#these are my adult designs!! they have matching red string wrist tattoos but an’s is covered

[duskstars]

anhane week 2024 day 7: free day 💙🩷

[ashintheairlikesnow]

Like Love: Dex

CW: Incredibly mentally messed up but still perfectly consensual and sweet spice! PG-13/Mild R spice levels, non-graphic. Referenced past abuse. Pet whump and some dehumanization (not during the spice).

Tagging the #FreeDex2020 Crew: @whumpiary, @iaminamoodymoodtoday, @whump-it, @neuro-whump, @spiffythespook, @redwingedwhump, @burtlederp, @brightside-blue, @pepperonyscience, 

See end of piece for a special note.

The only person who allows Dex his voice is a man he hates so deeply, and fully, that somewhere in the past twenty years it has begun to feel like love. 

Each visit, every moment alone was another break in the iron wall Dex had built between himself and the hell on earth he was living. 

Each time the man’s fingers skimmed his skin with expert care not to hurt him - and every time they even more expertly did hurt him, in exactly all the wrong and right ways - every direct command or murmured suggestion… 

Every soft you’re fine, Dex and gentle darling or good boy has built, in him, a solid foundation of feeling that started as loathing and, at some point, became something else. The man broke down the wall but had rebuilt something else in its place. 

He goes to the man by her design - with her allowance - at her command. 

Dex cannot lie to her; his ability to deceive her disappeared long ago, under the downward swing of her discipline and the endless days of blaring, featureless white that live in his memories from training. 

Dex drifts through his life in a dream he cannot wake from, but he jolted to awareness when she told him the man was in a hotel room nearby. So close, after five years apart.

“He asked about you. Do you want to see him, Dex?” Madam had asked, looking up at him from her seat at her desk in the home office, looking over some papers with her half-lens reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. 

Madam has gray starting to grow into the roots of her hair that she dyes away. Dex has gray, too - a scattering of pale hairs beginning to speckle through the dark. His is left as it is, to filter in a little more each year.

He was nineteen when she took him for her own. He was twenty-two the first time the man was alone with him and crooked his fingers, murmured, Come here, Dex, and he went. 

By twenty-four, he was lost.

When she asked, Dex had stood there staring at her, too aware of his idle fingers, the way his shirt felt shifting over his skin. He told himself absolutely not - the man deserved prison, or worse, had done terrible things. Dex had stood by and watched him do terrible things.

On occasion, Dex was the person he had done those terrible things to.

Still there was a part of him, the small tiny warm bit that he had wrapped deep inside of himself, held for his very own and away from her cold, all-seeing eyes, that had whispered he asked about me.

He had merely signed to her, in response to her question, that he would allow her to decide as always. He did not dare let the bit of him that did not belong to her show.

She wouldn’t like it, to know that there was a part of him that might belong to anyone else - the part that still felt anger, and loathing, and defiance, and the hate like love. He hid these things under a placid surface that no stone could disturb. The perfect pet, the picture of serenity. He could be fully trusted. He was so perfect for her that he was avoided even by Madam’s other Boys, because he would tell her anything she asked… anything, of course, but this one small thing.

I want to see him.

She had simply looked at him for a moment, in the silence, with a smile he could not read but did not like. He did not like any of her smiles, not even the ones that meant relief for him, or that the worst was over. It was only a matter of time before the worst came around again, after all. 

“Obedient as always, Dex. You have always been a particular favorite of his. I’ll make the arrangements.” She had paused, tapping her pen on the papers in front of her. 

Dex had tilted his head to see, unobtrusively. It was some kind of sketched-out jewelry design, perhaps - little metal circles with stones set into them, what looked like silvered thread or wire stringing them together.

She had tapped louder until his eyes jerked back to hers.

“That is not your business,” Karen Renford said coldly to the man she had kept kneeling at her feet for twenty years. There were days she spoke to him more like a friend than what he was - but in this moment she was as cold as ever. “He is your business now. I don’t care how you feel about him. You’ll go.”

He nodded, slowly, and it was only when he was back in his bedroom that he had allowed himself a smile - because she would have cared so much if she had known what Dex’s feeling actually was.

He was not going for her. Not this time.

“Good evening!” The clerk working behind the desk greets him as he enters the hotel, automatic doors sliding open on either side of him. If he were anything else, Dex thinks with no small hint of bitterness, they might have added sir.

