#this is so high def. my bones | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

livingdxadwriter · 8 months ago

Text

You’ve got my body, flesh and bone

Obsessed!Rafe x nerdy!girl!reader

Summary: something was different about you, and rafe can’t stop thinking about you ever since you came home from college. He knows you want him, too, even if you don’t show it

Warnings: explicit sexual content, minors dni, penetrative sex, p in v, unprotected sex, cream pie, oral (fem receiving), fingering, obsessed behaviors, pervy behaviors (I think?), Rafe is down bad, reader is secretly naughty, dom!rafe, spitting, choking, bit of degradation, Rafe is rough and she likes it.

Wrote this with s2 Rafe in mind but he’s not as psychotic🥰 reader also wears glasses, hope you like being blind

WC: 5.5k I’m so sorry

A/N: NOBODY LOOK AT MEEEEE. Anyway I couldn’t help myself. Rafe and Drew are in my mind all day and I need them so bad so I wrote it! I dedicate this to the reason of my insanity @bloodibambiidoll love you doll for feeding me into crash out Rafe😩. This was heavily inspired by her own Rafe fics so def check her out!

Also tagging my other rafe baby @babygorewhore🩷

There weren't a lot of things in this world that Rafe didn’t have. His whole life, anything he wanted, he had, at the palm of his hand. Whatever he wanted, he could do. And he fucking loved it. He didn’t know what it was like to crave something to the point of madness. Until you came around.

He didn’t know what it was, that feeling deep inside his gut. He didn’t know if it was lust, or desire, or if he truly felt something for you. Perhaps he felt all three. But one thing he knew for certain. If he didn’t have you soon, he was going to cave someone’s face in. It didn’t help that you shot him down every time. The more you ignored him, the more he craved you. Albeit he knew he had a chance in high school and he didn’t take it then. But even he knew he was a prick then. More than he was now, anyway. Deep down he couldn’t blame you for not giving him a chance now, he didn’t want you when you were all quiet and had those ugly glasses, so why should he get you now that you were more confident and stopped giving a fuck what people thought about you? He had to admit, college made you hot as fuck.

Rafe didn’t know it at first, but the first time he saw you at a party, your hair all pretty, your laugh so contagious he heard it across the room, your clothes hugging every curve of your body perfectly. His jaw fucking dropped. He almost didn’t believe it was you at first. Until he heard whispers about just how fucking hot you had gotten after college. He didn’t know it then, but his sanity was going to go downhill from there.

That was a month ago, and he still couldn’t get you to give him the light of day. It was almost like you were running away from him, every time. And it pissed him off, really, it did. He craved your attention like he never before. Maybe he was getting soft. Or he was going insane. Either one.

The worst part?

You were doing it on purpose.

You caught on pretty quickly. After the first couple of times of catching Rafe blatantly staring at you whenever he saw you, you were curious. It wasn’t entirely outlandish, you were like an exotic animal, having come back to the island after graduating early from university. You didn’t change much, you just learned to manage your social anxiety and started putting more effort into your appearance. You didn’t understand why everyone made such a big deal out of you. But you ignored it for the most part.

But you couldn’t ignore Rafe. His presence was intoxicating. Even if he didn’t approach you directly. You knew he was there. But you never made an effort to talk to him. You only ever talked to Sarah when you saw her. She was the one that pointed out Rafe in a corner, Topper talking his ear off but Rafe wasn’t paying listening to a word being said, he was looking at you. You, of course, brushed her off with the excuse you gave everyone.

“He'll get over it, just give it a week.”

He did not, in fact, get over it.

He thought you didn’t notice, but he followed you on instagram. Of course you noticed. How could you not? Your account was public, but you occasionally looked at who followed you. And the second you saw Rafe fucking Cameron followed you, you almost fainted. Suddenly, the stupid crush you had on Rafe at sixteen came flooding right back. You refused to get your hopes up, but the thought of Rafe quietly stalking your social media never left your mind.

You had no proof, but over the course of a month, you posted on your stories way more than you ever did in college, because you knew Rafe would see them. If you went to a party on Figure 8? Insta story. If you went to the beach? Swimsuit selfies. Felt pretty and did your makeup? Insta story. And what did you notice? Rafe always coincidentally seemed to end up at the exact place you were at. He never came alone, obviously. But he always hung out nearby, always within your line of sight.

You were driving him mad, certainly. There's no way it was legal for you to wear a swimsuit like that. It actually made his blood boil knowing there were other guys blatantly eye fucking you. Only he should be allowed to do that. He angrily sipped into his cup, silently fuming as he had to stand and simply watch you laugh and run around with your friends, walking past him every time you got drinks for the bar.

He swore he saw you grin at him one time, a devious and flirty look in your eyes when you made eye contact with him. And he was ready to grab you by the arm and drag you to his car and fuck you right then and there. But he decided against it. Somehow he had enough self control. But it was wearing thin the longer his torture dragged on.

“Girl, what did you do to Rafe?” Your high school best friend asked you when you came back with your drinks. You frowned, tilting your head innocently.

“To Rafe? Nothing. I haven’t even talked to him since I came back.” You answered with the truth. Though you purposely ignored what she probably meant.

“He’s been like glaring at you the whole night. He hasn’t moved from there all night and he’s just looking at you.” She pointed out, more quietly now. And you couldn’t help but subtly shift your eyes in his direction. And indeed, your eyes met with his piercing blue ones. You’d be lying if you said your heart didn’t race the slightest bit when you caught him looking at you like that. He was looking at you exactly how you desperately wanted him to look at you in high school.

“No idea what you mean. He’s probably just annoyed I’m hanging out with Sarah and her boyfriend. He probably thinks I’m encouraging her hanging out with the pogues.” You mumbled into your cup, shrugging as you quickly averted your gaze from Rafe. You weren’t sure if you wanted to convince her, or yourself.

“You’re better than me, because if Rafe Cameron looked at me like that I’d be dragging him to my car so fast.” She snorted and you almost choked on your drink. “I think you’re the only girl on this island he hasn’t fucked.”

“Thank God for that.” You responded a bit too quickly, hoping to hide the slight bit of hurt her words brought to you. You always knew you weren’t good enough for Rafe. You always pretended not to care, but you’d be lying.

You left alone that night. And Rafe couldn’t hold back the urge to follow close behind you. He didn’t know when he got in his car after you. Or when he started driving to your house. Or when he got out of his car. He wasn’t sure why, it wasn’t like he was going to knock on your door. Or maybe he would. He ran a hand over his face, squeezing his eyes shut as he swept his hair away from his face, exasperated. The very small, but still present, rational side of his mind told him to get the fuck out. And he was going to, until he saw you emerge from your room on the second floor, and you stood right in front of the large window cell. He panicked, running to hide from sight, behind a large tree, but he didn’t leave, he didn’t want to.

His jaw dropped, his eyes blowing wide open at the sight of you, untying your bikini top and just letting it fall, right then and there. The sight shot straight to his cock. What the fuck were you thinking? What if someone saw you? The thought of you exposing yourself like that made his jaw lock, but his now hard cock in his shorts was much more evident. He couldn’t look away. He was pissed he couldn’t see below your stomach, especially when he saw you crouch as you presumably took off your bottoms, too.

Rafe almost moaned at the thought.

