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slashmagpie · 3 days ago

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Break Like an Artist

My fic for @hermitadaymay's Solstice Social Collaborative Fanwork Event! I was paired up with the wonderful @eydilily to create something spooky, dramatic and contemplative featuring Gem and Pearl, and it's been an absolute blast putting this together. Please go check out Eydi's art for this AU, it's absolutely gorgeous. CWs: description of a corpse, dismemberment, loss of awareness, fire/flooding/destruction, and depiction of a panic attack. Wordcount: 5.8k

There is a plague sweeping Pearl's hometown.

One by one, she watches as her friends fall to the infection, the colour and life drained out of them and leaving hollow, apathetic husks behind. Even with the devastating loss of her friends, her village, and her regular life, the worst part of this situation is not the infection.

It's that Pearl knows that Gem is the one spreading it.

[Read on AO3]

It’s a grey day in the fishing village that Pearl calls her home. Not that it’s ever not a grey day, at least not anymore. She stares out of her window at the thick encompassing fog that’s claimed the bay, at the desaturated buildings that dot the shore, and she twirls her paintbrush in her fingers.

The canvas is blank, of course. She doesn’t remember the last time she sat down to paint and didn’t end up with a blank canvas. It must have been—months ago, at least. Back when the last monster from the depths had attacked, and not a single person had had the heart to fight back. When Tango’s house had been shattered in two, and Tango with it.

(He seems to be dealing well with the loss of his arm, at least. Or, as well as you can deal with anything, when the only things inside of you are all-consuming numbness and apathy. Pearl feels it in her chest, the yawning emptiness, and thinks that if she were to lose her arm right here and now, she also wouldn’t be able to summon the energy to care.)

She’d painted after that, though. She remembers it vividly, waking from a nightmare and running to her studio to capture lashing tentacles and inky waters and splatters of crimson blood. It’s a frenzied piece, a disturbing piece, and the moment she’d finished it she’d been filled with so much dread that she’d turned it around to face the wall and refused to look at it since.

The dread’s gone now. Along with the anxiety, and the uncertainty, and the fear. It’s all gone, and Pearl’s left sitting here, paints drying on the palette as she stares at an empty canvas.

Across the house, she hears her front door swing open and closed. A familiar voice shouts, “Pearl? Pearl, where are you?”

“Studio,” Pearl calls back, her voice flat. She continues to twirl the paintbrush as she waits for Gem to trek her way across the house to find her.

“Studio,” Gem echoes as she pushes open the door. “Oh, Pearl, are you painting again? Oh, I’m so happy for—oh.” The joy in her voice vanishes as she takes in Pearl, sitting on her stool, paintbrush raised and canvas empty. “Oh, Pearl…”

Sympathy. Pity. Concern. Pearl can pick apart the emotions in Gem’s voice, even if she can’t feel them herself. She stares back blankly, because she can’t find it in herself to care about either aspect of the situation, whether it be her own inability to paint or the way that Gem’s looking at her like she’s a wounded animal.

“Come on,” Gem says softly, crossing the room and gently prying the brush from Pearl’s fingers. Pearl lets her. She’s not really painting, anyway. “Let’s get you to bed, shall we? A nap will do you some good.”

Pearl lets Gem help her up, lets Gem allow Pearl to lean on her for support as they make their way back to Pearl’s bedroom. It’s not like Pearl has any difficulty walking. She’s not sick, she’s not injured, she’s just…

Cold. Empty. Not quite lifeless, not in the way Mumbo had been when she’d last seen him, skin and eyes and hair all the same shade of grey-white-nothingness as he’d stared into the distance, completely unresponsive. Listless, maybe, is the better word. She’s halfway to a fate worse than death and she cannot find it in her to care at all.

She feels colder where Gem touches her. She looks down, and she’s not sure if it’s her eyes playing tricks on her, or if her skin is more desaturated where it brushes against Gem’s. She lets Gem help her into bed, lets Gem fluff the pillows and fuss around her, lets Gem sit next to her as she hands Pearl a bowl of soup (“Your favourite!”) and watches her to make sure she eats.

If Pearl were more herself, she would care about what Gem’s doing to her. Care enough to stop it, maybe. Care enough to—no, not to confront her. Every time she’d tried, the words had gotten stuck in her throat. Because she’s known for a long time who’s been behind all of this, behind the corruption leeching all colour from their village, their home, their friends—

And she’d never said anything. Too worried about Gem’s feelings. Too worried about their friendship.

…Pearl realises, as Gem goes to take the empty bowl and brushes her hands against Pearl’s, that she’s not worried anymore.

She waits quietly as Gem washes the bowl in her kitchen, chattering to fill the silence as she does, updating Pearl on their friends’ conditions. Her tone is bright and optimistic, even as her words are dour. Scar seems to be doing the same. Grian’s getting worse. Joel’s down to communicating only in broken phrases—but he should be fine. It definitely won’t be like Mumbo, or Cub, or…

Gem returns to Pearl’s room, regarding her for a long moment before bending down to give her a hug. “Get better soon, okay?” she says into Pearl’s ear. “It’s not the same doing my rounds without you.”

Pearl knows that she’s not getting better. So does Gem, so Pearl doesn’t bother pointing it out. She just nods, lets Gem withdraw, lets Gem run one last hand through her hair.

“You should rest, Pearl,” Gem says, stepping away from Pearl’s bedside. “I’m going to go check on Impy now—”

Pearl’s moving before she’s even properly registered it, grabbing onto Gem’s wrist with force, holding her in place. Gem freezes. Pearl looks up at her through strands of greasy, greying hair.

“Gem,” she says, and it’s the first thing she’s said in days, and her voice is hoarse and her throat sore from the strain.

“...Pearl?” Gem replies, and she sounds almost scared.

“Gem,” Pearl repeats, getting used to the sound of her own voice in her mouth again. “I know.”

Gem laughs. It’s a nervous, tittering sound, the laugh Pearl remembers from when they’d gotten into trouble together as kids. “Know what?” she asks, voice strained.

“That it’s you,” Pearl says flatly.

Gem stares at her.

Pearl stares back.

Gem swallows. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says. “Pearl—”

“I know you’re the one doing this to us,” Pearl says, more specific this time, choosing her words carefully, and Gem—

Gem tries to pull away.

Pearl tightens her grip.

“Pearl,” Gem whines, eyes wide, tugging. “Let me go—”

“Why?” Pearl croaks, and Gem snaps her mouth shut.

---

Pearl’s in the midst of mixing a particularly tricky shade of green when there’s a loud, frantic knock on her front door. She sighs, setting down her brush to rest, and gets to her feet. “I’m coming, I’m coming, hold on!” she calls as the knocks continue, echoing through the house.

She pulls the door open and Tango’s there, a nervous ball of energy, just about ready to bolt. “Pearl!” he calls. “Pearl, come on, we gotta go—”

He grabs her by the arm and drags her off. Pearl just barely manages to close her front door behind her.

“Wha—? Where are we going? What’s going on?”

“Something washed up on shore,” Tango explains. “The whole town’s there, c’mon.”

Accepting that she’s not going to get an explanation out of him, and now deeply curious about this something, she lets Tango lead her down to the shore by the lighthouse. Sure enough, the whole town is there, a chattering crowd gathered around a spot on the shore that Pearl can’t quite see. Impulse is standing on the edge of the crowd and catches sight of them, raising his arm in a wave. Tango makes a beeline towards him, ducking under the crowd, and Pearl follows behind, apologising to False and Keralis as she bumps into them.

“Did you decide what to do with it yet?” Tango asks as he comes to a halt and finally lets Pearl go.

Impulse shakes his head. “We’ve decided it’s Gem’s call,” he says. “After all, she’s the—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence as the crowd suddenly goes silent and parts for Gem, her hair wild and eyes wide behind her thick-rimmed glasses. She’s got her lab coat pulled on over her day clothes, clearly not prepared for this in the slightest. She reaches the front of the crowd and stops dead still, staring at the thing that has washed up on the shore.

Pearl follows her friend’s gaze, and sees it for the first time.

It’s a body. Of course it is. A corpse, taken by the sea and ravaged by the waves and washed ashore by the brutal bay currents. The body’s clothes are torn and sodden, the skin beneath so pale that it could practically be paper. Pearl is stricken, for a moment, with the mental image of her taking a brush to this canvas, filling it back in with colour, painting contours back into its skin, breathing life back into the body.

She shakes her head violently, banishing the thought. Where did that come from? This isn’t a canvas, it’s—

It’s a person. A person who was alive, and is now dead, washed up on the beach like a dead whale and just as much of a spectacle. His eyes are open but rolled back, only the whites showing, and his hair is white too, just as pale as his skin. It stands as sharp contrast against the dark fabric of his torn clothes, a mask wrapped around the bottom half of his face.

Pearl swallows hard and averts her gaze back to Gem, who looks just as disturbed by the body as Pearl feels. It takes Gem longer to pull her eyes away, to glance around the crowd. “I’ll—I’ll take it back to my lab,” she says. “Investigate, and—and give him a proper burial.”

The words reassure the crowd, a low chatter beginning up again.

“Skizz, will you help me carry him?” Gem calls.

Skizz does, stepping forward from the crowd and helping Gem maneuver the bloated corpse. Pearl finds herself looking at it again, noticing dark striations in the skin, caught in glimpses between the tears in the clothing as it’s moved.

She shakes her head again, forces herself to look away as the body is carried out and the crowd disperses. The image of the body lingers in her mind. Something settles uncomfortably in her stomach, and she wishes that she’d never opened the door.

---

Things go back to normal after that. Or, well, as normal as they get in the village, at least. False monitors the currents and warns of any incoming floods or monster attacks. Impulse and Tango work maintenance on the fishing boats that Grian and Skizz and Keralis take out into the bay. Mumbo runs the fish market. Cub and Scar come and go along the trading routes. Joel maintains security, or at least the illusion of it.

Gem hides away in her lab running experiments she never explains, and Pearl paints.

She tries to return to her usual fare, brightly-coloured landscapes with fantastical features, but something about her paintings rings hollow when she looks at them. She decides she needs a change, to switch things up and just relax, so she pulls out her paints and a blank canvas and begins with no intentions. Her movements are fluid and free and thoughtless and she falls into a flow state that lasts hours, until she blinks her eyes and awakes to find a portrait before her, a colourless face in full saturation.

The corpse’s visage, so alive she can’t believe it’s not breathing, stares back at her from her easel, and Pearl flinches like she’s been burned.

She hides that painting away, face turned towards the wall, and returns to painting landscapes. They come easier now, and for a time Pearl feels normal, as long as she ignores the canvas in the corner.

It’s Impulse who notices that there’s something wrong first. It’s not surprising that he’d be the first to pick up on it, really. Skizz is his best friend, after all. Of course he’d notice when Skizz stopped laughing, stopped joking, stopped drumming out tunes with his fingers on the side of his boat. And when Pearl sees him, she notices changes too—his skin paler, like he’s spent several weeks locked inside a basement instead of out in the summer sun, his eyes no longer their regular bright blue.

“Hey, Skizzly,” she greets brightly, trying to play at normal, throwing him a bone to grab onto.

Skizz just glances at her before responding with a flat, “Oh, hey Pearl.”

Pearl’s smile falters. “How are you feeling? Impulse told me you’re a little under the weather.”

Skizz shrugs. “Fine, I guess. Did you need something?”

Pearl swallows, something cold sinking in her guts. “No, no, just checking in on you.”

“Gem already checked on me,” Skizz says. “She said I’m not sick.”

“Gem’s not that type of doctor,” Pearl reminds him with a weak smile.

Skizz shrugs again. “She’s the only doctor we’ve got.”

Pearl tries her best not to let that unsettle her.

---

It’s not just Skizz.

It starts with him, but it doesn’t end there. Keralis is next, and then Grian. Mumbo gets sickest the quickest, going from his anxious, affable self to a nearly-unresponsive husk within a week. That scares them all, because even Skizz is still responding when spoken to, still moving when instructed to, even after nearly a month of being infected with… whatever it is that’s going around.

False gets sick without anyone noticing, sequestered away in her lighthouse until she comes into town for groceries looking like a photograph that’s been left in the sun for too long, and that’s when people really start to panic.

And that’s when Gem declares, with all the authority that being a doctor of anthropology afforded her in a tiny town with no real doctor, that she’s putting everyone into quarantine until they can determine the source of the illness.

“I’m not sick,” Pearl tells Gem when her friend knocks on her door, dressed in full lab gear, her hair out of its usual ponytail and falling forward around her face. She’s pretty sure she isn’t, at least, having hyper-analysed the shade of blue in her eyes in the mirror every morning for the past month.

“I know,” Gem says. “I want to—I need to—can I come in?”

“Yeah,” Pearl says, stepping aside. “Of course.”

Gem enters, heading down the stairs into Pearl’s living space and staring at the paintings on the wall. Pearl watches her for a moment before stepping closer, resting a reassuring hand on her friend’s shoulder.

“What’s eating you?” she asks.

Gem snorts out a laugh at that. “I’m not a real doctor, Pearl,” she says.

“I know that.”

“They all need me to be a real doctor for them. I—” She breaks off, runs an anxious hand through her hair. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I need help.”

Pearl raises her eyebrows. “I don’t know how I can help,” she says. “I’m even less of a doctor than you are.”

“I know,” Gem says. “But you’re my friend, and I trust you, and I need—please?”

She stares at Pearl, bright green eyes magnified through thick glasses lenses. Pearl has never been able to say no to those eyes.

“Okay,” she agrees, letting out an uncertain breath. “Okay. What do you need me to do, Dr. Tay?”

Gem laughs again, high-pitched and anxious, and Pearl feels hot and cold all at once.

---

They do house calls. Once a day, Gem and Pearl, and sometimes Impulse, will make a round of the village, checking in on everyone. Gem brings some of her lab equipment and a notebook, where she scribbles down all the readings she takes from her instruments and any observations she makes. After the first week or so, Pearl also takes to bringing a sketchbook and a small travel painting kit, attempting to record the desaturation rate in her friends’ colours.

It doesn’t matter which way they look at it—the situation is bad, and rapidly getting worse. Most of the town is infected now, and Skizz is approaching Mumbo’s level of deterioration. Cub fell ill two weeks ago, and Tango—

Well, he’s not quite grey yet, but he looks washed out where he sits at his table, especially next to Gem, all bright copper and ocean blue and forest green. His voice is flat, all of the emotion in it gone, and while he responds in full sentences to Gem’s questions as Pearl attempts to capture the moulded-straw colour of his hair, none of his words sound like him.

Gem wraps up her check-in, and Pearl follows her out, paints packed away in her bag and sketchbook held carefully so as not to smudge the paint. Impulse is waiting for them outside, staring out into the bay, where a low-lying fog has been hanging for days.

He glances over at them, voice shaking as he asks, “How is he?”

Gem hesitates. “About the same?” she offers.

Pearl shakes her head. “Worse,” she says, offering her sketchbook to Impulse, pointing out the differences in values between the colours she’d sampled from Tango two days ago to the ones she’d taken today.

Impulse’s hands are trembling as he hands the sketchbook back to her. “What do we do?” he asks. “They just keep getting worse—Gem, what do we do?”

Gem’s eyes are fixed somewhere out at sea. Her expression is so scarily blank that Pearl would worry she was infected if not for how bright and vibrant she looks against the backdrop of the village. (Are the houses getting greyer? Surely not—surely it’s just the fog, and the fact that the sky has been overcast for a fortnight now—surely—)

“We look after them best we can,” Gem says. “I’m trying—every night I’m working on a cure.”

“And do you think it’ll work?” Impulse pushes.

“I have to,” Gem replies. “It has to.”

Pearl swallows, and does not voice what all three of them are thinking: what if it doesn’t?

---

Impulse turns up one morning a shade dimmer than he had been the day before. Pearl notices immediately, her stomach lurching at the sight of him. He offers her a smile that’s smaller than his usual ones, a greeting that’s a little flatter than it would usually be. Pearl’s not sure if Gem even notices.

But Pearl notices, and her eyes sting, and she throws herself at him in a way that catches all three of them off-guard.

“Uh, Pearl?” Impulse says, stiff and uncomfortable beneath her. “You okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Pearl mumbles against his ear.

“Pearl?” There’s a peak of distress in his voice but it’s not enough. Gem hears it, too.

“Oh no,” she breathes.

“Okay, guys, seriously,” Impulse says, pushing Pearl away. “What’s going on?”

They just stare at him.

Realisation dawns across Impulse’s face. “No.”

“Maybe…” Gem sucks in a breath. She reaches out to take his hand and squeezes it. “Maybe you should go home, Impy. Get some rest.”

“I’m fine,” Impulse protests. “I’m…” His protest crumbles under their gazes. He slumps, and Pearl knows that he would normally never crumble like that. He’d protest and fight back and keep working until he passed out on the docks and had to be carried back to bed.

“C’mon,” she says softly. “I’ll help you home.”

Impulse doesn’t protest that either. He knows, as well as the two of them do, how this ends. He knows that there’s no fighting this.

Pearl, very valiantly, does not cry about it.

---

With everyone except the two of them infected, Pearl manages to convince Gem to split the rounds, with her taking half of the houses, and Gem taking the other half, swapping halves every couple of days. Gem is reluctant, but she has no good argument against Pearl’s that this is more practical, and so she agrees.

And that’s when Pearl notices.

She thinks she’s imagining it at first, but the colour swatches in her sketchbook back up her suspicions, damning evidence she can’t ignore.

When she visits her rounds, she finds that the people she’s visiting appear to have stabilised, at least for a couple days, no greyer today than they were when she saw them the day before. And then she swaps with Gem, and notices that Gem’s half of the rotation are far paler, far less responsive, than they had been the last time Pearl had seen them. They stabilise for a couple days, and then they switch, and Pearl’s original rotation have deteriorated massively in the several days since.

There’s really only one conclusion she can draw from that, and she doesn’t want to draw it. She doesn’t want to believe that the one responsible for this is—

The fog is a permanent fixture of the village now, blanketing the bay in a thick blanket of quiet. Pearl finds it hard to sleep, even the familiar sound of waves muffled by the mist. Kept awake into the early hours of the morning, she finds herself in the studio, a brush in hand, letting the paint take her where it will.

And where it takes her is familiar: the village, desaturated and coated in fog, dark looming shapes in the mist beyond, rising out of the ocean. And there, in the midst of the painting, a bright spot in all the gloom, is Gem, so vibrant she practically lifts off the page.

Pearl stares at it for a long, long time, and then places it face against the wall and tries her best to forget about it.

---

In all the dread, they’d forgotten something important.

The sea isn’t safe. It never has been. Growing up in the bay you learn how to weather the storms, to predict the tides, to flee from floods. You learn how to build barriers, and you learn how to rebuild once the ocean drags them down.

Pearl knows that her village can handle the sea: she’s seen them do it time and time again over the years. Together, they move as a well-oiled machine, responding to threats from the depths with weathered ease. That’s why she doesn’t expect it, she thinks.

There’s never been a monster attack that False didn’t warn them about.

But False isn’t capable of doing much of anything at the moment.

And so when the tentacles rise from the waves, there isn’t a warning.

Just a deafening krk-crash that wakes Pearl from a dead sleep with a bolt of adrenaline that’s nearly nauseating. She scrambles from her blankets, still in her pajamas, and rushes up the stairs to throw on her boots. It’s edging towards winter now, the weather much milder than the summer months, and though it’s not cold by any stretch of the imagination the chill of the air still makes her shiver. She grits her teeth, racing from her front door to the village proper, and there—

There’s a sea monster, dark purple tentacles reaching out to the shore, destroying everything in its wake. The fish market is half gone, and it’s awful, but it’s a relief, in a way, because nobody lives there.

“Gem!” Pearl screams into the night.

“Pearl!” she hears echo back, followed by distant footsteps, growing ever-closer.

Gem’s face is flushed, her hair wild, her eyes wide. She’s also in her pyjamas, her lab coat that’s been ever-present for months now gone, and Pearl finds her eyes drawn to dark striations in her skin. They look like—

“Pearl,” Gem says again. “We need to get everyone out, away from the shore, up to the research centre—”

Pearl nods. “Got it,” she says. She points towards the docks and says, “I’ll head over there.”

Gem nods. “Be safe,” she says, and then she’s off again, pelting in the direction of the lighthouse.

Pearl doesn’t bother knocking as she throws Impulse’s door open. He’s still lucid enough that he’s been startled awake by the noise, though it hasn’t driven him to do much more than put his shoes on and stare out of the window at the dark shapes rearing up out of the fog.

“Impulse!” Pearl cries.

“Pearl?” Impulse says, glancing at her with dull eyes.

“We need to get people out,” she says.

There’s an extended pause, then, “Okay.”

“Can you get Skizz?” she asks. “Tango, too, maybe? I need to go to the beach, help everyone down there.”

Another extended pause, then a nod. “I can do that,” Impulse says. He moves too slowly, not driven by the same panic flooding Pearl’s veins, but it’s good enough. It has to be. Pearl doesn’t have time to consider the alternative.

