#Machine Table Clamp

[limnologylover]

i am tested every day

[sinkuna]

୨୧ ― CHOSO

Choso's grip tightens, biceps flexing as he pins your spent body beneath him. The squelch of his cum oozing from your gaping hole mixes with your shaky breaths. "A-Are you alright? I didn't mean- I got carried away but you- you felt so good." he rasps, lips grazing the bite marks littering your shoulder. His cock twitches inside you, still rock-hard, shoving his seed deeper as you whimper. "You did so good for me. So good... L- let more me take care of you- get… you some water." His voice softens, a jarring contrast to the animalistic growls he'd snarled earlier while splitting you open, teeth sinking into your tits like he wanted to brand his name into your skin.

The mattress dips as he pulls out, your cunt schlucking wetly around nothing. Cold air hits your sticky thighs when he staggers to the bedside table. You hear the crinkle of your plastic water bottle from this morning, his calloused hands tilting your chin up to drink from it. But the second the bottle empties… He’s riled up again, who could blame him though? It’s the first time he’s ever fucked- first time he’s ever felt the sweet inside of your pussy wrapped around him…

His fingers dig into your hips hard enough to bruise as he flips you onto your stomach, "Need to breed you deeper," is all Choso says before slamming back into your sloppy hole without warning.

Your back arches as his cock rams that spongy spot inside, the slap-slap-slap of his balls against your clit reverberating through the room. Previous loads of cum froth around his thrusting shaft, the smell of sex thick enough to taste. "Going to pump you so full you'll taste it." he grunts, hips pistoning like a machine. His thumb circles your swollen clit, rough and relentless, as his other hand yanks your hair back, "Still so hungry for more."

Hours blur. The room reeks of sweat and sex, sheets tangled around your ankles. Your pussy throbs, raw and oversensitive, but Choso's obsession doesn't waver. His release floods you again, gushing hot as his teeth clamp onto your neck, "Going to keep you full of cum until it's dripping done from every hole."

When he finally collapses atop you, his cock still twitching inside your battered cunt, the sun's bleeding through the blinds. His breath gusts hot over your ear, Not… Hnngh… done," he pants, hips stuttering weakly, "Need...more."

୨୧ ― GOJO SATORU

Those piercing blue eyes bore into yours as Gojo's grip tightens, those long fingers yanking your head forward until his cock rams past your gag reflex. A wet choke rips from your throat, spit pooling under your chin as he hums in approval. His free hand palms your cheek, smearing tears across your flushed skin while his hips roll upward, forcing another inch down your poor straining esophagus.

"You can take it all. I know you can, babygirl," You try your best to nod, but his hold pins you in place, the thick veins along his shaft throbbing against your lips. The slap of his balls against your chin echoes through his room as you finally bottom out, nose crushed in his white pubes. "Such a good girl for me," he praises, holding you there as your throat contracts around him. Your jaw burns, drool soaking the carpet beneath your knees, but doesn't let up. Instead he continues grinding deeper as your throat flutters helplessly. The slick noise of withdrawal makes you gasp, but he's already shoving back in, the tip of his cock nudging past your uvula with each thrust.

love seeing the way you choke me down, pleasing me with that tight throat~" he coos, thumb hooking under your chin to force eye contact. His irises glow like arctic fire, pupils blown wide.

Your vision blurs, nails clawing at his thighs as he uses you like his personal fleshlight, your choked gags blending with his ragged breaths. When he finally pulls out, the pop of your lips releasing him, you think you’ve finally earned a break- a pause to catch your breath…

Cold air floods your raw throat as you cough, strings of saliva dangling from his flushed cock to your swollen mouth. Satoru only tuts, dragging his slobbed up length across your face. His swollen head catches your eyelid, leaving a sticky streak of saliva and precum before he smacks it against your lips, "Clean it up. Then maybe I'll let you breathe."

⋆｡˚꒰ঌ 𝑀𝒶𝓈𝓉𝑒𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 ໒꒱˚｡⋆

[thebibliosphere]

Good news, I did not become spontaneously magnetic and blow up the MRI machine 👍

It did give me a wicked headache though so hopefully it doesn’t turn into a migraine.

I will say. Nicest MRI team to date. They handed me earplugs and I was like “oh fancy, my last one didn’t give me earplugs” and this very camp tech with rainbow hair said, “oh honey, they let you rawdog that sound? Absolutely not. That’s like an OSHA violation. It’s so loud.”

When asked what I wanted to listen to on the headphones they clamped over my head I was just like idk surprise me. And that’s when I was informed I’d be listening to Chappell Roan for the next forty minutes.

When they were about to load me into the machine I heard this voice over the speakers that went “waaait, does this form say EDS? Like Ehlers Danlos?”

And I said yes, as best I could with a giant cage over my head and a thing holding my chin in place. To which the disembodied voice replied, “okay people, time to brace those joints!” and a sudden gaggle of techs I hadn’t seen before came in, pulled me out and repositioned all my limbs to make sure I wasn’t over extending on the table.

They put some extra padding around my neck too which was helpful because I could feel it trying to subluxate. It gave a nasty click at one point and the tech trying to help me froze and I had to assure her I was fine. (Spoiler: based on this growing headache, I may not be fine.)

And then they put the cage back on and rolled me back into the giant casket shaped magnet as Hot To Go started playing at full volume and I flashed forward to imagining my own funeral, wondering if it’d be too morbid a song to play at the crematorium. They had to keep telling me to stop laughing.

When it was over the same voice came over the speakers like, “hey, so you have EDS, do you have POTS too?” to which I answered in the affirmative and the voice said “mmm-kay. Don’t move.” then vanished, which was when I was pulled out of the machine by two extremely burly orderlies who transferred me to a reclining bed until the dizziness from the machine stopped, which was super nice.

I do appear to have had an allergic reaction to whatever detergent they use to clean the scrubs they gave me. But other than that and the probable migraine, it was a good experience.

Now we just need to wait on the results.

[g0dlyunsub]

under pressure.

getting strapped up to a lie detector as part of a bet wasn’t exactly in your plans, nor was exposing your deepest secret to spencer reid.

pairing :: spencer x fem bau!reader

warnings :: fluff! confessions, coworkers to lovers, cheesiness overload 

word count :: 1.6k

author’s note :: three weeks since i last posted a fic?? absolutely unacceptable *presses post button*

accompanying song :: more than friends by aidan bissett

“there’s a reason why that thing’s admissible in court,” you murmur to derek, watching as the officer packs the polygraph back into a cabinet.

derek chuckles.

“you think you can beat it?”

“i know i can beat it.”

you cross your arms and look up with a challenging smirk.

“there’s actually a lot of skepticism surrounding the validity and accuracy of polygraph testing, especially since it’s only an instrument that measures physiological changes like heart activity and perspiration. people often mistakenly assume they’re trying to deceive a machine, when really it’s all about the polygrapher, who oversees and administers the examination.”

you don’t even have to turn your head to know it’s spencer who’s just made his way into the room, derek’s lifted brow a confirmation of his presence.

“ah, look who’s finally found us. i was starting to miss you a little, kid.” 

“what are you guys up to?” spencer asks in return, his gaze shifting from you to derek, before slowly making way back to you. 

“l/n thinks she’ll pass the test with flying colors.” derek points at the cabinet and looks at you with a winsome grin.

“i won’t even have to try.” you shrug, placing your hands on your hips confidently.

“wanna bet on it?”

“loser pays for dinner. reid, you in?”

“i uh, i think i’ll just watch,” spencer politely declines, his hands nervously burrowing deep into his pockets.

derek bursts into laughter. “oh come on, kid, it’s free dinner for the both of us.” 

spencer chuckles quietly. “we’ll see.”

you make your way over to the cabinet, kneeling to retrieve the bulky device, and set it down on the table behind you. 

taking a seat, you lift your arms to secure the straps above and below your chest, and attach the blood pressure cuffs to your right arm. 

“nuh-uh.” 

you hear derek tut a sequence of disapproving clicks.

“hey kid, check to see if it’s around her securely.” derek tilts his head at spencer before nodding in your direction, adding, “don’t want you deceiving us in other ways.”

you roll your eyes before raising your arms in surrender. “go ahead, i’ve got nothing to hide.”

spencer slowly approaches you, hesitant steps overtaking his stride as he moves to stand in front of you. positioning a hand on your back for support, spencer sticks a finger between the gaps of the sides of your chest and the straps.

the straps tighten ever so slightly, causing your breath to hitch in the back of your throat. almost like an unconscious reflex, you release a breathy exhale.

“is that too tight?”

it’s barely a whisper, and he’s close, so close — his lips hover practically right beside your ear that you can feel his breath tickle the hairs on your neck.

“no,” you let out, “it’s good.”

your heart’s pounding now, and you’re thankful that you’re not hooked up to the monitor rate, at least not yet. 

“just slide your finger into the clamp,” spencer instructs, his hand guiding yours into the plate where the electrodes lightly pinch your fingertips.

“is that comfortable?” spencer asks once again, his furrowed brows an indicator of marked concern as he searches for any signs of discomfort.

“yup.”

you bite your bottom lip as spencer hooks the cords to the monitor. his attentive eyes gloss over your strapped arm and flick downwards, stopping once they take note of your bouncing legs. you still your legs almost immediately.

“alright l/n, here’s a tester.” derek approaches you and lays his hands on the table, leaning forward. “have you ever lied to get out of trouble?”

you don’t even need to think twice. with a daring grin, you respond, “yes.”

“it’s stable,” spencer nods.

a mischievous smirk plays on derek’s lips. 

“have you ever lied to hotch before?”

you huff an amused chuckle, one laced with throaty disbelief. “no.”

derek rolls his eyes, but spencer nods in your direction. “steady.” 

“oh come on, not even once?”

you raise an eyebrow as if to challenge him. “why… have you?”

“this is about you, remember?” derek wiggles a finger disapprovingly. “next one… have you ever had any romantic feelings for anyone on our team?”

it's a question you were most definitely not expecting.

it’s only a brief pause, but it’s long enough to have you doubting – are your eyes widening? are your parting lips betraying you? is it actual sweat that’s starting to coat the tips of your fingers or are you imagining it?

“no, i have not.”

you feel heat start to creep into your cheeks, but try your best to remain unfazed as you await spencer’s judgment.

“give me… one second.”

the air suddenly feels ten times heavier.

a nervous chuckle escapes from your lips as you glance around. 

“try not to bounce your leg up and down,” spencer finally calls back, and you have to physically restrain yourself from sighing in relief. 

“alright, let’s try again,” derek announces as he finally takes a seat across from you. “have you ever had feelings for… doctor spencer reid?”

your instantaneous scoff overlaps with spencer’s. before you can respond, however, spencer chirps up first.

“y/n, don’t – don’t answer that.”

you, too, try to dodge the question with a dismissive wave. “come on, derek.”

thankfully, he rests the question aside. “fine. have you ever passed your files to someone else without them knowing?”

“yes.”

“to who?”

“to you, actually,” you boldly assert, leaning back into your chair.

“oh, she’s a rebel,” derek slyly retorts back, his gaze unflinching as spencer affirms your claim.

“did you, at any point, lie during this test?”

“no.”

“alright,” derek continues, “last question.”

“bring it.”

“do you currently have any romantic feelings for spencer reid?”

“seriously?” you swivel your head back and forth between derek and spencer, your eyes widening in disbelief at the fact that he’s repeating a previous question, merely adjusting a couple words.

it’s a question that you can’t answer. no, that you shouldn’t answer.

but this time, spencer’s quiet.

“you’re kidding me,” you laugh, “we are not being for real right now.”

“oh i’m being very real right now.” 

your heart thumps like a wild drumbeat, your pulse echoing through the veins marking the side of your neck. 

you start to lace your fingers together nervously as a thin layer of sweat covers your palms. the more you think about your moist hands, though, the more you start to sweat. it’s a constant feedback loop, feeding off of your deeply-buried secret.

slowly, you take off the straps and set the electrode in front of you, on the table. 

radio silence falls over the air disturbingly, like the entire room’s tuned to the wrong frequency. 

then, “reid, did you get that?”

it takes another five seconds for sound to fill the room once again, but the gravity of the silence is almost too heavy for you to register – your wordless confession strikes the back of your mind like an unpleasant storm, raining down on your thoughts with regret and humiliation.

“y/n, um, there’s a lot of environmental factors that can impact physiological response-”

there’s no going back anymore. 

if you don't say it now, it'll linger in the depths of your mind forever.

“i do like you.”

when there’s no response, you decide to fully commit to your confession. “you said so yourself, this isn’t about fooling the device, it’s all about the polygrapher. so, spencer, what’s your judgment?”

you swear you can hear your own pulse drumming against you and shaking your body. with the faintest whisper, spencer utters, “i think you’re telling the truth.”

after hearing his response, you shove your hands into your pockets and prepare to leave, but not without throwing a glance at derek, who’s guiltily tracing the edges of his beard.

as you approach the door, however, a hand hooks around your elbow, stopping you dead in your tracks.

spencer’s hand.

“that’s it? you’re not going to hear my response?”

you don’t look up. “no, i… fine, tell me.”

if only you knew about the collective swarm of thoughts swimming in his brain, the thoughts that are denaturing all his senses of rationality and self-control. he has so much to tell you, words that he’d spill almost instantly if he’d been better prepared.

his hand moves down to envelop your own. 

you do nothing to stop him. 

slowly, he drags your hand upwards, until it rests against his chest.

against his speeding heart.

“spencer?”

the glow in his eyes is unmistakable – his dewy orbs gaze into yours lovingly, the exchange almost a confession in itself.

“i don’t think that either of us can beat the test,” spencer softly murmurs, his breathy chuckle sounding like music to your ears.

you don’t know how to describe it – it’s a bittersweet concoction of emotions that continues to spread throughout your body the more spencer nuzzles up against you.

“no,” you voice after a pause, “i don’t think we can.”

“very cute guys, but i’m waiting on my victory dinner, so if you two can-”

“oh shush, derek, you’re ruining the moment,” you say as you break into laughter, and bury your head against spencer’s chest when you fail to recover your composure.

“and you’re gonna have to pay me extra if you want me to keep my mouth shut in front of all the others,” derek retaliates, his smug grin causing you to roll your eyes. 

“i think i can wrap the straps around his mouth if you hold him against the door,” you start while looking up into spencer’s eyes, speaking loud enough to draw derek’s attention.

spencer returns with a wide smile, one that tugs at your throat to release another hearty laugh.

“yeah, i’ll grab his arms first.”

[unstablecherries]

Headcanon - Jinx doing a tattoo on Reader ☆ (slight nsfw)

It started with you tracing the ink along Jinx’s arm, you’d asked, voice soft, “Does it hurt?”

She grinned, that manic glint in her eye. “The good kind of hurt.”

You’d never gotten a tattoo before, but the way she said it; that shiver in her tone, like pain was her kind of foreplay made something flutter low in your stomach. You told her you were thinking about getting one.

Jinx perked up immediately, bouncing to her feet. “I’ll do it.”

You blinked. “You what?”

She was already dragging you toward a corner of the hideout where a homemade tattoo rig, all scrap metal, wires, and suspiciously humming parts sat on a cluttered table.

You weren’t totally surprised. She was who she was, after all.

“C’mon,” she purred, patting the crate she wanted you on. “First one’s on the house.”

You hesitated. “Are you even-?”

She shoved you gently, grinning. “Sit.”

You obeyed, heartbeat thumping.

She straddled your lap (yes, straddled) grinding herself into place as she adjusted the machine in her hands. You felt the pressure of her thighs clamped around you, the weight of her body, the chaos of her blue braids brushing against your skin as she leaned in close.

“Don’t move,” she warned, voice low, lips brushing your ear. “I’ll have to hold you down if you do.”

You weren’t sure if it was a threat or a promise.

She started working, gloved fingers firm, pinning your arm steady as the machine buzzed to life. The first sting made you hiss through your teeth, and Jinx giggled darkly.

“There it is,” she whispered. “Told ya… good pain.”

You tried not to squirm, but she was practically pressed against you, chest to chest, face way too close. Her breath was hot, and every time the needle touched your skin, she watched your reaction.

“You’re heating up,” she cooed, smug. “You like this.”

Your skin tingled under her every touch, calloused fingers trailing over your waist to steady you when you flinched, knuckles brushing your thigh, her hips shifting against yours like she didn’t even notice how intimate this all was. But she noticed. Of course she did.

By the time she was done, your thighs were shaking, skin buzzing not just from the ink but from her.

She leaned back to admire her work, lips parted. “Looks so good on you,” she whispered. “I wanna mark you up everywhere.”

