#'Blackened' could be interesting as well

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

i was going to crack a joke about how the only thing on my lore wishlist for the dlc was that they would finally explain why the hell marika got impaled and crucified on the elden ring. and then it occurred to me that our one canon named boss so far is an archetypical erdtree traitor-styled demigod quite literally titled the impaler

[dadsbongos]

then, and again, and once more

6.9k words

Summary - Yuuji tries to impress you and win your heart, with the help of Sukuna… who seems weirdly knowledgeable about and interested in you.

Warnings - p in v sex, FULL NELSON BABY!!!, yuuji eats pussy :), oh yeah fem reader btw, sukuna is here too (and his cannibalism is mentioned), idiot friends pining for each other, very vague timeline idk but yuuji is aged up

sukuna-centric part 2

There it is again.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

That unbearable thick bass in his chest, banging so tirelessly against his ribs that it threatens to make him nauseous. A quick inhale and yep - scratch that - he’s definitely already nauseous.

Yuuji sinks his sweaty palms deeper into his pants pockets, eyes darting sharply down to his beaten sneakers. The once vibrant ruby shade is now marred by dirt and aging threads - and if he turns his right foot just so, then he can see an old, blackened stain from pizza sauce he spilled while eating out with you. The memory, or more specifically how you’re giggling in his memory, makes him smile.

And in the real world, Megumi is watching his friend grin ear to ear while looking at a black, crusty splotch on the inside curve of his right shoe. After having just wide-eyed stared at you from across the room while you and Nobara heatedly debate where to go for dinner.

He glares at Yuuji, lashes narrowing, “You look insane. Knock it off.”

That snaps the boy from his reminiscing, and it takes him three long seconds before he registers the insult, “I was thinking!”

“Obviously,” Megumi scratches the side of his nose, more to just have something to do with his hands than anything else, “What were you thinking about?”

Humming quietly to himself, Yuuji shrugs, “Oh, the usual.”

“You’re hopeless,” Megumi maintains his efforts to keep his hands busy by scratching the back of his head, “Just tell her already. What’s the worst that happens?”

“She rejects me and avoids me,” Yuuji pouts, “Honestly, ‘gumi, I would’ve thought you’d be more sympathetic - being a standoffish and awkward guy yourself.”

Swatting at his friend’s shoulder, Megumi shakes his head, “The hell is wrong with you? Was that just sitting in your mind?” he shakes his head again, glare growing stronger, “And don’t call me that.”

“I thought you had anxiety or something,” Yuuji shrugs, “Why else would you be so weird in public?”

Any previous concern regarding Yuuji’s well-being immediately flies from Megumi at that. He folds his arms across his chest with murmurs of hatred floating out from his lips. All as he waltzes over to where you and Nobara are seated around your laptop at the chipping hardwood table.

Yuuji has no problem shrugging off Megumi's irritation, but when it comes to the mere idea of your face stretching in disgust at him - God, isn’t that the worst?

“You’re the worst, brat,” comes that rumbling, terrible voice in the back of his head. The nagging used to sound more like him - and when he’s really stressed, it still sometimes does - but now his own voice has faded into the King of Curses’. Now his own voice is sweeter, more prone to praise and positives - in a weird way, Sukuna has made Yuuji better.

But in a lot more ways -

“Oi, don’t ignore me.”

He’s made Yuuji’s life so much worse.

“You like that one, right? I can help.”

You’re sitting back, allowing Megumi to take the reins on shooting down Nobara’s suggestion for sushi. Normally, that demand isn’t a problem, but this would be the fifth night in a row she’s tried roping you all into ordering sushi for her. You lean into Megumi a little, and Yuuji hates the way his chest tightens at the display.

It isn’t even affection. It’s just…

“You want to be the one she’s on, right?”

Yuuji sighs to himself and sneaks out of the kitchen, though it’s hardly a challenge when Nobara raises her voice to defend her long-lasting cravings.

With tense shoulders and a red face, Yuuji glances down each side of the hall to ensure nobody is nearby, “How could you help with this?”

Sukuna’s eye on Yuuji’s cheek has flitted up to stare into Yuuji’s, and that sickly crawl of his skin stretching to accommodate Sukuna’s wide grin makes his stomach turn, “You’re just a child, you don’t know anything about women.”

Yuuji could double over, hands on his knees and breathless in sputters of laughter, but he refrains - unwilling to let anyone hear his schizophrenic ramblings, “And you do?”

Sukuna’s eye rolls and Yuuji hates the way it feels under his cheekbone, nearly retching in response, “Of course.”

And that strings up some different terrible question in Yuuji, “But why would you help me?”

Sukuna has been so unwilling to do anything useful for Yuuji despite the fact he’s allowed to reside in this body - so what could possibly possess him to do this now?

“Do you want my help or not, worm?”

Yuuji sighs through his nose, eyes fluttering shut, thinking hard about the offer. He’d come to the conclusion not too long after swallowing his first finger to simply not question many of Sukuna’s motives, mostly since his goals are: chaos, women, and chaos.

“This better not be some gross pass at my friend,” Yuuji sneers, body electrified on the ready to smack down his own cheek should he hear an answer he doesn’t like.

Sukuna is too quiet for too long, and Yuuji is fully prepared to swipe at the parasite on his face when finally, that deep voice rattles again. It buzzes in his flesh, uncomfortable and itchy and so quiet he barely hears what the curse mumbles into him.

The boy pauses and lets the words melt on his tongue, he turns them between his molars and laves the roof of his mouth with the remaining implications. He wasn’t expecting Sukuna to be honest, not to that degree at least.

And Yuuji smacks Sukuna’s bulbous eye down anyway.

“Fine then,” Yuuji pulls his hand down and curls his fingers into a fist, another great big awful ragged sigh roughing over his tongue like barbed wire, “I’ll listen to you, but if you ruin this for me- “

“Calm down, brat,” the mouth pops back up stubbornly, bitterly spitting out his version of a promise, “I don’t plan on failing.”

Yuuji pushes himself off the wall and spins back into the kitchen unnoticed, hands locking behind his head as he saddles up beside you at the table, “So, what’s for dinner?”

He snorts at how you groan, looking up at him from your seat with tired, low-lidded eyes and gesturing across the table to where Megumi and Nobara are still arguing, “You tell me.”

“Why don’t we just go out?” Yuuji shrugs, grinning broadly despite the way his two friends both twitch their necks over to glare at him, “Come on, it’s not even dark! We can walk around and do a little looking; get some air!”

Nobara’s pitched shoulders drop, pinched expression falling into her usual lax, she looks over at Megumi again with a raised brow. Megumi shrugs, his own eyebrows still scrunched together, “If it’s fine with you two, I don’t care.”

You snicker, standing up against the stiff wood supports of the chair legs, one elbow digging into the table to further help hold you up while your spare fingers dance up to smooth out the crinkled space, “I think it’ll be fun.”

Megumi snatches you by the wrist and tosses your hand to the side while Nobara hops down from her own chair, stretching out her back until it pops obnoxiously. She’s already bouncing out of the kitchen to snag her shoes before shouting back, “Well, come on! We’re on a timer now, people!”

“Jeez,” you slip off the chair pegs, bumping slightly into Yuuji’s side - entirely oblivious to the sparkly fireworks you sweep across your poor friend’s body at the contact, “Should’ve just suggested that from the start, huh?”

Shrugging, Yuuji waits for you to begin walking out of the kitchen before following, “Sometimes you just need fresh eyes on a situation, you know?”

“I guess,” you fold your arms, evidently frustrated, “Just feel like that was something I should’ve seen.”

Yuuji feels that disgusting, familiar thumping in his chest just by looking at you now. Heat radiating from his cheeks to the expanse of his chest, throat swelling with the uncomfortable need to spill his guts - dump every little thought and feeling he’s ever had for you into your ears until you force him to shut up. Like how he can’t even look at Jennifer Lawrence the way he used to simply because she isn’t you.

Maybe then he’d tell you that this hasn’t happened in the six years since he first saw Silver Linings Playbook. Maybe you’d tell him to stop talking, and that you two would never happen.

Maybe then he can move on, when you crush his hope. But he doesn’t really want that.

And he doesn’t really know why he agreed to let Sukuna lend him any advice.

Oh well.

It’s when you’re rushing out the door to keep up with Megumi and Nobara that Sukuna opens his mouth for the first time.

His voice stabs into Yuuji’s ears, but it isn’t exceptionally as cruel as he usually finds it, this, instead, is purely instructional, “When you two are out tonight, tell her about that cat you saw around the garden today.”

Yuuji scratches through his messily filed memories, “I saw a cat?”

“Yes, twit, a black one. Tell her about how its fur changed color in the sun.”

“Okay…?” Yuuji huffs in his daze, finally putting effort into walking alongside you and the others, “Hey! So, I just remembered something.”

“Oh yeah?” you smile at Yuuji, purely encouraging, and he’s disgusted at the way he almost trips over his own feet.

Nobara and Megumi pay the both of you little mind, instead pointing out different potential favorite hotspots they could creep into for the night. Well, Nobara points out, they could even stop at two places if they’re feeling adventurous. And Megumi says they can do whatever the rest of you think is best.

But Yuuji isn’t listening, and you’re hardly lending an ear, he swallows down the rock in his throat and nods, “I saw a cat this morning - a black one! - and it made me think of you,” the gentle warmth spreading through him could either be the way you’re lighting up at him, or Sukuna silently congratulating his good line, “Its fur was all brownish red in the sun, it was…” your eyes are so starry and sweet, solely on him - it makes his tongue tie up in knots, “It was beautiful.”

“Bummer I wasn’t there, then,” you pout a little, “You need to get me for things like that!” he laughs at the way your face has morphed, all stern and strict business, “Seriously!”

“Okay, okay,” he surrenders, both hands up in playful defense, “I promise to call you if I see another cat.”

“Could’ve at least taken a picture for me,” you histrionically sigh, “And I thought we were friends.”

A sudden thought invades the back of Yuuji’s mind. Some hidden, more primal part of his mind that he doesn’t usually listen to flashes back to a time he doesn’t remember.

We used to be more.

You and him are sitting out in the sun with a fluffy little Bombay cat tucked into your lap. It paws at the buttery dandelions that bloom between you both, his own legs are sprawled out impolitely and your own are crossed to wall around the feline in your hold. His knee knocks against yours whenever he shifts his leg. You lean in, shoulder digging into the meat of his muscled arm and temple resting on his shoulder.

Your body is entirely at ease. His is, too.

Yuuji knows exactly where the thought comes from. And if that dark, creepy place weren’t so infested by evil then maybe he’d feel a little pity for it. But you’re in front of him now, and you’re excited to be here, and your pinky keeps knocking into his as you two walk side-by-side - so there’s no room for pity in his heart.

Your quartet winds up squished into a teal leather booth towards a back corner of Nobara’s selected diner. You and Nobara sit on the interior seats, pressed into the windows, with Yuuji and Megumi caging the both of you in. Megumi having shoved Yuuji down next to you before the boy could even see who was where.

“What were you thinking?” Nobara sits up, jabbing your arm with a manicured finger just to annoy you.

Flicking at her hand, you shrug, focusing on the boards plastered behind the front bar counter for any eye-catching special offers.

Yuuji can feel the tightening of his cheek skin as the eyeball threatens to pop out, it stings when his cheek is forced to split for Sukuna’s eye. His cheek below that parts as well for his lips.

And Sukuna is kind enough this once to be quiet, “Tell her to get the wildfowl bowl,” as if sensing his arising questions, Sukuna continues, “And tell the kitchen worms to make sure the vegetables are soft. Not well, not sturdy,” he sounds disgusted as he says it, “Soft.”

“Hey,” and against everything he’s been told by Gojo, Yuuji puts his entire trust into the curse inside him, “that wildfowl bowl looks good, right?”

You lean closer to Yuuji, arm brushing his as you try to see where he spotted that, “What’s in it? Duck?”

He gives a conformational hum even though he has no idea, “Probably good with soft vegetables.”

Megumi shakes his head, “What does that even mean?”

“When they steam the veggies for longer than usual,” you pat Yuuji’s shoulder while defending him, “I get what you mean, Itadori. Sorry Fushiguro is so judgemental.”

