#category: picking and peeling

[artficlly]

lessons in lovemaking [part two]

marvel au bucky x blackwidow!reader You and Bucky Barnes go undercover as a married couple, but when a fake kiss gets too real, he unexpectedly finishes in his pants—leaving you both stunned.

Warnings: 18+ content minors dni, smut, fem reader, dry humping, blindfolding, grinding, soft dom vibes reader, soft sub vibes bucky, bucky is touch starved, clothed ejaculation, vague mentions of previous sa, ex black widow reader, very consensual, safe words, kissing, bucky barnes needs a hug, if you squint, there's some plot, fluff, angst, bickering, reader is lowkey depressed, mentions of past violence, death and war, no use of y/n, lmk if i've missed anything

Word Count: 8.6k

A/N: hey guys, i'm literally so nervous posting this... it's been sitting in my drafts for like a month now and i finally worked up the courage to post after spending a couple hours editing :( i'm literally scheduling this to post at like 3am my time so i'm not awake when it goes live i'm so anxious bahaha. the start of this part is a bit slow, pls hold on because theres some light smut and angst at the end. i have plans for further parts that'll look more into the other avengers finding out and the development between bucky and readers relationship and their shared healing. sorry for any typos - not proof read.

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It was only on rare occasions that the full team of Avengers (and co.) were in the same room. A momentous historical moment, in fact, normally reserved for two particular occasions:

The world was ending (in some gloriously diabolical way that usually involved aliens, interdimensional warlords, or some ancient, forgotten god with a vendetta) or

Tony Stark was throwing another one of his famously exclusive penthouse parties (which, despite being ‘exclusive,’ still managed to include half of New York—most of whom showed up just to gawk at the Avengers like a travelling circus act sent to entertain them personally.)

Today, it seemed, was neither of those occasions. Thor and the rest of the Asgardians—Bruce Banner included, oddly enough—were busy rebuilding after the destruction of Asgard. Wanda and Vision were off playing happy family elsewhere, and Clint was busy with his own quickly expanding family. The others, agents, specialists, the people whose names you never bothered to remember, were preoccupied with their own missions. Which left you here, filed neatly into the elusive extra category. Not quite an Avenger. Too valuable to be let loose, too unpredictable to be fully trusted.

You leant back in your chair, only half-listening to the conversation beside you. The skin around your thumbnail was raw. You picked at it absentmindedly, peeling back the edge where it had already started to flake, a sting flaring along the nail. You were thinking—too much, maybe—so you let them talk, let yourself disappear as they debated which bar had the strongest drinks and the least pathetic men.

The three of you were early. By some miracle, morning training had ended ahead of schedule. Natasha had wiped the floor with you, to the point where it probably would’ve been more productive to stay on the mat rather than waste your energy hauling yourself back up.

“What do you think?” It took you a second to realise Yelena was talking to you, elbows propped on the table, chin resting in her hand. She was watching you expectantly, sharp eyes narrowed.

You didn’t look up. “I’m not coming.”

She sighed dramatically. “You never hang out with us.” She leant back in her chair with an exaggerated huff, muttering under her breath, “So mysterious and cool. You think you’re better than us?” 

Natasha watched on amused, the redhead poised as always. “She doesn’t want to drink in front of us in case she spills her secrets.”

You scoffed. “What secrets?”

“I don’t know.” Natasha leant forward, watching you a little too closely now, like she was gauging your reaction. “How about how that mission went with Barnes?”

Ever since the gala mission, the two had been trying to get you alone, a few drinks in, hoping for something—a slip, an offhanded remark, anything that would confirm whatever hunches they had. You knew what they were fishing for. They weren’t subtle.

You just weren’t playing.

Neither you nor Bucky had said a word about it.

That, apparently, was suspicious.

“She is right, you know. Neither of you will say a word about it. I’m beginning to think something happened—” Yelena cut over her sister with a grin.

“Nothing happened,” you interrupted smoothly, finally lifting your eyes from the wreckage of your thumbnail. “You keep asking, but you’re not going to uncover some dirty secret. Sorry to disappoint."

“Then why the silence? No one would care if you fucked him, you could just plead innocence, overcome by playing the perfect, doting wife—”

You shot her a look, one withering enough to turn bone to dust and ego to rubble. 

“I mean… maybe people would care, but I wouldn’t judge you! Super soldier, metal arm… so hot, or whatever.” Yelena prattled on, and you ignored her, exhaling through your nose.

"I think he’s just mortified that people assume something did happen. He’s got enough brooding energy as it is." You muttered. 

“I just don’t believe nothing happened, trapped in that hotel room together for a week. Apparently, you were convincing enough to keep the targets off your scent, and we all know Barnes�� acting is as stiff as a cadaver on ice—”

Your face twisted into a look of exasperation before you could control yourself, straightening in your seat. “God, you two really are like vultures, picking around for the slightest bit of gossip—”

“Wow, defensive—” 

“Isn’t that the joy in life? Digging for gossip?” Natasha cut back in with a sharp smirk.

“You two are insufferable!” You interrupted, slapping your palms onto your thighs. "I think I’ll keep my secrets. I’ll leave the both of you to continue plotting this fantastical mystery you’ve created in your minds—”

“It’s only fun because you get so worked up about it,” Natasha cut back with a grin you could only describe as predatory. “Plus, I do love watching Rogers squirm listening to all the theories."

“You know,” Yelena mused, swirling the thought around before letting it slip, “I don’t think Steve is as innocent as we think he is. I’m pretty sure I heard him and Sharon—”

She cut herself off just as the door swung open, and the rest of the team filtered in.

You schooled your reaction, easily slipping back into the picture of nonchalance. Bucky’s blue eyes flickered towards yours for a split second before darting away. It had been two weeks since your first ‘lesson’. Two weeks of carefully measured distance, of subtle glances that never lasted too long, of conversations that stayed just professional enough to not raise questions.

Bucky had been doing well—shockingly well, actually. He was receptive to your touch, followed your guidance with careful precision, and was beginning to trust you, bit by bit. You hadn’t gone much further than heated make-out sessions that usually ended with him finishing in his pants, but you weren’t in a rush. You were still feeling out his comfort zones, making sure he never felt cornered or overwhelmed. There wasn’t exactly a handbook for this kind of arrangement.

You slumped in your seat even further, shaking off the feeling. It was fine. No one knew.

Still, the way Bucky avoided looking in your direction made something prickle under your skin.

You were certain the super soldier would combust on the spot if any of his coworkers caught wind of what the two of you had been up to. Hell, he turned red enough just having you perched in his lap during lessons, whispering sweet nothings into his ear. And yet, during meetings, training, or any moment the two of you were forced into the same orbit, you couldn’t help but wonder—did he think about those moments? Did his mind drift back to the ghost of your touch the same way yours did?

You weren’t usually the sentimental type. Nostalgia was a luxury, a foolish indulgence you had long since trained yourself out of. But there was something about him—his quiet hesitance, his wary but willing surrender—that stuck with you. It was a service, nothing more. A transaction in which you gained no tangible benefit, so why did you linger on it? Why did the thought of his gaze meeting yours send a sharp thrill through your chest? Was it because he treated you like a person instead of a tool? Because he understood pieces of you no one else even tried to?

He wasn’t like the others. Never cruel, never greedy. He never reached for more than you offered, never treated you like something to be taken. Maybe that was why you kept coming back. Maybe, for once, you liked the control. Liked the feeling of choosing, of being wanted on your own terms. Of knowing that, for once, you weren’t a marionette dancing on someone else’s strings.

You swallowed the thought down and let your gaze flicker to him. Bucky sat curled in on himself, as if trying to shrink into nothing despite the broadness of his frame. He looked like a wounded animal—no, worse. He looked exhausted. The dark circles beneath his eyes had deepened, his hair unwashed and slightly greasy at the roots. He wasn’t sleeping. He wasn’t taking care of himself. You didn’t need to be a genius to figure that out.

He stared blankly at the grain of the wooden table, shoulders hunched between Steve and Sam, who were deep in conversation about something you didn’t care enough to eavesdrop on. And for reasons you weren’t ready to name, that quiet, hollow stillness of his sat uneasily in your chest.

You had… concerns for Bucky after what he had confessed to you. But you weren’t sure what to do with those concerns. Or those confessions. You held them close to your chest, unwilling to betray his trust, but understanding instead. You knew it was probably irresponsible of you to sit on them, but you didn’t want to overstep. Besides, Steve and Sam didn’t know you. You’d had maybe three conversations with each of them, most of them mission-related. To them, you were just Natasha and Yelena’s friend—Red Room collateral. You weren’t social, you weren’t a part of their circle, and you sure as hell weren’t someone they trusted.

And if they knew about your arrangement with Bucky… well, you didn’t want to think about what conclusions they’d draw—

“Hi!”

The sudden, chirpy voice nearly startled you out of your seat.

Kate Bishop had arrived—loud, bright, and effortlessly excitable, like a golden retriever in human form. She had that kind of energy that made you suspicious. No one was that happy all the time. Her dark hair was pulled into a ponytail, messy strands framing her face. She was dressed in casual, slightly dishevelled layers, looking like she had just come from sparring but didn’t have the same dead-in-the-eyes exhaustion you did after a training session.

“I’m Kate!” she announced, beaming at you like you were about to be best friends. She pushed her hand out. “Kate Bishop.”

You blinked at her, ignoring her outstretched offer. “I know.”

Her grin didn’t waver, and she coolly withdrew her hand.

“You’re Clint and Yelena’s pet project.” You spoke again, your tone perhaps a little more hostile than necessary. 

“It’s apprentice, actually.” Yelena cut in before Kate could argue. “You know, you’re starting to hurt my feelings. Stark has an apprentice, so why are you always giving me shit—”

“Oh yes, Stark’s pet project.” You gave an exaggerated sigh. “What was his name? Paxton, Peyton, or was it Parker?”

“Did I ask for your opinion, K.G.B. Barbie?” Tony Stark’s voice cut in lazily as he walked past, sitting at the head of the table like he owned the place—which, unfortunately for you, he did. As usual, he didn’t look pleased to see you, and the scent of entitlement wafted off of him in waves.

You met his gaze evenly. "No, but I was under the impression that unsolicited opinions were your love language, considering the amount your hand out.”

He scoffed, shaking his head. “Remind me why we let you sit at the big kids’ table again?”

"You don’t." You glanced at Stark, unimpressed. "But I was invited, shockingly enough. Or are you reckless enough to ignore Fury’s instructions now?"

There it was. That smirk. He smirked at you, and you knew in your heart he had the foulest, most cutting rebuke to lay upon you. He hadn’t even opened his mouth, and you were already grinding your teeth in frustration as you stared back at him, eyes locked onto his smug face—

Kate cleared her throat, stepping in before you and Stark could escalate any further. “So, what do you do?”

Stark held his tongue, so in return, you slid your gaze back over to a nervous Kate. And in that moment, you knew you couldn’t help yourself. Natasha had already shot you a warning look, but the redhead's trained patience for the playboy Stark had unfortunately never extended to you. 

"Infiltration, espionage, recon." You shrugged, expression carefully neutral. "I gather information, and then the big boys get to swoop in, throw a few punches, and take all the credit. Isn’t that right, Stark?"

Maybe you had woken up grouchier than usual—not that you could even call the few hours of restless tossing and turning sleep. Or perhaps it was the fact that you’d spent the morning eating the training mat, then had to suffer through Natasha and Yelena’s constant interrogations that had soured your mood. Either way, you weren’t exactly in the best headspace to deal with him.

Truthfully, you thought Stark was a prick, and unfortunately, you had never been exactly shy about that opinion. You and Stark had just never really clicked. Not in the way he had with the others, not in the way Natasha had seamlessly folded herself into the team, or the way Yelena had bulldozed her way in, loud and brash. You existed somewhere in between, tolerated but always lingering on the outside. It wasn’t that you didn’t get along with them. You could banter with Sam, hold an easy conversation with Steve when necessary and trade dry humour with Clint in a way that made you feel almost at home. Even Stark, for all his grating personality, wasn’t always intolerable. But there was always something between you and them—an unspoken distance, a careful line you never crossed. They didn’t entirely trust you yet, and you never gave them a reason to try.

Not because you didn’t want to.

But because trust had never been a luxury you could afford.

Your job was reading people—analysing, dissecting, and manipulating. You understood them better than they understood themselves, saw the cracks in their foundations and knew precisely where to apply pressure. It made you valuable. Indispensable even, but it also made people wary. The team knew what you were, even if they didn’t know the full extent of what you had been. But deep down, you knew they were smart enough to assemble the pieces.

So you kept yourself at arm’s length. You wanted to believe you could have that feeling—belonging. But wanting and trusting were two very different things that you did not dare confuse.

Kate’s eyes lit up. “That’s so cool.”

“That’s a polite way of putting it,” Stark interjected, leaning against the desk. “She’s just a pretty face we send in to distract while the rest of us do the actual work.”

There it was.

Your jaw clenched, but you didn’t rise to the bait. This was your hubris. You could already hear Natasha’s scolding—You really shouldn’t egg him on like that. The two of you are as bad as each other, always trying to get under each other's skin. A bunch of alleycats fighting it’s ridiculous—

Somewhere across the table, Bucky’s eyes had shot up. The movement startled you, and your eyes met briefly. It was milliseconds, maybe not even that, but as soon as you registered your brief exchange, Bucky shied away like a spooked animal.

And when you looked back at Kate, Natasha and Yelena, you found that Natasha had been watching the whole thing. She didn’t speak, didn’t even react. There wasn’t the slightest twitch in her brow or twinge in her lips. She stared like some kind of omnipotent god, and deep down, you knew. You knew she knew. 

Maybe she didn’t know the full extent, but the way she stared… it made you shudder.

Fuck.

Kate, however, frowned, turning back to you. “That’s not true, right?”

“Of course not,” you deadpanned, not letting the dread pooling in your stomach let you miss a beat. “I do much more than look pretty. Sometimes I get to torture people—”

Kate’s face pale, then through several stages of grief, trying to figure out if you were joking. 

You weren’t about to help her.

“Relax, Kate Bishop, she is messing with you,” Yelena said with an amused grin, though it was tight. A silent warning behind her eyes told you to keep your mouth shut.

Kate still looked mildly concerned, but she shook it off quickly. “Okay, but—so you can fight?”

“Of course.”

“Not as well as me,” Yelena cut in before you could elaborate, grinning smugly. “Don’t worry, Kate. You’re being trained by the best of the best. Me? I am the best. You know this.”

You rolled your eyes, and Kate beamed. That girl was too fucking cute for her own good.

The door swung open before anyone could respond to Yelena. Fury stepped inside, long coat sweeping behind him, his boots heavy against the floor. His usual expression—somewhere between perpetually pissed off and quietly judgmental—was firmly in place beneath the shadow of his eyepatch.

"Hope I'm not interrupting anything," Fury said, his voice edged with dry amusement, though his gaze flicked between you all with razor-sharp scrutiny.

"No, sir," Steve said, back straightening. Natasha, ever composed, merely leaned back in her chair. Stark didn’t even spare a glance.

“First off, I’d like to extend my deepest, most heartfelt gratitude for your attendance,” Fury began, spreading his arms in a broad, insincere gesture, his tone so dry it could have turned the room to dust. “I know how much of a hardship it is, taking an hour out of your busy lives to sit in a comfortable chair and listen to me talk.”

Sam snorted. Yelena smirked. Bucky, as usual, remained unreadable.

Fury’s eye landed on you and Bucky before he tossed a slim tablet onto the table, the display already flashing with the text of a mission report you hardly cared to examine in detail.

“Congratulations are in order. The gala infiltration went exceptionally well despite the odds stacked against you.”

You dipped your head in acknowledgement, catching movement out of the corner of your eye—Sam begrudgingly sliding Fury what seemed to be a twenty-dollar bill. Asshole.

Fury tapped the screen embedded in the table, replacing the mission debrief with a new set of images. An aerial view of a club, snippets of surveillance footage, a grainy close-up of a man slipping out of a side entrance, bodyguards in tow.

“And thanks to that intel recovered,” Fury continued, “we now have a location on our next target. Dmitry Karpin. Friend to H.Y.D.R.A. Dealt in smuggling high-profile weapons in and out of Soviet countries for a time, but now he’s taken to smuggling drugs. Serums, to be specific.”

Across the table, Bucky had gone still. Tension coiled in his shoulders, his hands resting stiffly on the surface, knuckles taut. H.Y.D.R.A. Serum. The words alone were enough to suffocate the room when Bucky or Steve were around. You didn’t let your eyes linger on him long nor allow your frown to deepen. 

Fury didn’t acknowledge the shift—maybe he was used to it by now, or perhaps he just didn’t care. His voice remained steady, rolling over the tension in the room as if he were reciting lines from a well-rehearsed script. Karpin’s security detail. The club’s weak points. Entry and exit strategies. The words blurred together, dissolving into background noise beneath the low hum of static in your head. It was hard to focus when you could feel Bucky sitting across from you, motionless, barely even breathing, his whole body locked up like a loaded fucking gun. And the worst part? He probably thought he was doing a good job hiding it.

You didn’t stare, didn’t let your concern show. Instead, you leant back in your chair, tilting your head just enough to feign disinterest. “So, just another fun-filled evening of chatting up sweaty old men for me? Sounds like a dream.” Your voice came out dry, with just enough sarcasm to mask any wobbles. 

Fury didn’t spare you a glance. “If that’s what you need to tell yourself,” he said, tapping the screen again. More grainy footage. More blueprints. The details kept coming, but you barely registered them.

You picked at your thumbnail hard enough that the cuticle began to bleed.

Eventually, the meeting drew to a close. Chairs scraped against the floor as the team rose, murmuring amongst themselves as they filed out. You stood, ready to follow, but—

“You two, stick around,” Fury instructed.

You hesitated, glancing at him, then at Bucky, who had also stalled mid-step. Natasha and Yelena exchanged a knowing look, their amusement not at all subtle. You ignored their barely concealed grins as they disappeared through the door.

Fury exhaled, hands bracing against the table as he surveyed the two of you. 

“I’ll be honest,” he said finally. “I wasn’t convinced it would work when I paired you two. Thought maybe you’d kill each other before you got anything done.”

Bucky scoffed quietly, gaze flicking away.

“But you proved me wrong.” His good eye narrowed as he continued. “The mission was a success. You handled yourselves well.”

A beat of silence. Then, just as flatly, “I want to know if you’d be open to working together again. Similar style of operation.”

Your eyes slid over to Bucky, gauging his reaction. You didn’t want to appear too eager or give any more credence to the stories Yelena and Natasha were spinning, but most of all, you didn’t want to put words into Bucky’s mouth. You weren’t in the business of pressuring him in or out of the bedroom. 

Bucky was quiet as if silently working through some thoughts before deciding. Finally, he offered a dismissive “Sure.”

You nodded slowly, offering Fury a nonchalant shrug. “I’m fine with that.”

Fury’s lips twitched. Not quite a smirk.

“Well, that’s the most enthusiasm I’ve heard all day,” he deadpanned before shaking his head. “Damn, you two are depressing. Sitting there all broody, staring at me like I shot your goddamn dog.” 

Neither you nor Bucky reacted, which was met by a low chuckle from Fury. “Regardless, I appreciate the hard work. You made me a nice chunk of money winning some bets.”

Your brow furrowed. “You bet on us?”

Fury raised an eyebrow, unbothered. “Course I did. Had to make it interesting. Half the team thought you’d get caught or kill each other before the first day was up.”

You blinked. “...Who bet against us?”

“Stark.” Fury’s lips twitched again. “He didn’t think you’d make it past security.”

Of course he did. Prick. 

—

"Alright, I’m in position."

You blinked. Bucky sat there like he was awaiting orders, his posture rigid as if he were about to breach enemy lines.  His hands hovered awkwardly at his sides, fingers twitching like he wasn’t sure where to put them like touching you required the same level of strategic planning as a high-stakes extraction mission.

You stared, straddling his hips, your fingers ghosting over his collarbone, feeling the tension thrumming beneath his skin. He didn’t quite meet your eyes, his gaze fixed somewhere just past your shoulder as if making direct contact might detonate something neither of you were ready for. For a split second, you half expected him to press a finger to an earpiece and murmur something about securing the perimeter.

In the dim glow of his bedroom, he looked every bit like a man being held hostage rather than one about to receive a very generous favour.

Lately… something felt off. The signs had been subtle at first, the way he always seemed a beat too calculated, his hands found the same places every time, and he would grow still like he was waiting for a command. 

And now, looking at him, so wound-up he might actually vibrate, it finally clicked.

Every touch and kiss was executed with the precision of a soldier running a drill rather than a man lost in the moment. It was methodical. He was analysing a strategy rather than experiencing pleasure. You half expected to glance down and see him taking notes—touch here, kiss there, don’t forget to do this. The thought horrified you, but if you were honest… it also amused you. 

You pinched the bridge of your nose.

“…Bucky, are you seriously treating this like a mission?”

He stiffened beneath you, his reaction just a fraction too quick, too defensive.

“What’d you mean?” His voice was steady, but there was an edge. He was already on guard, bracing for imaginary discipline. 

“The way you’re…” You trailed off, head inclining as you studied him. His jaw was clenched, brows drawn tight, the creased skin between them betraying him entirely. One could mistake him for a soldier behind enemy lines, waiting for the crack of a rifle. There were dark smudges under his eyes, no worse than usual. You knew he didn’t sleep well. Nightmares haunted him and left him running on fumes more often than not. You recognised the signs, and it was like you were looking into a mirror. 

“It’s like you have a mental checklist,” you murmured, watching for his reaction. “Like every move you make is planned like you’re running through a strategy in your head instead of just… feeling it.”

Bucky remained silent, his lips pressing into a firm line.

Gently, you squeezed his shoulder, fingertips pressing into hard muscle. He was tense—too tense. “You’re not clearing a building, Bucky. You’re not scanning for threats. You’re here with me. Just relax a little, won’t you?”

“I am relaxed.” He bit the words out, though neither his voice nor expression were even remotely convincing.

You let out a short laugh, shaking your head. “I appreciate the attempt to lie, but when I can feel the fucking tension in your body, it’s a little, well, very obvious.” Your hands traced along his shoulders, fingers kneading into the tight knots beneath the fabric of his shirt. His muscles were rock-solid, never fully uncoiled. His body had forgotten how to rest.

“See?” You gave a pointed squeeze. “This is not ‘relaxed,’ Bucky. This is as solid as a goddamn steel beam.”

Bucky scoffed a tiny huff of air through his nose. “Those are my muscles. I work out. Don’t you?”

You gasped in mock delight, lips parting in exaggerated shock. “Oh my God. Did you just make a joke? Bucky, was that a joke?”

Something flickered in his expression for the first time, a sliver of amusement breaking through the ever-present brooding. He finally met your gaze, eyes crinkling just slightly at the corners, and the sight sent a flicker of warmth through your chest.

You grinned. “Well, isn’t that a first? Guess I should mark the calendar.”

His smirk was brief, fleeting—but it was there.

You softened, your voice dropping just a little. “But seriously, you need to loosen up.” Your hands smoothed over his shoulders, slow and deliberate.“Attraction, desire… sex. It’s messy, it’s unplanned. It’s not a mission. This isn’t the army.” 

You didn’t dare say the following words in your mind aloud. 

This isn’t H.Y.D.R.A. 

But you knew that was where his thoughts drifted, that unspoken trouble that plagued you both. Your fingers ghosted along the silver chain at his throat, the faint jingle of his dog tags barely audible under the fabric of his shirt. “You don’t have to follow orders. You can just be.”

“I know.” The words came low, rough, frayed at the edges. You could feel yourself losing him, his eyes growing foggy as if pulled away to a place you couldn’t quite reach to drag him out from.

“I just…” Another breath, deeper this time, as though steadying himself. “They used me. For so long, they used me as a weapon. I don’t know if I can ever be anything different than that. I don’t want to lose control—what happens if I lose—”

“Hey.” Your hands framed his face now, thumbs brushing against the sharp angles of his cheekbones, anchoring him. “Hey, look at me.”

His eyes lifted, hesitant, guarded.

“You are more than that.” The words were gentle but unwavering, as steady as your hands on him. “We are more than that, okay? You’re Bucky. Just Bucky. And you are in control. Say it.”

His fingers curled against your thighs, knuckles pressing into the cotton fabric of your shorts. He was quiet momentarily as though testing the words in his mind before speaking them aloud. Then, slowly, he nodded.

“I’m in control.”

“You’re in control.” You echoed, smoothing your thumb over the faint stubble on his cheek. “And you still want to do this?”

His breath was slow, deliberate. “Yes.”

Your fingers had drifted higher, threading into his hair, the strands silky and cool beneath your touch. You swept a loose lock from his forehead, letting your fingertips linger against his temple. “And if you don’t want this at any point, what do you say?”

“Stop.”

“And what will happen if you say that?”

“You’ll stop. We’ll stop.”

“Good.” You praised him, your smile widening as you felt him squirm beneath you. There was a subtle hitch in his breath as your hands began to trail lower, palms smoothing down to his chest. The pulse at his throat fluttered beneath your fingertips, quick and uneven, betraying the calm he was trying to hold onto. You leant closer, your breath warm against his skin as you pressed a slow, lingering kiss to his temple. Then lower—to the sharp line of his cheekbone, the edge of his jaw, and finally to the hollow of his throat. A shudder ran through him, his grip on your hips tightening just a fraction. “Is this okay?”

“Yes.” He uttered after a thick, audible swallow.

You pulled back just enough to study him, to see how his lips parted slightly as though chasing the warmth of your touch. A quiet, almost reluctant noise rumbled in his chest, just shy of a whine. You traced your fingers along his jaw before tilting your head, considering him. “I want to try something.” You hummed to him. “You can say no if it’s too much, but I think it might help you.”

His brows furrowed. “Yeah?”

“I want to blindfold you—”

“You want to what?” He went rigid beneath you, every muscle tightening again as if you’d flipped a switch and snapped him back into defence mode.

“Hold on, just let me finish.” You held up your hand, hoping to counteract his immediate, instinctive reaction.

He huffed, rolling his shoulders as though shaking off the response, but said nothing. 

“I want to blindfold you,” you repeated, slower this time, words deliberate. “And I want to kiss you. And touch you. I want you to focus on feeling good rather than anticipating something bad. I want you to just… be here with me. Not thinking about what comes next, not waiting for an attack. Just focusing on feeling. That’s all.”

His expression was cautious before turning to contemplation—as though weighing the idea against everything instinct told him.

“You can say no,” you reminded him gently.

“No, I—” He hesitated, his fingers twitching against your hips.

You shifted back just a little, offering him the space to decide. “It’s okay. We don’t have to do it.”

“No, I—shit—” He exhaled, shaking his head. “I mean—no, I want to. Yes. I want to try that.”

