#ghoap parents | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

eowynstwin · 2 months ago

Text

anatidae - conception, i.

After several happy years together, Ghost and Soap finally convince you to have their child. - ghoap x reader. audhd reader. reader has a nickname. established relationship. polyamory. baby fever. manipulative Soap. smut. breeding kink. anal sex. top Soap. bottom Ghost. sex as manipulation. - Masterlist. Ao3

Eventually, they convince you.

It is impossible to tell who your daughter’s father is for two reasons:

One, when she opens her tiny eyes, one is blue, and one is brown. Complete heterochromia, unlikely to change.

And two—with every passing day, she looks more and more like you.

Four years old; roly-poly with baby fat, little legs and arms she doesn’t quite know what to do with yet. She fills the spaces in your plural household that you did not know were empty until she found them, with her curiosity, her laughter, her boundless appetite for each minute of every day.

She’s smart. Very smart, quick not only to learn but to apply her lessons to new contexts. She sleeps through the night almost every night since the three of you brought her home, turns her nose up at nothing you offer her to eat, never wanders far from you or her fathers at the park or the store.

She’s perfect—even though she has not yet uttered a single word.

Your baby. Your Lizzie.

And actually, it’s Soap’s idea.

His eldest sister’s middle child is turning six, so the three of you pile into his car on a warm Saturday morning to make the drive to the suburbs. The MacTavish-Donnelly household overflows with children in party hats and benevolently bored parents when Ghost pulls the old Jeep up to the curb, boxing some unfortunate van in the driveway, and your trepidation is visible the moment your shoes hit the pavement.

Being your partner has uncovered a new layer of perception for Soap and Ghost; they see and hear things they previously would have ignored, because with the way you move through the world you can ignore nothing.

You described it once having a live wire for every nerve ending; everything, everywhere, screams at you all the time.

So when you pause on the sidewalk when you see a trike in the front yard, and a few adults holding punch cups on the stoop chatting, Soap knows why he hears the wrapping paper around the present in your hands crinkle, your grip tightening.

He throws an arm around your shoulder and brings his lips to your ear. “You got your wee earplugs, aye, Ducky?”

“Yes,” you whisper nervously.

You sway into him at his touch—it’s grounding, you’ve explained. It keeps you from floating away, expanding outward to try to figure out everything happening around you. Nothing beyond the sphere he and Ghost make matters so much.

He kisses the soft spot of your jaw. Ghost comes up to your other side and pulls your hand up into the crook of his arm. “We can set the place on fire, if need be.”

“Don’t burn my sister’s house down, please, LT.”

“Sink fire. Set off the alarms, that’s all.”

You give a little sniff of laughter, and, thus fortified, the three of you advance.

There’s Twister in the living room next to a table piled high with a rainbow of gifts, children tumbling around each other on the mat and laughing while music plays on the telly. Pastel streamers and balloons festoon everything (the middle child being celebrated should grow up without any proverbial complexes, Soap thinks), and confetti is abundant on the carpeted floor like a piñata molted on its way through.

There are the usual stares as they walk through the house. Soap is used to it—likes to flaunt it even, sometimes—and Ghost has never given a shit what anyone thinks. But you seem to shrink even further between them as you feel watched, curious eyes wondering if the mousy little thing between them really arrived with two men.

Luckily, they find Mary in the kitchen, and even despite how obviously harried she is, wisps of hair flying around a lopsided ponytail, Soap’s sister brightens when she sees them.

“Johnny!” she exclaims, swooping him into a hug he’ll never get too big to fall into. “And Simon and Duck! Thank goodness, we’re about to cut the cake and we might need crowd control.”

“Mary,” grunts Ghost.

“Hello Mary,” you say.

Mary releases Soap and smiles very kindly at you. Out of all his siblings, she’s been the most fond of you from the start—probably, he thinks, because she sees something to nurture in you.

At that moment, two of Mary’s children and three of Soap’s nieces and nephews, including the birthday boy, rush in to glom around Soap’s legs, and after the choruses of “Uncle Johnny!” collide with him, they backwash toward Ghost, who always has candy in the many pockets of his utility pants for them to scavenge.

Soap’s family has accommodated you well, though—they flow around you like water, barely touching, and you take the opportunity to give Mary your own hug.

“We’re doing crafts in the backyard, Duck, I thought you might like that,” his sister says, patting your back.

You pull away and give her a smile. It’s one of Soap’s favorites; small and mysterious, and completely genuine. The one that means you’re very pleased, and you don’t feel pressured to show it.

“Yes,” you say, and you vanish outside to sit with the quiet ones.

Ghost allows himself to be dragged off by the rowdier kids, leaving Soap to lean against the kitchen counter and smile at his sister; when when she lifts a cup to sip at some punch, he taps her belly with two fingers.

He’d felt it when she hugged him. A little firmness, hidden by the weight she’s never managed to lose after three pregnancies, and the loose shirt she’s likely wearing to hide the growing bump.

“Number four,” he murmurs.

Jealousy, a thin, sharp garrote, tightens in a spool around his stomach, but it’s an old feeling—one he’s learned how to ignore, until it stops aching.

(Compromise—sacrifice. It’s how a relationship between three people sustains itself. Everyone in his plurality has given something up, or learned to live with something else, or adopted new practices they might otherwise have never picked up. It’s a solid, even foundation, and the last thing Soap wants to do is take a hammer to it.)

His sister’s face softens with warmth. The glow of it suffuses the stiff lines of her posture, gentling the anxiety that has fizzed in the way she stands.

“Our last one,” she says quietly. “We haven’t told anyone yet.”

“Planned?”

“No. God! Could you imagine? Mum and Dad are crazy enough.”

Soap smiles. “We turned out alright.”

Mary runs her hand over her stomach, quick but loving. “Yeah, we did. Remember me though? Swore I’d never become her, and look at me now.”

A house full of toys shoved into every corner; sippy cups in a wire drain basket by the sink. The long hem of her tunic shirt creased by tugging hands. The jamb of one door anointed with three different colors of sharpie, hatch marks measuring years of rapid growth.

Light, and warmth, and color.

“You’re happy, though,” he says.

“I am.” She aims a little grin into her cup—an expression he’s seen her make more often with every consecutive pregnancy.

A secretive curve of her lips. Tranquil, with the familiarity of some hidden insight, as if Mary can see facets of happiness that—to Johnny—remain a mystery.

“I always thought this would be you, you know,” she says. “If you married a girl, I mean. Then you and Simon got together, and I figured not, but…”

Soap settles his crossed arms lightly on his chest, sucking one cheek between his teeth. He sets his gaze on the rainbow of letter magnets on her fridge, spelling out the names of her children. “You know her. It wouldnae—wouldnae be a good idea.”

Mary nods. “And she doesn’t want any?”

“No. Neither of ‘em do.”

He feels his sister’s eyes on him. Probing, in only the way a mother of three’s can be—though even before having children, she’s always been able to see through him in a way no one else ever has.

“I dunno abou’ that,” she says eventually.

When he looks up at her, her gaze is angled elsewhere—toward the sliding glass of the back door, where a table piled high with cheap craft paints and canvas board and grubby jars of water are attended by the clan introverts. You’re the only adult sitting with them, happy not to be bothered—

But a little one comes shyly up to you, a messy painting clutched between two paint-smeared hands.

It’s Mary’s youngest, Angus—and her shyest. He comes to stand beside you with his shoulders hunched, eyes big and trepidatious as he waits for you to catch sight of him.

Soap watches you greet the lad when you notice him. The expression on your face doesn’t change; you always speak to the children the same way you speak to adults, no exaggeration, no upward pitch. Angus stretches his arms out to present his creation.

You look at the canvas when it’s offered to you, and then in a smooth motion you slide out of your chair to crouch down to the boy’s level. As Soap watches, you cross you legs and invite him to sit in your lap, and then, with as serious an expression as you might have at a gallery showing, you begin pointing at different places on the painting. One arm is wrapped loosely around little Angus’ belly, holding the child to you like a stuffed toy.

One side of the canvas is in Angus’ hand; the other is in yours.

He can’t hear what you’re saying, as he watches your mouth move, but Angus positively glows with the obvious praise you’re giving him. When he turns to look up at you, you give him your mysterious little smile—

Something hot blooms in Soap’s chest.

Then there’s a shriek of laughter in the living room, and when Soap turns to look, he sees Ghost on the Twister mat, huge body set in an arch, feet on green, hands on red.

He’s going to bitch later about his back or his knees, Soap can already hear it ringing in his ears—but right now Ghost holds position as kids crawl underneath him or do their best to clamber over him like climbing a mountain. Then, suddenly, Ghost collapses with one of their nephews worming over his belly, throwing his arms around the kid and hauling him over his shoulder.

“Bloody mountain goats, I look like a jungle gym to you?” he barks, baring his teeth in a mock-snarl. Though at home he’ll have it on as often as not, he never wears his mask around the children.

Ghost surges up to spin the boy around, and the other kids crow with laughter and demands for a turn of their own.

“Watch the lamps!” Mary cries out, undercutting her warning with a laugh. “You’re as bad as the wee ones, Simon!”

