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osamucide · 3 months ago

Text

⊹ PUT ME IN A MOVIE

IF HE LIKES ME, TAKES ME HOME . . . ft. Nikolai Gogol

wc: ~5.8k

cw: NSFW—MINORS DO NOT INTERACT, DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT—PLEASE READ ALL TAGS BEFORE PROCEEDING, snuff film maker!nikolai, alternate universe—no abilities, gn+afab!reader, 2nd person pov, siglai easter egg if you squint, stalking, implied/referenced dissociation, substance use/abuse, intoxication, drugging, abduction, choking, filming, restraints, graphic depictions of violence and gore, graphic noncon elements, mindbreak(?), spanking, object insertion (knife handle), knives/cutting, murder, reader.. dies(?)

reid: brilliant idea courtesy of my friend @berryzai thank u for planting this thought in my little freak brain. this was a fun little practice in suspense building and i would love feedback <3 .......if anyone would be tickled by a gross and gratuitous part 2 lmk lollll

It would happen to you.

At what’s felt like your goddamn lowest, too. There’s been a distant echo of a warning in your brain—perhaps from your mother or your father a long while ago; it rings now, still—that you hadn’t been heeding from the second the alluring silver-haired man placed himself with grace next to you at the bar. Be aware of your surroundings. Don’t go out by yourself. Don’t let your guard down. Sentiments you know to arm yourself to the teeth with—or, knew to, at some point, anyway.

You’re vigilant, always have been. Maybe aside from the going out by yourself part, but you could hardly help that living in a new city, sans friends and family, would prove more exhausting and isolating than you could’ve imagined in the technological age. No amount of text messages or FaceTimes or stupid Tiktoks sent to you from familiar, faraway fingers has translated into anything other than bitter little reminders that you’re really on your own this time.

Your social life has fallen completely by the wayside in light of your frantic work schedule. You’re never off the clock for more than twelve hours at a time, what with how criminally expensive your shiny, brand-new rent is—you could laugh to yourself right now if you were less delirious, thinking about paying so much for a room where you slept three feet from the shitter—and even if you did have friends, or nice coworkers, or a day off, would you even be able to muster up the dignity to bring anyone to your excuse of a place? You doubt it. You can barely stand being cooped up in there as it is, which is why, so often, you find yourself waggling your empty glass for the fourth time each evening at some bartender who by now recognizes you better than you recognize them.

And who could blame you? You have never felt so fucking alone.

You’ve been feeling caught in the spiraling downstream with all the other excreta Yokohama pushes from the pipes in the slums out into the ocean. It’s probably why you so eagerly welcomed the not-so-subtle curiosity of the man who introduced himself to you as Nikolai, proclaiming himself an avid drinker of your cocktail of choice—whiskey and whiskey—and commenting with enthusiasm on the glow of your skin even in the stale light of the bar. The apology for the awkwardness of such a compliment that followed it was just as bubbly; it was perhaps the first thing in weeks, if not months, that had made you crack a scoff of a laugh and raise your eyes to another human being outside the pretense of a monetary transaction.

He was stunning, really. You’d even felt lucky, momentarily, to have your attention stolen from your sorrows by this man whom you learned was visiting from Ukraine, was a filmmaker and photographer, was blind in one eye—it was true, it seemed, as his own skin was unblemished, perfect and not unlike porcelain, aside from a vertical scar plunging through his right eyebrow to below, just above his cheek, which did not detract from his beauty one bit, by the way. His teeth gleamed, wide and often, in low-contrast to his pale complexion when he tangented about his artistic endeavors which, according to him, explored the depth of the soul and the capabilities of the mind. He was fascinated with people, he told you. Fascinated, to a spiritual extent it seemed, with the billions of different possible human conceptions of the word freedom.

Freedom. It felt ironic now.

He could tell you had a certain depth, he’d said—one he liked to find and study in people. His testimony went like this: he’d have drinks and movies and a double bed for you to crash in, and it sounded a world more appealing than drowning your organs in liquor alone another night before slumping to your abominable makeshift-cell of a home before throwing up your hangover, sleeping a half-hour over the toilet, and heading in for your morning shift.

