౨ৎ ˖ ࣪⊹ SAFEGUARD — dazai, chuuya, akutagawa
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
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.”
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.
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.
thank you for reading !!! ❤︎
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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.
SMUT 18+ | gratuitous smut; HEAVY breeding kink, breeding; Dom!John Price; p-in-v sex, unsafe sex; rough sex; mentions of spanking; mutual manipulation; this is roughly 10k of John Plotting and fucking you; John is: unhinged, obsessive, possessive, and Scheming. mentions of birth control tampering but nothing is followed through. No. He’s going to knock you up the old-fashioned way—by making you beg for it.
AO3 MIRROR
John has always had this desire—this awful, instinctual drive in the back of his head to knock someone up. Get them fat, swollen with his child. His.
And maybe that's the crux of it. Possession. To have something of the most rooted kind. To irrevocably change someone—their anatomy, their body, the chemistry in their brain, their status in life from them (single no dependents) to mother (mother of his child), their very atoms—and create life from the combined parts.
It's this almost fantastical beast, this unreachable dream for him.
It's his Shangri-la. His castle in Spain.
He's not under any disillusionment that this idea of fatherhood, of parenthood, is slightly skewed. That most men who want children don't feel this overwhelmingly greedy desire to fundamentally alter someone in such an irreversible way. It's not quite ownership, but it's the same ilk. A bastardised, unwanted child of it.
And it's not just this idea of claimation—to forever be the father of their child, even if neither of them stays together; a piece of him will always be there, parasitic, no matter what—but something deeper. Something a bit less—egregious.
This is, and always has been, about yearning.
John's the type of man to lock his jaws around what's his, preferring instead to ruin things, puncture it full of holes, and litter it with scars, rather than to let it go.
Marriage, he finds, is breakable. Divorce, separation. He's always on his worst behaviour in the initial stages of dating, so it's never something he has to entertain since no one ever sticks around long enough for it to be on the table, much less the menu, but the idea of it—of signing papers, of hashing out the split, of being known as ex-husband—leaves a bitter tang between his teeth. It won't do. He needs permanence. Perpetuity.
Nothing says forever quite like a child, does it?
And sure—he’s aware that countermeasures exist: custody orders, sole custody, shared; allotted visitations; divisional lines in this new age that keep the parents from ever interacting—but while you can get divorced, you can't unmake a child, can you?
The child would never write him out, either.
Where deadbeats exist, it's important to note that their counterparts do, too. The ones like him who will gouge their eyes out of their skulls before they ever let what happened to them growing up trickle down and impact their child, polluting the pool.
Simply put: John Price knows he'd be the best dad there is because he's stubborn that way.
It helps, he supposes, that he really only has so much love to give out to the world, and greedily, he stashed the entirety of it away in a box to give to his would-be wife and their child. An overwhelming deluge that promises happiness should it ever be unlocked. Pandora's box, perhaps—down to the very essence because if John Price were to ever love someone, then it's probably in their best interest to run from it, this gaping, needy chasm.
Not that it would ever be a possibility, of course—he’s much too good at compartmentalisation, in taking out his anger, his viciousness, on the ugly world he drenches himself in, the one his hands have a tangible cause and effect principle in place that will forever feed that starving beast inside of him.
Ergo—he’s a staunch supporter of the theory: happy wife, happy life. Though where those men think in a box stuffed full of emotional intimacy, flowers, chocolate, maintaining love, all-consuming and enduring, he takes it to extremes that would have them cowering a little bit. Maybe a lot.
But that's fine. He only has to make sure his family is happy. No one else matters, save a select few who have a seat at his table during Sunday dinners.
The rest, though? Spare parts.
(The ice-cold resolve in those two words is apodictic, brass bound, and he's sure if his higher-ups knew about it, well—
His chest candy would be a hole in the ground. Put the rabid dog down before it has a chance to bite.)
But that all-consuming, devouring, obsessive love he has to give, that begs to be let free, is the reason why it's so tightly leashed. Locked up in a box. Untouchable. Inaccessible.
It's why he isn't married.
Ghost once asked him why the women he dated were older. Much older. Menopausal (always). And he'd said something to the effect of it being his type. Older women who wouldn't cower away from the acrid burn of him, who wouldn't hurt their delicate little hands on his gritty surface.
But the real reason is because he knows better.
He's a starving dog, and it's just bad form to dangle a piece of meat in front of it. Especially when the hand holding it is his own.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you, and all.
(The keen look in Ghost's eyes told him that, perhaps, the man already knew the reason when he asked, and was just satiating himself with kinship—the dark, awful look on Simon's ugly mug after the dredging the underbelly of Price’s rotten, mouldering mudfloor of things unsaid spoke volumes.
They'd both nodded. Content, then. And promptly ordered a shot of whisky to drown the salivation, the hunger, from clogging their throats. Killing the urge to bite.
A pair of packless, stray dogs.)
But then he found you, and all his careful planning, all his distance, blew up in his face.
It's always been on his mind since then. Lingering in his periphery—this fevered, tantalising vision of you, round and swollen with his child.
It's unattainable, of course. A fantasy.
Though, this—you throwing up in the washroom of his penthouse, undoubtedly knocked up by his machinations—is probably because he kept that desire too close to where he hides his questionable mortality, the one that allows him to throw innocent people to their deaths, and send mothers and fathers to an early grave just so he can rip his fists apart on their bastard offspring in his own brand of catharsis that always bites back when they grow up, hankering for revenge.
He's always been good at snatching dreams out of the air, clenching them tight in his fists. Taming chimerical wants, whims, until they were docile, domesticated. Making realities out of fiction.
And really—he’s just not a good man.
He thought you'd have known this by now.
He remembers the first time he growled the words into your ear as he came, your cunt clenching around him like a vice. Desperate for it, he teased after, fingers fucking into your sloppy, leaking hole. Pushing his spend back into you. Half-drunk on the taste of you still clinging to his beard, but mostly just mesmerised by the sight of you—pretty pussy all ruined, swollen from the vicious, hateful pounding he gave it, and dipping with his cum like a faucet.
(It pissed him off—still does, really—when you waste it like this.)
Gonna fill you up, he snarled, low and wrecked. Gonna make it take—
It was a fantasy. Still is. But the way it took root in the garden of your bedroom, like it belonged—native flora, he thinks, a touch mad with it—had something ugly, oil slick, rearing up from that untouchable place in his head.
He could really blame you for it—and does. The way your ankles locked tight around his thighs, hands reaching, grabbing at his waist, clawing at his asscheeks to press him in deeper, deeper still, as he came inside of you, cock lodged right against your plug, had that untameable beast cocking its head in consideration after you danced too close to it, waking it from his long, restful slumber.