The heat in his chest billows. St. Elmo’s fire catches in his alveoli, flash-burns the lining of his lungs inward to cloak his heart in a white blaze. Heat sears his neck upward to flood across his face.

He thinks of you, belly round, breasts heavy. Ghost with a baby in his arms, a tiny thing made tinier by the bulk of his huge frame. A toddler clinging to your leg, face tipped up to look at you with adoring eyes, or napping at midday, thumb in mouth, on Soap’s chest.

It takes his breath away. The kitchen sways around him, the earth’s center of gravity shifting. A fissure crack the casket of his want.

Mary catches his eye with a knowing grin.

He starts with Ghost.

You’re going to be the harder sell. Early in the relationship, the three of you had sat down to discuss this, and you had been unequivocal—no kids. You did not want children, and you did not want to be pregnant.

It was a sensory nightmare, you’d explained. The thought of sticky hands reaching out constantly to touch you, and shrill, high voices shouting and screaming, with no knob to turn down the volume, made you shudder with fear. Piles of toys to trip over, when your balance is medium on a good day, and no moment to sit down in silence without the risk of it being interrupted by some little goblin’s insatiable demands.

Put that way, Soap could see your point. He remembers his parents’ most exhausted days, dealing with no less than five children in the house and seven for birthdays and holidays. That kind of exhaustion would weigh on anyone, but for you, it would be a different beast entirely.

And Ghost was in accord—both for your sake, and his own. By then, he had told you and Soap about the Sonoran desert, Sparks and Washington, burning down his own house with four bodies still warm inside it—one smaller than the pool of blood it lay in.

He did not want to bring something into the world so easily taken out of it.

Soap could see that too. Certain moments in the field live permanently now in the folds of his brain, bloody and ugly and grisly in the way most people only encounter through fiction. Too real to him now not to look at his nieces and nephews sometimes with dread tearing up his gut.

Soap was outvoted. Moreover, he was convinced. So he kept his desires to himself.

But that evening after the party, he can’t stop thinking about it. A little bundle with his eyes, and your mouth, and Simon’s nose. Little hands curling around his fingers. A high chair at their dinner table, right next to his place. Bedtime stories. Halloween costumes. Friday night movies, like his Dad used to set up for him and his brother and sisters, popcorn fights during action scenes and falling asleep in piles on the floor.

Soap has always wanted children. Always. He thought he could give that up, being with you and Ghost—what’s between the three of you is rare, precious, more than worth having even by itself. He loves the life he has with his little family, and he wouldn’t change it.

But expansion isn’t exactly change, is it?

The more he thinks about it, the more right it feels. The more he can already feel the weight of his child in his arms. And he knows it would make the two of you happy, even despite the trepidation you and Ghost share. Neither he nor you grew up in happy homes overflowing with love—it’s natural that neither of you can see the potential of it.

But Soap did. Soap can.

He doesn’t mind being the visionary. He’s more than willing to lead the charge. He can do the work of opening his partners’ eyes—

And he’s not above fighting dirty to do it.

It starts with getting Ghost on his back. You’re out one night teaching an evening class (bento dinner in hand, an extra square of chocolate Soap snuck in at the last moment), so the next few hours are just for them, and Soap takes possession of every minute.

It’s always a sight. Ghost is the biggest man Soap has ever been with—and to have that huge body below him, fatty muscle red and quivering, hips rolling with a needy cant as Soap slowly drags his cock in and out of him, is something that never fails to take his breath away.

He massages his hands up and down Ghost’s chest, cupping his heavy pecs and thumbing his nipples as the big man’s eyes sink closed and his bitten mouth drops open. Between them, his cock, blustery red and standing straight up, twitches every time Soap pushes in, dripping clear and messy all over his stomach.

Ghost’s hands are vice-tight on Soap’s hips, but he doesn’t urge him to speed up, doesn’t snarl at him to get on with it, like he usually might. No—Soap set the mood just right, backing Ghost into the bedroom with soft kisses up his neck and softer hands wandering up his shirt. It’s honey-sweet and slow as dripping molasses, with Ghost hot and tight around him, their groaning breaths mingling as they hang there together in the moment.

Watching Ghost’s belly jump with pleasure, Soap says—breathlessly, as if letting it slip out—“I wanna get her pregnant, Simon.”

It’s only supposed to test the waters. Take Ghost’s temperature, see where his head’s at. Soap is ready for anything—for Simon to freeze, to glare at him, even to shove him away.

But instead—

“Fffffuck,” Ghost growls, chest expanding, stomach going concave as he heaves a deep breath in.

His brows screw together, upper lip curling, and he draws so tight around Soap that he has the delirious notion that Ghost is going to pull his cock clean off. If Ghost had been blushing before, he’s positively blazing now, red blooming bright across his face and chest and all the way up to the tips of his ears.

Soap knows immediately what’s happening—Ghost is on the razor’s edge of coming.

And all it took were those six little words.

“Yeah?” he presses, blending the long thrusts he’s kept steady until now into a few short, quick ones. “Yeah? You like that idea? Her all big with our baby, Si, something we put in her? Us?”

Ghost pulls his bottom lip between his teeth, throwing his head back. “Fuck—Johnny—” he snarls.

“Did y’see her with the wee ones?” Johnny croons, pressing the heels of his hands into Ghost’s stomach. “She’d be so good with a baby, Ghost, I know it. Our baby.”

Ghost starts panting, hard, grunting like an animal with every exhale. He’s never especially talkative during sex, unless it’s to give instruction or bark an order, but now it seems that language has completely abandoned him, as he tries to get Johnny to fuck him faster with the roll of his hips, trying to thrust his cock into the open air.

As if you’re already there, already taking him, and Ghost is trying to get himself as deep inside you as he can.

Johnny wraps one hand around it, sliding his fist loosely up and down. He can practically feel Ghost’s heartbeat plunging through every raised vein. If Johnny had the flexibility, he’d bend down right now just to get it in his mouth, but as it is he contents himself with getting Ghost’s precum all over his palm and licking it off with his tongue.

“Probably take a few tries,” says Soap, closing his hand back around Ghost’s cock. “Though with two of us, probably not long. Not if we go one right after the other, every time we can, aye?”

He pauses to spit on the red, exposed crown, circled round by thumb and fingers, so he can lube up his grip. Ghost’s dense, heavy thighs shake around his hips, as Soap thrusts his cock as deep as he can and slides his hand down to Ghost’s base. He mimics the squeeze of Ghost’s ass around him—the tightness of your cunt swallowing him up—as he jacks him off, up and down at the same time he pulls in and out.

“Fuck,” Ghost breathes, “Johnny, you—Johnny—”

“Sounds good, doesnae?” Soap says. “Gettin’ her between us, not stoppin’ ‘til somethin’ takes.”

“Fuck!” Ghost shouts, and then he’s gone, balls drawing up, a stream of white jetting out so hard it lands on his chest, right in the valley of his swelling pecs. Soap fucks him through it with his hand, and slams his hips hard against Ghost’s as as he chases his own end—

“Just—like—this,” Soap growls, tether snapping, and he empties himself as deep as he can into Ghost, cock pulsing as ecstasy pours up and down his stomach. He swears he can feel every drop of cum leaving him, and worries wildly that there won’t be enough left for you later, as the intensity of his orgasm seems to empty his balls of every last reserve.

He holds himself still for a moment after, still buried in his partner, nerves alight with an ecstasy so bright and so fervent that it’s sharp enough to cut him to the bone.

He feels very present. Anchored and secure in this place and time. At home, Soap struggles often with the feeling of being tugged in a hundred different directions, all at once, myriad urges to see, do, and act all clamoring at him for attention. It’s something that keeps him alive in the field—that keeps him thriving on deployment, really—but constantly on his toes when he’s home, all safe and sound.

Always searching, it feels like. Always looking for something he needs, and almost never finding it. The feeling quietens when Ghost curls his hand around the back of his neck, or you lean your head in close to his to kiss him or to speak.

Now—it’s silent.

A father. He’s going to be a father.

Panting heavily, Ghost finds his voice—at least, enough of it to start laughing.

“Spoiled brat, you are,” he chuckles in his steel-edged tenor. “You know that? Spoiled.”

Soap grins at him, caressing one thigh. “Your fault.”

“Mm,” Ghost hums, having long known that he’ll give Soap whatever he wants. The hard cut of his mouth is pulled into a wry smile. “She ain’t gonna fold so easy, Johnny.”

Soap pulls out of his partner, and crawls up to lay next to him. “I know. S’what I like abou’ her, after all.”

Ghost hums again. He lifts one arm to wrap around Soap’s shoulders, drawing him close, idly tapping his fingers on his tricep.

“You’re gonna have to get a desk job,” he says.

His tone is thoughtful, but Soap knows the words to be absolute.

Once you’d agreed to be theirs, Ghost had retired. It had surprised Soap and you both, but Ghost treated it as the most natural thing in the world. And it didn’t take very long, after the dust settled, for Soap to see why—you needed care, more than Soap had realized, and for Ghost, that need superseded any of his desire to remain in the field.

And Ghost was good at caring for you. It seemed to come as naturally to him as breathing: remembering what you liked to eat, helping you with your stretches, using the special brushes you had to wake your nerves up every morning. Putting together a schedule and keeping you on it, making sure you got to work on time and bringing you home at the end of every day.

