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retrievablememories · 9 days ago

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where the trees bend low | dpr ian

pairing: dpr ian x black fem reader

genre: bones & all au, 1980s au, fluff, angst

word count: 3.1k

a/n: so this is actually 2 fics in one post, i just didn't want to post them separately (i guess an ao3 account would've been useful here...)

these oneshots aren't standalone, neither of them will make much sense if you haven't read marrow

this first fic occurs within the main events of marrow, toward the end of the story. as usual, these fics contain dark content so if that ain't your speed, you know what to do

@cafekitsune dividers: here | here

1986

When you and Ian go to a theater one day—one of those matinees in the middle of the week that only elderly people attend—and end up watching a random film that you didn’t know was a romance, you are startled when you have the sudden thought that you want him in the same way. That you wouldn’t mind him holding your face in his hands again but kissing you this time, or walking down a street hand-in-hand, or lying next to him in some stranger’s bed and listening to him talk until you fall asleep. You try to send those thoughts somewhere far away, but days pass and they keep coming back, and that wanting in your chest only grows.

* * *

There are fingers brushing across your forehead…then stroking the flesh of your cheek.

They are harmless, but in your just-awakening state, your body interprets them as a bug’s legs, causing you to startle away from them and roll face-first into the grass. Maybe it’s just a grasshopper, or even a butterfly—but what if it’s some daddy longlegs or a palmetto bug? Shuffling onto your knees, you swipe your hands repeatedly over your face but feel nothing other than stray pieces of grass.

“Hey, you awake? Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

You relax at the sound of his voice, though your heart is still beating faster than normal. Ian kneels in the grass before you with his hair mussed by the light breeze, his muscle shirt drooping at the sides as he leans forward, revealing the tattoos on his torso.

“Obviously I am now.” You’d been lying under the shade of a wild blackberry bush to escape the intense sun. Small specks of light filtering through the leaves were the last things you saw before your eyes closed, akin to stars in the daytime. You only meant to lie there for a moment, to let your body rest and digest after you’d eaten a bunch of blackberries off the bush, but you’d drifted off instead.

“You were knocked out. It was pretty cute, but we wouldn’t want you to get eaten by a wild animal, would we, love?”

You can do nothing to stop the way your face flares with heat, even as you duck your head and give a response that’s as nonchalant as you can muster. “Thanks for saving me from certain death, I guess.”

When you and Ian first found this area, you’d walked into the woods near the little rundown shack you decided to stay in and discovered bushes with plentiful wild berries—edible ones. You’d both come back out today to pluck them off their stems and take them to the house, but you’d ended up eating half of your bounty, not thinking much about whether they needed to be washed first; you were hungry, and the food was free. Subsisting off of mostly gas station meals and chain restaurants for the last few weeks, you hadn’t eaten anything so fresh in ages.

“How’d you end up under there?”

“Trying to get out of the fuckin’ heat, Ian. It must be at least a hundred today, and it’s hardly June yet.”

“There’s the river nearby.”

You consider it. You don’t have a swimsuit, which means you’d either have to get in wearing your underwear or nothing. The same would be true for him, you also know. That thought begins leading your mind down a path that is becoming increasingly familiar to you, to no surprise.

You make your decision. “Are you gonna come?” you ask, getting to your feet. You grab the bucket of berries nearby, which is only half-full. The bushes still have more berries to give, though, and you can pick the rest later.

You both make the short trek to the river, the sound of rushing water growing clearer as you walk. The glint of the sun off the river surface reaches you first, vivid from between the trees and striking your eyes brightly enough to hurt.

You set the bucket of berries in the grass and strip to your underwear on the riverbank, laying your clothes on a large rock nearby. It’s the height of daytime, and though you haven’t seen anyone else in this area since you’ve been here, you’ll skip the skinny dipping today just in case. You don’t look back to see if Ian is following your lead before stepping into the river. The sweat on your body is washed away by the river water as you wade farther in and swim through the calm currents. The coldness of the water sends a pleasant shock up your spine.

“Enjoying it all without me?” you hear him call from behind you. Before you can reply, you’re doused with water as he jumps in beside you.

“Jeez!” You turn your head to spit out the water that’s gotten into your mouth, though a laugh slips out with it. When Ian resurfaces you see that he’s down to his underwear like you, but there’s no time to take in the view as you send a wave of water crashing back toward him; your move starts a battle in which you’re both splashing each other like little kids, free to be as childish as you please—all adult responsibilities cast to the wind.

This continues until you have to beg him to stop, lest you succumb to the aching of your stomach from laughter. It’s been many, many months since you’ve laughed this hard at anything, and the realization is almost startling.

Body now relaxed, Ian floats on his back in the water, looking up at the sky. “This is one of the better places we’ve found. I mean, if we’re only counting the abandoned ones.”

You’ve only been here for a day and a half, but there are things you like about it more than previous spots. “Sure, it’s nice.”

“Would you want to stay here forever?”

You give a short laugh, thinking he’s joking, but his expression is thoughtful. “I don’t know. There’s not even running water in that shack,” you say, brushing off the thought.

“But if there were—if we had everything we needed here, it could be a nice life.”

Your chest tightens at the idea, and you don’t quite know what to say. “Forever” is a big stretch of future that you don’t contemplate if you can help it; it’s a long way off even for your mind that’s always getting lost in the distance. It’s too difficult to think about being this way forever. But it seems his idea of forever isn’t as tortured as yours.

Your movements send ripples through the water, and you watch the disappearing rings. “Get real. You like people too much, you couldn’t stay in some remote ass place like this for the rest of your life. Who would you interact with?”

“You, of course.”

“Other than me!”

“Darling, isn’t that enough?”

You make no effort to answer, throwing him a look and making a big show of swimming farther down the river and away from him.

Isn’t that enough?

You aren’t sure. The quiet tranquility of this place is nice, but too much stillness is dangerous—lets your mind go where you don’t want it to, even as you try your best to be more present these days. Yet your nightmares continue, and the horrific illusion of Alicia’s agonized face still plagues you. With all this bloody history, are you allowed to be happy—happy with him, at that—after having been the cause of such death? It seems like a betrayal of Alicia, and that twists your heart.

