ethereays

[ethereays]

III. salt

REVENANT, au!remmick x reincarnated wife!reader

synopsis         Scarred throat. Ocean-wrecked eyes. A name that tastes like ash on your tongue: Remmick. He doesn’t flirt. He doesn’t ask. He just waits. With the patience of a man who’s died for you before. A man who remembers what it felt like to burn in your fire, to worship at the altar of your wrath. And he’s been waiting long enough to know the signs when your soul starts to flicker awake. When recognition hasn't bloomed, something older—something feral—starts to stir. Then walks in another ghost, one from this lifetime.  warning(s)       nsfw. mdni, 18+. sex occurring in dream. insomnia. blood. slightly pervy!remmick. more sea imagery. religious undertones. unhealthy coping mechanisms - mentions of one-night stands.  swearing. alcohol. smoking. slight! gore - descriptions of death/murder. implied jealousy. it dual pov time babyyyyy. 

angel talks          fuck me, this chapt took 5ever guys. I had to rewrite like a million times but i came up happy on this one. i'm so happy u guys loved the last one even tho it was a lil bit of a doozy. just had to hit yall w dual pov this time and a phat dosage of yearning here. is there a spn reference written in there? perchance :'). also we just hit 700 followers!! a celebration post will be coming soon so stay tuned for that! thank u guys for the tremendous amount of love, can't say it enough. muah! enjoy u freaks ;)

#NAV.ᐟ prev. II. hunger⋆.˚revenant mlist, au!remmick x reincarnated wife!reader⋆.˚ ao3

"and time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much

are you still mine?"

SALT MAKES THE BLOOD BITTER.

Or so the hollow-eyed sailors say, dragging the words with that lazy smirk like they invented it, tossing it at you when your temper flares hotter than the bourbon you pour.

You used to laugh. Now, it just grates.

It digs in deep, slow and steady, the way saltwater leeches into wood, warping the grain until even the strongest beam begins to bend. Finds every one of your nerves and lights it up raw, a slow burn until it eats away. Makes your hands twitch, jaw tense, until a glare sets mean and even behind your eyes and something sharp and dangerous cuts out of your mouth before you can stop it.

It shouldn’t bother you—not after all these years, not after hearing it spill from enough mouths to drown in. But still, it claws in deep. Still, it sticks. Because the worst part is you can’t pinpoint a time it wasn’t true.

You don’t remember softness, not the kind that stayed. Can’t remember nor tell where being gentle once began and where your temper rose up to smother it. Can’t recall a version of yourself that didn’t taste like brine and heat and bite.

And what makes you ache more than anything? You don’t remember being something pure.

Not in the Sunday-best sense. Not in the eyes-lifted, prayer-on-your-lips kind of way. But in the quiet way. In the before way. The way a soul might’ve once felt when it was still clean—not holy, not righteous—just unmarked. Before fear sunk its teeth in. Before fury became second nature. You can’t remember what it felt like to be untouched by survival and grit.

And survival? It ruins more than it saves. That much you’ve learned. If your memory—warped and waterlogged as it is—serves right, at all.

You tried, might’ve been several times, but still you tried. Tried to clamp your jaw shut around words sharp enough to draw blood. Tried to count to ten, clench and unclench your fists like it could calm the itch inside them. Like rage could be reasoned with. Like hands trained to break could be tamed.

But salt lives in you now. It lives in every crack of your foundation, every old wound that didn’t quite heal right. It coats your tongue, your breath, the backs of your teeth. It crusts over everything soft. Everything gentle.

Much like saltwater meeting fresh water—pushing, shoving, a brutal dance for dominance that only nature knows. Each shift, each pull, it feels like the earth itself is holding its breath, watching two forces collide in their ancient struggle. One fights for control, relentless, untamed, while the other resists, a quiet defiance against the inevitable. But nature doesn't yield to resistance forever. No. 

The currents settle, the tides find their rhythm. They clash once more—harder this time—until, at last, they merge, finding that delicate balance. It’s in the moment of surrender that they meld as one, a pact formed not by choice, but by the forces that govern the world beneath the surface. A peace that isn't so much an agreement, but an understanding. The saltwater pushes deeper, relentless in its hunger, until it overflows—its dominance undeniable, the fresh water’s purity diluted, swallowed whole.

And yet, the union doesn’t feel like a loss. No. It feels like a new beginning, an unspoken promise that with time, one will inevitably rise, and the other will give in. Until the cycle begins again.

Some say anything pure and still—cool as springwater, soft as a held breath—never stood a chance against something heavier. Against something brined and ancient, something that moves with weight behind it. Because purity may be precious, but salt is stubborn. Salt knows how to linger, how to cling to skin and soul alike. It thickens the blood, roughens the edges. It doesn’t ask—it consumes. And anything soft that stands in its path? It doesn’t get spared. It gets changed. Diluted. Hardened. Loved into ruin.

And maybe that’s what they don’t understand about salt. It doesn't just season. It preserves. It remembers.

Just like the wood beneath your hands.

The bar under your palms has memories of more than just spilled whiskey. It remembers the weight of fists and blood, the time you cracked a bottle over some dockhand’s head because he thought a drunk man's hands could trespass on things that didn’t belong to him. Your mouth had been worse back then—sharper, meaner, unafraid to tear into anyone who dared. The worst part? Sometimes, you miss her. Not the bruised knuckles or the bloodied knees. But the clarity. She knew what mattered. She didn’t ask twice.

“She was sweet ‘til she wasn’t.”

That’s what they whispered in town, where salt lives in every crack of the wood, and the gulls’ calls drift on the wind like warnings more than songs. They still remember you—sun-dried and freckled, hair pinned back in a way that looked accidental but never truly was, skirt hiked just a little too high for tradition. You could be seen humming behind the bar, sweet as anything, your mouth soft—unless it opened. And when it did? God help anyone who was around on a bad day.

Because when the red hit your cheeks, it wasn’t from the sun.

They still talk about the time you shattered a glass on the bar and told a man twice your size he could either bleed in the alley or apologize to the girl he'd grabbed. He didn’t make a choice fast enough, so you made it for him. Gave him a bloody nose and a black eye, and then told Jaime to clean up the mess while you threw back something that burned your throat raw. The mayor’s nephew tried his luck once, too. Got real close, whispered something about how a girl like you didn’t belong behind a bar. You dragged him across the counter by his collar so fast he choked.

The old-timers say the sea softens everything in time, that it wears away the jagged edges. But you know better. The sea is just another beast. And beasts know beasts when they see one.

Now, after a few strange years and too many nights swallowed by drowning liquids that stung on the way down and the cold concrete of pitiful county jail cells or bleeding knuckles, people say you’ve softened. They say the red faced men in too-tight collared shirts you tossed out of your bar—spat out like the sea spits up anything it deems too bitter to keep—were a kindness. They say that, somehow, every salt-bitten incident you clawed your way through has faded into something gentler.

You call bullshit.

You haven’t softened. You’ve just learned how to bury it in different places. Easier places. Quieter ones. You tuck it into the same liquor you pour for others, in the warm bodies that pass through town like ghosts, people you kiss like trouble and never expect to see again—and never do. You’ve learned to blow off steam in ways that don’t leave bruises, but still cut deep in their own way.

And the truth is, even that’s a kind of hiding. Because those lesser evils don’t just keep you moving—they keep the insomnia at bay. They dull the edges of mornings where your dreams claw at you, dragging you back under, where you wake up teetering too close to something you can’t name but know damn well could swallow you whole.

Call it whatever you want, but your blood still runs bitter—and you reckon it always will. Just like the old-timers say, thick with bite and salt and memories too spoiled by the past to ever sweeten. So until that bite finally stops tearing through your veins like it’s found its favorite meal, you keep smiling—keep trading pleasantries laced with sea salt and sun-warmed charm. Sweet on the surface, sure, but there’s always something bitter simmering just beneath, waiting like a storm on the horizon, ready to break.

And tonight, well, tonight feels like a breaking point for everything but your rage.

No, tonight—it's your body, undone, unraveling for that thinly veiled man whose favorite place to find you in your dreams is between your legs. Every night, you’ve felt him there—his presence, his hands, his breath—always lingering like a prayer you can’t quite remember. 

Tonight, you’re in a river.

Fresh water. Clean, cold, a stark contrast to the stinging salt you know so well. It’s icy, the kind that seizes your breath and shocks your body, but the sun overhead pulls a warm, quiet comfort from the chill. It makes you feel... right. 

The ache inside of you, the unbearable tightness, eases under the water’s touch. The way it moves over your skin is like the balm for some wound you can't even remember inflicting. Your back is turned to him. You don’t need to turn around to know who he is, the pull of him so familiar that it carves through your bones. But god, you feel him. You feel every part of him as he presses into you, his hands gripping your hips, your waist, anywhere his hands can find purchase. Those calloused fingers digging into you like they’ve forgotten how to touch anything that isn't wholly theirs.

He doesn’t let go. He never does.

His touch is sharp, relentless. You can feel the weight of his wedding band against your skin, glinting gold in the sunlight as it catches the river's surface. It burns, somehow—his touch, the weight of that ring, the knowledge that it’s meant to mark you, to brand you deeper than any ink or sin could. 

His pace, god, it’s unforgiving. He doesn’t move, not really—just ruts into you with a rhythm so fast and deep, you can’t keep up. Each thrust sends shockwaves through you, every push of his body against yours making the world around you spin. Your head tilts back against his solid chest, your hair plastered to your wet skin, mouth falling open in a gasp that feels like an exhale of something holy.

The river wraps around your legs, coaxing at you like it’s in a hurry to sweep you away, but you’re anchored by him. Anchored by his weight, his desperation, the feverish need that pulses through every inch of him. He doesn't let up, doesn't stop, even as the water rushes past you both, as if time has no hold here—only this, only the slow, inevitable burn of salvation and ruin intertwined in every movement.

His movements mark you with something heavier than lust. It’s like worship, but it’s violent, twisted, soaked in the kind of hunger that only the damned understand. There’s no pretense, no softness. It’s pure need—the kind that blurs the line between pleasure and punishment, between being devoured and being claimed.

And still, he presses, still, he takes—all with a force that sends your pulse spiraling. And he, much like saltwater, pushes deeper, relentlessly, until it overflows—his stubbornness undeniable, until it’s your very soul's purity that's diluted, swallowed whole

You’re drowning, caught in the pull of it. Caught between the river’s endless flow and the fire that licks up your spine. But it’s never enough, never. Not until the two of you are one, until his hunger consumes you whole, until there’s no fresh water, no salt, no body, no soul but the two of you, tangled in what feels like the inevitable.

Your body responds with instinct, with the knowledge that this is both what you crave and what will destroy you. The clash of these desires is the only thing that matters now—the sacred and the profane woven together until there is nothing left but the raw, desperate need to feel him break inside you. 

And just as you feel that familiar knot preparing to snap, that final release—the one that promises all the relief your body has been aching for—something cracks.

The ice-cold water that once embraced you now begins to shift. You feel it before you see it, a strange warmth unfurling against your skin, like a fire growing under the surface. Your eyebrows furrow, confusion settling in like a weight. You crack your eyes open for just a split second—and the sight is enough to pull you back, to rip you from that edge of bliss.

The water, once clear, once cold, is now thick, dark with blood. It swirls around you like some kind of living thing, and you’re painted in it, drenched. You don’t even have time to gasp before you hear him—his voice, low and satisfied, like he knows exactly what’s happening to you.

“Shoulda kept those pretty eyes closed f’me, baby. It was jus’ about to get good.”

And then—just like that—comes the sharp, brutal pain. It’s deep, sinking right into your pulse point, twisting like a knife made of hunger. Your body jerks in shock, but it’s too late. The wrecked groan that follows it is drawn from his very soul. It’s a sound that reverberates through your body, raw and helpless, like you're being torn apart and rebuilt at the same time.

And as he sucks, letting his teeth rip through your neck—pulling that same deep, wrecked groan —you feel the warmth of the blood around you, filling the spaces you didn’t even know were empty. It’s intoxicating, like drowning in something far deeper than the river. You can't decide if it's salvation or damnation. Maybe it’s both. 

“No, no. Not you.”

The words slip from your lips like a confession—soft, desperate, as though saying them could somehow stop the vision in your mind from taking root. But it’s too late. That’s the last thing that escapes your mouth before you shoot up in your bed, your chest heaving with the force of a breath you didn’t know you were holding. The room is still dark, the weight of the dream lingering like a fog in the corners of your mind.

Your hands tremble as they clutch the sheets, the cold sweat on your skin a sharp contrast to the heat of the nightmare you’ve just left behind. You can still feel the echo of it—him. The pull of his presence, the voice that was both a plea and a command, whispering through the shadows. The blood. The ache that doesn’t just settle between your thighs but in your ribs. 

The room is silent, save for the frantic thud of your heartbeat. You can almost taste the blood again—sharp, metallic—like you never left that river. It clings to your tongue, a reminder of something dark and unfinished. The dream hasn’t fully let go, instead it's wrapped its tendrils around you, squeezing tight. Your chest rises and falls in quick, jagged breaths as the remnants of it settle in the pit of your stomach.

You close your eyes, trying to steady your breath, pushing the images away, but they cling to you like a second skin. The weight of his presence presses against your ribs. You can still feel him—his hands, his voice, that haunting promise that sounds too real to be a dream at all. The echo of it buzzes in your ears, a hum that feels almost physical.

With an effort, you crane your neck to glance at the alarm clock on the nightstand. The numbers blur for a moment before they finally focus.

5:52 a.m.

“Too early for this shit,” you mutter, your voice raw from the remnants of sleep. The crickets outside, the soft rush of the sea, are the only things that hear you. The quiet is thick and heavy, like the fog that rolls in from the coast every morning, thickening the air, making it hard to breathe.

You pull yourself up from the bed, every muscle protesting as you swing your legs over the side. The floor is cold against your bare feet, the chill biting through the soles of your feet as you stand. Your head spins for a moment, your skin feels like it’s crawling.

The storm had cleared up, but the aftermath still lingers in the air. The clouds that hung low over the town yesterday are gone, replaced by a pale, washed-out sky, the light of the morning struggling to break through. The air feels damp, like the earth itself is scared of what will become of it when it exhales.

You shuffle across the room, hands rubbing your eyes in an attempt to tame the weariness from sleep, but it’s no use. It never is. You stare at your reflection in the bathroom mirror, eyes bloodshot and heavy, like you've been holding on to something for far too long. 

The face staring back at you doesn’t even feel like yours—not really. The tiredness in your eyes is a weight, something that’s been there so long you’ve forgotten how to shake it off. That hollow look of someone who's been running on nothing for too damn long. And for a second, the silence of your home swallows you whole, a deep, hollow thing, like the stillness between the crashing waves before the storm. It’s the kind of quiet that’s so heavy, it feels deafening—like it presses in on you from all sides, suffocating, unbearable. The air feels thick with it, the walls closing in as if the house itself is holding its breath. And you’re stuck here, drowning in that silence, searching for an answer that you know won’t come.

You ponder those haunted words, the ones that linger in your head, their meaning still sharp and raw, like salt cutting into an open wound. 

No, no. Not you. 

The words haunt you, reverberating like a chant that won’t stop echoing in your mind, spiraling out of control.

But who? Why? God, why do I beg, even if I don’t know who I’m begging to? 

You stand there, the floor beneath you solid but unsteady, like you could fall through it at any moment. The questions, the confusion, they weigh heavy on your chest, pressing down like the weight of the ocean. You feel like you’re sinking, pulled under by an unseen force, helpless against the tide that’s rising inside you. You feel the desperate ache, the pull of something you can’t grasp, can’t understand. A thirst you can never quench, no matter how much you cry out. 

Please. Please, someone—something—answer me. 

But the silence remains, as vast and unforgiving as the sea, and you’re left stranded in it, your voice swallowed by the storm brewing in your soul.

Why does this keep happening to me?

The question claws at you, relentless. Like a prayer unanswered, a plea that falls on deaf ears. And you wonder, maybe it’s not just the silence you’re drowning in—it’s the absence of something, someone, a presence you can’t even name. And you’re left to wonder if you’ll ever be saved, or if you’re fated to drown in this endless, suffocating silence forever.

"Ma’am?" A voice cut through the hush like a slow knife—thick, low, and foreign in the way old sea winds are, dragging itself through the stillness like it had weight.

Your body reacts before your mind can catch up, moving toward the sound almost instinctively, as if it knows something your brain hasn’t quite figured out yet.

"Hey there, stranger," you mutter, the words slipping out with a bite of salt, the edge sharp like a wave crashing against jagged rocks.

This voice—and the man it belongs to—has been haunting your counter for exactly five nights. Five nights of money barely trickling into the till, five nights of the same mind-numbing tasks to kill time, five nights of nightmares so vivid they bleed into your waking hours, and five nights of his presence, a constant, unnerving shadow. It’s not your usual regulars, not the familiar faces that blur together in this town—it’s him. The stranger, who’s somehow become a fixture of your nights, lingers like a storm that won’t pass—still raging even when the tempest from five nights ago has finally released its grip. That storm, the one that flooded the streets for a few of those nights, has calmed, but the unsettled feeling he brings still churns in the air, as relentless as the drizzling that lingers. 

And that accent—thick, foreign, oddly wrapped in far off Southern heat that's not placed anywhere near the sea and something older—dug its way under your skin like a splinter you couldn’t quite reach. It settled somewhere low in your spine and burned. You hated how it crawled inside your ribs. Hated more that he knew it. What a damn fool he is, you thought.

While always cut from the same cloth—same lean frame, same careful calm that didn’t match the chaos you knew lived behind his eyes—tonight he revealed something new. Subtle, but strange. Different in a way that made your stomach tighten without reason.

He wore a henley this time, dark gray or maybe navy, one of those muted tones that made his cerulean eyes shine like they meant to trick you. And sometimes, they did. Those weren’t the eyes of someone clean or saintly—no, they were storm eyes. Full of salted ruin.

But what caught you wasn’t the shirt or the stare. It was what the shirt didn’t hide.

That gold chain he always wore—always laid too pretty across collarbones that had clearly known pain—was no longer the only thing glinting in the low amber barlight. There, peeking just beneath the open collar, sat a pair of scars.

One ran clean across his throat. Precise. Calculated. Like someone meant it. The other was rougher—jagged and brutal—slashed across his collarbone like a warning carved in flesh.

You didn’t mean to stare, but it was hard not to. His posture, as always, was too perfect for a man who’d seen as much as he had. Back straight, shoulders set, but there was something different about the angle of his head tonight. Subtle. Tilted just slightly—as if his body, maybe even unknowingly, carried pride in the two acts of violence that brand him for everyone to see. 

He looked like a man who had no intention of hiding it. And you? You were still stuck somewhere between wanting to slam the nearest glass over his head, despite your unjustified annoyance with this stranger—or sit across from him and ask who carved him up like that and why it felt like a memory. 

Because that gnawing pulse at the base of your skull wouldn’t quit. A quiet throb, steady and unrelenting, like recognition hiding in the dark. You knew those scars. Not just in the way a bartender memorizes the faces that haunt their counter, not just in the way a woman catalogs every man who’s ever looked at her like a storm they couldn’t wait to drown in.

No, it was deeper than that. Like you could’ve been the one to lay those wounds yourself. Or worse—like you already had.

Delusional is what you are getting. Not soft, just plain delusional, babe. 

He chuckles at the nickname you’ve so casually bestowed upon him, nodding like it’s one he’s worn before. He sucks his teeth for a second, and it feels like your words are settling on him like dust on a shelf—accumulating but never quite making it past the surface. That it’s just all caught up on his teeth and not his tongue.

“Ya mind pourin’ for me? Whiskey, neat.”

His voice threads through the low thrum of the bar like smoke, thick and warm and meant for your ears alone—like a secret draped in molasses. The way he says it, soft and sure, you’d almost think it was a request. Almost.

You don’t answer right away. Your eyes are still scanning his posture. You let your fingers finish lining up the fresh glasses, let the silence stretch, taut and waiting. When you finally do decide to answer, it’s with a huff and a half-smile, your head cocked just enough to betray your amusement.

“Doesn’t matter if I mind,” you say, voice light, but eyes sharp. “Only matters if you’re paying. Who’s it gonna be tonight? My friend Jack or Jameson?”

He doesn’t blink. Just lets that faint smirk bloom, slow and crooked, like he’s savoring it.

“Jameson, darlin’.” That little drawl in the word, the way it rolls out like honey left too long in the sun—it shouldn’t hit the way it does. But it does.

“Jameson it is, stranger,” You nod.

Your hand reaches for the bottle of the Irish whiskey like it’s second nature, like every label on the wall is a line in a prayer you know by heart. A religion made of rye and regret, offered nightly to the desperate and the damned. You don’t need to look—the bottle is already in your palm, glass cool and familiar. You pour steady, no jigger, just instinct. One, two, three counts in your head. A pour like muscle memory, like an old wound pressed just right. 