And as you began to flourish in receiving his care, so too did Ghost flourish in giving it.

The hard edges of him softened. The sharp tones of his voice blunted. Soap saw Ghost become a steadier version of himself than he’d ever seen before—and he saw you blossom with a happiness that, at the inception of their odd relationship, had only begun to bud.

“Lookin’ after her is one thing,” continues Ghost. “I’m alright bein’ the hardass, ‘cause you make up for where I’m shit. But a kid’s different, Johnny. You don’t get to come and go as you like with a kid. It’s all, or nothin.’”

And Soap has to be honest with himself—a corner of his stomach clenches. There is a clarity in the smell of oil and gun smoke that he’s failed to find anywhere else.

But it does not dim the sunlight shining in his chest.

He knew it would happen someday, to old age if not a bullet. So to a baby?

Better than he really could have hoped.

He swings one leg over Ghost’s hips, and pushes himself up to straddle his partner. Ghost smirks beneath him, hands rounding the curves of his waist, sliding backward to palm Soap’s ass before traveling further down to squeeze his thighs.

“Gonna be fun, LT,” Soap agrees, grinning. “I hear pregnancy makes you horny as hell.”

“Bloody fucking hell, Soap,” Ghost snorts, lifting up to one elbow and dragging him down by the neck for a kiss.

next chapter early access

author's notes: y'all wore me down. I'm writing baby fic. What has the world come to

2K notes · View notes

bitterrfruit · 4 months ago

Text

clingfilm [1]

serial killer / detective ghoap x forensic pathologist reader cw: dubcon. free use. graphic depiction of a corpse. smut. 18+ only [masterlist]

The first body was discovered on the eighth of September, propped up at a bus stop in the outer suburbs of Whitfell. Found by a drunken teenager on his way home from the pub.

You got the phone call from the detective inspector in the ultra-black hours of the morning. The time of night where not even the waxing moon hung in the sky, its habits as sibylline as any nightcrawler lurking red-eyed at that hour. Yourself included.

Not alone, though. You had found yourself a lurker, one that would arrive unannounced in the pitch black and disappear before the sun broke over the low-rise city skyline. Exactly what you needed. If he were any more of a fixture in your life, you would have grown to loathe him. You were like that with everybody; you could handle people in doses — fixed, controlled, prescribed doses — and beyond that their very presence became as abrasive as sandpaper. Fork-on-plate grating enough to make your ears bleed.

It was a defense mechanism. That’s what all the pseudo-analytical armchair psychologists would tell you, anyway. Something you could work to overcome, like it was a problem in the first place. That you just needed to become one with yourself, and the right person would slot into your life like a jigsaw piece.

Tommy slotted in just fine, for now.

A little wonky, one of those unsolvable pieces that you had to squish in, in itself an indication that it didn’t belong where you had put it — but it would suffice. Having the hole filled was satisfying enough. Looked more complete when you took a step back.

He was uncanny, not quite all there. Offbeat in a way you were drawn to.

There wasn’t much to him. He simply offered his cock to you when you wanted it, and he didn’t burden you with the social obligations of a well-adjusted man. No wine and dining, no meeting the parents, no cooking breakfast. He told you very little, and you liked that about him.

You knew his name was Tommy, that he was from Manchester, and that he was a lorry driver for some packing or logistics company — you learned that when you first met him at the petrol station checkout. Knew that he’d be gone for weeks at a time driving up and down the island, only visiting Leeds for a quick fuck and a cigarette, and he’d be gone again. You knew he served in the special forces in his twenties and was discharged due to injury, and you only discovered that because you mindlessly asked him about a scar on his back. You knew his tattoos apparently didn’t mean anything and he got them to piss off his dad when he was eighteen.

He arrived at your flat just after three in the morning.

You had been growing roots into the sunken cushion of your sofa when he knocked on your door, television playing a box set of Grey’s Anatomy with the volume two notches above mute. You knew it was him, he always knocked the same way — two hard knocks with the back of his knuckles, a third too much effort. Loud enough to startle you. Ever impatient.

You opened your door with a twist of the handle (rarely bolted it, a careless habit). Greeted him in your oversized t-shirt, with no underwear on and your legs unshaven. You weren’t expecting him, but you knew he paid no mind. He’d sink his cock in showered or otherwise. Simple man.

He stood cladded in his rough canvas work jacket, day-old sweat embedded in his stubbled cheeks, cropped wheaten hair scruffed up and pointy. Greasepaint creased in the wrinkles of his sockets, once said it prevented sun blindness during his long hours on the road. Pinched a lambent cigarette between his scarred lips, amber glow catching a glint in his brown eyes.

Took up the whole doorframe, fucking behemoth that he was. The jacket made his goliath shoulders even bulkier, such a thing somehow possible.

“You smell good,” is all he said, as he pushed forward into your flat and swung the door shut behind him. Voice as hoarse as ever, the growl of an old dog, cords shrivelled by cigarettes and dragged raw over gravel.

“You don’t,” you answered frankly, turning to sit back on the sofa. You had unfinished business with a rum and diet coke that you left dripping on the coffee table. “Smell like petrol.”

He huffed, vaguely amused, hasn’t stopped you before remaining unspoken. He shucked off his jacket and dumped it on your cluttered kitchen counter, a grimy wifebeater the only layer underneath it. Came to sit next to you on the couch and landed in it with a grunt. The old springs sank deep under the weight of him and his sheer gravity pulled you in his direction.

You got down one sip of your drink before he scooped you up — with two dinner-plate hands on either divot of your waist you were swiftly lodged in his lap, ass nestled against him as though you were made to fit. He had your legs hooked over his, thighs wedged open, and you got a little splash of spiked coke down your front in the motion. You leaned forward to set the drink down on the coffee table, before he reeled you back in.

He was a taker, Tommy. Liked to pick you up and plonk you down as he wished, and didn’t like a fuss. He wasn’t rough about it, at least. He was a utilitarian, simply preferred convenience.

Fine by you. You were a pedant in most facets of your life — needed a tight grip of everything, always, or else you’d implode like a dying star. Some might have called you a control freak, under their breath and behind the cover of your inattention.

Not with sex, though. Sex was the only act wherein you could willingly relinquish all control. It was liberating, in a way — the ability to shut your brain off, cantankerous as it was, and for once let another person pull your bullied strings.

Tommy never checked, never asked. Sometimes he’d fuck you and leave without a word exchanged.

A wide hand bunched up the bottom of your t-shirt, pulling it up to your belly, and the other bent up and over your shoulder — he hucked up a lump of saliva into his salty fingers, and smeared it against your spread pussy with little fanfare. He was generous with his fingers, sometimes, at least well practiced — began by pushing a thick middle finger inside you, hooking and raking it against your outward wall, kneading into the gummy flesh below your bladder because you told him once that it felt good that way.

The rough heel of his palm grinded against your clitoris as his fingers coaxed your cunt to drool for him, a little harsher than would be most comfortable, but you would never say so. Telling him to do anything would defeat the purpose.

Once he got you warmed up, it didn’t matter. When your clit blushed under his attention, pink and alert, he’d redirect his focus. Would drag his finger out of you, coated in your watery slick, and paint stripes with it over your pulsing bead. Up, down, up, down. Nothing fancy, but you liked consistency — he’d expose your clit from under its hood with every upward stroke, the calloused pad of his finger directly touching the raw nerves would make you twitch. His fingertip would travel back downward every odd moment, scooping up more of your syrup before returning to its job.

Before long you were panting, sweat beading on the nape of your neck, and your head rocked back over his shoulder. The television was rendered nothing more than a lightshow in the dark sitting room, bouncing blue and white off the walls and ceiling. His iron-hard length pressed into your lower back, straining against the fly of his jeans, and he bucked his hips to make certain you could feel it. You could.

You enjoyed it when he dragged it out. When he had nowhere to be, so took his time. It wasn’t uncommon for him to rush, to fuck you hard and hurried and leave before your pussy was even warm. Whenever he was gone for a long while, though, he’d savour every minute. The longer he was gone, the more you looked forward to his double-knock on your door.

With the way he was indulging tonight, you’d have thought he had been gone for two months.

You saw him last week.

When you came on his fingers with a breathless whine, your thighs strained desperately to clamp shut around his hand, but he kept them jammed open — even readjusting his own legs to open you wider. Selfish. He candidly relished in the pained sobs you would let out when he persisted in vexing your sated clit, once the nerves in its peak were cloyed and inflamed. Sometimes he’d press it like a button, or pinch it tight between his fingers, just to hear you yelp in the shock. You felt his grin when he did it.

His turn, then. With a forearm hooked around your waist, cutting into your belly, he lifted you — reached underneath your bottom with a wet hand and tore down his fly, tugging out his cock and holding it upright like a sword, fist around the hilt.

He gracelessly impaled you on him without warning, yanking you downward onto his lap and making you squeal like a cat with its tail stepped on. Far from the first time you had been speared on him, but you never grew accustomed to the size of it — it stretched you open and burrowed itself among your organs, taking up so much space you could hardly breathe around it, became an organ of your own. Even with your doctorate you failed to imagine how your bowels could rearrange themselves to fit him.

