#well. as real as any bird could ever hope to be.

[zytes]

oblique omen

[reidrum]

the prophecy part 2:

poison blood from the wound of the pricked hand | s.r.

A/N: she's arrived! i hope we like this one,,,,.....,,,.,maybe a part 3 what who said that

cw: angst, hurt/comfort no comfort, penelope is a really good friend, fem!reader, spencer's kind of a dick bro

summary: you and spencer deal with the aftermath of cat's words

wc: 3.01k

part 1

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“I wish I fathered the child,” Spencer starts, JJ can feel her heart tighten, “Because you and I deserve each other, don’t we?”

Cat smirks, “You’re much better at lying now than you were last time at the restaurant, bravo. Better keep the performance up when you have to go explain yourself to your girlfriend later.”

Spencer’s face steels up and he’s trying his damndest to keep his composure, knowing the only way to get the location of his mother is to let Cat think she won the game. But with every mention of you that falls from her poisoned lips, he feels the burn sinking further into his skin when he thinks about what could be going through your head right now.

“Even if you think I’m lying,” Spencer stares at her, trying to push down any emotion on his face, “That’s the secret right?”

Cat is taken aback by his words, almost looking offended and triumphant all together.

JJ watches her eyes well up and dial Lindsey to give her the go signal, when Lindsey learns at the hands of the rest of the team her one sided lover was pregnant with another man’s child, she devastatingly surrenders the bomb controls and Diana Reid.

Spencer slackens knowing his mother was safe with his team, but he’s unable to stop thinking about Cat’s accusation.

“How did you know?” He asks as the guard stands her up to put the handcuffs back on.

“About Maeve?” 

He nods.

“At the restaurant, you were talking about a fake wife,” The guard walks her over to the door where she passes Spencer, only inches apart, “The ring may have been fake, but the way you spoke about her told me that she was real. And I’ve got eyes everywhere, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you’re different now than when you were with her.”

She pauses then chuckles, “But clearly this genius couldn’t figure it out.”

He feels the temperature rising again but JJ preemptively grabs his forearm before he has a chance to react, “The team has your mom, we’ll go meet them at the BAU.”

Spencer nods curtly and storms out of the room without a second glance at Cat.

————

The elevator doors open and he’s met with the relieving sight of his mother, safe and sound. He embraces her in a big hug while the team dissipates around them giving them a moment. Spencer holds onto his mother for some time, letting his emotions come to surface. The last 24 hours have been the most tumultuous he’s ever experienced—almost dying in prison, getting released, the kidnapping of his mother, and the most wrenching of all, you.

He can’t help but grip onto her like a baby bird refusing to fly. He’s been someone who’s had to grow up way faster than anyone expected, academically and mentally, in order to care for the people in his life when they weren’t able to themselves. It’s led him to questionable decisions with detrimental repercussions, but he’d do it again in a heartbeat if it meant they’d be okay.

Diana pulls away first and wipes the tears from Spencer’s eyes, “Can we go home?” He nods tearfully and pulls his keys out, walking to the elevator to go down to the parking lot. As they’re going down he feels the adrenaline dying down and the reality sink in. He has no idea how he’s gonna fix this—if he can even fix this.

In a taunt from the universe, he hears a text come through on his phone, from you, of course.

You should spend time with your mom and make sure she’s okay. I’m staying at Penelope’s for some time. We can talk later.

He sighs and shuts his phone off, slipping it back into his pocket. You were right, it had been a textbook definition insane 24 hours in his life, and he knew he needed to spend time with his mother in getting her resituated.

——

You and Spencer spent five days apart. Neither of you went into work, for obvious reasons, and all you could do was rot on Penny’s couch, barely eating or drinking enough water, hyper analyzing every intimate moment of your relationship with Spencer to find any clue that he wasn’t fully present with you.

Penelope would come home after her day at the office, bringing you food from your favorite takeout place just the way you like, the way only Spencer knew, and sit with you while you cried.

It nearly killed her seeing you so down, her dear friend who she cared for so much and wished desperately to take away all your suffering. But the empath in her knows that if she’s feeling this bad, she can’t even imagine how Spencer must feel.

She sits with you for twenty minutes in silence, your head in her lap as she strokes your hair before speaking up, “So um, he was able to put his mom back into a sanitarium. With a vetted full time nurse who said he’d get hourly updates from.”

“That’s great, Penny.” you mumble apathetically. A small part of you felt bad, despite what was going on between you and Spencer, Diana was also collateral in a whole different way. You were grateful that she could find some sense of normalcy after all that’s happened. You wondered if that could be you, receiving solace and safety from someone you were supposed to trust.

“He won’t stop asking, sweetie.”

You sigh, “I know, I’m sorry he keeps bugging you.”

She waves you off, “It’s not that. I—I don’t know how to fix this. You guys are my bestest friends, a—and to see Spencer go through wh—what he went through, and then seeing you after what he d—did.” she sniffled.

“Penelope—“

“I’m not trying to be selfish, I swear! I have big emotions you know this. I won’t tell you what to do or what I think you should, because honestly sweetheart I don’t know either,” she tears up more, “But I will tell you the facts, because like that dummy boy, fact dumping reassures me of what’s real. And I need you to remember that when your brain is trying to trick you otherwise.”

You start crying again seeing her all emotional and she puts a hand up, “Let me finish first, or you don’t get the donut I got you.” She laughs tearfully.

You match her laugh and let her continue.

“I only have one fact for you, and you might not like it but it’s the truth, no matter what you think.” she starts, “That boy loves you. Like he would petition the Oxford dictionary to put you under the definition of love, loves you.”

“But—“

“But two things can exist. He loves you dearly, but what he did was fucked up. How you feel is extremely valid. God, my love, I can’t even imagine how you feel. But if and when you go talk to him I just need you to remember that. Okay?”

You sit silently next to her, contemplating everything your brain has been computing the last five days. The spirals, the what ifs, the self doubt—you know logically you won’t get any clarity unless you face your fear, and accept that whatever happens is your predetermined fate.

“Okay.”

“I love you so much. I am always in your corner, and if it comes to it, I know his social.”

“Penny!”

“I’m just saying!” she laughs, “You’re more than welcome to stay as long as you need to, okay?”

You lean forward to hug her, “Thanks.” you mumble. She squeezes you and rubs your back affectionately.

You end up finishing out the week in Penelope’s apartment, using Sunday to deliberate your plan of attack for when you finally see him again. All the questions, insults, and doubt are written down in your notes app to help you organize your thoughts. But there’s no real organization, because what category does this even fall into?

You text Spencer a couple hours before that you’d be willing to talk to him now if he was free, and not even a second later he replies telling you to come over whenever.

The walk to his apartment feels like edging closer to the end of a plank that you willingly got on. The dread presses on you heavier and heavier with every step, and soon enough you’re standing at his door with a boulder on your shoulders.

The soft knocks echo through Spencer’s barren living room, and his head snaps to the door. He’s not sure if he’s mentally prepared for this, but he wipes his eyes and ruffles his hair stressfully and goes to open the door.

It’s like a truck hit him seeing you right in front of him, puffy red eyed and looking so defeated, nothing like the girl he knew.

“Hey,” Spencer breathes out.

“Hi, can I come in?” you reply.

Spencer stands aside to let you in, “Of course, yeah.”

You walk into his apartment, feeling a strange sensation wash over you. The familiarity of his bookshelves and antique chess boards provides you with a comfort you wish you had over the last week. But right now it feels like someone placed barbed wire over it all, enticing you to get closer lest you get hurt.

Spencer stands awkwardly in the door, watching you trek about his apartment before finding a seat on his leather couch. He shuts the door and sits in the adjacent arm chair, not knowing if you’d be okay with him even sitting on the same couch as you.

You clear your throat, “How’s your mom?”

“She’s good, she’s settled in the sanitarium.” he says with a slight tone of relief you knew he hadn’t had in weeks.

“Good, good,” you trail off and avoid his eyes, “Um, so obviously, I came because we need to…talk.” Spencer nods and waits for you to continue.

“I don’t even know how to start. But, I am hurt. I don’t know how to process this, or even get to the root of this.”

“Cat was lying.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

He furrows his brows, “Yes, she was. She lies about everything, that’s her game.”

You avoid his eyes, “No Spencer, that’s just what you want to tell yourself.”

“Baby—“

“You don’t get to call me that right now.”

That hits him bad. He takes a moment to take in your appearance, how you’re picking at your skin, repeatedly brushing your fingers through your hair and picking the strands that fall out. You’re trying so hard to be brave, he can tell. It breaks his heart.

“How am I supposed to convince you I’m telling the truth when you won’t even look at me?” he says with a slight edge of annoyance.

“You don’t get to be upset, Spencer! Don’t give me that crap—“

“I’m not upset, I just want to fix this! Maeve is gone, as far as it goes she might as well be an ex-girlfriend. The same way that I don’t get worked up over your ex boyfriends.”

“That is not nearly the same thing. You didn’t get to see her, Spencer. She didn’t even get a chance to be your girlfriend,” you huff, Spencer’s eyes start welling up as your voice lowers, “How am I supposed to believe that you still love me, when you’re thinking of another woman when you’re with me?”

Whatever color was left in his face has drained out of his feet, the swirl of emotions bombarding him senselessly. 

He’s upset, he’s mad, embarrassed, tired, shameful. He’s feeling hopeless, he wants to just drag you to his sock drawer where that little box sits and show you exactly how serious he is about his love for you. But he knows that would be a cop out, and you wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t believe himself either.

“Do you think we’re the same?” you ask, pulling him out of his thoughts. You’ve stood up and started pacing the living room, unable to sit still.

“No! God no, you are so much more than she ever was.”

“Are you just saying that because I’m sitting in front of you, alive?”

He’s taken aback by your bluntness. You’re nearing the end of your resolve, and truth be told, you’re just mad at this point.

“Every time we’ve kissed, we’ve been in bed together, anytime you’ve shown any affection towards me, you were thinking of that…that bitch.” you spit out with venom.

Spencer snaps his head at you without missing a beat, “Don’t call her that.”

Your face drops, “Or what?”

He doesn’t say a word.

Calling a dead woman a bitch is beyond any morals you’d set for yourself, but this situation is one you could have never predicted. Doubling down you step closer, “I called Maeve a bitch, Spencer. And I meant it. Now what are you going to do?”

Spencer swallows grimly, “You can be pissed at me all you want but there’s no need to act…irrational over past things.”

“My boyfriend is thinking of his dead ex girlfriend when he’s fucking me! I don’t know what part of this you expect me to act rational about!” you scream.

He flinches at your raised voice, knowing you were completely valid. Spencer hates that he feels he deserves pity right now, that he can’t help how the grief manifested in him and confused itself with the love he has for you. He loved Maeve, past tense, or maybe he loved the idea of her considering he never got the chance to actually prove it. 

He loves you. Loves—present term. And he has the chance to prove it every single day.

Yet, he still fucked up.

He stands up, “I don’t…think about her when you and I are doing anything. I swear.” he pleads blankly.

“Bullshit.”

He breathes out, “Sweetheart…I don’t know how to prove this to you. I love you, always you.”

You hardened your face despite your heart clenching, “Cat wouldn’t use that against you if she knew it wouldn’t work.”

Spencer’s face drops. He knows you’re right, Cat even told him the evidence that proves it.

A full three minutes of silence pass by before Spencer decides to speak up.

“It happened one time.”

Your glass heart shatters, “…When?”

“When we went to New York for that weekend between cases.” he recounts reluctantly, “It just slipped into my mind a—and I didn’t realize it at first. But once I did I asked you to stop immediately.”

Tears are free falling down your face, “Is that supposed to make me feel better? That you asked me to stop?”

“No—no it’s just me telling you what happened…It was…around the time of the anniversary of that day. So it was in my brain, and I guess it just…” he trails off.

“It just made you want to fuck Maeve?”

Spencer rubs his face with stress, “No, it didn’t. It made me realize that what I couldn’t have with her, I have with you and it’s a billion times better than I could have imagined.”

Your heavy breathes fill the room, and Spencer takes a daring step closer to you.

“I’m sorry, angel. I really am truly sorry. But I love you. I love you more than anything. I fucked up and I should have been honest with you. I’m sorry.”

For Maeve, for Mexico, for not being able to prove that you are the most important person in the world to me.

A soft whine escapes your throat, Spencer feels his heart shatter now, joining the scattered pieces of yours on the floor.

“I—I want to believe you Spencer, I really do,” you sniffle.

He feels the smallest glimmer of hope as you continue, “I don’t know how to move forward from this, I don’t know if I can.”

“I’ll prove it to you, I swear. I’ll spend every day proving that I love you, and showing you that you deserve the world and that I’ll try my hardest to give it to you,” he swallows and takes a deep breath before continuing, “Things like this don’t happen to me, people like you don’t happen to me. You are once in a lifetime. I don’t deserve any chances from you, but I promise to spend the rest of my life showing you how much you mean to me.” Spencer finishes with a tear rolling down his cheek.

A hiccuped sob escapes you and Spencer really wants to come closer and comfort you, but knows that that is quite literally the last thing you need right now. You angrily wipe at your face, battling your conflicting feelings on what the fuck is the right thing to do for you.

You realize that the truly sad part of all of this, is that you still love him. No betrayal could ever sway how you feel about him you think, and this seems to be the biggest one you can think of.

“I feel used, Spencer. Like I was a placeholder for something you didn’t even know you wanted.”

He pleads your name, “Never ever in my life have you been a placeholder for anything.”

“Well, at that moment in New York, I was.”

He shuts his mouth and bows his head like a cornered dog.

“I just want to feel like it’s me that you want,” you whisper to no one, “I just want to be enough. Why can’t it be me, Spencer?”

“It is you, it’s always you angel.”

You take a deep breath and let out, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” and you turn to walk out the door.

Spencer is left on the other side of the closing door, the shut of it echoing throughout his empty apartment. He pulls his phone out to text Penelope to expect you, and then drops on his couch.

Spencer knows many things, and while he has had his stupider moments, with all the certainty and truth in the world you are the love of his life. He won’t go down without a fight for you, because he’d always fight for you. Especially when you’re the one fighting him, he will always fight for you.

[sleep-0-deprived]

Feels like sugar in me~ (Dom Yandere manager x model male reader) ૮꒰っ˕‹̥̥̥ ꒱ა

WC:. 2.5k

Tags: power abuse, ass eating, voyuer, humiliation, gaslighting/ manipulation, older man-younger man (character is referenced in his mid forties and reader in his twenties) dark content, slight dub con, dacryphilia <33

A/N: my posting schedule has been all wonky the past month! But I hope you guys enjoy and as promised @blond3ang3l ૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა

Everybody knew that modeling was a cruel line of work, your father told you so ever since you were just a little boy prancing around your bedroom.

Most male models didn’t last more than a month in the industry, you understood exactly why once you started putting yourself out there. Applying to all the big name brand you could never dream to be taken in by but you wanted to atleast try!

Here you were, halfway across the U.S trying to pursue your own little American dream and how else would you do that if not by working in some rundown diner by your apartment. Well that was until you met Him, tall and undoubtedly handsome with black hair having grey streaks through the sides with a small little beard of mostly white hairs, his name hung infamous to anybody who ever wanted to be a somebody, Dean Carter was his name.

You didn’t know him too well, just a local man who liked the diner you worked at for some reason you always thought. But he’d smile at you a little too long or tip you a little too much with his age showing at every glance he handed you. Creases in the corners of his eyes and lips crinkling up in delight when he watched how your hips swayed in your apron working the floor having him in awe. He had to have you—he absolutely needed you.

He’d simply slip you his business card just trying to swoon you under his wing like any big dreaming boy, whispering honeyed promises of fame and being a star on the runway to you anytime you would doubt him. Your fate was sealed the moment he wanted you, he was a man of greed and power and he wanted you in his pocket like a caged bird.

Here you were, eight months later from meeting dean, a photo shoot just being finished by you but you were far from happy. How could you possibly be happy when all you were seen as was the pretty boy who slept his way to fame, and the worst part of it all was the fact they weren’t wrong and all you could do is sit in your designated seat in your dressing room feeling the cold hand clasping your cheek “don’t listen to them baby, you’re just so much more than a pretty face and you know it”

Dean leans down kneeling on his knees with his chin resting on your shoulder blade holding your chin making you look at the mirror straight ahead of you. “Sh-sh doll don’t pout, you’ll ruin your makeup” his lips press to the back of your ear as his hands grip the sides of your seat turning you facing him.

“Not right now dean..” you whimper out silently feeling the hotness in your eyes bubbling up with tears that threaten to peak. “Don’t be that way baby doll, let me make it all better, you know I just wanna help” his voice softens so much your heart wants to believe it’s all real but atlas, you knew so better and yet you still fell.

“Not tonight dean, I don’t feel like it” you sniffle put rubbing your face feeling your warm cheeks under your palms while his hands slip down massaging your thighs in the slacks you were modeling. His thumbs tracing up slowly to your zipper giving it a little tug, you already knew what he was getting at and you couldn’t bring yourself to stop him.

“Hush darlin, it’ll all feel alright so soon” a elicit purr fell from his thin lips when he stops after opening up the top of your pants leaving them hanging up on your hips, his hands slipping up to your hip bone and grabbing it gently lifting you up out of the chair and getting you on the counter of your dressing room while his hands guide your thighs apart.

“People will hear us dean” you hush out and tilt your head back looking upwards at him trying your hardest to not let your emotions win tonight. “Well then they’d be lucky, you’re my little show-boy aren’t you [name]? Always strutting down that runway”

Dean’s hands slide up your sides gripping your boxers and the waistband of your bottoms and slid them off down your thighs with ease leaving you in your white socks and the designer shirt, having not made it to putting on the shoes yet.

“O-h shit—“ you go slack in the face with your jaw hanging pinching your brows together when his face shoves between your thighs and nuzzles his way between your cheeks having you spread wide arching your back and holding the marble counter top.

“Taste’s so sweet doll, like sugar on mh tongue” his voice deepens rolling his own eyes back into his skull leaving red irritation marks on your ass cheeks from his stubble while he groans against your hole before lapping his tongue out from his mouth giving a long lick going down your crack leaving your balls neglected while your cock stands half hard.

“Dean, they’re gonna hear us~” you can’t help anymore, you slowly crumble on the counter, reaching your hands back and placing them over your mouth trying to hide how you were crying like a little boy and leaning back against the dressing room mirror internally praying that none of the brand executives made it to your room to see you in all your glory hitching your leg up on the older males shoulder and letting him devour you like a helpless lamb.

Deans tongue presses flat to your rim and keeps rubbing against it before his lips press against your hole sucking at it and gripping your thighs tighter looking up at you the whole time wanting to kiss away your tears.

“My baby boy is such a pretty cryer” he hums in a sickeningly sweet tone coating your rim in a glossy layer of his spit making heat build inside your stomach leaving your cock now fully erect pressing it’s way to your belly button.

“I’m not gonna- I can’t handle it!” A sharp gasp falls from your lips feeling like you’re being torn apart by the man between your thighs. His fingers moving off your thighs only leaving his right hand on your knee trying to keep your thighs from fully closing around his hand while he takes his fingers and snakes his way between your cheeks, letting us index finger prod open the walls whilst he keeps flicking his tongue in sync to his fingers.

“You wanna be a star right doll? Let me make you the brightest one” the movement doesn’t slow or waver leaving your lips trembling against your palm understanding his inward promise, the one he’s told you a thousand times over.

“Close dean” you sloppily slur and cry out feeling your hand slipping from hour mouth when his finger works its way against your prostate having the world around you turn white in a buzz and your cock glaze over with a pearl of semen leaking down the sides of your base making your body clamp up ready for the wave of release to wash over you only to have him pull away from your ass leaving your leg sliding off his shoulder when he stands back up.

“I want you to reach your orgasm from my cock, not my mouth baby doll” his words wash over you when he wipes his hands off and starts undoing his belt leaving his slacks undone while he opens up his fly, the grey waistband reading ‘Calvin Klein’ exposes itself to you before he pulls out his cock showing him already stiff from eating you out.

“Look at the mess you made baby, you’ve got my face utterly filthy” stepping between your thighs keeping them spread open while he presses his face into the side of your neck with your legs slowly lifting up to his hips, “the staff will hear us, I don’t want them to know dean” your hand finds its way into his hair and pulls at it, not even bothering to hide the hot tears streaming down your face.

He reaches his hand off your hip, still holding it tight with his other hand while he holds your chin firm and lifts his head from the crook of your neck pressing hot kisses to your damp cheeks. Dean’s cock presses its way between your slick cheeks letting his cock-head rub and make contact with your rim almost daring to push inside you but not doing so yet.

“Don’t worry baby, I’ve got’cha” his words linger muffled and half audible between his lust filled haze and the wet kisses he left across your skin. Your thighs stay parted up on his hips with your eyes looking up at him feeling humiliated in ways beyond words, unable to stare in the mirror behind you, unable to face what you’ve let him break you into.

“Just push in dean” your sniffles fall on deaf ears but he just smiles down at you and takes his lips off your cheeks placing them on your neck while letting your chin out of his clasp making your ruined face fall forwards on his shoulder when he slips his hands back to your hips guiding you down on his cock. “That’s a good boy, my sweet little angel” he talks you through it making your rim ease up when he sinks into you leaving you feeling every vein of his shaft when it pierces you.

“Sh-sh-sh don’t cry, baby. If you stay nice and quiet I’m sure they won’t hear” his words do very little in terms of easing you. Your neck tilts back looking up at the ceiling and staring through blurred leans as you reach your hands off the counter edges and dig your nails into the back of his tailored suit, leaving lighter colored marks on the fabric while the sound of hushed moans and skin filled up the dressing room.

Dean continued to roll his hips and make out with your neck, butting and sucking on every inch moaning into the skin, not bothering to stop your tears “you’re so pretty when you cry like that Y’know angel”

his voice was far to sweet for the ways he was ravaging your body. His cock pressed up against your prostate with every deep stroke he gave, your cock weeped against your stomach the whole time he held your hips flush against him while working between your legs, making sure his cock rubbed and violated every inch of your cavern.

Dean held your hips tight, softly massaging them and rutting his hips fucking you up against the counter with his canines dragging alongside of your neck so soft you felt like you were on cloud nine and yet you wanted to puke. You’ve never felt so beautiful yet so dirty until you were with him.