You wanted it. Ached for it. He could feel it in the way your walls tightened around him, practically starving for it. Your pretty, glossy eyes rolling back into your head. Drool running down your chin. A litany of pleas spilled from your kiss-bruised lips, begging him for it. Please, John. Please. Please—
Who was he to deny you?
Even if you made a big, flustered show of waving it off—not something I've ever imagined for myself, you know? and–and your lifestyle, what you do—is something like that even possible for us?—he saw how it curled around your shoulders, dipping its silver tongue into your ear. Germinating.
He let it. Encouraged it.
“Something to talk about later,” he indulged, reaching over for a cigar just to smother the urge to breed you stupid. To tie you to his bedposts and keep you full until your belly was swelling with more than just the absurd volume of his seed he pumped inside of you.
And, oh—
The uneasy smile on your face reeked of disappointment.
Fuck. Fuck—
John went to the washroom after that, heart pounding out of his chest, and jabbed the lit end of his cigar into his thigh to kill the fever in his veins. To rewrite the desperate, ugly howling in his head with pain instead.
It worked. Works—
Until you came to him, all watery-eyed and worried, and told him to please, please stop falling asleep with a lit cigar because you think you might just go mad if you lost him to a cigarette fire. And doesn't he see how silly it is, these burns look so bad, John, and I worry—
His teeth ached. He smiled, but it felt like a grimace. A dog holding back the instinct to bare its teeth.
“Sure, love,” he'd said, and started taking out his anger on your cunt instead, fucking you deep, and stupid. Getting you all cockdrunk, and hungry for the dream that spoiled so badly in the back of his head, he's sure a proper man would call it a nightmare. “Anything you want.”
(Brassbound. Apodictic. You know that, he knows you know that, so imagine his surprise when you come to him, all soft and tender, and ask him to pick up your birth control as if he hadn't spent the better part of two years grumbling every fucking time you took it and wasn't on the verge of tossing the damn bottle out the window, and fucking you until it took—
But—you do know that, don't you?
Well, then. Whatever his lady wants, right? Right.)
“Can you stop by the pharmacy on your way home tonight?”
He hums, fiddling with the belt of his slacks in front of the mirror. “Sure, love. You feelin’ sick?”
“No,” you murmur, sliding behind him on your way to the washroom, wearing nothing but a towel tucked under your arms. “I need my refill. For birth control.”
His hands still. A gnarled, rotted tendril curls over the edge of the cesspool, murky, ink black water splashing all over the place. “Oh, yeah? Still taking that, hm?”
You fluster. Hands waving, chock full of nervous, emotive energy you can't seem to shake off. “Well—yes. I mean, obviously.”
And he'd leave it there, let the spillage dry on the hot pavement, if you hadn't glanced back at him, all damp keenness, slightly skittish, and asked, feather-soft and utterly fragile, “right?”
Right? A question, he notes. Not a statement.
He licks his teeth. Tastes something rancid in the gaps.
“Mm. I suppose so.” He leaves it vague, but drenches it in the heavy weight of his disappointment. Anchors dragging it down. You flit around the space like a house-locked bird, slamming into the walls and ceiling as you try—blind and panicked—to find an escape. Any escape.
He finds the whole thing utterly charming. Especially when you realise he pitched himself in front of the only exit, thick, heavy hands curled around his belt, cock outlined against his slacks, already thickened, drooling in his pants.
There's gasp—wet, and sharp—as you take him in. The liquid of his eyes as his want bleeds out of his skull. The flush on his cheeks, the twitch of his cock at the mere mention of you not taking your silly little pills.
John lets it sit for a moment, taking in greedy lungfuls of your unease as you glance everywhere but at him, as if looking in his direction, breathing in this toxic miasma will give you a contact high. Infectious. Gnarled.
The little seed that started germinating blooms.
He fights back the urge to grin, all teeth. Madness staining them black.
“It's—it’s on—” and fuck, he's never seen you so unsure before, this nervous. You handle him like a wrangler, wrassling his brutish dominance until it's putty in your hands, splitting his head into pieces and galvanising the madness inside until it's scripture for you to peek at whenever you need guidance, insight into him, his essence, his being.
Your dyadic has always been built on permeance.
John doesn't think there's a single person alive who understands him as much as you do. The only person who seems content to gorge yourself on his rotted marrow like it was a delicacy.
Seeing you like this rents his resolve in two.
“It's the pharmacy near the, uh, the school. The kindergarten.”
He chokes on a groan, and thinks he tears something in his throat with the strain of keeping it down. There's blood, ash, in the back of his throat.
“Alright, love. I'll pick it up.”
You smell it, and shiver.
It's giving meat to a starving dog, and saying, dog, don't take a bite.
And so, of course he does.
John picks up your prescription, tossing it in the passenger seat like it personally offended him. And it has. Does. It's what's standing in the way between what he wants, what he craves, and there's a distinct thrum of irritation welling inside of him. One that started when he had to bark out your name at the counter earlier, and the pharmacist looked at him, and calmly, kindly, explained what it was he was picking up.
Make sure she takes them once a day. Preferably at the same time. This brand of oral contraceptive can be taken with or without food—
Fuck off, he thought—thinks, even now, glowering into the tinted window of the pharmacy.
He grips the steering wheel tight until his scarred knuckles bleach white under the strain, and sits in the parking lot, staring, unseeingly, at the shops. Pensive. Thoughtful. It gnarls over his expression until he's the picture of that grizzly-like intensity you often accuse him of. All furrowed brows and a pinched, angry twist to his lips.
There's a series of complex equations running laps in his head. He's no stranger to this process, needing to make life or death decisions in less time it takes someone to snap their fingers, or tentatively stammer out his title.
This one is more linear than the rest. One plus one, so to speak. But the weight of it is profound. Heavier, even, than deciding between the success of his mission and the life of an innocent bystander.
(But he thinks he's just selfish like that.)
In his head, he debates the ethics of replacing all of these silly little tablets that stand in his way with sugar pills.
It would be the quickest path to the end, but the risk-reward ratio ebbs and flows the more he considers things without the miasmic influence of that abomination throwing itself at the walls of its enclosure, howling in an endless cacophony of do it, do itdoit—
A better man wouldn't even have such a temptation. He supposes that's what you deserve, but he already had this particular crisis a few months after he met you, and realised that the things he wanted to do to you would undoubtedly put him on a list. Slapped so hard with a restraining order, his ears would still be buzzing.
That something about you made his jowls twinge, and his teeth ache, and no amount of stay away from her, Price; she deserves better than you was going to keep his dirty hands from curling around your throat, leaving soot-stains on your skin in the shape of his fingerprints. Brandishing ownership in burst blood vessels; a pretty collar for you to wear because as much as you like to pretend otherwise—
You're a dog just like him.
In any case, he's the best choice for you. The only one who'd burn the world just to keep you warm, and that's what you really need. Protection.