And just like that you were gone. And you didn’t come back to the window. It almost felt like the universe was playing a cruel fucking prank on him. Now he had to drive home with an uncomfortable hard on in his shorts. That pissed him off even more.

~~~~~~

This became a habit for Rafe. He would aggressively scroll through your instagram page multiple times a day, hoping that he’d find out where you were for the night. But not in a weird way. He just wanted to see you. But he still hadn’t found the way to get you to talk to him first. He was starting to see the flaw in that plan. But alas, he couldn’t talk to you himself if he didn’t know where to find you. And sometimes, he’d find himself just standing outside your window, hiding behind that same tree. Sometimes you’d sit by the window cell, play around with your hair, sometimes you would read. And sometimes, you’d walk around completely naked, in full view of Rafe. How many times he all but sped home to rub one out was actually embarrassing.

Rafe was tired of this little game. Though he didn’t quite realize it was a game at all. You had no proof, but you knew. That one time you caught him nearly running back to his car was proof enough for you. So you kept going, until he snapped. You didn’t anticipate just how fast he would break.

“Guess who showed up.” Your friend whispered in your ear. You casually glanced over your shoulder to find none other than Rafe, with Topper and Kelce right behind him like lost puppies. It had to be criminal how hot this man looked. The polo shirt he wore was hanging on by a thread under his biceps and you had to force yourself to tear your eyes away.

“Yeah, so? He shows up to every party.” You shrugged, pretending not to catch on to the blatant connection. She rolled her eyes at you.

“Oh, so he casually shows up to the one party you’ve come to all week? Don’t you think it’s a little odd?”

You shrugged again. You were sure it was a coincidence. Sure it wasn’t because you posted a selfie of your pretty makeup and your pretty dress with the location of the party you got invited to. And surely the way Rafe was staring at you right now had nothing to do with the way your dress accentuated your chest perfectly, showing enough but still leaving some to the imagination. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t seen them before.

“Nope. Anyway, want a drink?” You smiled at her innocently, completely ignoring her Rafe interrogation. She shot you a pointed look, surely she would grill you about it later, but she relented nonetheless.

With a smile you skipped over to the bar, your dress riding up ever so slightly as you leaned over the wooden bar to speak over the loud music. Rafe nearly dropped his beer, his eyes going from your hair down to your ass. He couldn’t take this anymore.

“Yeah, whatever bro. I’ll be right back.” He cut off Topper as he went on about one thing or another, he didn’t wait for a response and he approached you in long strides. He sniffed softly, running a hand through his hair before opening his mouth.

You heard your name spoken in a deep voice, with a drink in each hand, you whipped around, not expecting to run straight into a solid, muscled chest.

“Hey—oh fuck,” Rafe cursed when the drinks you were holding spilled all over his shirt, and over the front of your dress. You gasped loudly, nearly squealing when the ice cubes slipped down your chest.

“Rafe! What the actual fuck.” You almost screamed at him, desperately attempting to wipe off the alcohol soaking your dress, the front now sticking to your tits. Rafe wanted to say something, maybe apologize, but he was mouth agape at the sight of your soaked chest, it took him a minute to process.

“Shit, my bad. I didn’t mean to,” he swallowed, his own shirt starting to stick to his chest. Which didn’t slip past you, even in your anger. But you couldn’t think about that right now. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Yeah, alright. I’m sure you totally didn’t want to embarrass me by spilling drinks all over me. Grow the fuck up, Rafe.” You huffed, feeling everyone’s eyes on you. You could feel your face fluster with embarrassment and you had to force yourself not to cry. You had tried so hard to remove yourself from the old you, the one everyone made fun of, the one that got asked out to prom as a prank, the one everyone stared at in disgust. And you felt like that girl all over again.

Rafe didn’t even have time to argue, you were running off before he could get a word in. He groaned, discomfort settling in from his shirt sticking to his skin.

“Way to go bro. You didn’t have to embarrass the freakshow like that though.” Rafe sneered in disgust at your high school nickname and he rolled his eyes, shrugging off the casual hand on his shoulder.

“Shut the fuck up before I shove broken glass down your throat.”

If there was something in this world that Rafe could never have, it would be patience. And this little game had his sanity wearing very thin.

He didn’t know exactly when he ended up at your front door, fist pounding loudly as he called your name. His bike was somewhere on the lawn, he didn’t bother to hide it this time. He swore if you didn’t open this door right now he would kick it open. He stepped back, his jaw tight as he waited a few seconds before doing something more drastic. Then, the door swung open. And there you were.

“I swear to God Rafe.” You sighed loudly, crossing your arms over your now slightly damp chest, having somewhat dried off the front of your dress. Rafe was taken aback by the appearance of your glasses, however. He hadn’t seen you wear them since you came back. Were you always this cute in them?

No, focus.

“You didn’t even let me talk back there! I didn’t mean to run into you like that, I swear.” He took a step closer, slightly leaning down to talk close to your face. You couldn’t help but stare at him, eyebrows furrowed with mistrust.

“Oh right, so was it just a coincidence that you were standing right behind me like a wall?” You shot back, shooting him a suspicious look. He rolled his eyes at you, sighing heavily. “If you wanted to look at them better you could’ve just asked! You didn’t have to knock drinks all over my dress.”

The words left your mouth in a haze. Fast and angrily as you motioned your hands around. You didn’t realize what you said until the look in Rafe’s eyes shifted. Going from confused to downright sinful. He tilted his head at you, crowding your personal space with his big fucking body. You realized then that you really fucked up.

“What’d you say?” He asked, his voice low as he made you step back into your house. He followed you, his face close to yours and you swallowed.

“Huh?” Play dumb, sure.

“Uh-uh, don’t try to be all innocent now. What the fuck did you say?” He repeated, one of his large hands coming up to grip your jaw. You swallowed, your lips pulled into a pout.

“You really weren’t that sneaky.” You finally admitted, throwing all logic out of the window knowing you both got caught red-handed by the other. Though Rafe didn’t look embarrassed or even remorseful, if anything he looked pleasantly amused. Impressed even.

“Well, shit.” A grin pulled at his lips as he laughed, a rush of adrenaline flowing through his already amped up body. “You little whore. You were striping in front of your fuckin’ window on purpose, weren’t you?”

“I didn’t know for sure but, I heard your bike a couple of times.” You shrugged, trying to hide the devious smile on your lips. Rafe scoffed humorously, in utter disbelief. “You following me on insta was kind of a given, too.”

“You are..” He leaned down, his soft lips mere inches away from yours as he blew out a chuckle, “A dirty little slut. You have any fuckin’ idea what you’ve been doin’ to me? Hm?” He squeezed your jaw between his fingers, forcing your head back to make sure your eyes were on him.

The words that left his mouth made you rub your thighs together, heat forming between them at the thought of being this close to Rafe, knowing he was on the brink of madness, all because of you. You could see it in his eyes, that utter need to fuck you, take you over and over, or else he would go insane.

“Thought I wasn’t your type.” You shot back, pettiness lacing your tongue. A groan of annoyance rumbled in his chest.

“I didn’t know I was your type.”

“You’re everyone’s type, since when are you humble?” You mocked him with a small laugh, but it quickly died in your chest when his fingers fell to your throat, and he dug his fingers with the faintest pressure. You nearly moaned.

“Well you’re my type right now. Your tits sure fuckin’ are.” He bit his lip softly, making sure his eyes were on yours when he spoke again, “bet your pussy is my type too. Lemme find out, hm?”

If you weren’t wet before, you sure were now. You nearly moaned out loud, his words alone bending you to his will. Not that it would take much work.

Rafe didn’t get to say another word, you were pulling him down by the back of his neck and you kissed him, and you kissed him really fucking hard. He liked your intensity. He craved to find out just what else you were hiding behind your innocent and sweet girl facade. He slipped his tongue into your mouth, his fingers lacing into your hair to force your head back for him. And you happily let him. His other hand shamelessly grabbed at your ass, squeezing it as he kissed you. You couldn’t help but moan into his mouth.

“My bedroom is—“ you were breathless as you muttered against his lips. Rafe chuckled, cutting you off as he effortlessly hoisted you around his waist.

“I know where your fuckin’ room is.” Of course he did.

You giggled as Rafe tossed you on your bed, biting your bottom lip as you watched him pull his polo over his head and your jaw fell wide open at the sight.

“Dude why are you like, so hot? Fuck.” Your eyes were big as you nearly drooled at the sight of his muscled torso. He was so ripped it was unbelievable. Rafe smirked at you, happy to hear that you were stroking his ego. He quickly joined you in your bed, straddling you as he hovered over you.

“Yeah?” He leaned down, lips curved up into a grin as he pressed an open mouth kiss to your lips. You nodded as his tongue laced with yours, a string of spit connecting your lips when he pulled back. “You should've just talked to me then. Could’ve had me much sooner. You got any fuckin’ idea how long I’ve been wanting to fuck you stupid?”

“How was I supposed to know? You didn’t want me before. I didn’t know.” You pouted, a bit of hurt laced in your voice. He rolled his eyes at you, long fingers coming to squeeze your face. You held your breath as his blue eyes pinned you.

“No, you just wanted to punish me. You wanted to parade yourself around Figure 8 with your pretty little dresses and your innocent little smile. But then at night you’d strip yourself naked in front of your window.” He huffed out the words, frustration coating his tongue. You shrugged. “You wanted to act like a slut, so I’ll fuck you like one. But first, I wanna taste your pussy.”

The way your body shuddered when Rafe moved down the bed to settle between your legs was embarrassing. You were already shaking and he hadn’t even touched you. You held your breath in anticipation as he reached underneath your dress, tugging your panties down your legs. Rafe grinned at the blue lacy panties that matched your white and navy blue flowy dress. You pretended not to notice him casually shove the lace into his back pocket.

“Take off your dress. I wanna look at your tits.” You totally would punch any other man for speaking to you like this, but Rafe? He could speak to you in any way he wanted, especially when he was in between your legs, nearly drooling at the sight of your already soaked cunt.

You complied, unzipping the side of your dress before pulling it over your head, to reveal that you were indeed not wearing a bra today. Rafe nearly groaned at the sight.

“Fuck baby. You’re such a slut, did you plan this?” He laughed, shaking his head in disbelief. You opened your mouth to respond, but the words were replaced by a gasp when he dipped his head and licked a stripe between your folds without a single warning.

It was actually embarrassing how quickly you were falling apart. You were a sobbing shaking mess as soon as he started to circle his tongue around your clit, sloppy sounds leaving his mouth as he moved his head up and down. Rafe was enjoying this as much as you were, how many times he fantasized about shoving his tongue into your cunt, what you would taste like, how you would sound like for him. It was driving him insane. He was groaning and moaning as he lapped at your soaking cunt.

“You taste so fuckin’ good baby. You got any idea how many times I went home to rub one out thinkin’ about your pussy?” He groaned, spitting on your clit as he looked up at you, catching the way your back arched off the bed as your eyes rolled back into your head. “Should’ve just taken you. You would’ve let me, right doll? If I slipped in through your window and fucked this sweet little pussy in the middle of the night, wouldn’t even care as long as you got some dick, right?”

His words slipped past you, only the feeling of his tongue back on your clit. You couldn’t think straight, your pussy was pulsing, it just felt so good, you didn’t remember the last time a man ate you like this, with such intensity and fervor. Rafe looked up at you again, amused by the way you squirmed and writhed on the bed. With a grin, he wrapped both arms under your knees and folded them damn near against your chest, spreading you open for him. And you couldn’t run away either.

“I asked you a question.” He spat into your clit again, this time watching as the string of saliva ran down your clit before licking it.

“Ah! Rafe! Fuck—y-yes! You can do whatever you want to me!” You sputtered, your voice breaking into a cry when he slipped his tongue into your hole. His nose bumped your clit as he fucked you with his tongue and you were nearly digging your nails into his scalp as you clutched his hair. You wanted to come so bad. “Please Rafe. I’m gonna come.”

Rafe groaned into your pussy at your words. His tongue was replaced by two thick fingers and he curled them perfectly, enough to have you thanking the Gods for having your own house separate from your parents' main house.

“Oh, fuck yeah. You look so pretty begging me to let you come. Say it again, say it again just like that f’me.” His eyes never left you as his tongue was back on your clit, his fingers slipping and curling inside your throbbing cunt in the most delicious way possible. You couldn’t even form a thought, let alone a sentence. You sobbed, your pussy pulsing around his thick fingers.

“Please Rafe! Wanna come!” You didn’t have to say it twice, the second Rafe hummed at you, his tongue lapping at your swollen clit as his fingers fucked you raw, you were over. You were a shaking mess as you came, all you could do was gasp and cry as his fingers fucked you through your orgasm, and he happily continued to basically make out with your cunt.

“That was so fuckin’ good baby. You were so good f’me.” He grunted into your thigh as he lazily wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Your eyes were screwed shut, heaving as you were still jolting from the aftershock. When you opened your eyes again you found Rafe already hovering above you, his blue eyes staring down at you with devious intentions.

“You totally look so fuckin’ hot with those glasses. You should like suck my dick with them on.” You blinked at him, mouth slightly open which made him grin at you. “Not right now, I wanna be inside you now.”

Rafe didn’t waste any fucking time in pressing your knees to your chest, your glistening pussy on full display and ready for his cock.

“I’m gonna fuck this pussy like I fuckin’ own it.” He spat, his jaw slightly falling open as he slipped into you. Your eyes rolled back almost instantly, the feeling of his cock stretching you was better than you could have ever imagined. He was so fucking big, too. “All these fuckin’ assholes lookin’ at you and I’m the only one that gets to fill this pussy, you got that?”

You nodded harshly as he bottomed out, and without a warning he pulled out only to slam back into you, his cock damn near splitting you open. You threw your arms around his neck, your fingers lacing around his hair as he slammed into you, filling you deeper than anyone ever has before.

“Just you Rafe! It’s always been you!” You grabbed his face, pulling him into a messy kiss. Your words made his cock twitch and all he wanted right then and there was to keep you here, beneath him, stuffed with his cock and never let you leave.

“Why didn’t you come back sooner, huh? This pussy is so perfect, so tight. Just f’me. Want you all the fuckin’ time baby.” He grunted into your mouth, both arms caging you in as he drilled into you, his cock so deep you could almost feel him in your fucking guts.

A string of pathetic sounds, a string of uh-uh-uh’s left your lips as he damn near folded you in half, your cute nails dragging down his back, surely to leave red angry marks. Rafe grunted in delight, his large hand coming to grab your throat. He definitely didn’t miss the way you pussy clenched around him then.

“Shit, you’re so fucking hot, yknow that? Such a pretty little slut f’me. You’re gonna let me use you, hm? Do whatever I want with you?” He squeezed your throat, forcing your head up and down in a ‘yes’ gesture and you moaned, eyes screwed shut. “Mhmm, exactly. Open your fuckin’ mouth.”

The sound that left your throat was so pathetic Rafe laughed. You did as you were told, opening your eyes as you opened your mouth, you watched him with glazed eyes as he leaned down and spat straight into your mouth. He watched you jaw slacked as you happily swallowed, feeling the bump under his fingers.

“You’re so fuckin’ nasty, I love it.” He leaned down again, his fingers tightening around your throat as he spat into your mouth again, but this time he kissed you, it was so messy and sloppy and you fucking loved it. “Act like a slut, I’ll treat you like a slut.”

“Mhmm yes! I’m such a slut, just for you.” You choked out, your throat raw and sore from the grip he had on it. He shuddered at your words, his cock twitching as he dropped his free hand to rub harsh circles around your clit. Your eyes rolled so far back you actually looked like you were spasming. “O-oh god. I’m gonna come—! Please Rafe—!”

“Ohh, feels so good, doesn’t it baby? You wanna gush all over my dick huh?” He spoke right into your cheek, his sweaty cheek pressed right against yours as he held you by your throat, your glasses getting squished by him and you were praying to the Gods that he didn’t end up breaking them.

“Please, please, please Rafe!” You sobbed, your soaked cunt pulsing around his cock, your thighs sore and shaking as you hanged on by a thread, so close to reaching your limit.

“That’s it doll, squeeze the fuck out of me, come all over my cock, just like that.” He rubbed your clit and drilled into your already abused hole until you were gushing, you whole body shaking as you fell into a fit of sobs. Rafe wasn’t one to come just like that, but the sight of you so utterly fucked out and sobbing almost made him spill right then and there.

“Ah! Rafe!” You whined as he kept fucking you, his rough hips and harsh pace not once slowing down, driving you to the point of overstimulation. You squirmed, almost as if you wanted to run away from him. He tisked at you, releasing your throat to grab your arm, holding you down as he gripped the headboard with the other, damn near crushing you with his big fucking body.

“Oh, where the fuck are you going, huh? Who said you could run away? Nah, you wanted it, so now you take it like a good girl.” He reveled in the way you took his cock, jaw agape, eyes screwed shut and forehead screwed into a frown of pleasure.

You were practically done for when he carelessly shoved your face to the side, damn near knocking your glasses off your face. His lips sucked marks on your neck as your pussy convulsed around his cock for the second time. Your head was spinning so hard and your vision was so blurry, you didn’t even know what planet you were on.

“Hmph! Rafe!” You yelped but he cut you off, a particularly sharp thrust making you slide up the mattress.

“Shut up. I’m gonna fill you. Gonna ruin every other man for you.” He spat, his voice raspy and his hair falling in front of his eyes as he chased his high.

“Please Rafe, give it to me. Want it so bad!” Well that fucking did it. A moan rumbled in Rafe’s throat as he spilled himself inside you. His eyes were screwed shut and his mouth hung wide open. He snapped his hips, one, two more times before he sat still with a long breath.

You laid speechless, blinking softly as you tried to slow your racing heart, and process that this actually happened. Sixteen year-old you would totally freak out. Rafe Cameron just fucked the life out of you. Rafe was looking down at you with a pussy-drunk look, his eyes slightly closed and his lips were parted. Not that you could see him that well. Your glasses were so smudged and foggy all you could see was blurry shapes.

“I just fucked you dumb and you’re making that face?” Rafe narrowed his eyes at you as leaned on his forearms, holding up his weight as your legs fell to either side of him. You frowned at him, confused.

“What face?”

“You’re pouting and shit.” He smirked, squeezing your face between his fingers and you shot him a pointed look, groaning.

“I forgot to take off my glasses. They’re all dirty now. Can’t see shit.” You rolled your eyes, pulling your face away from his grip as you took your glasses off and tossed them on your nightstand.

“Well you looked cute and shit so. You’re fine.” He pressed a kiss to your pouty lips before laying down beside you, the feeling of your mixed release making you hiss softly.

Rafe lied with an arm behind his head and he couldn’t help but grin when he caught you looking at him with your lip pulled between your teeth. He nudged you over with his head and you happily settled underneath his arm with your head resting on his chest. You didn’t take him for a cuddling type but you’d happily take this.

You sighed heavily, just wanting to rest your sore muscles for a bit when you heard him speak again.

“So are you gonna follow me back on insta now or what?”

#rafe cameron smut #rafe cameron x reader #rafe cameron #rafe cameron x female reader #rafe cameron x you #drew starkey

1K notes · View notes

hyukascampfire · 5 months ago

Text

THE TERRIBLE HALF-TRUTHS OF THE UNDEAD ҜING

⠀(🍂 ) 𝓡EVENANT in folklore, a revenant is a spirit or animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living ... ( 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡 )

1︎5.5k revenant!yeonjun · ƒ ! r ft. soobin ⸺ ✴︎ 𝖿𝖺𝗇𝗍𝖺𝗌𝗒 ... smut, violence, angst, death, animal death & vivid descriptions of animal death, major character death, unprotected sex, cumming inside, dry humping (because bring it back), biting, dom yeonjun sub reader, mentions of death in childbirth, reincarnation, teasing, breast worship, yj calls reader ‘my love’, def some typos

🪶 ⦂ how fun is this collab? :,) this fic was so fun to write. i personally believe that tsfawc enjoyers will love this one,, but you'll have to read it to confirm that, right? hehe. and of course, go read everybody else's if you love this one! they're all set in the same world, and everybody worked so hard on these fics. send some love their way!

rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd!

𝒪𝑁𝐶𝐸 𝒰𝑃𝑂𝑁 𝒶 𝒯𝐼𝑀𝐸, in a land far, far away, where the treetops touched the soft clouds of the sky and the water sparkled under the glowing sun, where mountains rose high, and long, deep caves ran through them, where the sea met shore in collisions of swirling, foamy punches, where the undead walked among the living, where the winged flew above the finned, there was a land where things beyond reason and rhyme existed perfectly true. Among those strange beings and within the veils of Aethera, there was a girl loved by death.

He sits on your shoulder, a dark, boding shadow and glared at those around you with promise in his eyes.

That’s how it seems, anyway. That’s how everybody looks at you. They dodge you, whisper about you, evade your gaze as if he might reach his claws for them next if they linger for too long.

Crows with dead eyes arrive at your doorstep like some lover’s cheeky gift, other poor creatures like fat grey mice are left to rot in the wheatfields, and yarrow stocks wilt outside the wall of your room. If Death thinks that you are flattered, he misunderstands you. You are terrified of nothing more than dying. The first time, it was a sly joke. Then it happened again, and you watched their eyes change. And it happened again and again, and your people are a suspicious type. Something can only be a coincidence so many times.

When you began to sneak into a little shack with a village boy, you thought that maybe, somehow, this would all pass. He died too. There’s really no coming back from that, is there? You don’t blame them. You’re not the freak that they all believe you to be—none of them get close enough anymore to know that, though.

The wickerbasket’s handle creaks under your fist. You usually only forage along the shallow line of the forest; you pluck from bramble bushes topped with plump berries that crawl between trees during the summer, and when the crab apple tree’s branches hang heavy with the fruit, you snatch those up too. You’re more useful to your family out here, in the woods that they deem just as cursed as you. Where you won’t be their burden.

Crisp autumn leaves crunch under your boots. You scan between them—more grey and rotted this late in the season than fresh and orangey—for the edible mushrooms and roots that you usually forage at this time of year. The basket’s already pretty heavy with a variety, black morels and sorrel and burdock, as you bend down to pull a truffle from the dirt against a tree.

You drop it down with the rest of your finds. The basket smells like earth, no doubt your hands do too. You dust your palms off on your skirts and go to rise back from your squat.

A deep, billowing horn pierces the forest’s silence. It’s both far away, wiggling between the whispers of rustling leaves, and much too close. It draws out. Long. Bone-chilling. You freeze, scanning between each tree trunk and praying that you won’t find what you fear you might.

You are much deeper into the woods than you usually are. Than you ought to be. And you know what that horn means—you know that it means something far worse than what you’d been afraid of, coming into these woods. Much more primordial than the hide-behinds you were scared you might find this deep, much less avoidable than the faerie rings you stepped around.

Why would The Wild Hunt be here? A shudder runs down your spine, and you curl your fingers into your skirts and lift them as if to prepare to run, but you don’t. Your feet find root in the forest floor and all you can do is stand terribly still in catatonia. Their horn sounds again, and a procession of wicked whoops and howls follow. Wild hoofbeat rumbles under it all—the hunt and their rides. You hope that they’re just passing through, and you won’t so much as see one of those wild riders. There were plenty of folktales that the matrons of your village would bolster to terrify you as children, but you knew even then that their stories of the riders, with their flesh falling away from them and their pale or beady eyes and their gnarled maws and frightening figures as they rode on the backs of equally terrible steeds, were not fabricated. They are not a bogeyman or a wailing banshee; they are death made in the flesh, and they are here. In your forest.

Your legs won’t work. You curl your clammy fingers tighter around your basket and lean into the tree beside you. How deep had you wandered into the forest? Hopefully not too far; when you gain the courage to run, you hope that they do not send their hounds to snap their foul breath on your heels. Maybe just standing here and blending into the trees is best. The Hunt would love a chase, and you don’t want to become their next.

The next call comes and you throw that all to the wind. Your heart pounds against your ribcage as you let your basket clatter to the leaves and you take off. You fly over roots and shrubbery and between the trees, your blood roaring in your ears faster. You’d oblige if you could.

Above the loudness of your frantic mind, the harrowing whinnies and The Hunt’s ruckus dulls until it’s faraway again, and then it’s gone. Well, you don’t stop to check if they’ve really passed through the forest. You just run.

“There you are, love.”

His voice cuts through your frantic escape and stops you dead in your path. You almost go crashing down over the ground with the force that you dig your heels into it. Though the voice is non-threatening, you don’t turn to face the source.

He speaks again. You already know who it is. He, old as the earth you stand on itself, leads that band of wild riders. Is the king of the undead, collects souls for reaping.

And he’s the one who’s plagued you with his attention. Death.

“Why do you keep your back turned to me?” he says. “I frighten you. That hurts.” His voice lilts with amusement and sharpness. “I wish that you would face me.”

You’re not fond of the way that he speaks to you with a familiarity. But then again, you’re not fond of dying, either. Your legs are boneless beneath you. Turning, you slowly indulge him, though it takes a great amount of willpower to not run again like your jittering jaw and trembling hands ask you to.

