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rays-of-fire-and-ice · 3 months ago

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An Unwavering Light - Chapter 2

Rating: T/Teen for violence (in this chapter) and mature themes, including ones about trauma and depression.

Setting: begins before the confrontation with Aizen and co. in Fake Karakura Town arc, and goes from there to the Thousand Year Blood War arc. This chapter takes place during the events of the manga from chapters 334-391.

Music to listen to: Recollection I (YT | Spotify), In Remembrance by Evan Call (YT | Spotify), Ceremony Commences by Shiro Sagisu (YT | Spotify), 1130 TYBW full of guitars by Shiro Sagisu (YT | Spotify), Nothing Can be Explained Instrumental by Shiro Sagisu (YT | Spotify), Nightmare by Shiro Sagisu (YT | Spotify) Invasion by Shiro Sagisu (YT | Spotify)

Fic synopsis: During the confrontation against Aizen, the unthinkable happens. For Hitsugaya, a vow is broken, and for Hinamori, her future is unknown. With everything in shambles, how can they piece their lives back together? Or their bond?

Chapter synopsis: Hitsugaya loses his focus after Hinamori's sudden appearance on the battlefield and he finds himself turning his attention to the man who started all of this. Hinamori sets out to prove why she is worthy of being the lieutenant of the Fifth Division.

AN: A warning that this chapter is particularly violent, with mentions of severe injuries, including self-inflicted (only for Halibel's fraccion if you remember how Ayon comes into being).

Other than that, this chapter feels like I'm going 'look at all the missing scenes!'. I didn't want this to be a complete a play-by-play for the whole battle (and for the moments I did, I simply to did it either to show another perspective or look deeper into how the character may have felt in that moment), so I found moments where I thought something may have happened. We're only moments away from the pain that is chapter 392/episode 293 ;_;

Hope you all enjoy this!

Disclaimer: BLEACH and it’s character’s belong to Tite Kubo.

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___________________________________

The crescent moon shone overhead against a starless sky.

Hitsugaya shielded his eyes to make it out. He’d never seen a moon so sharp and bright. Somehow, though, he knows he’ll eventually grow accustomed to it. That it will become as natural to him as the sun and moon in the real world.

Hello, Master.

The booming voice didn’t startle him. He lowered head and hand, but was slow to turn to the towering dragon behind him. Unlike the last few times, the creature doesn’t bring icy gusts of wind or crashing snow with his arrival.

“It’s you again,” is all Hitsugaya could say. He was not in awe or fearful, only confused. What was this creature? Did he have anything to do with the spiritual potential that woman mentioned? “I can understand what you’re saying this time.”

Do you know my name? he asked.

Hitsugaya shook his head.

The dragon lowered his head rather sullenly. You will hear it in time.

"You haven't told me what it is," he said.

I have tried, but you cannot hear it.

Hitsugaya didn't understand how that was possible. Rather than question the dragon, he stared at the ice beneath his bare feet. It’s cold, but it does not freeze him. A landscape like this should have him shivering at the very least, but it’s surprisingly not unpleasant. If anything, it felt liked he belonged here.

The idea made him frown. “What is this place?”

Your inner world. It is where all your potential and power resides, the dragon said.

“And why did you bring me here? Why are you in my dreams?”

You called out to me.

Hitsugaya raised his head. “What do you mean? I never did that.”

You did it without realising. I hear things you cannot. For years now, you have been calling out to me, and I heeded.

“No, you were trying to hurt Baa-chan,” Hitsugaya accused. “Why?”

I did not. That was a result of you not having control of your abilities. I had hoped you would hear my name, and in doing so, harness the power within you. The dragon gave a growling huff – a sigh, perhaps. However, despite the power you have, you are still a child, after all.

Hitsugaya bit back a barrage of arguments, knowing it would get him nowhere. He was also perplexed at the range of emotions this dragon was showing. Before he’d been stoic, but just now he’d sounded disappointed. Still, there’s a patience about him, a willingness to listen to him even when he knew it would get him nowhere. In a small way, it reminds him of the patience of his Granny.

He stared down at his hands. This power the dragon spoke of, did it come from them? If he directed his hands in certain ways, like how Hianamori did when she practiced those weird gestures on her breaks from the Academy, would it he be able to control it?

Without realising, he found his mind shifting, as if focusing on a sense. But this was nothing like the senses he knew. He didn’t see, smell, taste, hear, or physically feel anything. It was a sense beyond those, one that encompassed his mind. It picked up a presence in the land around him and the towering dragon before him. It radiated in icy, invisible waves. It’s immense, so much so Hitsugaya winced as he tried to break out of whatever this was.

With a yelp, he freed himself, but it sent him stumbling back and barely catching himself before he could fall on his backside.

“W-What was that?’ he murmured to himself.

You sensed the power within you. That is only the surface, like what you see immediately here.

He looked around again and noticed for the first time just how vast the icy plain was. It extended beyond what his eye can see, continuing past the horizon into darkness. Frozen trees and hills far as the eye could see, lit only by a small crescent moon.

Hitsugaya shook his head. “What’s my power?”

You will learn that in time. First, you must train. Then, you must learn my name. The more the learn about your abilities and mine, the better control you will have.

“And Baa-chan will never be hurt again?”

No, my power will be for you and you alone to wield.

Shinigami were supposed to use their spiritual powers to protect Souls and Humans from harm caused by Hollows. He’d seen, however, that Shinigami are not the revered figures most children saw them as. Like any adult, they have faults. Like any adult, they could disappoint you.

He raised his hands again, looking at the backs before rotating them to face the palms up. What things could he do with these powers? The same as other Shinigami? He never wanted to become a Shinigami, but it seemed he had no choice. If he stayed in the Junrinan, he would never learn how to control the cold that had nearly killed Granny. And Hinamori would be there at the Academy, at least. He tried to ignore the slight glee that came with that thought.

“How do I learn your name?”

____________________________

When Hitsugaya woke this morning, before the sun had risen and all of his officers were still asleep, he thought about seeing Hinamori. Try as might, he couldn’t dismiss the idea as he changed into his uniform, attended the emergency meeting, or ate a small breakfast, appetite lost at the thought of who he would be facing. Even after Rangiku joined him in the few hours they had left before the battle, he thought to ask his lieutenant to take a detour with him to Fifth Division before they met up with the other captains and lieutenants.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t. He needed to focus on what lay ahead for them. They weren’t just engaging Aizen in battle, but the Arrancars. He’d trained in the spare time he had to ensure he was better prepared than he had been in the World of the Living.

Hitsugaya would cross swords with Aizen, he would see to it that it happens. Because he would not cut him down out of malice or hatred. He would defeat him for the vow he'd made years ago, and for Soul Society as part of his duties as a captain of the Gotei Thirteen. He had earned the title fairly and without agenda, Aizen had not. He would stand as an example of what captain should be, and against everything Aizen is and believed in.

He would go to this battle as a captain, and return ready to help Hinamori through whatever came next.

Yet, as he and Rangiku had made their way to the Senkaimon, he’d extended his senses to detect Hinamori’s reiatsu. It was stable, much stronger than he thought it would be. He couldn’t help but let out a small, relieved breath. She’ll be safe here, he thought, they can’t get to her here.

It’s why the pulse of her reiatsu is a shock to the system. For a fraction of a second, he thinks he’d imagined it, but it’s stable and remains in the periphery of his sense. He hesitates mid battle, almost earning him a slash from the blonde Espada. He doesn’t have time to look around as Hyourinmaru clashes with her sword.

The Espada holds him there, matching his strength. “Your spiritual pressure was spiked for a moment.”

He keeps his expression neutral. Was this a tactic to catch him off guard? “What are you on about?"

Her gaze narrows a fraction. “What happened?”

He matches it. “I don’t know what you're walking about.”

He releases a flurry of ice, which she lunges away from with ease. At least it put distance between them. More than being perturbed by his opponent’s observations, his chest constricts at sensing Hinamori’s reiatsu is still in the area.

Hinamori…

She’s somewhere behind him, next to Rangiku. She was likely the source of that fiery explosion before that helped his lieutenant against The Espada’s fraccion. Just as he noticed this morning, her reiatsu is steady and strong, perhaps the best it’s ever been. Yet he is reminded of the last time he’d seen her.

Please save Captain Aizen!

He lets out a shuddering, quiet exhale through his parted lips. Why did you have to come?

What’s going on in her mind? More importantly – the very next thought makes his stomach churn and anger roil up at himself for even thinking such a thing – was she here for the Soul Society or for Aizen?

His opponent comes in for another strike, and he’s forced to forget about Hinamori for the time being. If she’s with Rangiku, she should be safe.

___________________________

It’s had been simpler to find the battle than Hinamori thought. It was simpler still to rush around undetected, setting up an invisible kido net that used a combination of the spells around Rangiku and attaching it to her lieutenant’s badge. It’s one of the many combinations she’d come up with while researching and reciting kido chants in her room. Depending on how they faired after this one, she may need to use another. As Genji had said, these opponents are far stronger than any they’d faced, she can sense it from the reiatsu that emanates from them.

Even as she stared down these opponents a few minutes ago, Hinamori couldn’t help but notice Rangiku’s worry in her peripheral. This is why she came here: to prove to her and everyone else she was no longer Aizen’s subordinate. She was the lieutenant of Fifth Division, and she would fight alongside them.

Around them, her fire now extinguishes to smoke. She pants for a couple breaths and a sweat has broken out on her face and arms from exertion and nerves. She inwardly chastises herself for the latter. She has been in many battles, some of which have had months long gaps between them. Why should this one be any different?

“Are you okay, Hinamori?”

“Yes.” She drops a hand from Tobiume’s hilt and turns to look at her fellow lieutenant. She musters up a smile – albeit an rueful one. “I apologise, Rangiku-san. That’s the first time I’ve ever used that king of kido combination.”

Rangiku smiles faintly. “Don't apologise. It was impressive.” She briefly glances at the slowly dissipating smoke around them. “That was Fushibi, right? I’ve never seen it so finely spread out before.”

Hinamori can’t help but embrace the tiny swell of pride cause by Rangiku’s words. She lifts her other hand from Tobiume and gently massages it with the other. “Well…I blended Fushibi with Shakkago. After that, I cloaked them with Kyokko and stretched it out like a net.”

Most of the smoke has dissipated, and she casts her gaze to the horizon. It’s one of the few places where she didn’t see a battle occurring. “I must admit, it was hard to do all of that under these conditions but…” She returns her small smile to Rangiku. “I’m glad it worked.”

At Rangiku’s widening smile, Hinamori dares to hope. Finally, one of her friends’ worry had vanished. She’d proven she didn’t need worry or concern. She can fight alongside Rangiku and the others. Now, she needs to confront –

One of the few plumes of remaining smoke shifts strangely. Then, not even a second after, “Thrust, Cierva!!”

The other two also emerge from the smoke, calling out what sounded like releases for their weapons.

Hinamori’s heart races. “What?!”

She takes in their changed appearance – one has become half humanoid half serpent, the middle one has horns, and the last one had a yellow mane coming from coming from a headpiece. But above all, they looked unharmed.

She shakes her head. “I knew it wouldn’t affected severely affect, but there’s unscathed!”

“They regenerate when they perform their resurrection,” Rangiku explains. “It's their most powerful attack."

So surprised by this revelation, Hinamori doesn’t pay attention to what her opponents say to each other. Both she Rangiku raise their blades, ready for their next attack.

For Hollows, Hinamori had a knack for being able to tell what sort of attacks they will likely use. There was usually a tell, perhaps in something unique about their appearance or in the way they moved across the battlefield. With these three, she has no idea. They’re a species she’s not confronted until now. She wishes she got more intel about them before coming here.

Then, without warning, all three Arrancar each violently rip one of their own arms off. Both she and Rangiku can only gasp in horror, and watch as they throw their limbs into the middle of their semicircle, where they knot over one another, then twirl and becoming a thick cloud of white smoke.

It expands, becoming monolithic and taking the shape of something inhuman.

“Wh-What is that?!” Rangiku stammers.

But Hinamori cannot reply. She has lost her voice, and all she sees is darkness. A strange terror has her in its clutches, one that sends ripples of cold through her and drags her closer and closer to the beast’s eyes that are as black as bottomless pits.

___________________________

A new presence has joined the battlefield. One which gives Hitsugaya pause. He’s never felt anything like it; a dark abyss of energy, one that threatens to suck in anything near it.

He doesn’t chance a glimpse in the direction of the reiatsu, focusing on the Espada as she lunges forward with a particularly hard strike. He deflects it with a grunt, sending her sword off to the right. He takes the chance to stab at her side, but she spins out of the way and comes for his side instead. He twists and blocks the attack, but it leads to them clashing swords again.

Neither budge, pushing their strength and weight into their weapons. There’s faint tremor in his limbs which he pointedly ignores. However, there’s something about the Esapda’s posture too, it’s a fraction more ridged than it should be. He hasn’t been much of a struggle for her up to this point, and surely crossing swords like this was not a challenge for her. Is she affected by this dark presence too?

“What is that thing?” he demands. “It’s come from your fraccion.”

Halibel considers for a moment, simply returning his glare. “It’s none of your concern.”

Before she can notice, he lands a kick in her sternum, sending her skidding back. The beginnings of Hyourinmaru's Shikai are on his lips, ready to use the chain to –

Rangiku’s reiatsu violently spikes up

He freezes, eyes widening at the shock of it. She’s severely hurt, bordering fatally. Matsumoto!

Faintly, he hears someone else scream her name. With a grunt, he realises it’s Hinamori. What’s happening? He needs to --!

The Espada is suddenly in front of him. Her slash at him sends him barrelling backwards, his feet in the air until he forces them to the ground to skid him to a stop. Heart pounding and a bead of sweat falling down his temple, he struggles to return his focus to his opponent. He goes on the defensive against the Espada while he senses what’s happening with the lieutenants.

Rangiku’s is falling, and so Hinamori. Judging from her stable reiatsu though, Hinamori isn’t injured. Again, she calls out his lieutenant’s name. Then, they come to a stop, and as he dodges a strike from Halibel, he sees below them and off to the far right a blur of blue -- some kind of kido net, he can’t tell which – and two figures in the middle.

He barely has time to feel an iota of relief. Not because of the Espada’s attacks sending him away from the view within seconds, but because that dark presence suddenly appears in front of Hinamori’s reiatsu. Only two seconds later, it strikes her.

The impact on her reiatsu is as sudden as Rangiku. She’s gone into shock, and her injures are almost as severe as his lieutenant’s. She’s being propelled backwards.

He almost falls back and drops out of the sky. Hinamori! No!

He quickly straightens and looks back in the direction of the lieutenants. He can’t see them anymore, but there’s the source of the powerful reiatsu. A giant creature stands in the air above the city building, looking like a Huge Hollow but having the height of a Menos.

That all too familiar violent anger boils up in the pit of his stomach. He goes to flash-step to Rangiku and Hinamori, ready to freeze whatever this vile creature was to the bone.

A stab from the Espada stops him. The point of her sword comes dangerously close to his temple, and he barely manages to evade it. Strands of his hair are off, flying into the air.

"Pay attention," she reprimands despite her flat tone. "Their battle is not yours."

Hisagi and Izuru’s reiatsu suddenly appear next to Hinamori’s. The creature hasn’t moved, keeping it’s distance from Hinamori but still far too close to Rangiku.

Can he leave it to them? Does he really have a choice? His opponent won’t let him leave their fight, and he can’t let her attack someone else. With that in mind, it pains him to return his full attention to the Espada.

___________________________

Hinamori can barely breathe. There’s a wheezing sound coming out of her mouth as she tries to get air into her punctured lung. She tries to ignore the coppery taste on her tongue and she’s distantly aware that Hisagi is battling Ayon, but she only keeps her hazy gaze on Rangiku.

Izuru has his back to her, bent over their fellow lieutenant as he heals her. Sweat drips down his face and arms, and his brow and lips are drawn down in concentration. The green-blue kido emanating from his hands stands in stark contract to Rangiku’s paling skin and the light blue of the Tozansho’s prism.

Rangiku’s bones and organs slowly heal, while her flesh knits over itself smoothly and quickly. It’s evident Izuru hasn’t performed this kido in years; the spell is supposed to heal both internal and external injuries at the same pace, but an inexperienced or rusty user ends up repairing one part quicker than the other. Still, it's beneficial, better than her bleeding out.

Without warning, Izuru goes rigid and twists to the looming threat approaching them with booming steps. Hinamori forgets to breathe. Where is Hisagi? Had he been defeated by Ayon?

“H-He’s coming!” Izuru says, more to himself. “I’m almost finished, I just need a little more time.”

The kido beneath his palms stutters out for a moment. Hinamori is about to call out to him, when a hole of blood appears in Ayon’s chest. When she notices the Captain-Commander, she doesn’t know whether to be scared or relieved.

Izuru stumbles over his words in the older man’s presence, who lectures him in return. She loses focus, not able to keep up with what they’re saying. A wave of dizziness and cold suddenly overcomes her. Has she lost too much blood? Or is this from pent up anxiety?

She rests her head against the kido beneath her, but turns her gaze back to Rangiku. She’s still taking shallow breaths, and her shattered ribs and injured organs are sealed over by skin. She’s safe for now, but it won’t be long until she’s back to being on the brink unless Izuru continues to heal her.

“Izuru-kun…” Hinamori rasps out.

She’s not sure if he heard her. A darkness creeps in around the edges of her vision and a fatigue sets into her limbs. Her eyes become hooded, trying to resist closing them all together. Something escapes her lips, but she can’t tell if it’s a slurry words or a just a sound.

Izuru becomes a blocky blur, but he twists around to her. Before she falls into the darkness, there’s a loud, terrifying roar, and as she shuts her eyes, she thinks she hears Izuru say, “I’m going to move you and Matsumoto-san! Hold on, Hinamori-san!”

___________________________

Hitsugaya spins away from another missile of water. It splashes hard into the top of a building, caving in the roof and several floors before pouring out on to the streets.

He stops flapping Hyourinmaru’s wings and flattens them, sending him gliding lower. The Espada is stronger than he anticipated, and he hadn’t understood her battle strategy before. She shoots with waves after wave of water he can easily dodge. However, as he soars over the streets, the collecting waters gave him the idea. She’s waiting for water to build up.

To think he would face an opponent like her. They can wield the same element but in opposite states. Had Aizen brought her here to face him for that very reason? There’s something that feels almost predetermined about their fight he can’t shake off. Nor can he forget how she’d threatened the Captain-Commander.

“I will avenge their deaths.”

He glances over his shoulder. She’s gaining on him, fast. She draws her weapon back, and his eyes widen at the yellow glow that builds up on the blade.

“Cero.” She slices the air, sending the beam in an arc. He flash-steps away, but not quickly enough. One of Hyourinmaru’s wings is cut in half, and he has to quickly find somewhere to land. He goes to the first rooftop he sees and lands on it’s balcony. The railing is slick with water, as are the walls beneath and the power-lines above it.

Another of Hyourinmaru's flower petals breaks apart. Considering the attack he’s come under just now and for how long he’s been in the Bankai state, he’s doing better than he anticipated.

In the back of his mind, something bothers him. Reaching out his senses, he curses under his breath. Izuru and Komamura’s reiatsu are close by – so much so Hitsugaya is confident if he looks over his shoulder right now he would see them be able to clearly make them out from this distance. Next to them are the weaker reiatsu of Hisagi, Rangiku, and Hinamori. He takes what little relief he can that his lieutenant and childhood friend are both safe and no longer on the verge of serious injuries. Still, the way Hinamori’s reiatsu flickers and wanes, is worrisome.

He wills his expression to neutral, but find himself fighting off a deepening frown. The Esapda has her back turned to him still, but she no doubt sense him. Based one how this fight has gone, he’s confident she won’t attack the others; she seems focused on finishing their fight first.

“Your tactics are strange,” he comments, drawing her attention. In his peripheral, Hyourinmaru’s wing regenerates; he needs to stall until it’s completely reformed. “But I have a feeling why that's the case. I'm guessing we're both waiting for the same thing to happen. For this battlefield to fill up with water, allowing either of us to strike a killing blow.”

She says nothing, and her expression remains impassive. Still, it’s all the confirmation he needs to say his theory was right. He’d said to her before one should save their greatest tactics for the greatest moments of crisis. Given who is not too far away from them and how the battles around him were going, he needs to help shift the tides in the Soul Society’s favour. Given her strength, there’s only one ability he had that can vanquish her at this point. What if it affected the others somehow? He's never --

"Are you concerned for them?"

He grunts, returning his gaze to her. "What?"

"Your allies just over there, are you concerned for them?"

At his lack of an answer, her expression briefly breaks into something reflective. "Right now, you have a choice to either sacrifice them or make yourself a sacrifice to save them. Regardless of what you choose, either you or they will carry the moment you made a choice forever." She raises her weapon, once again becoming stoic. "Choose carefully."

What was this? Is she trying to unnerve or goad him? He shakes it off, choosing to see this as a threat to those behind him.

“Fine. There’s no use both of us waiting.” He raises Hyourinmaru, and more to himself than his opponent, he says, “I’ve never tried this while in Bankai, but you leave me no choice."

“What are you talking about?”

Hyourinmaru’s wing is almost regenerated. He doesn’t have to stall her for much longer. “To tell you the truth , I don't need to wait for water to gather. Hyourinmaru is the ultimate ice-type zanpakuto.” He fully faces her and grips his zanpakuto with both hands. “All water is my weapon.”

The Espada lets out a quiet, startled sound and her eyes widen at the sky as what he meant dawns on her. The clouds darken and rapidly gather above them, blocking out the sun for half of the battlefield.

With Hyourinmaru’s wing back to its full form, he launches himself from the railing and shoots back into the air, coming to level with her. “The whole sky is under my control.”

“What is this?”

It’s most emotive she’s sounded. He thinks to just initiate the attack and not tell her; given the circumstance, it might the smartest strategy to use. However, he finds himself uncomfortable with the idea.

He goes on to explain his abilities to her, and she only listens, not moving to strike him when she has every opportunity to do so. Is she accepting her fate?

When he comes to the end of his explanation, he pauses. He was not blood thirty or a lover of fighting like Kenpachi, but she’s been a worthy opponent, the strongest he’s faced in decades. Then there was her threat to Captain-Commander that won't leave his mind…

“What is your name, Esapda?”

As if his words take her out of a daze, she schools her expression to impassive again and looks down at him. “I'm Espada Tres, Harribel Tier.”

“I’m Captain for the Tenth Division, Hitsugaya Toshiro.” He raises his blade. “Are you ready?”

___________________________

Both Hinamori and Izuru watch as the clouds part and form a circle above the Espada. The that snow descends in a cascading rush through the hole makes both of them gasp. It’s so glaringly white, she has to squint to still see Hitsugaya and his opponent, who goes to make an attack against his. It’s useless; the magnitude of the avalanche is something no one can fight off.

“I-Incredible,” Izuru murmurs, stunned. “What…What is that ability?!”

“Whatever it was, he risked much doing it this close to us,” Sajin comments, failing to keep the alarmed tone out of his voice. “But then, he didn’t have much of a choice.”

Within seconds, the snow rapidly transforms into a tower of spiky ice. It resembles a pillar of flowers, piled on top of one another as though growing from hundred of vines snaked around a column. The Espada is nowhere to be seen, likely trapped within the ice.

The clouds begin to thin and the sun returns, but Hinamori frowns when she notices Hitsugaya hasn’t moved away. He remains close to the ice tower, zanpakuto lowered. Is he gazing into the ice to check his opponent is there?

Eventually, he turns, lingers for several more seconds, then flies off. He's heading towards them. For a moment, she wonders if he’s coming to check up on them. However, he angles himself higher into the sky and passes them overhead. She loses sight of him and she can't help the tiny pang that pricks at her heart.

“Shiro…can.” She barely realises she’s said the nickname aloud.

It’s been so long since she last saw him, and now she’s only gotten to see him from afar. That will change after this battle is over, she’ll make sure of it. Whether he’s angry at her for coming to battlefield or happy to see her, she’ll find him after all of this and thank him for protecting all them.

A whimper comes from her left. She lolls her head to the side. Rangiku has her eyes shut still and her brow furrowed in pain, but her breathing is normal. Izuru has done the best he can, but Hinamori hopes Fourth Division will arrive to battlefield sooner rather than later.

On the thought of her friend, she tilts her head downward to look at him. He’s kneeling over Hisagi, working on his internal injuries. The Ninth Divison’s lieutenant is still conscious at least, but he grimaces as he’s being healed.

Izuru's forehead and temple glisten with sweat, and there’s a small tremor running through his arms. He’s getting fatigue. Soon, he won’t be able to keep this up without hurting himself.

“Kira-kun…”

“I’m almost done here,” he says, slightly clipped.

“Are you all right?”

He lets out a grunt, and finally his eyes reach hers, wide with bewilderment. “What? Why would you ask that?”

“Don’t…push yourself –” A cough interrupts her, causes a fresh trickle of blood to run down her lips. The pain returns afresh, and she winces as it explodes through her chest.

Alarmed, Izuru looks between her and Hisagi. She wants to tell him to focus on Hisagi, but at the former’s nod towards Hinamori, Izuru deactivates the kido and rushes to her side.

“You’re the one who shouldn’t be pushing themselves,” he warns, before activating the kido over her torso. The relief comes quickly, soothing the pain into smaller waves. Her breathing remains shallow, not able to take in full breaths.

Her gaze slips to behind Izuru’s shoulder. There’s the pillar of ice, which Hitsugaya has returned to. He's comes out of his bankai state, but his posture is one of vigilance. He watches the battle unfolding around the area, looking for a moment he can strike perhaps.

Further away, Yamamoto’s flames burn in a circle of high walls. Hinamori tries and fail to not detect the reiatsu emanating from behind the fire.

She looks at Izuru. “Have you seen any of them?”

He picks up on the implication quickly. His brows fall into furrow. “No, just sensed him.”

She can’t help but let out a relieved sigh. “I hope…you don’t have to.”

The corners of his mouth tighten. “Yeah…I hope so too.”

The spike in his reiatsu says otherwise. There’s a hint of anticipation there, buzzing along the weighed down whirl that is his reiatsu.

He hesitates as he deactivates the kido over her. They both wait for almost a full minute for another coughing fit or for her pain to return.

“Where’s Abari-kun?” Hinamori asks in a whisper.

“He and Kuchiki-san went to Hueco Mundo.”

“Why?”

“I can’t say for certain, but likely because their Human friends went there to save the girl that sided with Aizen.”

Hinamori frowns. If she’s a traitor, why would they go after her? An answer comes to the surface, one she desperately wants to dismiss. Are they like herself? Unable to accept the truth about someone they thought they knew? Or perhaps this girl is innocent in all of this, and had been tricked by Aizen into following him. Perhaps it’s the fatigue weighing her down or the last embers of hope, but Hinamori wants to believe the latter is true. “I hope Abarai-kun and Kuchiki-san are all right.”

Izuru doesn’t respond. After a beat, he tilts his head to the side, pensive. “Why did you come here, Hinamori-san?”

She blinks. She shouldn’t be surprised by the question, but perhaps it’s because it’s coming from Izuru. A part of her had thought he’d understand without having to ask.

She lifts her gaze to battles happening above them in the distance. “I couldn’t stay behind. I had to be here, it’s a simple as that.”

He doesn’t raise his head. “You’ve always been like this.”

With how flatly he says it, she can’t tell whether it’s a fond observation or a critique of her character. “How do you mean?”

He shakes his head and shifts over to Rangiku. With his back turned, she can’t tell how he feels. “Nevermind.”

She wants to say more, but finds herself speechless. Is he disappointed that she came? Are there others who feel the same?

She watches the battles unfold, first with victory of Soi Fon over her opponent, and the battle between an Espada and Kyoraku and Jushiro.

Terror grips her as the sky splits a new Espada arrives with a fearsome, gigantic creature. The new Espada injures Jushiro and with a yell, breaks the ice encasing Hitsugaya’s opponent. Near her, Izuru goes rigid, his wide-eyed gaze solely on the events unfolding above them and the kido cast from his hands over Hisagi stuttering away to nothing.

He begs Komamura to go join the fight, but before Komamura can respond, a sounds comes the creature. It moves out of the split in the sky and comes to loom over the circle of fire. Pursing it’s lips, it blows a current of air flames, reducing them to streaks of smoke within seconds.

Hinamori forgets to breathe. Her vision is becoming increasingly blurry, but she can clearly distinguish Aizen. He’s there. He’s really there.

Izuru lets out a choking sound. In the end, he did see his former captain afterall. Despite their earlier interaction, she wishes she could stand by his side and they could help each other through this.

He falls forward, barely catching himself with his hands on the ground. “This is really the end!”

It must be. What can they do against Aizen? She came here and show he doesn't have a hold on her anymore, that she is worthy of carrying her title. In the end, she has ended up injured and scared.

And then, without warning, a new presence joins the battlefield. No, not just one, several. It's enough to pull Hinamori out of the spiral that threatens to engulf her. She barely registers the new arrivals, her senses so hazy she can’t quite distinguish each reiatsu from the other. There’s something strange about them. They’re Shinigami, but there’s something else within them.

She searches the sky, finding a group wearing clothes from the World of the Living. They’re directly confronting Aizen and the other former captains. Who are they? Are they on their side?

Perhaps her panic has gotten the better of her or her bewilderment is so great that she's lost her mind, but she can't help but feel an inkling of hope.

___________________________

The winds were harsh, screeching in his ears and threatening to push him over. It was the coldest it’s ever been on the frozen plains, it even burned the soles of his feet. Still, he remained standing. Still he kept his eyes closed. Still he gritted his teeth and resisted the urge to raise his arms and block the wind from biting into his face.

He focused on the power of this place, burling around him like a blizzard. This was his, even if he didn’t fully comprehend it. He knew it had to be his. Only he can wield it.

He cursed and opened his eyes. The dragon towered over him, watching Hitsugaya, unflinching as a statue. He could hear him speaking, voice as loud as a thunder clap, but like all the other times, the words are lost in the wind. He listened, really tried to listen.

“Your name is…Your name is!”

He hissed out a frustrated grunt. No matter how far he tried to reach for it in his mind, it always slipped from his grasp. He’d been training this whole time learn it, and yet it had only taken him so far in learning his zanpakuto’s name. Was it that the dragon did not trust him with it?

He’s at his limit. The desperation clawed at his heart, twisting and clenching it. Where else could he go? This power was his. He wanted it, needed it…

He flung his gaze up to the dragon’s. “There are things I want to protect with this strength and power!” he yelled over the wind. “That’s all I will ever use it for!”