And fuck—you toy with that particular urge that has always been etched in fine lines within the walls of bones; dipping your fingers into it, and spreading it over the apples of your cheek. Everything about you prickles along his hindbrain. Renders him from a modern man with modern ideals to an animal who can only speak in growls, snarls; pure primalism, all instinct.
You're made for each other down to the bone. He's sure he could split your head apart and find that your cranial sutures are perfectly mirrored. Made in the same image: you were grown from his missing rib, and he always meant to be cradled in the brackets of your thighs.
So, crisis of worthiness aside—because there are none, not anymore—he plots. Plans. Schemes. But his machinations keep catching on the soft fibrils of your wants.
John doesn't know what he'd do if you changed your mind.
(Or, rather, he does but that's another madness to unravel with his personal therapist.)
It's with this—the slight brandishing of his uncertainty in your certainty—that he gives up the idea, pocketing it for a later date, and drives home, back to you.
He doesn't toss the bag on the counter, but sets it up perfectly, placing it as close to the edge where the bin sits under it. All it would take is a breath of wind for it to fall into the trash.
That doesn't happen, though. You stare at the white, crinkled package for a moment as he sips on his tea, quietly contemplative. With your expression hidden from him, he has no idea what might be going through that pretty head of yours. Disappointment, he can only hope. And then you're reaching for it, fingers gripping the bag tightly in your fist. He hears the paper crumble. It sparks something inside his chest. A bloom of hope that you might just throw it out. Toss it in the bin—
You turn to him instead, knuckles white.
“Thanks,” you say, and the matter is dropped.
He goes to tuck that want back where it escaped, leaving slick trails of putrefying rot behind, but—
John peeks in the vanity later that evening, but where he expects to see the little rectangular package sitting in its usual spot between his aftershave and the mouthwash, he finds nothing. Just an empty spot on the ledge, spotlit by the lack of dust. A clean square of white paint, undisturbed.
His jaw twinges. He wonders if you're hiding it from him, keeping it safe from his machinations, but then he finds it shoved in the drawer with his shaving kit, and the box of condoms he bought when you'd first started dating (for show, naturally—John had no intentions of using them and learned persuasion was your Achilles heel; that and you tended to get a little glossy-eyed whenever he growled filth in your ear, the smell of your cunt heavy on his breath).
The package is crinkled like you squeezed it tight in your little fist before you tossed it in.
You're always meticulous in the way you put things in their places. Even the junk drawer is organised, all neat.
This speaks volumes, but he's not quite sure what it says. They are still here, though. Accessible. One is missing from the pack. It dampens his mood.
He picks up his toothbrush, and runs through those calculations again to see how he can convince you to skip the one you're meant to take tomorrow. And the next day, and the next, and the next—
He stays awake as you sleep beside him, looking into how many days you can miss before your brand of birth control stops being effective.
Seven pills in a row.
He files it away, lost in thought.
The next morning, he leaves his phone open on the bedside table with the article pulled up. He kisses you awake before he leaves to shower, humming something soft under his breath.
When he returns, he finds you sitting up in bed with your knees drawn to your chest. There's something pensive about the look on your face. Paper soft, as though it would all blow away at a mere whisper.
You regard him almost cooly but something raw, fractured splits over the ravine. A waterfall of midnight black sludge rains down.
(He wonders if it tastes of the same rot, the same madness, as the basin of the untouched recesses of his head—)
“I'm working late tonight,” you murmur after a measured beat, and he can't place your tone. “Maybe we can watch a movie when I get home.”
John nods, and your eyes drop, scaling down his bare, broad chest as he breathes in the flint staining the air. Your gaze is white-hot when it bludgeons into him, feverish.
It doesn't take much beckoning at all to have him crawling toward you, towel ripped from his hips and thrown somewhere in the aether.
As he steals the madness from your tongue, his eyes flicker to the phone still sitting on the table. It looks perfectly untouched. The screen is off.
That, too, he files away.
John comes to the succinct conclusion that the only means he has in his arsenal to get what he wants—legally, and somewhat morally, anyway—is persuasion.
There's no recourse if he can water that burgeoning plant inside of you, make it seem like this is something you want, too. A family. With him.
(Only him.)
He knows that you see things quite similarly to him. Wherein love is desire. Desire is hunger. And there's nothing more profound to you than to eat the person you love alive. Consumption of every part—the good, the beautiful, the bad, the ugly, and the rotted: skin, fat, muscles, blood, and bones. All of it.
So, even if somewhere down the road you think you hate him for this, it'll be fine. He'll just consume that, too.
John Price is a tenacious man. Stubborn.
(Bullish, he hears around the barracks. Fuckin’ stubborn prick, too.)
It helps that this line of work is perfectly suited for such a peremptory drive to the finish line, no matter the cost. Utilitarian to a fault, despite his rather recalcitrant disposition. It's how he gets his way more often than not. Brutish dominance. Loutish suppression.
But a near reckless, suicidal loyalty that attracts the sort of beasts this line of work needs.
But that's work, not this. Not trying to convince you, his sugar-sweet (and viciously diabolical) lover, to bear the burden of giving him a family because society says it's uncouth (and illegal, morally reprehensible, villainous) for him to chain you to his bed to keep the darker parts of himself that want to rip into anyone who had the pleasure—pleasure that no longer belongs to them—of looking at you.
That's all for him.
(Nasty old bastard.)
And, of course, because he's ready. Everything clicks. Locks into place. There's no one else out there for him.
Really, though—it's your fault for prodding that beast in the first place. For letting inside your house, your bed. For thinking it could be tamed. And so. You should accept responsibility for it.
(Nasty, nasty—)
But just as much as you know him, he knows you. You'll give him a litany of reasons why this shouldn't happen, and none of them will be because this isn't what you want. It'll be filled with reasons why you think he doesn't.
And that simply won't do.
So, he plots. Plans.
The thing is. No one ever taught him how to hold things in his hands without crushing it.
He doesn't think he can be delicate. Gentle. There's no way to gently nudge you into this. No.
He'll convince you to yield the same way a tsunami convinces a house to move out of the way.
Buried to the hilt in your cunt, he growls gospels into your ear about this beautiful Shangri-la, this sprawling castle he has in Spain until you're clenching down around him tight, conditioning your body to come at the thought of swelling with his child. About letting his seed take root, letting him knock you up.
It's a crass image that he spits into your head—fuck you until it takes, love; breed this pretty cunt every day until you're fat and swollen—serves as the positive reinforcement to his classical conditioning. He'll turn you into one of Pavlov's mutts, salivating at the sound of him groaning into your ear as he fills your pussy up to the brim. He'll reshape you, change your wants until you only come around his cock when he's spitting his release against the plug of your womb.
And when you make to get up, letting all his spend slip from your sloppy cunt to take your pill, he pulls you closer under the guise of wanting to feel your body on his, murmuring diabolical compromises he has no intention of letting you see through.