You finally look down from the ceiling with a sharp gasp “o-oh Dean-“ your eyes zoom out until they see the dressing room door peaking open, then it’s like bells and gears in your head start churning with your toes curled close to cumming. “Don’t even pay attention to it doll” Dean smooths you or at least he try’s to sooth you but fails, you just shove your face into his shoulder moaning and wailing to yourself when you realize there’s someone entering the room.

“Are you almost ready [nam—“ low and behold the door opened wide standing in the doorway was one of the stage managers for your upcoming shoot today, he stood jaw slacked the clipboard nearly falling from his hand staring at you watching how Dean didn’t bother stopping making the tears flow faster when you look up from dean’s shoulder having your eyes meet.

“Scram, boy. [name] is busy right now” Dean’s voice hardens tilting his head back out of your neck with drool smeared on his chin from a the kissing he was doing to your neck. He doesn’t bother to stop your coupling session but instead shoo’s off the other man. Oliver the stage manager scrambles to leave quickly, not wanting to be in the middle of the situation any longer but you knew him.

You knew within ten minutes the whole brand- better yet label. Would know your secret and that alone made your face go red with shame. “I’m close~ let-me come please?” You plead with Dean knowing that you needed your high, you needed the adrenaline that brought you to heaven before throwing yourself back down to sadness like always.

“Come for me darlin, just let go” Dean croons to you holding you up on the counter steadily thrusting into you already starting to leak more pre cum inside you. Your dressing room door still open wide leaving anyone able to see you being ruined by your manager if they just walked down the hall. Your cock starts to spasm and bob upwards jerking on its own about to cum as your legs wrap tighter around his hips, gripping his back and curling your toes tight arching.

Your walls clamped tight around his manhood when you finally hit your peak feeling rope after rope speed from the pudgy cock head when you orgasm. Dean pulls out of you and comes all over your thighs, holding you tight and panting when his cock throbs and releases its load all over your thighs in a thin and runny mess while you sit panting and truth to wipe away your tears before you can even look back at Dean.

“You did great, so great doll” he murmurs his words leaning down kissing your cheek and wiping your eyes leaving you sitting on your dressing room counter all splayed and ruined with cum coating your skin and runny mascara flowing down your cheeks as you watch Dean remove his hands off you and start fixing up his pants, wiping his cock off before putting it back inside his own boxers.

“I’m sorry I have to run honey, I need to straighten things out and I have an appointment with the magazine executives for your next shoot” with one last kiss on your cheek and an infatuatedly pleased smile when he looks down and sees your thighs coated in his cum, a small peck is forced on your lips before you watch him leave as he always did once he was finished.

Sitting alone in your dressing room, still up on the counter with the door now shut feeling the sadness wash over you from the after effects of your orgasm leaving your rubbing your eyes having to get up and get cleaned “I have to learn to stop crying, I swear” you whisper aloud to yourself walking around the dressing room just cleaning yourself off with a complementary rag and looking at your disheveled appearance in the mirror making you sight, after all how could you not? This same scene replayed day after day with Dean and you knew it would continue to.

[watercolorfreckles]

Could you do a story where a guard of a Supermax prison befriends a supervillain, because he treats him like a genuine human being instead of an animal; and later, all the power-dampeners suddenly fail; and all these villains just revolt against the guards; but supervillain makes sure he’s safe since he was always kind to him?

I understand if you don’t want to!!❤️

Hello! This has been sittin in my inbox for many months during my huge writing rut, sorry about that! I know you also gave this prompt to @the-modern-typewriter and she's been making an incredible series with it on patreon! I changed some things around because I don't want to in any way attempt some sad copy of her interpretation, but I was still inspired by the prompt itself, so I've taken some fairly big liberties to avoid any significant similarities! Hope that's okay! Also, please manage your expectations, I do not compare to the magic that is TMT's writing 😆

TW: Brief depictions of body horror. Violence.

The power blew out in sections. The lights dissolved sector by sector with a sickening whine and click–one by one–in approach.

The commotion ripped Eloise from the fictional world she was lost in, aged page corners still pinched beneath her thumb. Her spirited storytelling abruptly died behind her teeth.

Somewhere in the distance, one person shouted. Two.

Her gaze flicked behind them to the door isolating herself and the bound supervillain from the other sectors of the Maximum Security Prison for Powered Individuals or, as everyone called it, The Max. Seeing nothing but black beyond the bullet-proof glass, her attention snapped forward again to the supervillain imprisoned across from her. 

Was this the start of some elaborate escape plan on his part? Why did it have to happen on a day that she was stuck fulfilling her community service hours instead of being something she could safely gawk at in the newspaper from a distance in a few days? Her stomach did a nauseated flip. 

“What are you doing?” she blurted, voice quivering only a little. Her fingers tightened around her book.

The villain made a show of looking pointedly at his restraints. Wrists strung taut and chained to either wall, he shrugged an innocent shoulder at her as if to say “clearly, nothing.” He was perched on the edge of his bed like a bird, tilting his head with a matching sort of probing curiosity. 

For all the chaos outside of the room, Artisan had not a hair out of place. He appeared perfectly unconcerned, though as thoroughly trapped as ever: ankles shackled, arms stretched uselessly apart from each other. The power-dampening collar wrapped around his neck still blipped a faint red light, indicating it was active. 

The prisoners were rioting. Surely they couldn’t get too far? Containing the most dangerous of powered individuals was, after all, the express purpose of the facility…

The lights above them flickered, dipping the room in and out of inky darkness before settling into a dimly lit haze. Eloise’s breath stalled. The imposing dark felt like a threat, as if the lights could keep the monsters at bay. It only made a little sense, in the way that a child feels safe from the monsters under their bed as long as their nightlight is plugged in.

Except that these monsters were real. The most dangerous in the country. And she was currently feet away from the monster that made even other monsters run.

He hadn’t seemed so bad in the time that she’d known him. Quiet, impassive, yet twisting her gut with pity any time she eyed his barbaric restraints. The least she could do–while crossing off her hours–was to read the supervillain a story every few days. She couldn’t change his fate. Couldn’t make him more comfortable. What she could do was rattle off, sheepishly, about fictional worlds and impactful characters in literature and the way that a well-crafted story could transport you somewhere better.

A crash, gunshots, a scream. Tension racketed through Eloise’s shoulders. More shouts chased thundering footsteps.

Things were going very, very, wrong. And she was very much out of her depth.

Eloise jolted as something struck the door, her special-edition copy of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein falling to the ground and skidding away.

Finally, the lights cut out. With it, every noticeable piece of tech died. All of the energy felt sucked out of the room as if vacuumed. The camera’s blinking light disappeared. Alarms that should have been wailing cut silent. Speakers, keypads, and security systems, all dead. The secondary generator hadn’t sprung to life yet. That meant that this was more than a simple power outage. This was a calculated revolt.

 Eloise’s mind raced through a list of everything else that must have been failing. Coms. Sedative gas. Shock collars. Layers and layers of security locks…

Power dampeners.

Panic clamped vice-like and suffocating around her throat. Artisan’s collar was no longer blinking. 

She froze in the eerie silence of the cell, afraid of shattering the fragile calm. Her heart thumped, rabid, against her ribs.

Chains rattled and clinked to the floor.

Eloise bolted blindly for the door, smacking her palm against the DNA scanner while frantically swiping her “Volunteer Staff” badge through the card reader. When neither miraculously came to life, she resorted to banging on the door.

“Let me out, let me out! Guard!”

The door could only be opened by one person inside the cell and one outside simultaneously unlocking the security checkpoints. Even if the power were on, if the guard on the other side was gone…

The emergency floodlights kicked on, bathing the building in startling fluorescence. Eloise flinched, briefly stunned.

Hands grabbed her firmly from behind, yanking her backward.

Eloise yelped. “No, please–!”

The spot that she had been standing in exploded, steel door and concrete chunks collapsing into the room in a barrage of shrapnel. Something–no, someone–landed, bones crunching, at her feet. The guard who had last been standing on the opposite side of the door lay motionless. His blood puddled the floor, staining the soles of her Converse sneakers.

A horrified sound choked in Eloise’s throat.

Another supervillain strode in, eyes alight with hatred and something more–power. His lip curled, waving a mocking hand–engulfed in green energy–at the guard’s corpse. “God. I’ve wanted to do that for far too long. That one always got on my nerves.”

Artisan looked unimpressed. “You’re making a mess in my cell.”

Eloise’s breath caught. Hearing the supervillain’s voice was jarring. Artisan rarely spoke. Not that any of the other staff had ever actually attempted conversation with him… But even in news clips and YouTube videos, he carried himself with the kind of self-assured quiet of someone who had absolutely nothing to prove. His lethal efficiency did more for his reputation than any words could.

The other man was a villain named William Frenzy, a telekinetic with a gleeful taste for violence.

Faced with Artisan’s startling calm, Frenzy… paused. Faltering on a tight rope he had moments before been strolling across. 

“Yes, well. It won’t have to be your cell much longer, will it? They can’t stop all of us.” He smirked at the dead body on the floor. “Some of them can’t even stop one of us.”

Eloise shrank back toward the corner nearest the door, agonizingly slow, willing the ugly shadows from the artificial lighting to swallow her up while the supers focused on each other. She was the kind of person that people tended not to notice; a background character in the perimeter of a story that the protagonist would meet once and never spare a thought again. She wished, then, that invisibility really was her superpower.

Artisan said nothing, his steely gaze fixed upon Frenzy.

Frenzy floundered beneath the scrutiny. The smugness buffered on his face. Finally, he huffed, crossing his arms. “I made you a nice and easy door out. You’re welcome.” He flicked a hand toward the gaping hole in the wall.

Eloise inched further toward it.

Artisan tutted, and while it wasn’t aimed at her, it shot a cold thrill up her spine. She froze, briefly, before continuing her tantalizing escape. She listened to Artisan speak again. 

“I did not need anything from you. I’ll be getting out regardless. You on the other hand…” 

Eloise stared as Frenzy’s skin shrank taut against his bones, the frame of him creaking and groaning like an old tree in the wind. The air choked out of him, fingers grabbing at his jaw as it stretched open too wide. The corners of his lips tore, slitting his mouth into a gaping maw.

The faintest of smiles graced Artisan's lips as he continued, soft as ever. “Say sorry.”

Eloise didn’t wait to see the carnage through, slipping out into the hall and running.

The other sectors were washed in the same sterile glow as Artisan’s cell was, blue-tinged and horrible, like the lights in a dentist's office. She kept to the edge of things as best she could, clinging to the walls and dark corners.

There was brawling in every sector—guards with weapons drawn mowed to the ground by the creatures they had wardened for so long. A villain fell as shots rang out. Another grabbed the guard from behind, cracking his skull against their knee. 

The smell of blood stung Eloise’s nostrils. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe.

She turned to flee down another hall, but two fighting inmates crashed into the doorway in front of her.

Eloise squealed, jerking backward into the belly of the room's chaos.

Don't notice me, don't notice me, don't notice me.

Everyone was so occupied by their chosen prey, maybe she could fade into the background. Maybe she could–

Her heel caught on something and she tumbled, gracelessly, to the floor. It took her several moments to register the lake of blood seeping warm and sticky into her clothing. 

Terror blurred her brain in a white flash bang.

Disappear, disappear, disappear…

“Mm. What do we have here?”

Eloise couldn’t bring herself to lift her head. She clamped her eyes shut, another child’s illusion of protection. 

The villain opposite her chuckled. He ripped her volunteer badge off of its clip against her chest. Her eyes snapped open again. She recognized him as a ringleader among superpowered thieves. They called him Volt.

“Volunteer, eh? A pretty thing like you should know better than to willingly set foot in a prison full of men with nothing left to lose. It’s been a long sentence, darling. I could make excellent use of your volunteer services. Get up.”

Numbly, ears full of static, Eloise shook her head.

Volt frowned, electricity jumping to life in his palms. “No?” He reached for her, hand nearing her throat.

“Keep your hands to yourself or I will remove them.” 

Artisan’s voice was calm. His eyes were not.

The room quieted.

Spatters of red decorated Artisan’s prison uniform. A few drops dotted his face and he brushed them away with his knuckles, smearing the crimson across his cheek. Almost lazily, he popped his neck and stretched his shoulders, no doubt sore from the strain his restraints kept him in.

The villain across from Eloise paused, sparks still dancing across his fingertips. He regarded Artisan with the same wary caution as Frenzy had.

Before he'd been… Before Artisan had…

Eloise swallowed back the nausea climbing her throat.

Finally, Volt’s hand lowered. “She's yours?”

“She's hers. Step away.”

The man hesitated a moment too long. Artisan didn't offer a second warning. 

As if puppeted, the man's fingers raised to gauge at his own eyes. He screamed, the faint evidence of Artisan’s power shimmering over him. He clawed, next, at the skin on his face, peeling it back like wet wallpaper. 

As promised, his wrists crunched and bent, wrenching all on their own at impossible angles.

Eloise covered her ears, unable to bear the screaming. She felt sick.

“Stop,” she whispered finally. “Please.”

It did. The man collapsed into a sobbing, bloodied heap.

When Eloise managed to look at Artisan, she startled to find his attention fixed on her.

They stared at each other for a stretch of silence that itched. She imagined being forced to choke on her own lungs, or her skull constricting in on itself until it squashed her brain into pulp. For being so bold as to run, he might snap her legs and reaffix them the wrong direction, or splinter her bones to poke, grotesque, out of her skin. They always did say that his victims were his personal works of art, bodies twisted into shells of monsters.

He crooked a finger, beckoning her.

The edges of her vision swooped fuzzy and vertiginous. She rose onto wobbly knees and pushed herself to her feet. When she swayed, Artisan caught her elbow, slipping an arm around her waist to lead her forward.

He did not look back at the others, with complete confidence that no one would challenge him.

No one did.

Eloise was barely aware of taking one step after another. When they arrived back in the villain’s cell, the bodies of Frenzy and the dead guard, thankfully, were gone, though the floor was streaked with the drag lines of their blood.

She wrenched her gaze away.

Artisan’s hand moved further down her arm to her wrist, gesturing that she sit on his bed. When she shifted to do so, his grip tightened, tugging her to a stop. She frozen and tried to read his face. 

His dark brows were furrowed, suspicious eyes flicking from hers down to her hand.

He pulled down her sleeve and held her wrist up between them, revealing the power-blocking cuff clamped around it. His head cocked. He waited.

Eloise swallowed. “I’m not a super. I mean- not a super-super. Just a…..no one.”

“A no-one who volunteers at The Max? With a power-dampener?”

“They’re terms of my probation,” she blurted. “A thousand hours of community service here and a power-inhibitor for a year. I think they put me here to threaten me with where I could end up if I continue on like… Um…”

“Me.”

“A villain,” she clarified, as if that was better. 

Her gaze flitted from the fingers wrapped around her wrist and up to the villain’s face again. The harsh lighting haloed him, dimly silhouetting his face. He looked haunting. He looked lovely. A beautiful house, old and creaking, wrapped in ghosts like a bride’s veil and left to rot. 

“What did you do?”

“I…” Eloise felt very small. “I lied about being powered on my documents. So that they wouldn’t put me on the registry. When they found me out, I tried to run away.”

Artisan’s scrutiny burned her cheeks. He let go of her wrist.

“...What can you do?”

“Nothing special,” she said, cradling her wrist–wholly uninjured as it was–in her other hand. “It doesn’t even work most of the time. My power is sort of…blending in. Going unnoticed. When it’s working, I could stand in a the White House and people’s attention would glide over me as if I belonged there. Not quite invisible, but… It just tricks your brain into not thinking twice.”

Artisan’s eyes narrowed.

Eloise flinched back a step, stumbling back over her fallen book onto the bed. She stared at him.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

Some of the tension eased from her shoulders, but she still waited for the catch. “Why aren’t you out there with the rest of them? Trying to escape?”

The villain considered her for a long moment. He sat down beside her, and the hard cot creaked beneath his weight. “Mm. That’s just it. No one inside the prison could have blown the power-dampeners. They require someone with powers to turn them off or on, and the security is impenetrable. My team has tried. Besides, if this was a simple power outage, the inhibitors would still be on. But they’re not. This was premeditated–and no one imprisoned here could have done it. No one on the outside could have done it. So. Process of elimination. Who’s left?”

That was the most Eloise had ever heard Artisan speak, and she could only sit and listen intently–As he had when she’d read him stories. Her brain whirred in a jumbled jigsaw of puzzle pieces. 

“It… It could only be an inside job.” She wet her lips. “The heroes- The higher-ups- They want the prisoners to break out so that they can kill them. A clean massacre. Justified under the law. The world’s most dangerous criminals could never be allowed to escape…”

Artisan smiled and it swirled something in her insides. “A convenient way to get rid of all of the pesky criminals clogging up the system. I’d bet anything that there are 50 snipers surrounding the building, waiting to slaughter anyone who steps foot outside.”

“Oh.”

“Oh,” Artisan agreed, his smile easing into something softer; something with less feral teeth.

“Thank you for helping me,” Eloise whispered. “What do we do now?”

Artisan hummed. He bent down and swept up her book, dropping it into her lap. He laid back against his pillow and crossed his arms behind his head. The bloodspots on his skin and clothes glittered in the lowlight. 

“Keep reading. I want to know how it ends.”

Part 2

[killerlookz]

hiii!!<3 if you’re thinking abt writing for joost, can u pls write some thing abt an established relationship fic based off the song birds of a feather by billie eilish if u can! love ur writing!

Hi anon! thank you sm for the request <33 this song is so sweeeet omg!!! also... technically an established relationship, but i do recap how reader and joost met :-)

Birds of a Feather | Joost Klein

description: gn!reader reflects on all the special moments in your and Joost's relationship following an unexpected proposal.

content: so insanely cheesey! sorry! pure fluff! + lots of crying (mostly happy tears) literally the most tiny smallest sexual reference this fic contains rpf, do not continue if that makes you uncomfortable

word count: 2426 (this was supposed to be under 1k words but i got soooo carried away)

/I don't know what I'm crying for / I don't think I could love you more/

Shaky fingers fiddle with the cold metal looped around your ring finger. Your hand flexes outward, watching as the light from your window reflects onto the small stone. Something warm rolls down your cheek- a solitary teardrop, caressing the skin of your face. Your hand reaches up to wipe away the tear, but it's too late, you can feel more welling up near your waterline, any sudden movement now would send tears streaming down your face. You look up, your eyelids brink rapidly in an attempt to prevent the inevitable waterworks.

You hadn't seen an engagement coming- in all the years you'd been together, it still seemed like a milestone that had felt so far away. Until Yesterday.

You and Joost had been nearly inseparable since just about the moment you had met- A nervous 20-year-old studying abroad in the Netherlands for your second to last semester of university. You sat on the stairs outside of the apartment building that stood as your temporary housing for the semester, on the brink of tears, your randomly assigned roommate had been a real piece of work. You were on your third argument that week alone, and, saying you were fed up was an understatement. You contemplated at that moment packing your things and just going back home.

"Gaat het?" (Are you ok?) A voice calls out, a goofy-looking blonde standing at the bottom of the stairs. He looks vaguely familiar, you think you may have seen him in the elevator of your apartment once or twice.

You furrow your eyebrows at him, "Ik spreek niet veel Nederlands," Using one of the few Dutch phrases you knew to tell him you don't speak Dutch. You shake your head, kind of hoping he would get lost, not wanting to be bothered.

"Ah," He nods, "Do you speak English?"

You stare at him for a moment, unsure if you should lie, after all he was a stranger but something is telling you to tell him the truth.

"Yeah," You sniffle, attempting to remove any emotion from your face.

"Are you okay?" He asks again, this time you understand.

"I'm fine," You weren't exactly searching for a deep conversation about your current struggles in someone you didn't know.

"People who are fine don't usually sit outside their apartment building crying."

You bite your lip, contemplating engaging the kind stranger in what was ailing you at the moment. You sigh, having a feeling he would probably keep pestering you if you continued to insist you were feeling in a way you actually weren't.

"It's just my roommate-"

Two months after your first encounter with the blonde man at the bottom of the stairs, you were standing in front of a mirror, doing a final check of your outfit before going on your first date. You had learned his name was Joost, he was 21, and lived in an apartment two floors above you.

He was unimaginably kind, with a wit unparalleled by anyone you'd ever met before, and truthfully, he was very cute- so when he had initially asked you out, you couldn't get a "yes" out fast enough.

It seemed a little inconvenient, given that you only had one more month left in the Netherlands- but he knew this, and didn't necessarily seem like he had been looking for anything too serious. Besides, it would be nice for you to have a good connection with someone outside of the people you saw in your classes.

There's a knock at the door, and your feet are quick to start shuffling under you, you're practically running to go open it.

You stop for a moment as you get to the door, letting a deep breath fill your lungs to capacity, before letting it out, whipping the door open as you do so.

Joost is standing behind it, a smile plastered on his face, hands behind his back. He's dressed up, now that you thought about it, you never really saw him in anything other than a sweatshirt or t-shirt and some jeans. It was a pleasant change- a white button-up shirt and some dress pants even if both articles of clothing had been obviously wrinkled.

"Hey," He greets, removing his hands from where they rest behind him, revealing a bouquet of flowers in an outstretched arm, "These are for you- I didn't know what kind of flowers you liked so I sort of just guessed." He's unsure of himself, in an entirely endearing way. He was trying.

"For me?" You grin, "Aww, Joost!" You take the flowers from his hands, "Let me go find something to put these in."

A month later you're sitting on Joost's couch after what you assumed would be your last date together. Your study abroad program was ending in three days, and you'd be returning back home.

There is an air of sadness that surrounds you, one that you hadn't expected to feel- you'd only known the man for three months, yet somehow it felt like you were leaving someone you had known your whole life.

Gentle fingers grab onto your jaw, Joost is turning your head to force you to look at him.

"You know," He starts, "I've really been enjoying our time together."

"Me too," You agree, a small smile peaking onto your face, you try not to give way to the sadness you were feeling.

"And," He says, "Y/n, I really like you, and I think if I don't ask you now, I'm never going to get the chance to ever again."

"What?" You perk up, your heart suddenly beating much faster, your breathing quickens, unsure of what he's going to say next.

"Well- I- what I'm trying to say is, do you want to go out with me? Like- officially- like dating." His voice is trembling, you'd never seen him so anxious before.

