#their skull is a single piece
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une-sanz-pluis · 3 months ago
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god spare me from articles about Henry VI's death written by Ricardians going, "how do we even know Henry VI was murdered? huh? huh? Tudor propaganda!!"
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stuck-in-the-ghost-zone · 5 months ago
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tenpixelsusie · 1 month ago
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everytime i've fully considered the possibility that i might be a system and i just have some guys running around driving this thang i go "no i just have memory problems" and toss it away. well gentlemen. guess what possibility i'm considering again
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vinkumakkara · 11 months ago
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maybe if i gave him a moustache
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answrs · 11 months ago
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this is why we fucking hate the cleveland fucking shitnic.
"uwu your only symptom is your throat hurts a wittle" no I explicitly told you multiple times it's swollen shut to the point it's hard to breathe and sends flames up all the way to my ears any time i even swallow my own spit. as well as all these other symptoms you just turned the computer off half way through me telling you. literally right in front of my face.
"you don't have a fever the outer shell of your ear (because he couldn't be assed to actually use it properly) is 96!" my normal temp is 98-99 pull the other one.
"this swab will test for covid flu and cold and needs to be in your nose at least ten seconds." DOESN'T EVEN FULLY INSERT THE *BRISTLE*, goes 12345678910 as fast as she possibly can- about 4-5 seconds watching the clock, then runs out the door before I can even respond.
I'm about to fucking cry except it's too excruciating to do so with my windpipe at like 10% capacity
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somewhere-underwater · 2 years ago
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IM GOING INSANE WHY IS HE SO SKINNY
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tobiasdrake · 2 months ago
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I really do love how much you can tell about Doomguy just from looking around his room.
Like. Yeah, all the stuff you expect to see is there.
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He's got his big ol' gun rack.
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What appears to be a rock he uses as a punching bag.
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Whetstone for sharpening his knives. All the Real Manly Violence Man stuff you'd think would be there.
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But also a pair of nunchaku. Doomguy has never used nunchaku in any of his games. Those are just there because apparently he's the kind of dork who likes to play around with nunchaku and pretend he's doing kung fu.
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Also a jump rope. Gotta keep his cardio up for all that running and jumping he has to do.
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He reads Guns & Bullets magazine, but he also reads Science Monthly. Which makes sense that he'd be a bit of a techie since....
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...he seems to have made his new Praetor Suit by disassembling the old one and rebuilding it to be higher-quality. You can see from the guts of the suit that it's powered armor, and he just... knows how to work that.
He's mad. Not stupid.
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He also reads cooking magazines, of course. His only friend is Doom J.A.R.V.I.S.; He's gotta be self-sufficient. Though how he got those pizzas delivered is certainly beyond me.
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And, of course, he has a collection of regular books that he likes to read as well. Though his taste in literature reveals a certain trend.
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Also, he reads comics.
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So many comics.
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So, so many comics that he's left discarded comics lying around on his munitions cases. This man is a nerd.
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And if you doubt his nerd cred, remember that he even keeps collectible toy displays. Doomguy is explicitly the kind of person who will go out of his way in a firefight with the forces of Hell itself to go snatch up a new toy for his collection.
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He even has collectible toy figures hanging out on his computer desk. He put a little hard hat on one of them.
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On the other side of his desk, he's got some leftover pizza from the inexplicable delivery service, plus takoyaki flavor chips and some candy. It seems Doomguy is a fruity candy kind of guy, not a chocolate guy. Man after my own heart.
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Oh, you know he has shredded every single surface of the Fortress of Doom at some point. How do you think he learned to react so quickly in combat?
That is, of course....
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When he's not ROCKING OUT with one of his three separate guitars. I bet the middle one's his favorite. It has a place of honor under the giant demon skull.
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Some people might say that a record player and casette tapes are old-fashioned but cut him some slack; He's a Gen X-er.
Of course, there's one thing that any walk through Doomguy's room reveals more than anything else. The one thing that matters more than the world to him. The thing that drives him in his every waking moment.
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He loved his bunny rabbit. My favorite thing about the portrait - Well, my favorite thing about it is that it's a piece of fanart that got officially canonized, but aside from that - is that he's wearing his Praetor Suit in it.
That's not something he brought from home. He commissioned an artist to paint that after becoming a Night Sentinel. He still loves his poor, late bunny rabbit.
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And he keeps her close to him when he's home.
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Stanley wasn't sure if he was supposed to be dead. He wasn't all too sure if he was supposed to be alive, either.
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He was... somewhere. He didn't know where exactly, but it didn't matter. Nothing really seemed to matter all that much in this strange place. Compared to the unfathomable expanse of nothingness that surrounded him, everything else practically paled in comparison. Still, Stanley felt as though this all-consuming abyss that kept him prisoner within its dark maw deserved a name; at the very least, a title. Yet, it didn't feel right to call this place anything. Death too egregious, and Life too extroadinary; either terms felt far too extreme to his liking. There was nothing particularly hideous nor amazing about where he was. He was simply somewhere in-between.
For as long as he could remember, Stanley's world was just that. This somewhere; this in-between of not quite Death and not quite Life. This empty, greedy abyss that seemed to swallow him whole, stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction. There was no sky, no ground, no anything; only the daunting dakness engulfing his every senses and leaving him horribly, hopelessly blank.
That wasn't all there was to it, however. This... somewhere, it was more than just a lifeless void.
Stanley wasn't sure if he could find the right words to properly describe it. He didn't think he could ever come to fully understand the feeling himself, but. Somehow, the abyss felt... hungry. Unimaginably, insatiably, and unbearably hungry.
The hunger seemed to eat away at Stanley, tearing off pieces of him chunk by chunk, piece by piece. With every blink, another part of himself seemed to disappear into the ravenous darkness around him. The void never took much at once, only pieces; nigh imperceptible impossibly tiny crumbs of what made him- so little that they should have hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things. But Stanley noticed. He noticed every particle, every atom that was taken away from him by this greedy hunger. The darkness was eating him; digesting him.
It was as though hunger was all that mattered in this somewhere, this stomach; the world itself a single immense digestive system. He could practically feel the void's biting hunger pangs reverberate through his bones. It was so hungry, so hungry.
The dark ate him slowly, ripping him apart from inside out and outside in. It took his flesh first; stealing away the muscles and fat beneath the skin, leaving behind nothing but meager skin stretched over bone. Sometimes, not even his bones were given the luxury of being spared, and he would find himself with an odd dip in his side where the abyss had taken a rib or two; or with half his face lopsidedly sagging into a limp mess with no muscles, fat, nor eye socket to properly hold up the skin of his face onto his skull.
The hunger took without mercy, without order nor preference. It ate anything, everything, as long it helped abate the forever stabbing, starving desperation that painfully twisted and tore at its non-existent stomach. It never really was satisfied.
It got worse when it started eating his memories.
Stanley despised the thought of losing more of himself than simply his physical body to this greedy void. However, what terrified him far more than the notion that this insatiable hunger could breach even his mind, was the fact that he couldn't remember which memories it took.
Stanley couldn't remember much; before the darkness; before the endless hunger. He liked to imagine, though, of what he could have been before. He'd probably had a warm home, warmer than the cold, cold abyss. He'd probably had a loving family. Probably. He couldn't remember.
Everything turned unsure when his own mind started failing on him. Stanley tried to cling to what little he knew. He had his name held tight in his iron clad grip, repeating it to himself like a mantra. He would try and keep track of time, but it was all in vain. Time didn't seem to matter in the face of hunger. Perhaps it had been years since Stanley's arrival; hundred, maybe even thousands. Or, perhaps it had only been a few days, weeks, months. Stan once had a fleeting, terrifying thought that maybe Time too was already victim to the darkness' insatiable hunger.
However, as much as Stan could forget his past, his identity, and life, perhaps the most tragic loss to him greater than anything else was the memory of Him.
He was important to Stanley. He couldn't remember why, but he was. There was nothing of Him left in his memories. No face, no name; not even why He mattered to him in the first place. All he knew was that the loss of Him had struck him with such profound heartache and sorrow that it had left him weeping helplessly for so long, unable to move and rooted in one spot for days, weeks, years. He couldn't remember how long.
Stan was only snapped out of his comatose stupor by His hand.
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It was all that was left of Him, other than the knowledge of His past existence. It was warm, a glowing red hand that pulsed almost reassuringly within Stanley's own, its long six digits curled tightly and firmly around his hand, never once faltering in its grip. He couldn't remember a time when he didn't have it. He's had it clutched within his own cold, rough palms like a lifeline since forever; every step he took and every move he made done hand in hand with Him.
Desperately, frantically, he held onto His hand, never once letting it go. Losing the hand meant losing Him for good, and he wasn't sure if he would be able to cope with the consequences of that all alone.
However, ocasionally, even the the comforting presence of His hand was unable to keep his mind anchroed for too long, and Stanley would lose track of his memories. Plagued by odd laspes of utter emptiness, Stanley would suddenly forget. His own name, his face, everything he knew and remembered would slip withut warning between his fingers like sand; streaming down, down, down and getting lost in the gaping mouth of the void below him. He would wander aimlessly with no real destination in mind, simply roaming somwhere, anywhere.
He would come across all sorts of sights during these odd episodes of his. He'd crossed paths with hundreds upon thousands of partically decomposed remnants of once living, breathing organisms; All of them endeniably, for the lack of better words: dead. He'd walked past entire forests; enormous clusters of tall pine trees completely uprooted and floating in a massive mass of rotting leaves and half digested bark. He'd walked past countless animals, big and small, all in various stages of digestion. Animals always seemed to rot away faster than anything else, and Stanley wasn't so sure what that meant for him.
Once, Stan had somehow even found his way before the destroyed remains of a universe.
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It was dead. There was no other way to describe the state it was in. He hadn't even known it was possible for entire universes to simply... die. Stolen away from its rightful place in the starry night sky.
The scene was everything he'd thought impossible to take place in this all-consuming abyss. It was extroadinary. A veritable bursting cacophany of light and heat. It was as though the universe's explosion had been paused at just the right moment, frozen in time at the very moment of its heat death. Its particles flickered, undulating softly and shifting ever so slightly like looking through a warped window. If Stanley stood still enough, and listened closely, he thought he could even hear the softest sound of the shattered screams of the broken remains of the universe ringing silently in the air. It was as ethereal as it was haunting.
The thought of the unimaginable power required to be able annihilate entire universes just like that... It scared Stan.
Stanley may not be sure of anything anymore, but as he watched the debris swirl gently in the blinding epicenter of the shattered universe from afar, he knew with a certainty that he didn't think he possessed anymore, that he did not belong here.
Part 1/2
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kentopedia · 7 months ago
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౨ৎ ˖ ࣪⊹ SAFEGUARD — dazai, chuuya, akutagawa
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summary . . . they save you after you've been injured and captured by an enemy.
contents . . . sfw, f!reader (chuuya & dazai) and gn!reader (akutagawa), violence / blood, threats, injuries, hurt/comfort, angst, established relationship, and it's pmboss!dazai bc i can't help myself — 3.5k total
notes . . . i got this request so long ago lol. not my best work, but i have been in the worst writing slump ever and just wanted to finish something. i've also never written for akutagawa before so pls be nice <3
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𝐂𝐇𝐔𝐔𝐘𝐀 . . .
there are very few times that chuuya feels he’s been outsmarted. he knows he’s not the mastermind of the port mafia, but he certainly isn’t a fool. when it comes to you and your well-being, though, his mind short-circuits, half of his intelligence draining away while his emotions take hold. 
your relationship isn’t a secret to anyone in the port mafia, which means that it isn’t a secret to your enemies either. and while most people know it’s hard to land a finger on chuuya directly, his pretty little girlfriend doesn’t have the power of a god nestled inside of her.
the rage sparks through him, growing fiercely into the blaze of a forest fire, until all he can think of is getting you home safely. he thinks of your sweet smile as he rips the door of the enemies’ base off the hinges, crushing it into a million pieces with the force of gravity. 
the men are quick to react, but chuuya hurtles the crushed door towards them, knocking three of them to their feet. another group charges at him, but their guns do little against his skill. after years of fighting some of the strongest ability users, simple criminal organizations are as easy to step over like ants. 
chuuya kills them all — except for one.
the man’s knees are wobbling, hand shaking around the gun as he realizes that these will be his final moments. there is fear in his eyes, brown ones that rest wide open, and chuuya almost hesitates. his remorse doesn’t last long, though, before he’s wrapping a hand around the man’s throat, thrusting him backwards. 
“where is she?” chuuya asks, voice sharp and commanding. 
he can feel the man swallowing. 
chuuya knows that backup is probably on the way, but it won’t matter whether they show up or not. he’ll crush the rest of his enemies just as he’s crushed the last twenty men. the poor soul in his leather hold seems to know that as well. 
“i-i’ll take you to her,” he rasps, dropping his gun to claw at chuuya’s hand. 
he drops him, lets him take a few heaving breaths and coughs, before he’s kicking at him, forcing him back to his feet.
the young man takes him up the elevator, weaves him through a hallway as chuuya leaves a scattering of bodies in his wake, not hesitating to kill a single man that gets in his way. there is nothing that can keep him from you. 
how fiercely and loyally he loves you — it drives him to near insanity. 
finally, with blood coating his face and his clothes, the young man enters a room, locked with a code, revealing you. 
chuuya’s rage is almost as blinding as his corruption, as he gazes at the sight of you. bloodied and bruised, tied up in a chair, so visibly harmed. his hands clench into fists. “get the fuck away from her,” he says to the man who seems to be monitoring you.
“what are you doing in here?” the men left in the room panic, but they don’t have time to react before chuuya throws them back at the wall, so quickly, with so much force, that their spines snap. they hit it with a sharp crack, skulls shattering against the plaster, the wall crushing beneath the weight of them. 
limply, they fall to the floor. 
chuuya rushes over to you. 
the young man that led him here disappears, but chuuya isn’t worried about him. he’s a coward; he’ll likely flee from the country and never look back. the men that truly hurt you are already dead, and he’ll burn this building to the ground once he’s gotten you away from it. 
“hey,” chuuya says, cradling your cheeks gently, trying to coax you back awake. he’s not sure if it’s exhaustion, blood loss, or the obvious head trauma that caused you to pass out in the first place. but you’re still breathing, so he counts that as a blessing. 
“hey,” he whispers again, kissing your forehead, like it will heal all your ailments. “wake up, baby. we gotta get you out of here, okay?” 
it takes you a few seconds to come to, eyes glazed over and shell-shocked as you blink at him. “chuuya?” you say; your voice is so hoarse it makes chuuya want to keel over and vomit. “is it really you?” 
guilt gnaws at him, almost crushing, at the fact that thirty-six hours passed, and you’re delirious enough not to recognize him. you probably haven’t eaten, either. 
he should’ve been there. no one should’ve ever had the chance to hurt you, yet…
“it’s me, i’m here,” he says, kissing your lips, your temple, brushing your hair away from your face. the strands are sticky with blood. “shit,” chuuya nearly shouts, pulling a knife from his pocket, sawing through the thick ropes around you as quickly as he can. “i’m so sorry, i’m so sorry.” 
he can’t get you free fast enough, and you smile at him, drowsy, your eyes fluttering shut once more. “it’s okay, chuuya,” you say, leaning your head on his shoulder. “you’re here now.” 
“you have to stay awake,” he says desperately, realizing your head is still bleeding. he doesn’t know how hurt you are. chuuya’s no expert when it comes to medicine, but he’s smart enough to know that internal injuries could be even worse than the external ones. 
“stay awake for me, okay, honey? i’ll get you back to the boss and we’ll find you a doctor. you’ll be just fine.” 
“okay, chuuya,” you hum, weakly gripping his back. seconds of silence pass before you mutter, “i just want to go home.” 
"i know." his heart pulls, and he almost lets out a cracked sob. but he refrains, knowing that there is plenty of time to drown in his sorrows later. 
finally, he gets the ropes under, lifting you from the chair. you’re so much lighter, weaker, and it makes him sick as he carries you. “let’s get you home.” 
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𝐀𝐊𝐔𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐀𝐖𝐀. . .
the call comes just as akutagawa is getting ready to head home for the evening, his tasks completed, eyes heavy with exhaustion. 
normally, he doesn’t stick around to say any goodbyes, sneaking off into the darkness of the night like a shadow, blending right in. but, something about the evening, so gloomy and drizzly with spring rain, feels off. 
with a heavy knot in his chest, so much different than an incoming fit of coughs, akutagawa heads back up to mori’s office, if perhaps to only ensure that everyone else’s jobs had been completed. he’s a lot of things, but he’s never been a slacker; and he’ll do what it takes to ensure that his position in the mafia is eternally secure.
though, he doesn’t have the opportunity to get all the way upstairs before he run into the boss, who is calm, but with an air of irritation clouding him. 
he explains the current situation to akutagawa in a clipped tone, bored — an enemy group has kidnapped you, holding you hostage. 
“how rude is it to bother a man, just as he is getting ready to go to sleep?” mori says, sighing histrionically.
but what is a minor inconvenience to mori sends an entire wave of dread through akutagawa, his entire body feeling as if it’s been dipped in ice. he can’t explain the horror that washes over him, not really, because he shouldn’t feel so panicked. it is rare for him to get worked up about the danger his subordinates find themselves in, save for his sister, of course. 
but you… you’re different. 
“can i trust you to diffuse the situation?” mori asks, impatiently glancing at his watch as if that will change anything. “i can call someone else, but they will not be so quick.” 
akutagawa doesn’t even think before he accepts the job, hating the way he sounds pathetically desperate for more details. his hands flatten the edge of his cloak, as if his ability is going to take on a mind of its own. 
he calls for a driver, calm but breathing so heavily that an aching cough rises up in him. his throat feels as if it may begin to bleed, but he swallows, glances away from the driver and gets himself under control.
there’s a ransom — bring them the money and they’ll return you, mori had told him. you’re only a lower ranking member of the mafia, and someone that makes for a pretty poor bargaining chip, so the motive is questionable. 
mori probably would’ve let you die, akutagawa knows, his teeth gritting together, so much so that a splintering sound comes from it. but the boss, in his infinite, concerning wisdom, seems to also know that his loyal dog has an soft spot for you. 
as regrettable as that may be.
akutagawa has no doubt that whoever the enemy is, they are no match for him. still, a twinge of anxiety settles in his stomach, fingers jittery as the driver, despite the decreased traffic of the hour, seems to drive impossibly slow. 
“are we not in a rush?” akutagawa snaps, leaning forward.
“apologies,” the driver, says, not daring to even look at akutagawa from the mirror. but the car speeds up, enough for akutagawa to be able to notice, at least. it cools the simmer that has already begun deep in his chest.  
even so, the car seems to go at a snails pace, minute upon minute flying by, with you in the clutches of an enemy. 
akutagawa doesn’t care who they are. he doesn’t care why, or how they captured you. he wants them dead. he’ll rip them apart, easily, and he’ll make them suffer — they’ll be alive for all of it, for every second that he peels the skin from their bones, ripping the smaller ones out of their sockets. 
what he feels for you… well, it’s too hard for him to admit to himself. he has no experience with what it means to care for another person, doesn’t even know if that’s his goal. he just knows he wants to protect you.
and he can’t do that if you’re dead.
finally, the car pulls up to an old warehouse, one at the very outskirts of the port, beyond the docks and the shipping carts. it’s tucked far back, an obvious lair for some villainous organization that doesn’t want to be found. 
akutagawa gets there, but there is nothing. he hears nothing, feels no signs of life as he trudges through the puddles left behind from the earlier rain. 
a small string of panic begins again, as he wondered if maybe the call that mori had told him was only a ruse. maybe this entire time had been a distraction, a way to lure him away. there are other skill-users in the mafia, but none quite as dangerous as him. 
though, he hears it, then. a small little sound, muffled and hoarse, full of pain. 
he ducks into another corner of a warehouse, and you’re there — bound with chains and a gag across your mouth, one of your eyes blackened with bruises, your nose bleeding. 
his heart aches. never in his life has he so quickly made his way over, used the sharp edges of his ability to shear through the chains, falling to his knees as he unbinds the cloth from your lips. 