He looks the part of a sir, after all - tailored black pants and a custom-made deep green sweater that the man had bought for Dex himself during a visit maybe ten years ago. 

Dex had kept it immaculately cared-for, and it had been wrapped and packed away while the man was in prison.

Five years. It has been five years since he has seen him except for over Karen Renford’s shoulder, with thick panes of bulletproof glass between them, in the prison the man was meant to stay in for life. The hate twists in him, only it’s not really hate any longer. 

Or if it is, then maybe Dex has lost track of which feeling is which.

He looks the part of a sir… but the small, brightly colored blue booklet he holds in one hand - and the band of green leather around his neck, dyed to perfectly match the color of the sweater - ensures he can’t pretend to be anything other than what he is. Not that Dex would even know where to begin feigning freedom he doesn’t have.

He walks up to the desk with a small, placid smile on his face, sets the duffel bag he carries in one hand down and the blue booklet on the counter of the desk, open to the page with a photo of his face. When he turns forty, he’ll need a new one - and Box Boys his age are so rare that he watches the clerk’s face move from a blank lack of recognition to bafflement to a slowly dawning understanding.

“Oh… oh… oh! You’re one of, of, those-… um… oh, okay. So you have your passport, um, do you… what name is the room under?”

Dex holds up one finger, and presses it against his own lips, then mouths, mute.

The clerk only stares at him.

Dex sighs and holds out his hand for the pen and pad of paper he can see on the other side of the desk, pointing at it politely. The clerk stares down at his own hands, blinking, then back up at Dex.

“I swear to God,” a second, female voice says from the office door hidden just to the side behind the desk. A woman with bright red hair leans slowly out, only her head visible. “He’s telling you he needs to write it, Brent. Oh my god. If you get us another customer complaint, I will murder you. And it will be slow and it will be messy, you cretin.”

“I’m pretty sure you get fired for murdering your coworkers,” The clerk - Brent, apparently - snaps, his face flaring red with embarrassment. “I’m, I’m sorry, sir- uh, I mean I’m sorry, pet… I haven’t dealt with-… just a second-… don’t tell your owner, okay?”

Dex’s smile doesn’t change - but it stiffens somewhat. He nods.

If it weren’t for the blue book and the collar around his neck, they would call him sir. Before he was ever old enough to be a sir, that possibility had been taken from him, and he knows no other way of living.

The clerk hands him the pen and paper, and Dex neatly writes the room number he was given over the phone, in the pointy, angular handwriting that he sometimes wonders about… did he write like this before they took his identity away? 

Was he a child, once, with pointy handwriting, struggling with the swirling, rounded shapes of cursive? It’s hard to think he ever was a child. That he hasn’t always been this.

He hands the pad back over the desk, to the clerk who looks at it, then up at him, and then turns to the computer. He doesn’t thank Dex, the common overly-sincere, totally false customer-service friendliness that Madam often bemoans as so uniquely pervasive in America. No, Dex is a pet and so the moment the name is given, he is dismissed until they have to speak to him again.

His hands do not tighten into fists. They stay neatly, calmly at his side. He has lived like this, after all, for his entire adult life, the only life he knows.

He is not quite human… except with the man he hates. Unless the last five years have changed them both too much. But Dex is fairly certain he has never been allowed to change at all, except for those ways the man himself is responsible for.

“Oh! Looks like your owner’s already checked you in. Cool, cool. Okay. All right. Okay, Earnshaw, you head right up, Mr. Heathcliff is waiting for you.” Dex blinks - once, twice - at the names. 

It’s only after a full second has passed that he realizes two things simultaneously… the clerk has no idea that those names are references to one of the most recognizable love stories ever written… and that if he used such blatant names, the man must have thought the clerk was the stupidest creature he’d ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on.

A smile twitches, just slightly, on Dex’s serene, nearly-expressionless face.

That, at least, he and the man he hates agree on.

He takes the keycard he is given and his passport back, ignoring the stamp that marks him as PET and prints his Box Boy number and barcode along the bottom edge… as if they weren’t already tattooed into his left wrist, like all the others. He’ll be forty soon and it won’t matter at all, he’ll still be marked PET on his passport until the day he dies.

His stomach starts to twist in knots as he walks across the lobby to the bank of elevators. The man is on the top floor, because of course he is - nothing less for him, even on the run, even having just escaped from a prison that had given him multiple life sentences.

