#shay one shot

[s0larine]

𝐀 𝐃𝐀𝐍𝐂𝐄 𝐀𝐓 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐀𝐒𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐃𝐄 [𝐒𝐇𝐀𝐘 𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐂 𝐗 𝐅! 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐄𝐑]

summary ☩ The reader, an undercover Assassin, goes at a high-society masquerade ball to gather information about Templars and unexpectedly meet her former friend, Shay, now fully allied with the enemy. Neither can afford to reveal their true identities in such a public place, but they are drawn to each other through the anonymity of the masks.

[a/n] ☩ [y/f/n] means your fake name because baby we’re playing undercover tonight~ reminder that english is not my mother tongue. UNEDITED

word count ☩ 3,979

pairing ☩ shay cormac x f! reader

content warnings ☩ slight sexual tension, female reader, enemies to lovers, mentions of shay's deflection, fluff, assassin! reader, templar! shay, reader in a gown, shay being a man, shay having a long time crush on reader, mutual pining, ...

　　　New-York, June 1756

“Everything is in order. You can enter, Lady [y/f/n].”

The red coat handed you your invitation. As you entered the huge place, your eyes wandered around you, detailing every nook and cranny, taking in and memorising the layout of the area. The grand hall was indeed a spectacle of opulence. Crystal chandeliers sparkled above, casting a golden glow over the sea of masks that danced and mingled below. Laughter, the clinking of glasses, and the soft strains of violins filled the air, creating a scene that was far removed from the dangerous world you were familiar with.

Your mission tonight was simple: gather information, and your mentor was clear about your purpose here; not to engage at any costs. The Templars were holding this extravagant masquerade in the hopes of attracting allies from high society, and you had been sent by the Assassin Brotherhood with—of course, a fake name—to blend in, to listen, to learn. The gown you wore tonight was unlike anything you were used to—luxurious, intricate, and adorned with a mask that glittered in the candlelight. Your hair was gathered in a half bun and some golden hair clips adorned them. In order to pass for a member of high society, you even took the time to put on a jewellery set; a necklace, dangling earrings and a few bracelets and rings. But beneath the facade of wealth and elegance, your blade was hidden, strapped to your left thigh under your luxurious gown, ever ready. If I'd been born as a man, hiding it and having simple access to it would have been easier, but there's nothing more I can do in this puffy dress… you thought. 

As you walked amongst the other attendees, getting as close as possible to people whose clothes meant something to you, such as high-ranked Templars, you noticed a very particular group of men at the other side of the hall. Among them were Colonel George Monro and Sir William Johnson, both members of the Colonial Rite of the Templar Order. Your eyes fell on their silhouettes with their recognisable clothes from beneath your own mask but quickly continued their search. And who else…

What you hadn't expected was to find him here.

Shay Cormac stood with the group of men, dressed sharply in a black tailcoat with accents of silver and red. His mask, a sleek black piece that covered half his face, did little to hide the sharpness of his features or the air of authority he carried. His eyes, however, were unmistakable. The same stormy brown eyes that had haunted your thoughts since the day he defected from the Brotherhood.

You hadn't seen him in years, but the memories were fresh, the betrayal still raw.

But there was one detail that made your blood run cold: the young man's eyes were already riveted on you. When has he ever noticed you before? Your heartbeat quickened and you finally looked away, turning to a passing servant. You picked up a glass of champagne as he passed by you and began to sip the golden liquid, your eyes frantically searching for a place to rest in order to pass for an innocent. Maybe it was just a coincidence... No, no, he's far too clever to think that I'm just a random young woman...

You risked looking back up at the group of men he was with, but he had already disappeared. Your breathing quickened and you turned away from his previous location towards a random group of people, just to pass for a guest sympathising with others. Your heart raced as you opened your senses; you knew he was coming for you and you couldn’t do anything but pray he hadn’t recognised you yet. This was supposed to be just another mission, a simple infiltration, but now everything felt different. Could you approach him without giving yourself away?

A voice behind you jolted you from your thoughts, soon followed by a delicate 

"Would you care to dance?"

You freezed. A delicate palm soon rested on the small of your back and another one entered your field of vision from the right, at the level of your own right hand. Closing your eyes, you inhaled sharply before turning; you found Shay standing before you, his right hand still extended and a dangerous smile playing on his lips. Your heart skipped a beat once again at your inattentiveness. You needed to be more careful around him… The recognition in his eyes sent a chill down your spine. He definitely knew. He had seen through your disguise, just as you had seen through his.

But you couldn't afford to let him know the depth of your awareness, not here, not now.

"Of course," you replied, your voice steady despite the tension that coiled in your chest, giving away your champagne glass to a passing servant. You placed your right hand in his left, feeling the warmth of his grip, and he led you onto the dance floor.

The music swelled around you as Shay pulled you close, one hand resting firmly on your waist, the other holding your gloved hand in his. His touch was confident, and his movements were smooth as he guided you effortlessly through the steps of the waltz. The crowd around you faded into the background, your focus narrowing to the man before you.

"You've been watching me, [y/n]," Shay said softly, his lips barely moving as he leaned in. His tone was teasing, but there was an edge to it, a hidden challenge.

You met his gaze, your mask hiding the flash of defiance in your eyes. "I could say the same about you, Shay."

He chuckled, the sound low and dangerous. "It's been a long time, hasn't it?"

"Not long enough," you whispered with clenched teeth, your voice sharp despite the graceful steps of the dance.

Shay's grip on your waist tightened slightly, which made you tense, a silent acknowledgment of the tension between you. "You always did have a way with words. Tell me, are you here for pleasure, or are you working tonight?" You did not fail to notice his gaze sliding down your neck to the start of your cleavage, checking you out shamelessly. 

Your cheeks flushed, feeling like a lamb trapped in the fangs of a wolf. You felt the heat of his breath as he spoke, the proximity making it difficult to keep your composure. Every instinct told you to draw your blade, to end this now, but the crowd was thick, and the consequences of a public confrontation were too great.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" you replied, your lips curving into a smile that didn't reach your eyes.

He twirled you effortlessly, the skirts of your gown swirling around you as you spun, and when you came back to him, his hand was lower, lingering just above the hidden blade at your thigh. He didn't touch it, but the threat was clear. He knew exactly where it was. Your blood ran cold at the thought that he had found your dagger.

"Careful," he murmured, tilting his head, his voice a soft warning. "This is a delicate dance we're doing. One misstep and it could get… messy."

From being riveted on his chest, your eyes looked back up into his own, the familiar storm clouds swirling with something darker, something more dangerous. "You think I'm afraid of a little mess?"

Shay's lips quivered into a smirk, and for a moment, you saw a glimmer of the man you once knew, the Assassin and friend who had fought beside you. But that man was gone, replaced by the Templar before you.

"You should be," he whispered, pulling you closer as the music slowed.

The world around you seemed to fall away, the crowd, the mission, the masks—all of it dissolved as the tension between you reached a boiling point. The weight of your shared history hung in the air, unspoken but palpable. You had fought side by side once, and had trusted him with your life. And then he had betrayed everything.

But here, in this moment, with his hand on your waist and your bodies moving in sync, the lines between enemy and ally blurred. You hated him, you were sure of that, but the way your heart pounded in your chest told a different story. There was something more, something you had never fully understood.

"Tell me, Shay," you said, your voice barely more than a breath as the music began to wind down. "Why did you do it? Why did you turn your back on us?"

Shay's expression darkened, the playful smirk fading as his eyes grew hard. "You wouldn't understand, [y/n]."

"Try me," you insisted, your grip on his hand tightening.

For a moment, he hesitated, his gaze searching yours. And then, just as the final note of the waltz echoed through the ballroom, he leaned in, his lips brushing against your ear.

"Because sometimes, the Brotherhood is wrong."

With those words, the music ended, and Shay released you, stepping back with a final, piercing look. He bowed slightly, a mockery of the formal dance, and then turned, disappearing into the crowd.

You stood there in the middle of the dance floor, watching him go back to his Templar associates. You were unable to move, your heart racing, and your mind spinning. His words echoed in your ears, and for the first time, you weren't sure where your loyalties truly lay.

As the night wore on, you realised that this masquerade was more than just a mission—it was the beginning of a far more dangerous game. One that you and Shay Cormac were destined to play, whether you liked it or not.

The evening continued around you, but it felt as though you were standing still. The swirling skirts, the clinking of glasses, the murmurs of conversation—they all faded into background noise as your mind raced with Shay’s parting words.

“Because sometimes, the Brotherhood is wrong.”

Your hand unconsciously grazed the hidden blade at your thigh, the familiar weight suddenly feeling heavy. Shay had betrayed everything you once stood for. He had walked away, abandoned the Creed, and joined the very enemies you had sworn to fight. And yet… there was a flicker of doubt creeping into your thoughts, a doubt you hadn’t allowed yourself to feel in years.

The Brotherhood had given you purpose, structure, a cause greater than yourself. But now, for the first time, you wondered if Shay’s defection wasn’t just a selfish act of betrayal. His eyes when he spoke had held something you hadn’t expected: conviction.

You shook your head, banishing the thought. No. I won’t question the Brotherhood. Not now, not because of him.

But that resolve felt brittle.

You caught a glimpse of Shay again through the crowd. He had made his way toward the far end of the ballroom, mingling with Templar officials, exchanging pleasantries. But his eyes kept darting back to you, just as yours did to him.

What was his game?

Your mission was still clear. Gather information. You weren’t here for personal matters. You couldn’t afford to let Shay’s presence distract you. But despite your attempts to stay focused, your thoughts kept wandering back to that dance, to his touch, to the way his breath had brushed against your ear when he whispered those final words.

Suddenly, a hand landed lightly on your shoulder, jolting you from your reverie.

“Care to join me for a drink, my lady?” The voice belonged to a man in a silver mask, a high-ranking Templar based on the insignia on his sleeve. His eyes were sharp, watching you with interest. It was clear he had noticed your distraction.

Forcing a smile, you nodded, reminding yourself of your mission. “Of course.”

As you followed him to a quieter corner of the room where the drinks were principally gathered, you could feel Shay’s gaze burning into your back, but you didn’t look back. You couldn’t. The Templar was speaking now, sharing something about the recent victories they’d secured in the colonies, but you weren’t really listening despite the purpose of your mission tonight. Your mind was still with Shay, turning over everything he had said—and everything he hadn’t in a way. After a few minutes of absent-mindedly drinking champagne and listening to the man recount his false prowess, you finally excused yourself from the conversation, your head buzzing with alcohol and of course the weight of your conflicting emotions. You were a little hot and needed air, away from all those rich folks.

You headed for the balcony overlooking the formal gardens of the period building. Stepping out onto the balcony, you took a deep breath of the cool night air, leaning against the marble railing.

It wasn’t long before you heard the sound of footsteps behind you. Opening your senses once again, you closed your eyes and you instantly knew who it was.

“You always did like your quiet moments,” came a familiar voice.

You didn’t turn around immediately, your hands tightening on the railing as Shay approached. You could feel his eyes boring into your back, or even your bum, and the tension rolling off him.

“I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” you said, still facing the darkened city beyond. “You’ve made your point. Or was there something else you wanted to say?”

Shay didn’t reply immediately. Instead, he stepped beside you, his presence warm and solid in the cool night air. You could feel him watching you, studying you, but you refused to meet his gaze.

“Tell me,” he said finally, his voice low and measured, “do you truly believe in everything the Brotherhood teaches? Or do you just follow because that’s all you’ve ever known?”

The question hit harder than you expected. You had spent years training under the Creed, living by its rules, carrying out its missions without question. But standing here now, with Shay beside you, that certainty felt… shaky. He wasn’t just talking about betrayal; he was challenging everything you had built your life around.

“Why are you asking me this?” you shot back, turning towards him and leaning against the fence that was now behind you. The action made the dark-haired man's eyes slide towards your protruding chest, and they stopped there for a few seconds before returning to rest in your eyes. You frowned slightly, licking your lower lip, you decided to ignore his gaze and continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. “You’re the one who abandoned us. Who betrayed your brothers and sisters. You walked away, Shay. And now you want to question my loyalty?”

His jaw tightened, but his eyes never wavered. “I didn’t betray the Brotherhood. I saw the truth. The Assassins… they’re not as righteous as you think. They preach freedom, but they’re willing to sacrifice anyone who gets in their way.”

You inhaled sharply, your chest suddenly pressed against the corset of your dress. You opened your mouth to argue, but the words died on your lips. There was a certain fire in his eyes, a depth to his conviction that shook you. He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t manipulating you. He believed what he was saying.

“I followed the Creed because I believed in it, just like you do, [y/n],” seeing that you didn’t speak, Shay continued, his voice steady. “But I couldn’t ignore what I saw—the innocents we put at risk, the people we hurt for the sake of an ideal. The Brotherhood is supposed to protect people, not destroy them.”

You felt a pang of anger, but also of confusion. Shay wasn’t wrong about some of the darker sides of the Assassins’ work. You had seen it yourself—the collateral damage, the grey areas where right and wrong blurred.

But you had always trusted the Creed to guide you, to show you the path forward.

“And what about the Templars?” you countered. “They’re no saints either, Shay. You think they’re any better?”

“I don’t think they’re perfect,” Shay admitted. “But they offer something the Assassins never could—order, stability. A chance to build a world where people don’t have to live in fear of chaos.”

You clicked your tongue and turned away again, staring out at the city while shaking your head, your heart pounding in your chest. You couldn’t believe what he was saying. Part of you wanted to reject everything he was saying, to cling to the teachings of the Brotherhood. But another part of you—a part that had been growing ever since Shay’s defection—couldn’t ignore the doubts.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” you asked quietly, your lips quivering with sadness.

Shay’s silence was heavy before he finally spoke. “Because you deserve to know the truth. And because I don’t want to lose you to the same blindness that I was caught in for so long.”

His words were raw, unguarded. For a moment, you weren’t an Assassin and he wasn’t a Templar. You were just two people standing on the edge of something far bigger than either of you.

Your heart ached with the weight of it all—your history with Shay, your loyalty to the Brotherhood, and the undeniable pull you felt toward him. The night had begun as a mission, but it had become something far more dangerous. The real question was: what would you do now?

Slowly, you turned to face him a second time since you stepped on the balcony, the air between you charged with everything unsaid.

“What happens now, Shay?” you breathed, the question hanging heavy in the air.

Shay’s eyes held yours, the storm of emotions mirrored in his gaze. He stepped closer, his voice low but resolute. “Now, we decide what side of history we’re on. Together.”

The weight of Shay’s words lingered in the cool night air, settling between the two of you like an invisible barrier. His eyes held yours, intense and searching yet soft, as if he was trying to read the turmoil inside you, to understand the emotions you weren’t sure you could admit to yourself.

“Together?” you echoed, your voice softer than you intended.

Shay stepped even closer, his tall frame casting a shadow in the moonlight, towering over your gentle but firm and well-trained one. The tension between you shifted, no longer just the push and pull of conflicting loyalties. There was something else—something that had always been there, beneath the surface, but never acknowledged.