The vice around his heart squeezed even more, causing him to let out a strangled gasp. If he didn’t have this power and strength, how can he possible help those who helped him? How can stand by Hinamori’s side? How can he --?

It came out him as a scream, one that soared above the winds and plunged deep into the ice below his feet. “I want to protect her!”

There was a flash. Not before his eyes, but somewhere within him. Something like a locked door finally opened. One that had always been within him, hidden away until this very moment.

The power shifted, coiling around him, hissing in his ears and rushing up into his veins. He gasped at the cold of it, at the way is thrummed through his blood and against his bones.

“It’s…coming,” he murmured in wonder, staring down at his hands. Then, with more excitement, “It’s coming to me!”

Another flash, this time through his whole body. The power solidified, as if turning to impenetrable ice. It was a vital part that kept him together and whole; he doesn't knwo how he's lived without it for this long.

With widened eyes, he looks up to the dragon. He’d spread out his wings and bowed his head closer. The very action stopped the winds and brightened the moonlight shining down upon them.

The creature, he realised now, is truly a part of him. This power he held was this creature, and it carried in it a name. He spoke to him again. “ ‘My name is…’” Hitsugaya repeated back without realising.

He stood taller, hands fisted at his sides. He listened closer to the voice that whispered rather than roared in his ear, echoing from his veins and heart. From a part of him that had always been there, remaining unnamed until now.

He grasped on to what it said, in the voice of the dragon. “ ‘My name is Hyourinmaru!’ ”

He left his inner world through the moonlight, letting it consume him as the ice crackled and Hyourinmaru flapped his wings with a howl.

___________________________

Hitsugaya leaps forward, the air whistling around him and the world becoming streaks of color. He only sees the traitor he will cut down. He is far from anxious to face the Soul who had cut him down ad made him feel powerless. That boiling in his stomach roiled as he raised Hyourinmaru and brought the blade down harshly against Kyoka Suigetsu. It did nothing to rattle Aizen, but he half expected that would be the case.

“You came at me without much thought,” Aizen says, smiling faintly. “That was rather reckless of you, Captain Hitsugaya.”

Hitsugaya withholds a sneer; he refuses to show any emotion in front of Aizen. “Someone had to make the first move. I commend you for not activating Kyouka Suigetsu on your first strike.”

“Allow me to do the same for you…” Aizen says flatly, before deflecting Kyouraku’s attack to his side with a kido shield.

Hitsugaya knew Kyoraku would follow, had sensed it in the way he’d glanced at him briefly. Had he known he would strike first? Hitsugaya shakes his head; it didn’t matter.

He falls back, sensing the remaining captains, lieutenants, and their newfound ‘allies’ all coming towards them to join the fight. He and Kyouraku will have to keep Aizen occupied for the next minute.

He goes in for several attacks, as does Kyouraku, all avoided or blocked with ease. This is not the fighting style Hitsugaya has seen Aizen use before. This is a different Aizen, a truer version of him. He still has the same grace that comes when he deflects an attack with his zanpakuto and casts a kido at the same time, but there’s a fast pace to it, and a calculation behind each strike. It’s as if he knows their moves before even they do.

Swallowing the cry that wanted to come from his throat, Hitsugaya lunges again, bring Hyourinmaru down hard. He can’t let this frustration get the better of him. He can use it as fuel to keep him engage in the battle, but never as source of power. Never as his sole motivation. He is a Captain of the Gotei Thirteen, and the Soul before him had turned his back on that title.

Aizen brings his zanpakuto down, countering the attack and causing Hitsugaya to skid back. He comes to a stop a short distance away. As he stares the traitor down, he can’t get rid of the previous thought. Aizen hadn’t just turned his back on the title, but also on everything it stands for.

The words come to the surface, and Hitsugaya doesn’t stop them from reaching his throat. “Before, you said a sword without hatred is light an eagle without wings…that a sword swung out of duty will never cut you.” Aizen’s smile falters, falling to a straight line. Hitsugaya doesn’t gloat on the small victory, instead continuing as he lowers Hyourinmaru to his side, “You don’t seem to know the truth, and that is…a sword wielded from duty alone is what a captain always does. To wield one with hatred is nothing but violence. The Soul Society would never consider that a battle.” He stands a little taller. “It seems, Aizen, you weren’t ever captain material if you truly believe that.”

He was always planning the Soul Society’s downfall and their deaths along with it. He never cared for a single Soul or Human. He didn't even care for his allies, cutting down Harribel like she was nothing to him this whole time. The vision he had, whatever it was, had led him to this and dragged everyone in with it. To think he can hold such power, it sickens Hitsugaya.

“How interesting…” Aizen’s smile returns. “To hear those words from you, the captain who hates me the most out of all of them, is quite surprising to me.”

Hackles raised, Hitsugaya brings up Hyourinmaru again. He loathes how the comment struck close to home, that he has read him that well.

“Are you telling me you have no hatred in your sword right now?”

What’s he getting at with this?

“Or perhaps…did your hatred vanish when Hinamori-kun showed up completely recovered?”

It rushes up his spin, white hot and surging through every nerve-ending. It’s something dark and scorches like an ice burn. He’d experienced in the past few months on a smaller scale, in the moments where he struck a training dummy far too hard, or awoke in the middle of the night wanting to scream to the sky, or when he had last spoken with Hinamori and wanted nothing more than to kill Aizen right there and then.

Her near-death flashes before his eyes, far too vivid still. He can never forgive the traitor for that, could never let him walk away from this battle alive.

He’d missed whatever had happened between Aizen and Kyoraku as he'd gone into this state. Aizen turns around when Hitsugaya cries out his Bankai’s release. Behind him, Kyouraku becomes wary.

He ignores his fellow captain, zeroing in on Aizen alone. “You’re right, Aizen. My sword is filled with hatred. Hatred for you.”

Hyourinmaru roars in his mind, ready for this fight. The burning cold now flows through his veins and strikes through to his bones. He will become as cold and ruthless as he needs to be, as vicious as a blizzard that smothers all life caught in it.

Because truth of it all was he didn’t come here for the Soul Society. He wanted to fool himself into thinking that was his main motive, but he never could. Ever since the day he’d seen Hinamori dying on the floor of underground chambers of Central Forty-Six, this fight was never going to be about just protecting Soul Society. He'd thought of Hinamori this very morning, and how she would be safe. How he would ensure she remained safe.

“I didn’t come here to just do battle with you!” he bellows. “I came here to violently hack you to pieces!”

Let him be a hypocrite. In face of what this traitor did to Hinamori, what did his captaincy matter? If it meant he had to abandon it, then so be it. He’ll crush Aizen to nothing, will freeze him through to the core and shatter him to icy dust. His name will vanish in the decades, forgotten by all and only brought up when his demise was spoken of.

And what would become of himself? It didn't matter.

___________________________

They’d become specks in the distance, hard to see beyond the yellow of the kido shielding them. Hinamori had tried to keep her eyes open, but they were hurting and she ended up closing them and rolling her head to the side.

Now she cracks them open a fraction, able to see Izuru and Iba watching the battle. They’d stopped focusing on the injured and are completely still. Something must be wrong. She rolls her head to the other side. Rangiku, now conscious, has her gaze also above, but Hinamori can’t tell through the tussled blonde hair if her frown is one of concern or confusion.

She tries to make out the figures, and all but three are indistinguishable. The Ryoka boy – Kurosaki Ichigo, she corrects herself – stands a long distance away from the battle. Hitsugaya’s ice wings flap shooting himse forward at such a speed he becomes a blur before he attacks Aizen.

Other figures swoop in after that, and it becomes a chaotic scene. She loses track of the battle, seeing but not really concentrating on what is happening.

It’s why she frowns when, after Soi Fon engages Aizen in the confrontation, he vanishes.

She let’s out a surprised gasp when her view is suddenly obstructed. The white of the Soul before her is glaring against the kido. Without having to see his face, Hinamori’s heart seizes up and then races as her blood turns cold.

His shadow casts over her. A vague sense of kido, one of concealment, rolls off him. A blink, and Hinamori sees him more clearly as he casts his gaze to Rangiku. In the sickening seconds that feel like minutes, she hazily suspects he’s considering doing something to her fellow lieutenant.

She makes a sound, the beginnings of a wordless protest, which draw his attention back to her.

Hinamori blinks again, and he bends forward and grabs her by the front of her uniform. His face is darkened by shadows, making his appearance all the more shocking to her.

With a violent jerk, he pulls her back off the ground, forcing a choked gasp out of her. Her head and limbs loll back, as though she were a ragdoll. Is this real? How did he get past barrier? Why is no one around her seeing this? Even if he is using a concealment kido, it would have broken with him grabbing her. Unless it's one stronger than any she knows. The power of him, the things she never knew. The things he'd done, to her and her friends.

She lets out a broken whimper. “C…Captain.”

Aizen pauses. Behind him, high up in the sky, Soi Fon has created an army of clones, but they’re a blur to Hinamori, her focus only on him.

“Why did you come here?” His voice, so familiar but somehow so different, breaks something in her.

She can only let out a strangled sound in response. How she wanted to tell him to his face she'd come her to face him and fight alongside her fellow lieutenants and captains. She should reach Tobiume, sheathed at her hip, or shoot a kido through him. She has the strength to do the latter, but she’s paralyzed.

“No, I already know why.” She can hear the cold smile in his voice.

With a tilting back of his head, sunlight and the glow of the kido around them illuminates Aizen’s face. His eyes finally reach hers. He says something else, but it doesn’t register. The disdain and coldness in his gaze pierces her. It tells her what she already knows, what she’d tried to deny weeks ago but realized before she came to this battle. it's what splints whatever in her had broken before. You never mattered.

With a brutal pull, she’s off the ground completely. Everything passes in a haze, and then all she sees is the sky, much closer than before. A sudden cold presses up against her back, and she’s losing her footing. Looking down, Karakura Town is sprawled out beneath her, and Soi Fon is rushing at her.

Aizen is nowhere to be seen.

__________________________________

“It’s over Aizen!”

Hitsugaya lunges forward, and with a flap of his wings, he shoots forward at great speed. He doesn't give the other captains a chance to deal the finishing blow. He keeps his grip on Hyourinmaru strong and his focus solely on the man frozen again the ice.

Seconds before the blade pierces through the traitor’s back, Hitsugaya thinks he hears Hinamori begin to call out to his name. It ends so abruptly he barely even registers it.

He stabs Hyourinmaru through the ice and into Aizen’s back, and it's all over.

_________________________________

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#toshiro hitsugaya #momo hinamori #hitsuhina #rangiku matsumoto #izuru kira #sosuke aizen #tier harribel #bleach #fanfiction #angst #oh boy...#next chapter's going to be a hard one...#I hope you all liked this one though!#I ended up cutting a lot of content from it #hoping to find a way to incorperate somehow down the line in other chapters

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frostycatblr-fandom-files · 2 months ago

Note

Hey Frost 💙! Happy 200 Followers 🥳!!

For the event I would love to submit an idea! What about an angsty Wolffe confronting Fox after he shoots Fives 👀?

Congrats!

The Tragedy of Level 1325 [Commander Wolffe Fic]

Warnings and Information: Clones killing their own kin is always an awful occurrence, more often than not a rare and accidental thing. So when Commander Wolffe catches wind of what happened on Level 1325, he meets with the other canine-themed Commander to get answers. And none of them will be easy to get, or, to hear. Set after the Clone Wars season six episode “Orders”. Lots of angst and heavy stuff in this one, folks! Heavy references/allusions to Fives’ death. Heavy references/allusions to canon-typical death, violence and injury. Reference to Pong Krell. Star Wars and real-world swearing. Minimal Mando’a. Narrative and stylistic use of italics. **This is not a cloneship/clonecest fic. Tag it as such and you will find yourself blocked.**

Word count: 4,287

How fast word travels in the GAR is both a blessing and burden.

Regardless of the distance, time of day, or paint color, brothers will hear what the others have gotten up to in-between their conquest to defeat the Confederacy of Independent Systems. A rookie’s foolish notion to prank his superiors that ends with him earning himself a month’s worth of latrine duty. The terrible pick-up lines learned from holomags (and their success, or lack thereof) used on other patrons of 79’s. Brave charges lead out of killboxes and ambushes.

Clones turning on their own kin - that bitter pill was hard to stomach.

Commander Wolffe found himself choking down one such pill upon hearing the events of the night before.

It didn’t make a difference how many times he consulted the datafile in front of him, the mingling of horror and disbelief settled just as heavily in his heart each time. The primary commander of the Coruscant Guard had been the one behind the blaster used to end a Clone’s life on Level 1325, and it had not been an accident either. This was not another case of some sleemo stealing and wearing a Clone’s full kit; it had been, without question, a brother.

Clones were less uniform than many nat-borns would like to believe. They may look the same from the texture of their hair, to their face-shape, and the warm-brown skin, but that’s often as far as the similarities go. They found their originality in names, speech-patterns, scarring, the way hair was cut (or bleached or dyed or styled), the addition and location of injected ink. There were the occasional (minor) aberrations, too, of course; like the brothers who ended up ocean-eyed, or blond.

(They at least knew where the blondeness came from; a dormant echo in the genetics of the man who served as the master mold for the Grand Army.)

Not to mention the paint, and the patterns. The paint job was perhaps the biggest, most important piece of their individualism (at least externally). Those working in tandem with the soldiers relied quite heavily on the personalization to their second skins when first introduced.

So when the datafile in Wolffe’s hands tells him the armor worn by the dead trooper was not his own, a sense of confusion as well as a wave of mild horror washes over the flint gray commander. The deceased was one of the 501st Legion’s cobalt crusaders, yet the ARC trooper had been killed in an unpainted, second skin that had been stolen from another.

Why?

So many why-s.

When asking if his brother would agree to meet with him, it had taken some convincing. Fox’s agreement ultimately came with conditions, which were thankfully simple. Find somewhere in CoCo Town - as he was due to patrol that near that sector in a few hours time - and find some caf that didn’t taste like droid oil.

There, Commander Fox would attempt to provide as many answers to Wolffe’s questions as he could.

Though he couldn’t promise there’d be answers for all of them.

Entering the eighth eatery, Wolffe tries putting a little more trust in this diner’s advertising than each of the establishments he tried earlier. ‘Best food this side of the Senate District!’ A tagline like that would have to do a lot of heavy lifting for a greasy diner in a dilapidated industrial area.

Inside, the diner has been furnished with several deep booths with shiny red seats as well as a long countertop that offers a glimpse into the kitchen through a narrow viewport. The decor is a mix of chrome and neon. While it’s perhaps not what Wolffe would call his favorite style, he had to give whoever ran the place credit for a cohesive, and constant, theme.

This place looks like it hasn’t changed in years. Too often, Wolffe finds once-favorite establishments rehauling their menus, revamping the theme, gutting whatever charm the place had between his deployments. It’s a damn shame. Corsucant changes too quickly top-side; all of it fueled on someone else’s pursestrings, no doubt.

Noticing his arrival, a WA-7 waitress droid, idly chatting with a pre-dawn client, pardons herself to welcome the prospective customer. Assuming he’ll be subjected to a facial recognition scan, Wolffe holds himself in near-militant attention until the droid speaks.

“Welcome to Dex’s Diner! What can I get for you, hon?”

The first question he has for the waitress is the state of the diner’s caf.

“Is your caf instant?”

The droid’s feminine programming and friendly inflection does its best to make up for an inability to smile. (He finds it a little unsettling all the same.)

“It’s brewed in-house, every hour on the hour.”

Wolffe regards a small chronometer on the wall, displaying what his body-chrono already knows. Just a half-hour before dawn. Perfect. Depending on how far away Fox is, it shouldn’t take long for his vod to find his way here. Coruscant had been under the watchful eye and capable hand of the crimson commander very shortly after the start of the war; if anyone knew their way around this massive labyrinth of a planet, it would be Fox.

“Good enough.” Wolffe says with a thankful nod. “Saves me the trouble of finding another place.”

“Looking for something to eat?”

“Not exactly. I’m supposed to meet with someone.” he explains, sending the name of the diner to Fox’s comlink while the WA-7’s back is to him, asking him to follow behind. She’s got just the spot for him.

She shows Wolffe to a booth in the back-left corner, where he can already tell at a glance that the padding under the seat material is worn thin and unevenly. (Well, he’s sat in worse seats.) It’s secluded, just enough, that it should afford him and his brother a little more privacy. He unseals his helmet as quietly as he can to avoid disturbing the other patrons, and sets the sunbonnet down on the table.

“Your business isn’t our business,” the droid promises to Wolffe’s great confusion as he works to seat himself as gracefully as possible with the kama, “so rest assured that whoever you’re meeting, we won’t tell a soul.”

“Okay… I appreciate that.”

Wolffe straightens out his modified phase two helmet on the tabletop, dismissing the waitress’s offer to get him something to start with while he waits. Glass of Jawa Juice, perhaps? It’s a house special.

A mash of bantha hide and fermented grain so early in the morning doesn’t sound particularly appealing.

“Nothing right now, thank you.”

The WA-7 nodded. “Suit yourself, hon. Give a holler when you’re ready.”

It wouldn’t be long from now. Fox had sown the seeds for a system the Corries called ‘Zeros and Fives’ when it came to meeting their vode for non-military matters. Seeking out Fox for answers wasn’t technically an emergency, but it should hopefully be treated with a little more urgency seeing as Wolffe couldn’t wait around all morning. With the General’s help, he had to fabricate time-sensitive duties to excuse his presence on Coruscant earlier than expected.

Some poodoo about retrieving something-or-other under the General’s orders. Records of research from the Chief Librarian of the Jedi Archives, Jocasta Nu.

Records of what kind of research, he wasn’t sure.

That comes later. Now, he was waiting for Fox. Wolffe checks his comlink for any response to his choice of locale, finding only a silent ‘Seen’ status. Well, he’ll take it to mean his vod won’t be waving down the suggestion.

With little more than his comlink and the datafile to keep him occupied, the flint gray commander settled in for what could end up being a long wait in the event Fox ran into trouble on patrol. How long he would end up waiting would be inconsequential, so long as he got answers and insight to the root of this tragedy. Something to rationalize the reality of losing brothers to something other than Separatists and their sympathizers.

He just had to ask himself why he was doing this. Why he cared so much, what he hoped to find. Maybe even who he was doing all this for.

Was it for Fox, hoping to get ahead of the inevitable boiling point the rumors might reach?

Was it for Captain Rex, finding some shred of information that may bring closure to the death of one of his best men?

Was it for Fives, given the death of an ARC trooper was no insignificant thing? Was he hoping to find reason, or just cause?

Or was it for his own morbid curiosity, given other details of the deceased’s service file?

Commander Wolffe couldn’t be certain until his brother was dragging his over-caffeinated carcass through the doors of the diner, and down to the last booth on the left. He couldn’t be certain Fox would be forthcoming with those answers, either. Or the state the other commander would be in.

Fifteen minutes before the next hourly pot of caf is made, Fox shuffles into the diner, quiet and wordless. Not in the sense of stoicism; rather fatigue. Ignoring the greetings of the waitstaff, he walks himself down to the booth once he’s found Wolffe in his visor. Like his fellow commander, Fox’s helmet remains over his head until he reaches the table, at which point he unseals, and drops it with a dull thud half an inch over the table.

“Good to see you, Fox.” Wolffe says.

That was a lie. Perhaps only partially. He wished if he was paying the crimson commander a visit here on Coruscant, it would have been under better circumstances. With better beverages as well. The last time Wolffe had seen his brother, he was promised a splash of spotchka and the opportunity to properly talk about the Abregado disaster when next they met. To mourn the loss of Wolffe’s men and the change to his armor. They started this war named after members of the Canidae and painted in beautiful shades of red.

Now they were just a couple of canines.

Fox makes no immediate greeting. With a tired grumble, he drops into the booth, a small betrayal to the tireless façade the Corries had come to be known for.

“Sorry to make you wait,” he says at last, propping his elbows on the table as he begins rubbing one bleary eye, “Patrol took longer to button up than anticipated.”

“That’s fine.” Wolffe replied, just relieved the other canine commander was here.

Doing her rounds, the same service droid as before approaches the brothers’ booth and asks if they’d like anything to eat while they conduct their business. (She doesn’t suggest Jawa Juice this time.) Wolffe takes her up on the offer for the freshest cups of caf that would be ready not too long from now. Just as the droid goes to send in the order to the back-of-house, she takes another look at Fox— currently in the process of falling asleep at the table —and thinks better of it.

“... I’ll tell Dex to make it a carafe.”

When the caf is prepared, instead of sending it out with the service droid, FLO, Dex himself brings it out from the kitchen to the front-of-house.

And Dex had certainly not been what Wolffe imagined him to look like.

Standing roughly 1.88 meters tall by the commander’s estimation, the owner of the diner was a heavyset Beskalisk who wore an ill-fitting, heavily stained white shirt and apron that had certainly seen better days. Making use of the four arms in his possession, Dex carried the carafe with the lower set, and a pair of mugs in a third, upper hand.

Wolffe hides any surfacing unease after meeting the owner’s eye by fixing Fox’s helmet beside his own to clear space on the table. He came here to question his brother about an ARC trooper’s death over a decent cup of caf; he didn’t expect to be reminded of someone who put his brothers of the GAR through a gruesome campaign on the lightless word of Umbara.

A Force-wielding Besalisk named Pong Krell had tricked the 501st and 212th into turning their blasters on each other some time ago. His style of leadership was firm, his fighting form aggressive. Krell’s war record boasted several successes at the bloody cost of countless Clone casualties; the highest of any Jedi. Having been seduced by the allure of rising power, he betrayed the Order, the Republic, and weaponized the absolute loyalty of the men under his command.

It would be Fives, Jesse, and Hardcase of the 501st’s bravest blue to defy orders and take stolen ships to cripple enemy forces. They proved successful, though only Fives and Jesse would return. Krell had tried to order their execution as a result of this disobedience. But brothers in blue and orange mutinied against the fallen Jedi, and attempted his arrest. Once they managed to capture him, Krell had been interrogated and his treasonous plot was brought into the light.

Fives had been faced with the business end of a blaster at the hands of his own brothers twice.

He only survived it once.

Wolffe could only hope Fives’ mortal remains were being treated with far more respect than whatever had been afforded to Krell.

One thing was soon clear at least, the longer the diner’s owner was working to serve them the fresh caf: Dex was nothing like Krell, save for being a Besalisk.

Dex was far kinder, friendlier.

He first poured out a generous portion for Wolffe, chuckling warmly as he spoke. “You’ll want to be careful, gentlemen. Quite hot. Should do a fine job of perking you right up, though!” Wolffe was sure to thank Dex before carefully kicking his brother’s boot under the table to stir him. Fox hadn’t fallen asleep, but he certainly was heading in that direction the longer he sat in the booth.

Tiredly scrubbing a hand over his face in an effort to wake up, Fox took hold of the mug that had been carefully pushed in his direction by the four-armed cook.

“Thanks…”

“Don’t mention it! Matter of fact, I’ll leave the rest with you two and let you get about your business.” Dex carefully set the metal carafe on the tabletop and lumbered back into the kitchen, as promised.

Together, the commanders would take their first sampling of the diner’s caf; Wolffe found it of decent quality, nothing more. There was nothing special that set it apart from other diners, but it was a step above the instant powder in his and his men’s rations.

Fox on the other hand drank like the caf was no milder than water. Maker. That couldn’t be healthy. Once the mug had been lowered for a suitable amount of time, Wolffe voiced the first of his concerns.

“When’s the last time you slept, vod?”

With a heavy exhale, Fox set down the mug and leaned against the backrest. “Same time as the rest of Coruscant.” he said, too focused on the patternless web of scratches in the table to see the displeased furrowing of his brother’s brow.

“Coruscant never sleeps. Are you telling me you’re running on empty?”

“No. I just don’t remember, cub.”

Wolffe grit his teeth, full lips pursing as his displeasure deepened. This was no time for the kit-and-cub routine they had developed fresh off Kamino, possessing a curiously bright-eyed quality that would be lost before long. This was serious. All of this was serious, and Fox is choosing now to be sarcastic and apathetic with him?

He has to stop and take a measured breath before acting on any kind of anger. Should he be short with Fox, Wolffe’s opportunity to get sensible answers might slip between his fingers. So instead, he nurses his mug of caf before saything or asking anything else. Maybe it’ll help him hold on to his tether a little longer if he combats his own budding fatigue. Crossing several galactic timezones in order to get to the heart of the Republic could make even the most tireless of men weary.

Settled, Wolffe begins again. “What do you remember about last night?” A glance is cast over their helmets; the thought of scrubbing through helmet footage flickers in his mind.

“Might need to be more specific,” Fox replies, wantonly tracing the rim of his mug with his forefinger. “What part of last night are you asking about?”

“The part that ended with a dead ARC trooper.”

For a moment, the other commander remained unnaturally still, and equally quiet. Now that the reason behind the visit Wolffe was paying him had been revealed, Fox felt the atmosphere of the diner tangibly shift. So that’s what this visit Wolffe was paying him was about. He was aware from the beginning Wolffe was coming all the way to Triple Zero to question him; not the subject matter of these questions.

It was time to establish a baseline for the brothers.

“What have you heard?”

Propping up the datafile, Wolffe presents the timeline as he understands it.

Alongside the Kaminoan Nala Se and General Shaak Ti, ARC trooper Fives had traveled to Coruscant from the Clone homeworld and met with Chancellor Palpatine at the Grand Republic Medical Facility. Shortly upon their arrival, Fives presented a potential Separatist plot that he believed responsible for the death of a trooper by the name of Tup to General Ti, the Chief Medical Scientist, and Palpatine. Agreeing to hear him out, Fives was granted limited audience with the Chancellor.

Per protocol, shock troopers and the Red Guard remained in the room when Palpatine requested to speak “alone” with Fives. This meant when the Chancellor was suddenly attacked, the response was almost immediate.

Under threat of apprehension, Fives would escape the Medical Facility, and remain unaccounted for for some time before making contact with a member of Torrent Company - namely their medic, Kix. Coordinates would be given to a location on Level 1325 with the request General Skywalker and Captain Rex meet him there, as soon as possible, and importantly, alone. His commanding officers would go to Hangar 18 in Sector I-9, where Fives had been spotted by a probe droid, and find themselves caught in a ray shield.

While effectively at his mercy, Fives would tell his commanding officers he had been set up, framed, before the arrival of the Corries.

“Did you hear anything Fives might have said when you arrived with the Guard?”

Fox, just about to take a drink, paused. “Not everything.” Once they had made it inside the warehouse, he and his men were more concerned with finding safe cover before moving into action.

A minor tell of annoyance, the twitching of the scarred brow over his brother’s cybernetic eye, did not go unnoticed by the red commander.

“Obviously. But what did you hear?”

“General Skywalker questioned why his ARC trooper believed the Chancellor was capable of orchestrating this… Separatist plot when an assassination attempt had failed. Said the Chancellor was incapable, though his soldier insisted.” Fox replied, considering the dregs in his mug for the moment before pouring himself another serving.

“At what point did you step in?”

Not long after, his vod tells him.

“His back was to us. Didn’t see us draw our DeeCees.”

“Why didn’t you stun him?” Wolffe nearly demands.

Fives had been declared a fugitive, the commander understood that. When he had taken part in the manhunt for Ahsoka Tano following the declaration of her own fugitive status following the bombing of the Jedi Temple and death of a suspect, Letta Turmond, it had been under orders. Tano had been a dear friend to General Plo; the Kel Dor often spoke so kindly of her… she had saved his life in the aftermath of Abregado.

But given the evidence at the time, he believed she was the primary suspect behind the blast that had killed Clones, maintenance workers and six Jedi, and left many more injured. A belief that would be buried once he heard General Skywalker had found and brought the true perpetrator before those who put the Togruta on trial. Firing upon someone he cared about, in his own fashion, while she was dazed and unarmed, would be the last time Wolffe ever saw Tano.

The guilt still gnaws at him.

Maybe if they had taken Fives alive, the real perpetrator could have been discovered. Like Barriss Offee had been.

“Why,” he repeats himself, determined to break Fox’s continued silence, “Tell me why, Fox.”

“We didn’t exactly have much of a choice, Wolffe. I ordered him to stand down, warned him not to do it; but he drew a nearby weapon. He was acting erratically.”

Fox had to make a split-second decision with highly volatile variables at play; the way he had been trained. The way both of them had been trained. Trained to make the tough calls that came with the lofty status as Marshal Commanders, before Wolffe had been stripped of such a rank. Robbed of the red.

It would be replaced with gray, to honor and remember the dead.

The innumerable, tragic dead.

Try as they might, the Kaminoans could never hope to train the sting of a brother’s tragic death out of the men of the GAR.

Following a break to use the diner’s refreshers and collect themselves, the commanders return to the table, making use of limited time before Wolffe is supposed to act upon new military-wide orders from General Plo.

“What orders?” Fox asks, brow pinched in confusion.

He hadn’t seen any such notification. Just a report from Thire and Thorn that more surveillance footage had been acquired of the events from last night; they now had an answer for how ARC trooper Fives avoided the shock troopers checking IDs in the Clone bar. A damn hat given to him by a corporal from another unit, of all things.

“I’m supposed to report to the nearest Republic med center to receive some kind of vaccination. For a parasite.”

Continuing to read the message on his comlink, Wolffe learns soldiers on other planets will need to await the arrival of the inoculation that was being mass-produced to protect every Clone, whether their deployment was peaceful, or on the front lines.

“They… think some kind of rare parasite native to Ringo Vinda was responsible for what happened to Tup. For the behavior Fives displayed before you-”

Something about this didn’t feel quite right.

This answer was too convenient. How was it possible that a parasite was missed by the Chief Medical Scientist during Tup’s thorough examination on Kamino, but discovered by the Chancellor’s personal doctors in a rushed autopsy? (They had been thorough, right?) How did invasive organisms cause these “aggression inhibitors” to decay? How many more men of the 501st Legion were potentially infected, and how did the organism spread? Something about this wasn’t adding up.

Maybe by asking the shock troopers who had been present during the conversation Fives had with the Chancellor, he could find something they missed; maybe they had heard something-

“ -ffe. Wolffe,”

Failing to get the flint-gray commander’s attention, Fox has reached across the table and taken hold of his hand just as he finds it beginning to tremble. Minor stress tremors such as these have plagued him since the ill-fated naval battle, though they’ve been dormant for a long time with a combination of strict rest and discipline. And typically, they’re almost unnoticeable.

But Fox has always had sharp eyes with even sharper ears.

“When’s the last time you slept?”