So, you agreed, on behalf of the fact that you’d felt fascinated by him, too. You noticed he’d gone on blabbering so long that you’d sobered up adequately enough to nod and accept, in what you assumed was your right mind, his invitation to go back to his place with him. In retrospect, he could’ve asked you to come over and do this—whatever was happening right now—and you’re not sure you wouldn’t have just laughed and resisted only playfully.

You’ve been so desperate for any interruption in the mind-numbing, feet-dragging routine that’s consumed your pathetic life that if you weren’t a dose of sedative short of completely panicking right now, you’d probably still be thinking this isn’t too bad.

But that’s silly, of course. You do, above all, feel like an idiot through your haze. You’d done everything right—everything except the going out by yourself thing, and that's how you've wound up in this man's dingy apartment, cuffed to the radiator with no less than three layers of tape wrapped around your head and ankles respectively. Alone. Alone is what you're used to these days, and it’s looking like it’s all going to come to a screeching halt the very same way.

You have no idea where he's gone. You just hope he’ll save the mutilation for after you’re dead.

Hey, you can forget about paying rent for that shithole of yours, at least.

His own's not a sight to behold, and you've gotten pretty familiar with it since you've woken up. He was showing you pictures before he left—before he knocked you unconscious, cleanly and with whatever he obviously slipped in the homemade whiskey and whiskey as far as your memory serves, but the throbbing, sore patch at the back of your skull that's obviously bruised when you lean it against the wall says otherwise. He must've hit you. But maybe he didn't. At your brightest and most alert, you can't say you'd be able to differentiate between blunt-force fog, roofie brain sludge, or the mixture of both.

The photographs started out elegant, really. Men and women alike posed solo, side by side, or in small groups, with knives and guns, mostly—pretty lines, sharp contours, silhouettes that prompted you to ask if he was a student. No, he'd replied, here for work; this is just a hobby. More men and women—a few recurring ones, including an androgynous-looking person with the most artful pastel split-dye you'd ever seen and a side profile to die for—in intricate shibari. A coworker? you'd asked; you could say that, he had replied with a wink. You'd drawn your legs up into yourself onto his bed where you leaned into him closer than could be considered friendly and you fawned. You weren't sure you'd met anyone like him. You hadn't met anyone in a very long time, it felt like.

The photos got strange rather quickly. Same photoshoots, same models, same weapons—but with blood. Bullet holes and brain matter and exposed bones. He has a passion for practical effects, he'd told you. See that little bit of brains there? he'd pointed out. Wet cauliflower rubbed with food coloring. Just like that. Easy! Blown-off skin was exceptionally simple to recreate using deli meat, you learned. You remember ogling a particularly convincing pile of innards with half-disgust, half-astonishment. He had photos of similar nature pinned up, collaged, ripped and repieced all over his water-damaged walls, all taken by him; there must've been hundreds. He’d love to do a shoot with you, if you’d be up for it, he said. He’d make sure you’re comfortable—show you just how simple it is to create such images with practical, do-it-yourself effects.

It hadn't started to sink in until too late just how practical the effects in those pictures might've been.

But by then, you were seeing two of him. When did he grow another trailing, milky braid? You'd reached out drunkenly to touch it, take it between your fingers, and there was two of your one hand, as well; there had to be, for when you looked down at your glass, now empty, there were two of those, too. You had four hands, and his two smiles were as charming as ever when he giggled and asked if you liked his hair. Yeah, you're pretty sure you'd slurred, maybe once, maybe twice, but after that, it's all dark.

You should've scalped and strangled him with it.

Your guess is as good as anyone's how long you've been here, how long he—Nikolai—has been gone, if or when he's coming back.