The air around you seemed to thicken as he closed the distance. His gloved hand reached up slowly, hesitating for a moment, before gently lifting your mask. The gesture made you swallow your saliva in order to get rid of the lump that was starting to form in your throat. The intricate piece slid off, exposing your face to the night’s cool breeze. His gaze softened as he studied you, no longer the dangerous man who had left the Brotherhood, but someone familiar—someone who had once meant more to you than just a fellow Assassin.

“I never wanted to lose you,” Shay murmured, his voice lower now, more intimate as his eyes gazed at your opened lips. “Even after everything, I never stopped thinking about you.”

His confession sent a jolt through you, and you had to look away, your heart pounding in your chest. The years of anger and betrayal clashed with the warmth that was blooming inside you now, a warmth you hadn’t felt since before Shay had turned his back on everything you believed in.

“Shay, we’re on opposite sides now,” you whispered, though even as you said it, the words felt hollow.

He didn’t back away. Instead, his hand moved to your chin, gently guiding your face back to meet his eyes. “Does it matter? Here, right now, do sides really matter?”

Your breath caught in your throat. This was dangerous—not just because of who he was, but because of what you felt for him, what you had always felt. His hand moved from your chin to cup your cheek, his touch surprisingly gentle for someone so dangerous, so conflicted.

“I couldn’t let you go then, [y/n],” he continued, his voice barely above a whisper. “And I can’t now.”

The vulnerability in his words, in his gaze, disarmed you completely. All the questions, the doubt, the anger—it melted away in the warmth of his touch. For so long, you had convinced yourself that you hated him, that what he had done was unforgivable. But now, standing here, feeling the heat radiating from him, you realised the truth: you had never stopped caring for him.

Your breath hitched as he leaned in closer, his lips just inches from yours. You could feel the heat of him, the steady rise and fall of his chest. Your heart pounded in rhythm with his, the magnetic pull between you undeniable.

“I’ve never stopped thinking about you either,” you admitted, your voice barely more than a breath as your gentle eyes switched from one to another of his and sometimes stopped on his chapped lips for no more than half a second to switch back to his eyes.

That was all the invitation he needed.

Shay closed the distance between you, his lips capturing yours in a kiss that was slow and deliberate, as though he wanted to savour every second. His hand on your cheek slid to the back of your neck, pulling you closer, deepening the kiss. The warmth of him, the way his lips moved against yours, sent a shiver down your spine. The world around you disappeared—the masquerade, the mission, the war between Assassins and Templars. None of it mattered. Not now.

Your hands found their way to his chest, feeling the solid strength beneath the fabric of his coat, and absent-mindedly stroked the Templar sigil on his torso. His other arm wrapped around your waist, pulling you flush against him, his body warm and solid against yours. The kiss deepened, the slow burn of passion igniting into something more urgent, more desperate. Years of unspoken tension, of denied feelings, seemed to pour into that kiss, both of you trying to make up for the time you had lost.

When you finally broke apart, both of you were breathing hard, your foreheads resting together as you tried to catch your breath. His thumb gently stroked the side of your neck, a soft, intimate gesture that made your heart race even faster.

“I don’t care about the sides anymore,” Shay whispered against your lips, his breath warm. “I care about you.”

His words sent a wave of emotion crashing through you. You knew it wasn’t that simple—nothing ever was in your world—but for this moment, it felt like it could be. Like the war, the betrayal, everything else could fall away, leaving just the two of you.

“I don’t know if we can ever go back,” you whispered, your voice shaky with emotion. “After everything that’s happened…”

Shay’s hand tightened around your waist, pulling you even closer. “Maybe we don’t need to go back. Maybe we can start something new.”

You directed your gaze to meet his own eyes, seeing the same conflict mirrored in his eyes—the pull of duty against the pull of his heart. But there was something else too: hope. Hope that maybe, just maybe, you could find a way forward together.

“I don’t know what happens next,” you admitted, chuckling softly, your fingers tracing the edge of his collar.

Shay leaned in, pressing a soft kiss to your forehead. “Neither do I. But we’ll figure it out. Together.”

You closed your eyes, letting yourself savour the moment, the feel of him against you, the warmth of his embrace. For now, that was enough.

And maybe, just maybe, it could be enough for whatever came next.

　　　PART 2 in writing...

© solarine. i do not allow my works to be copied, translated, modified, adapted or published on other platforms without my permission. thank you for your attention.

dividers by @/thecutestgrotto

[lunarmoves]

this one definitely wins for longest fic title i've ever written

[autistic-shaiapouf]

Going through the biggest most life changing move in my life and I can't stop thinking about the trees

[carissimipaixao]

so, i watched the first season of hannibal

i'm in hehe

[hotchstead]

Massage - Leslie Shay

Requested: yes

Word count: idk

Warnings: none?

Masterlist

Can you stop moaning? I’m trying to help you relax but you’re making it hard for me to concentrate.” “Sorry, your hands just work a little too good.” “I’m going to pay for a masseuse next time if you keep doing this.” [shay]

Working at the fire station meant long hours, heavy lifting, pulling, pushing. And basically just pushing yourself to your limits whenever you were on shift. And being at 51 just made it worse.

The house of all houses. Crazy calls. Crazy people. It was like Chicago+ when it came to the type of incidents your team got called to. And to add to that, being on squad which takes care of all the unique and extra types of rescues?

You were achy. Very achy. Especially after the call today which included a little boy and a vat of chocolate and a very precise and awkward lifting position. Luckily though, you had a loving girlfriend.

“Baby?” You’re voice was soft as you made your way into the bedroom where she was laying, looking at something on her phone.

Leslie shay was probably one of the best paramedics you’d ever seen. Since the day she joined 51 you knew she was gonna fit in instantly. And she did, meshed with the team perfectly and it didn’t take long for you to get a big huge crush on her.

She hummed questionably, dropping her phone the second she saw you, giving all of her attention in your direction. “Do you think you could rub my back? It hurts like a bitch after today.” You muttered, crawling onto the bed.

Of course she nodded, a smile pulling onto her lips, “Sure, c’mere.” Leslie shifted out of the way, patting the mattress. She even smoothed out the blanket, sliding a pillow so you could rest your head against it.

As soon as you were laying in the right spot she moved to sit on your lower back, sliding her hands up your spine with just the right amount of pressure. “Think it would feel better without your shirt in the way?” Her tone innocent, as she leaned back to pull at it.

You shifted up, pulling it off before laying back down, able to feel Leslie’s usually cold but now slightly warm hands on your skin.

“Damn baby, your back is tight as hell.” She muttered, kneading her palms into the muscle behind your shoulder blade. Slowly she twisted her hands, pressing her thumbs into your skin, hitting one of the worst spots.

A slight moan left your lips, cheeks going red as you tried to keep your face hidden, ignoring it. Leslie on the other hand heard and couldn’t hide the light smirk that grew on her face.

She made her way down, shaking her head as another groan left your lips, “Can you stop moaning? I’m trying to help you relax but you’re making it hard for me to concentrate.” Shay spoke with a light laugh, your face growing even hotter.

“I’m sorry, your hands just work a little too good.”

“I’m going to pay for a masseuse next time if you keep doing this.” She pretended to threaten, your eyebrow lifting slightly, unable to look back at her.

Slightly you let out a breath, “And I would have no qualms. I do like your hands more though,” You spoke as she rubbed at the bottom of your ribs, hands slightly going around you.

Leslie nodded to herself, “Mhm, I can tell you do,” She teased, slowly and precisely massaging a knot out of your muscle.

“Okay you did that one on purpose-“ You mumbled into the pillow after a guttural moan grew in your throat. Shay leaned forward, kissing your back lightly.

“You have no evidence for that claim.” She whispered, pressing another kiss right below that one before she sat up, continuing to do what she had promised to do.

You rolled over when she was finished, your hands finding her instantly. “That felt amazing, thank you,” You spoke softly, grabbing one of her hands to kiss the top of it.

She had other plans, leaning down to press into a kiss, her hands pulling away to grab at your face. You hummed quietly, holding her sides as she leaned over you, looking up at her when she pulled away.

“That is for being such a tease just now.”

If you liked it feel free to join her tag list!

Tags: @winchesterszvonecek

[shays-shitposts]

i was never interested in d&d, but after it was announced that arin was going to be in the “Suikoden One-Shot”, i was then interested. watching the entire vod right now, and i love everyone’s characters, especially gremek. we stan gremek in this household

[mirrortouchedsea]

Madara tapped his foot impatiently as he listened to the stage crew move around to start cleaning up after the show. Leo had asked him to come to their live showing off all of Knights' featured outfits and originally Madara hadn't been able to but things wrapped up quicker than he thought and so here he was.

He didn't need to sneak in, management knew who he was and agreed to not let Leo know that his boyfriend had made it after all. Madara hadn't taken his eyes off Leo on the screen in the dressing room, wishing so desperately that he could be in the audience with him. Ah well.

A moment later the door burst open and the sounds of Knights' bickering filled his ears. He never missed how they all still took care of each other despite the insults that were slung across the changing room about makeup or their performance. It took a few seconds before Leo noticed Madara sitting on the couch and as soon as he did he was running over to crush him in a hug.

"You said you couldn't make it!" he exclaimed, burying his head in Madara's neck. Madara smiled and hugged him back.

"My schedule cleared up at the last minute. I wanted to surprise you~" he teased, giving Leo one last squeeze before letting go.

Leo started excitedly talking about how the live went and the inspiration that he had gained from it, grabbing a notepad and pen that had been left out on the coffee table to quickly scribble some notes in. Madara sat there and took it all in, in awe of how someone like Leo had come into his life, someone so filled with light and someone filled with darkness were an unlikely pair and yet...

"Hey Mama, are you okay?" Leo asked, reacting to Madara's uncharacteristic quietness. "If you need anything you can tell me you know?"

Madara could hear Izumi's "Get a room" comment but he didn't care. Leo's face was so filled with concern for him and--

"Everything is fine, Leo-san. I'm just a little tired, don't worry about me. Get changed and we can get something to eat." Madara hoped he could at least cover up his thoughts in front of the rest of Knights. Maybe he'd actually talk about his feelings with Leo in private, but not in front of his friends.

Leo frowned for a moment before smiling again. "Okay! I'll meet you outside in five minutes!" He bounced off to where he had left his casual clothes and Madara was shooed out of the room by Arashi, who winked at him and wished him luck.

"I love you!" Leo called out from his dressing table as Madara was about to leave.

"I love you too," Madara said, just quietly enough that nobody but himself would hear it.

[brittleskyblue]

And another thing. Idk how but both my current bigger fic projects ended up having titles that are lyrics from Take Me Back To Eden.

[iceicewifey]

7. what is the thing your oc likes the most about themselves?

:3

　 『 ᴏᴄ ᴀꜱᴋ ɢᴀᴍᴇ 』

　7.) what is the thing your oc likes the most about themselves?

besides her hair, shay likes her scars in a bit of a juvenile ‘this makes me look so tough’ way—excluding the scars on her hands.

gigi likes her moles. she used to hate them because other kids would bully her and call her ‘dalmation’ and ‘polka dots’, but she was embraced them and grew to love them later in life.

[acebean]

besties face for the matt dying fake out in the season 6 premiere was so fucking funny

[keehendrixx]

You Talk Too Much

dom!Terry! Terry Richmond x Black!Female Reader

Warnings: MDNI! this story is 18+!, Smut, a hint of BDSM, breeding kink, creampie, dirty talk, degradation, oral (male receiving), P in V, solo masturbation, usage of b-word! Drug use, alcohol use.

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You honestly didn’t expect your legs to be hooked over this man’s shoulders as he consistently dug into your depths. His eyes staring into your soul as whimpers came from your lips. Tonight was supposed to be a good night with laughter, drinks flowing, dancing, ect. So how did you exactly end up in this position? Well you’re mouth got you in it in the first place.

Earlier that night

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You and Terry went out with a couple friends you’ve known since moving into town. At least all of you guys were in relationships so why not make it a couples night. As you all made your way into the bar, the drinks began to pour. Your friends and you made it to the bar and began chatting.

“Girl how you manage to get Terry ass out the house?” Shay asked.

“No, for real because he doesn’t even come out like that!” Your other friend, Anissa, replied.

You chuckled.

“Y’all I honestly had to bribe him with some head to get him to come”

The two ladies looked at each other and snickered.

“Well I be damned bitch!” Shay laughed.

As y’all ordered another round of shots, you kept catching glances at Terry who was surrounded by his own homeboys. The cloud of smoke circling him as he took a puff from the blunt he was smoking. If you weren’t in a room full of people and in public, you would’ve sat your pussy on his face right then and there. He looked so sexy inhaling that smoke and letting it back out.

Your friends snapped you out of your hornified trance. Shay and Anissa asked you a very interesting question. “How is Terry in the bedroom” they both said. Your eyes went wide, but you quickly regained yourself. You smirked. “A fucking animal”, you replied back.

“Details bitch, we need details.” said Anissa

Knowing that Terry isn’t for his business being out and the open, even if it’s you telling your friends, you begin rambling on about how dominant and controlling he is.

As you went on and on, you didn’t even notice Terry creeping up on you three. He heard every single word came out of your mouth. As he came and stood behind you, Shay and Anissa’s facial expressions changed and you caught wind of that. You asked what was wrong and the only thing they could do was nudge their heads forward towards you, indicating someone was behind you. You slowly turned around only to be meet with a pair of hazel eyes.

Terry stood there with one of his eyebrows raised and him looked down at you. Your body instantly grew hot and your panties became moist.

“Baby, I thought you were with the-”

Terry cut you off mid sentence.

“Save that shit, what was said babygirl?” He came close, almost pressing his built body against yours.

“N-Nothing.”

“I heard every word you said, now I’ma need for you to go be a good girl and go wait by the car. We got some talking to do.”

Without hesitation, you grabbed your purse and sprinted to the car, you didn’t even say bye to your friends. Stay and Anissa looked at each other and muttered “Oooh”.

As you stood at the car, you seen Terry exiting the building. He unlocked the doors and you got in the front seat as he got in the driver’s seat. He started the car and drove off. He keep his gaze forward as he drove and occasionally gave you the side eye. After what seemed minutes of silence you started talking.

“Baby, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I was talk-”

“Did I say you could speak? You’ve done enough of that tonight, but I got something for that tho.”

If you could, you would’ve melted into the car seat.

“Matter fact, lift that dress up and slide them panties to the side and play with that puss.”

“Terry..”

“Now, I ain’t asking you, I’m telling you.” He gripped your inner thigh and pulled them apart.

You lifted from the seat a little allowing your dress to rise and you pulled your panties to where he wanted them. You took your thumb and begin rubbing your clit in slow circles, while your index and ring finger slipped inside of you.

“You better not moan or cum either, I’ma teach yo’ ass.”

Your juices flowed out of your hole like a waterfall as you bit your lip to keep from making a sound. Terry looked at you and back and the road, then at the mess you were creating.

“She wet as fuck, mama. That pussy wet for me?”

You didn’t answer.

“Answer me when I’m talking to you.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?” Terry demanded.

“Yes, Daddy.”

You felt your orgasm coming and you began fingering your bundle of nerves faster, Terry noticed this and snatched your hand away.

“I said not to fucking cum!” He barked as you sighed.