The King of Death stands tall and utterly preternatural, leaned against a crooked tree in the woods behind you. His smile cracks across his face in a jagged way that suggests he finds you amusing, but none of that meets his eyes. They’re the color of the greyish, rotted leaves beneath you. The dark shadows beneath his eyes are the only thing belying the weight that his infinite life might have on him. That, and the hollowness that rings from him.

And though he sounded entirely playful, you are shaken by the sorrow that you find in him now that you’ve turned. Even more so, you’re not sure why you feel it echoed somewhere in the hollows of your bones. “I’m sorry,” you say. It trembles terribly. You want to say that you’re sorry you caught his attention, but it seems you’ve always had his attention. It’s more that you are petrified down to your marrow that the time’s come that you face this… strange infatuation. Here he stands: the one who leaves hollowed out husks of creatures at your doorstep. Should you run or thank him? Is Death as prideful a creature as the other kinds that inhabit Aethera? “I don’t mean to…”

He pushes off his tree, fixing his cape that cascades over only one of his shoulders. It’s tattered and falling apart like the rest of his clothing, though you think that the bronze stitching and swirling oakleaf patterns in the black say that they might have been immaculate at some point. Or maybe they weren’t, and they had started that way. He is Death, anyway. “You’re sorry?” he says. “Why are you apologizing to me? You’ve hardly done a thing to warrant it.”

Faltering, you wet your chapped lips. You’re not really sure. Holding back another apology for fear that you’ve offended him and he’ll now strike you down for it, you say, “I thought that, maybe the hunt was…” Wow, you sound stupid. You can see in the sly smile his lips form that it amuses him. That’s almost worse than angering him: intriguing him. What you really should be doing is boring him so that he’ll find you a waste of his time. Then, maybe, he’d give up haunting you.

“After you?” he finishes. Shaking his head, he says, “My hunters only answer to me.”

“Oh,” you say plainly. Part of you wants to ask why that should comfort you, especially when you’re the one that he sends little bits of death to, but rationality keeps those words in the back of your throat. You don’t really want to know. “Why are you passing by here?”

Something akin to old longing passes through those witty eyes, and then he eats up the distance between you with languid steps of his long legs until he’s nothing more than one last step in front of you. The closeness consumes the air in your lungs, leaving nothing for you but short and shallow drags. The forest has gone dead silent aside from the sound of it. His voice is even more magnetic now that he’s so close.

You recoil when he brings a hand up to brush the pad of his thumb over your cheek and then cup your jaw, as if afraid that he might snuff you out here and now. His fingers are softer than you thought they might be, and the lines of his face sharpen into what you think is hurt. Hurt that you flinched?

“We go here and there,” he says, “but it’s been a very long time since we came here.” There’s a certain thickness to his words; a certain tension coiled over them from something that you’re not privy to. And yet, there’s a farawayness, too. You bet he’s full of a lifetime of secrets. Lifetimes of secrets. “But I think I’ve found myself a reason to finally return.”

Breathy and still struggling to flatten out your breathing, you ask him, “Why?”

The Undead King’s smile turns wicked once more, and he doesn’t answer you. It’s awfully eerie.

“Do you have… business here?” you try again. It’s a roundabout way of asking, do you have someone to take away?

“I have business wherever the living go,” he says, letting your face go but not giving you any more room. You narrow your eyes. He’s quite good at non-answers. “Nothing is more certain than that I will greet every living thing eventually. I’ll come to take you, too, when the time comes.”

Your mouth dries up. The entirety of your home, all the people you’ve ever known, fear you for all the death you bring. Not one of them fears it more than you do. You’ve seen it enough to fear its frightening finality.

The drop of your face must’ve told him how much that scared you. “Dying is not such an awful thing, love. Living pales in comparison.” Searching your eyes, he adds, “But I’ve not come to take you.”

That’s easy for him to say: that death isn’t something to fear. His words don’t calm your thundering heart, but you offer him a, “Thank you…” It trails off toward the end when you realize that you don’t have his name. If he has one, anyway.

“Yeonjun.” He tilts his head, strands of sparrow hair brushing over his watching eyes. “Most don’t know it, but you’re not most people, are you?”

Your breathing had just begun evening out. It’s a shame, the way that it kicks back up at the way he looks at you. “What do you mean?” you say, but of course you know. Nobody else is given dead things like you. It’s not like you yourself are very strange; you like pretty dresses and sharing gossip with friends just as much as any other girl your age.

Giving you another one of those knowing smiles that he uses just like words, he steps back. “I’m sorry that I scare you how I do.”

You don’t answer him. What could you say to that? That he doesn’t? That would be a lie, and he would know it.

Yeonjun’s eyes flit over your face, over your cheeks made pink by the autumn cold, lingering on your lips for a few unexplainable beats, and then landing on your eyes where he searches and finds something that sends his throat bobbing with a thick swallow. “I don’t mean to be your monster. It’s only that…” He steps back again. “You remind me a terrible amount of someone I once knew.”

“Who?” Though your shoulders relax a bit with some distance between the two of you, you do your best to not let your guard down. All the stories that you recall being told, all those cautionary tales passed down through word of mouth around a fire, end with some stupid girl thinking that the monster could be changed or tricked. You’re willing to bet that the man in front of you, no matter how human he looks or how enchanting his words are, could be neither.

That doesn’t explain the ache in your chest when he holds your eyes for too long. But you shove that feeling way, way down. It’s nonsensical.

His voice takes on a parting tilt when he says, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Death takes us all.” Yeonjun dips his head at you. His smile wavers. You’d think that crooked smile on his mouth was indelible had you not seen it twitch down at the corners only for a moment. If you’d have blinked, you’d have missed it. “You think I’ll hurt you,” he says, “well, don’t let me stop you. Go ahead, run. I apologize for your basket.”

Death takes us all. You’re not sure what that’s supposed to mean, coming from him, but it sends a cold wind up your spine and goosebumps crawling over your skin.

He watches you go. You don’t look back when you do, but his gaze sits on your back until you’re sure you’re out of his sight. When you return to your home, your mother asks where the basket full of ingredients for supper went.

You imagine what her face might look like if you told her the truth. But that was impossible, so instead you tell her some stupid story about a wolf that startled you so bad that you ran home paying no mind to where your basket was. It’s close enough to the truth.

༺ ꘏ ༻

It doesn’t matter what you do; you can’t get his face out of your head. While you cut butter into flour and then roll out dough, simmer fruits over flame and you slice cheese off blocks, you replay that meeting in the forest. The memory spins and turns over no matter how hard you try to put it away from your thoughts.

It’s not every day that somebody meets the likes of him. You can’t blame yourself; he had such captivating eyes. Dark, playful, and endless. There they are again. You sigh and dust your hands off. Maybe you are just as strange as they all think that you are. Morbid curiosity is like that, though. Taking the most normal of us and making you wonder what you absolutely should not wonder about.

And you absolutely should not wonder about him.

The sun has begun to hang high in the sky, but the breeze that crawls through the window you pulled open before you got to work is a crisp one. Autumn’s really come, now. Outside the window, a huddle of children play around in the leaves that you’d raked up. You’ll have to rake those back up, but you hardly have the heart to tell them to take their playing elsewhere. Their giggles and small voices waft in with the breeze, and a traitorous part of you yearns for a family that you know you’ll never have. No man would risk that fate, not after what happened to the last man who paid you any attention. You grit your teeth at the memory.

Having a face for the thing that’s made your life the way it is is strange. Seeing him in the flesh, with handsome eyes and a taunting mouth, looking something near human, you think you’ve come to resent him for it. How dare he ruin your life? He, more than anybody, should know how fleeting life is. What is in it for him to deface what little time you have? You keep going back to that thought: why did he ever even appear to you in that forest? There is not one story in which you remember Yeonjun showing his face to those he hasn’t come to claim. Death makes his visits swift and purposeful.

Moreover, why on earth would he even look your way? You wish there was a plain way to ask him why, or even to plead with him to stop. Whatever it is he’d ask of you, you think you might give him. To get back to living, you would.

A deep, familiar voice from behind you gives you pause. “Want some help with that?” Soobin says. He stands in the doorway, his head nearly brushing the top of the frame. It’s made too small for him. Most things in your tiny village were made too small for Soobin. There had been a time where you’d been taller than him, that had hardly lasted long enough.

“As if,” you dismiss and gesture at his dirty hands. He’d no doubt been out working his family’s field, his tunic sleeves rolled up to his elbows. “Cow shit isn’t an ingredient.”

Anybody else might’ve scoffed or taken offense, but he just laughs and invites himself in anyway. It never fazes Soobin. He doesn’t let you push him away.

It’d be better if he did. How long before he ends up dead, too? Alive one moment, and then a husk without a soul next. You don’t think you could handle seeing cold, dead eyes where the annoying, warm shine should be. Of course it would be better if he stayed away, if he had half the mind to. Even most of the children have heard enough from their mothers to stay a healthy distance. He’s not too much better than a child, though.

“Isn’t it?” he says. His cheek is smudged with whatever sort of dirt he’s got on his hands and under his nails. “I’m done with work for the day. Want to go out to the field?”

You two have always ran off and avoided your life in between willowy, flaxen wheat stocks. They were just tall enough at this time of year to hide you away. But, for some reason, your stomach does a quick flip at the thought of being outside. It’s silly; couldn’t he find you here, too? “I’m busy,” you say. You’d already kneaded this roll of dough plenty, but you dig your fingers into it and begin again.

“Busy?” he scoffs, “Since when are you too busy to get away from work?”

Gritting your teeth, you let the sounds of your kneading answer. Now, more than ever, he should keep his distance. You know one thing that you’re sure nobody else does: Death’s come to visit.

His brows shoot up in your peripherals. “I don’t get answers today?”

“I’m sorry,” you say, giving up working the over-kneaded dough only because your arms ache. “Why don’t you go talk off the ear of some other poor village girl? I’ve heard as much as I can handle today. And then when that one’s tired, you can bother the next, I’m sure.” You soften the words with a quick smile his way. No matter how many times you say something sour in hopes that it’ll send him away, as soon as you glance up at his face, you reel it in.

His company is all you’ve ever had. The least you can do for him is make sure he doesn’t end up like carrion, even if he chooses to take that risk himself. You don’t know why he does.

Voice playful, he says, “I’m glad to hear that you believe I’ve got ladies falling at my feet, but I’d rather not annoy a pretty girl, so you’re my only option.” He pokes at the sleeve of your simple cotton dress. “Should I drag you out of here? Don’t your arms hurt doing all that?”

“Oh, you are a refined man, aren’t you?” you say, shuffling out of his reach. Damn him, he makes it difficult. “Well, I am a pretty girl, so you should take yourself elsewhere.”

Soobin smiles easy. “I’m bored out of my mind. You’re just going to let me suffer?”

“That’s not my issue.”

“I’d argue that it is,” he says. “Come on. Why are you giving me a cold shoulder?” Leaning, he tries to get a look at your face. “Did I upset you? I wasn’t aware that you cared much about what I thought.” When you spare him a sharp glance, he says, “I think you are very, very beautiful. Would you stop ignoring me, now?”

You wish you could fall into the easy banter that comes with being around Soobin, but you can’t. You can’t let him be around you. “Soobin, stop it,” you say, draining your voice. You don’t look at him while you say it.

Going quiet, he seems to notice that today’s different. His gaze is heavy as he stares at you for a few long moments. Crossing his arms over his chest, he asks, “What happened?”

You swallow. “Nothing. I’m just doing something.”

“Oh, alright,” he says, tone inflicting in a way that says he doesn’t believe you one bit. He pushes off the counter. “I’ve put up with you pushing me away for years. You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Soobin,” you warn. If you look at him, you fear you’ll be forced to watch the only one who never cared much what a risk it was being around you leaving. So you don’t.

Your friend raises his hands in the air defensively. “Okay, then.” He makes for the doorway with languid, lingering steps. As if he doesn’t want to leave. “Tomorrow..”

That’s both a threat and a promise, knowing him. Sighing and watching the rowan tree out your window sway, you bid him a curt goodbye.

If only that jerk took offense to things. It would make things an awful lot easier for you.

༺ ꘏ ༻

Being out in the wheat fields brings you peace when you’re alone, but you find it to be terribly lonely. The earthy, sweet scent of it wraps around you, and the stalks whisper against each other in a soothing way.

When you look beside you, the patch of wheat imprinted with the shape of your bodies is empty on his side. You are quite weak; it makes you want to go knocking at his door for his company. But that would be the selfish thing to do, so you card your fingers between the golden straw instead.

A chill trickles down your spine. You feel his presence before you even see him; it’s a feeling that you used to get fleetingly, as if something far away was tugging at you. But then he became real, a living thing in front of you that can touch, and that is much different.

“Why is it that I always find you out in the wilderness?” Yeonjun says. His voice comes from behind you.

Has he been watching you? You stand and dust your bottom off, heart kicking to life. “It’s nice out here,” you say. In truth, you haven’t come outside since that day. You’ve dodged Soobin and made a million excuses as to why you won’t go anywhere past the fences of your home. “I like to… watch people go about their days. It’s interesting.” It’s true—you always watch from afar how the village folk interact. How groups of girls your age link arms and whisper to each other, how neighbors come together to fix up a shoddy fence. You watch them be a community that you are not a part of. Watching it tastes bitter sometimes, but mostly you take pleasure in imagining yourself there with them. You’re not sure why you try making small talk with him, but what else? Should you go running again? If you were to listen to your pattering heart, maybe that’s what you’d do. He’s hardly shown you any bad will, though, and he’s the one that’s come to you. Maybe it’s silly to wait until something bad happens to be cautious.

A thousand pounds in stones sit at the center of your chest, though, and his voice makes them feel lighter. Why on earth that is, you’re not sure. It’s a nice relief regardless.

He smiles. It's different from the ones he showed you before. It’s knowing; more sweet than cracking over his face like the smile you would expect from the likes of him. What use might he have in being sweet? “Could I join you?”

Blinking dumbly at him for a second, you nod. “Oh, uh… Yeah.” Settling back down into your spot, you spare him a few curious sideways glances.

The breeze billows over the gold stems, moving them like gentle waves over the ocean and blowing your hair in it too. The flattened bits rustle under his weight. He doesn’t even turn his face toward the village; instantly, his gravitational eyes are on you.

“Do you come here often?”

“I do,” you answer. Mostly when you and Soobin have too much to do and not enough will to do it. “It’s nice. The village doesn’t like me much, so it’s easier out here.” You don’t mention that mostly you don’t come here alone.

Yeonjun’s face becomes far away. It looks strikingly like somebody forced into an old, unpleasant memory. “Don’t like you?” he asks, “What reason would they have for that?”

“They fear me. Things go wrong around me, that’s all.” You pluck at the hay absentmindedly. “Things die. They’re smart to stay away.”

The hay whispers much louder for the long moment he remains quiet, digesting what you’ve said. Maybe deciding what to say, considering that it’s his fault.

“Die?” he asks, voice inflected with surprise.

Turning to him, your brow creases. Shouldn’t he know? He’s the one that’s done it to you. “Everything that gets too close ends up dead. Everything,” you say, resting your temple on your knee. “So, I guess, I just keep it all at arm’s length.” You look back at your tiny village, a collection of familiar, un-familiar thatch-roof homes.

Continuing to blink at you, his eyes narrowed in a strange grimace, Yeonjun says, “Death follows me, too.”

What? A laugh of disbelief bubbles up in your chest. Of course, death follows him. You cover your mouth with a hand to obscure your laugh, but you just giggle at him harder.

A laugh twitches at the corners of his mouth, too. “I mean it,” he says. The lines of his face become distant again, eyes both trained on your face and melancholic as if the sight reminds him of something.

It ignites a question in your mind about something he said in the forest. “You said that I reminded you of somebody,” you say, testing the waters. “Who?”

A muscle feathers in his jaw. He looks away, as if he can’t look at you while he says it. “I loved a girl from this village once. When I was human, no less than you.”

You falter, mouth falling open to ask all the questions that flurry through your thoughts. You settle on one. “You were human?”

“I was,” he says ruefully. “And I had everything. I had the love of my life. I think that even the most bitter of creatures on this island had envy for our love. She would braid dandelions into my hair, and then I’d braid them into hers.” He swallows thickly and pauses, as if the wound was still festering and fresh. “And then she died. She died starting our family. She died because of me, in my arms.”

You don’t know what to say, so you just look into his shining eyes as if that’ll help. You’re not very useful with people, much less comforting them.

“I couldn’t accept that. I wouldn’t. So I went where I shouldn’t have gone, and angered something much bigger than myself. They thought it would be a fitting punishment for me to live an eternity, the King of Death who could not bring back his dead lover.” The harrowed look that he gives you, only briefly, has your chest heavy all over again. “They have a sense of humor, the forces.”

You imagine what it would’ve been like for him to lose his lover in that way. How far he’d gone to try and have her back, but death does not give back. Where had he gone to have been turned into this? An immortal thing, forced to roam the world and scoop up the souls of the living for an eternity? To be bound in ancient bones and made to remember forever how you had lost your lover?

The grandness of what you want to say is too big, but all those words feel pitying and patronizing in a way that you don’t think will actually bring him any comfort. Rather, you doubt anything you say will be able to patch up a wound older than you could imagine. Simply, you offer him a raw, “I’m so sorry.”

Yeonjun lets a crooked smile replace the trembling at his lips. “As long as I live, so too will she,” he says, placing his palm over his heart. “Death doesn’t so much happen when we leave behind our bodies, but when we’ve left the minds of the living.” Narrowing his eyes at you, he brushes hair behind your ear with his knuckles. “I know she lives on, somewhere out there. Somewhere. I’ll find her.”

That intrigues you. “Is there some way that you could bring her back?”

The grim light in his eyes tells you his answer. “My curse is to take life,” he says, “not to give it. But the one who made me this, he is cruel in a twisted way. If I were to find her, as a human or an animal or a blade of grass in the forest, only then could I rest.”

It is cruel. “You’ve been searching, then,” you conclude. “When you find her, you’ll both be able to rest.” But how could he find her, if as he says, she could be any living thing? Where would he even begin?

Slowly, he shakes his head, throat bobbing. “Death needs a farrier.”

She would become what he is. You swallow thickly. Was it not him who caused the deaths that follow you? Or, at least, it was not on purpose?

Opening your mouth, you go to tell him that you’ll help him look. You’re sure you’ll be of no help. He’s spent an immortal lifetime searching, and he still hasn’t found his dead lover. Nobody would know better than him where to look.

The ground shakes beneath your palms with impact, and something cuts through the wheat. The noise of its bleating becomes nearer until the both of you scramble up to find out what’s in such distress.

A deer stumbles around wildly. It looks lame, but you don’t see anything wrong with its legs. Your throat tightens at the awful sound, piercing and sad. Frozen, you watch it try to stay upright before it finally collapses down, legs still kicking as though it still wants to run but its body has begun weakening on it. “Oh my god,” you say, stumbling back. The sounds; its sounds are awful, echoing in your bones and constricting your thoughts until they’re a pinched panic.

There’s an arrow lodged into its ribcage, deep and at a terrible angle. You already know that it’s pierced some vital organs, if not its heart. It continues to writhe on the ground, not ready to give up. You’re not sure if you should approach it—you don’t want to scare it, and you can tell by the look in its wet eyes that it already wants to be away from you.

Or, maybe it had come to you. How else had it found the two of you in the middle of this field?

Yeonjun’s already on it. He puts his knees into the dirt and dried wheat to kneel by it, running his hand over the beast's pelt in long strokes. The small buck flinches at first but relaxes once he learns that his touches are gentle, not the gnashing of hungry teeth ready to make him a meal.

Blood runs like lead through your veins. You say, “Can we help it?”

He shakes his head. “He’ll die.”

Whip-lashed, you swallow thickly. He says it so unphased, and you’re sure he is. You can hardly make yourself mirror that serenity that he exudes as he runs his hand over its flank, but you get on the ground beside him anyway.

The buck’s breaths slow to desperate drags for breath. For a few long minutes, the two of you sit in silence and stay with him until he no longer fights, until his breaths are ragged. You feel his side, still warm and alive, but you see the life going from his eyes. You sit here, talking to each other about nothing just so it hears gentle voices as it goes, for a while.

Eventually, he’s gone. Quiet and at peace, no longer hurting. This time, when you look over to Yeonjun who still smooths over the deer’s skin even as he goes, guiding him delicately into whatever greets us when we go, you see death as a gentle thing.

༺ ꘏ ༻

Though you never seek him out, Yeonjun always finds you. In hidden places, away from prying eyes, he appears behind you and makes himself known. Well, you have a feeling that he watches you for a while before saying anything. It’s hard not to feel the strange tingling of his gaze over your form. It’s akin to the sixth sense that’s supposed to keep you safe out in the dark hearts of forests, an innate feeling that tells you some beast with a rotten, pale maw watches you between the trees.

Yeonjun doesn’t feel rotten, though, preternatural and eerie as he is. As you shirk your duties and talk with him for hours, you stare into ancient eyes and watch his crooked mouth move around his words and you feel an odd comfort. As if he’s the only one who’s ever understood you, or maybe that your strangeness pales beside him and for once you’re nothing but who you are. So many nights, the sun fell on your talking until the night insects buzzed from the grasses and your eyes were heavy.

Sometimes, as you dozed off with your back to a hay bale or a hardwood wall of the abandoned home beside yours with its sagging thatched roof, you caught such festering longing in his his eyes that you’d let your lashes fall and pretend to sleep so that you could imagine what it was that he longed for. No doubt his lost lover. When you imagine him, bound in bones and coming back to haunt the living for an eternity as he mourns her infinitely, searching for her in impossible places, your chest aches with a gnawing intensity.

It’s a terrible, cursed existence. Even the nothingness of death becomes a paradise beside it.

“Is it scary?” you ask into the air, sat criss-crossed on the thick duvet of the bed. He sits across from you, looking perfectly lazy. Moonlight pools in like sterling mist through the shutters.

“What?” He watches you, sitting in your plain dress, as though you’re the only thing in the world.

You’ve begun to wonder. Wonder about those looks he gives you.

Shifting, you fix the shoulder of your soft chemise where it’s slipped down when you catch his eyes lingering on it. His throat bobs. “Dying,” you elaborate. “Is it really nothing? After we go, all of it was for nothing?”

A slow smile tugs his full lips, made a bit red in the middle where he likes to worry it. It’s such a human habit to see on something so far from human. “Hardly,” he says. “It’s like going home, right where your soul is supposed to be. Who do you think rides with me?”

Furrowing your brows, you tilt your head toward one shoulder and let your hair pool there. “The riders are dead?” You had thought they were undead in some way like Yeonjun, other sorts of revenants come back to life with their own purposes. Then, are their creepy horses dead, too? A chill goes down your arms. Sometimes, sitting here with him when his face is made soft by the orange glow of the fire he puts on, you forget what he is.

“They are.” He nods, leaned back onto his elbows, his eyes alight with a hunger that makes your insides feel funny. “It doesn’t stop once we’ve died. You don’t need to be scared, my love. So many things end, but then so many things begin. The earth no longer holds you down, the weight of being is gone. You don’t know anything like it; you don’t know leaving behind the pleasures of earth to know the ones that only the afterlife can show you.”

His eyes laced with something entirely else, he adds, “And it’s not the end. Not for everything. For some it’s only the beginning, and for others, those who have not yet fulfilled their purpose, they come back to the flesh. They return.”

You can’t tell if he means himself, or something else. The weight in his eyes, dark, endlessly swirling pools, makes you wonder again why it is that he’s lingering here: the place that he had not visited once since the death of his lover, for the fact that it still hurts too much. Why his shadow of death, his fault or not, was tangled in your soul enough to brush its fingers over the things around you.

“It’s scary,” you say, breathy. The thought of eternity.

Soft hairs brush over his eyes as he tilts his head at you. “Do I scare you?”

“No.”

“No?” he echos, pushing himself up so that he leans back onto his palms. “Isn’t that strange? Pretty little thing says she’s not afraid of death, but her heart races when I’m near. Her sweet heart jumps at just the brush of my leg. Are you sure you’re telling me the truth, love?”

Your blood roars in your veins, inflaming your cheeks and making your head dizzy. Nobody’s ever looked at you like that before. Hair prickles on your skin. “Yes,” you breathe.

Feral delight sparks in his eyes, black as pitch. His smile turns up all feline at the crooked corners. “Crawl to me, then.”

Like how fire licks up oxygen in any room it is in, his words steal the breath right from your lungs. What does he think you are? You blink at him wide-eyed and dumb for a moment.

How can he say that as though it were nothing? Moreover, how does the ravenous flare in his eyes, his head tilted back as he watches you down his nose expectantly, do that to your belly?

