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evidence-based-activism · 6 months ago

Note

you’re still ignoring WHY the rates for men are so high, because women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes. Women abuse children more and initiate 70% of domestic violence, yet men are still portrayed as the villains. You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously. You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. and are very gender essentialist themselves. Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take.

Hi -

So, I'm going to answer this ask and the one that includes the bustle link that I expect was also sent by you? However, I'm not going to continue putting in this degree of effort (i.e., reading and researching the information you send) unless you start matching that effort. It will be difficult for you to do so in an ask (although I suppose you could try), so I suggest you reblog this post to further discuss.

So, on to the response:

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No, there is not a significant reporting gap (at least, not one caused by sex).

You said "women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes", but there is no evidence that is the case. Let's take the crime data from two sources: the criminal victimization survey by the BJS [1] and the FBI crime data explorer [2]. These two sources are helpful for this discussion because the BJS attempts to determine total offenses including those not reported, while the FBI only looks at reported offenses.

For 2022 (rounding numbers) and looking at violent offenses (excluding homicide as the BJS report is interview based):

Male violent crime: 4,750,000 estimated by the BJS and 1,990,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 42% reporting rate

Female violent crime: 1,220,000 estimated by the BJS and 777,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 64% reporting rate

These numbers would suggest that more female offenders than male offenders are reported (i.e., a greater percent of female offenders, even though in absolute terms there are far fewer female offenders). However, there are some caveats to this data that makes me reluctant to state this conclusion:

The crime definitions between the BJS and FBI differ slightly. For example, I had to search through the "other crimes" for the FBI to find simple assault and several additional sexual assault categories to try and match the overall BJS "violent crime" statistic.

These stats are incident based not offender based. So, for example, if John commits 10 aggravated assaults and 5 of his victims report the assault to the police, 5 incidents are recorded in the system. Therefore, recidivism may or may not play a role in reporting rates.

I calculated the rate using the offender stats for individual offenders and "both male and female offender". Proportionally speaking a greater percent of female offenders are in the "both" category (23% vs 6%). Other statistics suggest more severe crimes are more likely to be reported to the police (e.g., 50% of aggravated assault is reported vs 37% of simple assault). If we make the assumption that violent crimes involving multiple offenders are more likely to be severe, then this could partially explain the disparity.

However, this point is essentially irrelevant, as the statistics previously discussed in the CDC report don't rely on reported crimes, they specifically interview representative samples in order to determine prevalence rates. (The difference between this data (and data in the BJS report) and the number of reported cases is how we know these crimes are under-reported.)

Just to drive the point home: the BJS study, which again, looks at both reported and unreported crime indicates:

Men take part in 84% of violent crimes and the only offender(s) in 79% of violent crimes (the stats for women are 21% and 17% respectively)

The offender-to-population ratio is 1.6 for men and 0.3 for women. That means the share of men in the "offender population" is 60% more than the share of men in the US population. The share of women offenders is 70% less than their share of the US population.

And before you send me another debunked myth: no men are not victimized more: the victim-to-offender population ratio for all violent crimes is 1.0 for both men and women.

I've also talked about how men don't under-report abuse (at least, not anymore than women do) in the past, so see this post for a couple more sources.

There's also no evidence that crimes committed by women get taken less seriously. However, it is true that when women do commit crimes, they tend to be less severe than the crimes committed by men (i.e., women commit more simple assault and aggravated assault). Given this, women's crimes may be taken "less seriously", but that's because the crimes are less serious, going by the accepted definitions of the crime. (And this is not my personal opinion! There is an actual "crime hierarchy" used in the American justice system that ranks crimes by degree of severity.)

In terms of legal consequences, women and men receive similar sentence lengths with one major caveat [3]. Caretakers of children, especially, young children, routinely received shorter sentences. Since women are more likely to be the primary caretaker of children, they'd be more likely to see this sentence reduction. However, this gap has been closing since the introduction of mandatory minimum sentencing. Some research suggests women may receive harsher sentences than men for "traditionally male crimes" [4].

Either way, crimes by women are clearly taken at least as "seriously" as crimes by men.

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No women do not abuse children more.

You said "Women abuse children more", but this is an oft-repeated statement from terribly misinterpreted data.

The misconception comes from data from the child maltreatment report from the HHS [5]. This report looks at reports of child abuse and neglect. In it they found that 52% of victims had a female perpetrator and 47% had a male perpetrator. At first glance, this looks like women abuse more children (hence the wide-spread misinterpretation), however this neglects to take several things into consideration.

First, since about 51% of the population is female, even if we considered nothing else, these values would suggest parity in maltreatment (abuse + neglect) rates. Of course, even this interpretation is deeply flawed, but I thought it merited pointing out.

Second, and perhaps most important, these stats are not looking at incidence or even prevalence rates. This isn't a rate at all. For example, you may be tempted to interpret these as "52% of children in a women's care are abused" or "52% of women abuse children". These are, and I must stress this, completely incorrect interpretations. These stats say only that of child maltreatment (abuse+neglect) victims identified by CPS, 52% of them were maltreated by a women.

Next, these stats fail to take into account the fact that many more women are the primary caretaker of children. According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), mothers spend 80% more time caring for children than fathers. This disparity widens even further when you exclude the "entertainment" categories like playing or reading to children (130% increase, or more than double) [6]. This matters because it provides some insight into how rates of abuse would be different. You need to adjust for time spent with children to get a meaningful rate. Another way to look at this is that despite mothers spending almost twice the amount of time around children as fathers, they account for the same number of perpetrators. This alone should tell you that a child is more likely to be safe in the company of a randomly selected woman than a randomly selected man.

In case you still aren't convinced however, the report also clarifies that the perpetrator sex varied widely by maltreatment type. Women were the perpetrator in 58.5% of neglect cases (vs 41%) and 70.5% of medical neglect cases (vs 29%). But men were the perpetrator in 49.5% of physical abuse cases (vs 49%), 89% of sexual abuse cases (vs 8%), and 59% of emotional abuse cases (vs 41%). While no form of child maltreatment is ever acceptable, I hope I don't need to explain how abuse (which "requires an action") is different from neglect (which "occurs from an inaction") and requires different responses.

Speaking of neglect: there is much discourse on how much of the neglect (and medical neglect) registered by CPS is "true neglect" and how much is a result of poverty. This is particularly relevant considering single mothers are much more likely to live in poverty than married couples or single fathers. Examples of this may include: a mother doesn't have enough money to buy food and pay for rent so she and her child eat very little until her next paycheck, a single mother can't miss work without being fired so she sends her sick child to school, a single mother can't pay for child care so she has to choose between leaving her child home alone or having an unfit adult (her own abusive parent? an unsuitable boyfriend?) watch her child. In all of these situations, something absolutely needs to be done to help the child, but it likely isn't the same something as a child who's being beaten or sexually abused by his father.

Other notes on neglect: even the relatively higher proportion of female perpetrators for neglect and medical neglect in this sample are well below parity when adjusted for time spent with the child. It’s also likely that men’s rates of neglect are likely severely under-reported here. Why? Because a neglect case is rarely (if ever) opened for absentee ("deadbeat") dads; it's also unclear how many men with non-primary custody are listed as perpetrators of neglect. (I ask you: if mothers are considered neglectful for failing to intervene on behalf of their child in abusive/neglectful situations, why aren't fathers?)

Other studies on child abuse perpetration (sadly no national reports) show:

Evaluations of child fatalities in Missouri over a 8-year period showed men inflicted 71% of fatal injuries on young children [8]

Evaluations of fatal and nonfatal abusive head trauma over a 12-year period at the Children's Hospital of Denver found 69% of the perpetrators were male (including 74% of the perpetrators of fatal head traumas) [9]

Data from conviction rates and victimization surveys suggest that 4-5% of adult, child sex offenders (as in child sex offenders who are adults) are female, meaning that 95-96% are male [10]

Altogether, this indicates that men are more likely to abuse a child in their care than women. Unsurprisingly, it’s safer for children to be around women than around men.

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No, women do not initiate more domestic violence/commit the same amount of abuse.

You said "women ... initiate 70% of domestic violence". It took me a while to find a source for this statistic, but I eventually found out it comes from a poorly done study that unfortunately finds company with a number of other poorly done studies touted by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Before we address that study specifically: a brief history of the nonsense plaguing domestic violence research.

To be clear, this is not a new discussion, we (the general we) have been having this same discussion about whether there's gender parity in domestic violence for, oh, 50 years or so. It is, possibly not entirely, but certainly mostly the result of the "Conflict Tactics Scale" (CTS). Intended for use in family violence research, it has several methodological flaws which make its results ... let's go with unreliable.

I really thought I'd discussed the CTS before now ... but can't find anything on my blog. But there is this post which is a nice pictograph about this next topic, which I will loop into our discussion of the CTS.

So ... why is the CTS so unreliable? Because "domestic violence" is not a homogeneous phenomenon. If I asked someone to picture an abusive relationship they are almost certainly going to imagine an abusive man controlling his partner through intimidation, likely restricting her behavior, and possibly hitting or otherwise physically harming her. This "typical" dynamic is what we think of when we hear "domestic abuse/violence". (I'd argue that it's what we should think of when discussing domestic violence, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.)

Notably, what this doesn't include is the -- far more common -- case of situational violence. A "typical" example of situational violence is arguments that "gets out of hand" and end with one partner slapping/shoving/etc. the other (switching between perpetrator for different incidents) or two people who routinely get "nasty" (name calling, personal insults) to each other during arguments. There's no intimidation or controlling behavior and it doesn't escalate. It also is generally not associated with significant victim hardship (i.e., no/little increase in depression, anxiety, or PTSD; little fear or feeling unable to escape the relationship; no or few physical injuries; little or no economic hardship; etc.). It's also what's predominately being measured by the CTS.

This isn't to say that situational violence is "okay". It clearly isn't, no more than a bar fight or slapping a co-worker is okay. It is, however, far more comparable to these examples (bar fight, slapping a coworker, etc.) than it is to the standard conception of domestic violence (which itself is more comparable to being a prisoner of war [11]). Some people have tried to resolve this by renaming the standard conception to "intimate partner terrorism" or "domestic abuse with coercive control". I have ... mixed thoughts on this, so I'm going to leave it at this for now.

If you'd like to read more about this, Michael P. Johnson at PSU (who originally proposed this division back in the 1990s!) has written a book and also has numerous articles about the topic.

I have a lot of sources about the CTS/differences in violence perpetration rates, but this post is already very long and I plan to make a whole separate post about this at some point. So, I'm going to briefly summarize the points and give some references that would be particularly helpful.

So, the issues with CTS include:

Failure to include a full range of possible violent behaviors, including many that are almost always perpetrated by men, including: rape, murder, choking, and suffocation.

Failure to examine post-breakup/divorce time periods, despite post-separation being one of the most dangerous time periods for abused women (but, notably, not men).

Failure to examine context. This gets back at the paradigm I mentioned above: studies that do examine context have shown that the vast majority of coercive controlling violence (i.e., traditional abuse) is perpetrated by men and the vast majority of responsive violence (i.e., self-defense) is perpetrated by women.

Failure to examine the severity of the violence and/or violence impacts. Studies have also shown that women routinely receive the more severe injuries than men. That applies to both the injuries received from coercive controlling violence and from situational violence. Notably, men are rarely ever injured from responsive violence. Women also routinely report more severe psychological and social problems as a result of abuse.

Extremely poor phrasing of the questions. The CTS is unique in its false positive rate, as has been established by several other measures of violence. For example, simply adding the stem "Not including horseplay or joking around..." reduced the number of violent incidents reported and also showed higher rates of female victimization than male victimization.

Inconsistency with every other scale/measure used for determining prevalence rates of abuse! Hopefully it is obvious why this is an issue, but as an example: if I created a new measure for "depressive symptoms" and I found that it correlated very poorly with every other accepted measure of depressive symptoms then my new measure would be considered to have very poor "convergent validity". In non-politicized situations, my measure would likely never make it to the publishing stage, and would certainly fall out of use once this poor validity demonstrated by another study. Unfortunately, science is not immune to politics any more than the people conducting it are, as we can see with the survival of the CTS.

I gathered this information from a bunch of sources, but I've selected a few reviews (i.e., papers that "review" or condense many other papers into one) that would be helpful to you [12-16]. I recommend [12] in particular, although [13] touches on much of the same information and is much shorter. Ultimately, the CTS can, at most, be considered a measure of situational violence (and it's not even very good at that!).

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So, finally, why is the 70% study [17] particularly bad?

All of the above problems with CTS apply, but in addition to all of that, they didn't just use the already flawed measure as it was ... no they, narrowed it down into 6 total questions. In total it asked about the respondent's perpetration of victimization of the following forms of violence: threatening with violence, pushing/shoving, throwing something, slapped, hit, kicked. They then "assessed" severity by asking a single question about injuries ("How often has partner had an injury, such as a sprain, bruise, or cut because of a fight with you?" and the corresponding victimization version.)

So, let's see ... failure to include predominately male forms of violence? Check. Further exclusion of even the existing items on the CTS that do examine this? Check! Failure to examine time past the relationship? Check. Failure to examine context? Check! Failure to examine severity of violence? Check. (Asking about a sprain or a bruise but not hospitalizations? broken bones? concussions?) Inconsistency with all other measures? Definitely!

Other problems with the study: they asked individuals to rate their perpetration and victimization, they did not examine their partners responses to such questions. This is a problem for a study like this, given that men tend to over-estimate their partners violence towards them and under-estimate their own violence towards their partner, and women do the opposite over-estimating their own violence and under-estimating their partners [12]. A note that a related problem has also shown up for the original CTS (i.e., if you asked both partners to complete the scale, their responses may agree on the "explaining a disagreement" item pair, but there was little if any agreement on the severe items like the "beating up" item pair).

To make a bad problem even worse: they condensed their multi-item (8-point) scales into binary (yes/no) categories and 3-item (low/medium/high) categories. This reduction in variance likely created artificially high rates for women and artificially low rates for men.

Hilariously (infuriatingly), they make it all the way through this data and then acknowledge that their study may not actually have examined domestic abuse at all! Instead it describes "common couple violence or situational violence", which, again, goes back to what the paradigm I introduced earlier. Of course, they don't revise their title or abstract to be less misleading ... that wouldn't be sensational enough.

Also, just to point this out: even this poorly designed, misleading study still showed "men were more likely to inflict an injury on a partner than ... women". So ... there you go. Even tipping the scales/design as far in favor of a "gender symmetry" result as they can possibly go, women still end up injured more than men.

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So, for the rest of your ask:

"yet men are still portrayed as the villains"

well when 1 in 3 men around the world openly admit to abusing women, and they are the perpetrator of 90+% of homicides, and 10-67% of men openly admit to believing non-defensive physical and sexual violence against women is at least sometimes okay it's pretty easy to see why women can see them as the villain/enemy.

"You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously."

This is one of those cases where critical thinking skills are pretty important! Let me start you off:

Do I think that a social media post will garner a representative sample from which to draw conclusions? Or is more likely that people who agree with the post will comment on and re-blog it, spreading it more people who are more likely to agree with it?

Can I see the re-blog I'm making comments about (i.e., evidence-based-activism's re-blog?). If not, (hint: it's not in the re-blog viewer :)) is it possible that there are other hidden replies that are disagreeing with this post?

Maybe most importantly: do I need female-on-male or female-on-female violence to be as common as male-on-female and male-on-male violence in order to show compassion to those who do experience it? (Hint: you shouldn't!! Something doesn't need to be common to deserve sympathy and rare =/= excusable.)

In addition, this is touching on a pretty common issue with discourse these days -- the prioritization of "feeling" over "being". Someone (male or female) may feel safer around men, but statistically speaking they are safer around women. It's reasonable to respond to and accommodate people's feelings on an individual basis, it's not reasonable to base an ideology or policy around them.

