#this is what i was writing before i got into a hellhole of hilarious nicknames

[forlorn-crows]

A possessive Mountain going into rut and deciding to stake his claim on Rain by bending him over the common room sofa and stuff him full of his knot him in front of the others?

i took some liberties with this one since heat/rut/knotting is absolutely not my forte. i read it to some extent, but only under the context that a majority of people headcanon that that's something ghouls just...do, ya know? not something im actively seeking out

BUT i still had an idea for this one so this is what i've got for you, dear anon:

Mountain bends over the purple orchid, dutifully clipping its wilting buds. The humid smell of soil and foliage blankets over him, soothing his aching thoughts.

This season’s heat has him mentally overstimulated more than anything, often retreating to the greenhouse to be alone. He prefers the calming atmosphere to the darkness of his room—he’s less likely to tear it up in the throws of arousal and frustration, anyway.

He's got his hands deep in a pot of soil when he smells it. Petrichor and warm sea salt. It wafts through the air and hits him straight in the nose, making him freeze. Suddenly, his mind is quiet, replaced only with thoughts of Rain. Want. Need. Where?

“Mountain?” Rain calls from the doorway.

The earth ghoul swallows dryly. “Yes, Rain?” He hears footsteps approach and stop a few feet away from him. Reluctantly, Mountain looks up at him from his hunched position.

That was a mistake. Rain looks completely unholy: hair mussed, lips shiny with saliva—someone else’s?—little crimson marks peeking out from the collar of his sweatshirt. Mountain’s on him in an instant, launching himself off his stool and looming over his lithe form, nosing at the spot behind his ear. His smell is icier here, but it’s masked under notes of cinnamon, citrus, and mint.

Mountain has to stop himself from growling, settling for some other low, disgruntled noise instead. “Did you come here to tease me?”

“N-no,” he stutters. Mountain’s pheromones wash over him, heavy and earthy. “Oh,” he breathes, leaning into the earth ghoul slightly.

“Then why are you here, raincloud?” Mountain runs a hand along his jaw, slowly, possessively.

Rain tilts his head towards the touch and closes his eyes. “The boys, we were—” His breath hitches as Mountain’s fingers trail further along his neck. His Adam’s apple bobs under his hand. “Playing, messing around. We missed you. Wanted you to join us.” He bites his lip.

Mountain looks at him, calculating. “Playing, hm?” His voice lowers half an octave, getting husky with need. “You want me to play with you, tadpole? Brave of you to come in here alone.”

“You can s-show me off.” Rain cracks his eyes open, revealing blown pupils. He bares his neck to the earth ghoul. “Mark me—ah—make them jealous.” He realizes he’s babbling, a side-effect of Mountain’s heat radiating over him, but he can’t help it.

“Fuck,” Mountain finally growls. He mouths at the spot where Rain wants him and pulls the water ghoul flush against him. 

“Oh, Mounty,” Rain whines. He stuffs his hands under Mountain’s t-shirt, running his palms over the plane of his stomach. Mountain almost does bite him at the skin-to-skin contact. His arousal is quickly becoming all-consuming, but he pulls away before he really loses it.

“You’re gonna be mine, raincloud,” the earth ghoul promises.

It doesn’t take them long to make it back to the others. Aether and Swiss have Dew a blubbering mess underneath them on the couch, kissing, sucking, and petting everywhere but where he wants it. Mountain pushes Rain to kneel in front of them, slotting in behind him. He presses his hardening length against Rain’s ass, grinding against him.

“You didn’t waste any time,” Swiss smirks.

“Could’ve been you,” he drawls, palming at Rain’s own erection, earning a moan from the water ghoul. “But you sent the princess to get me, so now he’s getting my fucking knot.” Mountain’s filthy when he’s in heat, his usual loving and loyal demeanor replaced with ravishing possessiveness.

Dew whines at that, immediately jealous.

“Told you,” Rains mumbles, dropping his head against Mountain’s collarbone. The earth ghoul drinks him in, laving his tongue over the muscles in Rain’s neck. He stares Dew down, flashing his fangs against the water ghoul’s pulse point.

“If you want it so bad, fire lily, let’s hear you beg for it.”

[austinpanda]

Dad Letter 050221

2 May, 2021

Dear Dad--

Sunday! I hope you’re having an excellent weekend so far. Thank you thank you thank you for the new package! I got the book and the smoking materials and they will be much enjoyed. I’m loving them so far!

The past week has largely consisted of me being frustrated by my new job at the casino. There are parts that are fun every day, like in the morning when I have to venture out onto the gaming floor for a brief spell before we open. Being on a casino gaming floor is like being in the middle of a fireworks display; you’re surrounded by millions of little points of moving colored light. (Modern slot machines have deliriously bright, dancing light displays. It’s very, very eye catching, I assume by design.) It’s seriously pretty and very pleasantly noisy.

Then I have to return to my desk and start working, which has been, for me, the daily point in the process where the wheels fly off and I forget everything they’ve taught me. I’ve been taking lots of notes while they’ve been training me, and they’ve been helpful to study, except sometimes my notes will consist of just a single important word with exclamation points around it, like:

!! Widgets !!!!!!!!!