“Later,” he rasps, pulling you closer. His mouth slots across your temple. “Just take it later, sweetheart. Later.”
“But—”
“It’ll be fine.”
And, as if you'd been waiting for that reassurance, you melt into his hands, wet putty.
(you take the bloody pill later, and he adds that to his mental calendar, adjusting the maths. He supposes he’ll just have to try harder next time.)
John's desire for you is overwhelming, all-encompassing, and he schemes around his wandering hands, bullying into your messy cunt only moments before your alarm is meant to go off, reminding you to take your pill, reinforcing that irritating little wall that keeps his come from reaching your womb.
It goes off, but he hardly hears it over the roaring in his ears, the sweet, sweet litany of moans that slip out, staining the pillow with your pleasure. He just keeps fucking you through it, growling mindlessly into your ears about how badly he wants to come inside of you. His warnings, threats, about how close he is intertwining with your desperate begging for him to come, come inside me, John is the most beautiful harmonisation he'd ever heard, and it sews itself into his marrow, polluting the ugliness inside with a new, fresh hell for him to torture himself with. That delicious pleasure-pain that drives him mad—
He fills you up, palm pressed taut to your lower belly as he spits his virile release deep into your cunt. He can feel the heavy outline of his cock against your skin, stuffed full of him, and it's this—the way he moulds your body around him, cock visible through your flesh—that makes his eyes roll back into his head. Makes the urge to fuck, to breed, to claim bludgeon into him, shattering reason, logic. He wants to change you, irrevocably. Forever. To mar you with his touch, his essence.
“Mine,” he chokes out, ugly and raw. It's a mangled mess in his throat. A threat. “All fucking mine, aren't you, love? All mine—”
His words seem to throw you into another climax, cunt clenching greedily down around him as he softens inside of you, plugging you up. You liked that, he notes, purs. The notion brands itself across his resolve, reshaping it into something that would make anyone else recoil in fear, disgust.
But you preen at this creature that bares its fangs at you, snaps wicked teeth against your jugular. Fingers threading through its hair, shushing it, soothing it, as you pull it back into your embrace, head tucked against your chest. You lull it into complacency with the heavy thud of your heart, your sweet, earthy scent.
What a pair, he thinks, and clamps his hands around your wrist when you murmur something about taking your pill now. Need to take it before it gets too late, John—
He makes his move, distracts you with his mouth, his tongue.
“Just take it after,” he murmurs into your pussy, thighs bracketing around his head. His hands pull your waist down, pressing you harder against his mouth. “Later, love. It'll be fine—”
“But, John—”
The protest dies, turns to ash, when he grunts, sealing his lips around your clit, bullying it with the rasping press of tongue until you're arching your back, riding his face. Thoughts of your silly pill are gone, swallowed by him as you gush, drenching his mouth in your slick.
And after, when you make to get up again, he pulls you close instead, voice curling around you like smoke when he tells you to take it after.
“No, love. Stay in bed with me,” he peppers kisses to your cheek, your jaw, chin, sweetening his words, and folds you into the tight embrace of his arms. “Take it in the morning. It'll be fine to miss a day.”
You level him with something that shadows the ravines in your gaze with pure, unadulterated scepticism, but as he scouts the canyons, the valleys, the pretty craters that make up the composite of your eyes, he finds no discernible trace of wariness, uncertainty. The terse line in his shoulders ease.
But while fossicking around he unearths something else. Something a bit more enigmatic, calculative, than doubt. Equivocal, slippery, it runs from him when he tries to give chase, tucking itself back into the harsh tenebrous that shades the landscape.
He hums, wanting to ask, but you sigh in quasi-acquiescence, and burrow deeper into his embrace.
“Fine,” you huff, but he tastes a purring sense of satisfaction in the air. “I'll take it tomorrow instead.”
“Good girl.” The praise slips out, low and gritty, perfumed with his heavy greed.
You shiver against him. The hitch in your throat is quiet in the bedroom, but to him, it sounds like a gunshot.
John keeps meticulous track of the empty pill slots, and notes with a sticky, resinous sense of glee that the numbers are becoming muddled, skewed. Later becomes tomorrow, and your soft acquiesce has days skipped. Missed.
You can't double up, you huff to him, mournfully slinking into the bed. It's nearly one in the morning. Technically, a brand new day. I absolutely have to take it tomorrow, John. Make sure you remind me—
There's something pointed in your tone. Something oil-slick. He nods, bites back a grin.
“Sure,” he pulls you close, breathes in the sweet, loamy scent of you—sweat and sex and the lingering remnants of your perfume, your soap—and lets it stain his lungs. “I can do that.”
You say nothing at all when he doesn't bring it up until well past midnight the next day, offering little more than an exasperated groan, and a huffy roll of your eyes, as if this was just a missed dinner with friends and not a life-changing misstep.
(The beast purrs. He places his hand over his chest, and feels the rumble under his skin.)
“Need to be more responsible than this, John,” you say, squirming in his hold to try and rush to the washroom to take that pesky little pill.
“Sorry, love,” he offers, and means none of it. Clings tighter to you. “Got a bit carried away today, is all.”
“It's not your fault—” something curls out from a dark crevasse when you look at him. “I've been so—off lately, you know? Must be the new batch. Maybe I should call my doctor.”
He stills. Body tensing, coiling. John tries to speak, but the words are ash on his tongue. He clears his throat.
“Could stop taking it.”
It crackles in the air. Hangs heavy like a stormcloud.
You blink, stunned. But it's artificial, hollow. Pulled from a wicker basket where you keep all your different skins.
“You mean—what? Stop it all together—?”
You flit in the space once more, but it's less of an injured bird searching for an escape, he realises suddenly, and more of—
A boomslang.
One rearing up, searching for the perfect place to strike.
Wishful thinking, though, because you're flustered and skittish once more, a small prey animal he isn't sure what he wants to do the most—sink his teeth into you, tear you into pieces, and devour you whole, or hide you away from the world.
“I can look for something else in the meantime,” you sound shy, hesitant, and it prickles across his skin. “But we'd need to be careful, you know. Otherwise you might actually get me pregnant.”
He tries to swallow his groan. Chokes on it instead.
“Sure, sure—” he hacks into his palm. “Of course, love. We'll be safe. I'll pull out—”
Naturally, he doesn't. Makes no effort to even try despite promising you he is.
“Not my fault your pussy won't let go of me, love,” he grumbles, hand cupping your weeping sex in his palm. The heat of you is searing. Blistering. He thinks he could happily melt inside of it for the rest of his life, and leans down to whisper his devotion into your come-slicked folds, the bitter tang of you, of him, admixing on his tongue. An elixir he could drown in.
You huff at him after, all glossy-eyed and sex-drunk, and tell him to please try harder, John, I'll have to get plan b tomorrow—
You don't, but the threat of it, the possibility, lingers in the back of his mind, souring his thoughts.
