#so sticking with the old fashion way

[bf-rally]

okay finally colored this!

idk what the sites color theme will be, so the colors will most definitely change but for now we have a logo (ft. my oc A)

[secrets-of-everwich]

Secrets of Everwich Podcast Auditions Open!

Hello! I've decided to turn the scripts posted here into a proper podcast, but I'm going to need some help.

All the information should be in the form, but just to reiterate some things here:

This is an unpaid project. You are volunteering to help out.

If you commit to auditioning, you are also committing to the project itself, and consenting for your voice to be used in the podcast.

Information will be passed over Discord, however if you do not have Discord, please let me know! It won't affect your audition

You must be 13+ to audition. If I find out you are not, I am very sorry but you will not be allowed to participate further.

Accents and gender do not matter, I will be picking people based on the Vibes being correct.

The form will be open until 17:00 GMT, or 12:00 EST, on 5th February 2025. This is a month from when it opens.

I may ask people to recall a character after the form closes. This is to either see more from them, or hear them as a different character.

Any questions, please send an ask to either this blog, or my main at @severevoiddragon !!

Thanks for your interest if you got this far, this is definitely a passion project, so I'm so excited to get other people on board working on it !!

The old masterpost of episodes is here: Masterpost

[cybertron-smash-or-pass]

G1 Perceptor

[araneitela]

I live for when these unexpected little things happen. Okay, so I forget to loop the song I had picked to listen to on Youtube, and it ends up auto-playing to a live performance of a song. So I peek over, and I see the outfit that she's wearing. High-waist trousers, and that shirt, mostly tucked in as it is, with its sleeves rolled up just like that? It's a bit of that old-school romantic aesthetic, it exudes a certain old-fashioned femininity, it's quite timeless in its simplicity, and classy despite a rather relaxed fit. This is something that I see Kafka wearing during her downtime, and especially within the comforts of the Stellaron Hunter HQ/complex, and exactly in that color-scheme as well: darker in the legs, lighter in the upper body. It's simple, there might be the ever-enduring presence of that single earring (pearl), a thin bracelet at most but even that I'm hesitant about, and while she'd be void of any sort of necklace, you could smell the fragrance of that signature Black Opium as always.

[deus-and-the-machina]

ffxiv garlemald discourse is so funny because people will go "ugh people just cant stand it when things aren't black and white" and then you look at how the empire are portrayed in stormblood and shadowbringers and its like hm. that seems like a pretty intense and accurate display of violent imperialism to me! Wow I wonder why people in this day and age may find it hard to feel sympathy for them or even hate them on principal. god its such a mystery.

the games like 50/50 to me on how it tackles these themes because I actually like the garlemald arc in EW, I think it has a lot of horrific and powerful scenes depicting how self destructive fascist propaganda and beliefs are, but I also think it doesn't go far enough on some fronts. the garleans' xenophobia is most notably and obstacle to getting them to accept the contingent's help, which is what they're there to do,

but there's never an admission of harm from any garleans on the uuuuuuuuh massive amount of war crimes the nations around them are still suffering from they're just kind of like "we misjudged you...but you actually wanted to help us all along" like yeah thats great now can we get you all some deprogramming because you keep talking about returning to your prime and glory days and I think we need to unpack some stuff you really SHOULDNT return to. im not even really talking about EW proper but the patches where things are a bit more chilled out and people are recovering.

It feels like they wanted to have their critique of imperialism and also have things end with the beauty of human connection and reaching out and these things just don't mesh well because hey a lot of your modern day audience is not gonna like having to treat people yelling xenophobic things at the cast and your character with kid gloves after you showed them hours and hours of the awful things these people's beliefs have done. especially in the present day hoo boy.

[wolfblood-of-anubis]

“not you too.” she is so done with rufus, she just wants to find a way out of the hole she’s dug herself in

[lightdancer1]

See the further irony is:

That in using 'Mall Goth Sauron' as the take on Dark Willow over 'misogynist has character randomly killed for LULZ' it also allows for greater accountability on the one hand and for Season 7 to thematically focus on repairing all this damage in the midst of facing an enemy of shadows reliant on lies to further itself. The only way to break the Druj is the absolute Truth in a very Zoroastrian sense. Characters don't get to neatly skip past accountability for their actions, and this would spiral over into further later seasons with the essential reality that in an otherwise lower-level setting this one random girl from California is a Dark Phoenix-tier reality warper and the most powerful person on the planet, or the universe.

And the questions of how that power could and should be employed on the one hand and that Willow is essentially a Doctor Strange type who beats up Gods and Eldritch Abominations for her regular line of work where her counterparts deal with the more 'street level' crises would in turn be the logical conclusion of where the show ends. She doesn't do as much physical fighting for the same reason that Stephen Strange never uses magic to go punch the Hulk in the face, her narrative role is ultimately that of Sorceress Supreme of Earth, with literally nobody in an ancient established war anticipating that this one random ginger from California was and is the new Sorceress Supreme and that if they had had such awareness the realities are that this power would and could have taken worse forms.

Unfortunately for the world, the reality too is that it is a shy computer geek who has a not at all subtle dark side and the usual teenage anxieties and insecurities given the equivalent of being able to reliably actually do things other people might dream of but can never do.

But again as long as Dawn Summers being a good thing is a narrative convention that's established memory magic is a poor choice to show the corrupting effects of reality-warping. It's a case of 'yes as established in canon all of this is true for that one season but then they decided to retcon it, so the fans are not obligated to care about it any more than the canon does about this itself.'

[princemick]

Couture fashion week at the moment and I think the Robert Wun show was the best

god yes but also HAS everyone seen the Gautier show?? because the WAY I am obsessed

[redsray]

I love the idea of the Wayne kids dropping extremely vague and disturbing comments during galas. Especially when in uncomfortable situations or if they're just bored. They pull out things from their nightlife too. Other times they just make shit up.

Socialite: Oh, dear, your cheeks look so sullen! Who sucked the life out of you?

Tim, dead serious: An old man with a goatee.

Socialite: Uh... what?

Dick: Once I broke my knee so badly that I swear I could see part of the bone sticking out.

Socialite: Good lord. How on earth did that happen?

Dick: Just clumsy gymnast things ^^

Socialite: The white streak is certainly a bold fashion choice.

Jason: I saw someone get decapitated once, so I could be doing worse in terms of what's on my head, yknow? At least I have one.

Socialite: What's your favourite colour, sweetie?

Damian: Red.

Socialite: Oh that's lovely!

Damian: Like the blood of my enemies.

Socialite: Oh.

Socialite: You must be new to these kind of events.

Duke: Uh, yeah, they're kind of scary. But I've had worse.

Socialite: Worse.

Duke: Well I've been left on top of a skyscraper before with no way down just to 'get over my fear of heights' so, yes.

Socialite: You don't talk very loud, do you? I can barely hear you.

Cass, with a straight face: If I spoke any louder every glass in the room would shatter.

Tim, behind her: I can vouch.

[joziokowalski]

looking for pictures of the haircut i want to me is like dealing with a foreign language but harder. i have no idea how haircuts work & the only thing i know for sure is it's not going to look the same on me anyway

[ot3]

i feel like the plot has really been lost in the conversation about sexualizing underage characters in anime.

one of the points that the anon who sent me that big bulleted list made about frieren is that "the female character designs are clearly lolibait and evoke the ‘1000 year old elf who looks very young’ trope" and yeah, clearly frieren is evoking the ancient elf who looks young trope just by being a literal direct example of that thing, but i'm not really sure in what way her design could be considered lolibait?

she's pretty short and flat chested but other than that the only part of this character design that's meaningfully childish is the pigtails. it's not exactly a design that's made to show off how relatively young she looks, nor is it a design that seems geared to be sexually appealing in its own right. and it's especially not a design that's designed to be sexually appealing because the character looks young. every inch of skin between the toes and neck are covered, and the only place anything is visibly form fitting is on her knees and calves. the rest has some pretty voluminous drapery going on.

in general a lot of people are pretty weird about anime character designs. like you've got whatshername from bocchi the rock. the red one with the guitar. i havent seen it hold on let me google her.

this lady. she's 25? i think. anyway obviously she reads as 'young' but also to the best of my knowledge everyone in bocchi the rock just kind of looks like this because thats how the artist draws people. is this lolibait? i've certainly seen people imply that character designs like this one are part of 'pedophilia culture' but to me that's just kind of scaremongering bullshit

i feel like it's just kind of an insidious thing to say. like ultimately at the end of the day, do either of these fictional characters resemble a real human child? no. they look like Cartoon Characters.

when adult characters that have faces stylized in the typical 'anime' fashion also have curvy builds and big busts, people will call it creepy because they're of the opinion that you're sticking a child's face onto an adult body and that's degenerate pervert behavior. then on the flipside, if they have straight figures and small busts it's also degenerate pervert behavior because the artist is CLEARLY just trying to draw a child and claim it's an adult.

so like what's the conclusion to be drawn here other than that there's a certain kind of stylization that is just automatcally interpreted as Pedophile Proportions. i really feel like acting like this stuff is a gateway drug to pedophilia is acting like fursuits are a gateway to sexually abusing animals.

[thelostconsultant]

Not a gold digger

pairing: Max Verstappen x reader

summary: Fans think you only want Max's money. But as it turns out, you were wealthy before he came into your life--you just don't make it obvious.

warnings: No smut, but there's a part that makes me say MDNI.

note: So... I'm kinda back? Idk, I'll see if I'll stick around.

The toxicity of the fandom was becoming quite entertaining, really. It was the third time since you and Max had made your relationship public half a year ago that someone started an anti gold digger campaign to protect your boyfriend. They truly believed they were doing this for a greater good, and they all begged Max for his attention.

It always began after they sniffed out he had given you something expensive as a gift or took you shopping to a luxury boutique. While there were some people who tried to protect you by pointing out that maybe he enjoyed showering you with gifts, the rest didn't care about that. 

You lived in a small apartment back home, you were driving a five years old Renault SUV, and no one knew what you did for a living. This was enough to enrage them and make them believe all you wanted was Max's money at the end of the day. Just think about the way she's looking at him, one of them wrote about two months ago, she's so clearly not in love with him. Poor Max, someone please save him. 

Ridiculous.

“Is everything okay?” he asked when he got home and kissed the top of your head. 

You were sitting in his sim rig, using the time while it was free to practice, because you wanted to play with him when you weren't here together, and he was more than happy to show you the basics. “Someone started another campaign to cancel me,” you replied casually as you got out with his help. 

Even when you were standing in front of him, he didn't let go of your hand, instead he raised it to his lips to place a soft kiss on its back. “Gold digging?” You nodded with a sad look on your face, but less than five seconds later you were both laughing. “Look, I know you're having way too much fun with this, but–”

Without waiting for him to finish, you raised your hand to make him stop. “I'm not stepping out of the shadows, Max. I've been hiding for years, even fucking Forbes doesn't know my real name or face,” you told him.

Back in the old days, when Bitcoin appeared, your geeky uncle had gotten into mining and trading it. He knew the potential, so he put most of his savings into buying them, then he held onto them, and by the time he got sick years later, he knew they were valuable and would be worth a lot more in the upcoming years. In his will, he left his savings and his wallet to you, giving you the chance to use them as you wished since you had learned everything about crypto from him.

So now you had Bitcoin as well as old fashioned investments, and you had used your money to help out an up-and-coming tech company for a forty percent share, and it was later sold to a tech giant for a lot of money. But despite your wealth, you chose to stay under the radar, because you loved your small apartment, and you weren't about to trade it for some fancy penthouse. 

You had met Max the year before in Las Vegas. F1 was a sport you watched with your uncle while he was still alive, and you were hell-bent on getting a VIP pass for the weekend. If you asked your boyfriend, he would say it was love at first sight, but in reality he was just annoyed by you. For a solid ten seconds, he would correct you every time you talked about it.

You agreed that you would hide in Max's apartment until this latest campaign died down, which gave you some time to spend together in peace. Every now and then you checked the tags to see how things were going, and after the silence of the past few days, today your name was trending again. Ready to have a good laugh, you opened the tag, but the most popular post gave you a minor stroke.