But there's no room for guesses when you're hyperventilating manually through your nostrils just to keep yourself awake. You've been searching frenetically, yanking uselessly, screaming into plastic for at least a couple of hours now—long enough to be reduced to whimpering, rocking, and absent surveying of your surroundings. A fridge with the handle duct taped on. An unmade bed with black and white striped sheets stretched over it. Cutlery all over the countertop. Laminated floors curling up beneath the cupboards. A birdcage, tipped over and with no bird in it. Smoke stains on the ceilings. Boxes. Boxes. Cardboard boxes piled up next to the dresser and spilling out of the meager closet, among other trash. A video camera silent on a tripod in the far corner. A distinct and hollow smell that reminds you, for some reason, of your elementary school. A small analog television. All those photos, everywhere.

You've cried enough in your life to know the taste of tears. It's odd when they run, like raindrops down a window, across the tape and you find the salt inaccessible.

Please, succumb to dehydration, or starvation, or let the will just leave my body—who hasn't wanted to drop dead a time or two in their life? You just never expected these prayers of yours to be so immediate. So visceral.

You think back to the pile of innards in that photo. Gelatin, he'd told you. As if to prove himself, he bounced over to his kitchen cabinets and produced a tin mold that looked readily liver-like.

So much trouble, just to get you here. Inevitably.

The last words you remember him uttering to you—quiz time had preceded them—while he tucked your hair behind your ear and grinned toothily, don’t haunt you as much as they feel like drying cement in your stomach.

“At what point tonight did I start lying to you?”

Even now—especially now—you can’t say.

You’re rather annoyed with the squeaking, wheezing sound that pulses through the space until you remember it’s coming from yourself. Your lungs and throat. It’s getting easier to slip out of your body like that, the longer you sit here.

You hope the dissociative blessing will find you again at the right times.

It would be nicer—not to be so aware of everything right now. The metal digging into your wrists, your elbows and knees knocking against the humming radiator, the absurd way your cheeks puff up like a squirrel’s before your airways can remember you’re not allowed to draw breath in through your mouth anymore. You’re aware of the ache at the base of your neck and the nail marks you dig into your own palms and loads of other physical stimuli, in the form of nothing, barraging you from inside this apartment where nothing, dreadfully, happens. Nothing.

But again, your awareness does not reach your sense of passing time.

So, when he does come back, it might’ve been an hour since you’d woken up—or it might’ve been a few, or it might’ve been longer.

You don’t know.

“Oh, my friend! Terribly sorry to keep you waiting,” he chirps, as if you’re lounging on the couch with the next episode of your favorite show loaded up and ready to watch.

The tears come fresh when he walks over and squats down in front of you, at your eye level, muttering hey, hey like you’re a small dog, smiling the smile that was once charming—now it makes your jaw tighten, your breathing quicken, your back hit the wall.

“I promised movies, didn't I?”

You could mistake his tone for warm if you closed your eyes. You want to. You can't.

After regarding you and finding some satisfaction—you're not sure what in—Nikolai hops up, whistling. Your gaze follows him, dutifully, as if watching him will keep him at bay. That white braid swishes out of time with your breath as the little television crackles to life.

His rifling through one of the boxes produces a stack of DVDs in telltale white paper sleeves, each with its own permanent-marker-scribbled identifier like a love letter—you see these, make these out when he kneels back down in front of you, still whistling as he fans them like a deck of cards, like he wants you to pick one, any one.

But then he clicks his tongue.

“So impolite of me.” He seems to remember the predicament he’s placed you in. Setting the discs aside, he digs in his pocket. “Let's try something, okay?”

On its own, your head shakes side to side. No, is what the tape keeps in your mouth.

But it's a small key, and he's reaching for your cuffs—some sick part of you feels ready to forgive him if he just unlocks you and lets you go. Maybe he'll let you go. You would've stayed for movies had he not done this to you, you swear, unintelligible in your mewling—you’d been so lonely, he could’ve shown you anything and you would’ve stayed. Just let me go, you think now. Just let me go.

Before the tooth of the key slides in—so close—he tells you, "Nothing funny, now. This hand—" he taps the one closest to him, "—is for picking only, got it?"

He's frozen; you realize he's waiting for an answer. Your sight has never wavered from him, but you feel like you're zeroing back in on him and his expectancy from behind closed eyes as he tilts his head forward, toward you. Yes begins to form on his lips, like he's speaking it into you. You nod harshly. It hurts your neck.

