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theoxenfree · 2 months ago

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vampire x crime scene cleaner!reader | 16.1k

you're a crime scene cleaner who happens across an advertisement for a mansion housekeeper in exchange for room and board. it's close to work, close to your university, and an easy job. the ultimate package. right away, you notice the owner's beauty as well as his eccentricities, but decide to commit to it. the spiral into depravity and debauchery begins when you're tasked with cleaning the site of a savage murder, solidifying you as a irreplaceable treasure.

warnings; dead dove do not eat; explicit non-con, extreme dubon, sadomasochism, blood play, overstimulation, choking, cigarette burns, smoking, hypnotism, theological themes, exploration of morality, gunshot wounds, extreme & graphic depictions of body horror + gore + grotesque details, graphic depictions of crime scene cleanup, possibly inaccurate depictions of crime scene cleanup (not looking for feedback on it), obsessive & possessive behaviors, heavy prose & details, the entire work is allegorical, murder, vampire is written as a monster bc that's what they are lmao, dividers are used between scenes

reposted from 2kmps; previously proofread by @ceruleansol

I shouldn't have to say it, but I will: nothing in this oneshot is indicative of my personal viewpoints. it is entirely fictitious.

this was a project that took me quite a bit of time to do, so I would be immensely appreciated if you'd please reblog + interact with it!! I'd love to hear your feedback!!

Another internet search bore fruit.

The image bouncing back at you from your phone had been hastily taken with a tremble in your hand, all the while launching a few too many cautious looks across your shoulder to either end of the dim, long hallway making up part of the second floor. There wasn't any particular rationale for your apprehension and busy eyes but the belief the mansion owner wouldn't be too pleased to see you taking pictures of his valuables rather than cleaning them.

That fear hadn't stopped you from reverse image searching a good couple of curiosities over the widening gap of time you had been living there.

Tonight was a Chalmette table vase displayed on a pedestal in the hall; brassy gold gilding cradled a somewhat drab white bloom that reached high and sprouted open to a hollow inside. Similar surviving articles went for thousands.

You totaled the prices of everything so far as enough to outright buy a house on the more modest side of town.

There was a daring thought that loomed in the back of your mind, an ugly little thing that told you one or two missing antiques wasn't any big deal. He wouldn't miss them, let alone even notice they were gone, because he was the strangest man you had ever met.

Four months ago, he had only ever introduced himself by the name Montague, letting an anticipatory stillness hang in the air while you waited for him to finish. He never did, handsome features lifting as his dark eyes thinned and smile inched higher. He had you in a tight handshake.

"I enjoyed reading the resume you sent in with your response to my advertisement." He had traces of an accent intact but had cleverly adapted to one more common to the area. "You're the first person I've come across wanting the room who's done that. It really stood out to me. A crime scene cleaner? Must be a difficult job."

"I know it was probably overkill, but I think this will be perfect for me." You were led to a suede armchair, his hand anchoring onto your shoulder to lower you into the seat. He sat across from you in something similar, one leg crossing. "I recently had to move out of my other place, and the university will be about an hour closer. My work won't be as far of a drive, either. I—I, uh, clean some gross stuff, so taking care of your house won't be anything."

Even after that spiel, Montague never let his smile slip. Rather, it seemed to widen as though delighted by your oversharing. He looked like a man basking in glee over a rare find, an offer he couldn't possibly turn away.

"All amenities in the house are yours." This was after he showed you to one of the rooms on the second floor: a capacious, well-dressed space behind a red door at the end of the hall. "As long as you listen to a few rules and keep things clean, we should have a very amicable... cohabitation."

You thought it was an odd choice of wording. "Okay. Well, what do I need to know?"

"No guests." It was immediate, his tone suddenly a touch edgy, razored, unyielding. "Not unless I give you explicit permission beforehand. I keep many important valuables; they're very dear to me. Also, do not invite anyone in unless I am there."

Again, odd, but it was his house.

"Sure," you said agreeably, having half the thought to write down these peculiarities of his. "What next?"

He was set on your shoulder, reaching out to pull a thin, frayed thread off of your jumper. "The downstairs—as in, the basement—is my personal space. If I need you down there, I will ask you for you to go down. You can go anywhere else in the house, on the property. None of it concerns me."

"Why the basement, though?" It felt damaging to press a question like that so early on, but you figured it was innocent enough. "This house is so big that we could be on the same floor and hardly see each other."

The muscles around his mouth twitched slightly, only once. You still noticed it. Noted: he didn't like to be questioned. "Sorry, I'm not trying to-"

"It's cold downstairs." he injected, shifting to look around the room as though taking in the newness of it as well. "I make sure it stays comfortable all year, all throughout the house, but the cold suits me best."

With how downright frosty his skin felt in that handshake earlier—on a mild day in mid-spring—you thought that explanation checked out. He must have only just come up to greet you at the front entrance.

You tried to forget the feeling. "Alright. Next?"

"Oh," he restrained an unseemly laugh, using one hand to crowd into a pocket on his dark blazer, "there is nothing else, at least nothing pertinent. It's my understanding that we're both quite busy, so this would be the current arrangement unless something changes."

What changes? You wanted to ask, thwarted to silence when he revealed some sort of silver thing pinched between his fingers with a thick handkerchief. It was a dainty-seeming contraption with chains linking several old skeleton keys at the end. The fabric he used to hold the clip concealed all of the elegant tracery that made up its shape.

"Traditionally, this is called a chatelaine. It’s something I’ve modified for you to get around the house. It’ll be easier to clean." Montague said, fast to force the mess of cold silver and chains into your palm, rubbing down his fingers with the handkerchief afterward. "The smallest key is to your room. The largest one opens the doors to go outside, so don't lose that. One of them is meant for doors in the basement—can't recall which."

He could see the wariness behind your eyes, a worrying crease forming in your brow. "This house has been around for a long time. I've just never gotten around to modernizing the locks."

Other questions came to you, but he hardly acted interested in entertaining them. You let him swivel on black soles, stopping him just as he reached the doorway.

"Why haven't other housekeepers worked out?"

Montague let his fingers rest on glazed woodwork framing the threshold, drumming out a soothing rhythm while considering an answer for all of two seconds. "In short? They couldn't follow the rules. Now, let me show you to the yard."

Afterward, the so-called cohabitation had become a seamless blend for you both. You had learned right away that Montague wasn't one for idle chatter and niceties without purpose. He had deviated from it once, on move-in day, to reassure you that the mysterious nature of your life schedule and odd hours you were called to a clean scene wouldn’t be a source of concern.

Shortly after settling your things around the house, the reason for his amenable attitude was a little more apparent. Several times a month, you would be pulled from your forensics projects to the landing at the end of the hall, piqued by fresh voices always indistinguishable at first, and folded your waist over the railing to see down.

The top of his head, hair short, impeccably styled, and ash-brown, was the first thing you noticed, followed by someone on his arm. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man—always conventionally attractive, always utterly enraptured by him. It struck a nerve with you once or twice, finding your thoughts swimming bitterly: Of course a man who looked like him would go for types like that!

Why did he act so much differently with them than you?

He wasn't nearly as friendly and affable as he was making himself out to be.

You stopped peeking down on him after an instance where his eyes shot straight up, pinning you where you stood. He simpered at you before leading his companion away to the basement, and that was it. You never saw them leave and never bothered to ask.

Tonight was different, however, both in the way you nearly toppled the two-figure Chalmette vase off its pedestal with flighty fingers and a duster, and the echo of a scream piercing the hollow halls to you. It stayed in one spot on the first floor, luring you down the center staircase with your duster clutched to you like a sword. At that point, your heart bursting in your ears was louder than the agonized cries resonating around the corner.

You looked around, spine wrapped in dread as another scream, weak, garbled, and wet, came from the basement, and then nothing at all. It was soundless in the house. Distantly, one of the clocks mounted in the kitchen archway toned onward. You followed its beat with the shuffle of your feet.

Hello, hello? Those words clung tightly in your throat, yet you were too afraid to announce yourself like that. Still, nothing came as you slowly pulled at the basement doorknob, brass and freezing and unlocked. The stairway plunging down inside was filled with inky black, so dark you couldn't get your eyes to adjust to it.

Is everything okay down there? Hello? Hello? You ran the imaginary chatter through your mind, lips sealed but trembling during your slow descent, the path now illuminated by white glow from your phone. At the bottom, the stone stairs turned into seamless gray marble and red wetness crawling toward the soles of your slippers.

"What–" You gasped, taking a step back while flicking the flashlight higher, deeper into the basement. The vivid red puddle glistened in your light, widening around a motionless figure with pale skin—a blonde woman you didn't know. Her face pointed up at the ceiling, twisted in terror, black tracks of mascara curving along her cheeks.

She was naked on the floor, surrounded by her own blood, something you didn't have to look at twice. Your breaths grew harsh, taking in the sight of her neck, or lack thereof; there wasn't much left of it. Only a few stringy bits of sinew and muscle kept it from a full decapitation, and blood still pulsed out in spurts from mangled arteries and veins.

A motion nearby made your nape prickle. It was like feet padding across wet pavement after a fresh rain, except this smell carried the malodor of rust and something sour under your nose.

You settled a pillar of light on the source, capturing the view of Montague standing amid the bloodbath, sickly skin bare and saturated in rich crimson.

Something was wrong with him, came an instantaneous, instinctual reaction the moment his head spun toward you, catching pale eyeshine in the white light.

The bones in his jaw cracked as the length of it began to recede into the semblance of something more man to you, rows of jagged teeth retracting into the depths of his throat until only a pair of long incisors remained.

Montague skimmed the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, smiling at you affectedly, saying as though it were some trife thing, "She started screaming."

You were gone and out of the basement after that, clearing the woman's body and kicking away the slippers on your feet when they squelched with blood. Montague said something after you when shrieks ripped out of your lungs and reverberated through the house. You winced as the basement door let out a hollow rattle when he collided with it, heart matching the rhythm of the skin on your feet slapping against old marble, thoughts disarrayed, frantic the closer you got to the front door.

Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! You were panting in unison with the vicious chants.

The doorknob was in your hand. The door was open—and it was thrown shut with the force of your body thrust against it, fingers wrenched off of the handle and enveloped in Montague's cold fingers as he pushed himself flush into you.

You felt his palm clamp around your mouth, whittling your screams into panicked whimpers, nostrils flaring with your ragged breaths.

"Ah, no, no." He had to stoop his neck to talk into your ears. "Shh, shh, shhh. Far too loud. I don't like screaming. Shh, shh, shhhh."

Tears seared red behind your eyes, making you think you could follow the warmth down your face as they filled the crevices in his hand. "It's really, truly a pity. She was a pretty one but far too smart. I'm usually decent at picking out the ones who wouldn't suspect anything or, at least, catching them before they try to scream.

"You'll have to forgive me. I swear to you I'm not ordinarily that messy. I prefer to keep everything tidy, especially so you don't have to go down there. After all, you're already so busy. You're already doing so much. I can't recall when I last saw you relax."

The weight of his palm softened, a wordless agreement that you honored with continued silence as he used that arm to lean against the door. His voice shifted around your head to your other ear. "That's it. Just wonderful. There's no need for screaming, is there? It's only the two of us."

"Are—are..." You couldn't get it out, lips and throat suddenly sucked dry. "Don't kill me, please. Please. Please."

His chest quaked while a subdued, eerily delighted laugh hissed through his lips. "Kill you? Oh, no, no, no. Never. How could I ever kill you when you're so remarkable? My home has never looked so beautiful and lived in. I'm enjoying how it looks with you in it."

You wilted away from his lips sinking to a spot below your ear, now taking far too much notice of his erection curving up along your lower back. It felt disgustingly wrong to wonder whether the violence and blood turned him on, or it was you and your fear. The man wasn't even human; that much was clear.

"What are you?" There was no shortage of daring questions in your arsenal. Montague was beginning to find the charm in them.

"That's quite difficult for me to answer." He let his chin lay on your shoulder. "I've been called many things over the centuries. I suppose the closest anyone has ever gotten is vampire, but even that's not quite right. You're free to guess as much as you'd like, though."

He was satisfied when you didn't, freeing the weight off of his arm to slide his hand under the hem of your shirt, fingertips still slick with that woman's blood as he explored your navel. You were too aware of the roundness of his fingernails stepping across your flesh, sometimes pressing deep, and other times a light touch you needed to scratch. His throat vibrated against your shoulder.

"What are you thinking? I'd love to hear it." He wanted to devour your fear in more ways than just feeling you wince. "Well? Tell me."

"I want to go." Go? Where could you possibly go that he couldn’t find you? If he ripped out the side of a woman's neck, he could track you down.

He leaned his cheek into your ear again, relishing the warmth that spread into him. "Where would you go? Who would you tell? Humor me, where is the first place you'd go?"

"The police," you said.

Montague let out a pleased hum. "Of course. It only makes sense to report a terrible scene such as that to them. Forensics and the police play together often, don't they?"

Your nod was weak.

"I know how hard you've been studying, how much stress you're under to commit to your degree, your work—to me." His hand crept along to your stomach, fingers splaying wide across the protective layer of skin and fat. "Let's say they were to find something I left behind. Who becomes a suspect in their eyes when they learn that I have someone who tidies up after me? Who knows the dirty insides of cleaning up anything and everything?"

You were starting to panic, fitfully struggling against his body. It's like he was made of stone. "They wouldn't accuse me of murdering anyone."

"Haven't you seen the news lately? Are you so sure?" he said derisively. "No, perhaps you're right. Maybe you'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't have your head for murder, but they would certainly try to peg you with something else. As an accomplice, maybe? And that's assuming that I don't disappear and let rip you apart.

"Can you imagine it? Can you feel your heart break at the very thought of losing it all? Your degree? Your job? Safety? The world is cruel, darling. You'd never have another moment of peace or anonymity. Anywhere you'd go, you'd be found, every alias sullied with your sins. All because you decided to speak up about it."

You knew he meant to send you downstairs to do something about the mess, spend hours scrubbing and mopping until what had once been there was a secret that thickened your tongue and made it hard to swallow. No one would ever find out, but you would carry it in every waking thought until, one morning, the cute barista on Market Street had an eerie semblance to that dead woman, and the light roast in your hand suddenly looked so red.

"Thump. Thump. Thump." Montague mocked the heavy thrum of your heart behind your ribs, his cold fingers skimming your nipples before resting over your sternum. "You can go if you'd like, but I'll find you. I'll hear your little heart until it bursts and drag you right back here. You're mine."

The push of his body gradually faded away, giving your chest the room to expand, leaving you to gulp quivering, greedy breaths that didn't stop even as the pads of his feet grew distant.

He called back to you, "Give me ten minutes or so, and then come down."

You were already partway through the front door with your car keys to pop the trunk when, floating like a spectre's moans in still night air, his voice reached out once more, "You may want to clean up yourself first. You have blood all over your face."

༺ ♰ ༻

A damp towel came before your descent back into the basement. In tow on your shoulders were three bags of absorbent, the fancy stuff hospitals liked to use to throw on puke and piss and anything else they just lazily wanted to sweep around. It worked for blood in smaller quantities, blood that was still wet, anyway.

The woman hadn't been dead long enough for her body fluids to dry, so you didn't anticipate needing anything except the basics stowed in your car trunk.

You weren't sure what you expected to see down there, noticing the lights were turned on high, fully illuminating the gray marble, the furthest reaches of the blood puddle with your slippers saturated dark red and ruined. What came as a shock was the woman's dead eyes and shredded neck being nowhere in sight. Montague had moved her body but to where?

For some reason, you were drawn to ridiculous spots like the walls, ceiling, and tiny cramped corners that he could have feasibly stuffed her in. There was no sickly trail of blood leading any which way, droplets only reaching as far as the stairs and first landing where you had been pursued—nothing else.

Where did he take her? Part of you was ready to turn a blind eye to all of this because you knew you would have to in order to keep everything. If you kept your head low and groveled a little bit, maybe he'd get bored and leave you alone, biding you the time you needed to finish your degree. But, that'd be two years of this.

You weren't sure you could stomach it.

As you moved granules of absorbent through blood with coarse bristles from the kitchen broomstick—shifting the puddle more than the actual absorbent—you wondered if he could hear your heart now from wherever he was.

You thought about a lot of things while letting your eyes roam the space. It was enormous, taking up the entire underside of the house, outfitted impressively with mahogany accents, sprawling bookshelves, armchairs, and loveseats pulled tight in leather and velvet. Across the room was a disheveled bed, creamy sateen sheets in a luscious heap but otherwise undisturbed.

To the adjacent end of this expanse were two doors you didn't notice at first, one a little taller than yourself in height, about as wide as any normal arm span, and looked old, so old that everything else was too new. Even from where you stood, you knew it'd take a skeleton key. The other door was more coherent with the rest of the basement, cleaner but certainly still part of the house's original construction.

By the time Montague had returned, you already had much of the ordeal pitched into a biohazard bag with some trace remnants putting you on your knees to scrub away. You hadn't realized he was even there until the tips of his shoes—brown leather loafers with a scalloped tassel near the toes—appeared in your peripheral, sending you launching back onto your hocks.

"This work is spectacular. I knew I had a good feeling giving that room to you." he said with a beguiling smile. All of the blood was gone; he was clean in a dark dressing robe with black trousers, a look you hated that you saw as alluring. "Don't forget to clean the floors upstairs. We made quite a mess there as well."

"What happened to that woman?" You were asking your pesky questions again. Montague wasn't so sure he found them as charming now, but you were still a prize.

You leaned away as he crouched in front of you, nearly risking the soles of his shoes in the blood and hydrogen peroxide. For the first time since meeting, you kept eye contact and saw that his reached a depth you didn't think could be possible for a human. He wasn't touching you, yet it felt like he had you caged, trapped in a vise that held you tight.

He did touch you then, grazing the side of your face with a thumb. Suddenly, he brought it to his lips and licked it as he rose to full height.

"You still had some blood just there on your cheek." There was an armchair a few feet away that he dropped into, withdrawing a gold compact from a chest pocket on his way down. "Don't worry. I wouldn't ask you to carry away the bodies. I'm not that Roman."

"That's not what I asked." you rejoined.

Montague tucked a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with a match he kept inside the compact. His first few puffs looked like they calmed him as he crossed a leg and settled deeper into the leather. "You shouldn’t expect answers to things you don’t need to know—or want to.”

But he humored you with a slight lean of his head towards the old door far away. "The original owner of this house was ingenious and built tunnels that were used to shuffle people in and out. Mistresses. Servants. More unsavory things—you must remember the era. At any rate, it stretches beyond the house and some ways off. I do not recommend ever going inside."

You understood now why you never saw any of the dates he brought home leave. And you believed every bit of his warning.

It inspired you to move away from the grim reality dwelling beyond that old door. You hovered over the same spot, drenching the floor with more of the disinfectant, grasping for a distraction. "I didn't know vampires could smoke. Isn't blood enough for you?”

Montague flicked his cigarette over an ashtray beside his chair. "Well, we all have our vices. Mine just happens to be five or six of these a day. Keeps enough of the edge off so you get to sleep at night."

Something about that comment made the entire stretch of the basement feel so confining—claustrophobic, even. Your back was wide open to it, to his ravening gaze and leather toe turning fluid circles as though to pace himself before lunging.

"I have class in six hours." You finished the job by tying off the bag. "I'd like to get the upstairs done and take a shower."

"Of course. Try to get some sleep, you've had quite a night." He didn't move to see you out. "Oh, and leave the bag. I'll dispose of it."

༺ ♰ ༻

Meredith Nimu died approximately twenty-three days ago after a stroke left her immobilized in her favorite armchair. Her body wasn't peeled away from the murky-green polyester until day twenty-four, following enough neighbor complaints about a bunch of rats dying in the vents.

Getting rid of the chair was half the battle in this case, something that Meredith's overzealous, recently divorced daughter spouted off as sacrilegious. She insisted that the carpet cleaner she used for her obese dogs with raw patches on their legs could do it all. Your supervisor had been inflectionless when telling her it didn't work like that.

One of your teammates, a middle-aged black man affectionately nicknamed “Hoss” had unceremoniously slammed the apartment door shut and flipped the lock so the daughter's rancorous eruptions were somewhat contained outside. The other half of the duo responsible for pitching the chair, T.J., a white man who could never tan, wheezed out a laugh as he labored a hard bristle brush through the gunk left behind from Meredith's decay.

"Boss ain't gonna be happy about that." T.J. couldn't commit to the act of a brownnoser even if he wanted to. A couple more chortles rattled through his respirator. They were infectious, ridiculous sounds that coaxed similar from Hoss when he rejoined the effort to get the job done and over with.

You could still hear the daughter on the other side of the door, never once allowing your supervisor a word in edgewise. A part of you wanted to pity her, perhaps conjure up a shred of empathy for someone so completely enmeshed in the throes of grief and anger. She was clearly spiraling, her entire life yanked out from under her—and she was free-falling with nothing to catch her, no thin wire she could snag in the bend of her fingers and watch as the velocity of that cruelly, cleanly severed white tendon and bone.

Where would she fall after that? You didn't know. You didn't care. She could regain control over her life even without fingers, but what about you? No one understood how disconcerting it was to know that your survival depended on a vampire's good mood. An old woman was meant to expire, but you were young and had aspirations—yet that could be stolen from you just as quickly as a clot could kill the brain.

It wasn't fucking fair.

Hoss had called out to you repeatedly until the hard brushes stopped scratching the floor, and he and T.J. were settled back on their heels, staring at you. You were used to leveraging your commitments in life as a means to get them off your case, but even they could tell this was different.

"You've been real spacey lately." It was enough to gently reel you back to the moment, eyes unstuck from remnants of putrid matter hidden under a deluge of chemicals and soap. Now you were thinking that the landlord would probably have to replace this entire spot in the flooring. It would be an expensive fix.

"Everything okay at home?" Hoss tried again, emulating fatherly concern in his tone and sidelong stare. It was something he couldn't help since you were so similar in age to his adult kids. "I don't think I've seen you eat today. We oughta finish up here up and grab somethin' quick on the way back.”

"Sorry, yeah, it's just the usual things." They didn't know what that meant to you, but readily accepted with dour expressions masked by their respirators. "I think I saw a gyro truck down the street."

As many times as you had regurgitated the same thing when they pried into your well-being, you were surprised they still asked at all. That made it hard to wave after them as you pulled the lever to the trunk, waiting to be left alone once the job was done to stack half your weight in absorbent until the back bowed to it.

It was just past two in the morning when you were locking the front door of Montague's sprawling estate behind you. Every time you did, a part of you hesitated to seal it the whole way, as though if you did, your final traces of freedom would be stripped away entirely.

"Welcome home!" Montague came out from prowling somewhere in the shadows, seeming to materialize from the darkest parts your eyes couldn't adapt to. He was in a dressing robe again, this one forest green with gold embroidery and a burgundy handkerchief tucked away nicely in his breast pocket.

He already had a cigarette lit between his knuckles, fussing with the little stick as he went to an open window, sucked in, and expelled pungent gray smoke. "I apologize. There's a bit of a mess for you tonight. It's unlike me to be so untidy, but it shouldn't take you too long—oh, darling, don't make that face."

"Why can't you get blood from other sources, like a blood bank?" It's been on your mind for a while, but Montague had a habit of turning petulant if you asked him too much.

He was in good shape tonight, though, despite still puffing away antsily. "Where's the satisfaction in simply being given what I want? Blood banks are a finite supply, but out there"—he gestured through the open window—"there is an infinite supply from any walk of life that I so choose. Did you know that not all blood is equal?"

You sensed him at your back, awash with that same vulnerability as the night on your knees in the basement. He strolled along with you while you collected your things, examined his leftovers, which fortunately wasn't as sensational as before. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot almost, purple-red and pristine, obviously untouched for some time.

Just like that dead blonde woman, there was nothing left behind of the victim except what Montague was too careless to handle himself.

"The worst blood is what you find in hospitals or on the streets. It doesn't matter their type; it all tastes like shit." he continued, even while you worked. Just like before, he sat himself nearby and observed your process with gross fascination. "In a pinch, though, I do what I must. It doesn't matter if a man is homeless or a woman is looking for a night out. When I hear their hearts dance, that thump, thump, thump—oh, I have to have it. I can taste them through their skin, even before I sink my teeth in.

"The fear in their eyes. The ragged breaths I see in their chests, watching their bellies pulse. I like to think in those moments they know exactly what's going to happen, like little flies in a spider's web."

Montague let more smoke slither out from his lips in skinny, swirling wisps that dissipated once it touched the air. The haze of it remained, just traceable to your eye. "I always find it interesting that they all struggle, even as they're writhing in their own blood. Sometimes I'll count how long it takes for them to die."

These weren't confessions of a madman because that would imply he was human. He was treating you akin to the way an old man recounted the fondness of his flawed, flickering memories. There were sensations of joy and affection in the work he did, a true love and visceral desire for carnage and suffering that made it hard for you to stomach. A few times throughout his soliloquy, you needed to bear your weight on the kitchen broom to keep yourself from toppling from nausea.

You shouldn't have been curious. "Has anyone ever survived?"

The surrounding space grew darker, not from loss of light but from the way his lower face sunk behind the hand wielding the cigarette. You saw his smile widen through sickly appendages and faint smoke.

His response pierced straight through you. "I'm looking right at it."

Suddenly, the urge to run rushed forefront in your mind, an instinctual reaction that you had trouble wrestling over with logic. The broomstick was easily pulled from your fingers and discarded onto the floor with a reverberating clatter that made your spine race with cold needles as Montague stepped into your proximity.

You shivered against the hands slowly climbing your neck to the underside of your jaw, cradling your face as he lifted it to meet his eyes. Something was so wrong with how black they were; you didn't see a pupil, nor did your reflection stare back at you in them. It's almost as though there was nothing there at all, the dark of them growing into an abysmal chasm that made your vision cross and blur, eyelids weighing like lead when you felt him kiss you.

His lips were the same kind of cold as the rest of him but full and unrelenting, never granting you the chance to mold the kiss in any other way. Surprisingly, the taste of stale smoke on his breath was just slight, a mediocre vexation you overlooked the moment his hands started groping you under your clothes.