A slow burning behind his eyes—the feeling stronger on the right—served as an uncomfortable reminder that he had been unable to find much meaningful rest after hearing what happened in Coruscant’s sub-levels. Another brother’s tragic, untimely death. Resisting the urge to rub his eyes and rid himself of the discomfort, Wolffe instead returns the steady squeeze rather than pulling away.

Voice soft, he heaves a quiet sigh.

“Not recently enough, kit.”

Perhaps it was his own fatigue that had him jumping to absurd conclusions. The demise of an elite ARC trooper had reminded him of his own heavy losses, and his composure was beginning to suffer for it. That was unacceptable. He needed to sleep. Both of them needed to sleep.

But more importantly, Wolffe needed to leave. He had a set time to arrive at the med center by, and it would be imprudent to be late. Gathering the datafile, his comlink, and his helmet, Wolffe took one last gulp of caf before standing to bid his brother farewell.

Then, he had an idea.

“Maybe… after I’ve gotten the inoculation, we should both crash in your quarters for an hour if you’ve still got that shitty old couch stuffed in there since the last time I saw you.”

Fox chuckled, a lazy smirk settling over his features.

“It’s still there and shittier than ever,” the crimson commander promised, “Been too busy to remove it.”

Wolffe resealed his helmet so Fox wouldn’t see the grim smile, one grateful for the meager space to sleep and troubled by the responsibilities his brother has had to shoulder that have kept him so busy, he can’t rearrange a stained sofa.

It was no wonder Fox was sporting some silver around his temples prematurely. It probably wouldn’t be long before Wolffe’s own raven-dark hair did the same, given his own burdens and losses. This war would make old dogs out of both of them.

Assuming they lived long enough to see the supposed end of it. After all, only the dead will ever see the true end of war.

And that was a tragedy for the living.

Thank you for making such a uniquely heart-breaking request for this event Maia; I hope I did these canine commanders justice and made it appropriately angsty enough. I hope you enjoyed! 🩷

Fic taglist: @anxiouspineapple99 @dukeoftheblackstar @dystopicjumpsuit @msmeredithrose @lonely-day3636

[Masterlist] [TCW Masterlist] [Taglist] [Requests: OPEN]

#frostfics #The Tragedy of Level 1325 #frosts 200 terrific follower event #request fic #ulchabhangorm #star wars #tcw #the clone wars #tcw fanfic #the clone wars fanfic #clone wars fanfiction #tcw wolffe #commander wolffe #cc 3636 #tcw fox #commander fox #marshal commander fox #cc 1010 #do not tag as ship

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philipjohnclapp · 1 year ago

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Great! Anyway I can request a Bam Margera x Female!Reader smutty imagine? Maybe Bam ends up meeting Johnny’s younger sister and they end up in a relationship at some point. While in said relationship maybe another cast member ends up flirting with her at a party to piss of Bam on purpose and it ends up leading to some protective Bam and jealous sex?

Sex Pollution

Jackass Imagine

A/N: To those who said I can’t write, get a load of this! Haha!

Imagine you’re Johnny Knoxville's sister, probably younger sister. You’re southern, with a real heavy drawl, and look almost identical to him. Maybe not, but you can definitely see resemblances. You grew up close, surely not a girly girl, you get your hands dirty with no questions asked. You’ve spent the start of your brother's career watching, like a bird. Never really met any of the guys, you didn’t really care. Steve-O was too wild, and you weren’t a fan of heavy drugs, Pontius was too flirty, and oddly, Preston and Wee-Man had their own duo, Dunn? Well, he seemed nice, but he didn’t have the best hygiene, and that was enough on its own to be a deal breaker. Who else were you missing?? Never mind…

You never really were looking for a relationship, really, or even a casual friendship. But things happen all the time; and when Jackass came to town, and your mother let these guys stay a few nights, your plans flipped upside down. You were left confused, flustered, and you felt like a teenage girl all over again. With some kid crush on a guy with such a cute face. Handsome like a guy should be, but he was pretty. Not pretty enough you’d mistake him for a girl, though. Just pretty enough for you to gawk at, to sneak around with when all the guys and your family are asleep. Getting drinks, and sneaking pecks on the lips. Before you knew it you were in your own secret relationship with a guy by the name; Bam Margera. It rolled off the tip of your tongue; and you liked it that way.

And then you moved on to Hollywood, the land of the stars. It was quick, sudden really. It wasn’t permanent, no, you were staying with your brother by day, and sneaking off into hotels by night. Because this whole Bam thing was getting serious. And then you found out party’s exist, and that opened a world of fun. Especially when you found out one of the guys was throwing a rager; and it may or may not be that oh so annoying guy you met months prior. Fucking Steve-O, but you couldn’t care less as you went hand and hand with your boyfriend. Having the time of your life.

Until you weren’t, well, you still were, with a few drinks down the hatch. The only one who was growing increasingly more disturbed, upset, was Bam. Some random guy, probably as high as anyone else was chatting you up a storm, and starting to get real handsy. He wasn’t completely random as you knew that face from the set, but with the alcohol in your system you just couldn’t tell who it was. You were polite, didn’t really wanna make a scene, so you used the excuse you needed to get another drink, smiled with your southern charm in full spring, and headed straight to the kitchen.

The minute you stepped away from the cast member and Bam was taking your place, you could see from the corner of your eye. He was threatening the guy. And it was almost funny to you. Almost. Because the moment you were in the kitchen, Bam was coming up behind you. Wrapping his arms around you and mumbling into your ear, his voice sounded so harsh for a whisper. Almost as rough as sandpaper,

“Fuck were you doing with that scum?”

He growled, like a feral dog. His embrace tightened as he pressed himself up against you. In the kitchen. You were stunned, letting out a breath of air that you felt like you hung onto almost too long as you stayed still, your brain short circuiting as you tried to come up with an answer. You swore you had one, but it popped like a bubble. Your head was as empty as the sky tonight. And Bam didn’t seem to care as he started talking again. His rough nails clawing your sides as he ran his hands up and down them like a cat scratching his owner's couch.

“It doesn’t matter, you know you’re all mine.”

You did. Well, if you didn’t before you certainly know now. His boner pressing against your asscrack was certainly showing it. And fuck, did you like being his. And Bam was gonna make sure you knew it.

He shoved you against the floating island, brushing all the cans, and needles, and lord knows what else off the counter as you bent over for him. Bam ripped your pants down so fast you could’ve sworn he ruined your jeans. Fuck. You couldn’t even be bothered to care as you arched your back for him. He ripped his own pants off with record speed, and would have broken the world record for that one as he slipped his boxers down completely.

Bam was as hard as a gun, and you couldn’t even be bothered with all the party goers so close. The chances of someone walking in and or seeing this was close to a hundred, fuck it probably was going to happen. You didn’t care, luckily Johnny wasn’t here. He’d skin Bam like a pig.

It seemed that Bam didn’t care either, he didn’t have any decency either as he just shoved himself inside of you, and you moaned instantly. Your walls clenching onto him as you squealed with pleasure. Jerking your hips forward instinctively as he started immediately with rough, quick thrusts. You could’ve gotten whiplash he was being so rough, all you could think was fuck as he dug his nails into your side, his other hand gripping hard into your hair, pulling your head back as he warned you,

“You’re mine…fuck…baby, you’re all mine.”

He grunted, letting out his own quiet moan as he quickened his pace. His thrusts getting all messy and desperate, the smell of sex polluting the kitchen and probably spoiling the alcohol as you both neared your climax. His grip on your hair tightened so much you thought he’d rip your hair out, and then he pushed himself deep inside of you, and you saw white as he came inside of you, and you came onto him, moaning as the pleasure swallowed you like a tornado. Fuck, you’ve never been so glad to be his.

#jackass #ao3 writer #jackass fanfiction #johnny knoxville #jackass headcanons #steve o #angst prompt #drabble #please request #chris pontius #cky news #mtv #bam margera smut #bam margera #bam margera x reader #female reader #jackass imagine

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youthereader · 11 months ago

Text

Near Zero part 5.

PAIRING: cillian murphy as j. robert oppenheimer x fem!reader

SUMMARY: 1.3k words. Brought on as part of the Manhattan Project, your old physics professor sees you in a new light.

RATING: E; (no smut in this part) mentions of infidelity

A/N: Although based on real life characters, this is J. Robert Oppenheimer as played by Cillian Murphy, a fictional character, and does not intend to be accurate. This is merely for entertainment. It's been months but I'm finally back! Thank you for your patience and Happy 2024!

masterlist

You remember Robert’s note every so often over the next week. You have little time to plan anything properly about your Santa Fe trip, but you fantasize when you’re alone enough. You have only been to the town on your way to Los Alamos months ago, and you were different then. You hadn’t known what this part of the world was capable of.

This dreaminess seeps into your life when you walk into the center of town to buy lighter fluid. You’re out of matches and may have to resort to a flint if you don’t hurry along to the store – and on the way in, you see Kitty, a basket in one arm full of packages from the butcher.

“You again,” she murmurs, flashing her perfect teeth.

She keeps the door open, people moving past both of you. She gives a nod to some women drifting past. It reminds you of high school.

“Robert mentioned something about you and the boys going off on a weekend trip next month,” she says, and you watch her face for any sign of suspicion. “But he can’t have you all to himself all the time, dear. I can’t have you over for my wives’ club since you’re so busy…”

Your eyes meet and you realize she absolutely does not see you as a threat. She’s trying to make friends.

“Unfortunately,” you say, though you’re pretending a little.

“There you go!” she laughs, hitting your arm playfully. “So, you understand my issue. We cannot go on knowing each other and not seeing one another. This town is small enough as it is…”

She trails off, looking behind her at the customers, something passing over her face.

“Did you know I’m a botanist?” she says eventually, glancing back at you. “I’m not just Robert’s wife.”

“Of course, you’re not,” you say.

“And I suppose you have no garden outside that godforsaken shack you’re in,” she goes on, having recovered from whatever she was feeling a breath beforehand. “I’m going to have to give you some type of succulent.”

“A succulent?” you repeat with a smirk.

“Yes, dear. A cactus. Something.”

You appreciate this, having someone that isn’t from T building to talk to. You give a shrug.

“I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

“Yes, and then you can come visit us again to pick it up,” Kitty conspires, smiling again. “Or Robert can drop it off at yours…”

You think of him visiting your house under innocent circumstances, hoping the irony doesn’t show on your face. You clear your throat.

“I’ll let you go,” you say, and she nods.

“Suppose I ought to get back to the brat,” she sighs. “He’s with a neighbor. Unless you’d like to join me?”

You shake your head automatically. “I need to get back to work.”

Kitty rolls her eyes. “I’ve heard that one before. Ta-ta.”

You watch her leave, and then finally walk into the store. Your head is full of Robert again; he must have mentioned Santa Fe while passing through his house. You can picture him bringing up this idea as if he hadn’t come up with it the night of the dinner party. Your face feels warm, remembering his lips on yours, the way he caught your hand in his.

You light a cigarette as you leave for lunch a week later, almost running into a uniformed officer. He calls you by your last name and you glance up, confused.

“Ma’am, Colonel Nichols wishes to speak with you.”

You feel some colleagues’ eyes on you, aware of Robert being within earshot, too.

“Yes?”

You can’t think of what else to say, given that you see there’s little choice in the matter. The young officer turns his heel, and you follow him out. You suck on your cigarette, exhaling to the side as you exit the building, keeping a brisk pace so you’re not left behind.

You only feel mild irritation when you arrive at Nichols’ office, since he doesn’t care that your lunch break is only so long, and there are only so many opportunities to take it throughout a busy workday.

You should have gauged Robert’s reaction on your way out, as Nichols does not seem pleased to see you despite his request.

“Please have a seat,” he says, barely looking up from his papers.

You would rather stand. You would rather not be there at all by how cold he is, by how your stomach growls. You don’t often listen to your body’s signals when you’re in the labs, but now you can’t ignore your rising hunger. You take a short inhale of your cigarette before mashing it in the ashtray in front of you, taking the seat he offers.

“I understand you have requested a weekend pass,” he says, finally looking at you.

His eyes behind his spectacles are pale and assessing. The blue smoke of your cigarette still lingers above your heads as you place your hands in your lap.

“Yes, was my application efficient?” you ask, and he smirks.

“You have never requested a pass before this week,” he says. “Why is that?”

You glance away, unsure of whether this is a joke. He has no right to know such a thing, your cheeks burning with embarrassment, nonetheless. Admitting the truth, that you haven’t wanted to leave because you had no reason to, made your life sound so small and sad. You refuse the mortification.

“I’ve been busy, or is that not a good enough reason, sir?” you retort, and he blinks, unmoved.

“It has nothing to do with Dr. Oppenheimer being present among the visitors of Santa Fe?” he says.

You freeze, wanting your cigarette back, wishing you had known it would be this way. Was he insinuating something, had he seen something? Heard a rumor?

“Dr. Oppenheimer and several of my colleagues will be in Santa Fe,” you say, drawing in a breath. You let it go, to seem bored by his invasiveness. “Are we not meant to spend time with one another outside of a laboratory? I would have thought the Army endorsed that kind of morale building among its ranks.”

You’re laying it on thick and he notices it, frowning ever so slightly.

“Oppie might not even come, he’s so busy,” you add with a half laugh. “And Feynman was always more fun. He is not pathologically introverted.”

“I would have thought you have been described as such, before this pass request came through,” Nichols drawls.

“Not diagnosed as such,” you say, a smile on your lips that you let fall instantly, knowing it to be a disturbing sight to some.

You no longer wish to pretend.

“Will I be allowed to leave Los Alamos or not?” you ask, and Nichols looks down at his papers, an open file.

“For now, yes,” he says.

You stare at one another, waiting for the silence to be broken. You refuse to blink, to further unsettle him. You despise being controlled and have not felt this type of outrage in a while.

“You may leave,” he says, and you rise from your chair.

He adds as you turn your back:

“Be careful, with what you share about the project.”

You always are. You turn back, frowning at him.

“Of course. Loose lips and all.”

He gives his own false smile, echoing you: “Of course.”

You find Robert later, who takes your elbow and steers you back out, making a show of insisting you get something to eat like you originally planned.

“Will you have lunch, then, Oppie?” someone teases, and he laughs softly.

When you are alone in the hallway, you stop, your voices lowering.

“Nichols knows. How does he know?”

“A guard, perhaps,” Robert says, and he is not anywhere near as concerned as you.

You stare at him. “Robert, I am being serious.”

“As am I,” he says, and he touches your cheek, then your shoulder, sighing. “My darling, I’m sorry you’re put through this.”

“I’m a willing participant,” you retort, and he shakes his head, just the once. “Will you please enlighten me-?”

“I have a file. And they watch me,” he whispers.

You look towards the entryway to the hall you occupy, then back at Robert. A distinct fear settles into you, deep down, to your marrow. You suppress a shiver.

Thank you for reading! I know I vanished for a while, but I hope to write more consistently. I have a nine month-old baby and it's hard to find time for creative things, so I'm very grateful to anyone who's been hanging out for more of this story! If you'd like to be added to a taglist, hmu! 🥰

#j robert oppenheimer #near zero #cillian murphy fanfiction #fem reader #cillian murphy #cillian murphy x reader #oppenheimer x reader #oppenheimer x y/n

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klausysworld · 2 years ago

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Could you write something with yandere klaus and he’s kidnapped the reader but she’s slowly becoming a yandere over him and refusing to let him have attention on anyone but her or to leave her alone?

I think…I love you

It started of like a nightmare. I was trapped and i hated him, i wished him dead or locked away like he had me.

I felt like a caged animal, i am caged animal…or i was?

It’s gotten confusing over the months. The more he spent time with me, the less i seemed to mind. To begin with i would yell and rile him up and he would lash back, be cruel and rough but once i gave in and stopped kicking or hitting and screaming, he wasn’t so bad.

The food he gave me was of the best quality and there was no shortage of snacks in the cupboards he had put up in my room.

Over time my room went from just a bed to a full on apartment. There was a kitchen section with a stove that only he could turn on, after the small incident that i caused when he originally installed it and tried to burn the room down, and then a microwave, sink and fridge freezer

“Now we can cook and bake together, my love, no more waiting for me to disappear and remerge with the food, you have your own” he said with a smile as he opened the cupboards filled with crisps and chocolates and such.

That was a moment I wouldn’t ever forget, I practically threw myself at him hugging him so unbelievably tight he could barely breathe. After a minute of shock he hugged me back before we baked dozens of cookies and cakes.

Next was the TV. That was a game changer.

Again i had jumped on him so suddenly he fell back onto the sofa he had bought with me on top of him. His eyes were wide as i slammed my lips to his, he moaned in surprise as my tongue met his in a frenzy. His hands were in my hair as he managed to get himself above me, my legs wrapping round his waist much to his surprise.

Now we didn’t go all the way but he was overly happy to have his fingers inside me. He seemed to be in more pleasure than i was-if that was possible- as he continued to groan into my mouth and curl his fingers against my spongey spot to have my chest pushing to his and my mouth opening wider for him. And when my head was thrown back while i cried his name and came all over his hand, he was sucking dark marks into my neck with a growl of satisfaction.

We had become much closer since then. I found myself drawn to his talented hands, aching to have them back on me, in me. And he was all the more happy to oblige. I knew once we had sex i would’ve finally given in completely, there would be zero chance of ever leaving my room. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t let him have me in other ways.

Now he was allowed to touch me he was all the more eager to get me whatever i wanted. He was like a gift from hell. He could be so horrible, demanding and selfish but then he would be kind, loving and giving. And I couldn’t help but want him around. I didn’t try to escape anymore, there wasn’t any point. I was…happy here, with him. There wasn’t anyone left for me in the real world, he had made sure of that ages ago so he was all i really had and i he had everything i needed so why run away?

There was one small problem though. He was often leaving, never able to stay too long because of another problem in town, his family, Salvatores, everything.

At times i even had to beg him to stay, anything for another ten minutes. It was horrible being in here alone, it felt empty and lifeless. Besides he enjoyed my pleading and grasping for him to stay, almost guaranteed me extra time with him.

I began to grow upset when he mentioned other women. One name in particular: Caroline Forbes. Someone who had very clearly taken an interest i him and yet he seemed oblivious

“She likes you” i stated and he laughed

“No she’s using me, she thinks she has me in her pocket but it is i who is winning this game” he muttered. A game? With a girl? Not good.

The annoyance in his voice was clear when he spoke of Elena and Bonnie, though sometimes he was a little too impressed by Bonnie’s power which always twisted something inside me. He liked me to be weak, enjoyed the hold he had over me so why was he so enamoured by hers?

Something when he didn’t come down to sleep beside me, my mind began to wonder. Was he in someone else’s bed? Were there other girls with their own room somewhere else i this place? Did he love me at all? I was well behaved now, obedient. Surely he wasn’t still mad at me for our earlier interactions?

That fear drove me. It had me clinging to him relentlessly, I needed him to stay with me like i would him. He had to be mine if i were to be his.

———————————————————————

I waited patiently as i heard his footsteps nearing. The door unlocking before he walked in dressed impeccably. His suit was tailored perfectly and his hair was gelled. His bowtie was white like his shirt with his blazer, pants and shoes were black.

“My love” he breathed as he pulled me into his arms. I hugged him lightly before pulling away with a frown

“Why are you dressed up?” I asked and his lips twitched into a smile

“It’s my mother, she has returned, she’s throwing a ball and so my siblings and i had to attend, bring dates and all that” he waved his hand dismissively before pressing his lips to mine but i pushed him away making him frown

“Dates?” I questioned, that sick feeling rising throughout me as i glared at the thought

“It’s only Caroline love, i had to otherwise it would be suspicious. I can’t have anyone suspecting you down here” he explained softly but his faux innocence only caused my fear and anger to rise

“How on earth is that fair? You have me! You don’t need her!? Am i- am i not enough? Oh god you’re going to take her too aren’t you?” My emotions were running a thousand miles a second as i backed away from him

“No, love no, of course not. You’re more than enough, i love you. It’s just an act sweetheart, i don’t mean anything by it. I’m not keeping anyone else like i have you, you’re all i will ever need, ever want” he assured but my head shook as my heart began to race, my breaths coming closer together

“You’re lying- you keep giving me things to distract me don’t you? Because you’re with other people… is- is this because I won’t sleep with you? You need someone else to-“

“No! No that is not what is happening at all!” He yelled, his eyes wide and his hands coming down to my shoulders but the contact made it worse. How many people were being touched by his hands? Fingers that had been all over me, in someone else?

“Y/n look at me, look at me bunny” he pleaded quietly, my eyes reluctantly rose to his as i felt tears cloud my vision. His thumbs were quick to wipe any away as he held my face gently

“I would never, and will never, do that to you. You have no idea how much i love you sweetheart. I watched you for weeks, months before coming to take you home, i know you my love. You’re mine, and i am yours, completely and utterly yours. I would do anything to prove that to you” he confessed as i saw his eyes glisten over as worry seeped in

“Then why do you leave me for her?” Her i whispered, my voice breaking as I attempted to withhold the sobs that were clawing at the back of my throat.

“To protect you” he murmured “that is all, you must believe me, i wouldn’t have done all of this just to throw you away, i love you more than could ever love anybody else, you mean an impossible amount to me”

“Why can’t we just be together Klaus? Why cant we have our own house and we can be together” i asked quietly now the tears ran down my face

“It isn’t safe for you to be outside” he explained

“Then I won’t leave. I’ll stay in the house, you can spell it, we can stay inside, together, isn’t that what you want? Just us..forever?”

He smiled sadly at me as he pressed a kiss to my forehead

“I’m afraid that just isn’t possible in my life, my family will always find me, my enemies will always find me, this. This is the only way to keep you safe and with me. I wish there were another way, and there is in a different world but not this one love, this is the only way” he whispered desperately trying to have me believe him

“Please don’t go to the ball with her” i uttered

“No love, I won’t” he promised pulling me into a hug and hiding his face in my neck, kissing tenderly. “I’ll just stay here, my family won’t notice just this once” he muttered as his lips moved down to my collarbone, sucking gently

“I think…I love you” i told him so quietly i was surprised even his supernatural side could hear me.

But i knew he had when his face hovered just over mine, his eyes shining as he smiled down at me

“And i love you, more than you could believe” he reminded

“I want to be yours, fully” I muttered bringing his hand to rest over my heart. “Please, i know you want to”

His eyes darkened as i moved his hand to squeeze my breast

“Not like this” he murmured “you’re vulnerable and upset, we will soon, I promise… but under far more romantic circumstances” he kissed the corner of my mouth before bringing me over to my bed, sitting me down in the middle “But if you lay back, i can still certainly help you feel better” he purred as he emerged from between my legs, his hands pushing my knees apart making me laugh lightly

“You know you’ve done the pleasing an awful lot over the past months, perhaps i can help you this time?” I offered, my hand reaching down to feel his crotch, my brows widening feeling him already hard and much larger than I expected. I could see his smirk as his hips gently rocked against my hand

“If you come here we can please each other” he grinned and my face grew hot

“I love you” i told him leaning up to kiss him

“And i, you”

264 notes · View notes

rqgnarok · 1 year ago

Text

orange juice - tommy miller (ii)

fandom: the last of us (tv show & video game)

wc: 7,664

warnings: mentions of alcoholism, ptsd, death and gore as seen on the show and games. no pronouns for reader.

summary: a surprising turn of events brings tommy back to your life and he won't let sleeping dogs lie.

sequel to dial drunk and loosely inspired in noah kahan's orange juice

masterlist / ao3 / ko-fi

“He’s looking at you again.”

“Let him,” you tell Maria, picking at your pancakes with your fork. It’s almost 10 PM and she took you out to eat breakfast for dinner, but it was enough incentive to get you out of the house after two weeks of no human interaction. That, and the fact that she’s paying. “He can stare all he wants, it’s not a crime.”

“Feels like one,” she shrugs, eyesight momentarily stuck to the corner of her eye where you know she’s scouting her target, her lips a tight, displeased line. “And your shoulders say otherwise, all up against your ears. You look like you’re waiting for the electric chair.”

You roll your eyes so hard it brings back to life the headache you’ve been nursing for the last couple of days. It had gently placed itself as a quiet dull in the back of your head and returns full force now.

The diner is half-empty– not an unusual occasion at this time of night, but the voices and laughter from fellow Jackson citizens only worsen the ache of the giant bruise that is your body right now.

“It would be a kinder fate, I think.”

Maria stands her ground, grimacing. “God, who even is this guy? When you said there was some bad history I thought you meant, like, a nasty ex. That man is looking like a cloud belongs permanently above his head.”

Who even is Tommy Miller? It’s a good enough question, one you never thought you’d have to answer in your life after the world ended.

You’d been in New York when the infected spread like wildfire across the country. There was barely enough time while running for your life to think about what might’ve happened to the Miller boys.

You hoped. By God, you hoped like you rarely dared these days that Joel, Tommy, and Sarah made it out safely. Guilt swallowed you whole the second you thought about it for too long.

You relinquished any rights you had on them when you abandoned them. You ran out of Austin with your tail between your legs and cut off all contact with them, one last futile attempt to put Tommy’s life back together.

Why are you being so fucking difficult?

I’m done watching you wreck your life, Tommy. I’m not picking up again tonight, or ever. Call Joel.

The first time you saw Tommy Miller again after two decades you were too in the throes of a panic attack to believe he was real.

It wouldn’t be the first time you confused the sight of a stranger for your long-lost friend. Freckles on fair skin, cow eyes so brown they could be black and broad shoulders under jean jackets; they’re more common than you’d think.

But they always turn around and the illusion always breaks. It’s your designed personal penitence, to chase after the man that knew how to hurt you better than anyone in your life, and that you let because you loved him. Love, still. Time and distance and the fucking apocalypse weren’t enough to diminish what you’ve always felt for Tommy Miller.

You loved him even when you left him. It’s why you left him, even if it killed you in the process.

But this time it was him. Along with a group of newcomers, he stumbled across Jackson and you found yourself trying to blink away the sight of a ghost in the town square to no avail. His expression was tight and distrustful, so Joel it created a vacuum of longing in your belly even through the panic.

And fuck, man, Joel. The last time you talked to Tommy was the last time you talked to his brother, too. A call right after you hung up on the youngest Miller that had him using all the curses available in his vocabulary on his brother’s name.

How many times has he done this to you?

Too many.

Fucking dumbass. Hope you keep ‘im in the doghouse a little longer this time.

I’m serious, Joel, I’m not picking after him again.

Joel had tried to convince you otherwise, but you both knew his heart wasn’t in it. You’d both witnessed Tommy’s mishaps once too many times and he knew dropping Tommy wasn’t a decision you’d make lightly.

Because it meant dropping him as well, and Sarah. It meant giving up on the realest family you had, most likely for good.

He’s gonna hate this. I think that boy would rather lose an arm than lose you.

He can live without me, Joel.

No, he’d said, oddly solemn, like he knew something you didn’t. No, he can’t.

But he’d been wrong. Here Tommy was, stumbling into your life as if he hadn’t left it at all. He'd locked eyes with you across town like the sea of curious citizens peering at the dirty strangers from outside town didn’t exist.

Even if it hadn’t been him those thousand times you thought you saw him, in your mind Tommy was everywhere: dead in some shallow common grave in Austin, turned and without any control over his body with a bite scar on his arm, running for his life with a gun in his hand and Joel by his side, hiding behind the alcohol like he’d been doing the last time you saw him.

The possibilities were endless and terrible, but they hadn’t killed you yet.

The way Tommy’s face fell in realization almost did. You’d rubbed at your eyes and strained your eyesight as best you could, but the hallucination refused to fade. He was still there, standing tall, weary and tired and hopeful.

He’d opened his mouth, the shape of your name already on his lips when you turned around and ran for your life back into your house. Your lungs didn’t fill with a full breath until you turned all the locks and leaned against the door, heart hammering against your ribs and nausea crawling up your throat.

As if Tommy would chase after you, knocking on your door and demanding something from you, or maybe just to be mean about the same things he’s always held against you.

But he hadn’t. Hiding worked. You didn’t hear anything from him or about him from Maria, so you stood your ground. You didn’t even throw a fit when she came to force you into the shower so you could have dinner together, only to avoid more questions you couldn’t answer.

Who is he? You looked like the Grim Reaper was walking into town, do you know him? Did he hurt you? I swear to God, if he did he’s not staying, hon, I promise–

An old friend, was the explanation you’d settled on, the biggest understatement of your life. We grew up together and went our separate ways way before the outbreak. Wasn’t really a clean break.

Maria took it, albeit hesitantly, and the worried glances she’d been sending your way in the diner grew tenfold when Tommy walked in. He sat at the bar and ordered a drink with a piece of pecan pie. Something in your heart clenched when the waiter put a colorful drink in front of him and Tommy poured it down without even blinking.

So what if he’s drinking, still? It’s why you walked away from him, isn’t it? If your ultimatum meant nothing to him then that’s not your problem, even if it makes something sorrowful and ugly bloom in your belly.

You look away just as he turns his head towards your booth so he doesn’t catch you looking. Instead, you catch him more than a handful of times, his gaze hot and piercing.

It’s always been unnerving, being under his careful eye.

“I don’t think he’s gonna stop.”

Fuck, you think. “Then I will,” you sigh in mourning for your nice evening and hit the table lightly with your fist as you stand. Maria hisses your name and goes to grab your arm but you’re already walking towards Tommy. The next time he sneaks a look he finds you closer than expected.

You would laugh at the look on his face if this were funny at all.

It’s not funny. Whatever bravado you might’ve put on in front of Maria is fake and gone by the time you reach Tommy’s side. He annoyingly smells of cologne, somehow a charming like hell scent even in a post-apocalyptic world.

“You’re staring,” is your opener, less annoyed than you intended and a little bit too breathless, but a truth all the same.

The asshole has the decency to look amused, eyes glinting, and that terrible mustache he’s acquired since he got here moves in a way that indicates he’s smiling and trying to hide it.

“Hello to you, too,” he says, and the roughness of his voice sends thrills of warmth down your belly. He both did and didn’t speak like this twenty years ago, a harsher edge to his tone that you credit to the terrible decades spent between then and now. But underneath it all there’s something so indescribably Tommy that leaves you incredibly out of your depth for this moment.

“Hey, Miller,” you say with a roll of your eyes at his sarcasm, but the greeting comes out too soft, too honest. You feel like the knots of anxiety inside of you are about to snap from how tightly they are woven. “You’re staring. It’s freaking Maria out.”

“Sorry to Maria,” he says without sounding even merely apologetic, and your heckles rise so quickly you’re practically blindsided. It starts with a few cute quips and ends with him calling you to pick him up from the bar fight he’s lost this time, breath reeking of tequila. “You look good.”

He checks you out slowly, brown eyes full of intent and lacking subtlety. It feels like you’re facing a shooting battalion, waiting for them to deem you guilty.