"Joost I-" You sigh, the reality of your situation crashing into you harder than it had before, "I'm leaving soon- we'll be hours away, when am I going to see y-"

You're cut off by Joost's lips crashing into yours, your thoughts suddenly disappearing the second your lips connect. You're entirely overwhelmed with emotion, every wire in your brain is fried, this move was an utter surprise, up until this point your relationship had been entirely chaste; the furthest you'd gone was sharing a hug at the end of your dates. Still, you kiss him back, your hand finding its way to his shoulder, tugging at it, begging him to come closer to you.

It had been seven and a half months since you had last seen Joost, but the two of you had talked at length each and every day during that time. By now, you had finished your degree in University and were ready to really start your life.

You could remember the cheer of excitement on the other end of the phone when you told Joost after a month of job hunting you had secured a job in the Netherlands.

"Does that mean you're coming back here?"

"Yeah, the job starts at the end of next month ."

A month and a half didn't necessarily give you much time to plan things out to the extent you would have liked, but Joost was more than ready and willing to help you out.

He had posited moving into his apartment- but the suggestion while sweet- was quickly thrown out. It wouldn't have been an ideal commute to your new job.

So the two of you got on to looking elsewhere, he had been kind enough to take the time out of his days to go to apartment showings for you near where you'd be taking your job, keeping you on Facetime as he viewed the places.

Eventually, you had found one you absolutely fell in love with, in perfect distance from the job. The problem had been- it was quite a ways out of your budget. You were heartbroken, it had basically been your dream apartment.

Joost, always swift with solving problems, suggested that the two of you move into the apartment together, that way he could cover the rest of the rent that you couldn't afford. And while you were over the moon about his offer- you worried about what living together would do to your relationship, the two of you had known each other for less than a year- would living together be such a great idea?

But as you're standing in the doorway of your bedroom on the first night being in your new apartment, staring up at Joost, who's leaning against the door frame- you just know you made the right decision.

A careful hand glides across your cheek, resting at the back of your neck,

"Thank you for coming back," Joost muses, gently massaging the spot where his hand resides. You lean into his touch,

"There was no other option" There's an undeniable twinkle in your eyes, admiring the man who stood above you, tired and messy from a long day of moving.

"I've been waiting to tell you this in person," His grip on your neck suddenly becomes still, rigid, "And- even if you don't feel the same yet, I just wanted to say that I love you." He's talking fast, simpering after he finishes his short words before resuming the gentle massaging motion of his thumb against your neck.

The breath is almost entirely knocked out of you- he loves you.

The words just about run out of your mouth, "I love you too,"

"You do?" His pupils are blown wide, "You love me too?"

You nod fervently, never having meant a statement so immensely in your life.

Joost is leaning down now, his head tilted so his lips can perfectly interlock with yours. It is possibly the hungriest kiss the two of you had ever shared, with the obvious implication of love now behind it. If Joost hadn't snaked his free arm around your back, you probably would have fallen straight to the ground, your legs tingling with excitement.

He pulls away, looking into your mostly empty bedroom, a smirk appearing on his face,

"What do you say we christen that bed I spent all day putting together?"

Five years later you're still living in that same apartment, the once-empty space now fully decorated with beautiful memories.

And now, the most crystal-clear memory sparkled in your brain, almost as bright as the ring itself. You'd been crying in intervals since then- since it happened since - You replayed it in your head.

"Do you remember when we first met?" Joost's fingers interlock with yours as the two of you walk down a familiar street- You were unsure of why Joost had insisted on taking you here, to the town where you both had lived when you met.

"How could I ever forget?" You grin, "Feels like just yesterday I was crying to some strange Dutch boy about my roommate issues."

"And how you told me, you never wanted to see the Netherlands again?" His words are slow as he looks deeply into your eyes, glimmers of adoration shining from every feature on his face.

"God, I was so dramatic- wasn't I?" You look away from him, scoffing as you look down at the pavement, thinking about your old self, looking back on it- it was a stupid decision to let one person ruin almost two months of your life, but back then it seemed like the biggest deal in the world. "Funny" You shrug, "The decision I made to talk to you on the day I was most certain I was just going to pack up and leave forever led me to making the Netherlands my home." You shake your head, "I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't met you on that day, but I don't think there's a reality that exists where we aren't together."

"Don't make me cry," He chuckles.

"I mean- I don't mean to be all sappy, but it's true- if soulmates are real, I can guarantee you're mine."

He's grinning now, you'd been so lost in your thoughts you barely noticed where the two of you had ended up, back at your old apartment, right in front of those very steps the two of you had met on.

He's pulling you up the stairs, and needless to say you're confused about this trip down memory lane.

"I think it's only appropriate that I do this here," His voice is low, and he's blinking more rapidly than usual. His hand slips from yours, and falls into his pocket- you watch anxiously for his next move. There's something in his hand now, and he's slowly bending down onto one knee.

The tears start nearly immediately, before he says a single word, you're cupping your mouth with your hand

"Y/n," He looks up at you, through the lenses of his glasses you can see there are tears in his eyes too, "Wil je met me trouwen?" (will you marry me)

"Joost," You choke out a sob- "Yes, Yes!" Your whole body is full of a tingling sensation, and your heart feels like it occupies more space in your chest than it did before, swelling with an overwhelming amount of love.

Joost grabs your trembling hand, caressing it tenderly with his thumb before slipping on the ring. You let him hold your hand for a moment more before you're pulling it away, desperate to see. You outstretch your hand in front of you, looking at the glimmering stone that sits on your finger. A visual confirmation of what had just happened.

He's barely stood all the way up before you're reaching for him, knocking into him with an embrace so energetically that it nearly knocks him over. As he catches his balance he wraps his arms right back around you, pulling you into him.

If you were to have gotten any closer, the atoms that make up each of your bodies may have actually fused together. Though you wish you could, despite how you fully braced Joost's body it doesn't feel like enough you want him closer to you.

Still, you're so warm in his tight embrace, letting out choked tears of joy against his chest.

A gentle kiss falls on the top of your head, followed by your favorite words to hear out of Joost's mouth, "Ik hou van jou." (I love you)

You shut your eyes, basking in the moment, you could absolutely get used to hearing those words every day for the rest of your life.

/I'll love you 'til the day that I die / 'Til the light leaves my eyes/

[netherfeildren]

Honey, Stomach, Mine ; 3. I Was a Child Once, I'm Not Any Longer

Series Masterlist ; Part 1. ; Part 2.

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics; Dystopian Society; Outbreak not Cordyceps AU; Slow Burn; Soft!Dom Joel; Sexual Inexperience; Small booby worship; FLUIDS — like lot’s of fluids forreal omg; Tummy Bulge; Heat Sex; Knotting; Biting; Mating; Blood Mention; Loss of Virginity; Squirting; Pussy Slapping; Breeding Kink; Size Difference; Size Kink; Power Dynamics; Creampie; Emotional Hurt/Comfort; Older and Experienced Alpha; Young and Needy Omega; Possessive Behavior; Age Gap

A/N: It's raining here right now and feels really like a perfect morning to post this, I hope you like it.

Word Count: 12.4K

Read on AO3

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3. I Was a Child Once, I'm Not Any Longer

When you make your way into the kitchen a while later – he’d left you with clear instructions of bathroom and teeth, thinking to give you some privacy to adjust to yourself once again after what you’d done together this morning – you’re nothing more than a little omegan mess. Hair a birds nest, his too big t-shirt sliding over one naked shoulder, and worst of all, almost bringing him to his goddamn knees, in the bright morning light shining in through the big bay windows, he can see the glossy mess of your slick smeared all down and along your pretty thighs, almost reaching your knees. 

Jesus fuck, but he’s in trouble. His teeth hurt, his gut aches, his cock – a mind of its own. It’s all starting, and he’s afraid and unprepared and too desperate to put into words. He wants it all now, he realizes, despite his fear, he can’t help himself but want it all. 

You step into the room primly, nose turning up in the air to sniff curiously at the smell of what he’s making you for breakfast, and when your eyes swing around the room to him, shy. Shy as if you’re remembering your modesty only after you’d let him finger your cunt and slicked his cock. The look makes him want to be gentle, a thing he often is not. And when his eyes move further down, something goes soft and shy within him as well: two of his too big socks, mismatched and sagging around your ankles. 

There’s something about you that’s impeccably vulnerable and honest, something he needs to guard fiercely. 

He blinks away, looking back at the cooking sausages he’s got sizzling in the pan. No one had ever cared for you before, not in any real and true way, and he’d received you here with nothing but promises of more uncaring gestures, threats to send you packing. The wrong foot indeed. He’s such an asshole. And he’d not seen to his responsibility properly last night, hadn’t made sure you’d had a rich and filling dinner, left you in bed alone and cold and without him, entirely unequipped for this little life that had suddenly been placed in his hands. But you’d also scared him last night, out on the cliff, more scared than he’d been at the simple notion of you, that of losing you, like with the letter, the bidding pool and the threat of you being given away, there was something wrongly terrifying about it all, the sudden possibility of you not being with him. Scared into want, into wakefulness, perhaps. 

Out of the corner of his eye he watches you tip toe into the living room, making your slow exploration around, to the big window where you pause to watch the outside world for a long moment, palm splayed against the glass as if you could reach out and touch it all, pluck the world into the cup of your hand. Then to the fireplace, bending in half to peer into the hearth and watch the flames pop, the sofa next, where he’d brought out another stack of blankets. You’d start nesting soon, and he needs to make sure you have the things you’ll want. 

He watches as you bring the corner of one of the quilts to your nose, smelling the scent of him that lingers there, rubbing it against your face, and then moving to the stack of his sweaters he’d left beside, you bend to bury your face in the soft, worn wool. His heart thumps and thumps and thumps within him. You pull one blanket first, laying it before the warm hearth in the spot of rug he’d cleared for just this. And then another and another, some pillows on either side, sweaters tucked and stuffed between, starting to build your nest. He’s hard, knot tight and hot and ready, and he has to take a few steadying breaths, force himself to look away and pull the biscuits he’d made from the oven, flipping the gas on the stove off and pulling the eggs and sausages from the heat, grabbing the bowl of oatmeal he’d readied for you as he moves towards the bar. 

“I made you some oatmeal, c’mere,” he calls, voice graveled with strangling want, but he appreciates the look of bright curiosity you swing his way. He’s coming to realize he finds everything about you, everything you do, devastatingly arousing, even just a simple look, the shift of your jaw. He pulses beneath his jeans as you approach, remembering the leak of your cunt against the throb of his cock from earlier and wanting more of it already. 

He hoists you onto the bar stool when you reach him, he’d draped a folded throw over the hard curve so you’d have something soft to sit your sore little cunt on, and turning you to face him, he slots you between his spread thighs on his own stool, close as he can get you. You stretch towards the spread of food, and give a little sniff, scrunching your nose at him in distaste. 

“Don’t gimme that face. Look, whatever you want–” He shows you the eggs and sausages and the oatmeal. He’d wanted to give you options. “I put honey and milk and cinnamon in it. Berries–” He pulls the bowl of blackberries closer. “You’re gonna be a good girl and eat all of it, and I’m gonna sit here and watch you do just that. C’mon, sweet thing, do as I say.” You look at him suspiciously, but with those words, as if your obedience were a foregone conclusion when he asks the right way, you start to eat. Slow little kitten licks and sips from the spoon of honey milked oats, and he has to force himself to turn and not burn you with the intensity of his gaze, piling his own plate high with biscuits and gravy and eggs and sausages, gut roiling with hunger not for food, he forces himself to eat, one palm still gripped at the back of your stool right up against your ass. He needs to feel you, to keep you close, it’s all starting now. 

“Do you eat meat?” He asks, taking a bite of the savory and fatty sausage. You scrunch your nose again, nothing but wide eyes and a bout of sweet timidity now that your greedy cunt had gotten what it needed. “No? You wanna try?” You shake your head no, shrug that bare and tempting shoulder, end on a nod, leaning forward to take a small nibble of the meat from his own fork. Plush blossom mouth opening to slick itself against the metal where his own mouth had just been – his cock leaks. You chew slowly, thinking, come back for more. He pulls you even closer, tugging the stool loudly against the hardwood floor, feeding you from his own plate and hand, watching the shift of your jaw, the bright of your eyes as you enjoy all the food he’s made just for you, until his plate is clear, and he’s so fucking hard he feels faint – all the blood that’s supposed to be in his brain pooling at his groin.

He could feed you forever. He will. 

Picking at the blackberries now, carefully choosing the fattest and shiniest one first, he presents it to you, watching your eyes shift from the berry to his eyes back and forth until you finally decide to humor him, plucking at his wrist with two tiny fingers, only a quarter of him in your grasp to pull him towards you, and opening your mouth so that he can place it on the dip of your tongue. Your mouth purses around it, they're sweet and tangy this time of year, and your nose scrunches again at the sour zing, and you’re so– he can’t help himself. Joel feels like a fucking animal, wholly himself. He yanks you towards him, up into his lap, head wrenched back and fucking eats at you, licking into you, tasting the fruit on your tongue, swallowing it down his own throat along with your spit. It’s disgusting only because it’s not enough, only because he wants more. And you– you respond to him immediately, little warbling song of a different sort of hunger in your throat, hitching higher in his lap, pressing closer, tugging and clawing at him. 

He feels insane. He feels insane. 

It’s a difficult thing to want so much, to be so confronted by the depth of your desire, your nature, to hold it within the palm of your hand as he is now. 

You climb over him, moving to straddle his lap, to rub that needy cunt over his lap, ravenous huffs as you push and pull him this way and that, kissing his face, his ears, his neck, smelling his hair. He has to plant his bare feet wide, steadying himself to hold the two of you upright as you lose control a little bit. It’s almost time, it’s so near. 

He lets you do as you need, grinding against him, marking him with your scent; your inexperience obvious in your desperation. For the life of him, he can’t fathom what his excuse is. 

His hands slide over your knees, “Look’t what you’ve done,” he tuts, passing a ghosting thumb over the skinned little cap, adventure wound from last night, up your thighs, beneath the hem of the t-shrit, no fucking panties, fuck, his fingers slip against your slick covered thighs to grip the meat of your ass, slippery, pulling your ass cheeks apart to feel all that glorious wet sliding everywhere. He needs to calm down, but he pulls you tight against the pulse of his cock, grinds and grinds and pants up into your own open mouth. 

You’re staring down at him now, wide eyed, and your frantic movements slow, hands on either side of his face, fingers clutching at the curls that wrap around his ears. He slides one hand lower to cup your sex, the smooth and bare little palm-full of it, the other sliding up your back, over your shoulder and down your arm to grip and squeeze your wrist tight, your eyes flash, and then he moves to cup your little tit, pinching and twisting the soft puffiness of your nipple, smiling up at your little gasp, and tucks the tip of his index finger inside of you, just a crook of the first knuckle, just to feel you tremble around him. You gasp, oh, and he wants to tie you up in strings and play with you, make you whatever he wants at that moment. Yeah? Just like that? He whispers up at you, and he wants you to give him so many things and everything, and suddenly, the possibilities of him are endless, so much potential to be born from you. He wants to fuck you full and breed you and keep you forever, and he feels insane and finally soothed. 

It’s the rut starting, he knows, and it should be considered a cruelty to want something so much, but you only feel like a gift. 

You sigh a shaky little exhale that makes his stomach clench with how sweet it sounds, lashes fluttering shut at the feel of him breaching you just this little bit. He bends his head to bite at your nipple over the worn cotton of his shirt, keeping his eyes on yours, on the shocked look you’re wearing. He gives one sharp tug with his mouth, and then shoots back up to press one more swift, hard kiss to your open mouth. When he pulls his finger from your leaking hole, he gives your pussy a gentle pat, right on the clit.

“We gotta calm down,” he says slow, can hear the sticky splash of your cunt against his patting fingers. You nod your head, but shift your hips side to side, trying to find friction. “Told you we gotta time it right – take our time. Didn’t I?” But his hand provokes you still, looking up at you with all the wonder of a man coming across something he’d searched for all his life and yet, at the final moment of discovery, is still shocked. 

“You need to eat too,” you say shyly, fingers still twined around his ears, one single tip laid flat against his right gland, applying soft pressure, pulling away, tapping twice, applying pressure again. Your shared want in a clicking language. 

You slide off his lap, back to your own stool, but keep your knees hooked over one of his own thighs, two little feet pressed against the other, fingers still shifting in his hair, petting him while he piles his plate again and digs in. You touch him everywhere you can reach, tugging on his ears, hand smoothing over the muscles in his arms, poking the soft of his belly, gripping his jaw on either side to count his chews, and then palm cupping his throat to feel his swallows.  

He feels suddenly, desperately impatient for the heat to start in full, to spread you wide on the ground and fuck into your slicked, open cunt, to pump it full of his semen and tie you to him with his knot. To own you in a way that only the thing you are and the thing he is would allow. 

You stare at him intently, focused concentration, like you’re reading his mind, brows furrowed and chin tipped. 

“Can I help you?” He crooks a brow at you. 

You shake your head, staring him down, chin to sternum. “No– You eat so much.”

“M’hungry,” he mumbles around a forkful of eggs, desperate to fill that hollow concaved feeling in his gut he knows is ravenous for something other than just food. But you nod solemnly, as if it were a thing of the utmost importance.

“I understand,” you say very seriously, still nodding. 

He swallows, tipping his head to look at you. And he realizes you’re right, in the obvious way of all such designated things, that you do understand him, and perhaps, for reasons other than just that mere designation. And on the tail end of that realization, another: he feels suddenly, starkly, like a victim. A victim in the same way you were, are, would have been, would no longer be. That same white box, that same perilous ledge, both of you trapped between precarious truth and free will. Both of you the same, and sitting here, side by side, now free, as well. Even despite your ties to each other. Of course you understand each other, you’re the same.

“How ‘bout we go down to the beach?” And your eyes go bright as that glowing comet, immediately throwing your arms around his neck and taking a bite at his ear, excited as a puppy. 

Oh, please, please, please, yes. Yes, let’s go, you squeal and strangle him, almost rip his hair out of his head, but it feels good. It makes him feel real. 

-

He’d dressed you in too many stupid, stifling layers, buttoned to the chin. Long thermals beneath your jeans, a sweater, a large puffer jacket, two pairs of socks, ridiculous, scarf wrapped around your throat you’re sure he’d use as a leash to stop you from galloping so far ahead of him across the wet sand if you gave him the chance.  

You want to run naked and reckless and free down the cold, battered shoreline. 

Everything is gray, everything is dark and cold and wet and so very unlike you. But you feel like it all allowed you to shed that blanket of shyness you’d donned at breakfast, after the kiss. All this: vast and endless and huge in a way you’ll never be. It makes you feel, for some reason, very steadfast in your smallness. Like, look how large the world is, look how unending, look how the sea crashes and prepares to strangle anything that would fall into it. What does it matter, my size in the world, my significance, when faced with all this? I might as well just be. 

You turn back to look at where he meanders slowly in the imprinted path of your bootprints, laughter in your throat you can’t help, holding the pail he’d brought down for you to collect treasures out of the sand. The sky is angry, and from this distance, lashed by the wind as he is, he looks as small as you feel. This is comforting; the two of you are the same.

You are the same. 

Standing still, you wait patiently for him to reach you, rolling the laugh like a stone over the surface of your tongue, enjoying the hurt of the saltspray, the biting wind that penetrates all the layers he’d insisted on. Soon there’ll be no part of you left unpierced. 

And when he finally reaches you, he pauses but two steps away, and God, he has eyes like mirrors, staring down at you from his great height, and silently puts the pail out for you to drop the new additions for your hoard, a sparkling shard of blue green sea glass, a two halved clamshell, the inside: a star hued lavender, cream and silver glow. Surely what the flesh of a dream must look like were it to come alive. 

Your thoughts turn suddenly, you spit the laugh out into the world and watch as it jars him, remembering how you’d read once, in all the many things you’d read in your many years of not life, that when a chest is split open during a traumatic emergency, that the procedure of splitting both halves of the sternum and ribs is called a clamshell thoracotomy. The process allows for access to both sides of the thoracic cavity – full exposure. 

And you can’t, for the life of you, explain why the thought comes into your mind now, staring at that little purple dream as you watch it fall from your sand wet fingertips into the pail he holds poised for you, but you’re sure that whatever the connection might be, it lies only with the idea that you’re prepared for him to do the same to you, that you’re ready for anything when it comes to him.  A splitting, a keeping – what more could be done to a creature used to only half measures? Half life, not life, half omega – not mated, full omega – mated. The intricacies of it all no longer matter, only the yes or no. 

“Will you still send me away?” He’d said he’d changed his mind, but you still ask anyways, voice sliding over the screaming of the sea, throwing him off kilter. You want to hear the words. It’ll storm soon, the waves tell of this by the way they throw themselves against the sea stacks. Poor things, you think, nothing but beaten. 

But you’re not like that. Let him say what he will, you feel buoyant and helpless and completely uncaring. 

And he’s very silent for a long moment, chewing on the possible rejection that you’ll spit right back at him if need be. But then: “Don’t you want your own life?” He asks, and his tone makes you pause, the look in his eyes makes you pause for the fear in it all, for the trepidation it’s made up of. You tilt your head at him this way and that, inspecting him very closely, reading him for all he’s worth. You wonder if he realizes how transparent he’s suddenly become to you. All his hurts, faults, strengths, nature, revealed to you with one question. 

Choice.

He’s asking you what you want. 

“Can’t I make a life here with you?” You counter. 

“Wouldn’t you like to see the world as only yourself?”

Further clarity – the marrow of all he is: afraid. 

You go very soft on the inside, all you are in light of all he is. “I already am myself, Joel.” The sea lashes and howls, his name off your tongue does the same. “Can’t you understand that? This is me, this is what I am.”

He frowns so darkly at that, “I do understand, but I–”

And you step to him, reaching up to cradle his face in your hands, size dwarfing you, fear not: “No. You don’t. But it’s okay, I’m going to show you,” and you turn to continue your path along the water, secure in your certainty now that he’ll follow regardless of anything else. 

Joel wants you to have choices. You’d failed to realize this before, you’d seen only his withholding. 