“where are they?” he rasps, mouth opening and closing, hating the sound of his own voice. he recognizes his desperation, his anger, but the affectionate sound that clips at the end is unfamiliar, as he shakily pulls himself closer to you. 
you glance up at him, eyes glossy and wide, and though you are scared, hurt, he’s so thankful you are alive. his heart flips once, as you grasp at his cloak, the material that has the blood of so many staining the threads. 
“gone,” you say, throat chalky, words nothing more than a note against the wind. “they fled when they heard it was you coming.” 
“and left you?” he asks, jaw clenching, as he hopes that the emotions aren’t as visible on his features as he thinks they are. “were you not a ransom?” 
“no,” you swallow, hard, as if in pain. he notices bruises around your neck, the shape of fingerprints indented there. “i was bait.”
anger rises up in him like a wave, engulfing him, wholly and relentlessly. he is no stranger to that, like he is the kindness you show him, the way you look at him as if he is your protector, rather than a bringer of destruction. “i’ll go after them. where are they headed? they’ll pay, i’ll slaughter—”
“ryunosuke,” you say, reaching for him as he stands, expression pleading as he backs away. “stay.” 
he has half a mind to ignore you — the enemy escaped, after all. but your voice. your eyes… you look so small sitting there, bloodied and bruised and broken. 
“please,” you try again, near tears, and though he has never been good with obvious displays of emotion, something within him snaps at the desperation in the word. 
he nods, slowing his pace as he returns to you, lets you wrap yourself in him, cling to him. his hands fall, naturally, to your waist, somehow knowing where they belong, even if akutagawa never has a clue what he’s doing with you. 
“i’ll call hirotsu,” he says simply, before pulling out his phone, not bothering to untangle himself from you. 
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𝐃𝐀𝐙𝐀𝐈 . . .
dazai is not a forgiving man, and will never learn to be. forgiveness is not a luxury he is often able to indulge in in his line of work, and his heart has hardened enough that until the end of time, those that are branded his enemies will remain his enemies. 
though, in his blackened heart, one soured over the course of time, you have carved out your own little space, lit it up with golden rays of light that are fiery enough to melt the stone casing of his chest. 
his only love — his only weakness. but it is a weakness that his enemies know about as well. 
dazai tries his best to keep you safe. he always has, and he knows that, sometimes, his grasp on you can be a little too tight. that the way he tries to keep you under his watchful eye can sometimes be stifling, frustrating. 
but he can’t always be there to protect you. and it is in times like these, that he regrets letting you go without a bodyguard. he regrets that he listened to your insistence that you could keep yourself safe. 
he should’ve at least told you to take a friend. 
“boss,” his subordinate says, bowing his head, his voice pleading, desperate. “i’m so sorry. your wife—”
“if anything… anything happens to her, you will be the one responsible, do you understand?” dazai says, his eyes cold as he glowers down at the man, only a few inches shorter than him, but feeling so much smaller. “i will personally see that this act does not go unpunished.” 
“of course, sir,” the man says, and he, at the very least, has the decency to sound resigned. to accept his fate and suffer the consequences, for allowing the boss’s wife to get herself into such a situation. 
and dazai means it, every last word; if he finds you in a state closer to death, anyone who put you in harm’s way will be torn apart from the inside out. he isn’t able to think of anything but bringing you home safely, his hands shaking with rage as he sends more than enough people out on a search to find you. 
with all the strings he’s able to pull as the mafia boss, it doesn’t take long to find you, for those that have bravely — or stupidly — used his wife as bait to come forward, and offer an attempt at some sort of negotiation. 
there’s little of the conversation that dazai remembers on the phone, even less that he remembers after that. the anger bubbles up in him and grabs hold of his conscience, the emotion directing his movements with a mind of its own. 
he’s already sent out every last one of his people into the field, ensuring that the organization that had the gall to threaten you is wiped off the face of the earth. deleted from every corner of the world, buildings flattened to the ground. by tomorrow, they won’t have ever existed. 
today, he doesn’t care what happens as long as he finds you alive. 
you’re held hostage by two men — so completely beaten that they’ve given up on any restraints. whatever they wanted from you, you seemed to refused to have given up, lip bleeding, eyes swelling so badly that you can’t even open them. 
dazai doesn’t hesitate before pulling the trigger on the first man, then turning to the other, shooting the hand that holds the pistol. the man recoils, shouts, and drops the weapon completely, as dazai lands another bullet to his knee, causing him to fall. 
slowly, dazai walks up, firing again to his other arm, a loud snap echoing throughout the room. the man winces, trying to crawl to the gun, one last desperate attempt to stay alive. 
he kicks the gun away, watching, as, pathetically, the expression in the enemy’s face changes — any of his remaining hope vanishes. 
“you told me she was unharmed,” dazai says, bending down, his coat flaring out behind him as he squats. 
the man coughs, gasping for air as the blood seeps out of him. “we lied.” he smiles cruelly, and though he shares the same sort of darkness as those in the port mafia, there is something even more twisted in his smile. 
dazai hums. “you the leader?” 
the man doesn’t give an answer, but the slight twitch of surprise on his face is all dazai needs. he’s no one — just a grunt whose life was put on the line to guard you. 
“didn’t think so.” dazai shoots him once, straight through the forehead, instantly killing him. but he is vindictive, angry, and the man he truly wants to destroy, the one who took you, is nowhere to be found. another bullet lands, tearing apart the flesh of his temple, then another, and one more, his skull beginning to cave in from the force of it all. 
dazai heaves, letting the gun clatter to the ground as it runs out of bullets, and then he realizes, all this time, you’ve just been watching him. the ugliest side of him — the worst side of him. 
you’re no stranger to it, of course. how can you be, when you’ve shared a life with him for years? but that doesn’t mean he wants you to see it, see how bloodthirsty he can become. 
he stumbles over to you, where you’re still sitting on the ground, your wrist in your lap, bent at an angle that he knows isn’t right. bruises are littered across your skin, and your hair is matted from the blood that pools at your temple. 
it takes every ounce of restraint he has to stay calm, a million feelings swirling under his skin. ones that he was never familiar with until he met you. 
“i’m sorry,” he says, taking your face in his hands so, so softly, worried that he’ll hurt you even more. “i’m sorry, darling. i should’ve — i should’ve been there.” dazai notices his hands are shaking and he balls them up into fists, leaning back. “fuck. fuck — i’ll kill them all, just tell me who it was. anyone who laid a finger on you. i’ll cut them down one by one.” 
“osamu,” you say, and your voice is raspy, cracking, as your unbroken arm reaches for him, squeezing his shaking hand. “i—”
you open your mouth to continue, but only tears come streaming down your cheeks, over your bloodied lips, saltiness soaking your jawline. no words don’t leave you, but a soft sob chokes itself up your throat.
“hey, hey, hey.” dazai’s voice softens, every muscle in his body relaxing as he draws you nearer to him, into his chest with a touch that’s barely there. “you’re safe. i’m here, okay? they’re not going to hurt you again, sweetheart.” 
you sniffle, barely making a sound, but he can feel the tears drop onto his clothes, soaking the material.
“can you walk? are you hurt anywhere else?”��
you hesitate for a moment before answering; he’s not sure if there’s a reason you only answer the first question. “i can walk.” 
dazai nods, and though the rage is still bubbling there, underneath the surface, there is a coolant streaming through him at the vision of you alive. the men who did this will pay the price, but he still has you — and that’s all that matters.
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thank you for reading !!! ❤︎
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yeyinde · 9 months ago
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when your need grows teeth | John Price x f!Reader
John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than let it go. It starts when you ask him to pick up your birth control—like dangling a piece of bloody meat in front of a starving dog.  Of course he's going to take a bite.  He thinks you ought to have known this by now. 
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SMUT 18+ | gratuitous smut; HEAVY breeding kink, breeding; Dom!John Price; p-in-v sex, unsafe sex; rough sex; mentions of spanking; mutual manipulation; this is roughly 10k of John Plotting and fucking you; John is: unhinged, obsessive, possessive, and Scheming. mentions of birth control tampering but nothing is followed through. No. He’s going to knock you up the old-fashioned way—by making you beg for it.
AO3 MIRROR
John has always had this desire—this awful, instinctual drive in the back of his head to knock someone up. Get them fat, swollen with his child. His. 
And maybe that's the crux of it. Possession. To have something of the most rooted kind. To irrevocably change someone—their anatomy, their body, the chemistry in their brain, their status in life from them (single no dependents) to mother (mother of his child), their very atoms—and create life from the combined parts. 
It's this almost fantastical beast, this unreachable dream for him. 
It's his Shangri-la. His castle in Spain. 
He's not under any disillusionment that this idea of fatherhood, of parenthood, is slightly skewed. That most men who want children don't feel this overwhelmingly greedy desire to fundamentally alter someone in such an irreversible way. It's not quite ownership, but it's the same ilk. A bastardised, unwanted child of it. 
And it's not just this idea of claimation—to forever be the father of their child, even if neither of them stays together; a piece of him will always be there, parasitic, no matter what—but something deeper. Something a bit less—egregious. 
This is, and always has been, about yearning. 
John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than to let it go. 
Marriage, he finds, is breakable. Divorce, separation. He's always on his worst behaviour in the initial stages of dating, so it's never something he has to entertain since no one ever sticks around long enough for it to be on the table, much less the menu, but the idea of it—of signing papers, of hashing out the split, of being known as ex-husband—leaves a bitter tang between his teeth. It won't do. He needs permanence. Perpetuity. 
Nothing says forever quite like a child, does it? 
And sure—he’s aware that countermeasures exist: custody orders, sole custody, shared; allotted visitations; divisional lines in this new age that keep the parents from ever interacting—but while you can get divorced, you can't unmake a child, can you?
The child would never write him out, either. 
Where deadbeats exist, it's important to note that their counterparts do, too. The ones like him who will gouge their eyes out of their skulls before they ever let what happened to them growing up trickle down and impact their child, polluting the pool. 
Simply put: John Price knows he'd be the best dad there is because he's stubborn that way. 
It helps, he supposes, that he really only has so much love to give out to the world, and greedily, he stashed the entirety of it away in a box to give to his would-be wife and their child. An overwhelming deluge that promises happiness should it ever be unlocked. Pandora's box, perhaps—down to the very essence because if John Price were to ever love someone, then it's probably in their best interest to run from it, this gaping, needy chasm. 
Not that it would ever be a possibility, of course—he’s much too good at compartmentalisation, in taking out his anger, his viciousness, on the ugly world he drenches himself in, the one his hands have a tangible cause and effect principle in place that will forever feed that starving beast inside of him.
Ergo—he’s a staunch supporter of the theory: happy wife, happy life. Though where those men think in a box stuffed full of emotional intimacy, flowers, chocolate, maintaining love, all-consuming and enduring, he takes it to extremes that would have them cowering a little bit. Maybe a lot.  
But that's fine. He only has to make sure his family is happy. No one else matters, save a select few who have a seat at his table during Sunday dinners. 
The rest, though? Spare parts. 
(The ice-cold resolve in those two words is apodictic, brass bound, and he's sure if his higher-ups knew about it, well—
His chest candy would be a hole in the ground. Put the rabid dog down before it has a chance to bite.)
But that all-consuming, devouring, obsessive love he has to give, that begs to be let free, is the reason why it's so tightly leashed. Locked up in a box. Untouchable. Inaccessible. 
It's why he isn't married. 
Ghost once asked him why the women he dated were older. Much older. Menopausal (always). And he'd said something to the effect of it being his type. Older women who wouldn't cower away from the acrid burn of him, who wouldn't hurt their delicate little hands on his gritty surface. 
But the real reason is because he knows better. 
He's a starving dog, and it's just bad form to dangle a piece of meat in front of it. Especially when the hand holding it is his own. 
Don't bite the hand that feeds you, and all. 
(The keen look in Ghost's eyes told him that, perhaps, the man already knew the reason when he asked, and was just satiating himself with kinship—the dark, awful look on Simon's ugly mug after the dredging the underbelly of Price’s rotten, mouldering mudfloor of things unsaid spoke volumes. 
They'd both nodded. Content, then. And promptly ordered a shot of whisky to drown the salivation, the hunger, from clogging their throats. Killing the urge to bite.
A pair of packless, stray dogs.)
But then he found you, and all his careful planning, all his distance, blew up in his face. 
It's always been on his mind since then. Lingering in his periphery—this fevered, tantalising vision of you, round and swollen with his child. 
It's unattainable, of course. A fantasy. 
Though, this—you throwing up in the washroom of his penthouse, undoubtedly knocked up by his machinations—is probably because he kept that desire too close to where he hides his questionable mortality, the one that allows him to throw innocent people to their deaths, and send mothers and fathers to an early grave just so he can rip his fists apart on their bastard offspring in his own brand of catharsis that always bites back when they grow up, hankering for revenge. 
He's always been good at snatching dreams out of the air, clenching them tight in his fists. Taming chimerical wants, whims, until they were docile, domesticated. Making realities out of fiction. 
And really—he’s just not a good man.
He thought you'd have known this by now.
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He remembers the first time he growled the words into your ear as he came, your cunt clenching around him like a vice. Desperate for it, he teased after, fingers fucking into your sloppy, leaking hole. Pushing his spend back into you. Half-drunk on the taste of you still clinging to his beard, but mostly just mesmerised by the sight of you—pretty pussy all ruined, swollen from the vicious, hateful pounding he gave it, and dipping with his cum like a faucet. 
(It pissed him off—still does, really—when you waste it like this.)
Gonna fill you up, he snarled, low and wrecked. Gonna make it take—
It was a fantasy. Still is. But the way it took root in the garden of your bedroom, like it belonged—native flora, he thinks, a touch mad with it—had something ugly, oil slick, rearing up from that untouchable place in his head. 
He could really blame you for it—and does. The way your ankles locked tight around his thighs, hands reaching, grabbing at his waist, clawing at his asscheeks to press him in deeper, deeper still, as he came inside of you, cock lodged right against your plug, had that untameable beast cocking its head in consideration after you danced too close to it, waking it from his long, restful slumber. 
You wanted it. Ached for it. He could feel it in the way your walls tightened around him, practically starving for it. Your pretty, glossy eyes rolling back into your head. Drool running down your chin. A litany of pleas spilled from your kiss-bruised lips, begging him for it. Please, John. Please. Please—
Who was he to deny you? 
Even if you made a big, flustered show of waving it off—not something I've ever imagined for myself, you know? and–and your lifestyle, what you do—is something like that even possible for us?—he saw how it curled around your shoulders, dipping its silver tongue into your ear. Germinating. 
He let it. Encouraged it. 
“Something to talk about later,” he indulged, reaching over for a cigar just to smother the urge to breed you stupid. To tie you to his bedposts and keep you full until your belly was swelling with more than just the absurd volume of his seed he pumped inside of you. 
And, oh—
The uneasy smile on your face reeked of disappointment. 
Fuck. Fuck—
John went to the washroom after that, heart pounding out of his chest, and jabbed the lit end of his cigar into his thigh to kill the fever in his veins. To rewrite the desperate, ugly howling in his head with pain instead. 
It worked. Works—
Until you came to him, all watery-eyed and worried, and told him to please, please stop falling asleep with a lit cigar because you think you might just go mad if you lost him to a cigarette fire. And doesn't he see how silly it is, these burns look so bad, John, and I worry—
His teeth ached. He smiled, but it felt like a grimace. A dog holding back the instinct to bare its teeth. 
“Sure, love,” he'd said, and started taking out his anger on your cunt instead, fucking you deep, and stupid. Getting you all cockdrunk, and hungry for the dream that spoiled so badly in the back of his head, he's sure a proper man would call it a nightmare. “Anything you want.”
(Brassbound. Apodictic. You know that, he knows you know that, so imagine his surprise when you come to him, all soft and tender, and ask him to pick up your birth control as if he hadn't spent the better part of two years grumbling every fucking time you took it and wasn't on the verge of tossing the damn bottle out the window, and fucking you until it took—
But—you do know that, don't you? 
Well, then. Whatever his lady wants, right? Right.)
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“Can you stop by the pharmacy on your way home tonight?”
He hums, fiddling with the belt of his slacks in front of the mirror. “Sure, love. You feelin’ sick?” 
“No,” you murmur, sliding behind him on your way to the washroom, wearing nothing but a towel tucked under your arms. “I need my refill. For birth control.” 
His hands still. A gnarled, rotted tendril curls over the edge of the cesspool, murky, ink black water splashing all over the place. “Oh, yeah? Still taking that, hm?”
You fluster. Hands waving, chock full of nervous, emotive energy you can't seem to shake off. “Well—yes. I mean, obviously.”
And he'd leave it there, let the spillage dry on the hot pavement, if you hadn't glanced back at him, all damp keenness, slightly skittish, and asked, feather-soft and utterly fragile, “right?” 
Right? A question, he notes. Not a statement. 
He licks his teeth. Tastes something rancid in the gaps. 
“Mm. I suppose so.” He leaves it vague, but drenches it in the heavy weight of his disappointment. Anchors dragging it down. You flit around the space like a house-locked bird, slamming into the walls and ceiling as you try—blind and panicked—to find an escape. Any escape. 
He finds the whole thing utterly charming. Especially when you realise he pitched himself in front of the only exit, thick, heavy hands curled around his belt, cock outlined against his slacks, already thickened, drooling in his pants. 
There's gasp—wet, and sharp—as you take him in. The liquid of his eyes as his want bleeds out of his skull. The flush on his cheeks, the twitch of his cock at the mere mention of you not taking your silly little pills. 
John lets it sit for a moment, taking in greedy lungfuls of your unease as you glance everywhere but at him, as if looking in his direction, breathing in this toxic miasma will give you a contact high. Infectious. Gnarled. 
The little seed that started germinating blooms. 
He fights back the urge to grin, all teeth. Madness staining them black. 
“It's—it’s on—” and fuck, he's never seen you so unsure before, this nervous. You handle him like a wrangler, wrassling his brutish dominance until it's putty in your hands, splitting his head into pieces and galvanising the madness inside until it's scripture for you to peek at whenever you need guidance, insight into him, his essence, his being. 
Your dyadic has always been built on permeance. 
John doesn't think there's a single person alive who understands him as much as you do. The only person who seems content to gorge yourself on his rotted marrow like it was a delicacy. 
Seeing you like this rents his resolve in two. 
“It's the pharmacy near the, uh, the school. The kindergarten.” 
He chokes on a groan, and thinks he tears something in his throat with the strain of keeping it down. There's blood, ash, in the back of his throat.
“Alright, love. I'll pick it up.” 
You smell it, and shiver. 
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It's giving meat to a starving dog, and saying, dog, don't take a bite. 
And so, of course he does. 
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John picks up your prescription, tossing it in the passenger seat like it personally offended him. And it has. Does. It's what's standing in the way between what he wants, what he craves, and there's a distinct thrum of irritation welling inside of him. One that started when he had to bark out your name at the counter earlier, and the pharmacist looked at him, and calmly, kindly, explained what it was he was picking up. 