He’s watching. You feel it, not on your skin, but somewhere deeper. Like the tide pulling in. Heavy, slow. Patient. The weight of it wraps around your ribs before you even set the glass down in front of him.

You slide it across with a tap of your finger against the wood. “Careful with that one. He’s got a bite.”

He catches the glass without looking down, eyes still on you. “So do you.”

You pause, just for a breath. Just long enough to let it sting a little. The smirk you offer is all edge, no warmth. It cuts clean, salt-ridden and sure of itself, like something that’s been sharpened on the bones of fools like him. 

“That pretty mouth won’t buy you a damn thing in my bar but trouble,” you say, voice smooth but low, the kind that doesn't ask twice. “Now drink your whiskey.”

His lips finally pull into that knowing smile—slow, deliberate—the kind that reveals his too-sharp canines and eyes lit with something just shy of sorrow, like he’s tasted loss and found it tender. Your expression falters for a breath, just a flicker. Barely enough to catch.

“Yes, ma’am” He says with a slow nod, that smile still carved too wide across his face—sharp, proud, and far too pleased for something laced in nothing but salt and bite.

In one smooth motion, he tilts the glass and downs the whiskey in a single pull. You track the way his throat works around it, the ripple of muscle, the way the light catches on that scar—clean and deliberate, carved straight across like some cruel signature. It stretches with the motion, almost sings with it. 

The corner of your mouth twitches up—just barely—a breath of amusement hidden behind practiced stillness. But you can’t help it. The sight of him like this, the light barely catching him like it’s afraid, posture damn near perfect, scars too bright, it tugs. At something.

Your curiosity rises more, like fog off the sea at dawn—soft but insistent. You shouldn’t ask, you try to reason with yourself. Maybe it’s a bad memory. A wound that hasn’t scabbed right. Maybe that pair of scars shining—the one you keep catching glaring at you when he moves—was earned in silence. Not meant to be spoken about, not in this place, not by your mouth.

But still, your eyes linger. You tilt your head, pretend it’s casual, like you’re checking the time or mentally going over your leftover tasks you’ve yet to get to. 

He’s been here for five nights now.

Five.

Same stool, same smirk playing on his lips when you give him even an ounce of your attention, same silence. No order, up until tonight, just a silence that leaves the tension thick. Like clockwork. Like ritual. And in all that time, his eyes always find you. Around you, through you, tracking ghosts in the corners of the bar that don’t exist.

There’s something about the way he stares. Like he’s waiting for a shape to appear in the smoke, for a voice to crawl out of the floorboards. Like he’s reading scripture no one else can see, scripture written in the way the bottles glint, in how your hands move, in how the air tastes after the rain.

You don’t know what unsettles you more—his constant, quiet presence that lingers like a shadow under your ribs, or the way your ears sharpen, just slightly, every time his voice cuts through the noise. The way your pulse stutters, traitorous and telling, every time he speaks. Not loud. Never loud. Just enough to make the air shift. Just enough to remind you he's there. And damn you, some part of you listens for it now—waits for it, like your body knows something your mind refuses to name.

Stranger things have come through your bar. Drifters, heartbroken men with cash to burn and no intention of being remembered. But this one? This one is anchored. Not to this town, no. He’s tethered something else entirely. You feel it every time he walks in and your spine goes taut, every time his eyes follow the trail of your voice like it’s smoke he could chase back to the source.

“You look curious about somethin’, darlin’.” His head tilts slowly, voice coming in low, deliberate—like the words are meant to slip between the cracks in the noise and land only in your ears.

There’s a softness to it, almost lulling, like a man coaxing a lost girl out of the woods with nothing but a whispered promise. It’s disarming in a way it shouldn’t be, not from a stranger you’ve known for all of five days, a man who’s haunted your bar like a ghost with unfinished business. But the way he says it, the way it brushes up against your skin instead of the walls—it makes your stomach tighten with something you don’t dare name.

“Penny for your thoughts?” 

Your brows draw together like you’re the one asking him the question. He’s read you a little too well for comfort, peeled you open like a page halfway through the novel—and you’d be damned if you didn’t answer. You square your shoulders, chin tilted with something just shy of a dare.

“Humor me,” you say, nodding subtly toward the pale scars cutting across his neck and collarbone. “What’re those scars?”

“Remmick.”

You blink. “You named them? How sweet.”

Your tone drips with sarcasm, one brow cocked high—but the huff of laughter that slips past your lips betrays your amusement. He smiles once again, the kind of smile that doesn’t chase approval, just waits for it to find him.

“No, ma’am. Not the scars,” he says, eyes never leaving yours. “My name. Figured since I’ve been hauntin’ your bar five nights straight, may as well not go nameless. ’Specially if you’re gonna be askin’ questions.”

You nod, slow this time. The playful edge in your voice dies on your tongue, simmering back into something quieter. The name sinks into you like water through old wood—slow, sure, soaking deeper than it has any right to.

Remmick.

You let it sit on your tongue, let your mind roll over each syllable like waves breaking apart a name etched into stone. There’s something off about it. Not wrong—familiar. But in a way that makes the back of your neck prickle and your gut twist low, like you’d just walked into a room you swore you’d never been in, but could describe down to the cracks in the floorboards.

It wasn’t a common name. You’d never heard it spoken in this town, not once—not in whispers, not in warnings, not even in barstool stories told by old men too drunk to lie. And yet… it echoes. Deep in some part of you that doesn't often stir. 

And that—that unsettles you more than anything.

You swallow hard, the name still there, heavy as salt in your mouth. Something in you recoils from it, like a memory surfacing without context, like a storm forming on the horizon that you recognize by scent alone. You know that name. Not from this life, maybe. But you know it.

"That’s different. Suits you,” you say, simple and assured. The words come easy, firm but not unkind. Even as a flicker of unease flickers low in your gut, you don’t show it. 

And though you feel as if you don’t owe him a damn thing, not even civility sometimes even if you’re unsure why, something in you finds it rude not to return the gesture. Your name slips past your lips before you can stop it—clean, unguarded, no salt or bite riding its tail. Just… honest.

You’ve had these kinds of exchanges more times than you care to count. Names tossed across a bar like poker chips, empty and forgettable. A formality. Something to fill the space between drinks and glances.

But this—this isn’t that. This is different.

Different in the way no man you’ve ever met has looked half as pleased to hear it as he does now. Like you just handed him something sacred, not a name. Like it means more to him than it ever did to you.

He holds it, silently, like a prayer. Like he’s afraid speaking it aloud might ruin it. As if your name is something he’s been waiting on. And now that he has it, he’s not letting go. 

He just nods, offering a smile that lands far too tender. It lingers, gentle in a way that makes your throat catch, and suddenly the silence between you stretches too long—thin and taut like the pause before a wave breaks. The air, once yours without question, feels borrowed now. Less a right, more a privilege, and you’re not sure when that shift happened.

​​You clear your throat, trying to shake it off, anchor yourself back into the room, the bar, the moment. But the truth is—he’s shifted something. And if he’s noticed the flicker of uncomfortableness that dances behind your eyes, he doesn’t show it. Doesn’t press. 

“This one right ‘ere is actually one of my favorites,” he starts, voice low and laced with a strange kind of tenderness that doesn’t belong in a sentence like that. His fingers brush absently over the scar across his throat—clean but glaringly angry, like it never healed right. “Nasty thing I got at the time. Took too long to heal, and a hell of a lot longer to remind me why I got it.”

You blink, half in disbelief. “What’s the reminder? That you like getting mangled up?”

That pulls a laugh from him—full and unguarded, rich in a way that sounds like it hasn't been heard in a long, long time. It spills out of him easy, a sound made of heat and breath and something faintly worn down. The kind of laugh that makes your stomach twist, like you’d accidentally stepped too close to the edge of something deep.

You’re not sure why it makes your heart skip, or why that reaction annoys the hell out of you.

“Nah, honey,” he murmurs, shaking his head with a ghost of that smile still tugging at his lips. “Just a reminder that I might’ve been lucky once. Maybe more than I had the right to be.”

You frown, uncertain. “Lucky?”

He hums, like the word’s a secret between him and something you can’t see. “Keeps a man like me humble. Reminds me of somethin’ real sweet, if ya ask me.”

Sweet.

You stare at him, at the mess of scarred skin and old wounds and a voice wrapped in velvet and ash. You try to reconcile the word with the violence he’s described. With the way he touches that scar like it’s a relic, something holy. You try to understand how a man can call pain lucky, how he can describe something torn and bloody and by the looks of it, nearly fatal, as sweet.

For a moment, your gaze drops—almost involuntarily—to your hands. Your fingers, calloused and sure, had been drifting over the pale ridges of old scars on your knuckles without you even noticing. Little ghosts of violence, carved deep into your skin by the life you’ve led and the choices that came with them.

You think back—back to the heat and rage that made those marks, back to the broken jaws and bloodied noses, the sting of split skin and the way adrenaline can feel like power when you’ve got nothing else to hold. You try, genuinely, to find where in all that ruin anything could’ve been called sweet.

Maybe some of it was satisfying. You’re not sorry for most of it. You don’t lose sleep over the men who had it coming—who left your bar or your life with a lesson they should’ve learned long before crossing you. Maybe some of it was just stupid. The kind of stupid born from being young, blood salted and ruined for anyone that looked too close, and too angry to be anything else. You were good at that kind of stupid. Used to wear it like a second skin. Hell, some of it might’ve even been worth it. Fights that changed things. Shifts that needed shifting. A path, as jagged and bloody as it was, that still somehow led you closer to yourself. But sweet? No.

Sweet was a word for warm pie, slow mornings, or kisses to your forehead from a loved one. 

Not blood. Not pain. Not even in the deep depths of dreams that have no right to haunt your very being. And certainly not in the kind of scars you carried.

“You’ve got a strange definition of sweet, Remmick.”

Your words hang there, low and dry, tinged with something that might’ve been teasing if it didn’t carry the weight of old bruises behind it, like testing his name on your tongue didn’t make your hands twitch. 

He doesn’t answer right away. Instead, his gaze dips—slow and deliberate—down to your hands. Those same hands you’d just been studying yourself, knuckles worn with time, stained with memory, etched with every lesson life hadn’t asked permission to teach.

And he looks at them like he knows them. Like maybe he’s seen hands like yours before—bloody, bare, defiant. Or maybe he just recognizes the way a body tells its own story when the mouth doesn’t bother.

There’s a flicker across his face then. Something quiet. A pull of thought that drags him far off, deeper into some corner of himself you haven’t been invited to. Whatever he’s thinking, he keeps it tight behind his teeth. Just gives a small nod—slow, almost knowing—like he’s chewing on your words, letting them sink in and settle in the pit of him.

When his eyes finally find yours again, there’s something unreadable there.

And though his mouth curves into that same faint, too-familiar smile, it doesn’t touch his eyes this time. It looks more like muscle memory than emotion—like a man who learned long ago how to grin through ghosts.

“Sweetness don’t come easy to a man like me, but there was a time it did. Even if it looks like this.” 

He doesn’t break eye contact when he says it—and somehow, in that slow, loaded pause that follows, it doesn’t feel like he’s talking about the scar carved into his throat at all. Doesn’t feel tethered to the violence you were just circling.

No, it lands heavier. Crooked. Like a stone dropped in still water, rippling out into something else. Like the conversation had shape-shifted without permission—and now you’re both standing in the middle of a different truth entirely. Beneath the weight of his smile, somewhere, under the swell of brine and barlight, the sea outside claws a little closer to shore.

One of Remmick’s earliest memories of his time with you was soaked in bruises, sweat, and the kind of silence that only followed blood. Work that broke the back and bent the soul. Land that didn’t care what your name was—it’d chew it down to bone and spit it back into the dirt like it never mattered. Long nights beneath a sky too beautiful to be real, stars too bright to belong to any man damned as deeply as him. 

And salt. Always the salt. 

“Salt over bones,” you’d muttered, hands stained red and shoulders steady, burying a man — rifle and all — who’d crossed your fences with bad intent and worse luck. “So the fucker it falls on don’t ever come back.”

You’d said it like scripture, like you were reciting something passed down through bloodlines rather than choosing it in that moment. Then you lit him up without so much as a blink, flame catching fast and hot, like you’d done it a hundred times before and wouldn’t mind a hundred more. 

Hellfire, you called it. Said you weren’t sending him to it — just speeding up the process.

That counted for something in his book. Maybe too much. He’d called it luck back then. Dumb luck. Luck he had no right to carry. To still be breathing, to not be the one buried, salted, and burning under your watch even when he’d showed up uninvited.

But deep down, he knew better. Even if he sat here now — barely alive and in the flesh — you’d already burned him once, and never stopped. Already buried and salted his bones long before he ever hit the dirt and his heart stopped beating and just started whispering your name.

And still… All he ever wanted was to live in your fire, let it rip through him the way it always did — like Hell itself — as long as it was your hands feeding the blaze and your mouth carving your name onto his tongue.

But that thought, that devotion… it festered. Turned feral. Gnawed at him slowly in the nights that followed long after you were gone. It clawed at the edges of his skull on every train car, every grimy bunk, every throat he’d ripped through in hopes of any answer, every godforsaken boat he took in some half-crazed hope the shape of you would appear again — standing on the platform, waiting at the docks, or in some far-off field.

The shape of your land lingered too. The land that still stank of you — copper and wildfire, your anger and gunpowder. And something softer he never could shake: the faint sweetness of vanilla and honeysuckle oil you used to smother your pillows with, the kind that clung to your hair, your collar, your skin. He swore he could still smell it sometimes, in the dark. Sweet and dangerous, like you. Like everything that ever mattered. 

You left it. And that… that he could never piece together. How the hell could you leave the land that cradled your name long before your mama ever uttered it? Land that fed you, never lied. Never once turned its back on you. Even when it tried to bite you, it was only to keep you alert, sharp. It bled you only when it had to, to keep you honest. The same way you bled him, right there at his throat and at his collarbone. Marks that sang like memory and stung like scripture. 

You chose to leave that. Ran from it like it never meant anything.

He tried—God, he tried—to make it just about that. About the land. About betrayal of dirt and fence posts, of something sacred and inherited. But the truth lodged itself deeper, like shrapnel between ribs.

It wasn’t about the land. It was about him. Always was and always will be. 

You’d left him on that soil. Left him barely breathing, in your absence like it was a disease. Left him with the ghosts of your bootprints and that quiet kind of fury only you knew how to wield. And he couldn’t stop wondering—wasn’t he worth staying for? Eternity was made for love like yours to last, right?

It was selfish. He knew that. Foolish and full of manmade ache. But that didn’t stop the question from echoing. Not when hunger was the most loyal ghost he had left—hunger for your voice, your wrath, your hands, your lips, your fire, even if it came with a knife at his throat.

He was dead the moment the teeth — not yours, not human — sank deep into the meat of his neck and stole whatever little life he had left. Dead he was, yes. But you — you — killed him. Because after that, you left. Left without looking back, without mercy, full of rage and the kind of silence that hurt more than any bite. Left him standing in the ruins of himself, blood whispering your name like a prayer and a curse all at once.

But it was love — stubborn, unholy love — that held him together. Kept him human, or what was left of him anyway. Because when he loved you? Well, his hunger loved you too.

Like flood tide breaking every levy he ever built in your absence. And hunger like that… it doesn’t quiet. It doesn’t forgive. No — it grows. It spreads. Wild and untamed, a thing with claws and teeth of its own, gnawing at his insides like it was born to undo him. It kept biting down through decades of calcified breath and brittle hope, through every scar and prayer he thought he’d buried deep enough to forget.

And the cruelest part? It wasn't death. It wasn’t even the leaving. It was knowing that hunger would never, ever, be enough — not until it found you.

But as he watched the lazy sway of your hips to the low, smoky jazz curling out of the jukebox, his chest tightened like a snare. You moved like sin dressed in denim — curves caught in the amber glow, jeans that clung cruel and perfect to every dip and curve he’d already spent hours and years memorizing until it branded itself behind his eyelids, and would spend eternity chasing, if only you’d just let him have it back. 

The hunger in him — old and sharp, buried deep in marrow and soul — flared hot then, licking through his ribs, catching fire in every corner of him you’d ever touched. Now this — this was fucking cruelty. Salted, bitten, and chewed up, cruelty. 

Because no matter how close you stood — no matter how many decades he’d crawled through the dirt and dark just to get here — he couldn’t reach out and grab you. Couldn’t let his fingers find their rightful place at your hips, or sink his teeth into the soft place where your pulse beat wild. To see you, to hear you — salted and biting, sharp as ever — was a blessing, sure. Maybe the only blessing he’d ever been handed by a God he never put faith in.

But to not reach for you? To sit there, watching, while his own hands stayed clenched at his sides? That was punishment. Worse than chains, worse than any hellfire. That was damnation itself. And it only made his blood run hotter. Like the devil’s own hunger coiled in his veins — gnawing, snarling, begging to consume, to claim what it already knew was his.

He’d spent so long—too long—with nothing but time on his hands. Time you should’ve filled. Time you should’ve burned through like wildfire, devouring every second, every minute, every goddamn year the way only you could. Greedy. Righteous. Yours by design.

Instead, he wandered—silent and starved, hollowed out and hunting. The century peeled away in ribbons, and he let it. Let the decades rot as he chased shadows that looked almost like you, sounded a little like you, burned a fraction as bright. 

But he always knew deep down, you didn’t just burn. You scorched.

And he’d cracked it eventually—this cursed, aching truth that if things like him existed, there had to be more. More cursed souls, more damned ones. More creatures that refused to die properly. Refused to disappear. Souls like his, stretched thin and soaked in sin. Souls like yours, too brilliant to extinguish, too stubborn to let go.

If vampires walked the earth, then so did ghosts. Then so did echoes. Then so did you.

He started finding patterns. Whispers. Threads in the tapestry—legends of souls that kept returning, always restless, always reaching. Sometimes human, sometimes not. Always burning. He learned to look for it—that familiar blaze behind borrowed eyes. That grief that had no source. That memory shaped like a scar across the heart. Souls caught mid-promise, mid-love, mid-death.

And yours—God, yours. Of course, it was the cruelest of them all. A soul he knew bound by design to never stay buried. Bound to return with a raging grace. Bound to never return with peace. Bound to claw its way back into the world—teeth bared, heart wild, beautiful and mean and fucking ravenous. Just like the first time you came into this world.

And that meant it took longer. Longer than the universe had any damn right to make him wait.

He’d spent lifetimes chasing it—aching years and nights that bled into each other. Tracking. Hunting. Tearing through bodies, ripping open names in manifest logs and yellowing registries, chasing the wake you left behind on that shore, on that godforsaken ship. The same one you vanished from. The same one you chose to die on instead of letting him touch you again.

It wasn’t his first time in this cursed stretch of coast either. Not by far. He’d been here before, once—barely living, feral, starved for a sliver of your soul, mouth full of your name. He’d come with blood under his nails and nothing left to lose. But you hadn’t been here then. Just the taste of you in the sea air and the ache of something not yet brought into fruition. Something unfinished. 

Still, his arrival was ruin made flesh.

The vanishing of half the town wasn’t just the sea’s doing—though the storm they blamed it on came howling like scripture, wrathful and divine. A flood of teeth and thunder, of winds that tore roofs from homes and swallowed ships whole. But storms don’t leave claw marks. Storms don’t snap spines or scatter limbs like driftwood. No, that was him. That was the truth buried beneath all the whispered legends and rewritten history.

It hadn’t been a cleansing, not like the stories liked to tell it. It was merely a lullaby meant to pacify what truly happened. A smearing of blood beneath the tide, the storm sweeping clean the evidence of what he’d done in the grip of hunger that had no language, only pure rage. Dozens torn apart, mauled so thoroughly they barely resembled the people they'd once been. And yet, back then, humanity still held tight to its illusions—still clung to the fantasy that there was a line between myth and man. Still thought that fear could be reasoned with, contained.

That was before they made laws to open this place to the rest of the world. As if more humans and the grueling distance and unforgiving waters could save them from the kind of hunger he carried. As if isolation could stop the inevitable from knocking on their doors with blood-stained hands and a grin full of wrath.

He never came for the town. Never gave a damn about its docks or its drowning men and women, its boarded windows or salt-bitten prayers when that storm came. That was just the noise—the collateral dressed up in chaos, perfectly timed, perfectly expendable.

He came for you. 

And when the ancient, merciless laws of this world finally relented—cruel as ever—they brought you back. 

Here you were, finally. 

And as if the universe hadn’t punished him enough—hadn’t wrung him dry, hadn’t watched him rip through decades and spill blood like wine—this was how it chose to break him further: by giving you back exactly as you'd been.

