#◇.⠀⠀⠀letters⠀⠀⠀⎯⎯⎯⠀⠀⠀⠀(⠀answered !⠀)

[theocannibalism]

ty for the tag Grimm! :) started watching House M.D. so I've been listening to a lot of Massive Attack lately and this one is cool and eerie

tagging @circuslollipop @drowningparty @oli-smiles-sometimes @throat-goblin @obeetlebeetle @blackfem only if ya want to of course! :D

rb with the last song you listened to with a number in the title

ill start mine is one million dollars by 100 gecs

[mymelllllinda]

Pretty Mouth — Geum Seong Je x F!Reader

You get shoved into the bathroom by Seongje, the door slamming shut behind you—and before you can even catch your breath, the lock clicks into place. He stands there, blocking the only way out, eyes dark and unreadable. “You’re not leaving,” he says, voice low and dangerous, “not until we fix that mouth of yours.”

cw: dark!seongje, noncon, forced oral, hair pulling, blackmail, degradation. #MDNI!!

“Unbelievable. I get stuck volunteering because you idiots decided to pick a fight with Hyo-man? Seriously! what the hell were you thinking?” I muttered, collapsing next to Sieun and stealing a sip from his water. “Not our fault Hyo-min was practically begging to get his ass kicked,” Hyun-tak said around a mouthful of food. I rolled my eyes. “Right. Because violence is obviously the mature, rational response.”

“So,” I said, giving Sieun back his water, “what’s everyone’s thrilling weekend plans? Other than, you know, being stuck here volunteering because someone decided to throw hands in front of the our school.”

Sieun barely glanced up from his exam book. “Studying.”

Jun-tae nodded. “Me too. I’ve got cram school.."

“Wow,” I said dryly. “Living the dream.”

Hyun-tak leaned back, grinning. “Baku and I have basketball practice. Coach said if we skip, we’re out of the next game.”

“Yeah, and if you fight in your uniform again, you’ll be out of school,” I shot back. “Principal was two seconds from calling your parents.”

Baku rolled his eyes. “He always says that. We’ll just write an apology letter and scrub a few floors.”

“I can't believe I’m stuck here supervising you clowns,” I muttered. “Great. Just what I needed after the week I had.”

Hyun-tak tossed a chip in his mouth and shrugged. “Could be worse. You could be spending your Saturday crying over your test scores.”

“I’ll take tears over push-ups, thanks,” Jun-tae said, not looking up.

Baku cracked a smile. “Technically, your arms do get stronger during mock season. From flipping pages.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, standing up and fixing my uniform. “Bathroom. Try not to burn the place down while I’m gone.”

“No promises,” Hyun-tak called after me, already reaching for the last piece of pizza.

“Where’s the bathroom again?” I muttered, glancing down the hallway. “Oh—here it is.”

I reached for the handle, but before I could push the door open, I felt a hand on my back. Firm. Then— A shove.

I stumbled forward, catching myself on the sink. The door slammed shut behind me.

My heart jumped. “What the hell—” I spun around. And froze.

“Seongje? What the fuck?!” I snapped, my voice bouncing off the bathroom tiles. “What are you doing here?”

He stood by the door, arms crossed, his expression unreadable but there was something off in his eyes.

“Relax,” he said, fixing his glasses. “I just wanted to talk.”

“By shoving me into a bathroom like some creep?”

“Well,” Seongje said, voice quiet but steady, “if this was the only way I could talk to you… then here we are.”

I stood frozen near the sink, the chill of the tile seeping through my shoes. He hadn’t moved from the door. Blocking it.

My throat felt dry. “Well, what the fuck do you what?”

“Why are you hanging out with Baku and his little squad?” he asked, ignoring the question. His gaze darkened.

“You should stay away from them. For your own good.”

Something in his tone like a threat.

My pulse picked up. I tried to keep my voice even. “Seongje, please leave me alone.”

His lips twitched. “I’m just trying to warn you.”

“Okay.” I asked, forcing a weak laugh.

His jaw clenched. For a moment, he didn’t answer. Just looked at me. And in that silence, something cold crept up my spine.

I took a cautious step toward the exit, heart pounding, but Seongje’s body blocked the way.

“Seongje,” I said slowly, “move.”

He didn’t.

“Seongje,” I said, more firmly this time. “Move.”

His eyes didn’t leave mine.

I stepped forward, trying to brush past him, but the second I did His hands shot out and grabbed my upper arms.

“Seongje!”

I barely got the word out before he shoved me back.

My body hit the cold metal of the stall door with a thud, sharp and sudden.

Pain bloomed along my shoulder blade, breath knocked from my lungs as he forced the door open, pushed me inside, and slammed it shut behind us.

Click.

The lock slid into place.

My heart dropped.

His fingers locked around my jaw tight, tilting my face up to him. The pressure hurt just enough to make my breath hitch.

“God, I can’t wait to ruin this mouth of yours,” Seongje growled, his words hot against my lips.

He shoved my jaw away like I was nothing but a toy he intended to break in. And as my head snapped slightly to the side, a tremor rolled through me, fear.

I heard the metallic clink before I saw it. His belt coming undone, slow and deliberate.

Then he unzipped.

His cock was already thick in his hand, flushed and hard, veins standing out as he stroked himself like he was savoring the wait.

“Open,” he said, voice low and wicked.

I shook my head in refusal, but he grabbed my hair and pulled so hard, I couldn’t stop the scream that tore from my throat.

And then he was in my mouth.

He filled my mouth—thick, hot, overwhelming. Salt, skin, and unfiltered male heat hit my throat so hard I gagged, eyes watering.

“That’s it,” Seongje hissed. “You sound better like this.”

He didn’t thrust not yet but I could feel him pulsing as he fed more of himself into me, slow but deliberate, watching the way my lips stretched around him.

“Look at you,” he murmured, almost sweet mocking and fond all at once. “All that fire… all that attitude… and now you’re drooling on my cock like you were made for it.”

My eyes watered, I tried pulling away. He pulled back slightly, thumb brushing my bottom lip, slick with spit. “God, I love watching you try to take it. Messy little thing.” I whimpered.

“Oh, you like that?” he breathed. “You like being used like this? Thought you were going to be a fight. Thought I’d have to break you first.”

His fingers tightened in my hair.

“But look at you now. You’re fucking melting for it.” His grip in my hair turned brutal.

“Fuck—don’t move,” Seongje snarled through gritted teeth, dragging my head back just enough to make my neck strain, to remind me I wasn’t in control.

Then he pulled out, fast, with a gasp that was more growl than breath.

And in the next second something hot and filthy, his cum splattered across my face.

I gasped.

He held my hair tight, forcing me to look up at him.

“Open wider,” he said darkly, voice low and dangerous. “Don’t fucking wipe it off.”

Fear rooted me to the spot so I did as I was told.

My lips parted, my breathing shallow, the weight of what I’d just done crushing and fulling me with shame.

Then I saw the glint of his phone.

Click.

My body went cold.

“Seongje, what the fuck are you doing—delete that right now! You can’t—”

“Shut up.” His tone was flat. Razor-sharp. “You think you get to fuck around with that little pretty-boy, Baku, and not pay for it?”

He angled the screen toward me to see my own image staring back. Mascara smudged. Mouth open.

“You belong to me now,” he said. Calm. Cruel. “And if I see you near him again—hell, if I even hear his name in your breath,this photo goes to every inbox at your school.”

I stared at him, heart hammering, mouth still open. Cum still drying on my face

“You’re sick,” I whispered.

He crouched in front of me, lips brushing my ear.

“Yes” he murmured, dragging his fingers slowly down my throat. “For you.” He stood, zipping up with a smile on his face.

“Clean yourself up,” he said without looking back. “And remember if I see you hanging around Baku again the whole fucking world is gonna see what a filthy little whore you really are.”

“And if that isn’t enough to keep you obedient,” he murmured, his voice dropping to something silkier—sicker, “maybe next time… I’ll bring Baekjin.”

My breath caught.

“See how well that filthy mouth of yours does with two of us.” He let the threat hang in the air like smoke, then left without waiting for a response.

fin

© 2025 mymelllllinda

[cryptidmickle]

PLLEEEEASE let us see more of the baby please please<3<3 also why wasnt pv answering his letters :(

direct view of the baby for yall

[lvrclerc]

✶ WATCH ME PARTY ON YOU

summary: post-race parties usually don't come with invitations, but this one does. you understand why when you see lando norris, your ex, mixing on a rooftop in monaco.

F1 MASTERLIST | LN4 MASTERLIST

pairing: lando norris x ex!f!reader

wc: 1.5K

cw: alcohol, many many the great gatsby references because party 4 u is just so tgg coded, exes to ???, reader is bisexual because i'm bisexual and i'm the writer, complicated relationship, not proofread.

note: requested here! i decided that writer's block wouldn't get me and that no matter how much i hated it i wouldn't delete a word once it's on the page, enjoy this one sitting madness <3

THE INVITATION HAD come gold-lettered, and your name nowhere to be seen on the expensive, grainy material of the paper. You had laughed in Kika’s face, because no one ever came to post-Grand Prix parties with invitations— you knew someone who knew someone who knew a friend of the person who was invited, and it was proof enough. The brunette shrugged, muttering something about a special occasion as she gently sweeped the bristles of her highlighter brush on your cheekbone.

Monaco is small when you’re someone, which is why every face on the rooftop is familiar. You leave lipstick stains on darkening blush as acknowledgement even if first names escaped you, and welcomed the cool droplets of those who dipped in the pool for celebration against your burning skin. The music throbbed low and intimate: lights were dark purple swirling with the dangerous golden hem of your dress, your body pulled flush against Kika’s. There was something about the way the beat looped, syrupy and sticking to your collarbones in its sweetness, that turned the atmosphere heavy with secrecy.

The tongue of the girl you kissed tasted like vodka and cranberry juice, and the perfume of the man with his hand on your hips smelled of endless car rides from one country to another. They both ended up talking about the earlier Grand Prix, the words getting lost to you in the heat of the first hours of morning. Kika had told you about the winner, which you promptly forgot about— she looked at you with barely contained pity when you answered you no longer tracked the fingerprints staining the trophies.

“The music’s good!” the girl comments. You nod through the lemony haze of your cocktail— it was good. Familiar, even, and your eyes turn to the booth at the very end of the rooftop, where the sky brushes the railing with modest curiosity.

The name Kika had uttered between layers of sounds crashed onto you.

He’s up on a platform, one headphone half-on and his shirt half-opened in a similar fashion, exposing the slick of his tan skin under the Monaco air. His curls are longer, grazing the back of his neck the way you used to. The sickeningly saccharine liqueur that is melancholy sobers you right up: Lando Norris was not supposed to be good at this—the mixing thing he picked up after too many nights post-race with too much adrenaline and too little sleep—but somehow he is. Of course he is.

Lando excelled at everything he set his mind to. Yet, when it came to you, to the quiet maintenance of love  and all the small, thankless instances that came with it, he faltered.

You weren’t built for waiting. Patience was a language you never learned; the world had never asked you to slow down, so you never did. Life moved with you— not the other way around. When Lando didn’t show up the way you needed, you didn’t wait for him to catch up. 

You left before he even had the chance to prove if he ever would. 

The tangled mess of bodies dancing together under harsh brush strokes of lights stills for the half of a second, and memories come flooding back in the dull brown of strangers in train windows. As the beat lags, imperceptibly, and the pads of his fingers you imagine must still feel as rough as his steering wheel hovers over the board, you still knew him well enough to deduce he saw you too.

The crowd is champagne-colored when you go back dancing but your heart is already heavy with a hangover when your feet find the tempo. Lando’s eyes, as he navigates through the music for the night, glides over you like water when you drop in people’s arms, laughing and singing, one after the other. You didn’t enjoy it one bit— not because it was unwanted, but because the knowledge of his presence made you all too aware of the debauchery you’ve been indulging in ever since you left. The outside perception of your humanity was not something you liked to be reminded of.

Tracks after tracks, you dance for Lando to watch, and you can’t remember if it was tears or tongues that wiped the specks of glitters on your cheek.

The party doesn’t end in a cathartic split. It bleeds out, like so many other things.

Bit by bit, the bodies disperse. Laughter thins into whispers, lost to the humidity and the inevitable promise of tomorrow. The last bottles sweat themselves warm on sticky countertops, cadavers-shaped confettis floated in the pool, the shades of light going from enamel to watercolor, and somewhere below, Monaco exhales— restless and bright.

You lost sight of Kika hours ago, you realize as your bare feet plunged into the water. You find yourself alone again. Not in the literal sense— there are still a few limbs flung on velvet couches, a couple kissing like the night will never end. You wished it did, so you wouldn’t have to find yourself in your own company.

Behind you, the music switches to something treacly, ripping open parcels of your heart without much thought about the consequences on the feeble hold you had on it. The melody trickles down your spine. The first lyrics escape your lips like a well-oiled, forgotten jukebox.

You don’t look to see whose feet dips in the water next to yours. “That’s a nice song choice,” you comment instead, eyes locked on the dark water below. The melody spills like honey into the quiet. You remember swaying to it in the kitchen light, tucked comfortably in the warmth of his arm, the rare times he allowed you to settle between the shards of his self-doubt. He held you at the base of your spine like it was the only place he could linger without trembling.

The notes had never felt more intimate as they do now.

“Thought you might like it,” Lando answers, and the only bite behind it is the unforgivingness of the cool evening air on your bare shoulders.

The silence stretches for a minute longer than it should, dense. The last stragglers had stumbled awkwardly to the exit before the Brit spoke up again, the melody of the song echoing between each syllable. “I play it at the end of each after party,” he says, barely above a whisper, shifting. “In case you’d drop by.”

“You sent the invite.” It’s not a question.

Lando nod. “Kika told me you’d be in Monaco.” He breathes in, sitting a little straighter next to you. “I just… I wanted to know if that's what it would take.”

“You could have just asked.”

“I didn’t think you’d come if I did,” he says. It’s almost sheepish, as if he was the one declining your own party. He put you on a pedestal deserving of a marble idol— you were just another woman with neons in her bones, with the necessity to crack a little in order to shine. Nothing like who he pictured when he kissed you.

Which is why you replied, “Me neither.” Then, after a beat. “But I’m here, so now what?”

That undoes him a little, you can hear it in the hand he runs in his hair.

Lando draws a breath, pursuing something that already slipped past the fragile skin of his lips. “We could try again,” he offers, voice brittle with something desperate. “We could go back to what we were before, you and me. Before it all fell apart.”

You let yourself savor the possibility— but that’s what it was: a suggestion. You could play pretend at being a different person than you were back then, and Lando could too, but the truth was that you were still the same people who couldn’t push the thorny edges of their own minds to love each other properly. The city below sparkles, but the rooftop is dim, quiet.

“We can’t repeat the past, Lando.”

He turns to you fully then. You can finally catch the dark rim lining his lower lashes, and the flicker of something wide-eyed in his gaze. The want inside of them blurred into a child-like naiveness, which you could only compare to a boy staring through a looking glass and hoping to find the answers he seeked. “Why not?” he asks. “It was good, wasn’t it? While it lasted?”

The last rooftop light flickers behind you. Once, twice, and dies. A final green blink before you’re swallowed in darkness. The music stopped a few minutes ago, the only familiar rhythm now the aching pace of Lando’s breathing.

You don’t answer. You choose to kiss him instead, and it grounds you. His mouth is familiar, yet salted with nostalgia and softened by regret. His tongue slips in your mouth to swallow your secrets, his fingers wipe the black stains running down your cheeks following the map he traced so long ago. You finally feel real again.

The rooftop stays dark and the city spins on. Here, in the quiet wreckage of a night that once belonged to the both of you, you kiss him as acknowledgement that the past did happen. As a testimony that, in this moment, it was still yours to hold.

©LVRCLERC 2025 ━ do not copy, steal, post somewhere else or translate my work without my permission.

[minteababe]

In 2018 my husband and I (both trans masc) were arrested in a very small town in Texas for possession of cannabis. My husband passes as masc much better than I do, and so when we were initially being loaded up in the squad car, the cop was on his radio talking to dispatch telling them he had "one male and one female."

Now, my husband has never had his gender marker changed. So when dispatch came back, they were very, very confused, saying, "Uh, we're seeing two females?"

The cop then flipped on the dome light in the back seat and took a good long look at my husband in his rear-view mirror, and said, "Well, damn. Whatever you're doing is working. Good job."

That was it.

When we got to the precinct, in the midst of talking to the cop doing our intake, I said something (I don't remember anymore, but I think it had to do with being surprised at how chill they were with us being trans) and she replied with a big belly laugh, "Oh sweetie, y'all aren't the first trans folks we've had in here and you won't be the last."

They kept my partner in holding for his safety instead of putting him with the men.

Now, because I had long hair at the time and hadn't been on T long, I didn't pass at all. Naturally, they put me in general population with a group of 11 women.

Within the first 24 hours, I had explained to one of the women that I really shouldn't be in with them and it wasn't fair to them, because I was trans. Her face lit up like a kid on Christmas when I asked her to co-sign a letter asking the warden to have me separated. Not because she was malicious, but because in her words, "I knew there was something different about you when I saw you come in."

She asked my permission to talk to the other women and have them sign my letter, too.

Later that day, I found myself seated on a bunk surrounded by women who just had questions. And I had answers! And I was happy to give them those answers, because meeting me was their chance to learn. They asked me everything they could think of about being trans, medical and social transition, etc. Most of them were just in awe, because they had no idea that people like me existed. A few clearly didn't "agree" with it, but still held the sentiment of, "As long as you're not hurting anyone else, do what you want."