There’s nothing suggestive or mean about it. It’s almost kind– wistful in a way you don’t remember him being. You're just having a casual conversation, even if there’s nothing casual about this encounter.

“So do you,” you say for lack of anything else, his honesty catching you off guard. His eyes fly to your face and scrutinize you like he’s trying to make sure you mean it. Whatever conclusion he reaches makes his smile widen, even if just by a little. “Can’t say I’m not surprised, though. Thought you would’ve moved on from Jackson by now.”

He shrugs, turning back to stare at his empty glass, still angling his body toward you where he’s sitting on a worn-out stool. “You don’t find this a lot these days.”

“Civilization?”

“Community,” his eyes twinkle, and, really, Jesus Christ, what’s up with the lights in this place? The man looks like a live-action Disney prince, all combed hair and bright eyes. “Reminds me of home, almost. And, well.”

He doesn’t say it, and you’ve long stopped trying to figure out what he keeps to himself, but you know what you want it to be. You’re too familiar with the way he stops himself from saying stuff he means– especially if it's kind. He’s saving himself the bashful blush that comes after but you desperately wish to hear it anyway.

And, well. You’re here, too.

He clears his throat when you only nod in response, silence stretching between you painfully. “Can I buy you a drink?”

It’s your turn to bite back your words. A firm, offended fuck no rests on your tongue, and swallowing it back down feels like gravel against your throat.

He’s trying, you guess.

You wordlessly sit on the stool next to him, careful not to touch him even on accident. Nodding at the waiter, you say, “I’ll have whatever he’s having,” intertwining your hands nervously and feeling somewhat victorious for getting anything out.

The waiter nods, tilting his head in question. “Non-alcoholic alright?”

You blink, once again losing the slight footing you’d found just now. You don’t turn towards Tommy, but you feel him shift in his seat, silent.

“I- yeah, sure.”

He nods and walks away, and you and Tommy sit in silence until he comes back to place a glass in front of you. You reach for it only to busy your hands but don’t drink from it. Anything you might take is only gonna come back up eventually out of sheer nervousness.

Tommy speaks after a beat. The anxiety in your belly keeps pushing further. “You could’ve ordered something else if you wanted. Maybe with a little more kick?”

“I don’t mind,” you promise dryly. “I, uh. I don’t drink, really. Like, at all.”

“Me either, if you can believe it,” it surprises you enough that your head turns to him in disbelief. Tommy’s already looking at you with an expression you can’t name but unsettles you all the same. He smiles at whatever he sees in your expression, gently amused. “I know. Joel made the same face when I told him I wanted to quit.”

The mention of the eldest Miller would bring you to your knees had you been standing up. “Joel. Is he…?”

You trail off but Tommy catches your meaning and his amusement dissolves.

“Alright,” Tommy confirms with a nod, taking a sip of his drink and running his tongue over his lips after, chasing the flavor. He looks suddenly stricken, but like he’s had enough of that emotion that his features have grown accustomed to it. “As much as he can be, I guess. We... lost Sarah the day all hell broke loose.”

Whatever relief had filled you is immediately displaced by nausea. Closing your eyes tightly doesn’t stop the tears from burning or the wave of grief from washing over you.

“Fuck,” you say through feelings that are now stopping you from breathing freely. “Fuck, Tommy, I’m so sorry.”

“I am, too,” he says, quiet and thoughtful and familiar. Fuck, so fucking familiar that it both soothes and shakes you even further. You feel him move again, and open your eyes to find his hand closer to yours on the counter than it was a second ago, not touching you but offering some weird sort of comfort nevertheless. “I know you loved her. She loved you, too. So much.”

Love is an understatement. You’d been the fourth person to ever hold her after her parents and her uncle, and she had you wrapped around your finger the second she held it tightly in her tiny, baby fist. You watched her first steps and her first words, went to her first soccer game and gossiped about her first crush. Nursed her first heartbreak when the men in her life were too out of depth to really help.

She’d been your family as much as Joel and Tommy had been. Any issue you had with Tommy had nothing to do with his niece or his brother. You’d hoped; stupidly, blindly, selfishly, that she’d made it even if this was never the world you wanted her to grow up in.

“God, all this time…” you cut yourself off and fight the urge to reach for his hand and intertwine your fingers. You’ve never missed him from this close. “I mean– it was always a long shot, but I thought. I hoped… If anyone…”

“I know,” he acknowledges, fingers twitching. He lets a moment pass before he says, tentatively– “I hoped for you, too.”

It would’ve hurt you less if he had insulted you. At least it would’ve been expected.

“Tommy–”

He calls your name as he finally puts his hand on top of yours, pleading. It’s too warm, sweaty, and firm on your skin, and you pull it off the counter swiftly before he can do anything stupid like squeeze it. You stand, distraught, and Tommy follows suit.

“Sweets, please–”

“Don’t,” you snap, harsher and louder than you mean to, earning yourself unwanted attention from a few curious eyes in the diner. Maria, on the other side of the room, is standing and eyeing you worriedly.

Her eyes say blink twice and I’ll kick his balls but even her support is too much. The world blurs around you and Tommy’s words from forever ago echo along with the blood pumping in your ears.

Don’t be like that, sweets. You can act all high and mighty next time, alright?

God, you can’t do this. You left a small town once to avoid this exact confrontation. Maybe it’s finally time to leave Jackson and this is God laughing in your face, screaming at you to go.

“This isn’t what I came for,” you say to the universe, to Maria, to Tommy, to whoever’s listening and is kind enough to get you out of your misery. “Just– stop it with the staring, alright? You can have my drink if you want.”

Tommy looks desperate and more unkept than he had a minute ago. His hair’s a mess even if he hasn’t even reached out to touch it, and the twinkle in his eye is made out of urgency rather than charm.

“Sweets–”

“Fuck off,” you bite, eyesight blurry with unshed tears of frustration. Tommy reels back a little. He wasn’t expecting any aggression from you. “I don’t want you to call me that.”

“I’ve always called you that,” Tommy’s brow furrows in honest confusion.

“Yes,” you say, because to you it’s as clear as glass cutting into your skin. “Yeah, that’s the fucking problem, Tommy.”

You can’t bear to look at him. How dare he be hurt about this after what he did? After breaking your heart, using your feelings against you, and then holding a grudge for two decades when you decided you weren’t gonna let him do that shit to you?

You leave the diner with those words, ignoring both Tommy and Maria calling after you. Only one of them tries to follow but you’re not in the mood to entertain either of them, even if Maria has nothing but good intentions.

God, those free pancakes weren’t even worth it.

You hide at home again.

You hate that this is what its come to. Even if Jackson has become your home you’re the one who has to hide away because Tommy decided to parade in without a fucking care in the world.

It’s weird, you spent years trying to live with your guilt over ending your friendship the way you did, even if it was for the better, but now that he’s back you feel nothing but anger.

Anger over him putting you in a position like that. Anger about his own anger and inability to see how badly you were trying to put his safety over your friendship. Anger about ending up here anyway: breaking yourself in two for his sake.

Some things never change, apparently.

The weekend comes and goes after your valiant escape from the diner and this time there’s nothing Maria can say or do to get you to go out again. She leaves some groceries at your doorstep because she’s a fantastic friend, but after blatantly refusing to answer her questions about Tommy she leaves you alone, wearing a disappointed mother-like frown.

You’re trying and failing to read a book one of your neighbors lent you when there’s a knock at the door. Believing it to be Maria you stay rooted in your spot on the couch, knowing she’ll give up eventually.

Except the knocking doesn’t stop.

It doesn’t grow more insistent or lose its intensity, but rather keeps its steady rhythm; three knocks, a moment or two of silence, and then repeat. It gets on your nerves sooner than later and you’re jumping off the couch to make it stop, clad in your pajamas and fuzzy socks that almost got you shot when you were bargaining for them half a decade ago.

By the time you reach the door, you’re about to pull your hair out. Maria’s name is on your lips when you come face to face with Tommy, his fist still raised mid-knock.

“Don’t close the door,” he rushes to say, hand settling on the frame just in case you decide to do it anyway. “I just want to talk, please.”

“What the fuck,” you answer out of mere surprise, body coiled tight as you try to keep your body language to a minimum. Any sudden movements and he’ll invite himself in, and then you really won’t be able to keep the line drawn between your past and your life here. “There’s nothing to talk about, Tommy.”

“Like hell, there isn’t,” he says with enough annoyance that you blink, reeling back a little. Finally, a taste of the Tommy you were expecting, short and mean and careless with your heart.

It’s almost a relief– the sweet facade was too good to be true and you didn’t believe it for a second. “We were friends once, or did you forget? And now you can’t even be in the same room as me for more than twenty minutes. I’m sure we’ve both got more than enough to get off our chests, sweets.”

“Don’t–”

“Don’t call you that, yeah, sorry,” he mimics your outcry from the other night, but he shrinks a little at the reminder, shoulders to his ears. It’s an honest enough apology that you refrain another biting comment from leaving your mouth. “See, I’d get a chance to understand why you hate it so much if you just talked to me–”

“I don’t want to fight with you, Tommy,” you say, more honestly than you mean to. He keeps pulling the truth out of you despite your best tries to give him as little insight into yourself as possible.

It comes out tired– reminiscent of the resignation you used to pick up the phone with whenever Tommy called late at night.

“And I’m not here for that,” the way he’s meeting your gaze leaves you unable to look away. You automatically preen under the warm, molten brown of his eyes. “But I– you owe me some kind of explanation–”

“Jesus,” you laugh, the sound loaded with incredulity. Just when you think you know what to expect from him… “That’s really fucking rich, Tom, really, so much for not fighting–”

“You’re the one who insists on making everything a godforsaken argument–”

“Listen to what you’re saying to me!” you exclaim a little too loudly, catching the attention of some of your neighbors and shit.

Motherfucking shit, you have no other choice but to grab Tommy’s stupid flannel in your fist and pull him inside your home away from prying eyes. You close the door behind you and turn back to him, fire at your tongue. “Fucking listen to yourself, Tommy! What the fuck would I owe you after everything–”

“Listen, just because you don’t like me anymore–”

“I don’t like you?” you say incredulously, stopping mid-path to the kitchen and trying to come to terms with Tommy standing in your home looking like he’s meant to be here. “Tommy, I mean this with the most respect I am capable of mustering for you right now, but are you high?”

It’s the sort of thing you would’ve told him when you were younger, unapologetically calling him out on his shit in the most picturesque way possible. Tommy’s eyes brighten with something– not quite glee, not quite fury– and he leans closer to you almost automatically, muscle memory pulling at strained, rusted pieces of him that are now awakening in your presence.

“Fuck off,” he snaps, but there’s something resigned about it. He presses at his temples with his thumb and index finger, hand calloused and steady and too familiar for you not to ache for his touch.

“You’re the one who dropped me like it was nothing,” he accuses. All the fight leaks out of him, leaving him curved inwards and small. “Like you weren’t my best fucking friend, like I– like I was always just– pulling you down, or some shit. Like you were just waiting for the right excuse to get rid of me.”

The words are a gut punch on their own but the way he says them– like he’s been thinking them to be true ever since you left– almost floors you completely.

You say, “Tommy,” and you can’t help it. Some instinctive part inside of you has come back to life and doesn’t know anything other than his name. “Tommy, are you being serious right now?”

“Do you know why I haven’t had a drop of alcohol in over a decade?” he demands, looking straight into your fucking soul as he waves his hands around, trying to make a point. “Because after the world went to shit all I could think about was you. I thought of you, dead and mad at me, and I wanted to be wrong about that more than I wanted to drink.”

Jesus. Jesus fucking Christ.

“You left me behind,” he says, an accusation, but it comes out too quiet for it to really be angry. “And you just… moved on. Moved away. It felt like everything we went through meant nothing to you.”

You gape. The silence echoes in your ears along with the rapid beat of your heart and your blood rushing to your brain as you make sense of what he's saying.

“It meant everything to me,” you admit eventually, the weight of your decision still making your shoulders ache after all these years. “Jesus, Tommy, don’t you get it? That’s why I had to leave. It killed me to watch you fade away like that. And to think I was… aiding and abetting, somehow–”

Tommy shakes his head, stubborn. “The drinking wasn’t your fault–”

“You called me every fucking time,” you interrupt, voice hard.

There’s little softness about the whole thing. He was your friend and you failed him by cutting him off and not being there when he needed you, but he wasn’t exactly pulling his weight. It was you on your own trying to maintain a friendship he wasn’t interested in saving.

“At one point I only heard from you when you needed me to bail you out. I got to know more about the sheriff on guard than about your own life. It wasn’t fucking fair, Tom. To either of us.”

Tommy doesn’t have an answer for that, arms crossed and glaring at your kitchen floor. His jaw quivers with emotion but his fluttering brows tell you it’s not anger. You know what he looks like when he’s trying not to cry.

“I was a reminder of everything wrong with your life,” you continue, quieter, softened by his lack of retort and the absence of any fight. “I was stopping you from moving on by coming every time you called. As long as I came to get you you’d keep getting shitfaced. Driving drunk, getting into fights, hurting the people you loved. I couldn’t keep doing that to you.”

“Hurting you,” Tommy says, meeting your eye. There’s only a table between you now, but you’ve never felt further apart from him, and that’s saying something. “All that time, I was hurting you.”

You look away in embarrassment, even though there’s nothing about the statement that warrants it. “And Joel and Sarah. Your mom. But yeah. Yeah, you were hurting me.”

Tommy sighs. He’s looking every one of his years and reaching for one of your chairs, sitting like his body can’t hold him up anymore, his vices calling to charge their fees.

You ask, curious, grief-stricken: “What happened to you, Tommy?”

“I don’t know,” he says, lost, the sound of his voice bordering on a break. He’s crying now, you realize, not shedding tears but trying to keep himself together and failing. “I don’t know, I was just so… angry. About everything. After I was discharged everywhere I saw, it was all red.”

You close your eyes at the mention of 22-year-old Tommy, some baby fat still clinging to his changing face that was hardened by his experience overseas. You’d gone with his family to pick him up from the airport, and he’d clung just as tightly to you as you did him when you ran to meet him on the tarmac. Your lungs had finally, finally filled with a full breath now that he was back home with you, but something was off and you knew it the second you saw him.

His shoulders remained tense all throughout your embrace and the ride home. He was quiet during the welcome party in his mom’s house, and later you spent hours on his porch until the sun came back up again. Whatever it was, he hadn’t wanted to talk about it.

You don’t want to hear about all that, he’d promised, arms around his legs and cheek laying on his knee, gaze on you and far away at the same time. Trust me, sweets, I’d take this fucking heat and some Willie Nelson over army shit every time.

“I don’t know when I realized drinking made it easier,” he goes on, and you wonder if he’s stuck in the same memory as you. “I could be as angry as I wanted to and still not feel a damn thing. And I didn’t care who paid the price of it. I didn’t care about anything.”

“That night, though,” he says, expression turning wary as if expecting you to make a run for it. You’ve tried to the last two times you came face to face with him, but you’re too tired now. You’ve picked too much at this scar to do anything other than let it bleed. “When you hung up on me, it all came rushing back. Everything I’d been tryin’ to avoid just crashed into me. Hurt a hell of a lot worse than the broken nose did.”

Your surprise bypasses your quiet grief. “You broke your nose?”

“It got broken,” he pulls a sour face that almost makes you smile. He rubs the crooked slope with his index finger, thoughtful. “Not that I didn’t deserve it, but I’m pretty sure Collins had had it against me since high school.”

You snort. You remember who he’s talking about– one of the officers you had to befriend in the hope he’d let Tommy go with a warning a few dozen times. He’d been a skinny kid with braces and a hero-like worship for the younger Miller before he graduated and signed up for the Academy.

“I’m not angry anymore,” he admits, and you don’t realize how much that statement means to you until your next breath comes a little too easy, fills your chest the way air hasn’t for twenty whole years. “After the world ended, being mad about something like this felt…”

You try to help when he trails off. “Insignificant?”

Tommy’s smile is small but real, fond. “I was gonna say ‘stupid’, but yeah.” He nods at you, wistful. “Yeah, you’ve always been better at words than me. Better in every sense, really.”

You soften again against your will. “Tommy.”

“Sorry,” he shakes his head, wiping some stray tears neither of you realized had fallen. He’s not gentle about it, and you itch to reach for his hands and do it yourself, remind him that the world has punished you both for long enough to have him be so rough on himself.

“It’s different now. Being sober,” he continues, nervous. He’s tapping the table, bouncing his knee, biting his cheek– a checklist for anxious tics. “Trying to get through the end of the world without booze was shitty as hell.”

He continues, ashamed– “I, uh, I fell off the wagon more times than I’d like. Definitely more than I can excuse, even with everything that’s happened.”

Guilt swells inside you and you’re unable to dial it back. You left him. He was in trouble without a way out and your response to that was to leave him.

Even if you’d been right to do it, even if you indirectly saved his life, you’ve always been honest with yourself about how much it haunted you. It’s a small, worthless comfort, how the right choices usually don't feel so.

“You kept calling me,” it escapes your mind without your consent, but now that you’ve put it out there you can’t stop thinking about it. “I didn’t pick up, but you kept calling at first. Always after midnight, always drunk. Always in trouble.”

You meant what you said when he first came in, you don’t want to fight, but you’ve spared his feelings at your expense for too long now, and you need to know. You never thought you’d get the chance to ask, so you have to. Even if Tommy hangs his head like he’s preparing for the guillotine, you need to lay this to rest now. For your sake.

“I know,” he says, soft and regretful.

“And then you stopped,” you recall, the hurt so vivid it’s still present, still clutching at your heart after all this time. “When you realized I was of no use to you, that I wouldn’t come to bail you out–”

He says your name painfully.

“I never stopped liking you, Tommy,” you tell him, a secret to apparently no one but him. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. It wasn’t me who stopped caring.”

“Me either,” he says, suddenly firm, looking up at you with a gaze made of steel that doesn’t leave any room for argument. You wrap your arms tighter around yourself as you lean against the counter, its edge jamming almost painfully against your back. “Please tell me you know that. I was a dick and I’m owning up to that but God, please tell me you know how much you mean to me.”

Mean, he says, your mind stuck like a broken record on the present tense as if you hadn’t told him you still loved him just a moment ago. Still, still, still.

You open your mouth but nothing comes out, literally having been rendered speechless. Tommy’s expression shatters.

“Sweets,” it’s a small, tender thing, but he corrects himself immediately even if you don’t complain this time. You’re too stricken by the turns of this conversation to do anything about it. He says your name and you pretend it doesn’t kill you, laughing to himself with every loaded emotion except humor. “God, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I fucked everything up, didn’t I?”

Your answer gets stuck in your throat. You don’t like any of the possibilities, saying either yes or no would be a lie. There are no absolutes in this, nothing crystal clear about this thing between you.

He reads your hesitation and watches you sit opposite to him like he’s exchanging words with a haunting, distrusting and hopeful all the same.

“We were– we were good, though,” he says, like a question, voice dry. He sounds so different from the last time he asked something of you, and the dichotomy is a little too much for you to handle. “Weren’t we? For a while there, before we– I… we were good, right?”

You do the unimaginable and reach out your arm, palm up. Tommy looks at it and you back and forth, like he expects you to laugh in his face, but eventually he meets you halfway and intertwines your fingers together.

Your tears clog your throat. There are so many things you wish had happened differently. “Yeah, Tom,” you say, benevolent. “We were really good.”

His smile is sad and fleeting but his hand is tight around yours. You sit in silence on your kitchen table as the light drains from the sky, but neither of you make a move to leave or turn on the light.

Your life goes on. Surprisingly, with Tommy in it.

It’s an adjustment, for sure. After your heart-to-heart, he promises he’ll stick around in Jackson indefinitely, but it’s still a shock every time he comes by to pick you up for lunch. With his hands behind his back and bouncing nervously on his tippy toes, he looks like he’s about to ask your mom if you can come out to play after you finish your homework.

It freaks you out. The first time he walks you home after an awkward, stilted late morning at the diner your mind bombards you with worse-case scenarios:

Tommy leaving town without telling you, Tommy relapsing after two consecutive hours in your company, Tommy avoiding you around town for the rest of your days as if you hadn’t talked things out at all.

But he comes back. Two days later and then the week after that and so on. Both your social skills slowly but surely begin to defrost and before you know it, you’re seeing each other almost daily for periods of time too long for mere acquaintances.

You’re friends again. Still, he insists as he puts his jacket around your shoulders because a fifteen-minute walk before dinner became a three-hour talk about your years apart. We’re friends, still. I missed you every second I wasn’t with you whether I realized it or not. You were what was missing, sweets.

Today, Tommy stares at you from the other side of the room, gaze clever and unashamed, and something inside you is filled to the brim, satisfied and content.

“He’s looking at you again.”

“Let him,” you say to Maria through the rim of your glass.

She rolls her eyes in good nature and locks her arm around yours. Thus begins the slow walk around the room that inevitably ends, as everything in your life seems to, at Tommy’s side.

She’d been the one who told you to invite him. It was her party, her choice, a private but grander-than-usual affair under the excuse that not many folks get to turn 40 these days. You knew Tommy knew about it because everyone in town did, but he didn’t talk about it until you brought it up yourself after a night together.

Sunlight had been streaming gently through the curtains that swayed with the spring air coming through the window. You’d blindly picked up the closest garment of clothing you found on the floor before you went down to make breakfast.

Tommy had taken one look at you in his shirt and intercepted your path before you could leave the bedroom, hand pulling you back into bed and, consequentially, into his lap.

He’d smiled as you wrapped your arms around his neck and it was like the years vanished between you. You were young again and at the receiving end of Tommy Miller’s honest, boyish charm. Mornin', sweets.

Except you never had this before. Getting Tommy back as a best friend had been one thing, but venturing into this new chapter meant jumping in blind with only his hand in yours to guide you.

He kissed you for the first time– since last time, of course– one early morning after patrol. He settled into the routine of it quite nicely, and he became your partner for it without complaints from, anyone, really.

Stop me if you don’t want to, he’d said, close enough that his eyes were turning from side to side to stare into yours, half-lidded. It was such a callback to the last time that you had to blink several times just to check it wasn’t a dream. But when he finally cut the distance between you you realized it couldn’t be– your dreams never ended like this.

Your dreams ended, but this didn’t. Tommy cupped your head tenderly yet with an intensity that hadn’t been there three decades ago. He licked into your mouth the second you shuddered and clung to the back of his jean jacket, heart hammering inside your chest.

He’d kept his eyes tightly closed after you pulled away, out of breath and high on giddiness, his hands protecting your face from the biting, winter wind.

You good in there, handsome?

Don’t wanna find out you aren’t real. I’ve dreamt about this, I’ll have you know.

You started the kiss then just for that, the thought of Tommy yearning after you like you did him during your time apart driving you a little too crazy.

So it’d been so easy, in the end, to let things progress the way you hadn’t had a chance to after high school. Within the year he was waking up at your place most mornings, coming over for dinner, and sinking into you when you wrapped your arms around him from behind, your temple against his back.

What does a guy gotta do to get you to come home early tonight?

You know you’re invited, right? You can come with me instead of moping around. Maria said so and everything.

I don’t know. I don’t think she likes me that much still–

Bullshit–

–and I wouldn’t wanna embarrass myself askin’ for water all night. He’d rubbed your back tenderly, slowly, up and down strokes while you tangled a strand of his hair around your finger, meaningless touches full of meanings. You go have fun, baby, alright? I’ll stick around for the night and see you after.

You understood and trusted him fully about it, of course. But you still couldn’t help yourself and dialed your home number during the party, hoping to catch him before he fell asleep waiting for you.

You can swing by if you want, you said into the phone, smiling at the sound of Tommy’s voice through the receiver and feeling a little too hot under the collar. Party’s practically over.

Am I gonna be peer pressure’d into party activities? Or do they know about my… situation?

It was a joke, but you could recognize the undertones of tension from miles away.

Yeah, honey, they know you’re sober, you soothed. I mean it, you don’t have to if you don’t want to, alright? But if you change your mind I’ve got some orange juice with your name on it. And Jamie’s kids’, but still. We’d be glad to see your face.

And so here you are. Maria giving you off to Tommy like one would deliver a bride at a wedding, stepping into his open arms and feeling something settle inside of you that’s been restless for over half your life. This love, this domesticity, you never thought you’d get to experience it, let alone with Tommy.

You never thought you’d ever be this happy.

“I’m watching you, Miller,” Maria says fake menacingly as she points two fingers to her eyes and then at Tommy as a warning. “Both of you, hands above the waist, please. Keep it PG for the kiddos, would you?”

You wave her away with a loud, “Thanks, Maria. Bye, Maria,” that has her cackling with laughter all the way to her next conversation.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Tommy jokes, and any undernotes of nervousness left are washed away when you glue yourself to him, your sides touching. “You enjoyin’ yourself, sweetheart?”

You hum an affirmative, leaning your head on his shoulder. “More now that you’re here.”

Tommy grins down at you. “Aren’t you a charmer?”

You smile back slyly. “I learned from the best. You alright?”

The sigh he lets out is big but honest, looking around the room with curiosity rather than like a caged animal looking for ways out. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Everyone’s actually really nice.”

“Told you,” you quip.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re always right,” he rolls his eyes in good nature, shifting so he’s got his arm wrapped around you. “Last time we were at a party together I had to be the jealous boyfriend.”

“I remember,” you do, Tommy twenty-five years younger with his arm around you just like this, a tad more possessive. It's been getting progressively easier to talk about the past and not be overwhelmed by it, and you're glad. It wasn't all bad. “Gotta be honest, honey, I like the real thing a whole lot better.”

You’d never seen him smile so much when you were younger. These days it’s weird to find him without his lips turned upward, like right now when he presses his smiling mouth to your temple. “That makes two of us.”

You fall into a lull of silence, the party going on around you, disturbed only by your content hum. Tommy nudges his nose against your temple, asking quietly. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” you murmur shyly, daring yourself to meet Tommy’s eyes even if there’s no judgment in his gaze, only warmth. You reach for the hand on your shoulder and he intertwines your fingers immediately, his hand warm and a little sweaty. “Just… it feels like I’ve been waiting for this forever.”

“This?”

“For you,” you shrug, squeezing his hand. “To come home. I didn’t think there was even a home to come back to, let alone a chance that we would. And now we’re here.”

He has to kiss you for that, rearranging your positions so he can cup your face in his hands and ignore Maria’s advice from earlier. He sneaks in a little tongue and kisses you with such force you have to hold onto him when you feel your knees go weak.

You break apart when breathing becomes imminent, and he exhales against your mouth, freckled face flushed and pleased. “Now we’re here.”

He draws you back into his embrace and talks nonsense as he draws mindless shapes against your back. About what he did today and what he plans on cooking for dinner tomorrow after patrol as long as he finds the right ingredients.

It’s so incredibly mundane that you can hardly believe it, but time ticks by and Tommy stays by your side, solid and real. He sips on his orange juice and life keeps on happening, your best friend lodged back into place after years and years of flying adrift.

it's here and it's yours!!!!

thank you all for your patience! i've been so busy with college lately but i was adamant to get this one out before august ended and here we are! i hope y'all like it, i love writing for tlou and tommy!

idk when i'll be able to post next, BUT! commissions are open right now for anyone who's interested, info about it here!

thank you so much for reading and any kind words you might have for me <3

tags: @spideysimpossiblegirl

#tlou fic #the last of us #tommy miller #tommy miller x reader #tommy miller x you #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #pedro pascal #gabriel luna #joel miller #sarah miller #maria tlou

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agent-cupcake · 2 years ago

Text

Dramaturgy

Ah yes, another commission to fund my gamer lifestyle from the incredibly lovely and patient @novcaine (thank you <;3)

Pairing: Vampire! Claude von Riegan x f!Reader

Synopsis: Trying to cope with the sudden death of your eccentric father, you fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy, curses, and your very strange (and very tragic) family history, leading you to the small town of Old Derdriu—and its darkest secret.

Warnings: explicit smut, dub/noncon, kidnap, drugged sex

Tags: horror elements, urban fantasy, blood kink, very unhealthy romantic dynamic, overstimulation, "orgasms make your blood sweeter" trope

Word Count: 27.3k

Notes: I read a few horror stories in an attempt to get the tone right for this one which, as I'm sure you'll notice, heavily influenced me while writing. I really got caught up in lore crafting for this one as well, although the real fun was matching up the serious stuff with Claude's personality.

Act 1

“Thither, full fraught with mischievous revenge,

Accursed, and in a cursed hour, he hies.”

9th day of Verdant Moon

As long as I can remember, it’s been just us two. Me and dad against the world. Explorers, adventurers, wanderers. Rogues who chase the horizon to keep the sun close, that’s what he says. Said. There’s always been somewhere new to go, we never stayed anywhere long enough to cast too long of a shadow.

That’s, more or less, what I said over his ashes. Not that there was anyone around to hear it. A eulogy for nobody. But it was true. It is true.

Once upon a time (that’s what people say, right?), it must have been when we spent a summer in Arundel living out of a camper trailer because we didn’t have an air conditioner and spent most of the time outside, I asked him why. I don’t know why I remember it so well, but the air smelled like bug spray and pine and campfire smoke. Not ours though, we hardly ever have fires. Dad claims it’s ‘reasonable’ caution. Claimed.

That night, I don’t know what compelled me to ask, but I did. I asked, “Why do we move so much?”

He said to listen carefully, and I did, because he never sounded so serious. He said that we have bad luck. He said that it was like water, that it’d pool up around us like a puddle if we stayed still. And I asked why, of course, because that was a confusing thing for him to say.

And he said, and I’ll never ever forget this, “it’s in your blood.”

I think. Back then, the distinction between ‘your’ and ‘our’ was virtually nonexistent. And maybe, just maybe, my memory is faulty, and he didn’t switch from a collective pronoun to a singular one. I could be seeing ghosts that aren’t there, convincing myself of untruths to explain some of this. It could have been ‘your’, and it could have been ‘our’, but the point is the same no matter how I split it apart.

I’ve got bad luck. It’s in my blood. I try not to think about that because I don’t want it to be my fault somehow, I don’t even know what I would do if it was.

But I have to know.

II.

“Excuse me, are you Cheryll Bates?” you asked hopefully, standing at the side of a table where an older woman in a bright pink cardigan sat. Nose crinkled and mouth slightly open in the way only people of a certain age could mimic, she adjusted her blocky red glasses higher to peer up at you. The lenses magnified her small, dark eyes like a bug, not helping the discomfort you felt beneath her unwavering gaze as she scanned you from head to toe.

