’s silenced with a pair of jaws to the jugular. Jax tries to swallow, then hunches over and empties whatever is left of his stomach into the sink.

The noise of the shower echoes against the walls when he finally heads over to flip the switch. He doesn’t step in until it’s scalding enough to sting his hand when he slips it under the spray to test the temperature, and he lets the fire consume him, ducks his head under the cascade and burns alive. It’s the only way he can find to wash off the feeling of the gore glazed over his skin enough to live with it; it never disappears, not truly- it stains him with a permanence like the neverending shooting pain through his bones- but it wipes away the outer layer. Fools his brain into thinking if no one can see the visible remains of what he is that they’ll never think to look deeper below the surface. 

Jax’s eyes find the floor, tracking the way the red drizzles out of his hair and off of his shoulders and chest and swirls away down the drain. He reaches up and runs a hand over his head, shakes it out, and flecks of flesh and bone come away and fall to his feet to join the rust brown on its way down the sewer pipe. 

Screaming- it bubbles up in his ears and he moves his head side to side like a tired old dog, trying to knock the memory of it out of his mind to no avail. He closes his eyes and sees the terror on her face, so he opens them up again and looks at his toes. They flex, and each movement pushes more blood out from where it’d been caked between them. He looks away. 

Tipping his head back, he lets the water fall over his torso while he reaches a hand up to rest over his eyes. Something wells up in his chest- shrieking, crying, 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦, 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦, 𝘨𝘰𝘥, 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦- 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘱! 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘱! 𝘗𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦!- and he locks his jaw like a dam against the emotions that threaten to swallow him whole. 

He digs his fingers into his eyes. His teeth chatter before he clenches them to silence it. A deep breath gets sucked into his lungs, and when he finally releases it a whimper comes out along with it and his face crumbles for a split second before he moves his hand and pushes his face into the spray. It’s convincing enough to his mind that he’s drowning for a moment that anything other than blank panic gets pushed to the side to deal with later. He uses the time to clean the rest of what he hasn’t yet- scrubs his hands over his body and through his hair in quick motions until the water running down to his feet is clear.

There’s a towel hanging on the rack beside the shower, and he grabs it once he shuts the faucet off and buries his face in it for a beat before moving to dry off the rest of himself. It’s all on autopilot. His body moves but he’s not really there, gazing with unseeing eyes at the wall while he drags the towel over his arms. His mind keeps feeding him flash images of the night before. He’s stopped his futile attempt to fight them off; he lets it happen instead. 

The towel ends up on the floor- he’s struck with the vague realization he hasn’t got any clothes to change into, and he briefly considers seeing if he can find something in one of the rooms before he leaves, but he shuts the idea down before he can think on it for too long. He’s in the middle of a forest. No one will see him here. He’s done worse than a naked trek through the woods to get back to wherever the hell he parked his truck.

No, the hardest thing he has to do now is make it down this goddamned hallway. 

He’s procrastinating it, he knows this. The second he opens that door everything he’s been trying to pack away inside becomes unavoidable. He gazes blankly at it for a good minute, eyes the doorknob like it’s liable to bite him if he reaches a hand in its direction. He does it anyway; it doesn’t bite him in the end, but the smell of death that hits him like a slap to the face when he eases the door open nearly sends him reeling back and slamming it closed again. He twitches his nose and steels himself, tenses his whole body like he’s preparing for a fight, and walks forward.

Eyes up, keep your eyes up. Ignore the walls, ignore the squish beneath your feet, ignore the body on the floor. He steps over it, and that’s his first mistake; his foot glides a bit on the floor and on instinct he tips his head down to look at it as he steadies himself with a hand on the wall. 

He meets their eyes; it’s always the goddamned eyes, every fucking time. The one piece that the beast always seems to leave behind, like it wants him to see them when he wakes the morning after. It wants him to know what he’s done in a way he can’t easily brush aside. They bore holes into his skin, burning themselves like a brand into his brain, and that’s the crack that starts the slow decline of the walls of steel and concrete he’d tried so hard to build around himself. He clears his throat, bites his tongue, and walks on.

His feet stop him in the living room again. He tries in vain to get them to move, to carry him forward, but there’s an invisible barrier that keeps him at bay. 

He parts his lips on an inhale that catches and sticks to the inside of his throat. He’s still looking forward, resolute and stalwart in his stubborn attempt to keep himself together, but his eyes are traitors and seek out the most ruthless betrayal- they slip undaunted from the doorway ahead of him, slowly but surely until they land on a hand on the ground. It reaches for something it’ll never touch, and Jax’s gaze traces it back to the mess of a body it’s attached to. The crack grows larger, eats away at his resolve. 

His hands flex at his sides, and his trigger finger is going wild, jumping and twitching without his say so in the same way his head, and then his whole body, starts to turn and move and shift with restless, almost disbelieving energy. 

It’s easier to see them all spread out when he’s stood up like this. The damage he’s done, claw marks in the wall and tearing the floor to shreds, claw marks in their flesh where the beast- where 𝘩𝘦- wouldn’t stop digging even after they were long dead. He scrunches up his face in an aborted effort to clamp back the stinging behind his eyes- the emotion chokes him like a noose, and all at once the hollow void in his stomach is flooded with things he didn’t even know he could feel, building and building and building until he’s fit to burst with it all. 

He wonders for a moment if he could. If he’d join them on the floor in a bloodied up pile of guts and gore. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘧. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵. 𝘚𝘵𝘦𝘸 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘵 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘥.

He coughs out a little noise that tries to make itself a cry- he thinks about the worlds he’s ended, the future plans he’s snapped in half, the hopes and ambitions he’s crushed, and his walls tumble and break around him before he can get on his knees to try and build them up again. 

The first tears down his cheeks do him in for good; once they start they can’t stop, and Jax raises his arm, presses the back of his wrist to his mouth to try and muffle a sob. 

It doesn’t do much to help- he steps to the side, turns, lands his feet in a puddle of crimson and turns again. It closes in on him on all sides, inescapable, and he surrenders himself to it. Let’s the guilt eat him alive until he’s nothing but skin and bones and endless, echoing sorrow. 

He screams. 

He sobs. 

He ends up on his knees, clutching the ankle of the woman with whiteknuckled hands as he dips his head and wails. The beast wails with him beneath his bones- they cry together, for who he used to be, for what he is, for the lives he’s ended, for the lives he knows he’ll end, the lives he’ll come to ruin and wreck. They cry for the hollow, never ending ache inside of them that can never be filled, they cry for the pain that racks over their body and leaves them shaking like a dog in the cold. They cry from exhaustion. He’s tired. 

He’s so, so tired. 

His body jerks and heaves with his sobs, tears dripping off of his nose and his chin to mix with the blood on the floor. It almost feels like a violation. That his grief dare get mixed with their sudden demise. 

He stares blankly at where they land as they continue to fall, making soft ripples only to be swallowed by red. And he stays like that for a long time. Until his throat goes raw and his voice goes hoarse, and the numbness returns to take its place in the pit of his stomach like it’d never left. 

He pants and he swallows and he pants again, finally unlatching himself from her leg and taking a beat to sit there before he fumbles and stumbles upright. His eyes flicker over the room once more. 

He takes it in, ingrains it into his memory. There’s consequences for a thing like him. 

And standing here, he knows, he must reap what he sows in spades.