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sunnami · 25 days

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❝we can't be friends (wait for your love.)❞

[credits to @artofpan for the lovely art! title is taken from ariana grande's song, we can't be friends.]

summary. fortune favours the bold, so they say. but you're an awkward ravenclaw in yearning.

pairing/s. poly!marauders x reader (james potter x reader, lily evans x reader, remus lupin x reader, and sirius black x reader.)

word count. 11.4k

tags. childhood friends to ex-friends to lovers, fluff, minor angst, happy ending, not proofread we die like remus and tonks, also a bit of spice ;3

note. asdhjf while im working on the last part of the time traveller au pls enjoy this fluffy piecee ueueue

‘TIS THE SEASON OF raucous jeering and gaudy paraphernalia in the corridors, the unmistakable scent of overly-polished brooms, mud trekking through the cobblestone floors, and jerseys soaked in sweat, rain, and grime after hours of vigorous training. The dreaded second week of school where arrogant fledglings end up in the infirmary on account of broken noses, dislocated shoulders, or sprained wrists.

In other words: Quidditch tryouts.

You’re just not fond of the havoc wreaked in every corner and alcove of the castle. But to your relief, the library remains untouched through it all.

Needless to say, you absolutely hate Quidditch.

It is a fact you simply will not elaborate on. The skies are blue, the grass blades are green; you and the Marauders are as different as night and day.

On your way to the library, the last bastion of academia, you weave past the crowd in the courtyard corridor, ears ringing from the shouting match earlier in the Great Hall for breakfast—something about the Cannons versus the Magpies. There’s a pile of books shoved inside your leather satchel, painfully bumping into your hip with each step you take. You traverse through the Romanesque architecture, blissfully unaware of the misfortune to come.

“If I study for Charms now, I can take a nap for the rest of the day,” You say to yourself, pensively tapping at your chin.

“Watch out!”

You barely have any time to react before a Quaffle comes crashing straight into your face.

“Merlin’s hairy arsehole—fuck!” There’s a sicky sound of bones cracking, a dizzying flash of white before your eyes, and something viscous trickling from your nose down to your lips. Your hands fly to your face—instantly flinching when you catch a glimpse of your fingers dipped in blood. Your eyes grow wide in panic, chest rapidly heaving—it’s only now that you realize that you’re sitting on the ground, textbooks laying haphazardly around you, shoulders quivering from the adrenaline. The crowd’s concerned murmurs are lost in the cacophony of hysteria.

“Move!”

To your rescue, is Alice Fortescue, a fellow prefect. She cuts through the onlookers of petrified first-years and nosey fifth-years. You have no doubt this incident will grace the school’s gossip column for the next few days. She grabs your arm and wraps it around her shoulder with ease. You’d write poetry of her gallant display, but you were too busy moaning in agony. She utters a few incantations to stop your nosebleed from worsening, though there’s not much she can do to help with the possible concussion.

“Did you know Bludgers used to be called blooders?” You mumble languidly, nearly crashing into one of the knight statues.

“I do now,” replies Alice, tightening her hold on your waist, the ghost of a fond smile on her face. (She’s missed you, actually—three and a half years of radio silence. There used to be a time where running into you in the Gryffindor common rooms was an everyday occurrence. Even the Ravenclaw prefects knew where to look first if they wanted to find you.)

After what feels like an eternity of trudging through the castle, you finally reach the infirmary. The matron, Poppy Pomfrey, shrieks in alarm at the sight of your soiled blouse and blood stained lips. She gently ushers you into her hold, guiding you to a vacant bed. Alice hangs back, awkwardly shuffling her feet, gaze worriedly trained on you.

“You may return to your classes, Miss Fortescue, thank you,” says Madam Pomfrey, tipping your head upwards and grimacing. “Oh, good heavens, what happened?”

Your head droops in her palms, blood trickling from the corner of your mouth—you must have bit your tongue earlier. You blubber pathetically, “Got hit by a stray quaffle.”

Wordlessly, Madam Pomfrey summons a vial from her stash in the cupboards. She hands the small bottle to you, uttering various healing spells under her breath with a deft expertise of someone who’s been doing this for years upon years now. “There,” says Madam Pomfrey, lips firmly pursed. “That should help with the fractured cheekbones.”

With—what?

As your eyes bulge out of your head, Madam Pomfrey looks over you once more, a floating quill at her side hastily scribbling on a parchment. “Concussion, mild blood loss, fracture in the cheekbones, broken nose cartilage.” She illuminates the tip of her wand, and moves it left and right in front of you. “Hmm. Any nausea at all, dear?”

“There’s a six point four chance I’m going to get amnesia,” You whisper solemnly, head hanging low as your voice cracks from the unbearable pain. “I don’t want to get amnesia.”

“There’s no need for you to worry about that while you’re under my care.” Madam Pomfrey gently nudges you to lay on the pillow. She hands you a folded blanket. “Rest now. We’ll keep you here until the morning in case your condition worsens.”

“I can’t.” You groan, sitting upright—Madam Pomfrey pushes you back onto the bed with a stern glare. “I’ve got to study.”

“And I’ve got three other students to tend to. Mister Lockhart has been dealing with food poisoning all week.” Madam Pomfrey places her hands on her hips, sighing sharply. She jerks her thumb behind her back—that’s when you notice that three certain people are staring back at you. Sirius Black and James Potter squeezing together in one chair—and miserably failing—and Remus Lupin, resting cozily on the infirmary bed with bandages around his arms and head. “And don’t even get me started on this one.”

“You love him, Poppy, don’t lie.” Sirius grins wolfishly at the matron. You make out the sunken bags underneath his gray eyes, pale lips and his unkempt heap of dark curls.

Pomfrey huffs exasperatedly. “It would be easier to wrangle a hoard of Hippogriffs than to keep you three out of the infirmary past visiting hours.” She spares you one last glance, nodding when she deems you safe and healthy—as can be, anyway. Gilderoy Lockhart rolls out of his bed, his cries echoing around the room, threatening to barf up his entire breakfast, and Madam Pomfrey is gone in an instant.

There is an awkward silence that envelops your side of the room—you roll over on your left, desperately ignoring the three of stares burning intensely into your back.

THE STORY GOES like this:

You know their names more than you know your own. Each morning finds them at the Ravenclaw common room’s doorstep—while waiting, Lily, Sirius and Remus try to figure out the password as James attempts to brute force his way in. (He had actually figured out the riddle minutes ago, James would just rather play along with his friends.) The blue-tied prefects watch endearingly as one of their first-years rush out of the tower, squealing deafeningly, and jumps right into the lion cubs’ embrace. (It’s not that Inter-House friendships are rare, it’s more common than one would think; usually, it just takes more time for the eaglets to break out of their shell.)

“I got a hundred and twelve!” You exclaim merrily, hair in disarray and eyes puffy from having just woken up. Lily grabs your hands; together, the both of you jump up and down, excitedly giggling in celebration of the success of your History of Magic essay. (You had ignored them for a day to focus on your homework—Sirius did not like that at all. It wasn’t as fun to play if one of their friends were missing. Gone off to study, of all things.)

The tale of your friendship may be an unsolved mystery to some, but to you, it’s like finding jigsaw pieces that perfectly fit together. Magic isn’t only centaurs in forbidden forests, or ceilings bewitched to look like the night sky—sometimes it’s stumbling into a random train compartment and shyly offering your bag of assorted treats. Next thing you know, Lily Evans and Marlene McKinnon are constantly with you in the library, oohing and aahing over pages of the fantasy novels Lily had brought from the muggle world.

There’s rarely a day where you aren’t spotted in a sea of red and gold. Except when you’ve studied yourself sick—and the Marauders are never fond of that.

(“I’m sorry, she can’t come down today,” says one of the fifth-year prefects, Lalita Burman, a rather tall girl with intricate curls, brown skin, and eyes that stare into one’s soul. She wakes up to banging on the tower entrance, not even eight o’clock in the morning yet—on a Saturday. It doesn’t come off as a surprise anymore when she opens the door to five red-faced children. “She’s come down with the flu. Most of the firsties have, actually. Madam Pomfrey says they’ll get better by tomorrow but Alex and I have been running ourselves ragged looking after them.”

James Potter narrows his eyes at her. “Okay. Then we’ll go inside.”

“Maybe we can help,” says Remus.

Lalita holds up her hand to stop them from barging in. “That’s really sweet, but we can’t risk any of you getting sick as well.”

Sirius stands on his toes to spy past Lalita’s shoulder, frowning when he finds nothing of importance—or really, when he can’t find you. He couldn’t wait to call you stupid for getting yourself sick—you just missed out on frog hunting. “That’s alright.” He huffs, shoulders slumping dejectedly. “Our immune system can take it. Will you let us in now?”

Her eye twitches. “Come back tomorrow.”

With that, she slams the door in their faces.

The Marauders then declare you are never, ever allowed to get sick again.)

Your second year in the castle creeps up on you without you noticing.

“Remus Lupin, I am going to kill you!”

No one bats an eyelash when you stalk up to the Gryffindor table, twelve years old and on a mission, fresh from the summer holidays. You slam your hands down onto the table, eyes ablaze as Remus stares at you, head resting on his palms, shaggy blond hair falling over his brows—no thoughts, head empty, just sheer adoration.

“Hello there, stranger,” Remus says, grinning fiendishly. “You look rather lovely—did you have a good holiday?”

You scoff, pointing an accusatory finger at him—Peter watches at the scene with wide eyes, slowly chomping on his shepherd’s pie, not an inkling as to what was going on. “Don’t try me, Lupin!” You exclaim sternly. “That book you gave me—you said it would have a happy ending! Tell me why I stayed up until bloody five o’clock in the morning crying me eyes out! You. . . you—!”

“Wanker, dingbat, berk, git,” Lily supplies helpfully with an innocent smile, pulling you down to sit with her. “And my personal favorite—toerag.”

You gape at the pretty redhead, jaw falling to the floor. “How do you even know these words?”

She hums nonchalantly, spreading blueberry jam onto her buttered toast. “A lady must arm herself with the necessary ammunition.” Lily points to a certain pair of boys—James and Sirius are currently engaged in an eating contest, shoveling pancakes after pancakes inside their mouths; so far it looks like Sirius is winning. Lily sighs dramatically, rolling her eyes, “Especially if she wants to survive that kind of company.”

“Him, even more,” says Lily, gesturing to Remus. “He may be Professor McGonagall’s golden boy but I see right through him.”

“What can I say?” Remus smirks, helplessly shrugging his shoulders. “I’m a monster.”

Lily glares at him.

Then, you turn thirteen—the dreaded age. Suddenly, you’re dealing with oily skin, acne, body odor, hair growing out of places you didn’t even know could grow hair, hormones messing up the way you look at everyone else—something awakens in you the day you see Dorcas Meadowes in the Quidditch pitch wearing a black sleeveless turtleneck—and hormones messing up the way you look at yourself.

Everything is starting to change.

You usually never blink twice when James wraps his arms around your waist, laying his head on your shoulder. Except this time, he’s gone from a gangly bean sprout, to a heartthrob with perfectly messy hair, newly defined muscles from his countless hours of Quidditch training, charming smile, eyes that one could get lost into for hours, and a tantalizing scent of mint and bergamot.

“Are you really not going to our game this Saturday?” James whispers in your ear—the five of you had been hanging out in the library.

You sigh. “Can‘t. Sorry.”

“Scared your House is going to lose to us, pet?” Sirius teases from where he’s sitting backwards on the chair next to you, engrossed in twirling locks of your hair around his finger.

You bristle at the nickname—they have been brazen with the endearments lately, you’ve noticed. “It’s not like we’re going to win anyway,” You mumble, tapping your quill on the empty parchment—there’s never any work done while they’re around. “There’s only a sixteen point seven percent chance of Ravenclaw winning against Gryffindor.”

James wrinkles his nose, now sitting on the edge of the table. “Percent, shmercent. What matters is how everyone plays that day.”

He kicks his legs against yours, pushing his glasses further up his nose. “So, will you come watch?”

“We have that History of Magic project, remember,” You say defeatedly. “I need to get started on it this week otherwise I’ll be behind all the electives I signed up for this year.”

Lily frowns, looking up from her own homework to glance at you in concern. “How many did you even pick?”

“All of them.”

“What?” Lily screeches in terror, suddenly rising from her seat to lean over the table. “How is that even possible? How did McGonagall even allow that?”

“Professor Flitwick,” You correct, wincing when Lily and Sirius glare at you. “It took a lot of convincing, but eventually I wore him down. All I had to do was rework some of my class schedules and promise him over a thousand times that my wellbeing wouldn’t ever be compromised by my studies. Otherwise he’d take back his decision.”

Remus doesn’t seem all too happy. “No wonder we don’t see you at Transfiguration anymore.”

“Or in Kettleburn’s class,” Peter pipes in.

“Are you sure it’s okay for you to be taking that many classes at once?” Remus grimaces, sharing a worried look with James. “The limit is three, and even that is too much to handle.”

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.”

(Peter knows a lie when he hears one.)

James tenses up, jaw tightening. “So you’re saying you’re going to miss a game because of school? Like all the other times? That’s bullcrap!”

Remus hisses his name in warning.

Tears prick your eyes instantly—you’ve heard him speak like this when quarreling with Slytherins, but never to your face. “That bullcrap means a lot to me, Potter. You’d understand that if you took your studies seriously more than just going around and playing silly pranks on everyone!”

James scoffs. “Like how you take us seriously? Did you know that Lily is the youngest ever to be invited to Slughorn’s club? Yeah, she got the invitation last week. Did you congratulate her for that when she was staying up late with you to revise for your practical test in Herbology?”

“I—” You stammer, guilt pooling in your stomach.

“No, you didn’t.” James sneers. “You only see yourself. Do you know what Remus has been going through? Do you even care?”

“That’s enough, James,” Lily says vehemently.

“Well, if you think like that, maybe we all should just stop being friends!” You retort.

Before anyone else can reply, Madam Pince comes around the corner, and everyone falls silent—a tense atmosphere that threatens to choke you. With a heavy heart, you gather your belongings and run out of the library.

The months pass by, and Frank Longbottom wonders why he doesn’t wake up at midnight anymore to find five students having a sleepover in the common room with a certain eagle, each of them trying to contain their giggles and failing. (One time, the Prewett twins had run down the stairs in panic, only to find you and Peter screaming from Remus’s theatrics in telling his ghost stories during an awful thunderstorm.) You no longer visit the Gryffindor table at breakfast, and they no longer wait for you after your classes.

“It’s probably just a tiff,” says Alice to Mary Macdonald. “They’ll make up—they always do.”

Mary nods, though unsure—while Peter is gut-wrenched about it all, the other four in particular seem like heartbroken puppies when you enter the Great Hall and barely acknowledge their presence.

The snow melts and time catches everyone unaware.

“I can’t believe I’m going to graduate and you idiots haven’t made up yet,” Lalita sighs as she pulls you in for a hug. In a few weeks, she and the other seventh-years are due to leave; you’ve grown real close with her over the past few terms. Her departure is going to be truly difficult for you to handle. “Just talk it out with them, okay?”

You sniffle, holding onto her robes. “I’m trying, but they’ve been ignoring me, too.”

Lalita squeezes you tighter. “Don’t worry. These kinds of things have a way of sorting themselves out.”

At the end of the term, you present your final project to Professor Binns. The ghost nearly returns to life. It was a research study on the Evolutionary Analysis of Magical RNA Manipulation in the Catalonian Fireball. Days after your paper is published, you’re featured on the Daily Prophet; dragon tamers and professors from Spain are owling you letters of praise and congratulations. It goes without saying that such a feat had naturally catapulted Ravenclaw to the top, ultimately winning the House Cup.

(But what you don’t tell everyone is that you’re so severely burnt out after that—to the point where you didn’t want to ever pick up a textbook again. For the first time in forever, learning had become a chore, not a passion. You’d been puking out of anxiety, hands trembling as you forced yourself to write on the parchment, the sides of your fingers constantly swollen and raw. You’d study until four o’clock in the morning, and wake up an hour later to complete all of your homework. You’ve begun to masquerade as the ghosts of Ravenclaw Tower; lifeless and indifferent. Xenophilius and Pandora fuss over you, but you just lock yourself in your room and say: “I’m tired.”

Perhaps, it is why Professor Flitwick isn’t surprised when you withdraw from most of your electives.

“The pursuit of knowledge is a rewarding journey,” says Professor Flitwick on the day you visit his classroom—hours away from needing to be on the train platform. He sighs and sets his spectacles on the table. “But it is a perilous one, too. I trust that you have understood the consequences of your actions. As a teacher, I can only offer guidance when it is needed. The other professors may disagree, but I find the best learning method to be, what is it the kids say—fuck around and find out.”

You snort.

Professor Flitwick chuckles, quite pleased with himself. “If I may be so bold as to leave you with another piece of homework, I would like to ask you to truly enjoy the holidays. I hear the summer is a time for discovering new things about oneself, for new beginnings and growth. After all, learning does not happen only within the castle grounds.”)

Later that day, you board the express, purposefully choosing the farthest compartment where you know they’ll be staying in. You share the cabin with two people whose names are Regulus and Narcissa Black—this is the first time you’ve ever met them. Narcissa shares her green tea flavored candy with you. Afterwards, you spend the rest of the ride back to King’s Cross asleep.

(Right before the train arrives, Remus is nervously searching for you in the crowd of people.

“We’ve got to say goodbye, at least.” Lily nibbles on her lower lip uneasily. She once joked that she could find you anywhere—as if you two had a red string tied around both your pinky fingers. Now, it seems you’re too far away for her voice to reach you.

James drops his head down in shame. “I never got the chance to apologize.”

“She’ll appear somewhere,” says Sirius unwaveringly with a nod, taking Lily’s heavy suitcase from her as steam whistles are heard in the distance. “She could be in our special compartment, waiting for us right now.”

“Are you sure?” Peter questions dubiously.

“Of course I am, she’s my best friend,” Sirius counters resolutely. “She’s there, I can feel it.”)

You’re fourteen when you return back to the castle—you hadn’t touched a single book throughout the summer, but you find yourself well-rested; you learn how to swim from your mother; staying up all night to accompany your family dog as she gives birth to seven beautiful puppies, and scratching yourself on the bark of sycamore trees with your poor attempts at climbing.

You find out that you don’t like Arithmancy at all, strongly preferring Herbology and Care of Magical Creatures. You’ve also garnered a curiosity for Ornithomancy, the oracle reading of birds.

This year, you signed up for the Gobstone club, despite your unfamiliarity with the game. It’s led by a Slytherin girl named Haerin Seong. (It’s properly read as Seong Hae-rin.) She has pin-straight hair, a sharp nose, and the mouth of a drunken sailor.

You also decide that you want to become a professor after Hogwarts. The groundskeeper, Rubeus Hagrid, belly laughs when you declare this to him one afternoon, right in the doorway of his hut.

“Well, go on then!” Hagrid bellows, patting you on the head. “Anyone who tries ter stop yeh has got ter go through me!”

On the dawn of your fifth-year, an owl delivers a prefect badge to your doorstep. Your father, born and raised as a Muggle, doesn’t understand the significance of this, but he cries harder than you on that Sunday morning. (“My child is a prefect!” He sobs into the telephone after dialing your aunt’s number.)

The fresh batch of Ravenclaw firsties aren’t the only new additions to the castle. According to the gossip mill, James and Lily are finally dating, so are Sirius and Remus apparently. (Then, months later, everyone would be shrieking about how they’re all dating. )

You hear of the news as you guide the first-year eaglets to their next class. You’re climbing up the spiral staircase when you see the Quidditch pitch through the window. They look like flying ants from this distance. You can imagine the wind in their hair, the tense muscles as they chase after the Quaffles, the crowd roaring in their ears, victory within their reach if they just fly fast enough.

You hate the way you envy them—how easily they soar up in the skies while you watch from below, much like a flightless eagle, shackled by your own shortcomings.

You hate Quidditch.

It’s bound by no rules, unpredictable and barbaric. Most of all, it looks down on the cowardly.

In your sixth year, you have your first kiss with a boy named Augustine Fenberry. It’s extremely short-lived and awkward. You date for three months until it’s unanimously agreed that you two are better off as friends—until you catch him laughing about you with his mates in an empty corridor, saying that you were clingy, too much, and needed to learn how to shut up. (You wonder if that’s why they grew tired of you, too.)

You handle him with a quick, “Entomorphis.”

It’s probably one of the more cruel jinxes; Augustine bawls piercingly as he grows antennas atop his head, the spell forcing him to get on his hands and knees; his friends hover around him in panic, but all Augustine can do is chirp like a grasshopper in the night. You wonder if you’ve gone too far, but Haerin tells you that’s exactly what Augustine is—vermin.

You also, with great satisfaction, deduct thirty points from his House—which happens to be Ravenclaw.

(Nobody knows this about Peter, but he’s nimble on his feet, a bit of a wallflower—and he is now the newest editor of Hogwarts’s newspaper column, The Golden Snidget. By the next day, everyone knows what he’s done. Argus Filch, who’s in charge of his month-long detention, should be the last of his worries. Peter sympathizes with the wizard—but only for a fraction of a second. Because it’s not even the werewolf Augustine has to be scared of, not the pureblood heir who could ruin anyone with just a lift of his finger; not the Quidditch prodigy with a sharp mind, knowing a thousand ways to seek revenge.

It’s Lily Evans.

“Go near her again and I’ll rip your balls off!” Marlene flips the bird to the group of cowering boys. “Matter of fact, if you treat anyone like that again, I will come for your bloodline.”

“Fucking toerag!” Lily wildly swings the Beater’s bat she had stolen from the Quidditch changing room. “If you even look at her, I’ll hunt you down and shove this up your arse—until you feel it in your throat!”

Peter shivers in fear. He didn’t ever want to be on the receiving side of Lily’s wrath.

“This is the same girl who cried for an hour when she saw the ducklings in the Great Lake separated from their mother,” says Remus, horrified.

“Honestly, I feel so, so conflicted whether to find this terrifying. . . or attractive,” James whispers to Sirius.

“Attractive. Definitely attractive,” Sirius responds breathlessly, all eyes on Lily.)

Gryffindor wins the House Cup that year, to no one’s surprise. You find yourself clapping along with everyone else, but can’t help it when your gaze drifts to the left-side of the Gryffindor table. You watch as Sirius lifts Lily in the air, her giggles somehow louder than the thunderous cheering, pressing a loving kiss to her lips. James stands on the table, encouraging everyone to sing more of his praises—there’s a split second where his eyes find yours, you look away immediately—as Remus covers his face with his palms, flushed from all the attention. After James, Remus had won the most points for their House.

They seem complete—a puzzle that never really needed another piece. (You miss them, heartachingly so.) Maybe it was for the best that all of you drifted further and further apart. You now forget the way they call your name.

And so, the story ends just like that.

YOU HAVE FOUND yourself in a very tricky position.

It’s past midnight when you wake up—you nearly scream bloody murder when James, Lily and Sirius materialize out of thin air. They stare back at you, frozen in place, unblinking for the last twenty seconds.

“Oh God, I’m hallucinating.” You cry to yourself, wrapping your arms around your waist. “I hit my head and now I’m seeing things.”

“No, no, no, no,” James stammers, shaking his head. “It’s an invisibility cloak—see?” He wears the cape, then abruptly takes the cloak off—his body disappearing and reappearing in time with his actions. “Not hallucinating, I promise.”

“That’s even worse,” You say hoarsely, on the verge of hyperventilating. “Y-You’re out past curfew—visiting hours are over. Someone could catch you. Madam Pomfrey will have your heads.”

Remus chuckles—he had missed your voice so bloody much. He barely contains his grin when you glare at him. (Finally, after three years, you look his way again.)

“We snuck in here to see you all the time,” Sirius tells you, the corner of his lips tipping into an overfond smile. “At some point, Poppy just stopped trying to keep us out.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Your gaze falls to the floor as you mousily toy with your fingers. The infirmary falls painfully silent. Again. You clear your throat. “Anyway, I–I should get going.”

“Oh.” Lily’s expression turns crestfallen, words cracking from the thick lump wedged in her throat. (This is the first conversation she’s had with you in years—one that isn’t awkwardly bumping into one another with shallow, hesitant greetings, before you scurry off like a timid squirrel.) “R-Right. But why don’t you have dinner first? We brought some from the feast and—”

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry,” You rasp, slipping into your shoes and throwing your cardigan over your shoulders. (More than anything, you want to hug Lily and congratulate her for making Head Girl—but you have to wonder if it’s too little, too late; if the distance between you and her is too great to try and cross.)

You toss Remus a wary glance. There used to be a time where you could say anything to him, and now it feels like ice-cold hands are stapled over your mouth. “F–Feel better soon.”

“Thanks.” Remus coughs.

Sirius’s eyes bounce from you to Remus, mentally ripping his hair out from exasperation—this whole thing is going nowhere.

You sprint out of the infirmary without a word, hands trembling from the nerve-wracking encounter inside. You take a moment to catch your breath, to shove your heart back inside your ribcage, as you lean sideways on the wall. It’s like running into a pack of wild chimeras in the mountains bare-handed.

“That was so scary.” You breathe out deeply, clutching the front of your shirt tightly.

The loud call of your name slices through the hallway and you jump in fright.

Luckily, it’s just James—but just James sets your heart aflutter and your knees wobbly even after all this time. He bridges the gap between you in quick, long strides; murmuring your name once more like a prayer. “Hey,” James says quietly, as if afraid to spook you off.

You gnaw on your bottom lip anxiously, tucking your hands inside your pockets. “Hey.”

“Listen, I just wanted to say—back in the library, all those years ago. I’m sorry. Really bloody sorry. Sirius decked me in the face that day, which I definitely deserved.” James nervously scratches the back of his head. “It was stupid of me—and I never should have said any of those things. I know it’s been years since then, you don’t even have to forgive me. But I just wanted you to know—”

“It’s fine, James.” You cut into his rambling, having already forgiven him for that day. “Really. Water under the bridge.”

In fact, some of what he had said made you realize how much you isolated yourself without even knowing. “And, I—uhm.” You take a deep breath. “I’m sorry, too.”

James widens his eyes, then instantly shakes his head. “It’s alright. You’re alright.”

A dark red blush spreads from his neck to his prettily carved cheeks. “So. . . uh. . . are we okay?”

“We’re okay,” You say and he exhales deeply in relief. “And James, I. . . I. . .”

“Yeah?” There’s a hopeful lilt in his voice as he takes one more step towards you—achingly patient, but there’s a sense of urgency and desperation.

“I—” You look away and the words fizzle out in your throat. “Never mind.”

I just wanted to say I’m sorry for what I said that day. I miss you more than life. Thank you for staying by my side all those years—for being one of my best friends. You make me feel safe, James Potter. You are one of the most intelligent and caring wizards I know. How anyone can think otherwise is baffling to me. I’m sorry if I don’t let you know that more often.

“See you around, James.” With that, you turn and leave.

Perhaps, some things are better left unsaid.

(So why is your heart shattering into a million pieces?)

“TODAY, WE ARE GOING TO be interpreting messages from the divine!”

On a lovely Friday morning, Professor Nasenyana drags the class out to the grounds for a hands-on Divination lecture, the groundskeeper’s hut within sight. He unlocks the barn nearby, where flocks of various bird species take to the skies instantly. He’s a rather eccentric fellow with one of the friendliest smiles you’ve ever seen. Most of the Ravenclaws are also star-struck, hanging onto his every word. As it turns out, Nasenyana is a graduate from Uagadou, the top school for Astronomy and Divination.

“Ornithomancy—!” He proclaims, flashy cloak billowing, startling some of the Gryffindors from their sleep. “It is a form of divination that looks into the behavior of birds—celestial creatures blessed with the ability to traverse through the heavens and the earth. But, you see, it is more than that. It requires utmost concentration and mastery. To pass this class, you will need to—”

“I told you we didn’t miss anything important!”

“Pads, shut up.”

Sirius and Remus come rolling down the hill. Remus’s robes are disheveled, whereas Sirius’s tie is loosely hanging around his shirt, sleeves folded up. They nearly crash into Professor Nasenyana—who doesn’t appear to be pleased with their tardiness. You notice Remus’s flushed cheeks, the sweat running down the sides of his forehead, and the pinkish bruises on the column of Sirius’s neck.

Lily chortles.

Oh.

You blush deeply—that is so none of your business.

“Mister Black! Mister Lupin! So nice of you to finally join us.” Professor Nasenyana exclaims. “I trust that it won’t take you thirty more minutes to find a place to sit?” He gestures to the assembly of students sitting down on the grass, some shielding the sunlight from their face with the Divination textbook, and others transfiguring their school robes into a picnic mat. “Take your seats, gentlemen.”

“And that is five points from Gryffindor. Each.” Professor Nasenyana declares just as Remus and Sirius plop down on the closest patch of grass to them.

Which happens to be right beside you.

You pour all your attention on the teacher, and not how warm Sirius feels next to you.