Not in borrowed skin. Not behind someone else's face. No disguise, no altered fate.

You—just as you were when you left him. Same voice, same heat, same wicked mouth. Same fucking eyes he fell in love with—the kind that looked right through him, sharp as shattered glass and just as beautiful. Same scars, though they’d faded to history. Same bite, same fire, same soul that ruined him.

And all dressed up in the one shape his hollowed heart still beat for. The only shape it ever knew how to chase. The soul that refused to rest. The one that burned too hot, too sharp, too unsettled to leave this world quietly. The kind of soul that stuck around just to haunt it. His soul starved while yours reincarnated.

He used to believe in tides, in pull, in the kind of slow, patient movement that shaped coastlines and broke stone into sand. But you? You were the storm surge. You were thunder at midnight and hands full of fire, the kind of divine wrath that didn’t leave room for repentance. And now that storm lived in him. Set its claws deep. Made a cathedral of his body and painted the walls with every memory you ever left behind. 

And when he closed his eyes, when he let himself slip under long enough to stop pretending he was something human—he’d see it. That shoreline again. That godforsaken place where the land met the sea and his world burned. You, standing at the docks, bloodshot eyes pouring tears that stained a face full of the kind of wrath only he brought you, the wind snarling your name like it belonged in psalms carved into bone.

He dreamt of it every time. That moment. The crowds of desperate bodies, the screaming, the blood that soaked the sand the minute that ship left with only you on it. His first massacre. 

The ache didn’t come as pain. It came as devotion. Ritual. A holy ache—scripture etched into his ribs, one syllable at a time, and all of them yours. He’d wear that gospel like armor, recite it in the dark when no one could hear, offer it up like tithe and sacrifice to the memory of you that lived behind his teeth.

Because it wasn’t just want anymore. It was love, sure, twisted and obsessive, but it morphed into more as the years passed. It was worship. And worship, he’d come to learn, was just hunger wearing devotion like a disguise—feral need dressed up in reverence, blood hidden behind prayer.

But damn it all—himself, God, and Hell thrown in—if his cock didn’t twitch behind the seam of his jeans every time your hips swayed like that. Slow. Unbothered. Like sin dressed in skin, dragging him to hell one step at a time and making him thank you for the descent.

You moved like you knew exactly what you were doing to him. And maybe you did. Maybe that was the point. Because with every shift of denim pulled tight over those curves, he felt himself thicken—hard and aching in a way that bordered on agony, his pulse loud behind his zipper, begging for friction, for release, for you. And he’d suffer for it.

Because wanting you hurt in the most sacred, ruinous way.

And still—he will wait.

Not because the ache wasn’t splitting him open from the inside out. Not because he lacked the hunger. Not because he was suddenly a man of restraint. No—he waited because he knew better now. Because love like his that spans centuries learns patience the way a butcher learns anatomy—slow, brutal, and by necessity. It’s not mercy that kept his hands off you. It was painstaking strategy.

There had been other lives—years stacked on years like brittle pages in a waterlogged book—and each one taught him that need alone wasn’t enough. He had clawed through them all, hands bloodied, hope worn thin, always chasing. Fate, he’d learned, played dice with broken hearts and unfinished business.

So he sat on the barstool like it wasn’t killing him. Like the wood beneath him wasn’t cracking with every second he didn’t reach out and touch you just to be sure you were real. Like he wasn’t one wrong glance away from falling to his knees and begging for you like a prayer, again and again. He could’ve whispered mine against the back of your hand like a vow torn from the bones of another life. 

Because timing was everything. And you weren’t ready. Not yet. You poured him drinks like you didn’t remember. Walked past him like your soul didn’t flinch. But he saw it—how your fingers twitched when they brushed his. How your breath hitched for half a second when his voice scraped the air.

It was there. Faint. But real.

You hadn’t remembered—but you felt. And Remmick, despite all the sharpness and savagery he carried like breath, could be patient when it came to you.

He waits because this was the first time the cards were close to falling his way. The first time your soul hadn’t been too far to reach. That the skin you wore now, a century later, was the same one that still haunted his every waking hour.

He waits because he had to earn it. Not your love—he had that already, somewhere buried beneath your ribcage—but your recognition. Your belief.

So he let you tease him. Let you flirt like it meant nothing. Let you brush past him like he wasn’t coming apart at the seams. Let you look through him while his whole body screamed for your touch, his fangs aching under his gums behind clenched teeth, his hands digging crescent moons into the wood just to feel something else.

He watched you—watched you move, watched you work, watched you live.

Because if there was one thing immortality had taught him, it was how to wait for the moment. The exact moment your guard would slip. When your soul would remember before your brain could catch up. When you’d look, and truly see, not a man that haunts this godforsaken bar, not a stranger, not even a man with salt-wrecked eyes—but Remmick.

Yours.

That’s when he’d strike. Not cruel, not quick. But with purpose. With the kind of hunger that had festered so long it’d grown something entirely separate from teeth and blood stained claws. And maybe then, you’d let him touch you again.

Maybe then, you’d call him by the name you used to moan through clenched teeth, maybe then, he could stop pretending. And start taking back what always belonged to him.

You.

All while your hips moved like memory. All while your voice echoed with the warmth of a hundred nights he thought he imagined. All while his cock pulsed with a longing that had waited so long it felt like mourning. He let the fire crawl up his spine and sit behind his teeth. Let it burn there—quiet, seething, divine.

Because timing was everything. And if he waited just long enough, you’d come to him. 

You always did.

And God help you if you didn’t. Because the universe wouldn’t forgive it twice. It would be a broken vow carved into the marrow of fate—a final, fateful trespass.

And if you dared to walk away again, then blood would answer where silence failed. Then chaos would follow in your footsteps like a shadow that couldn’t be outrun. It wouldn’t just be heartbreak. It would be reckoning.

And nothing—no god, no sea, no second chance—would spare you from the kind of carnage only your husband knew how to conjure. The kind born not of wrath, but of devotion twisted too tight, too deep. The kind that didn’t just follow ruin—it was ruin. And he wore it like every promise he ever swore to you—each one etched into him, carved into bone and blood, and every single one kept.

“Hey, Boss… Boss!”

The voice cut through the fog like a blade, snapping you back. Your eyes shot up, startled, the heavy silence you’d been sinking in shattering all at once as the world rushed back in around you.

“Shit,” you muttered, grinding the borrowed cigarette out on the cracked pavement. You turned toward him, jaw tense. “Yeah, Carm?”

“Y’okay? You look out of it…” Concern laced his words as his eyes flitted over your crouched frame worriedly. 

“Yeah—yes, I’m good,” you stammer, too quick to sound convincing, the words tumbling over each other like you had to catch them before they cracked open.

But your fingers twitch at your sides, and your throat feels lined with static—like the air before lightning strikes, all hum and no release. Truth be told, you’re not good. Not even close.

Admittedly, you were shaken up—though you’d never say it out loud. Not here. Not with Carmen watching you from the corner of his eye, his smirk faltering just enough to let concern slip through the cracks. You can feel it in the way his voice holds back, the way his footsteps shuffle closer, but not too close. He’s seen you unraveled before, but this? This is something else.

You keep your eyes down, fixed too long on the puddle at your feet—rainwater pooled just outside the back entrance, rippling in slow motion like something breathed beneath it.

It glows a sick kind of blue, the neon from the bar sign staining the water like a wound. It shifts with every gust of wind, every flick of motion, swirling with a darkness that doesn’t reflect right—too deep for the shallow dip it sits in, too still for something that should move. You swear, for a second, it pulses.

Like it knows. 

Questions claw at your spine—unspoken ones, old ones. Ones with teeth. You feel them coil low in your back, where the ache has started again from standing too long, or maybe from carrying too much that isn’t yours.

The puddle glows, unnatural and holy in a way that only cursed things ever manage.

And in that moment, with Carmen’s voice distant and the silence pressing back in like hands to your throat, you realize the worst part isn’t the fear.

It’s the recognition. You’ve seen something like this before. You just don’t remember when. Or what it cost you.

“Okay, well,” Carmen clears his throat, voice rough around the edges like he can feel how thick the air’s gotten, “you’re needed up there. Jaime says someone’s askin’ for you.”

You blink, like the words have to wade through fog before they register. “Yeah, got it,” you mutter, dragging your fingers across your jeans, smearing ash and nerves in equal measure. “Help me up?”

Carmen’s already reaching for you, calloused hand sliding into yours without hesitation. He tugs, gentle but firm, steadying you like he has before—more times than you like to admit.

“You know, lady,” he grunts, guiding you up from your makeshift seat on the overturned liquor crate, “I can handle this by myself. If your highness isn’t feeling up to it, that is.”

You shoot him a dry look, one brow cocked as your legs catch beneath you. “Wow, Carmen. Such gallantry. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

He snorts, hand landing between your shoulder blades in that familiar way—steadying, grounding, maybe even protective if you were the type to let yourself admit to needing that sort of thing.

“I try not to make a habit of kissin’ anyone while they’re havin’ a full-blown existential crisis next to haunted puddles and a crate of Crown Royal.”

You roll your eyes, but it’s weaker than usual. “It wasn’t an existential crisis.”

He quirks a brow. “Right. You were just starin’ into that water like it whispered your sins back to you.”

You let out a huff of laughter—small, but real. “Yeah, right”

“Christ,” Carmen mutters, rubbing the back of his neck. “This whole town’s goin’ weird. Good thing there’s business tonight, going through some kind of dry spell these last couple days”

You don’t say it, but you think it—It was weird long before you got here. And something tells you it’s about to get a whole lot worse. You opt to just nod at his words instead of voicing your thoughts. 

Still, the warmth of his hand doesn’t leave your back. And when you finally push the door open and step into the bar, you do it with your head held high and something cold curling in your gut.

Someone was asking for you. You already knew who.

Your favorite stray. 

He sat alone at a table near the back—still as a shadow, just barely touched by the amber glow bleeding from the overhead lights. The bar was packed, bodies shoulder-to-shoulder, pressed like waves against stone. But not around him. No, around him was space. Absence. Like the air itself had sense enough to bend away.

Despite the crowd, no one dared sit near him.

It was like something in his very being repelled the living—an unspoken warning woven into the curve of his spine, the stillness of his hands, the way his eyes cut through the haze like ship lights searching through fog. You’d seen men with dangerous auras before, but this was different. This wasn’t danger. This was something else.

And yet, you were already walking toward him. Like you always would. Like you always had.

“I’m getting real tired of you bothering me, Remmick,” you said dryly, though your smirk betrayed any real heat behind it. That same annoyance—sharp and biting once—had been softening night by night, melting slow like ice left out too long.

“Oh darlin’, not me this time,” he replied, raising his glass in mock surrender. “Though once this drink’s dry, I might consider botherin’ you just for the hell of it.”

You cocked your head, caught off guard by the strange glint in his eyes—different from his usual haunt. There was something almost amused in it, like he was holding back a joke just for his own damn pleasure.

Then his gaze flicked to the far end of the bar, toward the entrance. His smirk twitched, less amused now. “Someone else beat me to it.”

Your brows furrowed, then followed the tilt of his chin toward the man standing just inside the threshold. Tall, cocky, every inch of him exuding that slick, magnetic charm that always seemed to get him into more trouble than it was worth.

Boots scuffed, shirt half-unbuttoned like he rolled in straight from a fight—or a bed—and a grin that hadn’t changed in years.

Your breath caught, just a little.

“You recognize that stranger, honey?” Remmick asked, voice lower, laced with something unreadable.

A huff of disbelief—equal parts annoyance and reluctant amusement—slipped from your lips.

“Wishing I didn’t right now.”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

But you didn’t answer. You didn’t have to. Not when your legs were already moving, weaving you through the tide of drunken bodies like instinct. You moved through the crowd the way a sailor returns to sea—like it never left your bones.

The man spotted you before you reached him. Of course he did.

“Well I’ll be damned. Still storming through rooms like you own ‘em,” he drawled, that voice just as low, just as infuriatingly smooth as you remembered. He spread his arms wide, cocky as ever. “You look good, baby.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Rhett Bishop. A name you hadn’t heard in years, but a body you remembered far too well. You’d known him in a different life—or at least a different version of this one. He was a ranch hand turned traveling musician, too much charm, too little follow-through, and an expert in leaving right before the sun came up. The two of you had a rhythm back then: whiskey, reckless flirting, the kind of nights that ended with bruised knees and tangled sheets. Always messy. Always temporary.

“Well shit, that’s the greeting I get? After all we’ve been through?” he teased, stepping in closer, gaze flicking down your frame like he still had a right to it. “Y’still taste like Crown and regret?”

You rolled your eyes, but the laugh that cracked out of you was real—unwanted, but real.

“You still talk like a bad fucking country song.”

“Damn right. That’s where the money is, sweetheart.”

Before you could slap him or kiss him—because it was always a coin toss—he reached for your hand and tugged you gently, naturally, into the sea of people. The music had picked up again, something gritty and slow and full of bass.

“What are you doing?” you asked, tone flat, but your hand didn’t pull away.

“Dancin',” he said simply, spinning you once like he used to, as if time hadn’t dared change him. “Unless you forgot how.”

“Please,” you muttered, falling into the sway of it in spite of yourself. “I taught you everything you know.”

He leaned in, real close, breath warm against your temple.

“And you have ruined every other woman since.”

You didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The scent of him—whiskey and salt and that infuriating cologne—pulled old memories from places you’d tried to bury.

From across the bar, Remmick watched, jaw tight, eyes unreadable. Fingers tapping a slow rhythm on the glass now empty in his hand.

You couldn’t see it—but he was counting. Not the seconds.  The heartbeats.

Yours. And his.

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[ethereays]

More sketches!

[ethereays]

i thought your writing from the last chapter couldn't get any better, but i was happily wrong! how you world build and character build so much in one chapter is amazing, and the dialogues??? I'm obsessed how you do the accents!! also she sounds like a bad bitch, no wonder remmick's narrative will be haunted by her, i would let her haunt my past, present, and future too 😭😭 as always all love, can't wait for more!!! <33

II. hunger

REVENANT, au!remmick x reincarnated wife!reader

synopsis He drifted state to state, working as a farmhand, horse breaker, ditch digger, and hired gun when it came to that. By the time he ended up in her part of the country, he was thirty-three. Hard-eyed, quiet. The kind of man who’d been beaten too many times to flinch. He arrived after sundown, pack on his back, boots worn thin. The land stretched out gold and empty under a dying sky. He thought maybe he’d work for a few months, then vanish again. Just another hand. Just another name no one remembered. Until she met him with a blade as sharp as her tongue and blood across his throat.

warning(s) famine. trauma. death. grief. colonialism. violence. discrimination. religious undertones. swearing. mentions of alcohol. angst and slow burn as fuck. mention of guns, knives. blood. remmick as a ranch hand. whole lot of character lore. this one’s long as shit guys soz- reader described as having hair long enough to braid. no use of y/n. some flirting. (gif not mine)

angel talks. first off, THANK U GUYS FOR UR LOVE AND SUPPORT ON JUST THE FIRST PART ALONE!! i was a lil worried at first bcuz it was long asf and so so packed with some character building (like this part isn’t packed w it too but i digress) BUT u guys ate that shit up and i couldn’t be more grateful. as mentioned in the authors note i did change remmicks lore around, now in this vers, heavily imagined like roy goode or patrick sumner typa look to him. why did i go that direction? cuz i said so DUH and it so matches. pls heed the warnings cuz this one gets more angst.

#NAV.ᐟ prev - I. damnation ⋆.˚revenant mlist, au!remmick x reincarnated wife!reader

"jesus christ, don't be kind to me

honey, don’t feed me i will come back."

AMERICA DIDN’T SAVE HIM. It just fed him slower.

No, it just devoured him slower—bite by bite, smile by smile, dressed up in false promises and stained tavern sheets.

It didn’t cleanse him. It didn’t sanctify him. It clung to him.

Like smoke. Like hunger. Like sickness that settled into marrow and pretended to be salvation. This country didn’t offer redemption—it offered delay. A slow, aching rot that seeped into his bones like rain he hadn’t felt in decades, foreign and familiar in the worst ways. The kind of rain that didn’t cleanse—just reminded.

Of home. Of death. Of something sacred he’d been running from for far too long

In moments like this—where the road beneath his feet turned to gravel and bone, unpaved and jagged with intent, meant to tear at the soles of those too soft to survive—time had a cruel way of catching up with him. Like a hand he knew too well, fingers cold and familiar, the kind of touch that didn’t soothe but branded. A hand he’d grown to expect. Grown to need. Maybe even love, in the way a wound learns to live with rot.

An Gorta Mór. The Great Hunger. The third year—though truth be told, it could’ve been the second or the fourth. 1846 or 1845. Dates blurred like breath on glass when the world only taught you to count loss. He’d stopped keeping proper track around the time his bones ached with a life long full of pain and strangers stopped saying his name. Just counting bad. Just relying on the crooked maths whispered in crumbling corners of buildings that swore they were homes. They weren’t. Not really.

Now, all these years later, the echo of those numbers still clung to him like damp wool, heavy and sour. Hunger, after all, was a loyal ghost.

He came into the world while his mother bled on cold stone and his father dug burial plots not with tools, but with his own blistered hands. His earliest memories were of death: the curled-up bodies by the roadside, the smell of spoiled oats, the quiet sound of rosaries whispered through cracked lips. They buried their neighbors in shallow graves, their children in peat fields, and their pride with the land. His family were tenant farmers on British-stolen land, the kind where you worked your soul into the soil but owned nothing—least of all your fate. In the hush of night, when foreign men walked the land like they owned the soil instead of listening to it—ripping roots up by their throats rather than letting them run deeper—his father would speak in low, bitter tones about when it was theirs. His. His father’s. His father’s father before that. A line of men tethered to earth by calloused hands and quiet, stubborn pride, long before it was stolen by signatures and steel.

When the people starved, the grain was still exported to England. They burned their thatched roof in 1850 as they were forced out. His father died coughing into a rag on the coffin ship to Liverpool. His younger sister followed two weeks later. By the time Remmick reached Boston Harbor in 1851, he was twelve years old and completely alone. All that remained was his name—stripped of lineage, no surname he could cling to, to stake a claim the way his father once did over stolen land—a boiling rage, and the weight of old prayers clinging to an Irish ridden tongue. Words half-remembered, muttered more out of muscle than faith, like a ghost of belief passed down through blood and famine.

Americans called him “Mick,” spat at his accent, made him fight for wages that could barely buy bread. But rage makes a man useful. It makes him feared. It makes him hungry.

Through every trench, bruise, bloodied fists and an even bloodier face, he worked in stables, factories, railroads—whatever paid enough to keep his ribs from showing. He recounts New York, his turning point, when Irish immigrants were forced to fight in a war they didn’t start, for a country that barely tolerated them. He left for the frontier after that. The West was rough, cruel, unpaved—but at least it didn’t pretend to be kind. He drifted from state to state, remembering every cruel turn and pit of a new place but the same hunger. 

The clang of iron on iron echoed like thunder in his skull. Hot, bitter, and unrelenting, the mill roared with a kind of madness Remmick had long grown used to. Men shouted over the hiss of steam, sweat clung to their backs like a second skin, and the whole damn place stank of coal, blood, and broken ambition. He moved through it like a ghost that refused to die. Not quite one of them, but not dead enough to stop working either.

A hardhat hung off one crooked nail, but Remmick never wore it. It didn't matter how many times the foreman barked about false safety. If something was gonna fall on his skull, he figured it’d be God’s will, not steel’s.

He swung the hammer again—once, twice, the rhythm steady. Not because he cared. Because it kept him breathing.

“Keep movin’, or you’ll rot,” his old boss in Louisiana used to say. The man was dead now, last Remmick heard. Face down in a ditch with gambling debts carved into his skin. Remmick hadn't mourned him, but he remembered the voice. That was enough. He grunted and adjusted his grip, staring down at the glowing metal as if it might tell him something he hadn’t already learned the hard way.

He’d done it all by then. Coal miner, bootleg hauler. Spent three weeks running payroll for a two-bit rail company until he pistol-whipped the wrong supervisor and disappeared across state lines with the man's boots and a pocket watch that never ticked right again.

The only thing he kept was the sack slung over his shoulder—filled with scraps of a life pieced together from what the world hadn’t already stolen—and the last, bitter thing he truly owned: his name.

It wasn’t pride that made him keep it. Wasn’t stupidity either. Remmick knew damn well the weight of a name. Knew what it meant to carry something that painted a target on your back in towns that feared ghosts and men deemed too low for life itself. But it was his. That was the point. They could take his blood, his teeth, the boots off his feet if they worked hard enough. And plenty had tried.

But his name? They’d have to kill him twice to pry that loose.