And you didn't think much of it when your back settled into the clean linens on your bed, skin flushed with the crisp evening air and lips mapping their way south across your stomach and navel, delving lower to your core. It was too dark in your room to see down your body at the top of Montague's head, but you felt him with your fingers, coiling pieces of his ash-brown hair to your knuckles while he pushed your thighs wide open for him.

An anxious patter swelled in your chest, a vague understanding that something was horrible about this, but you were too wrapped up in a dreamy fog to think about it. More than the resounding boom of your heart, you heard your own breaths dissolve into lewd moans and slurred pleas for him to do more, more, more.

It didn't sound like you. It didn't feel like you despite knowing that build-up in your abdomen better than most things in your body. The hands in his hair, the back bending off of the mattress like an archway, the shaking limbs, and the cries begging for more were someone else entirely up until the very moment rapture fluttered behind your eyes in searing white, body deluged in hot release that left your scalp tingling and toes curling and spend on your sheets.

"Give me more." You tasted him again, his tongue pushing hard into your mouth where those salty notes of yourself lingered on your cheeks. His silhouette melded with the rest of the room, tangible only in the way he roamed every surface of you.

Montague had shucked the clothes from both your bodies earlier, preferring to lean into the flush of heat you radiated. Everything was only skin-deep away from him; he could feel your pulse throb on his lips when he teased himself against your carotid, your radial, trailing all the way to the powerful beat of your femoral nestled there in your groin.

His teeth came close many times to piercing you, allowing him a sliver of a taste like a parched king waiting for a drop of golden wine. But half the thrill of having you around was denying himself of you, knowing well that if he were to start, then he'd never be able to stop, and he'd fully hamper your dreams of escaping.

The air smelled like you now, heavy and like damp skin and your fluids soaking into the linens. He watched your face bunch and fall apart when he split you open with his cock, hips colliding, your skin sure to bruise as his thrusts turned savage. There wasn't much left in his heart anymore. Most of it had atrophied over the centuries, and yet the sound of yours spurred him on.

He could follow the path of your blood through your body, an extensive subject he had studied and dissected at length in his lifetime. The most vulnerable spots were gorged and worked the hardest, almost glowing red through your skin for him. When he thrust a little bit harder, a little bit faster, and felt your fingertips pushing against his chest, he heard your heart be the loudest it ever had been.

"That's it. That's it. That's it." His own breaths were ragged now. The sheer exhilaration of pushing his lips deeper, hot sweat leaving a slick layer on them, and that one big artery in your neck pounding out was doing everything for him.

Your frantic pants were a close second. He could feel you unraveling, tightening around his cock until you were soundlessly writhing on the mattress, clutching anything you could bunch together. The final few thrusts he made were purposeful; they were forceful and jolted your body, a show to make sure you wouldn't forget the feeling of him inside of you.

The clean linens were sodden with cum, some still dripping out of you while you lay there, legs splayed enough so you wouldn't feel it stick to your thighs. Whatever haze had been hanging over your eyes before lifted away, leaving you ruined and exhausted on the sheets but not alone.

"You've got class in a few hours, don't you?" Montague said from above, shoulders nestled in your headboard while one leg hung off the side of the bed. He was smoking again, acting the calmest you had witnessed him. "I don't really think you're in any shape for that. Why don't you stay home today?"

You were too spent to respond to him, somehow using the occasional breaths he blew out into the vast room to lull you into a dreamless sleep.

༺ ♰ ༻

Shin Nakamura had been a selfish man in life. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, and twice divorced from women who knew better—his tenants did not. He had built a reputation on the north side of town for hidden costs and faulty appliances that were never fixed. Once or twice in the past four years you had cleaned up scenes, they came out of Nakamura's buildings in the summertime, stuck to the floor and infested with maggots and flies in different orifices.

Everyone had asked at one point, yourself included, how he was able to get away with that level of blatant cruelty and disregard—and the answer was as simultaneously simple, complex, and terrible as poverty. The north end was an area notorious for local crime and violence, but more than that, it was forgotten in favor of gentrifying other areas of the city—pretty little boutiques that'd make a splash on social media and a couple of upscale dining spots, all of those meant to change the online scales deeming an area's walkability, and therefore, profitability.

The blind eye most city commissioners turned to the north end made it an easy life for Shin to do as he pleased without many consequences despite living in the area himself. Most of everyone found it an odd sort of justice when he was discovered in his office, unrecognizable from how badly the dozens of stab wounds had disfigured his face and body. One look was enough to know that it was personal, a tenant who had received their condemnation via a neon-pink eviction letter hastily taped to an off-white door.

Only, this time, Shin chose a person backed into a corner at their breaking point. There wasn't much left to lose, yet Shin had ultimately lost it all. Rumor had it that no one sold out the tenant who committed the crime, something even the more moralistic part of yourself could fathom. These were the cases that painted a grim picture of your future in forensics and often speared to the front of your mind at the worst of times—could you really be part of the reason why a person shattered by the powers of society goes to jail?

Shin Nakamura was a terrible man, but were his crimes punishable by that sort of torture? What about the tenants who probably heard Shin screaming for help, crying in agony—were they any better than murderers themselves?

What did that mean for you? An accomplice who quietly scrubbed clean murders at a monster's behest, you allowed those people to be swallowed up by Montague under a guise of fear, or was it selfishness?

That discomfort lasted you your entire shift, like an incredibly nauseating pill with a bad smell that sat in your nose for hours. You couldn't wipe away the thoughts like you could dried blood on smoke-stained walls or lumps of serrated flesh and fat wedged between slabs of wood on the floor.

"Man, he coulda been cleaner about this." T.J. had his feet planted solidly on the middle step of a ladder, well at work with a long-handled brush pushed flat to the ceiling. The splatter had gone that far, earning a few awestruck coos from him and Hoss earlier. "It would've made our lives easier."

It was a normal joke. You'd laughed at the exact same one many times before, even finessed your own commentary in there on occasion because the dead can't sue, and a murderer had no rights—but now, you thought it'd taste bad on your tongue.

The two hulking men noticed, far sharper than you gave them credit for. Or maybe you were just worse at hiding things than you thought. They didn't allude to anything until everyone was packed up in the van, dried from the sweaty protective suits and summer heat by the AC.

"Listen, it ain't my business, and I swear I've been trying my best not to ask." There was a furtive look linked between Hoss and T.J.; it was something they had talked about when you weren't around. "That guy you're living with. He isn't doing anything to you, right? You used to talk about him all the time in the beginning. Haven’t heard a peep about him in ages. God, you're not living in your car, are you?"

From the outside in, you weren't doing much to try to embellish fancy stories and reasons onto your drastic change over the months. You simply let it be and navigated every day with the hope you'd remember where you were going with your head down. It probably didn't look too good to a paternal man like Hoss, and to T.J., who had several younger siblings.

"No, it's not him—" But, of course, it really was and everything surrounding his cruelty, everything he made you do, and what you never refuted. "I'm just perpetually exhausted. I'm sure you've heard that from Sylvie and Deshaun while they've been in uni."

"All the damn time." Hoss beamed, chest perked a little higher with the mention of his children. It wasn't enough to diffuse the tension lingering in the van, however. "Just know, I'd do for you what I'd do for my babies—put the fear of God in that man. If he puts a finger on you, you let me know."

T.J. gave an agreeable hum, fingers sticking to the steering wheel as he moved them around, making a turn down some street. "We'll catch him by surprise and everything. I'll call in a couple favors, grab a few shovels and bags of cement from my dad's place. It's all good."

For some reason, their entire spiel only spiked your uneasiness, and suddenly you were far too aware of your bladder. It was enough initiative for T.J. to floor the gas and get back to headquarters, giving you the chance to break away and race the remnants of daylight all the way home.

༺ ♰ ༻

It had never happened before, but you managed to catch Montague by surprise when he walked through the front door to find you standing there in the foyer. The kitchen broom wrapped in your hands was a nasty ploy, along with the look you cast between him and a young man not any older than yourself. Again, just like all the others, you didn't recognize him. Montague's victims were fast, fleeting fixations for him, none worthy of names or an identity in his eyes. You suspected this guy was much the same.

Montague's bewilderment was swept away by a smile and laxing posture. He had settled back into his element. "You're home early today. I didn't expect to see you until much later. Not much to the scene, I assume?"

"It was pretty bad." A certain stiffness trailed on the end of your words, letting them echo through the hall and hang in the cool evening air. The young man was fast to perceive that tension: the tightness in your shoulders, fingers subtly wringing against the cracked wooden broom. Montague's anticipative smile climbed higher the longer he looked at you.

Would it be such a bad thing to turn around and pretend you had never seen him come home with that other man? You considered doing it, hiding upstairs and using your headphones until everything seeping through turned into an amalgamation of ambient noise that meant nothing to you, and you willed away the guilt like you'd always done.

In that moment, you thought about Meredith Nimu's apoplectic daughter, a woman so embittered by her own suffering that she was foul and relentless to anyone she crossed paths with. You thought about Shin Nakamura, a greedy, pitiless man who'd rather let coroners scrape up his tenant's remains rather than grant them mercy while they were alive and had been left in pieces because of it.

You thought of them and all their wickedness and edged your gaze towards the young man still standing in the doorway with his hand holding it ajar, clean fingernails picking at chipping paint, just steps from outside. "I think you should leave."

Run! Run! You'd better run away as fast as you can! Nothing would stop Montague from keeping his prey there, if that's what he chose to do. He did the opposite of that, and that was, simply, nothing at all. No pretty blandishments, nor a mouthful of teeth. Rather, now, he was particularly piqued by what you were trying to do.

To the young man, he had meddled into something rather egregious, probably convinced it was extramarital. You battled a surge of pride blooming inside you, shifting your chest a little higher, anchoring your spine back into your body.

"Don't come back here." You didn't need to say anything else. He was gone after pinching out a look of disgust towards Montague, tutting at him with his upper teeth showing through a curled lip.

Nothing happened for a while, not until the front door was secured after his departure. You were left to that responsibility, triple-checking the lock, while Montague ambled deeper into the house, but not too far away as you could follow the leisurely path by his heel strike. There was a rhythm in how he moved. It was deliberate, as though mimicking something.

It took you five paces to figure out he was miming your heartbeat, and he only stopped once it quickened in your chest. He appeared from around the corner, still taking his time reaching you, toying with some trinkets displayed on shelves built into alcoves throughout the lower floor.

You couldn't explain what you were feeling at that moment. Of the thousands—maybe millions—of victims Montague had taken in the previous times, you had just deprived him of one. That man would continue living, and he would tell his friends tomorrow about the weird night he had, and he would never have to be grateful that you saved him from a hellish death.

Yes, oh yes. Even as Montague approached you, carried by his deft gait with both halves of his gold compact open in his palm, you couldn't help but be in complete awe of yourself. A life continued outside of this mausoleum, and it was all because of you. You were entirely different from Meredith Nimu's daughter and Shin Nakamura, and, for once, your hands weren't sullied by bleach, blood, and body matter.

All that heaviness you had been carrying was suddenly so much lighter, and you felt like your chest could open up as wide as the room where you stood. The breaths you took were dry and cold in your throat, yet fresh as though you were walking outside in wintertime.

Montague must've seen something he didn't like on your face because he sucked down on his cigarette for a while, winding his wrist with it at his side once he was adequately calm.

"Did it feel good? I've only seen you this happy while I was fucking your brains out." It was jarring to hear him talk like that. He took another quick drag and let it out slowly as he rounded you. "Truthfully, darling, I didn't think you were the type to break the rules—on purpose, anyway. But I suppose we all get a little wound up every now and then, right? I've already forgiven you."

And then, you watched him drop the cigarette to the marble and snuff it underfoot until the weak ember was turned to soot. A black smear was left behind when he took his foot away. His stare into you was unwavering. "Clean it up."

You figured this was how a frightened animal felt when it wanted something within reach of an observant predator because you were trying to think of all the ways to get close without getting too close. It was a pitiful, humorous sight to him, seeing your steps forward so light and on the verge of bolting. But he showed no intention of doing anything more.

Still with the broom in hand, your knuckles turned stark around the handle while sweeping the remains towards you. It would take more elbow grease to get up that smudge, and he knew that just as well.

He reached for the broom and snapped it to a halt, making you jump, jaw clenching. A noiseless gasp lurched in your throat, his fingers wound tight into the hair at your crown as he yanked your head back to show all the fleshiness of your neck.

"What will you do about it, darling?" His lips were already cold and flush to the artery dancing in the curvature built of skin, muscle, and tendon. Your teeth chattered as the wetness of his tongue followed that intricate, breathtaking network inside of you as far as the neckline of your shirt would let him. "A man has to eat. Have you ever seen it? A man near starvation and the sorts of things he'll do to survive? Why, I've heard stories of desperate, little men eating their own lovers—their children—themselves just to claw around for a little longer. It's inspiring, I think."

He dragged you away then, up the stairs and through the hallway on the second floor to your bedroom, fingers still nested your hair until the moment you were shoved down onto fresh linens. There wasn't anywhere for you to go once he joined you on the mattress, feeling it bend towards his weight.

"Don't be afraid." he said this with all the fond familiarity of a lover, blunt fingernails digging crescents into your thigh through your clothes. In the waning moonlight that filtered through the dusty window over your bed, his pale eyeshine snared you like roots bursting from somewhere within your busy sheets to keep you there—keep you tame. "That's right. Come to me. Come to me."

There was a new drowsiness behind your eyes, one you couldn't stave by blinking. Montague's face was closer now, and you were struck with just how beautiful he actually was. The longer your gaze lasted, tips of your fingers exploring every shape and edge of his exquisite features, the less you were convinced he was a threat to you—that he couldn't have possibly been all that you'd feared up until now.

"I want you." His lips inched up like he expected you to say it. He felt your hands rest on the sides of his face, guiding him down into a soft kiss that he returned, that he kept clean and let you command until he was bored with it. You chased after him, lower lip pulled between both of yours and eventually out of reach. "Don't you want me too?"

"I wish you could understand just how much I do." He rummaged his pocket for the gold compact, losing it somewhere in the sheets, and then busied himself with stripping himself and you of clothes. Each piece discarded showed a greater expanse of your skin, a delight in his eyes because he could see that gorgeous webbing of arteries and veins throughout you, even in the darkness, through every defense your body created to protect you from every bacteria, virus, infection—from him.

He didn't need the breath, but he took one and held it anyway. You withered against his touch, those freezing, lithe fingertips traveling down all the areas where he wished his teeth could be, clear down to your groin. His smile stretched, feeling you search eagerly for a fistful of his hair with his lips smoothing across your inner thigh and then going higher.

There was warmth between your legs, a colorless glisten that leaked out onto the thin sheets, darkening a spot on them that tempted his tongue out for a taste. He came close to entertaining the notion of giving you that glimpse of heaven, allured by your hips leaping off the mattress and against his face.

"You really do think this is all about you." Montague kept you still by pressing down into your abdomen as he rose onto his knees, erection fitting tight between your bodies in the moments before he guided himself lower and hitched up into you. The sharp motion knocked a startled gasp out of your throat, where it quickly dissolved into a slew of filth and breathy panting. Your nails clawed into your palms, a sight he thought to make worse by digging himself deeper into you.

Montague had no issues biding his time this way, looming over the sprawl of your body beneath him, manipulating parts of you until he saw your face flinch and the first moans of discomfort shake all the way from your chest, up, and through your teeth. They matched the pace of his hard thrusts, smothered by sharp slaps of skin that carried in the inky air.

Indeed, I can wait. That thought of his unsatiated hunger melted in the back of his mind with the precedence of arranging the course of blood in your body. The drum of your heartbeat was deafening to him, but it wasn't enough. It wasn't loud enough. He wanted to be able to envision the arteries and veins bursting in his teeth, saturating the sheets and walls and both your bodies in hot red. He wanted it to paint his skin while he fucked you to absolution.

"It really, truly, is all about you in the end, isn't it?" He could still speak clearly, despite you being unable to utter noise beyond the air being forced out of your lungs. "You really are magnificent. How could I ever think to let you go? Not after everything you've done for me, how beautiful you look next to all of my things."

His hand shifted away from your abdomen at last, tracking across the soft span of your stomach and the muscles spasming there under his fingertips. All he would have to do is dig through you a little bit, and he could bury himself in those twitching fibers and insides. But he continued on his path to your pert nipples that he rolled against his palm a few times, higher still to fold his fingers together against your sternum where he felt your heart thundering there against your ribs.

"Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump," came his mocking chant that cracked into raspy moans as he lingered there. It had been a long time since something had made him feel this good. He had forgotten what bliss was truly like.

He reached your neck before long, trapping the underside of your jaw against his knuckles, forcing you to see him as his weight bore down on your throat. You both heard the cartilage and muscle in your neck shift, a subtle crack that sent your limbs flailing. You were thrown out of the rhythm of his thrusts in an attempt to grab at him.

"You really are despicable, aren't you?" He let out a gleeful laugh, letting your fingers turn ashen while you wrung his wrist. You weren't able to do much with your legs except use them to plant your heels into the mattress, vaulting your hips in the air to try to wrench yourself free. His cock slipped out of you, but he was hardly bothered by that. "Does it feel good that you chased off my guest? I could get him back, you know. You're aware of this. I know you are. But righteousness just feels so… rewarding, doesn't it? You couldn't resist. Desperation must've been eating you alive."

Strings of saliva glistened in your mouth, breaking apart the further your jaws spread. You were convinced, in that moment, that you would die like that in a silent scream. None of the words that Montague spoke truly reached you, not as your chest quivered and lungs burned as though swallowed in an inferno.

"Every misdeed in life vastly outweighs the good, you know? The scales have never been leaned in our favor—not I, and especially not for you. If that's the sort of thing you believe in. Isn't that what you're taught? Goodness for the sake of salvation at the end of a short life of inhibitions? How miserable." Montague took his hand off of you and let you breathe. You sucked in crisp air, gasping from your side through wet coughs and the sourness of vomit spat out on the floor.

Your respite was brief, weight on the mattress shifting as the hair on your scalp was used to lever you to your knees, body suspended upright only by his fingers tangled at your roots.

"This is all I can see." Montague loosened his hand from your head, moving south along your spine to your ass. He kneaded the bruised parts of your hips for a while after, lips ghosting their way along your neck up to the ear. "All I can see is what's right in front of me. And how it tastes. All that matters is that I have my fill—and that I feel good."

He smeared slick into the heel of his palm, rolling the head of his cock in that mess as he instructed you with every bit of lewdness how he wanted you to bend against the headboard, how far apart for you to spread your legs for him.

Every bit of it was humiliating for you, while he wished he could memorialize that moment of sinking back inside of you as your breaths broke into stifled sobs, face warped by anguish.

"Does it hurt? Tell me, I have to know, what does it feel like?" He enjoyed the suspense of not receiving an answer, listening as your fingernails dug tracks into the wood headboard and the dark room filled with obscene wetness that grew louder as his thrusts turned wild.

"Mmm—" He hinged forward, bracing his weight on top of your hands with his own. You shied from the surge of coolness that came with his cheek pressing yours. "You and I aren't so different. It makes me wonder if you actually like this. Isn't there something so freeing about it?"

"Mer—mercy, please." It was a coarse whisper from your dry throat, so much of your time having been spent with your mouth agape. The idea of having you that way was as tantalizing as all the others he thought up. "Montague, please—mercy."

Oh, now you were begging.

This was more than what he deserved. He managed a few more thrusts, spilling over into you by the third with a moan that he felt no shame to leave ringing in your ear. "Every part of you, every single part—I'll burn myself into your skin and your bones. You'll feel me in your veins, your blood. I'll make for certain that I'm all you remember—forever."

The vastness of your bedroom had grown warmer, permeated with the thickness of sweat and salt that left your palms slick against the headboard. You let your body slump against it, skin sticking to the wood. It didn't offer you the relief you wanted at that moment: a glass of ice water, all the tenderness of a soft bed to lull you into a blank dream—you just wanted to rest.

Montague knew this just as well, fishing his compact out from a muddled heap of linens and clothes. He checked inside to grab one of the two cigarettes left, making a mental note he'd need to replenish again tomorrow before lighting it and savoring it. At this rate, he anticipated he'd be empty before the end of the night.

For a while, he sat there cushioned on his haunches, admiring the way the smoke coiled towards the ceiling in dainty wisps and mingled with the stench of sex.

"It's not enough." he said, barely eliciting more than a glance from you. His current cigarette was already burnt to the filter, forcing him to pull the last and light that one too. "This is my last one. Such a shame."

You smelled the smoke strongly now, just seconds passing before you were yanked across the bed onto your back, the soreness in your scalp near excruciating as you yelped. Montague made a place for himself between your thighs again, leering down the length of his nose at you.

If he wanted to, he could trace the dread etched in your features with a finger, feeling all along your hot skin, into all the cavernous lines he wished he could preserve—right there, just like that. There had never been a more gorgeous visage than the one you wore right now. Only your gleaming, glowing, pink insides were more beautiful.

He watched your lips twitch while he teased a fistful of his hard cock against your sorest spot. You were swollen and bruised, and he could only imagine what it felt like when he bottomed out in you again.

The curve of your spine arched off the mattress, fingers frantically raking the air at him, reaching for any part you could sink into to get him out. Even your body seemed determined for the same, wonderfully stimulating walls squeezing around him.

It made a shiver roll all along his spine to his tailbone, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, with his first thrusts feeling positively divine. Especially when you jolted, an almost exaggerated response amplified by jagged cries and wet gasps you couldn't seem to swallow back down into your chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" You sputtered around the mucus piled in your throat. "Montague, I'm sorry. Please, stop."

He had burned away half of his last cigarette when he leaned over you, his body eclipsing what poor light had managed to illuminate the room for you. You could only follow the dainty mesmerizing glow that worked away from his mouth—his exhale barely masking a moan that he blew away with the smoke—and towards you.

"Keep doing it." His other hand was crawling up your neck, forcing you to suck in a hard breath. "Beg me again. Keep doing it."

All sound but the steady pulse of the headboard striking the wall had deadened, lasting well until the moment the cigarette touched your skin—and you screamed. Your throat vibrated, suddenly stopping when his palm closed around you again, silencing all your noise, his thrusts sloppy and rough while you thrashed under him.

This time, he kept you pinned by his chest, letting your feet dig for traction and slip and slide on the sheets. The bright smolder turned dark as he twisted it into your neck, taking all the remnants of restraint he had not to drill into you as far as it could go. He curled his tongue behind his jaws, keeping them tight.

Montague let go of your throat to allow you the grace of a stifled wail before that same hand sealed your lips. "Ah, ah. You know better than to scream. Shh, shhh, shhh. It's such an ugly sound."

He rubbed the cigarette into your skin until it crumpled, leaving him to lament for a moment once flicking it away to the floor. For him, it left behind a beautiful burn: raw, mad, red, and enticing. As his hand fell off of your mouth, daring you to do more than whimper and cry, his tongue was already flat against your wound.

"Oh, God," you wheezed, voice hoarse and jarring with the force of his hips knocking into you. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! Stop, stop, stop! I swear I'll never do it again! I swear. I swear!"

Montague caught the wrist you swung at his head, giving the taste of your seared flesh time to settle on his palate before turning towards the pulse in your thumb. He tried to match how he was fucking you out to how it throbbed on his lips.

"Oh, I'm well aware that you won't do it again. That much is a given." His strokes into you were suddenly languid and intentional, so achingly deep that your eyes rolled back. "I've already said that you're forgiven, haven't I?"

You could barely speak over the depth he reached. It didn't feel right. "Th-then, why?"

A smile flourished across his face, but your eyes couldn't pierce that dark veil to see it. You could feel the damp path he left on your wrist, how the muscle writhed all around the sprawl of your veins, going as far as to wind your fingertips before it receded back behind his lips.

"Because I'm enjoying myself." There was a weight of finality to those words before his mouth engulfed the side of your wrist, away from your fragile network of bluish-purplish channels. And when he bit into you, it was the incisors that sank through.

You didn't know what it was. A clamp seized you by the neck like his fist, steeling itself there and robbing you of a scream. The pain was unlike anything else—paralyzing and deep, like a pair of sharpened, narrow skewers made of molten fire piercing you with such an agonizing ache that you could do nothing but lay there.

But you still felt everything he was doing. His thrusts had grown truly vicious, chasing a high that came as the warmth of your blood seeped from a pair of punctures he had created. The steady flow he fed from was something he lapped on at his leisure. Enough of it streaked the length of your arm and dripped onto your bedding, onto your naked, warm skin when he guided the fall over your neck and chest, south to your stomach and abdomen. He let it fill and pool the seams of his fingers while smearing it with the fluids between your bodies.

At last, breaking the trance to speak, feebly, in between intermittent pockets of pain and numbness rolling through you, you asked with some hopefulness, "Are you going to kill me?"

"You? Kill you?" Montague dropped your wrist. It felt like a limp, dead thing that didn't belong to you. He dove at your neck for those drops he teased himself with, nudging your chin high with his nose to reach it all. "Death would mean letting you go. You're all mine, darling. Whatever other existence waits beyond death will never have you."

His tongue wet a trail to your chin, collecting a watery essence of blood and spit that he pushed into your mouth. Your lips were sealed by his ravenous kiss, relenting to the thickness of his tongue swirling the taste into your cheeks and down your throat, a nauseating intermix of iron and stale smoke that lingered and made you pucker.

And then, you heard him back in your ear, craning his neck only as far as to aggravate the cigarette burn with his breath. It gave several angry throbs. The weight of his body was almost flush on you, spreading the blood around as though your skin together was a single canvas.

To his eyes, it bloomed breathtakingly, seeping into every crevice, pore, and scratch that made up your design, an impermanent stain that he could saturate you in again and again and again. The things he whispered in your ear were vile and wicked, all on unlabored breaths while his strokes turned sluggish and stayed seated deep inside you until the final hitch of his hips left you full of him.

"I don't think you should go to work today."

You were only scarcely coherent of him—or anything for that matter—eyes unmoving from the black void above and unfeeling of how he chose to manipulate your body, still, hours later. All you could think about was the flutter of your lashes weighing down heavily over your eyes and how this world only survived on suffering such as yours.

