#there are Other Things that i have trouble wrapping my faith around so to speak

[heartpascal]

Re: drabbles, my favorite stories are I’ll be brave, so far from it, and all my faith but I don’t have any scenarios off the top of my head 🤨 a drabble à la the crooked kind would be so fun to read!!

but honestly anything and everything you put out, I will read. I eat it up every time.

▹— pre-outbreak!joel miller x platonic!f!reader

▹— summary: drabble from the crooked kind universe! • the time joel realised what your home life is like.

▹— a/n: my first ever drabble pls go easy on me D: (also if you have any situations you’d like written for this universe or others just send in a request!)

▹— warnings: abusive & neglectful family, almost father figure joel, sarah is your best friend, mention of argument with parents

masterlist

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Perhaps, he thinks now, Joel should have been suspicious of what you and Sarah had been hiding the third time you were sleeping over during the week. After all, most parents had a no-school-nights rule, and you were always quite skittish around him when he asked you questions. You also never responded well to him asking to speak to your parents, insisting that he didn’t.

But in his defence, he didn’t have a no-school-nights rule, so he figured that maybe, your parents didn’t either. It wasn’t a terrible assumption to make, although he’d given up on speaking to your parents pretty easily.

You and Sarah always got up on time for school, and you didn’t cause much trouble. Besides stocking up on some of your preferred snacks, you hadn’t had much of an impact on the Miller household, you actually blended in so well that it was like you were always there.

It was on the now sixth time of you staying at the Miller residence during the week that Joel was really starting to get suspicious. Over the course of the past three weeks, you had spent days and nights at his and Sarah’s, without so much of a word from your parents. Joel knew that he wouldn’t be all too happy if his daughter was out of the house for so long, but what could he do? Hell, even Sarah got defensive over him trying to talk about your parents.

The seventh time, he couldn’t keep quiet.

“Hey, kids?” He called up the stairs, having seen your shoes stored away neatly by the door. It was usually around dinner that Sarah begged for you to be allowed to stay the night, and that time was fast approaching. Joel figured it was best to nip this in the bud.

“What is it, dad?” Sarah yelled back, and Joel rolled his eyes at the attitude she was already showing. He resisted the urge to do that annoying parent thing, where they just didn’t answer your reply after they yelled you first.

“Come on down here, the both of you!” He responded after a moment of hesitation, hearing the vague sound of the two of you sharing hushed whispers. Joel moved on into the living room when he heard the steps coming down the hallway, the two of you finally descending the stairs when he had taken a seat on the sofa.

Sarah looked nervous, though you looked far more so, with trembling hands that you wrapped tightly around the straps of your backpack, already worn on your back. “Dad?” Sarah asked, after he hadn’t spoken for more than a moment of the two girls standing in the room.

Joel sighed, nodding his head to the couch and waiting for you both to sit down before he spoke again. “Listen, I think we need to have a talk.” He began, frowning when Sarah immediately cut him off from saying anything else.

“Dad, are you being serious?” She asked, eyes wide and defensive, and her sudden alarm wasn’t improving your nerves, either, and you were looking more anxious by the second. The last thing you wanted was for Sarah to get into trouble for you. “You’re being unreasonable! She needs to stay over here—”

Joel decided to play at Sarah’s own game, holding a stern look on his face as he cut her off. “Sarah, that’s enough. I ain’t said a word, just yet, calm yourself down.” He told her, not liking the frown she held on her expression. Joel turned his gaze to you, softening his expression when you shrunk under his gaze. “Now you two listen to me, alright? I don’t mind you stayin’ here. Can stay as many nights as you please, but god, kiddo, are your parents really alright with that?”

Sarah moved as if she was going to jump in, save you from speaking, but Joel fixed her with the strict dad-look, and she sat back, looking towards you with an apologetic gaze.

“Yeah, they’re—they don’t mind it, one bit. But I can go back, I don’t mean to be overstayin’ my welcome.” You rambled on, giving Sarah an urgent look as she opened her mouth to oppose your words, causing her to move her glare over to her dad.

“And the reason you have to stay here?” Joel asked after a moment, almost hesitantly. But if there was something more going on, he had to know about it. He was the parent here, and it was his job to look after the people under his roof.

You practically withered under the combination of his look and his question, clutching your bag straps tightly, like you were ready to head off with a moment’s notice.

“It’s nothin’, Mr. Miller, we just like hangin’ over here. Your place is much nicer than mine, right Sarah?” You looked to her pleadingly, and Joel’s suspicion only grew when Sarah nodded painfully quickly, confirming your words.

He didn’t believe you, not for a second, but decided to let the two of you off the hook.

It was the eighth time that Joel knew.

He felt sick to his stomach for not picking up on it before, for not actively trying to find out what was wrong when he knew something wasn’t quite right. For a moment, he also became angry with his own daughter, for not telling him.

The incessant knocking on the door came late that night, and given it was close to 9PM and dark out, Joel wondered who the hell would be coming to his house. It couldn’t have been Tommy — he would never knock, so Joel truly had no idea.

When he opened the door, he certainly didn’t expect to be met with you, backpack slung over your shoulders, your eyes squinting through the rain that was coming down heavy.

“Hi, Mr. Miller.” You greeted, shakily, and he didn’t miss the tremor in your tone as he ushered you inside out of the cold rain. You tried not to look too nervous under his scrutiny, tried to remain brave and nonchalant as he closed the door after you. “I’m really sorry, but could I stay over here tonight?” You asked him then, and Joel could’ve sworn he heard his own heart break at your voice.

“Jesus Christ,” He said, eyes wide as he took you in, soaked to the bone, your eyes shining with something that wasn’t from the weather. “Of course you can, kiddo, c’mon, let’s get you dried off.”

Whilst you took your shoes off, aiming not to traipse wet footsteps all throughout their house, Joel shouted up to Sarah to bring some towels. She didn’t hesitate given the urgency in his tone.

“What happened?” Sarah asked desperately as Joel took the towels from her hands to wrap them around you as you shivered, turning to look at Sarah with a nervous smile.

Joel didn’t miss the way you nervously looked in his direction, and busied himself taking the school bag from your hand and placing it down in the hallway. “Just got into a fight with my parents, ‘s’all.” You said, clearly downplaying whatever had gone on in your household. Joel’s attention was caught, that was for certain, and now he regretted every letting you go back to your own house, especially when you so often looked reluctant to leave.

Sarah looked towards Joel, much like you had, before she turned back to you, where you held the towel around your shoulders tighter. “Was it about you stayin’ over?”

You shook your head. “No, didn’t make my bed this morning.” You told her, not seeing the way Joel’s face fell. He couldn’t imagine telling Sarah off for something so badly that she left home late evening, in the pouring rain, let alone over an unmade bed.

“Kiddo,” Joel sighed, placing a hand against your shoulder, a look of slight anguish on his expression. “The two of you should’ve told me what was really goin’ on. You could’ve stayed as long as you liked.”

You frowned, your eyes still teary as you looked at your best friend’s dad, “Didn’t wanna keep botherin’ you.”

“You’re not a bother,” He said firmly, “Now c’mon, let’s get you into some dry clothes. You eaten?” At the shake of your head, his frown deepened further, but he nodded. “Then we’ll get you some food, alright?”

He let Sarah take you upstairs, off to borrow some spare clothes, and he cooked whilst you changed, just hearing the faint sounds of your quiet conversation with Sarah. He felt bad, not being the greatest cook, but he figured even shitty pre-packaged macaroni cheese would be alright with you. In fact, he often found that when you and Sarah had sleepovers, his supply of mac n’ cheese depleted.

You sat on the couch when Joel brought you a bowl of macaroni cheese, something unsettled in your eyes, but you smiled faintly at him.

“Now, you listen to me, alright? Anythin’ happens, and I mean anything, you can come here. Don’t even need to ask.” He said to you firmly, pretending he didn’t see the wobble to your lip that you hid behind your bowl.

“Thanks, dad.” Sarah said softly, responding for you, because she knew you better than you knew yourself. She sat between you and her dad, leaning her head against your shoulder.

“‘Course. But hey, if you’re gonna be stayin’ more often, you drink coffee in the morning?” Joel asked, bringing some lightness back to the conversation, his chosen topic coaxing a snicker from you as Sarah groaned, sick of her dad’s coffee addiction.

“That stuff’s gonna give you a heart attack, you know.” She said matter-of-factly, raising her eyebrows at her dad.

“Milk and two sugars,” You responded, the tremble in your voice replaced with a tinge of amusement, and Joel laughed with you at the sigh of annoyance Sarah let out.

— taglist: @auggiesolovey, @just-kaylaa, @evyiione, @lemonlaides, @fariylixie0915, @erensloveinterest, @dazedshoon, @faceache111, @randomhoex, @canpillowscry, @sleepygraves, @pedropascalsrealgf, @star-wars-lover, @coolchick333, @soobsdior, @ilybbg, @rvjaa

please let me know if you want your tag added/removed !!!

[emisprocrastinatingbywriting]

Alone and Forsaken

Chapter 5 Summary:

You wake the next morning to find Joel gone, your heat now lighting up every nerve ending in your body. Meanwhile Joel, sent into a frenzy by your unexpected visitor, works to fortify your position. After slicing his hand on a piece of barbed wire, he returns to the cabin only to be met with a sight that has his knees weak. Can Joel keep his distance?

Warnings: Bad dreams, brief mentions of past abuse/violence, reader has a fucked up past y'all, heats, hurt/comfort, and SMUT, sooo much smut (Minors, DNI please)

A/N: Howdy y'all! I hope all of you have had an amazing week :) Things are heating up (no pun intended) between you and Joel. But first, a nightmare about reader's time in the pit. As always, take care of yourself first! Trigger warning for the dream but you can scroll through the first bit if that bothers you. Moving forward, major smuttyness brought to you by yours truly, enjoy!

Chapter 5/20

Chapter 5: Hunger

“You know, your mother has been worried sick about you for the past two months.”

The light that framed Josiah’s figure was blinding and you squinted at him as your eyes struggled to adjust to the light. The room that they had been keeping you in was windowless and dark, with cement walls being your only company aside from the guards for the past few weeks. Or was it months? The days blurred together as you wasted away in the pit, the cold hard floor soothing your aching bruises as you tried to keep a hold of your sanity. 

“I guess I should have expected as much, the guards told me that you haven’t been answering their questions no matter what… techniques they use,” he mused, moving forwards into the cell. 

You scooted back, trying to put as much distance between you as you could. Your back hit the wall and you wrapped your arms around your knees, watching as Josiah crouched down in front of you. His pale blue eyes raked over your figure, a look of disgust turning down the corners of his mouth. Josiah sighed, shaking his head before grabbing your face. His bloated fingers pinched your chin and you tried not to wince, unwilling to give him the satisfaction of knowing that you were uncomfortable. 

“When I took you and your mother in, I had believed you to be a little angel. You were always so sweet as a little girl but the second you presented, I knew that you would be trouble. Always sneaking off with that other omega, defying your mother and I and speaking out of turn,” he tsks, pinching your face until you groaned in pain. 

Josiah let go of your face, pushing your head back so that it smacked against the concrete behind you. A sharp crack of pain made tears begin to form on your lash line, and you tried your hardest not to let them fall as he sneered at you. Josiah stood, towering over you for a moment before moving back to lean against the wall across from you. 

“You know what I said to myself the last time you gave me cheek? I said, Josiah, that girl needs an alpha. A strong one like yourself to keep her in line, someone who keeps the faith and does not spare the rod. Lord knows she needs a good whooping every now and again,” Josiah said. 

A laugh came out of your mouth before you could stop it, the sound broken and hollow from the dryness burning your throat. After the physical punishments had failed, the guards had begun to starve you out. You didn’t even remember the last time you had anything in your system but you knew it was too long as your stomach pinched itself and grumbled for food. 

Josiah cocked an eyebrow at you, glaring down at you before he said, “You will be mated to Paul. He will keep you in line and get you back to the Lord’s embrace. That is not up for discussion. The only question is when. If you give up everyone who helped you leave, then I will let you go back to your husband and the two of you can solidify the bond as God intended.” 

“He is not my fucking husband, I never said yes at that stupid ceremony,” you seethed. 

“No, but I did, and I am your father. Omegas don’t get a say, you know that. Now, I’ve talked to Paul and luckily he’s willing to forget your little runaway act. He said he would chalk it up to typical hysteria and let it go, as long as you humble yourself and be the good little wife that you were made to be,” Josiah said calmly, barely acknowledging your outburst.

“I. Am. Not. Your. Property,” you said, ennunciating each word as you scowled at your stepfather. 

Josiah laughed, reaching back and knocking at the wall behind him. A group of guards crowded the doorway and looked towards him, clearly waiting for some sort of instruction. 

“Oh I know you aren’t my property anymore, you’re a married woman now. But unfortunately for you, sweet daughter, your husband has been wronged. You owe him a debt, and you disappeared before he could collect. Now, it’s my job as leader in our community to right wrongs, which means sometimes I have to remind people of their place,” he spat before turning and murmuring something to the men in the doorway. 

Two of the guards moved forward and grasped your arms, dragging you upwards as you thrashed. Josiah just stood there chuckling as the guards struggled to keep you from getting away. 

“Don’t worry, you’ll learn soon enough,” he said before he focused on the guards trying to wrangle you, “Throw her in the sweatbox, see if that jogs her memory at all.” 

“NO!,” you screamed as they yanked you down the hall, tears pouring down your cheeks at the thought of the cursed space.

The sweatbox was infamous within the community, tales from those that survived it becoming a powerful deterrent for everyone else. After being thrown into it three times since your capture, you understood why. Unbearably hot and cramped, the tiny room felt like you were confined on the surface of the sun. You begged the guards through your sobs, remembering the smell of your depleted body and how you had to sit in your own filth for days before they dragged you back to your cell. The guards paid no attention to your cries, barely even looking at you as they shoved you into the room. 

“PLEASE! NO! YOU CAN’T DO THIS!,” you screamed. 

You pounded on the metal door, feeling claustrophobic already in the room that gave you just enough space to sit with your knees folded into your chest. Sweat had already begun to trickle down your back from the heat. You jolted back, the peephole suddenly being ripped open. Josiah’s eyes met yours from the outside, his gaze unwavering and cold. 

“I hope you confess your sins soon child, before Paul comes to me to inquire about a new mate,” he snapped. 

“Please,” you begged, all of the fight in you depleted from fear. 

“Repent or he’ll have no use for you. Sinful omegas beget sinful pups, you’d be wise to remember that. I’d hate to have to comfort your mother because your husband decided he wanted a more… accommodating wife,” Josiah warned, his voice low and daunting. 

Before you could respond to his threat, he slammed the peephole shut, leaving you blind in the dark heat once more. 

-

A gasp escaped your lips as you shot up, sweat pouring down your face as your damp clothes clung to your frame. Your eyes wheeled around the room as you tried to remember where you were. Bookshelves, carvings, a guitar, the worn sofa and throw blankets. You sighed as you remembered that you were with Joel, you were safe. Josiah was dead and Paul? Well, hopefully he was dead too. 

You wiped your brow, the sweat still dripping from your hairline and you tried to calm your racing heart. Standing, you started towards the bedroom in search of Joel but a sharp pang from your core had you dropping down to your knees in front of the couch. You whined, clutching your stomach as a bright and pulsing ache screamed at you from your core. 

“Joel?,” you croaked, suddenly feeling very vulnerable. 

No answer. 

Where was he? You tried to call out again but another wave hit you, forcing wetness to drip down your quaking thighs. You looked down and groaned, realizing what was causing the storm brewing under your thin shorts. 

“JOEL?!,” you cried out more urgently, now needing him for an entirely different reason. 

When no answer arrived, you braced yourself on the couch before stumbling into the bedroom in search of him. Leaning into the wall for support, you inched towards the door as waves of slick soaked through your bottoms. Finally making it, you pushed the door open only to be met with the smell of something sharp and sterile. You stood in the doorway, bewildered at the smell of cleaning products. 

And then it all came back to you. 

The man grabbing you, the struggle, breaking away and throwing the vase in his direction, ripping at his hair as he tried to push his grimy hands up Joel’s shirt, being dragged down the hallway as you wailed and fought, him climbing on top of you and you beating at his chest as panic overwhelmed you, him raising his hand to slap you before he was torn away. 

You stared at the floor, remembering how Joel had defended you. You listened when he instructed you to go, but you had only made it about halfway down the hall before you stopped. A sense of protectiveness had shot through you, what if Joel needed your help? What if the man got the jump on him? You had turned on your heel and crept back into the room just in time to watch Joel snap the neck of your attacker. You hated to admit it, but as you watched his hulking frame tower over the other alpha, a twinge of desire had sparked from your core before you remembered the ordeal that you had just been through. 

Now, with the body gone and nothing left behind besides the stinging scent of lemon, the memory made you feel weak. Joel had protected you, he had provided, he had even comforted you afterwards and covered you in his own scent. You groaned at the thought, forcing yourself towards the bed. Flopping down, you expected to be greeted by the usual aroma of Joel only to find clean sheets devoid of the alpha.  

You cried out, shoving your face into the covers and trying to find any trace of him, but it became clear that he had stripped the bed after disposing of the intruder. Your core burned, sending painful jolts of desire as panic began to needle its way into your chest. 

Moving on autopilot, you ripped open the door to the closet. Stooping down, you collected all of the stolen clothes that you had been hiding from Joel. You shoved your face into the worn fabric, whining at the smell before dumping them on the bed. Tearing into the living room, you collected everything you could, bringing back every blanket or pillow that smelled even remotely like him. You even snagged the bath towel that hung in the bathroom for your pile. Semi-satisfied, you went to work, adjusting the items just so before your instincts signaled that the nest was complete. 

You sighed, feeling slightly less panicked but still nervous at Joel’s absence. You wondered briefly if you should go find him but the jolts coming from your soaking folds were enough to dissuade you of the notion. Instead you crawled into the center, cocooning yourself in Joel’s musk as a fresh wave of slick had you shimmying out of your clothes and flinging them to the floor. 

Grabbing at one of his well worn flannels, you breathed in his scent before shoving it in between your legs. Any sense of shame long since gone, you keened as your pulsing clit rubbed against the harsh fabric. You thought of Joel cutting the wood, of him providing for you so well, of him towering over the man, of him sucking at your neck, of him calling you his. You rocked your hips against the flannel, your clit catching on it and sending sparks up your spine as you tried to imagine it was Joel that you were rubbing yourself against. 

As you ground your hips down hard, with thoughts of Joel swirling through your mind and your heat growing in intensity, you tried hard not to let his absence worry you. Instead you focused on the friction building and the pleasant smell that overwhelmed your frantic senses. 

 - Joel - 

“Fuck,” Joel hissed, a sharp sting erupting from his hand as he caught his flesh on the wire. 

Holding it up to examine, Joel watched as his blood began to trickle from his rough palm down to his rolled up sleeve. He cussed again, sighing as he tore a strip from the t-shirt hidden under his sweater. As Joel wrapped up his fist, he took a moment to focus on his breathing. Trying to calm his pounding heart, he tried not to think of what was waiting for him back at the cabin. 

Joel had woken that morning confused. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept without having his cruel memories jerk him back to consciousness. He had slept peacefully for the first time in a very long time, but his neck was fucking killing him. He groaned, cursing himself for getting so old. Lifting his head from the soft pillow that cradled his face, Joel propped himself up on his elbows. 

It took him a moment longer to notice you as his eyes adjusted to the early morning light that poured in from the windows, but then he did. His breath caught in his throat as he hovered over your sleeping form, watching your calm face and how your skin glowed with a light sheen of sweat. Looking down, Joel’s eyes widened as he realized where his face had been buried. A drool mark darkened the fabric across your chest, and he groaned as the fragrant air tickled his nose. Peppermint and lavender made his mouth water and his cock stir to life. 

Joel suddenly became very aware of how close he was to you. Your legs framed his hips, one hand loosely grasping the curls on the back of his head and the other laid upon his shoulder. He could feel the twitching in his pants responding to the feeling of your heated core against him, the wet fabric staining his jeans. It took everything in him to keep himself from grinding up against you. 

Joel imagined the gasp he would pull from your mouth as the seam of his jeans brushed against your throbbing clit. He imagined the way your eyes would blink open, squinting from the sun for a moment before zeroing in on him. He imagined grinding down against you once more, just to hear you moan, before capturing your soft lips. He - Fuck. 

Hips jerking back, Joel broke himself from the fantasies that were making his dick throb and leak into his jeans. He needed to get it together before he worked himself into a rut, your fever already clawing into the base of his being and drawing out his most primal instincts. 

As easily as he could, Joel extradited himself from your embrace. Stopping only momentarily to cover your sleeping body in a blanket, he moved forward and kissed your forehead. He gasped softly as he pulled away, an unfamiliar feeling wrapping around his heart but he shook it off, trying to push it as far from his mind as he could as he stood up.  

Quietly as he could, Joel had cleared the corpse and any proof that it had ever existed away from the cabin. He had worked diligently, almost growling at the memory as he covered the floor in harsh chemicals to pull the scent of your attacker from the wood grain. The contractor in him was shouting at him not to pour the scented cleaner over the finished wood but he ignored it. 

After finishing, he debated on what to do next. He stood over the couch for a moment, watching you sleep as he weighed his options. On one hand, he could crawl back over you and nuzzle himself into your sleeping form. He was sure that you would welcome him. On the other, a creeping sense of danger was making bile rise in his throat. He needed to keep you safe. 

Joel had left you, his need to keep you safe overwhelming the confusing emotions that you were eliciting from him. Taking into the surrounding trees, he moved quickly, setting up new traps and fencing around the cabin. He prayed that you wouldn’t go wandering off anytime soon, dreading having to unravel you from chicken wire.

With his hand throbbing and sweat covering his body, Joel knew it was time to go back. Turning back, he tried to go through every scenario in his head. You would be awake, it was too late in the morning for you to be still asleep. The thought of facing you made him attempt to slow his pace, but his nerves ensured that he reached the steps in record time. Joel stood at the front door for a moment, trying to steel himself before opening it. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with his good hand momentarily before turning the handle. 

 - You - 

A fire raged in between your legs, tears flowing down your flushed face as your rutted against Joel’s towel. Leaning forward, you buried your face into the fabric surrounding you, huffing at the smell of him. Your hips worked frantically, whining as the rough fabric scratched at your swollen nub. Heat gathered at your center, pulling everything tight before a weak pulse of pleasure inched its way out of your glistening folds. 

Slick covering your thighs, you cried out in frustration. The smell of the absent alpha surrounded you, driving you into a frenzy. The towel that you rubbed yourself against was a poor excuse for the man who plagued your mind. The heat returned immediately, the pain making you grasp at the walls of your makeshift nest and whimper. 

“Jooooel,” you sobbed, a fresh wave of tears accompanying the slick pouring from in between your legs. 

“Christ darling.”

You gasped, scrambling to turn and face the gravelly voice. Flipping around, you moaned at the sight of him. 

Joel’s cheeks were bright red, sweat made his t-shirt cling to his chest, and his hands were clenched at his sides. You watched as he gulped, his gaze finding yours momentarily before raking down your naked body. You should be embarrassed, but as you watched how his eyes turned black as he watched your breasts heave from exertion and how he licked his lips at the drops of slick rolling down your thighs, you felt a boost of confidence surge through you. The way he looked at you made you feel wanted, sexy even, something you had never felt before. 

“Joel, please,” you called to him softly, a coy smile gracing your lips as you crawled towards the edge of the bed to meet him. 

You rose and placed your hands against his chest, leaning into him. Joel stood there motionless as he chewed on the inside of his cheek, clearly warring with himself as you wrapped your arms around his neck. With you scratching at the nape of it, he closed his eyes momentarily and let out a low moan. Hands twitching at his sides, he sighed before snapping them back open. Joel’s gaze was pleading as your face inched towards his. You stopped inches away from his lips, doubt creeping up through the tension that crackled in the stifling air. The doubt didn’t last long as Joel surprised you by surging forward. 

A soft noise came from you as Joel crashed his lips against yours in a soft yet determined kiss. His hands came up, one cradling the back of your neck and the other yanking your hips against his. You moaned into Joel’s mouth and he took the opportunity to tease your tongue with his own. Burning desire made your thighs shake as you clawed at the hem of his shirt. 

Breaking away momentarily, Joel ripped his shirt off before picking you up off of the bed. You yelped, giggling before your eyes rolled into the back of your head. A pathetic whimper crawled out of your throat as Joel began to mouth at your neck, the hardness of his length pressing against your bare core as he carried you over to the dresser. Placing you on top of it, Joel broke away again. 

Whining, you tried to capture his lips again but he pulled you back with the grip he had on the back of your neck.

“I need you to tell me that you want this baby, I need you to tell me now. ‘Cuz once I start,” Joel groaned, leaning forward to whisper in your ear, “I don’t think I’ll be able to stop.” 

Your thighs clamped against his hips, bucking up to grind yourself against the harsh denim. Eyes rolling back, your nails dug into Joel’s shoulders as he sucked angry marks into your sensitive skin. You tried to muster up a coherent response but all that came out of your mouth was something between a wail and a shout. 

Joel chuckled darkly, moving his head back to hold your face in one of his large palms. With his breath fanning over you and scarred chest on full display, you whined as his other hand moved down the length of your shuddering form. You carded your fingers through the smattering of hair on his chest, absentmindedly tracing over a random scar that formed an angry line as he rubbed soothing circles into your hips and thighs. He caught your hand with his own, making you meet his piercing gaze. A shudder ran down your spine from the way he looked at you. The name for that look rattled around your brain as Joel pulled your hand up to his mouth and kissed the back of it gently. You gasped as you watched him place it over his thundering heart. 

“Tell me darling, please. I can’t - you need to tell me that you want me. Please, I need to know that I can have ya,” Joel begged, the desperation in his voice making you dizzy. 

Gripping the back of his neck, you pulled him closer and kissed him hard. A soft hum came from him, his lips moving in tandem with yours as you tried to meld your bodies together. Ankles locking behind his back, you dug your heels into him to pull his hips into your own. This kiss was different, longing rolled off of the both of you like waves and crashed together as hands and mouths explored one another. 

You leaned back to catch your breath, watching as the string of spit that connected you stretched and broke. Eyes meeting once more, you suddenly couldn’t wait any longer. You needed him. You’ve needed him since the first day you met him. Hell, maybe you had always needed him, but that was too much to think about right now. Not as your abdomen cramped and a heat like no other screamed at you to rip open the rough denim that pushed against you. 

“Please alpha, I need you to fill me up. Make me yours Joel, please, please, please,” you cried as your shaky hands tried and failed to unbutton his jeans. 

Joel let out a feral moan before he launched himself towards you. Desperate now, Joel kissed you passionately, his teeth clacking against yours as he devoured you. He nibbled on your bottom lip before delving his tongue in to taste you, making your head spin and body ache with desire. Sucking on your tongue, Joel reached up to cup one of your breasts in his hand. He pinched your nipple between his fingers, rolling the nub and hardening it. 

Panting, you broke away to whine, “Please Joel.” 

He hummed, leaning forward to kiss your neck once more before trailing his lips down your body. His mustache prickled your skin, leaving goosebumps in his wake as he moved to wrap his lips around the opposite nipple. You cried out and flung your hands up to pull at his locks, eliciting a devastating moan from him. His other hand came up to play with your other breast as he sucked and bit at your now reddened nub. Joel kept up his attention on your breasts for what felt like ages as you begged. He laughed softly as you thrashed below him, letting up only to switch sides. Tears had begun to fall from your eyes, your frustration making you wiggle so much that the dresser knocked into the wall behind you. Joel chuckled again before pulling back to look at you properly. 

“You’re some squirrelly today darling,” he drawled, playing with the curls that covered your mound as you arched into him, “Something on your mind?” 