“I was just saying…” Megumi’s voice flutters out of Yuuji’s focus.

Instead, another memory he never made begins to flourish from that black, mushy, rotted back of his brain.

You’re sat in his lap, large thighs perfectly bracketing around your own. A neglected bowl of slim slivers of perfectly browned duck meat sits atop cooling rice, carrots, and green beans. No doubt soft and easy to chew. In your hands is a steaming bowl, larger than the one in your lap, weighed down by thick cuts of juicy meat slabs. Almost like steak, but there’s no outer hide tanned by flame. It’s red, almost raw, and even after trimming the fat - it’s still bathed in pink, fleshy trails.

Grinning so lovingly, you pinch the slabs with your bare fingers and merely giggle when Sukuna’s sharp teeth prick at your skin. His long tongue works to clean your fingers of the excess meat juices as he eats. Two of his hands are on your hips, holding you steady, a third is steadied beside him against the cold bone of his throne, and a fourth resides at the back of your head. Almost big enough to palm the whole of your skull like a children’s ball - he pats and pets and smooths his fingers over the slope of the back of your neck.

Preening under gentle attention, you’re sure to empty Sukuna’s bowl before picking your own back up.

People watch with blood at their feet, none dare to move. Fearful to become the next hot meal in your hand should they disobey Sukuna’s silent command.

As your hands wrap around your cold bowl, a deep grunt reverberates behind you in Sukuna’s broad chest. He tugs the dish from your grasp; plucks the duck meat between his forefinger and thumb and holds it above your nose, forcing you to look up.

He waves it in front of your face, “Open,” and you follow his order, lips parting yet still pitched up in the impression of a pleased smile. And when he flattens the meat to your tongue and you begin chewing - you’re still smiling. That earns another fond stroke down the back of your head, pausing at your shoulder and digging his thumb into the muscle just to hear you sigh, “Good girl.”

Yuuji doesn’t see all of that. He can grasp some vague sense that you two have shared meals he’ll never get to taste, but he never sees the gristle left behind on your fingers or the saliva webbed between your fingers after feeding Sukuna.

That - Sukuna ‘hmph's proudly as he watches you beam at Yuuji over your modern interpretation of your favorite meal - the King of Curses keeps to himself. Selfishly, just as he always has.

That next morning, you sheepishly prattle into the dusty, creaky classroom with only four rusty, barely used desks and slip into the one by Yuuji. You’re toying with the tips of your hair, eyes bouncing from where Yuuji sits on the desktop beside you and the classroom door.

Nobara sits backward at the desk directly in front of you, arms coiled around the back support of her chair as she speaks and Megumi sits normally beside her - attention solely on his book. Yuuji watches you fiddle with the ends of your hair while pretending to listen to Nobara.

And then he sees it. The new cherry shade decorating your lips, and before Sukuna can sprout and tell him to - Yuuji’s leaning down with his best smile, “New lipstick?”

Jumping at the sudden voice, your rigid posture melts under the boy’s gaze, “Yes, actually. You like?”

It could be puke green and Yuuji would still want it smeared across his face from your kisses.

But despite housing Sukuna Ryomen and battling dreadful curses, Yuuji fails to muster the courage to say that to your face, “Yeah! It’s really pretty.”

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

There goes your annoying heart, hammering just from the sound of Yuuji’s overtly positive lilt. It makes your cheeks burn and fingers skittishly tip-tap against the pencil-scratched desk, “You think so?”

But he’d never lie, you know that.

So even though it shouldn’t be a surprise when he doubles down, your annoying heart won’t stop dramatically tossing itself around when Yuuji nods with a determined, boyish grin, “Definitely.”

It’s all so saccharine and perfect, it makes Sukuna nauseous. Which, in turn, makes Yuuji nauseous.

Face paling, Yuuji jumps onto his feet and excuses himself, rushing out of the room (with no Gojo even in sight, by the way) towards the bathroom.

“Is he okay?” Nobara murmurs, stretching her neck to see outside the door frame, “What a weirdo.”

“Yeah,” you sigh dreamily, “He is sometimes, huh?”

Megumi gags at your tone, “Seriously…?”

“What was that?” Yuuji’s question is spikey and venomous while he stares into the cracked, water-spotted mirror - straight at the little eyeball on his cheek.

“You two are disgusting,” Sukuna stares back into the glass, low-lidded and unimpressed, “Get this over with and ask her out, brat.”

“But what if she says no?” Yuuji reaches up and toys with the little pink hairs at the back of his head, eyes suddenly unable to meet Sukuna at all, “It’ll totally ruin everything.”

“Enough whining. She won’t say no.”

He doesn’t know how it took so long to recognize, or maybe he just needed an excuse to display his old, unbroken knowledge of you before your fleshly little weakling friends even knew it. But he’s seen the little bursts of color and stars and sparkles and all that cute mess before.

He’s seen it many times. It was the only way you used to look at Sukuna.

That puppyish, lovesick wonder as you fluttered your pretty eyelashes at him.

Even when he would return to you in blood and sweat and muck and smelling of the death and despair he expertly wrought.

You were always at least five paces ahead of Uraume, hands bunching up in the pretty flowing silks that decorated your body. Excitedly, you’d pounce and he would hold you. Sapping up your energy and feeding off the way you’d press cherry-tasting kisses all along his hardened face. You served yourself up to him on a silver platter, all your heart and soul and mind devoted entirely and without ulterior motives. That’s why you were always his favorite.

Nothing before or after you was ever up to par. And he felt disgruntled at every turn into different worshippers and concubines and lovers - somehow wronged simply by the fact they were not as you were. It was all so disappointing.

And every now and again he’d flash back to you while with others. He imagines it’s how children feel when they remember a lost or broken or tossed-out favorite toy. That ache of times lost and never feeling quite fulfilled again.

Which is why when he saw you again through this brat’s eyes, he could instantly remember those nights with you. Full-bellied and raw-lipped and your pulse between his teeth.

But Yuuji knows nothing of that, and so when he returns to the classroom - neither of you says anything.

It’s only the two of you. Everyone else was cast out in the violent, unwilling acceptance that they had done all they could. With no open wound, there was a horrific list rattled off in Sukuna’s ears. Illnesses and infections that attacked the lungs and nervous system and skin and heart - things that would eat you alive from the inside. And when all could be done about that, you remained in bed.

In and out of consciousness and delusional, proclaiming twisted lights and shadowy creatures trying to rip you from yourself.

Perhaps, one of the women called to care for you shyly spoke up, perhaps she’s just too old.

And that was something he avoided admitting to himself.

But it was time now.

With dew still moist on the blades of grass and morning sunlight streaming through the window beside your bed - the bell tolls. Your fingers are stiff in the sheets, limbs cold and stiff when you’re found. Wide, puppylike eyes gaze up at the ceiling and Sukuna has you buried beneath the tallest, most twisted tree he could find in the surrounding forest. And when Sukuna returns from your grave that night - alone - he crosses into a dark tunnel.

It’s cold and solid beneath his feet, paces echoing back for his ears. He keeps his eyes down to avoid maddening himself over the plainness - the displeasure of even glimpsing this tunnel’s repetitive nature.

Until there’s light, golden, with the shrouded, clumsy shape of twisted branches and lanky trunks coming into view at the far open end.

And faintly, like the sweet singing of a beloved music box, he hears the tune of your voice. A high scoop towards the end.

“Itadori, right?”

Sukuna’s feet move faster before he even fully knows he’s moving.

On the other side is you, a hand jammed out in front of you in a polite wave - as if the both of you are strangers. Then that name creeps back up his spine.

Well, it’s not truly his spine, is it? It’s this new brat’s.

But then there’s your honeyed voice again, “Huh, third eye.”

Right. You wouldn’t remember it, would you?

You wouldn’t remember any of it.

Yuuji shoots up, dark sheets tangled around his ankles and cold sweat beading down his forehead - strings of pink hair matted down to his skin uncomfortably. His wide eyes scramble across the shadows of his room, slowly refamiliarizing himself with the expanse and soothing his pounding heart.

He smoothes back his hair, running through the small kinks and knots, “What the hell was that?”

That slicing pain along his cheek shocks him awake further, but no sore, deep voice follows. The eye sits there, downcast. Sitting inside this body is one of the last things he saw for himself, but to exist beside you again is liquid gold just flowing in a river. A river his new body refuses to swim in.

“She’s still awake.”

Yuuji looks over to the red numbers lighting up from his bedside alarm clock, “It’s midnight.”

Sukuna inhales sharply, irritation scorching a hole in his tongue, but he withholds the many sudden hateful thoughts he has towards Yuuji and simply repeats himself, “She’s still awake.”

“It’s weird how obsessed you are with this,” Yuuji swings his legs over the edge of his bed and slips his feet into the slippers you’d gifted him. They’re cheesy and themed after fire engines and just barely fit, but he wears them at any given opportunity.

The eye sinks back into his skin, lips sealing shut, and a thick sludge boils in Yuuji’s stomach. Quiet King of Curses is an unsettling King of Curses, and Yuuji barely finds himself able to tune out the exhaustive wave of Sukuna’s criticisms. That is much preferred to this buzzing silence.

Creeping down the moaning wooden panels to your room, Yuuji raps his knuckles against your door before immediately shuffling his fists into his gray sweatpants.

Something clatters against hardwood, sheets ruffle, and your footsteps thump, thump, thump up to your bedroom door. Your face peeks out from the sliver of cracked doorway, and there’s no hint of sleep in your gaze. You seem alert, if a little lazily slouched against your doorframe.

“Itadori?”

Oh, right. He was here to say something, wasn’t he?

But he can’t possibly find the strength in his tongue, not when you look at him like that.

With some impossible adoration, like you simply can’t wait to hear whatever stupid bullshit he’s about to spout. He feels so unworthy of it all, and he can’t wait to find out more about you and mold himself to it. To become someone you can’t imagine waking up without. To study and be studied, he’s ready to throw himself into the horrors of being known - if it’s you he’s known by.

The air is punched out of him as he speaks, “Can…” you nod him along, opening your door wider, “Can I kiss you?”

Now that he’s so close to the sugary river, he can’t wait to dive in.

“Seriously?” you laugh in shock at the outburst, but when his face persists, you fling the door open entirely, “Seriously?”

Yuuji winds his hands tighter, to stop himself from desperately clawing his way down your throat, “I like you. I’ve liked you…” he’s unnatural like this, red in the face and dodging your stare, “I don’t even know.”

But you do, you felt it when you first saw him. However, you’re not plagued by the chains of past lives, so the implications are lost. Winding your arms behind your back and grinning at Yuuji with toothy glee, “Me too.”

His eyes nail you with that doughy, desperate plea for attention - the need to be seen as himself. And you’ve always been glad to lend it over in plentiful bounties.

That buzz of silence stabs the both of you.

Until Yuuji can no longer tether himself to his pockets, his big hands gentle as he cups both your cheeks. He molds himself to you, hoping that those troublesome flashes of times he never lived will at least serve his muscle memory now.

Your hands twist into the front of Yuuji’s shirt, nails biting into the black, soft, loose fabric and tugging him closer. Yuuji’s lips are slightly chapped, and you can feel the imprints from where he’s bitten them raw. He hisses when you peek your tongue at the smooth spots.

Wrenching your hands back, you quickly run them under and up his sleep shirt - his skin is warm and he gasps against your lips when your fingertips skim along his sides.

Yuuji pulls back, cheeks flaming, and shoulders his way past your bedroom door, kicking it shut behind him and placing his hands over his shirt - finding yours through the material. He grins, chuckling at how you grope his muscle, squeezing around your hands, “Enjoying yourself?”

“Whatever,” you huff, embarrassed, then ripping your hands out from under his shirt and twisting your fingers between his before - just to prove a point - planting his palms below your own shirt, “You try being normal like this.”

Yuuji’s broad palms are still only burning into the soft flesh of your stomach, but his heart is terribly out of whack.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

“You can go higher,” your voice lilts higher, a mere soft whisper as if anything louder could entirely break the poor boy’s brain, “If you want…”

Of course, he does. He’d trade a thousand years with that Sisyphus guy Megumi mentioned to him just for twelve seconds of his hands sizzling up your body. Maybe even just for the chance.