You bob aimlessly in the water as his words rotate in your mind. Are you allowed to want what he’s offering, even if it was only a silly suggestion?

You spend all of 30 minutes in the water before the downpour starts, startling you out of your contemplations. It’s one of those unexpected rain showers that happens while the sun is still out, the rays slanting through the droplets pelting you. A few large clouds had darkened over the course of the minutes, but the sun still shone so brightly that you hadn’t expected rain to follow.

“Aw, fuck.”

The raindrops roll off your eyelashes and obscure your vision; clumsily, you wipe your face and search for somewhere to take shelter. An overhang of thick tree foliage acts as a canopy along a stretch of the river, and it’s enough to give you cover while the rain falls. Some droplets continue making their way down to you, but it’s better than being outright poured on. Small branches scratch you and tug at your hair; you push them away irritatedly as Ian swims over to meet you.

“Is that enough water for you?” he asks with a chuckle, slicking his hair back with both hands, unbothered by the sudden rain. There’s adequate space for the both of you under this overhang, but your shoulders bump together as you huddle close. You turn to look at him, intending to reply, but your eyes catch and linger on the droplets that drip from his chin. Your eyes flick up to his lips, and for a second, as if outside of your control, you wonder how they’d taste if you touched them with your own right now. Like the river water? Rainwater? Or like the blackberries he’d eaten?

The thought goes as fast as it came, and you turn away a little quicker than you need to. “Yeah…it’s plenty. I’m glad we did this, though. It’s been a while since I swam.” It was actually last year during the campground visit, but you don’t mention this.

As the rain slows, you watch streams of rainwater pick up pollen from both riverbanks and send it into the river, coloring the water yellow in big swirls. You make a noise of disappointment as some of it reaches where you are and sticks to your skin. “We should get out before we’re completely covered. Our berries are probably drowned by now, too.”

“That means they’ve been washed,” Ian says, “which means less work for us.”

You laugh at the realization, the sound merely a breath rasping out of your mouth. “Huh, I guess you’re right.”

Lately, the onset of nighttime does nothing to cool the heat; the only difference is that the sun is no longer out to bake you alive. The humidity persists, making the air feel thick and close. And since this old shack has no functioning air conditioning—or power at all—it stays uncomfortably warm most of the time.

Sitting in a kitchen chair, you fan yourself with an old magazine as you try to distract yourself from the heat by reading an encyclopedia featuring a section on Arctic sled dog races—something you’d found on one of the dust-blanketed shelves in the living room. The kitchen window and back door are open in an attempt to alleviate some of the heat by letting in whatever small breezes disturb the night air. Small tea candles are set up around the house, along with some cheap lanterns you’d bought a while ago, to give you marginal light.

The kitchen still smells of the dinner you had earlier—cheap ham sandwiches and warm cans of Five Alive and chips you’d previously procured from a nearby gas station, plus the rest of the blackberries you collected for dessert. The meal took some of the edge off from the heat, which had worked you right back up into a tired and aggravated mess after cleaning all the pollen off your body.

Ian enters the room holding one of the lanterns now, setting it on the kitchen counter. You notice he’s wearing a shirt again, which most of the time he doesn’t even bother with; twice in a day piques your curiosity.

“Hey, so, I’m gonna go out tonight,” he announces, a hand finding its way into his hair as it often does.

You raise your eyebrows. “Supplies? I think we have enough, we just got some?”

“Nah, not this time. I’m getting hungry.”

Your stomach sinks when he says this. You’ve started to get more nervous whenever he goes out to eat—to hunt—alone, but the other alternative is for you to accompany him, which is worse for your sanity. It stirs a sickly guilt in you that you worry more for his safety than for whoever will end up being killed by him that night. But you’re reminded of the dangers every time you see the knife scar on his side.

This time of the month when he must eat always surfaces so many emotions in you, some of them nonsensical. You tend to feel somewhat angry at him for breaking the illusion. Of course, this is what you both have to do. But you prefer the rare moments when you don’t have to think about it deeply, or at all, and can act like you’re two people road-tripping across highways for fun rather than survival.

There’s a tense hesitation before you say, “Don’t get in trouble,” though the quip lacks adequate humor. You go back to your book, trying to will yourself to be less bothered by it all.

Ian crosses the room to slip into the chair next to yours. He reaches out with one hand, squeezing your cheeks as if you were a kid—because he knows it usually flusters you enough to distract you from your tragic moods, if only momentarily. On the surface, he takes your reactions for annoyance, though in reality it’s not that simple. “Of course not. Someone’s gotta come back to take care of you, babe.”

You swat his hand off your face, trying and failing to meet the mischievous glow in his eyes as your own lamp sitting on the table illuminates his features. His words make your mouth turn down, reminding you of how much he has emotionally destabilized you since knowing him; there’s no hope of rationality when he makes you feel too much of everything all the time. Regardless of your half-hearted efforts, you’ve let yourself become so entwined with him. “I took care of myself fine before I knew you, Ian.”

His smile conveys a certain amused kindness. Cheek now resting on his fist, his only reply is, “I know.” A silence as thick as the humidity surrounding you ensues, and you don’t know what to fill it with. Is he waiting for you to bid him farewell? Shouldn’t he say it first? As you flip through a couple of pages in the encyclopedia without reading them, fingers itching from growing restlessness, you don’t understand what either of you is waiting on. You still don’t return his gaze though you feel him looking at you; his eyes carving into you makes you want to step outside of your skin, outside of your body.

You will never ask him to stay when he goes off to hunt, because although you know he enjoys it, you also know it’s a matter of needing to do it, not just wanting. But in this hesitation before leaving, it’s almost like he wants you to express something other than your defeated acceptance and your urge to throw him out of the house so he can get this over and done with. Like he wants you to show concern with pleading eyes and mouth and say I’ll miss you, come back safe…or maybe your own sentiments are causing your thoughts to become too fanciful.

Jokes on him—these are words you locked away inside yourself long before knowing him, and they are too difficult to pull out on a whim.