“As I was saying,” Professor Nasenyana continues, hands folded behind his back, eyes gleaming with anticipation. “In order to pass this class, you will form groups of three where your task is to read each other’s fortune based on the information presented to you and document your findings. Everything you need for interpretation is in your textbooks. You will hand this assignment in after the winter holidays. I expect excellence from each and every one of you. Failure to comply will result in a Dreadful.”

Gilderoy’s arm shoots up in the air.

“Shall I guess your question, Mister Lockhart?” Nasenyana grins blindingly. “Your groups will be determined by fate—those closest to you will read your fortune, and you theirs.”

He lowers his arm with a bright blush.

You, however, are frozen in place, sitting cross-legged on the ground with a robe strewn over your lap—you even hold your breath from the shock. Fate must be mocking you right now. Spending the next few weeks in close proximity with the boys who held your fragile, little heart in their hands.

How fun.

Not.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in forever, you don’t pay attention in Charms.

The thought of working with Remus and Sirius haunts you so much that you burrow your head in your arms for the entirety of Professor Flitwick’s lesson. Your seatmate, Xenophilius, watches in horror as you flub the enunciation for Ascendio. Thankfully, no one is accidentally flung into the air—except for Gilderoy who is unfortunately blown away from his chair.

“Sorry.” You twinge empathetically as he climbs back onto his chair, glaring at you.

Xenophilius nudges your shoulder, whispering, “Are you alright?”

“Perfectly fine,” You respond hurriedly, almost choking on your spit. “What ever gave you the idea that I was not fine? I’m bloody fantastic even. The sun is shining, fishes are swimming, and there’s not a single thing out of the ordinary in my life.”

“It’s cloudy outside,” Xenophilius says impassively. “And Lockhart is looking at you like you’ve just attempted murder.”

“Lockhart always looks like that.” You brush him off with a wave, busying yourself with flipping the pages of your Charms textbook.

Xenophilius pokes you in the side. “You are avoiding the subject. Is it because of Lup—”

“Ascendio!”

This time, it’s too perfect of an incantation that even Merlin weeps from his grave.

At the end of class, you’re greeted with yet another surprise. Just as you leave the classroom, you find Sirius and Remus standing in the corridor, so absorbed in conversation that they don’t notice the sixth-year girls giggling as they walk by—either that, or they have had plenty of practice when it comes to ignoring attention from the entire student body. It’s not like you can blame everyone else—they’re a duo carved by heaven’s finest.

Sirius realizes instantly when you walk out of the doors. He smiles blazingly at you, instantly rising to his feet, hands shoved inside the pockets of his trousers. You can’t believe this is the same boy who’d give you piggyback rides down the hallway. Dark layered curls tumble messily past his shoulders, a smidge of dark liner around his eyes, multiple piercings in his left ear. He’s grown taller, certainly more confident, too.

“Ready to go, pet?” He asks, as if casually inquiring about the weather.

“Go?” You echo, nonplussed. “Go where?”

“Birdwatching, obviously.” Sirius grins devilishly before grabbing your hand and leading you to the courtyard, Remus hot on your heels—who, for some reason, now has your bag hanging from his shoulders.

“D-Do I even get a say in this?” Truthfully, you had thought that you could finish the project without meeting up. Ever. You even think of collaborating with them via owl; staying far, far away from one another. So that none of you get hurt again, and you don’t risk another heartbreak.

“Not one bit, darling.” Sirius looks back at you and winks—this cheeky bastard!

You’re in a daze by the time the three of you reach the middle courtyard. Sirius happily plonks down under a tree, further unbuttoning his shirt until a hint of a tattoo peeks out—you gape. Remus chuckles before urging you to sit as well, before he settles on your other side.

“This is nice,” says Sirius as he leans his head against the tree trunk, eyes closed. “Bloody missed this.”

“Missed what?” You dare to ask, heart hammering in your chest.

He opens one eye, cheek dimple flashing. “Being by your side.”

“Oh.”

One does not respond to that, actually. One just simply passes out and fades away.

And as you typically do when facing hardships in life, you ramble about homework. Clearing your throat and staring straight at the earthworms crawling out of the mud, you say, “So, about our project. . .”

“I was thinking we could get started on it next Saturday,” You splutter, fiddling with your fingers. “Or I could start on everyone’s reading and we’d put it on paper sometime next month—but I could do that myself, too. I-If you wanted. Just so that it’s easier for everyone. We really don’t have to rush, honestly.”

“Procrastinating on schoolwork?” Remus laughs heartily with a slow shake of his head, stretching his long legs on the ground. “Who are you and what have you done to our best fr—”

The word falters on his tongue, and his smile fades into a somber line.

To save everyone from the awkward tension, you carry on, ignoring the way Sirius stiffens, “If you want to start early, I can head to the library after lunch to find some books on Ornithomancy. The more references we have—”

“What happened to us?” Sirius interjects gravelly.

You let out a deep sigh.

You suppose this conversation has been a long time coming, given lions and their stubbornness.

“It’s simple,” You say gingerly. “After that. . . that day, the distance kept growing and growing until we went our own separate ways without looking back.”

A single teardrop slides down your cheek before you can stop it. “You changed. I changed, too. The difference was, you all had each other while I had no one.”

(Though Pandora and Xenophilius were the truest and most honest friends one could ask for, they didn’t hold your soul captive the way they did.)

Sirius stares at you as if you had just spit acid; a thunderstorm forming within his gray eyes, his jaw locking painfully.

“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Remus asks softly, leaning forward to offer you his handkerchief. His voice sounds strangled—as though your words physically torment him. He pulls away just as your gaze falls on his.

“That’s what happened, though. But I suppose it doesn’t really even matter anymore.” You flinch away, electrocuted from his touch.

There’s a stretched silence that blankets the three of you. It carries on for a few minutes, the breeze flowing by, and the slow, clamorous bell chiming in the distance. You’re about to speak up when Sirius breaks the quietude first.

“Be ready,” He says decidedly, looking straight ahead.

“For what?” You ask in disbelief.

Sirius drags a hand through his hair with a loud exhale. He rests his elbows on his knees, chin carelessly set on his palm, eyeing you intensely. “We’re going to prove you wrong from now on.”

“What exactly are you going to prove?”

Sirius chuckles, coiling a strand of your hair around his finger. “That it’s always been you and us for life, princess.”

Merlin’s saggy balls.

THE GRYFFINDOR TABLE descends into a coalescence of wide eyes and rapid, hushed whispers when you arrive sometime during dinner. It’s not out of your own volition, of course, but your own duty and responsibility as prefect to return the handkerchief that Remus had lent you earlier this afternoon. You hoped it would be a quick in-and-out; dishing out more forced smiles, and some half-baked banter until you could finally run away, tail tucked between your legs. Like most things in your life, it does not go the way you want.

“You could keep it, if you want,” says Remus, hesitantly taking the embroidered cloth from you.

If the world knew how many trinkets Remus Lupin had gifted you during your friendship, you would be swimming in gold—and cursed letters from his devoted fangirls.

“That’s alright. Thank you.” You placate him with a crooked grin, the words spilling from your lips like a jumbled mess. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Gideon and Fabian Prewett nudging each other’s shoulders whilst pointing at you, keeping their heads low. You have no idea what that’s about.

“Well. That is all. E-Enjoy your dinner.” You nod, mentally patting yourself on the back for not passing out in the den of lions. “Goodbye.”

Though the Ravenclaw table is placed next to Gryffindor’s, you have the bright idea of sitting with your backs to them, lest you engage in a round of cloddish staring contests with the Marauders. Just as you pivot on your heels, ready to make it to Pandora’s side, an achingly familiar voice calls for your name.

“Wait!” Marlene is partially out of her seat, bright blonde hair in a loose, messy braid; hand outstretched, as if reaching out to you. Her pale cheeks blossom with shades of scarlet as she receives miffed glares from the students nearby—such is the curse of a Gryffindor; if this were a fantasy novel, they would be the perfect protagonist. “Why don’t you eat with us? F-For old time’s sake. It’s been so long and I really would like to catch up with you.”

Your resolve nearly crumbles. This is the same girl who would bring sweet candies in her pocket in case you got hungry during class. But, if this were a fantasy novel, you would only be an extra; fated to walk a path so different from the likes of James Potter and Lily Evans.

“Maybe next time,” You say, unconvincing to even your own ears.

FROM ACROSS the Great Hall, another conversation is taking place.

“I am telling you, Minerva, I caught them talking again in the infirmary,” says Poppy Pomfrey to her fellow teacher, a spry grin on her kind face.

“Poppy, as I’ve told you, I do not make a habit out of discussing my students’ personal lives,” McGonagall replies tiredly, slicing into her dinner plate of steak and kidney pie. She pauses for a few moments, before pushing up her spectacles with a wrinkly smile. “But, perhaps, I’ll let this slide just this once. Tell me all about it. I’ve also heard that—”

“ACTA NON VERBA.”

Deeds, not words.

Truly a befitting password for the House of bravery and recklessness. The Fat Lady’s portrait gasps in delight, raising her champagne glass to you. Seconds later, the Gryffindor common room is revealed to you. (Most of the Ravenclaw prefects have the House passwords memorized, in case they encounter a lost student outside the dormitories who has forgotten the passcode. It happens more often than one would like. Although it isn’t just first-years who are often stuck outside. You’ve stumbled upon Frank Longbottom many times before in a heated argument with the Fat Lady.)

“Oh!” Alice, bundled up in a red scarf and a wooly jumper, is startled to find you at the entrance. She breathily says your name, eyes crinkling as she smiles widely. “What a pleasant surprise! Oh my Gods—it’s so nice to see you again. How’s the head? Last time I saw you, you were bleeding everywhere.”

“I didn’t get amnesia. So that was good.” You head inside the room, instantly enveloped in a familiar warmth, a welcoming hug as if you had never strayed far. “Thank you. For that day, I mean. For bringing me to Madam Pomfrey.”

She waves you off. “Don’t mention it.”

“But. . .” Alice cocks her head with a conniving smile. “Don’t tell anyone else this, but when James found out it had been the Gryffindor team’s co-captain who hit the Quaffle your way, I heard James put him through some intense training. He must’ve had to run a hundred laps around the pitch for a week straight. Poor guy even had to wash everyone’s jerseys without magic.”

“What?” You shriek. “But it was just an accident. Surely, James wouldn’t—”

Alice tweaks your nose with a chuckle. “Oh, for you? He would.”

You have the strangest urge to throw yourself out of the tower.

You cough into your first, desperate to shift the conversation topic otherwise you’d spontaneously combust. “S-So, where’s Remus? We agreed to work on our Divination project here—if that’s alright with you and the others, of course.”

“Ha!” Alice exclaims, palming her forehead. “So that’s why the tower stinks of flipping perfume.” She snickers at your bewildered expression, before engulfing you in a bear hug. “It’s so good to see you. You’re welcome here anytime, you know that.”

“Thank you, Alice.” You squeeze her back, giving yourself just this one time because you really did miss her.

Alice takes a step backwards before roaring loud enough to shake the ceiling. “Remus!”

“Get down here! Your girlfriend is waiting!”

You break out in a coughing fit. “I am not his girlfriend.”

“Not yet.” Alice winks at you, patting your cheek before skipping out the common room.

You hear the heavy footfalls of someone coming down the stairs. Moments later, you see Remus Lupin beaming at you, casually dressed, hair damp and tousled over his brows, broad shoulders stretching his white top, and fluffy, mismatched socks over his feet. He walks over to you in record speed.

“You came,” He says huskily.

“I did.”

“You look beautiful today.” Remus grins wolfishly, dimples poking out of his cheeks, flecks of light in his hazel eyes.

You blink owlishly, dumbfounded. You peer at your clothes—nothing fancy or experimental. “This is how I normally dress, though.”

“I know.”

Remus smiles, swiftly taking your bookbag from you. (Alice was right. He smells like a basket of green apples, old leather tomes, and sandalwood. Not that you mind.) You follow him to the couches by the fireplace.

“Where’s Sirius?” You look around the common room as you sink into the red sofa. There’s a pair of third-years playing chess, a young girl feathering her hand across the bookcase; sunlight streaming in from the tall windows.

But no sign of Sirius Black.

“Miss me, did you, love?”

Sirius chuckles into your ear—you jump out of your skin, clutching at your knees in fright.

“Merlin’s tits—!”

You gasp for air while Sirius and Remus laugh at your expense. “You fucking wanker!” You grab one of the quilted pillows as Sirius jumps over the back of the couch. “You’re an idiot, Sirius Orion.”

“There.” Sirius flops right down on the sofa; his hair tied up in a low bun, silver rings around his fingers. “Now you don’t look so bloody scared and nervous around us. We don’t bite, you know.” He pauses, then grins devilishly at you. “Unless you ask.”

You slap your palms against your lap. “Anyways—!”

Nostrils flaring as you take a deep breath—this is going to be a long day. You begin setting the parchments, feather quills, and Divination textbooks on the coffee table, along with a notebook where you had written some observations during the week. “When we were out—erm—birdwatching the other day, I noted down the birds that flew by for our readings. For Remus, it was a flock of Firecrests. And—”

“I’m very sorry, loveliest love, but none of this makes any bloody sense to me.” Sirius goes through the Divination volumes you had checked out from the library, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Tea reading, I can tolerate. But studying bird droppings really isn’t my thing.”

You glare heatedly at him, oddly defensive about the subject. “We’re not studying bird droppings, you plonker. There’s so much more to Ornithomancy than what meets the eyes. You see, nature connects everything. From the number of birds you encounter, to which direction they fly, their pattern of flight, down to the colors of their wings.”

You point to the glaring page from Snallygasters and Omens: Vol. 1 where a picture of a Jobberknoll jumps out. “This bird flies to the east because the east governs new beginnings and warm springs after winter. Blue wings symbolize reliability. One day in the future you’ll be tasked with a huge responsibility. A family could entrust their godson to you, who knows? You have to be clear-headed, Sirius. Your emotions can get the best of you if you’re not careful.”

Without even pausing to breathe, you say, “Remus. The firecrest. Smallest bird in the wizarding world, but will dare to fly higher than any other creature, even the king of birds. The firecrest and its flock were flying to the south that day, Remus. To the place of passion and life. Love. Beauty.”

“So it’s. . . it’s more than just bird droppings!”

By the end of it all, your chest is heaving, fingers trembling with adrenaline; Remus and Sirius gazing at you with stars in their eyes, devotion pouring from their growing smiles. (Oh, how their hearts beat for you.)

Sirius tips your chin with his knuckle, leaning closer until you feel his breath on your nose. “Welcome back, princess.”

NIGHT FALLS WITHOUT anyone’s permission. James, Lily, and Peter make their way back to the Gryffindor tower, patches of sunburn on their nose after spending the entire day outside observing bird flight patterns. Like Sirius, Lily has her mind firmly set against the philosophies of Divination; the mumbo jumbo not really all that comprehensible to her. As they enter the common room, her hand in James’s, they’re greeted by a rare sight—one that Lily didn’t think she would see again.

Sirius is sitting on the floor by the fireplace, wand tucked behind his ear, a pile of books at his side, his brows contorted in frustration as he drowns in the pages of When Fortunes Turn Fowl. He presses his finger to his lips when his silvery eyes fall on Lily and James, jerking his head to the scene across him.

Lily fails to bury her smile when she sees you snoring away at Remus’s lap, his fingers absentmindedly knitting through strands of your hair. The space is bedecked in loose pages with scribbled notes on them and ink stains on the carpet.

“I take it you three got further along than we did,” Lily whispers as she kneels beside Remus, softly nudging his chin as she captures him in a fond kiss.

Remus smiles into her lips. “A month’s worth of progress, at least. Thanks to this one here. I don’t think I’ll ever look at a bird the same way again.”

“Who knew our little eagle had a knack for Divination?” Lily chuckles, gaze softening as she delicately drags her knuckle down your cheek. “It’s getting pretty late. Should we wake her up?”

Remus shakes his head. “No. Let her sleep a bit more.”

Selfishly, Lily agrees. She traces the tip of your nose, the pillows of your lips, before retracting her hand with a long sigh. “We used to talk about anything and everything until the sun rose. Now, it seems like I can never catch up to her no matter how fast I run.”

“Lily—”

“Don’t worry,” says Lily. “I am nothing if not stubborn. She’ll know my wrath soon.”

Sirius snickers. “How charming.”

The fire crackles and you mumble something, deep in slumber, shifting in Remus’s hold, “Only one percent. . . of the world’s population is . . . is naturally redheaded.”

“Is that right?” Lily grins from ear to ear.

Just you wait, Lily is going to sweep you off your feet.

(Something she should have done years ago.)

“IS THAT A new jumper?”

Pandora simpers knowingly, heterochromatic eyes uncovering your every secret—the beads in her long braids click as she keeps in time with your brisk pace. She teasingly pulls at the oversized sweater. “It looks good on you.”

You narrow your eyes at her, watchfully twisting your arms around your waist. “It was cold this morning, alright? Remus lent it to me. It’s not a big deal. It’s what friends do, right?”

“So, you’re friends now?” Pandora muses. “Well, thank the Gods, because it has been excruciating watching you tiptoe around one another. It only took you lot three years, but it’s better than never, eh?”

“Wilderwood! No magic in the corridors! That’s five points from Slytherin!” You bark at the stubborn fifth-year who grins sheepishly at you, before you reply to Pandora, an ache forming at the back of your head. “It’s complicated. Everything was sort of awkward in the beginning.”

You think of last night, how Sirius was especially keen on making you laugh every few seconds; Remus would inch closer to you, head nearly on your shoulder as he peeks at the notes you’ve jotted down. You could barely think straight in their presence. Then, you remember waking up earlier this morning, James sprawled all over Sirius and Lily on the couch; Remus’s nose fully buried in his drawing book.

“But. . .” You trail off, remembering Remus’s arms around you as he sent you off, careful not to wake the others. (“I am a selfish bastard, pet,” He whispers into your hair, “I’m sorry, but let me steal this morning from them.”)

“It’s like coming home after a long day.”

“Brilliant!” Pandora exclaims, roughly laying her hands on your shoulders as she ushers you past the cobblestone walkway and into the grassfield, where the Quidditch Pitch rests in the near distance. You hadn’t even realized that you were a little ways from the castle already. “Tell them that!”

“What?” You squawk. “Are you mad, woman?”

You hear the sound of brooms zipping by at an unimaginable speed. The crowd clamors over the announcer’s intense commentary. Your legs feel like they’ve been jinxed to feel like jelly. You hate Quidditch.

“GRYFFINDOR SCORES! — That’s one-hundred and twenty in all! — Still no snitch yet! Hurry on, Potter! Mulciber’s got nothing on you– Ow! Professor! — Fawley heads for the goal! — Great deflect by Black! — Bletchley misses! — Another point for Gryffindor! We might as well end the game now!”

“Mr. Prewett!” You hear McGonagall scold into the charmed megaphone.

“Sorry, Minnie! Anyway! — Mulciber and Potter race for the Snitch! Potter reaches out! — Surprisingly good manoeuvre from Mulciber! — Come on, James! — He’s almost got it! — It’s right there!”

You wait with a bated breath.

The crowd goes absolutely wild.

“Potter’s got it! — GRYFFINDOR HAS WON!”

“Go on now, treasure. Before the Wrackspurts get inside your head again.” Pandora urges you forward, dusting the invisible creatures off your shoulders. As you take one step into the field, fireworks of gold and scarlet light up the sky, the Gryffindor teams’ cries of victory shake the ground; you hear Fabian screaming into the megaphone. Your fingers go numb. “Don’t let another day go by without expressing your heart,” says Pandora into your ear, almost a gust of wind if you hadn’t been paying attention. “Go to them. They are waiting for you.”

“But what if they aren’t?” You watch as the sun descends on the Gryffindor team lifting James in the air, Golden Snitch in his gloved hand. Sirius catches Lily by the waist, twirling her up high; her smile more dazzling than any other gem you’ve seen. As James is set back down on the ground, he snatches Remus unaware and bends him down for a fervent kiss.

“Dora, what if I’m the only one who feels this way? I can’t do that to them. What are the chances that I’ll ruin everything? That would hurt more than anything.”

Pandora cups your cheeks and lays her forehead on yours. “You won’t ever know unless you go out there.”

With that, she pushes you into the Quidditch pitch.

You swallow the lump in your throat, ears ringing from the crowd chanting James’s name, and your heart pounding in fear.

“J-James. . .” You call out weakly as he drowns in the sea of students.

Perhaps it’s a sign.

This really wasn’t a good idea.

Love is a fool’s game.

Don’t you get it? They don’t need you in the picture at all.

“N-No!” You shout, chest heaving. If everything happens for a reason, maybe you were meant to meet in that train compartment all those years ago. You’ve lost three years with them already.

If you don’t go to them right now, you could lose a lifetime.

If bravery is for the reckless and arrogant, you’re prepared to be the most depraved witch in the castle just to stay by their side.

“James—!”

“Go, go, Gryffindor!”

You bite your lip in frustration—but you can’t just give up. Not now.

Once more.

“JAMES FLEAMONT POTTER!”

Please.

Time stops as you stand at the edge of the field; James whips his head around and finds you instantly. The glow of having just won a match doesn’t even compare when his eyes land on you. He pushes past his team members and some of the Gryffindor students, his gaze unwavering, some of them call out his name but he doesn’t bother looking back. Before you even know it, he stands in front of you, breathing heavily—but not from the rush of the game.

“You’re here,” He says, eyes disappearing into his smile. “But you hate Quidditch.”

“I do.” You grin wearily. “But I love you more.”

Without even giving James the chance to speak, you ramble on, hurricanes whirling in your stomach, “You’re a bloody brilliant wizard, James Potter. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you that before. I see you. I see all of you. How could I not? I love you. I think I’ve loved all of you before I knew it was even love. It’s alright if you don’t feel the same w—”

James grabs the back of your legs and hoists you up, tendrils of hair falling over his glasses as he beams at you. The sun can’t even dream of competing with him.

“Put me down, James, I am going to hurl—!”

He spins you one more time for good measure before placing you on the ground. James barely gives you a second to gather your bearings as he seizes your lips with his own, hand cradling the back of your neck.

“You’re here,” He says, unable to believe his very eyes, gently chasing after your lips, breaths mingling until you don’t remember where either begins or ends. “Don’t leave. Please.”

“I won’t. I won’t.” You promise breathlessly as James pecks the tip of your nose, the arch of your eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Beautiful.” He kisses you until you’re gasping for air. “And all ours.”

There’s not a moment where you don’t feel loved, not even when he lets you go, and it’s Lily who encompasses you in her arms, bright hair filling your vision; you willingly burn in the warmth of her body. The mellow scent of pomegranates and red roses fill your nose. You see a never-ending horizon of kindness in her emerald eyes. (How could you have stayed away for so long?) It’s like finding a missing piece of your soul that you never knew that was lost.

Lily laughs—it sounds like an orchestral symphony. Her gaze cascades to your lips, the prettiest of smiles on her face; she cradles the curve of your jaw with utmost sincerity, a few drops of tears shimmering against her freckled skin. “May I?”

“Please.” You feel her breath tickling your lips, deftly pulling you in for a kiss until all you can feel is her. She consumes every inch of you, and you are happy to surrender, heart and soul.

“You must be the thickest Ravenclaw I’ve ever met,” says Lily, giggling as she kisses you once, twice—thrice.

“And that means?” You scoff lightheartedly.

She steals another kiss from you. “That means: I hope you know that we have loved you ever since, you daft witch. That I’ve loved you all this time. And now that you’re ours, we are going to make sure you remember that. Every single day for the rest of our lives.”

You smile, holding onto her hand, dizzy with a hundred emotions. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

(Your Divination project is a point lower than Lily, Peter and James’s, but you find that it’s the luckiest fortune you’ve ever had.)

EPILOGUE:

“I LOVE QUIDDITCH!”

You are twenty-two years old, nose bitten from the chilly air, lounging in the best seating area the Quidditch World Cup has to offer; an unobstructed view of the players. The match is between the Brazilian and Japanese National Quidditch teams. Much to Sirius and James’s chagrin, your cheek is painted in yellow and green stripes, the vibrant flag around your shoulders.

You scream along with the crowd, nearly spilling your Butterbeer popcorn, as the Brazilian players enter the vast stadium. You ardently shake Lily’s shoulders. “That’s him! That’s him! Lily, it’s Brazil’s youngest ever Seeker! Vinícius Silva! I watched a replay of his matches and he’s got a seventy-eight percent win rate!”

“Watch out, love, you’ll fall off the edge if you aren’t careful,” Lily says worriedly.

“His fastest record for catching the Golden Snitch is ten minutes and thirty seconds! He’s won Most Outstanding Player in the Junior Division twice! I’ve got a good feeling about this team—I knew those auguries were a lucky sign.”

“The only Seeker you should be obsessing over is me.” You hear James grumbling behind your back, stealing a kiss from Lily’s lips before pressing his mouth to your cheek. “And you bloody well know that Japan’s Chaser, Kurosawa, is going to steal the limelight in this match. An average possession time of thirty seconds per play. A beast, that one.”

You wave him off, more confident in your statistics. “Did you place my bets? I’m telling you, we’re going to be rich.”

“Yes, darling,” He says, utterly loving his role as the dutiful husband.

Moments later, Sirius appears at his side, fussing over your scarf, and kissing you just because. “Can we take off your bloody hat now? I think you just blinded Malfoy and his little blonde gremlin.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” You simper fiendishly before smacking his arm. “And don’t call your nephew that.”

Sirius grins.

You pull at one of his curls. “Besides, if you’re good you can take off everything later tonight.”

He pulls you in for a deep kiss, hand at your waist, nose brushing each other’s. “And that is why I love you, dear wife.”

You pout, albeit seeing right through his white, little jape. “Truly?”

Sirius lands another kiss to your forehead. “Are you doubting me, loveliest love of my life? The lighthouse in my ocean storms. The apple of my eye. Fire in my loins—”

You slap a hand over his mouth. “I get it, thank you, my love.”

Sirius beams from ear to ear. “Glad to have eased your doubts, darling.”

Thirty minutes into the match, Remus arrives, dressed in a muted gray suit, light brown hair flopping over his eyes. He greets everyone with a tired kiss.

You immediately wrap him in a hug, nuzzling your nose into his neck. He had a particularly difficult full moon some nights ago. You press a tender kiss to the scar right below his jaw. “How was work? Did you bring my binder? It has my lesson plan for next week, I don’t want to return to the castle unprepared, and—”

The newest Defense Against the Dark Arts professor squeezes your waist. “Work was fine, pet. And no, I didn’t bring the papers because right now we are not working. We are going to watch Brazil win the bloody match and get right home to Harry after.”

You, the newest Divination teacher of Hogwarts, tug him by his necktie, smiling coyly. “Sounds like a wonderful plan to me.”

BONUS:

“REMUS!”

The empty classroom is filled with soft, fervid moans—two professors especially drunk on the taste of each other’s lips. You’re seated on the desk, Remus wedged between your thighs, his hand inching dangerously higher and higher; the other hand slipping under your shirt and thumbing the bare skin underneath. He captures your whispers and mewls with his lips. Jackets and ties are tossed carelessly to the side.

“So fucking beautiful.” He nips at your lower lip.

“Rem. . .” You whimper, tugging at the strands of his hair. “Remus—please!”

The door to the DADA classroom slams open and you two detangle from each other’s embrace in record speed. As you pat down your hair, Remus draping his blazer over your shoulders, you watch Lily and Harry stalk over to you in lengthy strides, reaching the both of you within seconds. You clear your throat, awkwardly averting your gaze from your son’s precious eyes; Lily, a moment away from throwing her head back in laughter.

Harry, fourteen, and not at all ignorant to what couples do in the castle alcoves, sees the ruffled hair, the lipstick over his father’s cheeks and neck, and his parent’s misbuttoned blouse.

He grimaces. “You two are disgusting, you know that right?”

You guffaw, pinching his cheek. “Now, is that any way to greet the person who’s changed your diapers since you were a baby?”

Lily cackles from Remus’s side, fixing the collar of his shirt. “Harry’s got a bit of a problem. Go on, tell them, my love.”

Harry immediately throws his hands in the air, groaning frustratedly. “It’s Ron! He thinks I put my name in the bloody Goblet—!”

“Which, I will still be having a word with Dumbledore about,” You say decisively. You’re not about to endanger your son. The Minister of Magic and the Headmaster be damned. They can also take it up with your husband, James, Head Auror of the Magical Law Enforcement department.

“And now Ron’s not talking to me, Hermione’s not talking to me because I’m not talking to Ron—Colin’s following me around everywhere I go! I’m going mad, mum!” Harry slumps on one of the empty chairs, huffing. “Stupid bloody tournament.”

You chuckle as you walk over to him, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu. “Take it from me.” You press a warm kiss to his forehead. “Talk to them, otherwise you’ll lose time that was meant to be spent together. It doesn’t matter who was wrong or who was right. It’s important that you have the courage to reach out. They’re your friends. They will understand your heart soon enough.”

Harry blinks. “Thanks.”

He exits the classroom in a daze, heavily pondering on your words.