Afterwards, one of the women came to me in tears. She thanked me profusely for sitting with them and teaching them about my world. She then told me that her very young kid would often tell her, "Mommy, I want to be a girl when I grow up," and she just...never knew what to make of that before. She didn't know that was an option, and she was so happy and excited to be able to get out and go support her kid with more knowledge and understanding than she had before.

Think about that the next time someone asks you a genuine question. No, you don't "owe" anyone an education - but don't allow your knowledge and experience to become a barrier for others. Let me be clear: personal questions can be deeply uncomfortable, you don't have to answer them. Practice saying, "That question is difficult for me to answer because its a very vulnerable topic for me," instead of reacting in fear, anger, or defense. Being rude or aggressive in your refusal could mean that person never tries to learn about trans folks ever again.

People don't know what they don't know. And they never will know, if you refuse to teach them.

"The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I'm not a trannie or a fag so I don't care, just give 'em the medicine they need."

"This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility."

One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.

[heeseungsbm]

𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐟. ..𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ‪‪ꫂ ၴႅၴ‬་༘ ₜₑₐₛₑᵣ

𝘭𝘦𝘦 𝘩𝘦𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘶𝘯𝘨

❥ 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘 : surprises. heeseung always had them up his sleeve. but this? this was something different—something he clearly fantasized about behind your back. he knew how tense you got over school. thought about it often, wished to ease it himself. you clearly needed relief, and he'd always been good at relieving stress. tonight, all you had to do was play along, and do what his little gift told you to. (๑>؂•̀

𝐏𝐀𝐈𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆❥ : idol bf!heeseung x ♀college student reader

❥ 𝐆𝐄𝐍𝐑𝐄: smut with plot

𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒♡: voyeurism, solo/mutual masturbation, explicit filthy nasty pornographic phone sex, usage of sex toys, squirting, overstimulation, ♂&♀orgasms, erm let me not spoil too much

𝐓𝐀𝐆𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓: 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧! 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐚𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐝♡

nothing makes you cry faster.

the equations, the formulas, the unnecessary mixing of letters with numbers. because seriously, who the fuck's idea was this? your memory span of a goldfish didn't make it any better.

so, why did you major in chemistry? good question.

... no answer.

your knee bounced as you hunched over at your bedroom desk, having a staring contest with the paper below you. one you were losing terribly.

time for bed.

you peeled the moisturizing sheet mask off of your face, sighing as you tossed it in the mini trash to your left. somehow, standing up felt like sipping an overly carbonated sprite —sharp and chaotic, you nearly fell over feeling the sleep in your legs, a sting in your butt from sitting so long.

but, at least you were home. and even better, home alone for the entire week. your parents were away for their anniversary.

dorming was never a thought going into college. and frankly, you'd eat a jean jacket before doing so. you loved your room. the peace and quiet, your own space and privacy. all the little things in it that reflected your mind.

plus, you can't exactly flick the bean with a roommate always around.

unless you're both, like... really horny lesbians.

ask anyone. chem homework will put you to sleep faster than melatonin, you knew to pamper up before your study session. showered and shaved, dressed in silk sleepwear, your hair pulled back by a plush spa headband. you were all set for a long awaited good night's rest.

you began tidying up on your desk, neatly stacking textbooks, stuffing your papers back in their folders, squeezing highlighters and pens back into their pouch. but few items remained, and they made your busy hands become still.

a half-eaten bar of korean chocolate, van cleef bracelets still in their boxes, a glass vase of pink and white lego flowers next to your new macbook.

heeseung's valentine's day gifts.

there were more that'd been camping in your room for a while, untouched and neglected, still wrapped in their pink ribbons. the pressure of upcoming finals was swallowing you whole, and somewhere in the blur of all-nighters and deadlines, you completely forgot you had a boyfriend 5,000 miles away.

you wondered what heeseung was up to. maybe asleep, whatever time it was in korea. and if not, on his 4th pack of nongshim.

you couldn't help but smile, picking up the vase and admiring the toy bouquet, all of its complex miniature pieces. cherry blossoms and lotuses—your favorite flowers. your boyfriend was so thoughtful.

so sweet.

you thought back to the sweetness of his cherry chapstick. the warmth of his skilled tongue, the way it swirled in your mouth and all the other places that 14th of february.

heeseung was the best kisser, god did it make you so wet. it was so easy to get lost in him, to kiss and kiss until your head spun—until you were dazed and dizzy, drunk off the taste of his lips.

he liked to take his time with you. to tease, to savor the heat of the moment until you whimpered and begged for more.

you didn't realize how much you missed it until now.

he was yours in real life, not some parasocial fairytale that his fans dwelled in. it ate you alive— not being able to show and tell, and it was bittersweet how little you got to see him. heeseung always found small ways to show that he cared, to show how much he missed you, and you clung to them tight. but the space between visits still stung.

you tried not to think about it as much. it was almost like a trauma response—purposely keeping yourself busy so you didn't drown in the heartache. deep down inside, you really missed him.

you set the vase down, turning your head to all the gift bags and boxes by your bedroom door. a wave of guilt crept into your stomach.

you didn't have to open them to know that heeseung put his unwavering love for you into each and every one. he'd probably been waiting to hear what you thought, to hear a thank you. you were curious as to why he hasn't asked, how the two of you had been talking without a mention of them.

it almost felt like there was a reason for his silence. like there was something you had to do first, something you were supposed to uncover on your own.

you tip-toed over quietly, picking up the topmost box. it was noticeably smaller than the others—about the size of a shoebox, but heavier than it looked. you chuckled at the rushed cursive of your name in the corner of the matte white paper.

with a gentle plop onto your bed, you pulled the box into your lap. it was cutely tied with a perfect bow, just like all the others. so heeseung—his little attempts to make all things girly just the way you liked them.

you untied it, and slowly tore apart its wrapping. the top lifted off easily, revealing layers of crinkled pink tissue paper.

you removed them.

and when you did, your breath had never caught so hard in your throat at what lay beneath. like air had been yanked clean out of your lungs.

whatever you'd expected, it wasn't this.

clear and glossy, the most bright neon pink.

a fake penis.

a dildo.

this had to be some fucking joke.

you'd never used a sex toy before, nor had heeseung ever brought up the idea. it wasn't like you were completely closed off to the thought, it just seemed unnecessary. with the stress of work and school, there wasn't a horny bone in your body by the end of the night. not a spare second for you to crave anything other than sleep.

you picked up the dildo, eyebrows furrowed as you tried to make sense of it.

a chronic masturbater would've loved it. gummy-like to the feel, textured with scarily realistic veins. even the balls looked real.

it was so... big. and heavy.

you had to admit, it was a nice looking dick. but what made your stomach whirl the most —it was oddly similar to heeseung's length and girth, almost like he'd gotten it made custom to replicate himself. your two hands barely fit around it as you analyzed it in your grip.

you looked around your room—as if someone could've been watching—and quickly tucked it back safe, covering it with tissue. but when you did a double take into the box, there was more.

there it was. delicate, deceiving in its soft appearance.

another toy. a rose toy.

you'd heard about this one before, just never felt the urge to try it out yourself.

well... until now.

maybe it was just the curiosity, but excitement began to flicker within you. you picked it up, studying its petal-like designs. it was portable, and pretty. girls seemed to adore this rose—how it made them see stars, left their legs shaking like never before, how it sucked so much better than a man.

but it seemed impossible. no way could it beat your man.

not with the mouth he has.

you were still trying to make sense of of heeseung's intentions. because... why? it wasn't like you'd asked for these, or ever complained about the lack of sex. if anything, waiting for him only made it better, more intense, more worth it.

what on gods green earth was he thinking?

and just when you thought the surprise was over, you spotted it. tucked beneath a final layer of tissue at the very bottom of the box was a single folded piece of paper. two words screamed at you on the front: read me.

your fingers hesitated, almost shy. your heart raced with anticipation as you opened it.

your eyes skimmed over what was obviously heeseung's handwriting, except this time it was small and neat, more thoughtful in pink ink.

𝘍��𝘳 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴 𝘮𝘦 ᥫ᭡

𝘐 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘦'𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴. 𝘜𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘨𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯, 𝘭𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘯𝘰𝘸. 𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘮𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦. 𝘚𝘰𝘢𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘦𝘵𝘴. 𝘞𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘵𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰 𝘪𝘵. 𝘜𝘴𝘦 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘰𝘺𝘴 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘵. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰, 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘧, 𝘴𝘰 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘦𝘦 𝘪𝘵. 𝘎𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘦 𝘢 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭, 𝘴𝘰 𝘐 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘪𝘵. 𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘐'𝘮 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦, 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘐 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶.

𝘏𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘺 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘭𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭 ꨄ

𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘦, 𝘏𝘦𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘶𝘯𝘨 ༝༚༝༚

omg sorry guys let me clarify this is a teaser so that i actually drop im working on the full fic😭this has been a draft for 2 weeks jeball and its not letting my tag my permanent taglist either sorry bury me alive

[theskywithin]

💫🪞 Juno in the Houses 💌🕊️

Juno in the houses is about the kind of love that leaves a fingerprint on the soul, the vows we make without speaking, the lessons we keep meeting in every mirror.

If you liked this post, I’m offering 50% off full birth chart readings for the month of May — just $25 / 25€. DM me to book 💌

JUNO IN THE 1ST HOUSE

There’s a mirror welded into the skin with this placement. A silent expectation stitched into your spine: If you love me, I’ll exist. Juno in the 1st doesn’t just seek partnership, it becomes it. Your body turns into a question you’re asking others to answer. Do I belong in this form? Do I deserve to be chosen? In this life, the soul carries the imprint of being defined through the eyes of someone else. The first glance. The first promise. The first wound of being misunderstood. You may fall in love with those who reflect you too well or not at all, constantly orbiting the tension between merging and mattering. But the real vow isn’t to another person. It’s to yourself. To stand still inside your own image. To not flinch when love arrives. To not shapeshift in order to be touched. Juno here asks: Can you commit to being seen as you are, even before someone sees you? Can you stay with yourself long enough to know the difference between recognition and projection? This placement is about re-entering your own body, and calling it home.

JUNO IN THE 2ND HOUSE

Here, Juno moves like a seamstress. She threads her needle through your skin, stitches your worth into the lining of everything you touch, velvet glances, half-sipped silence, the weight of a wrist pressed into someone else’s palm. Love becomes cloth. Tangible. Measured in texture. You don’t just want to be chosen, you want to be kept. Wrapped in. Handled like something rare. But the pattern is old. You carry a memory of being appraised, not adored. Cherished for your function, not your form. And so you tighten your laces. Reinforce your hems. Offer yourself like a tailored coat: Will I warm you enough? Will I fit the shape you need? There is grief, sometimes, in how easily you offer comfort. And in how few ever ask what it costs you. But the soul’s promise isn’t to remain wearable. It’s to no longer confuse usefulness with love. To stop shrinking into garments that were never cut for your shape. You are not a fabric for others to wrap around their emptiness. You are the original thread. The heirloom pattern. The velvet of being that softens with time, not loss. And one day, love will come not to claim you, but to sit quietly beside you, palms open, asking nothing. Because the vow has changed. You no longer offer yourself to be used. You offer yourself to be known.

JUNO IN THE 3RD HOUSE

Juno here is a secret letter folded into the lining of your voice. It’s the vow you try to speak without knowing the language yet, the one you’ve been rewriting since childhood, every time someone interrupted you, misunderstood you, or loved you only for the version of you that kept quiet. Love, in this house, is made of syllables. Of late-night sentences braided with fear. Of conversations that begin with honesty and end with translation, you say truth, they hear threat. This placement carries the ache of being split between words and meaning. You learned early to speak carefully. To listen harder than anyone else in the room. To shapeshift into the dialect of the one you adored, mirroring their cadence, adjusting your tone, rewriting your truth to stay close. But your soul didn’t come here to echo. It came here to name. To speak not just to be understood, but to be real. And so, Juno in the 3rd doesn’t ask for a partner who’s clever. It asks for one who listens between the lines. Who hears the tremble behind your metaphors. Who doesn’t correct your grammar when your grief slips out mid-sentence. The vow isn’t just to communicate. It’s to unlearn all the ways you made yourself more palatable in love. It’s to stop translating your truth for someone else’s comfort. Because when you finally speak in your own accent, the one shaped by all your contradictions, the right one will answer without asking you to explain.

JUNO IN THE 4TH HOUSE

Juno here is not in the room. She’s in the walls. She’s the creak in the floorboard no one else hears, the chill that moves through the house when memory passes by. She’s the promise the soul made long before this life began: I will never build a home on fault lines again. There’s an inheritance in this placement, not of blood, but of blueprint. Somewhere along the lineage, love meant survival. Affection came with conditions. Safety arrived with silence. So now, you hold your breath around people who say “forever,” wondering if they’ve ever seen a foundation crack from the inside out. Love touches the most hidden part of you here. The part that flinches at softness. That rearranges the furniture of your heart whenever someone gets too close. That longs to be known but locks the door before anyone can knock. Juno in the 4th teaches that intimacy is not about history, it’s about shelter. Not about origin but return. The partner your soul remembers isn’t the one who lights a candle in your hallway. It’s the one who brings kindling to the storm. Who sits with you in the basement of your being, where the ghosts of childhood still whisper, and doesn’t tell you to be quiet. The vow here is not to create a perfect home. It’s to stop abandoning yourself in the name of keeping someone else warm. Because your heart was a house long before anyone asked to move in. And now, you remember: the light was always coming from inside.

JUNO IN THE 5TH HOUSE

Juno here lives in the orchard. She tastes like fruit warmed by the afternoon, like something that ripens just from being looked at gently. Love, to you, is a sensory thing, not romantic, not grand. Just the slow touch of presence. Just two mouths learning how to speak joy again. But there’s an old wound under this sweetness. A past-life ache that says: If I let myself feel too much, they’ll leave. If I shine too brightly, they’ll get burned. If I fall in love with the moment, it won’t last. And so, sometimes, you pull back when joy gets too close. You interrupt your own laughter. You brace for absence before the hand ever lets go. Juno in the 5th carries a deep knowing: love is not supposed to be a task. It’s supposed to be a dance. A delight. A sacred kind of silliness. And yet you may choose partners who tighten when they should loosen. Who intellectualize what was meant to be tasted. Who touch you like a concept, not a body. The vow isn’t to create beauty. It’s to become it without shame. To trust that joy can be an anchor, that presence can be a promise, that love can feel like honey, not hunger. When you stop questioning whether pleasure is safe you’ll find someone who doesn’t just walk with you through the orchard, but bites into the fruit beside you. Unafraid of the sweetness. Unbothered by the mess.

JUNO IN THE 6TH HOUSE

Juno in the 6th doesn’t speak in declarations. She moves through the day like a whisper in the spine, folding towels, refilling the glass, asking how you slept. Here, love is not a feeling. It’s a rhythm. A way of staying. But this placement carries the weight of past lives where devotion turned into duty. Where care was transactional. Where love meant overgiving, overfunctioning, outlasting your own body’s limits. So now, you may serve in silence. You may love through effort. You may fall for those who need fixing, mending, translating, as if love were a job you’re not allowed to quit. There is exhaustion here, if you’re not careful, a subtle erosion of self in the name of reliability. But Juno in the 6th is not about self-sacrifice. It’s about sacred calibration. About finding someone who doesn’t just show up on the good days but knows how to meet you inside the mess. Who doesn’t romanticize your strength but recognizes when you're running on reserves. The vow is simple, but profound: to stop proving your love by breaking your back. To let care be mutual, mundane, miraculous. To let someone hold the weight with you, not hand it back with thanks. Love here isn’t loud. It’s the dish still warm in the oven. The chair turned slightly toward yours. The kind of presence that doesn’t ask to be praised, only returned.

JUNO IN THE 7TH HOUSE

Juno in the 7th doesn’t just sit across the table. She becomes the table. The room. The atmosphere between two people when something holy and uncomfortable is being exchanged, not words, not vows, but recognition. There is a strange gravity here. A psychic pull toward the one who sees too much, too soon. The one who looks at you and accidentally unlocks an entire cathedral of memories. The one whose presence makes your own reflection unbearable or beautiful. This placement carries the memory of eye contact that changed you. Past-life entanglements. Silent contracts. Lessons in love that were taught through mirrors, not mouths. And so now, love arrives through the shape of the Other, the one who makes you real. The one who makes you recoil. The one who brings you back to yourself, over and over, whether you want to come back or not. Juno in the 7th is not asking for a partner. She’s asking for a witness. Someone who doesn’t leave when the projection shatters. Someone who understands that sometimes, the deepest intimacy is holding up the mirror and staying while the other one breaks. The vow here is to stop chasing balance. To stop confusing agreement with connection. To stop splitting yourself into halves just to be held. Because the real vow isn’t made to another person, it’s made in their presence, to finally see yourself clearly and not look away.

JUNO IN THE 8TH HOUSE

Juno in the 8th doesn’t make promises, she makes offerings. A name left at the river’s edge. A heartbeat surrendered in the dark. This is not love as a feeling. It’s love as initiation. There’s something ancient here. A soul-memory of bonds that went too deep, or not deep enough. Of giving yourself like an open wound and being devoured instead of held. Of learning, too young or in another life, that love could be a burial and yet still returning to the grave with flowers. This placement doesn’t want surface connection. It wants the bones of you. It wants to know what you look like without your coping mechanisms. It wants the version of you that cries without explanation and trusts that you won’t be left for it. You may find yourself drawn to those who awaken your grief, not to suffer, but to remember. To finally tend to the places inside you that intimacy abandoned. To stop guarding the vault and invite someone into the ruins. But the vow isn’t to fuse. It’s to undress, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally. To be naked in front of another soul and still choose to live. To no longer fear that love will end you and to know that if it does, it will be the death of who you aren’t. This is the house where love becomes a ritual of shedding. Where trust means letting someone walk with you into your own underworld and not asking them to save you. Because the ones who stay won’t just see your shadows. They’ll hand you the candle.