Minutes later, he pulled into you two shared home. He cut the car and grabbed your face, turning it to him.

“You got 1 minute to be in the room, naked, and in the assumed position. Don’t make me repeat myself.”

You scrambled out the car into the house damn near tripping up the stairs as you discarded your clothes. Terry walked in a little bit while after and came upstairs to the bedroom to find you on your knees.

“Such a pretty bitch and good girl for me.” He roughly grabbed your chin making you look up at him.

He rubbed your lips with his thumb as he began shredding his clothes. There he stood in all his glory, those ripped abs, strong arms with prominent veins popping out. Your eye’s traveled down further and they stopped at his thick, long dick.

He then tied your arms behind you.

“I want all mouth mamas, no fucking hands.”

“Gotta put this mouth you got to good use for a mouthy bitch like you. Open up.”

You opened your mouth and he leaned down to spit directly in yours. He tapped his dick on your tongue and he notches the broad head past your lips, groaning at the exquisite sensation of your tongue lapping at the sensitive underside. Slowly, inch by thick inch, Terry feeds more of his impressive length into the wet heat of your mouth, careful not to overwhelm you. You slightly gagged a little when you felt his tip touch the back of your throat.

“Nah, we ain’t doing that shit. Take it.” He gritted through his teeth.

Terry fucked your mouth as if you were a human fleshlight. You felt his saliva combing with yours and you took him deeper than you could possibly imagine. Spit pooled around your mouth and dripped onto your chest.

“Fuck, just like that.”, he praises breathlessly, his grip tightening slightly in your hair. “Take it deeper, gorgeous. Show me how well you can suck this big dick.” He grunted.

“Suck my fucking dick, just like that slut.”

“You such a nasty girl for Daddy and I love that.”

Terry felt is nut coming and held your head down as he released in your mouth.

“FUCKKKK!” He slipped out of your mouth.

“Swallow it.”

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Now here you are, legs over his shoulders as he gave you long deep strokes of absolute pleasure.

“Mhmm, fuck Daddy I can’t. It’s too much.” You moaned as you tried to pry him away from you. He snatched your arms away and hooked them over your head.

“You don’t ever tell me what you can’t do. You take what the fuck I give you.”

You were so out of it at this point, the only thing you cared about was cumming. Terry didn’t slow down on his thrusts either. This man was literally bringing you to oblivion and back. He lets your legs down and spread them back with both of his big hands, to the point they were touching your cheeks. You could feel his tip poking at your cervix and he pushed his on your lower abdomen, causing you to scream out.

“Daddy, please! Let me cum! I’ll be a good girl and I won’t open my mouth anymore.” You barely got out as your voice was going horse.

“I know you won’t, not after I’m done breaking ya lil’ ass in.”

Terry focuses his attentions on your clit, circling the sensitive bud with his thumb as your legs quake and shake. He hums in satisfaction, the pleasure coursing through both of your veins.

“Look at her, she just drippin’ all on these sheets. Creamy pretty ass pussy.”

He grabbed your face and made you look down at the mess you were creating all over his shaft. A thick white ring of cream that coated him and leaked on the bed.

You could feel your orgasm coming and he knew it.

“You wanna cum for me, don’t you?”

“Yessss, Daddy can I please cum?” You begged him.

“Wet that fat dick up baby, it’s yours.”

Your body shook uncontrollably as you came. Terry’s thrust grew sloppier but he pulled out and flipped you on all fours. He rubbed his tip against your wet folds, teasing you with it by pushing it in but not all the way. He spanked your ass until it was red and you had tears in your eyes.

“Daddy fuck me!” You screamed.

“Greedy fucking bitch!” Without warning, Terry lines up his rehardened cock and slams forward, burying himself to the hilt inside your tight heat in one powerful thrust. A low groan tears from his throat at the exquisite sensation of your walls clenching around him. “FUUCKK!”

The obscene slap of skin on skin echoes through the room as Terry takes you hard and fast, his heavy balls slapping against your clit with each forceful thrust. One large hand snakes around to roughly palm your bouncing tits while the other grips your hip, holding you steady for his relentless assault.

“Ouu fuck me! Fuck me with that big dick baby!”

Terry snarls in feral approval at your shameless begging, doubling his efforts to pound into your sopping pussy with animalistic fervor. The headboard slams against the wall with each brutal thrust, the entire bed shaking from the force of his passion.

Releasing your hip, Terry brings his hand down in a stinging slap to your jiggling ass cheek before reaching around to furiously rub tight circles over your aching clit. The dual stimulation proves too much, sending shockwaves of ecstasy rippling through your core.

“Cum on this dick, now!”

Your orgasm ripples through you like a tsunami.

“I’m finna nut in this pretty puss. Knock yo’ ass up! Make you round with my baby.”

“Cum in me big daddy! Please, I want your babies! UGHHH!”

With a guttural moan, Terry hilts himself one final time, grinding against your cervix as his dick throbs and pulses inside you. He buries his face between your shoulder blades, panting heavily as he rides out the intense waves of his release.

“Shit, fuck... so fucking good.” He grunts, hips twitching with the aftershocks of his climax. Terry pulls out, his softening member slipping free with a gush of combined fluids. He strokes himself a few times, aiming his tip away from your body as the last spurts of cum paint your lower back and ass.

“Next time, don’t open your mouth so damn much.”

A/N: this was my first time writing so go easy on me yall 😭.

@dxddykenn @writingsbytee @beenathembo @prettyisasprettydoes1306 @jimmybutlrr @theogbadbitch @kaylaahisthebestest- @theblacklewinsky @vivaalenaa @theereina @peachbuttetfly @callme-lover @pocketsizedpanther @nayaesworld @kimuzostar @episodes-ff @hxneyclouds @planetblaque @lrryss-vghn @luuvprincess

[autistic-shaiapouf]

Also pray for me gamers I. am beginning to sniffle and my throat is sore 👁👁

[sun-snatcher]

( all credits to @bankaizen from this phenomenal gifset ! )

✠ | LIGHT HATH NO TONGUE ; SHAY CORMAC

summ.  A lethal injury blurs the line between friend & foe. pairing.  Shay Cormac / Assassin!f!reader w.count.  12.7k (WHEW.) tags.  no y/n , porn-with-prose , fluff & smut galore , whump, pre-established lovers-to-enemies , & enemies-to- …something? , forbidden lovers trope , religious references , catholic guilt if you squint a lil a/n. More suitable on AO3! Regardless, I hope you enjoy Shay Cormac doing the nasty by yours truly. Hugs & kisses to the lovely @amariyad for beta-reading!

Light hath no tongue, but is all eye; If it could speak as well as spy, This were the worst that it could say - That being well, I fain would stay, And that I loved my heart and honour so, That I would not from her, that had them, go.

— John Donne, “Break of Day”

“SO YOU MEAN to tell me,” Connor says, in the aftermath of a lengthy silence, “That he saved your life, and delivered you back to the Colonies himself?”

“Yes. Gave Faulkner quite the fright seeing his flag flown in the waters,” you add, finding yourself perturbed at how Connor hasn’t yet turned to face you. The Assassin has one ear tuned to you and another to the stag he’s been tracking in the snow. Only his insular, hard-set profile can be seen underneath his beaked hood as he nocks an arrow, and it makes you wonder what it is exactly he’s thinking between the knot of his brows. 

Connor inhales. Draws his bow. Relea—

His usual perch creaks in uncharacteristic protest. In a flash, the stag startles, and leaps into the underbrush, vanishing beyond the thicket.

He huffs.

You never thought you’d imagine yourself saying, “Speak your mind, Connor,” to the bluntest, most forthright man alive you’ve ever had the grace of knowing (and, in a way, raising), but alas, here he is answering you with that usual impassive look that rattles you to the core. He always looked so much like his father whenever he pulls that face.

“I’m glad you are well,” he allows, truthfully, once both of you had descended the treetops. Though Achilles had done most of his training, you’d also been enough of a presence in his life to be a second mentor when you came by, and grew to be an even closer friend. “I was beginning to think the worst when you didn’t write back. Come. Let us check the snares.”

You both lead yourselves further out the forest, back towards the border of the Homestead. Connor tells you what he’s done so far while you’d been away; recruitments, marshaling intelligence with Aveline in Louisiana, and restrengthening the foundations of the Colonial Brotherhood again. 

Achilles would be proud, you’d told, and after he’d gathered and skinned his game, and quietly made headway back home, finally caved.

“Shay Cormac,” Connor begins curiously. “What is he to you?”

“He’s an--”

“Idiot,” you murmur, in an undertone that buries into the Captain’s very marrows. “…You should’ve left me behind.”

Never, is the instinctive thought. Then, bitterly: Aye, I should’ve left you a long time ago— In the bloody past; as I had done with the Brotherhood.

“That so?” Shay says instead, between the battledrum of alarum in his ears. His words are surely wavering from the crippling panic, but he has to keep you conscious for as long as he can. A buck-shot in the gut is too dangerous to let you fall asleep on. “An’ why’s that?”

You still feel the warmth of his palm around your nape, holding you close and safe and secure to his chest; where you can hear the rampant thundering of his heart. He’d done this before, once upon a time, neath the tangle of sweat-soaked sheets, when you two were everything but— 

“Enemies,” you shiver. The bloodloss has you feeling cold. “We’re enemies, Shay.”

And yet. 

Here you are. In the arms of a Templar; the sworn enemy.

For weeks during the hunt you’d teased him on the irony; how God must’ve been playing a cruel joke on him to have to chase turncoats of his own Order. You can hardly piece together how or when this truce even came to be. Something about both of you going after Templar-turned-mercenaries, except his intent had been borne out of duty, and yours out of vengeance for a late friend. 

“Aye,” he laments. “That we are, dove.” Then, chidingly, “An’ still y’took the bloody shot for me.”

Your laugh is sudden. Weak. 

Wet with blood and barely a whisper, really. And if Shay hadn’t known you as intimately, then he might not have heard it at all— but he does, and so he did. “Well, I must surely be dying, then.” Your winsome smile is damningly red, and so, so tired. “I haven’t heard you call me that in…”

Ages, you mean to continue, beginning to slip from him. When we were on the same side.

Shay calls your name. It’s distant. Underwater. Vibrating from the hollow of his high-collared throat you’re tucked firmly against, and travelling like a soothing frisson into your aching bones. You’re drifting, unmoored, somewhere between a sea of blinding pain and of numbness; of the waking world and the dreaming. 

“No, no, none’a that, c’mon. Y’can’t go to sleep yet, dove,” he hurries. “Eyes on me, now, aye? Attagirl.”

Had they been closed? You didn’t realise. The world’s tilted and swaying at an angle, and you can’t recall just how long you’ve been fighting to stay awake the moment Shay had whisked you away in his arms after the firefight you’d both encountered. It’d been an ambush. You’d caught the silver glint of a flintlock in the starlit night, and a blink later, you’re lying in a puddle of red where Shay should have been instead. 

(Instinct. It’d been instinct to take the hit. You’d have done it ten times over, because you’re a fool like that. Somewhere in the blurry haze, you think you can hear Liam grumbling defiantly over your shoulder like he always used to do when you came to Shay’s defense.) 

Y’bloody amadán, Shay had scrambled, looking the most terrified you’d ever seen him. Why’d you fuckin’ do that?!

“Why not?” you answer him now, delirious from the bloodloss. You’ve carefully been deposited onto a cot, it seems. A silhouette shifts quickly about the room. The air clots thick with the disgusting tang of metal and the sharp salt-winds of the sea. It makes you want to heave.

“Because if y’do, then I won’t see those pretty eyes’a yours, dove,” Shay replies, smart as ever. “Come now, keep talkin’ t’me, aye? Y’know I like hearing your beautiful voice.”

Liar, you hiss. At least, you think you do. Every sense in your body is guttering wildly between nothingness and white-hot pain. You want to tell him everything hurts. That your stomach feels flayed and you want the pain to stop. You want to tell him that you’re fucking terrified; that you don’t want to die. You want to tell him everything. Anything. I missed you. I hate you. I’m sorry. I love— I don’t love you. Why did it have to be this way? Why did you go? Please, don’t go. Not again.

“Thought y’wanted me to leave y’behind, dove?” comes his answer. Had you spoken aloud? There’s a thread of dry amusement in the low timbre of his words. You recognise the raw fear in them, regardless. It’s crept to the hazel-brown of his eyes. 

“Hey, look at me. Doctor’s gonna keep your body an’ soul together, aye?” He must have pulled a chair to your side sometime earlier, wherever it is you are now, because he’s come to meet your half-lidded gaze in a doting hush. “S’alright, m’not goin’ anywhere. Y’have my word. Just stay awake, dove. Stay with me.”

Stay with me. You try to recall why that sounds so familiar. 

“Hey, hey. Eyes open,” he reminds you, voice faint as the Doctor makes quick work with removing every musket ball embedded in your flesh. The shot had been poor; a desperate attempt at a final, killing blow. It’d fortunately only clipped through your side as you shoved Shay from the crossfire.

When you writhe at the surgical digging, let out a whine that’s caught between a pitiful cry and a howl— “I know, I know,” Shay breathes, all teeth and grit and grief as he muscles you back down. He couldn’t flat out say, you’re gonna be alright, you’ll pull through, because he couldn’t lie to save his own life— much less yours. 

It’s inadequate, but it’s all he can offer you as he cradles your face and pets your hair, “Lord above, it should’a been me. I’m sorry, dove. I’m so sorry.”

Your eyes go dazed and faraway as your head lulls. You think you hear the Doctor saying something about your strength failing, beneath the gossamer cloud of the void. “Shay?” 

“M’right here, dove.”

I’m glad it wasn’t you.

His hands are trembling from adrenaline. When had he removed his gloves? You suppose it doesn’t matter. You like it when he touches you. You like the feel of him swiping at the strands across your forehead, of him thumbing away the tear running down your cheek. There’s something about seeing the tender side of him again that makes you feel safe, underneath all the split knuckles and the rough around his edges. It reminds you of—

“—Home.” You choke back your tears, but they well anyway when you abruptly plead, blindly reaching for him between the marbling spots in your vision, “I want— I want to go home.”

Something splinters in Shay’s heart. You’re reduced to a dizzy, disoriented mess of homesickness, mumbled between sharp, staccato breaths: Nostalgia for the docks. Back in New York. Days of youth, with Liam. When the three of you were young and dumb and free, and neither the Brotherhood nor the Order had stood between you all. When war and bloodshed and being torn asunder sounded like the makings of a bad dream.

“Aye, love, we’ll go. We’ll go, then,” he soothes. There’s a burn licking up the back of his eyes as your grip in his hands begin to loosen. His voice rasps like stone. Liam is long gone. Home is gone. Now it seems you might be taken from him, too. Surely this lie, great as it is, wouldn’t count against him; not when it’s meant to give you a measure of peace?

“We’ll take the Morrigan, an’ we’ll set sail. Might even let you steer ‘er yourself, how about that? We’ll spot a whale or two. Y’ever seen one’a those? You just— Just stay with me, aye? Stay with me, love, please. Just a little longer.”

Stay with me, he’d said, that time you’d first crossed paths with him following his apparent death. You remember now. It’d been like meeting a phantom. Please. We can save the world together.