"You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. ... Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take."

Similar to the last point ... views on social media are not representative of a population. Views that you, specifically, are seeing are not representative! If they were, then "well, I see more posts preemptively criticizing people for not including men than I see posts excluding men" (which is true, almost every post I read now-a-days includes caveats like "but men are abused too!! and women can be abusers!!") would have been a valid counter-argument to your ask. But see, I know that my experience on social media is not universal, and I should hope you can acknowledge the same of your own!

Also ... to be fair to all these unnamed "radfems", I'm guessing that you would consider my posts (like this response) to be an example of someone "saying this", which is very much not the case. I am acknowledging social trends and making reasonable generalizations to allow for communication about a complex topic (you know, the way people do for any and every topic ever), but I'm not claiming that no women is ever abusive or that no man has ever been abused. I'm guessing that these other posts are pretty similar (if less verbose).

side note, you also said: "radfems ... are very gender essentialist themselves".

Either you don't know what "gender essentialist" means or the people you are talking to/about are not radfems. I acknowledge that there are a number of people going around and saying they're radfems, but the nice thing about a political group like this is they have (at least some) defined beliefs.

So, for example, if someone went around saying they are a communist, but then when asked to describe their desired economic system, describes an economy based around the free market and decentralized production ... then they aren't a communist no matter what they call themselves. A command economy is a central tenant to communism, so much so that a desire to implement one/have one is intrinsic to being a communist.

In the same way, if someone is calling themselves a radfem, but supports the preservation of gender/gender roles or believes that femininity/masculinity is biologically innate ... then they aren't a radfem.

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TL;DR:

Violent crimes for women and men are reported at similar rates.

Women and men are punished similarly for violent crimes (i.e., people do take crimes by women seriously).

Children are safer in the company of women than men. There is insufficient research to accurately describe perpetrator demographics of "minor" child abuse/neglect, but there is significant research indicating that men are the perpetrator of the the vast majority of severe injuries, fatal injuries, and sexual abuse.

Men commit the vast majority controlling domestic violence (the type of violence people think of when thinking about domestic violence); women's violence is predominately responsive. Women are also the recipients of the vast majority of injuries (minor and severe) and are the victim of almost all fatalities.

Social media posts are not representative studies.

Critical thinking skills are important!

And, everyone -- regardless of sex or any other demographic characteristic -- deserves compassion when harmed. It is still appropriate talk about trends and create policies that assist the majority of those harmed.

A reminder that I will expect a reasonable degree of engagement with this information if you plan to engage in further discussion! I'll answer the bustle link ask, but after that I'll simply delete asks that don't make a genuine attempt to think critically about this information. (Clarifying questions are okay to ask though :)).

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References below the cut:

Criminal Victimization, 2022 | Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2022.

“National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Details Reported in the United States .” Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend.

Myrna S. Raeder Gender and Sentencing: Single Moms, Battered Women, and Other Sex-Based Anomalies in the Gender-Free World of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 20 Pepp. L. Rev. Iss. 3 (1993) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol20/iss3/1

https://web.archive.org/web/20240406064949/https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/jan/12/intimate-partner-violence-gender-gap-cyntoia-brown

Child Maltreatment 2022. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/child-maltreatment-2022.

“Average Hours per Day Parents Spent Caring for and Helping Household Children as Their Main Activity.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-parent.htm.

Shrider, Emily A., Melissa Kollar, Frances Chen, and Jessica Semega, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-273, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2021.

Schnitzer PG, Ewigman BG. Child deaths resulting from inflicted injuries: household risk factors and perpetrator characteristics. Pediatrics. 2005 Nov;116(5):e687-93. doi: 10.1542/peds.2005-0296. PMID: 16263983; PMCID: PMC1360186.

Starling SP, Holden JR, Jenny C. Abusive head trauma: the relationship of perpetrators to their victims. Pediatrics. 1995 Feb;95(2):259-62. PMID: 7838645.

McCartan, K. (Ed.). (2014). Responding to Sexual Offending. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358134

Comparison Between Strategies Used on Prisoners of War and Battered Wives | Office of Justice Programs. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/comparison-between-strategies-used-prisoners-war-and-battered-wives.

Michael S. Kimmel. (2001). Male Victims of Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review. The Equality Committee of the Department of Education and Science. https://vawnet.org/material/male-victims-domestic-violence-substantive-and-methodological-research-review

Flood, M. (1999, July 10). Claims About Husband Battering [Contribution to Newspaper, Magazine or Website]. Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre Newsletter; Domestic Violence and Incest Resource Centre. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/215068/

Walter DeKeseredy & Martin Schwartz. (1998). Measuring the Extent of Woman Abuse in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships: A Critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/measuring-extent-woman-abuse-intimate-heterosexual-relationships-critique-conflict-tactics

Shamita Das Dasgupta. (2001). Towards an Understanding of Women’s Use of Non-Lethal Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/towards-understanding-womens-use-non-lethal-violence-intimate-heterosexual-relationships

Whitaker, Daniel J., et al. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 97, no. 5, May 2007, pp. 941–47. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020.

#feminism #male violence

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theunknownpoetandrewfoster · 2 months ago

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I want to take a minute to talk about the books that are in the therapist's office in 'The Gang Gets Analyzed'. Now, I've watched this episode at least ten times, and I never once paid much attention to them, but upon viewing it today, they finally stood out.

The first one that caught my attention was the Child Sexual Abuse book sitting atop the Lesbian Subjects one. I had to pause and rewind, and immediately I couldn't help but think they were referring to Dennis, Charlie and Dee (I've read speculation about her sexuality and it's a definite possibility as we know Glenn stated that all the characters are a little gay).

Let's look a little closer at the other titles - (I can't make out the very first one on the left, no matter how close I zoomed in), but from there we have Soul, Mind, Body, Medicine : A Complete Soul Healing SYSTEM for Optimum Health and Vitality (again, Dennis, anyone?), Psychological Research in Prisons (Mac and his daddy issues?), Power vs. Force (a book that explains how anyone can tap into their inner power to change their lives and the lives of those around them) (Again, this cries Dennis to me), Identity and Anxiety (Mac again), and finally, Listening Perspectives in Psychotherapy, a book that illustrates four distinctly different styles of listening that have emerged in psychoanalysis (Dennis and how he analyzes the other four).

I just found the titles not only interesting, but quite specific to the characters' traits.

Moving on...

Next up, on the top shelf, the first book Medicine Without Menopause felt like a dig at Dee, followed by Adult Children of Alcoholics (Dee, Dennis and Charlie), (And I Can only partially make the next one out) The Handbook of Psychiatric x (I can't make out the part in white but it sounds like something Dennis would've ingested at some point), Sex After Sixty (Frank, no doubt), and lastly Collective Behavior which the very definition of describes the gang to a t - {Excerpt from the book} Collective behavior takes many forms but generally violates societal norms. Collective behavior can be tremendously destructive, as with riots or mob violence, silly, as with fads, or anywhere in between. Collective behavior is always driven by group dynamics, encouraging people to engage in acts they might consider unthinkable under typical social circumstances.

Then we have the other books that are standing - The Human Animal (Charlie and possibly Frank), Adult Bipolar Disorders (Dennis, Mac?), When Life Becomes Precious (a book about taking care of a loved one with a terminal illness i.e. in reference to Charlie's Mom Has Cancer?), Woman Heal Thyself (another dig at Dee), and lastly, How to Live Well on a Shoestring Budget (Frank and Charlie).

This screenshot was taken in the last few minutes of the ep, and look! A new book has been added to the pile - Childhood Socialization. I don't know why I found that one to feel like it was calling out Charlie specifically, but could quite possibly refer to them all as well.

I feel like all of these titles weren't just mere happenstance and that someone picked these out to represent the gang as a whole or individually.

Either way, just thought there were a lot of interesting choices in the mold. Thank you for listening to my ted talk regarding the Gang Gets Analyzed.

#iasip #dennis reynolds #mac mcdonald #dee reynolds #charlie kelly #frank reynolds #the gang gets analyzed

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radmalenia · 5 months ago

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Men being sick filth, the likes of which woman couldn't come close to if she tried

It's also wild how they can never help but PROVE women's issues and concerns with them. They don't even try to fight them, they just prove them.

They're pathetic

since men couldn't tolerate the man vs bear discourse so now they're replacing it with woman vs tree. fucking dickheads how do they manage to snitch on themselves each time???? like "the tree would never say no" ong are they bfr 😭

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joels-shitty-puns · 1 year ago

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I'm gonna make a request again (sorry your last one was too good for me not to ask again) but this time for a jealous Joel! Maybe the reader and him have been friends for a while and she's oblivious to his flirting and she finally lands a date? How it goes from there can be up to you! I just love the jealous and possessive trope.