You whined and bucked, a frustrated noise leaving your lips as you playfully smacked his shoulder. Joel chuckled darkly, kissing your cheek sweetly before picking you up once more and tossing you on the bed. You flopped against it ungracefully, sitting up only to be knocked over as he grabbed you by the ankles and pulled you to the edge of the bed. Shivering as Joel stood over you, his eyes feasted on your vulnerable state. You gulped, beginning to feel self conscious at his primal gaze. 

“So fucking beautiful baby,” Joel breathed, moving to hover over you before leaning down and trailing his lips across your heated skin. 

He kissed over the scars and stretch marks, admiring the patch of hair above your seam for a moment before he pressed his nose into the curls and breathed in, moaning loudly as he rested his cheek against your thigh. Whining again, you begged him to crawl back up your body but he stayed put. Instead, you felt him pry your damp legs apart. 

“W-what are you doing?,” you asked through a gasping breath, hands clutching the sheets below you. 

“M’gonna make you feel good darling, get you all nice and ready for me,” he said softly before he leaned forward and licked a long stripe up your seam. 

A garbled, “Joel!,” left your mouth as he shoved his face into your core. 

Stubble chafing the inside of your thighs, you writhed on the bed as Joel’s long strokes had you pulsating. Feeling you grow impatient, he switched to calculated flicks, making your clit jump and a garbled moan bounce off the walls. Your mind was completely blank, the only coherent thought that you had was Joel, Joel, Joel, Joel… 

He was ravenous, sucking on your throbbing nub before moving down to shove his tongue into your core. You felt him crook his tongue inside of you, lapping up the slick that poured out of you. Hands flying to his hair, you shouted his name as he moved up again to suck at your clit, his fingers moving to breach your entrance. 

“J-Joel - AH! Oh my god, please Joel. I - fuuuuck,” you wailed as he slid one, then two fingers inside of you.

You had never been so full in your entire life. You had never been filled, period. Always nervous to try, warnings about purity haunting you even during the heights of your heats, you had satisfied yourself by grinding against whatever pillow or blanket you could find. Now, with two of Joel’s thick fingers pumping inside of your hole, and his mouth sucking and flicking at your clit, you felt a blinding pressure building embarrassingly fast. 

Nervous of the intense feeling building inside of you, you tried to scooch your hips back on the bed but Joel’s free arm clamped down over your mid section. Now, with his forearm pressing against your abdomen and his relentless pace doing wonders on your aching core, you had no choice but to feel the entirety of the pleasure that Joel was ripping from you. 

“C’mon baby, make that pussy cry for me, I know you can. You want to be a good girl for me, right sweetheart?,” Joel asked sweetly, his words making your head spin as his fingers picked up their pace inside of you. 

“Fuuuck yes, I wanna be good. I’ll be so good for you Joel. Please, please, please,” you sobbed, hips twitching with the pressure building inside of you, begging to be released. 

Joel’s fingers hooked against your walls, the calloused pads of his fingertips rubbing over a devastating spot inside of you that had you practically convulsing on the bed. Your heart rate sped up, blood pumping in your ears so loud that you could barely hear his response. 

“Good girl, now cum for me darling,” Joel said sternly, the tone of his voice making something inside of you melt as he lowered his mouth back down and sucked your clit hard. 

You wailed, hands pushing Joel’s skull into your center and heels digging into his back as you trembled. You barreled towards the precipice, letting yourself be overcome by Joel as you gushed around his digits. Babbling nonsense at him, you gasped and squeezed his fingers. Pleasure rocked through you, fraying all of the nerve endings in your body as Joel fucked you through it. His pace never faltering, he kept his mouth and fingers going even after the last contraction had weakly clutched him. Suddenly feeling the overstimulation, you whined and pushed at his head, trying to wiggle out from under his strong hold. 

“Quit it, I ain’t done,” Joel growled, his voice muffled as he spoke into your folds. 

The switch in Joel’s demeanor had your head spinning. He had always been so gentle with you, a true southern gentleman. Now, with his fingers pistoning roughly inside of your core, the wet sound of his hand smacking against your center echoing throughout the room, his presence was menacing. It only made you want him more. 

Any protest that you had soon vanished from your mind as Joel doubled down on his efforts. He sucked your poor clit in between his lips again, batting it with his tongue as he slid a third finger into you. You yelped at the sudden fullness, lungs fighting for air as your second orgasm barreled towards you. Black dots filled your vision as you tore at his scalp, worrying for a moment about hurting him before a feral noise sent vibrations through your pussy. 

“Fuuuck, Joooooel. Oh my - I fucking lo - oh my goood,” you moaned. 

Joel hummed, the vibrations of it buzzing against your clit and sending you flying off the deep end. You gasped, throwing your head back as your core locked his fingers in place, squeezing them almost painfully as ecstasy had you twisting in his grasp. You could hear him groan as more slick soaked his face, Joel slurping it up and prolonging the blinding pleasure that had you mumbling nonsense. 

Finally slowing, Joel carefully pulled his fingers from your core as you hissed. Bringing them up to his face, your eyes followed his movements as he separated them to watch the strings of arousal gleam in the daylight. His eyes met yours, a smirk forming on his face before he sucked his glistening fingers into his mouth. You gasped at the sight, having never seen anything like it. Moaning at the taste, Joel’s eyes raked over you as you laid panting and naked in front him. 

Weakly, you reached a hand out to him and he took it in his larger one, kissing the back of it sweetly before crawling up your body. With his lips kissing up your sternum, the heat was back now despite your two previous releases. Your hips bucked into him as he ran his teeth across the sensitive skin below your ear. Joel moaned at the friction, grinding his hips down into yours as he teased your gland. You wordlessly willed him to bite down, to seal the claim he already had over you, but he refrained. 

“Never thought I’d have ya like this darling. So sweet, so smart, so soft, and all fucking mine,” he mumbled, bruising your neck with his teeth. 

“Y-your, m’yours Joel. Please, I’ve never had someone like this. I-I-I need you, please, I need you to fuck me,” you begged, finally managing to shove his pants down his hips and gasping as his hard cock sprung from its confines. 

As you reached to grab it, Joel grabbed your hand and your eyes flicked up to meet his own. You whined, wanting to feel the warm length that pulsed against your slicked thigh. You were not an expert by any means, but you knew Joel was fucking huge and it made your mouth water. Pretty and thick, with veins running down the sides, a trimmed patch of curly hair gathering at the base, and a glob of precum pearling at his reddened tip, you needed to touch him. You fought against Joel’s hold on your hand but he demanded your attention. 

Joel’s chest heaved and you could tell he was fighting against his own instincts by stopping, but he pushed through, gripping your face and looking deep into your eyes. You stared back at him in confusion, frustrated as you wondered what the hold up was.

“Darling is this - have you never, uh… What do you mean you ain’t never had someone like this?,” Joel asked through panting breaths, the hair on his chest brushing up against your sensitive nipples. 

“Because I haven’t. I was with everyone at camp and then I was on the run, now m’here. Never wanted anyone before, never needed anybody before you,” you whispered, suddenly feeling shy as his eyes widened at your admission. 

“Shit,” Joel swore, blanching as he rolled off of you. 

“W-what?,” you croaked, eyes watering as he distanced himself from you again. 

You hauled yourself up and slid into his lap, chasing him without even thinking about it. Joel cursed, his bare cock now seated in between your folds as he tried to keep your hips from moving against his painfully hard cock. You whined, weakly shifting to try and spark some sort of friction between you as he hissed through his teeth. 

“Darling, f-fuck, I wouldn’t of done it like that if - oh sweet Jesus,” Joel groaned as you managed to rip one of his trembling hands off of your hips. 

Determined, you held his hand above his head as you rubbed your soaking seam against him, moaning as your clit caught on the tip of his dick. A fresh wave of slick coated him as you moved, helping you grind into Joel as he bit his bottom lip to keep his moans from spilling out. 

“I need you Joel. M’yours. Fuuuck, and you’re mine. This is all fucking mine, nobody else’s,” you growled, shocking the both of you as a wave of possessiveness washed over you.  

Something clicked in Joel’s brain as the words tumbled from your lips. Finally having enough, Joel flipped you on to your back and loomed over you. Pools of black boring into your soul, your walls fluttered against the emptiness his fingers left behind. As Joel watched your pussy twitch, you could practically hear the gears turning in his head before he came to a decision. 

“If you want me to stop, you tell me. If I’m hurting ya, you fucking tell me. Got it?,” Joel said seriously, making sure that your eyes met as he said it. 

Nodding before he had even stopped talking, you locked your ankles behind his back as he hiked your legs over his hips, bodies unbearably closer now. Joel leaned down, lips ghosting over yours as the need for him to fill you had you squirming against the solid wall of his chest. 

“Say it baby,” he chided gently. 

“Please Joel, I need you,” you whispered as your noses brushed against each other, his honeyed tone making your heart flutter. 

Joel kissed you fiercely and let one hand move down to run his fingers through your slit. He gathered up all the slick he could before he used it to pump himself, spreading your arousal up and down the length of him. He finally broke the intoxicating kiss, panting as he pressed himself against your opening, carefully pushing himself in the first few inches. Sweat began to form at your hairline as your body struggled to accommodate his size. Not only was Joel long but he was thick, your body fought against the intrusion as you winced. Joel grunted, clearly struggling as you squeezed him like a vice. 

“Fuck darling, you gotta - shit - you gotta relax and let me in,” Joel hissed, his brow furrowing as he tried to keep himself still.  

You nodded, moaning as he moved to capture your lips once more. As soft lips moved against yours and tongues mingled, you forgot about the heavy weight of his cock inside of you. With you distracted by his passionate kiss, Joel was able to slide in a few more inches. More slick came to greet him as your hole stretched and your fingernails left angry red lines down his back. Feeling emboldened by your response, Joel pushed through the last bit of resistance, sliding home and nestling himself in the cradle of your hips. 

“Fuck you’re so tight, fucking choking my cock darling. Jesus, little pussy’s so wet,” Joel whined unabashedly in your ear. 

You moaned, not used to Joel being so vocal. It was driving you crazy. His dirty words, mixed with the feeling of him carving out a space for himself inside you, had you nearing your end already. Mind long gone, you keened and tried to fuck yourself on him, pathetic little jolts to your hips making him gasp and groan. 

“Please fuck me Joel. I can take it, I swear. I’ll be good, I’m your good girl, I’m - oh!,” you cried out as Joel threw your legs over his shoulders, moving himself back carefully before thrusting forward again. 

His pace was slow but his thrusts hard, knocking the breath out of you each time. You choked on a whimper as he pressed forward and bumped against something that had a fresh wave of tears streaming down your face. Joel leaned forward, getting impossibly deeper as the curls at the base of his dick tickled your clit. Leaning forward, he kissed the tears on your cheeks, cooing softly as you hiccuped and whined. 

“Aw, my sweet girl, d’you like that? Like my cock stretching you out? Bet you won’t want another after this, ain’t nobody else gonna fuck you like this baby. Christ, do you hear her soaking for me? She’s fucking crying for my cock, isn’t she? Shi-i-t,” Joel growled, his hips picking up the pace slightly. 

You grabbed at his hair, his neck, his shoulders, anything to keep you grounded as you begged him for more. Joel gave you a devilish smile, making you squeak as his hips started slamming into you. Strings of your arousal dripped down Joel’s balls and soaked the hair on his thighs, making the curls glisten as he sucked at your neck again. Joel tore animalistic cries out of you as he pounded into your weeping hole, claiming you with each hard thrust. 

“Pleeease,” you pleaded, not even sure what you were pleading for as you weakly tried to meet his thrusts. 

Joel huffed a laugh through his moans, hips working double time as he felt your pussy begin to flutter around him. 

“What baby? Tell me what you want,” he crooned, moving one hand to brush through the cute patch of hair covering your mound, finding your clit and pressing down on it harshly with his thumb. 

Legs shaking and eyes watering, you locked eyes with Joel before you cried out, “You daddy, I want you!”

Joel’s pace slowed for a second as he took in what you said. Freezing, you wondered if you had crossed some sort of line. You weren’t even sure where that had come from, but it just seemed so right in the moment. An apology on the tip of your tongue, you were surprised by a primal growl rumbling out of Joel, making your already pulverized insides turn to mush as he pulled himself up on his knees. He moved you up on his lap as you helplessly wrapped your weakened arms around his neck once more. 

Faces pressed against one another, panting mouths sharing air and his cock almost unbearably deep, Joel grabbed your hips and began fucking you up and down on him. He speared into you so deep that you screamed, breath catching in your throat as he worked your limp body into a frenzy. Pleas, cries, and the slick sound of him moving inside of you filled the air. All of your senses were overwhelmed with Joel as panting mouths mashed into each other, lips greedily moving in tandem before breaking away again for air. The room spun as his heavy balls slapped against your ass, Joel moving faster and harder as your walls sucked him in. 

You were shocked at his strength. Joel effortlessly moved your body up and down his throbbing cock with one hand clutching your hip, the other moving to strum at your oversensitive clit. You squeaked, unable to do anything but hold on for dear life as he effortlessly dragged you closer and closer to your peak. 

“Say it again baby, whose pussy is this? Who gets to fuck you like this? Fuck, you’re too good for daddy sweet girl. Such a pretty thing, so smart, so strong, smell so fucking good. God - shit - say it please,” Joel moaned as he pressed into your clit harder. 

“Yours! D-daddy, I’m yours. Please, I can’t. Oh my fucking g- daddy please!,” you screamed, walls beginning to squeeze him brutally. 

Joel hissed, keeping up his pace as he kissed at every bit of skin his lips could reach, beginning to ramble as he neared his end. 

“S’right baby, daddy’s pussy, nobody else’s. M’yours too, fuck - anything you want from me is yours, just fucking stay, please fucking stay with me baby. I can’t lose - PLEASE baby, fuck, I need you to stay.” 

The desperation in his voice had you reaching out to grip his neck, bringing him down to meet your lips in a kiss filled promise. As you poured everything you had into the kiss, you felt something nudging at the outside of your hole. You gasped, looking down to see his knot forming and begging to be jammed into you. With your orgasm making your walls start to tighten around his cock, you were suddenly desperate for it. You ground yourself against his knot and Joel moaned as it began to tease your entrance. 

“F-fuck, you don’t have t- ah, oh shit,” Joel stuttered, his resolve breaking as your walls twitched against the base of it. 

“Knot me alpha. Shit - need you to fill me up so that I can feel you for days. Please daddy,” you begged, shattering any reservation in Joel’s mind. 

A grunt left Joel as he heeded your request, shoving himself forward. You cried out as you felt his thick knot lock the two of you together, pleasure boiling over as his cock began to twitch inside of you. Waves after waves crashed through both of you, walls contracting against his throbbing knot, each slight movement triggering another devastating round of ecstasy. You felt him spurting thick loads of cum inside of you, soothing the need that had been burning inside of you since waking up. Everytime you thought that he was done, a slight movement or twitch from one of you would have Joel crying out as he released again. 

You could feel your belly bloating from the mess he made inside of you. You tried to calm yourself, sensing that Joel was getting overstimulated as he tensed and shook but you couldn’t stop the way your walls clamped around him. Another orgasm had your vision blacking out around the edges, your voice hoarse as you called his name. Joel gasped, holding you close and pressing his face into your chest as his cock painfully released into you again and again and again. 

Finally spent, Joel carefully lowered you onto the bed. Groaning, Joel collapsed on top of you. The weight of his body was warm and comforting, pulling a purring noise from the back of your throat. He hummed, rubbing his face against the valley of your breasts as you began to play with his hair. With the heat satiated at last, you giggled at the feeling of his whiskers tickling your damp skin. Joel’s head popped up, pools of melted chocolate studying the lines on your face as you laughed. 

“What’s so funny baby?,” Joel asked, a grin evident in his voice. 

You settled, letting out a few more giggles before glancing down at his relaxed face, pushing his curls from his forehead as you smiled at him. 

“Nothing daddy, m’just happy,” you said softly. 

Joel barked out a laugh, groaning as the movement had his cock weakly twitching again. He shook his head, kissing his way up from between your breasts. He pressed his lips against yours softly, humming at the intimacy before pulling back and grinning down at you. 

“Daddy huh?,” Joel teased, watching as your cheeks reddened and you whacked his shoulder again. 

“You didn’t seem to mind,” you grumbled, looking away from him to study the wall in embarrassment. 

He laughed again, leaning forward and pressing soft kisses across your chest, neck, and face as you squealed and giggled. Joel kept kissing you until you were out of breath from laughter and pleading for him stop his sweet torture until he finally relented. Panting, you met his eyes once more as he looked at you with a softness that had butterflies erupting in your belly. A giddiness bubbled up to the surface and you bit your lip, suddenly feeling girlish and shy as Joel looked at you like you were the only person in the world. He leaned forward and kissed your forehead, pulling back and clearing the loose strands that stuck to your forehead off of your sweaty face. 

It was then that you noticed the poor excuse for a bandage that was wrapped around his palm, the center of it red with dried blood. You whined, panicking as you brought it up to your face to examine. Joel shushed you, shaking his head before you could get too worked up. 

“S’okay darling, I just sliced it when I was putting up some wire. Nothing to be worried about, I swear. Barely felt it,” he crooned, watching as you leaned forward and kissed the dark stain. 

“Why don’t you let me help next time?,” you asked, letting him go back to fixing your wild strands. 

He chuckled, “You really want to help me with choring that bad? It’s boring stuff. I wouldn’t want you to feel like you HAD to.” 

You whined, huffing impatiently at him as you rolled your eyes, “I’ve been bored Joel. I’m going nuts in here doing nothing all day. I would LOVE to help you with your ‘choring’.”

The last part made him snort as you tried (and failed) to mimic his deep twang. You giggled back at him, bodies brushing up against each other as the feeling of joy radiated off the pair of you. He watched you with a grin, noticing the way your nose scrunched up as you threw your head back in laughter. Joel grunted as your laughter made you clench around him, suddenly remembering that he was inside of you still. 

“I didn’t hurt you, did I? M’sorry if I did. I was trying so hard to stay gentle but fuck baby, you don’t know how hard its been for me to stay away from ya,” Joel asked, his concern cutting through the sweet moment. 

You kissed the hand that fussed over your messy hair, lips touching the bandage once more before you said, “Joel, you didn’t hurt me. That was everything I could have asked for. I’ve never felt so… wanted. Nobody’s ever made me feel like that.” 

Joel tsked, shaking his head and grumbling under his breath about how stupid every alpha in your life had been up until this point, how you were the prettiest damn thing he had ever saw, how he had no fucking clue how he got so lucky. A softer laugh tumbled out of you, breaking him from his reverie and making him smile.  

“Why’d you stay away?,” you asked softly, thumb gliding over the stubble on his cheeks. 

A sigh left Joel’s mouth and he looked down, his knot now deflated enough that he could ease himself out of your puffy folds. You whined, panic popping the bubble of comfort that had cradled you moments before. You were terrified that he was going to get up and leave you there. Trying not to cry, you cursed yourself for ruining the moment. He hushed you as you gripped his forearms, trying to assure you as he pulled away. 

“Shhh, it’s okay baby. I just need to clean you up and get something to fill that belly of yours. You need to eat before the heat comes back. Gotta keep your strength up for when my rut hits, reckon you’re gonna rip it out of me soon. Can already feel it coming,” he said carefully, massaging your sore hips as he inched off of the bed. 

You nodded, sniffling and whimpering as he made his way out of the room. You tried to remember his words as anxiety trickled into your pliant muscles, making you tense. Joel would be back, he would be back, he was just grabbing something to clean you up and some food, it’s okay, he won’t leave you…

A hiss came out of your mouth as you felt something cool and rough between your legs. Joel shushed you, softly cleaning the mess he had made of your core with a washcloth. Tossing it behind him, he lifted you up onto his lap, situating himself so that he was sitting against the headboard. Before you could nestle yourself into the crook of his neck, Joel stopped you. He brought a glass of water from the nightstand, placing it at your lips. You gulped down half of it in one go, surprised at how thirsty you were. 

“All of it baby,” he whispered when you paused, moving to tip the glass into your mouth again but you stopped him. 

Grabbing the glass from him, Joel raised an eyebrow as you placed the glass at his lips. You looked back at him sternly, daring him to defy you as you tipped the water into his mouth. He acquiesced, chugging down the rest of the water and placing the empty glass on the nightstand. Next, he grabbed a granola bar and presented it to you. You grumbled, not feeling particularly hungry but he was persistent as he shoved it at you again. 

“Share it with me?,” you asked softly, playing with his curls. 

Joel nodded, tearing the package open and breaking the nutty biscuit in two, ignoring the crumbly bits that fell onto the mess of sheets and clothes below. The two of you ate in silence, one of his big hands rubbing your thigh while you absentmindedly scratched his scalp. Finally finished, Joel let you lean forward and rest against him, your body straddling him and face shoved into the gland on his neck, snuffling at his musk. 

“Why?,” you asked again, your voice barely above a whisper. 

He tensed and you snuggled deeper into him, trying to cover his body with your own as you smelt his scent slightly sour with nerves. Joel huffed lightly at your knotted hair, trying to calm himself down before he answered you. 

“Darling I… There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. Things I’ve done, horrible things… Some things I did to people that deserved it, others didn’t… And I’ve failed people that cared about me, too many fucking people. I couldn’t - I can’t fail you too,” Joel murmured against your hair, fingers now clutching your hips and holding you against him firmly. 

You hummed in acknowledgement, playing with his hair as you responded, “You couldn’t fail me Joel, not even if you tried.” 

Joel shook his head, his nerves threatening to break him out of the peace that you had cloaked him in. He pulled back and tried to speak, but you covered his mouth with your hand before he could. 

“Joel, I know you think that you’re no good but you are. You are good. You could’ve left me out there to die, but you didn’t. You helped me and you didn’t even ask for anything in return, a bad man wouldn’t do that. Whatever you had to do in the past to stay alive, I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it,” you said, letting him work through the words for a moment before you continued. 

He moved to protest, gripping your wrist and trying to pull your hand off of his mouth so that he could reject your words but you slapped his hand away. Joel guffawed under your hand, the feeling of it tickling your palm as he furrowed his brows in confusion. 

“I know that you… That losing Sarah must have killed you Joel,” you could feel him growing more uncomfortable but you pressed on, “But that wasn’t your fault. None of it was. And it doesn’t mean that you aren’t good, okay? You’re good Joel. You. Are. Good.” 

Joel watched you silently as you eased your hand off of his mouth, eyes shining as he cleared his throat. He nodded, swallowing thickly before he leaned forward and knocked his forehead against yours, shaky breaths fanning over your face. 

“S’not all darling. I can’t - I don’t know how to tell you… There’s so much more than just Sarah and I don’t know if I can ever - fuck,” he cussed, his eyes falling closed in frustration as words failed him. 

“I know Joel, I know. You’ll tell me when you’re ready. But until then, I’m not going anywhere m’kay? Hell, I’ve got things I haven’t told you yet either but I don’t care, none of that matters. You’re mine and I’m yours now, you’re gonna have to throw me out into the cold if you want me gone now,” you chided. 

Joel chuckled, shaking his head before he said, “I’d never kick ya out baby. Just don’t know why you’d want to be with a grumpy old man like me. M’sure you could find a decent man in Jackson, probably tons of men your age there” 

You shrugged playfully, pretending to think it over, “Hmmmm… well as tempting as that sounds, I think I’ll stick with you. Think I like my men a bit more experienced, no clue why. Daddy issues maybe?” 

“Shut up,” Joel said through a surprised laugh, flipping you over onto the bed and attacking your sides with tickles as you screeched and giggled. 

The heaviness pulled from the air, the two of you smiled at each other. Moving to get up again, Joel groaned when he saw the mess that you had made as the two of you had rolled around playfully on the bed. Sucking in a shaky breath, he watched your pussy begin to drip slick down your thighs once more, hole winking at him enticingly as he swore under his breath. 

“Oh fuck Joel, I’m sorry. I know you probably need a bit of a break, seeing as you’re a senior citizen and all,” you joked breathlessly, his head shooting up at the jab.

A mischievous grin spread across Joel’s face, pearly whites gleaming menacingly at you as his gaze turned ravenous. 

“Oh honey, you’ve got no fucking clue what this old man is capable of,” he chuckled. 

A witty response died in your throat, mind numbing pleasure soon making you scream for the man that had his face buried in your core. 

[vampirzina]

Could you do headcanons Shang Tsung with a siren reader who is as evil as he is?

♒︎ ┆SHANG TSUNG w. DARK SIREN!READER HCS

tw(s): gn pronouns (you only), sfw, villain!reader, manipulation, jealousy, possessiveness/controlling tropes, one (1) question of faithfulness, typical siren powers, mdni

notes: for the sake of the story, reader has legs and is humanoid. also trying out new formatting styles so i apologize if there’s inconsistencies between posts/req

masterlist

— Spoiler: he’s the one who’s lured. He knew it asap.

— Yet he must lie to say he’s immune to you (he’s not). It’ll humble you in a way and keep him out of trouble, for now. That’s really the only reason I could think of as to why he wouldn’t jump to be in a relationship with you

— But best believe you’re already his.

— He just needs you to be focused on doing what he needs you to do in order to get ahead of his enemies. He’s also wary of you turning on him, so he’s only keeping a ‘close eye on you’, or whatever that means

— You don’t believe it for a second, but you play his little game. It’s annoying for a while when all you’re used for is to lure Liu Kang and his champion, as well as keep henchmen under a sort of trance

— However, you’re determined to prove that he’s not immune to you, if not the most head-over-heels of all the people you’ve lured

— Charm is on 100, and when you practically throw yourself on Johnny Cage when he gets to his lab (for example, other than the way you speak to General Shao or some random pawn), that tether anchoring Shang Tsung almost snaps

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

Shang Tsung is leaned against the cold wall with arms crossed, having been mean-mugging you from the corner ever since the Earthrealm champion left his laboratory.

He’d catch up with them later. For now, you.

It drove him further up the wall that you didn’t seem to care that his gaze pierced your very soul, as you kept picking away at your glass skin in a simple handheld mirror.

You shut it with carefully manicured hands, and you’d finally paid him attention where there he is across the room. Your painted lips flatten into a tauntingly tantalizing line.

“Excuse me?” you bat your eyelashes.

“You’re excused,” he replied, sulking further where he stood.

“You fished me out of my house to do a job, and that very job I did. Was there something I missed in that contract, Tsung?” you asked, but you got no answer except a brooding look. He knew if he spoke right now, he’d forfeit.

Your pursed lips curve into a smirk, you tilt your head at him and you squint. With a sway of your hips, you watch each other as you leave.

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈

..

— The straw to break the camels back was when you did it again, but this time got too touchy feely with one of those peers who are of status.

— He’s straightforward (and borderline aggressive that’s hiding behind a sly way with words) about what he wants now while you’re so nonchalant about it; he wants you all to himself. But that doesn’t mean you’ll stop luring people, no

— By time he realizes what he’s doing, it’s too late to go back. He figures that you’ve been worthy enough all this time because you made it this far, so why not? It couldn’t be that bad, having a beautiful thing like you on his arm

— While your fidelity might be questioned if you continue to lure people, it’s not a debate whether or not you have Shang Tsung wrapped around your finger now.

— …You’ll have to make up for/prove it in private quarters to keep him close, as he tends to act out when he thinks you’re phasing him out. And just between you and him: he’d ask you to sing him to sleep some nights while you were big spoon.

— He lavishes you, but he still has his mind enough to put himself first. No matter how much you try, you could never make Shang Tsung put you above himself enough to be able to make a puppet out of him.

— You’ll settle for second place.. For now.

..