He didn’t dream anymore, not really. Not unless you count the flashes—ashes in his lungs, a woman's scream, the cold slap of the Atlantic. He figured the memories would fade eventually, but they never did. Just shifted. Warped. There was a scar on his rib from a bullet that never should’ve been his. A chipped tooth on the left side of his mouth from a Tennessee bar brawl that ended with someone else’s jaw broken and a horse he never got paid for. He had more old wounds than stories to explain them.

He didn’t flinch when the furnace roared, didn’t blink when sparks flared like fireworks across his brow. He barely noticed the shouting anymore—men cursing God or their wives or their luck. None of it mattered. On a stolen break, he sat on a dented tin drum behind the mill, rolling a smoke with hands blackened from coal dust. He wiped the sweat from his neck, exhaled slow through his nose, and stared out at the skyline of iron and fog.

“Ain’t no peace in it,” he murmured, not to anyone in particular. Just to the wind. Voice as raw and unfiltered as it was as a boy, “Just harder days and smaller wins.”

He missed quiet sometimes. The way the sea sounded when it didn’t want to kill you. The rustle of grass on a still morning before the world woke up enough to disappoint you. But he’d been chasing that luxury for years, and all he ever got was silence. And that silence…it had teeth.

Later, when he was offered a different job—less heat, more violence—he didn’t say no. A man in a gray coat with a silver pocket pistol and a scar like a canyon on his jaw made him an offer in low tones. Something about a land dispute, something about needing someone who didn’t ask questions. Remmick just nodded. He wasn’t one for speeches.

“Pay in advance?” he asked. The man nodded, passed him a wad of crumpled notes and a single bullet

“This one’s just in case you get sentimental.”

Remmick chuckled dark, shoved the bullet into his coat pocket, and spit into the dust.

“Sentiment’s for men who ain’t been fed to the world yet.”

Then he walked away—boots heavy, spine straight, lungs blackened but still breathing.

Still chasing something. Not peace. Not God. Just another mile between him and whatever was catching up behind

The only constant in his life—as far back as memory served, as far as the ache in his bones could stretch—was the sun, and all the violence it carried. The kind of sun that didn’t warm, but burned. That cracked the earth, blistered skin, and made shadows run long like guilt. It rose without mercy and set without promise, and he followed it all the same, day after day, like a dog chasing something it could never catch.

Now, the soles of his stolen boots were wearing thinner than when he’d first pried them off a man whose face he can't remember. He walked like someone who knew the road wouldn’t be kind and didn’t care. Dust on his cuffs, blood in the stitching. A man made of miles, and of what the sun left behind.

And yet, beneath a moon that forgives with the kind of brutal grace only the night knows—painted pale and shining soft enough to fool the desperate—he hums. Low and rough, a tune half-forgotten but stubborn, one he carried with him ever since he left Texas. It slips past cracked lips into the rim of a grimy glass, filled with something cheap and cruel that burns like memory. All of this—this quiet, twisted version of luxury—was “bought” with stolen or earned bills, not that it mattered, they all spent the same to him. All soaked in sweat and phantom blood, crumpled deep in the seams of his patched-up pocket. Money that never felt like his, not really. Just another thing taken, like everything else. Money that was wearing thin now, in the borderlands. 

Drunkard tales drifted through the saloon like old ghosts, thick with slurred bravado and the scent of spilled whiskey. In the far corner, a nameless singer crooned for his supper, voice frayed like the hem of an old prayer. He sat at the bar, spine aching against the wall, worn down by time and travel. Eyes sharp, tracking every exit, every movement—because old habits don’t die, they dig in. 

Remmick didn’t move much—just nursed his glass of whatever burnt going down and kept his ears open, that low hum still stuck beneath his breath like a buried tune.

By the bar, a pair of workers leaned in too close to their drinks, dusty boots propped on the brass rail, spitting tobacco into cracked clay pots. Their voices carried in a slow drawl, that kind of molasses-thick tone born from heat, hard land, and not nearly enough good sleep.

"Fella passed through Hallow’s Edge last week—y’know, that stretch by the ranch? Place where the fence runs out like it’s afraid of wha’s on the other side?"

"Hell yeah, I know it. Ain’t just a ranch, it’s a goddamn wound. Beautiful though. Looks like someone laid gold over bones."

The other man grunted in agreement, eyes narrowed beneath a brim heavy with trail dust.

"Well, some stranger—city slicker by the looks of him, some tenderfooted fucker if ya ask me—thought he’d take a shortcut through. Came out the other end lookin’ like the devil himself had a bone to pick. Face all tore up, ribs pokin’ through like a damn scarecrow. Didn’t even make it to town proper—just collapsed near the watering trough, blood in his teeth, sayin’ some woman smiled at him ‘fore it all went black."

Laughter wasn’t mean, but it sure as hell wasn’t kind. “Sounds like the ranch gave him its version of a howdy-do.”

Remmick’s brow twitched—just a hair—but he didn’t look their way. Just traced the rim of his glass, watching the amber swirl like he was reading it for signs.

A ranch.

He’d heard tales before—once, maybe twice—like a whispered dare passed between cowards and killers before he crossed state lines. Somewhere sitting pretty around this area. A ranch too beautiful to be real, too quiet to be right. Something about it gnawed at him, slow and steady. He let the conversation bleed back into silence. Let the saloon chatter rise and fall. But the way his shoulders rolled back, how his gaze lingered too long on the map nailed behind the bar, eyes tracing where that ranch would be. 

He’d picked it up fast, out in the borderlands—wasn’t a decent soul for miles. And if by some miracle you stumbled on one, you’d be lucky if they lasted you ten. Ten miles before the land got to you. Not teeth and claws, but something worse. Something soft. Quiet. Cruel in a way only the Earth could be.

The land didn’t have to strike to kill. It just waited. Wilted you slow under its sun, coaxed the salt from your skin, kissed your lips dry with dust. Remmick had danced with that death more times than he cared to name. Knew her rhythm now. The land's touch could be beautiful—seductive even—but her fingers were quick, and her hunger was the patient kind.

She’d feed you comfort, and then gut you clean. And if you weren’t careful, she’d leave nothing behind but your name—and even that would rot in the wind.

Finding work—real work—was always the game. A necessary ritual for a man with pockets that had never known the weight of anything but grief, bad luck, and the slow, steady ache of death trailing him like a shadow. It had been that way since boyhood, since the day he’d been shoved onto a boat too young to understand the depth of the ocean or the weight of leaving everything behind.

Out here, in towns too small for secrets and too devout for mercy, it was harder still. Places like this didn’t offer second chances, let alone first ones. Every soul was accounted for, every name whispered in pews or passed between hands like gossip over warm bread and cheap liquor. There was no such thing as anonymity—just suspicion with a smile.

And God—God was always watching, or so they claimed. A false God, Remmick accused and had a heavy disdain for. One that sat fat and silent while men scrawled names into water-warped books, claimed it was holy just ‘cause the ink ran with prayers. But those prayers? They never reached higher than the steeple roof. Not when they came from hands that beat their own children, from mouths that drank blood and called it wine, from men who punished and pardoned in the same breath.

He knew what faith looked like when it was stolen. Saw it starved out of villages that bore his grandfather's name. Watched it rot in the bellies of fathers buried in mass graves no one prayed over. Back on land that bore his roots, the church wore gold while his people dug through dirt for crumbs—called it famine, called it God's will, like salvation was something you could ration. He remembered the hunger, yes, but worse was the hatred. How the same men who kissed crucifixes condemned their kind with spit and rope. Remmick never forgot that. Never would. And in his chest, beneath scar and sin, sat the heat of a thousand whispered curses—he’d been at this treacherous excuse of a “better life” for too long to even remember the mother tongue, but confident none of them were in English, and none of them meant to be forgiven.

Here, in this town, in this country that held not a single one of his roots, holiness was just cruelty in its Sunday best.

And still, he asked for work. Always asked. Because hunger didn’t care much for theology. And neither did the slow rot of poverty that clung to him like a second skin. 

And like a sinner pacing the length of a confessional, words burning the back of his throat, Remmick moved through the night in search of something—salvation, maybe, or just shelter from the ache gnawing through his limbs. Divine intervention wasn’t on the table. Not for someone like him. God had long since turned His eyes elsewhere, if He’d ever looked his way at all.

To the untrained eye, he walked steady. Boots hitting the dirt in slow, deliberate rhythm, coat pulled tight against the cool hush of approaching dawn. But the truth bled through in the stagger of his steps. A slight wobble when he turned corners too fast. That too-familiar drunken sway that clung to him like a second shadow. He wasn't stumbling out of recklessness. It was habit, exhaustion, and the burn of whatever godless liquor they’d poured down his throat hours before.

The town, if it could be called that, was half asleep. Lamps flickered low in windows. A dog barked once, then thought better of it. Wooden signs creaked above darkened storefronts, their letters faded like old scars. This wasn’t a place for mercy or comfort. It was the kind of place people passed through, left pieces of themselves behind in, and never spoke of again.

And yet—there it was.

Tucked back off the main road, more shadow than structure: an inn. Weather-beaten, sagging a little at the eaves, but still standing. Still lit. A single yellow glow spilled from the front window, warm and hazy like it hadn’t been cleaned in a decade. The paint peeled in curls from the frame. It smelled of woodsmoke, rain, and something older. 

He paused, one hand on the rust-bitten handle, eyes scanning the door like it might bite. Then he stepped inside. The lobby was narrow, quiet, with floors that groaned under his boots. A woman behind the counter looked up from a tattered ledger, her eyes skimming over him with practiced indifference. She’d seen worse. Probably housed it.

“Got a room?” he asked, voice dry—scraped raw from dust, drink, and too many miles unspoken. The Irish accent was buried deep in his throat, tucked into the same hollow pockets that carried his sins. Hidden like shame beneath the smoother one he’d learned to wear—pieced together from overheard conversations on trains, boats, and behind saloons where he lingered too long, just listening. Picking vowels like fruit, softening consonants like bruises. A man who knew how to vanish into his own voice.

“Just the one,” she said, and didn’t ask questions. He reached into his coat and dropped what was left of his money onto the counter—crumpled bills, coins still warm from his palm. Phantom blood money. Stolen, borrowed, all of them teetering on the edge of being earned. The kind that stinks even when it doesn’t leave a mark.

She took it without counting, slid a rusted key across the counter with two fingers.

“Upstairs. Second on the left. Sheets’re clean enough.”

That was all he needed. Remmick took the key and dragged his feet to the stairs. He didn’t look back. Didn’t have to. The door creaked closed behind him with the finality of a coffin lid. And upstairs, in a room that smelled like old cedar and forgotten sins, he fell into the mattress with a groan, boots still on, coat still damp, eyes already beginning to slip shut.

Outside, the wind howled low, like something warning or mourning—he could never tell the difference. And inside, he finally let the long awaited silence come.

He woke with the sharp, final urgency of a man who’s never known real rest—a kind of rising that felt more like survival than routine. The kind carved into muscle memory, into the bones of someone who’s always had to earn their breath.

Outside, the sun was already climbing—hot and mean, with no promises in its light, only hunger wrapped in gold. He watched it bleed through the frayed curtain in the corner of the room, catching on dust like specks of old ghosts. Honey-warm, but just as cruel.

He’d tasted honey once or twice, maybe. Couldn’t say for sure. Most sweetness in his life had been chased down through grit and grime, meals paid for with time and blood he never really had to spare. But today, like every day, he needed something useful. Work. Coin. Anything that might keep him upright a little longer. Another day to trade sweat for nothing and call it a life.

And so, the routine began—same calloused hands, different town.

This morning, those same calloused hands scraped over the coarse scruff lining his jaw—a beard that caught the sun with rust-tinged edges, more red now than it ever was when he first started growing it. It stayed just tidy enough, thanks to stolen blades and the mercy of still pond water when he could find it.

Every so often, as if summoned by the quiet of morning, a flash of his mother’s sharp voice would slip in, coated in a tongue he no longer remembers but his memory, the only thing that served, on occassion, right about him, understood—scolding his father for the "unruly whiskers" she claimed made him look half-feral. Those echoes, softened by time but still barbed at the ends, clung to Remmick’s fingers like ghosts as he trimmed the edges clean. If he caught his reflection, he knew what he’d see—jagged edges, sunburned skin, and those unruly whiskers curling sharp along his jaw. The beard would betray him, always did, especially when the red caught the light just right. A color that didn’t belong to him anymore. A color that whispered things he had no right to remember.

His fingers brushed the back of his neck, pausing over the curls that had grown too long again—soft, defiant things that coiled at the nape like they didn’t know better. He’d have to shear them soon. Before they drew the wrong kind of notice. Before someone looked at him too closely and remembered how easy it is to treat a man like him as nothing but wild, something to be caged or culled.

He dressed with precision, not pride—layering threadbare clothes that blended just enough to pass. Nothing too fine, but everything too worn. Just another face, another body in the crowd. No one worth watching, no one worth stopping. God forbid he draws attention. 

The door creaked open, and Remmick stepped out into a sun so hot it could’ve skinned a man alive just for breathing under it too long. It beat down heavy, merciless, the kind of heat that made the dust curl up off the earth in ghostly swirls. The town was already in full swing—horses clopped along uneven roads, wagon wheels shrieked over gravel, and the clang of a blacksmith’s hammer rang out like distant gunfire. Children darted through alleyways barefoot, mothers shouting after them with hands on hips. And men—too many men—lingered in doorways with narrowed eyes and mouths full of suspicion. Remmick adjusted the wide-brimmed hat he’d stolen two towns back, tugged it lower over his brow.

His sack thudded against his spine with each step. He kept his gait even, lazy, like he had nowhere in particular to be—which was half true. But anonymity is fragile. And in towns like this, trouble doesn’t need an introduction.

He hadn’t made it ten steps past the hitching post when a loud crack rang out—a shout, followed by the unmistakable sound of fists meeting flesh. A scuffle outside the general store. Two men in a tangle of limbs and rage, one already bleeding from the lip, the other hollering about “cheating bastards” and “what’s owed.”

Remmick didn’t stop to think. He never had to.

While heads turned, hands grabbed shoulders, and boots scuffed forward into the fray, he slid sideways like smoke. The man who’d dropped his coin purse in the middle of the chaos never felt a thing. Remmick’s fingers were fast, practiced. By the time he slipped the weight into his pocket and shouldered his sack again, the man was still swinging wild at ghosts.

He kept moving. Down past the farrier’s. Past the brothel with its half-shuttered windows and painted girls watching the commotion with bored interest. He didn’t dare glance back. He could feel it, though—that heat on his spine now thicker than the sun. The feeling of being seen. Maybe not recognized, not yet. But noticed. That was enough. He spat into the dirt and kept walking.

So much for keeping his head down.

Remmick didn’t quicken his pace—that was how you got clocked. Instead, he turned a corner, slipped between two buildings slick with sweat and mildew, and ducked into the shadowed mouth of a shop left wide open. The bell above the door had been silenced with a knot of twine—probably broken days ago and never fixed.

Empty.

Every warm body in town was still crowded around the fistfight out front, hooting like it was Sunday sermon. The shelves were picked over, but not stripped. Crates of dry goods and supple fruits that enticed the low growl in his stomach lined the floor, and a half-full register sat behind the counter. He didn’t bother with that—he wasn’t greedy, just cursed. But beggars can’t be choosers and he makes quick work of a loaf that's been sitting out too long and the fruits he’d probably never see for another number of miles if he was unsuccessful in his pursuits. His boots made soft thuds over wood warped by decades of heat and boots and blood. Behind the counter, tucked into the corner like someone’s afterthought, was a small moleskin pouch, cracked at the edges from use. He picked it up, thumbed it open.

Tobacco. Still fresh.

The corner of his mouth twitched—not quite a smile. God was cruel, but sometimes he played fair for a moment or two.

He tucked the pouch into the inside of his coat, where it joined the stolen coins still warm from someone else’s pocket. Then he slipped back out the way he came, quieter than breath, into an alley that smelled like horses and heat.

The shouting had grown louder. Someone had drawn a knife. He didn’t care. Let the whole damn town carve itself up and bleed into the dirt. They’d forget the man who walked through them soon enough, even if he left a shadow behind.

He struck a match off the heel of his boot, the flare brief and angry in the morning glare. A scrap of paper—creased and soft—was rolled tight between calloused fingers, stuffed with stolen tobacco. He took a drag, deep and slow, just as the first chimes of the church bells cracked through the dust like gunfire.

God always did have a cruel sense of timing when it came to men like him—full of wrath, bone-deep weariness, and not a drop of grace left to spare. Maybe it was a curse. Maybe it was justice. Hell, maybe it was just the way things were for men built the way he was: always reaching, always running, never quite forgiven.

Still, he walked.

Wandering, but not lost. The memory of the map he'd studied too long in the corner of the dim saloon burned behind his eyelids like a brand. Faint lines. Ink-stained promises. Roads etched in whiskey and desperation. A direction carved more by instinct than destination. A path meant only for the desperate and the damned.

And that, he figured, suited him just fine. 

His steps hit the Earth heavy with a hunger older than his body, moved by the worn-out hope that somewhere—anywhere—might feed him long enough to make it through another month without dying or getting caught.

╭━━━━━ ━━━━━╮

Cypress curled in like they were just as worn as he was—leaning crooked and tired over the trail, their shadows reaching long and slow like fingers trying to pull him back. The sun, now dipping low along the horizon, bled gold into rust, casting the land in that strange kind of light that made even dust look holy. It clung to his boots, to the sweat drying on his neck, to the sharp ache that had begun to settle in the base of his spine from walking too long without rest.

His breath came shallow, more out of instinct than need—Remmick had long since learned how to make do with less. Less water. Less food. Less kindness.

He kept walking until the trees gave way to a long stretch of fenced land, wire and wood warped by heat and age. A warning, maybe, for the kind of people who cared about those. Remmick didn’t.

He spotted the hole in the fence before he even realized his feet had slowed. It was small, tucked behind a thicket of brush, but there—like a door left ajar by a land that wasn’t his. The kind of invitation that didn’t need words. Just hunger. Just weariness.

He ducked through the break without hesitation, the wire catching slightly on the strap of his sack before he tugged it loose with a grunt. The land beyond opened wide—overgrown but not dead, like something remembered and revered. A house sat in the distance, stained a deep brown, with smoke faint enough to make him question whether it was memory or present. Maybe someone was home. Maybe someone was dead. Maybe it didn’t matter.

He stood for a moment, eyes sweeping the property, chest rising slow. Then he moved forward—quiet, deliberate, uninvited. Like always. But not without a plan.

Remmick had survived off worse odds, bartered with crueler men. This time, he’d play it smart—hands open, voice level, chin tilted in that respectful, half-submissive way that made men feel a little taller. He’d find whoever owned the place—likely a man, mean and practical—and offer what he had. A body that still worked, a back that could carry weight, and a sharp eye for broken things. Fences, tools, roofs—didn’t matter. He’d offer to fix the break he came through, too. He could smooth that over easy: Saw it on my way by, figured I’d follow it in to tell you myself. Lucky it’s someone honest, huh?

He’d say it with a confident nod, the kind that made people uneasy before they caught themselves liking it.

The land itself was no easy mistress. Remmick had walked enough country, crossed enough cursed ridgelines and blood-wet valleys, to know when soil held memory—and when it held malice. Some places were conquered, torn apart and left to rot beneath whispers of bone and smoke—ghosts of the innocent humming vengeance through the weeds. Others were sweet-talkers, soft and syrupy, beckoning the foolish with golden light and gentle winds, only to devour them whole when no one was watching. And then there were the ones like old men’s hands—hard, cruel, and cracked from labor not their own. Stolen lands, made sacred by force and fear. 

But this stretch? This ranch? It breathed. Not just lived—breathed.

Remmick could feel it in the way the air dragged through his lungs, thick with copper and wild mint. In the way the earth gave a little beneath his boots, like it was testing his weight, measuring him without kindness or cruelty. Just seeing if he’d hold. The fields stretched far and gold-tinged, rolling and dipped like a body resting after battle. And there was something in the soil—not a curse, not a wound—but a weight. A presence. Blood here didn’t feel like a stain—it felt like inheritance. Not taken by force, but birthed. Nurtured. Watered by sweat and sun and generations of staying put, come hell or high water.

This land had roots deeper than anything Remmick could see, and they weren’t the kind you could tear out. These roots held stories, promises, and scars. They pulsed underfoot like veins.

It unsettled him in a way he couldn’t quite place—not with fear, but with familiarity. Like something he’d once known, in another life, or maybe in a dream. The ranch didn’t offer welcome, but it didn’t bare its teeth either. It simply watched.