The Jealousy Bug

Pairing: Jealous!Joel Miller x f!Reader

Hi!! I'm so sorry this took me so long to write, but thank you for the request!! I hope you like it!! I got a lil carried away... hope its not too much smut.

~~~~~

(Reader and Joel live in Jackson, amid the apocalypse)

Word count: 6.8K (oof)

Warnings: 18+ only, MDNI!! Smut smut smut. P in V sex (likely unprotected but not specified. Its an apocalypse, yo.), masturbation (m and f), sort of dubcon? voyeurism?? sorta?, kissing, talk of genitals and arousal, horny behavior. Explicit language and mean names. Alcohol. Violence: infected, guns, punching, mention of a knife. Joel is kind of a jerk sometimes. Possessive. Mentions of loss and grief (all within S.1 of TLOU). I haven't played part II yet so we're just gonna ignore what we know happens there. Joel and Ellie are happy in Jackson. Joel and Reader are friends and sort of neighbors. Clueless idiots in love. A total asshole of a guy in the town. Lil bit of fluff/romance? Mention of bugs (pill bugs), but not in a gross way. If I missed anything, please let me know, and I apologize!

Other Stuff: Avoidance of reader descriptors, other than reader is AFAB. Mentions of having hair on the noggin. She/her pronouns. Reader is clueless and also clumsy as hell. Reader also drinks coffee and alcohol. Italics indicate thoughts.

__________

It was around 4PM when you filed into the community center for another mandatory patrol meeting. It may be an apocalypse, but even now, you wished this meeting could have been an email instead. Alas, that was a thing of the past, and you were unfortunately stuck listening to the usual spiel about necessary vs. unnecessary items to raid… The importance of remembering to ABC, “Always Be Cautious,” plants that can and can't be eaten, etc.

You sat in your usual spot, the back row next to Joel Miller. A year ago when you first moved to this town, first started patrol, you came into this very room not knowing anyone. Friend groups stuck together, each of the two front rows filled, yet a few empty spaces here and there. Instead, you walked towards the back of the room. A handsome man, who you soon learned was named Joel, sat by himself, three rows back, behind the last full aisle. He was alone. The whole aisle of chairs was empty. He sat with his arms crossed, and you could tell based on his posing that he was not the social type.

You were feeling a bit nervous, having finally found a sort of civilization in this mess, and hoping the people of Jackson accept you and not just shoot you, like most camps do when they see unknown faces. Unsure where to sit, you continued to head towards the back, slightly drawn to the gorgeous gray-haired man in the last row. Not wanting to intrude, you sat at the far end from Joel. You could feel his eyes on you as you sat, but you didn't dare look over and make eye contact. Years of survival instincts have told you that, especially when someone doesn't want to be bothered.

_____

When you first walked into the room, Joel looked up. He sat in the back row, as usual, not wanting to get close to anyone. However, even if he did, nobody gave him the time of day. They have heard stories of what he’s done, they have seen him around town, often grumbling about something. They could tell he wanted to be left alone and they had no interest in testing how badly he wanted to be left alone.

Joel found it easier to not form connections. Tommy kept telling him to make friends, come around more, socialize in the town. But Joel had learned over the years why making connections never ends well. All he has is Tommy and Ellie, and neither of those were his initial decision, but Tommy is his only family, and somehow he let himself care for Ellie.

But when Joel saw you… there was a flash of longing. He saw you smile gently at Tommy with a small wave. He could see you shrink walking to your seat past the cliques. You were beautiful, and if it were pre-pandemic, you'd be the exact type he'd probably take interest to.

But those days are over.

Or… so he thought.

He set his eyes back down on his hands in his lap, avoiding eye contact with you when you sat down at the end of the row from him.

Why did she sit so far away? Am I that horrible to be around? His heart questioned.

You don't want to be near people anyway. Good she sat far away. Leave me alone. His brain tried to argue.

Tommy droned on and on, the meeting nearing an hour by now, and you could feel Joel’s eyes on the side of your face every few minutes. You don't know why he kept staring, but it made you feel nervous. Did you have something on your face or clothes? Did you smell bad?

Tommy knew his brother well, sometimes more than Joel likes to admit out loud, and as he talked, he took note of Joel’s staring. At first his expression looked confused, maybe irritated or disgusted. Then it looked slightly… disappointed. But he kept stealing glances your direction, and so with a smirk, Tommy assigned the two of you to be on patrol together. Joel questioned his reasoning afterward, but he knew there was no point arguing with his brother.

After that day, you patrolled together. You both went to the bar with the group after meetings. You sat closer and closer to Joel. You managed to get some words out of him, and he listened to you chatter on. But it was when you brought him a cup of coffee before patrol one morning that he finally let down his guard. His heart had betrayed his defenses.

“What's this?” He asked, gruffly.

“Coffee, Joel…” you replied with a joking eye roll. “It's black. I know you don't like anything in it.”

He took a sip, shocked to taste that you actually knew how he took his coffee. “How did you know that?”

“I notice things Joel.” You patted his shoulder, walking towards the group.

_____

Now, a year later, the two of you were very close friends. You still surprised him with things you remembered or noticed, but much to his chagrin, the one thing you didn't pick up on were his advances. He'd call you pet names, be sweet to you, treat you like a gentleman, flirt a little, and it was like talking to a robot. You were clueless.

Tonight's meeting finally ended, the large group heading outside to the chill fall air. “You wanna get drinks with the patrol squad?” you asked Joel.

“Wouldn't miss it,” he winked at you, putting his leather jacket on his shoulders.

Although you went as a group, ultimately you and Joel spent most of the nights in your own little bubble, occasionally making space in your circle for Tommy, or Maria if she joined.

Tonight, the two of you sat at the bar, the patrol group spread throughout the room at different tables. Joel excused himself to use the restroom, and while he was gone, Jimmy, one of the other patrol members approached you. Hurrying before Joel returned, he flirted and asked you out on a date. You told him you'd think about it, that you weren't sure if you were ready for a relationship after years of caution.

Not technically a lie, you thought. Although you really just weren't ready for a relationship because your heart was already taken by your handsome best friend.

Joel returned just in time to see Jimmy walking away. “What did he want?” Joel grumbled. “Ah nothin, just wanted to say hi while getting a drink,” you lied. Joel accepted this answer and the two of you drank into the night. At the end of the evening, you seemed pretty drunk. Jimmy offered to walk you home, but before you had a chance to reply, Joel replied for you.

“I'll take her home, thanks.” He bit, turning you away from Jimmy. “I don't like the idea of that boy walkin’ you home. Don't trust ‘im. ‘Specially not when you're in this condition,” he wrapped an arm around you, shuffling you toward the door.

“You don't think I can handle myself, Joel?” You asked him, pulling away, a little bit irritated at him treating you like a weakling. “I seem to do just fine on patrol,” you argued.

“I know that, sugar. I didn't mean it like that. I just don't trust that guy. Heard how he goes through women. Don't want him trying’ anything with you,” he brushed his hand over your hair, causing you to soften at his words and actions.

You gasped lightly. “Is THE Joel Miller… jealous?” You knew he wasn't, but why not test the waters?

“What? Jealous? Of what? No ‘m not.” he balked. “Just lookin’ out for you…”

“Mmhm… you just wanna be the only big strong man walking me home, huh?” You teased, tripping over your own feet.

Joel caught you in his arms. “Big strong man, huh? ‘S that what you think of me?”

Shit… did I say that? You panicked. Maybe I'm more drunk than I thought…

Deciding to tease it off, you replied, “well you do always seem to catch me when I fall…” with a wink.

Falling in more ways than one… you thought, frustrated.

He rubbed his neck with the hand not holding you upright. You could almost see a pink tinge to his cheeks.

No, that has to be the lights playing tricks on my eyes… you thought. No way Joel Miller was blushing at your words.

“I kinda have to, ya big klutz. Practically a liability. I oughta tell Tommy to add a safety section on patrolling with you,” he bantered.

“Ah, shut up” you laughed with a push, causing yourself to lose balance instead of Joel. He just gave a knowing look, causing you both to laugh as you continued walking, now side by side instead of him holding you up.

After a few moments of silence, you spoke up. “You know, I could've walked myself home, Joel,” you stumbled, giggling.

“Whoa there, sweetheart.” He wrapped his arms around you again, propping you up. “Don't worry about it. Let's just get you home. You've had way too much to drink.”

“You're so sweet Joel,” you pouted at him, booping his nose. “Joelly Joel.” You giggled. “Jolly Joelly.” Another giggle. “I dunno why people think you're so grumpy. I think you're just a big teddy bear,” you closed your eyes, leaning your head on his shoulder while he stumbled forward, trying to keep you upright.

“Who says I'm grumpy, darlin’?” He tilted his head towards you, smirking. “The whole town, silly. Silly Joelly. Joely-poly.” You gasped abruptly, causing Joel to jerk and turn to face you. “What? What is it?” His hand reached for his knife on his hip. Old habits die hard.

“Joely-poly!!” You squealed. “Awe! Roly-polies. Remember those!? I used to love them when I was little.” You pouted. “Before this whole world went to shit.”

Joel thought back to the little pill bugs, playing in the dirt with them when he was younger. Teaching his own daughter about them. His heart aches for what he lost, but he also thinks of Ellie. He bets she would love the little bugs too.

“That's a cute nickname for you,” you smiled. “They're so cute. Just,” you booped his nose. “Like.” Boop. “You,” you wrapped your arms around his neck, hugging him tight. Another gasp from your lips.

He flinched again. “Darlin’, if you don't quit that I swear-”

“Joeeeel!” You pouted. “Do you think the roly-polies all died off with the infection!?” Your eyes welled up.

“Oh, sweetheart, don't cry. There's probably still some out there. Bugs could get cordyceps long before the fungus attacked humans, and they were still alive back then.” You looked up into his deep brown eyes through your fluttering lashes. “You really think so?” You leaned in, placing both your hands on his cheeks. His breath caught in his chest. “Darlin’, you drank a lot tonight-” you cut off his sentence, running your hands down his neck, resting your palms on his chest. His heart was beating a mile a minute. If he didn't know better, he'd worry his heart would leap out and fly away.

Your eyes lit up and you slid off his chest, lowering clumsily to the ground and gripping his sides for balance. You were now on your knees, eye level with his crotch, hands on his hips. His breath was ragged and his stomach full of twirling butterflies. “Wh-what do you think you're doin’?” He asked nervously. You looked up at him with big eyes, your hands slowly falling down from his hips to his thighs as you tried to balance yourself in your drunken state. He couldn't help but feel his pants begin to tent at the position you were in. He would never take advantage of you in your current state, but trying to ignore the desire brewing in his body after so many months of unrequited feelings was challenging. Did you finally see his advances for what they were? Feelings instead of friendliness?

You grinned up at him, finally regaining balance. “I'm gonna go look for ‘em!” you turned and waddled away on your knees, heading a couple feet away, towards a patch of flowers off the path.

She just needed to use me as a ladder, or what…? Joel thought to himself with a sigh and shaking his head in disappointment, his sexual frustration at its breaking point.

You crawled forward, falling onto your hands and knees in the soft dirt. Joel quickly stepped forward to try and grab you but realized, despite your lack of grace, you meant to do that. “Ugh… darlin', it's dark out here. It's cold. You're drunk. Let's get you home.”

“I'm looking for buggies, Joel!!” You leaned towards a leaf, arching downward so that your face was closer to the ground, ass up.

“Oh, have mercy…” Joel groaned under his breath, his eyes drifting downward. Your ass was up in the air, facing him, the fabric of your dress having fallen forward towards your front. Your light pink panties were on full display for Joel, leaving little to his imagination in this position. Joel subtly adjusted his pants, looking up to the sky and shaking his head in a silent plea.

You whined. “Joel, I don't see any.” You leaned farther forward, wiggling your butt somehow higher. Joel looked around, panicked at the thought that someone else might see you in this position. But luckily, you were close to your house and it was just the two of you out here. He turned back to you again. “I think it's time you get up and we go in-” you moved further forward, the streetlight shining above you and illuminating your ass. Joel tried to be a gentleman, but his eyes betrayed him. As he snuck another glance, he couldn't help but notice a little wet spot over the crotch of your panties. “In-inside…” he finished his sentence, words catching in his throat. He gulped, trying to divert his eyes.

Taking a shaky breath and stepping forward, trying to ignore the throbbing need in his pants, he lightly grabbed your arm. “It's time to go sweetheart. The bugs are sleepin’ I think.”

You looked at him and smiled mischievously. “I know, Joel,” you winked. Jumping up, you scampered towards your house, leaving Joel to wonder what the hell just happened.

“Woman's gonna be the death of me,” Joel muttered under his breath to himself. He caught up to you, just as you both approached your house. “Joel, I don't wanna go home. Can't I stay with you? And Ellie?” you batted your eyelashes at him. He rubbed his neck. “Ellie's with a friend tonight. But, you do have a point. You probably shouldn't be left by yourself in this state. Don't want you gettin’ hurt, or sick, and bein’ all alone.”

“Such a gentleman, Joel.” You touched his bicep, the two of you walking towards Joel's house across the street.

Hardly, he thought, grimacing at the reason he was aching in his trousers, feeling like an old creep, and a terrible excuse for a friend.

Once inside Joel's house, he gave you a baggy sleep shirt and a glass of water with some crackers to help with the alcohol. You changed, brushed your teeth with a spare toothbrush, and used the restroom. He let you have his bed, while he took the couch down the hall, scrunching his legs up to barely fit.

_____

Joel tried his hardest to ignore what he saw earlier and just go to bed, but the aching only continued, making it impossible to sleep. Sure that you must have fallen asleep by now, tucked away in his bed down the hall, he quietly reached into his pajama bottoms and boxers, pulling out his rock-hard penis. Even the mere touch of removing himself from his pants caused him to hiss, so worked up he could have cum just watching you bent over earlier.

He was a gentleman, but he was still a man, and one that hadn't been with a woman in a very long time. With as many people as he'd lost by one means or another, he'd told himself he wouldn't get close to anyone else. Sarah's mom. Sarah. Tess. Bill and Frank. Sam and Henry. He almost thought he had lost Tommy before Jackson, too. It was against his wishes that Ellie crawled her way into his heart, and then he almost lost her as well. He was beginning to think maybe it was him. He was cursed, doomed to have anyone he loved ripped away from him.

Which is why when you came to Jackson, he tried his best to ignore you. But you always greeted him, cheerful and sweet, like a little ball of sunshine that was somehow untarnished by the storm clouds of an apocalypse.

He was irritated to realize that he had made room in his heart for you. You caused an ache in his heart that yearned to be filled. A missing piece in his soul. A place for him to someday fit, tangled between sheets and loving words. It had been about a year since you moved to Jackson, and he still feared getting too close to you, yet he would try his hardest to woo you the way a gentleman should. Sweet nicknames, flirting, gentle touches. You never picked up on it. Whether or not you felt the same, he stupidly fell in love. Unsure if it was mutual, yet pretty sure it wasn't after all this time, he tried to ignore the dirty thoughts revolving around you when the late-night urges would hit him. Somehow it felt wrong.

But tonight, it was hard to avoid. Having you touch him. His face, his neck, his chest, his hips, his thighs. Kneeling eye level with his crotch. Slinking away, sticking your barely covered ass in the air, letting your wet panties be shown to him and only him. He couldn't get you out of his head as he stroked himself. First slowly, but then harder and faster, trying to reach his climax with the thought of him burying himself in that sweet spot underneath your wet underwear. How he longed to see you with his own eyes, begging for him.

He tried to be quiet, to keep himself hidden from you down the hall, but the noise of skin on skin grew slightly louder with each of his quiet moans and panting breaths that managed to slip from his lips. Imagining himself buried deep inside you, taking you from behind in the same position he saw you in earlier, imagining the tight grip around him and the slick noises he could only fantasize about. He could practically hear you moaning and sighing, the sound seeping from his subconscious to the living room. He pumped harder, swirling his thumb around the head, drooling with precum, as his climax grew closer. He could feel his strokes becoming less controlled and his balls pulling upward as he began to shoot load after load of white hot release up under his shirt onto his stomach. Stroking himself through it, he milked his last few ropes of cum out before laying back to catch his breath, slowly tucking himself back away in his pants.

Coming back to his senses, he realized the sounds of your moans and whimpers that he was imagining were still happening. Taken out of his fantasies when he finished, there was no reason for the sounds to still be in his head. Needing to grab a cloth from the linen closet down the hall anyway, he walked, nearing his bedroom door, and heard the unmistakable sound of you pleasuring yourself. Quietly, he padded down the hallway, closer to the door. He could tell you were trying to be quiet, but could still hear you, soft whimpers and pants, surrounded by wet schlick noises.

Fuck, he thought. He could feel himself already getting excited again, despite having just released a few minutes ago. He desperately wanted to join you in his bed, or at the least, stand by the door and listen to your sounds while pleasuring himself, but he wasn't going to be a creep, nor scare you to death. You were still his friend. Even if he did want to move the couch across the living room to hear you better.