༺ ♰ ༻

A small pile of things was arranged fussily in a duffle bag Hoss had given the day you returned to work after an impromptu leave of absence. It had only lasted three days, just enough time to acclimate to the pain that seemed to synchronize to every part of your body, throbbing everywhere, all at once, and at times with sharpness so great it toppled you to the ground. You could only lay there—wherever you dropped, on whatever cold slab of marble or concrete until it dissipated, unfurling from your limbs and organs to a rapturous wave of relief that melted the tension out of you.

It had only happened once while at work on a scene amidst a balmy summer night and came out of nowhere like an electric shock surging to your fingertips and toes, a hammer landing on your bones and leveling you on the sidewalk leading back to the company van. And that was all it took to incur a ruinous sort of anger in the two hulking men.

"You're going to take this bag, pack some shit, and you're leaving. Tonight." Hoss had to shake out the dust on the old duffle bag he pulled from somewhere in his car. "You ain't gonna tell me the reason, but I know he did something to you. T.J.'s calling in a favor."

"No. Don't—don't do anything. Don't try to come to the house—" There was a bandage around your wrist that you couldn't stop fiddling with. "I don't know what'll happen if you do. Just fucking don't."

"Nah, not us." T.J. slapped his phone back into the clip on his belt loop, eyeing the motions of your fingers on your wrist uneasily. "One of my old buddies—name's Roscoe—said he wants to handle it. Apparently, he and your guy have a history of some kind. He says to be ready to go by three."

The meaning behind what he said was left nebulous and concerning to you, even after you returned home with the duffle bag and started pulling things from your closet. Some ways across your room, high up on the wall and out of your reach was a clock. Its monotonous ticking brought your eyes over to it.

It was just after one-thirty, still enough time to change your mind if you wanted to. There was something so effortlessly easy about following along to the whims of other people. It felt safe, reassuring—their confidence was infallible. Not once in four years had T.J. or Hoss given you a reason to doubt their intentions, but right now, it boiled over in your mind.

But where will I go? What am I going to do? He'll find me. He'll find me. Montague would find you, but he wouldn't stop you from leaving. You could see it with clarity—him perched on the armrest of a chair, watching you walk through the door. He'd give you a headstart, a few days, maybe a few weeks.

You weren't sure you knew what to do without him. There was nowhere else in the world you could go, no one you could confide in that wouldn't be destroyed. He would keep your heart beating all the while breaking you apart until he had his fill, reminding you that this was how it was meant to be. This was how he showed you how you belonged.

And you—silly little you with your consciousness floating on the fringes of inscrutable ecstasy and some personal purgatory built on agony in your bones and blood—would believe him.

"Going on a trip?" His voice drifted to you from the doorway, far sweeter than it usually was. "I wish you would've told me. I can't imagine what it'll be like without you here in this house. You breathe life into it."

He was lured over by your silence, fitting his fingers between your shoulder blades to push along your spine, easing away the discomfort that had settled there. It was hard not to lean into that relief, a misstep that shattered any lasting hold of willpower when he stooped his neck to sweep you into a kiss.

"Why don't you stay instead?" He knew you wouldn't be coming back, not without dragging you back himself. "Stay with me instead. Right here. In this bed."

"Montague, stop—" He pressed down harder on your lips so those words withered into guttural frustration in your throat.

The duffle bag was flung far away, opening space on your bed for him to lay you out and begin to unravel the bandages around your wrist. Once he had access, his mouth was already full against the two puncture sites.

"Stay." He wasn't playing coy now. "I'll take care of you. It wasn't enough before. I can see that now. What can I do? It'd be too easy to break your legs. What if I chained you to this bed? What if I locked you up in this room? I wouldn't mind keeping you downstairs with me, but it would be too cold for you, I think."

"I want to leave." you said, mustering your composure through tight lips while he teased the infected purple holes with his flatter teeth. "Let me go."

He smiled derisively. "I don't think you know what you want."

"I—" You balked at him, reiterating with a stumble, "I—I just want to leave. Get off."

"How will you ever survive without me?" You didn't know if you'd be able to. "You'll be all alone, all alone in a world that's just ready to tear you open and spit you back out. I've told you before: Society doesn't reward virtue over vice—only those who play along. You won't last, not after you've known and tasted me."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything, whereas he swelled like a man who had salvaged a victory, lying himself down to kiss you again—

And then, the doorbell rang with an immense melancholic echo that you could feel vibrate up your arms and legs. Nearly a year later, you were hearing it for the first time and grasping onto the lapels of his suit vest, keeping him still when you remembered T.J.'s promise.

"Ignore it." you said.

"We have a guest—" Something in his tone made your stomach clench. "It's not polite to leave them waiting, especially at this hour."

Montague had untangled himself from you and was gone before you could stop him. Another wave of pain put you on the floor when you moved. Drool piled from your mouth. An ache so unreal pounded in the wrist he had played with. The crawl to your duffle bag was far, arduous in that every inch felt like carrying stones on your back.

I'm going to die. I might as well already be dead. You didn't have any more time to wait, so you slung the strap over your shoulder and used the wall to guide you along the quiet hallway, bumping into every pedestal and display where Montague's most treasured things had stayed undisturbed.

You were one of them, something he could keep on the second floor with the rest of his stuff, but unlike brittle porcelain and fraying embroidery—he could break you as much as he wanted, again and again and again, and fit you back whole. He could do it forever while you wasted, longing for an end he would never give you.

But as you crept along the bleak wallpaper and all of his curios, you were so gentle with them, steadying any wobbling base or piece as you went. The central staircase was close, voices at the bottom of it faint and unintelligible, drifting alongside you as though part of the house—

The air exploded. Just once. A single gunshot brought back all the alertness to your body, neck and shoulders at full length, pain dulled to where you could shuffle faster and look off the bannister at the landing below.

Montague was staring back up at you from the floor, entirely still and soundless. His jaw was unhinged, askew, frozen in a position that should've been impossible. A black hole gaped between his eyes, but didn't bleed.

"If you're not ready, that's going to be bad news." Another man stood nearby sheathing a gun, unfamiliar and yet with sameness in the way his gaze felt hollow and reached through you. "I'm repaying my debts. I'd like to make good on this one."

You were slow descending the stairs, even slower while you rounded Montague's body and denied yourself the chance to stop. Something invisible wanted to pull you to him, plow your knees into hard marble and weep over his chest. However, your insides bending in disgust and twinges in your bones kept you onward.

This man, Roscoe, was just as sickly-seeming and gray as the other, every slot of space on his arms and neck filled with images of religious iconography and portraits of saints—Mary being the only one you recognized with just a glance. It was tempting to touch him, something he noticed and stepped out of your reach.

"Is there another way out of here?" He made a weak motion towards the front door just ajar, but his eyes were stuck on the wrist wounded and unusable to you now. "We need to go. Now."

You were racking your brain for an answer, turning half-circles in place before pointing to the archway with a clock. "There's a backdoor, but the yard is fenced in and there's nothing but forest for three miles. There's also—"

Roscoe waited expectantly, ushering you to continue when he went for the gun in its holster. "Start moving, we'll figure it out." He unloaded another round into Montague's head, a near indecipherable twitch in the fingers made the hair on your neck shoot straight out. "Silver only keeps him down. It won't kill him. Go!"

"Th—there's, there's the basement." You smacked your lips, trying to swallow around a bulge in your throat. "There's an old door. He said there are tunnels, but I don't know where they go. I don't know if he was telling the truth. I don't—"

He threw a hand into your back, thrusting you forward at least three feet. You almost didn't catch your footing. "Then that's where we're going."

"Not a friend of yours then, I assume, darling?" Montague's voice from the floor was as much of a relief as it was terrible. The silent gaps of air all around were disturbed by sharp snaps and cracking bones as his jaw moved back into place and he sat upright over his thighs. You were transfixed by the silver bullets being sucked into his skull, holes shrinking until they closed completely. "I'm not surprised you're still fraternizing with the wrong crowds, Roscoe. You and that entire Society have always been a fucking eyesore."

Roscoe readied his aim. "Parasite."

Montague laughed all the way to his feet, tugging at the edge of his vest to make it neat again. He opened his mouth just enough to let his tongue roll out, shards of silver bullets tinkling as they hit marble underfoot. "You can't take what's mine."

He looked to you, stepping closer every time Roscoe moved you back with his arm. "Come here. Come back to me, darling. This is where you belong. This is your home. You belong here with me, here with everything that you know."

"He doesn't mean that." Another gunshot snapped you to attention, blinking out of a stupor you hadn't realized you were in. The bullet landed in Montague's forehead, teetering his balance in such a way that his back curved towards the floor, arms hanging like useless instruments, yet he still somehow kept his soles planted. "Time to go. Get to the basement."

Roscoe didn't fail to reach you this time, running tight on your heels through the house to the basement floor. He stopped partway to the old door to help you scour the duffle bag for a key—one attached to the chatelaine Montague had given you the day you accepted to move in.

Your breaths were ragged, heart ablaze and beating against your ribs. In that moment, as you flipped through the assortment of keys with an unsteady, slippery grip, you wondered if Montague heard your blood racing in your veins, if he could follow the suffocating drumbeat your heart made in your ears.

Just above, fast approaching the locked basement door, came a thunderous roar so inhuman and reverberating that it scared the clip of keys out of your hands into a clattering heap on the floor. Time was up.

"Move!" Roscoe shoved you aside, illuminated by the hectic flare of your phone as he fit his fingers through a gap in the door and ripped the entire thing off its hinges. He pulled you by the scruff of your shirt and heaved you inside the tunnel. "Go! Go! Go!"

The first thing to hit you was a putrid smell intimately known but always through protective equipment and a respirator. And as you went deeper into the tunnel, led by a single route and the light off your phone, the dirt packed under your feet turned soft, sinking to the tops of your shoes.

And then, you saw bodies.

Numerous—countless corpses in varying stages of decay with twisted faces reflected your terror and pain right back at you. Most were intact with missing limbs or dark red chasms in their abdomens that had been scraped hollow and dry under the white light. A few had been fully decapitated, briefly reminding you of the dead blonde woman from that night, but most of what lay stacked against the tunnel walls were emaciated figures with skin pulled so taut to their bones you could still make out their faces.

You were doubled over your knees, sucking in fetid mouthfuls of air and retching them back out on the ground. It burned in your throat, in your nostrils, and behind your eyes, but stifled your sobs as Roscoe dragged you alongside him.

"What did he do? What did he do?" You were crying, wheezing out those words on every shallow breath you took all the way to an end just ahead. The more you thought about it, the more you smelled the rot, tasted the bitterness of your own vomit, the more came out. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

Roscoe had to let you rest in the grass once you both surfaced. One of the exits turned out to be near the house, less than half a mile. But the tunnels kept going and so did the bodies. You suspected that there wouldn't be any reach of that underground labyrinth that didn't have some form of decay along it.

The thought brought the tears back, but now you could relish the sticky summer night humidity and touch dewy tendrils of grass under your hands.

"Can you drive?" Roscoe had a pair of keys hanging from his index finger, giving you a long moment to take them. He saw confusion in your watery stare. "I'll tell you where to go, just drive."

That's how it had been for hours at this point. You kept your hands locked around the steering wheel, one stronger than the other, gnawing the inside of your cheek while ruminating everything—tonight, the night Montague had bitten you, every other night before that, and your decision to have ever trusted him.

"How long ago did he bite you?" Roscoe had the seat reclined, arms over his eyes to shield them from oncoming headlights. "It doesn't look good."

You tested your grip on the steering wheel, but you couldn't do much without a sharp sting in your wrist. "I don't know—a couple weeks ago? I've tried everything short of going to the emergency room."

"That won't help," he said. "Modern medicine can fix a dog bite, antibiotics can kill an infection, a vaccine can protect you from a virus. Those aren't going to do any good."

Solemnly, you asked, "Am I going to die?"

Roscoe didn't sit up but had your wrist in his hands, turning it in little ways that didn't aggravate you. Besides the occasional glare from passing vehicles, there was no light in the car, and the holes in your skin were hardly distinguishable, though they had gotten darker. You weren't able to move it with any ease now.

"What you need to know right now is that he's never going to stop following you." He put your hand back on the steering wheel, careful as he enclosed your fingers around it. "It doesn't matter how long it takes, what you do, where you go—a parasite finds a host, and it latches on. And it doesn't let go."

You glanced between him and the road several times, tongue wetting the dry parts of your lips. "He's a vampire—you're a vampire. There's got to be something—"

Roscoe finally sat up in his seat, now cramped sideways with his shoulders flat to the window. The car veered a bit into the other lane. "You need to understand something. What you're saying would imply he ever had any humanity. Vampires are created." He paused for a beat, waiting for the realization to strike you. "Montague was never created."

"What—what the hell is he, then?" A horn abruptly blared by, prompting you to yank the car back onto the correct side. "He drinks blood. He has teeth. He—he hunts. He doesn't like silver. His eyes are the same as yours."

Roscoe lowered his gaze, but remained in that uncomfortable position. "There's a story I heard about him once. I don't remember the details except for one: ‘If the devil exists, they're one in the same.’"

You kept your eyes on the road, counting every car that flitted on past. They were probably going to work at this hour—green numbers on the dashboard showed it just after four—and they'd be able to have a place to return to at the end of the day. Now, you didn't belong anywhere, and twenty-four hours from now you still wouldn't.

The town where you had lived with Montague for a year was long behind you, backtracking would take hours, and you wouldn't know how to get back from the direction that Roscoe had told you to go. Dim streetlamps and cozy houses with spruced yards had morphed into an endless network of concrete, signs, and off-ramps to places you'd never heard of.

It was scary how everything could change in one night, and how it did. The only semblance of normalcy to you right now were the aches throughout your body, which had returned the moment you fully comprehended that you had escaped that house.

"Why…" Roscoe looked up at you, seeing your lips shake and eyes turn red. "Why do I want to go back to him?"

He fixed himself right in the seat, tousling a hand through his hair while looking out through the windshield. "You shouldn't do that. But you'll never be able to stop running."

You never saw Roscoe again once the car ride ended several thousands of miles later, mentioning something about how he repaid his debt to T.J. and had disappeared from a restaurant you both walked into. When that happened, you sat paralyzed at your little table for most of the day with a soul-crushing realization that you were truly alone with nobody in the world—just like Montague said you would be. And, for the sake of others, you'd never be able to have anyone else in your world.

It stayed that way for close to two years. The hardest part hadn't been the homelessness or constant vigilance, not the door revolving each person to come into your life since, but the fact that you still yearned for what you once had. Everything so awful about what you experienced sometimes looked like heaven when you thought about it, like soft, cloudy nostalgia from a time where the throes of agony were all you had ever known.

You were capable of thinking soberly as well, and with that came the understanding that a part of you would always want that time back—want him back. He had left you with a permanent scar and neurological damage that could never be corrected. It was anticipated you'd lose that wrist at some point in the future, but for now, you could still hold a cup and brush your teeth with enough conscious effort.

The pain never went away either, but you refused to let it impede your work in the field. And your two roommates were a couple of engineering geniuses who'd managed to make the flat more accommodating to your needs. They'd been patient with you during every step of your transition into a new life, calling you an enigma because you had nothing to your name except a dusty duffle bag and a "strange-looking dog bite" on your wrist when you first met them.

Sometimes, especially on the weekends after clinking together enough shot glasses, they tried to probe your brain for some clue as to who you were, who you had been historically. You had decided it was better that they—that no one—knew about it or what actually existed out there in the world.

And when you returned home from the lab late that Saturday night, you were surprised to find the lights off and the flat immersed in the kind of soundlessness that made your ears feel clogged with cotton.

You were slow in lowering your backpack to the floor, keeping the front door slightly ajar so a slither of light from the residential corridor slipped inside. "Jordan? Felix?"

No answer. You didn't hear anything from their bedrooms upstairs either.

"Jordan?" The nearest light switch didn't work, neither did the one after that, or any others you hunted down with the diffused beam from your phone screen. "Jordan? Felix? Are you guys home?"

It was possible they had gone out somewhere for the night and just hadn't mentioned anything to you, as unsound as that logic actually was, considering it simply wasn't their personality. But as you wandered through different rooms checking the switches, you knew you were rationalizing to keep yourself in check.

The light from the hallway still piled inside like a narrow pillar, raising all the hairs on your neck and arms, knowing that it wasn't a building-wide outage. They had never left you in a situation like this before. Something was wrong.

"Jordan! Felix! Whe—" Your foot nearly shot out from under you when you slid through something slick on the laminate. After a moment to fix yourself, bracing the edge of the countertop with a clammy palm, you steadied the white glow of your phone at the floor.

There, glistening back at you, was the vast richness of blood in a tall puddle that spread like long winding tendrils through grout in the flooring. It looked almost black under your light at a certain angle, estimating it had been there for several hours—untouched.

You held in a breath and grit your jaws together as the more you moved, the more you saw. And when the top of a head came into view, silky hair shining like fine thread before clumping together at the base where the blood had pooled the most, it was everything you could to keep yourself from hitting the floor.

Both of them were there, perfectly out of sight of the front door and completely unrecognizable. Their bodies had been left in one piece, though where their faces had once been were cavernous holes with pale, pink ribbons of flesh and fat left behind. The roundness of their skulls let blood fill inside it like a vessel. What little pieces of brain matter remained had floated to the surface.

You staggered back from them, phone loosening from your weak hand and returning them to the maw of darkness, while groping the wall behind you as far as your arm could reach. This wasn't a result of crude knife work or even bludgeoning; no, it was a slow kill, one meant to steep someone in torment so immense that you prayed to whatever was out there that they succumbed immediately.

"Help…" Your voice was trapped in your throat, barely registering as a whisper even to yourself as you sidled along the wall. "Someone—anyone, please help."

The patter of your heartbeat was torturous. Your every step back to the entrance was leaden with fear. You couldn't get your legs to move fast enough, and the light reaching in through the gap seemed to stretch on forever—further, further, and further still.

You thought back to that day you met Montague and shook his hand, noting how unnaturally cold it had been despite it being a nice day in spring. You remembered the dead blonde woman with mascara tears, and the bodies he used to decorate the tunnels, and the young man who was able to walk away that night believing it was all some shallow quarrel—never knowing he had sealed your fate.

You regretted all of it.

The door was in your reach now, and you could get out, call for help, and go back to running. This time, you wouldn't be tricked into false satiety or let anyone too close. You would see mountains and forests and oceans a thousand times over before you stopped again.

Two years hadn't been enough time for you to accumulate many things, you thought. It wouldn't be hard to leave most of it behind, just like you had before. You would unpack that old duffle bag from the back of your closet, fill it to the brink, and that would be enough.

You had your hand over smooth metal, but that cold reached greater depths in you as the door was pushed shut from behind, light shrinking away through the slot until you were swallowed whole in the dark.

"Hello, darling. I've missed you." He sounded the same against your ear. For a split second, you felt relieved. "Don't worry about cleaning up. We're not staying long."

He clamped damp fingers over your mouth before you could scream.

438 notes · View notes

explorevenus · 4 months ago

Text

dirty laundry ♡ re6!leon kennedy x puppy hybrid!reader

nsfw (18+) - minors dni or i will call ur mom. and also the cops

word count: 5.1k

tags/warnings: re6!leon, stubborn/reluctant puppy reader who pretends she hates him, brief chris redfield appearance, forced proximity (kinda), leon pining for u (he wants u to call him daddy btw), hybrid heat cycle shenanigans, thigh riding, dry humping, oral sex (f receiving), fingering (f receiving), no use of y/n

description: leon's had a tough time figuring out his new puppy hybrid roommate... outside of the fact that she's sweet on him, and just won't admit it. lucky for leon, he comes home from a mission to find her airing her dirty laundry.

a/n: this piece was commissioned by my beloved and adored @pupthepokemonenthusiast who is one of MY FAVORITE PEOPLE ON EARTH EVER ?!!!! and i luv yapping w them and that makes collaborating w them such a dream every time....

divider by @cafekitsune !!

my masterlist ♡

my ao3 ♡

fic under the cut, thanks so much for reading and i hope u enjoy ;w;

-venus ♡

Loose gravel crunched beneath Leon's boots, uneven pavement glittering with moisture in the streetlights. It was somewhere between raining and snowing, the wind splattering his rosy cheeks with little drops of condensation, every breath puffing out in a visible cloud, head tilted down at just the right angle to protect the lower half of his bruised face from the cold while still being able to see where he was going.

He didn't have a specific destination in mind, and truth be told, he couldn't really read most of the signage around here anyway-- it was all in Mandarin, and his Mandarin was even less reliable than his Spanish, to put it gently. But he could read what he needed to, at least, enough to find the basics like food, bathrooms, lodging, or hospitals, and more importantly, he could discern the backlit lettering above the shop two doors down; antiques and collectibles.

That was a phrase he'd familiarized himself with in damn near every language under the sun by now.

A bell dinged quietly overhead as he stepped into the storefront, grateful that it was even open past 9 o'clock at night. It was only one room and didn't have much space to walk around, but every available surface was stacked to the brim with knick-knacks of all shapes, colors, sizes, and price points under no apparent system of organization. Where some might be overwhelmed or put off by the volume of things to look at, Leon felt his heart skip a beat with excitement. He still had some time to kill before his transport back to the States was due to arrive, and not a single minute of it would be wasted overlooking any potential gems.

Judging by the horrified stares he was attracting, Leon could imagine he looked fucking insane right now, clothes still splattered with wet, rotting blood and the barrel of his gun practically still smoking in his holster as he towered over a shelf in the back corner, scrutinizing a darling little plush bear in one hand and a set of hand-painted matryoshka dolls in the other like it was the hardest decision he would ever have to make.

Ultimately, he chose not to decide at all-- money wasn't a factor, so why not buy both? If it weren't for the issue of luggage, he'd just say 'fuck it' and buy out the whole damn store. Unfortunately, helicopters tended to be quite limited in space.

Self control was a skill Leon used to have mastered, perhaps even too well-- for a long time, every uncomfortable, unsightly, pesky little emotion was pressed down into a condensed cube to be neatly packed away in the very back corners of his brain, boxes upon boxes of dense feelings continuing to pile up and take over more and more space up there until the pressure became too much, the lid blew, and he went off the fucking handle. It wasn't something he was proud of by any means, all those long months blurred into mush through a lens of alcoholism and other reckless behaviors, but what he did try to let himself be proud of was his relative success in making it to the other side.

That, of course, was a feat he did not accomplish without help, nor would he ever claim to. Chris Redfield was instrumental in his recovery in more ways than one, and at times, without even realizing it. He was a listening ear, a dealer of tough love, a trusted confidant...

...and the reason he had you.

For obvious reasons, Leon had never gone out of his way to get a pet in his adult life. It just felt irresponsible with the inconsistency and uncertainty of his work situation, even with all the money in the world to spend on trainers and walkers and boarding and... whatever else, but at that point, it would feel less like a pet than an accessory, and Leon didn't have much interest in material. Never saw the need for it. Then one day Chris woke him up in the middle of the night banging on the door to his apartment with a gift he never expected.

"She's a... what?"

"A hybrid. She's a human-canine hybrid, Leon."

Leon glanced between you and Chris with skepticism in his eyes, only to find the same look peering back at him in you. It was almost kind of funny that he'd have a hard time believing there could be such a thing as a human-canine hybrid, considering all he'd seen in his line of work, a thought that made his shoulders and his expression relax almost instantly.

You were a real cutie, that was for sure, tucked behind Chris and staring up at Leon through your eyelashes with this grumpy little look on your face, a plush, patchwork bear clutched to your chest. The toy was equally as vibrant and colorful as your clothing, if not a bit worn with time. Your ears were long and droopy, your tail hanging low but swishing side-to-side with cautious interest, and the longer he studied you, the more he became endeared by you.

"The B.S.A.A. rescued a group of hybrids from an illegal facility a few weeks ago, but finding accommodations for them isn't as simple as it sounds," Chris continued, resting a hand on your shoulder in an apparent move to reassure you. "Long story short, the people who were in charge of that facility aren't too happy about the acquisition, and the hybrids aren't safe at the B.S.A.A. anymore. Would you be willing to shelter her for a while?"

The firm look in Chris' eyes-- and the fact that he just had to bring this up with you right in front of him-- made it clear he wasn't really asking. No mind, Leon would have done it anyway. It just would have been nice to have had a heads up to rectify the state of the apartment.

"Yeah, of course," Leon nodded gently, stepping aside to allow you and Chris further into the apartment. "Make yourself at home." He caught the way your head tilted up a bit, as if you were studying the scent in the air, and he supposed it made sense that you likely were.

That was four months ago. And for the past four months, Leon quite enjoyed having you around. You were silly and playful, always bounding around the apartment with a toy clenched between your teeth or lounging in the sunny spots in front of the windows, pawing at him for belly rubs and treats and infinite tug-o-war matches. All that being said, you were equally stubborn, resisting him at every turn like magnetic repulsion, always kicking up a fuss seemingly just for the sake of it.

He wasn't sure. You were tough to read. Not only did some of your canine personality traits make you a bit forgetful and distractible at times, but you were also just terribly inconsistent with your affections, and he wasn't always sure what to make of it. All he knew was that he was determined to win you over in one way or another, and if he was going to do that, he'd have to figure you out first, and so far that was shaping up to be quite the herculean task. At least it seemed you would be here for a while.

With the way he guarded your little treasures during the flight home, one might assume he was smuggling something, but he just couldn't stomach the thought of coming home without something to present to you. The hardened federal agent was determined to crack a smile out of you on his terms, to get you to admit what you both knew to be true.

You had a crush on him. A big, fat, embarrassingly all-encompassing crush on him, and you rejected the idea of owning up to it so staunchly that it was turning you into a bit of a brat. That was the one thing he could read about you, and it drove you up the wall.

He certainly wasn't judging you. It would be an absurd lie to say he didn't have a big, fat, embarrassingly all-encompassing crush on you too-- he'd be insane if he didn't. But the back and forth was far too enjoyable, and Leon was always up for a good natured challenge.

See, self control was something Leon had worked really, really hard to regain a handle on, and when it came to his drinking and brooding, he certainly had... but when it came to you? Not by a longshot. That being said, he would rather be pouring himself into courting you than pouring himself another bourbon. That's what he used to shut up that little voice in the back of his head that questioned whether or not he was putting too much energy into this, banking too much on it.