“Oh, fuck me,” you yelled as you launched your phone into the couch.

Max pulled the headset down to his neck as he looked over at you. “Is everything okay?” You raised your finger to your lips as if you wanted him to stay quiet, but luckily he got the message. “I'm muted. So?”

You grabbed your phone and went over to him. “They know. One of those idiots from the company I helped back in the day posted a tweet to protect me, saying that if it wasn't for me being an angel investor, they wouldn't be millionaires now,” you summarized as you gave him the device.

He scrolled through a series of tweets, and found a post from a journalist of Forbes in which he promised a proper investigative piece based on this info. He handed you the phone, then wrapped an arm around your waist. “It's okay, schatje. I know that's not what you wanted, but maybe they'll stop with the recurring hate campaign now,” he tried. “And if you’re worried about the article… Don’t be. There is nothing compromising about you. Yes, you inherited the money, but you have proven you know what to do with it.”

“Maybe you’re right,” you admitted with a sigh. 

“I’m usually right. C’mere,” he said as he reached out to pull you closer, but you glanced over at the camera. Rolling his eyes, he quickly turned it off, then gave you an expectant look. “Will you hug me now? And I want a kiss too.”

With a laugh, you leaned down to wrap your arms around his neck and gave him a soft kiss. But he wanted more, his hand slowly sneaked under your shorts, his fingers running over your clothed cunt before he decided to pull your panties aside and dip a finger between your folds. You moaned into the kiss, but he pulled away a second later to lick his finger clean. 

Shaking your head with a chuckle, you patted his shoulder and walked back to the couch. You could feel Max’s eyes on you the whole time, and when you looked at him again, he flashed a devilish smile at you. “I should quit the stream. Now that I had a taste, I want more,” he told you. 

“I’m not going anywhere, just try to be patient.”

He looked back at the screen, then put the headset back on his head and unmuted his mic. “Sorry, I have to go. See you next time,” he told the others, then logged out. You couldn’t remember the last time he left the sim rig this fast, and only a few seconds later he was kneeling in front of you, eagerly reaching up to pull your shorts off you.

liked by user1, user2 and 947,896 others

f1gossips: Breaking news! Turns out Max Verstappen's girlfriend isn't a gold digger after all as she has her own fortune according to the investigative article published by Forbes. Will the fans apologize?

view all comments

user2: And here I was, thinking she's just a greedy airhead...

user3: Easy to be wealthy with your uncle's money.

↳ user4: Have you read the whole thing? She invested the money and helped out several startups--that later became pretty successful--as an angel investor. Yes, maybe she inherited a lot of money, but she knows what to do with it.

↳ user5: May I remind you how many F1 drivers started their careers with their families's money?

user6: Told you she wasn't a gold digger. Suck it, haters.

liked by yourusername, landonorris and 1,577,353 others

maxverstappen1: If you don't buy your girlfriend gifts every once in a while, you're a bad boyfriend. I love to spoil her, it's not a crime. I love her, I'm proud of her, and you can send us as much hate as you want, it will only make us stronger.

tagged: yourusername

view all comments

yourusername: I'd be perfectly fine without the gifts, I already told you.

↳ maxverstappen1: I don't care.

landonorris: You're absolutely right!

↳ maxverstappen1: You're single, how would you know?

↳ landonorris: Just FYI, I've been in relationships before.

danielricciardo: You're so disgustingly smitten with her. (I love you both.)

[yeyinde]

when your need grows teeth | John Price x f!Reader

John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than let it go. It starts when you ask him to pick up your birth control—like dangling a piece of bloody meat in front of a starving dog.  Of course he's going to take a bite.  He thinks you ought to have known this by now. 

SMUT 18+ | gratuitous smut; HEAVY breeding kink, breeding; Dom!John Price; p-in-v sex, unsafe sex; rough sex; mentions of spanking; mutual manipulation; this is roughly 10k of John Plotting and fucking you; John is: unhinged, obsessive, possessive, and Scheming. mentions of birth control tampering but nothing is followed through. No. He’s going to knock you up the old-fashioned way—by making you beg for it.

AO3 MIRROR

John has always had this desire—this awful, instinctual drive in the back of his head to knock someone up. Get them fat, swollen with his child. His. 

And maybe that's the crux of it. Possession. To have something of the most rooted kind. To irrevocably change someone—their anatomy, their body, the chemistry in their brain, their status in life from them (single no dependents) to mother (mother of his child), their very atoms—and create life from the combined parts. 

It's this almost fantastical beast, this unreachable dream for him. 

It's his Shangri-la. His castle in Spain. 

He's not under any disillusionment that this idea of fatherhood, of parenthood, is slightly skewed. That most men who want children don't feel this overwhelmingly greedy desire to fundamentally alter someone in such an irreversible way. It's not quite ownership, but it's the same ilk. A bastardised, unwanted child of it. 

And it's not just this idea of claimation—to forever be the father of their child, even if neither of them stays together; a piece of him will always be there, parasitic, no matter what—but something deeper. Something a bit less—egregious. 

This is, and always has been, about yearning. 

John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than to let it go. 

Marriage, he finds, is breakable. Divorce, separation. He's always on his worst behaviour in the initial stages of dating, so it's never something he has to entertain since no one ever sticks around long enough for it to be on the table, much less the menu, but the idea of it—of signing papers, of hashing out the split, of being known as ex-husband—leaves a bitter tang between his teeth. It won't do. He needs permanence. Perpetuity. 

Nothing says forever quite like a child, does it? 

And sure—he’s aware that countermeasures exist: custody orders, sole custody, shared; allotted visitations; divisional lines in this new age that keep the parents from ever interacting—but while you can get divorced, you can't unmake a child, can you?

The child would never write him out, either. 

Where deadbeats exist, it's important to note that their counterparts do, too. The ones like him who will gouge their eyes out of their skulls before they ever let what happened to them growing up trickle down and impact their child, polluting the pool. 

Simply put: John Price knows he'd be the best dad there is because he's stubborn that way. 

It helps, he supposes, that he really only has so much love to give out to the world, and greedily, he stashed the entirety of it away in a box to give to his would-be wife and their child. An overwhelming deluge that promises happiness should it ever be unlocked. Pandora's box, perhaps—down to the very essence because if John Price were to ever love someone, then it's probably in their best interest to run from it, this gaping, needy chasm. 

Not that it would ever be a possibility, of course—he’s much too good at compartmentalisation, in taking out his anger, his viciousness, on the ugly world he drenches himself in, the one his hands have a tangible cause and effect principle in place that will forever feed that starving beast inside of him.

Ergo—he’s a staunch supporter of the theory: happy wife, happy life. Though where those men think in a box stuffed full of emotional intimacy, flowers, chocolate, maintaining love, all-consuming and enduring, he takes it to extremes that would have them cowering a little bit. Maybe a lot.  

But that's fine. He only has to make sure his family is happy. No one else matters, save a select few who have a seat at his table during Sunday dinners. 

The rest, though? Spare parts. 

(The ice-cold resolve in those two words is apodictic, brass bound, and he's sure if his higher-ups knew about it, well—

His chest candy would be a hole in the ground. Put the rabid dog down before it has a chance to bite.)

But that all-consuming, devouring, obsessive love he has to give, that begs to be let free, is the reason why it's so tightly leashed. Locked up in a box. Untouchable. Inaccessible. 

It's why he isn't married. 

Ghost once asked him why the women he dated were older. Much older. Menopausal (always). And he'd said something to the effect of it being his type. Older women who wouldn't cower away from the acrid burn of him, who wouldn't hurt their delicate little hands on his gritty surface. 

But the real reason is because he knows better. 

He's a starving dog, and it's just bad form to dangle a piece of meat in front of it. Especially when the hand holding it is his own. 

Don't bite the hand that feeds you, and all. 

(The keen look in Ghost's eyes told him that, perhaps, the man already knew the reason when he asked, and was just satiating himself with kinship—the dark, awful look on Simon's ugly mug after the dredging the underbelly of Price’s rotten, mouldering mudfloor of things unsaid spoke volumes. 

They'd both nodded. Content, then. And promptly ordered a shot of whisky to drown the salivation, the hunger, from clogging their throats. Killing the urge to bite.

A pair of packless, stray dogs.)

But then he found you, and all his careful planning, all his distance, blew up in his face. 

It's always been on his mind since then. Lingering in his periphery—this fevered, tantalising vision of you, round and swollen with his child. 

It's unattainable, of course. A fantasy. 

Though, this—you throwing up in the washroom of his penthouse, undoubtedly knocked up by his machinations—is probably because he kept that desire too close to where he hides his questionable mortality, the one that allows him to throw innocent people to their deaths, and send mothers and fathers to an early grave just so he can rip his fists apart on their bastard offspring in his own brand of catharsis that always bites back when they grow up, hankering for revenge. 

He's always been good at snatching dreams out of the air, clenching them tight in his fists. Taming chimerical wants, whims, until they were docile, domesticated. Making realities out of fiction. 

And really—he’s just not a good man.

He thought you'd have known this by now.

He remembers the first time he growled the words into your ear as he came, your cunt clenching around him like a vice. Desperate for it, he teased after, fingers fucking into your sloppy, leaking hole. Pushing his spend back into you. Half-drunk on the taste of you still clinging to his beard, but mostly just mesmerised by the sight of you—pretty pussy all ruined, swollen from the vicious, hateful pounding he gave it, and dipping with his cum like a faucet. 

(It pissed him off—still does, really—when you waste it like this.)

Gonna fill you up, he snarled, low and wrecked. Gonna make it take—

It was a fantasy. Still is. But the way it took root in the garden of your bedroom, like it belonged—native flora, he thinks, a touch mad with it—had something ugly, oil slick, rearing up from that untouchable place in his head. 

He could really blame you for it—and does. The way your ankles locked tight around his thighs, hands reaching, grabbing at his waist, clawing at his asscheeks to press him in deeper, deeper still, as he came inside of you, cock lodged right against your plug, had that untameable beast cocking its head in consideration after you danced too close to it, waking it from his long, restful slumber. 

You wanted it. Ached for it. He could feel it in the way your walls tightened around him, practically starving for it. Your pretty, glossy eyes rolling back into your head. Drool running down your chin. A litany of pleas spilled from your kiss-bruised lips, begging him for it. Please, John. Please. Please—

Who was he to deny you? 

Even if you made a big, flustered show of waving it off—not something I've ever imagined for myself, you know? and–and your lifestyle, what you do—is something like that even possible for us?—he saw how it curled around your shoulders, dipping its silver tongue into your ear. Germinating. 

He let it. Encouraged it. 

“Something to talk about later,” he indulged, reaching over for a cigar just to smother the urge to breed you stupid. To tie you to his bedposts and keep you full until your belly was swelling with more than just the absurd volume of his seed he pumped inside of you. 

And, oh—

The uneasy smile on your face reeked of disappointment. 

Fuck. Fuck—

John went to the washroom after that, heart pounding out of his chest, and jabbed the lit end of his cigar into his thigh to kill the fever in his veins. To rewrite the desperate, ugly howling in his head with pain instead. 

It worked. Works—

Until you came to him, all watery-eyed and worried, and told him to please, please stop falling asleep with a lit cigar because you think you might just go mad if you lost him to a cigarette fire. And doesn't he see how silly it is, these burns look so bad, John, and I worry—

His teeth ached. He smiled, but it felt like a grimace. A dog holding back the instinct to bare its teeth. 

“Sure, love,” he'd said, and started taking out his anger on your cunt instead, fucking you deep, and stupid. Getting you all cockdrunk, and hungry for the dream that spoiled so badly in the back of his head, he's sure a proper man would call it a nightmare. “Anything you want.”

(Brassbound. Apodictic. You know that, he knows you know that, so imagine his surprise when you come to him, all soft and tender, and ask him to pick up your birth control as if he hadn't spent the better part of two years grumbling every fucking time you took it and wasn't on the verge of tossing the damn bottle out the window, and fucking you until it took—

But—you do know that, don't you? 