Next time, and I'll have to, John, you say, featherlight, lips pressed against the head of his cock. A warning, a goddamn tease—
His voice is strained, pinched. “Of course, love,” and he guides your mouth back to his cock, letting the matter fall into pieces when you suck on the sensitive head, tongue licking, coy and kittenish, over his frenulum.
It's only later, when watches you swallow down his come, that the beast slinks out of the shadows, pocketing the fragments.
You're off birth control—barely any scheming words of whispered concern needed—but the idea of you taking a little pill to wipe away his efforts has him pulling back. Recalibrating his plans.
He decides on a different route to the same end.
Damnation at your own hand.
John, for his credit, does begin to pull out after that—albeit, with a great deal of agonised reluctance—and instead comes all over your pretty face.
With thick ropes of his pearlescent spend dripping down the apples of your heated cheeks, he doesn't think he's ever seen a sight more beautiful than this.
And one with more opportunity.
Slowly, he swipes at it with his thumb and then promptly brings it down, hard, on your clit. You flinch, mewling at the overstimulation, and the threat he brings so close to your raw, unprotected sex. It's dangerous. This thin line he dances along could snap at any moment. Could rain hellfire and fury over his broad shoulders, unmake all the progress he'd steadily built up.
He walks the precipice, anyway. He pulls his hand away, and brings two fingers up to curve over your cheeks. His thumb, stained with your slick and his come, slides across your bottom lip.
The pout you give him—all wet-eyed lachrymose—has his spent cock twitching against his sticky thigh. “Fuck, love. Gonna send me to an early grave if you keep starin’ at me like that.”
“You're cracked,” you slur around his thumb. In retaliation, he digs it into your tongue, and preens—full of nasty, gnarled satisfaction—when your eyes flutter, rolling into the back of your head at the taste.
With this brief distraction, he drops his come-stained fingers to your mound, and rubs along the swollen rim of your hole. Just touching, pressing. A tease, a whisper.
You tense. “John—” it's muffled around his thumb, and he isn't sure if it's a warning or a plea.
He pushes the tips in, barely to the first knuckle, and just pets around your rim.
It's a battle of wills, now. “No more than this,” he promises, and the undercurrent of his threat rents the air. Makes you bristle.
You always loved a challenge—especially coming from him.
“Just the tip?” You tease, spittle running down your chin. Your eyes are dark—midnight skies, ink black—and he's struck by the afterimage of himself in those pools. Made in the same image.
He grunts, slides into the first knuckle, and scissors them apart.
“John—” it's breathless. Your teeth spear his thumb, tight around his bone. He wants nothing more than to have you bite down hard, scar his bones with the gnawed meteors of your desire. Your desperation. “Fuck—please—”
You give in so prettily, and he barely has a moment to think about how quick it's been when you angle your hips, hand falling to grip his wrist tight as you slide down his fingers, all the way to the last knuckle.
You clench around him like a vice. A pretty bow. He fucks you with his fingers, meeting your shallow thrusts with ones of his own, slamming viciously into your pussy as he coos adorations into your ear.
With his other hand, he reaches down and fists himself over your bare mound, pressing the tip against your clit where it weeps prespend over your flesh. His thumb sweeps across what spills out, dragging it back down to your sopping hole, pushing it inside.
It's probably not enough to reach your womb, to get you pregnant, but he clings to that tantalising fantasy as he drills his fingers into you until you come, breathlessly begging him to fuck you harder, to fill you up—
He isn't even fucking you with his cock, and you still beg him for it.
John pushes the tip into your slit, fingers still buried deep inside of your throbbing pussy, and groans with the force of his release. It makes him dizzy, almost nauseous with it, filling his head with nothing but the sweet, wounded sound of your moans filling the room, and the wet squelch of his fingers pulling out of you.
When he catches the threads of cognisance in his fingers once more, he leans back on his haunches, chest heaving, and brands the messy sight of your pussy fluttering, clenching around nothing, as his spend drips down your slit, over your hole, and pools in the sheets below.
He's not sure if heaven exists, but he knows the sight of you, breathless and whimpering on his bed, is the closest a man like him will ever come to seeing it.
The push-pull of this little game stretches on.
Price likes to see just how far he toe the line before you're whimpering into the sheets, telling him don't, John, don't come inside me, I'm not anything, John—and he's ripping himself away from the tight clutch of your wet, hot cunt, and coming all over you.
The illicit tease of barely pulling out in time, and then scooping up the mess he makes on your face, your breasts, your belly, your ass, lower back, thighs, and spooning it into your pussy until it's a fixture in your bedroom ritual.
And maybe it's the threat of it all, of playing such a dangerous game, seems to cudgel under his skin the most, ripping apart the thin veneer of that man he once pretended to be—righteous and good—shedding it off with each hiccupped gasp you make when he presses his come-slicked fingers inside of you, murmuring guttural words of affection in the shape of impish mockery (want it bad, don't you, sweet thing; so fuckin’ greedy for it, love—).
He likes it the most when he can fuck you stupid on his fingers. Cockdrunk, and come-starved (because you are, of course; he hasn't come inside of your cunt in weeks, and doesn't miss the mournfully pitiful whines you give when he pulls out, depriving you of the pleasure of feeling him come inside you), you're too blissed out, swimming in pleasure, to think about what he's doing.
In fact, he doesn't really give you much of a chance to think at all.
The next few weeks are filled with him fucking you each night brutally, viciously, snarling low in your ear about how bad he wants to come in you, stuff you full, and then keep you plugged up all night with his cock that it takes, and then pulling out right before, committing the sight of your betrayed expression to memory where it'll sit like a trophy when you finally break.
You make an appointment with your gynaecologist, and circle the date on his calendar.
John notes it down. Tucks it away.
And then he amps up the pressure.
John's fingers root behind your knees, pushing your thighs apart as he settles between them. His gaze drills into your bare cunt, slick and wet, and so ready for him. Eager for it.
He'd counted the days, and knows that if there's ever the absolute worst time to have unprotected sex, to come inside of you, is now.
Which, of course, means he has to. The clause in that is ironclad. Apodictic.
“Bit dangerous,” he rasps, and lifts your leg up, resting your ankle on his shoulder. You fluster beneath him, panting and pretty, and fuck—he’s not pulling out of your pussy tonight at all. “Should I pull out?”
It's a tease. A test.
He reaches down as he says the words, gripping his cock and bringing it down against your wet heat. The bare, blunt head of his cocks slaps against your clit, and you arch, keening. Nails bite into the thick muscles of his biceps, and he leans into the sharp sting. Letting it ground him. Centre him.
This will be your cacoëthes.
He's been depriving you for weeks, and John knows that you're wanting for it. Desperate. The little twitches your hips give, as if begging him to fill you up, are proof enough of how much you want this.