JUNO IN THE 9TH HOUSE

Juno in the 9th doesn’t knock on the door. She waits at the edge of the known world, lantern in hand, whispering promises through the wind. She is not the partner you recognize, she’s the one your bones remember before your mind catches up. Not a soulmate. A soul-echo. This placement hums with distance, not just physical, but existential. You may love those who live in other countries, other timelines, other states of becoming. Or those who remain slightly out of reach, suspended just above understanding, beautiful, untouchable, like a cathedral half-lit in fog. The ache here is not just for union. It’s for expansion. For someone whose eyes widen your cosmos. For the kind of intimacy that cracks open a hidden room in your psyche and lets the stars walk in. But this kind of love can also leave you untethered. You may mistake projection for prophecy. Wander from one profound connection to another, collecting revelations instead of roots. You may love through altitude, never quite descending, never quite staying. The vow here is to believe, not in another person, but in the version of you that emerges in their presence. The one who says too much. The one who loves without proof. The one who isn’t afraid to be foolish in the name of something vast and real. Juno in the 9th is the soul’s promise to trust the pull to follow the strange compass of chemistry and knowing, even when there is no map. Even when it takes you to the edge of your comfort and leaves you there with open hands. Because the kind of love you came here for? It doesn’t ask for certainty. It asks for faith.

JUNO IN THE 10TH HOUSE

Juno in the 10th stands on the roof at midnight. Not to be admired, but to be held up by something other than the ground. There’s a chill to this placement, not unfeeling, but exposed. Like a bell tower catching every echo. Like someone who learned, long ago, that love would come only after achievement. After proof. There’s a soul-memory here of being chosen for what you did, not who you were. Of being honored, but never known. So now, the heart builds scaffolding instead of sanctuary. You learn to love through accomplishment. You offer your competence like a gift wrapped in silence. But inside that posture is a softer vow, waiting. To not be turned into a role. To not become the version of yourself that earns admiration at the cost of intimacy. You may be drawn to partners who appear strong, composed, impressive, but love you only from a distance. From a pedestal. From behind a mask of mutual functionality. The connection is real, but the tenderness gets lost in translation. Because Juno in the 10th isn’t looking for status. She’s looking for witness. For the one who sees you when you’re off-script. Who knows how to stay when the world turns its back. Who walks into the room not to applaud but to kneel. The vow here is to stop proving. To let love come without an audience. To learn that being trusted is not the same as being seen. Because the most powerful thing you will ever do is take off the armor while someone’s watching.

JUNO IN THE 11TH HOUSE

Juno in the 11th doesn't fall in love. She drifts toward it like a signal broadcast across lifetimes, hoping the right frequency hears her hum. This isn’t romance. This is recognition from the outskirts. This is two souls orbiting the same forgotten dream, and realizing, mid-spin, they’ve met before, not in body, but in vision. You carry the memory of being alone in a crowd. Of belonging to a movement, but not a person. Of being celebrated for your ideas but starved for intimacy. So now, love feels safer when it’s abstract. When it has room to breathe. When it doesn’t ask for skin-to-skin closeness but soul-to-soul resonance. You may fall for minds before bodies. For friendships that slowly shape-shift. For those who carry a glint of the impossible in their eyes like they remember the same lost utopia you do, even if they never say it aloud. But the risk here isn’t distance. It’s dissociation. It’s confusing connection with concept. It’s mistaking collective love for personal touch, and forgetting that even the most cosmic bonds need warmth to survive. The vow is not to disappear into the dream. It’s to come back to earth with someone who holds the same sky in their chest. To learn that loyalty isn’t about ideology, it’s about presence. About knowing someone could choose anyone and still shows up, again and again, for you. Because in the end, Juno in the 11th isn’t looking for a crowd. She’s looking for the one who finds you in the static. Tunes in. And stays.

JUNO IN THE 12TH HOUSE

Juno in the 12th doesn’t wear a ring. She wears a shadow. She wraps herself around your aura like a forgotten melody, the kind that haunts you, even if you can’t place where you first heard it. This placement is not about partnership. It’s about surrender. About the kind of love that lives in the spaces between moments, the glance that lingers, the dream that repeats, the silence that doesn’t need to be filled. You may carry the imprint of hidden love. Of devotion unspoken. Of soul contracts that were broken before they could be named and so now, love feels like a riddle you can’t quite solve. You fall for ghosts. For feelings that arrive before their source. For people who slip through your fingers but remain lodged in your spirit. There is grief here, but also grace. Juno in the 12th asks: Can you love without possession? Can you stay open when no one is promising to stay? Can you believe in a bond you may never fully explain? The danger, of course, is vanishing. Becoming the dream instead of the dreamer. Waiting in the silence so long that you forget your own name. But the vow, the real vow, is not to lose yourself in love. It’s to trust that what’s real doesn’t always have a form. That the heart knows what language cannot hold. That even the invisible can be intimate. One day, someone will love you without needing to find you. And you will realize that you were never lost. Just hidden, until now, in the space where the soul whispers yes.

✨ Want to go deeper into the language of the soul? My book The Sky Within is a poetic guide to decoding the birth chart, now available on Amazon and all digital platforms.

[xxsyluslittlecrowxx]

What if Sylus was a prince from a neighbouring country and you were forbidden to be with him but you couldn’t help but be drawn to him? Thus a night of unbridled passion hehehe

𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐧, 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐑𝐮𝐢𝐧

[ 𝐒𝐲𝐥𝐮𝐬 ]

𝐒𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐀𝐃 𝐍𝐎𝐓 meant to read the letter twice.

The first time was an accident—her fingers trembling as they broke the seal, dark red and unmarked, save for the faint impression of a signet she would not dare name aloud. She had unfolded the black parchment with the caution one might offer a blade. Not out of reverence. Out of recognition. Out of dread.

The second reading was indulgence.

The third—betrayal.

By the fourth, her maid had begun to knock softly at the door, her voice threaded with concern, asking if she felt unwell. She lied. Said it was the heat. A passing fever. Perhaps the tea.

But it wasn’t. It was the letter.

' If you still dream of the garden, meet me where the orchids used to bloom. Midnight. '

Twelve words. No name. No signature.

And yet—him. In every curl of ink, in the silence between syllables.

She pressed her thumb to the writing, half-hoping it would smudge. That it might dissolve beneath her doubt. That if she willed hard enough, the looping script would fade, as if memory could be erased by sheer refusal.

But it never did.

It clung to the page like prophecy—unyielding. Certain of itself. Certain of her.

She set the letter on the edge of the windowsill, where the wind might take it. Where morning might find her brave enough to burn it. But still, it remained. Unmoving. Unshaken. Mocking her with its stillness.

She did not dare sleep. Sleep invited dreams. Dreams summoned memory.

And memory—him.

He had called himself Envoy once, at the treaty banquet. The hall had been crowded with strangers dressed like saints, drunk on duty and imported wine. He wore black that night, obsidian from throat to wrist, the cut austere—too austere.

Until she met his eyes.

Not simple. Not at all.

He had looked at her like a man who had spent his whole life building walls, only to find her waiting on the other side. His first smile was shallow. His second—dangerous. By the third, he offered her a glass of wine with his left hand and his name with his right.

The name had been false. The touch had not.

Three dances. That was all.

Once beneath the chandelier, the world watching. Once at the foot of the grand staircase, her hand grazing his in passing. And once—when no one was looking—behind a marble column, her breath fogging the stone as he leaned in and asked what she was afraid of.

She hadn’t answered. He hadn’t kissed her.

The memory had haunted her ever since.

Now the letter lay beneath her palm. Folded once. Heavy, though it weighed almost nothing. She stared as though it might vanish. As though it might grow teeth. As though the words might open her chest and nest between her ribs, coiled and waiting.

She should not go.

She would not go.

But even as she whispered the vow aloud—I will not go—her fingers were already reaching for her cloak.

It hung from the carved screen beside her bed—soft wool, lined in dusk-blue satin. She had not worn it in months, not since the frost had retreated from the fields. And yet it still carried the faintest trace of lavender and ash. Something clean. Something final.

She draped it around her shoulders with practiced grace. Not rushed. Not panicked. Like a woman dressing for a funeral where her name might already be carved into the stone. Every movement deliberate. Silent. Almost sacred.

The hem whispered against the floor.

The chamber was still, save for the rustle of fabric and the steady tick of the longcase clock in the corner. One hand to midnight. Her shadow bent long across the flagstones, wavered in the candlelight, stretched toward the threshold.

She stood motionless.

Not moving. Not breathing.

Only listening.

To the hush of the corridor beyond. To the stutter of her own heart as it faltered, then found its rhythm again. To the wind at the shutters, tapping like a question she lacked the courage to answer.

And then—

A sound.

Soft. Too soft for a stranger to make.

The door creaked open before she could speak. No knock. No announcement.

She didn’t need one.

"You're not asleep," came the voice—low, weary, but braided through with quiet steel.

Elaine.

Her maid. Her closest friend. Her constant since childhood. She stepped into the room with a candle in one hand and disappointment in the other. Her gaze drifted from the gaping wardrobe to the cloak clasped at her mistress’s collarbone. Then upward. And held.

"I knew you’d try," Elaine said. Not in bitterness. Not even surprise. Only sadness.

"I wasn’t going to," she replied, her voice steady, though her hands curled tighter within the sleeves. "I told myself no. I told myself it would be wiser—safer—to forget he ever wrote."

Elaine moved closer. The candle’s flame shivered, catching in the hollow of her throat as she stopped just shy of touching her.

"And yet you’re dressed to disappear."

A beat of silence.

And then another.

"Please," Elaine said. Her voice cracked like frost beneath a boot. "You don’t have to do this."

She turned away—not from cruelty, but because to look at her might be to stay. Her gaze fell to the floor, to the folds of her cloak pooling like ink at her feet.

"I do," she whispered. "I wish I didn’t. I wish I were stronger. Or colder. But I know myself too well, Elaine. And I know… this may be the last time I ever see him."

Elaine reached out, touched her sleeve, and for a moment—just a moment—held on.

"You’ll ruin yourself," she murmured.

She smiled. Faintly. Not in defiance. Not in pride.

In sorrow.

"Then let it be for something worth remembering."

Elaine did not let go.

Her fingers tightened—just slightly—as if she believed, foolishly, lovingly, that the right grip might anchor her mistress to reason. To safety. To the stillness of staying. Her brows knit together, not in anger, but in something older. Worn. A concern worn thin by years of quiet watching, polished now into something closer to grief.

“He’s the son of the enemy,” she said, softly. Each word landed like a stone dropped into the hush of the chamber. “You’re betrothed to another. And nothing good—nothing lasting—can come of this.”

She said it the way a nurse might warn a child about fire. Not to ruin its warmth, but because she had seen what the embers left behind.

The silence that followed was not defensive. Nor ashamed.

It simply was.

She looked down at Elaine’s hand still resting against her sleeve, and let the truth settle between them like morning fog curling across a field. She didn’t argue. She couldn’t. Every warning had already echoed within her, whispered in every sleepless hour since the letter first arrived.

But sometime between the second reading and the third, she had learned that longing cannot be reasoned with. And loyalty—loyalty is no match for love, once it has taken root.

She turned to face Elaine fully at last. The movement was gentle. Not defiant. Not fleeing. Merely unfolding.

Her smile was quiet. The kind of smile made only by candlelight—fragile, flickering. The kind that asked for no approval, only understanding.

“But I love him,” she said.

The words fell like snow through a cracked window. They didn’t beg. They didn’t justify. They simply were.

Plain. Irrevocable.

“And love,” she added, softer still, “is far too rare in this cold empire.”

Elaine looked at her for a long moment.

Her lips parted. Closed again. Her shoulders rose with a breath, and fell as if the truth had knocked the air from her lungs.

Then—slowly—she let go.

The absence of her touch was immediate. Not painful. But felt. Like the last note of a song that would never be played again.

“I always knew your heart would get you into trouble,” she murmured, quieter than before. “But I never thought I’d be the one helping you run straight into it.”

A shadow crossed her face. Not fear. Not reproach.

Something nameless. Fierce devotion laced with helpless resignation.

“If anyone asks for you before sunrise,” Elaine continued, “I’ll say you took ill and asked not to be disturbed. I’ll keep the lamps low. I’ll turn away the steward.”

Her eyes shimmered—not with tears, but with the weight of loyalty too deep to name.

“But when dawn comes,” she said, voice thin as thread, “you must be here.”

She nodded. Once.

“I will.”

Elaine stepped back, just far enough to clear the path to the door. Her lips pressed into a line. Not of judgment.

Of promise.

“Go, then,” she whispered. “Before I change my mind.”

The cloak felt heavier now. Not in weight—but in meaning.

She pulled the hood over her head with slow, careful fingers, gathering the fabric around her like armor no one would name aloud. Beneath it, her hair was pinned and plain. No jewels. No embroidery. Only the anonymity of darkness and wool.

“Take the servants’ staircase,” Elaine murmured, as the candle guttered low, nearing the end of its wick. “It will be empty at this hour.”

She gave no reply. Only met her friend’s eyes with a look that said everything.

Thank you. Forgive me. Don’t wait up.

And then, she turned the handle.

The hallway yawned before her—long, hushed, lined in portraits that had never known softness. With each step, the candlelight behind her dimmed, until only silence remained: the soft creak of wood beneath her slippers, the whisper of fabric against ancient stone.

She kept her eyes low as she walked. Not out of fear of being seen—but out of fear she might remember what she was leaving behind.

At the corridor’s far end, moonlight spilled through the high arched windows, painting silver onto worn tapestries. She had passed them every day of her girlhood—battlefields, crowned ancestors, mythic victories stitched in silk. Always men with swords and banners. Always women kneeling, smiling, handing over keys.

It had never occurred to her, not until much later, that all the women in those tapestries were surrendering something.

Her steps slowed.

The hush around her deepened. Grew solemn. The weight of her name—the titles sewn onto her like another gown—pressed heavy against her spine.

Princess. Daughter of the House of Virellan. Betrothed to Lord Commander Halbrecht of the Eastern Reach.

Betrothed.

Not promised. Not chosen.

No—she had been offered. Presented. Like a gemstone too rare to wear, but too valuable not to trade.

The arrangement had been made the month she turned nineteen. Her father had summoned her to his study, gestured for her to sit, and poured her wine in the manner of a man delivering condolences. The suitor was twice her age, and thrice as powerful—a fortress by the sea, an army at his back. The papers had already been drawn.

Her opinion had not been requested.

She was to dine with the man twice—smile where appropriate, laugh only when it was safe—and by spring, she would be sent across the riverlands to marry him beneath a cathedral veiled in violet banners. Her dowry would secure peace. Her womb would secure legacy.

And in return, she would be draped in silk and silence for the rest of her life.

That had been the shape of her future.

Until Sylus. Until the letter.

She reached the turn in the corridor that led toward the servants’ stair, her fingers grazing the edge of a marble column she had once hidden behind as a child. Back then, the palace had felt enormous. A world of stories. A kingdom of possibility. She had believed she would grow into something bright—something grand.

Instead, she had grown into a script someone else had written.

Noble blood, royal title—it meant nothing. Not truly. Not to the men at court. Not to the council. Not to the foreign dignitaries who examined her like silk at auction. Women like her were not daughters. Not in the ways that mattered.

They were treaties. They were leverage.

They were useful.

And tonight—more than ever—she understood the cost of being useful.

This moment—this one—was hers alone. Her only rebellion. Her only truth. Quiet, yes. Fleeting. But hers.

No steward had scheduled it. No father had blessed it. No alliance depended on it. No crown would rise or fall for it.

Only she would carry its weight. Only her.

One night to feel something real. One night to remember the shape of her body beneath someone else’s hands—not in duty, not in ceremony, but in desire. One night to speak a name not chosen for her.

She exhaled—and it felt like breathing for the first time in weeks.

Not for honor. Not for kingdom. Not for crown.

But for herself.

She took the first step down the servants’ stair.

The stone was cold beneath her feet. The dark wrapped around her like ink.

And still—she walked.

The staircase wound narrow, the walls pressed close—as if the castle itself had been built to bury its secrets in stone. Her fingers grazed the surface as she descended. Not for balance.

For something to hold. For something real.

No lanterns lit her path. Only memory guided her now: the turn near the old laundry room, the creak in the third stair from the bottom, the hush of the corridor beyond—always tinged with earth and oil and something older than time itself.

She reached the door to the lower courtyard and paused. Her hand hovered above the latch.

And she listened.

Nothing.

No footsteps. No voices. Only the stillness of a sleeping palace, and the tight, suspended rhythm of her own breath caught beneath her collarbone.

She opened the door.

The air met her like a whisper—cool, damp, edged in loam and turned soil. A world away from the perfumed corridors above. This was the night as it truly was: uncurated, untamed, honest.

She pulled the hood lower over her brow and stepped into it.

The courtyard lay still. Unwatched. The guards were posted at the gates and along the walls—not here. Not in this forgotten quiet where the heir’s daughter might wander to clear her thoughts.

Or, more truthfully, to escape them.

Her footsteps made no sound against the cobbles. Only the soft cadence of her breath gave her away.

Beyond the courtyard, past the arch choked with sleeping ivy, the path sloped toward the lower gardens—neglected, overgrown, the sort of place people spoke of only in past tense. The older maids still claimed the Queen Mother once walked there, heavy with child, and that the roses still bent toward the places she had lingered.

But the garden had long since surrendered its majesty. The hedges grew wild. The fountains had run dry. Moss clung to the statues like secrets whispered and never unlearned.

And still—she knew the way.

The gravel shifted beneath her steps. The trees thickened. And then—faint, unmistakable—the scent reached her.

Orchids.

Familiar. Sweet. Alive.