@𝐕𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐈𝐑𝐙𝐈𝐍𝐀೨

[dulcewrites]

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (modern au)

Pairing: Aegon II Targaryen x reader (wc: 3.6k)

Summary: Sometimes Aegon is sure that the Gods like playing tricks on him. Your reintroduction into his life only proves that further

A/N: the time has come for my Aegon work!! I’m so excited because this also my first time doing an modern au. I explained the idea more here. This will include all the hotd hits: mommy issues, daddy issues, the Targs being an all around messy family. This is my contribution to the tgc Aegon universe 🫡. Slight house keeping: Aemond has both of his eyes in this universe but the sight in one eye is diminishing/has been diminished over the years. Also there are certain elements I will be taking from hotd/asoiaf and the Faith of the Seven is one.

Blog masterlist

You had always assumed that therapist offices would be sterile and cold. Or at the very least, annoyingly put together.

Cregan Stark’s office is nothing of the sort.

From deep red floors to the walls of antic books and shelves filled of knickknacks. The office is not what you expected to it be. It only makes you more anxious for this whole ordeal. The only indication of his credentials as a professional being the certificate from the University of Cambridge hanging on the wall. Even the laidback nature of him made you pause. Call me Cregan. Mr. Stark was my father.

Long brown hair pulled back, dark beard, stormy grey eyes, topped off with a flowy button-down shirt. He looks better suited chopping down wood somewhere than helping university students. Everyone seemed weary of the new addition to the dance department.

Your eyes flutter to the clock behind him then back to his warm eyes.

“I am sure you are wondering why I wanted to speak with you,” his voice is soft. There is an element of mirth that has you raising a brow.

You shrug in response. “Taking inventory of the inmates, I assume.”

The joke does seem not seem to land the way you thought it would. He gives you a incredulous look before shaking his head. Your mother always told you that your inability to keep to certain thoughts in your head would get you in trouble sooner or later.

“My new position here is to help the dancers, especially ones transitioning out of school, handle this year,” he begins. “A sounding board if you will. Listen to any problems. Assist with finding resources and opportunities beyond this point.”

You nod slowly, still not understanding why this meeting is cutting into your warmup time. Instinctively, you point then flex your foot in your fuzzy black boot. Your eyes go back to the clock. Gods, Aemond is going to tear into you if this does not wrap up soon.

“Most of the notes were positive,” he replies quickly, reading the furrow in your brow. “Bright, hard-working, and diligent were just a few things said.”

“Most of the notes were positive,” he replies quickly, reading the furrow in your brow. “Bright, hard-working, and diligent were just a few things said.”

“Most of the notes were positive,” he replies quickly, reading the furrow in your brow. “Bright, hard-working, and diligent were just a few things said.”

“Most of the notes were positive,” he replies quickly, reading the furrow in your brow. “Bright, hard-working, and diligent were just a few things said.”

You let a breath you were holding in. Of course, that was what was said. You have dedicated your life to this; you expect nothing less than comments like that. They are sentiments you should not think but you know you are one of the most talented dancers in the program.

But then your mind drifts to something.

“Most?”

He gives you a pained smile. “There were a couple of comments that expressed concern about your… intensity and your health.”

You blink blankly at him.

“I don’t think I am any more intense than any other student here. We are all very serious about our art.”

Cregan nods. “I was informed about an incident that happened in your second term here. Something quite awful.”

Your blood runs cold, and you sniff stiffly in response. Please don’t you think.

“I am sorry for your loss.”

You try to keep your eye from twitching. There was a time in your life where all you wanted was someone to tell you that. To let you know that they feel bad for the situation you found yourself wallowing in… for the situation Marina found herself in.

That time is over.

“It has been over a year and a half,” you plaster on a smile. “Thank you for that, but I am doing fine.”

It was not lie. It really wasn’t.

Cregan hums softly. “Why don’t you and I make a deal. We meet each other once a week for the rest of the term. We can talk about how you are doing, and work towards you graduating.”

You feel your patience wearing horribly thin. It is not that you have a problem with therapy or counseling. You just don’t need it nor want it.

“Look, I appreciate the concern. I just don’t have time for weekly meetings. I have auditions for companies, finishing my classes strong. Also, an end of the year project… which is not going well so far.”

Your eyes go back to clock above him. You are so fucked.

“I do not have the time,” you repeat, not even clarifying if you mean for the meetings or this conversation. “I have too much on my plate.”

Cregan smiles, easy and cool. It softens the sternness that has settled into his long face.

“That is exactly why we need to do it.”

A sinking feeling gathers in your stomach. He is not going to take no for an answer, is he?

As you leave the room, new schedule in hand, all you can think about is how much you despise Cregan Stark. Your ire extends to whatever instructor told him you needed help in the first place. The walk to the practice studios is cold and damp. Somber weather matching the way you feel.

You must take a deep breath before going into the practice room. Aemond, perched at the piano, shoots you a glare. Ignoring his eyes burning into your back, you sit on the floor to put on your pointe shoes.

“I know you have little care for my time,” his voice cut through the room. Low and condescending. “But if you want to get through this, the least you can do is show up on time.”

You do not answer immediately, eyes focused on your shoes.

“It is just common sense.”

Aemond continues to lecture you about the importance of respecting people’s time. Perhaps if you told him about your meeting, he would let it go. But then again based off the few weeks you have spent with him, you know once he gets started, it is hard to stop him. His voice fades in the background as you stare at yourself in the mirror.

In your head, you repeat the affirmations you recite every morning.

You are talented, you are grounded, you are alive.

Aegon could not help but stare at the rain as it fell and splintered on the large class windows of the meeting room.

When he was younger, he hated the rain. The endless rolling clouds and damp days made him feel like he was in a bad nightmare. But the older he got, the more he started to appreciate the rain. Utterly soothed by the tip tap of rain against something solid. He could make a melody out of it. Plus, it helped him sleep.

He rarely got good nights of sleep.

The somber weather only added to the uninspiring atmosphere in the room. Aegon tried hard to listen. He fought hard to keep his eyes from glazing over. Placing fonder thoughts in his head kept him from outwardly expressing his boredom. Today, he thought of what he should get to dinner. Something hearty… or maybe something spicy. The thoughts lead to him texting his brother.

I can drive up. Want that Thai place around the corner from yr place

It took Aemond minutes to reply, but when he did it was a simple no. His brother was always a man of few words.

I’ll pay :)

He watched as the dots appear then disappear then reappear again. Aegon smiles at his phone when Aemond eventually says yes. He gives Aegon strict instructions to stay in the car and wait on him to come out.

“Aegon, are you listening?”

Aegon’s eyes shoot up from his phone to meet one that resembles his too much for comfort. Rhaenyra is eyeing him exasperated. There was slight tension at the beginning of the meeting when he gave her a funny look after she sat in the seat their father normally does. But he had no interest in arguing with Rhaenyra, at least not today.

“Yes, I hear you,” he clears his throat, and rubs one of his eyes.

“Long night?”

The smile is there when she says it but the words are condescending. Her smile works on others, but Aegon knows what lies beneath it. Such a delight to work with, Viserys would beam. Everything was easy when her eyes softened, and the corners of her lips go lopsided in a good-natured way. Aegon knows she must that to survive in this environment. Mask all her slender and confidence with smiles. He would respect it more if she did not try to play him like she does the other men in the firm.

Like he is one of father’s mindless cronies.

They share the same blood. Which means he knows they are both predisposed to thinking they know best by nature.

“I want to talk about reconsidering the pro bono option,” ok, maybe he does want an argument. Bothering Rhaenyra sparked a unique kind of joy in Aegon.

Rhaenyra’s brows furrow. Their brains had been hardwired differently by now; her business-oriented ideals sometimes working in direct contrast with the direction he thinks the firm should go in.

“I think the idea is one we should consider,” Tyland Lannister pipes up, voice chipper and full of mirth.

Rhaenyra’s gaze turns to him, completely unimpressed. Aegon had to bite back a smile. Tyland had a habit of siding with Aegon in meetings like this. The Lannisters, a family that has dipped their foot in any lucrative business they could find, not only had a history with Targaryens, but with the Hightowers as well. Rhaenyra had expressed to their father how much it bothered her. All she received was a wave of the hand; for all the special treatment he felt Viserys gave his eldest child, Aegon can say Viserys has never been good at laying down the law within the firm.

How he managed to run the company with that attitude was beyond Aegon.

With the slight support of Tyland, a couple of the other suits in the room nodded in agreement. Rhaenyra swallows, eyes shifting back to Aegon’s. When his sister is upset, he has noticed her eyes shift to a chill blue to a tempered iris.

She looks at him with a look that Aegon could only describe as pure exhaustion. The type of exhaustion that happens when you deeply resent someone. Somewhere down the line they took a sharp turn right, and never got back on track.

The irony of the distance between them, is that it was not always like that. His first memories of life are not with his mother, father, or even with the siblings he grew up in the same household with; they are with Rhaenyra. He has fuzzy recollections of teenage her blowing raspberries on his belly when he was a baby. They used to share knowing glances when their father went on tangents. She used to take him on trips to the park. Now Aegon finds himself wondering what things Rhaenyra whispers in Viserys’ ear when he is not around.

Maybe that was the last time Rhaenyra genuinely liked him. When he was younger with no motives or true thoughts of his own. He supposed he can’t blame her; that was the last time he liked being in his own body too.

There are times he looks at his sister, and he wants her to bring him into a hug. Rhaenyra always gave the best hugs, only rivaled by his mom. He wants to burst into tears and tell her that she was his first friend. That he needed her years ago. But then he remembers the look of disbelief he received when Viserys said Aegon would be working for the firm.

The coldness is better. His heart doesn’t break multiple times over anymore.

“Aegon and I can discuss that later,” Rhaenyra says after a minute. She stands to leave. “This meeting is over.”

She’s frustrated. He can tell by the way she leaves the room without a single glance his way. One thing they do have in common is the bone-chilling urge to flee a place whenever things get too difficult or when they get too annoyed. Could be self-preservation. Could be them sparring others the anger Targaryens are known for.

Aegon sits for a moment as everyone else filters out of the room. The rain comes down harder against the windows. He closes his eyes listening to way it bangs against the building.

Tip tap tip tap

He identifies with the rain. Moody, surly, gloomy.

———

By the time Aegon packs up to leave for Aemond, the rain had stopped. The clouds clearing out as the light leaves the sky.

He lets the top down on his car. The cool air nips at his tip of his nose and cheeks. It burns in the best way. Aegon sits at the front of the building that he knows Aemond will be in. He sits patiently for minutes, but then curiosity and impatience take over.

Whenever he is on the campus, he can’t help but want to take it all in. Look at all the buildings he can. Explore as if he was child again. He always thought it would be him to follow in his mother’s footsteps coming here, instead it was Aemond. He tries not to let the scratching bitterness work its way up his throat whenever they go home. The way Alicent frets and gushes over Aemond holds a special place in brain.

Her sweet, talented boy

He still does not know if she says it in front of him on purpose or by accident.

The building was nothing like the firm. Warm wood opposed to the glass and shiny metal he was used to. It was easy to know where Aemond would be, most of the lights in rooms dimmed except for one at the end of the hall.

He follows the piano he can hear faintly. Even though they are brothers, Aegon often feels like he is encroaching on something deeply personal when he hears Aemond play. Like he was hearing a part of Aemond he kept hidden from world. It made him peak in the room versus walking straight in.

He sees Aemond, eyes closed, playing a melody he does not recognize. It’s beautiful. But that is nothing out of the ordinary for Aemond.

Before he can finally make his presences known, a pair of legs obstruct his view. A graceful turn, followed by an acrobatic leap. All Aegon can is stare in slight awe, but he can’t help his mind from drifting to his mother. It reminds him of the black and white photos of her hanging in the foyer of their family home. Or the old videos of she used to show them when they were little.

He doesn’t know what he misses more - being that young or when Alicent wanted to share those things with them.

Before Aegon can finally walk in, the dancer stops abruptly turning to Aemond.

“Hmmmm,” she hums lowly. “I’m just not feeling it.”

Aemond lets out a guttural groan in response. He stands from the piano, roughly closing the top.

“You have not ‘felt’ the last two things I have composed.”

The dancer shrugs, not fazed by Aemond’s temperament. “Nothing has inspired me yet.”

He mumbled something under his breath, and Aegon watches as a head full of hair pulled pack in a ponytail snap back to his brother.

“What was that?”

Aegon knows that tone well. Him and Helaena would use it often when Aemond did that. They both hated when he would mumble under his breath. It always led to arguments that Alicent would have to break up. Aemond starts to gather the music sheets on the piano.

“Could be your tired routine that has everything feeling uninspired,” Aemond says louder.

“Oh please,” there is something so oddly familiar about the voice as it rings out. The insults don’t match the clear and sprite like nature of it. “If anything is tired, it is the cheap Rachmaninoff imitations you keep composing.”

“Gods, you’re such a….”

“Awe, what am I Aemond,” she doesn’t miss a beat. “tell me, so then I can tell you what you are. Because trust me if you think calling me a bitch is going to hurt my feelings, you should hear what people say about you.”

It makes Aemond falter. Aegon knows that deposited the tough face his brother puts on; he gets bogged down with what others think and expect of him. Aegon decides that maybe he should step in now.

“I think you both looked and sounded great,” he winced as soon as the words came out. His voice loudly ranges through the studio. Not entirely the smooth entrance it should have been. Aemond’s eyes shoot to Aegon; he seems to be getting that angry look from all his siblings lately.

Aegon freezes when his gaze meets big eyes staring at him incredulously. He recognizes the gentle slope of her nose, and the softness of her pretty face.

“Oh, fuck me.”

Aegon has a special talent for being foolishly. A knack for being numbingly unintelligent when it comes to feelings. At least that is what Daeron tells him.

“For someone so bright in other ways, you can be real stupid.”

But managing to include himself in the mess that is Aemond’s university life must be a new kind of low. This must be the Gods punishing him. The false promises he dishes out to women coming to finally bite him in the ass.

Her eyes go from Aegon to Aemond, then back to Aegon before she left out a chuckle of disbelief. “My life must be joke.”

Aegon opens his mouth to say something, but then realizes his mouth is the thing that got in him into this mess in the first place. His mouth on yours, his mouth on you, and his mouth’s ability to say sweet nothings at the drop of a hat. So all he can do is watch as you angrily put on your coat and tear off your dance shoes. While putting on your boots you turn to Aemond.

“Figure your shit out before reaching out to me again,” you hiss at him.

You don’t even spare Aegon another glance as you storm out. Leaving him with just the quick whiff of your sweet perfume.

The two brothers stand there in silence for a moment before Aemond finally speaks.

“I thought I told you to stay in the car?”

The drive to the Thai place was filled with Aemond cutting Aegon off by turning the radio louder and louder. He asks for what happened but seemingly shut down when the implication of what happened became clear.

“So, you fucked my project partner,” he mutters bitterly. “And then completely ghosted her after you promised you wouldn’t. On top lying about your last name.”

Aegon shakes his head, mouth full of tom kha khai. When he says it like that it sounds so awful.

“We did not have sex,” Aegon repeats. Then his shoulders slump. “But yes… we might have done… other stuff and I may have… not called when I said I would.”

Aemond scoffs, picking at his half-eaten curry. The brother bonding not going how Aegon wanted it to.

“I can apologize. I can send flowers.”

“No, absolutely not.” Aemond blanches. “You need to leave her alone. We are already not on the same page, the last thing I need is more issues with her.”

He did have a nice night with you. One of the better ones he can remember. It could why he was so apprehensive to reach out. It was just Aegon’s luck. He manages to fuck things up even when he says he won’t get attached and involved.

“Well, I guess I feel a little bit less bad about what I was going to tell you,” Aemond says, then clears his throat. “Criston asked about you again when we talked.”

Aegon says nothing in return. This dinner was a mistake. He had already had a bad day at work; everything has down spiraled from there.

“I invited him to my recital in a couple of weeks. I just thought I should give you heads-up if you decide to come.”

Aegon shrugs. “It is your recital; you can invite whoever you want.”

“Funny, mother said the same thing,” Aemond smiled, it not reaching his eyes. “I don’t get why you guys must take your feelings out on him. He was nothing but kind to us. Especially to you, he taught you everything you knew about drumming. He didn’t make you go ha-“

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Aegon snaps.

What he really wants is a cold pint or a glass of wine, but he knows the look Aemond will give him if he orders one. Before a head-splitting headache comes on, Aegon asks for the check.

He wants to forget about the dinner. To forget about all the feelings that get stuck is him brain and keep him from functioning the way he wants to. Some nights he dreams about his siblings all being together, their father a distant memory. Other nights, he has nightmares of Alicent’s face contorted in pain and tears. Scared and disappointed.

But tonight, brought something different. Visions of soft lips, and a warm laugh flood his mind. Everything syrupy, and hazy in the best way. Not even Aemond’s words could break the succession of them.

Stay away from her

Aegon has always had trouble doing what he supposed to

[panickingpansexuality]

Welcome Home

Elliot x FEM Reader

Slight spice at the end

The farmer paced their home around midnight, their faithful dog laying in the bed in a fitful rest. She was having trouble sleeping for the same reasons the Farmer was. Elliot was on his book tour for only a few more hours, he would be home soon and the Farmer so desperately wanted to be awake for it.

Unfortunately when Elliot left (y/n) had been asleep and when she awoke, he was gone. Half of her wanted to strangle him for doing that but the other half wanted him home just so she could hold him again.

(Y/n) checked the clock; 1:50 AM, she let out a groan as she felt her limbs tire, she wouldn't fall asleep this time, no she'd stay awake as long as it took. 

Her eyes started to close and unfortunately she could do nothing to stop it.

Elliot entered the cozy cabin, the first thing he noticed was that there was now another room in the house and the second was that his lovely wife was lying peacefully on their couch not on their bed.

Chuckling softly Elliot knelt down so his face was close to hers.

"Sweetheart..(y/n).." Elliot said softly.

The young woman stirred, and groaned softly. Elliot chuckled and brushed the hair away from her face and stood up deciding to let his wife sleep just a little longer.

(y/n) knew she needed to get up but for what she didn't know, slowly her eyes opened to the smell of coffee in the kitchen, she got up and yawned and turned to look in the kitchen and she gasped when she saw her husband sitting at their kitchen table.

"ELLIOT!" (Y/N) Yelled, she jumped over the couch and Elliot got up to meet her, he wrapped her in his arms and spun her in a circle.

When he set her back down on the ground, they kissed, it was the type of kiss that you can classify as a longing, reunited lovers, or maybe even just pure love.

When the two broke apart for air pressing their foreheads together.

"It's so good to be home." Elliot whispered to you.

"Next time," he swore, "Next time I'm not going without you."

"Only if it means I can go to your signings and act like a crazed fan." 

Elliot threw his head back laughing.

"My craziest and biggest fan." 

"You bet your sweet ass." (Y/n) said, pecking his lips.

"Speaking of asses." Elliot says, reaching his hands down to your ass cheeks and giving them a light squeeze.

(Y/n) blushed and gave him a smirk.

"Come on Mr. Writer, I need to show you how much I missed you."

(Y/n) tried to lead her husband to the bed but he moved his hand up to her waist, the other going right under her chin.

"Wait just a minute darling." Elliot said in a husky voice. "Last time I checked a gentleman's rule still stands."

"And what rule would that be?" (Y/n) challenged.

Elliot smirked, his hand on (y/n)s waist moving to the button of her jeans, she shivered and Elliot smirked as he undid her jeans and slid a hand down her underwear making her release a breathy gasp.

"Ladies first "

[angel-0f-verdun]

12 Chimera

Previous Chapter

The night was filled with the clomping of hooves at a constant trot or gallop trying to flee Hamunaptra. The noise was calming and the breeze of the night kept us cool, I had wrapped a blanket around my shoulders as it was almost too much at times. After the conversation with the leader, we knew there was more to fear. I could see the visible change in Rick from the pompous ‘I got him’ guy to ‘Oh shit we’re in trouble’. In my case, there were many thoughts that washed through my mind. Evil… The word filled my mind in metaphorical capital letters. We were all so focused on getting out of there that I hardly noticed Evy was trying to get my attention. 

“Eris?—Eris?” She asked repetitively. 

“Yeah, Eves?” I replied so she knew I was listening. 

“When we were in the chamber you said that the mummy would yield to you until he was fully regenerated. What did you mean by that?” She asked inquisitively. 

“Honestly, Evy I’m not sure. That was Ahmanet, it was like I couldn’t control her, a fight was happening in my mind.” I said to her choosing my words carefully. 

“Yep, I could tell that from your eyes and speech.” She murmured lost in thought. 

“It’s like I was possessed—wait, my eyes? What happened to my eyes?” I asked her. 

“They turned to gold and doubled; not like you had four eyes but your pupils. God, it was disconcerting Eris. I wish you could’ve seen it.” She explained. 

“It certainly got my attention. What I don’t understand is why you? Why did this entity attach itself to you?” Rick pipped up from the background. 

“Well, I’ve been told I’ve been marked for death because of my tattoos,” I whispered out, just loud enough to be heard over the hooves. 

“Marked for death… Who in their right mind would tell you that?” Jon asked as he slowed down to a trot next to me. 

“The warrior, the one that leads them all…” I told him. His face dropped, and his sarcasm died. 

“You’re put your faith in the one person who has attacked us not once but twice?” Jon asked recovering from the serious moment. 

“And beyond that, he has been watching us at each step of the process. Yet he didn’t come forward and say anything with concrete evidence until we were all in danger?” Rick asked me. 

“I guess it is silly when you put it that way… He just seemed to know more about this type of thing than any of us did.” I told them perking up a bit, now that I didn’t feel that I was going to die. 

“I swear to you, I won’t let her hurt any of you,” I said to them all, hoping that they would believe me. 

“She won’t get what she wants out of you, not if I have anything to do with it,” Rick said back to me. I nodded, knowing that there was nothing he could do. 

“We know.” They all echoed each other. 

“Eris, I wondered if I could talk to her…?” Evy asked curiously. I looked around at the other two curious about what their opinions were, Rick nodded and Jon just stared at me. 

“Give me your pack and weapons,” Rick told me, holding his hand out ready to receive them. I did slowly, then took my knife from my sleeve and gun out of my waistband. He nodded and held on to my gun for a second, watching my eyes. I nodded to him to take it once my hands were free I called Ahmanet to the front. She happily appeared a bit eager to talk for once. Evy’s grip tightened on her reins and she straightened her posture. I felt my own posture morph into something that was best described as regal, I felt Ahmanet straighten my back, my grip on the reins, stretch my neck out, and hold my chin up high. I knew she did not feel threatened by Evy she actually seemed interested in her. 

“Ahmanet, our last meeting was rather sudden, I would like a proper introduction. My name is Evelyn Carnahan, this is my brother Jonathan, and this is Rick O’Connell, Eris’s brother. I hope you don’t find it awfully rude that I have requested to speak with you.” Evy started the conversation strongly. I felt Ahmanet blink at her in response, she felt Evy was a lowly comparison to her and the introduction did not matter at all. 

“She cannot change her fate. The curse will never be broken. She was branded from a young age to be my host. My chosen before was murdered and before that and so on.” Ahmanet spoke in Ancient Egyptian nudging my camel to go faster as it followed Evy’s. 

“But if she is your chosen, why would you want to kill her?” She asked dropping all pleasantries. 

“Oh, I don’t want to kill her, I want to kill him. I am going to grant him eternal life, and make him a living god.” Ahmanet replied as if she was dishing with an old friend. 

“You murdered your father…” Evy said plainly hoping maybe to find some answers on my behalf.  

“I loved my father with all my heart, I only wanted his love in return. They were different times. The day of awakening will soon be upon us. He will become Set and the world will fall to his side, he will have power of life over death and he will have me.” Ahmanet explained to Evy watching her face fall gave her joy. I knew at that moment she was looking to twist the figurative knife that she had just stabbed Evy with. I kept her mouth shut from making any more problems with my friend. 

“What you have seen, what you must know… Why I’m sure it’s remarkable, I’d love to-- I have studied the world of the Old Gods and the New.” Evy started trying to pay her a compliment to see what kind of reaction that would produce. 

“The Old Gods? Your language is simple, what you truly wish to know is what lies behind the veil of death to know what I have seen. And you will when he kills you.” She curled my face into a small smile and watched Evy’s reaction. She shuddered but remained stoic and nodded. 

“I would like to speak to Eris now please.” Evy almost whispered out, Ahmanet faded away and let me push forward back into my own body. It felt so much better to have her leave willingly. Ahmanet knew that our relationship would be easier this way. Evy watched as I blinked and she looked back to Rick and Jon and nodded. Everyone let out a sigh, relieved nothing had happened. 

Rick rode up next to me and handed me the items back that he had confiscated while Ahmanet took over. I smiled at him and happily put everything back where it belonged. They knew I couldn’t control her appearance. I was focused on where we were headed, Cairo, we weren’t far out. We were heading to Fort Brydon, a common area for the locals and for the Royal Air Force, I’d assume we’d run into Winston as well. I needed to get Evy alone to see if she knew anything further about this creature Ahmanet. Her home wasn’t far from here, I assumed we’d be going there to collect her things before we left the country entirely. I knew Rick planned to go with her, my intuition told me to stay behind. I wanted to try to see if I could swing by the museum before we were all scheduled to leave. 

The sky was starting to cloud up and I could hear the thunder starting to rumble as we neared the city. A storm was brewing, with what, I wasn’t sure. But this was the type that I loved, it was exhilarating. I watched as Evy talked to the guard at the gate, Rick leaned over to me, standing up in his stirrups and stretching as he did so. Evy and Jon went through the gate leaving us. 

“I’ll see you in a bit, come down to the bar when you’re finished.” He told me. I nodded to him, clucking to my camel to take me in the direction of our house and the museum. The ride was short but would have been much faster in a car. I maneuvered the camel to the post where I climbed down and tied him up, I gave the camel a pat and reached in my saddlebag for a carrot to give him. I smiled as I held it while he enjoyed the carrot. I strolled through the library entrance, waiting to be greeted by the curator. Although I heard voices echoing through the halls, one was the curator the other was one I had grown familiar with but still surprised me. I could feel Ahmanet struggling in my head to be the main character. I went to the section I knew held the book I desired. Knowing Evy at all, I knew how she would categorize. I slinked up to the stalks and up the ladder to grab it, Set Volume 1. I tucked it under my arm and went back down the ladder feeling my feet firmly on the ground, I walked towards the curator's office. I’m not entirely sure why I did it, but I hid in the hallway for a few minutes listening to their conversation. 

“Yes, the creature certainly poses a threat.” The curator told the man I had previously interacted with. 

“But, the girl, she poses another issue as well. She has no idea the power she possesses, who knows if she has already given in to it. The only good news is that she doesn’t have all the information, although she is quite inquisitive about it. It’s better she knows less, I believe.” 

“Ardeth… I don’t think Eris is our problem here. She’s a bright young thing, quite an adept learner, I have no qualms with her or her family, in fact before this ordeal I would say she would have been a smart match for you. The Carnahan’s however, have a habit of sticking their nose where it does not belong.” I heard the curator chuckle out. 

“Dr. Bey, I respectively and vastly disagree. She has the power to wipe out the entire world, why, you know better than most the stories of Princess Ahmanet. She was beautiful, cunning, and ruthless, she vowed her life to Set and was reborn a monster. All she needs to do now is something she has not completed in her lifetime. The demon will be running around our world, and most likely the sacrifice will be the brother. Or that skittish fellow she’s been with as well, but I’m sure Ahmanet won’t settle for the woman. I’m sure Imhotep already has plans for her.” I stayed quiet hoping to hear more of my fate. 

“Yes, well, if you’ve made up your mind there is nothing I can do to change it. However, do not underestimate Eris, she is a strong woman, I’ve known her for over a couple of years now. I know little about her history but from what I have gathered she is certainly capable, driven, and mischievous.” The curator finished. I swallowed my pride and strode away, I didn’t want to pry any further than I already had. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, I wanted to go in and confront them. But I was worried what Ahmanet would decide to do since it would have been an easy fight. I walked quickly down to my own office retrieved a spare scarf I had in there and promptly left the museum. I put the book inside my saddlebag and started my journey to the house. I repeated the process I did the for museum with the camel. 