This. The dream he dripped into your ears, hot oil congealing over your frontal lobe; infectious and thick. You can try to chisel it off, but the pollution is already damning. Ruining.
You want this. He wears the axiom like armour.
And you beg for it—eyes shaded in gut wrenchingly beautiful lachrymose—and John snuffles closer, inching the weeping head of his cock into your tight, warm heat.
The sight of splitting you open is something he never grows tired of. Something that, without fail, makes his balls ache. His chest thrum. Blood turns to ichor. To wine. He's drunk on the contrast made between you—a garish chiaroscuro of your pretty pussy, soft and sickly sweet—almost nauseatingly so—swallowing down the fat, girthy length of his cock. The thick streams of veins running along the flushed, heavy shaft against your puffy, soft folds is almost hideous. Sinful. He can't equate it to anything else except corruption. The horrific beast sullying the princess.
And fuck—
The thought alone makes him throb.
He's sullied you plenty, he reckons, and yet you always look so sweet. Especially now, when your rim is stretched taut around the thick of him, pussy squeezing, clenching around him in a vice, as if you weren't sure to push him out or pull him deeper.
John decides for you. Opting instead to push your knees down to your chest, nearly brushing your ears, and follows with the bulk of his body until he feels your breath rush out of your lungs. You struggle for a moment, gasping wetly into his ear as his weight—every bearish pound of it—rests on you in the perfect mating press. Your bite into his biceps, keening prettily into his ear as he bullies the full length of his cock into you. Spears you open. Splits you apart.
He can feel you gush around him, drenching his groin and thighs with your slick.
Like this—chest to chest, forced to breathe in the same air, the same madness—he likes to just stare at you, taking in the heat simmering under your skin, the sweat beading along your temple, the pinch in your brow as you struggle to adjust to the sheer width of him cudgelling you open. A battering ram you're forced to make room for.
He takes it all in, each flicker of emotion, each heaving gasp. Burns it into his memory. Lets it soften the iron around his heart. Keeps it there, nestled in the cradle of his limited love, held aloft by indelicate, bearish hands. This sweet thing.
He can't wait to ruin it.
If these weeks leading up to this were lovemaking, fucking, then this, this, is mating. Animalistic. Primal. He pushes in as deep as he can, until the tip kisses the ripened seal of your womb, and grinds his hips cruelly into the cradle of your thighs.
Your nails leave bloodied indents in his flesh. A scar he'll proudly bear the mark of. A tattoo of the time when he turned you into something new.
His balls are soaked. The sheets, too. He mocks you for it, a rasping growl lodged deep in his throat, taunting you about how fucking wet you are for him. How badly you need it.
“Gotta plug you up, hm?” He grunts, and sets a pace that serves only to accentuate the sloppy, messy squelch of your cunt.
His cock pistoning into you, alternating between deep, full thrusts that knock the air from your lungs, and heavy, slow plunges meant to badger the blunt head of his cock against your walls.
You seem to like it best when he shifts his weight between each thigh, content to just grind into you. Make you feel every inch of him. You cling to him, yowling in his ear about how good it feels, how much you love this, love his cock—
The thick bed of wry, umber curls on his chest, stomach, and groin grow slick with sweat from the intensity of it all, from the shared heat. Pressed tight against you, he feels every quiver. Every flinch. Each moan is made known in a slight reverberation across his skin before he hears it.
Drenched in sweat, glued to you as he fucks you into the mattress, John feels very much like the beast making a house out of a twisted whim in his head. Feverish, sick, he drives into you with the single minded goal of filling that home up with three. Then four. Five—
As many as you'll let him.
And he almost loses himself to that thought alone. Dancing sugar plums that make his balls tighten. He stems the flood by pulling out of you, letting his heavy cock slap against your sticky, soaked cunt as he heaves into your hairline, sucking in the heady loam, the humus, of your scent.
The whimper you make when he pulls out of you sounds like a wounded animal, and the noise tickles across his hindbrain. His jaw aches. He bites down on a snarl as you thrash against him, mindless with the need to have him inside of you. It brings a nasty, vicious curl to the ends of his mouth, and he doesn't even bother trying to tamper it down. John lifts his head and lets you see his foaming muzzle, drooling with thick globes of saliva.
“Stay still,” he growls, low and dangerous. It's as much of a warning as it is a command, and the way you react, tensing, coiling tight—the flash of unease. Shock. And then the need. Achy, heavy. He feels it against his jugular when you shiver, moaning his name into the space between you where it reeks of desperation.
To soften the submissive tremble in your jaw—and maybe to temper down the challenging talons sharpening in your gaze—he nuzzles his cheek against yours, peppers wet kisses to your skin. He licks across your jaw, bites down on your flesh.
He tastes salt and sin on your skin.
(His eyes roll so far back into his skull he thinks he might get lost.)
“Gonna cum on your pretty cunt if you don't stop squirming, love.”
And John loves you most for your waspish intelligence—the ire smouldering in your throat. The way you bite back just as hard, never afraid to bear teeth when he snarls. He doesn't think he could ever love someone too soft—not without tearing them to pieces. To shreds.
But you wear plush, tender conchoidal skin over jagged, rough obsidian. He'll ruin himself if he ever tries to rip you apart.
Like this, though—you melt.
All that keen, vicious intelligence snuffed out. His scheming Cleopatra tamed on his cock.
Your heels dig into the back of his thighs, urging him closer to your sex. “Come on, John, just fuck me, fuck me already—”
(Tamed, though, perhaps being a misnomer.)
He huffs into your neck. “Impatient little quean.”
It gets him a sharp bite to the tip of his ear, and the floor roars so loudly in his veins, he gets dizzy from it.
“Fuck—”
He's pressing back into you again, into your warm, tight heat, and it's nirvana kissing his nerves. Liquifying his spine. He rolls into you with a weighted groan, buried to the hilt once more.
But even with the respite, he knows he won't last.
John needs you fucked stupid, docile and soft just for him, and sets out to do just that. Pounding into you with a spiteful twist of his hips that he knows will leave you a little sore, and tender tomorrow. But the idea of spreading your puffy, achy folds apart and soothing the slight hurt with his tongue for hours until you're sobbing into the cushions quells any hesitation that rears, begging him to slow down.
Go easy on your pretty cunt.
(As if.)
John batters into you until your eyes glaze over, and your chin, cheeks, smear with drool. Until the challenge in midnight black melts into submission. Docile, and malleable. Perfect for him to mould. Shape.
Reshape.
He glues to you, touch starved and tactile, and basks in the liquid heat that blooms from deep within you.
“Gonna cum soon,” he snarls, broken by the heave in his chest as he fucks into you, starved. “Gotta pull out, love—”
You're gripping him tighter, anchoring him to your body. You haven't come yet. Something he dangles in front of you like a threat.