“You’re the Macbeth girl?” she finally asked. It took you a moment to realize what she meant. Macbeth, your mother’s last name—a name you only learned of, along with the woman herself, a month previous.

“Uhm, yeah, that’s me,” you said, hoping you didn’t sound as immediately unsettled as you felt. “May I sit?”

“Be a waste of time if you didn’t,” she said with a slight tinge of an accent, gesturing to the opposite seat with a plump hand. It was the wooden kind with a quilted cushion and long skirt, matching the borderline stifling cozy atmosphere of the cafe. The kind ripe with this musty, dusty, patchouli and tea leaf smell you associated with old women and antiques.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” you said as you sat down, anxiety making your movements awkward. Although Cheryll Bates wasn’t your blood relative, knowing you were related at all was surreal. Throughout your entire life, you’d never heard a single mention of family, of a mom or uncle or grandparents or even a stray cousin twice removed. You should have felt excited, and a part of you was, but you couldn’t stop messing with the cardboard sleeve on your tea, your eyes flitting around the small cafe every few seconds.

The answers that had gotten you this far had only served to unravel the very fabric of your existence, but you sought them all the same. You had to. Dad used to say that knowing was often uncomfortable, but ignorance was an agony like no other. He said all sorts of wise things, although you learned recently that the truth was not one of them.

Cheryll’s mouth worked like she was sucking on something, fine lines fanning out around her lips. The sluggishly swaying Tiffany lamp above cast her in an odd, unflattering light, her dark eyes that much more unnerving beneath the shadows.

“I liked your mama, she was a sweet girl. How much did Indy tell you about her?”

Indy, as in, your dad. The man who raised you, who cared for you. It was a nickname he had earned in school, apparently, after the titular adventurer and archeologist from an old movie.

“My dad never told me a single thing,” you said, trying not to sound too affected. If you thought about this all as some sort of research project, it was easier. If it wasn’t your life, you could view it dispassionately. So that’s what you tried to do. “I am… aware of what she did though.”

“It was a terrible thing,” Cheryll said gravely. “Of course she’d already left you in Enbarr with Indy at that point, came home crying that she had a baby girl, that she couldn’t trust herself to even hold you. Nobody had any idea of why she was so upset, we thought she had lost her mind. And then your daddy came to try and bring her back and… well. I can’t imagine how a person could do such a thing.”

Something within you twisted in sympathy of that statement. Even reading an abstract report made your stomach churn. Self immolation as a means of murder suicide wasn’t very common, mostly because it wasn’t practical. The report had no answers for the hows and the whys, only dry facts.

“Do you think it was postpartum depression?”

Again, Cheryll stared at you with that sour purse of her lips, almost like she was sizing you up. “It was that family of hers,” she said. “I’ll tell you straight, the Macbeths weren’t quite right. Not to say it was their fault, what happened to them, but I won’t glorify the dead, neither. I don’t believe in it. I never wanted my Liv to marry that boy, I knew only bad things would come of it.”

“What do you mean?” you asked.

“Didn’t you read about what happened to them?” Cheryll asked, an edge of indignation in her voice. “One after another…” She didn’t finish that statement, closing her eyes to visibly, even theatrically, shudder. Then again, having seen the string of death certificates, you didn’t exactly blame her. “I went to a psychic when Liv told me she was getting married to that Macbeth boy, and do you know what they said? Don’t let it happen. But I did. I let her marry into that family, and I’ve had to live with that every day since.”

“But none of it was on purpose, was it?” you asked cautiously. “The fire was an accident.”

“An accident,” Cheryll scoffed. “An ‘accident’ that happened right after the two of them had a baby girl. Just like the ‘accident’ that killed your mama’s baby sister. Do you think what happened with your mama was an accident?”

“I thought,” you said slowly, trying to remain calm, wiping that thought from your head and your palms on your jean-clad thighs, “that my mother committed suicide.”

“All that girl ever wanted was to be a mama. I’m telling you, there was something wrong with the Macbeths and she realized it too late. They were cursed, all of them and especially the girls.” Cheryll paused, contemplating her tea. “That’s why your parents met in the first place. Indy was doing research into the families involved with that tragedy in Derdriu and they were the only two he could find.” Cheryll took a sip, frowned, then continued in an even softer voice. “I s’pose your daddy must have been just as cursed as your mama, but I didn’t know him very well.”

“What tragedy?” you asked.

“The Rain of Blood, they call it.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” you said, getting out your diary to write it down.

“Reign, not rain,” Cheryll said, peering at your notepad. “Like a king, reign.”

You erased the word, rewriting it. “Is it a story, or something that happened?”

“It happened,” Cheryll said. “He and your mama always had a laugh about that, said it was why they had such rotten luck.”

“Rotten luck,” you repeated under your breath, more to yourself than to her.

“They thought it was real funny,” Cheryll said, pulling you from your thoughts. “Indy scorned all the ghost stories, he said that it was a matter of history waiting to be uncovered. It seems like he changed his tune as soon as he saw what happened to them.”

You thought about your dad who got itchy when you stayed in one place too long, looking over his shoulder like he was being chased by something you couldn’t see. You thought about the puddles of bad luck forming beneath your feet.

“He might have,” you said, not wanting to think too hard about that. “Do you remember what he said happened? In this Reign of Blood, I mean.”

Cheryll impatiently waved her hand. “You’d have to find a book or something, I couldn’t tell you other than that. The town burned down after. That’s why you’ve got Derdriu and Old Derdriu. They were connected before the incident, but Old Derdriu had to be completely rebuilt later.”

“So Old Derdriu is newer than Derdriu,” you said, unsure if you were understanding her correctly.

“Oh, except for the ruins, they kept those,” she said, her head tilting as she remembered. “The castle from way back when Leicester had Kings and Dukes and the like. But I couldn’t tell you any more than that, I’ve never been.”

You wrote that down too, tapping the eraser against your lip as you contemplated all of this new information. Cheryll was drinking her tea, obviously wanting to finish this up.

“Thank you so much for meeting with me, I really appreciate it,” you said. “Is there anything else you can think of about my dad or…?”

“I’m going to tell you what I wish I had told my daughter,” Cheryll said, looking at you head on. “Leave, now. Go spend the summer on a beach in Enbarr with other kids your age. There’s nothing for you here.”

You swallowed hard, nodding. “Yeah, I… Yeah. I’ll think about it, thank you.”

III.

21st day of Verdant Moon

Being alone is worse than I thought it would be. Having to do everything by myself, figure out how to buy tickets and schedule stuff and all of that, it’s exhausting. But if I think about that too much I’ll cry and if I cry I won’t stop so all I can do is try to figure out what the hell any of this means. It has to mean something, doesn’t it? Or it’s all just insane nonsense and I’m the unfortunate product of a long line of nonsensical insanity, left to drift through this world with nothing but a payout from a trucking company and ghost stories from an old widow and some undiagnosed madness that was never treated because I had no idea I had a family history of mental illness because I was lied to, over and over again.

I can’t think like that.

Earlier, after I left that cafe, I remembered something. It’s weird to have all of these little memories popping up now, things that seemed so insignificant at the time. Maybe they are and I’m just trying to backfill information to explain all of the crazy things I’m learning about my dad and my family. I don’t know. I was just thinking about how during my first year of high school, my dad had a brief stint as a mechanic northwest in Elidure before working through the various little towns scattered around the old border between Adrestia and Faerghus as a construction worker—he even let me borrow the Indech branded pickup truck he’d gotten as a property manager on Lake Teutates to drive to my junior prom. The same truck where I got my first kiss playing spin the bottle with some people I was sort of friends with. I can’t even remember his name. It’s funny, almost. I remember that he tasted like the shitty booze we were all drinking and got way too slobbery and wore a purple tie and that I could see the Big Dipper right above his head but I don’t remember his name. Moving around so much, I guess, I never really bothered to remember things like that. After I graduated, dad and I left it all behind to spend a year on the Rhodos Coast. I liked it there. It was charming. But I always knew we wouldn’t be there long, dad got these twitchy sorts of tics when we stayed anywhere too long.

Anyway, the point is, I mentioned wanting to go east, to Gloucester or something because I heard they had mild summers, and he said no in a completely flat voice, nothing like I had ever heard from him. He didn’t even look me in the eye, just said no. We went to Gwenhwyvar pretty soon after that, and I didn’t bring it up again. Again, it could all be innocuous. It could all mean absolutely nothing. But I wonder. What if it did? What if there was a reason he wouldn’t take me here? A real, true reason that didn’t have to do with the horrible things that happened to my family? If he seriously thought I was cursed, why didn’t he tell me? What was he hiding? Well, I’ll never know that.

I looked up the Reign of Blood and barely found anything, it’s all some witchy weird occult stuff and ghost stories. The castle itself is called El Dorado, and it’s this sort of icon of superstition, but especially the Reign of Blood which is used as an explanation for why so many people disappeared in the fire. People debate if it happened more than they discuss what might have actually taken place. A part of me thinks that Cheryll was just messing with me, or lying. I don’t know why she would, but it makes more sense than the alternative. Who am I to believe that somehow I’m involved with this huge conspiracy? People who are hurting make up all sorts of weird things to try and come to terms with their pain, I’m just feeding into that.

I should leave. If dad didn’t think it was a good idea to be here, maybe it’s not. I should move on, that’s what he’d want, right? Keep on moving, never look back, chase the horizon.

I’ll leave. There’s no point in any of this, it’ll just keep hurting. I’ll leave. Tomorrow.

IV.

Before you left the city, destination TBD—but that was a lie, wasn’t it? You knew exactly where you were going, you just didn’t admit it because you knew it was stupid and the mark was the last person to admit they’d been conned—you stopped at your mother’s childhood home. It was a white farmhouse style place on the very edge of what used to be a suburban neighborhood but was now quickly giving into the urban sprawl. The Macbeths hadn’t lived there for over twenty years. You could see each of those years weathered onto the house. It was where your aunt died as a young girl. How? You weren’t so sure. Cheryll mentioned illness, but the official record only gave the date of her passing. That was a few years before your grandparents followed.

If you expected to feel something upon seeing the place, you were disappointed. Not even a twinge of disquiet that’d come with seeing a place possibly haunted by the dead.

You felt nothing other than a vague curiosity, a pang of regret, or melancholy. Never, not once in your entire life, had you lived in an actual house. The longest you had ever stayed in one place was Enbarr, where most of your earliest memories took place. And then there were a few years in Mozghuz where your dad taught history, and another few in a small Varley town where he worked as a consultant for a local museum. But those were apartments and townhouses and just you and him. No family, few friends. A life of transience, of existing ephemerally, always in a state of maybe or going or somewhere else.

A tingling sense of unease settled through you right then, although not because of the entirely benign house with which you were having an intense stare down. Why were you here? Not only at this long abandoned home, but in Leicester, in Edgaria. What were you searching for other than ghosts? Were you seriously going to believe in the superstition of an old woman who went to psychics and still grieved for her daughter? Bad things happened, sure, but that was true in a lot of families. That didn’t mean anything, you just wanted to assign meaning retroactively because of your pain.

And it did hurt. It always hurt. You lived in a state of in-between and those gaps were yours to fill all by yourself, overflowing with the pain you pretended you didn’t feel. Staring at the old house, you were acutely aware of the in-between. If you closed your eyes, you could imagine him standing next to you, filling up that empty space.

“Are you lost, Mr. Jones?” you would tease. “I doubt you’ll find the Lost Ark all the way out here.”

He would groan and ask who told you about that embarrassing nickname, and you would tell him that it was-

Well, you wouldn’t. Because if he hadn’t died, you would never know Mrs. Bates or that you weren’t actually his daughter or that his friends called him Indy.

The sound of rattling plastic on concrete startled you out of your increasingly dangerous thoughts. The next door neighbor was dragging in his trash bins. He was an older man, his face wrinkled and tan like leather, his posture a little hunched.

“Excuse me,” you called, trotting over to him. It was a long shot, but better than nothing.

“Huh?” he asked, looking at you with his thick, bushy eyebrows furrowed.

“Sorry to bother you,” you said. “I was just wondering how long you’ve lived here?”

“How long?” he clarified, his big eyebrows shooting up. “Huh. Gotta be fifty years, give or take.” He laughed, a dry, crinkly sound. “Too long, I say.”

“Did you know the family that lived here about twenty-five or so years ago?” you asked, gesturing to the big white house. “The Macbeths.”

As soon as you said the name, he tensed up, his friendly demeanor freezing. “Why do you want to know?”

You raised your hands innocently, surprised by the instant reaction. “I’m their… their granddaughter,” you told him. “I don’t mean to trouble you at all, I’m only curious.”

His cheeks puffed before he let out a big breath, that defensive posture shifting. “I hate to say that I can’t tell you much. They were always a real private family, kept to themselves mostly. It caused one heck of a scandal, the way everything ended. Don’t s’pose it sat right with anyone, not after-” He cut himself off, thin lips drawing inwards. “No, it’s not my business.”

“Please, I just want to know,” you said, still placating. “Anything you can tell me, I’d appreciate.”

He nodded, but his eyes were still cautious. “I’ll tell you this, the missus was very unwell,” he said. “When the youngest daughter died, people spread all kinds of nasty rumors about her involvement. Completely outrageous, what they said. But towards the end, she wasn’t quite right in the head, always talking about some curse. It was no thing ‘sides the agony of a grieving parent, but people took it as an admission of guilt.”

“It was all an accident though, wasn’t it?” you asked. “Nobody was at fault.”

“Exactly. If you want my honest opinion, the family had bad luck. There’s nothing more to be said, what with all those little ‘uns involved.”

Bad luck. The sun beat down on your skin, sweat beading up on your spine and hairline, but you shivered, casting a sidelong glance at the house as if it was somehow watching you, as if talking about these things was dangerous in any way, as if there was a looming manifestation of a bad luck over your shoulder, drooling in anticipation of getting you now that you were the last Macbeth left.

“I see,” you said, forcing a smile for the man. “Thank you so much for your time and honesty, I really appreciate it.”

“Of course, have a good day, miss.”

Act 2

“Who now is plotting how he may seduce Thee also from obedience, that with him, Bereav’d of happiness, thou may’st partake His punishment, eternal misery”

Essar, Hanneman, “Final Look at El Dorado.”

Excerpt from National Geographic, Vol. 162

September, 1991

“It was with great honor that I accepted the final invitation to visit El Dorado, the famed yet forgotten home of Leicester’s Duke, and eventual king, Claude von Riegan. The massive, not to mention opulent, castle sits in the cradle between Riegan and Albrecht, kept safe by the steep basalt wall to the south and acres of privately owned forest. For all of its grandeur and majesty, these gilded halls hide dark secrets, secrets that may never be truly known. Historians quibble over the voracity surrounding the chilling Reign of Blood. Was it, as many say, a tragic plague sweeping the population? Could it have been a cult formed following a period of famine? Or, as some fear, does this golden fortress hide a terrifying past of human sacrifice and Faustian bargains? These secrets are what has led to the permanent closure of El Dorado and…

“…For my tour, and indeed, the last ever tour of El Dorado, I was given a set of very specific instructions for the sake of my safety and the conservation of the historic site. The first demanded I stay close to my guide. The second instructed me to only enter rooms filled with natural sunlight. This, I was told, was the surest method of determining which rooms were safe. Truly, health concerns are as much a part of the closure as anything else, it is simply too risky to maintain. I was…

“...Despite the stories of prowling monsters and dangerous curses, nothing came of the tour, save for these beautiful photos I was able to capture in the hopes of memorializing what was once a golden beacon of wealth, nobility, and power. As of today, El Dorado is entirely inaccessible. Trespassers will not only be gambling with their own safety should they wish to enter, they also risk severe jail time and steep fines. As I…”

II.

The Sagittarius Express left Edgaria at nine the morning, and it would arrive in Derdriu around eight that night. Named after the starry archer, it was a fairly straight shot connecting the two major cities. It would be shorter in a car, but you couldn’t bring yourself to get in one of those. After spending the night in Derdriu proper, you would take the gondola up to Old Derdriu.

Settled into your compartment with only two other people—and one of them had been passed out cold ever since you boarded—you continued your research. In general, you were poorly versed in Leicester history. You knew there had been something going on with one of their dukes wresting power away from the nobles to consolidate power and drive out the domineering Church of Seiros, going so far as to annex some of Faerghus’ land, but not necessarily any details beyond that.

When you looked into the Reign of Blood and Old Derdriu, the castle El Dorado showed as the first result. It was the only structure that remained when the rest of Old Derdriu was razed to the ground. Those were the ruins Cheryll mentioned, the home of Claude von Riegan, duke turned king. Information about the event was sparse. Even when you did find information about El Dorado or the Reign of Blood, to say there was discourse surrounding it was an understatement. And that was assuming you could find historical facts rather than ghost stories. None of this was helped by the fact that, a hundred or so years before the Reign of Blood, King Claude von Riegan mysteriously disappeared. Such a tantalizing yet inexplicable vanishing act gave rise to stories about his occult dealings. Some people said he was cursed by the goddess Sothis for his vendetta against the Church of Seiros. Since El Dorado was his home, his story muddied the waters when it came to researching the Reign of Blood.

As the train pulled out of the station, you pulled up one of the more promising sources you had found: a Xerox of an old Life magazine article penned by some old guy named Hanneman Essar. The quality was terrible, compressed and squeezed dry of detail, but looking at the photos of the once grand castle made you more certain than ever that it was important. Something about the place drew you in, even as you glanced over your shoulder for the cold claws of whatever bad luck your father warned you of. There was no point in asking yourself why, or if you should or shouldn’t—you already knew you shouldn’t—because your course was set in stone. Carved out long before you arrived in Leicester.

Those sorts of thoughts, the ones that toyed with the idea of fate or destiny, were entertained in the back of your head, the place where you pushed every other unpleasant or undesirable or stupid thought.

It was better to focus on facts.

“Are you interested in El Dorado, young lady?” the man sitting next to you asked. You slowly lowered your tablet, looking up at the speaker. A mustached blond man with blue eyes, his eyebrow quirked curiously. “It’s rare to see someone your age taking an interest in history.”

That bristled you a bit, both his pompous tone and the implication. Even when your father worked other jobs, his fascination with history never waned, and it was the only area of your education that never faltered from constantly moving schools.

“It’s an interesting place, don’t you think?” you asked in a measured voice.

“Yes, it most certainly is,” he agreed. “A place most ripe with curiosity and fiction, a paradise for the easily fooled tourists they usher in.”

“What do you mean?” you asked.

“I should think my meaning is clear. The people in Old Derdriu spread ridiculous stories about El Dorado to stimulate their tourism, all for a place that they have shut off to the public,” he said. “As for the source of my interest, I am Acheron Phlegethon. I don’t doubt you’ve heard of me. I’ve debunked several famous hoaxes across Fodlan, including the fiction of Shambhala’s subterranean civilization. Now I have set my sights upon the legendary vampires of El Dorado.”

“Vampires?” you asked, your eyes widening.

Acheron squinted at you suspiciously. “I thought you said you had done your research.”

“I only just started,” you said, shrugging in an attempt to hide your ignorance. “I guess that explains why it’s called the Reign of Blood.”

“Bah, a fiction,” Acheron said, waving his hand. “There is no evidence of the cult they claim existed, let alone of the vampire they insist was the leader. Tell me, if the town or its people were truly cursed, why did retribution stop with a single fire that could easily be attributed to a natural cause? The deaths are the same, nothing more than a result of the violent beasts that are known to prowl that area. As I said, they sell these stories to bring tourists into their town. It really is the most insidious scheme, one that I will not tolerate. My next book will be the most comprehensive look at this scam to date, it’s sure to be a hit.”

“How do you know?” you asked. “Do you have any evidence that it’s a lie?”

“Evidence?” he asked, baffled. “Why, common sense. There is no such thing as vampires or curses, need I any better evidence than that?”

“Yes.”

Acheron’s eyes narrowed further, his mustache twitching. “It seems you are too young to be sensible. I recommend you continue to study historical facts instead of believing in superstitious bunk.” He paused, his head tilting. “If you give me your email address, I can add you to the preorder list for my next book. I’ve no doubt that you would find it most edifying.”

“No, thank you,” you told him.

“Hm, very well. I shan’t disturb you further,” Acheron said, pulling a pillow around his neck and a set of headphones from his bag. “Oh, and good luck with your research, young lady.”

“Thanks, you too,” you told him, although he was already pulling on an eye mask and probably couldn’t hear you.

You turned away from the man to look out the window, your thoughts whirling. If you believed that your family could be cursed, couldn’t you also believe in vampires? The logical side of your brain said no, emphatically rejecting the notion because it was ridiculous. Utterly insane.

Something in your gut said otherwise. The tight lead ball of anxiety burning in your stomach, the thing drawing you towards Old Derdriu despite everything that screamed at you to stay away. You looked again at the distorted photos of El Dorado, trying to imagine it in its prime. It must have been a sight to behold, unlike anything you had ever seen before.

It didn’t matter what you did or did not believe. It was just like you told Acheron, you needed evidence first. Rubbing a hand over your face, you returned to your reading.

III.

24th day of Verdant Moon

I had a dream last night. Sometimes I get these wicked nightmares which I guess makes sense considering what happened but last night it wasn’t a nightmare which almost makes it worse because when I woke up crying, it wasn’t just because I was alone, but because I feel so alone that it hurts, it hurts bad. People aren’t made to be alone. I don’t know how to be anything else than a set, a pair. It was always just me and him and now that he’s gone I have a gaping hole in my chest and I think that if I chase down answers it’ll mean something but I know it won’t, I’ll wake up just as alone as I did this morning.

My brain conjured this idea of a man just to taunt me, I think. A beautiful man who looked at me like he knew me, and I knew him even though I don’t. I woke up the second before our hands touched and just like that we (we, us) were out in the nothing of Fodlan’s great empty flatlands and there was a high wind warning and a great big semi-truck with Ernest Shipping painted on the side and a “rate my driving” sticker on the back. And then there were squealing tires and creaking metal and crunching glass and so much noise from all sides as the world closed in around me, the cab of dad’s vintage SUV giving way to make room for something else crudely forcing itself through. The wind was screaming, and so was I. But dad wasn’t, he didn’t make any noise as his body got crushed. Dead on impact, the first responders said. And yet, after I wriggled out of the mangled mess of what must have been a car—moments before it caught fire—I was relatively unharmed. A miracle, they said. Lucky, they told me. If dad hadn’t swerved the way he did, it would have been me who died. And it’s not even like I’m traumatized, right? I can write about this all I want, I told it to the police and the lawyer and everyone about it and it’s all fine, I’m perfectly fine, I’m well adjusted and alone and accursed, and I want to scream and be angry and cry until I’m all dried up but nothing, nothing is going to make it stop, all I can do is chase down this fantasy and shove all of this down because if this is what sanity feels like, I don’t want to be crazy.

In that dream, the man I saw had beautiful eyes. Blue green, like a sea breeze or something else equally poetic and reckless, surrounded by these thick, dark eyelashes. Now that I’m awake, all I can do is ascribe meaning to the meaningless, but it was like he was inviting me to him. I’ll be in Old Derdriu tomorrow and I’m probably just losing it but I keep thinking that it's where I need to be.

IV.

Old Derdriu was more or less what you expected. Small, quaint, and beautiful. It had the unique mixture of mountainous charm and oceanic appeal, giving the fresh air a green, salty weight. You spent the first day getting a measure of the place, glad for the mild weather. There was some displeasure when you realized one Mr. Phlegethon had checked into a room right next door to your own the day before—he even attempted to catch you in another conversation before you excused yourself—but you were quickly absorbed into your preliminary attempts at researching the small town.

Although all of it was only a prelude to, or maybe a distraction from, what you truly wanted. After lunch, you rented a pretty metallic bicycle at a place on main street. It fit the scenery, looking a little dated with its tall handlebars and a basket. An uncomfortable reference considering why you were here. All the same, hi-yo silver away, you left town to follow the northeast highway as per the directions on the map you bought earlier. Unfortunately, you quickly realized what you had already known to be true. El Dorado was exactly as inaccessible as Mr. Hanneman explained in his old article. The dirt road turn off was gated and locked, the rusty fence adorned with a large, angry “PRIVATE PROPERTY” sign. Even the famous golden tower could not be seen through the overwhelming barricade of trees.

Standing there on the empty road, the bike propped between your legs and dust and the thick scent of pine filling your lungs, unease worked through you. It came upon you slowly, and then all at once. The world was telling you to leave. Winds quieted, birds hushed, even the sunlight dimmed a shade. But something else beckoned you, calling out so vividly you felt yourself lurch forward a step, the bicycle wheels turning a notch. A wild and insane part of your mind was prepared to abandon it right there and break past the intimidating tree line, damn the consequences or legality. You even thought you could probably find El Dorado yourself, no matter how deeply it was buried, that its call would lead you directly to it. Blood following blood, an innate tracker buried in your DNA that had gotten you this far.

To spite the heavy silence, you laughed at how ridiculous that thought was. A wild, uncomfortable laugh. The trees swallowed the sound whole.

Turning around, you rode back into town. Only a part of you truly understood the choice you made while standing there in the stillness of the forest, although you knew absolutely that it was the only possible ending.

28th day of Verdant Moon

I looked it up. People can create false memories, it’s a symptom of trauma or mental illness, our brains are suggestable and weak and we just make stuff up by mixing real things with other information. Other information, like all of this weird shit I’ve been reading about El Dorado and Old Derdriu and the original Lady Macbeth and everything. Witch, wiccan, whatever. Vampires aren’t enough, curses aren’t enough, why not just add in a witch? Why the hell not.

The dreams I’ve been having, I think it’s something like that. Constructed memories of El Dorado and that same guy, the one with the pretty eyes. It’s weird though, maybe normal, they’re not bad dreams. Just about the castle, and him. It’s a break from feeling like I’m going to suffocate on all of this. They don’t feel real, exactly, just…

I don’t know, there’s no point in dwelling on it, I’m probably doing more damage by thinking about it so hard because then I just remember how alone I am and start tearing up and it’s so stupid. This journal is going to be used as a case study one day. People go wild for crazy women, right? There’s a whole cast of them flowing through my veins.

VI.

Acheron’s premise that the people in Old Derdriu hoped to make money off of the notoriety of their past was ridiculous. Questions regarding El Dorado were answered bluntly, but icily. Most people seemed like they wanted nothing to do with the dark history, especially not to make a profit off of it. You could say that you understood and respected it, but your frustration only mounted the more you realized how inaccessible the truth was. Your entire life had been built on convenient ignorance of unsavory history, and here you were.

Again.

That was fine. Your dad faced all sorts of difficulty in his historical research, you remembered him complaining about it on more than one occasion. So you did the thing that wasn’t committing felony trespass and went to the library to gather information. Research.

The library in Old Derdriu was easy to track down, within a short ride from the inn. What you didn’t expect was what you would find. In the front, it was fairly typical. The reading area and magazine shelves and receptionist desk, even a few computers along the wall. But, behind the front desk was what you could only describe as a tower of bookshelves. The unconventional arrangement had you craning your neck to look up, shocked at how the shelves expanded upwards for what looked like three floors with twisting stairs and platforms providing access to the collection. Every place that could store a book, had a book. You couldn’t even begin to imagine how they were organized.

A lone girl sat behind the desk in front of the tower of books, the only other person in the front. Her name plate read Flayn, and she twirled one of her long curls around her finger as she idly flipped through a magazine. When you approached, she looked up with a big smile.

“Hello!”

“This is… the library?” you asked.

“Yes, it is. Welcome,” Flayn responded sweetly. “If you need assistance finding anything, I would be more than happy to help.”

“I would really appreciate that,” you said, tearing your eyes from the tower of books to look at her directly. “I’m looking for books about the history of this town, specifically El Dorado. I’m not particular, whatever seems the most informative.”

She blinked, her smile lapsing somewhat. “Of course,” she finally said, standing up. “If you take a seat at a table over there, I will see what I can find.”

“Thank you so much,” you said with a nod. Slowly, admiring the scope of the library, you walked over to one of the tables and sat down. While you waited, you pulled out your tablet to continue flipping through websites that had mention of El Dorado. This one was old, the kind with a black background and dark red cursive font. There was very little to actually be learned, it was a ghost story that told a risque tale of blood sacrifices and a sex cult.

It was all ridiculous, of course, but one line gave you trouble, made your stomach turn uneasily.

Why was it fire? The author wrote. Not, I think, to rid the town of some undead threat. After all, the vampire was hiding away in El Dorado. No, they chose fire to burn the witches.

“Excuse me,” somebody said, calling your attention away from the unsettling words and up to the narrowed green eyes of an older man.

“Yes?” you asked, trying not to look guilty beneath his piercing glare. You hadn’t done anything, but something about him made you feel as if you had, you just didn’t know what it was yet.

“From your request, I can only assume you are researching El Dorado,” he said, his voice as stiff and stony as his demeanor.

“I am.”

“And what, may I ask, is your reason for conducting such research?”

You floundered for a moment, caught off guard and confused. Finally, you shook your head and shrugged. “Curiosity, I guess,” you said.

“Are you in any way associated with a man who calls himself Acheron Phlegethon?”

“What?” you asked, confusion replacing the discomfort. “No, not at all.”

“Are you sure?” he pushed.

“Well, I’ve met him. He tried to sell me his books,” you said, frowning.

“Are you sure that’s all?”

You realized pretty quickly what this man was actually asking, what he wanted to hear. “I’m here for… personal reasons,” you explained. “This place has meaning to me. Er, it had meaning to… someone very important to me.”

“I see,” the man said. You could practically see the calculations going on behind his stare, your words reduced down to ones and zeroes as he analyzed them.

“Is that okay?” you asked.

“Yes, of course. I would never withhold knowledge from the genuinely curious. I suggest you start with this one,” he told you, setting down a large book bound in green. “It offers the most comprehensive history of Old Derdriu. These,” he set down two more books, “are supplementary material. While I cannot vouch for their factual integrity, they provide further insight as to what researchers have discovered about Old Derdriu.”

“Thank you,” you said, pulling the books towards yourself, almost afraid he would take them away. There was that feeling, that possessive need. A craving, even.

His lips thinned out as he considered you, his icy expression locked in place. “I ask that you do not cause any trouble while you’re here. The people who live here have suffered enough harassment.”

“I understand, honestly,” you said emphatically, although his warning made your stomach clench and you weren’t lying, but was it really the truth that you weren’t going to ‘cause trouble’? Did you mean that? Could you?

VII.

[The following text are segments taken from letters found in the attic of a Derdriu home with other antiques. Forensic analysis can date them as being contemporaneous with the burning of Old Derdriu, however much of the contents have suffered such severe decay that entire sentences and paragraphs are illegible. Due to this, it is impossible to determine the author or glean any further context. Notes have been added in an attempt to clarify certain points, but without support, all researchers can offer is speculation.]