Your gaze searched his. “You’re sure?”

His lips pressed together, and then he nodded once, firmly. “Yes.”

You grinned, pressing a sloppy, lingering kiss to his temple before slipping off his lap with ease and rolling onto the bed beside him. “Do you have something we could use?”

“Uh, I don’t—”

“Like a tie, maybe? You wear suits, right? Or does Stark demand them back the second you step foot in the compound?”

Bucky let out a huff, eyes narrowing. “I don’t want to talk about Stark right now.”

You shot him a knowing look, but before you could tease him further, your gaze flickered downward—and you smirked. Even through the soft material of his sweatpants, you could see he was already half-hard. “Sure.”

A faint flush crept up his neck, staining his ears and cheeks pink. He cleared his throat, voice rough. “Top drawer. In the wardrobe.”

You were on your feet before he could finish, slipping into his walk-in wardrobe. Every apartment in the compound had one, though Bucky’s was noticeably bare. His clothes were monochrome, muted shades of grey, navy, and black. No bursts of colour. No sign of impulse. It was not a lack of wealth. You knew that for sure. No, this was intentional—a desire to blend in, to disappear.

You’d always known he was the type who preferred the shadows, slipping between crowds unnoticed. No wonder he hated the tailored suits Stark and Fury forced him into—arm issues aside. For some reason, S.H.I.E.L.D. were determined to parade him around. Look, the Winter Soldier. He’s a good boy now. He plays nice. Nothing to fear anymore. You were unsure how he felt about such displays, but you were sure it wasn’t too far off from how you felt about it. You had once been in his shoes, though more in the eye candy territory. A doll to dress up and play with, to smile and play the part.

Powerful men enjoyed degrading that which they knew to be dangerous, enjoyed playing with fire, and enjoyed the illusion of control. 

Shaking off the thought, you pulled open the top drawer, sifting through a few neatly folded ties. You selected a smooth black silk, running the cool fabric over your palm before returning to the bedroom.

Bucky was still seated at the edge of the bed, stiff as a board. His hands curled into fists atop his thighs, knuckles taut. His throat bobbed as he swallowed.

You slowed, holding the tie between your fingers like approaching a spooked animal. Visible to inspect and assess. No threat.

“Yes?” you asked, giving him another chance to change his mind.

His jaw tightened, but he gave a short nod. “Yes.”

You smiled softly. “Just breathe, yeah? Like we always do.” You inhaled deeply through your nose, then exhaled slowly and steadily through your mouth.

After a beat, Bucky mirrored you, chest rising and falling with measured breaths.

You moved behind him, settling onto the bed. He sat still, poised for an attack. Carefully, you draped the silk tie over his eyes, looping it around his head and securing it with a loose knot. It wasn’t tight—one purposeful tug and it would slip free.

You could feel the tension radiating from him. Even blindfolded, he was hyper-aware, attuned to every rustle of the sheets, every shift of your weight. His breathing had turned shallower, the serum sharpening every sound, every sensation.

“If you need to stop for any reason, just say so.”

He jolted slightly at your voice, caught off guard in the quiet. “O-okay.” His voice wavered, and then he cursed low under his breath in Russian.

You grinned. Some habits died hard.

“I’m going to touch you now.” You crept closer, lifting onto your knees behind him. “Just focus on me and how it feels. Nothing else. Can you do that?”

He gave a slow, hesitant nod.

You started at his shoulders, palms skimming over firm muscle, feeling the warmth of his skin beneath your fingertips. Every dip and ridge, every knot of tension. Your hands slid to his collarbone, then across the joint where flesh met metal, mapping out the contrast between warm skin and the smooth, cold vibranium.

He was solid beneath your touch, every muscle taut and solid as it stretched across the bone.

You had noticed the way his shoulders gave him grief. The slight tilt of his frame and the way his left arm always sat heavier. It was incorrect weight distribution; the metal limb was too heavy compared to its flesh counterpart. S.H.I.E.L.D had surely offered him physical therapy—massages, treatment plans—but you doubted he had ever taken them up on it. He didn’t like to be touched by strangers. Too wary. Too untrusting. 

“Can I take off your shirt?” you asked softly.

He stilled.

“I don’t—” His voice was lower now, rougher. “My scars. They’re not—”

“I don’t care about that.”

He swallowed hard. “You don’t?”

“No,” you said firmly. “Why would I?” 

Without a word, his hand reached behind his head, gripping the collar of his shirt. He yanked it over his head in one fluid motion, tossing the fabric to the floor. You adjusted the blindfold where it had shifted, then let your gaze drift over the broad expanse of his back.

His shoulders were massive, sculpted with muscle. The scars on his left shoulder were brutal—jagged lines of gnarled tissue where the vibranium met flesh. It might have been seamless after the amputation. Painless even. But it had been H.Y.D.R.A who had ruined him, left scars so deep even the Wakandans couldn’t erase.

And H.Y.D.R.A didn’t care for comfort. They cared for necessity. Likely, you suspected, they had wanted him to suffer.

An endless reminder of their ownership.

You swallowed, then placed your hands on his shoulders again, thumbs pressing gently into the base of his neck. You started slow, careful, massaging along the muscle, working your way down. His skin was warm beneath your palms, the mass taut and unyielding at first, like stone beneath your fingers. But you took your time, applying gradual pressure, thumbs circling into the knots built over time.

Beneath your hands, Bucky let out a low, guttural sound—a half-growl, half-sigh of approval. His head dipped forward slightly, chin brushing his chest, an unspoken invitation to continue.

You kept going, kneading deep into the knots in his shoulders, feeling the tension resist before you coaxed it loose. With each press and roll of your fingers, the stiffness unravelled like a cord being undone, thread by thread. You worked methodically, digging your thumbs along the curve where his neck met his shoulders, pressing firmly enough to elicit another low, unconscious groan from him.

You bit back a smile as you felt him lean into you just a little.

Trailing downward, you traced the slope of his shoulder blades, following the ridges of tendons and old wounds. The scars on his left side were tougher, the tissue uneven where flesh met metal, but you didn’t hesitate. Your fingers brushed the seam between the vibranium and skin, then continued downward, thumbs pressing slow, firm circles along the fuse.

Bucky shuddered.

His breath hitched as you dug into the deep-seated strain along his spine. A sharp inhale, a low exhale—he was losing himself to the sensation, surrendering to your touch. You didn’t rush. You worked him slowly, thoroughly, feeling him yield with each measured stroke. When you reached the dip of his lower back, you flattened your hands, smoothing over the tightness that lingered. He was warm now, his skin melting like wax beneath your fingers.

Satisfied, you finally pulled back, smoothing your hands along his spine one last time before shifting your position.

Rising onto your knees, you moved around him, hands trailing over his shoulders as you slid into his lap. His breath stuttered, but he didn’t pull away. You settled against him, straddling his lap, your arms draping lazily over his shoulders. The blindfold was still secure, and he looked… calmer now. Less wound up, his jaw no longer locked so tightly.

“You okay?” You murmured.

His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Good,” you hummed, tilting your head, lips just inches from his ear. “I think you needed that.”

Bucky exhaled a breathy, almost disbelieving laugh, but he didn’t deny it.

Your fingers trailed up the nape of his neck, nails scratching lightly against the short hairs, and you felt him shiver beneath you. You leaned in, lips brushing over his cheekbone, just at the edge of the blindfold, before trailing downward. You kissed along his jaw, soft and teasing, pressing your lips into the warm skin beneath his ear, down the column of his throat.

His hands fidgeted at his sides, tightening around the sheets. Then, as if giving in to some internal battle, they rose—hesitant but desperate. His fingers found your waist, sliding over the curve of your hips before gripping tight.

You grinned against his skin.

“There you go,” you murmured, voice a breath of silk against his throat.

A sharp exhale left him, his fingers tightening, pressing you closer, holding you in place. You cupped his jaw, tilting his face up before pressing your lips to his.

Bucky groaned into the kiss.

It was soft at first, your mouth moving against his, teasing, coaxing him deeper. But it wasn’t long before he cracked. The tension he had held onto for so long—his control, his restraint—it frayed at the edges with every pass of your lips against his. You pressed closer, shifting in his lap, and the moment your hips rolled against him, his breath stuttered.

A broken sound escaped him, part groan, part whimper.

You did it again just to hear it.

His hands flexed against your sides, his hold firm, frantic, but he didn’t stop you. He only breathed harder, his forehead falling against yours as you peppered kisses along his lips, his cheeks and the bridge of his nose.

Then you moved again, grinding against him slowly, carefully, and Bucky outright whimpered.

He made no effort to stop you—no attempt to control the rhythm, no resistance left in him. His mind was no longer caught in the tangle of right and wrong, of what he should or shouldn’t do.

He only felt.

Only responded.

You kissed him again, deeper, fiercer this time, and he met you with equal hunger.

Bucky’s hands roamed, sliding up your back. Then, his vibranium hand found your face, cradling it between cool, unyielding metal, and you shivered at the contrast—the bite of cold against your flushed skin, the sheer strength in his hold, barely restrained.

He kissed you like he was starving.

You sighed into his mouth, rolling your hips down to meet his, and he groaned—deep and guttural as his body jerked beneath you. He was fully hard now, the evidence pressing against you through his sweatpants, and you couldn't help the soft, breathy giggle that escaped between kisses.

Bucky growled, his grip tightening, his body chasing yours as you rocked against him.

Your hand trailed down, slipping between your bodies, fingers teasing along the waistband of his sweatpants. You could feel the heat of him, the way his breath hitched as your fingertips ghosted lower—

Then he flinched, catching your wrist in a shaky grip.

“Too much,” he muttered, voice barely above a whisper, but the strain was evident.

Immediately, you withdrew, pulling your hand away without hesitation. “I’m sorry. Do you want to stop—”

“No.” he replied quickly, breathlessly.

You cupped his jaw, kissing him slowly, tenderly, as he shuddered beneath you. His hands flexed where they held you, his body still trembling with need, but he didn’t pull away. You kept your movements soft and gentle, pressing your forehead against his, letting him breathe as you kissed him repeatedly. 

“Is this better?” you checked in between kisses, voice warm, reassuring.

“Yes.” He muttered against your lips.

You kissed him deeper, tongue sweeping across his bottom lip and into his mouth.

His body convulsed beneath you, hips twitching up to meet yours, his breath turning shallow and erratic. You could feel the tremors coursing through him, his muscles tensed, his restraint crumbling with every slow, dragging roll of your hips.

Then, with a choked groan, he stiffened.

A broken moan tore from his throat as he came, his body shuddering beneath you. His breath hitched, then stilled, his head falling back onto the bed as he panted heavily, completely spent.

You smiled, watching his chest rise and fall, his body finally wholly relaxed.

You let him catch his breath, your hands smoothing over his chest in slow, soothing strokes. His eyes were still covered, the black silk of the tie snug against his skin, and for a moment, you just watched him—his expression relaxed in a way it so rarely was, his lips parted as he inhaled deep, steadying himself.

Reaching up, you brushed your fingers over his jaw before carefully undoing the knot at the back of his head. The tie slipped away with ease, and his eyes fluttered open, blinking as he adjusted to the room's dim light. His pupils were blown, irises hazy, but there was something else. Softness. An openness you didn’t often see.

“Hey,” you whispered.

His lips twitched in the ghost of a smile. “Hey.”

You leant down, pressing a gentle kiss to his temple before shifting off of him, allowing him to breathe. He hesitated momentarily before sitting up, his movements slow, almost reluctant. His sweatpants were clinging damply to his skin, and he grimaced slightly before rubbing a hand over his face.

“I should, uh—” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be right back.”

You nodded, watching as he climbed off the bed and disappeared into the bathroom. The soft sound of running water followed soon after. You stayed where you were, fingers idly playing with the silk tie as you listened, giving him the space to clean up and gather himself.

When he returned, his sweatpants had been swapped for a fresh pair, the fabric hanging loose around his hips. His hair was damp in uneven patches where he’d raked wet fingers through it, a lazy attempt at tidying up. He lingered in the doorway, weight shifting from one foot to the other, eyes flickering over you like he wasn’t sure what to do next.

You patted the empty space beside you. “Come here.”

His shoulders loosened just a fraction before he climbed back onto the bed, settling beside you with a quiet sigh. He was warm—solid and steady. Without thinking, you nestled closer, resting your head against his chest. His arm came around you automatically, like muscle memory, pulling you in and holding you there.

For a while, neither of you spoke.

Then, barely above a whisper, you asked, “Did you like it?”

Bucky exhaled a deep, slow breath. “Yeah,” he admitted, his voice lower than usual, like he wasn’t used to saying it. “I did.”

You smiled, tracing absentminded circles against his chest. “What did you like about it?”

He was quiet for a long moment, his fingers toying with the hem of your shirt. When he finally spoke, his voice was careful.

“It made it easier,” he murmured. “Not seeing. I could just… feel. Focus on what was happening instead of everything else.” His thumb brushed lightly against your side. “Didn’t have to worry about if I was doing something wrong.”

You frowned slightly, tilting your head up to look at him. “Bucky, you’ve never done anything wrong.”

“I know,” he said, but his voice was tight, a shadow crossing his expression. “It’s just—” He stopped, mouth pressing into a thin line.

You reached up, smoothing a hand over his cheek. “Talk to me.”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed. Then, so quietly you almost missed it, he said, “I’m scared of it sometimes.”

Your brows furrowed. “Scared of what?”

“Pleasure.”

His fingers tightened slightly against your side like he was bracing himself, but he didn’t look away from you.

“I was taught…” He inhaled sharply. “That it could only be taken. Taken from me. That it was never given freely.” His voice dropped lower, almost a whisper. “That it wasn’t mine to have.”

Slowly, carefully, you sat up, shifting so you were fully facing him. He looked at you, expression guarded, but there was something vulnerable beneath it, something fragile in the way he held himself.

You reached for his hand, threading your fingers through his. “Those people, the ones who taught you that, they were trying to hurt you, degrade you,” you told him firmly. “Pleasure is to be shared equally. It’s something you deserve.” You squeezed his hand, your voice softening.

His lips parted like he wanted to say something, but no words came.

“I want you to know that you don’t have to do anything to earn it,” you whispered.

He swallowed hard, his grip on your hand tightening. His voice was barely above a breath when he said, “I don’t know if I know how.”

You smiled softly. “That’s okay. We have time.”

You lifted his hand again, pressing a lingering kiss to his knuckles before settling back down beside him. His warmth seeped into you, but the ache in your chest remained—persistent, lingering. It had nothing to do with exhaustion, the tension in your muscles, or even the way your body still hummed with remnants of touch. No, this ache came from somewhere deeper, from the thoughts unravelling in your mind like a loose thread tugged too far, too fast as you contemplated his confession. 

You had always been a giver. That was your role, your purpose. You gave and gave until there was nothing left. Until you were hollow inside. And yet, the world kept asking for more. You wondered if, over time, it had chipped away at your soul, piece by piece, until there was nothing left.

The words left your lips before you could stop them, before you had the chance to weigh whether you truly wanted to say them aloud.

“Do you ever feel like you’re not… whole?”

Bucky turned his head slightly, his brows furrowing in the low light, lids heavy as he blinked his dark lashes. He didn’t press or demand, didn’t look at you as if he needed clarification. He just waited, silently, like he knew you weren’t finished.

So you kept going.

“Like with every mission, every fight, every demand, you lose something? A tiny piece of yourself, given away without even realising it?” Your voice dropped lower. Bucky was still beside you, completely still, only his breath tickling your cheek with each slow rise and fall of his chest.

“I don’t even know if I’m still the person I was when I was born or if I’ve just been rebuilt from borrowed parts. Pieces given to me, made for me, shaped to fit what I was supposed to become.” You exhaled a sharp breath. “Or maybe… what they wanted me to become.”

The words were bitter on your tongue, and yet they kept coming.

“And I think… maybe I’m afraid that if I ever showed the real me, the world would reject me. That they’d be disgusted by my soul. By everything I have done.”

A shaky breath left your lips, your voice barely more than a whisper now.

“Because sometimes… sometimes I think the only way people will keep me around is if I give them something in return.”

Silence.

You turned your head toward him, searching his face, waiting for something—anything—that would tell you what he was thinking. You hoped for a look, a breath, a word to ground you. But as your gaze swept over him, you realised his breathing had evened out, his lashes fluttering softly against his cheeks. The sharp furrow of his brow had smoothed, his lips slightly parted in a way that spoke of exhaustion finally pulling him under.

Asleep.

Your words had been lost to him.

You weren’t sure if that was a relief or a disappointment.

Maybe it was for the best. He needed the rest, the peace of slumber more than you did. Even now, in the soft glow of the room, dark circles remained etched beneath his eyes.

You let out a slow breath, staring at the ceiling momentarily before carefully slipping out of bed. You moved with quiet precision, gathering your things without making a sound. When you reached the door, you hesitated, glancing back.

For a second, a small, selfish part of you wished he had—wished he had heard you, had held you, had given you something, anything, to quiet the storm inside your chest. But he hadn’t.

And maybe that meant you could take the words back.

Tuck them away for another time.

Or hold onto them forever, maybe all you had needed was to say them aloud, even if only silence itself was listening.

Bucky didn’t stir from his slumber, not even when the door clicked shut behind you.

PART THREE

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taglist: @civilbucky @buckysbbydoll @rosegarbage @fleurenoir @oikarma @blackstabbath6 @kcbug1128 @ellesbellswrites @thaynarajejheje @wunder-blunder @oceanaroma @dyscalculiaaa @murdocklvrr @pursuedbyamemoryy @fantasyheroine @chronicallybubbly @nikkinss @maryevm @doilooklikeagiveafrack (sorry if it didn't tag anyone properly)

[pathologicalreid]

spring into summer | s.r.

in which Spencer pursues a relationship with you. you try to resist every advance - for your own protection.

[previously] | [next]

who? spencer reid x fem!reader category: angsty content warnings: blowing smoke part tew, at a bar but it's not specified whether or not reader drinks alcohol, kissing, if you have a problem with my bar music keep it to yourself, maeve as a plot device, love confessions, not edited word count: 2.25k a/n: y'all i wasn't gonna do this, but listening to this song... yeah i had to.

“Spencer’s here!” Penelope exclaimed from her bar stool, her heels clicking on her way to the front of the bar, hoping to lead Spencer through the crowd to where the team had decided to set up shop.

Your head snapped up in alarm, tilting your head to the side and trying to get JJ’s attention, “I didn’t think Spencer was coming out tonight.”

She frowned slightly, placing her glass on the bar and shrugging, “It was an open invite.”

An open invite that you extended to the guy you’re seeing. You huffed, pulling the strap of your dress back over your shoulder and flagging down the bartender, hoping to get a drink before you need to play defense against Spencer.

“Hey,” Ethan said from behind you, a cute guy from counterterrorism that Penelope had introduced you to. His hand sat comfortably on your waist as you got the bartender’s attention again, letting him know that you’d actually need two drinks.

You smiled back at him, panicking slightly when he leaned in to kiss you. Evading his kiss, you let his lips land on your cheek, turning your head so that you were facing Spencer.

The two of you had as little contact as you could manage in the past two months, ever since Spencer’s attempt to ask you out had gone completely awry. Of course, ceasing all contact was unavoidable, between work and Spencer’s continued pursuance, you continuously found yourself under his net.

Ethan squeezed your waist gently, taking the glass that the bartender had placed in front of him and grabbing a straw for yours. You thanked him, crushing the straw wrapper against the bar and taking a sip.

Admittedly, you weren’t interested in the guy in the slightest. The second time you went out together, he’d gotten your name wrong, but he was friends with Penelope’s crush, so you were trying to be a good sport.

It felt like the world was playing a cruel joke on you, pairing you with someone who couldn’t be bothered to remember your name while you were trying to shut out a guy who remembered your favorite flower from a conversation three years ago. Yesterday, you’d found a bouquet on your desk for the third Thursday in a row.

Every time you read the card that he sends with the arrangement, you almost forget yourself. It would be a waste for you to get rid of them, which is the only reason you’ve kept them on your desk.

Or so you keep telling yourself.

“You look nice,” Spencer whispered to you, reaching between you and JJ so he could grab his drink from the bar. He looked good, you noticed him against your better judgment, even the embroidery on his tie managed to catch your attention.

Before you could collect yourself enough to respond to him, Morgan had already pulled him back to a booth, putting an arm around his shoulders and pointing out different girls in the bar while Savannah rolled her eyes. His hair was growing out from the undercut that he’d debuted in the fall, falling in front of his eyes until he inevitably flicked the stray hairs away.

Peeling your eyes off of him, you looked back at Ethan, who’d already made his way through half his drink. His eyes were glued to the baseball game being displayed above the bar. If your date had noticed you ogling your coworker, he didn’t show it.

Tentatively, you tapped his stool gently with your toe, “Hey,” you tried to get his attention, batting your eyelashes. “Do you wanna go over to the jukebox with me? We can pick a song together,” you offered.

He frowned and shook his head, “Nah, the Nationals game is on.” He nodded his head up to the TV, refraining from sparing you a glance.

You looked up at the screen, they were at the bottom of the second inning, and you were in for an exhausting night. “Right,” you said flatly, “I’ll be right back.”

Sharing a look with Penelope, who shot you a supportive thumbs up from the other side of the bar, you got off your stool and adjusted your purse over your shoulder. You liked that this bar still had a real jukebox, as opposed to the updated touchscreens commonly found in bars nowadays. You dug through your purse for a quarter, half paying attention to your rummaging and using the rest of your brain power to study the available songs.

A few things caught your eye, most of the available tracks were classics—Journey, Queen, and a Meatloaf track that was suspiciously out of order. Probably because the song was over eight minutes long. “Here,” the familiar voice—that you’d been trying to avoid—spoke.

Spencer held a quarter out for you, leaving the coin displayed in his palm until you graciously accepted it. “Thanks,” you said, “Do you have any suggestions?” You expertly dodged his attempt at eye contact, sliding the quarter into its slot and reading through the titles again. Pressing your lips in a thin line while you ignored the way he was leaning over the jukebox.

“Why did you ask him to come out?” He asked, pointing at one of the songs and chuckling when you shook your head. He should’ve known better than to actually make a request. After all, you were just being polite.

You squinted at a title, worn with time, and you distracted yourself with the task of reading it. “I didn’t know you were coming with us,” you muttered, refusing to let your curiosity get the better of you and resisting the urge to just select the worn button. “You don’t usually like this bar,” you reminded him. You couldn’t remember the last time Spencer went out to a bar that wasn’t O’Keefe’s.

He hummed next to you, standing so close that you could feel his body heat intermingling with your own. “So,” he started, “You wouldn’t have asked him to go out if you had known I was going to be here.”

“I didn’t say that,” you told him, your eyes flickering to the side. Not enough to see his face, but enough to notice that he’d taken off his suit jacket, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows.

“You might as well have,” he returned, watching as you finally chose a Fleetwood Mac song, concluding that you’d either have to choose a song you didn’t want or waste Spencer’s quarter.

You peeked around him, your date still preoccupied with the sporting event. Even so, you tried to make your way around Spencer, but he grabbed your elbow and held you back.

There was nothing forceful in his action. If you wanted to snatch your arm away and stalk away from him, he wasn’t going to stop you, but you found yourself interested in staying with him. It would be worth your while to stay with someone who was begging for your attention rather than return to the bar to beg for someone else’s.

Spencer looked around, mindful of the members of your team who were still in earshot while he led you away from the crowds. He tucked you away, resting your back against a shiplap wall in a corner, perfectly concealed from curious profilers. “I want to talk to you,” he whispered, leaning against the wall.

You crossed your arms in front of your chest in preemptive defense, making sure he stayed at least a foot away from you. “I’ve said everything there is to say to you,” you made no effort to avert his gaze, no attempt to duck away from the conversation.

“I haven’t,” he responded immediately, his voice steady despite the noticeable pounding of his carotid. It was almost as if he’d practiced this speech before, going through every permutation of the conversation in his mirror before meeting you out.

Raising your eyebrows, you looked up at him; the sun was setting, the orange light reflecting in his brown irises while he studied you like it was the last time he’d ever see you. “Spence,” you breathed, waiting expectantly for him to continue.

“You never actively pursued me, how was I meant to know you were interested?” His question made you want to scoff, but the earnest look in his eyes gave you pause. “Admittedly, social cues aren’t my strong suit, and I know you know that.”

Your shoulders relaxed, “So, because I never actively pursued you, it’s my fault that we never ended up together? Was I supposed to declare my intentions to you?”

He shook his head, sending strands of wavy brown hair tumbling in front of his forehead. In another life, you would’ve reached out to fix his hair. “No, I’m saying that while you never actively pursued me, I am actively pursuing you. I just want to make sure you know what page I’m on,” he told you, nervously picking at his nails.

“Spencer,” you sighed his name, “I already told you I couldn’t do it.” You’d cried it to him, actually. You expected this conversation to be more of the same, pleading with Spencer to understand your perspective on the situation while he relentlessly begged you to reconsider.

Reaching out, he touched your arm gently, nothing more than a graze of his fingertips across your bare skin, “And I want to prove to you that we can do this. I can be the guy that you want.”

You pressed your lips together, trying to push yourself further into the wall until you phased right through it, “I can’t take the back and forth.” You needed something stable, but what you needed would never be reflective of what you wanted. The most brutal truth of all was that you still wanted Spencer. You considered him your first love, and no one ever gets over their first love.

Just like he’d never get over his.

“There are just too many years between us, Spencer. It’s too complicated,” you told him, trying to keep your breathing steady. It would be exhausting to explain your tearful look to the rest of the team.

He waved your reasoning away, “It’s not. It’s not complicated. I love you and you love me. So, why can’t we be together?”

Your lips parted, staring up at him with wide eyes as your brain frantically tried to catch up with the situation at hand. Each beat of your heart was like a repetition of the word—love, love, love.

Spencer took your silence for rejection, “Maybe it’s just me then.”

“It’s not,” you croaked, fear and love and sorrow causing your throat to strangle your words. You looked up at him and wondered how long he’d been sitting on that confession. You wondered how long he’d known you loved him. You wondered if he still dreamed about Maeve. For whatever reason, that’s the only curiosity that you voiced, “Do you still dream about her?”

“I only dream about you these days,” he answered, his voice soft in the cacophony of the bar, keeping the conversation private despite your public stage.

“You can’t mean that,” you murmured, your face warming in response to his confession.

Your response only seemed to encourage him further, leaning his head down to allow himself contact. He pressed his lips to yours gently, and you found yourself leaning into him more than you’d like, each movement of his lips reminiscent of a chisel against the wall that you had constructed between the two of you.

Reaching your arms up, you propped one over his shoulder and used your free hand to weave your fingers in his hair—just as silky as you had always imagined it would be. His lips were soft against yours, and you knew you were fighting a battle that you could never win. You’d always run back to him.