Not perfumed. Not pressed. These breathed the same night air she did, blooming defiantly in the dark. Vines spilled from stonework ahead, curling through ancient cracks as though they, too, had come searching for something lost and half-remembered.

Her steps slowed.

The garden opened.

It rose from the overgrowth like a ruin sanctified by moonlight. The pillars, cracked and weatherworn, stood stubborn in their elegance. The domed ceiling shimmered faintly where silver light touched it, ivy trailing from the eaves like a hymn long forgotten but not quite lost.

He was there.

Still. Silent. Half-shadowed.

He stood beside one of the columns, motionless—not looking at her, not needing to. His posture was deliberate. A statue carved from shadow and restraint. A sword belted at his hip. Not dressed for war, not dressed for court—but for something in between. His cloak stirred gently in the breeze. One gloved hand rested at his side, as though waiting—for something, or someone.

She stopped just short of the clearing, hidden still beneath the trees.

And watched.

Waited.

There was no doubt in her now. No hesitation. The space between them might as well have been a breath.

And yet she did not move.

Because this—this—was the moment.

Not the kiss. Not the touch. Not the ruin that might follow.

No.

This.

When two souls stood on the threshold of something vast. When the night forgot who they were supposed to be— And remembered only what they were.

She watched him in the stillness.

The distance between them stretched—silent, inviolate—not to be crossed quickly, nor without consequence.

He hadn’t turned. Not yet. But she knew he had felt her.

The way one feels the first drop of rain before the storm. The way a flame senses the breath entering the room.

The air between them pulsed—weightless, expectant.

And then—slowly, as though the motion required surrender—he turned.

There was nothing dramatic in it. No flourish. Only a shift in balance. The fall of his cloak as he moved. The tilt of his head until the sharp lines of his face emerged from shadow. Moonlight caught on the edge of his jaw, on the curve of his cheekbone, on the faint scar just beneath his eye.

His gaze found hers.

And time collapsed inward.

He didn’t smile. Didn’t speak. He only looked.

As though the very sight of her had undone something inside him—something for which no language yet existed. As though he had waited this long precisely for her to arrive… and now could only stand still, holding the moment together by sheer will.

She didn’t lower her hood. Not yet.

She wanted him to see her like this—cloaked, quiet, unannounced. Not a princess. Not a symbol. Just a woman who had chosen to come.

His mouth parted slightly. Not to speak. Only to breathe.

Then—at last—his voice.

Low. Measured.

“You came.”

She nodded. Not for lack of words, but because there was no language vast enough to contain what she felt.

His shoulders dropped, just barely—like the loosening of a tension long held but not yet released. He took one step forward.

And stopped.

“I didn’t think you would,” he said.

Another step. Slow. Controlled.

“I told myself not to expect it. That hope was…”

He trailed off.

She stepped into the clearing, out from the shadow of the trees. Moonlight painted her in silver, cloaking the pavilion floor in a wash of pale blue.

Their eyes met and held.

“I couldn’t stay away,” she said.

The sound of her voice fractured something in the space between them. Not harshly. Not violently. Like glass warmed until it cracked. Like silence… letting go.

He exhaled through his nose. Closed his eyes.

“I’ve thought of this,” he said quietly, “too many times.”

She moved closer. Slowly. Always slowly. Her heartbeat was steady only because she refused to let it betray her.

She stopped just at the edge of the stone.

“If we’re caught,” she whispered.

“I know.”

“If they find out—”

“I know.”

He opened his eyes. In them, something unspoken.

Not pain. Not joy. Something rarer.

“I would still choose this,” he said.

They stood there—on either side of a line drawn by kingdoms, by blood, by ancient oaths.

And yet closer now than they had ever been.

She stepped forward.

Only a breath. The smallest shift.

But it was enough.

Enough for him to move.

His hand rose—not suddenly, not urgently, but with a reverence that felt older than either of them. As though he had imagined this moment so many times that now, faced with its reality, he dared not disturb it.

His gloved fingers brushed the edge of her hood. Paused. Waited.

She let him.

He lowered the fabric gently, folding it back until moonlight kissed her face—her cheeks flushed from wind, her eyes wide and unwavering, her lips unpainted, unsmiling, unafraid.

He did not speak.

Not yet.

Both hands rose, one to either side of her face. Leather met skin. His thumbs resting just at the curve of her jaw.

And then, soft—so soft she might’ve imagined it: “Let me look at you.”

She did not lower her gaze. Did not flinch, did not shy away. She let him hold her there, steady in his palms, as though he could anchor her to this fragile sliver of time by touch alone.

His hands weren’t possessive. They weren’t desperate.

They ached.

The kind of touch that begged time to stop.

He studied her—not with hunger, but with something far more dangerous.

Love.

Unhidden. Unguarded. Unspoken.

But there—in the tension carved into his brow, in the tremble that lived at the edge of his mouth, in the way his fingers curved, reverent and trembling, as though memorizing the shape of her.

“You’re exactly as I remember,” he said at last, voice rough, thick with what he did not name. “Only… more.”

More real. More near. More breakable.

She lifted her hands, slowly, placing them over his.

Bare skin to leather.

“You’re trembling,” she said.

Sylus gave the faintest shake of his head.

“I’m trying not to.”

Her smile was small. Sad. It did not quite reach her eyes.

“Why?”

His breath hitched—once.

“Because if I let myself feel everything I feel for you…” He stopped. Swallowed. “I don’t think I’ll be able to let you go.”

She closed her eyes then.

Not to retreat. Not to hide.

But because it was too much—the tenderness, the truth, the unbearable possibility that this moment was their last.

“I don’t want to say goodbye,” she whispered.

His thumbs brushed across her cheeks—a slow, reverent pass. Like a prayer said without words.

“Then don’t,” he murmured.

There was no certainty in his voice. No lie. No comfort.

Only love.

Fractured. Fragile. Real.

She leaned into his hands, tilting her brow to his, their foreheads meeting in a touch so small, so sacred, it broke something open inside her.

A dam held too long.

They stood like that. No kiss. No vows. No promises made to be broken.

Just presence.

And in that stillness, she understood—

This was what it meant to be known. To be seen. To be chosen—

Not for crown. Not for coin. But for nothing. For everything. For her.

His breath trembled against her skin.

And then—so softly, the words nearly lost between them—

“Don’t marry him.”

Her eyes opened. Slowly.

She didn’t pull back. Didn’t answer. Only looked at him.

The rawness in his voice had cut through her. Not sharp. Not sudden.

Deep.

Like something caged too long, slipping through the bars at last.

She smiled.

Not from joy. Not from hope. But from sorrow.

From knowing.

Her eyes shimmered.

“It is my duty.”

Sylus flinched.

His jaw tensed. His hands did not leave her face, but they tightened—just slightly. Just enough for her to feel the battle in him, the words he wanted to say but didn’t. The protest. The plea. The silent unraveling of every thread binding her to that future.

He closed his eyes.

Held still.

And when he opened them again, they glistened. Not with rage. Not with self-pity.

With grief. With love.

“I know,” he whispered.

And she knew he did.

That was what broke her.

Because he understood. He knew the weight of names. The inheritance of chains—not of iron, but of bloodlines and law, of crowns passed down like cages. Of duty whispered into cradles.

And still—

“To hell with duty,” he said.

It came out like breath. Like prayer. Like sin.

He pressed his forehead to hers again, firmer this time. Their noses brushed. Their lips hovered—aching, unsaid.

“I would burn down every hall that ever spoke your name as currency,” he murmured. “I would tear apart every oath that asked you to suffer for its sake. I would raze every altar built for men who never once loved the women they crowned.”

A beat of silence.

Then, quieter:

“I would give up everything I am if it meant you could be yours.”

And then—

He kissed her.

Not gently. Not carefully. But with the reverence of a man who has run out of time.

His hands cradled her face like she might vanish—like the night itself might steal her if he let go for even a moment.

Their tears met between their lips.

And between each kiss, he breathed the litany:

“To hell with duty.”

A kiss. “To hell with titles.”

Another. “To hell with borders.”

A gasp. “To hell with the blood that keeps us apart.”

A sob. “To hell with the morning.”

He broke then—just for a second.

Pressed his forehead to hers once more.

“I love you,” he said, voice cracked open and spilling. “I love you, and I don’t know how to stop.”

She kissed him back.

As if to say—don’t. Don’t ever stop.

And for one breathless, unrepeatable moment— The garden belonged only to them.

He took her hand.

Said nothing.

Only laced their fingers together, as if sealing a vow older than language itself, and led her across the timeworn stones of the pavilion floor. Their steps were silent. Unhurried. Measured not in distance, but in the quiet unraveling of two hearts tethered across fate.

Beneath the open dome, where moonlight filtered through the fractured lattice above, he turned to her once more.

They stood at the center.

No altar. No witness.

And yet—it felt holy.

His hands came to her waist. Not to claim. Not to coax. Simply to anchor. To ground her in this quiet, sacred defiance. His forehead met hers again, and when he breathed her name, it came like liturgy—soft, desperate, devout.

“I have lived lifetimes in the spaces between your glances,” he murmured. “And I would live a thousand more, just to feel your breath against mine again.”

Her eyes fluttered closed.

Not from modesty. Not from doubt.

But because every word settled into her chest like a second heartbeat—rare, relentless, and utterly hers.

His hands moved—upward, slow—to the clasp of her cloak.

Still, he paused.

Not to ask. But to offer a moment. A choice.

To see if she would stop him. To see if she would look away.

She didn’t.

Her gaze held steady as her fingers rose and undid the fastening herself.

The cloak slipped from her shoulders in silence, folding into itself at her feet like the closing of a sacred book. Beneath it, she wore a gown the color of twilight—simple, long-sleeved, unadorned. Chosen not to be seen, but to pass unseen.

And yet to him—she looked like revelation.

He reached for the buttons at her collar.

Fingers slow. Intentional. Unfastening one, then another, then another—each undone like a breath held and finally released.

All the while, he whispered:

“You were never meant to be given away like a coin in a man’s palm.”

Another button.

“You were meant to be chosen. Again. And again.”

Another.

“And if this world will not give you that—I will.”

She made a sound then—small, aching.

He caught it with his mouth.

Not a kiss of urgency. Not of fire.

But of devotion. Of reverence.

As though her lips were psalm and he, a man who had wandered too long in silence.

Her hands found his shoulders. The slope of his neck. The soft resistance of his hair. Not pulling—just holding. Steadying herself in the storm of being seen so fully.

His mouth moved to her cheek. To the curve of her jaw.

“I will memorize every part of you,” he breathed. “So that no matter what this night costs me—I will never forget what it meant to live.”

She trembled.

But not from fear.

From the ache of being known.

His fingers returned to her buttons, undoing them slowly, one by one—as though each slip of fabric were a page turned, not undressing her, but reading her.

The gown loosened beneath his touch. It did not fall. Not yet.

It clung—to her shoulders, to gravity, to hesitation.

He eased it from her with care.

First one side. Then the other. His knuckles brushed her arms, her collarbone. Her breath caught—not from the touch itself, but from how he touched her.

As though she were something delicate. Something sacred. As though he would never forgive himself if he let her forget—this, too, was hers.

The bodice softened in his hands, slipping lower until cool night air kissed newly bared skin. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t hide.

Still—he paused.

“Tell me what you need,” he whispered. “And I will give it.”

Her voice trembled in her throat, caught between ribs and breath.

“Just… you.”

Something in him broke open.

He bent, brushing his lips beneath her jaw—slow as moonrise, steady as devotion.

“You have me,” he said. “Every breath. Every scar. Every word I was never supposed to say.”

Her gown slipped past her hips.

It made no sound as it pooled at her feet.

She stood in her slip—bare from shoulder to wrist—the fabric thin, clinging, moving with each breath she dared to take. Her skin, so long hidden beneath velvet and ceremony, shimmered beneath the fractured light of moon and lattice.

Not painted. Not adorned. Just hers.

And Sylus looked at her—not as a man entranced, but as one transformed.

Not because she was beautiful—though she was. Not because she was powerful—though she had always been.

But because, in that moment, she was free.

“May I?” he asked again, his hands hovering near the hem.

She nodded.

And he dropped to his knees.

Not to beg.

But to worship.

His hands moved upward—slow, reverent—from her calves to the gentle flare of her hips. He eased the final barrier down with care. Kissed the bone at her side. Once. Then the other.

Not from hunger.

But from gratitude.

She reached for him then, fingers threading through his hair, her chest rising in uneven rhythm—not from shame, but from the unfamiliar weight of being touched without claim. Revealed without being taken.

When he stood, she was bare.

Entirely.

And not once did she feel small.

He looked at her—not like a man overcome, but like a man undone.

His breath hitched. His eyes softened.

“You are not something to be possessed,” he said, voice raw with truth. “You are something to be remembered.”

Her throat tightened.

She reached for the clasp at his shoulder. Her hands were unsure—but he stilled. Let her.

Watched her undress him as he had undressed her. Layer by layer. Piece by piece.

First the cloak. Then the tunic beneath.

Each garment he wore fell heavier than hers—not in weight, but in history. In consequence.

And still, she undressed him.

Until nothing remained between them but breath.

He pulled her into him—skin to skin, chest to chest—their warmth mingling, hearts echoing each other like two halves of a song neither of them had ever been allowed to hear.

“I want to show you what love looks like,” he said, “when no one else is watching.”

And then—

He lowered her to the stone.

Carefully. Slowly.

Not because she was fragile.

But because this was.

The pavilion floor—worn smooth by years, by seasons, by the hush of vanished footsteps—cradled her spine as if it, too, had been waiting. For her. For them.

The air was cool.

But beneath his gaze, her skin burned.

He knelt beside her first. Not to rush. Not to claim.

Just to look.

Not at her body alone, but at her. The flush blooming across her cheeks. The way her lips parted, breath trembling in her throat. The soft rise and fall of her chest—as though the night itself forgot to breathe without her.

His hand traced from her sternum down the line of her ribs, reverent, his fingertips barely grazing. Her body rose instinctively to meet his palm—not from hunger, but from welcome.

He bent over her, one hand braced beside her head, the other sliding down past her hip, along the soft curve of her thigh. He kissed her as he touched her—slow, deep—like he was tasting the very center of her soul.

“You feel like something I was never meant to find,” he whispered between kisses. “And yet… here you are.”

She gasped as his fingers found her—low, knowing, unhurried.

He didn’t fumble. He didn’t force.

He knew.

Somehow—impossibly—he knew.

The first touch was soft. Exploratory. Then again. And again.

Her hips rose to meet him. Her hands gripped his shoulders, pulling him closer, grounding herself in the quiet intensity of being wanted this wholly.

Though he was still half-dressed, she felt the heat beneath his clothes—the strain, the tremble that betrayed how undone he already was.

Sylus pressed kisses along her jaw, her throat, the hollow where her collarbone met skin. His mouth moved like it offered absolution.

And beneath him, she bloomed.

Inch by inch. Like something thawing after a long, silent winter.

When his fingers circled. Coaxed. Opened—

She sighed his name.

Not as plea. But as prayer.

“I want you,” she breathed—not from desire alone, but from truth. From certainty.

He lifted his head. His eyes—lit from within—burned.

“I’m yours,” he said.

And she believed him.

He shed the last of his clothing in silence.

No performance. No pretense.

Just skin.

And the man beneath it—aching, bare, ready to give her everything.

When he came over her, he didn’t collapse into her. He hovered—every muscle braced, every breath measured—his weight held back with aching care. His forehead pressed to hers. Their noses brushed. Her fingers curled around the back of his neck.

He reached between them. Aligned their bodies with reverent precision.

But still—he paused.

Eyes locked. Hearts thundering in tandem.

“I want to remember how you looked,” he said, “the moment I became part of you.”

Her throat tightened.

“Then take me.”

And he did.

Slowly. Steadily.

Until she gasped, her back arching from the stone as he filled her—not with pain, not with pressure—

But with presence.

She felt all of him.

And all of herself.

And something more.

He groaned, the sound buried in her hair—raw, broken, holy. He held still. Just breathed.

“You feel like a promise I never dared to make,” he murmured.

She kissed him. Soft. Desperate.

And together, they moved.

Not frantic. Not rushed.

But slow. Measured.

A language of breath and skin, of bone and vow. Each thrust a confession. Each press of their bodies a sacred truth.

He whispered between the rhythm, between the gasps—

“You are mine in this hour.” “In this breath.” “In this life—or the next.” “I will carry you… in every silence I endure.”

Tears slipped from the corners of her eyes.

Not from sorrow. But from the truth of it all.

Her body rose to meet his—again and again—each motion a sacred cadence, as though she had never been made for anything but this: to be opened gently. To be loved completely.

His lips found hers. And again. And again.

She held his face when he began to tremble—when the moment cracked open inside him and he began to unravel, shaking above her like a man who had found divinity.

“Let go,” she whispered.

And he did.

With a cry that tore through him like wind through trees, he buried himself in her—releasing everything: the fear, the longing, the restraint.

And with it, a love too vast for any vow.

She followed.

Breathless. Trembling.

Her body arching toward his, her heart splitting open in the most exquisite way.

And when it was over— When the storm had passed— They lay together in the quiet.

Bodies entwined. Skin damp. The stone beneath them warm with borrowed heat.

He brushed her hair back. Kissed her temple.

“You were never meant for cages,” he said.

And for the first time in her life—

She believed it.

— © 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 𝐛𝐲 𝐒𝐲𝐥𝐮𝐬 𝐋𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐥𝐞 𝐂𝐫𝐨𝐰

𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 : @ikesimpleton

[sir3nsfi1m]

hidden chemistry / paige bueckers

You were nothing if not an honor roll student, rarely skipping classes, head buried between the earthy scented pages of those hefty textbooks, the letters mixing and merging as your eyes would caress the words, blinking harshly as if to unscramble the jumble the mixture.