With arms like boa constrictors coiled around your belly, fingers boring into the flesh of your waist, he raised you up and tugged you down again — it was as though you weighed nothing to him, he could lift you up and down like a doll without toil. Fucked you like he was jerking himself off with your body.

“Only good cunt,” he grunted deeply into the back of your neck, where his teeth grazed your skin. So low that you felt it rattle in your chest, as though he thought you could not hear it. “No wonder.”

The shit he said was always gibberish. Uttered as low as a secret, always referring to something he never made you privy to. You never bothered asking. You just liked the sound of his voice.

“Wan’ another one?” He asked roughly, as a pair of fingers creeped over your mound and resituated themselves at the crux of your pussy. Almost gibberish, but you understood quite clearly this time.

“Yes please,” you softly purred, a little breath.

Hearing your obsequiousness aloud was always painfully shrill. Such a needy little sycophant the moment a cock was inside you. Embarrassment would settle heavy and thick later, once you were alone, and the thrumming heat twisted up in your core had unwinded.

He touched you differently with his right hand — left-handed, you supposed — would smear circles over your clit with the palps of his fingers, lazy and imprecise. Used the rutting of his pelvis to guide his motion, as he hammered into your cervix with the thick head of his cock. You’d be sore later.

As he sped himself up, blindly chasing the acme of his own pleasure like a dog after bone, and you chewed on your lip like meat—

Your phone rang.

Glowed bright white from where it sat on the couch beside you, the piercingly loud marimba of the ringtone as jarring as a smack to the cheek. You blinked over your shoulder to look at it.

D.I. MacTavish.

You never saved his contact, but you knew the number by heart. Could determine the caller the moment you saw the incoming call on your screen. Very rarely came with good news.

Expecting that Tommy would snap at you for being distracted by it, you shut your eyes again and turned away, focused on his busy fingers and the cock in your guts — but, to your shock, he slowed.

“Better get that,” he grumbled.

You groaned childishly, the back of your head knocking against his collarbone as you slumped back into him. “I don’t want to.”

“Pick it up,” he said rigidly.

Short-fused man that he was. Request better be followed by action in the first instance, or he’d ignite quicker than a match in petrol. Never got physical with you, at least. He’d just grit his teeth and leave in a huff.

You all but mumbled fine as you leaned over to grab the phone from the cushion next to you, but with a tug he kept your hips riveted to his lap, and his cock skewered in you to the root.

There was something deeply depraved about picking up the phone to speak to the detective while being fucked by another man, but you didn’t think too much of it in your come-drunk haze. You wanted to avoid the inevitable fit of rage that would erupt if you made a fuss. Hoped for a short conversation.

“Hello?”

You weren’t very good at phone calls. Not well versed in the formalities. You silently waited for him to elucidate the reason for his bothering you at such a ludicrous hour — but, given the shared nature of your professions, you could hazard a guess. Doubly inappropriate that you had a dick inside you, in that case.

“Did I wake ye?”

Been a while since you heard that voice. A month, at least. It made your chest a little warm to hear it, lilted and deep as it was, even through the tinny phone speaker.

“No, I—” You hiccuped as Tommy moved his hips, and his cock raked pointedly against your constricting walls. You felt his hot breathing against the nape of your neck and tried to ignore it. “—I’m just watching telly. Something happen?”

“A body’s been found in south Whitfell,” he said bluntly.

Not a friendly call. You reached back and patted Tommy on the shoulder, implicitly telling him to stop moving as though you couldn’t feel him. You could keep it together if he stayed still and let you breathe steadily.

“Do - do you need me there tonight?” You asked, voice stiff, struggling to sound at ease while you were stuffed full.

“I’d love a visit,” he said, and you couldn’t tell whether any humour was webbed in his tone. “Need ye to take a look in situ.”

As you opened your mouth to speak, Tommy brusquely bucked his hips, and his stone-hard cock pummelled into the plug of your womb brutally enough to force a piercing squeak from your throat.

That was enough to make you angry. It flared hot in your belly and made your jaw clench up, and you twisted your spine to spitefully jab him below his collarbone, holding your breath when his cock mashed against your organs.

He was smirking vindictively, pupils blown wide, ravenous as a shark. You hadn’t taken him for an exhibitionist, but with the context of the phone call painfully clear, you weren’t going to let him use this as the opportunity to explore it.

You unhooked a leg to get yourself off of him, and his grin dropped from his face so abruptly it was as though you had flipped a switch.

Cold dread needled down the back of your neck.

His huge hands kept you bolted to his lap, cock grinding into you as if to spite you.

It dawned on you then the precedent you had set — allowing him unfettered ingress to your body and not once disputing mid-act. He had the size and strength to keep you pinned to him for as long as he wished to; a fact that would normally excite you, that now only frightened you.

Only when you scowled at him with enough ire to turn him to stone, smacked him on the chest and again attempted to get off, did he finally and reluctantly acquiesce. His glower was gelid, venomous, and his disdainful fingers clawed over your thighs as you stood yourself up. His slick cock tugged out of you and landed against his hirsute stomach, leaving a wet patch on the white cotton of his wife-beater. In any other situation you’d mourn the emptiness.

You brought the phone back to your ear with a clear of your throat, as you timidly wandered away from the couch towards your bedroom.

“Must get excited when a cadaver shows up, MacTavish,” you said coyly, flustered, wiping an errant hair from your forehead. “Gives you an excuse to see me.”

A beleaguered sigh grumbled through the phone. “That’s no’ funny.”

Johnny’s gallows humour was a quirk of his you enjoyed, even though he routinely used it to get a rise out of you while you did the work they paid you for. So, his uncharacteristic severity made clear that there would be no such persiflage this time. You didn’t know how to act toward him when he was serious. It made your skin itch.

“Sorry,” you said awkwardly into the phone, through teeth. Well rehearsed. He left a silence harsher than nails on a chalkboard before you brought yourself to speak again. “S’it look like a homicide?”

“Body was sitting at a bus stop. Young lad spotted it,” he replied stiffly. It didn’t sound like him. “It’s — it’s wrapped in clingfilm.”

“Oh,” you hummed. That was new. “Kid didn’t see anyone?”

“Nobody,” he answered. “He hasn’t been much use, though. Lad was steamin’. ”

You rummaged around in your chest-of-drawers as he spoke, phone wedged between your shoulder and cheek. Shoved your bare legs into your jeans once you found them, and stuffed some changes of clothes into your Nike gym bag. Homicides always necessitated an overnight stay.

“Any decomp?” You asked clinically, “might have been dead a while. Soft tissue intact?”

“Dunno, Bones. I didnae look that close. That’s your job.”

You always cringed a little when he called you that. He decided it was your nickname upon first meeting you, and persisted even after you told him that television’s beloved Bones was a forensic anthropologist and not a forensic pathologist. The difference was lost on him. Expressing any displeasure only made the name stick.

Still, it was evident something had gotten under the detective’s skin. It made you viscerally uneasy, and he wasn’t even in the room with you to give you that toothy look of heavy-browed discomfort.

The human mind was an enigma to you. A labyrinth of dark hallways and trapdoors. You always found yourself turning the wrong corner and hitting a dead end, or losing your footing and tumbling into a spike pit. Your own mind no exception.

Bodies were much easier. You knew what there was to be found and exactly where to look for it. Skin, flesh, organs, bones, teeth. No constituent variance between one person and another, no discrepancies to account for.

Saying the right thing was a more difficult undertaking than autopsying a corpse.

“Everything alright, detective?” You felt obliged to ask, when the silence stretched too long, and your ears began to ring.

A long sigh. His muteness only endured, but he finally spoke after a pruritic pause. “Sorry. I’m — just — s’good to hear yer voice.”

You bit down on nothing as you marched out of your room and towards the door to your flat, only to find it ajar and the sitting room utterly empty. Glancing around for a moment, you checked for Tommy — not in your bathroom, not in the kitchen — just gone. Must have stormed out in a temper. For the best.

“Didn’t answer my question,” you said edgily, as you grabbed your keys from the table by the door.

“I’m fine, bonnie,” he grunted. “When’re ye getting here?”

You stuffed your feet into your boots, yanked your long black coat from the rack by the front door.

“I’m on the way,” you said.

The drive to Whitfell would normally have taken around two hours, but you drove a steady five miles an hour over the limit, and got there ten minutes sooner. Cumbria Constabulary could just as well find a pathologist in their own region — you were sure there would be at least one — but they had an affinity for calling on you at wild hours, likely because you never refused. Not to mention the hardly vocational reasons their detective inspector had for liking you.

The roads were dead empty that early in the morning, just after four. The asphalt was glossy with autumn dew and reflected the odd streetlight in stripes. Mostly empty motorway and rural hills between there and Leeds, but the pseudo-city you headed to had a decent population that was only expanding, and the sprawl of freshly built flat-pack condos proliferated beyond its borders every year.

By the time you arrived at the scene it had been cordoned off with tape, the suburban street blocked by four flashing patrol vehicles, a CID van, and the mobile morgue. A few night-robed slipper-wearing bystanders hovered around the barricade, too sleepy to be a bother but curiosity compelling them to get out of bed and poke their noses around at the drama outside their houses.