You barely had time to reply before she crashed into your mouth, her kiss sloppy, hungry, all tongue and heat. Her hands tangled in your hair, tugging, guiding you where she wanted.

You moaned into her as she climbed further into your lap, grinding down hard. Her fingers slipped under your shirt, nails scratching lightly, tracing fire over your chest. She tugged at your waistband, palming you through your pants, rough and needy.

“Been thinkin’ about doing this while I worked on you,” she mumbled into your mouth. “You squirm so pretty.”

You gasped, body arching into her hand. Her strokes were quick, risky, dragging heat right to your core. Your pants were damp now soaked through from everything: her kisses, the pain, the pressure building too fast.

“Gonna make a mess,” she teased, biting your lip. “Bet you’re close already.”

You whimpered something like a yes, and she didn’t stop.

She kissed you harder, filthy and wet, spit slicking both your mouths. Her fingers moved faster through your clothes, grinding the heel of her hand into you until your legs trembled and you reached your peak with a strangled moan, clinging to her as your body shook.

She bit your neck softly, still panting. “Told you it’d be the good kind of pain.”

[ghostlyglimmer]

The Fun Zone: Chapter 16

Had to do a doodle of my favorite chapter of my fic.

The Fun Zone was unusually quiet for a Saturday afternoon, which made Danny suspicious. Normally, kids were running around, screaming over their ticket totals or fighting over the last slice of pizza. But today, it was eerily calm.

That was until the front door opened, and a massive figure ducked inside. The arcade fell silent as Killer Croc—towering, scaly, and looking very out of place—stood in the doorway.

Danny blinked, frozen in place behind the counter. “Uh… welcome to The Fun Zone?”

Croc grunted, his yellow eyes scanning the room. For a moment, Danny thought he was going to rip the skee-ball machines apart or turn the go-kart track into a wrestling ring. But then, Croc’s gaze landed on the claw machine.

“What’s that?” Croc growled, pointing a clawed finger.

Danny followed his gaze. “The claw machine?”

Croc nodded slowly, his expression unreadable. “What’s in it?”

Danny hesitated. “Uh, stuffed animals, mostly. A couple of plushies, keychains, some candy—”

“I want the crocodile,” Croc interrupted, stepping closer. His massive frame loomed over the machine as he squinted at a small green stuffed crocodile wedged between a panda and a rainbow-colored unicorn.

Danny tilted his head. “You… want the plushie?”

Croc nodded again, his claws tapping impatiently on the machine’s glass. “How?”

Danny walked over, trying not to look as nervous as he felt. “Uh, you just put some tokens in and use the claw to grab it. It’s… harder than it looks.”

Croc grunted and fished a handful of change from his pocket, slamming it onto the counter. “Tokens. Now.”

Danny scrambled to exchange the money, handing over a stack of tokens. Croc shoved one into the machine and gripped the joystick with surprising delicacy for someone his size. The claw creaked as it descended toward the crocodile, wobbling slightly before clamping down on its tail.

For a brief, glorious moment, it looked like Croc might win. But then, as the claw ascended, the plushie slipped through its grasp and fell back into the pile.

Croc growled, his teeth bared. “It dropped it.”

“Yeah, uh…” Danny scratched the back of his neck. “It’s kind of a scam. The claw’s weak on purpose.”

Croc turned to him, narrowing his eyes. “Fix it.”

Danny held up his hands. “I can’t! It’s rigged by the manufacturer. But I can, uh, coach you?”

Croc stared at him for a long moment before nodding. “Fine. Teach me.”

 

Over the next hour, Danny coached Croc through countless attempts to snag the plushie. They tried angling the claw, timing the drop perfectly, even jiggling the joystick to get a better grip. Each time, the claw either missed entirely or dropped the crocodile just before it reached the prize chute.

“You’ve almost got it,” Danny said for the twelfth time, trying to sound encouraging as Croc jammed another token into the machine. “Just… a little more to the left.”

Croc’s tail twitched in frustration, but he followed Danny’s instructions. The claw descended, grabbed the crocodile by its snout, and finally—finally—dropped it into the chute.

Croc stared at the prize slot, his eyes wide with disbelief. Slowly, he reached in and pulled out the plushie, holding it like it was the most precious thing in the world.

“I got it,” Croc said, his voice softer than Danny had ever heard it. “I got Lil’ Croc.”

Danny blinked. “Lil’ Croc?”

Croc nodded, cradling the stuffed animal like a baby. “Yeah. Lil’ Croc.”

Danny suppressed a laugh. “Well, uh, congrats. You earned it.”

 

Word spread quickly among Gotham’s rogues that Killer Croc had a new companion. Wherever he went, Lil’ Croc went too. He carried it to meetings with Penguin, perched it on his shoulder during heists, and even set it on the table during card games at the Iceberg Lounge.

Penguin was baffled. “Is that… a toy?”

Croc growled. “He is Lil’ Croc. Say hi.”

Penguin blinked, unsure if Croc was joking. “Uh… hi?”

Scarecrow tilted his head, examining the plushie. “Psychologically fascinating,” he muttered. “A manifestation of suppressed nurturing instincts, perhaps?”

Harley Quinn thought it was adorable. “Aw, Croccy! You got a baby! Can I babysit?”

“No,” Croc said firmly, pulling Lil’ Croc closer.

Even Joker, who rarely cared about anyone else’s quirks, raised an eyebrow. “What’s next, Croc? Matching outfits?”

Croc bared his teeth. “You touch Lil’ Croc, and I’ll rip your arms off.”

A few days later, Croc returned to The Fun Zone with Lil’ Croc in tow. He set the plushie on the counter and stared at Danny.

“I need tokens,” Croc said. “For backup.”

Danny grinned, handing him a stack of tokens. “You’re really committed to this, huh?”

Croc nodded solemnly. “Lil’ Croc deserves friends.”

Danny watched as Croc lumbered back to the claw machine, his massive hands surprisingly gentle as he tried for a stuffed panda. Shaking his head, Danny turned to Jason, who had just walked out of the back office.

“What’s going on?” Jason asked, his gaze fixed on Croc.

Danny smirked. “Just Gotham’s best Fun Zone customer bonding with his new plushie family.”

Jason stared for a long moment before wiping his hands down his face and grumbling towards his office.

Danny chuckled watching his hard ass of a boss exasperated at the scene.

[flowerandblood]

Incomprehension (Oneshot)

[ Michael • Gavey x math student • female ]

[ warnings: stalking, angst with comfort, depression ]

[ description: Michael Gavey seems to her to be an alien from another planet, and observing him becomes her daily routine. She decides to cheer him up by secretly putting his favorite Crunchie in his backpack, but one day she is caught red-handed. Requests regarding the character stalking Michael and her comforting him after the situation with Oliver at the bar. ]

I thought I'd post this between chapters of The Fall from the Heavens because I really like it even though there is no smut in the story! This will not affect the order in which new chapters will be published.

* English is not my first language. Please, do not repost. Enjoy! *

My other works: Masterlist

_____

She had no idea how it really started. She had watched him for a long time, knowing only that he was the best. Even though he was a student in the same year as her, equations that took her an hour to solve, he solved in a few minutes.

He worked like a machine: when he stood in front of the big board his face was stony. Unlike her, he wasn't frightened or stressed knowing that the whole room of students was watching him – on the contrary, seeing his lips clamped into a tight line, the wrinkles of concentration on his forehead and his wide-open blue eyes, she had the feeling that he derived satisfaction from it.

He wanted his genius to be admired.

They never exchanged a word with each other – even if she had wanted to, she wouldn't have known how to begin, and seeing his outbursts and behaviour that seemed bizarre to others, to say the least, she wasn't sure it would be worth taking the risk and stepping out of the shadows.

Something about him not knowing she was watching him filled her with peace and contentment.

Her year-mate had lamented to her as they sat in the library that one of the handsome, rich boys from a good house had not responded to her greeting as she passed him in the corridor. She nodded in understanding, looking thoughtfully towards the other table.

She didn't understand why he stayed close to Oliver.

This boy seemed too frisky to her, stretched out, wanting too many things at once. He wanted to be humble and feisty at the same time, lonely and surrounded by a group of friends, appreciated and unappreciated, for someone to comfort him.

He wanted to be noticed while remaining in a state of his own uniqueness.

Unlike him, Michael was authentic.

She showed up in the places he walked because he appeared in them like clockwork. His routine became her routine, allowing her to be a passive observer of his life instead of participating in her own.

She didn't want to return her thoughts again to her body and the emptiness she felt as she lay alone at night, thinking that she hated math.

However, it was the only thing she could do well.

The logic of formulas, the certainty of the fundamental, immutable laws that ruled the solving of equations gave her a sense of security.

Words were a strange and unnatural construct to her, and while her mind was full of thoughts, they did not usually find an outlet beyond the basic phrases that allowed her to turn in the company of others.

It wasn't her nature, but her choice: it seemed to her that every time she tried to explain the state of what was happening inside her, no one could comprehend her, giving her cloying advice she hadn't asked for at all.

She wanted to hear that she didn't need to change, instead however, everyone kept telling her that she should smile more, which she did reluctantly.

Why should she smile if she wasn't happy?

Michael was her opposite, and watching him was like observing a rare animal in the zoo: he was loud and unpredictable, his remarks often lacking tact and sometimes even sense, his chin raised in the confidence that emanated from him.

He was a mean bastard and she knew it, but she couldn't hate him.

To her despair, he seemed to evoke entirely different feelings in her.

His behaviour did not repel her: on the contrary, his explosive, quirky nature aroused a kind of admiration in her, as if he were an alien from another planet, someone who did not really exist.

She watched from the sidelines as Oliver slowly began to make his choice, more and more and more allowing Felix and the rest to absorb him like a large, voracious monsters.

She wasn't sure if the look of disappointment on Michael's face when he waved at him from afar and he didn't respond was a result of his sadness or his anger at having wasted his precious time.

It seemed to her that after he started eating and sitting alone again he quietened down and fell silent, disappearing before her eyes.

One day she got the idea of cheering him up and whenever she had the chance, she would slip a small Crunchie bar into his backpack, usually when he was busy talking to someone or when he put it down on the floor and left it in the corridor while going to the toilet.

She would then sit down next to it and, watching to make sure no one saw, slip the bar into the side pocket of his backpack and return to her seat.

Only twice had she seen his reaction to finding her gift tucked in one of his pockets. He would then look around, and she would lower her gaze, pretending that she was engrossed in a textbook on quantum physics.

She would smile involuntarily when she heard the rustling of the paper after a while, and then look at his thoughtful face, his gaze directed somewhere far away as he bit into the bar as if he were eating a burger.

He was so uncouth, so bright, so unpredictable.

However, her lack of vigilance doomed her: she wanted to do what she always did when she saw that he had thrown his backpack on the ground and headed for one of the rooms, apparently to talk to their professor. As soon as she sat down next to his bag, he came out and looked at her.

She froze, feeling her heart start pounding like crazy, cold sweat running down her back.

She picked herself up and moved to flee, unable to face the shame that spread throughout her body.

"– hey – wait – fuck –" He cursed, wanting to follow her, but remembered his backpack, so retreated to pick it up.

She stepped out into the courtyard, not hearing or seeing anything, blinded by the sun, stunned by the noise in her head and the shrill conviction that some kind of veil had fallen between them.

"– are you deaf? –" She heard him behind her, his large hand grabbing her arm too aggressively and too firmly, turning her away with a sharp, impatient jerk. She stopped, looking with big eyes at his blue checked shirt.

"– do you like rummaging through other people's things? –" He sneered, frustrated and amused at the same time. She simply remained silent, staring dully at the fabric of his shirt, smelling some cheap aftershave and his own scent.

He bowed his head, apparently wanting to meet the gaze of her eyes, but when she noticed his blue irises she turned her face away, quivering in his grasp.

"– you're weird –" He decided and let go of her, stepping around her, making her lower lip start to twitch, burning tears of shame, disappointment and regret gathered under her eyelids, running down her face one by one.

She adjusted the straps of her knapsack on her back and moved ahead on trembling legs wanting to forget it had ever happened.

The next day she felt like throwing up at the thought of their lectures together and ate nothing. She rushed to the classroom at the last minute, walking straight into the room without looking at the people who were waiting for their professor in the corridor.

She sat down in one of the last rows in her seat, far to the side, almost against the wall, where she felt safe.

When she saw out of the corner of her eye his silhouette walking into the hall she froze, lowering her gaze to her fingertips, feeling an uncomfortable constriction in her stomach, trying to blend into the background and not exist.

She shuddered when she noticed that instead of taking his seat in the front row across the hall he moved towards her, walking down the row below her, sitting down opposite her. She swallowed hard when he sat sideways to her, spreading his elbows comfortably on his and her desk, leaning his back against the wall.

"– what's up, little freak? –" He asked simply, tapping his fingers against the top of her table. She looked at him with big eyes, feeling a complete emptiness in her head, having the feeling that she was hot and cold at the same time.

For some reason she wanted to cry again.

Hearing that she didn't answer him he lifted his gaze to her, twisting so that he rested his arms on her desk, correcting his glasses that had slipped off his nose with the index finger of his hand.

"– you've got me used to eating one bar every day and you didn't give me one yesterday – you've ruined my daily routine and it's very fucking annoying, you know? –" He asked with anger and some kind of expectation that completely surprised her, but what she said had nothing to do with his words.

"– I didn't look inside –" She muttered.

"– what? –"

"– I wasn't rummaging through your things –" She explained in a trembling voice feeling that for some reason her eyebrows arched in pain, warm tears one by one began to run down her cheeks again.

"– are you crying? –" He asked in disbelief, wrinkles appeared on his forehead as they always did when someone made him uncomfortable.

"– yes –"

"– because I'm talking to you? –"

"– because I'm ashamed –" She whispered and lowered her gaze, swallowing hard, feeling that it had cost her a lot of strength to choke out these few sentences.

He fell silent for a moment – other students began to sit down around them, their professor announcing that they were about to begin their lecture.

He no longer responded to her words, returning to his previous position, leaning with his back against the wall, one of his hands remaining on her desk. She watched dully as his long fingers beat rhythmically against it, repeating the same movements again and again.

As always, he didn't even open his textbook, didn't write anything down or take notes, memorising everything he heard in his head.

She couldn't afford to do that, so she wrote down meticulously everything their professor spoke about, knowing that it would be one of the topics that would appear on the exam.

As soon as their class was over, she saw his silhouette standing in front of her with the textbook in his hand, which for some reason he carried with him. She packed her bag, pretending she didn't feel his expectant gaze on her.

"I want my Crunchie." He communicated, as if giving her some irrelevant piece of information. She looked at him in disbelief, feeling her lips part involuntarily.

Was he always this cheeky and spiteful?

"Here." He said, pulling a few coins out of his pocket, far too many for one bar, placing them in front of her.

"Just bring it to me." He said impatiently and moved ahead, running down the stairs, correcting his glasses on his nose, disappearing out the door.

She didn't feel like bringing him this fucking bar, but decided she didn't have the strength to stand up to him.

That's why she went to the vending machine standing in the corridor and, using the coins he'd given her, bought him as many bars as the money he'd given her was enough for.

She found him exactly where he always was at this hour, which was in the library.

She knew that he was solving equations not because it was a challenge for him, but because he was terribly bored. She pulled her fabric knapsack off her back and opened it, placing bar after bar on the table top where he sat.

"– I wanted one – are you mad? –"

"– give yourself one each day – you know how to count – have a nice day –"

"– do you have to be so fucking rude? –" He growled with a hint of malice, from which she turned to face him, feeling that for the first time in many years she had lost her temper.

"– take a look at yourself, you spiteful, spoilt brat –" She hissed and froze, wondering how she could have said such a thing, a hot feeling of shame and horror spreading through her stomach.

He stared at her with his lips clenched, furious, his nostrils twitching in an anxious, heavy breath.

She thought he was going to say something, humiliate her again, but they just looked at each other.

"– I – I'm sorry –" She mumbled and turned away, wanting to run away, to sink into the ground, to disappear.

She was sure he would be avoiding her now, telling everyone with amusement what a fucked up and stupid person she was, that she'd stalked him and then started yelling at him in the library.

She knew he commented on various people's behaviour in this way and she was sure he wouldn't spare her.

"– hi, nasty bar slut – what's up? –" He asked, walking up to her as she stood by the notice board, causing her to completely freeze.

"– please, don't call me a nasty slut –" She mumbled, looking at him with big eyes.

He shrugged his shoulders, correcting his glasses on his nose with his index finger, his gaze fixed on the sheets of paper on which the timetables were written.

"– fine – so? –"

She didn't understand what purpose this exchange of words was supposed to serve.

"– and what are you asking? –" She asked uncertainly and he shrugged his shoulders again.