But when the key clicks, a caged animal cannot be expected not to pounce.

Your free hand flies up to claw at his face, hard, unforgiving and without knowing what exactly you hope to accomplish. Nail tracks and fingertips find purchase as quickly and comfortably as they can into an eye socket. If your mouth was free, you'd be spitting. Shouting.

But he just peels you away and twists your arm in a way that forces your torso to follow and you screech into the tape; he twists, toward your chest and then down, and you're no match for him and his manic clenched teeth and the way he rises up to plant his foot upon your wrist, in the middle of your back.

Your chin hits the floor.

Something in your shoulder tears loose with a nauseating crack.

You scream. It's not loud enough.

“It's only gonna get worse if you don't just listen to me, sweetheart,” he growls, leaning down, grinding your carpal bones to dust beneath his heel.

Sweetheart. The first time he calls you anything other than friend is when it's really started. He's hurting you and the gutting certainty that he won't stop here is washing over you like a frigid wave.

Those pathetic, annoying sounds again—whining, whimpering. It's harder to remember it's coming from you when your eyes are screwed shut. If you close them tight enough maybe you can pretend this is all happening to somebody else.

“Obviously, that won’t work,” Nikolai says more to himself than you, yanking you back up, putting you back together off the radiator in a few motions you can’t keep up with before he lets you fall again.

You ragdoll.

You would like to think you might’ve had more fight in a situation like this one. But a steady ache is spreading from your shoulder down into your back and the angle at which he presses you into an arch reminds you your dignity is not something of his concern. You ragdoll.

“No, no, baby, we’re gonna get up now.” He drags you up by your wrists and hair and you groan and ache and try to ragdoll yourself into a bag of sand but he kicks your bound ankles and the negative spaces your knocking knees cut out until you’re sitting on your ass on the edge of his bed, in front of the buzzing TV, tears aglide in a new wave when he threatens you, with so little as a bruising grip on your face, to stay upright. “You’ll be okay,” he purrs emptily.

You’re past the liberty of choice, so the thin stack of DVDs hit the dresser with a papery thwack—all but one, which he jams into the slot before he crawls behind you on the bed.

It wouldn’t have been so difficult to turn you into a lover, really. You wish you could tell him this while he sets either thigh on each side of your own, slides his arms around your middle, beneath your arms, the dishonesty of his fingertips beneath the hem of your shirt so welcoming. You still wish he wouldn’t have lied to you. You wish he wouldn’t have put drugs in your drink. You wish he’d take the tape off and let you wake up from the pain careening parallel to your spine and in your hand and you’d cover his arms with your own and tell him thank you, you’ve needed this, it’s been so long since you’ve felt physical affection from a human being that you think you could cry. His fingers wander between your legs and away again and you are crying.

But Nikolai doesn’t want to turn you into a lover. The staticy screen hosts a shaky frame trained on where a cracked alleyway swallows up the foot of a brick building in shifty evening light and when it pans up to a window, there you are, impossibly, between a sliver of blinds. When you turn your head away—hearing those suffocated garbles from someone else’s throat—he creeps back up to your jaw, hard, like he wants to leave his fingerprints on the teeth they’ll use to identify you.

You watch yourself get undressed. You watch yourself wrap a towel around your waist and step halfway out of sight behind the frosted glass of your shower door.

He gets up, periodically, to change the disc. Whistling, leaving you shivering in your bones, glaring sharply at you when you writhe until he guides your wet eyes to another film of yourself. And another. And another. And another. Ones where you’re on your way to work, on the bus. Ones where you carry groceries. Ones where your back faces him, on that barstool of yours. Ones where he gets close enough to touch you and then retreats. Ones where he’s picked up the convenience store receipt that slips out of your pocket. He uncrumbles it for the camera and scans the text and discerns your fate between your case of wine and bag of chips, laughing to himself. He’s a filmmaker. You’re his muse and we’re going to make the best movie ever, you think you hear him whispering to you or shouting at you with vigor when the television finally zaps dead beneath his touch. It’s going to be an exploration, he says, and he’s so lucky it’s you, who did everything right, sweetheart.