Make sure she takes them once a day. Preferably at the same time. This brand of oral contraceptive can be taken with or without food—
Fuck off, he thought—thinks, even now, glowering into the tinted window of the pharmacy. 
He grips the steering wheel tight until his scarred knuckles bleach white under the strain, and sits in the parking lot, staring, unseeingly, at the shops. Pensive. Thoughtful. It gnarls over his expression until he's the picture of that grizzly-like intensity you often accuse him of. All furrowed brows and a pinched, angry twist to his lips. 
There's a series of complex equations running laps in his head. He's no stranger to this process, needing to make life or death decisions in less time it takes someone to snap their fingers, or tentatively stammer out his title. 
This one is more linear than the rest. One plus one, so to speak. But the weight of it is profound. Heavier, even, than deciding between the success of his mission and the life of an innocent bystander. 
(But he thinks he's just selfish like that.)
In his head, he debates the ethics of replacing all of these silly little tablets that stand in his way with sugar pills. 
It would be the quickest path to the end, but the risk-reward ratio ebbs and flows the more he considers things without the miasmic influence of that abomination throwing itself at the walls of its enclosure, howling in an endless cacophony of do it, do itdoit—
A better man wouldn't even have such a temptation. He supposes that's what you deserve, but he already had this particular crisis a few months after he met you, and realised that the things he wanted to do to you would undoubtedly put him on a list. Slapped so hard with a restraining order, his ears would still be buzzing. 
That something about you made his jowls twinge, and his teeth ache, and no amount of stay away from her, Price; she deserves better than you was going to keep his dirty hands from curling around your throat, leaving soot-stains on your skin in the shape of his fingerprints. Brandishing ownership in burst blood vessels; a pretty collar for you to wear because as much as you like to pretend otherwise—
You're a dog just like him. 
In any case, he's the best choice for you. The only one who'd burn the world just to keep you warm, and that's what you really need. Protection. 
And fuck—you toy with that particular urge that has always been etched in fine lines within the walls of bones; dipping your fingers into it, and spreading it over the apples of your cheek. Everything about you prickles along his hindbrain. Renders him from a modern man with modern ideals to an animal who can only speak in growls, snarls; pure primalism, all instinct. 
You're made for each other down to the bone. He's sure he could split your head apart and find that your cranial sutures are perfectly mirrored. Made in the same image: you were grown from his missing rib, and he always meant to be cradled in the brackets of your thighs. 
So, crisis of worthiness aside—because there are none, not anymore—he plots. Plans. Schemes. But his machinations keep catching on the soft fibrils of your wants. 
John doesn't know what he'd do if you changed your mind. 
(Or, rather, he does but that's another madness to unravel with his personal therapist.)
It's with this—the slight brandishing of his uncertainty in your certainty—that he gives up the idea, pocketing it for a later date, and drives home, back to you. 
He doesn't toss the bag on the counter, but sets it up perfectly, placing it as close to the edge where the bin sits under it. All it would take is a breath of wind for it to fall into the trash. 
That doesn't happen, though. You stare at the white, crinkled package for a moment as he sips on his tea, quietly contemplative. With your expression hidden from him, he has no idea what might be going through that pretty head of yours. Disappointment, he can only hope. And then you're reaching for it, fingers gripping the bag tightly in your fist. He hears the paper crumble. It sparks something inside his chest. A bloom of hope that you might just throw it out. Toss it in the bin—
You turn to him instead, knuckles white. 
“Thanks,” you say, and the matter is dropped. 
He goes to tuck that want back where it escaped, leaving slick trails of putrefying rot behind, but—
John peeks in the vanity later that evening, but where he expects to see the little rectangular package sitting in its usual spot between his aftershave and the mouthwash, he finds nothing. Just an empty spot on the ledge, spotlit by the lack of dust. A clean square of white paint, undisturbed. 
His jaw twinges. He wonders if you're hiding it from him, keeping it safe from his machinations, but then he finds it shoved in the drawer with his shaving kit, and the box of condoms he bought when you'd first started dating (for show, naturally—John had no intentions of using them and learned persuasion was your Achilles heel; that and you tended to get a little glossy-eyed whenever he growled filth in your ear, the smell of your cunt heavy on his breath). 
The package is crinkled like you squeezed it tight in your little fist before you tossed it in. 
You're always meticulous in the way you put things in their places. Even the junk drawer is organised, all neat. 
This speaks volumes, but he's not quite sure what it says. They are still here, though. Accessible. One is missing from the pack. It dampens his mood. 
He picks up his toothbrush, and runs through those calculations again to see how he can convince you to skip the one you're meant to take tomorrow. And the next day, and the next, and the next—
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He stays awake as you sleep beside him, looking into how many days you can miss before your brand of birth control stops being effective. 
Seven pills in a row. 
He files it away, lost in thought. 
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The next morning, he leaves his phone open on the bedside table with the article pulled up. He kisses you awake before he leaves to shower, humming something soft under his breath. 
When he returns, he finds you sitting up in bed with your knees drawn to your chest. There's something pensive about the look on your face. Paper soft, as though it would all blow away at a mere whisper. 
You regard him almost cooly but something raw, fractured splits over the ravine. A waterfall of midnight black sludge rains down. 
(He wonders if it tastes of the same rot, the same madness, as the basin of the untouched recesses of his head—)
“I'm working late tonight,” you murmur after a measured beat, and he can't place your tone. “Maybe we can watch a movie when I get home.” 
John nods, and your eyes drop, scaling down his bare, broad chest as he breathes in the flint staining the air. Your gaze is white-hot when it bludgeons into him, feverish. 
It doesn't take much beckoning at all to have him crawling toward you, towel ripped from his hips and thrown somewhere in the aether. 
As he steals the madness from your tongue, his eyes flicker to the phone still sitting on the table. It looks perfectly untouched. The screen is off. 
That, too, he files away. 
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John comes to the succinct conclusion that the only means he has in his arsenal to get what he wants—legally, and somewhat morally, anyway—is persuasion. 
There's no recourse if he can water that burgeoning plant inside of you, make it seem like this is something you want, too. A family. With him. 
(Only him.)
He knows that you see things quite similarly to him. Wherein love is desire. Desire is hunger. And there's nothing more profound to you than to eat the person you love alive. Consumption of every part—the good, the beautiful, the bad, the ugly, and the rotted: skin, fat, muscles, blood, and bones. All of it. 
So, even if somewhere down the road you think you hate him for this, it'll be fine. He'll just consume that, too. 
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John Price is a tenacious man. Stubborn. 
(Bullish, he hears around the barracks. Fuckin’ stubborn prick, too.)
It helps that this line of work is perfectly suited for such a peremptory drive to the finish line, no matter the cost. Utilitarian to a fault, despite his rather recalcitrant disposition. It's how he gets his way more often than not. Brutish dominance. Loutish suppression. 
But a near reckless, suicidal loyalty that attracts the sort of beasts this line of work needs. 
But that's work, not this. Not trying to convince you, his sugar-sweet (and viciously diabolical) lover, to bear the burden of giving him a family because society says it's uncouth (and illegal, morally reprehensible, villainous) for him to chain you to his bed to keep the darker parts of himself that want to rip into anyone who had the pleasure—pleasure that no longer belongs to them—of looking at you. 
That's all for him. 
(Nasty old bastard.) 
And, of course, because he's ready. Everything clicks. Locks into place. There's no one else out there for him. 
Really, though—it's your fault for prodding that beast in the first place. For letting inside your house, your bed. For thinking it could be tamed. And so. You should accept responsibility for it. 
(Nasty, nasty—)
But just as much as you know him, he knows you. You'll give him a litany of reasons why this shouldn't happen, and none of them will be because this isn't what you want. It'll be filled with reasons why you think he doesn't. 
And that simply won't do. 
So, he plots. Plans. 
The thing is. No one ever taught him how to hold things in his hands without crushing it. 
He doesn't think he can be delicate. Gentle. There's no way to gently nudge you into this. No. 
He'll convince you to yield the same way a tsunami convinces a house to move out of the way. 
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Buried to the hilt in your cunt, he growls gospels into your ear about this beautiful Shangri-la, this sprawling castle he has in Spain until you're clenching down around him tight, conditioning your body to come at the thought of swelling with his child. About letting his seed take root, letting him knock you up. 
It's a crass image that he spits into your head—fuck you until it takes, love; breed this pretty cunt every day until you're fat and swollen—serves as the positive reinforcement to his classical conditioning. He'll turn you into one of Pavlov's mutts, salivating at the sound of him groaning into your ear as he fills your pussy up to the brim. He'll reshape you, change your wants until you only come around his cock when he's spitting his release against the plug of your womb. 
And when you make to get up, letting all his spend slip from your sloppy cunt to take your pill, he pulls you closer under the guise of wanting to feel your body on his, murmuring diabolical compromises he has no intention of letting you see through. 
“Later,” he rasps, pulling you closer. His mouth slots across your temple. “Just take it later, sweetheart. Later.”
“But—”
“It’ll be fine.” 
And, as if you'd been waiting for that reassurance, you melt into his hands, wet putty. 
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(you take the bloody pill later, and he adds that to his mental calendar, adjusting the maths. He supposes he’ll just have to try harder next time.)
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John's desire for you is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and he schemes around his wandering hands, bullying into your messy cunt only moments before your alarm is meant to go off, reminding you to take your pill, reinforcing that irritating little wall that keeps his come from reaching your womb. 
It goes off, but he hardly hears it over the roaring in his ears, the sweet, sweet litany of moans that slip out, staining the pillow with your pleasure. He just keeps fucking you through it, growling mindlessly into your ears about how badly he wants to come inside of you. His warnings, threats, about how close he is intertwining with your desperate begging for him to come, come inside me, John is the most beautiful harmonisation he'd ever heard, and it sews itself into his marrow, polluting the ugliness inside with a new, fresh hell for him to torture himself with. That delicious pleasure-pain that drives him mad—
He fills you up, palm pressed taut to your lower belly as he spits his virile release deep into your cunt. He can feel the heavy outline of his cock against your skin, stuffed full of him, and it's this—the way he moulds your body around him, cock visible through your flesh—that makes his eyes roll back into his head. Makes the urge to fuck, to breed, to claim bludgeon into him, shattering reason, logic. He wants to change you, irrevocably. Forever. To mar you with his touch, his essence. 
“Mine,” he chokes out, ugly and raw. It's a mangled mess in his throat. A threat. “All fucking mine, aren't you, love? All mine—”
His words seem to throw you into another climax, cunt clenching greedily down around him as he softens inside of you, plugging you up. You liked that, he notes, purs. The notion brands itself across his resolve, reshaping it into something that would make anyone else recoil in fear, disgust. 
But you preen at this creature that bares its fangs at you, snaps wicked teeth against your jugular. Fingers threading through its hair, shushing it, soothing it, as you pull it back into your embrace, head tucked against your chest. You lull it into complacency with the heavy thud of your heart, your sweet, earthy scent. 
What a pair, he thinks, and clamps his hands around your wrist when you murmur something about taking your pill now. Need to take it before it gets too late, John—
He makes his move, distracts you with his mouth, his tongue. 
“Just take it after,” he murmurs into your pussy, thighs bracketing around his head. His hands pull your waist down, pressing you harder against his mouth. “Later, love. It'll be fine—”
“But, John—”
The protest dies, turns to ash, when he grunts, sealing his lips around your clit, bullying it with the rasping press of tongue until you're arching your back, riding his face. Thoughts of your silly pill are gone, swallowed by him as you gush, drenching his mouth in your slick. 
And after, when you make to get up again, he pulls you close instead, voice curling around you like smoke when he tells you to take it after. 
“No, love. Stay in bed with me,” he peppers kisses to your cheek, your jaw, chin, sweetening his words, and folds you into the tight embrace of his arms. “Take it in the morning. It'll be fine to miss a day.”
You level him with something that shadows the ravines in your gaze with pure, unadulterated scepticism, but as he scouts the canyons, the valleys, the pretty craters that make up the composite of your eyes, he finds no discernible trace of wariness, uncertainty. The terse line in his shoulders ease. 
But while fossicking around he unearths something else. Something a bit more enigmatic, calculative, than doubt. Equivocal, slippery, it runs from him when he tries to give chase, tucking itself back into the harsh tenebrous that shades the landscape. 
He hums, wanting to ask, but you sigh in quasi-acquiescence, and burrow deeper into his embrace. 
“Fine,” you huff, but he tastes a purring sense of satisfaction in the air. “I'll take it tomorrow instead.” 
“Good girl.” The praise slips out, low and gritty, perfumed with his heavy greed. 
You shiver against him. The hitch in your throat is quiet in the bedroom, but to him, it sounds like a gunshot. 
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John keeps meticulous track of the empty pill slots, and notes with a sticky, resinous sense of glee that the numbers are becoming muddled, skewed. Later becomes tomorrow, and your soft acquiesce has days skipped. Missed. 
You can't double up, you huff to him, mournfully slinking into the bed. It's nearly one in the morning. Technically, a brand new day. I absolutely have to take it tomorrow, John. Make sure you remind me—
There's something pointed in your tone. Something oil-slick. He nods, bites back a grin. 
“Sure,” he pulls you close, breathes in the sweet, loamy scent of you—sweat and sex and the lingering remnants of your perfume, your soap—and lets it stain his lungs. “I can do that.” 
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You say nothing at all when he doesn't bring it up until well past midnight the next day, offering little more than an exasperated groan, and a huffy roll of your eyes, as if this was just a missed dinner with friends and not a life-changing misstep. 
(The beast purrs. He places his hand over his chest, and feels the rumble under his skin.)
“Need to be more responsible than this, John,” you say, squirming in his hold to try and rush to the washroom to take that pesky little pill. 
“Sorry, love,” he offers, and means none of it. Clings tighter to you. “Got a bit carried away today, is all.” 
“It's not your fault—” something curls out from a dark crevasse when you look at him. “I've been so—off lately, you know? Must be the new batch. Maybe I should call my doctor.” 
He stills. Body tensing, coiling. John tries to speak, but the words are ash on his tongue. He clears his throat. 
“Could stop taking it.” 
It crackles in the air. Hangs heavy like a stormcloud. 
You blink, stunned. But it's artificial, hollow. Pulled from a wicker basket where you keep all your different skins. 
“You mean—what? Stop it all together—?”
You flit in the space once more, but it's less of an injured bird searching for an escape, he realises suddenly, and more of—
A boomslang. 
One rearing up, searching for the perfect place to strike. 
Wishful thinking, though, because you're flustered and skittish once more, a small prey animal he isn't sure what he wants to do the most—sink his teeth into you, tear you into pieces, and devour you whole, or hide you away from the world. 
“I can look for something else in the meantime,” you sound shy, hesitant, and it prickles across his skin. “But we'd need to be careful, you know. Otherwise you might actually get me pregnant.”
He tries to swallow his groan. Chokes on it instead. 
“Sure, sure—” he hacks into his palm. “Of course, love. We'll be safe. I'll pull out—”
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Naturally, he doesn't. Makes no effort to even try despite promising you he is. 
“Not my fault your pussy won't let go of me, love,” he grumbles, hand cupping your weeping sex in his palm. The heat of you is searing. Blistering. He thinks he could happily melt inside of it for the rest of his life, and leans down to whisper his devotion into your come-slicked folds, the bitter tang of you, of him, admixing on his tongue. An elixir he could drown in. 
You huff at him after, all glossy-eyed and sex-drunk, and tell him to please try harder, John, I'll have to get plan b tomorrow—
You don't, but the threat of it, the possibility, lingers in the back of his mind, souring his thoughts. 
Next time, and I'll have to, John, you say, featherlight, lips pressed against the head of his cock. A warning, a goddamn tease—
His voice is strained, pinched. “Of course, love,” and he guides your mouth back to his cock, letting the matter fall into pieces when you suck on the sensitive head, tongue licking, coy and kittenish, over his frenulum. 
It's only later, when watches you swallow down his come, that the beast slinks out of the shadows, pocketing the fragments. 
You're off birth control—barely any scheming words of whispered concern needed—but the idea of you taking a little pill to wipe away his efforts has him pulling back. Recalibrating his plans. 
He decides on a different route to the same end. 
Damnation at your own hand. 
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John, for his credit, does begin to pull out after that—albeit, with a great deal of agonised reluctance—and instead comes all over your pretty face. 
With thick ropes of his pearlescent spend dripping down the apples of your heated cheeks, he doesn't think he's ever seen a sight more beautiful than this. 
And one with more opportunity.
Slowly, he swipes at it with his thumb and then promptly brings it down, hard, on your clit. You flinch, mewling at the overstimulation, and the threat he brings so close to your raw, unprotected sex. It's dangerous. This thin line he dances along could snap at any moment. Could rain hellfire and fury over his broad shoulders, unmake all the progress he'd steadily built up. 
He walks the precipice, anyway. He pulls his hand away, and brings two fingers up to curve over your cheeks. His thumb, stained with your slick and his come, slides across your bottom lip. 
The pout you give him—all wet-eyed lachrymose—has his spent cock twitching against his sticky thigh. “Fuck, love. Gonna send me to an early grave if you keep starin’ at me like that.” 
“You're cracked,” you slur around his thumb. In retaliation, he digs it into your tongue, and preens—full of nasty, gnarled satisfaction—when your eyes flutter, rolling into the back of your head at the taste. 
With this brief distraction, he drops his come-stained fingers to your mound, and rubs along the swollen rim of your hole. Just touching, pressing. A tease, a whisper. 
You tense. “John—” it's muffled around his thumb, and he isn't sure if it's a warning or a plea. 
He pushes the tips in, barely to the first knuckle, and just pets around your rim. 
It's a battle of wills, now. “No more than this,” he promises, and the undercurrent of his threat rents the air. Makes you bristle. 
You always loved a challenge—especially coming from him. 
“Just the tip?” You tease, spittle running down your chin. Your eyes are dark—midnight skies, ink black—and he's struck by the afterimage of himself in those pools. Made in the same image. 
He grunts, slides into the first knuckle, and scissors them apart. 
“John—” it's breathless. Your teeth spear his thumb, tight around his bone. He wants nothing more than to have you bite down hard, scar his bones with the gnawed meteors of your desire. Your desperation. “Fuck—please—”
You give in so prettily, and he barely has a moment to think about how quick it's been when you angle your hips, hand falling to grip his wrist tight as you slide down his fingers, all the way to the last knuckle. 
You clench around him like a vice. A pretty bow. He fucks you with his fingers, meeting your shallow thrusts with ones of his own, slamming viciously into your pussy as he coos adorations into your ear. 
With his other hand, he reaches down and fists himself over your bare mound, pressing the tip against your clit where it weeps prespend over your flesh. His thumb sweeps across what spills out, dragging it back down to your sopping hole, pushing it inside. 
It's probably not enough to reach your womb, to get you pregnant, but he clings to that tantalising fantasy as he drills his fingers into you until you come, breathlessly begging him to fuck you harder, to fill you up—
He isn't even fucking you with his cock, and you still beg him for it. 
John pushes the tip into your slit, fingers still buried deep inside of your throbbing pussy, and groans with the force of his release. It makes him dizzy, almost nauseous with it, filling his head with nothing but the sweet, wounded sound of your moans filling the room, and the wet squelch of his fingers pulling out of you. 
When he catches the threads of cognisance in his fingers once more, he leans back on his haunches, chest heaving, and brands the messy sight of your pussy fluttering, clenching around nothing, as his spend drips down your slit, over your hole, and pools in the sheets below. 