Well, then. Whatever his lady wants, right? Right.)

“Can you stop by the pharmacy on your way home tonight?”

He hums, fiddling with the belt of his slacks in front of the mirror. “Sure, love. You feelin’ sick?” 

“No,” you murmur, sliding behind him on your way to the washroom, wearing nothing but a towel tucked under your arms. “I need my refill. For birth control.” 

His hands still. A gnarled, rotted tendril curls over the edge of the cesspool, murky, ink black water splashing all over the place. “Oh, yeah? Still taking that, hm?”

You fluster. Hands waving, chock full of nervous, emotive energy you can't seem to shake off. “Well—yes. I mean, obviously.”

And he'd leave it there, let the spillage dry on the hot pavement, if you hadn't glanced back at him, all damp keenness, slightly skittish, and asked, feather-soft and utterly fragile, “right?” 

Right? A question, he notes. Not a statement. 

He licks his teeth. Tastes something rancid in the gaps. 

“Mm. I suppose so.” He leaves it vague, but drenches it in the heavy weight of his disappointment. Anchors dragging it down. You flit around the space like a house-locked bird, slamming into the walls and ceiling as you try—blind and panicked—to find an escape. Any escape. 

He finds the whole thing utterly charming. Especially when you realise he pitched himself in front of the only exit, thick, heavy hands curled around his belt, cock outlined against his slacks, already thickened, drooling in his pants. 

There's gasp—wet, and sharp—as you take him in. The liquid of his eyes as his want bleeds out of his skull. The flush on his cheeks, the twitch of his cock at the mere mention of you not taking your silly little pills. 

John lets it sit for a moment, taking in greedy lungfuls of your unease as you glance everywhere but at him, as if looking in his direction, breathing in this toxic miasma will give you a contact high. Infectious. Gnarled. 

The little seed that started germinating blooms. 

He fights back the urge to grin, all teeth. Madness staining them black. 

“It's—it’s on—” and fuck, he's never seen you so unsure before, this nervous. You handle him like a wrangler, wrassling his brutish dominance until it's putty in your hands, splitting his head into pieces and galvanising the madness inside until it's scripture for you to peek at whenever you need guidance, insight into him, his essence, his being. 

Your dyadic has always been built on permeance. 

John doesn't think there's a single person alive who understands him as much as you do. The only person who seems content to gorge yourself on his rotted marrow like it was a delicacy. 

Seeing you like this rents his resolve in two. 

“It's the pharmacy near the, uh, the school. The kindergarten.” 

He chokes on a groan, and thinks he tears something in his throat with the strain of keeping it down. There's blood, ash, in the back of his throat.

“Alright, love. I'll pick it up.” 

You smell it, and shiver. 

It's giving meat to a starving dog, and saying, dog, don't take a bite. 

And so, of course he does. 

John picks up your prescription, tossing it in the passenger seat like it personally offended him. And it has. Does. It's what's standing in the way between what he wants, what he craves, and there's a distinct thrum of irritation welling inside of him. One that started when he had to bark out your name at the counter earlier, and the pharmacist looked at him, and calmly, kindly, explained what it was he was picking up. 

Make sure she takes them once a day. Preferably at the same time. This brand of oral contraceptive can be taken with or without food—

Fuck off, he thought—thinks, even now, glowering into the tinted window of the pharmacy. 

He grips the steering wheel tight until his scarred knuckles bleach white under the strain, and sits in the parking lot, staring, unseeingly, at the shops. Pensive. Thoughtful. It gnarls over his expression until he's the picture of that grizzly-like intensity you often accuse him of. All furrowed brows and a pinched, angry twist to his lips. 

There's a series of complex equations running laps in his head. He's no stranger to this process, needing to make life or death decisions in less time it takes someone to snap their fingers, or tentatively stammer out his title. 

This one is more linear than the rest. One plus one, so to speak. But the weight of it is profound. Heavier, even, than deciding between the success of his mission and the life of an innocent bystander. 

(But he thinks he's just selfish like that.)

In his head, he debates the ethics of replacing all of these silly little tablets that stand in his way with sugar pills. 

It would be the quickest path to the end, but the risk-reward ratio ebbs and flows the more he considers things without the miasmic influence of that abomination throwing itself at the walls of its enclosure, howling in an endless cacophony of do it, do itdoit—

A better man wouldn't even have such a temptation. He supposes that's what you deserve, but he already had this particular crisis a few months after he met you, and realised that the things he wanted to do to you would undoubtedly put him on a list. Slapped so hard with a restraining order, his ears would still be buzzing. 

That something about you made his jowls twinge, and his teeth ache, and no amount of stay away from her, Price; she deserves better than you was going to keep his dirty hands from curling around your throat, leaving soot-stains on your skin in the shape of his fingerprints. Brandishing ownership in burst blood vessels; a pretty collar for you to wear because as much as you like to pretend otherwise—

You're a dog just like him. 

In any case, he's the best choice for you. The only one who'd burn the world just to keep you warm, and that's what you really need. Protection. 

And fuck—you toy with that particular urge that has always been etched in fine lines within the walls of bones; dipping your fingers into it, and spreading it over the apples of your cheek. Everything about you prickles along his hindbrain. Renders him from a modern man with modern ideals to an animal who can only speak in growls, snarls; pure primalism, all instinct. 

You're made for each other down to the bone. He's sure he could split your head apart and find that your cranial sutures are perfectly mirrored. Made in the same image: you were grown from his missing rib, and he always meant to be cradled in the brackets of your thighs. 

So, crisis of worthiness aside—because there are none, not anymore—he plots. Plans. Schemes. But his machinations keep catching on the soft fibrils of your wants. 

John doesn't know what he'd do if you changed your mind. 

(Or, rather, he does but that's another madness to unravel with his personal therapist.)

It's with this—the slight brandishing of his uncertainty in your certainty—that he gives up the idea, pocketing it for a later date, and drives home, back to you. 

He doesn't toss the bag on the counter, but sets it up perfectly, placing it as close to the edge where the bin sits under it. All it would take is a breath of wind for it to fall into the trash. 

That doesn't happen, though. You stare at the white, crinkled package for a moment as he sips on his tea, quietly contemplative. With your expression hidden from him, he has no idea what might be going through that pretty head of yours. Disappointment, he can only hope. And then you're reaching for it, fingers gripping the bag tightly in your fist. He hears the paper crumble. It sparks something inside his chest. A bloom of hope that you might just throw it out. Toss it in the bin—

You turn to him instead, knuckles white. 

“Thanks,” you say, and the matter is dropped. 

He goes to tuck that want back where it escaped, leaving slick trails of putrefying rot behind, but—

John peeks in the vanity later that evening, but where he expects to see the little rectangular package sitting in its usual spot between his aftershave and the mouthwash, he finds nothing. Just an empty spot on the ledge, spotlit by the lack of dust. A clean square of white paint, undisturbed. 

His jaw twinges. He wonders if you're hiding it from him, keeping it safe from his machinations, but then he finds it shoved in the drawer with his shaving kit, and the box of condoms he bought when you'd first started dating (for show, naturally—John had no intentions of using them and learned persuasion was your Achilles heel; that and you tended to get a little glossy-eyed whenever he growled filth in your ear, the smell of your cunt heavy on his breath). 

The package is crinkled like you squeezed it tight in your little fist before you tossed it in. 

You're always meticulous in the way you put things in their places. Even the junk drawer is organised, all neat. 

This speaks volumes, but he's not quite sure what it says. They are still here, though. Accessible. One is missing from the pack. It dampens his mood. 

He picks up his toothbrush, and runs through those calculations again to see how he can convince you to skip the one you're meant to take tomorrow. And the next day, and the next, and the next—

He stays awake as you sleep beside him, looking into how many days you can miss before your brand of birth control stops being effective. 

Seven pills in a row. 

He files it away, lost in thought. 

The next morning, he leaves his phone open on the bedside table with the article pulled up. He kisses you awake before he leaves to shower, humming something soft under his breath. 

When he returns, he finds you sitting up in bed with your knees drawn to your chest. There's something pensive about the look on your face. Paper soft, as though it would all blow away at a mere whisper. 

You regard him almost cooly but something raw, fractured splits over the ravine. A waterfall of midnight black sludge rains down. 

(He wonders if it tastes of the same rot, the same madness, as the basin of the untouched recesses of his head—)

“I'm working late tonight,” you murmur after a measured beat, and he can't place your tone. “Maybe we can watch a movie when I get home.” 

John nods, and your eyes drop, scaling down his bare, broad chest as he breathes in the flint staining the air. Your gaze is white-hot when it bludgeons into him, feverish. 

It doesn't take much beckoning at all to have him crawling toward you, towel ripped from his hips and thrown somewhere in the aether. 

As he steals the madness from your tongue, his eyes flicker to the phone still sitting on the table. It looks perfectly untouched. The screen is off. 

That, too, he files away. 

John comes to the succinct conclusion that the only means he has in his arsenal to get what he wants—legally, and somewhat morally, anyway—is persuasion. 

There's no recourse if he can water that burgeoning plant inside of you, make it seem like this is something you want, too. A family. With him. 

(Only him.)

He knows that you see things quite similarly to him. Wherein love is desire. Desire is hunger. And there's nothing more profound to you than to eat the person you love alive. Consumption of every part—the good, the beautiful, the bad, the ugly, and the rotted: skin, fat, muscles, blood, and bones. All of it. 

So, even if somewhere down the road you think you hate him for this, it'll be fine. He'll just consume that, too. 

John Price is a tenacious man. Stubborn. 

(Bullish, he hears around the barracks. Fuckin’ stubborn prick, too.)

It helps that this line of work is perfectly suited for such a peremptory drive to the finish line, no matter the cost. Utilitarian to a fault, despite his rather recalcitrant disposition. It's how he gets his way more often than not. Brutish dominance. Loutish suppression. 

But a near reckless, suicidal loyalty that attracts the sort of beasts this line of work needs. 

But that's work, not this. Not trying to convince you, his sugar-sweet (and viciously diabolical) lover, to bear the burden of giving him a family because society says it's uncouth (and illegal, morally reprehensible, villainous) for him to chain you to his bed to keep the darker parts of himself that want to rip into anyone who had the pleasure—pleasure that no longer belongs to them—of looking at you. 

That's all for him. 

(Nasty old bastard.) 

And, of course, because he's ready. Everything clicks. Locks into place. There's no one else out there for him. 

Really, though���it's your fault for prodding that beast in the first place. For letting inside your house, your bed. For thinking it could be tamed. And so. You should accept responsibility for it. 

(Nasty, nasty—)

But just as much as you know him, he knows you. You'll give him a litany of reasons why this shouldn't happen, and none of them will be because this isn't what you want. It'll be filled with reasons why you think he doesn't. 

And that simply won't do. 

So, he plots. Plans. 

The thing is. No one ever taught him how to hold things in his hands without crushing it. 

He doesn't think he can be delicate. Gentle. There's no way to gently nudge you into this. No. 

He'll convince you to yield the same way a tsunami convinces a house to move out of the way. 

Buried to the hilt in your cunt, he growls gospels into your ear about this beautiful Shangri-la, this sprawling castle he has in Spain until you're clenching down around him tight, conditioning your body to come at the thought of swelling with his child. About letting his seed take root, letting him knock you up. 

It's a crass image that he spits into your head—fuck you until it takes, love; breed this pretty cunt every day until you're fat and swollen—serves as the positive reinforcement to his classical conditioning. He'll turn you into one of Pavlov's mutts, salivating at the sound of him groaning into your ear as he fills your pussy up to the brim. He'll reshape you, change your wants until you only come around his cock when he's spitting his release against the plug of your womb. 

And when you make to get up, letting all his spend slip from your sloppy cunt to take your pill, he pulls you closer under the guise of wanting to feel your body on his, murmuring diabolical compromises he has no intention of letting you see through. 

“Later,” he rasps, pulling you closer. His mouth slots across your temple. “Just take it later, sweetheart. Later.”

“But—”

“It’ll be fine.” 

And, as if you'd been waiting for that reassurance, you melt into his hands, wet putty. 