He moves alongside you after a while, after you’ve allowed him a moment of consideration, idling patiently while you dig through the sand, crouching down to hunt for shells and rocks and glass, fingers wriggling deep beneath the freezing cold sand to feel the burn of it. And after a distance longer, and with much bravery, you clasp two of his too big fingers in your sand crusted fist and hold his hand as you walk together, gently leading him down the path you choose, and he’s so grumpy, and you can’t help but be endeared. 

“I think that's the end of the world out there,” you say, pointing to that stopping point where your eyes won’t go any further.

 He looks out at the sea, eyes stopping as far as the world allows, swings back to your face. And you clutch at his arm, pressing your cheek against his bicep, taking in his scent which has deepened and swelled and grown a body within the last hours – the musked cardamom of him – staring out at all that immensity, personification of all you feel for him, this want that is violent and grown teeth, that exists as nature exists. This want that, yes, perhaps you did not choose, but is still what you want, is still what’s right. 

“The sea is so beautiful, and I’m so happy to be here.” No, you don’t want to go out and find another life. You want to find life here. 

You already have. 

When you turn your face up to his again, he’s staring down at you with that strange look from before, but changed now too. Devouring. No one has ever looked at you like this, and you don’t think anyone else besides him ever will. It’s only him, you see, with eyes like mirrors that reflect back your shared sameness. 

“Is that what you came out here for? To find the end of the world? To hide?” You don’t care if you shouldn't ask, you don’t care about any of the things you shouldn’t do, only about what you want in this moment here and now. 

Selfish, selfish, selfish. Yes.

“What does it matter?”

“I don’t know,” you say. “But it does.” It means everything.

He doesn’t respond, only more of that unfathomable look. You don’t care about this either, let him have his silence like a weapon or a punishment. 

“How old are you?” You ask now, realizing that no one had ever told you, that you’d never even cared to ask – bad of you. But not that it would have mattered or made a difference. 

“Too old. Old enough to be your father.” And this makes you angry, sparking angry. Your father – you’d had a father. A stranger father, but still yours. Joel is not that. So, this is anger like Leo’s. Anger at his offhandedness, anger at your own want, despite his words that sit like rust over your skin, anger at the violence of your own want. 

You fight to swallow it, roll your eyes at him. Insist: “How old?” 

“Forty eight.” And he says it like an admission of guilt, which you snort at blithely. 

You flash two held up fingers at him twice, mouthing the words, twenty two. 

His gaze is sad again, and you rub his arm gently, soothing. “I know.” 

And yes, you think, he surely knows so much, but not everything. “I’m not anything else but what I am, you know? What I want to be.”

“Too young–”

You ignore him, voice insistent, “And neither are you.” You turn to face him full on now, taking two steps away so you’re not forced to crane your neck up at him, he cants towards you as if he can’t bear the distance. Nature: he surges toward it hungrily, and just as quickly, surges away. The wind buffets his scent against you, washes you in it. “You can’t make me any of these things you’d thought I’d be. I’m only what I am, and you’re only what you are. Whatever the rest of it is you want to force, or the world wants to force, or the white box says I should be– I don't give a fig for any of that.” You swipe your hand in a cutting gesture through the salted air, and he looks like he might smile first, lands on a flinch instead. “I am not ornamental, Joel.” 

And he flinches again, jarred by his name, but then seems to remember himself, to be reminded of himself by the sound of it, and musters his strength, tightens his seams and says, “‘Nd I’m not here for you to impose yourself on. I’m going to make my own choices.”

“So will I,” you say slowly, and you suddenly want to cry. “So do I. This,” you, “Is my choice because I’m also an omega.” You suck in a tremulous breath. That truth, like a sea between the two of you. You’d thought he’d seen, understood, that he wouldn't have touched you as he had this morning, as no one else ever had, if he didn’t understand the gravity of that. “And if I’m not scared of that, you shouldn't be either.”

He swallows once, twice, devastated mask in place. He looks so forlorn, bearing a weight beyond his years on his shoulders. He turns out to face the water and asks it, “But what about what I want?” Not what he needs.

You close the two steps of distance, pressing against his side, circling his thick wrist in both of your hands, feeling the weight and strength of the bone beneath fevered skin. His sweater is thick, cable knit, soft and worn, a tiny fray at the edge of the sleeve, and a deep navy color, layered over a blue green flannel. No jacket again, he’d donned the colors of the sea instead, but you know now that he isn’t cold. It’s almost time. 

You’d felt so shy after this morning, as you’d walked out to face him in the light of day, sat in his lap and kissed him, newly made, newly minted. Now, you feel as if you know everything you could ever need to know about everything there is to know about you and him. 

“What about what you want? What do you want? Tell me,” you beg. “Say it out loud so we can both hear the truth of it no matter what it costs you.”

“Sweetheart, please,” he begs for mercy, looking down at you again, standing within the confines of your shackle, something further than devastation on his face now. Something like shedding years against your will, going back in time, stepping within a vehicle that would take you to the worst of it all, that point at the end of the world which he already stands on. 

The two of you feel, very much, like two unexploded bombs, existing with great care beside each other. 

The highs of his cheekbones and the tip of his nose are cold reddened, wind lashed, curls damp from the spray of the waves, burning with that dogged nature he fights and fights and fights. And he’s such a part of the world, standing here like this, tall and broad and vital. You want to be like that too, you think, large in a changing way. And he’s strong, strong in a way other creatures aren’t, strong in a way you aren’t. 

But weak in others. 

You release his wrist, forgo the shackle, remain in place. There’s a desperate plea coming from either of you, which though, you’re not entirely sure. 

And then suddenly, and you can’t even be sure from where it comes from because really, if you’re the most honest you can be, you know nothing of this thing. “Have you ever been in love?”

He goes so still that the sea seems to grow more violent in comparison, an offset to his freeze. “Yes. I have.”

“Will you–” swallow your fear, be the brave girl, “Will you ever love me?” You must ask. There’s no other recourse for you in this, you want all of it or nothing.

He bends to you suddenly, getting right in your face, cold nose to cold nose, teeth bared, animal. “I am selfish and jealous and cruel. And I will keep you in a strangle. Do you understand that? Can you even understand what it’ll mean to belong to me? To belong to a thing like this? Yes, I will love you.” So then there’s nothing else to care about. He spins away from you, paces, paces, “I’ve– I… fuck–” fights the dog fight – you wonder how long he’s waged it for, maybe his whole life – turns back to face you, and there’s the look of a boy now too, like Leo, lost and angry and faced with what he is in an insurmountable, unwinnable way. We are what we are, truth impossible to ignore. 

And then finally, fight lost, his face does a funny thing, a strange fracture and decision happening across the canvas of it, all at once. “I used to be a father. I used to have a daughter,” he tells you. 

Entirely unexpected. Entirely terrifying. “Used to?” You take an urgent step toward him, use an urgent tone, the memory of your aunt and of would-be parents flashes in your mind. You don’t want him to say what you know he’s about to say. “Where is she?” You aren’t so naive.

“Sarah,” and he says her name with so much love. “She died.”

You shake your head no, tears swept away with the wind, freezing salted on your lashes. “No,” you say again, louder. 

“When the outbreak happened – in the confusion. We were attacked ‘cause of what I was,” and he shakes his head once, hard and fast as if trying to jostle the confusion out of his mind, or perhaps knock it back into coherence, “Am,” voice limp at the end.

And then he’s the one coming to you, taking you up into his hold, cradling you more gently than the world could ever imagine a thing like him capable of. He finally understands what you are, you can feel it in the way he holds you. “Oh, no, Joel,” you cry into his neck, hugging him to yourself, pulling his head down to rest on your shoulder. “Oh, no. Oh, no.” Your poor alpha. Your poor alpha, he’d been so alone, so hurt and so afraid, and you realize now that you’ll have to be strong for the both of you, that you need to help him in ways only you can, that you need to be strong when he can't. And there’s only sameness here, of the most important sort. Both of you together, equal. When one could not, the other would. 

It’s obvious the way all truths are. 

“If I care for another thing…”

“I understand,” you tell him. It’s obvious the way all truths are: he’s afraid. 

You kiss his face, cup his ears to warm them, bring one of his too big, rough hands to your mouth, pressing your lips to his knuckles, letting him know you’re here now to protect him in the ways he’d never been and had always needed and would never want for again. 

-

He pulls you against himself in a hurt lock, tight enough he lifts you straight off your feet, face buried in your hair, teeth at your neck, biting hard enough you let out a bay of hurt. He can’t explain it, but there is so much care in the words you choose to wield against him, so much wisdom despite the innocent naivety, a clarity about the way you see him and all the rest of the world that sends him into such existential vertigo, makes him want to take a bite out of you so that he might swallow some of that innocence, some of that wisdom down for himself. An honesty about you that gives him no choice but to choose that which he knows he’s always wanted but has never let himself need. 

“I understand,” you’re whispering, letting him savage your throat as he needs. “But everything is going to be okay now–” a moan of pain, “–that we have each other, don’t you see that? We’ll take care of each other.”

He digs his teeth deeper at the fine tendon in your neck, and then slides his tongue up and over your gland, tasting the leak of pheromones there. It’s time now, he can feel it pulse and beat, glowing bright within you. He had been stupid and carelessly blind. He’d been a liar. “I see now – I see. It’s alright, sweetheart. Don’t cry. I’m alright now.” But you wrap your arms around his head, comfort and cradle him, and he has to have you with a desperation that brandishes teeth and boils. 

He shoves you back by your hips, keeping his grip on you steady, and turns to push you back down the beach the way in which you’d come. “Home. Now.” But you push back against him, rubbing your ass against the heft of his cock, presenting him with that cunt that belongs to him. 

“No. Here.” It’s a demand, you have an instinct for this. 

“Absolutely not,” but he’s gripping your hips hard enough to bruise anyways, grinding against you, tension vibrating his too big body, as if he were actually considering it, taking you here and now. 

Please.

“You’d let me knot you right here on the beach with the whole ocean and God watchin’?”

“Yes. Yes, I don’t care.” You try and turn in his arms, head craning back, hungry mouth seeking his own lips.

The insanity of the fever. Now, omega, he rumbles, and there’s no mistake in the burr of his tone, his nature on display, loud and clear – an alpha ordering his omega back to her nest so that he might have her there. He shoves you forward gently, setting you on your way, and picks up your pail full of treasures to stalk after his own. He takes in the sparkle of seaspray like gems in your hair as he follows, the shiver of your frame beneath the too many ridiculous layers he’d forced you into, the stumbling of your feet as you turn back to spy him hunting after you.  There’s wet on your face, and he doesn’t know if it’s the salt of your tears or the salt of the sea, and he wonders if when he drags his tongue across it he’ll be able to tell the difference. He’s sure he will. 

Your scent like a leash leads him, stronger and fuller and warm enough to burn. His gut is tight and aching, cock so hard he feels he can barely stand up straight. He’s sure he can smell the pouring of your slick from your finally readied cunt, the bloom of it obvious in the air around you, juniper berries everywhere – something warmer, spiced vanilla, earth. It’s so good he wants to swallow it down like liquid, drink from your well. 

He follows and follows, and if you weren’t already at the end of the world, he’d follow you there too. Up the stone steps etched into the cliffside, the steep incline sending you to huff and puff in strain. He’d feed you more, make you strong, feed you his cock and fill your belly with his come like honey. His breaths are bullish, bursting out in white clouds of steam, his neck hot and damp, skin boiling beneath his clothes. 

You keep turning back nervously, your left hand stretching back as if to reach for him, and then speeding up again in agitation, going as fast as your much shorter legs can take you compared to his. But he measures himself, lets you get there in your own moment, and eventually, he’s pushing open the cabin’s front door and shoving you inside, forgetting to measure his strength, lost in his delirium as he is, so that you’re stumbling, being snapped back like a rubber band with his fist wrapped in the back of your jacket. 

He rips it down your arms, uncoils the scarf, pulls the sweater over your head, hair a mess, all disoriented and malleable, and yanks you back and into his chest, heaving you up into his arms so that he can clamp his teeth at your throat again, laving his tongue over your gland, slicking you in his spit, sucking hard at the patch of skin, the burst of flavor on his tongue now, bubbling, carbonated almost, so strong his knees buckle and his cock is surely leaking a stream of precum down his leg. So fucking sweet, he’s growling, murmuring like a madman, grinding his erection into the lush of your ass, fingers sneaking under your shirt to squeeze hard and tight at your little tits. Your belly is a ball of embering fire, like you’d swallowed a comet, and he presses down on it gently, hand low on your pelvis over where your little womb is, this place he’s about to fuck full of his spend. 

“The way you smell – your scent – I’ll go fucking crazy, I swear I will.” His voice sounds not his – coming from some source outside of his body, ringing hollowly in his head empty of everything else except you. 

It’s started, it’s started, it’s started. 

You’re full of glorious heat, and he soothes at the soft swell of your belly with gentle circles, hand sliding down to cup the little palm-full of your cunt, rubbing back and forth over your jeans, and then goes to his knees behind you, pawing at the button, ripping them down your legs along with the leggings he’d forced you into beneath them, panties and all; the popping of seams – his or the clothes he can’t be sure. He traps you in the tangle, leaving them around your ankles, boots still on and takes a too sharp, too aggressive bite of your ass cheek, leaving teeth marks, leaving Joel marks, enjoys the sound of your baying that ends on a shocked little squeak, a little ah, ah, ah. He grips your asscheeks too tightly and spreads them wide, watching the delicious little wink of your holes provoking him, and licks the broad flat of his tongue from cunt to asshole, finally, fucking finally tasting you. 

He’s entirely lost to his madness from that moment forward.

He licks your ass again, again, pushes you forward to deepen the arch of your spine to eat at you better, and you mewl, whine, Joel, I’ll fall, but he can’t find it in himself to care. “Fall,” he tells you, “I’ll catch you.” But he spins you in his hands, fast and stumbling, trapped as you are, to face him on his knees before you as he is, as he should be, and you’re so small, morsel sized, perfect for swallowing whole, and open mouthed, he inhales at the mound of your cunt, tongue swiping out to find your clit swollen already. 

You smell like nothing he can describe, too delicious to allow him the choice of clear thought. He pulls you down to the ground, rips your boots and pants the rest of the way off, and right there on the floor by the front door, he spreads your legs wide and eats your cunt. 

Eats it. 

Nothing gentle or restrained about it as he probably should, this being your first time a man licks your pussy, small and innocent as it is, he fucks his tongue inside your shaky hole, sucks hard and sharp on yor clit, your first orgasm, sensitive as you are, trembling through you already. More, more, more, he wants more. He hunches over you like the beast he is, tiny thing, pulls you up, palm cupping your bottom, one knee knocking against his ear, the other leg splayed wide, sliding down his arm, so he can suck, suck, lick at your clit, a gentle kiss as a prize for taking it so well, and then his tongue is back into your cunt to taste the river of slick you’re spilling just for him. Your flavor, so musk heavy, sweet and thick like honey; he feels full and set to burst, no more hollow pit. And he wants more, to gorge and gorge like a glutton. You come again, a splash against his tongue, so wet you’re slipping and sliding in his grip. He can hear your high pitched cries and whines, your Joel, Joel, Joel’s he shushes, soothes with his tongue, little kiss to your little clit that pulses against his mouth. 

“Y’taste so fuckin’ good, baby.” He lets you down, crawling over you, pushing your shirt up to get at your tits, sucking and biting hard enough to hurt. He wants you to feel it all for days after the heat’s over, to leave marks, to make sure he’s left in your skin forever. Forcing your jaw wide, he slicks his tongue along yours, feeds you the taste of your own cunt, salty, sweet, his, and you take it so well, half limp and yet still clinging to him weakly, two orgasms forced on your virgin pussy back to back. 

He scoops you up, belly to belly, spider limbs around his neck and waist, grabby hands yanking at his hair like you’re angry he’s not put you on his knot yet. His knees pop, his back aches something fierce as he heaves the two of you up, muscles in his thighs bulging to support you – he’s fucking old – and walks you over to your nest, setting you down on your back, spreading your knees wide, cunt ripe and blooming, so red, a wound of all the world says you’re meant to be.

Slicking his thumb over the soaked curve of it there’s a sticky string of omega drool that leaves him connected to you when he pulls back. He presses again at your swollen clit, thinks he can almost see the pulse of your rushing blood beat here at your spread cunt, slides down to the tiny winking hole and circles his finger there, giving you the slightest pressure, pressing in a tiny bit, up again to tease your clit. 

“I’m gonna fuck this soft little hole until it’s so full of my come I don’t fit inside no more. Would you like that, sweet baby?” He asks so gently, don’t spook the fawn, don’t spook the beast. 

Your eyes are fevered, face covered in a shine of sweat, your belly glows with heat, and you nod slowly, little smile playing tricks with him whispering across your face. His hands slide up, circle your waist, squeeze and squeeze and squeeze as if he could watch you burst, witness all that heat explode like a comet, then further up to your chest, two big hands covering two little tits.

“You’re so pretty, little omega.” And you preen, you glow, suffused with such vulnerable, honest pleasure. Joel has to be so careful, he has to be so good for you. He will be. You circle one of his wrists, tender little hand, fingers of vapor, he has to be so good for you, he has to be so careful. Again, remember, remember. He bends to press a soft kiss to the pretty tip of each nipple. 

“They’re too small,” you whisper in an even smaller voice. 

“No. No, baby, no.” He presses another kiss, drags his teeth over a peak, sucks on the other, switching back and forth. “They’re fucking perfect, so pretty and so soft. I love them– I’m fuckin’ obsessed with you.” He opens his jaw wide and takes the whole soft mound of it into his mouth, sucking on the whole thing of it. He probably shouldn’t say such things, he doesn’t give a fuck. “Look–” he says around the little globe, “Whole thing fits in my mouth.” He bites some more, kisses some more, sucks on them until you’re whining and pushing him away, until they’re sore and stinging and still he doesn't stop. He shows you just how obsessed he is.

He kisses you all over, your belly, your waist, the soft spot beneath your ribs, your thighs, and the pulse between your collarbones. Slow, slow. He has to be slow and gentle and patient for as long as his looming rut allows, he needs to ease you into this. Taking an ankle first in one hand, he presses a kiss to the gland just there on the inside of it, suckles a little, then the other, and watches as your cunt becomes more and more needy and swollen, red as a bloom, until you’re so desperate for it you’re writhing around wantonly in the nest of blankets, almost entirely lost to your fevered delirium, but not just yet, not just yet. 

“Will you– will you put your big thing inside me now?” You slur innocently.

And he laughs gently, a tenderness pinching his heart which if he was less lost to himself, he might cry for. “My big thing?”

Oh, please. “Please, I– I think– please, I think I really need it now.” You twist this way and that, pulling the blankets up to your face to hide yourself away. 

“Almost, sweetheart. Almost.” But he feeds you two of his fingers then, playing in your slick, the sticky wound of softness, and crooks his fingers to wedge them just inside of you. “Like that– oh, isn’t that nice?” He croons, pressing a little further in, feeling the stretch of you around him. Your eyes go wide and shocked, your back arching in a taught curve, hips opening for him to sink deeper until he’s palm to cunt. He leans over you, watching the place where his hand disappears inside and hooks his fingers, petting at the textured little place at the front of you, so, so sensitive. You keen loudly, a warbled sound that’s all fucking his. His control is so close to snapping. 

He pulls his fingers from your cunt suddenly, watches how it shudders while you screech at the loss, looking up to search for him with bleary eyes as he rips his shirt and sweater up over his head, and then he’s pressing his two fingers back inside, thrusting into you a little harder, the splash and slap of your cunt as he fucks in and out of your tight hole. “Perfect little thing that's all mine.” He has nothing but praise for you, his good girl, taking him so well. 

He pets and pets at that soft spot, molten heat pouring from your cunt, and when he starts to shake his hand, a little jiggle to knock your next orgasm loose inside of you, you give it up so, so nicely. Pussy going tight as a fucking fist, strangling his fingers, and then spilling loose and soaked, flooding his hand. When the contractions of your little womb have abated he stuffs a third finger in, forgoes some of that gentleness, and pressing a hand low on your pelvis, he shakes his hand hard and fast inside of you. “Want’cha to fuckin’ soak me,” he grits through clenched teeth, head slightly dizzy, slightly faint with want. And with pressure both from the inside and out, you do. Gush of come following your high pitched moan, tears soaking your hairline as much as your pussy just soaked the lap of his jeans. He pulls his fingers from your gaping hole, bends to lick through all that glorious omega slick and swipes his fingers through it from side to side, tapping on your clit harshly, slapping it a little, sucking on it again, fast, fast his fingers from side to side, forcing you into just one more little climax before he lets you rest. 

You’re all twisted in the blankets, face turned and buried in the pillows. He crawls up over you, contorted as you are, cunt splayed wide and pulsing, and unbuttons his jeans as he goes, finally, fucking finally letting his raging cock free. It hurts, it needs you so fucking badly, leaving a sloppy trail of drool slicked along the already wet curve of your belly as it drags heavily against you, bobbing obscenely from his open zipper. He buries his face in your neck, kissing and licking up the taste of you, sucking on your gland. 

“Please, please now. Please, now,” you keep mumbling into the blankets where you’re hiding. Please, now. Begging for his cock and his knot, so ready to take your first fucking like the perfect omega you are. 

“Not yet,” he soothes, petting your hair back from your steaming face, pressing a kiss to your sweaty hairline. Please, you whine high, and he lets his cock rest heavily against the curve of your red cunt, slicking it there, dragging it back and forth, giving you both the weight of what you’ll have so soon. You kick one leg out weakly. “Not yet, it’s okay. It’s okay, sweetheart,” he pitches his voice low, soothing, gathers you to himself. “Let’s rest a little. No, no – just for a little bit,” he says over your whines and cries. You cling to him weakly, hips rocking against him. “I know, baby. I know,” he hums, letting you rub your sticky, sore cunt against the wide head of his cock, nothing but a boneless little mass of omega, stuck to him with tears and slick and sweat. 

He rolls over with you on top of him, the brand of your cunt enveloping his erection between swollen lips, and his knot is ready to pop, it fucking hurts, his rut is near too. But he can tell you just need a little more time – a few more hours to soften and ripen just that little bit more, to lose yourself a little bit more so that he might fit himself inside of you, his too big body in your too little one. 