He watches the slow crawl of realisation crest over your messy face, and thinks he falls just a little bit more in love with you at the sight of your little pout.
Loves, even more, the way it breaks apart when he pounds into you harder, viciously, watching drool dribble off your chin, and reason leak from your ears—
“Please, John—” the sound of your whimpering has him grunting, head dizzy with the saccharine sweet taste of it on his tongue. “Please, please—come inside me. I–I want you to–to fill me up—”
“Yeah?” He taunts, mean and breathless. “Want me to come inside your sloppy cunt? Dangerous, ain't it? Jus’ might take, sweet thing. Is that what you want?”
You're howling a litany of sin into his ear, desperation drenches each clamour of his name, each orison uttered, begging him to come, to fill you up, and then—
“Fuck—I want it so bad—” his head is filled with static. Whitenoise. “Want it to take, John—”
He comes inside of you, cock pulsing so hard it feels like a sob. Filling you up. Wishing on all the stars that it takes—
As a reward for your good behaviour, he spreads you out over the sheets, and growls his approval into your sopping pussy, drenching himself with the taste, the smell, of you, promising to wear it like a perfume so everyone knows how good you are for him. Him, alone.
(His, his, his—)
When you come, you nearly smother him, and he thinks he sees a glimpse of nirvana in baby soft yellow before he's pulled back by your shaking hands brushing the hair off his sweat-slicked forehead.
“Are you okay, John—”
He rolls you under him, fucking into your drenched pussy like a man starved. That tantalising vision glues itself to his hindbrain, so close he can scent the fresh dew of fresh milk, and warm bread in his nose. Feel the bump of your stomach.
He's almost angry about it, about being ripped away from that dream, and takes his aggression out on your sloppy, leaking cunt. The way his come trickles out, staining the mattress below and the back of your thighs has him growling darkly into your nape.
“Keep it in,” he snarls, words sharpened on the whetstone of his need. “Keep it all inside, love.”
“Ah, John, John—” something falls from your split-slicked lips, and his fingers bite into your hips. Punishment for the slurred backtalk.
“I'll spank your ass if any of it leaks out—”
It does. Of course it does.
He bends you over his knee, and slaps his broad, rough palm over each cheek ten times before deliriously shoving two thick fingers into your sloppy cunt, stuffing his come back inside your tender, swollen hole, rough and mean, as you howl, squirming in his lap about how you promise you'll be good next time, John, please—I'll keep it all in, I swear, I—
“You fuckin’ better, love.” He groans, and thinks about cumming on your messy face, all slick with sweat, and drool, but decides against it. A waste, he thinks, and leans over you to shove the thick, twisting length of his angry cock inside you to the hilt just spit his release against your seal once more.
“That was…” You're still panting against his chest, eyes dazed, and body laxed. Melted wax over his chest. “Intense,” you settle on after a beat.
There's a hiccup in your breath when he hums, chest rumbling with the sound.
“Mm, but you liked it, didn't you?”
Of course you did. Of course. The evidence of it is drying, tacky and slick, on his groin, his thighs.
You burrow into his side, peeking at him from over the thick bed of wry curls that clot over his chest. “You're fucking me like you haven't in years, John. Makes me wonder if you have an agenda.”
He considers your words. The weight of them. Wonders just how much you've clued into, but huffs when he catches the same look in your eyes as the one reflected in his own.
Cheeky little—
“Can't I just want to fuck you? Not everything has to be about schemes, love.”
The oil of his lies, the sticky resin of his evasion makes you huff into his skin.
In all his meticulous planning, he'd picked up several books on this particular topic, and scoured every available, reputable, site he could find. John knows what to look out for by now, and keeps a keen eye on you—one that very quickly dips into obsessiveness, but you're kind enough to call it overbearing.
Jesus Christ, John, why are you asking me how many times I pissed today?
He just needs to wait things out.
But rather irritatingly, he's called away overseas for the next week.
Ah, well. He'll have to try harder next time.
He arrives in Heathrow mid-morning, and follows Laswell into the office. There's a mountain of reports to fill out—things that, rather irritatingly, require his signature—and resolves to spend the rest of the day hunched over at his desk, even though there's an itch in the back of his skull demanding he go home.
It is always like this, though—both the post-mission ritual of banal paperwork that seems almost comical considering what he'd just done, and the undeniable urge to flee back into the sanctuary of your shared home.
His bones ache for it.
Laswell huffs when he lingers by the exit, and he swallows a groan.
While he was away, you'd been silent. Moreso than usual.
Where he'd have expected an update on what was going on—the mundanity of your life that he clings to when the beast in his head whets its talons a little too sharp, digs into a little too deep—you’ve gone silent. Not radio. Not completely. But the information you give is sparse. Cagey.
You don't tell him about the visit to the gynaecologist, offering nothing but a quiet hum into the receiver, all blase and nonchalant, and a simple, equivocal: “good.”
He tucks it away, lets the matter drop.
If he timed things correctly—barring your impish prevarication aside—then something will begin to show soon. You would have mentioned something. Some nominal change to your physical well-being, but when pried, pressed, you huff.
“I'm good, John. When are you coming home, anyway?”
He raps his knuckles on his desk, still smarting from the punches he'd thrown recklessly this past week, too keyed up to let his anger simmer instead of boil, and thinks. About you. About this.
A week isn't a lot of time—he’s been called away for months in the past—but this feels like it's lingering. Time stretched and distorted. Elongated. And a part of him feels chipped, fractured after touchdown.
It wasn't as if this particular assignment was any more, or less, dangerous than the ones he went on before. If anything, it was comparatively mild. Muted. He honed into his training, and did his goddamn job. And yet—
Yet.
You lived in the spaces he occupied. The air he breathed. The water he drank.
He brought you with him, something he's never, ever, done before. Perched pretty on his shoulder, he heard your voice in his head with every step he took, every radio call.
But it was hallucinatory. Chimerical. You weren't there, you were here, but the problem lies in the lack of a divide that usually bifurcates the world into two fractions: his job and you.
It eats at him.
He brought you where he's never taken anyone before. Never let them in.
His thoughts were asunder. Pulled in all directions, but the centre was always you. His compass pointing north. He wants you. Needs you. His whole being has been recalibrated with the needle aimed toward you.
An alert on his phone shakes him from his reverie.
He reaches for it, slides his hand across the lockbar. The notification pops up. A message from his bank.
His card—the one he gave you, the one you've used all of once to buy a chocolate bar when he gruffly, surely, complained about you not spending his money—has been used.
Curious now, he opens his app, eyes scanning the threadbare purchases—all mostly interest fees and service charges, bar one. It was recently used at a drugstore for under twenty dollars.
He doesn't know what this means, what you're playing at. He makes to text you, but he gets an email next.
Thank you for your purchase; here is your e-receipt.