Endless hills rolled in like waves turned to dust, dipping into steep ravines and sudden cliffs that cut the earth like it had been cracked by God’s own fist. Sounds of water that he knew had to be winding rivers sneaking through it all like veins—still, slick, and deep enough to swallow a man whole if he wasn’t paying attention. The grass, dry and half-dead in the fading sun, crunched under his boots, already brittle from heat. Come winter, he knew it’d freeze stiff, harder than bone.

This harsh beauty—weathered barns, fences that held more curses than nails, posts leaning like tired shoulders after long days. He remembers the talk of this place in the saloon. A place not named kindly, though no one dared speak ill of it too loud. Men lowered their voices when the ranch came up, muttering over their drinks like the land itself could hear them.

Brutal place, one had said, fingers curled tight around a sweating glass. Beautiful, another added, voice soft with something close to reverence.

They spoke of a man—the father—harder than the land he owned. A presence more than a person. Said his word was law out here, and his loyalty ran so deep it bled out of his kin. Said he’d chew a man up and spit out the bones if he crossed him wrong. And his daughter—well, they didn’t speak of her much. Not without looking away first. All Remmick could gather was that she wasn’t for the faint-hearted, and no one got close without earning scars.

He stepped further, every crunch of grass underfoot swallowed by the wind.

A place like this didn’t forget. Not the trespassers. Not the faithful. And sure as hell not the desperate. His eyes kept sweeping the land, sharp and steady, even as the sun began to drop behind the hills—bleeding gold into the tall grass, turning the weeds into firelit threads. Time was thinning. He’d have to move fast if he wanted to secure anything of use before nightfall set in and made every shadow a threat.

Up ahead, tucked low against the incline, stood a barn—small, squat, and cloaked in what looked like a recent coat of paint, the kind of effort that said someone still gave a damn about the place. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. A place like that might have tools. Might have hands that needed more hands. Might even have someone willing to look past a man’s grime if he could swing a hammer or mend a fence.

Remmick spat into the dirt and started toward it, his steps deliberate but slow, calculating how he’d play this. No sudden movements. No tales unless they were asked for. Just sweat and skill and maybe, if luck hadn’t turned completely on him, a chance to stay somewhere a little warmer than the road.

While steps were slow, measured. He didn’t want to spook anything—beast or man. He knew how to approach wild things, and this land, this ranch tucked deep like a secret worth keeping, felt alive in a way that had his every instinct lit up like lightning in his ribs.

He made it halfway to the house, sack still slung over one shoulder, boots kicking up loose dirt with every quiet step. The windows up the hill glowed faint with lamplight, and the scent of woodsmoke drifted through the air like memory. He figured he’d knock soft, ask for work, maybe barter with the last of his strength. If nothing else, he’d offer to fix the break in the fence he snuck through. Just enough to earn a cot in the hay.

But then—a flash of movement in the dark.

He caught it too late.

The breath left his lungs in a grunt as something sharp dragged clean across his throat. Not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to make the world reel and punish. His hand flew to the wound as warm blood spilled fast between his fingers, hot and slick. He staggered back, sack dropping to the dirt, boots scuffing against the packed earth.

“Fuck!” He snarled, low and guttural, the word dragging itself out of his throat in his full, unhidden brogue—rough like gravel, thick like old whiskey. The mask he usually wore had cracked clean through, now paired with a gash across his throat and a trickle of blood blooming from how hard he bit his lip on the sudden impact.

She was already on him. Not some panicked ranch wife with trembling hands and a shotgun held too loose. No, this one moved like a ghost that’d learned how to fight. Controlled. Dead steady. The kind of woman bred for brutality and raised by land that didn’t give out softness unless it was earned, and even then, just sparingly given out like rations he’d live by in factories. Her blade caught the half-moonlight like a smirk made of iron. Short. Personal. The kind used not for show but for gutting things close-range.

“Fuck you doin’ on my ranch, huh?!”

Her voice came low and mean, cut from the same cloth as the wind curling cruel through the grass. It bit worse than the blade she hadn’t even truly used yet.

Remmick blinked rapidly, vision wavering, but he didn’t so much as stagger. His mouth twitched into something that might’ve passed for a grin—feral and red, one tooth stained pink, gleaming with spit and iron.

“That how y’all greet everyone ‘round here? Or just the ones askin’ for a bit of honest work?”

For half a heartbeat, he swore he saw something flicker behind her glare—surprise, maybe. But then it hit.

Her fist cracked across his jaw like gunfire. No warning, just wrath. A clean, practiced punch that snapped his head sideways and sent a fresh wave of blood down his jaw. It poured hot and quick, soaking the collar of his shirt and dripping to the dust below. The ringing in his ears built to a sharp buzz now singing across his face. He barely had time to grit his teeth before her hand was in his collar, jerking him forward with a force that belied her size. 

“Who are you talking to, stranger?” she hissed, all fire and venom. “I oughta gut you and feed you to my fuckin’ dogs for even breathing here.”

Remmick was stunned. Not because of the threat—he’d heard worse, lived through worse. But the woman wielding it? She wasn’t bluff. She was carved from cruelty and command, eyes as sharp as the knife in her grip. No fear. Not a drop of hesitation. She looked at him like a problem she knew exactly how to solve—with blood and silence.

And fuck him, but some twisted, rusted-out piece of him—maybe the same one that always walked toward thunder instead of away from it—respected the hell out of her. Even with her blade a breath from opening his throat like a second mouth.

He’d been a goddamn fool to let silence stretch this long. That was always his trouble—letting things hang too loose, too long, like rope waiting to be noosed. Half the time he didn’t care. But now? Now he wished he’d stitched that habit shut three states back. Because what came next was sharp and loud, a crack that tore through the night just like the one she’d left blooming across his cheek.

She yanked him forward so hard his shirt collar gave way with a violent rip. Cotton tore like paper in her grip, and now the blade hovered real close, the tip pressing just enough to make a threat out of pressure.

“You better speak up and fix the confused face” she hissed, breath hot and steady. “I asked you a question. You don’t answer, I drive this blade down your throat, and you’re gonna wish you’d never crawled outta whatever hole you came from.” Her voice was calm in the way only dangerous people could manage—like she’d done it before. Like she'd already decided what to do with his body once it stopped breathing.

“Jus’—just lookin’ for the man who runs the land,” Remmick rasped, breath hitching, the copper in his mouth thick and bitter. “Honest work, ma’am. I swear it.”

His voice sounded foreign to him, hoarse and cracked like dry timber. Pathetic, almost. He’d fought men twice his size and crawled through places darker than hell with a blade in his gut, but this—this woman, this blade, this goddamn land under his boots—it made him feel stripped and foolish. Stumbling, bleeding, uninvited on land that didn’t even want his shadow near it.

He braced for more. And then came the sound: a sharp, disbelieving scoff that rolled from her throat like it could cut glass. 

Next was her palm—flat, calloused, and mean—slamming into the center of his chest. Not a punch, no, but it knocked the air out of him just the same. Like her hand carried the weight of the entire goddamn ranch behind it. He staggered back, boots dragging in the dirt, breath stolen.

“You’re lookin’ at her, asshole.”

There was fire in her eyes, not the kind that flickered. The kind that ate. She stood square, jaw tight, shoulders rolled like a fighter before a bell. And Remmick? He could do nothing but stare, vision blurring from the blood and the shame curling somewhere in his gut.

She was the one in charge. Fuck.

It landed hard and fast in his chest—he wasn’t looking for the man of the land. There wasn’t one. There was her. And she looked at him like she’d already decided his bones would make decent fence posts at the same break in the fence he sneaked into, if he gave her enough reason.

“My… apologies, ma’am. I’m just—” He faltered, finally registering the warm slickness creeping down his neck. The bleeding had picked up. Fast. His shirt was sticking to him, collar torn from her grip, his pride hanging by even less.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t soften. Didn’t even blink. If anything, she looked bored.

“Spit it out,” she snapped, eyes sharp as her blade. “Gimme a reason to hand you somethin’ to put pressure on that shit besides my boot.”

Not a drop of mercy. Just rage. Earned rage. The kind carved into someone who’d had to fight for every goddamn inch they owned. And Remmick—stupid, bleeding, cornered Remmick—knew better than to beg. So he offered something else. Something real.

“I can work,” he ground out. “Repairs, fences, livestock, tools. Hell, I’ll clean boots if you ask it. I’m not lookin’ for a handout. Just work. Just a place to sleep and enough to eat so I don’t bleed out in some ditch like a dog.” 

He took a breath that rattled in his chest, dirt thick on his tongue.

“I’ll fix that break in your fence. The one east side, tucked behind a stand of brush,” he added, voice lower, careful. “Didn’t think anyone saw it. But I did. You let me stay, I’ll make it better’n it was before.”

A long silence stretched between them, heavy as dusk. He didn’t beg. Didn’t blink. Just stood there with blood on his torn collar, hope in his voice, and nothing left to lose.

For a beat, she just stared at him—sharp and unmoved, like she was weighing the worth of his bones against the trouble he was already costing her. Her lip curled, a slow, disdainful thing. Then came the smallest shake of her head, like she couldn’t believe the audacity of the mess bleeding in her yard. Her hand dipped into her coat.

For a breath, Remmick wondered if this was it—if she was gonna pull iron and finish the job herself, let the beasts sort out what was left of him. Instead, she yanked out a handkerchief. Worn. Clean. Smelled faintly of saddle soap and cedar.

She shoved it hard into his chest, and he nearly stumbled back with the force of it.

“Go on,” she snapped, eyes blazing. “Told you already—put pressure on that damn thing. You bleeding out ain’t gonna fix you struttin’ up here like some idiot.”

She was fury wrapped in sun-bleached cotton and leather, and he—Remmick, sore and half-dead—did what any man with half a brain would do. He pressed the cloth to his neck and didn’t say another word.

“You’re no damn use to me if you’re leaking all over the dirt. Especially since I should gut you where you stand for being here”

He nodded, curt and now understanding, muttering to the cicadas buzzing around them. 

“Yes, ma’am.”

She didn’t wait for him to find his footing.

“Move.”

And move he did, half-stumbling behind her through the high grass, cradling the soaked handkerchief to his neck while she walked a step ahead like the Devil’s own fury in boots. The barn loomed ahead—broad and weathered but sturdy, the kind that didn’t fall down easy no matter how hard the storms hit. He was right, its wood was painted a fresh coat of white and was silver at the edges, the big doors yawning open just enough to reveal the amber flicker of lantern light inside.

They passed a long row of fenced paddocks, and even in the dim wash of twilight, the horses shone. Big, strong things, coats like spilled ink and molten copper, eyes dark and clever. One kicked at the dirt and snorted as they walked by, the others watching with a quiet dignity that Remmick remembered too well. That silence before the storm of muscle and instinct, before a colt broke wild or worse—broke you.

He slowed just enough to get a better look.

“Don’t,” she snapped, voice slicing through the buzz of cicadas.

Remmick turned his head sharply. She’d stopped walking. Her back was still to him, but her shoulders had squared like she felt his gaze, knew it for what it was.

“You’re bleeding on my land, stranger,” she said, quieter now but no softer. “That means you don’t get to look at my beautiful things. Not until you’ve earned it.”

He dipped his head, chastened. “Yes, ma’am.”

She grunted like that was good enough—for now—and shoved open the side door of the barn. It was cool inside, heavy with the scent of hay and leather, horses shifting in their stalls. She led him to a small room near the back, no more than a cot, a shelf, and a hook on the wall. Clean enough, but it still smelled like old tobacco and the sweat of men long gone.

“You’ll sleep here tonight,” she said. “Up before God himself tomorrow. Porch at first light. You so much as yawn too loud, I’ll put you to work muckin’ out stalls with your bare hands.”

Remmick nodded again, blood drying tacky on his skin, exhaustion sinking in like a stone tossed in a still pond. “Understood.”

Remmick leaned back slightly on the edge of the cot, the metal groaning beneath him, the sting in his neck pulsing dull and wet. His sack of belongings lay at his feet, and the handkerchief in his hand was soaked dark now, clinging to his skin like penance. He looked up at her—this woman who hadn’t so much as blinked when she’d slammed her fist into his face or threatened to feed him to her dogs—and for a moment, all he could think was: Goddamn.

The moonlight, soft as it was, painted her like a myth. It cut across the slats above them and bathed her in silver, like something half-forgiven, half-feral. A face too fine for fists and warnings, too damn carved for the life she clearly lived—but she wore it like armor. And her words, her threat, was the blade beneath.

“You can run, stranger,” she said, voice steady as a bullet chambered. “But I promise you, there ain’t a damn stone in this town I’ve ever left unturned, and that sentiment isn’t startin’ with you. I find even a damn horseshoe missin’ if you decide to leave, I’ll keep my promise, and my dogs are gonna be fat n’ happy after I’m done.”

She stepped closer, casting a longer shadow across the floor. “So do what you came to do and sleep. Don’t stare at my fuckin’ horses too long. And I better find you on my porch.”

Then she nodded—one final exclamation mark to her warning—before turning on her heel.

Remmick blinked, heart thudding slow and heavy like boots in mud. The corner of his mouth twitched—just barely—into a ghost of a grin a man doesn’t earn, not when he’s bleeding. He’d never been the type to put much stock in women past a warm night and a way to blow off steam, but he’d seen beauty before. Plenty of it. Just not the kind that came with a fist to the jaw and a voice like thunder rolling low across a field.

This one didn’t just strike him—she damn near branded him. Fury in a face too fine for the damage she dealt, and still, every bit of it felt deserved. He was an idiot for stumbling in uninvited. Worse for liking the way she reminded him he wasn’t invisible after all.

Jesus Christ, he thought, tasting iron on his tongue again. 

Out loud, his voice came rough—raw like whiskey left too long in the throat, edged with dust, dried blood, and a kind of reverence that wasn’t holy but something close to it in the way only ruined men could understand. 

“Ma’am,” he rasped, letting the word drag slow off his tongue like it hurt to say, “I ain’t ever seen horses that pretty… or a woman who could break a man in half ‘fore he’s even said his name.”

There was a pause. Just long enough for the air between them to still, for the wind outside to howl in approval. She stopped in the doorway, her back lit by a streak of moonlight like some kind of goddamn specter carved from the land itself. But she didn’t turn around.

“You think talkin’ sweet’ll help you?” Her voice cracked like flint against stone—dry, sharp, and carved from the kind of steel no man could sweet-talk past. “What a damn fool you are. That pretty mouth won’t buy you a damn thing out here but trouble.”

She paused just enough for her next words to hit like a warning shot.

“I better find that bullshit scrubbed off by morning. It won’t get you far—not with me, not on this land. You’re treading on ice so thin I can already hear it crackin’.”

He swallowed thick, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, and forced his body not to sag under the ache settling deep in his bones. But his voice, this time, came gentler—not soft, not pleading, but honest. Almost too much so.

“I’ll be on your porch,” he said. Quieter. Firmer. “Swear it.”

And he meant it. Not out of fear. Not even out of debt. But because there was something about her—something ancient, like the way land settles after a quake or how thunder holds its breath before the lightning falls. She reminded him of the parts of himself he’d buried and hoped wouldn’t crawl back up. Fury without cruelty. Order without mercy. And steadiness that could only come from pain carved deep and early.

As her boots thudded away into the dark, crunching over hay and dirt like punctuation marks to a sentence he hadn’t finished reading, he finally let the tension bleed out of his shoulders. He dropped onto the thin cot with a grunt, the old frame groaning beneath him.

The barn smelled like iron and leather and dust. The kind of smell that reminded him of war camps and baptism by fire. He stared up at the rafters, eyes wide, jaw aching, heart thudding like a drumbeat that didn’t know if it was mourning or yearning.

“Fuck,” he muttered, dragging a hand over his face, knuckles scraping the dried blood.

Not a prayer. Not a curse. Just the only word that fit.

As promised, he was on her porch before even God had the decency to open His cruel eyes.

A different shirt clung to his frame—clean enough, sleeves rolled to the elbows, fabric already damp with the morning’s sweat. The blood on his neck had dried to a dark, rust-colored smear, the gash no longer bleeding but still raw, pulsing in time with the low thrum of his heartbeat. His pants, sun-faded and torn at the knees from too many years and too many miles, hung low on his hips, cinched by a belt he couldn’t remember stealing or buying. Probably stolen. Most things he wore were.

He stood on her porch like a man waiting to be judged—shoulders squared, jaw set, the sharp scent of pine and horse and distant smoke threading through the morning air. He'd been there long enough for the wood beneath his boots to remember his weight. Long enough to forget, for a second, why he'd come. Long enough that he nearly didn’t knock.

But he did. A single, quiet rap against the door. Then another. 

And he waited.

Then, like the crack of a rifle, the door swung open.

She stood there with that same look—hard-eyed, sharp-jawed, and already irritated—as if she'd been waiting to be disappointed by him. The same look she’d worn when she clocked him in the jaw without hesitation. No greeting, no welcome—just cool appraisal, the weight of it heavy as a stone in his gut.

But behind her came the smell. Hot bread. Fresh.

And coffee—real coffee. The kind that bit at your nose before it kissed your tongue. Not the bitter, gritty sludge boiled in old tin pots over dying fires that he'd grown used to choking down. No, this had to be dark and rich, full-bodied, ground with care and made in one of those stovetop percolators he’d only ever seen once, years back in the house of a man who paid him to knock on doors and collect debts at the end of a pistol.

This place had too much softness tucked beneath all its iron. That, more than anything, made his skin crawl.

It wasn’t the warmth that unnerved him—it was what the warmth was hiding. Like a lullaby sung over the sound of a cocked hammer. And maybe it was just the smell of fresh bread and coffee messing with his head, but something about it made his teeth grind.

Apparently, it messed with his stomach too.

Hunger—his most loyal, obedient companion—curled low and mean beneath his ribs. The stolen apple he’d gnawed down to the core in the barn this morning must’ve burned off during the long, silent walk to her porch. Now it was just ghosts in his gut, and the scent of real food felt like sin.

He shifted his weight, jaw clenched tight. Starving was fine. Starving, he knew how to do. Starving meant control.

But this? This kind of morning—with the door cracked open, the smell of a real breakfast, and a woman staring at him like he was already one bad word away from bleeding again—this was unfamiliar territory.

Dangerous in a way bullets and fists had never been.

“Good thing you knew better, we’re doing maintenance today ” she muttered. She herself was a contradiction dressed in dust and deliberation. Remmick had seen his share of ranch wives from Texas to Kansas, and they all seemed to come out the same—laced up tight, soft-handed, smelling of rosewater and resignation. Gowns stitched for show, not for sweat. Their business was the kitchen and the prayer bench, not the corral.

But this one?

She wore a dress, sure—but it had been tailored by need, not fashion. Her clothes, though plainly cut, were nothing like the ranch wives he’d seen in other towns, all ribbons and drooping lace. No, hers were sharp, functional—soft blue linen sleeves rolled high, and the hem of her work dress stitched up in the front to reveal the split sewn for riding, the skirt hitched just enough to keep her mobile. A roughspun thing cinched at the waist with a leather belt that had clearly been repurposed from some old tack. She moved like a woman who had no time for pretense and even less for people slowing her down.

As she moved, the skirt shifted just enough for Remmick to catch a glint of metal strapped to the warm curve of her thigh. A pistol. Well-oiled. Tucked into a leather holster like it belonged there. Like it always belonged there. Small but mean-looking. Worn smooth at the grip. Well-loved and likely more loyal than most men she’d known. Not the sort of weapon you carry for bluff. No, that one had barked before, and likely would again.

Remmick’s tongue went dry. His boots scuffed slightly on the porch plank as he shifted his weight.

“Jesus,” he muttered, more prayer than curse. She turned, eyes sharp under the brim of her hat, or maybe just under the kind of woman-worn fury that didn’t need a brim to cast shadow.

“You see somethin’, stranger?” she asked, voice like dry rope dragged across gravel. Daring him.

He let his busted lip twitch. “Ain’t used to seein’ a woman carry with more style than the goddamn sheriff.”

She didn’t laugh. Didn’t smirk. But hell, did she glare.

“That’s why your kind ends up dead,” she said flat as winter. “Too busy admirin’ the holster to notice the barrel pointin’ at your gut.”

His hands flexed at his sides—slow, deliberate, palms open and plain for her to see. A quiet show of compliance, the kind a man made when standing in another’s domain and trying not to get shot for breathing wrong.

Not that it would’ve made a lick of difference if she’d thought him dishonest. Hell, if she’d caught even a whiff of deceit on him last night, she’d have slit his throat without losing sleep or her footing. He didn’t doubt it. Not for a second.

But what she had seen—what she’d chosen to clock, even in the dark and bleeding—were hands. Rough-hewn. Scarred at the knuckles and calloused deep enough to mark time. The kind that spoke of labor, not lies. Maybe she figured the man behind them was pitiful—she wouldn’t be wrong—but at least the hands worked. And for now, that was all he had worth offering.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, low and steady. “Duly noted.”