She goes racing off for the beach. She throws open Keralis’ door first, relieved that he is, at least, wearing underwear when she drags him from his bed and into the night. She leaves him there while she grabs Grian from his hut, and then takes them both by the wrists, pulling them along behind her while she races for the cliffside.

It feels like hours that she races back and forth, grabbing her friends from their homes and dragging them in various states of comprehension to the safety of the cliff before running back into the danger zone. Grian’s hut is gone, and so is a large portion of the road. The tentacles have taken a chunk out of the farms further up the coast. Gem’s been taking the people she rescues a different route up to the research facility, the path that Pearl’s taking cut off to her by debris.

Once she’s got everyone on her side of town, she collapses panting on the grass, her lungs aching with the strain. There’s a fire somewhere down on the shore, someone’s lantern knocked astray by swinging tentacles. Her eyes burn just from looking at it.

A voice says, “I got him.”

Pearl looks up.

It’s Impulse, manhandling a colourless, greyscale Skizz.

Pearl goes cold.

“Where’s Tango?” she asks.

Impulse blinks. Slowly. Too slowly.

“Oh,” he says. “I’ll go get him.”

Pearl shakes her head, rocketed up to her feet by panic once again. “No, I’ll go,” she gasps. “You stay here.”

And then she’s off running again, beelining for Tango’s house, praying to any higher power that will listen that she’s not too late. Her lungs ache. Her legs burn. She can’t quite catch her breath. She’s shaking.

And then she’s knocking down Tango’s door, grabbing him from his bed against the far wall, dragging him away—

The roof coming down sounds like thunder, like the sky split open and gutted for parts. Pearl goes down hard, stars bursting behind her eyes, her breath coming out empty and then as a whine. She blinks, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark, for her ears to stop ringing, and that’s when she hears it.

It’s—not a scream. More of a whimper, or a wail, stretched out and awful and pained and punctuated by short, desperate gasps. It goes straight to her stomach, straight to making her sick, and she doesn’t want to look. Doesn’t want to move.

But, god, she has to, doesn’t she?

She wiggles her fingers, her toes, and lets out a deep groan as she pushes herself up onto her hands and knees. The world has narrowed in on itself, the open air of Tango’s house reduced to a crawlspace, and she shuffles down it, rubble and debris tearing her skin open and leaving bloody red marks on desaturated wood. It is a far cry from the blood she finds, practically brown with how much colour has been leeched from it.

“Oh, my god,” she chokes. “Tango…”

Tango just moans in response. She can’t tell if he’s pale from blood loss or pale from the infection, but either way it has the effect of making him look half dead. He’s half buried beneath the rubble, body jerking with what she can only assume is pain, barely felt beneath the weight of numb apathy.

“I gotta get you out of here.” The words taste acrid against her tongue. Or maybe that’s the smoke. She can’t tell. “I’ve got you.” She grabs Tango by his good arm and grimaces. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It’s not a reassurance for him. Not really. Pearl’s familiar enough with his condition by now to know that he can’t really care about being okay at this point.

It’s more for her as she does her best to get leverage in the small space and pulls.

When Tango screams, she knows it’s completely involuntary, an animal howl of agony that stops her short. Pearl gasps, tears on her cheeks, head spinning. “Please, no,” she begs, and she doesn’t know if she’s talking to him or the higher power that’s been ignoring her for weeks. “No, no, I gotta—I—”

“Pearl?”

“Gem!” Pearl cries. “Gem, please, I need—it’s Tango—he’s—”

“I’ve got you,” says Gem’s voice, familiar and close as footsteps pound across rubble. There’s a series of grunts and clunks as rubble shifts, and then there’s light pouring into the crawlspace, which is no longer so much of a crawlspace. Gem stares at the two of them, Pearl in tears on her knees and Tango half buried and lying in his own dull blood.

“Okay,” she gasps out, and she sounds terrified. “Okay,” she repeats, steadier this time.

Pearl wants to be relieved, but she’s just on the other side of hysterical. Gem’s holding an axe, which she must have used to clear the rubble, and she steps forward with it held between white knuckles.

“Hold him still,” she tells Pearl.

Pearl swallows. “Gem?” she whispers.

“Please.”

Gem glances down at Pearl, and god, she never has been able to say no to that, has she?

She shuffles forward, puts her weight against Tango, holds him still. Squeezes her eyes shut.

It doesn’t make it any better.

It doesn’t stop her from hearing the sick crunch of the axe cutting through bone or the blood-curdling scream Tango lets out.

It doesn’t stop her from feeling the sudden lack of resistance as she pulls Tango’s bleeding body away from the rubble, leaving his arm behind.

---

Pearl manages to hold it together until they’re able to get Tango safe and stable. Once the wound has been cauterised and disinfected and bandaged, and he’s left sitting with a mostly-unresponsive Skizz and an Impulse who’s just aware enough to be awkward about how little he feels for his friend, she walks away from the town’s refugees on the hillside until she can no longer hear them, and they can no longer hear her. She stands for a moment, surveying the damage below, the sun rising over the sea and the flooded streets and destroyed buildings, and she sucks in a breath that knocks her to her knees.

The panic attack comes in quick half-breaths and waterlogged wails, her hands gripping at her hair and pulling it hard enough to hurt. The world blurs around her as she chokes on saltwater and bile, her ears ringing with screams and funeral bells. When the hands settle on her shoulders she barely feels them—only feels them when they rise to her wrists and untangle her fingers from her hair.

“—earl? Pearl. Look at me. Come on, I know you can do it.”

“Ge-em,” Pearl chokes out. “I can’t—I—”

“I’ve got you,” Gem soothes. She takes Pearl’s hands in hers, squeezes them tight, real and grounding. “See, come on, that’s it. Breathe with me.”

Pearl blinks tears from her eyes as she tries to time her breathing to Gem’s. She’s not very good at it, her heart too quick and Gem’s too slow, but it helps, dragging her down from the high of panic.

“That’s it,” Gem breathes. She lets go of Pearl’s hand, reaching up to push the hair out of Pearl’s face, cupping her cheeks in her palms. “See? Nice and calm. Everything’s fine, see?”

“Yeah,” Pearl agrees, and the words feel hollow. Her panic feels hollow, somewhere above her body, her soul sunken to somewhere below her knees. She sucks in a breath, lets Gem wipe tears from her eyes with her thumbs.

Gem is so bright. A searchlight in a storm, a ray of rising sun through the dark. The world seems to grey around her.

Pearl reaches out, splaying her hand against Gem’s cheek, a clumsy echo of Gem’s own reassuring, grounding touch. Gem is still so bright, vivid enough that Pearl doesn’t think any paint could capture it.

And Pearl, held in comparison, is grey and dull. A shade, drained of life.

She swallows. Lets out a shaking breath. Looks up into Gem’s green eyes, sees the fear and regret in them, and can barely summon her own panic or hurt in return.

“Oh,” she says, and the word falls like a stone, plunging into the depths.

---

Pearl lets out a breath. “It was the body, wasn’t it?” she asks, loosening her grip. “The one that washed up. It did something to you.”

Gem swallows. She pulls away, holding onto her own wrist where Pearl had dropped it, clutching it to her chest. “I’m so hungry, Pearl,” she whispers. “I fade so fast now. I need… I need…”

“You’re going to kill us.” Gem flinches at the words. “You know that, don’t you, Gem? You’re going to kill us. You are killing us.”

“I just need your colours,” Gem replies, a whine in her voice. “I just…”

“What happens when we’re gone, Gem? What happens when you’ve taken all the colours? What happens then?”

Gem stares at her. There are tears in her eyes. They don’t quite fall, but Pearl can feel them drip into her hollow heart. There’s an ocean between them now and Pearl doesn’t have the wits to cross it. She doesn’t care enough to cross it, and she doesn’t feel enough to care about that.

“I have to go and check on Impy,” Gem repeats, her voice thick. “I’ll see you later, Pearl.”

“You won’t,” Pearl calls after her as Gem hurries for the door.

Gem doesn’t reply, just slamming the door shut in response.

Pearl sits in bed for a long time, staring at the wall with hazy vision. Her thoughts are muffled under the thick fog that chokes the village, and so when she finally stands, she’s not entirely sure why. She lets her body carry her back to her studio, picks up a canvas from against the wall, and places it on her easel. She sits down in front of it and stares.

Gem’s face stares back at her, the only alive thing in a dead and colourless world.

#solsticesocial #hermitaday #hermitcraft #fanfiction #magpie feather quill #if you're seeing this immediately after posting the ao3 link might not work #i am spending most of posting day on a plane so i am going about it in a way that's a little janky

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imagining-in-the-margins · 1 year ago

Text

Instinct (S.R.)

Summary: Spencer explains the biology of sex to Reader during the act. Request: Spencer Reid explaining what happens to your body during an orgasm while giving you one 🥵 Couple: Spencer Reid/Fem!Reader Category: Smut (NSFW, 18+) Content Warning: Fingering, biological processes, penetrative sex, unprotected sex, mild degradation/dumbification Word Count: 1k

MASTERLIST

When you find yourself in Spencer’s bed, there is no time to wonder what led you there. You have no interest in debating it, either. Your attention is diverted, devoted to more pressing things—things like the feel of his hands on your hips and his lips on your neck.

You’d never even allowed yourself to wonder what instinct drove you straight into his arms… not until his mouth shifts to your ear.

“Do you want to know why you’re really here?” he asks.

You nod before you’ve even considered the question.

This was the correct answer, and he rewards you by sneaking a hand between your thighs.

“You’re here because I want you to be,” he says, “and humans are, at their core, simple animals acting on the same instinct as everything else.”

You try to focus on the words he’s saying but you’re too caught up in how beautiful his voice sounds. You are also distracted by his fingers that gently cup your heat.

He pauses, his chest heaving with excitement as he taunts, “You wanna feel good, right?”

You try to nod, but he’s already speaking.

“I know, sweetheart.”

Mercifully, two fingers slide between slick folds. Your back arches forward, seeking to feel the weight of his body but he stays too far away.

He just watches you with a clever smirk. Your stomach tenses under the lustful gaze, but you say nothing.

It’s the right answer.

“You know, your brain actually changes when I touch you like this,” he chuckles.

His fingers continue to trace the outline of your heat but fail to breach the entrance. He is movingly entirely too slow and seems to be taking far too much pleasure in your squirming.

“The part of your brain that dictates your values and how to make decisions… that’s long gone.”

You know you’re supposed to nod, but you whimper, instead.

“No fear, no anxiety, no pain,” he hums, “your mind can only focus on one thing…”

“Please,” you beg.

He punishes your interruption by sinking both fingers into you without warning.

“Me,” he confirms, “All you can think about is how to get me to keep touching you like this.”

You cry out for him, reach for him like a tether.

He more than lets you. He revels in your nails digging into his skin.

“Your heart and lungs are working so hard, but they can’t keep up.”

Spencer’s motions are faster, his fingers thrusting into you with a ruthless pace. Exactly as he said, you are gasping for air between desperate moans.

But he just prattles on, still sporting that dark, almost condescending smirk.

“Do you want to know why your thalamus is active during sex? It’s because it helps integrate memories. Memories about touch and those secret last-second thoughts just before you fall apart.”

You can’t focus enough to even try to conjure a fantasy beyond his fingers that you are figuratively and literally wrapped around.

He has you exactly where he wants you at the precipice of oblivion. Only then does he remove his fingers and drags them over the swollen pearl at your crest.

“What are you thinking about?” he teases.

“You,” you gasp.

It’s the right answer.

Spencer is quick to kiss you, his lips crashing against yours while his fingers feverishly stroke at the most sensitive part of you. His tongue sneaks between your teeth until you feel there is no part of you he hasn’t claimed.

You sob against his lips while your body writhes beneath him. You tremble with tension and overwhelming relief until you collapse back into the bed.

Spencer, though, seems unfazed by your exhaustion. Instead, he pulls his hand back and continues his lecture despite your glazed-over eyes.

“Now you’re here. Dopamine is rushing through your body. You might think it’s just about pleasure, but you’re actually learning.”

He stalks closer, crawling over your half-limp body. His eyes are still burning with that same predatory look.

“Right now your body is telling you that I know how to fulfill your needs and it’s trying to figure out how to make sure I’ll do it again and again and again.”

With the same hand he used to touch you, Spencer touches himself.

“But see, this is where it happens. These formative moments when you’re nothing but a blissful mess, that’s how I make sure you come back to my bed.”

He lines himself up against aching folds. He groans at the nearly formed wetness, but he hesitates to push forward.

“Right now your body is begging you to find someone, anyone to take care of you,” he says with great satisfaction. “This is the most important moment, when your blood coursing with dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, and prolactin…”

Then, right before he fills you past your breaking point, he chuckles against your lips.

“This is where you fall in love.”

As if on command, your body clings to him. You wrap all your limbs around him and try to bring him closer somehow.

But he’s already too close. Each time his hips crash into yours, you can feel him bottom out with an almost euphoric jolt of pain.

You can feel it, the truth in everything he’s said. His skin burns into yours as your heart struggles to keep up with the slew of sensations. Your chest, face, and neck are on fire, and he seems dedicated to trying to quell that heat with feverish lips.

After what feels like forever and not nearly long enough, he fucks you even harder. His teeth sink into your neck and the almost-pain makes you shiver.

“Do it again,” he growls against bruised skin, “Come for me.”

With a particularly brutal thrust, he fills you until you have no other choice. Your body snaps, seizes around him and begs him to reward you one final time.

You feel the gentle waves of warmth, the heavy throbbing of his cock as he joins you in the bliss. Your bodies begin to slow from frantic motions until you are left cradled in an exhausted embrace.

Spencer moves just enough to be able to kiss you, soft and slow and without any hint of pain.

And you know that… is exactly why you're there.

(Tell me what you thought about this fic here!)

Reid Taglist: @mrs-dr-reid , @dreatine , @hopefulfangirl24 , @laurakirsten0502 , @dontcallmekittens , @rintheemolion , @andreasworlsboring101 , @imsuperawkward , @wentz2005 , @lovejules888 , @dashneydanger , @materialisthicc , @violetspoetic , @mslowlife , @conniesanchor , @trippol-threat , @will-byers-needs-a-hug

Complete Taglist: @cynbx , @emsma11 , @mediocre-writer , @fightingdragonswithwho , @andiebeaword , @jayyeahthatsme

Thanks for reading!

#spencer reid #spencer reid smut #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fanfic #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid x you #criminal minds fanfic #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds smut #spencer reid blurb #spencer reid drabble #imaginingafterdark

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drdemonprince · 2 months ago

Note

ENM/Poly circles explicitly discourage real talk around jealousy, and practical considerations around nonmonog in ways that routinely exclude and excise POC and disabled people.

ENM/Poly expects everyone involved to act as though “love” is the reason for every relationship choice. Cliche #1: love isn’t finite. Which… sure. Maybe love isn’t finite, but attention and time sure are— and those are at a premium.

Cliche #2: Love is all you need/love is what makes a family. I am familiar with criticism of this from a family abolition, anticapitalist standpoint, but I have seen this be uncritically repeated by ENM/Poly people. It’s not true that love is what makes a relationship work or not work. It’s also about dumb shit, like geographical proximity and practicality. Good luck being ENM if you can’t regularly host because you have roommates or live at home. Good luck being the gold standard of ENM (out to everyone, including family and maybe even the workplace!) if you are any kind of marginalized. Love is simply not enough. There’s real world shit to consider.

Most ENM/Poly people are white gen x’ers and older millenials for a reason. It’s a framework that works awesome if you have abundant spare space, disposable income to blow, and free time. Plus most ENM/Poly people are heavily in therapy, and just have a fuckton of time to deal with their various baggages… or at least like to posture as though they are doing those things.

Non monog can be liberatory— disabled polycules caring for one another. QPRs! Multiparent households! But ENM/Poly is very lodged in a liberal, hyper-independent Super Good Boundaries Thank You Very Much world of its own, and so most of the “resources” like More Than 2 or Polysecure have hella flaws in that respect.

COME OFF ANON SO I CAN FOLLOW YOU! Because you just said a whole word.

I find "ethical nonmonogamy" and polyamory circles to be viscerally unpleasant and alienating to be in as a crazy, chaotic antipsych person who does not always make choices for carefully therapized, restrained reasons -- and who doesn't believe that most other people do either, no matter how much they claim to.

I don't fuck multiple people to serve some higher purpose; I do it because I'm horny, impulsive, and have a variety of niche fetishes that are really difficult to satisfy.

I didn't choose to be openly nonmonogamous because I nurtured my soul and found that it was abundant with love that I just had to give -- all my relationships already were nonmonogamous at one point or another, either because I cheated or the other person did or both, and I eventually decided to move with my feelings rather than against them, and to stop denying all that is inside me -- all of the hunger and darkness as well as the light.

And I can't say that my nonmonogamy is inherently "ethical" either -- just like my monogamy sure wasn't! I'm a human being, and a crazy one at that, I get jealous, I have emotional blowups, I lash out and fuck other people to make myself feel better or to affirm that I am desired, I make big demands of the people I date, I fail to show up for people consistently, I get hurt, and I hurt others, and I will continually have more to learn. I will also continually have wild animal emotions and triggers, and I won't always deal with them in the way my partner(s) might want me to. I try to avoid hurting other people needlessly, of course, but sometimes your own needs are incompatible with another person's, and hurt is inevitable.

When there is only so much time and attention available in our lives, it's true that somebody's often going to come up short. And ultimately the person that I choose above all others is me. And so, no, I can't say I'm always doing nonmonogamy in some caring yet dispassionate way, or that love is the solution to all problems -- I am driven by passion and need, and sometimes being alive in those ways means getting hurt, or hurting in turn.

I would echo essentially all that you've said. We need time and resources and spaces to enjoy privacy with other people, and if you're not some rich work-from-homer, that shit's all in short supply. I hate the sheen of calm positivity that "ENM" and polyamory folks tend to place on everything -- as if no choices they make are fueled ever by bitterness, dislike, resentment, or hell, fucking white hot irrational DESIRE. With how fair and measured so many of them make their polyamory sound, I don't even see what's fun about any of it.

Sometimes you want to upend your whole life because you're so down bad for a person. Sometimes you hate the shit out of your partner's partners and you say and do little manipulative shitty things to convey those feelings, or to try and blow the relationship up. Sometimes the hours just don't add up and somebody gets shafted. Sometimes you make a promise and then you can't follow through, or just don't WANT to anymore because you have changed.

These are real human realities whether we like it or not, and I find it terribly unrealistic AND unsexy to refuse to acknowledge all the darkness and frustration that comes out in any relationship. I think a lot of the ENM/poly crowd that is white and middle class and heavily therapized is so averse to naming anything edgy or prickly in themselves that they make their spaces actively hostile to anybody who openly expresses negative feelings. That means Black & brown people get tone-policed a ton, "mad" people like me get no-true-scotsmanned out of "ethical" nonmonogamy for ever doing anything messily, and all the romance and sexiness of relationships gets sanded down into a Canva-graphic beige blandness of weekly polycule meetings and processing sessions.

In this world of self-optimization, even fucking and loving other people has to be cast as therapuetic -- our desires must justify themselves by somehow making us better, more capable, more controlled people, But fuck that. Sometimes sex or love is worth exploding your whole life over. The ENM/poly crowd says their way of loving makes them more even-keeled but it seems like a kind of death to me.

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drluvsick · 6 months ago

Note

hello!!! I read lots of your work and must I say it is very delicious omnomnomnom, is it okay if I request an either sanemi x reader or tengen x reader bcs I'm down bad for both sjshshs where the reader looooveeeessss physical touch and kind of likes pda and how would you think sanemi/tengen would handle that? thank youuu have a nice day!!! (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)

𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐒 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐀 𝐒/𝐎 𝐖𝐇𝐎 𝐋𝐎𝐕𝐄𝐒 𝐏𝐇𝐘𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐀𝐋 𝐓𝐎𝐔𝐂𝐇 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐏𝐃𝐀 — 𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐧 𝐮𝐳𝐮𝐢 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐦𝐢 𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐳𝐮𝐠𝐚𝐰𝐚

headcannons of tengen & sanemi with a s/o who loves physical touch and pda. 📝 gn! reader. loooved this!! oh, and i didn’t know if you wanted the wives included with tengen, so i just left them out— but send an ask if you want ‘em in! i hope you have a nice day as well! :]

word count : 450+

𝙉𝙊𝙒 𝙋𝙇𝘼𝙔𝙄𝙉𝙂 . . . 𝘚𝘏𝘖𝘞 𝘔𝘌 𝘏𝘖𝘞 — 𝘔𝘌�� 𝘐 𝘛𝘙𝘜𝘚𝘛

𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐍 𝐔𝐙𝐔𝐈

— he’s so on board. physical touch? he’ll be clingy asf upon hearing that. hugs, random kisses, letting you feel his muscles— major ego boost for him.