The door clicks shut, and Lily wordlessly locks the entrance. She turns to you and Remus, a sultry grin on her ruby red lips. “What are the chances we Floo home, and invite Sirius and James to join us?”

You take her outstretched hand. “A hundred and twelve.”

a/n. i wasn't satisfied with the angst here.. so expect a hufflepuff!reader and enemies to lovers next time (i promise to do better in the next fic aaakfsh) tell me what u thought of this one EUEUEU HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS FIC!! heart heart

#poly!marauders x reader #sirius black x reader #remus lupin x reader #lily evans x reader #hp imagine #hp fluff #hp angst #poly!marauders #poly!marauders x you #poly!marauders fluff #poly!marauders imagine #poly!marauders angst #marauders fanfiction #sunny's hp fics #poly marauders #marauders x reader #james potter x reader

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too-much-tma-stuff · 5 months

Text

Finally Getting Help (pt 3)

first | last | Masterpost | Next

What Tim and Bruce found was completely ridiculous. It really wasn’t hard to find the Doctors Fenton’s website but it was ridiculous! It was outdated and gaudy with animations of cartoony ghosts everywhere. If it hadn’t been for how clear Danny was about his parents' names Tim would have skipped right over it. But when he got past the terrible website design and started reading it his stomach just dropped lower and lower.

The writing was clean and scientific though it couldn’t disguise the malicious delight they took in tearing the creatures they called ‘ghosts’ apart. Whatever these ghosts really were Danny had been internalizing this attitude about Himself for years! They also bragged about their weapons and their government contract. So whether that was true or not Danny hadn’t been lying or delusional, it was his parents. And regardless of what these ghosts actually were it was obvious they were supernatural so RR sent a link to the website to Zatana.

(link)

RR: What do you think?

Tana: Lol is this a joke?

RR: I wish, I know it looks like one but no, this is deadly serious.

Tana: Hang on

Red Robin put down his phone to give Zatana the time to read over the site and looked more into Maddy and Jack Fenton while she did. He found their graduation certificates, and pictures of them in college with what must have been a much younger Vlad. So they were actually doctors of some sort, they had their doctorate, though that didn’t exactly make it any less likely they had gone fully off the rails now.

His phone dinged and he picked it up to see one short message from Zatana.

Tana: I’m coming to the cave.

Tim sighed and put his phone back down, spinning his chair to face B who was hunched over the computer typing furiously. “Zatana is on her way, I asked for her opinion of the Fenton’s research and she must think it’s big.” He said as he dug out a domino mask.

“Hm,” B sounded and went to get his cowl. “Report?”

“The Doctors Fenton are doctors, they got their doctorates though I don’t know in what yet. They’ve been friends with Vlad since university and they certainly at least think they’re studying ghosts. Their website has articles on behaviours and biology, and how to hunt and hurt ghosts. They brag about a government contract.” Tim summarized. “You?”

“The Ghost Investigation Ward does exist and they are a government agency but they only seem to be active in the town of Amity Park and they’re so inept! It wasn’t hard to hack them, they’re trying to sound mysterious and a little dangerous talking about protecting humanity from invasions from other worlds but I don’t think they’re actually that competent,” Batman said with a scowl.

“The only reason we didn’t know about this was because we weren’t looking! And it’s possible Danny is right and they were jamming calls from Amity to the JL, but I have a terrible feeling what actually happened if that the call came through and someone heard them talking about ghosts and rogue government agencies, assumed it was a prank and blocked them,” Bruce said massaging his temples.

“Ah,” Tim said, his heart dropping at how plausible that sounded. Could they have saved Danny before, if they had taken that call seriously.

“And Vlad is the mayor of his town, there are articles about Danny fighting him in public. It seems like everyone knew their relationship was antagonistic at best and No One defended him. The GIW also listed him in their special thanks for helping fund them. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s been using them as a tool to threaten and control Danny.” Batman said with cold fury. Tim took a deep breath, and exhaled slowly.

“We weren’t able to protect him, but we will avenge him. And we’ll keep him safe Now,” Tim reminded his father. Privately thinking that as soon as he could he was going to tell Jason about this so they could Really make sure Vlad never came near Danny again. An arrest just wasn’t strong enough for a man like that. He wasn’t going to tell Bruce that though, obviously.

The sound of the Zeta tube interrupted their moment as Zatana arrived, looking slightly more ruffled then she usually did. She must have really rushed here, which was a bit worrying.

“Zatana,” Batman greeted.

“Hello Batman, before we talk I need to check your wards.” She said already walking past them.

“Hm,” Batman sounded, making RR smile a little, how Batman made that sound mean so many different things always sort of amazed him.

“I need to check the ones on your home too. And I’d like to meet the boy you have under your care,” She said briskly.

“How did you know about the boy?” Batman asked gruffly.

“Lucky guess,” she said briskly, her hands glowed as she walked around the cave, making seemingly random gestures as if touching or pulling on invisible threads. None of the bats really understood magic so they left her to it. When she was done they let her up into the manner, she knew their identities already after all and she checked all the wards on the home very thoroughly, occasionally casting spells to reinforce them. They collected Dick and Damian trailing after them curiously as they went as well.

“Alright, can I meet the boy now?” She asked, turning towards Bruce who crossed his arms and puffed out his chest a bit.

“Not till you explain to us what’s going on,” He growled and Zatana looked over the curious stubborn faces surrounding her and sighed.

“Fine,” she allowed, resigned. She rubbed her temples as she looked around for a chair and sunk down into it. “So what the Fentons seem to be referring to as Ghosts are actually denizens of the Infinite Realms, the space in between every world and afterlife. Some of the beings there were once people who died but many aren’t. They’re also known to be very powerful and quite violent though thankfully not particularly interested in the living. The fact that the Government is apparently messing with something like this is very bad news.

“Constantine and I have been keeping half an eye on the situation in Amity Park but they had their own pair of Heroes, Phantom and Red Huntress, who seemed to have the situation well under control so we weren’t all that worried about it. We weren’t tracking the more human elements of the GIW and the Fentons,” She bit her lip and thought for a moment.

“When Tim sent me that website and I was made aware of those, that changed things. What’s worse is the photo the Fentons’ have of their family. Their son… we knew Phantom looked young but ghosts often stay at a younger age than they really are, with how powerful he was we assumed he was Old. But he looks exactly like the Fenton’s son. Did they not notice he was dead or…” She looked around at their faces, apparently getting her answer from their expressions.

“There have been rumours for a long time about a very rare and powerful sort of living dead, humans soaked in the pure energy of the infinite realms resulting in a still living ancient. It’s so rare that people usually think it’s a fairy tale but with the work Phantom’s parents do it makes a sick sort of sense. And what it means is that that boy you have stashed away is basically a baby God and we all have to be very careful.”

There was a heavy silence as they all processed what she was saying. “Are you… sure?” Tim asked, uncertainly.

“I won’t be till I meet him, but I’m as sure as I can be without that at the moment,” she said firmly.

Tim sighed and pulled out his phone. “Cas is with him, I’ll text her to see if she’s up to meeting you. If he’s that powerful we don’t want to push him right?” He asked as he typed out a text to Cas.

“Yes. Like I said he’s been acting as a hero in Amity, he seems like a good kid but I have no doubt in my mind if he’s pushed too far we could have a truly apocalyptic situation on our hands,” She said which made Tim swallow thickly.

His phone dinged and he checked it. “Danny is willing to meet you but he’s really tired so go easy on him and don’t stay long,” Tim relayed her message.

“Alright that’s fine, thank you. Show me the way please,” She requested.

Bruce took over, leaving the way. “We don’t want to overwhelm him, I think only I and Zatana should go in, with Cas still there since he seems to feel safe with her,” Bruce informed his children.

“Alright, just tell us everything soon!” Dick demanded and Bruce’s lips twitched up in just the suggestion of a smile as he nodded to them.

He took off his cowl, he wasn’t in his full uniform anyway and he didn’t want to scare Danny. Besides if he had been a hero even if he clocked Bruce he would understand.

“Hello Danny, it’s a pleasure to meet you, I’m Zatana,” She introduced herself s she followed Bruce in. She would have offered her hand to shake but Danny was half hiding behind Cas sitting on the bed.

“It’s nice to meet you too. What’s with the outfit?” He asked curiously which made her laugh.

“I’m a hero, one of the less known ones. I’m part of Justice League Dark which is their supernatural division along with Constantine and Deadman and a few others. He’s a ghost, but I assure you the government hasn’t been giving him any trouble, probably because they knew they wouldn’t get away with it.”

“So I’m just lucky then,” Danny said with a bitter curl to his lips.

“As a hero, I want to ask, are you Phantom?” She asked rather bluntly.

Bruce shivered as the temperature in the room suddenly dropped a few degrees and Danny’s eyes started to swirl with green as he glared at Zatana who managed to barely react. Batman noticed how her back tensed a bit but it was barely there. “You know?” Danny demanded. “You knew about what was going on in Amity and you didn’t help?!”

“I’m very sorry Danny,” She said genuinely. “We knew something was going on, but we didn’t look closely enough. We thought that you were an older ghost just of someone who died young because of your strength, and it looked like things were under control. Normally our involvement wouldn’t have been appreciated, intruding on someone’s haunt, so we didn’t look any closer. I am so sorry we overlooked you but we’re going to make up for it now I promise.

“I’ve checked and reinforced the wards on the house so nothing should be able to come in uninvited, and I’m going to contact the rest of the JLD. We’re going to go to Amity, we’ll figure this out and deal with it I promise.”

The temperature in the room slowly went back up, Danny was still upset, but he didn’t seem like he was about to snap anymore. While Zatana had been talking Cas had started gently rubbing Danny’s back and that seemed to be helping too. After a moment Danny looked up again and nodded, accepting the help.

“The veil must be very thin there, to let so many ghosts through?” Zatana probed gently.

“It is, but more than that two years ago my parents succeeded in building a portal to what they call the Ghost Zone. This kinda green world of floating islands.

“A portal,” Zatana said flatly, blinking rapidly. “To the Infinite Realms?”

“Ah is that what it’s really called? Ya probably? That’s how everyone’s been getting through. How I got my powers too, the ghosts call me a halfa, but I’m not the only one. Vlad’s one too.”

Batman heard Zatana mutter “Two?” softly, baffled and alarmed but she nodded. Bruce filed that information away too, it seemed Vlad was even more of a threat then he’d first appeared to be.

“Alright, I’ll get as many of the JLD together as I can and we’ll head to Amity. We’ll shut down the portal and deal with this.” She said determinedly.

From the look on Danny’s face he didn’t really believe her, but he nodded again and leaned against Cas. “Good luck I suppose,” he muttered and sighed, rubbing his face.

“Just… tell me if you get in over your heads okay, I’m used to dealing with all this stuff.” God he sounded so tired, the poor kid.

“I will, but don’t worry about us, just take care of yourself okay? This is a good place to be, I promise you won’t have to be alone anymore.” Zatana assured him. She probably had more questions, but it was very obvious that Danny was getting tired.

“Bruce is good dad,” Cas chimed in, speaking up for the first time. It embarrassed Bruce a little but he smiled at them and nodded a little.

“Thank you,” Danny said, his shoulder slumped and his back curled. “Can I go to bed now?”

“Of course Chum,” Bruce agreed, starting to shoo Zatana out of the bedroom with Cas on their heels. When they closed the door behind them Bruce heard the lock click quietly closed behind them. He really hoped that Danny would feel safe enough to sleep well.

@zlinen @sebas-nights @littlefeather345 @isnt-that-grape @idontgetpaidenoughforthisshit @shadowkatt99 @fantasticstoryteller @blackshuckatdusk @blacksea21090 @sithlordchimchnga @fanfictionforme2 @imalittlefangirl25 @bushbees @yotsubaayase @thomasdimensor @ultimatebluff

#red robin #danny phantom #dp x dc #batman #bruce wayne #fanfiction #tim drake #zatana #cassandra cain #the fentons are bad parents #Vlad is a creep #misunderstanding #danny is pregnant au #mama danny #bad parents jack and maddie

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ceilidho · 7 months

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prompt: vegas wedding (ghost/reader)

Your fingers trail over to the other side of the bed and touch something solid.

It jolts your body back into itself, mind awake when you register the heat of warm skin where there shouldn’t be skin. Not next to you in bed. The other side of your bed is usually cold to the touch, the sheets still pressed and tucked in place, undisturbed because you tend to stick to your side. They’re rumpled now, the sheets; tented under the body next to yours.

You open your eyes only to instantly shut them. There’s an ache in your forehead that throbs when the sunlight filtering in through the gap in the windowblinds hits your eyes. You remember drinking the night before, but not much more than that. Actually, you don’t remember much from the night before besides getting dressed up in the hotel room with your friend before parting ways in the casino.

Getting out of bed feels like it takes every ounce of energy left stored in your poor, aching bones. You turn on your side ever so carefully before shimmying out of bed, woozy enough when you stand up that you have to grab onto the bedside table to keep from crumbling into a ball on the floor.

It sparkles in the light when you happen to glance down. One big, gaudy rhinestone in the centre and then a band of diamonds all the way around. It’s heavy on your finger, accentuated by the emotional weight and repercussions of it that threaten to actually make you topple over this time.

“No, no, no, no,” you whisper to yourself, trying to pull it off and wincing when it doesn’t budge past your knuckle. Too small. You must have really shoved it on the night before.

You wince at the thought of how much work it’ll be to take it off. Surprisingly, it doesn’t hurt though—it catches around your knuckle, but rests perfectly when you push it back down to sit on your finger like a ring should.

The man under the covers—it’s an assumption, you’ll admit it as you don’t know for sure that it’s a man—makes a noise, shifting in his sleep. Your blood coagulates in your veins as your head whips over your shoulder to watch him carefully for any sign of wakefulness. For the first time since waking up, you get a glimpse of the man probably wearing a ring matching yours and he—well, he really takes up his side of the bed.

The big lump under the covers doesn’t move as you stare at him. You don’t allow yourself more than a glance, charting the slope of his back muscles and the top of his dirty blond hair. He lies on his stomach, cheek pressed into the pillow facing away from you, obscuring his face. Probably better for you.

Still fighting the urge to scramble out of the hotel room with your things, you allow yourself one smug moment. He’s handsome, whoever he is—you’ve certainly pulled worse. More to your credit, you somehow talked him into getting hitched in Vegas. His back rises with every breath; you stare for a while and wait for the periodic soft, gruff noises that he makes in his sleep. When he turns over onto his back, you muffle a squeak when the covers tent under his barely covered morning wood and slowly back away and into the bathroom, shutting the door behind you.

The shower doesn’t help at all; it just prolongs your panic attack that worsens every time you glance at the door and imagine the man sleeping in your hotel bed waking up on the other side. It does feel good to wash off the grime from the night before, however, scrubbing every nook and cranny of your body.

He’s sitting on the edge of the bed when you come out, only a complementary hotel robe wrapped around you. You freeze. Big shoulders undulate when he rolls them back, stretching them out after a long night’s sleep. When he stretches an arm up to scratch his upper back, you almost whimper at the way his arm bulges.

“Thought you could sneak out, is that right?” he grunts, his accented voice rippling down your spine. You hadn’t expected it to come out of his mouth, not this large, blue collar-looking man with his muscled pectorals and the bit of pudge around his middle, softness that comes with labour and not vanity. He drags his hand over the scruff growing on his face, only slightly darker than the hair on his head.

“…I’m not really sure what to say,” you blurt out, reflexively tightening the belt cinching your robe in place. Conscious that your day-old clothes are still sitting in a pile on the bathroom floor, nothing underneath your robe.

The man stares at your chest like he knows it too. “‘Course you do, love. Probably would’ve skipped off if I hadn’t gotten up, tail tucked between your legs.” His stare flicks down to your legs then, eyes growing heated, half-lidded. You frown.

“That’s how this goes, isn’t it? We, uh, do…this…that…last night or whatever,” you stutter out, face hotter than you’re comfortable with it being, “and then we go our separate ways. That’s what I’d expect from anyone.”

“‘Anyone’ isn’t wearing my ring on her finger,” he points out, tilting his chin towards your hand. You hide it behind your back.

“That was an…” you clear your throat, “unfortunate detail. I can fix it though, I swear, just…just give me your email or something and I’ll send you the papers.”

This is precisely the most uncomfortable moment of your life. Thus far, anyway. You’ve had worse things happen to you, but as far as uncomfortable things go, little else comes close to subtly implying that you’ll serve a man whose name you don’t even know divorce papers. It’s certainly not what you expected from a weekend girls’ trip to Vegas.

He tilts his head, eyes locked on you. “Don’t worry about all that, love.”

“Why? Do you—I can give you my email address instead, if you want to…if you have a lawyer friend that’ll help.”

“No. Don’t need help with something that isn’t gonna happen.”

You can feel your temper getting the better of you. This whole weekend is shaping up to be a bigger headache than just the hangover you’re nursing. “A divorce—I’m talking about getting divorced, if that isn’t clear.”

“It is. It just isn’t happening.”

He’s being far too casual, unconcerned with your fists clenching at your sides, eyes lazily sweeping you up and down. He yawns like a big cat.

“What are you talking about?” you hiss, taking a step towards him. Trying to seem intimidating even though your heart is beating erratically in your chest. “You can’t just say no. This shit happens and then—why wouldn’t it happen? It’s just a divorce!”

“Don’t believe in divorce, love. I gave my word.”

His words hit you so hard that it briefly rocks you out of your headache. “That’s so—that’s so stupid! It’s practically an annulment anyway! We didn’t even, you know—” your voice drops to a whisper, embarrassed, “—consummate it.”

“Maybe didn’t get to the whole course, but we didn’t do nothing,” he teases. A subtle thing, barely a twitch of his lip to let you know that he’s toying with you. Men like him toy with their prey like cats with a mouse.

He probably isn't wrong. You might remember it with time, but he looks like a man that’s seen you naked. It’s an infuriating look.

“Look, I’ve got—my friends are probably wondering where I am anyway.”

“Give ‘em a call; you can tell ‘em you spent the night with your husband.” No mistaking it now, the heat in his eyes. Nor the blankets bunched in his lap in lieu of his clothes, a fact you’d been carefully not letting yourself focus on for fear that you’d wind up just staring at his crotch.

Like you are now, helpless to do anything as he drags the sheet away, letting it slip off the bed. His thighs are dusted in dark, coarse hairs, wide enough that you could comfortably sit on one of them. He gives one a pat too, beckoning you towards him.

“Come back to bed,” he suggests, dick resting red and heavy against his stomach, big enough that you know you would’ve remembered having that inside you even if you’d blacked out. “Let me wake my wife up the right way.”

#ceil writing #cod mw2 #cod x reader #simon ghost riley #cod simon riley #simon riley x you #ghost/reader #ghost cod #ghost x reader

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kentopedia · 1 month

Text

˚₊‧꒰ა cold embrace (provenance) — fyodor dostoevsky

𝓈𝓊𝓂𝓂𝒶𝓇𝓎. you buy a two hundred year old house with a two hundred year old painting hanging above the mantel. it's not the only thing the previous owner left behind.

𝒸𝑜𝓃𝓉𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓈. ghost!fyodor, f!reader, violence, angst, death, alternate / modern universe, no smut but it is suggestive, fyodor is kind of a pervy ghost so, wc: 6.1k

𝓃𝑜𝓉𝑒𝓈. this one has two titles bc it was supposed to be for my kinktober... never finished it. embarrassing ! but here is a semi-revamped version for this series! i can finally check it off my wips page <3 idk how i feel about it but i hope you enjoy

part of my summerween series !

A chime from the grandfather clock brings Fyodor out of his stupor, the sound signaling another day, another meaningless hour that will only continue his eternal misery. He’s grown used to it now—evening after evening of emptiness, of reading nothing but the same books, playing the same pieces of dull sheet music, and the lifeless chess matches against himself. The house is cold with only his presence, dusty without a housekeeper and a life to make it a home.

There are a million things in Fyodor’s life that he must have done to deserve this misery, but he can’t pinpoint which one solidified his reward of a lamentable, endless cycle.

He’s certain hell is better than this. It’s something he wishes for every day, if only to have an eternal companion with the devil, a challenge to overcome.

Though, even with this boredom, Fyodor refuses to let anyone live in his home. They’ll only serve to be another pain, something that would, surely, push him past the brink of sanity.

The centuries old décor will get replaced with gaudy twenty-first century items, ones that will be nothing more than an eyesore. There are a few already scattered around his home from previous tenants, but only things that he believed useful enough for him to keep; a few books from authors he didn’t live to read, a television from the nineties, a computer that he watched one couple scroll on before he murdered them in cold blood.

Perhaps he is two hundred years dead and gone, but he refuses to be an ignorant ghost, one that is unaware of anything beyond these four walls, caught forever in the past.

Although now, it’s been a while since anyone’s tried to move in, and he’s certain the only reason the house hasn’t been torn down is because its preserved nicely, an eighteenth-century home that has withstood the test of time.

Fyodor, in his lowest moments, wishes they would tear it down. Maybe then, and only then, can he be set free. Or maybe, he’s forever trapped in this exhaustive lot, doomed to decay, even when there’s nothing left of the foundations but soil.

He pushes a pawn forward on the board, putting himself in checkmate for the millionth time in a row. It’s been so long that he’s used to his own tricks. Even the computer, which he’d come to understand quickly, is no match for him. It’s far too exhaustive to play against a machine that utilizes an algorithm he can so easily decipher.

Out of nowhere, the front door unlocks, and Fyodor glances over at the sound, dark hair falling over his eyes. Seconds later, he notices an older realtor with a clipboard leading you around, a woman he’s never seen, dressed up nicely with a darker shade of lipstick smeared across your mouth.

He’s been through this before. It’s a miracle the realtor hasn’t given up on this house yet, a mansion she is determined to sell despite the endless horrors that have been committed by his hand.

“Here it is,” she says, nervous, gesturing around the expansive hall, the crystal chandelier and staircase that immediately follows. “It was built in 1731, but one of the owners remolded it in the style of the mid-nineteenth century. The structure has been stabilized; it’s safe… enough.”

The two of you chat, but he doesn’t bother to listen in. It’s all questions of: when can I move in? can we negotiate? — things you will come to regret once he sets his sights on killing you.

Then, the realtor is sighing, wringing her hands together as she watches you spin around the house in awe. It’s clear that you’re impressed by the layout, the rich furniture and colors that have been used.

That, at least, satisfies Fyodor. Everyone else who has moved in was looking to upgrade it to a modern style, rid the place of its aged grace and charm.

“I’m truly sorry,” she says, brushing curly hair away from her cheekbones. “But I am legally obligated to tell you that every person who has lived here before has suffered a terrible, terrible fate. There have been gruesome murders that cannot be explained, done in ways that I don’t even want to tell you about.”

You laugh, eyeing her with skepticism. “Are you telling me it’s haunted?”

The realtor shrugs. “That’s what people say.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” you answer, and Fyodor rolls his eyes, scoffing as he floats to the second floor, unable to listen into the unreasonable conversation anymore. It’s been the same story for decades. No one believes in ghosts, but it is always a ghost that kills them.

He returns to the chess board, irritated, though unable to consider the game any further. Your face is stuck in his mind. For some reason, he can’t remember the last time he’s ever seen anyone with such beauty.

Fyodor stops; your ageless elegance doesn’t matter—it can’t, and it won’t. You’ll be dead by the end of the month, when you gather all your things and invade the bedroom that was once his own. Even if you are beautiful, you are a nuisance, a threat to Fyodor’s eternal torment and quiet existence.

Still, he can’t help but wonder if it would be nice to have something other than his own thoughts to distract him from the endless misery.

You move in on the thirteenth of June, nothing more than a few boxes and a decade old car to keep you company. He guesses you’ve traveled a long distance to get here, and you’ve gotten rid of half of your life in the process.

A good thing for him. That means things can be over relatively quickly, and all your belongings can be disposed of easily after he kills you.

You spend the entire first day unpacking, and Fyodor waits patiently, allows you time to get comfortable in his home. He watches as you bring a stack of thick novels into the waiting room, which once boasted large parties, and place them on a shelf below those that have his name within the covers.

You take a few calls as you hang up your autumn coats, ones that won’t be needed for a few months. The voice on the other line sounds frantic, worried. A local, most likely. You only seem annoyed by his continuous string of anxieties.

When the sun sets, and you grow tired, you rub your eyes and head to bed. The first night you will spend in this place that Fyodor likens to Hell.

It’s the time he’s been waiting for—a moment to catch you off guard. You are so unsuspecting, already so at home in the mansion, that you have no fear of anything hurting you in the middle of the night.

While you get ready for bed, Fyodor slips into your room, observing the pieces of your life that have conquered his bedroom. A soft classical piece plays from your phone, one that he recognizes from his mortal life. Clearly, you are fascinated by the period he once lived in. A shame, really, he won’t be able to tell you more about it.

You leave the bathroom, come back towards him to change into a pair of small shorts, a large shirt hanging over your frame.

He’s forgotten how long it’s been since he’s seen a woman, how long since he’s touched one.

Fyodor finds himself distracted by your body, the smoothness of your skin. His eyes travel over your legs, your hips, the fullness of your breasts and ignores how much he desires to let his thumb graze over your flesh. There is something so soft about you, so gentle and innocent.

Perhaps, that is where his fascination stems from: he has always been the opposite. Even in his human existence, Fyodor was not a kind man, and he doesn’t plan on becoming one now that he is dead.

He shakes away the vision, the thoughts that swirl within his mind. It has been far too long since he has experienced any sort of pleasure, and maybe even a man as cold as himself is not immune to the desires that course within his veins.

Though he tries to be. He ignores his arousal desperately in exchange for a renewed bloodlust.

You climb into bed, put your phone on the white cord, and shut your eyes. Thirty minutes later, you’re sleeping soundly, soft puffs of air leaving your lips as you sleep.

It’s the opportune moment. The silver knife gleams brightly in his hand, streaks of moonlight tracing over the slanted point. It’s the same blade he’s killed every other new tenant with, their screams still echo in the halls like a harmonious melody each time he bring the knife down on another unknowing victim.

He stands before you at the side of the bed, watches as your chest rises and falls, the evidence of your life undeniable. You are a lovely image like this, something to be painted and adored; more beautiful than many of the women he’d met in his time, even those who were of the finest elite in the country.

Fyodor presses the blade to your throat, contemplative. He considers how much lovelier you will look with the scarlet stain of blood seeping down your neck, spraying across the room and ruining the fresh sheets. Will you awaken, gasping as you claw at your throat, or will you drift away without even understanding what has become of you?

He pictures it, and digs the blade close to your throat, nothing more than a pinprick of blood flowering there.

You don’t awaken; but you a little sound leaves you, something between a gasp and a moan, and you shift away from the knife gripped between his pale fingers. It’s a sound that has him pausing, musing, as he regards your vulnerable state, a beautiful figure there with no clue that such a murderous man is also a resident in her home.

You make another one of those pretty noises in your throat, and Fyodor, against two centuries of murderous intent, pulls the knife away. He watches as you roll on your stomach, your shirt scrunching, moving up your body to reveal the undersides of your breasts. Your hand shifts towards him on the bed, reaching in his direction, before you still. Then, your breathing is back to normal, evened out completely.

Your lips part blissfully as you sigh in your sleep.

He can’t stop looking at you, can’t stop wondering what his name would sound like leaving the perfect swell of your mouth, if you’d sound just as pretty when you orgasm as you do when you’re asleep.

Surely, he can find a better use for you—it would be a shame for such a pretty thing to go out so early.

As he draws back, Fyodor notices the chess board on the side table, the pieces arranged nicely, each on the correct square. He can’t tell if you play. You could just have it for decoration, or perhaps it was a gift given to you from a lover that he hasn’t seen pictures of, the one that he’s certain someone as lovely as you must have.

The board is aged; not as old as the one in the drawing room, but a nice set, nonetheless. Fyodor glances back at your sleeping form once more, smiles coolly to himself, and shifts a pawn forward.

The chess piece is the first thing you notice in the morning.

It’s almost ridiculous how easily it catches your eye, a tiny little movement within the chaos that was your brand-new room. A pawn is on a different square, leering at you from the other wall, as if smiling, a flashing sign above its head, calling to you, hoping you’ll pay attention.

You almost think nothing of it; things can move, can’t they? Perhaps there was a shift in the earth overnight… Though, that makes little sense when you think about it rationally.

It’s strange, that much is certain. You remember the realtor telling you about the ghosts, and though you aren’t inclined to believe in haunted houses and scary stories, you find a part of yourself questioning the logic of the chess piece.

You are certain it was on the correct square before you slept.

It’s the only thing on your mind as you get ready, suffer through a tasteless breakfast, and throw on a rain jacket to combat the dreary weather. You’re meeting a friend for lunch—the only friend you have in this town. Sigma is the sole reason you decided to move here, instead of the other arbitrary cities that you’d been desperate to escape to.

Still, the board won’t leave your mind. You take one last glance at it before, on a whim, pushing the opposite color pawn forward as well.

