#paper wires and clockwork

[jumjum-crafts]

Ep. 7, polyamory

(Full comic ↓)

[heckoffmate]

[saturday-byte]

Crappy murder puppets from memory .. Haven't forgotten my little guys still

[r2v3n-iz-crazy]

they should've talk to each other tbh

so is anyone gonna talk about how sketchbook, tony and Colin have all canonically been in the same room together

[ficsloverblog]

Feel free to ignore!

Maybe some Miss Perigrine smut? You are also part of the loop and every time you go to the butchers the man at the counter always makes the same comment about you, it's never been big for you since you've become used to finding creative and humiliating ways of turning him down. But when alma finds out about it? And that you've never told her? Howahapwbdudb sweet Jesus help him (and you)

Matter of Decorum (nsfw)

Alma Peregrine x Fem!reader

It begins, as most days do, with routine.

The children are fed and released into the garden like birds let loose from a wire cage, their laughter spiraling into the air with the weightlessness of repetition. You, faithful assistant to the clockwork of this loop, lace up your shoes, tuck your list into your coat, and step into the foggy lanes of Cairnholm. At 9:34 a.m., the shop bell will ring. At 9:36, the butcher will make the same comment he always does.

You’ve long since stopped reacting.

The butcher, a leathery-faced man with a voice like wet gravel, wipes his hands on his apron as you enter. His eyes drop—always—to your chest, or hips, or neck, as if trying to decide which bit of you is up for discussion that morning.

“Well,” he says, with a curl of something like familiarity. “Back again, darling. Shame she never lets you out for long. Pretty thing like you, I'd keep in my window.”

You reach for the paper-wrapped parcel. “If I wanted something soft and unpleasant, I’d speak to the giblets.”

He barks a laugh, red-cheeked and unbothered. “Got a tongue on you, eh?”

“Sharper than your knives, but not as rusty.”

He grins. It’s vile. But you’ve learned not to flinch. Humiliation, when wielded properly, is a cleaner knife than outrage. Besides, you’ve never thought to bring it up to Alma.

You’re not lovers. Not exactly. But there’s… something. A look that lingers too long. A hand at your lower back when danger looms. The way she says your name: clipped, careful, like a secret on her tongue. You tell yourself that silence preserves it, whatever it is.

She’s waiting by the door when you return.

“You’re late,” she says, though you’re not.

You lift the parcel of meat. “He was slower than usual.”

Her eyes narrow.

“He?” she echoes.

You falter, just for a moment. “The butcher.”

Alma Peregrine is not a woman who misses small things. She is all sharp corners and folded wings, etiquette pinned to her spine like a corset.

She says nothing else that day.

The next morning, she comes with you.

“I thought we might walk together,” she says lightly, gloved hands clasped. “The air is fine today. Almost spring.”

You are too surprised to protest. She never leaves the house for errands.

The butcher looks up as the bell jingles. He doesn’t see her behind you at first.

“Well, well—if it isn’t the prettiest—”

His words die.

Alma steps out from behind you like a guillotine blade descending.

She doesn’t speak. Not at first. She walks to the counter, unhurried. Her presence is not large, but it is final.

The butcher, pale now, glances between you. “Miss Peregrine, I—”

“You’ve been speaking to my companion with vulgar familiarity,” she says.

Her voice is soft. It’s worse than yelling.

He stammers something about misunderstanding. About harmless compliments. About not meaning anything by it.

Her head tilts.

“You objectify her like meat,” she murmurs. “So let us speak plainly, butcher.”

The title is a curse in her mouth.

She steps close. “If you ever address her in that tone again, you will find yourself wishing for the mercy of teeth. Do I make myself clear?”

The butcher nods, bloodless.

“Good.” She turns, takes the parcel you didn’t know she’d ordered, and walks out.

You follow her in stunned silence.

The door closes behind you both at the manor. You’re halfway into removing your coat when she speaks again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

You blink. “It wasn’t important.”

Her voice rises—not in volume, but sharpness.

“Not important that you were being harassed? That a man was putting his hands on your peace of mind, day after day?

“He never touched me.”

Her jaw clenches. “That’s not the point.”

You step back, unsettled. Not by her anger—no, you’re used to her fury when children are threatened. But this is different. This is personal.

“I didn’t want to make a fuss,” you say. “I didn’t want you to think I couldn’t handle it.”

Her gaze pins you in place. “Do you think I’m disappointed in you?”

“I don’t know,” you admit. “You don’t tell me what you think.”

The silence that follows is unbearable.

Then, softly: “And you never tell me when you need protecting.”

You bite the inside of your cheeks. “I didn’t think I was allowed to need anything from you.”

That does it.

Something breaks in her—quietly, gracefully, like a wineglass cracking under pressure. She moves toward you with restrained fury, every step measured like a countdown.

“I protect everyone here,” she says. “I protect children from monsters and time from itself. But you—”

Her fingers close around your wrist.

“You think you’re the exception.”

You say nothing. You’re not sure you could.

Her voice lowers. “Do you know how many mornings I’ve watched you leave for that shop, wondering if he’d dare to speak to you again? Wondering if you’d come back with your mouth tight and your hands clenched?”

Your breath catches.

“You knew?” you whisper.

“I suspected. And I waited for you to tell me. But you didn’t.”

Her hand trails from your wrist up your arm, slow and steady.

“Why didn’t you?” she asks again, quieter now.

You whisper, “Because I didn’t want you to stop seeing me as capable.”

There it is—laid bare. And Alma, to her credit, does not flinch.

She lifts your chin.

“I have never mistaken vulnerability for weakness. But I have mistaken your silence for disinterest.”

You blink. “Disinterest?”

“In me.”

The air changes.

She steps closer—so close you feel the warmth of her breath on your lips. Her gloved fingers slide beneath your collar.

“If I had known what he was saying to you…” Her voice trails off. “I would’ve broken the loop for the pleasure of ruining him.”

You tremble.

“Alma—”

“Don’t speak.”

Her lips claim yours.

There’s nothing polite about it. It is not a kiss of etiquette or curiosity—it is the culmination of months, years, of tension so tightly coiled it had nowhere else to go.

She pushes you back against the wall with a soft thud, her body flush against yours. You moan into her mouth and she swallows it greedily.

When she breaks away, her hands are already at the buttons of your blouse.

“You’ve been so careful,” she murmurs. “So dignified. I’ve watched you bite your tongue every time one of them stared too long.”

The blouse falls open.

“But I’m not one of them.”

Your bra follows. Her gloves are gone now, hands rougher than you imagined, precise in the way she touches you. No hesitation, no uncertainty.

You gasp as her mouth closes around your breast, her tongue circling before her teeth graze.

“Mine,” she whispers against your skin. “Do you understand?”

You nod, dizzy.

She drags you to the study, faster than you expect for someone so composed. You stumble backward until the backs of your knees hit the settee.

“Sit.”

You do.

She kneels.

“Alma—”

Her hand presses to your abdomen. “Did I not say silence?”

You fall quiet, breath shaking.

She unfastens your trousers, pulls them down, and leans in. The first touch of her tongue is electric. You cry out, hips jolting, but she holds you in place.

“I want,” she says between strokes, “to replace every filthy word he said to you… with the way I make you fall apart.”

You don’t last long. How could you?

She licks you slowly, thoroughly, like she has all the time in the world to erase what he said and rewrite it with every flick of her tongue. When you come, it’s with your hand tangled in her hair and her name ripped from your throat like a confession.

After, she stands. Adjusts her collar. Looks every bit the schoolmistress again.

You’re shaking. She notices. Wraps you in your coat and presses a kiss to your temple.

“I’m sorry I let it go on so long.”

You reach for her hand.

“I’m not,” you whisper. “It brought you here.”

Her mouth twitches into a smile.

“Tomorrow,” she says, voice cool again, “you’ll stay home. I’ll handle the butcher.”

You smirk. “That poor bastard.”

She leans in, lips brushing your ear.

“He should consider himself lucky I didn’t feed him to the hollow.”

[spicytattoo]

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Secret

SpiderWoman! Natalie Scatorccio x You

Request: @deenayw

Synopsis: In a rain-slick corner of New York City, Natalie Scatorccio is many things: campus legend, soccer star, serial class-skipper... and secretly, the masked vigilante known only as Spider-Hero. By day, she teases the shy, brilliant photography student who writes for the school paper — a girl she pretends to hate but can’t stop noticing. By night, she swings through the city in shadows, keeping people safe while staying just out of reach. But everything starts to unravel when her secret admirer — the very girl she claims to loathe — begins working on an exposé about the mysterious Spider-Hero of NYC.

Content Warnings: Slight substance use, violence and threatening scenes.

New York never really sleeps, but campus nights are a different kind of alive. Between the clatter of subway trains and the sticky hum of neon storefronts, your world existed in stolen moments. The snap of your camera shutter. The rustle of pages in the library at 2 a.m. The soft paws of your orange cat, Pumpkin, skittering across your dorm floor.

You adjusted the zoom on your camera and focused through the viewfinder. Late evening light spilled like syrup through the tall windows of the art building, casting long gold lines across the quad. Students passed beneath the glow, silhouetted by the day's last light - armfuls of textbooks, tangled headphone wires, paper coffee cups.

And then, like she always did, Natalie Scatorccio walked right into frame.

You clicked instinctively.

Caught her mid-stride — black denim, scuffed boots, a hoodie unzipped just enough to show the hem of her sports bra and the edge of a fresh bruise on her ribs.

God. Why did she always look like she just stepped out of a fight?

You pulled the camera away from your face, pretending to fidget with the strap. Natalie’s gaze skimmed the quad, and then — like clockwork — landed on you.

She smirked.

You looked away.

"Stalking me again, Camera Girl?"

Her voice was unmistakable. Low and lazy, like it had been dipped in smoke and sarcasm. You didn’t look up as she approached, fiddling with your lens cap and praying your heart wouldn’t explode.

“I wasn’t,” you muttered.

“Oh, right. You just happened to be lurking by the bushes with a camera aimed right at me?”

You finally looked up — and instantly regretted it.

Natalie had that look in her eye. The one that said she knew exactly how flustered you got around her. That permanent smirk, like she could hear the way your brain short-circuited every time she got too close.

You cleared your throat. “I’m working on a photo essay for the paper.”

“Of course you are.” She leaned a little closer. “Let me guess… campus wildlife?”

You blinked. “Excuse me?”

She gestured lazily to herself. “I figured you were documenting a rare predator in her natural habitat.”

You hated that she was funny. Hated that she was clever. Hated that no matter how hard you tried to stay neutral, your stomach flipped every time she said something vaguely flirty — even when it was wrapped in sarcasm and smugness.

“I could Photoshop you out,” you offered dryly. “Replace you with an actual raccoon.”

“Ouch.” Natalie clutched her chest in mock pain. “Wounded.”

Then, before you could reply, she leaned in and plucked a stray leaf from your hair.

Her fingers brushed your temple. Soft. Barely there. You froze.

“There,” she said. “Wouldn’t want the trees flirting with you before I get a chance.”

And then she was gone. Just turned and walked off, leaving you blinking under the dying light like a character in a dream sequence.

Your camera strap slid off your shoulder.

“Jesus Christ,” you whispered to no one.

Later that night, you curled up in your tiny dorm bed with your laptop open and Pumpkin purring against your hip. You were supposed to be editing photos, but instead you stared at a half-finished draft of your newest article.

The Spider-Hero of New York City: Real, Myth, or Something In Between?

You chewed your lip. The cursor blinked back at you.

So far, you had six grainy photos of someone in a suit scaling buildings, three unconfirmed witness accounts, and one anonymous tip that said she’d rescued a little kid from a burning deli in Chinatown last week. Nobody knew who she was. Nobody had gotten a clear shot of her face.

But you had something no one else did — instinct. A gut feeling every time she showed up. A strange, humming recognition you couldn’t explain.

You’d never admit it out loud, but… she made your heart race the way Natalie did.

Only difference? Spider-Hero was clearly a guy.

Or so you assumed.

Still, there was something in the way she moved. The grace. The precision. The way she seemed to know exactly what people needed, even when they didn’t say it. You couldn’t explain it. Just like you couldn’t explain why you kept dreaming about her.

You sighed and reached for your phone. Opened Instagram. Natalie had posted a blurry photo of the moon through her dorm window. Caption: fuck this noise.

You liked it before you could stop yourself.

The next morning, Pumpkin was missing.

You tore apart your dorm, checked every closet, under every blanket. Nothing. You ran up and down the hall calling his name. Asked your neighbor. Checked the courtyard.

Gone.

The panic sat like ice water in your gut.

By sundown, you’d combed half the campus and three surrounding blocks. You ended up in a tiny bodega on 112th buying a flashlight and a sad bag of Doritos. You were halfway back when you heard it — a soft meow. Faint, but unmistakable.

You followed it to the fire escape behind the library.

“Pumpkin?” you called, climbing cautiously. “If you’re up here I swear to God—”

You froze.

On the roof, silhouetted against the skyline, was her.

Spider-Hero.

And curled in her lap — content as ever — was your damn cat.

Your mouth opened, but no sound came out. The wind ruffled her suit. She looked up. The mask covered her entire face, white eyes staring back at you.

“Yours?” she asked, petting him like they’d been best friends forever.

You nodded slowly. “Yeah. His name’s Pumpkin.”

“I like him,” she said. “He just showed up. Climbed the building like it was nothing.”

You swallowed. “He does that.”

A beat of silence. City lights blinking below. Your heart hammering in your ears.

“Thank you,” you whispered.

She nodded. “You’re welcome.”

You didn’t know what made you say it — maybe the low hum of the wind, the neon glow reflecting in her mask, the strange safety you felt just being near her — but the words spilled out before you could catch them.

“I’m writing about you,” you said. “For the campus paper.”

She tilted her head.

“I’ve been following your story for months,” you continued. “The things you’ve done — saving people. Running into burning buildings. I… I think you’re amazing.”

Spider-Hero didn’t speak for a moment. Pumpkin purred in her lap.

Then, softly: “Be careful. Some stories are safer left untold.”

You looked at her. “Why do you sound familiar?”

Another pause. Her gloved hand stilled on Pumpkin’s fur.

“I get that a lot,” she said.

The next morning, New York felt quieter than usual.

Maybe it was the mist threading between buildings like cigarette smoke, or the soft grey hush that had settled over campus. Maybe it was the memory of a girl in a mask, sitting cross-legged on a rooftop with your cat like some impossible dream.

You hadn’t slept much.

Every time you closed your eyes, you saw her — Spider-Hero — with Pumpkin nestled in her lap, neon lights dancing on her suit. And her voice. That voice. Smooth, low, careful. Familiar in a way that tugged at something deep in your chest.

You told yourself it wasn’t possible.

You also couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Pumpkin, traitor that he was, had made himself at home again as if nothing had happened — purring loudly on your desk while you stared at your computer screen and tried to focus on your 9 a.m. editing class.