Your mind glazes over with something thick and heady, and you damn the nerves in your belly and begin to crawl from your end of the bed to his. His tongue darts out to wet his lips, making sure you feel every inch of the taunt in his eyes as he trains them on you. When you’ve gotten to him through the thickness in the air, you settle into his lap and bracket his waist with your thighs.

Yeonjun takes the soft fat of your hips in his fingers. “Fuck,” he says. It sounds like he’s barely holding the gates on something endlessly consuming. Something that might break loose on the two of you, and leave you changed forever with its hungry, gnashing teeth. His head hits your collarbone. “Tell me to stop. Please, tell me to go. Because I don’t know how.”

“Don’t,” you say. “Don’t stop. I want it, Yeonjun. I want this.”

He straightens, pupils blown and eyes as tense as his set jaw. “No, you don’t understand what you’re asking for. All I’ve ever done is ruin. All I’ll ever do is ruin. I won’t ruin you; not again.”

That rings bells somewhere outside the heavy fog that’s infiltrated your mind, but they don’t sound too alarming when he looks as though he wants to drag his teeth over your heart to taste its beating. It doesn’t touch the ground, when you want him to, so badly. So badly that you taste it on your tongue and it tinges your words as you tell him, “I do know what I’m asking for. I want you. Yeonjun. Don’t you want me too?” Voice and confidence wavering, you pull back. Maybe you’ve read this all wrong. A tickling shame crawls over your skull. “Do you not want me?”

“You think I don’t want you?” he says, straightening up and meeting your gaze. His breath is hot on your mouth. “I want you so fucking bad. You are in the marrow of my bones. Fuck, I have done nothing but want you, but I am foul. I will only hurt you.”

He takes your hand and places it over his chest, where a heart should be. Beneath your palm, you do not feel the thumping of an alive thing. Yeonjun has no heart. You knit your brows and examine the strain of his features. Does he think that you’ll be disgusted? Maybe the girl you were in that forest might’ve been, but being near Yeonjun has changed you in ways you couldn’t start to put your finger on. “I’m asking you to,” you say. “Show me what you want to do to me. What you’ve wanted to do to me.”

Searing silence burns between you as he drinks that in, and then he shoves you onto your back. Supporting himself with an arm beside your head, he curls his fingers into your hip and nudges your thighs wider. He doesn’t lift the hem of your chemise like you expect him to. No—Yeonjun begins to grind himself into your cunt through all the layers of your clothes. Though your dress is bunched up and his pants lay between any real contact, Yeonjun’s hard and that friction tastes fleetingly sweet.

“I want you to beg me for it,” he says, grinning down at you with cruel intention. “Beg me, and make it so pretty.”

You let little sounds linger in that back of your throat and become hungrier each time he grinds against you. It’s so much, mind swimming and sparks spraying up your spine, and yet each time it is not near enough. Damn that foxish smile on his face; you beg for him anyway. “Yeonjun,” you breathe, curling your fingers around the wrist of that hand with which he pins your hip. “P…lease, will you help me? It feels so good; I want more, please.”

He raises his eyebrows at you and an eager grind comes right over your throbbing clit.

You know he wants more than that, but mortification already is making your voice unsteady and your cheeks burn. “Yeonjun,” you huff, hips wiggling.

The king of the undead delights fully in your shame and rewards you with more of those pointed, dry grinds. Your legs tremble; he’s giving you so little, and yet your need takes it and magnifies it into something grand.

Though he pretends he’s on some high ground, you hear his shuddering breaths each time his fucks his hips against you. He feels that roiling, liquid need in his belly just as vehemently as you do. The room fills with your breathy pants and grinding bodies. You catch your lip in your teeth and begin to meet him half-way. Your moans are low and sweet, and each one sends his jaw tighter.

You twist and grind against each other like fumbling teens until you’re coiled up so tight that he has to pull himself away. Your throbbing cunt protests, but you know he doesn’t want you cumming like this.

“You want me to show you what I’ve wanted to do to you?” he says, working at his pants. His eyes are so drunk on you, and his cheeks betray his state. “Open your legs, my love. Let me show you a little death.”

Throat gone dry, you slowly let your thighs fall open. The dull throbbing between your thighs roars to life. He slides your skirt up your leg, stopping when he frees your knee to pepper a few hot kisses into it. Once he’s got it bunched up at your ribcage, he runs his tongue over his dry lips to wet them. “Fuck. Such a pretty pussy. I want to fucking eat you up.”

“Yeonjun,” you whine. His name is all you can muster out, anticipation sharpened to a knife point.

Flashing his teeth, he purrs, “You like that, you filthy thing. I bet you’d like for me to fuck you till your brain’s gone and all that’s left is my name. Isn’t that right? Is that what you want?”

Your thoughts stall and you nod, making your mouth into a filthy pout. God, how you want that. Maybe he’s right about you being filthy. Coming from him, it sounds like a delicious thing to be.

The pretty, leaking tip of his cock brushes your clit as he slides it up and down your slit to collect the mess there. Your thighs jump to close before your mind gets the better of it. He does this a few times—up and down, letting you feel and get used to the size and length of him all the way till his cockhead kisses your clit and you squeak.

“Are you comfortable, love?” he asks, shifting your hips with strong hands. “Do you need anything from me?”

It’s so at odds with his other, nastier words. Your head spins, the moonlight blurring. “I’m okay,” you tell him. “I… just want you. Want you to put it in, want to feel you.”

His cock catches on your hole, and he begins to push forward with promising pressure. But then he pulls back, smiling downturned. You whine; why can’t he save his capriciousness for later? You’d almost had it…

“I could give it to you, or I could not…” He hums. “Wouldn’t that be so cruel of me? To leave you wanting?”

You flutter around nothing. Every inch of your body buzzes. Alive. You are more alive now, at the promise of Death’s touch, than ever before. The irony might be something to wonder about if you weren’t dribbling down onto the bed sheets with crude need. “Stop it,” you say. Your voice is whiny. You’re glad you can hardly hear yourself past the pounding in your bloodstream.

That delights the King of Death. He wrinkles his nose at you, burning you alive with his eyes as he presses his palm to your belly and guides himself into you with his free hand. You wrap around each inch of him slowly. The air between you bows under the weight of your gazes; he holds your eyes the whole way, inch by inch until he’s seated fully into you with his groin flush to your body. He stretches you to fit, and yet it’s just right. You could ask for no more or no less; you might even think your body was made for him, were you not too busy circling your hips to feel him.

“Good?” he says, squeezing your hip. “Do you need a moment?”

Pursing your lips, you test out the shape of him with another wiggle. “Maybe… Maybe a second.” Truth be told, you need a moment to grapple with the sparks sprinkling over your mind more than you need a moment to adjust to his stretch. You let out a shuddering breath.

He traces circles into your belly, just beneath your navel. The pad of his thumb goes round and round, warm on your flesh. “As long as you need,” he says, but it’s more like a triumphant, playful coo. There’s that lopsided smirk. One day, you’d like to kiss it off him. Taking that hypnotizing finger, Yeonjun trails it up your stomach, over your ribcage. He hooks it beneath your dress and drags it higher, revealing the soft swells of your breasts to the air. You shudder, body so, so hot that your nipples peak and tighten against the cool air.

“Such pretty tits,” he says, brushing his knuckle up the underside of one. “Everything about you. Such a pretty, pretty body. God, I don’t know if I want to worship it or ruin it.” His breaths fan over your skin as he bends down and pops an eager nipple into his mouth, lavishing it before releasing it with a lewd pop and letting his mouth fall all over your breast. Lick here, nip there, until you’re squirming adequately and squeezing him like a virgin. Then he blows cool air over it and watches with eyes like a cat toying with its prey as you shudder harder, your chest jumping. “Fucking look at you,” he sneers.

“Junnie,” you say, lost for breath. You think you’ve walked yourself into the lion’s den.

His breathy laughs fall over your breast. Taking his teeth, he drags them over your skin, right over where your heart thunders a rhythm fully for him, and then he bites. Nothing more than a shallow mark, the shape of his teeth in your soft tit. He lingers there, admiring the sight before he straightens himself up again.

“Fine.” He pulls out of you slowly, but you know what comes after that, so you savor every second of it. “I suppose you’ve wanted after it long enough. Let me hear your sweet voice again, my love.”

Yeonjun fucks you just right. His cock nudges right up on your sweet spot as if he’s done this before. Like he knows where to find it. You gasp and whine—you’re just happy he’s finally giving you something.

“Oh, fuck,” you mewl. His shoulders wear the red crescent marks of your nails. “That’s—so good right there.”

Ever egotistical and cocky, he croons, “Yeah?” Rolling himself back, he makes it his mission to hit it ruthlessly.

A sharp, pitchy sound comes tumbling past your lips. You bring your hand up over your mouth, letting your eyelids dust your burning cheeks so that you can brave the flipping in your spine and deep in your belly. It’s nearly insufferable—the way pleasure licks up your spine, how it spreads out into your veins and takes control of you.

“No,” Yeonjun growls. “Don’t you dare close your eyes. Let me see that look in your eyes when you cum.”

Your eyes are heavier than they’ve ever been, but you open them. The sight that greets you is worth the effort. Yeonjun’s lip twitches and then he throws his head back, the column of his neck on display as his Adam's apple jumps around a thick swallow.

If that sight wasn’t enough to send you teetering down into whatever depths of lust and ecstasy that he crawled out from, then the angle he hits as he pushes one of your thighs to your chest is. The world frays, deep tremors starting at one small point in your cunt and then exploding up through your stomach and down the back of your thighs. Your chest arches off the bed and you mewl helplessly, fighting and embracing your orgasm in an intoxicating death.

“Oh, fuck,” Yeonjun growls, strained with something whinier as he watches you shake beneath him. “Fuck. I’m gonna—fuck, I’m gonna cum…” His voice chokes as his hips become stuttered more than pointed, the slick sounds of your own release tangling up with his grunts and pants until he shudders and stills, cumming into your puffy, fluttering cunt.

You both catch your breaths as if there’s no air in the room left for a while. His hair’s damp on his forehead, as is yours on your neck, and his eyes droop lazily. More lazy and content than you’ve ever seen him.

Collecting you to his chest, where only your heart thumps away frantically, he presses his mouth to your ear and says, “Do you think death is so scary now?”

With your limbs nothing more than boneless and liquid pleasure floating slowly through your thoughts, you smile.

A little death can be more visceral than living, you think.

༺ ꘏ ༻

The tree stump beneath you makes your tailbone ache. You sit criss-crossed, watching Soobin work away at the soil and tend to that section of the fence that’s begun to rot and sag. Your mouth moves endlessly, filling the space that would otherwise just be made up of his grunts of hard work.

“You know, you ought to help me if you’re just going to sit and watch,” he says, straightening to swipe at his forehead, sweaty despite the cold in the air.

“Totally improper,” you say, smiling at him cheekily. “Are you saying that you can’t handle yourself, strong man?”

He glares at you with the venom only somebody made to put up with hours of chatter could muster. “What’s got you so talkative?” he says.

You know he means why you’re suddenly not glaring him away. You can’t tell him that you’ve spoken with Death himself, so instead you say, “Nothing.” Letting your legs dangle down, you smile at him.

Yeonjun hadn’t done any of it. It’s a comfort, to some degrees, to know that. It’s not your fault that they died. Being around them, being around Soobin, won’t make them turn up dead. The rest of them still don’t know that—and they wouldn’t believe it, anyway—but the black shadow hanging over your shoulders dissipates.

For the first time in so, so long, you do not feel marked by death.

“Sure.” His smile tilts. “A week ago, you wouldn’t even look at me.”

Rolling your eyes, you decide to give him a hard time. “Not true. You just have a way of getting on my nerves.”

“I take pride in that.”

“Take pride in what? Being insufferable?”

Crinkling his nose, he says, “Knowing how to bother you best.”

“Get back to work, stupid.” Your heart soars. It’s good to have friends. To let yourself have friends is an ever better thing. Is this how it is? To be with others and not feel like their burden, or like they’re crossing their fingers behind their back to ward off whatever bad things you might bring onto them? He’s made it his mission to hover around you no matter what, but this feels different.

Maybe, for so long, part of it has been your own gloom that’s obscured it all. Maybe if you didn’t bare your teeth to anybody who got too close, it could’ve been like this always. You hate to think that your own isolation could be some part your own fault. But how were you not to show your teeth when someone tried to reach their hand out to you?

It doesn’t matter now. You shove that all down and let yourself feel the slight warmth of the sun’s glow on your skin where it peeks through the clouds. It’s a nice day, you shouldn’t ruin it with those thoughts.

The sun’s begun making its descent when Soobin’s done. He takes a long drink of water, hissing with relief and crumpling down to the ground with his back to your stump.

“Are you making any way with that girl you were talking to me about?” you prompt.

Giving you a long look over his shoulder, he says, “Don’t.”

“What?” You laugh a little, raising your brows down at him. “I’m not doing anything.”

“You know what you’re doing,” he says, voice flat as he picks stickers out of his fingers.

Soobin’s had a thousand different crushes. There was that daughter of the shepherd, and then the wealthy merchant’s daughter and her long pretty hair, and then the neighbor… Well, you could go on. None of them ever really came to fruition for the poor guy. He thinks that it’s because he’s a poor farmer’s son, but you always tell him that it’s because he’s got an insistent mouth, and that he should be more grateful that you deal with him. Your lips turn up at the corners a little thinking about it—he’ll find the one eventually, but you like the indignant look on his face when you say it.

“I mean it!” you say, nudging him with your leg. “Tell me. I want to know.”

“You won’t even tell me what’s happening with you. Until one of us quits keeping secrets,” he says, placing accusation heavy over the words, “I’ll keep my dealings to myself. What’s it to you, anyway?”

Feeling the weight of his head as he lets it loll lazily against your thigh, you decide that it couldn’t hurt to tell him. The itch to tell somebody crawls under your skin. Especially to tell him. “You know the other day? When I was… being awful?”

His body shakes with a vindicated laugh. “If you’re nothing else, at least you’re self-aware.”

You skirt around that with your own, more awkward, laugh. It’s nice that he thinks so, but you don’t feel it. “Stop,” you huff and nudge him again. “I was foraging out where I usually go. But I guess I wandered out farther than I thought I did. You remember when they used to tell us stories, right? Like the bogeyman. That he’d come snatch us up if we didn’t listen.” Your mom especially had loved that one, back when she cared what became of you. Would she care again, if you told her that everything was fine? “Well, I don’t know if you remember the one about The Wild Hunt, but… Anyway, I was picking some stuff, and…”

Sitting up from his exhausted slouch, Soobin looks like he’s suddenly come back to life. “What?” he interrupts. His voice is strangely serious.

“What?” you say, brow creasing. “They travel here and there… but they were here. In the woods. Like, I heard them.”

Tersely, he asks, “What were you doing that deep in the woods?”

“I mean, I just kept on finding nice stuff until I just… was deeper.” You survey him. You hadn’t thought that he’d react like this. “So I ran, and then there was this guy,” you say, watching realization fall over his face. He knew those stories as much as you do—knew where you were going with this. He is as starkly superstitious as the rest of your people, you forgot. Pushing past the grimace on his face, you say, “And I knew that he was the king. The one from the stories. It was so weird; it’s like you can feel it. And I spoke to him, and then…”

Stood up now, he cuts you off once more. “Are you kidding?”

“Why are you being like that?” you say, messing with your skirts to quell the defensive bite in your tone. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything? Are you trying to get killed?” He throws up his hard-working hands. “We have rules for a reason. Don’t go out into the forest, don’t make deals with faeries, don’t follow a banshee scream. And then you go and talk to the king of death? How am I not supposed to be upset about that? You know that…” Soobin blinks a few times as if second-guessing what he’s about to say, but he says it anyway. “You know that he’s the reason that they treat you how they do. You know that he’s the one who ruined your life. Why would you ever mess with that?”

You push yourself up from the ground, eyes burning. That stings like a cut. “He didn’t do it. None of it is his fault,” you say, furrowing your brows. “What are you trying to say, Soobin? Just say what you want to say. Come on.”

“He didn’t do anything?” He scoffs, letting a heavy silence hang suspended in the air for a moment before saying, “Is that what he told you? And you just believed it? Listen to yourself, does that make any sense? He’s played with your life like it’s some fucking toy, and now he’s come to rub it in your face. Think about it: do animals just fly into anybody else’s windows and die? Do the trees that they pick from just end up dead? It’s his fault that they all treat you the way you do.”

Mouth opening and closing, you don’t know what to say.

He sees the hurt in your burning eyes and tries to reel it back in. “What I’m trying to say is—”

“I know what you’re saying,” you say, grabbing up the lunch you’ve been nibbling on. “I know exactly what you’re saying. I just never thought you’d say it out loud.”

“Say what?” Soobin says, his voice raising behind you as you storm off.

That you think it’s my fault, you want to say. That they all die because I am a plague, and you are a charity worker for being my friend. Instead, you just leave and try to choke down the tightness in your throat.

༺ ꘏ ༻

You curl your arms around yourself, the night biting cold. Yeonjun had dragged you from bed, and who knows what hour of the night it is? If the heaviness beneath your eyes is to judge it by, it’s far too deep in the dead of night to be outside with your boots half-laced and nothing but your sleep chemise on.

You might’ve just stayed wrapped up in your blankets if you weren’t so lonely as you’ve been. Soobin’s been scarce. The most you see of him is in the fields from morning to afternoons. You hope that he’ll stop by your doorstep and knock so that you can groan about it but swing the door open anyway each time, but he doesn’t. He thinks that you won’t want to see him, and so he allows you your space.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s hard to be the one to come back after a conversation like that, though. You watch him from the windows and hope he understands at some point instead. It’s an awful lot easier.

Other than preparing meals and window watching, you’ve been up to nothing much at all. You hadn’t realized how much you had, but you feel him in his absence.

“It’s cold…” you say. The fog of breath that punctuates it makes your point. Whatever he’s brought you out here for, you have no doubt it’ll be something strange. The grin on his face tells you as much.

Leading the way, he heads for the Darkwood. “Only you would come rushing out without a cloak for your shoulders.”

“Well, only you would drag me from my nice, warm bed at this time of night. For what?”

“Can’t anything be a surprise with you?” he says, shooting you a cheeky glance over his shoulder. “Surprises are fun.”

“Surprises!” you say, working your legs to catch him. “Not surprises that involve you bringing me out into the woods. You know, it’s awfully suspicious. Somebody who sees this might think that I am the type to… sneak out with men.”

“Aren’t you now?”

Your lips tug down. “You know what I mean.”

He laughs in his airy way, a twig snapping under his foot. You’re well in the woods, now. Probably somewhere near where you’d first met him.

Lifting a brow, you look at him expectantly. Maybe a will-o’-the-wisp will come floating through with its light bouncing off the trees. That would be a nice surprise, you admit.

Yeonjun circles you. His presence behind you tingles in the way it always does, but true chills erupt when his breath puffs against your ear. “Close your eyes. I have something I want to show you.”

Your mind wanders back to what Soobin had gotten so twisted up about. It might be naive and reckless and against everything you ever learned, but you let your eyes fall shut to blackness. If he was going to hurt you, you imagine he’d have had that opportunity a mind-numbing amount of times before.

“Are they shut?” he asks, waiting for your nod. His voice comes from in front of you now. “I want you to keep them shut. You can’t open your eyes, or it will all go away. Okay?”

“Okay,” you breathe, mind full of a bounty of questions. You don’t even know where to begin to assume what he’s got going on, so you stand there shifting your antsy feet.

There’s a strange, rustling sound that catches you off guard with your eyes closed. It drags on for a long moment. Curiosity pries at your eyes; you want nothing more than to just crack an eye open to spy the source of the ruckus.

It’ll be gone if you do, anyway.

You let out a surprised squeak as something rises up beneath you, as if risen from nothing more than the dirt and roots of the forest floor, bringing you up from the earth. You wobble and send your hands out to find a perch.

A horse. It’s a horse, its mane so tangled and windswept, but matted and clumped with leaves that crunch under your palm when you find them. It reeks of mud—everything around you begins to smell of earth and decomposition.

You know that if you open your eyes, you’ll find yourself sat upon the pale white steed of the Undead King, its eyes white and its knobby knees almost as famous as the leader of The Hunt himself. It chuffs beneath you.

“Are you ready?” Yeonjun says over your shoulder. You can hear the feral grin in his voice. It’s the leader of The Hunt, a creature of folklore, that sits behind you now. He curls an arm around your waist and tugs you closer to him, securing you against the wall of his chest. “Hold on tight, my love.”

The call of the wild, that horn, bellows again like it had the first time you heard it. Rather than coming from nearby as you thought it would, it dances between trees far off just like it had that time, too. Your heart jumps up into your throat.

Taking off with a howl, the Wild Hunt follows it.

You dig your fingers into Yeonjun’s at your waist. Weight melts away, and you know you’re in the air. Your belly swoops in tandem with the howls and hoots of the riders, heart palpitating to the hoofbeats. How there’s hoofbeats as you ride through the air, you’re not sure. The ghostly fleet manifests around you in vivid imagery, though you squeeze your eyes shut. They are wild enough to imagine just what they might look like: with their clothes and flesh in tatters, with their eyes beady or pale, with their hounds piercing the air with their calls and running alongside them, they are a perfect personification of freedom.

Whip-lash sends you reeling, body going rigid. You grit your teeth and squeeze your eyes harder, wishing that you’ll touch ground soon and that everything would become real again.

Yeonjun feels you go stiff. Bringing his head back to your shoulder from his own delight, he says, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Let it into your bones. Do you think I would let it hurt you?”

He is their leader. If it got too much, you know Yeonjun would be there to catch you. Curling your fingers into his, you release that tension and allow their drumbeat to echo through you.

And when it does, your blood begins to sing along. The wind whips your cheeks and your hair, and you begin to laugh with them. The Hunt twists and turns and dances through the air, an apparition in the night, but nothing more than that.

It comes to a slow, eventually, until the noise and even your steed crumbles back down into the dirt it appeared from. Your eyes pop open hoping to catch at least a glimpse of them, but only the dark forest and pale moonlight answer. Your legs threaten to give out on you, veins still thrumming, but, oh, do you feel alive.

You feel more alive than you ever have, more than you ever could have hoped to have known. Mind spinning, you stumble. Yeonjun catches and steadies you before you can go scraping your knees on a rock.

“Oh my fucking god,” you say.

The laugh that Yeonjun breaks into has you sending him a glare, but you break too. Everything about him is ironic; and how ironic indeed that Death himself should show you how to be alive, rather than to just live?

༺ ꘏ ༻

The air is so fresh in your lungs when you step outside that it nearly burns. You clutch your basket of warm fig tarts. Songbirds trill and fly between tree tops that slowly become more bare the deeper you fall into the season, singing their sweet songs that sound like new beginnings.

Raising your hem from the ground churned up into mud from the afternoon’s trickle, you prance into town with a lively pep in your step. You spent all last night making these—Yeonjun had kept you company, watching you how he always does as you pored over making them just right. His cruel snicker when the jam had simmered over flame for too long and became too thick bounces off your bones in a sweet melody. You’ve come to adore his wicked delight, the way his smile cracks over his face and the facetious raise of his brows, more than you fear it.

Sending small smiles to the people that you pass, you stop by a huddle of kids digging sticks into the mud. They look up at you with curious eyes, stopping to gawk.

“Hey, guys,” you say, pulling back the cloth laid over the sweets. “I’ve made some fig tarts. Do you like fig? I bet you’ll like them; they’re sweet.”

The kids stand up, eyes big as they share a look. They don’t let out so much as a peep before they scurry off home.

You blink. Well, you’re used to weird reactions, but that was… different. Picking up your deflated shoulders and hesitant limbs, you make a shoddy attempt at not letting it dampen your good morning. You were expecting wary looks, anyway.

You head down a little further toward the far side of your home village, the side that breaks off after a fenceline into a great, grassy field. There’s a bustle, mothers washing their clothes in pails and hanging them up to dry and a few others whispering at each other lowly as they go about their days.

An old woman so old her back curves and her fingers have gone knobby makes her way to wherever the day’s duty demands her to be. Your neighbor—an eccentric old lady bound in her times. You decide on her: the elderly are forgotten by the young. She might enjoy knowing that her neighbors still know she exists.

“Hello,” you say, showing her your basket with a hopeful, excited heart. “I have some treats that I was wanting to give out. I know they might not be much, but would you like one? I’m not the best baker, but I do it often enough.” A face like that, dragged down by her years on this earth and not long to death, has no doubt spent many years making meals for her family. You imagine your goods would be nothing beside hers, but it’s the gesture, no?

“Oh, girl,” she says, voice crackling as she clutches her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “I’m afraid it’s best if you found yourself missing from this place. Hurry yourself up and spare the drama.”

The incessant cawing of a crow from a clawed tree fades into the background as you furrow your brows and lower your basket to ask, “...Huh?” Your belly goes up in knots; terrible knots done up tight and fast. You haven’t got a clue what she’s talking about. Elders always did speak a bit strange, though. It could be nothing much; she’s a stern old lady.

But her eyes are not angry and glaring in the way that a harrowed old hag might turn her nose up at the youth. They drag down with a cold pity.