He gets up eventually, shucking his jeans, and getting a glass of water to force you to take, and leaves the large, cold glass near for when you’ll need it again with all the slick you’re producing. So much that it runs down your thighs, slides up your back and all over him and the blankets and everywhere; everything sticky and heady with your scent. This is, he thinks, right before he succumbs to sleep too, head and balls throbbing from not having come yet, the most singular way an omega claims ownership over an alpha. That scent like a shackle that would keep them together at all times, that scent that after long enough, is impossible to be without. He buries his face in your hair and breathes deep, letting your smell move through him like a tangible thing, a kaleidoscope through his mind until he finally falls asleep. 

-

Your hips move in a slow rocking swing over his belly, slicking the curve of it, making the hair covering him here clump sticky and soaked in this stuff that will not stop coming out of you. There’s so much, and you feel so empty, your head, your head is full of nothing but heat and bubbles and a throb that glows, and you don’t know why, but– oh, finally, he’s waking up. Yes, yes, alpha, wake up now. 

He shifts and rumbles deep in his chest, and you feel his big thing poke you in the butt; it’s so heavy and so thick and it smells so good. You’d sniffed it, and you’d tasted it a little too when you’d first woken up, but you need to make sure to remember to taste it more later again because it had been so yummy, and long too. You can’t understand how it’ll fit, but you’re sure you’ll make it somehow. And it has a funny soft bit of skin at the end, and thick veins that pulse under the warm, incredible softness that covers it. 

His left arm stretches out and over his head, he’s thick here too, big muscles under his skin that’s so burning hot it hurts to touch and feels good all at the same time. He has a dark vein that runs from his shoulder over the bulging muscle, and you’d tasted that too, then pressed your face into his hairy armpit to sniff him there also; gone all drunk and light headed at the scent.  You rock harder; the little nub at the front of your cunt – it belongs to him – it hurts and it’s swollen and when you press your fingers to it, it has a little tiny heartbeat that you’re sure beats to the sound of his name, Joel, alpha, Joel, alpha, and everything is so, so hot. 

You whine that sound you know he likes, the one that you know provokes him, rubbing your slippery cunt all over his stomach, grinding and sliding against him, trying to make the throb go deep and hard again like he’d made you do with his mouth. And oh, he’s so– he makes you so upset, and you feel big and little all at once, and that stretched soreness of your cunt, it’s all his fault, and the bruising around your nipples too, and he needs to put it inside. 

He stretches again, blinks open slowly, long lashes, dimple beside the corner of his mouth, and you dig your nails into the hard muscles of his chest, dragging your blunt edged fingernails down his skin as you slide lower, over his big cock – that’s what it’s called, and you love the sound of the word, think it sounds how you imagine it’ll feel, cock – and try to put it inside, shifting and rolling over it, trying to impale yourself on it. It’s so heavy, and you know the heaviness will make the hurt inside you, the bruised feeling inside you, go away, if only he’d just do it. 

You huff at him, cry a little, whine a lot, try and make it go inside again, slipping and sliding in all the slick that won’t stop coming out of you all while he blinks slow and patient at you, a little smile on his face, and he’s so pretty he makes you so, so upset. You bend forward suddenly and bite his nipple hard, yank on the hairs on his chest and thighs. Hard enough to hurt. He grunts, but lets you, only twinning his fingers in your hair tightly, letting you chew on him until you’ve released his skin on your own. 

“You upset with me ‘cause I haven’t fucked you yet? You gettin’ impatient with me?” You huff at him. “Think you’re ready, sweet thing?” Oh, please, please, please. 

You know that you’ve never been more ready for anything in your entire life. 

He rolls you over, spreading you wide to play with your cunt again, and you start crying for real. “It hurts, alpha, please. It hurts, and I glow.'' It's so hot everywhere. 

“You’re full in your heat now, baby. Don’t worry – knot’s gonna make you feel all better. You’re gonna be so full.” And his voice is so soft and deep and hard too, all at once. It floats away and it comes back, and he sounds like all the things and all the sounds that can have ever existed in the whole world, and also, just right enough to let you remember, only for a second, very calmly and in a moment of bright clarity, that you’d always known he’d come to fix it all. This is only the last part of that at last. 

“My brave girl,” and he pauses a beat above you, between your spread thighs, his cock hanging heavy, tip-slicked between his thighs, giving you a sticky kiss every time it bobs against your tummy. He drags the pad of his thumb at the hollow beneath your eye, catching fallen salt water there, only of desire, not the sad sort, you know the difference so very well by now. And his own eyes, they’re so dark, so full of all that heat that’s so chock full inside you too, but also different, something like cool and serene and full of knowing, full of patience. Eyes like mirrors. The two of you are the same. 

He wraps his big hand around his ever bigger cock, and smears the tip against your swollen, needy sex, pressing hard at the aching nub, sliding down and pressing hard at the bruised little hole. You growl an impatient quipping noise at him, but he returns it in kind, deeper, scarier, full of an order to settle. 

“We have to go slow,” he says, “It won’t fit just like that.”

But you rock your hips in hitching jerks anyways. “No, I’ll make it fit,” you promise, clawing at his chest to achor yourself, find the right angle, find relief. 

He shakes his head, continues to smear and press against you, and then oh, oh, oh, he’s just there, first a big stretch like from the morning, and it hurts, it burns, but not as bad as being without, and you make a sound like you’ve never made before, feeling a feeling you’ve never felt before and had waited your whole life and a year for. Inside, please, please, inside, alpha. He feeds you himself, makes the heat brighter, fans the flames and soothes them all at once, and oh, it really does hurt and feel so good. 

He’s panting like a bull above you, sweating and groaning, and the sounds he makes, the sounds he makes, rough and wounded, like you’re wounding him, like you have the power to wound a great thing like him. “Ain’t that so fucking good?” He coos and croons and pets at you, feeds you and feeds you and feeds you. It’s so big and it splits you, cleaves you wide and forces you into the place and thing you’d lived your whole life waiting to be. “Look at my girl,” he’s saying, “Look how well my little girl takes my big cock in her tiny cunt.”

He pushes a little more, touches a thing inside of you that is swollen and bruised and so sensitive, and, “Oh, you’re in my belly,” you gasp when he finally stops pushing in. You cup your hand over your tummy, pressing down. “I can feel you,” there are tears slipping form the corners of your eyes, and your cunt feels so full it’ll burst or swallow him whole or a little of both, “I can feel you from outside.” You press down harder, rub over the bulge of him inside you; a cock in your belly under your palm. 

So good, just like that, he’s murmuring and you close your eyes to better listen to the dip and hum of his voice. “I am. I am – gonna fill your little womb. And we’re gonna do it just like this for now,” he starts to move, “Just half so you’ll let me in all the way.”

“There’s so much,” you hitch, breath quivering, chin trembling, tears leaking, cunt leaking even more. 

I know, I know, he rubs your belly, soothes you so well, rocks and rocks and rocks, a cock rocking inside of you. He kisses your jaw and your shoulder and your breast, and then changes something, and you finally open your eyes. He touches something so raw inside of you, something that screams and sings and throbs, and there’s something going swollen inside. He’s so beautiful, silver streaked, creased, lines over his forehead, alongside his eyes, his whole life painted in roadmaps and metallic patterns across him. Other places slicked and wet, red and flushed and sun touched, and you make him look like this, and then he presses the swollen thing again, and it bursts. Your cunt flutters, goes so tight it hurts, forces more tears out of your eyes, you claw at him, your body feels not your own, only his. Oh, fuck yes. Good girl. Fucking come for me. For him, for him, for him. 

You shiver and shiver, there’s only hot air and the rocking cock in your belly, the heartbeat inside of you everywhere, and when he finally presses once more, finds the end of the world inside you, he’s all the way in, making a sound that you’ll have to force out of him for the rest of forever; a perfect sound. He tugs you up onto his thighs, sits up, belly to belly and heart to heart and glow to glow, and he fucks you like he said he would. Hard. You finally understand what it means. His cock punches the bruised thing that lives inside, that has you keening a wounded sort of noise, clawing at him, mouth searching for his gland, sliding across his clavicle, up his neck until it’s there, swollen and throbbing and it tastes so, so good you can’t help it when you sink your teeth into the softness of it, the salted rust of his blood sliding over your tongue, down your throat and into your belly like a promise. He makes that glorious sound again, and he fucks you so rough it hurts in only the way fucking a man so much larger than you can hurt. He splits your cunt wide and ruts into you like a beast, and you take it because you want it, because you were made for it, because it’s so right. And you suck on the pierced gland, swallow the taste of him and when a pressure worse than what you could have ever imagined starts to swell within your battered and bruised opening, he pulses and pulses and spills inside of you, filling your womb like he’d said he was going to also. 

Then there is his knot, finally, within you. “Again, baby. Come on my knot, sweetheart. You’ll feel so much better if you do.” And he’s right, as you shiver into it once more with only his command to prompt you, his knot swollen like a lock, connecting you together, it soothes the bruise and the heat from the inside out. He rips your teeth from his neck by your hair, swallows your protests, tasting his own blood on your tongue as he comes inside of you, fills you with a heat more potent than anything the glow had ever made you feel. 

When you fall together like felled weeds, knot tugging gently, mewl falling from your lips, he soothes you so patiently while he continues to spill inside of you, all plugged up as you are, belly set to burst full of semen. He suckles at your nipples, bites and pinches and makes them hurt, and you can do nothing but let him do as he pleases. And you don’t sleep this time, for the throbbing is so strong inside of you, his soft groans sometimes turned to whimpers so wonderful you need to be awake to listen to them forever.

 There’s nothing of the not life anymore, there’s only him here with you. 

He does sleep though, after a while, or he goes very still and very quiet. His lashes quiver and his eyes move beneath their lids as if he were watching a dream, and his body steams and shudders, but eventually, the knot softens enough that you can shift and wiggle over him, and his eyes flash open, predator gaze zeroing on the little omega trying to leave her trap, he presses a big hand down on your tailbone, grinding your cunt that feels raw and full and bruised and right against his pelvic bone. “Where do you think you’re goin’?” Voice a deep burr. 

You give him a shy, appeasing look, nuzzling his belly, his thick pectoral and shift and shimmy up towards his face, feeling the heavy weight of him fall wetly from your bruised sex. It stings and flutters madly, clenching around the too large space he’d made inside you. Shuffling up on your knees, you peck at his chin, his mouth, suck on his lip. And when you look down between the two of you, there’s a puddle of thick white semen slowly drooling from between your legs onto his belly. 

You shuffle down now, licking up the mixture of slick and sweat and come, tasting the crease between his thigh and pelvis. You move lower, and resting your head on his thigh, you mouth at his cock, wet and slobbering, pressing a kiss, tasting the flavor of your cunt. 

“I feel so lovely,” you sigh dreamily, pressing another kiss.

He groans low, “A little more tongue– there you go. Oh, fuck– omega, that’s so good.” He threads his fingers through your hair. “It’s because you’re full of everything I just gave you. You’ll need more soon.”

You open your mouth wider, try to swallow him down, enjoying how his come slips out of you, making the tops of your thighs, your ankles you’re sitting on, all sticky wet. All mine, you mumble around his thick length, and his answering laugh is so vital, oh, everything really is so wonderful. He tugs you up by the roots of your hair, jaw hanging wide and spit slick so he can stick two big fingers in there and rub at the slimy surface of your tongue, grunts a hungry sound. 

-

He pushes you back, hand still fisted in your hair to spread you wide and inspect the wreckage he’d left between your thighs. “Lemme see–” he murmurs. “Look at how red and swollen you are, baby. Little cunt’s all fucked open.” He gently scoops his come back inside, smearing it along your cunt. 

Ah– Ah– You protest when he presses his fingers inside to feel the slip of his semen along your walls. Poor, baby, he coos. His cock stirs at your little sounds of hurt, soaked as it is, streaked with come and slick and a little pink tinge of blood. The sight makes him fully hard again. “You did so well, first time taking a knot. It’ll be easier next one.” You writhe and arch as he pets your cunt, spreading your legs wider despite your limp sounds of protest. Head rolling back against the blankets, you grip your tits in both hands and squeeze, whimpering at that too. 

When you lift your head to look down at them, lifting the two little handfuls in your palms to take in the sight of your chafed, swollen nipples your eyes go wide. “Look’t what you did to them – they hurt now.” And although he’s sure you intend to sound like you’re cross, the moan you end on, the way you’ve begun to rock your hips, tells of different things. 

“My poor girl, lemme kiss ‘em.” He stretches over you, taking your hands away to press a barely there kiss to the tip of each breast. “Poor little tits – poor little pussy too, all split open.” And he bends to kiss your blood tinged cunt, the flavor of lost innocence and come on his lips. 

He kisses you again, nibbles on your thighs, and your eyes are hazy, fever full, and you sigh a fluttering sound of oh, “Everything’s so lovely,” you say again. “And you’re so beautiful, alpha. We should eat green apples. I love green apples so much.” Delirious, a little nonsensical. 

“We will. We will– whatever you want,” he says, but he’s already mounting you again, wedging his fat cock into your tiny, battered hole, enjoying the sound of your half pleasure, half pained keen. And he doesn’t give you the grace of going slow, the rut is full on now – he fucks you into your nest hard, fucks against your womb until he’s filling it again. Only gentles once when you mumble into his ear, slurred and almost drooling, I want to watch it go in and out of me.

And despite his ferocity, the way he uses and abuses your cunt, he knows you need it from the way you open that little blossom mouth and try to swallow him whole, hungry thing. You yank at his beard and pull on his hair and scratch at his skin, bite his gland again and again, and he shocks himself by being nothing like afraid, nothing like uncertain. No, he only feels settled now. Joel only feels himself. 

He realizes that he had always needed this, but now, he wants it too. The distinction is stark and important beyond measure like some sort of primordial state of consciousness. He is only himself, dog fight lost and left victorious for it. 

You pass the days of your heat and his rut locked on his swollen knot, a steady stream of his come being pumped into you constantly. There’s no way he hasn’t bred you by now, and it makes something pleased and terrifyingly savage swell within him. 

He’s forced to shove an ice pack between your legs on the third day, between bouts on his knot, during a moment of clarity for the both of you while he feeds and waters you. But then later, after he’s given you one of the strawberry cream popsicles he’d made and frozen for you the day before you’d arrived, you sit, swollen cock buried deep, slowly rocking back and forth while he watches with an almost sick sort of rapt fascination as you eat the popsicle in little kitten licks, leaning back on his lap ever so often to bare your cunt to his gaze, slick and split wide, red as the strawberries in your sweet treat. 

“How is it?” He doesn’t specify which, the popsicle or the cock rocking inside of you, but you peer at him with the brightest and keenest sort of gaze, a look that tells him all he needs to know about himself, all that you see within him which is everything. You flash him a huge, cheesy grin, all the answer he’s getting, and you’ve got a tiny gap between your two front teeth that he finds so, so endearing, and his answering laugh is so vital, so alive, it’s like he steps into himself again after twelve years of vacancy. 

And with that bright light of clarity, a blink, blink, you seem to come fully awake for a moment. “Tell me of the things you like,” you order, taking a large bite of the iced treat and pressing your cold mouth to his, passing the flavor of strawberries onto his tongue.

He takes the moment and tastes it, pulls you close, “I like how the fire plays over your skin,” a palm ghosting down the slope of your naked back to the place where you’re connected. “How it makes shadows and shows me that glow inside.”

And as the fever fades, he switches to handling you with carefulness, gently stroking at your sensitive, come-filled pussy, careful of the stretched soreness of your little hole and the bruising around your nipples. With more awareness you remind him that he’s a big, stupid alpha with a big, stupid knot and that you hurt and want more.

But there’s still time and heat to take advantage of, and on the day he knows will be the last day of this animal lust, he stretches you out flat on your belly, his weight completely over your back, and he fucks you prone and immobilized, caged in by his bulging arms, telling you of how you own him now, how he belongs to you, how he’s going to keep you full and happy forever. “Make me come. Clench – good girl. Again,” he orders, and when his knot swells for what he knows will be the last time of this rut, relishing in the last whispers of your heat filled belly, he sniffs through the curtain of your hair and finding the still swollen gland at the nape of your neck, he slowly sinks his teeth into the vulnerable patch, binding your mating. 

-

Dawn peeks over the horizon like a faint suggestion, and you’re married on the cliffside one bitingly cold winter morning, the sea as your witness. Ellie and Dina are there, and they’re your friends now. You have friends, real friends, no more half life, no more half friend.You have friends, and you are important and significant and as vital and alive as Joel is. You’re real, and he helped make you so, yes, but really, you always had been. 

You wear flowers in your hair and a dress the color of the sky, and he has mirrors in his eyes, and the two of you are the same. Equal and only yourselves, and you love each other more than anything in only a very true way, nothing soft about it. 

When you know you’ll have a baby, he swallows your fear and your worry, marks your gland again as a reminder of all he is, all you are. And when you ask, for you can’t not share with him, “Will they come one day, to check if we did what we were supposed to? To see if we had a baby?”

He tells you, “Yes, they might,” very solemnly.

“What if–” a difficult thing to say out loud, now that you understand the thing you are and the way of the world so well, now that he’s shown you all there is to be shown, “What if they’re an omega like me – will they take them?” Give them their own white box and a not life to be nurtured by instead of a mother. 

But like all obvious things, he shares with you, always, only truths. “Never.” And the look in his eyes is so serious, eyes like mirrors, that you know his words are fact. “I’d never let that happen, I swear to you.” 

And the glow still comes, and the heat still takes you, but he’s always there now and nature is still an inescapable thing, but the perilous edge is no longer such a danger when you’re protecting each other. 

Netherfeildren's Masterlist

Updates Blog

[slitherpunk]

games i liked in 2023 (And Other)

I like games ! You know that ?! and I played a lot 2023! and I liked a lot :). They aren't in any specific order, it's just a little highlight of games that stood out to me this year. I've attempted to write a few thoughts on each so I hope take a look. I wrote playtimes for some also but that is very subjective.

-Ones that actually came out 2023-

Lunacid https://store.steampowered.com/app/1745510/Lunacid/ I think I mentioned enjoying this in 2022 but it officially released so I can say it was one of my favorite games in 2023 :3! I like to feel around this game's walls for secrets. I like the npcs that are full of hope and whimsy despite the bleakness of its world. Chill and occasionally spooky first person dungeon crawling around moody caverns and ruins varying from underground forests to vampire castles and blood lake. (Blood lake!!!! Lake of blood!!! Big creature there.) Lots of fun weapons and spells to find, I like the one that lets you turn blood into coffins.

~20 hours

Orbo's Odyssey https://feverdreamjohnny.itch.io/orbos-odyssey If you played the massively popular demo for "Peeb Adventures" by feverdreamjohnny then you know that Johnny makes some fun and funny games and this is certainly one of them. speedy and satisfying platforming! funny dracula moments! short and sweet.

~2 hours

A Walk in the Woods https://mooncaller.itch.io/a-walk-in-the-woods Quaint little GBStudio game :) Made by some friends of mine for a jam :) It's cute I like it. There's minigames where you catch bugs and birdwatch.

~30 minutes long

Undertale Yellow https://gamejolt.com/games/UndertaleYellow/136925 I've only completed the pacifist run and checked out a neutral run so far. as the title somewhat implies, this is a prequel to Undertale where you play as the fallen human who had the yellow colored soul. This Undertale fangame has a lot of charm!!! A lot of battles really feel like they could have been in the original, with quite a bit of extra flair in some circumstances.

~10 hours

vs really cool bird https://bobacupcake.itch.io/vs-really-cool-bird you know that really cool bird that rob bobacupcake made well you can fight it in undertale and it's really fun. yeah two undertale fangames. . . wat of it …

~30 minutes

Misericorde: Volume One https://xeecee.itch.io/misericorde I wont lie the main draw for me into this was cute anime nuns I sure didn't know a whole lot else about it when I dug into it. But it's (the first part of) a VN murder mystery! And I enjoyed it a whole lot. All the characters are memorable and I really enjoy how all of them have differentiating designs. The protagonist is so failgirl. She sucks so much and I love her. I'm very intrigued by the mechanics of the game's world, it clues you in near the beginning to expect something a bit supernatural/fantastical, which gives you (and later the protagonist) a curiosity about what's real and what isn't. The music is all very impressive too, with the ost reaching past 100 tracks varying through post-rock, folk, drum & bass, and others. (Remembering when the track "Scandal" played and my friends and I took a moment to be like- okay hang on this track pwns.) Big fan of its haunting locals and how the aesthetic of the game fits them well. Also the humor is a lot of fun, and I love all the moments getting to know the different characters. Very excited to see the eventual continuation of this.

~12 hours

Absolutely Perfect Specimen https://chambersoft.itch.io/absolutely-perfect-specimen It seems like a lot of people are craving toxic horror yuri lately. Here's a recommendation. It's a VN about the android maid "Pan" and the mad scientist girl who created her. Horrifying & gut wrenching & largely about having other people define you. The art and music is haunting & poignant and matches the ever increasing feeling of dread throughout. It's yuri with the chunks. Peak robotgirl horror for those who can stomach it.

~90 minutes

Wordhopper https://kokoscript.itch.io/wordhopper Very quaint word search type puzzle game for ms dos! I think its style is very slick and that's pretty impressive to see. Chill game with nice vibes and eyecandy visuals. also it was so cool to have played this and then ended up seeing the dev's booth at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest. I was like omg woah I just played this.

~bunny

Bossgame https://lilyv.itch.io/bossgame This game is yuriful as f*ck. Delightful humor and fun character dynamics! A simple-to-understand-difficult-to-master boss rush battle system that makes you satisfied to get it right, and enticing to get just a little farther if you get it wrong. There's a lot of detail and charm to this game's menus and dialogues and win screens, I remember noticing that once you beat a boss there would be some marquee text that would pass by with some prose on it. I love how it balances its silly moments with its heartfelt moments and its high octane moments. I like the character development and revelations had throughout the plot. & I like how good the protagonists are for each other :) It's very sweet. It's hype as hell. if you want some boss rush action paired well with that sweet sweet girl's love, you *will* play this game.

~5 hours

Elly's Adventure https://bikwins.itch.io/ellys-adventure Very cute and witchy!! You are the little witch girl "Elly" on an adventure to get your toys back!! Feels like a pretty authentic gameboy type experience, it takes a lot of design cues from Kirby's adventure and the like. I am a big fan of how playful it feels.