Then you leave, hoping that a conversation with your friend will take your mind off the strangeness of that happenstance, the anxiety you feel about moving to a new place, a new job where no one knows you, a home that stays cold, despite the heat that reigns with long summers.

The walk to the cafe is short, but with the wind and the drizzling rain, you are miserable, your hands wrinkling from the dampness, even within your pockets.

Sigma is waiting for you, his lavender and white hair loose over his shoulders as he peruses the menu, eyes darting across it like he’s never read it before.

You sit, offer him a greeting, and though your conversation is cordial, the two of you catching up on your day, you eventually ask the question you’ve been dying to know.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

Sigma stops, puts the utensil back down on his plate, and regards you with a thin frown. “Did something happen?”

You think of the chess piece, wonder if another will be moved when you get home. “No, but—”

“I told you not to move into that house,” he says, eyes narrowing. Sigma refuses to step into that mansion, grows anxious every time you mention it. “Over ten people have died there. Do you want to get murdered?”

“No particularly,” you say, staring at him flatly, your mouth pulling into a line. “But I’ve made it one night already. I’ll be fine.”

A hard laugh leaves him, as he shakes his head, unamused by your cheekiness. “That’s what they all say, isn’t it? Then they all die.”

“Very dramatic.” You take a long sip of your water. Sigma’s features don’t crack in the slightest as he stares at you, waiting for you to continue. “I’m not scared. I just want to know if you believe in ghosts or not… Because I don’t.”

Sigma’s eyes flit across your face, searching for any hint of a lie, for any signs of fear. When he finds none, his hands stretch across the table, lacing them together as he glares. “Whether you believe in ghosts or not doesn’t matter. There’s something evil about that house, and you’re putting yourself in danger by living there.”

The conversation with Sigma weighs on your mind for hours after, when you return home, still thinking about the chess board. It was just as you’d left it, two pawns moved forward, staring each other down menacingly. Nothing out of the ordinary.

You sigh and finally put it out of your mind. It was just a coincidence, that’s all. The piece was probably on the wrong square all along, and you’d been too tired last night to notice it.

Instead, you focus your sights on unpacking, and contemplate what to do with the portrait hanging above the mantel.

It’s a dusty old thing, one that the previous owners had, for some reason, never taken down. It had hung over the mantel for centuries, the corners faded from the sun, but the sinister grin of the subject never losing its effect.

You tilt your head, stare at it from a different angle. Looking at it that way, you could, perhaps, see why the painting appealed to them. It’s old, with a style from a different century, and the man composed of deep shadows and pale colors is undeniably handsome. He seems out of place in the portrait, trapped there, too otherworldly to be captured on such a canvas. His features are sharp, molded out of something tougher than diamonds, something more beautiful than this plane is able to comprehend. His deep eyes seem to know all as they stare at you, trace you across the room.

For minutes, you are hypnotized, before a wave of disgust washes over you, and you turn away, unable to look at it any longer. You’ll sell it, you decide. Maybe it will be worth a pretty penny.

That evening, you decide to look into it, but the search into a local art dealer doesn’t get far. When you sit down at your laptop, beginning to type your question into the browser, the lid shuts on your fingertips.

It takes a moment for you to register what had happened. A faint sting dances along the back of your hands, your knuckles tender as you lift the lid back up. Lines bounce along the screen, as if the imprint of your hand had made its way into the pixels, matching the pulse of your nerves.

You curse lowly, hoping that a reset will fix the issue.

The lid had just fallen, nothing serious. It was a newer model, but those things could happen. Issues with the manufacturing, with the way it was assembled. Technology fails you all the time.

You hold the power button, irritated, and upset, when a horrible, screeching noise echoes from the computer. Nothing but a shrill scream, the speakers begging you for help. You slam it shut once more, and the noise stops, but your heartbeat doesn’t slow down.

Shit.

Tomorrow, you’ll have to take it in, and see if anyone can discern the issues. It’s not ideal, but there’s so many things to still need to do, and a broken laptop makes those things very difficult.

You sigh, pushing the chair back into the table. The portrait looms above you as you retreat back to your room, hands shaking. It’s irrational, you know it is, but you swear his eyes follow you all the way up the stairs.

It doesn’t take long for you to start believing in the ghost that is haunting your manor, the one who has let you live for a week and who plays a new game of chess every time your back is turned. Whoever it is, they are much better than you; so far, you’ve lost twice—haven’t even gotten close to winning.

He hides things from you, items that you are needing for the next day, papers that you can’t submit to work on time because the important files have been stashed away.

You find your books opened to paragraphs the ghost seemingly finds interesting, your sheet music scattered in a mess when you return. The candles get blown out unexpectedly, and doors slam when you’re not suspecting it.

If he’s trying to scare you—it isn’t working. You remain in the house, sometimes talking to him like he’s a friend, whispering amongst the walls that know all of the secrets in your home.

You stop at the library on your free weekend, flipping through a dusty copy of the local legends, only stopping when you find your home. There’s a copy of the painting there—your painting, the one that still hangs above your mantel, despite your better judgment.

Beside it, there’s a painting of your home, done when the house was first built. The outside of it is a differently color entirely, the garden in front blooming with pink and yellow flowers. It looks cheerful; the home of a warm and loving family, inviting and kind to each of the neighborhood children. Nothing like the dark manor it is today, with a dead garden in the front and shutters that keep even an ounce of light out.

You read the pages proceeding the painting. The first owner had been a kind man, but the next were not such. After the original owner lost his wealth, he sold the house, passed it to a line of greedy men, ones that were focused only on their money. For a century, it went on this way—until a man named Fyodor Dostoevsky purchased the home for twice as much as it once was.

He was the one who changed it, renovated it, upgraded it to his own personal style, ensuring that it fit in with the times and his own opinions of luxury. Fyodor was charming, but ruthless, deadly with his own intelligence, owning half the town as they lost their money to his schemes.

Fyodor’s rein came to an end when he was poisoned by his closest friend, perhaps the one man he had trusted. It was the first murder in a string of ones to follow within the house.

You close the book, unsure if you regret the knowledge you’d gained or not.

The house feels colder now that you know the history of it. As if you can see the cruelty etched into every wall. Colors of the home bleed into each other, a pastel yellow of warmth and light, and the next room empty, almost uninhabitable, with its royal purples.

You stare at the portrait as you make dinner, feeling like you can never escape the gaze of those oil painted eyes. He has a name now—Fyodor. It feels even more disarming now that you know more about him than he’ll ever know about you.

And though Fyodor watches you, every night, from every angle, you convince yourself it’s just the way that the painting is situated. It would be foolish to think that he’s really watching every move you make, irises pinned on your form, unblinking.

The oven heats up behind you as you cut up your food, humming a soft tune to yourself. It’s getting hotter outside – you’d almost forgotten how miserable the summers could be. You forget every year, even though you’ve lived many.

Just as you’re getting lost in your thoughts, going through a list of things that need to get done in your fixer-upper home, you hear a scratch behind you.

It’s a quick sound, so quick that you almost think it was only your imagination. It’s enough to give you pause, your humming fading out into the night as your eyes dart around your house. Although you’ve tried not to let urban legends get the best of you, you’re paranoid in this aged mansion now.

A few seconds pass. You listen to the sound of your own heartrate, feel it pounding in your chest as you will it to calm down. It’s just enough time for you to convince yourself that it was nothing, that you’re far too nervous about silly ghosts to think rationally.

Though as you turn, a knife flies from the counter, just grazing your cheek, but enough to cause a scratch to open up against the skin. Your finger draws away scarlet as you press it to the wound, staring at the painted crevices of your fingertip.

You can’t move. Despite every cell in your body begging, screaming at you to move, you’re frozen, trapped in the four walls of that kitchen as you stare at your bloodied hand.

It’s all a dream, you repeat to yourself. A dream.

One that you don’t wake up from.

Time passes strangely, when every muscle in your body is on edge, your head pounding from the anxiety that spikes throughout your nervous system. A bead of sweat drips from your temple, and though you aren’t sure how long you stand there, nothing else happens. The knife remains lodged in the wall behind you, and the ghost makes no other attempt to lodge one into your stomach.

It’s quiet. There’s no noise, save for the music that plays softly from your phone.

After you regain control of your racing heartrate, you realize that the song playing isn’t what you’d put on originally. It had switched to a gentle, classical piece. Tchaikovsky, you think… or something similar. Something that a man from a different era would be familiar with.

“Who’s there?” You find yourself saying, perhaps stupidly. “What do you want?”

There’s no response – of course there isn’t. You’re talking to the air. To a ghost. No one had gotten inside the house. You’d checked more than enough times, just as you always did.

“I live here now,” you offer, thinking that, perhaps anger is not the best course of action. Neither is fear, though, if the scary movies you’d watched as a teenager had been any indication. “But I’ll leave, if you want me to.”

There’s no answer to that either.

You sigh, and deflate once more, trying to make yourself believe that there was a logical explanation to knives flying and playlists changing. Just as you’d made yourself believe that everything the “ghost” had done before was just a game, innocently played.

Perhaps, there was never a ghost at all. It could be that stress is driving you to insanity.

With a glass of wine in your hand, you finish up dinner, feeling like you are at your wit’s end. How is it that only a few weeks in this house has already singed your mind, turned you into a believer of things that you are not?

The portrait feels like an omen, staring at you with violet eyes, as you wonder where Fyodor is now. Does he watch you when your home, cooking, as you shower, a vicious gaze tracing over each curve of your body, with a sickening thought of all the things he wishes to do to you?

You shiver. It’ s been a while since anyone’s looked at you with a hint of desire. The feeling has become foreign, now, but you can still recall the gratification that comes with being wanted, how it makes you feel, if only for a moment, comfortable in your own skin.

That thought alone quickly snaps you out of your irrational behavior. Thinking of a ghost wanting you? A man that had been buried in the earth for so long that his body would be nothing more than bones?

This house was making you sick, you concluded, wrapping your leftovers up in plastic and tinfoil, placing them in the fridge. Your nervous friend was right – you never should’ve moved into this house, and you never should have stayed this long.

Your hands shook along the banister, heart racing around every corner. You expected that, maybe, you would see a dark-haired spirit there, his body translucent, but still corporeal. Though, there was no spirit hiding within the depths of the shadows, lurking in the places where he still belonged. No sounds startled you, caused you to jump as you brushed your teeth, completed the one last routine of your day.

The bed was colder than usual as you climbed into it, like a flush of a cold spot had settled within the sheets. You remembered what they said about temperatures and ghosts—how they changed, nothing able to survive in the places that they haunted, as they were not of this world, but something in between, something unnatural.

Your lamp flickers as you turn it on, and it’s just one more red flag you choose to ignore. In houses as old as this one, there are issues like that. The wiring is faulty, the electric needs to be monitored, a laundry list of items you will probably never resolve.

There are a thousand rational conclusions, though, and only one irrational one, which puts your mind at ease. Things like flickering lamps and cold spots can be explained simply, even if knives flying at your face cannot.

Still, you settle into bed, deciding that you will talk to the realtor again soon. You’ll move in with Sigma if he’ll have you. Anything to put your mind at ease for good.

That night, you dream of Fyodor, as if he is there right in the room with you, looming above you with those deep, violent eyes. His fingers, long and pale, trace across your cheekbones, as your eyes flutter open, consciousness coming back to you.

He says your name – it’s no surprise he knows it, after living with you for so long. It’s spoken softly, with a hint of possession behind it, like you belong to him. And yet, you’ve never said a word to him, even if all this time, he’s gotten to know you better than anyone else ever has.

You expect a scream to leave your throat, some hint of surprise, of fear, even, to see a stranger in your bedroom. To see him watching you with those familiar eyes, hair falling over his pale forehead as he gazes down at you from the edge of the bed.

No sound emerges.

Your mind feels a little fuzzy, hazy at the edges as you blink at him, closer to a state of intoxication, than you are alertness. Despite that awareness, you can’t seem to snap out of it; maybe you don’t want to. Instead, you sink deeper into the warmth, the honeyed feeling that comes with turning off your rationality. Everything feels as if it’s coming through in blurred, rosy glasses.

“Fyodor,” you mouth, instead of the scream that you’d anticipated, his name coming out in two wistful syllables.

You should hate him – there’s something in your instincts pushing back at you. A flash of a knife, the days of chaos and uncertainty, where you were sure you were losing your mind, come back at you.

But none of that seems to matter now, as you trace your finger across his cheek, feeling the sharp indent below the high bone. His eyelashes are a shade lighter than his hair, soft as they flutter over his forehead. The portrait of him didn’t do him justice… or perhaps, it is in death that he has found his purest form.

“I’m too tired.”

You’re not sure where those words even come from. Calm, like this is nothing but routine, and waking up with Fyodor beside you is the closest thing to normalcy.

He smiles at you, leaning over you again on the bed, lips pulled tightly together in a morbid grin. It does little to sour your mood, to scare you into action, even if you can’t quite understand why.

“I know,” he replies.

It’s the first time you’ve heard him speak, a deep, accented sound smoothing against your ears as he traces his gaze against each of your features; musical, almost. His voice calms you, lulls you back into a meditative state.

You reach for him, in a trance, and twirl a strand of his hair between your finger, just to see if he’d let you. After the hell you’d been through the past week, well – was it really that miserable? He seems content to watch over you, observe the gentle movements of his dark hair coiled up around your pointer finger.

“Why are you here?” you ask, your voice softer than a whisper, carried away by the wind until it never existed at all.

Fyodor never disappears from your line of sight, even when you try to blink, to close your eyes. He’s there, gazing at you with a lustful fondness, one that’s dangerous, perhaps even malicious. If it’s a dream, it sure feels like a vivid one.

“You wanted to leave,” he says, taking your finger away from his face, before bringing it to his lips. The kiss is barely there, and his mouth is cold, chapped, from the brutality of the afterlife. “I couldn’t let you do that.”

“Hm?” You try to sit up. It takes more effort than it should’ve – you’re so relaxed, so weak, that you fall back down, letting yourself sink into the plushness of the pillow. “Why?”

Fyodor releases your hand, before touching his own finger to your mouth. It’s slender, like a piece of ice, gently parting your lips before grazing your chin, hovering over your neck. Then, he drops his touch to your collarbone. He stakes a claim on every inch of your skin, pausing as he reaches your chest, still covered by the blankets.

Your clothing is thin – it wouldn’t take much effort to get his cool hands on your bare skin. But he refrains, still smiling before answering your question, tucking his hands together onto his lap. “It’s been so long.”

It doesn’t make sense, but you can’t muster up the effort to question him, not when he’s contemplating every word, like he’s hesitant to scare you away. You let him think, watch him ponder, as you stare, too exhausted to move a muscle.

“I thought you’d be like all the rest,” he says, taking a seat next to you on the bed, nearly touching your hip. “They were nothing but filth, stains in these halls. It’s a crime for them to ever think that they belonged here. In my home.”

You blink. “It’s my home, too,” you say, suddenly filled with an immense amount of dread. It crawls up your neck, chokes you, and nothing leaves you but garbled sounds, as you panic.

Fyodor doesn’t move – there is no twitch in his features, as he watches you with disguised adoration, a kind you didn’t think a ghost capable of revealing. “Of course it is, darling,” he says, so softly, it could’ve been mistaken for kindness. Fyodor leans down, presses his cold, dead lips to your cheek, a kiss of death. “That’s why I couldn’t let you leave. It’s your home. You belong here.”

“Right,” you breath, steadying yourself, before nodding. “My home.” Once more, you gaze around the room, your eyes flicking over every surface. Things are exactly as you’d left them, nothing out of place. “With you?”

The ghost smiles, and reaches out to you, finally helping you into a seated position. Your neck is so stiff, in pain, and you roll it around, feeling nothing there when you expect shifting bones. “With me,” Fyodor confirms, running his icy fingertips across your throat, tangling them with your hair.

He leans into you, pressing a lingering kiss to your mouth, one that catches you off balance, before you accept it with an eagerness that surprises you further. It doesn’t feel unfamiliar, instead, it’s as if you’re coming home, like the man you’ve never seen until now was always meant to find you.

A thought that should’ve scared you, even though it doesn’t.

Fyodor pulls away, right as you begin to shift forward, maneuver yourself onto his lap. “You should rest,” he replies, keeping you at a distance. “It might take some time to adjust.”

“Hm? What do you mean?” you blink, holding onto his wrist as your gaze shifts from his impossibly dark eyes to the mirror across the room.

There, in the darkness of the evening, shrouded in moonlight, you can see your reflection staring back at you, eyes vacant, lifeless. You expect to see yourself as nothing but exhausted, but when you draw your gaze across the image of yourself, there is blood seeping from your neck, a stream of scarlet. There is thick gash across your throat, slashed so deep that it would’ve killed you instantly.

The expression on your face shifts from one of calm to horror, as you scrape at your neck, trying to clear off the blood that isn’t really there, the permanent wound that will follow you even into your death.

“What did you do?” you scream, tears rolling down your cheeks, even though you can’t feel them, can only see them in the mirror. “What did you do to me?”

Fyodor smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners. Though you fight against him, he takes you into his arms, and you are too weak to fight him off. “I told you,” Fyodor says, shushing you, running his palm over your head as you scream. “I couldn’t let you leave.”

thank you for reading !

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capslocked · 10 months

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PANACEA

male reader x sakura && kazuha

17k words

Sakura can't expect you to actually be down for this - the setup, the miscommunication, the endless drama, all that messy work, and for what, your girlfriend-in-eveything-but-name-only's peace of mind?

You lean in. "Declining. Politely. Please."

“C'mon, It’s foolproof. Have I ever steered you wrong?” she says with a click of her tongue. “We can fix her.”

(It isn’t foolproof. She has. And you can’t.)

If you’re going to get tangled up in origin stories, this is probably a good place to start: at this gaudy bar, on the gaudier side of Ginza, with the shops you can’t afford to shop at - whose clientele can’t afford to be seen with you. It’s not your first pick, and you can say this because it so very often is, that this one’s all Sakura’s idea.

To be specific, it starts when Sakura grabs you by the wrist - Kazuha pinched by the fabric of her dress - and shuffles you both into a coat closet, which is as empty as the frost-less days of spring might expect. It was probably a mistake, thinking she wasn’t serious, but it’s that uncanny talent of hers, to always find someplace or another to steal away.

And look, you’re not crazy about the bar scene. Not here. You never have been.

When you’re at home, when you’re alone - when it’s you and Sakura - it never takes long to fall into that sensual rhythm of give and take, but here, under the dim light of the closet, it’s no different. You can feel the corners of her wry, delighted smile beginning to quirk as she steals those little shudders at the end of each exhale.

Maybe it’s the abundance of time you’ve had to become familiar with how Sakura can set the stage:

The soft press of her mouth on yours, the speed of her kisses, those little licks, to that less-than-gentle pull at your bottom lip. It’s like she is everywhere, all at once - the warmth of her breath ghosting along the cartilage of your ear, the curve of your throat, her teeth hovering above where your pulse thrums and your skin runs thin.

Nevertheless, something quite new, a touch of novelty. This girl in black - built like a gazelle, all legs - who you think might quietly prefer to be addressed by her full name. Kazuha Nakamura, who would rather not make a fuss over the fact you forgot it the first twenty times or so - but she does have that look about her, that, if she asked you to, you could imagine dropping everything, anything, just to be at her beck and call.

That if she were in your shoes, you could imagine her wanting to do the same.

And then she asks for the most mundane thing.

Kazuha looks at you, not the way she looks at Sakura, but there is a stilled softness, a sweetness, that has her asking for permission - like she isn’t asking to do what she’s about to do - and when Sakura gives her a little tug at her skirt, Kazuha slides onto her knees.

“What did I tell you,” says Sakura, right into the angle at your jaw, pulling tighter on the end of your tie. She wraps it once over her wrist into something she can make a real grip out of. “The girl’s head over heels.”

A touch at your thighs, touches hooked into the seam of your pants and furling elastic - noticeably different from the hand kneading circles into the nape of your neck and carding through your hair. You laugh when you realize Kazuha has your fly undone and her shallow breath is hot against you, anticipating. Part of you is shocked, though another part equally thrilled. She’s actually going to do it.

Which, imagine that.

“And just what is it we’re doing here?” You lift your mouth off Sakura’s several times, chins brushing, colliding, kisses coming together and falling apart again. Your hold on Sakura’s waist firms up, steadying her as you try to reason with her. “What do you figure happens if we bring her home?” “Oh, I have no clue,” Sakura admits. “We’ll probably fuck her, and then fuck each other again when we she leaves.” “Hm,” you start, shakily, coping with the tongue that’s begun licking up from the base of your cock. It’s agonizingly slow - fuck, it’s only the seal of Kazuha’s pouty lips cushioning themselves around you. Which feel perfect, but only so perfect to the extent that it makes you want so much more. Sakura’s looking at you like she knows you’ll take it if you have to. Like she knows Kazuha will let you.

“Well.” You’re pushing some of the dark, glossy hair that had fallen in front of Kazuha’s face out of the way, and you start to posture, “I’m not about to start complaining, but-”

Sakura shoots only the slightest smirk in your direction. She’s got that usual unrepentant expression, eyes wide and brilliant, framed by those long eyelashes that happen to land more or less exactly on what you’d describe as your type.

“You have to see how this could backfire.”

She blinks once, twice, a few times, her expression remaining all but even, studying your face. “It’s not going to backfire.”

Your lips part to voice some final concern, but if that isn’t a ship long sailed. Here you’ll be marooned, shipwrecked - something you’ll have to come to terms with later - because you’re left only with siren calls: the soft sounds of Sakura’s lips smacking, of Kazuha’s; left with only a gaspful of air when she finally steals you into the wet heat of her pretty little mouth.

See, these hookups, your dalliances and escapades - the truth is that none of this really comes to you as a surprise anymore. Because if anything, Sakura has always had that tendency, a real proclivity for it. She was mischievous right from the jump, from when you first met her, and she’s only grown bolder. But the thing that you’re having to learn anew, beyond the way Sakura gets her mouth onto yours, how she’ll make a mess of your hair and leave marks on your neck, how her tongue glides effortlessly past your teeth, is with a second set of lips - that blowjob Kazuha is now settling into, mouth inching further and further down your cock - there’s suddenly a little less surefire to your wit, to your raillery.

(Because here, you’d anticipated for impressive, perhaps even overwhelming, but with these two - well, there’s a lot to unpack. There always will be.)

The plan is - or at least it was - to catch an Uber back to Sakura’s apartment. All three of you piling into the backseat, acting casual and pretending like you weren’t just trying to engineer how to share a kiss between three people. How’s that for logistics? Though that was moments before Sakura dropped a doting kiss into Kazuha’s hair and helped ease her down onto the carpet of the coat closet. And when you consider letting out the moan that festers in your chest, the one growing ever more unruly each time Kazuha’s tongue slowly curls around the head of your cock, you hesitate, swallowing down on nothing.

“Fuck,” you say quietly into Sakura’s mouth. You’re not in public, technically speaking, which is not at all the reassurement Sakura insists it is.

Sakura twists her fingers into your hair a little bit, just enough to sting, and asks, “does that feel good? Kazuha’s perfect mouth on your cock?”

“Yeah,” you admit, slightly annoyed - slightly under duress. The pressure of Sakura’s thumb a little harder into the soft muscle of your neck can usually coax out whatever it is she wants to hear. “Of course it feels good, Sakura.”

“I’m glad, it should.” Sakura nods. “And look, she’s just a natural, isn’t she?”

Oh, Kazuha - the poster child for a debate on innate talent and hard work, because as she works more of you into her mouth, you realize she’s both, a total package, an all in one. You’re not easy to take, and she presses her lips down, and draws you deeper like she’s done it a thousand times.

Though it pains you to ever admit Sakura’s right, about anything.

“How about we dial it back,” you say to Sakura, and for the first time, you look down at the mess of midnight hair in front of your waist. It’s glossy, even here in the dim glow of a dusty closet, and it’s just as silky to the touch. As you pilfer more of it through your fingers, you watch the glistening length of your cock vanish between the pouty pucker of Kazuha’s lips - bowed perfectly into this red elegant arch.

“Are you sure? You seem like she’s just about killing you,” Sakura says. It’s the wince here and there. That slight quiver in your lip. All dead giveaways.

“Listen-”

“Shh-shh,” Sakura soothes you gently, and starts to ease your jacket off your shoulders until it lands in a puddle of fabric at your feet. “Why don’t you just let her take care of you, huh?”

Sakura has her hand fit under your jaw again, urging you down to kiss her, but you’ve not quite finished taking in the sight of everything - of Kazuha, kneeling and bobbing her head back and forth - really settling into this hasty tempo. She takes more of your cock each time, and when you can feel her mouth tighten around you, to where her throat narrows and offers you a truly filthy sensation, you watch her eyes open, with lashes fluttering away stray tears and looking straight up at you. Pupils blown, dark as the dead of night, and every bit as sinful. It’s hard to even start to believe, that the girl who was paranoid a few weeks ago that she looked nothing like the fake ID Chaewon had given her is here on her fucking knees, slobbering on your cock.

“What’s the matter?” Sakura asks, pouting ever-so-slightly as she realizes you’re not going to lean into her again, and settles with a hot, open-mouthed kiss into the side of your neck.

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable,” you start, kind of sharply. It’s the way her black mini dress hugs her body - this masterwork of genetics, of countless hours in the gym, a miracle in the flesh. It’s the way one of its flimsy straps is falling down her shoulder and she’s so busy sucking your cock that she can’t be bothered to pull it back up. You don’t look away. You can’t. And jesus, your voice is coming out more broken, more graveled than you expect. “I should - if she’s going to swallow my cum, I think I should get to watch.”

“You hear that?” Sakura asks, and Kazuha chokes on you, just a little. There’s spit at the corner of her mouth when she pulls herself back, runs her tongue over the head of your cock, and tries again. Sakura’s laugh comes out rather amused. Her two favorite people in the world, finally getting what they deserve. “You’re so perfect, Kazuha, you’re going to make him cum.”

Kazuha lets you slip from her lips, and for the first time since she last said anything at all - muttering, please, please, I want to suck his cock - she pulls a stray hair out of her mouth, looks up at you and says: “On my face. I want it on my face.”

“Jesus,” you murmur, gripping Sakura’s waist harder into you. A sort of reflexive response. Because, fuck, if that isn’t well within your wheelhouse. If she’s asking - if you can oblige -

Kazuha lifts her gaze toward Sakura, eyes beaming. “Can I? With your boyfriend’s cock?”

“Kazuha, sweetie, he’s not my boyfriend.” And you can almost hear Kazuha trying not to roll her eyes. It’s just not a technicality she’s ever been interested in - you’re not taken, but you’re definitely not single, and that’s the part that’s only ever mattered to her. Sakura lets her hand fall to the base of your cock, angles it up for Kazuha to instinctively start licking its sensitive underbelly, fingers threading through your balls and fuck, the little kisses she saves for those are going to fucking end you. “You have to ask him.”

Kazuha’s got her brown, bambi eyes fixed back on you when she does. And it’s just a litany of nonsense, as she tries to look you square on, asking you politely to cum on her face. "Please, can I have it? Please, please. Cum on my face. Cum on my pretty face. I want it so bad, please. Please, I need it."

She’s a self-starter at some things, but the profanity, the dirty talk, these simple methods of seduction, you’ll ease her into them. You figure you’ll ease her into a lot.

Because you’re taking note of how her soft lips pucker as you cup her face. Fucking hell, she’s breathtaking.

“I’ll try not to get it in your hair,” you tell her. In a tone that makes it feel like a compromise. Something just shy of completely corrupting, though heavens knows you want to. This want - to get your hands in her hair later, bordering on something near abusive - otherwise, it comes across as this gentle dominance radiant with authority. Something she quickly melts into, eyes twinkling up at you, and you can’t resist digging a little deeper, asking, “that always been a fantasy of yours, sweetheart?”

“She watches porn with Yunjin.” Sakura leans into your ear. “Like, a lot.” Like, it’s borderline concerning, she explains.

The shade of crimson burning across the bridge of Kazuha’s nose is as beautiful as she is, and you’re piecing together some of the puzzle. “I see,” you say, more serious.

For the girl who Sakura described as naive but enthusiastic, you’ve become rather lost, maybe a little too quickly, somewhere deep in the pull of it. Quick, quick, slow. Quick, quicker, painfully slow. The draw of Kazuha’s soft lips back and forth along your cock. Every now and again, you can feel her tease the head of your cock against the back of her throat, just short of dragging you past her palate and holding her nose nearly flush to your groin.

She pumps a fist around your shaft harshly, delivering an indiscriminate pleasure. You can hear her steady her breath, and almost without missing a beat, she lets her spit drool onto your cock and familiarize itself with her fingers, corkscrewing around you faster. Tighter.

“So here’s what I’m thinking,” Sakura starts hot and close, breath fanning over your cheek, and yielding her idea a moment to the sound of Kazuha’s hand sliding up and down your shaft. It’s such a filthy noise, lathering spit and precum between her slender fingers, the obnoxious squelch of it when she grips firmer and starts to pump you in earnest.