(you take the bloody pill later, and he adds that to his mental calendar, adjusting the maths. He supposes he’ll just have to try harder next time.)

John's desire for you is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and he schemes around his wandering hands, bullying into your messy cunt only moments before your alarm is meant to go off, reminding you to take your pill, reinforcing that irritating little wall that keeps his come from reaching your womb. 

It goes off, but he hardly hears it over the roaring in his ears, the sweet, sweet litany of moans that slip out, staining the pillow with your pleasure. He just keeps fucking you through it, growling mindlessly into your ears about how badly he wants to come inside of you. His warnings, threats, about how close he is intertwining with your desperate begging for him to come, come inside me, John is the most beautiful harmonisation he'd ever heard, and it sews itself into his marrow, polluting the ugliness inside with a new, fresh hell for him to torture himself with. That delicious pleasure-pain that drives him mad—

He fills you up, palm pressed taut to your lower belly as he spits his virile release deep into your cunt. He can feel the heavy outline of his cock against your skin, stuffed full of him, and it's this—the way he moulds your body around him, cock visible through your flesh—that makes his eyes roll back into his head. Makes the urge to fuck, to breed, to claim bludgeon into him, shattering reason, logic. He wants to change you, irrevocably. Forever. To mar you with his touch, his essence. 

“Mine,” he chokes out, ugly and raw. It's a mangled mess in his throat. A threat. “All fucking mine, aren't you, love? All mine—”

His words seem to throw you into another climax, cunt clenching greedily down around him as he softens inside of you, plugging you up. You liked that, he notes, purs. The notion brands itself across his resolve, reshaping it into something that would make anyone else recoil in fear, disgust. 

But you preen at this creature that bares its fangs at you, snaps wicked teeth against your jugular. Fingers threading through its hair, shushing it, soothing it, as you pull it back into your embrace, head tucked against your chest. You lull it into complacency with the heavy thud of your heart, your sweet, earthy scent. 

What a pair, he thinks, and clamps his hands around your wrist when you murmur something about taking your pill now. Need to take it before it gets too late, John—

He makes his move, distracts you with his mouth, his tongue. 

“Just take it after,” he murmurs into your pussy, thighs bracketing around his head. His hands pull your waist down, pressing you harder against his mouth. “Later, love. It'll be fine—”

“But, John—”

The protest dies, turns to ash, when he grunts, sealing his lips around your clit, bullying it with the rasping press of tongue until you're arching your back, riding his face. Thoughts of your silly pill are gone, swallowed by him as you gush, drenching his mouth in your slick. 

And after, when you make to get up again, he pulls you close instead, voice curling around you like smoke when he tells you to take it after. 

“No, love. Stay in bed with me,” he peppers kisses to your cheek, your jaw, chin, sweetening his words, and folds you into the tight embrace of his arms. “Take it in the morning. It'll be fine to miss a day.”

You level him with something that shadows the ravines in your gaze with pure, unadulterated scepticism, but as he scouts the canyons, the valleys, the pretty craters that make up the composite of your eyes, he finds no discernible trace of wariness, uncertainty. The terse line in his shoulders ease. 

But while fossicking around he unearths something else. Something a bit more enigmatic, calculative, than doubt. Equivocal, slippery, it runs from him when he tries to give chase, tucking itself back into the harsh tenebrous that shades the landscape. 

He hums, wanting to ask, but you sigh in quasi-acquiescence, and burrow deeper into his embrace. 

“Fine,” you huff, but he tastes a purring sense of satisfaction in the air. “I'll take it tomorrow instead.” 

“Good girl.” The praise slips out, low and gritty, perfumed with his heavy greed. 

You shiver against him. The hitch in your throat is quiet in the bedroom, but to him, it sounds like a gunshot. 

John keeps meticulous track of the empty pill slots, and notes with a sticky, resinous sense of glee that the numbers are becoming muddled, skewed. Later becomes tomorrow, and your soft acquiesce has days skipped. Missed. 

You can't double up, you huff to him, mournfully slinking into the bed. It's nearly one in the morning. Technically, a brand new day. I absolutely have to take it tomorrow, John. Make sure you remind me—

There's something pointed in your tone. Something oil-slick. He nods, bites back a grin. 

“Sure,” he pulls you close, breathes in the sweet, loamy scent of you—sweat and sex and the lingering remnants of your perfume, your soap—and lets it stain his lungs. “I can do that.” 

You say nothing at all when he doesn't bring it up until well past midnight the next day, offering little more than an exasperated groan, and a huffy roll of your eyes, as if this was just a missed dinner with friends and not a life-changing misstep. 

(The beast purrs. He places his hand over his chest, and feels the rumble under his skin.)

“Need to be more responsible than this, John,” you say, squirming in his hold to try and rush to the washroom to take that pesky little pill. 

“Sorry, love,” he offers, and means none of it. Clings tighter to you. “Got a bit carried away today, is all.” 

“It's not your fault—” something curls out from a dark crevasse when you look at him. “I've been so—off lately, you know? Must be the new batch. Maybe I should call my doctor.” 

He stills. Body tensing, coiling. John tries to speak, but the words are ash on his tongue. He clears his throat. 

“Could stop taking it.” 

It crackles in the air. Hangs heavy like a stormcloud. 

You blink, stunned. But it's artificial, hollow. Pulled from a wicker basket where you keep all your different skins. 

“You mean—what? Stop it all together—?”

You flit in the space once more, but it's less of an injured bird searching for an escape, he realises suddenly, and more of—

A boomslang. 

One rearing up, searching for the perfect place to strike. 

Wishful thinking, though, because you're flustered and skittish once more, a small prey animal he isn't sure what he wants to do the most—sink his teeth into you, tear you into pieces, and devour you whole, or hide you away from the world. 

“I can look for something else in the meantime,” you sound shy, hesitant, and it prickles across his skin. “But we'd need to be careful, you know. Otherwise you might actually get me pregnant.”

He tries to swallow his groan. Chokes on it instead. 

“Sure, sure—” he hacks into his palm. “Of course, love. We'll be safe. I'll pull out—”

Naturally, he doesn't. Makes no effort to even try despite promising you he is. 

“Not my fault your pussy won't let go of me, love,” he grumbles, hand cupping your weeping sex in his palm. The heat of you is searing. Blistering. He thinks he could happily melt inside of it for the rest of his life, and leans down to whisper his devotion into your come-slicked folds, the bitter tang of you, of him, admixing on his tongue. An elixir he could drown in. 

You huff at him after, all glossy-eyed and sex-drunk, and tell him to please try harder, John, I'll have to get plan b tomorrow—

You don't, but the threat of it, the possibility, lingers in the back of his mind, souring his thoughts. 

Next time, and I'll have to, John, you say, featherlight, lips pressed against the head of his cock. A warning, a goddamn tease—

His voice is strained, pinched. “Of course, love,” and he guides your mouth back to his cock, letting the matter fall into pieces when you suck on the sensitive head, tongue licking, coy and kittenish, over his frenulum. 

It's only later, when watches you swallow down his come, that the beast slinks out of the shadows, pocketing the fragments. 

You're off birth control—barely any scheming words of whispered concern needed—but the idea of you taking a little pill to wipe away his efforts has him pulling back. Recalibrating his plans. 

He decides on a different route to the same end. 

Damnation at your own hand. 

John, for his credit, does begin to pull out after that—albeit, with a great deal of agonised reluctance—and instead comes all over your pretty face. 

With thick ropes of his pearlescent spend dripping down the apples of your heated cheeks, he doesn't think he's ever seen a sight more beautiful than this. 

And one with more opportunity.

Slowly, he swipes at it with his thumb and then promptly brings it down, hard, on your clit. You flinch, mewling at the overstimulation, and the threat he brings so close to your raw, unprotected sex. It's dangerous. This thin line he dances along could snap at any moment. Could rain hellfire and fury over his broad shoulders, unmake all the progress he'd steadily built up. 

He walks the precipice, anyway. He pulls his hand away, and brings two fingers up to curve over your cheeks. His thumb, stained with your slick and his come, slides across your bottom lip. 

The pout you give him—all wet-eyed lachrymose—has his spent cock twitching against his sticky thigh. “Fuck, love. Gonna send me to an early grave if you keep starin’ at me like that.” 

“You're cracked,” you slur around his thumb. In retaliation, he digs it into your tongue, and preens—full of nasty, gnarled satisfaction—when your eyes flutter, rolling into the back of your head at the taste. 

With this brief distraction, he drops his come-stained fingers to your mound, and rubs along the swollen rim of your hole. Just touching, pressing. A tease, a whisper. 

You tense. “John—” it's muffled around his thumb, and he isn't sure if it's a warning or a plea. 

He pushes the tips in, barely to the first knuckle, and just pets around your rim. 

It's a battle of wills, now. “No more than this,” he promises, and the undercurrent of his threat rents the air. Makes you bristle. 

You always loved a challenge—especially coming from him. 

“Just the tip?” You tease, spittle running down your chin. Your eyes are dark—midnight skies, ink black—and he's struck by the afterimage of himself in those pools. Made in the same image. 

He grunts, slides into the first knuckle, and scissors them apart. 

“John—” it's breathless. Your teeth spear his thumb, tight around his bone. He wants nothing more than to have you bite down hard, scar his bones with the gnawed meteors of your desire. Your desperation. “Fuck—please—”

You give in so prettily, and he barely has a moment to think about how quick it's been when you angle your hips, hand falling to grip his wrist tight as you slide down his fingers, all the way to the last knuckle. 

You clench around him like a vice. A pretty bow. He fucks you with his fingers, meeting your shallow thrusts with ones of his own, slamming viciously into your pussy as he coos adorations into your ear. 

With his other hand, he reaches down and fists himself over your bare mound, pressing the tip against your clit where it weeps prespend over your flesh. His thumb sweeps across what spills out, dragging it back down to your sopping hole, pushing it inside. 

It's probably not enough to reach your womb, to get you pregnant, but he clings to that tantalising fantasy as he drills his fingers into you until you come, breathlessly begging him to fuck you harder, to fill you up—

He isn't even fucking you with his cock, and you still beg him for it. 

John pushes the tip into your slit, fingers still buried deep inside of your throbbing pussy, and groans with the force of his release. It makes him dizzy, almost nauseous with it, filling his head with nothing but the sweet, wounded sound of your moans filling the room, and the wet squelch of his fingers pulling out of you. 

When he catches the threads of cognisance in his fingers once more, he leans back on his haunches, chest heaving, and brands the messy sight of your pussy fluttering, clenching around nothing, as his spend drips down your slit, over your hole, and pools in the sheets below. 

He's not sure if heaven exists, but he knows the sight of you, breathless and whimpering on his bed, is the closest a man like him will ever come to seeing it. 

The push-pull of this little game stretches on. 

Price likes to see just how far he toe the line before you're whimpering into the sheets, telling him don't, John, don't come inside me, I'm not anything, John—and he's ripping himself away from the tight clutch of your wet, hot cunt, and coming all over you.

The illicit tease of barely pulling out in time, and then scooping up the mess he makes on your face, your breasts, your belly, your ass, lower back, thighs, and spooning it into your pussy until it's a fixture in your bedroom ritual. 

And maybe it's the threat of it all, of playing such a dangerous game, seems to cudgel under his skin the most, ripping apart the thin veneer of that man he once pretended to be—righteous and good—shedding it off with each hiccupped gasp you make when he presses his come-slicked fingers inside of you, murmuring guttural words of affection in the shape of impish mockery (want it bad, don't you, sweet thing; so fuckin’ greedy for it, love—). 

He likes it the most when he can fuck you stupid on his fingers. Cockdrunk, and come-starved (because you are, of course; he hasn't come inside of your cunt in weeks, and doesn't miss the mournfully pitiful whines you give when he pulls out, depriving you of the pleasure of feeling him come inside you), you're too blissed out, swimming in pleasure, to think about what he's doing. 

In fact, he doesn't really give you much of a chance to think at all. 