He deserved those life sentences.

He deserves worse.

But still Dex’s stomach is in nervous, excited knots as he presses the number 14, notes absently the missing thirteenth floor between 12 and 14. Superstitious hotel owner, maybe. His heart is beating hard inside his chest, and he tells himself it’s fear… but it isn’t.

In five years, he has not seen the man he hates, and five years is long enough to admit to himself that he misses him. The man he hates - hated - gives him his voice back, will wait to hear it, bring it out patiently, and afterwards whisper into his ear I want to hear you again, darling.

Each time the elevator moves past a floor, the light changing number by number, Dex’s eyes jerk to it, as though he can make it happen faster simply by staring. Faster or slower, he doesn’t know which he wants it to be, because he can’t stay long.

Madam will want him back.

She’ll want him to report to her if there’s anything he sees that Madam doesn’t know about. Karen and the man have been friends since just before Dex came to live with her (before she broke you, he thinks, and then he locks that thought down as tightly as he can) and still Karen has plans, and thoughts, and a purpose she doesn’t always share.

She wants Dex to share that purpose with her.

He is here for his own purpose - and the man’s - not hers.

Fourteenth floor.

The elevator beeps once and he balances through the final drop as the elevator stabilizes.

He takes a deep breath as the doors open, trying to steady himself as he steps forward and out into the hall. Hotel carpet - swirling abstract geometrics in vibrant nonsense patterns of reds and yellows and blues, textured walls in a simple cream color. Mirrors hang across from the elevators, and Dex looks right at himself when he comes to a brief stop to check the sign to know which way to turn.

He checks one more time to ensure that his hair is combed just to the side, that his sweater hangs just right on him still - the way it did when the man first gave it to him - that he… looks good.

If they were any other people, he might be a man going to meet a lover.

But they are who they are, and he is a human pet sent to give his body as a welcome home present to a convicted murderer. They are a broken man who isn’t even legally considered a full citizen… and a man who tortured people for decades until he was finally caught.

And still he wants to look good for him, to live up to what he expects.

I was broken before you, Dex thinks. But I am broken for you, now.

He turns left into the hallway following the numbers on the doorways, feeling with each step a little dizzier, breathing more shallowly. The sound of his own pulse is deafening inside his mind, in his ears, at his wrists and neck. 

Dex floats down the hallway as the human wreckage he became a long time ago, intent on his purpose - not Madam’s purpose, his. He’s a man made of drifting boards from a shipwreck, floating boxes and crates. He is the twisted coil of rope that washes up along the coast of Madagascar months after a volcano erupts in Polynesia.

But the man is the coastline that wants the wreckage, just as it is.

He stops in front of the door - room 1432, and Dex wonders absently if there was ever a Box Boy given that number, before they had to keep adding digits.

Finally, he takes a deep breath and knocks - two long knocks, three short raps. Just as Madam said to.

When he hears steps, he takes in a breath and forgets to exhale. 

The doorknob turns and Dex stands there like any other man - except for the leather around his neck, except for the very foundations of him that were shattered and remade.

Except that he is not any other man, and neither is Wright Farling.

For the time Dex’s breath is held - the door swung open - he and Wright simply stare at each other.

Wright had always looked young for his age, but time, it seems, has caught up with him. The shift from forty - the last time Dex had seen him without the orange prison jumpsuit - and forty-five has taken its toll, etching new lines into a handsome face.

They’re smile lines, mostly - the same ones that had been forming before he was locked up. Wright was always smiling, always joking except for when he wasn’t, always ready to listen to another’s joke… even ready to laugh at Dex’s humor, when he signed his own wry commentary to the movies they watched or the music they might listen to.

There are other lines now - on his brow, around his mouth - that indicate not humor but an increase in ferocity.

“Dex, darling,” Wright says, and there’s an edge to his voice, something that brings a twist of some terrible, wonderful anticipation in Dex’s core. “I’ve been waiting for you.” 

His whitish-blond hair is whiter, the change in his easy former lifestyle to prison life and his exposure to the other inmates has left a harder set to his features… but the confidence is still there, the hint of winsome pleasantness that suffused his expression.

Dex drops the duffel bag at his own feet without thinking and holds up his hands to sign, I have been waiting, too.

The smile he receives in return is brighter than any he’s ever given him before. There was something genuine, there. Wright leans down to pick up Dex’s bag and tosses it behind him carelessly, and Wright Farling is never careless.