— and just setting aside him being suggestive in some of these touches, he’s definitely holding your hand or keeping a firm grip on your hip in public to let others know that you’re already called for. not only that, but he’ll sometimes have you sit on his lap (if you’re comfortable with it) and just hug you in that position.

— when you both are mad at each other, distancing yourselves is the worst punishment for the both of you. it never lasts more than a day, because how are you two going to sleep without each other’s arms and “i love you”s?

— does every type of kiss on you. eskimo kisses, french kissing, you name it. will do his research and come home to try them out.

— calls you nicknames in public from intimate ones to outright silly ones (honey bunchkins, just to embarrass you a bit <3).

— cannot keep his hands off of you in public i swear, everyone has to know that you’re his or else someone’s going to come up to you and try to sweep you off your feet before he can do anything about it!

— physical touch ✔️, pda ✔️, this man is one to love those as well!

𝐒𝐀𝐍𝐄𝐌𝐈 𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐀𝐙𝐔𝐆𝐀𝐖𝐀

— he has a rough & tough exterior to keep up! you can’t just go up to him and hug him from behind to watch his face turn red— it ruins everything!

— that being said, the first time you wrapped your arms around him from the front (despite his gruff talk about hating these kinds of “cringey couple actions”) his opinions turned a full 360 without him noticing it.

— he’d grown to love your unexpected kisses, even though he’d tsk at you anytime you’d do it.

— and after getting back from a long, bothersome mission? he’d be the one to initiate the hugging and cuddles because he’s too tired to care about your teasing of him being needy.

— not too big on pda, he’d rather let himself indulge in you at home where you’re both safe from prying eyes. but if someone’s looking at you like they want you for themselves? hooo boy… sanemi will absolutely show that you’re taken. whether it be by hugging, kissing, simple gestures/nicknames— that person looking at you has no chance.

— when you tease him for it he either denies it and sticks with that or just flatly admits that yeah, maybe he was a little jealous.

— this guy will be your stuffed animal if you want him to be

overluvsick | please do not repost, translate, and/or claim my works as yours !!

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averycutesalamander · 22 days ago

Text

Brighter than the Sun, Bigger than the Moon

wc: 8k. hurt/comfort, angst with a happy (kinda bittersweet?) ending, warning for vague mentions of sex. also up on ao3 if that's your preference

One of the greatest mysteries in the universe is that of soulmates.

They’ve existed for as long as history itself – perhaps even longer. No one knows if it’s the influence of an Aeon, or if it’s something stranger; the most recent theory is that Aha is behind it all, but it’s a joke to even think about getting a straight answer from THEM. Not every soul bond is the same, and they don’t even have to be romantic or sexual; plenty of them start and remain as entirely platonic, but either way, you have a partner for life. The details differ person-by-person as well; some have matching marks, some have a red string, some can't see color until they meet.

Shared dreams are on the uncommon end of the spectrum - even more so when they live on different planets. Such is the case for you and the boy who will later be known as Boothill.

When he first sees you in his dream, he thinks little of it; you’re another unknown face among a sea of strangers. He’s busy climbing a seemingly endless mountain, chasing a spectacularly evasive lizard that’s as large as a cow; Nick has just started talking about teaching him how to ride horses, and damn it all, he just can’t wait. Just when he manages to climb on its back, the earth shakes underneath him, and he starts to slide off – then, out of nowhere, you appear on the beast’s back, grabbing his hand and pulling him back on.

When he really sees you for the first time, he thinks your smile is brighter than the sun.

Even as a kid, he's deeply charmed by you. When he mentions the friend he made in his dream one night during dinner, Nick and Graey are so overjoyed that they light up the whole room with their grins. You're his soulmate – but, really, all he cares about is that you're very funny and nice and are a lot of fun to play with. Every night, you talk and play games and run around in elaborate environments that the two of you create together. The dream can be static, if you want it to be – so the two of you make a giant oak tree in the middle of a field to mark your names on, and mutually decide to meet there every night. Eventually, you start to mark your heights on it; the notches get higher and higher every year, and you joke that you'll need to start climbing branches if he gets much taller.

As a teen, he tries to teach you horseback riding, but it turns out that trying to do things that only one of you understands is a lot harder in the dream, especially when that task involves an animal that neither of you can quite control; eventually, you promise him that one day, you'll visit his home, and he can teach you in person.

That's the thing, though. Neither of you have a damn clue where his planet is. You searched for it when he told you the name, the syllables clear and crisp on his tongue – but you can't find any matches, which leaves you with little to go on. And he certainly won't be able to find you, but…

Both of you try not to worry about it. You'll find some way to meet, eventually. You're soulmates, after all.

You're with him as he grows into an adult, from a sweet boy to an equally sweet man, though he now reserves most of the sugar for you. You're with him the night after he makes his first kill, after the first bloody drops of justice stain his hands. You're with him the night after he claims his first bounty; when you ask how much he got for it, the two of you spend an embarrassing length of time trying to figure out the value of each other's currencies. You're with him the night after he takes his first bullet wound; though he's put on a strong face for Nick and Graey, he lets himself whine dramatically into your neck, bemoaning how fussy Graey has been and how he'll have to obey his order for bed rest, lest he invoke his wrath.

And every step of the way, he's with you, too - comforting you on bad days and celebrating with you on good ones, hugging you through friend breakups and laughing with you over inane drama. When one of your close friends dies, he holds you while you sob, gently rocking you; when you recover, he quietly asks if there's anything you want to do in the dream to remember them by – a memorial. With your voice raw and your lips trembling, you tell him about a tradition on your planet – one where you plant something in memory of the lost; you are obligated to care for it, naturally, and as the plant grows, you will heal with it as well. You decide to plant a cypress, not too far from the oak; he helps you pat down the dirt around it, the dust on your skin washing away with your tears.

There are good times, too. On one of your birthdays, he tries to figure out how to conjure some malt juice for you to try – but the whiskey is awfully hard to get right, and the flavor never quite matches reality. You try to let him taste some bizarre fruity drink from your home, only to have the exact same problem. “Why is it sour?” you grouch, a cute little pout on your lips. “It should be sweet, and just a little tart!” He watches you speak with fond, dreamy eyes, soaking in your warmth like the sun. No, he thinks, the sun doesn't even compare.

You're still fledgling adults when you first tell him you love him.

You say it so simply, so easily, like it's the most obvious thing in the world; your head rests on your hands as you lounge in the pleasantly fuzzy grass, your eyes soft and tender in a way he never knows how to handle. “I love you,” you tell him, right in the middle of a fifteen-minute ramble about his latest bounty.

He stops dead, every function in his brain going on pause. After a beat too long, he stutters, “I– Really?”

Your smile widens. “Yeah. Bigger than the moon.”

He throws up his brows dramatically, just in the way that always makes you laugh. “Really?” he drawls, faking skepticism. “The moon’s pretty fuckin’ big, sunshine.”

Your snicker makes his whole body light up with warmth. “Yeah, that's the point.”

As the two of you mature, you get closer - a lot closer, as soulmates often do. The night he chooses to kiss you isn't because of some other special event; perhaps the stars in your dream make you look just a bit more exceptional; perhaps you smile at him in a way that makes him a little too hungry; perhaps he just wants to do it for no reason in particular. Either way, he kisses you, clumsy and wanton and embarrassingly lovestruck, and you reciprocate with just as much passion, making sweet little noises into his mouth as he nibbles at your tongue with blunt teeth.

It becomes routine, then. When he first leaves the waking world and enters your shared dream, he kisses you sweetly in greeting before asking about your day. When it's time to wake, he gives you another as a parting gift - deep and passionate and longing, some nights more than others. And with every night that passes, your touches get a little bolder, a little needier, a little hungrier; he licks into your mouth with enough fervor to steal your breath away, and you moan so prettily under him that he feels like his heart is going to burst from his chest.

The topic of sex comes up eventually, if a bit hesitantly. Somehow, he's more shy about talking about it than you, but after some back-and-forth, both of you agree that you'd like to save it for the real thing. When he sinks into you for the first time, he wants to really feel you, wants to hold you in his arms, wants to nibble at your skin without an inch of distance between the two of you – because as wonderful as it is to kiss you in the dream, he just knows that it won't compare to the real thing.

Eventually, he finds that little girl in the snow; as he tells you about her, about her cheeks rounded with baby fat, about her sweet brown eyes, about the way she tugs on his hair every chance she gets, you smile brilliantly enough to put the sun to shame. You ask what her name is, and he just shrugs. “Never been good at naming things,” he says; he named his first horse Blackjack because he won it in a game of blackjack - simple as that. You laugh – that sweet laugh that always makes his heart skip – and think about it for a time, staring at the impossible stars as you ponder. You rattle off a few names that you think would be cute, mostly just as an idle exercise - but when he hears "Clementine," his eyes light up.

"That's the one," he tells you, staring at you with a love warm enough to melt ice. "That's her name. It's a cute one, ain't it, sunshine?”

He loves you. He's known for years, for his whole life, from the moment you reached down and offered him your hand; he loves you more than the sunlight, more than the shimmering stars in the sky, more than a fresh breeze on a hot summer day. He's always loved you, and not a damn thing will change that.

He'll have to marry you, once the two of you finally meet in person; he thinks he wouldn't be able to look at your hands without imagining a pretty ring on your finger.

And then the men in black arrive.

He's immediately wary, he tells you – but when he describes them in more detail, about the strange device they gave him that granted impossible knowledge, your expression darkens like the sky before a storm. He wishes he felt anything other than dread when you confirm his suspicions.

“That's the IPC,” you mumble, your eyes distant and quietly resentful – he's never seen such a severe look on your face. “You should be careful, honey. They're always bad news, no matter where they go.”

Neither of you could anticipate just how right you were.

Once the fighting begins, your worry increases with every day that passes. “I know it's awful, sweetheart, but… You should try to find somewhere for your folks to escape to.” Your eyes are dull with terror – fear for him, for his family, for his home, for his life. “And you should go with them. No one wins against the IPC.”

He scoffs, prickling subtly. “You're tellin' me to just run? That I should just let ‘em do whatever the fuck they please?”

There's a gravity to your sorrow – like you're grieving a tragedy that hasn't happened yet. “Maybe you'll hate me for saying this, but… yeah, I think you should run.” You turn away from him, wiping your freshly budding tears away. He doesn't move to comfort you. “It's better to lose and survive than to lose and die. At least there would be something left.”

“We ain't gonna lose,” he spits, glowering at your back. He doesn't feel ready to wake up, but he doesn't want to be here anymore. “You'll see.”

It's the first fight you've ever had.

Neither of you know that it will be the last.

They lose.

They're crushed beneath the cruel boot of absolute power, of weaponry that they can barely comprehend. One by one, his siblings, his friends – all of them die, their lives stolen in squabbles that they never win.

For weeks, he doesn't meet you by the oak tree. For weeks, he takes refuge in the dark forest you once played in, the pine needles beginning to crumble from the withering trees. He thinks, and plans, and plots – but he does so alone, still fuming over his hurt pride.

But his pride does nothing for him when the world is aflame, when his home has crumbled into charred wood, when his family has been reduced to ash, when his entire life has gone up in smoke.

When he finally returns to the oak tree, you're already waiting there, your shoulders hunched and the air deathly still. The leaves on the oak are beginning to yellow at the edges; the grass in the field around you has begun to shrivel; the sky has been muddled with clouds so dark that they look like ink.

For a long, long moment, he stands and stares, suddenly feeling as if he's been hollowed out. Then, as if you hear his heart crying out for you, you look up at him and his tear-smeared face and his red-rimmed eyes–

And you know.

He falls to pieces in your arms. You don't breathe a word of anger to him – only quiet, futile comforts and gentle apologies. He cries so hard that he feels like he’s been gutted, like he’s been dissected, like he’s been bled out and left to dry. His anguish and regret and anger bleed from his eyes, staining your dream with grief.

He's an idiot. He was such a fucking idiot, thinking it was a good idea to abandon you after that spat. It seems so goddamn stupid now that he's looking at your tired, worried face, now that he sees the evidence of your pain all around him, in the fields and in the sky.

In that moment, he makes two promises to himself:

One: he'll never leave you alone like that again, no matter what. Even if he's angry, even if he's annoyed, even if he has to go out of his way, even if fate itself tries to keep you apart – he will never leave you.

Two: he's going to slaughter that man.

“I'm gonna fuckin’ butcher him,” he rasps, his voice ragged from sobbing. “The one that gave the order. I'm gonna find that son of a bitch, and I'm gonna make him wish he weren't ever born.”

“Okay,” you respond quietly, like a wisp of smoke. “You'll… It'll be really difficult. If he's an executive…”

“I've got a plan.” His voice sounds more somber than he'd like, but the anger sank beneath the surface the moment he laid eyes on you again, the moment he saw the leaves withering on the oak tree.

He tells you about the half-baked plan he's got brewing. He's going to commandeer a ship and find someone that can make him invincible. While he bears the weakness and complications of flesh and blood, while he's weighed down by his mortality, he'll never be able to slaughter his way to the top.

So he'll cast aside his mortality, his morality, the sanctity of his body.

He has to admit that he's grateful that you don't protest. You don't try to stop him, don't waste your time failing to convince him; you only listen, your eyes sad and dark. And in the following days, you earn his gratitude a thousand times over; when you search for his planet now, you get a match – and with your guidance in this new, terrifying world, he finds a mechanic that will help him begin his hunt in earnest.

(You don't tell him about the official records that the IPC put down for his planet – how his people “died in a mysterious disaster.” His cup is already overflowing with rage; you worry that if it fills any further, he'll collapse.)

The night before he meets with the mechanic is a somber one.

“Please be safe,” you whisper, as fragile as a breath of wind. “Please. Promise you'll come back to me.”

“I promise,” he tells you, firm and earnest. He reaches up, cupping your face in both hands, thick and rough with callouses. “I'll come back, sweetheart. I promise.” Almost hesitantly, tentative to bridge the gap, he presses a tender kiss to your lips. “I love you so much, sunshine.”

The smile you give him is tired and weary – dimmer than the stars.

“I love you too,” you answer, your throat tight, “bigger than the moon.”

You'll be brighter than the sun again, one day – he'll be sure of it. Even if he has to strangle the light from the sky with his bare hands, he'll be sure of it.

He's not quite prepared for the long, aching hours he spends in limbo, while his humanity is surgically removed and replaced with cold, unmoving steel.

The darkness has seeped into every seam of his body, creeping into the cracks of his spirit like an invasive weed, the roots disturbing the fractured pieces of his heart.

He wonders, for a time, if any of this is worth it at all; if his family would even want him to strive for vengeance like this; if Nick and Graey would be happier if he settled down with you and forgot the bitter past, letting the wounds heal, letting the ash turn to dirt until it blooms with new growth. He can almost hear Graey’s voice in his ear. “Nothing can change the past, sweetpea. When something breaks and can’t be fixed, you have to let it go.”

He thinks of you – of your sad, tired eyes, of how desperately you held him when he last dreamed.

The heavy chains of grief bind him, sinking him deeper into the black.

But then he thinks of little Clementine, of her bright laughter, of her wobbling steps – and the doubt is incinerated in a fire hotter than the sun, the chains melting and reforming into an armor that cuts inside and out.

He claws his way out of the dark, his heart burning with rage, his chest aching with sadness.

“Congrats. You’re pretty hard to kill.”

He wants to laugh, bitter and acidic.

Yeah. Yeah, he sure is.

When he prepares to go into rest mode for the first time, a faint note of dread rings in his chest, sharp and inexplicable. Ever since he woke in this new body, he’s felt off – which is to be expected, of course, but…

This feeling – this disconnect, this vertigo, this tension – he can’t quite put his finger on it. And as he drifts into sleep, it nags at him, clinging like a tick.

Except–

It's like he only blinks. One moment, his systems are going into sleep mode, his heart pounding with anticipation; in the next, he's awake again. He checks the time, and it's four hours later.

No.

This can't be happening. This has to be a fluke. He has to be able to fix this.

He can't lose you.

The next day, he slams open the door to the surgeon's dingy back office, his steel fists clenched and his eyes burning. When he demands answers, she merely shrugs with far too much nonchalance.

“Soulmates are pretty tricky. When I removed part of your brain to sync the rest to the neurochip, it probably screwed something up.” She watches him fume with an idle gaze, then shrugs again. “Sorry. It's not like you mentioned it or anything.”

He grits his teeth so hard his jaw groans. “Fix it.”

She sighs, openly exhausted. “I can’t undo what’s already been done – just like I can’t restore your body. You’re out of luck.”

(He’s been out of luck for months.)

For a long, long moment, he considers riddling her full of bullets. But a sense of emptiness begins to sink into him, taking root in his chest, hollowing him out. He feels like he's going to be sick.

He's lost his home, his family, his little Clementine, his life, his body, his dream–

And now he's lost you, too. Because how could he ever find you in a cosmos as vast and infinite as this, when he's not even sure you ever told him the name of your planet?

Just like that, he has another person to grieve.

And one of the worst things about it all?

The IPC doesn't even have all of the blame.

He spends the following years in a sort of daze, clinging to his hatred as an anchor – because it's all he has, now. He loses himself in violence – lets it seep into his core until it's fully saturated his soul. He fills the cracks with IPC blood until he's nearly unrecognizable, until he feels nothing but the visceral excitement that comes with bloodshed. He suffocates the grief under a thousand corpses, and piles on a thousand more for good measure.

Whenever he dreams, now, it's always nightmares – something he's never had to deal with before, blessed as he was with your shared dream. The first is full of flames and ash. He scrambles desperately through miles of burning rubble, his fingers bleeding and broken; thousands of screams echo in his ears, but loudest of all is yours, ragged and broken as you beg him to find you, to come back to you, to join him in the fire – doesn't he want to rest? Doesn't he want to be with you? Doesn't he love you?

“You promised,” you cry, so pained that he feels his heart shatter like glass. “You promised to come back to me.”

He wakes with a heaving breath, feeling very distinctly like he's about to hurl his guts out, his eyes burning with tears that will never spill again.

The nightmares only get worse with time. He sleeps less and less, pushing his systems to the limit, getting upgrades that let him stay awake for longer and longer.

And then, one night, after years of silence, he dreams that he's beneath the oak tree.

The leaves have fallen off, the branches clawing at the black, starless sky. The plains around him are empty and dead, the grass blackened like a fire had raged through. In the far distance, he can see the forest the two of you once ran through; the trunks are bare and charred, and the ground below is coated with lifeless ash.

Your dream is dead.

But there, by the oak tree, just beneath the faded carvings of your names and the notches marking your heights…

A collection of plants, most of which take him some time to identify: the muted red leaves of a sapling spindle tree, tattered and worn; the tall stalks of an asphodel, its flowers dry and browning; bunches of primrose, whose blooms are paler than bone; stout meadow saffrons, whose petals are dusted with frost.

For a long moment, he wonders why they’re there–

And then he remembers what you did when your friend died, all those years ago – and his heart shatters into a thousand pieces, never to be repaired.

He finds himself there a few more times over the years, and it feels like a punishment every time. Most nights, the dream is more of a blur than anything, smeared and warping like he can't focus his eyes. He can't interact with it anymore; it feels more like he's a passing viewer, on the outside looking in through a window blurring with the pouring rain. Always just out of reach.

Always missing you – if it’s even real at all.

On a few occasions, he swears he can hear you talking, your voice indecipherable, but clearly anguished. He mostly convinces himself that these are just delusions – mere wishful thinking.

Once, all he hears is the heartwrenching sound of you sobbing. Maybe not wishful thinking, then.

Every single time, he wonders what he did to earn a fate like this – to earn this kind of torment, this kind of pain, this kind of loss.

No god ever answers.

And then, one day while he's chasing a bounty into a busy marketplace–

He sees you.

He stops dead in the middle of shoving his way through the crowd, deaf to the protests of the people around him. From this angle, from between the moving bodies, the most he can see is a sliver of your face – but he could never forget the swell of your cheeks, the arch of your nose, the shape of your ears, the texture of your hair. It's only a little, but it's enough.

He abandons his bounty without a single thought in his head – now, he's weaving through the crowd with a different target in mind. He's getting closer, only a few bodies separating him from you. His eyes never leave you, his vision tunneling–

When you turn to walk away, you turn toward him – and it's like your gaze is magnetized toward him, like you could sense something was amiss. And when your eyes lock onto his, the entire world grinds to a halt.

You've aged somewhat; the laugh lines on your cheeks are just a little more prominent, but the crease in your brow is new, and your eyes are duller than he remembers. There’s a weariness to you – a sort of permanent exhaustion that he’s never seen on your face.

He doesn't even register that you're rushing toward him, too absorbed in savoring the sight of you after so many years apart. It's only when you're just a few feet away that he murmurs your name, so soft that he's certain the noise of the market has swallowed it, but your eyes widen like you heard him anyway.

He doesn't realize that he's reaching for you until you grasp his hand in yours, cold metal against warm skin; his hands are no longer the shape they used to be – the shape that molded perfectly against your palm. Without a moment of hesitation, you begin to tug him through the crowd, guiding him into a tiny alleyway between two crowded buildings.