You weren’t one to be noticed. Forgotten in the back of classrooms, huddled in the dark corner of the hushed library, entangled in the sheets of your familiar bed. You were enclosed in the comfort of your own little corner of the world.

It’s not like you wanted to enclose yourself, cut yourself off with the world. You just didn’t want the technicalities that was arranging a time everyday to devote yourself to every person that you care about. You weren’t rude, you were busy. Stuck between the pages of overfull textbooks with tiny scribbles in the margins, flash cards that you read so many times it almost burned a hole in your irises. You were creating history. Developing new systems everyday to answer the hardest questions the medical field can never seem to answer. Prosthetics, medical imagining systems, bioinstrumentation.

You had no time for anyone else. Not that anyone would devote any of their time to you anyways, from how unavailable you presented yourself, you would be surprised if anyone even dared a glance at you.

But then again, when you aren’t tearing your eyes from those damned pages, you will never see who’s looking your way.

Those bright blue eyes, those furrowed brows, like she’s cutting into you so deep she’s discovering a new meaning to the way you exist. The way you close yourself off, the way you barely glance up as people walk so close to you they brush against the fabric of your fleece hoodie you’ve always got one, whether hot or cold.

She hadn’t meant to notice you. Hadn’t meant to keep drifting towards you as she caressed the dust-covered shelves of the unfamiliar hushed library she barely frequented just a couple months ago.

She was light. Spotlight in the middle of the court, drawing eyes to her even thousands of miles away through electrical devices. Conversations with her name whispered across lips, statistics and pregame interviews, articles and post-game reports. People follow her, no matter where she goes.

She reveled in the spotlight, mostly. As much as she could before her palms got sweaty and her head started to shake with the pressure of millions of eyes dawning on her. She claimed her spot within her life a while ago, but after a while, it became more than just her playing the sport she loves.

It became making a whole new persona. Media training, basically telling her to hold back her emotions no matter how deep they cut wounds into her. Already drawn up answers to the repeated questions she’s asked everyday just rewritten in ways she couldn’t even understand. Criticism she has to roll off her shoulders because she’s stronger than to let someone undermine her life’s work all because she had one shitty game.

It was cliche maybe, but sitting here in the opposite side of the quiet library, a book she knew nothing about laying open to a random page as she snuck glances at you, she felt different. Like she wasn’t being seen for once. Like she had the pleasure of seeing someone else. Not her name lit up on a scoreboard, not her face plastered over the walls.

She didn’t make it creepy, of course. She never took photos, she never stared for elongated periods of time. She was gentle, as if one wrong move and you would disappear from her sights.

She didn’t know what it was about you that just drew her in. Maybe it was the mystery? The not knowing of who you are, what your name is, if you even go to school there. Maybe it was the quiet, like she was looking at a painting among a gallery that just sat out amongst the others.

Some days, she wondered what would happen if she walked up to you and asked you what your name was. Other days, she didn’t even bother showing up to the library because she knew her nerves would never let her unstick her feet from the padded carpet over to your corner.

Some days, she felt stupid pining over a girl who probably didn’t even know she existed.

Ever oblivious, you would show up at the quiet library at approximately 8:30 am almost every day if you could, other days you would camp out in your dorm, your roommates clearing out for morning classes and friend gatherings.

You prided yourself in your work, in the way that you wouldn’t let distractions tear you from your creations, how you stuck with a plan and never once backed down no matter how hard it got.

However, sometimes, you wondered what it would be like to have someone look at you and tell you they were proud of you. Or maybe even just look at you.

You would internally scoff at the pda plastered over love-stricken college kids as you walked past them, you would cringe at the corny Instagram captions with the photos of entangled lips and promises of forever.

But sometimes, you wondered what it would be like.

What it would feel like to have someone look at you. To have someone sit and listen to you drone on and on about biomedical engineering and engineering principles. To have someone see you for more than your work. To have someone say they want to be with you forever.

You were too much to handle for yourself, however, so how you someone else handle you?

Your eyes lock.

It was accidental. The first time you had looked up for your lecture that day. The second she had looked over to you just to get one last look before she decided she felt like she was being creepy and was going to put down her book (the biography of someone?) and head back to her dorm.

But your eyes locked.

Your eyes were quiet, like your aura. Like everything she had seen when she looked at you. Tranquility, silence, peace. Your eyes resembled your soul, shining brighter than any court had in the past 20 years.

Paige thought she was doomed.

Not because you had seen her, but because she never wanted to look away. She wanted to know you, wanted to see you, wanted to talk to you and never shut up.

And as if you had spoke it into the universe, someone was looking at you. Not at the wall behind you, not at the edge of the table, not at the girl giggling with her friends in the corner.

At you.

That hidden chemistry, that fading spark lingering between two souls on either side of that library, finally unraveling in a swirl of emotions.

[goddessofthundathighs]

Light My Fire

Summary: Lyric engages in a bit of self-care to decompress from a stressful week, only to be interrupted by Stack and his insatiable appetite.

Suggested Listening(s): Chicago Boy x Ari Lennox, Speechless x Beyoncé

Pairing: Vampire!Stack x Black OC (Lyric Aucoin)

Warning(s): 18+, MDNI, This is porn with some plot sprinkled in

Word Count: 2K

A/N: I was randomly scrolling Tumblr last night and came across the above gif, which inspired the title. It's been a minute since I wrote some smut & ya know, sometimes you need to get ya soul snatched by a 130-year-old vampire. (Lyric, I'm living vicariously through you, girl!) There were a few girlies who asked to be tagged in my Heathens fic that I added here as well. I hope this holds y'all over until I finish that.

♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️♾️

Needed some Ricolas, stepped in CVS

Saw you in the corner, I was lookin' a mess

You didn’t notice Jason was instigatin'

I wanna bring you closer, tired of waitin'

Tired of waitin’, ooh

The forgotten AI speaker plays faintly in the background. The Bondage Sex & Cheerios playlist featuring Ari Lennox’s sultry voice was the perfect soundtrack to Lyric’s current task. Breathy moans slip past her lips as her burgundy curls stick to the back of her neck, damp with sweat and satisfaction. The air is thick with heat and the heady sweetness of her latest fragrance obsession: KAYALI Sparkling Lychee. The scent of juicy lychee, sweet vanilla, and sugared amber clings to her skin like the satin sheets tangled around her thighs, a testament to the work she’d been putting her body through for the last 30 minutes.

She exhales deeply, her fingers gliding down her stomach like they had a map to a hidden treasure. She needed this. A recalibration after surviving another week of being the smartest bitch in every room she entered.

Monday had been back-to-back labs. Tuesday, a grown man had cried over a broken grow light like it was a dead pet. By Friday, she’d survived two pop-up dispensary events, a tense meeting with her supplier, and a DM from a Tinder fling that read simply: “you up?”

She was not then.

But now she was. Wide awake. Lit up from the inside out, toes curling and jaw slack. Her breathing syncs with the pulse in her ears. She doesn’t rush the finish. This is a slow burn. A drawn-out love letter to herself written in soft gasps and low whimpers.

Said listen, baby, I know that I'm speedin' up this vibe

Is you gon' judge me if I fuck you 'fore I catch this flight?

No freakin' worries, I just want to get you comfortable

I need you now, but I don't wanna get your feelings broke

Her latest sex toy haul had proven successful. She’d finally given in to temptation and purchased the viral rose toy she’d seen all over Twitter. Its soft petals press snug against her clit, gently suckling her pearl with deadly percision. Not too much, not too little. Just enough vibration and focus to make her thighs tremble and her toes curl. She squirms against the sheets, hips grinding ever so slightly, like her body was trying to meet the toy halfway. Every nerve in her body buzzes like static.

She was right there. So close she could taste it, feel it rising in her like a heatwave. Her stomach clenches. Her spine arches. Her thighs start to shake. And then…

Let me tell you ‘bout this

Super fly, dirty, dirty

Third coast muddy water

Shawty pop that pussy if you wanna

Alexa springs to life without warning, her chirpy tone slicing through the air like a blade. Lyric groans dramatically, regretting every life choice that led her to this moment. The bass to Big K.R.I.T.’s Country Shit thumps hard like it knew what she’d been doing seconds ago.

“Bitch,” she mutters, dragging the back of her hand across her flushed chest as she sits up. Her mound still aches, lips swollen and begging. Her fingers hover over the screen like it is a landmine, and like an idiot, she answers.

“Whaaaaat?” she whines, voice thick, breathy, and unbothered by the fact that she is still glistening between her thighs.

Stack’s face fills the screen, lips twisted in a smug smirk. The glow of the streetlights cast him in shadow, but she could still make out his outfit. Signature maroon hoodie, gold chain, and that eternal ‘fuck-you’ confidence only 93 years of immortality could breed.

“Well hello to you too, Sunshine.” His tone drips with faux annoyance. The sound of heavy boots echoes through her speakers. He’s walking, eyes still that deep violet, evidence that he’d just finished feeding. “What took you so long to answer the phone?”

“I was busy.”

His smirk deepens as he climbs the steps to her building, moving like the night bent around him.

“Doing what?”

“Why?” she screeches, sliding a hand between her thighs in an effort to discreetly finish her mission. It wasn’t discreet enough.

“Babygirl if you was playing wit ya pussy just say that,” he teases, silver fangs glistening in the moonlight.

Lyric rolls her eyes so hard they nearly get stuck. “Goodnight, Elias.” She hovers her thumb over the red button, eager to return to her unfinished masterpiece of self-care.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he laughs, voice crackling with heat. He could see it. Her pouty lips, barely-there robe, the look of irritation and arousal bleeding together on her face. His dick throbs in his jeans. This woman would be the death of him, and he was already undead.

“I wrote something,” he says quickly, walking faster now, determined. “I want your opinion.”

Lyric’s interest flickers, but barely. Her thighs shift as her hand inches toward her rose toy, pink and blinking like a tiny little haloed demon.

“Can it wait until morning?” she pouts, grabbing the toy like it was a lifeline. “I really need to finish this.”

“It’s a poem,” he says, now right outside her apartment. “And it ends with me tongue deep in your soul.”

Her thumb freezes. He couldn’t be. Goddamn him.

“If you’re at my door, knock once and shut up.”

“If?” he grins. Then, black. A second later. Knock. Once. Just like she’d instructed. She stares at the door, toy still humming in her hand. This man was about to ruin her night. Again. And she was going to let him. Because sometimes self-care means letting the vampire in.

–

Do you think of me when you touch yourself?

The question is barely audible, but Lyric heard it loud and clear. Echoing in the back of her psyche like a never-ending song. She wants to curse herself for being here in this moment, trapped in his powerful gaze once more. She watches almost helplessly as he stalks towards her, fangs twinkling in the dimly lit space. He’s since ditched the hoodie, allowing her to stare at his bare, tattooed chest lustfully. His chest had always been one of her favorite things about him.

Do my words caress your mind the way my hands used to caress your body?

Committing every dip, curve, and dimple to memory

His voice is hypnotic, slowly luring her back into her most vulnerable state. He was the flame and she the moth, constantly drawing her into his aura, to use anyway he saw fit. 

I’ll ask again, do you think of me when you touch yourself?

Do your thighs still shake at the thought of me diving in

Plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss 

Exploring parts that you didn’t even know exist

Do you think I can still make you cum from just a kiss?

Do you?

Her eyes flutter closed, and she’s instantly transported back to their last sexual encounter. His body towering over hers, Cuban link chain thumping against his chest as his member thumped that sweet spot inside of her. 

“Stack..” 

Her moans were breathless as he continued to do the Lord’s work on her body. He looked down at her and flashed a devilish grin. 

“That’s not my name, Sunshine. Now say ‘ahh’.”

Do you still taste me on your tongue?

Does my essence linger on your senses?

Triggering earth-shattering orgasms as your mind replays all that I’ve done to you between those sheets

Her breath hitches, palms sweating the same way they did when he crossed her path for the very first time. He was different now. His once smooth, chestnut skin was now riddled with tattoos, a testament to how much he liked the way the times had changed. Instead of the slicked down do of old, he now sported a low, tapered fade. Immortality had been good to him.

“God he’s beautiful,” she muses to herself, finally opening her eyes to see him standing directly in front of her. 

Do you still scream my name as you bring yourself to completion time and time again?

Willing your fingers to work double time to make your love rain down the way I used to 

Do you?

He smiles and she freezes, knowing full well he meant what he’d said about being tongue deep in her soul when he was done. Before she could process the action, he catches her chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting her face up until their eyes lock. 

“I asked you a question, Sunshine.”

Do you think of me when you touch yourself?

Her throat is dry and wanting. She doesn’t answer with words, instead, she kisses him like her body had been aching for this exact chaos. She bites his plump lower lip hard enough to taste a hint of copper. It was different, but she liked it. He groans. Loud. Animalistic. He walks her backwards until the backs of her knees hit the couch. She falls with a gasp, and he follows, kneeling between her thighs, spreading them like scripture.

Where you been baby?

Waited for you all day

Waited for you to use the key

That opens my place

My heart starts trembling

As I hear your footsteps pace

Lock opens, doorknob turns

There appears your face

Beyoncé’s siren-like voice coos from the speaker as Stack presses kiss after kiss to her inner thighs like he’s laying offering to his goddess’s altar. His grip is rough, possessive. One hand anchors her leg over his shoulder while the other is splayed possessively across her stomach, holding her still because he knows she’ll try to run once he gets started.

His tongue flicks against her skin in lazy, teasing circles, dragging hot trails over the sensitive crease where thigh meets pelvis. Her hips twitch, desperate for contact, but he just chuckles against her. The vibrations make her shiver. Her fingers clench the couch cushion behind her head.

And when he finally reaches her dripping center, tongue dipping into her like a starved dog, Lyric sees stars. Not metaphorical stars. Not cutesy cartoon ones. Real ones. Galaxies behind her eyes. Pulsars in her chest. A blinding cosmic explosion behind her ribs as his tongue circles her clit, slow and deliberate, like he’s drawing sigils for a spell only her body can complete.

Speechless, all I can say is

Yes (Yes), yes (Yes), yes (Yes)

All I can say is

Yes (Yes), yes (Yes), yes (Yes)

He groans into her, and her hips jerk.

“Fuck, Stack!”

Her voice cracks, high and breathy, one hand flying to the back of his head to push him deeper into her sex. He grabs her thighs tighter, grounding her, eating like she’s the last meal before a century-long famine. Her legs fall open wider, trembling. Her eyes roll back, mouth slack as his tongue works her with surgical precision, lapping, sucking, flicking until the coil in her belly is so tight it feels like she’s going to spontaneously combust.

Then, without warning, he does it. Stack sinks his fangs into the supple flesh of her thigh, eyes fluttering closed at the sweet taste of her blood on his tongue. Lyric explodes in his mouth, clutching his head with both hands like she’s drowning, legs shaking as her orgasm rips through her like lightning. He doesn’t stop. He slows down just enough to ride the wave with her, kissing her through the aftershocks like he’s sealing a promise in the mess between her thighs.

He stands, admiring the sight beneath him. Lyric lay on the couch, beautiful sable breasts heaving as she pants. Her soft curls now a mess of frizz atop her head. He licks his lips, relishing in the delicious cocktail her blood and cum made. He presses a soft kiss to her temple before taking her spot on the couch. He allows her to rest against his chest, rubbing his hands up and down her back to ground her.

“Still think of me when you touch yourself?” he asks again, voice low and smug.

She doesn’t answer. She’s already asleep. Dripping. Dreaming. And completely ruined.

TAGS: @nahimjustfeelingit-writes @uzumaki-rebellion @soufcakmistress @thickemadame @blackpantherismyish @kumkaniudaku @youreadthatright @post-woke @chaneajoyyy @kissmyafropuff @empressdede @melodyofmbaku @blktinkerbell @turbulentvoids @writerbee-ffs @jasssdee1 @cerya @hearteyes-for-killmonger @theegoldenchild @theogbadbitch @honggihwa @dashhoney25

[emilys-bangs]

thankful you don't send someone to kill me | e.p

Tags: bau!reader, london!emily, angst, exes who STILL haven't gotten over each other, phone calls, pregnant!emily, brief mentions of blood, reader has trouble sleeping, implied previous insomnia, they still want each other bad

Summary: History repeats itself; when you call, Emily answers.

Word count: 1.7k

Part one

The TV blurs in Emily’s vision. Her eyelids are heavy, lashes skimming her cheeks, but another kick to the ribs swiftly dissolves any hopes of sleep. She groans quietly into the couch cushion, her palm smoothing over the curve of her stomach.

“Go to sleep, kid,” she mutters, feeling her daughter flutter under her skin. It’s all but fruitless by now; weak, watery light filters in through the curtains, dawn slowly creeping across the living room floor and chasing away the likelihood of going back to sleep. Emily rubs between her brows, stamping down on the urge to cry.

Nothing is easy when you’re 30 weeks pregnant. Not walking or sleeping or, hell, just being upright. She’s constantly tired, constantly aching, constantly on the verge of falling apart at the seams. Her skin is bone dry in the midst of summer, lips cracking and peeling if they’re not perpetually lathered in Vaseline, but the hormones are probably the worst of it. Wild and out of control, they bubble to the surface faster than she can blink, tears blurring her vision over nonsense, anger sparking in her blood at the slightest inconvenience. Mark flounders around her, desperate to have her in one piece; Emily is very nearly the same, slowly losing her patience with both him and herself, longing for the moment when she’d finally have her daughter in her arms.

But that moment isn’t coming along any time soon.

Emily nuzzles her face into the space between the couch cushions in an attempt to block out the light. Some shuteye has to do some good, even if by this point it’s probable it’ll tire her out more somehow. Her baby begins to still again, and Emily closes her eyes, relishing in the yet unbroken peace of the morning. 