“Listen to me, girl.” She points at you with one of those worn, sun-spotted hands. “You had best leave. The boy’s gone, and they are already not fond of you. Who will they point their fingers to?” the woman says. “I hardly know you, but I would hate to see it.”

The rest of her words fade into the roaring in your ears, the feral drumbeat of your heart like a wardrum in the cage of your ribs as it beats against them as if to escape from you. You don’t feel the basket in your hands, don’t feel the solidity of the earth beneath your feet, and don’t feel a single one of your thoughts like tangible things. They flit as if liquidated into a rotten, sick mush.

Nothing. You can think of nothing. Nothing real; nothing holding you to the earth.

“What?” Your voice hardly reaches your ears, but what does is weak and broken and like a plea for her to tell you that it’s not really what you think it is.

And if you could see or hear anything beyond your fraying little rift in reality, you would’ve heard the man coming up to you. You would’ve heard the words coming from his angry, sneering mouth, and would’ve done something when he picked up a pail of water, and you would’ve been shaken by the nasty ice water that runs down your frozen body and plasters your hair and clothes down as he pours it over you. But none of it cuts through your stupor.

He yells some awful, stabbing things at you, and a few others join him. They tell you that you are nothing but a plague, tell you to leave and to not come back here.

But this is your home. Where else would you go?

With your sopping wet dress clutched in your shaking fists as though that might keep you grounded, you choke down the tightening of your throat and sift through their faces, searching for his face. Those brown eyes, brown and always shining with nagging playfulness, do not come up anywhere. Jaw trembling, you search harder. Out on the field where he should be at this time of day, at your doorstep demanding that you go spend the day doing nothing with him, in someone’s yard helping them fix up a broken fence, no matter where you look, neither his broad silhouette nor his cheeky, dimpled face is there. You continue to stand stricken dumb, looking for him even though you know by the churning in your belly that it’s true, and you’re just hurting yourself trying to find him right where he should be.

Fine. Alive. Untouched by your disgusting, destructive presence.

When you can no longer fight the strangling tightness in your lungs and your dress is as heavy as your heart, you take off. The hem of your dress drags in mud and sticker bushes and catches on stray twigs, and you don’t know where you’re going, but you just run. You’ll give them what they want.

You stumble, probably like some lost, undead thing, until you find yourself at the edge of the forest. Only then do you let the wall of whittle-edged tears roll down your face. And you assume you sound like a choking, dying animal with how you choke and heave on them, but he was the one you might’ve dropped your head and cried to, so what’s the use of making it pretty? No; you let it all fall as it is.

Soobin’s dead. Soobin’s dead, and it’s nobody else’s but your own fault. You clutch your chest to staunch that old ache that’s grown teeth and tears at your heart; you have and will always be the end of everything that comes near. You are just as much the plague that you began to pretend, to believe, you weren’t. It was your stupid hope that maybe you could have something and not watch it become carrion that drove that pick. It was by your hope that he’s gone.

The hair on your arms begins to raise. You pick your head up and find Yeonjun standing in front of you.

There’s a few beats of long, dreadful quiet as he takes in the state of you. He drags his eyes down and they become liquid flame—something different from the impious delight that he is made of. He becomes the King of Death.

“What happened?” he says. The chills on your arms prickle furiously at the words, furling out distant and yet furious like the center of the fire.

You shake your head, wiping your soaked cheek.

“What the fuck happened?” he growls again, taking your face into his hand. “Who did this? Who did this to you, my love? I need you to tell me who the fuck did this to you.”

Letting the venom in your mouth out, you shove his chest and say, “Get away from me. Don’t fucking touch me.”

Yeonjun’s face twists up, looking scalded. Not surprised, though. “Don’t do this,” he says. “Let me hold you while it hurts. Don’t push me away. I can’t… I won’t lose you again.”

All the pieces that you had been putting into the corners of your mind snap together at that. As many suspicions as you had, though, it feels sour hearing it confirmed from his mouth. That you are his dead past lover, reincarnated or whatever you are. That it was his presence—because even though he stayed away for centuries, a part of him still lingered with you—that now has torn down everything you ever thought you could love. He, standing there in front of you like a kicked puppy, is the ruination of your life in the flesh. The flipping of your stomach is nauseating.

“I hate you,” you spit. “I hate you so much.” You repeat it a few more times, and you sob it into his chest as he takes you into his arms. “Is this what you wanted? You’ve been waiting for this forever, haven’t you? To find me again, so that you can die and fucking leave me here. So that you can make me exactly what you are, while you get your peace. You are a liar and a thief. All you’ve ever done is steal and take. How could you do it? Huh? Tell me…” Your voice trembles and staggers off. “Tell me how you made love to me, how you made me believe that you loved me, and all you ever wanted was to save yourself? You betrayed me.”

Pulling back, Yeonjun says, “No.”

“Yes,” you say, stumbling back away from him with a shaking, accusatory finger pointed at him. “Yes you did.”

Fingers itching to reach out to you, he holds them back by curling them into fists. “No. That’s not fair. I have spent an eternity loving you. I spent the entirety of my immortal, monstrous life searching for you, just so that I might find you in any form. I would have been glad to find you as a leaf in a tree, as long as I found you. But, then, I find you alive. Alive and back, as if… it never happened.” He steps toward you, aching to be near you. His voice wavers. “Please, don’t do this to me, love. Please, just let me have you again. I’ve waited… I’ve waited and I’ve waited, and I finally have you, and now you’re looking at me like I… Like I’d ever hurt you. Finding death—finally getting to die would be worth nothing if you weren’t there with me. It was never about that.”

“I could never love you,” you say, matching his steps forward with steps away from him. “I could never love a monster that does… Does nothing but kill. Take.” You know your words are cruel, but you need them to be. You need him to hurt, you need him to go so far away from you that never again will you cause another living thing’s death.

“You did.” Yeonjun’s mouth cracks into a pained smile, sharp at the corners. “You loved me just as much as I love you, once.”

“Just leave me. Leave me, and I wish to never see you again. If you love me, then you��ll give me that.”

He looks at you, clever eyes intense and glassy, for a long time. And then he says, “Would that make you happy? Would it make it so that you could live a happy life, and find yourself something to live for?”

What’s left for you? A small village that won’t ever embrace you? No, it wouldn’t fix your life. But you open your mouth and tell him, “Yes.”

“Okay,” he says, brushing his knuckles over your cheeks reverently. He swallows in your features, running over them for what he knows is the last time he’ll be seeing you—the very last time he’ll see the face of his undying love. When he finally opens his mouth again, his voice is gentle. “I’ll leave you. If my being here hurts you, then I won’t be selfish. I love you, darling.”

Don’t go, you want to tell him. Please don’t leave. Please, hold me. But your mouth is dry, and you let the radiant hurt in your chest stop you. You let him go.

༺ ꘏ ༻

There’s only one place you can think of going to. It’s the only place your vagrant feet take you.

His spot still is held sacred by the flattened, gold wheat stalks. Your best friend, still living here on Earth in at least one way even if he’s not here to listen to your stupid rambling. And he would maybe complain, but he’d always listen.

The last thing you’d done was fight with him. What an awful thing—what an awful way to repay him for being the only one who ever dared to get close.

You sit in your spot, beside his, and rest your chin on your knees. If only the ground beneath you would open up and swallow you whole. You’d deserve it.

What’s left for you? Is there a place in the world that would keep you happily once they see what you do? No. There is not. You wish you knew what to do; you wish you had somebody to ask.

Releasing a long, tight breath, you just sit and wait for something to give you answers. A gentle breeze makes your hair dance, but it does not whisper anything to your ears. Something’s circling over head, but it doesn’t caw in the cadence of his laughter.

The day moves along without you. You’re not sure how long you sit, but it stretches somewhere between a few minutes and eternity. No matter how long you wait, there are no answers. No matter how long you mull over it.

Conceding, you begin to push yourself up from the ground. A rustle in between the foliage stops you before you stand.

A tawny hare leaps out in front of you. It sniffs around you, nose twitching. Then it stands back on its haunches. It stares straight at you, an intelligent light in its eyes that knits your brows. The wild thing stands there with a purpose that is uncharacteristic of a forest animal.

But entirely familiar in the face of your best friend. That shine in its eyes as it stands there, nose still twitching, makes your chest tighten up.

“Hey,” you say, as if it might answer you. Your eyes well up with hot tears again. Of course, it doesn’t.

Maybe you’ve gone mad, but you know that it’s him. That idiot, coming to show you that he’s okay in the afterlife—to visit one last time and to let you know that you shouldn’t worry for him or cry for him. Look at me, full of life once again, he seems to say. The hare blinks its beady eyes. It lingers there for a long time, the ease of peace found in his gaze that Soobin hadn’t had in this life, saying that there is still something waiting out there for us once we go. You reach out a hand. He does not flinch as you scratch behind his ear.

“Okay,” you whisper. “I’m glad to know you’re alright. I know what I need to do, now.”

He blinks.

You laugh a hoarse, breathy laugh, familiar in only the way that Soobin could achieve. “You look stupid.”

Indignantly, the hare stomps a bratty foot in a way reminiscent of one of Soobin’s huffs before it settles back down onto its forelegs and scurries off. He goes to live out this new form of life, because it’s true: life does not end in death. He’s shown you that.

Maybe, like this, he’ll find that pretty lady that loves him the way he deserves. That loser.

༺ ꘏ ༻

You spend only one night in your home and you know that what you’ve chosen is right. After spending your day out in the field, you sneak under night’s cover into your husk of a room and let yourself sleep there under the covers one last time. When morning breaks through the window, you gather your weary bones up and leave.

You run into your mother on the way out. She doesn’t yell at you to leave, but her eyes have gone cold. Colder than you’re used to. You’ve killed again, in every way that counts. So you don’t bother with bidding her or any of them any grand goodbyes. You couldn’t handle the relief you might find falling over them, should you.

Plopping down to the floor, you take a few bites of the cheese and bread lathered in sweet jam that you’d swiped from the kitchen. The grass is long and willows in the wind, bending and dancing prettily. It’s so soft; you enjoy the feeling of it beneath your fingers in your quiet serenity. The scent of it, fresh over the baseness of dirt, you breathe into your lungs.

It would be the loveliest place to spend the rest of eternity.

For the first time, Yeonjun appears in front of you rather than behind you. He materializes from nothing, his elbow on his knee as casual as if he’d been sat there the whole time. The darkness beneath his eyes seems heavier, but then again you know that exact heaviness. It sits right in the very center of you.

You both are quiet for a bit. You let the tall grass whisper, instead.

“Bread?” you say and slant your lips into a smile. Bringing it up, you offer it to him.

His smile wrinkles his nose and curls at the edges. Entirely him. Yeonjun accepts the bread, ripping a bite out before throwing it away into the sea of green. Once he’s chewed, he leans in and captures your lips in a kiss that’s utterly at odds with his sharp mouth. Your lips move over each other gently, save for an indulgent nip or bite here and there.

He pushes you back into a bed of sweetgrass, never letting your lips go. Not to breathe, not to say something that’ll pale in comparison to the sweetness of your mouths on one another. He kisses you until he’s had enough to fulfill a lifetime without it, and then some more.

“My love,” he whispers into your skin, his breath hot on your collarbone. “Mine,” he says, pressing a kiss into the column of your neck, and then he says it again with a hot kiss to the place where your dress suggests your breasts. He says it a handful more times as he pushes your skirts up your thighs. “My love forever. I waited for you so long, and I would do it again.” Lowering his voice to a honeyed whisper, he adds, “I would find you no matter what.”

Laughing softly, you run your fingers through his raven hair to better see his eyes. You know he would.

Gently giving you one more of his lingering kisses that make your skin tingle, right into your bare shoulder, he presses into you. You loose a soft breath, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. The beating in your chest slows to a content purr as he begins languid thrusts in and out of you, rolling pointedly and unhurried.

Yeonjun makes love to you in a thousand dusted kisses and sweet words, your hands holding each other’s soft edges. Yeonjun traces the lines of you, taking the pads of his thumb down your cheeks and your lips and then his hand over the swell of your breasts and down your belly and over your thighs. Clamping down on him as your belly grows tight in the way it had the first time you had done this, your thighs begin to shake.

Breathlessly, as you hurdle over the edge, all that you can say is, “I love you, ‘Junnie.”

Yeonjun smiles at you and then presses his face into your neck. He doesn’t even brace himself against the grass to chase his own peak. Neither of you want this to end; you want to hold on to this moment and let it span forever. Slowly, Yeonjun rolls up into you until his hips finally stutter and he cums into you, his cheeks pink. The weight of him above you as he shakes with your shared ecstasy, and even as you both have come down and are nothing but lazy, is the only thing in this world. He is the only thing in this world.

Once you’ve both evened your breathing out, you roll apart and face each other, still just two forms bending the grass into your shapes. Blinking slowly and digesting his features one at a time—the angle of his eyes, softened but never tamed, the line of his nose, the line of his mouth always so proud and playful, and that pretty dot below his left eye—you let them solidify fully in your mind.

“Yeonjun,” you say, finally meeting his eyes across from you. “I want to go. I’m ready.”

The gentle, knowing look that he gives you soothes over the way your heart begins to race in your chest in rebellion. “I know,” he says.

Of course he had known. Yeonjun had been called here to ferry you into the afterlife. He had known the moment he appeared in front of you that his last soul to reap would be you; an ironic circle of karma that should be cruel, but you two make it something sweet. Chewing on your lip, you will your hands to not shake as you curl toward him. You’re no longer scared of going. You know that if you’ll be with him, it will be okay. It won’t be so scary. A hot tear rolls down your temple and then drops into your hair. “Will you be with me? I won’t be there alone?”

He tucks some hair behind your ear reverently and then leaves his hand there. “I don’t know,” he answers. “But I won’t leave you. I’ll stay right here with you.”

You lay there for a long time. Chatting and giggling and just looking into each other's eyes, until your heart becomes slow and all you feel is the wind singing in your blood. Yeonjun presses one final kiss to your forehead.

Maybe, in some years, somebody might dig up your bones and find you immortalized like this in your love. Your bones bowing toward each other, as if even death were not enough to stop you from reaching for each other. Or maybe they’ll just find yours, and Yeonjun still curling into them how you know he will for an eternity more.

Either way, the going is still slow and gentle, as death always is.

🪶 ⦂ tears. omfg i cried writing this which could totally be me being a bitch baby but it DAMN. omfg.

rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd!

▸ tׁׅagᥣׁׅ֪ꪱׁׅstׁׅ @lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , @izzyy-stuff , @miukuui , @lunesdesire , @sunoolver , @cherricola-star , @xylatox , @filmnings , @hearteyes4hobi , @hyunj00 , @kangtaehyunfan029 , @caratcakemoa, @usuallyunlikelyfox , @zi-vian , @brrytears , @stormy1408 , @soobabby , @nshmrarki , @dontwannacry04 if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

657 notes · View notes

artisticprocrastionator · 3 months ago

Text

🎶[See the sky and all the land together again]

[See the way the earth can stay below]

[Who do we think we are?]

[Everything plays a part]

[There are some things we are never meant to know.]🎶

____

Little about me, I’m a big fan of Tally Hall! I especially love their Album Good & Evil (def should go listen to it!)

Never Meant to Know became one of my favorite songs when I first listen to the album, and even more when I started playing Block Tales. I just feel this song represents Cruel King perfectly, and I really wanted to do a post on this.

Below this is me going into a lyrical analysis of the entire song and how they relate to Cruel King.

Why did this song make me think of Cruel King???

I see this song as Cruel King’s reflection of the events that transpired. He points out his flaws and how they led to his downfall. This song, from how I interpret it, is Cruel King coming to terms with his death and understanding that there are some things he is never meant to know.

______

Lyric Analysis:

(If it helps to follow along with the song, go right ahead!)

[Woke up today with the lay of the land. Feather in cap and the sun in the sand. It was easy, it was easy to understand]

This is before Cruel King’s became influence by the dagger.

He saw himself as a righteous King that was proud of his Kingdom and himself for his accomplishments.

This was a period where everything made sense and everything was perfect. He wakes up every day knowing this and it was a routine he fell into.

[Everything suddenly falls out of sight. Every attachment is made of the light. That you offered, you have offered to give me life]

This now takes place to kinda the present of the events of Block Tales. Player breaking in, attacking his guards, and ultimately leading to Cruel King’s downfall.

However, he is now reflecting back on this as a sign that player was the salvation to his problem that offer to help him out of his darkness, but Cruel King refused player’s light and continued to go down his dark path.

[See the sky and all the land together again. See the way the earth can stay below.]

All Cruel King wanted was to protect his people and to see everything in harmony. The sky and land coming together represent unity which is what Cruel King wanted. It was something he wanted to see.

The earth line I kinda perceive as his status. He is the king and looks over everything so the earth to him always seems beneath him. This can probably mean Cruel King not worrying about a potential threat that can harm his kingdom or that he so high above everyone else he never sees anyone strong enough to bring him down.

[Who do we think we are? Everything plays a part. There are some things we are never meant to know]

Cruel King now understands he had no power in stopping fate. Even him, a king, a guardian of the ice dagger, was inevitably to the outcome of his kingdom and himself.

Even though he may not understand why it happened to him, it is just something he will never have an answer for and have to be content with that thought as everything happens for a reason.

He hopes his reflection will reach other people and prevent the same thing happening to them

[Having enjoyed all the meat from the bone. Is perfectly equal to being alone. It was even, but you breathe and I turn to stone]

Even though he was wealthy and was granted with anything he could have, he still felt empty inside as he had no one to share his wealth. Being king was just the same of being alone, and later Cruel King admitted he wished he had connections to talk to.

However, at this time, being alone was something he was okay with because it would kept everything in balance and avoid any possible trouble for his kingdom.

That was until player would enter and attack his palace. Seeing Player terrified Cruel King as his worst nightmares became true and that the Player was here to take down Blackrock and him.

[Everything suddenly looks like a sign. Easy to see from the outermost clime. I believe in what I leave in the way behind]

This is Cruel King acknowledging his spiral into madness and paranoia due to the ice dagger’s influence. Everyone and everything seems like a sign to Blackrock’s demise.

It was clear to everyone on the outside that nothing was going to happen and it was just Cruel King’s own delusions and paranoia.

This would ultimately make Cruel King to make irrational decisions to stopping this upcoming threat (such as exiling Banished Knight and imprisoning prisoners who question him as potential examples).

[And all the parts combine to one. And all of us around the sun. Everything will fall away. To order from the disarray]

I interpret this part when Cruel King is in possession of the Ice dagger. He feels it all aligning again as he saw that the Ice dagger can help stop the fall of his kingdom.

Everything would be perfect again and he would be able to rewrite history to prevent its fall with the Ice Dagger.

[See the sun, the shadows cast. From all the times I floated past. See the ocean spinning out. With all the hope and all the doubt]

However, he is not aware that the powers of the ice dagger is actually harming his kingdom and his people with them being the forefront of the disasters he will unintentionally inflict on them.

Though he is seen as “the sun” that brings light to his people, his sun is unintentionally putting them into darkness that prevent them from seeing his light.

His people are hopeful that the King will solve these issues and try to believe the King has nothing to do about it, however, there is doubt.

[See the sky and all the land together again. See the way the earth can stay below. Who do we think we are? Everything plays a part. There are some things we don't understand. Reasons on the other hand. There are some things we are never meant to know]

This restates the chorus again, but I feel these last few lines tie up Cruel King’s overall thoughts (almost like this is him talking to us).

Even after his death and the (potential) fall of his kingdom, the world keeps moving on unbothered. Everything is still in order dispute Cruel King’s believing that everything was in shambles.

Cruel King’s understand that he had no power in stopping fate and as painful as it is to come to terms with that, everything happens for a reason. That reason is not in his grasp and something he’ll have to deal with. Now that he is dead, he has to accept the fact that Blackrock will fall and he’ll never have a reason why his kingdom would fall, but sometimes, there are some things that he is never meant to know.

_______

Extra notes:

Here are song other songs on the album that I like a lot!

You and Me

Who You Are ⭐️

Hymn for Scarecrow⭐️

Turn the Lights Off

Misery Fell

#block tales #cruel king block tales #cruel king #block tales cruel king #blox tales #tally hall #roblox #never meant to know #i finally finished this #This was hard to draw due to the angle #I may make more art based on Tally Hall music

155 notes · View notes

gold-onthe-inside · 5 months ago

Text

no grave can hold my body down

who? emily prentiss (s7) x teacher!reader summary: your grief over losing emily is forced undone when she re-appears seven months later outside your apartment content warnings: no smut, pg13 though, def suggestive word count: 1.8k songs: tarantino by plvtinum, skin and bones by david kushner, i wanna be yours by sofia karlberg

You had never been one to kid yourself — your life was probably as mundane as it could get, the highs and lows scored by the school bell, hefting a pile of essays to correct at home with a glass of wine darker than the red you mark up your papers with. Seven months ago, you might have had company over, a certain raven-haired woman with dark lipstick and a low cut top, her handgun and badge stowed away somewhere.

You’d met at a seminar on school shootings, one that was district-wide, the appointed representive for your school, and for some inexplicable reason, you had caught her eye. She’d been the one to make the first move, obviously. Women who look and sound like Emily Prentiss always get what they want. Two drinks had loosened your lips, the magnetic charm of her dark gaze drawing you closer to her, leading to her brownstone apartment, much nicer than yours.

You let out a slow, shaky breath as you walked to your car, a blushing orange painting the sky as you left the essays in the passenger seat and closed the door behind you, and when you bit your lower lip, you can remember how Emily would have used her thumb to pull it free, tipping your chin back to kiss you smoothly. Seven months in the grave and she still wouldn’t leave you alone.

“I’m not looking for a relationship,” she had whispered and you hadn’t cared. It had feverish and each kiss felt like molasses, thick and rich, her hands running all over your neck, then down to grasp your thigh. Her fingers slowly pulled up the edge of your skirt, pushing it up as her hand slowly made its way up your thigh, all the while continuing to kiss you hard. She was so focused, so determined, like all she wanted in the world was to take you entirely as her own.

Your breath had been so sweet, the faintest taste of bourbon shared between your lips as the kiss turned hungry and demanding, Emily’s tongue pressing between your lips to taste the warmth of your mouth, a low groan escaping her lips as she grasped at the hem of your blouse.

You dropped your head on the back of your seat, running a hand through your hair — how many times was your body was going to torture you like this? It was like Emily was a part of you, the absence of her touch, of her presence, aching like a missing limb. You pulled out your phone, replaying old voicemails just to hear the sound of her voice. Calls from hotel rooms across the country, telling you that she was thinking of you. A dark and enigmatic woman turning into a soft kitten, leaving you cheesy messages about how she wondered if you were looking at the same moon as her.

You weren’t even her girlfriend, or so you kept having to remind yourself when she reappeared once a week with a book she thought you’d like. Some people collected mugs, or fridge magnets from airports. Emily brought you books, books that you’d devour and tab and text her about in your lunch hours. Who’s got you smiling like that? they would tease, and you’d reply with a smile and a shake of your head. Who was Emily to you? Someone who had snuggled into your chest, warming your heart, and then leaving you, cold and hollow. Just something to house her in until the phone rang.

Somehow, you managed to gather your wits long enough to get yourself home, a cheap place in a surburban part of DC, and you left the dusty red sedan with your bag, your essays, and your car keys, hands too full to get to your apartment keys when you hear her first.

“Need a hand?” she asked, not as cocky and self-assured as you remember and you looked up to see her standing outside your building and you almost drop your things, staring at Emily. Sure, she’s haunted you every day since you met her, but you’ve never had a full-on hallucination. Your lips parted, frozen to the spot and Emily cautiously approached you, gently reaching for your papers.

“I…” You have no words. “Are you real?” you asked, your voice barely above a breath and Emily looked so… sad.

“I… um..” she said, the sadness in your eyes breaking her heart, so she gave you a small smile. “Yeah, I’m real. It’s okay… It’s okay, I promise I have an explanation for all of this,” she said, her voice desperate. You’ve never heard her desperate, not like this, with her heart in her hands. “Can we go inside, please?” Emily asked you, stirring you from your reverie and you fumble for your apartment keys, your head buzzing in confusion, like a television with no signal.