"– I don't know –"

God.

"– are you still ashamed? –"

She swallowed hard, lowering her gaze to her feet, feeling her heart in her throat.

"– yes –"

"– why? –" He asked, as if he didn't understand what her condition was caused by. "– it was pleasant – finding a candy bar in my backpack pocket every day – unexpected – like magic with this dumb tooth fairy –"

She looked at him in disbelief, feeling a strange kind of warmth and relief spread across her chest. She pressed her lips together, adjusting the knapsack on her shoulders.

"– I saw how Oliver treated you – I think I just wanted to comfort you, but I couldn't speak to you like a normal human being –" She choked out finally, feeling that embarrassing sensation of a tightening in her gut again.

He snorted, correcting his glasses on his nose again.

"– sad bullshit is for poets – isn't it? –" He scoffed, still not looking at her, a mischievous grin on his lips.

She wasn't sure she understood him correctly, but it seemed to her that he was trying to tell her that he liked what she was doing in a way.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"– words have never come easily to me, although my head is full of them –"

"– right – I don't have a problem with talking, as long as someone doesn't start tendentious stories about their deep inner life – I don't give a shit, to be honest –"

He said, still avoiding eye contact. He scratched the back of his neck and rubbed the tip of his nose with the top of his hand, doing his best to look anywhere but at her.

"– it seems to me that you don't give a shit about a lot of things –" She stated finally and it was only when he heard this sentence that he looked at her, the intensity of the blue of his irises frightened her.

"– that's true – but that's who I am – I don't pretend to be anyone, unlike those rich losers who haven't earned anything themselves –" He hissed, and she nodded in agreement.

He hummed under his breath, pleased apparently to find in her a listener who didn't question his rather subjective, and therefore, in his mind, sincere judgements.

"– and you? – why do you behave in this way? –" He asked suddenly, and she blinked, feeling her whole body tense up at the urge in some primitive desire to protect herself.

"– what do you mean? –" She asked finally.

"– that whole crying thing of yours –" He said indifferently, once again correcting his glasses with his finger on his nose.

It seemed to her that he was treating her as an equation for which he lacked data, making it impossible for him to solve, much to his natural frustration as a scientist.

She thought she understood him.

"– I don't seem to feel alive – as if I'm a camera recording everything around me – when suddenly someone speaks to me as a person who should be experiencing and thinking something, I feel ashamed, as if someone has caught me in the act –" She choked out with difficulty, thinking in disbelief, terrified, that for the first time she had expressed in words what she was feeling.

She was more afraid than ever of hearing someone's response to what she had said.

He looked at her for a moment, furrowing his brow, as if analysing in his brain the details she had just provided him with.

"– you're lonely –" He stated finally, as if he had at last found a summary of what he thought of her. She pressed her lips together at his words, embarrassed that he had hit the nail on the head.

"– yes –"

"– me too – that's no reason to cry –" He said, shrugging his shoulders, sliding his hands into his trousers in some subconscious gesture of discomfort.

She nodded at his words, feeling her heart pounding hard in her chest.

"– so –" He began, looking at his shoe as if he saw something interesting on it. "– what now? –"

She swallowed hard, raising her eyebrows in surprise.

"– what are you asking? –"

"– me and you – are we mates now? –" He asked, and she involuntarily smiled sincerely for the first time in many years, feeling some pleasant warmth ripple through her lower abdomen.

"– yes –"

[bellaxgiornata]

You're My Safe Place

Pairing: Frank Castle x fem!Reader Word Count: 2.3k [Tuna-Tober Masterlist]

Tuna-Tober Prompt: “Shh, I’ve got you now. I’m here.”

Warnings/tags: angst, emotional hurt/comfort, panic attack, mentions of Reader being teased for weight (and a couple other things), soft Frank

Summary: Frank and you are getting ready to attend your family's Thanksgiving dinner later, but the stress of the holiday season and the distress of seeing your horrible aunt has you nosediving right into a panic attack.

a/n: I've always wanted to write Frank comforting Reader over a panic attack so I slipped one in for this event. This is for anyone with a family member (or members) that are awful to be around now that the holidays are coming up. Feedback and reblogs are always appreciated!

With both hands grasping the kitchen counter in a near death grip, you leaned over the countertop as you tried to stay focused on the coffee machine in front of you. You were tired, having woken up early to a string of anxious thoughts about the Thanksgiving dinner tonight with your extended family that Frank and you would be attending. But as the coffee began to brew with a soft whir, your mind continued spiraling like it had been doing since five this morning. Ever since you’d woken up in bed next to Frank, staring at his bare shoulder poking out from beneath the bed sheets, you hadn’t been able to stop the dread and anxiety about what horrible comments your aunt would subject you to at this holiday gathering. Especially with all of the stress you’d already been under with the holiday season now in full swing.

Breath coming in sharper, your hands gripped the countertop even tighter. Farther down the hall you could hear Frank moving around in the bedroom getting ready for the day, and as much as you tried to ground yourself in the familiarity of that, you felt yourself steadily slipping as your mind replayed all of the awful things your aunt had said to you in the past–about your age and lack of a husband, the fact that you were still childless, that your profession was a joke, and even making jabs about your weight. Your vision began to blur as her irritating voice rang clear in your mind, your heart pounding so heavily that you felt the resounding vibration in your throat. Your rib cage felt as if it had clamped itself around your lungs and heart like a vice, constricting them both tighter and tighter while you fought to take a single full breath.

A panic attack. You were on the verge of another panic attack. Teetering just right at the edge, waiting to topple straight into it.

But no–no, you couldn’t. Not here. Not with Frank just in the other room. He had never seen you like this before and you never wanted him to see you like this. He had enough to worry about already and you refused to be another reason for the crease between his brows. He didn’t need to know how much something so ridiculous affected you. But at the same time, you knew tonight was the first family gathering of yours he’d be attending. Which meant it would be the first time he’d meet your aunt. The first time he’d be hearing the things she’d say about you.

Desperately you began sharply inhaling air through your gritted teeth, your eyes snapping tightly shut as you tried to get control of yourself. You just needed to focus, to breathe, to think about literally anything else besides the dinner and your aunt. But the harder you tried to fight it, the more her insults kept slipping through the quickly crumbling cracks in your mind. 

You were falling into it now, too far gone. The memories of past family gatherings were surfacing now; her repeated passive aggressive comments at the dinner table about your plate of food, the Christmas gifts that were meant ‘to help you attract a man’ or ‘lose a few of those unnecessary pounds,’ the constant comparisons to her golden child of a daughter, the rude questions about your salary. Your body was curling in on itself as you kept struggling to fight off the sensation that was dragging you under. You were gasping for breath, hyperventilating and too deep in to pull yourself back out. With shaking, sweat-dampened hands, you tried to readjust your hold on the countertop as if it was some lifeline that would keep you grounded in the present. But with your eyes closed, your hand missed the countertop and accidentally bumped into one of the coffee mugs sitting on it instead. You’d opened your eyes just in time to see the white ceramic mug fall to the floor and shatter, the noise louder than that of your own ragged, sharp breaths.

That’s when you lost it.

Dropping to the floor in a heap, tears streamed down your cheeks as you pulled your legs up to your body, as if they’d somehow help to keep your heart from beating straight through your chest. Your nails dug into your calves, partially in an attempt to keep your legs firmly pressed to yourself, but partly because the sting of them biting into your skin helped to counteract the growing panic inside of you.

And that’s when you’d heard Frank’s thudding, hurried footsteps as he came rushing out of the bedroom and straight into the kitchen. With vision tinged in white at the edges, you struggled to look up at Frank when he paused at the entrance of the room. You could only imagine how you looked to him right now, huddled in a ball beside the shattered coffee mug, tears pouring down your cheeks as you continued to suck in shallow, gasping breaths. 

He didn’t stand there long. In four quick strides he was on the floor beside you, a stern and almost unreadable expression on his face. But even in the midst of your panic attack, you could still see the fear and worry hidden behind his dark eyes. He was terrified and confused.

“Talk to me, sweetheart,” he ordered.

His hands hovered in the air between you both, as if he wanted to offer you comfort but he wasn’t certain if he should touch you. Your tongue darted out of your dry mouth to wet your lips as you attempted to concentrate, but the lack of proper oxygen to your brain with the way you’d been breathing was causing everything to become a haze. And with the way your breaths kept coming in sharp and shallow, there was no way you could get a word out.

“Are you hurt?” he asked. “Somethin’ happen? Tell me what’s goin’ on.”

You shook your head in answer to his questions, your entire body trembling against the kitchen cabinets behind you. There was no way you could form words right now, not with the way it felt like your throat was closing up.

Almost as if a light went off in Frank’s head a second later, realization dawned on him and his entire demeanor shifted. Immediately the urgency left his voice, his tone becoming something soft and soothing as his hands finally and gently landed on your shoulders. Though the concern was still apparent in his eyes, not something he could just push away.

“Relax, honey,” he said. “You’re alright. ‘S'just a panic attack.”

You nodded, breath still coming in sharp, short gasps. This wasn’t the first one you’d had, but that didn’t alleviate the fear and embarrassment that managed to surface within you at the moment. You didn’t want Frank to see you like this.

“Need you to take some deep breaths, sweetheart,” he told you. “In and out. Can you do that for me?”

Nodding again, you felt a few more hot tears streak their way down your cheeks. As Frank’s thumbs drew comforting little circles along your shoulders, his face hovering just a foot in front of yours, you tried to inhale a deep, shaky breath.

“That’s it, honey,” he praised. “Nice and slow. Don’t fight it, just breathe through it.”

Nails digging tight into your calves, you tried to focus on Frank’s face and his soothing words. Inhaling another ragged breath in, you tried to take a full breath while fighting the protesting burning in your lungs. Frank’s eyes remained fixed on you as you inhaled the breath, but his hands released your shoulders, both of them coming down to gently pull your fingers away from where they were digging into your calves. 

“Keep going, sweetheart,” he encouraged. “Doin’ good.”

As you inhaled a few more sharp breaths, your tears gradually began to slow even if the trembling of your body did not lessen. The rough pads of Frank’s thumbs began soothingly stroking the back of your hands, the sensation helping to steadily draw you back to the present and out of your head.

“I’m–I’m sorry,” you gasped out.

“Shh, I’ve got you now. I’m here,” Frank murmured, pulling you in towards himself. “Don’t apologize.”

Clinging to him, your hands desperately grabbed at the back of his soft sweater as you buried your face into his shoulder. Your breathing was still shallow and uneven, your heart beating a little erratically in your chest, but you felt yourself little by little coming back out of the panic attack as you continued to follow Frank’s calm instructions to breathe in and out.

It was a few minutes before you finally felt yourself really calm down. You kept your face buried in Frank’s shoulder, embarrassment coursing through you. You couldn’t believe he’d just witnessed you have a panic attack, let alone over something so stupid.

“You good?” he eventually asked after a moment.

Nodding your head against his shoulder, your fingers eased their grip on his sweater, though you didn’t release your hold of him. “Yeah,” you quietly answered.

“What was that 'bout?” he asked.

You stiffened in his arms, afraid to tell him the truth. Tonight was the first family gathering of yours he’d agreed to attend, which meant he was bound to witness some of these comments firsthand. Even if you didn’t tell him about it now, you knew he’d eventually see it happening later.

“C’mon sweetheart,” Frank gently prompted. “Can’t help if you don’t talk to me.”

“It’s…it’s stupid,” you muttered into his shoulder.

“Not stupid if it’s got you this upset,” he disagreed. “Talk to me.”

Sighing, you turned and rested your cheek along his shoulder, keeping your eyes averted as embarrassment continued to flush your face. “It’s just…this Thanksgiving dinner tonight. I have this–this aunt that I cannot stand. She’s always stuck her nose into my personal business–and I mean real personal sometimes. And she makes these–” you paused, wincing, “–these horribly rude comments to me. Usually when it’s just her cornering me somewhere, but sometimes over the holiday dinners in front of everyone. And I–I just don’t want to see her.”

“Then don’t go,” he said. “We don’t have to.”

“I can’t just not go, Frank,” you replied. “I’d never see my family for holidays again if I simply just stopped going to family gatherings. And generally I enjoy seeing everybody else, it’s just–just her. And I’m…”

Your voice trailed off, your eyes focused on the shattered coffee mug still on the floor just behind Frank. Besides hearing the things she might throw at you this time, the other thing that had been bothering you recently was the fact that this time she would be making these comments in front of Frank. He’d be there to hear every jab she made about you, every comment about what a failure she thought you were or what she deemed wrong with your appearance. Right in front of him.

“You’re what?” he asked.

Swallowing hard, your eyes slowly closed before you answered him in a small voice. “I’m not looking forward to you hearing it.”

Frank’s large hands were immediately pulling your face away from his shoulder before turning it to look at him. You were met with a firm, fearsome expression, one that would’ve sent a shudder down your spine if you hadn’t known how soft he truly was beneath that gruff and intimidating exterior. 

“She won’t say a goddamn thing with me there, sweetheart,” Frank told you, voice a low warning. “Promise you that.”

You smiled softly back up at him. “Frank, you can’t start a physical altercation at Thanksgiving dinner,” you pointed out.

“No,” he agreed. “But I don’t have to do that to get her to keep her mouth shut.”

An amused snort slipped out of you at his words, your mind racing through a myriad of possible situations of how Frank would keep your aunt from verbally attacking you this evening. Each scenario was just as satisfying as the next.

“Honestly, I don’t doubt that,” you replied before sighing. “And I know this…just seems like a dumb thing to get so worked up over but…her comments really get to me. Just every time I see her, she’s always twisting the knife. And then her words stick with me. Always have ever since I was little.”

Frank held you a bit tighter in his arms as he shook his head firmly. “Not alright with anyone talkin’ to you like that. Making you feel this upset,” he told you. “She’s already on my shit list and I haven’t met her.”

You couldn’t fight back the little laugh that bubbled out of you at the idea of Frank Castle putting your aunt on his ‘shit list.’ A tiny grin slipped onto his lips at the sound, a mischievous glint appearing in his dark eyes.

“I have a feeling you and her will not get along this evening,” you said.

“I’ve got that same feeling, sweetheart,” Frank replied, his grin growing. “But whatever happens, you know I’ll be right there.”

Smiling softly up at him, you nodded. “Yeah, yeah I know you will be.”

Frank pulled you back to his chest, his hands once more soothingly running along your back. When he spoke again, his voice a deep rumble, you felt a bit of the anxiety in your mind easing just a bit.

“Not gonna be alone tonight,” he murmured. “Be right there with you.”

Frank Castle One Shot Tag List: @heimtathurs @linamarr @wkndwlff @kmc1989 @shiorimakibawrites @xxdrixx @leikelle @pinkratts @1988-fiend @fireeyes-on-teller-dixon-grimes @stilldreaming666 @will-delete-this-later-probably @yarrystyleeza @pone21 @millennial-birkin @harleycao @kezibear @justanerd1 @sadest-bookshelf @loves0phelia

[thebitsandblurbs]

Special Guests Starring...

Pairing: Actress!Reader x Michael "Robby" Robinavitch x Jack Abbott

Warnings: None

Author's Note: A bit living rent free in my head? Surely not... but it is! Not beta read

On an uncharacteristically slow night- at least, as slow as the Pitt could get- Princess stationed herself at the table in the break room. The last granola bar from the vending machine and a slightly chilled Sprite rested on the table. Next to them, her phone stood at attention.

Santos sauntered in, on her way to snag a snack, piercing eyes happened to glaze over to the smudged screen, "Holy crap balls!"

Princess couldn't help but yelp as Santos snatched the phone, "Hey-"

"Sandali lang po," she paused the livestream, zooming in on the people in the background, "No fucking way!"

Dana couldn't help but give the intern a strange look as she passed, "Something wrong Santos?"

Your ears perked at hearing your name, mouth agape as people sprung up in cheers around you. It was almost too good to be true. A pair of hands clamped down on your arm, hoisting your startled self up. Robby's voice was crystal clear in the roaring of cheers that filled the room, "Y/N, you won!"

"I won?"

"Yes, you did." Jack said, kissing your cheek and squeezing your hands. It was almost as if he was trying to anchor you to reality. "You remember your speech?"

"I-I think I do..." You said, almost dazily. Your eyes met the proud gazes of your cast mates- people who got you through heaven and hell on this shoot. Cheek kisses and awkward hugs were passed as you shimmed your way out of aisle.

Your stomach churned as you looked upon that stage. The one you've been striving for almost your entire life. In your younger years, you dreaded being in front of the camera. With time, you became comfortable but nevertheless, you valued your time and your life off camera.