Finally, he nods, perhaps a sudden acceptance of something you aren’t privy to. “Don’t wait up for me,” he says, getting up and heading for the back door.

You respond immediately with, “I won’t.” But you both know you’ll likely be awake when he gets back, the anxiety of whether he’ll return at all keeping you away from proper sleep.

You are still awake when he returns, the hands of the dusty wooden clock on the wall pointing toward 3 o’clock in the morning. Not for lack of trying, though; you are tucked in the bed, having gotten under the thin sheet hours ago, but sleep only finds you in small intervals that you can’t even distinguish between real sleep and the act of just resting your eyes for a few moments.

You don’t realize how wired up you are until you hear the Renault pulling up, the engine’s sound distant and faint at first through the closed bedroom window and then idling in front of the small house before cutting off. Then, the familiar footsteps on the worn porch. The tension in your muscles drains like rainwater spilling off a roof. In a flash, heat prickles your neck in your embarrassment over how you’d worried. But it shouldn’t be strange to be a little afraid, you try to reassure yourself, after all the people you’ve lost through the years.

You wait for Ian to walk into the bedroom. Instead of going over to his side of the bed like you expect, he comes to you. He smells clean, not like blood or plasma or organ meat, though the smell of cigarette smoke also clings to him. His hair hangs in damp strands. Maybe he went with the person to their place, whoever it was, and took a shower there after it was all done—their blood swirling down their own shower drain with the same simplicity of rinsing off blackberry-stained hands.

He places a hand on the mattress behind you, leaning over your body and peering at your face like he needs to verify for himself whether you’re awake. “Still up?” he asks, knowing full well you’re looking directly at him.

“No shit,” you mumble, blinking slowly. Now that the stress has left your body, you are tired and ready to drift off rather than sit here talking. You don’t really care to hear the details of the deed.

“Go to sleep, Y/N.” He smirks as if he’s amused by you not keeping your word and moves his hand to squeeze your shoulder. You close your eyes and simply nod, turning your face into your pillow. Because if you stare at him any longer like this, poised just a couple of feet above you, you’ll begin to imagine what it’d be like if he leaned just that much closer and erased the remaining space between you—and right now, you don’t have the energy to shove those thoughts away once they start. His fingers sweep down your bicep as he departs from your side, and it makes your skin prickle.

You lie there in a deceptively peaceful state as he strips off his clothes and gets into the bed on the other side. You don’t sleep the way you used to in the tent or in the car anymore, overly wary of the space between your bodies. It would be so simple to turn around and have his face be your last vision before sleep. But tonight, you don’t. You listen to him breathe and shift around as difficult thoughts make sleep evade you for a little while longer—about how his hands can be gentle to you but capable of ending another’s life. The dichotomy disturbs you and you don’t know if it’ll ever stop disturbing you, but the same type of dissonance rests in your own body.

And you wonder if you should be more uneasy at the fact that, alongside all this violence, you still desire those hands.

vile incarnation of consummated bliss (m)

pairing: dpr ian x black fem reader

genre: bones & all au, 1980s au, horror, angst, smut-ish

word count: 2.5k

a/n: sorry, this fic is all over the place with the past tense and present tense. kinda threw grammar to the wind here.

this is set a few years after the events of the main story, marrow.

1989

The smell of blood is all around you and inside of you, bathing your nostrils and your tastebuds and the interior of your throat. The only sounds in the room consist of the last remnants of your chewing, your sporadic shifting around on the plastic tarp beneath you, and the radio playing oldies from across the room. There had been no thought given to turning it off before you started tearing into the old man Ian brought home, songs from faded decades serving as the background noise to your feeding. Some Johnny Cash song is playing now, and though you can’t remember the name of it, the twang of the guitar and the melancholy tone of his voice make you feel like you’re back on the highways again, driving past nothing but green and yellow fields for miles.

Toward the end of your time on the road, the HVAC in your second car—the Renault was a memory at that point, finally abandoned on some dirt back road when the engine died and couldn’t be restarted—had long since given up, and you spent more time outside of it than in. The summer heat is just as oppressive here, made worse by a set of window ACs that only work when they want to. You long to open the rest of the windows in the small house, but doing so would send the heavy odor of blood swirling through the yard outside. The smell may not matter as much here in this tucked-away neighborhood, a patchwork of overgrown grass dotted with the shabby homes of misfit neighbors, but complacency has never served anybody. Plus, the lingering humidity from the earlier night rain would only amplify the tang of the blood.

(You can never complain too much about the state of this house despite its flaws, because it’s the first permanent home you’ve lived in in years, thanks to the landlord who’d taken pity on you and offered it up for affordable rent—low enough to keep you with a roof over your heads until you’d found steady work in the town.

Maybe it wasn’t too bizarre, because you’d smelled it on her during your first meeting and knew why she felt such a sudden kinship for two total strangers.)

Ian sits feet away from you with his back resting against the gray couch cushions, his eyelids low like he’s trying not to fall asleep. His previously white tank top is dyed all the way red, lying forgotten on a corner of the tarp in shades of drying blood. You don’t know why he still bothers with wearing white anything, knowing what will become of it eventually.

Over time, there are things you have gotten used to doing—covering your hair with a scarf, not just for protection when you’re sleeping, but to stop blood from soaking into it during the feed. Laying down the tarp and the trash bags beforehand. Making sure all the window curtains are pulled tight and the doors locked. Scrubbing at whatever blood leaks from the plastic tarp afterwards until your hands hurt.

You’re annoyed by your clothes sticking to your skin because of the blood and sweat, so you begin peeling them off until you’re naked. The blood that remains on your skin is somewhat disorienting yet gratifies you, reminding you that your stomach is no longer empty. You always feel surreal fresh off the act of eating, destructive and stranger than human.

The guilt is slightly smaller now as time, the need to survive, and the constant exposure to violence wear away at your more human sentiments—not something that you wanted to happen but that you now understand was inevitable, living this way. You think about the victims and the stolen potentiality of their lives but don’t linger on it for ages the way you used to. The details of Marygold’s face barely remain in your consciousness anymore. Alicia, too, has turned blurrier with time, the specifics of your memories with her becoming more uncertain to you.