“How many days,” he begins, moving you like a mannequin to face him on the bed, your legs curling up uncomfortably as if they’re one, “did I follow you, do you think? Give me your best guess.”

You desperately don’t want to vomit behind the tape, so you don’t make a sound.

But he’s looking to you like he’s waiting for you to take your turn in the game, most likely unwilling to give you a leg up after your little outburst earlier. The tiny red crescents between his brows, barely visible beneath his snowy bangs, do not miss you.

Chain link clicking, you lift up your one ten-fingered hand—no more four hands for a wider array of guesses—and present six shaky fingers. You think about going for his neck.

Nikolai shakes his head as if he’s pleased to be winning. “Try again.”

You spare a middle finger. Without looking at your seven, he shakes no once more. You don’t have to cast your eyes down to his arms, filling out the sleeves of his plain white shirt, to remember how strong they were around you without even trying to be. You’d have to be quick and you’d have to squeeze hard.

Your thumb pokes out.

No.

The rest of your planning time rests like a marble between your last two fingers and when your ring finger flicks up you feel it slipping—slipping because what will you do after? You’ll have to choke him until he’s out cold. You’ll have to be certain he’s subdued before you’ll be able to waddle on your bound feet to his door to undo the latch and deadbolt—forbid you shouldn’t have enough time before you can make it out, pound on a neighbor’s door, get to a phone so someone, anyone can help you get out of here.

Happily, Nikolai shakes his head once more.

And you’re uncurling your pinky, making your way to a mockery of jazz hands.

But before you get there, you lunge at him with everything left in your body and shattered hand—your ridiculously stringy reserve of willpower, funneled down through your dislocated shoulder and hours of frantic breath and trembling next to that radiator so that when your nails land this time in half-moons around his throat you groan; you get his jugular with two palms, one assured, one numb, insistent knuckles, and vengeant fingertips and his eyes widen so sweetly, his mouth twists down in the first and only displeased expression you’ll see on his angel-white face and you grit your hidden teeth and squeeze. You can taste the outside air and the blood from inside your cheek.

Frowning and flailing backwards, Nikolai gives you the privilege of a little performance.

You think you could kill him before he kills you. You want to see the blue rise up his pretty skin. You grit your teeth. Your groan becomes a shriek. You squeeze.

And when he’s on his back he pries you off. Does you one better.

He’s grinning before he can get you off him—you’ve lost. You’ve lost a long time ago—when are you going to believe him? Does he have to spit it in your tear-streaked face? Surely you’ll understand, after his knuckles ripple into the space between your upper and lower jaws, now that he stamps his knee into the back of your neck in another choreography-perfect motion you never stood a chance against. Jazz hands against your chest, elbows jabbing your stomach.

“It was thirteen, anyway,” he growls like he’s angry with you for guessing incorrectly. “Thirteen days. Feisty one.” You had no extra hands or mouth to make such a speculation, and now his heavy leg bears down on you. Hand on your back, grappling toward the curve of your ass, almost soothing. Almost. Your eyes are pressed into a blur of black and white stripes.

Smack.

It’s one of the kinder touches, still.

“I don’t like having to discipline my subjects into submission, you know.” Nikolai almost sounds regretful. “If you’ll just—” Smack— “trust me to do my work, I can trust you to be good for me.”

Your spinal cord could snap like the head off a flower and he just smacks your ass, over, over. All your permission to make sound is trapped between his kneecap and his mattress, him and his rough hands, one of which knots in your hair and yanks, yanks until you can’t pretend this is nice anymore. You should’ve struck faster, gripped harder, shaken him with all your might but you should’ve done lots of things prior to now, and he’s the disappointed discipliner and you’re sorry, alright—you’re sorry you caused either of you all this trouble and you just want to go home. You just want to go back to your shithole apartment and let your chafed wrists heal and allow the long-term pain of a few dodged medical bills remind you that this wasn’t quite a dream, but at least you’ll be alive.

At least you’d be alive.