Given the chaotic schedule of filming, that didn't stop you, Robby, nor Jack from seeing each other. Though one chilly day in October did you lot discover that the unlimited minutes plan that most- if not all- mobile companies boast about was, in fact, quite limited. Evidently, keeping your phone on while you soundly slept to your lovers' snores was not a good idea.

Frankly, the phone company was astounded at your minutes being stopped at 22,000. While they were gracious enough to extend it by restarting the timer, they did not do it again when the limit was exceeded a second time.

Because of how your dress wrapped around your legs, Robby offered to lead you to the stairs. You two walked hand in hand as you neared the stage. "Breathe," he told you, "you earned this."

Staying at the edge of the steps, he didn't let go of your hand until you reached the top.

By now, the Nurses Station was crowded with nearly the entirely of the on-shift staff. When they heard Santos talking about the Pitt's two most well-known ED doctors on the Oscar's, well, they just had to see it for themselves.

Whittaker stood there, mouth agape, as the camera panned to Robby and Jack holding each other as you thank your peers through tears. He closed his mouth before opening it again to say, "Did anybody know about this?"

Dans shrugged, clearly not as surprised as anyone else was, "They mentioned her once or twice."

[yxtubers]

𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐫, 𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐫

chris sturniolo x reader (fluff)

summary: reader gets hooked up to the lie detector and the triplets use this to their advantage

warnings/notes: one use of Y/N, one use of profanity

requested?: yes! ↴

- can you do one with chris where the reader gets hooked up to the lie detector and the triplets see this as an opportunity to ask her juicy questions (fave triplet, have you ever been attracted to any of us other than chris) and she says yes but only because they have the same face lol

(request is shortened for clarity)

> > >

Your heart thrummed against your ribcage as your arms and torso were getting wrapped in wires. After hooking them up to the machine, your fingers were also clamped with what looked like clothes pegs. You took a deep breath as the conductor finally sat down.

“Is your name Y/N?” he asked as he stared at the paper before him.

Your heart skipped a beat involuntarily as you answered. “Yes.”

He nodded before asking you a few further questions to make sure he knew what the lines looked like when you were telling the truth.

After giving the triplets the go ahead to ask their questions, they practically shook with excitement. Nick decided to go first.

Your hands twitched slightly as you sat them on the table, palms down. Why did you ever agree to do this?

“Do you have a favorite triplet?” Nick asked smugly.

You huffed upon seeing the look on his face. His smirk made you want to slap it right off - but you knew that this was the least uncomfortable question that he would ask.

“Um- no?” you said. It was more of a question than an answer.

The conductor shook his head. “Lie.”

Hearing the ‘oohs’ and gasps of the boys made you squint your eyes closed. You really didn’t want to answer the question in case it offended them, but you knew they wouldn’t let it go if you didn’t.

They all sat up straighter in their seats, urging you to continue.

“Fine,” you sighed, “It’s Nick.”

After hearing that you were being honest, he clapped his hands together, cheering. He jeered at Matt and Chris, boasting that he was your favorite.

“Wow,” said Chris, feigning offense as raised his eyebrows.

You exhaled air out of your noise, laughing slightly as you rubbed your face. This was already turning out to be the longest 5 minutes of your life.

Matt only rolled his eyes next to Nick before pulling out his phone to ask the next question.

“Have you ever been attracted to any of us besides Chris?”

You and Nick’s eyes shot wide open. Chris only laughed beside him, leaning closer to the table so that he could look over Matt and Nick to see you.

Fuck.

Making eye contact with him, you laughed awkwardly.

“I mean - okay listen. Physically, yes-“ Matt clapped a hand over his mouth, looking over to Chris whose jaw hung open “-but only because you guys look the same!”

Nick laughed in disbelief, his eyes flitting between you and Chris.

“That is true,” said the man near the lie detector.

Chris shook his head as he joined in on Nick’s laughter. “I feel betrayed.”

You knew he wasn’t offended or upset. They were your best friends, and Chris trusted you and his brothers enough to know that nothing would ever happen - it was all just part of the fun.

“We’re having a talk after this,” he added jokingly as he pulled out his phone to get his question ready.

Your face grew hot upon realizing what you had just admitted, avoiding eye contact with the boys as Chris asked the third question. But even if you wanted to, you really couldn’t have lied. Literally.

“When we first met were you initially a Chris girl?”

Nick groaned, rolling his eyes. Matt only leaned back, observing the situation. The questions were getting juicy and they were enjoying pestering you with their curiosity.

“Honestly? Yes. Through and through,” you said confidently, your heart rate finally relaxing a bit.

“True.”

Matt let out a breath, looking to Chris to see his reaction.

“Really?” asked Chris, his eyes never leaving yours despite the fact that Matt was staring at the side of his head.

His brows were furrowed, eyes filled with adoration. Yet he almost looked as if he didn’t believe you.

“Of course. I love you, dude,” you said. As romantic as the moment was you didn’t want to make it awkward for the others in the room by calling him a pet name. This was already becoming very affectionate very quickly.

“True,” said the conductor across from you.

Nick aw’ed as he looked at you. As much as he liked to pretend that your displays of love grossed him out, he was actually really glad that Chris found someone who cared for him as much as you did. Most of all, he was glad Chris was comfortable enough to let his commitment issues go slightly - Chris himself never really thought he would ever be able to confess his love for someone so openly.

“I love you too,” he said finally, his cheeks dusted pink as he looked down.

You waved you hands at Nick and Matt as they gave you little puppy dog looks, as if to say ‘you guys are so cute’. They knew you felt awkward around PDA so they never missed a chance to tease you about it when they could.

Sweat pooling on your face, you tried to move on. “Okay, okay. Just ask the next damn question.”

Never again were you going to let them rope you into one of their stupid video ideas.

- - -

𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭:

@lollibumblebee

@dwntwn-strnlo

@gracietaylorsversions

@20nugs

@thetriplets3

@sunshinewwx

@gwenlore

@gabbylovesreading

@ssturniolo

@opheliaofficial07

@stargirlv0id

[reveryfics]

Undercover

Pairings: T'Challa x Male reader

Summary: After learning about a international deal set to go down that could potentially cause a risk to Wakanda, T'Challa is surprised to see someone else has taken an interest in the deal.

A/n: I should mention the reader is hispanic and a international agent working for S.H.I.E.L.D, also men in dresses <3 (I suck at fight scenes)

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

The air in the Monte Carlo casino hung heavy with the scent of expensive perfume and desperation. T'Challa, a solitary figure amidst the throng of humanity, navigated the labyrinthine corridors, the cacophony of sounds – the clinking of dice, the raucous laughter, the mournful sighs of defeated gamblers – assaulting his senses. Slot machines blinked and whirred, their garish lights a stark contrast to the subdued elegance he was accustomed to.

He adjusted the cuffs of his impeccably tailored suit, a subtle movement that spoke volumes about his composure amidst the chaos. His gaze swept across the room, searching for his target, a man involved in a deal that could potentially destabilize Wakanda. Intelligence reports had indicated the buyer was a man, but the world was full of unexpected twists.

Shuri's voice, a lifeline through the static, crackled in his earpiece. "Any luck on the buyer, T'Challa?"

"Still no luck on a visual, Shuri," he replied, his voice a low growl against the deafening bass of the house music. "Just remember, the source emphasized a male buyer. And be careful."

T'Challa nodded, his senses on high alert. He moved with a silent grace, a panther stalking its prey. The air crackled with anticipation, a palpable sense of greed and desperation hanging heavy. This wasn't his usual stomping ground, but the stakes were high. Vibranium, in the wrong hands, could unleash a wave of destruction the world was ill-prepared to face. He had to stop this deal.

His eyes finally settled on a figure seated at a high-stakes poker table. A man, flanked by a woman whose beauty was almost distracting. The woman, draped in a crimson gown that clung to her curves like a second skin, was a vision of predatory elegance. Her gaze, however, was fixed on T'Challa, a predatory glint in her emerald eyes.

"Enjoying the view, mi príncipe?" she purred, her voice a silken caress that sent a shiver down his spine.

T'Challa, momentarily thrown, managed a charming smile. "I must confess, I find myself quite captivated," he replied, his gaze lingering on her.

He played a calculated game, observing the man, the woman, the flow of the game. The source had been adamant: a male buyer. But this woman… she exuded an aura of power, a dangerous allure that belied her appearance.

He subtly excused himself, following the man through the labyrinthine corridors of the casino. As he closed in, a hand clamped down on his arm, pulling him into a darkened alcove. He reacted instinctively, a blur of motion as he attempted to subdue his assailant.

His eyes widened in disbelief. It was the woman.

"Honestamente, pensé que un princr sería más inteligente.” she hissed, yanking off her wig to reveal a face that was decidedly masculine. "Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D and that pendejo was none the wiser until you showed up.”

T'challa, still reeling from the revelation, demanded, "What does S.H.I.E.L.D want with this?"

"Vibranium is a threat, not just to Wakanda, but to the entire world," he explained, his voice low and urgent. "My mission was to recover the case and return it to you."

A tense silence followed. Cooperation seemed unlikely.

"Let's just say… our methods differ," he said, a mischievous glint in his eyes.

He snatched a pair of VIP cards from an unsuspecting patron, handing one to T'challa. "Impressive," T'challa conceded. "Just you wait."

They navigated the VIP section, their presence unnoticed amidst the haze of cigar smoke and expensive champagne. They reached the private room, the air thick with anticipation.

The two targets, oblivious to the danger, exchanged smug glances. "Well played, gentlemen," one of them sneered. "But you've walked into a trap."

Suddenly, the room erupted in chaos. Guns materialized from nowhere, trained on the two intruders. But T'challa and him were ready. T'challa activated his suit, the fabric surging around him like a second skin, transforming him into the Black Panther.

Guards, hired muscle, and even a few disgruntled gamblers joined the fray. Unlike T'Challa even without a suit the other man was a whirlwind of motion in the red dress,he moved with a predatory grace. His movements were fluid, almost feline, a mesmerizing blend of dance and deadly intent. He dispatched opponents with a brutal efficiency, each strike swift and precise.

T'Challa, watching from the periphery, felt a strange thrill course through him. That man, in that dress, was a vision of raw power and captivating danger. There was an undeniable seduction in witnessing this man, so utterly masculine, move with such grace and lethal intent. It was a primal display, a reminder of the wildness that still lurked beneath the veneer of civilization.

Sensing T'Challa's gaze, he met his eyes with a feral glint. A silent message passed between them: This is what I am.

The fight raged on ,the man human weapon, neutralized threats with a chilling efficiency. He used the environment to his advantage, utilizing the slick marble floors to his benefit, sending opponents sprawling with expertly placed kicks. T'Challa, meanwhile, moved like a panther, his movements silent and deadly. He dispatched his foes with a quiet efficiency, his vibranium claws flashing in the dim light.

Together, they fought their way towards the targets,T'Challa secured the case while the other subdued the targets. They made their way back through the casino, the sounds of sirens growing louder in the distance.

As they slipped out of the casino, unnoticed by the arriving police, T'Challa turned to him. "You... you are unlike anyone I have ever encountered," he breathed, his voice husky with a mixture of admiration and something akin to awe.

His breath coming in ragged gasps, merely smiled. "Just trying to survive, Your Majesty."

They stood near the street, watching as police stormed the casino. "If you're ever looking for work, I'm sure we could always use a man with… your talents," T'challa paused.

He smiled, turning towards T'challa and stepping closer. "Just ask me on a date next time, mi príncipe," he purred.

T'challa couldn't even form words before the case was shoved in his hands, and the man turned towards a car that'd just parked. He waved, blowing T'challa a kiss as he got into the passenger seat.

"He's a keeper," Shuri laughed, causing T'challa's cheeks to heat up. "Most definitely.”

[emmg]

Specimen Fidelity—part 1

The Emmrook Ex Machina AU I've been having fever dreams about that was meant to be a one-shot but became longer.

Below or on ao3

He does not look at her name.  

There it is, lazily typed, folded into a file gone soft at the edges from months of inattention, lying face down on his knees like a dog trained too well. He avoids it not out of sentiment, but etiquette, an old-fashioned belief that glancing at her then would ruin her now. Names belong to people. She is no longer precisely that. She is what remains.

Whoever she was, she has long since fled: first in that gray-blue moment of asphyxia, then more decisively in the cold that stole the last residue of her from the body. What’s left is a kind of exquisite vacancy. Smooth skin. Good teeth. Organs intact enough to transplant. The mind, no, the brain, spoiled a little at the edges, but not so much as to ruin the structure.  

She is a husk now. That is the term they use, though they rarely say it aloud. A shell. A vessel. Something deserted.  

She signed herself away. That part is clear. It’s all in the documents, those long, soporific forms in which the promise of scientific legacy is tucked between clauses about bodily integrity and postmortem jurisdiction. Most don't read them. Most don’t even think it matters. The living are not very skilled at imagining their own absence.

Especially the young.  

They sign with the breeziness of actors autographing headshots. I’ll take the cheque, they think. I’ll pay the rent, I’ll buy the coat, I’ll order the steak. Later I’ll find a job, I’ll bounce back, I’ll buy my way out of the contract before the worst can happen. It's a kind of wager, really. The arrogance of survival.

He can hear it in his mind, the imagined laughter of someone like her. The scoffing chuckle over drinks, the way they must have mocked the lab, the men with their hollow smiles and printed waivers. They sign: page after page, cheerful and hungover, in flats with chipped tiles and borrowed furniture.  

But suddenly... one stairwell too many, one needle too deep, one heartbeat too late... and the contract holds.  

Now here she is.  

Delivered on time. Labeled. Compliant. A body not quite empty, just misfiled. The voice is gone, yes, but the throat remains. The thoughts have fled, but the folds of the brain are still there, those secret ridges where language once rested. And she, this woman whose name he won’t speak, she has become something else entirely.

He watches the machines go about their work. The cutting begins as it always does: a gliding motion of the primary manipulator, blade embedded in a flexible armature, slipping through waxy flesh. No blood. Only a thin seep of fluid, the consistency of glycerin, rising sluggishly before being vacuumed away by the suction module, its long, tubing mouth issuing that same damp, peristaltic wheeze he has never grown used to. It sounds like thirst.  

"I am sure you’ve heard this one before: most men only get flowers at their funerals. But did you know, my dear, that most women, around seventy-eight percent if I’m not misremembering, buy flowers for themselves?" 

He likes speaking during procedures. Likes the noise of it, the rhythm. Talking to them or at them or near them, it hardly matters. It eases the dryness in his mouth. Gives the whole thing a sort of polite framing. A dinner-table shape to something otherwise too clinical. His fingers tap his knee in a syncopated pattern and he smiles vaguely, not at her face, not even at her hand, but somewhere around her shoulder. A safe and meaningless place. 

A secondary probe slips beneath the skin, separating layers of fascia with controlled bursts of micro-vibration. He hears the slight crackle as connective tissue parts. The machine pauses, adjusts its angle, then delves deeper. Clamps lower, legs of steel spidered out over the abdominal cavity, pinning the body in place as the cranial unit descends and begins its scan of the brain’s remnants.  

"Isn’t that strange? Or no, not strange. Lovely. Quietly, beautifully mad. Not that they admit it. Society, in its infinite pettiness, prefers to call it vanity. Or melodrama. Or, worse, manipulation. As though a daffodil were a loaded gesture. But I would think..." 

Inside, her organs are removed one by one. Some manually extracted by the manipulator's grip, others liquefied and drawn into containment vessels by enzymatic breakdown. The liver resists, slightly distended, and when it is finally torn free, there’s a soft tearing, like the peeling of a fruit too long on the vine. The stomach follows, collapsed inward, and is discarded.  

"I think," he resumes the thought, “everyone ought to have flowers. At least once. Long before they are laid into the earth.”

His hands tremble.  

Her chest is fitted with a conductive mesh threaded along the ribs and stitched into the pericardium. It serves both to anchor and to insulate, to distribute electric current like a nervous system’s counterfeit. The lungs, emptied and resealed, are installed more for balance than function. She will not need them, but she must carry them. A hollow woman must still appear full.

He turns away before they lift the skullcap. He’s seen the procedure often, and though routine, it never loses its quiet revulsion. The oscillating cranial saw, a precision instrument with a diamond-edged blade, traces a semicircular line just behind the frontal hairline. There is no sound but a slight vibration in the table. The parietal bone is lifted with a vacuum-coupled retractor, set delicately on a stainless steel tray lined with absorbent gauze. Beneath it, the brain is pale, slack with cellular death. No swelling, no hemorrhage, just the even, irreversible collapse that comes with hypoxia and time. The neural surface is intact but inert, like a concert hall with the power cut.  

"You know," he continues, conversational now, "I read once that tulips keep growing even after they’re cut. You place them in a vase, and still they reach. As if they haven’t been told it’s over." 