You try to frame this change in healthier terms—moving on, some would say. But even though it has shrunk, the guilt is always there. You continuously nudge it back into its assigned compartment when it spills over, forcing it to share the space it occupies with other things in your life. Distractions.

Clothes abandoned, you crawl over to Ian and fit yourself against his side. He comes back alive from his post-feeding euphoric haze to wrap his arms around you. He turns his face to you, tucking his nose into the folds of your headscarf in search of your natural scent, but it’s eclipsed by the smell of viscera.

Would you dream a dream of me, wherever you may be? Goodbye, little darling, goodbye

The Johnny Cash song is short. Another song starts after it fades out—one that’s even older. The tinkling chimes at the beginning pique your recognition.

Dream, when you're feelin' blue Dream, that's the thing to do Dream, while the smoke rings rise in the air You'll find your share Of memories there

Maybe this oldies station isn’t the best choice. Your mind keeps drifting back to the elderly man. Did he listen to these songs as a younger man? In those days, did he think his life would turn out differently than it did? He must have. You didn’t know him well, but you knew he had no remaining family that cared about his existence. His few grandchildren had not wanted to deal with the expenses and hassle of putting him in a nursing home or letting him live with them, and instead had let him stay in his ramshackle trailer to live an empty life in this town. They and their parents had long ago escaped the confines of this place.

You never interacted with him in any meaningful way. You only heard about his story from the cashier at the nearby grocery store you frequented, but you felt some sense of sympathy.

(The cashier, you know, is an eater too.

You don’t typically go out of your way to speak to her, but you don’t try to avoid her, either. You both just eye each other in the store, a small nod or a smile—the expression a tad strained on your end—exchanged before moving on.)

You’d seen the old man a few times in that same store, shuffling about in a manner that reminded you of a ghost—not emotionally cold or senile in the way that old age brings, but largely uncaring of his surroundings. Like his mind had already detached and gone elsewhere, maybe to someplace better than here.

You thought about going to keep him company sometimes, or stopping by his home to see how he was doing. It was the kind thing to do for a neighbor, especially someone who had no one else making that kind of effort. And maybe it would help balance the scales—a small way to atone for all the carnage that enshrouded your existence.

You never got around to it.

Now, you are ashamed of these poorly conceived ideas that never amounted to anything. Had you only conjured those thoughts to make yourself feel better in the moment? To try to remind yourself that you still have a human heart?

Before you devoured the old man, you and Ian nearly argued about it hours earlier—when he brought the man’s lifeless body into your home—even as your stomach was twisting itself into desperate knots.

Your whole body perked up at the sound of the door opening, more of an instinctual reaction than anything else—because this sound meant that Ian was back, and with him would come nourishment. You stumbled toward the front room as your hunger made your limbs hard to control, but you halted in the entrance of the hallway, shaking and sweaty.

“What—what have you done?” you groaned, recognition of the body sending horror racing through your bones.

“What I needed to do. He was there—just ready to be taken—and I need to be able to feed you, darling. Would you rather wait here starving for days while I try to find someone else?”

“Is my life worth that much to you?” Your voice was rough, chest aching with contrition. Your eyes darted around Ian’s face as you tried not to stare at the small old man he held in his arms—mouth slack, pupils cloudy, and skin even more saggy and dull in death. “Does this make sense to you? He did nothing to deserve this.”

Even faced with your anger and the grotesque nature of the situation, Ian’s eyes were soft—and a tad melancholy. As if he felt bad for you. “My love, you still don’t understand that I’d do anything for you.”

A stilted laugh snuck past your lips. “That’s a dangerous way to be.”

He laid the body on the ground, the limbs and neck frail against the ridiculous blue tarp, and contrary to your instincts you wanted to shout for him to get it out of there. “Either way, it’s not about what anyone ‘deserves.’ When I came to him, he wasn’t afraid or angry. I didn’t tell him—not at first—but he suspected what I wanted and didn’t even care.”

“What? Didn’t care?”

“I mean, he wasn’t interested in fighting death like the others.”

In all your time of being a cannibal, you’ve never encountered someone who didn’t mind having their life stolen from them.

You sank to your knees on the tarp, the hunger beginning to overpower your cognition and willpower even as you tried to focus on the conversation. You found one of the man’s hands and squeezed his fingers tight in your palm, as if trying to give comfort before the desecration. Even in your effort to show some tenderness, your senses zeroed in on how papery his bony fingers felt and the still-cooling blood dying in the veins of his hand.

Ian called your name, and you forced yourself to look at him. “The loneliness can be unbearable. We both know that.” This was his only explanation, but you didn’t need more context; you knew exactly what he meant.

Maybe if the man hadn’t been so neglected, he wouldn’t have forfeited his life so readily. But even if you wanted to, you could not dwell on your remorse any longer; the empathetic human part of your mind shriveled smaller and smaller as you closed in on the body, giving way entirely to primal appetite.

You dig your fingernails into your knees as the memory of your earlier exchange and the ensuing feast presses into every corner of your mind. “I need to stop thinking,” you mumble, squeezing your eyes shut for a painful moment, and you both understand what this means.

Ian kisses you then, his fingers on your chin warm, sticky, and tender. He hasn’t shaved in a while, and his stubble scratches you as your lips touch. It’s a brief gesture, only a glimpse of what’s to come and not quite enough. When he parts from you and makes to stand up, your hand slides down his bare stomach and to the waistband of his shorts, which stretch tight over the muscles of his thighs with his movements.

“You wanna do this here?” he asks, surprised. He doesn’t protest but watches your reaction carefully. You stare back, observing the mask of red around his mouth and the errant streaks of blood on different body parts—collarbone, sides of the neck, even near his hairline. You figure you must look similar.

“I do,” you murmur. “Just—please. I don’t know why.”

He leans in to kiss you again, his lips lingering on yours this time. “Have me then, love.”