Even when you pried yourself away from him, there wasn’t an ounce of regret in your bloodstream, but there was an outpour of sorrow. “Spence,” you breathed, blinking tears from your eyes while he pressed his forehead against yours.

“I’m sorry,” he responded, “I shouldn’t have done that.” His tone didn’t reflect his words in the slightest, there was no remorse in his eyes when you met them for the first time in a new light.

You shook your head instantly, “It’s okay.” You understood why he had done it. Telling you he loved you. Kissing you. He hadn’t done either of those things with Maeve. Spencer was trying to make a statement with you; he wanted his actions to speak louder than words.

He frowned, “You’re crying. I’m so sorry.”

Your lips parted to respond, but you hesitated for a moment. Curiosity was rapping at your door, wanting to know if the last person he had kissed was Diane. “I’m not crying because I didn’t want you to kiss me,” you admitted, hoping that your candor would serve to bring him some comfort.

“Oh,” he breathed, “Oh.”

You nodded, confirming his suspicions, “But I meant it when I told you I can’t do this. I just… not right now.” You needed time to come to terms with the fact that the love you never expected was right around the corner, and you needed time so that Maeve wasn’t the first person you thought over after kissing him.

“Okay,” he said, taking a small step away from you, “But you… you’ll let me know?”

Your head bobbed, “I’ll let you know.”

"I love you and I always will and I am sorry. What a useless word." - Ernest Hemingway

[darlingdaisyfarm]

♡.ᐟ his hands know you better than you do ˚⋆

a/n: sorry if this is self-indulgent but i just needed to write something where Ford fucks the stress and depression out of me. honestly, wouldn’t mind if Stan did too. this started as princess treatment but derailed into filth, but whatever

tags: Ford x reader, princess treatment, mostly nsfw, soft Ford, praise kink, worshipping, vaginal sex, oral sex (f receiving), fingerfucking actually lots of fingerfucking because Fords fingers deserve their own category, petnames, dumbification

there’s something tragic about the way you struggle with the clasp of your necklace, standing in front of the mirror with your fingers fumbling at the tiny silver hook. it's such a small thing, but frustration gnaws at you nonetheless. and Ford is always here to wash that feeling away. you feel his warm hands, six fingers sweeping your own aside, “allow me, please.”

he stands behind you as he secures the chain at your nape, admiring his sweetheart in the mirror. his fingers linger, pressing lightly against the fragile dip where your spine begins.

“there. perfect.”

Ford is always fixing things. adjusting the strap of your dress, tugging your coat tighter around your shoulders when the wind picks up, brushing stray lashes from your cheek with the soft drag of his thumb. he notices. he always notices.

there is a gravity to the way Ford Pines touches you, like the sea is pulled to the moon. six fingers softly grazing over your cheek as if you are precious, at if you're some rare, undocumented star he has been searching for his entire life. nothing has ever captivated him like you.

it's the little details that ruin you. when he pulls your gloves off finger by finger in the winter. when he cups your jaw in the middle of a conversation, just to tip your chin up and look at his sweetheart properly, murmuring about how your eyes catch the light just so.

when he says “there you go, sweetheart” whenever he helps you into a coat, a car, a chair. and you bite your lip when you catch the envious glances of other girls.

his hands, oh, his hands. meant for research, for careful sketches of interdimensional maps, for scrawled notes in the margins of mysteries unsolved and yet, they belong to you now.

Ford always pulls you closer in crowds, putting his firm hand at the small of your back because he needs to make sure his sweetheart is safe and near

if your feet ache, if your delicate ankles are too sore from those pretty little shoes, he’ll sweep you into his arms without a second thought. he grumbles though, muttering something about you being reckless for wearing those ridiculous shoes, but you know it's just because he cares.

you poor, delicate thing. you look so lovely when you’re tired like this, slumped on the edge of the bed with your heels kicked off haphazardly, body aching from a long day. too much effort, too much weight carried on your dainty little shoulders. but don’t worry, Ford will take care of you.

he kneels before you, a man who has spent decades chasing the unknown, kneeling at your feet like a man finally bowing before the only mystery he never wants to solve. calloused hands reach for your ankle, undoing the delicate strap of your shoe, fingers tracing the curve of your instep. and you sigh when you feel his warm lips pressing against the skin just above your ankle.

“you look so tired, my dear, please let me take care of you.”

his hands travel higher, peeling off the layers of the day, undressing you carefully and that feels almost ceremonial. fingers working at the zipper of your dress, pushing it from your shoulders, watching as the fabric pools around you. his breath is warm when he leans in against the curve of your thigh, kissing, kissing, kissing, an exploration, a devotion.

your hands never open doors, never carry bags heavier than a dainty purse. Ford notices everything. if your lipstick smudges after a kiss, he’s already smoothing his thumb over your lower lip. if your hands are cold, his are already cupping them, rubbing warmth into your skin, bringing your fingers to his mouth to breathe warm air over them.

in a moment of hesitation you'll always hear “don’t trouble yourself with that, love. let me handle it.”

you struggle with your hair and Ford is already reaching for the brush, pulling you between his knees as he gently, meticulously combs through the strands, what makes shivers bloom down your spine.

because Ford's sweetheart should never struggle, not when he can do something about it.

but that treatment does not stop at the threshold of the bedroom.

always kissing your wrist like a proper gentleman before pinning them down and making you sob.

when you straddle Ford's lap, rocking against him with slow, teasing rolls of your hips, he doesn’t stop you, only leans back, watching you.

“mmh, you’re making quite the mess of me, sweetheart.”

you know his hands have built machine leading to other worlds and dimensions, but now, they exist for you.

and in bed they are worshipful. you dont have to work for pleasure, you receive it. his pleasure is your pleasure.

you melt when his big hands hold you steady, guiding you against the hard press of his cock, letting you take what you want. if you decide to ride him, he always settles his hands on your hips, just because he wants to be close to you.

but oh, he likes to give, too.

you are his subject, his obsession, the one thing in all the dimensions that he has deemed worthy of true complete devotion.

you cum first, always, that's his rule. even while he’s making love to you, even when he’s right there on the edge. you'll always hear him groaning “cum for me, love,” and he means now.

fingers, fingers, fingers, obsessed with them, using them on you, making you cum on them.

because damn, he needs to make sure you’re ruined and twitching before he fucks his own release into you.

“look at you. dripping all over my hand. such a pretty little thing”

and thats a fact. his fingers always come first. they have to. he’d never think of fucking you without it, not when your little pussy flutters just from the slow push of his long digits inside. two first, then three, stretching, pressing, working until you’re soaking and weak.

Ford fingers you so often and naturally, that you start to think it’s just second nature to him. you’re sitting on his lap, buried in one of his oversized sweaters and his hand is already under it, teasing at the waistband of your panties, rubbing soft circles over your sensitive clit. or you’re in bed, drowsy and half-asleep and Ford is already between your thighs, lazily sliding two fingers inside you, curling them deep as he whispers sweet nothings in your ear.

“just relax, sweetheart, let me take care of you.”

Ford never rushes. six fingers, six places to hold, touch and tease. one teasing your nipple, rolling the sensitive bud between his fingers. another smoothing over your hip, keeping you still. but the two buried inside you work you open, coaxing wet little sounds from your lips, stroking that soft, aching spot deep inside.

his voice is always deep and soothing, even when his cock is aching, even when he’s watching your slick drip down his wrist. Ford is patient. determined. he won’t fuck you until you’re trembling, begging, nearly crying for it.

“that’s it, love. such a sensitive little thing.”

your nipples, he just adores them, rolling them between his fingers, sucking them slow, teasing, making your back arch so pretty, your fingers digging into his hair as he kisses, licks, bites, its never enough.

“so soft. you’re beautiful like this. love you so much.”

yeah, Ford knows you love his fingers because you always run your mouth about them, without even realising. you’ll watch him turn a page in his journal and murmur “ohh your hands are so strong, Ford.” or when you trace your fingertip along the veins of his knuckles and hum, “beautiful, so big.” you say it without a thought, praising him for nothing, really

and Ford never comments, never says a damn thing, but he burns with the knowledge that you have no idea what you do to him

so later, when his thick cock stuffing you up, filling every little space, fucking you open, that’s when he gets his little revenge.

“Ford, w-wait—“ you gasp when he pulls out suddenly, leaving you aching and empty when you were so damn close, in response you feel Ford rubbing his broad palm down your belly, down between your thighs. “shh, just for a second, just let me. here we go,” its two first, then three, pressing inside, stroking that spot that makes your body jolt.

Ford kisses your neck. “this little pussy loves my fingers more than anything, doesn't she?” fuck, you do, you can’t help it. you whimper, nodding so fast it makes him grin. “so go on, starlight. cum for them.”

there's nothing he loves more than making you cum around his fingers.

Ford, although quite awkward, insists you sit on his face and you know his mouth was made for worship when you perched prettily on him. greedy hands gripping your thighs, trying to keep you there forever. six fingers press into your flesh, keeping you open and spread, keeping you exactly where he wants you with your thighs trembling around his head.

his tongue moves with purpose, slowly lapping at your pussy like he has all the time in the world. you tilt your head back when he sucks your little clit into his warm mouth, moans against you like he's the one getting fucked, groans deep and filthy when you grab his hair.

“you taste divine, darling.”

Ford loves to press his forehead to yours when he bottoms out deep, stretching you good enough that you whimper, wrapping your arms around his neck. he kisses your lips, your jaw, the corner of your mouth, memorising every inch of you, letting you feel every inch of him, holding himself still so you can adjust.

and Ford hates making you cry, he swears he does. but god, if he doesn’t love the way your little tears stain his lips when he devours your mouth with kisses.

“i know, darling, i know,” as his thumb catches the first tear that spills, swipes it up, brings it to his lips like he’s starving for it. “look at my pretty girl, getting all teary for me.”

he can’t help it. his hands tighten as he ruts faster into you.

It's his guilty pleasure but damn, Ford adores it when you get dumb for him, too far gone to even think as he fucks into you so deep, the bed creaking. your knees trembling where they hook over his hips.

“sweetheart, still with me?” he’s got your wrists pinned, forehead to forehead, mouth brushing yours as he drinks up every little sound.

“fuh—Ford, too much—c-can’t—“

he’s not even touching you anymore, just watching how your lashes flutter and your mouth stays open, how your chest rises and falls in rapid helpless gasps. you can’t think straight. he’s hitting too deep, ruining you too slow and that feels too good.

“you can take it. just let me make you feel good.” he cups your face, wipes the mess off your cheek.

but Ford loves it when you use him too, when you ride him, rolling your hips in teasing circles, grinding down just to hear him groan. Ford always lets you take what you need.

and when you collapse against his chest, tired, trembling, whining softly into his neck about how good he feels, he fucks up into you, slow and sweet, holding you close, cradling you.

“i’ve got you, baby, i’ve got you. let me love you.”

ever the gentleman, Ford always asks you where you want his cum.

“tell me, princess. where do you want it? inside? on your pretty stomach? your soft thighs? tell me, sweetheart. let me give it to you. im so close.“

it. . . doesn't really matter that he wants it inside you, that he needs to fill you up, keep you full and watch it drip from your spent little cunt. no. the most important thing is what his beloved wants.

even afterwards, Ford doesn’t roll away, but stays pressed against you, holds you through it all. whispers soft things against your temple, kisses your fingertips, your shoulders, your belly as he thanks you for letting him ruin you.

because princess treatment doesn’t end when the sex does. Ford cleans you up gently, tugs you against his scarred chest, runs his six fingers through your hair until you fall asleep, safe in his arms.

“there, there, sweetheart. took me so well. so proud of you. just rest. i’ve got you.” and here you are, worshipped, fucked, adored

[ramp-it-up]

Payback

Call Me Captain When I…| Mood | Captain. My Captain

Summary: Steve promises you something for later.

Word Count: 2.6 K

Pairing: CATWS era Captain Steve Rogers x SHEILD Reader; Sam Wilson x Steve and Reader (Platonic)

Warnings: 18+ Only, Minors DNI. Not Beta’d. Read at your own risk. S MUT! CATWS Steve, Dom Steve, Captain and Sir kink, Brat reader, teasing, semi-public sex, orgasm denial, Sam is horrified, dirty talk, reference to safe word, consentual filming of sex acts, multiple orgasms, overstimulation, begging, rough sex, oral (female receiving) references to m receiving, rough sex, bruising, squirting, raw p in v, aftercare.

A/N: This can be seen as adjacent to the Captain Steve fics that start with Call Me Captain When I..., but can be read as a stand alone. It's you know who's bday today, so I'm having a moment. Block me if you don't like it. Otherwise, let me know if you do.

I no longer have a taglist. Please follow @rampitupandread and turn on notifications to learn when I post! 😘

NOTICE: I Do NOT Consent to my work being reposted, translated or presented on any other blog or site other than by myself.

----

It was a weekend morning in your quarters and you woke up with your muscles deliciously sore and Steve’s arm draped heavy over your waist like an anchor. He hadn’t moved much all night, just held you close, his big hand resting over the curve of your hip, proprietary even in sleep.

Last night had been another marathon of expression, and you couldn’t wipe the smile off your face as you snuggled deeper into Captain Steve Rogers' chest.

When your alarm finally buzzed, he groaned, pressing his face into your shoulder.

“No.”

You smiled, turning just enough to brush your lips against his hair.

“Brunch, remember? Sam’s expecting us.”

A beat of silence.

Then his grumbled reply, “Sam can expect disappointment.”

You shifted, stretching, the motion pressing your bare skin to his. 

Always enough to get his attention. 

His hand slid up your ribs, thumb brushing over the mark he’d left on your breast hours before. You felt him smile against your skin.

“Don’t tempt me, sweetheart. Not if you actually want to walk into that diner under your own power.”

You huffed a laugh and finally peeled yourself away, dressing at a leisurely pace under his watchful eye. He didn’t rush you. Just watched. Like he was still filing every detail away for later.

—--

When you and Steve finally strolled into the little diner Sam had picked, the smugness waiting for you was practically a wall. You’d thrown on a light sundress, easy and casual, a big change from your every day uniform. You’d pulled Steve’s hoodie over it before leaving the apartment, and from the barely concealed grin stretching across Sam’s face, it wasn’t exactly a subtle choice.

“Took you long enough,” Sam teased, leaning back against the worn leather bench, arms crossed. His tone was light, but his eyes were sharp.

Steve slid in beside you, settling a warm, steady hand over your thigh under the table.

“Traffic,” he said smoothly.

Sam raised his eyebrow.

“Uh-huh. You two look like you’ve been through traffic. Or a category five hurricane.”

Your cheeks flushed, but Steve only gave that slow, lazy half-smirk, the one that said he knew exactly what Sam meant, and didn’t give a damn.

You ordered coffee and tried to behave, but the ache still pulsed low and deep, the memory of Steve’s voice on repeat in your head.

Say it again. Sir. Again. Louder.

“So,” Sam piped up after a while, glancing between you and Steve with barely disguised amusement.

“Captain Rogers taking well to his... continuing education?”

You almost choked on your coffee. Steve cleared his throat, a low, sharp warning.

“Very well, actually,” you replied sweetly, glancing up at Steve through your lashes.

“Sometimes we get deep... into discussions.”

Sam leaned forward, entirely too pleased.

“Oh, knowing Steve, he’s relentless about driving his point home.”

Steve’s mouth twitched, but his voice stayed calm.

“You have no idea.”

Brunch meandered along, easy and warm, with Sam doing most of the talking as usual while Steve chimed in here and there, all charm and dry wit. You basked in the rhythm of it, the weight of Steve’s hand on your thigh, the occasional brush of his fingers a quiet, possessive reminder.

You sat back in your sundress, legs crossed under the table, toe occasionally nudging his calf, watching Sam and Steve bicker their way through a story about Bucky nearly getting himself arrested over a parking dispute.

You waited until Sam paused, mid-sentence, laughing about something dumb Bucky did on patrol, and then you leaned close to Steve, your voice soft, syrupy-sweet.

“Would you pass me the salt, Sir?”

The reaction was instant. 

You saw the sharp flicker in Steve’s jaw, the curl of his fingers around his coffee cup. Sam froze mid-sip, eyebrows climbing toward his hairline.

Steve passed the salt, his voice cutting and clipped.

“Here.”

You batted your lashes and accepted the shaker like nothing was out of the ordinary.

“Thank you, Sir.”

Sam choked on his juice and you three fell silent, the air suddenly thick with realization.

Steve set his cup down slowly, his hand sliding under the table again, fingers finding your thigh and squeezing hard enough to make your breath hitch.

Sam’s eyes flicked downward, then back up, wide with dawning understanding. Then he rubbed a hand over his face, shaking his head. 

“Yep. That’s exactly what I thought. Jesus Christ.”

Steve didn’t even blink, still watching you.

“Excuse us,” he said, his voice smooth and final. “We’ll be back in five.”

Sam raised both hands in surrender.

“Don’t explain. I don’t wanna know.”

—--

Steve’s hand stayed locked around yours as he led you out the back door of the diner. The second it swung shut behind you, he had you pressed against the brick wall, breath stolen by the force of his kiss.

“You think you’re cute,” he murmured against your lips, his hands already mapping familiar territory, sliding beneath your dress.

“You think I’m cute, Steven. Said so yourself last night when I was on my knees…”

Your didn’t voice waver with the way his fingers were teasing the sensitive skin of your thigh, nor with the wicked promise in his eyes.

“Cute was not the word, Sweetheart. And you’ve got some nerve,” he whispered, voice dark and honey-smooth.

“Saying it like that, in front of him. You wanted me to lose it, didn’t you?”

Your only reply was a shiver and the soft, broken sound his mouth swallowed as his his large hands lifted you up.

It wasn’t gentle. And it wasn’t meant to be. It was the kind of punishment you’d goaded him into all morning without saying a word. He entered you quickly, stretched you with no prep for his huge cock, and had you pinned to the bricks, thrusting rough and fast until he spilled inside you with a low, guttural grunt, uncaring of your release.

When he was finished, when you sagged against the brick, dazed and breathless, he straightened your dress for you like a gentleman. 

Except for the glint in his eyes.

“Now you’ll sit pretty through the rest of brunch,” he murmured, kissing the corner of your mouth. 

“And you’ll behave. And maybe, just maybe. I’ll let you cum later.”

You tried to answer. Your knees nearly buckled instead. 

You didn’t finish, but you got what you wanted. 

Steve lost control for you.

You walked back into the restaurant a little too slowly, legs not quite cooperating, the glow on your cheeks unmistakable, and it wasn’t from the sun. Steve trailed behind you, relaxed, sleeves rolled up, cool as a cucumber. He sat down like nothing had happened.

Like he hadn’t just fucked you against a wall.

You tried to smooth your dress. Failed. Tried to sit like normal. Failed harder.

The wince gave you away.

Sam kept his eyes locked on the menu, lips pressed into a thin, grim line. You reached for your water, hands still trembling faintly, downing half the glass in one go. Steve sipped his coffee, unbothered, then glanced your way.

“You good, sweetheart?”

Sam choked on his juice. Again.

You flushed, but your voice was sweet and perfectly polite.

“Yes, Sir.”

Sam slammed his menu shut.

“Nope. I’m out. I fought aliens for this? Bucky when he was a crazed super soldier assassin. But somehow this brunch is still the most traumatizing thing I’ve ever lived through.”

You bit your lip, trying not to smile. Sam pointed directly at you.

“You. Don’t even pretend you’re innocent. You limped back in here like you got benched mid-mission.”

Steve, for once, actually choked on his coffee.

You ducked your head, whispering just loud enough for them to hear: “You should’ve seen what he did last night.”

Sam groaned and threw his napkin on the table.

“I need new friends.”

“You love us,” Steve said easily, his arm sliding along the back of your chair, fingers toying lazily with the strap on your dress.

“I do not,” Sam shot back, already getting up. 

“I’m going to sit at the bar. Text me when you’re done being freaks.”

You leaned against Steve’s side, smug and breathless.

“That was fun.”

Steve’s gaze dropped to you, soft but hungry.

“You’re not off the hook, sweetheart.”

“I didn’t think I was.”

He kissed your temple.

“Good. As long as we understand. Make sure you remember your safe words.”

—--

You were already soaked when he told you to get on the bed.

The second the tripod clicked into place and the camera’s red light blinked on, your heart kicked up a notch.

Steve didn’t speak. Just sat in the chair across from you, fully clothed, legs spread, those thighs on display, blue eyes looking to the bottom of your soul.

“Look at yourself,” he said finally, voice deep and calm.

You turned toward the mirror and saw it: the flush blooming across your chest, the gleam of slick glistening between your thighs, and the wide, glassy look in your own eyes.

“You’ve been waiting all day to cum, haven’t you?”

You nodded, voice already caught in your throat.

“Yes, Sir.”

Steve smiled devilishly. 

“Then let’s make up for lost time.”

—---

The first orgasm came fast. Too fast.

His fingers were inside you before your knees even stopped shaking from the command to spread them. Two strokes. Three. Your back arched, your hips jerked, and he was right there, voice low and steady as your body crumbled.

“That’s it. That’s my good girl. Needed that, didn’t you?”

You were still trembling when he didn’t stop. His mouth replaced his fingers, tongue circling your clit while two fingers worked deep and sure, stroking that spot that had you seeing stars.

The second orgasm broke through the remnants of the first, sharp and blinding. You cried out, hands scrabbling at the sheets. It was sharper this time, tighter, like your nerves couldn’t keep up.

“Steve…fuck!”

He didn’t say a word. Just kept licking, relentless and patient.

The third took you apart. Your vision went white and you tried to twist away, legs trembling violently, but he caught your hips like you were made of tissue paper and dragged you back down to the edge of the bed.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I…I can’t….”

“Yes, you can.”

You were already shaking, your body too sensitive, every nerve exposed and electric. He filled you to the hilt and didn’t give you time to adjust.

“You wanted to come,” he said, voice thick, breath hot on your neck. “Now take it.”

He fucked you slow at first, then harder. Deeper.

You came again. And again. Four. Five. Six. You lost count somewhere between sobbing his name and biting down on his hand to keep from screaming.

The mirror was brutal. It showed you everything: the shake in your thighs, the drool on your chin, the way your eyes rolled back. You didn’t recognize the woman in the reflection, wrecked and ruined and still begging for more.

The camera kept rolling.

“You’re so fucking pretty when you break,” Steve gritted out, one hand anchoring your hip, the other sliding between your legs again. “Show me one more.”

You shook your head wildly.

“I can’t…I’m gonna…”

“Yes. Yes you are.”

He pounded into you faster, thumb rubbing that overstimulated bundle of nerves in evil little circles that threatened to drive you insane. 

Your body gave up, gave into the violent, full-body detonation. Your vision blurred. Your voice cracked. You went boneless, collapsed onto the mattress in a wet, twitching mess.

And still, he kept going.

“That’s my girl,” he murmured, slowing down, riding it out with you. 

“That’s how you cum for me.”

You were sobbing into the sheets, overwhelmed, ruined, and completely wrecked.

He kissed your shoulder. 

“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “You did so fucking good.”

You didn’t even realize you were still on camera. And you didn’t care.

You just let him gather you into his arms and hold as your body trembled against him as you watched his hand slide down your belly again in the mirror.

You were spent. 

Your body twitched with the aftershocks of too many orgasms stacked too close together. You didn’t know which one had made you cry. The fourth? The sixth?

You didn’t know how long it had been since brunch.

Since he’d denied you.

Since he’d promised you later.

This was later.

Steve was between your thighs, mouth slick and possessive.

You could barely breathe, but he still asked, “Think you’ve got one more in you, sweetheart?”

Your eyes flicked to the mirror.

At the blinking red light.

At the wrecked, and yes, beautiful, woman staring back at you.

At the camera with its steady red light blinking in the corner, still rolling, capturing every second of this.

You opened your mouth, and your voice cracked.

“Yes, Sir.”

He groaned.

“Good fucking girl.”

And then he went back down.

His mouth was everywhere. His tongue circled your clit, then pressed flat against it, slow and hard. Your hips bucked, but he just held you down tighter.

The overstimulation rolled in hard and sharp, blinding you.

You tried to close your legs, but you couldn’t. His forearms pressed them open; you just knew there would be bruises tomorrow.

You were floating on feeling. 

“Stay with me,” he murmured, voice low and ragged. “Give it to me, baby. Let go.”

You sobbed, body curling, every nerve screaming.

And then he found it.

That perfect pressure, that rhythm that pushed you beyond pleasure into something raw, overwhelming, and uncontrolled.

You gasped.

“Steve! Oh my God…I’m…”

“I know.” His tongue flicked harder. Faster. “Let go for me. I want all of it.”

You shattered. Your back arched, your thighs clenched around his head, and then…you released. 

A sob tore out of your throat as your body convulsed, a sudden gush soaking his mouth, his fingers, and the sheets. 

You screamed. You couldn’t stop and you couldn’t think.

Steve moaned into your cunt like he’d been blessed.

“That’s it,” he murmured. “That’s my girl. Fuck, look at you…”

You squirted again, shorter and sharper this time, your body pulsing around nothing, too empty, too full, too much. Your thighs shook violently as another wave hit you, and he didn’t stop licking, didn’t stop praising.

You could only cry.

He licked you through it. Praised you through it. Held you through the fall.

You didn’t even register when it stopped, just felt the cool air on your skin, the hot press of his chest as he gathered you up and whispered softly, “Shhhh, baby. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

—----

The world came back in pieces.

Steve carried you to the bathroom, gentle with you, quietly murmuring to you the whole time. He ran the water warm, checked the temp three times, then climbed in first and pulled you onto his lap like you were fragile.

You felt boneless, floating.

His arms wrapped around you, lips pressed against your temple. He rocked you in the water and whispered things only meant for you.

“You did so good for me.”

“I love you so much.”

“You gave me everything.”

“I’ve never seen anything so fucking beautiful.”

His hands smoothed over your thighs. Down your back. Up your arms. He washed you carefully. Between your legs, he was even gentler with soft strokes and apologies in every touch.

When your breathing evened out, he held up a bottle of water.

You blinked at him, dazed.

“Small sips,” he said, helping you drink. “I need you to stay hydrated, sweetheart. You lost your whole mind for me.”

You smiled, dazed, cheek pressed to his shoulder.

“I’d do it again.”

He laughed, rich and wrecked.

“Don’t tempt me,” he whispered. “You say that again, and I’m starting the camera back up.”

You groaned. But you didn’t say no.

All you said was, “I love you, Steve Rogers.”

[parkerdoeswriting]

Late Night Talking

(Dad!Spencer x GN!Babysitter!Reader)

category: fluff oneshot

summary: spencer’s daughter wonders about his and reader’s relationship

warnings: pure cringey fluff

word count: 2k

A/N: HHHH might not do a part two for this it’s lowkey embarrassing……… ALSO DONT ASK WHY I KEEP POSTING CHILDREN AND PREGNANCY FANFICS IM FERAL RN

Spencer had been gone on a case for around two days now, his unit being called out to consult on a case somewhere in Tennessee. So now you were staying at his house for the meantime, babysitting his four year old Alice, who you had been a nanny for since she was around nine months old. She and Spencer were practically your family, even though you’d never say it out loud to anyone.