It was innocent, right? It's not like you were a bad influence or whatever. If anything, a lot of nights that he would have spent at the bar were instead being spent at home playing with you. Surely that had to be a net positive, especially considering you would have otherwise been getting poked and prodded at in a lab.

Stepping back into the apartment for the first time in weeks, Leon hadn't even bothered bringing his duffel bag in with him from the car, the only thing in his arms being the wrinkled paper bag from that antique shop. His own belongings could wait. As soon as he shut and locked the door behind him, stepping out of his shoes, the first thing he noticed was how quiet it was.

No lively music from the shows you liked to watch, no little bumps or growls from you playing toys, no quiet padding of your feet across the hardwood from you coming to see who was at the door. He glanced at his watch, finding it was only half past nine in the evening, and while you often proclaimed to abide by a healthy bedtime for yourself, you had a habit of napping all day and bouncing off the walls all night. Something was amiss.

Stepping further into the apartment to investigate the scene, Leon peered into the living room. The lights were on, the TV was off, there were a few toys strewn about the couch and the floor, but not a glimpse of the sweet puppy who left them there. Odd. Suspicious. Maybe even staged.

His lips came together in a whistle meant to grab your attention, knowing your sharp ears would hear it from anywhere in the apartment, even if you were sleeping. When that call garnered no response, he began to wonder if you were mad at him. After all, he was supposed to return almost three days ago, and while Chris had been able to stop by and check on you when he had the time, it just wasn't the same, and you didn't do well with loneliness, and Leon knew that.

Turning on his heel to head deeper into the apartment, he continued to find you nowhere. Not climbing the countertops in the kitchen, or playing under the dining table, or even reluctantly having a bath. As he reached the end of the short hallway, there were only two doors left to open.

Leon tried another whistle and called out, "Hey, pup? I'm home!"

He waited, and listened... and heard nothing. Your bedroom door was closed, and it looked like the light was on in there, judging by the subtle glow spilling out beneath it, but still, no response.

His bedroom door, however, was cracked open. The overhead light was off but the bedside lamp was on, and his dirty laundry basket was tipped over on the floor. When he stepped forward to turn it upright again, he thought he saw the bedding shuffle out of the corner of his eye. Closer inspection of the bed brought the case of his missing puppy girl drew to a close. Your soft tail was peeking out beneath the edge of the covers, the markings and patterns in your fur being undeniably familiar to him now.

It was perfect timing, really-- he was just about to tip over into the realm of worrying about your safety, but now he was back to just worrying you were mad at him... and he couldn't help the amused grin that tugged at his expression.

"Is that a little puppy in daddy's bed?" He asked aloud, his tone taking on a smitten and adoring lilt. Once again, he received no response... at least not verbally. Quietly setting down that paper bag, he stood there and watched with his arms crossed as your tail fluttered to life in response to his tone, the tip silently patting the sheets in a lazy and reluctant little wag that you might have actually gotten away with, if it weren't for the fact that your tail was in plain view.

He was initially going to try a few more times to get a response out of you, hoping to make sure you were okay and to see if you wanted to talk, but he quickly realized that wasn't going to work with you. You weren't all doom and gloom like he tended to be, you were silly, you were playful, you were fundamentally kind. A lighthearted approach wouldn't work with him, or with most of the people he dealt with on a day-to-day basis, but it would almost certainly work with you.

"Well," Leon stretched his arms up with a dramatic groan, "Since there's no puppies in the bed..."

And then he playfully toppled over the lump in the bedding, bracing himself on his elbows so as not to actually crush you, of course, music to his ears being the muffled squeal of stubborn discontent that sounded out from beneath the covers.

"Leon!" You whined, arms squirming around beneath him in a desperate flurry of moves to find the edge of the blanket, tugging it down to free your face for some air. Soon enough your head poked out from beneath the covers and your eyes were already narrowed into unamused slits at him.

But that wasn't really what caught his attention about the look on your face. You were panting for breath, your ears flopped back lazily and your hair an absolute mess, your skin hot to the touch and clammy with sweat. Now his eyes were narrowed at you in suspicion, because you were certainly frustrated, just... not the kind of frustrated he was anticipating, if his suspicions were found to be correct.

"You look guilty," He commented, brow raised as he took you by the chin and tilted your head this way and that, as though in observation. "Why do you look guilty, puppy?"

"I'm not," You were quick to defend yourself-- much too quick, in Leon's opinion-- and you stubbornly recoiled back from his hand, continuing to squirm and resist beneath him. "You're squishing me!"

You planted the palm of your hand dead in the center of his face in an attempt to push him away, the bedding slipping further down in the process to reveal your flushed collarbones and shoulders, both of which were bare. Were you naked? In his bed?

He took you by the wrists to pin your hands down with ease, staring down at you in scrutiny. "Don't lie to me, sweetheart," He said, tone firm, but not unkind. "You're red as a tomato."

With a stubborn whine, your ears flattened back against your messy head in what could only be read as shame, and that certainly wasn't what he was going for at all, even with the compromising position he had you in at the moment. It was just meant to tease you, but you looked mortified, and he could only imagine why that might be.

"Puppy," He softened, letting go of your wrists, one hand taking you by the cheek to gently caress you. "You know I can't help you if you don't tell me what's going on."

Your mouth fell open and then snapped shut again a time or two, a clear indication that you were tripping over your words in search of the right ones. Finally, you managed, "It's... I-It's hot."

"Then why are you all bundled up, huh?"

You didn't even really need to admit it at this point, because it was clear as day what was going on here-- after all, Chris had warned him this might happen, that hybrids could have... intense reproductive cycles-- but he also wasn't going to push it if you just wanted to ride it out on your own. He wasn't an expert on this, he didn't know exactly what you needed, and he didn't want to overstep and freak you out.

That being said, the thought that you'd retreated to his bedroom, desperate to surround yourself with his belongings in his absence just to cope with being in heat, was a remarkably good one.

This time you didn't seem to have a retort, still writhing under him and trying to push him off of you, which wasn't new behavior for you, though this time he did take it upon himself to give you some space instead of continuing to mess with you.

"Alright, alright, relax, daddy's not making fun of you--"

"You're not my daddy," You interjected stubbornly, but just like always, the rosy, searing blush on your face betrayed how you really felt about the topic, even as you added, "Stop trying to make me call you that!"

Leon dearly and sincerely adored you, that much was to be sure, but your hard-headedness could run him ragged sometimes, when you'd dig your heels in so hard about things that seemed so innocuous. Whether or not you should be expected to call him daddy-- which he regularly enjoyed teasing you about but would never legitimately force you to do-- didn't feel like the biggest issue at hand here. Not by a mile.

How was he supposed to focus on that when you were just... burning up? Panting for breath and shaking and whining? Oh dear God, this wasn't good, and for as much effort as he was putting into focusing on your wellbeing, it was becoming increasingly difficult not to focus on the way his pants were beginning to feel uncomfortably cozy in the front. He brought one hand down between you to adjust himself only to find he'd unintentionally solicited a faint, but distinctly needy moan from you in the process, presumably because you'd touched you somewhere he hadn't necessarily meant to.

"G-Go away, Leon," You insisted, eyes screwed shut as you turned your head to the side and maintained that stubborn frown he knew so well on you. "Get off of me!"

But your tail was wagging in an absolute blur, thumping mindlessly against the damp sheets and knocking in between his knees at an intensity that was impossible to miss. Leon's eyes narrowed and he bared his teeth in an intrigued grin before finally sitting back on his haunches, still straddling you, but at least freeing your upper half.

"Leon, quit--"

You poor dear, you were so, so close to finishing that sentence, if only it weren't for the way Leon swung one leg between your own, driving his knee right up to the apex until you felt the muted pressure lavish your clit. Whatever you were about to say fizzled out on your tongue and instead popped out in a string of whimpers, your back arching up off the bed. The movement caused the bedding to slip down just a little bit further, confirming his suspicion that you were in fact naked, at least from the waist up.

Taking the soft globe of your breast into the palm of his hand, Leon let his thumb brush over your already pebbled nipple and asked lowly, "Oh, c'mon, pretty puppy... you're totally sure you don't want daddy's help? I think you're just being fussy..."

Your chest rumbled with a little growl, but it was more of a moan than that, and the fiery glare on your face was the perfect image of it. You were pissed, and quite frankly, it was a good look on you. Maybe even one of his favorites. Suddenly you were baring your teeth at him too, just pretending it was in the opposite way. You were such an open book to him.

"You're being mean," Huffed the stubborn little puppy, but of course, Leon could be meaner.

So he was. Leon snatched the covers off the bed in one quick swipe, and what was revealed to him beneath had to have been a thousand times better than anything he might have expected. You were naked, yes, but tangled between your legs was a pair of his sweatpants, undoubtedly retrieved from the depths of the overturned laundry basket, the grey cotton soaked through in patches with slick all over the crotch and thighs.

Fucking Christ, you weren't just getting off to the thought of him, but also the scent of him, the feeling of his clothes on your skin, and presumably, an idea not unlike what he was already teasing you with; letting you rub one out on his thigh.

Squishing your cheeks in one hand, he said firmly, "Look at me. Do you honestly feel like I'm being mean to you?"

There was a pause while you stared at each other, your eyes searching his own skeptically. It didn't really seem he was messing with you, no, in fact he appeared like he really wanted to help you. The back and forth was fun and he enjoyed the little game you'd made out of getting to know each other, but when it came to your comfort and wellbeing, he wasn't interested in being forced to solve puzzles. You couldn't really blame him.

"N-No," You admitted.

"Exactly, so just... simmer down, will you?"

This time Leon didn't give you another chance to tell him to fuck off. He scooped you up at the waist and pulled you to your knees, drawing your body close to his until you were straddling his left thigh. Eyes wide, you stared at him stiffly, like you were too afraid to move. Huffing out a breath, he rolled his eyes with a smirk and gripped your hips, tugging you down until you were finally bearing your weight on him.

For as fast as your pointed teeth sank into your bottom lip to quiet yourself, it didn't even matter. You still let out a pleasured whine, ears flat against your head and your tail hung low, the tip swishing in a reluctant little wag that patted the outside of his knee with every other beat.

"You're too precious for your own damn good," He grumbled, thumbs brushing soothing circles into your hips. "Y'know that, pup?"

Breaths falling short, it felt like your head was full of warm mud, teetering for balance on your neck as your upper body tipped forward to grasp at his arms. As expected, Leon caught you effortlessly, steadying you by cupping your face in his hands so he could look you right in your braindead little eyes, your noses almost touching as your tongue lolled out in lazy gasps.

It was obvious he wasn't going to get much more out of you in the way of words at this point, so it was a damn good thing you had that pretty tail knocking about. He figured all that wiggling was the closest he'd get to a literal window into your mind.

"Go on, then," Leon smoothed your hair away from your sticky forehead, still mindful to hold you upright. His tone was low and, as always, far too sweet for you... but it was so nice, it vibrated down to the base of your spine and made you dizzier. You were just about to fulfill what he was encouraging you to do when he added wryly, "You've already made such a mess, don't get shy on me now."

A quiet whimper stuttered from your dry throat-- you couldn't sit still anymore, he was being evil and he knew it, downright evil... and you typically would have stuck up your nose at him and brooded on it for a while, but you didn't even have the strength of mind for that at the moment. You hardly even realized you were already rocking your hips back and forth against the clothed meat of his thigh, nails threatening to snap under the pressure as they begged to sink past his shirt and into his muscles.

It was pleasant, sure, but it wasn't nearly enough, especially not after hours and hours and hours of tossing and turning in his bed, rubbing yourself nearly numb with your fingers and your toys and his pillows and his clothes, aching for something tangible and warm to nurse the pain away. You let your forehead rest against his own for a moment to catch your breath, hoping to find the right angle, but you just weren't getting what you needed, and the frustration alone made your glassy eyes sting with the threat of tears.

That just wouldn't do.

"Oh, you really made a mess, didn't you, sweet girl?" Leon cooed sympathetically, shushing your delicate cries. Thumbs skimming over your burning cheeks, he asked quietly and carefully, "Why don't you let daddy lick it up, hm?"

Your expression scrunched up in a weak pout and your empty little head bobbed up and down in an airy nod, and just as soon as you gave him that go-ahead, he was moving to make it so. You were on your back in seconds, Leon's broad hands spreading your plush thighs apart to make space for himself between them, and for as cool and composed as he was trying to appear right now, he couldn't help the low moan that made it past him just at the sight of you.

Sure, he'd seen more than enough by now to guess that you were wet, but you weren't just wet, you were dripping all over yourself. It was all he could do to collect as much of you on his tongue as possible, groaning at the taste and dragging you closer by your hips until he was as close as he could get, the tip of his nose buried against the curls at the lowest point of your mound as he lapped you up with abandon.

You were writhing and crying, legs kicking out at the stimulation before drawing back up to dig into his shoulders and pull him further into you, into the mess of you. He'd managed to find it somehow, to become that something tangible and warm and redefine it, unraveling you from the root with a sanguine sense of desperation that was tempered by his undying commitment to treating you like you were made of glass.

Your tail was curling up tight against the base of your spine, your chest was heaving for breath, you couldn't keep your eyes open anymore, and he hardly could either.

But he also couldn't stand not to. If you had the capacity to pay attention to small details, you might have noticed his eyes were just as bleary and drunk as yours were. Leon recorded your every movement in his mind like scripture from this angle, his own hips rutting down into the bed while yours bucked into his mouth, and it was only when he found the strength to pull away for air that he found a moment to reorient himself in reality.

His lips were puffy, rosy, and slick with you as he caught his breath, two fingers toying with your puffy, aching clit in the absence of his tongue. It was almost like muscle memory for him to reach up with his free hand and pat your belly, an affectionate hum ringing from him at the near-immediate reaction it got out of you, even in a state like this. You were squirming and arching beneath him as your quivering body fought to determine priority over the attention brought by either hand, a rather endearing dilemma to have found yourself in.

"Oh, my poor baby," Leon preened, lavishing the inside of your right thigh with kisses. "You're so cute..."

Unable to help himself from letting you have the best of both forms of pampering, he replaced the tips of his fingers with his tongue yet again, freeing both hands to pet your soft tummy. The movements were lazy, but sure enough, your tail was going off as fast as it could while you laid there shivering and whining and clawing at him, tumbling over the edge into release before you could come up with a way to warn him first.

As if he would have cared anyway. A warning wouldn't have changed anything. Hell, it might have even spoiled what turned out to be a dizzying moment of unabashed indulgence for him.

Gentle, adoring hands kneading delicately at all your favorite spots, Leon willfully deprived himself of oxygen in pursuit of every drop of your syrup as it flowed from you, knowing he would come to regret being wasteful later if this should turn out to be a one-time thing. He lost himself to the throes of hedonism for several drawn out moments until he was confident you were licked clean, until he came to again and realized you had gone completely limp in the wake of your expenditure.

Rolling over onto his back, Leon spread out just as bonelessly across the bed as you did, the both of you a sorry sight of sweat and heat. He spent several minutes trying to find a way to break the silence. With the haze of lust wearing off a bit and clearing up space in his mind for more intelligent processes, Leon was already beginning to dread the inevitable conversation this would warrant between the two of you.

Lucky for him, that was so far outside of the realm of your current train of thought... or lack thereof. You certainly felt better, but that didn't mean your brain wasn't mud anymore. Little else mattered to your muggy, muddled mind but the here and now.

In an unexpected move, you rolled onto your side to rest your head against his chest. The way you struggled to meet his eyes was enough for him to know you were likely still struggling to talk, or maybe you just didn't really want to, but the olive branch you'd extended demonstrated your agreeable state, which was more than he could've said for you half an hour ago.

Shit, half an hour ago he was still hoping a couple presents from his trip would win your affections, yet here he was with the taste of you lingering on his lips, your naked body curled up to him for comfort.

Wrapping his arm tightly around you until you were tucked up comfortably into his side, Leon rested his chin atop your head and mumbled fondly, "What am I gonna do with you, huh? Can't even sleep in my own bed after a long mission 'cause this pretty little puppy made such a big mess... I hope you know how to work the washing machine."

#venustext #sintext #resident evil #leon kennedy #leon kennedy x reader #leon kennedy x you #re6 leon #leon kennedy smut

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astrolocherry · 6 months ago

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Birthday Venus-Saturn aspects ~ "Your Daddy Loves You..."

Written by Astrolocherry

Venus conjunct Saturn, Venus sextile Saturn, Venus square Saturn, Venus trine Saturn, Venus opposite Saturn

The individual born with Venus forming aspect to Saturn is gifted a double-banded commitment ring from Saturn. Therein contains a promise that while partnership may be potentially timeworn and difficult to find in this lifetime, when the love eventually comes it will be greater than anything she could have imagined. She may have distant fantasies or longings about her ideal partner, but never completely entertains these as actual possibilities, often due to an inherent sense of worthlessness or being undeserving with matters of the heart. Something happens during the developmental phase of life that breaks this heart before it has fully formed. It is sensitive, scarred, and often bandaged in the protective defences that cut her off from accepting the affection and attention that she can’t admit is much needed. In traditional astrology, Venus is the portion of our consciousness that beholds our eye of beauty, femininity, aesthetic, and style. The shadow of Saturn leering over Venus often produces an apathy and at worst, a revulsion regarding her own self-image of beauty.

Despite feeling so disconnected and detached from her feminine side, the individual with a Venus-Saturn aspect is divinely feminine in its most timeless, antiqued, resiliently elegant, and everlasting archetypal form. It is a lifelong reunion between the inner Fairy Godmother, and the little girl inside who is enslaved to those leftover feelings of being defective, unattractive, and impossible to love. It is until this reunion occurs, or in the worst case scenarios when the inner work has been left incomplete and it never happens at all, that the individual experiences the traditional Venus-Saturn suffering in love that we would expect. These conditions may result in a choice of relationship partners and dynamics that reflect and play-out the sentiments of the little girl inside rather than the woman, and may involve themes of relegation, power imbalances, mistreatment, and re-casting father figures. There may also be some form of self-imposed entrapment in relationships, something inside that stops her from walking out an open door.

The traditional Venus-Saturn age-gap in love and attraction to older people may be one relationship theme that prevails through life. However, as she grows older and wiser, she will often come to recognise this attraction being shaped by different needs and desires that are more authentic and ultimately satisfying. As she becomes less beheld to old conditions, the need is less for paternal fulfilment and redemption . This could be a young soul or an old soul - her attraction to older people has never been about that. It’s rather about a depth that this heart possesses, a serene, dewy, alluringly tragic wisdom and insight that is decades older than its years, searching for somebody who could possibly understand this, at times confusing age for inner experience.

With her poised and intriguing interactive style, she is often readily complimented and admired by friends, colleagues, superiors, and strangers alike. And while she hears the sentiments quite clearly, she barely absorbs a word. She appreciates the genuineness, but she cannot feel a thing, and she won’t until that girl is back in the arms of the Enchanted Elder inside. Breaking their spell of separation repairs her broken heart. She slowly embraces her femininity, and a pageant of Feminine Priestesses embrace her back, and once she starts seeing and styling herself in this way - the real show of Who She is really begins. This is also often when the first chapters of life’s true love story only just begin. A growing comfort and confidence, a silver Saturn glow that may have seen its shadows, yet there blooms a Venus rose that is everlasting and can never die without sunlight.

Cherry

#venus-saturn #venus conjunct saturn #venus opposite saturn #venus square saturn #venus trine saturn #venus aspects #saturn aspects

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audreyscribes · 11 months ago

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Ω PJO DEMIGOD HEADCANONS:

💀 HADES: God of the Dead and Riches 💎

author's note: I had a sudden idea about writing some headcanons Camp Halfblood demigods being claimed and what it's like for each respective god and cabin, followed by a small blurb afterwards. Thank you for reading and please like and reblog! The order is not in order of the cabin numbers. [PJO DEMIGOD HEADCANONS MASTERLIST]

You’re not claimed in a way like the others. Instead you come across a pale faced boy with black hair, dark bags under his eyes, and a leather jacket. The ensemble he wore screamed something to you and he introduced himself to you as Nico, child of Hades. And you’re one of his half-siblings.

Whether you’re like him, a child of Hades displaced out of time before the Oath was made after WW2, or a child born after the oath was rescinded, Nico has been finding any Hades’ demigods he could find. If you didn’t know better, you would think it was his life mission.

When you arrive at Camp, whether Camp Half Blood or Camp Jupiter, people already know who your godly parent or blood is when Nico is with you, but the claim over your head is just icing on the cake. It is the sign of the cusp of fall and winter together, the silence that presides over it.

People give you a wide berth of respect, awe and fear. Not surprising given how powerful Hades is.

Regardless, Nico sticks by your side and helps guide you. He teaches you how to handle the dead and the more peskier ghosts, but ultimately, he doesn’t let you feel alone. You tell your story to him and he tells his.

You’re also introduced to Hazel who seems the complete opposite of Nico but you realise that while children of Hades both stick together but are very independent. Solitary but not isolated.

While it may be bothersome and sometimes unsettling seeing ghosts and spirits, there are perks; you can reanimate and see dead and loved animals. You always tell the doggos they are good boys. That or the hellhounds.

“Hello Darkness, my old friend”- ‘The Sound of Silence’ by Simon and Gafunkel.

Regardless if you’re Greek or Roman, when people diss and don’t believe that the planetary Pluto is not a planet, you will get bad and they will know to never diss Pluto.

Dried flowers, fungi, antiques, faded memories, abandoned buildings. Once filled with life and encompassed with what could be death. Many do not appreciate them but they open themselves to you, and you and your siblings remember them. You carry old, past clothes on your backs, you gently touch the dried petals of flowers with their faint smell still cling to you. You see the hands that touched the antiques, touches of human life. You see the abandoned buildings and know that they were built and housed life in them with their shelter.

While you may be part of Death’s domain, you greatly cherish life; the people in your life and that help shape you. When you love someone, you love them to a beyond that transcends death.

You know about shadow traveling as Nico helped you go through it. At the minimum, you can fold yourself into the shadows and be unseen like Hades, but at the most, you can travel to any place where shadows preside over. You find its easier to travel to places wherever Hades’ domain presides over; you can travel more easily to places of death (i.e. cemetery, battlezones, altars) and riches (i.e. mines, the world trade centre, places of great bounty, banks). A rare power of a child of Hades may call things forth from the shadows, whether its things you place into the shadows or using the shadows to your will. You can grab an objects’ shadow to your advantage or use your hands to create shadow shapes to ‘life’. It is rumoured that once, a child of Hades that possessed that skill was able to freeze a person with their shadow pinned by them, and was able to kill them by simply cutting off a person’s shadow.

Like Hades, you may seem aloof and stern in matters, but on the other hand, this can be seen as fair and honourable.

When the children of Hades gather in one place, you all give off an Addams' family vibe. The aesthetics, the attitude toward things. Hades is Gomez and Persephone is Morticia, you can guess where it goes from there.

You looked at Nico, who introduced himself as your half-brother. You tried to find the similarities you two shared and while it isn’t entirely physical, there is an air around him that draws you in. A solace if you will. It’s been more than 70 years since your original time and now here you are, in the 21st century. You thought you had died and now you were here, breathing. You could feel the anticipation turning into dread when you would eventually realize the math of your birth era and now.

It was a stark change from your time, yet in some sort of attempt to grasp your sanity, you started to find similarities, things that seemed to be the same from your time and this time. It calmed you down but also at the same time, you were a bit overwhelmed where your half brother had taken you.

McDonalds, he said. You looked at the meal he had bought and inspected it. It was different yet strangely good? The soda-pop however, was entirely bizarre but still delicious (sickeningly sweet you thought).

You both ate your meal as Nico gave you a rundown of the situation. The existential weight of being children of Hades and Pluto was, especially after the creation of the Big Three Oath after the world war, and how it was absolved not too long ago in this time by a son of Poseidon. Then came the eventual appearances of deceased children of Hades and Pluto, which you found out were either killed in the wars, or were deliberately hunted down by Zeus and Poseidon; much like Nico and his sister Bianca.

Nico tried to give you a rundown of what times are like now and their delicate situation, but even then, Nico wasn’t too knowledgeable given everything.

Silence fell between the two of you, as you tried to process literally everything. You tried to speak but the knot in your stomach and the weight in your throat was getting heavier. It was becoming awkward and you looked at Nico, realising he too was out of his depth. You found some amusement that he really must be your brother if the two of you were both socially inept.

You saw Nico open the two red box with the golden arches, before he took out the two toys. You looked at them, wondering really how the meals costed. Toys weren’t very cheap back in the day, and while you had a feeling manufacturing must’ve improved, to have a toy come with a meal must be costly…but you were sure of how much Nico paid as you watched him to get a handle on today’s currency.

“So uh….which of the kids meals toys do you want?” he stammered.

You stared at him with wider eyes as you saw him slowly shift in his seat in awkwardness. Everything came to a head as the hilarity of the situation dawned upon you. You started laughing as Nico looked at you like you had grown a second head.

“I’ll take this one” you chuckled, taking the toy before wiping away the tears, “Thank you Nico.”

“I mean…I eat here pretty frequently-”

“I mean finding us” you said, as Nico blinked at you owlishly. You placed a hand on top of his in a reassuring gesture. “You went through a lot and you’re just as young as us, yet here you are, finding the rest of us who may be wandering limbo and offering us toys.”

“Well…it’s not fair” he tried to play off.

“None of it is fair,” you noted, “But this is.”

Nico stared at you before nodding. “We have to go to Camp to get you settled in,” he started.

You hummed as you helped clean up, “Perhaps yeah…then where next?”

“What?”

You smirked at Nico, “If you want to go alone, you can but if you’re going to find the rest of us, count me in.”

“Are you sure? There’s a lot to digest.”

“Probably, but we’re demigods, I doubt things are going to be normal for a long time.”

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hoonieyun · 7 days ago

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letter from: jaeyun ⋆｡˚❆˚ ｡⋆

i've been down this road before. fell in love on christmas night but on new years day i woke up and he wasn't by my side... -ariana grande "santa tell me"

pairing: sim jaeyun x reader

genre: romance - the smallest amount of angst - fluff - suggestive - strangers to lovers - both down bad for each other

warnings: suggestive, kissing, profanity, and overall 18+

summary: jaeyun runs into the girl from a one night stand

christmas herald masterlist ⋆｡˚❆˚ ｡⋆

word count: 2706

College parties were not your thing.