“When we get home,” she continues, “I think you should get that dangerous mouth of yours-”

Okay, fuck. Fuck. You’re spitting the word out, groaning as your eyes snap shut - the moment Kazuha gets her lips back around you, hollows her cheeks, she inhales sharply.

“-oh?” Sakura teases, flirting her lips about the edge of your ear. Her breath is hot, close, closer. “Maybe your mouth isn’t the one I need to be worried about.”

In an instant, you’re nuzzled deep into Kazuha’s mouth, seeking damp, seeking heat. With the flat of her tongue, she has you reeling from base to tip, and oh, god, the teeth. Just the slightest, sharp scrape of her teeth as she works her mouth on you faster, sloppier - without caring for so much as a concern about the tears cornering in her long dark lashes, or the makeup smudging beneath her eyes. It’s electrifying, and it has you bucking forward into Kazuha’s little mouth, until you’re swallowed nearly in full.

But behind that, it’s silent. Behind the smacking sound of Sakura’s lips pulling harshly at yours, behind the half-chokes punctuating how hard Kazuha’s lips are trying, it’s just breaths. Sakura’s, relaxed. Kazuha’s, careful and measured. And yours, panting, desperate.

It didn’t matter what image Kazuha had in her head before, beyond the generic appeal of your smile or how you’d rub the back of your neck when you laughed, or the way your forearms looked when you rolled your sleeves up. The silence Sakura creates when she seals her mouth over yours, kisses drowning those slight shuddering whines, it reveals to Kazuha the more present truth: you’re not just perfect. No, you’re perfect for her, and with the right touches here - of which Sakura is eager to demonstrate - ever so wonderfully brittle.

“Mnpph.” Kazuha simply hums, sucks up and down, over and over.

“Come on,” Sakura breathes against you, barely above a whisper, then says it once more as she twines her fingers with yours and makes silky knots of Kazuha’s hair for you to hold onto.

“Fuck her pretty mouth,” she tells you, and you do.

With two greedy handfuls of Kazuha’s hair, with Sakura’s hand sliding down the buttons at the front of your shirt until she’s replacing Kazuha’s at the base of your cock, you rock your hips forward, experimental. Kazuha makes a strained sound, but nothing like the protest you were listening for - and so you do it again.

And again.

It’s unreal how she doesn’t react at all, just splaying her fingers out along your thighs, ready to brace herself as your thrusts into her mouth start to quicken. Given how things started - coupled with the fact that she looks so satisfied and serene - she’s doing outstanding. And if the air dragging through your teeth isn’t enough to make that clear, Sakura’s sure to guarantee you’re all on the same page:

“Just like that,” she tells her. “You look so pretty taking his cock, love. You’re doing so good, keep going, just a little more, and he’s going to cum for you.”

So then, there Kazuha is, bruising her knees and yielding her lips, her mouth, her throat to you - with the girl she idolizes giving her the praise she’s always craved, these sickly-sweet affirmations, a petal-blossom of assurances. They ignite something laid deep within her, something that makes her work that perfect mouth onto you just a little harder, a little deeper, a little more slacked.

She wants you to cum so badly.

You can feel her tongue flatten again, and without hesitation, while you fuck unabashedly between her wet, messy lips, she delves, she massages, she laves.

For god’s sake, she worships.

Sakura is grinning, because she knows. She can feel the familiar way you’ve begun to throb, how the pulse in your neck is racing and blotchy and hot - she recognizes instinctually that all the damage your teeth have now done to your bottom lip could only mean one thing - you’re spiraling. You’re cracking under pressure, and so, so quickly. And then, nonchalant as ever, she just teases, “going to cum?”

You laugh, dryly. You are. You’re forcing the mundane into your thoughts: rainwater sliding down a pane glass window, paint swatches, the sound of your alarm clock, ringing, ringing, sucking - slurping, choking and spitting and gagging and fuck, Kazuha’s making a god damn meal out of you. You’ll let her.

“I’m pretty fucking close,” you finally admit to Sakura, holding Kazuha’s face firm. It’s not a warning. It’s an admission of guilt: you’re fucking ruining her makeup. There’s mascara dark as india ink, as dark as her jet black hair, streaking down her cheeks, and you’re imagining her glassy, tear-filled eyes, the ones that are currently screwed shut, impossibly tight. But she doesn’t wince, she doesn’t whine - and aside from the choking sound her throat makes when your cockhead stains pre-cum onto the back of her throat - she keeps her lips sealed tight, totally demure. Perfectly submissive.

“In her mouth,” Sakura orders dryly.

You still can’t look away from the place where you and Kazuha are joined together, cum and spit and lipstick clinging to your shaft, her mouth, her chin. You’re simply stuck imagining the amusement stretching across Sakura’s face when she tells you again, voice resolute - fuck your load into her mouth.

It’s nothing that might ever take a lot of convincing, but you’re being gracious, being polite, trying to take Kazuha’s side. “We both heard her. She said she wanted-”

“Unh-uh, no,” Sakura tuts, rubbing a knuckle into the base of your spine. “Not here, you can make whatever mess you want when we get home.”

You thrust again, loosening one grip, tightening another. Vaulting toward the edge.

A mess, mess, mess, mess; a proper one, of her, crying and clamoring, shaking and stuttering, you know we will, you know it’s what she wants, Sakura’s explaining. Trying to explain. Fuck, it’s hard to pay attention to anything beyond your cock sheathed deep in Kazuha’s throat, but Sakura’s voice carries that usual gentle quiver, like she isn’t describing the filthiest assortment of ways you’ll get Kazuha off, how you’ll both get off. Going to fucking take her apart - she’s murmuring, kissing into your neck - until she’s sobbing for it.

It’s not difficult to imagine. There are these images taking shape in your mind’s eye, photographically vivid, near pornographic, and god, Kazuha’s body is magnificent: how it curves, how it flexes, how it bends. You’re so close to unloading in her throat when you can practically hear Sakura’s posh, practiced smile flirting her voice into your ear. “If you’re worried she won’t swallow it, I will.”

For once, you don’t manage to say, no, not yet.

“Mnnph.” Kazuha strains, sinking deeper into the floor, hands falling to her knees. Nothing short of full surrender.

And it’s all over in a flash, before you can even register it.

Though in fact, you’ve seen it. You know it. There’s the warmth, the wet, the tightness of the seal that Kazuha makes around your cock, and the way she just fucking stays there, her mouth unmoving as you spill down the back of her throat. You try to catch yourself on the doorframe, and there are a thousand and one things you want to say to her - tell her, ask her, beg her, please, sweetheart, please, fuck, fuck, baby, I can't-

But you don't.

Instead, your teeth are grit and your jaw is tense and your hand is knotted into a fistful of her hair and you can hear yourself barely manage to get out each sinful consonant: “I'm cumming,” and then nothing else.

In the silence, you can see the lumps roll down the column of her throat, of her swallowing, and it doesn’t end. It doesn’t stop. Kazuha’s lips stayed locked around you, and she sucks, she swallows, and sucks and sucks. Like she doesn’t even know you’re reeling.

“Oh…” Sakura says, over a tiny laugh, the kind that’s dripping with mirth. She traces a line with her finger, from your jaw over your chest and down to your hip.

Realistically, the relatively innocent touch shouldn’t make you crazier than her hand gently wringing out your cock, or the way Kazuha’s chest rises and falls with a heavy, satisfied breath, or -

The look she has, staring up at you with her heavy-lidded, sated eyes:

It’s the sort of look that’ll be stitched into your thoughts and haunt your dreams for months.

(It’s the sort of look that leaves an impression, one that cuts deep and engraves:

Adoration. Arousal. Awe.)

Sakura starts to pull her fingers through Kazuha’s hair, smoothing down the parts that were mussed, and she leans down, planting a kiss at her temple. And then another. And another. She whispers something into her ear - a request, a command - something more, until Kazuha finally lets you slip from her mouth.

It’s a disaster.

There’s a translucent thread of spit hanging from her chin, and her tongue runs a semi-circle over her lower lip to collect the last bits of cum clinging to her skin. It should be criminal, how she looks up at you through those long eyelashes, a mess of black makeup and glassy eyes; how her cheeks are rosy, and her lips swollen and parted.

How she can smile through it all and still manage to look like this is what she was made to do. Like she can go a second round, like she could go several - you can practically hear her saying it: let me get your cock back in my mouth. I can do better. I can be better.

But she never gets the opportunity. You crack the veneer of that unearthly silence first.

"Sakura."

"Yeah?"

"I have a question," you say steadily, and Kazuha makes a wounded expression as you pull up the zipper on your pants.

"What's that?" Sakura asks.

“How close is that car?”

“Should we wait outside?” Kazuha starts to say, but it's a garbled mess. She’s still wiping her lips when Sakura reaches into her clutch and pulls out her phone. There's the saliva, the spit, the cum. You can't help but think you've ruined her voice. That it might not sound the same, even a week from now.

“Yeah.” Sakura brings her fingers to Kazuha's chin, tilts it up towards her, and then she kisses her. “We probably should.”

This is where it gets kind of complicated, because you know Sakura, know her better than most.

She’d been enrolled in one of your elective courses way back when. Had been the kind of girl that immediately stood out, the kind that left a mark. You were likely the more studious one, by comparison. Grounded. Whereas she had her dreams, a dream of a life, a dream of the world - and the two of you just had this way of keeping each other level-headed. When you think back to it, and for as long as you can remember: it was one, the other, a constant pendulum, always swinging back. You know what keeps her steady, what makes her tick, and she knows you just as well.

Though about this thing you share, the thread between you, it’s not something you pretend to understand.

"Maybe we could define it," you suggested, once.

"No." That was her answer. "I don't know. We're just doing what we do, right? We're just having fun."

"Okay, sure," you said. "I get it. But you know how these things are. They’ve got a tendency to go belly up."

“Oh absolutely,” she remarked, casually, leading you to believe that she both understood the peril and was somehow totally unfussed by it - she probably always had the upper hand. See, she’s gorgeous, but also there’s just that pinch of cute in the mix that makes you believe she’d never hurt you. Makes you believe that she never could.

And that was before it metastasized into where you’re at now:

She’s got a toothbrush on your bathroom counter. There’s a pair of shoes too, at the front door. Shirts in your closet, a jacket of hers that’s managed to claim its own hook. She’ll throw her underwear into your wash while you’re measuring detergent and give you these gentle eyes that make all these silent demands, look the other way, please, just ignore me.

There’s the coffee already in the brewer, light roast, the one she likes. There’s her side of the bed, it’s neatly made. Always. She's neat like that. And it’s all a bit much, if you’re being honest.

Because, yeah, it's not exactly conventional. What the two of you are doing is this total, unmitigated disaster.

So the fact that Sakura wanted to invite Kazuha out -

The fact that Kazuha actually showed up -

The fact that Sakura is now helping her out of her dress in the entryway of her apartment and is kissing her neck and her shoulders and telling her, sweetie, come on, let’s go, let's get you in the shower -

Yeah, this is the part that is sort of fucking complicated.

It's a lot, even for someone like you.

- So - of fucking course it backfires.

You’re hesitant to say I told you so, but Sakura can read the sentiment right off your face. You don’t need to say anything.

Though that’s a realization that only catches up with you once a week goes by and the progress you’ve made in regards to the whole Kazuha situation is categorically negative.

Because, here it is: her lipgloss on the rim of your water glass.

The lid of her moisturizer sitting on the kitchen counter.

According to Sakura, it’s not supposed to go like this, though a lot of people, if asked, would suggest you should probably not be playing with this girl’s heart in the first place, and then there’s the issue that yours is starting to look more and more precarious, like a house of cards. Forget it, they’d probably suggest - move on, be done with it. You haven’t thought so far, in days, hell, even hours, to decide that it might be good for you. You’re usually rather decisive. But, Kazuha? Yeah. Deciding to not think about her was never going to happen.

In the sense, anyway, when the surprise cold of a winter-in-spring day still has you wearing your sandals where there's a blizzard - memorable in how there are flecks of melting white everywhere, like frozen lace, and a sensation lingering at the tip of your fingers, numb and insensate, which -

Or maybe the same is true of frostbite - or, better, hollowness: how it lingers and persists, that faint sting.

"Kazuha." You sigh, closing a book shut. It falls onto the coffee table and slides to rest, and there’s more: her perfume bottle on the side table, the socks on the couch, her favorite shirt balled into the crease of the cushions, and the sweater that she’s apparently keeping draped over one of the kitchen chairs.

You think you’re starting to understand her perspective, if at least a little.

It’s only a handful of days later, when Sakura wakes up to a long, bumbling text from Kazuha. She’s still in bed, holding the edge of your comforter up over her breasts like you haven’t seen her naked a million times before, and she’s twisting her lips, tapping away at her phone screen.

The text is long, you realize as Sakura’s reading it out to you.

Its message is a bit disjointed but legible nonetheless, more or less asking, hey, can i come over?

Hand to god, this was never about the fucking. Well, not exactly.

The truth is you really did want to get to know Kazuha - in whatever ways, under any circumstances - in a less...messy setting.

Not just to get her off, or to hear her make sounds she never even knew she was capable of; to have the luxury of seeing how she lets a stray moan echo in the back of her throat when she tries not to get too carried away; how she bites at the raw cushion of her cheek when Sakura works a hand beneath her shorts - like she's always desperate to shut herself up, lest someone call her out on it - because, the whole point to this, it's never really been about the fucking.

But, never you - and certainly never Sakura - were going to be able to keep your hands off her.

It isn’t totally your fault either. It can’t be. Kazuha’s at your front door, and she’s wearing the smallest dress imaginable. The tiny little piece barely qualifies as a sundress, and she knows it. Some sort of pattern recognition - she’s putting two and two together - the type of bodice that clings tightly to the gentlest curve of her chest, the skirt hem that stops right at the tops of her thighs, and you think, fuck, she’s just too damn beautiful for her own good.

Then it’s the other thing: she’s so nervous that her hand is nearly trembling around the strap of the duffel bag slung over her shoulder. It's not your fault she's so pretty. So shy. So easy.

The moment she steps inside, you can see it in her face, that same neediness, the same hunger from yesterday, the day before, from last week - at the bar, when she was kneeling in front of your cock, looking at you like you’d just offered her the world.

(And in so many ways, you did.)

“An overnight bag?” Sakura sounds moderately amused. "Correct me if I’m wrong Kazuha, but I thought you said you just needed to drop by," she continues, not in any grandstanding manner - just factually, straightforward. "How long are you planning on staying?"

You watch her bite her lip, and you’re trying not to react, but there’s a noticeable twitch in your brow. You start by puzzling out the weight of the duffel bag as you help it off her shoulder. “Feels like a couple of nights."

Kazuha nods, sheepishly. “Yeah.”

And she should be ashamed, you think. She knows exactly what she's doing, probably wearing those little lace panties if you had to guess - or maybe nothing at all - the pair of black heels, and her hair is down and wavy, and her lips are full and painted pink, and she smells like the best kind of trouble, and if she isn’t trying to get fucked -

"I'm sure we can figure something out," you tell her.

She smiles at you, and there's that fluttery, flirty kind of a gesture, the kind of coy, coy shyness that could just make anyone's heart swell.

"Want to help me find a spot for this in the bedroom?" you ask.

She nods again, and the blush coloring her cheeks is this soft, subtle shade of crimson.

"Yeah," she breathes, "yes, please."

Let the record show, Sakura kisses her first.

You watch her hands thread into the silkiness of Kazuha's hair, the way they firm up and hold her steady, how she draws her body into her own. It's the kind of kiss you see in a movie, the one that should happen in a rainstorm, with an orchestra swelling, the camera panning, a fade-to-black. You're watching the way their lips meet, how she holds Kazuha close, the ease in her shoulders when she feels Sakura smile against her. How it all just seems to click.

It's the sort of thing where you could watch forever.

And, honestly, Sakura is gentle with her - maybe as an overcompensation, a correction for the fact that she’ll get her mouth between her legs later and make her scream - but here she is, tender, warm, touching her delicately like otherwise she might break. The same as she was in the backseat of the car, the first time, the same every time after that. But she doesn't let the opportunity slip through her fingers either. Kazuha's body ends up pressed back into the mattress, and the sound of her breathing is slightly haggard, just like the rise and fall of her chest, as Sakura's pulling up the hem of her dress.

“Hey,” Sakura starts, with a kiss at the corner of Kazuha’s mouth, and then the other. And then a few more, until Kazuha is blushing, smiling, and she asks her, "do you want this off?"

Kazuha sits up and leans into her, and they both laugh softly, because, god, Sakura is fumbling with the zipper on the back of her dress. She tells her to hold still, and gets it down in a second. It's just the slightest sound - a little shuffle, the swish of fabric pooling on the floor, and then Kazuha is in nothing but a set of lingerie, the heels that make her legs look so long you start to ache, and and with only a moment’s hesitation, the two of them are kissing again.

"Kazuha…" she says, "you know, I didn't take you for someone who owned lingerie. This is nice."

And it is.

There's the dainty fabric hugging Kazuha's body, the way her chest looks, the bra, the lace, how her nipples are just barely peeking through the thin material, and how she's just letting her fingers trail along the top of her panties, this tiny triangle of satin and lace.

"What," Kazuha says, "you don't think it's me?"

"It's very cute," Sakura agrees, running her thumb over Kazuha's lower lip, and as you settle in next to her, skirting touches first at her bare knee, tracing up to where her skin is softest on her thighs, she adds, “but you don’t need to dress up for him.”

"I don't mind," you murmur through busy lips - dragging kisses up her leg. "I think it’s hot."

"Then I suppose she should keep the shoes on," Sakura suggests and lifts her own shirt over her head, heaping it somewhere near the laundry bin. Her hands come up to her tits, holding them in place, and as she lets go - lets them bounce back into place - the smile she gives Kazuha’s is so, so soft.

This genuine flash of affection.

You get lost in them both a little. For a minute. Two. The three you all tangled up, bodies folded into one, arms coiled over each other, lips crushed, until finally, there is a need.

Something frantic, burning, clawing. Something insurmountable.

Kissing and kissing.

And kissing - and kissing - and -

Then you’re kneeling at the side of the bed, between Kazuha’s legs, sucking at her hip. Her skin. Pressing your mouth to every place it can reach. Up and down her thighs - running hot over the stitches and marks and stains from where your lips have dragged, peppered, blotched and bruised. Where you will, more.

In the past week, this image has hardly left your mind, sticky and unmoving. Kazuha in your bed, on your sofa, in the bath, over the cool countertop of the kitchen island - wanting to be touched, wanting to be used - chasing every possible high - you had her begging to cum on your fingers, on your mouth, on your cock. In every possible way.

That probably should have been enough.

But after Sakura strips down to nothing, wrestling her feet from her shorts, panties hanging loose from the edge of her ankle, she mounts Kazuha, straddling her waist, bringing her hips right atop hers - rolling them down, further, inching closer and closer -

It isn’t. Oh, it isn’t, it won’t be. It never would be.

“How many times are we going to make you cum,” Sakura wonders aloud, a single finger making a slow circle around the outline of Kazuha's bra. "Huh. Two?" She’s smirking now, you can hear it. "Three? I could probably convince him to go for four."

Sakura kisses hard into her neck, and it’s reflex that sends Kazuha spinning, coiling - closing her legs around you. Or at least she attempts to, but you get your hand slipped between her thighs first, and you’re leaning forward, leaning in, pressing these tantalizing kisses to the side of her knee, drawing your thumb under the arch of her foot. You can just see it, the dark blush she's starting to get between her legs: this lovely, sweet, rose-colored flush. Radiant with heat, with want, with need.

You could have your way with the two of them, you realize, take and take and take; they could put on a show, all for you. And it's not just about the pretty picture they make in bed together, Sakura and Kazuha, who are both the type to belong on covers of magazines, on billboards. Sakura's a deceptive panoply of curves, and Kazuha’s all toned muscle - her built-like-a-trackstar physique looking amazing above you, underneath you, on all fours -

But Sakura, well. There are those things that get her going.

You slide your thumb across her pussy, and you can hear the moment her breath catches, somewhere downstream of all those sweet nothings she’s saving for Kazuha, the kisses into her jaw, her neck, crashing fast against her lips. Those nothings, filthy and sweet, obscene and tender.

“Fuck, Kazuha, I didn’t realize how bad I needed this,” Sakura is saying, telling her. Promising. Her hand is brushing through her hair, making sure she doesn’t flinch away, and god, they’re so close. Sakura’s toned stomach at the dip of Kazuha’s ribcage, laid flat - the way Sakura’s breasts press into Kazuha’s chest has them spilling out ever so slightly at the sides, and Kazuha has her hands all over the ridges of Sakura’s back, dug tight into her shoulders.

“He’s going to fuck us again. Until we can’t take it anymore,” she adds, almost reverent, and you are, you will, your fingers catch the elastic of Kazuha’s panties, drag them to the crease of her thigh and -

It’s fucking perfect, how they’re both so impossibly wet.

Sakura turns back to give you one last look. She tends to be bossy, she likes to feel like she’s in control, and maybe that’s why she can’t get over how Kazuha melts beneath her, but it’s not enough. She’s snapping at you, “I need you to eat me out. Right now.”

You arch an eyebrow, acting surprised. “Right now?”

“Right now,” she repeats, shifting her hips pointedly.

“This very second?” You’re teasing, you’re a little irritating when you want to be, you’re well, you’re a lot of things, but you’re also working at the button of your pants, rubbing a thumb over the fabric of your underwear where it’s stiffening, tightening, all at the sight of these two in front of you.

“I swear to god,” she practically growls at you, the sound catching in her throat.

“So demanding.” You laugh. You have to. And your breath fans right over the folds of her pussy. She hates that. She loves that.

“If you don’t start now-”

But the thought never finishes.

Because you're leaning forward, and your hands are gripping tight, pulling you into her, and -

Fuck, it's not fair, she tastes fucking fantastic. With your mouth at Sakura’s pussy, licking past her heat, she spreads her knees just a little further apart.

Then there’s your hand, ghosting across where Kazuha needs you most, and you let the pad of your index finger roll, circle, drag and drift everywhere else. She shudders, gasping into Sakura’s mouth; you lick up, tongue through the perfect squeeze of Sakura’s lips - perniciously lapping, licking - and she’s returning to Kazuha the very same.

It's indulgent. Not that you hadn’t known it would be.

But Sakura - god, she grinds her hips down, down, down, against you, against Kazuha, and you can just hear the pair of them kissing. It’s messy, hard, hungry. There’s wet sounds, sloppy ones, and tongues, lips, teeth - Kazuha is moaning, Sakura is sighing - fuck, you could settle in here, like this, for days.

Because here’s the first truth: you’re an expert at eating Sakura out. Possibly the best.

You’re not being boastful here, it's just a fact. You know how she tastes, how to get her off - and Kazuha learns this firsthand.

And just like that, the best part about it is, when you flick your tongue flat against Sakura's clit, when she breaks her kiss enough to spit out some curse or another, Kazuha can feel it.

When you push two fingers into Kazuha - deep into her - curl them, massage, crook, tug -

Well, Kazuha can feel that too. Made certain by the way she croons into Sakura, how she holds on tight, grips hard. How Sakura does the same, rolls her hips - there’s so much to digest, just in how Kazuha breathes out your name, and by the way Sakura sighs, by the way she chokes back these whiny, winded moans. You’re afraid to miss any of it. Any single second.

And so it goes like this: your tongue working Sakura over; Kazuha writhing on your fingers; her hips shifting, squirming; Sakura rocking herself back onto your face, onto Kazuha’s cunt, onto the sharp edge of her hips - all while you’re sucking and kissing and licking - until you have one dripping down your chin. The other ruining the sheets.

Until you have Sakura practically unraveled, frayed and falling apart, that thread nearly unwound from its spool, messy and inarticulate.

Until you have Kazuha whimpering, and Sakura’s voice hushed into a whisper, speaking these words you can barely make out:

“You’re doing perfect, Kazuha, baby, keeping your legs open for him, for me, for us-”

It’s just the right amount of praise, of adoration, all of it cracking, splintering, breaking apart - Kazuha laboriously tries to kiss her quiet, breathing her in - and when you use the hand that isn’t mercilessly fucking two, three fingers into Kazuha’s little cunt to grab at that perfectly-sculpted ass, Sakura starts to lose it. She falls apart.

Loudly.

“Oh god,” she sputters, again, and again, and again. Because you grab more. A handful. Your entire fist. Spreading Sakura open so that your tongue can reach further, licking in, in, in. It starts at her thighs, a tremble, this quaking - Kazuha not far behind her: swallowing these desperate, useless sounds, gulping down air like it’s in short supply.

The room is filled, flooded, drowning, with just their voices, the pair of them moaning nearly in tandem. With the sound of your fingers fluttering, blurring, making the wettest mess between Kazuha’s legs.

Until -

Sakura cums first. And she cums hard.

It crashes over her like the kind of thing you read about in a magazine: a flash, a spark, an explosion. It rolls up through her spine, over her ribs. You can hear her try to catch her breath and come up short, Kazuha drinking every ounce of it. How she collapses, folding - Sakura resting her face in the crook of Kazuha’s shoulder; your tongue doesn’t stop.

Sakura doesn't ask it to, she can’t. And you keep on, keep going, making her cum and cum and cum. There’s something so satisfying about it, so inexplicably filthy - you, with Sakura’s cum all over your mouth, and Kazuha, this hot, wet flustering tangle of limbs. When you finally rise to your feet, you can tell she’s so near her own finish that the tension in her muscles is winding up, running hot over the skin of her neck. She looks so good getting fucked like this.

"Fuck," Kazuha's sighing, panting. "I can't, I need-"

Her hands are everywhere: up in her hair, down her neck, gripping the sheets, fisting at the bedspread. If it wasn’t for how Sakura had crumpled into a heap on top of her, mewling softly into her shoulder, she’d be rubbing fast circles at her own clit.

"You want my cock," you ask her - well it’s not really all that much of question, but the look on her face tells you, yes, yes, fuck, yes.

You say it to her, and Sakura says it too, with a kiss at the side of her jaw. So good, look at you - she’s murmuring, not even coherent - so fucking good.

“Here, Kazuha, just hold on for me,” you tell her, stepping out of your shorts, and, to be honest, you’ve never seen anything so desperate. So ragged and needy. It inspires the worst kind of half-truths, these wicked assurances that slip from your lips as your palm drags the length of your cock. I’ll be good, I’ll go slow, I’ll go easy, I’ll do anything for you - oh, she’s putty in your hands, and she’s not going to fuss over the technicalities; how you’re hooking under her thighs and sliding her forward on the mattress, settling her into that angle that’ll let you absolutely ruin her cunt.

You could tease her - you have, and you would, in a second - but the fucking noise you earn out of her when draw the shape of your cock over her wet lips is like music: a broken moan, the kind you could bottle up, save forever, the kind that has you thinking aloud, “what a good little slut, Kazuha, fuck, aren’t you just perfect. I’m going to fuck your pussy now, okay?”

And you mean it, when you say it, when you push your hips forward, when you watch her take it. There’s the head of your cock, the way her pristine little pussy seems to open - to suck you in.

“I need - you need to fuck me.” She's barely able to say your name, begging - please, need it, hurry - it’s like Kazuha’s ticking off, minutes to midnight, gasping out: "please, please, please."

You slip inside her. Even when you’ve come to expect it, you’re still left next to speechless, because, fuck - how she can stretch.

It’s hot, it’s heaven, it’s hopeless, and as you sink further, bottoming out, there’s all this heat - the wetness - she had to have been just made just for you. Which is wild, you think, considering you’ve done nothing to deserve it, but her gorgeous little cunt is right there, quivering, hugging every inch of you while she throws her arms around Sakura’s neck.

You start to pull back, and then, thrust, once, twice. Just to let her know, to feel how tight she is.

“Shh,” Sakura’s soothing her and kissing her to silence as Kazuha holds on so, so tightly. You watch the pointed ends of Kazuha’s acrylics, faux set of french nails, dig deeper into Sakura’s shoulder blades, the fine edges of bones, the muscles and the tendons - it’s all so visceral, and so quickly - her eyes screw shut, and she’s biting the inside of her cheek so hard you can see the indent. Only letting it go when you snap your hips back into her, deeper, faster - (There's something almost instinctual about it, in all the most upsetting ways.

So, here’s your new angle: it’s not usually like you, or it shouldn’t be. With you fucking fast into her sopping cunt and making her sob with it, like you need her at the furthest point, you want it the tightest possible, when she has her ankles hooked together around your waist, until she’s crying and cock-addled, all fucked-out and satisfied - with a load of cum buried so deep in her, she’ll be thinking about it for weeks.)

Sakura lets the kiss go with a loud smack. And when she turns those brilliant eyes over her shoulder, she's got that dreamy, lop-sided kind of smile of a girl who'd just been sent to the moon and seen stars.

"Okay, look," she chides, voice uneven, but entirely the usual sound. Her arm reaches back until her fingers splay out across your hip. “You’re going to break her in half, you know, if you fuck her like that-”

"No," Kazuha whispers. Or rather, chokes. "Harder," she’s urging you, wanting you, needing you. "Please. Don't stop."