“I wanna watch Frozen!!” Alice pouts, holding the dvd case out for you.

“Munchkin.. it’s almost bedtime” you laugh, crouching down to match her height.

“Pleaseeeee?” she says, giving you the most adorable puppy dog eye look.

You recheck the time, mentally making calculations on how long the movie will take, since you wanted her to keep with her bedtime schedule. 

“Didn’t you watch it two days ago?” you question the four-year-old, raising your eyebrow at her. 

“It’s my favourite movie!” she exclaims, holding out the dvd case more, begging you to take it.

“Okay, but it’s our secret okay?” you shake your head, taking the dvd and standing up.

“Yay!” she jumps up and down, hugging your leg.

“Come on, let's get your jammies on first” you pick her up, carrying her to her room.

You spend a couple minutes changing her into her pajamas, which coincidentally were Frozen themed. You swiftly brushed her long brown hair, styling them into two French braids. You move her to the bathroom, helping her brush her teeth.

“Thank you” she smiles, making an ‘uppie’ motion at you.

“Course hun” you pick her up, giving her forehead a quick peck. 

You head back downstairs and place her on the polyester couch, wrapping her in a fluffy blanket. You smile at the scene before heading to the player, slipping in the dvd. You sit back down next to her, in which Alice responds by resting her head on your lap. You gently trace circles into the back of her head with your finger, emitting a yawn from her. 

Hans and Anna’s song starts playing in the background, causing you to hum along to the beat, which you knew by heart. Alice giggles faintly, her eyes still peeled to the television. 

“Love is an open dooooooooor!” you sing along, pretending to hold a microphone.

“You’re so silly!” she squeals, laughing and squirming around.

You chuckle, pinching her cheek, causing her to giggle more. The song ends, and you see as she sits up to look at you. 

“What’s wrong baby?” you ask her, rubbing her back.

“Are you married?” she asks, sitting in a criss-crossed position.

You laugh softly, shaking your head.

“Why do you ask, Ali?” you tilt your head.

“Do you want to be married?” she scooches closer to rest her head against your arm.

“One day, maybe, if I meet the right person” you smile, holding the back of her head.

“Oh..” she yawns, clinging to your arm.

You move her to your lap, readjusting your body so you're lying on the couch and she's resting on you, trying to get her to sleep.

“Is daddy the right person?” she asks, the sleepiness evident in her voice.

Your eyes practically bulge out of your head, your face red with embarrassment. 

“W-Why do you ask?” you play with her fingers, looking at how tiny they were compared to yours.

“Cause..” she mumbles quietly, a little shy to answer, “I want daddy to be happy, and he’s always happy when you're here”. 

The sentence sends a shockwave through your heart, causing your body to heat up.

“He is?” you ask, smiling. 

She smiles sleepily, nodding matter of factly before cuddling back into your chest. The movie plays in the background, but you don't pay attention, your head rushing with thoughts. You can hear faint snores mixing with the dialogues. You snap out of it, picking up the blanket and placing it over you both.

You check your phone for any new messages from Spencer, as he hasn’t called for his nightly phone call with Alice. You sigh as your notifications turn up empty, placing your phone back on the end table. You decide to get some hours of shut eye, having been exhausted from a day of entertaining an energetic kid. You shut off the tv, falling asleep moments later.

The next thing you know, you hear keys in the lock jingling, the door opening quietly. You hear footsteps stepping in and a bag dropping to the floor, you drowsily look over the couch, trying to see who it was.

Spencer walks into the living room, seeing your drowsy face and smiling. You put your finger to your lips, indicating for him to be silent, pointing it back down to where the sleeping Alice lays. He peers around the couch, laughing silently at the sight. You get up, gently picking her up, making sure she remains asleep as you bring her up the stairs to her room. You set her down, letting Spencer tuck her in. He leans down, pressing a soft kiss to her forehead. She stirs slightly, a small smile creeping onto her face.

He looks back to you as you both leave her bedroom, and you notice the dark bags under his eyes. You smile softly, reaching out for him, giving him a small hug.

“You okay?” you whisper in his ear, his arms tightening around your waist.

“Rough case” he sighs, pulling away moments later.

“Wanna talk about it?” you head back down the stairs, getting ready to pack up your overnight bags so you can head to your apartment.

“I’m good, thanks” he follows closely behind you.

“Well then.. I should get going, if I wanna make the next subway” I smile sleepily at him, throwing various things back into my bag, making sure I have everything.

“You should really stay over.. it’s not safe for you to be out at this time” he speaks up, reaching for your shoulder.

“I wouldn’t want to impose..” you reply, your body heating up as you feel his touch.

“Please.. stay?” he says, his voice soft.

His words cause your heart to flutter, causing you to remember words his daughter said to you just hours earlier.

“He’s always happy when you're here”.

“Course” you smile once again at him, causing his face to blush a light pink.

He gives you a double handed thumbs up, before heading to the kitchen and grabbing a glass of water and a quick snack. You trail after him, watching his movements.

“I can heat up some leftovers for you.. if you want?” you offer, leaning against the smooth countertop.

“It’s alright, I’m not that hungry” he shakes his head, snacking on some mixed fruit.

“Are you sure, when's the last time you haven't eaten something that came out of a vending machine?” you tease him.

He chuckles, looking at you.

“I’m fine, really, thanks for worrying” he leans his lanky body against the counter, next to you.

You both stand in relative silence for a while, watching as his hands dip back into the bowl of fruits. 

“Alice asked me a funny question tonight” you laugh quietly.

“Oh?” he nudges you with his elbow, beckoning you to say more.

“Yeah, she asked if you were the person I wanted to marry..” you rub your neck. 

He chokes on the berry in his mouth, coughing loudly, he tries to cover his mouth so Alice can't hear.

“She what?!” he stumbles over his words, his face red like the berries he was eating.

“She also said you are always happy when I’m around” I tease him, poking his chest.

He groans, holding his head in his hands.

“I can’t believe I’m raising my own little profiler” he laughs, rubbing his forehead. 

As if on cue, a small “Daddy?” can be heard from the top of the stairs, alongside the sound of mini footsteps stomping down them.

“Baby.. hi” Spencer swiftly moves to her, swooping her into his arms.

“You’re home!” she exclaims, still sleepy.

“I am, were you good while I was away?” he looks at her, his eyebrow raised.

“Yuh huh!” she nods, her face tucking into his neck.

“Good, good” he rubs her back, looking over to you once again.

You smile at the scene, imagining what life would be like if you were actually their family. You approach them, giving her head a soft caress.

“Look at my braids!” she claps her hands together excitedly, showing them off proudly.

“They look gorgeous” he kisses the top of her head, lingering there for a second. 

“Can I sleep with you tonight?” Alice pouts at Spencer, her small fingers in his wild hair.

He bites his tongue, knowing it’s impossible to say no to a request like this. You know he’ll most likely say yes, as she wasn’t the only one missing the other. 

“Just for tonight, alright?” he says, making her squeal in excitement.

“Are you staying for a sleepover?” she redirects her attention to you, smiling.

I nod as well, my mouth curling into a smile.

“Yay!!” she starts to celebrate, but gets cut off by a long yawn.

You all head back up the stairs, grabbing your overnight bag as you pass it. Alice watches you from behind Spencer, her eyes fighting to stay open. You wave her goodnight as you turn to open the guest room door, but you are swiftly met with objections. 

“No.. sleep with me and daddy!” she frowns, reaching her hands out for you. 

“Sweetie..” Spencer says, his voice filled with sternness.

“I’m sure your father wouldn’t feel comfortable with that, sorry baby” I lean your lips near her forehead, giving her a kiss. 

“I’m.. I’m fine with it, if you are…” he mumbles quietly. 

“Come on!!” she attempts to grab you.

“I will, just let me change first, okay?” you chuckle, heading back inside the guest bedroom. 

You change into a pair of sweatpants and a tank top, brushing your hair and looking at yourself in the mirror. You make sure you look decent before heading to Spencer’s room, seeing Alice jumping around on his bed. 

“Hey monkeys” you giggle, making your way to the mattress. 

She happily jumps close to you, practically pulling you onto the bed. You sit down, crossing your legs together. 

“Okay Alice, it’s bedtime now, alright?” Spencer says, yawning as he rests his head on his pillow.

“Okayyy” she huffs, laying down beside him.

You rest on the edge of the right side, trying to put as much distance between you and Spencer as possible. Alice reaches for you, trying to pull you closer to her. You begrudgingly obey, rolling next to her. Spencer’s eyes watch you, a faint grin on his face. Alice attaches herself to you, cuddling into your chest. Your hand rests against her back, letting her face hide in your collarbone.

Spencer scooches closer, his hand resting on his daughter’s shoulder as she snoozes off. Your breathing hitches, your face flushing for the fifth time today. 

“I’m sorry if you feel pressured to do this, you can leave now if you really want to” he whispers, his eyes moving to his daughter's sleeping body.

“It’s fine” you remove your hand from her back, rubbing the back of your neck before returning it back to its position. 

He swallows nervously, moving his hand on top of yours. A grin creeps onto your face, moving your and his hand’s so they interlocked. His thumb caresses yours, sending little shivers into your body.

He moves closer to you, sandwiching Alice in the middle of you both. Her face was still pressed into you, her little hand clutching at the fabric of your tank top. His jaw rested above her head, trying desperately to touch foreheads with you, in which he succeeded. 

You could get used to this.. 

[sweetwolfcupcake]

Gaze (IV)

Secret Garden

Category: Drabble

Yandere John Wick x Reader

Part III

Warning: Nothing really, just useless art interpretation by the author who knows nothing about art.

GIF does not belong to me, credit to the original owner.

Unedited

You see him again. You wonder how you managed to run into him twice despite the unlikelihood of it. Are you about to become one of the unsuspecting victims of Cupid when he is in the mood for mischief?

You see him the night your friend hosts an exhibition of art by one of the most respected artists in the nation. Indeed, a jackpot for him and his gallery; there is no turning back from here. His hard work has finally paid off.

You see him admiring a piece. In a classic black turtleneck and a coat. Surely, he has been sent here just to devastate you.

You are familiar with the painting displayed, though, for a change.

An ‘underrated classic’, your friend once called the life-size painting of pomegranates, which seemed to have been peeled in a hurried manner, almost violently. A knife lies by their side, stained red. A hand extends to pick one of the pomegranates. The size, the protruding veins, and the strong forearm show that it belongs to a man. The glow of candles is focused on the pomegranate on what seems to be a large wooden table with intricate designs on it. The rest of the items have been deliberately shrouded in the play of light and shadows. Perhaps your friend can tell you more about the painting. You have seen him being inspired by it frequently.

“Do you know what it is titled?”

You flinch mildly at the sudden question that is directed at you, even if his gaze has not moved from the painting yet.

“Hello again.” You manage to keep your voice steady yet feel the beads of sweat on your nose.

Is it normal to feel nervous to the point of your throat being parched around a man you are already acquainted with?

You would like to paint it as the result of you being hopelessly and intensely attracted to this man. But somewhere deep in your mind, you know that there is more to the bodily reaction you have. They are like little warning signs. Subtle yet undoubtedly there – the kind you get while approaching a perfectly calm trail that just does not feel right.

John finally looks at you, “In Pursuit of Love ”, he smiles, 

“Huh?”

“The painting, it's officially titled ‘In Pursuit of Love’, though he often called it ‘Persuasion’.”

“It is. So is love.”

“Persuasion? Love? The painting looks strangely sensual and violent to me.” You comment, walking up to stand beside him and get a closer look at the painting.

A marvel indeed, but you do not understand the depths and details like an art enthusiast or any expert would.

You raise your eyebrows and turn to steal a glance but find his eyes already on you. Why does it make you go still for a moment? You do not know.

“I understand the sensual part, but violent?”

“Our desires are born out of our senses, and desires often make us go to violent lengths and meet violent ends, reaping violent delights. Some desires, though, are rooted in our damned and lonely souls, and they give birth to the most twisted and violent outcomes. All in the name of love.”

You blink, nodding slowly, trying to absorb this all at once “This…” letting out a nervous chuckle, you sigh, “This is intense. Never thought of it this way.”

“What did you think?”

“Well, I’m no expert, so—”

“It’s art; it doesn’t matter.”

“I thought… When I first saw it, I thought of it being a metaphor for murder or human greed or something.”

“I see.” His eyes catch the light just right, and the ghost of a smile and mirth in his eyes are what make you smile.

“You like the painting?”

“Very much.” He gives it one last glance before extending his arm towards you. “You want to see more and interpret?”

“I’m afraid that would be laughable to you.”

This time, his lips tilt into the barest of smirks, and you force yourself to tear your eyes away from them. “A fresh insight is always welcome. Come, walk with me.” He raises his arm slightly.

****

You take it. Of course, you accept it. There is something incredibly comforting about his warmth and being so close.

It also means that you are close enough to smell his cologne again. It makes a tinge of unease settle somewhere deep in your brain. But you smile it away, favouring the warmth of your chest over the faintest ring at the back of your mind as you allow him to lead the way.

[badathumanemotions]

Still On The Line

Spencer Reid x Fem Reader MDNI Category: Smut, Angst, Hopeful Ending CW: Noncon Voyeurism, Masturbation (Male), Perv Spencer, Fantasizing, Boob-Job, Vaginal Sex, Doggy-Style, Riding, Hopeful Ending. WC: 2,133 Spencer and Y/N are face timing before bed when she accidentally leaves her camera on while getting ready for bed. Perv Spencer just can't help himself. (Not Proof Read) Master List "Alright, night Spence," Y/N said, her voice muffled by a yawn as she leaned closer to the screen. Her bedroom was dimly lit by the glow of her laptop.

"Night, Y/N," Spencer replied, his own voice thick with sleep.

Y/N minimized the window without another thought. She stretched and padded over to her bed, not realizing that she had forgotten to disconnect the call. As she peeled off her shirt and pants, the camera lens remained open, broadcasting everything to Spencer's shocked eyes. He had never seen his friend like this before—bare and unguarded. The sight was unexpectedly mesmerizing, and he couldn't help but watch as she revealed more of her soft, smooth skin. She was beautiful in a way that made his heart race and his palms sweat.

Spencer's eyes widened as he realized what was happening. He should've ended the call, should've looked away, but his curiosity and budding arousal held him captive. He watched, his breath hitching, as she pulled off her bra.

Her breasts, free from their confinement, bounced gently, and she shivered slightly in the cool room. Her nipples were a rosy pink, tight from the chill, and Spencer felt his body responding in a way he hadn't anticipated. He had always thought of Y/N as a friend, but now he was seeing her in a different light—a light that illuminated her curves and made him question everything he thought he knew about his feelings for her.

Next, she slid off her panties, revealing the patch of dark hair between her legs. Spencer's eyes were glued to the screen, his mind racing with thoughts he had never allowed himself to have about her before. He felt a pang of guilt but also an undeniable thrill. Y/N's body was a revelation, a secret garden he hadn't known existed.

Y/N bent down to pick up a fallen item from the floor, her back to the camera. Spencer's breath caught in his throat as he took in the view of her round, firm ass, the perfect curve of her back, and the shadowy split between her legs. He had to clench his fists to keep from reaching out and touching himself. This was wrong, he knew it, but the sight of her was like a drug, and he was already addicted.

Her cheeks, normally a soft peach, were flushed from the cool air, and the cleft of her ass was a tempting crevice that he hadn't even dared to imagine. He watched, his heart hammering in his chest, as she straightened up and turned around, still unaware of his gaze. The sight of her bare pussy was like a punch to the gut, making him ache with a desire he hadn't felt in a long time.

Spencer knew he should close his laptop and pretend he'd never seen it, but he couldn't tear his eyes away. These images of Y/N were now burned into his memory, a secret he'd carry with him forever. He felt a strange mix of guilt and arousal, like he was betraying their friendship by watching her in such an intimate moment.

Y/N, oblivious to her audience, gathered her hair into a loose bun at the top of her head. Her body stretched upwards, her breasts lifting slightly with the movement. The action was innocent, but to Spencer, it was the most erotic thing he had ever seen. The way her skin pulled tight across her chest, the subtle jiggle of her breasts as she secured the bun, it was like watching a dance of seduction performed just for him.

Next, she reached for a bottle of lotion on her nightstand. Spencer felt his body responding more intensely as she began to apply it. She started with her arms, sliding the cool, scented liquid over her skin, watching the way it shimmered in the low light. Her movements were slow and deliberate, each stroke calculated to soothe and pamper herself. Spencer's mind filled with fantasies of what those same hands could do to him.

Then, she lifted one of her legs onto the bed, exposing herself even more to the camera. The scent of the lotion filled the room, a sweet and sensual fragrance that seemed to wrap around her. She began to massage the lotion into her thigh, her hand moving in slow, circular motions that hinted at something more intimate. Spencer's eyes followed the path of her hand, his heart racing as he anticipated where she would go next.

The moment her hand reached the apex of her thigh, Spencer's breath hitched. He could see the plumpness of her pussy, the delicate folds of skin that he'd never dared to imagine. She applied the lotion to her thighs with such casual ease, not realizing the effect it was having on him. The sight was too much to bear, and his own hand found its way to his boxers, his erection straining against the fabric.

Y/N finally noticed the light on her laptop and turned around with a gasp, her hand flying to cover herself. Spencer's heart plummeted, his face flaming with embarrassment. He'd been caught, but there was no way to explain what he was doing. He slammed the laptop shut, his heart racing.

The silence on the other end was deafening. Y/N had to have realized he'd seen her. Spencer's mind raced, trying to come up with an excuse, a way to fix this. But what could he say? He'd seen her naked, watched her with a hunger that was anything but friendly.

The images of Y/N's naked form plagued him as he got ready for bed. Her curves, her skin, the way she moved—it was all he could think about.

Spencer tried to push the thoughts away as he brushed his teeth, the minty foam feeling like a cold slap in the face compared to the heat of his arousal. He spit out the toothpaste and rinsed his mouth, hoping the cool water would clear his head. But when he looked up into the mirror, all he saw was the reflection of his own desire.

He retreated to his bedroom, the same room where he'd had countless conversations with Y/N. But now, the space felt charged with something new—something he wasn't quite ready to face. He slid into bed, the cold sheets doing little to cool his feverish skin. His erection pressed against the fabric, a reminder of what he'd just witnessed.

Spencer's hand found its way down to his dick, tracing the outline of his desire. He couldn't help but picture Y/N's face. The image of her naked body was burned into his mind, and it fueled his strokes. He imagined her lying beside him, her soft curves pressed against his side. His thumb circled the head of his penis, mimicking the way he'd seen her massage the lotion into her skin.

He pictured her looking up at him with those big, innocent eyes, her mouth parted slightly with surprise. In his fantasy, she didn't push him away. Instead, she reached out and touched him, exploring him with the same curiosity that he'd had for her. Her small hand wrapped around his cock, her eyes wide with wonder and lust.

The image grew clearer as he stroked himself faster. He saw himself straddling her, his dick poised between her perfect breasts. He'd always admired her from afar, but now he was imagining her up close, the way she'd look with her hair mussed and her cheeks flushed. He could almost feel the weight of her breasts in his hands, the softness of her skin against his own.

In his mind, Y/N's eyes were closed, her mouth open in a silent moan. Spencer pushed his cock between her tits, feeling the slickness of her lotion as they slid against his skin.

With a deep groan, he imagined himself pulling away and positioning her on all fours, her ass in the air. He reached down and slid his thumb through her wetness, her body responding to his touch.

Spencer's hand tightened around his shaft as he thought about spreading her cheeks apart and lining himself up with her tight entrance. He could almost feel the heat of her, the way she'd clench around him as he pushed inside. He'd always been a gentle lover, but with Y/N, he wanted to be anything but. He wanted to claim her, to make her his in a way that was primal and raw.

In his fantasy, he slammed into her without warning, her body jolting forward with the impact. She'd squeal, but not with pain—with surprise and pleasure. Her tight pussy gripped him like a glove, and he'd hold onto her hips, pulling her back onto him with every thrust.

The sound of skin slapping skin filled his ears as he watched his cock slide in and out of her. Each time he pulled back, her pussy would cling to him, desperate for more. And when he pushed in, she'd take him all the way, her inner walls quivering around his length.

Spencer's hand moved faster, his grip tightening as he felt himself getting closer.

In his fantasy, Y/N was riding him now, her hips bucking as she took him in. Her breasts bounced with every movement, the tips of her nipples hard and erect. He watched, his eyes transfixed, as she leaned back.

Her fingers found her clit, and she began to rub in time with his thrusts. Spencer could see the muscles in her stomach tighten with each stroke, her pussy swollen and begging for more. He reached up and took a nipple into his mouth, suckling gently as she moaned and arched her back.

In his mind's eye, Y/N's climax was building, her breath coming in quick gasps. Her eyes locked onto his, a silent plea for release. He felt her walls start to spasm around him, her orgasm approaching like a storm on the horizon. Her cheeks flushed a deep shade of pink, and her eyelids grew heavy with pleasure. The sight of her impending climax was too much for Spencer to handle. His hand moved faster, his breathing ragged. He could feel the pressure building in his balls, his orgasm close at hand.

With a final, desperate thrust, Spencer came. Thick ropes of cum shot out of his cock, painting his stomach and chest with warm, sticky fluid.The reality of what he had just done hit him like a ton of bricks—he had masturbated to the thought of his best friend.

Shame flooded through him, a cold, bitter tide that washed away the last vestiges of his arousal. He had violated Y/N's trust, invaded her privacy in the most intimate way possible. His heart raced with guilt as he cleaned himself up, his mind reeling with the weight of his actions.

Spencer collapsed back onto his pillows, his breathing shallow and erratic. He couldn't believe what he'd just done. He'd always seen himself as a good person, a loyal friend. But now, he was a voyeur, a pervert who'd taken advantage of an accident to satisfy his own desires.

The room felt too small, the air too thick with his guilt. He threw the covers over his head, hoping to hide from the reality of his actions. But even in the darkness, he couldn't escape the images of Y/N's naked body. They played on repeat in his mind, each frame more vivid than the last. He'd never felt so dirty, so wrong.

But eventually, exhaustion won out, and Spencer slipped into a fitful sleep, his dreams a tumultuous mix of desire and regret.

The next morning, Spencer's eyes snapped open, the weight of his actions from the night before crashing down on him like a heavy fog. He reached for his phone, his hand shaking with nerves. The screen lit up, revealing a text from Y/N that read, "I hope you enjoyed the show ;)."

The smiley face at the end of the message filled him with a mix of hope and dread. Had she known he'd seen her? Was she okay with it? The little yellow emoji felt like a lifeline thrown to him in a sea of uncertainty. He read the message over and over again, trying to discern the tone behind the smirking face.

Spencer took a deep breath and replied, his thumbs hovering over the keyboard. "Y/N, about last night…" He paused, his mind racing for the right words. "I'm so sorry." The message remained unsent for a moment, his heart thumping in his chest. Finally, he hit send, feeling like he'd just taken a leap off a cliff.

Y/N's response was quick, and it stunned him. "Don't be. I liked it." The words hung there, stark and unmistakable. Spencer's cheeks flushed as he read and reread the message.

[reidmarieprentiss]

omg need more chip taylor. Loved your fic of him!!!

Juno(OH)

Pairing: Chip Taylor x fem!reader

Category: fluff

Warnings/Includes: showering together (SFW)

Word count: 684

main masterlist

You returned home a day earlier than Chip expected. Technically, your trip ended on schedule, but you’d told him you wouldn’t be back until the next day, hoping to surprise him.

When you walked into your shared trailer, the sound of the shower running caught your attention. A smile spread across your face as you thought about sneaking in to join your man under the water before it turned cold.

As you approached the bathroom, however, you paused. Over the gentle rush of water, you could hear Chip’s voice singing along to the radio. The song choice stopped you in your tracks, a soft giggle escaping your lips.

Chip was belting out Juno by Sabrina Carpenter in the shower, completely unaware of your presence. The joy and enthusiasm in his performance only made you adore him more. c

You crept closer to the bathroom, careful to keep your steps light so as not to alert him to your presence. The muffled sound of water spraying against the tiles mixed with Chip's slightly off-key, but endearing, singing filled the small space.

He was really into it.

“You make me wanna make you fall in love.”

You had to cover your mouth to stifle a laugh. The passion in his voice was both hilarious and adorable, and you found yourself debating whether to tease him or let him keep enjoying his moment.

You decided to join in the fun. Kicking off your shoes quietly, you leaned against the doorframe and waited for a pause in his singing. As the verse ended, you belted out the next line with as much theatrical flair as you could muster.

“Oh, late at night I’m thinking ‘bout you–”

The shower stopped mid-verse.

 “WHAT THE—" Chip’s startled yelp was followed by a loud thud, as if he’d slipped on the soap. “Y/N?! What the hell?!”

You doubled over laughing, struggling to get the words out. “Oh my God, Chip! I didn’t think I’d scare you that bad!”

The shower curtain flew open, revealing a soaking wet Chip with suds still in his hair and a look of sheer embarrassment plastered across his face. His eyes narrowed at your hysterical figure. “You’re not supposed to be home until tomorrow! I wasn’t—” He gestured vaguely at himself and the singing that had just betrayed him. “This is not how I wanted you to come home!”

Through your laughter, you managed to step closer, resting a hand gently on his chest. “Oh, babe, don’t be mad. I think it’s adorable—you have such a gift!”

“I hate you,” Chip grumbled, his cheeks tinged pink from embarrassment.

“No, you don’t, baby,” you teased, your laughter bubbling up again.

Chip rolled his eyes dramatically, still flustered by being caught mid-performance. He muttered under his breath as he turned the shower back on, the steam rising around him.

“Are you actually mad?” you asked, your grin softening as you began peeling off your clothes again.

“Mhm,” he mumbled, the sound low and unconvincing. He wasn’t mad, not really, but his flustered state made him put on a show of grumpiness.

He didn’t even glance back as you stepped into the shower behind him, the warm water cascading over both of you. Unable to resist, you took a quick, appreciative glance at his perky behind before wrapping your arms snugly around his waist.

Smirking to yourself, you leaned closer and began to sing softly in his ear. “I know you want my touch for life…”

Chip groaned, his head falling forward slightly as he realized what you were doing.