“I can’t, Shay,” you reply, then; Now. “I can’t.”

The world dips into dark.

Shay doesn’t pray, but it’s a very close thing.

He isn’t exactly the type. He thinks he ought to, though, for someone as warforged and broken as him. But repentance had been more his Ma’s thing, as far as he remembers being told of her Catholicism. The gold cross he inherited is just that. Memorabilia. A vestigial haunt of the past. A slow, tightening noose around his neck—

A lot like you.

“If she breaks the fever, she may just make it,” the Doctor had said. “You’re lucky you got her down to me quick enough.”

I make my own luck, comes the lightning reflex. But he catches himself. Glances at you in the cot. Your pulse is as delicate as a butterfly’s wing, chest rising and falling so minutely he had to keep making sure you’re still breathing to calm himself.

You’ve been balancing the tightrope for days; Threading the needle. This is far from lucky.

He shifts his collar, unclasps the cross from his neck, and closes it gently into your palm. It isn’t him who needs a miracle, after all, and repentance does not fit the likes of Shay Cormac.

Revenge does.

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

— John Donne, “Death Be Not Proud”

You wake, and sleep, and wake, and sleep.

Between it all, Shay’s voice croons like an interlude. Shifting in the peripherals of your diaphanous, muslin-thin haze somewhat like an angel, incandescent with righteous fury smouldering in his eyes. He promises home. He promises justice. He promises divine retribution. Fallen, you correct yourself. A fallen angel.

You glean the Morrigan’s been anchored at Port La Joye for nearly a week, after you’re able to reconcile your left from right and your dreams from reality. 

The crew are good, honest, working men. Fathers who have daughters; brothers who’ve sisters; sons of mothers. Shay runs a tight ship, but he’s made sure to not involve and tie them into Templar-Brotherhood shadow business, you gather, because they rejoice once they see you back on your feet (“Glad to see ye right as rain, lass! So will the Cap’n. Never seen his face lookin’ white as a ghost before.” “More like Hell on earth! Ach, I pity th’ poor souls he’s after, truly.”), and more than willingly help you with filling in the blanks of the timeline from when you’d been shot back in Halifax and untethered from existence.

Then it takes another 3 days before the Captain returns to his ship—

And only a mere second to cross the distance between you two once he sees you, idle in his quarters.

“You’re awake,” Shay breathes, as if he’d just breached a terrible tidal wave; as if seeing you is like daybreak after a seastorm. “You’re—”

“Please tell me that’s not your blood, Cormac.”

He blinks. Takes in the dread reflected in your eyes. Right. He’d hunted down the scents of the remaining Templar turncoats that’d slipped from him back in Yarmouth and, like a starving hound to fresh meat, had slaughtered them as a farmer would a voluntary culling. “Aye,” he agrees, grimly. “None’a it’s mine.”

His face is practically drenched with dark splatters, and his usual calm temperament has gone withdrawn. In the dim, swinging lantern light, he looks like the slow-crawl beginning of a ghost story. “I take it they’ve all been… handled.” 

Shay doesn’t skip the bitterness in your tone. “I would’ve saved y’one,” he replies, “For y’to avenge your friend yourself. But it’s not like y’were in any condition.”

A seemingly endless moment passes. 

“Thank you, Shay.”

He winces. 

“Don’t— thank me, for murder.” Shay knows enough about himself to still find the act of killing repulsive, however much he had an affinity for it, or so Haytham constantly liked to claim. (He hasn’t yet managed to shake out the way the turncoats begged and bayed for mercy; hasn’t yet silenced Adéwalé’s final words those years ago—)

“I mean for saving me,” you correct, pointedly. “I’m not the type to appreciate people killing in my name.”

Shay drops his shoulders at that. Hadn’t realised just how tense he’d been. The long weeks of voyage, fretting over you, and the blind pursuit for reve— justice— suddenly seemed to weigh on him. There are old aches he’s been ignoring that sting now, like angry, insistent contusions. 

“I’ve set course back to New York,” he says, stiffly, unsure how else to inhabit the silence.  “With the winds an’ a little bit’a luck, we’ll be there before winter.”

A beat. 

You finally look at him. Truly look at him. Beyond the blood stains and the prickly defensive walls he’s put up since you’d first dealt the truce with him. Beyond the donned Templar uniform and the Captainship. 

He’d been afraid, you realise. Has been. You try to imagine what it might’ve been like from his perspective; that it must have been terrifying to have been in his shoes, watching the last of his childhood friendships die out (and for him, no less); watching a piece of his heart d—

Shay is still. Glacially so. 

There’s that post-adrenaline jitter in his eyes that you’re familiar with yourself; caught somewhere between fight-flight-freeze. Paralysed in survival mode. The ugly type that lingers after gruesome violence, and you’re left scorched with little else of your humanity but the animalistic remnants of raw, buzzing energy that leads you spiraling downwind if you don’t steady yourself quick enough. 

(Sometimes, it’s so easy to forget Shay Cormac is just a man doing what he believes is right.)

“Christ,” you sigh, before reaching out to grab his lapels. You tug him to you, ignore the confusion in his eyes as you set him on his bed with a stubborn Sit down, Cormac, and draw a chair (the very same, you later note, that he’d sat in to watch over you through the restless nights when you’d been recovering) beside him. 

“A little bit of luck?” you parrot, unimpressed. You toe the pail of fresh water prepared by the bedside closer to your feet, and reach in to wring the frayed cloth damp. “Don’t you make your own luck, Cormac?”

“You—” He elects to protest, but when your hand sets on his cheek demandingly, and you begin to clean away the blood splatters and cruor on his face, he finds the words fail to take shape. 

Shay should stop this. It’s the right thing to do. Neither of you owe each other anything now. He had saved your life as you did his; the scales are balanced. Scores even. Debts repaid. With this distance, this proximity— knees bumping against knees, face inches apart— all it would take to cut down another crucial pillar of the Brotherhood is a swift blade to the jugular. 

He could be done with it. He could be done with you. He—

—wants to kiss your palm.

When had been the last time the both of you had trusted each other enough to be this vulnerable? Unarmed. Armours off. Skin against skin. Nothing but the hope, the blind faith, that the other wouldn’t strike at the open opportunity?

Shay finds himself leaning into your touch near imperceptibly, instead. 

You press your palm to his jaw, thumb at the scar below his eye. His gloved hand circles your wrist, relishing in the pulse, the warmth—

“You’re alive,” he finally manages. Chants it in his head, practically, like Church prayer and hymn, along with the rest of his rioting thoughts that’s unspooling like yarn: of doldrums, how still the sea gets, how his Da used to tell him the calm is the most dangerous kind of waters to sail. He thinks of how still you had been, boneless in his arms and slack on the cot with nothing but blood on your face and stomach and hands. 

Then he thinks of his Ma, too; (She must’ve been like that after he’d been born. Motionless. Still.) And is reminded of the gospel his Aunt once read to him on a lown Sunday: of the tale of Lazarus, who’d been raised from the dead with nothing but words. Shay thinks of you here, now, resurrected; has half the mind to properly worship God again like you’d been a miracle come to life. 

But calling it a miracle would’ve been generous. You fought to live.

“I must sound crazy,” Shay swallows, awkwardly. 

Your eyes dart between the bob of his Adam’s apple and the seam of his lips so quickly he could’ve been imagining it.

“No, not really.” You tear your gaze away, soak and wring the cloth from the tinges of dull crimson. “I know a little bit of what it’s like to see a ghost too, remember?”

1756. When Shay had all but abandoned the Brotherhood, and you’d gasped out a plea while you tried to intervene Chevalier from firing right at him— and then, reappearing the year afterwards like an apparition, except this time you had called out for him in a whisper of nervous recognition. You’re alive. 

Shay Cormac is your ghost just as much as you’re his.

You move to take his hand, carefully remove his gloves to clean the split knuckles, the old scabs. The dried blood sitting in the cracks and crevices of his palms, his fingernails. (Pontius Pilate, Shay shudders. Are you absolving him, he wonders? Or had he lost your forgiveness the day he decided to turn his back to the Brotherhood?) 

“Y’don’t have to do this,” he rasps, and very nearly tags dove at the end of it. “Not for me.”

“You’re right,” you hum. “I don’t.” 

You don’t stop. Shay just sits and stares at you. The lantern illuminates above you like a proverbial halo, and Shay takes the opportunity to admire; to carve into memory every divot and slope of your face lest he never gets the chance again.

“You’re—” 

“Don’t,” you say, teeth set at the familiar tone.

—Beautiful, he doesn’t get to say. Angelic. “Alive.”

“Yes,” you patiently say. “I am.” 

He’s bruised and scratched and sweating from the exertion of his manhunt, now looking at you in that deep, soulful way you’ve always known him for— but his expression, you notice, is open and unbearably, unrepentantly soft. 

“Before I forget.” The cloth is returned into the bucket, and you lean back to your seat to reach your collar. His Ma’s gold cross finds its way back to him. 

“Y’needed it more than I,” he says.

You huff. It’s a far cry of your trademark smile. Shay hangs onto the rare sight of it regardless. “Well, not anymore. Besides, isn’t it the faithless who need it most?” 

Shay isn’t quite sure how to answer. 

But he settles on just saying “Aye,” because declaring It’s you who makes me believe in God would’ve been too candid.

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run, And do run still, though still I do deplore? When thou hast done, thou hast not done, For I have more.

— John Donne “A Hymn to God the Father”

“--old friend of mine.”

“He wanted to kill the old man.”

“No,” you scold, in the most motherly way you can summon. “Haytham wanted to kill Achilles. It was Shay who convinced him otherwise.”

“It changes nothing. He is still a Templar, and a traitor.”

You wince at that. Connor notices. “Yes, as so everyone often likes to remind me. But Shay Cormac was my friend first. We grew up together in New York.”

Now that. That he hadn’t known. He hadn’t gathered your relationship with the Captain may have predated even your allegiance with the Brotherhood.

Unbidden, Connor couldn’t help but think of Kanen’tó:kon. Of what and how much he would give to go back to simpler times. “I understand,” he says, at last.

“Yes. It’s hard not to care,” you admit, as the Homestead came into view. Your hand settles on your stomach, where the healing pockmark wound of the killshot still marrs your flesh in taut, pale scar-tissue. Connor eyes the movement. “Quit looking at me like that,” you say, put out by his scrutiny.

“Like what?”

Like Haytham; like Achilles. Like I’m a turncoat. “Like I’m pregnant,” you blurt, offended. “I was shot in the stomach, Connor. Are you touched in the head?”

“I’m not,” he retorts childishly, wrinkling his nose. (It makes you wonder if it’s a trait of one, or an elision of both his parents.) “If we cross paths with Shay Cormac again—” he begins to deflect, and oh, now he truly is sounding like the Haytham Kenway and Achilles Davenport you knew—

“I came to that realisation long before you have, Connor,” you cut, in a manner which meant for him to tread lightly. But he’s a Kenway through and through, and states, boldly: “Yet here you stand, by his mercy.”

You frown. Land softly from off a bough and into the glittering snowbank beside him. In hindsight, it isn’t unfair for Connor to question your loyalty. You hadn’t yet confessed to him you’d been the first one to act out of turn and warrant Shay’s indebtedness, after all. 

“Speak plainly, Kenway.” You needn’t tell him twice. Connor is not one to skirt the edge or beat around the bush. 

“I think--”

“Any closer, an’ you’ll fall overboard,” warns Shay. “Won’t save y’a next time around.”

But he figures you might not care at all, and he couldn’t blame you: Beyond the stern a lovely gam of whales have been breaching the white-capped waves, playfully trailing after the Morrigan’s wake in delightful song, where you listen, enthralled; captivated.

“I might just,” he hears you lament to yourself. “Oh, I wish I could take one home.”

There’s a small, sincere smile on your face that you’re not completely letting him see, but—

Jesus, Mary an’ all the Saints, Shay admires. You’re heaven-sent.

All of the Morrigan thinks so too. Not even a week into the voyage, the crew had taken to their new lady-guest with welcoming arms, and Shay’s never had the pleasure of witnessing his merry band of seamen trip over their own heels trying to make your sail back home as comfortable and hospitable as can be until now. You recover, and acclimate well and swiftly, so it’s no surprise they like you;

The easygoing angel-face who could not only take a joke but could also give one, who isn’t soft to fierce thunderstorms nor spoiled rotten to turn your nose up at hardtack; who offers sage advice on their womanly woes and whispers embarrassing tales of their rough-around-the-edges Captain every now and then when the sun beat too hard. 

Shay allows the tongue-in-cheek jabs, ofcourse. He claims so on the pretense of boosting good morale— really, he just likes listening to your voice; especially when it meant you spoke of him in that wistful manner he hadn’t heard in years: fond, and so charged with… something. 

“Childhood friends with Cap’n, eh?” Someone had mused, one sluggish, warm sunrise. “Nothin’ else beyond that, m’lady? What? Oh, come off it, Hoskins— I may not be her type, but she’d surely never give your sorry face a chance!”

“We’re—” you’d caught Shay’s wandering eye from the helm. “—friends,” you allowed, between the crew’s jostling. “Until New York, that is.” 

Shay had held your gaze until you turned away. 

It isn’t as if the atmosphere between you two is cold, though neither is it exactly pleasant. It’s been cordial, and amicable, and perfectly courteous, yes— but there’s something high-strung in the air even the salt-winds couldn’t cut through, and any man aboard with sense and a working pair of eyes could see it. 

(“Ach, friends?!” Came a whisper that late night. It was the Morrigan’s Navigator, their most keen-eyed; it seems, even in people. “I been tellin’ yous since we left port, mates: No man comes back bleedin’ like the Devil ‘imself and suffers like the Cap’n did for their own glory. To him, she’s worth the pain, and twice more.”)

Howbeit, he’ll take what he can get, Shay supposes. An unspoken agreement seemed to have solidified that the usual back-and-forth arguing from when you’d both first started the truce would be pointless now, and most of all useless on your trip back. That means conversations are brief and civil, but it’s far better than animosity or being completely ignored.

“Fancy havin’ a go of the Morrigan?” Shay offers out of the blue, amid an uneventful afternoon. It’s more a measured, wary gesture of banter. Then, before you can decline; “C’mere,” he reaches for your hand, guides you to stand between him and the steer. “Go on, she doesn’t bite.”

“Shay, this is a terrible idea.”

“Y’survived a gunshot, lass,” he snorts as he settles you at the helm. “You’ll be alright. I’m here.”

(A flash of memory. Hands caressing your cheek. M’right here, dove.)

It takes little to notice his nebulous presence step up close behind you. “Heavier than it looks, aye?” Shay hums, gently ghosting the edge of your wrists. The heat of him stirs something deep in your chest. “But be easy, still. She isn’t a horse y’can yank. Go with the currents; there shouldn’t be too much give.”

A tentative, studious moment passes. When he’s satisfied—

“Attagirl.”

—he pulls away. Shifts to lean casually against the guardrail facing you. All that fills the sea air now is the creak of the Morrigan, the flap of canvas, and the echo of his saccharine praise in your ears, drowned out by the droll of the crew singing Leave Her Johnny.