Your pace has gone reckless, rough, relentless, but this isn’t even all on you. She’s shaking. The building, the crescendo, you’d already taken the time, with two fingers, taken more with three, slowly winding her clockwork tight, tighter, tightest - like she hasn't quite yet realized: you might never stop fucking her.

There aren’t words really, and there haven't been, it's nothing but nonsense. Guttural moans, high whines, your hips fuck into her and you’re choking off an expletive here, another there. But still, she’s an open book, and you’re reading every page. You know each of those transient thoughts in her head, every single word, even if she fails to give a voice to any of them.

Cumming - Kazuha’s trying to mouth out, the silent shape of each syllable falling off her lip - I’m going to fucking cum. And you see -

she is,

so fucked.

It just hits her: suddenly, impossibly fast, rolling her in like a tide.

Sakura is there to hold her down as she washes up. She gives her succor, she tells her not to worry, whispering this gentle hush, hush, shh - pressing a kiss to the side of her cheek as your cock dives deep and makes an audible mess of her pussy. Makes a mess of the blankets, the bedding, and you think, if she’ll be here all weekend, you’ll be in and out of the laundry, load after load.

“I’d be willing to bet you'd take anything he gave you,” Sakura says. She’s laughing, recovered mostly, and somewhere in the doting affection and tenderness is the indistinct bite of a sneer. “Wouldn't you, you little, little fucktoy. Look how good your cunt stretches for him, for his big cock. You’re just so easy, aren’t you? Oh, Kazu, you are just so - so good for us."

Kazuha’s gasping in incoherence. "I can't - oh god, I can't - please, please-"

In the moments before, it's like every toned muscle, every taut nerve in her body had braced against one another. She takes your cock like the perfect little thing she is, and then - the twinge, the twist, the fucking release - it’s too much. She can barely make a noise out of that pretty mouth of hers, wrenched open in delighted agony, but her body is screaming.

Here you could spill into her in a fucking heartbeat, so it feels almost wrong when you pull yourself from her cunt, teetering there instead.

“Kazuha,” you say, slapping your cockhead against her sore clit, and it’s so sensitive that it makes her keen. “Do you think you can take it, if I fuck your cunt a few more times. Is that what you need? This pretty thing full of cum?"

It’s cute, her commitment to the bit - the bashful, the blushing, the biting into the edge of her hand. You can’t help but find the kind of innocence in direct contradiction to the sight of her: legs thrown wide, cunt absolutely fucked raw and dripping, painted in the glow of an orgasm that ripped her voice to shreds.

“Nope. Sorry sweetheart. Too slow.” Sakura’s lifting herself, shifting her hips, and she quickly has a hand reaching back to your cock. Her slender fingers encircling your shaft. Holding it, stroking it.

Like it needs any help.

"Do you have even the slightest idea?" she continues, talking out both sides of her mouth - this time at you. “How fucked you both are? I don’t think she’s going to let you off the hook until she’s got your cum inside her.” Kazuha whimpers into her hand, merely at the thought. “It’s a little cruel I imagine, to keep her waiting too long, but trust me: when we’re finished, I’m going to ride your cock - not going to stop until you fucking cum again, and then maybe, Kazuha should too.”

Probably by virtue of proximity and time, you know Sakura could go on like that forever, and it's true: when the moment is right, she's going to take what she wants, going to slide herself onto your cock like it’s hers. Right after you let Kazuha sit on your face - letting her rub herself off, however she likes it - then maybe even have her mouth. Your cock between her lips, watching those pouty things flush hard all over again.

The throuple, the three of you, this plurality you’re still not entirely sure you’re used to - not so sure you should be getting used to - there's time you figure, for Kazuha. There has to be. And Sakura again after.

But in terms of the here and now, you’ve got a set fingerprints burning into Sakura’s impossibly narrow waist, a fist around your cock, brushing Kazuha’s slick right into the wet between her lips - just a matter of alignment - and - and -

“I don’t think you should be drawing this out.” A course correction. Sakura slides lower, hips up higher, proffering, and she’s drawing back at the soft, supple skin across her thigh, letting you take her all in. Her face is flush against Kazuha’s, combing a finger through her hair, telling both of you, “our little girl looks like she can’t wait another second.”

"Hm," you're starting to say. “I suppose you’re right.” The least you could do was add the one-two of another suggestion, but then your cock is lined up perfectly with the tight muscle of her ass, and, well.

It’s like you said, you know Sakura.

There’s a sharp draw of air sucked in through her teeth as you get her started. And fuck, she’s tight, so delectably tight - with each bit, the barest touch of your tip at her rim at first, before your hand finds leverage in the curve of her back, easing her onto your cock like she’s some obscene piece of artwork.

Even then, getting slowly fucked open, she has the capacity for these thinly veiled barbs:

“This, Kazuha, like this - that’s the way you deserve to get fucked. Your perfect little cunt, your ass-”

You should probably be familiar with it, about how she is always, always plotting, always scheming - in control of things that should be well beyond her grasp - this is all on her own.

So as your cock stretches, inches, spreads her out - it isn't at your mercy. Though not quite at hers, either.

“Oh, fuck,” You have to steady a breath, because it feels better on you, you think, it must. Because Sakura has you squeezing past the ring, and oh, you can only imagine how it feels on her, taking it inch by inch. How full Kazuha would feel. God, imagine what you could do with a girl like her, it would ruin her. Ruin her in the best way.

“Sakura,” Kazuha says, faintly.

You can hear Sakura biting down on nothing when she answers, “Kazu, yeah.”

“Is he… are you...”

Her sentence never really finishes. Kazuha’s holding onto Sakura with both hands, one under her jaw, another in her hair. Her eyes are trailing along, studying the serene lines of her face, how they wobble ever-so-slightly when you pull your hips back and sink into Sakura’s ass again. And again. Until you can tell your cock is starting to settle, to hit this particular angle, that perfect sort of spot - that makes her body start to grow soft, shiver, and spill over.

Sakura tries to shake the hair out from in front of her face, and you get to watch Kazuha. Watch as she delicately brushes it back behind her ears, and they lean in. They kiss. And it's nothing like before.

“Words, sweetie,” Sakura tells her, hot against her lips, “say what you want to say.” Kazuha bites at her lip, and when Sakura draws her into another kiss - an open-mouthed one, a long, lingering one - their tongues push together, meet together, dance together, the words leaving her throat with hardly any sound at all:

“I want, him, I want - to be fucked, I want him - I want…”

Sakura interrupts her, and in the exact same lilting cadence, that same smug tone, she says, “you want him to fuck your ass, Kazuha, right baby?” Kazuha starts to blush profuse - bright pink up the sides of her neck and in her chest, this roseate smolder seared into her cheeks. Some part of you is disappointed she can’t see the whole picture, because for you, it’s all in frame: you spread a hand across the full round of Sakura's ass, squeezing as you pull out, sliding it along to press your thumb into the base of her spine as you push yourself inside her again. “Come on, of course you do,” she goads, the obvious edge in her voice looking for a reaction. And she can have an audible one from you, because Sakura looks like an absolute dream, the outline of her back flexing, muscles moving like machinery under her skin. Her legs strain against the mattress as she starts to fuck back. Taking control of it, of you, of her. You know her game, you’ll play along.

Your gaze flickers, first to Kazuha, back to where your cock is fucking Sakura open. Until it vanishes in between those two faultless curves. Buried to its base. Until the rhythm gets there. Until it takes you. There are certain things that, at this stage, are just inevitable - this momentum, or call it the weight of desire - and suddenly, Sakura’s fingers wind tightly around one of your wrists, guiding you, trying to show you: deeper is good, harder, more, rough, rougher - trying to tell you to wrap her up and fuck her - truly fuck her. “With this beautiful fucking cock?” Sakura is saying, somehow unrushed and harried at the same time, in her half-there, half-catching-her-breath kind of way. “Oh Kazuha, you just want to be an awful mess - an utter fucked-out mess. Under him and on him and filled; tell me it isn’t that you want your perfect asshole getting fucked raw and hard by his big thick dick-” As she sinks down onto your length, leaning backwards - which, god, she's probably fucking gaping - you bring an open palm down hard onto the taut, creamy skin of her bare ass, and she yelps. “Maybe we should just show her.” You pull Sakura's little frame up into you so you can say it right into the shell of her ear, and your thumb smooths a line from the bony edge of her hip, up to her navel, with your fingers splayed out over the concave flatness of her tummy. “It would be so much easier, for all of us.”

She squirms into your shoulder, agitated, but with another snap of your hips into her slick, puckered hole - with a satin-like kiss onto her lips - she bends to you, surrenders to you. She has to. Kazuha can’t look away. Pushing her fingers into her cunt. She’s watching you fuck Sakura and hold her tight. Watching closely how you’re going to take her apart. The way it all comes down, the beginning of the end, it starts with a kiss. Another.

A series of them, quick. Crushing your mouth onto hers. Sakura hums this meek sound into your mouth the moment your hands are up on her perfect tits, cupping them, squeezing, kneading, listening to her pitchy little whines when you roll your fingers around her nipples.

Kazuha. Sakura.

Circling fingers, mussed up hair.

Folded knees, rippling skin.

There's no shortage of imagery for either one.

Lewdness, vulgarity, the truly depraved - the dark places the brain goes, the deepest recesses: the buried fantasies. You are fucking her harder and harder and faster and faster and - god, Sakura loves it, she wants it, her tiny body clinging to you - pulling you back every time your cock threatens to drag free from the confines of her tight ass - pulling you back every time your mouth leaves a spot, a smear, an unbearable, unendurable mark into the line of her shoulder. “Please, you need, it's, god, it's just, you feel so perfect,” is what you’re shaking out of her, broken, breathy.

The screws of the bed are just about wailing with it, her chest is in full motion, the picture perfect arch of her neck is red, pink, raw. And how her skin glows, you have no idea, but her eyelids are fluttering open, closed. Open, closed - all the while using the hand that isn’t pinned behind her back to tease at her swollen little clit. “Oh,” you say, grinning, “what happened to using my fucking cock for exactly what I'm made for, hmm?”

"Don't - don’t get all funny," she huffs at you, face too stricken with your cock throbbing in her asshole to scowl. Then her body relaxes, and it seems to work. That, and the quick circles she's rubbing over her cunt, the one soaking down onto Kazuha’s legs, into the mattress, the sheets, everything. You fuck her harder. She rolls her shoulders back. And somewhere beneath, lost in the fold of the sheets, the pooling sweat, there's something so unguarded - this sick little voice in the back of your thoughts, thinking - mine, mine, mine, mine - and it’s so incredibly territorial. It doesn’t get any quieter when you look down either; Kazuha’s eyes, heavy and hazy. They have to be. She has two fingers sunk inside her. And they look like they're doing the work for you, because it's like she's been waiting for ages, ever since you sank the length of your cock into Sakura's ass. She hasn't stopped rubbing figure-eights and circles over her cunt. She hasn’t stopped, and you don’t think she ever will. “Cum, please, I want you to cum,” Sakura is frantic at you, breathless, a little miserable, and you think you could, with your own hand and just from the way Kazuha is moaning and panting and getting herself off. "Just, fuck, get that cock in her, cum, fuck, don't-"

You could lose your mind here, and it's what they’d both want.

(That is, until Kazuha calls out: fuck me, please fuck me.)

Which makes you aware. Reminds you: not even yet - you’re fucking Sakura so hard, so fast, you’re ready to burst -

“Fuck,” you spit, with your cock sliding out of Sakura’s ass and watching her recoil.

Actually, it’s almost too late. You’re almost too slow on the draw. And for a few seconds, all you have are your senses: there’s the wet, failing noise, your skin is fevering hot as liquid fire, and the smell, blossoming saccharine sweet, turgent like gasoline.

Actually, you can’t keep your eyes open, not for a moment. You’re cumming everywhere.

On the inside of Sakura’s thigh, into the bedding, and when you get your cock into your fist and point it at Kazuha’s cunt, you spill a puddle of cum right onto her puffy, reddened lips - pumping, jerking - there’s more on the flawless plane of her stomach, hot white streaks across her body like you’re debasing a masterwork, a canvas beholden to the perfected female form. Now tarnished, and sloppy and slutty -

But, you’re fucked. You’re spent. Kazuha sees the pale in your face. You can read the wordless worry there, but what she does with it is obscene.

Just the tips of two fingers, and she traces a line down from her chest, picks a lazy path through the splatter on her skin to rub it into her pretty, soaked pussy. You watch as she pushes it all in, like it could be - where it’s supposed to be - all filthy, the fucking definition.

There’s a listless groan, and a shake of Sakura’s head. She’s running her hand over her brow, through her messy fringe and flipping it away. “Jesus, Kazuha, gross, if you want it inside - put his cock in there, seriously. Go sit on it, ride him till he can't help himself.”

(Always the smooth-talker, Sakura.)

"Wait, wait," Kazuha says, scuffing her feet against the comforter, knocking her head back as far as her shoulders will let her. "I’m close," you're barely able to catch the words, paper-thin and shivering, "just need..."

Sakura shimmies off of Kazuha and lands on her feet, gait looking kind of silly.

“Oh, Kazuha,” she says, with the kind of dejected little sigh that you’re used to hearing when you say something disappointing or objectionable and Sakura has to set it right.

She shoves you off with a gentle push from her fingertips and moves until the two of them are reshaping themselves into this soft, cozy pile. By the time they finish, she's got her fingers hooked around Kazuha's thighs and her face buried between her legs.

“There, there,” Sakura’s whispering as she laps and circles her tongue around Kazuha’s cunt, the needy tragedy of a shape that it’s in. She makes a long lick up and through the glisten between her legs before pushing her finger in, just a knuckle, curling - then two. You feel it. You’re half-hard and aching, maybe ready to go. You feel those familiar phantoms of rising pressure, in your thighs, your hips, your chest. The familiarity of how Sakura soothes her into it, inches closer to her, you never knew it looked like this.

“Fuck, Sakura, you-” Kazuha’s eyes are widening and the bones of her neck are straining, her lips parted into a perfect, pleading little bow. The duvet spills through her fingers as she searches blindly for somewhere, anywhere - she needs, and needs, and needs - needs to stay, to find an anchor, to come up for air -

She is gasping. It’s fucked: the friction, the fever-dream.

Because Sakura has her nose on her clit, mouth fucking her fast and senseless, precise, eager to please, and the way her fingers flutter in and out of her cunt looks nothing short of amazing.

It looks even better when her orgasm hits, or when it vanishes, as the case may be, because for her none of it manages to last that long; there's just this crazy moment where Kazuha goes white all over - it starts in her face, spreading across her torso, and her back snaps forward in a cresting wave before she falls. Flat and alluring and inviting.

It makes Sakura almost laugh, right into her skin. “That’s our good girl.” Kazuha is laying there, fucked-out, sodden in her own slick, destroyed. She has a hand over her face, one between her legs, feeling over her skin and what it's turned into now. Her beautiful, blemishless skin, just…smeared with you. Smothered.

It's impossible. How could anybody function at even half their normal rate when it all just ends up here?

“Okay, alright.” Sakura crawls back on her hands, peering back. Her chin glistens and she kisses the taste off of her lips before sucking a couple fingers into her mouth to clean up. Then she lifts her arm, looking at you with a steely expression, and points to the chair in the corner of the room.

Her smile kicks back up into the corner of her mouth, elastic, and she just says, “A promise is a promise, yeah?”

(Of course. Of course she does.)

It’s hours later, when a foot sharply jabbed into your rib wakes you in the middle of the night.

You have the wherewithal to take inventory, to tally it up: Sakura, Kazuha sprawled out across the sheets, the night sky flashing and splintering into iridescent sparks of darkness outside the bay window - rainfall now slowly pelting across its pane.

At the sound of a snore - a novel one, one that must be Kazuha’s - Sakura turns and drapes the sheets up to her waist. She’s half-asleep. The softness in her eyes obscured by the short, drowsy blinks of her lashes.

“What time is it?” she asks, trying to will herself back to sleep.

You tell her: “Don’t matter.”

The "full disclosure" here isn't of a whole lot of use. Not really. But it's all there, at least, this surface-level pretense of an explanation.

It’s late August, a summer ago, and you can still picture the unbothered look on Sakura’s face when she brings it up.

“So, like,” Sakura starts to say. She’s inspecting a pair of stilettos, weighing them carefully in one hand. They would look lovely on her and the price tag isn’t anywhere near enough to dissuade her. “What’s your take on Kazuha?”

“Um.” You’re there, beside her, shuffling out the way so a mother and her squalling child can pass. “Is that a name I’m supposed to recognize?”

There are several people in line behind you and not a single one of them are pleased, judging from what you can infer from the grumblings in their pockets and the anger bristling amongst their expressionless faces.

You could ask: please be patient with us, it has been a long few months - I can tell by how Sakura has this irritated look in her eye and hasn't called me by my pet name since we woke up from a midday nap, or how she's barely said anything other than oh and yeah or umm or sure since. That said, there have been bigger, larger-scale concerns, so forgive us, please, we love each other, or something like that.

Instead, you lean against a wall, by a clothing boutique display full of eye-searingly-bright polo shirts, and pull out your phone.

“Seriously?” Sakura asks. “You’ve met her like, twenty times.”

You don’t look up from the screen. "Well, when you give me some kind of clue, I'll see what I can do."

This gets a tight-lipped frown. She leans in on her toes, whispering it into your ear: "The one I said is a little crazy about you."

“Ah.” It clicks. Kazuha, that one. “She was the one with Chaewon the other night right? Dark hair, yea-high? At the gala - helping Minju look for her boyfriend. Did you ever hear about where they found him? By one of the bathrooms on the second floor, with an arm around Eunbi and-”

Sakura creases an eyebrow.

(And what a glare, really. It makes her face look like the backdrop of a brick wall in some mediocre, early-2000s film noir.)

“Another quarter in the gossip jar.”

“Oh, but asking me some loaded question about a girl I hardly know is let-me-guess: perfectly kosher.”

“Loaded?” Sakura huffs, tugging at her sleeve. She pauses, though, her expression almost flounders because she can never truly ever explain why the rules don’t apply to her. “Is that the word?”

“My answer,” you tell her, “is unchanged. She’s sweet and nice and a sort of, conventionally attractive.”

"Really; nothing about her does it for you?"

A loaded question gets a loaded answer, so: “No, not particularly.”

"And what happens if the question becomes less 'what do you think' and more 'I want her to rail me,'" she says, somewhat chilly. “You know, as a hypothetical.”

She wants you to look up at that, and well you are, because you realize it now. “Oh my god. Sakura, you still haven’t told her about us.”

Sakura just makes a face, of a type of: puzzled and concerned quality, and it’s kind of cute actually. She’s perfected the look.

Although, really, she shouldn’t have to explain anything - why you sleep over some times, stay the whole night. Or several. Nothing has to be answered after. It’s you, Sakura, and it always has been. But it’s a problem. Each morning, Kazuha’s eyes get a little sadder, and that kernel of shame inside Sakura grows ever larger.

“Sakura,” you insist.

“I know, I know, I know.” She bites her lip, thinking, and hums under her breath. “Lying about it obviously isn’t helping, but being straight with her sounds…” Sakura’s expression dips. “You know she just has that - that disposition, those never-been-hurt-once kind of eyes. Disappointing her is like choking out the little mermaid with a bike chain.”

“You could set her up.”

“Trust me: Chaewon and I have tried.”

“And it doesn’t take."

Sakura shrugs. “She gets nervous easily, or something. Didn’t get enough attention from boys while in ballet school I suppose - and then here you come along and smile at her like you don’t know what it does to people. Which, careless by the way.”

“Well, it explains the legs.”

Sakura scoffs. “Conventionally attractive, huh, seems like you’ve cast a wide net.”

It earns her this pinched look, your mouth set in a tight line, and Sakura smiles - all smug-like. By this time, she’s narrowed it down, a pair of shoes in each hand, and she holds them out to you, sighing.

"Which ones."

You point at the heels Sakura has in her left: a sleek pair of green pumps with a thin gold buckle across the ankle strap.

"Hmm. Kazuha likes the color green, by the way. A lot."

"That's nice. I'm a fan of neutrals."

Sakura clicks her tongue. “You really don't have anything to say about her."

"Nothing comes to mind." You hold a tote bag out in front of you, waiting for her to plop the shoes in. "Although, she's tall - taller than you - hey, with the heels maybe you could finally kiss her."

“Ha, funny,” she says, and then, pursing her lips, you see the lightbulb go off: Sakura is struck with an idea.

You don’t go out of your way to hate her ideas. She has so many of them. It’s just that they have this tendency to be pretty damn awful.

“Can I, politely decline?” you ask, once Sakura finishes whispering into your ear, and sinks back to the soles of her feet.

Sakura blinks, innocently. (She can be so obnoxious when she wants to be.)

"No, I'm serious," you tell her. Sakura can't expect that you're actually down for this - the setup, the miscommunication, the endless drama, all that messy work, and for what, your girlfriend-in-eveything-but-name-only's peace of mind? "Declining. Politely. Please."

"C'mon, hear me out. It'll be fun."

You tip your head, onto some more dismissive angle or another, but Sakura takes it to be a whole different type of signal: that you're actually warming up to the idea.

(You're not.)

"Fun," you repeat.

“Well,” she says, cracking a grin. And that’s when you know - that her mind is set, immovable - like she’s laid the foundation, poured the concrete and is now standing in it, knee deep, spitefully triumphant. "It sure as shit ain’t going to be boring."

It was supposed to be like dominos, falling sequentially, until at last, the final one is knocked down and all three of you can move on with your lives.

This is how things tend to work out: Sakura, a bit of a schemer, and you - well, you a bit of something else.

It’s begun raining biblically by the time the three of you’ve gotten dressed, eaten and had something that even remotely resembles a functional, human interaction.

It’s over a cup of tea and a modest stack of papers - Sakura's sitting at the dining room table with her knees tucked into her chest and has taken to typing something on her laptop. It’s a whole thing, she refuses to write by hand like you. And Kazuha feels it’s within reason to start playing twenty questions. Starting simple, mundane: how did the two of you even meet? How have you not told me this story? How did it become, whatever the fuck this is?

Sakura rolls her eyes, thinking, please, how juvenile, and opens her mouth to explain, then pauses, unsure. She thinks it through - the simplest iteration, the most plausible interpretation, or at least something that makes the two of you seem a little less unhinged - but when those gears grind to a halt, Sakura's teeth click together and the words fail to make any headway at all.

You lean forward in the quiet, and end up telling Kazuha the usual story, how it kind of went down, telling her that neither of you "are looking for any sort of commitment."

(That's, by the way, exactly the turn of phrase Sakura once told you when she explained she didn't want a "monogamous, committed relationship," once upon a time, in fact - just a wayward daydream - a hazy, silly memory.)

Kazuha laughs, softly. "Cool." She does a bit of nodding, biting into a slice of toast, the crunch singular and resolute. She seems to understand.

Then she cocks her head, a frown shadowing in on one side of her mouth. "Okay, um, you're not...doing that with anybody else though right?"

"Doing what?" Sakura asks, seeming kind of amused.

"Dating - fooling around, that kinda stuff."

You let go of the ballpoint pen in your hand and take a deep breath.

"Kazu," Sakura says, clamshelling her laptop emphatically. “We are not going to (1) have a threesome with anybody we’re not absolutely candid about and then (2) fucking lie about it after.”

“Cool.” Kazuha bobs her head again. “Cool, cool, cool.”

So actually, maybe it’s not a total disaster, you think. It’s all with a bit of luck, and a whole lot of foolishness, but it’s however those sayings tend to go. You can’t take life too seriously, or you’ll never make it out alive.

Here's what tips you off: Sakura is deep into a game of Bloons on her phone when you cum on Kazuha's face.

Well - after your load spits a long stripe onto her tongue - and once the heady taste of it makes her recoil on instinct, but then she sinks a little further onto her knees and settles, with her mouth open wide, and her tongue out like she’s being baptized. She simply lets the rest of it happen. And let’s be perfectly clear, she wants it to.

She’s jerking you with her fingers, smearing it all over her. On her cheek, her forehead, across the bridge of her nose, the luscious swell of her pink lips; every gorgeous and perverse spot and stain becomes something Kazuha has earned.

Sakura’s laying totally horizontal on the couch and has yet to lift a single one of her eyes from the screen, humming approvingly, "is she letting you jizz on her face?"

You look up at Sakura's even expression, catching how she's peeking from beneath heavy eyelids, with two thumbs swirling over the face of her phone.

"Guess she is," you reply, turning a smirk into your shoulder, rolling a thumb along Kazuha's temple as a viscous glob of cum dribbles over the edge of her brow and into her lashes. "Fucking filthy little cumslut."

Kazuha lets your cock slip out from her lips. Manages still, a pretty little smile.

It’s not just that she likes it when you degrade her a little, which, honestly, you wouldn’t have ever pegged, but Kazuha likes being made to wear her sin so that it never leaves her alone. Here she is, now realizing that dirty, divine truth: getting called names, used and treated like a cumrag.

Now, she can’t get enough.

The grip you’d woven into Kazuha’s dark silky hair to fuck your cock into her lips is the same you use to rein her in, walking her from the unassuming doorway where she’d gotten herself down on her knees for you and reached her fingers into the waist of your pants - over toward the couch where Sakura’s lounging in the world's smallest pair of shorts and a tank top.

Sakura’s still going on about this level she can’t figure out when you bend Kazuha over the arm of the sofa. “It’s this fucking chimps stage,” she says, blowing her bangs out of the way. “It’s the only intermediate one I haven’t full cleared-”

Kazuha gasps - and the sound comes out near reverent - when you pull her underwear down her thighs and slip your cock into her cunt.

Fuck, she feels incredible. You’ve claimed two greedy handfuls of her ass, watching her head drop between her shoulders as she steadies the air that rattles out of her, and you just keep sliding into her - deeper and deeper until your cock is fucking her apart, spreading her open, so very full.

“Have you tried, not spamming plantations?” you ask Sakura, the syllables slowing, making room for the rough cadence of your breathing, as you drive your hips in. “Since they, you know, don’t actually pop anything.”

“Hey.” Sakura’s lip quivers like it’s about to pout, but never does. “It’s rude to backseat.”

You’re fucking Kazuha slow, but you’re also tilting your hips down, going for the deep, sharp angle that you’ve found she likes - the kind of stroke that get’ll her sobbing if you really lean into it. You don’t miss the soft moans that drift out of her either, or the way her pussy throbs and grasps and swallows every inch of you.

“And see, that’s a common misconception,” Sakura continues to drawl, squinting up at the screen, “this game isn’t actually about popping the bloons. It’s about making as much money as humanly-”

She looks up. Sees, finally.

You press your hips right down to the curve of Kazuha's ass and bottom out inside her. Confirming what you already knew: the way it feels to fuck this needy, insatiable, incomparable body. Sopping wet. So hot, too. So tight, snug around your cock. It's unlike anything, and seeing Kazuha like this, folded over and racked with a shudder - when it all comes down to it, it's just that simple.

It's this fucking little pussy. That fucking curve of her ass, peerless in nearly every conceivable way. It urges you to move, irresistible. To push past that tight, snug grip and pound her relentlessly.

However she wants it.

“You look pretty today, Kazuha,” Sakura tells her as she leans forward, nonchalantly and holding back a smirk, and she starts to inspect the damages: the red that taints her ears, the blush creeping in, the face you're drawing a few curls of her hair aside for Sakura to stare at.

There is, of course, the more obvious - the most obvious - all the cum still painted onto her pretty face. You find beneath your fingertips that it’s sticky all over her cheeks, the kind of sticky that is quickly drying, almost tacky.

"I always look pretty," Kazuha gathers the composure to say back at her, like her arms aren’t trembling with the effort to hold up her lithe frame.

Sakura laughs, the sound coming like a plucked chord.

And it is true, that beneath a few splatters and streaks of your cum, Kazuha looks pretty, is pretty. She's pretty because of what she is, with what she was born with, born without - and if she's sinking her teeth into her lip, covered in cum, biting down on this moan, the next, the one that shivers through her whole body when your hips snap reckless into hers, that is more proof of her flawless disposition. That is something special one could be lucky to witness: her panting and squeaking and pressing her palms into the leather beneath her so you can slam the cock inside her to its very hilt - then fucking her, razing her like a blaze, spreading her apart until she's writhing and clawing at the sofa with every strike of your cock to that sweet, spot within her.

"You just look so particularly, um," Sakura does a bit of tilting her chin, thinking, "fucked."

Kazuha smiles despite herself. Maybe there was this vision of her before - prim, polite - demure, reserved; with the role now filled out, it couldn’t have fit less.

Sakura lets her phone fall between the cushions, and leans forward, dragging her thumb along Kazuha’s jaw - smearing more of you into her skin - dipping it just barely into her mouth so that Kazuha can suck on the tip.

“So,” Sakura starts, tipping Kazuha’s chin up on a fingertip and studying how each motion urges forward a tiny, punched-out breath. “Are you two planning on doing anything else today besides fucking each other senseless?”