He looks like a man who has gone five years without something precious, and has suddenly remembered how important it really is, how much he had appreciated having it.

Dex knows his own face must look exactly the same.

I hate you so much, he had mouthed once in Wright’s arms. He has said it a thousand times, a thousand different ways, and now he can’t find it in him to say it at all.

Wright tilts his head, his eyes dropping from Dex’s to his mouth, taking in the first hints of lines at the corners. Dex smiles so rarely that laugh lines struggle to etch themselves into him. 

He smiles now, for Wright. What do you want me to do? He signs, and Wright grins.

An old song and dance, and they both know all the steps.

“Come,” Wright says in a low, soft voice, and crooks two fingers to beckon him forwards.

Dex moves to him and the door has barely closed behind them before Wright grabs him and slams his back into the wall, Dex huffing silent laughter and Wright not even bothering to keep his own laughter quiet as he kisses him with all the desperate intensity that five years of loneliness has built. 

Dex’s arms are around his waist, and his hands are up on either side of Dex’s face and the kiss is nearly painful but neither pulls back or away.

Wright is a drowning man and Dex is air - or the other way around, he is drowning and Wright is the air, or he is drowning in Wright… he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.

The press of lips, tongues sliding against each other, the pressure of Wright’s hips pushing hard against his - and Dex shifting so he can press back, making a low soft sound in his throat at the dim pleasure already beginning to coil into real heat, the way he comes to life immediately at his touch - it’s everything he’s been missing.

He missed the convicted murderer in his arms, a man who has cracked him apart a thousand different ways, but the man who wants to see the cracks.

“Dex, you wore the sweater,” Wright murmurs when they break apart, rocking his hips forwards until Dex’s own knees buckle just slightly. Wright’s fingertips slide down Dex’s face and to the sides of his neck, almost as though he would choke him. He lingers over the green leather there, the sign of Karen’s total control of him. “Did you do that for me?”

Dex nods, leaning forward just slightly to brush his nose against Wright’s. For you, he mouths, and after twenty years Wright reads his lips as well as he reads every other part of his body and mind.

“Did you miss me so much…?” Wright asks, and for a second there is something like a real vulnerability on his face. By the time Dex blinks, it’s gone, and back instead is the winsome smile. “Of course you did. Let me get this off you, darling.”

His fingers slide along to the back of the leather collar, and Dex tilts his chin up to make it easier for him, arches his back. One of Wright’s hands stays on the buckle and the other slides up into Dex’s short dark hair, twists around the strands. 

“Haven’t felt your hair in five years, either,” Wright says, more to himself than Dex.

Dex lets Wright pull his head back and back by the grip in his hair, breathing harder, jolts of pleasure straight down his body from the fingers that run along his scalp.

“Good boy,” Wright says in his ear, and Dex nearly moans. “Still such a good boy for me.”

Wright’s fingers deftly undo the buckle, making quick work of Karen’s symbol of ownership, and he drops it to the carpet with a soft thump, as if it’s nothing. As if Karen doesn’t control him at all.

Wright taking off his collar isn’t meant to mark him as free - it’s a reminder that he belongs to Wright in deeper ways, ways that cannot be marked with a strip of leather and a metal buckle.

His marrow belongs to Wright Farling - his bones, his nerves, his heartbeat, his mind.

Karen Renford only owns his skin. He gave everything else to Wright so long ago, and she has never noticed.

“That’s better.” Wright’s smile is nearly a smirk, and his hands slide down over Dex’s chest, down his sides to hook into the belt loops of his pants and pull their hips back together. “Much better. Will you speak for me, Dex?”

Once, there had been humiliation in Wright forcing him to speak, pushing him to an edge where his desperation, despair, or anger pushed him past the conditioning and pulled it out against his will.

That has changed, too.

Now, Dex only smiles at him - I am helpless for you, I will do anything you say, anything, forever - and nods. Wright tells him to speak and, despite twenty years of what they have made of him, he tries.

In a life surrounded by evil, Dex will choose the evil that wants to hear his voice.

“Wr-… Wright,” Dex says, hoarse and guttural. He has not spoken in more than five years, since the last time he saw Wright before he was caught at his evil, before they locked him away for it. It’s not a beautiful voice - it’s an ugly sound, and Dex knows it, but Wright never seems bothered at all. He still isn’t.