In your normal routine, you always wait until the blood’s cleaned up and all traces of your crime are gone to do this—to wrap yourselves around each other as if it would help you erase your deeds. You let him kiss your lips and any tears if they come, though they are rarer now, as if his love is a salve you could use to heal your many wounds. They can never disappear entirely, but they hurt less after they have been touched by him.

With the evidence wiped away, it’s easier for you to indulge, to not second-guess yourself and wonder whether you deserve this affection, to have someone love you in spite of your vile cravings.

And so you aren’t sure what’s possessed you to make you want this now, when you’re still in the thick of the mess—sitting among the small remnants of flesh and bone shards that are the only reminders of what was once human.

Maybe it’s the haze. Your body still seems not wholly real as you lie on your back on the slick plastic and as Ian kneels between your legs and glides his hands over your torso, smearing the crimson. Your head feels like it’s submerged underwater as you wrap your legs around his lower back and his blood-slicked fingers make it further down, slipping between your thighs.

You press your mouth into his hair when he closes the distance between you, holding himself up over your body, and much like yourself, he smells like sweat and blood. Strands of his hair fall past your lips when your mouth opens in a gasp, but you don’t mind having more of him inside you. You close your eyes as he rocks into you, all your senses whittling down to this sensation and the sound of the radio somewhere in the background, as if miles away.

When the orgasm finally grips you, it empties your mind for some good long minutes; the flood of endorphins overtakes you completely as you tremble around him. Your embrace is desperate in how you cling to each other with no space in between, you turning your head to suckle at his fingers that grasp the side of your face. But eventually, you are forced to reckon with the truth of the blood coagulating underneath your back and making you stick to the plastic.

Afterwards, you both scrub away any escaped blood on the floor and get rid of the disposables and wash yourselves clean, and you sit on that same gray couch with the TV playing some late-night soap, assuming the ideal of being a normal couple with only normal needs and desires: food, air, water, sun, shelter, and never the taste of another human’s organs.

As the TV images flicker and you feel the weight of Ian’s arm around your shoulders, you wonder for a moment if the old man’s family would be glad to learn he’d been taken off their hands, or if they would feel any way at all about his disappearance. The ghost of his blood manifests in your mouth as if for one last haunting, and you savor the taste. Your stomach throbs briefly with shame.

You don’t know how long you can keep playing this game until your mind snaps or you fully lose whatever shreds of morality you have left—tonight, you feel closer to the latter—but you play on.

#dpr ian x reader #dpr ian scenarios #dpr ian imagines #christian yu imagines #christian yu scenarios #dpr imagines #dpr scenarios #black reader #x black reader #female reader #fem reader #black fem reader #x black fem reader

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retrievablememories · 9 days ago

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wow one of your favorites? thank you so much 🥲🥲🥲 i really appreciate this!

only have eyes 42 | yeri, taeyong (m)

pairings: vampire yeri x fem black reader, vampire taeyong x fem black reader summary: it’s surprisingly easy to be seduced by two benevolent strangers who fill in the empty spaces of your life—especially when you have no clue of their true nature. genre: romance, vampire!au, 1800s!au word count: 4.3k warnings: mentions of traditional gender roles/pressures to get married. blood consumption. kissing. biting. sexual tension. no full smut but suggestive content so MDNI. virgin!reader i guess? taeyong’s kind of a simp. voyeurism/eavesdropping. more creep behavior from taeyong. did i unintentionally write sugar mommy!yeri? well. undercurrents of manipulation/deceit. yeri and taeyong are fake cousins. gonna very tentatively put infidelity here just in case, although yeri and taeyong are both in on everything that’s happening between them and y/n, so… a/n: this is a sequel of sorts to “steal you,” set a few years after the initial events, with a different MC…as the previous one is dead. i unintentionally retconned some things in the original fic while writing this, but whatever!

note that precise historical accuracy wasn't the aim here, since these are only vignettes/scenarios and not a full story (yet?)

there’s a lot of background context that’s not (explicitly) mentioned here, so i'm thinking of writing a larger fic for this? we'll see...this is really just self-indulgent bisexual thoughts lmao 🙃

Days spent running the dress shop with your mother and youngest sister are often hectic and occasionally slow, but rarely are they fun. At least not for you. The kind customers make up for the rude and impatient ones, but there is only so much smiling you can do when your mother’s friends and acquaintances keep stopping in to ask you Have you found a suitor yet? or I can still arrange a meeting for you with my son, if you’d like!

Both your sisters had already found husbands. Your middle sister married at 20, and you hardly see her anymore since she went to live with her husband’s family. The youngest married at 19, but her husband still allows her to keep working at the shop because of how much she enjoys it—and because all money she earns goes directly to him, of course.

With you being 24 and having already rejected more than one proposal from men you hardly knew, everyone has been breathlessly expecting you to follow suit. You try in vain to ignore their expectations. You aren’t sure you’ve ever felt any romantic love for another person before—not the way your sisters or others describe it—and though the mounting pressure vexes you, you are mostly okay with that reality. You can’t miss what you’ve never had.

Until, one day, a particular woman walks into the shop.

You haven’t seen her in the shop before, or anywhere else around the city, and you are certain she would’ve remained in your memory if you had.

Years from now, when you think back to how this inscrutable woman altered your life’s path, you’ll remember this first day so clearly—all because it was raining. It was not the type of bone-soaking downpour you’ve always hated, but a gentler shower.

A man accompanies the woman, carrying a delicate pink and white umbrella above her head as he opens the door for her. When she steps inside, some water droplets roll off the umbrella and onto her pinned-up black hair, making her shiver when they reach her neck and slide into her collar. That small motion makes you smile in amusement before you can stop yourself, and at the same time, you catch her eye. She takes your expression as a welcoming smile and returns the gesture.

With her smooth skin, perfectly curved Cupid’s bow, and captivating eyes, she is remarkably beautiful.

You do not know who the man is, just assuming him to be a servant by the way he is holding her things and attending to her, but you find your eyes also lingering on him, despite yourself. He has a nice side-profile reminiscent of one you’d see in a painting, with a sloping nose, a handsomely formed bone structure, and plump lips. The second thing you notice is that his clothes are of a higher-quality than many of the servants you see daily; maybe he isn’t one at all. You’d gotten so into the habit of making (usually correct) assumptions about the shop’s patrons.