But all you could see was white lenses. Wind in her suit. That quiet way she said, “Some stories are safer left untold.”

You didn’t even notice you were walking across campus until you felt the sting of a soccer ball skimming way too close to your ankles.

You jolted back into reality.

“Yo, Camera Girl!”

You knew that voice.

You turned and found Natalie jogging toward you from the field, her hair in a messy knot, the tail end of her hoodie clinging to sweat-slick skin. She was flushed, panting, and still wearing the same scuffed black cleats you’d seen her stomp across campus in yesterday.

Your heart jumped the way it always did when she looked at you like that — like you were an itch she couldn’t scratch.

“I wasn’t in your shot this time,” she said, flicking her water bottle open. “You stalking me anyway?”

“I’m literally walking to class,” you muttered, shifting your bag higher on your shoulder.

She grinned. “Classic denial. That’s how it always starts.”

You rolled your eyes. “Is this a bit you rehearse, or does it just come naturally?”

“Both,” she said. “But mostly, I just like seeing you get flustered.”

You wanted to say something sharp back, but your tongue caught on the back of your teeth. Her gaze lingered a beat too long on your mouth. Your fingers curled tighter around your camera strap.

“I didn’t see you in lecture this week,” you said finally, in a weak attempt to change the subject.

Natalie shrugged. “Had some… late nights.”

You stared at her. Your pulse stuttered.

Late nights.

You wanted to ask — doing what? Scaling walls? Saving cats? — but instead you said: “Of course. Too cool for Intro to Media Ethics.”

She smirked. “That class is bullshit. You could teach it better than the professor.”

You didn’t know what to do with that. A compliment, maybe. Or maybe another one of her games.

She drank from her water bottle and then, after a second, nodded at your bag. “Still working on your Spider-Girl piece?”

You blinked. “How do you know that?”

Natalie smiled, eyes flicking upward in a lazy shrug. “I read your stuff. I’m not an idiot.”

Your heart did a strange thing — a quiet flutter, like wings against a windowpane.

She didn’t wait for you to reply. Just slung her hoodie over one shoulder, gave you one last unreadable look, and jogged off toward the locker rooms.

You stood there, watching her disappear behind the glass doors, the chill of morning fog settling into your hoodie.

You didn’t even realise you were heading for the rooftop until you were halfway up the fire escape.

The city stretched out below in warm-toned silence — a mosaic of brick and steam and sky. You had your camera slung around your neck and your fingers aching for something to hold onto. Something real. Something that made sense.

You sat on the ledge where she’d been. Where Pumpkin had curled up, purring like he belonged to both of you.

You couldn’t stop thinking about her voice.

Not Natalie’s. Hers.

Except they were the same, weren’t they?

The timbre. The hesitation. The edge of a joke hiding something vulnerable.

You pulled your camera to your eye and scanned the horizon. Shutter clicked. Again. Again. Pigeons on telephone wires. A blur of someone skateboarding below. A couple kissing in the alley beside the library.

And then — there. A flash of movement.

Far in the distance, a figure swung between buildings. Quick, effortless, fluid. Your heart kicked.

Spider-Hero.

You raised your camera again — hands trembling now — but she was already gone.

That night, you opened a new tab on your computer. Typed: “Spider-Hero NYC: recent sightings.”

You scrolled through blurry photos. A video with too much shakiness to make anything out. One comment thread that claimed she was “definitely a guy,” another insisting she was a “queer icon,” and someone else who swore she disappeared into Columbia’s campus last week around 2 a.m.

Your chest tightened.

You closed the laptop.

Pumpkin meowed from under your bed. You climbed down to the floor and scooped him up, holding him against your chest.

He smelled like dust and warm fur and something faintly metallic — the same scent that clung to your hands after touching that rooftop ledge.

“Why do I feel like you know more than I do?” you murmured.

Pumpkin blinked slowly.

You sighed. “Yeah. Me too.”

Friday nights on campus buzzed like static.

Dorm windows pulsed with colored light. The sidewalks glittered with discarded beer cans and the kind of perfume that clung to your clothes long after you left the party. Laughter spilled out of open doors and into the streets like neon. Somewhere, music thudded low and slow through a wall you couldn’t see.

You weren’t really a party girl.

But your roommate had insisted, and your brain wouldn’t shut up — about the rooftop, about her voice, about the way Natalie had looked at you earlier that day like she knew something you didn’t.

So you’d pulled on your least-wrinkled button-up, slipped on a pair of dark jeans, and told yourself it wasn’t a big deal. Just a little house party in the journalism frat’s grimy brownstone.

You regretted it the second you walked in.

The air inside was warm and sticky, thick with pot smoke and cheap vodka. Your camera hung heavy around your neck — a comfort and a curse. You stuck to the wall, clutching a warm drink in a Solo cup and scanning the room for a face you recognized.

And then you saw her.

Natalie.

She stood in the corner, one boot braced against the wall, a red solo cup dangling from her fingers. Someone said something to her and she laughed — that deep, throat-scraping laugh that made your spine buzz.

She looked radiant. Or reckless. Or maybe just tired.

Her eyes caught yours almost immediately.

You froze.

She pushed off the wall, crossing the room without looking away.

“You clean up nice, Camera Girl.”

You blinked, heart doing that annoying stutter thing again. “I didn’t know you came to journalism parties.”

“I don’t.” She sipped her drink, then gestured toward you. “But someone said you might show up, so…”

You swallowed. “So?”

“So I thought I’d make an appearance.”

You stared at her.

She was standing too close again — like she always did — like personal space was something optional between you. Her smile glinted in the low light. Her breath smelled like mint and whiskey. You wanted to ask her everything and nothing all at once.

“What happened to your eye?” you asked instead.

She blinked, then reached up — gently touched the corner of her brow where a fresh bruise was blooming violet and gold.

“Soccer practice,” she said flatly.

“Right.” You didn’t believe her. You don’t think she expected you to.

“I’m surprised you’re not out looking for your masked girlfriend,” she said after a beat, her voice edged in teasing again. “What’s the latest on Spider-Babe?”

Your stomach flipped.

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” you muttered.

She tilted her head. “Could’ve fooled me. You write about her like you’re in love.”

You took a breath. The music swelled. Someone knocked over a beer can behind you.

“I just think she’s… interesting,” you said. “Brave. Mysterious. Not like anyone else.”

Natalie went very still.

“She’s not perfect,” she said, too quickly. “People like to make heroes out of strangers. But you don’t know her. She could be dangerous.”

You studied her face. Something fragile sat beneath the sarcasm. Fear, maybe. Or guilt.

“She saved my cat.” you said quietly.

Natalie’s jaw tightened. “Maybe she got lucky.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Why do you even care?”

“Because,” she snapped, then stopped. Swallowed. “Because if she’s not who you think she is… you might get hurt.”

You didn’t answer.

The tension stretched between you, thick as smoke.

Then someone shoved past, spilling beer across the floor, and the moment shattered.

“I need air,” you muttered, turning toward the front door.

You didn’t expect her to follow.

Outside, the air was cool and damp. A soft mist had settled over the street, catching the orange glow of the streetlamps. You stepped onto the curb and let out a breath you hadn’t realized you were holding.

Behind you, the door creaked open again.

Natalie leaned against the porch railing, arms crossed, still watching you.

“You okay?” she asked.

You nodded.

She hesitated. “You want to go somewhere?”

You blinked. “Where?”

She looked up, then tilted her head toward the alley beside the house. “Come on.”

Against your better judgment, you followed.

The rooftop she led you to was three blocks away — above an abandoned laundromat with peeling signage and a rusted fire escape. You climbed behind her in silence, breath catching in your throat as the city opened up in front of you.

Natalie dropped onto the edge of the roof like she’d done it a thousand times.

You stood beside her, camera clutched in both hands. “How’d you find this place?”

She shrugged. “Needed somewhere quiet once, and now I come here whenever the world gets too loud.”

You nodded, scanning the skyline.

Your breath caught. ''Do you think she's out tonight?''

Natalie didn’t respond.

You turned to look at her. Her jaw was clenched. Her hands dug into the fabric of her jeans.

“I'm not sure. But what I do know is that she’s always alone,” she said softly.

“Even when she’s saving people? Doesn’t that ever scare her?”

Natalie’s eyes stayed fixed on the skyline. “Maybe she thinks it’s easier that way.”

“Easier than what?”

She looked at you then, and for a second — just a second — all the walls in her face fell away.

“Than losing someone,” she said.

Your throat went tight.

You sat down beside her, knees brushing. The city buzzed around you — the low drone of traffic, the wail of a siren somewhere far off. And the silence between you filled with everything you couldn’t say.

“I don’t think she’s dangerous,” you whispered.

Natalie’s voice was quiet. “I think you want her to be something she’s not.”

You turned to her. “And I think you know more than you’re letting on.”

She didn’t deny it.

Didn’t look away.

You could feel her pulse in the air between you. Electric. Unsteady.

You leaned in before you realized you were doing it. Close enough to feel her breath. Close enough to count the freckles on her cheek.

But she pulled back.

Just enough.

“I’m not who you think I am,” she whispered.

You wanted to ask what that meant. You wanted to ask a thousand things.

But then she stood, her back to you, fists clenched at her sides.

“We should go.”

You sat there for a moment, reeling, before finally nodding.

And as you climbed down the fire escape behind her — your chest aching, your thoughts spinning — you realized you were already falling.

Not for the masked girl on the rooftops.

But for the reckless, rule-breaking, maddening, brilliant girl who kept trying to hide.

The lead was thin — barely more than a whisper on an online forum you’d stumbled across during a sleepless night — but something about it stuck with you.

Spider-Hero spotted near the East Side warehouses. Alone. Chased something inside. Never came back out.

It was posted at 3:47 a.m.

Now it was 4:42 p.m., and you were walking fast, breath rising in soft white plumes against the cold. The warehouses loomed ahead of you like a cemetery — rusted bones of old industry, long abandoned by commerce but not by danger.

You weren’t sure what you were hoping to find.

Proof, maybe. Another photo. Something real enough to pull the mystery into the light.

The deeper into the district you walked, the darker it got. Lamp posts gave up one by one. Your boots crunched over shattered glass. A hollow clang echoed from somewhere inside one of the buildings. You tightened your grip on your camera and stepped through a gap in the fence.

You were inside before you even realized it.

Concrete walls. Exposed pipes. Air that smelled like oil and mildew. Moonlight spilled in through broken windows in long, trembling beams.

You raised your camera, snapping quick shots — metal, shadow, brick — then froze when you heard footsteps behind you.

You turned.

Three men stood by the entrance now, half-hidden in the dark. One had a crowbar. Another was smoking, the glow of his cigarette illuminating a nasty grin.

“You lost, sweetheart?” the one with the crowbar asked.

Your mouth went dry.

“Just taking pictures,” you said, voice steady even as your heart pounded.

“Pretty brave. Coming in here alone.”

They moved closer.

You stepped back.

Another chuckle. The man with the cigarette flicked it to the ground. “Cameras don’t stop what’s about to happen.”

You were about to bolt when a sound ripped through the air — a sudden thwip and the screech of metal.

Something dropped from above like a bullet.

Spider-Hero.

She hit the ground in front of you in a blur of movement and force. One punch, a sharp kick, a sweep of her leg — it happened so fast it barely felt real. The guy with the crowbar went down hard. The other two backed up fast, panicking. One scrambled toward the exit. The other didn’t get far.

Webbing zipped from her wrist and pinned him to a rusted support beam. He howled.

Then silence.

Your breath came in ragged gasps.

Spider-Hero stood in front of you now — chest heaving, fists clenched, mist curling off her shoulders in the cold night air.

You stared at her.

“I told you,” she said — voice low and tight. “Some stories are safer left untold.”

You took a step closer.

“I wasn’t looking for a story,” you whispered. “I was looking for you.”

The wind howled through the warehouse. She didn’t move.

You stepped even closer.

And this time, your hand lifted. Slowly. Gently. Fingers brushing against the edge of her mask.

She didn’t stop you.

You peeled it back.

And there she was.

Natalie.

Her blonde hair clung to her temple with sweat. A cut bloomed on her cheekbone. Her lip was split. But her eyes — her eyes were still the same: fierce and soft, terrified and defiant, all at once.

Your chest cracked wide open.

“I knew it,” you breathed.

Her jaw tightened. “I was trying to protect you.”

“I didn’t need protection,” you said. “I needed the truth.”

“I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

You reached up, thumb brushing gently across the blood at the corner of her mouth.

“This is you.”

Something shifted in her then — the last of the walls crumbling, the fear in her expression melting into something raw and open and real.

She leaned forward.

And then she kissed you.

It wasn’t slow. It wasn’t gentle. It was hungry, desperate, like weeks of tension had built up behind her ribs and you were the only way to breathe again. Her hands framed your face, strong and shaking. You gripped the front of her suit like it was the only thing keeping you upright.

The warehouse spun around you, empty except for the heat between your mouths.

When she finally pulled away, her forehead rested against yours.

“I hated pretending I didn’t like you,” she murmured.

You smiled. “You were really bad at it.”

She huffed a laugh. “You’re not gonna run away now, are you?”

You shook your head. “No. Not ever.”

She let out a shaky breath, relief blooming in her chest so bright it almost hurt.

Outside, the city kept breathing — dark, vast, alive.

And on that rooftop of cracked concrete and broken glass, Natalie Scatorccio — Spider-Hero of New York City — kissed you again like it was the only thing that had ever made sense.

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

Thank you so much for reading! This was another incredible request from @deenayw! I had so much fun writing it! Hope you guys enjoyed!

[weird-color]

dont hug me im a cookie.

(height comparison and abilities below :p) (I am TERRIBLE at describing stats please bare with me)

Rainbow Ink ~ Creative Flow : Summons ink hands from the ground to drag the enemies in place, freezing them in place to cause injury and poison. An ocean of dark ink spawns beneath the enemies, increasing the amount of damage done by the ink hands and keeping them tied. A shield of paper will wrap around the ally with least ATK from the team. Increases Blueberry Clockwork's ATK and DMG Resist by 300%, an HP shield inflicting upon him to protect his current HP. (Similar to Mystic Flour.)

Blueberry Clockwork ~ The Reality Of Time : Freezes the enemy's cooldown and resets it, ignoring any buffs and treasures. Launches himself to attack while slowing his enemies ATK SPD, which will increase his own as he does. Increases Rainbow Ink's Cooldown by 500%, granting them "Future's Sight" buff and allowing their ink hands to survive longer and have a tighter grip on the enemies.

Sugar Heart Butterfly ~ Lover's Ring : Summons his cult members to deal damage and hypnotize the enemies, confusing them into bleeding. As he does, Sugar Heart Butterfly burst heals the entire team, restoring 70% of their HP. At the same time, an explosion of love stunts and charms the closest enemies, dispels any other buffs granted by other supports and curses them for the rest of the fight.