He's not sure if heaven exists, but he knows the sight of you, breathless and whimpering on his bed, is the closest a man like him will ever come to seeing it. 
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The push-pull of this little game stretches on. 
Price likes to see just how far he toe the line before you're whimpering into the sheets, telling him don't, John, don't come inside me, I'm not anything, John—and he's ripping himself away from the tight clutch of your wet, hot cunt, and coming all over you.
The illicit tease of barely pulling out in time, and then scooping up the mess he makes on your face, your breasts, your belly, your ass, lower back, thighs, and spooning it into your pussy until it's a fixture in your bedroom ritual. 
And maybe it's the threat of it all, of playing such a dangerous game, seems to cudgel under his skin the most, ripping apart the thin veneer of that man he once pretended to be—righteous and good—shedding it off with each hiccupped gasp you make when he presses his come-slicked fingers inside of you, murmuring guttural words of affection in the shape of impish mockery (want it bad, don't you, sweet thing; so fuckin’ greedy for it, love—). 
He likes it the most when he can fuck you stupid on his fingers. Cockdrunk, and come-starved (because you are, of course; he hasn't come inside of your cunt in weeks, and doesn't miss the mournfully pitiful whines you give when he pulls out, depriving you of the pleasure of feeling him come inside you), you're too blissed out, swimming in pleasure, to think about what he's doing. 
In fact, he doesn't really give you much of a chance to think at all. 
The next few weeks are filled with him fucking you each night brutally, viciously, snarling low in your ear about how bad he wants to come in you, stuff you full, and then keep you plugged up all night with his cock that it takes, and then pulling out right before, committing the sight of your betrayed expression to memory where it'll sit like a trophy when you finally break. 
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You make an appointment with your gynaecologist, and circle the date on his calendar. 
John notes it down. Tucks it away. 
And then he amps up the pressure.
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John's fingers root behind your knees, pushing your thighs apart as he settles between them. His gaze drills into your bare cunt, slick and wet, and so ready for him. Eager for it. 
He'd counted the days, and knows that if there's ever the absolute worst time to have unprotected sex, to come inside of you, is now. 
Which, of course, means he has to. The clause in that is ironclad. Apodictic. 
“Bit dangerous,” he rasps, and lifts your leg up, resting your ankle on his shoulder. You fluster beneath him, panting and pretty, and fuck—he’s not pulling out of your pussy tonight at all. “Should I pull out?” 
It's a tease. A test. 
He reaches down as he says the words, gripping his cock and bringing it down against your wet heat. The bare, blunt head of his cocks slaps against your clit, and you arch, keening. Nails bite into the thick muscles of his biceps, and he leans into the sharp sting. Letting it ground him. Centre him. 
This will be your cacoëthes. 
He's been depriving you for weeks, and John knows that you're wanting for it. Desperate. The little twitches your hips give, as if begging him to fill you up, are proof enough of how much you want this. 
This. The dream he dripped into your ears, hot oil congealing over your frontal lobe; infectious and thick. You can try to chisel it off, but the pollution is already damning. Ruining. 
You want this. He wears the axiom like armour. 
And you beg for it—eyes shaded in gut wrenchingly beautiful lachrymose—and John snuffles closer, inching the weeping head of his cock into your tight, warm heat. 
The sight of splitting you open is something he never grows tired of. Something that, without fail, makes his balls ache. His chest thrum. Blood turns to ichor. To wine. He's drunk on the contrast made between you—a garish chiaroscuro of your pretty pussy, soft and sickly sweet—almost nauseatingly so—swallowing down the fat, girthy length of his cock. The thick streams of veins running along the flushed, heavy shaft against your puffy, soft folds is almost hideous. Sinful. He can't equate it to anything else except corruption. The horrific beast sullying the princess. 
And fuck—
The thought alone makes him throb. 
He's sullied you plenty, he reckons, and yet you always look so sweet. Especially now, when your rim is stretched taut around the thick of him, pussy squeezing, clenching around him in a vice, as if you weren't sure to push him out or pull him deeper. 
John decides for you. Opting instead to push your knees down to your chest, nearly brushing your ears, and follows with the bulk of his body until he feels your breath rush out of your lungs. You struggle for a moment, gasping wetly into his ear as his weight—every bearish pound of it—rests on you in the perfect mating press. Your bite into his biceps, keening prettily into his ear as he bullies the full length of his cock into you. Spears you open. Splits you apart. 
He can feel you gush around him, drenching his groin and thighs with your slick. 
Like this—chest to chest, forced to breathe in the same air, the same madness—he likes to just stare at you, taking in the heat simmering under your skin, the sweat beading along your temple, the pinch in your brow as you struggle to adjust to the sheer width of him cudgelling you open. A battering ram you're forced to make room for. 
He takes it all in, each flicker of emotion, each heaving gasp. Burns it into his memory. Lets it soften the iron around his heart. Keeps it there, nestled in the cradle of his limited love, held aloft by indelicate, bearish hands. This sweet thing. 
He can't wait to ruin it. 
If these weeks leading up to this were lovemaking, fucking, then this, this, is mating. Animalistic. Primal. He pushes in as deep as he can, until the tip kisses the ripened seal of your womb, and grinds his hips cruelly into the cradle of your thighs. 
Your nails leave bloodied indents in his flesh. A scar he'll proudly bear the mark of. A tattoo of the time when he turned you into something new. 
His balls are soaked. The sheets, too. He mocks you for it, a rasping growl lodged deep in his throat, taunting you about how fucking wet you are for him. How badly you need it. 
“Gotta plug you up, hm?” He grunts, and sets a pace that serves only to accentuate the sloppy, messy squelch of your cunt. 
His cock pistoning into you, alternating between deep, full thrusts that knock the air from your lungs, and heavy, slow plunges meant to badger the blunt head of his cock against your walls. 
You seem to like it best when he shifts his weight between each thigh, content to just grind into you. Make you feel every inch of him. You cling to him, yowling in his ear about how good it feels, how much you love this, love his cock—
The thick bed of wry, umber curls on his chest, stomach, and groin grow slick with sweat from the intensity of it all, from the shared heat. Pressed tight against you, he feels every quiver. Every flinch. Each moan is made known in a slight reverberation across his skin before he hears it. 
Drenched in sweat, glued to you as he fucks you into the mattress, John feels very much like the beast making a house out of a twisted whim in his head. Feverish, sick, he drives into you with the single minded goal of filling that home up with three. Then four. Five—
As many as you'll let him.
And he almost loses himself to that thought alone. Dancing sugar plums that make his balls tighten. He stems the flood by pulling out of you, letting his heavy cock slap against your sticky, soaked cunt as he heaves into your hairline, sucking in the heady loam, the humus, of your scent. 
The whimper you make when he pulls out of you sounds like a wounded animal, and the noise tickles across his hindbrain. His jaw aches. He bites down on a snarl as you thrash against him, mindless with the need to have him inside of you. It brings a nasty, vicious curl to the ends of his mouth, and he doesn't even bother trying to tamper it down. John lifts his head and lets you see his foaming muzzle, drooling with thick globes of saliva. 
“Stay still,” he growls, low and dangerous. It's as much of a warning as it is a command, and the way you react, tensing, coiling tight—the flash of unease. Shock. And then the need. Achy, heavy. He feels it against his jugular when you shiver, moaning his name into the space between you where it reeks of desperation. 
To soften the submissive tremble in your jaw—and maybe to temper down the challenging talons sharpening in your gaze—he nuzzles his cheek against yours, peppers wet kisses to your skin. He licks across your jaw, bites down on your flesh. 
He tastes salt and sin on your skin. 
(His eyes roll so far back into his skull he thinks he might get lost.)
“Gonna cum on your pretty cunt if you don't stop squirming, love.” 
And John loves you most for your waspish intelligence—the ire smouldering in your throat. The way you bite back just as hard, never afraid to bear teeth when he snarls. He doesn't think he could ever love someone too soft—not without tearing them to pieces. To shreds. 
But you wear plush, tender conchoidal skin over jagged, rough obsidian. He'll ruin himself if he ever tries to rip you apart. 
Like this, though—you melt. 
All that keen, vicious intelligence snuffed out. His scheming Cleopatra tamed on his cock. 
Your heels dig into the back of his thighs, urging him closer to your sex. “Come on, John, just fuck me, fuck me already—”
(Tamed, though, perhaps being a misnomer.)
He huffs into your neck. “Impatient little quean.”
It gets him a sharp bite to the tip of his ear, and the floor roars so loudly in his veins, he gets dizzy from it. 
“Fuck—”
He's pressing back into you again, into your warm, tight heat, and it's nirvana kissing his nerves. Liquifying his spine. He rolls into you with a weighted groan, buried to the hilt once more. 
But even with the respite, he knows he won't last. 
John needs you fucked stupid, docile and soft just for him, and sets out to do just that. Pounding into you with a spiteful twist of his hips that he knows will leave you a little sore, and tender tomorrow. But the idea of spreading your puffy, achy folds apart and soothing the slight hurt with his tongue for hours until you're sobbing into the cushions quells any hesitation that rears, begging him to slow down. 
Go easy on your pretty cunt.
(As if.)
John batters into you until your eyes glaze over, and your chin, cheeks, smear with drool. Until the challenge in midnight black melts into submission. Docile, and malleable. Perfect for him to mould. Shape. 
Reshape.
He glues to you, touch starved and tactile, and basks in the liquid heat that blooms from deep within you. 
“Gonna cum soon,” he snarls, broken by the heave in his chest as he fucks into you, starved. “Gotta pull out, love—”
You're gripping him tighter, anchoring him to your body. You haven't come yet. Something he dangles in front of you like a threat. 
He watches the slow crawl of realisation crest over your messy face, and thinks he falls just a little bit more in love with you at the sight of your little pout. 
Loves, even more, the way it breaks apart when he pounds into you harder, viciously, watching drool dribble off your chin, and reason leak from your ears—
“Please, John—” the sound of your whimpering has him grunting, head dizzy with the saccharine sweet taste of it on his tongue. “Please, please—come inside me. I–I want you to–to fill me up—”
“Yeah?” He taunts, mean and breathless. “Want me to come inside your sloppy cunt? Dangerous, ain't it? Jus’ might take, sweet thing. Is that what you want?”
You're howling a litany of sin into his ear, desperation drenches each clamour of his name, each orison uttered, begging him to come, to fill you up, and then—
“Fuck—I want it so bad—” his head is filled with static. Whitenoise. “Want it to take, John—”
He comes inside of you, cock pulsing so hard it feels like a sob. Filling you up. Wishing on all the stars that it takes—
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As a reward for your good behaviour, he spreads you out over the sheets, and growls his approval into your sopping pussy, drenching himself with the taste, the smell, of you, promising to wear it like a perfume so everyone knows how good you are for him. Him, alone. 
(His, his, his—)
When you come, you nearly smother him, and he thinks he sees a glimpse of nirvana in baby soft yellow before he's pulled back by your shaking hands brushing the hair off his sweat-slicked forehead. 
“Are you okay, John—”
He rolls you under him, fucking into your drenched pussy like a man starved. That tantalising vision glues itself to his hindbrain, so close he can scent the fresh dew of fresh milk, and warm bread in his nose. Feel the bump of your stomach. 
He's almost angry about it, about being ripped away from that dream, and takes his aggression out on your sloppy, leaking cunt. The way his come trickles out, staining the mattress below and the back of your thighs has him growling darkly into your nape. 
“Keep it in,” he snarls, words sharpened on the whetstone of his need. “Keep it all inside, love.” 
“Ah, John, John—” something falls from your split-slicked lips, and his fingers bite into your hips. Punishment for the slurred backtalk. 
“I'll spank your ass if any of it leaks out—”
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It does. Of course it does. 
He bends you over his knee, and slaps his broad, rough palm over each cheek ten times before deliriously shoving two thick fingers into your sloppy cunt, stuffing his come back inside your tender, swollen hole, rough and mean, as you howl, squirming in his lap about how you promise you'll be good next time, John, please—I'll keep it all in, I swear, I—
“You fuckin’ better, love.” He groans, and thinks about cumming on your messy face, all slick with sweat, and drool, but decides against it. A waste, he thinks, and leans over you to shove the thick, twisting length of his angry cock inside you to the hilt just spit his release against your seal once more. 
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“That was…” You're still panting against his chest, eyes dazed, and body laxed. Melted wax over his chest. “Intense,” you settle on after a beat. 
There's a hiccup in your breath when he hums, chest rumbling with the sound. 
“Mm, but you liked it, didn't you?”
Of course you did. Of course. The evidence of it is drying, tacky and slick, on his groin, his thighs. 
You burrow into his side, peeking at him from over the thick bed of wry curls that clot over his chest. “You're fucking me like you haven't in years, John. Makes me wonder if you have an agenda.”
He considers your words. The weight of them. Wonders just how much you've clued into, but huffs when he catches the same look in your eyes as the one reflected in his own.
Cheeky little—
“Can't I just want to fuck you? Not everything has to be about schemes, love.” 
The oil of his lies, the sticky resin of his evasion makes you huff into his skin.
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In all his meticulous planning, he'd picked up several books on this particular topic, and scoured every available, reputable, site he could find. John knows what to look out for by now, and keeps a keen eye on you—one that very quickly dips into obsessiveness, but you're kind enough to call it overbearing. 
Jesus Christ, John, why are you asking me how many times I pissed today? 
He just needs to wait things out. 
But rather irritatingly, he's called away overseas for the next week. 
Ah, well. He'll have to try harder next time. 
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He arrives in Heathrow mid-morning, and follows Laswell into the office. There's a mountain of reports to fill out—things that, rather irritatingly, require his signature—and resolves to spend the rest of the day hunched over at his desk, even though there's an itch in the back of his skull demanding he go home. 
It is always like this, though—both the post-mission ritual of banal paperwork that seems almost comical considering what he'd just done, and the undeniable urge to flee back into the sanctuary of your shared home. 
His bones ache for it. 
Laswell huffs when he lingers by the exit, and he swallows a groan. 
While he was away, you'd been silent. Moreso than usual. 
Where he'd have expected an update on what was going on—the mundanity of your life that he clings to when the beast in his head whets its talons a little too sharp, digs into a little too deep—you’ve gone silent. Not radio. Not completely. But the information you give is sparse. Cagey.
You don't tell him about the visit to the gynaecologist, offering nothing but a quiet hum into the receiver, all blase and nonchalant, and a simple, equivocal: “good.” 
He tucks it away, lets the matter drop. 
If he timed things correctly—barring your impish prevarication aside—then something will begin to show soon. You would have mentioned something. Some nominal change to your physical well-being, but when pried, pressed, you huff. 
“I'm good, John. When are you coming home, anyway?”
He raps his knuckles on his desk, still smarting from the punches he'd thrown recklessly this past week, too keyed up to let his anger simmer instead of boil, and thinks. About you. About this. 
A week isn't a lot of time—he’s been called away for months in the past—but this feels like it's lingering. Time stretched and distorted. Elongated. And a part of him feels chipped, fractured after touchdown. 
It wasn't as if this particular assignment was any more, or less, dangerous than the ones he went on before. If anything, it was comparatively mild. Muted. He honed into his training, and did his goddamn job. And yet—
Yet. 
You lived in the spaces he occupied. The air he breathed. The water he drank. 
He brought you with him, something he's never, ever, done before. Perched pretty on his shoulder, he heard your voice in his head with every step he took, every radio call. 
But it was hallucinatory. Chimerical. You weren't there, you were here, but the problem lies in the lack of a divide that usually bifurcates the world into two fractions: his job and you.
It eats at him. 
He brought you where he's never taken anyone before. Never let them in. 
His thoughts were asunder. Pulled in all directions, but the centre was always you. His compass pointing north. He wants you. Needs you. His whole being has been recalibrated with the needle aimed toward you. 
An alert on his phone shakes him from his reverie. 
He reaches for it, slides his hand across the lockbar. The notification pops up. A message from his bank. 
His card—the one he gave you, the one you've used all of once to buy a chocolate bar when he gruffly, surely, complained about you not spending his money—has been used. 
Curious now, he opens his app, eyes scanning the threadbare purchases—all mostly interest fees and service charges, bar one. It was recently used at a drugstore for under twenty dollars. 
He doesn't know what this means, what you're playing at. He makes to text you, but he gets an email next. 
Thank you for your purchase; here is your e-receipt. 
His heart does something strange in his chest. Turns in on itself. Goes all askew. 
Not only are you using his card, you're using his account, too. He clicks it, eyes scanning through the purchases (only two), and blinks. 
A card, and—
His want takes the shape of a hand, presses against his jugular. 
—a pregnancy test. 
He knew when he started this game that this was, of course, the inevitable outcome, but having it here, right in front of him—in that sneaky, noncommittal way you always do things; behind his back, and in the dark, like you enjoy watching him try and sniff out the truth—has his belly knotting up. Churning. 
A pregnancy test. 
Fuck—
(and out of all the ways to tell him, you cheeky little—)
He's up out of his chair before he's even aware that he's standing. 
“Laswell,” he gets out, and can't be sure how his voice is so measured when his head is being shredded into pieces. “I'm out for the rest of the day. This whole bloody week, too—”
“Something bad happen?” 
His hands shake when he pulls his jacket on, slips his car keys into his hands. “No. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm going to be a father. A bloody dad—”
It's on that sentiment when his voice breaks. Shatters. He clears his throat, blinks furiously. Fuck. Fuck. It's happening—
Shangri-la sits in his fist, taking the shape of an e-mailed receipt. 
In his periphery, he sees Simon's head come up. Watching him. Measured. 
Laswell, too, eyes him with a degree of wariness. He supposes to them this means the end of everything. 
She breathes in. “Tuscany would be my choice.”
“Oh?” He tears his eyes away from the screen, gracing her with a steady, unflinching look. “Was thinking something a bit more local. Liverpool.”
It gets a scoff, one full of disgust. “She'll divorce you within the year.” 
“I'm having a baby, Laswell. Not getting married.”
“Oh, no?” It's a challenge. “I seem to recall something about someone being a proper gentleman, or was that just the lie you told your unofficial missus?”
“We'll get married. That's not up for debate—” an intern makes an alarmed face, like perhaps it ought to be. Had he not been holding nirvana in his hand, he might be a bit more cautious with his madness. Too bloody bad. “Wherever she wants—Tuscany, Udaipur, fucking Siberia. I don't care. What I’m a bit more concerned with is my expectant wife.” 
“Soon-to-be,” she volleys, just because she knows it's the sort of thing that will itch under his skin. 
“Already is, Laswell.” He gripes, flat. “Or damn near close to it.” 
“If she knows what's good for her, she'll say no.”
“Lucky me, then, that she doesn't.” 
Lucky him, indeed. 
On his way out, Ghost utters a heated congratulations to him, and John can see his gaze is absent. Turned inward, mind whirring. Reeling. He can hear the gears grind from where he stands, and if the ink-black madness in his lieutenant’s drifting, pensive eyes means much of anything, then John sends a silent hail mary to whatever unlucky person was misfortune enough to unleash the muzzle on that particular dog. 
Well. It's not really his problem. Until it is. Until it becomes one. But since it's not something that'll impact him in the next five minutes, he tucks it away. “Thanks.” 
He doesn't linger. Doesn't, really, even remember the ride home, head buzzing with thoughts that keep twisting around themselves, driving him mental. Things like, is it real? what if you were joking. what you weren't? 
Oh, fuck—
You better not be. 
But you wouldn't. You're conniving and wily, but you're not cruel. 
This is happening, then. 