~1 hour

Nour https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141050/Nour_Play_with_Your_Food/ This was a treat for me, but I understand that not everybody is going to get it. It's a game where you play with food(and food accessories). And that's it. It knows what it was going for. I think a lot of people were expecting something else for some reason. It's a cute little toy game and I felt satisfied with my time with it.

~food

Hi-Fi Rush https://store.steampowered.com/app/1817230/HiFi_RUSH/ Do I have to say this game is super fun? It's a big one everybody probably already knows it. This game's dopey humor made me laugh a lot and I'm not afraid to admit it.

~12 hours

WHISKEY.ST2007S https://bonicle.itch.io/whiskey-st2007nes One of the last games I played in the year because it released super last minute. Does anybody else get a rush when running a shopping cart down the parking lot? This emulates that feeling. Short game where you collect whisky stones in the whisky stone dimension because you forgot to go christmas shopping until the very last minute. it rules. It's very short you can go play it right now & get a highscore.

~5 minutes

re:curse https://devpalmer.itch.io/re-curse Discovered this one near the very end of the year also. Fun little rpg maker horror/humor game about a weird scientist lady, her butch, and an evil clown computer virus that figured out how to warp reality. I got a kick out of it. and also enjoyed digging through the game's files, which was actively encouraged by the dev, which I thought was very fun.

~90 minutes

-Didn't technically get to until 2024 but released last year-

SWOLLEN TO BURSTING UNTIL I AM DISAPPEARING ON PURPOSE https://1207.itch.io/swollen-to-bursting-until-i-am-disappearing-on-purpose People love to dunk on a lot of indie rpgs for being "quirky Earthbound inspired and about depression" or whatever. Earthbound's great. If people can nail the kind of humor and absurdity it likes to pull off while also balancing difficult topics I think that deserves a high mark. SWOLLEN TO BURSTING was fun. Bizarre and charming places to explore & distressing secrets to find. I like how it blends meander-around-the-town gameplay with Yume Nikki sort of exploration and effects. Also I'm a big fan of the music. I like how it has the lofi sound which matches the early 3d look of the game.

~6 hours

HalOPE https://starbage.itch.io/halope Another for the fans of sweet little rpg maker games that have a lot of heart. HalOPE is about an incomplete little angel wondering through worlds. Each has a theme, usually to do with an emotion or feeling, and they do well at evoking that feeling as well as its antithesis. a lot of the music is very homey and charming at moments and unnerving at others, sometimes lonely, all doing well in their corresponding chapters to further the feeling of its specified theme. There are so many delightful characters and designs in this & I found myself feeling really attached to their tiny little stories. The narrative at the core of it all hit me. If I may be vulnerable, I cried a whole lot at various moments in this game. It was really cathartic. I feel very excited for people to experience this game.

~5 hours

-Favs I finally got around to that didn't come out 2023-

An Outcry https://quinnk.itch.io/an-outcry Kind of sad it took me so long to get to this one, but glad it meant I got to play the "definitive" updated version of it. Apartment wandering RPG maker horror. Bum smokes from your neighbors and use them to save the game. I wish I could unwrap a lot more of what I like about this game than I can without spoiling too much. But if I could, I'd probably go on for too long. Let me attempt to be succinct & not giving too much away. You can tell pretty early on that An Outcry is about taking action when necessary & not turning a blind eye. What it explores about player vs protagonist agency is very fascinating to me as well, and I enjoyed learning about the inspirations for why the game's narrative works the way it does. The character Anne is such a sweetie and I love her a whole lot. This game has a very tangible feeling, this apartment complex is dirty and crumby, it smells of smoke, and there's a surrounding desperation you can feel.

~5 hours

Pigments https://punkcake.itch.io/pigments Honestly I had gotten this game in a bundle and while I was playing it I hadn't looked at the name and I just kept calling it FRUIT. On call with my friends I'd be like "hey im gonna play more FRUIT". I straight up didn't read the title screen. But it's called Pigments. You play as a fruit and you try to paint the whole floor and not get sliced by buzzsaws. Fun little arcade type game.

~fruit

Bridge, October 3rd https://lowpolis.itch.io/bridge-october-3rd Very short vignette. I like it. It's what it says it is. I'm not going to overexplain.

~like a minute

-Other Games I Want To Mention-

Pseudoregalia https://store.steampowered.com/app/2365810/Pseudoregalia/ I think a lot of people might have already known this one but I felt like it was a pretty fun 3d platformer. There were a few issues I had with it (boss fight at the beginning was frustrating, and I got lost a lot [but it looks like there's been a map patch by now, so, perhaps for some that is a fix]). I enjoyed it but sure felt weird that the only accessibility option was to give the protagonist pants. What kind of joke is that?

~5 hours

Mushroom Musume https://mortallymoonstruckgames.itch.io/mushroom-musume (Disclaimer, this game is still early access, but I saw a lot of people talking about it last year. SO I will mention here?) Haven't played much of this yet, but I have enjoyed what I played so far!! As of writing I've gone through 6 playthroughs, I feel like I've hardly scratched the surface and I've been so impressed by its depth. It's very charming, you never know what sorts of fairytale shenanigans are going to happen, and it's very cool to see how your different stats will affect things. It very much plays out like a roguelike vn. Which is not the sort of thing you may expect to make much sense but it pulls this off well. Also all the mushroom girls are very cute and I love them very much. I hope the sad goopy one who had bugs in her skin rests in peace.

~mushroom

Knuckle Sandwich https://andybrophy.itch.io/knuckle-sandwich -_- Hm. Where do I start with this one. I was pretty excited for this one since the demo and kickstarter in 2018. I felt like the demo was a hell of a hook that got me curious & horrified. As time went on, it seemed to be shaping up into something really cool. turn based combat with action commands and wario-ware-type microgames?? with a banging soundtrack?? like, count me in!! Then it released and well, the gameplay, art, music all delivered. It was very fun and engaging in those aspects. But the story… oh it just devolves into disappointing nonsensical randomness. The whole hook at the beginning seemed to be completely thrown away for the wild goose chase plot that ensues, leaving you to wonder if it was ever going to be relevant again. It felt like it had no idea what it was trying to say or do. It disappointed me that a game that has so much good in so much else about it gets brought down so much for me by this plot.

~12 hours

Rhythm Doctor https://store.steampowered.com/app/774181/Rhythm_Doctor/ (Putting this one in mentions because it is early access.) I really enjoyed the act 5 release. When I first saw this game, I kind of shrugged it off, thinking "that base mechanic doesn't seem like it will last". I thought it was basically just that one ghost shooting game from Rhythm Heaven which I Hate. Well let's just say I am now seeking penitence for my previous transgressions. It's really fun. There's a lot more to it that I didn't know when I first took a look. Also, consistently amazed by people's custom levels, I had no idea that its level editor allows people to do so much in it, I look at some levels and think "This editor seems as complex as an industry standard video editor". I'm looking forward to what they're planning next, very curious how they could possibly one-up the last update.

~rhythm

El Paso Elsewhere https://strangescaffold.itch.io/el-paso-elsewhere This was really fun & funny so far but unfortunately I had been encountering an issue with a certain level where the game would crash. I reported the issue, got a response, and there has been an update since then so I think there's a possibility that it got fixed but I have not tried yet. I would like to return to this sometime but having to relearn controls midway through is always daunting to me.

~?

-Things that looked good but didn't get around to-

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood https://store.steampowered.com/app/1340480/The_Cosmic_Wheel_Sisterhood/ Still don't know a whole lot about this. But there are witches, and I like witches.

Casette Beasts https://store.steampowered.com/app/1321440/Cassette_Beasts/ I haven't felt thrilled about Pokémon lately. I know a lot of people seemed to really enjoy this little monster-collecting-rpg. The style is appealing to me as a die-hard gen 5 fan. I started playing it but haven't set aside the dedicated time for it yet, but I'm excited to dig in more when I do.

Little Goody Two Shoes https://store.steampowered.com/app/1812370/Little_Goody_Two_Shoes/ Started watching a friend play this, and I'm certainly curious.. Some sort of horror fairytale but also there's yuri? Yum. Enjoyed the style and animation in the nightmare segments that I saw.

Venba https://store.steampowered.com/app/1491670/Venba/ I've picked this up a while ago but still haven't gotten around to it, but I'm eager to, I've heard nothing but good things.

Goodbye Volcano High https://store.steampowered.com/app/1310330/Goodbye_Volcano_High/ I think there are gay dinosaurs in a band and it's going to be the apocalypse? I have also heard nothing but good things about this.

-Things I watched friends play-

Signalis https://store.steampowered.com/app/1262350/SIGNALIS/ This was a pretty big one. You probably already know it, right? Watched a friend play this and I missed various parts but I understood a solid bit of it. hey. robotgirls are always getting put in these fucked up situations. have you noticed this? one time i got really high and cried about it. it isn't fair

Bomb Rush Cyberfunk https://store.steampowered.com/app/1353230/Bomb_Rush_Cyberfunk/ This one was also probably big enough you don't need me to sing its praises. but it looked really neat. swag.

-Various Thoughts-

Lately I've been thinking more about design and narrative. I feel like I haven't been doing as much analysis as I should be when it comes to games. I want to dissect more what games are saying and figure out meaning. Also attempt to see how the mechanics aid in that. I feel like most of my own work is pretty abstract & random. I simply make what I like. While that's fun and all, I still want to improve in a lot of ways, especially in having more of a theme or message. Figuring out how other games accomplish this is obviously a good step toward this.

If you saw games here that interest you I highly urge you to take a look, many are pretty short, and I pretty explicitly wanted to highlight some smaller titles. If you know me you know I like to uplift small games. (Save for the occasional big game, but that's rare these days) I think it's healthy for you to play and support independently developed & published works. I don't want to ramble too much this time about why that's important, but I hope that you might have found something you may enjoy here and if not then I encourage you to find small stuff that you would like. And I would like to encourage everybody to share their findings as well! Little games need our help to be seen and talked about! They don't have the budgets the big ones do for advertising, and advertising on your own is a whole ton of work. If you like something, spread the word! I'm sure the developers would very much appreciate that.

[pretty-little-mind33]

Tangerine x fem!reader

Summary: Tangerine falls in love with his pretty neighbor.

Genre: Fluff 🍰

Warnings: swearing, blood, def a cliché mess but in a good way (hopefully)

~ breaking my T.S title streak for this one! inspired by the song Too Sweet by Hozier ~

TANGERINE MASTERLIST

It truly was some cruel sick joke that the sweetest looking girl he had ever seen had moved into the house across from his.

Tangerine honestly couldn't remember the last time he let himself have anything truly good in his life, since he knows everything he touches burns right in front of him. Which meant he made the decision that he can't afford that with you—so he's stayed as far away from you as possible.

You, on the other hand, have never wanted to become friends with anyone so much as you did with your two, mostly quiet, neighbors in the house in front of yours.

You'd overheard some neighborly gossip that they weren't to be messed with—gangsters or something like that. You didn't really believe those rumors considering you'd seen one of them, the one with dark skin and platinum hair, feeding the birds that rest on their porch. 

What kind of dangerous gangster would care about birds?

So, that's why, one month into having moved in, you stand in front of their door with a plate of miniature strawberry shortcakes displayed neatly in a pink tray. It feels corny and stupid when no one answers the door for a moment. You raise your hand to knock again when eventually the door opens and you look up, making eye contact with eyes that are the prettiest shade of blue you've ever seen.       

The man is dressed in a white button-up, half of it unbuttoned in his trousers and his brown hair is curled naturally, the ends sticking up messily as he looks you over. He tucks something behind him, clearing his throat awkwardly as his gaze falls to the tray in your hands. "Pastries," he says, his voice velvety and his British accent thick. 

You hold the tray out closer to him. "Shortcakes. I made them myself," you say with a smile and the man just looks annoyed—his lips twitching as he looks you over again, taking in your apron and the cream that's smeared on your cheeks. 

"It's late," he points out calmly, "much too late for afternoon tea."

He's right. It is. It's almost seven—you'd just taken more time with the cakes than you'd wanted. You feel embarrassed now and lower the tray.

"Oh," you bite the inside of your cheek. You'd had a whole introduction plan and now you're flustered. "You could use them as a late-night snack—" you pause, trying to explain, "Most nights, I see that your lights are on when I wake up at around three or four am for water and–well if you already can't sleep, a sweet treat wouldn't do you any harm?"

You feel like the creepiest stalker as the man's eyes widen. 

"Sorry, this was a stupid," you say and turn around, preparing to walk away when the man's voice interrupts your thoughts. 

"I'm allergic to strawberries," he says, "but my brother isn't. He'd love them. Here, I'll take 'em." He takes the tray from you as you turn back around and he looks down at the cakes he's now holding. Tangerine can tell you clearly spent time on them and he has to fight himself not to smile. 

"Thank you—"

"Y/n," you say your name much too quickly, itching for connection to this mystery man. 

"Thank you, Y/n."

You don't even hesitate when you ask, "And you are?"

Tangerine hesitates. He can't tell you his real name. Speaking to you like this, out in the open, is already risky. He sniffs nonchalantly and uses an excuse, one he hopes you won't question too much. "My friends call me Tangerine."

You laugh and the sound is so beautiful it's unfair. "Tangerine? What? Is that some shitty drunken inside joke with your mates at Uni?" you guess, pushing down the curiosity to jokingly ask if you using his nickname makes you his friend. It's too soon for questions like that.

He shrugs. "Mm, something like that," he says and he doesn't elaborate further. You wonder if you'll be worthy of his real name one of these days, but for now, this feels like some progress. You smile at him, rocking on your heels for a moment and then you look back across the street at your house. 

"Well, Tangerine, it was lovely meeting you but I should—" you point behind you with a smile. "I'll see you around and hopefully I can meet your brother! Enjoy the shortcakes!" you wave and skip down the steps as Tangerine watches you, his stomach filled with unfamiliar, normally dormant, butterflies.  

He chuckles, biting his cheek, and then walks back inside. He untucks his gun from his trousers and slides it into the designated drawer of the entrance table, shaking his head with a small smile as he remembers your wide grin. He returns to the living room and puts the tray next to Lemon's puzzle. 

"Someone important?" Lemon asks and then he looks up and sees the cakes. His smile widens and he doesn't hesitate to take one. "Ooo, pastries," he exclaims and practically stuffs one in his mouth, humming with joy. 

"Nah, just our neighbor," Tangerine says and runs a hand in his hair, leaning against the table and mindlessly playing with one of the puzzle pieces as he remembers how pretty you looked. 

Lemon cocks an eyebrow and speaks with his mouth full. "Which one?"

Tangerine shrugs. "Does it matter?" 

Lemon rolls his eyes. "Yer bein' weird as fuck. It was that cute bird from across the street, wasn't it? The one ya keep starin' at when you can see 'er from 'er window—like some creep—"

"Oh, piss off," Tangerine grunts, lowering his head to hide how pink his cheeks have turned.

Lemon hums, continuing to eat the pastries you'd made them, and grins. He knows how his brother is; always too damn proud to admit he has any feelings other than nonchalance and disdain. But he's seen how Tangerine is smitten with you without even an interaction and he can't wait to see where this goes. 

"Want one?" Lemon asks as he motions toward the tray.

"No. I'm allergic to strawberries."

Lemon laughs. "Ya aren't allergic to strawberries, you numpty."

Tangerine stands straighter, eyeing the tray of what looks like really delicious shortcakes for a moment until his jaw clenches and he turns around, his thumbs hooking in his pockets. "I am now," he says bluntly.

* * *

Lemon has gone inside first as Tangerine hangs behind, making sure the garage is fully secured. He's exhausted and there are dark bags under his eyes. Usually, he'll take the inside entrance into the house, but this morning he needs some fresh air after that mission. He walks outside and looks up at the dusty pink sky. It's 4:30 am in the morning—no sane person would be up. 

"Mr. Tangerine!" 

He startles at his name, holding his hands behind him—knowing they're still covered in blood. He looks up and his eyes widen when he sees you.

You're walking across the street to meet him, tightening your ponytail as your grin widens. You don't look sleepy at all. "Good morning," you say and look him over, "Weird running attire," you joke, mentioning the navy blue suit he's wearing.

"Running?" he echoes. 

You drop your arms to your sides, looking him over with a small, amused, frown. "Oh– I just assumed—most people, including myself, are only up at this hour for a morning run. What are you doing?" 

You ask the question so innocently that Tangerine doesn't know how to answer. 

He can't exactly tell you what he's been doing. How the truth is he's been out all night killing for money. He pushes the image of your disappointed and scared look from his mind and lies. "Oh, I like seeing the sunrise," he says, sounding nonchalant, pushing his hands in his pockets quickly so you don't see the dried, crimson, mess. 

Hopefully, you'll leave him alone soon. 

Unluckily for him, you don't leave him alone. "Oh! I love watching the sunrise!" you say, smiling as you point behind you, adjusting your sneakers. "We should go see it someday," you offer kindly, your tone a more sincere nonchalance than he was, "no pressure or anything." 

Tangerine is speechless. He blinks at you, his sharp blue eyes scanning you up and down. You must be kidding. No sensible soul would invite a stranger to do something seemingly so intimate. You shouldn't be inviting him like this, you don't know him. He's dangerous. 

"You don't know me, why would you want to do that?" he asks bluntly. 

You shrug, still looking as nonchalant as ever. "Can't know you if you shut me out," you say, smiling, as you return his bluntness. When he doesn't answer, you just send him a small wave, saying your goodbyes as you begin your run. 

Tangerine is tempted to run with you now. To protect you. He shakes that thought. 

Lemon interrogates him the moment he comes back inside. "Flirtin' with her now, Tan?"

"You're gettin' on my fuckin' tits," Tangerine grunts, your offer still swarming his mind. Lemon laughs. 

Tangerine doesn't have much peace until he eventually, after you deliver more and more pastries as an excuse to talk to him, accepts.

He doesn't sleep a wink that night. He's a nervous wreck as he plays every scenario in his mind and spends hours in the kitchen just to see your smile when he walks out of his house with a covered basket as the morning sun prepares to peak from the clouds.

Your eyes widen and you rush over, your pretty sundress hugging you in ways that make him lose his mind even more. 

"You made something?" you ask, grasping at his arm. Tangerine hums, guiding you to his car. 

"I know a spot," he whispers, hiding his smile. The drive is silent but comfortable and when he drives you to a park, he walks with you up the hill. You watch with amusement as he fusses over the picnic cloth and then opens his basket and pulls out a bowl of strawberries drizzled with frozen chocolate and a small bowl of whipped cream. You both sit down and you look at him, slightly confused. 

"As a thank you for the shortcakes."

"I thought you were allergic to strawberries."

You both say in unison and you laugh. Tangerine's cheeks turn pink and he runs a hand in his hair, answering you, "I- I lied. I just, I was nervous," he says as he picks up a strawberry and outstretches his hand. You smile and look at the cream.

"You whipped this yourself?"

He nods. "The store-bought cream is always disgustingly sweet," he shakes his head and dips the strawberry in the cream before he turns to you again, your knees almost touching as you lean in. You refuse to take the fruit and instead, you part your lips and stare at him, your heart hammering. 

You wonder if this is too forward, but Tangerine brings the strawberry to your lips. It takes bittersweet, like how you assume he would taste, the dark chocolate mixes with the whipped cream, and some falls from your lips. He doesn't say anything as he catches the drip with his thumb, looking at you intensely as his heart beats loudly in his ears. 

"Were my shortcakes too sweet for you?" you ask in a murmur, his hand not leaving your face. 

Tangerine knows he shouldn't. He knows he'll hate himself after but nothing sounds more appealing than kissing you now—so he does.

He can taste the chocolate on your lips as his hands cup lightly around your throat, his touch light. Just enough of a warning as to who he truly is. You gasp, not minding at all, as you kiss him back.

As complicated as you know it will be, this feels so right. 

Tangerine's hand finds your waist and, bunching up your dress a little in the process, he pulls you in closer. He takes a breath, looking down at you as he ignores the screaming in his head. "No," he whispers, knowing damn well he'd held himself back from tasting them, "No, they weren't too sweet for me."

It doesn't matter because, in the end, he isn't talking about the shortcakes.

tags: @kravensgirl, @brokeaesthetic, @earth-elemental18, @lqrlei, @princesssunderworld, @longlivedelusion, @thewinterv

[helluvagirlboss]

Based on a conversation I had with @oversensitiveandoffputting I think that ironically, “Apology Tour” was the episode that fully convinced me that Stolitz was a relationship that could work in the long run.

Hear me out, because I know this is the episode where the state of Stolitz is the worst it’s ever been.

In every romantic relationship, you two will inevitably piss each other off and you might end up in an argument that ends badly. But after you two have said your piece how will you proceed? How will you treat them before you make up? Well “Apology Tour” gave me that answer.

Yes Blitz and Stolas opened the episode having a really brutal argument where the two of them, mainly Blitz, said a lot of hurtful and insensitive shit. But later in the episode at the Anti-Blitzo party, Blitz goes to talk to Stolas still trying to apologize even after Stolas publicly sang a song about how much Blitz hurt him and that he was “a motherfucker” (which honestly, good for Stolas, the bird needed a healthier outlet for his pain).

And when Stolas sees him, despite him being mad at Blitz, despite the fact that he is still clearly hurt by Blitz’s actions and words, and despite the fact that he is surrounded by people that would 100% be on his side if he were to expose Blitz, Stolas still tries to hide Blitz and warns him against exposing himself. Even when he’s mad at him, Stolas tries to protect Blitz.

And on Blitz’s end of things, Stolas is drunk off his ass and extremely vulnerable. Despite the fact that Blitz in that moment has the power to try to make Stolas feel worse about himself, despite the fact that Blitz is also extremely hurt by Stolas’s actions, despite the fact that Blitz could easily have chosen to leave Stolas to drink himself to the point of danger, he still chose to take care of Stolas in his drunken state and bothered to listen to what Stolas had to say and only left when Stolas asked him to.

Even when the two of them are mad at each other, confused as hell about how badly things ended, when they no longer have any obligation to each other, and are too wrapped in their own feelings to understand how the other is hurt, they are still looking after and caring about each other, even if only to the extent of ensuring things don’t go worse for the other person.

I don't know how to articulate how much this means to me because after seeing a lot of couples both fictional and in real life go through a rough patch, maybe even break up, and they proceed to treat each other just awfully because of their hurt, what Stolitz did is almost unheard of to me. They have no more obligation to each other, but they still chose to take care of each other when both of them were at their most vulnerable.