A plethora of crime scene investigators pottered about, taking photos and lifting prints and swabbing surfaces, the odd constable there to oversee it and write their aimless notes. Screens of grey canvas had been propped up around the scene, shielding the cadaver from your sight and that of the bystanders, but the floodlights within projected the shadows of every CI working behind it like a puppet show.

The detective spotted your car as you pulled in to park, immediately sauntering towards you and squinting in the glow of your headlights. Thick mohawk cresting his skull as scruffy and unprofessional as ever, he stood dead still with his hands in the pockets of his black duffle coat as you killed the engine. He wore his authority like a nice jacket, standing tall and brandishing it proudly, a fact you always found amusingly juxtaposed to his boyishly crude character.

You flashed your warrant card at an approaching officer as you got out of the car, and they left you be without a word.

“Got ‘ere quick,” he called to greet you, and you shoved your card back into your pocket as you walked over to him.

“Sounded serious,” you answered bluntly, perplexed by his surprise.

He nodded, lips in a line. “Sorry if I was a wee bit blunt,” he said grimly, wintry grey eyes as piercing as you remember, even under the dim orange glow of the streetlight above him. “Bit shaken up, I s’pose.”

“Doesn’t sound like you, Johnny,” you teased, quirk in your brow as you leaned slightly to the side to see past him.

“I’m no’ made o’ stone,” he gibed, finally baring his pointed teeth with a grin, silver-capped canine glinting in the light of the street lamp. “It’s no’ nice to look at, I’ll tell ye that.”

“I’m sure,” you said.

“Get on yer gear,” he told you. “Come take a look. Need yer noggin on this one.”

You gave him a nod and hurried around your car, popping open the boot and digging around the rubbish for the PPE kit that was a permanent fixture among your belongings. Climbed into disposable white coveralls and smoothed down the velcro-close front, tugged a pair of fresh teal latex gloves from their cardboard box and bullied your hands into the floppy rubber, plucking the band around your wrist to ensure a good seal. Three-ply mask, shoe covers, palm-sized notebook in tow.

Returning to the detective, he flicked his head towards the scene, and you followed him at the heel like a duckling. Your heart fluttered high in your chest, buzzing a keen anticipation that always swelled inside you whenever a homicide was in question. Likely inappropriate. Not a secret you’d share.

“There she is,” he grumbled, far more sombre now that the cadaver was in his immediate line of sight. He sniffed, held the back of his hand under his nose as if to stifle a retch.

She indeed. A woman, quite clearly, sitting upright on the bench under the bus shelter, across the road from a quaint little play park. A double layer of clingfilm wrapped snugly around the body from head to toe — meticulously done, each limb individually swathed, the plastic corset-tight around the waist. Dark nipples were visible through the glossy film, breasts squished flat by the tautness of the plastic. The head was less visible, face only determinable up close — bandaged up by multiple layers of film, turned greenish in the thickness, nose and eyes smushed up underneath it.

“Jesus,” you muttered, and for the moment that was all you could muster.

Johnny nodded. “Aye,” he agreed morosely. “No’ somethin’ ye see everyday.”

“Have any of the CIs touched the plastic?” You asked resolutely, focus already needle-pointed and honed in. “Taken any off, moved it at all?”

“No’ that I know of,” he said.

You grunted irefully. “Well, they better not have. You need to keep a better eye on them, detective. If they pissed around with—”

“They’re well trained, doc.” He said, more pointedly, and you sensed that he was gently chiding you for assuming their idiocy. The subsequent chagrin made you shrivel up like a prune.

“How long since it was discovered?” You asked dispassionately, changing the subject.

“‘Bout two hours,” he answered. “Lad said he called triple one straight away once he found it.”

“Mh,” you considered aloud, crouching down beside the bench. Clicked your pen and flipped open your notebook.

Your eyes scoured every inch of the corpse — legs, knees, feet, genitals, stomach, ribs, arms, hands — anything that was visible without having to touch or shift it from its position, you made a note of.

Contusions visible on: right hip, right shoulder, left side of neck, left clavicle. Blood (?) present on the inside of the clingfilm, around stomach and throat areas. Partial lividity (?) on outer left thigh and arm. Pocking/marbling (?) visible on: both thighs, lower stomach, chest, both arms, left foot.

Positioning — sat upright, neutral positioning. Hands flat on thighs above knees. Head leaning slightly to the left, otherwise neck neutral. Legs spread at ~30°, feet flat on ground. No shoes. Evidently nude beneath clingfilm. Hair apparently intact, tied up. Eyes open.

“You’ll have to get your team to analyse the clingfilm,” you muttered flatly, more a spoken thought than a directed statement.

“Huh?” Johnny queried, right behind you. He liked to watch you while you worked. Surveyed like a hawk every anomaly you pointed at, every note you made in your book. Always overly curious about your movements.

“The plastic,” you repeated, glancing up at him over your shoulder. “Get your team to look at it. The brand, or something — it just, it doesn’t look like the stuff you’d get from Tesco, does it?”

“Don’t it?”

“No, it’s — it’s thicker, see? It looks sturdier. Here, look.”

Johnny pursed his lips. “Dinnae need to get any closer, hen.”

A knit pulled in your brow. “You’re being weird,” you said, the irony of your comment not lost on you. “It’s just a body. You’ve probably seen more of them than I have.”

“Callin’ me old?” He chided, an uneasy smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth, dimpling his cheek.

“No, I mean—” You quickly corrected yourself, panicked that you had insulted him. “From, you know. Being a soldier, or whatever.”

“Ah,” he nodded. “I ken. This is hardly like that, though, eh? Dinnae see anything as fucken’ horrific as this out there. This is — ah. S’like a horror movie. I don’ like horror movies.”

You smiled at that. “Little wuss,” you murmured impishly.

“What d’ye think, then?” He asked.

“Of horror movies?”

“Of the fucken’ body, Bones, Jesus.”

You nodded tightly. “Oh, uh—” you looked back at your notebook, “hard to say without taking off the wrapping. But it looks like it was taken from somewhere else and put here recently. Tonight.”

“Mh,” he warily hummed. “How can ye tell?”

“Um—” You bite your words, wrangling them into a comprehensible sentence opposed to unintelligible medical jargon. “There’s blood pooling, on the left side, which suggests it was initially on its side post-mortem. But it’s, it’s not fully settled. I’ll have to look more closely in the lab.”

“Anythin’ else?”

Your eyes raked over the cadaver in front of you, new notes buzzing in the air around you like insects. “It’s pretty intact. Hardly any decomposition. Doesn’t really smell, does it?”

“Cannae say I’ve sniffed it.”

You snorted. “Well, there’s — oh.”

“What?”

Stare hitched on something you hadn’t noticed while you were focusing on the flesh beneath the plastic — water.

Little puddles underneath where the cadaver sat, pooled around its feet. Then you observed droplets, mostly evaporated but what was left trickled in rills down the thighs and chest, atop the plastic.

“It’s wet.”

Johnny chuffed, disquieted. “S’it leaking?”

“No—” You leaned closer, squinting, and laid the back of your gloved hand against the body’s belly. Frigid cold. “I think it’s freshly thawed.”

“Shite,” he grunted, visibly perturbed. He was sharp, the detective, and the realisation of renewed urgency was quick to settle. “Alright, let’s rush ‘er to the fridge then.”

You’d have liked more time to assess the body in situ, but MacTavish wasn’t wrong to want it in storage as soon as possible. The more quickly the body was able to thaw, the more posthumous changes might disturb the secrets it retained from its murder. You stepped back from the bench as the detective whistled over some hazmat-clad drones to bag and tag the cadaver and haul it into the mobile morgue.

You began your shed — pulled off your mask, plucked off your gloves, took down the hood of your PPE suit and let it puddle around your neck. Let out a breath of relief once the most abrasive layers were peeled from you.

“Y’want me to do the post tonight?” You asked impassively, when Johnny returned his attention to you.

His eyes were solemn, overcast, and he stiffly shook his head. “Nae, hen. Save it for the morn, eh?’”

“You sure?” You puzzled, frowning, “I should do it now. Now that it’s not frozen, it might—”

“Och, stop,” he dismissed. “Not havin’ ye look over a body like that if you’re knackered. Yer notes will all be gibberish.”

A curl twisted in your lips. “I’ll be fine. I’ll just have a RedBull.”

“No,” he said. “Tha’ one’s an order.”

“You can’t order me to do anything, detective,” you jeered. “I’m not a cop.”

He let loose a wide grin. “I can do what I damn well please.”

You snickered, rubbing the heel of your palm into an eye — only after he mentioned it did your exhaustion make itself known. It pulled on you like sinking stones, made your legs heavy as lead. The sun was probably not far from rising, and you hadn’t yet slept a wink. Had been far from a relaxing night, in fact.

“Fine,” you grumbled. “I’ll be at the lab in the morning. Or, y’know, in a couple hours.”

He nodded, the buck of his head a salute.

“Will ye crash at ma bit?” He asked, kept his hoarse voice low, as if a secret.

Would be far from the first time you’d have stayed at his flat. He invited you every time you were forced to stay the night near the lab, though the first few offers you had modestly declined.