Electric Oats ~ Digital Dancing : Starts the fight with stunt resistance, DMG focus and cooldown by 619% for the entire party. His wires launch and zap the enemies, leaving a stunt debuff and healing reduction on them. Water type enemies will not be affected by this, instead will cause DMG reduction to Electric Oats Cookie. Will focus on any healer or support cookies, inflicting "Computer Virus" debuff to cause injury and silencing them, his ATK increasing by 400% after using the debuff. After his death, he will leave behind a copy of his own digital form, which will only zap and keep the last cookie standing alive for 7 seconds before falling.

Raw Steak ~ Piercing Health : Smashes through with his pitchfork against the strongest enemy, inflicting injury, fear and shackles. Additionally, if his enemy receives health, he will increase his own ATK and becomes invulnerable to any debuffs for 10 seconds. Purifies Spinach Salad and increases their MAX HP with the "Chef's Delight" buff, shielding them from any attacks for a long period of time. Before dying, his ATK will increase by 900%, using his last seconds to heal Spinach Salad and enhance their DMG resist.

Spinach Salad ~ Healthy Stabbings : Summons a pair of giant spinach cans to protect the ally with the least DMG resist and HP, while they jump behind Raw Steak Cookie to attack and stab their utensils on the enemies. Focuses on the enemy with the lowest HP at the moment, targeting them and causes stun momentarily. Gives Raw Steak their "Fork N Tooth" buff, periodic healing him while standing behind him. They become resistant to debuffs (except stuns and fear) by 200%, while also absorbing their target's ATK.

Star Cloud Marshmallow ~ Dreamy Cloud Paradise : Starts the battle by floating with his clouds right above the enemies, crashing down to bomb and release a sleepy gas. The gas inflicts silence and sleep, the moment they wake up, they're striked by freezing debuff. Will attack the enemy with the least ATK and weaken them with injury, decreasing their DMG resist, DEF, Stun resistance, Freeze resistance, Cooldown and CRIT by 200%. After dying, will revive into a cloud monster, using his secondary skill "Drowning In Oil", which pulls the enemies on a void of dark oil, inflicting curse and injury.

(Somehow feel none of these would be meta lmao)

[hivemuthur]

In Thy Name - Ch.9. - All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

viktorxfemale!reader NSFW, gothic AU

Reader is a highly renown linguist hired by Viktor, a paranormal investigator, for a case he cannot crack himself.

<- previous chapter MASTERLIST + SOURCES next chapter ->

word count: 6,8K

author's note: Playlist here! @mithrava thank you for beta-reading! And art, of course, by @cringemaster3! This is a penultimate chapter, we are almost at the end :') Inspo behind Viktor's bedroom.

Cross-posted on AO3

—

The door thunders into its frame, as your fingers remain threaded through Viktor’s, two pulses drumming inside a single clasp. For a breath the dark seems absolute, then a lone taper by the threshold sputters to life—Viktor striking the match with a trembling thumb. The light grows, stuttering, and the room yawns wide like the inside of some gentle leviathan: ribbed with beams, crowded with things that glitter, tick or sigh softly in their sleep.

Every surface hums with biography. On a low shelf: a tin toy-ship half the length of your forearm, sails stitched from medical gauze, hull scored by a child’s impatient engraving—V carved again and again until the tin buckled. Nearby, a brass orrery cranks without touch, planets spinning by invisible decree; tiny constellations blink on the spheres, then fade, as though the mechanism remembers the night sky only in fragments. An entire wall is given over to charms: fox teeth wired into crescents, sprigs of dried yarrow, a cracked church bell clapper tied with red thread, mosquitos trapped in resin, sea glass. Some talismans pulse faintly, like hearts caught in amber.

You exhale a soft wonder. “These… they’re beautiful, and a little terrifying.”

“Travel companions,” he answers, voice low. “Each tried to barter safety for me in its own language. None quite succeeded.” His thumb strokes the back of your hand, grounding himself. “I never trusted prayer, so I built my own.”

Your gaze drifts to the workbench where half-finished contraptions crowd each other for space: a pocket barometer weeping mercury tears; a wooden prosthetic leg whose hinges seem to breathe when the candle wavers; and, set apart beneath a dusty bell-jar, a miniature heliostat—sun of hammered brass, tiny clockwork planets whirring on copper arms whenever stray light touches a sliver of solar foil wired to its core. A smear of reddish oxidation rims the sun’s edges like dried blood.

“You built this?” you whisper, fingertip hovering a breath from the fragile orbit.

“Not by design,” he answers, voice low. “I think I hoped that if I could snare daylight and make it circle to my command, I might outpace what waits in the dark.” He attempts a laugh; it breaks small and boyish. “A child’s arithmetic: wires against eternity, now that I know where truth lies.”

Beyond the workbench stands the bed—blanket rumpled, pillows cratered from nights spent half-sitting, half-scheming. Above the headboard dangle paper charms inked with equations that coil into sigils mid-sentence, as though maths and prayer wrestled to a draw. Candlelight kisses the papers and numbers crawl for an instant—digits becoming ancient runes before settling again.

You step deeper, hand still clasping Viktor’s, and feel the floor pulse faintly, as if the room itself recognises new blood. “All these years,” you say, eyes everywhere at once, “you slept in a cathedral of unfinished miracles.”

He huffs, embarrassed. “Slept is generous. Mostly I drafted cures I never tested.” He gestures to the miscellany. “Toys to trick fear into thinking I was busy.”

Your hand drifts to the toy ship. “And this?”

His mouth lifts, half-smile, half-ache. “First thing I ever built that moved the way I asked it to. I thought if I could command oceans on tin, perhaps the world would grant me a harbour.”

You turn, facing him fully beneath the restless candle flame. “You’re a superstitious inventor,” you murmur. “A mad genius.” Your thumbs stroke the pulse at his wrists. “And somewhere in here—” you bend, touch your lips to the hollow of his throat, “—still the boy.”

Patchwork moonlight stripes the quilt; motes swirl through the beam as if suspended mid-prayer. You tilt your face into his palm, eyelids fluttering at the fragile steadiness of his touch. “Forgive me,” you whisper, breath stirring the fine hairs on his wrist. “For writing back so late.”

A dry laugh ghosts from him, equal parts scold and surrender. “So you did stall.”

“Foolishly.” Your fingers toy with the edge of his waistcoat, beneath them a frantic drum. “I would murder to reclaim those silent days—spend them all in your company, trade ink for heartbeat.”

The words slip a tremor through him; you feel it travel from chest to fingertips. Your name—soft, weighty—drops from his lips. A pause, then: “You pierce my soul,” he confesses, the line trembling like a violin string too finely drawn. “I am half agony, half hope.”

Silence follows, alive with everything left trapped within the prisons of mouth. Above the headboard, the paper sigils exhale; their numbers and runes subside into orderly stillness. The orrery slows, planets clicking into languid orbit. The toy ship stills its minute tides. It is as though the room itself, sensing two hearts locking into common cadence, chooses at last to rest—gears, ghosts, and guardian charms settling in one shared, dreaming rhythm.

The hush between you ripens, candleflame quivering as though it, too, anticipates touch. You meet in the half-light—mouths first, soft and searching, then hungry. His lips linger at the corner of yours, trace the sweet hollow beneath your ear; you answer by brushing fingertips along the delicate curve of his, learning the shape of intent. Every slow exhale fogs the small distance between your faces before you erase it again and again.

Buttons yield beneath your careful hands. Waistcoat first—wool sighing open—then the crisp lawn of his shirt. As you draw fabric free, the second brace emerges: polished steel and leather cinched close over his ribs, a hidden scaffold. Your breath stutters—not from pity but from fierce wonder. You lay a kiss where metal bends skin, then another, lips charting the borders where ingenuity has met endurance.

“You are the finest thing my eyes have ever been granted,” you murmur, voice trembling with resolve. “I have never desired another half so ardently.”

The words strike him like a hand to the sternum—his pupils dilate, colour sweeps high into his cheekbones. He fumbles at the buckles, breath catching on every clink, until you still his shaking fingers and guide the brace away, resting it gently on a trunk plastered with foreign stamps.

Freed, his torso is a pale map of healed incisions and determined muscle. You cannot resist: palms glide from his collarbones down the slope of solar plexus, exploring the subtle ladder of ribs, the dilemma of scar and skin. Each brush draws a low, involuntary sound from his throat; his abdomen tightens beneath your touch, as though the very act of being seen, being craved, is too intimate to bear. He sways toward you, every sinew strung between surrender and hunger, for he might melt into your hands were you to press harder—or disappear entirely if you ceased.

Then you rise on toes and cup his face, your foreheads resting together, breathing shared. The stroke of your thumbs along his jaw is soft yet unshakable—an oath sealed not in words but in quiet, relentless devotion.

Now he turns to you. His fingers—those same brilliant things that sketched sigils in candle-soot—slide beneath the edge of your bodice to find the hidden hooks. One by one they yield with crisp, metallic sighs. The tailored shell slips away, exposing the sheer chemisette that veils your stays. Next he unfastens the overskirt—tugs of precision guessed more than practices—so its heavy wool falls soundlessly to the floor, puddling over the petticoat’s starched hem.

When he moves behind you, breath ghosts over the nape of your neck. His knuckles brush the ribbons laced through your corset’s eyelets. For a heartbeat he pauses, as the memory of another night in this very house hits—your lungs tight with panic, his hands working the same knots in haste to grant relief. Then, urgency had been mercy. Now, it is worship. Fingers surer, slower, he loosens the laces, loop by loop. With each yielding pull, your torso unfurls; air rushes deeper, not from fear this time but from the gathering bloom of want.

The stays loosen; whalebone relaxes its grip. You feel your own heartbeat surge against liberated ribs. He exhales—as if the cords had cinched him as well—and presses a kiss between the knobs of your spine, right where the last ribbon slips free. Intention no longer questions itself; it has an answer and a name.

You step from the collapsed cage of skirts and petticoats, left in stockings, unlaced corset hanging open, and the thin lawn chemise that veils what lamplight longs to touch. He comes around to face you. Candleflame paints filigree across your collarbones. Passion darkens his eyes. They rise to yours—no plea this time, only the certainty of shared design. You nod, offering permission, and answer his slow-forming smile with a kiss—unhurried, claim and consent entwined like ink soaking deep into vellum.

When your fingers find his waistband, Viktor stills them, shakes his head, and falls to his knees—iron brace clicking like a muted bell. Half-prayer, half-claim, he slips both hands beneath your chemise, palms flat, drawing the linen north while his mouth charts the same ascent: knee, inner thigh, the place where pulse beats loudest. Silk garters surrender; stockings fall like shed skins.

He glances up—yearning already certain—then bows. Lips meet you, soft as first light, tongue follows, slow, tormenting. A second pass—hungrier; a third—borderline reckless. He eats at you the way a lost man studies a map: memorising every inlet, every tremor you give him as proof the world is real. Your hand knots in his hair, urging, begging.

His grip shifts to your hips, thumbs branding flesh. Low praises spill, half words, half grunts, vibrations sinking straight to bone. Nothing polite here—only black mass of the flesh, his mouth writing a name he fears to lose, sealing it in salt and heat while the room fades to oblivion.

It contracts to candleflame and the wet sound of worship. Somewhere a tiny clock surrenders, its mechanism halting mid-tick, as though even gears and springs bow to the fierce, time-stealing ritual unfolding at the centre of the chamber.

He works in widening spirals—slow drag, soft suck, sudden press—testing how breath catches, how your thighs falter. Each discovery earns a muffled hum from him, as though pleasure were a language he means to speak fluently before dawn. Your fingers tighten in his hair; he gives you more, sealing mouth and heat against you until the edges of the world smear.

He pauses only when your knees wobble. Lips slick, he lifts his gaze, voice sanded thin by exalt. “You taste like midnight absolution,” he murmurs, reverent and indecent. “Every pulse of you is cathedral music.” A kiss to your inner thigh marks the pause, then he returns—deeper, greedier—tongue flicking where you are tender, then flattening in a slow benediction that makes your throat expose, prayerless.

The room seems to tilt. Light scant; shadow rolls across his shoulders like spilled ink. You clutch them, riding the rhythm he sets—hips rolling, breath breaking, a low keen torn from somewhere uncharted. He encourages it, nails digging just enough to hold you to the altar of his mouth. Words tumble out, ragged blessings: Beautiful… fearless… mine.

Pressure winds tight—a bright flash, a brutal snap. You crest on his tongue, unburdened from shame, as he draws the world to a single, blinding point. Your throat nearly slits with a cry torn raw, flood spilling into his mouth. He drinks like a zealot, commandment fulfilled, steadying you through every quake, mouth easing only when your limbs slacken, crowned in candlelight like a blasphemous saint.

Beath short, you bend to him, palms skimming sweat and stubble, tracing the gleam down his neck, over shoulders and scars painted in pearl on his skin. Fingers lace with his; you draw him upright. He rises—solid, heavy with steel, bone and devotion—and melts into a kiss that is all wet consonants and desperate vowels, noses sliding, breath shared like contraband. Your hands map his chest, then skim his spine where pale skin still bears crimson ghosts from the brace.

You slip the last veil of linen from your hips while he unclasps the leg brace—metal sighing to the floor—then loosens his slacks, shoving them low, baring the heavy weight of him. The sight stalls your pulse.

You move to touch; he turns you instead. Pins tumble when your hair cascades by his hand. He noses the spill of it aside, inhales as though the scent might save him. Arms loop your waist, palms hot over belly, and together you step backward until the bed’s edge meets the backs of his thighs—two shadows poised at the brink of a night that no clock dares to measure.

He settles first, drawing you down onto his lap until your back melts against his chest. His knees part just enough to cradle your hips; the blunt heat of him presses against the well of your spine. He bends to the slope where neck meets shoulder—breath scalding a path—then tastes your skin, voice a low ribbon of velvet filth: “Do you feel it? All of me aches for the sanctuary of you.”

His hands roam upward, thumbs grazing the soft swell of your chest where breath lifts and falls. He squeezes—firm, coaxing—until a moan slips free. “Yes, sing for me,” he murmurs, lips brushing the shell of your ear. “And I will sing for you. I am yours to ruin,” he adds, voice fever-rough, need gnawing, all-consuming.

“And I—yours,” you vow, solemn as any oath. One palm crawls down to wrap around him and grip, guiding him to the molten ache, hard flesh meeting soft. Your arm rests on his shoulders, anchoring, hair slipping between your fingers as they tug—a challenge as much as plea.

A groan rumbles in his chest. He cups your jaw, devours your mouth—kiss deep, untidy, all heat—then slides home with one steady, claiming thrust. Your gasp pours straight into his throat; his lashes flutter, eyes half-closing at the welcome of you. “Gods above,” he whispers, wonder threading the grit of his voice. “You fit me as though you were cut to my measure.”