She barely counts ten seconds before her phone buzzes with a call. 

The vibrations travel through the cushions and force her eyes open again. Her phone doesn’t even ring twice; it goes still mid-ring, the screen dying to a flat black. 

She’s going to kill Clyde.

Emily grabs her phone, scowling at the screen until her brain catches up, the letters on the screen joining together to form a name, and then endless ashy memories.

You.

Her breath hitches. She blinks and reads the name again, dragging her thumbnail over the screen. Its shape is so familiar, sloping letters joining sweetly to make up years of faded bliss, months of ever-present agony. There’s no way you’d call. Not after the last time, when she ground your heart to pieces beneath her heel, heard it crack in your voice and in her own chest. No, you wouldn’t call—she made sure of that.

Unless you’re in trouble.

The thought makes her chest tight. Emily doesn’t hesitate, pressing call and bringing the phone to her ear, hardly hearing the long rings through the roar of blood in her veins. 

Beep. Beep. 

She mentally calculates the time difference. Almost 2 am, if you’re in DC. Emily gnaws on her lip, automatically smoothing over a kick to her spleen.

Beep. Bee—

The line clicks. It’s silent, both of you holding your breath. Movement buzzes in the background, faint white noise; it doesn’t bend beneath your voice as you stay quiet. Waiting.

Emily cracks first.

“Y/N.” Her tongue almost weeps at the feeling of your name on it. “Are you—are you okay?” It’s embarrassing, the way her voice cracks, but she doesn’t even hear it. “It’s late. Are you home? Is everything—?”

“I’m fine.” Your voice is faded. Toneless. Emily exhales at the sound of it, her ears ringing. “Sorry. I, uh—I didn’t mean to call.” 

It stings, a barely healed cut slicing open again, but what did she expect? Of course you didn’t. 

But, she thinks deliriously. 

But you still called.

“My finger slipped.” You say, effectively deflating the balloon of hope in her chest before it can grow. “Sorry.” 

Emily swallows. Her baby kicks and she rubs over the ache, feeling the imprint of an elbow as the silence stretches and thickens and starts to taper off neatly into a goodbye. 

The thought sends a strange panic racing through her. She grabs the silence, snaps it in her hands, and lets her voice echo down the line. 

“Why are you awake?” 

But she knows why. Your mind races too restlessly too often. It wasn’t always that she could help; sometimes she just sat with you on the couch as muted reruns flashed on the TV, doing nothing but keeping you company and raking her fingers through your hair. 

Her hand twitches. She clenches her fingers into a fist, bringing them up to the torn skin on her bottom lip.

“Don’t know. Just one of those nights, I guess.” You speak slowly. The tired rasp in your voice is familiar, haunting; she wishes she could smooth it away. “We’re in New York.” You volunteer.

Emily peels a dry patch of skin from her lip, blood wetting her nail. She pretends it’s the sting that burns her eyes, makes them drown in salt.

“You’ll have to be up early.” She rasps needlessly, thinking of Hotch’s disfavor for tardiness. “Try to close your eyes, love.”

She bites down on her tongue, blood coating her teeth, but it’s too late. A sardonic sound huffs from your mouth, a phantom burst of air caressing her ear. “Solid advice, Emily. I hadn’t thought of that.” The bite of your tone claws into her flesh, drawing streams of blood down her limbs. Her tears join the mix, swirling down in the wake of your bitterness and her crumbling resolve.

Seconds clump together, and this time, she’s too scared to break the silence, afraid she’ll say something stupid. Confess that she’s not too sure she hasn’t made a mistake. Fucked up her life, and yours, and Mark’s. Beg you to take her back, away from her stiflingly kind fiancé who handles her with kid gloves, too unsettled by a version of her that isn’t fully composed. 

But no, she already pushed you away, didn’t she? She doesn’t get to go back. She won’t.

Emily’s heart trips in your silence. Do you hate her already? You must. Sometimes she thinks she hates you, but she’s pathetically weak where you’re involved. She can’t hear your name in someone else’s mouth. Can’t bear to think about you for more than a few minutes without her mouth going sour, cheeks puckering as she wonders if it’s possible you could’ve moved on, found someone better. She’s tender all over on the inside, bruised and sensitive, entirely composed of the fresh, delicate skin hidden beneath a scab.

Emily glances at her phone, making sure the call is still running. Your name is trapped in her mouth, her cheeks cool with sticky tears as she soothes her daughter’s restlessness and waits for whatever it is you’ll unleash on her. 

It takes an age before you speak. When you do, your voice is quieter. “It must be—what time is it over there?”

“Almost seven.” She croaks.

”God, that’s early. Sorry I woke you up.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” She blurts out.

“Everything okay?” She hears the concern bleed into your voice. It chokes her, your lovely fingers digging into her throat and cutting off the flow of air to her lungs.

“Everything’s fine.” Her voice shakes. “It’s not—uh. Not nightmares or anything.” 

She can’t get herself to say it. Say, I can’t sleep because my baby’s keeping me up. She’s using me as a punching bag, and I can’t tell you about it because I don’t get to. Because I signed up for it and you didn’t. Her tongue is numb around the words, frozen in a way she never used to be with you.

Briefly, Emily hates the both of you. Hates herself for being ashamed to mention her unborn child that she’d torn her heart to get, hates you for making her hesitate.

Your silence tells her you understand. You were always a smart one, easily catching on to her wit and matching it with your own. Now you clear your throat. “Can’t be easy sleeping now. Seven months, huh?”

Her heart flutters.

“Just over,” she mumbles, looking down at her stomach. It gently warps the material of her tank top. “30 weeks.” Her voice wobbles. A warm tear drops on the crest of her bump and bleeds through the cotton, staining it dark. 

God, she’s thought of this. Dreamed of it. Calling you, hearing your voice even though she’s the last person to deserve it. She doesn’t even deserve to hear it tinny and flat through the speakers of her phone, through the buds of her earphones, trying to get close to the real thing—feeling it beat faintly in her ears—without stripping away more of her dignity.

It didn’t work. Nothing ever did.

Emily wipes her damp cheeks, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Um, how are you? How’ve you been?”

“Let’s not do this, Emily.” You murmur. You suddenly sound years older, worn down and thready. She closes her eyes.

“Are you eating?” Are you walking around with missing fragments of a heart like she is? “Is Serg?”

“The damn cat’s always eating.” You huff, something like a laugh. It pinches at her chest. “He misses you.” You say, quieter.

“He loves you.” Emily’s throat is numb with the taste of tears.

Your breath hitches in her ear. 

“I have to go.”

“Wait.” She whispers. “No, wait, please, I…”

I miss you. I still love you. I think I fucked up, but I’m not too sure I didn’t.

“Hey. Don’t…” You trail off, heaving in a breath, “Don’t cry, Em. You’re—you’re happy, aren’t you?”

She digs a heel into her eye. “I’m not.” She sniffs, her words ringing entirely hollow. “Not crying, it’s just—the baby. She’s kicking.”

Your stillness is palpable. “She, huh?” You say, your voice straining. “Picked out a name yet?”

What is she doing?

“You don’t have to do this. God, I’m sorry, I’ll just—take care of yourself, okay? Please.”

“I should be the one telling you that.”

Emily touches her stomach. Her daughter doesn’t rise to her touch, finally stilling. “I will if you will.” She rasps, rubbing circles on her skin.

A beat. Then, softly, “I’ll try.”

That’s all she can ask for. Maybe, Emily thinks as the call disconnects, even that is too much.

taglist: @suckerforcate @sickoherd @lextism @catssluvr @i-lovefandom @haiklya @justhereforthosefics @storiesofsvu @ashluvscaterina @basicallyvivi @temilyrights @professorsapphic @decadentcatcrusade @piiinco @jareavsheavn @mourningthewicked @heartoreadallthequeerthingz @rustnroll

[orellazalonia]

Operation: Lover’s Retreat (You Think)

Summary: Sent on a recon mission in the Carpathian Mountains, you treat it like a romantic getaway including but not limited to bath bombs, a sparkly kazoo, and one shared bed. Bucky remains constantly torn between exasperation and deep affection. (Bucky Barnes x chaotic!reader)

Word Count: 1.2k+

A/N: More fun stuff while I think of other stuff. Happy reading!!!

Main Masterlist | Earth’s Mightiest Headache Masterlist

To be fair, no one explicitly said it wasn’t a romantic vacation. Which is why, when Fury assigned you and Bucky to a “low profile surveillance op” in the Carpathians, your brain heard:

Secluded mountain lodge. Cozy fires. Spy sex.

So naturally, you packed accordingly.

Bucky blinked at the rolling heart-shaped suitcase you proudly hauled to the Quinjet, emblazoned in bold pink letters: “His & Hers”.

“What is that?” He asked flatly.

You grinned. “Our mission supplies, James.”

“I said pack light.”

“I did! This is vacation-light. I only brought four books, one board game, two full sets of bath bombs, a crockpot for ambience and a grappling hook.”

He opened the suitcase, found the glow-in-the-dark stars you planned to stick on the ceiling of the safehouse, and muttered, “We’re supposed to be covert.”

“And what’s more covert than a deeply-in-love couple on a sensual nature retreat where someone might accidentally dismantle a black market weapons trade?” You batted your lashes. “Besides, you love when I do the ‘danger honeymoon’ bit.”

He exhaled slowly. “I never said I loved it.”

“You didn’t have to,” You whispered dramatically, wrapping your arms around his neck and swaying like you were dancing to a song only you could hear. “Your eyes said it. Remember when I threw that flaming fondue pot at that one Hydra guy last time? There were hearts in your eyes.”

“There were burn injuries, sweetheart.”

“Burns of passion.”

He tried, really tried hard to look annoyed, but you saw it. The tiniest twitch of his lips. He kissed the top of your head like he was apologizing to himself for encouraging you.

“You’re lucky I love you,” He said.

“I am lucky. And hot. And very well packed.”

He peeked into the duffel again. “You brought a kazoo.”

“For distraction purposes.”

“You labeled it ‘Sexy Danger Kazoo.’”

You nodded proudly. “It has sparkles.”

-

The Quinjet touched down just as twilight was bleeding over the dense Carpathian forest, a soft purple washing the sky. You hopped off with all the energy of a kid who just found out naps were optional as Bucky followed, grim-faced but patient, lugging a backpack that looked suspiciously heavier than your luggage.

The safehouse was an old cabin, camouflaged perfectly by thick vines and the shadows of tall pines. From the outside, it looked like it hadn’t been touched since the Cold War, but inside? Well… that was a different story. Stark had apparently outfitted the place with every modern convenience a couple on a "low-profile mission" might need. You immediately spotted the sleek coffee maker and made a beeline for it.

“Why do you think Fury left us here?” Bucky muttered, peeling off his jacket.

“Because this is the perfect place for a romantic getaway disguised as espionage,” You answered, pulling a ridiculous “MISSION: COZY” banner from your bag and hanging it over the cracked fireplace mantel.

Bucky froze, then rubbed his temples. “You are unbelievable.”

“I’m also in love with you,” You added, flashing a grin that was half apology, half challenge.

He sighed, shaking his head, but the corners of his mouth twitched upward. “Fine. But this is recon. Keep it professional.”

“Professional as in,” You plopped down on the one and only large bed, arms stretched wide, “Professional cuddles?”

Bucky’s eyes narrowed, and then his lips curved into something like a smile. “You know there’s only one bed, right?”

“Oh, I know. It’s your fault for not bringing a sleeping bag.”

“You knew that,” He said, sitting down heavily next to you.

“Details, details.” You leaned your head on his shoulder and pulled the blanket over both of you. “This is perfect.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward, it was comfortable. Bucky’s hand found yours, fingers lacing together like they fit perfectly. After a moment, you whispered, “So, what’s the actual mission?”

“Observe and gather intel. Don’t get caught. Probably freeze our asses off.” He let out a dry chuckle. “And babysit you.”

You smirked. “Babysitting, huh?”

“Yeah. Someone’s got to keep you from setting off the alarm with your kazoo.”

You pouted but laughed anyway. “Hey, I’m a tactical genius with a flair for drama.”

“And a flair for eating four bananas in one sitting,” He reminded you, eyes softening.

You groaned. “Don’t remind me. My stomach is still plotting revenge.”

He pressed a gentle kiss to your temple. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The soft crackle of the fireplace was the perfect soundtrack to your “romantic” evening. Bucky, finally starting to relax after a long day of surveillance and your relentless banter, had just pulled the blanket tighter around you when you produced your “Sexy Danger Kazoo” from your jacket pocket. You gave him a mischievous grin.

“Want to hear my latest war tactic?” You whispered, raising the glittery instrument like a weapon.

Bucky’s eyes widened. “No.”

But of course, you played it anyway. A bizarre, off-key rendition of the Avengers theme that sounded more like a dying duck than a call to arms.

His sigh was so long it almost became a sound effect. “You’re impossible.”

“Impossibly in love,” You corrected, settling back down with a triumphant smirk.

Then, just as you were about to doze off, because even chaotic geniuses need sleep, the quiet night shattered.

CLANK.

The sound of metal scraping against metal echoed through the cabin.

Bucky shot up, pulling you with him. “Hydra.”

You blinked. “Already?”

He didn’t wait for you to grab your grappling hook or glitter gel pens. He was moving, fast and silent. You tried to follow, but your pajama pants tangled on the bedframe, and you stumbled, barely catching yourself on the wooden floor.

“Smooth,” Bucky muttered from the shadows.

The door to the cabin burst open, and two Hydra agents stepped inside, rifles raised. But before they could fully process their surroundings, a sudden blaring kazoo shattered the silence. Yours, of course.

“Surprise!” You yelled, charging like a glitter-wielding warrior.

Bucky facepalmed.

Before the Hydra agents could react, you whipped out a handful of glowsticks and started flinging them like grenades, the room suddenly glowing in psychedelic neon colors that were suspiciously brighter than any he had ever seen.

“What the hell is going on?!” One Hydra operative shouted, squinting at the glowing chaos.

Bucky took the opportunity to disable one with a swift punch, then ducked behind the counter to cover you.

“You did say you had distraction expertise,” He hissed.

You grinned wildly, still buzzing with adrenaline. “I’m a tactical genius. Trust me.”

The fight was brief but chaotic, involving a lot of slipping on stray bananas you’d left in the kitchen (don’t ask), glitter explosions from one of your surprise bombs, and a kazoo solo that was definitely more disorienting than tactical.

When it was finally over, Bucky turned to you, exasperated but undeniably impressed.

“You’re the worst mission partner I’ve ever had.”

“And the best,” You said, grabbing his hand and pulling him close. “But hey, if you wanted a boring recon op, maybe you should’ve asked Sam.”

He shook his head, smiling despite himself. “Next time, I’m bringing the actual weapons and leaving the kazoo at home.”

You leaned in, brushing your lips against his. “Now where’s the fun in that?”

Outside, the Carpathian night resumed its quiet, the stars blinking down on a cabin that was very much not low profile. But inside, you and Bucky knew something important:

Chaos was one of the only things you did well and somehow, it was working perfectly.

[mysticalcrowntyrant]

I was thinking it would be cool to have a male fae Yandere that poses as a dancer to seduce a fem presenting reader. But like they used soft power to make them enter now they can’t leave. But it also feels very similar with the jester who i would love to see more of!

Yandere Fae x Reader

Moonlight filtered through the grand stained-glass windows of the Niowil Court’s ballroom, casting a kaleidoscope of colors onto the marble floor. Musicians played a languid, haunting melody, their bows sweeping over the strings, each note a delicate lure. Nobles in silks and velvet danced in slow, measured steps, faces hidden behind intricate masks of gold, silver, and porcelain.

But it was him who drew all eyes.

You didn’t know his name, only that he was the court’s favored dancer. His mask, a delicate creation of silver vines and crystalline leaves, framed piercing, luminous green eyes. His hair flowed like spun silver, his movements were water given life.

You should have looked away. Should have ignored the whispered rumors about the fae who danced at the Duke’s masquerades, of those who met his gaze and were never quite the same. But the first time those emerald eyes found yours, you felt something seize in your chest, a longing so fierce it left you breathless.

Now you stood at the edge of the ballroom, half-hidden by a towering marble pillar, trying to catch your breath, trying to make sense of the warmth in your veins. You had been invited—no, you had been chosen. The summons had come to your family’s modest estate in a sealed letter, the script written in a fine, swirling hand. An invitation too grand to refuse.

But why had they chosen you? Why did his gaze never seem to leave you?

“Lost, my lady?” a voice whispered, low and melodic. You turned, and he was there—close, far too close. He smelled of wild roses and the crisp air of a forest at dawn, his smile soft but his eyes hungry.

“I—no. I was only—” Words faltered under the weight of his gaze. His hand rose, fingertips brushing a loose strand of your hair back, the touch feather-light.

“You dance so beautifully,” you whispered, desperate for something to say, to fill the strange, suffocating silence.

“It is but a poor attempt to mirror your radiance,” he murmured, and the music swelled, as if answering his voice. “But would you grant me the honor of a dance?”

His hand extended, palm up, a fragile offer that felt more like a command.

Every instinct screamed to refuse, to run. But the moment your fingers touched his, the world shifted.

The ballroom melted away like mist under sunlight. You were standing in a forest of towering silver trees, their leaves glimmering with an unnatural light, the scent of roses thick in the air. His grip on your hand was warm, his other arm snaking around your waist, pulling you close.

“Let me go,” you gasped, but your body betrayed you, pressing closer instead.

“Go?” He laughed, a sound like a spring breeze, sweet but tinged with cruelty. “Did I not tell you, love? Those who dance with me are never free.”

You struggled, but his strength was effortless, his touch both a caress and a shackle.

“What do you want from me?”

“Only what you have already given.” His lips brushed against your ear. “Your gaze, your desire, your devotion.”