When you finally capitulated it innocently started with you on his couch, but that only lasted a night. It was only a formality, really, to even pretend that you would sleep in his sitting room — by the next night he had skulked down the stairs and approached you in the dark, allowing you just enough time to squeak his name in shock, before he pulled you by the ankle and buried his mouth in your pussy through the loose leg of your little sleep shorts.

For a while, it was something of a tradition. You’d park in his driveway, put on your pyjamas out of courtesy, dither about whether it was improper, before he inevitably had his cock in you and you were knocked out in his bed. Forced to comb it all out and appear unfrazzled when you arrived at the lab the following morning.

In recent months, though, your visits became fewer and further between — MacTavish’s department had proved somehow too effective, and homicides had become atypically scarce. You could acknowledge the senselessness of bemoaning that the detective was too good at his job, but in some petulant way you held it against him. It meant your paths only crossed once a month, if that, when you were called in.

You had been withholding yourself from him, for the last few visits. Motivation eluded even yourself. Perhaps out of spite, or shame, or an inexplicably renewed concern about the appropriateness of the trysts while you were ostensibly in the city to investigate a murder. Maybe you just couldn’t get past the notion that you had been busy fucking another man, saddled with the certainty that he would not be pleased if you were to tell him, even if you couldn’t sympathise with the jealousy.

“Not tonight,” you answered, and he looked like you had just kicked a puppy.

“Why not?” He all but moaned, reaching his burly hand toward you and brushing your jaw with his thumb. You suddenly felt like people were watching. “We don’t have t’do anythin’, bonnie. We can just sleep.”

You almost snickered at that, because you knew how vastly unlikely that would be. Instead you gave him a pleasant smile and a noncommittal shrug, hoping he’d leave it at that.

He didn’t. “Are ye mad at me?”

His hand was on your shoulder, then, at the crook of your neck. Johnny was like you, in that way — had to have his hands on you, craved the tangible like a carnivore craves meat, ever-chasing the succor of touch.

“No, Johnny, I’m not mad at you,” you said mildly, through a placid smile.

“Y’sure?” He asked. “Y’been prickly, lately. Have I done somethin’ tae upset ye?”

“I’m always prickly,” you muttered, now defensive, broke your eyes away from his interrogative glare to look at the asphalt of the footpath beneath you.

“Aye, ‘n ye ken I like yer prickles,” he said with a smirk.

“I’m sorry,” you huffed. “I’m just gonna get a room at the Travelodge.”

“You’re avoidin’ me,” he said edgily, hooking his hands onto his hips.

Possessive brute he was. Yet another reason you’d avoid revealing your escapades to him, even though he had absolutely no right to claim you as his own nor to bemoan your sexual habits.

“I’m not,” you said. “It’s not my fault we’re hardly ever in the same city.”

“Got another fella, do ye?”

Your brows pulled tight. “No. I don’t.”

It wasn’t in your nature to lie, and you weren’t good at it. It didn’t help that the detective’s entire being was built to hunt for the truth, he could scent a lie like a bloodhound could a fugitive. His brows were low and hard and cast a shadow over his eyes, dimples deep in his carved cheeks as he chewed on your fib.

“He do it for you?” He asked derisively, jealousy thick as tar lacquered every word.

“Stop it, Johnny,” you sternly implored, shrinking into yourself like a snail. “I’m just here to do my job.”

“Mh,” he mumbled, contempt in his throat. “Prefer the company of dead bodies, do ye?”

You pouted unwittingly. “Don’t be mean.”

He let out a huff of potent disappointment, wiped down his cheeks with a wide, stiff hand.

“Sorry. I’m sorry,” he said gingerly, hand returning to you with a brush of your cheek, a sweep of your hair behind your ear. You never begrudged his touchiness, it made your skin tingly. “I just miss ye, s’all.”

You bristled when he said that, irrationally. He missed your cunt, that was what he meant. He missed you warming his bed. More likely, he didn’t miss you at all. He’d call you in more frequently if he did, wouldn’t he?

“I know,” you said, hands in your pockets. “I’ll see you tomorrow, though.”

“Alright, hen,” he said with a nod, hand retreating. “See y’in the morn.”

The snippy receptionist at the Travelodge managed to check you into a room on the first floor of the three-storey building, built in the eighties with those hideous chocolate-square bricks. The room itself was without frills, a double bed with teal and brown sheets, a little bench with a kettle on it and one wrinkly teabag remaining in the rack. The bathroom fixtures were all yellow-faded with specs of green mould stuck under the caulking at the edges. A nice view of the parking lot out your window, when you peeled back the sheer polyester curtains to have a look.

It was a precarious decision to have a bath as sleepy as you were, but you were all sticky after a half-fuck and the excitement of a fresh homicide. You lay in the water for half an hour, made use of the little bottles of budget soap that sat in the shower caddy.

Once you were done you dried yourself off with the provided towel and left it scrunched up over the rail, and you climbed into the crisply-made bed stark naked — you forsook pyjamas when you could, because they twisted up tight when you tossed and turned and you found it maddeningly overstimulating. Checked your phone before you went to sleep, and you had a text from Tommy; another number you hadn’t saved, but you hadn’t memorised that one yet. Only realised it was him when you opened the messages and saw the older one before it.

23/08 02:21: Need some cunt.

08/09 05:03: You gone?

You didn’t reply.

The sun had risen just before eight, and you woke up with it. A short and spasmodic sleep, more of a nap than a true slumber. You came awake on a gulp of air with sweat on your nape and your arm dead asleep. It was limp and heavy when you pulled yourself out of bed and got yourself ready for a day at the lab.

You poured yourself a black coffee from the instant machine once you got there — a subterranean wing of Whitfell General Hospital, inconveniently situated a ten-minute drive from the police headquarters. Everything in there was rubbery, wrapped in linoleum and vinyl, crisp white or speckled teal. Far less flash than the crime labs you were used to in Leeds. Block fluorescents lined every corridor and the hum always made you twitchy, despite your years of experience underneath them. You always had earplugs in while you were working to escape it.

The reek of rubbing alcohol and hospital-grade hand soap permeated every surface of the wing, and it made your nostrils flare. The smell of challenge. One that always had your heart fluttering with an admittedly twisted exhilaration — especially today, knowing how many secrets were wrapped up in that body, you were itching to read whatever stories it had to tell.

You greeted Jenny, the lab assistant, as you elbowed through the swing door into the mortuary, and she waited for you by the unmanned reception. Wiry wee girl that she was, riddled with neuroses that even you found unreasonable.

“Sleep in this morning, doctor?” She asked with a thin smile, and you wondered how long she had been waiting there for you. Her lime-green coffee mug was just about empty.

“Yep,” you grunted, sweeping the lanyard she had left for you off the reception counter and hanging it around your neck. “You made a start?”

She shook her head as she gestured for you to follow her. “No, ‘course not. Not allowed to start without you.”

“Mh.” You took a pacifying sip of coffee from your foam cup.

“I have prepared everything, though,” she said curtly, marching ahead of you, scrubs billowing with her haste. “The tools are all laid out and I have the chiller on extra cold. I also requested some scissors specifically for the clingfilm.”

“Fabulous,” you said wryly.

The first door into the lab was something of an airlock, a vestibule with a window into the autopsy room, providing room to cover yourself in PPE from head to toe and take a deep breath before you made your way in. You wore casual clothes under the crunchy blue tyvek suit — same pair of jeans as yesterday, and a woolly sweater to keep yourself warm under the blisteringly cold aircon in the sealed laboratory. Layers on layers — two pairs of cloves on each hand, shoe covers, sleeved plastic apron atop the coveralls, N95 respirator, face shield, a cap to cover your hair. You were fastidious about it; every inch covered, protected, sealed up.

You swallowed a breath as you entered the lab, anticipating the familiar stench of death and formaldehyde — hit instead with only bleach and the faint smell of raw meat.

The plastic mummy lay flat on the steel dissection table in the centre of the room, gleaming under the blinding overhead lamps above it.

Surreal to look at.

You had seen and cut up many corpses in your profession and studies prior — never one presented like this, awaiting being opened like a gift at Christmas. It looked like a practice doll until you approached it, and the human parts became plainly visible through the shiny film.

You had Jenny assist you in carefully slicing through the plastic wrap, peeling it back as gingerly as possible, exceedingly careful not to nick the skin. The plastic stuck firm to the epidermis, moist underneath, and it made a foul gooey noise as you peeled it away. Even once the seal was broken, the odour of decomposition was not nearly as fetid as you were used to; almost as if it were a fresh death, but your gut told you that it was far from.

Unwrapping the head was a morbid ordeal. The face was milk pale, the bulb of its nose coal-black with frostbite, the skin both stodgy wet and shrivelled in texture. From her features you’d have guessed the woman was in her forties.

What your eyes pinned to, though, was the perfectly round hole in the centre of the forehead. You could look through it and see straight down to the shiny steel underneath. Precise but not clean, skin and flesh feathered out from the orifice.

Gunshot. FIred cleanly from the back of the head, you guessed, but you’d need to roll the body over to confirm.