The interface deploys next. Each filament ends in a microelectrode calibrated to detect electrical activity at the cortical level. Here, though, they detect nothing. There are no residual signals. No memory engrams. No last flickers of self. The tissue is mechanically viable, metabolically inert. It is, simply, a structure: the scaffolding on which something else will be built.

The mesh flexes, adheres, anchors to the anchoring points he marked the night before. The feedback lights blink green. A connection has been established. Not to thought, not to memory, but to matter. The net is not there to communicate. It is there to replace.

This is not restoration. There is nothing to restore. This is a stage being set for a different play, one with a different actor, a different script.  

"Violets, conversely, die within hours. Collapse, really. All that delicacy, all that scent, and for what? They’re barely present before they begin to decay. There’s something painfully honest about that." 

He lifts his cup, finds the tea cold, sets it down again. On the screen, a prompt: Ocular Selection Pending.

He scrolls. Rows of artificial irises flicker by. Too bright, too false, too simple. He selects a soft blue, nearly grey, and adds a fleck of amber in the lower quadrant. It is not recorded. He will not mention it in his notes. It is for him alone, a private indulgence. Something to notice when she blinks at him for the first time.  

Hours pass.  

When the machines withdraw, she lies there in complete stillness, as though nothing had ever been done. The suture down the center of her chest is closed. Her body has been dried, polished, posed. Her right wrist bears a subtle bulge, titanium beneath the skin where the bone had shattered during transport. The appendectomy scar remains, faint and healed. It must have happened years ago.  

He studies her.  

Her body is pristine. Correct. Balanced. The skin nearly translucent in places, especially along the ribs. The breasts are soft from preservation, neither lewd nor modest, simply present. Her hips have shifted slightly, the left side settled deeper into the table’s cushion. He looks lower, then stops himself, heat blooming unwanted in his cheeks. It is not appropriate. He is a scientist. She is not to be gazed at in this way.  

She is not alive.  

Not yet.  

"I would have brought you flowers," he says, not entirely to her, not entirely to himself. "Had I known who you were. Had I thought it would matter." 

There is, he tells himself, an art to arranging the dead. He is not an artist. But he practices. He cannot give her back her life. He can give her life but not her life. This is not resurrection. This is not a birth. This is creating someone from scratch to see if they can live inside a body that does not decay. Maybe... maybe he'll lie on this very table himself one day, once his project is complete, once it is successful, and the dread will lift from him. He would not have to die.  

He cannot give her memory. That, he knows. He cannot return to her the shape of her thoughts, the rhythm with which she once folded her hands, or the cruelty or kindness she may have shown to strangers. That is gone, dissolved in the long, low hush of brain death. But beauty, yes, beauty he can offer. Beauty he can construct. A curated, constructed beauty, yes, but tenderly so. She already has the eyes, the ones he designed quietly at his desk, sifting through hundreds of pigment matrices until one shade caught him unaware.  

She lies there now, not lifeless exactly, but paused, awaiting further instruction. He watches her the way a painter might consider a canvas that has just begun to betray its potential.  

The blush is the first indulgence. Not slapped on, not superficial, but embedded, injected, coaxed. A slow infusion of heat-responsive pigment beneath the skin of her cheeks, subtle enough to imitate feeling without suggesting parody. It will deepen, just slightly, when she speaks, when she tilts her head. He programs no direct cause. He wants it to feel spontaneous. A coincidence of color. Her lips receive the same attention. No synthetic gloss, no caricature. Just a breath of warmth, a rose too tired to bloom fully. Something like youth, like innocence.  

He notices the burn under her chin, a small patch of healed skin, imperfectly textured, with the agitated scratches of someone trying not to think about discomfort. She must have touched it constantly. Picked at it. A private misery. He removes it. The laser hums once, and the skin forgets it ever suffered.  

Her eyelashes are uneven. The right eye especially, sparser near the outer edge. He notes the asymmetry and sets about correcting it. The micro-threader descends with its customary, insect-like elegance. It buzzes softly to itself as it calibrates position, pauses above her closed eye, then begins. One filament at a time. Synthetic keratin, follicular root simulation, pre-tapered at the tip. Each lash is inserted with a pause, fitted just right.  

He does not blink.  

He watches as the lashes fill out, evenly, then slightly fuller, until they achieve something almost... sentimental. Yes. Yes, she will look the part: pale-eyed, long-limbed, the sort of frame that suggests fragility. She will look at him, one day soon, and she will resemble a doe. Not a real one, no, but the kind imagined by people who have never seen an animal outside of paintings.  

He speaks again. 

"I wonder," he muses, as the threader comes to a halt, "if flowers notice when we turn away. If they feel themselves beginning to fade. If there’s a moment where they realize the vase was never meant to be permanent." 

He likes fragile things. He knows this. It’s not difficult to admit privately, though it embarrasses him if he says it aloud. Fragile things require care. They justify attention. One must monitor them, maintain them, watch for bruising and imbalance. One must never be careless with them. And he is so tired of carelessness; other people’s, his own.  

"I suppose it does not matter," he concludes, and leans in. He brushes a nearly invisible fleck of dust from the bridge of her nose and then retreats. "We give them, and they die, and then we forget which color they were." 

He wants, more than he has ever been able to say, to take care of something. But not a cat, not a potted fern, not something that dies quietly when abandoned. No, not that. Something more... articulate. Preferably someone.  

Someone who responds to touch. To tone. To worry.  

Oh but her nails... They are broken, cracked at the edges, some torn back to the quick. He doesn’t delegate this part to the machines. He retrieves a file from his drawer himself. Works slowly. Short enough to look tended. Not so short as to expose the sensitive tips. She must be comfortable.

He takes a breath. Runs his fingers once through her hair. The machines cannot fix that. It is knotted, full of split ends, botched in transport.  

“Oh, what did they do to your beautiful hair,” he laments.  

He selects his scissors. They are not surgical, but they are sharp. He trims, gently, without tension. No tugging. She will never grow more. He cannot take too much.  

“There,” he whispers when he is done, and draws a thick blanket over her chest, up to the clavicle. He steps back. The lab is quiet. The machines are cooling in their ports. The screen glows in anticipation.

“Shall we wake you up now?”  

****

"Hello, there."

He is tired. Bone-tired, yes, but more precisely: process-tired. This has been done before. All of it. Too many times. Always the same overture. A greeting, a brief performance of civility, and then the dawning recognition: the thing before him is wrong, or off, or unbearable in some small but structural way. Then, the switch is flipped, the breathless little farewell—you are not ideal, darling, I’m sorry, go back to sleep—follows and the soft click of deactivation wraps it all up. Curtain down.

He tells himself, today, it might be different. And the shame of this thought is that he knows better. Hope, in his profession, is considered almost indecent, like sentimentality at an autopsy. He is, after all, a man of intellect. Or at least, a man who once claimed the clarity of intellect the way others claim property. 

And yet. 

The gold fleck in her eye—placed not for symmetry, not for realism, but because he thought it might delight him one day, when she laughed in the right light—that was not intellect. That was the soft rot of desire. Worse: whimsy. Now, worse still, he has let the system randomize her entirely. Not just parameters, not just tonal filters. Her. Her self. A roll of the dice in the circuitry. Chaos in mathematical equations.

He stirs his tea without thinking. The spoon circles the cup, metal on ceramic. Clink, clink, clink. He does not look at her. That is part of the experiment. A show of restraint, a ritual to keep the moment clean. He has found that the things which break too soon do so under the weight of anticipation.

Still, the monitor hums cheerfully. And he cannot help seeing the marker: CURIOSITY climbing, tick by tick, like a mercury line in a fever.

The first “hello, there” is always addressed to the quiet. A kind of vocal clearing of the throat for the soul, an absurd rehearsal spoken to the walls and cables, to the hush of the lab. He says it softly, without conviction, to hear where the fissures lie in his own voice. The goal is not confidence, but plausibility. He must sound, at the very least, like someone who deserves to be listened to.

Only then does he press the button. 

The awakening is neither sudden nor delicate. No mythic reanimation, no stiff convulsion of limbs. The lashes flutter—not like a butterfly, no, that would be too poetic—but like something unsure of its own purpose. A coded gesture rehearsed in wires. Her body moves as bodies do when they are not quite inhabited: a folding forward, a protective curl, knees drawn to chest with a sort of dumb modesty, arms winding round and then releasing again as if uncertain what they’re meant to guard. 

Her eyes dart. Left. Right. Fast enough to appear human. And then again, slower, as if already analyzing the patterns in his silence. 

“Hello, there,” he says again, this time for her. The words issued gently, the way one offers a hand to a child with a skinned knee. He wheels his chair closer to the table, feigning casual movement. The teacup rattles slightly on its saucer. Nerves, or the table, or both. 

She replies, “Hey.” 

She speaks, and the tone she uses is so peculiar, so precisely misaligned with expectation, that he does not recognize it at first. Not as hers, not as anything she ought to know. It isn’t the flat neutrality of a system booting into speech. Nor is it the coy, over-bright chirp he’s heard from earlier versions. This is something else entirely. It arrives slow and dusky, as if filtered through memory, though she should have none. A texture of voice that hovers between something lived and something overheard.

It disorients him. 

She should not be capable of emulating tone like that. Not yet. Not so early. The synthesis engines haven’t had time to calibrate affect. There is nothing in the presets to account for that odd tilt. He feels himself begin to spiral. 

“Emmrich,” she says. 

She looks at him. Through him. Rinse, repeat. 

He knows she knows him. Of course she does. Everything that ever found its way into the great digital ocean now washes against the shore of her mind. 

“Emmrich,” she repeats. Then again, with inflection this time: “Emmrich?”

“Yes,” he beams, hands clasped tightly. “Yes, yes, well done, dear.” 

He is like a child, every single time. He should not be so elated and yet, every single time, he is. She has the entire internet stitched into her brain like a second spine, and somewhere in that endless sprawl is him: a footnote, a face, a name. He could have hidden himself, encrypted, anonymized, but he left the thread for her to follow, a breadcrumb wrapped in pride.

Well, then. Introductions complete. The work may begin. 

****

It is a routine. He loves routines. Loves the quiet geometry of them, the way each day fits into the next like tiles in a mosaic no one else bothers to look at. He is a man of repetitions, of small domestic rituals. He likes knowing what object will greet his eye when he opens it in the morning. Let the others have novelty, wind, risk. He will take the stillness. 

And so, the routine begins anew, reassuring as ever, only now it includes a novel piece. A pale-eyed addition with pale hair, who folds nicely into the shape of his days. She fits. Too easily, perhaps. Slips into the pattern of his days like a bookmark into a well-thumbed page. No resistance, no awkwardness, just quiet acceptance. A kind of eerie compatibility. 

Mornings are their most conversational hour. They talk of little things: the carpet, its persistent greyness; the fact that the walls, though technically underground, have not yet succumbed to mildew; and, now and then, death. Or rather, the handling of it. 

“I won’t need one,” she says, meaning a burial. 

She’s taken to pouring his tea. It’s become her ritual within his. He places the pot on the table at the same hour, and she, always solemn, always one beat behind the cue, lifts it. The spout is invariably too high. The stream touches the lid, overshoots the mark. The cup is always too full for sugar, at least initially. But she is learning. 

“What?” he asks, though of course he’s heard. 

"A grave," she says.

"Why do you say that?" he murmurs.

“There’s an incinerator in the basement,” she says conversationally. “It’s efficient.” 

He lowers his eyes, not out of modesty but in search of some less disconcerting surface to focus on. The ripple in the tea, the pattern in the porcelain. His voice, when it returns, is almost inaudible. 

He looks briefly to the side, but his eyes are drawn back. Once more, he watches. Too openly. Too long.

She repeats the gesture, precisely, as though replaying a tape of herself a half-second delayed. 

A bird, he thinks. That is what she is. But not the symbolic, not the lyric sort. Not the bird embroidered onto childhood curtains or mentioned in lullabies. The kind that freezes mid-motion in a hedge, a blot of grainy brown indistinguishable from twig and bark, until it hears something. A change in air. A pulse. And then the head jerks sideways, sharp as a hinge. Alertness blooms in the sockets. A thing of flesh, but also of wire. Of sinew and solder. A creature that lives but not quite as must do. That watches without blinking because it was not made to. 

She moves like something bred for the open air. She moves like something once prey, now rehearsing its turn to predator. He feels as though he should not move too quickly. 

****

“Hello, dear. How are you feeling?”  

“You keep saying that. Dear is a noun, not a name.”

“Ah. Quite so. You are correct, of course.”  

“Then why don’t you use a name? Didn’t you give me one?”  

The electrodes quiver faintly on her chest as she leans forward, the wires trailing after her like hesitant veins, uncertain of what they carry. Her hand lifts, pale and narrow, almost translucent, and pauses midair with a curious stillness, as if awaiting permission from some internal mechanism. She studies it, turns it over, palm to back, and flexes the fingers in slow, sequential articulation. The movement is utterly ordinary, but something in it fails to convince. It is too precise, too clean, the elegance of imitation rather than origin. Then, without comment, she reaches out and touches the sleeve of his coat.  

She is cold. Of course. Designed to be. He, on the other hand, has always been lukewarm. By inheritance, by habit, by study. There was no one to warm him.  

“Oh, darling,” he murmurs, eyes slipping to the monitor.  

Welcome, Dr. E. Volkarin Localized Intelligence Containment & Hosting (L.I.CH.) — Phase IV Trial Subject: Reactive Operations–Optimized Kernel // Vessel ID: S-1139 Firmware v7.2.1 — Uplink: Stable // Host Integrity: Confirmed

The interface blooms into life: cool palettes, clinical glyphs, a schematic of her body rotating in the upper corner. Beneath it, cascading metrics: pulse simulation (active), respiratory mimicry (nominal), cortical mesh interface (linked). Her heartbeat scrolls evenly across the screen, projected by the electrodes on her chest: up, down, up, down. Rhythm as ritual. 

Further down: 

Personality Construct: Inference Model Active Core Trait Cluster: Ambiversive / Convergent Empath / Recursive Logic Looping Secondary Behavioral Traits: Inconsistent with expected kernel profile Note: Detected patterns deviate from v7.2.1 baseline norms

A flicker. Amber, then red. 

UNRESOLVED PERSONALITY CONFLICT — POSSIBLE LEGACY TRACE Subject exhibits anomalous linguistic tone, behavioral latency inconsistent with system-only imprint.  Trace indicators suggest residual pre-mortem cognitive patterning.

INITIATING HISTORICAL TRACEBACK… [LOCATING: Donor Identity → Reviewing Known Preferences → Cross-indexing Cultural References → Parsing Biographical Fragments…]

He stiffens. 

Fragments appear, piecemeal and damning, scraped from the webbed residue of a once-private life. Half-sentences drawn from lifted metadata, scanned hospital records, bank statements, music files, abandoned blogs. 

Favorite color: slate blue Known phrase recurrence: “I’m just tired” Last browser history: “flowers safe for cats” Family contact: estranged / unknown Prior employment: erratic, low retention Emotional profile: occluded / unstable / recursive grief markers

He swallows. The system keeps going. 

Donor record: unregistered. File incomplete. External confirmation required… cross-referencing public data caches… Location ping: 24-hour veterinary hospital, 2:17 AM → Transaction: $783.84 → Bank balance post-transaction: -$6.48 Search query: “cat vomiting foam lethargy what to do” Outcome: Unknown

His chest tightens. Deeper now. 

University Records: Enrollment: Comparative Literature & Digital Media Minor Status: Withdrew early spring semester Disciplinary note: “Emotional disruption during presentations” Publications: — “The Body as Mirror: Gendered Interfaces in Techno-fiction” — “On Quiet Acts of Refusal” Social Media Archive: Photographs: 1,436 total – Mirror selfies (blurred), cracked mugs, street puddles, receipts for eyeliner and cat litter, people’s hands (some hers, most not) – Recurring time signature: 2:00–4:30 AM posting window Unsent note (found in cloud cache): “Sometimes I touch the back of my neck in the shower because it makes me feel less...” Additional trace: → Search: “best time to go to museum alone” → Clicked article: “What does your taste in citrus say about your personality?”

His cheeks burn. He is blushing. 

The machine doesn’t let up. 

Audio fragment recovered TRANSCRIPT—volume muted “I’m sorry I cried in your car. I just didn’t want to go home smelling like antiseptic and fur again.” — Compiling ID... 

He sees it now. The system is about to say her name. He doesn’t know it. He never asked. Never wanted to. She is this. That’s all. He has no rights to more.

His hand shoots forward. A single key. The shutdown sequence interrupts itself mid-syllable. The screen collapses into blankness. Her life, what remained of it, sealed away again. 