“My dear sister...discovery, but I fear I will not…seems that my death is inevitable, all I can do is…she offered me a chance, a slim hope that is buried beneath the earth…”

“...sister… bad news… if something good came of it, does that make it right?... better left buried lest we… believe in such stories?... truly be Claude? [this is possibly a reference to Claude von Riegan. The mysterious circumstances surrounding his disappearance have long been a point of interest for those interested in the occult—See page 127 for further information]... put my trust in legend, or… risk my soul for… shall sleep, tomorrow we will return to the site and search for…”

“…I know nothing of the truth, it is obscured by… can trust, she claims… of the Agarthans [The “Agarthans'' are another popular yet unproven occult group based upon an ancient civilization. Artifacts supposedly associated with them were found in El Dorado]... and Lady Macbeth hopes to… blood and soul, I…”

“...forgive me… of my selfishness and hubris. I am frightened… a blight upon us… she will suffer the curse of Seiros [The goddess of the Church of Seiros, who has historically been used as an occult figure following the purge of faith from Liecester]... and yet it is too late…”

“He is awake. The Reign of Blood has begun.”

[This line is one of the most contested within these letters. Since it is on its own page, with this single preserved sentence written in a shaky hand, there are those who argue it was included in order to bolster the cult and supernatural narrative surrounding El Dorado and the burning of Old Derdriu. If these letters are accurate, it is the last communication documented from any of the 257 people who disappeared, likely perished in the fire that reduced the town to ash.]

VIII.

“Hold on a moment, young lady,” a familiar voice called. You paused, turning to face Acheron as he hurried down the hall, stopping you from entering your room.

“Yes?” you asked, more than a little suspicious. With the key in the lock to your room, at least you had a swift method of escape.

Acheron came to a stop, dramatically swiping at his shiny forehead. “I have a proposition for you.”

Your jaw dropped a little at the blunt statement. “I-I don’t think-”

“We have the same goal here, no?” Acheron asked, steamrolling over your obvious conclusion without the slightest shred of self awareness. “To discover the truth behind the infamous El Dorado. And yet we are waylaid by these pesky townsfolk at every turn. I have had enough of it, I say. It’s time to take action.”

“What do you mean?” you asked hesitantly.

He looked around the empty hallway before leaning forward, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I have it on good authority that the castle’s security is not as good as they would have us believe. If one knows how to circumvent it, that is.”

You considered him for a long moment, chewing on your lip and refusing to openly indulge your immediate excitement. “What are you saying?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Acheron asked. “I would see the famed El Dorado for myself.”

“It’s dangerous to go inside, people get sick,” you said.

“Bah. The stories about any sort of lingering sickness within its walls are wildly exaggerated. The local youths brag about having visited as a rite of passage. If those scamps can make it in and out, I see no reason to believe I should be capable of anything less. I, of course, am extending the offer to you only out of courtesy. You hunger for the truth as desperately as I, do you not?”

You considered him for a long moment, wondering if this was some sort of setup.

“When do you intend to go?” you finally asked.

“Tomorrow night,” Acheron told you. “I would quit this dismal town as quickly as possible. All I need is good footage and photographs of the inside.”

“Do you have the right gear?”

“Gear?” he asked, frowning.

Of course it would have been too much to think that a man like him would think this through. “Yes, gear. Flashlights, a map, the right kind of clothes—”

“Is all that really necessary?” he asked, cutting you off.

“Have you ever done something like this?” you asked, omitting the fact that you hadn’t. But, unlike Acheron, you had common sense and some experience with night hiking. “You can’t just rush in unprepared, you’ll get hurt.”

“Hm.” Acheron’s mustache twitched and you could tell he was thinking up some way to argue with you. But, eventually, reason won out. “Very well, I shall procure whatever is necessary tomorrow.”

“If you buy this stuff town, they’ll know what you’re planning.”

Acheron’s eyebrows furrowed. “Then I shall make a trip into Derdriu and return in the evening, we can meet at the road leading to El Dorado upon my return.”

You wanted to argue, to deny your interest on the basis of not wanting to break the law. The risk factor was far too high, you were a fool to go along with it.

“I found a book today that has the plans for the inside, I’ll find a way to make a copy of them,” you said, anxiety and anticipation going wild in your gut because you knew how wrong this was, but you also knew that it was what was bound to happen from the start, something you couldn’t change or control. “Let me give you money, I’ll make a list of what we’ll need.”

Act 3

"The monstrous sight

Strook them with horror backward but far worse

Urged them behind: headlong themselves they threw

Down from the verge of Heav'n"

31st day of Verdant Moon

This will only end in the hallowed halls of El Dorado, an owed price for the folly of Lady Macbeth, damning her bloodline, bringing a curse to us all.

Yeah. Like this is some sort of fucking movie or something. I wonder if insanity is a legal defense for criminal trespass. I don’t think I’m insane, but isn’t that what crazy people all say? Yes officer, I only broke into this blocked off historical site because I had a dream where a beautiful man told me to. Also, incidentally, I had to figure out if I’m cursed or not so I can decide if I’m the cause of my dad’s death. Oh, and you might be interested to know that my great great great great whatever grandmother was a witch and vampires might be real.

It’s foolproof.

II.

Acheron was right that sneaking into El Dorado was easy. Too easy. Disturbingly easy. After you got past the gate, there was only a security booth to creep past which should have forced you into the view of security cameras, but a convenient hole in the fence circumvented that obstacle. If you were even slightly more worried about getting caught, or maybe slightly less desperate to see inside, you would have given up right then and there on the grounds that breaking and entering shouldn’t have been as simple as ducking through some trees and making a tense, but relatively short, trek through the woods.

All sense left you when you broke the clearing into what used to be the grand lawn of El Dorado, the vague threat of getting caught by angry landowners falling far to the wayside as you stood in front of the grand majesty of King Claude von Riegan’s personal castle, staring down the centuries old castle with equal parts trepidation and excitement.

Other than the cicadas and frogs and slight wind, the night was very quiet. Acheron fiddled with his camera, getting ready to take footage of the inside. All you had to potentially take photos with was your phone, although you weren’t inclined to gather evidence of your crime. It was enough to watch, to look, to commit this sight to memory.

And what a sight it was. Nothing like you had ever seen, except in dreams that were not dreams but you didn’t dare call memories. Overgrown with thick, possessive greenery and fallen into a state of dull disrepair, the castle was truly a breathtaking spectacle, the years of ruin only added to the sense of tragic mystery. It was nothing like the stout fortresses of the west, or the elaborate Imperial complexes in the south. Terrible with its jagged maw of an entrance, the intimidating golden tower looming above. Beautiful, the result of long lost artistry. Foreboding and alluring.

No longer were you looking over your shoulder out of paranoia, but staring down each window and shadow of the castle’s aged, inscrutable countenance for some sign of the life you could practically feel thrumming from within. But, even suffering from the hyperactive state of distress, you knew you couldn’t leave. It wasn’t interest or curiosity, it was a fixation, an urge, a compulsion.

You had to go inside.

You had to get away.

“Wait, before I forget-” You pulled out the set of walkie talkies you had brought. They were the ones you and your dad used when you went hiking. You didn’t want to think of that. “Testing, testing, one two three.” Your voice, crinkling through the static, exited the other walkie talkie.

“What is that?” Acheron asked, raising a thin eyebrow.

“Walkie talkies,” you said, handing him the second. “In case we get separated somehow. There’s no cell service out here.”

“Do you intend on making a private excursion?” he asked.

“No, but…” you looked at El Dorado, uneasiness once again sinking through your gut. It was as if the castle itself was watching you, the eyeless windows winking in the moonlight. “Just in case.”

“Hm.” Acheron clipped the walkie talkie onto his belt, and so you did you. It was too bulky for your little sling bag. “Well then, after you.”

“What?”

“You have had more time to familiarize yourself with the layout, it’s only natural that you should lead the way.”

You wondered if Acheron was scared. It was difficult to tell if he was any more pale than usual, and he wore the same blustery confidence as usual. It didn’t matter. If he got scared and bolted, you would do this alone. You were getting used to that, right?

“Okay,” you said. You weren’t scared. Maybe you felt a little nervous. But you weren’t scared.

Staying vigilant for any strange movement or sounds, you ascended the cracked, overgrown steps, telling yourself over and over that you were not afraid. There were no such things as vampires, ghosts, or curses. And if there were, you would know for yourself. Answers. You would get answers.

The large door was mostly intact, but it was stuck in a perpetual state of half-open. Almost like an invitation. A horror cliche. There was a pinch in your bladder and your heart thudded too heavily in your chest and the animal part of your brain didn’t want to breach the shadows and go inside. You were propelled not of your own free will, but of some existential force that tugged you forward. Step by step by step until you were inside the breezeway, the central entrance hall of El Dorado.

The general plan that the two of you had discussed before sneaking into the private estate was to get into the Golden Hall, the three story vaulted ballroom off of the northern wing. It had been the jewel of the gilded paradise of El Dorado, but nobody had seen it for decades because of the infection that supposedly filled the inside of the castle. The path there would take you through the breezeway, the atrium, the courtyard, the pleasure plaza, and the dining room. Not into the heart of El Dorado, but deep into its rotted guts.

A very quiet, but incredibly persistent, part of your mind pushed you there with the hushed notion that it was where your dreams took place. You had to confirm for yourself that it was completely different in real life, that your mind was making things up. Even if you gleaned no further insight from this misguided exertion, settling that fact would go a long way in convincing you once and for all that you weren’t cursed, just a little mad. At least one of those problems could be solved with medication.

Broken glass littered the breezeway, hidden like little jewels within piles of leaves and refuse and the broken bits of castle that had wilted to the ground. You tried to imagine El Dorado’s beauty in its prime, shining gold and inviting, sunshine filtering in through the dome ceiling and high windows, wind playfully teasing the long curtains. But you couldn’t, it was too dark. Darker than you might have thought, darker than the thickest section of the woods, so dark that the places outside of the range of your ThruNite seemed to be physically encroaching shadows rather than void of light.

Hanneman had been told to only go into rooms where the light touched, that it was the only way to stay safe, but that didn’t seem factually sound, did it? Surely that wasn’t the most accurate method of determining which areas were safe. The only thing that actually feared sunlight, if myths and legends were to be believed, were vampires. There was no sunlight now, and you doubted vampires feared LED’s.

Gripping your light in a sweaty fist, you forced yourself forward, the ground crunching beneath your boots. The terrible, heavy dread got worse with each step. It sat like a weight right behind your sternum, beating behind your eye. The other part of the feeling, the insidious part, was the familiarity.

Bad. Bad. Bad.

You wanted to explain the feeling as nothing more than animalistic paranoia and some malignant fear of the dark, but it made the fine hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, your breathing picking up. All across the breezeway—throughout most of the castle, really—balconies lined the halls and rooms. You couldn’t see what was above, there was no light coming in, not even diffused moonlight. Somebody could have been watching from above and you’d never know.

Keep going. It was fine. Everything was fine.

“I told you that this place was safe,” Acheron said, startling you. “If it weren’t, this level of upkeep would be impossible. I have little doubt that they hire people to ensure the roof doesn’t cave in for occasions just like this.”

You exhaled, looking around with that thought in mind. He had a point, the place did seem a little too well maintained for the number of years that had passed. Then again, maybe it was just good construction. Or maybe something that still lived here. Something ancient, something immortal.

The two of you left the breezeway, entering the main atrium hall. Hanneman had featured many many photos of this room in his article; he had been fascinated by the intricately carved stonework. It was too dark to see much of that now. In fact, you very badly wanted to get out of the atrium as soon as you entered it because of how unnervingly dark it was. Two tiers of balcony circled around the ground floor, shadows lurking ominously right behind what was left of the railing. Every little sound echoed, rippling through the motionless air. High above, a chandelier caught the shine of your flashlights, moving with some breeze you couldn’t feel.

Something made a sound, a scuffling. To your right, on the stairs. You flicked your flashlight to it quickly, your hands shaking with adrenaline.

“Did you hear that?” you asked breathlessly, nervously holding the light on the steps as if to keep them from moving. But there was nothing, just the large stone staircase and decaying walls and long-abandoned artistry memorialized and forgotten in some old Life magazine article.

“Hear what?” Acheron asked.

You exhaled harshly, looking away from the empty stairs and kicking yourself for being so jumpy. It could just be a stray animal. That’s what you told yourself. Rats, racoons, birds, any number of things could have made El Dorado their new home.

“Nothing.”

There was some relief when you entered the courtyard, even if the scent of overbearing foliage and vivid green rot was nearly suffocating. At least there was more air, and you could see the stars twinkling above. Full, or almost full, the moon draped the open space in silvery light. Ignoring the overgrown shrubbery, flowers, and grass, you looked around at the balconies wrapping around the second floor. The construction of El Dorado was almost made for someone wanting to spy on guests. Or intruders. Acheron was talking to the camera but you weren’t really listening, too busy focusing to hear any sign of movement, trying to find what was making you so uneasy.

Vampires in El Dorado. Lurking in the dark, in the moonlight, waiting for ignorant fools to wander in. A missing king, a goddess’s curse, a burning witch. The Reign of Blood. You could almost smell it, the tangy iron of blood and the thick smoke of a town burning to the ground.

“Are you coming?” Acheron called.

You shook your head in an attempt to cast out those thoughts before scurrying to catch up, passing the large stone fountain that had once been the featured centerpiece of the courtyard before the ripe overgrowth took over. The standout piece was a large, intricately carved deer. Once, it must have been a magnificent beast, but now its head was cracked in half, the prongs of one set of antlers sticking out of a murky film covering the stagnant water settled in the basin. Something dark grew over the broken statue, starting on its fragmented head and dripping down to give the gruesome illusion of blood. It watched you pass with the remaining stone eye, forever frozen in a proud, alert stance.

A breeze trembled throughout the courtyard. The castle taking in a breath. You shivered, pointedly forcing your gaze forward.

Acheron lagged behind to force you to take the lead under the pretense of messing with his camera, leaving you to enter the so-called pleasure plaza first. Careful to not get caught by the jagged row of broken glass and wooden teeth attempting to bar your entrance, you stepped into the decaying mouth of El Dorado’s recreation wing. This was the place where Leicester’s elite once came to enjoy themselves, a yawning space that time had seen to shambles. Because of the many doorways and hiding spots, this room was even more unnerving than the atrium. You would have to cross it to get where you needed to go.

If you were being entirely honest, you weren’t sure you had any desire to see the Golden Hall anymore. Rather, you weren’t sure it was worth the stress of getting there. Considering the unreasonable fear you felt going through areas you knew to be safe, you worried what you might find in a place nobody had seen for so long, worried about what secrets were better left to die. And that pulsing, pounding, beating of familiarity just kept getting worse, harder, closer. Louder.

You needed to get out.

You needed to know.

Inhaling the sweet scent of rot and age, you continued onward, your footsteps hollow against the sinking floor. Each sweep of your flashlight caused the shadows to move, to crawl away from you as if to hide. It hit each object without any subtlety, erasing details and making the darkness that much darker.

You forced yourself to carry on. Carefully, cautiously, unafraid. That’s what you kept telling yourself. Show no fear and all that. Although, that began with the presumption that there was something around to see your fear.

Your skin erupted in painful prickling chills almost as soon as that thought came to you. And then, in the same moment or before or after or so close you couldn’t tell the difference, you saw movement out of the corner of your eye. You flashed your light quickly around the room, hoping to catch a glimpse of a rat or some other disgusting but inoffensive animal to reassure yourself that you were safe because you still had hope that this was all innocent, that you were the crazy one for believing in ridiculous stories of the supernatural.

Something retreated behind the doorway.

Your stomach sank with freezing cold ice and panic. That was no rat.

A person? It certainly seemed human sized. Those were footsteps too, weren’t they? Disguised beneath the sound of your own? And if it were somebody with authority, somebody who wanted you to leave because you were trespassing, they wouldn’t be lurking around watching you. So that meant it was somebody doing the same thing that you were. But, somehow, you didn’t feel as if it were another trespassing explorer. You felt it in your gut.

“Acheron, hold on,” you said quietly, stopping.

“Yes? What is it?” he asked loudly. Too loud, bumbling around with his footsteps echoing against the walls as he turned to face you. You winced, holding up a hand to shade your eyes from the glare of his light.

“We need to leave,” you told him, speaking softly and calmly. “Now.”

“But we’ve hardly seen anything,” he said. You couldn’t see his frown, but you could hear it.

“I’m telling you, we need to leave,” you said softly, desperately trying to remain calm. “We’re not alone.”

“Someone is here?” he asked loudly, shining his light in a large circle, catching it all on camera. “Show yourself!”

“Acheron!” you hissed.

“Don’t you want a head start?” an unfamiliar voice asked. No. Not unfamiliar. Jarring though, because you didn’t recognize why you would know it. What memory was attached to that disembodied sound.

Acheron let out a high pitched sound of terror which scared you nearly as bad as the voice, almost causing you to fall over.

“Who is that? Show yourself!” he demanded. No answer. Of course there was no answer. No sound, not even the faint echo of footsteps.

“We have to leave,” you murmured, more to yourself than to Acheron, your voice an octave too high with stress. “We have to get out of here.”

“It’s nothing. I told you that the local youths often come here, did I not?” he asked, maintaining that feigned sense of control. “I demand you show yourself!”

“Acheron, please,” you begged, tugging at his jacket. He kept his camera fixed on where the voice had come from. It was from the hall branching off of the entrance out of the pleasure plaza and into the courtyard, essentially barring your most direct route of escape.

“You really ought to listen to the lady,” the voice said, just as casual, just as playful, just as recognizable. You hadn’t really been aware of a distinct echo beforehand, but the room was large enough to cause the voice to bounce around, to obscure the speaker’s location. Not only disembodied, omniscient. And you were stupid and crazy but you were acutely aware of how dangerous this was, it was a primal instinct to recognize danger.

Freeze finally ran its course, returning some semblance of sensation to your numb limbs to take flight. You didn’t think, you ran, turning away from the voice to bolt in the opposite direction. Right then, you didn’t care whether or not Acheron decided to follow. Since you couldn’t leave the way you came in, you picked the nearest door. Terror thundered in your chest, a compliment to the sound of your footsteps on the rotting floor. You, with Acheron right on your heels, entered into a music room or another sitting room, or some other area where the wealthy and powerful whiled away their hours of excess. You shouldn’t have looked behind yourself, but you did and you could see, silhouetted in the moonlight from the courtyard, the unmistakable form of another person. And then you were pushing Acheron further into the dark with a fistful of his jacket, driven only by the need to get away. The door was intact enough for you to throw it closed behind you, and the sound rattled through the air.

The scent of wet rot was stronger back here, but you didn’t even think about stopping. The door didn’t open as you both scrambled through the room and into the hall, but you knew from the plans that there were other ways in and out of most rooms in the castle. If not directly, then from above, or even from below.

“This is the wrong way,” Acheron told you crossly, although his control was fraying with his labored breathing.

“Just run,” you told him, pushing at his back. You could have let go and run past him, but you were too scared of being alone, of having to navigate this dark, creepy place by yourself.

He didn’t argue. Or maybe he did, you didn’t even know, couldn’t hear anything over the pounding of your heart and harsh breathing, your body synthesizing musty air into iron-tanged rasps that cut up in the inside of your throat. You had no idea where the hallway you ran into led, but it didn’t really matter. Away, that was what mattered. The hallway was narrow and stank of humid rot, entirely dark save for your flashlights, but the room at the end had windows, filling it with blessed moonlight. Slamming the door behind yourself again, you continued forward, stumbling to keep up with Acheron.

Until you were yelping in surprise, the floor giving out beneath your feet. There was a brief moment where gravity hooked beneath your bellybutton and yanked, and then the floor hit, and it hit hard. Although you instinctively tried to fall in a slightly upright position, the momentum dragged you into an awkward roll, your body curling so as to protect your head. For a miniature eternity, there was no air, there was no thought in your head, there was no light save for the blinding radiance as impact blazed white hot agony through your head. Gasping, writhing on the cold, hard floor, you blinked teary eyes, staring at the hole that had just eaten you with some vague idea that you were dreaming, that this was all a made up fantasy. It was unreal, and it was painful.

A moment later, a beam of light hit your face. So bright, like a little sun. You sucked in a lungful of air, tasting blood. Then, almost unconsciously, you jerked sideways and lurched around onto your knees. The pain enveloped you in a mad rush all once, your empty body dry heaving with nausea. Only, there wasn’t enough air to expel the sour bile in your stomach, leaving you to choke and suffocate on nothing instead. That tapered off into a few pathetic coughs a moment later, your entire body shaking and clammy.

“Oh dear,” Acheron said, his voice thin with fear. “Are you hurt?”

All you could manage in response was a groan, and then a broken sob. But fear was a good motivator to get moving, and adrenaline shocked your system enough to force you upright. Now that you could remember, more or less, how to breathe, the worst of the damage was where you had initially landed on your hip, your shoulder hitting nearly as hard a second later. It sent violent, lurid pain straight down your arm and leg, the entire left side of your body alight as if from a branding iron.

“I’m fine,” you croaked out, not knowing if it was true but knowing that it needed to be true.

“Thank goodness,” Acheron said, his voice heavy with relief. “I don’t suppose you see any way to climb back up?”

You couldn’t see anything outside of the hot spotlight from above, your ThruNite had gone dark and skittered away somewhere into the shadows. At first, you only felt panic at the realization, terror that you were stuck in the darkness. It took you a long moment to think past the pain and the dark and the fear to remember that you had a backup light. After a few tries of fumbling with the zipper on your sling bag, you got your sweaty fingers around the yellow plastic base of your second flashlight. It was nothing so good as the hefty ThruNite, emitting a buttery yellow glow, but it was something. You waved it around, although you knew it was a lost cause before looking. The hole you had fallen into was rotted all the way through, leaving a few jagged boards around the edges, some of which you had brought with you on the way down, and parts of which were embedded in your hands and knees. There was no way back up.

“No,” you said, painfully staggering to your feet and brushing yourself off as best you could. “I’ll have to find the stairs, I think… I think there’s some in the southern wing. Meet me there and we can—”

“And stay here?” he demanded. “Are you mad? No, no, I simply cannot. I shall… I shall run and send help. Yes, that is the best course of action.”

You squinted against the blinding beam of his flashlight, mute with confused shock for a long, silent moment.

“Acheron, you can’t do that,” you said softly, more bewildered than afraid.

“You cannot expect me to retrieve you myself,” he said defensively.

“No, no. You can’t just… just leave me here,” you said weakly, panic closing in around your heart, ice fizzling out like bubbles in your head.

“I will not put myself at risk for your own carelessness,” he told you harshly. “If you remain there, the rescuers should find you quickly.”

And that was it. His light disappeared, leaving you blind and blinking up at the hole in the desperate hopes of seeing his face, of seeing some sign that you weren’t actually alone.

“Acheron,” you called, unable to keep your ragged voice soft. “Please don’t leave me here.” Nothing. You called out again, and nothing. No footsteps, not even the sound of doors opening or closing, although the violent rush of blood could have covered noises like that. And then there was only your heavy breathing and the sour bite of vomit in your throat and the creaking sound of the castle’s breathing in time with your own.

With shaking hands, you got out the walkie talkie. It took you two tries to find the button, and then the sound of static. “Acheron?” you asked. “Do you copy, Acheron?”

You didn’t get an answer. At least, not from the walkie talkie. You heard something. From far away, up above, you heard this howling, like an animal, but very distinctly human. Your guts lurched, a shiver slithering down your sweaty back, all the way through your body.

You quickly pressed the button down again. “Ah-Acheron?” you asked, looking around the empty room. The shadows of decaying furniture followed your yellowy light, almost mockingly avoiding it. “Acheron, are you alright?”

The speaker let out a little burst of static, startling you. “Sorry, he’s pretty busy right now,” a crinkled voice on the other side said. “Can I take a message?”

You paused, your chest clenching. “Who is this?” But you knew. You knew very well, you just didn’t know.

“Your guilty conscience. Trespassing is a serious crime.”

“Where is Acheron?” you asked. “What did you do to him?”

“Do to him?” the man asked, sounding like he was offended by the question. “Nothing. He ran off as soon as he saw me, so now we’re playing a little game of hide and seek. Sorry, no girls allowed this round. You and I can have a match when I win, okay? Okay, so you’d better start looking for a really good spot.”

Your mouth was open, gaping with no sound coming out. You felt nearly as winded by this as you did from the fall, unable to think, to formulate any rational reaction. “I-I don’t understand.”

“You’ve never played hide and seek? Oof, your childhood must have been a real bummer. The point of the game is that you hide and I seek. Simple, right?”

“I’m not… not playing,” you said. “I just want to leave. Please… Whatever this is, I… Please stop.”

“Come on, where’s your sense of sportsmanship? Even this coward is giving it a chance.” He paused, and then raised his voice, calling out to someone else. “Isn’t that right? Why don’t you tell her what a good time we’re having?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to... We’re sorry, so please don’t… don’t hurt him,” you begged, your voice wobbling with tears and panic.

“I’m not sure I get why you’d defend a guy who was willing to abandon you here. I mean, who knows what could happen to a girl like you in a scary place like this. It’s practically falling apart. Not to mention all of the creepy and dangerous things that could be lurking around.”

You shook your head, blinking back tears. “Please,” you said, although you weren’t sure what you were pleading for.

“I’m in a good mood tonight, so I’ll give you some advice. First of all, the basement is no good. There aren’t very many escape routes, you’ll definitely get cornered. And, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I’ve heard that it's haunted.”

“Please stop,” you begged. “I’ll leave, I’ll leave and-”

“Hey, hey, don’t panic,” he said soothingly. “You’ll need to save up all that energy for running. Oh, and you might wanna ditch the walkie talkie, it’s a dead giveaway.”

All this time, you had worried about vampires. But it made more sense that some lunatic would use this place as hunting grounds. Preying on the stupid and reckless and your delusions that you were somehow cursed and connected to this place. You were cursed alright. It was the worst curse of all—blind naivety.

“Please stop,” you begged again. It wasn’t that you wanted to talk more with the potential lunatic, but hearing his voice was better than not hearing it because at least it meant you weren’t entirely alone down here in the dark. But there was no answer, just some static. “Hello?” You asked, your voice even weaker. “Hello?”

No answer, over. Over and out. Ten-four.

You stood there for a long moment, sore and sweaty and trembling, your body all at once wrung out and over energized, your heart beating way too fast. The light didn’t reach far enough, it was like the shadows were gnawing at the edges of it, attempting to retake their territory. A little part of your brain understood that you weren’t capable of thinking rationally, the part that recognized the insanity of all of the actions that led you here. But knowing that and overcoming blind, animal panic were two different beasts entirely.

Escape. That was all you could do. At first you thought about searching for your fallen ThruNite, but you were afraid to linger in here too long. You had no idea where it had ended up, there were too many places in the room it could have been hiding. That left you with the weaker incandescent light and, if that failed, your phone’s flashlight.

Your past self was a lot smarter than your current one, thinking to bring some water. That cured the rancid tang of metal in your mouth, settling you somewhat as you considered your options. Rather than abandon the walkie talkie, you shut it off. It was stupid, but you couldn’t just abandon your sole source of connection to any living beings. You checked your phone as well, but the same NO SERVICE bar sat at the top.

There was no other way than forward. The room that you fell into didn’t have doors, only dark, decaying holes where doors might have once been. The one on your left was the source of the dank, rotting scent. It was completely flooded, the water covered with an inky, oily film, your light reflecting off of it unnervingly. When you steeled yourself to venture forward, you realized that the hall was slightly flooded as well. Not more than an inch or so, but enough to make your boots wet, and enough to make each footstep splash and squish, rendering stealth impossible. Then again, the light made that impossible anyway. Shining your light both ways, you debated which way to go, trying to remember the castle plans. The trouble was that you had no idea where you might have fallen. Everything was dark and creepy and awful and you just wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else. To close your eyes and imagine your way out of the situation, to stay right there without ever moving and escape.

After a second of despair and terrified self pity, you went right.

If you followed the hallway, you would find a way upstairs. That made sense, there had to be some practicality to the design of this forsaken place. Or, that was all you could hope for. In reality, the dark and uncertainty threatened to turn your guts inside out, vomit biting your throat as you skirted along the wall. It was so quiet, unnaturally so. In the silence in the absolute void of light, your mind conjured noises. Extra footsteps, the sound of breathing. Echoes where there shouldn’t have been.

You were afraid to blink, that when you opened your eyes something would appear in the beam of your flashlight. But you didn’t want to see anything, either, it would be better to face death ignorant to its face. You wanted to shield yourself from whatever horrors might exist.

Staying in place was a death sentence, going any further was uncertain terror. The man said the basement was haunted. By what? Ghosts? Witches? Vampires? Murderers?

Did it even matter?

Each open doorway you passed came with the anticipation that something would jump out at you. Or, worse, that you’d look in and see the dark silhouette of something inside. Somehow, that thought was almost as terrifying as being assaulted. Animals attacked on sight, true predators were the ones who were patient enough to lurk, to wait, to watch, to toy with the fear of their prey. And that’s what you were. Prey.

On and on. Down the deep dark hall, your footsteps squelching on the damp floor, down down down to the corner where you turned, your light terrifyingly weak, nothing more than a pathetic glow against the all consuming darkness. The moment you saw a set of stairs, you could have wept with relief. Maybe it was stupid because it wasn’t as if they would lead you anywhere good, but those stairs were the best thing you’d ever seen. You gave into the spine tingling fear and ignored the pain of your body to run to them, splashing out of the water and taking the steps two at a time.

There was no door at the top, just a sharp bend leading into a wider hall, the stairs tucked away and likely used by the servants. You didn’t care. This hallway wasn’t flooded, and the scent of death and decay wasn’t nearly as strong. It left you with the same problem though. Where did you go from here? Where were you?

Relief soured into dread. Now that you were upstairs, the game had begun.

It would have been smarter to shut off your light, but without any source of ambient illumination, you would be completely surrounded by the darkness. You stayed very, very still, straining your ears in an attempt to hear any stray sound, anything out of the ordinary. But there was nothing. The castle creaked and groaned, and your heart raced, and your ears rung faintly.

Indecision and fear nearly paralyzed you. Like drowning, you had no idea of which way was up, you were merely thrashing in the blind darkness, hastening your own demise in your desperation to live.

You found yourself walking without thinking about it, clinging to the wall with some idea that it would protect you. Just keep going. There was a sharp turn and then you realized that there was a light ahead. At first you thought it was a trick of your imagination, but you switched off your flashlight and blinked fast to adjust to the darkness, eventually making out that it was light. Soft, pale moonlight. That meant outside, that meant escape.