Once the plastic was finally removed entirely — which took almost two hours — the rest of the autopsy was fairly routine. With all of her quirks, one thing Jenny was exceptionally good at was taking note of everything you uttered aloud. You could say a single word and she could translate it into a meaningful report. You dictated everything as you found it.

Interrupted lividity on left side. Cadaver was left on left side for <1 hours prior to freezing. More recent posterior lividity, consistent with storage positioning post-thawing.

Severe cell damage from crystallisation, major damage (pocking, marbling on epidermis) consistent with being frozen >2 weeks. Digestive tract empty, suggestive of a lack of food intake for 24-48 hours prior to death.

Major contusions on: ribs (left - blunt force damage to ribs 4, 5, 6, consistent with tip of shoe - possible kick to ribs), medial back (blunt force - crushing injury? Possible stomping, consistent with shoe sole size 12.5-13).

Ligature marks on neck and throat, and both wrists (wide restraint - possibly tape/duct tape). Petechiae present around eyes, cheeks, mouth. Consistent with asphyxiation, non-lethal.

No evidence of sexual activity or genital trauma ante-mortem. No evidence of defensive wounds.

Gunshot wound centre cranium, external bevelling anterior. Significant internal bevelling posterior, consistent with weapon fired against back of head, suggestive of execution — “Yes, Jenny, write that down.” — bullet wound ~1cm in diameter, consistent 9mm semi-automatic pistol. GSR present in neural tissue, no bullet present. Clean entry/exit.

Toxicology results pending. DNA analysis pending.

Estimated PMI: <1 hours prior to freezing, 3 or more weeks since death.

Cause of death: Gunshot wound to the head.

Manner of death: Homicide.

Jenny obsequiously aided you in suturing up the large Y-shaped incision you had made to open up the chest cavity, punctilious as she was. It was always a little disappointing to return a body to the fridge unidentified and with no next-of-kin. Nobody to relay the details to, no curiosity to assuage.

You liked to do a final comb-over once the assistant had left the room to make copies of the preliminary autopsy report — Jane Doe, case number: 0187 — if only to quell the writhing inquisitiveness that permanently riddled you.

You checked the hands, checked every crease and line, noted the colour of nail polish: berry-red, chipped at the free edge. The soles of the feet: clean, hardly calloused, no running through mud. No tattoos, only the earlobes pierced, no earrings. Teeth square-straight — braces as a teenager, no doubt — freshly cleaned aside from the discolouration of decay, likely a recent appointment at the dental hygienist before death.

Only as you peered into the open mouth, squinting in focus, did you spot something abnormal — a scratch mark, on the inside of a molar, previously hidden by a fat grey tongue. The powdery ivory enamel was stark white where it had been carved into, clearly inscribed post-mortem. Maybe even moments before the body was dumped at the bus stop.

You frantically scoured the lab for a mirror, anything reflective; came up short with a small steel tray, but it was smooth enough to see a blurry reflection. Furiously tore out your notebook, and immediately scribbled down what you saw when you tucked the tray behind the teeth and tilted it to the right angle.

Mandibular teeth: #20 - R, #17 - O, #19 - U Maxillary teeth: #13 - S

The killer had left a message.

Who for?

It took D.I. MacTavish less than seven minutes to get to the lab. You imagined he screamed through the traffic on his siren-bedecked motorbike many miles per hour over the limit. He came thundering down the corridor and you heard his approach before you saw it – you were disrobing in the antechamber, dumping all of your disposable PPE into the biohazard bins, washing your ungloved hands with antiseptic soap in the large steel sink.

He bulldozed in through the push-door, panting like a dog, clad in a sweaty grey button-up with his black holsters around his shoulders, secured with a strap across his chest. Carried unease in his eyes and his blazer in a fist.

“Show me,” was all he said, ragged and impolite.

It was poor practice to re-enter the autopsy room without your PPE on — you made the detective put on some latex gloves and a respirator, at least, as you allowed him inside to look more closely at the body. He stuck an imprudent thumb behind the teeth on the lower jaw, hooking it open to widen the mouth as he peered within.

“What the fuck,” he muttered, under breath, evidently disturbed by what he saw — you wanted to say told you so, but held your tongue. “R, U… what is that, O?”

“There are four,” you explained impersonally, “R, O, and U on the bottom, and S on the top.”

“What,” he said, stopping to think. “Sour?”

“Yeah, could be.”

“Y’don’t think so.”

“No,” you gritted, “can you get your finger out of there now?”

He nodded, pulling his hand from the mouth and standing straight, gesturing for the two of you to leave the room. Lucky that Jenny wasn’t there to reprimand the both of you. You waited with your arms crossed, leaning against the double-glazed window into the lab, watching as Johnny plucked off his gloves and dumped them in the rubbish along with his mask. He raked up his sleeves with a grunt and began washing his hands in the sink.

“We got more comin’, don’t we,” he said grimly, back to you.

“More letters?”

“Bodies, hen,” he clarified.

You swallowed a shaky breath, the air suddenly harsher on your throat. “Yes,” you uttered cautiously. “I think so.”

A mutter, “Christ.”

“Yep,” you said. “I’ll grab you a copy of the report.”

“Gimme the spark notes, please,” he grunted, already exasperated — he turned to face you, leaning on the sink, and he wore that worn-out look he always did at the end of a long day (eyes heavy, jaw tight), despite the fact it was only half-three in the afternoon. “I’ll read the lot with the team later.”

You let out a tight breath as you considered which details to give him.

“Well, the victim was a middle-aged woman,” you started, “I’d say late forties. Wealthy, too.”

He nodded. “Cause and manner?”

“Definitely a homicide, but that wasn’t really in question,” you started. “She was shot in the back of the head, I reckon with a nine-millimetre. It — it seems like it was an execution. Like the killer had the victim face down and pressed the barrel against the skull before firing.”

“Clean freak?”

“Maybe,” you shrugged. “Certainly would lend an explanation to the clingfilm and the freezing.”

“Mh,” he thought aloud. “So he has ‘em in cold storage. Why’s he only dumpin’ them now?”

“He?” You asked, a quirk in your brow, and he suddenly looked agitated.

“Not a rogue assumption,” he argued. “S’always a man, with this shite.”

A smirk tugged at your lips. “S’pose so,” you admitted. “I’m guessing they — he — has something to say, right? Leaving messages in the teeth — that’s zodiac shit.”

“Sour,” he repeated, lost in thought. “What else.”

“The victim was asphyxiated, but the ligatures around the throat are pretty minor compared to the airway damage. My guess is suffocation with plastic, given our guy’s affinity for it. Victim was alive when she was shot, though — maybe he suffocated her to subdue her.”

He was in front of you, now, hands hooked on his hips, tip of his thumb anxiously rubbing his brow.

“Fuckin’ animal,” he huffed.

“We’ve swabbed all over for DNA,” you said, some clinical effort to comfort him. “He’ll have left something behind.”

“He better ‘ave,” he said, looking briefly at his shoes, and his unease radiated from him, made your mouth taste like metal.

“You alright?” You asked, less gently than you had intended.

“I’m fine,” he said, vaguely defensive.

He eyed you for a moment, sharp silver rings with their pin-prick pupils inspecting your face as though analysing the minutia of your features. You shuffled uncomfortably, looking at your fingernails to evade them.

“What’re ye doin’ for dinner?” He asked, more warmly, and the whiplash made you cock your head back in disbelief.

“What?”

“Y’heard me,” he said.

“I’m—” you stammered, bewildered. “I haven’t thought about it yet.”

“Grab a bite with me,” he said with the sternness of an order. “We can sit down somewhere. Have a real chat.”

“Johnny, that—” you groaned, “that doesn’t seem like a good idea.”

“For fuck’s sake, bonnie,” he barked, and you flinched at his sudden intensity. Not quite aggression but certainly encroaching on it.

“What?” You growled, recoiling, back pressed against the window behind you.

“I’m sick of it. Y’been fucken’ cold to me, and I haven’t done nothin’ to deserve it.”

“I’m not — I’ve not been cold.”

“No?” He snapped, “y’wont even look me in the eye for more than a damn second! Last time y’didn’t even say good-bye when ye left.”

Riled annoyance flushed high on your cheeks, thrummed in your temples as you curled your tongue in search of a retaliation.

“We’re not — there’s nothing here, Johnny. I don’t owe you anything. You can’t — you can’t expect me to worship you.”

“Worship me?” He asked incredulously, “I don’t need ye tae worship me, hen, Christ — yer just so fucken’ icy I can’t focus on anythin’ at all when yer here. Like i’m walkin’ on eggshells everywhere I go.”

“If I’m that distracting then you should find another pathologist,” you spat. You didn’t have a bone of de-escalation in your body; made entirely of kindle that took far more energy to snuff out than to ignite.

He wiped down his face with white-knuckled hands, eyes rolling into the back of his head in pure frustration. Sometimes you simply enjoyed riling him up, but this time you only sought to get him to leave you alone.

“Yer bein’ cruel,” he grumbled, and you could hear the swelling anger roiling in his throat.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” you hissed. “If you need to let off some steam so badly go stick your dick in someone else.”

His eyes turned dark, you watched his pupils distend right before you.

“Don’t want someone else,” he murmured coarsely.