You've been playing house with matches inside of a tinderbox. He shouldn't be surprised when it all goes up in flames, in smoke, but as he walks through the door, and glimpses the pregnancy test perched innocently on the counter beside a card—congrats, daddy (and the caricature of a man in a pinstripe suit nearly makes him gag)—he feels all the maligned pieces inside of crack. 
It shifts—
You walk out, hand cupped protectively over your lower belly. Eyes gleaming like a wild cat crouched low in the tussocks surrounding the savannah, watching him an eager sense of anticipation, excitement, and just the slightest edge of what he can only imagine the unfortunate mate of a black widow sees before it's consumed. Spare parts. 
It thrums inside of him. Ignites this wicker basket he calls a heart until it's cinder. Ash. Soot. He breathes it in. Tastes you on his tongue. 
John doesn't have the words. Can't think beyond the steady brag of his burning heart. 
His. His.
—and then it all falls into place. 
Yours.
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He dotes on you with an almost unhinged devotion, murmuring stilted, gruff words of muted affection into the shallow bump on your belly. Ones that you, politely, pretend not to hear. 
A new bedtime ritual, one he adheres to with an almost obsessive need. 
Until it becomes too much. 
“Go and get my prenatal vitamins from the washroom, please. I just need five minutes without you smothering me, you stupid bear of a man.”
“You love it,” he grumbles, but acquiesces, giving your small, barely there bump a pat. “I'll be back soon.”
“Oh, no… please take your time.” 
Despite the prickle in your tongue, your eyes are soft. Warm. Melting him just a little more. 
John pulls away, and doesn't even pretend the reluctance to be apart is feigned. 
“It's in the drawer,” you call, voice stretched. Echoing. “Next to your shaving cream.” 
He pulls the drawer open, scanning the contents briefly, before finding the purple bottle in the back. Why you chose here of all places to put the bloody things—
His knuckles knock against the old box of condoms, tipping it over. There's a strange rattle as it falls, and his brows furrow at the noise. 
Curiously, he reaches for it. Shakes it as he picks it up. The same sounds spill out. He pops the flap of the box open, peering inside, and—
A gruff chuckle crackles in his throat. 
Inside the old box of condoms—the ones he never bothered to throw out, or use—is an accumulation of all the pills you'd meant to take. 
His jowls ache. He rubs at his jaw with his hand, and feels the skittish patter of his heart thudding out of his skin. Madness in his veins. 
John closes the drawer with his knee, and then tosses the box of condoms in the bin, leaving it for you to find later when you're inevitably wracked by another wave of morning sickness. A little shred of vindication for this little game you made him play. 
Though he supposes turn-about is fair play, and the number of pills in the box is less than the months he spent scheming for this vision of his.  
In the back of his head, the beast purrs.
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“Do we need to play these games again for the next one,” he rasps. “Or can I just fuck you until it takes.” 
You blink at him, wide and owlish. Full of faux innocence as you coax the beast out of hiding. “I don't know what you're talking about, John.” 
More games, then. He thinks he might crack open your ribcage and rest his weary head on the frantic beat of your heart. 
“Mm, don't know what I'd do without you,” he says, guns aching. He reaches for the pack of gum (no smoking around the baby or you'd toss him off the balcony), and pops a spearmint into his mouth. “Might live longer, I reckon, but—”
Your elbow digs into his side. “You sure about that?”
He just kisses your crown in response, and places his heavy, scarred hand over the curve of your belly. The beast inside purrs, content for now. Satiated. 
When he looks into your midnight eyes, he finds your own beast slumbering away. 
A match made in a tinderbox, he guesses, and kisses you until you're dizzy. His very own Shangri-la sitting pretty inside his bed, nestled in the castle in Spain you helped him build.
Will help him fill. 
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space-snake · 4 months ago
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Ghosts start appearing all over the world, particularly places like Gotham. They don’t seem overtly hostile though they are rather rowdy as they seem to be celebrating something.
Jason doesn’t understand why he can feel the ghosts elation or why he can apparently land a physical hit on them during what the ghost called a ‘friendly brawl’ when so far only magic users had any affect, limited as it was. (“You really need to your ass to Far Frozen man, you’re cores fucked” the ghost had said with a chuckle afterwards)
Shazam reports that the last King had been some kind of mad tyrant but can’t offer much else; he has limited knowledge of this universes Dead Realms, let alone the Infinite Realms that house them. He has no knowledge at all of the new King.
Constantine reports the last King was named Pariah Dark and nearly destroyed the Infinite Realms which would have caused reality itself to collapse. It took all of the Infinite Realms together to seal him away… and the crowning of a new King meant that he had been bested in single combat, which would make the new King even more powerful than Pariah had been.
Observation proved that the ghosts were violent and mischievous though rarely outright malicious. They liked to pull ‘pranks’ and have destructive fights. They were all eclectic individuals, though there was clearly a culture to them. And they all spoke willingly to any who would listen about the power of King Phantom, how fiercely he protected his Haunt, how often he would accept spars, how he calmed tensions between different ghost factions.
After three weeks of chaos, the ghosts suddenly disappeared. And then one more appeared on the Watchtower.
“Hello. I am High King Phantom. My apologies if my subjects have caused harm to you; they are many and the Realms are vast so it’s taking a bit to visit all the affected Living Realms and calm down celebrations. Please understand any who have broken the laws of the Infinite Realms are being dealt with. If you would like to discuss reparations, you can contact me with this; I may not answer immediately however”
The lanky teenager with white hair, a crown of burning ice, and a skull ring placed a piece of paper with a summoning circle on it on the table and promptly disappeared.
Silence.
“Anyone else expecting someone more… I dunno, kingly?”
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rebelfell · 5 months ago
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A li’l more self-indulgent bestfriend!eddie fluff…
reader w/ boobies, cont’d from here
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“Do you, um…do you think you got a good enough look?”
Ringing. There’s a ringing in Eddie’s ears and he’s pretty damn certain his jaw is on the floor. And he is going to need about a million q-tips stat before he believes he actually heard those words come out of your mouth in that exact order.
Did he die? Is this a dream? A coma? Did he get trapped in the Matrix? If so, which color pill does he take to stay in it forever?
“Eddie? You okay?”
Your face fell the longer he took to respond, shrinking into yourself as worry washed over you.
Thinking you must have misread things, thinking he was just being nice, thinking you’ve just ruined everything by throwing yourself at the best friend you’ve ever had…
YES, YOU IDIOT! SAY FUCKING “YES” SAY SOMETHING YOU’VE BEEN QUIET FOR WAY TOO LONG SHE’S GONNA THINK YOU’RE—
“Sorry,” he chuckles. “Pretty sure I hallucinated. Uhh…any chance you can repeat that?”
“Eddie…”
He can almost hear you scoff and see your eyes roll before it happens. You glance around, looking for where you tossed your bag when you got here, but Eddie reaches out and wraps his hand around your wrist. His thumb rubs over the delicate skin on the inside of it, praying he’s not imagining it that he can feel your pulse quickening underneath the calloused pad.
“Sweetheart, you just offered me the single greatest honor and privilege of my life,” he says. “Forgive me for wanting some extra reassurance. Seriously…how is that even a question?”
Relief floods Eddie’s brain as your lips slowly spread into a smile prettier than every sunset he’s ever seen before combined. His heart is pounding in his chest, all his other organs shuddering with the force, as your hands carefully pull from his grasp and drop to the hem of your shirt.
The pounding stops. His breathing stops.
Everything stops as you lift it off fully this time, letting it fall to the floor beside your feet. It lands in a heap and Eddie is struck with the urge to fold a piece of clothing for maybe the first time ever in his life. Because if you ask him, that thing should be in the Smithsonian behind a bulletproof glass barrier—the shirt you removed in his presence.
If that’s not historically significant, what is?
Except Eddie can’t even think about that any more, because now your arms are raising again and your hands are reaching behind your back to unhook the clasps of your bra.
Forget the Matrix. This is heaven.
He stares at you raptly, not even trying to hide the fact that his eyes are about to jump right out of his skull. Black lace falls to the floor and Eddie is tempted to join it, more than ready to sink to his knees for you and do whatever you say for the rest of his life. Only he can’t form the words to tell you that because all he can think about is how your bare fucking boobs are out in his room.
You are topless and literally a foot away from his bed and—god fucking damn it why didn’t he change his sheets?!
“Can I, um…”
His eyes dart between you and them, his mouth still agape. His hands flex at his side, his fingers trembling with the need to grip their softness, to mold and squish them in his palms, to roll your nipples between his thumb and index until he hears the sweet, sweet sound of your moans—
“Please,” you whisper.
Okay, yep. Definitely heaven.Only in heaven would you be the one pleading for Eddie to touch you.
“Fuck, they’re so pretty,” he sighs, almost mournfully, his eyes rounding as his hands came up to cup them gently. “How do you walk around with ‘em all day? I’d never get anything done if…”
He trails off, a flush coloring his cheeks, bashful smile making his dimples deepen.
“If, what?” you prompted.
“If they were mine.”
His eyes lifted to meet your gaze, deep brown irises brimming with heat. Your tongue darts out to wet your lips and his hands stretch, his fingers spreading wider and squeezing tighter.
“They’re all yours, Eddie,” you tell him with a small smile. “Do whatever you like.”
He doesn’t need any further instruction.
A breathy laugh flutters in your chest as he buries his face in between them. Eagerly, as if he was trying to suffocate himself. Shit, maybe he is. He’d happily die right now with your warm flesh on his face, the scent of you in his nose, and his breath rippling down the middle of your sternum.
He kisses and kisses and kisses them, like he’s the pope and you’re the tarmac. And then he’s shaking his head back and forth, moaning and humming and groaning while you erupt giggles—downright giddy with all his attention on you.
It almost makes you feel…proud of your boobs.
Because there were ones out there that were bigger than yours; ones that were smaller than yours; ones more evenly sized or shapely that better filled out dresses or low-cut tops.
But none of those boobs were the ones currently reducing Eddie Munson to a puddle before your very eyes. That’s just yours.
And they are perfect.
Eddie jumps when he feels you pull away, his head popping up, his bangs mussed and sticking out to reveal his vast forehead and his panicked eyes. Shit, what did he do? Did he bite you? He could have sworn he only thought about doing that, but maybe—
You step backwards, smiling as you walk him to the bed and guide him down with you to lay on the mattress. He slides up next to you, his body finding a home against every dip and curve of yours. He looks at your face, brows raising in a silent question until you give him a nod.
“Can’t believe this is really happening,” he moans, burying his face back where it belongs. “I’ve wanted this so long, you have no idea...”
“How…how long?” you gasp, breathless as he kisses all over them, his tongue swiping over your nipples. “Eddie, how long have you felt like this?”
“Fucking forever,” he groans into your skin and the vibrations make waves across your chest. “Can’t remember the last time I went to bed and didn’t think about this…about you.”
And you know you should be melting. You know you should be flattered by what he’s saying and to be over the moon that the boy you’ve been in love with your whole goddamn life actually wants you too—but all you feel right now is rage.
“OW! What the—”
Eddie yelped as you reached over and pinched the skin on his stomach as hard as you could. He pulled away, staring down at your hand and the bright red spot it just made on his pale skin.
“You idiot!” you snapped. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Wh…what?”
“I’ve been going out with losers for years trying to get over you.”
Eddie blinked back at you, his mouth falling open so he looked a bit like a carp with stage fright. His head started to shake back and forth, wiry curls rustling as he stammered out an answer.
“I…I thought…”
His head dropped, shoulders slumping as he thought of all the men he’d ever seen you with. Cool guys. Normal clothes. Normal interests.
No freaks.
“The guys you were picking were nothing like me. I…I figured I wasn’t your type.”
His big, round eyes flashed back up to yours and soundly vaporized all the anger that overtook you. Because it was true. You always avoided guys that reminded you of him. Always went for the dishes the polar opposite of the one you craved.
Because eating frozen yogurt only ever made you want ice cream more.
“You should have said something, Eddie,” you whisper. Half scolding, half an apology.
“You should have said something,” he countered.
But Eddie nodded, leaning in close to bump your head with his. It made you both smile, yours and his cheeks both pushing up as they touched. And then it wasn’t just your cheeks touching.
His lips met yours with a gentle brush. Almost accidental, but not quite. Delicate and light like the start of a snowfall. It made your stomach swoop and your neck stretch, chasing the feeling. His eyes scanned your face, searching for any sign of hesitation before he dove back in.
There was none.
“Now, if you don’t mind…” he smirked as he crawled on top of you, scooting down until his face was level with your chest, “I’m getting back to the greatest moment of my life. That okay?”
thank you for reading, love you mean it 😘
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tropes-and-tales · 1 month ago
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The Enemy of My Enemy
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(The Predator/Yautja x F!Reader)
CW:  Violence; smut (monsterf*cking; fingering; PiV, unprotected). 18+ only.
Word Count: 9889
AN:  This was originally requested by an anonymous person!
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The distress call is what bring Mah’tu to Earth:  a Yautja ship infested with a single xenomorph that escapes its cell to wreak havoc before the ship crashes onto the planet of the oomans.  Mah’tu, in a nearby star system, is the closest to handle it.
Thank the gods he has the foresight to call for aid.  A single xenomorph on a planet full of soft, weak creatures…it turns into an infestation almost immediately.  Mah’tu is grateful the Yautja ship at least crashed in a small ooman settlement
Still, the small settlement is overrun quickly.  Mah’tu finds himself outnumbered, outgunned, overpowered.  He sees some oomans as he fights:  they scurry around, they try to run.  Few manage to escape before they are slaughtered.  He pays them no mind.  They are a weak species and only worthy prey because of their inventiveness, but these oomans are panicky and stupid with fear, and easy prey for the serpents.
He finds himself cornered in a large building.  He hears the faint crackle in his comms of other Yautja as they approach Earth, but he himself is lost:  he’s trapped with two of the xenomorphs, and he dispatches one easily, but the second stabs him with its barbed tail, sprays acid blood, and Mah’tu falls. 
The Yautja are strong, durable.  They heal quickly, and neither of these injuries would be fatal, but he feels his vision edging in black, and he knows once he’s unconscious, the serpent will kill him.
Mah’tu is a noble warrior.  He was Blooded young.  His bloodline is ancient, and he’s sired many Yautja that will live on beyond him, so he does not mourn his own lost life as he slips out of consciousness.  At least he won’t feel the blow, though there’s little honor in that sentiment.
It surprises him, then, when he doesn’t die.  When he instead wakes up, comes to, and finds a ooman—small, trembling—crouched beside him.
No, not beside him.  Not exactly.  The ooman is crouched between Mah’tu and the second xenomorph.  It lies dead and twitching as it oozes its acidic blood from where the ooman has impaled it with a metal pole through its long skull.
The ooman is a female of the species, even smaller than the males, and Mah’tu sits up with a grumble and takes in the measure of his savior.  A small thing, filthy.  Stinking of fear and sweat and the rich metallic tang of ooman blood and the acrid, biting odor of serpent blood.  Trembling as she turns and stares at him, her too-wide ooman eyes studying him warily.
How did something so small and cringing manage to kill a serpent, and with a piece of scrap metal, no less?  Mah’tu had seen better trained, better armored Yautja fall to serpents, and yet…
He knows what it means to kill one of the kiande amedha.  The Yautja revere them as the ultimate prey, and to kill one is a feat to be celebrated. 
He does it with little thought:  the ceremony is ingrained in him, as it is ingrained in all of his kind.  To kill a kiande amedha means the ooman is Blooded by Yautja culture, so Mah’tu reaches down and drags a claw through the pooling acid blood of the serpent.  Then he reaches out to the ooman, who flinches away from him, makes a whimper of fear.  But he reaches out his other hand to grasp the filthy face.  He holds her still and traces a small mark onto her forehead that makes her cry out at the sting of the blood as it scars her. 
He marks the ooman—you—as Blooded.  In Yautja culture, it means you are an adult, capable of Hunting alone.  But more than that, it marks you as a full member of the clan, and given the strange circumstances of this moment—Earth, a xenomorph infestation—he marks you as his clan.
When the crackle comes through his comms that his fellow Yautja have arrived, that the military oomans of this sector have loosed a missile of some sort to level this infestation, Mah’tu again acts with little thought.  This is ingrained in him too:  marked as his clan now, he grabs your wrist, tugs you to the roof of the building, and narrowly escapes with you before your settlement is leveled by your government.
He realizes what he’s done once the ship is safely away from your star system.  He’s marked you as Blooded, as his clan, which means you’re his responsibility now.
-----
A famous ooman once wrote that the course of true love never did run smooth.  Mah’tu, without the benefit of any sort of literature course in his Yautja education, never heard the quote, but it doesn’t make it untrue.
Who would have thought the cringing little ooman would be so relentlessly furious at him, once the fact of her situation became clear to her?
Reason must flee your little skull.  There is nowhere for you to go unless out of the airlock into the void of space, yet you fight him.
Or you try to.
The first night you attack him, Mah’tu is taken unawares.  Why would he ever think you’d try?  He’s sitting in the pilot’s seat of his ship when the sensitive appendages on his head alert him to someone behind him, but not quickly enough:  there’s a dull bloom of pain in his shoulder, and it comes accompanied by you yelling some ooman word he does not understand.
He turns in his seat and appraises you.  He takes in the fury on your face, as it cedes to confusion, then dejection.
From the meat of his shoulder, a small shank of metal is half-buried.  He pulls it out, the pain minuscule, the cut already mending.  He examines the weapon, a pathetic thing that you’ve found and tried to shape into something that could kill him.
It makes him chuckle, which sounds like a trilling to you.  Then he stands, takes your arm in his paw, and drags you back to the storage area he cleaned out to house you. 
“Stay,” he orders you, and he locks you in anyway.  He cannot know how you bristle to be ordered about as you would order a dog.
The second time you attack him?  You’ve loosened the bolts on a seat in the cockpit.  You must have been at it for hours at a time, working your feet against the fastenings while you slouched beside him and stuck the fleshy part of your mouth out in a pout.  Mah’tu bends in his seat to recalibrate a certain piece of equipment, and a moment later, the loosened chair smashes against his skull.
The chair breaks into several pieces.  His skull doesn’t break at all.
“God fucking dammit,” you breathe out as he straightens out, stands to his full height. 
He locks you in again, and as he drags you to your quarters, you try to punch him.  Your little fists aim for his face, his eyes, his throat, and they glance off of him with no effect.  You land a punch to his mouth and it cuts your hand.  Mah’tu smells the metallic tang of your blood as he tosses you into your cell.
He thinks on it a beat later, then tosses in a med-spray so you can heal your fragile ooman skin.
-----
From there, you change your tactics.  You abuse him verbally.  You narrow your eyes into slits and call him all sorts of names:  monster, alien, crab-faced motherfucker.  Slimy fucked-up lizard.
When he’s alone in his quarters, he must look up some of the words you use.  A crab, for example, is a harmless water creature on earth that oomans eat.  Mah’tu cocks his head, considers it.  Have oomans ever eaten a yautja before?  The records are silent on the matter. 
The verbal abuse is much like your physical abuse.  It glances off of him.  His kind have little capacity for metaphor, for simile or abstract thinking, so when you call him a “motherfucker” it does not bother him because you are wrong—he has never mated with his dam.  A silly thought.
-----
Your fury never seems to lessen, but it does cool into something more refined and less ruled by passion.  You finally seem to grasp that he means you no harm and that attacking him could leave you stranded in a star system your kind has never even heard of before.
You don’t try to attack him anymore, and your verbal assaults have lessened as well.  You still twist your too-soft mouth around into a look that means displeasure, and Mah’tu senses that you are assessing the situation.  Waiting for an opportunity to escape him.