He should’ve sewn his mouth shut along with his habit of letting the silence seep too long three states ago, too. He thought.

“Y’ain’t no use to me if you’re feral and starving. If you make it through today, your quarters will be in the bunkhouse. Follow me.” She spat the words like grit from her teeth, already stepping off the porch before he could muster anything close to a reply.

Remmick moved aside without hesitation, bootheel scraping the wood, her braid slicing through the air behind her like a noose just shy of swinging.

She didn’t wait.

The land yawned out wide in front of them—open, blistered, and brutal in its beauty. The morning mist hadn’t yet burned off the hills, and where the sun touched the earth, everything came alive in gold. Grassland stretched in all directions like a sea with no tide. Fences twisted with time lined the edges of pasture, nailed crooked in places but still holding. A cluster of barns sat in the distance, built more from will than symmetry, and all of it sat under that cruel, endless sky that seemed to judge men just for breathing.

Remmick followed in silence, shoulders squared, sack slung over one. His new shirt stuck to the dried blood on his throat, but he didn’t flinch. Not now. Not when the wind carried the scent of horses and hot dust, not when the earth beneath him thrummed like it remembered every name that ever tried to own it and died trying.

She led with a hard gait and the posture of someone who’d never had anything handed to her—and would gut anyone who tried. His stomach knotted. Not with fear, exactly. With something adjacent.

“You always bring in strays like this?” he asked, voice low, not quite biting.

She didn’t glance back. “Only when I’m short on hands and long on bad luck.”

They crossed the wide dirt stretch between the main house and the corrals. A few ranch hands were already out—three of them near the far post fence, one tossing feed, another saddling a dapple-gray with wide, wary eyes. They paused, sizing Remmick up the way you do when something wild wanders too close to home.

“This here’s a new ranch hand,” she barked, nodding toward him like he was a burden she’d agreed to carry and might still toss over the fence. “He’ll be workin’. Don’t feed into his jawin’ if he gets mouthy. He bleeds easy.”

That earned a sharp chuckle from one of them, a broad-shouldered man with a scarred lip and arms thick with work. The others just nodded, unreadable.

The bunkhouse sat at the edge of the corral fence, framed by two drooping cypress trees that looked like they’d been praying for death since the war. The door was kicked crooked, and the single chimney spit a slow wisp of smoke like a dying breath. Remmick’s boots hit the porch hard, the wood creaking like it might buckle.

Inside, it was what he expected—barebones but built to last. Eight beds, four on either wall. Iron frames, patched wool blankets, each bunk with a chest at the foot and a hook for a coat. It smelled of old sweat, saddle soap, and damp earth—home enough for men who didn’t expect one.

“Pick a bed that ain’t taken. You live clean, you pull your weight, and you get fed. You give me trouble, you’re gone,” she said, arms crossed, still blocking the doorway like she hadn’t decided whether to stake him or let him breathe another day.

Remmick looked around, took it in. The way the lanternlight flickered low, the way one bed had carvings in the headboard—names scratched into wood like men trying not to be forgotten.

He looked back at her. “Reckon I’ll take my chances.”

“You already did,” she snapped, eyes flint sharp. “Don’t make me regret lettin’ you up off your damn knees.”

Then she was gone—boots striking the porch, braid cutting the air again like a mark left behind. He stood there a moment longer, sack still on his back, pulse loud behind his eyes. He smirked to himself—bloodless and small.

“Hell of a place,” he muttered. And chose the bed closest to the back wall. Always near an exit. Always.

Work was back-aching, sun-scorched, and unforgiving—but it was the only thing that kept Remmick upright and fed. And for a man with no kin, no land, and no right to ask for anything more, it was more than he deserved. So when they put him through the ringer—through the blistering, callous-making rhythm of a ranchhand’s first day—he didn’t spit, didn’t gripe, didn’t ask why.

He just worked.

At first light, he was knee-deep in muck, mucking out stalls older than some towns he’d passed through. Flies swarmed, biting into open scabs and sweat-wet skin. One of the older hands—name was Boone, square jaw and crooked nose—spit near his boots and barked, “Low man does the shit work. That’s you.”

By midday, he was hauling tack from the barn to the fence line, then hoisting feed bags twice his weight into the loft, each lift stretching the ache across his spine like a song that wouldn’t end. He broke a sweat before the sun had cleared the top rail of the paddock, and by high noon, it felt like the ground itself wanted to kill him.

“Move like molasses, low man,” another ranch hand jeered when Remmick paused too long, catching breath beside the trough. “You ain’t gonna make it to supper at that pace.”

He didn’t rise to it. Just rolled his shoulders and kept to the work, biting down on the inside of his cheek until it bled. His boots were caked with mud and shit, hands raw from the leather reins and rusted nails, and still he pushed on. Quiet. Focused.

Come sunset, they were cooling the horses down in the round pen—gold light catching on the dust kicked up in long, amber sweeps. The other hands had already started to slack off, laughing rough and loud, half-assing the final chores of the day. Remmick kept moving, tension roping his shoulders tight. He didn’t like leaving things half done.

That’s when the trouble started. Boone again, predictably. Bigger, meaner, and too used to being top dog around these parts.

“Hey, low man,” he called, tossing a coiled rope too close to Remmick’s feet. “You clean my bunk too, or just the shit outta my horse’s ass?”

Remmick didn’t stop. “Don’t need to clean what already stinks.”

The air shifted—like the whole ranch held its breath.

Boone was on him in seconds, kicking up dust like a spooked colt. No warning, no lead-in. Fist to the jaw, hard and sudden, sent Remmick stumbling sideways into the rails. Another tear at his already split lip, maybe. He didn’t taste it yet.

It was quick and ugly after that.

Boots scraping, dust flying, blood getting flung across the round pen sand. Boone was solid, but Remmick fought like a man who’d had every bone broken once already and still came back for more. He ducked low, caught Boone in the ribs, then came up fast and sharp with a headbutt that split skin clean across Boone’s brow.

By the time she arrived, half the hands had gathered like it was a cockfight behind the stables. Dirt kicked up thick and hot, sweat rolling down sunburned necks, and boots scuffling like the devil was keeping score. Some hollered, some wagered under breath, and Boone’s knuckles were already bloodied from the last hit when the sound of her boots split through it all like a thunderclap over dry land.

Solid. Sharp. Measured.

She didn’t shout. Didn’t even blink. She just walked in.

Through the pen gate like it was nothing more than smoke and insult. The crowd parted like wheat in the wind. In her hands, the rifle sat upright, grip easy but unmistakable. Power didn’t always come loud—and hers never needed to. It lived in her jaw, in her shoulders, in the way men twice her size took one look and remembered their place.

“The fuck,” she drawled, voice low and lethal, like flint striking steel.

The silence that followed came swift and immediate. Boone froze where he lay bleeding. Remmick, panting, blood dripping slow down his temple, held his ground but didn’t dare speak.

She moved closer, deliberate steps crunching over churned dirt, the butt of her rifle knocking Boone hard in the shoulder with the kind of force that sent him stumbling like a child caught stealing.

“Get the fuck up. What’s wrong with you?” she hissed, not even raising her voice. Didn't have to. That voice—controlled and cold—had the weight of every round loaded in the chamber.

Boone scrambled up like his pride might follow, muttering, “I’m sorry, ma’am, I just—”

She didn’t let him finish. Didn’t give him the privilege of explaining.

“There’s no fightin’ on my ranch.” The words weren’t a warning. They were scripture. “You wanna throw fists, you take it to the devil himself. But not here. Not on my dirt.”

Then she turned to Remmick, rifle shifting in her grip, mouth hard as the line of her brow.

“You wanna fight again?” she said, stepping once closer. “Come talk to my damn rifle.”

Remmick met her eyes, chest rising and falling slowly. Blood sat like warpaint at the edge of his jaw. His knuckles throbbed, the ache almost welcome. He could taste copper in his mouth, but there was no defiance in him—just that same steady grit.

“Understood, ma’am.”

Her gaze held his a moment longer, then flicked back to Boone. She looked him over like she was picking the spot she’d put a bullet if she had to.

“Clean yourself up,” she said flatly. “And both of you—get your shit together. Tomorrow’s still coming.”

With that, she turned on her heel, braid lashing behind her like a noose cut loose, stride unbroken, dust catching on her boots like the earth itself didn’t dare stick too long.

The hands all watched her go.

Remmick spit blood into the dirt, wiped his mouth, and muttered under his breath as the crowd started to break away. He looked at Boone, still nursing his ribs.

“Guess I earned my keep.”

And like she said, tomorrow came.

The sun had barely cracked the horizon, still low and bleeding gold over the hills when Remmick stepped out of the bunkhouse—first one out, boots already laced, shirt damp at the collar from cold water and sweat. Gash still sitting above it, starting the slow process of healing, of reminding. A slight ache lingered in his side from yesterday’s scuffle, but it was dulled by the familiarity of it all. Work, wounds, repeat.

She was already there. Of course she was.

Leaning against the fence like she’d been waiting all night, her hand dragging slow and practiced along the glossy flank of her stallion—a beast as black as coal and twice as proud. The kind of horse a lesser man wouldn’t even try to saddle. The stallion nickered low, shifting under her palm, muscles rippling like stormclouds beneath his hide.

“Good mornin’, ma’am,” Remmick offered, voice low but steady, rough with sleep and yesterday’s blood.

She didn’t look at him at first. Just let her fingers curl gently under the stallion’s jaw, inspecting the bridle. Then:

“You always this chipper after gettin’ your ass handed to you?” she asked dryly, eyes still on the horse.

Remmick gave a tired smirk, tongue pressing to the cut on his inner cheek. “Only when I’m still standin’ after.”

That earned him a look. Just a glance, over her shoulder—sharp, assessing, like she was measuring whether he was worth wasting breath on.

Then, after a beat: “What do they call you?”

He blinked. Not because he didn’t expect the question, but because no one had asked it like that in a long while.

“Remmick,” he said after a pause. “Just Remmick.”

She eyed him for a second longer, then gave a tight nod. “That’s different. Suits you. Sounds like somethin’ that doesn’t know when to quit.”

He huffed a short laugh through his nose. “Yeah. Somethin’ like that.”

She clicked her tongue and adjusted the cinch on the saddle. And like a tide rolling in—one that could swallow you whole but still, you watched and listened anyway—she said her name.

It didn’t slip out so much as settle. Heavy. Sure of itself. It hung in the air longer than it should’ve, like a challenge more than an offering. Like the sea cracking against jagged rock—soft if you weren’t paying attention, brutal if you got too close.

Remmick didn’t say a word in response. Didn’t dare repeat it. Some things felt sacred, even if spoken through grit.

“Didn’t peg you for a woman who gave her name so easy,” he muttered, eyes slipping between tracing your figure and the stallion.

You turned, finally facing him fully now, arms folded across your chest. Your sleeves were rolled up past your elbows, revealing forearms marked with faint scars, sun-darkened and strong.

“I don’t,” you said flatly. “But if I’m barkin’ orders, and considering that I cut up your neck, I may as well get it over with.”

The tension sat between you like an unspoken bet neither of you would admit to placing. He wasn’t afraid of you, but he was wary—and there was a difference. One you seemed to respect more than most.

“You saddle a horse, Remmick?” you asked suddenly. The sound of his name on your tongue hit him harder than your fist ever had—clean, sharp, and with a strange kind of heat that settled in his gut like a coal left smoldering too long.

It wasn’t the way you said it, not exactly. It was the weight behind it. Like you’d carved it out of something that bled and then dared him to own it.

Something stirred in him, slow and forgotten, low in his stomach—a feeling he’d long since buried beneath bruises, whiskey, and the years spent running from things with names. He bit the inside of his cheek at the sensation, jaw twitching. Couldn’t afford softness. Not here. Not with you. Not with the sun barely risen and his blood still drying under his shirt.

“I do.”

“Then grab a rope and don’t fuck up my morning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and meant it.

And just like that, you swung into the saddle and turned the stallion with one clean flick of your wrist. Dust kicked up behind you, and he moved to follow, your name rolling around his mind like a bullet chambered, not yet fired.

╭━━━━━ ━━━━━╮

The sun was sinking slow over the hills, painting everything in copper and ash. The last of the horses had been brought in, the gates secured, and the scent of hot iron and horse sweat lingered in the air. Already a week in, he’d fallen into the groove of the ranch’s work, Remmick had half a mind to scrub his hands clean and find somewhere to sit that didn’t creak or itch. But your voice came sharp behind him before he could wander.

“You walkin’ around with your head in the clouds or just lost your damn sense?”

He turned slowly, brushing the dust from his shirt. You were posted up against the barn door, arms crossed, that braid of yours falling loose and wild now, stray strands stuck to your neck from the heat. The lowburn fire in your eyes hadn’t dimmed since morning.

“Neither,” he drawled, thumb catching the edge of his belt loop. “Just enjoyin’ the quiet. Feels like I ain’t heard nothin’ but boots and barkin’ all day.”

Your mouth twitched. Not a smile—God forbid—but something passed over your face like amusement disguised as judgment. “You ain’t earned the right to complain.”

“Didn’t say I was complainin’, ma’am.” His eyes lingered a beat too long on your hands, rough and sure, the way they curled around your flask. “Just observin’. Like how you only ever call me when there’s somethin’ that needs fixin’ or lifted or carried.”

“Ain’t that what you’re good for?”

His grin curled slow, sly. “You tell me.”

You took a pull from the flask and wiped your mouth with the back of your hand, eyes never leaving his. “You’re good for bruises and trouble, near as I can tell. Don’t make you special.”

“And yet you haven’t sent me packin’.”

“You think that means somethin’?”

“Means somethin’ to me.” His voice dipped there—lower, quieter. Not sweet, not soft. Just honest in a way that made you blink once, slow and unreadable.

You stepped forward, just once, and the sound of your boots on the packed dirt was louder than it should’ve been. Close enough now that he could see the flecks of gold in your eyes, the way sweat clung to your temple.

“You want a medal for stickin’ around a week?” You asked.

“Nah. Just maybe the occasional ‘thank you’ instead of bein’ looked at like a stray dog that bit your boot.”

You looked him over, deliberate, slow. Your gaze dragged from his boots to the still-healing cut across his throat to the scar along his jaw he’d never bothered to explain. When you spoke again, your voice was quieter. Meaner, but in that way that tasted like salt and heat instead of real anger.

“You got eyes like a dog, y’know that? All hopeful and haunted. Ain’t never sure whether you’re gonna fetch or bite.”

“Would it matter?”

You held his stare for one long second.

Then you capped the flask and tossed it to him. He caught it, surprised.

“Go clean up,” you said, turning your back to him. “And don’t drink more than half, or I’ll gut you and make you work tomorrow with your liver in your hand, Remmick."

He chuckled, the sound itself felt foreign, voice rasping with smoke and sweat and something else too old to name. Not missing the use of his name, but that hungry pit in himself, sure as hell was craving the sound of it a little more.

“Yes, ma’am.”

And as you walked off, braid bouncing with each step, he took the smallest sip and kept his eyes on your retreating form. Hell, maybe you'd kill him one day. But it wouldn’t be before he saw what else that mouth of yours could do besides spit fire. That is—if you let him.

taglist ; @lunaleah @idiotsatan @arquiiva @pixieofthesun @kaelizl @nefertiti2003 @damnzelsoul @latebean @creamqvvn

[ethereays]

ethel cain songs are so brutal i’m starting to miss willoughby tucker too

[ethereays]

YYUUUPPP YYUUUPPPP!! delicious, amazing, spectacular, beautiful first chapter, your writing soo 😙🤌 can't wait for more!! i already know this will be on my mindd

I. damnation

REVENANT, au!remmick x reincarnated wife!reader

synopsis Vampirism is a curse of memory. Reincarnation is the curse of almost remembering. And so they dance, century after century: She returns with dreams she cannot explain. And he waits, starved and reverent and wrong. Never able to touch her without bleeding. Never able to stop following the scent of her soul. Because love—when cursed—does not fade. It rots slow. It burns gentle. It waits. And Remmick has nothing but time.

warning(s) nsfw. mdni 18+. prolific dreams. religious undertones. oral implied (f and m recieving). choking (implied). alcohol mentioned - reader is a bar owner. whole lots of sea imagery cuz well duh. yelling at annoying tourists. swearing. reader feeling lowk crazy. insomnia. slowburn asf. no use of y/n.

angel talks omgomgomg thank u guys for all the love u showed just my TEASER. holy fuck. ive been so fucking excited to share my first series w u guys, like truly. i have so much in store for u guys so i cant thank yall enough for all the love and support. i kindly ask u guys to read my authors note before starting, that will be greatly appreciated to give some clarifications about the story going forward. comment on either the teaser or my mlist post to be added on to my taglist if u guys enjoyed this first part n wanna stick around for the rest of it, ageless or untitled blogs will not be added.

#NAV.ᐟ revenant mlist, au!remmick x reincarnated wife!reader

"i know you, i've walked with you,

once upon a dream..."

DAMNATION. Total. Inescapable. The kind that seeps, not strikes.

The nights were always the worst. Not for the work, or the faces that blurred together behind the bar, or even the endless crash of waves chewing at the black rocks beyond your window.

No—that sound had become something else. A lullaby. Crooked and ancient. The kind of tune that clings to your bones like smoke. It didn’t soothe, not really. It hovered. Whispered.

Like a hymn sung just behind your ear, in a voice too old to be trusted.

No, what unsettled you came after the lights went out. Sleep had never come easy. It arrived fractured, vivid, like slipping into another version of wakefulness where your body remained behind but something else wandered freely. The doctors once called it “sleep paralysis,” scribbled it down like a footnote in your medical chart and moved on. But in the darker and bone-chillingly quiet cracks of your mind, you figured it to be a twisted sense of familiarity

It wasn’t paralysis—it was memory. Or something close enough to rot.

You saw him there, always. A figure stitched together from shadow and something too devout to be holy—reverence soaked into every movement, every word he spoke like it might sanctify or damn you in the same breath. Dreams of knives kissing skin in acts too gentle to be violence and too brutal to be love. Hands that held you like an offering. Eyes that glowed wrong, just enough to keep you from calling them human. They burned with a light that didn’t belong to this world, red and undeniably angry, but when they were on you, it was an entirely different story. Just wrong. Too steady. Too knowing.

And God, the teeth paired with those eyes, so sharp. Sharp enough to split bone from breath, sometimes white, sometimes not, but always too many.  One word had always lingered on the edge of your thoughts, even before you knew how to spell it—before you understood what it meant. Damnation.

Not just a curse. Not the flaming, shaking-fist-at-heaven kind they talked about in church pews and hymnals. This was something quieter. Older. Something that didn’t beg for repentance because it never offered redemption in the first place.

Damnation was not a place—it was a condition. A blood-deep certainty that you had been marked, chosen not for salvation, but for ruin. That your soul had been spoken for in a tongue older than any holy text. Signed and sealed in dreams that left your sheets tangled and your heart pounding like something had been chasing you through sleep and nearly caught you.

It wasn’t punishment for sin. It wasn’t justice. It was possession.

A slow, creeping inheritance of something unspeakable. It smelled like salt and coppery blood, like storm-drenched wood and old stone. It moved through you like instinct. You’d feel it in the pit of your stomach when the world went too quiet, in the corners of your eyes when shadows moved against the grain of the light. And in those dreams—those vivid, breathless, too-close dreams—you felt it fully. His touch like worship. His voice like rot dressed in silk. A liturgy of ruin sung only for you. He didn’t bring damnation. He was it. And somehow, impossibly, part of you was too.

You didn’t fear him. Not exactly. Despite the way his form shifted—familiar one night, monstrous the next—he was never made to be purely feared, or even truly frightening. There was something reverent in him, something patient. No, the fear didn’t lie in him.

It lived in the part of you that reached back. Or maybe not you, exactly—not the version you see brushing your teeth in the mirror, not the one who pays bills and walks the shoreline with salt-stung eyes. That version felt like a decoy, a performance of normalcy. The one in the dreams… she was older. Wiser. Willing. And somehow, terrifyingly, more true.

There were days when the boundary between the two began to blur, when waking up didn’t feel like waking, just moving from one version of consciousness to another. Days when your reflection seemed slightly off—as if your body remembered things your waking mind tried to forget. The dreams had lasted so long they no longer felt like dreams at all. More like bleed-through. A haunting with no clear source. And on the darker days, the ones where the sky felt too still and the silence too loud, a part of you couldn’t help but wonder: what if your dream-self isn’t separate? What if she’s always been you?

And what if he’s not just following you into your dreams— but waiting for you to remember what you really are?

That, in itself, was your damnation.