“Don’t fucking move,” he doesn’t bark at you. He’s not unkind. It’s a simple instruction. All the air rushes back in when he gets up, off you. Moves somewhere in the room to make a soft clatter.

At least you’d be alive. But for what? To slog back to the machine? With all this added weight on you?

Would you want to be? You hadn’t begun with much when you crossed the threshold of the bar into the night he swept you up in. You had the stifling promise of work, home, work, home, feel alone, drink yourself to sleep, and you would be dumbly hopeful—no, pitiably lying to yourself to think anything more, anything different would be waiting for you on the other side of this.

Another clatter, dull and short, sounds on the bed next to you and you dip with the weight of him following. From the clatter he chooses scissors—you know this because your shirt goes first, the cotton ripping, before your pants which too rip, rip, rip in places all over before he shucks it all, undergarments too, off you like the skin of a fruit.

At least you’d be alive. But what is it you’d aim to become after being Nikolai’s pretty little victim? A work of his art? Surely this isn’t something you want to carry with you, you think in the margin between rationality and ruin—between you and the door you’re not certain you’ll ever reach again. Certainly, not in one piece.

You roll over, exposed. He’s so pretty, biceps flexing, jaw clenching while he situates a body that is not yours into an adequate position where he can sever the duct tape binding the ankles with a few back-and-forth flourishes of his serrated knife like it’s a saw. This is a hobby, you remember. You wonder if he’s a butcher or a mortuary scientist or what he does to make his living and if he looks just as beautiful doing it. You’ve been granted the point-of-view of specimen. You can’t think of a perspective you’d rather watch him splay himself across your thighs from.

Your feet twitch to kick. Your brain doesn’t follow through.

“I told you you’d be comfortable, didn’t I?” He’s back to grinning that grin you’re holding onto. You can be a pretty model if you keep reminding yourself that if you weren’t weakened and restrained in his bed, that grin would look so inviting. His joy and passion are what drew you into him in the first place, after all. He talks to you, looks at you so softly while you feel broken. Isn’t that all you’ve been craving for someone to do? “Let’s get you comfortable, dovey.”

He kisses you—not rough, especially gentle in fact—over the tape as he’s tucking the same knife between your bodies. The kiss of an angel, the kiss of death.

It’s not comfortable when the stainless steel handle finds its way inside you. You can’t even get wet, looking at him, seeming so patient now that he’s got you bending nice and far, and his teasing from earlier has done nothing; he’s so pretty and you would’ve wanted him before this. He didn’t have to do this to you.

It’s uncomfortable, too, when he fucks you with it, slow at first—gradually faster. You don’t think you even moan, or whine. You just watch him, silky braid fallen in the crook of his neck, as he alternately studies your face, the knife, how you don’t react. When he fucks you faster, risking cuts upon his own hand, you let your eyes flutter shut, your fingers curling and uncurling subtly like they’re the only part of you that registers what’s happening. You don’t want to watch him anymore, going to the trouble. For you.

He pushes it so deep for you, so deep you start to feel the serrated teeth. Your toes echo your fingers and finally, you give him sound in the form of a cry.

“Oh, that’s good,” Nikolai tells you. A laugh bubbles through the words.

Stop, you think you’re saying. Don’t. It’s anyone’s guess and his guess is more.

So you leave. You remember this is all happening to someone who isn’t you—you have to feel it, but it’s not happening to you. You leave and you pretend it’s two of his fingers in you—they’re cold, that’s all—pretend the tape and the cuffs are some kink thing you were thrilled to indulge him in. Pretend you’re not concussed. Pretend your faculties can come back to you anytime you want in this little daze of yours—he’s just making you comfortable, he’s just making you feel good because your life isn’t so sad that you don’t deserve even that.

He’s just making you feel good.

Your tears have no end. They unravel out of you like string.

“Don’t cry, baby,” his voice shakes with the speed. You jostle with his pace but you pretend you’re floating. “Don’t cry, pretty thing.” But he’s cutting you open from the worst place and when he grabs your chin again, his hands’ slick with his blood or maybe yours and you jolt back home into your body to find him again and the knife is still inside you.