Continuing to cling to the wall, you hurried towards the opening, eventually turning to the corner and finding yourself within your originally stated destination. At least you knew where you were. Nowhere near the exit.

What rotten, twisted irony. You could almost laugh if you weren’t so close to tears. The Golden Hall, now flooded with thin silver moonlight, was exactly as beautiful as the name suggested. You knew it not from the second hand descriptions—they didn’t even begin to accurately describe the sweeping, luxurious ballroom—but because you had seen it before.

Far above, the cold moon observed you through panes of broken glass. So close, yet impossibly far. Taunting, tempting, representing an unreachable whisper of freedom. Your knees almost buckled, giving into the pain and exhaustion as you considered having to brave even more of the castle if you were ever going to get out alive. The Golden Hall echoed your own personal despair, a decaying corpse of what it once was, its profoundly decadent construction fallen to ruin. But you could imagine—remember, it was a memory, constructed or otherwise—how it looked in its prime. Shining, lustrous gold. And a man, one with entrancing eyes and a sly smile. His hands had been cold but the feeling was so warm, your own heat igniting you both.

“The point of the game is to hide, you know,” someone said from behind you. In your despairing trance, you had gone further into the ballroom. Now you whirled around, clutching your chest in terror. “Although I am impressed you found your way up. Even I get the creeps going down there. Somebody really ought to do something about the flooding.”

Shaking hard, you flicked your flashlight on, illuminating the man in its weak, yellow glow. He didn’t shy away, looking at you head on. His footsteps were slow and measured, impossibly graceful. Yes, yes of course. So obvious, so brutally, painfully blatantly obvious that it would be him. In the dim glow of your light, the most you could make out was the gold wink of his earring, but you knew without seeing that his eyes were that lovely shade of green, tinged with the romantic oceanic blue, so striking against his tan skin and black eyelashes. You knew that as surely as you knew the creases of your palm, or the constellations in the sky.

“I admit,” he said, breezing past your silence, “I do have a slight advantage. You hurt yourself when you fell, right? I could smell your blood all the way from the catwalk. I’ll let you know if it tastes as good as it smells.”

“Stay away from me,” you demanded, surprised at how clear the words sounded despite the saliva pooling on your tongue.

“I mean it, you smell really good,” he said, ignoring you and continuing forward. “Hey, why don’t you make this easy for me and put down that light? Nobody likes a sore loser.”

“I told you-”

“Yeah, yeah, stay away,” he said flippantly. But he did stop, tilting his head in consideration. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you? Fine. If you’re going to run,” he gestured behind himself at the exit into the dark hall, “now’s your chance.”

You didn’t think about the cheeky smile he wore, or the mocking tenor of the offer, or the reason he might let you run in the first place. You just did it, just ran, not looking back. There was blood in your throat and your entire body ached and you weren’t entirely sure you knew where you were going, but you didn’t pause.

Step after pounding step, your heart racing, your breath coming out in sharp little gasps. Through the hall, which spanned miles and miles and miles, into the dining hall with its dust and cobwebs and ruined finery. You hit your bruised hip on the doorway which nearly sent you tumbling onto the ground. The red hot pain was so intense you had to stop and lean on the wall, your body physically refusing to go forward.

Could you hear him? Were those his footsteps coming down the hall or your own telltale heart with its madness inducing beat?

There was no time for your pain. If you couldn’t get away from here, you would die. That was a fact. Rubbing your sweaty palm on your hip as if to soothe it and sobbing dryly with all the pitiful disgrace of a child, you took off again.

When you burst out into the pleasure plaza, the place of that first confrontation, hope reignited in your heart. It didn’t matter that there was still a significant dash to the exit, at least you knew where you were. Ignoring all else, you retraced your original ill-fated steps out into the courtyard. The moon was hidden behind the golden tower, peering into the front of the castle and leaving the courtyard nearly as dark as the halls. It didn’t matter. You raced across, blindly passing the one eyed deer in his long night vigil.

Until your toe caught on a loose rock, and you launched forward onto your elbows and knees, skittering forward across the ground. Once more, your flashlight was flung from your grip and landed somewhere ahead in the dense foliage. A harsh yelp left your mouth and you collapsed, completely boneless and exhausted and in genuine, insistent agony. Everything ached and the terror was relentless, pain consuming every panicked thought and infecting every inch of your body. You were doomed. Damned. Dead.

Footsteps approached from behind. Easy, casual, measured. You flipped onto your back, wincing at the weight it put on your bruised hip. Your pursuer didn’t look dangerous. The outline of his messy curls gave him an innocent silhouette, and his hands were empty of any weapon.

“Ouch, that must have hurt,” he said. “You should be careful, you could injure yourself if you don’t watch where you’re going.”

“Stay away from me,” you got out between gasping breaths.

“I bet you’re tired from all that running, huh? That’s fine, I think we’ve had enough fun for the night.” Without pausing, he dropped down onto his knees, one between your legs and the other astride your hip. You cried out in protest, getting your trembling arms beneath yourself to crawl backwards, but he caught you by the strap of your sling bag, and then with a fistful of your shirt to keep you in place, caging you in with his body. You couldn’t see the color of his eyes, they were only dark as he leaned down over you.

“Stop it, please,” you begged, weak and trembling, tears sliding down your flushed cheeks, mixing with the sweat. “Just let me go, please.”

“I’m sure you get this all the time, but you smell unbelievably delicious,” he said, his nose brushing your sweaty neck. You could feel your pulse jump against the thin skin there and you held completely still, a million thoughts slamming into each other all at once in your head. Vampires, murderers, insanity—anything and everything but most of all was just the mindless, irrational terror and despair. You were going to die. In a final spasm of rebellion, your back arched and legs kicked, but your body was caught between the jagged ground beneath and the firm press of his body above, pinned flat. And your hands weakly pushed at his chest, but it was a lost cause, and he wasn’t listening to your constant mumbling pleas to stop.

Another pathetic sob hiccupped in your chest. You wanted your dad, you missed him. You needed him. And then you went limp because, now and forevermore, you were alone.

“Come on, you don’t need to cry,” he murmured sweetly, a smile in his voice. You didn’t respond, staring up at the starry sky above. They were cold and without shape or form. Indifferent to your pain.

The touch of his lips on your neck was shockingly cool, you almost wouldn’t have believed it was a mouth until you felt the needle-like puncture of fangs. That made you jump, squealing, but he held you in place which was probably a good thing because he was biting your neck and that could get dangerous fast. The pain sharply worked down through the rest of your body, the unnatural intrusion of something beneath the skin sending you right back into high alert. And then his lips closed around the created wound to suck.

A little whimper left your mouth, almost confused because even with the unambiguous pain of being bitten, there was something more. The wet release of sensation that followed the bite bloomed out from the point where his fangs pierced your neck in a flizzling wave. He sucked hard for a moment, but then went stiff against you, pulling back with a sharp intake of breath to stare into your eyes.

He looked shocked, almost innocent if it weren’t for your blood smeared across his mouth. “You’re…” He breathed out that word faintly, reverently. There was meaning there, a meaning that you understood. Letting out a little laugh, a bubble of genuine exuberance, he released your shirt so that hand could delve into your hair, so he could pull you into a kiss.

His skin was impossibly cold, unalive, and you could taste your own blood as he licked between your lips to part them. While his eyes were squeezed shut, dark eyelashes resting on his cheekbones, yours were wide open.

The kiss wasn’t violent, it was amorous. And familiar. He held you, practically cradled you against him. He felt it too, he understood what you had known from the moment you saw him.

There was no way to escape the violently seated weight of your own body, of every sensation and feeling he inspired within you. Although, in another situation, the kiss might have seemed sensual, it was only grotesque and terrible. A display of affection in a moment of horror. You didn’t want it, your body thrummed with fear and pain, but you also felt yourself giving into the overwhelming wave of defeat. Even with all that was unnatural and terrible, this man’s kiss was imbued with some sort of cosmic sense of belonging.

If the pain weren’t so sharp, you probably would have relented.

Instead, you used it as an opening, as your final chance to reject this twisted insanity. Your hand scrambled out to the side, blunt nails scraping the ground and open wounds packing with dirt. But you found what you were looking for. Stray rubble, forced up and broken by the relentless roots of new growth, nature overcoming manmade structure. You wrapped your bloodied fingers around the chunk of displaced stone and swung at his head, thrashing against his grip at the same moment.

It was enough to displace his body from on top of yours, maybe out of surprise because you certainly didn’t feel any human give of flesh and bone beneath the weight of the rock. You didn’t stop to consider that, or anything. He grabbed the strap of your sling bag as you scrambled away and you unclipped it without thought, refusing to let it catch you, to keep you trapped. It didn’t matter, you didn’t need it. You needed to escape. You were little more than a wild animal, the taste of your own blood on your lips, blood dripping down your neck, fear infecting every cell of your being.

“Wait a second,” he called. Disgruntled, not pained.

The first few steps, you were practically crawling, your back hunched like a beast as you used pure momentum to carry you into the atrium. And from the atrium to the breezeway, your back painfully straightening out, hip screaming in agony. You didn’t think about it, you just continued forward. Ran out into the night, ran through the woods, sticks and foliage catching your clothes and skin, ran down the dirt path to the road. There wasn’t a single thought in your head to get help, just to get away. And then you were flying through the night on your silver bike, your body pushed past the point of weary, into some territory where you weren’t even sure you were actually alive anymore, just acting because you had to act. Although it seemed to take hours of cycling down the dark road, there was this vague impression that no time at all passed before you were coming up to the inn, the bicycle’s wheels crunching across the gravel alley before you ditched it.

Your room’s window was still open, the way you left it so you didn’t have to sneak in and out the front. The lights were on and they were warm and bright, inviting. You scrambled in, bloody and filthy and sweaty and shaking, and slammed the glass pane shut so hard it rattled, pulling the blinds shut to protect you from the night.

And then you wept, and you retched, and you waited for sunrise.

Act 4

“Die he or justice must; unless for him Some other able, and as willing, pay The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”

1st day of Horsebow Moon

It’s all real. There is something living in El Dorado. He got Acheron, I waited all night and he never came back and they’re saying that he left yesterday but I know he didn’t. I left him there. I abandoned him there. I’m so sorry. It’s all my fault.

If you find this, it means he came for me too.

II.

A woman sat in the waiting room of the police station when you entered, her legs crossed as she casually read the paper. There was nobody else around, not even at the desk. A lazy fan swiveled in the corner, whirring loudly but not doing anything to cool the room so much as it just pushed around the warm air. It made the high necked shirt you were wearing that much more uncomfortable. Trying very hard to hide your limp—your hip wasn’t seriously injured, but you’d have a hell of a bruise for weeks—you walked up to the desk, peering into the back to check if anyone was there. No luck. It was almost eerily quiet.

“Are you here to talk to the police?” the woman asked, looking at you over the top of her paper.

You opened your mouth to respond before settling on nodding instead.

She turned to the next page, her attention drawn back down. “What about?”

You hesitated, not knowing how to answer, or even if you should. Before leaving the inn, you hadn’t thought very hard about how you would present your story. The only evidence you had was your sore body, but you had to do something for Acheron. Even if he was annoying and rude and unpleasant, that didn’t mean he deserved to be dead and forgotten.

“I know all of the folks on the force,” she explained. “I’m sure I could help you out.”

“I… I’m here to give a statement, that's all,” you told her, aware of how hoarse your voice was. You sounded and looked rough, there was no hiding it.

“Well, they’re at lunch right now,” she said. “Why don’t you sit down and wait with me?”

You looked at the empty desk, and then at her, and then sat down, once again trying not to wince at the way your hip complained. Really, your entire body complained. You used practically half a bottle of Bactine trying to clean up the mess of shredded skin on your hands, elbows, and knees. Not to mention the bruising.

“I’m Judith, by the way,” she said.

“It’s nice to meet you,” you said.

“I take it you don’t know who I am,” Judith said, a hint of amusement in her eyes. That perked you up, just a bit. Not in a good way. So lost in your own miserable anxiety and fear, you hadn’t really considered how off putting her demeanor was before now.

“Should I?” you asked.

“You might be interested, at least. I’m the owner of El Dorado and the surrounding property.”

You felt the blood fade from your face, your empty stomach twisting with guilt and fear, the sore muscles clenching uncomfortably.

“Don’t make that face,” she said, folding up her paper. “I’m not here to report you.”

“I-”

“That’s not to say I couldn’t,” she said, cutting you off, “but I figured I’d give you a chance to do the smart thing first. It’ll save both of us a lot of trouble if we agree that nothing happened last night and move on with our lives.”

You froze. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Do you know the punishment for felony trespass?” she asked.

“Acheron’s still in there,” you whispered, adjusting your high necked shirt again. “They have to save him. Somebody has to do something.”

“I heard your friend left town,” Judith said.

“No, I saw him. He was real, and he got Acheron,” you insisted, tears welling up in your eyes. The words didn’t make any sense, even you weren’t entirely sure how much of it you meant. What you thought, what you felt, what you believed. Your head pounded with a violent headache, your entire body sore and clammy.

“I don’t know what you think you saw, but hallucinations are a side effect of things like black mold,” Judith said, her eyebrow arching. “It’s dangerous. There’s a reason that place stays locked up.”

You opened your mouth to argue, then closed it. Could that be true? Maybe Acheron had left after all, you weren’t exactly in the clearest of mental states. He could have escaped, it was what he intended. And the rest of it, the man who stalked, taunted, and attacked you, maybe there was some other explanation for that. Maybe you really were losing it.

“You can go ahead and make a report, if you want,” Judith said. “It won’t matter. All of the evidence points to your friend packing up and leaving. Without a body, the only crime here is yours. They’ll bury you in whatever charges they can make stick.” She paused, giving you a sideways glance to make sure you were listening. “None of that has to happen. No report, no paperwork, no crime. You go back to your inn, pack your bags, and leave town. Everybody’s happy.”

A couple of answers came to mind, and then a couple of complaints. Eventually, you just nodded.

“See? I knew we could handle this peacefully.”

“I’m scared,” you said softly, the pitiful admission leaving your mouth without thought.

Judith sighed, looking at you with a disapproving mixture of compassion and pity. “Don’t worry. Even if there was something there, I promise you that it’s not getting out any time soon,” she said, a flicker of understanding in her eyes. That passed quickly and Judith stood up, tucking her paper under her arm. “I have to go. It was nice meeting you. I’d say that I hope to see you later, but-”

“I’m leaving soon. Tonight if I can,” you said quickly, getting to your feet as well.

“I thought that might be the case. Well, then. Have a safe trip.”

III.

1st day of Horsebow Moon

I took a nap earlier, while the sun was still out, and dreamed of him. He wants me to go back. Maybe I should, maybe it’d be better if I did. When he kissed me I… I don’t know. I think about it and I’m not scared, I just want to cry. My heart hurts. Why?

I wish it had been me too. I really do. We could have gone out together in a blaze of glory, us rogues. At least I wouldn’t be alone, I wouldn’t be thinking that when he touched me, I didn’t want anyone or anything else, and I felt-

I can’t think like that.

The past is written in ink and stone and blood and ash.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning, it was the earliest time I could find to get out of here. I’ll have to get back in a car. Thinking about it makes me sick, but there’s no choice. She says it’s not real and I know that’s a lie. The bite on my neck is real, I couldn’t have made that up. She’s lying. They’re all covering up for this, that’s all I can think. Earlier when I ordered food, the delivery guy acted so strange, like he knew. It’s insane to think, but I swear, everybody in this awful little town is in on it.

I put the note from earlier under my mattress, just in case something happens tonight. For some reason, I keep thinking that it will, jumping at every little sound. The walkie talkie keeps bursting out static, like it’s connected to the other one, but that’s impossible because Acheron had the other one and the range isn’t that long. I could have sworn I heard a voice from it while I showered too. Maybe it’s connected to another channel. Maybe I’m insane. Maybe I’m going to die. Maybe he’ll come for me.

Death doesn’t scare me, not really, but I don’t want to die alone.

Act 5

"And should I at your harmless innocence

Melt, as I do"

Fiercely clawing your way out of the heavy shackles of sleep, you shouted yourself fully awake, thrashing in an attempt to escape an unknown threat, sickness churning violently in your stomach. Being awake hurt. Why had you been asleep? Everything hurt. Fear was more potent than pain and you forced yourself to breathe, to focus on your confusion and make sense of the world around you. Unfamiliar, although that in and of itself wasn’t dangerous. You had always existed in a state of ever-shifting unfamiliarity. What was wrong, what was dangerous, was that you knew where you were. Rather, you had a feeling.

“Woah, woah, easy,” he said, backing away with his hands up. You blinked rapidly, panting, trying to fight your way out of the haze. The tide of unconsciousness threatened to consume you once more, lapping at your heavy head, urging you back down. It was nearly more than you could take to keep your eyes open, but you fought it. Something was wrong, you needed to be awake. As your vision brightened bit by bit, you met a pair of green eyes, and your blood turned to ice.

“It’s you,” you said, your voice soft and close to breaking, mushy in your mouth. Nearly inaudible. Everything was sore and stiff and painful, and it was so unbelievably hard to keep yourself from drifting again. It had to be a drug in your system, but you couldn’t think properly to know how or why. “You… You’re-”

“I usually go by Claude,” he told you with a winning grin. And it was a smile you knew. Intimately, honestly, a smile so familiar you ached.

You blinked hard, shaking your dizzy, heavy head in frustration, unable to accept what you were seeing and hearing. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn’t remember the last thing you’d been doing before you woke up here, the squishy bit of brain behind your eyes pounded at the effort. And that name. You knew it, you had long attached it to the man in your dreams no matter how little sense it really made.

Or maybe it all made perfect sense, and that was why you were so scared. Claude von Riegan, resident vampire of El Dorado.

“I… What happened?” you asked weakly, tearfully. “Why do I…? Dizzy…”

“Don’t worry, that’s from the little concoction I slipped into your food before that kid dropped it off,” Claude said. “It’s not poisonous or anything and, trust me, I would normally never use such underhanded tactics, but I couldn’t have you ruining things by making a big fuss. It’ll wear off soon.”

“No no no,” you muttered, your words bordering on incomprehensible with the effort they took to get out, “this can’t be happening. This can’t…”

“Would you feel any better if I told you it wasn’t?” he asked nonchalantly, sitting on the sofa across from the bed, his arms spanning the back in a casual position.

With blurry vision, your eyes took in the room around you. It seemed normal enough, if lavish. Big bed, large furniture. The smell though, that was distinct. Not rot, but old. Aged.

“You have been having an awful lot of weird dreams lately,” he continued thoughtfully.

You exhaled harshly, going still. Then, slowly, you met those playful green-blue eyes. They danced with candlelight and mirth. Enticing, exactly like in your dreams.

“I hope you don’t mind, I got bored while you were asleep and had a little peek at your diary,” he told you. “I’d love to hear more about that strange, beautiful man who haunts you in the night. He sounds intriguing.”

Had you written about those dreams? You couldn’t remember what you might have put down, usually you just went in and dumped as many thoughts onto the page as possible. The invasion of privacy was like a knife to the bone, but you couldn’t think of what you should do about it, the world was too abrasively heavy to know what to do with anything. Tears gathered in the corner of your eyes. Tears! Like you were going to cry! It seemed impossible to fight, like you were just as helpless to yourself as you were to what was going on.

“It was fascinating to see how much you pieced together. I’m glad you’re smart, I really am. It’ll make this a lot more fun.”

You shook your head again, which didn’t help the dizziness. “I want to leave,” you said, “I don't want to be here, I can't…" Your voice slurred a little, like you weren’t in complete control of your body. Your thoughts too, they kept getting away from you, slipping out from your grasp.

"Out of curiosity, where would you go?" Claude asked.

You sniffed pathetically, your thoughts falling to an abrupt halt against the question. "What?"

"If you left town right now,” he said, “where would you go?"

You stared at him, unable to figure out what he meant.

"You don't know, do you?" Claude asked, but his tone was all-knowing and smug. "I thought as much."

"I do, I just…" you said. But you didn't. You had no idea about anything. What you would do, what you were doing, everything was a confused mess and you just needed to get out of here, get away. Your breathing was picking up, your heavy head spinning with it.

“Shh, calm down,” Claude said gently, switching from the couch to the bed. It dipped with his weight and you didn’t think to move away, just stayed where you were and looked at him, attempting strength but only managing desperation as you tried not to break down completely. “I can tell you’re scared, but I’m not going to hurt you.” He paused, smiling non-threateningly. “And, you know, I wouldn’t have had to do any of this if you didn’t play hard to get last night. So why don’t we agree we were both in the wrong and move on? Forgive and forget, no harm done.”

“I-I want to-to leave,” you insisted, taking inventory of yourself to figure out if you were even capable. Everything was so foggy, disoriented, your body unbelievably heavy. It was getting better, but slowly. You weren’t sure you could leave the room, let alone escape.

"Sorry, but that's not gonna happen," Claude said, and it wasn’t a threat but the casual way he spoke made the statement that much worse. He was simply telling you something that was. A fact, a forgone conclusion.

"Someone will… will come looking for me," you said with more confidence than you actually felt, grasping at straws to make your case because you didn't have anything else.

"I wouldn't be too sure about that," Claude said. "They still think that I'm too weak to leave, seeing as the Macbeth bloodline has completely died out and all." He smiled at that, meeting your eye knowingly, unflinchingly. "Without the blood that roused me from my accursed slumber, there's no way I'd have the strength to steal somebody all the way from town and back."

Pieces began to shift into place. Slowly moving, scraping together as your fogged brain did its best to comprehend what he was telling you. The vague outline existed, but you couldn't quite pin it down, couldn't quite see the whole.

"My blood…" you mumbled, pressing your hand to the puncture wounds on your neck.

"But," Claude continued, ignoring you, "let's say that they know you're here. It's not impossible. Are you really going to place a bet on complete strangers risking their lives for you when they can't even be sure you're still alive? Personally, I wouldn't."

Your breathing, already unsteady, was only getting more out of hand the longer this conversation went on, the pressure behind your eyes mixing a headache with the threat of tears. A hot flush worked its way through your body, a sure sign of genuine panic, some potent mixture of terror and the effect of whatever drug he'd given you.

“Hey, calm down. I'm not trying to scare you,” Claude said, “but I'm not gonna lie to you either. So let’s get to know each other a little. I’m sure I’ll surprise you.”

Surprise you? The enormity of what was happening finally settled somewhat. He had kidnapped you, presumably by drugging you. He had killed somebody. Many people, maybe.

“Are you going to kill me?” you asked, your voice trembling and small.

Claude huffed, slight irritation wrinkling his brow. “No,” he said. “Frankly, I’m offended you’d even ask.”

“You’re crazy,” you said. “You… you killed Acheron, you…” You put a hand to your neck again. The needle-like punctures had bruised, the skin tender and sore.

“Okay, okay,” Claude said, trying to placate you. “I know I might have gone too far, and I’m sorry. I promise I won’t do that again. I was just a little excited, you know? I’ve been stuck in this place for centuries all on my own, too weak to leave and haunted by the ghost of my terrible, yet sympathetically tragic past.”

He paused, eyebrows up as if expecting you to say something, prompting you to say something. How could you possibly respond to that? He spoke so fluidly that you could almost miss the way he casually threw around the word ‘centuries’ as if it were normal, as if it made perfect sense.

“Doesn’t that make you sad?” Claude pushed. “Doesn’t your heart just ache for the pain I must have been feeling all this time?”

“You’re crazy…” you whispered again, unsteadily sitting up against the headboard, drawing your legs closer to yourself to put as much distance between the two of you as possible. You couldn’t ignore the evidence that there was something weird going on here, but you couldn’t ignore reason either. A crazy guy with razor sharp teeth living in a castle famous for its vampiric and occult ties hunting and killing trespassers was more reasonable than the alternative, wasn't it? You couldn’t just give up and submit to the fantasy, not entirely. You needed to make this make sense, to find a valid explanation other than the impossible.

“You already tried that one,” Claude told you. “And, for the record, I’m not crazy. If you think about it, and I know you have, this is meant to be. Who are we to deny fate?"

“Fate?” you repeated. “No, that’s…” Crazy. It was crazy. Everything about this was insane.

“Then why are you here?” Claude asked, raising an eyebrow. “Ah, actually, don’t answer that. I already know. Oh! Speaking of which…” He stood up to find something, pawing through the mess haphazardly left on one of the tables before straightening up with a phone in hand.

“That’s mine,” you said, tensing up.

“Yeah, you left it here. Aren’t you glad I took care of it for you?” he asked, waving it around as if to taunt you into lunging for it.

“Give it back.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Give it back.”

“Ooo, how very charming,” Claude said, oozing sarcasm. But he gave it to you anyway, tossing it onto your lap casually before sitting back down. “You know, if you’re going to break into creepy forbidden castles, you probably shouldn’t take something so important. Especially the thing that has all of the information about where you’re staying, what you’re doing, who might care if you go missing suddenly… Or, actually? You should do that, it makes things easier for me.”

You clicked the home button, greeted with your familiar background, a flower your dad found for you on the lake. That was last year. Not so long ago, but it felt like a lifetime. You weren’t sure what you were looking for as you swiped the screen to unlock it. There was no service here, you already knew that. The phone may as well have been an expensive brick for all the good it did you.

“I’m astonished by how much information can be crammed into such a tiny little device,” Claude said. “Although, in your case, there wasn’t very much to find. No friends, no family, no home… I’m sorry about your dad, by the way.” His voice lacked all levity when he said that, almost like he meant it.

“Don’t,” you said, stiffening. But it was a weak kind of anger. Whatever he had used to drug you sent your emotions way out of whack, fear and anger and sadness getting all knotted up and leaving a lump in your throat.

“Nobody to worry that you’ve gone missing. Nobody for you to miss,” Claude continued to muse. “Nothing for you to leave behind. If I didn’t know any better, I’d wonder if you weren’t waiting for this exact thing.”

“That’s… You’re wrong.”

“Of course, I do know better,” Claude said, ignoring you, “I know why you risked life, limb, and the law to break into my humble abode. Rather, I know why you think you did. You want to know why you’re cursed, and why all of these terrible things happened to you. You think that when the truth is laid bare, it won’t hurt anymore. Once everything makes sense, you won’t feel so alone and scared. You and I are pretty much the same in that regard. I can’t stand not knowing things.”

You shook your head quickly, refusing to hear his words. He wasn’t right anyway, he was just assuming, just pretending like he knew you for the sake of some twisted power trip. Then again, he was right, wasn’t he? Your brain wasn’t so focused that you could simply deny the truth, deny that you thought answers would make the pain stop.

“Amateur prose aside, you’re right about almost everything—the curse, Lady Macbeth, Old Derdriu, me. You are cursed, Lady Macbeth was a witch, I am a vampire, and so on and so forth,” he said flippantly, disregarding the supernatural as if they were matters of tired fact. “But I have to say ‘almost’ because you’ve misunderstood something very important. Honestly, your little tirades border on willful ignorance sometimes. I can’t tell if you’re intentionally missing the point or if you’re just that obtuse… Er, no offense. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

“No,” you said.

Claude huffed, frowning. “You’re probably the only girl in the world to come face to face with the literal man of her dreams and still insist that you don’t believe in fate. I’m actually a little amazed right now.”

“You’re lying,” you said. “You’re lying so I… Because I’m…”

“You’re not insane, if that’s what you’re going to say,” he told you bluntly. “You’re not weak either. No, you just want a way out, don’t you? There’s nothing for you out there, you know that. You’ve been searching desperately for someone to swoop in and give you direction again.”

“No,” you said again, refusing to hear those words or to believe them.

“Careful,” he said, “if you lie too much, I might just feel compelled to do something about it.”

Your breath caught, your body freezing in place. “You’re crazy,” you whispered, tears burning your eyes.

“Aaaand back to square one,” Claude said, rolling his eyes. “Okay, I see we’re not going to get anywhere like this. Time to move on to Plan B.” He twisted up onto his knees, like he was going to crawl towards you.

“Don’t come near me,” you said with wide eyes, clumsily scooting away, covering your neck defensively. Your body wasn’t moving correctly, your limbs awkward and ungainly. Although, if you were honest, he didn’t look that intimidating in the warm light. No, he looked beautiful. That was the point, wasn’t it? Those green eyes, the soft hair with one little curl flopped over his forehead, the pretty face, the little gold earring, all of it was meant to entice. Vampires were beautiful on purpose, they were both bait and trap.

“I told you, I’m not gonna hurt you. All I want is to get to know you a little better,” Claude said innocently. “Thing is, I’m a hands-on kind of learner.”

“Stay away from me,” you told him as firmly as you could manage, watching him distrustfully with this terrible tingling sense of anticipation. Like you wanted him to do something.

“I mean it. Fear and pain makes your blood all sour. Pleasure, on the other hand…” He trailed off with a grin, letting the implication speak for itself. “Well, we’ll get there.”

“No,” you said, winding up your arm to throw your phone at him. It was hard to keep your arm lifted, the muscles were so heavy that they trembled with the strain. Claude’s eyes widened, and then narrowed, his irritation obvious.

“Oh, come on. There’s no need for that.”

“Stay away from me,” you said again, your voice coming out more like a whine. At this point, your thighs were clamped so tightly together that the muscles ached, your arm wavering from the weight of your phone. Claude reached for your wrist, but you dropped the phone before he could do anything, deciding to make your escape instead.

There was no surprise that you, unsteady and dizzy and drugged, nearly fell off of the bed when you tried to jump onto the floor. You definitely would have face-planted if a set of cold hands didn’t catch you.

“I know this is happening pretty fast,” Claude said, gently pulling you against him. You couldn’t do much to stop him, your head spinning, your mind on the fraying edge of sense from the sudden shake up of blood. He was inhumanly cold, but the fabric of his buttoned shirt was soft. The smell was wonderful, clove and orange and something lower, masculine. “Believe me, if I could give you more time, I would. But we have to make do with what we’ve got, right? And I’m…” His arms tightened around you, not that you were at risk of escaping. When you nervously peered up at him, Claude caught your eye hungrily. His throat worked hard as he swallowed. “Honestly, I’m starving.”

“Stop,” was the most you could offer, slurring the word. You realized that there was no heartbeat in his chest. Of course there wasn’t, he wasn’t alive. His cold hand slipped beneath the hem of your shirt, tracing along the warm, sensitive flesh of your back, to your ribs. “No,” you protested, squirming. His body was unyielding and firm against your own in the most intimate of ways. You had never been this physically close with another person, not like this.

“It’s okay,” he told you, his nose brushing the crown of your head.