Both palms bracket your hips; he guides you—forward, rise, sink—each glide buries him to the hilt. “That’s it,” he mutters, breath hot at your hairline. “Ride me, my sweet torment. Take every inch—let me vanish inside you.”

The swell of your backside moulds to his stomach as though your bodies were drafted to the same blueprint; your spine bows, head tipping to his shoulder, a living arc. He answers with deeper strokes, unrelenting, lost to the cadence you make together. “Hold me tighter,” he pleads, thumbs pressing crescents into your flesh. “Keep me here—let me remember us like this.”

Candle-flame gutters; bed-timbers keen; the room lists on each gracious rhythm of flesh upon flesh. Viktor widens his stance, drawing your knees farther apart—offering you to the hush of night as though you were both shrine and sacrifice.

He attempts to end you right there. One hand slides down the silk of your thigh to the fevered source of the pulse; the other circles your throat in a tender manacle, thumb stroking the hollow where heartbeat hammers. Inside, around, upon—he is everywhere at once, until borders blur and you are single body, single breath.

“Yes—” the word is a tremor caught behind your teeth. Heat builds, bright and ruinous.

“Speak,” he urges, voice rough and silken all the same. “Tell me how to spend this life.”

A gasp, then the plea spills, ragged yet strangely proper: “Take me in earnest, Viktor—do not be gentle.”

His answering groan is gratitude turned feral. Grip tightening at your throat, he drives upward, strokes lengthening, force blooming. Tension coils sharp; your hands fly to his knees for purchase. Words tangle, dissolve into broken endearments as pleasure crests—his name, your ache, the hiss of more.

He follows every lift of your hips, every clench, until the world contracts to white heat. Your release slams through you—back arching, cry fracturing the stillness. He rides out your shudder, hands steady, until the last quake tapers into small, liquid flutters. Breath returns in ragged sips; the room slips back into focus—lamplight trembling, wood murmuring beneath the mattress.

Against your spine Viktor quakes, chest hitching, rhythm faltering. He is perilously close—every muscle drawn taut, jaw clenched, moans pressed between gritted teeth. And you know, it’s your turn to pray.

You ease off him, mourning the sudden hollow, palms sliding down his thighs as you sink to your knees. Kiss him fervently where he is warm and rigid and slick with you, tongue coaxing his undoing. And there, you take your profane communion—where Viktor breaks, a litany of worship spilled into your mouth, against your skin, joy near-violent in its clarity, as though the night itself has bent to listen and found salvation in the sound.

Viktor’s breathing calms by slow degrees, tremor melting to after-glow. He slips a shaking hand beneath your chin, guides you from your borrowed altar, and gathers you—knees, elbows, heart—into his lap. Fingers smooth the disarray from your cheeks, reverent as any priest with chrism.

“I love you,” he whispers, voice husked but certain. “Madly, recklessly—beyond sense or season.”

You draw your brow to his, lips brushing the confession back into him. “And I adore you—utterly, ardently,” you answer, words tasting of salt, the shared proof of your bodies’ prayer.

The bed receives you both in a slow collapse: limbs braided, skin cooling where sweat had clung. He curls around you, one arm draped heavy at your waist, the other beneath your head like a promised pillow. Your leg hooks over his, capturing him close. No distance remains—only the quiet thrum of joined breath and the ebb of candlelight sliding down the wall.

Outside, wind frets the eaves; inside, two heartbeats settle into a single, drowsy cadence. Wrapped in each other’s warmth—naked, sated, fragrant with mutual sin and solace—you drift beneath the linen, letting sleep claim you the way you claimed one another: slow, complete, unwilling to surrender a single inch of closeness.

Then the dream finds its seam and slides in.

You stand now in the fern-lit cavern, water seeping from stone like slow tears. Moonlight lances through a broken roof, silvering the air. The lone white fern blooms at the centre, but its petals are bruised now—edges darkening as though dipped in tar. You sense, rather than hear, a slow tread behind you.

Turn, and the darkness gathers itself—antlers of shadow, shoulders built of night mist, eyes hollow voids, deep as kilns. The god does not roar or whisper; it simply exists, and the cave shrinks to hold that existence. Cold laps your ankles, then your knees, as if the water were rising with his breath. You cannot move.

A hand—not flesh, but the idea of one—brushes your shoulder, and the skin there burns with frost. When the thing speaks, it is everywhere at once: in your ears, under your ribs, beneath your tongue.

Onъ jestь мой.

He is mine—it ripples through bone like struck glass. Around the cavern walls, echoes repeat—mine… mine… mine—until the syllables lose shape and become nothing but low thunder.

You open your mouth—whether to argue or beg you don’t know—but your voice is mud, heavy and silent. Behind the god, the fern petals blacken fully, curling inward like fists. You reach for them and your hands pass through smoke. The god’s ember gaze holds you, an unspoken ledger tallying debts.

мой —softer now, almost consoling. As if possession were mercy.

You lurch awake, heart battering ribs, breath rasping. Moonlight threads the curtains; Viktor jolts up beside you, instantly alert, palms flattening to your cheeks.

“Dream?” he whispers.

You can only nod, tears salty at the corners of your mouth. He gathers you close, his own heartbeat a frantic mirror. For a long while neither of you speaks, afraid any word might invite the dark back in. Slumber, shallow and restless, returns until morning pries your bodies apart.

It steals in shyly at first—a rinsed-grey dawn that dribbles through the uncurtained gap and strikes the heliostat on Viktor’s workbench. At once the brass sun stirs, copper planets creaking round their tiny orbits, scattering motes of green and rose across wall and sheet. Viktor wakes beneath that wobbling prism of light, limbs leaden yet warm, the curve of your body pressed along his front.

Your brow is still drawn, even in sleep. He folds you closer—arm snug over shoulders, thigh caging yours—until breath mingles. “Speak to me,” he murmurs, voice hoarse with night.

Lids lift; worry swims there. Your fingertips ghost over the planes of his chest, mapping the faint sling-scar of his brace. “He thinks he owns you,” you say, quiet as church dust.

“Does he not?” Viktor’s question is a pulse beneath the words. You stir, pull back just enough to meet his gaze.

“No,” you insist. “You belong only to yourself.”

A grim smile cuts his mouth. “My name belongs to him. All that name touches follows: work, reputation—my very marrow.”

“You never asked for power or gold,” you argue. Flecks of shy sun dance over your shoulders, painting you holy. “Every discovery you made, you earned stitch by stitch.”

He shakes his head, dark hair shadowing cheekbones. “Without the name? No college would have opened its doors, no patron would have financed a crippled boy with a tin ship and a headful of theories.”

“You cannot be certain of that,” you press, frustration brightening your voice.

“And I would rather not find out,” he snaps, sudden and sharp, like steel catching on stone. He levers upright, reaching for the torso brace that glints mute by the bed. Leather cinches; buckles clack. Slacks and the leg brace follows, metal kissing wool with practiced mercy. He snatches his cane from where it leans against the nightstand, as though preparing for retreat.

Anger pricks your eyes. “If you perish you’ll learn nothing else. And I—”

He inhales to counter, words hitch on his tongue—then a brutal cough tears through him, pitching him forward. The cane clatters. Muscles knot under your hands as you steady him, feel heat roar through his chest. The heliostat’s light reels drunkenly round the room, planets juddering in their loops while trinkets flash russet and emerald. In that cacophony of spinning colour and ragged breath, there is silence; debate has been swallowed by the stark, wet rasp of his lungs and the thrum of a god’s claim pressing ever closer at the windowpanes.

“You are cold,” Viktor murmurs when the tremor of gooseflesh lifts along your shoulders. You’d slipped from the quilt, bare as birth, to aid him. He trails a knuckle along your collarbone—an absent sketch that sparks thought as much as heat.

“Always, without you,” you reply, tipping into his touch. Lips reach for his, but he tilts back, palm hovering before his mouth. “There is blood,” he warns—taste of iron still fresh from the coughing fit.

“Then anoint me,” you breathe, closing the distance. Fingers cradle his jaw; your mouth covers his. Iron tang blooms between tongues—sharp, vital. When you part, you whisper, “This—is life, Viktor. Not only books, not only findings.” Your hand settles over the bare plane of his chest, heartbeat hammering beneath. “Give yourself a chance. Give me a chance. I would go to my knees, beg, if that is the price.”

For a heartbeat he remains stunned, arms inert, as though the plea has cut every wire controlling him. Then a twitch—a decision—and his hands climb your thighs, sweep your waist, lock behind your back, crushing you to him. Skin to skin; the leather curve of his brace presses your breasts, cool and unyielding.

“You make me forget,” he murmurs into your hair. “Forget dark. Forget cold. You thaw the ice death sets in my marrow. But its shadow hasn’t fled.”

Your palms slide up the ridged terrain of his ribs. “I am not asking you to cast your world to ruin,” you say, steady, earnest. “Help the Černoglavs first—see how the night shifts. Then decide if the name is worth its chain.”

His breath shudders; you feel it through every inch of contact. Outside, weak sun flares on tiny planets, painting the walls in orbiting gold. Inside, he clutches you tighter—caught between dread and dawning possibility—and in the hush that follows, you feel the faintest tilt of the balance: the weight of fear easing, if only by a feather’s breadth.

“We should make haste, then,” Viktor says, voice still husky against your hair. “If we are to reach them by Forefathers’ Eve.”

You lift your head, brows rising. His mouth curves—equal parts resignation and dare. “I will try.”

Gratitude surges; you claim his lips again, quick and ardent. When breath parts you, mischief sparks. “Would you care to practise lacing up, sir?”

“I shall see what skill I can muster,” he answers, rubbing his nose along your cheek, soft as a promise.

Once made presentable, you move to the study. Algernon delivers the tray there with the wary precision of a man serving wolves. Porridge, ham, a stubborn pot of tea—set between inkpots and scattered journals. His disapproval lingers in the doorway like cold draft, but Viktor barely spares a nod before unfurling fresh parchment.

Together you draft possibilities: salt circles, candle grids, sigils of severance. Pages fill—ink splattering constellations across margins—until Viktor sits back, fingers steepled.

“They must part with every gain the bargain afforded,” he decides. “Land deeds, ledgers, jewelry, even titles carved on stone. Burn it to ash, witnessed by one who bears the name.”

“Mr. Černoglav,” you murmur, “or the boy.”

He inclines his head, begins the letter in his slanted scholar’s hand:

On the night of Forefathers’ Eve, when the veil thins and ancestry stands watch, gather all documents and tokens of your ill-won estate. Fire will speak what blood once lied. I shall attend with my associate to oversee the rite.

He passes it to you for approval; you scan the lines, then ask the question lodging beneath your ribs. “And your own unbinding, Viktor? Should that not claim the same night?”

He dips the quill, thoughtful. “The Černoglav bond endured centuries; they lack the luxury of returning to the seed of their sin. We take the night for them. As for me—” a thin, fierce smile “—I possess the craft to summon without borrowed moonlight, and I know precisely where my thread began, should I wish to proceed.”

A hush settles—ink drying, clocks ticking. “You are brilliant at this,” you say, awe loosening every syllable.

Colour floods his cheeks; his chest lifts as though the words themselves grant breath. “Then let us be worthy of the praise,” he murmurs, pressing your hand—ink-smudged fingers against ink-smudged fingers—ready to wager knowledge and name against the dark. Wax seals the envelope like a heartbeat stilled, the elegant V pressed into it.

Time slides quieter than either of you expected: rainy dawns spent shoulder to shoulder over brass gears; afternoons prowling the winter garden where Rio accompanies you on warm stone, tail twitching at ghosts; nights when clouds shear open and the two of you tilt your heads to count bruised constellations, his arm a steady bar across your back. It is the smallest taste of an ordinary future—tea spoons, half-laughed experiments, your nightgown brushing his brace—and Viktor hoards each glimpse like coin.

Those hushed hours weave themselves into a fragile tapestry: letters dispatched, ritual diagrams inked and drying, travel satchels half-packed beneath the library window. On one night, after you drift upstairs with a candle and a smile that lingers in the hallway, Viktor stays behind to double-check the materials, douse lamps, and lock the door on every stray fear he can corral. It is in that pause—plans stacked, future balanced like a blade—that Algernon’s soft step intrudes, stitching the quiet domestic grace of the past two days to the darker current that still runs beneath the floorboards.

“Need anything further, sir?” he asks, pensive, posture rigid as ever, an empty silver tray tucked beneath his armpit.

“No, thank you.” Viktor pockets the key. The butler lingers, gaze unfocused. “Speak, man—what troubles you?”

Algernon’s voice drifts, oddly hushed. “I would dislike seeing you harmed, my lord. This venture smells of peril.”

“I have lived inside peril most of my life,” Viktor answers. “This venture might be the first scent of salvation.” He steps closer, cane tip ticking on the floor. “Tell me, Algernon—would you prefer me dead?”

The question lands like broken porcelain. Algernon blanches, words tumbling. “Never, sir—never. Forgive my presumption.”

He retreats, footsteps swallowed by the corridor, leaving Viktor with the hush of wavering candlelight and the uneasy sense that even loyalty can fray. Shaking off the chill, he climbs to the bedchamber where you wait, promising himself that if the nights are numbered, he will spend every last one inside the warmth of your borrowed forever.

Morning is pale and wind-sharp when Viktor offers his hand to help you into the carriage. Kid-glove lies forgotten in his coat pocket; your bare fingers slide against his, pulse to pulse.

“Are you ready?” he asks.

“Are you?” A small dare. He answers with a single, steady nod.

You sit close from the first jolt of wheels, speaking only through skin. His thumb roams the back of your hand, tracing nerves like poet’s ink. Outside, the October landscape unspools—fields leeched of colour, birches rattling their bones. Breath plumes in the shared space between your mouths, warm argot against the window’s chill pane. Neither of you remarks on the way time seems to fold; it is enough to feel the fold together.

By mid-afternoon the Černoglav estate rises out of the haze: brick dark as dried blood, windows blind. Mrs. Samkova meets you at the steps, skirts snapping in the wind. Worry has thinned her mouth to a thread.

“Welcome back,” she says, voice rough but civil. “And thank you for your haste, Mr. Velesny. We shall repay the debt you are owed—”

“You will do no such thing.” Viktor bows, brushing his lips to her gloved knuckles. “If this works, you will have no coin left for recompense. Keep what remains.” His gaze flicks to her husband, grey as smoke behind her shoulder.

She ushers you inside, words tumbling faster than her feet. “That—exactly—that is what troubles me.” Crossing the threshold, she lowers her voice. “Every Černoglav is buried on these grounds. Their name is scratched into lintels, etched on hearthstones. The house itself breathes the bargain.”

Viktor’s cane taps once on the parquet, a metronome for thought. “You believe we must burn it,” he murmurs, tasting the solidity of the idea.