Notes like that make sense when I write them down (This is the step where something dreadfully important happens with widgets.) but they don’t really convey a lot of information after the fact, beyond the existence of the word “widgets.” I’ve since attempted to make my notes a bit more descriptive, so I can read them and know what to do. This has met with occasional success.

My boss Tyler and my coworker Chris are both very gracious about answering my daily fusillade of questions, and if it makes it harder to get their own work done, they haven’t squawked about it. They are a pragmatic bunch; I guess they just understand that the shit is very complicated, it’s going to take weeks for me to attain proficiency with it, and ultimately I’m there to help reduce their workloads by taking some of the auditing off their hands. In the meantime, it’s like trying to take a road trip while stopping to ask for directions every three and a half minutes. I’ll start on a task, and refer to my checklist, and it’ll say to “Do X.” And then I have to consult my recollection and my notes to figure out what “Do X” means in terms of me, and my hands, and my colored pens, and my adding machine and spreadsheets and emails. Then I go ask Chris to help get me started and he graciously does so.

Mercifully, I am past the point when I am nervous every day coming to work. I encounter enough frustration and tension during each work day that I don’t have to artificially generate any between the time I wake up and the time I get there. And I have already isolated a way in which I can go a bit above and beyond, a way I can create something of my own that could perhaps be used as a training aid for the next me that comes along in the audit department. It’s kind of interesting, Tyler and I came up with the same idea, which was a much more verbose and explicit version of some of our work checklists. If we have a checklist that says, “Do X,” it might help a new auditor if you had a more detailed description of X, so you know how to complete the tasks. I’ll be helping to create something like that.

I’ve also identified another area where I can help out, beyond just showing up and doing my best. My area is a bit of a post-apocalyptic hellhole. I don’t know if it’s because of Covid, or because the department is a bunch of guys, but there are small areas in our section that are messy as fuck. Office supplies everywhere. It’s an affront to my sense of tidiness, so I’m going to find time to clean the place up, in a way that doesn’t conflict with my general job-doing. Right now, if I had to give a nickname to our section, it might be The Dark Lair of the Audit Troll, or The Little Office that Cried. After I learn how to do my job, I want to invest some time getting our work area squared away and spotless.

Spring is springing! We have seen our first chipmunks of the year. I got so excited that I marked the first sighting on our calendar. Now begins the period of the year when the electricity bills go way down, because we’re not spending every damn dollar we make trying to keep the place at a livable temperature. The trees are budding, and I no longer greet the arrival of spring with loathing and anxiety like I did in Texas, because spring is no longer just a brief, pleasant pit stop on the way to an unbearable 5-month long fiery furnace of summer. Spring lasts a while here! And all the trees wake up and begin budding, and the omnipresent piles of dirty snow disappear.

I’ve been feeling rather proud of myself recently. Since my goal in life seems to be: be a functioning adult in a place that has snow, I’m achieving the SHIT out of my life goals right now. And in two days, I will get my second Covid vaccine! The boss said to take that day off work. I did the thing I felt I was required to do, which was to say, “But I don’t want to miss a day of work so early in my illustrious casino career!” To which my boss replied, “That’s great, but if you have a bad reaction to the shot, you probably don’t want to have it at the casino.” I am therefore taking Tuesday off. I will get my shot at 6:00 in the morning, because I grabbed the earliest time slot I could, and then I’ll go home and see what mischief the shot will impose upon my person. I predict very little will happen, and I’ll end up having a day off with maybe some body aches. There is always a chance, though, that it’ll just beat the shit out of me, and I’ll have to miss a second day. Boss seems prepared for both eventualities. We text each other, so if it looks like the vaccination is going to cause sudden and irreversible death syndrome, I can let him know as it happens.

I shall include with this letter a before and after shot of my bathroom, now that I’ve received my new custom-designed shower curtain in the mail. I realized a few weeks ago that we just had a shower curtain liner in our bathroom, and not an actual shower curtain to look nice, so I got on Amazon to order one. Our shower stall is shorter than most (4 ft. wide, as opposed to the more standard--I think--72 inches) so we can’t just pop down to WalMart and get one. Right away, on Amazon, I found an option that allowed you to upload a photo of your own, and they’d turn it into a custom shower curtain. I uploaded a closeup photo of our cat Horta. Now you can’t take a dump in our house without staring straight into a four-foot blowup of our cat’s face! We had the option of adding text, so I added, “Whatcha doing?” to the picture, but ultimately decided it was better to just have the huge, big-eyed kitty, otherwise unadorned. I think it’s fucking hilarious, and not for nothing, but it’s beautiful to look at. Horta (as is true of most cats) is photogenic as hell. On the shower curtain, her big golden eyes are as large as saucers. Twenty bucks, and it’s going to turn all future poops into a giant kitty adventure. I may not be good at creating art, but I like to think I’ve filled my life to bursting with little artistic masterpieces such as this one.

More, as always, next Sunday. All my love to you both!