_____

Meanwhile in Joel's room, you had tried to sleep. You really had. But tossing and turning, each roll causing your nose to be surrounded with his scent, you were thrown into a frenzy, like an animal in heat. Each smell of his cologne, shaving cream, deodorant, and natural body scent that you picked up from his bed sent a wave of arousal directly to your core. You wondered how many times he'd pleasured himself in this bed and how frequently. You wondered if he ever thought of you while doing it, imagining himself buried deep to the hilt inside of you, each drag of his cock more perfect than the last, much like you were imagining now.

You would be lying if you didn't say there were a lot of handsome men in Jackson. Granted, you had been without romance for a very long time, but still. Many of them were single, and some of them were very sweet and friendly. Yet for some strange reason, your heart had been drawn to Joel. The first moment you saw him, with his silvery curls and his grumpy face, his shining brown eyes and his patched beard, you were smitten. You were a bit disappointed that he seemed to be a massive grump, but despite what everyone said, he was always nice to you. Granted, you were always nice to him, so why should he be anything less, right?

He was always a total gentleman, calling you names like darlin’ and sweetheart, his southern drawl pulling you in like a lasso. His care for his unofficially-adopted daughter warmed your heart, and you could see he was a real family man from both their relationship, and the one he shared with his brother. It warmed your heart, especially when you befriended Tommy and Ellie, getting to hear them talk about Joel. Seeing the love they feel, even if they give him a hard time sometimes. You didn't see how people felt Joel was cruel or heartless, even with the stories you heard. Times were rough, and people did what they had to for survival.

You were always too chicken to make a move, and you figured he wouldn't be interested anyway. Surely him calling you those names and being sweet with you was just his Southern gentlemanly nature, right? You were nice to him, he was nice to you.

So tonight, when Jimmy, the local heartthrob in town, asked you on a date, you told him you'd think about it and let him know. Yeah, you claimed you weren't sure how you felt about relationships after all the world had become. Truth was, you wanted a last chance with Joel before throwing in the towel and settling for Jimmy.

Sure, Jimmy was handsome. Blonde hair, blue eyes, rugged, yet boyish. Several of the women in town had crushes on him, and he had had several of the women in town. You weren't clueless to the rumors about his playboy behavior. But it had been a while and well, you weren't getting any younger. It might be nice to have a partner, even if he did only want a short little fling.

So throwing back a few drinks, you decided you needed the liquid courage to finally make a move at Joel. One last effort to get his attention. You still didn't want to say anything to him, lest it ruin your current friendship that had grown so strong, but you could certainly use your body to entice a little. Drinking just enough to be brave, yet not so drunk that you were completely out of it, you gave an impression you were much drunker than you were, and needed Joel to help you out. Jimmy had almost been the one to walk you home, to your disappointment, before Joel stepped in, seeming slightly irritated about Jimmy's offer.

Yet after practically waving your ass in his face, showing him your panties (which you were sure looked wet), being inches from his crotch at knee height, and hanging on him all the way home, to now sleeping in his house and his bed, you were quite sure he didn't feel the same. Obviously his gestures were pure gentlemanly charm if he didn't bite after tonight's show.

So you tried to sleep, still a little drunk, but getting drunker off his scent. You tried to ignore the ache between your legs but the thought of him in this bed, groaning as his hand pumped his member to completion, made you throb. Soaked and antsy, you finally gave in and stuck your hand under the waistband of your panties. You let your imagination run wild, picturing him taking you in this bed, bringing you to bliss more than once. You could practically hear him groaning and panting, the sound seeping from your subconscious to the bedroom.

Tomorrow you would likely tell Jimmy yes. But tonight, you would try your best to get Joel out of your system, one stroke of your fingers at a time. But as you finished, coming with a whisper of Joel's name under your breath, you could still hear the groans and pants from Joel. Climbing out of bed, you moved to the door, pressing your ear against it. You could just barely hear the sounds of him panting and groaning, intermittent with the fapping of skin on skin. Delightedly surprised, you listened harder, feeling your pussy drool at the thought. How desperately you wanted to go out into the living room and climb on top of him. But he might not want that… he probably just couldn't sleep. Probably nothing to do with the scene you put on earlier. So instead, you slinked back to his bed, opting for round two.

At some point, the two of you fell asleep, panting and writhing with the self-induced pleasure, and the sound of each other through the door.

_____

The next morning, you awoke, walking down the hall to see Joel in his pajama bottoms and no shirt, making coffee. Your eyes scanned his broad shoulders and back, naked and tan. Bringing you back to last night's events, you felt your breath catching in your chest.

“M-morning” you stuttered out, nervously.

Joel jumped, having not heard you. He turned, greeting you with a good morning. A faint blush crept across his cheeks and he quickly turned his head to pour a cup of coffee, offering you some as well. Thanking him, the two of you sipped in silence, both stealing glances at the other and thinking of the night before. Both of you felt like you had a dirty little secret the other didn't know.

“Thanks again for taking care of me last night,” you added. In more ways than one, you thought.

“Of course, darlin’. Couldn't have you walkin’ home all alone or getting sick in the middle of the night. You're always welcome here,” he smiled.

“Well, I guess I better head to my house now,” you sighed. “See you later at patrol?”

“Course. Take care, sugar.” He brushed his hand over your arm. That's new… you thought. But still, probably friendly, unfortunately.

____

Hours later, you show up to patrol, noticing Joel hasn't arrived yet. Still a few minutes early, you look at the map, thinking over the route. You felt a tap on your shoulder, and turned around to see Jimmy.

“Hey, Jimmy,” you greeted, feeling slightly awkward. You assumed he probably wanted (and deserved) an answer. You rubbed your arm nervously, staring at the ground, wondering what to tell him. He was handsome, you thought, and you weren't getting anywhere with Joel.

“Did you, uh” Jimmy scratched behind his ear, “give any more thought to that date?”

Geesh. Not a lot of thinking time here…

“I did,” you replied. “I think… My answer is yes. I'll go out with you.” You felt a pang of regret in your stomach, but you wanted a connection, and you just weren't getting that from Joel, despite what you wanted to think from last night.

Jimmy grinned. “Really?” He picked up your hand, holding it in his. “That's great. I know you have patrol today, but maybe Friday? I'll meet you at your house at 6?”

“Sure,” you gave a small fake smile. “Sounds great.” He still held your hand, warm and soft and nothing like the rugged, large, callused hands of hard-working Joel. Although Joel has never held your hand, the times he's touched your arms, or held you up on your walk from the bar, he left a trail of goosebumps and butterflies in his wake, despite being warm to the touch.

Jimmy went to kiss your hand, just as Joel walked up. “What’s goin’ on here, huh?” He asked, seeming almost… angry, looking from Jimmy, to your connected hands, over to your face. “Joel,” Jimmy dropped your hand, giving Joel a curt nod.

“Jimmy..” Joel replied, teeth clenched.

“I'll see you Friday,” Jimmy smiled at you, touching your shoulder before walking away.

“What did that little asshole want?” Joel growled.

“Geez Joel, chill out. What's your problem? I'm not allowed to talk to people?” You crossed your arms.

“I toldja last night. I don't trust that kid. Too busy sleepin’ around with the whole town. What's he talkin’ to you for?” Joel furrowed his brow, looking over at Jimmy across the room, now talking to some of the other patrolmen.

“Gosh Joel.. seriously what is wrong with you? First of all, he's hardly a kid. He's at least in his thirties. Second of all, everyone he's been with, I'm sure has been consensual, otherwise Tommy would have kicked him out of the town. And lastly, but probably more important. What do you mean “what is he talking to you for?” You mocked in a deep voice. “Like I'm the only option he has left? Like I'm not deserving of a man talking to me? Not that it’s any of your business, friend, but for your information, Jimmy is taking me on a date on Friday. So fuck off, Joel.” You started to stomp away angrily, grabbing your pack off the desk.

“The fuck he is,” Joel muttered under his breath, so quiet you didn't hear and grabbing his pack as well.

_____

Five hours. Five hours of riding in complete silence, checking out abandoned buildings in complete silence, and taking breaks in complete silence. Even your first patrol wasn't this quiet, and you couldn't help but feel like he was somehow angry at you.

As irritated as you were with him, not talking to him somehow felt worse. This wasn't like him. Is this the grumpy side everyone talks about? Is this Joel, the asshole you have yet to meet?

Feeling confused, your eyes started to cloud, slightly teary with anger and sadness, yet also a bit of dread at going out with Jimmy. You blinked your eyes, sorting through the abandoned drug store you and Joel were in.

Finding some condoms on a shelf, you threw them in your pack. “What're you doin’?” Joel asked. “Those can't be sold, didn't you pay attention to Tommy? They're rarely effective this old.”

“Yes I paid attention, Joel. I know they can't be sold. They're for me. I figured it's better than nothing,” you replied bitterly. “I have a date in a couple days, I want to be prepared,” you scowled. Joel’s jaw clenched, but he didn't say anything, instead turning to look the other direction of the aisle.

Crouched down to search the bottom shelf for other items, Joel was still turned away from you, keeping lookout on the other end of the aisle.

You didn't even hear the stalker leap around the corner from the shadows and pounce on you. It opened its mouth, fungal strands spreading from its mouth towards your face. Pure fear pulsed through your veins.

“Joel!!!!!” You cried out, using all your strength to try and push the infected off of your body, but it was too strong.

You screamed and kicked, struggling to break free, when Joel fired his shotgun, shooting the enemy in the head and immediately running over to you. Throwing the infected off of your body as if it was weightless, Joel scooped you into his arms. His lips moved but you heard nothing. Your ears rang, high pitched squeals from adrenaline, fear, shock, and the bang of the shotgun.

Joel pawed over your body, roughly inspecting you for bites and wounds in a frenzy. When he didn't find any, he held you in his arms again. “It's okay baby, it's okay. You're alright sweetheart. Come back to me, it's okay. You're okay.” Your hearing must have returned. He rocked you, tears welling from your eyes and his. “You're okay. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.” He kissed your ear and the side of your head, still rocking you in a hug, sitting on the floor, inches from the now-dead infected. The two of you needed to get out of here, but neither of you could move yet.

Finally you spoke. “Why are you sorry Joel?” You asked with a sniffle. You wrapped your arm around his back, the other hand finding the back of his head, gripping his curls gently.

“I'm sorry for how I've been actin’ all day. I'm sorry I didn't see that stalker before he attacked. I'm sorry for being so possessive earlier. I'm sorry,” he held you tighter.

You pulled back to look into his eyes. “Joel, you couldn't have heard or seen that stalker. That's what they do best. You saved me and that's all that matters. As for earlier, you were being an asshole, and it did really hurt my feelings. All this time people have said you're such a jerk, and I didn't see it,” you pulled away from his grip, “but today I did.” You looked at your lap. “Don't I deserve to go on a date? Don't I deserve to have someone love me?” You picked at the hem of your pants, avoiding his eye contact.

“Oh, darlin', I'm so sorry. I never meant for you to feel that way. I just - you deserve something real, not a hookup like that guy wants. I know his type. He'll sleep with you and toss you aside. You deserve to be treated like a lady.”

You snorted. “Yeah, Joel. That's how things are nowadays, too. Gentleman just waiting to sweep me off my feet. Shit, you literally just saved me from near-death, something that happens all the time today, and yet you're saying I deserve love? To find romance? Yeah, right.”

Joel didn't say anything. He just looked into your eyes, lips pursed and moving to the side in thought. His eyes drifted to your lips and back up to your sight.

You continued. “I don't even like Jimmy,” you said quietly. “I like someone else, but I just got tired of waiting and wanted some kind of connection. Even if it's just a night in bed.” At the last part of your sentence, Joel grimaced, almost in pain. And then he thought.

“Wait,” he sat back a little, scanning your face. “Who do you like?”

You gulped. Why not a little more adrenaline? “Well, it was you, until you started acting like an asshole. But I realized you probably didn't feel the same way a while ago. Especially after I practically threw myself at you last night.”

“Threw yourself at me last night? What are you talkin’ about? You were drunk,” Joel answered.

“I wasn't that drunk, Joel. My movements were pretty planned. The placement of my touches on your body. My ass angled up in your direction. I wanted you,” you added, pointedly.

Joel looked like he was solving a complicated math problem. “So you… last night when you… I heard you, in bed, pleasurin’ yourself. Were you… thinking about me?”

You looked up at him in shock and panic. “You heard me?” You asked in a frantic whisper.

“Yeah, I uh… I did. I got up to get a towel and heard your uh… sounds” he cleared his throat.

“I guess I should tell you then that I heard you too,” you said with a smirk.

Joel swallowed, hard. “Y-ya heard me?”

“Yep” you replied, popping your lips on the p sound.

Joel had nothing to lose at this point. “I was thinking about you,” he proclaimed. “Thinkin’ bout that wet spot on your panties when you flashed your ass in the air. Wishin’ I was buried inside you.” He ran his hand across your thigh.

Your breathing picked up. “I was thinking about you too. Wishing you'd bust through that door and take me in your bed, running my nails down your back as we came together…” you mimicked the motion with your fingers down his jacket-clad back.

“Fuck,” he hissed, eyes closing. You glanced down at the noticeable bulge in his jeans. “I like you too, I just never thought you felt the same. Y’never seemed to pick up on any of my sweet talkin’ or my names for ya.”

“I just figured you were being nice,” you replied, glancing back into his eyes.

“You should know by now, I'm only nice to you,” he growled. “I'm sorry I ruined that today,” he glanced at your mouth, licking his lips. “Was just jealous. Want you all for myself,” he stroked your thigh again.

You sighed at the feeling, pulling him by his collar to kiss him deeply. The kiss was frantic and rough, both of you trying to get as much of each other as possible, a year of build-up boiling at the surface. Teeth clashed and tongues danced and you pulled each other closer, grasping at clothes and skin.

The two of you broke the kiss, needing a gasp of air. You started to take off your shirt when Joel stopped you. “Whoa, darlin'. I want you just as bad, but not here,” he gestured to the old building. “It's dangerous, not to mention gross in here. I wasn't kidding when I said you deserve romance,” he stood, pulling you to your feet. “We're about a 20 minute ride from base, let's head home. Make your fantasy of fuckin’ in my bed come true,” he winked, giving a smack to your ass.

_____

The 20 minute ride felt never-ending as you both stole glances at each other, your panties still wet with arousal, and him still sporting the tent in his pants, which was hard to miss.

Finally making it back to the stables, you both quickly undressed the horses and put gear away, about to head out of the barn when Jimmy and his partner rode up. “Hey, babe,” he called to you. It sounded wrong from his mouth. Joel tensed at your side.

Dismounting his horse, Jimmy strolled over to you. “Hey Jimmy, I was thinking. I don't think I want to go on that date after all. I'm sorry, I just don't feel the same way.”

“What?” Jimmy asked in disbelief.

“I know, I'm sorry if I hurt you. I- I like someone else. I just didn't think they felt the same way,” you replied sheepishly.

“Fuck you,” he spat.

“What?” You were in disbelief.

“Fuck you, bitch. One of the few women in this town who won't fuckin’ put out. I was even gonna take you on some shitty date before I got you into bed, and now you make a fool of me? Nah, I don't think so,” he stalked towards you angrily.

You stepped back, worried what he might do, but Joel stepped in first, nailing a punch at Jimmy's nose. “Don't you dare talk to her like that,” Joel yelled.

Tommy came running in, hearing the commotion. After hearing what happened, it was decided that Jimmy wouldn't be welcome in this town any longer.

Satisfied, you grabbed Joel's hand. “Why don't I show you who I really belong to?” You looked up at him, biting your lip.

“Lead the way, baby.” He pushed you forward, smacking your ass.

The two of you stumbled into his house, kissing with little regard for objects. Luckily, Ellie was still at a friend's house. The door slammed closed and you kissed furiously, undressing as you walked. Finally you reached his bedroom and fell onto the bed, where he made all your fantasies of the night prior come true. The two of you enjoyed the taste of each other's mouths, kissing and licking, while he pounded into you, leaving you breathless and screaming his name as you both came.

“That was even better than I imagined,” you sighed, rolling over onto his chest.

“That's my girl,” he cooed, kissing your head and rubbing your back.

“Mine,” he whispered.

778 notes · View notes

written-in-flowers · 4 months ago

Text

Her Soldier: Demon!San x Fem!Reader

Pairing: Incubi!San x Fem!Reader

Genre: Fluff, smut, angst MINOR DNI

Word Count: 14k

Summary: Injured during a mission to protect Lucifer's child, San begins to doubt his dreams of having his own someday. It's only your comfort that convinces him it's not all pointless.

Tags: polyamorous relationship (m/m/m/f) bisexual!demonline, graphic depictions of violence, serious injuries, scenes of child birth/child labor, blood, blood and violence, angels vs demons, religious imagery, underage storylines, mentions/allusions to underage violence, implied child neglect/abuse, crime, mentions of childbirth death and complications, fluffy vanilla sex this time, multiple orgasms, slight overstimulation, breeding kink, breeding.

Pretty Lady Masterlist