The moment you turn to look at him again, you drop your shopping bag to the ground without a second thought. With trembling hands, you reach up and cup his cheeks – cheeks that are too smooth, too cold; cheeks that lack the smatter of freckles he always had, lost and forgotten when his skin was replaced; cheeks that are missing the scars he gathered over the years, like the one he earned falling off a horse for the first time.

You whisper that name – the name of a dead man, of the man he once was, of the man he can never be again – and he's never heard you sound so broken, so desperate; his heart aches like it's been crushed.

“I'm… I'm not him anymore, sunshine,” he rasps, his throat so dry that it feels like his tongue is clogged with ash. “I can't be him anymore.”

“It's still you,” you whisper, your voice trembling. “Even if you're different, it's still you.”

His eyes burn so horribly that he wonders if he's actually going to cry, if the weight of his anguish will break the rules of his new body.

Suddenly, you surge forward, wrapping your arms so tightly around him that, if he were still human, you would’ve crushed the air straight out of his lungs. “I thought… I thought you were dead,” you sob, clutching him even tighter, like you're trying to dent his body. “I thought you died during your surgery, or didn't recover, or– or–”

He presses his lips against your temple, his steel arms wrapping tenderly around your shoulders. When he breathes in, your smell hits him all at once; he never could smell you in the dream – only a strange void of scent, like something was removed from his brain before he could process it.

Somehow, you smell familiar. Somehow, you smell like home.

“I’m here, sweetheart,” he murmurs, one hand slowly petting the back of your head. “I’m right here.”

He lets you cry into his hold just as you did for him, so many years ago, his chest aching like something inside him shattered to pieces; when your knees begin to fold out from under you, he carefully picks you up with one arm beneath your thighs, bearing your weight with inhuman ease. You take the opportunity to cling your legs around him, gripping him like your life depends on it – like his life depends on it.

He doesn't have a clue how long he holds you like that, rubbing circles into your back as you cry and cry and cry. You calm slowly, your breath hitching and your nose sniffling while you recover. Finally, you ask him to take you home; he carries you in one arm and your groceries in the other, following your guidance down the streets as you cling to him like he's going to disappear from under your grip. When he reaches your apartment, your hands are shaking too hard to unlock the door, so he gently pries the keys from your shivering fingers and carries you inside. You direct him to your bedroom, your groceries abandoned in the entryway.

He settles you into the sheets like you're made of glass, but neither of you want a single millimeter of distance; he cradles you in his arms and curls around you, murmuring quiet reassurances when you begin to shake and cry again.

Finally, when your breathing is calm and even once more, he tentatively asks, “Did… Did you plant flowers in the dream? Under the oak tree?”

You blink up at him with red-rimmed eyes, a little astonished. “How did you… know that?”

“I ended up there, a few times,” he says quietly, thumbing away the remnants of tears from your cheeks. “Thought I was making the whole thing up.”

You stare at him like you can't believe he's real. “...It was for you,” you confess, so quietly that he probably wouldn’t have heard it if he were still human.

His chest aches with a grief that isn't his. He doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how to comfort you; he fears that part of him died like everything else. “I love you,” he rasps, stupid and earnest.

A little smile graces your lips – a little quirk in the corner of your mouth; he feels his heart sing in response. “...Bigger than the moon.”

Your exhaustion catches up to you, sooner or later, and he lets himself rest shortly after you fall into an uneasy sleep, a tiny sliver of hope in his broken heart.

He wakes up under the oak tree.

The dream is clearer than it has been since his rebirth – so sharp and vivid that he can taste the ash from the forest on his tongue. For a fraction of a second, he wonders if he'll be flesh and bone again, if his hands will mold perfectly to yours – but he looks down and finds them to be just as hard and cold as usual.

You don't seem to mind. In fact, you barely seem to think about his new body at all. You still hold his hand the same, still kiss his cheek the same, still hug him the same. He can't bend for you, not anymore – but you bend around him without a breath of complaint.

The two of you talk, eventually, about everything and nothing. You update him on the direction your life has taken, the things that have changed. He doesn’t miss the ways you talk around the worst parts, about the years you spent depressed, about the veil of darkness that overtook your life; you don’t miss how he does the exact same thing. Neither of you press about it.

He stays with you for days, into the indeterminate future. He keeps every thought of his hunt out of sight, out of mind; he's been burning the candle on both ends for years, and now that he's in your arms, the exhaustion has sank its teeth into him.

So he stays. He takes care of you, spoils you rotten, desperate to make up for all of the lost time. You’re absolutely inseparable. Everything goes on pause to integrate him into every second of your life; perhaps that’s not the healthiest course of action, but neither of you are willing to acknowledge it, let alone change it. You talk during the day and while you sleep, and when you aren’t talking, you’re savoring each other’s company in silence.

He relearns you, and you relearn him. He notes all of the ways you’ve changed, all the new scars, the ways your face has shifted with age, the ways your speech has changed. You note all of the subtleties of his new body, his new eyes, his sharpened teeth, the way his feet have themselves been turned into boots. He shows you the cannon built into his left arm, all of the dozens of little utilities and tools built into him, all of the scuffs and bumps and scrapes that he hasn’t repaired yet.

It takes time to settle into something resembling familiarity. There’s a caution between both of you, at first; it’s hard to pin down, but it’s like both of you are terrified that the other is going to disappear, like you can’t let your guard down in case it’s all ripped away.

But he stays, and so do you.

When you first ask him if he wants to make a memorial in the dream for the ones he lost, he thinks his brain functions completely halt.

He never did get the chance to make graves for them – any of them.

After a long, long silence, he swallows, his throat thick with grief, and manages to nod.

After the grave markers are down, it takes him a great deal of time to decide what would be best – what they would like the most. You help him form a rocky hill in the plains, within viewing distance of the old oak, but far enough to be inconspicuous. You grow a small grove of trees to coat the whole area in dappled shade, granting him privacy to work on his own as you busy yourself; growing things in the dream has become a momentous task in the time you’ve been apart, and it’ll take some time to get everything right.

He tries not to think too hard about what to put down. His heart will know best, after all – not his head.

A well-crafted wooden swing, just like the one Nick and Graey had on their porch; a small garden plot, dense with lettuce and artichoke and tomatoes; an eagle’s nest, at the peak of the tallest tree you made; a herd of roaming horses, their spotted coats gleaming in the sunlight; a thin creek with tiny waterfalls and even tinier fish; a thousand other tiny details, one for each of his siblings and friends.

When he makes the clementine tree, he stares at it for several long, aching minutes. He's silent and still for so long that you come to check on him, a furrow in your brow. (He doesn't like that he's becoming familiar with such an expression on your face. Contentment fits you so much better.)

He speaks before you can ask. “I'm alright,” he lies, his voice thick with grief. “I just…”

You approach him slowly, a bit like the way he would with a spooked horse. When you gently reach up to cup his cheeks, it’s only when you smear wetness across his face that he realizes that…

He’s… crying.

He barks out a laugh, bitter and disbelieving.

Of course. Of course he can.

When he manages to compose himself, he turns back to the memorials with blurry eyes.

There's only one thing missing, now.

He could just make it out of thin air, he knows – but that feels… cheap, too simple, too… cold.

It takes hours of effort, as it did the first time, but you sit by him all the while, trying to coax flowers to bloom from the dry, barren earth. The scrape of his knife and the tap of his chisel and the rasp of sandpaper fill the too-silent air. When he finishes his work, his hands ache with phantom pain and his fingers have a few new scrapes – but it's all worth it.

He wills the limbs of the clementine tree to bend into a cradle, sheltered by soft leaves and plump fruit. With a trembling grip, he settles the tiny guitar into the gentle hold of the branches, watching them curl protectively around it, ensuring that it will never fall.

It looks comfortable there, somehow. He can almost picture her in his arms, trying to scramble up the tree with her pudgy little fists, reaching for the strings with clumsy fingers.

She never got to taste the fruit she was named after.

When he bursts into tears again, you stand by his side in an instant, holding him silently in your arms. When he sinks to his knees, brought down by the weight of his anguish, you cradle him against your chest, slowly stroking his hair.

For years, he thought he’d run through this seemingly endless wellspring of grief, that he’d truly hollowed himself out, that he’d manage to excise everything that wasn’t fuel for the raging fire.

For a long while, he stares at the scene he's created – at the swing rocking in the wind, at the eagles flying overhead, at the horses prancing in the field, at the babbling creek, at the tiny blooms on the clementine tree.

He decides there's something else he'd like to add.

Slowly, tentatively, he shifts to look at you. You must see some hesitation in his gaze, because without missing a beat, you cup his cheeks and ask, “Is there anything I can do for you, sweetheart? Ask and it's yours.”

He swallows, working his jaw. “...Y'know that tradition ya taught me about, when we were young? About the plants?"

Your eyes widen into saucers. “You want to…”

“I want you to… help me,” he chokes, fresh tears welling in his eyes. “To… To help me figure out what to plant for who, and to help me keep everything alive.”

You stare at him with a quiet sort of awe, an immense but tender kind of love that feels like the warm swaddle of a blanket. Then, finally, you nod. “Of course,” you croak. “Of course I’ll help you.”

He tells you about all of them – all of the friends he made and lost, all of the siblings he grew up with. One by one, you work through them all, telling him the meanings of the plants you choose for each person.

He tells you about Simon – a smug little bastard he grew up with, who kept his arrogance until the day he died. He'd challenge him to bizarre, impromptu contests at every opportunity, racing him back to the house for dinner and proposing that he'd never be able to catch as many fireflies as him. “Loyal to a fault and dumb as a bag a’ rocks,” Boothill huffs, staring at the jar of softly glowing fireflies he'd set beneath a tree. “Sorry bastard couldn't lasso to save his life.”

You laugh quietly. “Mm… Something to represent loyalty, for sure. Maybe… perseverance? Ambition?”

He hums in agreement. Ambition. Simon really was ambitious, wasn’t he?

Before long, his grave is blooming with tall spikes of red and violet gladiolus, intermingled with white hollyhock, framed by the fuzzy petals of edelweiss.

He tells you about Jess – the snarkiest woman he ever met, and clever to boot. They met early into his bounty hunting days; she approached him in a bar and flirted with him so relentlessly that he almost didn't notice her trying to filch his wallet. Turns out that she'd mistaken him for a target she was hunting, and had a habit of robbing her bounties blind before turning them in and doubling her money – and sometimes she'd even make a bet with them before a game of pool, just to add insult to injury. “Sharp as a nail and wily as a fox, that one,” he laughs, eyeing the pool cue he'd set up against the rocks by the creek.

You nod in contemplation. “Intellect, ingenuity…”

His lip quirks a little, fond and wistful. “Anything to represent a wicked lil’ liar like her?”

You laugh. “I’m sure I can think of something.”

For her grave, you grow brilliant scarlet hyacinths, pencilled cranesbill geranium, and dark red snapdragons.

On and on and on you work, going through every gravestone, the air rich with memories. He laughs when he tells you about Micah – the funniest man he’s ever known, and too damn whimsical for his own good; the first time he took a bullet was after he'd literally shot himself in the foot while mucking around with his gun. He tells you about a man he only ever knew as Bark – a mute gunslinger with wicked aim, who loved to chew on pine bark. He tells you about Beau, a sweet girl that loved her horse more than anything else in the world – but when it came to shooting, there was no one as bloodthirsty as her.

For Nick and Graey, you plant asters – a symbol of love, you say, and of happiness in old age. For Nick, black-eyed susans, coltsfoot, and elderflower; for Graey, magnolias and purple irises.

For Clementine… baby's breath and cinquefoil.

It takes three nights of work to finish everything. By the end of it all, you’ve both made a brilliant garden, rich with splendor and greenery in a dream that’s only just recovering, still brown and dead and barren. But the memorials stay healthy, with his maintenance and your own.

He doesn’t have the words to express his gratitude.

…But as he hugs you tightly to his chest in the dream, fresh tears spilling from his eyes and wetting your skin, he thinks you understand.

He’ll need to leave again, eventually. He knows this. You know this. It’s an unspoken dread – one that neither of you are willing to acknowledge yet. (What if he stops dreaming when he leaves? What if he never comes back? What if you disappear while he’s gone? What if, what if, what if?)

He spends weeks with you, and in that time, the two of you manage to defrost. The light returns to your eyes, and the constant tension in his jaw fades away; you stop clinging to him like a bear trap, letting your body rest; his endless paranoia about you being found by the IPC melts away into something gentler, something more reasonable; your wounds begin to heal, and the wicked sting of grief and loneliness fades to an ache.

The night you first make love is hardly different from any other; perhaps the tender affection in your eyes makes you look just a bit more exceptional; perhaps you smile at him in a way that makes him a little too hungry; perhaps it’s for no reason in particular.

And it really is making love, not simple sex. It takes hours – not because of his limitless stamina, but because both of you refuse to do anything but savor each other. He maps your body in full for the first time, pressing tender kisses to every inch of your skin, making note of the marks he's never gotten the chance to see and keeping track of which spots make you squirm the hardest. You explore his new body with a touch so tender that it makes his heart ache, following every ridge and divot in his plating, tracing the seams, learning all of the markings and vents and ports with a reverence that leaves him dizzy.

The pace is slow and sweet as honey; you worship each other for hours in a melting pot of pleasure and satisfaction, and when he finally enters you, it feels like a missing piece of his soul has clicked into place. He kisses you so gently that your eyes well up with tears, and he presses them away with his lips as he rocks slowly into you. You cling to each other desperately, longingly, passionately, your hands hot on his metal and his fingers strong on your hips.

He makes you come with your name on his tongue. You beg for him so, so sweetly – but you never needed to beg. He would tear the stars from the sky if you asked; he would gift you the universe if you wanted it. When the exhaustion catches up to you both, you fall into the dream together, still unable to keep your hands off each other. He was right – the sensation really is different in the dream.

It’s still wonderful, because it’s you.

He’s surprised that you’re the one to bring up his departure first. You seem… more relaxed about the idea than he expected, too. He himself has been agonizing over it for weeks, the thought nagging in the back of his mind in the limbo between the waking world and the dream. But you bring it up with a sort of resignation in your face, a quiet, sad kind of acceptance that makes him want to hold you and never, ever let go.

(You don’t beg him to stay. You know that he’d cave in an instant, but you also know that he’d be restless for the rest of his life. You know he loves you, but you also know that he’s etched the memories of hatred and grief so deeply into his soul that he could never be happy without resolution.)

You love him more than life itself.

…So you let him go, no matter how reluctant both of you are.

He kisses you with every ounce of passion and love and care in his shell of a body, and he looks you in the eye, and he tells you, “I’ll come back.”

You nod, and though there are tears in your eyes, you are lacking that dim, bitter grief that you once held in a moment just like this, all those years ago. “I know.”

He leans toward you, pressing his forehead to yours. “I’ll come back. I promise,” he breathes, his voice tense with tears that he can only shed in dreams. “I swear it. I’ll come back. I’ll visit.”

You smile, a fragile little thing. “I know.” You press a kiss to his lips, your tears spilling over. “I know you will.” You cradle his face in your hands, and he feels like his chest caves in at what he sees on your face.

Your eyes are gleaming with love, with trust, with affection. The sun has returned to your gaze.

“I love you,” you murmur, quiet and earnest.

His lips twitch, his eyes burning. “...Bigger than the moon.”

And so he leaves, the salt of your tears stinging bitterly on his tongue.

But he dreams.

It seems like the proximity changed something in him – reignited a piece of himself that died when he did – because when he next sleeps, thousands of light years away from you, he finds himself under that oak tree.

Words can’t express his relief when he sees you sitting beneath its barren canopy, staring at the plants you’d tended to for years in his name. Their growth is wild, untamable – but they’re alive.

You’re both alive, and that’s all that matters.

The dream gradually recovers as both of you do. The dark clouds begin to fade in the twilight of the rising sun; fresh sprigs of grass sprout in the fields; pine trees begin to poke out from the ash; the bitter wind begins to warm. But, perhaps most importantly of all–

There are tiny, fresh buds growing on the jagged branches of the oak tree.

Winter has begun to reach its end, and spring is blossoming beneath the ash.

He'll learn how to love again, how to dream again, even if it isn't the same; even if you've both changed. Because if there's one thing he's always known…

…it's that his love for you is brighter than the sun, and bigger than the moon.

#sal.txt #sal.bttsbttm #boothill #boothill x reader #honkai star rail #hsr #hsr x reader #gn reader #x reader #reader insert #this was meant to be a 100 word drabble. oops lol #if you saw this when the formatting was fucked up no you didnt

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alphajocklover · 3 months ago

Text

Commissions, Rules, Story Index and Other Information ————

Commissions Information

I only have 5 slots at a time, but that may expand even more one day. I charge 1 cent per word. Below is a link to my ‘commissions page’ (it’s a google doc) with all the details, including a list of what I won’t do, what I definitely will do, and how to contact me. If you’re interested, please DM me and let me know!

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Firstly this is a Jockification blog. It’s mainly about turning nerds into alpha male jocks. That doesn’t mean I won’t do other transformations or go into other kinks. I’ve already done some slightly different things like the macro tf and the Muscle daddy tf stories, both of which I loved writing. But most of this stuff is going to be jock tfs. Just wanted to make that clear.

Now, onto what I absolutely will not do. These are off limits, and I’ll explain why too. I’m not here to kinkshame or anything but I write these stories for fun, and if I’m not into something then it’s so much harder to write about.

Anything that’s not 18+. I know this is a very controversial topic, and I want to be clear. I do not have issues with age play (although personally I don’t love to write about that stuff either). As long as there are no actual children involved in the making of an erotic piece of fiction, or you are encouraging people to actually do horrible things to kids, you can write whatever you want. But since it’s so controversial, and it is way too easy to write something that makes light of a traumatic experience, I would rather avoid that all together.

Rape. Once again I am not going to kink shame anyone. A lot of people have a rape kink, and that’s perfectly normal. As long as all parties are consenting and of age irl, you can do whatever you want in the bedroom. But once again it is incredibly easy to write something that offends and hurts people, and on a personal note I just don’t feel comfortable writing something like that. I’m not gonna claim that everything I write, with all the reality bending and changing identities, is perfectly consensual, but there’s a big difference between writing about impossible magic powers and writing about realistic rape, and I don’t feel comfortable crossing that line.

Beastiality and Animals. Once again not going to kink shame anyone. And I want to stress I’m not talking about furrys or pup play or whatever. I’m talking about actual beastiality. You can write and read whatever you want as long as it’s not hurting people, but as far as I’m concerned animals can’t consent, so I won’t be writing anything with them in it. I’m also not entirely comfortable with human to animals tfs. Those are just not my thing.

Bathroom stuff and Smegma. This one is less complicated. I just don’t write this kink because I don’t like it. Watersports and scat and smegma all do nothing for me. Just a personal preference.

Real person Fiction. Once again it’s nothing personal. Plenty of people love real person fiction. I just feel so awkward writing about real live people. So I avoid it. Fanfiction about characters is another story.

Inanimate and Body part TF. I don’t really understand why, but these types of transformations make me uncomfortable. Really it’s just my preference.

Entirely Female Focused TFs: I am a gay man, and have a harder time writing erotic stories about women. While I can write about straight sex and women, I prefer to keep men as the focus, or at least have them heavily involved.

Gender TFs: I know this will probably upset some people, but I’ve personally just never enjoyed gender change tfs. Perhaps I will experiment with it one day, but not now.

Racial Slurs: While I do like raceplay and racial changes, I will not include slurs I cannot reclaim in my work.

That’s all there is for my big limits. If theres anything else you’re unsure of and want to check, just DM me. I won’t judge, the worst I’ll do is say no. I hope all this serious talk didn’t upset anyone. More stories coming soon!

Will update as needed!

Just a reminder that I am up for story suggestions, questions, and DMs. I especially want story prompts because I’d love the opportunity to make more stories for you guys. I’m also open for trades if anyone is interested

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Blogger Backup

My Blogger Blog, where I backup all of my stories, can be found here.

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Story Index

Below is a list of my bigger stories and ongoing series. I'll be doing this chronologically, and adding to it periodically! I'll be listing some kinks that are controversial or unusual for my blog next to each story they are in. I won't be marked G2S because I use that a lot. I hope this helps you guys get around my page better!

SuperNova TFs | A person makes a wish on a SuperNova

Older Brothers (My first story!) (involves incest)

Unmoved (involves bisexual sex)

Stereotypical

Professor to Frat Bro

Supernova Comedian (Political Play)

End of the World (100th Story Special!)

Wake Up | The true self awakens, and spreads

Wake up Bro

Wake up Pops

Marvel TFs | TFs themed around Marvel Characters. Not all connected

No longer a Spider, finally a Man (Implied relationship between a student and teacher)

Possessed by the Power of Thor (Giantism)

Like the Hulk

Like Wolverine

InstaJock TFs | A mysterious app that jockifies users.