Sitting at a park? Your thing.

Watching YouTube essays on conspiracy theories? Your thing.

Collecting antique vases and flowerpots? Your thing.

College parties? NOT your thing.

But here you are, in your best friend’s car trying to convince her to drive back to your shared apartment even though the two of you were parked down the street from the frat house. This specific college party was at the same frat house where you met a sweet & cute boy who you ended up having a one night stand with & who happened to ghost you after

Sure, you weren’t expecting for it to go anywhere since it was just a one night stand, but you didn’t expect for him to just outright ghost you. Nothing that morning after and still nothing 5 months after.

It was a bit snowy as it was just a week before winter break and although you definitely would prefer to be studying for your finals, you knew your best friend would not leave you alone about the party so you just agreed to go. Regretfully, so.

The two of you enter the house, smiles and greetings from the people you knew. You saw Sunghoon with some girl you didn’t recognize, you could’ve sworn he had a girlfriend that lived somewhere else, but you weren’t completely sure. You and your best friend find your way to the kitchen to grab some drinks and because you knew your friend would be getting quite wasted, you decided to be the designated driver for the night. Especially since you knew she wanted to be here more than you, not drinking that night wasn’t a problem for you.

⋆｡˚❆˚ ｡⋆

It’s about an hour into the party when you look up from your phone that you’ve been glued to when you realize your friend was nowhere to be seen. You sigh and haul yourself up from the couch, the two pairs of couples making out next to you falling into the empty space where you were previously sitting. Honestly, you were glad you had an excuse to get up because you couldn’t bear to be sitting next to them any longer.

As you’re navigating around the frat house to find your friend, you walk up the stairs only to run into a familiar face, Jake. He was rushing out of a room that was just at the top of the stairs and you collide with his chest as he exits the room, neither of you seeing the other until your bodies came in contact.

“Shit!” you gasp as you look up at him.

“It’s you…” Jake asks, clearly remembering you from your night together.

“Me? Do I know you?” you respond, choosing to act like you didn’t remember him because you were still slightly hurt he ghosted you. Well, maybe more than slightly.

Jake slightly gasps, his plump lips parting at your confession. He couldn’t believe you didn’t remember him. The night you two shared was great, he’s thought about it since and when he ran into you just know he felt butterflies in his stomach just like the first night the two of you met. You try to walk away but Jake grabs your hand, pulling you towards an empty room in the frat house that you’re assuming is his room.

You weren’t sure why you didn’t fight off Jake pulling you to be alone but a part of you kind of liked it.

As you enter his room, you take in the details. Several hoodies were thrown around the room, LED lights outlining the ceiling, and a soccer ball sat in the corner with a pair of cleats. “You really don’t remember me?” Jake asks and you’re unsure if you want to keep up the act but ultimately decide to keep acting anyways.

“Not sure… Are you my TA for physics?” you ask and he teasingly rolls his eyes, starting to think he was catching on. Jake slowly saunters closer to you and when you notice that he’s closing the gap between the two of you, you decide to turn around and face his window. Choosing to stare out the window and watch as snow has begun to slowly fall from the sky, creating a thin layer of ice on the grass outside.

You could feel Jake getting closer behind you and although it was making your stomach do somersaults, you couldn’t bring yourself to turn around and look at him. The last time you were looking into his eyes the two of you were in a compromising position and wrapped in a blanket on your bed. Jake’s breath sent a shiver down your spine as you felt it on the back of your neck. His hand finds it’s way around your waist and suddenly you’re being twirled around to face him, a small yelp leaves your lips and your hands land on Jake’s chest to stop yourself from fully colliding into him like you did just a few minutes ago.

Your faces are awfully close to each other and your breathing is matched up with his. He’s staring at your lips and you couldn’t help but do the same. You recalled how soft and pillowly they were and you were simply trying your best not to kiss him right then and there. Jake was beginning to close the small gap between the two of your lips but suddenly your phone rings, a small text tone echoing in his room; breaking the silence that surrounded the two of you.

Pulling yourself out of Jake’s grasp, you pull your phone out of your pocket to see who it was and it reveals a text from your friend. She was texting you to say that she’d be going home to her ex that she ran into and although you were going to protest, she had already sent several texts after saying that you couldn’t say anything to change her mind. I guess you were in no place to protest since you were in somewhat a similar situation. Being reunited with someone you were intimate with in the past.

Jake suddenly grabs your phone and tosses it onto the bean bag chair sitting behind you. “Hey!” you exclaim, shocked at his actions but Jake just chuckles at your response. He found you so cute and you didn’t even realize it.

“That was mean! Why do you always do that?” you say, turning around to bend over and grab your phone and Jake tries his best to stop himself from checking you out but ultimately fails. “What did you say?” Jake questions as you turn back around to face him.

“Hmm?” you ask, unsure of what he was asking.

“You said and I quote, “Why do you always do that?” End quote.” Jake says and you realize you’ve been caught as you referenced the time he grabbed your phone and threw it on your couch during your one night stand. He could tell on your face that you were aware that you slipped up and that you did remember him. “Shit.” you muttered to yourself.

“You do remember me!” Jake asks, coming closer and wrapping his arm around your waist once again, this time you’ve put your hands in between the two of you to create some space but it wasn’t successful as his strength brings the two of you closer anyways. Once again, you’re both staring at one another and pondering about the night you two shared.

“Why’d you act like you don’t remember me?” he asks and you’re slightly unsure if you should tell him or not because you didn’t want to come off as clingy. You pull yourself off of him and take a seat on the bean bag chair, plopping down and making a small thud sound as your bottom makes contact with the chair. You cross your arms and pout at him, looking away to avoid the conversation like you were a child who had just gotten caught doing something you shouldn’t have.

“So?” he asks and you weren’t sure why but you found yourself responding to him. Like you were compelled to do so and not because he was smiling at you with that stupid smile that caused butterflies– no, caused a whole zoo to dance in your stomach. That smile that you had been thinking about for the last few months and even had dreamt about.

God, how did this guy have so much power over you for someone you’ve only now just had two interactions with. Unbeknownst to you however, you had the same power over him. You couldn’t help but comply and just tell him the truth. “Well if you hadn’t ghosted me after that night you would’ve been more memorable.” you say with a shrug and pout, wanting to tease him a bit because you knew that you could get a reaction out of him; and you were right. Jake pretends to be hurt by clutching his chest and flinching, like you had just stabbed him in the heart.

“I’m not memorable enough for you, baby? You sure did seem like you were having the time of your life, I know I did…” Jake says in response, jutting out his bottom lip and before you knew it you were melting into his touch. Like he just knew all the right ways to be able to make you swoon and cause your heart to swell with awe.

“Why’d you ghost me?” you ask and you could tell he’s shocked. Jake explains that he did text you, as a matter of fact, he texted you several times later that day when he didn’t hear back. He even went as far as calling you but he heard nothing back so he thought you were the one that ghosted him. You weren’t sure why none of his texts or calls went through and by your expression, Jake knew you were being genuine and so was he.

Jake pulls out his phone to show you the texts and calls and that’s when you notice it. He had input the middle three numbers out of order, you assumed because he was hungover and could barely think straight. Your number was meant to be “388” but Jake had input into his phone “338”. The two of you laugh off the situation and how the two of you were very clearly into each other and wanted for it to go further but Jake’s hungover state had sabotaged the two of you.

“So does this mean you like me?” Jake asks and you pretend to think about your answer even though you knew the answer was yes. “I don’t know but I think you might like me more since you… texted me 8 times in 1 hour.” you respond, looking at his phone halfway through your sentence to check his texts to the number that definitely wasn’t yours. You didn’t know why but teasing Jake lovingly came so easy to you and for Jake being weak to your advances came naturally. “Alright, alright.” Jake says, throwing his arms up in the air in a surrender and for a second you miss the presence he had around your waist.

“You caught me, I like you, don’t arrest me!” he says and you can’t help but laugh at him. The two of you share a laugh and for the rest of the party, the two of you spend the night in Jake’s room getting to know one another.

You learned that Jake played football (not the American kind), he had a cute dog named Layla, he was born in Australia hence his accent, he’s a physics major, and that he really likes fishing. You also learned that Jake was a natural yapper and you loved that about him because you could listen to him talk with his accent for hours, like it was a lullaby that could lull you to sleep. Jake enjoyed yapping to you because you were genuinely interested in what he had to say, something he wasn’t used to with his ex-girlfriends who often do not actually pay attention to him and just brush off whatever he’d say.

You weren’t always a yapper, only to special people you were comfortable around and you soon learned that Jake would be added to that list. He was such an active listener you felt like you were talking to one of your girls when talking to him, his reactions were the same and he’d agree with whatever you’d say, even adding comments that some of your best friends have said before.

The rest of the night was filled with laughter as you two continued to get to know each other, not even noticing that the party downstairs had died down until Jake got a text from one of his frat bros that he and “his girl” were being too loud. Although you weren’t Jake’s girl, you liked the sound of that.

“Sorry, he thinks we’re dating because I haven’t been able to stop talking about you since we first met.” Jake confesses and it makes you even more happy to know that you were on his mind as much as he was on yours. “I don’t know… I don’t mind.” you respond and Jake looks at you, tilting his head like he was unsure.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“I like the sound of being called your girl.” and a smile spreads onto Jake’s lips like he had been waiting for you to say that. He sits up from his current position, laid across his bed with you laying on his chest; you sit up with him.

“Yeah? Does that mean you’d let me take you out on our first date?” he asks and you tell him that you think this moment right now could be considered your face date but he disagrees. Although he’s enjoying this moment of you being in his arms, he wants to take you out on a real date where he plans everything and all you have to do is look pretty and show up, knowing that you’ve already had the first part down.

“Okay, fine. So ask me…” you say, straightening yourself out and pulling his blanket off of you. Jake does the same except instead of staying on his bed, he kneels in front of you beside the bed and you watch him with a smile.

“YN, my beautiful queen who was almost the one that got away; will you do me the honor of going on a date with me?” Jake asks and at first you were going to tease him by saying no, jokingly, his gesture and eagerness was just so cute you couldn’t help but accept right away. When Jake hears the word “yes” leave your lips, he jumps back onto his bed and wraps his arms around you in a hug; peppering kisses onto your face.

“I promise, this is going to be the best date of your life.” he says in between kisses.

“And I promise, that I won’t be the one that got away.” you respond, finally connecting your lips together for a tender and passionate kiss.

“Also… you should probably update my number on your phone.” you advice and he does it immediately, almost dropping his phone in the process. He quickly asks you to pose for the camera to take a contact picture and you ask him the same.

“What did you put my name as?” you ask and he shows it to you, the contact reading as “YN My Pretty Girl” with a red heart. “What about me?” Jake asks and you show him in return, “Boyfriend: Maybe?” he reads out loud, once again pouting at you and you once again, laugh at his cuteness.

“Hey! It only means that you’re halfway to being my boyfriend!” and like clockwork, Jake is flashing his pretty smile once again and hugging you. “I’m never letting you go.” he says pulls you down into a laid out position much like how you were previously. “and I’d stay in your arms forever.” you mutter and Jake smiles, pressing a kiss onto your temple as the warmth of your bodies and the sounds of your heart beating so closely together lull you both to sleep.

all writing here is fiction & not in any association with characters mentioned.

if you enjoyed reading this please consider reblogging and following <3

#kiki diaries #enhypen #christmas herald #en-diaries #kpop #kpop au #kpop fic #kpop fanfic #kpop fanfiction #enha #fanfiction #enhypen au #enhypen x reader #enha x reader #enhypen jake #sim jaeyun #jake x reader

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kururreal · 3 months ago

Text

“have i not loved you enough, my sweet﹖”

𖢷 ۪ ࣪ ﹙☆﹚ ࣪ ִ HEADCANONS ‹3

culture courting! ooc. don’t kill me pls.

❪ ENMA YUUKEN .ᐟ ❫ 𓍢ִ໋🤍

I. The word "shy" is often used to describe Japanese individuals, and this perception may stem from their traditional cultural practices. Those unfamiliar with Japanese customs might find the Japanese way of life to be rather restrained and conservative, with a strict moral code that could be seen as somewhat antiquated to outsiders. This cultural backdrop contributes to the characterization of Japanese people as being shy and reserved.

II. Yuuken is not dissimilar from others in his nervousness when it comes to courting you. He hesitates to make any significant moves, fearing to cause you discomfort, as he finds the prospect unbearable. Doing so would make him a disappointment to his ancestors, a situation he strives to avoid at all costs. Yuuken's nervous demeanor can be seen as a result of his concern for your comfort and the fear of causing any distress or unease. His wariness is motivated by a deep sense of responsibility to uphold his family's honor and avoid bringing shame upon his ancestors. This trepidation is a testament to his respect for cultural norms and his desire to approach the relationship with sensitivity and consideration.

III. Yuuken adheres to the cultural teachings that discourage excessive public displays of intimacy, as this behavior is deemed improper within Japanese society. Although it is generally frowned upon, those who witness such acts tend to remain polite and look away, attributing the lack of proper understanding to the situation. Despite this, Yuuken is influenced by his upbringing and mentality as a Japanese guy, and continues to follow the traditional standards of courtship while navigating the boundaries of public display of affection.

IV. Yuuken strongly believes that demonstrating genuine care and love to someone special involves expressing it through tangible actions and deeds. Spending quality time together, displaying unwavering support for one another's aspirations, and being unafraid to voice heartfelt sentiments and display affection are all crucial components of his approach to cultivating a meaningful connection. Furthermore, he acknowledges that being open-minded, adaptable, and flexible is essential since every individual is unique and has distinct needs, preferences, and expectations. Ultimately, Yuuken's strategy to court someone revolves around authentically conveying affection through his words, body language, and actions.

V. Japanese youth are raised with the principle of respecting their elders, which can contribute to their shyness and difficulty in expressing their feelings, particularly when it comes to matters of love. The strong emphasis on collectivism and group dynamics further reinforces this behavior, as younger individuals may find comfort in acting as part of a group rather than expressing their emotions individually. Consequently, Yuuken may require some external encouragement, such as moral support or a nudge to bolster his confidence, in order to openly declare his love for someone.

VI. Younger individuals in Japan, who are too shy to initiate a date with someone they like, often turn to a popular dating strategy known as "gokon" (合コン) or "group date." In this setup, the male typically invites his male friends, such as Ace and Deuce, and you invites your own companions. Ideally, there is an equal number of his friends and your friends participants, fostering a more relaxed and inclusive atmosphere, thereby minimizing any potential awkwardness or feelings of being left out.

VII. It is highly probable that Ace and Deuce will tease Yuuken, adding a touch of jest to the situation. Furthermore, there is the possibility that you may lack companions to enlist for their involvement in the group date. In light of these circumstances, Yuuken is likely to instead choose to express his love through actions. In Japanese culture, words of endearment hold little value without corresponding behaviors that genuinely reflect those sentiments. Therefore, he may demonstrate his affection by praising your qualities, sending heartfelt messages, or offering thoughtful gifts.

VIII. Despite the differences in expressing love between Japanese culture and the Western world, the underlying foundations share a common understanding. Both cultures recognize that love is nurtured and reinforced through consistent everyday actions over time. The sentiments themselves are universal, but the Japanese perspective emphasizes the power of actions over words in demonstrating affection. This nuanced difference in expression highlights the significance of tangible actions in strengthening and nourishing the bond of love in Japanese culture.

The courtship rituals in the Queendom of Roses would undoubtedly be distinctive, imaginative, and unconventional. The whimsical and imaginative atmosphere of this realm would lend itself to creative expressions of affection. As a result, each courtship encounter would be like a surprise, adding an element of spontenuity and uniqueness to the experience!

Courtship rituals can differ drastically between the various kingdoms within Wonderland, and the key to successfully courting a partner in this realm is to display confidence, imagination, and a touch of eccentricity. In the Queendom of Roses, unusual gestures and unconventional approaches are highly valued, so don’t be afraid to embrace your uniqueness. When searching for a suitor, seek someone who can handle your fiery demeanor and provide some intellectual stimulation as well. In the Queendom of Roses, partnerships are viewed as a delicate balance between power and wit. Once you find your ideal match, do not be hesitant to pursue them boldly.

The second step in the courtship process in the Queendom of Roses is crucial - the proposal! In this whimsical realm, a well-thought-out proposal typically goes beyond a simple "Will you marry me?" and is instead seen as an opportunity to showcase one's devotion, creativity, and unyielding loyalty. A truly successful proposal in the Queendom of Roses should demonstrate your ability to think outside the box, surprising and delighting your partner with a unique and memorable proposal!

The proposal, in the Queendom of Roses, is an unparalleled affair. Rather than a traditional approach on one knee, the suitor is more likely to orchestrate an extravagant and theatrical spectacle, featuring hidden riddles, intricate scavenger hunts, or even a thrilling escape from the Queen’s guards. It’s not merely about asking for their hand in marriage; it’s about demonstrating one’s willingness to go to any length and handle a dash of the Queendom of Roses brand of madness.

“what about dating?” Oh dear, you are quite impatient aren't you? Dating is the third step, dear. In the Queendom of Roses, dating isn't like those traditional candlelit dinners and hand-holding. No, dear, it's an intricate dance of wit, riddles, and games. Here, they believe the courtship period should be a time to test one's mental acuity, cunning, and ability to keep up with their maddening pace. So, when you begin to date in the Queendom of Roses, keep things lively. Forget about those romantic dinners and movies. How about a thrilling scavenger hunt across the kingdom instead? And instead of a romantic picnic, imagine a tea party with pastries that may or may not be laced with poisonous surprises. Remember, the key to a successful Queendom of Roses relationship is to never, ever get monotonous or dull.

In the realm of Queendom of Roses, the art of courting consists of a precarious equilibrium of allure and insanity. It would likely start with Yuuken sending enigmatic riddles and challenges to assess your shrewdness and ability to keep up with his erratic actions. Once he found a suitor he deemed worthy, he would plan a splendid exhibition of his affections. Perhaps a sumptuous feast where he would make a toast to your impending union, or a soiree filled with games meticulously designed to unveil the compatibility between you and him.

But beyond all that, he'd let his madness guide him. After all, what's courting without a bit of insanity?

❪ RIDDLE ROSEHEARTS .ᐟ ❫ 𓍢ִ໋❤️

I. Riddle would meticulously adhere to the courtship practices of the Queendom of Roses. He would generously bestow gifts and symbols of his affection upon his suitor, each more peculiar and unexpected than the previous. He would organize opulent festivities in their honor, complete with a plethora of whimsical and unforeseeable entertainment. Every moment spent together would become an exercise in preserving his reputation for being "mad" while simultaneously showing his loyalty. And as his suitor responds in kind, they would be accepting the challenge to match his madness, thereby proving themselves worthy of becoming his companion in love and insanity.

II. In this step, Riddle would keenly observe you, diligently studying your personality to ensure that it somewhat resonates with his. Bear in mind that the first step is to select someone who can endure your spirited nature and offer a healthy challenge in return. The Queendom of Roses firmly believes that a partnership should be a delicate balance of power and intellect. You might notice Riddle's gaze lingering on you for longer than others, causing you to wonder if you have accidentally broken a rule. However, fear not, for it's merely riddle meticulously searching for a flawless suitor, and he suspects that you may fit the bill!

III. The next stage, as viewed through Riddle's lens, holds great excitement. There is an opportunity to test your devotion and resilience in the face of his challenges. However, from your point of view, it may seem like he despises you! He propels you towards outlandish scenarios beyond your wildest dreams. He assigns you tasks with objectives that seem inexplicable or impossible to achieve. In addition, he exhibits increased harshness, even meting out punishments for minor transgressions. Confronting a shapeshifter is merely one of the many trials he presents. Every predicament is meticulously orchestrated to unveil your depth of dedication, loyalty, and ability to withstand. He Clearly, he doesn't want a submissive partner, but rather someone who can stand their ground and meet his challenges head-on. These tests are not just his way of having fun, but also an essential part of his evaluation process.

IV. After a week filled with various events and dramatic episodes, Riddle would finally assess that you possess the qualities he seeks in a suitor. He would then regard you with a look of satisfaction, and begin to become increasingly intimate with you. This housewarden can be quite perplexing, isn't he? The third step, dating, unfolds with him inviting you to extravagant parties and tea parties. These occasions are usually teeming with excessive activities and chaos. Riddle thrives in this constant whirlwind of nonsense, and follows rule three to the letter: never be bored. How does he manage to maintain this perpetually tumultuous lifestyle?

V. To sum it up, being courted by Riddle is an absolute whirlwind. It requires a healthy dose of creativity, innovative thinking, and a willingness to embrace the realm of pure insanity that defines the Queendom of Roses. Get ready for a relationship unlike any other!

❪ ACE TRAPPOLA .ᐟ ❫ 𓍢ִ໋❤️

I. RIDICULOUS I HATE HIM I I HOPE HE DIES

II. Don't worry about that. Based on his personality, there is a 50% probability that Ace would follow a more conventional approach in courting. However, due to his unique nature and desire to stand out, it's likely that he would incorporate his own creative flair into the courtship process, aiming to make the experience truly special and memorable for his chosen suitor.

III. The first step in Ace's plan to win your heart is to grab your attention. He might begin by presenting you with a small, eye-catching gift. Then, he'd gradually start to get closer to you, learning more about your interests and desires. He'd actively seek opportunities to spend time with you, whether in a group setting or one-on-1 scenarios. The amount of time spent together largely hinges on your level of interest in him. Ace would also become increasingly physical, if you're open to it, offering hugs and light teases as a way to express his feelings and possibly provoke a reaction from you.

IV. Once Ace has gotten to know you better, he'll take the initiative and make the first move. He understands that it's crucial for him to display his genuine interest as well; it can't always be a one-sided affair. With a clear understanding of you, he'll start flirting with you, but he won't be shy about it. He'll be upfront and bolder in his approach, wanting you to know exactly how he feels and hoping to ignite a reciprocal interest within you. He’d start by making subtle advancements, like touching your arm while talking or sitting next to you closer than usual. If you’re responsive, he may attempt to make more significant moves, like trying to hold your hand or find excuses to get into physical contact with you. Depending on your reaction, he might even lean closer to whisper flirtingly into your ear or surprise you by wrapping an arm around your waist.

VI. After the initial flirtation, Ace would transition to Step 2: making sure you understand your importance to him. He would demonstrate his care through small gestures such as checking in on you when you're feeling upset, offering comfort and reassurance. He would want to make sure you feel safe and confident in knowing that you could always count on him. In addition, he would shower you with a memorable time, taking you out for a wonderful date and treating you like royalty. During this time, he would also subtly highlight his strength and reliability, strengthening your connection. Once he feels comfortable enough with you, he’d start expressing his feelings more openly. He would become increasingly more touchy and flirtatious, he might even start calling you with endearling nicknames. He's not shy, so he’d probably just end up wrapping an arm around your waist without even realising it

V. Lastly, Ace would employ his favorite tactic: good-natured teasing. As a typical teenage boy, his pride is too great for straightforward confessions. He would tease you here and there, leaving you in a state of curiosity and wonder. And why does he do this? Simply because it's amusing to him. He knows that you never know what someone is going to say or reveal about themselves when they're in a more relaxed and playful mood, and teasing is the perfect tool. Have you ever heard of the phrase "pulling pigtails"? Ace's tactic isn't just a form of playful banter or a way to rile you up—it's a way for him to learn more about you. He's interested in seeing how you react to his teases and what kind of person you are. Teasing, in his mind, is a quick and easy way to get a glimpse into your true nature. It's a game he enjoys playing, and he hopes you'll play along. But be warned, his teasing can be quite relentless!

In the vast expanse of the Shaftlands, the courtship customs are influenced by the myriad cultures and climates found within its borders. Nevertheless, a common thread runs through all of them: a deep rooted appreciation for chivalry. Traditional values such as a gentlemanly demeanor and romantic gestures typically feature prominently in courtship rituals, with men expected to take the lead. As a first step, small tokens or gifts are often presented as symbols of affection or interest. These gifts can range from small trinkets or flowers to more meaningful tokens that reflect a deeper thought or understanding of the recipient's interests or personality. Such gestures serve as a way to express interest and begin the initial stages of courtship, with men often looking to impress and capture the attention of those they are courting.

Respect for the partner's parents or family, especially the elders, often plays a significant role in the Shaftlands courtship rituals. While the culture encourages independence and self-sufficiency from a young age, families hold great importance in the lives of Shaftland individuals. Once you're in a serious relationship with a Shaftlands partner, expect to spend a considerable amount of time with their parents, also known as the Schwiegereltern

The final step to a courtship in the Shaftlands is often spending quality time together through shared activities and conversations. However, it is worth noting that the Shaftlands are a vast country with diverse climates and many regions with distinct cultures. As a result, the specifics of the courtship process can vary greatly depending on the locale and cultural traditions. Some regions may place more emphasis on courtship rituals and symbols, while others may prioritize getting to know each other through shared experiences.

In Vil's country, courtship is approached gradually and thoughtfully. The good news is that there are no strict dating rules in the Shaftlands, making it a rather flexible environment for pursuing romantic connections. However, bear in mind a few key points when navigating the world of love in Shaftlands. Unlike the passionate and fervent dating culture in the Queendom of Roses and Sunset Savanna, Shaftlands individuals favor a more measured and rational approach to dating. Rather than fiery and intense encounters, initial dates and even a handful of subsequent dates are likely to be kept casual and focused on building a strong foundation of understanding between partners. Don’t expect the first date—or even the first several dates—to have a strong romantic flair. Instead, the goal is to engage in relaxed, unpressured activities that allow you and your partner to grow closer on an emotional and intellectual level. This approach ensures that when and if the relationship moves towards a deeper commitment or the introduction of intimate elements, it will be based on a strong foundation of mutual respect and comprehension.