So be it.  You may be a Blooded member of his clan now (a fact he must remind himself, as your behavior often puts him in mind of a youngling, rash and stupid), but he is your elder both in age and tradition.  He has followed all the protocols:  he’s alerted the head of his clan, who required several confirmations that yes, you were a ooman and yes, you had killed a kiande amedha.  He registers your DNA in the clan’s codex.  Lists both your ooman name and the Yautja one he chooses for you (his name means “Swift Judgment,” but yours translates roughly as “Vexing Thorn”). 
And though you are Blooded, as your elder, he takes up your training.  Against his judgment (swift or otherwise), it is protocol, so he trains you.
Wisely, he starts by teaching you defensive moves.  Why put a blade or worse, a plasmacaster, in your twitchy little paws?
If he hadn’t seen the evidence of your killing the kiande amedha, Mah’tu would doubt it now.  Even accounting for the general weakness of oomans, their lack of speed or agility or flexibility, you are terrible.  Your reflexes…do you even have reflexes? 
Mah’tu shows you how he’ll attack you, he shows you how to counter, he comes at you at quarter-speed, and still you fail.  You take his punches, his slaps, the sweeps of his leg, and you always end up on the mat in the training room of his ship.
As your elder, he tries to give you helpful advice.
“You are very slow,” he tells you.  “Move faster.”
His advice is not well received.  “Fuck you,” you spit from your place on the floor, wheezing as you try to catch your breath.
Mah’tu shakes his head.  “No, you must train more.  How will you ever join the Hunt?”
“I’m not a hunter, asshole!”
“You are Blooded.”
“I’m a goddamned dispatcher at a heating and cooling company!”
He considers this—he did not know that the oomans could control the weather or environment in this way.  He will add it to the codex so that other Yautjas may investigate it.  But it likely will not help you on the Hunt.
He holds his hand out to you, and you glare at him for a long moment before you take it and allow him to haul you back onto your feet.
“Again,” he says.  “I will attack you from the front, and you must feint and then counter by striking me low on my arm.”  He pauses and adds, “I will go as slowly as I can.”
You make a growling noise in the back of your throat.  “Fuck. You,” you grit out, but you change your stance as he shows you.
A second later, you’re on your back again, but at least you land a blow before Mah’tu puts you on the floor.  Your weak little fist glances off his arm, but he is feeling generous and counts it as a win for you.
-----
At his next Hunt, Mah’tu judges that you are not prepared, so he leaves you behind at base camp.  He’s not concerned that you’ll try to escape:  if you run off, he’ll easily track you.  If you try to steal the ship, you won’t get far, as you don’t know how to fly it.
“Stay here,” he orders anyway, and you do that thing with your too-close eyes where they move in their sockets.  He believes it may mean you are displeased, but most of your expressions seem to mean that.
“Aye, aye, captain.”
He shakes his head, touches his hand to his chest.  “No, I am Mah’tu.  Not cap-tan.”
You do the thing with your eyes again.  “It’s an expression.  Sarcasm, in this case.”
He tilts his head, and you clarify, “a kind of joke.”
Ah.  He nods, then turns back to his weapons.  He inspects them one last time, then holsters them on his body.  The different blades, the net-gun, the darts and spear.
“I will return victorious.  You will stay here, little sain’ja.”
You scowl at the nickname but say nothing, and Mah’tu doesn’t tell you that it means “warrior.”  It is a jest because you are no warrior.  A kind of joke, as you’d say.
-----
It is a successful Hunt.  It brings him much honor and new trophies. 
You are unimpressed, but when he strings up his kills and begins to clean the skulls, you make an injured noise and dart to the edge of camp to retch.  The retching goes on and on, so much so that Mah’tu pauses in his efforts to check on you.
“You are ill?” he asks.  “You have eaten something poisonous, perhaps?”
“No, you fucking psycho!”  You stand up, swipe the back of your hand along your mouth.  “You killed those creatures just for their skulls?”
“Oomans kill for trophies as well,” he points out reasonably.
“Yeah, but we also eat the meat.  Venison, turkey, whatever.  Some humans, you know, use all of the animal.  The skin and horns and stuff.”
Ah, a misunderstanding.  It’s bound to happen.  Mah’tu puts his hand on your shoulder and lowers his head to show he is sorry for not explaining better.
“Do not worry,” he tells you.  “We will eat these creatures’ flesh as well.”
You blink at him, and then you turn away quickly to retch again.  Perhaps there was a misunderstanding, but perhaps you are ill as well. 
“I will get you a med-kit,” he tells you.  “It will cure your illness quickly.”
“Dude, really?”  You heave again, but your stomach seems to be empty of any contents.  “Honestly, fuck you.”
-----
Living with you is never easy, but it does reach moments of ease, especially when considering how you tried to kill him at first.
He trains you, or tries to.  You do get stronger, leaner.  You lose some of the ooman softness you had, and through your spat-out cursing, Mah’tu learns small details of your life on earth.  How, for example, your role as weather-shaman was a passive one that entailed a lot of sitting and little movement.  You apparently were a leader of sorts, ordering other weather-shamans on where to go to bring heat or coolness to other oomans. 
There is a limit to your abilities as a fighter, though, and you reach them quickly under his tutelage.  You can block many of his attacks, and you can land a blow occasionally, but in twenty sparring sessions, you are lucky to draw his blood once. 
He finds that the sparring helps to spend your general fury at him, and the time afterwards—your muscles trembling, your body fatigued and bruised—is almost pleasant.  Mah’tu has always been interested in the ooman civilizations, and when he asks his questions, you usually answer them honestly.
“Who were your sire and dam?” he asks.
“My mom and dad?”
“Yes.”
“Then say ‘mom’ and ‘dad,’ you weirdo.”
This is how Mah’tu learns that word choice is important to oomans, that your species uses words to differentiate things that are essentially the same thing.
“I never knew my dad.  He took off before I was born.  My mom was an alcoholic.  She died when I was twenty.”
“You did not know which clan sired you?”
You narrow your eyes at him.  “Fuck you.  I knew my dad’s name, but that was it.”
“Did you share your si…dad and mom with others?”
That, for some reason, makes your mouth turn up at the corners, your lips curved upwards.  “We call those siblings.  Brothers and sisters.  And no, I was an only child.”
“Ah.”  Mah’tu nods knowingly.  “Your dad was not worthy to sire many oomans.”
And that, for some reason, makes you laugh.  It doesn’t sound like a Yautja’s laughter, but it isn’t unpleasant, Mah’tu finds.
“Mom would have liked that.  Not worthy.  Well, the bastard never paid a cent of child support anyway.”
-----
The two of you continue like this:  misunderstanding each other, clarifying what confuses the other, navigating your two separate species and cultures.
It’s not easy, but it grows easier with each passing moment.  He no longer has to lock you in your room each night, as you no longer try to escape.  He no longer fears your fury (not that he feared it much anyway), so he doesn’t keep such a close eye on you.
He deems you worthy of a blade.  He knows you’ll likely never be trained to a level of plasmacaster, but a small blade, designed and weighted for your size and strength seems appropriate for the rare Blooded ooman.
He spends long hours in his workshop crafting it for you.  His sire was a renowned weapons master, and he passed his skills onto all of his offspring.  Mah’tu forges the metal, hones the edge to such a sharpness that it could split one of the hairs on your head.  He carves the handle to fit your hand perfectly, and finally, he tools a fine sheath out of leather, because he worries that you’ll cut yourself sooner than you’ll cut an enemy.
On the leather sheath, he picks out the symbols for your Yautja name.  His Vexing Thorn.
-----
Mah’tu learns much from you, and he adds all of it to the great shared codex of information so that other Yautja may know and learn.
Your mention of child support, for example.  It is a thing that a sire must use to support his offspring—money, which is the paper goods that represents wealth.  He questions you heavily on this point; Yautja honor is derived from the Hunt, but ooman honor seems to come from which of your species can acquire the most of those paper goods.  It determines who may live in a fine home and who may starve, and when he explains it back to you—to make sure he understands it correctly—you stare at him, then nod.
“I mean, basically.”  But then you try to explain a thing called a stock exchange, and a thing called capitalism, but when he presses certain points, you get confused too.
“I dunno, dude.”  You throw your hands up, a gesture of helplessness.  “I never went to college, and if I had, I wouldn’t have majored in economics.”
-----
Early on, he calibrates to the ebb and flow of your body, and the questions he asks you in regards to your biology is what makes you the most anxious.  Through his bio-mask, he can see how the heat courses to your face.  He can hear your heartbeat increase in cadence, but he cannot understand why you respond in such a way.  A body is a body.  It’s systems and rhythms are what they are.
“You are injured,” he tells you, early.  He’s still locking you in at night, and you’re still scowling at him and calling him, among other things, a fucking lizard asshole. 
“’m not,” you reply.
He breathes the air of the cockpit.  “I smell blood.”
The heat floods your face; it shows white-hot in his mask.  “Shut up.”
“If you are injured—”
“I said I’m not.”
“If you are bleeding, I can get a med-kit—”
“Fuck, dude!  I’m on my period, okay?”
Mah’tu tilts his head and thinks back to the rudimentary studies he’d read about oomans.  “Ah, you are menstru—”
You cut him off with another scowl, but your eyes fix on the stars in front of you outside of the cockpit.  “And by the way, having one’s period in deep space is not as fun as it sounds.  I bet Princess Leia never had to worry about it.”
He does not understand your ire.  “Is this Princess Leia a famed statesman on your planet?” he asks, kindly as he can, but you cut him an icy glare and launch yourself out of your chair and out of the cockpit.
You manage to toss a strained “fuck you” over your shoulder before you leave, as you often do.
-----
So Mah’tu comes to understand the seasons of your body.  He also comes to understand how your feel about those seasons.  He does not mention when you are on your period, though he can tell.  He is sure to give you more privacy, and that helps ease the strain between the two of you.
But with other things, your face does not get inflamed.  When your head aches, or when you twist a joint in sparring, you are free with discussing these things with him.  When you feel hunger or thirst, when you require a blade to trim away the excess hair that grows from your head.  When you feel tired.  You share these things with him.
The only other thing  you don’t share is when you are in heat.  Mah’tu can tell that too, can scent you when your heat is upon you.  It runs in the same rhythm as your period does, the two part of the same cycle that seems to come every thirty or day earth days.
It happens so often, he thinks.  Yauja females only have a handful of heats in their entire long lives, yet you could spawn eleven or twelve oomans in one earth year.  His mind is baffled by the math of it until he checks the codex and learns that no, oomans do not spawn that much.  Despite their numerous heats, they only produce roughly the same number of pups as a Yautja female would. 
Mah’tu sighs and leans back in his seat once he reads that.  He has so much to learn.
The next section in that part of the codex details observed ooman mating rituals, and below that, known instances of Yautja and ooman mated pairs. 
It is the latter that makes Mah’tu lean forward, then glance over his shoulder, then lean forward more:  a furtive move that would put one in mind of a teenaged human boy looking at pornography for the first time, though of course Mah’tu would not know that.
*****
Sometimes you wonder if you were in an accident that has left you in a deep coma somewhere.  How else can you explain the hell that broke loose that night, your small town overrun by monsters?
And how else can you explain the monster who…what?  Kidnapped you?  Saved you?  Because he stole you away from home, but you also saw that mushroom cloud from the porthole in his ship.  Did earth even still exist?  If you could escape, where would you go?
It’s easier to imagine this all as a fever dream.  A coma.  Some consequence of a broken brain throwing out insane story lines around monsters and aliens and space travel to worlds you couldn’t even fathom.
But then reality comes rushing back at you, usually in the form of the giant beast named Mah’tu, swiping at you or tripping you or hitting you with the dull blades of his goddamned fucking spaceship dojo.
Then you realize, arm or leg throbbing, bruise forming on your stomach, eye swelling shut or lip split:  this is no coma.  It’s real life.
-----
He doesn’t kill you.  You learn, over time, it’s because you killed one of those disgusting black things with the giant head full of teeth.  He had traced its blood onto your head, and you finger the scar sometimes when you struggle to sleep at night.
“You are Blooded,” he explains, like you know what the fuck that means.  “You are a member of my clan now.”
Great.  Wonderful.  You finally had a found family of giant lizard aliens.
You try to explain it to him.  Killing that thing was dumb luck.  It was some animal instinct, flailing as it cornered you.  Your hand had found the piece of metal, and the monster came at you, and you had swung in a move of self-preservation. 
“Dumb luck,” you tell him.
But his beady little eyes shine at you, and he lays a heavy paw on your shoulder.  “A warrior’s instinct,” he corrects you.
You snort.  You, a fucking warrior.  You barely passed gym class in high school, cringing during dodgeball, puking during the timed mile run. 
“A mistake,” you counter.
He shakes his head.  “Fate.”
-----
It’s not terrible.  You’re no warrior, but your childhood with an unsteady mother left you with the ability to adapt pretty easily.
He trains you, or tries.  He goes hunting for his psycho room of trophy skulls, but he doesn’t force you to eat the raw, dripping meat he harvests.  He takes the time to feed you a fruit-type stew, great chunks of roasted vegetables, some kind of flatbread.  You recognize the hypocrisy of it—you loved a good burger on earth—but now you’re a vegetarian by default.
He gives you your own space, a narrow storage closet that he cleans out and makes a little nest of furs.  When you hurt too much or get sick, he administers some sort of alien medicine that heals you and gives you a boost of energy, like you imagine old-style Coca-Cola used to do when they made it with a little cocaine.
So you endure, and sometimes—you’ll never admit it to him, the goddamned asshole who stole you away from home—sometimes, you actually enjoy this new life.  When the stress of work and debts and making rent each month and trying to save up for a new car fall away, when you are whittled down to a more essential sort of life, you find that your anxious mind calms. 
You find that you sleep pretty well in that nest of soft furs, all things considered.
-----
The training, though.
The goddamned training.
He is unfailingly patient, at least.  He never once gets frustrated when you fail to move the right way.  In the rare off-chance you land a blow on him, his happiness is outsized, like a parent crowing when their toddler takes their first steps.
It should be humiliating, but sometimes his praise makes you smile in spite of yourself.  You know he’s humoring you, but still.  You’ll take your wins where you can get them.
The problem with your handful of training successes, though, is that he thinks you ready for more.  He introduces weapons with dull blades.  Today, you’re training with some fucking spear thing, and he raps you over and over with his own.  A stinging blow across your knuckles.  A stab to your belly that lands like a punch.  Finally, a curt jab to your ankle that strikes you right on your ankle bone, and you hit the ground with a shriek at the pain that crackles like lightning from your foot.
“Asshole!” you wheeze.  You pull yourself into a fetal position on your side, and you pull your injured foot up towards you.  You flex your foot.  It doesn’t seem broken, but you know it will bruise.  And you know he’ll make you swallow a vial of whatever healing shit he has, and the bruise will heal within the day, and tomorrow you’ll be back here, tears leaking out of your eyes as you stare up at him.
“You were supposed to move to the left.”  He tilts his head, studies you.  “You stepped into my blow instead.”
“Fuck you!”  You spit it out with all the venom you can muster.  Sparring is as much choreography as it is strength and speed, and guess what?  You’ve never danced in your life, aside from some drunken flailing at bars and wedding receptions when you were younger.
At your words, though, he tilts his head the other way, and his bright yellow eyes bore into you.
“Not now,” he replies.  “Perhaps when you are in heat next.”
That immediately takes your mind from the throbbing in your ankle.  You gape at him, and he stares down at you wordlessly.  Did you misunderstand him?  It seems a miracle he can speak at all, and English at that, but he is very literal. 
“What?” you finally manage to choke out.
“If we are to mate, we should wait until you are in heat again.”  He says it so matter-of-factly, and you can feel the blood flooding your face and neck.
“I don’t—”
“It will be upon you in four or five earth days.”
You uncurl yourself and sit up.  “How the fuck do you know that?”
“I can smell you.”
You curl your nose in disgust.  “Oh, gross.  You can smell me?  You sound like a fucking serial killer.  Hannibal Lecter in space.”  You struggle to your feet, and when he reaches out his hand to help, you bat it away.
He tilts his head again, but now there is a question in his eyes.  “Is this a misunderstanding, little sain’ja?  You have said numerous times you would like to mate with me.”
“The fuck I have!”
“Is that not what it means, when you say ‘fuck you’?  The codex indicates that ‘fuck’ means ‘to mate.’”
You gape at him again.  Then you close your eyes, pinch the bridge of your nose.  You take a deep breath.  He’s not wrong.  You’ve said ‘fuck you’ a thousand times to him.  Goddamnit.
You keep your eyes squeezed shut, and you manage to say as politely as you can, “yes, it’s a misunderstanding.”
You hear the huff he breathes out, the low growl, and then he replies, “another instance of ooman words meaning different things, then.”
“Yeah, update the codex, dude.”
“I will.”  A beat, and then he adds, “this Hannibal Lecter.  Is he a great warrior in your species?”
-----
The problem is, once he says it, you can’t get it out of your head.
Why do you seem more open to it as time passes?  You read once that Stockholm Syndrome wasn’t real, but perhaps it is and you have some version of it.  Or maybe you’re just lonely, and had been lonely before you got kidnapped by him, or saved by him, depending on the lens you took on the matter.
It’s true that you had been in a dry spell on earth.  You lived in a small town with few prospects.  Everyone your age was already paired up, many married with kids.  You and your ex had broken up a year before the alien invasion, and you’d had no dates in the interim, no offers, no tempting moments with another person.
And anyway, your ex hadn’t been that great.  It had been a relationship of convenience until you had gotten wise to the fact that life with him was not convenient at all.  The sex was mediocre at best, he was always borrowing money from you, and never rinsed his toothpaste down the drain when he brushed his teeth.
He never got you anything as a gift either.  Mah’tu, in comparison, crafted a custom knife for you…which isn’t exactly a necklace from Tiffany’s, but there is no other knife like yours in the known universe, either.
He’s also considerate to your temperament, your likes and dislikes.  He makes sure you have food you’ll eat.  He does his skull-cleaning grossness out of sight now.  More than once, he’s taken a detour to a planet just to show it to you, just to watch you stand on alien soil and gape like an idiot at flora and fauna that no other human has ever seen.
The craziest thought you’ve ever thought:  maybe this fucking alien is the closest thing to a healthy relationship I’ve ever had in my life.
“You’ve lost it,” you whisper in the darkness of your quarters one night.  “You’ve lost your goddamned mind.”
Because you lie there for a long moment, thinking about it, and you find that you don’t need to be in heat (the word alone makes you groan in disgust) to feel the sharp knife of desire lance through your belly at the thought of him.
-----
One night, around the fire of a planet where he’s hunting, you ask him.
“Why did you save me?”  You watch him as he looks up from polishing his knife.  He seems to consider his answer.
“Because you are Blooded, in my clan.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t have to do that.”
He shakes his head, the dread-like things on his head moving as he does.  “It is required.  You killed a kiande amedha.”
“I’ve told you, that was an accident.  Dumb luck.”
“Many Yautja die in the attempt to kill one.”
“But I’m no warrior.  I could never kill another.”
He makes a low trill, which seems to be his version of a chuckle.  “No.  But you only need kill one to be Blooded.”
You look down at your hands.  They are calloused now from all the training, the nails trimmed short.  “So it’s just that, then?  Just dumb luck that got me here?”
“Not only that, little sain’ja.  You could have killed me but did not.”
“So you owe me?”
“No.  There is no debt.”  He pauses.  “Why do you question me?”
You lift your hands in a helpless gesture.  “I dunno.”