The next few weeks are filled with him fucking you each night brutally, viciously, snarling low in your ear about how bad he wants to come in you, stuff you full, and then keep you plugged up all night with his cock that it takes, and then pulling out right before, committing the sight of your betrayed expression to memory where it'll sit like a trophy when you finally break. 

You make an appointment with your gynaecologist, and circle the date on his calendar. 

John notes it down. Tucks it away. 

And then he amps up the pressure.

John's fingers root behind your knees, pushing your thighs apart as he settles between them. His gaze drills into your bare cunt, slick and wet, and so ready for him. Eager for it. 

He'd counted the days, and knows that if there's ever the absolute worst time to have unprotected sex, to come inside of you, is now. 

Which, of course, means he has to. The clause in that is ironclad. Apodictic. 

“Bit dangerous,” he rasps, and lifts your leg up, resting your ankle on his shoulder. You fluster beneath him, panting and pretty, and fuck—he’s not pulling out of your pussy tonight at all. “Should I pull out?” 

It's a tease. A test. 

He reaches down as he says the words, gripping his cock and bringing it down against your wet heat. The bare, blunt head of his cocks slaps against your clit, and you arch, keening. Nails bite into the thick muscles of his biceps, and he leans into the sharp sting. Letting it ground him. Centre him. 

This will be your cacoëthes. 

He's been depriving you for weeks, and John knows that you're wanting for it. Desperate. The little twitches your hips give, as if begging him to fill you up, are proof enough of how much you want this. 

This. The dream he dripped into your ears, hot oil congealing over your frontal lobe; infectious and thick. You can try to chisel it off, but the pollution is already damning. Ruining. 

You want this. He wears the axiom like armour. 

And you beg for it—eyes shaded in gut wrenchingly beautiful lachrymose—and John snuffles closer, inching the weeping head of his cock into your tight, warm heat. 

The sight of splitting you open is something he never grows tired of. Something that, without fail, makes his balls ache. His chest thrum. Blood turns to ichor. To wine. He's drunk on the contrast made between you—a garish chiaroscuro of your pretty pussy, soft and sickly sweet—almost nauseatingly so—swallowing down the fat, girthy length of his cock. The thick streams of veins running along the flushed, heavy shaft against your puffy, soft folds is almost hideous. Sinful. He can't equate it to anything else except corruption. The horrific beast sullying the princess. 

And fuck—

The thought alone makes him throb. 

He's sullied you plenty, he reckons, and yet you always look so sweet. Especially now, when your rim is stretched taut around the thick of him, pussy squeezing, clenching around him in a vice, as if you weren't sure to push him out or pull him deeper. 

John decides for you. Opting instead to push your knees down to your chest, nearly brushing your ears, and follows with the bulk of his body until he feels your breath rush out of your lungs. You struggle for a moment, gasping wetly into his ear as his weight—every bearish pound of it—rests on you in the perfect mating press. Your bite into his biceps, keening prettily into his ear as he bullies the full length of his cock into you. Spears you open. Splits you apart. 

He can feel you gush around him, drenching his groin and thighs with your slick. 

Like this—chest to chest, forced to breathe in the same air, the same madness—he likes to just stare at you, taking in the heat simmering under your skin, the sweat beading along your temple, the pinch in your brow as you struggle to adjust to the sheer width of him cudgelling you open. A battering ram you're forced to make room for. 

He takes it all in, each flicker of emotion, each heaving gasp. Burns it into his memory. Lets it soften the iron around his heart. Keeps it there, nestled in the cradle of his limited love, held aloft by indelicate, bearish hands. This sweet thing. 

He can't wait to ruin it. 

If these weeks leading up to this were lovemaking, fucking, then this, this, is mating. Animalistic. Primal. He pushes in as deep as he can, until the tip kisses the ripened seal of your womb, and grinds his hips cruelly into the cradle of your thighs. 

Your nails leave bloodied indents in his flesh. A scar he'll proudly bear the mark of. A tattoo of the time when he turned you into something new. 

His balls are soaked. The sheets, too. He mocks you for it, a rasping growl lodged deep in his throat, taunting you about how fucking wet you are for him. How badly you need it. 

“Gotta plug you up, hm?” He grunts, and sets a pace that serves only to accentuate the sloppy, messy squelch of your cunt. 

His cock pistoning into you, alternating between deep, full thrusts that knock the air from your lungs, and heavy, slow plunges meant to badger the blunt head of his cock against your walls. 

You seem to like it best when he shifts his weight between each thigh, content to just grind into you. Make you feel every inch of him. You cling to him, yowling in his ear about how good it feels, how much you love this, love his cock—

The thick bed of wry, umber curls on his chest, stomach, and groin grow slick with sweat from the intensity of it all, from the shared heat. Pressed tight against you, he feels every quiver. Every flinch. Each moan is made known in a slight reverberation across his skin before he hears it. 

Drenched in sweat, glued to you as he fucks you into the mattress, John feels very much like the beast making a house out of a twisted whim in his head. Feverish, sick, he drives into you with the single minded goal of filling that home up with three. Then four. Five—

As many as you'll let him.

And he almost loses himself to that thought alone. Dancing sugar plums that make his balls tighten. He stems the flood by pulling out of you, letting his heavy cock slap against your sticky, soaked cunt as he heaves into your hairline, sucking in the heady loam, the humus, of your scent. 

The whimper you make when he pulls out of you sounds like a wounded animal, and the noise tickles across his hindbrain. His jaw aches. He bites down on a snarl as you thrash against him, mindless with the need to have him inside of you. It brings a nasty, vicious curl to the ends of his mouth, and he doesn't even bother trying to tamper it down. John lifts his head and lets you see his foaming muzzle, drooling with thick globes of saliva. 

“Stay still,” he growls, low and dangerous. It's as much of a warning as it is a command, and the way you react, tensing, coiling tight—the flash of unease. Shock. And then the need. Achy, heavy. He feels it against his jugular when you shiver, moaning his name into the space between you where it reeks of desperation. 

To soften the submissive tremble in your jaw—and maybe to temper down the challenging talons sharpening in your gaze—he nuzzles his cheek against yours, peppers wet kisses to your skin. He licks across your jaw, bites down on your flesh. 

He tastes salt and sin on your skin. 

(His eyes roll so far back into his skull he thinks he might get lost.)

“Gonna cum on your pretty cunt if you don't stop squirming, love.” 

And John loves you most for your waspish intelligence—the ire smouldering in your throat. The way you bite back just as hard, never afraid to bear teeth when he snarls. He doesn't think he could ever love someone too soft—not without tearing them to pieces. To shreds. 

But you wear plush, tender conchoidal skin over jagged, rough obsidian. He'll ruin himself if he ever tries to rip you apart. 

Like this, though—you melt. 

All that keen, vicious intelligence snuffed out. His scheming Cleopatra tamed on his cock. 

Your heels dig into the back of his thighs, urging him closer to your sex. “Come on, John, just fuck me, fuck me already—”

(Tamed, though, perhaps being a misnomer.)

He huffs into your neck. “Impatient little quean.”

It gets him a sharp bite to the tip of his ear, and the floor roars so loudly in his veins, he gets dizzy from it. 

“Fuck—”

He's pressing back into you again, into your warm, tight heat, and it's nirvana kissing his nerves. Liquifying his spine. He rolls into you with a weighted groan, buried to the hilt once more. 

But even with the respite, he knows he won't last. 

John needs you fucked stupid, docile and soft just for him, and sets out to do just that. Pounding into you with a spiteful twist of his hips that he knows will leave you a little sore, and tender tomorrow. But the idea of spreading your puffy, achy folds apart and soothing the slight hurt with his tongue for hours until you're sobbing into the cushions quells any hesitation that rears, begging him to slow down. 

Go easy on your pretty cunt.

(As if.)

John batters into you until your eyes glaze over, and your chin, cheeks, smear with drool. Until the challenge in midnight black melts into submission. Docile, and malleable. Perfect for him to mould. Shape. 

Reshape.

He glues to you, touch starved and tactile, and basks in the liquid heat that blooms from deep within you. 

“Gonna cum soon,” he snarls, broken by the heave in his chest as he fucks into you, starved. “Gotta pull out, love—”

You're gripping him tighter, anchoring him to your body. You haven't come yet. Something he dangles in front of you like a threat. 

He watches the slow crawl of realisation crest over your messy face, and thinks he falls just a little bit more in love with you at the sight of your little pout. 

Loves, even more, the way it breaks apart when he pounds into you harder, viciously, watching drool dribble off your chin, and reason leak from your ears—

“Please, John—” the sound of your whimpering has him grunting, head dizzy with the saccharine sweet taste of it on his tongue. “Please, please—come inside me. I–I want you to–to fill me up—”

“Yeah?” He taunts, mean and breathless. “Want me to come inside your sloppy cunt? Dangerous, ain't it? Jus’ might take, sweet thing. Is that what you want?”

You're howling a litany of sin into his ear, desperation drenches each clamour of his name, each orison uttered, begging him to come, to fill you up, and then—

“Fuck—I want it so bad—” his head is filled with static. Whitenoise. “Want it to take, John—”

He comes inside of you, cock pulsing so hard it feels like a sob. Filling you up. Wishing on all the stars that it takes—

As a reward for your good behaviour, he spreads you out over the sheets, and growls his approval into your sopping pussy, drenching himself with the taste, the smell, of you, promising to wear it like a perfume so everyone knows how good you are for him. Him, alone. 

(His, his, his—)

When you come, you nearly smother him, and he thinks he sees a glimpse of nirvana in baby soft yellow before he's pulled back by your shaking hands brushing the hair off his sweat-slicked forehead. 

“Are you okay, John—”

He rolls you under him, fucking into your drenched pussy like a man starved. That tantalising vision glues itself to his hindbrain, so close he can scent the fresh dew of fresh milk, and warm bread in his nose. Feel the bump of your stomach. 

He's almost angry about it, about being ripped away from that dream, and takes his aggression out on your sloppy, leaking cunt. The way his come trickles out, staining the mattress below and the back of your thighs has him growling darkly into your nape. 

“Keep it in,” he snarls, words sharpened on the whetstone of his need. “Keep it all inside, love.” 

“Ah, John, John—” something falls from your split-slicked lips, and his fingers bite into your hips. Punishment for the slurred backtalk. 

“I'll spank your ass if any of it leaks out—”

It does. Of course it does. 

He bends you over his knee, and slaps his broad, rough palm over each cheek ten times before deliriously shoving two thick fingers into your sloppy cunt, stuffing his come back inside your tender, swollen hole, rough and mean, as you howl, squirming in his lap about how you promise you'll be good next time, John, please—I'll keep it all in, I swear, I—

“You fuckin’ better, love.” He groans, and thinks about cumming on your messy face, all slick with sweat, and drool, but decides against it. A waste, he thinks, and leans over you to shove the thick, twisting length of his angry cock inside you to the hilt just spit his release against your seal once more. 

“That was…” You're still panting against his chest, eyes dazed, and body laxed. Melted wax over his chest. “Intense,” you settle on after a beat. 

There's a hiccup in your breath when he hums, chest rumbling with the sound. 

“Mm, but you liked it, didn't you?”

Of course you did. Of course. The evidence of it is drying, tacky and slick, on his groin, his thighs. 

You burrow into his side, peeking at him from over the thick bed of wry curls that clot over his chest. “You're fucking me like you haven't in years, John. Makes me wonder if you have an agenda.”

He considers your words. The weight of them. Wonders just how much you've clued into, but huffs when he catches the same look in your eyes as the one reflected in his own.

Cheeky little—

“Can't I just want to fuck you? Not everything has to be about schemes, love.” 

The oil of his lies, the sticky resin of his evasion makes you huff into his skin.

In all his meticulous planning, he'd picked up several books on this particular topic, and scoured every available, reputable, site he could find. John knows what to look out for by now, and keeps a keen eye on you—one that very quickly dips into obsessiveness, but you're kind enough to call it overbearing. 

Jesus Christ, John, why are you asking me how many times I pissed today? 

He just needs to wait things out. 

But rather irritatingly, he's called away overseas for the next week. 

Ah, well. He'll have to try harder next time. 