I walked through the door and took a deep sigh of relief. It felt good to be back in a familiar place. I walked over to my room and pulled out some clothes to change into, but the first order of business was to take a shower. I got inside and did everything without a sense of urgency. It was nice to feel the hot water over my skin and the suds wash away the dirt and grim that had accumulated on my hair and skin. I scrubbed and scrubbed until I felt like a new woman. Once I was satisfied I stepped out and wrapped a towel around my form and another around my head to pull the water from my hair. I left my dress and corset from the trip on my chair in the bathroom and walked to the bedroom to change into the pants and shirt I had laid out. I dried myself thoroughly before putting the clothes on my body. 

“Must we dress like a peasant?” I heard Ahmanet hiss at me. I brushed off the insult and continued moving through my motions. I walked toward the bathroom again preparing to do my eyeliner. I slowly winged the liner being careful not to mess up the lines. 

“At least your face is reminiscent of royal lineage.” I scoffed at her words, heading to Rick’s room. I wasn’t entirely sure why he wanted me to pack him a bag, because he hadn’t touched his clothes here in 3 years, and I wasn’t even sure if they fit anymore. I looked in the closet finding a couple of shirts that might fit and then rummaged through the drawers finding a few pairs of pants. I pulled out a duffle from underneath the bed and put the clothes inside. After this, I went through the house turning off the things that would bill us and other things. After a final round of checking things, I went outside and rode the camel back to the fort. I wrapped my scarf over my head and continued until I saw the guards at the gates. 

“Eris O’Connell, here for Evelyn Carnahan,” I told the man in Arabic. The guards waved me through as I felt Ahmanet pushing through to the surface, I’m sure she would have just doubled my iris to terrify them. It was as joyful to her as it was for me to see their faces change instantly. I tied my camel to a post with the others and slowly got down from the height. I took the book from the saddlebag and threw it in my pack. I then slung the duffle and pack over my shoulder and headed towards the entrance, keeping my head down and away from prying eyes. I walked through the courtyard and down some stairs to the bar. I saw Jonathan talking at the bar with the Americans. I took a seat next to him and decided now was the time to do some research on Set, I opened the book and waited for my brother to arrive happily settling in and ordering a gin and tonic from the bar.  

Next Chapter

[christian-perspectives]

Safe In The Arms Of God

Does God actually wrap His arms around us to keep us safe? Maybe, maybe not. However, The Bible says that when we go to Him for refuge, he will keep us safe. Keep me safe, O God, for I have come to you for refuge. Psalm 16:1 David filled all but one verse in Psalm 16 with encouraging words for those who trust the Lord. He understood God's nature, authority, and His provision. I said to the Lord, "You are my Master! Every good thing I have comes from you." Psalm 16:2 The Psalmist recognized that his godliness didn't stand on its own. Though God credited him as a man after His own heart, he sometimes fell short. Therefore, he appreciated others' help. The godly people in the land are my true heroes! I take pleasure in them! Psalm 16:3 The Lord doesn't expect us to go it alone as we serve Him. He supplies us with pastors and teachers, and friends and mentors to walk with us. Other witnesses have also walked before us. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. Hebrews 12:1 The arms of God kept David safe, and he cherished the influence of his godly friends. Therefore, in verse four of our Psalm, he wrote down some things he wouldn't do. Troubles multiply for those who chase after other gods. I will not take part in their sacrifices of blood or even speak the names of their gods. Psalm 16:4

Who's Chasing "other gods?"

In today's world, the subtlety of "other gods" makes people deny that they are even chasing after them. But they come in all shapes and sizes and rate higher in their lives than God. Jesus became our ultimate sacrifice by dying on the cross and conquering death. Thus, He abolished animal sacrifices for our sins. Instead, the Lord wants us to offer Him a living sacrifice. And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. Romans 12:1 David mentioned two types of inheritance he received from the Lord. First, he acknowledged that God alone was his inheritance. He referred to it as his cup of blessing. Then he thanked Him for the physical inheritance he received in the way of land, which he called pleasant. Peter the Apostle also wrote about the inheritance God has made available for us. All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation, and we have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay. 1 Peter 1:3-4

Each Night Feel Safe in the Arms of God

According to David's writing in the seventh verse of Psalm 16, he can sleep peacefully at night. Each night God instructs him while wrapping His arms around him to keep him safe. I will bless the Lord who guides me; even at night my heart instructs me. And I know the Lord is always with me. I will not be shaken, for he is right beside me. Psalm 16:7-8 We, too, can rest peacefully through the night when we focus on the Lord. No matter the turmoil in your life, you don't need to be shaken because God is with you. David continued by saying: No wonder my heart is glad, and I rejoice. My body rests in safety. Psalm 16:9 Is your heart glad, and do you rejoice in the Lord? Peace from God gives us a safe assurance that He will wrap us in His arms. The Psalmists found other reasons to be glad and rejoice. - I will be glad and rejoice in your unfailing love, for you have seen my troubles, and you care about the anguish of my soul. Psalm 31:7 - Then I will rejoice in the Lord. I will be glad because he rescues me. Psalm 35:9 - But let the godly rejoice. Let them be glad in God's presence. Psalm 68:3 - This is the day the Lord has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118:24

Eternal Praises to God!

In Revelation, John recorded the last place we can read about rejoicing and gladness. He heard a vast crowd in heaven singing songs of victory while shouting praises to God. Praise the Lord! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us be glad and rejoice, and let us give honor to him. For the time has come for the wedding feast of the Lamb, and his bride has prepared herself. Revelation 19:6-7 We will feel safe for all eternity because God will welcome us into his presence with open arms. David wanted that assurance, too. He didn't want his dead body to remain in the ground. For you will not leave my soul among the dead or allow your holy one to rot in the grave. Psalm 16:10 David never saw Jesus walk the earth. Nor did he have the advantage of reading the letters in the New Testament like we do. He did, however, trust the Lord for an eternity with Him. You will show me the way of life, granting me the joy of your presence and the pleasures of living with you forever. Psalm 16:11 God has opened His arms to you, inviting you to feel safe and secure for now and forevermore. So, rejoice and let your heart be glad, for this is your day. And the Lord has made it just for you. Dear God, sometimes I don't feel safe, so would you hold me tightly in your arms? If I squirm and try to get loose, please squeeze a little tighter. Check out these related posts on the presence of God. - Enjoy The Presence Of God - How To Enter Into The Presence Of The Almighty - Being in The Presence Of God Is Your Goal - Being In The Presence Of God - Lord Where Are You? Read the full article

[spiritsoulandbody]

#DailyDevotion Trust In The LORD Alone. He Is Merciful Forever.

#DailyDevotion Trust In The LORD Alone. He Is Merciful Forever. Psalm 118 (On the way:) Thank the LORD because He is good and merciful forever. 2Israel should say, “He is merciful forever." 3Aaron's family should say, “He is merciful forever." 4Those who fear the LORD should say, “He is merciful forever.” This Psalm was probably sung on the way to the tabernacle and later the Temple. We have a call for thanksgiving to the LORD. The reason for this thanksgiving is the LORD is good and merciful forever. There then is a call to various groups to respond, three times, “He is merciful forever.” Now we know the LORD's name revealed to Moses in Ex. 34:6 contains the revelation that He is full of mercy. Perhaps because our life is so full of strife that we need to be reminded of this. We may question, “If the LORD is so merciful, why do I experience all these tribulations?” We should remember we deserve far worse because of our sins. We may lie to ourselves thinking we aren't all that bad. We don't go around hurting other people. But what are the thoughts of our hearts? And the reality is, we hurt more people than we can ever know but chances are we justify ourselves thinking, “Well, they deserve it.” Where is our mercy then? Hmmmm? Then we should also remember the mercy of the LORD includes discipline. So maybe we don't always “deserve” the trials we are having. Perhaps they are there to purify and strengthen our faith in the LORD. Now isn't that a merciful thing for Him to do? 5In my trouble I called on the LORD. The LORD answered me and set me free. 6The LORD is for me, I'm not afraid. What can man do to me? 7The LORD is for me; He helps me. I will gloat over those who hate me. 8It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust men. 9It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust the best of men. Speaking of trials and tribulations, here the LORD's anointed, David, and then Christ our LORD, testify they had a trouble. In the trouble, they called out to the LORD. The LORD helped them. Verse six reminds me of Jesus' teaching in Matt. 10, “28Don't be afraid of those who kill the body and can't kill the soul, but fear Him who can destroy soul and body in hell.” We should always seek the help of the LORD in all our troubles. He is merciful forever. With the LORD on our side we should fear no person, no illness, no government, and no situation. When they come against us, we should turn to the LORD and hand these things over to Him and then sing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving trusting He has heard us. Verses eight and nine are a wake up call for those of us who put our trust in politicians and political parties. We cannot trust them. We just can't. We should not act insanely and keep putting our trust in them to do good and help our situations. I'm not saying you can't be involved in those processes. But do so realistically. God says don't put your trust in men, even the best of men. Our trust should be in God, the LORD alone. We have the name of Jesus. Why should we get ourselves all wrapped up in fear, worry, and anxiety about what is going on in the world? Don't we trust in the LORD? Don't we trust in His righteousness? Don't we believe Jesus is coming to judge the living and the dead? Do we not believe we are worth more to God our Father than many sparrows? So cast all your cares on the LORD because He cares for you. (Peter) Let the One who has all power, all might, all wisdom, all knowledge, and who is merciful forever deal with all these things. Only He is able to help. Only He is able to intervene and do what is right for us. He may use men, politicians, political parties, governments and situations to be the answer to our prayers, but let Him and trust Him to do it. Trusting in the LORD, you sit comfortably in your own britches and panties for we know and believe He has our best interest in mind. Heavenly Father, give us Your Holy Spirit that we may believe in Your mercy, call upon You in all our troubles and rest in Your grace. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Read the full article

[lindajenni]

oct 27

a safe harbor, a full deliverance

"the Lord God has given me the tongue of the learned, that i should know how to speak a word in season to him who is weary. He awakens me morning by morning, He awakens my ear to hear as the learned." isa 50:4

i confess that is true because it is the word of God and God cannot lie. i confess it for me and i confess it for you. i believe it for me and i believe it for you. if ever there is a place for the weary and down trodden to come, it should be to the church of God.

there are many precious believers out there who have grown weary. weary of the burden they feel they are carrying alone. weary of the times that are descending upon us. weary and perhaps even dreadful of what may be coming next. we must not let them give up when the finish line is so close. we may not be the first to cross, but we stop to carry our brother across with us. in so doing, "the last will be first, and the first last." matt 20:16

yes, i could tell you the old cliches. "it's always darkest before the dawn." "this too shall pass." i'm sure you have heard them all many times. words spoken by man meant to console are useless to create an environment other than pity; even self pity. only the word of God can bring peace, joy and light into the situation.

if i might, i would offer you one more cliche. "take it to the Lord in prayer." "so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord." acts 3:19 there is a peace and joy that comes when we lay it before the Lord. and we all know: the joy of the Lord is our strength!

we often talk about offering sacrifices to God. sacrifices of self. sacrifices of praise. He also wants us to sacrifice our burdens to Him. perhaps you do not consider a burden as a worthy sacrifice. has He not said, "'My strength is made perfect in weakness.' therefore most gladly i will rather boast in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me." 2 cor 12:9

have you tried to carry it all alone for too long? do you see no way out of it all? respite is to be had. "for we have no power against this great multitude that is coming against us; nor do we know what to do, but our eyes are upon You." 2 chron 20:12 i think of the verse from a song we used to sing. "Jesus knows that when we praise Him, when we lift Him up and raise Him, it does as much for us as it does for Him, cause we get lifted up."

"praise Him for His mighty acts; praise Him according to His excellent greatness! praise Him with the sound of the trumpet; praise Him with the lute and harp! praise Him with the timbrel and dance; praise Him with stringed instruments and flutes! praise Him with loud cymbals; praise Him with clashing cymbals! let everything that has breath praise the Lord." psa 150:1-6

praise Him in the midst of your struggles and trials. yes, battle against the attacks of the enemy. confess the victory and believe it is yours. receive the comfort only He can give. "we do not look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen." 2 cor 4:18 faith is a real substance and the unseen can become seen.

"who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." 2 cor 1:4 we are the body of Christ. let us wrap our arms around those who have a need, be it physical, mental or spiritual. we are "thoroughly equipped for every good work". 2 tim 3:17

"behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; nor His ear heavy, that it cannot hear." isa 59:1 are you hearing what i'm hearing today? there are some who need to give and there are some who need to receive. we are one body, working in unison, to care for the whole.

"no man left behind." it's not just a slogan of man. it is the cry of God's heart. "that the members should have the same care for one another. and if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it." 1 cor 12:25-26

"let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart." gal 6:9 “for yet a little while, and He who is coming will come and will not tarry." heb 10:37

there is a safe harbor and a full deliverance awaiting each of us at the end. our journey may be hazardous but we know the One who commands the waves of the sea and calms the storm. know this: when the perfect storm arises Jesus will be our perfect rescue. "gather My saints together to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice." psa 50:5

[silvaswiftcast]

FFxivWrite2023 Prompt #25: Call it a Day

Characters: Silva Cataracta and Ricmorn Silverkin (Cataracta)

Rating: General

Notes: This scene takes place early in Heavensward. Silva and Ricmorn are NOT in a relationship/courtship at this point in time, but they are very aware of the feelings they have for one another. Things are just complicated as they work through their issues.

Content Warnings/Additional Tags: None.

“Ah— So this is where you wandered off to after dinner, Silv.”

Silva looked up from the small travel journal she was writing in to find Ricmorn standing a yalm or two away, curiosity shining in his sky-blue eyes. She let herself get lost in the glowing orbs for a moment before giving him a timid smile.

“Found my little hiding spot, did you?” she mused, the point of her tail twitching against the cool stone floor.

The tall Auri man flashed her a grin full of bright teeth and fangs. “Seems I have.” He walked forward a few steps, taking care not to wake the pile of dragonets slumbering in a pile nearby. “I promise to keep it a secret if you let me stay for a while. I-I mean, if you're comfortable with—”

Quiet giggles escaped her as she raised her hand, stopping him. “You’re more than welcome to join me, Ric,” she said, hoping to settle his nerves. She watched as the tension in his shoulders fled before looking off to the side, warmth flooding her cheeks. “I would love it, actually. You know I never mind your company.”

She couldn’t tell if it was the red lighting from the mysterious glowstone lamps lining the room she tucked herself in at Anyx Trine or if it was a blush staining his pale skin. His gaze was soft as he looked down at her, full of amusement and fondness. Fondness for her.

And it made her heart skip a few beats.

Silva took a second to collect herself, stashing her journaling supplies back into her bag before patting the space on the ground next to her. Ricmorn crossed what little distance there was between them and sat beside her.

“The old you would have balked at the proposition,” he murmured, continuing their playful banter.

A snort left her. “The old me didn’t know any better. She was… afraid of invading your space and overwhelming you with her presence.”

“The old me didn’t know any better, either. He was a fool who was too stubborn to see the most amazing thing to ever come into his life was right in front of him.”

She blinked, not expecting her fellow Warrior of Light to be so open and honest about his thoughts and emotions. A habit he was trying hard to become better at. Not just for her and what little remained of the Scions but for himself. A habit that showed his growth as a human being and as an individual.

And she loved it.

Silva reached for his palm, carefully wrapping her fingers around his wrist and removing his white leather glove with her other hand. He let her, watching in silence as the protective hand covering came off with ease before she laced her fingers with his. Their hearts raced in time together as sparks of levin danced along their skin.

“If it’s any solace, you’re not the man you once were, Ricmorn,” she told him as she gave his large palm a tender squeeze. “Stubborn, yes — we all are to a fault. But… you’re no fool, not to me.”

They both have done a lot of growing over the last three years. They made it through nasty fights and disagreements, troubling times, and periods where they refused to speak to one another out of fear and anger. And now they were here, edging closer and closer to something neither of them thought possible after everything.

When did they call it a day and finally decide to take this leap of faith?

A few rumbling chuckles escaped him at her kind words, returning the squeeze she gave him. “You are… I’m unsure of how to respond to that, Silva.”

She shook her head. “You don’t have to say anything.”

The white mage reached over, brushing some of her stray purple waves behind an ivory horn. “Even so, pray know it means the world to me that you think so. And… I think deep down, the old you would have been secretly proud of who you are today.”

And deep down, Silva thought so, too.

[blazingtheway]

Taking a Leap with  Faith - Storyline 12 - Together

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Why do I need to fool someone? Do you have someone in mind?”

•- Embry Call -•

A little memorized by those eyes… “Um… what were we talking about again?”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Shaking my head. “You are taking a running  jump off the cliffs. Are you game?”

•- Embry Call -•

“You know I’m always ready cliff dive!” Grins and rubs my hands together excitedly.

“You brave enough to join me without the audience this time?”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Raising my eyebrow. “This was my idea, wasn’t it? So, what do you think?”

Looking over my shoulders to see who could be around.  “And no one to see how amazing I am? That’s harsh.”

•- Embry Call -•

I waggled my brows. “I’ll be there! I’ll see you.”

I smirked. “C’mon then, Trouble! On your bike.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“So, now you’re testing that whole being demanding thing too?” Walking away towards my bike.

“Race you up there, Dimples.” Throwing my leg over the body of my baby.

•- Embry Call -•

Damn that was sexy… I bite my lips and admire those long legs, straddling the powerful machine. Which was more powerful I wondered?

“Always a race with you!” I chuckled and mounted my old lady. There was way she could keep up with Leah’s beast. But it as one of the reasons I loved her.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

My baby sang with his power, no revving was ever necessary. I didn’t need to show him off. He did it for himself.

Shrugging my shoulders. “I didn’t mean the ride. I meant the moment we are off them and, on our feet, Wisearse.”

There was no fun if it wasn’t a fair competition  “So, see you at the bottom of the cliffs.”

Not a question, a statement instead as I pulled my baby off his stand and set off without a backwards glance.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed. She would never go for an easy win. “We’ll see… I can’t promise I’ll give t my all though… I like the view from a few feet behind you.”

My old lady started smoothly and like a ten-year-old engine… She was always reliable. I took off and followed her along the route all of us took. Never pushing the bike beyond her comfort zone. She was always good to me when I was good to her.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

The sound his bike make wasn’t one you could mistake for anything else. We all knew it and recognised it.

My lips curled up into a smile, the wind blowing into my face and hair was enough to send me to my happy place.

Even without music playing, the wind has its own tune, and it sang it loudly.

I rode in and out of the few cars and trucks we passed by. Leaving them all behind without even trying to.

•- Embry Call -•

The traffic was light, and my bike may be older than me... But she easily outpaced the trucks and most of that car too... Just enough that I don't lose sight of Leah.

The salt air on my face was a welcome and at the speed of it whipping by it made my blood hum for the thrill of the fall.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

The sounds are f the world wasn’t what I heard as I took the winding roads. It was the hum of the spirits, with the call of the forest on one side and that of the ocean on the other.

Our ancestors were calling, where speaking and it gave me a rush to answer them in my own  way.

As soon as the ocean came into sight, I kicked my foot to change gear and turn off towards the edges of the climb.

We created our own trail up the cliffs, one that no one would follow. Keeping it well hidden from any roaming eyes.

•- Embry Call -•

Off the road, the scent of sea and forest mingled together with an intensity that reminded me of sleep all wrapped up with Leah. This was where she picked up that scent that lingered in her hair.

We followed the trial worn into the earth after so many  years of feet and tyres  wearing it smooth and bear.  When the trail ended, I rested my bike on the kickstand and turned off the engine. "I'm guessing this race of yours starts now?" I smiled as a light rain started... that meant that the beaches would be empty in minutes if they weren't already.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“No. No.”

Not turning to face him, I could hear it all. The bike being set up on her kickstand, Embry climbing off, and way the forest waiting with the anticipation of what was to come.

“It… starts now!”

The words left my lips and my feet and body turned to the tail setting off. I wasn’t going to give him a head starts. And he should have been prepared to go the second his feet hit the soil.

The wind blew my hair back off my face, and I Turing my eyes back for a beat to see where he was, and the look on his face.

•- Embry Call -•

Even if I had started running the second, I was off my bike she still would have caught up and passed me... So, I wasn't about to add insult to injury by taking off early and still losing. I chuckled... Silver lining; the view from behind was spectacular!

I still took off as fast as I could to keep her in my sights. The rain whipped against my face the smell is sea breezes and the damp earth was at its freshest. And keeping hidden the fact we were here alone... Together.

Timing.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Those first drops of rain in the day had an impact on your senses. It was like a clean morning with nothing but sunshine (even when there was no sun anywhere. If you know. You just know.)

tilting my chin up I let the drops of rain fall in my skin, seeing the heat of my body evaporating it, leaving the ocean behind.

My wolf pawed at me, this was her time. The forest, the damp soft ground under our feet, the breeze in our hair, the rain…. It was all something we looked forward to.

But she knew. She knew we couldn’t shift. The moment we did we would be found. And the bubble would be broken.

•- Embry Call -•

Water steamed around us; Leah’s face was tilted high. The rain drops clung to her eyelashes and ran down her cheeks. The sound of waves on rocks called to us. Pulling us towards shore, towards that glorious drop.

The trees thinned and we stopped right at the edge of the cliff. The wind whipped fiercely here, and I laughed, holding out my arms. I was thoroughly soaked my t-shirt clung to my torso. I felt the rushing air and the salt spray they didn’t quite reach us, the rain…. The hum on the wind.

“Ever feel like the Spirits are trying to tell you something?” I smiled wide. They had given us a perfect moment hidden and unhidden all at once.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Standing at the edge of the cliffs I didn’t look down, my gaze moved out. Out into the heart of the ocean, where the spirits showed me the boats of our peoples past. The hum of their song, and moments in which they worked for their tribe.

I smiled when his footsteps came rushing up from behind, turning my head just enough to see the sight that would have made my heart jump in the bubble. It wasn’t that he looked like Adonis on top of this cliff, with the small break in the clouds shadowing the light  on him. but that smile, the sound of his breathing and his heart. The scent of him mixed with the world that we were born to protect. And out in the open, the spirits had made sure we were alone.

However, right now with the walls up inside of me, everything was still. Telling me it would hold on to this moment for me to live later.

“They never stop telling us things, we just need to close our eyes and listen.” Which I did. Turning back to the water, my eyes closed listening to them and with it the beating of his heart.  

•- Embry Call -•

She turned her gaze back to the ocean but mine stayed on her. She was beautiful… that word wasn’t nearly strong enough to describe her.

I turned to her, my senses casting out into the woods behind us, having checked all the beaches were empty. I touched her cheek, leaned in like I might kiss her and paused.

What would it be like? To kiss her here?... In this spot where so much our evolution was sparked?... By me throwing her off this very cliff. But we were here... Together. Just us... The ancestor protecting our moment of freedom.

“Take your clothes off, Clearwater.” I whispered my voice deep and a tiny bit breathless, but not from the run. It was the closeness and excitement for the dive.

I stepped backed and kicked out of my boots as I simultaneously pulled off my shirt.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Turning into him, the space closed between us and yet the wind still blew through the distance left there.

My eyes opened to find his, the earthy colour that opened up a vault of feelings and emotions that belonged to him.

His breath was felt on my skin as I held mine. There is was again. That sound, his beating heart I would know without seeing him.

Pressing my lips together, my eyebrow arched up. My heart betrayed me with its reaction, but I stayed still.

Watching him kick his boots off, and then his skin came to light as his shirt dropped.

A flash back to the night it all began. This evolution between us, came rushing back.

“How didn’t I see this coming?” I whispered.

Slowly, my boots came off one by one. And then my jacket. My fingers worded the buttons of my shirt before I slipped it off too.

•- Embry Call -•

My gaze fixed on hers, she always held her breath when I pressed against the edges of her boundaries. My heart fell out of time, and I smiled; apparently, I didn't need to kiss her to have the desired effect.

I stripped down to my boxers, there was no point trying to find somewhere out of the rain to leave our clothes... They were already soaked.

I watched Leah remove her clothes... Now my heart was racing, my teeth caught my lower lip.

“Because then you would have had a head start.” I answered her whisper. “And there's no way I could have caught up.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

"So, what you are saying is..." Folding my clothes even if they are wet, I set them on the rocks for later. "...Is that the Spirits stacked the cards against me? Interesting."

They hadn't. It wasn't how they worked. But to keep me in one place long enough to see my path that they would have done.

"I could still run." My brown eyes darkened moving to his chest to where his heart gave him away.

"Eyes up Call. Don't want you having a heart attack right here. Would be hard for me to explain it to the others."

•- Embry Call -•

I chuckled... "Maybe they were just levelling the playing field considering you're normally ten steps head."

I smiled at her, she wasn't going to run... But I had promised I wouldn't chase her if she did. I couldn't help but wonder if that was a promise I could keep after all that had happened now.

I didn't let the thought linger... because that just wasn't how my mind worked.

My brows raised. "She says as her eyes move south." I teased her.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Arching my eyebrow, now my eyes were on his. The look on my face deadpan as I curled my lip and said. “Don’t worry yourself Embry Call, you have nothing…… I don’t have already.”

The words had changed slightly since the last time we were up here. But it was still as true as the first night we had that conversation. I didn’t want anything, because now. Now we had each other in so many ways.

“Now, are your planning on staying up here acting like you are a runway model. Or are we jumping?” Moving gracefully towards the edge.

•- Embry Call -•

I chuckled... "Oh sure... nothing you left nightstand can't fix right?" I winked. "That's why you keep letting me in. "Besides... it's still too soon to really know if that nightstand is... up to standard."

"Please! Runway models wish they could be this hot." I stepped up next to her and looked at the waves below, then back to her.

"Together?" I smiled that smile she couldn't resist.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Shaking my head. “Your kind of hooked on my nightstand, aren’t you? Want me to give you both some alone time?”

My laughter escaped from deep inside. “I’d be worried if you thought anyone could put shine you.”

My gaze turned to the waves below us, the wind blowing and the ocean spray. “Scared to jump alone?”

Turning to face him again. My hand slowly opened up in offer to him. “I’ve got you.”

•- Embry Call -•

I winked at her and leaned in to whisper. "I just want to blindfold you... open it up and see what sounds I can coax out of you with your stash." There was no chance of me being heard here. But my lips against her ear just added to my words.

I looked down at her hand and my heart gave me away. Did Leah Clearwater just hold out her hand to me? I mean... she'd taken me by the hand metaphorically a lot recently... but this?

This was a first.

I slipped my hand into her and squeezed. "You have no idea how true that is." I said with a smile... and she had more and more of me the further we travelled along this path.

I strode for the edge of the cliff and with her hand still in mine... We jumped.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Thanking the spirits for my walls because that should have had my insides melting. The images that could have come to life in my mind if we were in our bubble would have churned me full of energy and pleasure.

But this wasn’t the time or the place, even if his breath tickled my ear. I didn’t need to say another as we stepped up and then stepped free of the land. The air came blowing up, my hair flying freely my body arching and turning to fall fast down the sides of the cliffs. My breath flowed easily from my lungs and my lips curled up into a smile.

This was the best of it all. Where the heritage of our lands, the water, the air and the fire within took over and everything else was forgotten for the few seconds of weightlessness.

•- Embry Call -•

She was so much better at self-control than I was.

But the fall. The freedom and thrill of it. Adrenaline pumped through my veins. I let go of her hand as we both twisted into the dive… as epic as it would be to both dive into the ocean with our hands locked… it wasn’t even the tiniest bit practical when hitting the ocean at this speed.

But Leah Clearwater offering me her hand was epic enough for me today.

The Ivey water reached up to greet us… The cold embrace of the sea against searing hot skin was always and exhilarating shock .to the system.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

As soon as he let my hand go, they came together over and above my body, making the tip of a hot knife as it cut through the ice-cold water.