“If you love me right, then who knows?” you continued, barely suppressing a laugh. “I might let you make me Juno…”

Chip let out a huff of laughter through his nose, finally giving in to the ridiculousness of the moment. Without turning around, he picked up the lyrics, singing off-key but with gusto, “You know I just might, let you lock me down for life…”

The two of you dissolved into laughter, the sound mixing with the patter of the water, the moment as ridiculous as it was perfect.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[imaginesmaimasterlists]

You can request about any of the characters above, or any other masterlists I have (here), always following the Requests Rules. My main blog is @imaginesmai​

💕:Fluff

🎈: Funny

💋: Smut

😭: Angst

⭐: Personal favourite.

🥇: The most popular fic in each category (it might change).

Angst Alphabet

Fluff Alphabet

Prompt List 1

Kink-November

Azriel

Breaking point: Azriel comes back from the dungeons broken and you're left to pick up the pieces, which makes you take matters in your hand and talk with your High Lord about Azriel's missions. 😭

Breeding tonic gone wrong: during a trip to the Illyrian mountains, Azriel and you discover a cabin with all types of monstrosities. One of them ends up in Azriel's blood system, a breeding tonic, which no male nor female has survived before. 😭💋 (darkish)

Hewn city, where nightmares come true: your anonymity makes you a great choice for Rhysand's mission, even if Azriel doesn't agree. But you'll do anything to discover more of Azriel's life, even the worst part. So you decided to take that trip to Hewn City - where nightmares do come true.😭

I love you: after the worst possible outcome after one of your missions, Azriel comes back to you, trying to fix what was broken.💕😭

Little secrets (headcanon): the batboys keep a small secret during your relationship, and you find about it. 💕🎈

⭐Missed target: (2) Azriel is convinced Elain was made for him. Three sisters for three brothers, and no one can make him change his mind. But someone or something is determinated to change the course of fate on his behalf. No matter how hard he tries. 🎈💕

🥇Right around the corner, (2), (3), (4), (5): 💕🎈😭

Four times someone notices something weird about Azriel, and that time someone figured it out.

What happened after each time Azriel's family noticed something weird about him, and that time they found out.

The turth comes out, but in a way Azriel didn't expect.

After the damage has been done, Azriel finds his brothers ready to pick up the pieces.

The story of how Azriel fixed what was broken, and how you forgave him

Promises to keep (2) (3): while you are held in a rotten cell, Azriel asks you to promise him something you can't. Because no matter how much he wishes it wasn't true, there was little you wouldn't do for your mate. 😭

Something new: Azriel proposes something new, and even if you have doubts, you're all in.💋

Taken: you're taken in the worst possible situation, and Azriel fights against time to find you. 😭

Time you take for granted: t for time: you're ill and you don't have much time together, from my Angst Alphabet 😭

⭐The orange peel theory: the spring court is beautiful, oranges are beautiful, but there's nothing more beautiful than your mate. 💕

Your name on my body (nerd-tattooed!Azriel x bimbo!reader): Azriel gets a tattoo with your name and it leads to smutty time, set in a modern time 💋

Eris

Feelings I cannot express: Five times Eris didn’t know how to express his feelings, and one time he did 😭

His precious treasure: Beron manages to ask the right questions at the wrong moment, making Eris suspicious of your safety. His hidden treasure in the forest, where he cannot get fast enough 😭

Cassian

Behind closed doors: Morning training in a storage closet. 💋 (Kinktober 1)

Little secrets (headcanon): the batboys keep a small secret during your relationship, and you find about it.💕🎈

Rhysand

Little secrets (heacanon): the batboys keep a small secret during your relationship, and you find about it.💕🎈

Rhun

Safe place: the autumn king tries to hurt you with his words and actions, but Ruhn is always there to help you up. 😭 💕

[fortheloveofwonderland]

Rusty | Chapter 17 | S.R

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A/N - this is where it starts to ramp up. Hold onto your hats guys, she’s gonna get bumpy.

Summary - After living in bliss for six months, things seems to be catching up on you. Is this the end of the road?

Pairing - Spencer Reid / Fem! Reader

Category - strangers to friends to lovers | angst | smut minors DNI

Warnings - blood, tears, medication, mentions of sexual activity, swearing, weight loss, depression, drinking, aggressive Spencer, violent Spencer, bruising, dissociations.

WC - 5.9k

Chapter 17 - Gunfight at the O.K. Corral

Six Months Later 

The gravel crunched while the sand flew up in violent plumes with each heavy, rapid step. The airless desert sprawled for miles in every direction, muggy and stagnant and not allowing fresh oxygen to replenish the supplies you were hurriedly losing. 

The sun was working its way out of the sky soon to dip below that blessed horizon and offer you some kind of reprieve from this heat that swelled around. But the humidity would remain, that oppressive humidity which was trying to suffocate you. 

Your limbs throbbed with every harsh pound of the desert floor, sending shockwaves up through the soles of your feet spiralling up your legs. Your heart pounded aggressively, your lungs desperately cloyed to any scrap of air they could find. 

Sweat clamoured at your forehead, rolling in beads down the side of your face, into your eyes. Your clothes were damp with perspiration, clinging to your frame. And then there was the blood. 

You could feel the warm, sticky claret as it trickled from an open wound on your bicep. The pain was dizzying, nauseating. And yet you didn’t stop running. 

If you stopped you would be caught. You were prey and they were the predator and the only way to defeat a predator was to outrun them. 

If you’d had half a chance you would have mounted Rusty, she would have gotten you away so much faster. But there was no time, it was life or death. And so you ran. 

You couldn’t hear much over the sound of your frantically hammering heart, stifled breaths and footsteps as you continued to hasten through the desert. You had no way to know if you were still being chased, hunted like a wild animal. 

The only thing you could rely on was your gut instinct and it was screaming at you that you weren’t safe, you weren’t out of dodge yet. 

So you ran and you ran. Even when your eyes started to blur and your head was spinning through lack of air, you ran. You ran and you ran and you ran. 

And then your gut instinct was confirmed when you heard another blast of shotgun. It was getting closer. 

Tears filtered out of your eyes, mixing with your sweat as they rolled down your cheeks. Was this really where it all came to an end? No, you wouldn’t let it, couldn’t let it. 

So despite the fact your body was trying to tell you to stop, you continued. You picked up your pace, pushing you to your absolute limits. If you stopped you were as good as dead. 

You were supposed to be safe out here, in the eerily named Tombstone, Arizona. For the past six months you and Spencer had lived blissfully on your new ranch, starting your lives together away from the danger that had been chasing you. 

You’d grown complacent. You’d been happy, settled. But now it was all coming crashing down around you and you couldn’t see a way out of this. 

Perhaps you should have known it would end this way. Maybe it was naive of you to believe the two of you could have a pseudo normal life. 

The sun's position in the sky left it directly in front of you and between it and your lack of oxygen you could barely see. So it wasn’t until you were practically right on top of it did you see it. 

In a former life it might have been someone’s homestead. Set back here in the middle of desert land it was now nothing more than a shell of what it would have once been. 

Its turquoise paint was faded by the elements and peeling at the edges. The old front door was boarded over and graffitied and appeared to be sealed shut. 

However just past the little dilapidated home was a large loft barn, similar to the one found on yours and Spencer’s ranch. The door was bolted shut and the deadbolt was incredibly rusty. You reached for it, your legs pleased to have a reprieve from running for a moment. 

Your breathing was ragged as you fought with the bolt, the fear pulsing through every nerve ending. You heaved and you heaved and eventually you managed to wiggle it loose and cloy it open. 

You got the door open just enough to slip inside and close it behind you. The barn was almost entirely shrouded in darkness apart from a small sliver of light that came in through a hole near where the wall met the roof. 

You squinted as you looked around. It was littered with hay bales and three horse stalls. There was a ladder on the far side which looked to lead to the second level. 

You crept towards it, giving the wooden ladder a little shake to test its stability. Little chips flaked off of it at your touch and it shook violently. Probably not safe.

But then you heard the shotgun ringing out again in the distance and you had to bite your tongue to stop from making a sound. There was nowhere to hide on the ground level. You had to go up. 

Trying to control your shaking limbs you gripped each side of the ladder before stepping up on the first rung. The ladder swayed as it took your full weight and you whimpered but powered on.

You hurriedly climbed, the quicker you got up the less likely you would fall if it snapped beneath you. The fourth rung gave out when you tried to put weight on it and if it hadn’t been for your steely grip you would have fallen.

You whimpered again, heart hammering heavier than before. You took the large step between the third and fifth rungs and continued your ascent. 

You were crying fitfully now, your entire body trembling. But somehow you made it to the top and collapsed on the dirty wooden floor. 

You still needed a better place to shield yourself. You couldn’t leave anything to chance. 

You pushed yourself to your feet no matter how hard your body fought for you to quit. Your revolver was tucked in the back of your pants, you needed a vantage point from which you could shoot if necessary, but also somewhere that was going to keep you concealed.

The floor creaked under foot, feeling like it may give way in places. There were sporadic holes in the wood which you had to manoeuvre around to save falling to your death. 

It was anybody's guess how long this place had been abandoned for, it must have been a long time given the state of disrepair. You just hoped that the floor would hold out beneath you. 

You found several bundles of hay near the edge of the second story for which you could crouch behind and if you could get a good enough angle maybe even get off a shot if needed. 

For now you threw yourself behind it on the ground, gasping to refill your aching lungs. You raised your hand to the bleeding wound on your bicep and hissed at the touch. 

It wasn’t life threatening but it throbbed wildly. It definitely needed checking out if you made it out of here. 

You left the wound alone and drew your revolver, wiping your sweaty brow on your arm. Your heart would not still, the fear that ran through your bones was incomprehensible.  

You had never been so full of terror in your entire life and that spoke volumes. You were never so scared when your stepfather beat you, not even the first time when his blow to your abdomen had forced all the air to leave your lungs. 

You hadn’t even been this terrified when you’d found Spencer unconscious and bleeding from his self inflicted forearm cut and you thought he was dead. 

This was a whole new degree of trepidation. This was your life on the line. One false move and it would all be over for you. 

You forced your breathing to return to normal no matter how much it burnt your lungs. You crept out from behind the hay stacks just enough so you could have line of sight on the barn door. 

You raised your firearm in a trembling hand in the direction, making as little noise as was humanly possible. You honed in your hearing to pick up on any little sound. You needed to be prepared. You needed to have the upper hand. 

You heard something in the distance, still a little way off and you couldn’t quite work out what it was. You noticed it a few more times and on the fourth, you realised it was a voice. And they were calling your name. 

Time felt like it was slowing down and ramping up in equal measure, you had no concept of how long you had been running, how long this chase had gone on for. You couldn’t keep track of how long you sat in the barn, waiting, hoping you weren’t found. 

Tombstone was supposed to be a fresh start, a new beginning for you and Spencer. You’d cultivated a life there in the last six months and you’d foolishly believed you were safe from harm's way. 

You’d talked through several options for relocation, your original plan of Mexico was quickly dismissed by Spencer. After his arrest he was terrified at the thought of returning. You settled on Tombstone as it was similar in its old west style ways to Bandera but with a slightly larger population. 

It was a good eight hundred miles west meaning it was unlikely you would be found. You went by the name of Elizabeth Parker, Spencer drew his savings out of his bank and the two of you only ever used cash. 

Tombstone was known for its O.K. Corral located on the historic Allen Street - an outdoor theatre which holds reenactments of a 1881 cowboy gunfight. It was dubbed, the town too tough to die. 

The town offered a glimpse into the past with its various museums, stagecoach tours, an underground mine and a Western theme park. It conjured images of gunfights and dusty streets, whiskey and Faro games, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as well as a plethora of western movie scenes.

You were renting a ranch just outside of town until his old place sold. It had forty five acres of land which was slightly less than he’d had in Bandera but it was plenty for what you needed it for. 

The land boasted a four car garage, a large loft style barn equipped with six horse stalls with feed and wash bays. Willow and Rusty delighted in the extra space, as of yet the two of you hadn’t acquired anymore steeds or any cattle. It also included three fenced off pastures, an extra bunkhouse similar to his old lodge, a hay barn and a smokehouse dating back a hundred and fifty years. 

But the pièce de résistance of the ranch was the three bedroom Victorian home sitting atop a hill, giving the most wondrous views of the rolling terrain. It was an old white wooden building which had been extremely well cared for and included all its original intricate details, such as the glass door handles and sweeping porches. 

The property was rented out by an elderly couple who had long since retired down to Florida. As such the home was fully furnished which was perfect for the two of you as you had none, even if the interior was a little dated.

Worn stone steps led to a large, open front door with a swing chair on the front porch. Ornate antique light fittings illuminated the entrance way in the dark from either side of the front door. 

Inside the floor was all hickory dark wood, aside from the carpeted staircase. Huge oak folding doors separated the living area from the foyer but you insisted on keeping them propped open at all times for maximum light. 

The living room was spacious, double the size of his entire Texan lodge. It possessed floor to ceiling French doors at one end which led out to a vast fenced off backyard. The porch wrapped around the entire property and outside the living room on the deck were plush couches facing the horse stable and making it the perfect spot to watch the sunset.

The kitchen was incredibly airy, with a sizable granite island running through the centre. It was the most modern room in the house, kitted out with a state of the art stove and huge double fridge-freezer. On one side sat a dining table which allowed a field of vision out of the window to the front of the house.

There was a separate dining room which Spencer had turned into his own personal library. He’d purchased several floor to ceiling bookshelves and even more books to fill them with. He’d moved two of the big leather armchairs from the living room and set them under the back window. It was the place in the house he frequented most. 

One bedroom was to the back of the ground floor and the master and second guest room were upstairs. The focal point of the master bedroom was a colossal, vintage bed made in dark oak with intricate carvings of flowers in the headboard. Sliding oak doors led to an ensuite which housed an old clawfoot tub and a contemporary waterfall shower, which created a strange juxtaposition.

The tub was your favourite place in the house. It was situated in front of giant windows that gave an immaculate and unhindered view of the entire property. Over the last six months you've spent an obscene amount of time soaking in the bath and simply staring at the rolling greenery. To the other side of the bedroom more French doors led out to a large second floor balcony.

There was a small creek at the back of the property which you often took Willow and Rusty down to for them to bathe. But they weren’t the only creatures who enjoyed a dip in the water.

A few weeks after arriving in Tombstone, you and Spencer had discovered an abandoned litter of puppies in a cardboard box on the side of the road one day whilst riding your mares into town. 

The five little creatures were shivering and mewling in hunger, ten piercing blue eyes looking up at the two of you as though begging for your aid. 

You’d taken them to a nearby veterinarian who ascertained the four females and lone male were Catahoula Leopard Dogs of approximately six weeks old. The girls weighed in at around fifteen pounds while the boy was closer to eleven and much smaller than his sisters. 

They were all similar in colouring to Rusty, particularly the boy. He had a short, smooth coat which looked almost painted on, a large head with drop ears and a strong tapered muzzle. His undercoat was a muddy grey while he was mottled with dark red patches with seemingly no design. He had one unique splotch over his right eye, and his entire front left leg was the splotchy dark red. 

The female pups were rather aloof while the male clung to you, whining fitfully if you didn’t cradle him or stroke him in some manner. You’d fallen in love with him in an instant and, somewhat reluctantly, Spencer agreed to take him home. 

Now at close to eight months old, Copper was close to fifty pounds and still growing. By the time he’s two years old he could be anywhere up to ninety pounds. He had a thick, muscular neck, a long curved tail and stocky, rectangular build. He was intelligent and focused, their breed being known for herding and hunting. He had an abundance of energy which he worked off swimming in the creek and running laps of the fields. 

He was inquisitive and sometimes fiercely independent but he was also incredibly loyal and protective. You’d trained him quickly to be off leash and didn’t grow concerned when he spent some days roaming, only to return at night and cosy up with you on the couch in front of the stone fireplace or on the porch on warmer evenings. 

You grew a little wistful now as you thought of Copper and by extension, Rusty. What would happen to them if you couldn’t return to the ranch? Copper and Rusty were you faithful companions, you couldn’t imagine your life without them. 

You spent more time with the animals than you did with Spencer. You’d both gotten jobs in Tombstone in an attempt to assimilate with the locals and for the most part worked opposing hours, leaving little time to spend together. 

Four days a week you worked on guided pony trail rides. You rode upon Rusty while Copper followed along as you led groups of tourists through fields and deserts on the variety of ponies on offer. You also helped clean out the pony stables and groom the steeds when you weren’t leading tours. 

Spencer split his time between two jobs, both on graveyard shift. Three nights a week he led the guided Gunfighter and Ghost Tours from downtown Tombstone. It was a history packed walking tour which included such highlights as the legend and lore behind the Courthouse hangings, John Heath and Bisbee Massacre, China Mary’s opium den in Hop Town and the Tombstone General Hospital where patients died excruciating deaths. 

Another two nights a week he tended bar at the Four Deuces Saloon. Usually by the time you were returning home for the day, he was just leaving for the start of a shift. At least once a week you went with him to the Four Deuces and spent at least half of his working night propped up at the bar, keeping him company as it didn’t always get very busy. You would take Copper and he would curl up at your feet or flit between the locals for attention. 

But you’d gotten used to seeing each other less, it just meant the time you did get to spend together was all the more fulfilling. You often used your free time to read together in the library or curled up in front of the fireplace with Copper. 

Your sex life had been steadily getting better. Once his stronger meds started taking effect he didn’t experience the same level of guilt after the two of you were intimate and rarely dissociated. 

He did seem to have a preference for foreplay, usually happier for the two of you to spend hours using your hands on each other than having intercourse. He was particularly keen on worshipping you with his mouth but never let you return the favour. 

You did have sex from time to time and it was always incredible but Spencer seemed to have to be in the right frame of mind for that particular activity. But when he did have the impetus for it, it never just happened once in any given sitting. 

Sometimes he would fuck you three, four, even five times in quick succession, often staying inside of you once he’d gone flaccid and remaining there until he was erect again. But then it could be weeks, even a month of nothing but foreplay. You couldn’t exactly complain, you were still getting off but sometimes you wanted more. 

On the whole, things were great between you, right up until they weren’t. 

About two months ago Spencer started acting differently. It was little things at first, he became irritable easily, he was often quick to anger over silly little things. He blew up at Copper for chewing on the living room rug, a rug which Spencer didn’t even like, scaring the pup half to death. 

He became incredibly restless, unable to sit still for more than five minutes at a time before he was jiggling his leg or tapping his fingers or sometimes getting up and pacing the room. You had a suspicion he wasn’t sleeping either, you always fell asleep before him and he was always up before you.

Then he started suffering from headaches, once a week then every few days. He said the headaches made him sick, and being sick made him not want to eat. As a result he’d been rapidly losing weight as of late. 

But soon things seemed to get even worse. He was anxious all of the time to the point of being paranoid. He grew depressed, barely speaking to you and rarely going to work. On occasion he would struggle to control his speech when he did talk and seemed hypersensitive to sounds, getting even more irate with Copper on the rare occurrences he barked. 

And then you found several empty bottles of whiskey hidden away in a cupboard in the barn. You hadn’t realised it before but when you found them it made so much sense. He always seemed a little disorientated, sometimes slurred his speech and he was often chewing gum, probably to mask the smell. 

You confronted him about it and he’d grown aggressive, one minute he’d been placidly reading a book but when you challenged him with the empty bottles he’d suddenly lost it. 

You wished you could say he’d dissociated but it wasn’t what happened. His eyes didn’t become vacant and unseeing like they did when his mind divorced itself from his body. Instead they were sharp, laser focused and unyielding as he glared at you. 

He all but threw you against the wall and got up in your face, screaming at you, spital flying like he was a wild animal. 

“Are you fucking judging me? With the amount you drink, you’re judging me?”

“I’m just concerned. You said yourself you don’t drink because of your addiction.”

“Don’t fucking talk to me about my addiction! You have no idea!” 

“S-Spencer, you’re scaring me.” 

“Shut up! This isn’t scary, you’ve not seen scary. Not yet anyway.” 

He was right, you hadn’t. And he proved that point by slapping you hard around the face. You’d whimpered like an injured puppy and tears were quickly making their way from your eyes. 

He scoffed in response, taking a step back and grunting, “don’t fucking test me, Y/N,” before storming away. 

You heard him leave the ranch and less than a few minutes later you heard your car engine screech to life and then he peeled away in a flurry of dust. 

It was the middle of the night when he returned and you knew for a fact he’d been drinking. You could hear him stumbling on the stairs, knocking into walls. 

You were already awake, unable to sleep. Copper jumped up from his dog bed in the corner of your bedroom as soon as he heard the intrusion. 

You knew he’d driven home, you’d heard the engine and the tyres on the gravel again. You had no idea what to expect after his earlier explosion. 

He didn’t say a word as he entered the dark bedroom. You watched as he stripped out of his clothes to his boxers, almost tripping himself over on his pants legs. 

He crawled into bed and it was only then he realised you were awake. You involuntarily flinched when he raised his hand to the red mark on your face he’d caused earlier. 

His eyes, even in the dark, flooded with his sorrow. 

“I’m s-so sorry.”

His breath reeked of whiskey and his words were slurred. 

“I’m so sorry. I d-didn’t mean to. I love you. You know I love you, right?” 

You didn’t reply and instead he kissed you fiercely. And maybe it made you an idiot but you let him. You also allowed him to go down on you while he muttered how sorry he was and how much he loved you. 

In his state, the whole affair was rather sloppy and uninspiring and eventually you’d faked an orgasm for it to simply be over. 

And then he collapsed next to you and within seconds he was snoring. 

The following few months things just went from bad to worse. Spencer continued to drink and was quick to anger. He didn’t hit you again but he often shoved you out of his way or pinned you to walls while he yelled at you. 

He’d left bruises on your wrists a few times from holding onto you so hard in these instances. But they weren't the only marks he left on you. 

For the past two months his sexual appetite had been through the roof. The two of you had sex almost every night with increasing roughness from Spencer. 

He left bruises on your hips where he gripped you so hard whilst fucking you senseless, he left welts on your ass cheeks where he’d spanked so violently whilst pounding you from behind. He’d once even tugged your hair so hard he’d ripped some out at the roots. 

He’d gone from mostly foreplay to bypassing that step altogether. Sometimes you weren’t even prepared when his thick, heavy length was plunging into you, stretching you so much it burnt. 

And then his dissociations came back with avengence. Usually it was after sex and you could keep a watchful eye on him so he didn’t hurt himself and you could work to snap him out of it. 

A few times you hadn’t been present and you’d found him with a few new self inflicted wounds mostly confined to his legs and thankfully nothing that warranted medical attention. 

You should have known what was happening, you should have seen the signs. But you were so busy walking around on eggshells, trying not to anger him that you’d missed what was right in front of you. 

You’d tried so hard to cling to what you and Spencer once had, desperate to believe that this wouldn’t last, that the person he once was would come back to you. 

You still saw hints of that man. He was still able to make you smile in a way no one ever had. The small windows into the man he was gave you hope. Like when he surprised you with breakfast because he’d finally taught himself to cook bacon and eggs. Or when he read to you or held you so delicately you thought your heart might explode. 

When he took you for an impromptu picnic down by the creek just a week ago and between homemade sandwiches and making love on the grassy bank, he’d produced a ring. 

“Y/N, I know things have been…not great lately and I’m so, so sorry for that. But I love you more than I ever thought it possible to love someone and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. 

“I know it’s crazy, I know it’s fast. But when we decided to run away together we were kinda promising each other forever anyway right? And I know with you being a fugitive filing a marriage licence won’t exactly be easy, but we can figure it out. 

“Or you know, maybe we can’t get married for real. But at the very least I want you to have this ring as a symbol that I will never, ever leave you. And if you decide to wear it you’re saying the same. I promise I’m going to try and be better for you. I want to be the man you fell in love with. So, uh, will you marry me?” 

You were snapped out of your thoughts by the sound of your name being called again, closer this time. You sucked in a breath, clutching the revolver for dear life. 

The reality of the situation was clawing its way up your spine like a slow shiver. It tingled harshly within your skin, as though it was beneath the surface, weaving between flesh and muscle. 

There were a finite amount of ways that this could go wrong and only a few in which they might work in your favour. 

You’d evaded the law twice before this should be a walk in the park. 

The voice grew louder still and you knew they were close. As you levelled the gun again, the vintage engagement ring caught your eye and you felt a pit forming in your stomach. 

You loved Spencer despite what he’d become and you’d agreed to marry him or simply wear his ring as it would put you in unnecessary danger to fill out any paperwork with your name on it. 

If you’d even have the chance. You were already in a grave amount of danger and chances were you would most likely never get to marry Spencer even if you could. 

You heard footsteps now, heavy and unrelenting on the gravelly sand outside. Then you heard the shotgun being cocked and a voice called out, worryingly close.

“Y/N, you can’t run forever. Games over, you can’t get away so you may as well just come out.” 

You clenched your jaw violently to stop from making a sound. Your chest tightened and your heart started beating somehow harder. Your palms were clammy, causing the revolver to slide in your grip. 

The air felt thick and heavy and it had nothing to do with the desert heat or the stale old air of the barn. The tension rippled through you, fear pulsed in your veins. 

The footsteps grew even louder and you knew they were extremely close. The shotgun cocked and suddenly fired, sending a bullet screaming into the wooden wall of the barn. 

You made a small whimper, physically biting down on your tongue to stop from making too much noise. You could immediately taste the blood pooling in your mouth from your teeth piercing the muscle. 

Tears hindered your vision but you blinked them back, needing to remain hyper focused. There was no time for tears. If you got away, then you could cry. Or if you were captured maybe you’d cry then too. 

But not now. 

You tried to steady your shaking hand, tried to keep it levelled at the door on the ground floor. It was immediately going to be breached, you just had to pray that they wouldn’t find you. 

Things were just starting to get better and now this? Life was intrinsically unfair. 

For a fraction of a second you allowed yourself to mourn everything you stood to lose. Your beloved steed and trusty dog. The homestead you’d been building for the past six months. 

The love of your life. 

You fought back tears again and forced yourself to focus on the task at hand. There was no margin for error. One misstep and it was all over. You had to come out victorious. 

The barn door suddenly flew open on its hinges, creaking and crashing as it hit the wall with the force in which it had been opened. 

You stifled a gasp, hand still violently shaking as you tried to level the gun on the head of the shadow who stepped into the room. 

The figure was in complete silhouette as was the shotgun resting on their shoulder, pointing out into the dark barn. His footsteps were quiet and deliberate, just as he had been trained to do so. If it hadn’t been for the homicidal way in which he’d burst through the door, you might not have realised he was there. 

His slow movements meant you could probably get a shot off. You were a pretty good aim but given the amount in which your hand shook you probably wouldn’t get a headshot. But you could at the very least disarm him. 

You didn’t want it to come to that, you didn’t want to hurt anyone else. However it came to his life or yours you may have to rethink that. 

He cautiously traversed the barn, so silently he could be floating. How many hundreds of times had he done this in the past? This was his bread and butter, chasing and stalking unsubs. How many of them had outrun him, outsmarted him? Could you be one of the few who got away? 