His hands scope higher, palms glued to the planes of your body like he’s trying to scar himself along your skin. The sudden need to leave some lasting impression that he was there - here with you.

Yuuji does his best not to jump when Sukuna’s voice slithers into his ear, polite enough to whisper so he doesn’t alarm you, “Get her on her back. Tongue her cunt.”

You look at him all sweet and concerned when Yuuji’s nose scrunches, “Are you okay? Is something wrong?”

But he has no idea how to tell you that Sukuna’s words make his stomach churn, and by the time he even tries to form the words he’s thinking about it. Imagining himself on his stomach with his head between your thighs, your hands tangled in his hair, and eagerly trying to annoy your friends as much as possible with how loud he can make you. And he feels so, so lightheaded at that.

Yuuji’s eyes are wide, staring into yours with such fire that it almost makes you shy away, “Can I eat you out?”

But you brave his dissecting gaze, heart pounding in your ears.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

And, oh, Yuuji could just about die happy right now.

On his stomach with his head between your thighs, your hands screwed into the twirls of his tousled hair and (hopefully) annoying at least a nosy Nobara should she be listening to your soft moans next door.

Yuuji wiggles his tongue into your weeping hole, nestling his nose against your clit with a wheezy little whine. His eyes flutter up at you through the gaps between your shaking arms.

“Get your hands in there,” Sukuna’s voice is muffled against the thickness of your thigh, “Thumb her clit, don’t rely on your nose.”

Crinkling his brows, Yuuji has to bite back his remarks about how Sukuna could’ve told him that sooner. Snaking his right hand over your leg, Yuuji flattens his large hand against your lower stomach and pins your bucking hips. His thumb taking residence on your swollen clit, the bridge of his nose still saddled beneath it.

Your back arches, hips grinding down into Yuuji’s thumb and tongue. He’s messy with it - head shaking just to tease and feel the wetness of your pussy slip and slather across his chin. He tongue-fucks you in earnest, practically moaning into you as he grinds against the mattress. Swishing his thumb against your clit faster when he can feel you tighten around him, chasing the feeling of you cumming all over his face.

He can hear it despite his desperation - the way your breath hitches and throat cinches out a squeal. Your thighs squish around his head and Yuuji has to force his hips still lest he be submitted to the horrors of cumming in his pants.

And it isn’t even the fear of your reaction - no, he knows better than to think you’re capable of making him feel shame. It’s just-

“Yes,” Sukuna’s voice is husky, tongue lolling out along Yuuji’s cheek to lather up your juice, “Yes!”

Yuuji knows exactly who will be making fun of him instead. He smacks at the unwanted presence and takes it as pure luck when Sukuna actually stays down.

He works his tongue out of you slowly, letting you whine and huff the way off your high naturally before peeking up at you. He’s grinning, eyes wide and hands retreating to dig hungrily into the meat of your thighs.

“Hey, I wanna try something,” Yuuji’s shamelessness in licking at his soaked lips makes heat flush all the way to your forehead, “Just let me know if it’s too much, okay?”

You nod sheepishly, body jittery with the little bugs crawling beneath your sweltering skin. Yuuji bends to the sudden thought he’s sure has something to do with the curse inside him with a mysterious catalog on all things you.

Yuuji slips onto his back beside you, curled against the cold wall corning your bed with his feet flat against the mattress and legs bent. He uses the unnatural well of strength he’s harbored since birth to squeeze at the fat of your sides and lift you atop of him. He can feel the warmth of your cunt on his pelvis and it wracks him with a shiver, you whine helplessly when his right hand immediately welds to your slit. His index and ring fingers part your lips so his middle can swipe coyly over your clit.

“Hah,” you watch his ring finger abandon its post to join the rude teasing, “Yuuji…”

“I know,” Yuuji sucks his bottom lip between his teeth, eyes glued to where your wetness drips onto his skin, his hard cock peeking up between your legs, “I know, I’m sorry,” but he doesn’t sound very sorry. Especially when he’s continuing to tease you while pressing a kiss to your cheek, “Okay, serious now,” but he dips his fingers lower and prods at your hole, “Serious.”

You giggle, hot-faced, at his focused gaze, “Yuuji!”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he spreads your lips again just to stare from over your shoulder, voice hoars when he finally speaks up, “Alright. Serious now.”

Reaching between your legs, Yuuji grabs hold of his cock - hissing at the contact - and is internally grateful when you raise your hips to meet his head. He presses his forehead against your shoulder when his tip pushes inside you. You feel the hot puffs of air he sends against your back as you continue lowering yourself. He whimpers, the hand at his base flying across your abdomen and gripping your breast. He squeezes and pinches and tries suffocating the embarrassing little noises escaping his lips when you rock your hips down on his pelvis.

“Okay down there?” you twist your head to look back at Yuuji and you’re so glad you did.

He’s flushed down to his chest and his lashes are kissing his cheeks to keep himself together, when he finally opens his eyes fully and looks up at you. His bottom lip is red and puffy from how hard he’d been biting it, “Now I’m gonna do something new.”

This wasn’t new?

Yuuji’s arms stretch under the backs of your knees and come over your shoulders before winding behind your neck, pressing his palms flat against the back of your head. Your arms dangle uselessly at your sides, hands stretching out to graze his ribs and legs bouncing limply as he manhandles you.

His cock bullies itself in your cunt, hips jerking up into the fat of your ass.

Yuuji tries to suffocate down his groans in favor of your sweet moans being punched up from your gut every time he sweeps deep inside you. His lips press tightly just as your own pop open for adorable “ah, ah ah!”s - fighting to maintain his pace despite how badly he wants to pin you to his body and wallow through the wetness sucking him back in for every thrust. Feel your sweaty skin slide and stick against his and whine at the pulling sensation when you peel apart.

Another sudden idea pops into his brain and it’s almost instinctual how he follows it. Besides, it isn’t like he’s going to complain about being brain-blasted with memories that aren’t his if it means not having to hear Sukuna’s voice while fucking you.

Hips never falter in their snaps up into you, Yuuji cranes his neck to teeth at the meat of your nape. He bites possessively and grunts in response to your immediate pitchy moan. Then licking over the marks apologetically.

You try to smother down your breathless moans as Yuuji bullies his cock repeatedly into that spongy spot shooting stars behind your eyes. With an angle and drive and care you’re sure would be lost on any man other than Yuuji - and you’re dumbly struck by the hope that maybe this hard work is only because he’s here with you. And that coherent thought is fucked out of you with Yuuji’s next whimpered request.

“Don’t do that,” he gasps when you tighten around him after a particularly rough thrust, “Please don’t keep it down- wanna…” he moans and the sound flutters straight to your tightening gut, “Wanna hear you so bad, pretty girl.”

Unlatching your teeth from the plush of your bottom lip, flames lap through the wiry twists of your veins - burning through the stretch of your skin and scarring Yuuji. And he eats it up and greedily begs at your feet for more. It shames Sukuna just as much as it excites him to taste the salt on your skin through his vessel’s tongue and watch the way your legs shake and bounce under his vessel’s iron hold. His favorite way to have you and your favorite way to take him.

Yuuji unwinds one of his arms from behind your neck, lowering half your body slightly to swipe his fingers between the junction of your thighs. Right over the slippery spot where you’re creaming on his cock and taking the soaked fingers to your clit. His canines and soft lips battle for a monopoly of your neck and shoulder, swiftly circling your clit with his middle and ring fingers as his hips continue fucking you stubbornly.

“Hng, Yuu…!” you gasp, head throwing back and narrowly missing his - the coil winding tighter and tighter and your walls milking Yuuji tighter and tighter, “Yuuji!”

“I know, baby,” he kisses up your bent neck and presses his flaming cheek against yours, “God, please, cum for me. Cum for me,” his hips stutter, and his breath hitches and oh, he’s so close, “I wanna feel you cum on me, baby- I need it. Need it so bad.”

“Oh, Yuuji,” you dig your face closer to his as if trying to meld yourselves into one body, “‘m cumming,” you clench and he’s damn near wheezing, the knot in his lower belly popping as he feels you cum and drips down his balls, “‘m cumming, I’m cumming, I’m cumming…!”

And just to avoid embarrassing himself from admitting he’s in love with you while spitting his own cum in your warm, wet walls, Yuuji strangles down his own final cries with a coppery, abusive bite to his bottom lip.

It starts to hurt, how he overstimulates himself through his slowing thrusts - letting you slip down onto his thrumming, sticky chest. Your legs sprawled across his sides, Yuuji slipping his softening cock from your hole.

You lazily roll off of Yuuji, landing face-first into your sheets at his side.

Yuuji can hear it again, that terrible, grating voice telling him, “Clean her, brat.”

And what’s the most terrible is he knows Sukuna’s command is entirely warranted. Flopping a hand onto your back, Yuuji traces heart shapes into the skin as he talks, “I’ll be right back.”

And when Yuuji’s wetting a soft, clean cloth he braved the hallway (nude) to retrieve from his room, he hears that voice again. It echoes in your bathroom.

“I want a turn when she’s awake,” a pause, “Fully awake.”

“Aren’t you charitable?” Yuuji rolls his eyes.

And that same utterance from hours before rings through Yuuji’s ears once again. Why Sukuna cared so much about petty crushes. Why Sukuna bothered himself by actually giving genuine, helpful points. Why Sukuna was fascinated by you.

“She was my most devoted and favorite lover in her past life.”

The way he says it inspires no respect for Yuuji - underlined in his thriving desire to be worshiped, as he imagines he deserves. Yuuji wouldn’t dare uphold you to that.

When he tenderly presses his thumbs into stiff muscles with a red flush and warm smile, Yuuji knows that for sure.

“Can I stay the night?” he whispers, folding his discarded towels and lazily tucking them by your bedpost on the floor. He feels that same hurried ache in his chest, awaiting for your impatience.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

You hum, lifting your head off the pillow and snickering, your drowsy face pinched to look at him like he’s stupid, “Duh.”

Giddy, Yuuji slips under the blankets he’d slid over you after cleaning the mess from between your thighs, and slots himself right next to you.

Rolling again, you twist into an open space against Yuuji’s chest and under his thick arm. Warmth drapes across your shoulders when he rests that arm over you. He circles his other arm around you and squeezes, grinning so hard he can feel it burning in the balls of his cheeks. Your ear rests against Yuuji’s chest, and you soothe yourself to slumber on the rhythm of his heartbeat.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump.

Blissfully unaware of the fact that when your bones are rotten and six feet deep, two more people will be curled into each other’s arms. With your same starry eyes that some pink-haired kid falls in love with every time they’re on him.

[iceunhie]

˗ˏˋ ꒰ ⊹ unexpected development ! ꒱ ˎˊ˗

summary ⁠☆ you get transported into your favorite otome game’s world as a shitty side character with a raging death flag. you try to prevent your inevitable destruction... but it doesn't go according to plan as much as you'd hope.

notes ☆ of course it's another scaramouche fic except this time it's plot is manhwa inspired

“This trashy game!” you curse, watching the pitch black GAME OVER screen linger in your phone. Happy music plays despite the current cg of your character at the hands of the tyrant character slash love interest Scaramouche. You sigh, tapping on the back button. “I was so close to completing his route… stupid, stupid game, ugh…”

Teyvat’s Seven Stars was a new otome game that you'd tried out for fun, bored out of your mind. The amazing art and soundtrack garnered your interest, not to mention the male leads were totally your type!

It had an array of tropes and spared no expense of flowery scenes and fanservicey excerpts that made you play despite its massive cashgrab feature. Heart fluttering near death scenes! Action packed romantic scenes with the main characters! It was consuming you and you loved it.

Even if the Scaramouche route was testing your patience.

You get that he was the most difficult to conquer out of all of them, but really, one! wrong! move! ….and an immediate gameover. Life sucks when he's your favorite character, and when your favorite character was notoriously known for having a horrid and difficult complete clear route that no one has completed yet, of course you needed to complete it, no matter what!