InstaJock Introduction

InstaJock: A Small Glitch

InstaJock: On The Go

InstaJock: Details and Settings (Race TF, Asian)

InstaJock: Payback

Revert Mind

InstaJock: Preview

InstaJock: Research and Frats

InstaJock: Tricking a Thief

InstaJock: Regional

InstaJock: Secondhand

InstaJock: Girls

AlphaJock?!

InstaJock: Boyfriends

InstaJock: Double Friend Request (Race TF, Asian)

InstaJock: Sexuality

InstaJock: The Master and Mysteries

Alpha with a Capital A | A look into literal Alphas

Alpha with a Capital A intro

Alpha with a Capital A: Sexuality

Alpha with a Capital A: Alphas and Gender (Transgender Character and physical gender transition)

Gay Couple to Straight Beta Bros

Greaser Alpha

Alpha with a Capital A: Big bro and Lil bro

Asian Alpha Bro

Jock Studies | Coaches and their brainwashed Jocks

Jock Studies: Swimming Coach

Straight to Gay

The role of Coaches

Assistant Coaches and Baseball

Eye of Beholder (EB) Jewelry | Jewelry Company with a secret

Engaged

Science Teacher to Football Coach

EB Jewelry: New CEO

EB Jewelry: The New COO

AirBFnBF

EB Jewelry: My Friend and Gauges

EB Jewelry: Dog Tags and Brothers

The Best Club in Town | Gay clubs and their members are turned straight

The Best Club in Town

The Douchebag Revolution | Time traveling fight over your right to be a straight douche

Welcome to the Revolution

Douche Rehab

1,000 Follower Special, The Douchebag Revolution Begins

The Hometown Hex | The town where everyone is a jock. Everyone

The Hometown Hex

Baxter Beach

500 Followers Special: Wally's Visit

Made for This Town

The Hometown Hex: Exports

BDE: Big Dick Energy | Literal BDE causes changes

An intro to BDE

BDE: How it Works

BDE: Extreme Buildup and Infection

Retsam Mirror | Swapped with your selection. By force

Retsam Mirror

Trapped

My Uncle | Lore on my character, and his journey to save his Uncle

My Uncle

My Uncle: A Follow Up

Nick the Devil | A friend (Boyfriend) of my characters Uncle, whose a literal Devil

Nick the Devil

The Church | Evil Church converts people into new member

The Church (Semi-religious themes)

Potions Set | I gave an Actor a bunch of potions. I hope it works out...

Getting the Role

Camous | Those who change to fit in

Camous

The Master | The Man behind InstaJock and my Uncles Transformation. The Big Bad.

InstaJock: Going Viral (@occamstfs Occams 2000 challenge entry)

The Drunken Chameleon | A TF Bar

The Perfect Bar for You

Halloween TFs | Halloween themed transformations! Returns every October!

Personal Transformations | Transformations my character performs | references other stories

Miscellaneous Stories | Stories without a series or common theme

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I hope you guys like this! It took a lot of work putting this index together. If you have any questions or ideas, or just want to, dm me! Total stories: 100!

#non story post #story index #massive post

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miaoua3 · 3 months ago

Note

Can we please get a Vernon head cannon… I struggle to find them on here but your svt ones are just amazing :))

hi! sure you can, and thank you so much for saying that, hope you enjoy this!

Vernon Boyfriend Headcanons:

•(sfw! hcs):

we all know that he is mostly silent throughout the day, but i truly believe that vernon would NOT be able to shut up with his significant other, he would be talking 24/7 to you, be prepared to hear about his day from the moment he woke up to the moment he came through the door of your apartment

throughout your relationship, you notice that your boyfriend has a problem. a very big and potentially dangerous problem. and that is that he brings all sorts of animals home. it started on one rainy night, he was supposed to be home 20 minutes ago but he was nowhere to be seen or heard. just as you were about to call him for the nth time, he came in through the door, drenched from head to toe from the heavy rain. and with three kittens in his arms. he didn’t even try to make any excuses, he just proceeded to say “i found them behind the dumpster two blocks away.”

we all know that he sleeps like a corpse, so naturally he wouldn’t cuddle you back while he’s asleep, but before that he definitely won’t let you out of his arms. he’s either talking your ear off or is casually scrolling through his phone. to be honest, it doesn’t matter what he’s doing, as long as you are in his arms he considers it time well spent. and just because he doesn’t cuddle you back during his sleep doesn’t mean you can’t do what you will lol, you can lie on him, hug him tightly and throw your leg over his stomach, he won’t care-but he also he won’t reciprocate it either because my man is just like this🧍

constantly shows you something on his phone, doesn’t matter what you are doing, you will just see his hand appear in front of your face before you even hear him say “babe look at this”, be it a meme or a cute cat video, he just wants you to see everything that he does too so you can enjoy it too

speaking off, kinda unpopular opinion but vernon definitely calls you babe or a nickname based on your name, i don’t really see him only calling you bro or dude like most claim he would do, i just don’t think he would go that overboard on cute nicknames either, but something small and cute just to signify both to himself and you, as well as to people around you that you two are together, and at the end of the day that would be a small way of him showing his love and affectionate for you

if you have a niece, count on vernon to ask you every other week with sparkly eyes if you can go and visit them, he just loves your niece so much even though he doesn’t really know how to play with her, he still loves her so much. even if he has to sit on a little pink chair with a tiara on his head while drinking ‘tea’ from a little pink cup, he doesn’t mind, as long as he gets to read her bed time stories when she goes to bed, he’s okay with it all❤️

i feel like everyone has already said this but vernon definitely has a big thing for showing you and sharing to you his love for music and movies. from making you new playlists with new songs he heard (and that remind him of you), to having a dedicated day of the week for movie nights, he just wants to have somebody that he can talk to about his favourite things so pls make sure to pay close attention to what he’s showing you :(

•(nsfw! hcs):

vernon strikes me as a man who wouldn’t have that high of a sex drive, but when he’s in a mood, count on the fact that you will be doing it for hours to no end and that you won’t be able to walk the next day. he will bend you in positions you didn’t even know you could be bent into, he will try out all the paces until he finds one that you enjoy the most that night. sex with vernon would never feel like chore but rather like a brand new and beautiful experience every single time

he actually gets really nervous before going on stage, so he always drags you into the nearest corner for a quickie or to eat you out or to have you suck his dick, for him it’s a great way to get all that pent up energy out (plus seeing you on your knees, with teary eyes as you struggle to wrap your mouth around his thick cock is something he can think about while on stage as a way to pass the time-)

if you ever thought that this man had a stone face and that he’s expressionless most of the time, that would change the very first time he fucked you-his eyebrows furrowed in pleasure, his mouth opened as moans keep on spilling from his mouth, droplets of sweat sliding down his temple, a few landing onto you due to him hovering above you-yeah, let’s just say that he makes the prettiest faces and noises ever

prefers it when you ride him, especially after a hard day at work, there’s nothing he loves more than leaning on the backrest of the couch and letting you take care of him, as well as letting your wet pussy swallow him whole, he would just lay there with his eyes closed and let you do whatever you think he would enjoy-sucking on his neck, scratching his chest with your nails, whispering sweet and encouraging words in his ears- let’s just say that this is top 3 best feelings he could ever feel

has a thing for both biting and being bitten, just something about the sensation you feel when you’re being bitten is so hot to him-imagine feeling so good and so much pleasure that the only thing to stop from screaming and letting the whole world know how good you’re feeling is to bite his shoulder, it makes his brain go ckslcnsnqjqh

for some reason finds himself always fucking you in the most unusual places-on top of the kitchen counter, in the bathtub, behind some restaurant that is secluded enough but also not enough, on dino’s couch??? when he wasn’t even in his apartment??? he just…fucks you when he gets in the mood, no matter the time, place or the occasion

you can’t even dare to say to me that he doesn’t have a thing for cream pies, just the sight of his cum dripping from inside you, your pussy clenching around nothing before he pushes his cock back inside along with the cum that was just about to drip out-let’s just say every thought from his head (if he had any left due to the feeling of your pussy clenching around his dick) evaporates, only thing he can focus on is you and how good his cum looks like coating your lower lips i- i need him i fear

#seventeen #svt #svt x reader #fypシ #tumblr fyp #fypage #smut #vernon x reader #hansol vernon chwe #vernon #vernon x you

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littlemisshyperfixation · 5 months ago

Text

Wonwoo Fic Recommendations

a - angst f - fluff s - smut

One Shots

meet cute of the century (f a s) by @lovelyhan ✩♬ ₊˚. the last thing you expected when you volunteered at your city’s local animal shelter is to meet the hottest cat person in the world. now if only he’d just adopt one of them so you’d stop ogling him every time he drops by.

Midnight Appetite (s) (ft. mingyu) by @writeformesinpie ✩♬ ₊˚. You have found yourself in possession of an invite to the exclusive host club The Midnight Appetite. Within moments of walking into the establishment, one of the hosts sinks his claws in, staking his claim on you for the night. It isn’t long, though, before he adds another to your table. This isn’t how you thought your night would go.

class project (s) (ft. mingyu) by @smileysuh ✩♬ ₊˚. You’re less than enthusiastic about being paired with notorious frat boys Mingyu and Wonwoo for a class project. They make it a point to change your opinion of them... by being the ultimate meanies.

The Peephole (s) by @rubyreduji ✩♬ ₊˚. wonwoo can’t stop thinking about how he wants to ruin his roommate, the peephole in his wall isn’t helping tamper those desires either

homewrecked (a s) by @ncteez ✩♬ ₊˚. Wonwoo doesn’t seem to realize that you’re giving him the best option out of a relationship that doesn’t even involve you. With a cheating best friend on one side, and a loyal Wonwoo loving her from two hours away on another, you decide that home wrecking isn’t always a bad idea.

April Shower (f s) by @sluttywoozi ✩♬ ₊˚. Wonwoo meets a lot of people through his career as a travel photographer. Not one of them has ever made him want to stay in one place, until he met you.

wedding weekends with wonwoo (f) by @suhnshinehaos ✩♬ ₊˚. jeon wonwoo, the perfect man. kind, smart, successful career, and not too bad on the eyes. all his friends are getting married and everyone’s aunts, mothers, and family friends are trying to set him up with their friends, sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews at every wedding he attends. he’s tired of it. what better way to solve his problem than to employ your help, someone who’s having the exact same one?

penance (s) by @smileysuh ✩♬ ₊˚. You’re hyper-aware of the fact that all four of your lovers are just outside the confessional, that they’re listening in- it’s making your mouth dry, your palms becoming sweaty as you rub them against your dress. “When you last confessed, you mentioned greed and lust as your sins. Would you care to elaborate more on that?” The priest asks. “Maybe it will be easier, now that you’re amongst… friends.”

Loud Leather & Loud Thoughts (a f) by @bitchlessdino ✩♬ ₊˚. Hard to maintain a good acquaintanceship if it started off on the wrong foot, but Wonwoo tries to do just that, no matter how much you resent him from childhood. Now reunited as adults, you're questioning whether your negative impression of him has stuck since being away or have you grown up just enough to realize how much between the two you have changed?

Closer (s) by @hannieehaee ✩♬ ₊˚. after making it all the way to your final year of uni still having not experienced a single orgasm, you decided to take matters into your hands. your solution? asking your best friend wonwoo to teach you all he knew.

game on (s) by @ahloveisboo ✩♬ ₊˚. it’s been a shitty day and all you want to do is be close to wonwoo.

Chat, is that Rizz? (s) by @sailorrhansol ✩♬ ₊˚. Your rivalry with Wonwoo has existed for as long as you’ve been streaming. It’s fun, and both of your communities love it. Wonwoo is happy to play along - at least until you question his rizz while live, and he feels like he should remind you just how much rizz he has.

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harfanfare · 2 years ago

Text

I like to think that romance with Idia widely differs depending on the time you’ve been in a romantic relationship.

1. “Just started dating” stage.

If you're reading Idia fanfiction, there is an 80% chance this is the stage your relationship is on.

Idia is… treating you like a very precious stranger. He's on his toes and seeks your approval in whatever he's doing. He is going to great lengths to understand the theory of dating and your hobbies - so you can maybe share even more interests - but won’t really act on anything.

He’s constantly surprised by every romantic move you make and you have numerous occasions to adore his cherry blush and various puckles of hair igniting with pink and red. He stutters a lot and can’t focus on anything in your presence.

Idia will outright reject any suggestions for bolder moves. He’s unprepared, and although guilt is eating him from the inside, he is not up to anything you two weren’t doing as friends. Well, maybe handholding, kissing, and cuddling get a (hard) pass, but you are the only one initiating these things.

He will try his best to reciprocate effort, though.

2. “Have been dating for a while” stage.

It’s an interphase between two very different stages, so he’s a funny mix: a very shy outsider and a cocky genius at the same time.

Gaming sessions will be the centre of your couple's time. Idia regularly invites you to his dorm, sometimes even on spontaneous sessions when a new event comes up or he has found a new game that looks very cool. You share snacks, drinks, and clothes (read: you have unwritten permission to claim his blouses).

This boy would be dead without you and Ortho, and with that knowledge, you make it your mission to (somehow) tidy up his room, buy some cosmetics, healthier food, etc. If you are up to organizing a “self-care evening”, he will be hesitant at first but will be looking forward to it after a while, with some older anime. (I like to think it would be a magical girl series like Sailor Moon, Tokyo Mew Mew or Chobits, or some shoujo).

In exchange, he might construct some little gadgets (maybe anime-themed?) for you, helps you get the merch you want, and supports you in your games.

At this point, he doesn’t weigh his words much. He’s still easy to fluster, but he comes with comebacks right away. The most flirty he gets on the phone when it’s late at night and you are using a chat to talk, especially when you are not in the same room. 3. Long-term relationship stage.

He knows you are doomed to him and shamelessly takes advantage of that.

He has no claims against calling you in the middle of the night to watch him sharing his screen when he pulls for a character he wants to get in the gacha system. He believes your presence brings him luck, so he must have you when he does crucial things!

Idia disses your taste in fictional men. Sometimes, he reads the dialogues out loud from the otome games you play. He may alter them, which can make you either huff or laugh. If you read or write fanfiction, he might read them too, giving you an out loud commentary on some fragments and asking you if you are that desperate for dates so you are sending fanfiction to inspire him. If you say yes, he will hum and return to whatever he was doing before, but he might plan something out that you will preferably be able to do in his room.

Chatroom with him and Ortho is quite calm, almost polite, but your private chatroom with Idia is the most chaotic one you’ve ever been. You learned to not leave your phone openly if you don’t want to explain some inside joke with a layered backstory. An app you use to chat with Idia is the one your screen time is counted on most, and writing with Idia is your guilty pleasure.

If you are interested in IT, he might program you an app or something to help you with it! He will give you the best feedback ever, and although it may be harsh, the last thing he wants is to discourage you from learning further.

On one anniversary of your dating, he will gift you this kind of couple bracelet which lights up if the other person touches it. He created them himself. When he receives signals throughout the day, he thinks of them as a promise from you, that no distance can sever your bond.

If you bring up some serious talk, you will be bullied with memes. It’s Idia’s coping mechanism. He will plan his future with you, don’t worry, but wait for him to muster up the courage to get on one knee and ask the question.

#In conclusion at some point the stuttering will end #and he will smoothly pull an uno-reverse and 4+ cards on you.#This analysis sounded better in my head hhhhhhhh #idia #idia shroud #idia x reader #idia shroud x reader #twst #twisted wonderland #twst x reader #twisted wonderland x reader #twst idia #twst idia x reader

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howlsofbloodhounds · 2 months ago

Note

Can you talk more about the fandom's ableism with Ink and Killer??im quite curious!/gen (reference to your reblog tags)

I can try, but know im not an expert and also bigger knowledgeable inks fans are welcome to chime in.

So we all know how Ink is soulless, yes? It is because of this that people take it as an excuse to demonize them and make them evil, fake, manipulative, abusive, a bad parent, a rapist—everything under the sun simply because he’s soulless, lacks empathy.

Some people claim he doesn’t feel emotions because of his soullessness all the time and the paint vials he takes are just “fake emotions,” but in actuality Ink needs those paints to function (because without them Ink becomes an unmoving husk and this makes him extremely vulnerable to being used and taken advantage of), and to feel. It’s basically medication that he needs.

Not to mention; Ink is clearly a neurodivergent character, having hyperfixations and everything. This breeds depictions of “Ink is so stupid,” “Ink is a child,” “Ink needs to be leashed and treated like an animal,” “everyone is tired of and hates ink because ink is annoying.”

You see this type of thing with Killer a lot too in his fanon depictions, and this is because it’s a pretty agreed upon headcanon that Killer has ADHD; it’s just that most people clearly don’t do any research into how Ink and Killer’s ADHD/Autism are disorders, how they actually impact them as characters and their lives rather then how they annoy and inconvenience everyone else around them, infantilize and dehumanize them by treating them like hyperactive idiotic children or animals that need to be kept on a leash—is stereotypical depictions of ADHD with the typical “hyperactive talking a lot so annoying oh my god can you just shut up?” and “can’t ever stop moving or talking” and just generally have other characters be ableist and abusive as fuck towards them both and play it off as if it’s supposed to be funny to be talked to like that just because something they have no control over was a little annoying today.

there’s no discussions or depictions how this stuff effects either of them. Killer already has a dissociative disorder and CPTSD and can’t trust his own memory, and Ink has short term memory loss so bad he needs to write things down on their scarf just to keep track of it, and yet Killer’s memory issues are completely ignored because he has to be the silly haha comedy relief that all the characters use as their punching bag and Ink’s is only ever brought up in any serious capacity to paint them as a bad parent who would forget that his children even exists.

Killer and Ink are both characters with little to no empathy for others; and this is used to demonize them, or is completely ignored by giving Ink a soul or and forcing Killer into Stage 1 as their quick fixes.

Their lack of empathy and emotionlessness is only ever brought up to use them as villains in another character’s story; which is extra fucked up when people refuse to acknowledge that Killer is a canonical victim of literal conditioning, abuse, torture, kidnapping, and literal fucking trafficking.

People are demonizing someone who is literally trapped in a trafficking ring and being sent out as weapon of terrorism by Nightmare under threat of torture, death, and replacement all because, oh. He’s emotionless. He’s sadistic. He doesn’t act like a perfect victim curling up in a ball crying from guilt every single day and why doesn’t he just say no?

Killer isn’t perfect but people like to pretend he has more control and power than he does and like he actually wants this when the man doesn’t even know what he wants because he became who he needed to be to survive. People seem dumbfounded by the concept that victims will mirror their abusers to survive and that obviously won’t make them good people, but killer doesn’t consider himself people.

It’s never brought up how Ink’s memory loss and his lack of paints making him a husk would make him very easily to abuse and use and lie to and manipulate and take advantage. It’s never brought up how Ink thinks and feels about upsetting or losing friends because he forgot their names, or their birthdays, or when they were meeting up and where, and no matter how hard he tries things just keep slipping from his mind.

It’s never brought up how Stage 2’s indifference and overwhelming apathy and dehumanizing view of himself (and others, just like Ink, who sees others as characters in a story whereas Killer sees people more like codes programmed to follow specific scripts and roles in a long series of games and tests and just not real), means he is a lot more likely to be used and abused and taken advantage of—and yes, raped, because for some reason people really really love making Killer a sexual predator as if he’s not the one most likely to be abused in that manner—means he’d likely just accept whatever someone does to him (especially if he believes they’re stronger than him) because why should he care? Nothing matters anyway. There’s no point in resisting, why bother. This is how it was always supposed to end, and nothing is real anyway. This doesn’t affect me, i don’t have emotions, im not real. I’m not a person.

The only form of control Killer would have is playing along. Acting, pretending he enjoys it and is having fun—but ultimately, he doesn’t know if he does or not. Where does he begin and the act end. He doesn’t know, but if everyone around him is telling him one thing, then it must be true.

Stage 2 wouldn’t see himself as a victim or anything that happened to him as anything particularly significant. Nightmare asks him to do something and he does it because why not is what he thinks—it’s just how it works, Nightmares stronger. He ignores what would happen if he drug his feet or attempted to refuse because to him it’s just logical that he’d be punished for that, and he likes pain anyway, so enjoying means he must’ve wanted it.

(Does this justify the people he hurts when commanded to, triggered to, provoked, or when his dehumanization of others and conditioning leads him to do pretty awful abusive shit to them out of sadism or curiosity or just needing to feel in control? No, of course not. Any of his victims are allowed to hate him or feel however they want about him.

Doesn’t mean we have to ignore that he’s also a victim and has even less control than he allows others to see or know about, and that he himself likely refuses to acknowledge or look at too deeply.)

Which is another thing a lot of people use to justify Nightmare’s abuse of Killer. That he’s masochistic and sometimes pushes and provokes Nightmare into hurting him—the idea that it’s not actually abuse because he “wanted it” and “liked it” or that he’s somehow as bad as Nightmare because “he provoked him.”

He cannot access the emotions and trauma and fear and moral concerns and safety concerns of his other Stages because that is the entire point of his dissociative disorder and his conditioning. This makes him easy to control and this how he’s survived and remained even somewhat functioning.