You hurt all over. He’s just making you feel good.

Your sobs come loud and violent, withheld only by tape. He’s patient with you. He’ll be patient with you while you purge it, surely. You blur over, the string undoing faster and faster and he’s wiping your tears away, replacing them with something else, something red. It gets in your eyes. You miss his grin this time but if you were to see it, you would not think it the same one from before.

When your body rejects the knife he scoops it up, licks the handle clean of all you’ve given him so far, with care.

And he hushes you.

“It feels good,” he reaffirms to you. “You’re doing so good.”

You’re doing better than you ever have. You’re good—you must be. It’s the first time you’ve heard that in what feels like lifetimes. You’re good beneath his touch. He smears your blood or his blood down your cheek, down the tape, and you cry for him. Stop. Don’t. Be cruel to me again. It’s what I know. It’s easier to die when burning hatred is the one burying you. His affection makes your stomach turn. You loll into the palm cupping your face. You’re doing so good.

And he’s grinning, sharp and wide, when your eyes roll back and forth. Back into your skull, forward onto him. Nikolai grants your wish when his fingers worm beneath, between the tape and your skin, while he’s telling you don’t scream or I won’t be so nice anymore and when he tears it away your face feels cold and you scream anyway—you scream for your crumpled arm and the violation and the knife life’s held above your throat come to materialize now in the third strike against him and there is a thick, flowing gash that leaves you feeling waterboarded as it seethes and gurgles its way through your teeth and around your shoulders all at once like a crimson harness to keep you flat on your back while Nikolai looks at you like you didn’t learn.

“Ultimately—” His cloud-colored eyes burn as he towers over you like a god. Your god. The only one that can set you free, now. “—you made such easy little snuffbait,” he quips, running the blade once, twice along the cloth of his shirt before turning it on the thin, tender skin keeping him from your sternum. You and your first-floor housing and your melancholia. “Too caught up in your woes to notice the man following you around each corner for—god, weeks now. So little to live for anymore, sweetheart—it wouldn’t be so much of a shame to put you out of your misery now, would it?”

The look you give him must be delirious and begging; you swear a flicker of the most genuine sympathy you’ve ever seen crosses his face until he’s laughing, softly, rumbling to your ears like a fan’s whir.

“Oh, it would be such a waste of you,” he waves away. “Besides, I’ve already given you my artist statement.”

His artist statement. From the bar.

Freedom.

His work—work, the word is bitter and foamy mixed with your blood—explores different conceptions of freedom.

Freedom. What could it possibly have to do with an innocent person, bound and drugged with their throat slit on film? What exploration is being made? What endeavor toward enlightenment are you when your mouth is too full of blood to ask him to stop?

Freedom. He’s been following you for weeks, if all he’s said is truthful, while you’ve been swirling in that downstream like a helpless fucking bug. And like a kid looking for an insectile test subject, Nikolai plucked you right up, splayed out your limbs, and stuck you beneath the microscope. Next he’d pin you, dry you, feed the story of your mortality to someone—his next victim, an empty roll of film, his own reflection, some god that wasn’t listening to you—and you would be another nameless face, a decomposing body, a snapshot demonstration of how well deli ham apparently mimics peeled-back human skin. A lesson in deliverance.

You haven’t been free in a long time. Perhaps, even, since before you moved to Yokohama and all your shit uprooted itself to the forefront of your mind and landed you on your back in the Devil’s bed.

“You should know well by now I’m interested in more than just seeing you bleed.”

Your hands reach out, trembling for his face like it’s salvation, while he leans to rest with his chin above yours. The Devil traces white heat, a bullseye for where he’ll stab into that tender skin on your chest, drag down, cut you open for him to begin the messy part of his project.

You tilt ninety degrees and the red light of the camera winks at you. At least you’re not alone.

“I told you, I’m going to set you free.”

#nikolai x reader #nikolai smut #bsd x reader #bsd smut #bsd dead dove #dead dove #dead dove do not eat #mdni #nnnsfw.ᐟ #with love—reid

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