He arrives in Heathrow mid-morning, and follows Laswell into the office. There's a mountain of reports to fill out—things that, rather irritatingly, require his signature—and resolves to spend the rest of the day hunched over at his desk, even though there's an itch in the back of his skull demanding he go home. 

It is always like this, though—both the post-mission ritual of banal paperwork that seems almost comical considering what he'd just done, and the undeniable urge to flee back into the sanctuary of your shared home. 

His bones ache for it. 

Laswell huffs when he lingers by the exit, and he swallows a groan. 

While he was away, you'd been silent. Moreso than usual. 

Where he'd have expected an update on what was going on—the mundanity of your life that he clings to when the beast in his head whets its talons a little too sharp, digs into a little too deep—you’ve gone silent. Not radio. Not completely. But the information you give is sparse. Cagey.

You don't tell him about the visit to the gynaecologist, offering nothing but a quiet hum into the receiver, all blase and nonchalant, and a simple, equivocal: “good.” 

He tucks it away, lets the matter drop. 

If he timed things correctly—barring your impish prevarication aside—then something will begin to show soon. You would have mentioned something. Some nominal change to your physical well-being, but when pried, pressed, you huff. 

“I'm good, John. When are you coming home, anyway?”

He raps his knuckles on his desk, still smarting from the punches he'd thrown recklessly this past week, too keyed up to let his anger simmer instead of boil, and thinks. About you. About this. 

A week isn't a lot of time—he’s been called away for months in the past—but this feels like it's lingering. Time stretched and distorted. Elongated. And a part of him feels chipped, fractured after touchdown. 

It wasn't as if this particular assignment was any more, or less, dangerous than the ones he went on before. If anything, it was comparatively mild. Muted. He honed into his training, and did his goddamn job. And yet—

Yet. 

You lived in the spaces he occupied. The air he breathed. The water he drank. 

He brought you with him, something he's never, ever, done before. Perched pretty on his shoulder, he heard your voice in his head with every step he took, every radio call. 

But it was hallucinatory. Chimerical. You weren't there, you were here, but the problem lies in the lack of a divide that usually bifurcates the world into two fractions: his job and you.

It eats at him. 

He brought you where he's never taken anyone before. Never let them in. 

His thoughts were asunder. Pulled in all directions, but the centre was always you. His compass pointing north. He wants you. Needs you. His whole being has been recalibrated with the needle aimed toward you. 

An alert on his phone shakes him from his reverie. 

He reaches for it, slides his hand across the lockbar. The notification pops up. A message from his bank. 

His card—the one he gave you, the one you've used all of once to buy a chocolate bar when he gruffly, surely, complained about you not spending his money—has been used. 

Curious now, he opens his app, eyes scanning the threadbare purchases—all mostly interest fees and service charges, bar one. It was recently used at a drugstore for under twenty dollars. 

He doesn't know what this means, what you're playing at. He makes to text you, but he gets an email next. 

Thank you for your purchase; here is your e-receipt. 

His heart does something strange in his chest. Turns in on itself. Goes all askew. 

Not only are you using his card, you're using his account, too. He clicks it, eyes scanning through the purchases (only two), and blinks. 

A card, and—

His want takes the shape of a hand, presses against his jugular. 

—a pregnancy test. 

He knew when he started this game that this was, of course, the inevitable outcome, but having it here, right in front of him—in that sneaky, noncommittal way you always do things; behind his back, and in the dark, like you enjoy watching him try and sniff out the truth—has his belly knotting up. Churning. 

A pregnancy test. 

Fuck—

(and out of all the ways to tell him, you cheeky little—)

He's up out of his chair before he's even aware that he's standing. 

“Laswell,” he gets out, and can't be sure how his voice is so measured when his head is being shredded into pieces. “I'm out for the rest of the day. This whole bloody week, too—”

“Something bad happen?” 

His hands shake when he pulls his jacket on, slips his car keys into his hands. “No. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm going to be a father. A bloody dad—”

It's on that sentiment when his voice breaks. Shatters. He clears his throat, blinks furiously. Fuck. Fuck. It's happening—

Shangri-la sits in his fist, taking the shape of an e-mailed receipt. 

In his periphery, he sees Simon's head come up. Watching him. Measured. 

Laswell, too, eyes him with a degree of wariness. He supposes to them this means the end of everything. 

She breathes in. “Tuscany would be my choice.”

“Oh?” He tears his eyes away from the screen, gracing her with a steady, unflinching look. “Was thinking something a bit more local. Liverpool.”

It gets a scoff, one full of disgust. “She'll divorce you within the year.” 

“I'm having a baby, Laswell. Not getting married.”

“Oh, no?” It's a challenge. “I seem to recall something about someone being a proper gentleman, or was that just the lie you told your unofficial missus?”

“We'll get married. That's not up for debate—” an intern makes an alarmed face, like perhaps it ought to be. Had he not been holding nirvana in his hand, he might be a bit more cautious with his madness. Too bloody bad. “Wherever she wants—Tuscany, Udaipur, fucking Siberia. I don't care. What I’m a bit more concerned with is my expectant wife.” 

“Soon-to-be,” she volleys, just because she knows it's the sort of thing that will itch under his skin. 

“Already is, Laswell.” He gripes, flat. “Or damn near close to it.” 

“If she knows what's good for her, she'll say no.”

“Lucky me, then, that she doesn't.” 

Lucky him, indeed. 

On his way out, Ghost utters a heated congratulations to him, and John can see his gaze is absent. Turned inward, mind whirring. Reeling. He can hear the gears grind from where he stands, and if the ink-black madness in his lieutenant’s drifting, pensive eyes means much of anything, then John sends a silent hail mary to whatever unlucky person was misfortune enough to unleash the muzzle on that particular dog. 

Well. It's not really his problem. Until it is. Until it becomes one. But since it's not something that'll impact him in the next five minutes, he tucks it away. “Thanks.” 

He doesn't linger. Doesn't, really, even remember the ride home, head buzzing with thoughts that keep twisting around themselves, driving him mental. Things like, is it real? what if you were joking. what you weren't? 

Oh, fuck—

You better not be. 

But you wouldn't. You're conniving and wily, but you're not cruel. 

This is happening, then. 

You've been playing house with matches inside of a tinderbox. He shouldn't be surprised when it all goes up in flames, in smoke, but as he walks through the door, and glimpses the pregnancy test perched innocently on the counter beside a card—congrats, daddy (and the caricature of a man in a pinstripe suit nearly makes him gag)—he feels all the maligned pieces inside of crack. 

It shifts—

You walk out, hand cupped protectively over your lower belly. Eyes gleaming like a wild cat crouched low in the tussocks surrounding the savannah, watching him an eager sense of anticipation, excitement, and just the slightest edge of what he can only imagine the unfortunate mate of a black widow sees before it's consumed. Spare parts. 

It thrums inside of him. Ignites this wicker basket he calls a heart until it's cinder. Ash. Soot. He breathes it in. Tastes you on his tongue. 

John doesn't have the words. Can't think beyond the steady brag of his burning heart. 

His. His.

—and then it all falls into place. 

Yours.

He dotes on you with an almost unhinged devotion, murmuring stilted, gruff words of muted affection into the shallow bump on your belly. Ones that you, politely, pretend not to hear. 

A new bedtime ritual, one he adheres to with an almost obsessive need. 

Until it becomes too much. 

“Go and get my prenatal vitamins from the washroom, please. I just need five minutes without you smothering me, you stupid bear of a man.”

“You love it,” he grumbles, but acquiesces, giving your small, barely there bump a pat. “I'll be back soon.”

“Oh, no… please take your time.” 

Despite the prickle in your tongue, your eyes are soft. Warm. Melting him just a little more. 

John pulls away, and doesn't even pretend the reluctance to be apart is feigned. 

“It's in the drawer,” you call, voice stretched. Echoing. “Next to your shaving cream.” 

He pulls the drawer open, scanning the contents briefly, before finding the purple bottle in the back. Why you chose here of all places to put the bloody things—

His knuckles knock against the old box of condoms, tipping it over. There's a strange rattle as it falls, and his brows furrow at the noise. 

Curiously, he reaches for it. Shakes it as he picks it up. The same sounds spill out. He pops the flap of the box open, peering inside, and—

A gruff chuckle crackles in his throat. 

Inside the old box of condoms—the ones he never bothered to throw out, or use—is an accumulation of all the pills you'd meant to take. 

His jowls ache. He rubs at his jaw with his hand, and feels the skittish patter of his heart thudding out of his skin. Madness in his veins. 

John closes the drawer with his knee, and then tosses the box of condoms in the bin, leaving it for you to find later when you're inevitably wracked by another wave of morning sickness. A little shred of vindication for this little game you made him play. 

Though he supposes turn-about is fair play, and the number of pills in the box is less than the months he spent scheming for this vision of his.  

In the back of his head, the beast purrs.

“Do we need to play these games again for the next one,” he rasps. “Or can I just fuck you until it takes.” 

You blink at him, wide and owlish. Full of faux innocence as you coax the beast out of hiding. “I don't know what you're talking about, John.” 

More games, then. He thinks he might crack open your ribcage and rest his weary head on the frantic beat of your heart. 

“Mm, don't know what I'd do without you,” he says, guns aching. He reaches for the pack of gum (no smoking around the baby or you'd toss him off the balcony), and pops a spearmint into his mouth. “Might live longer, I reckon, but—”

Your elbow digs into his side. “You sure about that?”

He just kisses your crown in response, and places his heavy, scarred hand over the curve of your belly. The beast inside purrs, content for now. Satiated. 

When he looks into your midnight eyes, he finds your own beast slumbering away. 

A match made in a tinderbox, he guesses, and kisses you until you're dizzy. His very own Shangri-la sitting pretty inside his bed, nestled in the castle in Spain you helped him build.

Will help him fill. 

[cybertron-after-dark]

Average transformers g1 episode:

Megatron is attempting to black out the entire sky across a hundred mile radius and funnel all the sunlight into one, concentrated solar death ray to target a heavy duty solar panel he's having soundwave and the cassetticons build in order to convert it to energon. Then he plans to hit the autobot base with the death ray just for funsies. Starscream plans to push Megatron directly into the death ray, also just for funsies.

Optimus sends Wheeljack and Spike to deal with it, along with two bots you're pretty sure have not been in this show before this point, but you're kind of past asking how many of these fuckers were on the ark offscreen when it crashed. One of them has the worst fake Canadian accent you have ever heard, and the other's name sounds inexplicably dirty.

Starscream tries to get Megatron to stand in the spot he told Skywarp and Ramjet to direct the death ray, but is interrupted when Rumble asks why Starscream stuck him with extra work (a task Megatron assigned specifically to Starscream). This vexes Megatron. The autobots show up and try to figure out what the point of the blacked out sky is while Starscream attempts to talk his way out of it. Then the death ray goes off two feet away from Megatron, which only pisses him off further.

The Canadian bot yells "AH BINARY-BEAVERS!!" because the death ray caught him off guard and completely gives away the bots' position. Soundwave immediately fires on them. Gratuitous robot violence ensues. Spike is generally useless and tries chucking rocks at Rumble. Megatron is too busy trying to almost-murder Starscream to bother with the autobots and just lets Soundwave handle it.

Probably-an-innuendo-name-bot is luckily a flier and takes the chance to see what's blocking the sun now that their cover's blown anyway. He gets up there and the seekers are sticking tinfoil on the clouds to make the tops reflective. The writers are really just hoping you don't think too hard about it.

Skywarp starts firing on dirty-name and calls him a nerd. Dirty-name takes evasive action. Skywarp runs out of ammo and starts just chucking tin foil at him. Dirty-name calls him dumb and says his processor is made of spare toaster parts. Then he crash lands and canada-bot asks if dirty-name's wings are spare toaster parts as well. Wheeljack yells that they'll all be spare toaster parts if they don't focus on the decepticons. The death ray goes off again and barely misses the autobots. Wheeljack corrects himself to Melted spare toaster parts.