While casual dating may be the standard in the Shaftlands, it is generally assumed that both parties will not be seeing multiple individuals simultaneously. Engaging in such behavior is viewed as offensive and disrespectful unless both parties have explicitly agreed upon it from the onset. Monogamous relationships are the preferred and expected norm, and any deviation from this practice without clear agreement can lead to hurt feelings or broken trust.

The process of transitioning from casual dating to a serious relationship in the Shaftlands can be a gradual one, as rushing into committed partnerships is not a priority. Relationships here often progress at a more measured pace, developing slowly and naturally over time. Consequently, patience is key, and the dating period should be viewed as an opportunity to thoroughly get to know your partner and assess the compatibility of your connection. By taking the time to truly understand one another, you can ensure that when the decision to enter a committed relationship is made, it is done with confidence and clarity.

this is getting too long (°▽°)

❪ VIL SCHOENHEIT .ᐟ ❫ 𓍢ִ໋💜

I. If Vil were to court someone who holds a special fondness for nature, she might plan an outing to a lovely garden where they can bask in the beauty of the natural world together. On the other hand, if her suitor is artistic and values refined aesthetics, she might arrange a visit to an art gallery, where they can spend the day admiring the skill and beauty of the creative expression. In essence, Vil would tailor the first date to cater to her suitor's unique interests, creating a memorable experience that reflects their individual tastes and passions. In summary, Vil would take the time to understand her suitor's preferences and interests, and plan the first date accordingly. This could mean going on a nature walk in a beautiful garden for someone who appreciates the beauty of the outdoors, or exploring an art gallery and admiring the creative expressions for an artistic individual. By catering to her suitor's unique preferences, Vil would aim to create a memorable and enjoyable experience that sets the foundation for a meaningful connection.

II. Vil, being a busy individual, would approach the dating process with a deliberate and measured pace. She would carefully arrange dates during her free time, taking care to be on her best behavior and ensure that she presents herself in the best possible light. In the event that the initial date went well, as she is confident it would, she would plan additional dates but still maintain a slower pace. Vil has the habit of making her partners wait to assess their patience and level of effort. If she believes they are worthy, she will gradually open her heart more and more, eventually granting them the privilege of being considered hers. In essence, Vil is a person who holds high standards and values individuals who can demonstrate patience and dedication. She is not one to rush into relationships, but rather takes her time to evaluate her partners and their commitment. Only if someone can prove their worth and devotion would Vil consider letting them into her heart.

III. When it comes to your date with Vil, it is crucial to arrive on time. She values punctuality and expects her date to respect her time. However, in the event that an unexpected situation arises and you find yourself unable to make it at the agreed upon time, be sure to notify her promptly. Otherwise, she might perceive it as a lack of consideration for her schedule and effort. Showing up late without a valid reason can make you appear unreliable and disrespectful of Vil's time, so it's essential to be mindful of the agreed-upon time and plan your arrival accordingly. If an unforeseen circumstance arises, promptly communicate this to Vil and provide an explanation to ensure a smooth and respectful start to your date.

IV. Following a successful first date, Vil would move on to a second date and continue spending time with her suitor. However, it is important to note that she sets the pace and does not easily give herself to her partner. She wants them to prove their worth and seriousness by meeting her particular standards. During dates, Vil maintains her usual strict and composed demeanor, avoiding any signs of clinginess. She expects her suitor to respect her and show that they are not taking her for granted or assuming victory just because they have gone on a few dates. In order to win her heart completely, they still need to continue courting her. In short, despite going on multiple dates with her suitor, Vil will not immediately become overly affectionate or dependent on them. Instead, she expects them to continue courting and demonstrating their commitment and respect for her values and standards. She will not be easily won over and will remain discerning in her assessments of her partner’s intentions and dedication.

VI. Upon reaching the third step, if her suitor continues to impress her and does not let her down, Vil would start to open up and show vulnerability more. She would share her dreams and secrets with them and gauge their reaction. If they do not use this information against her, she would become more affectionate and offer a kiss on the cheek as a token of her growing feelings. However, she would not completely give herself away just yet, as she still expects her suitor to work for her affection and earn her trust completely. Despite her initial cold exterior, Vil is discerning and demands genuine, lasting efforts.

V. In the fourth step, Vil would begin to invite her suitor to events and parties, but still as a friend. She would continue to observe their behaviour and manner in public settings, keeping them on probation even then. However, if she is satisfied with their conduct thus far, her treatment towards them will become more special and affectionate, with hints dropped to indicate that they are making progress in winning her over. Despite these signs of softening, however, her suitor must still maintain their patience and keep up their efforts, as this is not the time to become complacent. If they have managed to stay in her good graces up to this point Vil would further demonstrate their growing closeness in public, such as holding their hand while walking or allowing them to enter her personal space. It’s possible that she might even allow them to address her by her first name at this stage. However, all of these actions are dependent on the suitor’s behaviour and continuing efforts to make her feel secure and valued in their relationship.

In the scorching lands of The Scalding Sands, "dating" typically takes a different form. The primary intent is to get acquainted with someone, with the ultimate goal of marriage in mind. Public displays of affection are not common, and it is uncommon for couples to meet alone. This is because of the cultural norms and societal restrictions that govern relationships in the region. Couples often meet under the supervision of a family member or chaperone, and the process of courtship involves more formalities and traditions compared to other regions.

While arranged marriages are still common in The Scalding Sands, a newer trend is emerging, particularly in urban areas. Young people are now more likely to express interest in a potential partner to their parents, who will then facilitate the marriage. This process allows for young individuals to explore less serious relationships, enabling them to gain a clearer understanding of what they seek in a life partner. Once they feel ready to settle down, they can communicate this information to their parents, who will then embark on finding a compatible match.

Some couples in The Scalding Sands may have already been secretly dating before revealing to their parents that they would like to marry. The approach to the marriage process can vary depending on the region and the familial perspectives. This secrecy could be due to the traditional norms around the topic of dating, where families may not approve of couples seeing each other before an official agreement has been arranged.

In The Scalding Sands, the concept of 'dating' is culturally taboo and often met with disapproval. If a couple is caught in a private setting, it is considered a sin or crime known as 'khulwa'. The consequences of engaging in khulwa can be severe, including punishments such as flogging and imprisonment. If sexual relations are involved, the penalties can be even more severe, potentially leading to death through execution. This strict cultural stance reflects the region's conservative values and deeply ingrained beliefs about premarital relationships.

In The Scalding Sands, dating tends to be a covert affair and finding romance in this highly conservative kingdom can be challenging, but not entirely out of reach. Expats should bear in mind that dating in the traditional sense is not practiced; instead couples come together when it's time for marriage. Parents play a pivotal role in deciding which partner is appropriate, and a person's say in the matter can vary based on their family's adherence to tradition. Additionally, due to the conservative nature of the culture, public displays of affection are not generally accepted, and physical contact between unmarried couples is strictly prohibited. Therefore, dating in The Scalding Sands is often limited to secret meetings or conversations in private spaces, where couples must exercise caution to avoid disapproval or punishment.

In addition to the previously mentioned points, it is important to note that it is both morally and legally wrong for unrelated individuals who are not married to spend time together in The Scalding Sands. As a result, those seeking a romantic relationship should exercise caution and creativity. Despite the progressive changes in the Kingdom, which now allow for entertainment such as music, movies, and theaters, thus allowing for more public interaction, dating, sexual relations, and romantic relationships are still highly stigmatized and seen as taboo.

In The Scalding Sands, due to the taboo nature of dating, the first dates are typically held discreetly. If both individuals reside in the same compound or have access to one, they might opt to spend their first date at the movies or a restaurant within the compound. Since the societal rules are more lenient within the compound, this is a comfortable choice for couples. Select restaurants in major cities also offer private cabins and exhibit a relaxed attitude towards gender mixing. Reaching out to your circle of fellow expats is a great way to discover suitable date spots, as they often know of locations with a more lenient approach.

In The Scalding Sands, it is not legally permissible for unmarried couples to share the same space. As a result, it is not customary for men to drive women to and from their homes. It is also not advisable to adhere to Western dating rituals, such as giving gifts, hugging, and other forms of physical intimacy. At the conclusion of the date, if there is a bill, men will typically pay for it, and they might find it offensive if a woman offers to contribute to the cost.

❪ KALIM AL - ASIM .ᐟ ❫ 𓍢ִ໋💛

I. Kalim, being raised in a traditional merchant family with a lineage of wealth and prestige, grew up in a privileged and sheltered environment. With his elevated social status, Kalim was well-aware of the importance of expressing his interest in someone. He adopted a straightforward approach, either through compliments or directly telling them of his feelings, without resorting to beating around the bush. Back in his homeland, there were numerous ways to express interest, such as gifts, flowers, food, and even whispering sweet words to someone's ear. Unmarried, unrelated individuals could not spend time together, as elders sought to preserve purity and innocence before marriage. This segregation was seen as a means to preserve purity and innocence, and it was believed to reinforce family values and traditions. While relationships were discouraged before marriage, once two people wed, they were expected to devote their lives to their spouse and children. In The Scalding Sands, the cultural emphasis on family was reflected in its views on dating and intimate relationships.

II. If you have feelings for someone, it is crucial to be discreet about it. Gifting presents and such gestures is still allowed, but families and elders would prefer not to know about it. They might force a marriage and deal with all the boring formalities otherwise. To initiate a romantic pursuit, the first step is to let the person know you're interested. Kalim would use a variety of methods to express his interest, such as giving gifts, whispering sweet words, or even simply telling them. Additionally, he would utilize eye contact, physical touch, and other subtle gestures to make a statement. Eye contact, physical touch, and being close to someone all serve as indicators of Kalim's investment and interest in them. They convey that he wants them and can't keep his hands off them. This non-verbal communication can be a powerful way to demonstrate affection and build attraction. While the elders and families might prefer to remain unaware of these romantic pursuits, Kalim's actions make it clear that he has his sights set on his chosen person.

III. The second step in the traditional pursuit of romance is a significant one, signaling mutual interest. It's often a declaration of feelings, and it culminates in asking for a kiss. However, the timing of this step can vary; it doesn't have to happen immediately. The process can progress at one's own pace. Making such a gesture acts as a bold declaration of liking someone, essentially saying, "I like you, and I want to show that I like you." It serves as a mutual test, and if the person responds by kissing back, it indicates shared feelings. Conversely, if a person pulls away, it implies a lack of interest. Body language can be a reliable indicator. A person who isn't into you may create emotional distance through actions like moving away from your touch or getting too close. They might show confusion or bluntly state their disinterest. However, someone interested in you will do the opposite. They may smile, lean into your touch, or even become shy if the feelings are reciprocated. You can discern these signals.

IV. In The Scalding Sands, dating is not a widespread practice. When two individuals realize they have feelings for each other, their families step in to arrange the marriage as soon as possible, but the timing can vary. The arrangements for the marriage typically begin once mutual interest is established. In Kalim's case, if he senses the other person shares his interest, he would promptly start the process leading to a marriage proposal. Before what Westerns refer to as "dating", Kalim would approach the person's family to ask for their hand in marriage. This process is not rushed, and it generally follows a pattern where you get to know the person and spend time together before making the proposal. By doing this, he makes a strong statement, basically declaring his intention to be with the person, which carries significant weight given the traditional values of the region.

VI. Kalim's formal marriage proposal would include gifting and some sort of public announcement, adhering to traditional customs. However, typically, it's a family member who seeks permission from the other family. Kalim could ask for the person's hand in marriage directly or have a family member do so on his behalf. A gift or offering would be given as a demonstration of his ability to provide. It's important to note that some families might prioritize monetary value over material gifts, but generally, offering gifts or money serves as a common approach for marriage proposals in Kalim's culture. The act of asking for someone's hand in marriage is indeed a very formal affair, steeped in tradition. It typically involves the giving of gifts and some form of public announcement, symbolizing both respect and a declaration of intent. It is also worth noting that in Kalim's culture, it is often a family member, rather than the individual himself, who makes the request to the other family, whether it be to seek their blessing or to ask for their hand in marriage. Giving a gift, or more often, money, serves as a crucial gesture of goodwill and a demonstration of one's ability to provide and support.

V. This phase is often considered the last step before officially getting married. Instead of referring to it as "dating," in The Scalding Sands' culture, this period is more focused on spending time together to determine how compatible the couple is, especially in the context of a future marriage. It's a crucial time for assessing compatibility and preparing for the commitment of matrimony.

VI. Kalim would be generous by showering you with luxurious jewelry and other extravagant gifts. He would also try to spend as much time with you as possible, potentially being a little clingy due to his desire to keep you all to himself. Kalim might take you on wonderful dates like going to festivals or parties, or even stargazing or taking you on a magical carpet ride. He would devote all his attention to you and likely shower you with sweet compliments. Kalim would go all out, spoiling you with expensive jewelry and exclusive items. He'd want to spend every moment with you and might be somewhat possessive, not wanting anyone else to get close to you. He'd plan exciting dates like attending festivals or parties while also offering special experiences like stargazing or a magical carpet ride. Throughout it all, he’d shower you with his undivided attention and compliment you in the sweetest ways.

i cant write “x reader” properly i’m so sorry

“courtship” has slowly lost its meaning

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captain-hawks · 1 year ago

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ADVERSARIAL APPETITES

♡ — aki hayakawa x f!reader

The only thing worse than accidentally running into the Lust Devil is having to call Aki fucking Hayakawa for help.

18+ ONLY

wc — 1.9k

prompt — coming in pants, praise kink (requested by @antique-remains)

additional content — enemies to lovers, edging, masturbation, phone sex, light brat taming, light dom!Aki vibes, voice kink, mentions of anal sex, coming untouched, dirty talk, anal fingering

╰┈➤ kinktober masterlist

“Hayakawa.”

“Yeah?”

His voice is slightly muffled, and you know there’s a cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth, burning orange embers dangling precariously as the white stick shakes with the slight movement of his lips.

Pinching the bridge of your nose, the back of your head thuds against the creaky motel headboard as you close your eyes and exhale noisily before muttering, “I need your help.”

Later, you’ll look at your call log and be horrified to find that you called Aki fucking Hayakawa to grovel for assistance. Like this is your first goddamn day as a Devil Hunter. Like he’s not the most insufferably broodish bane of your existence.

You may never forgive yourself for this temporary lapse in judgment, though that will ultimately be a problem for Later You.

Later—when you’re not stripped down to your bra and panties in a dingy motel room with a questionable smell lingering in the faded brown carpet, your blood-stained button-down shirt and pants carelessly tossed over the back of a half-busted chair, filthy knives left discarded on the nightstand where they’re sitting precariously close to a well-worn copy of the Bible.

When the metallic taste of blood isn’t still lingering in your mouth from your split bottom lip.

When you’re not about to crawl out of your skin with arousal because your simple in-and-out solo assignment was interrupted by an accidental run-in with the fucking Lust Devil.

The Lust Devil, who had laughed with an irritatingly melodic voice as you tried and failed to decapitate her. Your knives sang through empty air with each swipe as she repeatedly disappeared into a cloud of hazy, pink vapor, the sickeningly sweet smell of which left you doubled over gagging and gasping for breath.

She’d kissed you on the cheek and tapped your nose with a deceivingly girlish little giggle before taking her leave, ominously lilting, “Good luck with that, love.”

You’d hardly made it to this shitty, back road motel with the dredges of your self-control intact, almost orgasming from the mere feeling of your car bouncing with the bumps in the road, scraping your thighs together as you floored it. Abdomen pressed desperately against the edges of the dubiously stained sink, you’d scrubbed your hands raw with scalding hot water thrice in the cramped bathroom before unceremoniously stripping down and flopping onto the bed.

After an hour of trying and failing to bring yourself over the edge, your sticky, arousal-soaked fingers are now cramped and sore from repeatedly plunging them in and out of your aching cunt. Try as you might, every time you reach the precipice of release, your pleasure evaporates in an instant, leaving every nerve ending in your body painfully ignited with need. Pathetic tears prick at the corners of your eyes as you desperately hump your hand, powerless to expel the insurmountable lust burning inside of you.

Clearly, masturbating isn’t the solution to the Lust Devil’s little game.

And Aki says as much after you finish explaining yourself through gritted teeth, fighting for your life to stave off the embarrassing urge to dip your fingers between your thighs again while the call is still active.

“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?!” you cry out in frustration.

“Her power is fuelled by the fear of something, remember. But it’s not the concept of lust.” He pauses for a moment. “It’s the fear of lusting after someone that you shouldn’t. She feeds on the shameful feelings of acting on inappropriate sexual desires.”

You raise an eyebrow, even though he can’t see you. “So you’re saying I should come back and seduce Kishibe sensei.”

“You’re fucking shameless.”

“I like a quick solution.”

You can hear his exasperated sigh on the other end of the line. “From what I’ve been told, it’s not about physical consummation. It’s a mental thing.”

“So I just need to think about a dirty little secret while I’m touching myself, and then I’ll finally be able to orgasm?”

“Essentially.”

Twenty minutes later, half of the pillows and bed covers have been angrily tossed to the floor in your attempts to touch yourself in every position you could possibly think of—sadly to no avail.

“Yes?” Aki sounds bored when he answers your next call, and you make a rude gesture in the direction of your phone.

“It’s not working.”

“And?”

“And I’m two seconds from losing my mind. Can you put that stupidly smart brain of yours to use and actually help me?”

The other end of the line is quiet, so you add with an annoyed huff, “Please.”

You can hear the slight amusement in Aki’s tone as he asks, “What, do you need me to tell you how to masturbate?”

You pointedly ignore the odd feeling that zips up your spine at his words. “Wow, you sure know how to talk dirty to a girl, Hayakawa.”

He scoffs.

He fucking scoffs.

There’s a shuffling sound before he responds in a low, clipped tone, “Stop being a fucking brat.”

Everything is silent save for the ticking of the clock on the wall.

“I…” you trail off, not sure what kind of response you can formulate with the way your heart’s suddenly pounding in your chest.

“Tell me what you’re doing,” he intones smoothly, your toes involuntarily curling at the cadence of his deep voice.

“Laying in bed,” you reply, far shorter of breath than you were moments ago.

“And what are you wearing?”

“My bra and underwear.”

“That’s too much. Take them off.”

Your sharp inhale is your only response, and though Aki’s normally hard-pressed to even suggest you do something on a regular day without getting a snarky response in return, your hands are like phantom limbs as you comply with his request.

“Are you naked now?”

You nod, only to belatedly realize he can’t see it, so you reply, “Yes.”

“Good girl.”

Your back arches upward from where you’re lying face up on the mattress, those two words catching you entirely off guard.

Aki’s the bane of your existence most days, for reasons your foggy brain can’t quite remember now that you’re naked and dripping wet to the husky sound of his unfairly attractive voice in a shitty hotel room in the middle of nowhere. You’ll certainly hate yourself for this later, for shamelessly imagining the slightly bored look on his stupidly handsome face as you spread your legs wide, exhaling shakily while running your fingers over your sensitive, peaked nipples.

But oh, if it’s an inappropriate orgasm the Lust Devil wants?

It’s what she’s going to get.

(And if you’re silently moaning now in anticipation at the thought of Aki fucking Hayakawa murmuring dirty things to you over the phone to get you off, nobody else needs to know that.)

“I like you like this,” he murmurs.

“Like what?” you ask, as if you don’t already know.

He chuckles.

—

You’re insufferable.

Absolutely, positively insufferable.

You live and breathe to make Aki’s job far more difficult than it needs to be, with your snappy, headstrong attitude and your penchant for nearly getting yourself killed on a regular basis.

But right now?

Right now, that’s the last thing on Aki’s mind. Because all of your bristled, sharp edges have gone pliant on the other end of the phone, your scathing, impatient remarks replaced by the sound of your heavily aroused, labored breathing.

“I bet you’re already soaked,” he says, shifting slightly from where he’s seated on his couch as he feels himself harden in his slacks at the thought.

“I'm dripping all over the sheets,” you admit.

He bites his fist.

“Touch yourself for me then.”

You don’t hesitate—he knows that because he can immediately hear the lewd, squelching sound of you starting to pump your fingers in and out of your wet hole.

“Slow down,” he chides, just to be a dick. He can’t let you off that easy, after all.

“Fuck you,” you pant out with a whine.

“Maybe if you behave,” he drawls, clicking his tongue. “How many fingers are you using?”

“Two.”

“Put in another.”

He hears a strangled moan fall from your lips.

“S’tight,” you whimper.

“How do you expect to take my dick then?” he asks, the words past his lips before he can stop himself.

There’s a slight choking sound from your end. “How would you fuck me, Hayakawa?”

“Aki,” he corrects you with a slight edge to his voice, not sure why he suddenly feels compelled to do so.

“How would you fuck me, Aki?”

His dick is straining painfully against his zipper now, a dark spot of precum staining the black fabric of his pants. He presses the heel of his palm against his throbbing shaft to relieve some of the pressure as he hears the damp slide of three of your fingers plunging in and out of your cunt.

“Till you’re begging me to come.”

You moan for him.

For him.

He’s fucked.

“Would you fuck my mouth to shut me up?” you breathe out, words hoarse.

“I bet you’d look so pretty choking on my dick.” More precum leaks through, and Aki’s muscles tense.

“Would I look pretty with your cum all over my face?”

His dick is so painfully hard it feels like it’s going to fall off.

Aki’s going to kill the fucking Lust Devil with his bare hands.

“You’re filthy,” he comments, hips rocking upward to no avail.

“Rude,” you exhale between a moan and a whimper, and he imagines the way you’re probably teasing your supple breasts while fucking yourself on your fingers right now.

“That was a compliment.”

“I haven’t even told you what I’m doing now,” you tease.

He raises an eyebrow, letting himself run his hand over his throbbing shaft briefly one more time. “What’s that?”

A loud, broken moan follows. “Using what’s dripping out of me to finger my ass.”

Oh.

He’s really fucked.

Aki bites his lower lip so hard he tastes blood as he resists the urge to furiously fist his cock.

“How many?” he croaks.

“One.”

“Give me two,” he nearly growls.

“I can’t—“

“Prep yourself for me. Two fingers.”

Aki’s fairly certain he’s never been so desperate to fuck anyone in his life as he is in this moment.

He hears you gasp and whimper as you slowly ease a second lubricated finger up your ass, knows it’s shoved all the way in by the sobbing moan that follows.

“Okay,” you whisper shakily.

“Good girl,” he says again, because he could tell what it did to you the first time.

You keen at the praise, and he hears as you resume playing with your pussy while plunging in and out of the tight ring of muscle between your cheeks at the same time.

“I’m close,” you sob.

“Come for me,” he tells you, like he’s not on the verge of an untouched orgasm himself.

“Wanna feel you come in my ass,” you whimper.

Aki’s helpless to hide his answering moan, the mental image sending him reeling. But it’s the sound of you crying out his name as you come that’s his undoing—

“AKI!”

The coil in Aki’s gut unfurls like a whip, white-hot pleasure washing over his body as he trembles with the force of his orgasm. Cum floods his boxers, his hot, sticky seed leaking all over his balls and soaking through the front of his slacks. He gives in and roughly grasps his cock through the damp material, riding out the aftershocks as cum drips along his inner thighs, belatedly realizing just how loudly he’s moaning right along with you.

Then it’s quiet for a moment, save for the sound of both of you breathing hard.

“Did you—“

“Text me the address of that motel. Now.”

— likes, comments, &/or reblogs are greatly appreciated!

#aki hayakawa x reader #Aki hayakawa #Aki hayakawa smut #csm #chainsaw man #chainsaw man fanfiction #dee writes

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thesoftboiledegg · 4 months ago

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Recently, I decided to take a trip to the city. I grew up in a rural area, and antiquing every weekend was my parents' idea of fun, so I've been trying to get out more as an adult.

I drove around for a while, found a populated area and pulled over to take a break when I--

Heeey, wait a second. What's that in the background?

OK, I didn't actually end up here by accident. The Rickmobile made a stop, and I dropped everything to go.

These cardboard cutouts greeted me at the building entrance. A man asked me to take his picture with them, and people had photoshoots with Anime Rick and Morty all night.

But I'm not here for cardboard cutouts, although that was a bonus. I'm here because this is the ultimate merchandise roundup. It blows all other merchandise roundups out of the water.

First off, I was surrounded by people wearing Rick and Morty merchandise. And, believe me, I came prepared with my own:

One fan said he liked my shirt! Bootleg, official, streetwear, old, new, eclectic...there were so many great shirts that I wish I could've taken photos of them all. I did ask a fellow fan for a picture of her Mr. Nimbus shirt as we waited in line, and she was delighted:

Three Adult Swim employees gave out prizes in the Rickmobile. While I waited, I noticed that somebody had taped a few drawings on the walls and ceiling.

When I approached, a worker drew an X on my hand with a permanent marker. She said that was to keep people from getting in line twice.

I thought I'd have to buy merchandise, but they gave it away for free! They had you spin a wheel, then gave you a prize with the corresponding number.

My turn! ✨

The bearded guy said "Go ahead and spin the wheel! Get schwifty!"

I won a tiny meditating Anime Rick pin. I'll have to find a safe spot to keep it. Maybe I should make a Rick Sanchez itabag...

And if you see me on the news, this is why.

Now it was time to explore. The Rickmobile was the main event, but Adult Swim had another surprise: Morty came along for a spin. And boy, he didn't know what to think.

Aaaaaaaahh!!

Still, Rick couldn't help being the center of attention. To be fair, he WAS the one giving out free stuff.

And it turned out that this wasn't the only Rickmobile present.

One of the food trucks joined in, too!

It was a bit of a drive, but I'm glad that I went because it was an incredible experience. It was amazing to be surrounded by so many Rick and Morty fans. Everyone was smiling and having a good time.

One woman pulled over in her vehicle and rolled down the window to ask an Adult Swim employee what was going on. When he told her they were promoting the Rick and Morty anime, her face broke out in a grin. "I love Rick and Morty!" she said.

Rick and Morty has attracted controversy, but you can't deny that it has a global fanbase that brings people together. What a great opportunity to relax and celebrate our favorite show.

On the way back to my car, I stopped and asked a guy if I could take a picture of his shirt. He enthusiastically agreed and told me he got this shirt at the 2018 stop.

When I said that I'd missed out, he told me that it wasn't that great--all they did was hand out beer. This time, they had prizes AND a screening. He was so happy and excited to be there. I need enthusiasm like that in my life.