His heart does something strange in his chest. Turns in on itself. Goes all askew.
Not only are you using his card, you're using his account, too. He clicks it, eyes scanning through the purchases (only two), and blinks.
A card, and—
His want takes the shape of a hand, presses against his jugular.
—a pregnancy test.
He knew when he started this game that this was, of course, the inevitable outcome, but having it here, right in front of him—in that sneaky, noncommittal way you always do things; behind his back, and in the dark, like you enjoy watching him try and sniff out the truth—has his belly knotting up. Churning.
A pregnancy test.
Fuck—
(and out of all the ways to tell him, you cheeky little—)
He's up out of his chair before he's even aware that he's standing.
“Laswell,” he gets out, and can't be sure how his voice is so measured when his head is being shredded into pieces. “I'm out for the rest of the day. This whole bloody week, too—”
“Something bad happen?”
His hands shake when he pulls his jacket on, slips his car keys into his hands. “No. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm going to be a father. A bloody dad—”
It's on that sentiment when his voice breaks. Shatters. He clears his throat, blinks furiously. Fuck. Fuck. It's happening—
Shangri-la sits in his fist, taking the shape of an e-mailed receipt.
In his periphery, he sees Simon's head come up. Watching him. Measured.
Laswell, too, eyes him with a degree of wariness. He supposes to them this means the end of everything.
She breathes in. “Tuscany would be my choice.”
“Oh?” He tears his eyes away from the screen, gracing her with a steady, unflinching look. “Was thinking something a bit more local. Liverpool.”
It gets a scoff, one full of disgust. “She'll divorce you within the year.”
“I'm having a baby, Laswell. Not getting married.”
“Oh, no?” It's a challenge. “I seem to recall something about someone being a proper gentleman, or was that just the lie you told your unofficial missus?”
“We'll get married. That's not up for debate—” an intern makes an alarmed face, like perhaps it ought to be. Had he not been holding nirvana in his hand, he might be a bit more cautious with his madness. Too bloody bad. “Wherever she wants—Tuscany, Udaipur, fucking Siberia. I don't care. What I’m a bit more concerned with is my expectant wife.”
“Soon-to-be,” she volleys, just because she knows it's the sort of thing that will itch under his skin.
“Already is, Laswell.” He gripes, flat. “Or damn near close to it.”
“If she knows what's good for her, she'll say no.”
“Lucky me, then, that she doesn't.”
Lucky him, indeed.
On his way out, Ghost utters a heated congratulations to him, and John can see his gaze is absent. Turned inward, mind whirring. Reeling. He can hear the gears grind from where he stands, and if the ink-black madness in his lieutenant’s drifting, pensive eyes means much of anything, then John sends a silent hail mary to whatever unlucky person was misfortune enough to unleash the muzzle on that particular dog.
Well. It's not really his problem. Until it is. Until it becomes one. But since it's not something that'll impact him in the next five minutes, he tucks it away. “Thanks.”
He doesn't linger. Doesn't, really, even remember the ride home, head buzzing with thoughts that keep twisting around themselves, driving him mental. Things like, is it real? what if you were joking. what you weren't?
Oh, fuck—
You better not be.
But you wouldn't. You're conniving and wily, but you're not cruel.
This is happening, then.
You've been playing house with matches inside of a tinderbox. He shouldn't be surprised when it all goes up in flames, in smoke, but as he walks through the door, and glimpses the pregnancy test perched innocently on the counter beside a card—congrats, daddy (and the caricature of a man in a pinstripe suit nearly makes him gag)—he feels all the maligned pieces inside of crack.
It shifts—
You walk out, hand cupped protectively over your lower belly. Eyes gleaming like a wild cat crouched low in the tussocks surrounding the savannah, watching him an eager sense of anticipation, excitement, and just the slightest edge of what he can only imagine the unfortunate mate of a black widow sees before it's consumed. Spare parts.
It thrums inside of him. Ignites this wicker basket he calls a heart until it's cinder. Ash. Soot. He breathes it in. Tastes you on his tongue.
John doesn't have the words. Can't think beyond the steady brag of his burning heart.
His. His.
—and then it all falls into place.
Yours.
He dotes on you with an almost unhinged devotion, murmuring stilted, gruff words of muted affection into the shallow bump on your belly. Ones that you, politely, pretend not to hear.
A new bedtime ritual, one he adheres to with an almost obsessive need.
Until it becomes too much.
“Go and get my prenatal vitamins from the washroom, please. I just need five minutes without you smothering me, you stupid bear of a man.”
“You love it,” he grumbles, but acquiesces, giving your small, barely there bump a pat. “I'll be back soon.”
“Oh, no… please take your time.”
Despite the prickle in your tongue, your eyes are soft. Warm. Melting him just a little more.
John pulls away, and doesn't even pretend the reluctance to be apart is feigned.
“It's in the drawer,” you call, voice stretched. Echoing. “Next to your shaving cream.”
He pulls the drawer open, scanning the contents briefly, before finding the purple bottle in the back. Why you chose here of all places to put the bloody things—
His knuckles knock against the old box of condoms, tipping it over. There's a strange rattle as it falls, and his brows furrow at the noise.
Curiously, he reaches for it. Shakes it as he picks it up. The same sounds spill out. He pops the flap of the box open, peering inside, and—
A gruff chuckle crackles in his throat.
Inside the old box of condoms—the ones he never bothered to throw out, or use—is an accumulation of all the pills you'd meant to take.
His jowls ache. He rubs at his jaw with his hand, and feels the skittish patter of his heart thudding out of his skin. Madness in his veins.
John closes the drawer with his knee, and then tosses the box of condoms in the bin, leaving it for you to find later when you're inevitably wracked by another wave of morning sickness. A little shred of vindication for this little game you made him play.
Though he supposes turn-about is fair play, and the number of pills in the box is less than the months he spent scheming for this vision of his.
In the back of his head, the beast purrs.
“Do we need to play these games again for the next one,” he rasps. “Or can I just fuck you until it takes.”
You blink at him, wide and owlish. Full of faux innocence as you coax the beast out of hiding. “I don't know what you're talking about, John.”
More games, then. He thinks he might crack open your ribcage and rest his weary head on the frantic beat of your heart.
“Mm, don't know what I'd do without you,” he says, guns aching. He reaches for the pack of gum (no smoking around the baby or you'd toss him off the balcony), and pops a spearmint into his mouth. “Might live longer, I reckon, but—”
Your elbow digs into his side. “You sure about that?”
He just kisses your crown in response, and places his heavy, scarred hand over the curve of your belly. The beast inside purrs, content for now. Satiated.
When he looks into your midnight eyes, he finds your own beast slumbering away.
A match made in a tinderbox, he guesses, and kisses you until you're dizzy. His very own Shangri-la sitting pretty inside his bed, nestled in the castle in Spain you helped him build.
Will help him fill.
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