“There it is,” Wright breathes out, and Dex doesn’t know if he’s happy to hear the name or happy to know that none of his control is gone. Maybe both. “Come, darling. It’s been so long… I’m not letting you off the bed until you can’t leave it.“

What happens when Wright takes him by the arm is less like allowing Wright to lead him and far more like falling into his inevitable gravity, once more, down and down into the darkest parts of himself.

“God, I missed having you, Dex,” Wright says, and he pushes Dex hard in his chest until he falls onto his back on the soft, warm white comforter, hands already at the hem of the pretty green sweater to pull it up and over Dex’s head, mussing up the hair he’d combed so carefully. Dex wriggles to try and help him, Wright sitting on him straddling his hips and holding him down.

Not that he’d run. Not now, not ever again, not from Wright.

“Missed you, Wright,” Dex croaks out, forces from beyond the conditioning that has kept him mute with everyone else. “Missed me?”

Wright pauses, looking down at him with his head tilted, lips parted. There is some analysis behind the smile on his face, the way that his eyes always bare the deepest parts of Dex, pull them out to the light. “Do you need me to miss you, Dex? Do you need me, now?”

“Yes.”

Wright doesn’t answer the question Dex had asked him. Instead, he only watches him for a moment longer and then says, softly, “Beg for me.”

“Please.” In his hoarse, grinding voice, rough from disuse, he begs without hesitating. There is time to hesitate, to think too much, for Wright to tear him apart, later. For now, he runs his hands up over Wright’s thighs to his hips through the fabric of his soft pants, lets them settle there, feeling the heat coming from his skin, and bucks his own hips up to show Wright how ready he is. “Please. I need you, Wright.”

“Good, Dex. That’s very good,” Wright says, and his smile widens. He drops down to hold his weight on his hands, leaning down to kiss him again. “I love hearing you say my name. I’m gonna make you scream it.”

It is when Wright calls his name later, while buried deeply in Dex - when they are both so tangled in each other that Dex barely recognizes he is anything more than an extension of Wright at all - that Dex realizes that it isn’t that twenty years has made the hate feel like love.

It is that, after twenty years of this man’s voice whispering through his blood, his bones, his mind… what he feels for Wright is love.

ENDNOTE: Wright Farling belongs to @spiffythespook. He is used with permission, and Spiffy collaborated with me on Wright’s actions and dialogue!

[chocobroobsession]

The Red String - Chapter 19

Author’s Note: Soulmate AU based on the red string of fate story featuring Ignis x fem!OC. The end is nearly here. Only one chapter left! Trigger warning: self-harm. It has a nice resolution though, to make up for it. A tad NSFW at the very end. Plus, we get to see a bit more of Prompto and Gladio. Word count: 2262.

Chapter Masterlist

Ignis thought that life with Chandra was blissful and effortless. They both had their flaws and of course they had arguments on occasion, but their love prevailed and they spent the days reveling in one another. Not long after their first lovemaking session, Chandra asked Ignis to move in with her. Naturally he agreed. They fit together perfectly, and though their days were filled with happiness, they both still dealt with their own personal daemons.

Chandra still had emotional damage from her past traumas. Though the pair rarely had nightmares, she would occasionally wake up screaming. Ignis would hold her close and hum her favorite songs until sleep found her again. Though she managed to overcome many of her insecurities, one major one still remained.

One day, Ignis walked in on her cutting at her wrist. He smelled the blood immediately and made his way over to her as she shrunk away from him. She cried as he held her hand and gently cleaned the wound. He ran his fingers over the raised scars that crisscrossed the barcode.

“Love, you don’t need to do this. I understand it’s a painful reminder of your past, but I hate to see you harming yourself like this.”

“I know. It just feels like a brand. Like a curse. I hate looking at it. I’m sick of wearing longs sleeves and bandages all the time,” she sniffled.

“I see. Maybe together we can come up with a better solution? Better yet, maybe we should speak with Prompto. He knows more about what you’re going through than I do,” he suggested.

Prompto had spent his life hiding his barcode. As a child, he hid it with a sweatband. As an adult, he hid it with a leather bracelet. He had hoped that by finally confiding in his friends, he would be able to forgo a cover and be able to show it to the world, like a battle scar. Instead, he continued to conceal it, pained by all it represented.

When Ignis and Chandra came to him about her woes, he understood all too well. He was still living with Gladio at the time, who overheard their conversation.