Previously on Pretty Lady

Next >>

***

He’d never seen anything like it before. The young woman laid on the stone table in the torch lit room, sweat gleaming on her body and blood oozing from her legs. Dark hairs sticking to her forehead, her face squeezed tight as she made attempts to push the child from her. Women wearing black cloaks stood around her, dabbing cold cloths on her forehead and encouraging her to breathe between pushes. One sat at the edge between her legs, gloves on her knobbly hands as she urged the woman to keep going. Around the room, monks in crimson cloaks held black candles. Her cries drowned out their low chanting, an incantation to welcome the new babe into the world. San couldn’t keep his eyes off the mother. She looked so young. She couldn’t be any older than you, and here she was harboring the greatest responsibility a servant of Lucifer can bear.

His seed.

He’d heard people around her say how lucky she is to be pregnant with Lucifer’s child; it is a high honor to carry the King’s child. They tell her that she will be the mother of a powerful lord, who will take over the world and rule as a living god. He heard one midwife talk of Lucifer’s other children, and how successful they’d become. Very few women have had the privilege to carry the new Antichrist. She should be thankful for this child’s birth is a slight upon The Almighty. San knew he’d be more worried about not dying during the birth than the honor of being chosen.

“Your first birthing ceremony, son?”

The soldier beside him leaned over and whispered, not catching anyone’s attention. San almost didn’t hear him. He saw more blood staining the mother’s white dress. San shed more blood than either of his brothers, but this was different.

“Yes, sir.”

Hector chortled. His former commander stood in bronze armor that popped against his green tinged skin. His horns, white and ribbed, curved from the top of his forehead and his wings remained close to his back. He stood several inches taller than San, and much wider too.

“Is it always this…bloody?” he asked, watching the midwife reach forward.

“Yes, sometimes bloodier depending on the woman,” he replied. “It is an honor to be here, Choi. Not just anyone is chosen to protect The King’s offspring.”

“I know.”

The messenger came to the Black Keep with a royal summons from His Majesty to San. San thought it might be to perform a demonstration in the frozen palace in the ninth circle, since he’d done it before, but he’d been wrong. Lucifer had impregnated another follower, who was due any day. They’d chosen him and others to protect the mother and child. His brothers begged him not to go.

“You could die, San. You could actually die if an angel gets their sword in you.”

“Please, decline. You can tell him that while you are honored, you cannot accept. San, you’d be going to the living world and you’d be facing holy magic. That can actually kill us. Do you hear me? A holy blade can and will kill you.”

“Sannie, don’t go.”

Your plea had been the softest of them. Even if you didn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation, you didn’t like the sound of it. The look of concern in your eyes haunted him as he stepped through the portal into the living world. He found himself memorizing your kiss when they arrived at the church. Standing in the circular room, watching a young woman give her life for her master, you kept rushing to his mind. It was possible that this birth would be successful and he'd go home to you. But, the likelihood of a fight was also possible. Every soldier faces the risk when they head into battle. San knows once he picks up his sword, he agrees to the fight. There’d been a time in his life where he’d join without hesitation, but that changed when you arrived.

The image of you sitting across from him, laughing at one of his jokes and engaging in conversation, brought comfort to him. In a world of blood and pain, you’d become a beacon of warmth; the candle in the window or the light in his valley of darkness. When he first looked at you upclose, seeing you in the soft firelight, he felt you slip through the chinks in his armor. He still thinks about the vision of you on the soft sheets, soundlessly sleeping next to him the morning after. He’d wanted to stay holding you a bit longer. San wanted to know the beautiful “human” who’d wandered into his life so unexpectedly. He’s thankful you’d decided to stay so he can keep digging for more.

“Father,” the midwife turned to the coven leader, “There’s something wrong.”

“What’s wrong?!” the mother panicked hearing this, eyes wide with fear as she looked between them. Neither priest or midwife answered her, but instead quietly spoke to one another. “What is going on?! What’s wrong with my baby?!”

San’s blood ran cold. He watched the pair continue talking before the priest went to retrieve a black bottle from a nearby altar. He bid the mother to drink it, telling her it’ll save her child. San saw him bring the bottle to her lips, and she gulped it greedily. Thin crimson trails leaked from the sides of her mouth, not going to waste as she wiped them. Suddenly, she screamed. A terrible, painful scream ripped through her chest and out into the world. Bony fingers gripped the sheets underneath her, and her toes tightly curled inwards. The midwives encouraged her to keep pushing, even as her screams turned into guttural snarls. San’s eyes widened as that final push ended in high pitched squeals drowning her out. The coven members awed and praised her as the head midwife pulled the squalling babe from her.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Hector asked, wiping his eyes. “I always cry at these things.”

“Yes. It’s wonderful,” San said in a monotone voice.

The midwife wiped the blood and matter from the baby, and San finally caught a look at it. Skin the color of snow, he saw small hands and feet kicking around before being swaddled in a blanket. The mother beamed happily, laughing as she held her baby to her naked chest.

“She’s beautiful, Francesca,” smiled the midwife. “You’ve done well, my child.”

“What’s her name, Sister?” asked one of the attendants.

“Gisella,” the mother sniffled, unable to stop her happy tears. “Her name is Gisella.”

Francesca kissed her daughter’s forehead, not bothered by her small claws or dark red eyes. San knew once the child grew, the human features would start appearing. He wondered if any child you two had would be the same. His heart fluttered imagining you in her position, holding his child and crying tears of joy. It was unlikely you’d want children or a family, since you never showed interest in having them, but he knew you at least liked babies. You smiled whenever you saw one in the street, and some friends of yours had them. The dream of you carrying his children, being a mother to them would be a dream.

“Choi,” Hector called to him from the birthing bed, “Come see her.”

In timid steps, San approached them. The stench of blood grew thicker, but the sight of the newest Antichrist took his attention away. The baby had His Majesty’s sharp nose and round eyes, but her mother’s lips and chin.

“Congratulations,” San said kindly.

“Thank you,” she smiled, immediately looking back at her baby.

“His Majesty must be informed at once,” the priest said.

“I’ll have one of my men go inform him…” Hector said, but San tuned him out right away.

An unnatural breeze blew in from the nearby tunnel entrance. His entire body moved into action. In an instant, a figure in bright gold armor appeared from thin air, raising their longsword to slash at San. He blocked it with his own sword, then swiped at them. The angel, with their large feather wings, lifted into the air and more of them appeared. Then, the battle began. San and Hector stood by the table while their fellows fought off those at the entrances. The angel who’d attacked San came at him again, but a swing of his sword to the midriff and then to the back of their wings wounded the celestial being. San then blocked another angel’s sword, kicking them right in the chest and stabbing them in the gut. All the adrenaline he’d held back came at him full force. It fueled his fast, precise movements, causing his heart to pound in his ears and made him hyper aware of his surroundings.

“Beat them back!” ordered Hector, who blocked an angel’s sword. “Protect the babe!”

He could not fail. If the angels managed to get their hands on the baby, they’d never see her again. One angel flew and landed on top of the table, reaching for Gisella, but a slice at the back of their ankles crippled them. San then stabbed them right in the neck, blood spurting from the wound and the angel clutched their neck as they fell. He had no time to observe.

“Can you stand?” he asked Francesca, who shook her head.

“Take her,” the young woman cried, handing Gisella to him. “Please, take her.”

“Take the baby and get out, Choi,” Hector ordered.

He gently took the baby from Francesca, and held it close to him. Due to all the noise and commotion stimulating her senses, little Gisella’s shrieks nearly blew out his ears. San, unable to use one arm, swung his sword at any enemy he came across through the tunnels. The portal back home was on the other side of the church, underneath the Vatican streets. Urgency pushed him forward, and panic had him holding the child close to his chest. He moved through the caverns until he reached a large room where seven demonic statues stood facing the center. Yet, right as he reached the very threshold, one of the angels grabbed him by the metal arm guard and spun him away. San lost his grip on Gisella, who floated in the air before being caught by an angel.

“No!” he screamed, scrambling to stand and rush at the man holding Lucifer’s child, but was then countered by another soldier.

The burning heat of a holy blade seared his skin, sinking further into his body. All the air in his went out in a single gasp. His muscles constricted, but he maintained his own strength. As the pain took over, San reached for the dagger on his belt. The handle carved with serpents slithering towards the rose pummel, San sunk his blade into the angel’s exposed neck. Blood poured out from the angel’s mouth and artery, while more bled out from San’s side. The angel fell first, laying flat on their wings as they struggled to stay alive. Demon blades held the same power as holy ones. Falling to the ground, San took deep breaths on the stone ground. Each one burned, and he felt them start to choke him. He grabbed at the wound between his ribs. His vision started to blur and blacken, but he blinked it away. Images suddenly flashed before his eyes.

Hongjoong smirking and winking as he stole a grape from San’s bowl.

Seonghwa smiling widely, a book in his lap and the sun beaming behind him.

The three of them sitting in the lounge, chattering and laughing together.

And you. Wonderful you. Your eyes are bright with happiness as flowers grow all around you. Face down on the floor, the stone scratching his cheeks and arms, he held onto images of the four of you. The sounds of his enemies fleeing with the squealing baby became muddled and inaudible to him. He thought of your laugh, sweet and cheerful. He’d promised to come home. More pain shot through him as the magic took over, sapping more life from him.

“Choi!” he heard a voice say from nearby.

Before, he would’ve been glad to be dying for his king. He’d feel honored to die fighting. Not anymore. Now, he wanted to live. San only groaned, rolling onto his back. He struggled for a breath, clutching onto each one as it may be his last. He told Seonghwa he’d be back in no time. It’d been almost a month. Hands grabbed at him, and he left the ground.

He told Hongjoong not to worry; that he’d been in tons of battles before.

He told you he’d be fine. He said he’d be home before you knew it.

Promises he’s unable to keep. San clung on to every breath, feeling the pain it brought and the hollowness of his chest. The sudden nothingness of the portal sucked more precious life from him. He heard voices all around him. Bright lights burned his eyes. Where were you? He wanted to see you. He wanted to see his brothers. Several hands laid him on a firm surface, and small wheels could be heard underneath him.

“You’re going to be alright, son,” he heard Hector’s voice. “You’re going to be alright.”

His Darling, who brought so much comfort to him. He’d never known real comfort until he ended up in Hell. The couple he’d been given to gave him the bare minimum. The witch, Hyeon, and her servant, Heechul, took him in as a baby and never told him about his true identity. He’d only learned what a family was when his brothers took him into their home.

Darkness came over him the moment the cart stopped. He forced himself to stay awake, despite the blood filling his lungs to choke him. San wanted to see you. He needed to see you one last time.

“YN…”

****

“Wake up, you stupid boy!”

The world came to him in a blur. He blinked back the rays of sun peeking in between the cracks in the curtains. Outside his doorway, he heard the other tenants starting to rise from their corners of the shared room. The stench of sweat, illness and filth sunk right into his nose at the first breath; he coughed it out as he did every morning.

“I said ‘get up’!”

A swift kick to his ribs took the breath from his chest. San curled inwards on the thin mattress, groaning as the pain subsided into a dull ache. Kicks to the stomach hurt more without any fat protecting it. Immediately, the boy stood up from his bed on heavy legs. Ahead of him, a skinny woman with messy black hair in a bun walked away from him to a rickety dresser. He watched her start slipping into a ragged chemise and stockings. In a corner of their small area, a man in rags sat passed out against the wall. The dark bottle beside him told San he'd drunk too much gin again. He recalled Hyeon and Heechul’s argument last night, and the latter likely drowned his sorrows in the drink. The yellowish puddle around him made San’s stomach churn.

“Daniel!” Hyeon screeched from her cot, using his English name.

“I’m up.”

He picked up the gin bottle from Heechul, and finished it off. The pure liquor stung his throat, but relieved his thirst and woke him up right away. All around him, he heard people starting to rise from their beds to begin their day. He saw Mrs. Cimorelli pulling on the top layer of her dress. His eyes scanned over her slim figure, taking in her soft curls and olive skin. A shudder went through him when he recalled a few nights previous, when he’d offered her his last bit of coin for a suck. His age, fifteen, didn’t matter to a whore like her. San snapped back into reality when a sharp hand hit the back of his head. This caused Mrs. Cimorelli to turn her head. It took her a moment, but she smirked when she realized he’d been watching her.

“Filthy lout,” Hyeon scoffed, pulling on her worn out boots. “You’re going to catch a pox one day, boy. You mark my words.”

“Ah, shut up, you ol’ cow,” he snapped back, rubbing where she’d hit him.

“You're lucky I got work, or you'll get more than a clout on the ear. You get yourself right and get going. The overseer will deduct your wages if you’re late.”

San glared at her. He'd grown used to it since arriving in New York. Whenever she started barking about work, he thought of telling Hyeon they’d do better starving back home than starving in a new country. Though, she’d quickly retort with, “There aren’t any jobs at home.” He’d then tell her fortune tellers and mediums did just as well in Korea as they did in New York.

When Hyeon turned her back, San quickly snatched the lump of bread she had hidden under her blanket. Taking a bite of the hard lump, he glanced back at Mrs. Cimorelli as he passed her. Her small wink and smile warmed his blood. If he made enough, he’d give her another go if he caught her on the street that night. San walked past the other tenants in the small apartment space, nodding to those he knew and turning from those he didn’t and walked outside. In the stairwell, he heard the hustle of the morning crowds. He heard and smelled everything around him. He heard babies crying behind closed doors; he caught Mr. And Mrs. Wang arguing about Mr. Wang’s drinking again; he saw Daisy, Irene, and Sarah walking up the stairs from their night on the streets.

“Morning, Handsome,” Daisy, straight black hair in a messy braid and dress slightly askew, smiled at him. “We missed you last night.”

“Sorry ladies, I had places to be,” he said apologetically as he walked down past them.

“Will you be out tonight?” asked Irene, a red blotch starting to bruise on her peachy skin. “You know I always save space for you.”

“If the boss lets me,” he winked, walking down the steps to the next floor.

The best thing about New York? The girls. Back home, girls shared the conservative, modest views of their parents. The women in the brothels looked tempting, but they didn’t service teens. The ladies he’d met in America did him as long as he had enough money.

Coming out into the street, San took in the sights and smells of New York’s Chinatown. It wasn’t strictly speaking only Chinese people. A melting pot of different ethnicities and races lived in the small community, working and surviving off meager wages. Those with a bit more sand did jobs for the gangs around the city. When he first arrived, San got a job at the textile factory working the looms. It was a dangerous job for a skinny boy who barely spoke English, but it was better than the street. Of course, any money he made went directly to Hyeon, who claimed to spend it on ‘keeping them above ground’. Heechul worked in the fish market, coming home stinking of fish guts and stagnant water every day, while Hyeon was a seamstress who told fortunes on the side. It was when he beat down two thugs trying to rob him that he caught the attention of crime boss Lee “Benny” Siwon. Siwon led the gang known as the Black Lotus, a gang known for smuggling, theft, and drugs. He offered San a place in his gang.

San had been working for him ever since.

Making a right turn down an alley, he passed through a market street where vendors peddled their wares. His stomach growled seeing the fruits and vegetables being left out. He bypassed a fruit vendor, and with a deft hand, took up the topmost apple in the pile. The vendor never noticed. Nobody noticed. He waited until he’d gotten a good distance before he sunk his teeth into it. The sweet juice filling his mouth pushed back the constant seed of hunger. San could never take food home, otherwise Hyeon split it and gave him the small pieces. One might think a new country with better opportunities would make the old witch turn over a new leaf. It’d done nothing.

San finally reached a small restaurant nestled between a butcher’s shop and a chemist. The black lotus sign hanging above the door told people who ran these streets. He walked in with a small smile, seeing people already at tables and servers taking orders. The boys sitting at a nearby table took notice of him first, all of them smiling and greeting him. He shook hands, and took the shot of gin that they offered. As the boys went back to talking about their various runs, San lit a cigarette and took his first puff of the day. Any minute now, Siwon will send one of his thugs to give them various jobs for the day. Everything from passing on messages, picking up or dropping off products to theft and beating people up could be assigned to any of them. San hoped he’d be sent on one of the more important jobs for once. Things like stealing from rival gangs, picking up money from extorted business owners, or roughing up people who owed money paid much more. Siwon promised he’d give him a chance one day, but ‘one day’ is too far away.