They didn't have to but they still chose to.

Now this in and of itself doesn't mean the two of them are ready to get back together. Blitz needs to unlearn his self-destructive habits born out of debilitating self-hatred, and he needs to learn that his -self-loathing will hurt the people around him because let me tell you, it hurts like hell when someone you love is determined to not accept that you care about them. And Stolas still needs to do a lot self-reflection on why his actions lead Blitz to believe that Stolas could not possibly care about him, because it also doesn't feel good when it feels like someone doesn't respect you enough to treat you like an adult.

However, the fact that the two of them still chose to be kind and attentive to each other in spite of their anger and the messiness of the situation, this tells me that when the time comes for them to have another conflict that frustrates them both, they will work to overcome it together.

They know how to have a good time together, but now they're figuring out how to have a bad time together, and honestly if this is how they treat each other when they are at their worst, I have a lot of hope for how they will handle conflict moving forward.

[yannights]

The Caged Truth

Yandere male X winged reader

A/n: Hi, it has been a while, sorry for being absent but I am back with a new story. You can imagine any male character for this story, feel free to choose your favourite.

"A caged bird isn't a real bird. A real bird can fly. Those that are trapped lose all that makes them a bird."

Your statement came as a surprise, so surprising that it caught the attention of your captor as he was reaching to open the bedroom door and leave. He stopped, all movements faltered, and a deafening silence created a sense of unease that could almost make you sick. But you refused to show such emotions and patiently awaited his response. A few seconds went by, and the air started to thicken, as if it was warning you. Had you made a mistake? Had you spilled the wrong words? But you had only spoken the most honest truth. Surely he would understand, given the situation.

He slightly turned his head to the side, showing he was thinking about the words he was going to say in response.

"A bird with one wing chopped off cannot fly as well. Does that not make it a bird then?" He asked.

Those words were definitely ones you were not expecting. A simple question that nearly contradicted your own words. You felt stress rise as you tried to find a way to answer without leaving another opening, hoping to make a better point. You realized that the bedroom had now become an arena, where one of you would come out as the victor, and the other as the loser. Your mind raced desperately. If you gave no answer soon, then he would win, and you would face pure humiliation.

"But at least it is still free. Regardless of its disability, it may not fly, but it is outside, living and not confined..."

"But vulnerable." He interrupted.

Your form moved slightly backward as your eyes widened in shock. He turned around, and by doing so, you could have sworn the room darkened. He faced you with a stoic expression that nevertheless had an apologetic tint to it, as if he understood where you were getting at but was still convinced by his own ideal. He adavnced slowly. You instinctively backed away. He watched you while you avoided his gaze.

This lasted until your wings made contact with the cold wall behind you, which signified that it was short-lived. He finally came to a grounding halt as his chest was millimeters away from your form. He leaned forward and slowly reached his hand out towards you. You flinched, not knowing what he was going to do. You closed your eyes tightly but reopened them as soon as you felt the rough hand caress your left wing.

"A one-winged bird can never survive in this cruel world. It would die as soon as it is born," he said as his other hand reached out to touch your other wing, leaving you completely trapped in his hold, too afraid to move.

"Even a bird in its integrity can fly, eat, sleep, but can also die so easily as it has many predators hungrily watching it, as it has many arrows pointing ready to shoot it down, as it has ways to fall and die."

His hand movements stopped, and he let go of your wings. He moved one to your face and tilted it upwards to look into his stone-cold eyes.

"That is the price of freedom, a price I will not allow you to pay. That is why cages were made, to keep it safe."

The word "it" really meant "you," and you could see the sincerity behind his words. His stern expression softened ever so slightly, but yours only grew sadder.

"But at what cost?" you whispered, your voice trembling. "A life without freedom isn't a life at all. Can't you see that?"

His grip on your face tightened momentarily before he let out a long, weary sigh. "I can see it, but I cannot risk losing you. The world out there is merciless and unforgiving. Here, in this cage, you are safe. With me, you are safe."

Tears welled up in your eyes as you searched his face for any sign of relenting, and in the end, they only spilt down your face. He kissed your forehead as soon as he saw your sadness but did not wipe your tears away. Because tears are a sign of realization...

A realization that you would never leave his cage...

[onestepbackwards]

Hello Soulmate

🔸Zhongli x Reader Drabble🔸

Summary: You've had a weird soulmark on your wrist since you were young. Who knew it was the soulmark of a god who has waited for you for almost 6000 years?

CW: Fluff, soulmate au

Word Count: 1428 words!

--❤❤❤--

Imagine Zhongli, in all his years alive, has never found his soulmate.

On his chest above his heart, a small bird symbol lays dormant. If it wasn't for the very obvious mark, he'd believe he never had a soul mate to begin with.

But not once in his thousands of years on Teyvat, had it ever lit up, or burned, or glowed. Tell tale signs a soulmate is alive, and that you have met them, or that they were nearby.

His did none of those. It just sat innocently on his chest.

At least it wasn't ashen grey, showing his soulmate had passed.

He had long grown not to expect his soul mate to appear. Zhongli did have hope after becoming an Archon, hoping that would make finding you easier.

But you never once showed up.

Eventually time went on, and he no longer felt hope.

Well, that would be a lie.

He felt hope, but it had long since grown into a warm, smoldering coal, instead of the blazing fire it once was.

The dragon knew if he were to still meet you in this life, he would love and cherish you, excited beyond belief.

But that day had yet to come.

So with a heavy heart, he went through with the death of Rex Lapis.

It was one of the most difficult decisions he had ever made. But it had to be done, regardless if he truly wanted to step down or not.

Erosion would eventually come its way for him, much like it had done to Azhdaha. It was best to let his country grow on its own two legs, and be prepared for when that day came, whether it be in a hundred years, or a thousand.

A part of him worried you would come, only when he was beginning to wither.

Zhongli didn't want you to see him like that. You already missed him in his prime, but he had nightmares of meeting his soul mate when his mind started to erode.

But it had to be done.

He wasn't too surprised to see your mark on his human vessel, though he still felt so empty. Deep down, he yearned to hold his soulmate, even now.

So when he was sipping tea one day, taking his time for an order for Director Hu, he dropped his tea cup when he felt a burn on his chest, right above his vessels heart.

His eyes widen as he reaches up to touch the spot. For once, he curses himself for wearing so many clothes.

He's leaving the tea house he is in, uncaring if the mora he slammed down on the table was enough to cover his meal. Rushing to his small home he had bought years ago, Zhongli slams through the door, almost stumbling to his room.

Ripping off his clothes, he shakes as he sees it in the mirror.

Your soulmate mark, alive and glowing warmly on his chest.

He stares in wonder, fingers gently reaching up, touching the delicate looking mark with awe.

You were real. You were alive. You were close by.

Old instincts pushed at the boundaries in his mind, and he forced them back down.

Not now. You were alive. You were real. He had time.

Rex Lapis waited 6000 years for you. Zhongli could wait just a little longer.

Meanwhile, you had an odd soulmate mark, ever since it first materialized as a child.

It was the Geo symbol. Just that, the Geo symbol.

Your parents had been stumped since the mark showed itself, on the inside of your wrist clear as day.

It glowed a stunning amber, and was outlined in black. Whoever it was, was alive and well.

Most marks had very interesting meanings. But THE Geo symbol?

It had your parents scratching their heads.

Not once had anyone you met had any symbol similar. Never had anyone seen a mark of one of the elemental sigils.

As you got older, it only brought more questions than answers.

Though you remember talking about it with a friend in the bar in Mondstadt, when the bard there asked about it when he saw it on your wrist in passing.

"You know... It might be someone from Liyue that uses a Geo vision. Or maybe an adeptus that works with Rex Lapis? Who knows, maybe even Rex Lapis himself?"

The bard then laughed, and your face went red at the remark. You? Being able to claim a god as your soulmate? Please.

The head of the bar ended up dragging him away, though the mischievous, almost knowing look that bard sent you over his shoulder had you second guessing yourself.

His words kept whispering in your head. Maybe your soulmate was in Liyue? That was the nation's symbol after all. If anything, it would be a good place to start looking.

After all, you always felt sometimes you had to grab fate by the horns and take control of it yourself.

So when you packed a bag and headed out, your parents tearfully waving goodbye behind you, you didn't think much of it.

If you found them, then you did. If not, you could always go home.

Though you weren't expecting your mark to burn when you stopped to rest at a Statue of the Seven near the harbor. The late Rex Lapis' statue.

A part of your mind grew anxious at this news. Your mark glowing and burning like this.

"Who knows, maybe even Rex Lapis himself?"

The bard's words echoed almost tauntingly in your mind.

You tried not to sadly laugh as you felt the warmth flow through your body.

Of course, if it really was Rex Lapis, it would only be your luck it was a dead god you were tied to. If only you had been a year sooner...

But that didn't mean Rex Lapis' spirit was gone. You had read the papers, and Lady Ningguang had mentioned a dream where he told her about how he had perished.

Or something like that.

Perhaps that was what this was then? Since he was a god, that's why your mark wasn't ashen grey? His spirit was strong enough to live on?

How cruel. If that was what this was, your soulmate was taken from you far too-

"I found you."

You scream as you spin around, and a man with the most gorgeous amber eyes you have ever seen is standing behind you.

He looked a bit disheveled. His clothes almost haphazardly thrown on. You got the impression he normally didn't look like this.

The mark on your wrist pulsed, and your eyes widened.

"You..." You began, though you couldn't think of the words you wanted to say.

The man is quick to unbutton his shirt, and tug it to the side.

When you saw the glowing bird, pulsing on his chest above his heart, you knew.

That mark was yours.

Carefully, you lowered your wrist, and he oh so carefully reached out for it. His hands were so gentle as they took your own, as if you were made of glass.

The spark that followed as a thumb ran across the symbol, left you breathless.

"My symbol..." He murmured, in awe over the small mark.

But you could already tell there was weight behind those words.

His eyes snapped back to your own, and you saw it.

This man... he was older than he looked. Those eyes were the ones of an old soul.

You felt power radiating from him, and your mouth went dry.

"You aren't... human, are you?"

It wasn't so much a question, as it was a statement.

The man blinked, almost in surprise, before he began to laugh.

It was a gentle one, one that had your heart pounding in your chest.

He smiled at you, eyes glowing bright.

"I should have known my soulmate would be able to figure it out first thing."

"Who knows, maybe even Rex Lapis himself?"

Those word rang in your mind once more, and you found yourself speaking before you could think about what you were asking.

"...Rex... Lapis...?" You asked, almost unsure, though the thought somehow felt so right.

His eyes seemed to brighten, along with his smile.

He brought your hand up to his mouth, and kissed the Geo symbol on your wrist, sending shivers through out your body. He then nuzzled against your hand, eyes never leaving your own. The loving look he sent you left you almost breathless.

"Hello, my dear. It's nice to finally meet you."

[gguk-n]

The Sky Between Us (Charles Leclerc x Reader)

Summary- You can't keep two love birds away, especially not when fairy godmother Carlos has got any say in that.

google translated french

Series Masterlist

Chapter 3- Reunion of Hearts

Charles had magnets in his eyes, especially when it came to Y/N. He could tell if she was in close proximity. That's why he noticed her being sat a couple table away from them. Charles and Carlos were celebrating Carlos's win in Australia after beating appendicitis. He couldn't take his eyes off her, she looked beautiful as ever, laughing so brightly, it made his heart constrict. He wasn't the reason of that bright smile. He wondered had she moved away. He hadn't really tried reaching out to her. How could he? After all he was the one that wanted to end it all. The months after Y/N left were misery to say the least. He would always end up on a piano playing the most heartbreaking notes or moping around. Everyone was fed up with him. Arthur even told him to man up and just talk to her. At least during the season, his mind was preoccupied; the real test was after Abu Dhabi. He was stuck at home, barely left his room. All he could do was go through their old pictures and Y/N social media accounts. He felt some kind of solace knowing that she still followed him, maybe he still had a chance until Christmas when he saw that she had unfollowed him. Y/N had moved on and it was time for Charles to do so too.

The season started off strong, when he stepped on the podium in Saudi Arabia, he hoped that she was watching. Maybe she saw him, maybe just maybe she was still proud of him. 2 weeks later, he was in Australia, Carlos won the GP. All was well, until he saw her. His heart was ready to jump out of his chest. Carlos had noticed where his team mates eyes kept drifting off to. Much to Carlos's relief, it was Y/N. Carlos knew what had to be done. He know Charles still loved her, what he did in Austria was stupid but he needed closure or a second chance if Y/N would give him one. Carlos decided to talk to Y/N when they left their seats to exit the restaurant. Y/N was more than happy to be greeted by Carlos and kept the conversation short and polite. Carlos could only hope for Charles to step in and talk to her, but to his dismay Charles barely came or even spoke to her except for the couple pleasantries. He followed Carlos out of the restaurant as soon as possible. Carlos really wanted to smack his team mate right across his head for not talking to her when he missed her so much.

Carlos spent the next couple of weeks talking to Y/N, trying to gauge the situation. He wanted to know if she felt the same away about Charles before he decided to play cupid. To his delight, she still loved him and seeing him in Australia had brought her back to square one it seems. Carlos was about to make the boldest and scariest suggestion; he asked her to come to Monaco for the GP. She was back from her work trip in Australia and Carlos only asked for a day. He asked her to come to Monaco for the GP, just for the race; he begged her, she didn't even have to be there the whole weekend, just Sunday. Carlos lied that his girlfriend missed her wanted to hang out. Charles better play his cards right, Carlos thought.

Y/N couldn't say no because deep down she knew that she loved Charles and wanted nothing more than to go back to how things were but she knew that it would be fruitless if he truly felt like she didn't care. It was for closure she said, if she ran in Charles, which was a given, she could have a talk with him and finally end this chapter of her life. Amy wasn't really on board with the plan. If she could, she would've tied Y/N down and left her locked in her apartment but Y/N was a big girl now and had to handle her own problems.

Monaco grand prix rolled around quiet slowly for Y/N, she found her self dressing up for the race. She had reached Monaco the morning of the race and made her way to the paddock. The race was going to start in a while, in a turn of events, she didn't run into Charles even though she half hoped to; except, she found Carlos who took her to the Ferrari hospitality. Charles was too busy with their strategist. He only saw Y/N as he was getting ready to get in the car. Their eyes met and Charles bolted in her direction, "Y/N, you are here, you're real." he said while holding her hands. She pulled her hands away from him, "All the best Charles." she said while looking into his eyes. "Please, stay. I'll come see you after the race." Charles begged. "I'll think about it, maybe if you win the race." she suggested.

The race was off too a good start with Charles at pole position, there were a couple crashes and one safety car but Charles finished P1 in his home race, breaking the Monaco curse. The whole team ran to Charles, but his eyes were only on her. The first person he spotted in the crowd and the first person he hugged after winning was Y/N. It was like she was his lucky charm, he broke the curse because of her being there. "I have to meet the team and do the post race interview. Please just wait for me, I'll be back and we'll have a talk." he said earnestly while looking into her eyes. She nodded with tears in her eyes, "I'll be in your driver's room" she muttered feeling the honesty in his words.

Charles couldn't wait to finish all the post race celebrations and the interviews. All he could hope was for Y/N to actually be waiting for him. He ran to his driver's room and to his relief, there she was, sat on the leather couch. It wasn't a dream, she really saw him win his home race. He slowly walked towards her, "I can't believe you're here." Charles breathed out. He wanted to hold her but he held himself back. "Well, I wouldn't be, if not for Carlos." she said. "I'll have to thank him later." he muttered more to himself. "I'm so sorry mon amour, I was out of line in Austria. I haven't been able to forgive myself for hurting you or the words I said. I love you and I am so sorry for everything. I completely understand if you don't want anything to do with me but knowing that you were watching me and knowing that you saw me win my home race meant everything. I love you so much and I'll spend the rest of my life proving it to you, if you'll let me" he rambled on. Y/N had a smile on her face, she knew she loved him but she wasn't going to forgive him that easy. "Firstly, congratulations on the win. I'm happy I got to share such a special moment with you. I was and am still hurt by the things you said, but I still love you. So, I am willing to give us another chance." she said. Charles hugged her while resting his head in the crook of her neck, "I'll cherish this opportunity and make sure to never repeat this mistake ever again." he whispered. Y/N felt tears against her skin, she knew he was being honest. And he was an idiot, but she was willing to keep that idiot if he would have her. "Today is the best day of my life." Charles said while looking into Y/N's eyes. "Is it because you won Monaco?" she said. "Not only did I win Monaco, but I also won my girl back." he said. "I'm not a prize baby, you still have a lot of work to do before you 'win' me" she chided. Charles knew that and he was grateful for the opportunity.

They started dating again, Carlos was very happy with his brilliant work, going as far as asking them to name their first born after him; to which Charles was not opposed to. He really owed Carlos big time. Charles knew that these are once in a life time chances and he wasn't about to lose it. He knew whether he travelled around the world racing in an F1 car or not, his heart would always be where ever Y/N was. He was happy to leave his heart with his home forever.

THE END

hope you liked it!

[johnwickb1tsch]

bittersweet ~ a yandere!John Wick x fem!reader sunshine/grump coffee shop AU... Part 15 all chapters

AUTHOR'S WARNINGS: N$FW, SEXUAL CONTENT, COPIOUS SWEARING

-You wake with a pounding head, and total uncertainty if your adventure the night before had all been a dream.

Did John actually tie you up with his belt? And did you beg like a hungry little kitten for his cock?

And he didn’t give it to you?

Jesus fucking Christ.

You know you’d sensed all along that there was something dark swimming beneath the surface in Mr. Wick, but you’re not quite sure this was what you expected.

You look down at the little purple bruise on the inside of your thigh, and you know it had all been real.

A hot flood of embarrassment fills you as you remember more from the night before. You are mortified, and frankly, a little scared. You’re not sure you can actually handle a man with tastes like Mr. Wick’s, and you also know that once you’re in his company again you won’t be able to think anything through, or frankly, deny him anything he wants.

He has this drug-like effect on you. You would like to blame the wine for the night before, but deep down, you know that mostly it was just hunger.

You could easily forget who you really are, caught up in the web of a man like John.

The first hint of morning light is peeking over the rooftops. You know that if you are going to make your escape, this is undoubtedly your best opportunity. You tie back on your shoes, preparing yourself for the worst walk of shame you’ve ever endured. Even with your new found flexibility, you are only able to get the zipper of your dress half up your back.

Motherfucker.

The morning concierge gives you a knowing look as you walk through the lobby, and you narrowly resist the urge to flip him off.

How ironic, that the day that you want to flee this beautiful city with your tail tucked between your legs, is the day you finally seem to get your bearings. You make your way back to your hostel, taking off your platforms and carrying them half way. When an early morning wanderer tries to hit on you, you finally snap, yelling at him in a mixture of English, Spanish, and broken Italian, so furious that he’s actually the one who flees. You catch the word pazza, which you think means crazy.

He has no idea.

When you get back to the hostel, hallelujah if the fucking door isn’t unlocked this fine morning. How novel.

Your beautiful dress is wrinkled from sleeping in it. You hang it up anyway, and hope no one steals it. You pound two Aleve from your toiletry bag with some stale water, and think a hot shower might fix some of your ills.

Too bad the water heater is only set to tepid. You wash away the grime, but not your anxieties.

You go to breakfast, completely stuck in your own head, when you hear, “Y/n?”

You look up to see Javi sitting at one of the tables with a cornetto and a cup of the weak coffee the hostel provides for free.

You offer him a tired smile and sit down across from him.

“Are you alright?” he asks, and it’s a little touching that he knows you so well after only a short time in his company.

“I’m fine,” you lie. “I had a…weird night.”

That’s when Kelsey, the Australian girl who helped you with your zipper the night before, saunters up with a shit eating grin. “There she is. Noticed you didn’t come home last night. How was your date?”

“It was…something,” you answer with what you know isn’t a convincing smile. “I’m tired,” you try to cover.

Javi is still looking at you, like he doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying.

Knowing you will not be able to process any of what just happened to you in the boisterous bustle of the backpacker hostel, you eat a quick bite and rise. “Think I’m going for a walk,” you say.

“I’ll join you,” offers Javi, and you can’t figure out how to say no without hurting his feelings.

You walk out the front door together, chatting about something silly. He manages to make you laugh, until you look across the street. Your mirth dies like a bird struck with a stone.

John is there, leaning against the building like a tall dark omen, and he does not look happy. He stalks over to you, giving Javi a forbidding look before turning to you.

“You shouldn’t have run off like that. I was worried.” There is something chilling in his tone. It reminds you a bit of the way he’d scolded Brian that one day, but times ten. Somehow, his teeth seem sharper in this tense moment in the buttery Venice sunlight. 

 “I’m a big girl, John.”

John glares at Javi again, but the younger man stubbornly stays at your side, not taking the hint. “We need to talk,” says John, taking your elbow.

“You don’t have to go with him,” says Javi with a frown, grasping your other arm. You feel like you’re stuck between two dogs with a bone, and it’s too much.

“Both of you, let go of me,” you snap.

Miraculously, this does the trick, though goddamn if there isn’t something like murder glinting in John’s eyes as he does it.

If you weren’t in public on a crowded street, you have a feeling it wouldn’t have worked at all.

“I am going for a walk. Alone. Thank you, Javi, you’re very sweet. John, should I choose to talk to you, I know where you’re staying.”

You turn on your heel, and flee down the street.  

[littlenahsstuff]

When will my life begin- Pt2

Chloe Charming x Red x F!reader

Synopsis: you are adjusting to school life with your favorite roomies and unknown feelings quickly pop up. Castlecoming is around the corner and you aren’t sure what’s happening with it.

Warnings: still a little angst but really cute. Not proofread. I think that’s it. We’re learning guys!

Word count: 3.4k

Pt 1.

“Y/n please, sit down, dinner will be brought shortly,” Rapunzel-you mean, your Mom says. She glances at your fingers nervously tapping the chair.

“Yes, of course.” You sit down at the long table. At least two feet to your left sits your new brother. He’s pretty young still. Your parents told you he was ten but he was decently tall for his age.

“Hey Y/n, I know you are still adjusting like mom says but do you think you could come to my tourney game tomorrow?” He exclaims. Your mom looks nervous at the mention but quickly smiles. You are too. Your younger brother William is surprisingly very sweet already.