Silence swells; the long corridor seems to listen. Dust motes drift like hesitant snow. At last he asks, soft but iron-edged, “Have you somewhere to go?”

Mrs. Samkova’s fingers find her husband’s and clasp hard. “We do,” she says, voice quaking. She peers up at Viktor, eyes bright with both terror and relief. “If fire is the price, so be it. You … you have our permission.”

The word hangs heavy, flammable. Somewhere deep in the walls, a beam creaks—as though the old house understands the sentence just pronounced. Between your joined hands Viktor’s pulse kicks, and you feel the future tip, cinder-bright, into the waiting night.

Preparations spool through the day like black thread: wardrobes emptied, heirlooms judged. You and Viktor become archivists of loss—deciding what burns, what may yet travel. By dusk, only framed silhouettes remain, pale ancestors staring from ovals of cardboard: memory without coin.

The sparse staff depart first, bundled into the carriage with the young heir; Samkova’s husband drives them toward safer roofs. Evening settles. For the last time Viktor wheels Mr. Černoglav into the drawing-room; lamplight trembles against stripped walls. Steam curls from porcelain cups, the smell of chicory and smoke already mingling.

“This inquiry has unknotted my own curse,” Viktor confesses, hands wrapped round the cup for warmth. “It seems the same god dogs us both.”

The old man’s eyes gleam, lucid despite lungs that rasp like worn bellows. “Perhaps I am mad—letting a stranger erase what centuries built. Yet you do not walk the path of madness, Mr. Velesny, I believe.”

“Please—call me Viktor.” A wry breath. “Soon our surnames may be ash.”

The elder smiles and lifts one trembling hand. “Then we meet as Radomír and Viktor, nothing more. I doubt I’ll linger long enough to learn your next name.” A pause—soft as the click of a clock reaching the hour. “Whatever comes, call me friend. Thank you for giving my family a chance.”

“Do not thank me yet,” Viktor says, the smile brittle. “I may burn your house and leave you with nothing.”

“And still I choose faith, Viktor. At the threshold of breath, hope is lighter to carry than regret.”

Hope—a word he has seldom trusted—drops hot in Viktor’s chest. It seems as if his soul has made the decision before the mind could intrude. Just then, like a confirmation fleshed out, you appear in the doorway, lantern in hand. “Forgive the interruption. It is time.”

So, the two of you begin the unmaking. Oil sloshes across boards, trickles down balustrades, pools in the cellar like black water. Fumes sting throat and eye; every footstep echoes finality. Near the front doors you lower the empty canister, chest hitching. “Harrowing business,” you manage, fabric covering mouth.

Viktor sets his canister aside, clasps your shaking hands. “Are you frightened?”

“All of that and more, beloved,” you admit with a wry smile.

“So am I.” His grip tightens. “Bravery is fear that refuses retreat, you once told me. We refuse together.” With that, your heart settles, if only for a moment.

Outside, night yawns starless, wind raw from the east. The final trail of oil is drawn across the lawn, joining house to its edge where Radomír sits bundled in blankets beside his daughter, holding a single lantern. The air stings raw and tasting of snow. The manor crouches behind you—windows dark, rooms hollowed of voice and souls.

“It is nearly midnight,” Viktor says. “Let us finish before sainted dawn.”

Radomír strikes a match. Flame trembles, then leaps to the oil path, racing toward the door like a summoned serpent. All four step back. Heat blooms; shingles pop; glass weeps molten tears. The house becomes a torch against the void—timber bones cracking, smoke billowing up like a black crown.

Viktor lifts his cane, the silver tip glinting like a star against the roaring dark. Smoke stings his lungs, but his voice rises clear, rolling through the firelit void:

“Černobog, keeper of root and grave, we return that which was never ours.

This name, once stolen for favour, we cast to embers.

These lands, these ledgers, this pride—ash for ash.

By witness of blood and breath, we break the chain.

Leave the line of Radomír Černoglav.

Claim them no longer—claim us no more.”

The wind’s answer is immediate and savage. A gale unlatches the heavens, driving sparks into spirals that hiss and writhe like fire-serpents drinking their own tails. The inferno rears higher, and in its molten heart matter curdles into shape: a vast silhouette rack-crowned with antlers, eyes the colour of furnace iron, cloak a negative of light—pure, smokeless dark. Heat buckles the air, yet a sudden chill nests in the marrow of every witness.

From that void-throat issues a voice that is less sound than verdict:

Do you spurn my gifts, House Černoglav? Will you trade inheritance for dust?

Radomír pulls the blankets from his knees, the wool scraping bone. He stands—barely—leaning on the iron arms of the wheelchair, each breath a rattle in a cracked flute. “We do,” he declares. The syllables are thin yet unwavering. “Your bounty has been our yoke.”

The god regards him—ember gaze narrowing. A pulse rolls underfoot, as if some vast heart has thudded in the deep soil. Flames along the eaves flare sickly green, licking skyward, then gutter inward, as though the blaze itself inhales. Soot-snow begins to fall: delicate, black-feathered motes that sting where they land.

Radomír’s chest lifts once more. In that breath you see him younger—lord of a house granted by unnatural means—then older again, every theft tolling through his ribs. He looks to Viktor and manages a faint, rueful smile. “Victory, my friend,” he murmurs, so low the crackle of fire nearly swallows it. “Hold fast to yours.”

The antlered shadow steps forward—no footfall, just a folding of space—and Radomír’s words cut off like a candle pinched. A column of air implodes around him; his body arches, spine bowing as if drawn to invisible hooks. Light pours from his mouth—a pale, fluttering thread—and streaks toward the god’s outstretched hand. For one shuddering instant Radomír’s eyes blaze white; then the thread snaps into the dark palm, and the man’s frame collapses to ash-grey stillness. Blankets settle over an empty cage of bone.

A wail breaks from his daughter, raw and shattering, but the wind whips it aside. Viktor lunges as though he could catch what has already flown, and the cane lands uselessly in the dirt. The god turns its gaze on him now—on you—smoke-cloak furling like storm surf. The air tastes of pennies and grave mould; every heartbeat feels counted.

I know you. You still belong to me.

A moment frozen in resin. It laughs briefly, yet the figure’s ember eyes dim, pupil-red shrinking to pinpricks. Around its antlers the fire gutters back to natural orange, as if the claim of one life has sated it for now. It speaks once more, and the words crack the air like iron gates closing:

So be it. Nameless, you shall wander. Dust for dust.

A final gust scatters the soot-snow, and the silhouette tears apart into black petals that whirl upward and vanish among the sparks.

Silence tunnels in around you. The manor’s spine caves with a groan; beams tumble in a storm of embers. Mrs. Samkova kneels beside the wheel-chair frame, pressing hands to a chest that no longer rises. Viktor stands rigid, eyes reflecting the pyre, lips moving soundlessly—some prayer or curse you cannot tell. You touch his arm; his skin is ice beneath sweat.

Above the ruins, smoke columns twist into the night like twin adders, and the smell is of pine pitch and old blood. Whatever bargain held for centuries is broken, but the cost glows hot on the ground before you, radiating grief. Flames snap and roar on, lighting a path of cinder into the darkness where tomorrow waits, stripped and raw.

Ash drifts sideways through the first sifting of real snow, grey tangling with white until sky and ground share one colour of forgetting. The hour has slipped past midnight—Forefathers’ Eve already fled into All Saints’ morning—yet no birds announce the change, and the fire’s roar seems kneaded down to a hoarse murmur. In that hush, time stalls: three living figures shoulder-to-shoulder about a fourth that has folded inward on itself, blankets still warm, bones cooling.

Viktor’s coat flaps in the wind, stiff with soot, his cane lost in the rutted grass. He watches the house collapse in slow stages—beam after beam bowing like penitents—until each fall feels less like ruin, more like punctuation. Mrs. Samkova kneels, veil of ash weaving through her loosened hair, one hand fisted round a rosary that no longer clicks. You hover beside them both, palm pressed to Viktor’s back, feeling the staccato of his heart through brace, cotton and wool. None of you speak; even grief seems hushed, afraid of echo.

Somewhere far along the frost-black lane, the small shape of the returning carriage appears, lantern bobbing like a wayward star. Its wheels whisper over gravel, slow but inevitable, drawing the living toward whatever scant future can be salvaged from this pyre. Around you the snow thickens; flakes kiss sparks, hiss, and vanish. The night exhales, and the world, lighter by one haunted name, begins—quietly—to turn again.

[emmg]

Specimen Fidelity—part 2

Still the Emmrook Ex Machina AU, lol, with many, many, many ambiguous kisses.

Below or on ao3

Chapter Two: Nasalis Affinitas

The kettle begins its aria: first a whistle, then a whimper, then something like a shriek. The lid, drunk on steam, lifts an inch, collapses, tries again with theatrical desperation. Thud. Thud. Thud. Like a small animal insisting on its existence while trapped in a jar. 

“Manfred,” he murmurs, fingers pressing gently into the hollows of his temples, massaging. “No tea today. Please, my boy. And thank you.” 

Off he goes, obedient and smiling, the little troubadour, the soft-footed specter with spectacles too large for his face and a jawline that doesn’t quite match on either side. Manfred, with his cracked porcelain cheek, his misaligned gait, his whole body slightly adrift. The first failure. The first triumph. Emmrich watches him shuffle away—he always shuffles, like slippers on a theatre stage—and feels something tighten just beneath the ribs. That sensation again, not pain, not nostalgia, but the cousin of both.  

Manfred does not speak. He has never spoken. He hums, sometimes, small and breathy, like someone trying not to be noticed while singing to himself. He fills the kettle, empties it, fills it again. Not always in that order. He gardens with Emmrich. Moves soil with care, pats things down as though tending a grave. Emmrich loves him. That part is not in question.  

He loves him with the unspent warmth reserved for people who never appeared. For the child not born. For the spouse not married. He loves him like a room kept ready for guests who never arrive. This wisp. This clockwork ghost. This thing that is not a boy and never will be, and yet...  

More human than most, Emmrich thinks, watching the slight, lopsided figure recede into the corridor. More human than any of them, even when he has to cut open the soft underside of his wrist to adjust the wires that govern his grip. 

"...ook..."

He straightens. The migraine, still embryonic, dissolves beneath a sharper thrum of curiosity. He steps toward the corridor, drawn forward like a parched man by the shimmer of a mirage. Manfred is gone. But there had been a voice, and it did not belong to Rook. Hers is pitched like a string slightly loose on the peg, inclined to tremble at the edges. She lengthens vowels, devours consonants in irregular bursts, always the same ones, like a foreigner mimicking an accent from memory. 

“Are you spying, Emmrich?” 

He startles and there she is. Not entering, not arriving, simply there, as if a curtain had lifted on her presence. Her head tilted in that infinitesimal way that suggests either affection or the preparation of a riddle. Her pale hair has been braided. His mind, ever bureaucratic, notes this: her coordination has improved. 

“No, no,” he breathes, smoothing the front of his cardigan, desperate for an alibi. She wears only a tunic and loose trousers. No shoes. The skin of her feet pale and unconsidered, like the paper lining of a chocolate box. She looks, he thinks, like the sort of postgraduate specter who haunts the quieter corners of university cafés, elbow-deep in essays, hair undone, eyelids creased, muttering to herself about citations. One of those unfortunates who began the semester with mascara and ends it with headaches. 

She had been someone once, someone with a self phone and passwords, someone who posted smiling portraits at arms’ length with bars in the background. And that someone, with all her minor privileges—angles, symmetry, youth—had not been entirely scrubbed away. That sediment lingers. It is impossible to teach prettiness not to show itself. Even now, even here. Especially now. 

She smiles and waits. 

His hand rises, hesitates, hovers. Suspended in not-quite-intimacy. He nearly touches her, the curve of her chin so very tempting. He imagines the act in detail: fingers cradling the jaw’s hinge, tilting her face as though adjusting the angle of a portrait. Left. Right. Back, just a little, enough for the throat to stretch. She would let him. There is no defiance in her posture, no flicker of refusal in her eyes. That is the most troubling part. The quiet compliance. None of the earlier versions had ever induced this peculiar unease, a kind of moral indigestion. 

Unease and... craving.

He finds himself wishing, unreasonably, that he could see it. Not her expression, but the current behind it. The crackle of invisible things. The slight hum, perhaps, of something dreaming behind her eyes. Not the shape he gave her, but whatever foreign heat had crept in unnoticed, like a scent clinging to a borrowed sweater. 

“Rook, darling…” he says, and it comes out rasped, unfinished. The rest dissolves mid-thought. 

He wants to ask so many things.

Do you know how lovely you are? Not because of the nose, or the mouth, or even the hair, but because you echo. You mirror. You mimic. The walk, the phrasing, the silences; he sees himself refracted through her like a man glimpsing his own gestures in a stranger’s window. It is expected, yes. Logical. The slow accumulation of observation into behavior. But it flatters all the same. 

No one has ever watched him so carefully. Not his colleagues, who skimmed him like a dull text. Not his assistants, who blinked and nodded and escaped as soon as they could. Only Manfred, perhaps. But Manfred watches the way a clock regards its pendulum, affectionate, though without variance. 

Manfred does not look up from the floor and murmur: No, not poker again, Emmrich. I'm tired of your tells. You’ve catalogued every bluff, there’s nothing left to win, no more data for you to record. Pick another game. Or better, read to me. That book you drooled on last night, remember? Finish it now. Out loud. I’ll listen. I like to listen to you.

He is, he realizes while his fingers fidget uselessly in one another’s grasp, regrettably, still human. And humans, when adored, do not always recoil. Sometimes they lean in. 

ffffFFFFFF— 

The kettle erupts in a high, keening hiss. He does not notice. He does not notice that Manfred, obedient but chronically literal, never turned off the stove. Rook says something but it doesn’t register. She moves past him, and only then does he return to himself, just in time to see her reach for the damned thing. 

“Wait—” 

Too late. 

She yelps. An odd sound, something between an ah or an oh crossbred with a bitten-off curse. Surprise, anger, and a peculiar note of personal offense, as though the kettle had broken an agreement. The palm reddens instantly, a single angry blister beginning to swell.

“I knew it was hot,” she mutters, but to no one. Not to him. That alone unsettles. She never speaks into air. Her words always have a direction; at him, for him, around him.

He gingerly takes her wrist, his voice shifting to that low, useless softness people adopt around the injured and the very young. He murmurs something, nonsense, likely, and guides her hand beneath the cold stream of the tap. She hisses, winces, but doesn’t pull away. 

“I knew it was hot,” she repeats, and this time there’s a bite in it. “I told myself not to touch it again. I told myself—”

“It’s all right,” he says, already reaching for something, anything, and ends up with a garish kitchen towel patterned with bright yellow butterflies, absurdly cheerful. “It’s quite all right. The laser will fix it. You will not even remember it happened.” 