She’s quiet as she followed you in to your apartment, helping you set your things down so she could follow you into your living room. She didn’t know exactly how to tell you everything and make it all okay, so she just sighed, her hands nervously fiddling as she began to recount the story. To your credit, you listened to her without interrupting once; the undercover assignment, the international terrorist hunting her down, her old team members being killed one by one. You listen to all of it, your chest caving in as she spoke.

“I didn’t want to leave you,” she whispered softly, her eyes locked on to yours. “I’ve missed you.”

"You missed me?" you asked hollowly, looking at her.

“Yeah,” Emily sighed softly, knowing that she didn’t deserve you, but she would tell the truth, no matter how difficult it was. “I thought about you every night, even when I knew I shouldn’t.”

Your hands ran over your face, unable to help the thoughts that plagued you every time she would tell you about her work. You don’t belong here. This whole thing was so laughable that you actually snorted a little in derision at your own stupidity. “I teach high school English, Emily,” you scoffed, unable to look at her. “God, what was I thinking, getting involved with a federal agent?”

“I know,” Emily whispered, and you can hear her voice cracking slightly. She had hurt you, and she had known exactly what she was doing when she had asked you to be her… whatever you were to her. She had only wanted you a little bit, had told you that she couldn’t give you all of her, because she didn’t trust that you could keep her all to yourself, and she regretted each and every one of those words. But her regrets wouldn’t help you, so she simply asked, “Is there anything I can do to fix this?”

"Fix what, Emily?" you asked, not quite angry but, like you had given up the fight. "Come on, who are we kidding with this? We don't... Emily, we don't belong together. An international spy and an English teacher?"

She hadn’t expected you to welcome her back with open arms, even though she’s wanted you to, especially after she thought about you every day for months, the taste of you lingering on her lips as she lay awake in bed. But the hurt she had done to you was greater than any of the good she’d done, and she just asked, “What do you want me to do? Do you want me to go?”

You looked at her, your eyes heartbroken. "I want you to stay," you said quietly. "I always want you to stay. But I just... I don't think you're the kind of person who stays."

Her throat tightens at your words and she sighs, nodding her head. She looks down at the floor, closing her eyes for a moment as she tries not to cry. “I don’t have the best track record,” she admitted softly, “but you’re not just some person. Not to me,” she whispered softly, her hand gently reaching for yours. She didn’t pull you close, but simply held your hand, giving you a sad look as she softly said, “I don’t want to go.”

You looked at your hands, taking a breath before intertwining your fingers with hers. She can’t help but smile at that and she squeezed your hand, taking comfort in the warm touch of your fingers. She’d missed the feel of your skin against hers, and she wondered if you had missed her just as much. "I don't want you to go," you whispered, looking up at her.

“I don’t want to go,” she repeated with a small smile and she pulled you a little closer, resting her forehead against yours. “Not unless you ask me to.”

"You know I won't," you murmured, closing your eyes, her heat making you dizzy.

“Then I’ll stay,” she whispered softly, and she finally leaned down, meeting your lips with a gentle kiss. You taste just as good as she remembered. You let go of her hands, cupping her face to kiss her harder. She sighed into your mouth, her hand gently cupping your cheek, pulling you a little closer to make the kiss deeper. She’s almost afraid that you’ll disappear, but with your arms wrapped around her neck, she feels safe for the first time in months.

continued... (nsfw, mdni)

#emily prentiss #emily prentiss x reader #emily x reader #criminal minds x reader #teacher!reader #emily prentiss angst #emily prentiss fanfiction #emily prentiss x you #emily prentiss x female reader #emily prentiss smut #my fics

212 notes · View notes

notiddygothgf · 7 days ago

Text

xv.

★ pairings: aki hayakawa x fem reader

★ ❝ You're the only one I'm seeing. ❞

★ c.w.: situationship-typical confusion, smut, cockwarming, shotgunning, making love. not-quite-confessions. no beta cuz im impatient and wanted yall to read this.

★ a/n: hiiiiii!!! okay so if you read my a/n on for your love, feel free to skip this part. so chem def jumped me im ngl. im sorry for abandoning ship. it took me a while to recover from the semester i had. accelerated courses are no joke lmfaooooooo. anywho! this chapter was one of my faves to write because we get to see into aki's cold heart a little. i won't spoil, but i hope you all love it as much as i liked writing it! leave comments as always, you know yall r my motivation ;))) (mama's back fr this time)

★ w.c: 12.4k

pornstar ; chapter index

YOU CALLED OUT OF WORK two days in a row, barely bothering to fake a cough over the phone. You weren’t sick. Not really. Just drained – emotionally raw in a way that made the thought of seeing Aki fucking unbearable.

You couldn’t pretend everything was normal. Not when your head kept replaying the look on his face the last time you saw him. Like he wanted to say something but didn’t. Like he knew you were pulling away and didn’t know how to stop you.

You spent the first day scrubbing your apartment down to the bones. The kind of deep clean you only did when something inside you was coming loose. You took every cushion off the couch, wiped the windows, rearranged the spices alphabetically – anything to keep your hands moving.

Later, you went shopping under the guise of self-care. A few new things for your closet, a pair of earrings, a ridiculous amount of skincare. You even bought one of those overpriced candles in a scent you didn’t particularly like, just to feel like you were changing something.

But the second day felt different.

You woke up late and slow, the sun already high. The silence in the apartment was too loud, too full. You drifted through the day without purpose, reheating leftovers you didn’t want, scrolling past every name in your phone, waiting for a message that never came. After a while, you cracked open one of the beers in the fridge – one of the six Aki had brought over last week. He drank three of them. You had one. Two were left. Now just one.

You didn’t even like the taste, but it was something to hold onto. Something of his.

The news played low in the background while you sat curled up on the couch, nursing the beer and picking at a tear in your sweater sleeve. There was a report about a devil incident – downtown, some minor destruction, possible casualties. You listened but didn’t absorb any of it. Your mind was too busy drifting.

Aki’s ghost lingered everywhere. In the couch cushion. In the faint cologne still clinging to your throw blanket. In the silence that had a shape now – tall, broad-shouldered, quiet unless he had something important to say.

You stared at the TV, but your eyes were unfocused, your chest too full of something nameless.

Guilt? Regret? Longing? You weren’t sure.

You just knew you were being stupid. Avoiding him like this wasn’t proving a point. It wasn’t protecting your pride or your heart. If anything, it was making everything worse.

Fuck my life. You sighed and let your head fall back against the cushion, the bitter taste of the beer sitting on your tongue like punishment.

Then there was a knock.

You blinked, sat up slowly. Checked your phone again – no messages, no missed calls. You weren’t expecting anyone.

You padded to the door barefoot, hesitating before opening it just a crack. A delivery guy stood outside holding a paper bag of takeout, warm steam curling from the top.

"Delivery for this address?” he asked, reading something off the receipt.

You frowned. “I think you’ve got the wrong place.”

“It’s already paid for,” he replied. “Says it’s for you.”

Confused, you stepped out a little more and reached for the receipt.

HAYAKAWA.

Your breath caught.

Aki’s name was printed there, clear as day.

You stared at it for a moment, then looked up, flustered.

“Oh. Right. Sorry,” you said, your voice soft and a little uneven.

The delivery guy gave you a polite nod and handed the bag over. “Have a good night.”

“You too!” you murmured, closing the door gently behind you.

You stood there in the entryway, holding the bag like it might disappear if you moved too fast. The smell was instantly familiar.

You set the bag down on the kitchen counter and just looked at it for a moment. Your chest felt tight in that strange way where you weren’t sure if you wanted to cry or laugh. Probably both.

Aki hadn’t called. Hadn’t texted. He just sent food.

That was his way of checking in.

Quiet but specific. Direct. Careful. You could imagine him pacing around his apartment, unsure if you’d accept it, unsure if he was overstepping.

An olive branch.

You swallowed hard and looked around your apartment – still spotless from yesterday’s breakdown cleaning spree. It felt emptier than ever.

And yet… warmer now. Like a piece of him had made its way in anyway.

The takeout bag sat warm on your kitchen counter, steam curling gently through the paper as you unpacked it. Chicken teriyaki over white rice. Stir-fried noodles, heavy with sesame oil. A handful of sauce packets nestled at the bottom. Everything was exact. Everything was him.

Of course Aki paid attention like that.

No explanation. Just a quiet instruction, the kind that didn’t invite resistance.

He didn’t have to say more. He never did. That was the way things worked between you. His control didn’t shout – it whispered, settled over you like a second skin. He told you what to do because he knew what you needed, even when you didn’t.

Even now, when you’d gone silent for two days, shut him out without warning, he still made sure you were fed. Still gave you direction.

Still checked in, sent you food to make sure that you were alright.

You sat at the table, unwrapped the chopsticks, and began to eat like you were told. Obedient, even in his absence.

The apartment was painfully quiet. The TV was still on low in the background, playing some news report about a devil attack, but it barely registered. All you could think about was him. The way the two of you had left things. The low hum of his approval when you followed orders without being told twice.

Your chest ached at the memory.

“Fuck,” You sighed.

It wasn’t supposed to get this far.

You just needed space. A little air. A couple of days to breathe, to figure out what everything even meant. But cutting contact hadn’t made it easier… it had made it worse.

He didn’t deserve the cold shoulder. Not when he cared.

In a strange way, of course, but he still cared.

You took another bite, the noodles sweet and hot, and tried not to imagine how he would’ve told you exactly how much to eat, how fast, how to sit. Tried not to remember the last time his hand was around your throat, firm but careful, guiding you with a wordless kind of gentleness that never stopped making you melt. It was in those moments you felt most grounded – cared for.

And now you’d left him hanging.

He paused by the door, turning to face you one last time. His eyes were dark and serious, but there was something softer there too – regret, perhaps.

“I’m sorry,” he uttered quietly, the apology so heavy it seemed to fill the room with silence.

You put the chopsticks down, appetite fading as guilt pushed its way up your throat. You didn’t like this distance.

You didn’t like being disobedient, not really. Not when it meant hurting him (and yourself). You had your pride, yes, but, fuck…

You needed to fix it. Or at least… try.

You stood slowly and walked over to the wall phone – the clunky landline you still kept around. You used your phone to scroll through your contact list. His name came up instantly.

Aki Hayakawa (Home)

You tapped it open, stared at the digits on the screen, then reached for the receiver.

Then, taking a deep breath, you dialed the number.

It was cold in your hand. Heavy.

You pressed each number slowly, deliberately, your stomach tightening with every beep. Truthfully, you didn’t know exactly what you’d say – only that you had to say something.

That you missed him, perhaps. That you’d eaten, like he told you to. That you were sorry.

That you were still his, if he’d have you.

The phone rang twice before the line clicked. You held your breath as it did so, waiting for that voice you knew so well – the voice you craved to hear. You expected him to be a little groggy at this hour, voice a littl hoarse.

What you hadn’t expected was the girlish voice that answered, “Hello?”

Your heart sank through the floor. Do I have the right number? “Is this… Is this Aki’s number?”

Then, as if the situation couldn’t have gotten any fucking worse, she giggled – she fucking giggled, like it was the funniest thing she’d heard all day. “He’s busy,” She replied. “Can I take a– um… a message?”

Your brain froze. A girl? Answering his phone?

His phone. The one in his apartment.

Your throat tightened like you were going into anaphylactic shock, eyes burning with the weight of uncried tears that were hurriedly making their way to the surface. Without thinking, you hung the phone up on the receiver, standing in stunned silence.

There’s someone else.

Why does that hurt so bad?

Then, something far darker – Did I mean nothing to him?

Was I just another girl on his roster?

You should have known better. You weren’t his girlfriend, anyway. You weren’t a “someone” to him. You were just sort of… there. Hanging on by a thread being strung along, feeling like you were the only girl he was talking to, then…

Fuck, that fucking laugh.

Who is she? Does he laugh like that with her? Touch her like he did you?

You looked at the takeout box on the counter – the one with chicken teriyaki and noodles, all untouched except for a few bites.

The thought of that meal, meant for you, now felt like a lie.

You’re crazy. You’re ridiculous.

You shoved the box into the fridge. Food was food, but you didn’t want to eat anymore. Not with her voice still echoing in your head.

Who the hell is she?

I’m gonna put an end to this, You grabbed your keys, yanked your jacket on, and stormed outside before your brain could talk you out of it. I’m gonna give him a piece of my fucking mind.

Reasonably, you knew you were being ridiculous. The cold air hit your face like a splash of reality, but it wasn’t enough to make you care. Fuck, had the last few weeks meant nothing to him?

Had your love meant nothing to him?

You pulled your coat tighter around you, fists clenched.

You’re not his girlfriend. You have no right to be this pissed off.

You couldn’t give a rat’s ass.

You walked fast, slippers clicking on the down the stairs, down into the lobby, out onto the sidewalk, heart pounding like a drum. You couldn’t even have been bothered to change, let alone lock the door to your apartment.

How long has she been there? You wondered. How many times has he lied to me?

“If you see this, call me. Thinking of you.”

You stopped in front of the street, trying to steady your breathing.

You scanned the empty road, then looked up at the street lamps glowing faintly above.

I’m going to find a taxi.

I’m going to go over there and kick his fucking door down.

You darted across the street, not caring about the cold biting your cheeks.

God, that asshole!

You lifted your arm, hailing the first cab that passed, your heart racing like you’d just run a marathon.

The taxi slowed, pulled over.

You slid in without a word.

You told the driver, voice low and steady despite the chaos inside: “Take me to the corner of Fourth and Ninth.”

Close enough to where he lived to remind you why you were losing your mind. Far enough not to lose control.

You stared out the window, the city lights blurring as the taxi moved.

I was never his, you reminded yourself.

I was just a placeholder.

The desk lady had already locked up and gone home for the evening, so you slipped past the empty front desk without a second glance. The lobby was quiet, a little too quiet, and the overhead lights cast a dull glow over the polished floor. You hesitated only a moment before stepping into the elevator, just as another tenant pushed the button for the sixth floor. She was a middle-aged woman, carrying a bag of groceries, humming softly like she hadn’t a care in the world.

You caught her glance, a polite smile exchanged, but inside you felt like you were walking straight into trouble. The elevator hummed and glided upward, each floor ticking by like a countdown. Your stomach twisted with nerves, heart pounding just enough to drown out the silence.

When the doors slid open on the sixth floor, the hallway stretched out, long and dead silent. The faint buzz of the elevator behind you was quickly swallowed by the thick stillness. The walls, a dull beige, looked cold and unwelcoming, and the faint scent of dust and old carpet filled your nose.

You knew it was a bad idea. You had no right to be here. But still, you stepped out, your footsteps soft but deliberate against the carpeted floor. Your breath hitched with every step, the sound unnervingly loud in the emptiness.

Finally, you reached his door. Your hand hovered over the brass doorknob, trembling just a little. You swallowed hard, heart caught in your throat, then knocked.

The knock sounded louder than you expected, a sharp rap in the quiet corridor. You pressed your palm against the cool door, waiting, nerves tangled in your chest like barbed wire.

There was rustling on the other side – a shift, a shuffle.

Then, a minute later, the door creaked open slowly, and there he was. Hair loose and tousled like he’d just rolled out of bed, wearing soft pajamas that looked like they belonged on someone about to settle in for the night. The tiredness in his eyes matched the way his shoulders sagged slightly, but there was still a flicker of something alert, something wary.

Fuck, he’s hot.

You stood frozen, words failing you. For a long moment, it was just the two of you in the silence, the world outside reduced to nothing.

You realized suddenly – you didn’t even know why you’d come here. What were you expecting? An apology? An explanation? Closure? You had no answers.

So, instead, you decided to dig yourself a deeper hole.

“Where is she?” You asked, slightly out of breath.

Aki tilted his head like he had no idea what you were talking about. “...Who?”

Asshole wants to play dumb, huh?

“The girl who answered your phone, dickhead,” You hissed. Warily, you glanced behind him, trying to see if you could catch the bitch in action. No one was there, of course. No, he’d probably told her to run and hide.

But Aki didn’t look the slightest bit tense, like you’d caught onto some lie he’d been hiding. Instead, he sighed, shoulders sagging. “That was Power. The two pinheads were playing around on the phone today while I was getting changed,” He carded a hand through his hair, “Not sure why your number was one of the ones they called.”

The name hit you like a bucket of cold water. Power. Of course.

That explained everything.

Well, now, I just feel stupid.

Your mouth opened, but nothing came out. You turned, deciding you’d done enough damage just by showing up.

But before you could step away, his hand caught your wrist – gentle but firm.

“Wait,” he said, voice thick with something you couldn’t name yet. “Don’t go.”

You looked back, and the warm pressure of his hand made your skin prickle. His eyes searched yours – vulnerable and complicated, not the man who’d sent that takeout or left you wondering where you stood. He looked every bit as conflicted as you were (and then some).

“Can you…” He trailed off, “Come inside?”

Why? So I can make the same mistake all over again?

You sighed, shaking your head – you knew it was a horrible idea, but that didn’t stop you from contemplating it. “Aki… I shouldn’t have even come here. We can’t.”

“I know,” He answered back quickly, like he knew exactly what you were thinking, “I know.”

But, then, fuck, he pulled you in like no time had passed at all, strong arms wrapping themselves around you, broad chest pressing into your cheek, and before you knew it, you were hugging him back. You didn’t fight it. No, you stood there in the middle of the hallway while he buried his face in your shoulder and inhaled like he hadn’t been able to breathe without you.

God, I needed this. You needed him, you just hadn’t realized it.

“I don’t know why,” He murmured, deep voice muffled against your warm skin, “But I’ve been missing you like crazy.”

And that was all it took. That was it.

You didn’t mean to end up inside of his apartment – not necessarily – but there you were, following him in. One moment, his arms were around you, and the next, the door was closing behind you with the quietest click.

You stood there in the foyer, just past the threshold, too frightened to do anything more while he turned the lock – like you hadn’t been avoiding him for the past 48 hours.

And now, you were here. With him. You figured you would make the same mistakes a hundred thousand more times if it meant they would lead you right back into his arms again. You’d fucked him plenty of times, but to be held so tenderly, like you were fragile… that was different playing ground.

He looked softer like this – hair loose, a little mussed, donning a pair of sweatpants and a gray tee. Less like the Aki you kept at arm’s length more like the version you dreamt about.

“I was just about to step out for a smoke,” He nodded towards the glass sliding doors at the end of the living room, “I can give you a sweater, if you want to join me.”

You didn’t take him up on the sweater offer (because there wasn’t anything casual about that), but you did follow him wordlessly over to the balcony. He slid the door open and stepped out. You followed suit.

You stood a careful foot away from him, arms folded around your body. Still, your eyes betrayed you, seeking him out like you couldn’t fucking help it.

The breeze moved freely through his hair. His pretty face was lit faintly by the streets below.

You hadn’t meant to fall for him, let alone so hard, but the ache was there anyway.

He shifted, glancing at you, eyes flicking over your face with that look you couldn’t quite read like he was trying to understand you. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I wasn’t.” A lie.

He didn’t challenge it. He nodded.

“I wasn’t…” You tried to fill the silence while Aki fished out his carton of cigarettes, popping one between his lips and lighting the end of it. “I didn’t know if you’d wanna hear from me.”

“I probably shouldn’t,” He sucked in a mouthful of smoke, letting it pour freely from his lips while he answered, “But I did anyway.”

The silence returned – heavy, fragile, balancing on the edge of something neither of you wanted to name.

“You look tired,” He added. It was true – you imagined you were quite a sight, hair disheveled, still in your pajamas.

You shrugged, “Haven’t slept.”

That was also true. In all honesty, you hadn’t been sleeping very well the past few days.

“Yeah,” He pulled in a mouthful of smoke. Breathed it out into the open night air, “Me either.”

You leaned on the balcony, casting your tired gaze into the streets below. A few cars drove past. A couple walked down the sidewalk, hand in hand. Their laughter could be heard from all the way up here, where you stood next to the man who had been occupying your thoughts.

“Did I miss anything at work?” You asked, rather then pouring your heart out to him.

The cigarette burned between Aki’s long fingers, illuminating his pretty face with a faint orange glow. The smoke billowed out of his mouth, dissipating into the air between you. “Denji broke his foot,” He noted. “Himeno got wasted and puked all over my shoes last night.”

You winced. Not the Converse.

“Nothing new, then, huh?” You teased.

To your surprise, he answered, “Not really. I tend to get bored when you’re not around, actually.”

The words shouldn’t have felt like a confession, but they did. You felt them dig into your heart, lodge themselves between your ribs like something you shouldn’t have heard.

“Why’s that?” You asked. You totally weren’t trying to pry, or anything like that.

Definitely not.

“You keep me on my toes, I guess,” He sighed, not quite meeting your eyes. “Never know what you’re gonna do next.”

There was a shift in the air. A pause. Something sharp and quiet settling in between you.

You didn’t know how to respond – didn’t know what kind of weight to give those words. But your pulse was suddenly in your throat, and when he held his half-burnt cigarette toward you, wordlessly offering, you didn’t hesitate. Maybe you just wanted something to do with your hands. Maybe you just didn’t want to think.

You stared at it for half a second too long. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t look at you like it was a big deal.

But it felt like a big deal.

You took it.

You tried to inhale like you’d seen him do, steady and effortless, but it hit the back of your throat too fast. You sputtered hard, coughing into your arm, your eyes tearing up.

It was embarrassing. The smoke clung to your lips, bitter and chalky.

Aki laughed at you. Really laughed – low and rough and amused in a way you never heard from him before. The sound made your stomach flip, tension threading its way through your veins. You looked up at him, and….

God.

There was something about him. Something about his pretty face, about the way he was watching you cough. He looked like he wanted to say something – maybe breach the one topic neither of you seemed to want to discuss. Maybe, without meaning to, he already had.

His blue eyes dropped down to your lips for the briefest of moments. You weren’t entirely sure who had leaned in first (nor did you care), but before you knew it, Aki’s hand was cradling your jaw, and he was kissing you.

Everything fell silent. The outside world. Your thoughts. All of it. The cigarette may have been forgotten, but you could taste it on his lips – bitter and heavy, but it worked for him. His mouth moved slowly against yours, like he’d missed you too.

Like he wanted to savor it.

You kissed the man back, a little too desperate for your own liking. You fisted a hand in his sweater, pulling him closer, and when he didn’t stop you, you rested a hand on the hard plane of his chest. You could feel his heart beating below your palm. Relaxed, steady, strong.

Your core burned red-hot, like it had missed him more than you did.

If you had told you from a few months ago that you would be here, making out with your bitchy superior on his balcony after confessing your love for him, well…

Aki walked backwards, taking you with him. He broke away from your lips only for a moment – only to plop down into the chair. He reached for your hips, then, pulling you gently into his lap.

The chair creaked as you settled your weight onto him, unafraid of hurting him, because you knew he could handle it. Your trembling knees bracketed his hips, hands braced against his chest like you felt you would fall.

And he looked up at you breathlessly, pretty lips parted around an exhale while his eyes raked over your face.

This time, you kissed him.

The kiss slowed. Changed. Became something heavier, quieter – his breath brushing against your cheek, his mouth softer now, almost reverent. His fingers slid up your spine. Yours curled in the back of his hair.

And then he stopped.

Just enough to breathe. Just enough to press his forehead against yours, eyes still closed.

Your heart was pounding. You weren’t sure if he could feel it, or if he was just as shaken by the silence.

You didn’t speak. Neither did he.

Because whatever this was – whatever it meant, whatever it was becoming – neither of you seemed to be ready to talk about it.

Aki let out a slow breath. You felt it fan across your cheek as he shifted slightly, took the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. Then, his hand came back – sliding along your lower back, deliberate now, more sure of its place.

And you kissed him again.

This time you didn’t hesitate. This time it was messy, needy – your mouth open under his, and his tongue slid over yours with a kind of lazy control that made you feel fucking dizzy. Your hips moved without thinking, just a little, a slow roll forward as the heat began to gather between your thighs.

Aki didn’t stop you. No, he guided you.

His hand curled around your waist, pressing you down just a little harder, his thigh firm beneath you. His lips broke from yours long enough to murmur low against your jaw:

“Careful.” A pause. A breath. “Any moment now, someone could look up and see us.”

But the hard on he was sporting said otherwise. You knew he didn’t give a shit if anyone saw. This was, after all, the same man who had you bent over the desk after-hours in his office. No, you knew he wanted to see if you were brave enough to go through with it.

Your breath caught, your thighs tightening instinctively around him. You could feel him beneath you – hard already. Waiting. Just like you.

“Feels like you’re into that idea,” You teased back, hand creeping down between your body and his, heat flushing your face and your neck. “You an exhibitionist, Captain?”

He grinned, lazy and a little humored. “Maybe he just missed you.”

You quirked a brow at him. “You talking about you or mini you?”

“Maybe both,” He teased right back. “Maybe if you keep moving like that, I’ll show you just how much I missed you.”