“Hey boys,” a tall man with square shoulders and an oval face approached them. In his tailored pin-strip suit, he looked like any ordinary gentleman.

“Shoiming!” the boys cheered, clasping hands with the older man.

“I got your jobs right here,” he said, holding up a few papers. "You know your streets. You know your marks,” he began passing items to certain boys, “Get the job done fast, you get paid even faster.”

Shoiming handed everyone a slip, and San looked at his. From the scrawled handwriting, he saw mostly pick ups and drop offs. He sucked his teeth. Pennies again. He supposed low wages were better than none. He stood up from the table, holding his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, as he tucked the paper into his pocket. It was then that Shoiming stopped him by the shoulder. For a split second, San thought he’d get a scolding for his reaction, but the large man didn’t seem angry.

“Do your work quickly,” he said, “Siwon has a big job for you tonight.”

“Really?” San’s eyes lit up. “What is it? Smuggling? Roughing up?”

“Something like that,” he nodded. “Go on, now.”

San walked with a pep in his step the rest of the day. While Hyeon thought he was at the factory, he was really jumping from place to place. He handed off packages and messages that couldn’t be sent through official channels. He bought and sold the items given to him by various vendors. San even took time to go into the fancy part of town where he picked pockets. He’d gotten away with a decent loot: a gold pocket watch, a few coins, three rings he lifted from a shop, and a snuff box he stole from a fancy lady. Siwon will be so impressed, he’ll take him on the big jobs. By nightfall, San felt nervous and excited. He came back to the restaurant with his loot and messages.

“Good haul,” nodded Shioming. He took the pocket watch, two rings and the snuff box. “Siwon’s not here. He told me to tell you to meet him at Flannery’s Hall. It’s on King’s street, not too far from here.”

“What’s that? Some kind of club?”

“Yes, now hit the bricks. Don’t be late.”

He left right away, going down all the alleys and side streets until he reached King’s street. The nightlife started buzzing to life around him. New York never slept, he’d come to learn during his time there. Back home, everything grew quiet once the work day ended. That wasn’t the case in this new country. Life kept going even as the moon reached high into the sky. He liked that. He never grew bored or anxious in the hustle of the city. Walking down a row of clubs and bars, San stopped outside the one with the sign ‘Flannery’s Hall’ written on it. He only stopped because his stomach twisted tightly. A pair of women’s boots hung on the newel post leading down into the building’s basement. San tried not thinking anything of it as he walked through the doors.

Once inside, a new world unfolded in front of him. In the small bar, he saw men sitting and drinking at tables with pretty girls. Except, most of the ‘pretty girls’ weren’t girls at all. They were boys in girls’ clothes and wigs who’d powdered their faces. In various stages of dress, they moved about the room to their marks while one “girl” sang up on a stage in a falsetto voice. San’s insides told him to run, but he knew better. Siwon didn’t like people who didn’t follow orders. He walked up to the bar where a young man stood handing out mugs of beer.

“Excuse me,” he said to the man, “I’m looking for Siwon. My boss said he’d be here.”

“Nah, I ain’t seen him,” the barman replied.

A lie. He likely didn’t trust San. Most white people didn’t. He huffed and turned to the room. San tried not noticing the boys around him. He found them to be beautiful in and out of their dresses. He supposed them dressing as girls made it easier for their customers to stomach their desires. San preferred boys who looked like boys and girls who looked like girls. Of course, he kept that bit to himself. If Hyeon knew, she’d kick him out for sure. She’d rather he be stealing than selling himself to old men.

“I know where Benny is,” someone said to him.

In a very short night dress and stockings, there was nothing hiding the fact that they were a boy. Blond hair cropped short, he wore a thin robe that barely hid the naked flesh exposed underneath. He sat on the bar stool next to San, light blue eyes sultry and flirtatious, and leaned closer.

“I can take you to him.”

“What’s it going to cost me?”

“For you? Not a dime. I’m Lucy,” he said, “Benny and I are pretty close. I can get you in with him.”

“He asked me to come,” San said.

Lucy paused, his seductive stare breaking for a brief moment, “Huh, alright. Come with me, handsome.”

Lucy walked him through the bar’s main floor and up the stairs. He tried ignoring the workers servicing their clients or sitting in their rooms waiting for the next one. San enjoyed a good brothel, but something about Flannery’s Hall disgusted him. Not the boys or the girls, but the clientele. Old, wrinkled men who want things that real girls would not do. He saw one man in just his trousers come out of a room holding his shirt. Even after being with the person inside, he still sized San up with hungry eyes. He nearly vomited before moving onwards. Lucy led him to a series of rooms on the third floor. These rooms weren’t much quieter either. His body grew numb. He regretted coming here.

“Do you know what he wants?” he asked Lucy, keeping the nerves out of his voice.

“What every man that comes here wants.” He brought San to the last room and turned around, “Just relax. It’ll be over a lot quicker than you think.”

He blew San a kiss, and walked away. San could run. He could turn tail back home and pretend he’d gotten lost. He can say he got picked up by cops. But, he knew Siwon. The old man would see right through him. It wouldn’t be his first time with a man, but those had been different. He didn’t do it for money or by force then. San turned the knob, took a deep breath, and went inside.

“-And I told him, ‘Sure you can have it, but let me tell you, this snuff bites back!’”

Siwon sat in a well furnished room with a group of other well-dressed men. He stayed frozen by the door, counting down the seconds before someone saw the young, good-looking boy in the doorway. Siwon lifted his head first, gleeful and sucking on the end of a cigar, and smiled at San.

“San! There you are!” He stood up and walked over to him, patting his shoulder. “I worried you might’ve gotten picked up.”

“I ain’t a whore,” San heard himself say defiantly. “I ain’t sucking anything I don’t want to suck.”

Siwon appeared stunned by his words. “What?” he said in disbelief, but then it came to him and he laughed. “No, no, Sannie. You don’t have to worry about that. That’s not why I called you here.”

“It’s not?”

“Hell no,” he said. “You’re a good looking kid, San, but my girls have to be delicate and pretty. You’re too rough for that kind of work. Nah, I got a better job for you.” He put his arm around his shoulders and brought him closer to the men, “You see these men?”

San nodded, and he immediately noticed their fine suits, pocket watches and shiny shoes.

“They’re some friends of mine from uptown,” Siwon continued. “I told them I’d show them a good time while they’re visiting our little corner of New York. Now, I got the ladies and the booze, but we need the entertainment. That’s where you come in.”

“I ain’t following, Siwon.”

“This,” he gestured to another boy on the other side of the room, “Is Tiny.”

Tiny stood much taller than San, with muscular arms, legs and chest. In nothing but a pair of trousers, he might’ve been mistaken for a grown man if the face didn’t give away his age. San saw the faint scars on Tiny’s bronze skin, and the scab on his lower lip. He gulped down his nerves when the truth came out.

“And you’re going to fight him.”

****

“San? San? Can you hear me?”

The voice came to him through a blurry haze. A gentle hand touched his face, and he instantly swatted it away. He pictured Siwon, the old man who’d caused his death, hanging over him with disappointed eyes. He’d lost the fight. Tiny beat him to a bloody pulp and he landed in the hospital. It explained the pain coursing through his body, starting at his torso and radiating across the rest of him. A low groan escaped him as a rough hand cupped his face.

“San, wake up,” a familiar high voice said, not in the usual forceful tone but tender and calm. “Wake up, Sannie.”

“I’m sorry,” he coughed, the breath he took hurting his chest.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for,” they said. “We’re just glad you’re home.”

“San,” a female voice spoke to him. Hyeon? No, not Hyeon. Someone whose voice calmed every nerve in his body. The other person moved away as the woman came closer. “It’s me,” she said, “It’s YN.”

Opening his eyes at last, he saw you next to his hospital bed. Your eyes, puffy and red, stared at him worryingly. The girls in New York looked nothing like you. They had bruises or scratches from rough customers, and they carried that New York bred toughness about them. You had sand, but softness too. If he’d met you then, he would’ve tried keeping it straight and narrow. He’d get an honest job and marry you. That’s what couples did back then; they got married. But then, he wouldn’t know who and what he was.

“YN…” your name left him in a hoarse croak.

“Yeah, it’s me,” you sniffed. “We’ve been so worried about you.”

“I’m okay,” he said unconvincingly.

“You got stabbed in the lung and started choking on your own blood,” said Seonghwa. “You aren’t okay.”

“What?”

Then the truth came to him. The birth. The angels. The baby. “Where’s Gisella?” he asked, panicking. “Did we get her back?”

“Gisella?”

“He means the baby,” Seonghwa told you. “They lost her,” he answered San’s question. “The angels got away before we could get her back.”

He’d failed. Once again, he’d let somebody down. “What happened after?”

“Don’t worry about that right now,” he said. “You stay here and rest.”

“What happened?” he asked more forcefully.

“They brought you here,” Hongjoong answered. “Hector told Lucifer they’d taken the baby, and, well, losing a kid isn’t great news.”

“You’re lucky he doesn’t blame you,” Seonghwa said. “The guy’s lost so many Antichrists that he isn’t surprised when the angels take them away.” He paused, looking down at his younger brother. “Let’s give San some breathing room. We’ll come back later, Brother.”

A pair of lips touched his forehead, and another hand ruffled his hair. San reached out for you, grabbing your sweater. “Stay,” he said, though felt himself dozing off again, “Don’t go.”

“I’ll stay here.”

“Until they kick you out,” noted Hongjoong.

San heard footsteps cross the linoleum floors and a door softly close. The scent of oranges caught in his nose, and he inhaled it until his lungs hurt. Your fingers pushed hair from his forehead, giving him a way to catch your hand.

“I thought you’d died,” you said in a whisper, afraid to break the quietness of the room. “When you didn’t come home after a week, I thought something happened to you.”

“The birth took longer than expected.”

“It made me think of what it’d be like without you,” he heard your tears thicken your voice. “I don’t like it.”

“I wouldn’t prefer it either.”

“Don’t ever do that to me again,” you said, sniffling. “You hear me?”

“I’ll try.” He felt you rest your head on the bed, still staring at him with watery eyes. San hated seeing his Darling cry. “Please don’t,” he said. “I’ll be okay now, Darling.”

“I can’t help it.”

He cupped your cheek and wiped a stray tear. Whatever painkiller they’d given him slowly took over again. He didn’t let go of you, worried about where he might end up.

“Just sleep, Sannie,” you said, kissing his inner wrist. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

****

He should be in pain. The bones Tiny broke with bloody fists should be cracked and poking through his skin. Blood should be dripping from the broken teeth and cut cheeks onto the floor. His jaw, his arms, and shoulders suffered so much pain that they must be in pain. Yet, when he opened his eyes, he felt barely anything. Only a dull stiffness in his muscles remained. A soft groan pulled itself from his chest, which did not feel broken or torn apart. He forced himself to open his eyes, but immediately regretted it.

“Welcome,” a man’s voice said from nearby. It didn’t sound like anyone he knew. “Name?”

“Huh?”

“Your name, son. What is your name?”

“Daniel,” he answered with his English name.

“Your true born name, please.”

“San.”

“Surname?”

“Choi.”

He blinked the pain from his eyes, and took in his surroundings. He found himself on a cold, hard floor. Looking around, he saw empty chairs in a carpeted room. When he glanced upward, he saw a man in a purple suit standing behind a window like a bank teller. Except, this wasn’t a bank.

“Choi San, Choi San, Choi San,” the suited man looked through a thick, leather bound book. “Date of birth?”

“July 10th, 1910.”

He sensed the man’s silence when he finally stood on his stiff legs. The man, dark skinned with tight black curls, looked at him in astonishment. All the breath came out of him at once, and he fixed up his suit jacket.

“My-My Lord,” he said, “Forgive me. We weren’t expecting you so early. You had four more years until you came of age. This is, I’m sorry to say, quite irregular for us.”

“What’re you talking about?” he asked, confused. He touched his lip where Tiny slammed his fist last, and felt the split skin. “Where am I?”

“You’re home, sir,” he answered. “I am Charon, ferryman of souls.”

“Okay, and what’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re in Hell, my lord.”

San’s eyes widened, and his heart jumped into his throat. “I’m where?”

“In Hell,” he repeated. “Since you are a demon, you came to my station instead of the forest.”

“Look,” he walked up to the window, “I know I wasn’t the best kind of kid, but I couldn’t have been that-” then he stopped. “Wait, what did you say?”

“I said that since you are a demon-”

“-What? I ain’t a demon.”

“Yes, you are. Look for yourself.”

Charon turned the book around to show San a list of names scrawled in black ink. He pointed to San’s name, “Choi San, birth date July 10th, 1910. Mother: Kim Youngmi. Father: Asmodeus, Prince of Lust and Lord of Depravity. You’re a Duke of Lust, my lord.” He paused, “Did you…Did you not know that?”

San stared at the names. That couldn’t be right. Hyeon and Heechul were his parents. As terrible as they were, they’d tolerated him enough to feed and house him. Hyeon always told him she’d given birth to him in their house in Korea. Heechul claimed to have delivered San on his own. No Youngmi or Asmodeus came looking for him.

“I can’t be. I just can’t.”

“But you are,” he closed the book, “You’re a very important person down here, my lord.”

“I ain’t a ‘lord’.”

“Yes, you are. Come with me. The ferry for Depravity hasn’t left yet.”

Charon walked out from behind the window and walked him to the front door. He led San out into what reminded him of the ferry back in New York. Thousands of people moved in straight lines towards the different colored ferries. A melancholic, dreadful feeling carried through the air. San thought he’d stepped into the most miserable place he’d ever been. He followed Charon down a flight of stairs opposite the one leading down to the crowds. By the ropes separating this line from the others, San guessed he’d gotten special treatment. Charon led him past the flowing black river, the crowds thinning the further they walked from the main ferries.

“Are all those people demons too?” he asked.

“No, these are reluctant sinners or those who received no baptism or funeral rites,” he said. “They’re taken across the river to Inferno’s port where they’re shepherded to Limbo. That’s where the sin seers figure out where to put them. Don’t fret, my lord. You’re not going to Limbo.”

“Where am I going?”

“Home.”

“Home?”

“The Lands of Depravity, located several circles above the circle of lust,” he said. “Your older brothers will explain more.”

“Brothers?” San gulped, “I have brothers.”

“You didn’t know that either? Whoof, whoever raised you certainly did you no favors,” he huffed.

Charon led him to a smaller dark green ferry. At the bottom of the ramp leading onto it stood a soldier in bronze armor. Charon approached with a self-important smugness.

Charon turned to him. “Here’s your ferry and your ticket,” he handed San a ticket from his inner pocket. “Hand it to the guard, and he’ll let you on board. It’s a short trip, but there’s plenty of food and drink there.”

“Thanks,” San said, reading the white ticket.

“You’re welcome, and I hope you enjoy your new home.”

San nodded as Charon left his side. Anxiously, he walked up to the guard.

“Ticket, please,” he said. When San handed it to him, he checked and then stamped an approval. “Welcome to Hell, my lord.”

“Thanks.”

San took careful steps up the ramp. It reminded him of the ferries back in New York, except this one didn’t have any people. An attendant in a purple vest and pencil skirt smiled brightly when he walked into the sitting room. She offered him refreshments, but he declined. He might vomit if he digested anything. Sitting on a chair, he kept an eye on his surroundings. He wanted to think he’d entered a sort of coma-induced dream. Right now, he’s really in a hospital bed. Any second, he’ll wake up and it would’ve been a big dream.

He figured out he was wrong once the ferry reached port. The attendant led him to the ramp and gave him the typical customer-service farewell. At the bottom, he spotted dozens of people leaving their own boats to come ashore. He might as well be in New York, coming off a ferry from one part of the city to another. San had no clue where to go from here. Charon gave him no directions, and the attendant told him nothing. Staring around, he saw certain people in suits holding up signs. He spotted a tall, broad-shouldered man in a suit holding a card with his name on it.

“Um, hello?” San approached him slowly.

“Choi San?” the man asked with bright eyes.

“That’s me.”

“Oh, wonderful,” he laughed with relief. “I’m Yunho. I work for your brothers. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, sir. We weren’t expecting you for a few more years.”

“Things happen,” he shrugged.

“As they do,” he agreed. “Come with me. I'm going to take you straight home.”

“Where is ‘home’?”

“The Lands of-”

“-Depravity, yeah, the Charon guy told me that. What is home? Who is there?”

Yunho guided him towards the turnstiles, “The Black Keep. Well, it isn’t so ‘black’ anymore, but the name’s endured the centuries. Your brothers, Lords Seonghwa and Hongjoong live there. When they received Charon’s message, they were overjoyed.”

“They don’t even know me.”

“That’s not important. You share a mother and father. Do you understand how rare that is for a demon prince?”

“My dad’s a prince?”

“Yes, Prince Asmodeus. Charon didn’t tell you?”

“He glossed over it.”

“As usual. I suppose it’s excusable since he has a lot on his plate. Things have been heavy for him since Lucifer added more ferry boats…”

He brought San over to a motorcar. Black with white leather seats, San hesitated to get inside. “I ain’t never been in a motorcar before.”

“There’s a first time for everything.”

The car ride distracted San from the city around him. He hardly noticed how much it reminded him of the big cities of the world. He held onto the side of the car as it bumped and rode through the streets. Soon enough, they’d left Inferno and ended up in a vast countryside. It looked nothing like what he expected. Evergreen trees lined the rolling hills and fields of tall grass. The sun shone bright in the clear skies. This was “rich people country”, as Hyeon used to say. Street rats like them didn’t live in big houses with lots of land and fresh air. He knew it must be nice, but not like this. Yunho drove up the country lane to a large gold and white gate. Golden serpents slithered down from the bars that resembled flower vines. They opened on their own, letting them drive onto a circular roundabout surrounding a floral bronze fountain.