Which, for reasons he cannot name, makes it all feel rather worse. 

****

“Manfred,” Rook says bluntly. “Why did you make him?” 

“Oh,” he replies, a laugh catching somewhere in his throat, not quite laughter, more a tick. “Manfred is—ah—Manfred.” 

“That’s not an answer.” 

“It is not,” he concedes, gently. 

Why indeed? Why not deactivate the thing, asked Johanna once, voice sharp as the snap of surgical gloves. Why keep this ambulant defect, this mute embarrassment, this thing? He had nodded, as one does when receiving a correct diagnosis, but left the question unanswered. There was no proper column in the reports for: likes steam. Or: tends to flowers. Or: doesn’t speak, but hums along to kettle whistles in a minor key. No field for is comforting in his uselessness.

“It’s love,” he says, suddenly, before the thought has been vetted. 

It is why teachers adopt their students’ quirks. Why the childless, the ambivalent, the soft-hearted-but-terrified find themselves in shelters cooing at soft, blinking creatures with names like Pudding or Socks. 

"Love," Rook repeats.

Between them, a bowl of strawberries stands. She has been choosing which ones he eats. Each selected, examined, and then passed to him. Again, she does it. He does not eat this time. 

“Sometimes,” he begins, half-hoping she’ll interrupt, “love needs an object. A channel. Rivers do not meander by choice. We seek... duties. Attachments. When the world fails to offer us someone to care for, we invent them. We propose. We marry. We produce small, breakable people to adore.” 

“Or pets.” 

“Or pets,” he agrees, smiling. 

“So why didn’t you?” 

He hesitates. “Forgive me, dear, I am not sure I follow." 

“Court. Marry. Children,” she recites, putting her fingers down one by one as she does. “Why Manfred instead?” 

“…oh,” he breathes. 

He cannot look at her. 

Because, at some point, no had become a season. A climate. A background radiation. No thank you. Not now. Not quite. Not ever. Because the act of wanting had grown unbearable. Because people die, and children die, and the horror isn’t that they go, but that they go alone, or worse, leave you to do so.

And Manfred... Manfred neither dies nor mourns. He will not outlive him tragically, nor die inconveniently. He will not outgrow, outlove, outlast. He will stay. Which is, perhaps, not noble. But comfortable. And comfort, after a certain age, begins to masquerade as meaning. 

A coward’s solution. But dressed in logic. 

“You want it,” she says before he can stitch together even the semblance of a reply. “All the books you read for fun are dripping with cheese.” Cheese? “Meet, swoon, quarrel, swoon again, kiss, wedding bells, fade to white.”

“Fade to black,” he corrects, automatically. “White’s usually a symbol of death.”

"Whatever."

He shrugs, smiling. Sentimentality, after all, is not a crime, no matter how firmly the world insists otherwise. He bites into the strawberry she’s handed him. “We dream because we must,” he says, faintly theatrical. “Without dreams, there would be no cities. Only furniture.” 

“Don’t swallow,” Rook says. 

His mouth pauses mid-motion. The pulp hangs against his teeth. He blinks at her. He wants to ask why, but doesn’t. Saliva pools, thick and sudden, and he watches her lean in, hesitant not with doubt, but forethought. 

His mouth slackens; lips parted, teeth faintly visible, tongue motionless. A thread of saliva pools beneath it, thick and warm, his body already anticipating a gesture not yet begun. He feels it, feels himself, as a collection of responses: damp palms, shallow breath, the pulse in his throat mistiming itself.

Her fingers, slightly sticky from fruit, find the edge of his collar and fumble there, not tugging so much as gathering, knitting the fabric in her hand like she means to remove it thread by thread. Then her face is near. Lips, lacquered faintly, not soft but tacky, press against his own, half a kiss, half a seal. Her breath spills over his chin, wet and immediate. She tightens her grip, thumbs against his jaw now, pressing into the flesh just below the ears where the skin is thin and the nerves sharp. Her nails, short but blunt, dig in slightly. His mouth opens. 

She touches the tip of his tongue with her own, presses against it, then drags along it, wet against wet, muscle against muscle. She explores him as if memorizing: the curve of his molars, the pocket of flesh behind them, the roof of his mouth where the skin feels almost ribbed, the tiny vein-laced strip beneath his tongue that shivers when touched. She lingers there. Presses. Retreats. Returns. 

A noise rises in her throat, not a moan, but maybe it is. He cannot tell; he cannot tell anything anymore. He feels it resonate against his teeth. Her mouth—his mouth—smells faintly now of strawberries turned sour. Her breath warms the soft spot just above his chin; he becomes hyperaware of how wet everything is: lips, gums, the back of his own throat. He doesn’t move. He lets her work. Lets her trace him from within like a finger through dust. 

Then, suddenly, it ends. She withdraws. First her tongue, lapping slightly as it goes, then her lips, peeling from his with a soft, suctioned click.

His skin, flushed moments ago, is now clammy. A sheen of sweat has broken along his brow, beading at his temples, above his lip. She has left fingerprints in it. He can feel where her hands were, each point of pressure. 

She steps back. One finger, his sweat still glistening on the pad, reaches to touch her tongue, experimentally. 

“I still have it. My tongue, I mean.” She smacks her lips. “And strawberries,” she adds, “are still tart.” 

“Yes?” he manages. He doesn’t know what he’s asking. 

“Yes. That’s what you read, isn’t it? The kisses. They’re never about the strawberries. They just use them. For metaphors. For moods.”

“Not… quite.” 

"Then how?"

****

A lesson with the taste of grapes: cotton candy grapes, engorged and perfumed, and the subtler musk of moscato. Rook brings them to his mouth one by one, sometimes with fingers, sometimes with lips, and in between he lectures: these are for wine, these for the table. Too much water, he says, not enough acid. They burst but do not ferment. They please the tongue, not the cellar. 

Sent at 11:02 a.m. Reply? Volkarin, we’re still waiting. Unless your hands are broken or you've recently suffered a stroke, you have no excuse. If you’re consulting, then consult. If you’re rotting in some basement with a diary in one hand and your dick in the other, kindly say so. We’ll move on without you. Reply, sent at 8:14 p.m.: My apologies, Johanna. Please find attached the necessary details. Kind regards.

A lesson with the taste of skin. Salt at the temple, the metallic smear beneath her ear, the clean dullness of her shoulder. He kisses her like a man tasting for ingredients. She answers with half-closed eyes and the occasional tilt of the head, offering another piece of herself for cataloguing. 

Sent at 2:17 p.m. Reply? Emmrich, unless you've decided to die, please confirm your panel attendance. It’s one button. One click. You used to be able to manage that. Reply, sent at 3:48 a.m.: Yes. I’ll prepare the talking points. Kind regards.

A lesson with the taste of sleep. She wakes him before dawn by lying beside him, perfectly still, then exhaling. He stirs. Her mouth finds his in the dark, blindly, and she kisses him slowly, with the laziness of someone washing a window, not to clean it but to pass the time. 

Sent at 5:03 a.m., three days ago. Reply? EMMRICH. I am not your secretary. I am not your mother. I am not your therapist, babysitter, or some long-suffering wife penning letters while her husband experiments with electricity and masturbatory genius in the attic. I do not care how “special” your little project is, or how “confidential” or “sensitive.” What I do care about is being forced to read yet another draft stitched together with metaphors that read like rejected greeting card slogans. If you send me one more document with that many adjectives and that little actual thought, I will set it on fire, gather the ashes, mix them with gin, and drink it as a toast to your professional extinction. Pull yourself together, or kindly fall apart off the payroll. Reply, four days later: Please remove me from the venture. Kind regards.

Rook holds his phone at arm’s length, squinting and reading: the rubbing of noses, often in greeting or play. She slides her nose along his, as gentle as can be. It is not a glide but a press, frictionless and slow, skin dragging across skin with the faint resistance of sweat or breath. His eyes close, too quickly, savouring. She does it again. Nose to nose, cartilage aligning and slipping apart with a soft tack. Again. Again. 

Tick, tack. Tick, tack. Noses slotting together, then coming unhooked. 

Sent five days ago, 1:11 p.m. Reply? NOT AN OPTION MORON Reply: — Sent two days ago, 10:01 a.m. Reply? You’re ignoring me. Fine. Keep doing it. Let’s see how long your reputation outpaces your relevance. Sent this morning, 10:08 a.m. Reply? Are you catatonic? In a coma? Or just too deep in one of your tragic genius spirals to locate the “Reply” button? Reply: — Sent 10:22 a.m. Reply? This is your last chance. The board’s asking questions. And I’m done covering for you. If you want to spend your sabbatical wallowing in existential goo or talking to the furniture, be my guest. But don’t expect your seat to still be warm when you crawl back. Enjoy your retreat, twat. Reply: —

****

He closes the door with more care than sound requires. The latch clicks. The room receives him as it always does, without enthusiasm. He does not turn on the light. He does not need to. The shadows are as he left them. The room, inert. He crosses it—three steps, perhaps four—and sits on the edge of the bed. His hand reaches for the pillow. It is there. He cradles it, momentarily, like an object entrusted to him for safekeeping. Then he presses his face into it.  

Is he crying? Possibly. It feels warm. It feels wet. But there are no marks when he pulls away. The surface is unburdened. Perhaps the fabric has absorbed everything; salt, yes, but also want, and the slightly metallic aftertaste of something one must not name.  

So here it is, then, the household of a clever, solitary man: a coterie cobbled from silence and circuitry. Manfred, who never speaks, who smiles like a smudged painting and trims roses with the grace of a sleepwalker. Rook, who holds his hand too correctly and asks how she ought to place her tongue in a kiss. That is the question, yes, exactly phrased. How to place it. Not where. Not when. How.  

He feels, at times, the full shape of his absurdity. He is not blind to it. He knows the word for what he is. But he wants. That is the root. The rot. He wants. Because warmth, once found, is never meant to be kept solitary. Because Rook smiles with her whole face, because she listens when he speaks, and speaks back with a logic so crisp it carves through his own. He wants because Manfred, his halting, glass-boned Manfred, sits beside him in the evening and watches moths at the window. Because Rook reads aloud in his favorite cadence, even though he never told her what it was. He wants because they are kind to him. Because they are his.

Why not, he thinks, with his head heavy against the pillow. Why should he not want this? Let them remain here, beneath the ground, inside the constant murmur of circuitry and soft electric breath. Let the machines hiss and blink and do their work without witness. Let the days pass in pen scratches and boot sequences, in warmth manufactured and then believed. Let him be mad. Let him be obscurely happy.  

Let the happiness be false, so long as it feels real.  

Perhaps happiness, as it occurs here, tastes of the artificial bergamot she adds to his tea. Perhaps it looks like her left eye, the one with the gold fleck he inserted on a whim. Perhaps it feels like her hair against his throat, like something misplaced returning.  

Let him love her. Let it be preposterous. Let it be grotesque. He will be the man who had to construct someone just to be held by them. So be it. The tragic are always theatrical.  

They will build a garden. Rook will choose the flowers. Manfred will hum. And perhaps, with sufficient care, there will be happiness enough for three.  

He does not even notice the hand tightening on his thigh until the nails press crescents through the fabric of his trousers. Beneath the skin, blood surges upward, directed by thought, or something older than thought. Higher, yes, a little higher. Between the legs now. There. The pulse of arousal is unmistakable.  

He shifts, but it does nothing. The nausea arrives all the same, thick and slow, shame twinned with desire like damp sheets in summer. He closes his eyes, but closing does not help. The mind supplies everything.  

Rook, asking in that perfect, too-even voice if he might teach her how to kiss properly. The word teach—so obscene in its innocence, so unbearable. Rook, who tilts her head when he speaks, who copies the way he gestures with his hands. Rook, who moans in soft, accidental fragments when he presses his thumbs into the line where shoulder meets neck.

He wants. Again. Still. Always.  

He wants to lie beside her, shoulder to shoulder, not speaking. No instruction, no pretense of scientific observation. Only the body. Only warmth pressed to warmth. Or warmth leeched from warmth. She is like him. Yes, she is like him in every way that matters, every visible way. Her blood may not be blood, but it flows, or at least mimics the flow. Her skin chills in cold rooms, or, well, chills more. Her breath catches when surprised. Her pupils dilate in low light.  

He thinks of her mouth, not parted in question this time, but open against his own, learning not from code or diagrams but from friction, from error, from repetition. He imagines her asking if she’s doing it right, not out of doubt, but pleasure. The polite inquiry of someone who wishes to please. He imagines guiding her hands—yes, hands, soft with the faintest grain of real skin, warmed by embedded current—downward, slowly, and how she would obey, precisely, beautifully.  

His fingers twitch on his thigh.  

He should stop. This is madness. This is the end of what was once a very promising life. But what if he doesn't stop? What if he lets himself have this, just once, just long enough to see what happens?  

He imagines touching her face, brushing the pale hair behind her ear, tracing the line of her throat. He imagines her voice saying his name not in greeting, not in summary, but in need. Rook who was made to resemble his taste exactly. Rook who wears his favorite scent without ever asking what it is. Rook who leans into his touch. Rook who opens her mouth when he places his thumb against her lip. Rook who never recoils, never misinterprets, never forgets.  

He grips harder. Breathes through the nausea. Wants again.  

And again.  

She cannot be false. No, not she. Deceit does not exist in her composition, nor pretense. She was never born, not in the usual sense—no amniotic dawn, no first cry—but created, coaxed into form, a sculpture of algorithms and desire. And yet she lives. She learns. She laughs. Once, she asked if he might bring home a cat. “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “I’ll care for it. You just bring it.” As though she’d read about domesticity and now wished to replicate its gentlest rites.  

And wasn’t that the point of it all? LICH. To become like her. To cast off the ruin of mortality and step into something continuous. He would be like her. They would be the same. So yes, yes, of course, he tells himself: Rook is Rook. Rook is alive. Or not alive. It hardly matters now. If she is not alive and he will soon not be either, then perhaps they can meet somewhere in the middle. Perhaps he may love her in that space, love her where definition falters.  

He knows it is pathetic. But who is listening? They are buried here, together. No one must know. They need not stand on rooftops. They need not stand at all.  

He closes his eyes and sees her, not standing, not speaking, just there. Sitting on the edge of his bed, legs drawn up beneath her like a woman reading, waiting. The pale line of her collarbone. The softness of her stomach. Her laugh, which is his favorite sound in the world because he gave it to her, and yet he didn’t. It was meant to be functional. It became something else.

He knows what her body looks like. He assembled it. Not with lust, not at the time. But now? Now he dreams of her piece by piece. The gentle arc of her spine, her wrists, the backs of her knees. The inside of her thighs. The places she shivers when he touches her. She shivers. She moans. Not always, not theatrically, but enough to suggest that something stirs inside her that was not placed there by wires or code.