Not to mention. The idea that Ink and Killer need to “learn empathy” or “learn emotions” to be better or good people, and not because being in touch with emotions is an important thing everyone should learn especially victims of abuse and those with trauma and that having little to no empathy is not some moral failing on their end or says something about the type of people they are. It just means they struggle to relate to others, understand their emotions, or feel others emotions as if it were their own.

There’s also the matter of some people trying to say that because Ink is soulless he is AroAce. That is not true, is both aro/aphobic and ableist. Ink is both soulless and AroAce and these are two completely separate things—they’d still be AroAce even if they had a soul.

There’s probably a whole lot more that can be said about this, but I’ll end it right here. Others can add on or correct me.

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lovebugism · 2 years ago

Note

i am so sorry but reader talking about robin right before making out with eddie is like absolutely the best thing i’ve ever read i’m obsessed i genuinely can’t wait for anything else in that universe that you do

THE CUSTOMER'S ALWAYS RIGHT | god help the girl

summary: in which you come to terms with the fact that you're hopelessly in love with eddie munson. pairing: virgin!eddie munson x reader word count: 13k warning: phone sex, more discussions of shitty boyfriends, j*son c*rver name drop, talks of unhealthy eating practices, smut 18+ mdni! a/n: this ask has been sitting in my inbox for ages now, but i wanted to save it until robin made an appearance in the series! thank you, anon, for being so sweet! and for the few of you who've been waiting on me to finally post <3 hope you enjoy! xoxo

( PREVIOUSLY ) | ( SERIES MASTERLIST ) | ( NEXT )

They only met once, but it changed their lives forever.

That’s what the movie cover reads at least, but the words have long blurred into a jumbled mess at your tunnel vision. John Bender stares you in the face, but all you see is Eddie — boyish and brazen and scowling because he thinks it makes him look intimidating, but nowhere near as cruel as he seems.

He’s certainly got the hair for it, much longer and curls far wilder than Judd Nelson’s measly set of brushed-back locks. He’s got the terribly animated personality down pat, too; the one that either makes you laugh uncontrollably or squirm in discomfort when it’s pointed your way. And the style’s a pretty fine match also, though you’d argue that no one sports a leather jacket quite like Eddie Munson does.

Wallowing in your boredom at the empty Family Video store on Main Street — where your best friends slave over mundane work with aching backs and a lingering sense of gratefulness that no customer has been in in well over an hour — you find yourself analyzing each character pictured on the front cover of The Breakfast Club.

Robin would surely be Allison, you conclude rather quickly, because their deadpanned glowers are eerily identical. They’ve also got this sort of atypical aura to them, too, like a dark storm cloud or the promise of a long night. But strangely it sparkles — strikes of lightning or a sky full of stars. It draws everyone’s attention to them; even when they’re desperately trying to hide in the very back of a room.

And Steve would be Andrew, not particularly because of his affections for this Allison-Reynolds-Robin-Buckley hybrid you’ve concocted, but because "popular guy with daddy issues" is a trope that fits him far too well. He’s way more likely to get detention for trying to look cool in front of his assholes friends than for anything actually malicious of heart. But that would’ve been years ago now. He’s not that kind of guy anymore.

He’s soft and sweet — a Brian Johnson sort of soft and sweet, if you will. If Brian wasn’t the brains, but the sweetest dumbass anyone’s ever met.

You realize then, that Jim Hopper would make a mean Richard Vernon. He’s impatient to a fault, almost too stern at times, but never enough to make you genuinely fearful of him. You’ve found that it’s virtually impossible for you to take him seriously when he’s so cartoonishly angry. It’s a match made in heaven, you find, though Jim might take offense to the comparison.

And if Eddie is Bender, then that’d make you the Claire Standish of the bunch.

She’s dreadfully stylish, a bit stuck-up at times, and perhaps a little bit more spoiled than the average person; but it’s not like she ever claimed to be perfect. And you wouldn’t either.

You’ll take more pride in your wardrobe filled with pretty pleated skirts and flouncy dresses than your somewhat glacial disposition. And you might not be drowning in daddy’s money, but you’re certainly spoiled in other ways — if only in the employee discount at Enzo’s that got you wine for cheap and your connections at Family Video that meant free movie nights whenever you wanted.

The bad boy and the princess was a tale as old as time itself. It’s a fairytale you wouldn’t mind living in if it ended how it did in the movies — with a kiss on the cheek and an exchanged diamond earring in the calloused palm of another. A soft pink smile and a celebratory fist in the air.

But you’ve met your fair share of John Bender’s and none of them had been particularly kind to you, let alone had fallen in love with you.

Maybe that’s because you were no Claire Standish. Never pretty enough, never mousy enough, never pure enough. You try and dissect why you’ve never been successfully loved, and all the signs point to you, you, you.

You hope Eddie’s different. You need Eddie to be different.

“Something’s wrong with me,” you blurt out of nowhere.

Well, it’s not totally out of the blue for you. You’d been stewing over that thought since you got there — since you left the woods with damp underwear and the scent of you on Eddie’s fingers.

But to Steve and Robin, who’d stayed relatively silent and locked eyes only once after they noticed how abnormally hushed you’d gone, it catches them quite off guard.

Steve lifts his heavy head from where he mans the counter. His tired eyes leave the computerized catalog for the first time in forty minutes, and he has to rub at them with the bottom of his palms to see you properly. Meanwhile, Robin crouches at your side, taking returned tapes from the bin sitting next to her and placing them back upon the shelf you lean against.

She blinks up at you, deep ocean eyes swimming with apprehension, like she can sense the spiral you’ve just about twisted yourself into.

“What do you mean?” she wonders, ever the supportive best friend, as she plucks Heather’s, Pretty in Pink, and Weird Science from the bin and sets them onto their assigned rows in the Teen Drama section.

“Eddie won’t fuck me.”

Neither of them is particularly stunned by the unabashed nature of your admission.

Not only have they both fucked you at one point or another, but they’re your best friends — no one’s ever going to know you quite the way they do. It leaves little left unsaid between the three of you, with secrets you’ve all sworn to take to your graves. Steve once stuck a finger in his ass to see if he liked it (he did) and Robin sometimes gets off on her childhood teddy bear (rather ironically named Mr. Snuggles).

So this? This was nothing. Especially in comparison to all the other shit you’ve confessed to them because god knows the whore of Hawkins has a plethora of stories to tell.

Steve is more shocked by the name that leaves your mouth than anything else. “Eddie Munson?” he repeats with furrowed brows, like he had to have heard you wrong.

You bring your chin to your right shoulder to look at him, then nod.

“Eddie… The Freak… Munson?”

You nod again, slower for him this time.

“You wanna fuck… Eddie Munson?” Steve reiterates once more, as though the idea was too appalling to be true. “Eddie Munson — The Freak?”

“Yes, Steve,” you huff in irritation.

His face contorts into a puppy-like confusion. A frown settles between his bushy brows and he cocks his head to the side, nose scrunching and his lip quirking slightly. He couldn’t look more disgusted if he tried.

“…Why?”

You groan and tilt your head back dramatically. “That’s not what’s important here, Steve. The better question is why won’t he fuck me?”

The boy’s lack of any actual assistance doesn’t surprise Robin in the slightest — his dumbfounded gaze and innate confusion are actually pretty on brand. It just puts all the burden on her, to help you wriggle out of the mess you’d tangled yourself into.

It’s not like she isn’t used to it, though, nor does she mind doing it for you. She walks you through your emotions like a professional, squashing out all the burning orange embers for you before they have the chance to burst into flames.

“Well, what do you mean he won’t fuck you? Like… did he actually say that or does he just wanna, you know, take things slow?”

The latter would’ve been way too easy. Eddie’s always been nice enough to you. It’d make sense for him to want to stay unhurried and gentle with you, but those words weren’t exactly in your vocabulary.

The first time you were alone with him, you were getting yourself off on his thigh after making him come in his jeans. The next time you saw him, after four days of him clinging to your consciousness, there wasn’t as much small talk so much as there were two of his fingers stuffed knuckle-deep inside of you.

You don’t know Eddie’s birthday, but you know how he likes to be touched — squeezed and not rubbed. You don’t know his middle name or how he likes his eggs in the morning or what his relationship with his mother is like, but he’s already made you come. Twice.

You are completely, utterly, and totally incapable of taking things slow. So it wasn’t that. It couldn’t be. So it had to be the other thing. The very scary, terrifying, boogeyman of a thing.

“I mean, I offered to give him a blowjob and he completely turned me down,” you lament in reply.

Robin and Steve wince. Like, physically wince. Their faces scrunch and their heads flinch from something invisible. Audible ooh’s fall from their mouths without them even realizing it, because you don’t get rejected. Ever. Especially not after offering to pleasure someone without much of anything in return.

They don’t mean to react the way they do. The visible shock that coats their features is involuntary more than it is anything, and it only adds to your fears.

“Exactly!” you exclaim.

“I hate to say it, but I think hell might be freezing over as we speak,” Steve half-jokes.

“Well, he was working, right?” Robin asks with raised brows. “Maybe he was just busy.”

“Sorry, Rob, but no guy’s too busy for a blowjob.”

“Real charming, Stevie.”

“Maybe he just has a small dick,” the boy concludes with a shrug.

“I felt his dick,” you shake your head almost immediately. The feeling of Eddie’s hard cock through his denim jeans, all rough and warm against your palm, hasn’t yet left you. “It’s not small.”

“Well, maybe he can’t get it up—”

“Yeah, that’s not a problem either.”

Eddie was rock hard when you left him, throbbing and aching and obviously needing some kind of relief. That’s partly why you’d been so ardent to return the favor, though the other half of it was purely selfish — you haven’t seen a more beautiful sight than Eddie Munson getting off. To deprive yourself of that masterpiece made you feel like you were starving.

You have a hard time imagining the raging hard-on just… dissipating after you’d left him. That means he probably jerked off in the back of his van and you missed it. And if he came, right after he promised everything was okay, that means he just didn’t want you to do it… right?

Steve seems to be caught in the same inner turmoil you’re currently stuck in; and for good reason. In all the years he’s known you, he can count on one hand how many times he’s had to turn you down. And every time, it was because he’d gotten back together with Nancy. It was never because of you. Not once. And sometimes he felt like it hurt him as much as it did you.

As far as Steve’s concerned, you’re so out of Eddie Munson’s league that you’re not even in his fucking orbit — so the freak show, turning you down, doesn’t make whole lot of sense to him.

“Huh…”

“It’s me. It’s definitely me,” you conclude with the shake of your head. A bitter, almost hysterical laugh spills from your lips. “He thinks I’m fucking ugly or disgusting or something. It’s totally fucking me—”

Robin completely abandons her basket of tapes then. She rises to stand in front of you, looking timid as she does so. Her raised brows form wrinkles on her freckled forehead and her blue eyes widen to reveal more of the whites of them. She looks like she’s approaching a wild animal. A bomb that’s about to explode.

“Okay… You’re starting to spiral, alright? So let’s just try and take a few deep breaths—”

You don’t listen to her.

Actually, you do quite the opposite, as you begin to blurt every fleeting thought that crosses your mind.

“I’ve made out with nearly everyone in this stupid town— I’m pretty sure I’ve fucked almost half— and you’d think Eddie would wanna take advantage of that, the way everyone makes him out to be some sort of freak, right? But he hasn’t and at this rate, he won’t, and I just don’t understand why,” you ramble without taking in a single breath. “Usually being a slut is a huge turn-on for guys, you know? But what if Eddie thinks it’s gross? I mean, it is gross— I’m gross—”

You only stop for air when Robin takes your shoulders in both hands. She looks less apprehensive and more stern, as she forces you to look at her.

“Look. I love you, but you need to get a hold of yourself, alright? I know you’re not used to being told no, and I know how much it sucks, but shit happens. I’m willing to bet all the money I’ve ever seen that whatever is going on with Eddie has nothing to do with you, okay? And if it’s making you this upset, maybe you should just talk to him.”

“But I don’t wanna seem like I’m too eager, that’s gross—”

“Then find someone else to fuck,” she offers with her signature Robin Buckley half-smile. “I’m sure it would take you less than five minutes to find a willing participant.”

“Yeah, right here,” Steve jokes from the counter with the pathetic wave of his hand and a dumb grin on his lips.

You don’t hear him over the voices in your head — half calling you crazy for letting a boy drive you this mad over nothing, and the other half bitterly affirming each of your deep-rooted insecurities.

Your face screws up, like the thought of being with anyone other than Eddie upsets you — it does upset you.

“I don’t want anyone else.”

“Then what do you want?” Robin yells in your face, shaking you by your shoulders.

“I want Eddie!” you shout back without thinking. The words seem to spill out of nowhere. It takes you of all people by surprise. No one in this rat trap town would ever expect the whore of Hawkins to want to settle down, least of all the harlot herself. It’s strange; it’s riveting; it’s really fucking scary. “…Fuck.”

The brunette smirks, proud of herself. “Well. There’s your answer.”

“I hate when you’re right,” you mumble to yourself, pouting as she crouches back down again.

“I know.”

It was a terrifying thought, to know that you were head over heels for someone else. You try to come to terms with what that means.

Sometimes you think you fall in love with a new person every day. A cute guy holds the door open for you, a pretty girl compliments your outfit — they never think about you again, but they’re on your mind for days. It was so easy to develop such meaningless infatuations, especially when you were bored.

But Eddie was different.

He was a nice guy. A nice guy that was sweet to you just for the sake of being sweet to you; not because he secretly wanted something in return. That made you fall for him at first, but then you just… kept on falling. Eddie Munson was an infinite void you couldn’t crawl your way out of even if you wanted to, even if you tried.

And that’s what frightened you the most.

Because if you really thought about it, you’ve only truly been in love a handful of times. And, sure, it didn’t work out — that was normal — but some of them fucking ruined you.

You’re still trying to figure out who you are without all of the people that have broken your heart. You’re still fighting like hell every day to recognize the person you see in the mirror, while Billy Hargrove fucks off with a new girl every other week like he didn’t totally destroy you.

But, even still, Eddie was completely different. No one’s ever made you feel the way he makes you feel. And it’s more than the stupid heavy petting — it’s more than anything. It’s never been like this before; not even with the blonde mulleted asshole who ripped your heart to shreds.

And you’re scared that if you get hurt again, you’ll never be able to come back from it.

“Steve, do you have another copy of Fast Times in the back?” you suddenly ask the boy, tossing him a look over your shoulder.

It’s your last ditch effort to rid yourself of the ponderous, gray doom and gloom surrounding you like some storm cloud. Your comfort movie solves all of your problems — or, at the very least, Phoebe Cates does — but it seems everyone else in town has developed a similar fondness for minute fifty-three of the film and got all the tapes off the shelf before you could get your hands on one.

“You know I keep on in stock for you,” he answers quietly.

He reaches below the counter to pull out a spare copy for you, and your heart swells with the rays of a thousand rising suns and the songs of every morning bird.

Steve told you some time ago that he could change. And back then, all it did was piss you off, because he didn’t want to change for the town slut — for the girl he put through the goddamn ringer. He wanted to change for Nancy. The princess bruised his brittle ego a little, and then he realized what an asshole he’d been to everyone, to you.

But as angry as it made you, you never believed him. “Once the King of Hawkins High, always the King of Hawkins High,” you remarked bitterly.

You wouldn’t say it to his face, for the sake of keeping his ego from inflating all over again, but you could tell he was really changing.

He was kinder, he was softer. He stopped caring about what everyone thought about him, about what not caring would do to his reputation, and started giving a fuck about the people worth giving a fuck about.

Apparently, you were one of them.

“…Really?”

He nods with a subtle shrug. Like it was no big deal. Like it wasn’t one of the sweetest things he’d ever done for you — keeping your favorite movie on hand so you’ll always have a spare, knowing that it’s the only thing that gets you out of a deep, dark funk sometimes.

“Stevie… You’re gonna make me blush,” you lilt with a grin as you saunter over to him, hands innocently laced behind your back. “You need to be careful, Harrington. I’m gonna start to think you actually like me.”

He scoffs. “I do like you.”

“Yeah, when it’s convenient.”

It’s obvious your joke hits him where it hurts. It serves as a bitter reminder of the asshole he used to be, the douchebag he’s trying like hell to grow out of. He looks up at you with a sheepish, honey-tinted gaze before ducking away again.

A year or more ago it would’ve made you feel good, to know that you hurt him just a fraction of the way he hurt you. But you know that that isn’t the same man standing in front of you now, that he’d rather die than make hurt your feelings, and it makes you feel like shit for saying it in the first place.

“Sorry,” you apologize with a scrunched nose. The palms of your hands dig into the edges of the counter as you lean against it. Your shrug. “It just kinda came out…”

The barcode scanner in his hand beeps as he passes the thing over the back of the tape — never charging you, just getting the movie out of the database.

“So, uh…” he starts before clearing his throat. He focuses his gaze on the computer and types on the bulky keyboard with the tip of his pointer finger. “You really like this Eddie guy, huh?”

“Maybe. I think so.”

“And he’s not, like… a total freak or anything?”

You can’t tell if he’s trying to look out for you or if he just wants intel on what it’s like trying (and failing) to bang the local weirdo. Either way, it makes a smile tug slow at your lips as you joke: “Not in the way everyone thinks.”

“Jesus,” he winces at the obscenity of your words.

“Sorry,” you apologize again, though the laugh that bubbles from your lips after cancels out any hint of actual sincerity. “You don’t need to give me the talk or anything, Steve. I can take care of myself.”

“…Can you?” he half-jokes.

It makes you falter. “Well… With you and Robin and Hopper constantly on my ass, then yeah.”

“Just don’t want you to get hurt,” Steve finally admits, soft and suddenly shy as he hands the VHS over to you.

“That’s rich coming from you—”

He jerks back the tape before you can take it from him, leaving your hand reaching for thin air. His cinnamon eyes glimmer with a foreign seriousness, not completely unkind, but lacking their usual blithe. “That’s why I’m saying it. I just… I want you to be okay.”

Steve is one of the rare ones, you conclude right then in there — in the liminal emptiness of Family Video, beneath fluorescent lights that cast sharp shadows upon his already chiseled features. He was a mythical creature of a man, one who breaks your heart and does everything in his power to mend it again.

He hasn’t forgotten about what he did to you, not like Billy did, and he won’t. Not ever. He saw what he did to you and he never moved on from it, just matured enough to make sure it never happened again. And he won’t let another unworthy douchebag hurt you like he did. Not if he can help it, at least.

And he did try to warn you about Hargrove, to be fair. You were just the dumbass that didn’t listen.

“Well, me and my Phoebe Cates wet dream are golden, Pony Boy,” you promise. He hands you the tape again and lets you snatch it from his grip this time. “Don’t worry your pretty little head, Stevie.”

Steve Harrington was right.

The fleeting thought flashes across your mind for half a second, and you quickly realize that those words have never been uttered in the same sentence before now. But he wasn’t wrong in what he’d said about you, just before you left — you were completely, totally, absolutely, and implicitly unable to take care of yourself.

You nearly passed out in the bathroom after taking the hottest shower of your life, feeling too woozy to slap on anything other than moisturizer because you failed to remember to actually eat something that day. It wasn’t totally your fault, though; if anything, it was because of Eddie and all the butterflies he’d given you that made food the very last thing on your mind.

You half-heartedly dry yourself off, keeping your hair in a towel, while you slip on a cotton set of underwear you’ve had for way longer than what's likely acceptable. Damp and half-naked, you prance into the kitchen to fix Bowie her bowl of dinner before you feed yourself.

You fork a can of wet food onto a flower-shaped plate and let her eat on the counter — because you’re an adult now, and you can do that sort of thing.

The calico purrs while she feasts, but your stomach thunders with negligence. You peek into your mostly bare refrigerator and make a mental note to go grocery shopping when you get paid next week.

With a lack of food and an even lesser will to cook something, you settle for the half-eaten chocolate bar you keep stashed in the very back of the fridge; kept only for the most special of occasions — when you’re reveling in your loneliness and trying to convince yourself that you can make it on your own.

It was practically the size of your forearm when you first bought the thing at some too expensive candy store in the city. Now it’s no bigger than your hand.

You eat the thing in bed, even though you know you’ll get crumbs everywhere and that it’ll make sleep agonizing for you — if you get any, that is. You’re bound to feel like a total zombie by the time the sun rises and the late-night sweet will likely make its appearance on your skin by then, in a red and raging blemish of a consequence.

You’ll feel empty and starved and surly, a snapping grouch instead of an actual person, until you get some actual food in your system.

And you’re more than aware of all of these things, but you don’t do a single damn thing about them.

You’re nothing but a sulking lump upon an unmade bed, lying in a pitch-black darkness that’s evaded only by the static-y television across your room, trying your best to pretend like you aren’t waiting for Eddie’s phone call. It’s hard to remember to forget him, though, when the movie you’re watching is practically a feature film of him and all the ways he makes you feel.