“Good morning. Fine weather today, isn’t it?” you say with a laugh.

The man gives an answering chuckle. “If you like nearly being washed into the gutter, maybe.”

“You’re endlessly dramatic,” the woman comments, raising a gloved hand to check for any more water droplets in her hair. Even her small movements are graceful in a way that comes naturally.

“...So, how may I assist you?” you ask, giving them both your attention while trying to avoid seeming like you’re staring.

“My lovely cousin Yerim here—” The man pinches the woman’s chin, and she sweeps his hand away in shocked annoyance “—is incredibly indecisive and has made me take her to every dressmaker on this side of London, so I do hope you have something here that catches her eye.”

“It’s not been every dressmaker,” Yerim clarifies, rolling her eyes with a small grin. “But your dresses in the window seemed exceptionally pretty, so I was curious.”

“Oh, of course. There are more fabrics like those, if you’ll follow me.”

You and Yerim look over the rows of available fabrics, and you give some recommendations on patterns and colors you think would fit her. She listens diligently as you talk, as if she couldn’t be more interested in anything else. A bit flustered by the attention, you end up keeping your eyes on the fabrics more than on her face.

As you’re explaining a particular material, she grasps the edge of the fabric you’re holding, brushing her lacy-gloved thumb across it until the digit bumps into the side of your hand. She giggles discreetly and only moves her hand away—causing the lace to slide across your skin—after it’s already lingered for what’s considered a little longer than normal.

You struggle not to pause in your speech as your mind stalls on that moment, giving her an apologetic smile when you stammer anyway. You don’t yet understand why you’re reacting like this, but the meaning will become clear to you in due time.

“You’re certain Taeyong won’t mind being left behind?”

He’d been accompanying the two of you on your walk through the park, which is scarcely filled with people at this time of day. Everyone else is at work, which you normally would’ve been too. Except for Yerim—who had enough money that your impromptu free day could be easily pulled off, and who’d nearly begged you to come out with her by offering to pay for two days’ worth of your earnings. It was a difficult overture to reject, and your mother had surprisingly few complaints about it. Not when part of the money was also going into her own purse.

Now, it’s just you and Yerim walking along the path together, as Taeyong had become preoccupied with ogling at a family of geese sunbathing in a field. You think it’s a bit eccentric how he always gets lost in excitement over stray animals and pets and the like, but that’s just how he is. You aren’t actually concerned about him being left behind, but more so because he’ll complain to Yerim about her “stealing you away” for the rest of your outing if you let him.

Yerim’s deeply rose-pink lips draw up in a smirk, and she rolls her eyes. “He’ll be quite fine by himself. Believe me, he survived well long before me.”

“You two seem to get along quite well. Most cousins I know have a world of problems between them. Families are so aggravatingly complex.”

Yerim gazes ahead down the path, as if she’s suddenly lost in her thoughts. Sunlight peeks through the lace trimming of herhatand creates shadowy patterns on her face. She often wears one of her pretty hats or even uses an umbrella when she steps out during the day, claiming her skin burns easily. “We both want the same things, so it makes it easier to relate to each other.”

“Well, now that’s intriguing. What similar things do you both want?”

Yerim looks at you, turning her body toward you with the motion, and you feel like you’ve suddenly got the sun bearing down on you in all its fullness. She slips her hat off, as if doing so will help her see better, and grasps the brim of it in her gloved hands.

“Life,” she replies, and though she doesn’t explain further, it feels like the type of answer with a world of meaning behind it.

“Life,” you repeat, and you try not to sound incredulous or mocking. “I would think you’d already experienced any spoils of life you could dream of and then some.”

“There’s always more.” Yerim says it with the subtle intensity of someone who harbors a constant hunger just beneath the surface, a yearning that even you can pick up on. It makes your skin become hot, and you internally chastise yourself because you’re sure she doesn’t intend it how you’re assuming. “Don’t you want more, too?”

“I suppose so,” you answer.

“Do you?” Yerim asks again, like she wants you to expand upon your response.

“The dress shop is fine,” you say, though that doesn’t feel truthful, “but it…would be nice to travel the world.” You speak the first desire that comes to mind, which makes it seem more real now that you’ve acknowledged it aloud.

“Hmm, wouldn’t that be nice? You could do just that.” Yerim comes to a stop in the middle of the pathway, and you do too, looking back at her to see why she’s paused. Yet again, she doesn’t give any hint about how doing just that could be possible in your current circumstances.

She twirls the large, lacy hatin her hand and holds it up in front of both of you, so that if anyone were coming from the other direction—say, another park visitor, or Taeyong—they wouldn’t see your faces. “But, even more importantly, there’s something I want to show you. Close your eyes.”

Her voice is measured and secretive. Her eyes are mischievous. The air thickens between you in the few seconds that you stare at each other within the concealment her hat provides, and it surprises you how quickly you come to the conclusion of what this something must be.

“Here?” you murmur.

Yerim nods, her face betraying no apprehension, only sweet anticipation. “Close your eyes?” she asks again. And so you do, your lips twitching into a small smile before you try to assume a straight face.

While you’re looking at the backs of your eyelids, you hear her heeled boots shuffling in the dirt and feel her presence growing closer. There’s a pause, an exhalation like she’s laughing without sound, then the press of those rose-pink lips upon yours.

This lovely woman who’s always in your shop, with a face you can hardly look away from and an ever-present magnetic aura, has her mouth over your own, her free hand grasping your waist earnestly. Her mouth is gentle and warm, and that familiar rose petal scent envelopes you.

It’s the first time you’ve kissed each other, but it feels like you’ve already done this multiple times before. The nerves you expected to feel are not there—there is only the soft familiarity, the fragrance of her perfume, and the warmth of her hand on your waist.