He stepped into the small patch of light on the floor created from the open door and the hole high in the wall, meeting perfectly in the centre of the room. The sun was dangerously low in the sky but it illuminated him enough to see his haggard features. 

The sweat coating his face glistened in the small sliver of light. His brows were heavily furrowed in annoyance, his nose scrunched a few times as he adjusted to the scratchy scent of old hay and abandonment. His finger coiled around the shotgun trigger, shoulders squared and back straight. You could make out the small spots of blood on his shirt sleeve, your blood. 

He made quick work casing the room, eyes briefly flitting up to the second floor and you hurriedly threw yourself back behind the hay bales. Your breath was viciously trying to escape in rampant breaths but you held it down, couldn’t make a sound. 

Hidden away again you could no longer see his movements but the removal of one of your senses heightened the others. Your ears could now pick up on the almost imperceptible footsteps, the slow and steady breaths leaving his lips as though the exertion of chasing you hadn’t impressed upon him in the slightest. 

You could smell him now, the sour and musty scent of sweat combined with the harsh lingering aroma of shotgun fire. The revolver in your hands felt smoother, heavier and the metallic taste of blood on your tongue became sharper. 

He took a few more hushed steps, each one causing your heart to beat more furiously inside your chest. He was hunting, tracking, creeping; it ran through his veins, as instinctual to him as breathing. 

You dared to peer out from your seclusion to glance down at him, the frustration rolled off of him in waves. And then suddenly he turned, a full one eighty degrees on the heels of his boots until he was facing towards the door again. 

He huffed out a merciless breath, hand tightening around the shotgun. His eyes cased the front corners of the dark barn, quickly ascertaining there was no one hiding in the shadows. 

“Goddamnit,” he grumbled under his breath as he stalked back towards the open barn door. 

He took one step outside before he turned and gave the barn another once over. He lowered the shotgun to his side, shaking his head in dissatisfaction. Even though he was nothing more than a gloomy outline once more, you saw his jaw clench. 

Before he stepped away and continued his hunt in the cavernous yet baron desert, he panted out another thick breath and shook his head briskly. And when he spoke into the seemingly desolate void, his voice was so unlike anything you’d ever heard from his lips that it struck you at your very core.

This man was no longer the same one you’d come to know. He was but a vessel of evil, possessed by some kind of darkness the likes of which you had never seen before. His fractured mind had finally torn in two, his psyche now owned by whatever demons had lived inside of him for so long. It might be his body, but his mind had been taken over by some other spirit.

Spencer Reid was no more. That was only confirmed by the way he cackled manically before spitting out the words, “I will find you princess, mark my words. I will find you.” And then he vanished into the desert, leaving you utterly petrified and questioning everything you thought you’d known about the man you loved. 

@kalulakunundrum @voledart @katrina0-0 @bakugouswh0r3 @prettyboyandthefangirl @zooni92802 @marvellover1819 @babyspiderling

[blacktabbygames]

Hey folks! Thank you so much for making Slay the Princess' launch month an absolutely incredible experience. The game already have over 3,700 reviews on Steam, 97% of which are positive, and a 91 critic score on metacritic, making it the 15th highest rated release in 2023 across all platforms, and the 3rd highest rated PC release of this year.

We can't express how much it means to us to see it resonate with so many people.

Today is the start of voting for the Steam Awards, and we'd appreciate it if you could lend Slay the Princess your vote for Outstanding Story-Rich Game. You can only submit one game per category, and you can only submit one category per game, so if everyone focuses on this one, we might stand a chance! You can vote for us here: 

Today is also the start of the Steam Autumn Sale! Slay the Princess unfortunately isn't participating (Steam doesn't let you participate in sale events until 30 days after your launch, so we just missed the cut-off here) but Scarlet Hollow is 25% off!

I'd also like to take the chance to highlight a couple of bundles we're in that have stackable discounts.

The Cartoonists Turned Gamedevs Bundle

Meredith Gran's Perfect Tides is, I think, one of the most criminally underrated narrative games of at least the past several years. Some of the point-and-click mechanics can be a little challenging to navigate, but the art, writing, and overall experience is absolute top-of-class. I cannot recommend this highly enough, and if you already own Scarlet Hollow, you can get Perfect Tides for an additional 10% off its sale price whenever it's discounted by finishing this bundle: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/29945/Cartoonists_Turned_Game_Devs/

Horrors of the Heart

If you want some romance with undercurrents (or overcurrents) of horror and the supernatural, the Horrors of the Heart bundle contains a few horror visual novel staples, including the excellent Girl-Cthuhlu-Dating-Sim Sucker for Love, and charming stuck-in-a-cabin-for-too-long Cooking Companions. Same deal as the Perfect Tides bundle: if you own any of the games in it, you can still pick up the others and get that extra discount: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/26929/Horrors_of_the_Heart/

That's all we've got for you for now. It looks like we've zeroed in on a date for rescheduling the Slay the Princess livestream (December 16th), but we'll do a more formal announcement once that's wholly set in stone.

In terms of development work, we're taking a little time off following Slay the Princess' release, but the gears have already started turning for Scarlet Hollow Episode 5, so keep your eyes peeled for more updates.

All the best, Tony

[pathologicalreid]

Hello, love your writing, can i request a oneshot for spencer Reid x wife!reader with the plot of the movie taken where she goes on a business trip or something and she gets taken and the team have to work against the clock to get her back. Had this idea for so long and thought you would be perfect to write it. Perfectly fine if you dont but im craving this story.

leave a message after the beep | S.R.

When you go missing under suspicious circumstances on a business trip, the BAU goes to Texas - and ends up in the middle of something bigger than anticipated.

who? spencer reid x fem!reader category: angst content warnings: kidnapping, blood, guns, reader almost kills someone, hospitals, the securities and exchange commission, typical cm violence, texas, takes place maybe circa season 7 word count: 4.03k a/n: okay anon so like yes i can write this but also i've never seen the movie taken so really i took your request and made it my own! i hope you like it either way!

Tuesday, 2:17 p.m.

“Hey, Spence, it’s me. Shame I got your voicemail, but I just landed at Dallas Fort Worth and I’m waiting for my ride to take me to meet the regional officers. Not sure if you’re traveling, but uh, call me when you get this, I guess. Or when you can. Hopefully, this trip goes better than I think it’s going to… oh, I think my ride is here.”

Tuesday, 6:42 p.m.

“Hey babe, so, the first meeting went fine, they don’t seem very receptive, but people generally aren’t when I’m sent in to change their methods. Wish you’d pick up your phone. Anyway, I’m on my way to the hotel now, I’ll probably try you again before I go to bed. I know my updates are probably riveting.”

Tuesday, 8:09 p.m.

“Well, I’ve definitely stayed in nicer hotels than this one, but I guess I can’t complain about being put up for free. I’m probably just biased because the a/c unit is busted – oh, my room number is 316, I know you like to have it. I opened the windows to let air in but it’s so dry here that I’m not sure it’s helping any. I’ll shut them before I go to sleep, so don’t worry about that. Call me back, I miss you, don’t worry about waking me up. I think that’s all I’ve got, goodnight, I love you!”

There was a collective sigh in the roundtable room, five agents around the room all looked nervously at each other. No one wanted to be the first person to speak. No one wanted to be the first to propose a theory. “Where’s Spencer?” Emily asked, looking through the voicemail transcripts that were splayed out in front of her.

“In Hotch’s office, they’re talking,” Rossi said, eyeing the photo of you that was being projected up on the screen. Most of the time, Penelope just used driver’s license or passport photos in files, but for you, she had chosen a photo from the last BAU O’Keefe’s outing. Your skin was flushed and there was an odd shadow being cast on your face, but your smile was unmistakable.

The official files would have your driver’s license photo, but that picture was for the BAU. Seemingly unable to peel her eyes off of the screen, JJ asked the question that everyone was sitting on, “We’re on this case, right?”

It felt ridiculous, one of their own had gone missing in the middle of the night and they weren’t even sure if they had the jurisdiction to look into it. When no one answered, Morgan looked around the room, “The brass isn’t seriously going to try to tell us not to investigate.”

“No, they’re not,” Hotch said, suit jacket unbuttoned and fluttering behind him as he walked into the roundtable room with purpose. “We’ll debrief more on the plane, JJ and Garcia will stay here, the rest of us are headed to Dallas,” he instructed, nodding at everyone before turning around and walking out the door, the rest of the team following like ducks in a row.

On the jet, the traveling members of the team watched as Rossi held a cup of coffee out for Spencer to take, but the team's youngest member took a moment to even recognize that it was there, “Oh,” he mumbled, “thank you.” Blinking a haze from his eyes, he took the cup in his shaky hands.

A familiar concern flowed among Spencer’s teammates, they all watched as he twisted his wedding ring around his finger – a nervous habit that usually presented itself when he missed you. “Y/N’s boss is en route to Quantico to talk with JJ, the flight’s about three hours, we should get started,” Hotch was the one to speak up, herding the sheep in the correct direction while everything felt aimless.

With his legs tucked beneath himself, Spencer watched the team as they bounced back and forth in a discussion on what you were doing in Dallas and Penelope scoured through your recent communication.

“According to the voicemails and the hotel records, her room was on the third floor,” Emily spoke up, flipping through the file in front of her. “Do we have crime scene photos from the hotel room yet?”

On the video screen, Penelope shook her head, “CSI is still processing the scene, I have an inquiry in with them to send the photos as soon as they can.”

Checking his watch, Hotch looked over at Spencer, still sequestered on one side of the jet, “Make sure they keep the scene undisturbed for when we arrive. Dave and Morgan will meet with the sheriff at the hotel, and the rest of us will head to the precinct to set up.”

If Spencer wanted to be the one to investigate the crime scene, he didn’t protest his assignment, he just continued to spin that gold band on his finger. He didn’t notice the glances exchanged between the rest of his team; he could only think of you.

With the involvement of the BAU, the team had been redirected to the Dallas Field Office. “There was a hole torn in the window screen, the crime scene techs think that’s how they got inside,” Morgan announced to the team, they were all gathering in the conference room.

“On the third floor?” JJ questioned over video chat, she and Penelope sat right next to each other on the screen.

Rossi nodded, “We must be looking at a team. At least two, likely three UnSub’s in order to pull something like this off. They cut the camera feed and broke into the hotel room where she was staying – this was premeditated.”

It wasn’t difficult to deduce that being taken from the third floor of a hotel meant that you had been a target, but the evidence of a break-in settled like a boulder on Spencer’s chest. Someone had intended to take you. Someone had intended on grabbing you from your hotel room in the middle of the night – and they had succeeded.

“Is there any chance she forgot to close the windows when she went to sleep last night?” Emily looked over at Spencer, dark brows raised quizzically as she leaned over the table, skimming through the voicemail transcripts again.

Clenching his jaw, Spencer shook his head, recalling your promise to close the windows before the end of the night. “No, she’d never forget. She knows I worry,” although, after this, you’d never be able to chide him for worrying too much ever again. Sharing a knowing look with the brunette before him, “So, she’s been missing since last night, not this morning.”

The initial assumption had been that you’d disappeared at some point early in the morning, maybe on your way to your first meeting of the day, no one was entirely sure, but this confirmed that you had been missing for at least eight hours more than the first estimate.

A knock on the door garnered the attention of the team, each of them turning to see a field agent, “Uh, Ezra Buchmann is here to speak with you, he said he got a call from your tech girl.”

Hotch nodded succinctly, “That’s the co-worker who reported the case. Morgan, go see if he needs anything. Dave, let’s go check out the office building that Y/N had been working at.”

“Do you think she might’ve been caught up in something at work?” Spencer asked, following his team members with his eyes as they left the conference room.

The unit chief didn’t provide a forward answer, “I’d like to start checking off some possibilities. It’s been fourteen hours with no firm leads.” It wasn’t as optimistic as anyone had hoped, but Hotch shared a look with Emily before leaving the room.

Rubbing the back of his neck, Spencer turned to the evidence board, looking at the pictures of your hotel room, the water splashed around the rim of the bathroom sink, your phone charging on the bedside table, your wedding ring resting on the counter, and if he separated himself from the missing posters, he could almost convince himself that they were just random pictures. Almost.

Frowning at the blown-up images of partial fingerprints and a random CCTV shot from across the street, he recalled your voicemails. “I wasn’t busy,” he confessed to Emily. “When she called me, I wasn’t busy. I was doing other things, but I wasn’t too busy to answer the phone. I assumed that I’d have the chance to talk to her today,” he said, slightly leaning over the oak table, resting his fingerprints on the varnished surface in an attempt to keep himself standing.

Pursing her lips, Emily took a member for responding, “That’s not an outrageous assumption to make,” she tried to reason with a miserable man. “You’d never think something like this would happen.”

“Until it does,” Spencer continued. “We see it happen to people all the time, we’ve made a life of it, but I never thought it would happen to me. To her,” he maundered. If he had a dollar for every time he had heard the same sentiment from victim’s families, he’d never have to work another day in his life. “I did call her back when I got home last night,” he added, though, he wasn’t entirely sure who he was trying to reassure.

In an effort to comfort him, Emily reached out and patted his arm, “We will find her, Spencer.”

Dead or alive? He wanted to retort, but he bit his tongue, holding it in.

As a favor to him, in the hopes of providing him with some emotional respite, Emily had haggled with the field agent whose name was last on the chain of custody of your belongings. It wasn’t entirely proper for evidence to be released to family, but she offered to put her name on it in the interim.

She stayed with Spencer in the conference room, letting him keep your things nearby as she spoke with JJ and went through the information that had been acquired back at Quantico. The team now had your performance reviews at work and, according to JJ, your boss couldn’t say enough good things about you. While it was nice to hear, it didn’t bring them any closer to finding where you were.

Tracing the woodgrain of the table with his fingertips, Spencer eventually tuned the phone call out, instead wondering at what point he was obligated to call your parents. He was so lost in thought that he didn’t notice your phone was ringing in the evidence bag before him until Prentiss tapped him on the shoulder.

It was an unknown number, but that was a barrier easily blocked by Garcia with a quick search. The rest of the team watched as she blanched on the screen, “Uh, you might want to answer that.”

“Garcia, who is it?” Hotch asked, a hardened look on his face as he looked from the screen to the buzzing cellphone.

JJ frowned at Penelope’s monitor as if she couldn’t believe what she was reading, “It’s the SEC,” she responded.

Swiftly, Hotch answered the phone call, turning on speakerphone so the rest of the team could hear, “Hello.”

“Hello, may I speak with Mrs. Reid?” A male voice came through the receiver, everyone sharing the same wary look.

Focused on the phone call, Hotch shook his head, “This is Supervisory Special Agent Aaron Hotchner with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, you can speak with me.” He said, elaborating on the situation and rendering the SEC investigator speechless.

Unable to listen to the conversation any longer, Spencer got up, minding his movements as he walked out of the conference room. He checked the map of the building that was posted on the wall before walking up the stairs, making his way up to the roof of the building.

The dry heat of Dallas was about as miserable as everyone made it out to be, but it was hard to ignore the way it reminded him of home. Maybe he could call his mom – speaking with her usually brought him some semblance of peace. Though, she might have a negative reaction to the situation he found himself in. On the hot rubber roofing, he kicked around piles of dirt before leaning against the ledge of the building, craning his head back and closing his eyes when he heard the rooftop door open.

“Look, I’m really not in the mood for any sort of discussion right now,” he complained, neglecting to spare a glance at whoever was disturbing his quiet – not exactly an Eden, but quiet.

He recognized Emily by the sound her boots made, even on the rubber that had been softened by the relentless sun, “I’d be more surprised if you were in the mood to talk.”

Impulsively, he rolled his eyes, “Did Hotch put you in charge of me?” He was glad his eyes were still shut, that way he couldn’t see the look on Emily’s face when he sniped at her.

“No,” she responded, gathering his attention as he brought his head down, squinting in the sunlight. “I thought you might want to know what just happened,” she nearly challenged, dark hair gleaming in the daylight.

Mentally kicking himself, he nodded for a moment, “You’re right, I just… I’m sorry.”

Taking a moment, Prentiss walked over, standing next to him, “I know.” She sighed, turning around and taking inventory of the surrounding buildings, “She was sent out here to look at some shady dealings of the company – insider trading, that kind of stuff. The main branch has an investigation open with the SEC, and they have been for the last few months. She was supposed to meet with that Ezra guy this morning to try and work something out. Hotch is talking to the CEO right now, he’s claiming he couldn’t tell JJ because it’s need-to-know,” Emily explained, focusing her eyes on the highway in the distance. “The SEC has an office in Fort Worth, they’re sending some people, and they faxed over all of the files.”

Setting his jaw, Spencer was the first to move to the stairs, the air conditioning providing an instant relief as he strode down the steps with Emily trailing close behind.

A field agent was standing in the middle of the office, stirring a cup of coffee, “Would someone really kidnap a woman over an SEC investigation?”

“We’ve seen much worse for much less,” Spencer mentioned in passing, swerving through the office of people until he made it back to the conference room. “Why would Y/N’s boss send her to investigate something that had already been brought to the SEC?” He posed the question to the rest of the team, taking one of the files that Morgan handed him and reading through the pages.

Rossi shrugged, nodding his head in the direction of the evidence board, “He wanted it handled quietly,” he posited. “Maybe he thought she could negotiate a solution and they could call off the securities investigation.”

Understanding where Spencer was going with his question, Hotch watched the board as if it was all coming together, “But, Y/N had no idea there was an open investigation. This was just another assignment to her.”

You had basically said as much in your voicemails, you went in, and you cleaned up fires across the country, and now you were caught in a blaze. “It was a setup,” Spencer concluded.

“And I know just who you need to talk to,” Garcia said over the phone, typing on her keyboard, “Check your phones.”

Ezra’s assistant folded immediately under the threat of being charged with interfering with a federal investigation. She had no knowledge of what her boss was up to, but she did know where the BAU could find him.

On the edge of the city, your company held an old office building that was slated for demolition. With the information from the assistant and some actions of questionable legality from Garcia, the team was able to nail down Ezra’s location and, hopefully, yours.

Letting SWAT lead the way, Spencer, Emily, and Morgan all made their way up yet another flight of stairs, hoping to be able to find you on the third floor. The SWAT commander signaled with his fingers to direct everyone in their respective directions.

There was a clang from across the floor and everyone froze in place, “Fuck you!” Your voice rang out, reverberating through the mostly empty office space. The yelp that followed would have sent Spencer clambering in your direction if it weren’t for Morgan grabbing his arm in warning. “I didn’t know,” you spoke again, your tone less obstinate as the misery you felt crept in.

Drawing their weapons, the team clung to the wall as SWAT gave orders over comms until the team came into view, lifting their firearms.

In retaliation, Ezra pulled you up, keeping a deadly tight grip on your upper arm as he kept you compliant by pressing the barrel of his gun to your temple. “She told me you’d come,” he said, nearly seething with rage like a rabid animal.

It seemed like a ridiculous moment to feel relief, but the fact that you knew the BAU would come for you ever so slightly lightened the weight on Spencer’s shoulders. However, whatever relief he felt was quickly banished from existence when his eyes met yours, you were covered in blood. It leaked in a steady stream from your nose and down your sleep shirt, he hoped that was the extent of the damage that had been done but based on the evidence of a struggle in the hotel room, he doubted it.

“Y/N, don’t look at him, look at us, look at Spencer,” Emily reasoned, noting the way you looked over at your captor, eyeing the gun in his hand.

You didn’t look scared, not to Spencer, though Emily had reasonably assumed that you would be in this situation. “Y/N, don’t,” Spencer said in a warning.

But his warning came too late, you had already swung your bound hands up, grabbing the weapon from Ezra as you kicked his legs out from under him. If Spencer hadn’t been so worried, he would’ve been impressed, but now he found himself in an entirely different situation.

“The safety’s still on,” you chastised as your now shaking hands undid the small latch, settling your pointer finger on the trigger as you stared him down.

SWAT seemed entirely dumbfounded, not sure how to go about the admittedly unique situation, so, it fell upon your husband to talk you down. Slowly, he holstered his weapon and stepped toward you, “Baby, put the gun down.”

You sucked in a harsh breath, “He set me up, Spence”

“I know, darling, I know,” Spencer said breathlessly, holding his hands out to stop any and all movement in the warehouse. “This isn’t the answer though, okay? You know this isn’t the answer.”

Your hands didn’t stop shaking, still bound together by the flex cuffs on your wrists as you narrowed your eyes at Ezra. “He set me up,” your voice broke at the sheer memory of the betrayal.

Distantly, you heard Derek tell people to lower their weapons, convincing the field agents that you weren’t a threat. “This isn’t you,” Spencer insisted.

Blinking as tears fell from your eyes, you gripped the handle of the gun, leaving your pointer finger hovering precariously on the trigger. This isn’t you. This isn’t the answer. This isn’t you. This isn’t the answer.

Swallowing thickly, you looked down at Ezra, who was taunting you, trying to get you to pull the trigger. You fought against yourself, trying not to stare at Spencer because you knew as soon as you met his brown eyes, the choice would be made for you.

“Pull the damn trigger,” Ezra jeered, baring his teeth at you. This was it; this was the end. The FBI had the whole building surrounded. Even if he tried to run, the BAU would follow him, they’d chase him down, and they’d kill him themselves if it came down to it.

Slowly, you moved your thumb, re-engaging the safety before you lowered your arms, handing the gun off to Spencer. As he grabbed the barrel of the gun with one hand, he pulled you in with the other, passing the gun off to Emily so he could hug you tightly.

He pulled away for a moment, retrieving a pocketknife and using it to cut the flex cuffs from your wrists, letting the stiff plastic fall to the ground, and catching you when you practically threw your arms around him.

Your legs gave out from under you, and Spencer wondered how long you had been in this sweltering building without water, likely having used the last of your strength to stop Ezra. “Shh,” he hushed gently, “Let’s sit down,” he spoke to only you as he guided you to the ground.

Closer to you now, he saw more of the damage that had been done, the glazed look over your eyes, your chapped lips, and a bruise on the side of your head. “I knew you’d come,” you murmured dazedly, swaying ever so slightly, “I told him you’d come.”

“I know, I know,” Spencer reassured you, listening to the buzzing of people, hopefully EMTs, around you.

A hiccupping sob almost broke his heart, but he just kept his hold on you, keeping you upright and wishing your nosebleed would clot. “I almost killed him,” you mumbled.

But you didn’t, he wanted to respond. Part of him felt like it would’ve been fine if you had. You’d have gotten away with it, even, but he knew firsthand what it felt like to take another life. He wanted to believe that he had played a part in you turning the safety back on, but even he wasn’t sure.

“How are you feeling? Better?” Spencer asked, sitting on the edge of your hospital bed and taking your hand in his.

He squeezed your hand gently, allowing you to admire the way your wedding ring looked now that it had been returned to its rightful home. “Much,” you assured him, keeping your head resting on the mountain of pillows behind you. You had been cleaned up, stitches on your forehead, and a bandaged cut on your thigh, but the main concern was your dehydration. An IV delivered fluids to you while you sipped on a cup of water, waiting for your stomach to settle enough for you to eat something.

Spencer raised his eyebrows, reaching out and sweeping a strand of hair behind your ear, “Good enough to try something for dinner?”

You nodded apprehensively, “Something light?”

The smile that sprouted on his face was enough to convince you to eat. He offered to go talk to your nurse, pressing a tender kiss to your forehead before he left the room, leaving the door open so you could see him in the hallway.

A small chime got your attention, looking around for the source of the noise, you found yourself digging through Spencer’s bag, retrieving your cell phone from the leather satchel.

There was a scratch over the screen, but it still worked just fine following your skirmish in the hotel, you opened the phone to find that you had a voicemail. You tapped the message before bringing the phone to your ear.

Tuesday, 10:23 p.m.

“Hey love, I’m just leaving the office now. I’m sure they’ll be more receptive to you as you talk more, you can be very convincing. The weather is very dry in Texas, make sure you keep hydrated, okay? I’m sorry I didn’t answer any of your calls, we’ve been trying to prepare all of this paperwork for Strauss and time just got away from us. I miss you, maybe when you get home, we could talk about taking a trip. We could go see my mom. It’s been a while. Hm… I have to admit, I’m a little bummed you didn’t answer the phone, but I’m glad you’re getting sleep. I love you so much, sleep well.”

[uncouth-the-fifth]

pythia, a supernatural rewrite. bloody mary, rough draft.

read it on ao3.

words: 6k notes: hi y'all! yes, you read that chapter title right - this is a little unconventional, but since I've unfortunately shifted hyperfixations and have drifted away from SPN, I thought I would post what I have for the next part of pythia. since I'm moving into resident evil land, I'm not sure if I'm going to come back to this fic—but I absolutely didn't want to leave you guys empty-handed!! I'm so so sorry that this fic will go unfinished (for now), and I'm so grateful to those who were along for the ride with me. I have so much love for all the people who motivated me through writing this fic. all of you are beyond kind!! and I hope you enjoy this dose of pythia content, featuring some of my notes and process-work, lol. I only had a few heavy chunks of the beginning written, but the prose for this chap (ironically) started to get into the meat of what I really wrote this fic for—psychic bullshit between reader and Sam. It was just too plain juicy to not share!! All of my spn fics will remain up, but if you keep up with me, expect lots of Leon Kennedy bullshit and tomfoolery. Again - thank you so much for your endless love and support, I had so much fun writing what I could of season one!! Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy this unfinished chunk of silly/ansty Christmas drama :)

EAU CLAIRE, WISCONSIN - Dec 21st, evening.

Sam drops the stack of glossy, brand-new legal pads into his lap, and flashes his brother a plain smile. “Thanks, Dean. I needed more of these.” From your spot seated on the living room rug, you twist your rings and wait for Dean’s witty reply. With all those notes you’re always makin', Sammy, I’ll hafta buy you some for New Years, too. You wait for him to make a crack about the gift he got Sam, something about diaries or his brother’s girly handwriting.

Instead, Dean shrugs, “Well, then there ya go.”

Voila. And with that, the feeble threads you’d tried to braid into a proper Christmas are cut. Without a word, your Mom picks up the little wooden jewelry case the three of you had thrifted her and recedes into the dark hallways of the house. Dean peels himself out of his seat to clean up. Sam sighs, picking at the plastic seal around his legal pads. Hilariously, this all plays out while Paul McCartney chimes about what wonderful Christmastime he’s been having from the radio in your kitchen.

Technically, you hadn’t just been celebrating Christmas. No, you managed to completely bomb both Christmas and the sacred Winter Solstice sabbat that the Proctors had been celebrating for a bajillion fucking years. The special sabbat that would have a real spiritual effect on you for the next couple months.