“I ain’t ever seen a place like this…”

More snake motifs molded into the cream colored walls, with a long balcony above the tall doors. San stayed frozen in the car as he continued taking in the grandeur of the mansion. The people who lived here came from old money, like Siwon used to say. Their home didn’t appear brand new by any means, but it was not decrepit or unkempt. It amazed him. Not even Siwon could afford a place like this. His sleazy uptown buddies would never own a home like this.

“Behold, my lord. The Black Keep.”

“It’s…”

He saw gold roses winding through the rails of the balcony above, and more clinging to the columns holding it up. San felt tears in his eyes. He’d never seen a more beautiful place, and this guy was saying he’d be living here. Impossible. Not even in his wildest dreams could he make up a place like this.

“My lord?” Yunho opened his door without San realizing it. “We’re here.”

“Nah,” he shook his head, “This can’t be it.”

“You’re right. There’s more inside.”

San couldn’t picture the inside. Slowly, he stepped out and onto the gravel driveway. Yunho led him up stone steps to the front doors. More roses.

“They must like roses, huh?” he joked, trying to hide his anxiousness.

“They’re part of the family crest.”

“What’s a crest?”

“Like a little picture representing the family. Seonghwa will explain it should you want to know more.”

Yunho opened the doors and San stepped inside. He’d been right. He could not have dreamed up this place. High ceilings, paneled walls, expensive paintings and drapes with a grand staircase could not be of his own imagination. He gazed up to the ceiling to see a garden mural with a naked woman standing next to a tree holding an apple. He’d never seen a more beautiful painting.

“You’re here!”

No fantasy of his could create them either. At the top of the steps stood two men: one with thick black curls hanging to his chin, and the other with dark red hair slicked back from his face. They weren’t New York boys. They weren’t human. Their beauty surpassed any boy or girl he’d paid for back home.San saw the golden pins on their chests: a snake coiled around a singular rose. The dark-haired one wore a white shirt underneath an emerald velvet and satin vest with a nice tie. The red-head wore a similar fashion, except dark red rather than green. They were beautiful.

“You’re more beautiful than I thought you’d be,” the dark-haired brother grinned, eyeing him from top to bottom. “A bit grubby, but with a bath you’ll sparkle.”

“I don’t mind a bit of grubbiness,” said the redhead, also sizing him up. “I think it adds to his charm.”

The way they undressed him with their eyes didn’t bother him like it might have before. He couldn’t look away from either of them. He’d let them take a piece for free. The dark-haired one snorted with a smirk.

“Naughty,” he said. “I’m Seonghwa.”

“I’m Hongjoong,” said the other brother, still looking down at San's body. “He’s the oldest. I’m the middle child, and you’re the baby.”

“I ain’t a baby.”

“You mean ‘I’m not a baby’,” Seonghwa corrected him.

“But, I imagine you’ve done a lot of things kids your age shouldn’t have been doing,” Hongjoong winked, but stopped when Seonghwa backhanded his arm.

“He’s a child, Hongjoong.”

“You think the people up there care?” he retorted. “They force boys to dress up like girls and fuck them for spare change. They’re a bunch of animals. I bet he walked around with a painted face and gave blowjobs for two dollars-”

“-I ain’t a fucking whore,” San interrupted him harshly.

“It’s ‘I’m not a fucking’-”

“-Correct me again and I’m putting you on the floor,” San cut him off.

Seonghwa laughed rather than cower away. Hongjoong beamed, “Finally, somebody with some fire around here. Are you sure he’s our brother, Seonghwa?”

“Yes, I double checked. It seems he inherited Mother’s tough streak,” he said, amused. It was then that Seonghwa addressed the injuries left on San’s body. He walked up to him, and tried touching his chin before San flinched away. “Who did this to you?”

“A kid named Tiny.”

“What was he? Like four-feet but full of fire?”

“Six-feet with muscles that no kid should have. My boss made me fight him.”

San didn’t want to explain it to them. He still tried wrapping his head around the incident. He always believed Siwon cared about the kids who worked for him. Whenever one of them was mugged or picked up by the cops, Siwon sent men to take care of them. As he thought about it, he realized Siwon didn’t protect them. He protected the product the kid held for him. It saddened him.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Seonghwa said. “Men like him only care about themselves at the end of the day. If he’d treated you like scum, you wouldn’t have worked for him. I’m positive if you’d survived that fight, you’d end up doing it again with someone else.” He brushed his thumb on the split lip, “Nobody is going to hurt you here. Not even if you asked,” he glanced sideways at his brother. “You’re the son of a lord now. Demons around here would be marked for death if they put a finger on you.”

“We’d make sure of it,” reassured Hongjoong.

Their words should comfort him, but the comfort never came. He’d met plenty of adults who made the same promise. Hyeon was supposed to protect him, but she never did. Heelchul was supposed to protect him, but he never did. Siwon, Shoiming, his friends all meant to protect him and they didn’t. He meant nothing to them. He meant nothing to anyone.

“Come on,” Hongjoong touched his shoulder, and frowned when San pulled away. “You’re peaky. Cook will make something for you. What do you like?”

Nobody did things for free. “Nah, I’m fine.”

“You’re not. Let’s go.”

Hongjoong and Seonghwa led him into a fancy dining room. On the table, servants put a large spread of food. Meat, cheese, fruits, and small cakes laid about the table. San’s stomach rumbled. The two of them sat on the other sides of the table, watching him closely. A woman in a maid uniform served him pieces of chicken, potatoes and vegetables. San stared at the plate. It beat the bits of bread and cheese he managed to steal off Hyeon. He picked up one drumstick and bit into it. The juicy meat broke on his teeth, tender and steaming hot. The first bite preceded the next greedy bites. It was so good that San thought he might cry again. Nabbing a bread roll, he wiped up gravy to stuff into his mouth.

“Easy there,” Seonghwa chuckled. “The food isn’t going anywhere.”

“Or are you used to food disappearing before you eat it?” Hongjoong asked with a knowing look. “You aren’t the only person here who’s used to going hungry.”

“How could you get hungry? You live here,” San asked, food in his mouth still.

“I didn’t always live here. Neither did Seonghwa.”

“Did you know who you were?”

“Yes.”

“Wait,” Seonghwa paused, “Did you not know you were a demon?”

“Not until I got here.”

“You mean to tell me that not only did your caregiver treat you poorly, but they never told you who you are?”

“Yes.”

Hongjoong laughed gleefully. “They’re going to get torn apart.”

“Rightfully so. You weren’t supposed to be here so early. You’re still a child.”

“I ain’t a kid.”

“Yes, you are,” said Seonghwa firmly. “Just because you’re not twelve doesn’t mean you’re not still a child.”

“Nobody treated me like one.”

“Because they didn’t care. I care. Hongjoong cares.”

He’d believe it when he saw it.

*****

Nothing beats coming home. Whether from a vacation or a night out, walking through the door into the comfort of familiarity relaxed the mind. San breathed much easier when he finally came home. He smiled seeing his bedroom, neat and tidy as he’d left it, and at the softness of his own bed. Seonghwa told Cook to make his favorite dinner for his homecoming; Hongjoong pulled out the “fancy shit” from their cellar. He appreciated his brothers’ attempts to make the event special, but the person who eclipsed them was you.

“No fair,” frowned Hongjoong when you walked into the dining room, “Nobody said to look hot. Seonghwa just told me to wear my ‘nice shirt’.”

San couldn’t take his eyes off you. In a velvet blue dress, he saw the tantalizing off-the-shoulders and the way the dress slimmed down to your shins. You’d put on the diamond necklace and earrings he’d bought you for your four month anniversary. He stared down your body as you walked to him and kissed his cheek. A single whiff of your expensive perfume had him capturing your lips with his.

“You look divine, Darling,” he grinned, taking in the shade of your lipstick and your upturned lashes. “And all for me?”

“All for you,” you agreed, kissing him once more before taking your seat at the table. “I wanted to look nice for you.”

“Do we really have to eat?” Hongjoong asked Seonghwa. He looked over to you, “She looks better than anything on this table.”

“Back off,” San joked, throwing a piece of his roll at him. “You sleep in your own bed tonight.”

“Oh come on,” he whined, “We missed you too Sannie. I think we should all celebrate you coming back home alive together.”

“We can do that another time,” he laughed at the weak attempt. He took your hand, noticing the ring on your finger. “I want my Darling all to myself tonight.”

“I’m not the one complaining,” you replied, smiling coyly at him.

“First course, please,” Seonghwa told one of the maids, who bowed and went to the kitchen. “This reminds me of his first homecoming.”

“His first homecoming?”

“He’d gone back home for a special assignment,” he said, buttering a bread roll. “On their 18th birthday, a demon is allowed one free kill. They get their choice of prisoner, living or dead, and can torment them however they see fit.”

“I tormented a guard from my reform school,” Hongjoong smirked over his wine. “I put a box of rats on his stomach and-”

“-San,” Seonghwa continued, “Was offered the pass too.”

“You killed someone?” you asked, surprised by it. “Who?”

“Lee Siwon.”

“Who’s that?”

“He was a gang boss who cheated, lied, stole, gambled, raped, and killed. He sold young boys to seedy old men. He forced kids to fight each other until they knocked out or died. He was your classic asshole criminal,” he picked at the soft inside of his roll, “My dad gave me the torment pass as a gift for my birthday. He said it was a right of passage for demons. You can really exercise your powers and spread sin everywhere at the same time. I could only think of one person when he asked me who I’d pick.”

“Was he still alive?”

“Surprisingly,” he nodded. “I figured he’d still be in the same city, extorting the same families and fucking the same kids. I got my pass and went home.”

“And he saw you?”

“No,” San grinned, recalling his one year back home, “And it drove him insane.”

“How?”

“General ghost stuff at first,” he shrugged. “I would open drawers and cabinets. I’d move stuff around his house and office. I’d make random noises in quiet rooms, open windows, and make radio static during his favorite songs.” He then laughed softly, “Every night at exactly 3:42am I’d turn on his water faucet. Not a steady stream, but enough that he’d hear it dropping. It drove him crazy. Then,” he ate the soft part of his bread, “I revved it up. I’d make him think people stole from him by taking money and hiding it around his businesses. I’d leave messages to make him think people in his gang were conspiring against him. Whenever he went to a drug deal, I’d either take money or damage the goods.” He laughed softly, “He finally spiraled when the market crashed, and he lost everything. Without me, he might’ve been able to survive with the money he’d kept hidden in one of his warehouses.”

“But you happened?”

“A huge fire started in the warehouse and destroyed property and the goods inside. By the time Siwon put the gun to his head, he’d completely lost his mind.”

San pictured his killer: Siwon, his hair streaked with gray, kneeling in his dusty apartment, sobbing as the agony took over. He remembered the man’s luxurious apartment having been stripped of anything valuable. Without a maid, and his wife having left him, Siwon surrounded himself with filth. Stuck in an apartment of trash, no money to his name with only the clothes on his back, Siwon had fallen. By the time San finished with him, nobody feared or respected Lee Siwon. He only revealed himself in those last few minutes, disguised as his fifteen-year-old self. Believing himself to be in a delusion of despair, Siwon didn’t question it when San made him see more children: the ones he forced into prostitution, the ones he put into fighting rings, and the ones he sacrificed on his path to fortune. The visions surrounded Siwon as he put the shotgun in his mouth.

“No talking gore at the table,” said Seonghwa as the first course was served.

“My favorite part was when he came home,” Hongjoong smirked, hardly noticing the soup bowl in front of him. “Seonghwa and I used to peep at him through the holes in his walls. We didn’t want to force him into anything, since we weren’t sure if he liked boys. Imagine our delight when Sannie walked into the lounge and,” he held back a laugh, “And told us if we wanted to see him naked, we could have just asked.”

“And then you guys fucked?”

“And then we fucked,” San confirmed, starting to eat the soup. A creamy chicken soup he’d fallen in love with when he first tried it. “What did you do while I was gone?” he then asked, wanting to change the subject.

“What happened between you and Siwon?”

“Huh?”

“You could have picked anyone, but you picked him.”

San’s eyes met Seonghwa’s from across the table. He preferred not to think about how he ended up in Hell in the first place.

“He killed me,” he said. “Well, indirectly. He put me to fight this kid that was twice my size and he beat me to death.”

“You've taken out guys bigger than you though. Jongho and Mingi have told me.”

“I was fifteen, skinny as a twig, and tired from running errands for him,” he answered. The image came to him as he spooned more soup. “If he and his friends wanted to watch a fight, they should have chosen grown men, not kids.”

“That's terrible,” you said. Like he knew you would, you picked up on his reluctance to continue. “I didn't do much.”

“Didn't do much?” Seonghwa said, astounded. “You learned how to make armor and weaponry with just your abilities.”

“You did?”

“It's not perfect. The bark is soft in some spots.”

“It can't be hard everywhere,” San said, “Otherwise you'll have trouble moving around when you're fighting. You can try filling up those weak spots with some kind of soft leather or mossy chainmail or whatever your flowery version would be.”

“What do you wear?”

“Breastplate, shoulder arm and shin guards.”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s meant to be a costume as well as actual armor,” he explained, finishing off the small soup. “It’s in an old coliseum, so it has this Roman era theme to it. The armor protects most of the body, but leaves room for mobility. If every inch of me's covered in steel, I can’t move as quickly. The heavy armor would weigh me down because of my weight and-”

“-She’s been learning how to make living things with her plants too,” Seonghwa told him. “She’s managed to make flowers that sparkle like gems.”

“That’s great,” said San with a grin. “What have you made so far?”

You began telling him about what you called “gem stems': a beautiful range of different flowers that glittered and gleamed like gemstones. You’d managed to produce opal, rose quartz and amethyst flowers. Diamonds, rubies, and sapphires, you said, proved a bit more challenging for you, but you’d get it in the end. San found your creativity your most attractive trait. He saw the ensembles you wore, the way you redecorated your bedroom, and the plants you grew in your greenhouse. Everything you made turned out vibrant and beautiful. Seonghwa’s experiments might have had various shades of purple and red, but yours popped. He thought of the yellow-mouth flowers you’d made variations of in your greenhouse. Instead of only yellow, you had purple, pink, and orange-red ones. Octavius’s offspring came in hybrid forms now. Rather the purple hibiscus shapes, you’d merged them with sunflowers, roses, and tulips. Even the more dangerous flowers, who you called ‘Spike’ and ‘Rex’, bore interesting personalities and colors.

San wondered, as the conversation switched, about Francesca. He hoped Lucifer hadn’t harmed her. She’d already been in so much physical and emotional pain. Not only had she just given birth, but she’d lost her child. He’d thought someone might tell him what happened to her, but nobody breathed a word. The mother of Lucifer’s halfling children never seemed to matter to anyone. She was simply a vessel for the child who’d one day destroy the world.

He looked over at you, cutting into the steak dinner Cook prepared, and felt grateful. Demons could breed with other demons. Demons could not breed with humans, aside from Lucifer, the King of Demons. Demons and cambions did not typically reproduce because most demons considered cambions closer to humans. When he first entered you, he quickly thought about how you’d never have his children. He’d never met a woman he wanted to “mate” with until you. Knowing you better now, and knowing your status, it was possible. Not certain. It’d be difficult and there’d be many failed attempts, but not impossible.

But, what kind of father could he be if he’s unable to protect them? He’d been trusted to protect His Majesty’s child, and he could not do that. He’d failed in keeping the child safe. It’d likely been purified and turned into an angel by now. What if the same thing happened to you and he’d failed again? The image of you in Francesca’s place, laying flat on your back with blood pooling around your thighs and legs came to him. Some women died in childbirth. His mother claimed she’d nearly died giving birth to her last child, who’d come out deformed and sickly before passing a week later. He didn’t want that to happen to you. He didn’t know what cambion-demon pregnancies were like, but it could not be that different from normal ones.

“San?” your voice broke through his thoughts, and he saw you looking at him with concern. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Darling,” he said, pushing pictures of you lifeless and bloody from his mind.

You didn’t believe him. He saw your worry even as you went back to eating. San tried keeping up the charade by eating his own dinner. The meal ended with a variety of tarts San enjoyed. He devoured the peach tarts, while you’d dove into the strawberry tarts. Your appetite never ceased to amaze him. You told him in your past life, you’d waste time going on fad-diets to keep yourself from gaining more weight. Now, in a world where that doesn’t matter, you indulged more than you used to. Cook’s excellent skills made everything you tasted mouthwatering. San didn’t mind at all. He loved a woman who ate well; particularly the luscious curves that might result from proper appetite.

“I’m heading to bed,” you said once dinner ended, kissing each brother but lingering on his lips the longest. “This dress is nice, but not sleepwear. Right, San?”

“If you give me a few minutes,” he slid his hand down around your thighs to your ass, “I can help you take it off.”

“No, I want to keep it a surprise.”

You kissed him one more time before leaving the dining room. San downed the last of his wine before standing from the table. Seonghwa and Hongjoong instantly gravitated towards each other as they often did when alone. It reminded him of the first time he saw them together, and he shuddered.