When you first met he seemed impartial to you but quickly found out your shared love for birds. It was one of the only books you had. You have no idea what tourney is though.

“I would like that very much,” you respond. He grins but doesn’t say anything else as the best looking meal you’ve ever seen comes out.

You wait before taking anything, trying to gauge what is an acceptable portion. Even then you avoid the deserts. Once you got a cupcake for successfully getting your powers to work. You had only a bite before it was snatched out of your hands when you failed but it was the best thing you’ve ever eaten until now.

During dinner it was nearly quiet save for the occasional question about you.

“Y/n, what do you enjoy doing?” Your Father asked.

“Uh… I like reading and drawing. I’ve always wanted to work with paint but um…. she said it was too messy,” you swallowed the lump in your throat. Your mother gave you a bittersweet look before an idea popped into her head.

“I too like those things, in fact painting is my favorite hobby. We should try it together sometime!” She suggests it and you think you’re life couldn’t get any bet-

“Your majesty, I apologize for the interruption but I have two letters. Both are for Princess Y/n, one from Auredon Prep,” some footmen says.

“Very well,” the queen says. He walks over and hands you the two letters. Your father raises an eyebrow.

You open it and read,

“Dear Princess Y/n,

Auredon prep must notify you that, due to extremely limited space, you must either start your school year this following Monday or be forced to stay behind.

We understand your particular circumstances and will offer free tutoring, exemption for all assignments during the two weeks you have missed, as well as counseling. We hope we see you early.

In addition to the limited space you will end up rooming with two students who have requested you. Red of Hearts and Chloe Charming.

Thank you,

Auredon Prep Staff.”

“Oh dear,” your mother says. “It’s up to you sweetie.”

You think about it, while you’ve had zero to none experience with the real world the offer of school and rooming with your two saviors is tempting. You don’t know what to do.

“If it’s alright I think I need the night to think on it?” You ask.

“Of course,” your Dad responds immediately.

Your mother nods too.

****

You get to your room, a stunning and very spacious purple room, and flop on your bed with the other letter in your hand. There is no address or name besides your name.

You tear it open.

“Hi Y/n, Sup,

We wanted to write to see how things are going. OH it’s Chloe, and Red!

We hope it’s okay but we heard you might be coming to Auredon prep and wanted to see if we could room with you.

You haven’t missed too much here. The classes are wonderfully boring. Not all of them! And if you are worried I can totally help you out.

This school is actually interesting on occasion, apparently they brought back some elective magic classes to “better teach the students control and the dangers of it all” but sometimes it kicks. I managed to make the teacher breakdance. It was cool.

That and the food here is not bad.

Anyways we respect your decision very much, but we would totally want you to be our roomie. Yup!

Chloe, and Red.”

The letter makes you giggle and your feet are kicking in the air weirdly. It seems like you’re excited about it now. It’s decided, you’ll go.

***

It’s your first day at Auredon. You were amazed by how magical everything looked. Your suitcase was heavy from your books but you lugged it in fairly easily, the stairs were a bit much.

When you opened the door Chloe immediately jumped up and squealed.

“Y/n you’re here! Come in, come in!” She drags you to what you presume will be your bed and sets the suitcase next to it.

“Good to see you,” Red softly smiles and sits on her bed across from yours.

“I’m glad I’m rooming with you too, thank you!” You reply cheerfully.

“Oh it’s no problem, we did promise we’d be there for you and besides I get how hard this whole, new world thing, can be. We got your backs Y/n” Red says. Her sincerity makes you blush a bit internally.

“Yes, and if it makes you feel better, we all are still new to the school. I’m sure barely anyone will notice you” Chloe adds.

***

She was in fact very wrong.

School was hard; as expected when you don’t know anything, but what was harder was the rumors that got worse by the day. You were this celebrated princess when you were missing apparently. You had a festival that took place on your birthday and everything! But when you turned out to be not that smart and without anything that set you apart in a good way, you were talked about a lot. Loudly too. It’s not even that you’re an idiot, you just legitimately do not know basic algebra or history.

Today was bad. The daughter of Mirabel Madrigal was a massive gossip and she did not inherent her quiet aunts nature. She saw you get an D minus on your first test and was in your history class when you were called upon and completely forgot the name of the school. Mariposa wasn’t a complete jerk about it, in fact the worst part was you can’t get too mad because she sounded worried when she told the entire school.

Chloe was the first to find out, Red didn’t have too many other friends unlike Chloe who was the best in Fencing club. Chloe didn’t exactly know what to do but it’s now she realized she should make good on her promise and help you out. Red was supposed to get help from her too. She felt a little ashamed. So she decided to remedy it the next night.

“Hey Red, Y/n?” You were so lost in the equation muttering to yourself about the different variables and how the heck some pig would need 18 pieces of coal per day for a random project.

“Uh… Y/n?” Red asks too, she gave up on the same problem a minute ago and was doing all the easier ones first. You now look up at them.

“Oh, did you say something? I’m sorry it’s just, I’m having a bit difficultly with some of the language here. What even is a square root? Pigs are mammals not plants and if I remember correctly, neither is this coal stuff!” You groan, flopping back onto your back.

“Want a little help guys? That problem does look difficult but I am fairly confident I can explain it better than the two year one math teachers. They aren’t very thorough. Don’t feel bad.” Chloe’s offer has you sitting up again and Red flips back to the question.

“Yes please,” you whisper, grateful Chloe is able and willing to help.

“And for the record….” She starts, “failing a test does not mean you’re dumb. Bookish intelligence is only one trait amongst thousands that can make a person good.” Now you know she knows which embarrasses you, but does Red? There’s no way she doesn’t.

“You’ll find what makes you tick tock tick,” red adds. She definitely knows too. “For me it was dance and art.” You sigh.

“Thanks, a lot truly. Anyways, please oh wise Chloe show me your brainy ways.” You say, causing all of you to giggle.

“Wish pleasure!” You weren’t perfect still but at least by the end of the night you found out what a square root was and even worked through the hardest problem. The teachers at the school are actually really bad because, while it wasn’t immediate, you could understand what Chloe was explaining. Red could too!

***

You start feeling like a third wheel by fifth week. You couldn’t understand the burning ache came from everytime they talked about castle coming. They were secretive beyond belief about it. They talked about it incessantly but you only caught bits and pieces. You yearned to know why they weren’t excited outwardly while talking about it. You couldn’t tell why it hurt so much and you felt bad about it. Whatever it was didn’t seem so healthy and you hadn’t felt like it since your time locked up.

You often shamefully stared at them while they were interacting. It was interesting to see such affection and how they felt a little more comfortable with you being there.

At the moment you were listening to them talk about dresses for castlecoming. Over the few weeks that and dance proposals was all anyone could talk about. You were told everyone could go but you didn’t want to be alone. You also didn’t want to ask to get a fancy dress. Your parents paying for your school supplies alone felt like a massive gift.

You didn’t want to see them have fun without you and it made you feel guilty as heck.

You stayed awake the majority of the fifth night from castlecoming. The next morning you looked like a zombie. Chloe had to go into practice early but when you awoke with a groan before realizing you had roommates again, Red looked at you funny.

“Y/n you don’t sound so good, and pardon me if it’s blunt but you look dead. Are you okay?” Red comes over to you. You sit up.

“Oh yeah I’m fine, it was just a weird night. Anyways um, so. Can you tell me more about your hobby’s? Chloe told me all about hers and it sounded cool but not something I would enjoy. Other than her gardening club. I might join that one.” You rub your eyes and yawn. Red sits on the edge of your bed.

“Of course. I like to work with spray paint the most, but it typically requires more room so I stick with regular paint nowadays. There’s actually an art club here, I joined it. The people there are pretty quiet and it’s relaxing. But when we show each other our work everyone is really supportive. The club ranges from people who don’t have any experience to those who are really good. I like to think I’m on that side.” She says wiggling her brows. You smile, it sounds like it’s right up your alley.

You shuffle a little. “Could I maybe join you sometime? I don’t want to intrude, but I do love art,” you admit. She nods enthusiastically.

“Yes! That would be so fun! I got to admit I was feeling a little jealous over you and Chloe spending some time together at a club. I wanna hang with you too!” She says but you’re confused again.

“If this sounds stupid, forget about it. What… what is jealousy?” You softly ask. She looks a little surprised but not completely aghast.

“Oh uh… it’s like an icky feeling within your soul. Like you want something and because others have it you get a little sad? Chloe could probs tell you better than me. Jealousy is normal but in some cases it could complicate things and if you let it get the best of you it could hurt your relationships. But again, it’s completely normal!” She finishes, sure of her explanation. It made her feel good that she could answer one of your questions and not just Chloe for once. You kinda are frozen now.

“Oh, I get it now. Thank you,” You say. Red doesn’t want to make you feel stupid and you already look uncomfortable, so she decides to drop it. Something she later realizes, she shouldn’t have done.

***

The weekend finally came and your roommates worried about something. What you didn’t know was they wanted to ask you to go with them to the dance. As far as you were concerned, however, couples went only with each other. You were avoiding them and the dance was this Sunday. Friday night they had to ask you to give you enough time.

Despite everything that happened during the original castle-coming at Merlin Academy, Auredon Prep would be much better. They knew that. They were still nervous about it and could tell you wanted to know why they were talking about it so quiet but they couldn’t tell you what happened yet. They also couldn’t agree on how to ask you to go. There was no time now, they needed to just get it over with and ask you to not only go to the dance as friends but as their third.

It was wild for both when they figured out they both liked you a lot. They think you are sweet, kind, funny, and the hardest worker they’ve ever seen. Your refreshing take on life reminded them of young Bridget and Ella at the same time and while they didn’t want to think how weird it sounded, they loved those traits.

After you got back to the room, as soon as curfew hit they were a little worried. As far as they know you only did two clubs and had two besties so far. You walked into the room and saw them staring at you.

“Hi guys!” You switch up. You know they know you’ve been avoiding them at this point. It will be okay because everything will go back to normal after the dance…. You hope.

“Hi Y/n” they both say In sync. You smile but it’s whiped away after Chloe says,

“Could you sit down for a sec? It’s nothing bad, we just wanna ask you a few questions.” You tense a little but comply.

“Are you going to the dance?” Red starts off. You shake your head no. Both Chloe and her look at each other with slight frowns.

“Why?” Chloe questions. You fiddle with your hands.

“Well, aren’t you not supposed to go if you don’t have anyone ask you or friends that aren’t going single. Nobody told me the rules but so far that’s what I’ve observed. And also, I don’t have anything fancy to wear. I don’t want to ask the king and- I mean my parents. I don’t know, I’ll go if you want me there but just… I don’t want to be left alone.” You admit and their eyes widen.

“No we really do want you there and you can go or not, any student can go. About the dress thing, Chloe has hers but I’m an insane last minute shopper. We were gonna pick it up tomorrow. You can pick yours out too!” Red says frantically.

“Yeah and you haven’t been here all day but your parents sent you an envelope with what seems like a pretty fat stack of cash in it and a letter. I’m assuming that it’s for the dress anyways.” Chloe adds, you are a little shocked. You are so close to saying you’ll go but then they grab each others hands and your heart drops.

The real reason you’ve been avoiding them was so you don’t show them you’re jealous of the both of them. You don’t know why but you assume it means wanting both of them. Why you have no idea. They’re awesome but it’s not like you know what love is when it comes to you experiencing it.

“Hey, what’s wrong? You zoned out a little, you don’t have to go if you don’t want to that bad.” Chloe offers.

“I don’t want to lose you,” you start sobbing and both of them look very confused from what little you can see through your bleary eyes.

“Hey, hey you aren’t what’s wrong?” Chloe rubs your shoulder. You sniffle. Red looks a little frozen now. Unsure of what to do with herself.

“I think I’m jealous but I don’t know why and I really don’t want to lose you. I’m sorry for avoiding you but I didn’t want you to know about it and now you know anyways! I don’t even know what I’m feeling but I really like you both and-“ Chloe comes over to you and kisses you on the cheek. You freeze. Thinking that Red was gonna get really angry. Chloe kissed you to make you feel better and now it’s such a mess and it’s all your fault.

“Shh, Y/n. Deep breaths. We aren’t going to leave you, we like you way too much!” Chloe soothes.

“The both of us do.” Red adds with a nod and she leans closer to you.

“I do have to apologize though, I may have been a little hard when explaining jealousy to you. It’s not that big of a deal unless you were screaming angry about us and sometimes it can be justified.” She pauses, your sniffling has lessened. “I am gonna try to be more careful when I say this but… I think you like-like us Y/n. And thats okay! I mean it’s like really obvious but we understand you don’t even know the signs yourself. I get it’s a lot, I had to have this conversation with Chloe around a month ago myself. But Chloe and I have talked and-“

Chloe interrupts Red, “We like you too. So much! We can take things slow but tonight we were gonna ask if you wanted to be our date to castle-coming romantically. Do you?” Everyone is frozen now with bated breath. Your brain is on overload now and even though this is everything you could have wanted it’s so much.

Red tries to break the tension, “No presh.”

It snaps you out of it.

“Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes! I would love to!” You cheer and hug Chloe tightly before jumping up and hugging Red. She flinched but seems to melt right into it before you notice.

“Wait…” you stop, “does this… how does this work am I like your girlfriend or is this just me hanging with you more than platonically or- do we kiss for real? Do three person couples exist. I’ve heard of the seven dwarves but that’s it…” you trail and they giggle.

“It means that yes we kiss, and yes you are our girlfriends if you want to be” Chloe answers.

“And don’t worry they exist, especially in Wonderland!” Red says. “Maddox my old tutor was once in one.”

“Oh, girlfriend. I really really like the sound of that.” You say it softly as if it’s a promise. You’re stomach is replaced with fluttery sensations and instead of your heart hurting it feels as if it would burst into giggles.

“Can we maybe, kiss you?” Red asks, face flushed. Chloe nods too.

“Please-“ you make out before reds soft plump lips are on yours and it’s the best sensation ever. It’s hard and impactful. It gets replaced by an equally as awesome feeling when Chloe kisses you, it’s still strong but soft too in a way that tickles. They kiss each other and it’s not long before you are all covered in Red’s signature lip color. You giggle.

“So this is love,” you say dazed and they both burst into full on cackles. “Wait- what did I say?” They both just kiss you on the cheek and continue making out until you somehow manage to fall asleep all in your bed. Thankfully it’s fit for royalty. You are left excited for whats to come, especially getting to dance with your new girlfriends.

[lucky-draws]

(transcript + some notes/explanation under the cut:)

i feel like the context of this is maybe only apparent in my own head LOL so basically ive kind of imagined an au where, based on the rebirth ending, james has succeeded in bringing mary back to life, but also maria, and also james gets killed in the process. so it's basically just maria and mary alone in the townTM trying to figure each other out. and this is a letter maria sends mary at some point basically. transcript in case the font is annoying to read:

Mary, You’ll have to forgive me if any of this sounds a little weird. I haven’t written anybody a letter in years, and I’m not sure if I have much of a way with words. Though I’ve been spending a lot of time in Ernest’s library lately, so hopefully some of his great literature has rubbed off on me. Somehow, I had this idea that I never liked reading much - that it wasn’t really my style - but I ended up getting kind of hooked. His dusty old books sure aren’t the worst company in this town, at any rate. I wonder what we really are, you and I. I used to think of us as two music box dolls: dancing side by side, spinning in perfect unison to somebody else’s tune. Like a pair of clocks keeping the same time. Two parallel lines, and an impossibility for us to ever intersect, to face each other head-on without some kind of disaster.

We’re not completely identical, though. If you looked closely at me - if you could bear to do that - you’d see all my imperfections. I lack your fine details. The paint on my lips is messier, my joins are showing, and there are bits of sprew left between my fingers. Pick me up, and you’ll feel how much lighter I am - I’m missing a lot of internal parts, you see. I’m a knock-off - we were cast from different molds. You were born of nature, while I was born from your very own killer. But I suppose I don’t need to tell you that. Do you hate me? I understand if you do. Or maybe I’m not so important - maybe you can only think of him. Or perhaps you’re trying not to think of anything at all when you sit by that lake for hours on end. I don’t know how you can stand it - going to the lake every day. It's so quiet. No ducks, not even a single bird. I’d go crazy, I think. That’s why I like to stay at the bar: there’s no one here either, of course, but it feels easier to imagine there might be. To pretend that we’ve only just closed, that those drinks on the table belonged to the last customers, and not to me. I’ve been so restless lately, sitting in the bar all night. I wonder if - no, I guess I’m hoping that - something’s going to give, soon. I think I’m losing the beat  - I’m spinning slower than you are. I think it’s because I keep getting distracted, always thinking of you. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s simply because you’re the only thing in this dreadful town that’s not a monster. But I think you must be as lonely as I am. Much more so, probably. And I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if you’d only reach through the mirror and touch me. I’m full of missing pieces, I know - but I have this notion that between us, we might just be able to come together into something like a real person. You know, some days I feel I hardly know who I am; but other times I feel so sure that I’m beginning to dance to my own beat. It’s no fun dancing alone, though. Well, I guess you know where to find me. I’ll be waiting at the bar tonight. I always am. I’ve waited there every night - for something, someone, anything, anyone - for what feels like forever. But these days, I’m just waiting for you. See you around, Maria

[bunji-enthusiast]

Hello I don’t really know if this is where I have to request or if your requests are open if there not I’m sorry and you can ignore this but if they aren’t I was wondering if you could make a Tristan Liones x reader who is Arthur Pendragon daughter so it’s like an enemy’s to lovers again I’m really sorry if this isn’t the right place to request or if your request are closed I’ve never done this before

Still (Wakes The Deep)

No worries darling! Thank you for the request, I tried my best to fulfill the vision lol. It kinda looks one-sided enemy wise though, my apologies, I don't have much experience with the enemies to lovers trope.

You were the daughter of Arthur Pendragon, one of which next to no one knows about your existence in order to maintain the visibility of your safety. It was a sure-fire way that your father could keep an eye on you, sure, he could simply gaze through the Orlandi’s eye — but it was much easier. Having alleviated his anxieties of his abilities to protect you, his dearest daughter. But once before, you had snuck out of Camelot, you weren’t sure about everything. Your father’s idealizations, the hunt for the four knights of apocalypse and even the legendary seven sins themselves. 

“Oh, crap–” You let out an audible groan as you held your right leg, having felt a sharp and stinging pain shoot through the side of your achilles. Every movement you made was a herculean effort, you weren’t particularly gifted with pure speed and strength compared to your father, but there was one sure thing you had inherited from the king of chaos. 

It was pure spite and hope. 

Which had allowed you to move on forward without much trouble despite the occasional winded breath and exhausted muscles, in each and every group. 

The land of greenery had stretched out across from you, you let out a gasp of awe as you admired the livelihood that the land held. The land of Britanna, you had never much understood your father’s chagrin for the other races, you thought it was nice that everyone had worked together to create a truly working ecosystem, kingdoms and even towns. 

You had even heard that interracial marriages are accepted now, which you thought was also very nice. 

Almost everything is, if all the war and combat are ignored. Then you truly enjoy the life of which you live, if not for you having been born to your father; Arthur. 

You watched every step you took, seeing the deer, wildebeests, birds and even a fairy go by. In no way shape or form had you been imprisoned in all 16 years of your life, yet due to restraints settled by your father’s impatience and due diligence towards you, you had rarely sought out the outside — well beyond what you know is the falseness of Camelot. You had heard whispers eight years back that the real Camelot had been destroyed by devastation, you held great sympathies, but you had wondered many times why he’d not gone to rebuild the kingdom, and achieve the dream he yearned for without endangering the lives of others. 

Well, it wasn’t any of your business to question anyway. 

When the knowledge of your existence occurred as a revelation, it left about everyone in Liones worried. Lest everyone who knew about the four knights and the battle against Camelot, Tristan most of all, he knows he should give a benefit of a doubt, and give people a chance without engaging in combat first. But this was the you, the daughter of Arthur Pendragon, simply just leaving it be wouldn't do. You could become a major problem as well if you decided to follow in the footsteps of your father, which wouldn't do well for anyone in Britannia.

He wondered many times over how he should go about things should he ever cross paths with you, thousands of ideas, simulations, and scenarios. None of them came to fruition as the perfect thing to be prepared for, as he would want to be prepared for any and all scenario. But all he could see was knowing how horrible you simply may turn out to be first meet, Tristan knows that may sound wrong, yet it was the predetermined premonitions that you are no good.

It was on the one day he was off-duty, and crossed paths with you purely by accident. Tristan was immediately weary of you, sensing your chaotic power beneath your birth-given one. Though it was rather odd, you didn't have any ill-will against any other races of residents bustling amongst the streets of Liones.

It was as if you just wanted to be blending in, a civilian of Liones as well.

The nephlilim still couldn't bring himself to trust you just yet, you needed to be far better than just words alone. There was rather something about you that still made him quite weary of your words and movements.

So he just merely played along, and showed you around. Mostly showing you places of least importance and least civilian residents in the areas, there was no telling of which you were possibly planning. He wanted to make sure that he minimized your map of the kingdom and played restraint on your movements.

You could clearly see what the prince was doing, so you had put on an innocent demeanor. Staggering along the way, occasionally throwing in a few harmless questions here and there. And not even once or twice, could you understand that Tristan had not caught on to your second layer of masking. You had played the part well so far; considering you had somewhat tricked the prince into showing you further on the map of Liones, which is exactly what you wanted.

After the last few places you had been shown to, you had stopped yourself and Tristan. Letting him know you appreciated his willingness and kindness to show you around the whole of the places, he offered his welcome in return, and you simply walked off after you finally finished the interaction.

"That was insane." You muttered to yourself as you held your wrist, twisting it somewhat as a small shiver crawled down your spine as you weaved your way through the bustling crowed of civilians.

The power emanating from the prince of Liones was intense, massive even. Even for someone comparable of your strength, there was no way you would've been able to walk away from the fight if it had ever happened right then and there. He was rather terrifying at first glance for a Knight of Apocalypse, there was no doubt about it.

If you remembered correctly, the prince is about the same age you were. Which had meant there was still more to learn for him, more growth and training. The thought of it had left you to wonder how truly powerful he'll be as a full grown adult, quite the intense feeling of Déjà rêvé you had felt.