Damn it, now you've run out of love points to restart another run. Fuck you, system! Stupid trashy money grabbing game! You put down your phone, closing it. An immediate heavy weight settles on your shoulders, making you feel sleepy as you clutch your phone to bed.

Tomorrow… you'll complete his route for sure…

[ TEYVAT’S SEVEN STARS SYSTEM ACTIVATED! RUNNING GAME FILE NOW ]

Ah. You should've known what was coming.

—

[ CHARACTER FILE: [NAME] [LAST NAME] - CROWN PRINCE KUNIKUZUSHI’S BETROTHED! ]

What the fuck.

You think you've lost feeling in your jaw when the glare of the system shines bright, mocking you.

“[Name], you're awake!” You turn to the sound, and you face probably the most beautiful person you've ever seen. No, what the hell. You've seen him before.

Beautiful silky dark hair, glossy electric indigo eyes, a perpetual aura of ethereal lightness…. the game descriptions weren't lying after all. yes, you weren't dreaming. This was Scaramouche, or should you say at this point in time… Kunikuzushi?

He immediately clings to you. Oh. Oh. Well fuck. “I… uh.”

Scara- ahem, Kunikuzushi’s eyes are littered with tears and oh no you're a weak hearted person for your favorite character. “I'm so glad you're okay! I'm sorry, my mother- I mean, I'm so glad you're okay.”

The rest of the moments is a blur when your… fiance? betrothed? fills you in on what happened. Your mind is fuzzy and you can only piece together just a rough summary of what point in the game you're in.

So, you are currently three years early from the main story. Unfortunately, you are not either of the main protagonists Lumine or Aether. No, the system apparently hates you for being a hater and gave you the most egregious role.

A side character. A side character who barely even appears in the story, left to be trampled on by the story's plot. What's more, you're in the timeline wherein the current Kunikuzushi doesn't take the name Scaramouche because his Mother, the lone Queen Raiden Ei left him when he could not pass the Inazuma kingdom’s test to be worthy of the gnosis.

He took the name Scaramouche after being trained by the shady organization known as the Fatui, the main villainous force in the game and usurped his mother. In other words, a blackened tyrant character!

...And you were the betrothed his mother set for him - executed in the future because he didn't want any trace of Ei’s influence. Amazing.

The future Kunikuzushi would be an arrogant, tsundere and soft-for-only-one-person type of character, but now, he was like a gentle, tucked away from the world young prince.

Wait…. wasn’t he also gullible before?! Very cute, but it's no wonder he blackened so quickly with such a naive personality!

You, well, technically, the character [Name] [Last Name] ended up in this situation after they threatened to leave Kunikuzushi because he was far too fragile for their taste. A side character who’d contributed to Scaramouche’s blackening and paid for it with their life. That was who you were.

Okay, now you pity this boy a lot. He already had a traumatic childhood with Ei not giving him enough love and therefore a plethora of issues, and he'd even end up being a crazy tyrant who stopped at nothing to get the main protagonist in his grasp! For your death flag not to happen, you HAD to do something about that.

You had no choice.

To survive this horrendous fate, you came up with a plan. And that would be Plan give-kunikuzushi-all-the-love-in-the-word-before-he-meets-the-protagonist-and-turn-into-a-blackened-dark-tyrant!

Okay, lengthy plan, but to plan ahead is to be smart, so you can take care of the name later.

—

So far so good, this plan of yours. Plan get-kunikuzushi-to-turn-into-a-sparkly-prince character and not his blackened self was going well! (You gave up on thinking of a cool name) Thank god for cliche romance novels.

So far, you've increased your proximity to him, including him to spend time with you, showering him with bouts of affection and care. And so far, it's been paying off. The once secluded Prince has become so cute and so sweet!

You have to pat yourself on the back for this. You were doing the protagonist a huge favor that now they had a wonderful love interest in their sights for future reference.

Although, if there was one nitpick you had on your conduct, it would be the fact that Kunikuzushi didn't take kindly to others aside from you, and would even be panicked, utterly devastated if you even brought up the mere mention of leaving.

“Break… our engagement in the future?” if it weren't for him looking shell-shocked and deathly pale, the furrow on Kunikuzushi’s face would've been cute. “No! I don't want that! You aren't planning to leave me, are you?”

He gives you the most horrendous god kneeling look of a plea, and of course you drop the subject immediately.

“It was a joke, of course. I'd never want to break our engagement!” you hurriedly reassure, gently taking his hands in yours.

Kunikuzushi looks at you, all puppy eyes and pink cheeks. So cute. Who wouldn't want to stay by his side? You reassure him, “Whatever happens, I'll always stay by your side, okay?”

He looks at your intertwined hands with an unreadable expression on his face. “Do you promise?”

You nod. “I promise, Kuni.”

He nods, gripping your hands tighter, and his expression rivals a blazing sun, brimming with conviction as he pulls you in for a huge hug.

And of course, who wouldn't turn down an opportunity to hug their favorite character?

Surely this time, you’ll definitely escape the death flag and horrendous side character ending, right?!

You don't notice the shadow on Kuni’s face when the mere mention of being separated from you comes up.

In the back of your mind, you wonder what would happen if your Kunikuzushi met the protagonist. Would he immediately fall for them? you wonder, and an uncharacteristic pang of discomfort tugs at your chest. Ah, what would it matter.

You smile at the gentle, pristine and kind Kunikuzushi that's currently excitedly telling you about how Ei praised his sword skills after he beat his younger sister. Even if the main protagonist would come here, you could keep this adorable Kunikuzushi for yourself for just a little longer.

You kiss his cheek, and he heats up. Yes, the future can wait for now.

How the hell did it come to this?

“You told me you'd always stay by my side, right?” a hand slicked with blood is resting on the side of your face. Electric indigo eyes, these ones now having a ruthless glint to them, stare up at your own. “I've removed everything else that can take you away from me. Now, you have no reason to leave.”

By remove, he meant the man who'd decided to make a move on you after you went to the gardens for some fresh air. Hence the blood on his hands and sword, hence the reason why there's a dead body by your feet.

The once adorable and fair-faced Kunikuzushi still turned into Scaramouche after all, and you failed to prevent his blackening. He was truly, undoubtedly the same game Scaramouche.

But… Why was he acting like this? Wasn't this the exclusive feature only the protagonist should be experiencing?

He presses a kiss to your forehead, then the back of your palm. You blush.

Yes, he is now an extremely dangerous individual capable of executing anyone he deems appropriate to just for the sake of it, and yes, this same man is kneeling before you as you're just about to leave after the main storyline cg act just started. And yes, like the protagonist, you should stay far, far away from him.

But could you really? When he was pleading you with such an expression of longing and yearning? He takes your hand to caress it to the side of his face, eyes haughty and grin unsettling, gosh was he so… so attractive, like that.

“You won't leave, right?” Why was he so…. so sweet? Why was this scene structured as if you were the one he wanted to be with, not the protagonist? “You promised me, after all.”

….And why on earth did your heart leap out of your chest when he said he wanted you to stay?

(It was hard to pretend you didn't know why when the smile on your face said otherwise.)

1.5k words, only the real ones know that ive been planning a cliche otome game au since day 1 I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT HAPPENED TO ME WHEN I WAS WRITING THIS FIC 😭 might turn this into a series if people like this though <3

@ MHIIEEE : do not repost, copy or plagiarize or claim my content or work as your own.

[vigilskeep]

do you actually have a ranking or like. rundown of each love interest's particular brand of insanity re: tranquil beloved...? or if that's too big an ask perhaps the highlights.. i am sitting so attentively reading all of the ones you've detailed thus far

in no particular order

zevran: cruel to the end to ask him to have his love’s blood on his hands again, but if he believed it was what they would have wanted, it would be the gentlest, tenderest, of assassinations

morrigan: what power does a templar possess that is beyond her ability to reverse? she will claw the answer from the far corners of the earth and the furthest reaches of the fade before she abandons what is hers

leliana: once, the chantry sunburst was a comfort, a sign of refuge in a world of darkness. now she can only see the one burned into their skin, the wondrous gifts the maker gave to them stolen in the maker’s name, the cruellest game he has played yet. could she keep her faith through such a test? would she even want to?

alistair: there is a hollow in his life that can’t be laughed around. a sick weight in the stomach, remembering flipping his runic token between his fingers in distraction through every chantry lecture where they promised this was necessary. he’s angry. he’s beginning to think he might be a very angry person, really. he’s beginning to think he’s got good reason

fenris: he wonders if, when the lyrium was touched to their forehead, it burned the way his does. he thinks better of asking. there was a time when magic felt like a curse on them both that he couldn’t break. he wants it back

anders: history always repeats itself. there are certain inevitabilities, foregone conclusions, lessons the circle teaches well. you escape, you get caught. you love something, they take it away. you destroy the last thread tethering a mage to humanity—you’re that brutal, that cruel, that stupid—and all you’ll have left is an abomination

merrill: she never understood tranquillity until it was this close; she could never really believe it was possible. it doesn’t matter. her love’s not quite here right now, even as she chatters away to them, but it doesn’t matter. you can fix anything, as long as you’re willing to pay the price

isabela: it’s her own fault, really. her own fault, for taking a chance on someone so targeted, so foolish, so—brave. her own fault for believing them, when they promised she wasn’t going to lose them. she should leave. there’s nothing left for her here. but it’s gotten so hard to run away

sebastian: this changes nothing. his love is as cold as the portraits that line the halls of the palace in starkhaven, as silent and empty as the chantry statues that offer no guidance for what will come. he still kisses their cheek, takes their hand, walks at their side. he is still a husband; he still has his vows, and one more to add to the rest—to find who blackened the maker’s name with this, and teach them what His judgement truly looks like

[doe-eyed-fool]

Fallen {Chapter One}

Alastor x (fem)Reader

Summery- Innocence meant nothing in a place like this. Here, innocence was weakness. It would only get you killed. And yet, it was craved by the most twisted and sinful of demons.

Innocence to them, was something to be tainted, corrupted, and ruined beyond saving. It gave them great pleasure to destroy that innocence.

And he was no different. To him, she was nothing more than a new form of entertainment. But even he, as demented and cruel as he was, could not ignore the feeling that slowly grew deep within his blackened heart.

"What have you done to me?"

I was once a woman of god, my faith unchanging and strong. Because of that, I was granted entry into the kingdom of heaven. However, it would not last.

I awoke in a dirty and dark alleyway, my whole body ached, my mind struggling to keep up. My eyes opened, and I was met with a most horrifying scene. Above me, in the blood red sky, was a giant pentagram that loomed over all. My heart sank upon realizing just where I was. Hell. I had landed myself in hell.

But, how? I was in heaven. I had earned it. I had been good. I've only ever been good. I was faithful and true. So why? I brought myself to a sit, as I did so, a sharp stab of agony shot up my back. I failed to hold back a cry of pain.

Looking back on myself, a gasp escaped me as I found the source of my pain. My wings were still there. Once neat soft white feathers, now messy and dirtied from the ground. But that was not the worse of it. What made my stomach lurch, what caused the horrible throbbing pain I could not ignore, was the broken joint on my left wing.

The bone jutting out from flesh, golden blood dripping down the feathers of my wing. The fact that I had wings at all was proof enough I actually was in heaven. That, and my long white and gold-trimmed dress. However, it only made my confusion grow. If I was in heaven, why am I here now?

I took a shaky breath before attempting to stand, however it would not happen so easily. I hissed out as I felt a sharpness in my legs. Looking down, I saw more of my blood leaking from the various cuts along my legs. One nasty deep gash in particular on my right calf. This wasn't good.

I was bound to be attacked by some loathsome demon if I didn't try to escape. Flying wasn't an option, and neither was walking it seemed. But if I didn't do something quick then-

"Well. What do we have here?"

My breath caught in my throat at the sudden voice. I looked up to see a rather tall, well dressed demon standing before me. His grin, filled with sharp teeth, made my skin crawl. His deep red eyes bore into my own. He looked at me as if I were his next meal, and in a place like this, I very well could be.

I kept my mouth shut, even if I wanted to talk, I couldn't bring myself to speak. So, he filled the silence himself. "I thought I had seen something a bit strange earlier. It's not everyday you see an angel falling from the sky! Well, not unless it's time for the yearly extermination. If that's what you're here for, I'm afraid your a tad too late." He said with a chuckle. Still I kept quiet, he continued.