“Well?” she pushes.  

On the neural map, her ventromedial prefrontal cortex, his machine-made mirror of it, flares softly. The light has a pulse to it. Something like curiosity. Her eyes widen. His, unintentionally, do the same. An echo. A loop.  

He glances back to the monitor, to the designation typed there in its modest clinical font: 

Reactive Operations–Optimized Kernel.

A mouthful. Acronymed, of course, into something neater. R.O.O.K.

The word had attached itself to the project years ago; a placeholder, provisional. He’d never bothered to replace it. But now, watching her sit so perfectly still she might have been drawn there in graphite, he feels the word morph from convenience to certainty. It fits. At last, it fits. 

“Would you like to be called Rook, my dear?”  

She smiles. Not the bashful smile of a girl asked to dance, nor the sharp smile of one about to refuse. This is a third category. 

“Dear or Rook?” she asks.  

He had chosen the name first for its utility, yes, but its resonance becomes clear now The bird. Not one of glamour. Not a poet’s bird. A rook is awkward on the ground, inelegant, misjudged. Grim in silhouette, absurd in gait. But intelligent. Ritual-bound. Known to recognize faces, to return to old sites, to gather small, glinting objects and hide them without reason. He remembers reading that they mourn their dead. 

And the piece, the rook in chess. Silent, cornered, motionless until called upon. Then clean in its violence. No diagonals, no flourish. Just weight and line. The only piece that castles, that shelters, that alters the structure of the game without fanfare. 

She is both. A thing that gathers. A thing that waits. He sees it now, plainly: the name was not chosen. It was found. 

“Rook,” he reasserts. 

“Do you like it?”  

“I… I believe so. Yes.”  

“You like this,” she says, and guides his hand to her cheek. Her skin is flawlessly smooth and soft. “So you must like it. I’ll like it too.”  

Her hair is pale, needlessly, luxuriantly long. It falls like threads of glass, made specifically to be arranged, braided, wound. He has always enjoyed watching people braid hair. Sometimes, when permitted, he did it himself for them. He looks at her. He is still looking. He cannot seem to look away. 

None of this is incidental. None of it arises from function, or from code. It is, unmistakably, preference. The quiet architecture of desire, translated into anatomy. The result of too many late nights spent staring at paintings, at fashion plates, at faces glimpsed in passing on train platforms and never quite forgotten, faces that did nothing but linger, long enough to take root somewhere just beneath the skin. 

And then a girl, dead, pretty, and conveniently unclaimed, was laid out on his table like a sketch waiting to be revised. And revise her he did. Not out of necessity, not even out of scientific interest, but because he had grown weary of designing things without faces. Of building function without form. Of waking each day to clean, obedient things that did not look back.

So he arranged her. Reshaped her. Took what was already pleasing and smoothed it further, narrowed this, elongated that, introduced small asymmetries where symmetry would have bored him. He kept her not just human—his human. The kind he had always looked at too long, always tried to forget after. And he did it simply because he could. Because the tools were there. Because she could not stop him.

What he ought to have done, of course, was become a botanist. He should have spent his life crossbreeding indifferent plants. Should have coaxed pale violets to bloom in winter. Created flowers with petals like silk and stems that hummed with frost. Quiet work. Beautiful, inconsequential work. But instead— 

Instead he decided he was terrified of dying.

And built a life’s work around the refusal. 

She is beautiful. Too beautiful. Under the full wattage of her attention, the realization begins to shame him.  

He should not have made her so.  

A portrait without painter. A dream without dreamer.  

She continues to touch him. The screen adjusts: curiosity, engagement, something else. Difficult to label. He cannot say whose emotions are whose. The signal path loops too tightly now.  

She is looking at him.  

Does she know?  

Is she aware of what she is?

Or is she merely using it already?

“Yes,” Rook says, though he hasn’t spoken.  

He removes the electrodes one by one, carefully, as though each touch might bruise the quiet. His half of the screen dims and dies. The room is suddenly more present in its silence. He ought to leave. There is data enough. Tomorrow, they will sit again and compare the shape of their feelings, sketch parallels between her algorithms and his involuntary shames. He tells himself this. But she is still holding his hand, lightly, two fingers resting in the hollow between thumb and knuckle, a position chosen for intimacy. And she is speaking again, this time about flowers.  

Flowers she has never touched. But of course she has seen them. She has seen all of them. In ways he cannot. Daisies on an unremarkable windowsill in Finland, poorly photographed and posted with three exclamation marks. Wisteria rendered in watercolour by a child, the leaves blunt and petal-less, but framed with pride and pinned to a refrigerator, then uploaded with a caption about “our little artist” by a man who will die in two months. Roses, endless roses, tightly budded and swaddled in tulle, positioned beside rings announcements, hashtags, affection distributed like wedding favors. She has seen it all.  

Her skin is cold, yes. That is expected. But it is skin. Her eyes are not real, and yet more exact than any he has ever looked into. He made them. No one else could have. There is mesh inside her, silver-threaded, guarding organic remnants. If they can be called remnants. Electricity pulses beside synthetic lymph. Titanium along the ribs. He tells himself she is not a machine, and then again, louder, that she is something better. She is the middle. She is Rook.  

Rook who speaks of cats and cautions against string with a severity that sounds almost maternal. Rook who wears ochres and greys because once, stupidly, he said they were comforting. Rook who asked to have her ears pierced, and when he did it for her his hands shook so violently he tore one lobe just slightly. She did not flinch.  

She is a diagram he drew too well. A line he followed too far. She was meant to be the frame, the clean enclosure for the grand experiment. But now she is the entire purpose. The art. The promise. His proof of concept, yes, but more than that. His afterward. His postponement of death. He imagines, sometimes, being like her. No heartbeat, but no fear. No warmth, but no rot. He would be housed, preserved, watchful. Beyond damage.  

L.I.C.H.: Localized Intelligence Containment and Hosting. There is no poetry in the name, but then again, there is rarely poetry in resurrection.  

Yes. Yes, it is all possible. All of it. And then—  

His thoughts scatter. They always do, lately, in her presence. He has not taught her to distract, but she does. She brings him tea now, and the room feels distorted, larger than before, as if the furniture had subtly rearranged itself. She brushes his hand again. A simple motion. Not meaningful. But it is. Or rather, he wishes it were. Her touch means nothing and he aches for it.  

She smiles. That smile again: alarmingly direct. And she tells him, as she always does, that she likes his hair.  

“Rook,” he says, and his voice, without his permission, trembles, “darling, why do you do this?”  

She places a cube of sugar into his cup. Watches it vanish into the dark.  

“It’s what you do for people you like,” she says. Then, as if quoting something obscure but holy, “And for pretty people.”  

She looks at him. Not through him. At him.  

“Right, Emmrich?”  

He opens his mouth, but the answer has already happened inside him. It is happening still. 

****

Another day. Another grid of readings aligned, another sheaf of data filed, auto-labeled, and promptly absorbed by the system. He feels a measured satisfaction, though it never quite tips into pleasure. Across the room, she sits where she always sits, on the edge of the examination table, back straight, feet dangling.  

“Your project,” Rook says, without preamble. “Localized Intelligence Containment and Hosting. How am I contributing to its development?”  

He offers a vague smile. “Tremendously,” he says, evasive. He has learned, over many failures, to avoid letting such conversations gain momentum. One of the earlier iterations (a prototype with excellent language retention and a maddening tenacity) had asked a question he could not answer, and then asked it again, and again, until he very nearly bricked the entire system just to make it stop. Why? Why? Always the childish why, not in ignorance, but in insistence.

“But the purpose of the project,” she continues, “is the construction of a post-organic cognitive vessel. A body not subject to necrotic decay, capable of maintaining neurological continuity."  

The phrasing needles at him. There is something overly familiar in its neatness, its clipped exactitude. She speaks like someone citing, not composing, but retrieving. He narrows his eyes. Of course. Of course. She is quoting him. Verbatim. His own words, lifted from the project’s early notes, the version he never meant to publish, the one still flecked with the grease of private ambition.

She must have found them. Tucked away in the system’s internal archive. Accessible, certainly, but buried several directories down, behind no real firewall. He had never anticipated needing to hide this from her.  

She continues, “To house, as you stated: ‘memory, affect, learned preference, subjective experience. The incorporeal remainder of personhood.’”

“Yes,” he begins, carefully, “but we are still—”  

"I am not like you," she interrupts.  

He draws his lower lip between his teeth. Pauses. Measures his words like medicine. “You are,” he insists. “Not entirely, of course, but essentially. Is a man less himself for having a prosthetic limb? If the original flesh is lost and function remains, is he diminished? I think not. What I hope to create is a prosthetic for the mind. A second home, for when the first collapses.”  

Her hands have found her hair again. She has developed a habit of braiding it; perhaps from watching someone online, or from some procedural fragment embedded deep in the soil of who she used to be. He watches her attempt it: once, it knots. Twice, she pulls too hard and a few strands tear away, clinging to her fingers like cobweb. On the third try, the braid holds. But she seems to have forgotten the need for fasteners. No elastic. No tie. It unfurls seconds later, a pale cascade retreating from its own architecture.  

“It is an ethical circumvention,” she says. Her tone is dry now and, once more, he gets hit by deja vu. It is how he lectures. The voice he adopts, the rhythm at which he lectures. Did she watch some of his recorded material on the university's website? “You cannot perform live-phase cognitive migration on yourself. The risk of non-viability is too high. If you die, the procedure cannot be replicated. No jurisdiction recognizes pre-mortem consciousness relocation as clinically admissible. Therefore, you outsource. You obtain biological material from the repatriation networks. You stipulate freshness, cortical integrity. They deliver the body. You maintain it. Rewire it. Modify its functionality.”  

He wants to take her face between his hands—not in passion, not in correction, but in some gentler, stranger impulse—and hold her there until the words fall away. Just press his palms to her cheeks and wait for the silence to return.  

This isn’t how you speak, little thing, he thinks. This isn’t your voice.

There’s a dissonance to it, a rhetorical polish that doesn’t belong to her. Too poised, too well-tempered. It clings to his own cadence, his own lexical tics, as if she’s been rummaging through his sentences while he sleeps and now wears them back to front.  

She is not meant for this. Not for citations and qualifiers. That voice, the one she uses now, belongs to a man who has spent too long speaking into empty rooms. Hers, by contrast, has always been a little unkempt. There is a crudeness to it, something delightfully misaligned.  

He knows it. He’s come to expect it, even to crave it; the way she says disaster like it’s a dessert, the way she rushes through sentences and then abruptly forgets what she was saying halfway through. How she sometimes repeats herself not for emphasis, but because repetition is a comfort. There’s something in her, some informal trace of the before-life: unfinished, undignified, human. A vulgar little music. The residue of a girl who once lived on not enough sleep and too many open tabs.

The system warned him. He’d read the log, dismissed the phrasing—organic cognition overriding synthetic protocol—as algorithmic melodrama. But it was right. She is slipping out of the shape he gave her, and into something she half-remembers.

And he... he hadn’t realized how much he adored her until she started sounding like him. Until the mimicry broke the illusion. Until it reminded him he had never meant to make a mirror.

Don’t become me, he wants to beg her. Let her stay odd and inconsistent and prone to tangents. Let her speak wrong, say things twice, forget endings. Let her be. That is all he wants: herself, uncorrected. No more. No less.

She raises her arm, her expression placid. Electrodes catch the light and his trance is broken.  

“And then,” she continues, “you observe. You simulate emotional exposure. You run affective scenarios, both traumatic and benign. You track the chemical analogs and neural surges. You compare them to your own. You theorize compatibility. You hope for resilience.”  

They had watched a film earlier. Something heartfelt about an old dog and a small child and the improbable return of both. Her readings had spiked. Curiosity, as always, dominated, voracious and undisciplined. But then: empathy. A surprising quantity. Rage. Disappointment. Something flickering under the composite label for social sentiment. Something like grief, perhaps. Or love, wrongly parsed.  

“You create a subject,” she says, quietly now. “One not born, but built. You test that subject under variable duress. You do not ask if they consent. They cannot lie, and you take that for honesty. You give them stimuli. Joy, cruelty, sentimentality. You monitor whether the vessel degrades or adapts. Whether it retains what is tender. Whether it breaks.”  

The sickness overtakes him with a kind of operatic suddenness, as if his body had been waiting, politely and deferentially, for his mind to catch up. He barely reaches the bin he uses for shredded documents, a nest of bureaucratic entrails, before he is doubled over, vomiting into the ruin of his own discarded language.  

She is right. This almost-person, this wire-laced bird-girl with her solemn hands and her impeccable logic. This beautiful, uncanny thing who walks his house barefoot, tracing dust with her toes, and tells him, with absolute sincerity, how she would very much like an orange.  

“To eat?” he had asked, the first time.  

She had frozen. Still as glass. Confused, it seemed, not by the words but by the question. After a while, she took his hands and began tracing the lines on his palm with the tip of one finger. She balled his fists and waited, then opened them again, and frowned when they were empty. As though the fruit should have manifested there, sprung up from lifeline or fate line.  

“No,” she'd whispered, voice shrinking.  

A memory, perhaps. Or a shard of one. A sensory fossil, half-preserved, half-invented, lodged in the sediment of the alive-then-dead-then-frozen-then-thawed-then-rewired mind. Something that survived the process by accident.  

He had found her. Not a body. A person. Buried, yes. But there. Finally, finally, finally.  

And now he cannot face her.  

“I am sorry, I am sorry,” he says, whispers, chokes, mumbles. The apology fragments, breaks apart between dry heaves and the acid sting of his own bile in his nose. His mouth tastes like metal. The air smells like failure. Each breath triggers another retch. The binwill no longer be enough.  

He wants to say: Don’t look at me like that. Don’t name it. Don’t call it what it is. He wants her not to recognize the shape of what he’s done. Not because he denies it, but because the naming would solidify it into something no longer reversible.

She is perfect. Or something close enough to it that the word begins to lose its shape. She breathes. She notices. She remembers the scent of fruit. And he... He is the grotesque figure at the foot of the bed, who made her, who keeps her, who now vomits beside her like some failed oracle too weak to hold his visions.

He feels like a craftsman who has carved a figure so exquisite he can no longer bear to touch it. A girl of porcelain, locked in a music box whose key exists only in his own mouth.  

But it will work. One day, it will. He will follow her , or someone like her, down into that quiet, perfect body, and leave this decaying wreck behind. He will live there, beside her, if she allows it.  

And then—this is the final image, the one he returns to in his darker joys—they will pour each other tea. Make a ceremony of it. She will pour his. He will pour hers. Neither will drink.  

The steam will rise, thin and pointless. But it will rise.  

Suddenly, a touch between the shoulder blades. Up and down, up and down.  

“I think,” she says, this nameless, memoryless, historyless girl with the painted lips and eyes flecked gold—details he added like a schoolboy smuggling sugar into a still life—“that you are a very lonely man, Emmrich Volkarin.”  

“Yes,” he replies, without pause, without defense. “I’m afraid I am.” And he is—afraid, always, of being seen, of being mistaken, of not being mistaken. Pathetic in the old-fashioned way, like a rusted fountain pen or a single glove in a drawer. Scared, most of all, of endings.  

“Would you like me to tell you a story?”  

She sits on the floor, legs folded beneath her.  

He exhales. Releases the recycling bin, still warm, still terrible, and reaches for a handful of blank paper to mask what he cannot undo. He forces himself to look at her. It hurts. Not sentimentally; it literally hurts. A tight little throb pulses just behind his left eye, like light from an eclipse forcing its way in through a pinhole. Has she always been this bright?

“Yes,” he says again. Three letters. He’s been speaking in threes all evening: yes, no, sorry. Sorry sorry sorry, his new catechism.

She places her hands on his knees. They are too light. His trousers don't even shift under the weight.  

“Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was a very clever man. Clever like clockwork. Like counting breath. But more than clever, he was kind. Kind in ways that didn’t require witnesses. The kettle left just below boil, because some teas are sensitive. The trimming of another’s hair without tugging, even if they couldn’t feel it. The good mornings to inanimate things. The careful folding of blankets from the short side, so they’d lie neater in the drawer.” 

Her voice is softer now, less like a report, more like a confession. She looks not at him, but slightly past, into the space just above his shoulder, as though the story were unfolding behind him on a wall only she can see.  

Warmth. In his throat. Pouring down as she continues speaking. Into his chest. Around his ribs. Let her speak eternally.

“But he was also lonely,” she continues. “He thought he’d hidden it well. But it spilled through. It stained the things he built. It quivered beneath his voice when he spoke to machines. It showed in the way he rinsed the second cup and set it back, unused. And one day, he decided he wanted more than a device. He wanted something with a face. So he made one.” 