Dirty-name gives Wheeljack the rundown on the tinfoil clouds so he can figure out a way to get rid of them while Canada-bot fights Soundwave and the cassettes in the background. Spike is kind of helping too sort of almost. Those rocks hes chucking sure are damaging. Ravage gets straight up drop kicked. It cuts back to Wheeljack whipping up a good old fashioned Device™️.

Starscream flies up past the tinfoil barrier while Megatron shoots at him. All the holes he's shooting in the blackout barrier are just making more, slightly shittier death rays and the main one is losing concentration. One of them hits Megatron right in the optic and he keels over with an over the top screech. Starscream descends, breaking another hole in the tinfoil to see a golden opportunity.

"MEGATRON HAS BEEN BLINDED!!! I, STARSCREAM AM NOW YOUR LEADER!!!"

Wheeljack finishes his Device™️: A grenade that makes tinfoil entirely invisible, thus rendering the whole weapon unusable. The writers are hungover, please do not think about it too hard. Pretty please. Dirty-name doesn't know if he can throw it into one of the holes in the barrier on his own since he can't fly in robot mode and he cant throw in altmode. Spike offers to get on his back and throw it in for him if he can get close enough. And he's just SO good at throwing things. The other two agree he's their best shot, they're so happy spike is around, couldn't do it without him.

Starscream is hovering in the air as he gives his Decepticon Leader Acceptance Speech he's prepared for this very occasion, golden light streaming in from the him-shaped hole in the barrier. Dirty-name and spike zip past him and spike makes the best goddamn throw of his life. Before starscream can properly question the Fucking Audacity of these autobots interrupting him while he's trying to have a moment, the invisible explosion goes off that the animators are just happy they don't have to put that much effort into drawing. Starscream gets knocked out of the air and crashes directly onto Megatron. This vexes Megatron.

Sky's normal again. Don't worry that there's still tinfoil there, don't even fuckin worry about it dude. Spike and Dirty-name touch back down. Round of applause for spike for throwing super good. Wheeljack comments that he's just happy it blew up the way it was supposed to. Cue uncomfortably long laughing. Megatron manages to roll starscream off him and calls for a retreat.

Back at the decepticon base, Megatron has an eyepatch and is skulking. Starscream yaps about how it makes him look like a proper tyrant, brooding and battle scarred, and, dare he say, darkly handsome? This vexes Megatron.

[x-brik-x]

I'm seeing a lot of people say that punk fashion is expensive and inaccessible, which is very wrong. here is a list of some ways you can make punk fashion easier, cheaper and more accessible for you, since that's... kinda the whole point.

others are encouraged to add onto this!! (just don't recommend corporations like amazon. not cool.)

1. patches!! you don't need to buy them. DIY patches are not ugly or boring. in fact, they are encouraged here!! DIY, in my opinion, is always the best thing to do when it is an option and is safe to do so.

2. speaking of DIY, spikes!! you can make them!!

cut the top and bottom off of an empty can. cut down the middle of the cylinder and flatten it, so it's just a flat rectangle of metal.

cut out a shape that is kind of a third of a circle, but around 3/4 of the curved edge is taken up by triangle shapes. (I'm not very good at describing, so here's a badly drawn picture)

roll it into a cone, leaving the 4 triangles sticking out at the bottom. this bit is optional, but you can fill it with hot glue to make it more sturdy, just be careful touching the hot metal. I tend to hold the cone by one of the triangles with a bit of fabric wrapped around my fingers for this bit. cut 4 small holes in your fabric in this kind of shape:

and put the spiky bits of triangle through the holes. fold the triangles in on themselves to secure the spike in place. boom. spike obtained. this is one I made and attached to a little piece of fabric to test this method out:

3. battle vests!! (like the base jackets). the best places to buy these are charity shops and second hand websites in my opinion, but if anyone else knows any better options, please reblog with those!!

a good trick I find works well on eBay is to filter search results to your country (or state? can you do that in the US? idk) so that a: fast delivery because local, and b: all the sellers of everything that shows up are in YOUR TIME ZONE.

why is this important? when people sell something for really cheap, it goes FAST. check eBay at like, 2am or something. all the scalpers in your area are asleep. grab the cheap stuff while they can't.

4. sewing!! want patches, but can't sew for whatever reason? I've heard of a lot of people with joint conditions like arthritis complain about the inaccessibility of patch stuff, and that does sound extremely annoying, however:

safety pins!! while they are still a little fiddly, they're much less work so you don't have to fiddle about for long. if you can, you could even ask a friend to help, since it doesn't take long at all I'm sure someone will be willing to help out!! (I know I would, but that's just me, and I love this kind of thing). safety pins on clothes are also widely considered to be a symbol of solidarity, so if anything, you're adding some extra love and meaning to your patch pants/battle jacket.

if that's still too fiddly, fabric glue is always an option. unfortunately this means you won't be able to remove/reposition patches, at least without leaving a massive patch of residue, but if you're ok with that then fabric glue is probably your best bet.

for people who prefer sewing: as for where to get the thread, I've heard a lot of people recommending dental floss, as it's apparently much cheaper and works just as well. I haven't tried this myself so can't confirm that, but I thought I'd share it regardless.

5. where to get fabric!! old clothes. rip em up. you don't need any kind of fancy fabric from the craft store. my patches are made of old jeans that I grew out of.

don't have any old clothes and you don't want to waste any good ones? I'm not sure about other countries, but in the UK, as long as you're not on private property (trespassing), dumpster diving is perfectly legal.

I definitely ;) do NOT encourage ;) trespassing rich people's land ;) to steal from their dumpsters ;)

or tbh it doesn't matter too much how rich the person is, since it's all going to landfill anyway. if it's in the bin, it's free game, but you didn't hear that from me. ;)

please add onto this where you can!! and if I missed something or got anything wrong, add that on too!!

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Shaken and Stirred.

I was really inspired by this fan art and was plagued by thoughts of a pathetic whiny lil meow meow 🥺 I don't drink myself, but I love the mature aesthetic of it and wanted to... write a drunken confession... to close off 2024...

… DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT OTL wait no please J WORD I CAN EXPLAIN

***Content warning: Alcohol consumption, though Leona is the only one drinking. (The legal age is 20 in Japan; I’m going to assume this for Twisted Wonderland.) Everyone else is having sparkling juice :v***

Imagine this…

"Feel like joining us for dinner? For old time's sake.”

The invitation had come so casually, the same way a housecat might drop a mangled rat or bird at your feet. To them, an easy, everyday act. To you, a surprise you weren’t quite certain how to feel about.

You didn't have plans for the evening, nor a reason to refuse, and while you were busy weighing the pros and cons, you found yourself strung along in their outing. Muscular arms wrangling you into the herd, boisterous yells welcoming you back. An honorary member, the Savanaclaw students had branded you, recognized by their king.

Now you sit in a barstool, fingers on the rim of a cup clouded with condensation, absentmindedly swirling its contents. Juice, its sweetness stifled by melted ice.

Some would call you a lamb willingly waltzing into a lion's den. They're wrong. You are no beast, but a curious observer of them. This is a prime opportunity for that.

It’s dim, the glowing jellyfish set low, faint lights swimming overhead. The music is loud, a departure from the Mostro Lounge’s usual soft jazz. The bass is even louder, rattling your bones like a set of steel drums. Rowdy patrons clink cups, chant at their friends to chug, belt out laughter straight from the bellies. You can barely hear your own heartbeat. The sounds of nightlife drown it out.

Jack lurks in a quiet, shadowed corner, his back against the wall. Muscled arms folded, he has assumed a stern stance but wears a small, fond smile in spite of himself. Ruggie has climbed onto a table, raising a jet-black card to the waiting mob. It’s their golden meal ticket.

“All-you-can-eat food and drinks on Leona-san! Long live the king!!” he roars, and the others echo his excitement.

“LONG LIVE THE KING!!”

You chuckle to yourself. First he rents out the entire lounge, then he decides to feed everyone for the day? How generous of him. Guess the big guy’s going all out.

You scan the restaurant in search of him, seeking out his familiar visage. Long, wild tresses. Sharp eyes, emerald flecked with golden flakes, like the sunlight shining through verdant leaves. The scar that speared his left side. A noble aura, his lazy feline grace.

Leona Kingscholar always sticks out in a crowd, commands too much attention with his mere existence. “That man is only good for his face,” Vil would bitterly hawk, “his only redeeming feature.” And he was right, to some extent. Tall, dark, and handsome are all apt descriptors for Savanaclaw’s dorm leader. Leona is all that and more.

Your pulse quickens.

His shape—you can’t discern it from the myriad of bodies collected in the lounge. A puzzle piece missing from the box of your most treasured memories.

“Looking for someone?”

The question is low and nonchalant, almost musical in its own right, yet you can so clearly hear it rising above the bumping bass. Your blood hums in anticipation, already knowing who the voice belongs to.

Leona has slipped into the open seat beside you, nursing an Old-Fashioned filled halfway with a strongly scented amber liquid. An orb of ice chills it, so clear cut you can see through to the other side. He sits with an effortless confidence upon his throne, as though he—not Azul—owns the damn place. You'd believe it too, from how the patrons are shouting his name like a mantra.

There’s no greetings to exchange. No need to.

"I think I've found what I was looking for," you tell him teasingly. “Nice of you to throw this little get-together. What’s the occasion? Don’t think I remember when you were in this good of a mood.”

“Who said I was in a good mood?” he grumbles, leaning onto the counter. “Didn't feel like being left alone with my thoughts tonight is all.”

“You, brooding? Never."

He makes a sound as if repressing a dry laugh. “You think yourself clever for an herbivore, don’t you?”

“Maybe. Not as clever as you, though.”

“Hmph. You really know how to stroke a guy’s ego."

It’s comfortable, this trading of quips. Safe. The conversation flowing so easily, like wine poured. It is the only true way you can stand on the same level as him.

Leona lifts the glass and downs the rest of his drink. From the way he winces, it must burn on the way down. You wrinkle your nose at the sharp smell that meets it. Earth spiced with hypnotic smoke and the acrid pang of sorrow.

“They serve alcohol here? I thought those jars on the shelves were full of tea blends.”

Leona scoffs. “If you know the right people and the right strings to pull. The cephalopunk said his establishment was more than happy to provide for me as long as I shelled out and signed some liability waiver.”

“… Does the headmaster know about this?”

“He doesn’t need to know.” Leona smirks, placing his newly drained drink down. Immediately, a staff member appears and replaces it with a fresh glass. “What’s he gonna do, anyway? Sue me? I’m of legal drinking age, and ‘s not like I’m passing out alcohol to minors”

“Unbelievable.” You shake your head in disbelief. “You’re so bad.”

“The worst,” he agrees sarcastically. “And you choose to keep me as company.”

“I’m but your humble accomplice, sir.” You jokingly salute to him. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret. Rough day?”

He sighs in a way that gives the impression of saying, Like you wouldn't believe. But that tail of his swings back and forth like a patient pendulum, refusing to reveal his secrets. “This isn’t about me.”

“It literally is.” You pass a not-so-subtle glance at his second helping of whisky.

"I'm the host. It wouldn't do to bring down the festive atmosphere of this celebration with my feelings, now would it?"

You don't miss how he proceeds to take a swig right after his claim, how readily he consumes poison, even when it hurts him. Alcohol, insults. Pain, self-inflicted.

He has an arsenal of tricks and techniques to deflect—partaking in vices, one of them. Leona's magic rendered fortresses to sand, but he is an expert at building his own structures just the same. Studier, even. Imperious.

Attempting to scale the walls directly, you know, won't get you very far. Not when he has gone to such great lengths to guard his heart. There's a moat with leering crocodiles, barbed wire decorating the gates, a drawbridge firmly closed.

You attempt to breach the subject, toeing the line between testing his patience and challenging it. “What is it that you want then, Leona?”

He falls quiet, staring at the remains of his beverage. It’s like the sphere of ice the whisky swims with is a crystal ball, and he’s peering into it, seeking answers. His verdant eyes shift a shade deeper, darker.

When he’s solemnly silent like this, he’s contemplating. His next move in a game of chess, his next words in a debate. Plotting, scheming.