I was listening to his heart the whole way down. It was so unlike me. I liked to listen to the world, to the sky, the ocean. But today. it was Embry’s heartbeat.

Hitting the water just at the moment and point of entry we all knew so well. Missing the rock that could rip in apart, into the ocean who opened her arms to welcome us.

Down.. down.. down… I went, until I tuned myself and kicked up.

•- Embry Call -•

We dropped below the surface; I sank down and watched Leah twist her live body beneath the waves. Her powerful body kicked to the surface. She was a goddess... Strong, gorgeous... And slipping father from my reach.

That just wasn't acceptable.

I swam to the surface, shook the hair from my face and let out a satisfied laugh.

After a quick glance to the cliff top, I reached out to her and took hold of her pulling her close and dragging both of us under the water. The heat of her skin on mine always excited me. But here... In the icy water it was even more intense. I kicked my legs a spun us both in the water before surfacing again. “Looks like I've got you too.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

My hands cupped together like a comb, moved from my face back into my hair pushing the water off me as I opened my eyes for the second time. “You have some balls Embry Call!” Laughing now as I bobbed up and down in the water.

For the second time my eyes scanned the shoreline as well as looked up at the cliff face where we jumped from. No one had come out and we are still alone. The rain battering down helped to keep the beached clear, a helpful hand for those who watched and sang over out souls.

“You were the one to push me down Wisearse.” Two strokes and I was up by him again, this time both my hands flat on his shoulders and my feet kicked up to give him an almighty push back down under the water.

•- Embry Call -•

I watched the way she slicked her soaking hair back from her face. Sexy… distracting. But I just shook mine out of the face again. Leaving strand plastered to my forehead and cheeks.

“I think we’ve already established that… more balls than common sense.”  I laughed. The  rain was louder on the water, and the sound was perfect. Keeping our voices from carrying.

Then she dunked me, and my arms reached to grab her and drag her down with me, but she was too quick.

I swam under her and popped back up behind her. “You know… it’s unfair that  you’re that quick on land and in the water.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Me eyes reminded on his form under the water, the waves and the rain distorting the view a little as I searched for him, following the sound of his heart.

I swirled around in the water kicking my legs and my arms, to find him breaking up through the water behind me. Me eyes reminded on his form under the water, the waves and the rain distorting the view a little as I searched for him, following the sound of his heart.

I swirled around in the water kicking my legs and my arms, to find him breaking up through the water behind me.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed. "I mean it's not that hard when I can see everything they can see. Also... Because I can do it means anyone else in the hive can see it too... Your speed is only ours. And way more useful."

I splashed her when he brushed my hair from my face. "Unless there's wolves rogue and we can't find them."

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Snapping my teeth at him, my hand came up to cover my face from the water out of habit. Because let’s face it, the rain and being in the ocean. There was no way out of being wet.

“Waiting. Is Embry Call under selling his skills? Not taking credit for something he can’t do  better than anyone else? Spirits. We didn’t see that coming.”

Pushing back against the waves hitting my back.

“My skills. I’m kick arse. And all of you know it.”

•- Embry Call -•

I just laughed. “The spirits give us what we need to fulfil our duty. It a one of the many, many skills I have that I don't brag about. I'm just grateful it was gifted to me.”

The sea rocked us closer together and further apart as she saw fit. It was one of the things I liked about being in the water, the constant motion it took just to keep your head above water. Not a frantic struggle... But still, every kick stroke had a purpose.

“Do you want to swim to the beach or brave the slippery climb?”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“So, unlike you. I’m not used to you not bragging about something or another.”

But as I said the words, it occurred to me. He wasn’t doing it as much these days. Embry Call’s path of evolution had come with so much of him I didn’t even see coming.

My eyes moved to the climb  and then the swim. “Rock face you have the upper hand, the swim... I do. Which shall we pick?”

Without saying another word, I started swimming towards the cliffs. “I do like a challenge.”

•- Embry Call -•

I smiled... "If make you feel any better, I still maintain I'm the best-looking guy in the pack... and of course, my musical skills are top class."

I grinned when she started for the cliffs. "You never take the easy road do you." I chuckled and swam after her. It was a treat  her I could admire one day and next it meant she was beating herself up about something beyond her control.

When we tucked in close to the cliff face and took hold of her. Bracing one arm on the rocks peeking above the surface to stop the waves from pushing us into them. We were hidden here. From the beach and cliffs.

"Don't drown me." I smirked before I kissed her.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“You learn nothing on easy roads. I want to learn.”

And I knew he would teach me. I was never ashamed to say show me or Tech me. Learning was a gift; one I could appreciate.

The moment his arm came around me and he pulled me in. I could have punched him in the face.Because I saw it in his eyes now. Just before he did something. And then those words asking not to be killed.

We were hidden, but this wasn’t the bubble. And rules were in place for a reason. But I kissed him back once before mumbling.

“First warning. Next time you die.”

•- Embry Call -•

Her kiss was brief but still... My heart had barely started to relax from the thrill of the jump, it sped up again. I chuckled looking up at the rain. “They’ve given us a perfect moment. I know you love the rain...” I pressed our bodies as close she would let my, still braced away from the rocks with one strong arm.

“Are you telling me that kissing me here... Out in the wild where belong isn't doing something for you?” I smiled. “They've protected us here.” I believed it was true... I could feel as easily as I could feel the heat of her skin even freezing water. “Remember the part about being grateful for the gifts the Spirits give us?” I brushed the tip of my nose to hers because she hadn't moved away. Then I let her go, because this wasn’t our bubble and stealing kisses, she wasn't expecting inside of our safe space was fair game... But here. We both had to want it.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Glancing all around us, the cliffs above us, the water under. The wind and the rain keeping the sounds of our words and our heart hidden, as well as the sea and forest keeping the scents flowing away from the lands.

I closed my eyes listening to the songs in the wind. And all  they were doing to keep us out from being found.

“Spirits.”

They were listening for me so that I could…. “Live in the moment.” I whispered just as he let go of me. My hand reached out gripping a hold of a smooth rock with a grove unit just the right size for my fingers. the wave moved me away from him, and then back again.

“You know what you are being close to me does.” My body always betrayed me. But I had it on lockdown. Until now. Until now I didn’t show what the touch of his kiss, the sound of his heart, the heat radiating between us did to me. But all at once I let my walls down just enough for him to witness it first-hand.

•- Embry Call -•

I smiled when she said my mantra out loud. "Wise words!" I chuckled. "And because of that philosophy, I can now officially say that I've kissed a woman in the rain... and in the ocean."

I watched her easily hold her own against the waves. I took the first handhold at the bottom of the cliff.

"Ready to climb... or are you still..." My gaze locked on her... those eyes always made my heart beat double time. "... Living in the moment."

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Raising the eyebrow, I snapped my teeth. “Glad I could help mark things off your list.”

Our eyes locked, I pulled myself up out of her water to below my chest. My hand holding on tightly.  “I’m ready to see how this works out for you. Shall we?”

Eyes now on the rock face my hand reaching out to the next edge to grip, using my upper body strength to pull free of the icy waters while it steamed off my body.

•- Embry Call -•

I swallowed… hard. This woman was hot as fuck… but she was soaking wet, steaming like goddess, and hauling herself up a cliff face… ever muscle in that powerful body primed and ready… she defied description.

Even in the frigid water my blood rushed.  “Uh…” I chuckled. “I might actually need a minute.”

My toes found purchase on a ledge below the water. “Apparently the Pacific Ocean isn’t a cold enough shower when you’re around.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

My bare feet found a slot and I hung there looking down at the water and the steam coming off his skin. With an almighty roll of my eyes my lips curled up into a smirk. Thinking of the words he always uses on me.  “Why, do you see something you like? Take a picture. It’ll last longer.”

Reaching up with my free hand to the next rock, my hand slipped. But I caught myself trying again, while waiting for Embry to ‘cool down’.

•- Embry Call -•

I had no doubt that she could catch herself I did tense a little… falling here would not be fun. Not that it would do any damage they wouldn’t heal in a few hours from this low down… we were built to protect. None of us could stop that reaction.

“Need me to catch you if you  fall Clearwater?” We couldn’t help but tease one another.  “And you already know I like everything that I see.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Growling as I looked down over my shoulder at him. “Just move out of the way and let me fall. The spirits of the ocean will cup their hands for me.”

Also, it would mean that I wouldn’t take him down if I fell. Hurting myself I could deal with. Hurting another because of my own mistake was unacceptable to me. “You do know this is a race, right? Or are you planning to test how long it takes your skin to prune?” 

The answer… our skin didn’t do that, it was always healing and protecting.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed... "Oh yeah sure... Is that even biologically possible?" My brow raised. We both knew it wasn't, those instincts to save and protect profuse every fibre of our beings.

"Maybe I'm just enjoying the view?" I chuckled and reached out long arms the hoist myself up until I was level with her. "Try to keep up." I pushed up with my legs, toes gripping the narrow crags in the rockface to push me higher.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Arsehole!” Laughing as I said it, because of course his arms were longer. And the way he came up from behind and now I was looking up at him as he took the lead.

“Maybe I should have made the most of my head start. You’re just showing off now.” who could blame him, looking up at the view of him from behind have my hackles rising. The way his muscles curved….

“Such a distraction.” I muttered.

‘But what a view!’ My wolf pruned.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed... she knew I could still hear her. "See something you like, Trouble?" I glanced down at her, but I didn't stop. As soon as she started to move, I would lose my lead fast.

The question was; would I lose it before I reached the top?

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Shut up!”

Snapping my teeth at him I hung from one hand, wiping my hand over my face to clear away the salt water and rain from my eyes, and then I began.

I’d watched his route and I wasn’t ashamed to follow in his trail. Heaving myself up one length at a time.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed and kept climbing, my glances down showed me that she was reaching for the handholds I had used. Clever... I wouldn't call myself an avid climber... But thanks to #Sam’s literal approach to rising above our interpersonal issues in the pack I was experienced at it... This was something she’d learned not that long ago. She was never the type to ignore a chance to learn.

“Someone learns fast.” I chuckled.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Someone isn’t a fool.” Gritting the words out of my teeth as my arm muscles tensed as I pulled myself up the next level shy of his feet.

“Where would I be if I didn’t pay attention?” Biting the inside of my cheek, I hunt myself with my toe pushed into a crevice, looking, and finding my next hold.

•- Embry Call -•

"Oh, I've noticed." I laughed and heaved myself up another arm’s length. "And smart women are really hot."

She was definitely learning Normally she flew up the side of the cliff but lost perches when they crumbled under pressure. Testing the sturdiness was faster, you didn't  lose time catching yourself and starting to climb again.

"Almost there."

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Just like musicians are nerds, huh?”

My next hold caught loose rocks making that hand slip, however my other hand was still holding strong. So, when my body fell, I dangled looking down at the dark waves crashing into the rocks below.

“Spirits, need to slow down.” I muttered to myself before swinging myself around finding another hold.

Taking a few breaths my eyes scanned the cliff side to see where to go next.

•- Embry Call -•

“Don’t forgot let the hot part.” I chuckled. I looked down but didn’t insult her by asking if she was okay. One crumbling handhold was enough to bring her down. “Musicians are HOT nerds.”

I waited her catch up, just a little bit. “See…. Racing is overrated sometime, Isn’t it?” I teased.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Sure, sure. If it helps you live a little happier, I guess you could have it.” My muscles tensed and then relaxed into an even rhythm when I found myself moved upwards again.

“It’s like a song. Climbing? Once you pick up the sound and the beat.” My hands and get just moved together keeping my body moving forward.

“Racing is never overrated. It’s like you don’t even know me.” Reaching up I smacked the back of his calves. He was in reach of me now.

•- Embry Call -•

I glanced at her and smiled; her skin was still steaming... Probably from the rain at this stage. From this angle she was incredible, every line and curve of muscle... My mother watered. “I supposed it is a combination of technique and inspiration...” I flashed her a grin as I reached for the top of the cliff, one last push to the top.

“Never.” I smirked. “Even when you lose.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Spirits!” Growling as I pushed myself up another arm’s length, but it wasn’t fast enough to catch him. Seeing him pull himself that last edge and over I knew I’d lost.

‘Gives us more of a reason to keep trying.’ My wolf grumbled because she disliked losing as much as I did. “Keep up the smugness Wisearse. One day…”

I moved faster having remembered the placement of his hands and feet, I followed them. “…I will win, leaving you in my dust.” Pulling myself up and over the ledge. Looking to find him right away.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed and pulled myself up over the ledge just ahead of her. "I do not doubt it."

"I do not doubt it!" I smiled down at her, watching her pull her live form up over the ledge with an ease that would have had blood rushing if it wasn't for the fact, we were no longer  hidden at the base of the cliff.

There was zero sarcasm in my tone. I knew it was true as much as she did. "And when it happens, I will enjoy the view immensely."

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“I would expect nothing less, your eyes are going to get your arse into trouble someday.”

Turning to face the water I sat on the ledge I just climbed over. The rain was still falling, steaming off my body, my muscles felt alive and ready to climb a mountain however, for me the view was the thing that made me still.

“It always feels peaceful up here.” I told him as I noticed the break in the weather in the distance. It would be heading inland soon I was sure by the way the wind was blowing.

•- Embry Call -•

I dangled my feet over the edge, sat next to her. Following her gaze. “It sure us… until it’s over run by a hoard and of stomping, gossiping, hyperactive puppies.” I chuckled.

“But even then… there’s something special about too. I spent a lot of time here when it was just  four of us. It was the only place I felt like I wasn’t hiding.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

I pulled my eyes free from the horizon to gaze over to him. Taking in his side profile as he took in the world. I’d heard the pack all exchanging stories of their step into finding their warriors. But I never asked questions. I didn’t want to know because I had no plans on sharing my own.

“Sam, Jay, Paul, and You lead the path. Such show offs.” They we’re far from it.

“We still have to hide, Embry. Look at the pups who are trying to find their way through it all. Sure, they have the OGs to support them. But… somethings have to be done alone.”

•- Embry Call -•

I chuckled. “I know... I don't just mean hiding our calling... I mean back then, with my temper... While we were still learning we vented... We fought... Maybe even cried. We just got to let it all. And it wasn't just bad stuff either.”

I didn't try to deny the showing off  part... There was no point. I would lose, and I knew it.

“Then the others started to phase and there just more and more memories made here.” I bumped her shoulder with mine. “None are better than tackling you off the cliff.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Slapping his shoulder, I also snapped my teeth at him. Before combing my fingers though my long-wet hair pulling it all to one side listening to him.

Rolling my eyes at the last comment. “Oh please, I’m sure you had more fun showing your skills off to the girls you jumped with.”

Some of them used to do that (from much lower down of course. Because who in their right mind would jump from up here?) “I still think I should have drowned you that night.” So much had happened that day with me. “If only there weren’t any witnesses.”

•- Embry Call -•

“So hot.” I muttered almost silently when she snapped her teeth. The way she wrongs her finger through my hair made mine twitch with the want to do the same.

“Never brought girl to the lower cliffs.” I chuckled. “Seemed too much like a date… I did flirt with the girls the brought though.” I winked.

“This place was always just for us.”

•- Leah Clearwater -•

Resting my palms flat behind me, I leant back with my gaze back out on the water. Watching the clouds beginning to break. “Too much like a date.” Repeating his words. “We don’t do dates.” My lips curled up a little.

Both Embry and I was known for it. (Well, he was. I was  just known for not seeing anyone. There was no insight into my life.) “And this is why the pups don’t want to bring their dates around us.” It wasn’t true, just a tease. “You are showing them up.” Tutting I clicked my tongue.

•- Embry Call -•

I chuckled, following her gaze out to sea where a clear break the rain cloud could see. Making it was toward us. It was like an hourglass on our time here. The Spirits telling us  that not all perfect moments needed to last forever; they were only to be remembered, always. And lived in the now.

“Nope… not at all. We don’t do dates.” But I didn’t think a date would be an inaccurate description of today. I laughed again. “Hey… if they aren’t afraid to lose her or him then they don’t deserved them in the first place.” I was talking the guys that dated… fear of losing an imprint was different.

•- Leah Clearwater -•

“Fear of losing is once thing. Fear of losing to you… that’s a challenge.” Half smiling at the comments and the teasing I’ve seen over the years between all of them while I stood back and away. It was a good way to gather the bigger picture and see things they couldn’t.

I sat for a little while just looking from the sea over to him. Something had changed that day when we were last up here. I hadn’t seen it in that moment, or maybe I had but had not indication as to what I was witnessing.

Finally, I shifted. “It’s time.” With no need to say anything else. The moment had come to a close. It was going to become a memory now. One that I wanted to keep close for a long time.

•- Embry Call -•

I laughed… “It not my fault my that the ladies love me. I’ve tried to teach the pups my ways… but they just can’t pull it off.”

I turned to smile at her. “I think it is.”

It had a great, unexpected afternoon. The rain was still pouring and shielding us discovery here. Our combined scent washing away before it could settle.

“Let’s go, Trouble.” I pulled myself up to go and get redressed into my rain-soaked clothes.

𝕋ℍ𝔼 𝔼ℕ𝔻

[sleepymarmot]

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Short non-spoilery review:

If you love to be grossed out and scared by movies, this one might be a disappointment. If you don’t, it might be more watchable than you’d expect. I would not classify this film as “horror” at all — it’s fairly tame speculative fiction with a surprisingly optimistic portrayal of the world and the main character. The horror aesthetic is wrapped around non-horror events; there is upsetting stuff, but it’s in the realm of tragedy or crime fiction. The premise of the film is that “pain has all but disappeared”, so the gory visuals and sounds are not accompanied by suffering — in fact, quite the opposite. My own description would be something like “transhumanist erotic sci-fi noir about having a conflicted relationship with one’s body”. If that sounds relevant to your interests, the film is worth watching regardless of its shortcomings. I thought that the execution of the concepts didn’t live up to their potential, that the worldbuilding and dialogue were weak — and it still inflicted days of intense brainrot on me. I can’t in good faith call it a great film, but it sure is thematically rich.

Below are ~9k words of my spoilery thoughts about bodies, health, age, art, gender, sex and some other things. I started writing this post as a review, but I’m not sure it counts as such by this point. I went into full fandom mode and poured two weeks’ worth of obsessive discourse blogging into a single text document. Warning: I have (hopefully temporarily) lost the ability to stay in my lane or shut up about my personal subjective experiences. I also made an abridged version that you can read instead.

Since the “review” got so long, I changed the usual order and put it before the liveblog. I assume that if anyone’s actually reading this post, they’d be more interested in something I at least tried to make coherent than in a long string of unfiltered first reactions.

Review

General thoughts

I’d been quietly obsessed with this film for a week before I had the opportunity to watch it. This means I knowingly stole from myself many if not most of the good experiences I would have had as a first time viewer. I’d seen the key scenes in gif form, and had a general awareness of the characters, themes, and plot. So by the time I got around to watching, I’d already been done feeling the positive emotions about the aspects of the film that directly catered to my tastes, and had too much time to feel dissatisfaction with their execution.

A bit of TMI: as someone who had spent the week before watching the film constantly coughing and able to sleep only with a raised pillow for several nights, and who is in general not on great terms with food and “the old sex”, I found Saul relatable in a rare way — much more than the characters close to me in gender and age (the usual criteria for representation). Sure, the plot is about him growing new organs and transforming into different species, but a major part of the character are his realistic health issues and alienation from the body. He has trouble eating, he needs to manage his pain constantly, he has to use special mechanized furniture, he has to sit down after walking somewhere, he gets (and, as far as the characters know, needs) regular surgeries; he compensates for the vulnerability of being exposed during invasive medical procedures by wrapping himself in black cloth from head to toe when in public, he struggles with conventional intimacy. The film is frustratingly vague about his experience of pain, but it seems like he’s immune to pain from cutting etc. like everyone else — and yet suffers from pain originating from chronic illness; the former makes him fantastical, the latter keeps him relatable. The elimination of pain and infection is by itself a futuristic power fantasy about health and physical wellbeing, of course. Speaking of fantasies, have you ever wished you could cut yourself open and remove a hurting internal organ? Well, Saul gets its done by the loving partner, and they get a career out of it! A good romance is always a plus, but I particularly appreciated a visibly chronically ill character who is in a functional and fulfilling long-term relationship, and is seen as attractive not only by his partner but also by someone who just met him. You don’t often see focus on health issues in genre film protagonists (unless it’s a disability+superpower blend), and for me, a character whose health is in worse condition than mine feels more real than a character with a flawless body that never gets in their way.

In other ways, though, the filmmaking perspective is all too familiar. The protagonist is a man, his love interests are women; conversely, the man is allowed to be old and sick, but the women have to be young, beautiful, and healthy. In a film about transhumanism and the meaning ascribed to human bodies, it’s conspicuous that the main characters are white and cis. Where are the people marginalized via race or ethnicity relative to whatever society this is set in, if there’s talk of some people being less human than others — and why the hell is the fascist cop the only black character?! Where are the intersex people who were subjected to violence for their bodies in childhood, like poor Brecken was? Where are the transgender people showing up to say “We fucking told you so, having a non-normative body and modifying it as you please is good actually”? Obviously I’m not against the very idea of a story that could be interpreted in multiple ways and compared to the experience of multiple existing social groups, but if you don’t acknowledge the existence of these groups within your narrative, it’s as if they don’t exist in the fictional world; it’s like making a fable about gay rights without showing a single same-gender couple on screen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “shoehorn in a token minority because it’s better than nothing”. But surely there are other ways to convey that they exist somewhere in the fictional world! In a film where a lot of the dialogue consist of philosophical exposition, it’s mostly about the characters’ personal opinions, rather than the positions of social groups and factions. There’s one tantalizing mention of “escapist propaganda”, but that’s the only hint at the larger discourse I can think of.

I knew I would ask all of these questions about representation long before I pressed play, but what I realized with the context of the entire film was that it was a general problem of the lack of worldbuilding and social awareness. The film’s scope is very small, restricted to the sphere of the protagonist’s personal reach. It’s about the body hidden in a black cloak or exposed in a surgical theater, about lying on a bed and sitting on a chair, about having a meal (or failing to), about taking a political stance or having sex in private vs in an auditorium full of people. But what is the society around that? What exactly is legal and what isn’t? Why is the National Organ Registry like that? What happened to the normal computers, why is digital technology used only in medical devices and one (1) kind of camera? How does the organic technology fit into all this? Is this post-apocalyptic future or alternate history? What exactly are all the different factions in relation to each other? If pain and infection have “all but disappeared”, what about Saul’s “pain centers” and the commercially produced equipment meant to manage them? If “only a lucky handful of us experience pain in our sleep”, how does LifeFormWare’s business stay afloat? Is there an inherent difference between acute and chronic pain in this world if the former is nowhere to be seen but the latter remains? How does elimination of pain and infection change society and its largest institutions — what happens to the army, police, prisons, healthcare? How do the standards of hygiene or access to clean food and water change when infection is not a concern? When did pain and infection disappear, was it both at the same time, was the process sudden or gradual? How long ago did that happen, how many people remember the world as it was before, how did living through the change affect them? What language are the film’s characters speaking in-universe, what is the geopolitical situation? You can see that lack of interest in the wordbuilding even in the UX of the surgery/autopsy remote: seems like nobody cared to make the buttons correspond to specific movements of the SARK’s limbs, so the actors just stroke them in whatever way is the most sensual.

Someone’s review said that the film feels like a mediocre adaptation of a good novel. I agree: the unfulfilled worldbuilding potential makes the film seem like a part of something bigger. We all like to complain about franchises and profess our love for standalone stories these days, and yet I can’t help but want to get more out of this premise. I can easily imagine it in a book (or series), a prestige TV show, a tabletop RPG setting. The film just came out, and I am already ready to fantasize about a remake or an adaptation that would fix all my problems with it! And not only problems, to be honest. I want to know what happens next: does Saul ever talk to Timlin again, do Saul and Caprice make his evolution known to public, are they able to escape persecution? Conversely, as much as I love the established romantic relationship, I’d also not mind seeing how they “unleashed things in each other”. (That could work just as well in fanfiction form, though.)

But the almost nonexistent worldbuilding is only my second biggest problem with the screenplay. The problem number one is dialogue. It’s bad. Star Wars prequel trilogy level bad. Sometimes perhaps worse. (Actually, the comparison with George Lucas might be more accurate than originally intended: this is the work of a visionary who really should have found a co-writer who would have reshaped his cool ideas into decent dialogue.) There’s an enormous amount of exposition, and yet it’s often unclear what history characters and organizations have with or what they know about each other (I’m thinking of the first scene in the National Organ Registry in particular). At times, neither sentence structure nor the word choices sound anything remotely like what a real person would say aloud (maybe their brains evolved first and they never noticed?) A couple of examples a very short time apart from each other that I just had to write down: - “I’ve heard that some of the Sarks that were modified for performance surgery have been really brutally hacked around, but this one was converted by someone with a very delicate touch.” - “Seeing you here, is like a lightning bolt from the blue. It strikes you very hard and very convincingly.”

The weird thing is, there is one exception: the dialogue is consistently effective when it’s humorous. The clearest example was when Kristen Stewart spent about two minutes straight on fighting for her life against the most forced monologue of all time, then a few more minutes later Viggo Mortensen closed the scene with a single very effective quip.

My top 3 of the funniest dialogue in the film:

“I’m sorry. I’m not very good at the old sex.”

“Careful. Don’t spill.”

“Why is he a corpse?” (two lines later) “You have the body of your son?” “Yes, of course I have the body of my son. He’s my son.” “Wow.” “Yeah, I know.”

Not only the dialogue, but the internal logic of the scenes and their staging are often illogical too. One particularly bizarre example: the scene that reveals that the purple bars are toxic. Why are the two technicians talking to some random guy? Why is Lang leaving his secret and deadly plastic bar on the table? Why is the random guy picking up someone else’s food and eating it? Why does Lang not bother to stop him?

Of course, there were also scenes where the way characters existed in their space drew my attention in a positive way. Some physical comedy highlights:

An instance of dark/hypocritical comedy where a character rants about human evolution that makes people too perfect with the lack of pain and infection, while Saul leans on the door, sinks to the floor in exhaustion and stays there. Nobody offers him a chair! Even Caprice leaves his side just as he slides down, and doesn’t bother to help him! Either this is thoughtless direction (which was my initial thought, tbh), or the characters are all assholes.

Timlin after the performance laser-focusing on Saul, quickly finishing her drink and getting rid of the glass without taking her eyes off him, and beelining to Saul’s seat to ask him “something intimate” without so much as a hello.

The scene in Timlin’s office is hysterical from start to finish. Her very awkwardly advancing and him somehow even more awkwardly moving out of range and hiding his face. Her prying his mouth open with considerable effort and looking inside like he’s a goddamn horse as he stares at her in mild confusion.

Kristen Stewart needed more screentime — I expected a full-fledged love triangle or maybe something more :c Her acting style is completely different from anyone else in the film. In her very first scene we see her on the left side of the screen while Seydoux is on the right, and they have a conversation like two characters who came from entirely different genres. But I can’t be mad at her overacting because everything she does is completely unhinged sex comedy. She has got to be one of the horniest characters I have ever seen on screen. She almost literally says “rearrange my guts daddy” at one point. Initially I wanted to open the review with the sicko meme but that’s redundant because Timlin is already an embodiment of it.