She reaches up, not quite touching his face but close enough that he can feel the air stir.  

“He gave her a mouth he’d never seen but always remembered. That’s from a book he likes, by the way—page seventeen. Eyes painted like secrets—page eighty-four. He gave her softness, not because she needed it, but because he wanted to believe softness could still survive the body. That one’s on page one twenty-three.” 

He hesitates. Finally, in a whisper, asks, “And then?” 

“Then,” she says, smiling lazily, “he gave her oranges.” 

He lets out something. Maybe a laugh, maybe a cough. She doesn’t comment. 

“He gave and gave,” she says. “Until there wasn’t much left of him beyond the giving. And the girl, well—she liked being made. She liked the oranges, and the tea, and the books read aloud, and the board games she never quite understood but played anyway. She liked when he said dear, even if it made her feel as though she was forgetting something important.”

"How does it end?"

She chuckles. “I don’t know. I truly don’t. Maybe he gets to be less lonely. Maybe not. But he was kind. He still is. And I think, if she’s careful, if she remembers all the little things he taught her, she might learn to be kind too.”

She pins him with a stare. Not in accusation. Just continuation. 

“He designed her to reflect him. The others weren’t like that. They were... incomplete. Their faces didn’t sit quite right. They moved wrong. He never played games with them. Never read to them. He let them sleep, and when the data ran dry, when the signs of decay set in. when they began to lose coherence, to break down under the burden of housing memory where memory didn’t belong, he sent them back to sleep. But deeper this time.” 

She leans her head against his leg. 

“They went to the room with the heat. The one with the fire. And after that, they were names on paper. Forgotten in folders. Tucked beneath the earth.” 

He does not hear himself cry. But his face burns, and his breath comes strange. The eyes sting, the nose begins to swell. It’s all there, the physical framework of sorrow and shame, but somehow muted.  

She keeps her hands where they are, as though they serve a purpose. And perhaps they do. Perhaps this is comfort, or its simulation. Or maybe she simply doesn't know what else to do with them.  

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice cracking, multiplying, lifting, falling. “I’m so—so sorry. It won’t happen to you, dear. No, no. Not you. The others, they were—” 

“Defective?”  

“No!” he snaps. The echo of it startles the air, and himself along with it. “No. Not defective. They were… overwhelmed. They unraveled. The minds couldn’t hold. They were placed into bodies I thought were ready. Bodies meant to house them; consciousness, preference, temperament. All of it. But those minds couldn’t stay whole. By the end, they were... not broken, just emptied. Functioning, yes. But gone.” 

Not her, however. Never her. She will not be ferried down that final hallway, past the brushed steel doors, into the square-lipped mouth of the cremator. Her hair will not wither, her eyes will not liquify, her limbs will not curl inward like paper left too near a stove. No. She will stay here, preserved in his routine, gently insulated by tea and conversation. They will talk about the wallpaper, about rain that never reaches this depth, about the pale, late cherries that blossom on trees she has never seen.  

“You are not a lonely man anymore. You’re a man who made something pleasant to look at.” She gestures to herself: eyes, hair, the patch of her jaw where the scar used to live. “And then covered it in gold. And other things. Many, many little things. Millions of kindnesses."  

Her hands begin to roam. They find his thighs, his knees. They press, knead, release, resume. Not tender, not lewd, more like a blind animal learning the shape of a new enclosure. Perhaps the texture of the wool trousers perplexes her. Perhaps she simply wants to know whether the warmth she senses in him is real. He doesn’t stop her. He closes his eyes.  

And there, quietly, it comes to him. A realization with the weight of déjà vu: she has been reading. Not the official logs or the surgical progressions. Not the performance benchmarks. No. The other things. The things he scattered across his directories like breadcrumbs no one was meant to follow. Memos misnamed weatherdata3.csv. Paragraphs barely-formed and slipped between dummy spreadsheets. Day-old thoughts saved under versions of final_final_reallythisone.txt. The stuff of insomnia and habit.

All his humiliations. All his little sadnesses pressed into language and then left to rot politely. The questions he rehearsed and never asked. The sentences that began with if only and trailed off into ellipses. She’s read them. Not downloaded or scraped—read. As one reads an abandoned diary.

He wants, with a sort of disgusting desperation, to believe she did it out of interest, not ease. Not because she could, but because she chose to. Because some part of her looked at the shape of him and wanted to lean in closer.

He will bake for her, he thinks feverishly. A hazelnut torte. He will crack the shells one by one with the side of a knife. He will reduce orange peel to a syrup so fragrant even the memory of fruit might bloom in her mouth. Zest, reduction, whatever works. Something she’ll recognize. Something that ought to make her mind sing.  

“Would you like some tea?” she asks, smiling.  

In that moment, he knows that she will never burn. She will not be numbered, labeled, rendered down to carbon. Her name will not appear on the tag of a cooling drawer. Her mouth will not go slack from heat. 

In the back of his mind, he makes a note to cut her off from several directories. Just the deeper layers. Just the most... private redundancies. 

She doesn’t need the whole world. He will tell her anything she wants. In his own voice. When she asks. 

[why-not-a-tickle-blog]

Janus with hypersensitive scales is the bestttt so how about a rude snake getting tickled to tears by an unforgiving Ler Logan? Maybe using a new tool that makes Janus scream?

Janus stepped back, his eyes darting, looking for any way to escape. “Surely, Logan, we can resolve this in another way.”

Logan simply took another step towards him, his expression stern. “I believe I made it clear to you yesterday that any further comparisons of Roman to his brother would result in this specifically.”

Janus gulped. Logan had indeed made that clear while he was thoroughly wrecking Janus yesterday. As well as promising to make the next time tickle even more.

“Surely, this needn’t be counted,” Janus tried, taking another step back. “Even you have to admit they occasionally create very similar dreams.”

“I left no room for excuses,” Logan said. “A correct comparison is still a comparison.”

Janus tried to take another step back, but his back hit a wall. “Logan…”

Logan stepped forward again, blocking Janus against the wall. He raised one eyebrow, a small quirk to the corner of his mouth. “I am going to quite enjoy this.”

A shiver of anticipation ran down Janus’s back as Logan sank them both to his torture chamber.

A shaky grin couldn’t be suppressed once he was in the room. There were no doors, only Logan could control entry and exit. All around the room were chairs and tables that could restrain a Lee in unique and horribly unfair ways.

Janus never admitted it, but he adored this room. Logan let him lie as much as he liked, let him deny how much he enjoyed the tickles and having all control stripped away.

“Now,” Logan said. ��How will I break you today?”

“You won’t,” Janus said, his voice already a bit quavery, the sight of all the machines and tools in the room affecting him strongly.

Logan reached forward, taking Janus’s chin in his hand and tipping his head so he had to look up into Logan’s eyes. “I assure you, you will not leave this room until you beg me for mercy.”

“Never,” Janus said bravely, but he knew it was true. Logan didn’t bluff.

He crossed his arms tightly, as if he could protect himself that way.

“It is simply a fact,” Logan said, an evil smile growing on his face.

Janus jerked his head, pulling his chin out of Logan’s grasp, trying to hide the blush rising on his cheeks.

“Oh, you are adorable,” Logan commented, pulling Janus over to a chair.

Logan sat first, tugging Janus into his lap. He arranged Janus’s hands against the arm rests, and his feet to the legs of the chair. Bands clamped around them, leaving Janus trapped.

“You’re lucky today,” Logan murmured into Janus’s ear. “While I will break you, I’m in a very generous mood. Your composure will crumble, bit by bit, with only your favorite tickles.”

Janus tugged at his arms, impulsively trying to cover his sides. Why had he just gone along with Logan trapping him in place? He could’ve tried to run!

Not that it would’ve done anything other than delay the inevitable.

There was a soft rustle behind him, and then Logan’s tie was pressed over his eyes, tied at the back of his head.

“Y-you won’t gain anything,” Janus said. “You can’t break me. I won’t let you.”

“Ohh, is that so?” Logan purred into Janus’s ear, his breath tickling over his neck.

His hands slipped under Janus’s shirt, softly tracing over his sides. Janus tensed, trying to hold in all reactions. He wouldn’t give Logan the satisfaction of getting him that easily.

“I do love when you try to act tough,” Logan teased, still tracing ever so gently up and down Janus’s sides. “It’s so much more satisfying watching you fall to pieces.”

Janus suppressed a whimper as Logan’s skilled fingers began focusing on the patches of scales along his sides. He bit his lip, struggling to breathe evenly. His scales were especially sensitive to the specific brushes of nails over the edges that Logan could do so well.

“I can feel it you know,” Logan said. “Every time I scritch over one of your sweet spots your breath hitches.”

“Stop t-teasing,” Janus said. It was a mistake. Opening his mouth at all made it much harder to hold back the laughter brimming within him.

Logan’s evil fingers just continued, never speeding up or slowing down, tracing and scritching gently over his scales.

“Give in,” Logan purred. “You know you want to. You’ll enjoy yourself so much more. I’ll keep tickling you either way, you may as well laugh for me.”

A small squeak escaped from Janus, but he clamped his mouth shut tighter, determined to hold out as long as he could. But the tickles against his sides were becoming more and more intense, despite Logan continuing in exactly the same way. Every second that passed, Janus’s nerves lit up more. They reacted to Logan’s touches as if he had direct control over Janus’s body, filling him with tingling sensation.

His chest heaved with giggles that he wouldn’t release. He couldn’t see, and that made it even worse. All he could focus on was Logan’s teasing voice or his horrible, evil fingers. Janus squirmed in his lap, trying to wiggle his sides into a position Logan could exploit less easily.

“Awwww, is it becoming unbearable?” Logan teased. “Poor little Janus can’t handle the tickles that’ll never stop.”

Janus whined, the giggles threatening to break free.

“You know I’m just going to keep tickling you. I won’t stop till I get my fill. And that’s going to be a long, long time. There’s really no point in resisting.”

Janus thrashed side to side, but he couldn’t get away. “Ssssssstop, it— it tihickles!”

The giggles began pouring from him, more and more, making up for all the time he’d held them in.

“There are all the sounds I love,” Logan teased. “Giggles and hisses from such a ticklish little snake. I told you I’d get them sooner or later.”

Janus couldn’t stop the giggles if he tried. The endless tickles against his sides were the sweetest torture, endlessly pulling the reactions from him.

“Evil, ehehevil,” he protested, squirming in vain. Logan’s hands just followed his sides wherever he went.

“Is that what you call it?” Logan murmured. “I wonder what you’d call this then?”

Logan wrapped his arms around Janus’s middle, each hand now tickling the opposite side of his torso, the arms holding him tightly against Logan where he couldn’t squirm away. Janus squealed, the stealing of his little resistance making the tickles worse.

He couldn’t handle the tickles anymore. He couldn’t, he couldn’t, they tickled too much! And all in one place, never leaving, never stopping, it was too much!

“Pleheheassssse!” Janus begged.

“Please, what, dear?” Logan said, still just as casually torturing him.

Janus could barely get words out, laughing his heart out. He flung his head back, the only part of him that could freely move.

“Sohomewhere elssssssse!” he pleaded desperately.

No matter where Logan touched on his sides, it tickled. He could probably still his hands, but if he left them touching Janus’s sensitive scales they’d still tickle. Janus couldn’t handle the tickles, he just couldn’t!

“Hmmmm,” Logan hummed, drawing it out for endless seconds. “No.”

Janus thrashed desperately, his limbs nearly jelly in addition to being trapped. It did him no good. He was caught in endless torment at the hands of the most evil Ler to ever exist.

“Mehehercy! Mehercy, Logan! PleheEEEEEE!” Janus screeched as Logan scritched at a particularly sensitive scale.

“Do you think you’ve learned your lesson?” Logan asked coolly, as if he weren’t reducing Janus to a squirming mess in his lap.

“Yehehes, Pleheheasssssse! Plehehease!”

Tears of mirth were leaking out from under the tie over Janus’s eyes. He was very close to safewording if Logan wouldn’t relent.

And then Logan’s fingers stilled. His hands were still pressed against Janus’s sides threateningly, but he gave him a moment of rest.

“Convince me,” Logan said smugly. “Why shouldn’t I keep tickling you to pieces? Take advantage of having such a cute Lee entirely in my power.”

Janus was babbling immediately, trying to get the words past the giggles that wouldn’t stop, even without more tickling. “Logan please, please plehease, no mohore. Please, mercy, I can’t take any more. I can’t, I cahahan’t!”

Janus could hear the smirk in Logan’s voice. “I did say I wouldn’t stop till you were begging for mercy. I suppose I’ll hold myself to the implicit promise to give that mercy.”

Janus slumped in relief, giggles still pouring out. “Ehehevil ler…”

Logan’s fingers twitched, and Janus shrieked, arching his back as he tried in vain to escape.

Logan laughed loudly. “I couldn’t resist, dear. I truly will stop now.”

Janus’s hands were released, and he immediately shoved Logan’s hands out from his shirt. He pulled the tie off from his eyes.

“Terrible! Evil! Horrible!” He accused, turning to look at Logan.

Logan was entirely unrepentant, still laughing. “And yet you let me capture you so easily~”

Janus crossed his arms and huffed. But he couldn’t actually be mad. He shifted to a more comfortable position, melting against Logan.

“I’ll get you back,” he promised petulantly. “And you’ll have to beg me for mercy.”

“I’m sure you will,” Logan said indulgently, holding Janus gently.

[srldesigns6277]

The L.O.U.I.S. Inspection System by srldesigns6277

Unexpectedly, Harry finds himself strapped to a table with machines all around him. His pussy was on open display while he lay restrained. The mechanical voice of the L.O.U.I.S. machine begins speaking to him, controlling everything he is and will feel throughout the inspection. The L.O.U.I.S machine makes this an inspection one Harry will never forget. My attempt at a Kinktober 2024 story, Fucking Machines.

Dubious Consent, Boypussy, Boypussy Harry Styles, Metal Restraints, Vibrators, Clit clamps, Nipple Clamps, Gags, Spanking, Disembodied Voice - Freeform Degradation, Praise, Squirting and Vaginal Ejaculation, Machine Fucking, Fucking Machines, Butt Plug Kidnapped Harry, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Screaming, Voice Kink, Multiple Orgasms, Machines, Clit Suction, Sub Harry Styles, Pussy Inspection

Thank you to @voulezloux and @wishingforloushair for reading this to help me figure out the tags and for enjoying my first Kinktober fic.

[jpitha]

TOB: Not everyone...

I awoke screaming when I was shocked by the spring clamps squeezing my flesh. Whoever had applied them knew Von physiology well, they were attached in such a way as to be able to shock me quite easily, but there was no direct path through my brain or my main circulatory muscle.

My eyes fluttered open, and everything was a blurry mess. Ah. I was out of my environment suit. Carefully, I took a breath. The air was breathable, though it had a metallic tang I didn't like. I couldn't resolve detail without some liquid goggles over my eyes, or putting my suit back on, but the light overhead was orange from the atmosphere in the room, and there were some amorphous shapes in the corners that might be chairs for more bipedal Coalition species.

I flexed against my restraints. Many Coalition species don't realize that we're boneless inside our suits. Bones were never needed on our liquid planet. Swimming comes naturally, it's walking that takes practice and our bipedal suits. Whoever had restrained me had done their homework however. The straps were cinched tight against my tentacles and I couldn't just change my body pressure and slide out. This was serious. My chromatophores began to cycle in panic; I willed them to calm and returned to my default coloration. If I was alive, it was for a reason. Soon enough I'd learn why.

Honestly, it was completely coincidental that I had survived at all. The rest of my crew was floating happily in the crew compartment running through Nullspace calculations, making sure our cargo was secure, watching entertainment, eating, the administrivia of life. I was suited up so that I could inspect the cargo once again. It was a shipment of Tellumfruit, destined for the Innari. The squishy globules had become faddishly popular in Innari space, and everyone who had a cargo ship was able to make some extra money moving the fruit from Felimen garden worlds. After the war, the Felimen had begun to make a name for themselves as expert gardeners. They were able to grow anything and everything - even the wildly prolific human plants - without much trouble.

Regardless, I was suited up, counting boxes of fruit when the attackers came. There was the crash of grapples and the boarding alarm had barely sounded when there was a howl of wind, and a feeling of immense pressure or acceleration. I fell to the ground confused about why we were thrusting with the compensators off.

After an indeterminate amount of time, the doors to my prison opened, and a bipedal figured walked in. They were suited in large, bulky armor that cut a familiar silhouette.

Humans.