“Please…” The word was a whimper, and he smiled, fingers tracing down your back.

“Oh, my sweet,” he whispered, his eyes aglow with that unearthly light. “Your plea is the sweetest of music. Struggle all you like, it only binds you further.”

Around you, the walls seemed to close in, their pillars twisting together, forming an impossible, towering cage. His lips brushed against yours, a kiss that stole the breath from your lungs, your knees weakening, your mind clouded.

“Stay,” he whispered, a promise and a command. “Stay, and I will teach you the beauty of surrender.”

Masterlist

[jjwolves]

What do you think ena or her coworkers would think of a reader being really strong? like, theyve defeated bosses or boss like entitys before?

TEST YOUR MIGHT ════ ⋆★⋆ ═════

What: 5 Headcanons of The Hub Coworkers & A Very Strong Reader

Who: ENA the Worker, Froggy, Coral Glasses and Dratula from ENA Dream BBQ

How Much: ~900 Words, ~4 Mins

Credits: Image Banner -> JoelG, Divider -> @animatedglittergraphics-n-more

Warnings: None

You’re a bit of a powerhouse. You can do incredible things that others usually aren’t capable of—tying blood rivers into knots, sidestepping acid rain before you get burned and chopping through titanium gumball machines with your hands. During your interview, Froggy briefs you on your work target: the Boss. It seems the goal of today is to aim for the gut. You say OK, no problem. Point the way and pay me. Froggy seems taken aback. “Well, you’re definitely confident! But it’s no easy task. Listen, listen, it’s good to be eager, but the Boss is really strong!” You shrug. The Boss sounds about as strong as an Archon or Hypervisor. Different names, same things. Froggy is baffled, before relenting and saying that he “needs to make a phone call”. He walks in circles and pretends to deliberate before hiring you on the spot.

It’s not long before your other coworkers pick up on your abilities, even if you try to keep them on the down-low. At one point, you and ENA were sent out on a mission to retrieve coordinates, wandering through a gloomy city made out of churches leaking black water into the streets. ENA attempts to flick an ancient lever which should open the old steel gates you need to pass. They don’t budge. “Stupid lever, work already! I’ll eat your cogs, under-manufactured trash!” You nudge ENA inside and punch a hole through the gate, tearing it open into an improvised entrance. “Oh my! You’re quite the economic superpower. Thank you for the assistance, brave beast!” ENA seems a little wiry standing next to you, but later on, when she unsheathes her fan and slices a clock spirit into ribbons, you see a warrior. Like you.

You hadn’t known that Dratula was on your side as an informant. The pointy ears and claws made him seem monstrous—maybe he was sent by the Boss! You kicked into action when you saw him tell Coral Glasses something pretty incriminating: “I AM DRATULA! I AM THE BOSS!” Immediately, you were on him, grabbing his ears so you could fold him into a square like laundry. “NO! I AM DRATULA! UNHAND ME! YOU’RE GOINK TO HURT MY SECRETS!” There wasn’t much the supposed vampire could do besides use his face to note down an expression of surprise. Coral Glasses shied away from the bloody spectacle which was about to unfold in order to shake Froggy’s arm and hope that he would do something. Froggy stared on before remembering that he needed his sole source of intel alive. “Hey, hey, wait up! Leave him alone for now. We can get back to this once we find the Boss!”

Coral Glasses takes diligent notes of all of the ways you could help defeat the boss. She asks, you answer—it’s like a second interview. A few forms are printed out of her head and she begins diligently recording your answers in the spaces. “Could you aim for the gut with a cannon, perhaps?” Yes, you could do that. “How good are you in foot to mouth combat?” You were decent at it. Fortunately. Or unfortunately. Finally, she nervously peeks out over the top of the forms for her final question. “Would you win?” You hesitate before answering. Probably. She gives a neutral hum and goes to sort the paperwork somewhere. ENA spins over to you in a swivel chair, doing her best ‘color tornado’ impression. “How about terminating the boss by throwing paperclips at him? We have a surplus.” They’d have to be pretty sharp paperclips. “Maybe we could use a deluxe one!” What, like a giant one? Seems impractical to you. “Well then YOU come up with an office weapon, smartass!” You already did. You hand her two letter openers chained together like nunchucks and she’s already appraising them like you just handed her a bargain. You call it a chain letter. “I like the way you think! Positively barbaric! You’re hired!” You were already hired, but you graciously accept.

One night (or however time worked here) you and your coworkers all went out for drinks. And by drinks, of course, they meant bottles full of artifacting snowflakes bouncing around the inside like TV screensavers. It wasn’t long before ENA was drunkenly alternating between slurring buzzwords and yelling at the bartender, who kept a straight face (which wasn’t very difficult, as he was a faceless egg who had yet to hatch). Coral Glasses was breathless, laughing at everything like she had heard the joke that clowns hear from angels upon achieving holy initiation. You were still drinking and yet to be affected. The Receptionist was complaining that the cheap swill was freezing up her beautiful joints. Froggy was feeling the effects a bit, it seemed, but he was holding up OK, all things considered. “To the muscle of the group,” he said, to which monochrome sleeves, red mitten-hands and costumed arms raised unsteady winter glasses to the new hire. Everyone took another swig. A little later, Froggy scooched over to you and admitted something. “Hey. I just wanted to thank you. Everyone’s seemed a little grave looking towards our main mission. But I feel like they’ve been a lot more at ease with you around. Me included. So, thanks for all the help.” You patted him on the back. Your work was never done, but you were glad to help in the end. These people were worth it.

[apoloadonisandnarcissus]

“I see the end”: Mairon, Dagor Dagorath and Arda Healed

Let’s take another deep dive into Tolkien legendarium. Would Sauron side with Morgoth during the Dagor Dagorath? The answer might be surprising.

“I see the end, Celebrimbor. So clearly. I have seen it from the moment I awoke.” This is among the most interesting and important quotes in “Rings of Power” because it holds so much significance in Tolkien legendarium, and takes us back to the origins of Mairon the Admirable, why he chose Aulë, and then Melkor, and even his entire fate in this tale.

As we know from “The Silmarillion”, during the Ainulindalë, Melkor tainted the universe with evil, rebellion and discord. This means all of these characters live in what Tolkien called “Arda Marred”. This is connected to one of the core themes in Tolkien legendarium; “The Fall”, which means every character (except Eru Ilúvatar) can be corrupted.

The Ainur (Valar and Maiar) sang the universe into existence, together with Eru Ilúvatar, but Melkor went freestyle on the song. “Satan fell. In my myth Morgoth fell before Creation of the physical world” (Tolkien Letter 183).

“Morgoth lost (or exchanged, or transmuted) the greater part of his original 'angelic' powers, of mind and spirit, while gaining a terrible grip upon the physical world […] Morgoth's vast power was disseminated. The whole of 'Middle-earth' was Morgoth's Ring. […] No such eradication of Morgoth was possible, since this required the complete disintegration of the 'matter' of Arda.” (“Morgoth’s Ring”)

This is exactly what it sounds like; the only way to erase Morgoth’s corruption of Arda is for the world to be made anew, which will only happen after the Dagor Dagorath, when there will a second Song. But more on that later.

In “Morgoth’s Ring”, we are also told the Maiar that joined Melkor right there are called “Úmaiar”, and the Balrogs were among them.

This was not Mairon’s case.

From “The Silmarillion”; “In his beginning he was of the Maiar of Aule, and he remained mighty in the lore of that people.” In the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy we are also told of the goodness in which Mairon began: “For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so.”

(source)

When exactly Mairon joined Melkor, we don’t know. It wasn’t during the Ainulindalë (he joined Aulë). We know why, though: “Because of his admiration of Strength he had become a follower of Morgoth and fell with him down into the depths of evil, becoming his chief agent in Middle Earth” (Notes on Letter 183).

“He [Sauron] still had relics of positive purposes, that descended from the good of the nature in which he began: it had been his virtue (and therefore also the cause of his fall, and of his relapse) that he loved order and co-ordination, and disliked all confusion and wasteful friction. (It was the apparent will and power of Melkor to effect his designs quickly and masterfully that had first attracted Sauron to him.)” (“Morgoth’s Ring”)

Mairon sided with Melkor to get more power and make his plans a reality. But what are these “plans”? And why would a Maia of order and obsessed with perfection ever side with the Vala of chaos and destruction? Morgoth and Sauron are opposites; one wants to destroy, the other wants to perfect. After all, that’s why Sauron’s goals aligned with the Elves of Eregion to make the “rings of power” a reality.

In the same book we are told: “While Morgoth still stood, Sauron did not seek his own supremacy, but worked and schemed for another, desiring the triumph of Melkor, whom in the beginning he had adored.”

In “War of the Jewels”, it’s revealed the Valarin name of some of the Valar and of Ossë. We don’t know what’s “Mairon” Valarin name, but “Mairon” is Quenya for “the admirable”. How does he have a Elvish name? And if it follows the logic of the examples we have, it’s probably the Quenya translation of his Valarin name. Which indicates it was a name the Elves gave him. And this makes sense with what Tolkien wrote in “Parma Eldalamberon”: “Sauron’s original name was Mairon, but this was altered after he was suborned by Melkor. But he continued to call himself Mairon the Admirable, or Tar-mairon ‘King Excellent’ until after the downfall of Númenor”. Altered by whom? By the Elves, of course. They are the ones who started to call him “Sauron” (“The Abhorred”).

In “The Silmarillion”, we are told it was Sauron who discovered the dwellings of the first Elves, and he was apparently already working for Melkor then. And in his Letter 131, Tolkien writes: “And there is Sauron. In the Silmarillion and Tales of the First Age Sauron was a being of Valinor perverted to the service of the Enemy and becoming his chief captain and servant.”

Throughout the First Age, Sauron was, indeed, a loyal servant to Morgoth, and worshipped (“adored”) him.

However, both in “The Silmarillion” and “Lay of Leithian”, the “Lúthien and Huan” episode might suggest a different picture in later years. Which is probably why “Rings of Power” is following the route of Sauron being tortured by Morgoth.

“Lúthien came to him [Sauron], and said that he should be stripped of his raiment of flesh, and his ghost be sent quaking back to Morgoth; and she said: 'There everlastingly thy naked self shall endure the torment of his scorn, pierced by his eyes, unless thou yield to me the mastery of thy tower.' Then Sauron yielded himself, and Lúthien took the mastery of the isle and all that was there; and Huan released him.”

It’s the threat of Morgoth’s wrath that causes Sauron to surrender, and then he runs away. And we only hear of him again at the end of the war, when he repents before Eönwë. Did he stay hidden or did he return to Morgoth and face his wrath? We don’t know. Not even the Valar were able to find him.

We are told Sauron “in truth repented”, and it’s added “in fear”. But in fear of whom or what? Because while he can’t bring himself to return to Aman and face trial by the Valar (like Eönwë tells him to), Tolkien writes in his Letter 152: “could not face the humiliation of recantation, and suing for pardon; and so his temporary turn to good and 'benevolence' ended in a greater relapse.” We have a combination of fear and pride preventing Sauron from facing the Valar' judgement.

During the Second age, Tolkien tells us Sauron wants to rebuild/heal Middle-earth, comparing him with “all ‘reformers' who want to hurry up with 'reconstruction' and 'reorganization'” (Letter 152). “He [Sauron] lingers in Middle-earth. Very slowly, beginning with fair motives: the reorganising and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-earth” 'neglected by the gods'” (Letter 131). And this is the context for his “rings of power” project.

This idea is explored in “Morgoth’s Ring”: “But like all minds of this cast, Sauron's love (originally) or (later) mere understanding of other individual intelligences was correspondingly weaker; and though the only real good in, or rational motive for, all this ordering and planning and organization was the good of all inhabitants of Arda”. And so, he believed it was his “right to be their supreme lord”.

We know Sauron eventually becomes the “final incarnation of evil”, especially during the Third age, when he claims to be “Morgoth come again”, and even makes the Númenóreans workship Melkor to orchestrate their Downfall during the Second age. But was he still devoted to Melkor like he was in the First age?

Tolkien gives us the answer in “Morgoth’s Ring”, but, in short, no, quite the opposite:

“Sauron, however, inherited the corruption of Arda, and only spent his (much more limited) power on the Rings; for it was the creatures of earth, in their minds and wills, that he desired to dominate. In this way Sauron was also wiser than Melkor-Morgoth. Sauron was not a beginner of discord; and he probably knew more of the Music [of the Ainur] than did Melkor, whose mind had always been filled with his own plans and devices, and gave little attention to other things.”

Morgoth was envious of Eru Ilúvatar creation, and wanted that “power” for himself. Unable to have it, he devoted himself to corrupt and destroy it.

“Thus, as Morgoth, when Melkor was confronted by the existence of other inhabitants of Arda, with other wills and intelligences, he was enraged by the mere fact of their existence, and his only notion of dealing with them was by physical force, or the fear of it. His sole ultimate object was their destruction.” And Tolkien adds: “Morgoth would no doubt, if he had been victorious, have ultimately destroyed even his own creatures, such as the Orcs, when they had served his sole purpose in using them: the destruction of Elves and Men”. “Melkor’s final impotence and despair lay in this: that whereas the Valar (and in their degree Elves and Men) could still love Arda Marred, that is Arda with a Melkor-ingredient, and could still heal this or that hurt, or produce from its very marring, from its state as it was, things beautiful and lovely, Melkor could do nothing with Arda, which was not from his own mind and was interwoven with the work and thoughts of others: even left alone he could only have gone raging on till all was levelled again into a formless chaos. And yet even so he would have been defeated, because it would still have existed, independent of his own mind, and a world in potential.” “Sauron had never reached this stage of nihilistic madness. He did not object to the existence of the world, so long as he could do what he liked with it.”

This sounds contradictory, but Sauron, unlike Morgoth, has a plan. He wants to dominate the minds and wills of others with a very specific purpose; he’s not doing this randomly.

And it all goes back to healing Middle-earth. He believes the Valar failed (Morgoth included), and Eru deserted and doesn’t care about His creation anymore. So he steps in to fix everything. And Tolkien tells us: "beginning well, at least on the level that while desiring to order all things according to his own wisdom he still at first considered the (economic) well-being of other inhabitants of the Earth" (Tolkien Letter 183). However, he relapsed into evil because his "pride and the lust to exert [his] will [domination] eat [him] up." (Tolkien Letter 153)

But Sauron is not above using Morgoth (chaos and destruction) to achieve his goal. But why? Is this because “the bounds Morgoth laid on him were too strong” or “Sauron had not served Morgoth, even in his last stages, without becoming infected by his lust for destruction, and his hatred of God”?

Tolkien tells us something else, too: “Sauron could not, of course, be a ‘sincere' atheist. Though one of the minor spirits created before the world, he knew Eru, according to his measure. He probably deluded himself with the notion that the Valar (including Melkor) having failed, Eru had simply abandoned Ea, or at any rate Arda, and would not concern himself with it any more.”

At its core, Sauron is a consequence of Morgoth. Like Tolkien calls him in his Letter 156 “absolute Satanic rebellion and evil Morgoth and his satellite Sauron”. But, Tolkien also tells Sauron can’t never be a “sincere atheist” because he knows Eru Ilúvatar, and his feud is against the Valar, not Eru himself. To the point, he actually believed the Valar went rogue on Eru:

“It would appear that he [Sauron] interpreted the 'change of the world' at the Downfall of Numenor, when Aman was removed from the physical world, in this sense: Valar (and Elves) were removed from effective control, and Men under God's curse and wrath. If he thought about the Istarl, especially Saruman and Gandalf, he imagined them as emissaries from the Valar, seeking to establish their lost power again and 'colonize' Middle-earth, as a mere effort of defeated imperialists (without knowledge or sanction of Eru). His cynicism, which (sincerely) regarded the motives of Manwe as precisely the same as the his own, seemed fully justified in Saruman. Gandalf he did not understand."

Why is this relevant? Because of the Catholic inspiration behind the legendarium: “In The Lord of the Rings the conflict is not basically about 'freedom', though that is naturally involved. It is about God and His sole right to divine honour.” (Letter 183). And this is Sauron’s greatest crime in the legendarium. Believing Eru had deserted Arda, he wanted to take that position for himself: “Sauron desired to be a God-King, and was held to be this by his servants; if he had been victorious he would have demanded divine honour from all rational creatures and absolute temporal power over the whole world.” (Letter 183). Which is why he’s in open rebellion against the One and, indirectly, serving Morgoth (“rebellion”), even thought he ended up hating all the Valar (yes, even Morgoth).

Of course, Sauron was defeated. And this is a key difference between Morgoth and Sauron’s plots. Morgoth succeeded in corrupting Arda (to the point his influence can only be eradicated if the world is made anew), while Sauron failed in healing Middle-earth, and his influence ended with the destruction of the One ring.

Now, everything happens according to Eru Ilúvatar’s plan, and he knows everything. What was His plan for Mairon to side with Melkor and cause all this trouble?

Eru Ilúvatar even changed the world because of the Númenor mess, after all. It’s important to recall no one can alter Eru’s plan (not Morgoth, not Sauron). In “The Nature of Middle-earth” we are told about the Downfall of Númenor:

“The Catastrophe represents a definite intervention of Eru and therefore in a sense a change of the primal plan. It is a foretaste of the End of Arda. The situation is much later than “conversation of Finrod and Andreth” and could not then be foreseen by anyone, not even Manwë. In a sense Eru moved forward the End of Arda as far as it concerned the Elves. They had fulfilled their function – and we approach the “Dominion of Men”.”

Yes, this is connected to the Dagor Dagorath. And yes, I’m with the Tolkien scholars on this one. I also don’t understand why Christopher Tolkien believed his father abandoned this idea when it’s mentioned almost everywhere in the legendarium.