“The codex says that oomans often question their fate.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” you snort.  “I just was curious.  I thought maybe it was that thing, you know.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
“You think I brought you here because we mutually aided each other against the serpents?”
You nod.  “Sure.”
Mah’tu shakes his head again, and he chuckles in his way.  “No, little sain’ja.  I brought you here because you are Blooded in my clan.  I’ve kept you with me because I enjoy your presence.”
It’s not Shakespeare, you suppose, but it’s a sweet sentiment, in his own sort of way.
*****
There is a series of Hunts, and Mah’tu fails in one, succeeds in the others.  His trophy room has much more Honor added to it, though you remain unimpressed by his prowess.
“Gross,” you say when you peek in at it.
He points to the long skull of the kiande amedha, the one he killed to become Blooded.  “Had we more time, I would have beheaded yours so you could keep your trophy.”
You make a face and lift a hand to touch the scar on your forehead.  “I think I have plenty to remember it, but thanks.  If I ever end up back home, I’ll need to look up a plastic surgeon to handle this.”
It takes some explaining what you mean, but when Mah’tu grasps your meaning, he is outraged.  You think the mark makes you unworthy.  Ugly, you say.
“It marks you as worthy.  A special ooman,” he spits out.  “The others of your kind would be fools to not see you as such.”
Normally, you’d do that thing with your eyes, but instead you study him.  Stare at him, steady and unblinking.  Finally you say, “you may be the only creature who sees me that way.”
He huffs.  “Then I am the only creature with eyes to see and a brain to think.”
-----
He is not sure what changes with you.  Perhaps you only needed time to adapt to life with him.  Oomans, he knows, are highly adaptable.
You have stopped the verbal abuse entirely.  You make an earnest attempt when training, and by applying yourself, you earn the right to learn the net-gun.  You earn your own bio-mask, and Mah’tu labors over it for several star cycles.  You have such a tiny skull, and your eyes are so far apart.  It must be custom made.
You join him on a Hunt.  It is just a small one, a training to whet a new spear he has made.  The prey is hardly worthy, but Mah’tu uses the opportunity to teach you how to stalk, how to move silently, how to be still and watch.  You are much better at that than you are at fighting, and though you kill nothing on your first Hunt, you earn Honor for yourself by successfully stalking a herd of very jittery prey.  They never once suspect you, and Mah’tu trills in pride when he sees you get close enough to reach out and touch one.
That night around the fire, he gives you much praise.  You like that, he finds—you duck your head as if ashamed, but it is to hide your smile.  Which means you are pleased. 
“Had you been a moment quicker, you could have killed one,” he tells you.  “Though it would be a small skull.  Our younglings often kill them to learn their blades.”
You laugh.  “Oh, fuck you.  Our younglings.  Yeah, yeah, I get it.  This weak-ass human is less skilled than a Yautja infant.”
That phrase again.  He knows what it means now, though he was greatly disappointed that it wasn’t what he thought.  Still, he bristles; he sits up straighter and looks at you when you say it, and when you realize what you’ve done, you give him a sheepish look.
“Be at ease,” he says.  “I know what you mean.”
Incredibly, you lower your head, and he sees no smile there.  You kick your foot in the dirt, scuffing it, and you mumble, “maybe I meant it the other way.”
“Which way?”
You groan, and you place your hands over your face.  He isn’t wearing his bio-mask, but he can guess that your face is inflamed. 
“Don’t make me say it.”  The words are muffled, and your voice is tight.
“Say what?”
“Ugh, the gross way you phrase everything.  You know what I mean.”
“I do not, little sain’ja.”  Though he does—it is a lie to say he does not understand.  As you’d say, it’s a kind of joke.  Pretending one thing when another is true.  A ooman sort of jest.
“You know what I mean.  Fuck’s sake, I mean mating.”  You whisper the last word, make it small in your mouth, but he hears it anyway.
He wonders what changed in this respect too, but he can consider it later.  “We should wait until your next heat is on you.”
That makes you squawk, a sound of outrage.  “Absolutely not!  I’d never survive it if I got pregnant!”
He chuckles at your horror.  “There would be no risk.  There are no Yautja-ooman hybrids.  It is an impossible thing.”
You sag in relief.  “Then why wait?”
“We cannot if you are not in heat,” he points out.
Now it is your turn to laugh at him, and then Mah’tu has another clarification to add to the codex:  oomans can mate nearly any time, any place, so long as the mood is upon them.
As it turns out, the mood is upon you now, and Mah’tu is grateful that his face does not show his emotions as blatantly as yours does—otherwise, you may see how he is flustered, then aroused in equal measure.
*****
He would take you outside, you think, but you douse the fire and lead him back into the ship.  For one, you don’t want this to be out in the open, where any creature could witness. 
For another, you want to be as close as possible to his array of med-kits and healing sprays.  God knows how this is going to work.  He’s bigger than you in every way possible.  It may not work at all.
He seems confused, but he lets you lead him.  You, for once, hold your hand out to him.  He makes a low trill, and takes it, and he follows you into the ship.  You start to lead him into your quarters by habit, but he stops, tugs you towards his.
“More space,” he says.
In his quarters, he only stands and watches you.  Waits for you to make a move.  Which is novel, for you:  you’re used to letting your partner lead, though your partner up until now has exclusively been a disappointing and generally clueless human male.
“Um.”  You kick off your boots.  You fiddle with the hem of your shirt, then take a breath and pull it off, as quick as you can.  “How do you usually?”
That curious head tilt of his.  “Usually what?”
You swear to god that he’s toying with you.  His stupid face gives nothing away, but he’s not usually so dense.
“How do your kind mate?”  You undo the snap on your pants, the zipper, and you push them over your hips.  You kick them off, peel out of your socks, and stand in front of him in your underwear.
They mate like they do everything else:  with ceremony, rules, customs, elaborate steps that either mean honor or dishonor.  They mate due to some confusing clan alliance, and the mating is always towards breeding the next generation of Yautja.  They don’t generally mate for pleasure, though of course it is pleasurable to mate, he explains.
“But you are not beholden to those customs,” he adds.  “As you cannot add glory to our clan by breeding with me.”
“Noted.”
“Even if we could have offspring, they would be very weak.”
“I said I got it, thanks.”
While he gives his explanation, he strips too.  He lays aside his greaves, his gauntlets, his weird footwear.  The data pad he wears on his wrist.  The fine netting of his invisibility tech.  The thick belt that holds more weaponry than Batman’s setup.  He leaves his loincloth-thing on, though, and stands to look at you.
He makes no move.  You give him a long moment to lead, but when he only stands and watches you, you decide to lead.
You bridge the few steps between you, and this close—sans most of your clothing and most of his—the size difference has never been more stark.  Hell, the difference in your damned species has never been more stark.  He’s objectively ugly, you suppose.  You must be just as ugly to him, but you wonder if he finds you as fascinating as you find him?
He's a greyish green at first glance, but you’ve noticed that his coloring depends on the light.  Sometimes he looks more like a gem, glimmering a darker green like an emerald.  Now, in the lower light of his berth, he shimmers almost iridescent. 
You’ve touched him plenty in the training sessions, so you know that your first impression (cool and slimy) is incorrect.  His skin is dry, warm to the touch.  You reach out a tentative hand and lay it on one of his massive pectoral muscles, and when you do, he lays his own hand over yours.  Engulfing it.
“How do your kind mate?” he asks, and honestly?  He kinda nails the bedroom voice because he lowers his register and growls it, and the sound makes the ache between your legs grow stronger.
Who knew he had it in him?
You think on how to answer him, but he adds, “show me, little sain’ja.”
*****
It takes much of his strength to not overpower you.  He can smell your arousal, sharper even than when you’re in your heat.  He can hear your heartbeat growing faster, can hear your breathing getting a harsh edge to it.  Mostly, though, it’s just his instinct to want to fight you, to submit you to him.  To treat you like a Yautja female, really.
But you’re not Yautja.  The sight of you in your thin underthings is proof of that.  Your fragile skin has no variations aside from a few scars.  Your fleshy mouth, your too-wide eyes, the strange lifeless hair that sprouts from your head…he should find you repellent, but when you touch him, he leans into the sensation of your hand on his chest.
He orders you to lead.  He does not want to hurt you, so he puts the moment in your hands.
You pause, considering your moves.  Thoughtful of what to do in order to make this work.  You nod then, and remove the remainder of your clothing, and Mah’tu takes in what has been hidden from him:  your breasts, despite having no younglings to nourish.  The curls that cover your sex.  You gesture to him, and he removes his loincloth, and your already-wide eyes go wider to the point where he fears they may fall out of your skull.
“Fuck,” you breathe out.
He nods.  “Yes.”
You laugh at him, and it’s the merry version, not the frustrated kind.  “We have to go slowly.”
“Yes.”
“I mean it.  You have to….”  You pause, and he hears the way you swallow as you study him.  “You’ll basically have to not move until I, uh, get used to it.  Once we…start.”
Another nod.  “Yes.  I understand.”
"But you can, uh, touch me. If you want. Before we start."
He lies down on his furs when you tell him to, and you approach him carefully.  You cast a wary eye on him as you kneel beside him, then shuffle closer.  He takes a hand and chances to touch one of your curves, the one from the dip in your waist to the swell of your hip, and you like that.  He can smell the way your arousal blooms, so he continues touching you.  Slowly.  Carefully.  He leads you to lie down beside him, and he touches all the parts of you he never has touched in your training sessions.
Each place is a revelation.
Your breasts are soft, malleable, yet they are tipped with firm nipples.  He molds his hands around the shape of them, which makes you moan, but when he skates a blunt nail carefully over each nipple, one and then the other, you part your lips and swear at him.
“Fuck’s sake,” you say, and your voice is tight, like you’re pained.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No.  God, no.”  Another hard swallow.  “That’s…that’s good.  You can do that again.”
So he does.
Oomans, he finds, perhaps like their pleasure with a little pain, or even just the threat of it.  He is gentle with you, careful of his strength and his claws, but your arousal grows sharp when he draws a nail over your tender skin or when he wraps one hand around your neck to hold you still from your wriggling.
His exploration leads him lower, to the source of your arousal.  He slides a gentle finger between your legs, feels how hot you are, how wet you are, how the slick seeps out of you in anticipation for the joining with him.
All the same…
“Your sex is very small,” he mutters.  He drags the pad of one finger through your folds and finds your entrance.  He tests it, pushes it into you, and it goes fine with how wet you are, but a lone finger is nothing compared to his cock.  Still, when he breeches your entrance with his digit, he hears the breathy way you whisper his name.  Better, he feels how your sex twitches against him.  Like it seeks to draw him in deeper.
So he adds a second finger, which makes you curse, but it is much the same.  The same twitching from the smooth muscles of your sex.  A fresh pulse of wetness coats his fingers, and he pushes them in, draws them out, mimics mating in this way.  Spreads his fingers inside you, to stretch you in preparation.
“God,” you whisper.  “Please, don’t stop.  Keep…keep doing that, okay?”
He nods.  He’s an eager pupil, and you can teach him this.  A moment later he feels it:  your tiny hand, fumbling for his cock.  Circling your slender fingers around his girth.  You have little strength but it’s enough to give him pleasure, and he wonders how much is due to your grip and how much is due to the fact that it’s you, his Vexing Thorn, gripping him there.
“This gives you pleasure?” he asks.
“Yes.”  You hiss it, draw the word out.  With your other hand, you reach down yourself and show him another part of you, a firm little bud also slick with your arousal, just above your entrance.  “If you, you know, touch that carefully.  Rub it?  Carefully.  It will be…ah, fuck, yes.  Like that.  Just like that.”
As he works his hand, he feels you relaxing.  Loosening.  You are still very small, but it seems more likely that you can take him now, so he keeps going, and you writhe against him, stroke him as you whine out all sorts of words he’ll have to study later. 
You reach some point where you deem yourself ready, and you push his hand away.  You take your own hand from him, and he grumbles in disappointment, but then you are on him, on top of him, pushing him back, and he lets you.
“Are you okay with this?” you ask.  You straddle him, and he feels the hot slick of you pressed against the length of him.  “I mean, I don’t know the politics of this.  Is this even consensual?”
“Explain your question more.”
You sigh, but you also slide against him, your lower body moving back and forth in small motions as your hands brace on his stomach.  He feels how you’re coating him in your arousal, and the mechanics of it make sense.  If your sex is slick and his is as well, it will make the mating easier—
“I mean, we never reviewed consensual sex with other species in high school sex ed.”
“I do not understand.”  He grips the fat of your ass, you’re so soft there, and he urges your movements.  There is pleasure even in this, and he feels himself growing harder underneath you.
“Am I…fuck, I don’t know how to say it without just saying it.  Is this what you want?  Am I coercing you for sex?”
He chuckles under you, trills deep and long.  “Little sain’ja, how could you coerce me?  You are so weak.”
You pout, the fleshy lower lip of yours stuck out and wet.  “Asshole.”
“I could throw you off me in an instant.  I could be on top of you before you could even blink.”
That makes a fresh beat of arousal pulse out of you, coating him more.  He notes it.  Perhaps you would find pleasure underneath him, just as he is enjoying being underneath you.
“Okay, yeah.  Good.  So we’re good, then.”
“This is what I want,” he clarifies to your question.  “You can feel how I strain to seat myself in you.”
“Well, then.”  You gaze at him a beat longer, but you shift, reach your hand down.  You grasp him at the root of his cock, and you lift yourself up enough to slot the flared head of him against your entrance.
“I mean it.  Please don’t move at all until I tell you.  This is…”  You trail off, and your pink tongue darts out to lick your lips.  “This is a lot.”
He nods.  “I will not move until you order me to.”
At that, you begin to lower yourself onto him.
It goes so slow.  It must, despite your arousal.  You are so small, and he is large, but your anatomy is such that it can take far more than he thought.  But it must go slow, so your sex can adapt to him.  Wonderful, adaptable oomans:  your sex twitches and grabs at his cock as you work yourself onto him, but he enters you bit by bit, and you breathe deep and mumble curses, but you also groan at what you’re feeling, and it sounds like a pleasurable noise to him.
But you take him to the root, in time.  In time, you sit flush on him, no space between where he ends and you begin, and Mah’tu has never felt a mating like this in his long life.
“Fuck, I can feel you in my throat,” you whine, and you wriggle at where you sit on him.  It sends him a fraction deeper, and he can feel the end of his cock nestled against some inner part of you, though he assumes it is your womb and not your throat.  But he also assumes it is one of those things where you say a word and it means something else, but he doesn’t ask for clarification because he needs all of his strength to lie still and wait for your command to move.
It doesn’t come just yet.  You sit on him, the back of your thighs flush with his hips.  You don’t move much; you move and resettle, you wince and then move, and your tense face cedes to one of panting pleasure.  Little by little, you start to move:  lifting yourself off of him a fraction, lower yourself back down.  Your arousal keeps it as easy as it can be, and in moving, he feels your sex relax more, molding itself to the shape of him.
“Is this okay for you?” you whisper, and he nods his head.  He keeps his grip on your ass but only as a place to touch you, not to harry you along.  How can he describe what he’s feeling?  He has no tricky words like you do, and he fears his blunt speech may anger you.
If he could say what he’s feeling, it would simply be this:  that you’re his mate, and now that he’s felt this once, you’ll be his mate for life.  He would not give you to another, nor allow another to touch you, and if you wanted to return to earth, he’d go with you and find a way to live amongst the other weak, tricky oomans.
Eventually, you begin to move in earnest.  Riding him in a steady rhythm:  raising off of him until only the broad crown of his cock is nestled in you, then sinking back onto him.  Over and over, in this way, your constant phrase of ‘fuck you’ is realized, and Mah’tu growls at this new way of mating.
“You can…you can move,” you finally tell him.  “But slowly, slow….ah, fuck!”
You don’t finish the thought because he moves.  Not as you expected, probably, but Mah’tu is a quick study.  He shifts one hand from where it kneads at the softness of your ass, and he draws the pad of his finger at where the small nub peeks out at the apex of your sex.  He rubs it carefully, mindful of his claw, and it makes your hips jerk against him.
“Yes, don’t stop.  Jesus, you’re….keep doing that.  Just that.”  The pace you’re riding him picks up in speed, and it makes your breasts bounce, drawing his gaze for a moment before it snaps back to where he disappears into the confines of your body.
“I’m close,” you tell him a moment later.
“Close to me?” he guesses.
You laugh, breathless.  “Close to coming.”
“Coming where?”
Another laugh, and your rhythm falters for a moment.  You reach out and steady your hand on his chest, and your face is perfectly relaxed, radiant in happiness, and Mah’tu thinks that even if you are ugly with your ooman features, he finds you beautiful.  Perfect.
“Close to…my pleasure,” you clarify, and you resume the quick pace of fucking him, riding him, drawing him into your body.
“Ah.”  He strokes the hot, swollen bud above where he slides into you, and he considers himself.  His own pleasure has been close for a while now, his seed close to bursting.  “I am close too, then, little sain’ja.”
“You can….come….with me.”  You’re panting now, pushing out your words in time to each time you reseat yourself.  A sheen of sweat glistens along your skin, making you look almost part Yautja in the low light.  “If you…want.  Want to…feel you.”
He nods.  “I will do as you ask.”
Another breathless laugh, but then you say no more, and he can only observe your body for any clues.  Ooman pleasure is blatant, he finds, because your sex gets wetter, and then you moan loudly.  Then your entire body seizes in a way, trembles and shakes above him, but your sex tightens against him like a fist, and it’s easy for his pleasure to break as well.  He feels it in a way he never has before, like a great wave carrying him towards you, and he spills inside you with a roar that must shake the walls of his ship.
-----
With Yautja mating, once it is complete, the two part.  If they meet again, it is only incidental, a consequence of sharing younglings.
So it is strange, how you nestle against him after you both reach your pleasure.  He remains nestled inside you, a snug fit that keeps his seed confined in your body—but you lean your upper body down onto him, nuzzle your face against his broad chest, and just lie there.
It is very strange.  But it is not unpleasant.  A beat after you settle, he places a hand on your back to hold you firmer against him.  Your skin is warm and soft under his palm, and he strokes you softly.
“I did not hurt you?” he asks after a long while of lying like this. 
“Only in the best way.”  Your mouth is near his skin, and he can feel your warm breath against him.
“Explain your meaning.”
“I’ll definitely be aching in the morning.”  You pause, seem to think on it.  “But it’s a good ache.  Like…the ache of training really hard.”
Mah’tu chuckles, and he drags the blunt tips of his claws along the skin of your back, which makes you squirm against him.  The motion makes his cock, only half-hard now, twitch back to life.
“You are much better at mating than training,” he tells you.
“Asshole.”  You turn your head against him, and he feels the blunt edge of your teeth.  You are biting him, but there is no pain.  The sensation—your wet mouth on him—makes his cock twitch harder, make the blood pool there to make him grow harder.
You can feel it.  You breathe against the wet spot you’ve put on his chest, but then he feels you move—a deliberate rocking, very carefully. 
He has many questions he’d like to ask you—other ways your kind mate, for example—but he saves them for later because the mood is upon you again, just as the mood is upon him.  And anyway, in the course of your second mating, some of his questions are answered by showing, and Mah’tu is an eager pupil.
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simonrileysfavteacup · 8 months ago
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The Scare
Pairing: Simon "Ghost" Riley x gf!reader
Word count: 1.2K
Warnings: Angst (ooooo, my first time writing angst), comfort, break in, attempted kidnapping, simon in ghost mode, graves being a pussy, simon being a good bf
Summary: You thought it was Simon, he had come home early from his mission, but there were 2 pairs of footsteps walking around your home.