You’d given it a good ol’ college try. First, you’d painstakingly picked out gifts for the boys and your Mom. Good ass gifts, too, that you’d been hiding in your duffle since summertime. Hell, you’d been looking for the Eagles album you bought for Dean in tape form for at least two years. (Cool, Dean had said, half alive in his armchair after your chupacabra hunt in Illinois. He was at the ugly front end of a cold. He’d sniffled, Don’t have this one.) And knowing that this would be Sam’s first Christmas without Jess—the one person who had given him any kind of good holiday when he was away from home—you’d poured extra love into his gift, too.

He’d been begging you to read Frankenstein since high school, and you’d dodged it because sometimes books that pushed too far into the “classics” category could lose you. Mary Shelley got a little wordy at times. But you were a big girl with a big brain, so you’d read the whole thing for Sam… and annotated the whole thing for Sam…

He’d taken one look at your labor of love and murmured, “Good. Glad you read it.”

…Yeah. You had half a mind to check if he’d been replaced by a clone, hearing that. Fifteen-year-old Sam would have melted into a babbling, ecstatic mess if someone had carefully combed through one of his favorite books and shared their thoughts on it with him. Bare minimum, you figured he’d at least enjoy having his own copy of Shelley’s work. All his other books had been lost in the fire.

But you’d given the book to a Sam who was twenty-two, not fifteen. Fine. People changed.

The boys being a collective bummer was something you could deal with. Sam was always sullen around the holidays, and you couldn’t exactly be mad at Dean for being exhausted after a stressful hunt. But your Mom…

Beth used to make Yule her bitch. When you were a kid, come December 1st, the Proctor House could easily have been the center of all Wicca celebrations in the world. If working retail during the holidays tested one’s love for festive music, then the non-stop winter songs bouncing off Beth’s vinyl player would’ve made Santa beg to hear something else. Every room would gush with the smell of evergreen branches and holly. Your family’s altar, the home of all the love and joy for the season, would be lush with offerings and presents. The candles you lit as a family to welcome the light of the new year would glow in a neat row—your little silver candle, your mother’s tall red one… and the biggest. Your Dad’s.

Now, your Dad’s candle was tucked away with the rest of the unused decorations in the attic. From your spot on the floor, you couldn’t help but stare at your piss-poor excuse for a family altar. Beth hadn’t “had the time” to find the table runner your great-grandmother had embroidered just for that space. The small bouquet of mistletoe you’d brought sat pathetically on the wide, barren surface, framed by your family’s dollar-store candles: silver for you, red for Mom, and twin green candles for the boys. 

It was stupid. Really, you shouldn’t have cared so much. You were almost twenty-five, and the older you got the less people cared about silly, trivial things like a single holiday out of the year. That was just a fact of life.

Still, an ugly ball of bitterness sat in your gut. She couldn’t have tried to decorate? Even out on the road, you’d still found ways to make today a little special for the people you loved. Did she really have such little strength left in her? You’d dragged the boys up to Wisconsin with you so your Mom didn’t have to be alone. Was it really that impossible, after eleven whole years without your Dad, to try and be happy?

Fuck this. Yule isn’t over yet. There’s still time for you to squeeze some life out of today, and you’re going to start straight at the source. You find your Mom in the kitchen, mindlessly swiping invisible crumbs off pristine counters. When she senses you paused behind her in the kitchen doorway, clutching in both hands the gift she got you this year, the radio suddenly needs to be toyed with. Then cleaned. There are gray strands in her hair that shine like tinsel in the low kitchen light.

“Hey,” you say, your voice bright and christmas-card perfect. “I don’t think I got to say thank you for the gift.” (You did. More than once already.) “It’s been a bit since I read this one.” The gift in question is your Dad’s second edition print of The Shining. It’s even older than you are, with soft, petal-thin pages that reek of that wonderful old book musk. Rolling the flexed and cracked paperback between your hands, your Gift automatically picks up the distant echo of the hands that had touched these pages when they were new.

When you were little, you’d always found it kind of strange that your Dad considered this book his favorite. He was a sweet, soft-spoken person, and the mental image of him indulging in uncensored horror novels didn’t mesh with the Ray preserved in your head. Having since grown up and read it for yourself, you understood that it was less about the gore of the Overlook and more about “the shine;” the array of psychic abilities that kept five-year-old Danny Torrance alive through the book.

Years of having book-club with Sam had trained you to form cultivated opinions about the stuff you read, but The Shining existed in a realm that made it hard for you to describe how you felt about it. See, you had Danny Torrance’s shine—on the same level, too, enough shine to power the decades of ghostly ballroom parties and mob conspiracies inside the Overlook for a century. Seeing your Gift put onto a page so nakedly and cinematically made you uncomfortable. Yet, feeling the weight of your father’s book in your hands, standing in the kitchen he hasn’t touched in a decade, you know that it must’ve comforted him. Back then, surrounded by a psychic mother-in-law, girlfriend, and daughter, it would've been impossible to survive without a little shine of his own. You’re sure that your Dad's Gift was faint and unimpressive next to the psychic blackholes of your Mom and Grandma. Just enough to know if you’d skinned your elbow or had a nightmare. On the days that you came home from school tear-streaked and ruddy-faced, Dad would be waiting on the porch with soup.

You can still feel the faint psychic imprint of one of his whiskery kisses on your face. You don’t have many vivid impressions of him left to feel; none that haven’t been rubbed again and again, like the hollow of a fingerprint smoothed into the face of a rock over time.

Your Mom gives a non-committal hum at your attempt at conversation. Not because she doesn’t care—you can feel how much she cares from across the room—but because she’s tired. Adult Tired, like when she’d turn down your pleas to play together as a kid. Not tonight, baby. Momma’s exhausted.

“Mom,” you say, sounding as glossy and clean as a brand-new cookie tin. You open your mouth to say more, maybe to start in on one of your long-winded book-rants that had everyone wondering where Sam had suddenly appeared from. You know the answer, but you ask anyway, “This was one of Dad’s favorite books, right? I vaguely remember him talking about the hedge animals.” Beth accidentally hits a button as she’s dragging a rag over the shiny front of the radio, forcing Paul McCartney to have yet another wonderful Christmastime. She doesn’t look at you.

“Yup. But you knew that already, honey.”

C’mon. Nothing? She won’t even throw you the smallest, most pathetic olive branch? A psychic battle occurs. You get so frustrated all at once that your throat closes up, and that frustration balloons out into your family kitchen like the expansion of a bomb. You push. There is no give. The bubbling stormcloud of grief and loss hanging around Mom is there, then it’s not. The side of the kitchen your mother stands on is suddenly a void of absolute nothingness, empty of any feeling whatsoever, good or bad. She’s cutting you off from reading her—and protecting herself from your explosive emotions, as per usual.

Beth keeps cleaning the radio, her back to you.

Your rage bubbles out of you all at once. One day! One day out of the entire fucking year, the day your Dad always made special, and she can’t even pull herself together for that. You know you should be a good daughter and empathize with the woman who made you, but you’ve been a good daughter about this since you were twelve years old. Eleven Yules have gone by since your Dad passed. Just for one measly moment, you want to talk about him like he’s not a corpse rotting in the living room.

And the worst part is that Mom knows that. She’s known you’ve felt that way all day, a slow-bubbling pot building to a boil across the room. The two of you can always feel each other. You’re the only two who can; she’s the only other radio tower that can receive your station in its purest quality, and yet she has the gall to shut all her signals down.

“Fine!” You burst out, making the conversation physical.

It should feel good to yell, really. After the slow, ungratifying day you’ve had, you’ve been a shaken soda bottle waiting to implode. Instead, since you’re the crazy person yelling at nothing for no reason in the kitchen, your anger booms out of you and fizzes out in the same breath like a faulty firework. Fine. Fuck all of this. If you can’t beat em’, join em’. If everyone’s determined to rot the day away, then you’ll go wallow in self-pity the Proctor-Winchester way, too. Merry fucking Christmas, and a happy fucking Yule.

There is no satisfying door to slam on your way out of the kitchen. You take a sharp right down the front hall, hoping to veer up the stairs and slam your feet down on every single step up to your room. If your Mom wants to live forever in the year your Dad died, by all means—you’ll even bring home your thirteen-year-old self and her childish tantrums, just for time-accurate ambiance. Sam’s standing frozen just outside the kitchen archway, and you catch his deer-in-headlights look as you go peeling around the corner. You’re still keyed up with enough lashing rage to spare, so seeing him, just as hollowed-out and not there as your Mom, only feeds your pyre.

As you get to work thoroughly stomping the staircase to death, you hear him go into the kitchen and ask Beth about soup for Dean’s sore throat.

Upstairs is even more painfully quiet. Through the floor, Paul McCartney muffles down to a cheery mumble. All old houses shift around a little, but yours settles like it's alive, clicking, creaking, swaying. You don’t look at the portraits of Proctor women up the stairwell. The dusty grandfather clock in the hall watches you with its stained glass face, and you’re so lost in your own head—

—and Dad’d be so pissed we didn’t decorate the altar or listen to the Tull Christmas album, he’d riot, he’d talk some sense into her—wouldn’t think any of this is stupid— —that you don’t hear it when it chimes. Muscle memory plants you right in front of your bedroom door. Having a good cry under the covers sounds like a perfect end to the night, right? And yet you stop. Your hand drops on the knob and stays there, unmoving. Maybe it’s your Gift, or good old-fashioned human instinct knowing when something in the home has been nudged two inches to the left, but the air in the hall tastes staler than usual. A draft? Your gaze is pulled all the way down to the opposite end of the hall, where the untouched, stately storage room door is ajar.

Your Mom probably left it open. Maybe she’d gone in there to hunt around for all the heirloom Yule decorations, only to rediscover Dad’s football memorabilia or Dad’s engraved cigarette case and go bolting out of the room. —everything’s different without him, Sam and Mom and Dean too. So am I. Everything’s twisted—without him— Still riding the whirlwind, you stomp from one end of the yellowing, starry zodiac carpet (Aries) to the other (Pisces), the floorboards squeaking under your weight. You push the door and it goes shuddering into the darkness. This was one of many rooms in the house that Mom had banished you from as a kid, mostly as a way to shoo you away from the hunting world. It’d given you this insatiable fascination with it as a result, but when you tug the chain to turn on the closest lamp, what it illuminates doesn’t come close to the spectacular stories you’d made up in your head.

It’s just a room. It has windows and shelves and old things, some from your childhood, some from your Mom���s. Some from even further back than that. The closest fascinating thing is a shiny gold blob poking out of your baby things, which turns out to be Sam’s eighth-grade mathlete trophy. You had no idea what possessed Mom to come up here so often. There was no way she wasn’t in here at least a couple times a week; the tall metal storage shelf where she immortalized your Dad’s things was never dusty, and yet the whole room reeked of rotting books and insulation. You shove the box with Sam’s trophy aside with your foot until it skids out of your way, and then send the heavy door shut behind you with a wall-shaking bang.

A flurry of dust hails down from the ceiling. You cough through the cloud, wandering in your blindness towards the neat row of plastic storage tubs labeled with your Dad’s name. Clothes. Misc. Books. Maybe that’s where Mom had gotten your new copy of The Shining from, halfway through one of her sacred meditations over Dad’s things. You drop a hand onto the cold lid of the tub. Nothing, not even the slightest psychic imprint, reaches back.

What is she even holding onto anymore? You try the clothes next. The rounded corners of this bin have been scuffed gray from how many times it’s been pulled off and then pushed back on its shelf, again and again. The case feels as lifeless to you as it would for anyone else, but you try your luck and slide it out onto the floor. It comes loose with a solid thud.

When you were old enough, Beth would sometimes send you up into this room to grab things (spell ingredients, books you didn’t keep downstairs). You would run full-tilt right up until you hit the storage room door, then pass inside like a stranger in a dangerous realm, watching where you stepped and always, always keeping your Dad’s shelf in the corner of your eye. On brave days you would pick up his silvery cigarette case and roll it between your palms. It grew harder and harder to feel him each time, the ghost of him whittled down like a rock made round by the current of a river.

When you crack off the lid, you expect some kind of smell. You don’t remember what he smelled like, but you have a few guesses—cheap, vanilla-sweet aftershave, or maybe the woody stale smell of cigarette smoke you know you shouldn’t love. Maybe both. It doesn’t really matter. The neatly folded stacks of your Dad’s old shirts and jackets don’t smell like a damn thing. You dip your face into a holey band-shirt with the sleeves scissored off, but all that comes back to you is the rotten smell of dusty insulation. He’s here—he’s right here in front of you, right in your fucking hands, and yet the whole world is dead of him. You can’t sense even a sliver of him left.

The same old reservoir of despair pushes and pushes at your composure, wiggling through your cracks, widening them with a hundred thousand tons of pressure bearing down on you a minute. It is a day by day task to handle the reservoir. You like to think you’re good at handling it, at patching the cracks as they come and letting them breathe when the moment calls for it. But when you lift your face from the bin, the leak springs—really, genuinely springs, like it hasn’t in years.

You fall back onto your haunches, swallowing back sudden stinging tears. The bin and its askew lid go shrieking back onto the shelf with a lash of your foot.

-

The music downstairs stops. You can’t tell how long it’s been.

When his death was fresh, and you were stuck deep, deep within the reservoir, you’d wondered if it would always feel this way. It got easier, right? And in many ways it had—on most days you could talk about your Dad without it hurting, letting the dam’s water run. The battle was still there, but it was a burden you were proud to carry if it meant his memory lived on in you. He would want you to be happy, your Mom used to urge. So you gave being happy your best shot, loving and giving as much as you could.

That’s what frustrated you so endlessly about your Mom. She’d been right; your Dad would’ve wanted the two of you to move on, and yet she still entombed herself in the bottom of her reservoir far too often. There was no release, no acceptance with her. The dark part of you that wanted to pass blame wondered if this was all because of John, and how well Winchester grief happened to mingle with a Proctor’s. How would your mother’s life be different, if the evil that’d taken Dad hadn’t been put down a week later? Would she be just as hellbent? With your knees sore from pressing into the floor, you knew the answer. You knew if the thing that’d taken Sam or Dean from you was right in front of you, you’d chase it until you were in your own grave. You knew that even after it was dead, you would be digging your nails into the backseat of the Impala and clawing for every psychic molecule of them left in the leather.

And that’s what scared you—was she just going to be chasing Dad forever, til’ there wasn’t a wisp of him left in the world to feel? 

Something dawns on you, thudding through your mind like a rock dropped down a chute. With limp hands, you slide The Shining towards you on the worn wood floor, part the pages with your thumbs, and press your nose into the binding. There’s the smoky, earthy scent of old paper first… then something just underneath the surface that no one but you and your Mom can pick up.

Old books. Yes. Yes, that’s what Dad had smelled like.

-

You’re seated on the floor of the storage room, back pressed to one of the ancient metal shelves holding up your gramma’s VCR collection, when a blot of the future is tossed at you. Cheap deodorant and lemon cough drops.

Around a minute later, the stairs beyond the door squeak under someone’s weight. Even without the roulette glimpse of the future, you can tell by the footfalls who it is. Heavy knuckles rap the door and come straight in without waiting for an answer. Behind him, the silence of the rest of the house is even heavier.

You try to sound like a reasonable adult, but the mopey teenager slips out anyway. “Thought you were sick, Dean.”

He artfully dodges your point. (Dean is, after all, a master of the craft.) You don’t look back at him, but the lemon cough-drops glimpse you got of him creates a clear picture: Dean’s whole body listing into the door frame, one hand on the knob, his face lacking its usual color. His cheeks have graduated from stubbly to scruffy, neglected. “Hey,” he says. It’s the, okay, you’re done cooling down, let’s have a grown-up conversation kind of hello.

You don’t know what to say back. You’re not sure if you can have any kind of conversation right now.

Dean rolls with it, trying to decide if this silence is begging for a subject change or a heart-to-heart. You’re not sure what he goes for when he says, “I had an idea.” “Did it hurt?” You joke. Jokes you can do.

There’s his opening. After a beat, you’re—

—fucking lobbed with a foam football. Like you’re fucking twelve. Dean’s throw arcs straight towards your head and bounces clean off the top, a perfect spiral. You yelp in outrage, and before you can think you’re following where the stupid ball went so you can clock him right in the face with it. Asshole. It loop-de-loops on the floor around an old dining chair, and you clamber on your knees to fish for it.

Just when you get the toy in your hands and you’re about to demolish him with it, Dean ducks behind the doorway, chuckling, “Woah! No face shots! You wouldn’t bash a poor, sick guy’s face in, would’ja?”

God. You can’t fucking believe him. If anyone else did that…

You lower your hackles and drop the foam toy into a basket, far out of reach of congested troublemakers. When his shining eyes appear in the slit of the doorway again, your cheeks are aching with an impossible smile. “You’re lucky it’s Christmas, loser. What is it?”

Dean hesitates a moment more, just in case you’ve got something else to throw at him, then joins you in the storage room with the evil little oily smile you love. The same dust cloud that got you earlier descends on him in a rough coughing fit, but this lets him get a good look at the little mess you’ve made: the book on the floor, your Dad’s things open and askew. When he clears his throat for the last time, he looks pained.

For your sake, you pretend it’s an empathetic kind of pained. And you know that’s a part of it—Dean doesn’t enjoy seeing you and your Mom like this. But it’s an unfortunate fact of your life that you will have four times as much context for him than he will ever have for you. Just breathing the same dusty air as him, you know he’s been nursing a sinus headache since Monday, one that’s made his head feel like it’s chock-full of stuffing, and that Sam made him canned chicken noodle soup—and at first he felt a little smug making Sam play nurse, until he stewed on it more and—

—hate it when he gives me that dead-eyed look, like he can’t even pretend to care anymore. Like he’s just dragging himself through this for our sake. Poor kid scares the shit outta me. Is this how it’s always gonna be? Sammy aching over her, night after night after night—

You know just touching the bins holding your Dad’s things that on a icy February afternoon in 1994, fifteen-year-old Dean had picked up the plastic tubs for your Mom from the store.

So when he gives you that pained look, you know it’s part-concern, part-fear. If this is what you look like eleven years after your Dad’s passing… if John never comes home from his hunting trip, is this what Dean will become? The loyal son, waiting and waiting on that porch for a man who would never come home? 

Your whole life, you’ve felt like you were becoming more and more like Dean; lately, it feels like he’s becoming so much like you. Your last four years on the road together had slowly but surely melded you together.

“Okay, so, Yule’s a fire festival, right?” Dean grasps around in his memory for the yearly history lesson your Mom gives about the Wicca calendar. “Uh, we lit candles… I thought about burning Beth’s Muppet Christmas CD with my lighter a couple times. That’s about all the fiery, burny-stuff we did today.”

“I love the Muppets Christmas album,” you pout.

“After the millionth partridge in John Denver’s goddamn pear tree, you’d change your mind,” Dean swears. “But I was thinkin’—we got the firepit in the backyard, marshmallows, and I think I could put together some vodka shots. Then we can blow em' out and eat em' with the s'mores.” Your eyebrows raise. Only he, of all people, could take your sacred family traditions and twist them into such a wonderful, stupid-ass thing. Maybe it’s ridiculous, but… there is chocolate and graham crackers downstairs… and with how cold it is outside, a fire would be perfect… It’s the best blend of weird Proctor-Winchester traditions you need to save Christmas and Yule. Dean takes your silence as glowing awe. “Exactly. I told you, I'm a fuckin' genius. Helluva way to start the wiccan year, right? You in?”

You’re well aware that this is an elaborate plan to coax you away from your moping. Still, it’s just too Dean to turn down. “...Hell yeah.”

At first R hopes that it’s just her and Dean, and that Sam and Beth keep their grief to themselves. But then she realizes how cruel and selfish she’s been—everyone grieves in their own way, and just because she works through it by talking about it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. It’s not good that Beth is holding on so tightly to her loss, but that doesn’t mean R wants to leave them out.

Lead this into a touch of psychic!Dean and how he has a teeny tiny second sense for what she needs, just like her Dad did. Just enough shine to get by.

R and Dean come downstairs and invite Sam and Beth to their campfire 😀

Or, at the very least, all the psychic happenings in the house echoing between them; if Dean's sharper instincts were as psychically heavy as a shadow falling on grass, then Sam's Static was six feet of snow in an arctic blizzard.

It tingles all the way up to your shoulder when Sam touches you. And that, oh, that was a whole new can of worms. As they get dressed for the snow outside and assemble the s'mores and flaming shots, you try not to head down that train of thought again.

Every time you’ve glanced at Sam these past few weeks, you’d been unable to hide from what you’d sensed there—from what you’d seen in the demon, and what you now knew to be completely and utterly true after reading its mind.

Sam had It. The Gift, the Shining, whatever the fuck you wanted to call it. Not the vague imprint of psychic-ness from loving one or sharing the Impala with one for four years; full-on, unlatched, REDRUM, I-saw-it-before-it-happened psychic abilities. In the weeks you'd had to sit with that revelation, you'd poked carefully at Sam from afar. Obviously, you knew what a fucking psychic felt like. The five-year-old Sam who'd cut Dean's gum out of your hair had not been psychic. Yet this Sam, twenty-two with three-fourths of an ivy league law degree under his belt, was as psychic as a fucking—well. You. He was just as psychic as you.

Without even a sliver of the same control or even understanding of—of what he had, yes, but you were confident that if Sam was pushed, he could reach into your mind just as easily as you could reach into his. There had been a shift, then. At six, having gum cut out of your hair, you had been decidedly less psychic than you were at twenty-four. So Sam had gone through the Proctor Rite Of Passage; some terrible moment had cut him deep, deep enough to pull a new kind of blood to the surface. After Jessica, he had been... yeah.

It was fucking crazy. And yet it also slotted perfectly into some of the weirder things you understood about Sam; about who he was now and the vague, strobing flashes you got of his future. It freaked you the fuck out. Did Sam know? Did anyone know, besides you? Had your Mom recognized that spark in Sam, the same way she'd seen it in you? Had John?

And the plain existence of the Gift in Sam begged the question—why? Had he just happened to drop from the tree as a different kind of apple? Or was this something you could trace back to his mother, the same way it traced back to yours? Had Mary…?

The implications of that took pretty much everything you understood about Sam and Dean’s life, lined it up on the chopping block, and cleaved it in two. Needless to say, thinking about it made you sick. How could you even begin to bring this up to them?

You cursed your abilities with all you had. There were nights when you sat on the bathroom floor, wishing you could dig in with your nails and rip out whatever had put It in your head. Never in a billion fucking years would you have wished It upon anyone else; especially not Sam, good, selfless, wonderful Sam, who already ached so deeply for other people. Seeing their future, too? And even more often, seeing it and being helpless to change it?

He used to cry over squashed spiders as a kid. You'd felt a whole lot more than just spiders die.

…Beside that shuddering horror was another, far more selfish feeling. As scary as the implications could be, when you thought less about the Winchester family and more about your relationship with Sam, you were… excited. Relieved, even.

There were only four people in the entire world that you could share your Gift with. One of them has been six feet under for over a decade. Your Gift was a clingy, possessive creature, too. It was maybe two steps shy of being an eldritch horror. It poked through Dean’s dreams when you slept beside him, sucking them up like cigarette smoke. It breathed down Sam’s neck wherever he went. If you wanted, no one could lie to you—all punchlines and stories were spoiled for you, you knew when people found you annoying or pretty or stupid. If that particular Proctor gene had skipped you, then maybe you’d be able to form relationships with people where you didn’t immediately, intrinsically understand who they were and why. Dean would say, You need a drink. You would know without asking that he meant, You scare the ever-living hell out of me n’ I know I can’t hide it from you. Fucking hell, kid, I wish I could.

You knew you were a freak. The tiny human vessel for the lashing, bubbling, soul-melting, cosmic weight of a star about to bloom into a black hole. Only your mom would ever understand what it felt like to exist on the fringe of time, between the exhaustive influence of the past and the vast, spotty expanse of the future. You were a tool to men like John; an anomaly for men like Bobby; and a responsibility to men like Dean. 

But Sam… Your best friend Sam, he’d always tried to understand. Maybe he’d never fully get it, but the point was that he tried to. You remembered sitting with him on the curb outside your old high school, the concrete thrumming with music from the junior prom you’d both left behind inside.

How either of you had gotten dates was a miracle. You, the class weird-freak-emo punchline, and Sam, on his fourth round being the new kid that year, were two peas in a pod. Your date had never picked you up; Sam’s had escaped with her friends long before their first dance. Neither of you were very broken up about it.

The future had sprawled in front of you that night as clear as could be. You must've sat and talked on the curb for three straight hours, pressed together at the hip with Sam’s blazer around your shivering arms.

He was always beautiful in the boy-next-door kind of way, dimples popping with every good smile and freckles rising out of the too-short sleeves of his button-up. But that night he’d been fucking Helen of Troy, and the roar of the past and future slowed to a halt around him. 

Do you really see the future all the time? Every second? Sam had curiously tilted his head, sending a gleaming swish of chocolatey hair out of his eyes.

Swallowing hard, you’d hesitated, Not every second. But a lot, yes.

Again, the head tilt, then the swish. His gaze was innocent and intrigued. No existential dread, no sweeping sense of fear. Just plain curiosity. Not even morbid curiosity. Sam had asked, What about right now?

Sam’s cologne—oh god, his cologne—was steaming off his borrowed jacket and floating around your head in a wonderful rosy fog. You’d poked at the future. Sometimes things came back, sometimes they didn’t. That night, the future had come back tasting like Sam’s vanilla chapstick and junior prom punch, and your face had gone up in flames just sensing it. He’d waited for an answer. You’d blurted out the plain truth: In a minute or two, you’re gonna kiss me.

This kind of absolute, unshakable certainty about the future had made other hunters’ blood run cold. You’d braced yourself for Sam’s displeasure or worse, his fear. But instead, there were those dimples again, and Sam had the gall to bat his lashes at you and delightedly ask, Really? That’s what the magic eight ball has to say?

His big hand had dropped onto your knee and you’d squeaked out a shrill, Signs point to yes!

Sam loved the stupid magic eight-ball joke. You could feel him smiling about it as he kissed you, kissed you, hand-on-knee, his face tipping down to yours, the shitty school punch staining his lips as the two of you connected. At fifteen and sixteen respectively, this was the first kissing that either of you had ever done. It’d been wetter and warmer than you’d expected, and Sam’s vanilla chapstick had left the slightest print on your mouth, one that your tongue swiped over obsessively for the next month. Your Gift had chased him for weeks after that, silently and invisibly swarming him every time he entered a room.

Back then, your mind had been on the Curse. But now, you thought about what had led to the kiss in the first place. Sam hadn’t kissed you on a night when your Gift had been crammed down deep where it could bother nobody but you. He’d instead chosen the precise moment where your Gift was most raw, one of Its fingers coming down from the sky to press against the pulse of the future. It was small, but at a time in your life when you’d wanted to claw your Gift out with your bare hands, Sam had gotten the smallest glimpse of It and had fallen in love.