Say what you will about Rick and Morty fans, but we are definitely not shy.

But hang on, guys, the story doesn't end here. Stay tuned for part two, where I'll tell you what happened after dark... 🌙

#rick and morty #rick sanchez #morty smith #rickmobile #rick and morty anime #rick and morty the anime #adult swim #roundup

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thoodleoo · 5 days ago

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Hi! Can you help me out with something?

Ever since I was a kid, I've been in love with antiquity. My dream career was always something related to the study of dead languages, and ancient history, and literature. I've always been the kind of person that is full of doubts, indecision and insecurity, and yet I've always been sure of this one thing: I want to study ancient Greek literature, language, history, religion and philosophy.

I'm a history major (and latina, which I think is relevant because where I'm from, the narrative of "those people are the ancestors of our civilization" isn't as strong as it is in Europe or America, tho it does exists), and ever since I started college I've wondered what's the relevance of this knowledge? I look at my colleagues (although I know comparison is the killer of joy) and I see them studying modern politics, psychology, prison abolition, slavery, etc, and I just can't help but wonder what is my knowledge for. Everything they study is so relevant and important, and then I look at what I study and it feels like just one more interpretation of something that's been studied and analyzed a thousand times by a million different people. I don't mean to say it's useless, but there's already so much research in this field, people have been obsessed with Greece and Rome for centuries. Sometimes I search up some papers, and I look at their title and I can't help but think "man, what is left to say? Does this change anything? Does it matter?".

I don't know. I know there's so much I don't know about the field, but I just feel a bit hopeless — and that's fucking me up because there is no other choice, I want to study Greece and my heart won't be satisfied with anything else (believe me, I've tried). So, I guess what I wanna ask is, is there something I'm not seeing? Why did you choose to do what you do? Do you think it matters?

hm see this is something i often struggle with myself because i sometimes get in my head about like. actually WHY is it useful or helpful to know about different obscure uses of the ablative or what have you,

BUT. there are still TONS of things to learn about the ancient world, and there's always something new to say, and recent world events have been a pretty good reminder of how important it is to learn to examine things that are outside our own cultural context. ultimately humans exist for ourselves and for each other and there is always a benefit to furthering our understanding of the us-ness that makes makes us even WANT to look back on the way things used to be. i could go on and on about how studying classics is a great foundation for having conversations about things like politics and psychology and prison abolition, and it really IS a great field of study for teaching us how to think critically and live our lives in an informed manner. but also, i think that something mattering to you is enough to make it worth pursuing, because our humanity is what makes us want to pursue it.

really i chose to go into the classics because i love them and i want to share them and i think at this point theyre a fundamental part of my being. mayhaps that is not the most satisfying answer in terms of the importance of my contributions to the world but ultimately we are all here to be the most human self we can, and i find that valuable enough to keep going

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yamayuandadu · 1 year ago

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The most important deity you've never heard of: the 3000 years long history of Nanaya

Being a major deity is not necessarily a guarantee of being remembered. Nanaya survived for longer than any other Mesopotamian deity, spread further away from her original home than any of her peers, and even briefly competed with both Buddha and Jesus for relevance. At the same time, even in scholarship she is often treated as unworthy of study. She has no popculture presence save for an atrocious, ill-informed SCP story which can’t get the most basic details right. Her claims to fame include starring in fairly explicit love poetry and appearing where nobody would expect her. Therefore, she is the ideal topic to discuss on this blog. This is actually the longest article I published here, the culmination of over two years of research. By now, the overwhelming majority of Nanaya-related articles on wikipedia are my work, and what you can find under the cut is essentially a synthesis of what I have learned while getting there. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed working on it. Under the cut, you will learn everything there is to know about Nanaya: her origin, character, connections with other Mesopotamian deities, her role in literature, her cult centers… Since her history does not end with cuneiform, naturally the later text corpora - Aramaic, Bactrian, Sogdian and even Chinese - are discussed too. The article concludes with a short explanation why I see the study of Nanaya as crucial.

Dubious origins and scribal wordplays: from na-na to Nanaya Long ago Samuel Noah Kramer said that “history begins in Sumer”. While the core sentiment was not wrong in many regards, in this case it might actually begin in Akkad, specifically in Gasur, close to modern Kirkuk. The oldest possible attestation of Nanaya are personal names from this city with the element na-na, dated roughly to the reign of Naram-Sin of Akkad, so to around 2250 BCE. It’s not marked in the way names of deities in personal names would usually be, but this would not be an isolated case.

The evidence is ultimately mixed. On one hand, reduplicated names like Nana are not unusual in early Akkadian sources, and -ya can plausibly be explained as a hypocoristic suffix. On the other hand, there is not much evidence for Nanaya being worshiped specifically in the far northeast of Mesopotamia in other periods. Yet another issue is that there is seemingly no root nan- in Akkadian, at least in any attested words.

The main competing proposal is that Nanaya originally arose as a hypostasis of Inanna but eventually split off through metaphorical mitosis, like a few other goddesses did, for example Annunitum. This is not entirely implausible either, but ultimately direct evidence is lacking, and when Nanaya pops up for the first time in history she is clearly a distinct goddess.

There are a few other proposals regarding Nanaya’s origin, but they are considerably weaker. Elamite has the promising term nan, “day” or “morning”, but Nanaya is entirely absent from the Old Elamite sources you’d expect to find her in if Mesopotamians imported her from the east. Therefore, very few authors adhere to this view. The hypothesis that she was an Aramaic goddess in origin does not really work chronologically, since Aramaic is not attested in the third millennium BCE at all. The less said about attempts to connect her to anything “Proto-Indo-European”, the better.

Like many other names of deities, Nanaya’s was already a subject of etymological speculation in antiquity. A late annotated version of the Weidner god list, tablet BM 62741, preserves a scribe’s speculative attempt at deriving it from the basic meaning of the sign NA, “to call”, furnished with a feminine suffix, A. Needless to say, like other such examples of scribal speculation, some of which are closer to playful word play than linguistics, it is unlikely to reflect the actual origin of the name.

Early history: Shulgi-simti, Nanaya’s earliest recorded #1 fan

A typical Ur III administrative tablet listing offerings to various deities (wikimedia commons)

The first absolutely certain attestations of Nanaya, now firmly under her full name, have been identified in texts from the famous archive from Puzrish-Dagan, modern Drehem, dated to around 2100 BCE. Much can be written about this site, but here it will suffice to say that it was a center of the royal administration of the Third Dynasty of Ur ("Ur III") responsible for the distribution of sacrificial animals. Nanaya appears there in a rather unique context - she was one of the deities whose cults were patronized by queen Shulgi-simti, one of the wives of Shulgi, the successor of the dynasty’s founder Ur-Namma. We do not know much about Shulgi-simti as a person - she did not write any official inscriptions announcing her preferred foreign policy or letters to relatives or poetry or anything else that typically can be used to gain a glimpse into the personal lives of Mesopotamian royalty. We’re not really sure where she came from, though Eshnunna is often suggested as her hometown. We actually do not even know what her original name was, as it is assumed she only came to be known as Shulgi-simti after becoming a member of the royal family. Tonia Sharlach suggested that the absence of information about her personal life might indicate that she was a commoner, and that her marriage to Shulgi was not politically motivated The one sphere of Shulgi-simti’s life which we are incredibly familiar with are her religious ventures. She evidently had an eye for minor, foreign or otherwise unusual goddesses, such as Belet-Terraban or Nanaya. She apparently ran what Sharlach in her “biography” of her has characterized as a foundation. It was tasked with sponsoring various religious celebrations. Since Shulgi-simti seemingly had no estate to speak of, most of the relevant documents indicate she procured offerings from a variety of unexpected sources, including courtiers and other members of the royal family. The scale of her operations was tiny: while the more official religious organizations dealt with hundreds or thousands of sacrificial animals, up to fifty or even seventy thousand sheep and goats in the case of royal administration, the highest recorded number at her disposal seems to be eight oxen and fifty nine sheep. A further peculiarity of the “foundation” is that apparently there was a huge turnover rate among the officials tasked with maintaining it. It seems nobody really lasted there for much more than four years. There are two possible explanations: either Shulgi-simti was unusually difficult to work with, or the position was not considered particularly prestigious and was, at the absolute best, viewed as a stepping stone. While the Shulgi-simti texts are the earliest evidence for worship of Nanaya in the Ur III court, they are actually not isolated. When all the evidence from the reigns of Shulgi and his successors is summarized, it turns out that she quickly attained a prominent role, as she is among the twelve deities who received the most offerings. However, her worship was seemingly limited to Uruk (in her own sanctuary), Nippur (in the temple of Enlil, Ekur) and Ur. Granted, these were coincidentally three of the most important cities in the entire empire, so that’s a pretty solid early section of a divine resume. She chiefly appears in two types of ceremonies: these tied to the royal court, or these mostly performed by or for women. Notably, a festival involving lamentations (girrānum) was held in her honor in Uruk. To understand Nanaya’s presence in the two aforementioned contexts, and by extension her persistence in Mesopotamian religion in later periods, we need to first look into her character.

The character of Nanaya: eroticism, kingship, and disputed astral ventures

Corona Borealis (wikimedia commons)

Nanaya’s character is reasonably well defined in primary sources, but surprisingly she was almost entirely ignored in scholarship quite recently. The first study of her which holds up to scrutiny is probably Joan Goodnick Westenholz’s article Nanaya, Lady of Mystery from 1997. The core issue is the alleged interchangeability of goddesses. From the early days of Assyriology basically up to the 1980s, Nanaya was held to be basically fully interchangeable with Inanna. This obviously put her in a tough spot. Still, over the course of the past three decades the overwhelming majority of studies came to recognize Nanaya as a distinct goddess worthy of study in her own right. You will still stumble upon the occasional “Nanaya is basically Inanna”, but now this is a minority position. Tragically it’s not extinct yet, most recently I’ve seen it in a monograph published earlier this year. With these methodological and ideological issues out of the way, let’s actually look into Nanaya’s character, as promised by the title of this section. Her original role was that of a goddess of love. It is already attested for her at the dawn of her history, in the Ur III period. Her primary quality was described with a term rendered as ḫili in Sumerian and kuzbu in Akkadian. It can be variously translated as “charm”, “luxuriance”, “voluptuousness”, “sensuality” or “sexual attractiveness”. This characteristic was highlighted by her epithet bēlet kuzbi (“lady of kuzbu”) and by the name of her cella in the Eanna, Eḫilianna. The connection was so strong that this term appears basically in every single royal inscription praising her. She was also called bēlet râmi, “lady of love”. Nanaya’s role as a love goddess is often paired with describing her as a “joyful” or “charming” deity. It needs to be stressed that Nanaya was by no metric the goddess of some abstract, cosmic love or anything like that. Love incantations and prayers related to love are quite common, and give us a solid glimpse into this matter. Nanaya’s range of activity in them is defined pretty directly: she deals with relationships (and by extension also with matters like one-sided crushes or arguments between spouses), romance and with strictly sexual matters. For an example of a hymn highlighting her qualifications when it comes to the last category, see here. The text is explicit, obviously. We can go deeper, though. There is also an incantation whose incipit at first glance leaves little to imagination:

However, the translator, Giole Zisa, notes there is some debate over whether it’s actually about having sex with Nanaya or merely about invoking her (and other deities) while having sex with someone else. A distinct third possibility is that she’s not even properly invoked but that “oh, Nanaya” is simply an exclamation of excitement meant to fit the atmosphere, like a specialized version of the mainstay of modern erotica dialogue, “oh god”.

While this romantic and sexual aspect of Nanaya’s character is obviously impossible to overlook, this is not all there was to her. She was also associated with kingship, as already documented in the Ur III period. She was invoked during coronations and mourning of deceased kings. In the Old Babylonian period she was linked to investiture by rulers of newly independent Uruk. A topic which has stirred some controversy in scholarship is Nanaya’s supposed astral role. Modern authors who try to present Nanaya as a Venus deity fall back on rather faulty reasoning, namely asserting that if Nanaya was associated with Inanna and Inanna personified Venus, clearly Nanaya did too. Of course, being associated with Inanna does not guarantee the same traits. Shaushka was associated with her so closely her name was written with the logogram representing her counterpart quite often, and lacked astral aspects altogether. No primary sources which discuss Nanaya as a distinct, actively worshiped deity actually link her with Venus. If you stretch it you will find some tidbits like an entry in a dictionary prepared by the 10th century bishop Hasan bar Bahlul, who inexplicably asserted Nanaya was the Arabic name of the planet Venus. As you will see soon, there isn’t even a possibility that this reflected a relic of interpretatio graeca. The early Mandaean sources, many of which were written when at least remnants of ancient Mesopotamian religion were still extant, also do not link Nanaya with Venus. Despite at best ambivalent attitude towards Mesopotamian deities, they show remarkable attention to detail when it comes to listing their cult centers, and on top of that Mesopotamian astronomy had a considerable impact on Mandaeism, so there is no reason not to prioritize them, as far as I am concerned. As far as the ancient Mesopotamian sources themselves go, the only astral object with a direct connection to Nanaya was Corona Borealis (BAL.TÉŠ.A, “Dignity”), as attested in the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN. Note that this is a work which assigns astral counterparts to virtually any deity possible, though, and there is no indication this was a major part of Nanaya’s character. Save for this single instance, she is entirely absent from astronomical texts. A further astral possibility is that Nanaya was associated with the moon. The earliest evidence is highly ambiguous: in the Ur III period festivals held in her honor might have been tied to phases of the moon, while in the Old Babylonian period a sanctuary dedicated to her located in Larsa was known under the ceremonial name Eitida, “house of the month”. A poem in which looking at her is compared to looking at the moon is also known. That’s not all, though. Starting with the Old Babylonian period, she could also be compared with the sun. Possibly such comparisons were meant to present her as an astral deity, without necessarily identifying her with a specific astral body. Michael P. Streck and Nathan Wasserman suggest that it might be optimal to simply refer to her as a “luminous” deity in this context. However, as you will see later it nonetheless does seem she eventually came to be firmly associated both with the sun and the moon. Last but not least, Nanaya occasionally displayed warlike traits. It’s hardly major in her case, and if you tried hard enough you could turn any deity into a war deity depending on your political goals, though. I’d also place the incantation which casts her as one of the deities responsible for keeping the demon Lamashtu at bay here.

Nanaya in art

The oldest known depiction of Nanaya (wikimedia commons)

While Nanaya’s roles are pretty well defined, there surprisingly isn’t much to say about her iconography in Mesopotamian art.The oldest certain surviving depiction of her is rather indistinct: she’s wearing a tall headdress and a flounced robe. It dates to the late Kassite period (so roughly to 1200 BCE), and shows her alongside king Meli-Shipak (or maybe Meli-Shihu, reading remains uncertain) and his daughter Hunnubat-Nanaya. Nanaya is apparently invoked to guarantee that the prebend granted to the princess will be under divine protection. This is not really some unique prerogative of hers, perhaps she was just the most appropriate choice because Hunnubat-Nanaya’s name obviously reflects devotion to her. The relief discussed above is actually the only depiction of Nanaya identified with certainty from before the Hellenistic period, surprisingly. We know that statues representing her existed, and it is hard to imagine that a popular, commonly worshiped deity was not depicted on objects like terracotta decorations and cylinder seals, but even if some of these were discovered, there’s no way to identify them with certainty. This is not unusual though, and ultimately there aren’t many Mesopotamian deities who can be identified in art without any ambiguity.

Nanaya in literature

As I highlighted in the section dealing with Nanaya’s character, she is reasonably well attested in love poetry. However, this is not the only genre in which she played a role. A true testament to Nanaya’s prominence is a bilingual (Sumero-Akkadian) hymn composed in her honor in the first millennium BCE. It is written in the first person, and presents various other goddesses as her alternate identities. It is hardly unique, and similar compositions dedicated to Ishtar (Inanna), Gula, Ninurta and Marduk are also known. Each strophe describes a different deity and location, but ends with Nanaya reasserting her actual identity with the words “still I am Nanaya”. Among the claimed identities included are both major goddesses in their own right (Inanna plus closely associated Annunitum and Ishara, Gula, Bau, Ninlil), goddesses relevant due to their spousal roles first and foremost (Damkina, Shala, Mammitum etc) and some truly unexpected, picks, the notoriously elusive personified rainbow Manzat being the prime example. Most of them had very little in common with Nanaya, so this might be less an attempt at syncretism, and more an elevation of her position through comparisons to those of other goddesses. An additional possible literary curiosity is a poorly preserved myth which Wilfred G. Lambert referred to as “The murder of Anshar”. He argues that Nanaya is one of the two deities responsible for the eponymous act. I don't quite follow the logic, though: the goddess is actually named Ninamakalamma (“Lady mother of the land”), and her sole connection with Nanaya is that they occur in sequence in the unique god list from Sultantepe. Lambert saw this as a possible indication they are identical. There are no other attestations of this name, but ama kalamma does occur as an epithet of various goddesses, most notably Ninshubur. Given her juxtaposition with Nanaya in the Weidner god list - more on that later - wouldn’t it make more sense to assume it’s her? Due to obscurity of the text as far as I am aware nobody has questioned Lambert’s tentative proposal yet, though.

There isn’t much to say about the plot: Anshar, literally “whole heaven”, the father of Anu, presumably gets overthrown and might be subsequently killed. Something that needs to be stressed here to avoid misinterpretation: primordial deities such as Anshar were borderline irrelevant, and weren't really worshiped. They exist to fade away in myths and to be speculated about in elaborate lexical texts. There was no deposed cult of Anshar. Same goes for all the Tiamats and Enmesharras and so on.

Inanna and beyond: Nanaya and friends in Mesopotamian sources

Inanna on a cylinder seal from the second half of the third millennium BCE (wikimedia commons)

Of course, Nanaya’s single most important connection was that to Inanna, no matter if we are to accept the view that she was effectively a hypostasis gone rogue or not. The relationship between them could be represented in many different ways. Quite commonly she was understood as a courtier or protegee of Inanna. A hymn from the reign of Ishbi-Erra calls her the “ornament of Eanna” (Inanna’s main temple in Uruk) and states she was appointed by Inanna to her position. References to Inanna as Nanaya’s mother are also known, though they are rare, and might be metaphorical. To my best knowledge nothing changed since Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz’s monograph, in which she notes she only found three examples of texts preserving this tradition. I would personally abstain from trying to read too deep into it, given this scarcity. Other traditions regarding Nanaya’s parentage are better attested. In multiple cases, she “borrows” Inanna’s conventional genealogy, and as a result is addressed as a daughter of Sin (Nanna), the moon god. However, she was never addressed as Inanna’s sister: it seems that in cases where Sin and Nanaya are connected, she effectively “usurps” Inanna’s own status as his daughter (and as the sister of Shamash, while at it). Alternatively, she could be viewed as a daughter of Anu. Finally, there is a peculiar tradition which was the default in laments: in this case, Nanaya was described as a daughter of Urash. The name in this context does not refer to the wife of Anu, though. The deity meant is instead a small time farmer god from Dilbat. To my best knowledge no sources place Nanaya in the proximity of other members of Urash’s family, though some do specify she was his firstborn daughter. To my best knowledge Urash had at least two other children, Lagamal (“no mercy”, an underworld deity whose gender is a matter of debate) and Ipte-bitam (“he opened the house”, as you can probably guess a divine doorkeeper). Nanaya’s mother by extension would presumably be Urash’s wife Ninegal, the tutelary goddess of royal palaces. There is actually a ritual text listing these three together. In the Weidner god list Nanaya appears after Ninshubur. Sadly, I found no evidence for a direct association between these two. For what it’s worth, they did share a highly specific role, that of a deity responsible for ordering around lamma. This term referred to a class of minor deities who can be understood as analogous to “guardian angels” in contemporary Christianity, except places and even deities had their own lamma too, not just people. Lamma can also be understood at once as a class of distinct minor deities, as the given name of individual members of it, and as a title of major deities. In an inscription of Gudea the main members of the official pantheon are addressed as “lamma of all nations”, by far one of my favorite collective terms of deities in Mesopotamian literature. A second important aspect of the Weidner god list is placing Nanaya right in front of Bizilla. The two also appear side by side in some offering lists and in the astronomical compendium MUL.APIN, where they are curiously listed as members of the court of Enlil. It seems that like Nanaya, she was a goddess of love, which is presumably reflected by her name. It has been variously translated as “pleasing”, “loving” or as a derivative of the verb “to strip”. An argument can be made that Bizilla was to Nanaya what Nanaya was to Inanna. However, she also had a few roles of her own. Most notably, she was regarded as the sukkal of Ninlil. She may or may not also have had some sort of connection to Nungal, the goddess of prisons, though it remains a matter of debate if it’s really her or yet another, accidentally similarly named, goddess.

An indistinct Hurro-Hittite depiction of Ishara from the Yazilikaya sanctuary (wikimedia commons)

In love incantations, Nanaya belonged to an informal group which also included Inanna, Ishara, Kanisurra and Gazbaba. I do not think Inanna’s presence needs to be explained. Ishara had an independent connection with Inanna and was a multi-purpose deity to put it very lightly; in the realm of love she was particularly strongly connected with weddings and wedding nights. Kanisurra and Gazbaba warrant a bit more discussion, because they are arguably Nanaya’s supporting cast first and foremost. Gazbaba is, at the core, seemingly simply the personification of kuzbu. Her name had pretty inconsistent orthography, and variants such as Kazba or Gazbaya can be found in primary sources too. The last of them pretty clearly reflects an attempt at making her name resemble Nanaya’s. Not much can be said about her individual character beyond the fact she was doubtlessly related to love and/or sex. She is described as the “grinning one” in an incantation which might be a sexual allusion too, seeing as such expressions are a mainstay of Akkadian erotic poetry. Kanisurra would probably win the award for the fakest sounding Mesopotamian goddess, if such a competition existed. Her name most likely originated as a designation of the gate of the underworld, ganzer. Her default epithet was “lady of the witches” (bēlet kaššāpāti). And on top of that, like Nanaya and Gazbaba she was associated with sex. She certainly sounds more like a contemporary edgy oc of the Enoby Dimentia Raven Way variety than a bronze age goddess - and yet, she is completely genuine. It is commonly argued Kanisurra and Gazbaba were regarded as Nanaya’s daughters, but there is actually no direct evidence for this. In the only text where their relation to Nanaya is clearly defined they are described as her hairdressers, rather than children. While in some cases the love goddesses appear in love incantations in company of each other almost as if they were some sort of disastrous polycule, occasionally Nanaya is accompanied in them by an anonymous spouse. Together they occur in parallel with Inanna and Dumuzi and Ishara and Almanu, apparently a (accidental?) deification of a term referring to someone without family obligations. There is only one Old Babylonian source which actually assigns a specific identity to Nanaya’s spouse, a hymn dedicated to king Abi-eshuh of Babylon. An otherwise largely unknown god Muati (I patched up his wiki article just for the sake of this blog post) plays this role here. The text presents a curious case of reversal of gender roles: Muati is asked to intercede with Nanaya on behalf of petitioners. Usually this was the role of the wife - the best known case is Aya, the wife of Shamash, who is implored to do just that by Ninsun in the standard edition of the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s also attested for goddesses such as Laz, Shala, Ninegal or Ninmug… and in the case of Inanna, for Ninshubur.

A Neo-Assyrian statue of Nabu on display in the Iraq Museum (wikimedia commons)

Marten Stol seems to treat Muati and Nabu as virtually the same deity, and on this basis states that Nanaya was already associated with the latter in the Old Babylonian period, but this seems to be a minority position. Other authors pretty consistently assume that Muati was a distinct deity at some point “absorbed” by Nabu. The oldest example of pairing Nanaya with Nabu I am aware of is an inscription dated to the reign of Marduk-apla-iddina I, so roughly to the first half of the twelfth century BCE. The rise of this tradition in the first millennium BCE was less theological and more political. With Babylon once again emerging as a preeminent power, local theologies were supposed to be subordinated to the one followed in the dominant city. Which, at the time, was focused on Nabu, Marduk and Zarpanit. Worth noting that Nabu also had a spouse before, Tashmetum (“reconciliation”). In the long run she was more or less ousted by Nanaya from some locations, though she retained popularity in the north, in Assyria. She is not exactly the most thrilling deity to discuss. I will confess I do not find the developments tied to Nanaya and Nabu to be particularly interesting to cover, but in the long run they might have resulted in Nanaya acquiring probably the single most interesting “supporting cast member” she did not share with Inanna, so we’ll come back to this later. Save for Bizilla, Nanaya generally was not provided with “equivalents” in god lists. I am only aware of one exception, and it’s a very recent discovery. Last year the first ever Akkadian-Amorite bilingual lists were published. This is obviously a breakthrough discovery, as before Amorite was largely known just from personal names despite being a vernacular language over much of the region in the bronze age, but only one line is ultimately of note here. In a section of one of the lists dealing with deities, Nanaya’s Amorite counterpart is said to be Pidray. This goddess is otherwise almost exclusively known from Ugarit. This of course fits very well with the new evidence: recent research generally stresses that Ugarit was quintessentially an Amorite city (the ruling house even claimed descent from mythical Ditanu, who is best known from the grandiose fictional genealogies of Shamshi-Adad I and the First Dynasty of Babylon). Sadly, we do not know how the inhabitants of Ugarit viewed Nanaya. A trilingual version of the Weidner list, with the original version furnished with columns listing Ugaritic and Hurrian counterparts of each deity, was in circulation, but the available copies are too heavily damaged to restore it fully. And to make things worse, much of it seems to boil down to scribal wordplay and there is no guarantee all of the correspondences are motivated theologically. For instance, the minor Mesopotamian goddess Imzuanna is presented as the counterpart of Ugaritic weather god Baal because her name contains a sign used as a shortened logographic writing of the latter. An even funnier case is the awkward attempt at making it clear the Ugaritic sun deity Shapash, who was female, is not a lesbian… by making Aya male. Just astonishing, really.