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Everyone knew Lieutenant Riley was cold. He was ruthless, cruel, heartless, and so much more. 
But there was one thing that made him soft. One person. 
You. 
Barely anyone knew that the Lieutenant had picked himself up a hot little thing and managed to keep her. The two of you had been together for 3 years now and he was so close to proposing. He was ready to spend his life with you. He was ready to make you his and give you his last name. 
But what happens when someone who shouldn’t know about you finds out about you?
***
Graves knew. Somehow he knew. He mentioned your name to Simon, “Ghost, that is not nice. How would your pretty little (Y/N) think of that?”
Simon shivered. 
And then he realised. 
Graves was coming for you.
***
You were curled up in bed, music playing in the background as you read one of your favourite romance books Simon had bought you. The lights were off, a single three-wick Bath and Body Works candle on your bedside table. It was peaceful. Cosy. 
You were on the 15th chapter before you head footsteps and your front door opening. 
Simon isn’t supposed to be home yet.
You check your phone. 
Simon would’ve messaged if he was coming home.
There was no message. And he wouldn’t surprise you like this. 
You sit up, turning off the music. The footsteps are doubled. There’s two people. 
Simon wouldn’t come home with someone else. This wasn’t Simon walking around your apartment. 
With trembling hands, you reach for Simon’s hidden knife, concealed under his side of the bed. You clutch in it a sweaty palm, silent praying that the person walking around your apartment is a friend, not a foe. The footsteps get closer. You take a deep breath.
The doorknob jiggles. Your anxiety skyrockets. There’s murmurs before a foot hits the door. 
1 kick…
2 kicks…
3 kicks before the door finally busts open, shattering the lock. 2 men, dressed in black military uniform, hold up their guns to aim for your head. You suck in a breath. 
“That her?” The first man asks. 
“Think so. She fits the description,” the other one responds.
You shiver. They barely acknowledge you as they speak. 
One of them steps closer to you, reaching for the knife in your hand. You strike, stabbing his wrist through the jacket he wears. He yells, “Bitch stabbed me!”
He pushes you, reaching down to grab his wrist, pulling out the knife. The other one walks over while you’re distracted, talking a hold of your arms and tying them behind your back. You yell before you hear the sound of duct tape ripping. Within seconds, there’s a piece over your mouth. You try to yell. No use.
They begin to speak to each other fast, so fast you can barely catch their words. 
Help me…
The one you stabbed wraps up his wrist with a cloth, before picking up your legs. The other picks up your torso. 
You thrash around in their arms, trying to get free as you kick the one you stabbed, He holds your feet together with one hand, barking out a quick, “Stop it!”
He has an American accent, you notice. They carry you out of your bedroom as you continue to thrash around. They almost make it to the front door. 
But the door is wide open. And in the door frame stands a tree of a man, face covered by a mask of a skull. 
Simon…
Your eyes fill with tears of joy. 
Simon’s eyes are as dark as the night as he stares at the scene. 
The men immediately drop you, making you hit your head on the floor, a cry of pain dropping from your lips. Your vision goes blurry as you hear Simon step closer, fists clenched. 
You roll over onto your side, trying to get your hands out of their bonds, trying to grab your head to ease the pain. You suck in a sharp breath. Your vision stays blurry, barely making out the black blobs fighting in front of you. 
From the blobs you see, the one with the mask is bigger. And he’s winning. 
You think… 
One of the men drop down next to you, a new red blob on the ground making it’s way into your vision. You count to fifteen before the other man drops down too. 
You count to eight before you feel a hand pull the duct tape off your mouth. You let out a loud sob of relief. Simon…
He unties your wrists, gently massaging them as you roll over again, grabbing your head. You close your eyes as you let out cries of pain. 
It hurts. Your wrists hurt. Your mouth hurts. 
But the pain in your head is indescribable. It shoots from the back to the front, meeting at the centre of your forehead. It shoots back. And then back to the front again. And back again. And front again. And over and over. 
You can barely hear your cries anymore over the feeling of pain. 
A pair of arms pick you up bridal style, as if you weigh nothing. The black blob holding you takes you to the bedroom, setting you down on the bed. The blob walks away again. 
You count to thirty before it-he-returns, holding an ice pack, a glass of water, and a few advil pills. He sits on the edge of the bed, setting down the items. 
He takes off his mask, vest, gear, and everything else until nothing remains but a shirt and his tactical pants. Simon tips up your chin, placing one of the pills on your tongue, pushing it back with some water. “Swallow.”
You do as he says. 
A deep exhale leaves your body. 
He presses the ice pack to your head. “How bad is i’? Do I need to call a’ ambulance?” 
“N-no…” you blink back tears.
“You sure, lovie? ‘t was a bad fall,” he sighs, smiling sadly at you. “‘m so sorry ‘is happened to ya. Ya are the most important thin’ to me and Graves, bitch that ‘e is, took advantage of tha’. Soap and Gaz ‘re in the kitchen, gettin’ rid of the garbage. Tol’ them not to come in ‘ere. Ya need rest, okay? Bu’ don’ fall ‘sleep, ya migh’ have a concussion.” 
You nod to the best of your ability. He takes a hold of your hand, kissing your wrist. “‘M so so so sorry. Ya didn’ deserve ‘hat, okay? Ya so perfec’ and special to me…”
He looks down at the bloody knife on the ground.
“Ya try to protec’ yourself?” You nod in response to his words. “Good girl. Ya atleas’ did some damage…slowed them down enough jus’ in time for me to get ‘ere.” 
“Ho-how did you know I w-was in…” you don’t bother to finish your sentence. 
“Graves sai’ ya name to me. I took a guess ‘e was gone go for ya. Rushed here with the other three. They gone go on the mission without me. Need to stay ‘ere, make sure ya okay.” 
He presses a kiss to your forehead. You smile, softly. 
“Thank you…Si…” you nod. “For everything.”
“Always gone be there to save ya,” He nods. “When ya get bette’, I gone teach ya how to properly use that knife…and a few more things, just in case.”
“Sounds good, Si,” you hold back a giggle. 
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ghostaholics · 1 year ago
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𝐏𝐈𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄-𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐅𝐄𝐂𝐓
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➸ PAIRING: Lieutenant Simon 'Ghost' Riley x gn!reader (aside from a single idiom whose origin uses masculine language/pronouns - every man for himself) ➸ SUMMARY: Against all odds, the Lieutenant accidentally falls asleep on your shoulder. Unfortunately, there are witnesses to the precarious situation (just your luck that it would be Gaz and Soap). ➸ WORD COUNT: 2k
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𝐒𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐒𝐀𝐆𝐄 𝐀𝐃𝐕𝐈𝐂𝐄: don't poke the bear.
Danger in your line of work typically consists of trying to walk away from a mission while still being left completely intact (i.e. the goal is to make it out alive, in one piece). You’ve survived a great number of ordeals: cornered into a shootout with a dwindling supply of ammo, tiptoed your way through a field of pressure-sensitive IEDs, dove towards probable death (with an awfully high probability of splattering onto hot, concrete hell like a bug on a windshield) because your helo was sent tail spinning courtesy of a perfectly-aimed RPG – and really, the list goes on.
It's been child’s play, in the grand scheme of things. An extensive catalogue of life-or-death scenarios accounts for your entire military career. And sure, this might be a bit of a stretch, but you'd wager that none of those instances thus far have been as high-stakes as the current predicament you’ve found yourself in.
Jesus-fucking-Christ. Why’d Ghost have to fall asleep on you?
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𝐀 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐎𝐅 𝐂𝐀𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍: avoid sitting next to him on the plane ride home. You've had to learn it the hard way.
And the kicker is that this whole thing could’ve been avoided; it didn’t have to be your problem. You could’ve sentenced any one of the other soldiers to your seat. Every man for himself, right? Get off scot-free, have a normal trip back to base with plenty of legroom so that you’re not cramped. Theoretically, it would've been beautiful – a passenger's paradise, the closest you could get to a first-class ticket.
But no.
Instead, play the Good Samaritan; extend your hand out with an act of benevolence. What’s the harm, right? So, you'd spared the poor guy, said you wouldn't mind switching places with him because he'd looked as white as a damn sheet at the idea of being crammed beside this behemoth of a lieutenant who's infamously every FNG's living nightmare.
Yeah, well hindsight is 20/20. Had you known what was going to happen, you would've had no reservations about throwing him under the bus. Sayonara, mate.
Law of the jungle, plain and simple.
To make matters worse, he is, in fact, exhibiting terrible flight etiquette. His head (which is dead weight and feels about as pleasant as a fucking bowling ball, mind you) has taken up every inch of real estate on your shoulder and is practically tucked into the curve of your neck; you’ll need to take a trip to the chiropractor’s after this – several, probably. The edge of his skull mask is digging into you. And, the cherry on top: get this – he’s man-spreading, so his left leg's trespassing into your own territory and brushing against your thigh. Utter lack of regard for personal space.
Incredible.
You’d still rather die than wake him up, though. You're not sure what'll happen if you do, but that's a risk you're not willing to take.
All things considered, an achy shoulder is a much better alternative than incurring the wrath of one angry Lieutenant. He's more subdued in this kind of context. To be completely honest, if you weren't already well-acquainted with him, you'd find it endearing.
From here, it's easy to see the simple rise and fall of his chest, steady and even. Slow inhale in, slow exhale out. He's at peace, a rhythmic lull that matches your own breathing. You can't quite put your finger on the exact moment he fell asleep. (He's got a habit of shutting his eyes and folding his arms over his chest when he isn't in the mood to converse with the other soldiers onboard. But God willing, he would never voluntarily loll his head onto your shoulder.) For what it's worth, he deserves the rest – never been one to do it this soundly as countless missions have taught you that he's usually a light sleeper. You remember him roughly prodding the toe of his boot at Soap's arm once when the Scot was conked out and his snores were a bit loud for Ghost's taste.
Rather odd then, that the Lieutenant even managed to allow himself to doze off like this. It’s too loud, too unsteady – the droning of the plane engine doesn't exactly make for good white noise and the turbulence outside is jostling the cabin around. Moreover, this puts him in a position of vulnerability, and he’s not the type to let his guard down so easily.
But somehow he did it with you beside him.
You try not to think about the implications of that.
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𝐈𝐓 𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐒 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐒𝐄, 𝐎𝐅 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐒𝐄.
Because, Soap's just woken up from his nap, the first among the entire company of soldiers in the cabin still sleeping, excluding yourself. His seat's parallel to yours, straight across the walkway within direct line of sight, so he’s got an unobstructed view of you and Ghost. Soap sends a questioning glance in your direction, eyebrow quirked. A look that says, The hell's going on?
The level of your voice is down; it's at a conservative decibel to avoid rousing the others. Yet you convey your distress with the same amount of passion as if you were stuck in the middle of a losing firefight. "MacTavish, help."
Soap works with bombs for a living. Surely, he's capable of defusing situations too.
Alright the man’s a demolitions expert, but that’s semantics.
He blinks like he's trying to make sense of the situation. Though, it's pretty obvious what the problem is here. You're not sure why he’s got to take a moment and contemplate it. You need a solution, now. And he's moving at a snail's pace.
For a second, you think he might sympathize with your plight.
But then his mouth morphs into a shit-eating grin and when he nudges Gaz awake, you know right then and there that you're absolutely fucked.
More witnesses.
Great.
Because that’s just what you need, isn’t it?
Gaz drags a hand down his face. He pans over to his right to figure out why he’s been jolted awake so suddenly, and sees Soap who’s inexplicably, nauseatingly jovial before his eyes land on you.
Much like Soap’s original reaction, Gaz can’t help but offer a quizzical expression. The confusion is evident. His brows are drawn together because he knows that the L.t. wouldn't fall asleep on your shoulder.
Soap's shifting, sliding his hand into his pocket before pulling out his phone. He messes with it – a few taps here, a few swipes there. And then before you're registering what's happening, he's aiming it straight at you, like one of those mums getting a snapshot of their kids in matching jumpers during the holidays.
"Say cheese."
An indignant gasp leaves your mouth. "If you so much as—
"Soap, no. Don't do that." Gaz says from beside him, plucking the phone out of his hands. He tsks him with a click of his tongue. Stern disapproval in spades. The meaning is clear: it’s a big thumbs down from the Brit. He’s not endorsing this type of behavior. “Gone mad now, have you?” he asks in admonishment.
You release a sigh of relief. Finally, some moral support. He's reliable. Your faith in him is unshakable. Always could count on Gaz to get you out of—
"Have to shoot with a wide angle, see? Or else it'll look wonky," he corrects, flipping the phone horizontally before handing it back to Soap.
"Aye, thanks mate.”
Gaz's smile isn't as excessive as Soap's but the smirk gracing his face tells you he's relishing in your misery all the same.
Fucking traitor.
"Knobheads—"
They’d risk their own hides to save you from certain death. You've seen it in Cairo, Valencia, and Seoul. Good men. Good hearts in the right place as well. However, they're also the type to embarrass you at every opportunity – public humiliation being somewhere on that roster as well. And for that, you want to strangle them.
"Rude,” Soap comments pointedly.
"Bite me, MacTavish."
"Just wake him up if it's bothering you," Gaz supplies unhelpfully.
"If you were in my shoes, would you do it?"
"'Course, not," he snorts. "I don’t have a death wish.”
“Well, I also prefer my head on my shoulders, thank you very much," you whisper furiously, nearly hissing at him.
And Soap is admiring his handiwork, when he coos, “Aw, the two o' you make quite the pair." He briefly twists the screen so that you can catch a glimpse of it, and even from this distance, you can confirm that he's captured the shot. Annoyingly well, to add insult to injury. Angle? Spot-on. Lighting? Brilliant. It's interesting, has character. Black and white photography. He's managed to make a stunning composition and your upper lip is curling up into a sneer of disgust at his artistic eye. How infuriating.
"I'll send this to the Cap. He’ll get a kick outta it."
"Sod off."
"He'll appreciate bein' included."
Gaz matches the energy with an equally gleeful smile, now delighted by the idea. “Hey, and the L.t. he looks—”
“—cute," Soap has the audacity to finish for him.
What.
There are many words that you’d use to describe Ghost.
Cutthroat, maybe. Imposing. Glacial. Taciturn. A stringent set of ideals that makes him the perfect soldier: disciplined, honed, fierce. Intimidating, if he's not fighting on your side – someone you'd much rather have on your team than against, unless you fancied death. He can be a stone-cold terror on occasion. The man’s been penned as a walking horror story by those in the military. Given his iron-hearted demeanor, you'd be hard-pressed to disagree with that statement; there's not much room to call his steel-encased resolve into question.
So, yeah. Above all else, he's certainly not cute.
Your eyes narrow at them. "Congratulations, the both of you have officially made the top of my shitlist."
Soap, indifferent to your crisis, asks, "Want a copy for your wallpaper?"
There's another heated remark waiting on the tip of your tongue, because there's no way in hell that you would and you're ready to tell him off, about to give him an earful.
But somebody else beats you to it.
“Wipe that picture, or I’ll wring your bloody necks.”
Ice surges through your veins. Goosebumps break out across your skin. Because that voice belongs to one person. Oh, Christ. Never in a million years would you want to be on the receiving end of it.
There's anxiety warping in your chest. You're scared stiff, paralyzed with fear in a way that implores you to remain stock-still. The coarse fabric of your trousers bunches underneath your palms as you try not to freak out. This isn't your fault. None of it is.
And here's the worst part: Ghost hasn't lifted his head from your shoulder yet.
But Soap's unfazed. He blinks a couple of times, seems like he's weighing his options – as if there's something else he could choose besides following his lieutenant's command – yeah, right. He wises up, settling for a simple answer in the end. "Alright, Ghost." His smile makes a reappearance, sweet and well-meaning. Troublemaker. "Any chance you'd like a copy before I do away with it?"
"What kind of fuckin' question is that, Johnny?" he grumbles. "Obviously."
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𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐔𝐒 𝐒𝐂𝐄𝐍𝐄:
"I take it you don't think I'm cute then. Have I got that right?"
"I'm sorry... mind repeating that again, sir?"
"You didn't have anything to say about Soap's comment."
"I have a feeling that whatever I answer will get my arse handed to me, L.t."
He's smiling in response – like sunshine trapped behind clouds. Despite it being obscured by the mask, you can see his eyes crinkling at the corners, which makes the black charcoal that's lining them begin to crease a bit. "Permission to speak freely, Sergeant. You have the floor."
Your mouth parts in surprise. Well, then. Maybe you stand corrected. And so, you appraise him momentarily, giving it some serious thought. There's more to Ghost than you give him credit for. He's terse and rough around the edges, but respected for a reason. Admirable. Someone you think highly of and has deserved your approval. The mask undeniably provides an air of intrigue. “I suppose you can be,” you start off, gradually warming up to him being more approachable. “When you’re not terrorizing the new recruits, that is.”
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daisiescomelate · 9 months ago
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Prompt: Sukuna keeps getting tattoos because you keep kissing every inch of them.
Content: Mature, drabble.
div. plutism
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He already had the dark lines running along his body when you met and they got a good amount of attention. Arms, legs, chest, back and face. And then one day he got a random tattoo after so long, a small thing over his chest that won him a peck every time he got off the shower.
He got a second tattoo after that because one of his friends saw that new one he got and asked him to accompany him to get one of his own. Already in the shop, Sukuna asked for a big piece on his arm that you traced every night in bed while waiting to fall asleep.
By the third one he started to notice the patterns.
If the tattoo was small it gained him butterfly kisses, and if it was bigger you took your time to trace every line. Kissing and kissing his skin. To get the line art, the details and the specs of color.
Then the third and the fourth and walking around the house without a shirt on were kisses garantied, and t-shirts stopped being a thing for him at home.
The neck tattoo was a great investment. Every time it caught your attention it gave him a solid thirty minutes of love and nibbles. You would climb onto his lap and trace the leaves and the roses and the skull with your lips and the tip of your tongue, and he would melt over the back of the couch or the pillow, keeping his head back and exposing his most vulnerable spot to you to bite and bruise it as you pleased.
At times he used his discovery to his advantage and with devious intent, like the quote that run from the middle of his ribs to his V line and down to his tight. It was a random line that you had mentioned in passing that you liked so he just put it there, and he shivered every time you kissed it letter by letter, rewriting every character with soft and warm kisses and pressing them with your teeth. No skips, no rush.
Yes, in the beggining he was trying to be hot about it and put more thought into what the pictures were, but he soon run out of ideas and even at some point it didn't even matter to him what the tattoo was. You mentioned you thought sharks were cool? Done. There is a type of flower that he noticed had caught your attention? Awesome. Some dumb lyrics that you kept repeating? Good enough for him. It saved him time and energy that way.
What was truly important? How would the lines flow over his body, where would your lips fall. Long lines dancing up and down, spiraling over him, thought-out for you to care for. Delicate, without rough edges so you would take your time.
A wink to one of your hobbies over his shoulder blade. A single feather of a bird you liked. A random drawing in your favorite color. A shrine because you had a date on a temple once. Of course he didn't tell you what they meant, and you couldn't tell because he was smart about it, only hinting at things in the images and waiting enough time for you to forget that you mentioned something before he got it, never picking something too obvious.
The picture didn't matter. Your breath over his skin, the sweetness of your lips, the way they locked your eyes all over him, were all the tattoos real purpose.
Ink, and ink, and ink, every tinted inch of skin was your conquering. A game that you didn't even knew you were playing, and where Sukuna was willing to give it all up.
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