Whatever was happening to Saul and Caprice’s relationship never coalesced into a coherent storyline for me. I think they were supposed to have Marital Problems™, which is unsurprising when one of the partners is also the other’s collaborator, assistant, caretaker, and doctor. Caprice was clearly dissatisfied with her professional role: “Saul likes me to do the techno dog work. Keeps me in touch with my roots,” she says with clear resentment. That, I guess, was supposed to be solved when Caprice declared her intent to engage more creatively and actively in the shows’ planning and performance — but Saul reacted to that with a surprising lack of enthusiasm. You’d think he’d show more pride and interest in his girlfriend’s personal growth, but instead they both seem uncomfortable, and she even defensive. Another question: are Saul and Caprice in an open relationship, or are they cheating on each other? (I feel like whatever happened with Odile would count as a fling, even if it wouldn’t in our world.) They seem to talk honestly with each other (Saul says he finds Timlin attractive, Caprice repeats Odile’s “desire to be open” line), but in both cases the other reacts like they hate to hear about that. This also seemed like a natural starting point for a storyline that never happened. Perhaps I should take these scenes as a good sign: the two are communicating their honest feelings like adults they are, instead of suppressing themselves and putting on a mask even for the person closest to them. There was at least one undeniable, glaring communication issue, though: Saul going behind Caprice’s back to secretly work with the goddamn fascist cops. I was sure he’d come clean at the end! It’s not like I require characters to be pure and unproblematic, but the way these threads were left hanging made me feel unsure whether I imagined them or was just missing what the film was trying to tell me. I guess it bothers me specifically because otherwise the relationship is very sweet and romantic, and found myself strongly emotionally attached to it. What’s better than finding the one person in the world who understands and accepts your weirdness because their own weirdness perfectly complements yours!

I’m not really a fan of horror, body horror in particular; I’ve seen gifs from some of Cronenberg’s earlier work and found the special effects repulsive, and not in a fun way. I’m also a romantic who prefers uplifting endings. The only Cronenberg film I’d seen before was Videodrome, which had one of the most despicable protagonists I’ve encountered in recent memory and a very cynical perspective on sex and romance. It felt like a gift to me personally that the same director’s new futuristic sci-fi was centered on a heartfelt romance and took such a hopeful stance overall. Humanity will evolve past the problems that have plagued it since the beginning, and even direct that evolution. Nature and technology will find a new balance as humans gain the ability to lessen the damage their industry has done to the planet. People will adjust to their changing bodies and find new forms of pleasure and intimacy. Grotesque alterations of human flesh will be painless and consensual, even desired. And one man will be able to handle the tense antagonistic relationships both with his own body and with the world that demands different things from it, and he will have a supportive partner by his side.

About bodies, surgeries, and age

This is a film about eating plastic and enjoying surgery. Plastic surgery. Haha get it?

No, seriously, was the surgical CGI supposed to look plastic? It was pretty unconvincing, even before I went to look up some real-life videos. It’s not just the visuals but the procedure, too; as this review points out, “there’s no question of infection or, for that matter, of blood flow. Caprice sterilizes nothing, cleans nothing, suctions nothing, and closes up Saul’s wounds with a mere heat seal”.

Cronenberg himself commented on the previous point in this interview: “In the surgeries that we show, there’s not much blood, and in the real surgery, there would be much more. Of course, they’d be sweeping it away so that they could see what they’re doing, so it’s a little bit of a fudge factor — I’m sort of pretending that’s what’s happening. Yes, it’s open-abdomen surgery, but I think the context in the film is so specific and artificial fantastic that the gross-out factor is really diminished.”)

The same interview also highlights some important connections: the fictional old artist representing the old artist who created him; old age as the time when it becomes more common for human bodies to become reliant on and intertwined with technology, changing their senses and relationship with the world; the shared the experience of modifying one’s body as basis for interpersonal connection.

I’ve talked about the age gap before; Caprice didn’t have to be young, but it’s crucial that Saul is old. Even one of the first things we hear from Saul and Caprice is, on a thematic level, a conversation about his age: “I thought I was all tapped out. Dried up.” “You always think that, and you're always wrong.” “One day, I’ll be right.” “Not today.” His body’s biological productivity is the basis of his art which is the basis of his sex life. These are the words of an aging man dreading the approach of artistic and sexual impotence, knowing that deterioration is coming but not knowing when. The formation of new organs holds two thematic symbolic meanings: it is a disease that he seeks to get under control, but also the foundation of his lifestyle that he’s afraid to let go; both the presence and the loss of that process can be a metaphor for aging.

Many metaphorical interpretations can be made for Saul’s antagonism with his body. An old person trying to hold back the deterioration of their health. A young person horrified and disgusted by puberty. (I came up with this and then a few hour later realized I’d been halfway through an article titled “Art Is the New Puberty”, haha.) A public figure promoting plastic surgery and/or dieting, making a career out of fighting their body’s natural growth and removing the parts that don’t fit their idea of normality. And of course there’s the trans reading, which people more qualified than me have already written about. There’s even a connection with the more traditional horror trope of monstrous transformation: the body not accepting human food, the growing pains, the grotesque new organs.

There’s something I really like about Saul’s transformation as this film’s secret true horror element. The “body horror” that can be seen in trailers and screenshots is not associated with fear, suffering or violence — the qualities of the horror genre. On the other hand, the slow painful transformation of a human into a frightening, mysterious entity is a classic horror trope… But the way it’s represented in this film is via its most naturalistic element that I have praised above as representation: the protagonist’s health issues. When a character in a horror story transforms into a monster like a vampire or a werewolf, it is normally signified by outside characteristics like fangs, fur, inhuman eyes etc. But Saul’s transformation happens inside, invisibly to the viewer! It’s his internal organs that are transforming! Because it’s a film about the internal organs, about the hidden truth beneath the surface! Which lets the film hide its true horror content in plain sight. We see Saul’s food problems twelve minutes in! And we see Brecken eat plastic long before that. That should be enough to connect the dots, and I’m sure there are viewers who do. But there is so much else going on, and the performance is so naturalistic, that the side of the character that is most relevant to the main plot and to horror as a genre seems deceptively mundane.

Another contrast is the conflict between the best and the worst things about embodiment. The body as a conduit for pleasure, human connection and artistic expression, vs the body as a torturous and exhausting malfunctioning cage and the target of external violence and control.

The differences between our real world and the world of the film sometimes mean that the viewers’ and the characters’ ideas of normality are the reverse of each other. Something like tattooing a person’s internal organs (while they’re wide awake, too!) would be completely horrifying in our world, but for the characters with “plastic”, invulnerable bodies it’s intimate and domestic. Conversely, Caprice is shocked and horrified at the sight of a child’s dead body and the thought of doing autopsy on it, and she’s the person who regularly cuts her boyfriend open as sexy performance art.

That last point is actually very important for the theme of people ascribing meaning to bodies. I’ve seen people voice discomfort with the “surgery is the new sex” film culminating on a child autopsy, but I think that’s the point. There’s nothing inherently sexual in cutting someone open even in the film’s world. The meaning of the action is ascribed to it by its participants. This is something I see discussed pretty often in the real world, in relation to things like kissing on the lips or having a bath together. Or, within the film: the entire basis for Timlin’s statement that the surgery was sex is a simple projection on her part. She really walked up to a celebrity and said with her whole chest “what you just were doing in front of me was sex because I thought it was hot”. Okay!

Another thing about the child autopsy I’ve seen people comment on was the body’s nudity. I was a bit surprised by that myself, because in my memory of famous art pieces depicting autopsies the body was always covered. The same film takes pains to preserve its adult stars’ modesty, having them fold legs strategically, so this was a deliberate artistic choice. I felt like it dehumanized the body, treating it as just flesh on a slab… Which was probably the intention of the film’s director, but my question is: why would that the people directing the show in-universe, Saul and Caprice, want that effect? Doesn’t that contradict the humanizing message of Caprice’s speech? Either way, this is very effective at making me not want to post screenshots or gifs of this very important scene in case the platform takes it the wrong way.

More about the autopsy: Caprice only started taking the job seriously when she encountered the saw the child’s body with her own eyes. The moment it became real for her, she started crying reflexively and never really stopped. Do you think she felt guilty about the erotic “rehearsal” she had earlier?

Caprice’s lines about her sudden “desire to cut her face open” confused me, especially because she proceeded to add horn-like mods instead of something that evokes openness. I think I understand better now. That conversation starts with Odile saying “Oh, you have no idea how hard it's been for me to find plastic surgeons who understand that I do not wish to be made more beautiful.” Caprice in her performance looked like a very beautiful, very normal woman. Saul’s body gets to be interestingly gross and weird, but she could be seen as “normal” (if you don’t pay too much attention to the unabashed look of lust on her face, at least.) Altering her face and speaking during the performance makes a statement that she’s also a freak and proud of it, that she doesn’t want to be aligned with normality and palatability. The unblemished pretty face was a mask, and to put a crack into that mask it’s enough to make the face weird. In this interpretation of openness, it’s not necessary to literally show the inside of her body to the public like Saul does.

About bodies, comfort, pain, and furniture

More about contrasts and extremes: the smash cut between Saul and Caprice melting into a kiss so tenderly and comfortably to Saul painfully trying to force down a single spoon of breakfast, straining in his wobbly wheezing chair.

This furniture looks sooo uncomfortable btw 😭 As does the way Saul uses it. The bed doesn’t have a mattress and seems way too firm, there’s no blanket, Saul sleeps in his day clothes. (In fact, I’m pretty sure he spends the entire film in the same set of clothes, day and night…) The chair, too, would be a great idea in theory, but in practice we don’t see a single character who is helped by it, and I can’t imagine what good it could do except making the owner carsick in the middle of their meal.

At the beginning of the film, we see Saul and Caprice eat breakfast separately, and I thought it was a bit cold of her to sit comfortably in the sun while he struggles alone. But in a later scene Caprice keeps Saul company in the evening while he’s trying to eat. So maybe it’s Saul who doesn’t want to watch her easily eat normal tasty food while he can barely force down his dreadful purée.

Speaking of LifeFormWare, I don’t understand how the bed is supposed to interact with Saul’s pain. At first I thought it was simply pain relief. But at one point one of the technicians says: “Creation of art is often associated with pain, and pain, as we know, is always associated with sleep. We at LifeFormWare specialize in manipulating and modulating the pain of artists, and, to us, Saul Tenser is the greatest challenge, so intimate and involving in his art, and the nature of his pain. A good night's sleep is a hard thing to define when you're an artist and you seek pain.” (By the way, yet another endless sentence that no living person would under any circumstances say spontaneously aloud.) So what exactly is it supposed to do? Nothing about Saul’s onscreen relationship with his chronic pain seemed to me like he sought it…

To stay on the topic of pain, it’s remarkable that the justification for the society where people use surgery as sex and are obsessed with body mods is not “everyone is masochistic” but “nobody can feel pain”. These are two very different things! I’m glad the film went with the latter: it’s more original, more alien, and allows pain-as-the-general-audience-knows-it to be a negative presence in the protagonist’s life without making a distinction like “good pain” and “bad pain” (which would have been very confusing in a screenplay).

The practicalities of the body mods had me straining my suspension of disbelief. Sure, there’s no pain, but there are still other concerns! Even normal zippers are a pain in the ass when they catch on your clothes, imagine one doing the same to your intestine! Even if infections aren’t a problem, yikes! Is there a horrible little flesh flap inside to help prevent that? And how is that random woman going to walk after having her foot cut to the bone, is giving her a disability actually the point here, or if not then what is?

I want to talk again about Saul not changing clothes for an unknown length of time, unlike any other character. Is this part of his characterization as a sick old man, implying that he can’t keep up with with regular standards of hygiene? If he doesn’t change clothes, I assume he doesn’t shower either. Or is that more normative in a world where “nobody washes their hands anymore”? What other forms of personal hygiene have become obsolete? We see Brecken brush his teeth, so that’s still a thing at least. On another note, this is another example of the gendered double standard I mentioned before, where the male protagonist is not held to the same standards of physical perfection and glamorousness as his female love interests; both Caprice and Timlin wear a selection of distinct outfits.

About art

After all that, I still don’t really see how Saul is an artist. How isn’t he “just a glorified organ donor”, as the film’s primary antagonist (and the only black man, ugh) put it?

In the interview with Letterboxd, Cronenberg says: “It’s a movie about an artist who gives everything, including the insides of his body, to his art. […] When I step back, having made the film, I can say, ‘Yes, this is what art is to me: that you are really giving everything you have.’ And for me, “everything” is the body. That’s the most that you can give. I’m interested in performance artists, because they do that. A performance artist who alters their body in a permanent way is giving a lot. It’s a real commitment to your art.” Maybe I just disagree with his views on performance art in general… If Saul and Caprice were thinking of the extra organs as tumours, and of their removal as necessary and life-saving, how can that count as “giving” or “commitment to art”?

Cronenberg also gives similar explanations in this interview with Vanity Fair: “So the performance artists here are the avatar, the template of any artist who is passionate and aggressive and ambitious, opening himself up, opening themselves up, completely exposing themselves, their most intimate inner workings, offering them to an audience which makes them incredibly vulnerable to rejection to misunderstanding, to anger, and it basically, therefore, is the model of what an artist is.” This argument is more understandable to me, it works on a metaphorical level — but I still don’t really see how it makes Saul an artist in a literal way. By this logic, anyone who exposes themselves to an unusual extent to the public is an artist!

Artists other than the main couple didn’t present a coherent picture either. Someone who grafts ears all over himself but can’t hear through them as a hack, but someone who has gills cut on her face and says “What I do to myself is very traumatic” even though she can’t feel pain is brilliant and exhilarating?

The most convincing argument that I can see for Saul being a true artist is that there’s a theatricality in their performances we haven’t really been shown. In the post-Odile conversation, Saul says “You want to take over the Brecken show,” and Caprice responds “I want to perform”. Then they discuss the show’s structure. Earlier, Timlin says Saul “creates theatre out of” “the rebellion of his own body”. Perhaps there’s more to the usual performances than the surgery, but we haven’t been shown that because the film chose a different focus. We also see Saul work on the SARK, and the technicians praise the quality of his alterations, so maybe his contributions as a mechanic count too?

While Videodrome is about media and its power to influence the masses, the Crimes of the Future world has no media at all. Partially it’s a consequence in the film’s disinterest in institutions and large-scale worldbuilding, but it has an interesting effect on the main characters, making them truly independent artists. It seems that they are just famous enough to have the audience they need, and executives breathing down their necks are not a concern. Everything in the film points to their art being noncommercialized and authentic — including its erotic component, which in another situation could have been a cynical “sex sells” (or, as the closest thing to a villain in this film put it, “sexier means easier funding”).

On a more light-hearted note: Saul’s amused reaction to Timlin’s confession is very funny in the light of him being an author avatar. I can only imagine how many people told Cronenberg “Your films awakened something in me, thanks”!

About sex and also art

It’s nice to see characters in a healthy long-term relationship who don’t need to negotiate something they’ve done before many times (the surgery), but when improvising something new they either communicate verbally (Caprice clearly says what she wants in the naked scene) or successfully read each other’s body language (Saul shows off his zipper and Caprice doesn’t need to ask before proceeding). There’s very little drama in any of that (as opposed to films where sex scenes are used to show characters getting together or growing apart), just character development and worldbuilding.

I’m pretty sure we never see the main couple kiss until the very end of the film. The progression of what the viewers are shown: sex in public, then sex in private, then a romantic kiss. It’s a fun reversal, and makes sense for an established couple.

Do these scenes form a storyline that decouples Saul’s identities as an artist and a lover? The starting point is the big scene that establishes the status quo: performance = surgery = sex. Then there’s the scene at home with the role reversal and the “this is just for us”. Then there’s the zipper scene where Saul and Caprice have a conversation about art and sex (which is, frankly, not the best written or most coherent dialogue in the film):

Caprice: Have we just been made obsolete? Saul: No, of course not. It’s just a functional thing. It’s a zippered fly; it’s not art, It’s not sensual. Besides, remember what our Registry friend said: sex is surgery. A zipper can’t replace our Sark. Caprice: I think she said “surgery is the new sex”. Besides, zippers have their own sex appeal.

I can’t follow the train of thought very well, but it seems to me that Saul is making the argument that only something artistic and high-effort can be truly erotic, and Caprice provides a counterargument in words and in action. Once again it’s Saul who is fixated on the artistic performance and Caprice who advocates directness and spontaneity (aligning with the more traditional gender roles in this, unlike their roles during the surgery).

Then there’s Caprice’s epiphany about wanting to be even more direct and in touch with her emotions (to which Saul reacts with strange, almost dismissive coldness). After that comes the kiss with Timlin who is desperate to be in his show but loses her nerve after a couple of seconds of awkward coughing from him. And finally, an opposite of that — the big romantic kiss with Caprice in the middle of the night in his bedroom, placed between the two scenes where he chooses his side in the ideological/physiological battle, which implies that his artistic period of pruning his “rebelling” body is coming to an end. Perhaps Caprice’s recording of his plastic meal will become his last performance.

(I haven’t mentioned whatever Timlin was doing to Saul during their first scene together because it doesn’t really feel like a part of this storyline. But. I just want to give a quick shout out to that moment so that you don’t think I missed or forgot about it.)

The phrase “surgery is the new sex” is also interesting because the wording here implies that surgery is not a type of sex, but “the new sex” i. e. a different thing that eclipses the original in popularity and is used for similar purposes (intimacy and pleasure, in this case) but doesn’t necessarily achieve them in a similar way.

It’s really a shame that we never hear how Saul and Caprice defined what they were doing before a creepy stranger came along and they started using the “new sex” phrase she coined. What language had they been using the entire time before? I am once again asking: where is the discourse, what do the various groups of people in this world say about the new developments in human sexuality? We see people cutting each other in dark alleys instead of making out etc., are they outliers or is this a general trend? “It’s time” for “the new sex” for what reasons exactly — only cultural or also physiological? Did the shift in the human perception of touch also lead to the collective loss of interest in the previously common sexual practices? If that’s physiological, where does that evolutionary road lead in terms of reproduction? How have the changes already affected the relationships between genders, the institution of marriage, the industries that deal with health or sex? Does this solve the problem of abortion access? Saul and Caprice’s thing is remarkably healthy, but how many dark counterparts do they have in people who are pressured into unwanted mutilation to keep the interest of their partner or commercial audience? Or is that escalation held back by the lack of mass media and advanced communication, making Saul and Caprice pretty extreme by the entire world’s standards? What are the communities, identities, common points of contention in this world? It seems like the world changed within a single lifetime, so how did people handle that? Are there bestselling memoirs like “I was a masochist for 30 years and then there was no more pain in the world”? What do people like that think of our main characters?

Of course I have a similar question about the opinions from the real world. So far I haven’t seen any serious discussions of this film as kink representation, and I want to know what people are saying. Certainly this feels astonishingly more positive than the scaremongering I saw in Videodrome. Also curious how this film and Cronenberg’s work in general compares to ero guro as a genre, I’m not familiar with it at all.

This film is the latest example of the very fun kind of media that makes me feel like I’m an alien in a human sexuality college class. *taking notes* Seems like some humans find the concept of touching one another’s bodies on the inside and not just on the surface erotic by itself, instead of only practicing penetration for pragmatic purposes! Weird, and even weirder that it’s news to me at this age, but okay! Or maybe it’s just Cronenberg, who can tell, certainly not me!

Every scene in the film where something erotic is happening passes every criteria I can think of with flying colors. They’re all important for the plot, themes, and character development; they’re not vulgar or violent or offensive; they’re not unexpected. Still, I couldn’t help but feel slight irritation at how much trouble R-rated films are logistically if you don’t live alone, regardless of the quality of adult content. Took me a few days to find a good time window…

The order of events in the film is one hell of an icebreaker. Usually I get a bit squicked when camera gets right into the characters’ faces to show kissing, but the scene with Timlin was so far into the film that by that point I was like “I’ve already seen this guy’s liver. I don’t care if I see his tongue, actually. Whatever.”

About genital symbolism

Viewer who has only seen Videodrome, watching her second Cronenberg: if I had a nickel every time this guy’s movies featured a stomach pussy I’d have two nickels so far, is that a coincidence or am I going to be rich?

To be serious for a second: in both films, the addition of an orifice resembling a vulva to the protagonist’s body is supposed to unsettle and disgust the audience; it is meant to be unnatural for a viewpoint character to have such a thing on their body, and its presence disturbs the bodily integrity and creates an image of vulnerability. Here are some features that the yonic orifices have in both films: a body part that does not belong on a “default” body; artificially and invasively produced for someone else’s benefit instead of being an integral part of the body; a hole instead of a functional organ; an orifice for inserting things, and not for either having things come out of it or even not being disturbed at all. In other words, the way yonic wound imagery in used both of these films reveals a patriarchal perspective in which people without vaginas are the default/the subject, while vaginas and the people who have them signify the Other/the object and exist in relation to the former.

Years ago, I complained about similarly misogynistic writing in “The Thirty-Six Lessons of Vivec” from Morrowind; in it, the cis male writer gives the androgynous (and often interpreted as intersex) protagonist a weapon that symbolically represents their genitals, with the phallic shape (a spear) and the yonic name (“Milk Taker”) — except, as you can see, the supposedly yonic part is also phallocentric because the misogynistic writer could not conceptualize a vagina beyond its utility for a penis. Same thing as the misogynistic real life etymology of the word “vagina” as “sheath, scabbard”, or, conversely, the “-ussy” words.

To give credit where it’s due: in this film, the yonic slit is created consensually and used for mutually enjoyable sex with a woman, unlike the violent insertion of the cassette and whatever was happening in there with the gun in Videodrome. Progress! But this is the brand new latest work of a very old and prolific artist, and I wonder how long it took him to get here. Hopefully I’ll have better informed opinions when I’m more familiar with Cronenberg’s filmography. Though I kind of spoiled his entire body of work for myself when two weeks after writing this part of the post, I came across an academic article about this exact topic… (Sounds like his early films were horrifically misogynistic, ouch.) If anyone has other good links with analysis of “offputting vagina” imagery in cis men’s art, I’d be interested, too.

About gender roles

On a similar note of the man as the default subject — this time in the sense of being allowed more interiority. I really love the tender scene at the end where Caprice and Saul have nightmares after the autopsy and comfort each other. It took me several rewatches to notice that it’s only Saul who talks about his nightmare. The only thing Caprice says about her own is “I almost thought I was feeling,” and it isn’t even clear what she meant (at least to me). Because it’s important to show the viewers what the man is thinking and feeling, the contents of the woman’s mind don’t matter so much, just infer them from the context! I understand he’s the protagonist, but I also think the audience is supposed to think of them as equals, and this approach undermines that.

The artistic collaboration between Saul and Caprice involves a refreshing role reversal. Usually the woman would provide the body, be it as a model or as a canvas, to represent the unthinking, instinctual, sensual side of the process, and the man would be the one holding the brush, purposeful and intellectual. Here, it’s the man who grows new organs without control or intent (but perhaps out of subconscious, repressed instinct) and provides his body as raw material that is tattooed and surgically sculpted by the woman while he lies back passively — and it’s the woman who holds the tools and even calls them her paintbrush on screen. For the audience of the surgery, it’s the man who is reduced to a collection of objectified body parts, his torso exposed (stripped not only of clothes but also skin) and face irrelevant.

Saul’s black outfit has many ambiguously gendered connotations. The masculinity of Aragorn’s hooded or Batman’s masked silhouette in the dark and Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, plus the femininity of black clothing covering him from head to toe and leaving only the eyes exposed like a niqab, plus the genderlessness of a monk or a nun’s robes. The mysterious heroism, the Romantic loneliness. The type of body that becomes the subject of ideologically-driven government control and public debate. The denial of the body and its sensuality, its removal from the gendered paradigm.

Saul’s black clothes also mirror Caprice’s white clothes, and in the kiss scene their bodies almost form the Yin-Yang symbol. The roles are reversed: the woman is Yang (light, active) and the man is Ying (dark, passive).

About “natural” and “artificial”

In a previous section I used the phrase “artificially and invasively produced” in the negative context of sexism in art. I wanted to make a note that the film actually celebrates the artificial and the invasive, but immediately realized it was more complex than that.

The motivation for Saul and Caprice’s invasive procedures is to preserve the “natural”, original state of his body by removing the growth presumed to be invasive and hostile. On the other hand, there’s what the government fears and the plastic eaters want: the results of surgeries being preserved and passed down genetically. Both sides use the same word: respectively, “It was all natural. He was born that way” vs “The first to be born with a plastic processing digestive system. To be naturally unnatural.”

These two threads intersect in the pivotal scene where Saul and Caprice defend the former worldview and Lang Dotrice defends the latter. It is not only a theoretical ideological clash; one of the two arguments is backed by nature itself, and it’s Lang’s, even though he doesn’t live to see it. Body is reality. The reality cannot be denied. Saul has to either die or accept what nature has chosen for him. Or has he done it, subconsciously, himself? The film asks the question of how much input Saul has on what’s “cooking” inside him, but never gives a definite answer. What is clear, though, is that the film takes the side of accepting the “natural” state of one’s body, of growing past the futile attempts to control and fight it. The relief and joy of finally being at peace with one’s body is portrayed as a transcendent, spiritual experience in the final shot of the film. Does that mean that the film’s position is ultimately against surgery? After the happy ending, the couple will probably stop removing new organs, so their performances must end or at least change in a major way — does that mean the film presents the surgical sex of the performances as a distraction or even a mistake? The assistive chair goes quiet, not needed anymore as the protagonist is transformed by the acceptance of his body — does that count as a miraculously cured disability? I’m not sure, but the film’s position is definitely more complex than it seems at first glance.

About the cinematography

When we see Saul’s room for the first time at the beginning of the movie, the visuals of the shot just bother me. The blurry landscape outside looks greenscreened in. The light is supposed to be coming out of the door to the balcony, but the room and especially Caprice’s body are much more noticeably lit from the front, from a secondary light source or a huge reflector.

In the window kiss scene, whenever Timlin raises her hands, for some reason it throws a soft rose/red light on her neck and face. Very distracting.

Nice parallel: Caprice looking intensely at Saul during the first surgical scene we see (when she’s operating on/having sex with him) and during the last one, the autopsy (when she says “Let us not be afraid to map the chaos inside. Let us create a map that will guide us into the heart of darkness” to him and about him — her mind clearly changed since the argument with Lang and her line “We’re making art out of anarchy” in it).

Great excuse for shifting into black and white for the final shot. I haven’t seen The Passion of Joan of Arc, but I think I get the idea. Actually I’d seen the screenshot comparison before the film itself, and it had me very concerned about Saul’s fate — so getting to the end of the film and realizing the real context was a relief.

About genre and similarities to other things

I said above that I don’t see this film as a horror film, but there’s a caveat. Horror does have a presence in it — not just drama and tragedy and revulsion but the actual emotion of horror. The main characters are not monsters or survivors — but they witness horror. And it leaves a mark on them: Caprice is inspired to “not be afraid to map the chaos inside”, Saul chooses a side. We watch them pull each other closer after the destruction of someone else’s family gave the both of them nightmares. Saul and Caprice are also themselves artists of the horror genre, creating gory spectacles that shock and unsettle the audience. So the autopsy is a multi-layered horror event: other people do something horrific and violent, Saul and Caprice make a spectacle out of showing it to public, and their roles shift from the creators of fake tame horror to the audience of real violent horror.

This film being classified as horror because of its painless gore is also funny to me because “icky and uncomfortable to watch, but the characters enjoy it so at least the empathetic reaction is positive” is that how I usually react to entirely ordinary sex scenes in media. Welcome to my world!

Weirdly, this film reminds me of Stalker. Both because of the general aesthetic and atmosphere, and because the plot is thin and the characters are mouthpieces delivering author’s opinions on abstract discourse with little personal touch. Stalker is way better visually (at a horrible real-life cost) and has smoother direction and dialogue, but despite its reputation I found Crimes more thought-provoking (as evidenced by the length of this post) even if less articulate. Curious how the philosophy of the two films is directly opposed: Stalker is a Christian’s complaint about “the victory of materialism” while Crimes of the Future is an atheist’s rumination on “body is reality”. The former declares viewers like me to be its ideological enemy, the latter resonates with my own worldview (which is why I went so unhinged with this post). Now that I think of it, there’s also something that reminds me of Dostoyevsky: the contrast between gloomy naturalism and characters who are deep within their own heads (or up their own asses).