The worship of Nanaya

A speculative reconstruction of Ur III Uruk with the Eanna temple visible in the center (Artefacts — Scientific Illustration & Archaeological Reconstruction; reproduced here for educational purposes only, as permitted)

Rather fittingly, as a deity associated with Inanna, Nanaya was worshiped chiefly in Uruk. She is also reasonably well attested in the inscriptions of the short-lived local dynasty which regained independence near the end of the period of domination of Larsa over Lower Mesopotamia. A priest named after her, a certain Iddin-Nanaya, for a time served as the administrator of her temple, the Enmeurur, “house which gathers all the me,” me being a difficult to translate term, something like “divine powers”. The acquisition of new me is a common topic in Mesopotamian literature, and in compositions focused on Inanna in particular, so it should not be surprising to anyone that her peculiar double seemingly had similar interests. In addition to Uruk, as well as Nippur and Ur, after the Ur III period Nanaya spread to multiple other cities, including Isin, Mari, Babylon and Kish. However, she is probably by far the best attested in Larsa, where she rose to the rank of one of the main deities, next to Utu, Inanna, Ishkur and Nergal. She had her own temple, the Eshahulla, “house of a happy heart”. In local tradition Inanna got to keep her role as an “universal” major goddess and her military prerogatives, but Nanaya overtook the role of a goddess of love almost fully. Inanna’s astral aspect was also locally downplayed, since Venus was instead represented in the local pantheon by closely associated, but firmly distinct, Ninsianna. This deity warrants some more discussion in the future just due to having a solid claim to being one of the first genderfluid literary figures in history, but due to space constraints this cannot be covered in detail here. A later inscription from the same city differentiates between Nanaya and Inanna by giving them different epithets: Nanaya is the “queen of Uruk and Eanna” (effectively usurping Nanaya’s role) while Inanna is the “queen of Nippur” (that’s actually a well documented hypostasis of her, not to be confused with the unrelated “lady of Nippur”). Uruk was temporarily abandoned in the late Old Babylonian period, but that did not end Nanaya’s career. Like Inanna, she came to be temporarily relocated to Kish. It has been suggested that a reference to her residence in “Kiššina” in a Hurro-Hittite literary text, the Tale of Appu, reflects her temporary stay there. The next centuries of Nanaya are difficult to reconstruct due to scarce evidence, but it is clear she continued to be worshiped in Uruk. By the Neo-Babylonian period she was recognized as a member of an informal pentad of the main deities of the city, next to Inanna, Urkayitu, Usur-amassu and Beltu-sa-Resh. Two of them warrant no further discussion: Urkayitu was most likely a personification of the city, and Beltu-sa-Resh despite her position is still a mystery to researchers. Usur-amassu, on the contrary, is herself a fascinating topic. First attestations of this deity, who was seemingly associated with law and justice (a pretty standard concern), come back to the Old Babylonian period. At this point, Usur-amassu was clearly male, which is reflected by the name. He appears in the god list An = Anum as a son of the weather deity couple par excellence, Adad (Ishkur) and Shala. However, by the early first millennium BCE Usur-amassu instead came to be regarded as female - without losing the connection to her parents. She did however gain a connection to Inanna, Nanaya and Kanisurra, which she lacked earlier. How come remains unknown. Most curiously her name was not modified to reflect her new gender, though she could be provided with a determinative indicating it. This recalls the case of Lagamal in the kingdom of Mari some 800 years earlier.

The end of the beginning: Nanaya under Achaemenids and Seleucids

Trilingual (Persian, Elamite and Akkadian) inscription of the first Achamenid ruler of Mesopotamia, Cyrus (wikimedia commons)

After the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire Mesopotamia ended up under Achaemenid control, which in turn was replaced by the Seleucids. Nanaya flourished through both of these periods. In particular, she attained considerable popularity among Arameans. While they almost definitely first encountered her in Uruk, she quickly came to be venerated by them in many distant locations, like Palmyra, Hatra and Dura Europos in Syria. She even appears in a single Achaemenid Aramaic papyrus discovered in Elephantine in Egypt. It indicates that she was worshiped there by a community which originated in Rash, an area east to the Tigris. As a curiosity it’s worth mentioning the same source is one of the only attestations of Pidray from outside Ugarit. I do not think this has anything to do with the recently discovered connection between her and Nanaya… but you may never know. Under the Seleucids, Nanaya went through a particularly puzzling process of partial syncretism. Through interpretatio graeca she was identified with… Artemis. How did this work? The key to understanding this is the fact Seleucids actually had a somewhat limited interest in local deities. All that was necessary was to find relatively major members of the local pantheon who could roughly correspond to the tutelary deities of their dynasty: Zeus, Apollo and Artemis. Zeus found an obvious counterpart in Marduk (even though Marduk was hardly a weather god). Since Nabu was Marduk’s son, he got to be Apollo. And since Nanaya was the most major goddess connected to Nabu, she got to be Artemis. It really doesn’t go deeper than that. For what it’s worth, despite the clear difference in character this newfound association did impact Nanaya in at least one way: she started to be depicted with attributes borrowed from Artemis, namely a bow and a crescent. Or perhaps these attributes were already associated with her, but came to the forefront because of the new role. The Artemis-like image of Nanaya as an archer is attested on coins, especially in Susa, yet another city where she attained considerable popularity.

Leaving Mesopotamia: Nanaya and the death of cuneiform

A Parthian statue of Nanaya with a crescent diadem (Louvre; reproduced here for educational purposes only. Identification follows Andrea Sinclair's proposal)

The Seleucid dynasty was eventually replaced by the Parthians. This period is often considered a symbolic end of ancient Mesopotamian religion in the strict sense. Traditional religious institutions were already slowly collapsing in Achaemenid and Seleucid times as the new dynasties had limited interest in royal patronage. Additionally, cuneiform fell out of use, and by the end of the first half of the first millennium CE the art of reading and writing it was entirely lost. This process did not happen equally quickly everywhere, obviously, and some deities fared better than others in the transitional period before the rise of Christianity and Islam as the dominant religions across the region. Nanaya was definitely one of them, at least for a time. In Parthian art Nanaya might have developed a distinct iconography: it has been argued she was portrayed as a nude figure wearing only some jewelry (including what appears to be a navel piercing and a diadem with a crescent. The best known example is probably this standing figure, one of my all time favorite works of Mesopotamian art:

Parthian Nanaya (wikimedia commons; identification courtesy of the Louvre website and J. G. Westenholz)

For years Wikipedia had this statue mislabeled as “Astarte” which makes little sense considering it comes from a necropolis near Babylon. There was also a viral horny tweet which labeled it as “Asherah” a few months ago (I won’t link it but I will point out in addition to getting the name wrong op also severely underestimated the size). This is obviously even worse nonsense both on spatial and temporal grounds. Even if the biblical Asherah was ever an actual deity like Ugaritic Athirat and Mesopotamian Ashratum, it is highly dubious she would still be worshiped by the time this statue was made. It’s not even certain she ever was a deity, though. Cognate of a theonym is not automatically a theonym itself, and the Ugaritic texts and the Bible, even if they share some topoi, are separated by centuries and a considerable distance. This is not an Asherah post though, so if this is a topic which interests you I recommend downloading Steve A. Wiggins’ excellent monograph A Reassessment of Asherah: With Further Considerations of the Goddess.

The last evidence for the worship of Nanaya in Mesopotamia is a Mandaean spell from Nippur, dated to the fifth or sixth century CE. However, at this point Nanaya must have been a very faint memory around these parts, since the figure designated by this name is evidently male in this formula. That was not the end of her career, though. The system of beliefs she originated and thrived in was on its way out, but there were new frontiers to explore. A small disgression is in order here: be INCREDIBLY wary of claims about the survival of Mesopotamian tradition in Mesopotamia itself past the early middle ages. Most if not all of these come from the writing of Simo Parpola, who is a 19th century style hyperdiffusionist driven by personal religious beliefs based on gnostic christianity, which he believes was based on Neo-Assyrian state religion, which he misinterprets as monotheism, or rather proto-christianity specifically (I wish I was making this up). I personally do not think a person like that should be tolerated in serious academia, but for some incomprehensible reason that isn’t the case.

New frontiers: Nanaya in Bactria

The key to Nanaya’s extraordinarily long survival wasn’t the dedication to her in Mesopotamia, surprisingly. It was instead her introduction to Bactria, a historical area in Central Asia roughly corresponding to parts of modern Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The early history of this area is still poorly known, though it is known that it was one of the “cradles of civilization” not unlike Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley or Mesoamerica. The so-called “Oxus civilization” or “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” flourished around 2500-1950 BCE (so roughly contemporarily with the Akkadian and Ur III empires in Mesopotamia). It left behind no written records, but their art and architecture are highly distinctive and reflect great social complexity. I sadly can’t spent much time discussing them here though, as they are completely irrelevant to the history of Nanaya (there is a theory that she was already introduced to the east when BMAC was extant but it is incredibly implausible), so I will limit myself to showing you my favorite related work of art, the “Bactrian princess”:

Photo courtesy of Louvre Abu Dhabi, reproduced here for educational purposes only.

By late antiquity, which is the period we are concerned with here, BMAC was long gone, and most of the inhabitants of Bactria spoke Bactrian, an extinct Iranian language. How exactly they were related to their BMAC forerunners is uncertain. Their religious beliefs can be compared to Zoroastrianism, or rather with its less formalized forerunners followed by most speakers of Iranian languages before the rise of Zoroaster. However, there were many local peculiarities. For example, the main deity was the personified river Oxus, not Ahura Mazda. Whether this was a relic of BMAC religion is impossible to tell.We do not know exactly when the eastward transfer of Nanaya to Bactria happened. The first clear evidence for her presence in central Asia comes from the late first century BCE, from the coins of local rulers, Sapadbizes and Agesiles. It is possible that her depictions on coinage of Mesopotamian and Persian rulers facilitated her spread. Of course, it’s also important to remember that the Aramaic script and language spread far to the east in the Achaemenid period already, and that many of the now extinct Central Asian scripts were derived from it (Bactrian was written with the Greek script, though). Doubtlessly many now lost Aramaic texts were transferred to the east. There’s an emerging view that for unclear reasons, under the Achaemenids Mesopotamian culture as a whole had unparalleled impact on Bactria. The key piece of evidence are Bactrian temples, which often resemble Mesopotamian ones. Therefore, perhaps we should be wondering not why Nanaya spread from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, but rather why there were no other deities who did, for the most part. That is sadly a question I cannot answer. Something about Nanaya simply made her uniquely appealing to many groups at once. While much about the early history of Nanaya in Central Asia is a mystery, it is evident that with time she ceased to be viewed as a foreign deity. For the inhabitants of Bactria she wasn’t any less “authentically Iranian” than the personified Oxus or their versions of the conventional yazatas like Sraosha. Frequently arguments are made that Nanaya’s widespread adoption and popularity could only be the result of identification between her and another deity.Anahita in particular is commonly held to be a candidate. However, as stressed by recent studies there’s actually no evidence for this. What is true is that Anahita is notably missing from the eastern Iranian sources, despite being prominent in the west from the reign of the Achaemenid emperor Artaxerxes II onward. However, it is clear that not all yazatas were equally popular in each area - pantheons will inevitably be localized in each culture. Furthermore, Anahita’s character has very little in common with Nanaya save for gender. Whether we are discussing her early not quite Zoroastrian form the Achaemenid public was familiar with or the contemporary yazata still relevant in modern Zoroastrianism, the connection to water is the most important feature of her. Nanaya didn’t have such a role in any culture. Recently some authors suggested a much more obvious explanation for Anahita’s absence from the eastern Iranian pantheon(s). As I said, eastern Iranian communities venerated the river Oxus as a deity (or as a yazata, if you will). He was the water god par excellence, and in Bactria also the king of the gods. It is therefore quite possible that Anahita, despite royal backing from the west, simply couldn’t compete with him. Their roles overlapped more than the roles of Anahita and Nanaya. I am repeating myself but the notion of interchangeability of goddesses really needs to be distrusted almost automatically, no matter how entrenched it wouldn’t be. While we’re at it, the notion of alleged interchangeability between Anahita and Ishtar is also highly dubious, but that’s a topic for another time.

Nana (Nanaya) on a coin of Kanishka (wikimedia commons)

Nanaya experienced a period of almost unparalleled prosperity with the rise of the Kushan dynasty in Bactria. The Kushans were one of the groups which following Chinese sources are referred to as Yuezhi. They probably did not speak any Iranian language originally, and their origin is a matter of debate. However, they came to rule over a kingdom which consisted largely of areas inhabited by speakers of various Iranian languages, chiefly Bactrian. Their pantheon, documented in royal inscriptions and on coinage, was an eerie combination of mainstays of Iranian beliefs like Sraosha and Mithra and some unique figures, like Oesho, who was seemingly the reflection of Hindu Shiva. Obviously, Nanaya was there too, typically under the shortened name Nana. The most famous Kushan ruler, emperor Kanishka, in his inscription from Rabatak states that kingship was bestowed upon him by “Nana and all the gods”. However, we do not know if the rank assigned to her indicates she was the head of the dynastic pantheon, the local pantheon in the surrounding area, or if she was just the favorite deity of Kanishka. Same goes for the rank of numerous other deities mentioned in the rest of the inscription. Her apparent popularity during Kanishka’s reign and beyond indicates her role should not be downplayed, though. The coins of Kanishka and other Bactrian art indicate that a new image of Nanaya developed in Central Asia. The Artemis-like portrayals typical for Hellenistic times continue to appear, but she also started to be depicted on the back of a lion. There is only one possible example of such an image from the west, a fragmentary relief from Susa, and it’s roughly contemporary with the depictions from Bactria. While it is not impossible Nanaya originally adopted the lion association from one of her Mesopotamian peers, it is not certain how exactly this specific type of depictions originally developed, and there is a case to be made that it owed more to the Hellenistic diffusion of iconography of deities such as Cybele and Dionysus, who were often depicted riding on the back of large felines. The lunar symbols are well attested in the Kushan art of Nanaya too. Most commonly, she’s depicted wearing a diadem with a crescent. However, in a single case the symbol is placed behind her back. This is an iconographic type which was mostly associated with Selene at first, but in the east it was adopted for Mah, the Iranian personification of the moon. I’d hazard a guess that’s where Nanaya borrowed it from - more on that later. The worship of Nanaya survived the fall of the Kushan dynasty, and might have continued in Bactria as late as in the eighth century. However, the evidence is relatively scarce, especially compared with yet another area where she was introduced in the meanwhile.

Nanaya in Sogdia: new home and new friends

A Sogdian depiction of Nanaya from Bunjikat (wikimedia commons)

Presumably from Bactria, Nanaya was eventually introduced to Sogdia, its northern neighbor. I think it’s safe to say this area effectively became her new home for the rest of her history. Like Bactrians, the Sogdians also spoke an eastern Iranian language, Sogdian. It has a direct modern descendant, Yaghnobi, spoken by a small minority in Tajikistan. The religions Sogdians adhered to is often described as a form of Zoroastrianism, especially in older sources, but it would appear that Ahura Mazda was not exactly the most popular deity. Their pantheon was seemingly actually headed by Nanaya. Or, at the very least, the version of it typical for Samarkand and Panijkant, since there’s a solid case to be made for local variety in the individual city-states which made up Sogdia. It seems that much like Mesopotamians and Greeks centuries before them, Sogdians associated specific deities with specific cities, and not every settlement necessarily venerated each deity equally (or at all). Nanaya's remarkable popularity is reflected by the fact the name Nanaivandak, "servant of Nanaya", is one of the most common Sogdian names in general. It is agreed that among the Sogdians Panjikant was regarded as Nanaya’s cult center. She was referred to as “lady” of this city. At one point, her temple located there was responsible for minting the local currency. By the eighth century, coins minted there were adorned with dedications to her - something unparalleled in Sogdian culture, as the rest of coinage was firmly secular. This might have been an attempt at reasserting Sogdian religious identity in the wake of the arrival of Islam in Central Asia. Sogdians adopted the Kushan iconography of Nanaya, though only the lion-mounted version. The connection between her and this animal was incredibly strong in Sogdian art, with no other deity being portrayed on a similar mount. There were also innovations - Nanaya came to be frequently portrayed with four arms. This reflects the spread of Buddhism through central Asia, which brought new artistic conventions from India. While the crescent symbol can still be found on her headwear, she was also portrayed holding representations of the moon and the sun in two of her hands. Sometimes the solar disc and lunar orb are decorated with faces, which has been argued to be evidence that Nanaya effectively took over the domains of Mah and Mithra, who would be the expected divine identities of these two astral bodies. She might have been understood as controlling the passage of night and day. It has also been pointed out that this new iconographic type is the natural end point of the evolution of her astral role. Curiously, while no such a function is attested for Nanaya in Bactria, in Sogdia she could be sometimes regarded as a warlike deity. This is presumably reflected in a painting showing her and an unidentified charioteer fighting demons.

The "Sogdian Deities" painting from Dunhuang, a possible depiction of Nanaya and her presumed spouse Tish (wikimedia commons)

Probably the most fascinating development regarding Nanaya in Sogdia was the development of an apparent connection between her and Tish. This deity was the Sogdian counterpart of one of the best known Zoroastrian yazatas, Tishtrya, the personification of Sirius. As described in the Tištar Yašt, the latter is a rainmaking figure and a warlike protector who keeps various nefarious forces, such as Apaosha, Duzyariya and the malign “worm stars” (comets), at bay. Presumably his Sogdian counterpart had a similar role. While this is not absolutely certain, it is generally agreed that Nanaya and Tish were regarded as a couple in central Asia (there’s a minority position she was instead linked with Oesho, though). Most likely the fact that in Achaemenid Persia Tishtrya was linked with Nabu (and by extension with scribal arts) has something to do with this. There is a twist to this, though. While both Nabu and the Avestan Tishtrya are consistently male, in Bactria and Sogdia the corresponding deity’s gender actually shows a degree of ambiguity. On a unique coin of Kanishka, Tish is already portrayed as a feminine figure distinctly similar to Greek Artemis - an iconographic type which normally would be recycled for Nanaya. There’s also a possibility that a feminine, or at least crossdressing, version of Tish is portrayed alongside Nanaya on a painting from Dunhuang conventionally referred to as “Sogdian Daēnās” or “Sogdian Deities”, but this remains uncertain. If this identification is correct, it indicates outright interchange of attributes between them and Nanaya was possible.

The final frontier: Nanaya and the Sogdian diaspora in China Sogdians also brought Nanaya with them to China, where many of them settled in the Six Dynasties and Tang periods. An obviously Sinicized version of her, accompanied by two attendants of unknown identity, is portrayed on a Sogdian funerary couch presently displayed in the Miho Museum.

Nanaya (top) on a relief from the Miho funerary couch (Miho Museum; reproduced here for educational purposes only)

For the most part the evidence is limited to theophoric names, though. Due to unfamiliarity with Sogdian religious traditions and phonetic differences between the languages there was no consistent Chinese transcription of Nanaya’s name. I have no clue if Chinese contemporaries of the Sogdians were always aware of these elements in personal names referred to a deity. There is a fringe theory that Nanaya was referred to as Nantaihou (那那女主, “queen Nana”) in Chinese. However, the evidence is apparently not compelling, and as I understand the theory depends in no small part on the assertion that a hitherto unattested alternate reading of one of the signs was in use on the western frontiers of China in the early first millennium CE. The alleged Nantaihou is therefore most likely a misreading of a reference to a deceased unnamed empress dowager venerated through conventional ancestor worship, as opposed to Nanaya. Among members of the Sogdian diaspora, in terms of popularity Nanaya was going head to head with Jesus and Buddha. The presence of the latter two reflected the adoption of, respectively, Manichaeism and Buddhism. Manicheans seemingly were not fond of Nanaya, though, and fragments of a polemic against her cult have been identified. It seems ceremonies focused on lamentations were the main issue for the Manichaeans. Sadly there doesn’t seem to be any worthwhile study of possible Mesopotamian influence on that - the only one I found is old and confuses Nanaya with Inanna. We do not have much of an idea how Buddhists viewed Nanaya, though it is worth noting a number of other Sogdian deities were incorporated into the local form of Mahayana (unexpectedly, one of them was Zurvan). It has also been argued that a Buddhist figure, Vreshman (Vaisravana) was incorporated into Nanaya’s entourage. Nanaya might additionally be depicted in a painting showing Buddha’s triumph over Mara from Dunhuang. Presumably her inclusion would reflect the well attested motif of local deities converting to Buddhism. It was a part of the Buddhist repertoire from the early days of this religion and can be found in virtually every area where this religion ever spread. Nanaya is once again in elevated company here, since other figures near her have been tentatively interpreted as Shiva, Vishnu, Kartikeya and… Zoroaster.

Buddha conquering Mara (maravijaya) on a painting from Dunhuang (wikimedia commons)

zoom in on a possible depiction of Nanaya next to a demon suspiciously similar to Tove Jansson’s Fillyjonk

To my best knowledge, the last absolutely certain attestation of Nanaya as an actively worshiped deity also comes from the western frontier of China. A painting from Dandan Oilik belonging to the artistic tradition of the kingdom of Khotan shows three deities from the Sogdian pantheon: the enigmatic Āδβāγ (“highest god”; interpreted as either Indra, Ahura Mazda or a combination of them both) on the left, Weshparkar (a later version of Kushan Oesho) on the right and Nanaya in the center. It dates to the ninth or tenth century.

Nanaya (center) on the Dandan Oilik painting (wikimedia commons)

We will probably never know what Nanaya’s last days were like, though it is hard to imagine she retained much relevance with the gradual disappearance of Sogdian culture both in Sogdia and in China in the wake of, respectively, the rise of Islam in Central Asia and the An Lushan rebellion respectively. Her history ultimately most likely ended with a whimper rather than a bang. Conclusions and reflections Obviously, not everything about Nanaya could be covered in this article - there is enough material to warrant not one, but two wiki articles (and I don't even think they are extensive enough yet). I hope I did nonetheless manage to convey what matters: she was the single most enduring Mesopotamian deity who continued to be actually worshiped. She somehow outlived Enlil, Marduk, Nergal and even Inanna, and spread further than any of them ever did. It does not seem like her persistence was caused by some uniquely transcendent quality, and more to a mix of factors we will never really fully understand and pure luck. She is a far cry from the imaginary everlasting universal goddesses such longevity was attributed to by many highly questionable authors in the past, from Frazer to Gimbutas. Quite the opposite, once you look into the texts focused on her she comes across as sort of pathetic. After all, most of them are effectively ancient purple prose. And yet, this is precisely why I think Nanaya matters. To see how an author approaches her is basically a litmus test of trustworthiness - I wish I was kidding but this “Nanaya method” works every time. To even be able to study her history, let alone understand it properly, one has to cast away most of the dreadful trends which often hindered scholarship of ancient deities, and goddesses in particular, in the past. The interchangeability of goddesses; the Victorian mores and resulting notion that eroticism must be tied to fertility; the weird paradigms about languages neatly corresponding to religions; and many others. And if nothing else, this warrants keeping the memory of her 3000 years long history alive through scholarship (and, perhaps, some media appearances). Bibliography

Julia M. Asher-Greve & Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Goddesses in Context: On Divine Powers, Roles, Relationships and Gender in Mesopotamian Textual and Visual Sources (2013)

Paul-Alain Beaulieu, The Pantheon of Uruk During the Neo-Babylonian Period (2003)

idem, Nabû and Apollo: The Two Faces of Seleucid Religious Policy in: Orient und Okzident in Hellenistischer Zeit (2014)

Matteo Compareti, Nana and Tish in Sogdiana (2017)

idem, The So-Called "Pelliot Chinois 4518.24". Illustrated Document from Dunhuang and Sino-Sogdian Iconographical Contacts (2021)

Olga Drewnowska-Rymarz, Mesopotamian Goddess Nanāja (2008)

Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature (2005)

Andrew R. George & Manfred Krebernik, Two Remarkable Vocabularies: Amorite-Akkadian Bilinguals! (2022)

Valerie Hansen, Kageyama Etsuko & Yutaka Yoshida, The Impact of the Silk Road Trade on a Local Community: The Turfan Oasis, 500-800 in: Les sogdiens en Chine (2005)

Wilfred G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (2013)

Enrico Marcato, An Aramaic Incantation Bowl and the Fall of Hatra (2020)

Christa Müller-Kessler & Karlheinz Kessler, Spätbabylonische Gottheiten in spätantiken mandäischen Texten (1999)

Lilla Russel-Smith, Uygur Patronage in Dunhuang. Regional Art Centres on the Northern Silk Road in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (2005)

idem, The 'Sogdian Deities' Twenty Years on: A Reconsideration of a Small Painting from Dunhuang in: Buddhism in Central Asia II. Practices and Rituals, Visual and Material Transfer (2022)

Tonia M. Sharlach, An Ox of One's Own. Royal Wives and Religion at the Court of the Third Dynasty of Ur (2017)

Michael Shenkar, Intangible Spirits and Graven Images: The Iconography of Deities in the Pre-Islamic Iranian World (2014)

idem, The Religion and the Pantheon of the Sogdians (5th-8th Centuries CE) in Light of their Sociopolitical Structures (2017)

idem, The So-Called "Fravašis" and the "Heaven and Hell" Paintings, and the Cult of Nana in Panjikent (2022)

Marten Stol, Nanaja in: Reallexikon der Assyriologie, vol. 9 (1998)

Michael P. Streck & Nathan Wasserman, More Light on Nanāya (2013)

Aaron Tugendhaft, Gods on Clay: Ancient Near Eastern Scholarly Practices and the History of Religions in: Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices. A Global Comparative Approach (2016)

Joan Goodnick Westenholz, Nanaya, Lady of Mystery in: Sumerian Gods and Their Representations (1997)

idem, Trading the Symbols of the Goddess Nanaya in: Religions and Trade. Religious Formation, Transformation and Cross-Cultural Exchange between East and West (2014)

Xinjiang Rong, The Colophon of the Manuscript of the Golden Light Sutra Excavated in Turfan and the Transmission of Zoroastrianism to Gaochang in: The Silk Road and Cultural Exchanges between East and West (2022)

Gioele Zisa, The Loss of Male Sexual Desire in Ancient Mesopotamia. ›Nīš Libbi‹ Therapies (2021)

#mesopotamian mythology #sumerian mythology #mythology #bactrian mythology #sogdian mythology #sogdia #nanaya

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