Not the holy kind. You weren’t raised on pews and psalms, didn’t bear the weight of stained glass judgment or whisper penance through trembling lips. You didn’t kneel beneath crucifixes with bruised knees and bloodied prayers like the wives in town—those women with salt-bitten hope clinging to their throats, who beg for husbands the sea refuses to return when it storms just right, cruel and alive. Though even that grief, in some crooked way, felt familiar to you too. Like you’d once known what it meant to wait on a shoreline for something that would never come back.

But no—this wasn’t religion. This wasn’t the devil in red or the wrath of any god written in someone else’s book. This was personal. This was knowing. A damnation etched into the marrow of your bones, whispered to you in dreams that smelled like brine and blood. It didn’t ask for belief—it didn’t need it. It knew you. This wasn’t a punishment handed down. 

It was a homecoming. 

But tonight, while the dreams always feel as real and vivid as your heart beating. This stirred differently, closer and too near on the horizon to be deep in the far depths of your mind. 

You dream of that same man with rough hands. They move over your skin with the certainty of someone who’s done it a thousand times—someone who’s bled for the right. His palms are wide and calloused, like he’s spent whole lifetimes carving out places for you in the dark. He doesn’t touch you like a stranger. He touches you like a man who built you up, broke you, buried you—and never stopped coming back.

You don't know his name. Never really have.

But in the dream, he says yours like it’s sacred. Like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to whatever soul he still has left. He kneels between your legs, jaw tight, eyes darker than sin. His mouth is hot against the inside of your knee—soft, reverent.  Your stomach pulls tight, breath catching in your throat.

“Mine,” he whispers into your skin. “Always been. Always will be.”

There’s a scar on his collarbone. Fresh, jagged. You don’t know how you know, but you gave it to him. A mark left in another life. One where you wore knives the way other women wore perfume.

You don’t know this man, no matter how familiar he is. But in the dream, you know how he sounds when he’s falling apart.

He mouths down your thigh, murmuring filth like prayer, eyes half-lidded like this is the end of the world and he’s choosing to spend it between your legs. You should be afraid, you think you were, once—but all you feel now is heat and grief.

His hands tighten on your hips. His tongue moves like he remembers every time you've ever broke, just like this.

“Still taste like sin,” he growls, mouth full of you. “Still so fuckin’ mean.”

You writhe beneath him. You don’t know why you're crying. You don’t know why it hurts.

There’s a weight to it. A mourning. This isn’t the first time.

This is never the first time.

“Don’t leave me again,” he says.

And it’s that line—that broken, gutted plea—that shatters the dream.

You wake gasping. Sheets twisted around you like chains. The room is cold but your body is slick with sweat, skin flushed and humming like a fever’s still clinging to you. Your heart hammers in your throat. Thighs aching.

You stare at the ceiling, blank-eyed, trembling. Hands no longer feeling like your own.

You've had dreams before, always had.  Vivid ones. Strange ones. But this—this was different. This felt real. Like a life lost. Like a man you buried. You don’t know him.

And still, you're sure, after years spent tangled in sheets that no longer bring comfort—he’s looking for you.

╭━━━━━ ━━━━━╮

You slipped into what looked, at first glance, like your own little slice of heaven on earth. A quiet coastal town buried deep along the East Coast, the kind people send postcards from and never truly leave behind. You arrived like the fog that drapes the shore most mornings. Quiet at first, uninvited, but somehow meant to stay. Even if just passing through, you’ll still be here when the tides roll back in. The kind of town where the buildings don’t sag from age alone, but from the weight of stories pressed deep into the earth. Stone walls cracked with salt and time, quaint to the untrained eye, but if you looked closely—really looked—you’d see the carvings. Etchings. Traces of lives that never quite left, lives the sea took without asking.

The wind doesn’t just whistle, it claws. Scratches at your windows, as if it knows your name, as if it’s been waiting for you all along. The sea that surrounds the town speaks in a language older than words. Not in waves or spray, but in something older. Older than maybe blood itself—ancient, low murmurs that awaken something buried deep within your bones.

The place is silent not because it’s empty, but because it holds too much memory. If you stand still enough—listen beyond the hush and the roar—you’ll catch its whispers. Names of forgotten places, footsteps that vanished long ago, shadows of lives once lived and never fully laid to rest. The soil here is heavy with blood and claim, a patchwork of hands that took without asking, resting over bones denied peace. The salted mist clings to you like a second skin, a quiet mourning that seeps into your very being. No matter how raw you arrive or how much you try to wash it away, it remains—wrapping around you, pulling at your soul, like the land itself recognizes you as one of its own.

Your Home. 

Though today, beneath a deceiving sky and promising clouds, the sun shines bright and the tides bring ships of men and women finally coming home. The town hums with a restless energy today—the docks alive with the sounds of creaking wood, shouted greetings, and laughter tangled with the sharp tang of salt and smoke. Mariners, returned after months of chasing horizons far beyond the map, pour off their ships with rough hands and tired smiles, clutching letters, gifts, and stories that shimmer with hope and heartbreak alike. The air buzzes with the weight of reunions, farewells, and the quiet promise of another voyage yet to come. Amidst the scuffle of footsteps and the town’s rising hum, your bar remains still—quiet as breath held underwater. It waits, as it always does, behind its stone walls, patient and expectant, listening for the voices that will soon fill it again. Your shoulders rest the way they always do after a night like the last—tense, worn down by a treacherous sort of familiarity. Not quite pain, but close. Not quite peace, either.

A tiredness that settles deep in the bones, edged with something stupidly hopeful. You wait for the only kind of relief you know how to ask for—not rest, not escape, but that strange, addictive calm that money can’t buy but often pretends to: the clink of glass, the scrape of boots on old floors, the same familiar faces with the same half-truths on their tongues. A little penance, a little pleasure. That masochistic ritual you’ve built your life around. 

Your bar. Your haven. Your crown.

“Busy night tonight. Y’ready to see everyone?” 

You didn’t turn right away. Just stood for a moment, eyes on the sea, its silver surface breaking like cracked glass in the late sun. Your voice came easy, even if your mouth pulled a little crooked with it. “You know, I see enough of everyone when they owe me money.”

A low chuckle answered you. Boots scuffed wood behind you, the weight of someone used to slipping in and out of places unnoticed.

“You know, most people might say that with a smile.”

You finally looked over your shoulder, slow and deliberate. “I’m not most people.”

There was a pause—just long enough for the breeze to lift the edges of your coat, to let your perfume coil into the salted air like something sweet laced with danger.

“That’s what they say, anyway. This godforsaken place. Whole damn town talks like it’s yours and you’re just lettin’ the rest of us drink here outta pity.” Carmen teases, light and playful as he is.

He's young—too young for the weight he carried behind the bar—but bright in that firecracker kind of way. All sharp teeth and quicker wit, brash enough to mouth off to sailors twice his size and charming enough to get away with it. He moved like he’d been raised in places with neon signs and trouble on tap, but something about the Crown suited him. He was exactly the kind of respectable you liked to keep on payroll: knew how to pour a drink, shut down a fight, and make a broken man laugh—all without ever letting on how carefully he was watching the room. He said things with a grin, but his eyes were always checking exits.

Just smart enough to survive. Just loyal enough to stay.

You turned then, fully, one brow raised, lips curled in that almost-smirk you were infamous for.

“It’s not pity. It’s taxes.”

The Widow’s Crown was the heart of the town—its pulse, its compass, its crown jewel. A bar tucked into the craggy cliffside like it was carved straight from the bones of the sea. Stone walls, stained glass in storm hues, a fireplace that crackled year-round like it knew secrets, and a back room only the brave or the stupid asked about.

Locals whispered that the land it sat on had been cursed or blessed depending who you asked. That your name was etched into the foundation somewhere, beneath the floorboards or deeper still, down in the cellar where no one but you ever went. The truth was simpler: you’d earned it. Fought for it. Outlasted men who tried to own it and townsfolk who thought you too sharp to hold anything soft.

You rebuilt it with salt and spite—stone by stone, drink by drink, until the walls held your shape better than your own skin ever did. Now they come to you. Always.

For drinks. For comfort. For penance.

The very things you chase yourself, just dressed different— burning in their throats as liquid courage, slipping through your veins as sleepless nights and hollow comfort. Familiar devils, all of them. And somehow, still so welcoming. Still so easy to mistake for home.

And tonight, the sea brings them back in droves—sunburned sailors, ghosts wrapped in skin, wanderers who remember your name even when they shouldn’t. “You pourin’ tonight, or is that honor left to your poor trembling staff?” 

“Depends. You planning to behave, Carm?”

“Not in the slightest.”

You just rolled your eyes and turned toward the Crown’s doors—painted black, scuffed by boots and years, still shining like a secret—throwing over your shoulder:

“Good. I hate a slow night.”

And it wasn’t.

The evening bloomed loud and warm, thick with the scent of brine, sweat, cheap perfume, and something cooking slow in the back—probably stew, possibly regret. The Widow’s Crown filled like a throat: laughter wedged between throaty shouts, bodies packed shoulder to shoulder, boots thudding against floors worn down by too many storms and too much living. The jukebox flickered alive like it needed to be summoned first. The first song it spat out was older than half the sailors inside—gritty guitar and a voice that sounded like it smoked three packs a day and made love with a knife tucked in its boot.

Glasses clinked like windchimes in a storm. Someone passed around a story that wasn’t true—about a siren, or a curse, or a woman who walked into the sea and never walked out—and no one cared enough to correct it. Not here. Not tonight. 

You moved through it all like a current—barefoot in your boots, sharp-eyed, that rag always slung over your shoulder like a flag no one dared question. The crooked half-smile you wore wasn't an invitation, and everyone knew better than to mistake it for softness. You poured drinks. You counted cash. You made someone cry in the hallway without saying much at all, and someone else fall in love by the jukebox just by listening a little too long. You reminded the room—without raising your voice, without even really trying—that this was your place. You didn’t run the Crown. You were the Crown.

"You're late," you said flatly when Carmen finally slid behind the bar, shirt wrinkled and smelling faintly of oranges and gunpowder. "You're early," he shot back, ducking beneath the swinging shelf with all the grace of someone used to being chased.

“You work here, dumbass.”

“Debatable,” he muttered, already flipping a bottle upside down with one hand and wiping the sweat off his brow with the other. “I prefer the term essential presence.”

“Keep talking like that and I’ll make you essentially unemployed.”

He grinned, all teeth. “That’s the spirit, boss.” 

Across the room, Old Lemmy—the drunk with a glass eye and a tattoo of a flamingo he swore was a phoenix—slapped the table and yelled, “Where’s my goddamn drink, woman! I’m dyin’ over here!”

You didn’t even look up. “Lemmy, you’ve been dying since Nixon resigned. If it’s taking this long, I’m not rushing it.” The bar howled with laughter, and Lemmy wheezed so hard he nearly fell off his stool.

“You’re cruel,” Carmen muttered, pouring him a whiskey anyway.

“You’re soft,” you replied, lips twitching. “That’s why I keep you around.”

Near the jukebox, Birdie—sweet-faced, sharp-tongued, and back from her third divorce—was already telling someone half her age to stop breathing near her unless he had a boat or better cheekbones. She winked at you across the bar like you were in on a secret. You were.

You always were. Everyone inside had their place, their rhythm, their role to play. You just happened to be the one who remembered how the script went when they forgot their lines. Someone leaned too far over the bar and you stepped forward, not saying a word. He backed off with an apology before your hand even reached the rag on your hip. Respect came easy here. Not out of fear—but because they knew you’d earned it.

Carmen slid you a glass of water you didn’t ask for. “Hydrate or die, boss,” he said. You took it, downed it, rolled your eyes. “I swear, if I ever go missing, they’ll find you at the bottom of the harbor with my boot in your ribs.”

Carmen just smirked. “At least I’ll die hydrated.”

The night spun on, full of sharp turns and too-loud laughter, sweat-slicked forearms, sloshed drinks, and the kind of camaraderie that stung a little the next morning but never quite disappeared. And through it all, you stood at the center. Like a lighthouse. Or maybe—like the storm that breaks against it.

But time, like the tide, always rolls back. And when the last round poured, when the stories grew slurred and the ghosts of the sea called their children home, the night changed.

The laughter faded. The sailors filtered out with the last of their pay tucked in calloused palms. Music dimmed into memory. And the salt in the air thickened—not bright and bracing like a summer breeze—no, this was heavier. Older. Like the tide had dragged up something it shouldn’t have, and now the town was bracing for its scent. You kicked the door closed behind the last straggler and twisted the lock. The sound echoed, too loud.

The bar swelled with the sea’s return. Outside, the fog began to gather. Not the soft kind that kissed your cheeks and vanished with the wind—but a thick, bone-deep kind. The kind that didn’t move so much as settle. Stubborn. Intentional. Like it had been called here. 

You stood in the threshold of the Crown, arms crossed, gaze locked on the docks below. From this cliffside view, the town looked like it was sinking beneath pale ghosts of clouds. Streetlights flickered down the narrow streets, amber pinpricks in a wash of gray. Footsteps grew quieter. Doors clicked shut. 

Even the gulls had gone silent. All that remained was the sharp-teethed wind and the crash of waves gnawing at black rocks—daring anyone still standing to feel it, to bear witness to the sea’s temper without flinching.

The days that followed moved like the storm circling slow, waiting for the right time to strike. There was no rain yet, no thunder—just that hush that comes before something breaks. Despite the new faces that rolled in with the tides—sunburned tourists and wandering souls looking for something nameless—there were still those who had lived here long enough to know better. Men and women weathered by salt and time, whose skin remembered storms even when their mouths refused to speak of them. They’d seen the sea show its teeth. They’d lost half the town to it, years before the wind ever began whispering your name too.

The town loves cruel, in its own way. A deep, briny kind of love. Gentle only in its consistency. It seduces the naive with postcard charm, then leaves them cracked and hollow, forgotten in doorframes and stonework. You’ve seen it happen more times than you can count—tourists who stumble in under starlight and salt, only to leave pieces of themselves behind. Not always by choice. It’s a funny thing to witness. But so unmistakably human.

Over time, you’ve learned the rhythm of it all. The faces that return. The ones that never leave. The patterns—of footsteps, of stories, of half-truths rinsed and repeated. Calloused hands gripping scuffed glass, promises passed across the bar like currency. It’s all part of the tide. They come bearing sea-dreams and sunburned hearts. Eyes strung with salted hope, voices worn thin from chasing the horizon. But with them—always—come stories.

Tales whispered late, when the lights are low and the whiskey’s burned clean through the throat. Of creatures with eyes too sharp to be human. Of voices that echo too closely to the ones you hear in dreams. Of things that look like people, but aren’t. As unforgiving and brackish as the waters that birthed them.

Hungry things. Waiting things. And lately—you’ve begun to think they might not be stories at all.

First, like it always have started with, came your damnation. Like it always had for as long as you could remember. Tonight, a new image surfaces, one that always follows, always clings: arms around you. Strong ones. Holding you like you’re already gone.

They’re warm, yes, but not comforting. Not safe. It’s the kind of warmth that comes from fire licking too close to skin. Desperate arms. Pleading hands. A grip that trembles, not from fear, but from refusal. They love you, you think—whoever they belong to. But it’s a love that feels misplaced, off-kilter. It doesn’t fall soft like morning light or stretch out slow like trust. It crashes. It clings. Reverent and forceful. Obsessive. A love that wants not just to keep you, but to claim you. Like an oath. A curse.

You don’t know why you’ve chalked that haunted embrace up to love. Maybe because you’ve never really known what love was supposed to feel like. Or maybe because whatever this is—this endless, hungry thing that holds you in dreams and memories and waking shadows—wants you so deeply it feels holy.

But even holiness can rot—can calcify into something brittle and cruel. It doesn’t strike with the hand after it’s fed you, but as it does—a sanctified cruelty, masked in comfort, bleeding you slow with grace still on its tongue.

Another night, another dream that leaves you wrecked. You wake the way you always do—panting, pulse slamming against your throat, sweat slicking your skin like a second, fevered layer. There’s a familiar ache—deep in your chest, sharp between your legs—and it’s so goddamn specific, so precise, it almost feels like punishment.

Twisted. That’s what it is. Downright fucking twisted.

You lie there staring at the ceiling, trying to catch your breath and think—not for the first time—that maybe you’re the fucked up one in all of this. Maybe you hit your head as a kid. Maybe you buried something so traumatic your brain decided to toss you scraps of it in cinematic, semi-erotic nightmares. Maybe this is just how madness blooms—Soft at first. Slow. Sensual, even. And then, all at once, it lives in you.

These dreams don’t just haunt you. They know you. Have been haunting you for longer than you care to admit—long enough that whole years have blurred, and you’re not sure if they’re memories or reruns. Moments you feel in your bones but can’t pin to a place, to a date, to a version of yourself that ever really existed. Time doesn’t run straight in your world. It bends. It folds. And it leaves you chasing after ghosts you’re starting to think might’ve once been you.

Is this that imposter syndrome bullshit Carmen’s always rambling about when he’s three shots deep and pretending he’s a therapist?

Because if so—great. Spectacular. Guess you’re officially losing your mind at your grown-ass age. Perfect timing. Really.

Then came the eeriness. Not the kind you feel as a kid, tucked in a blanket fort whispering ghost stories with wide eyes and sticky fingers. Not even the kind that creeps in on a lonely walk through town when everything’s gone too still, too quiet—when the streetlights flicker and you swear the shadows breathe.

No, this was something else. Something older. Hungrier.

This was the kind of eeriness that drained a person—not just their nerves or their sense of safety, but their essence. Their warmth. Their blood.

The morning sun broke sluggish through the fog, bleeding gold across the wet stones and half-drowned streets. The sea had not receded so much as curled back to watch. You showed up to the Crown early, as always. Keys biting your palm, shoulders tight beneath your jacket, throat sore from the dream you couldn’t shake. You hadn’t slept—not really. You just laid there for hours, haunted and raw, your body still echoing with phantom touches and that voice, his voice, whispering ruin like a promise against your skin.

Still, you moved. Still, you worked. That’s how it always was.

The windows were fogged and beaded with sea spray when you unlocked the front. The jukebox flickered like it had seen a ghost. You cleaned. You stocked. You counted out registers with a precision that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with control. You’d nearly convinced yourself it was a normal evening by the time the regulars started trickling in.

“Storm's rollin' in slow,” one of the dockhands muttered, shaking off rain from his coat. “Don't they always?” you replied, not looking up.

But there was one new-old face at the bar today. Captain Eli. A relic of the docks. A man with sea-glass eyes and fingers like driftwood—bent and brittle, stained by pipe smoke and salt. He’d been around since the town’s teeth first showed. Sometimes you forgot he was still alive. Sometimes you wondered if he was. He sipped his drink like he didn’t have teeth and started talking like he didn’t need an audience.

“Saw fog like this once before,” he rasped, voice dragging like an anchor chain across the floor. “Back in ‘77. Cold as death. Fog so thick it swallowed a man whole. Sea gave ‘im back a week later. Hollowed out. Eyes still blinkin’. Mouth full of someone else’s name.”

You didn’t flinch, but your jaw went tight. Someone near the bar chuckled. “Just a drunk sailor’s tale.” Eli didn’t laugh. His stare locked onto you.

“Nah. Some places remember. Some faces too. They come back wrong, though. Same skin, new time. But they carry things. Like scars. Debts.” You stopped wiping the glass in your hand.

“My grandpa had seen it. Woman just like you once, long time ago. Mean as a cut lash and sharper than God’s own sword. Married a man who didn’t stay dead. Or maybe he just refused to stay gone.” A silence fell so deep you could hear the gulls scream outside.

You met his gaze and spoke low. “You see a lotta things that ain't there, Cap.”

He smiled with only half his mouth. “Maybe. But some of it sees me back.”

And then, just like that, he turned to sip again. As if he hadn’t cracked the spine of a nightmare and left it open on the bar between you. You walked away slow, each step deliberate. But the hairs on the back of your neck stayed raised. Because his story felt more like a memory than a lie. And somehow—you knew he wasn’t talking about anyone else but you. The night carried on. At least, it tried to.

Voices rose, laughter echoed, and the Crown did what it always did: held the town’s secrets between its stone ribs and didn’t spill a drop. Men came in with weather-worn hands and salt still in their boots, nodding greetings, passing flasks, scraping chairs loud across the floor. You poured drinks like always. Cashed out the machine. Fixed the jukebox when it spat static instead of song. But it all felt… off.

Like a memory you didn’t know you had. Like déjà vu with blood under its nails. Every word the old sailor had rasped was still rattling around in your head like storm wind in a boarded-up attic.

“Married a man who didn’t stay dead.” “Same skin, new time.” “Carried things. Like scars. Debts.”