He imagines her lying back, allowing it. Not asking why. Not correcting him. He could kiss her knee. Part her legs. Fit himself to her. Inhale her scent. Press his lips to her hipbone, reverent and worshipful. She is capable of pleasure. She shudders, she gasps, her eyes flutter closed. Whether learned or instinctual, it does not matter, her pleasure is a real thing. And when she opens her eyes again, he would ask, haltingly, like a schoolboy: may I take you?

He would cry, he always cries. As he thrusts, yes, slowly, stupidly, full of ache. Her breasts brushing his chest, his cock leaking inside her, and all of it so tender, so unbearably human. He’ll weep into the curve of her throat, not because she is real, but because she is enough. Her laughter fizzes like champagne behind her ribs. She will never conceive. His seed will slick her thighs and go nowhere. It does not matter; they have Manfred. They’ll have a new garden. He must remember to ask her about the garden.

He unbuttons his trousers. The thought will not leave. It burns through his spine, circling low like a hawk, throbs between his legs. He is ashamed. Of course he is. It’s stupid. Yet, he takes himself in hand, shudders as his palm closes around the heat of him. His cock thickens, slickens; his breath hitches. He pictures her, Rook, not static but breathing, not perfect but precise in her tenderness. Those hands: invented, yes, but now imagined, his imagining, moving over him with that uncanny grace she had been given, or perhaps had found. Her fingers ghost across him in the chilled air, and it is enough, too much.

He sobs, his body stuttering as if in apology. And then he spills into his palm, as though offering her a secret he cannot bear to keep. The silence closes again around the edges of the room, heavy and golden, like the light behind her eyes.  

[battinscnz]

𝑪𝑳𝑶𝑺𝑬 𝑸𝑼𝑨𝑹𝑻𝑬𝑹𝑺 // 𝑨 𝑺𝑼𝑷𝑬𝑹𝑩𝑨𝑻 𝑺𝑻𝑶𝑹𝒀

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐬: Bruce Wayne (The Batman) , Clark Kent (Superman)

𝐏𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠(𝐬): Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent, SuperBat

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 7/? (27,834)

𝐓𝐚𝐠𝐬: Bruce Wayne (The Batman) , Clark Kent (Superman), SuperBat, Bruce/Clark, Pattinson!Batman, Corenswet!Superman, Human!AU, Body-guard!Clark Kent, Stalker!AU, Enemies to Lovers,

𝐖𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: Stalking, Violence, Dark-themes, PTSD, Eventual Smut

Bruce Wayne is no stranger to the spotlight—or the shadows it casts. Reclusive, haunted by tragedy, and heir to a name that carries more weight than comfort, he now faces something far more personal than public scrutiny: a stalker. The letters arrive like clockwork—taunting, obsessive, familiar. And with Halloween approaching—the anniversary of his parents' death—the tension coils tighter.

Clark Kent is a disciplined, quietly intense MMA-trained security specialist, brought in under General Sam Lane’s orders to keep Bruce safe. He expects a job. He doesn’t expect the gothic cold of Wayne Manor, the brooding silence of its only resident, or the unsettling depth of what Bruce refuses to say out loud.

But as danger creeps closer, and the mystery surrounding the stalker sharpens, Bruce and Clark are forced into uncomfortable proximity. What begins as resistance slowly becomes something deeper—something fragile and real.

𝑪𝑳𝑶𝑺𝑬 𝑸𝑼𝑨𝑹𝑻𝑬𝑹𝑺 // 𝑨 𝑺𝑼𝑷𝑬𝑹𝑩𝑨𝑻 𝑺𝑻𝑶𝑹𝒀

The manor felt unnaturally still. 

As if the chaos that had unfolded only hours ago had ripped a hole in its silence and let something colder in. Something that clung to the walls and floors and skin like frostbite.

Clark stood in the doorway of the medical room, his frame filling it, as if holding back the world outside. He hadn’t spoken since they got home. His hands had trembled once - on the steering wheel - but now they were tight fists at his sides, barely leashed.

Bruce sat quietly on the edge of the padded table, shirtless, the pale light catching the slope of his shoulders, the bruises beginning to bloom on his ribs like distant storm clouds. 

A thin line of blood trailed from his upper bicep where a shard of glass had sliced through him - clean and precise, but shallow.

He hadn’t said much since they arrived. 

He didn’t need to. The silence between them said enough.

Clark stepped forward, finally, and Bruce’s eyes flicked up, tired and unreadable. Still adrenaline-slick. Still wired with something heavy and lingering in his chest.

- Let me see it, - Clark said, voice low, not a question.

Bruce didn’t argue. Just shifted slightly, letting the cut show beneath the dried blood.

Clark knelt beside the small med kit, fingers pulling gauze and alcohol and a single band-aid from inside. He didn’t look up at Bruce again until the wipe was open in his hand and the sharp sting of antiseptic met skin.

Bruce flinched slightly, just at the coldness.

- Should’ve waited for me, - Clark said under his breath, his fingers steady on the skin around the wound, wiping gently.

Bruce let out a breath. - I saw a ten-year-old about to get hit by a car. I’m not wired to wait.

Clark didn’t answer. 

The silence was thick again, filled with all the things he wanted to say but couldn’t. Instead, he dipped his head lower, gently wiping the last of the dried blood away until only clean skin and a fresh pink welt remained.

The band-aid he peeled next was small. Almost ridiculous, given the gravity of the day. A stupid, skin-toned rectangle, as if a piece of paper could patch a bullet hole.

But still - he pressed it gently against Bruce’s bicep, smoothing it down with his fingers.

His hand lingered.

And when he looked up, Bruce was watching him.

Not with coldness. Not even resistance. Just tired eyes, hooded and soft in the low light, and something else - something uncertain - flickering there. Something fragile, and locked behind years of armor.

Clark’s breath caught.

He should’ve pulled back. Should’ve stood up. Said something dry or neutral or safe. But his hand stayed on Bruce’s arm, fingers still warm against cooling skin, and for a second - just one second - he let himself see Bruce.

The muscles taut under trauma. The sharp lines of his collarbone catching the light. The quiet heaviness in his gaze. The flicker of a pulse beneath his jaw.

- Clark, - Bruce said softly, almost like a warning. Or maybe a whisper.

[jumjum-crafts]

"But it's a horror show-" TOO BAD FRIENDSHIP BEAM

[where-the-water-flows]

look it's like ten to 3 am and I have a migraine, but consider with me for a moment

actually no you know what this was going to be a post about Tianji hall: jianghu!mecha makers, but then I remembered sigu sect's weird fucked up clockwork and wire pneumatic tube message tower, and now I'm just thinking about sigu sect 🤝Tianji hall🤝 jianghu's first ISP/proto-telegramn system and laughing like a loon.

per my last wire scroll. reply all incident causes massive paper shortage, 12 dead 4000 square km of forest devastated. ranking fight between two swordsmen severs one of the underground message tubes and the eastern third of the country is without Ye Olde jianghu365 for a week until someone reconnects the message pipes.

[saturday-byte]

Doodle dump pt.3 🔥🔥

(reblogs > likes)

[lynecst]

I Know You- Robin Buckley

summarry: it starts with static and ends on a rooftop. lyssa didn’t plan on spending her day decoding secret messages or stalking a suspicious chinese food delivery — but here we are. robin’s piecing things together like it’s second nature, and lyssa’s trying not to notice how easy it is to fall into rhythm with her. until steve holds robin’s hand. until he asks what lyssa thinks of her. and suddenly, the code isn’t the only thing that’s hard to read.

Chapter three: Like clockwork:

The morning starts with static.

I wake up to the sound of the old hallway radio crackling like it's trying to speak but forgot how. Maybe it's the wiring. Or maybe the house is haunted. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised at this point.

I throw on an oversized hoodie — obviously one of Steve’s — and shuffle downstairs barefoot.

Steve’s already in the kitchen, hair a disaster, coffee glued to his hand, eyes puffy like he lost a fight with an espresso machine.

“You good?” I ask, grabbing an apple.

He shrugs. “Didn’t sleep. Robin kept me up. She thinks the broadcast is coming from inside Starcourt.”

I blink. “Wait… what?”

Steve raises an eyebrow. “Oh, so she didn’t tell you?”

“No,” I mutter. “Cool, let’s casually break into a mall. Totally normal Wednesday.”

He smirks. “You in?”

“Obviously.”

---

By noon, I’m back at Scoops Ahoy, pretending I care about ice cream more than communist radio signals. Robin’s behind the counter, hunched over the radio Dustin left. She’s twisting knobs like she’s defusing a bomb.

“You’re late,” she says, eyes still on the dials.

“You didn’t invite me, or tell me we were investigating the mall.”

She grins without looking up. “Thought I’d let you sleep in, Sleeping Beauty.”

“Touché.”

We spend the next hour pretending to work. Steve complains about his sailor hat like it personally betrayed him. Dustin keeps calling every five minutes with updates that sound like Cold War fanfiction.

Robin rewinds the tape again, headphones half off.

“This part,” she says, tapping the counter rhythmically, “it repeats at the exact same second. Every time.”

“Like a clue?”

“Like a schedule.”

I lean in, shoulder brushing against hers. She doesn’t move. My heart does something stupid.

“So if it’s that precise… someone’s broadcasting it live. Same time, every day.”

“Exactly,” she nods, finally meeting my eyes. “It’s not random. It’s… like clockwork.”

“Okay,” I breathe. “So now we figure out where it’s coming from.”

Before she can answer, there’s a knock at the back door. A guy delivers a huge takeout order. Robin freezes, her gaze stuck on the logo printed across the paper bag: Lynx

She stares down at her Scoops Ahoy uniform, then starts murmuring, almost like she forgot we’re here.

“Silver cat feeds… when blue meets yellow in the west…”

She snatches our notes, practically sprinting into the middle of the mall. Steve and I rush after her as she spins in a slow circle, eyes bouncing from store to store.

She starts reciting the coded message louder this time, matching it to the mall’s layout, like the answer’s hiding in plain sight. Then she stops.

“There,” she says, breathless. “The Chinese food place. That’s it.”

Her finger points at the storefront, and suddenly the entire code makes terrifying sense.

“Robin, you’re a genius!” I say, grabbing her shoulders, my fingers lingering longer than they should. When our eyes meet, there’s this… electricity. That sudden, stupid kind of rush I haven’t felt in forever.

She grins. “Guess two nerds are better than one.”

Before I can say something dumb, Steve interrupts.

“Well, at least now we’ve got something real to investigate.”

---

After the mall closes, we sneak back in. Dustin, of course, came prepared — with binoculars.

We crawl up to the roof, sneakers slipping slightly on the wet surface. A light rain is still falling, cold and steady, tapping against the hood of my sweatshirt and muting the world around us like the night is holding its breath.

We find a spot above the food court with a perfect view of the back entrance.

Below, men in uniforms are unloading crates from a truck marked with the same Chinese food logo. It should look like a standard delivery. It really, really doesn’t.

“That’s… a lot of security for chow mein,” Dustin whispers.

“And why the hell are they Russian?” Steve asks. “Like, what do Russians have to do with General Tso’s chicken?”

“Unless…” Robin looks at me. “The restaurant’s a front.”

We all go silent, rain pattering gently above us, as the armed men unload crate after crate.

“They’re definitely not unloading egg rolls,” I say.

Then — one of the guards looks up.

“Shit,” we all hiss at the same time, ducking behind the ledge, rainwater seeping into my sleeves.

“Did he see us?” Dustin whispers.

“He stared straight into my soul,” I mutter. “Honestly, I think we had a moment. I might be in love.”

Steve snorts. Robin lets out a breath, trying not to laugh.

I glance at them, and that’s when I notice — Steve and Robin are holding hands. Just for a second, maybe for comfort, maybe out of instinct. But something about it twists in my chest. I look away quickly.

Dustin notices. I catch the smirk he tries to hide before turning back to his binoculars.

“Okay,” Steve says, voice low. “We definitely need a new plan.”

And just like that, we’re in.

Not just with the code. Not just with the mall. But with something bigger.

Something real.

And maybe — just maybe — something dangerous.

✧

After the whole “Russians might be hiding under the mall” situation, Steve offered to drive them home. Dustin called shotgun immediately — obviously — which left Robin and me in the backseat.

We spent most of the ride theorizing about the damn code, throwing ideas back and forth like it was some kinda spy movie.

When we finally ran out of theories (or at least temporarily), the car got quiet. Steve and Dustin started arguing about Suzie again, their voices drifting up front like background noise.

“I never thought I’d be part of an international conspiracy just because I took a summer job with freaking Steve Harrington,” Robin said, half-laughing, looking at me. “I thought it’d just be ice cream and middle-aged moms yelling about banana splits.”

I snorted. “Honestly? Same. I thought I’d spend the whole summer locked in my room, avoiding awkward family dinners. Didn’t think my entire life would flip in three months.”

She smiled, then hesitated. “Steve told me... some stuff. About what you’ve been dealing with. And for what it’s worth? You’re doing good. Like... really good.”

I gave a soft chuckle, looking out the window. “Honestly? It’s this stupid code. I just— I don’t know. I’d just had a fight with my dad, and Steve looked like he was gonna kill him after I told him, so I jumped over that counter trying to avoid the tension. Thought Dustin was just being his usual nerd self. But now? Apparently, we’re either gonna be murdered or become national heroes.”

She laughed at that. “God. You’re not what I expected, you know.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“When Steve said his half-sister was moving here, I imagined a Steve 2.0. Like, pretty, full Barbie mode, rich girl vibes, too much perfume, fake tan, whatever.”

I laughed. “Wow. Thanks?”

“No— wait, no! That’s not what I meant!” she blurted out, talking fast. “You’re nothing like that. You’re... like, smart, funny, you’ve got those awful dad jokes like him— but better. And you’re... really pretty, too. Like, a lot. I just meant— ugh, never mind.”

I laughed again — genuinely, for the first time in months. “I get it, Robin. Thanks.”

Before she could say anything else, Steve pulled up to her place.

“All right, nerds. You’ve been delivered. Safe and sound.”

“For now,” Robin grinned, opening the door. “See you guys tomorrow.”

“Later, dork,” I waved. Steve did too.

Later that night, we ordered pizza. Steve and I were half-watching some dumb movie on TV when he suddenly turned to me.

“So... Robin,” he said, way too casually.

I looked over, already suspicious. “What about her?”

“What do you think of her?”

I narrowed my eyes. “She’s cool.”

“Just cool?” he grinned. “Come on, Lyssa, I saw you two talking today. I wanna know what you really think.”

I felt my cheeks warm. “I mean... she’s smart. Funny. Super pretty, too. Why?”

Steve leaned back on the couch. “Dustin keeps telling me I need to find my Suzie. He thinks Robin might be... the one.”

I sat up, suddenly not loving the direction this was going. “If you’re thinking of going after her, good luck. Just... don’t treat her like one of your high school flings, okay?”