"Though, you do not look like the usual exterminators. No, I don't think you are. How very interesting." He took a step closer to me. Finally my body reacted, I scramble to move back as he grew closer. My back hit the hard brick wall behind me, I wince at the pain I received by doing so.

My heart was beating out of my chest, tears gathering in my eyes. My reaction seemed to have been amusing to him, as his grin grew wider.

"Afraid?" He leans down, his face inches from my own. "You should be." I shut my eyes tightly as he moved his hand up to my face. Flinching as his clawed finger made contact with my skin. I felt him move a strand of my messily tangled hair out of my face, before his hand left me.

"A creature like you my dear, is just begging to be harmed in a place like this. Though, I don't entirely blame you. You appeared to be heavily injured." I dare to open my eyes, only to be met with his sharp gaze.

His eyes only left mine briefly to meet my broken wing, then down to my injured legs, then back up to my face. "Quite the fall you had." He chuckled. I only nod. That had to be right. I fell from heaven. It was the only explanation that made sense.

Why else would I be here? The demon stood straight again, looking over his shoulder for a moment before turning his attention back to me.

'I doubt I'll ever get an opportunity like this again.' He thought, his grin somehow growing even wider. "Tell me, what do you plan to do now? Surely you intend on leaving this horrid place, yes?" He questions. Of course I do. I don't want to be here any longer that I already have. I nod my head, words still failing me.

"It will be quite the challenge my dear. You can't fly, and no one leaves hell just like that." He says with a snap of his fingers. "What will you do?" An excellent question. What will I do? What could I do? Panic set in quickly as I realized that there was nothing I could do now. I was stuck here. I would never be able to leave this god forsaken place. The tears finally began to roll down my cheeks, my shoulders shook as I cried.

How could this have happened? Why was this happening? Perhaps I've done something wrong? Maybe I've upset god in some way? Is that why I'm here? I'm being punished? Is that it? The demon's voice caught my attention once more as he spoke.

"Oh, how I hate to see a lady cry." I could have sworn there was a hint of sincerity in his tone. But I would be a fool to think a demon could feel sympathy for anyone. "Perhaps, we should make a deal."

I wipe a few tears away before looking at him with a confused glance. "I'll try and find a way for you to return to heaven. And in return..." His expression grew dark and sinister. "All you have to do, is amuse me." Amuse him? My stomach churned at the thought of what a demon would find amusing.

I look up at the sky, the pentagram's glow stinging my eyes. Heaven was out of reach, but I yearned for nothing more than to return. The deal almost sounded tolerable. I look back at the demon and finally, I spoke.

"W-Will you hurt me?" My voice cracked. "Of course not!" The demon waved his hand, as if dismissing the thought. "I'm rather curious about you. And I can't have someone like you harmed. Your value topples almost over all here. Many demons would kill for a chance to obtain an angel such as yourself. That alone is enough for me to keep you in tact as much as possible." His words weren't comforting, that's for sure.

But he said he wouldn't hurt me. I think. I couldn't trust him, but what other choice do I have? I don't want to be stuck here forever. The demon offered his hand. "What do you say?" He asks as a faint green glow engulfed his hand.

I sigh before hesitantly taking his hand with my own. As our hands clasp, the glow engulfed mine as well and a sting could be felt throughout my palm causing me to wince. The glow grew brighter, I shut my eyes tightly to shield my eyes from it.

I missed the twisted smile from the demon, but I felt his hand tightening around my own slightly before the glow finally calmed down and went out. The demon let go of my hand, only to pick me up. I gasp as I felt myself being hoisted up into a bridal style carry.

I couldn't bring myself to look at him, so I kept my gaze down at his chest. "Hold on tight." He warns me. And before I knew what was happening, I felt a rush flow throughout my body. It was almost like the feeling you'd get when going down a steep drop on a rollercoaster. And suddenly, we were in a new location.

I look around and take in my surroundings. There was a rather nice looking home before me. Well, I could consider it nice if it didn't look...haunted. I could have sworn I saw a shadow move in one of the many windows. Surrounding the home was a swamp, the water was infested with gators.

But not normal ones. These gators were far larger, their scales an inky black, multiple sets of eyes glow a deep red, and their teeth abnormally sharp and long, stained with the blood of I didn't know what. The plant life was unnatural as well. While they were alive like normal plants, they were sentient.

Looking for some unfortunate passerby to feast upon. This being proven by a demonic version of a frog hopping by one, only to be snatched up and ripped apart. I look away, not wanting to watch as the sound of crunching and squishing filled my ears. The bugs were abnormally large too, and just as carnivorous as the other creatures of the swamp.

"Home sweet home." The demon sighs before walking up the porch stairs. He walks in, the inside completely dark at first before he steps through the threshold. Like magic, light filled the home. And once again, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, shadows retreating into darkness wherever they could find it.

"Now, let's get you patched up." The demon says as he heads up the stairs. He brings me to his bedroom and sets me carefully on the surprisingly soft and comfortable bed.

I tried to keep still, as not to irritate my wing any further. But nothing could ease the pain, I winced and hissed out sharply as another throb jolted my wing. I could have started crying again it hurt so bad. The demon took note of that before moving to my left. I watched him carefully, wary of what he would do next. He said he would patch me up, while that confused me, I still didn't trust his word.

"This might hurt. But do try to keep still." He says before moving his hand over the broken bone. I move away fearfully, a foolish thing to do. I cried as more pain shot up my wing and back. "What did I just say?" The demon sighed.

"What are you going to do?" I ask sharply. He didn't have anything that could properly set the bone, nothing to ease my pain. Did he intend to force it back? "I'm going to heal it. But I need you to sit. Still." The demon said sternly. Still noticing my hesitation, he rolled his eyes. "I will try to make this less painful as possible. Now, are you going to do as I say? Or are you going to just sit there, still in pain?"

I sighed heavily before doing as I was told. I shut my eyes tightly after I watch him move his hand back. Suddenly I felt a shift in my wing joint, but no pain followed as I had expected. After a moment or two, Alastor moved his hand away.

"There we go. All better." The demon says softly. While I felt no pain, I never felt more light headed. My stress finally caught with me and felt I just might actually pass out. My body began to fall forwards, but the demon caught me before I could fall completely. I go limp in his arms, my eyes lids drooping. I heard him chuckle before I felt him moving my body, he gently laid me on my back.

I look up at him with tired eyes, his grin remained the same. I got the feeling he was enjoying this, it made me more sick to think about it. "Try and relax. I'll work on your legs next." He tells you as he moves his hand down to hover over them. I then heard him laugh, before I could question him he spoke.

"My, how rude of me. I've yet to introduce myself. I suppose I've gotten use to everyone knowing who I am, that it slipped my mind." The demon glances at me, he spoke his name with the most charming of tones.

"My name is Alastor."

Alastor? It was such a nice sounding name for a demon. "And who do I have the pleasure of knowing?" I took a shaky breath before answering with a shaky and cracked voice. "Y/n." Alastor's grin soften for a moment as he spoke my name. "Y/n. What a lovely name."

It felt strange to hear a demon speaking my name. It felt wrong. Though, it wasn't any worse than actually making a deal with him. I close my eyes, and begged god for forgiveness. I hope god could forgive me for what I've done.

I only do this to return to god's light. That's all. Please...please understand. The more I thought about that deal, the worse I felt. I didn't want to think about it, but it would always be there. In the back of my mind, will forever be the guilt of my choice.

And I could only hope that whatever this deal would entail, wouldn't be as bad as I fear it would be.

[50cal-fullauto-astarion]

hot in sarajevo ii

[ part one ]

könig x f!reader operator (no use of “y/n”) / 7.3k words / NSFW

cw: body modifications in the form of könig's split tongue, references to monsterfucking, cunnilingus, vaginal sex, actually pretty sweet all things considered. a.n.: this literally kicked my ass during the two months it took to write it, and i sincerely hope you enjoy! sweet to the first half's sour, with a little surprise at the end if you read between the lines. ETERNAL thanks to @dotcie for beta-ing this for me, it wouldn't have been half as lovely without you, and to @parttimeprophet for helping me with my german so i wasn't making silly mistakes <3

The safehouse is a two-story, narrow shed shoved between two other, significantly older, significantly more robust stone buildings. A shithole that looks like it was made of tinder and afterthoughts, but it’s as glorious as an oasis after ten miles of hiking east over craggy, stony hills under a searing sun-fall. 

The fading light cooks your back, and there is an uneasy, but needy tension between you and König in the aftermath of a successful and gruesome assassination. Neither were strangers to such orders handed down by KorTac, but you were both experts in carrying them out with bloodthirsty perfection. 

When you’d left the campsite staging area in the center of the forest–where König taken you into his lap and fucked you senseless–he hucked you up on his back and hauled you through the forest without asking.

He was not a difficult man to read, at times; he’d felt bad for making your cunt sore. 

The thirteen hours of broiling under the harsh Adriatic sun in full-body ghillie suits didn’t ensure an easy or pleasant slog into the city proper. After the maniacal fuck that König required to jailbreak his emotional regulation, you were lucky you were walking at all. 

It seems to your eye that, sometimes, he views the world as an iPhone in the hands of an angry fourteen-year-old, and all his ailments are caused by wanting to watch porn outside of their parents’ childlocks. He could do that, and easily, if only he could aim his destruction at the proper target. Holding that thought, you have to remind yourself that König didn’t have any kind of a phone until he was eighteen. 

His parents had been of an older generation and had little interest in advancing technology, and no interest in throwing their scant money toward any of it. They’d continued to stagnate in the past–rotting in a poverty-burdened, filthy hoard house, amongst kennels of well-bred Doberman dogs that were better loved than he–while König had moved into the city and the modern era. But he still enjoys jailbreaking his iPhones, if only because he can. 

Maybe because he hates restrictions and authority. Maybe because they are the only concepts he understands, even as he struggles against them–though he always ultimately succumbs. 

Well. He hates restrictions and authority that doesn’t make him cum. 

You’re both dressed down to hiking civvies, and he’s got a black cotton gaiter pulled up his face. You’re sweating in sheets that cascade down your breasts, stomach, and back. Your thighs soak the legs of your pants, and every stride renews the raw, dull ache of chafing skin. There is not a stitch of clothes on your body that does not cling disgustingly to your overheated skin, making you feel beastly. 

By looking at König, and his sweat-blackened shirt and narrowed eyes, you can tell he feels the same. A shower cannot come soon enough. 

The exfil vehicle that had been waiting after the hike has done well enough of a job, but the closer you got to the safehouse, the narrower the roads became. Ultimately, it has to be abandoned several streets down. Left in a back alley, you pull yourselves out and pop the back hatch, where he pulls the strap of a surplus rucksack over his shoulder. He also  takes yours without asking, and adds it to the weight.

“What the fuck are you doing,” you say, not even allowing the end-pitch of a question.

“You can carry the case,” he replies. What an utter gentleman, allowing you to slug your own equipment, like you hadn’t spent years and years humping full packs across the hottest hellholes on the planet under active fire. You’re too tired, and too close to heatsick to argue it too much. The streets around here are mostly dark, quiet and full of Bosnians that mind their business. 

Baščaršija is a beautiful place. The old town is full of ancient mosques and minarets on stone-paved streets, some narrow, some wide. There’s one slim street in particular that you pass down, by far older than the necessity of wide paths for motor traffic, where the shops lining it are all broad, tall windows, the lights from within warm and softening the darkness fading into the city. 

You pass antique stores, bistros, couples and gaggles of friends crowding around each other, listening to music from their phones, smoking cigarettes, laughing. It’s nothing like home, a completely different animal, but it pulls you in. No one in this city knows that you and the man you walk beside are the cause of four monstrous deaths in the hills. 

You are two strangers, finding solace in hands reaching for hands, a moment of exhaled relief when contact is made by the tentative and exploratory brush of fingers. For a brief moment, you let yourself buy into the thought that you are just a backpacker, finding your way to lodgings with your boyfriend, carrying an odd case that could be anything. 