You try not to feel the way his eyes unabashedly linger on your face. 

“I always wondered how you ever knew which direction you’re going. It’s just a horizon to me.”

He cocks his head to the sun. “Rises east to west. See where it’s setting? That means west is dead ahead. Y’keep the sun just off your left shoulder— or portside— an’ you’ll stay on course.”

“And when night falls?”

“Compass. Constellations guide our way too. I’d show y’tonight, but,” he turns over his shoulder, where a smatter of clouds in the distance have begun to look like trouble. “Storm might be brewin’.”

You’ve seen the celestial maps that Faulker had gifted Connor once upon a time, when he’d gotten the Aquila repaired. “Polaris? The North Star.”

He raises his brows, impressed. “That’s one of ‘em, aye.”

“Aye, Captain,” you narrow.

“Oh, you’re learnin’, y’are,” he twits, unruffled. He strides over to set his tricorn on your head, and you roll your eyes when he crosses his arms with a satisfied look. “There. Don’t y’look a right gentle-woman, Captain?”

“It’s loose. Your head must be abnormally huge, Cormac.”

“I fancy that’s just ‘cause I’m smarter than you, Captain.” 

You turn your nose up playfully. “Fishes live in the sea,” you begin to recite in challenge. “As men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.” 

And had Shay been in a sour mood he might’ve taken the passing jab at the Order more personally— but how could he? The dusk light has broken through, painting you saffron and ethereal, limning you in saint-like radiance. 

For a treacherous moment, he allows himself to imagine he isn’t harboring an Assassin of the Brotherhood; that Shay Cormac is just a Captain, and you are just his— friend? His lady? His passenger? (Whatever it is; anything but an enemy.)

“Let me guess,” he says instead. “John Donne? No? Plato, then.”

“William Shakespeare, actually,” you smile, triumphant, and it’s a sun-bright sight: warm and beautiful and soft. “Though, I must say, I’m impressed.”

“Impressed?” he exclaims, although he couldn’t hold heat to it— you’re happy, after all, and he can’t help but smile too. “An’ what’s that supposed to mean, then?”

You shrug in faux-nonchalance. “Didn’t take Shay Cormac to be such a learned poet, is all.” 

“Aye? You’re the one who’s all high-society—”

“Oh? Enlighten me, please, when have I ev—?”

Your musical laugh is cut short.

You yelp.

The Morrigan had lurched, sails having caught rogue wind, and before you register it—

A hand over yours on the helm; chest firmly behind your back. 

(Heart against heart.)

Shay has steadied you. 

(…That lightning reflex has always been such a frustratingly attractive feat of his.)

“S’alright,” he soothes, voice going a low, fetching timbre. His words ghost above your shoulder, eagle eyes trained on the luffing sails. “Rogue wind, is all.”

Shay stays, this time. Steadfast as a plinth. Rooted behind you like a Cypress tree. His other hand tentatively slides a lick of fire from your elbow and up your forearm, until it finds its rest on yours. It’s rough, firm. As expansive as the broad of his solid chest fitting like a perfect puzzle against your spine, where he’s dipped his head just a little to accommodate the height difference as he speaks:

“Easy, now… Jus’ a few degrees.”

He’s a looming tower. A formidable force. Shay Cormac has always been able to inhabit and command an entire room with nothing but his sheer presence, and here you are—

Caged, yet again, between the space of his unyielding arms. 

A pleased hum— mmh— rumbles from the hollow of his throat and travels through you. It’s dizzying. Fogs all rational thought in your mind. Makes it wander, elsewhere, to a distant time you heard him groan it when you’d touched his bare flesh—

“Attagirl,” he praises.

Something zips through your nerves.

Christ. He must be doing that deliberately, you think (or hope?), because it’d be far more eliciting otherwise. That gravel-deep undertone that seeps into your skin and makes your blood run rampant. Surely— surely, he could feel the thunderdrum of your heart beating into his own ribcage too, from how he’s sidled— pressed— stood— his weight securely against you. 

“You talking to me, or your Morrigan?” you try to deflect, and you hope to God he hadn’t heard the tremble of your voice. The yen.

“You, dove. Ofcourse.”

Later, amid a friendly round of Liar’s Dice with the crew, you think (or rather, come to a conclusion) that that may have been the tipping point. In him calling you dove; that sanguine lilt in his tone, blanketed by the air of casual off-handedness: Shay hadn’t noticed at all that the petname had even slipped out his tongue— it was second nature.

Who is so safe as we? where none can do Treason to us, except one of us two.

- John Donne, "The Anniversary"

The thunderstorm had passed without too-destructing an effect. The crew escapes waterlogged, but it’s hardly the worst; they’ve faced fiercer weathers and conditions than a bad lashing. You’d gone out of your way yourself, much to Shay’s disproval, disappearing below deck to help with the wounded and with fastening any loose cargo from tipping over. In the aftermath, the crew had managed to cajole their Captain into allowing them reprieve in rum stored from the hold.

“Go on, lass, sing a song for us!” someone suggests to you, when the last of the pour had passed, and the sky cleared into a cloudy, starlit night. There’s a chorus of excited agreement: “A lullaby, perhaps?” ; “Bet you’ve a lovely voice, m’lady!” ; “Aye! Don’t shirk repayment, miss.”

“Boys,” Shay says, by way of warning. 

They shrink quickly.

And you couldn’t stop but colour warmly at that; the hair-trigger instinct of his when it comes to— well, you. He hadn’t said a word until now. Shay meets your gaze then; knows you aren’t the performative type, not even when you were children.

But you let him see your quiet smile. It’s sincere.

“I suppose I do owe you good folks a song or two for your labours,” you say, peaceably, and make way to the mainmast to bow theatrically as they rejoice. “And to the Captain, for doing good on his promises to me throughout the voyage so far, despite my… being trouble.” 

Shay laughs. It’s a small sound of assent as he nods his head to you from where he’s leant starboard.

You’re not in your usual mufti of assassin robes in favor of the wet weather: you’d forsook your leather boots after they’d overflowed with rain, and you’d turned to layering the cotton raiments of a usual sailors outfit so you wouldn’t be weighed down too heavily as you busied in the belly of the Morrigan. 

Regardless, the crew take to you as they always do, hanging onto every word you sing like dazzled sailors to a siren song— rapt with attention as they clap and stamp and cheer along to your coltish, barefeet song and dance: To Téir abhaile ‘riú, to The Jolly Beggars, to Spanish Ladies, and a number of other unheard shanties or cantatas you’ve picked up from your worldly travels. 

Then, when you’d grown tired—

“Very well, then,” you yield, “But the Captain shall pick the last song. So, what shall it be; happy or sad?”

A beat. 

“Sad,” Shay decides.

You hum. “Alright. But I’ll warn you; it’ll break your heart.”

And perhaps it’s the alcohol rendering him loose-lipped— but Shay had huffed out a weak laugh, and with a defeated shake of his head, muttered: “Already broken.”

You don’t know what to say. You never have— not when faced with Shay and his frustrating habit to wear nothing but naked truth upon that weary, scarred face of his. 

You don’t know what to say; so you stand on the crate leant against the spar instead, and begin the slow croon of The Parting Glass as a drizzle begins to fall. A lament; a bid farewell to sailors and friends and comrades and enemies. 

Shay watches you throughout it all. Basks in you, practically. Of too-old times and bygones and things he can’t take back.

God must be cruel, he reflects, To punish me with a woman so beautiful upon my ship, an’ have her want nothing to do with me.

“Should be 2 days before we port to New York, with the winds carryin’ us,” he informs you, after applauding your stellar performance. He had moved towards the eddying crowd sometime during your song. “Get some rest, aye?” 

He offers a hand to help you down your stand.

(Ever the gentleman.)

It’s an excuse to touch you; And a greedy part of him wants to hold on forever— but he watches you go in the end. It feels like wherever you touch him glows.

(Shay can’t help but flex and unflex his hand.)

In Gist’s absence, his Quartermaster claps him on the back instead. “Looks to me another lashin’ll be comin’ down. Lay your head to rest, Cap’n, why don’t you? We got it from ‘ere,” he says, “An’ spare yourself the grief, brother. Go talk to her.”

“There’s nothin’ to talk about,” Shay brushes off.

“Well then, don’t talk.”

“What?”

“Y’heard me.”

“Shut your gob,” Shay says flatly, in the way he’s learned from Haytham how not to allow anyone to get a rise out of him. But he finds himself trailing after you, anyway. 

“Hello, Captain,” you greet, when he’d stepped into his cabin he’d given up to you for privacy. “Or shall I say broken-hearted man?”

“I prefer Shay,” he says, only barely managing to reign in: When it comes to you. 

You hum. Run your fingers through your half-damp hair to untangle the snarls. Shay idles by the Mercator globe, lit under sull moonlight shining through the sea-weathered bay windows. For all his repertoire of being a ruthless hunter, and for all the way he seems to be able to cut a mean, menacing figure under that damning scar of his and his Captain’s gear— 

He looks out of place in his own cabin. Perhaps because you haven’t exactly seen him inside of it since he’d lent it to you, but even then, he looks almost slightly… out of place. The quarters is a charming, comfortable nook under the helm; sparse yet graciously spacious in a way all Sloop-of-Wars tended to be. Pieces of Shay catch and cling in its corners: 

Anthologies, novels and an old hardback bible collecting dust on a bookshelf by the red chaise; A navigation desk with tools and notes in his handwritten-scrawl of bearings, strewn over fading nautical charts— all carefully arranged in a way it didn’t scatter over to the simple bed by its side. 

(Not that it matters, you’d thought, the first time he let you in here. The bed had kept its firmness because it’s hardly been slept on. Shay must have preferred the canvas hammock he’d strung up in the other corner of the room, the true seaman he is.)

All this to say: Sleeping in here alone throughout your voyage these countless nights, with nothing but the lap of ocean waves and the droll of the Morrigan— it feels alot like a glimpse into the barebones of Shay Cormac’s soul. 

A manifestation of his sea-pelagic loneliness.

“Hope you’re not looking for a private song,” you say, carefully, unravelling the long sleeves of your sailor’s shirt-turned-chemise. The size is comically large on you, but it’s comfortable.

Shay starts. Blinks. He hadn’t calculated trailing in after you would’ve immediately been taken as a come-on, but he wasn’t about to risk stumbling through an awful explanation over himself. “I… wanted to talk.”

“Well,” you uncross your hands, lean back at his desk. “I owe you as much.”

“Y’don’t owe me anything,” he replies, quickly. It’s honest. “We evened the scales back in Halifax. I…” 

“Yes?” you say, after the silence had stretched a moment.

“I think I just wanted to see you,” Shay admits, on an exhale. “Before y’go.”

Go. How final it sounds, in spite of the 2 days that remain. “Funny,” you say, tracing the gridlines of a discarded map to distract yourself from just how… raw this conversation is; where it seems to be heading. “I imagined you had your fill of me long before I even ended up— broken on your ship.”

“We were allies, once,” Shay says dutifully, as measured as he could. He hadn’t said friends, nor lovers, but you find, for some reason, that it stings more that way. 

“Once,” you repeat, keenly, blinking long enough to picture the Homestead in its prime: of Liam, Hope, Kesegowaase, Chevalier, Achilles, Adéwalé. “And then again, at Halifax, in a way.” He watches you hesitate before continuing. “What does that make us now?” 

You don’t ask Or in two days? Because you don’t think you’re ready to hear an answer for that yet. (Shay is glad you hadn’t. He wouldn’t have been ready either.)

“A Captain, an’ a passenger,” he says, pragmatically. But there’s nothing rational about the rattle in his bones from the sight of the cotton blouse you still haven’t had the chance to change out of, damp still from the rain, and sticking to your dimly-lit silhouette at the seams. 

He tramples the thought. It’s natural to confuse nerves for— yen.  “And to you?” he asks.

“A broken woman,” you begin, light and humorous when you lift your shirt to show the bandages around your abdomen. He wonders, privately, if you’d caught him staring earlier. “On the ship that belongs to a broken-hearted man, apparently.”

“We were both broken a long time ago,” Shay says, resolute. 

“Is that what you think?” you ask, something genuinely surprised and pensive in your eyes. “Is that why we… never actually happened?”

Something in his chest lurches.

(Happened, by way of meaning: Something that could’ve been serious; could’ve been true. Something that went beyond clandestine trysts and touchy dalliances under everyone’s nose in the Brotherhood before—)

“I…” Shay inhales. It’s strained. “…How much have y’had to drink, dove?

Dove. You purse your lips, a dry laugh bubbling from you. “What a darling you are,” you say, bemused. (You're glad the lantern light is dim enough to hide your shy fiddling.)  “Making sure I’m not going to say anything I regret, hm?”

“Or do. Aye.”

“I had one bottle, Shay. And I’ve had plenty of time recently to realise that rarely do I ever regret alot of things when it involves you.” 

“Liar,” he snipes, if only to curb that tide of dangerous affection in his stomach, and the unbidden memories where both of you would fold against each others arms in countless, restless nights from before.

“Which part?” You raise your brows, and when he’d tilted your head to give you a look that roughly translated to All of it, obviously, you snort critically. “I don’t regret you ever coming into my life since we were children. Nor taking this bullet—”

He seems to bite his tongue in a flinch.

“—But I do regret not being drunk enough now to forget my own terrible performance just then.”

“I told y’the first time y’were here,” he reminds: “Y’have a beautiful voice.”

Reflexive, again. As if he always teeters the water’s edge; Could never hold back from the truth— could never hold back from you. It makes something hot stick in your throat. “And how much have you had to drink, Captain?”

“Not nearly enough.”

Something charged passes in the air. 

Shay shifts to move towards you. It’s hesitant. Tentative. The Morrigan creaks underneath his slow stride, until he stands a foot from you. His eyes are trained on the bindings beneath your threadbare blouse, hand hovering where the old blood had blotted through like a bastardised version of the Ursa Major constellation. “Y’put the heart crossways in me, y’know?” 

You don’t say anything. (There’s nothing you can answer to that other than an apology, after all, and you aren’t in the habit of apologising for something you don’t regret.)

“Y’were so still,” Shay describes, going somewhere far away in his mind. It’s the softest you’ve ever heard him speak. An’ the waters were still, an’ so were the winds, an’ the world, an’ my heart. All of it. All but my mind. “I thought, for sure…”

He finds himself brushing his fingers against yours. 

For a terrifying minute, the idea makes itself known.

“…We shouldn’t,” you say.

But you interlock your hands with his. Meet his gaze.

“We shouldn’t,” he agrees. 

It would be a terrible, terrible thing. A betrayal to the Brotherhood and the Order each. It’d be a fork in the road; a turning point; a watershed moment. The same way his eyes opened to the truth after Lisbon: Tectonic plates coming together to herald nothing but destruction, when the world gave way beneath his feet into a— a divide. Between you and him. The Assassin-Templar shadow war, this gaping maw; the uncrossable— 

“Dove,” Shay wavers, thumb smoothing behind your palm by way of quiet permission. “Are you… cold?” 

Goosebumps line your skin. “Yes.”

—Crossed.

Kissing Shay Cormac feels like coming home.