You rocked your hips again, more deliberately this time, testing. Chasing.

And his grip tightened.

You whimpered, quietly, and buried your face in his neck. “I want you, Aki,” you whispered, voice ragged, needy.

He chuckled – slow, dark, smug. “That right?” His fingers dragged a lazy circle over your hip. “You gonna ask nice for it, or are you just planning to use me?”

That shouldn’t have made you whine, but it did – your breath shivered as your hands moved without thinking, reaching between you, searching for the waistband of his sweatpants. Your fingertips brushed the strings and you felt him twitch beneath you.

“I’ll be good,” you whispered, barely more than a breath. “I’ll be so good–”

“Oh, I know you will,” he murmured, and there was something wicked behind his voice now, something dark and coaxing and possessive. He leaned back, shifting his hips so that you could get better access. “Show me, baby. Go ahead.”

It took a great deal of effort to weasel your pants down your hips, and even more effort to wiggle them off of one leg, then the other.

Your fingers curled around the strings of his sweatpants, tugged them loose, and pulled him out – warm and heavy in your palm, already hard enough that it made your breath catch. You swallowed, your thighs tightening as you hovered over him, the tip catching at your entrance.

But you didn’t sink down. Not yet.

You rocked your hips forward – once, slow, dragging yourself along the length of him. Just enough to tease, to make yourself feel it. Again, a little harder this time, your clit brushing the head as you ground down against him with a quiet, trembling breath.

Aki groaned low in his throat, and the familiar sound blanketed you in a warmth you didn’t realize you’d missed.

His fingers dug into your waist. Not stopping you – not yet – just feeling you, guiding the rhythm like he wanted to feel how desperate you’d gotten.

“So wet already,” he muttered, voice thick and dark with heat. “What was it you were saying earlier? Did she miss me?”

You bit your lip. Your eyes fluttered. You nodded, just a little, barely able to breathe through the tension twisting tight in your gut.

And finally – you couldn’t take it anymore. You angled your hips just right and began to sink down on him, inch by slow inch, stretching around him, swallowing the fullness until you were seated all the way.

You whimpered – broken, breathless – and your hands curled in the fabric of his sweater like you needed something to hold on to.

You started to move. Just barely – a shift of your hips, a slow grind downward, chasing that dizzying friction–

“Didn’t say you could move.”

His voice cut through you like a knife, sharp and firm, and everything in you stilled.

“But…” you started, your voice so small, helpless as the want curled tighter in your belly. “Aki–”

Don’t do this to me.

He tilted his head, tsked quietly.

“Gotta earn it first,” he said, and you heard the smirk in his voice now, lazy and smug. “Think you can wait ‘til I’m done smoking?”

You blinked at him, stomach flipping, lips parted in disbelief.

But he was already pulling a new cigarette from his sweatpants pocket, placing it between his lips like he hadn’t just rendered you completely undone. His cock was still buried inside you, pulsing, thick and hot and unforgiving – and now you were supposed to sit there?

Still?

Your legs trembled. But you nodded anyway.

“I can wait,” you whispered. “I’ll be good.”

Aki smiled – slow, indulgent, like he loved hearing that from your mouth, and your face burned.

“That’s my girl,” He crooned softly.

He handed you the lighter, casual as anything, like you weren’t trembling in his lap, already soaking around him. You flicked it open, thumb brushing the wheel, and watched the flame catch the end of the cigarette. Watched it light up his face – those sharp cheekbones, that mouth you couldn’t stop staring at, the lashes dark against his skin as he inhaled. Exhaled slowly.

And there you sat – full of him, thighs trembling, trying not to roll your hips, trying not to grind down where you needed him most.

His eyes were half-lidded, lazy, unreadable. You could see the soft glow of the ember at the end of the cigarette as he inhaled, watched the red pulse faintly light up his face, and it made your stomach flip. He exhaled slow, the smoke curling between you both – ghosting over your skin, sinking into your lungs.

He looked so calm. So comfortable. Like this was nothing.

Like he wasn’t making you fall apart just by sitting still.

Every breath he took was torture. Every second he didn’t move his hands, didn’t let you move, made the pressure in your core burn hotter, twist tighter. Your body ached to shift, to ride the friction you weren’t allowed to chase. But you didn’t dare grind down – not without permission. Not after the way he’d told you to wait, voice all soft warning, all quiet command.

Still… your muscles twitched.

Your hips shifted just a little. Barely more than a sway – like you could convince yourself it didn’t count, like it was involuntary. Like it wasn’t you testing him.

But it was. And Aki didn’t miss a thing.

His hand flexed on your thigh instantly, fingers tightening in warning – not enough to bruise, just enough to remind you. He didn’t even look at you as he said it.

“Be still.”

The words floated through the smoke. He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t need to.

You froze. Your breath caught in your throat.

“You don’t wanna make me change my mind, do you?”

You shook your head too fast, panic fluttering in your chest. “No,” you whispered.

He finally looked at you – finally let his eyes meet yours – and fuck, it made your whole body go hot. His gaze was unreadable, but heavy, anchoring. Like he saw everything – every twitch of your thighs, every flutter of restraint inside you, every little whimper you were trying to swallow.

“Then behave,” he said, and his voice dropped lower, rougher. “Or we can stop.”

You bit your bottom lip so hard it almost hurt, nodding once, obedient.

You wanted to be good. Wanted to show him you could handle it. But the minutes dragged, stretched long and slow as honey, and your body wouldn’t stop screaming for friction, for movement, for anything.

Aki took another drag. His free hand rested lazy at your waist, fingers spread wide, thumb brushing barely beneath your ribs. The touch was maddening – light enough to soothe, heavy enough to warn. His other hand held the cigarette loosely, bringing it to his mouth with all the time in the world.

And there you were. Stuck on his cock. Too full. Too hot. Every tiny clench of your walls sent a ripple through your core, a reminder of how badly you wanted more – of how good it would feel if you just fucking moved.

You shifted again. Less than before. Just your breath catching as you rolled your hips forward a fraction of an inch. Maybe he wouldn’t notice–

“Sweetheart,” He sighed.

Your whole body locked up at the sound of that nickname in that voice.

“That’s twice now.”

You swallowed, shame burning through you. “I’m sorry,” you breathed.

He gave a soft exhale – half amusement, half warning – and as he dragged another long pull from his cigarette, the smoke curled into the air with deliberate slowness. His palm slid to your lower back, keeping you in place. Not restraining – reminding.

“I know you are,” he murmured. “But if you want me to fuck you the way you need, you’re gonna have to wait.”

Fuck.

You whimpered – you didn’t mean to, it just slipped out.

“Such a pretty little thing,” he murmured, voice dripping with praise. “So fucking desperate, yeah?”

You nodded quickly, heat flooding your cheeks.

“Good,” he said. “Then you can sit here a little longer. Show me just how patient you can be.”

He brought the cigarette to his lips again. Inhaled. Flicked the ash lazily over the side of the balcony. Then reached out – and brushed his fingers over the inside of your thigh, just once, just enough to make you jolt.

Not enough to let you move. Not enough to give you what you wanted.

Just enough to feel it.

You were shaking now. Sweat beading at your temples. Your pussy was throbbing, your clit pulsing with every heartbeat, and you swore you could feel your heartbeat in your throat. He was so big that he filled you to the brim, pressing up against all of the right spots and, somehow, none of them.

He watched you, every now and then, between drags – eyes sliding down your face, your parted lips, the way you bit them to keep quiet. The way your thighs trembled with effort.

It wasn’t even about teasing anymore. It was control. It was him knowing exactly what you needed and making you earn every second of it.

And still, you nodded. Still, you stayed. Still, you obeyed.

Because you wanted him to know you could take it. You wanted him to be proud. You just didn’t know how much longer you could last.

Aki’s eyes dropped to your face again, and something shifted behind them – something warm, dark, and pleased. His lips curled into the faintest smirk.

“That’s more like it,” he murmured, low and rough. “Good girl.”

The words hit like a pulse straight through your chest – pride and heat and something deeper all curling tight in your stomach. You let out a shaky breath, biting down on a sound that might’ve been a whimper.

Then his hand moved. Slow at first. His fingers slid from your waist down, gliding between your bodies, knuckles grazing your belly, until his hand dipped lower.

You gasped – tried not to, but couldn’t help it. And then his thumb found your clit. You twitched. Your hips nearly bucked on instinct, but his other hand was still there, firm on your hip, holding you in place.

“Ah– Don’t move,” he said, and his voice was calm, warning, like a leash tightening around your throat. “You did so well. Don’t ruin it now.”

You nodded frantically. “I won’t,” you breathed. “I promise.”

“Good,” he said again – softer now, almost indulgent. “I know you can do it.”

His thumb pressed in slow, agonizing circles – gentle at first, light enough to tease but just firm enough to set your nerves on fire. You shuddered, breath catching, hands trembling where they gripped his hoodie for support.

Fuck, you thought. I need to move.

Every motion was precise. Controlled. Not fast. Not hard. Just enough. Just enough to make you feel it – to edge you toward the relief you’d been aching for, without letting you fall over.

“Poor baby,” Aki murmured, watching your face. “Look at you… shaking already.”

“I can’t–” you gasped, teeth sinking into your lip. “Aki–”

“You can,” he cut in, quiet but commanding. “You will.”

I will.

Your whole body was quivering now. He hadn’t even moved his hips – hadn’t even fucked you – and still, just the press of his thumb, just his voice, was enough to have you fiending for more. You were clenching around him, hot and wet and throbbing, and he hadn’t let you move. Hadn’t let you do anything.

You were going crazy.

“You gonna cum just from this?” he asked, thumb circling slowly, torturously. “Just from a little rub? No movement, no fucking– nothing?”

You whined. “I don’t know… I just–”

“You really are that desperate, huh?”

His tone was amused. But his eyes – his eyes – were heavy with hunger. With affection. With ownership.

Ugh, you thought. I know I was just mad at him, but, fuck…

Pretty privilege is a bitch.

“You’ve been so good,” he said, his voice dropping lower, rougher. “So patient.”

You swallowed around a cry, and your nails dug into his chest as his thumb sped up – just a little. Enough to make your thighs tighten. Enough to make your hips twitch with the effort not to grind down and ruin it.

“You gonna keep being good for me?” he asked, mouth brushing your cheek now. “Or are you gonna get greedy?”

“I’ll be good,” you whispered, frantic. “I will, I promise– please, Aki–”

He just took another drag from his cigarette, smoke curling up through the evening air as if he had all the time in the world. You were barely holding it together, and he knew it. That was part of it – the way he took his time, the way every second he made you wait pushed you further down into yourself. Stripped you bare.

Then his free hand moved – sliding from your waist up to your throat.

You gasped softly as his fingers wrapped around your neck, not tight, just there, guiding you forward until your lips were close, your mouth parted in anticipation. He held you steady, thumb pressing gently under your jaw. He was still watching you when he brought the cigarette to his lips one last time, pulling in slow, deliberate.

And then he tilted his head – and exhaled the smoke right into your mouth.

You inhaled on instinct, eyes fluttering shut, breath catching around the heat of it. Your hips jerked just slightly, the smallest involuntary roll, and your walls clenched hard around him.

Aki moaned.

Not loud – more a deep sound from his chest, half a growl, like it was dragged out of him against his will. His grip tightened on your throat, just a little, and he leaned in closer.

“Fuck,” he muttered, lips brushing the corner of your mouth. “I can feel that. You like that, don’t you?”

You couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe.

But your body gave you away – the way your lashes fluttered, the way your thighs twitched, the way your nails dug into the front of his sweater just to stay upright.

He huffed another breath, more smug now than surprised.

“Course you do,” he said, his voice all gravel and velvet, and, fuck.... “So sensitive. Can’t even take a little smoke without squeezing around me like that.”

You whined, high and helpless.

But you didn’t move. Not fully. Not the way you wanted to.

Because you’d told him you’d be good. And you meant it.

The minutes that followed dragged by, slow and thick, his thumb never leaving your clit, your body trembling under the weight of his restraint. He smoked leisurely, taking his time between drags, touching you just enough to keep you shaking, just enough to keep you desperate.

You didn’t know how you lasted that long – how your thighs didn’t give out, how you didn’t sob from the frustration. But you stayed still. You obeyed.

And then, finally – finally – he took one last drag. Tilted his head back. Exhaled long and slow toward the stars. And flicked the cigarette off the balcony, where it landed somewhere in the streets below.

You didn’t even have time to react before you heard it:

“Bedroom. Now.”

You practically jumped.

“Okay,” you breathed, scrambling to get off of him. You clenched around him once more as you lifted yourself up, nearly trembling from the loss of him as you stood on unsteady legs. Your thighs were slick, your entire body overheated and wound too tight.

You took two steps toward the sliding glass door near his bedroom and didn’t even make it through before you heard him behind you – the sound of fabric shifting, his pants pulled back into place in just enough time for him to follow.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

His steps were slow but deliberate, and you could feel the heat of his gaze between your shoulder blades as you opened the door and stepped inside, barefoot and dizzy. You barely made it past the threshold before his hands were on you again.

One swept beneath your thighs.

The other wrapped around your back.

And then he lifted you – all smooth motion, strong and steady, like you weighed nothing. You gasped, your arms instinctively locking around his neck, your heart nearly beating out of your chest as your legs kicked around

He didn’t even stumble. Just carried you in, easy as anything, through the quiet dark of the room. And then – with one hand still on your back – he kicked the door shut behind him.

You couldn’t stop staring at him – the hard line of his jaw, the heat still dark in his eyes, the way his lips stayed slightly parted like he was still tasting you, like he wasn’t even done with you yet.

God, what a man.

He just walked – long strides through the dim-lit room, past the low dresser, past the photos, until the edge of the bed met his thighs.

And you exhaled, finally, the last of your control fraying at the edges, the tension breaking loose like a dam about to give way.

Because you knew what came next.

Fuck, yes!

The quiet weight of the apartment pressed around you both. His roommates were home. Somewhere beyond the walls, life went on. But here – here, it was just you and him, pulled so close you could feel every breath he took against your skin.

He lowered you down gently onto the mattress, his hands never leaving you, his eyes searching yours as if asking permission, asking if you were ready.

“We shouldn’t,” you whispered, voice barely more than a sigh. “They’re here. Your roommates.”

He smirked, that lazy curve of his mouth that always made your stomach twist. His hands were already working on his sweatpants again. “Like I give a shit.”

And then he kissed you – slow, deep, like he had all the time in the world and still couldn’t get enough. His lips parted yours with a soft sigh, his tongue brushing gently along yours, and you melted beneath him, every bit of hesitation dissolving into heat.

The room around you blurred. Everything beyond the bed, beyond him – it stopped mattering.

He kissed you like it was something he couldn’t take back. Like this was inevitable. Like it already meant something.

Your fingers slid under his shirt, tugging it up until he pulled back long enough to strip it off. He leaned back down, his chest pressed to yours, and your legs parted to welcome him in. Your body felt too hot, too wired, too aware of the weight of him above you and the weight of this – of what it meant to be doing this now, here, like this.

His hips settled between yours.

You gasped quietly at the feel of him – hard against you, dragging along the heat between your thighs with a teasing roll of his hips. It wasn’t enough. It was everything.

“Aki,” you breathed, tugging lightly at the hem of his sweatpants. “Please.”

“Shh.” His voice was low, a hush made of gravel. “You wanna wake them up?”

You shook your head fast, biting down on a whimper as he reached between you, dragging the waistband of his pants low enough to free himself.

The head of his cock nudged at your entrance, hot and heavy and already slick from how much you wanted this – wanted him. And the moment his hips shifted forward, pressing in, you clenched around nothing, your breath catching so fast it nearly hurt.

He watched your face as he pushed in – slow, deliberate, inch by inch, filling you with the kind of care that made your chest ache.

You moaned, soft and strangled, your hands clutching at his back, his shoulders, anything. Anything to keep you anchored to the now, to this bed, to him.

“God,” he whispered, voice shaking just barely as he bottomed out. “You feel– fuck, you feel good.”

You wrapped your legs around him, pulling him deeper, keeping him there.

He didn’t move right away. He just held you. Pressed his forehead to yours and breathed. You could feel the shiver in his chest, feel the way he was holding himself back – not because he didn’t want this, but because he did. Too much. Too deeply.

You kissed him, soft and slow, your fingers curling in his hair. He kissed you back like he was trying to speak without words – like his mouth could say the things he never did.

I love him, you thought, then quickly squashed it down.

When he started to move, it was gentle. Careful. Like he knew what this was and didn’t want to break it.

Fuck, I really shouldn’t be doing this with him.

Each thrust was slow, deep – rocking you back just enough to make your breath stutter, to make your eyes flutter closed, but not enough to make noise. Not enough to wake the apartment.

Like making love.

“Pretty girl,” he murmured, brushing his lips along your jaw, your throat, your collarbone. “Just let me take care of you. You’ll be quiet for me, won’t you?”

You nodded, voice caught in your throat.

The tension built slowly, like a storm gathering beneath your skin. His body moved against yours with unshakable control – every roll of his hips perfectly measured, every breath shared between your lips, every drag of him inside you like a promise he didn’t know how to say aloud.

You clung to him. You arched into him. You gave him everything in the silence.

And he took it – with reverence. With restraint. With a kind of aching hunger that said he didn’t just want to fuck you. He wanted to show his feelings for you, he just didn’t know how.

“Aki–” you breathed, your voice trembling.

He kissed you again to quiet you. To remind you: soft, quiet, stay with me.

The bed creaked once and he paused – breathing hard, eyes locked on yours.

You both froze. Waiting. Listening.

Aki’s shoulders dropped with a sigh of relief, and then he looked back down at you – the corner of his mouth twitching with something crooked and boyish.

God, this is crazy.

You bit your lip to hold in the laugh bubbling up in your own throat, but you didn’t get a chance to say anything.

Because he started moving again.

And this time – this time – you couldn’t stay quiet.

Not when everything from earlier was still coiled up inside you. Not when your body was still aching from restraint. Not when he rolled his hips in slow, deep thrusts that made you tremble, made your voice catch in your throat and your eyes flutter closed.

Fuck, that’s good.

You whimpered, your legs tightening around his hips. He grunted softly, forehead pressing to yours again while he licked his lips.

“Shh,” he whispered, but there was no edge in it – just a breathless warning. “You gotta stay quiet, baby.”

Baby.

“I…” you tried, you really did. “I can’t–”

But he was already reaching down, slipping a hand between your bodies, thumb finding your clit with practiced ease all over again.

You gasped. He kissed you again to catch the sound – the movement slick.

His thumb moved in tight, slow circles, the same rhythm as his hips. A steady build. You clung to him like he was the only thing keeping you from unraveling – and he was.

“That’s it,” he murmured against your mouth. “You can take it. Be good for me.”

You nodded desperately, your voice caught behind your teeth.

His lips trailed along your cheek, your jaw, the shell of your ear.

“You’re doing so fucking good,” he whispered, voice rough now, thick with something tender. “You feel amazing. You’re perfect.”

You whimpered again – too soft to carry beyond the room, but loud enough for him to hear. Loud enough to make him groan as your body clenched around him, fluttering from the pressure coiling tighter and tighter in your gut.

You kissed him – open-mouthed, messy, desperate – breathing against each other, mouths parting only to whisper things you didn’t have the courage to say in daylight.

“Aki,” you gasped, your nails dragging down his back. “Feels good–”

His thrusts faltered for a beat, and then deepened. “You take me so well,” he murmured, voice shaky. “Feels so good like this. You’re so fucking perfect.”

You moaned, forehead tipping against his, the heat of his breath fanning over your lips as he filled you deep and slow again. Your thighs trembled around his hips, trying to keep still, to match the rhythm he was setting – steady, worshipful, like he didn’t just want to get off, but wanted to make sure you felt it.

All of it. All of him.

“You’re so deep,” you whispered, the words spilling out in a breath you couldn’t control.

Aki let out a soft groan, like he felt it in his chest. And still, he moved - hips dragging back slowly before rocking forward again, burying himself fully inside you.

Your fingers curled against his spine, your nails digging just enough to make him hiss quietly through his teeth.

“Again,” you whispered, eyes fluttering closed as your head fell back. “Do it again like that–”

He kissed your throat. Open-mouthed. Lingering.

“Greedy,” he murmured, teasing. But the smile didn’t last – not when he did exactly what you asked, grinding in deep, dragging the tip of his cock against that soft spot inside you until your mouth fell open in a silent cry.

It was uncharacteristically gentle, uncharacteristically tender, but it was enough to shove you closer to the edge.

Your body arched into him, helpless and raw, your arms clinging tight around his neck as your voice caught in your throat. He groaned again, low and strained, and then dipped his head to your chest, kissing the space between your breasts as he kept moving. He sucked gently at your skin – not enough to leave anything visible, but enough that you felt it. Enough that it made your toes curl and your legs shake all over again.

“You’re shaking,” he whispered, lips brushing your skin. “You close already?”

You nodded, desperate. “Oh God– Don’t stop–”

“I won’t, pretty baby,” he murmured, and his hand snaked between your bodies again – thumb finding your clit, rubbing slow, tight circles as he picked up his rhythm. Just slightly. Just enough. “I promise.”

And you knew he hadn’t told you he loved you, but, fuck, his eyes… His eyes peered into yours with such an affectionate intensity that you couldn’t help but wonder if he did.

You cried out, but he kissed you before the sound could leave the room – catching it with his mouth, with a groan that vibrated straight through you.

“You sound so pretty when you try to be quiet,” he murmured against your lips, grinding his .“Good fucking girl.”

“Aki–” Your voice was shaking. You were shaking. You could feel your orgasm building, fast and sharp, too soon – your body raw and aching but still wanting.

Still craving more of him.

“You gonna cum for me?” he asked, breath warm against your cheek, his thumb never easing up. “Be good and give it to me, baby. Wanna feel you.”

Your whole body clenched at his words. Your hands found his face, held him there, made him look at you. You needed to see him when it happened. Needed him to see you, too.

I love you.

“I’m right there– fuck,” you whispered. “Don’t stop, Aki, please–”

His lips brushed yours. “Cum for me, Baby.”

And then, you did just that – sharp and helpless, your body clenching around him, your thighs trembling as you tried not to cry out. He groaned at the feel of it, at the way you pulsed around him, at the way your breath hitched like it was too much to bear.

“Fuck,” he gasped, hips stuttering. “That’s it. So perfect like this, baby. So fucking good for me.”

You whimpered, the high leaving you breathless, limbs heavy. Your chest rose and fell against his, skin sticky with sweat, lips swollen from his kisses.

You could feel him getting close now – the way he lost his rhythm, the way he started moving faster, rougher, like he couldn’t hold back anymore.

Your voice was wrecked, hoarse. But you still whispered, “Let go for me.”

And Aki – who was always in control, who never said more than he had to – just groaned, and finally gave in.

He came deep inside you, jaw clenched, head bowed as his hips ground into yours with one final thrust. His hands gripped you hard – not to hurt, but to keep himself tethered to the moment, to you. His breath hitched once, twice, before he buried his face in your neck, gasping softly as the last tremors passed through him.

He’s fucking beautiful.

You held him through it – arms wrapped around his shoulders, lips brushing the side of his head. Fingers sliding slowly through his hair, combing it back, curling lightly at the nape of his neck. You didn’t say anything. You just stayed there, skin against skin, your heart pounding beneath his cheek as you tried to remember how to breathe.

You kept petting his hair, gentle and slow, letting your nails lightly scratch along his scalp. His breath started to even out. His hands loosened their grip on your waist, sliding slowly down your sides before settling against your hips like he couldn’t bring himself to let go just yet.

Time passed in shallow, quiet breaths.

And eventually, Aki shifted.

Just a little. Enough to peer up at you with soft, half-lidded eyes, his cheek still resting against your collarbone. His hair was a mess, his face a little flushed, and he looked… shy, almost. Like he wasn’t sure what he’d see in your face. Like part of him was scared of the sheer intimacy of it all.

Like he’d felt the touch of a woman before, but never one so tender.

Your hand didn’t stop moving through his hair. You just looked back at him, breath still catching every few seconds, your lips parted but saying nothing.

He blinked slowly. His gaze traced your face like he wanted to memorize it.

Neither of you spoke.

And after a beat, he rolled off you with a quiet groan, pulling out slow, carefully, like he still didn’t want to hurt you. He collapsed onto the bed beside you, one arm falling over his eyes for a moment like he needed to shut the world out.

You turned your head to look at him. He didn’t move.

So you lay there too, breathing in the quiet, letting your pulse settle. Both of you naked and exposed in every possible way – still warm from the weight of him, still aching in places you didn’t know could ache. The air between you felt thick with the things neither of you had the courage to say.

You stared up at the ceiling. It was dark, speckled with soft shadows. The city lights from outside glowed faintly through the blinds, casting lines across the sheets.

Aki’s arm dropped away from his face after a long moment. He turned his head, slowly, to glance at you. His expression was unreadable – tired, maybe. Still catching up to everything that had just happened.

You looked at each other, quiet. Breathing. Heart still unsteady.

He didn’t smile. You didn’t either.

There’s nothing casual about this.

Still, he didn’t pull away.

He didn’t move closer either.