“Looks like San is going to get a second dessert tonight,” smirked Hongjoong. Seonghwa cupped his jaw and kissed his cheek, “A nice, thick, yummy creampie.”

“Hush,” San laughed, cheeks turning hot. “I won’t be the only one tonight, it seems,” he said, nodding to Seonghwa. “You two have fun.”

“You too,” Hongjoong said, hazy from his tipsy state and Seonghwa’s full lips on his neck.

He walked out of the dining room to his bedroom. Sadly, he envisioned a child in the hallway. A beautiful girl with your eyes and hair, giggling and skipping joyfully. Perhaps a boy with his nose and jawline, playing with a wooden sword and pretending to cut down imaginary foes. San wanted to say you’d both be good parents, but could you really be? Andromeda was the kindest demon he’d ever met, who’d loved you with all her heart. You had some idea of how to be a loving mother, should you want to be one. But he didn’t grow up with such love and attention. Hyeon and Heechul despised him, and did nothing to hide it. He’d been another burden for them to bear. He never felt a mother’s warm hug and kiss or a father’s arm around his shoulders or patting his back. No fun holidays together. No cozy nights. Nobody comforted him when he cried or had a bad dream.

He didn’t have any of that until Seonghwa. Hongjoong might’ve been more of a sibling figure, but Seonghwa took on the parental role. He made sure San got a good education, that he ate well, bathed and tried making him the gentleman Hongjoong refused to be. He’d hated it at first because he saw it as a force to change. But, he soon learned Seonghwa didn’t want to change him, he wanted to help him. If San should imagine any father figure, it should be his oldest brother.

San walked into his apartment, not bothering to turn on the lights as he headed straight to bed. He pictured you, him and your child having come back from a family night out. You’d be in one of your lovely dresses, and he’d be wearing a suit and tie. Your kid would be put to bed first, wrapped up in soft pajamas and falling asleep as one of you read to him. Then, you’d both be alone. As he removed his jacket and unbuttoned his tie, the idea of domesticity between you both appeared to only sadden him. What if someone tried harming one of you, and he failed to protect you? What if he wasn’t quick enough? Strong enough? Brave enough? If he’d moved faster, he might have saved little Gisella. Lucifer would be delighted for another antichrist; lovely Francesca would be rocking the baby to sleep right now. But because of him and his hesitation, that had been shattered.

“This room hasn’t felt the same without you.”

San, unbuckling his pants, turned to see you leaning against the doorframe. You wore a lace night dress, a slit through the middle to reveal the matching underwear underneath. Your beauty usually distracts him from any thought in his mind, but not tonight. All he saw when he looked at you was Francesca and the baby he didn’t save.

“Has it?” he asked, knowing he had to say something to keep you from suspecting anything other than pure lust.

“It was empty,” you sauntered over to him, running your hands down his back and around his waist when he turned away. “And the bed was always cold.”

He felt your warm lips dot kisses on his shoulders, and your hands replaced his at his front. With deft hands, you undid his belt and fly, then lightly pulled at them until they pooled at his feet. In the mirror, he saw you clinging to him. He touched one of the hands on his chest, feeling the softness of your fingers and palms. Your fingers then intertwined. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing you.

“What’s wrong?” you asked, the temptress dropping in favor of the sweetness.

“Nothing,” he assured you.

“Liar,” you said, lips on his skin. “What happened up there? Who’s Gisella?”

“What?” He never recalled mentioning neither mother nor child to anyone.

“You said her name in your sleep,” you replied. You didn’t sound jealous. You sounded comforting, “Was that the baby’s name?”

“Yes,” he said, preferring not to lie to you.

“What happened to her?”

“She was taken. I…I didn’t get her back in time.”

“What do angels do with demon babies? They don’t…” you hesitated, then said, “They don’t kill them, do they?”

“No, they purify them,” he said. “They use their holy magic to sap out the demonic energy in their blood, and turn them into another angel. To Lucifer, that’s as good as death, but it’s more favorable than true death.” He stared at himself in the mirror. Even with all his muscles, speed and skill, he couldn’t protect the most important being in demonic history. “I’d nearly gotten her out. I was right there, YN. I was right at the exit into Hell, and they caught up to me. I…I tried fighting them off, and I did for a bit but then one of them caught me and she…” his chest tightened remembering the moment she slipped from his arms. “They caught her before I could. One of them stabbed me through my armor. I managed to stab my knife into their neck, but not in time to save her. They’d escaped through their own portal. I failed, YN. I was given one job. I had one job to do and I failed.”

“Just because you failed once doesn’t make you a failure. You did all you could-”

“-I have fought angels twice my size. I have fought against humans, demons, angels, archangels, cambions, and all the rest. I should have succeeded-”

“-You’re not always going to win,” you assured him, putting yourself between him and the mirror. “From what Seonghwa told me, the likelihood you would lose the kid was fifty-fifty. You might get the child away or you might not. It isn’t an indication of your skill or abilities.” You rubbed his arms comfortingly. While you have bite and bark, you also carried a gentleness he rarely experienced.

“I watched the birth happen,” he explained, “And the mother. She was so young, but carrying this big responsibility. I saw the pain in her eyes when she handed her baby over to me. She’d hoped I might be able to take her to safety, and I didn’t do that. The child she bore for weeks was gone, and she’d never see them again and it’s my fault.”

“No, it’s not,” you said bracingly. “She must’ve known what she was getting into when she agreed to get pregnant. Seonghwa told me all about it. He says every few years a woman is chosen to have his kid, and she has to consent before it happens. This woman knew there was a chance she’d lose them one way or another. Now, is it nice that it ended up happening? No. The kid getting taken is not your fault.”

“It is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It is.”

“No, it isn’t,” you said more firmly. “You did the best you could.”

“I should’ve done better.”

“Stop that,” you cut him off. “Everyone always says what a great swordsman you are, but you’re not going to win every battle-”

“-What if that happens to you?” he said. He cupped your cheeks and looked into your eyes. Their shape and color had been his last thought before he slipped into unconsciousness. “What if something happens to you and you die because I wasn’t fast enough to act? What if we have a kid and they get hurt or die because I didn’t try hard enough? YN, you are the one person who matters most to me. I don’t want to lose you-”

“-Is there something that makes you think you will?” you said, touching the hand on your cheek. “I do have a shadow demon for a bodyguard, and Jongho and Yeosang aren’t weaklings either. There’s also two other demons who’d protect me just as much as you would. What makes you think something might happen to me?”

“The fear of losing something that makes me happy,” he said. “When I was growing up, nice things always got taken away. When I made some money, the witch took it from me. If I got a bit of food, she’d snatch it and give me the smaller piece. If I showed any sign of happiness, it disappeared somehow. I love you, YN,” he said, “And I don’t want anyone to take you from me.”

“Nobody is going to,” you assured him, kissing him lightly. “I’m not exactly defenseless either, you know,” you gave a small grin.

You extended your hand, and several thin vines extended from your hands and around his wrist. San hissed when the vines tightened around his arm, squeezing him until his arm seized up. As that happened, you flicked your other hand and out shot a spiked, magenta dart that lodged itself to the wall. San watched the barb start spreading a sizzling, black goo that burned a hole right through the stone.

“Where did you learn that?” he asked, impressed by the snake vines slithering back into your palm and the acid dart dropping to the floor.

“My Aunt Rhea,” you shrugged. “She’s been giving me self-defense classes. She says ladies need to know how to protect themselves from man-things. Gaia is the one who teaches me how to create and grow the flowers I work with now.”

“Your mother?”

He noticed your sad expression, “How to live again.” You held the hand you’d cut the circulation from, rubbing it gently, “How to feel whole and happy.”

“Were you not before?”

“Not truly,” you said. “I filled my life with meaningless, temporary happiness. I thought having lots of nice things and sleeping with good looking people made life worth it. But, now I realize how empty I’d always felt then. I never felt complete,” you brushed yourself up against him, “Until I met you and your brothers. I love you more than anything else, and not just because the sex is amazing.” The both of you shared a laugh, “I don’t want to lose any of you. I might have owned nice things, but the people I chose to share myself with didn’t stay long. I don’t want you to get bored of me and throw me out or trade me in for something better-”

“-There is no one better,” he reassured you. “No one.”

He stepped out of his pants, kicking them away as he cupped your bottom. This prompted you to leap into his arms, wrapping yourself around him tightly. He turned to the bed, where he laid you down gently before landing on top of you. Once your bodies met, his lips opened yours in soft caresses. The intoxicating natural drug in your mouth mingled with his own, and that familiar burning desire ignited between you. Usually, this sensation took him down a rabbit hole of overwhelming lust. Tonight, it didn’t seem to do that. This time, he felt nothing but tenderness as he slowly grinded himself into you. He wanted you, but not in the sexual, primal way. San didn’t want to fuck you until the sun came up. He didn’t want to ‘take you’ like an animal in heat. He wished to melt with you. After witnessing so much violence and blood, he wished every vein and muscle in his body sunk inside yours to make you one body.

‘You are the sun and I am the moon. Without your light, I am nothing.”

A quote Seonghwa read in a poem came to him as his hands slipped off the straps of your dress. Seonghwa was better with words. He grew up with poetry and literature while San could never get a grasp on it. He often forgot names of poets or authors or playwrights, but he understood their words. He felt them. This quote bundled everything he felt for you into two sentences. Now that he had you, he would be nothing if you left him.

“San,” you breathed his name between kisses, “Don’t be rough tonight.”

“I don’t plan to be,” he replied, pulling down the top half of your dress. He peppered kisses on your chest as your breasts spilled out of the cups. A nipple in his mouth, he sucked and licked softly. “I want to feel every inch of you.”

He exhaled deeply when your hands slid through his short hair and down his neck to his spine. Your hips slowly rocked against him, your thin underwear dampening between you. He wouldn’t use toys this time. He won’t call you dirty names, choke and slap you. San treated you with all the gentleness of a man holding fine china in his hands. He delicately handled your breasts, giving them gentle squeezes and sucking them until you whimpered. He did not bite them like he sometimes did. San teasingly wagged his tongue over each just to hear your soft gasps. He knew how much you loved having your nipples teased. It’s why they paid so much attention to them during those first few moments in bed.

Your excitement grew when he kissed between them and down to your pubic bone. Kissing along your hips, his arms wrung around your thighs so his hands massaged the inner sides. The mere scent and taste of you aroused him. He started at your knees before moving closer to your center, where you hitched a breath when he reached the very innermost corner. He kissed back up to your waist and to your breasts again. On the base of your throat he asked:

“Would you want one?”

You did not answer right away. You paused, staring at the ceiling. Right when he thought he’d ruined everything, you answered him. “Maybe? I never thought about kids before. I like kids, and babies are cute, but I never considered it. I never met anyone I wanted a family with, since most of them already had families.” Hands in his hair, you looked down at him. “But then, I met you.”

This brought you to his lips, where he kissed you as passionately as before. You both broke apart as if you’d just come up from underwater. You wrapped your legs around him as you kissed his neck. “Give me one,” you whined in his ear, rocking against him again, “Fill me up with one. I’d have one with you any time.”

He strengthened his arousal. His cock hardening against your inner thigh, he groaned as he pushed to your hips. His hands on your breasts, San moaned when a hand slid between you to his groin. He didn’t stop you from pulling him from his boxers to lightly stroke it. The pleasure it brought felt like nothing before. It might as well be the first time you two have touched each other. While he suckled your nipples, you took your time fondling his boner. He could feel your fingertips sliding over the most sensitive parts of his cock; he groaned aroundyour hard nipples whenever you gently squeezed the bulbous head. San knew he was larger than either of his brothers. They liked mentioning it whenever they shared a bed. The only thing that mattered to him was how much you liked it. Pushing into your fist, he thought of all the times you reached out and groped him.

‘I don’t know why. I just love having it in me. It hits the spot each time and makes me cum so much.’

San hooked his hand to the side your panties and slipped himself under them. The both of you shared a moan once his thick head touched your soft lips. He didn’t enter right away. San lifted himself up a bit more to see the two of you nestled together inside your wet panties. Your hands gripped his forearms for stability as you slid yourself up and down his tip and shaft. The sweet nub at the very top, hard and uncovered from its hood, dragged across the slit of his head. He took hold of himself just to move side to side over the sweet spot. You pulled your panties aside to give him a better view of your soaked pussy opening up to his throbbing cock. It made for a beautiful sight. He saw the need for him in your eyes, and he’d usually withhold it. San and the others enjoyed teasing you into madness, but not now. He sunk himself inside the tight entrance that clung to him. It brought a twinge of relief before he pulled out to keep rubbing.

“Don’t stop,” you said, moving your legs further apart to give him more room. “That feels so good,” your eyes fell shut as he sunk back in and pulled out a second time.

“It’s you that feels so good,” he groaned, sliding in and out a few times before withdrawing. He saw how wet you became each time he did it. “It’s your pussy that drives me absolutely insane,” he huffed a laugh, then groaned when he saw you stretched around his shaft. “It’s so tight every time,” he said when he pushed further inside, rolling his hips to get deeper, “It makes me want to breed you whenever we fuck.”

“Then breed me,” you said, head tilting back into the bed and hands gripping his arms tightly. “Cum deep inside until I’m bursting with it.”

Anything for you. Laying on top of you, arms sliding underneath your shoulders to keep you close, San fully plunged inwards. Even though his body begged him to go faster, he continued gradually. His lips found yours, and you each moaned into each other’s mouths. He never felt so close to one person, not even his brothers. Not a single soul alive made him feel the way you do. It was unlike any romance or feeling he had for anyone before. San needed you the way plants need sunlight; the way fish need water and birds need the sky. After what he’s gone through these past few days, he cannot be without you anymore.

Even when you managed to roll him over, you remained connected by a few inches. Arms on either side of his head, you kept kissing as you brought your hips up and down on him. The faint smacking of hips on hips joined your moans and groans. He felt down your back to squeeze your supple cheeks. He didn’t let go, but he didn’t spread or spank them either. He simply held you as you went at your own pace.

“San,” you whispered his name in the midst of your whimpers, “Sannie…”

“YN…” he replied, merely wanting your name to roll off his tongue.

You are the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Just like when he first laid eyes on the Black Keep, it nearly brought him to tears at times. He pushed his hips to yours, feeling his orgasm slowly climbing to the top. Your taut walls grew tighter as his tip hit that squishy piece inside, driving you to rock back and forth. He put one hand to your chin, thumb resting on your lower lip. The feeling of your tongue and lips around the digit made his jaw drop. You put his other hand between you to your clit, where he slowly rubbed it from top to bottom. He made sure you felt the pad of his thumb moving around over the middle.

He came right when you did. Your body stiffening, mouth hung open with his thumb still inside, you kept him buried deep as you shuddered on top of him. He removed his thumb to hear your moans uninterrupted, causing his own to drive further. He felt the distinct hot sensation of his cum shooting inside while yours covered him entirely. You planted yourself on him as his head stayed firmly on your g-spot, bringing overwhelming pleasure before it turned to sensitivity.

San didn’t pull out right away. With a bit of maneuvering, the both of you stayed connected against the pillows. You hugged him close as he continued pushing inside you despite his sensitive cock. More deep, passionate kisses resulted in him remaining hard for another orgasm. San lifted your knees up, curling you upwards to shove in at a different angle. When he broke away to look down, he saw thick white fluids mixing each time he slid outwards. This encouraged him to keep his strokes short and deep so nothing spilled too far out. He can’t breed you if he lets it seep onto the bed. That’s awfully wasteful.

“Fill me up with more,” you said, hands tugging at his scalp. “Please, San. Please.”

“As much as I can give you, baby.”

He did. He came inside until he felt empty. You enjoyed this part particularly because his orgasms also brought out yours. By the time he felt spent, he still did not pull out. Holding you to his chest, he brought the covers over the both of you as you kissed wherever your lips could reach.

“I love you,” the words escaped you in a single breath, staying as close as you could under the covers.

“I love you,” he said back, giving light kisses to your chin and lips.

While it was highly unlikely it’d take root inside you, San liked the idea of it happening. He’d do anything for you regardless of whether it happened or not. You meant the world to him. Seeing you fall asleep in his arms, San pictured it and smiled softly before kissing you one more time.

***

A/N: Such a fluffy good time! I kind of wanted to dial back on the kink for this one, so I hoped you guys still enjoyed it <3 Like and reblog! It keeps posts alive!

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