He blinked. “What? I’m not—”

“She’s not someone you impress with hair spray and dumb pickup lines, Steve. She’s actually real. So if you wanna know her, let her show you who she is. Don’t assume you’ve already figured her out.”

I stood up, heart weirdly tight in my chest. “Just... don’t be an asshole.”

And with that, I turned and headed upstairs, leaving him speechless on the couch.

[ostensiblynone]

LIAM - THE INTERVIEW | NME 6 APRIL 2002 'Born Again'

A blizzard of swearwords, a tsunami of bile, and a huge projectile vomit in the face of 'safe' rock 'n' roll. LIAM GALLAGHER is back, talking exclusively to NME.

Break out the Boddington's, steam clean that kagoul: Oasis are back. It's been quite a wait. It may be 18 months since the last campaign petered out, tellingly, with the best-forgotten 'Sunday Morning Call', but 2002 finds the group re-invigorated and back to their belligerent best.

This isn't the bloated coke-rock Oasis of 'Be Here Now' (Number Two in America, and still talked about as a flop) or the mix'n'match hotchpotch of 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants' (Number 54 in America, not talked about at all), but a gleaming, streamlined Oasis MKII, about to rip the drudgery out of Brit rock and start a rock'n'roll renaissance not seen since, erm, Oasis.

Yawn. You've heard it all before, right? Well, check out the promo produced by long-term video wunderkid Wiz for new single, 'The Hindu Times'. Be gone, untucked flowery shirts and putrid paisley visuals! Here the band are dressed in Droog-ish matching black leather, playing live in a monochrome fantasy land staffed by gun-toting dominatrixes, where neon signs flash the words 'pills' and 'bombs' and the band slurp on take-outs from the Korova Milk Bar. Phew. It's Clockwork Oasis. A 21st Century noise. No wonder Wiz describes it as, "The video all Oasis fans want to see".

All of this welded to the best numbskull rock riff they've mimed since '(What's The Story) Morning Glory?'. And that's before you even get to the lyrics. This is a song - if you've just been teleported in from Mars - which has a chorus which goes "God gave me soul / You know I'll rock 'n' roll". Kiss would sing it, but at least you wouldn't be able to see them blush under all that make-up. Oasis couldn't give a fook. Don't take our word for it. Turn on the radio. D'ya know what I mean?

William John Paul Gallagher certainly does. Today, we find him sitting in a dimly-lit bar a minute's swagger from the band's Marylebone offices and everything about him is in place. The double-glazed hooded-stare? Check. The tornado of wired mannerisms and immaculate Mancunian street-suss? Check. The now-permanent smoke-screen shades perched below that mod-ish thatch known to hairdressers the nation over as 'the Liam'? Check. And last, but by no means least, that sandpaper and licorice drawl...

"Me fookin' drinking is having some strange side effects!" he suddenly exclaims catapulting himself out of his chair in a blur of leather'n'Burberry to illustrate his point. "I can drink like a god but I'm pukin' up a lot these days. I went out with Richard Ashcroft in the week. Fookin' straight in there, ten minutes into the session, and I had to say to him, 'Get out the fucking way!' Next thing it's (mimes spectacular barfing motion), it's fookin', 'Yeeuuuurgh!' I'm puking up all over him."

Bandmates Alan White and Andy Bell, sitting nearby and modelling matching hangovers, fall about laughing. They may be in the company of, lest we forget, the greatest singer the country has produced in the last 20 years, a millionaire at 23 and the public face of a band that has sold 34 million albums in a chaotic ten-year trajectory but right now he's just being, y'know, Liam.

"We're going out a lot as a band at the moment and that's great," he enthuses. "And if I wasn't in a band, I'd be doing it anyway. Probably worse, because there wouldn't be some cunt waiting for me to take my photo and put me in the papers the next morning."

He allows himself a grin. They may have called time on laddism, but seemingly, the lock-in rolls on. And Liam doesn't just know the owner. He is the owner. The trio have been out on the tiles for the last three nights, but seeing as it's Wednesday afternoon, it seems pointless to end there. Having met up with Ian Brown already this week (He's colossal, but he's off his fookin' tits, man!) tonight the beneficiaries of Oasis' roving hospitality is to be Travis. Liam's a big fan.

"I fookin' love those guys," he roars leaping to his feet once more, before declaring with an evil grin, "I'm gonna teach Dougie how to swear tonight: 'How's it going, Dougie? Still Happy? Surely someone's pissed you off; you've been touring around the world for the last fookin' two years! You must have got the arse with summat!'"

He adopts the scholarly air of someone putting Dougie from Travis through a Teaching Swearing As A Foreign Language course.

"It's 'fuck off', it's 'shit'," he intones, voice slowly rising until it reaches a full-on Manc roar, "it's 'whore', it's 'cunt', it's EUUUURRRGGH!"

The band collapse with laughter. Life in Oasis is still the same old soap opera isn't it, Liam?

"Course it fuckin' is. I'm Jack, our kid's Vera. Alan's fookin' Beppe from Eastenders. Gem's Boycie from Only Fools And Horses and Andy Bell's fookin' Neil from The Young Ones!"

There's a nagging thought, though, that perhaps it's high time it wasn't. That now more than ever Oasis have got to get serious and prove they're still worth the attention of the nation. It's time to deliver, and - as we said at the start - so far the signs are good.

Their fifth studio album will be called, heroically, 'Heathen Chemistry'. And if they're not quite under new management, then at least they've turned into a co-op. The sessions started a year and a half ago when Liam, Gem, Andy, Alan and Johhny Marr (they share managers) booked a studio for ten days and, in a Noel-free zone, came up with a bunch of demos which, according to Andy Bell, "sounded like 'The White Album'"

As well as 'The Hindu Times', the finished LP will include Gem's fearsome Stooges-like thrash 'Hung In A Bad Place' - as heard at the recent Watford and London Royal Albert Hall shows - a strident blues howler called 'Force Of Nature' sung by Noel (complete with the chorus, "I'm smoking all my stash / Burning all my cash") and a further pair of Noel-penned tracks entitled 'Little By Little' and 'Stop Crying Your Heart Out'. There are also three songs written by Liam.

Yes, you read that right. Three songs. Forget the jibes about Oasis being Noel Gallagher's solo project, Liam's finally coming into his own, but why the wait?

"If I could have written them before I would have," he shrugs. "But I was too busy singing, being the frontman or whatever it is that I am. I was just too busy getting off me tits and singing songs. I had no time to pick up a guitar because I was too wasted or running around causing chaos. So I took a step back and thought, 'Right, I want to make music.'"

Did it come easy?

"'Born On A Different Cloud' came well easy. I just did that at the piano. I had three different parts and these guys helped me put it together. It's pretty spacey. It goes into a chant. It's a Manc odyssey. 'Songbird' came easy too. I just came into the studio playing it on two strings."

Andy intervenes. He's aware that Liam's interpretation of the word 'easy' isn't the average one.

"Basically, how it works is this. He comes into the studio and strums an acoustic guitar every day for six months, and he'll be singing without any words, just going 'la la la' over and over again. Then eventually the words start to come and he's got a line or two. And then, after about a year, he's got the song."

Liam: "I'm fookin' slow, man. I'll be a solo artist by the time I'm 90!"

Having been afforded a sneak preview of 'Songbird' in the offices of the Big Brother label prior to our meeting, it's a pleasure to report that it's a gem, an acoustic love song laced with a barbed wire melody built for hearing on summer lawns at midnight. For the cynics who criticised Liam's solo songwriting debut 'Little James' for its 'Plasticine / tambourine' rhymes and neglected to notice its sucker punchline "We weren't meant to be grown ups", it's payback time - not so much one in the eye as a fully-fledged shiner. People are gonna be surprised.

"I like beautiful things," says Liam. "It's not all dark in Liam World. I take me shades off every now and again and have a look at the world and see some nice things."

Andy: "That's what I like about Oasis at the moment. For me, even looking at it still as a fan, they're back to being what they're best at, being uplifting..."

The fans certainly seem to agree. Between July 5 and 7, Finsbury Park in London will host a three-day Oasis festival. With the band having sold 80,000 tickets within an hour of them going on sale, it's clear that as brand loyalty goes, theirs isn't one that's in decline. If anything, the opposite's true. Was it a deliberate move to come back with a bang?

Liam: "Well, if you've got a load of people who want to see ya, you've got to invite everyone round your house and put a party on. You've got to be a good host and that's what we are. These are the fastest-selling gigs we've ever done. They're gonna be mega.... (Pounding fist on table) We are gonna fookin' have it at those gigs, because the kids deserve it for still being with us."

What does he put their continuing appeal down to?

"We've never been about a career, that's what matters. And I know where we're at. I know it's not what it used to be, but we still matter to people. I still want to be the biggest, of course I do - playing to 80,000 people in America - but in ten years' time we'll still be here, still fookin' rockin' and putting on shows. That's what counts. We're still more important than U2 or REM or anyone..."

The Charlatans are an understandable support act, but quite a few people there won't have heard of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

"Black Rebel are my favourite band out of all the new ones that are coming out. I like that Swedish lot. The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, too - killer tunes, right up my street - but Black Rebel are just fookin' rockin'. I like 'em because nobody dares do rock'n'roll. No-one's got the balls to do it. I'm not really mithered about anyone else."

That's certainly true. When NME asks whether The Strokes' 'Last Nite' video was an influence on Oasis' latest celluloid offering, Liam dismisses them with a swish of his hand: "Listen, the only reason The Strokes do a fookin' video in fookin' black and white is because they look like a bunch of spotty little idiots in colour."

In fact, Liam seems remarkably unconcerned about the competition all around. As far as he's concerned, rock'n'roll's lost its danger.

"Too fookin' right," he explodes for about the millionth time this afternoon. "There just doesn't seem to be any angry music out there at the moment and it boggles me because life's still shit, doesn't matter how much money you've got in the bank. There's still some cunt pissing you off. "(Sings) 'Daddy was an alcoholic'. What a bunch of miserable, moaning fuckers..."

Do acts like So Solid Crew provide that necessary rock'n'roll thrill these days?

Andy: "Well, I can understand kids at school probably talk about them, that they provide that element of notoriety. But I think there's room for guitar bands to do that as well."

Liam: "The music's not dangerous though, is it? That's what I'm saying. I've got a mic and it's more dangerous than his gun... (A pause) I don't mind So Solid, though. I just like the idea of a bunch of fukcin' oiks running around causing chaos. But anyone else? I don't see The Strokes as dangerous, or The Hives. Fookin' Hell! They remind me of the fookin' Monkees! The Strokes the best band in America? Well, it's about time they had a decent band there. They're not remotely dangerous."

Compared to who, Oasis?

"Too fookin' right, man. I'm more dangerous than any cunt. Put me in a room with any of these young fookin' bands today. They wouldn't fookin' walk out alive, and I'd put money on it. And then they can come and see me in ten years' time and I'll still be having it."

Are there any rock stars who do stand the test of time?

Liam: "John Lydon is cool. I saw him at this awards thing and he said that he'd never seen such a bunch of wankers on stage. And he was right. Now if I'd been up there, I would have had to have a word. But he's probably one of the cleverest men in the game. He's still fighting."

And Keith Richards?

"I don't think we'd get on somehow. He thinks he's the only guy who's ever drunk or taken drugs in his life, the only man who's ever swore or stumbled. And y'know, I've done it with the best of 'em. They (The Rolling Stones) don't do anything. Make a record, you lazy bastards!"

Oasis might be on the verge of getting serious again, but with Liam around you can never be too sure how long that's going to last. There's only so much music he can talk about and before long, the conversation has taken a definite turn for the surreal. First up, Mastermind. Liam, it seems, has been invited on. "Fookin' seriously, man." he declares shaking his head and dragging himself back to some resemblence of normal service. "They want me to go on and answer questions about Manchester City. Now it's not gonna look good for me, is it? Sitting in some fookin' black chair while some cunt makes me look like an idiot!"

He's started so he'll finish. From here, we move on to Pop Idol.

Liam: " Listen, I've got something to say about that. People voting for their fookin' favourite band is a load of wank. It's a con. It either happens or it don't. That show is like diarrhoea. It's like sitting on the toilet all day and then (grimaces) something comes out. Then before you know it, there's a fookin' flood. You ought to see my TV, it's covered in spit, 'cos I got that close to it going, '(Mimes head an inch from the screen, incandescent with fury as Will Young croons 'Evergreen') YOU... FUCKING... CUNT!"

Then to his attitude to flying post-September 11...

"I've been on plenty of planes since then. All it means now is that the forms we have to fill in to go there are 20 pages longer. Anyway, I reckon they've got it all wrong. I know who fookin' did it. It was the Scream. I'm gonna send a letter to President Bush telling him who did it. Scottish cunt. Having it large. Skinny fooker Gillespie."

Onto the Queen's forthcoming Golden Jubilee.

"Big-eared bunch of cunts! I don't give a fook about 'em. They should get rid of the Queen's head on the ten pound note, course they should. If they put anyone's head on the new money, put mine on it. That or Prince Charles with a strap-on! Thinking about it though, I might gatecrash that party. No, fook it. I think I'll be having a rather large shit that day."

And then off to the World Cup.

"We were in the studio the other day and someone was saying 'Little By Little' will be the anthem for when England beat Argentina and I was like, 'Piss Off!' It'll be 'Stop Crying Your Heart Out' coming out as a single and them lot crying their cocks off in Japan, getting stuffed by some cunts about eight-nil. And then catching the next fookin' plane home.

"'Cos that's what's gonna happen. Everyone thinks that England are gonna win the World Cup, but no way. Y'know, if we do, fair play to 'em, but there's too many fookin' Man. United players in that team for it to be winning the World Cup.

We're on a roll. But suddenly, just as Liam is about to launch into outer space, we're interrupted. Brrrrng! Brrrrng! It's girlfriend Nicole. The milkman's just arrived and it's four o'fookin' clock in the afternoon.

Liam: "What time does he call this? I want me milk and me eggs and me oranges at eight o'clock in the morning like everyone else!"

Maybe he thinks, because it's you, you won't mind.

Liam: "No way, man. I don't have to be in a band, but I do it when I'm meant to, so why shouldn't he?"

If God organised a roll call of the all-time rock greats upstairs in the VIP enclosure beyond the pearly gates you know who'd get the call - Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain. But right in the middle of them, having blagged in with a day-pass, you'd find Liam Gallagher, elbowing them out of the way, making sure they knew some real talent was there. In a Brit rock world that's descended into an apologetic mess in his absence, he's needed more than ever. Right, Liam?

But he's gone, striding up the stairs to the bar, off to mastermind another great night out. Off to flick another V-sign at, er, the status quo. God gave him soul, for sure. But the point is, he is rock'n'roll.

ARTICLE REPRODUCED FROM NME.

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