You both just… lay there. Shoulder to shoulder. Close enough that the backs of your hands were brushing on the blanket between you. Staring at the ceiling. Listening to the hum of the room and the occasional honk from outside – so far away now it might’ve been another world.

Neither of you was ready to confront this.

“You know, I never wanted to do Public Safety,” You spoke up, clearing your throat, eyes tracing the corners of the ceiling. “I wanted to go to nursing school. Figured Public Safety would be an easy way to pay for it.”

Aki didn’t answer right away. He was on his back beside you, one arm behind his head, the other resting against the sheets. Still catching his breath. Still warm from what just happened.

Still acting like this was normal. Like this was routine.

You swallowed. “Didn’t think I’d still be here years later, covered in blood half the time, doing paperwork the other half.”

A small huff came from his side of the bed. You glanced at him.

“I didn’t really plan on anything either,” he said, eyes fixed on some point on the ceiling. “Didn’t have the luxury. You’re too good for this Devil Hunting shit, I’m telling you.”

You nodded, chewing the inside of your cheek. The air between you was heavier now – not tense, exactly, but heavy in the way things get when the high wears off and silence creeps back in.

“I mean,” you started, hesitant now, “it’s not like I regret it. The work matters. And I’m good at it.”

He nodded, but didn’t say anything else.

You turned your head, searching his profile in the dim light. He looked tired. Or thoughtful. Or maybe both.

“I used to think you were sleeping with Makima,” you said, the words slipping out too easily.

That got his attention. He blinked, eyebrows pulling together slightly. “What?”

You shrugged, eyes flicking away again. “Just… you were always with her. She had that hold on you. I figured maybe there was something going on.”

There was a beat of silence. You felt him shift slightly beside you, his arm brushing yours.

“There wasn’t,” he said, and his voice was flat. Definite.

You didn’t reply.

The room stayed quiet.

This was always how it was with you two. You’d sleep together, then pretend like it didn’t mean anything. Like it wasn’t personal. Like the weight of his hand on your back or the way your bodies fit together didn’t stir up something dangerous underneath the surface.

You never talked about it. That was the rule.

You broke the rules, though, and now here you were, saying too much, letting it spill out into the air like smoke you couldn’t bottle back up.

You exhaled. “Look, I don’t care if you’re seeing anyone. It’s none of my business.”

Aki turned his head then – not all the way, but enough that his eyes found yours.

“You know,” he said, his tone still low, unreadable. “You don’t have to worry about any other girls.”

You stared at him, confused. “What?”

“You’re the only one I’m seeing.”

The words hit you hard. You sat with them, unsure if he was serious, unsure what they meant.

There’s no way I’m the only girl he’s seeing.

“Aki,” you said slowly, cautious, “don’t say that unless you mean it.”

You knew you were being delusional. Crazy, even. You had no right to ask, and yet you were.

To your surprise, he humored you. “I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t.”

His voice was steady now – not gentle, not teasing. Just quiet. Firm.

And that was the problem. You knew he meant it.

You looked at him, heart pounding in a way that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with what had just shifted in the space between you.

He wasn’t asking for anything. Wasn’t making a declaration or drawing a line in the sand.

But the moment felt different now. He’d pulled a thread loose, and you couldn’t pretend you didn’t notice.

So you looked away. Back up at the ceiling.

“You haven’t been able to get out much, then, huh?” You asked, putting on a smile and pretending that his words hadn’t cracked your chest right open.

“No,” He hummed, “I’m just not interested in having anyone else in my bed.”

Those words sounded strangely similar to a confession.

“You should know, then…” You breathed out. “You’re the only guy I’ve slept with in the past… year,” With a laugh, you added, “Long dry streak, I know.”

He shook his head once, eyes drifting back up. “What about you? Don’t get out much?”

You let out another laugh, softer this time. “No, I do. There’s guys. Some have been interested in me. I just…”

You trailed off, not sure if you wanted to say the next part out loud. Not sure if he wanted you to.

He waited.

You said finally. “I don’t know. I’ll talk to them, flirt back sometimes… but it never sticks.”

Aki made a sound in his throat – a kind of low, acknowledging hum – like he understood more than he let on.

“It’s like…” You trailed off, at a loss for words.

“Like they’re missing something?” He answered. “I feel that way, too. I just don’t know why.”

Your chest tightened, and you swallowed.

Then you turned your head to look at him, your voice quiet, measured, but steady.

“You want the honest answer?”

He looked back at you. Really looked. Like he already knew you were going to say something dangerous.

“I’m not sure,” He sighed. “Look… I’m sorry about how we left things the other day. I– I know there’s something here, I just… I don’t know how to make sense of it. I’m not good at the whole–” He waved a hand around in the air, “Emotions thing.”

That pulled a laugh out of you, dry and soft, breaking the tension just barely.

“No shit,” you said with a smile that didn’t quite reach your eyes. “I think I got that.”

Aki chuckled under his breath, but it faded too quickly. He ran a hand over his mouth, then let it drop, knuckles brushing the blanket between you. “It’s a childhood thing. I have attachment issues because my family died when I was young… you know, the whole nine yards.”

He’s opening up to me…? You thought.

You didn’t want to ruin the moment, so you stayed quiet.

Silently, you watched him form his next sentence.

“I just…” he started again, voice lower now. “I don’t know what I’m feeling. That’s the problem.”

You nodded slightly, trying not to flinch even though the words pricked at something inside you.

“But I know this,” he added, and this time, he looked at you again. “I care for you. I really do.” He hesitated – just long enough for it to feel like he almost didn’t say the next part. “Probably too much.”

Your heart stuttered.

Because it wasn’t “I love you.” It wasn’t a declaration. But it was something. Something real. Something raw.

A step in the right direction.

You swallowed the lump in your throat, the heat blooming behind your eyes, and let yourself smile – slow and sure, the kind of smile that rose from your chest and not your lips.

“I care for you too, Aki.”

You saw the change in his expression the second you said it – subtle, but unmistakable. His eyes flickered, like you’d touched something fragile inside him. Like a part of him hadn’t expected you to say it back.

And then he nodded – once, tight – like that was the only thing holding him together.

His voice cracked just slightly. “Stay with me tonight? Don’t leave.”

The request landed soft, but it thudded in your chest like a drumbeat.

Because it wasn’t just about tonight. It was the way he said it – low, and almost scared, like he was asking for something he didn’t quite believe he was allowed to ask for.

You watched him. His posture – tense. His fingers – twitching near yours like he wanted to reach for you but didn’t know if he should.

Don’t leave.

You stared at the ceiling again, but all you could think about were those two words. What they meant. What they didn’t. How it sounded so much like a confession without ever actually being one.

You slid beneath the covers. He followed suit.

You inhaled slowly, eyes softening as you lay back down beside him, the blankets pulled up to your chest. His warmth was right there – inches away. Without thinking it over, you scooted closer, laying your head on his chest.

He tensed before it melted away, before he wrapped his arms around you.

You didn’t look at him when you whispered, “I won’t.”

Beside you, you heard him exhale. Not heavily. Not with relief. Just… quietly. Like something inside him had unknotted, just a little.

And then, softer – maybe more to yourself than to him, “I promise.”

a/n: omg. phew. that one was so hard to write LMFOAOAO. again, i cannot apologize enough for p much abandoning yall when my chem course got rough. i hope this makes up for it! if not, then.... there's more coming very soon ;)) special thank you to my beloved @mrshayakawaa for really helping me get out of my slump. you have been a source of inspiration for me! thanks for killing my writer's block! love you bunches muah muah muah x

credits: einruji__ on twitter . I obviously do not own csm or anything related to it. please do not reproduce, copy, or translate my works anywhere. dont fk w me im a bruja.

also: come find me on my wattpad if u wanna interact more!

taglist: @mitsuyeahhh , @sleepysnk , @enneadec , @noaabean , @em1e , @drakensdarling , @bertholdts--butt , @satanlovesusall666 , @mitsuwuyaa , @noctifule , @scaraphobia , @ask-the-insect-hashira , @lovingranchturkeyweasel , @bontensbabygirl , @slvdsjjk , @novacrystalli , @hanmastattoos , @kodzuksn , @hqtiny , @ohmaiscool15 , @redlittlequeen , @leivane , @goldeneagles-posts , @yeahblahlame , @no-oneelsebutnsu , @cookiesandcreammy , @cawwn , @the-haitani-baton , @littlelovebug98 , @armani78 , @mindurownbussines , @kokos-property , @violetmatcha , @hp-simp505 , @acethebrave , @mitsuyeahhh , @sleepysnk , @enneadec , @noaabean , @em1e , @drakensdarling , @bertholdts--butt , @satanlovesusall666 , @mitsuwuyaa , @noctifule , @scaraphobia , @ask-the-insect-hashira , @lovingranchturkeyweasel , @bontensbabygirl , @slvdsjjk , @novacrystalli , @hanmastattoos , @kodzuksn , @hqtiny , @ohmaiscool15 , @redlittlequeen , @leivane , @goldeneagles-posts , @yeahblahlame , @no-oneelsebutnsu , @cookiesandcreammy , @cawwn , @the-haitani-baton , @littlelovebug98 , @armani78 , @mindurownbussines , @kokos-property , @violetmatcha , @hp-simp505 , @mrshayakawaa, @xxpr3ttyk173rxx

wanna join the taglist? | pornstar ; chapter index

#prnstar •#ask notiddygxthgf ✧˖*°࿐#aki x reader #aki hayakawa x reader #csm x reader #aki hayakawa #hayakawa aki x reader #chainsaw man x reader #notiddygxthgf ˚ ༘♡ ⋆｡˚

61 notes · View notes

alexanderlightweight · 2 months ago

Note

Could you write malec being feral/unhinged for each other?

Could be dark, smut, or any au. I just wanna see them ready to destroy people/the world for each other, with each other.

i hope this hits the right vibes? I feel like they're being feral and fairly unhinged but in like a very specific way so now i'm a bit unsure but nevertheless, I hope you enjoy. this is in pray to the hunters, last bit here. this is a bit of a time skip to when Magnus needs energy.

this verse has a lot of cannibalism and murder and necromantic magic so if that's not your thing just let me know! (though it def has Malec who only care about each other)

<3 lumine

pray to the hunters

The first sign that something is truly wrong is how hungry the room is.

Alec feels a rush of lust — for blood, for gore, for power — rising in him the moment he crosses the wardline. Tensions are high, Jace and the mundane arguing over something and Fray crying and Magnus, Magnus... Magnus is magnificent and ravenous.

Too hungry to be satiated by Alec’s energy alone.

“Jace.” Alec says and it snaps Jace’s attention away from the mundane, “Magnus said he needed me.” Magnus makes an agreeing hum and Jace frowns, looking between the two of them suspiciously. “And you’re going to hunt for me. I have a target marked and tracked already. You just need to bring it to me. Alive, though injured is fine. Just keep it breathing.”

Jace’s swallows, visibly uncomfortable, “Alec, are you sure?” What he really means is, 'is this necessary?'.

“Do you want to help Clary? Because this is the only way, or I can leave and Magnus can refuse to help you since he needs my energy to do so.”

Magnus makes an agreeing noise and Fray sniffles and just like that, Jace breaks.

The reason Magnus needs Alec’s energy is simple.

Necromancers make for poor healers.

Magnus’ own magic is already too volatile and while Alec’s sure he can normally heal without a problem, it’s too turbulent for that currently. He’ll need to take the energy of life that Alec himself has and transfer it to Luke, since Magnus’ own magic and connection to death is currently too temperamental to risk it by itself.

Alec knows it’s because of the ritual they did.

The hunt and second and third ritual they’d shared and the fact that Magnus is — even now — hiding the vastness of his power.

Bonds made from hard, white bone contort around Luke like a giant ribcage, pinning his arms downs and while he continues to convulse, it’s less violent and more restrained.

“You’re going to need a lot of energy, and even more to make up for it after. I won’t be able to provide that without a fresh sacrifice.” Alec tries to keep his voice quiet and he thinks he does a good job of hiding his concern, considering Jace leaves without another look.

“Sex would work just as well.” Magnus mutters, almost under his breath but from the filthy look he shoots Alec, he’s meant to hear it.

“Maybe for you.” Alec allows, because he means it. However death and blood is what works for Alec and always has, “not exactly a territory I’ve strayed into before. We can’t say I’ll create energy good for healing without prior testing when I haven't had sex and don't even know if I'll enjoy it.”

Magnus seems to perk up even more at that and Alec narrows his eyes because this is not the time or place. Not with Fray within earshot and Garroway so close, coherent or not.

“Behave.” He hisses because a warm hand of magic suddenly strokes down his spine and he shudders, wanting to relax into the melting heat of it.

“I’m terrible at behaving, darling. Or following orders.” Magnus winks at Alec and it’s only because biting Magnus’ smirk would be a reward for the other man that Alec holds himself back. A hand reaches for his own and Alec gives it, feeling the bite of cold power pass from himself into Magnus.

—

It’s refreshing.

Like walking out of a too-hot room onto a mountain of freshly fallen snow, crisp and clean and bitingly cold.

It wakes something up in Magnus. Stirs the heat of danger that lingers in his belly and Magnus takes more, ignoring Garroway to use his grip on Alexander’s hand to pull him closer.

“At least a kiss, Alexander.” Magnus murmurs, “surely you won’t let me starve?”

Alexander lets out an irritated sigh, but his scowl tastes the same as a smile when Magnus claims his mouth. It’s cold and harsh and quick, Alexander barely lets him savor it before he’s retreating. Lips slick with spit and eyes hard and focused not on Magnus, but Garroway.

It’s an inconvenience to have to deal with the werewolf and Magnus heals him with vicious competence. He cauterizes wounds that could be healed with time and takes Garroway’s own Alpha power and uses it to boost the werewolf’s natural healing.

Even if it will make his over-all recovery harder.

“His body is slowly accepting the power, even without the potion. It's not a fix, just a stay of infection.” Magnus is fascinated and makes a note to send to Catarina later. “It’s almost as if it’s fleeing from our combined efforts.”

“The instinct to survive is strong.”

Magnus knows exactly what Alexander means.

Even while they heal him, Garroway’s body fights and resists and hesitates to accept Magnus’ help. His very nature and instincts are terrified of the death they can feel in every ion of Magnus’ magic.

—

Jace brings back the body and Alec ignores Fray’s horrified gasp when she runs out, because the mundane isn’t back yet and Alec is running out of energy. It's mostly intact and Jace has a bloody nose but is otherwise fine, nothing an iratze or a night of sleep won't heal.

"Why did you bring a body?" Fray shouts and all she's doing is making this harder.

For Garroway.

Magnus won’t risk Alec.

Alec already knows that. Which means Garroway’s organs will start to corrode and shut down if Alec doesn’t get what he needs, simply because Magnus won't risk Alec turning from him, even only from discomfort.

“She’s supposed to be stirring the potion!" Magnus snaps at them, "I cannot remake the base with the time left if it's ruined."

“I thought it was Simon—” Fray manages but Jace is shaking his head and shoving her towards the apothecary and thankfully — with one last disbelieving glance — she goes.

Jace dumps the body on the ground with a grimace, “do you need—”

“No.” Alec cuts him off gently, not making him offer. “Go help Fray, or see what’s taking the mundane so long. Magnus sent him to a local herbalist, he should be back soon and shouldn’t walk into this.”

“Oh thank Raziel.” Jace whispers but not nearly quietly enough as he heads for Fray. The apothecary door shuts firmly behind him and while Alec doesn’t like the idea of anyone shutting themselves in any of Magnus’ rooms without permission, it’s probably for the best.

“Can you stay stable for for a few minutes without me?”

—-

Magnus can, he can go for longer than that, but he still shakes his head, licking his lips. “Another kiss, Alexander? To tide me over?”

Alexander makes a suspicious, frustrated noise and kisses him, teeth clashing and tongue catching on Magnus sharp canines, sharing blood between them messily.

It’s delicious.

Rejuvenating as well and Magnus sighs longingly, wishing to sip from Alexander’s lips all day yet alas, he must suffer. Instead he can barely even admire the view as Alexander leaves him to fuss over Garroway — of all people, Valentine once-parabatai.

“Sweetheart, couldn’t you at least kill your prey where I can watch? You’re taking all of the fun out of this.”

Alexander scoffs in response and instead, Magnus only gets to hear the sound of a strangled gurgle.

A crack comes next — vaguely reminiscent of the ones a ribcage makes in order to harvest organs— and then mere moments later Alexander is stepping up close to him again. Lips and jaw bloody and eyes wild with an icy fire as he shows Magnus two small pieces of raw organ.

“Liver and heart,” Alexander explains and his fingers are delicate as they place one of the offerings in Magnus’ mouth. Even staying still and letting Magnus lick the blood away from his fingertips before he pulls away. The pieces are barely more than a mouthful each but they’re rich and full of life and angelic magic that revitalize Magnus.

Another nephilim harvest then.

Alexander is practically spoiling Magnus, not that he’ll let on to that fact just yet.

“What would I do without you? Hmm?”

“Probably not have let anyone in and let fate decide if he lived or died?” Alexander offers and well, he’s not wrong. Garroway’s continued existence doesn’t really do anything for Magnus. Alaric is the true informant for the local law enforcement with Garroway focusing mostly on protecting himself and Jocelyn along with Clarissa.

Magnus motions for Alexander to rejoin him, except Alexander is frowning down at the blood on himself as if just realizing he’s messier than a newborn vampire.

Magnus doesn’t have the time to coax Alexander into letting him lick it off.

Even if Garroway didn’t die, the blonde shadowhunter or Clarissa or the mundane could all come back at any time and ruin it. It’s with a sad little sigh that he snaps his fingers, cleaning Alexander, the floor and moving the body to a pocket of space where it won’t decompose. He’s sure it will come in handy later and well, nephilim ingredients are rather rare to find.

Alexander doesn’t seem to mind either, just shrugging it off and then taking Magnus hand and pulling it to his mouth for a kiss of appreciation and thanks.

The mundane shows up nearly twenty minutes later and Magnus’ temper is beyond frayed.

It’s a torment to hold back from properly holding Alexander -rather than just holding his hand and taking his energy. And it’s even worse of a torment to have to heal someone he doesn't even like, rather than kill them.

The potion works and Magnus ignores the personal drama going on and snaps his fingers, a spark of warm magic nipping at Alexander’s hands when his boy goes to do something as mundane as clean.

“Now that Garroway is alive and all is well,” Magnus claps his hands together, getting everyone's attention. “Take him and get out.”

“Magnus, what?” Clarissa asks slowly, eyes wet as if she’s about to cry or argue and Magnus meets her gaze.

“I am not your guardian. I am not your sovereign and I am not your friend.” Magnus states it clearly and concisely and he wonders at the hurt, almost betrayed look Clarissa sends him. Has he even once shown her anything but the bare minimum of professionalism? All of his interest has been reserved for Alexander, he can’t imagine how she misunderstood Magnus enough to think he cares about her.

For Edom’s sake, he only allowed her mother to stay in New York because better the enemy you know the location of, than one in hiding.

“I’ll be billing you, the both of you. This petty and small of a squabble should have never made its way to my doorstep. I do not meddle with such tawdry affairs without good cause and I find all of you lacking a reason that could be considered worthwhile. The fact that it did come to my door, well. I do hope you remember the nature of making business personal, when it comes to me.” Magnus nods to Garroway and sees the way the man’s deep brown eyes shutter. The furrow on his brow deepens and Magnus can see the conflict there.

“As for you, if you cannot lead the pack, I will find someone who will. That I saved your life is not a favor I owed you or because the pack needs you, it’s merely a service. Remember that.”

Behind him Alexander makes a soft questioning noise and Magnus waves a hand behind his back at him, shooing him back.

“Luke’s still bleeding and we have no idea where is safe and you’re just going to kick us out?”

“Garroway’s place is safe enough, isn’t it? It's not a location he's shared with the pack or any downworlders. Also aren’t you a shadowhunter now? Take him to the Institute for care if you think they’ll let you. I’m not a hospital or a hostel, Clarissa. I do business, not charity.”

After a few more arguments quickly snipped in the bud, they start to leave and Magnus is relieved that he won't be undoing all his hard work.

“Alec, you coming?” Blondie nearly ruins that with his question as he stops at the door. A stubborn jut to his chin as he glares at the mundane, not even bothering to look at Alexander. As if reminding a dog to heel.

“He’ll be staying here, to finish tying off the excess energy used. We’ve rather compatible base energy."

Blondie frowns but nods with discomfort, understanding the hidden message and threat but Clarissa is outraged.

“You’re letting Alec stay? But kicking us out when Luke’s the one who is injured?”

Magnus only bothered to heal Garroway because it presented the opportunity to taste Alexander again and for an official reason even. Otherwise he would have let the former shadowhunter die. Werewolf and now a downworlder or not, Garroway isn’t the type of person or character that should be leading a pack.

Garroway has always been a follower.

First of Valentine and then of Jocelyn and now of Clary and not because the man isn't capable, but because love blinds him continuously.

“Alexander is the reason Luke survived, whether or not you like it. He would never have lasted until the ingredients got here or the potions were made if not for Alexander. If anything, you owe him as well. He’ll be staying because magic like this is powerful and so are the repercussions.”

“Then shouldn’t Luke stay too?”

“No.” Magnus tells her simple, tilting his head and her gaze finally catches on his and she goes still, like prey. “Simply because I no longer wish to suffer any more of your company.”

Magic pushes them the rest of the way out the door and slams it in their face and Magnus turns, more than pleased with himself only to find Alexander giving the door a rather bitchy look.

“Darling, as tempted as I am. I did not just spend several hours and numerous ingredients to save Garroway only for you to kill him and Clarissa. Not to mention that we’d then have to deal with the mundane.”

“He shouldn’t even be a part of this.” Alexander mutters grumpily and Magnus can’t say he disagrees. Clarissa is on the way to getting her friend killed and she doesn’t seem to care, because she’s been warned multiple times.

“Well, I’ll send him a recommendation and a note for a free checkup at a local downworld clinic.” Magnus double checks to make sure no one has lingered past his ward lines and then he grabs Alexander’s cool hand. “Now come along Alexander, to the roof with me.”

“Why the roof?” Alexander doesn’t pull away, just shifts so that his fingers entwine with Magnus’ own more comfortably. “Why am I even here, didn’t you get what you want?”

Magnus lets his gaze linger over Alexander, long and filthy and possessive.

“No darling, since you did not let me fuck you in ritual, I did not get what I want. I do have you though, which counts for something.”

Alexander nearly stumbles and Magnus uses the distraction to gleefully pull him up the stairs until they’re on a beautiful rooftop, even if the view is a bit drab now that he compares it to Alexander.

“It looks the same as a few nights ago?” Alexander offers after merely a few seconds after looking around, “was there something you wanted to show me besides the view?”

“Yes, the new view.”

Magnus summons the matrix holding the wards in place and hears Alexander’s low breath of awe as it appears. It looks like a small, condensed planet that gleams red with a violet hue and pulses madly with small rings like Saturn in a brutal song of empowerment and adoration.

Magnus laughs, his magic eagerly devouring each of Alexander’s emotions as he latches on to one of the wardstones in Brooklyn, closer to Manhattan but in a very protected and magical part of town. The view is even better than here, with an amazing sunset that's only beat out by the sunrises.

Magnus only left it empty for so long because it’s closer to the Institute than he normally prefers, however with Alexander now a part of the equation, things have changed.

“Far too many people knew the last location even though it was new.” Magnus offers, fluttering his lashes to look at Alexander from under them invitingly. It’s a trap, as was leaving his location known to Clarissa. Magnus knows enough that he can stay ahead of things and is even owed a favor or two.

Now, he’ll play things a little safer.

Hide a little better and not flash his fangs until provoked.

Unless it concerns his subjects, or Alexander.

Alexander rolls his eyes, but the light dusting of pink on the curl of his ears and the arch of his cheekbones give him away. Magnus coos, reaching out to brush his thumb across the splash of color.

“Stop it,” Alexander glowers as if in annoyance but Magnus laughs, because his boy makes no movement to get away.

“Then stop me.” Magnus dares, ghosting his fingers lightly over skin until he’s cupping Alexander’s face. “Pull back or push me away, whatever you’d like sweetheart. If you actually want that.”

Alexander huffs, face growing even darker and angrier and yet he just leans his face into Magnus' touch with a low, stubborn “no.”

AN:

is this feral enough or is it too layered under implications? yes Alec sent Jace out for a body like you would someone for a coffee run.

Magnus takes no shit.

despite how the last part went before timeskip, its only been a few days and they haven't had sex yet. they've made out and some other stuff but they haven't yet gone all the way because uh, they already get pretty intense without sex. they haven't had the time or energy because they've done some other rituals but not full on sex rituals.

magnus also didn't realize Alec is a virgin. he thought Alec probably just normally killed who he fucked and Magnus was (going to be) an exception.

Magnus is now like: I get to introduce him to sex AND death magic this is the best day ever.

so like, Magnus knows already what Alec likes in the most basic of ways. how he likes to be kissed and that he likes kissing Magnus and being touched. he's just also putting Alec on the spot because they're not in private.

Alec: how dare you pet me

Magnus: should I stop?

Alec: no. don't you dare.

Magnus: we could do a sex ritual

Alec: no, I haven't tried those out yet I don't know what kind of energy will be harvested

Magnus: ... you know Alexander, I'm a known researcher. Scientist, inventor, etc. Would you like to commence in a study with me?

Alec: you just want to have sex

Magnus: specifically with you, but yes. that is true.

Alec: we can just have sex?

Magnus: what's changed?

Alec: accidental corpses aren't sexy. only on purpose ones. garroway dying because we got too distracted would have ruined the mood. as would fray, Jace and the mundane.

Magnus: I wish I could but I can't argue with that.

Alec is very much a 'make me' kind of personallity except where to everyone else it's a taunt (because they can't make him do anything) to Magnus it's actually a gift because he really does want Magnus to make him and he'll even let it happen.

he's just also going to be bitchy about it

Also Alec: i'm going to sulk over being petted

Magnus: the fact that I petted you or the fact that I stopped?

Alec; both. both is good.

Magnus: you're lucky I like brats, sweetheart. (Alec is not lucky that's literally half the reason why Magnus likes his reactions so much. he's very into it.)

#lumine writes #writing wednesday #writing wednesdays #pray to the hunters #alec lightwood #shadowhunters #magnus bane #malec

94 notes · View notes