Nostalgia comes in the slow, satisfied hum that carves out of his throat and into your parting lips; Homesickness in the way your nose fits like a slot perfectly against his, in the familiar sea-brine and bitter-rum taste of his tongue.

It’s deep and delicate and perfect. Akin to anchoring at your true port of call; your true North.

His free hand slips to cover the thin of your cheek curtained under your hair, honey-slow and shaking, as if he’s afraid you— he— would shatter at any moment.  

“Tell me to go,” he shudders, between another breathless kiss that threatens what remains of his resolve. “Please, dove,” he rasps, voice as rough as stone from sheer restraint. “If y’don’t, if y’don’t want this—”

“Christ, no. I want you,” you pant, and press your face closer into his open hand. “Please.” Shay watches your long lashes flutter shut, watches you turn to kiss his palm with the kind of pious reverence you’d only see between candle-lit pews at Sunday Mass. “I’ve always wanted you, Shay.”

You’re looking up at him now with radiant hope: Doe-eyed, like a wicked siren calling him to a watery grave— to damnation. 

Fuck.

He yields. (His emotions are never far from the surface these days— and when it comes to you? Always. Always.) 

His lungs deflate. Shay dips his head back down to kiss you, purely fervid with the only longing to hold you. To shelter you. To protect you. “You’ll be the death of me, d’y’know?” he says. Confesses. Mouths the words against your jaw as he breathes in the rainy scent of you like it’s something sacrilegious. 

“And the cold will be the death of me,” you jest, when he slides his hands up to peel the shirt off your wet skin, rivulets running from your hair down your navel, to where you’ve tugged your breeches off. 

Shay loops a single, steady arm around you and lifts you onto the desk edge, all solid muscle and terrifying ease— it’s paralysingly attractive. A reminder of just how much that pristine, lean build of him belies the pure strength and utter brawn he possesses.

It’s that which does it for you. Zips arousal down your spine and kindles something primal in you.

(The Assassin Hunter, they call him. The Brotherhood’s Bane. No wonder.)

It shouldn’t have been a thrill to feel so subdued, pinned beneath him and his tenebrous gaze like a helpless animal waiting for a slaughter, and yet— 

And yet.

(Ever the gentleman:)

“Let me, then,” Shay asks, ghosting his lips gently to your brow. So how could you not let him? When a Man of God sins for you? When a Templar Knight bends his creed just to kiss you; who cradles and covets you like you’re a very piece of Eden itself? 

“Lemme take care’a you,” he repeats, brogue accent gone deliciously, sinfully thick from fervor. “Aye. I’ll warm y’up, dove, hm?”

Please do, you’d meant to answer, but you surged forward instead to meet him halfway. He is warm. Infernally so. Shay Cormac has always run hot as a blaze since you’d first met. A pillar of effervescent sunlight that had drawn you to him; the burn of his noble righteousness pouring out the cracks of his soul and through his skin, lighting him aflame and scalding those who never understood him the way you have. 

(It makes you all the more desperate to disrobe him and cling onto him; to tuck yourself impossibly at the spaces between his ribs, burrow yourself into his beating heart. You want every iota and inch of him. You want him in a way that no word can possibly describe.)

“Shay,” you keen, seeking his mouth again. And to hear his name whispered like this— like a prayer coming from you; like saying my beloved, my heart, my God— Shay thinks he might just truly offer pieces of himself up to you on a silver platter. “Touch me.”

The plea is a strike of a match.

The tenderness melts away into something more ardent.

God, he shouldn’t be doing this. He truly shouldn’t— 

You can feel the molten heat of him sinking into your very marrows when he presses against you, hard and eager; all while laving his tongue over your naked body, skin still wet and cooling from the storm’s wake. Shay’s ungloved hands are broad, smouldering— calloused from years spent climbing ashlar and knotting sails— abrasive enough to roughen you up, to curl at the base of your throat and to knead the flesh of your breasts.

Then they wander. Lower and lower; deliberately careful. While his mouth canvasses every dip and divot of your neck, his fingertips trace the margins of your tremulous body in tandem, skating over your hips and tugging off your thin underlinen, where he can feel, finally, the warmth of you— the soft, wet, seam of you.

“Jesus, fuck.” His voice is coarse. Laden with desire. Your noses bump when he leans his forehead to yours. All it takes to have you slick and needy is nothing but his blistering touches and open-mouthed kisses, it seems. “Already, dove?”

“I missed you,” you whine, tinny and saccharine. The concession has him groaning. Your left hand rakes up his nape and cards through his hair in anticipation; right hand a plinth to support your weight from the inevitable bliss he’s going to bring you to. “Please, Shay, please—”

He sinks one, gingerly, to the knuckle.

The gasp that escapes you is choked. Shay swallows it with a heady kiss. “Easy, now,” he grunts, ragged and humid, when you sidle your hips closer to the edge. “S’alright, dove. M’not goin’ anywhere. We got all night.”

We’ve got 2 days, you want to retort, but a pinched moan wrenches out of you instead. He’s pushed in another thick finger. The stretch makes your toes curl when he moves; makes him curse at the way he can feel you pulsing and pulling him in. If you’re this plush, this tight from his fingers alone—?

Shay feeds a third not long after. Works it in with effort. Mutters praises at your ear as he does so, teasing and rubbing your sensitive clit with his palm. Attagirl. Aye, y’doin’ so good for me, dove.

He watches, transfixed, at the glisten of his fingers as they noisily glide in and out of you, mouth watering at the lewd sight and sound he can draw out your body; mewling and writhing right infront of him, barely able to keep your eyes open or string your words coherently from sheer dizzying pleasure. Yes, Shay— Hah, yes— s’good. So good, please—

Ofcourse, it’s good. Shay’s touched you like this before. Hurried or unhurried; he’s memorised, intimately, how to pet and play and punish you. He knows where you’re weak: that lovely spot deep in your cunt he brushes with a perfect hook of his fingers— “Ah— fuck. Shay. Right there, yesyesyes—”, or the bare spot right below your jaw he enjoys marking up with a biting bruise— “You’re mine, dove. Mine alone. Y’hear?”

The hoarse sound of him makes you shiver. It’s brassy. Matches the malevolence he carries in presence even when he looks wrecked just from watching you be taken apart by his hands: broad chest rising and falling in deep breaths of your scent in the stifling air, underneath all the uniform layers of dark leather and glinting buckles. 

(He looks like a hawk, a villain; raking his scarred eyes over fresh kill. The thought makes you stir. Sparks an old memory in your head from when he’d gone territorial over you in an old mission long ago, and he fucked you so hard you swore you’d be branded by every inch of him on the inside for the rest of your life.)

“You’re close,” Shay says. States. He knows. He always does. Recognises it in the feather-tremble of your body and the way you arch your back, clutching at his wrist (your hand is so small compared to his. Drives him fucking crazy—) as if you couldn’t tell whether you wanted him to stop or continue fingering you. “Aye, y’are, aren’t you?”

You nod mutely. Vision crossing. There’s nowhere for you to go, so you burrow your face against his throat like you want to hide from the world as you come undone. 

Shay lets you. It’s an endearing moment, and he’s sweet like that. Even if he wants to study your face as you get off on grinding against his palm, even if he wants to swallow your tongue and every susurrus moan that he ekes out of you. He slides his hand up your spine and settles it there instead, holds you up when your own arm fails you and curls over his neck for support. 

“So good, dove. So beautiful,” he whispers, at the scant space below your ear. Shay damn near smiles at the way the words involuntarily opens you further, allows his fingers to smooth and stroke and scissor— until your legs abruptly snap shut around his wrist like a vice, astrolade clattering to the floor from your blinding, seizing orgasm.

You’re gasping. Moaning. Twitching like a fragile fawn in his arms. “Shay— I— ah, ah—”

“Easy now, love,” he soothes, nuzzling at your temple. 

The sight of you melting from your hot, silken climax prompts something primal— something instinctive in him. (Wolves, he imagines. Perhaps hounds. One’s already been satiated with having you fall apart because of him, the other still longs to shield you; to fold you into his arms and shelter you with whatever goodness is still left in his damned soul.) 

He slides his soaking fingers out. A puff of a sigh escapes you. Relieved. Sated. “C’mere,” you mumble, blearily nosing forward for another kiss—

“S’alright,” he says, dodging you by resting his thumb on the dent beneath your lip. “Tell me to go, dove, an’ I will. I will. We don’t… we don’t have to.”

(There it is again. Taking care of you and leaving himself out to dry. Ever the gentleman. It makes your heart jump.)

“I want to,” you promise. Your voice dips into something dulcet; dangerous. “I’ve been wanting to.”

Something flickers in his eyes.

He swallows so hard you can hear the click in his throat.

“I’ve been wanting…” You trail off, grasp his hand holding your chin. He watches, rapt, as you splay his fingers apart, your slick still sticky between them, and then—

Press them into your mouth.

His ring finger. His middle. 

It breaches past your bitten-red lips, slow and sinful, smarting against the wet glide of your curling tongue, coated in saliva as you suckle at the ichorous taste of them. 

“Fuck, dove,” he says, and more inwardly: You’re a minx. Shay knows you. Knows you’re teasing him with his guilty pleasures; his oral fixations. The perverse texture and sound and feel of you: your tongue laving hungrily and sucking at your own slick, choking from his fingertips catching and going beyond your molars because of how far you insist on taking him. 

It makes his cock twitch from the depravity; makes his skin simmer like a low-grade fever under his clothes. He wants to slip something else into that glorious, tight mouth of yours—

“Still cold, aye?” he rasps. Slides his fingers out the tight seal of your lips with an obscene pop. “Need somethin’ else to warm y’up, hm?”

He kisses you before you can reply. Brain-melting. Desperate. A low, amorous groan into you that roils your insides. Then you’re picked up— once more, by those delicious sailor arms of his— and deposited onto his bed like you weigh nothing. 

Good God. “Christ, Shay, you’re…” 

You falter, suddenly shy of all things. Here you are, naked and exposed with nothing save bandages around your stomach, supine and heaving on the untidy linen of his sheets— and you’re curiously, girlishly, timid over complimenting him.

It makes him laugh. Quiet. Airy. “Use your words, dove.”

But you’re too busy staring— ogling him where he stands at the foot of the bed. Shay’s undressing himself, patient and meticulous, and enjoying is an understatement for how you feel watching him divest and strip himself for you. (There’s something incredibly intimate about being allowed this, to witness him dismantle the precious armour— the defenses and image— he presents to the world.)

“Go on, then,” he croons, “What did y’want to tell me?” 

Shay tugs his shirt over his head from the neckline. Swift. Smooth. When he crawls over you, unclothed, you think you finally understand the true, biblical epitome of temptation. 

The sturdy contours of him, lean muscle cording across his torso and his vast arms; body smattered with forgotten scars and wounds both old and new that make him all the more roguishly handsome; the happy trail from his navel leading down to the heavy, leaking, length of him—

“Strong,” you concede, breath skittering when his shadow descends over you like doom itself, and he slowly settles some of his weight on your body. Your hands have wasted no time in pawing eagerly against his chest, gripping at his firm biceps when he smothers you with an indulgent kiss. “You’re so strong. I’ve always— mh— admired that about you.”

“Admired, aye?” It’s a teasing sound. A huff of sincere laughter ducked into your shoulder. He’s preening at the rare stroke of his ego, the bastard. “S’my hands all it takes to have y’this sweet on me?”

“Shut up,” you bite your grin, feel the blood rush to your cheeks again. “You’re insufferable.”

“You’re perfect.”

Your heart stutters. Skips. Stumbles. Then Shay kisses you, sweet and brimming with loving affection— and kisses and kisses and kisses. Hand cupping your cheek, and the other stroking at your nape. The type that’s full of utter devotion: like you’re salvation; the only person capable of ever delivering him utter Absolution.

Shay digs his fingers into the meat of your thighs, sangfroid, and begins to pry them apart.

You can feel the hard length of him throb, tip spitting prespend against your navel.

“Shay,” you call out, tugging at his hair when he tongues the swell of your breast and latches to your nipple, gropes at the other with a rumbling groan he couldn’t seem to bite back.

“Aye?” he says, before pulling away entirely in a worried blink, “Your stitches. Did I—?”

��No, it’s not that,” you say, meeting his concerned gaze and his touch running over your bandages. “I just, I’m not— It’s been awhile since—” 

Oh. Oh. “S’alright,” he reassures, taken aback by the way his own lungs unwillingly expand from the new knowledge; the sudden rush of appetite flooding him. “Been some time for me too, dove.” He tucks a strand of your hair behind your ear, and gives you the thousandth kiss of the night. “Jus’ tell me if I’m hurtin’ you, aye?”

(Ever the—)

“Gentleman,” you smile, petal-soft. You press a chaste, delicate kiss on his cheek, at the crooked scar splitting it. 

Something basal rattles in him at the tenderness. Startles a flutter of sparrows in his chest.

And then—

You curl your fingers around the base of him.

Shay jerks with a start. Hisses something guttural in Gaelic. “Fuck, dove—” He ruts forward, face digging to the crown of your head, where you’ve taken to licking at his jugular: tasting the masculine, heady sweat of him as you squeeze his cock.

Shay can feel the molten heat of your folds splitting at the nudge of his weeping head. 

He might ruin you.

(He wants to. Greedily. To fuck you until you see the stars of Cassiopeia beneath your eyelids; until everytime you swore loyalty to that damned, wretched Creed of yours, all you would ever remember— ever feel— is how full you were when you were taking Templar cock.)

But he’s a restrained, merciful man for all his notoriety of pitiless bloodshed. A distinct dissonance; a paragon of irony. It’s hardly a surprise, really, if you think about it.

Shay Cormac is a Man of God, and men of God are raised to deliver only two extremes: grace and retribution.

So he’ll be gracious. Generous.

His hand falls to your right knee, thumbing the flesh beneath it; And pushes once more to spread yourself to him, to accommodate the thick of him as you guide him up into your soaking, eager cunt—

You whine at the fit. 

The wrecked, immodest sound alone unmoors him. 

Makes him all the more desperate to take you apart. “I know, dove,” he coos, emblazoning into memory the way your face twists in half-pleasure, half-pain; eyes misty at the edges and brows furrowed into a pinch. “Missed y’too.”

When Shay buries to the root, he distracts you from the scathing ache with another nip at your jaw and lip; gropes and moulds his hands over your thrumming skin and flesh. The pull of you inside— the nigh-virginal tightness of you (how long has it been again?)— has his vision swimming from the scorching decadence. 

Then you’re pleading his name. For him to move. To satisfy. A murmuration of Shay, m’so full. S’good. Please. Pleasepleaseplease—

It tears a depraved moan out of him once he shifts to ease in, and out. Yeah? Feel good, dove? 

From where you’re eclipsed, pinned underneath him, his gold Cross swings above you with every bated breath and every forceful thrust; A twisted reminder of your heresies. (The both of you will reason this truce out, someway, somehow. Chalk it off as filling the boredom of your recovery and voyage— but either of you know better. Know the truth.)

A sacrilege of the Penitential Act: For what I have done (“I love you.”), and have failed to do (“You shouldn’t.”); Forgive me.

(…But forgiveness is in neither of yours’ hands.)