Like mentioned above, Sauron interpreted the Downfall of Númenor as the Valar and the Elves being “removed from effective control”. The Eldar loremasters who wrote “The Silmarillion”, on the other hand, seem to believe he was only thinking about the Númenóreans.

One of the most iconic descriptions of this event is Sauron laughing on his throne: “And Sauron, sitting in his black seat in the midst of the Temple, had laughed when he heard the trumpets of Ar-Pharazôn sounding for battle; and again he had laughed when he heard the thunder of the storm; and a third time, even as he laughed at his own thought, thinking what he would do now in the world, being rid of the Edain for ever, he was taken in the midst of his mirth, and his seat and his temple fell into the abyss.”

Mairon here appears to think the end of Arda has come? He probably thinks he has successfully pissed off the Valar, though.

The Dagor Dagorath is pretty much the Christian Apocalypse or the Norse Ragnarök. It’s the “end of days”, the end of the world. Which is very fitting with every maior inspiration of Tolkien legendarium. It’s a prophecy called the “Second Doom of Mandos”, when Morgoth will return from the Void to be defeated.

From the later version of the “Quenta Silmarillion” in “War of the Jewels”:

“Thus spake Mandos in prophecy, when the Gods sat in judgement in Valinor, and the rumour of his words was whispered among all the Elves of the West. When the world is old and the Powers grow weary, then Morgoth, seeing that the guard sleepeth, shall come back through the Door of Night out of the Timeless Void; and destroy the Sun and Moon. But Eärendil shall descend upon him as a white and searing flame and drive him from the airs. Then shall the Last Battle be gathered on the fields of Valinor. In that day Tulkas shall strive with Morgoth, and on his right hand shall be Eönwë, and on his left Túrin Turambar, son of Húrin, returning from the Doom of Men at the ending of the world; and the black sword of Túrin shall deal unto Morgoth his death and final end; and so shall the children of Húrin and all Men be avenged. Thereafter shall Earth be broken and re-made, and the Silmarils shall be recovered out of Air and Earth and Sea; for Eärendil shall descend and surrender that flame which he hath had in keeping. Then Fëanor shall take the Three Jewels and he will break them and with their fire Yavanna will rekindle the Two Trees, and a great light shall come forth. And the Mountains of Valinor shall be levelled, so that the Light shall go out over all the world.”

Unfortunately and oddily, Sauron is not mentioned in this event. In the “Book of Lost Tales” it’s said: “Turambar indeed shall stand beside Fionwë in the Great Wrack, and Melko and his drakes shall curse the sword of Mormakil". The “drakes” are the dragons. This is the only known reference to Morgoth’s creatures standing by his side during the Battle of Battles.

Many wrongly assume Sauron was sent to the Void after the destruction of the One ring. Mostly because that’s what the Eldar loremasters believe in “The Silmarillion”. But that’s not Tolkien tells us in his Letter 131: “There was another weakness: if the One Ring was actually unmade, annihilated, then its power would be dissolved, Sauron's own being would be diminished to vanishing point, and he would be reduced to a shadow, a mere memory of malicious will.”

Which is what Gandalf tells Frodo in the “Fellowship of the Ring” book: “If [the One Ring] is destroyed, then [Sauron] will fall; and his fall will be so low that none can foresee his arising ever again. For he will lose the best part of his strength that was native to him in his beginning, and all that made or begun with that power will crumble, and he will be maimed for ever, becoming a mere spirit of malice that gnaws itself in the shadows, but cannot again grow or take shape. And so a great evil of this world will be removed.”

Mairon’s spirit remains in Arda after the One ring is destroyed; which is connected to his Ainur nature, after all. He’s powerless and unable to take on physical form, though.

I would also like to bring this description from “Return of the King” when the One ring gets destroyed: “And as the Captain gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent [Sauron’s spirit]: for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed, then a hush fell.”

We have a “great wind” taking Sauron’s spirit away which opens a lot of possibilities. Manwë is the Valar of winds and skies, so can it be he sent some of his Maiar to capture Sauron and bring him to Valinor? Eönwë, maybe? After the mess of the Second and Third ages, the Valar would probably want to capture Sauron if they got the chance, I would say. So, it’s entirely possible that Mairon was imprisoned within the Halls of Mandos. Until the end of days?

Story keeps repeating itself in Tolkien legendarium. Like Sam tells Frodo “Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?”

Sauron was also oddily missing from Morgoth’s side at the Battle of the Powers at the end of the First age, when the Valar chain Morgoth and imprison him in the Void. After all of his forces were erradicated, Morgoth stood alone. Which is somewhat similar to what we are told about the Battle of Battles, when it’s prophesized the black sword of Túrin (Gurthang) will destroy Morgoth.

Tolkien having Sauron repenting and stressing “the good in which he began” over and over again is significant. Is this only to show “in my story I do not deal in Absolute Evil. I do not think there is such a thing, since that is Zero. I do not think that at any rate any 'rational being’ is wholly evil” (Tolkien Letter 183)?

Sauron’s plan is oddily aligned with “Arda Healed”, the new and perfected world that shall be sung into existence after Morgoth is defeated, the Second Music of the Ainur and Men. And this is why “Rings of Power” having Sauron saying “I see the end, Celebrimbor. So clearly. I have seen it from the moment I awoke” is significant.

From “Morgoth’s Ring”:

“Eru is Lord of All, and will use as instruments of his final purposes, which are good, whatsoever any of his creatures, great or small, do or devise, in his despite or in his service. But we must hold that it is his will that those of the Eldar who serve him should not be cast down by griefs or evils that they encounter in Arda Marred; but should ascend to a strength and wisdom that they would not otherwise have achieved: that the Children of Eru should grow to be daughters and sons. 'For Arda Unmarred hath two aspects or senses. The first is the Unmarred that they discern in the Marred, if their eyes are not dimmed, and yearn for, as we yearn for the Will of Eru: this is the ground upon which Hope is built. The second is the Unmarred that shall be: that is, to speak according to Time in which they have their being, the Arda Healed, which shall be greater and more fair than the first, because of the Marring: this is the Hope that sustaineth. It cometh not only from the yearning for the Will of lluvatar the Begetter (which by itself may lead those within Time to no more than regret), but also from trust in Eru the Lord everlasting, that he is good, and that his works shall all end in good. This the Marrer hath denied, and in this denial is the root of evil, and its end is in despair.”

From the lore, we know Sauron supposedly hates Elves and has a special interest for the race of Men: “Sauron, the lieutenant of the Prime Dark Lord, who had fallen back into evil and was claiming both kingship and godship over Men of Middle-earth.” (Tolkien Letter 156)

“Arda Healed” will be for Men, and the Dominion of Men is one of Eru Ilúvatar’s plans. Hence the “fading of the Elves”. Which is probably why “Rings of Power” had Sauron talking about “Rings for Men” with Celebrimbor right away in 2x02:

"I did not come here to toast the Elven Rings. But to plead with you to make Rings for Men [...] You saved the Elves. [...] Mordor's rise was but the beginning. At this very moment, all Middle-earth balances on the brink of the abyss. Soon, every realm will fall. Not just Elves, but Dwarves. And Men. The darkness is growing stronger. And the Rings of Power are our last hope of restoring the light. You and I have work to do."

We also known from “Morgoth’s Ring”, Sauron knows Eru Ilúvatar ("at his own measure") and he also knows more of the Music of the Ainur than Morgoth ever did.

But the similarities between Sauron’s plan and "Arda Healed" are not random because, at the beginning, he was a Maia of Aulë. And in “The Silmarillion” we are told: “Ilúvatar will hallow them [the Dwarves] and give them a place among the Children in the end. Then their part shall be to serve Aulë and to aid him in the remaking of Arda after the Last Battle.”

Aulë and his Children (and servants) are in charge of rebuilding Arda anew, "Arda Healed", after the Dagor Dagorath. And now, everything becomes clearer about Mairon’s dreams and aspirations of a “new and perfect world” and why he harmonized with Aulë during the Ainulindalë.

But why was Mairon fated to “fall”? Was it to become a sort of “horseman of the Apocalypse” and to act as a catalyst for the Dagor Dagorath?

Mairon joined the very thing he wanted to destroy, the responsible for “Marred Arda”. Which seems contradictory, at first. But it isn't: because the entire world has to be destroyed to be remade anew, after all. That's the prophecy. And that's why Mairon joins Morgoth, and supports his chaotic destruction. Until he doesn't, because he loves order above all, and Morgoth became a nihilist.

Everything is a "means to an end" to Mairon, but "the end" is not Morgoth, it's "Arda Healed" (what he saw at the beginning when he awoke). But he's merely a Maia (not a Vala like Morgoth), so he settles for "healing" Middle-earth.

"But out of the chaos, we will forge a new and perfect order. No longer will we be hunted as the demons who broke Middle-earth, but rather worshipped as the saviors who finally healed it. By bringing its peoples together, to rule them all as one!"

But what would be Mairon’s role in the Battle of Battles? Since many characters will have the opportunity to redeem themselves, will Mairon be given the same chance?

Now we have to think about Mairon’s corruption, and how his virtues were reversed, perverted, by Morgoth. He became “the great deceiver” because of this corruption, after all. He didn’t began as such. Unless, his fate is to ultimately deceive and betray Morgoth.

Some descriptions of the Dagor Dagorath are very similar to the Norse Ragnarök; mainly the final battle between the gods and the demons and giants, ending in the death of the gods and the world reborn. Tolkien, however, later added Men and Elves to his own version. Everyone comes together in a massive battle in Valinor.

In the Ragnarök, the battle ends with a final showdown between Loki and Heimdall, after everyone else is dead. And they mortally wound each other, ending the battle. Then, the world is remade.

The majority will associate Sauron with Loki, since they are both tricksters. However, Heimdall is the watchman of the Gods, the “all-seeing eye”. And while Loki is chaos, Heimdall is order. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is very similar to how Morgoth and Sauron are opposites. Also, Loki is known for stealing jewelry (golden necklace of Freyja), the same way Morgoth stole the Silmarils.

As for the Christian Apocalypse, it’s the “Book of Revelations”, when Satan is released from Hell and is defeated by Jesus Christ. Also similar to the Dagor Dagorath in the way Morgoth also breaks free from the Void to be defeated, and that’s where the similarities stop.

In the early drafts of the Dagor Dagorath, Tolkien did plan for a final showdown between Morgoth and other character (“Book of Lost Tales”):

“For 'tis said that ere the Great End come Melko shall in some wise contrive a quarrel between Moon and Sun, and Ilinsor shall seek to follow Urwendi through the Gates, and when they are gone the Gates of both East and West will be destroyed, and Urwendi and Ilinsor shall be lost. So shall it be that Fionwë Úrion, son of Manwë, of love for Urwendi, shall in the end be Melko's bane, and shall destroy the world to destroy his foe, and so shall all things the be rolled away.”

This was when Tolkien was still on board with the Valarindi, the children of the Valar, and that’s why we have a son of Manwë defeating Morgoth, because of the death of his love, Urwendi. "Fionwë Úrion" is Eönwë, and "Urwendi" is Arien (the Maia of the Sun).

Of course, this tale no longer applies because Tolkien removed this (expect the destruction of both the Sun and the Moon). Still, the idea of a one-on-one combat to defeat Morgoth will be present in other versions. From “The Shaping of Middle-earth”: “Fionwë will fight Morgoth on the plain of Valinor, and the spirit of Túrin shall be beside him; it shall be Túrin who with his black sword will slay Morgoth, and thus the children of Húrin shall be avenged.”

Either way, all the versions we have speak of a man defeating Morgoth wielding the black sword of Túrin (Gurthang reforged from Anglachel; forged by Eöl the Dark Elf), after he fights Tulkas and Eönwë. In some versions, it’s Turin himself, while in others Turin is in charge of slaying dragons. So we don't have a definitive version of Turin's part in the Dagor Dagorath, except that he'll be present and he'll fight against Morgoth's forces to redeem the children of Húrin.

We have nothing on Mairon’s part.

But if we go by the “The Book of Lost Tales”, it’s Morgoth’s creatures that will stand at his side; not merely Dragons, but Balrogs, wargs, Orcs, and all sorts of dark creatures and monsters Morgoth bred during the First age.

Werewolves were Sauron’s creations, though.

But Mairon himself wasn’t created by Morgoth, and Tolkien tells us, he has no true loyalty towards Morgoth during the Second and Third ages, seeing him as a failure and using his methods as the “means to an end”. And “the end” is what comes after the Dagor Dagorath, as we’ve seen. So, Mairon has no interest in joining Morgoth’s forces (at least, not truthfully) nor in having him hypothetically succeed.

From the information we have, the most logical conclusion would be Mairon will stand against Morgoth in the Dagor Dagorath. This way he will also fulfill his “task” of helping Aulë rebuilding Arda anew, "Arda Healed", and will probably earn his redemption. Him surviving the battle and taking a part in the Music of the Ainur and Men is another matter entirely.

[talonabraxas]

“At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.” ― Lao Tzu

Galactic Sun Center Talon Abraxas

Saturn in Aries 2025-2028

Saturn moves into Aries on May 24, 2025, where it will remain until September 2, 2025. During this window of time, we will get a brief glimpse into the lessons and gifts of Saturn in Aries. Saturn will later return to Aries in February 15, 2026, where it will remain until April 14, 2028.

Saturn moving into a new sign of the zodiac indicates the opening of a new generational cycle that can help us to level up and reach a new point of mastery. Saturn is considered the Lord of Karma, and tends to press on areas of our lives that we need to step up and take greater responsibility for.

Saturn highlights where we need to do the most growing and encourages us to rise up and take ownership of the life we want to lead.

In Aries, Saturn will be guiding us to work on our impulses, the speed at which we do things, our level of confidence and motivation, and our willingness to take leaps of faith and start new things.

Saturn’s presence in Aries may create a feeling of inertia, stuckness, and even a lack of confidence, but this is only to bring these qualities out from deep within us.

Let’s take a deep dive into Saturn’s journey through Aries, and what we can expect.

Saturn in Aries 2025-2028

Aries is the leader of the zodiac. It is fast-moving, loves starting new things, and relies on its impulses. Saturn, on the other hand, is all about moving slowly and steadily in order to achieve its goals. It is calculated and risk-averse. It wants to understand the ins and outs before moving ahead.

Saturn in Aries could definitely slow things down and put a dampner on all the new ventures or projects we wish to pursue. Saturn will want to enforce boundaries and restrictions and make sure we are following the rules to the letter.

Impulsive Aries may struggle with this notion. Aries is a risk taker and wants to leap ahead into new, unchartered territory. It is bold and confident and believes in itself. Saturn will push the pause button, and its cautious nature may even instill some self-doubt.

While this sounds like a challenging dynamic to work with, there are many gifts that this energy dynamic can bring.

Gifts of Saturn in Aries

In Aries, Saturn will be teaching us to sharpen our instincts and impulses. If we have been too rash, headstrong, or impulsive, Saturn in Aries will help to temper this so we can better listen to our instincts and intuition.

Saturn in Aries may slow us down and deflate our confidence for a period, but it will also get us to focus on finding a deeper strength and inner self-worth. We will have to dig through the layers to access new portals of confidence and self-determination. We may find that we are able to shed confidence that comes from our ego, or from external validation, and instead find something purer and more unwavering.

By the time Saturn is wrapped up with its journey in Aries, we very well could feel a new, mature confidence in our abilities and what we wish to achieve. We may feel that we know ourselves better and have found a new strength from within.

Saturn in Aries can also narrow our focus, helping us to align with projects and ventures that truly serve us. Aries energy can sometimes be scattered and erratic, causing us to spread ourselves too thin or uncertain of what to be a part of. Sometimes, Aries energy is good with starting projects but not following through.

Saturn will help with this by allowing us to follow through and bring new projects and ideas to their completion point. We may find projects or decisions that we begin under this alignment have a greater chance of standing the test of time as Saturn will implore us to put in the hard work and stick it through.

Ultimately, Saturn in Aries will allow us to feel more grounded, more aligned, and more in tune with our impulses and intuition. It will also give us the stamina to follow through on the new ventures or leaps of faith that we do take.

Saturn in Aries Themes

On the world stage, Saturn represents authority, law enforcement, and rules and regulations. In Aries, we could see a fiery rise in support of or against these areas. There may be more unrest or distrust when it comes to how the law is enforced. Long-standing laws and regulations may also be challenged.

Aries can bring combative energy, which may resist or try to go up against Saturn’s more grounded and practical nature. Aries will want to fight and can cause heated emotions to rise, whereas Saturn will want to take a more methodical and practical approach.

Saturn will not give much room to entertain the heated emotions of Aries, and will instead want to follow logic, structure, and order.

Saturn in Aries can also help societies to create more sustainable products and ventures as we use the innovation from Aries coupled with the grounded, responsible nature of Saturn.

We may start to notice a greater push towards sustainability and supporting businesses and practices that consider the long-term consequences.

Saturn in Aries may also slow down the emergence of new innovations in favor of innovations that have a tried and true past. There may be a resurgence of the “old ways” of doing things, and people may be more willing to wait rather than receive instant gratification.

Saturn and Neptune in Aries 2025-2026

As Saturn enters Aries, it will hover close to Neptune, coming to an exact conjunction on February 27, 2026. Saturn and Neptune touring Aries together is a very rare dynamic that will color our experience of both these transits.

As mentioned already, Saturn is about structure, rules, and boundaries, but Neptune is about dissolving, dreaming, and feeling. These two planets coming together will help to melt away some things but reinforce others.

We may find that Saturn is able to give more structure to our spiritual ideas and help us take a more practical approach when it comes to our creative visions.

Saturn and Neptune can be a somber combination, helping to expose the harsh truths of life. But it can also lead us to a greater spiritual connection and understanding.