Things I didn’t understand

The purpose of the beauty pageant subplot — I think it went nowhere.

The meaning of Caprice’s speech during the autopsy — did she also realize that the organs were faked by the government, or did she play right into their hands? To be honest, the autopsy scene didn’t work for me on most intended levels — I was confused by the organs, and Caprice’s speech didn’t make sense ideologically or emotionally. It’s supposed to be the film’s Big Dramatic High Point but it feels like a misfire.

Had Saul and Caprice interacted with the Registry before? How much were the two bureaucrats familiar with them by the time they met in person? There’s a lot of contradictory information in the relevant scenes.

What was Timlin’s worldview? How come she was the one to actually coin the film’s “Surgery is the new sex” motto, seem to be actively interested in futuristic bodies and modes of interacting with them — and she still ended up working against the most futuristic faction?! How did she expect that to improve her chances of “being Caprice for him” and not to completely destroy them?!

When Timlin talked to Saul, Caprice asked “What was that all about?” and he said it was about art, did she hear the conversation and joke about how weird it was, or did she not hear it, ask him about the content and get a lie as a response? Oh wait, found the answer to this one myself: in the zipper scene, Saul quotes Timlin’s words from that scene inaccurately and Caprice corrects him. So she heard everything. Leaving this one in, in case someone else has the same question.

Caught rewatching the scene: at the beginning of the film, the National Organ Registry guy tells Saul and Caprice: “Our fear is that some of these neo-organs might establish themselves genetically, and then be passed down from parents to children, who would then no longer be, strictly speaking, human.” At the end of the film, the plastic-eating guy says that’s what happened to his son, Saul says that “sounds insane”, and Caprice doesn’t argue. Were Saul and Caprice also not paying attention?

If the plastic eaters became plastic eaters after “the same elaborate surgery” “developed over years of collaboration”, and the only other known way to acquire the mutation is to inherit it genetically, how did Saul spontaneously and independently gain the ability to eat the exact same material as they do? We see Dr. Nasatir have struggle with his food in the same way — has this mutation started to occur spontaneously in people who are messing with their insides in other ways?

What is the goal and ideology of the two technicians? Is LifeFormWare a separate faction with its own ominous goals, or are these two women New Vice’s moles within LifeFormWare?

Why is Saul sleeping on the floor at the end? Did the technicians sabotage Saul’s bed? Did he decide he can’t trust them and their technology? Did the bed malfunction all by itself? Did he roll off because of the nightmare? My first assumption was that the bed threw him out, which is pretty scary honestly.

When Caprice says “I almost thought I was feeling” at the end, what does it mean? Was she dreaming about physical pain? Or is it supposed to be a last-minute reveal that pain wasn’t the only sensation/emotion that people lost? If people completely lost the sense of touch and can feel only what in the real life would be agonizing, that should have been established early because it would affect everything about the way characters interact or simply exist on screen.

Here’s one not about the film, but about the audience reaction. I don’t understand why people keep calling the setting dystopian. It doesn’t seem much more oppressive than real life — in fact, the authorities seem absurdly powerless. The one step back compared to our world is the lack of computers — but even as an extremely online person, I think I would have given up the internet in exchange for no pain or infection for every single human being worldwide. Please, where can I find a devil to bargain with and sell TikTok in exchange for no COVID? If anything, I actually thought this world was almost utopian, and a pretty interesting take on the concept at that; not a sustained utopia, not one built on a cracked foundation and currently in decline like a certain podcast season, but a world on a rocky road to becoming one. This is the future liberals (me) want!

If you’re still reading the post, thank you! The “review” is over now. Next are the notes I took during the first viewing. (Obviously, I had to look up so many scenes while writing this post that I rewatched almost the entire thing already.)

Liveblog

I’ve read all the warnings and was prepared for this scene. Wasn’t even as bad as I feared. Very sad though

Haha the horror music for the high-tech bed Is the balcony greenscreened in? The lighting doesn’t look right

Wait is she just having a look or tattooing his insides?

What is this chair even doing future assistive technology sucks

“National Organ Registry” in a place like this?! What is the state of the world here, is it post-apocalyptic? Or just a small poor country? I Don’t Believe That Man Has Ever Been To Medical School. Or law school for that matter

The difference between Seydoux’s realistic performance and Stewart’s overacting is hilarious. They’re on screen at the same time but they belong to totally different genres. Stewart’s character is so unbelievably horny on main from the first second we see her lmfao

Stewart’s quite literally playing the “haha yes” sicko

Is he upset about the tattoos in general or the specific one Caprice gave him?

Are we gonna get any worldbuilding details because it’s wild. High tech medical devices with seemingly organic elements but pre-computer paper documentation… Tiny ring-sized digital cameras but also uhh film cameras?

How does the audience even see anything? I see only one screen it’s transmitted to, and it’s tiny

Whatever genre everyone else is in, Stewart is in a sex comedy

Why does the new character look so much like the murder mom

“Why is he a corpse?” (two lines later) “You have the body of your son?” “Yes, of course I have the body of my son. He’s my son.” “Wow.” “Yeah, I know.”

Did he leave it on autopilot or something? Doesn’t that defeat the point? I’m no expert, but I’ve always assumed that if your partner says “keep going”, your next step shouldn’t be to stop what you’re doing and lie down to cuddle.

“What I’m saying with that body-art stuff is that I don’t like what’s happening with the body. In particular, what’s happening with my body, which is why I keep cutting it up.” Aw :(

Do I want to google wtf a “stoolie” is

“I’ve heard that some of the Sarks that were modified for performance surgery have been really brutally hacked around, but this one was converted by someone with a very delicate touch.” “Seeing you here, is like a lightning bolt from the blue. It strikes you very hard and very convincingly.” WHAT IS THIS DIALOGUE. DID GEORGE LUCAS WRITE THIS

Where are they? Did she catch him in a random alley on the way home?

Does the bearded dude want him too?

I still don’t understand what is supposed to be legal and what isn’t. Anyway why is Stewart’s character crying “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at the old sex.” How come every normal line the worst writing I’ve ever heard but every funny line is comedy gold?

Do Caprice and Saul have an open relationship or are both of them just very willing to cheat?

This is at least the second time I see Greek alphabet. Are they just in Greece?

“Has it ever occurred to you that you might simply be interfering in a fantastic natural process that you should surrender to?” I’m desperately trying to remember where I’ve seen this story before

Alright, so the moral dilemma for the protagonist has finally crystallized: does he deny his nature and betray the other “mutants”, or does he stand with them?

How many goddamn factions are there

Hold on, didn’t Caprice want to be the one cutting?

I don’t get it. How are there tattoos on the inside? Why is this supposed to be ugly if the tattoos on Saul’s internal organs weren’t?

Oh okay the tattoos were faked and in truth the kid was “all natural”. So the film isn’t siding with the fucking eugenical police. That’s a relief

Ohhh I think I see what is going to happen in the remaining 13 minutes. Saul will publicly cut himself up to reveal what the plastic-eating bodies actually look like.

Noo, Timlin did this?! Why?! I thought her bad vibes were in the opposite direction!

“It’s going to make him a martyr. Just what the cause needs.” Well that’s good news at least

I like the fakeout where at first it sounds as if the two are having “old sex”. Did the technicians sabotage Saul’s bed?

She really should use a normal stationary camera. How the hell does it look when she opens the plastic bar while the camera is on her hand, it must be just shaking footage of the wall!

Yay for self-acceptance! I’m glad the couple remained a team until the end, I was really rooting for them.

Wait, what was the beauty pageant subplot for?! And what was the meaning of Caprice’s speech during the autopsy — did she also realize that the organs were faked by the government, or did she play right into their hands?

[lilybarthes]

Does it bother you that a lot of Catholicism isn’t biblically sound?

so many things bother me about catholicism anon

[mandoalorian]

Sinner [Dark!Din Djarin x F!Reader] *SMUT*

Summary: The Mandalorian has been attending confession for weeks now, with the sole intensive purpose to see you. 

Rating: 18+ smut

Warnings: Dark!Din, implied age difference, religion kink (don’t come for me...), sex in a place of worship, smut: loss of virginity, mutual masturbation, dirty talk, degradation, unprotected p in v, cunningless, death mention, alcohol mention, brothel mention. 

Word Count: 4000+

Masterlist

REBLOGS APPRECIATED!<3

He’d been coming to confess for about a year now. He’d gone off the rails when he lost the kid. You’d heard rumours about the Mandalorian — strong, fierce, brave... a warrior. You certainly wouldn’t have pinned him for a man of faith. You’d seen him a few times when you were shadowing your father in church. He was tall, broad shouldered, and only came during the dead of night, when the abbey was completely isolated.

“Hello,” you greeted him, your soft voice echoing throughout the chambers. Your crimson red heels clicked against the marble floor beneath you as you approached the masked figure. Curtseying politely and removing your hood, you couldn’t help but bat your eyelashes in the direction the Mandalorian. “It’s quite late. I was just closing for the night.” you admitted, biting down on your lower lip in hope that he’d understand.

“I thought places of worship aren’t supposed to close?” He countered quizzically, an air of amusement in his voice. 

“You’re right, technically,” you hummed, picking at your nails as a wash of nerves flooded over you. “But my father is out of town and... I need to sleep.”

That’s where he recognised you from— you were the daughter of the Grand Bishop. He’d seen you before, doting around the abbey in your signature black gown and red robes. You were hard to miss, your beauty being beyond standards of measure. Yes, he knew you. He had noticed you watching him from the pillars above, when you thought nobody was looking. He noticed the way you’d deliberately brush past his body... desperate for just the slightest touch. He recognised your scent too; it was sweet like honey. And your ruby coloured lips. He’d dreamt of them plenty of times. It was really you.

“Where is he?” The Mandalorian asked after a beat of prolonged silence.

“He was requested by Senator Berenko to present evening mass on Naboo, for the Festival of Lights.” you explained, probably offering a little too much information.

“When will he be back?”

“Next week.”

“Well, I’ll be back then.” 

No, you couldn’t just let him leave. You couldn’t just let him walk away from you. This was your chance. In a fluster, you extended your arm and pawed at his bicep. He froze under your touch, and you hoped that you hadn’t overstepped. 

“Are— you’re here to confess. Aren’t you?” you asked him with a nervous gulp. Maker, why were you so nervous? The Mandalorian didn’t say anything, so you heeded to continue. “I’ve seen you come by before. I know you speak to my father usually but— I can do it. The confession, I mean. I’ve been shadowing my father for the past few months— training with him. I can do it. If... if you’d like me to.”

The Mandalorian took a moment to process your words. Maker; you were a sight to behold. Your eyes were starry and reflective of the galaxy he’d spent so long venturing. Your skin was soft and delicate. You were pure— untouched— holy. He was afraid the discussion of his sins might be a bit too much for you to handle. 

Or maybe there was something more.

Maybe he was afraid that once he’d start opening up to you, he wouldn’t be able to stop. He wouldn’t be able to resist you.

“Aren’t you a little young?” The Mandalorian scoffed incredulously, bringing his leather gloved hand to his helmet, his thumb grazing the cloth between his chin and his neck. His rude manner didn’t surprise you at all, but yet, you kept a strong posture and held your head high.

“I’m old enough.” you declared, not ripping your gaze from him once. Even through the dark tinted visor of his helmet, it felt like you were looking into his eyes, staring deep into his soul. 

So, he agreed. You told him to wait in the confession box by the altar. “I won’t be long, I just have to lock up and turn out the lights.”

As you walked down the aisle, you lit a match and ignited some candles. They were tall and made from beeswax, and the flicking amber flames provided barely enough light. But it had to be enough. It had to do. The wax dripped down the sculptures and chambersticks, pooling into swirls of hardening ivory. 

The Mandalorian waited for you in the confession box, having already discarded the plates of his beskar armour. It was hard to wear, and heavy on his back, but he felt safe… here, with you. He had no reason to be still wearing it. No more fighting tonight, he hoped.

The image of you couldn’t escape his mind, no matter how hard he tried. Dirty thoughts — it was wrong of him. You were the Grand Bishop’s daughter for Heaven’s sake.

When you entered your side of the confession box, your full intention was to follow the ordinary strict protocol. There was no reason for distraction.

“State your name for the records,” you requested, shuffling around as you worked on getting comfortable in your chair.

“Din Djarin.”

Din Djarin. It was a beautiful name. Your mind immediately went to pairing his last name with your first name, and then you cursed yourself for the inappropriate thought. 

“Din,” his name left your lips like the sweetest tasting honey. “Why are you here today? What would you like to confess?”

“I went to Corellia over the weekend,” he announced, his voice cold through the modulator. “The bad part— well, it’s all bad over there,” he corrected himself before continuing. “Got into some trouble gambling at Lady Proxima’s casino and a bunch of white worms surrounded me. So I killed them, all of them. I didn’t have to. But I did. I murdered them in cold blood.”

It was in that moment you learned how dangerous of a man The Mandalorian was. His beskar armour was just as cold as his heart.

“Wh— why did you kill them?” you asked timidly, almost afraid to know the answer.

“For the release. The adrenaline. The feeling of power. I can’t escape it. Have you ever killed?”

“N—no.”

Din scoffed incredulously. “Of course you haven’t.”

“What do you do after you kill?” you inquired, hoping to change the subject.

“Corellia has the best brothels… cheap too. I sought them out and look for a quick fuck.”

“Out of wedlock?” you pondered with a queasy frown.

Din laughed. “You’re asking if I’m married?”

He was right, it was a foolish question. 

“Do you enjoy your time at the brothel? Or do you regret it soon after?” you wondered.

Another laugh— and Maker, he made you feel terrible. Were you really that bad at this? 

“Yes, I enjoy myself. The girls there are pretty little things. Needy. Desperate. But— it’s not special, you know? It’s not… not exactly what I crave.”

“What do you crave?”

“To touch someone untouched. Pure. Holy…” the Mandalorian trailed off. “So, when I fuck the girls at the brothel, I tend to think of the Grand Bishop’s daughter.” He revealed, feeling his cock harden in the confines of his pants at the memory. You swallowed, a wave of heat immediately washing over you. You. He was thinking about you.

This was ridiculous. Was he messing with you? He had to have been messing with you. Sure, he’d seen you around before but neither of you had even held a conversation, prior to today. And he’d been thinking about you while he was sleeping with other women? You had to suck it up and remain professional, no matter how much it irked you. He was here to confess and you couldn’t let this become personal.

But it was so hard. Maker, why was it this hard? Was it because you’d thought about him too? Because you’d imagined his cock in place of your fingers, at night when everyone else is sleeping? You yearned to know more. You ached to know the details. Surely that was fair. He was speaking about you, after all.

You could already feel your panties begin to dampen with arousal. How could one man have such an effect on you? In your place of worship too. You wanted to punch him, kick him, take out all your anger on him. But most importantly, you wanted him. His touch. His hands on your body and his cock splitting you open. That’s what you wanted the most.

“What did— what did you think of?” You swallowed, anticipating the details. You were glad he couldn’t see how flustered and hot you were right now. It certainly wasn’t in the code for you to ask about details such as this but… surely one question would do no harm.

You could just about hear Din chuckle, from the other side of the wall, and it made your slick wet cunt clench around absolutely nothing. He was driving you feral. “I’d think about her ruby red lips and how they’d look wrapped around my cock. I’d imagine fucking her mouth, making her gag— wanting her to cry. I’d want to see the tears stream down her cheeks as I give her my all. And finally, I’d imagine her letting me cum down her throat.”

There was something about him talking about you, to you, in third person. Like you weren’t supposed to be there, listening. Like this information was not made for your ears.

Your panties were soaked at the thought. You couldn’t believe it. All this time, all these sessions of confession with your father, and it had only stirred him on more. He’d been going to confess, only to see you. 

“Tell me, princess. How does that make you feel?”

Shit. He could not be serious right now. You placed your palm flat against the wall and took a deep breath. “Mando, you’re here to confess. Not me.”

You tried to shut out his words, but your body ached for him. Ached to feel him… touch him. You wanted him just as much as he wanted you — but it would be wrong. It would be so wrong.

Another chuckle. You hated when he did that. As if all of this was some kind of joke to him. Did he even know what he was doing to you? It was like torture. 

“See, the Grand Bishop’s daughter… oh wow. She’s a vision. She dotes crimson red lips and she walks around as if she owns the place, her stiletto heels clicking against the floor. She’s bad, like the devil in disguise, and yet, I know her. She’s young and untouched. Her father will probably marry her off to some other minister in the outer-rim, ship her away for good. And she’ll be forced to deal with very mediocre sex for the rest of her life. Which is a shame, really, because she deserves better. You deserve better.”

“You have no idea who I am.” you spat out, feeling your cheeks burn with rage. How dare he make these assumptions about you and your family. This crude, older man with a tongue that could kill. How dare he. 

You wanted to be mad at him so bad. He couldn’t possibly get away with this. But he was going to. Because what exactly could you do? 

“She’ll never know how it feels to be stretched open by a real cock,” Din gritted out, dismissing your comment completely. “F—fuck.”

Din was palming himself through his pants, desperate for some kind of release. His sleuth, dirty words set a fire blazing in your core. You wanted it too. You wanted it so bad. You contemplated all the things you could do, all the actions and their consequences. You and the Mandalorian, both in the confession box. You couldn’t even see one another… the prolonged silence on your end prompted Din to get up and leave when he heard your honey velvet voice speak once more.

You had to say something.

“When the lights are out and everyone is asleep, I think about you,” you confessed, hating the way the croaky admission left your lips. You’d done it now. Din’s head snapped upwards to face the wall and oh how he wished he could see you right now. You were squirming around in your chair and when you heard the zipper of his pants become undone, you knew it was your queue to continue. “I touch myself. It’s hard to keep quiet… thinking about you. I imagine you touching me… running your gloved hands all over my body,” you bring your hand to your breast and give it a little squeeze. “I figure.. maybe you don’t take the gloves off. You praise me when you feel how wet I am, and I tell you that it’s all for you. I’m all yours. To use however you like. I want you to ruin me. Spoil me for any other man. Fuck me until I cant walk. Bite me, give me marks I have to hide during tomorrow’s mass.”

Din made a fist around his cock and began to pump as he listened to the dirty words that left your holy lips. His grunts and groans echoed throughout the box and went straight to your core. Oh how you wished you could see him right now. Peeling up the hem of your robe, you slid your fingers under the waistband of your panties and began to rub tight circles into your clit. 

“You’re a virgin?” he asked, although it came out more so like a statement. Like he already knew the answer. 

“Ye-yeah,” you whimpered, quickening your pace.

He was achingly stiff now, beads of milky white precum already dripping down his shaft.

“You want this?” He quizzed. “You want my cock right now? Think you deserve it?”

And in that moment, you made your decision.

Maybe this life that your father had given you, just wasn’t for you.

“Y-yes, oh God yes. I deserve it.”

A low and dark chuckle left Din’s lips. “You’ve been a child of God your whole life. But you want this, yes? You’ve been waiting for this?”

He was right. You had been waiting for this. 

“P-please Din, please. Wreck me. Ruin me.”

“In the chapel too?” he laughed, rising to his feet. “You really are desperate. C’mon then.”

In a fluster, you practically fell out of your side of the confession box.

The Mandalorian stalked towards you with his cock in his hand, jerking himself off as he got nearer and nearer. His eyes didn’t leave you once and although you couldn’t see his face, you could only imagine the predatory glint in his eye. Maker he was huge, and thick, and you wondered how you’d ever be able to take him.

You weren’t used to this— Maker, you’d never done anything like this before. There was no way your fingers would ever be able to compare to the size of the Mandalorian. 

“Are you sure you want this?” he grunted, releasing his cock and grabbing your throat, giving it an experimental squeeze. You nodded your head desperately and subconsciously licked your lower lip. “I must know. If I start, I won’t be able to stop. Do you want me to claim you?”

Just like Hades claimed Persephone? You shut the absent thought out of your mind and agreed to his proposition.

“I do.”

If it was so wrong, why did it feel so right? You had dreamt of this moment. How could you ever deny him? 

He pinned you against the altar and tapped at your thigh, gesturing for you to open your legs up. His eyes dropped straight to your dripping core and he had to hold back a guttural moan.

Din wasted no time and rubbed his cock along your slick wet folds. For a second you were afraid he’d knock over the many burning candles that you had lit earlier in the evening, before your little confession session had begun. But, to no surprise of your own, the Mandalorian had extremely good coordination. 

“Oh f-fuck, such a pretty little thing. So warm, bet— bet you feel so fucking good.” Din mumbled utterances of praise, his grip tightening around your wrists as he propped you up. 

Every now and again the bulbous tip of his cock rubbed over your clit and the sensation practically sent you into orbit. You were touch starved, having never experienced intimacy like this with anyone before. “Do you want me to fuck you now, huh? Want me to fuck that pretty little cunt of yours?”

You whimpered a small ‘yes’ and Din chuckled darkly, tapping his cock against your cunt before sliding into you with one swift movement.

You let out a squeal, your fingernails digging into the muscles of his back as he seated deep inside you. Underneath his helmet, his perfect lips were parted into an ‘O’ shape as your fluttering walls clenched around him and made him feel like he was home.

“Fuck— so tight, so fucking tight. Just like I’d imagined.” He murmured, feeling like he was already seeing stars. 

Din thrust upwards into you, the curve of his cock stretching you open and pulsating inside of you. His movements were rough and bruising, as his fingers dug into the soft flesh at your hips as he held onto you for support. Just like you’d requested, he was completely and utterly using you. 

“How’s that?” his gasp rolled into an achingly long groan as his balls slapped against your cunt, creating the most obscene wet sounds.

It was uncomfortable at first. He wasn’t soft or gentle by any means, but you’d anticipated that. After just a few thrusts, the intrusive pain turned into bolts of pleasure that coursed through your veins. It clouded your vision like white noise— like what the red berry wine you’d drink during Sunday mass would do to your mind. Din grabbed at the thin cloth that covered your chest, and ripped it off, exposing your bare breasts to him. A sheen of glistening sweat glazed your skin like the most beautiful honey dew. The Mandalorian was tall and broad, and as he towered over you, he coated you in his dark shadow.

His large hands palmed at your breasts and you moaned at the sudden, unexpected contact. He continued thrusting, fucking you mercilessly. With every movement, he hit that sweet spot inside of you, and you knew he’d been doing this for a long time. He was definitely experienced.

He dropped his hand for your chest and lowered it to your clit, expertly moving his two fingers across your bundle of nerves. That feeling, combined with his thick cock, was enough to send you over the edge. 

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” you chanted his name like it was a prayer— and he felt powerful.

The Mandalorian grinned wolfishly under his helmet as he increased his speed. You were seeing stars and it felt like your whole body was trapped under a spell. His spell.

“I ca- oh I can’t, I’m close, I’m close,” you cried as he continued to rock his hips into yours.

You hugged his body into yours, wishing the pleasure would never end. With every twitch of his cock he watched you intently. He watched the way your body reacted to him, revelling in the way your face screwed up in heated pleasure. Din adored the way your brow knitted together and your mouth parted as the most angelic noises omitted from your plush lips. 

“Have you ever felt so alive than you do right now, with me inside of you?” Din queried with a grunt.

“No,” you answered, shaking your head profusely. “Please don’t stop.”

Your orgasm ripped through you like a tornado and without warning, The Mandalorian split his seed deep inside of you, his salty cum roping your perfect walls as they gripped down around his cock. Now he had marked you for life.

Din returned to confession a week later when your father had returned from the Festival of Lights. There was no reason for you to see The Mandalorian anymore. 

“Forgive me, Grand Bishop, for I have sinned yet again.” Din announced, his voice clear as daylight after discarding his beskar helmet. He ran a gloved hand over his face.

“Another kill?” your father inquired, but from the other side of the wall, Din could only smirk.

“I’ve met a woman. A holy woman. And she has consumed my every thought. When I think about her I feel more inclined to sin, over and over again.” 

It was true. Your ruby red lips, high heels, thin robes… Din had become completely enraptured with you. 

Your father spent a moment contemplating the Mandalorian’s words, finding that he was speaking a lot differently than ever before. Not as ruthless or dangerous— but almost genuine.

“Would you give your body to this holy woman, if she requested you do so?” The Grand Bishop asked, not realising he was speaking about you, his own daughter.

“I already have,” Din confessed, subconsciously licking a stripe over his lower lip, at the memory of your taste. “And I would do it again.”

-—-—-—♡—-—-—-

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[loki--fics]

Hey !!! I love your writing !!! Could I possibly request a super fluffy like wedding day where both you and Loki are nervous but it all goes away when you see each other and a wee lil bit of smut at the end? Totally cool if not !!! ✨💜

sorry this took so long, this was by far my longest oneshot! i wanted to fit in as much detail as possible, though i was tempted to turn this into a series as well haha. thank you for the request though, and feel free to ask for more :)) i hope you enjoy!

~

Loki's Bride

Pairing: Loki x Fem!Reader

Word Count: 4,668

Content Warnings: fluff, lots of smut at the end

~

It was late afternoon, the warm sun guarding against the chill of the autumn breeze. You sat in front of the window, your eyes closed as a handmaiden worked on your makeup, another one standing behind you working on your hair. They had been doing this for what felt like ages, but you didn't mind; it took your mind off of how nervous you were. But then, you had reason to be nervous - today was your wedding day.

The crisp breeze wafted in from the open window, caressing your skin like a whisper, but you could barely feel it over the cold pricks of anxiety. You and Frigga had been planning this day for months now, and throughout the months you had been excited, but now that the day was here, you were nervous.

"It is time for the dress, Lady Y/N," Said the handmaiden who did your hair. You recalled her stating that her name was Ingrid, and the other maiden was named Eira.

Nodding, you stood and walked with Ingrid to the wardrobe, from which she grabbed a large garment bag.

"Her Majesty had this dress made for you," Eira said happily as Ingrid unzipped the bag. You were met by the most beautiful dress you had ever seen, a creamy off-white number with off the shoulder sleeves and intricate gold lacing, the skirt wide and puffy with a short train. Its beauty was almost unreal.

"It's gorgeous," You said, your fingers brushing the fabric.

Eira slipped your robe off of your shoulders, placing it on the bed as Ingrid helped you carefully step into the dress. As she zipped up the back, it hugged your waist and bosom snugly, but not uncomfortably tight. It was a perfect fit, as were the shoes and the waist belt for the dagger ceremony.

"This is amazing," You breathed, smoothing out the dress. It felt as though you had been transported into a faerie tale, with the dress, the handmaidens, the stunning view you had from your window, and the fact that you were marrying a prince.. You were afraid it was too good to be true.

A knock sounded at the door, and Eria walked over to answer it. "Your Majesty!" She said, bowing. "I was wondering when you would arrive, we've just finished getting Y/N into her dress."

Your eyes met Frigga's as she walked into the room, ever the epitome of grace. "Dearest Y/N, you look beautiful!" She said happily, her eyes trailing over you.

"Thank you," You replied, bowing slightly. "The dress.. I'm not sure how I could ever thank you for it, it's perfect."

Frigga waved you off. "I assure you no thanks are needed." It was then that you noticed the square, velvet box in her hands, and she followed your eyes downward. "Oh, yes. This is for you as well, dear." She opened it, and resting inside was a beautiful gold circlet with emeralds and diamonds inlaid, delicately woven to resemble leaves.

"Oh, Frigga, you shouldn't have," You said, feeling tears well up in your eyes. "I couldn't possibly accept this!"

"You can, and you will," She said gently, removing the circlet from the box. Gently clasping it at the back of your head, she turned you toward the mirror. "Go look."

Your eyes widened in shock as you looked at yourself in the mirror. Never in your life had you looked so beautiful, you were sure of it; your skin had a dewey glow, your hair was left down and curled simply, with intricate braids on either side of your head connecting in the back, the circlet pulling the whole look together. You truly looked like royalty.