König’s grip becomes more insistent, a thick layer of dependence in its tight hold, and he looks dead ahead, head lowered, shoulders bunched. You give him three quick squeezes–I love you–and he answers it back with four–I love you, too. You now turn your attention to getting a read on him.

Normally, he is amped after a successful mission, but he was already needy. His jaw is set hard, and his eyes are flat and flinty. He’s looking, but not seeing. You know that he’s turned against himself.

The pair of you had fallen together in a frenzy. To call your fall for one another an orbital strike would be an understatement. Yours was a crash site made home, and the months of settling under the strange, but welcome and cherished atmosphere of a relationship had begun to peel away the dermis, revealing the sensitive nerves and muscle below.

There lives a hatred in König’s soul that often turns inward. Would that he could rip himself to shreds like a sheet of paper folded and twisted under nervous hands. And he does. You still haven’t found a way to break through those walls–hell, you don’t think he even knows how he erected them, because he would also see them crumbled and turned into utter wreckage. 

If you were going to pull logic out of the chaos that’s occupied his body since he was thirteen, you would have to admit to yourself that there isn’t anything you can do. That he’s the one that has to somehow find away to break apart and rebuild the way he thinks, nearly on a molecular level. 

With no other help to offer, feeling weak and useless in the face of his battle, you hold his hand, and you walk beside him.

“I’m sorry,” he says after two blocks of walking. Spits it out sudden-like, not meeting your eyes. His posture is fucked, slumping him forward. 

“Stop that shit.” No heat, you never use heat with him; the man’s been burned enough. “Wouldn’t I tell you if I didn’t like the way you handled me?”

There is a telling pause, you can feel the lie he’s building on his tongue become too big to swallow or spit. He grinds it down between his molars, and his hand grows tighter around yours in desperation. 

“I think you would lie to make me feel better.” 

It’s an earnest and brave bit of truth–the man developed a frightening skill with white lies through his life to survive all of the shit hands he was dealt, and his skin crawls under the admission. But your love is dissection, vivisection: it has given you months of slow, thorough study, and an understanding of what patterns his thoughts led him down to land on that conclusion. 

It is what he would do to make you feel better.

“Lee,” you say, using the part of his real name that he finds acceptable, and only from you, “you know I give more of a fuck about your security than your comfort when it comes to shit like this.”

The blunt admission makes him stifle a wince, but he holds tight when you slip out of his hand to wrap your arm around his waist, his arm around your shoulders.

The moment you’re through the threshold of the safehouse, the Steyr’s case hits the floor, along with your packs, and out come the sidearms. You and König slide right into formation, clearing the building room by room, call and response in flight like crows. 

He takes the lead, and you follow–as much as he might not like the designation dumped in his lap, he is good at it, running hot with his jaw ticking, eyes engaged and unblinking. It was a barb during the fuck, calling him an insertion specialist, but there is not another soul at KorTac that you would trust with your safety on the ground the way you put your life in his hands.

After the building is confirmed clear, it comes time for your speciality. Both of you are experts in urban warfare, but where his skill lies in blunt force, yours burns brightest in paranoia. 

Paratrooper by training, guerilla tactics by experience, tearing apart the house in search of bugs or aberrations. Anything wrong, anything out of place. It takes longer than the clearing, König helps, and at the end, the safehouse is as spotless as it can be from a tactical standpoint. 

Standing in the attic bedroom, you stretch your back. “I’m radioing in. You hit the shower.”

He shakes his head and makes an argumentative noise. “Nah. Give me your pieces, I’m breaking down and cleaning everything,” he says, holding his hand out expectantly. 

He presents his .50 GS–a literal hand cannon, and a fraternal twin to your own–without asking, and holds it out to you by the barrel. You do not like the way your hand feels wrapping around the checkering on the grip. You do not like that it’s aimed at his stomach. 

You take it anyway, holding it loose in one hand with your finger on the trigger guard, and pass him your P99 and matching .50 from the holsters under your arms. There is sore white all around his eyes, and he is not blinking. 

“Where are you setting up?” he asks, voice tense like a wire-plucked.

Your initial report runs smoothly, getting in contact with Majka on a secure, encrypted line on the tablet usually kept in König’s possession. For this operation, your call signs are Schakals. Jackals. Wild things, unafraid of humanity. Wandering far too close, with teeth too ready to reveal under peeled chops.

König stays close, breaking down your guns a mere cushion away on the couch where you’ve planted your ass, hips aching and thighs tight now that the aftershocks of sex have long, long faded. His head remains bowed, and his gaiter remains in place. Every few minutes, he rolls his shoulders back. Forcing the blades of bone together, trying to release tension that will not let go.

When your report closes out, and you move to sit forward reaching for your cigarettes and lighter, König jerks as he turns to you. “Where’re you going?” His question is brittle, and keyed-up, eyes darting over your body as you settle back a bit.

“Nowhere, calm down,” you tell him, lighting two cigarettes. “Can I pull down your mask so I can give you this?”

He responds in a subtle nod, and you reach for his trappings to tuck the cigarette into the corner of his scarred mouth. König tries to follow your hand when you pull away, a nigh-unconscious tell that gives away his endless desire to be near you, always. It’s a level of wantedness you still grapple to understand–and it’s gut-turning fear mixed with crushing want that makes you pull your hand away instead of cupping his jaw.

You were never told what to do with the parts of yourself that somehow remained soft through the abuse of years. You’re stuck having to teach yourself, and it is not an easy process, though König has helped break an innumerable amount of those barriers. 

He looks kicked when you sink back into the armrest of the couch, until you shove your feet under his thigh, flicking your eyes toward the neatly disassembled handguns on the trunk-cum-coffee table before him, a silent nudge of keep going. 

Some peace washes over him as he cleans the broken-down guns, heeding your urging. 

His eyes don’t ever soften, not that you’ve ever really seen–except for rare moments, when he looks at you, and you wonder what visual information his brain is processing from his retinas. It puts you in a wondering state: curious if he thinks of you in the poetry of weapons engineering, or nuclear physics, or the black shine of blood spilled at night–but his gaze isn’t dagger-edged in concentration. 

Neither would you call it contentment. You know König is only content when he’s burned through all of his bad energy, and all the screaming in his head has died down to guttering, airless moans.

“Do you want to go out and get food later?” you pose to him, thinking back on the smell of kebabs roasting over burning coals overwhelming your memory and empty gut, and he nods again. Neither of you speak Bosnian or Serbian, but his Croatian is conversational, and passable enough. 

“Saw a couple booths doing Turkish coffee on the way. You’ve ever had that?” he asks half-mumbled, his attention unevenly divided. 

“You can do it on a stove, but it’s not the same as…,” he says, drifting, and your mouth twitches toward a smile when you realize he’s moved past the other half of his sentence. A good half inch of ash clings to the end of his cigarette, and it falls on his thigh, utterly unnoticed as he slides the guns back together slow as syrup. 

It’s a bit fun to watch as he pours his attention into the flow of his hands. On the field you’ve seen him breakdown and rebuild these same guns in seconds when demanded. There’s some measure of novelty in watching him take his time.

Your guns are handed back to you, cleaned first and checked over for defects. You slide them back into your holsters, just like coming home as you silently observe him moving onto the Steyr. 

The god-killing gun falls apart in his hands–pulled piece by piece in diagrammatic sequence from the molded foam from a case twice as expensive as your monthly rent–as if waiting for his attention, spread across the coffee table in a way that seems almost indecent to your eye. 

Maybe it’s a situation of projection–identifying with the horrendous and heavy weapon that, just today, took four lives in one of the most brutal ways imaginable. Thinking of yourself in precision machined pieces, willing and eager to disassemble under König’s hands, because you know he will dedicate himself fully to your continued existence and function. 

The Steyr’s all spread out before him like you often are, a pile of components unmade at his hands: unscrewed barrel, its bipod assembly, its scope and sights and grips, its magazine and receiver.You feel yourself pulse, clit throbbing in time with your increasing heartbeat. 

Maybe you should be more open and honest during your next psych eval, if you’re getting this wet over thinking of yourself as similar in nature to a rifle.

This process takes longer, but when König is finished, handing you the cigarette butt to put out, he puts the pieces back into the appropriate slots in the case. He stretches back, smelling like the slick, oily residue of DW-40 and the metallic odor of the faintly acidic oils on his skin reacting with the weapon’s metal. It clings to and pinches your soft palate like the sting of a sweat bee, something you can feel just under your eyes. 

His spine cracks, releasing a hard, meaty sound as the joints give, and he grunts in relief, turning his head toward you. He looks like he’s about to say something, but stops right before the words can gather behind his teeth.

Shit, you must be obvious. Can’t help the pull on your lips as you look up at him, shifting your legs, your thighs pressing together, amplifying the thump of your blood. “Hey.” Stupid thing to say really, but your come-on lines have never been all that stellar. But he’s always excited you, made you feel giddy and frivolously young and unburdened. Like you’re finally able to have all the things were denied as you grew into adulthood, shoved aside in favor of trauma that demanded the attention more.

“Hey,” he says, laughing a bit. He pulls what he can of his scarred lips between his teeth, wetting them, his brow furrowing. “I’m going to wash my hands. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Briefly, there is a twitch in your stomach, watching him go, and the anticipation and giddiness twist for a moment toward sickness. Sometimes, you worry he will leave and not come back. That he’ll have decided that he’s had enough, even with his threshold as high as it is, and he will simply be gone.

But, true to his word, he’s not gone long at all, just gone to the kitchen on the other side of the room, and you are bad off all over again. Watching him bow his head and hunch slightly to fit his hands under the stream of steaming water, soap foaming clear up his wrists, is making your mouth flood and your throat clicking dry. Big bastard, he’s doing it on purpose, hitting all of your buttons.

And the way he maintains eye contact with you all the way back, his hips loose and rocking, his pants already beginning to tent. His deep breathing gives him away, nevermind the fact that he hasn’t pulled his gaiter back up.

He sits back down, turned toward you, and pushes his hands under the hem of your shirt, his palms warm and soft from the wash and scrub. His thumbs knead into your skin, and his lids droop as his fingers tuck into the waistband of your pants. The pressure in his fingertips is possessive, greedy, starved like a street dog. He savors your skin, tracing patterns where he knows your tattoos live beneath your skin, pressing the heels of his hands into your hips.

Your tongue feel like lead. Everytime he touches you like this, it reads loud and clear that he’s holding onto something–someone he considers his. He’s surveying the scope of his lands, his dominion, and, dear god, does he love this country he calls home. 

“Bitte, Schatzi,” he mumbles, leaning forward so minimally anyone else in the world would need a micrometer to measure the distance moved, “let me have your cunt. I’m starved, and you look like you’re having fits.” A wicked smirk flickers over the corner of his mouth as his eyes darken, and his hands grip tighter where they’ve slid to your waist. “I’m probably the world’s biggest asshole, but I can’t stand to just watch you suffer because of me.”

You pull your tongue along the bottom edge of your teeth, thinking of how he was in the woods earlier–sharp-edged and demanding, unrelenting, holding you in place over his cock as he rammed into you over and over, until you literally saw stars and couldn’t breathe. Aggression, all claws, borderline unfit for human companionship, all under a soft gold sunset. And, here, you still would not say the man before you is a different man at all. He’s just König. He’s just Leopold Königsbacher, from Schladming, Austria, who juggles kitchen knives to make you laugh.

“You just wanna sink down there til you grow gills or something?” you ask, a bedroom, sliding your leg into his lap, soaking up the look of relief on his face. His hands slide farther down, cradling the swell of your hips, as you undo your belt and zipper, pushing your pants and boxers down. 

He helps pull them down as far as either of you can, looking fucking ridiculous as your clothes can’t go farther than your boots. Doesn’t pay to take them off, no matter how long you’re going to be here, you might have to run, and it’s easier to keep everything within pulling distance. 

Flicking his eyes over your body, a small, caught-out smirk touches his lips. “Hah. Yeah, jawohl. Would live between your fucking legs, if I could.” His hips roll against nothing, rubbing his hard cock against the strain of his pants. You know there’s an anxiety in him that screams to fuck and to fuck now, and it’s raising its head. 