It’s a short kiss, which you try not to feel disappointed about. Yerim understands your desire and finds it amusing. She offers you a knowing smile, but she won’t give you any more unless you ask for it, and right now, your pride is still too stubborn to allow that. You’re still unsure why this lavishly moneyed woman is wanting to spend so much time with you, or what the mysterious things she says mean, or if there could be something else to all of this. What something else is, though, you have not a clue.

It wasn’t your intention to spend the night at Yerim’s home. But after you finish an exhausting day of tending to customers and working on complex sewing projects, she brings you to her house for the first time to have dinner. And you get so caught up in eating and touring every nook and cranny of the place—which really wasn’t as large as you expected it to be—and even playing a game of cards with her and Taeyong, that she insists it’s too late at night for you to go back home. Surely, you could wait until morning for them to return you to your own residence before work?

Before you know it, you are lying next to Yerim in her bed during the dark and early hours of the morning, gazing at the rest of the room through the wispy fabric draped around her canopy bed. You could’ve slept in a guest room of your choosing, but somehow, you’d been talked right into her bed. And it did not take much convincing for you to acquiesce.

“Are you happy?” Yerim asks. She hasn’t bothered to climb under the covers, and neither have you. She lies down with her arms folded across her stomach, knees bent, and toes curling absentmindedly into the comforter. This position makes her nightgown pool around her waist, exposing the length of her legs under the opposing candlelight and moonglow. You try not to stare. You don’t know how she has this much energy at night, as her body has hardly stopped moving since you began getting ready for bed.

“Yes, actually…I had a lovely time this evening, despite the earlier exhaustion.”

Yerim smiles. “I mean in general. Do you fancy working at the dress shop? You told me it was ‘fine,’ but you always seem so…unlively when I come in—in that split second before you notice my presence…”

“What do you get out of being that observant?” you ask, somewhat jokingly.

“It means I know everything.” She says it with some air of seriousness, as if she were truly granted omniscient powers you weren’t aware of. You only blink in response. “Now, why do you look that way?”

“Maybe I am just…stressed.”

Yerim turns onto her stomach and props her head up on her arms, using her pillow as a support, and your own stomach involuntarily tumbles with her gaze fixed on you. “What distresses you?”

Glancing up at the patterned ceiling, you close your eyes for a long moment and let the ensuing darkness surround you. It’s somewhat comforting. “My mother is anticipating that I should find a proper husband soon. We make money from the shop and live fairly comfortably that way, but she insists I must have a man to take care of me, like my sisters.” You sigh deeply as you continue with, “And bear children, of course.”

Yerim laughs like you’ve told a joke she can’t believe, and you are startled, as nothing you’ve said is particularly amusing.

“Shall we find you a proper husband who will support you handsomely, then?” she suggests through a giggle.

Your brows draw together, and you turn your head to look at her and those errant eyes. “Who?” You begin to regret mentioning this at all, wondering if she’ll actually use her social standing to contribute to the effort of marrying you off to some wealthy stranger. Surely, this will not be the culmination of your friendship…

Yerim moves so that she’s on her hands and knees now, and she doesn’t stop shifting until she’s hovering over you. You watch with eyes growing wide as her arms cage you on either side of your body, her legs sliding between yours. “Me. I will be the proper husband who supports you handsomely.”

Finally, a hesitant yet amused grin disrupts the prior confusion on your face. “Really? And who will approve of that?”

“That hardly matters. We’ll need no one’s approval.”

Her hair falls over her shoulders and dangles in front of you, and you part it like a curtain to brush away the shadows obscuring her face. Her visage is half-shadow and half-candlelight, reminiscent of an oil painting. The glitter of her eyes and the glint of her teeth as she smiles are sharp, as if you could be physically cut by these flashes of light, and your chest stirs with something like unease for a moment. You don’t know why.

Your voice is quiet when you say, “You won’t find any opposition from me, then.”

“In that case, close your eyes again.”

“Why? Perhaps I don’t want to lose this view.”

Yerim draws her index finger across your lower lip. “I’ll give you a gift—one like that day in the park.”

Your heart stutters at the thought. “Do what you will,” you murmur, letting your eyelids slip down.

The same hand that was on your mouth takes your chin in a loose grip, and you make a small noise when she lowers her body flush against yours.

Her kiss is no longer soft or brief. Her lips press against yours as if she means to meld every part of your beings together, her tongue slotting itself into your mouth, and you accept the proposition.

You kiss until your lips hurt, though that’s more likely from the way she keeps biting your bottom lip until she draws blood—and then she kisses you even more feverishly as if she’s invigorated from the bloodshed, the primal quality of it. It makes your lip sting, but you realize you like the sensation.

Her body continually shifts against yours during your embrace, and by the time she separates from your mouth to give your neck a wild, messy lick, your underwear has grown damp and your legs knock clumsily into hers. Dizzy with lust you’ve never encountered before, you find you’re unable to do anything but lie prone and let her do what she wishes to you.

Meanwhile, Taeyong stands outside of the door as still as a statue, listening to the now-familiar sound of your blood rushing and your heart pulsing—the unique rhythm of every human’s blood that defines their very existence. No two bodies are ever quite the same. The sweet music of your blood is punctuated by your small murmurs and moans, and he doesn’t need to press his ear to the door to hear clearly, but the absurdly human desire to do so is still there, if only to get closer…

He knows that Yerim must realize he’s out there, listening in like a pervert, and he does not care.

You’re sitting at Yerim’s kitchen table sewing a rip in a scarf of yours when you prick your finger on the needle. You drop your materials from the shock of the sudden injury and hold your finger, watching blood bead up on the pad of it as it throbs with pain. Taeyong is away from the kitchen counter and by your side before you even register it, and you are slightly startled by him sliding into the seat next to you.

“What?” you ask.

“Can I see it?”

“Is there any gauze?” you ask, showing him your finger.

Taeyong carefully grasps your wrist with both hands. “For this little wound? It’ll stop bleeding in minutes.” There’s a certain urgency to his movements and his tone that makes you curious. “All it needs is this.”