You couldn’t help but see this thing inside him, his Static, and feel the exact same way. His powers were twisted and unavoidably demonic, and yet you kind of loved them. It made perfect sense to you. No one really understood you like Sam did. Now, it's clear why.

-

tags: @samssluttybangs @cookiemumster1 @lacilou @cevans-winchester @leigh70 @seraphimluxe @emily-roberts @emme-looou @aloneatpeace @williamstop @ornella0910 @chaoticshepardplaid @dakota-dream @lcvecstiel @goghkiss @spnexploration @stoneyggirl2 @urm0mmmbbg @mulattomoon @poeticsorcery @deansapplepie @rennydenny @babydollfoster @badlandsbrunette @hallecarey1 @pplanetcaravan @notanotherthembo

[dingochef]

Pairing: Jake "Hangman" Seresin x You (OFC)

Warnings: Not much, being ill, talk of periods, Jake Seresin being too fucking perfect, fluff

Word Count: 2.8k

Summary: The double whammy of being on your period and having a cold puts a wrench in your plans to go out with Jake.  He surprises you in the best  way in showing how caring he can be.

I needed some Jake fluff after having to deal with finally getting COVID this past week.

Part of the Jake and Elsa Universe 

Masterlist

Closed for Renovations

Jake: Hey doll. When can I pick up your fine ass tonight? 

You: This fine ass has got to bail.  Double whammy of lady parts closed for renovations and I've got a cold. You probably don't want to hang around this mess.

Jake: Is closed for renovations a clever way of telling me you're on your period?

You: Yes

Jake: Let me restate the question, what time do I show up on your doorstep with Mama Seresin's famous chicken noodle soup, chocolate, and other reinforcements?

You: You're serious?

Jake: As a heart attack or in this case a period cramp

You chuckle as you read Jake's latest message.  You're surprised that Jake is all in on spending time with you while you're both sick and on your period.  Most of your past boyfriends gave you a wide berth when Shark Week was upon you, some finding it "gross" or "weird".  As annoying as it was, it was also an easy way to gauge the maturity and long term potential of any guy.  Right now Jake was pulling into a very clear first place.  

It's still early on in your relationship, a few weeks after the craziness that brought you together. New enough that you're still encountering a lot of firsts and navigating the intimate details of a blooming relationship.  Your period being one of them.

You: I stayed home sick today, any time is good for me.

Jake: I'll swing by after work with ingredients.

You: Sounds great.

Jake: You're great

You: 🙄❤️☺️💋

With that settled you turn back to your cup of tea and trashy reality TV.  Somewhere along the line you must have fallen asleep because you awake to a gentle knocking on your door and the TV screen asking if you're still watching. You sit up abruptly, realizing Jake is here and your house looks like a NyQuil commercial with tissues and every kind of tea imaginable strewn out on the counter.  

Resigning yourself to the mess you peel yourself off the couch to answer the door and let Jake into the house. When you open the door, Jake is holding two large grocery bags filled with food and has his phone pinched between his ear and his shoulder.

He mouths,

"Sorry," just before he speaks into the phone.

"Yes, Mom, I got the fresh thyme, although I think Elsa has some growing on her patio. Speaking of which, I'm at her house…"

He nods agreeing with his mom on something,

"Yes, she is…someday, yes, love you too, Mom.  Thanks for the help."

A small smile creeps on your face as you listen to the exchange between Jake and his mom, his love apparent for her. You reach out and take one of the bags from Jake so he can hang up the phone to come inside.  

"Talk to you later, Mom," he says as he follows you into the kitchen.

Just as you place the bag of groceries down, Jake comes up behind you and gives you a hug and kiss on the cheek.

"How ya feeling, El?"

"Okay," you respond, obviously congested. 

"How about I get you another cup of tea, and you can keep me company while I make my Mom's literal county fair winning chicken soup," Jake offers putting the kettle back on the stove.  You sit at the bar and watch Jake as he unpacks ingredients from the bags.

"County fair winning? That's still a thing in Texas?" you ask, raising an eyebrow.

He laughs,

"Yes, it is and it's serious business. My grandma is still peeved at her neighbor for taking the 'good apples' from the tree that grew on both their ranches and winning in the apple pie category, 30 years ago." 

The kettle whistles and Jake holds up the box of lemon tea next to the stove in question.  You nod and he prepares a cup of tea and slides it across the counter.

"Thank you, so do I get to know the secret if you're making it in my kitchen?" you ask. 

He grins,

"If I told you, I'd have to kill you. But you can watch."

With all the soup ingredients on the counter Jake hauls two last items out of the bag.

"I didn't know if you were a milk chocolate or a dark chocolate fan, so I got some of each," he offers, holding up two giant chocolate bars.

"Oooh," you coo, "What if I said white chocolate was my favorite?" 

Jake grimaces slightly,

"Is it?"

"Haha, no. I don't consider it real chocolate and reserve it only for foofy lattes from Starbucks," you reply, his facial expressions easing.

"That's good, that could have been a deal breaker," he laughs.

"Gimme, please," you say, pointing to the dark chocolate bar.

"A woman of sophisticated tastes," he teases, handing you the bar. 

"Don't spoil your appetite," he admonishes, pulling a cutting board out of the cupboard.  He dons one of your aprons over his khakis. Jake prepares tidy rows of carrots, celery, and onion as he talks with you about his day.  

Soon, savory smells are wafting through your kitchen as Jake pours the rest of the chicken stock over the neatly chopped vegetables.  

"This is where it goes to the next level," Jake says, piquing your interest.

"Do you have flour, eggs, milk, salt, and a rolling pin?" he asks.

You nod and direct him around the kitchen.  

He takes the flour and scoops out some into a bowl following it with two eggs, a dash of salt, and some milk.  Using a fork, he stirs the ingredients into a shaggy dough. He sprinkles more flour on the counter and turns out the ball onto the counter. Flouring up his hands he kneads the ball for a few minutes. The way his strong hands and forearms push and pull at the dough sends your cold medicine addled, and apparently lust filled, mind in a different direction.  You've never wanted to be a ball of dough more in your life right now.

"That has to rest for a few minutes. More tea?" Jake asks, smirking, as he breaks you out of your naughty daydream.

"Yes,..umm, tea. Please," you stutter. 

"What are you making?" you finally ask as Jake heats up the kettle again.

"Homemade egg noodles for the soup," he answers, nonchalantly. 

"Homemade noodles? Wow."

"I said it was next level," he replies back.  

"That is next level. No one has ever gone to homemade pasta level for me before," you answer, in awe of this amazing man in your kitchen. Jake turns around from the stove and the kettle, a wistful look on his face. He walks across the kitchen and slides his hands around yours where they rest on the counter. He leans over to kiss your forehead sweetly.

"That is a travesty, because you are definitely worth the effort, you are homemade noodles worthy, El," he says, so earnestly it makes you tear up a little and laugh at the same time.  (Which you can only blame on the hormones of your period only partially.) 

"If I knew how to make homemade noodles I'd make them for you Jake Seresin," you say. 

"My nonna would be happy to teach you, but you'll just have to watch and learn for now," he breezily says, taking the rolling pin to the pile of dough. You tuck the mention of his Nonna and presumably meeting her and what all that means into the back of your brain to think about later. He pushes and pulls on the pin, flattening the dough out to a thin layer before he slices it up into skinny noodles. Jake grabs the mass and slides them into the boiling soup.

"Just a little bit longer," he says, working to clean up as you wait for the soup. You watch him contentedly as you sip your tea, enjoying his form and just how comfortable he is in your kitchen wearing a frilly floral apron.  A gift from Beth when one unremarkable boyfriend broke up with you because, 

"All he really wanted was a housewife, not someone more ambitious than him." Beth had written in the card, "Goodbye to the bastard, be your own trophy wife." You smile at the memory, a reminder of how much your relationship with Jake is better than anyone before him.

A few minutes later, Jake ladles out the steaming soup and slides a bowl over the counter to you. Inhaling the wonderful smelling steam in through your congested nose it almost feels magical the way it opens up your airways.

"This smells amazing," you gush, happy to be able to breathe again. He sits down on the stool next to you, his body turned towards yours so his legs can tangle with yours.  

You lift the spoon up, heaping with noodles, vegetables, and some chicken to gently blow on it, trying to cool it down.  Jake is watching you intently and hasn't taken a bite yet waiting for your reaction. Finally satisfied that you're not going to burn your tongue, you take the much anticipated first bite and it is perfect.

A fresh burst of herbs, the salty savory stock, and then the buttery smoothness of the noodles are all perfect. You close your eyes, it's that good.

"Wow, this is so good," you gush, enjoying the slight blush and sudden shyness on Jake's face.

"No wonder your mom won the county fair."

"I'm glad you like it, eat up. It's practically medicinal," he urges you.  You hum in agreement and savor the delicious soup, your appetite finally ignited for the day.  You and Jake sit in comfortable silence finishing your meal.  

You go to stand up to clear the bowls, trying to feel useful, when a familiar stab of pain shoots through your torso from back to front.

"Ahhh, shit," you groan, collapsing over your belly and crossing your arms. Jake stands up immediately, concern on his face,

"El, are you okay?"

You stand up, still grimacing, 

"Yeah, fine, just Aunt Flo being a bitch."

Jake smiles gently and rubs your back,

"You've got a lot of witticisms for being on your period. You need some painkillers or a heating pad?"

The mention of a heating pad makes you light up with hope and then immediately scowl when you remember that it broke last month and you haven't had a chance to replace it.

"I've got some ibuprofen in the bathroom, but I forgot to get a new heating pad," you inform Jake, glumly. Jake's face lights up,

"I've got just the thing then," he says, rubbing your back one last time before he steps away and grabs the last grocery bag. He holds up a box of heating pad patches.

"I wasn't sure you had a heating pad and I've used these for muscle strains before…," he trails off talking as he takes in your face.  You are definitely full-on crying, like maybe ugly crying, you can't believe this is your life.

"El, are you okay?" he asks, gently pulling you into his arms, "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," you sniffle into his uniform shirt, trying to avoid the ribbons, thinking those would be a bitch to clean snot out of, 

"You," you add.

Jake laughs, his sense of confidence unfazed by your comment,

"Me, I'm what's wrong? What are you thinking sweetheart?" he asks, tightening his arms around you as he starts to slightly sway in a comforting way. Another gentle kiss to your temple makes you sob a little.

"How are you so amazing? You cooked for me, brought me two kinds of chocolate, and brought back up heating pads. I bet there's both Tylenol and Advil in the bag, too."

He chuckles and you can feel him nodding in agreement.  You lean back and wipe your eyes,

"I'm just a little overwhelmed, no one's ever really taken care of me like this…wanted to more importantly. Like I don't deserve this. Oh my God, I'm so sorry for crying." Jake reads the panicked look on your face and pulls you back as you try to retreat, 

"Listen to me, El.  You are worth every bit of effort, every bit. You understand?" he asks, sincerely waiting for your response. You nod, not sure what to say.

"Not to disparage your past taste in men, but they sound like they fucking sucked. I can't complain that they didn't realize what a treasure you are, because I got the chance to show you." 

You sniff, taking a deep breath to get your emotions under control.  

"More importantly, you're the first woman that I've ever wanted to take care of, be there for you. Make you see your true worth. You make me want to be a better man, El. I love you," Jake says, earnestly his eyes imploring you to believe him. You meet his gaze and stare back into those intense green eyes for a few seconds before closing your own for a second to stem the tears. 

"Okay, Jake. I love you so much. So much it overwhelms me sometimes. God, I'm such a mess today, hormones and viruses are not being kind to me today," you say to Jake wiping away the tears.

"It's okay, El. You're my mess and that's what matters. I'll be here to take care of you when it gets messy, always," Jake reassures you, his arms still wrapped around you. You rest your head on his chest, letting his love envelop you. 

"How about this?" he asks as you look up, "Grab some Advil, wash your face, and I'll get one of those heating pads, some chocolate, and we can snuggle up on the couch and watch whatever cheesy rom com or trashy reality TV you want. I'm gonna change into some sweats, okay?"

"Sounds perfect, although you might regret giving me carte blanche over our viewing choices."

"Never."

The rest of the night is spent cuddled up on your couch with Jake watching Pride and Prejudice. Between the warmth of Jake's embrace, the Advil, and the cozy heating patches you fall asleep not too long into the movie. You're awoken by a quick succession of text notification sounds.  Jake puts his phone down when he sees you awake. 

"Let's head to bed, El," he whispers, kissing your temple.  You nod sleepily and he scoops you up bringing you to bed. The last thought you have before you fall asleep again with Jake wrapped around you is that for a day that started kind of terrible it has ended up kind of perfect. 

Bonus Content Jake's Text Convo with his Mom. 

@kmc1989

@starswholistenanddreamsanswered

@mayhemmanaged  

@callmemana  

@dempy  

@hangmanscoming  

@lanie-k 

@callsign-viper  

@senjoritanana  

@djs8891

@atarmychick007

@memoriesat30

@midnightmagpiemama

@mygyn

[x-reader-theater]

Frozen Waste

summary: Taking refuge in a cabin safehouse in the middle of a snowstorm is cold.

pairing: Simon "Ghost" Riley x Male!Reader

category: Gen

word count: 2012

warnings: There are brief mentions of the reader having a more masculine body, but there are no pronouns used. However I made it male reader so those who want gender neutral readers wouldn't feel betrayed.

a/n: i stole this from a bunch of SoapGhost fics.

"God fucking fuck fuck FUCK!" You should over the roaring of the snowstorm around you. Your arms are wrapped tightly around you in the absolutely freezing weather. 

"Keep it together, Sargeant!" Ghost commands over the chugging of the wind. "We're almost at the safehouse. I can't have you losing it in me now!" 

You shake your head at him and sigh. "Of course not, sir!" You shout back. "How could I go insane with you right here!" 

You can't see it behind the reflective ski goggles he's wearing, but you know Ghost is just rolling his eyes at your terrible attempts to flirt. It's the only way you won't go crazy, though. Some little sense of normalcy in this fucked situation. 

"Like I said, only a little longer to the safehouse! Then I might be able to put some distance between us!" Ghost shoots back quickly, without missing a beat. 

Now it's your turn to roll your eyes as you say, "You'll freeze to death without me to help warm you up!" 

"No innuendoes in the field, [L/N]!" Ghost barks. 

You scoff even though it gets lost in the wind. "Not an innuendo Lieutenant!" you shout back. "Just stating a fact! It's fuckin' cold as balls out here!" 

Ghost doesn't say anything else as the two of you trek your way through the snow covered landscape. 

Eventually, you see the almost completely snowed-in cabin that is the safe house, and you find yourself picking up your footsteps and walking just a little bit faster at the promise of warmth. Ghost seems to keep pace with you and walks quickly up to the cabin. You have to dig out the door a bit but you thank whatever higher power is out there, if there is even one, that the door opens inward. You and Ghost use your full body weights to push the door closed behind you, trying to get as much snow that fell in, back out. 

When the door clicks shut with a finality that would normally worry you, you sag against the door in relief. 

Ghost instantly goes to the small fireplace in the one room cabin, the only other doors being to the extremely tiny bathroom and a backdoor to the cabin. He kneels before the fireplace and throws in a couple of the already stocked fire logs by the fire and gets out his tinderbox while you rush over to the bed to start pulling off as many layers of wet clothing that you have. Your boots, socks, and pants are all taken off, as well as your heavy, waterproof coat, leaving you in your vest and sweatshirt, as well as your thermal layer that covers from your neck to your ankles. 

"Wh-wh-why di-i-i-id Pri-i-ice ins-s-s-sis-s-s-sted on-n-n no wo-o-ol?" You shiver out as you drag your wet and damp layers to the now growing fire and lay them out on the hearth in front of the mesh fire screen. 

Ghost just looks at you, and while you can’t tell what he’s thinking, you can see his muscles trembling in shivers. 

You strip down to your underwear, as even your long johns have been soaked through. You sigh as you finally peel off the last layer, stretching out, but pulling your limbs back into your body as the cold air causes you to shiver once more. You walk over to Ghost with your wet clothes and spread them out by already warm fireplace while Ghost goes and checks around the place. You sigh as you feel some feeling return to your fingers and warmth return to your bones. You glance over to Ghost, who’s looking around the safehouse, making sure it’s not compromised. You can see he’s still shivering. 

You scoff as you stand, saying, “Take off your clothes.”

He freezes and turns his head to look at you, but doesn’t move other than that. “What?” 

“You’re shaking,” you say, gesturing to him. He stops shaking as soon as you point it out. “You’re freezing. If you stay in those wet clothes any longer you’re going to get frostbite.”

You cross your arms and tap your foot, trying to convey a look that brokers no argument. It seems to work, that or Ghost actually knows you’re ultimately right, and he makes his way over to the fireplace. You smile at him and shake out your limbs, before moving towards where the attached bedroom is. There’s only one bed, however there’s no fireplace in there, so it’s pretty useless right now. You go and grab a few blankets from the bed, the extra fluffy comforter and the quilt that’s currently on the bed. For a rarely used safehouse it’s remarkably clean. 

You walk back out of the bedroom and almost drop the blankets you’re carrying. 

Standing in the glowing light of the firelight is Ghost, with almost all his skin on glorious display. He’s pale, which makes sense for a man who spends 90% of his time covered up. What surprises you however is just how many scars litter his skin, and the entire tattoo sleeve that spans his right arm and up to his shoulder. He has a healthy layer of fat over what has to be incredibly strong, corded muscle. He’s not small, you never thought he was, but seeing just how much of Ghost is muscle, how little he actually wears as padding to make himself bigger shocks you. 

You clear your throat and get a better grip on the blankets as Ghost looks up. He still has his balaclava on his head, but other than the very tight boxer briefs he’s wearing, the rest is all laid to bare. You hold out a blanket, your cheeks feeling warm, and you hope Ghost attributes it to the warmth from the fire, but you’re not holding your breath. Ghost doesn't miss anything. 

However, he doesn’t make any indication that he knows as he slowly reaches out and grabs the quilt. You plop yourself in front of the fireplace, wrapping the fleece covered comforter around your shoulders, but you’re still shivering after being away from the fireplace for so long. Ghost joins you, sitting next to you at a respectable distance, but it’s as if Ghost is stealing away all the heat from the fire and leaving none for you. 

Your teeth chatter and you feel yourself shaking. Ghost sighs next to you and opens up his arm. 

“Here,” he says, his voice low and gravely. You look over and see he has his arm out. You look at him shocked, but all he says is, “Bare skin contact can help you heat up faster.”

You nod slowly and push the comforter from around your shoulders. Ghost grabs it and slings it over his back and you crawl over and into his arms. Immediately you feel your chest warm as your back leans against his chest. His arms encircle your waist, and you sigh as you finally feel like you’re warming up. 

You look up at the underside of Ghost’s chin, still covered by the mask. You stare up at Ghost, trying to discern anything from what is showing, but Ghost’s mask is not just the one that covers his face. 

“Eyes forward, Sergeant,” Ghost orders. 

You feel yourself jolt and your cheeks heat up even more, that familiar tingle of embarrassment prickling underneath your skin. “Sorry Sir,” you mutter, twisting your head so you’re facing forward once more, watching the fire crackle in the hearth. You feel your cheeks heat up even more before you say, trying to stop it but failing, “You’re really hot.” 

You stiffen in Ghost’s arms, and you almost think he gets warmer, but you can’ be sure, being surrounded by all the heat. 

“Is it too warm for you?” Ghost says hesitantly after a moment, going to take his arms away from your body, but you grab them, pulling them back to your bare chest. 

“No, no, it’s fine,” you say, still feeling overly flushed. Ghost seems to relax again, as much as he can relax, and you feel yourself shifting slightly into his lap more. You can feel your eyelids and limbs getting heavy, the muscles finally relaxing after an entire day of walking and shooting and yelling and action. 

“Get some sleep, sergeant,” Ghost says. 

You smile sleepily and nod. “Alright. Yes Sir,” you say, your voice trailing off as the warmth seeps into you and you begin to fall asleep. 

When you wake up, it’s slow, and much colder than how you went to sleep. You blink slowly, gritty corners almost painful in the cold, dry air. You wrap the blankets that have been placed around you tighter across your bare back as you sit up from where you were laying on the floor. You look behind you and see it’s empty. The space Ghost occupied is empty now, and the fire on the other side of you has burned down to embers, a reflection of the blaze it once was only a few hours ago. 

As you sit up you start to hear quiet talking in the background as your ears begin to work again become less fuzzy, not filled with the proverbial cotton. You rub your eyes as you look over towards the single, small table in the open space, where you see Ghost, still wearing nothing but his mask and underwear, bent over a small radio in his hands, talking with someone. You watch him as he talks quietly, the sun that now glints through the open window turning his skin from a pale moon to a golden glow, his scars that litter his body almost blinding in the light. 

You watch him for the time it takes him to communicate back and forth a few more times before he sits back in the wooden chair. Your eyes trail up from his thick, muscular thighs and over his slightly protruding belly covered in a small patch of blonde hair that trails beneath the waistband of his underwear. Your eyes gracefully rove upwards towards his scarred chest, protruding collarbones, wide shoulders, over his stretched neck that’s half covered by his balaclava. 

He looks over at you and you feel your face heat up as you look away, clearing your throat. 

“Ah, ahem, who-who was that?” you ask, taking a deep breath and trying to school your expression as you look back at Ghost. Your breath catches in your throat as you see him leaning back, facing you, with his arms crossed over his broad chest. You breathe through your teeth, trying to keep your face cool. 

“That was Price. We need to suit up and meet them at  exfil,” Ghost explains, and you nod. 

You drop the blankets with a shiver and push yourself to standing, stretching out, joints popping and muscles tensing before you relax. You can feel Ghost’s eyes on you until you bend down to grab at your now mostly dry clothes. When you look back behind you, you can see Ghost stand up and walk around you in a way that means his eyes don’t have to be on you. 

You smile and shake your head as you collect the rest of your clothes, and start putting them on again, facing away from Ghost as the both of you suit up in your damp tactical gear, When you’ve both finished, you turn to look at Ghost, who has his rifle in his hands and is standing by the door. You collect your own and walk over to Ghost, and go to open the door to leave when he places a gentle hand on your shoulder to stop you. 

“We’re never talking about what happened here,” Ghost says. 

You nod but something sharp- heartbreak?- lances through you and your smile is strained. “Of course.” 

“Already Sergeant,” Ghost says, clapping you on the shoulder in a stilted, overly friendly manner. “Let’s move out.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” you respond shortly, saluting before leaving the cabin, and the peace you found together, for the cold, uncaring snow-covered landscape. 

[drgenius-reid]

War and Peace, and Coffee

A/N: It's down to the wire but I just about managed to get something together for @imagining-in-the-margins Meet Cute Challenge. Summary: Spencer finds himself meeting a lovely stranger in a coffee shop where they read together. Pairing: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader  Category: Fluff Content Warnings: Use of Y/N. Word Count: 920

Spencer didn’t think he had ever seen someone more beautiful in his life. Even as she sat in the corner of the coffee shop, curled up on a chair with a pair of glasses perched on the end of her nose, she looked adorable as she succumbed to the words in front of her. 

She read 1984 by George Orwell. Spencer could tell what book it was just from seeing a tiny piece of the cover that poked through her fingers. He noted how delicately she was holding the book, being careful as to not ruin the spine of it. 

On the small table in front of her, Spencer could see an untouched cup of coffee, a bookmark with a quote that he couldn’t figure out from where he stood, and a banana peel on a plate. He was intrigued by her. Even though he didn’t know why. 

The woman looked up from her book before Spencer could look away. Their eyes met and Spencer’s cheeks grew warm, embarrassment flooding over him at being caught watching her. He tipped his head forward towards her when she smiled softly at him, her eyes wandering back to the words that had pilfered her attention. 

Spencer walked up to the counter at the front of the coffee shop and ordered himself a black coffee with plenty of sugar, and an orange, paying for them before he headed to the bottom of the shop where a tall shelf sat, completely filled with books. He grabbed a copy of War and Peace and took a seat at the table next to the woman’s. 

‘You know you can always take the spare seat at this table,’ she said softly. 

Spencer looked to his right to see the woman now holding her cup of coffee, hands wrapped around it securely. Her glasses were back on her nose properly and her book rested on the table near her knee. 

‘I wouldn’t want to ruin your reading time,’ Spencer smiled. ‘Thank you though.’ 

The woman let out a small chuckle before motioning her head towards the door. ‘See that woman who just walked in? That’s Margaret. She is about to order herself a port of tea and a slice of cake. You, my friend, are sitting in Margaret’s seat and trust me, you don’t want to be there when she gets here. She will either flirt with you until you leave to try and get away from her, or she will pick you apart.’ 

‘And what if I’m into older women?’ Spencer challenged the woman, who threw her head back in laughter. 

‘I promise you, if you want to read your book and actually enjoy it, you’d be better coming to sit here with me.’ 

When Spencer saw the older lady ordering the exact thing he was told that she would, he moved his things across to the next table as quickly as he could, sitting down just in time. His new table mate picked her book back up to continue reading. 

‘Nice choice of literature you have there.’ 

The woman smiled at Spencer as she shrugged lightly. ‘The best books are those that tell you what you know already.’ 

‘But one must know that there was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.’ Spencer smiled at the woman who looked at him in disbelief. 

‘You’re an Orwell fan?’ 

‘More like a literature fan. I’ve read this book multiple times already,’ Spencer said as he lifted the book into the air slightly. 

‘Quote it,’ the woman challenged, placing her bookmark back into the book so that she could put her attention on him fully. 

Spencer took a deep breath and looked at her, trying to hide the smile that wanted to spread across his face. ‘Yes, love, but not the love that loves for something, to gain something, or because of something, but that love that I felt for the first time, when dying, when I saw my enemy and yet loved him. 

‘I knew that feeling of love which is the essence of the soul, for which no object is needed. And I know that blissful feeling now too. To love one’s neighbours; to love one’s enemies. To love everything - tol;ove God in all His manifestations. 

‘Someone dear to one can be loved with human love; but an enemy can only be loved with divine love. And that was why I felt such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What happened to him? Is he alive? Loving with human love, one may pass from love to hatred; but divine love cannot change. 

‘Nothing, not even death, can shatter it. It is the very nature of the soul. And how many people I have hated in my life. And of all people none I have loved and hated more than her. If it were only possible for me to see her once more.’ 

Spencer trailed off. The woman was staring at him, mouth agape. It was a look that would normally make him extremely uncomfortable but with her, it didn’t.  

‘I’m floored,’ she said finally. ‘War and Peace was the first book I read for my undergrad and I remember reading that passage for the first time. It really made me think about the nuances of love and what it means to love everyone. I’m Y/N, by the way.’ 

‘Spencer.’ 

‘It’s lovely to meet you, Spencer.’ 

‘And you, Y/N.’