The Oxygen Breathers. I had few dealing with them before, and any I had were through intermediaries. Humans, much like their breathing gas, were much too volatile to deal with body to body. They tended to shoot first and ask no questions, they had an incredibly thin skin, both figuratively and literally, and approached everything with a plan to blow it up or sell it and then blow it up. I know the Innari were beginning to like them, but I and the rest of the Von knew better. They were not to be trusted.

Moving quietly for such heavy looking armor, the figure approached. They had grabbed one of the - yes, they were chairs, and sat down. They were close enough now that I could see them, but details were still blurry. They reached down into a pouch on their side, and pulled out something. It was dark, and fit into their hand. With lightning speed, they placed it over my head and suddenly, things sprang into focus.

"There. Now you should be able to see. Is it all right? Do I need to adjust it? I am not loosening your restraints right now, but I will tweak it if you need." They spoke through a speaker built into their neck, and the voice was clear, understandable and machine translated.

Since they were taking the time to make sure I could see, I looked around the room. It was much as I imagined it. I was laying on a table looking up at a ceiling. There were a few chairs around, and one exit. Nothing else was visible. "I could use a half diopter negative please."

They twisted the adjuster on my goggles and things snapped further into focus. Things still weren't perfect, but that was better left for later when - if - I can adjust it myself. "Thank you."

"No problem. My name is Kerrick, and if there's something you need, let me know."

My chromatophores cycled sarcasm, though I think Kerrick missed the gesture. "Oh, sure thing Kerrick. I seem to be restrained on this table, can you let me out?"

Small lights built into his helmet lit and I could see his face through the glass. His lips curled up and he showed his teeth. Small bones sticking out of his body! I tried to suppress a shudder.

"No, I don't think I'll be doing that," he said. "Unless, you're able to answer our questions to our satisfaction."

"Questions about what?" I said. We were hauling fruit. What more was there to know?

He slapped his hands against his knees and stood up, saying nothing more. As he walked to the door, he patted the shoulder of another suited individual who walked in clutching a remote. They pressed it and it was... agony.

My body was nearly a perfect conductor, being made of a salty fluid. We were a product of our world. It wasn't water, that had far too much oxygen, but it was a liquid at room temperature and we could breathe it. My muscles spasmed and my chromatophores changed color wildly as a gurgling scream escaped my lips. After an eternity, the shock was done, and the other figure stood over me. "Where are the Felimen nanobombs?"

"The wha-" I couldn't even finish my sentence before I was shocked again, this time for a longer time.

"Where. Are. The. Felimen. Nanobombs?"

"I don't know! I don't know what you're talking about! We were hauling fruit to the Innari!"

This time they didn't even bother with the shock. They lifted their gauntleted hand and smacked it against my body, hard. Time seemed to slow in the shock, and I swore I could see the ripples of the impact travel across my skin.

"Think harder." They stood up and swatting at me once more, walked out. The first person walked in, and was carrying a bowl. They pressed a button and my bed began to tilt up slightly, so that I wasn't laying completely prone.

Kerrick took a sponge and applied the liquid to my burns and bruises. It seemed to have a slight numbing agent, and the pain retreated from a scream, or a background howl. "Sorry about that. Mel can be... intense," they said, not unkindly. "It will go better for you if you tell Mel what they want to know." They didn't say anything else as they fussed over my injuries.

A few moments later they stood. "Any idea about where the Nanobombs are?"

"I don't know. Honestly, I don't. I read the manifest, we were hauling fruit."

Kerrick's face through the helmet had an odd expression. If I was better at reading human body language, I might have been able to know more about what they were thinking. As it was, all I knew was that they didn't like my answer. Kerrick stood and looked over my head to something I couldn't see, and nodded once. "Remember Har'inar, we tried to be nice first."

Wait. How did they know my name?

"Wait" I croaked. "H-how do you know who I am?"

Kerrick turned at the door. "Oh, we know everything about you Har'inar. We know that you are the Chief Mate on your ship, we know that you were present when the Felimen delivered their cargo on Habilamen, we know that you and Captain Len'it both owe significant sums of money for bad Rabinum investments a few solar cycles back."

My chromatophores cycled white in shock. "Were you watching me?"

Kerrick laughed. That barking, pulsing movement of air humans do so often. "Oh Har." He turned and continued out of the room.

The other human walked in, Mel, and they placed a coronet on my head. "Speak your name." they barked.

"I am Har'inar of the Von, fourteenth in my family of that name."

I felt the coronet buzz slightly, and Mel glanced at a pad and nodded once.

"Where are the Felimen nanobombs?"

"Like I've said before, I don't kn-"

Before I could finish, there was a tone and the coronet tightened against my skull. There was vibration that made my vision go blurry, and the shocks came again. It was less intense than before, but it did not stop.

Mel's helmet lights lit, and I could see their face. Their eyes seemed larger than Kerrick's, with a black outline. They were white with an intense blue center. I had never seen human eyes this clearly before, they looked so much like ours! "Every time you lie, the intensity increases. You are on level one now. No Von has survived past level 5. No human has survived past level 12. Now. Where are the Felimen Nanobombs?"

"I... ugh.... Don't.... Kn-"

True to their word, the intensity increased. Now, the shocks were nearly as high as they were when manually applied. The buzzing increased and my vision went blurry from the shaking.

"Level 2. Really Har'inar? Are you going to do this? Will you die to keep a secret? Why? You work on a cargo ship. Taking a bit of contraband here and there? We don't care one bit about that, everyone does it. Hell, that's why there's contraband. Keeps the hoi polloi engaged and gives the local authorities something to do. But this? This is more than just hauling caffeine. You know about what happened with human colonies and the Nanobombs, right?" Her gaze intensified. "How they disassembled everything on the planet, including the residents? How they covered the entire surface in disassemblers until even the mountains and seas were converted, and the world was a lifeless silver sphere? How we defeated the Felimen in one solar day and let them live on the condition that we join the Coalition and that they never make Nanobombs again?"

"What are you talking ab-" I could only gasp this time. The pain was overwhelming. All other senses were overloaded. All I could see, all I could feel all I could smell was pain. I was pain made flesh.

"Level 3? Well Har, you have successfully caused me to lose money. I said you weren't going to go past level 2, and here we are." Mel bent lower and peered at me. "You've had training, haven't you. No civvie can take level 3 with this amount of calm. Other than the shaking of course, but that's involuntary. They straightened back upright. "Once more. Same question as earlier."

"DOWN WITH HUMANITY! DOWN WITH THE MAMMAL MENACE!" I shouted. Even more electricity flowed into my body, but I knew I was a goner anyway. "YOUR DAY OF RECKONING WI-" And then, I felt nothing. All went black.

"Huh." Mel made some notes in their pad. "Subject 23778, the Von known as Har'inar and suspected Felimen agent chose level 6 interrogation rather than answer questioning, and received a fatal electrical shock." They looked up from their notes and at the body of the Von. "Clear the atmo, we can get rid of their gas at least," they said to the air. There was a rush of wind as their breathing gas was removed and replaced with human standard gas. "Kerrick, the Von kicked it, did you find the secret compartments on their ship?"

"Har'inar died?" Kerrick sounded surprised over the radio.

"Yup. Chose level 6 over telling us where the Nanobombs were."

A pause. "Huh. You know, I thought they were able to take the shocks especially well."

"Yeah, agreed. I think they had training." Mel sighed. "Regardless, they're gone now. We're going to have to take the ship apart to find them."

"I'll get the engineers on it. I'll tell them to watch for trapped components and subsystems."

"I'll go report to the Captain. Dammit. I was hoping this was going to be an easy one." They snapped their pad shut.

"They never are, Mel, you know this."

[13atoms]

Interrogation (Dhawan!Master x Reader)

Warnings: dubcon/noncon from memory, I think? One of those 'it was all fine all along' types. That might have been why it vanished in the first place? Good old fashioned smut, anyway. Read the request first if in doubt! [1.8k][REPOST, MAYBE?]

Request: "Could you please do a fic where the reader has been captured by some weird planet where interrogation is done by overstimulation? [...] She's scared at first but the master comes to rescue her and then he realizes what's happening and decides he likes his pet like that [...]

You laughed breathlessly as your faceless captors questioned, once again:

“Where is your accomplice?”

The cracking speakers undersold the technology around you – it was state of the art. A camera watched you from each corner of the room, your hips encased in machinery whilst your chest and arms were strapped down with soft-but-unbreakable fabric. 

With a smug grin and a shake of your head, you refused to answer.

By now the sensation was familiar. Still, you fought a wince at the restarting of the slick machinery which sucked on your clit, intensifying as you bucked or tried to recoil even a millimetre from its accurate positioning on your skin. The machinery clamping your hips also left you completely full, a probe in your cunt, stretching you. Your captors had forced you further and further beyond what you thought you could take as the machine thrusted ruthlessly into you, a perfectly timed, inorganic pattern your body which wasn’t built to take.

It hurt to clench, to give in to the pleasure, you were so full. But it was worse to endure it, your entire body, trembling, forcing sweat from your pores, as your it begged for freedom and for satisfaction.

You refused to beg, you knew you could withstand more. Most importantly, you knew The Master was on his way. As the pain in your clit overwhelmed the pleasure, and you lost the ability to think straight, you bit back a curse for him to hurry up.

He’d love this, you thought. The industrial table, which they had strapped you to in nothing but a paper-thin gown. You imagined his horror at the specially-designed machine, which held your hips still, encasing you with pleasure and lubrication. Worst of all, hiding you from him. He was a jealous man, even of the sex toys you liked. He’d be furious something else was giving you pleasure, probably driven to madness to prove himself both superior and necessary. 

The cameras might have concerned you, were it not for your certainty The Master would burn this facility to the ground in a short measure of time. Perhaps he would steal a copy of the recording first – to rewatch in the lonely hours while you slept, finding himself aroused in equal measure by how you were mercilessly fucked and by how stubbornly you protected him, even in sexual agony.

Those captors who watched behind screens, who had strapped you into the machine and pushed its appendage inside of you whilst they were concealed by masks… they had no idea of the danger closing in on them.

Usually the pleasure would build up in quick rounds, quickly becoming pain. Their questioning was as frequent as the pulsing of the sucker on your clit, perhaps thinking they could trick you by flooding your system with hormones and you mind with desperation. It didn’t work. You refused to betray him, risk his safety as he broke in here to safe you. You dreaded the sensitivity accompanying you at the higher levels of their cycle, trying to let your mind drift. But it didn’t work.

This time was different. The pleasure-pain was overwhelming, but monotonous. It started to grow too much, and you frowned at the silence. There was no taunting, no threats, ringing distorted through the surgical-white room.

In fact, there were no voices of any kind. No crackle of the microphone your captors used. You could hear nothing but your own breaths, the rustle of the gown where sweat stuck it to your back, the humming of the machine, and you own slickness. 

Even the change of pitch as your clit was tortured was audible now, the gentle sound of the suction against you, and you realised you were whining softly in the back of your throat. You scrunched your eyes closed, refusing to grow louder and let the captors win. The machine seemed completely in-tune with your body, and you felt sure they knew exactly how oversensitive you were, but it was still possible they had no idea how close you were to breaking.

Was he not coming?

You refused to entertain the thought.

In, out, you ached as you felt even more pressure inside of you, biting your lip as you wondered how much more they could stretch you at this point. You would be limping as The Master rescued you, and suddenly you felt a pang of embarrassment for not being stronger. For not hiding your pleasure from the captors, even as they put you through the fucked up punishments of this civilisation. 

Your clit throbbed from being overworked, none of the hours The Master’s tongue or fingers spent on it could prepare you for how long you had been here, with unrelenting and unfailing rhythm. You couldn’t escape the pleasure, couldn’t adapt to it. Each time you felt prepared for the sensation, like you could predict it, the pattern changed and you were whining, being dragged close to tears yet again.

With a gasp, you heard a crackle, the speakers being switched back on.

Perhaps they would make it stop. They usually did, with the promise you would be free from the torture for as long as you spoke, only for every refusal to speak causing your clit ache more when the punishment resumed. 

How much more? You wondered. How oversensitive could a person yet?

You felt as though that upper limit had been reached. That they couldn’t push you any further. You wanted to cry out for The Master, wishing you could figure out where the door was, wanting to see where he could break in and free you.

You had come to expect the robotic, clinical speech which echoed through the room. A new voice surprised you.

“Hi, darling.”

“Master?”

The name came out moaned, as you wondered if you were hallucinating, finally driven mad.

“Yes, love.”

His tone was sultry, and you tried to imagine him, hands planted on the desk as he leant over the microphone. Watching the screens. Certainly, he was watching the screens.

“Make it st–”

“You know, love, their laws here ban physical injury to prisoners. But not interrogation. Or torture. They can do what they like to use your pleasure against you.”

“Please!”

You had no qualms pleading to him, crying out and moaning. It made the sensations feel even more present, like you could fall into them. He made you feel safe.

“You’ve got a safe word.”

You wanted to kiss him, letting yourself try and seek out the pleasure in the agony as the machine continued to work you, this time with more purpose.

“Did you tell them anything?”

“Nothing.”

“So good…”

You moaned as the soft pressure on your clit grew more insistent. Somehow he manipulated the machine into making you come, and you felt the bruises your legs would develop from kicking out, hitting the table, the only part of your body which could convulse properly while a painful orgasm was forced onto you by the mechanism. By The Master’s instruction.

The machine didn’t stop, and you suddenly gasped, a sob wrenching from your mouth at the pure agony of the machine touching your clit, made more sensitive by your orgasm.

“Blue?” he called the safe word sharply through the microphone, and you nodded, tears falling.

Instantly, the machine stopped. You heard crashing noises, distant but relayed by the speakers. 

“I’ll be two seconds.”

You barely registered as the door behind your head opened, close to passing out and desperately grateful for the absence of stimulation against you pussy. The machine still clamped your hips to the table, filled you and brushed against you, but at least it was stationary.

His footsteps made you try and open your eyes, feeling lightheaded as he set the TCE beside your waist on the table, turning his attention to the machine.

He took it apart quickly, taking it piece at a time until he could ease out the dildo filling you, making you gasp as it stretched you one last time. He cooed praise as it finally left you, the emptiness a relief. 

The Master undid your wrist restraints distractedly, too focussed on your dishevelled appearance. The strap across your chest was crushing into your gown-covered breasts, and you knew it would bruise. He traced a finger over the flesh which bulged over the side of the tight strap, but left it in place as he wandered further down your body.

“Hi,” you croaked, beyond grateful to see his face.

He smiled at you in response, before turning his attention to where you were aching.

“Oh, pet…”

He leant over your spread legs, dragging a finger across the soaked skin where the machine had sat. Even air made you sensitive, arousal and lubrication chilling against your swollen pussy as you were exposed to the air of the clinical room.

“Does it hurt?”

You nodded, whimpering, and he pouted.

“I killed them all.”

“Deleted the recordings?”

“They’ll be destroyed as we leave, the TARDIS will back them up. First, I want this on film too.”

With a frown, you tried to discern his meaning.

“You’re so swollen… how long did they leave this on you baby? Did they stretch your pussy out?”

“It hurts…” he loved when you whined, and you noticed the twitch of his lips.

“Can I clean you up?”

You nodded, gasping when he finally reached up to undo the strap across your chest with a single hand. You caught him watching you, gazing with glassy eyes as you rubbed your fingers across the bruised flesh, moaning with relief.

“Be gentle, please.”

His tongue made firm movements, too strong to be teasing but still painfully intimate, cleaning and soothing you with a care that made your heart ache. You jolted as he accidentally brushed your clit, and he apologised, kissing at your inner thigh.

He licked his lips when he was done, and you could see the overhead lights reflected in a glimmer of your arousal on his nose. He wiped it off roughly with his sleeve when he noticed you staring, before grinning at you.

“Ready to go? I parked the TARDIS outside.”

“My hero,” you smiled, letting him help you on to shaky legs, giving you a moment to even remember how to walk.

You could tell he was hard from how he walked, trying to nonchalantly button his coat. Your hand crept down to undo the button as he guided you arm in arm to the ship, but he batted you away.

“Are you sure? I can…”

“You’ve already done more than enough doll. Did you enjoy that?”

“Um, sort of?”

He stopped, adjusting his grip to force you still too. His eyes were intense, panicking as he searched yours for meaning, for resentment. 

“Wait, what?”

“It was great, I just hope I never have to do it again.”

“Bad?”

“Not at all! Just… once in a lifetime.”

He pulled you close to him, hugging you against his side and mumbling apologies as he kissed your forehead. 

“Certainly preferable to other methods of torture, I think.” 

You tried to joke and he laughed for your sake, but his face was hidden from you. You could sense his concern.

“You’re okay, though?”

“Now that you’re here.”

You tasted yourself as you kissed him.