Taeyong presses his lips to your finger as if to soothe it. You’ve licked your own cuts after the many times you’ve been pricked while sewing, but to have someone else do it, and in such a manner, was…strange. The action enflames your body; it seems oddly more satisfying than it should be to him, as if he gets some kind of bizarre gratification from it. He inhales deeply and doesn’t move his mouth; he just keeps it pressed against the cut until he finally moves your finger away, the sphere of your blood broken and smeared across his lips. He drags his tongue across his lower lip to rid it of the blood smear, and your body twitches; you want to look away. You feel like you’re witnessing something obscene and private you aren’t meant to see.

You don’t say anything as he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes the rest of the blood away from your finger before quickly tucking the cloth back into its place. You wonder if he’ll wash it; it’ll be ruined by your blood otherwise.

Unbeknownst to you, he will take this handkerchief out in the privacy of his room later that night and press his face into it, breathing in the faint scent of your blood and imagining the faded taste of it on his lips.

“Are you well?” he asks.

“...It still hurts. I didn’t think a silly kiss would help,” you answer, and chuckle quietly to try to defuse the nerve-wracking atmosphere of that earlier moment.

“Fine, hold on a minute.”

Taeyong finds gauze in another room and comes back to wrap a small piece of it around your finger, protecting your cut from the outside world. Afterwards, you’re about to slip your hand out of his when his grip tightens, and you pause.

“What’s troubling you?” you ask, already knowing something is amiss from the furrow in his eyebrows and the tension in his body that wasn’t there before.

Taeyong drops his head, pressing his forehead to your wrist, and you think he might sob or collapse for no apparent reason. Alarmed, you’re about to speak again when you realize this isn’t the case; he lifts his head so that you can see him lower his lips to your hand again. He kisses the back of your hand in a way that’s markedly different from his previous touch; this one is more sensual, intentional in its purpose to rouse a response from you. His mouth trails a path down to your uninjured ring finger, and you observe silently as he bites the tip of it softly.

“I’m jealous of you and Yerim…” The confession comes out in a sigh, like it’s a sound his body needs to release rather than a thought-out sentence.

“Jealous…” It’s not a question, as you already had an idea of this in the back of your mind, but you don’t know why he’s chosen now to mention it.

“I’d also like to know just how soft your lips feel, or what they taste like…” Taeyong keeps kissing the tips of your fingers and your knuckles slowly, almost like he’s pretending your hand is your mouth with how engrossed he is in this task. You find this shameless display simultaneously embarrassing and appealing in some deep part of yourself; it’s the way he prostrates himself before you, flays open his hidden desires to you. “I’d like you to touch my body the same way you touch hers…I’d like to make you moan desperately the same way she does, late at night when you believe me to be asleep.”

Your only answer is a rough exhalation. Your dress feels uncomfortably hot; you wonder how he knows of those things. Does he stand outside the door? Listen at the wall? You didn’t realize the walls were that thin around here, and you think maybe you should be more put-off by his unabashed eavesdropping.

“What do you say to that?” he asks, lifting his head to look at you.

“I say it’s rather pathetic,” you answer, meaning it wholeheartedly—and for some reason, the pitiable state of his desire makes it more alluring to you. There’s a thoughtful pause between the two of you. You make no move to reject him when he leans closer, staring at your lips. One of his hands releases yours and touches your throat instead, his fingertips splaying to rest above your pulse.

“Then allow me to make myself appear even more pathetic in your eyes for just a moment.” Taeyong’s so close that his lips almost brush yours when he speaks. Your mouths connect only for a second before the front door opens. That brief touch of his lips to yours is all you receive.

The separation between you widens to its original innocuous breadth as Taeyong sits back in his seat. He is placing your hand back into your lap when Yerim walks into the kitchen a few moments later, and she abruptly stops in the doorway. You think she must be upset because she has somehow figured out what transpired. In actuality, she is cross because of the lingering smell of your blood in the air, which your human senses can’t pick up.

“Yerim…” you say, your throat feeling choked. You two hadn’t spoken seriously about a relationship, especially not with the dilemma of your mother still hunting for a husband for you and the fact that you’d both be shunned, but you realize that kissing your lover’s cousin is probably not the way to go about things.

Yerim walks over to the two of you and greets you as she normally would. “Y/N,” she says calmly, stroking a finger against your cheek; there’s always some part of her body touching yours whenever you meet. The same hand lands tightly on Taeyong’s shoulder afterwards, and the smile she gives him is close-mouthed and unnatural. He looks up at her with a face that isn’t guilty, but more curious and slightly irritated. “You haven’t been hurt badly, have you?” she asks, glancing at the gauze on your finger.

“Oh…no. It was just a pinprick,” you say, tentatively picking your sewing materials up off the table. Yerim’s tension rescinds when she notices the sewing needle, though her gaze towards Taeyong stays suspicious. “I…think I’ll just go and put this away for now.”

The two wait until you leave the room to speak in barely audible tones.

“Remember our arrangement,” Yerim whispers, unable to keep the disgust out of her voice.

“You’re eager to lambast me for bloodshed I didn’t even cause, yet you drew her blood on her first night here. Who exactly has forgotten themselves?”

Yerim’s tone is perfectly matter-of-fact when she responds with, “I have more self-control than you—as all the unsuspecting human women of London you’ve ravaged are well-aware of your lack.” She levels Taeyong with a deadpan look. “She wasn’t in any danger with me that night.”

“You’re fond of drawing this dance out beyond reason, and then you have the audacity to be surprised when one’s patience wears thin.”

“Then maybe I’ll return to finding prey on my own if you’re so worn thin. Do recall that you’re the one who asked me to help you sweep up all your mess from the beginning, so I’d speak more carefully if I were in your place.”

“Just unbelievable,” Taeyong mutters as Yerim brushes past him without a second glance. His fingers twitch over the pocket where the blood-smeared handkerchief rests, but he dismisses the urge to pull it out now.

Self-control, he thinks. You have no monopoly on self-control.

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retrievablememories · 9 days ago

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thank you so much for this comment. i know this is fairly old but i had a crashout around this time and didn't get around to responding jkfsjks 😭 i think about this comment like once a week tho. i'd written this fic for my own indulgence and didn't think it'd have much of an impact of anyone else 🥲