You gritted your teeth. “That’s too b—”

Cut off by a gasp as his body suddenly rammed against you, he used his weight to smother your disputes as a needy hand grasped at the button of your jeans, tugging and wriggling it vigorously to break it loose.

“Johnny—” You belted, throat plugging up in the shock.

You swung back a hand and threw it viciously into his cheek with a bullet-loud slap — but aside from the white-hot handprint you left on his face, he was utterly unperturbed. He deftly seized your assailing hand by the wrist and grappled it tightly, wrangled the other one while you were distracted and pinned it to your chest with a fist.

You balked as he yanked your right hand towards him, planting his mouth in your palm; his breath was blistering hot, made your hand all clammy as he pressed his slovenly lips into the hollow.

“Miss ye,” he grumbled into your skin, wetting your palm with his tongue, no doubt it tasted like latex and soap. Didn’t seem to faze him, as he slid the tip of his tongue between the valley of two fingers, before taking your pinky finger in his mouth. Wet, and warm, enveloped it hole — the rough texture of his taste buds on the pad of your finger made your hairs stand on end, needle-sharp tingles down trickled your spine.

“God’s sake, Johnny,” you breathed, dyspneic; tried to wriggle free the hand he had riveted to your sternum, but he only secured his grip of you. “This is — n-not here.”

“Don’ care,” he muttered, after releasing your finger from his maw; dragged his mouth hastily down your wrist, then your forearm, catching in the knit of your sweater. Found purchase once it reached skin again, took your febrile neck between his teeth and suckled there, basely relishing in the saltiness of your sweat.

“John — please,” you chirped, when he bit your thickest tendon, and you felt your scruples begin to melt like butter. “I’ll go to d-dinner with you, just — this is so—”

His messy lips were on your jaw, then, but he never made his way to kiss you; as if kissing you on the mouth was too intimate, too severe a violation to commit, more so than anywhere else on your body he could have planted his mouth.

“After,” he mumbled into your cheek, and his hands sunk to the button of your jeans, undoing it with a pop. Kept you wedged against the window into the autopsy room with his hips against you, gargantuan mass nearly squeezing the air from your lungs in an effort to keep you still.

“Made me wait too long, bonnie,” he slurred, mouth on your collarbone, most of your exposed skin now wet with the marks of his saliva — hardly kisses, tastes instead. “Look what y’done to me.”

“I wasn’t…” you faltered, breathless, as he dropped to his knees hard enough that you winced at the thought of his kneecaps hitting the solid floor.

The sound of your fly being torn down was harsh, ear-piercing; you squeaked in panic when he took the undone waistband of your jeans in his fists and yanked gracelessly them down your hips, dexterously taking your underwear with them.

Hadn’t even shimmied them to your thighs before he keeled forward and took your cunt in his mouth, lapping at the seam of you like a dog on water, planting mushy kisses at the top of your slit as though greeting a lost lover.

Your protests turned to liquor on your tongue, inebriating — your head spun with it, ceding every modicum of agency to his charge, the responsibility now his to orchestrate you, the onus on him to steer you. He knew you well, the detective, could read you like the pages of a book. Knew how rarely you’d give, only hoping he’d take.

And take he did, fucking glutton that he was — ate you like an animal, hardly even trying to prevent his sharp teeth from grazing your labia as he sucked your clitoris into his mouth, laving it with the voraciousness of a hound starved — suckling down your slick and letting it run down his chin, smear over his mouth and cheeks, eager to drown himself in you — you could only sputter and mewl in surrender, skull donging against the hollow glass of the window behind you as your head rocked back from your shoulders.

“Johnny—” You hiccupped, aimless, hurling his name into the overcrowded air of the stuffy vestibule as though hoping it would stick to something. Your hands clawed at the veneered sill of the interior window, scraping off the polyurethane, you could feel the shards under your fingernails.

Your clit burned under his tongue, pebbled and swollen and throbbing like a heartbeat — slithering rapture coiled up tight in the base of you, made your vision blurry and your mouth wet — on a cry you came, it ricocheted out from your perfervid clit in shockwaves that turned your vision white, and you did your best to stifle your cloying noises with a fleshy palm between your teeth.

Legs went weak with it, nearly buckling if not for the hands that held you up by the hips, and he finished his meal with a gentle swipe of your anguished clit, flat tongue.

Not like Tommy, he didn’t mock you for your orgasm, didn’t chortle and torment you with pokes or pinches just to make you squeal. Johnny was grateful for it, reverent, took his time to breathe in the heat of your rapture directly from its source, exhaling cool air on your glowing pussy as if to comfort it.

“Ah, fucken’ needed that,” he vented, panting, forehead on your belly. “Ma perfect kitty, mh, couldn’t wait any longer, bonnie.”

You thought he might bring himself to stand, pull up your trousers for you, perhaps apologise for the incursion in a place as depravedly inappropriate as this — but, he didn’t. He instead tore your jeans down your thighs with unhampered haste, past your knees, hoisting up your ankle to yank the pant leg from your foot.

That was all he needed, evidently, once your legs were no longer tethered by your trousers; he stood up and had you by the thighs in an effortless ascent, adroitly hooking your legs around his waist and wedging you against the window. His fist tore at his belt, and it clinkled as he unbuckled it — followed the flick of a button, the zip of a fly.

“You’re a degenerate, Johnny,” you puffed, with a whine, and he all but chuckled at you.

“M’just a man,” he grunted, cock unsheathed in a blink, you felt it smear against your sodden pussy and saturate his shaft with your needy syrup. “Y’won’t let me take y’out, won’t let me call ye, won’t let me—”

Bitten off by a groan as he nestled the blunt head between your folds, broke through your entrance without pause — sunk deep as he fell against you, and you bleated as he split you open — he was thicker than Tommy, the girth a painful shock every time you let him in, and you didn’t believe your cunt could ever be inured to the stretch, it could only rip itself to fit him.

“—Fuck ye,” he groused, low voice breaking as he sealed his lips to your neck. “Christ, bonnie—”

You only whimpered, turned stupid, as you hung your arms over his shoulders and clawed at his back, nails catching in the stiff straps of the holster that cladded his scapulae. Herculean shoulders worked facilely to hold you up, thick and straining against the thin cotton of his shirt. His thrusts were steady, hard, bounced you up and down against the glass — your sweater rode up with every rut, until your bare back smeared against the cold window, you felt it grow damp with the condensation of your sweat.

“Feel tha’, hen?” He growled, the resonance of his ragged voice wracking through you like a quake. “Fucken’ made for me, eh? Perfect fit—”

So greedy, insatiable, he fucked you with a simmering rage, one that had been bubbling under the surface and whose temperature had only risen with every visit you turned him down — one, two, three months since you last let him inside, figuratively and literally — and he let you know of his spite, fucked you with the ferocity of a man boiled over, you worried that he’d push you through the window and the shards would cut you to pieces.

You bit down on little cries with each rut, the upward curve in his cock had his rigid head battering your bladder from inside you to the point of ache, and it turned you pudding soft — all defiance siphoned from you, pooling around the base of his cock until it went foamy in his bed of trimmed dark hair.

He groaned, feverish and needy, and you knew what that sound portended.

“Agh — fuck, can I—”

Come inside you went swallowed, because he was too close, and he wouldn’t have had time to pull out if you were to say no.

His teeth chewed reverently at your shoulder and he moaned into your skin, bucking in, to the hilt, ruts turning erratic and volatile. His cock jolted hard within your constricting walls when he finally reached his climax — spurting scalding hot come into the depths of your cunt until you were glutted with it, filling you up to the fornices, and you could almost taste its brine on your tongue.

A slow whimper leaked out from behind your teeth, perhaps a moan of relief, now that he was hopefully surfeited — he slumped into you with a puff of air, kissed your shoulder where he had bitten you, chased a final thrust to squeeze out every drop.

“Been too long,” he purred, winded, humid with sweat. “Dinnae make me wait like that again, eh?”

“M’sorry,” you slurred, fucked drunk, brain knocked against your skull one too many times in the last twenty-four hours for it to make much sense of what had happened.

You felt stuffy, filled up to the ears with come and confusion, and you wanted nothing more than to climb out of the corpse-ridden basement he had just fucked you in and take a breath of real air.

He slipped his cock out of you once it had marginally softened, and a glub of come oozed out of your cunt and dribbled down your thigh. You groaned as you bent down to put your jeans back on — but to your surprise, he helped you. Took your foot (sneaker still on) and fed it through the leg of your underwear, then your trousers, pulled them up both your legs with a shimmy, fixed them over your hips.

Even did your button back up for you, pulled up your zip fly as if he was undoing the damage he had done.

“There, hen,” he said gently, petting your cheek as if to praise you. “All better.”

In your stupor you could only be grateful. “Thank you.”

“Will y’come get a bite with me, now?”

You were dizzy. You needed to put Jane Doe back in the fridge. You needed to give him a copy of your pathology report. You needed to send the toxicology samples to the forensics lab.

Maybe you could leave it all for Jenny.

“Okay,” you said.

#dd:dne #simon riley x reader #johnny mactavish x reader #soap x reader #ghoap x reader #dark fic #cod fanfic #cod smut #ghost x reader #bella-writes

900 notes · View notes