König has the sort of anxiousness where if the things he desires do not happen immediately, they will not happen at all. His mind works in such a way that even small things become so desperately escalated into needs, he can hardly function without answering those demands.

On the best of days, you’re not much for words, and he has no natural talent for them–he can talk at screeching speeds, expelling high levels ideas that are baffling or frightening with ease, but his delivery is lacking, and leaves his listeners shifting uncomfortably or looking for exits. You, on the other hand, are simply not good at them. Too cold, too strange. Too blunt, or removed. But König understands you as you understand him, and he coaxes sweet nothings out of you more than anyone else has ever managed.

Despite the sweetness that spills from your lips being an understood language between you,  none of your words are the soft, looping things most would like to hear muttered into their skin. In the bedroom-dark safety of bodies-meeting-bodies, you and König still snap out the sounds of predators, and anyone scenting as prey would fail to find the beauty in your phrases as he does. 

And, beyond that, you’re not sure you could even find words. Not with him towering over you between your legs, though he bows lower. Not with the light from the kitchen behind his head hitting the wheat-colored curls escaping from his hair tie, illuminating him like a saint. Lord, he looks like dreams you used to have. 

You reach for his neck, and you tug him down, permission passed without even parting your lips, and the relief that relaxes his eyes is colossal. Like he’s walking his way home in the dark on a path he would know blind and numb, he finds his way to your cunt with the ease of muscle memory. 

But König is still König, and his anxiety will always outweigh his softness tenfold. He lets out this nervous, pitchy hyena laugh of excitement. Not waiting for permission and not giving a second of preamble, he licks you from asshole to clit in a broad, wet swipe with his long, split tongue.  

Electricity shoots straight up your spine. Almost immediately, he buries back in, massaging the halves of his tongue around your clit like he’s painting in brush strokes. 

He ropes an arm around your leg and over your pelvis, weighing you down, and fits his free hand into the crease where your thigh meets your hip. Using that as extra leverage, he pulls himself further in, and pushes your legs further back–hobbled as they are by your clothing around your ankles. Your skin burns like an oil derrick in flames every spot you’re touched, and his mouth is volcanic; you only just this moment realizes how badly you needed to thaw.

You were a barracks bunny before König and your mutual, supermassive possessive streaks; always easy to put out, wet on your own command, perpetually bored and looking for fun stolen minutes at a time. You can easily say sex is a sorely jaded topic in your roster. 

But, holy fuck, every time he hits his knees to devour you feels new, and alien, and strange. 

Not only his tongue—practiced, clever thing it is now that he’s been able to take his natural talent for it to use with you, drawing figure eights and pinching and pulling at you, teasing your hole and your clit at once—but his utter, sustained greed pitched against his plain desire to serve. How he gets more focused and desperate, sucking on your lips, groaning into you, sounds become wetter by the second. 

“Pretty, fuck, your pussy’s so pretty,” he mutters, panting, pausing to kiss your seam. Between your cunt and thigh, your perineum, making you squirm and whine. His dogmatic fervor has always been borderline chilling–you’ve never been handled with this level of desire, or needed so fiercely you function akin to air that is needed to live. 

No one has ever loved you this way–no one before him. If you could wrap the threads of fate around your forearms like the reins of horses, to exert your horrid and steely control over them, he will never have a successor. 

It will always be only him.

You reach down and grab him by the hair at his temples, which you’ve never ceased to be charmed to find is gray before his years. “Fuck me—with your tongue, right now,” you command him, and he complies, only reaching up to hook his thumb in your shirt and bra to ruck them up over your breasts. 

The instant stretch makes you dizzy, squeezing your thighs tight around his head. Don’t his cheekbones just cut right into your muscle, and doesn’t he just moan and heave a whole body shudder under you?  Greedy fucking man, pushing his tongue deeper, scissoring the halves of it wide in all directions, curling against your walls as he finds an angle for his neck that fits him to thrust in and out of you. Feasting, feasting, feasting.

It’s a fullness you’ve only recently gotten used to with him–too much dexterity, too fluid and swirling, and it reminds you shamefully of all the times you’ve masturbated to the point of wrist-aches with tentacles, and aliens, and monsters on your mind. Fevered, otherworldly, inhuman beasts dying of desire, with the sparkling-sharp sentience to know exactly how to slake their thirst and sate their hunger. 

His hands grip tighter, nails digging into your flesh, and you know it’s going to leave bruises, but you don't care. It only gets better when he cracks his eyes, a picture of anguish and ecstasy, moaning deep and rumbling in his chest. 

It seems he brings himself under some form of control. His mouth turns pliant, and the way he tastes you turns indulgent, slow. The only man you’ve ever met who could self-soothe by eating pussy. And, shit. Doesn’t that work out perfectly for you.

Your hands soften, brushing over his tied-back hair, playing with loose ringlets. Staring down at him, watching the creases fade from his forehead and from around his scars, he looks satisfied, and at peace. It’s a look you’ve seen only rarely, not even in his sleep. 

He sighs and groans, kneading your thighs, when he makes you come on his tongue, sliding it in and out of you as lazy as late, humid afternoons; rumbling deep in his throat when you arch off the cushions, groaning and clenching your thighs to keep them from squeezing around his head again.

“Aw, fuck, Kö—,” you half-whine, making him hum a nasal laugh, pulling out of you agonizingly slow. The lower half of his face is a mess with your slick, shining under the light, and his pupils are dilated to the size of fucking 10-cent pieces. 

There’s a proud, giddy cut to his expression, his scarred-crooked mouth pulling into a lopsided grin, chest heaving. 

“Did you like that, Schatzi? Did it make you feel good?” he pushes, his hands coming to your knees, fingers pressing firmly into your flesh. 

“Yeah,” your voice drags as you speak, laughter raspy. Your racing heartbeat is only just starting to slow, and the whole of your body pulses in time. There is delight in being rocked by ground-shaking tectonics of pleasure. There is divinity in the way he looks down at you–starving, an acolyte wanting to worship. “Have a condom on you?”

A quick nod is your answer, and he starts to pull up your body, dropping your legs. It’s ridiculous and hurried, and the laugh that bursts out of you is huge, taking on a life uniquely its own when he starts climbing in between your legs and your pulled-down pants, “What are you fucking doing?”

“Path of least resistance, even though it looks like the path of most resistance!” he barks in return, laughing too loudly and frenetically, filling the room. He hikes your pants up over his ass and onto back, yanking you further down the couch, and deeper into his lap. As simple as if you were just a jump harness he had to wrestle into. “I’m thinking on that fifth dimension shit right now! You have to catch up, Schatzi,” he says, giving you a maniac, you get it? grin. 

“You’re a fucking idiot,” you accuse him, but you’re beaming and cackling all the same, unfastening a chain from around your neck with zero thought, working a fully blind impulse. 

“No, you’re fucking an idiot,” he shoots right back, “really, Liebe, you have to at least try to keep up.”

Oh, and what the fuck. This is König–the one that you dream about, the one you go looking for when the world wants to crush you in its titanic fucking grip. Thinks himself so dog-ugly, dog-tired. Distempered, foul, and unworthy of anything but beating. 

He’d probably sneer, roll his eyes, and insult you if you compared him to the sun, but the thought remains firmly anchored in your head as your hands slide the thin, cheap chain around his neck twice, fixing the clasp at his nape. König’s too distracted to notice much more than lifting his chin to afford you access, as he pulls out his cock and rolls the rubber down it.

When he lines himself up with your cunt, looking too eager, the two fingers you keep tucked between a strand of the chain and his neck tug, tightening the links around his skin. At once, you’ve got his full attention, his chest heaving as he holds himself above you.

“What’s that?” he asks, licking his lips, beginning to tremble, leaning into the pull of pressure. “What’re you doing?”

“I was thinking about playing with your air a little bit. That okay?” you purr, giving the chain another small tug. “Nothing big. I won’t cut your breathing off completely. But I thought you might like it.”

“Oh, fuck.” He starts up laughing again, but it’s dripping with a rotten core of sudden need. “Bitte–think you have to, now. Can’t just tease me with that shit and not deliver.”

It was in your head to pull him down over you, but your breath catches in your throat looking at him. With half your body bound to him by tangled clothing and your own greedy legs anchoring tight to his sides, each of you flush with laughter and arousal, your heart is a bleeding stone on your tongue. Instead of staining your teeth as the blood rolls out of your mouth, it spills in reverse, and you can hardly drink your fill of it before you begin to choke. 

“I love you—” It snaps out of your mouth and dies, the harsh need to hide away your face makes you pull him down, moaning as he slides deeper, and, fuck, it hurts. You’re still so tender, and bruised, and god knows what else from this taking just barely managing to handle the way he’d fucked you that afternoon that anything but slow, sweet, and shallow was going to be an agony endured. 

His hips buck and jag, entire throat filling with the moan of your real name. He tries so hard not to fuck into you fully, planting his hands on either side of your arms as if he’ll bar himself from giving into his own body. 

“Don’t do that, don’t do that, don’t do that,” he begs and rambles, shuddering, breathing in shallow, clipped laps as if freezing. His hips and legs shift, nearly nervous–a horse spooked and dying to run. “Oh, fuck, don’t do that,” he pleads, hanging his head, trying hard to catch his breath.

The chain is so easy to use, and he listens to the summon of pressure, sucking in a breath to hold it tight. His body sways, buffeted by arousal as if he is a ship on deep-rolling seas, and his head ends up sunken within whispering distance of your lips. So close you can smell the sweat cooling through his curls. So close you can taste the copper-tinged scent of his skin without ever licking him.

“You’re so good, Schatz,” you say, tapping on a name you rarely call him, borrowing his language. “Such a good boy. Such a loving boy.” The pain dulls to a throbbing ache that can be enjoyed, his hips slowing as he rocks into you. Already, he runs ragged, but his rhythm is bursting with devotion and slow-melting sweetness. 

There is a monster that lives in your chest, cradling, always, the molar-cracking force with which you love König. The beast beneath that calls your ribcage a prison and a home does not know a single way to handle things in half-measures. There are no lengths you would hesitate to go for the man above and inside you, head bent and buried into your shoulder in supplication.

Your pillow-talk starts to spill out, eyes sliding closed, as you revel in the breath making your skin humid, “I couldn’t stand seeing you with anyone else, Schatz. If you ever left me–ever started fucking another person–think I’d kill ‘em. I’d lose my shit, not being the last person you ever took to bed.”

“I wouldn’t–oh, sheiße–Schatzi, I would never,” König vows in a moan, the sound filling the dip above your collarbone like collected sweat or blood pooled from a spilling neck wound. 

He loses sense of his rhythm, rutting like an animal in heat. It becomes difficult to ride it out with him, timing his peaks with the pull on the chain, forcing him higher and higher. You’re too sore to cum like this again today, but his mouth had seen to it that you were finished. Now it is a matter of making him match as he rides you, pressing more and more of his weight down.

“Cum. God dammit, König, you need to cum,” you command him, breathless, pulling the chain taut now. It’s been entirely too long now that he’s been keyed up, desperate for your cunt, gripping you to his body like he needs the touch to simply survive. The way he breathes, when you allow him, is the heavy heaving of brittle-dry sobs. His skin burns against yours, sliding with the sheer amount of sweat pouring from his body. 

It’s almost enough to make your eyes roll back, listening to him whimper, “I’m trying, I’m trying, bitte, Liebes, I promise,” his voice unraveling into an escalating, hysterical, almost panicked moaning. 

“I know–I know you are, honey. Christ–fuck–you’re killing me. Love how you fuck me. Love how hard you get when you kill people. How you act all fucked up, and vile, and need to cut loose,” you gasp, more of the vulgarity breaking out of you as your ragged pants barely manage to pull air into your lungs. “Know this isn’t that. I know you’re–being gentle on purpose. Fucking me like you need me, ‘cause you do. You couldn’t move on from me–there is no one else, is there?”

There is one last ruthless constriction of chains against his throat, holding him tight. This time you really do cut his air, metal biting into your fingers. The last stretch of his desperation draws longer–long enough you wonder if it was a mistake–as every roll of his hips slides him deeper. 