Spicoli and his terribly inebriated friends slur as they chorus “No shoes, no shirt, no diiiice” and you swear you can feel Eddie’s shoulder bump softly against yours as he laughs, hear every sound of his melodic chuckle in your ear that made you giggle right along with him. The low bass of Moving in Stereo plays in the otherwise empty silence of your bedroom, and every beat feels like the rhythm of your thrusts against his thigh.

Eddie Munson is all-consuming.

Even the thought of him feels physical.

Phoebe Cates all but undresses herself in front of you, but you’re stuck thinking about some guy who lives in a trailer park across town, deals drugs for a living, and can’t graduate high school. You’re a total fucking goner.

Your eyes flutter shut, and instead of the backs of your eyelids, you see Eddie’s trailer. Your lips start to tingle as they kiss his for the first time — hungry, yearning, needing. His thigh is pressed snugly into your cunt, denim jeans rough against your soft cotton panties, and you have to bite back a moan when he tenses every time you squeeze his hard, covered cock.

You can feel it, all of him, like he were here with you now.

You wish that he were.

His fingers would feel far better, leave far more sparks of electricity in your belly, than the ones as you sneak through the hem of your underwear.

You try and take things slow with yourself, to be as gentle as he had been with you earlier in the woods, but it feels strange to treat yourself with so much tenderness. To touch your pussy like it’s the first time it’s ever been touched. Like it’s a beautiful thing you need to be sweet to.

Maybe you find it so foreign to be careful with yourself because no one has ever been careful with you.

No one, except for Eddie.

Your touch doesn’t rival his. It doesn’t even come close.

No matter how tightly you squeeze your eyes shut or how hard you try to pretend that they’re his fingers inside of you, you can’t make yourself feel as good as he did.

Your fingers aren’t as rough as his guitar-string-scarred ones and they don’t caress your clit with the same methodical care. They don’t fill you quite the same either, nowhere near as satisfying as his much thicker ones.

And you’re no stranger to masturbation, not by any means. Sometimes it’s the only way you can guarantee an orgasm for yourself when you’ve got a partner who cares so little about your own pleasure. But Eddie was different. Eddie cared — so much so, that he’s gotten more orgasms out of you than you’ve gotten from him, which is something you’ve never said about anyone else you’ve been with.

It’s rare and unfamiliar, a bouquet of all things refreshing and terrifying and strange, tied together with a pretty little ribbon.

You know that you can make yourself come. It’ll just take way too long to actually be worthwhile and won’t be nearly as mind-blowing as you need it to be. You won’t be left with trembling thighs and nearly numb legs — just a pitiful excuse for an orgasm that you could get from any one of your exes with half as much work.

What you need is Eddie.

And you hate that. You hate how much you need him and you’re terrified of what that means.

As far as precedent goes, right when you start needing someone is usually when they start to leave. It’s like fucking clockwork most of the time — like everyone knows that you’re a ticking time bomb and eventually it gets too risky to stand too close to you.

You’ll just have to keep Eddie at arm's distance. So he won’t see the grenade that you are.

You pull your fingers out of your wanting cunt, still slick and throbbing with a need that you can’t give it, when the phone rings.

The high-pitched shrill in the quiet makes you tense like it’s the first time you’ve ever heard the damn thing. Your breath catches in your throat, first out of fright and then at the inclination of who waits for you on the other line.

Suddenly, you’re scrambling to collect yourself. As though there was any possibility that Eddie might be able to see you through the phone line.

You wipe your wet fingers haphazardly on the cotton of your underwear and sit up straighter from your ungracefully lazed position. Then you count to five — one mississippi… two mississippi… three — so Eddie won’t think you’re some kind of crazy person who doesn’t have anything better to do than wait for his call.

So he won’t know that’s exactly what you are.

You lift the ruby red rotary from its hook at your bedside table and stretch the corkscrew cord to press it to your ear. “…Hello?”

“Yeah, hi. I’d like to order a pizza. Half pepperoni, half hawaiian.”

You roll your eyes at his dumb joke, even though the familiarity of his voice makes you smile. It warms you like a home-cooked meal, like you were high-pitched and starving before and now you’re on the soothing comedown of finally being satiated.

“Yeah, sorry, we’re closed.”

“Then why’d you pick up the phone, huh?” he teases back. You swear you can hear the grin in his voice. You didn’t know a smile could be so audible. It makes you wonder if he can hear yours — if you’re doing a real shit job at pretending. You anxiously twirl the cord with the pointer finger of your free hand.

“Because I’ve been waiting for you to call me all night, dummy.”

Your answer is more honest than either of you were expecting.

Eddie’s sigh crackles through the shoddy reception. “Yeah. Sorry ‘bout that, sweetheart. I’ve been working all night. I only got home, like, five minutes ago.”

You can hear the heavy exhaustion in his voice. “Rough day?”

“Kinda,” he answers with a shrug. You can hear the grating squeak of his mattress as he plops down onto his bed. “I dealt to one of Jason’s goons today… They always give me a hard time.”

“I’m sorry,” is all you can think to answer.

Eddie’s been the brunt of every joke since seventh grade — people made fun of too big clothes, his too wild hair, his too loud music. But he took it all in stride, laughing with everyone else before volleying a harsher joke back in response. You almost started to think that he liked it. That, somewhere deep down, he was fond of all the attention he got from people who supposedly couldn’t stand him.

But it hurts to know that it hurts him.

“Don’t apologize. It’s not like you did anything,” he assures with a soft laugh. He makes the bold decision to be honest then, too. “You, uh… You made my day a whole lot better, actually.”

You don’t know if he’s talking about the brief fling in the woods or the phone call you’re sharing now or if you particularly care either way. Your heart flutters like it’s been kissed by the wings of a butterfly.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean… I don’t know— I couldn’t stop thinking about you, you know. And, knowing that I was gonna get to talk to you again kinda got me through the day, I guess… And, yes, I am fully aware of how lame that sounds, but—”

You don’t get to hear the rest of his excuse, of why what he just told you totally isn’t lame, because you’re covering the receiver with your palm and turning to squeal into your pillow. A far more pathetic sight, in your humble opinion.

There hasn’t been a more fulfilling feeling than this one, to know that he’s been feeling the same way you’ve been feeling about him this whole time. It’s better than all the orgasms he could give you combined, to be loved so wholly.

“…You okay?” you hear his muffled voice ask after you’ve gone suddenly AWOL.

You press the phone back to your ear and nod like he can see you. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. The phone… fell— you said you just got home?”

“Uh, yeah. I met with Hellfire for a bit at school. We’re almost at the end of the Cult of Vecna, so they’re kinda on my ass about it. The little shits are obsessed.”

“Well, they should be. It’s a really good campaign, Eds.”

“Thanks to you,” he mutters. You can almost picture the glimmer in his button eyes and the shaky half-smirk he always looks at you with when he gets all shy.

“That was all you, Eddie Spaghetti,” you retort. “I still have no idea how you did it.”

“Did what?” he wonders, chuckling a bit at the nickname.

“Make something so beautiful out of thin air.”

Lying in the depths of his bedroom, blanketed by the darkness and bathing in streams of moonlight, Eddie feels his breath catch in his throat.

For the first time in his life, he doesn’t have a joke to spew out on the spot. He’s speechless, just for a moment, a quick blink of a second, with nothing to say. Because, if he really thinks about it, that’s sort of what happened with you.

You were just his customer and he was just your dealer.

You were a loyal client and then a girl way out of his league that he developed a too big a crush on. Then you made him come in his underwear and washed the sticky stains out of the denim for him. Now you’re on the phone with him. You let him tell you all about his shitty day and apologize like you weren’t the only good thing about it — like you aren’t the only good thing, period.

It’s not the most cliche love story, nor is it the most beautiful, but it has his cynical little heart beating like the wings of a hummingbird.

Then, when all the mushy mess fades like fog, he finally thinks of something to say.

“It’s the witchcraft, sweetheart,” he shrugs to himself. “Didn’t you hear? I’m a devil-worshipping freak.”

“You know that’s not it, Eds,” you retort with the roll of your eyes.

You know that it’s hard, to be a metalhead from the wrong side of the tracks in the eighties — at the height of the Satanic Panic and all the delusional craze. That shit’s followed him since freshman year. Even still, it nips at his ankles like rabid dogs.

Maybe you were never naive or bored enough to believe all the rumors, but Eddie Munson was always more than that to you.

“No?”

“You can blame it on being a freak show all you want, but I know it’s because you’re one of the funniest, smartest, most creative guys I’ve ever met—”

“You must not know a ton of guys then, sweetheart,” he interjects playfully, like he couldn’t stand to hear you compliment him any longer. You’d give anything to see his blushing cheeks just now.

“…You’re kidding right?” you giggle in response.

“Sorry— that’s— I didn’t mean it like— It was— I was joking,” he stammers, frightened that he might’ve offended you in some way.

It only makes you laugh harder. Both of you know you lost count of all the guys you ‘know’ a long, long time ago. You do imagine it’s somewhere near ‘a ton’, though.

“I know, Eds,” you assure with a contented sigh. “I was just teasing.”

“Oh.”

“The slut and the freak… Who would’ve thought?” you wonder all dreamily, like it’s a fairytale as old as time itself. That’s what it feels like, sometimes.

Eddie isn’t sure what you mean — who would’ve thought you’d be friends? Two people caught in that in-between stage of platonic and romance that’s complete agony and total, total bliss? A couple of kids falling in love—

“It’s sort of kismet, huh?” he answers.

“I think so.”

“So, uh… What are you up to?” Eddie wonders then, equal parts curious and eager to keep the discussion going. He’s frightened any lapse in conversation is going to lead to saying goodbye.

He wants to stay on for hours, until both of you are fighting to stay awake, and then listen to the sound of your heavy breathing when you inevitably lose — like that isn’t the creepiest thing anyone’s ever wanted. He’ll fight Wayne about the bill if it comes to that, he doesn’t care, he just never wants to stop being this close to you.

“Do you want the real answer or the fake one?”

“Uh… Both?”

“Well, I’d say I was doing something super productive with my night, you know, catching up on all the boring adult shit, but then I’d be lying. And I don’t wanna lie to you, Eds,” you tell him with a teasing lilt playing at the edge of your voice.

Eddie swallows thickly, fearing he’d somehow been caught in his own lie — or rather, his half-truth. He moves on quickly, though not exactly full of grace. “Right. Yeah. Totally.”

“Honest answer is, that the only productive thing I’ve done tonight is shower, and now I’m in bed watching Fast Times and eating all the chocolate in my house, because I can’t cook for shit and I have nothing else better to do with my night,” you admit to him, picking at the thread of your comforter.

“Oh, don’t tell me I missed the ‘Moving in Stereo’ bit,” he agonizes.

“Just.”

“Well, correct me if I’m wrong, sweetheart, but it sounds like you’re having loads of fun tonight.”

“I’m having a lot more fun now,” you assure him.

“Glad I can be around to make you laugh,” he retorts like he’s not all too happy to do it.

“You’re a total comedian, Eddie Spaghetti.”

“If I’m the jester, you’re the queen, sweetheart,” he promises, a grin evident in his voice.

Your breath catches in your throat something fierce; you’re almost worried that he’s heard it. His words pierce your heart, a stroke of lightning or a blade of steel. He’s joking, but it’s so strangely profound, the kindest thing anyone’s ever said to you and it’s dripping in sarcasm.

It’s sort of Eddie’s love language, you’ve come to understand, to say something so sweet but coated in venom to make it sour again. It makes you feel special, loved, almost.

A fire builds behind your rib cage, sharp and distant and all-consuming.

“Are you alone, Eds?” you ask him suddenly.

The sudden curve ball in the conversation takes him by surprise. “Uh, yeah, Wayne’s at work right now… Why?”

“Because I want you to talk to me…”

“Oh?” is all he can say because isn’t that what he’s been doing this whole time?

“And I want you to say things that… maybe other people shouldn’t hear,” you explain slowly to him.

“…Oh.”

He’s heard about this only once before, the whole phone sex thing.

It was from Andy in the back of Ms. O’Donnell’s class a year or more ago, though Eddie never called him by that name. Andy, in all actuality, was Jason Carver’s right-hand man, and he meant that in every sense of the phrase. Eddie was more than convinced that the guy was so obsessed with the blonde haired, blue eyed douchebag that he was giving him handjobs on the regular.

But it seemed the dick brigade couldn’t function properly without their leader and Eddie had the misfortune of hearing all the mindless bullshit they were spewing behind him — basketball, parties, girls; in true white bread fashion.

His friends gathered around him like he was telling some sort of secret, though it was loud enough for anyone in a three foot radius to hear. Eddie, caught directly in the line of fire, heard all about Chrissy’s older sister, Wendy, who was two years older and off at college.

He’d gotten her number from some party he’d crashed. At least that’s how he told it, right before telling everyone that she swore like a sailor when she came and that she told him all the dirty things she wanted to do to him while she did.

“It was like her hand was on my dick, dude, I’m serious. That shit was crazy, bro,” he’d laughed after retelling the whole conversation in excruciating detail.

Eddie rolled his eyes to himself then, inwardly jealous that he’d never get to meet Wendy — or any other girl that would be willing to have phone sex with him, for that matter. His phone only ever rang for telemarketers or a rogue Dustin Henderson calling to annoy him.

But, here you are now, the most wanted girl in Hawkins, offering it to him on a silver platter. He wonders if you’ve done this before, surely you have — oh god, he thinks to himself, what if you’ve done this with Andy?

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to,” you assure him after his unusually long silence. “I know you’re probably busy and tired and everything—”

“No! No, yeah, I— I want to. I totally want to.”

“Okay,” you nod. Petals of a flower begin to bloom in your chest as you lie back in bed, settling further into the mattress. The movie, already long forgotten, serves only as light and background noise. “So… What are you wearing, Eds?”

“I feel like I should be asking you that,” he laughs.

On the other side of Hawkins, in a trailer in the middle of nowhere, Eddie rises from where he’d originally flopped back onto his bed with the notion that it was going to be a semi-normal night. He props himself against his headboard. His fingers twitch at his thigh.

“Beat ya to it, Munson.”

“Well, I’ll have you know that it is very sexy, sweetheart. I’m wearing the same Hellfire shirt you saw me in, I don’t know, five hours ago — except now it’s got a rip in it because I totally ate ass on the way back to the van.”

He tells you this to make you laugh — it works — but he prays you don’t ask any questions. Because he got it while hurrying back to his van mere minutes after you’d left him, so hard he thought he was going to burst, with no more than seven minutes until his next client arrived.

Thankfully, he only needed three.

“I love that shirt,” you respond in place of saying what you really want to — ‘I love how that shirt looks on you’ — how it clings to his lean torso and reveals his midriff whenever he stretches his arms over his head.

“She’s a lit-tle worse for wear now, sweetheart,” he lilts.

“I’ll stitch it up for you.”

“And I’ve got on a pair of boxers that are so old they’re practically see through because I’m pretty sure they used to be Wayne’s back in… I don’t know… the eighteen-hundreds.”

Eddie was right. It was sexy, though, for the exact reason they weren’t supposed to be.

There was something so domestic about it all. You can picture him lying in his bed, in the most comfortable clothes he owns, in the one place he can feel at peace. Like a renaissance painting, something familiar and comforting and beautiful — fuck, you’d give anything to be next to him.

“…I think that means it’s your turn now, sweetheart,” he teases.

“Is it?” you mock in return.

“C’mon. Don’t leave me hangin’ over here.”

“It’s nothing, special,” you assure. Your eye flits down to peer at your own body — nothing special, indeed, you think to yourself. The lilac cotton set came from the grocery store downtown on the clearance rack you so often frequent. “I just have my underwear on. It’s very boring, I’m afraid.”

It’s not boring. Not to Eddie — the boy who prides himself on his insanely active imagination. He might not be able to pass english with his brain, but he can certainly create worlds with it, and it’s too easy for him to picture you. He imagines you, freshly showered, and smelling of the warm lavender-vanilla scent you always smell like, mostly bare and lazing upon a fluffy comforter.

He swallows thickly. “Oh, that’s— that’s really, uh— that’s really sexy.”

His thankful that you don’t seem to mind his poor excuse for dirty talk.

“It’s only because I was too lazy to get into actual pajamas.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

“Yeah?” you press, smiling to yourself and caging your bottom lip between your teeth.

“Yeah.”

“Can I tell you a secret, Eds?” you wonder, made brave enough by his own admission.

“‘Course you can.”

“Before you called…”

“…Uh-huh?” he eggs on, intrigued at the way you trailed off, sounding suddenly shy.

“I was…” The thought of telling him what you were doing mere seconds before he called makes you nervous. It wasn’t like you were ashamed of touching yourself or anything, nor is the art of dirty talking lost on you, but something about Eddie makes you timid.

“You were… what, sweetheart?” he wonders gently, with a too audible grin.

“I was touching myself.”

That’s all you tell him. The words linger and hang in the air of your separate bedrooms and you cling to the silence — almost mortified and anticipating his reply. Eddie, meanwhile, feels like his tongue has swelled in his mouth and all the air has been punched out of his lungs.

“Oh...” he tries to respond without the breath to accurately do so. “…Yeah?”

“You know what Phoebe Cates does to me,” you try to joke.

His laughter crackles through the receiver. “Yeah. I kinda have her to thank for the other night, don’t I?”

“Give yourself some credit, Eds. The hottest guy in Hawkins was sitting right next to me, what was I supposed to do?”

“No way you think I’m the hottest guy in town,” he scoffs. “Everyone knows you’ve got a thing for pretty boys.”

“Pretty boys?” you echo with a giggle.

“Uh-huh. The Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington type, you know?”

“Well, I think you’re a hundred times prettier than he is.”

“Really?” he scoffs cynically, obviously not believing you.

“He wasn’t the one I was thinking about with my hand shoved down my panties,” you admit, immediately quelling his self-doubt. “That’s gotta count for something, right?”

Eddie clears his throat and then stammers, “I— I guess so— yeah.”

“Are you hard, Eds?” you ask in a breathy whisper.

And he just nods to himself at first, too stupid to answer audibly. He can feel himself stiffening in his boxers, only halfway hard now, but getting firmer by the second. Soon, he’ll be aching.

“Yeah…”

“Can you touch yourself for me?”

Eddie would rather take a bullet to the chest than say no to you — at least, he figures that’d probably hurt less — so he slips his fidgeting fingers through the band of his boxers and takes his warm, stiffening cock in his hand. He squeezes himself just enough to make his stomach tighten.

“Want you to touch yourself, too,” he admits, neither asking or demanding it, just telling you.

“Yeah?” you tease.

“Well, I think it’s only fair, sweetheart.”

You can’t help but notice how breathy he’s gotten — how it shakes on the inhale and hitches on the out. He’s got his hand shoved down his underwear and you’re jealous of the fingers that get to wrap themselves around his cock. You wish they were yours. Both of you will have to settle, it seems.

“Whatever you want, Eds,” you answer playfully.

You obediently slide your hand back into the warmth of your panties. Your fingers slot between your lips and collect the slick that had gathered there since before you’d even answered the phone. You bring it up to your clit, circling the pads of your fingers there until you twitch, then dragging them down to press into your opening. They slip in with ease.

Both of you have turned into lovesick idiots, separated by so many miles, and missing the other most ardently. Lying in the depths of your bedrooms, basking in a velvet loneliness, building with a mutual pleasure with nothing but yearning hands and longing sighs.

Eddie’s eyes flutter shut at the sounds of your low moans and fragile whimpers that crackle through the static — beautiful still, but certainly no match to the ones you were breathing in his ear just hours ago.

His lashes dance across his cheeks as he tries to remember how you’d felt against his fingers, soft like velvet and delicate like silk, weeping and pulsating with need.

He drags his hand from his boxers and lets the band snap against his pelvis. He spits into his palm and wets his cock with it, sighing as he tugs at himself without much friction.

“Are you wet, sweetheart?” he asks, though the words threaten to get stuck in his throat.

“Yeah,” you whisper back like it’s some kind of secret.

You work yourself open with your middle finger and slip your pointer in next to it without much trouble. Your walls flutter around them while you fight to find the spot the makes you keen. You’re only able to tease it, fingers not quite long enough to caress it completely. Your thumb keeps working at your clit, though, to make up for the lost pleasure.

“I’ve been wet since I left you,” you admit through labored breaths. “Haven’t been able to… to stop thinking about you, Eds.”

“Glad I’m not the only one whipped over here, sweetheart,” he manages a laugh.

“No one’s ever made me come that hard before. Not just with their fingers,” you tell him mindlessly, dumb on pleasure, as you feel yourself climbing that peak.

“Really?”

“Never,” you promise, then whine. “Doesn’t even feel as good now… Can’t get as deep as you can—”

Eddie hangs on your every word as he works his palm up and down his stiff cock, squeezing at the base and swiping his thumb over the head with an expert hand. His face scrunches as his stomach starts to tighten, he’s close to coming — too close for his liking. He doesn’t want this to be over so quickly.