"A distraction," he declares at last, in that resolute tone he uses when he’s set on capturing a prize.

"A... distraction."

He nods, angling his head toward the noisy lounge. Ruggie is rallying some of the guys for a round of root beer pong. Jack’s trapped in a headlock, the hyena urging him to join in. They’re rowdy and ruddy from the exhilaration that comes with competition.

“Get my mind off of things. Take me away from all of this for a spell."

“How, exactly…?”

Leona drains his second glass. The server slides him a third. "Let's start with your day. From there, ramble about whatever.”

Amuse me, he seems to say, even if his mouth doesn’t. The twinkle has returned to his eyes, brightening them like the stars do the milky way.

You gulp, feeling compelled to obey.

Gathering your thoughts and wetting your lips, you begin. "This morning..."

The story opens like a newborn finding its footing for the first time: clumsily. Granted the space to expand, you do. Slowly, the conventions come to you. Balance, coordination. Each sentence is like a step, taken one at a time.

You run through your daily schedule and, reciting it out loud, you realize how terribly mundane it is. Classes, chores, chums. The usual. Worry flickers through you—Will he be satisfied with this?—but he only gestures for you to continue.

“Ah, so I picked up this new hobby recently…”

Leona props his face up on one hand, curled fingers resting against a cheek. He watches you with a look that isn’t quite predator on prey but isn’t quite human to human either. It’s intimate in a way that makes you feel exposed even when you avert your gaze, calculating enough to make you feel like a complex equation he has yet to solve.

“When something’s hard to get, it makes you want it all the more,” he had once told you. The memory surfaces like bubbles in a flute of champagne. Then it pops, fizzling away in a fine mist, and it is gone.

Moments like this are magic, you think.

You slip into a cadence, a rhythm. You lose count of how many stories you tell, how many whiskies Leona slams down in the span of them.

And still, the glowing green of his irises never seems to stray far from you. Vibrant and pulsating, like plants with heartbeats of their own, swaying in time with a stray breeze. Seeking something.

You don’t know if that concerns or thrills you.

"Ahahah…” You allow yourself a chuckle as you stretch in your seat. “This is so strange, isn’t it? I never thought I'd be rubbing elbows with a prince this time last year.”

Leona responds with a noncommittal “Mmmmm.”

He lowers his gaze to his drink number who knows?, his honey-colored reflection gazing back. When he blinks, his lashes seem to fall and flutter in slow motion.

You wonder what he's thinking, why he's thinking.

You reach for him. Carefully, gently, as if approaching a wounded animal. He is wounded--in that frightening way that leaves no visible marks, no scars.

"Leona..."

You hear your name being called before you can tap his shoulder. You look--there's Jack, waving at you. Ruggie has his hands cupped over his mouth.

"Wanna participate in an arm-wrestling contest? Jack's the reigning champ!"

"Oh, um--" you try to respond, to explain that you're preoccupied. The blaring music washes you out.

Ruggie makes a face of confusion and shouts again: "What?!"

You start to rise from your stool and turn to him, raising your volume. "I said..."

You stop. Your wrist is ensnared in Leona's grasp, cuffing you to the spot.

“… Don’t go." His command cuts through the noise, startling you with its softness, its contrasting clarity.

"It'll only be a second. It's too hard to talk over the--"

"You must've not heard me the firs'time," he interrupts, his words slightly slurring together, one melting into the next. Leona pouts like a child. "I’m orderin' you to stay. Stay here, with me."

"You've been awfully bossy today."

"Cuz you keep bein' a pain in my tail. How'm I supposed to..." The more the man babbles, the more confidence drains from his voice. His proud lion's roar shrinking and shrinking to a kitten's mewl. Tiny, vulnerable. "Don't go. Don't... leave. Everyone else has. They always do."

Non-sarcastic pleading? From Leona?

You eye him in concern. "Being serious for a sec, are you okay?"

He winces, like speaking or touching you is a considerable effort. You're set free, his body slumping as he lays down at the bar. His mane spreads out around him like a pool of chocolate. Leona cradles himself against the cushion of an arm, groaning into it.

Definitely not okay.

You pass Ruggie a firm shake of the head--a no to his offer--then settle back into your seat, returning to Leona.

"I'm here," you reassure him with a soft push against the middle of his chest. "See? I'm not going anywhere." Then you poke him on his forehead. "What's up? You're thinking of something."

He peers at you from behind an arm and snorts. "Thinkin' about how you run your mouth a lot."

"You told me to. I'm just following orders--don't you like that? You're so hard to please."

"I have high standards," he says simply.

"Well..." You lift a brow expectantly. "Am I meeting them?"

This manages to draw out a bark of laughter from him, however strained it sounds. He fixates on you, the start of a scowl upon his searching expression.

Assessing you.

“… Why?” Leona asks suddenly. No proper answer. Instead, an inquiry thrown back in retaliation.

“Why what?”

“Why d’you bother stickin’ around? Why d’you…” A pause, as if the verb that comes next is capable of killing if not handled correctly. “Why do you care so much?”

You shrug. “You don’t really need a reason to care about someone. Anyone with a heart would, right? You’d do the same for me or any of your dorm members.”

“And what do you know about heart?” He fumbles for his drink, but you slyly slide it out of reach. A growl of frustration. “All I got’s a big black hole where my heart should be.”

“That’s not true,” you protest stubbornly. “Your students say so many good things about their dorm leader. They all really look up to you.”

“Hah, as if.” He lifts his head and slams it on the table. “I failed’m. What good’s a king if he can’t produce results? What good’s tryin’ if all there is at the end of the tunnel’s darkness? Can’t even dispatch the damn lizard or beat ‘m at his own game…

You frown. “Hey. hey! Don’t talk about yourself like that… and stop doing that, you’re going to injure yourself.”

Leona doesn’t seem to register anything you say. He continues deliriously mumbling to himself, the alcohol having wiped away his inhibitions and all the cards he so often kept close to his chest.

“I never get what I want,” he complains, dragging himself up—but he sways and is forced to hunch forward on his chair, elbows on the counter for support. “Never, ever. No matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I work… It all comes crumbling down eventually.”

His hair covers his face the same way the strands of a weeping willow do. You can’t see what kind of an expression is making. Do you want to see it?

He’s sinking, you realize. The same claws that struggle for a firm grip on the rocky ledge he dangles from, the same claws that render enemies to ashes—they don’t help him against crashing waves, the swamp that drags him down, down, down, into its murky depths. No sunlight, no air.

“The crown… the interdorm tournament... love, respect, admiration... Everything slips through m��fingers like sand. It’s some cruel, sick joke. Must be m’fate as the prince with naught.”

“Leona..."

Is this what haunts you every time you're alone in your room? The thoughts that you're scared of visiting you every night... What you needed a distraction from?

“Get my mind off of things," he had said. "Take me away from all of this for a spell."

There's an ache in your chest. The dull, throbbing pain that comes at the end of reading a sad story. His story.

But it's not the end of it, right? It can't be.

Your fingers tangle in his tresses and brush them aside. From behind the curtain, he peers at you like some stray cat having retreated into its cardboard box. And you meet him without hesitation.

"... Hey," you manage. "I think you've had enough. You're starting to say all this... unkind stuff about yourself, and you're not having fun anymore. Can you walk? Let's get you back to Savanaclaw and have you lie down."

Leona sways slightly. Even drunk, his tone is haughty and shreds into you like claws. "You can't tell me what t'do."

"You're the host," you insist with a smile. The words are his, borrowed, sharpened, and repurposed in your possession. "It wouldn't do to bring down the festive atmosphere of this celebration with your feelings, now would it?"

He stares at you, eyes blown wide. Then his lids lower, lashes shading his view of you.

"Why... Why d'you hafta be like thish? This would be sho much easier if y'didn’t look at me like that."

"L-Like what?"

Leona inches closer. He usually smells of sun and soil, but all of that has been smothered by the reek of booze. Heat radiates from his face, flushed from liquid courage, and hits yours.

"Like there's still a chance for me." He speaks clearly and concisely, each syllable a brick laid out and sandwiched with mortar to the next. Pouring all his energy into them. "Like you still believe in me."

"Because I do. Is that so wrong?" You're unsure of the answer--a part of you, dreading it.

Leona counters with another question. It is tinged with anger, irritation. "Why can’t you be like the others and just give up already? It'd save you a lot of trouble."

"I can't bring myself to leave you hanging on the edge of a cliff. We all want a hand sometimes to lift us up when we're down, so... I want to be that for you. And it seems like you could use that hand to get you out of your troubles right about now."

His lip trembles. Leona's voice comes out huskily. "I hate that dumb, wide-eyed look of yours. So full of hope. When you look at me like that… it makes me think I might still be able to have you.”

“You already have me, dummy. I’m right here, remember?”

“No.” His gaze is intense, almost pulsating. He has a way of scrutinizing that lays you bare before him, pinning you in place and making you inadvertently squirm. “Not in the way I want you t'be.”

Your heart stops, as if he has seized it in his grasp. One squeeze, and he can crush it. It's a mercy he doesn't, even as you erupt into a flurry of confusion, an inferno engulfing you.

"What?" you whisper, scarcely believing your ears. "Wh-What do you mean by that...?"

THUNK!

His balance caves. Leona keels over, the weight of his large body toppling onto yours like a domino crashing into the next one in a sequence.

His head lands on your shoulder, neatly nestling into the junction of your collarbone and neck. Arms loosely snake around your hips, hugging them, his tail wrapping around a leg like a ribbon decorating a pillar. A throaty groan escapes him.

Panic bolts through your muscle and bone.

Your immediate instinct is to shove him off—but he’s heavy and inebriated, and it’s hard for you to fend off the warmth pressed against you. He’s not playing fair. Is he doing this on purpose? You shouldn’t be surprised; he never does.

His low purr tickles you, his breath feathering across your bare skin. He sounds half asleep, caught in that magical twilight realm between the waking world and dreams. “Is it okay… for someone like me to fall in love with someone like you?”

Love?

Four letters, one simple word.

Your surroundings dullen, the chatter and the laughter and the music floating far away. You become acutely aware of all of the places where he touches you, of every spot where you connect. There are so many people gathered in the lounge, but all you can perceive is him: Leona, Leona Kingscholar.

Your mind races, set to a frantic pace like wildebeests rampaging.

Love, the thing with wings that soars high above the clouds. Love, the golden light that brings life to the lands. Love, the wellspring so many drink from.

He feels all of that for you?

It feels like I'm dreaming. Am I dreaming?

"D-Do you really mean that, Leona?" You need to know. You must confirm it. "That you... love me?"

Silence.

“L-Leona…?” you stutter, lightly tapping his back. It rises and falls, rises and falls, like the tides lapping the seashore. Soft, at ease.

But not a response.

One, two, three.

Three seconds. Three seconds is all it takes for Leona Kingscholar to knock out--and he is out like a light.

The party and its twisted beat carry on, the bass blasting in your bloodstream, uncaring. And you remain, cradling a snoozing cat in your arms.

... Ah, seriously. How did it turn out like this?

Upset, annoyance--you think that these are, perhaps, what you're meant to be feeling in the moment. They are missing, not so much as a phantom present. Instead, there's an excitable fluttering that doesn't have a name to it yet.

You swallow, still slightly shaken. The confession, raw and revealing, stirring emotions you didn't think possible before. Emotions that burned red hot, with serrated teeth and talons.

A hand goes to the back of his head, stroking his mane and smoothing it out. It's comforting to him, you imagine, but it's comforting to you as well. Grounding.

You're here. He's here. The both of you are here, together.

There is it again, that unnamed, excitable fluttering kicking up back up. It fans out from your core, from your head to the tips of your toes. You feel like you're lighter than air, flying to the moon and playing among the stars.

He loves you.

Leona Kingscholar loves you.

The fingers trapped in his hair stiffen.

You draw out a sigh. It mingles with the music and stretches thin, a string of fabric pulled from a spool.

Until the clock strikes midnight… Let’s just stay like this for a little longer. That much would be okay, wouldn’t it? We can figure out the rest of the story once the sleepy prince wakes from his slumber.