Clawing down his back, legs greedily bracketed around his hips to siphon every inch of him in, the ferric sheath of him in you has liquid pleasure crackling through his veins. Between all your wanton purrs and his crude growls the room drowns in impurity under the pelting rain outside;

It’s breath mingling with breath, heart thundering to heart, skin sliding against skin. He white-knuckles your hip when he hikes you up harder into the bed, each urgent rut of him reaching further inside your pulsing cunt as you grip into the sheets. 

“Oh, hah— fuck—” you choke. “Yes, Shay. God—”

“No Gods here, dove,” he grunts, devilish, and you swear you can hear him smirking that canine-sharp smile of his. “Jus’ you an’ me.”

You shiver. Whimper into his devouring mouth when he seals you into another kiss, and he grinds into you so hard you’re sure the curve of him would poke at your navel. The thought alone— of being full of him, of him breeding you with every drop of his seed that it might just take— has Shay shuddering against you. 

He shouldn’t. Heavens above, he shouldn’t.

Even here, right now, he shouldn’t even be this demanding with how he’s fucking you. Gorging at the searing feel of your sex giving in and stretching to his girth— he ought to be a little more gentle, given your quivering state.

(He likes brutal. He wouldn’t have made a brilliant soldier for either the Brotherhood or the Order at all if he couldn’t handle being a brute; If he hadn’t indulged— or at the very least, been a little bit familiar with that dark skeleton in his closet.)

Shay’s trying to be gentle, ofcourse, which is already everything to you. He’s restraining every fibre of himself, and you know this. Can feel it in the deliberate brace of his hard cock inside you; in the way he stifles his animalistic noises to your ear, outmatched only by the noise of your flush cunt. Can see it in the pretty furrow of his brows, as if laid with proverbial thorn; the hitch of his lungs at each inhale of you.

He sets a perfect pace. Keeps to it until you can feel your nerves fraying at its edges. The knot formed where his hips are meeting yours in circadian rhythm tightens, has you gasping his name in anticipation when he palms down your arched spine and cants you closer to the fierce nudge of him. 

Aye, doin’ so good, Shay hums, knowingly. He sneaks his hand to your slit, petting and teasing at your swollen clit until you’re clamping around him. Y’gonna give me what I want, love? Y’close?

The answer is stolen from you.

It’s an engulfing crescendo of all-too-much. Your orgasm splits you from the lower belly up, synapses firing wildly from the all-encompassing feel of him still battering into you, overwhelming every single sense you possess. Your eyes roll. Your mind whites out into pure pleasure. Aching muscles aren’t your own, inner walls and legs spasming and quivering around his throbbing length; And throughout it all: Attagirl. Attagirl, love. A chuisle mo chroí. Mo ghrá.

His release stutters close after. 

It takes more coaxing, grinding; More time before the growing tension in his groin snaps like a wire. He’d fucked you through your climax, but now you’re egging him on, velvet-voiced and seductive, despite the sweltering edge of overstimulation creeping on you. “I wanna— ah—  feel you. Please, Shay. Harder. I wanna feel you inside me— mh— for weeks—”

It sparks him closer to his edge. Inside? he’d ground out, sparing a glance between your sticky thighs, where his cock slots into you like you belonged here. Fuck. Y’know I can’t do that, dove. 

But he entertains the thought anyway. Chases the thrill. Tells you how good you feel around him and spreads you just a little bit more. Imagines notching and seating so deep into your aching cunt until you couldn’t possibly spill a single drop of him; until you’d taste him from the inside out. 

Shay rucks you up higher into the bed, allows a sliver of his viciousness to slip through in the unbridled way he carves himself into you with every thrust. (“Please, I can take it. Harder, Shay— hah, C—Captain—!”) The feeling of you leaving crescent-indents on his biceps and shoulders as you clumsily clutch onto him, surging helplessly as he groans and grunts into your balmy skin, and takes and takes and takes what he selfishly wants— 

“F–Fuckin’ hell—” It’s a jagged rasp. Your name tumbles from his wet lips, husky and corrosive and dangerous. The growling sound alone makes you keen, reminds you of who exactly it is that’s just fucked you raw and is now painting your body with his cum: 

Shay Patrick Cormac. The Templar’s very own Assassin Hunter. 

Your natural predator.

Sex and sweat and Shay’s scent clots the very air. Ropes of his molten hot spend spurts over your torso as he pulls out to fist his jerking, fluttering cock into satisfying completion (“Been so long, dove. S’all for you. Saved it all— Fuck, ah— Just for you—”); the white, pearlescent threads of him shooting even up to your chin and bottom lip, still glossy and shiny from drool after your sloppy kisses. 

Not even a moment later, Shay watches your red tongue dart out to lick it up. 

Bloody hell—

“Oh,” you purr, breathless. (He tastes salty. Masculine. It’s intoxicating.) “So you do prefer being called Captain, hm?”

“Don’t,” he pants, half-laughing as he drops his head on your shoulder, trying to navigate through the cloying fog of his mind-melting orgasm. 

There’s something grimly satisfying about seeing and having you— a Grandmaster Assassin of the Brotherhood— like this. Ravaged. Conquered and sprawled beneath him like a puppet with its strings cut. An unfurled flower. Bruises mottling your flesh like blossoms. Activates something carnally possessive in his hindbrain.

(And to think he’d been holding back all this time—?)

Eyes flitting shut, Shay presses another series of delicate butterfly-kisses: shoulder, cheek, nose, forehead. Non-sexual spots. It’s, ironically enough, infinitely more intimate than the fact you just coupled exhaustively on his own bed. 

Then, after he’d gone to clear the debris and remnants of him off you: “Still cold?” he humors, melting into rest underneath the scratchy covers beside you.

You huff a soft, tired laugh. Tangle your sore legs with his and scoot closer to his bonfire warmth after he lets you doze in his embrace. The vestigial high has both of you drifting back to earth slowly. “Mh. Warmest I’ll ever be for a long while,” comes your content, nuzzled reply, feeling him comb through your hair as you intertwine your fingers with his again. 

It feels like old times, tucked into him. It feels like the day you’d taken the shot and he scooped you up into his arms— like everything has changed, and nothing at all.

Still, we’ve changed, you think, thoughts piecing back from the sex in a way you hadn’t noticed before. There’s a new scar slicing across the hairs of his chest, and another unfamiliar pockmark wound on his collar that looks to have come from a ricocheting bullet. Testaments of time and battles that’s passed between you both.

“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he ensures.

A beat.

“You could never hurt me.”

Yes, he very nearly agrees. I could never.

“Shay,” you whisper, before the bravery escapes you.

“Dove,” he acknowledges.

His voice rumbles from his sternum and into your ears. It’s a painstakingly mellow sound. It’s home.

“What did we just do?”

His hand stills. You can only hear the hum-drum of his heartbeat echoing in his chest. 

“I think,” he says, faintly, “We’ve just said our goodbyes.” 

Against all odds, however—

You laugh. It’s sudden. As bright as tide breaking on shore. “What?” Shay says, unable to stop his smile against the crown of your head. 

“Told you you were a learned poet.”

“Lord, I ought to throw y’overboard, woman,” he sighs.

Another laugh. The banter is a glimpse into the domesticity you’d once shared so often, and he couldn’t help it. He’d nudged a kiss to your forehead and went, “I’ve missed you,” and met your lips before he could confess: I miss you already.

“We’ve voyaged weeks,” you point out.

“You know what I mean, dove.”

“Ah, the sex, then?”

“Being close to you,” he corrects, unimpressed yet amused. “Having you in my arms.”

You do know what he’s trying to say. The loving; the freedom of being just you and just him. Of loving with neither guilt nor shame from the fact you both construe the world in different light.

“Have I told you how much I hate it?” you say craning to meet his half-lidded gaze.

“The sex?” he volleys easily, smiling like a serpent as he sneaks his hand between your thighs again. “I think I remember y’enjoyin’ yourself plenty, dove.”

“Bastard,” you swat playfully, pinching at his forearm as he laughs out. “I was going to say how safe you make me feel.”

Shay doesn’t say a word, but his expression rings louder than any reply: he’s glowing; a spark of sincere and profound fondness in his eyes, that has to be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. He hadn’t even seemed to mind at all that you’d mentioned you hated it.

“What an inconvenience that must be,” he finally says, and as much as he’s tempted to tease you further for it, settles on giving it a rest for now. “We’re all guilty of something, whether we admit it or not.”

“Original sin,” you hum. “I forget you’re a Man of God, Shay Cormac.”

A beat. For a moment, you wonder if you’d said something you shouldn’t have.

“Well… You make me believe,” he says, softly. The quiet concession matches the tentative unfurling of affection in you. 

“In what?”

Everything. “In God. In goodness. In love.” 

Shay tugs you into a doting kiss. The deep and fiercely kind that translates everything he can’t put into words; the kind that rattles the very foundations of your soul and every mighty defense you’ve ever built around your heart.

“I love you,” he exhales; like he’d been holding it back for centuries. “Please remember that. Please remember that’s never changed.”

“Oh, Shay,” you begin, and kiss him once more for good measure, instead of telling him:

I--

“--think you do not have it in you to kill Shay Cormac, when it comes down to it.”

A narrow look. You don’t even bother starting with the surety of Connor’s choice of words: when, over if.

“Just because I trust him onc—”

“No,” he overrides, suddenly, inexplicably fierce. “You love him. There is a difference.”

He’s learned this dilemma for himself the hard way. He had faced a ghost of his past, forged a truce, and naïvely dreamt of an impossible unity. In the end, all he received was the black blood of his own father on his hands, and a terrible guilt that would last his entire lifetime and the next.

But, he had, by the grace of whatever watches over him, not learned what it is to be at the very brink of death in the same way you had been after you were shot— To walk the precipice and return home with only a scar to show for it; and he prays he will never understand what that’s like for a long time. Perhaps it’s because he is his mother’s son (and yours by charge), too, that makes him lower his hackles.

“Se:nikónrarak,” Connor re-attempts, determined, though less hostile this time. “If you are not careful with your heart, it may prove to be your demise, again.”

You stop short. “Again?”

“I am no fool,” Connor says knowingly over his shoulder, where you’ve rooted yourself at the frost-pathed foothills leading up the Homestead. “You are the quickest Assassin I know. You would not have been shot, unless you wanted to be in the crossfire.”

“I don’t—” you hesitate, dismayed. “I don’t love him.”

Connor disappears from your view.

In the far distance, a lone rooster crows.

What sea soever swallow me, that flood Shall be to me an emblem of thy blood; Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise Thy face, yet through that mask I know those eyes, Which, though they turn away sometimes, They never will despise.

— John Donne, “A Hymn to Christ”

More footnotes & insight in AO3!

[peridot-tears]

@aquilaequinox

@straight-into-the-animus (Beating-up-old-man rights for Arno and Ratohnhaké:ton.)

@benewhorian

@especiallyhaytham

All good answers (how am I both the senior citizen and the raging alcoholic at the same time).

I was actually thinking of this meeting as some sort of afterlife scene (is this limbo? Where are these two Catholics going? Aren't there like ten layers of hell that you go through to get to heaven that Dante wrote in a fanfic and everyone just rolled with it idk religion), so their lives would have been over and done with, but it's a moment where -- just like during his Initiation into the Brotherhood -- it's trippy af and Arno has to examine his deepest regrets.

(And happiest moments too pls. Boy deserves some happiest moments, though I think most of them involve running away after cheating someone at cards.)

But also, Arno finding Senior Citizen Shay is giving Katara-meets-her-mother's killer vibes, and ooooffffff. Shay not recognizing Arno, Arno coming to a slow realization, and all of this is happening while they're in the Cormac family garden on a peaceful day, Shay's daughter-in-law within earshot, chilling in the kitchen with an open window.

I don't know if Shay was aware Charles Dorian had a child. We see in the Animus that he passes by Arno and Elise introducing themselves, even hearing them say that their fathers were here on business. In Unity, though, their little introduction is cut off immediately by people realizing Charles is dead, meaning Shay would have already been in the Hall of Mirrors with Charles by the time the kids were telling each other their names. Remember, when he killed Charles, they had a conversation for maybe 20 seconds before Shay snuck out and the uproar started. The timing between Rogue and Unity is off.

So maybe you can relive memories in the Animus that Shay didn't experience (kind of like how later, when you relive Kassandra's memories, you can also make different choices and see how differently her reality could have been). Because his encounter with Arno and the accuracy of the Animus are now dubious -- I call that Ubisoft couldn't resist a little cameo without caring about timing, but let's call it canon -- maybe Shay stabbed Charles before Charles started calling for Arno? Meaning he didn't hear Charles calling for an obvious child, and then describing a "a little boy around."

So it's like a who-shot-first scenario -- if Shay killed Charles while he was calling out for Arno, or if he got to him before Charles even had a chance to speak, then we know how brutal the Templar Grandmaster Shay became.

I like to think of there being a space in the Gray where Arno meets Shay face-to-face. I don't think anyone knew Shay was the one killed Charles Dorian, not even the Templars.

How would that meeting go?

[hotchstead]

Don’t Get Up - Leslie Shay

Requested: yes

Word count: 379

Warnings: sexual insinuation

A/n: sorry it’s short

Masterlist

“We can shower together if you get up.”

“Don’t get up, please.” The first words out of your mouth the second you woke up wrapped up in your girlfriend’s arms. It was always hard to get up in the morning for you. 

Being a bartender meant getting home late, but considering Leslie Shay was a paramedic, on her shift days she was up with the sun. And to be honest she was even on off days but those days were more lenient. 

Shift days meant up and out of bed right away, but that never stopped you from holding onto her hand tightly as she tried to get up. “Baby please,” The second she shifted enough away from you, it was like coldness wrapped itself around you. 

Leslie chuckled faintly, turning to kneel onto the bed, a light kiss to your forehead, “Think about it, y/n. We can shower together if you get up.” Her lips lingered over your skin before she pulled back just slightly. 

“And I don’t know about you but I can think of a few things I wouldn’t mind doing to you in there.” Leslie made sure to add before pecking your lips chastely. “So I’ll be in there if you care to join.”

With a wide smile she popped off the bed, disappearing into the bathroom only seconds later. In an even shorter amount of time you were up and on her tail. “Now when you say that, you mean…” you trailed off, eyes on the back of her head. 

She hummed faintly, turning the water to the shower on. “Well I could mean a couple things,” The girl turned, facing you as she pulled her shirt off. No matter how many times you saw her bare chested it still made your heart race and a deep blush to cover your cheeks. 

“I-“

“God you’re adorable,” Leslie kicked off her pajama pants, holding her hands out. “Cmon, we’re working on borrowed time right now.” She grabbed your hand and pulled you closer, holding onto the bottom of your own tshirt as she did. 

As you looked at her she grinned, “Hope you don’t mind a bit of a shaky leg for a while though,” Leslie joked, tugging your clothes off and hopping into the shower, definitely making true to her comment. 

JOIN LESLIE'S TAGLIST HERE!