You didn’t believe in curses. Not exactly. But you knew the feel of something following you. You’d felt it your whole life—lurking just behind your reflection, moving beneath the skin of your dreams, speaking in a voice you swore you never learned but knew in your bones. Tonight, it whispered louder.

You moved through the bar like a ghost in your own body. Wiped tables, nodded politely, smiled when you had to—but your hands kept twitching. Like they wanted to grip something. Like they remembered holding a blade, perhaps even a rifle. And then came the words. Not out loud. Just there. In your mind. Words that didn’t belong to you. Not really.

“What a fool you were, to love him past the grave.”

“Don’t ask a promise from a man you have to bury.”

You didn’t know where they came from, but they sounded older than the floorboards beneath you. The captain looked at you once across the bar, like he heard them too. He raised his glass halfway, eyes shining with something just this side of recognition.

“Y’know,” he said, voice low, dragging like low tide, “we used to say it different, back then. Before the war. Before the sea took half the town.”

You raised a brow. “Say what?” 

He swirled the amber in his glass. “Love. Damnation. Fate. We didn’t call it that. Called it binding. Called it reckoning. Said some women were born with blood that called monsters to their door.” You swallowed, throat dry.

“And what’d they do with women like that?”

He smiled, all teeth. “Married ‘em. Then buried ‘em. Never stopped loving ‘em.”

You didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. The words were in you now. Like a second pulse.

Mine. Always been. Always will be.

You stared out the bar window then. Toward the black mouth of the ocean. Toward the fog that hadn’t lifted since last night. Something inside you ached—not fear, not grief—something more like homesickness. But not for a place. For a moment. A face. A name you couldn’t say without bleeding. You were forgetting something. Or maybe—remembering it. And still, the bar kept humming.

The sailors told stories they barely believed themselves. The drinks kept flowing. The jukebox played a song older than it should’ve been allowed to remember. And Eli, half asleep in the corner, muttered something into his glass that sounded like a prayer.

“Let the sea take him this time.”

You didn’t ask who. But for a second, you wished you knew. Deep down, maybe you did.

And just like that—like the slow, unexpected drip of a cracked fountain—everything stopped.

Abrupt. Jarring. Like a needle screeching off a record mid-song, leaving behind a silence that felt too sudden, too knowing. The storm, still coiled somewhere out beyond the horizon, still clinging to your skin and leaving your bartop slick with condensation, simply… stilled. Not gone, not over. Just paused. Like the whole damn world had exhaled—one long, tired breath held too long.

It reminded you of those rare moments behind the bar—you, Carmen, and the poor souls that got roped into the shift—sinking onto overturned crates, backs pressed to liquor boxes, a stolen cigarette making slow rounds between burned-out hands. Not rest, exactly. Just a break from the chaos. The kind that doesn't last long, but hits like grace when it comes. Time, it seemed, had taken one of its own. And for a second, everything felt too quiet.

And yet, your irritation? Very much alive.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” you snapped, slamming a towel down hard enough to rattle the bottles behind you. “Get this son of a bitch outta my bar before I personally handle it. Where the hell is Jaime?!”

Carmen popped up from the back with a half-eaten orange slice in his mouth. “He’s bouncing some frat guy who thought the jukebox was voice-activated.”

“Ain't that a damn miracle,” you muttered. “Then someone else can bounce this one—preferably out the front door and into oncoming traffic.” The offender in question—a sunburnt, tank-top-wearing caricature of bad decisions—was currently arguing with one of your servers about why he shouldn’t have to pay for the drink he spilled on himself.

“Babe,” the tourist slurred, gesturing with a lime wedge like it was a threat. “I’m just saying—where I’m from, the customer is always right.” You were already halfway around the bar.

“Where you’re from, do customers get their teeth knocked in for being dickheads, or is that just a charming local tradition I can introduce you to?”

The guy blinked at you like you’d just spoken Latin. “Whoa, no need to be hostile—”

“I’m not hostile,” you said, sweet as cyanide. “I’m fucking working.”

Before the conversation could evolve into something more physical, and oh, it was close, Jaime appeared—broad, silent, and cracking his neck like punctuation.

“Please escort this pile of Axe body spray out of my building,” you said, already turning back toward the bar. “And if he resists, consider it cardio.”

“Yes ma’am,” Jaime rumbled, hand already on the guy’s shoulder. “Hey—hey!” the tourist protested as he was hauled toward the door. “This is, like, discrimination or something!”

“Yeah,” Carmen muttered, passing by with a tray of dirty glasses. “We discriminate against assholes. Tough break, man.”

The bar laughed—your people. Your locals. The townies. Regulars who knew to duck when glass flew and when not to test your temper. You swept behind the bar again, mood dark as thunderclouds, lips pressed into that dangerous little smirk that made grown men shut the hell up.

Carmen handed you a fresh towel. “Feel better?” he asked.

You shot him a glare sharp enough to cut rope. “You wanna join him?”

He held up his hands. “I’m just the talent, boss.”

You rolled your eyes, but the corners of your mouth twitched. Outside, thunder groaned low and slow—like it approved. Despite the growing irritation thrumming just beneath your skin from the frat boys, the condensation, the low hum of thunder that hadn’t cracked yet—you were, admittedly, beaming on the inside. Quietly. Secretly. Like someone hoarding the last piece of chocolate or the best corner booth in a diner.

Because for once, you weren’t running on fumes and stubbornness alone. The stillness tonight? It wasn’t empty—it was earned. With the storm’s pause came something better: ease. A rare, elusive creature in your world. You hadn’t opened the bar this morning, hadn’t dragged yourself in at dawn on pure caffeine and curses. Instead, you’d woken hours later to a room still dark with fog, sheets wrapped loose around your limbs, your body heavy with the kind of sleep that didn’t ask questions or pull you under screaming. Inky silence. No dreams. No whispers through the cracks in your memory.

Just...nothing. And it had felt like a blessing.

Nine hours. Maybe ten if you counted the blurry half-conscious phone call to Carmen where you’d slurred something about prepping ice and not setting anything on fire. He’d grunted something in reply that vaguely sounded like “yes, boss,” and you’d hung up before your brain caught up.

You’d slept, by your very loose and slightly cursed definition of the word, like a goddamn baby. No ache in your chest. No tremor in your thighs. No sweat-soaked sheets or phantoms pressed too close. Just warmth. Stillness. Peace.

You’d even stretched when you woke up—stretched, like some self-care influencer and not a woman who usually started her mornings with a shot of whiskey and a half-forgotten scream into a cracked mirror. And now, even as you wiped condensation off the bar with more aggression than necessary, even as you threatened to personally exorcise the next tourist who mispronounced the town’s name—you felt the echo of that rest clinging to your bones. It wasn’t much. But it was enough.

Enough to make the thunder seem poetic instead of ominous. Enough to let your smirk linger a little longer. Enough to make you think—maybe just tonight—you’d make it through without a dream dragging you back under.

But even that peace, small and stolen, carried a warning. Because the calm always came first, before the sea took something back. And your body, whether it remembered it or not, had always known how to brace for the storm.

Sweat clung to the base of your spine, a thin sheen catching on the small of your back and soaking deeper into the black tank top stretched across your shoulder blades. It stuck tighter with every shift and lean, every dip between tables and worn barstools, the humid air turning skin to velvet and breath to fog. The kind of heat that softened the bones and sharpened the edge of every sound. Heat that made even the ghosts restless.

The Crown boomed with unmistakable pulse despite it all—rowdy, salt-laced, a little mean like all good places should be. Boots dragged across warped floorboards slick with sea-damp. A woman's laugh broke too loud and too fast, slurring into something just shy of a yell. Carmen was yelling back, of course, but it was the charming kind—him snapping a bar rag at someone with that shit-eating grin, bright eyes catching yours across the room.

You gave him a nod. Wiped the back of your neck. Told yourself you weren’t imagining the way the condensation on the windows seemed to crawl upward instead of down. The regulars were in rare form. Ricky, with his chipped tooth and lifelong tan, was in his usual corner nursing the same whiskey he’d been pretending to sip for twenty years. He was mid-story, as always, and by now you could mouth along with it like a song. “And I told the bastard, you ever touch my boat again, I’ll gut you with a spoon!”

Laughter followed—boisterous, a little too easy. “Bet you tripped over your own feet trying to get to that spoon,” someone heckled. “Hell, he probably drank the boat dry!” another shouted.

You smiled without thinking. Tossed a lime slice across the bar at Ricky’s head. It missed. Barely. He flipped you off with the kind of affection only earned by pouring a man drinks for a decade and dragging him off the floor at least twice a month. “Love you too, sweetheart.”

But then the jukebox hiccupped. Not skipped. Not glitched. Just… stopped. A single note held a little too long, like something got caught in its throat. You looked up. Carmen paused mid-pour. It started again a beat later—different track, older one. One that hadn’t been in rotation for months. You frowned. Made a note to check it later. Or maybe not. These kinds of things happened in the Crown. Electrical, magnetic, or just plain weird. It wasn’t new. Still, something about it crawled up the back of your throat and sat there. You shook it off.

Someone slammed a shot glass onto the bar. “Another round, boss lady!” You poured. Wiped your hands. Turned just in time to see the ceiling fan slow, its blades groaning like they’d aged fifty years in the last minute.

And then you heard it—faint. A scrape. Like nails dragged gently across the underside of a table. Like someone whispering their name just barely out of earshot. Your head snapped toward the hallway. Empty. Just the shadows stretching long and crooked in the corner, bending a little wrong in the flickering light. You blinked. They straightened. Carmen was talking again, someone was singing along with the jukebox, a glass shattered somewhere near the bathrooms and two patrons laughed like they’d seen it coming. But underneath all that—beneath the sweat and salt and noise—something pulled. Tugged low in your stomach like a muscle memory. Like recognition. And then it bled through.

Not a vision, not quite. Just a feeling. A warmth that wasn’t from the bar’s heat. A pressure at your throat, gentle and possessive. Hands that weren’t there, but once had been—holding your hips, lifting you, laying you down on something not a bed but not the floor either. Stone maybe. Wet. Cold. Sacred.

You sucked in a breath so fast it burned. The bar kept moving. You didn’t.

For a moment, your eyes didn’t belong to you now. They belonged to another room, another life. Dim candlelight. A mouth full of devotion and ruin against your skin. A voice rasping your name like it was a prayer and a threat all at once.

“Mine,” he’d said. You hadn’t heard it in this life.

But your body remembered it. A gust of wind swept through the Crown. It rattled the windows like a tantrum. Every flame flickered. Glasses wobbled on shelves. Then the door creaked. You turned slow. Then—A gust of wind.

It swept through the Crown with no warning, no cause. Just… entered, like it owned the place. The windows rattled with a fury that didn’t match the calm on the street outside. Flames in their low glass homes danced frantically. One blew out entirely. Glasses trembled against shelves. A napkin lifted off a table, floated, then dropped in silence. You turned slow. And there was nothing.

No figure in the doorway. No tall silhouette carved in lightning. Just the door cracked open an inch too far, letting in a mist that curled around your ankles like it had fingers. The storm, settled now, breathed soft against the threshold. A cold that sank deep but didn’t bite. You exhaled. Long. Slow. Practiced. The kind of breath you’d taught yourself to take when the dreams got too loud.

The ache in your ribs eased, just slightly. Then came Jaime’s voice. Firm, but not urgent. Just that steady, dependable calm he carried when things started to fray around the edges.

“Bar’s almost at full capacity… got a guy outside askin’ if he can come in.” You blinked—like waking up.

Your fingers found the towel at your waist, gripping it hard enough to feel the fabric bite. “Yeah,” you said, voice still a little hoarse from whatever that was. “Let him in. Just… keep an eye out, alright? Tourists are one thing, I don’t need this place flooding or fists flying in the middle of all this.”

Jaime nodded. You didn’t need to say more. He was good like that. And just like that—Normal resumed.

But something had shifted. Not the kind you could see. Just a thread in the weave gone tight. The seal had broken. You could feel it. Like a draft you hadn’t noticed until it sank into your skin. Minutes that dragged like hours passed, and then the tide came in. You were mid-pour when the Crown tipped sideways into chaos.

Not the violent kind—no, just the usual barroom mess: someone on Carmen’s end of the counter didn’t show, a table of locals were halfway through a bottle and demanding fries like it was their divine right, and the cocktail shaker was jammed again, refusing to come loose unless you used the heel of your palm like a weapon.

You didn’t flinch. You moved. Like tidewater—brisk, automatic, and always knowing where to go before anyone else did. It was muscle memory. Breathe. Step. Smile.

Carmen shot you a panicked look from the far end. You already knew. Section three was slipping. Someone no-showed, and now you were the net. You pivoted off your heel and wove your way into it—your rag slung over your shoulder, boots scuffing the floor, voice low and cutting as you flagged two college kids who were trying to steal shot glasses again.

You didn’t notice the door open with Jaime’s invitation. You didn’t hear it either—not over the hum of the jukebox, the clang of the kitchen, the bark of laughter from a group of off-duty dockworkers. It wasn’t until you turned, trying to steady a tray with two whiskey sodas and a plate of wings, that the air changed.

Like sea mist, an odd man was just—there. No thunder. No drama. Just presence.

You didn’t even look at him first, your mind too full of orders and numbers and that familiar throb behind your eyes that always came on busy nights.

“Give me a sec,” you said out of habit, turning toward the bar with the tray still in your hands, the words barely formed.

Then—He spoke. Only a jumble of three muttered words.

“‘Scuse me, ma'am.”

Simple. Low. Soft like silk dragged across old wounds. You turned without meaning to. And the tray in your hands nearly tipped.

It wasn’t that he looked familiar. It wasn’t recognition. It was the gut-punch of déjà vu without memory—the sense that your body had already knelt for this voice in a life that wasn’t yours. The rest of the bar seemed to hum around him, but nothing touched him. Not the heat. Not the sound. Not even the mist that clung to his coat like it had followed him in from the sea itself.

He wasn’t wet. But the scent of rain came with him. And like it had been waiting for his permission, the storm broke. A crack of thunder. Then the slow, deliberate tap of rain on the roof. First soft. Then steady. Then relentless.

And you—you just stared. The tray slid from your fingers and thunked softly onto the bar. Not broken. Just forgotten.

And somewhere deep beneath the Widow’s Crown, the sea shifted.

“Can I get you anything?” Your voice came out soft as a daydream, but as certain as the thunder that now boomed proud and bashful right outside your doors.

His eyes flicked up at the sound of you—cerulean, deep, and sharp around the edges like the sea right before it swallows a boat. He barely reacted. A single twitch, maybe, just a hair widened—but you caught it. You always caught things like that. Reading faces came second nature. Especially the ones that wanted to be unread.

He sat too still. Back straight, elbows resting stiff on the bartop like they didn’t belong there. His clothes were wrong, too—off in a way that set something low in your stomach turning. Black work pants, sure, the kind dockhands wore, but too clean, too pressed. Like he wanted to pass. Gray shirt clinging to a chest that told you he wasn’t new to violence, no matter how carefully he stood. You could’ve sworn—just for a breath—his eyes took on that same deep gray when they shifted under the crackling firelight, dripping down from blue like wet ink. And then that chain. Gold, delicate-looking, stretched tired across the pale column of his throat. Like it had been worn too long and he'd exhausted it. Like it had belonged to someone else first.

The leather jacket was the final nail. Too many pockets. Too many places to hide something sharp. Closed up tight like a confession not meant to be spoken, like a damn secret. Like he was trying to look like he was playing nice. He looked like a secret pretending to be a man.

In all honesty, it fucking irked you. 

The silence that followed your question went on too long—long enough to feel pointed. The heat in your chest twisted, coiling like a storm all its own, the ember of your earlier mood flaring hotter behind your eyes.

You leaned in just slightly, arms crossed, smile long gone.

“You gonna keep staring, or can I help you, sir?” Your words bit, soft and polite only in form. 

The way he swallowed at it—sharp and slow—should’ve been a sign that he was nervous, his throat bobbed. But maybe, if you really were as delusional or insane as your dream-soaked mind liked to suggest, he was satisfied with being bitten and chewed up. Even if it played as being soft, if it was you. And that—more than anything—was what really set your teeth on edge.

And then, only then, after soaking in what was barely more than a nip, he smiled. Crooked and slow, like he was in on something you hadn’t been told.

“Just lookin’ for a respectable place to ride out the storm, ma’am. Nasty one, isn’t it?”

His voice dripped like warm honey, coating each word in a tone that sank beneath your skin—soft, slow, and deliberate. It prickled as it landed, made the hairs on the back of your neck stand at attention. That alone was the first red flag: he wasn’t from here. No one local spoke like that.

His accent was strange, but not off-putting—Irish, unmistakably. But laced with something else, something Southern and smooth at the edges, like bourbon poured over old songs and Sunday confessions. The kind of voice that didn’t belong in this town full of hoarse laughter and salt-split vowels.

Just like him—he didn’t belong.

And in this sea of familiar faces, of regulars you’d poured drinks for a thousand times and traded insults with like they were currency, he stood out like a ghost in rainsoaked moonlight. Strange. Unsettling. And yet… undeniably familiar. 

That caused the flames riding high and mighty behind your eyes in that steady and blinding pulse, to move to lick at your throat. You weren’t sure why you were so goddamn irritated at this peculiar stranger, it almost left you speechless, almost.

You blinked, your mind catching up with your body too slow, too dream-drunk for your liking. Still, your voice came out smooth. Steady. A practiced thing, even as the air around you thickened like it was listening.

“Respectable’s a stretch,” you said, cocking your head as your eyes dragged over him, shameless and sharp. “But if you’re lookin’ to keep dry and outta trouble, you picked the wrong night and the right place.”

His smile twitched wider, and you hated the way it made your chest tighten—hated it so much you wished your words had been meaner, sharper, cruel enough to split skin on contact. It was a strange thing to hold against a stranger, really. Irrational. Petty. But that didn’t make it any less true.

Because despite all that he was—strange, unsettling, far too composed for a storm night—he was still just a man. And yet, you felt the need to bare your teeth like he was something else entirely.

You turned then, forcing your attention back to the bottle of whiskey itching with cold sweat and anticipation next to your elbow, shoulders tense with the weight of something unnamed. Something old. 

“What’s your poison?” you asked, voice clipped. Because suddenly, the storm wasn’t just outside anymore.

It had walked in, slow and smiling, and asked for shelter.

taglist ; @lunaleah @idiotsatan @arquiiva @pixieofthesun @kaelizl @nefertiti2003 @damnzelsoul @latebean

[ethereays]

Undergarments of The Edwardian Era

[ethereays]

my dearest wife (mwuah),

i am managing, though the trials of the mines are unrelenting. it is only the sight of thy portrait, nestled close to my heart, that grants me strength amidst the searing heat and stinging soot. the devil himself could scarce contrive a crueller test, yet i have prevailed. by god’s grace, i gathered the necessary documents and have been accepted into college (yippee).

how i long to see thee and our dear children again; little oliver, arabella, big timmy, (and the other little one, i can not remember). to be present in their lives, to hold thee in my arms.

yours faithfully,

your devoted husband-wife

my beloved wife,

pray forgive my prolonged silence; the weight of labor and ambition hath kept me bound in the dark depths of the earth. the toil of the coal mines, though harsh, hath been but a means to a greater end. joy of joys, i have been accepted into the college of my dreams

i think of thee with every weary breath, and it is thy love that sustains me through these trials.

yours always,

your devoted husband but also wife

I’VE MISSED YOUUU I HOPE UR DOING WELL ML 🫂💞💞

[ethereays]

Quick odypen painting because I’m missing them this Christmas Day

[ethereays]

IM GETTING READY FOR BED ☹️☹️ BUT IM HAPPY YOU'RE DOING GOOD 💕💕

WIFEY IS ONLINE HI HI PRUE HOW ARE YOU DOING???

MY LOVE HELLO I’M DOING GOOD HOW R U???

[ethereays]

[ethereays]

@/hisethelcain. “i'd save you but the world's bent” twitter, 14 nov 2020.

[ethereays]

tired of being casual. who will die for me

[ethereays]

growing up in a strict religious family makes you have crushes on strange otherworldly creatures that your mortal eyes cannot even fathom

[ethereays]

four horsemen of the apocalypse save me... save me four horsemen of the apocalypse

[ethereays]

The mysterious "Pyramid Head" ―S I L E N T H I L L 2 REMAKE (08.10.2024)

[ethereays]

And when I was hanged between earth and heaven they lifted up their heads to see me. And they were exalted, for their heads had never before been lifted.

Personal piece :) The compression may be hiding this, but written on the underside of the antelope's skin is "un jour je serai de retour près de toi" ('one day I will return to your side'), which is something I have been turning over in my brain a lot as of late.

Hope you're all taking care of yourselves!!

[ethereays]

Chung Thanh Phong 'I Dreamed a Dream' spring 2025 collection