The thought still nagged, however, that this was all too good to be true. Turning away from the mirror with a sigh, you took a seat in front of the window once more.

"Is there something troubling you?" Frigga asked, shooing the handmaidens out of the room and taking a seat on the wooden bench next to you, her eyes alight with worry.

"This seems too good to be true," You admitted. "What if Loki realises that he's making a mistake, or he realises he doesn't love me anymore? I'm only a mortal, and he's going to live on far longer after I've gone from this world."

Placing her hand over yours, she spoke. "I know my son, Y/N, and I can see from the way he looks at you how deeply he loves you. Please trust that all will be well."

"He's going to have to watch me grow old and sick and die, while he stays perfect," You voiced. You had realised this quite some time ago, but hadn't let yourself truly come to terms with it until now, and you felt yourself begin to panic. "I'm going to die centuries before him, and then he'll remarry, and-"

"Y/N!" Frigga said, snapping you out of your ramblings. "Do not think of such things. Focus your mind on the love you hold for him, and the love he holds for you; a love as true and pure as yours does not happen often, believe that Loki will not allow anything to happen to you."

"Your Majesty," Ingrid spoke from the doorway. "It's time."

As the two of you stood, Frigga wrapped her arms around you in a warm embrace. "Focus on your love for him," She repeated in your ear. "All will be well, I promise."

~time skip~

All too soon, you stood facing the doors that led out into the garden, where the wedding was taking place. Thor was at your side, your arm looped through his as the two of you waited for the music to start, your cue to walk down the aisle.

"What if I forget my vows?" You asked frantically. "What am I supposed to do then?"

Thor chuckled, patting your hand. "Lady Y/N, you have been studying your vows for weeks, I have good faith that you will not forget them. However, if you do, simply speak from your heart."

You heard the low sound of the music begin, and that meant there was only a moment before the doors would open and you would face the people of Asgard and the Allfather, and you felt your heart race. "Please don't let me fall," You whispered.

"Never," Thor whispered back, squeezing your hand. Taking a deep breath, you squared your shoulders as the doors opened.

It took only a moment for your eyes to adjust to the light, and almost immediately you spotted Loki. As you and Thor began walking slowly, you watched Loki's eyes widen as he looked at you, his lips parting slightly as a blush rose to his cheeks. You saw nothing but love in his eyes, and you smiled as your own eyes took him in, looking handsome as ever in the Asgardian leather suit he so prided himself on.

Looking down, you saw that the white carpet that stretched from the doors to the altar was sprinkled with beautiful red bougainvillea flowers, which you'd requested as soon as you'd discovered that they were Loki's favourite. He noticed this as well, looking down at the flowers and giving you a small smile.

There were hundreds of people in attendance, most of them being residents of Asgard, many of whom you had yet to meet, all standing with their eyes on you. You saw many happy smiles, but also caught a few jealous stares from some of the women, and flushed. Continuing your slow steps, you focused your gaze back on the handsome groom waiting for you.

As you neared the altar, you spotted your team - your family, standing in the front rows greeting you with wide smiles. When you had first told them about your relationship with Loki, a year and a half after he'd returned to New York to gain pardon from the people of Earth, and six months after your relationship had begun, they were understandably shocked. But through your time spent with him, he had shown you a softer, gentler side to him, one that they had not yet seen. An even bigger shock came when Loki had proposed to you in front of everyone at the New Year's Eve party that Tony had thrown, but now, they expressed nothing but happiness for the two of you.

You felt your heart swell as you looked at them, even more so as you looked back at Loki, and it took everything in you not to pick up your dress, run to your groom, and throw yourself into his arms. This was everything you had dreamt of and more since he proposed to you eight months ago, and you wanted to laugh at yourself for being so nervous. How could you have thought, even for a second, that he would just stop loving you?

Thor pulled his arm out of yours, placing his hand on your shoulder and smiling as he took his place with the rest of the team in the front row. You picked up your dress and walked up the steps of the beautiful stone gazebo, decorated with bright, beautiful flowers and leaves, taking your place across from him.

"You are stunning, my love," Loki said quietly, his blue eyes gazing into your e/c ones as he took your hands.

"As are you," You replied, squeezing his hands. "I cannot wait to spend the rest of my life with you."

"Nor can I."

The music quieted as Odin stepped in front of the two of you and raised his hands, cueing everyone to take their seats.

"Good evening, people of Asgard and guests." Lowering his hands, he continued. "Today, we have taken ourselves out of our usual routines of daily living to witness the union between Loki of Asgard, and Y/N of Midguard." He gestured to each of you respectively. "As Loki and Y/N prepared for the ceremony, they took time to reflect upon what it is they love in the other, and they will now state these vows, starting with the groom."

Loki smiled at you lovingly. "I, Loki of Asgard, by the life and seidr that flows through my blood and the love that resides for you within my heart, take you by my hand, my heart, and my spirit, to be my chosen one. There is not a moment where you do not take my breath away, and I will never seek to change you in any way. I will trust and respect you as your own person and realise that your needs are no more important than my own.

"I hereby promise to love you wholly and completely, without restraint, in sickness and in health, in plenty and in poverty, in this life and beyond, where we shall meet, remember, and love again. I will grow along with you and I am willing to face change with you. I will always respect you, your beliefs, your people and your ways as I respect myself, as I am your partner and we shall be equal in all things.

"I cannot begin to describe how happy I am to have won the joy of such a consort, and I will forever delight in the love of you. I will cherish each tear to fall from your eyes, both in sadness and in joy, and I will do my best to ensure you are safe and secure, and to honour the love you have for me. To find someone as special as you, out of all in the Nine Realms, is something I never imagined possible. Today, Y/N, I give myself to you and vow to love you eternally."

You couldn't stop the tears that welled up in your eyes as he finished, looking at you with such love and adoration you had to restrain yourself from kissing him then.

"And now, the bride will state her vows," Odin said.

Taking a deep breath, you squeezed Loki's hands. "I, Y/N of Midguard, by the life that flows through my blood and the love that resides for you in my heart, take you by my hand, my heart, and my spirit, to be my chosen one. I promise to love you when you are confident in yourself, as well as when you cannot bear your own reflection. I will love you when all is perfect, and when it seems all is falling apart. I promise to never judge you, nor your feelings, and to listen to you always, even when it's hard.

"From the moment our paths crossed you have surprised me, distracted me, captivated me, and challenged me in a way that no one ever has. I have fallen in love with you countless times, again and again, without reservation, and I still cannot believe that I am allowed the honour of being your bride.

"Whilst I cannot promise that dark clouds will never hover over our lives, or that the future will bring us many rainbows, I can promise that regardless of what lies ahead I will be by your side through all of it. You have my everlasting devotion, my loyalty, my respect, and my unconditional love.

"You are what makes my life a joy to live, and I vow to cherish every moment that I get to spend in your company. I would, on no uncertain terms, do anything for you. I will always choose you, in this life and every one beyond, in any world, and in any version of reality, I will find and choose you. Today, Loki, I give myself to you and vow to love you eternally."

"Now," The Allfather said after a beat of silence, "The couple will now exchange their handmade daggers."

The two of you released each other's hands, and you turned behind you to receive the dagger that you had made for Loki from Frigga. At the same time, Loki had turned to Odin for the dagger he made for you. Turning back to each other, you each held up your daggers, then Loki leaned toward you and placed the dagger into your waist belt, and once he was finished you repeated his actions, placing your dagger into his waist belt.

"Present your rings," Odin said, and both of you complied.

"I give you this ring as a symbol of my love everlasting," Loki said as he slid the ring onto your finger.

"I give you this ring as a symbol of my love everlasting," You repeated, sliding the ring onto his finger.

Odin spoke once more. "Loki of Asgard, and Y/N of Midguard, today you celebrate one of life's greatest moments and give recognition to the worth and beauty of love. As you have stated your vows with your lips, so you shall seal them with your lips."

Throwing your arms around your now husband, you pressed your lips to his with such force it was as though you had been starved of his kiss for years. The thundering applause and shrill cheers seemed to fade away as you kissed Loki, your fingers tangling in his jet black hair as his hands wrapped around your waist and lifted you, spinning you in a circle.

Setting you back down, Loki broke the kiss, leaning his head against yours and looking at you longingly. "I love you so very much, Y/N," He whispered with a smile.

"I love you, too, Loki," You whispered back, feeling happier than you had ever thought possible.

~time skip~

After you had changed out of your wedding dress into your reception dress, you and Loki enjoyed the festivities and feast for a while, dancing in merriment with everyone until Loki had pulled you aside.

"I need to speak with you," He said lowly, leading you over to the balcony. The two of you stepped out into the crisp night air, and Loki shut the doors, presenting you with a black box.

"What is this?" You asked, confused.

"I have one last proposal to make," He said, getting down on one knee. "If you truly wish to spend forever with me," Opening the box, a single apple that appeared to be made of gold rested inside, "All you need do is eat this apple."

Your throat felt tight as you looked at the apple. "Loki…"

"This is an Apple of Idun, it is what originally granted the Gods and Goddesses immortality, and if you wish, it will grant it for you as well," He explained.

Your eyes welled up with tears as you touched the apple. It was cool, and felt like a normal apple. Frigga's words from earlier when you voiced your fear of dying before Loki poured into your mind and you gasped. "Frigga-?"

"It was her idea," He admitted. "She convinced Idun to spare an apple in the name of love. Do you accept?"

You sank to your knees, putting yourself at the same level as Loki. "Forever?" You asked, searching his eyes.

"Forever," Loki replied sincerely.

Slowly grasping the apple, you considered the weight of what you were about to do. Were you truly ready to give up mortal life, to live for thousands of years like the people of Asgard?

Looking into Loki's blue eyes, full of love and hope, you knew the only answer was yes. For him, you would do anything.

Bringing the apple to your lips, you sunk your teeth into the soft flesh, biting a chunk out and chewing it slowly. It was sweeter than any apple you'd ever eaten on Earth, perfectly ripe with juices trickling down your chin. Taking another bite, you almost moaned at how delicious it was, reveling in the taste. It seemed the apple had no core, no seeds, so it was unable to be replanted, and you were able to eat the entire thing.

You felt something akin to the feeling of your limbs falling asleep, the tingling sensation spreading over the whole of your body. Your vision blurred, and you would have fallen back if Loki had not caught you and laid you in his lap. A strange, out of body feeling overtook you, as though you were hovering over the two of you, the body laying in Loki's lap no longer yours. It was as if the universe had poured a bit of its everlasting essence into your veins, feeling like the purest magic had filled your body. Then, as soon as it started, it was over.

Vision cleared, you looked up at your husband, seeing him much more clearly than you had before. Every strand of hair caught your attention, every wrinkle in his suit, every line in his hands.

"You are breathtaking," You gasped, your eyes wide in awe. "What just happened?"

Loki smiled softly. "You became immortal."

Sitting up, you threw your arms around Loki, and he grunted, your new strength taking him by surprise. "I cannot wait to spend forever with you," You whispered. "I love you so much."

"Nor can I, my love," He whispered back.

~ time skip ~

The two of you had rejoined the festivities, dancing and grazing on the plethora of food, conversing with the people of Asgard and your team, but now it was time for your honeymoon to officially begin.

Grasping your hand, Loki put his lips to your ear. "I do believe it is time we consummate our marriage, my love," He said lowly.

You felt heat blossom in your core, and blushed. Bidding goodnight to your team, you followed Loki out of the room, followed by a chorus of cheers and wolf-whistles. Tonight was the first night you were to be intimate with Loki in such a manner - he had been being watched by Heimdall and the Allfather most of the time the two of you had been dating, so you had only been able to steal kisses here and there. Not the most romantic, but it was better than nothing.

Now, however, as Loki pulled you to his chambers, you felt almost as nervous, if not more so, than you had before the ceremony. No one was watching you now, the two of you were utterly alone.

Loki stopped outside the door to his chambers, turning to you. For a moment you were confused, but then he scooped you up, bridal style, and carried you over the threshold. The door closed with a solid thud behind you as he walked you to his bed, setting you down gently. After the ceremony you had changed into a shorter dress, the hem reaching your mid-thigh, with a white skirt and lace top that wrapped around your neck. Now, Loki eyed it hungrily, wanting it off.

Gently holding the back of your head in his hand, Loki kissed you, laying you down slowly as he hovered above you. His lips claimed yours completely, his tongue swiping along your lower lip. You gasped lightly, and he took the opportunity to slide his tongue into your mouth. Feeling a familiar tingling sensation, you realised Loki had used his magic to remove the clothing from both of you, leaving you in undergarments, and you blushed, instinctively moving your arms to cover yourself.

Pulling back, Loki met your eyes. "Hear this now. You need never cover yourself in front of me. You are a treasure to behold, my love, and in my eyes, you are nothing short of perfection." His hands gently pried yours away from your body, his eyes relishing the sight. "There is not a single soul in the Nine Realms that I would rather be with right now, and not a single thing in the Nine Realms that could take me away from you. I love you, not only for your body but for your soul, your mind, your heart and your spirit."

He said every word with such sincerity, his eyes showing nothing but love for you, that you could think of only one thing to say.

"Kiss me."

He did, with an intensity that rivaled every other kiss he'd ever given you, including your wedding kiss. It was so filled with passion that you were certain no being in the Nine Realms and beyond had shared such a kiss before, it felt as though the universe itself was bowing from the vehemence of the kiss.

Every inch of your skin that Loki caressed seemed to be set alight, and you were certain that, had you not been holding him, you would have floated away to Valhalla. You felt his hardened member brush the thin lace veil that covered your core, and were unable to quiet the moan that fell from your lips as your hips bucked, desperate for more.

Loki's lips left yours, venturing down your jaw, your neck, your collar, kissing every inch of exposed skin. You were hot and cold all at once, your body nearly vibrating from the force of your arousal as his lips travelled lower, between your breasts, down your stomach, to your thighs. He peppered delicate kisses along the inside of your thighs, looking up at you as his fingers hooked in the waistband of your panties.

"Is this okay?" He asked, pausing.

"Oh Gods yes, Loki," You breathed, your chest heaving with the force of your breaths as you met his eyes.

Slowly, deliberately, he pulled the thin lace fabric down your hips, tossing them to the side as he took in the sight of your glistening core before him. He pressed two long, dexterous digits against your opening, sliding them inside of you and pumping at an agonisingly slow pace. His head dipped down, lips just barely brushing your sensitive nub, inhaling your sweet, musky odour before pressing a kiss to your core.

"Please, Loki, stop teasing me," You whined, gripping the sheets.

He smirked. "As you wish." With force, he launched an assault with his lips, his tongue expertly swirling around your nub whilst his fingers curled perfectly against your g-spot. Your eyes rolled back in your head as you moaned loudly, fingers tangling in his soft raven locks.

Loki's free hand gripped your thigh so tightly as he devoured you, you were sure it would bruise. He moaned, sending delicious vibrations through your core and your orgasm ripping through you with a force you had never before felt, your body set aflame as his name fell repeatedly like a prayer from your lips.

Pulling his head back, your husband looked at you with dark, lust filled eyes as he brought his fingers, covered with your arousal, to his lips. Slowly, he put them in his mouth, sucking off every bit of your juices before pulling them out and climbing on top of you, pressing a kiss to your lips and allowing you to taste yourself.

"You are sweeter than the finest søt vin," Loki said lowly.

Butterflies were no match for the hurricane that erupted in your stomach. "I want you," You begged softly. "All of you. I'm yours."

With a flick of his wrist, the rest of the clothing was removed from both of you. Your eyes moved down, almost of their own accord, taking in the size of his member. You were no virgin, and you were sure Loki wasn't, either but you had never been with someone of such size and girth, and it would be dishonest to say you weren't intimidated.

"I'll be gentle, love," He said softly, his hand caressing your cheek.

"I trust you," You replied, leaning into his touch.

Kissing you softly, you felt the God position his manhood at your entrance, sinking himself into you slowly. He groaned at your tightness, his head falling into the crook of your neck as he waited for your hole to adjust to his large size. The sensation of being so wholly filled by him was a bit painful, your walls stretching to their limit as they tried to accommodate him, and after a moment you bucked your hips.

Pumping into you slowly, the pain morphed into pleasure as your legs wrapped around his waist, allowing him to sink deeper into you. He quickened the motions of his hips, the head of his manhood perfectly hitting your g-spot as he thrust into you. Both of you were moaning, your lips roaming each other, hands groping anywhere they could reach as Loki plunged into your opening again and again.

"Please, harder," You moaned, gripping his shoulders.

All too happy to oblige your request, Loki brought his hips to meet yours with such force that you saw stars. Moaning loudly, your nails dug into his skin as he thrust into you harder, his movements growing faster as you both neared your climax.

Wrapping his arms around you, Loki pulled you upright so that you were sitting on his lap, continuing to pound into you as he brought your nipple into his mouth, swirling his tongue around it before nibbling lightly. Delirious with pleasure, you gripped his hair and pulled, earning a loud moan as his nails raked down your back. He smashed his lips to yours, and you bit his lip so hard it drew blood as your orgasm hit you with even more force than the first, your primal screams of pleasure filling the room as he buried himself to the hilt inside of you, releasing his seed as he shouted obscenities.

After a final few pumps, he pulled out of you, the two of you falling back onto the mattress, limbs entangled and your head on his chest.

"I will never grow tired of that," You giggled, fingers drawing lazy swirls on his pale skin. "This has been the best day of my life."

Loki smiled. "It was mine as well." The two of you were covered in a sheen of sweat, and with a lazy wave of his hand, the window opened and a cool breeze wafted over the two of you.

"I love you," You said sleepily.

"I love you," He replied.

"Forever?"

"Forever."

[choibinn3]

GET IT TOGETHER, JUNGWON!!

[ nine. hehe ]

series masterlist

⋆·˚ ༘ * in which jungwon had meant for that love letter to go to yeri, and not you—her bff. for some reason though, he finds that with each moment he spends together with you he's closer and closer to forgetting all about that damn letter.

no song for this chapter!

WRITTEN PORTION. 2.1k

also partially unedited, sorry if some things don't make sense or are confusing T_T

—

The bell rang.

You made eye contact with Jungwon across the room, and yet his brown pools nervously flitted towards Yeri's direction instead. They were President and Vice President though, so you didn't question much. She was packing up her bag, and had sent you a small smile.

"I'll see you next class, ok?" she said, "Make sure you eat a full meal before work."

You grinned at her. "Got it! I hope you have a good time with whatever you said you were doing, sorry I couldn't eat with you today."

Being the only two people in your friend group with the same lunch period, you usually sat with her for it. Talking about classes, chatting mindlessly, idly looking around the cafeteria for people you knew was fun only when it was with her.

"It's fine," she replied, waving off your apology and placing her notebooks away. "It's your first day with a boyfriend, I want you to be happy."

You appreciated her genuine gladness for your own happiness so much, you could barely hold it in. You wrapped your arms around her, sending her stumbling a bit with your weight. "Woah, YN!"

Having someone so positive, so supportive, and so authentic as Yeri around you for so long had definitely brightened your outlook on life. Such a friend was a one in a lifetime chance, and yet you lucked out. You just hoped she thought the same of you too.

"Thank you! I love you so much!" you exclaimed into her shoulder.

She released a giggle, patting your back with one hand as if to ease you down. "It's the bare minimum of friendship, YN. I just hope that Jungwon doesn't hurt you."

The tone in which she said it felt more serious than it usually was, which was a bit odd. You understood her concern though, of course your friend wouldn't want you to be hurt! And yet, everyone and their mother knew that flower boy Yang Jungwon would be the least likely person to do such a thing.

You loosened your arms a bit, tilting your head at her confusedly. "Why would Jungwon hurt me..? You know he's too nice for that!"

You knew that Jungwon and Yeri had definitely gotten closer to each other since the Student Council elections, but your faith in Yeri had outshined any insecurities or suspicions that could've ever formed. She had definitely talked frequently to him, especially with all those times they've had to stay after school for paperwork, so you would've thought that she'd know Jungwon's personality by now.

She took ahold of your arms, smiling at you before wrapping her own limbs around your form. Gahh, hugs from Yeri! You giggled into her shoulder again, from where your face had buried itself into. "I know, I know. I'm just being worried, I think."

You nodded. "I get it, thank you."

Yeri and the rest had always been like this. Even though Niki would act disgusted towards your displays of affection, he loved it when you made time for him. Heeseung too, actually. Yeri and Heeseung were both equally protective of Niki and you, even though Yeri was your age.

Since the day you had became friends she was the one looking out for you. Not to say you were irresponsible, but because she was just naturally a protective person. It was a quality you and many others admired about her—her loyalty to her friends.

"Remember that guy that was obsessed with you? Back in middle school?" she muttered.

You hit her arm playfully, and she let you go. "He wasn't obssessed!" you insisted, "I thought the snacks were cute!"

Yeri laughed. "Ok, whatever you say, but he was always buying you stuff. Can't believe you turned him down, though."

Your eyes glanced towards Jungwon, who was waiting by the door with his hands in his pant pockets. The large mass of students filtering out of the opening had covered his figure at times, blocking your view when they did, and yet you knew you could point him out in any large crowd. He stood out in a way that had you nervous all over again.

"Yeah well," you started, looking away and instead down towards your shoes bashfully, "I told him I liked someone else, and now we're just buddies."

You slung your bag over your shoulder as Yeri decided to nudge it. "Wonder who that could've been," she teased, and you let out a indignant whine.

"You don't have to wonder!"

She pinched your cheek, and you pretended to attempt to bite at her finger playfully. As the both of you exited the doorway, you sent a smile towards Jungwon.

The brief eye contact made him look away again, for whatever reason, you didn't know. "I'll see you in the cafeteria, right?" you asked, a bit hopefully. Yeri stopped beside you.

He fidgeted a bit, nodding his head. "Yeah, I'll find you there."

You grinned at him, and went onto your tippy toes. Jungwon's large brown eyes widened, and he almost leaned back when you planted another chaste (burning) kiss onto his cheek. Again?! You're kidding!

Neither of you knew how relationships worked, but were you sure a kiss on the cheek could be considered the first step? He had to hold his breath, otherwise he would've made a noise.

"Ah—" Like the previous time, you moved away too quickly for him to have comprehended the situation fully—or to say anything.

Your bag slightly jostled as you promptly walked down the hallway. The figure of your back going further and further down, becoming smaller and smaller as he stood there once again. He held onto his cheek. The ghost of your lips were still there, faintly, but the touch was evidently still imprinted into his mind. He wasn't sure he'd ever be able to get used to that.

As you left, Yeri looked over towards him. Her smile was devoid, which was the first odd thing, and suddenly she grabbed his wrist—the one still tracing your kiss.

Jungwon looked after at her shocked, but she provided no explanation as she dragged him along with long, big strides. "What are you doing?"

"I said it'd be quick, you have to get to YN, right? Lunch with them?" She turned her head to the side, awaiting an answer.

"They told you?" he asked, but of course they told her. You were best friends. "I mean yeah, nevermind. I do."

He was going to tell you about the misplacement of the letter, too.

With how fast Yeri was rushing them both, they made it to the Student Council room much quicker than they would've if they had walked casually as they had done before. The windows of the Council room were open, the long curtains blowing with the passing wind.

The room was fairly old, not yet upgraded as the other classroom in the Hybe building were. They still had gray, cloth curtains connected to their windows, and Jungwon had found the curtains annoying when they decided to brush against his face while he was working.

Still, he found the sun and its brightness too pretty to try and close the windows. As he looked at them, Yeri had made a point to shut the door.

Jungwon glanced over in time to see her lock it, too. If he wasn't anxious before, he was now. "What did you want to talk about?" he inquired, placing his bag down.

No answer. He looked up, and blinked at her as she said nothing, just staring at him with her head tilted.

She took a step forward (he took one back, he had to), and another (his sneakers squeaked against the polished floor), and another, and another (Jungwon stumbled a bit, feet confused with his backwards direction), and more until—

Jungwon's back collided roughly with the wooden surface behind him, making an aching pain build upon the lower part of his body. Before he could even think about the spreading heat, Yeri had already slammed her hands on either side of the desk, shocking him into straightening back up.

She was close.

Not closer than you were, but close enough to where he was panicked on where to look. They had shared such a proximity before. Only once, but it was still near. He had leaned over to take a look at some paperwork on her desk, and her face was inches away.

He didn't notice her lashes though, nor her bright eyes like he did with you.

"I called you here today to speak to you," she began. Her voice was steady, calm, confident. Whatever she was planning to say, she had either rehearsed it or was steeled in her resolve.

"A-About what?" A stutter. Not good. He hadn't meant to stutter, so he just gulped down his next nervous words.

"About YN."

All of a sudden, Yeri had surged forward. Her stands of hair had flown with her, falling off her shoulders and hanging over Jungwon. Even though he was taller than her, he had to lean back to not come in contact with any part of her skin.

He held his breath again, like he did with you, but because he was terrified he'd accidentally breathe on her face.

Her eyes had narrowed. Yeri's eyes never narrowed. They had always been slightly curved from a smile, or fondly closed in thought, but never once had they even become close to those dangerous slits on her face.

Was this the same person he knew? What had initially drawn him to her was her sweetness, so how could she look so stone cold (read: terrifying) in this moment?

"Look, I know we're kind of close and all, but YN was my first friend and one of my only long-standing friendships since I was 9 years-old." Jungwon couldn't take her gaze, so he turned to look out the window as she spoke.

"They've been my rock ever since I started having trouble with my parents, and was always supportive of everything I did. YN is self-sacrificial and diligent in a way you'd only notice if you were friends with them, and observant to the small details, playful when you need them to be, and highly emotionally empathetic—"

She paused, as if finally noticing Jungwon's attempts to distract himself.

"—I'm talking to you here." His eyes snapped back towards her face at the harshness of the tone she used, and a bead of sweat formed at the back of his neck. Ok, never trying that again. "You're not a bad person, Jungwon. I know you're not the type to hurt someone like that, but I'm not taking that chance. YN is a very sensitive individual, ok?"

Yeri waited, long enough for the frightened boy in front of her to get the memo. Eventually, he nodded.

"Good. So don't you ever attempt to hurt them—actually, even if it was a mistake, I couldn't care less. I will make sure you won't live past the age of 30. You won't even be alive to see your grandchildren, Yang Jungwon."

To make her point clear, she turned her glare burning. He could feel it through his soul. Such a stare would generally leave his heart palpitating, and it was surely, but he'd be an idiot if he didn't know the difference between it beating in fear and from affection. Right then, it was fear.

As if she was finally satisfied, Yeri leaned back from the cornered Student Council President in front of her, and took several steps backwards.

"Take this as my blessing for your relationship," she offered, hand coming to give a small pat at his shoulder. It took every fibre of his being not to flinch. He did Taekwondo for God's sake, what was with him?

The words hadn't come out of her mouth, but it was silently spoken from one party to another. This wasn't just a blessing, this was a warning. A threat too, all in one.

Yeri took it upon herself to exit the room first, even making sure to close the door gently as to not disturb anyone around them, and Jungwon's legs took him to his Council President seat—because if he didn't take a seat, he was sure he'd faint somewhere along the way back.

Kim Yerim had just threatened him like an overprotective Mob Boss whose child had just gotten their first boyfriend. Kim Yerim, his crush, the girl he had been pining over since they had both been elected for Council positions, Kim Yerim—who he had apparently not known enough about.

Outside of the room, Yeri was making her way down the hallways, checking messages on her phone as she did so.

(10)! unread messages from Heeseung!

All with the same premise. What did you talk to Jungwon about? What did you say? Yeri? Where are you?

She should've known Jungwon would tell his other friends, it was only natural he would. I'll deal with that later.

She tucked her phone back into her skirt pocket, unaware of the frantic footfalls of someone running down the hallways in the opposite direction.

—

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TDLR: you kiss his cheek again, yeri drags jungwon to the stuco room, yeri will make sure jungwon wont live past the age of 30 :D

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i hope this was worth the wait you scoundrels