“Why not just cover them with tattoos? I know a guy who could do it. He’s the one who did mine. He managed to escape Insomnia and open a parlor right here in Lestallum,” he offered.

“You know, that���s not a bad idea,” Ignis agreed.

“Yeah, but do you think it would work for me, what with my, um, other scars?” Chandra asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Gladio explained. “I’m covered in scars from battle and my tattoo still went on just fine.”

“Yeah, let’s get matching tattoos!” Prompto piped up. “It can be like BFF bracelets, but more permanent!”

Chandra couldn’t help but smile. Prompto really had become her best friend aside from Ignis. They understood each other, both being victims of Niflheim. Plus Prompto had always encouraged her relationship with Ignis and was their biggest supporter. He was easy to talk to and fun to be around and she was thankful to have him in her life as well.

Prompto and Chandra spent the next few days brainstorming what tattoo they would get. They both agreed that it would have to be dark and bold to cover the barcode enough to where one couldn’t tell that it was once there. They would also have to wait a couple of months until Chandra’s cuts had fully healed. In the meantime, Prompto gave her an extra leather cuff he had to cover it.

When the time came, they made an appointment with Gladio’s tattoo artist. Ignis held Chandra’s hand as she got hers, and he even held Prompto’s, but that was only to stop his whining. Turns out, he really hated needles. When they emerged from the parlor, both were proud of their new ink. Covering their barcodes was a blackened city skyline that wrapped completely around their wrists like a bracelet. Peeking out from behind the buildings, was the rising sun. The skyline they picked was that of Insomnia. Though Chandra had never gotten to see the city in person, it was Prompto’s home and Ignis’s as well. She saw Ignis as her home, and so it was only appropriate to go with that. Thankfully, Prompto had taken many pictures of his city before its fall, including several from a distance back from when they first embarked on their road trip with Noctis. There was a vantage point on a hill where you could see over the wall and take in the grandeur of the city. The rising sun was added because they all knew one day Noctis would return and bring the sun back with him, thus ending the Starscourge.

Chandra guided Ignis’s hand and traced his fingertip along the outline of her tattoo. “Does that sort of help you to picture it?”

“My dear, though I haven’t laid eyes on my city in ages, I cannot forget that view. Thank you for thinking of me when deciding on what to get.” Ignis smiled as he leaned forward to kiss her hand.

“Of course, Love.” She stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

“I’m so glad we did this,” Prompto interrupted. “Thanks, Chandra. Without you, I’m pretty sure I probably would have hidden my wrist for the rest of my life.” He pulled her in for a hug.

“No problem. Thank you for the design. It’s perfect.”

Though she would forever have the raised scars, at least she would never have to see that wretched barcode again. A tremendous weight was lifted off of her shoulders and she felt more at peace than she had in a long time.

A few weeks later, in the comfort of their own home, Ignis finally confronted one of his own insecurities.

“Darling?”

“Yes, Ignis?”

“How…just how bad are my scars?”

“Huh?” The question caught Chandra off guard.

“Well, I can feel them, so I know how large they are, but what do they look like?” He bit his lip and lowered his face towards the floor.

“Has this really been bothering you all this time?” She tenderly asked as she slid down next to him on the couch.

“Yes,” he answered. “I know it’s vain. Looks aren’t everything, and I know you love me, but I also know people stare at me. I can feel it. And I’m not sure if it’s out of fear or pity or both.”

Chandra reached over and caressed his cheek, turning his head to face hers. His eyebrows were bunched together as he frowned. It didn’t matter the expression on his face. She still thought he was the most handsome man she had ever laid eyes on. She found herself attracted to him when she saw him in Altissia without his scars, and the addition of the scars hadn’t changed her feelings in the slightest. Though she missed the intensity of those green eyes staring into her brown ones, she cared more about the man who owned them.

She studied his face before speaking. “I’m out of practice being descriptive without sounding clinical, so forgive me if I don’t paint a proper picture. Your scars are discolored. They have undertones of maroon, plumb, and dark brown. They are raised and uneven. Rough to the touch, actually. It looks as though your outer layer of skin was burned and peeled away. But they aren’t as prominent as you seem to think they are. The area over your left eye isn’t entirely hidden by your shades, but they do cover the majority of it. In fact, your shades are more noticeable than the scars themselves are. Your right eye is a little milky, but I can still see your green iris. But your scars aren’t hideous like you seem to think they are. Honest. At first, I was weary because they looked painful and I thought maybe you were in constant agony. I met you when they were still fresh wounds, you know. The color has since dulled and I’m glad to see that I can touch you without hurting you.”