It’s a hard sell. Not with your hands on her narrow, wrought little waist, and certainly not when her cunt keeps rippling around you, pulsating, spilling over - dripping like she can't take it any longer. Kazuha's a bit out of sorts, has been for more than a few moments, but this one, especially. With the stilted way she's saying, "could, we go again, if, ah," then sucking a hard breath, "if, we," and "if you think," and "please, please, please."

“Just to be clear,” Sakura runs her tongue between her lips before her gaze tracks up to meet yours. “This is on you; she wasn’t like this.”

“What, you mean cumdrunk?”

Sakura runs her hand through Kazuha’s hair “Something like that.”

All the while, she is sliding one of her hands under the cotton of Kazuha's shirt, bringing another one up the sensitive expanse of her leg, thumb stroking just inches from where your cock is gliding in out of Kazuha’s aching cunt. You almost find it a shame that Sakura's never in any rush to actually fuck Kazuha, taking her apart piece by piece first, not allowing for an ounce of hurry.

Not to mention the effect she has on her - something intense, something almost electric - and there are sparks, when she leans in and silences Kazuha’s moan with a soft kiss, somewhere between their lips, as Kazuha melts -

And dissolves -

And opens her mouth -

Your hand finds the jut of Kazuha's hips, squeezing gently, using her body to pull her into you. Pumping, thrusting. Then back and in, again, and again. Kazuha goes a little boneless; this soft, quivering mess. There's one final teary squeak - and she just, takes it.

"God," you whisper out, in an almost perplexed admiration; her cunt looks so good like that. Taken. Fucked. In use.

It’s like some wild and wonderful thing - the absolute fucking wreck she is now - her bottom lip sticking out, Kazuha sighing, "m-more."

Sakura peers over her, eyes sharp, head held high. “Better not keep her waiting.”

As it were. It all goes on and on and on.

So,

Here’s what people usually fail to consider about “fucking each other senseless” when they’re discussing definitive day plans:

In general, it goes off the rails - like when your hand closes around the column of Kazuha's throat and the bathroom is abruptly fogged in sex-infused haze as you're fucking your cock between her legs. The tip nudging just past the smooth of her folds, slipping along the ridges and curves of her thighs, or when it all builds up to something else and the head of your cock is a sloppy mess against the little dip of her asshole and you fuck her there, too.

Sometimes, it gets very silly. When Sakura pouts at you and pulls your fingers from Kazuha's cunt to have her lick at them and there's an instant jolt that hits at the look in her eye - dilated and black, smirking, hungry.

Then, maybe Sakura slips a hand down Kazuha's pants, gives her a little, "good girl, huh? Little fuckin' cumslut. And you can do it with your mouth full, too, hmm?"

She’ll do this thing so practiced, you’d think she’d done it a thousand times. She’ll slow the roll of her hips down on your cock, for a rare respiteful second, and press a sharp bite to the shell of Kazuha's ear. You get that gleam off her canines when Kazuha lets the words drop, mumbling with Sakura's fingers on her jaw and yours buried three knuckles-deep inside her mouth. "Yes ma’am, yes I can."

And there's when things get very serious. Maybe, in particular, a time, a moment -

(Let's call this moment one of many, but just to use it as something of an example.)

-a phone, going off and ringing, ringing, ringing.

You haven't seen the numbers - you're kind of too busy with your cock in Kazuha's cunt and her riding the edge, circling her hips on the line of your thigh, rolling into it and soaking your skin. Until she freezes, going rigid.

(Yeah,

No shit, she's the one getting Yunjin on the other line. A few days out of town, she has this text - call ASAP. ASAP means: she is now in this awkward spot, of pulling her own soaked underwear off of your wrist, trying to compose herself, not moan or writhe. You're trying to act natural, as Kazuha hastily arranges you both - nudging you onto the bed, letting Sakura wrench your shirt off from behind.)

By the time Kazuha's listening to Yunjin retell some story - no, yeah, she went out and got a new car. Then this funny thing, so she came across the scrapyard, and this other thing - did you know it costs a dollar fifty? She's got a shovel in the back, still can't believe it! - your hand is closed around your cock, trying to, gently, in vain, get some sort of handle on it.

But everything else happens way too fast: Sakura's foot falls across the meat of your inner thigh, and her expression is all, please. Don't you want to put me in my place? Please, for her - it'd mean so much to, just to, ride that massive, fat fucking cock-

Fuck, she's a bad influence, your best friend. Your lover, in all senses.

Anyways - your tongue in her mouth -

Your arm around her waist -

Kazuha gets it figured out. Yunjin's good to talk for a couple of minutes, and while your head is thrown back on a pillow, hearing Kazuha work out all this small talk about her shiny new volkswagen, your brain is somewhere between exploding, overstimulation, overload - Sakura's mouth, her tits, her pussy - whatever, wherever - just, fuck, she's -

You're just…fucking her. Truly fucking her. She's grinding, rolling her clit, making these choked noises. She’s not as flexible as Kazuha, who’d let you turn her into a pretzel or force her into the splits and pound away until there’s a load leaking from her pussy - until there’s several - but there’s something else about Sakura’s tight, grasping cunt, how you it quivers and milks you, a soft, soft silk that wants to tug at you, consume you -

Kazuha’s on the phone, wrapping up, telling Yunjin, “okay, I love you, bye, I love you, yes, okay, I love you, bye, I’ll talk to you later, soon, I love you. Yes, I’ll get to it. First thing tomorrow.”

Sakura’s on a sort of different thread, leaning into you and telling you to put a hot load into her cunt, your pretty girl, please - her mouth toying with the soft lobe of your ear, working in the angle of her hips on top of you and dragging her cunt against all the right parts of your cock in tandem, then asking: "is this little pussy gonna get filled up like hers? Make a mess and ruin me?"

And, there’s you -

Going fast, faster - you want more of her, she wants more of you - her tiny frame shaking with need, your hips slamming into hers and pushing her up the mattress and making a fucking mess of her perfect cunt. Your fingers are clasped over her mouth. Hers are probably clasped around your very soul, because you think:

This girl.

This girl -

Fuck, it isn’t complicated at all.

(As it is most years, the full bloom lasts about a week. There’s a cherry tree outside the window, one, three floors down from your apartment; its flowers are in their final days. A warm breeze whispers a cascade of petals to the earth below, and from this distance, they look almost dream-like, like snow falling soft.

You lie to yourself: maybe, if it could stay just like that, maybe forever.)

For weeks, Kazuha comes and goes. More of her belongings enter than ever leave the apartment - shoes, laundry, hair ties, the occasional purse or two. Her books take up the most space, overflowing to the point where the stack is spilling off the kitchen table.

It all serves to solidify the unspoken agreement among the three of you, that this isn’t going away any time soon.

At present, she’s currently in a moment of going.

You and Sakura watch from the fire escape as her figure on the street below climbs into a cab and heads off in a vaguely-western direction.

With your backside to the railing and your elbows looped over the iron bars, the cigarette smoldering between your fingertips curls up a single smoky tendril. Beside you, Sakura has her sunglasses shielding her eyes from an early-evening summer sun. Her lips, just the subtlest pink shade of coral - pink, rose - start to pick up the colors of fleeting daylight. You watch her focus flit between you and the horizon, unreadable, inscrutable and turn back on the asphalt.

There's this wind that fills out her skirt and reveals a sliver of her thighs, a space in time where her legs aren’t painted red and her hair looks a bit lighter.

Sakura points the fronts of her sneakers down as though to really study the pavement below. "What's with that face?"

"No face," you say.

"Yes face," Sakura insists, tipping her head.

A strand of her bangs swings along the line of her cheekbone to where she tucks it, delicate, behind her ear. And then:

"Y'know."

You tap off a line of ash. "Do I?"

She rolls her eyes and replies, simply, "us."

Some mornings, there's coffee.

Some evenings, another show gets binged, or a movie.

Some nights are always reserved for bed, a three-person scrum at the very center and warm bodies laced over one another.

This one - tonight - is always the hardest to predict.

There was no denying the thud. There were no stifling the sounds - the cries and pleas, the streams of no, please don't stop, which you think must’ve been coming from Kazuha. There were other voices too, fainter - they slipped right out your head, unabashed.

Another came from behind, Sakura moaning out a hoarse "there you go baby, just like that. Take that little cunt of hers." And on, on and on: Kazuha whimpering and mewling out an obscene pitch - fucked over and out, full and satisfied.

With that, you can't even tell which is better. Looking down, the lovely sight of your cock filling Kazuha's pussy - spreading her wide open for you - so indecent, and hot, and, really, there's that fantasy that she has that can play out on repeat. Laid out on a mattress and used, exactly as she's always wanted to be. Fucked, again, again, again - full of cum.

Only somewhere along the way it all slows down. To the basics, the essentials.

See, there’s a place by the tidal river that you and Sakura like to go, sometimes, just to take a break. It’s a clearing in the trees that by mid-summer will be swarming with bugs, but is for now, mostly okay. And if you’re going to get tangled up in origin stories, this is probably the best place to start:

"What about that one?" Kazuha asks, pointing up at another ambiguous point on the vast dark canvas overhead. Her head is in your lap, and she's tearing up the grass with her other hand.

Sakura squints. "Hmm. Let's see. That one over there is Gemini, I think." She moves her finger, dragging Kazuha's gaze across the heavens. "That star cluster right there. I call it The Bee. But if you want the real name, you can call it Messier 35. The French got to that one first, I guess."

Kazuha seems to ignore her, the brief aside, to stare, to dream.

“Sakura, hey,” she says in a half-whisper, its sound trailing into the dull drone of cicadas, the croaking cadence of bullfrogs, like a will o’ wisp into the night sky. “Where’d you learn all this stuff?”

“She didn’t,” you tell her. “She makes it up as she goes along.”

Kazuha twists around to level her with this pout, half-crooked, almost grinning. Sakura just shrugs, blameless. There’s grass falling off her sweatshirt and speckling her knees. Her ponytail is crooked, her smile bright and beaming and contagious - you find it a wonder how you ever manage anyway.

“What about that one, you think?” she asks Kazuha, gesturing vaguely to a cluster of three bright flecks, glistening against the gradient, and Kazuha’s head tilts to follow Sakura’s index finger.

(And it’s totally worth pointing out the sort of cosmic irony here being that if any of you knew a lick about anything, you could say oh that? That’s Orion’s belt, binding together the great hunter himself - to his quiver, and to the bowstring, his pride, and to his most prized possession: his arrow, gleaming, eternally shining in the midnight glow of faraway planets and twinkling, blinking stars.

None of you are astronomers after all. Not you. Sakura, maybe, if you ask Kazuha. But for the time being, you'd never know.)

“Dunno,” Kazuha says, "but it must mean something."

You and Sakura share a long breath.

The three of you staring up into the infinite blue.

#sakura smut #kazuha smut #le sserafim smut #izone smut #kpop smut #male reader smut #izone sakura smut #le sserafim kazuha smut #le sserafim sakura smut

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balu8 · 4 months

Text

The Ghost of Gaudi

by El Torres by Jesus Alonso Iglesias

Lion Forge/Magnetic Press

#magnetic press #the ghost of gaudi #jesus alonso iglesias #el torres #comic book #long post

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comfortless · 5 months

Note

The way you write König makes me cry and dry heave cuz you balance his loser unhingeness and his heartbreaking tenderness is✨ ART✨

Now I feel like you would be able to EAT this prompt up but imagine König as Frankenstein’s creature that is this big ass hulking mass of body that immediately makes the town grab their pitchforks but he can DESTROY them in seconds. But inside he is just a little guy who just wants somebody to hold and love (and other activities if ya know what I mean

Keep doing what you do❤️

A Place For Us

Frankenstein’s creature! König x fem! horologist reader

content/warnings: 18+. minors do not interact. discrepancies!, reader is implied to have anxiety, angst & fluff, non-malicious stalking?, loner/loner dynamic my beloved.., brief mentions of previous murders and religious imagery, codependency, smut; masturbation, unprotected piv.

notes: receiving this ask was so funny to me because @melancholic-thing and i have been bouncing this idea around forever (i simply could not have brought this any justice without ghost’s input— if you see this please know that ily dearly). thank you, anon for your kind words and finally giving me the push that i needed to write it! 💘

wc: 10.6k

You’re good at fixing broken things; tinkering with them with a set of well-polished tools until they begin to tick, or chime, or cuckoo.

Some take longer than an afternoon sat before the wooden desk, weeks or months— a year, once. Oiled parts and small cogs, the three arms that jerk and glide over a face riddled with numbers that all lull you into feeling that your work is not just some monotonous service only the rich buzzards could afford, but as if you were a healer of sorts; a little cleric stationed to bring life into whichever jagged, broken thing has been dropped or kicked at her doorstep.

This one, however… you’re convinced it’s as good as dead.

No matter how many times you take apart the little, gray pocket watch, the arms refuse to move. Its ticking sounds less like that of the beating of the heart and more like the grinding of dry teeth, a corpse begging, pleading to let this attempted resurrection come to an end.

Your tweezers wrench the face free, and all at once it proves too much— bending and warping beneath the metal grip until it cracks, a split right through it, down to its very center.

“How…” Your voice fills the void of ticking, pseudo-silence surrounding you. A word slipped out in frustration and unknowing before you finally toss the wretched little thing onto the desk with a clatter and step aside.

The house is as dark and brooding as always, too large for a woman on her own and a workshop that hardly counts as a proper business. Shelves of broken clocks serve as decor where potted plants and well-loved photographs should sit in their stead. Books of study for modern devices such as these in place of the poetry and worn love letters other women seemed to have in abundance.

This place was starved out of light, even with the flickering glow of candles and the electric humming of the unnatural yellow one above.

The sun is no stranger, either, your curtains neatly pulled aside to allow for it to filter through like an invited guest. Only it doesn’t, not on such a melancholic gray day.

You need a walk, a distraction, or this hungry home would be certain to rip away your work from the shelves and swallow you whole instead.

Isn’t it such a tragedy that, someone who pours her creativity and all of her love into time, all she seems to do is waste it?, the gaudy wallpaper seems to taunt, all the colors of filthy maroon and darkened blue flowers seeming to make it feel more imposing and less of a comfort.

Your hand curls around the handle of your umbrella, a sturdy thing, but just as drab as the rest of the home. Then, the package you’ve been putting off delivering to the elderly woman in town. Best to get it done with now, maybe upon your return the hands that fix could do so once again.

Shame about the clock face though. You would certainly have to patch together another and pray the pocket watch’s owner wouldn’t notice.

The wind is not what you had anticipated.

Outside is different. The howling of it past the windows and shuddering through the attic felt perfectly at home in your shoddy little house, but as the door swings shut behind you, it feels entirely alive. Cold and bitter and angry— the things you keep repressed that nature lacks the tact to.

The trees bend and sway from its invisible yet incessant pushing. The hand containing the package falls down to the lap of your skirt to keep it from flying up just as your other clutches the umbrella ever tighter to keep it from billowing out into the air to be left discarded miles away.

It isn’t a short walk to town, but with the wind and the drizzling rain, it almost seems as though you’re in more tender company than the lumber and the ticking clocks.

The path through the forest is overgrown as always, branches are pushed aside and your skirt is lifted to avoid burrs and thorns.

You should have had the sense to bring along a coat, because when the thunder does strike up and the rain finally begins to fall in heavy, hurried drops, you find yourself shivering terribly with the package guarded against your chest.

Lamplight would have done well, too.

You would have almost happily allowed yourself to toss aside the umbrella and be battered by the rain if you could only see. The forest is dark on days like this, with the canopy of thick branches and their dense leaves blocking out any sliver of light cast down from overhead.

It’s only by sheer luck that you don’t manage to trip, toss your delivery into the shadow of a tree and lose it entirely before you do make it out. When the trees finally part to the barren hill overlooking town you breathe a sigh of relief, a quiet thanks for the grayed light above.

Your steps are hurried as you make your way through the quiet town. The shop windows are all lit aglow with the silhouettes of people inside, strangely dancing like shadows through a fog. A place you can not be, can not touch.

The stares the townsfolk give you make your skin crawl, as though they are so close to being what you are but not, only tied down to your world when they think themselves lofty. Their eyes always seem to question, scrape under your skin with sharpened arms, ticking and flaying, always asking: Why?

You face forward as your skin begins to prickle, not from the wet or the chill but a subdued sort of fear that nestles burning into your chest, sets your heart rushing like a rabbit.

The streets are silent enough, a small blessing; any passing strangers are hurriedly skittering through the rain and muck to hide away in their homes, children ushered with a hand to their back by flustered looking mothers, complaining in hushed voices about the rain. You only smile at them and step aside when your paths cross.

They never smile for you.

It’s why the broken clocks are delivered to your doorstep rather than brought inside, addresses and names from muffled voices calling out beyond your thick wooden door, coins and bills pushed through the mail slot to lie cold on the welcome mat. The bell above the door never chimes, and you only make your deliveries on days like this, when the rain or the dark blanket you up to keep you safe and eternally somber.

You leave the package on the doorstep, covered from the rain by a small, vermillion awning. One sharp knock is given and you’re back on your way, back to the old house, to the simplicity of the ticking, the comfort of the old cobweb on the vaulted ceiling and the drab gray of the bleakness.

There are puddles now, glistening with any light they can suck into their depths, threatening and taunting as the dull stares and that rickety old desk you really should fix. You think for a moment, that perhaps no one would even notice if one of those dark pits of rain water pulled you in entirely, only to splash through it with ease, dirtying the ends of your skirt.

The rain lessens when you crest the hill, the forest less a tangle of clattering limbs and now only a gentle sway reaches the tops of the trees, light filtering through them, as if to guide you on your way. It doesn’t lessen the bushels of thorns, the tree limbs downed and scattered over the path. In some small blessing, you’re able to scramble over them without having to plan a visit to a tailor to repair a ripped gown; scrubbing the mud from it would surely be tedious enough.

The droplets splatter against the dirt and fallen leaves in hushed bursts, the forest alive as always with the cooing of nesting birds in spite of the rain. The only thing that seems out of place is a sudden, soft thud, the snap of a branch underfoot. Just one footfall, and things return to a placid state amidst the sky’s tears.

You raise your head to glimpse in the direction, gaze sweeping over the figure of a man some paces off to your left. Beneath the shadow of a broad, twisting pine layered in thick branches, his details are mostly obscured, a thin trail of silver light only casting aglow the glimpse of a blue eye.

He’s only large enough to notice, shoulders slumped and chest rapidly rising to fall like a frightened animal; as his silhouette shifts just so you even consider that he’s shivering.

There’s something in that stare of somber blue that splinters at the wall of discomfort; it is not accusing, not bitter, worn and cold. Curious. Something akin to your own.

Damn your sweetness, your inability to simply let things be even as that ache twists around in your chest, clawing at a cage of bone and hissing that you keep silent. Be on your way. Don’t look back.

Instead, you extend your umbrella outward, toward him.

“Awful rain, hm?,” you chime.

The figure visibly tenses, seems to shrink into himself for a moment before straightening and giving one solemn nod.

“You can take my umbrella. I’m almost home, anyway.”

That seems to spark something, not much, but the stranger does take a step forward. Your eyes catch on the wet, matted hair clinging to his head, cascading down to shroud a face you still can’t quite make out.

The poor thing stirs something in you, a deep sympathy that clouds even the judgment of that flighty, skittish thing resting deep inside.

Even from such a distance it’s clear that he’s been neglected, likely cast off by the town even less favorably than you have. His scent carries on the breeze, like dirt and wood and misery.

You extend the umbrella again before realizing he won’t come any closer with you being there. So, you lower it to the ground, avoiding the mud as best you could and leave it. If he took it, fine. If not, you travel this path so often it would be collected in time.

The figure mutters something as you rise, a low string of foreign words that you can only interpret as being spoken out of surprise, perhaps even gratitude.

You smile toward him as you wipe fat, slithering raindrops from your brow.

“You don’t want to catch a fever.”

With that, you’re back on your way, thoughts of the rugged stranger weigh heavy on your mind as the roof of your home comes into view, stilted and in the same drab navy as the flowers on the wallpaper.

You could have done more. It had been instilled into you to not to open the door for someone you did not quite know, yet a part of you longed to take care of something not simply fed by oil, something only capable of telling you how much time you’ve sat alone as thanks.

Surely it was best not to let it distract you.

This was good enough.

The key is produced, the door opened, and just like the many times before that you have forced yourself from this place, the house seems less unsettling upon your return.

As what little daylight remains fades away into night, you find yourself seated, toying with the old pocket watch once more. It’s the only one that doesn’t make a lick of sense, a puzzle that can not be solved. For all the polished parts and meticulous tinkering, it still won’t work properly.

It grates and growls as though rusted, the cogs shifting inside with each movement of the arms are well-polished yet seem to do little but hiss and spit.

This is the fourth time you have taken it apart only to put it back together with no improvement.

There was little to be known about the man who owned it, some pompous, arrogant creature that you had only seen in passing. He had turned his nose up to you, you were sure of that, only to deliver this dying thing to your door the following day.

Your work had always been compared to your father’s. Though you possessed a similarity in skill, you were not what the townsfolk had deemed to be respectable. An unwed lady out on her own, biding her time repairing what they had broken rather than feeding hungry mouths delivered from her very womb, how terribly scandalous.

The pocket watch is set aside as you busy yourself tailoring a small sheet of metal for it. The graduations are carved in with a sharp razor, impeccably angled. Then, the Roman numerals, just before it’s slotted back into place.

The likeness to the former face is nearly uncanny, it’s only sturdier and less susceptible to ripping from the mere touch of tweezers. The rust s gone from the casing, and at long last— it ticks; no grinding growl as the second hand begins its revolution. The fickle thing just needed a touch up, you supposed as you flick off the desk lamp and rise to your feet.

The curtains are drawn as they always were when you step into the bedroom. The muddy dress is finally peeled away as you change and slink into the covers, and just for a moment, you almost think that you feel the animal between your breasts begin to settle too.

———

There’s a letter stuffed into the mail slot: crumpled with no postage stamp, scrawled across some scrap of paper that surely was plucked from a garbage bin.

You marvel at the lack of care for a moment before your fingers do find themselves pawing at it, unfurling the worn edges to find the words: Thank you.

Written in thick black ink, there’s a clumsiness to it, the dance of a quivering hand holding pen. You think back to the elderly woman you had made that delivery to only yesterday; had she trudged through the mud and muck just to bring you this?

Her thanks was only needed in the blessing of payment, and she had already generously done just that when she left her little humming wall clock at the door.

You flip the note over, inspecting it carefully. There’s a line there, too, hastily scratched out in the same black ink, the lines crossing and digging leaving little pinprick holes in the paper.

Holding it to the light, you can just barely make out the words: I have been alone.

Your mouth dries at the sentiment, tongue flicking out to try and force a wetness to your lips. The animal begins its keening howl, a chain rattling as claws sink into your innards; the very same agitated fear that starved you out of comfort day in and out.

The man in the forest, perhaps. You were sure that you would have remembered seeing someone so disheveled and tall about town, and if not for a certainty that he had not followed you home, you would have assumed it was him. Gratitude finally said, and well on his way to someplace else.

There’s nothing here for him or anyone else, surely he could see that. Even you could.

The walls around you seem to bulge, the room shrinking once again as every little thing held within begins to taunt and yowl. Safety was only a temporary luxury, it always has been.

The letter is discarded onto a table, as you opt to hazard a peek out of your curtains instead. The gray from yesterday remains as thick clouds crowd above, threatening another storm. The treetops and tall grass dance in the breeze, freeing leaves and breaking flower stems. There’s no one standing there to greet you, to explain themselves for the strange message that they had left.

The town had probably already driven you to madness, picturing things that were not there while old fools jab you with ominous letters and jeering stares to see just how long it would take to watch you fall apart.

Another delivery day it would be, then; best to get it out of the way before the rain begins to fall.

Maybe you could even retrieve the umbrella along the path, discarded, battered from the rain and likely unused.

You don’t bother packaging the pocket watch, choosing to hastily stuff it into the pocket of your coat instead. Courtesies be damned. Tea and a warm bath would do well when the house was sated by your absence, when you were finally given time to breathe.

In your haste, you nearly kick over what’s been left on the uppermost stair leading to your door.

You find a table clock covered in a thick black fabric, a little note attached to it giving the owner’s name and address, and a small bag containing payment.

It’s all securely placed inside, next to the ugly letter on the table.

Your umbrella doesn’t wait on the path, but you’ve hardly the mind to care. Your hand tightens around the pocket watch as you cord your way down the path and back into town, rushing amidst the foliage until the sounds of your footfalls are dulled by the street.

Reaching the house, a towering narrow building that smells like tobacco even from outside, your hand curls to knock at the door in the same breath taken as the chain is plucked to place it on the knob, intent on scurrying away immediately to avoid the disgusted gaze of the man that waits inside.

You don’t quite make it far enough before the door swings open and you’re greeted by a round face, nose upturned and lip curled into a sneer.

That isn’t imagination.

There’s a genuine hate in this man, seeping down into his bones that makes him almost seem to reek like sulfur through the cloud of cigarette smoke that wafts around him. It’s the face of someone who would love nothing more than to see your own damnation, watch the earth suck you in until your wails fall silent and a fire roars upward in your wake.

“This isn’t my watch, dear.”

“Parts needed to be replaced,” you explain, voice tight and keening like a wolf in a trap, “I assure you that I—“

“It’s shoddy work. Any clocksmith up north would have done better for half the price..”

It goes on like this for what feels like at minimum thirty revolutions, but it must have only been five or so. His droning voice makes it hard to keep track, buzzing as he examines your work, hours wasted upon aiding such an awful creature.

He only seems to grow bored of his chiding when you fall to silence. He wants a reaction, not a wide-eyed fretful stare and pursed lips caging in any sound that may bubble up from your throat.

In one final act of detestation, the watch is tossed to the ground, stomped in repetition until the hands snap, the ticking quiets, and you see months of your work brought to ruin in a mere seven seconds.

He storms back inside and slams the door shut as you stoop to collect the little, broken thing, cradling it in your palms. Maybe it wouldn’t be fixed again, but you’ve hardly the mind to let anything be left abandoned like this.

Though the anger builds, white bitter smoke billowing through your veins, it remains tucked away inside eventually communing with the animal, all but entirely snuffed out when your steps lead you to the front door of the house.

The window to the right is open, not broken. The curtains were pushed aside as though to allow a breeze to enter. A muddy footprint, vast and long scales the siding, but there’s no exiting one to join it.

You stare and listen, taking one quiet step towards the open window to strain your hearing. Nothing. Inside, it’s quiet, only the sound of the breeze rattling that note left on the table, the ticking and the familiar creaks and groans of the house settling.

So, you enter.

With the poker from the hearth in tow, the rooms are investigated one by one. Each and every one of them clear of any intruder. Even the attic, for all of it’s imagined ghosts sits empty, stale and silent. There’s no one here, nothing out of place or broken that hadn’t already been cast out from the world and delivered into your hands.

Strangely enough, it’s more peaceful like this; the leaves could be heard rustling outside, birds calling, even the chirps and strumming of crickets too late to flee the onset of chill seeping through this purgatory, filling the mundane void with sounds of life and peace.

You leave the window open.

The pocket watch is left on the desk, the kettle filled with water and placed upon the stove to heat, all before your eyes trail over to that little table beside the front door.

The only thing amiss is there, your intuition roars at you: “Look, look. Just look.”

The table clock from this morning sits there, the wood casing dusty and the hands perpetually stuck to sit at six o’clock, easy to enough to break, and easier still to fix. An overworked battery and a little oil would be its saving grace; if only things could be so simple for yourself, for the thousand or so others that surely must feel the same— clawed, fretful little rabbits.

Your eyes narrow momentarily, vaguely recalling that the damned thing had been covered when it was dragged inside. Something sable and thick, a scrap of a heavy dress shirt perhaps, verily stained. Odd that someone would have broken in merely to steal something so useless, but stranger tales have been told. For all you cared, the perpetrator could keep it.

You entertain the idea of the wild man in the trees, thick and sturdy as one. Perhaps he left the note, stole warmth from your home and found comfort in that useless old shirt after leaving that roughly scrawled note. Though the idea would horrify others, it only sets your ceaselessly racing pulse at ease.

Toying with the idea that someone so very much like you lurks the hills, found a home in your eyes and paid a visit, kind enough to wait until you were in town as to not scare you… and the kettle begins to whistle.

———

You had forgotten to close the window last night. Or maybe it was left as an invitation, a silent offer of your companionship for the unknown thing that occupies your already haunted mind these days. Something in your subconscious dared you to simply forget, see what happens, and you’re not entirely disappointed to find out that yes, something has happened.

There are three flowers laid out there in a row, smushed by the weight of a heavy palm: a daffodil left golden and proud despite the way her petals fray and wither, and two others wild and unnamed with blue and white colors leading to vibrant green stems. And roots. He hadn’t the time to pluck them proper, nor had a sense of gentleness to his touch in doing so.