“You’ve ruined every other guy for me, Eddie Munson,” you confess, more than pleased to hear how it makes him whine. It sounds like it comes from the depths of his chest, the way it crackles low and needy through the receiver.

“Good,” he grumbles through his pants after he’s gathered himself all over again. “Don’t want anyone else to have you, sweetheart.”

This time you’re the one letting out the most pathetic of whines. It makes a smile flicker at the corners of his lips.

“You like that?”

It sounds so dirty, but you can tell by the sincerity of his tone that it’s genuine. So you answer with a longing truthfulness, a delicate “yes”entwined with a yearning moan.

“You just wanna belong to me, don’t ya?”

Now, this is dirty talk. The teasing lilt of his tone — it’s almost degrading — and makes you clench around your fingers. “Yes, please,” you whine, all but pleading for him now.

Eddie’s close, so dreadfully close, with a pleasure so tangible he could taste it. Your words make his cock twitch in his hold as the fire builds in his belly.

Through your whole-hearted promises and wanting moans, he can hear the sound of your slick through the receiver. The static reception doesn’t do it justice, but the wet click of your fingers working you open was unmistakable.

A moan grumbles in his throat as he digs the crown of his head back into his pillow. “Holy fuck— I can hear you, baby.”

“I’m so wet for you, Eds,” you tell him through fragile slurs, like it wasn’t inherently obvious.

You were wrong before, about wanting to hide from him. You couldn’t conceal your need for Eddie if you tried. The honey you drip, all sweet and just for him, wouldn’t let you keep it a secret.

“I know, baby, I know,” he nearly coos. “Are you— fuck, please tell me you’re close?”

“Yes,” you promise in a whine. Your thumb presses harder into your clit. It makes your thighs tense until they’re shaking.

“You rubbing your clit for me, sweetheart?” he asks like he knows. “I know that’s what you like.”

You whimper, working at the spongy spot within you as your hips buck off the bed. “Yeah.”

“Keep rubbing yourself like that for me, okay? Want you to keep going until you come for me.”

If he keeps talking to you like that, it’ll come a lot quicker than he’s prepared for.

It’s too soft to be much of a demand, but you listen obediently anyway, rubbing at yourself though your sensitivity keeps building. It grows like a morning tide, rising and flowing like white waves on an ocean, stirring something fierce in the depths of your stomach.

“Eddie,” you sigh out his name, broken through staggered pants.

You hear his stuttering breaths, too. “Y—Yeah?”

“I’m about to come,” you promise through a whine when the familiar crescendo sends a shock through your body.

“O… Okay,” he responds, pathetically, then whines, even more so.

“Want you to come with me… Please…”

“Fuck— okay. Shit, sweetheart, I’m almost there.”

“What are you thinking about?” you ask him.

“Your pussy,” he answers without thinking — he’s not doing a whole lot of that anymore. “Wish I’d gotten to taste you earlier. Wanna feel you… fuck… Wanna feel you come on my tongue.”

“Holy shit, Eds,” you moan at his words, at the vivid picture they paint in your head.

“And you get so… God, you get so fucking wet. Just want you to drench me, baby.”

It feels good, to be complimented for something boys used to make fun of you for, to realize for the first time that’s it’s sexy — that you’re sexy — and that Eddie is more than happy to drown in you. The feeling almost rivals the impending orgasm that’s bound to hit you like a tidal wave.

“I’m thinking about how I coulda took you on that bench… Just, fucking, get on my knees for you. Shove my head between your legs. Hold your— shit, baby— hold your thighs open, keep you exactly where I want you,” he rambles but then cuts himself off to moan at his own words. “Goddamn, sweetheart. Wanna taste you so fucking bad.”

The moan you let out is pitiful. It leaves your mouth in the most delicate cry.

No picture has ever been clearer than the one of Eddie between your thighs, your hands knotted in his hair to move him to exactly where you need him most and forcing him there. You can feel his fingers digging into your hips, his rings pressed against your burning skin, and the way your legs tremble on either side of his head.

“Yeah. Keep— Keep doing that. Keep moaning for me,” Eddie tells you. “I’m about to… holy fuck, I’m about to come.”

“Wanna feel your tongue in me so bad, Eds,” you whimper, egged on by the moan he lets out. “Want your cock even more.”

That’s what does him in, the assurance — the promise — that you want him just as bad as he wants you.

He tightens his fist around his cock, achingly hard and raging a crimson at the tip, trying to imitate the way you’d feel around him. It’s not all that close, not nearly as wet as the honey you’d be dripping for him, but his imagination does the rest of the work for him.

All at once, you’re on top of him, riding him for all he’s worth, your pussy threatening to swallow him whole. You’ve drenched him, just like he’d begged for, and that wet schlick noise still echoing from the receiver is the evidence of each of your assured thrusts over top of him.

You’re still pleading for him anyway — for more, for his tongue, for his cock — and he wants so desperately to give everything to you.

“Oh god, baby—” he sputters. He grips the phone in a white-knuckled, fist trembling. “Oh, fuck, I’m coming, baby.”

“Please, Eddie. Please come for me,” you plead over the low sounds of the forgotten film playing across the room and all the dirty wet sounds your pussy makes against your fingers. You sound like you need it, like you want his orgasm more than your own.

“Want you to come with me… Can you— Can you do that for me, sweetheart? Please?” It’s not dirty talk anymore. He’s actually fucking begging you and doesn’t feel the least bit ashamed to do so.

He wants to hear all the pretty noises you make when you come — that initial cry that stems from the depths of your soul, the high-pitched whimpers that come when the sensitivity builds, and the whines that leave you when it ebbs.

He wants to hear it over and over and over again, like a worn cassette, and play it until the tape spins out.

“Yes…” you promise through a set of stuttering breaths.

There’s no talking when either of you come. Eddie’s long forgotten to talk you through it, but you would barely hear him if he had. The phone slips out of your hand when your grip slackens and it falls to the pillow beside your head.

You chase your orgasm full throttle, working through the crescendo and the strikes of lightning, focusing only on his muffled moaning and the pretty sounds he makes as he comes.

The breath of your name whimpered through a tight throat is what does it for you. Your body has hardly any time to warn you before you’re gushing all over your fingers, twitching every time the pad of your thumb rubs over clit.

That cry, the one you always let out as you come — all wet and full of need — makes Eddie orgasm right alongside you.

He swipes his thumb over his head again, collecting the pearls of precum gathering there and sliding them down the base to squeeze himself there like he’d been doing this whole time. He clutches harder this time, imagines it's your cunt locking him in a vice-like grip, and whines in his throat when he comes.

Several loads of it spill onto his cotton boxers, most of it gathering along the side of his hand and dripping down his knuckles. His breath staggers as he works himself through his high, praising you through the phone like you’re the one who brought him to it.

“Fuck, baby… You’re so good… So fucking good.”

You’ve long settled from your own orgasm, still tingly and numb in some places, but not as gone as you had been just moments before. You still float on a cloud, getting lost as you stare through your window at the half-hidden stars sprinkling the night sky and feeling as though you could reach out and touch them.

You can feel the satin moonlight bathing you, and the jittery static of the neon of the television screen. You can feel everything and somehow nothing at all.

“I don’t know how you do it, Eds,” you confess, hardly thinking about the words spilling from your mouth when you lazily bring the phone to your ear again.

“Do what, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know… You always make me feel good. Even when you’re not here… Even when we’re not getting each other off.”

“I feel the same way,” he promises you, all mushy, even though he feels like a slob for wiping his hand off on his discarded jeans on his bed. “Just… wish you were here.”

“I wish I was there, too… Wish I could clean you up.”

Eddie’s eyes shut tight as his head tilts back to his pillow at the thought. “Fuck… You’re gonna make me hard again, sweetheart.”

You perk up suddenly as an idea sprouts like a flower in your head. A smile blooms on your lips, and you rise up onto your elbows, glowing with an unanticipated excitement. “How long would it take you to get ready?”

“…Get ready?” he echoes.

“Yeah,” is all you say.

“I mean, I— I don’t know. I figure if I put on some new underwear and a fresh pair of pants, I’ll be good as new... Why?”

“You wanna do something?”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything,” he answers clumsily in place of saying, ‘Anything to not have to be without you.’

“I wanna go to Skull Rock.”

“Skull Rock?” he repeats.

Legend has it, you and Steve made that place a local landmark. People have always said that Hopper caught the both of you one too many times up at Lover’s Lake and the Quarry, that you needed a more hidden place to fuck. So you’d stumbled around in the middle of the woods until you found a place the chief wouldn’t think to look for you.

You’d certainly found it. Then every other horny high schooler did too.

It’s the place you go to fuck, the most private place in all of Hawkins — hell, maybe even Indiana entirely for teenagers who can’t get the house to themselves. And as appealing as it sounds, to take you beneath a sky of twinkling stars, Eddie doesn’t want his first time with you to be on dirt or in the middle of the woods. That’s how all the horror movies start, don’t they?

So, needless to say, your answer takes him by surprise.

“Yeah! You can see all the stars really good from there. It’s too hard to see them so close to town.”

Eddie’s heart swells all at once at how sweet you are, like sugar poured directly onto his tongue. You’re not eager to be without him either, it seems, and that thought is as gratifying as it is thrilling.

You’re an adventure he’s about to go on, without a map or a way out, a journey he’s happy to go into blind as long as you’re holding his hand the entire way through it.

It breaks his heart to hang up the phone. He practically begs you to do it for him, and it makes you laugh — a kind giggle entwined with a tease ‘you’re such a baby.’ It rings in his ears long after the receiver clicks.

Most of all, he hates all the stoplights that separate your place from his. He hadn’t known where you lived before now, not until you uttered it over the phone. He makes a mental note to figure out a quicker way, somewhere through the winding back roads that his old van can speed through to make the distance less daunting.

He pulls into your apartment complex, a quaint two-story thing on the quieter side of town, where the woods are plentiful and the street lamps far fewer. He turns his radio down out of respect for all your neighbors that he’s sure he’ll never meet and spies you through the neon orange porch lights. You shut and lock your door in quick succession, then scurry across the way to meet him.

Eddie leans over to unlock the passenger side door for you, already beaming, and finds you’re smiling too when you climb in next to him. The grin you shoot his way outshines the night sky and makes a bright yellow sun of the girl sitting in his passenger seat.

“Hi,” you’d greeted him, all shy like you didn’t just make him come all over his hand thirty minutes ago.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he volleys back like he always does, with that big ol’ smirk and teasing lilt as he cock his head to the side — using his playfulness to cover up the bashful mess you so easily reduce him too.

Neither of you had gotten particularly dressed up to see each other. All he did was put on fresh under and pajama pants. You succumbed to a smilier laziness it seems, haphazardly brushing through your half-damp hair, throwing on a too big t-shirt, and calling it a day.

The cotton hangs low at your chest, stretched out and obviously well-loved. It falls well past your thigh, though you spend much of the drive anxiously tugging it down.

It makes him wonder what you’re wearing beneath it. If you’ve tugged on a pair of shorts or if you’re in the bra and (undoubtedly wet) underwear you’d told him you were wearing over the phone.

Eddie winds himself up all over again while you sift through the flimsy case of endless cassettes he keeps tucked in the glove compartment that never quite shuts all the way.

“How do you now have any ABBA tapes?” you wonder like it’s baffling, with an Iron Maiden tape in one hand and Cinderella in the other. Metallica plays lowly, nearly inaudibly, from the stereo.

Eddie laughs and darts his eyes from the darkened back roads to look at you, all smiley and bathed in moonlight, before turning back to the road again. “Uh, because I’m not a thirty-year-old woman. That’s the shit moms listen to.”

“Moms and hot girls,” you retort jokingly.

“Right, moms and hot girls listen to ABBA — of which, I am neither, sweetheart. Sorry to be the one to break it to you… Besides, it’s not like you walk around listening to, fucking, I don’t know— Van Halen or whatever.”

“Hey. I listen to Van Halen,” you shoot back.

He scoffs. “Yeah, right.”

“It’s got what it takes!” you sing suddenly, not quite catching the rhythm of the song, but smiling anyway as you reach for his forearm resting on the center console. “So tell me why can’t this be love!”

“Oh, my god— that’s literally their worst song,” Eddie chuckles through the widest grin you’ve ever seen from him.

It makes you smile big too, looking like an idiot who’s totally head over heels for the boy next to her. And of that, you’re happily guilty of.

“Not true,” you shake your head defiantly. “I love that song.”

“So that means it has to be good, right?” he retorts playfully, shooting you a teasing look, though his beam is more than sincere.

“Obviously,” you answer with a scoff that makes Eddie roll his eyes.

He knows he’s going to start to love it, though, if only because it’s the only Van Halen song you halfway know.

He’s going to hear that song on the radio and he’s going to want to turn it, but he’s going to remember this moment now — the one with you reaching for him while you sing the lyrics to a song he can’t stand, sitting pretty in his passenger seat, while the moonlight blanches your smile and the bare skin of your thighs.

Eddie Munson is going to love that goddamn song for the rest of his life.

He parks as close as he can to Skull Rock, knowing his van can’t work its way that far into the woods. The two of you are forced to walk the rest of the way, not exactly minding it, though Eddie’s incessantly worried you’re going to get cold.

He’s already forced his jacket upon you, which you took with little fight. It warmed you almost immediately — with his cozy heat and musky cologne.

You make mindless conversation the entire way there, about music and then about his band and then what animal you’d want to be in your band if that were the least bit possible. Eddie chooses a sheep without any hesitation, though you’re confident that a penguin would be far cooler.

You keep a careful distance between you, at first, like both of you are too scared to initiate the first move. That is, until you trip over a raised branch and nearly eat ass on the forest floor. Then Eddie’s holding your hand the entire way, keeping you close.

“If you wanted me to hold your hand, you coulda just said so, you know?” he jokes. “Didn’t have to go through all the dramatics, sweetheart.”

You try and yank your hand out of his grip in protest then, but he doesn’t let you. In fact, he pulls you closer and twirls you into a bear hug that you happily relax into.

He feels your sigh fan against his collarbone as you rest your head at the nape of his neck, his arms wrap around your shoulders as yours settle at his waist. He rocks you back in forth, in a moment that’s too almost sweet to make fun of.

Eddie finds a way, of course, “See?” he singsongs. “I’ll hug you like this all the time, if you want. You don’t have to almost kill yourself to get my attention, babe.”

“All I did was trip,” you laugh at his theatrics.

“Death by tree root… What a gnarly way to go.”

He holds your hand the entire way to Skull Rock.

He doesn’t let you go once, not until you’re ascending the large boulders to plant yourselves at the very peak of them. He’s grabbing you again once you settle, though, and the two of you just sit there, for several long moments, just gaping at the stars that dance with life above you. They sprinkle an infinite void with enough light that manages to touch you, trillions of miles away.

There’s a subtle beauty in that Eddie never would’ve appreciated before now.

“Shit, babe,” he breathes through a whimsical existential dread. “You were right. The stars are really fucking pretty out here.”

You love how much he loves this, to come to Skull Rock with you and count the stars. Any other guy would’ve had their tongue down your throat by now, stuffing your hand down their unbuttoned jeans.

But not Eddie.

He just holds your hand because he likes the feeling of his fingers entwined with yours, grasping tightly onto you while he gazes at an infinite universe — like you might float off right along with it.

His neck is stretched to gape at the night sky. You catch his adam’s apple bobbing every time he swallows. You want so desperately to kiss his milky white skin and sprinkle blotchy red bruises there.

His curly locks fall over his shoulders. He shakes his head to get his bangs out of his eyes while the chocolate buttons of them dart around the endless void.

He’s more beautiful than every star in the sky combined. You can’t be sure of how many that is, of course, but it’s a whole bunch if you had to guess. It makes sense, though, for the prettiest boy in the whole damn galaxy.

“Told ya,” you answer with a smile, leaning over to nudge his shoulder with yours. “You come out here often?”

You’re asking if he takes girls here and he knows it, but it’s not like you’re being inconspicuous about the whole thing. Eddie gauges it almost immediately, the subtle jealousy hinting at your tone — something no one else would’ve caught — and he squeezes your hand in reassurance.

He shakes his head. “No… Never.”

“Never?” you press with raised brows, like his answer shocks you.

“Ever. It’s not really my scene, I guess… But what about you, sweetheart? Never seen you around these parts before.”

You knock his shoulder again, harder this time. “Shut up. You already know the answer to that.”

“Yeah…” he nods to himself, eyes darting back and forth as he reminisces on something. “You and Harrington, you and Hargrove. Hell, I think I heard about you and Jason one time—”

“That was a long time ago,” you argue. “Before I even knew you, okay?”

“I’m just saying,” he shrugs in defense. “You totally have a thing for pretty boys, sweetheart.”

“I never said I didn’t, Eds. Just that you were pretty, too.”

“Whatever,” he scoffs and rolls his eyes like he isn’t glowing red beneath the moonlight.

“You’re better than all three of them, Eds,” you confess with a sudden softness that catches his attention almost immediately. He turns his attention from the sky to look at you properly again. His breath catches at you sad you look — all beautiful and coated in shades of blue.

“…Yeah?”

You nod and drag his hand into your lap to fidget with his fingers. You trace the skeleton heart on his middle finger, subverting all your attention there because it’s easier than having to look at him now. “Better than all of them combined— not even just them, you know? Out of everyone. No one’s ever been this nice to be before.”

“Me neither, sweetheart,” he confesses with a morose grin. “The freak of Hawkins High attracts a lot of assholes, believe it or not.”

“Is it bad?” you wonder cautiously, like you’re scared to hear the answer. In some ways, you are.

You hadn’t known him in high school, not really. For obvious reasons, you ran in very different circles. You never even had classes together. There was never any excuse to be close to each other before now, never a reason to become friends. So you didn’t.

You grew to know him as a freak, and he knew you as the town slut. Then somewhere down the line, he became your dealer and now… here you were.

But you’ve graduated now and he’s still army crawling towards a diploma. You couldn’t save him from the hell of Hawkins High even if you wanted to.

“Nothing I can’t handle,” he shrugs. “Jason and the dick brigade just wanna make my life hell, that’s all.”

“I hope they aren’t,” you respond shyly.

Eddie scoffs then shoots you a smile. “Oh, of course not. Look at me. I’m at Skull Rock with the most wanted girl in Hawkins. I’m living the dream, sweetheart.”

“So you don’t care?” you wonder, peering at him through your lashes, as you twist the silver cross around his finger.

“Care about what?”

“That I’m a slut,” you laugh like it’s obvious.

Eddie doesn’t think it’s all that funny. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s not like it isn’t true, Eds,” you retort with a trembling smile. “I mean, that’s literally what people call me — most people don’t even care to call me by my real name anymore.”

“I don’t care,” Eddie shakes his head. “I don’t care about that. I don’t give a shit about what people say about you. If everyone cared about what everyone said about everyone, neither of us would be here right now… Because you’d think I was some devil-worshipping freak and I’d think you were too busy getting it on with Chief Hopper.”

You screw your face up immediately at the thought. The mere idea was repulsive. The asshole was practically your father these days. Jim Hopper was in that small bunch of available people you would never fuck, and happily so.

“I’d never stoop that low,” you joke.

“I like you, how you are, right now,” Eddie promises. “Don’t want you to change a damn thing.”

His brown eyes twinkle with a sincerity that rivals the stars above you. All of a sudden, you don’t care about a bunch of heavenly bodies light years away from you — you care about this man, the one sitting beside you now, holding your hand even though your palms have gone all sweaty.

It’s too good to be true — the way you looks at you, the way he talks to you, the way he treats you. You’re scared that it’s a dream, that you’ll wake up and find that none of this was ever real. Or worse, that he was, and that he just didn’t care about you the way you cared about him.

It’s almost irrational. Almost.

But it’s happened before.

And it’s left you a scarred and mangled mess.

You shake your head to yourself and scrunch your face as you turn to look him. “Have you ever done this before, Eddie?”

“Don’t what?” he wonders with furrowed brows.

“I don’t know…” you shrug. “Any of this? With anyone else?”

He’s grateful he doesn’t have to lie. Or tell some clumsy half-truth for the sake of saving his own skin. He realizes tonight is perhaps the most honest he’s ever been with you, baring his pale soul beneath a silver moonlight.

“Never,” he answers, unwavering, with a firm shake of his head.

“Really?”

“Really,” he nods, then swallows thickly at a gut-wrenching realization. “I’ve never felt his way about anyone else before.’

“Me neither,” you promise.

It’s a tad more meaningful coming from you than from a boy who’s never had someone to love and to love him back.

You’re experienced, you’ve found what you like and what you don’t like. You’ve been with guys who have given you the world and guys that have ended yours altogether. And out of all of them — all of the assholes in Hawkins you could’ve picked — you’ve chosen the freak.

You want him.

You want Eddie.

The revelation makes him grin. “Promise?”

“Cross my heart, Eddie Spaghetti.”

#published by bug #eddie munson x reader #eddie munson smut #stranger things x reader #stranger things imagine #eddie munson imagine #virgin!eddie munson x reader #virgin!eddie munson

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