She removed his shades and traced the scar on his left eye. He closed his right eye and leaned into her touch. She then traced the small scar on his right eyebrow, and then the one on the bridge of his nose. When she got to the one on his lip, he smiled and kissed her fingertips. He grabbed her hand, holding it against his cheek as he rubbed his face against her.

“Thank you. Thank you for being honest. All this time, I never asked anyone to describe them to me. I asked the guys if I looked alright and they said yes, but I assumed it was just to spare my feelings. I was terrified that you would be turned off by them when I met you, but you were drawn to me all the same.”

“You really have no idea just how attractive you are, do you?” Chandra laughed. “Seriously, I think people look at you because you’re so damn hot. That and you’re obviously blind, and yet you walk around and act like you can still see. You’re really amazing.”

Ignis grinned, his mood lifting. “People think I’m hot?”

Chandra playfully swatted him on the arm. “I wouldn’t make that up! Seriously, some of the other nurses saw you one day when you were picking me up. I had to finish up shift change when I heard them talking to each other about ‘that cute blind guy’ in the waiting room. They went on and on about how muscular you were and how hot you were. One of them must have seen you training with the guys before because she talked about how you looked when you flipped and moved in battle and she wondered how flexible you’d be in the bedroom. Then they had to speculate if you were single and if you’d want to see them better with your hands and that’s when I lost my temper and told them to back the fuck off because you were mine.”

“Really? Other women find me attractive?” He mused.

Chandra playfully smacked him again. “I tell you a story about other women objectifying you and being perverted and that’s the part that makes you happy? What about me? I’ve always found you attractive! Don’t I count?”

Ignis laughed and wrapped his arms around her waist. “Darling, I was just teasing. Of course you count. Honestly, I didn’t know I was all that desirable. I was always used to going out and watching women drool over Gladio.”

“Eh, I don’t see it,” Chandra shrugged. “I mean, he’s big and muscly and I guess his face doesn’t look bad, but he’s definitely not my type.”

“Oh, so what is your type then?” Ignis nuzzled his face into her neck.

Chandra could feel heat pooling in her middle from the close contact with one of her weak spots. “Oh, you know. Tall, lean and muscular, tawny hair, smooth voice, daemon hunter, good with daggers, adviser to the Lucian King, intelligent, sexy as all get out. I’m very particular about my men.”

Ignis began kissing her neck. “That was oddly specific. You must be impossible to please.”

“Oh I know. I am impossible,” she laughed but it was shaky, almost turning into a moan. “You want to know what else I told those nurses?”

“Hmm…what was that?”

“It was a bit vulgar of me.”

“I think I can forgive vulgarity.”

Chandra blushed. “After I told them you were mine, I started to walk away, but I couldn’t help but add something along the lines of ‘oh, he is a good fuck, but not like you’ll ever know’ and that was also the day I waltzed up to you and kissed you very heatedly just to further add insult to injury. I admit it was a poor comeback but I was so flustered and angry at the time. I guess I just got a bit possessive.”

Ignis stopped the kissing and leaned his forehead against hers. “That was a really naughty thing you said, Kitten. You think you have it so easy with me being in your bed every night, but I should make you beg for it.”

Chandra started to protest, but Ignis stood up and lifted her off the couch, throwing her over his shoulder. She squealed and he responded by smacking her ass.

“Be quiet, Kitten. Resist and it will only prolong your release that much longer.”

“You know, I think I’m already into this side of you. I like trying new things,” Chandra grinned.

“We’ll see soon, won’t we?” Ignis smirked as he carried her off to the bedroom.

He took her to the bed where he ripped off her clothes and edged her over and over until she couldn’t take any more. She begged for her release and when he finally granted it, she screamed his name as wave upon wave of pleasure pulsed through her body. He chased his release as well and the two of them laid in a tangled mess of blankets and sheets, completely spent.

Chandra chuckled. “Well, I guess I may just have to misbehave more often if this is the kind of punishment I’m going to receive.”

“You’re incredible,” Ignis laughed as he kissed her lips. If this was the kind of life he had to look forward to, then he definitely couldn’t wait to see what was next in his blissful forever.