It’s the first time you’ve laughed in months, a giggling that makes your chest ache from a sudden mirth through all of this wretchedness. Who knew it would only take three flowers and the appearance of someone so disconnected? You take them and place them in a vase in the same spot, careful to add just the right amount of water to keep them living for a time.

Someone brought you flowers— actually brought you a gift, not a job. You remember those eyes, too. His hands may not have been gentle, but that look was.

Though darkness still creeps internally, you’re resolute in what you must do when you prepare for the day. You’ve never really worn this dress— a soft, white thing with billowing sleeves and tight cuffs that brings a swell to your breasts and cinches your waist. One of the women about town had given it to you in lieu of payment for repairing her husband's watch, left a note prattling onward for three pages about how a woman should dress to find a man. Three!

You’ll find him, thank him for the flowers, bat your eyelashes just a little and retrieve your umbrella. That’s all. The rain would be back, more deliveries would have to be made, and if you could manage a friend from all of this well… surely things could work out for you, just this once.

Your steps are less hurried and more tentative this time around. You don’t barrel through the woods like a galloping mare, mindful of your dress as you lift the fabric at the hips to avoid thick, slickened mire. There isn’t much to do about the thorns nipping at your ankles, leaving little scratches like cat’s claws in their wake.

The thought that maybe this was a ridiculous idea only settles in your mind after an hour of searching. You don’t even have a name to call him by, not an idea on just where he may be or what his intentions truly were, all further punctuated by the fact that you’ve found yourself in the midst of a wild orchard, the yellowing grass nearly reaching your knees as you reluctantly allow your dress to flow free. Thick clusters of apples hang above your head, each nearly ripe, some even fallen to leave a fragrant sweet smell in the wake of their rot.

Thunder roars above, distant but loud, cruelly threatening the wake of a downpour that would so easily sully the delicate thing you wear. Your chest aches from exertion, from whichever horrid fear it's settled on today, and you’re nearly fully convinced of your own madness when something does finally catch your eye.

There’s a cabin, nestled between the trees, old and lacking glass panes for the windows. The roof is covered in moss, walls creeping with the old green of vines and nearly hidden away entirely by the tall grass that rises above its face.

You could wait out the storm in the dark there, rethink your steps until you find a way back home and the prospect of actually entering a building that wasn’t the very picture of your own agony stirs something within you.

You don’t bother to knock, only waltz right in and let the door shut softly behind you. It creaks as it goes, whining from the rust laden over its hinges. As expected, the cabin is mostly barren; a set of dust laden chairs sits on opposite ends of a table missing a leg, a large bookshelf housing only a torn copy of Paradise Lost and a journal, a few dirtied dishes are left on the floor, and in the corner…

There are a lot of things that make you feel small.

You couldn’t live up to your father’s name in town. The thought that you were not an equal to the other ladies with their fine jewelry and dresses, rings wrapped around their fingers, that was a sore spot despite the way you refused to admit to it. Even the hounds lurking about the butcher’s shop on lonely night deliveries, baying and growling when your feet carried you too close.

None of those things could even compare to how you felt now.

The rug he lies beneath is large on its own, but your flower-giving, grateful titan seems even more so. It’s as though walking into a bear’s den and expecting a mere squirrel. Even curled into himself in sleep, he seems impossibly huge.

You couldn’t see much of him that first night, but now… where the rags that make up his clothes reveal a series of long scars along his legs, the hairy arms that seem far too thick: all of him, all of him is massive.

Your rabbit heart does not claw or fight you now, it only flutters, placated by the sight of something so… was there really a word for it? The idea that someone so imposing could strike the match of attraction within you. Feelings were strange, each comes sharp and new like the deliberate twist of a knife through a body, soft like warm bread.

You smile as you wander to his side, recognizing the cloth he wears over his head immediately as the one stolen from your house. Your dress is smoothed at your rear as you lower yourself to sit on your knees at his side, quiet and slow.

“Hello,” you whisper, placing a hand on a shoulder that dwarfs it entirely, feeling the bulge of muscle beneath the ripped shirt, the ridge of keloid scars from deep cuts laid into his skin.

The titan’s eyelids flutter for a moment as he begins to stir, staring up at the ceiling, teetering on the edge between waking and dreaming. Then, those cold blue eyes lock onto you. A flash of disbelief crosses them, just for a moment before something flips and from the holes ripped into that makeshift hood you see an expression that seems almost agonized.

“Hello,” he rasps after a long moment, shifting onto his side to prop himself up and raise his head to level with your own.

His breathing is shallow, almost panicked and you finally think to bring your hands to your lap instead, avoid touching him and potentially startling the poor man further.

“I wanted to thank you… for the flowers. They’re beautiful.” You pause as you study what little of his expression you can make out through the mask, the way his eyes crinkle at the corners only giving a glimpse of a smile. All teeth, probably, an excited one that even the imagination of warms your heart. “I put them in a vase. I didn’t want them to die.”

“I should not have…” His voice is softer than you ever imagined that it could be, well-spoken as the words are pulled from his throat. You find yourself transfixed, almost, praying that he continues if only to hear the delicate strumming of his tone, the soft sigh of breath that leaves him afterward.

“Es tut mir leid.”

The apology is followed by a low sweep of his gaze, slowly crawling from the peek of your cleavage to your hips to rest where your hands lay clasped in your lap.

He hardly seems to know what to do with himself, what to say, and all at once the realization dawns on you that no, he isn’t merely paying his thanks and seeking conversation. Perhaps that was part of it then, but now… he seems almost entranced.

You recognize those looks, from men in passing when they leered, but from him… from this weary, haunted stranger. It only seems a silent sort of reverence; as though longing for something he’s been deprived of.

“No, it’s fine, it made me happy.”

“Happy?”

“Yes, it was sweet.”

He falls silent at that, conflicted if the pinch of his brow were anything to go by. Then, sudden, he takes your wrist and jerks your hand toward his face, thumb brushing over the small calluses over each pad of your fingers. There’s dirt beneath his fingernails, even more scaring along those massive hands and you shiver. It’s not fear it’s… something akin to it, opposite by the way it dances and writhes in warmth rather than the cold.

“You have the hands of a maker.”

Strange, sweet Goliath.

His words are spoken somberly, as if there is more to say that he holds back. A part of you warns that you’re not prepared for it anyhow, so you let him continue that motion, brushing over your palm with a featherlight touch until it begins to tickle.

Your giggle prompts him to raise his head, watery eyes threatening tears when he hears that sweet sound bubble up from within you. His hand curls over your own, trapping you in his grasp as though little else matters to him more than the need to touch you in some way.

“You have kind eyes.”

“I am not kind.”

You shake your head at that, flicking your thumb across the top of his burly hand, marveling at the smooth skin of his scars and the rough texture of the hair that dots his knuckles.

“You’re sweet to me, and that’s all that matters.”

It could have been a mistake, how easily you’ve taken to this bizarre titan. Any lady with proper regard for her standing and womanhood assuredly wouldn’t have said something like that to a beast that has the stature and the scent of something wild.

Still, the words leave your lips far too quickly to draw back; he responds with an urgency.

You find yourself pulled ever closer by the iron grip on your hand, tugged into the rug-turned-mattress by this man as he cages you in to meld against his chest. He’s everywhere, warm and burning against the chill of your skin with flesh touched by hellfire.

You only sigh pitifully when his arm wraps around your waist. When was the last time you had even felt an embrace? You couldn’t recall, and even if you had, it would have paled in comparison to one such as this. You breathe him in like a summer’s breeze, tasting a hint of the apple orchard beyond on your tongue when you open your mouth to speak once again.

“See..?”

The tension in his muscles seems to melt away; if your heart is like a hare then surely his must be more akin to a bull. It takes some time before he softens entirely against you, despite his initiation. His breath is almost a pant when his hand trails upward along your back, feeling every ridge and dip and curve, breath catching in wonder as you allow it.

“You are soft like…”

His head dips to press into your shoulder, breathing you in, humming his approval at the mingling scent of clock oil and tea leaves that lingers on your skin. Even from beneath the hood, you can feel the way his lips brush over you, his mouth parted in a voiceless plea.

“… like one of the flowers.”

It’s almost torture really, how someone could be so comforting, so endearing.

His hand trails further, drifting over the backside of your dress to curl against your thigh threatening something if you don’t conjure the sense to stop him. It stokes the fire within you, glowing ember in place of a brain, it seemed. You feel weak, lost in a foreign touch and sweet, clumsily spoken words.

If the townsfolk could see you now, herded up in this stranger’s arms, surely they wouldn’t dare to cast any disapproval your way. Not one of those meek little devils would have a word to say… not now or ever again.

“You’re like… a tree then,” you whisper as you finally will yourself to twist away from the grip, already mourning the loss of warmth as a cold wind filters through the openings in the cabin.

He doesn’t sulk as you pull away, only seems content to have been blessed with that much. That mist remains in his eyes before they shut again, willing himself to rise to sit up just as you do.

“Will you stay?”

You glance over the cabin again, with all of its dust and cobwebs. Your umbrella sits in the corner, propped upright with its handle leant against the wall, out of place amidst the dilapidation prevalent here.

This wasn’t a home at all, just a quiet, cold purgatory. Though the halls of your own may mock your solitude, this place seems to echo his very being: alone, broken, rotting and so, so very cold.

Your heart bleeds as you weigh your options, expression growing sullen and torn. He notices, tentatively takes your hand again in an almost practiced way of providing comfort. Had he ever even…

Your thoughts begin to drift again, and you force yourself to settle on a choice. It’s not your heart that should be damned, but that horrid seed of doubt constantly burdening, stealing from, and clawing at you.

“I should get home, before the rain.”

“Verstanden.”

“You can come too.”

There’s an audible hiss of breath through his teeth, that peculiar look of agony crosses his face again… and finally, he weeps.

———

König, you think to call him.

He teaches you German from time to time, in turn for you allowing him to watch as you work away at the clocks. It feels fitting in a way. Not because he harbors the self-importance of a noble figure, nor his stature; he’s simply become something impossibly important in the week long span you’ve spent together now.

You’ve decorated the guest room properly for him, and in turn he’s brought you firewood, foraged and hunted so that neither of you have had to bother with the town. The fire raged in the hearth as the cold continues to set in, and your walks to town have been enjoyable now. He accompanies you to the hill on some nights, draws you a bath when you come home, even cooks.

So… maybe a king was not entirely appropriate, but calling him a servant certainly wasn’t either. Even with the way he seems to melt and become docile at the slightest brush of your hand, the way you know with a certainty he would die for you if you spoke the word.

And still, you call him König: the king of your heart.

There are flowers at your windowsill each morning, still clinging to their roots. You bake the bread while he cooks stew with herbs gathered from the little garden just beyond the walls of the home, one he’s graciously told you he’s wanted to expand for you. Books you’ve overlooked for years have been read end to end by him, and he especially seems to like those with art of flowers drawn into their pages, always seeking you out to show you, explain their meanings, expressing the beauty that he sees in them and within you.

You don’t know where he’s come from, what his life was like before this, and with the same respect that he gives to you… you don’t ask.

“We’re starting a new story,” you had said the first morning over a breakfast of hastily made apple dumplings. To which he had agreed, with a somber hum, nodding his hooded head.

Though you do wonder about his secrets, his face. Seeing him now is all it really takes to make you smile.

He comes through the door, hauling in the massive grandfather clock that a carriage had left only this morning. The bob and the lyre both appeared broken at a glance, but your heart sinks when you read the name on the note left attached to it.

The same petulant little man that had stomped that poor watch to pieces right in front of you, no doubt he had broken this one too in some sort of tantrum. What was it now? Had the poor clock chimes a bit too loudly during the night? Was that deserving of a foot lodged right into its heart?

“König, do you mind just leaving it there?” You gesture toward the middle of the room, watching as the muscles beneath his shirt don’t even seem to ripple from exertion.

“Natürlich.”

As you set to work, pulling away parts, straightening out bends and replacing what’s broken, he kneels at your side watching with rapt attention. There’s no fixing the pendulum bob entirely, it’s far too bent and scraped, but you wouldn’t be replacing that with work of your own either. The bastard gets what he gets and that will do.

In truth, your work since having König here has only improved, and perhaps you’re showing off a bit, but the way he watches you tinker with the dusty old things as if mesmerized fills you with pride. You could fix anything, yes, with him at your side you wanted to.

The house doesn’t echo wasted time anymore, only that crowding feeling of something buzzing and chirping, budding up in the spaces where shadows should crawl: love. You wouldn’t trade it for the loneliness to return, not ever. A new sort of fear that stings just as much as it does caress.

So you work in silence, only breaking it to answer the sparse questions that he throws out.

When the clock is shoddily finished, you wipe the oil from your hands on a rag, and take König’s own large arm as it’s offered out to you to stand.

“I will carry it for you tonight,” he suggests, delicately brushing a bit of dust from your sleeve. His touch does linger, always lingers, trailing up to massage at your shoulder and cup at your neck. The swell of heat that arrives at your face then, the press of your thighs beneath your skirt… it’s always the same.

“I thought that you didn’t want to go into town?”

Your shoulder meets his chest as you press against him, doing very little to calm your body’s frustrations. The blood within you stirs like a violent wave feeling him this near— cleaned up and dressed in some patchwork conglomerate of your father’s old clothes. He smells like a union between the earth and sea, salt and alder leaf, a hint of thyme and lavender.

His eyes glitter when his gaze roves from your face to chest, hand skittering down to curl at the small of your back. To anyone else, you would look the picture of husband and wife perhaps.

“I would go anywhere with you.”

A fresh normal, like the rise of spring, those words and touches that suggest more: threatening while you plead in silence for him to just give you a push, unlace your dress and finally feel and see him properly.

“Then… yes, let’s get the cursed thing out of here tonight.”

His grip tightens around you just for a moment, fingers curling and flexing into the soft linen covering you, bunching it up just so at your back before he relents, draws away.

“You dislike this one?” König sounds almost hurt, perhaps he favored it, being tall and similar to him in some way. Another odd thing, hard to place, but he’s never seemed to like you talking down about your own work, a habit that needed breaking.

“No,” you begin to explain, curling your arms around his middle as you both stare at the thing, ticking quietly before you, “its owner is just a pain.”

“I can tell. You seem nervous, meine geliebte.”

“You haven’t taught me that one yet,” you point out, not playing coy, despite the look he gives you that suggests you know.

There’s always that ache when his eyes narrow and that playful glint reaches them. How someone could look as though they’ve suffered dozens of lifetimes of pain and still have that look, you did not know, but it excites you. A furious, needy excitement.

“Beloved,” is all that he says.

The stare relents as he heads back out into the garden, leaving you to sort yourself out.

———

“You’re sure that you can carry it the entire way?”

It’s not that you could help, really. The thing must have weighed as much as yourself, strung up over König’s back with a rope he had found lying someplace in the garden.

“Ja, it’s fine.” He’s not out of breath in the slightest either. You realize then that if you put on all your charms bending, arching and delicately maneuvering your hands to fix the clocks, the assuredly this was his way of doing the same. You try to reign yourself in from staring at the damp spot on his shirt, clinging to his broad expanse of chest, the way that his thighs seem to tense with each step forward.

You can’t— you merely trail behind him until you take the lead to bring him right to the other man’s doorstep. Your hands find the ropes that keep the clock saddled to König’s back, carefully untying them as he stoops down to let its wooden legs rest against the ground below. It scrapes, the consequence of being so heavy and forced to stand on those four tiny legs, and only then does it decide to make a cacophony of noise signaling the new hour, a trilling sort of bong that makes even your ears ring as it breaks up the silence of the night.

You don’t even need to knock, because the door flies open immediately. The man stands proud, unperturbed by your giant companion as he shoves past you to inspect his clock. There are no greetings, no pleasantries, and if you were just a bit more careless with your reputation, smacking him would have only brought you satisfaction.

“Not good, but it will do,” the little man huffs, knocking at the glass casing over the clock’s face with his knuckle. “Be a dear and have your friend bring it in for me.”

You’ve no doubt that König senses your annoyance as he cocks his head at you, but when you give a curt nod in response, he does what’s requested. The clock is set in a large den. It’s not as opulent and gilded as you had expected, just a simple home housing a very infuriating man. You watch from the doorway, swaying on your feet as König rights the clock and pushes it where he’s directed. Just a few more seconds and the two of you would be well on your way, and perhaps he would even teach you a new curse for a man like that.

He comes uncomfortably close to König’s side, a smug look plastered over his face that only seems to exaggerate just how greasy and mousy that you know him to be. Something is whispered that you can’t quite make out, a dare, a mocking taunt, something that pisses you off even without the knowledge.

The hood is pulled off by thin fingers, cast aside to the floor beyond the pair.

The man’s face goes pale before you even get a glimpse of König at all. He backs away, mouth gaping as König calmly moves to retrieve the cloth. You think you hear the word “monster” mumbled amidst a slew of incoherent babbling, but when your companion turns to face you, you feel no fear.

König’s face is like patchwork, scars connecting all together. They run like small streams up from his jaw and over his chin, splitting his lip at the corner of his mouth and dancing up to his eye. The nose is broken in places, several times over likely, crooked with a bump that only seems strangely cute. The unkempt hair lining his jaw should be trimmed, but… there’s no monster here. Only a man who has seen and felt pains that you could not bring yourself to imagine.

His head dips when he notices your wide-eyes stare, a sort of shame hidden away behind strands of long, black hair. He shuffles out of the house and shuts the door behind him, standing rigid as he expects the worst, for you to wail and sob and gather a group of townsfolk to herd him far away with fire and stones.

You only take his hand.

“Let’s go home.”

He doesn’t bother to hide himself away again during the walk back, his hand remains in your hold, trembling every now and then and gripping you tighter as he struggles with the thoughts no doubt raging in his skull like a storm. You offer your comfort as you lean toward him, head pressed against his arm even as you turn the knob and step inside.

You warm a bath for him then, a task that is no easy feat. König does not offer his help, resigned to some belief that this is only a temporary pity.

He allows you to peel away his clothes, graze your fingers over his body, over the scars all with a barely contained creature scraping out from inside: the untamed bull that you can not see. You press a kiss there, over his heart, feel it’s beating against your lips, pulling away only when his thumb strokes your cheek.

Each new sight of him is just as wonderful as they have always been. It’s not that you take pleasure in seeing the way he must have suffered; the now healed bullet wound over his abdomen speaks volumes of just what people are capable of when met with the sight of something that they do not understand.

The questions burn at the back of your skull, bitten back as your jaw tightens.

You help him wash with soap and a soft cloth, carefully removing any patches of dirt and dust that have lingered despite his near-daily bathing since living beneath your roof. The rough beard is trimmed in full, until all that’s left is a trail of dark stubble lingering along his jaw, broken up by scars like thin spider silk that make up the entirety of his body.

His hair is a mess, too, matted and clinging to his skull in wild clumps. You’re gentle with the brush as you free the tangles, clipping at what can not be saved with sharpened scissors, and massaging at his scalp as he murmurs his approval. It’s such a subdued, gentle cooing from his chest, a purr almost that shatters your heart and forces it back into place instantly.

Whatever he was or was not, you were certain this stray had never felt a touch like your own, if he had ever been touched by human hands at all.

König seems to settle greatly once you’ve tended to him and it does seem to finally dawn on him that you’re not repulsed, you’ve touched most of his damaged body, and have only brought him the gentleness that should have been commonplace by now. This isn’t some elaborate torture method— it’s only tender.

“Your turn, hm?”

That, however, brings you pause. Your hands rest on his shoulder, carefully trying to loosen a stubborn knot when you abruptly still. As if that were all he needed for encouragement, his hands cinch your waist, pulling you up and over the rim of the tub as you whine your protests in hushed little hisses. All for naught, as you find yourself submerged below the waist.

“I’m still dressed,” you sulk as the water dampens your dress, now seated between his parted thighs.

König only gives a laugh in response as his arms encase you in another embrace, his head resting against the dip between your shoulder and neck as his chest is brought to press against your back.

“And you’re still mine.”

His fingers trail further down to the wet fabric billowing amidst the soft, lapping waves of the water, pulling it up until it rests just above your hips. There’s no tact, only a clumsy sort of desperation rarely seen upon men, especially not of his stature.

You allow him to loosen the strands of lace at your back, bring your clothing up and over your head to leave it resting and dripping over the rim, pooling below onto the boards of the wooden floor. Your undergarments follow to join the flooding pile of soaked linen and lace.

You’re flustered certainly, grateful for the water surrounding that conceals the warmth that echoes your fondness for this titan between your legs.

You even considered that he would be more shy, not… as eager to begin to wash you, and not with the cloth but with his own hands, nimbly moving over every dip and curve coating you in the slick residue of soap, leaving suds in its wake. He starts at your shoulders, breath growing heavy the more you soften and relax against his chest.

It’s only a matter of time before his hands find and cup your breasts, and you swear that you can feel the grin that splits his face as you melt further against him. König gropes at and massages you there, eager fingers deliberately stroking at your hardened nipples until you quiver and sigh.

You find purchase moving your arms to your sides to grasp at his biceps, muscles flexing as he works his way down your trembling abdomen to your mound, kissing at your shoulder as you purr your encouragement.

The praises that leave your lips come tight and barely restrained as a finger trails against your slit, moving up to circle your clit before diving back down to prod at you.

Your head is gently tilted back by his free hand, your face peppered in clumsy, messy kisses as a digit sinks into you. It’s lazy work, trying to find a rhythm with your squirming. He only seems satisfied when it presses further, curling against the spot that makes you mewl sweetest, and finally, he kisses you full on.

It’s delivered as sloppily as his fingering, any trailing thought left in your skull dims, fuzzy with sheer bliss as his thumb begins to pet at your clit in tandem with each push and drag of his index. It doesn’t help that you feel his own growing need, hard and hot against your lower back, throbbing with each sound pulled from your mouth, his hips jerking on occasion to drag his shaft against your backside.

“König, we should get out,” you murmur through a flood of heat that curls and urges and presses at your lower half to seek some satisfaction, have him bed you proper. “We can go to—“

His mouth meets yours again, hungrier and more determined than before, the water rolling with each flick of his thumb. In a mere moment you feel that heat stoke to an inferno, blazing from your stomach to cause your feet to kick out, water sloshing over the side of the tub as you ride out each passing wave of paradise crying openly into his mouth.

When your trembling does subside, he kisses your cheek and pulls you up from the water, wrapping you up in his arms. His stare remains ever burning, pupils blown to a coal black, dreamy in the way he slinks back just to drink you in further. You can’t keep track of all of the places his eyes seem to dart, which touch to settle on and relish as he paws at you from chest to rear, as if mesmerized that you are no mere illusion.

You’re giving him everything; no longer the king of simply a beating organ tucked beneath your breast, but your body, bed, wherever he chooses to conquer next, of all the things that he’s been deprived of.

“We will go to bed, beloved,” he rasps, sounding more present than ever. The nightmares lurking behind his eyes have long past now: all focus is turned to you. You’re the only thing that’s ever loved him in return. “We will… become one.”

“Have you ever…” Your own voice fails you now, the evident want between you two incapable of making this any less… tedious. It was tedious, a flighty feathered thing that seems keen on slipping out of your grasp at any moment. If it were to be his first, surely it should be special, somehow, someway. If it were not… you dreaded that thought, a bitter envy sours on your tongue until it’s shaken off.

“No,” he states simply, shrugging.

Though a sense of relief seems to flood you at that, you dare not show it. You will take him to your bed, climb atop him and show him how these things work, a slow sort of love and the rest could wait.

It was foolish to believe that König would settle for such a thing, wild and only temporarily tamed by your sweetness: he is entirely different the moment you’re herded into the bedroom. The desperation of his touches has faded out entirely, replaced with what feels almost like a rage.

He wouldn’t take out humanities sins on you, no, but he would years of brutal neglect have left him starved and it just so happens that you’re an outlet for it, something to feed from by way of spilling his soul and his seed all into you, taken back with the kisses and praises that would surely come after this union.

You’re unceremoniously pushed onto the bed, lying at your side as he climbs in behind you. He whispers his requests into your hair, even as his hand wraps to pull your thigh up before you can bless him with a nod in response. He struggles for a moment, parting your labia with the obscene, ridiculous thing that hangs between his legs. It drags over you in repetition, oiled like the clock cogs before the head of his cock finally finds the opening his finger explored only minutes earlier.

You almost expect him to break you right then, force you to take what your body— no body- had surely been made for, but he only thrusts the tip inside and gives you some time to adjust, roll your hips down centimeter by agonizing centimeter.

“You are… Does it hurt you..?” His voice is a breathless pant, trying to hold himself together despite the daze he’s found himself in, buried not even three inches into your cunt.

“No… you can move,” you breathe out, eyelids fluttering as you tilt you head to look at him over your shoulder.

König clings to you as he sinks further, grasping at your waist to pull your further down, sharp breaths hissed between gritting teeth as he delights in the way your womanhood grips at his shaft.

Just as before, there’s no rhythm to him, he takes the sounds that leave you as a direction, huffing into your ear words that your mind could not hope to translate. There’s an indulgence to it, shared between you both as his hand curls tighter against your thigh, spread open and accepting of the brutal pace he takes to have just a taste of what it feels to be a normal man.

His words falter at a point, when you feel your body tightening around him, sucking him in, closer, nearer as your head lolls back. The inferno from before pales in comparison to the blaze that overtakes you now, his voice strained with bliss as you begin to moan for him. With each drag and soar of his cock spearing you open, you’re only brought further to a glimpse of Eden. If this were the fall of man, you find you couldn’t question Eve for relishing in it.

“… you gave me a name,” he rasps, “A home…”

All at once that glimmer of heaven crashes down around you, bathes you in the glow of something lofty and holy as he pulls you close and drives himself to the hilt within you. The throbbing and pulsing of his length pulls you over just as his seed spills within, drips thick and flooding as your own sex drools in tandem, sharing a perfect rapture both clandestine and sacred. He gives you another generous thrust, ensuring that he’s carved a space inside no other man could ever hope to fill.

You fret when you find him weeping, quiet tears rolling down his pale cheeks to spill over your shoulder, but the gentle smile on his face is pacifying as you twist around to face him. “And now you have my love.”

“I’ll cherish it,” he murmurs, voice broken and pitiful as you’re maneuvered upward to rest against the feather-stuffed pillows against the headboard.

You curl against him, head resting on his chest, an arm draped over his waist. He takes your hand into his own, appraising it like the first time you properly met. Hands of a maker. Your mind wanders to significance in that statement, the things that needn’t be told are finding ways to curtain you anyhow when he speaks again.

“Could you fix me?” He asks, tracing over the calluses on your fingertips, still bathing in the afterglow.

The question, though you felt it coming, still hurts to hear him speak it: breathing life into a thought that should have never existed to begin with.

“There’s nothing to fix.” Though you speak true, though you know he feels your sincerity, his eyes are heavy when he looks to you again. “Why would you ask me that?”

The story that he tells you then is one of horror. From his maker down to the things he’s done, seen, felt: hated from the moment he woke into this strange world, the horrible loneliness that pushed and bedded down inside of him like acceptance never would. The people that he’s throttled in some desire to finally have someone like him; men, women, it made no difference. All of it is bared with only one message eternally prevalent: he has only ever wanted to be loved.

In truth, he was a monster. Not because he was given the instinctual urge to be, but because it was all he knew. Gnashing teeth from demons hurling that word out with every stone they threw, every shot and stab at his heart.

You listen, despite the way it hurts, pull him a little closer when he ends his tale with your meeting, how he knew you were the only blessing he would ever receive in his lifetime— however long that may be.

You were good at fixing broken things, but König never needed to be fixed. Only found.

———

“Now you’re supposed to say it,” you hum, as his hands reach to the hem of the hood— his- covering your face. They rove beneath the fabric, curling against the skin of your cheeks, tracing small patterns there, some rotations like the clocks, others the childish hearts scribbled into books.

“I vow to take you as my wife.”

“You’re bad at this.” You giggle when he does finally push the cloth up past your nose, above your eyes and further until it’s pulled back like a veil.

“I will love you endlessly,” he continues, returning your noise of elation with a huffed laugh of his own. “I already do.”

“I love you, too.”

No one in town would ever properly marry you two, not if one look could make a weak man fall to his knees in horror, but here, beneath the roof of a home once echoing the same voice that haunts him… it was good enough. The moon seems to echo your vows with dancing rays, stars twinkling in approval as the calls of night birds carry through the open window.

There are no rings, no written formalities to be stored away with dust-ridden papers, preyed upon by mites. It’s far more sacred, genuine than the flippant affairs and arrangements that go on with those that would so readily cast the both of you aside. In truth— the thought of them rarely comes; doesn’t even rile up that intense fear inside of you any longer.

Everything only seems easier with the blooming garden outdoors, and the man who gazes upon you like he sees divinity itself behind your eyes, in the softness of your flesh.

When you kiss, it’s something from a fairytale, flowers strewn at your feet and the veil removed from your hair by a gentle hand.

Eden doesn’t seem so much like a memory lost to time, after all.

#könig x reader #könig x you #konig x reader #konig x you #könig #konig #cod fanfiction

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