TAGS: @winchesterszvonecek, @kellykidd

[phyllocnistis]

♦️♣️the grand prize♠️♥️

femme sub gets offered up as a prize for their butches poker night<3

casey's pov:

pulling you from a peaceful sleep, the familiar feeling of a warm presence behind your body awoke you. you smiled groggily into your pillow as the hands explored you and squeezed you, pinching your nipples and dragging nails across your skin.

two fingers gently pressed against your clit and you shuddered, excited to be used. suddenly, the fingers and the warm body behind you were gone, replaced by an empty space that you fell into. with a jolt, you felt a firm grip on your ankles as your partner, shay, pulled you to the edge of the bed. you stared up at them, making your eyes look as big and needy as possible, obviously already worked up.

"i have some things you're really going to like, darling."

this made you perk up. her voice was delicious and clear, you could drink it up like water, gulp it down until you could no longer breath, until it consumed you.

you sat up onto your elbows, puzzled about what she was up to, half dressed. before you could ask, she produced a black bag with a nice, ribbon handle.

"gift number one, my love."

you pulled the sheet around you, covering yourself as you reached for the bag. inside was a sexy, short dress; something you wouldn't have bought for yourself, but liked more the longer you looked at. tiny red spades and diamonds created an alluring, timeless pattern across the fabric. you were eager to try it on, knowing it would be revealing and that shay would eat it up.

"ah, there's more," they said, arms crossed and eyes hungry. you turned back to the bag, reaching inside to find a set of black lingerie, strappy and see through. your eyes lit up and your heart pounded as you shot out of bed, eager to put it all on and show your butch how good you could really be. how good you wanted to be. she was practically drooling watching you.

"no panties, please," they said as you stood up. you felt their eyes glued to you as you walked past.

the dress fit you perfectly, hugging you in all the best places; your hips looked delicious, your cleavage looked extra tender in the new bra, and the dress covered your ass just enough. excited to go show off and please your lover, you pranced out to her making sure your titties bounced, hoping she'd get worked up.

they gasped and let out a quiet, "fuck," when you walked by them. staring at you with their mouth open and eyes steady, you gave them a show, strutting back and forth across the living room. as you walked by, they reached out with both hands and pulled you into them forcefully. their hands were tight around your hips and you arched your back, looking over your shoulder to see their face. this did it for her, though, and unable to contain herself, shay shoved your face towards the ground, bending you over. your dress rode up as you bent over and with a delighted moan from shay, a tongue pressed into your pussy.

she knew exactly how to please you and how to torture you. as large hands spread your cheeks open, their tongue glided around your cunt, licking your folds and gently rolling over your hole, taunting you. her wet tongue swirled around your clit and she left bite marks on your inner thighs, marking you as her own.

as quickly as it had started, it was over. they pulled you up by the neckline of your dress and fixed your hair, ignoring the desperate, pleading look on your face.

"panties now, please. and get ready to go out for the night."

you wanted to beg for more, you needed more, but you knew they were scheming something and you also knew they couldn't get enough of you, despite your years together. so instead, you did what you were told, pussy throbbing and dripping as you walked to the bathroom to clean yourself up. you put the new panties on, spritzing shay's favorite of your perfumes on your neck and behind your ear. you found a pair of black tights and red heels that matched the highlights in the dress beautifully and grabbed a plain cardigan for the cold.

the two of you left the house soon after, the chilly evening causing your nipples to grow hard. you could see shay staring at them as she held the door for you. the warm car was a nice reprise and while you had just cleaned yourself up in the bathroom, their hand on your inner thigh threatened to undue the progress. your favorite music played quietly over the speakers as you drove and you felt your pussy aching as her hand got closer, slowly inching their way from your knee to the outline of your panties. she didn't go further than that though, refusing to break past the elastic band. she knew what she was doing; she had you completely soaked through the new lace panties by the time you pulled up to their.. friends house?

"what are we doing at quinn's place, baby?" you ask, confused. you had assumed you were going out dancing, maybe to dinner.

"you'll see soon enough," they replied.

trying to shake your desperation and lust, you got out of the car, pulling the cardigan around you tightly to brace from the cold and hide the revealing outfit you wore. your legs were shaky as you walked up the walkway, shay's arm wrapped around your waist. they were dressed nicer than normal tonight, wearing black fitted jeans your favorite leather boots. a silk shirt hung off them, unbuttoned and chest exposed where a gold chain sat around their neck, moving gently as she leaned forward and knocked loudly. looking down at you with desire still in her eyes, she smiled. what was she playing at here?

quinn opened the door dressed just as well as shay was. they wore a long sleeve shirt under a green vest and corduroy pants, cartoony socks peeking out from the floor. they looked pleasantly confused by the sight of you, but pulled shay in for a hug nonetheless.

"shayyyy! you're the last one here, man. and what god has graced us with casey's presence, tonight?" they asked, pulling your hand to their lips to kiss it. you blushed looking to shay for reassurance and found it in the form of a huge, knowing smile.

"she's my good luck charm tonight! you'll see, just watch." shay said excitedly.

the two of you entered the house, closing the door on the frigid night behind you.

"can i get you something to drink?" quinn asked as several voices could be heard chatting from the floor below them.

"yeah, i'll take a beer actually," you answered first. shay shot you a smirk and looked you up and down while asking for their own. you bent over to fix one of your heels and your cardigan split open, revealing plenty for both shay and quinn to stare at. you loved getting them worked up in public, especially around such caring and sexy friends.

grabbing your drinks, you followed the two of them down a nicely furnished staircase, boisterous laughter and smoke filling the air as you descended. you took your time, careful as you maneuvered the steps in your heels. the anticipation grew in your stomach; you were excited to know what they had planned for you.

they stepped down first, the two of them waiting on either side of the stairs to help you down like royalty. in front of you, you saw several familiar faces and one that you did not recognize. mutual friends, mostly shay's, sat around a gorgeous wooden table, ornately carved. there was a large red shag rug on the floor and it smelled of cannabis and cologne. as you took your final step into the room, you felt the energy in the room shift. like a record scratch, the talking stopped, save for a few gasps, and at once, everyone's eyes were on you. you felt vulnerable, but not scared. shay wouldn't put you in a situation you wouldn't like, not on purpose. you braced yourself and smiled, shedding your cardigan and handing it to quinn, who hung it up for you.

as you turned to walk towards the group, the only sounds being soft music and your heels clicking on wood, you really started to take in who all was here. there were three people seated, one you did not know, and two you recognized as mutual friends, people you'd partied with before. you also noticed how different you felt.. everyone here was incredibly butch. you were the sacrificial femme lamb. sage, one of the friends you knew, sat with his arms crossed and a denim vest hanging off of thick muscles. tattoos covered his exposed skin and you would be lying if you said you hadn't thought about him before bed once or twice. for the first time since you entered the house, you felt your cunt throb. you noticed jo, another friend, puffing a joint and blowing smoke into the partially lit room. you felt so sexy strutting by and pulling a chair up right at the center of the table. as you took a seat, crossing your legs, the unfamiliar face spoke up.

"holy shit, shay. can't believe you really did it," their voice was gruff and their jaw twitched as the spoke.

a flannel shirt draped across them with the sleeves rolled up and they wore several silver rings on their hands. it was now that you realized the table was covered in stuff and the hands covered in rings held cards. puzzling over it, it only took you a few moments to realize it was a poker game. of course! it was friday. shay usually went to poker on fridays! you were suddenly even more intrigued by what was going on now.

"i said i would, didn't i?" shay said, springing you from your thoughts. they moved across the room and stood behind you, warm hands rubbing your shoulders. you stared up at her and asked,

"would what, baby?"

a false innocence crept into your voice as you began to put the pieces together. you stared out at the group as she leaned down to you, lips almost touching your ears, and whispered quietly enough that only you could hear her.

"you're the grand prize."

the words sent a shiver down your back. your eyes widened and your head fell back as you squeezed your breasts together with your forearms for everyone to see. you were speechless, all your thoughts seemingly misplaced.

you had talked about this before with them, expressing your desire to be used by their friends, to be offered as some sort of trophy. it had always just been a fantasy, you'd never expected it to come to fruition. but right now, with all 4 of them staring back at you with thirsty, lustful eyes, you wanted nothing more than to offer yourself up to be used in any way they wanted.

taking a sip of your beer, you looked each of the players in the eyes, shay included.

"you better start the game then."

shay's pov:

you couldn't wait to see her on display. the dress fit her perfectly, her stomach showing in the skin tight dress. she had black fishnets on and your favorite pair of her heels were strapped up her ankles. she looked so goddamn sexy.

she had told you about this fantasy of hers months ago, just a little conversation in passing. you hadn't been able to shake the thought of her on her hands and knees, splayed out on the poker table for your closest friends, getting pleased by one of them. you had planned it carefully, making sure your friends were all on board before finding the perfect outfit for her. last week, you paid for her nails and hair in preparation, telling her it was "just because you loved her," not because you wanted her to feel her best for this.

the game started slow. soft music played from quinn's record player and the whole room enjoyed smoking and drinking, relishing in each others company. you introduced shay to ash, the only friend of yours she hadn't met yet. she was dressed in a white tank top, nipples visible through it. casey noticed and took a liking to it, staring at her frequently. everyone got on well and after you let casey in on the secret, she was flaunting herself for everyone, fetching drinks and bending over to set them down. she knew what she was doing.. halfway through, it was safe to bet everyone in the game was ready to spread her open and her for their own.

you felt yourself getting worked up just watching her, your briefs growing wet as she rubbed jo's shoulders and ran her fingers through ash's hair. she ran her hands across quinn's chest, whispering in their ear before taking a moment to sit on sage's lap, arms wrapped around his neck. the sight made you squirm, but not out of jealousy; you just loved seeing her be such a good girl.

you could tell everyone was having a hard time focusing on the game too, trying to give it their all to win such a coveted prize.

you thought about what it might be like if you abandoned the game; threw the cards and chips to the floor and put her up on the table, she would be so easy to turn into a soaking, whimpering mess. you were so lost in your thoughts, you didn't even notice it was your turn.

casey's voice interrupted you, pulling you back to reality.

"baby? do you want to do that?"

"i-i'm sorry, ha. i was daydreaming. do i want to do what?"

the group laughed, amused by your response.

"well, i just think it would be fair if everyone got a turn," casey answered, apparently having just read your mind.

you weren't sure exactly how things played out from there, only that it was almost identical to your own fantasy. chips and cards flew off the table as a cacophony of moans and whimpers rang out.

sage's arms flexed, veiny and thick, as he tossed casey onto the table like she weighed nothing. quinn and jo joined in immediately, pulling her panties down together.

in no time at all, sage's face was buried in your girlfriends cunt, his arms wrapped around her thighs, holding them together tightly. casey's face was pressed against the table and her arms spread out like she was on a cross. she smiled at you wildly before breathlessly begging,

"please, sirs.."

sage took his time exploring casey's pussy with his tongue and rubbing his thumb on her squished up, swollen clit. he left her fishnets on, tearing a larger hole in between her legs for easy access. he sucked on her cunt and licked her whole pussy, front to back and slid his fingers into her, causing her eyes to cross. during this, quinn left and returned, pulling a strap onto their legs as they did. walking up to her and pulling her head up by her hair, quinn stuffed the strap into casey's mouth. she stared up at them, choking on the thick cock in her mouth, desperately trying to take as much as she could. using her hair, quinn fucked her face, spit dripping down her chin and onto the table.

after sage had his fill and casey's moans sounded like beautiful music, jo stepped in. they pulled her off the table and naturally, casey dropped to her knees and began unbuckling jo's belt.

"that's it, pretty girl," jo said.

you knew this would make casey melt, she loved being praised. casey's eyes widened as she pulled her pants and boxers down revealing a rock hard, warm cock. she didn't even wait a second before she spit on the tip of it, shoving it down her throat. she swirled the tip with her tongue and rubbed their balls with her hands while she gargled and moaned, her eyes watering. jo's head fell back as she firmly pulled casey's hair into two pigtails, using them as handles to thrust her cock in and out of her mouth.

"that's it princess, you're doing so good,"

you said. her eyes shot to yours and you could tell she was in heaven.

quinn stepped in then, pulling casey up by the hips and unzipping the dress from the top to the bottom, her ass jiggling and shaking as it fell out. in one motion, quinn sat down and sat casey on their lap, their strap deep inside her. she screamed out in a way you recognized; the same way she always screamed when she got that first thrust. quinn grabbed her hips and controlled her body, rolling their hips against hers, making sure she felt every inch of their cock. their arm wrapped around casey's chest, hand firmly placed on her throat. she whined and moaned as quinn's hips thrust back in forth inside of her, her tits bouncing beautifully in the bra you'd bought her. jo walked up then, positioning herself in front of casey and quinn. quinn shoved her face down and like the good girl she was, she took jo's cock in her mouth and quinn's cock in her pussy.

without even knowing you were close, your body shuddered and you came in your underwear, your eyes rolling back at the sight of her. you gasped and moaned, the group turning to look at you. casey was especially delighted by the sight.

quinn used her up, fucking her hole and burying their strap as deep into her sweet, precious cunt as they could. she was shaking and screaming by the time they were done and ash figured it was time for her to step in.

lifting casey back onto the table, she leaned back onto her elbows, breathing heavily as she stared down ash who was kissing her thighs. she kissed her stomach and hips, her hands exploring casey's breasts and pulling the lace bra to the side. she sucked casey's nipples, licking them and biting them. you had to get in on the action, approaching casey and kissing her forehead as she laid there, spread out. ash's fingers slipped inside casey's pussy as she sucked on her breasts and she let out a gasp, her legs shaking aggressively. ash fucked her hard, taking turns curling her fingers inside your girlfriend and slapping her clit. casey looked so overstimulated as ash's fingers pulsed in and out of her and with a moan of pure delight, casey squirted violently, soaking ash's white tank top.

immediately, ash shoved her face into casey's cunt, sucking up all the juices and spit she could from her.

"does it feel good baby? do you want more?" jo asked, pushing ash out of the way.

"mmhmm, yes please, yes ma'am. please,"

casey whimpered, on the verge of tears.

jo pushed casey's legs back, her knees held up by her ears. she pressed the tip of her cock into casey's cunt slowly, letting out a growling moan as she did. holding her legs down still, she thrusted her hips desperately, the fat cock sliding in and out with a delicious, wet sound. moments into it, casey was making the hottest "uh, uh, uh" sound, with each pulse, obviously reaching her limit.

"i'm gonna come," casey said breathlessly, "can i come?"

"not yet baby, good girls wait," jo answered, still fucking her brutally.

with a deep "fuck," jo pulled herself out of casey, shaking and rubbing her cock, on the edge.

like the princess she is, casey wasted no time flipping herself around and taking jo's cock in her mouth, licking off her own pussy juices. pulling her hair to keep her face still, jo came into casey's throat, quivering and shaking as they did. when they were done, casey practically melted off, falling back into the table like a shaking, used up mess.

her eyes were watery and mascara ran down her cheeks as she stared at you, smiling ppwith bliss in her eyes.

you pulled her into your lap, stroking her hair while she composed herself. sage brought water to the group and quinn had prepared beds for everyone already, so you felt no rush. she shook and quivered, ruined in your lap, for several minutes until finally she turned to the group of worn out, sweaty butches in front of her and asked,

"how'd i do?"