“It’s not.”

“It is,” Claude affirmed, unendingly gentle. He was tracing little patterns on your back that made you shiver. You should have been fighting to get away, but the scent of him was intoxicating, and you felt… Not peaceful, there was too much about all of this that was uncomfortable and scary to be peaceful, but you didn’t feel displaced. “You don’t want to be alone anymore, do you?”

Your composure finally collapsed, tears welling up in your eyes. You hid them against Claude’s cold, empty chest, clinging to him because you had nothing else.

“It’s okay to let it all go,” Claude told you, continuing to pet your skin sweetly. “I’ll make you forget, at least for a while. I don’t want to brag, but I’m the best you’ll ever have. I’ve had a few years of practice to really hone my technique, you know? You won’t remember a thing by the time I’m done with you.”

Your heart pounded heavy and hard once, twice.

“What do you mean?” you finally asked, mumbling the words against him to hide your red face because you had a feeling you knew what he meant, the price he’d demand to cure your loneliness. In a way, it made sense. Another piece of a puzzle that would fit in just as it was meant to, as it had been destined to.

“Wait…” Claude pried you away from his chest, gripping your chin to force you to meet his eye. You tried to avert your gaze, but there really wasn’t anywhere else to go, anywhere to hide. “What do you think I mean?”

Your thighs squeezed together, heat rising to your face.

“I dunno,” you said, trying to squirm away, overly aware not only that you were in his arms, but practically cradled in his lap.

“I can’t tell if you’re being coy or not,” he said. “I guess it doesn’t matter either way.”

“What doesn’t?” you asked.

“I’m talking matters of the heart,” Claude said, letting go of your face to wrap an arm around your waist, his grip impossible to fight even if you weren’t still dizzy and leaden from the drug. “And matters of the body. More specifically, your body.” His other hand delved down, slipping beneath the elastic waistband of your sweatpants to press against you through your panties. You hissed out through your teeth, thighs clamping down around his hand like a vice. Claude only groaned, his palm grinding against you. “I’ve gotta say, it’s awfully cute. You’re so warm and soft.”

“Stop,” you protested, your voice thin and your face hotter than ever.

“Pleasure makes your blood sweeter,” he said, the air of his words brushing against your ear. “The more, the better.”

You shook your head, hiding your face against his chest. “I… I don’t…”

“It’s a fair deal, don’t you think?” Claude asked, his fingers teasing you through the thin fabric, curling to press between your folds, skimming over the sensitive flesh beneath. You squirmed, your hands weakly tugging at his wrist. “We both get something out of it.”

“I… don’t…” you stammered out again, not sure where you were going with it.

“And it’s much more respectable than a messy quickie out in the courtyard. Blood as precious as yours deserves to be savored in its finest form,” Claude said, dragging his finger over your clit, the extra friction of the fabric adding to the sensation. You shuddered hard, heat sinking low in your gut. “I think we’ll start with three and go from there.”

“Three?” you asked breathlessly, your head spinning so hard you had to rest it against his chest.

“Yeah, I’m going to make you come three times,” Claude said, his tone more than a little indulgently condescending. “To start with, at least. You know, to sweeten you up. It’ll soothe your nerves too. As for what happens from there…” He shrugged, the movement impeded by the way he was cradling you. “I like the spontaneity of figuring it out as I go. It’s more romantic, don’t you think?”

“Nn…no…” you said, your stomach sinking, sickness and something else—something that was decidedly interested in the proposal—swirling dangerously low within you. Claude hadn’t stopped teasing you through your panties, and you weren’t really pulling at his wrist anymore so much as just holding on.

“What, are you thinking more along the lines of four? Five?” he teased. “We’ve got more than enough time to kill.”

“That’s not…” You whimpered, holding tighter against him when he wedged the fabric between your pussy’s outer lips to grind even harder against your clit. It bordered on too rough, but it was working as intended, your clit swelling hot and needy, your hips jumping forward in an unintentional chase for more. “I can’t… do that.”

“Did I mention how good I am at this?” Claude asked. “Not that I get the impression you’ll be too terribly difficult.”

You whined in objection, squirming in a half-hearted attempt to escape.

“That’s not a bad thing. The opposite, actually. Like I said, the more, the better,” Claude said, his other arm wrapping around your waist to adjust you, to make it easier for his other hand to work between your legs. You were too sensitive and you didn’t know how much of it was natural and how much of it was from the drug, only that pleasure was pooling up quickly in your core.

You swallowed against the excess saliva pooling on your tongue, past the lump in your throat. “I… I don’t…”

“What?” he asked. “You don’t… something. Sorry, I didn’t catch the last bit.”

“I…”

“You weren’t going to lie and say you don’t want this, were you?” Claude asked, his cold lips brushing the shell of your ear. Your hips jerked, your mouth falling open. You could feel the way your body was coiling up tense, desperate to come. It would be a quick flash of pleasure, hidden and tight beneath your clothes, but it was still pleasure, it was still good.

“I’m—mmm…” You pressed your lips together to stifle yourself, holding even tighter against him. The wave of heat was building too fast, too frantically. Exhaustion, drugs, your general mental degradation, you could pin the blame on any number of external factors so you didn’t have to take responsibility for what you felt. The result was the same though, and it was you and you alone who chased the tantalizing build of pleasure.

“Do you feel that? That’s the sweet, sweet feeling of me being right yet again,” Claude said, saccharine and smug. “Feels good, doesn’t it, sweetheart?”

It was the pet name that really did it. Nobody had ever said something like that to you, and the heavy weight of it in his voice pushed you over the edge with an anxious little jerk of pleasure and a choked noise in the back of your throat, with a hot flash that made your clothes feel too tight, that made your clit pulse beneath his touch, rubbed raw with the friction of fabric. It was awkward and cramped and thin and it was everything, you clung onto him as the fizzles of heat sparkled out, your muscles contracting, your mouth open and silent.

When it was over, when Claude quit rubbing those evil little patterns over your sensitive clit, you let out a shuddering breath, trying to calm yourself down. Without the distraction of pleasure keeping you on edge, you felt the bite of nausea in your throat. The recognition that this was wrong, and that you had no idea what to do to fix it, or even if that was possible.

“The thing is that when you come, your body releases all sorts of hormones. It’s a fun little cocktail that behaves in basically the same way as sugar. For me, at least,” Claude explained, unceremoniously dumping you onto your back in a boneless splay. “A couple of orgasms is… It’s like the difference between gnawing on a day-old biscuit and savoring a cinnamon bun with icing.”

“What are you doing?” you asked. You tried to hold onto him, but Claude easily knocked your arms away so he could pull your sweatpants off. They were cast somewhere to the side before he hooked a cold hand under your knee, lowering himself between your legs. “What-”

“I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth,” Claude explained, looking up at you with bright eyes. He looked so innocent, so sweet. So mischievous. “You don’t mind, right?”

“Mind what?” you asked, trying to close your legs, to hide yourself from him. The panties you were wearing were old and plain, far from anything even approaching sexy. But the idea of removing them was worse, you couldn’t stand thinking of him looking so forwardly at your bare pussy. The humiliation would kill you. “Please stop,” you said, your voice pinched and small.

“Oh, wow, would you look at that?” Claude asked, his finger tracing the wet spot soaking through your panties. Your hips twitched, the muscles in your thighs tensing. “It looks like you don’t want me to stop.”

“Don’t look,” you said, squirming in an attempt to get free.

“Don’t look?” Claude repeated, feigning guilelessness. “So it’s okay if I touch, but only so long as I keep my eyes closed? Good to know.”

“No, that’s not-”

He cut you off, his tongue replacing his fingers, dragging over the wet spot with a depraved sort of intensity. And his eyes, as he said, were closed. Already, the sane thoughts of sickness and doubt were beginning to scatter anew, your body responding to the promise of new pleasure. Claude exploited that, continuing to lickyou through the damp fabric of your panties while you squirmed, settling for covering your face in place of fighting him off. Not that he was looking.

“You’ve been alone for a long time, haven’t you?” Claude asked, hooking his fingers beneath your panties to slowly peel them off. You fought that, but it wasn’t hard for him to wrench the cotton from your grasp, the elastic tearing before he got them all the way down and off. When he ghosted his cool fingertips over the bruise on your hip, you shivered. “I’ve barely done anything and you already came once. Every time I touch you, it makes you twitch. I thought you were just discrete, not writing about any boys in your diary, but the truth is that you’ve had nothing to write about, right? Well, until now, that is.”

“What are you doing?” you hissed down at him, finally panicking enough to grab his hair, trying to pull his head out from between your legs, shame raging a horrible storm within you. Claude groaned, flashing a grin up at you as he casually tossed one of your bare thighs over his shoulder.

“Yeah, you can pull my hair all you want. I don’t mind,” he said, his cold lips brushing your inner thigh. You thought of his fangs and how easily they had pierced your neck, falling still as he passed the artery there. But that wasn’t his destination, you realized. Claude separated your outer lips, staring at your bare pussy for a long moment before his head dropped forward.

You yelped when his cold tongue began to draw relentless patterns over your swollen clit. His fingers kept you spread open for him and you couldn’t breathe, every single muscle in your body pulled taut in preparation for the orgasm you were being enticed into. Disgust and humiliation remained constant, sure, but it wasn’t enough to dissuade your body from the pleasure.

Even when your thighs closed around his head, certainly suffocating him, Claude didn’t falter. Even when you pulled at his hair, even when your hips jumped against his face, he just groaned, doubling down. He had to have been putting on a performance, considering how loud he was, eating you out as sloppily as possible so you had no choice but to revel in the depraved noises. The rest of it was all you. Your moaning, your whimpering, your gasping. Your body didn’t belong to you, you couldn’t force yourself to stay still, couldn’t stop the noises from leaving your mouth, couldn’t stop the hot coil of pleasure from building and building and building.

“I c-can’t,” you got out breathlessly, “I-I… I can’t.”

“Just keep telling yourself that,” Claude said, looking up at you from beneath thick, dark eyelashes. “It’ll make this a fun surprise. For you.”

Forcing your hips flat against the bed, his wicked tongue continued to push you even closer to the precipice. You whimpered, tossing your head back because there was nothing else you could do. It was embarrassing and awful and you hated it, but you knew you weren’t far off. Heat ballooned up in your core, all of your blood seemingly rising to the surface and making your entire body too hot, too tight, too tense.

Claude’s lips closed around your clit and sucked and you came with a helpless cry straight out of some trashy porno, your entire body tensing and shuddering and completely overcome with nothing except for the raw sensation of pleasure. By the time you were spent, your fingers were twitching, the rest of your body limp and sweaty.

“See what a difference a can-do attitude makes?” Claude asked, looking up at you with a big smile. You shook your head, breathing too hard, too fast. Unable to meet his eye. “As in, I can make you do anything I want. Funny how that works out.”

“I-I need… a moment.”

“No you don’t,” Claude said. Messily, hungrily, he moved up from between your legs, his lips tracing your abdomen, your stomach, your ribs, pushing your shirt up to gain access to more and more of your bare flesh. When you realized he was trying to remove your shirt and bra, you fought it, desperate to retain some modesty.

“I don’t want-”

“Ah, ah, ah,” Claude scolded. “Remember what I said?”

With his supposed can-do attitude, it wasn’t difficult for him to get your shirt and bra up and off, shoved past your shoulders and arms until the knotted wad of fabric dropped onto the floor. You tried to cover your bare tits, but Claude barely paused, simply slapping your arms away so he could map your chest with his mouth too. Palming one breast, pinching the aching nipple between cold fingers, he wrapped his lips around the other.

“Claude, I don’t-”

He effectively shut you up by biting your nipple. Not with his fangs, and not hard, just enough to make you squirm, writhe against him like you had last night, stuck between his unyielding body and the mattress. Sweaty and hot and desperate, but now for completely different reasons.

You made another sound that was intended to be his name but didn’t come out that way, it was barely language, and far from comprehensible.

Claude groaned, the fingers of his other hand pushing into your pussy at the same moment, driving right past the tense muscles of your entrance and deep into you. The weight was enough to make you really moan, the feeling of him stretching out your inner walls electrifying your entire body. You could hear how wet you were for him, feel how easily his fingers curled and scissored inside of you, reigniting the little ember of need low in your core. His mouth switched to your other nipple, leaving the first red and aching, and all you could do was hide your face, one hand threaded through his hair as if looking for an anchor point. You thought you needed a break, but already you were back in it, already wanting to come again.

His fingers fucked into you with a sloppy sound. In and out, curling and scissoring and not at all gentle. Not that it mattered. Your body was entirely pliant, moving with him. More than that, responding to each swipe gleefully, needfully, pulsing around his cold fingers and sucking them deeper, your back arching to press your chest harder against his mouth, your thighs squeezing his hand to keep him in place.

“You’re tight,” Claude said, pulling off your nipple with a slick pop. “Is it possible that you’ve been saving yourself for that special someone?”

You shook your head, more than a little aware of the way his taunt made you tighten around his fingers. So close. Just a little more and you were going to come for him, the heat having gone from a smolder to hellfire beneath your blushing skin, your entire body wound up.

“Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t been suffering all by yourself, waiting for your prince to show up and take care of you?” Claude asked, making his point with each hard thrust. “Cause, I’ll be honest, that’s what this feels like to me. Sensitive, tight, needy… Those are all classic symptoms of neglect.”

It was difficult to breathe. Difficult to think.

“Please,” you breathed out and you weren’t sure how he heard you, you could barely hear yourself over the crushing thrum of blood in your ears, but Claude responded with a groan.

“By the way, that is the magic word,” he said. Despite the quip, he fingerfucked you roughly and carelessly. His mouth on your tits was beyond pleasurable. It was exquisite, terrible. You came again, your entire mind clearing out as pleasure shuddered through you, stoked by each thrust of his fingers. They kept on curling, teasing, grinding against your g-spot, going as deep as they could each time. Your orgasm felt like it lasted too long, leaving you wrung out, shaking and almost confused. Maybe that was just because of how hard you were breathing, your brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

Sweat slicked your skin and tears had dripped down your cheeks into your hair and everything glowed when you managed to blink your eyes open.

“You don’t mind, right?” Claude asked, his mouth moving up from your sore nipple to your neck. His hand hadn’t stopped moving, fucking into you. He pulled his fingers out only to add a third, to add that much more impact to each thrust.

And he. Didn’t. Stop. Claude didn’t so much as pause when he bit into your neck, pushing you past numb overstimulation, past the discomfort, and right back into the cruel build of yet another orgasm. Unlike last night, the piercing sting of his fangs into your flesh was only good, hazy bright red and sharp, followed by the sweet, cool release of his mouth fixing around the wound to suck. It hurt, but the pain was only an aspect of pleasure. And when Claude groaned happily, his tongue lapping at your blood with the same desperation you felt beneath the assault of his fingers, you moaned openly.

You came again when he bit into your neck a second time, his fangs digging into your flesh mercilessly. The needling sting made you writhe, but his fingertips curled at the same time to press against your g-spot and you couldn’t help it. At this point you were so wet it was dripping past his fingers, slicking your thighs and the bed. Claude sucked even harder at your neck, enough to make you lightheaded.

Whining, you pulled halfheartedly at his hair. Not for him to stop, but because you wanted him to fuck you. Actually fuck you. At this point you probably were insane, but you didn’t care, all you could imagine was how full you’d feel, pierced by both his fangs and his cock.

“You want another?” Claude asked, pulling away from your neck. When he pulled back, his lips were wet with your blood, his green eyes alight. “Some girls would be begging for a break right about now.”

“I…”

“No, no. It’s okay to be a little greedy sometimes,” he said, grinning, the picture of poise and control despite the lunacy swirling within his gaze.

“Nn-no, I want you-you to—” You let out a high pitched mewl when his other hand dropped to touch your clit in time with his fingers inside of you, writhing desperately, helplessly. This wasn’t what you wanted, you didn’t think, but already sense had flown from your mind, replaced by the intense dread and need that had reduced you to a babbling, mindless thing.

He had to have known what he was doing to you, how far your mind had degraded, but that didn’t seem to matter to Claude at all. Torturing you with the dual assault of his fingers, he moved back down your body, muttering for you to hold still before his fangs punctured your inner thigh. Biting the sensitive, giving skin hurt in a different way than your neck, but you were already on your way to coming against and when he sucked hard on the wound, you just whined, gripping his hair in a desperate attempt to stop yourself from falling apart completely.

Claude moaned, sucking hard as you sobbed and moaned and trembled through another orgasm, dripping and squeezing his fingers, twitching with overstimulation and pain and pleasure and the raw rush of ecstasy. He finally let up when you whined, his mouth releasing your thigh and pulling his fingers out of you with a final little press against your g-spot that made your legs jerk. What little sense you might have had before was long gone.

“Now… What was it you wanted me to do?” asked as he sat back. “You were mumbling, I couldn’t quite understand.”

You turned your face away from him in embarrassment, still trying just to breathe, let alone speak. Claude laughed indulgently. Warm, sweet, even affectionate. He leaned over you to press a kiss to your neck, lapping at the beads of blood that had welled up. Even as you burned, he was cold.

“Look at me,” Claude told you softly, sweetly.

And you did, meeting his eyes again because you were beyond refusing. What you didn’t expect was for him to take advantage of the way you were gasping for air and shove his fingers in your mouth. They tasted like you and maybe a distant part of your mind was disgusted by that, but it was so much easier to do what came naturally and suck on them, your tongue cleaning his skin of your wet arousal. The reaction seemed to amuse him, and, curiously, he pushed his fingers a little deeper. Predictably, you choked. Claude pulled them out with a spill of saliva. Filthy, but everything was already so wet, the added mess made little difference.

“Oop, sorry,” he said without the slightest shred of repentance, sitting up and unbuttoning his shirt, tossing it aside. You could barely remember what had happened to your own clothes. “I’d hate to put words into your mouth, so why don’t you tell me what it is you want.”

You shook your head, closing your eyes in an attempt to collect yourself. More than ever, reality loomed as a detached concept, floating above you and below you but not quite stable. There were reasons that was probably dangerous, but you couldn’t think hard enough to know. Every time you tried, it was just the heavy thump thump thump of your heart, and sweat, and your heavy, heavy head.

“How about I tell you what I want, and you can let me know if it's agreeable to Her Highness?” Claude asked playfully. You peeked at him from beneath your eyelashes, barely coherent enough to be surprised that he was naked. Beautiful, the warm tan of his skin belying the bloodless cold beneath. Vampire biology, as it turned out, was comparable enough to human biology. “I want to see how many times I can make you come on my cock before you either beg me to stop or pass out. Preferably while enjoying a little more of your blood.”

You blinked, some sense returning to your head as your eyes followed the trail of dark hair down his abdomen to his cock. A bit of fear because the sight of his hand stroking it made you very aware of what was about to happen, and then his words registered and you froze up entirely.

“Oh, don’t make that face, that was a joke,” Claude said, scooping you up. The world rolled, your head heavy and limbs limp. “I won’t let you pass out, you’d miss all the fun.”

“Dizzy,” you muttered, trying to hold onto him for stability, everything he just said fleeing your head as the reality rolled and twisted and shifted incomprehensibly. You couldn’t be afraid of what was happening when you didn’t even know what was happening, although that was distressing in and of itself.

“You’re okay,” Claude said sweetly, brushing a lock of hair from your face, capturing your attention back onto him. Something to hold onto. “I’ve got you. Just relax, let me take care of you.”

Amidst the blurry, disorienting world, his eyes were familiar and clear. Beautiful. You must have muttered something in the affirmative because it made him laugh, the sound rumbling in his bare chest. Claude kissed your lips, your cheek. Then you were turned around and falling forward. It was difficult to balance on your hands and knees. He had to settle for your knees and elbows, your arms were trembling too much to hold you.

“You really are gorgeous, you know that?” Claude said, his hands tracing over your waist, down your hips. He didn’t put any pressure on the hurt one, simply tracing the very tips of his fingers across the ugly bruise. With how sensitive the skin was, it actually felt good, tugging a harsh shiver down your spine. “I’m serious. I mean… Look at you. Not that you can. I guess you’ll have to take my word for it.”

Shame made a brief reappearance as Claude groped your ass, playing with your body a moment before spreading your cheeks, exposing you enough to run the tip of his cock through your slick folds. That made you shiver even harder, your body tensing up, your pussy squeezing around nothing, dripping a little more in anticipation.

“A meaner man would make you beg,” Claude said, nudging the blunt head against your hole. You exhaled shakily, desperate and nervous and filled with red hot lust.

“Claude,” you said.

“You’re lucky I’m so nice.” With that as your only warning, he nudged his hips forward. Once the head was in, you were more than wet enough for him to slide in smoothly.

But Claude still took his time, holding you tightly against him to fill you with little rolling thrusts, his cock dragging against your fluttering inner walls bit by bit so you could feel everything. He held onto the headboard with one strong arm, the other holding your back flush against him which was good because, especially now that you were so full, you had no control over your body. In contrast to your feverish, sweaty skin, Claude was cold and smooth, his flesh unyielding and hollow. Your pussy worked around his cock, adjusting to his size. Any discomfort was easily smoothed out by how right it felt. How perfect.

“Scratch that, you’re going to be lucky if I ever let you leave my bed,” Claude said, his voice a bit harsher, more affected, his arm tightening around you.

You whimpered, your body unintentionally responding to what should have been a threat but only registered as a delicious promise. Claude still hadn’t moved. Every little movement made you tighten and flutter around him, a new reminder of how deep he went, how completely full you were. Claude groaned in turn, the sound muffled against your neck.

When he bit you again, you could feel the way your cunt clamped down around him, your hips desperately twitching in an attempt to make him move. The piercing ache of his fangs spread through your skull, your spine, and then his lips latched onto the wound as if to soothe it. The sound of Claude sucking against your skin was beyond lewd, sloppy and wet and needful.

“Please,” you whimpered. Not to make him stop, but to make him move, to fuck you properly. He pulled off of your neck with a slick pop.

“I thought you’d want me to be gentle,” Claude teased, pulling out of you slowly. He didn’t take on the sensual tone of a lover, remaining playful despite what he was doing. “But that’s not true at all, is it? You want to be used. You want me to fuck you so hard you won’t be able to walk, let alone escape from my devious schemes. Then you’ll have no choice but to be a pretty little blood bag for the mean, mean vampire of El Dorado. Am I right, or am I right?”

The words made your cunt tighten despite yourself. “I-” When he thrust back into you, his hips smacking loudly against your ass, you could feel everything. Every ridge, every vein, it was rough and rocked you forward. Only, he held you in place, leaving you with no escape.

“Exactly, I’m right,” Claude said, repeating the motion, making you cry out pathetically. “Of course, I almost always am. You’d think I’d get sick of it at some point and say something wrong just for a change of pace, but…”

You weren’t really listening to him. How could you? Each thrust was hard enough to practically throw you forward, but the cage of his arm kept you in place so he could keep up the rough pace, fucking into you like you were little more than a doll. You wanted to meet him halfway, wanted to participate, but you were too far gone to possibly keep up. Luckily, Claude didn’t seem to mind either way.

His fangs buried into your neck directly on top of the wound from last night and it should have hurt horribly, but instead it threw you over the edge, your pussy tightening around his cock and your body trembling as you came. The sensation was hard and rough and completely physical, pleasure blooming out from the place where his cock slammed into you and spreading outwards in wonderfully sensitive sparks of heat.

Claude growled. You could feel the vibrations in his chest, his throat. The iron tang of your blood mingled with the filthy scent of sex, and the sound of him slurping at the skin of your neck was nearly as lewd as when he ate you out, like the sex was the same as the blood drinking, the two acts intrinsically linked.

The inside part of your consciousness remained in the heavy, hot confines of your body, desperate for a break so you could come down from the orgasm but unable to deny some hot, painful desire for more. The outside part of your mind floated above, like a balloon, disconnected and distantly interested in what was happening, almost like this was a dream. The two parts warred. One mind focused only on Claude and the pure physicality of it all, the other in a state of disbelief that any of this was happening at all.

Neither mattered, really. Within your chest, your heart raged in a double time beat, racing against the blood loss and the syrupy thick pressure of exertion. Superficial pleasure raced over your skin like electricity. Claude bit into your neck again, drinking even more of your sweetened blood with desperate fervor. You tensed up, realizing that you were going to come again with a twinge of panic. Your body rebelled at the idea, but it would be more painful to deny the pleasure, it would leave you shaking and wanting and desperate and it would hurt.

“You just can’t get enough, can you?” Claude asked. You moaned wetly, pathetically. He licked a wide stripe up the side of your neck. Even now, his tongue was impossibly cool against the bleeding wounds.

He let you fall down, pushing your torso into the mattress. You went without protest, boneless and limp. Claude held you up by the waist, his thrusts slowing down as he experimented a few times. You didn’t really realize the point until your body jerked with intense, almost aggressive, pleasure.

“That’s it, right?” Claude asked, a smile in his voice. You weren’t sure why he asked in the first place, your body’s reaction to him hitting your g-spot was more than telling. It felt good, beyond good, but it was in an electrified, panicked sort of way because at this point you were overstimulated and dizzy and every time he fucked into you it was unbelievably pleasurable, so much that it hurt. It didn’t help that Claude was being so rough, his thrusts losing tempo. And you just took it, jerking each time, spasming around him, moaning helplessly, that coil of heat building with too much intensity, with too much raw-nerve pressure.

“C-aa-n’t,” you gasped out between thrusts, your voice heavy and wet.

“Can too,” Claude told you, twisting your hips a little, enough to add that little bit of extra sensation. You pressed your face against the sheets as you came, your moans coming out practically as sobs because of how utterly overstimulating it felt as your pussy unintentionally clamped down around Claude’s cock, forcing more pressure on your g-spot, cruelly dragging out your own orgasm. He was muttering something, praise maybe, but you couldn’t hear it above the roaring of blood in your ears.

Pretty soon Claude moaned loudly, layering your name with the heavy sound of pleasure. You realized that he was coming too, slamming into you roughly before his hips stuttered, flush with your ass. You shook and gasped and whined, your pussy fluttering and squeezing him, accepting the torment. Inviting it even, dripping around him even as he buried himself too deep inside of you, finishing with a few heavy thrusts.

Claude laughed lightly after a few moments, although it sounded more like a sound of exhilarated joy than humor. You hoped he wasn’t laughing at you, although you couldn’t do anything even if he was.

He kneaded your ass, spreading your cheeks to watch himself pull out of you with a rush of wetness. Shame had burrowed deep into your gut, but you felt enough to pull away, to press your thighs together as soon as you had the chance.

“I may have gotten a teensy bit carried away,” Claude admitted.

You didn’t open your eyes or respond, not even when he threw himself down onto his side and gathered you against him. He was cool and smooth, his flesh inhuman against your own. You were the feverishly sweaty one, although you realized as he held you how cold you felt on the inside. Cold and sore and empty.

“I know you’re not asleep,” Claude said, nuzzling against the side of your neck, lapping up the blood before sucking lightly at the freshest wound, groaning at the taste.

You didn’t move. If you did, if you acknowledged the cold or him or the discomfort or anything, you would have to deal with how awful you felt. Blood loss felt a bit like altitude sickness, at least insofar as it left you lightheaded and nauseous. The sore overstimulation was different, but you definitely didn’t want to deal with that. Mostly, you just wanted to stop existing and shirk the discomfort and pretend that none of this was real.

Claude pulled away from your neck, smacking his lips contentedly.

You continued not to move as he adjusted himself, his arm leaving your waist to reach for something off to the side. “Can you sit up a little?” Claude asked. Your head spun as he pulled you upward regardless of your answer, the world lurching. Your pussy leaked uncomfortably, coating your thighs and the damp sheets. Every inch of your body either ached or felt clammy and sour. Your head pounded with a headache. Your skin was too tight, sweat dripping into the scrapes and bitemarks. A straw appeared at your lips, urging you to finally open your eyes. “Here—drink this.”

You looked at him from beneath fluttering eyelashes, meeting those pretty green-blue eyes before looking at the bottle he held.

“Whassit?” you asked, your voice slurred and barely recognizable. Your stomach protested at the thought of taking anything, but your mouth was bone dry and tasted like blood.

“Water,” Claude said, pushing the straw past your lips. You just accepted it. Maybe you shouldn’t have, he already admitted to drugging you, but you weren’t thinking clearly and it was easier to just do what he said. “Humans need a lot of water. Especially after losing so much fluid.” He paused, smiling playfully. “Do you always get that wet or am I special?”

You blinked at him, taking in a few more mouthfuls of water before dropping the straw. Claude set the cup aside, wiping the excess water from the corner of your lips, and then smoothing over your hair, pulling you against his chest happily. It was easiest to let it happen. He really did smell good, spice and citrus and musk and Claude. The man of your dreams, he called himself.

“They thought they could trap me here forever. After their massacre and the fire, they…” Claude didn’t finish that thought, his voice troubled. There was no heartbeat in his hard, muscled chest, but you could feel the rumble of his voice. “She had family, sure, but her blood was cursed. No Macbeth woman would be able to release me from this place ever again. And then you came.” He paused, petting your hair again. “More than once, if I recall.”

You groaned softly, eliciting a laugh from him.

“Yeah, that was in poor taste. Unlike you, who tastes excellent,” Claude said affectionately. A moment later, he sighed, returning to a somewhat serious tone. “Anyway, the point is that, vampire or no, I’m man enough to admit that I needed saving just as badly as you. That’s enough, isn’t it? We really should stick together, us accursed outcasts.”

You didn’t say anything, you weren’t sure what you were meant to say. Your thoughts, still, were little more than confused slush. And, more than that, you weren’t sure that was the sort of thing that needed a response.

Claude accepted your silence and kissed the top of your head. And then he just held you. Not like he was afraid you would leave him, but like he was afraid you would cease to exist altogether, his arms nearly desperately keeping you pressed against his chest, his hands brushing your back or nose ruffling your hair as he reminded himself that you were still there.

And maybe those thoughts were just projections, but you didn’t think they were.

II.

1st Day of Ethereal Moon

Now it’s just us two. Me and Claude ruling the world. Explorers, adventurers, wanderers. Rogues who hide behind the horizon to keep the night close. I told him that the other day and it made Claude laugh. It didn’t hurt even a bit to say, either. Dad would like him, I think. Claude likes discovering things and chasing mysteries and all that too. There’s always somewhere new to go, we never stay anywhere long enough for people to notice our shadow. It can be hard sometimes, but I’m not alone. It’s as good an ending as any.

Happily ever after.

#claude von riegan #fe claude #claude von riegan x reader #fe claude x reader #fe3h #fire emblem three houses #my writing #not sfw #tw.drugging #tw.dubcon

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