A sound chokes in his throat, and he holds himself rigid, his shoulders quaking with suppressed trembling as his wrapped cock kicks inside you. He’s not even breathing, obeying the constriction around his neck, and he rocks the longer it draws out. For a stupid moment, you wonder if he’s somehow blacked the fuck out in his frozen state, until the links holding the chain’s clasp give, the necklace snapping.

He pulls in a huge gust of air and collapses on top of you, forcing your chin to slot over his shoulder as his weight crashes down, pushing the wind out of you.

“Shit–damn, baby, was it that good?” you ask, relieved and shaking in time to match his. You didn’t cum, but you didn’t need nor want to. You find yourself perfectly satisfied, the heady, filthy contact of skin sticking together its own prize.

“Shh,” he admonishes you, taking a huge breath, sloppily kissing your neck. 

“We didn’t even shower.”

“Shh,” he now insists, lazily lifting a hand to cup it over your mouth, and he rumbles with contentment as you place your teeth on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger.

After an indecently thorough shower, you both dress in the small cubby of a bathroom afforded to you. It’s a slow process, König seemingly spending more time kissing you and touching you than actually dressing. The sadness and desperation had gone out of him with the sex–it could even be called lovemaking, but. Well. You’re both on the far side of skittishness when it comes to naming something so gently.

But, in turn, you are softer. Kinder. Thawed. When his hands slide into yours, you massage his palms and the heel of his thumb. You squeeze his fingers, and brush the soft veins of his wrist with your fingertips. 

Your love is dissection, vivisection, but there is a reason that flesh is cut and dermis, fascia, and muscle are pulled apart. 

It is to learn the body beneath your hands, and you are so acutely learned in König. When you kiss his palms, he breathes in tightly. When you put a hand over his chest, as if to hold his oversized heart, you swear he would let you cradle it to calm the slamming it produces.

“I love you,” you say to him, sliding your eyes up to his, liquid-smooth, flowing. This time it is said with intent. It is not a burst of confession in the midst of blistering heat, where it feels guilty and fraudulent. This is a surety. This is your heart speaking with a projected voice.

He takes your hand off his chest, his face softened with a weak expression and glittering eyes, and he presses his lips to your knuckles. After the kiss, he holds you there, simply nuzzling your skin. “Ich liebe dich, auch, mein Liebe,” he murmurs, lids sitting heavy over that blue you know so well.

Baščaršija had awoken as you two had hidden in one another’s bodies. The sky is dark as pitch, and the light pollution from the bazaar blots out the stars, but the air smells spiced and warm, with a faint tinge of sweat-touched skin leftover on the locals who had spent their days under the sun.

While waiting in line for the coffee König had mentioned as he’d broken down and cleaned your guns, he examines the snapped length of your necklace. “It’d be an easy fix. Might have to wait until we’re home, but–no, yeah–two minutes, tops,” he says, pinching the stretched-out link that had caused the failure below the free edge of his thumb nail.

You lift a shoulder in a shrug, looking down at his hands. “It’s cheap, I’m not worried about it. I have to have a dozen and a half just like that in my junk jewelry box,” you snort. It’s an easy let-go. It’s garbage silver over copper, and it’s not worth the money that made the tag that once hung from it. 

“Always with the shitty jewelry,” he sighs, bemused, but it’s not a real jab. He still winds the chain around two of his fingers to make a little bundle, and stuffs it in his pocket. He’s not going to let it remain broken, simply because it’s yours. He’s quiet for a moment, though he hums warmly when you turn around and press your back into his chest, your boots between his boots while you wait in the queue. But he starts, “You know…”

You press back into him, humming, “Hm?” in answer.

“I could buy you jewelry, if you want. Real jewelry,” he begins to venture, tone a completely different animal than you’re used to meeting eyes with. It’s almost hesitant, and isn’t that just so massively strange when it comes to this man. “Or…a diamond.”

The word lands like an anomalous warhead–something gargantuan and frightening, that does not detonate on impact. It’s still a terrifying occurrence, but not an instant death as should be feared. Your back straightens against him, and you fall into a controlled breathing pattern in the same way you’d fall into a plummet when running off the back of a cargo plane. Good god, you hope your chute opens.

“Do you like diamonds?” he queries further, soft and anxious. He begins to shift and fidget. He’d hoped for a faster answer to this question-beneath-a-question.

Reaching behind you, you draw your hand down the length of his arms, until he pulls out of his hoodie pocket. Relaxation floods his body the moment you lace fingers with him, squeezing him tight, three times, I love you, and his four beat answer comes quickly. 

“Diamonds are pretty,” you start, slow and careful in navigation of the thoughts ricocheting around your racing heart. Exhilaration? Dread? Hope? You can’t possibly tell, but you know exactly what he’s asking. “I’d want a lab grown one, though. Think we have enough blood on our hands without jumping for something mined,” you further, in small beats. “What about a, uhm. What do you think of a sapphire? Maybe…something heirloom.”

Callused fingers brush your knuckles, and a scarred mouth hidden by a black cotton gaiter lowers to your ear, nuzzling your hair. “I’d love how you look wearing a sapphire,” he murmurs in utter reverence. It makes you scoff a little under your breath–he holds you in higher esteem than he’d ever held any god–but you reach up and offer benediction in the form of your free fingers sliding into his freshly washed curls.

“Maybe that’s something we’ll talk about more coming up, huh?” you ask and assure. It is not a no, you are not putting out his flame completely, but this is something that should not be spoken of while clocking hours with kills. You’d rather not have anything between you and König defined in a setting where blood could shower at any moment. You’d like neither blood diamonds, nor blood proposals. “But, yeah, Schatz. I’d wear your jewelry.”

He presses a kiss to the spot in front of your ear, and quickly pinches your ass, laughing hyena-pitched once again. “Good. You wouldn’t get to take it off, you know. I’m going to put it on you, and a mortician is going to have to remove it.”

You rub the spot he’d pinched, giving him an eye roll over your shoulder. “Ah, I see, so you’re also telling me that you get to die, first,” you deadpan, though you can’t stop the smirk that curls your mouth.

“Of course. Why would I want to hang around any fucking place you’re not?” he throws your way, and in the pit of your heart, you know he means it.

tag-list: @alittleposhtoad @bitchoftoji @jaredhopworthsknickers @kastlequill @miyabilicious @moths569 @pssytrux <3

[photo1030]

Leather and Lace - Chapter 15:  Feelings Revealed

PART 1 - I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU

Summary:  You finally confront Arthur about how you feel about him, and force him to make a decision, whether you are ready for the answer or not.

*This is a long one and will be broken up into multiple parts.

*Special thanks to the wonderfully talented @rivetingrosie4 for beta reading this for me.

Previous Chapter / Next Chapter

**This exquisite image comes from @kmartkiddieisle​​

Tag List:  @rivetingrosie4 @bimbo-dollz @pine4pple-b0i @redwritr @kuri-chans-blog @queer-sadie-adler @joelmillerswifey @gimmethosedaddymilkers @pcotarelo @delilah-grimes @maemortem @wistfulwisteriawitch @lilacxxdreams @plumbeeb @mentallyillfrogs @absolutegeek @spurz @sophiaj650 @uniqueclodzinevoid @lookingformaurice @pawoui @randomidk-123  @yyiikes​  @eddiemetalheadmunson @twola

*I tagged people who expressed interest in the continued story. If you’d like to be added or removed, please let me know. 

Arthur isn’t sure how it happened. He let his guard down, that’s for damn sure. Some bounty hunter had recognized him when you and Arthur were in Ourey last week. He had a tip that Arthur was in the area, but not sure exactly where. And as luck would have it, the hunter was in the saloon for a drink when he just happened to glance over his shoulder and see the very man he was looking for sitting at a table in the corner with a lady, chatting away without worry, like the world wasn't on his back.

Earlier this morning, Josiah Trelawny had come to the camp, asking if you could tend to one of the locals in need of medical attention. There still aren't too many doctors in this area, and this particular fellow is a friend of Josiah's. Dutch agreed to let you go, as long as you got paid for your trouble, of course. And, naturally, Arthur insisted that he be your escort.

After the two of you had made a brief stop in town for needed medical supplies, this bounty hunter spotted Arthur again. He followed the two of you at a distance, careful to not let Arthur catch on that he was being followed. The hunter patiently lingered in the woods that lined the house while you two tended to the sick individual. And once you had left the homestead, he tailed you and Arthur, waiting for the opportunity to take down one, Arthur Morgan.

And now, this bounty hunter has you as his hostage.

The clouds in the sky dance playfully around the sun, alternating sunlight and shadows upon the Earth's surface below as the three of you stand in the clearing. The bounty hunter pulls you tight against him as your hands clutch at his forearm, which has a vice-grip around your shoulders. He holds a well-used revolver to your head with the other. His hot breath carries across your neck and stinks of tooth-rot as his face hovers close to yours. You can feel his torso and hips dig into your backside and it makes your skin just crawl with repulsion.

But the hunter is not focused on you. He stares past your shoulder at the man who is his main target. A sneer of superiority crosses the hunter's lips, exposing his blackened and snaggled teeth. He triumphantly displays his upper hand to Arthur, elated that he has discovered the notorious outlaw's weakness. You.

You watch Arthur's expression turn from surprise at being snuck up on, to one of outrage. His jaw clenches, and you can see the muscles of his face twitch as he grits his teeth together. His beautiful blue eyes, always a beacon for you to stare into, have turned hard and icy gray. Arthur's shoulders square and set, seeming to add another few inches to his already intimidating stature. Although you have heard of how menacing Arthur Morgan can be, you have rarely seen it yourself in person. And it is a terrifying thing to witness. In fact, the last time you saw him this angry was the day the two of you met. And unfortunately, it was a similar scenario then, as well.

"Let her go," Arthur grits out in a low, calm voice. "She ain’t got nothing to do with this."

But the bounty hunter only laughs at Arthur's request, as if it is the most ridiculous thing he's ever heard. "Since when do you give a damn about anyone else, Morgan? Hmmm?" And then the hunter's face changes to an exaggeratedly surprised expression as if he just had a profound realization. "Oooo, wait a minute now. You like this one, don’t you, Morgan?" He turns his face into yours just slightly, but keeps his steely eyes trained on Arthur. "I can see why. She’s real nice." He begins to rub his face along yours, taunting Arthur. "Nice and soft. Skin so pretty. It'd be a real shame if something were to happen to this face." His hand creeps up to cup under your chin, pulling your head back to him even tighter as he shoves the barrel of his gun harder into your temple, causing a quick and soft gasp to escape your dry lips.

Arthur's face contorts just slightly, breaking his cold exterior for just a fraction of a second. And in doing so, it reveals to the hunter that he has indeed hit a nerve, causing a smug smile to dance across his mouth.

"You best get your damn grimy hands off of her," Arthur threatens, his voice almost a growl now and his hands balling into fists of rage. "I ain't gonna tell you again." Arthur's warning sends shivers down your spine as you hear the words drop from his lips. His movements and tone are so slow and deliberate, with a menacing air that radiates off of his body so acutely that you almost do not recognize the man standing in front of you.

The bounty hunter just grins horribly and opens his mouth to drag his tongue along your cheek, further provoking Arthur. The act makes you close your eyes and whimper in disgust. You slowly open your eyes again and keep them on Arthur, not wavering from his gaze. You don’t cry or beg while being held by this pig, but remain perfectly still. The only thing that betrays your anxiety is how your body trembles ever so slightly from your broken breathing.

Arthur can clearly see the fear in your wide eyes. It makes him angry--both at this man, and at himself, for putting you in this situation. He will kill this man for his transgression. There is no doubt about that. It's not as if Arthur likes killing. But he has killed men for far less noble reasons than protecting you. So it stands to reason that this man's end is most certainly inevitable now.

As you stand there with the cold metal of a gun barrel digging into your temple, and with this horrible man pressed against you, you suddenly realize that the reason you are afraid is not so much that you could die right now, but that you could die without Arthur knowing that you love him. Before this moment, you have never divulged your heart's secret to him. And now, you may never get a chance to. You may never hold him or to ever know what it is like to properly kiss him. And worse yet, you'd never know if Arthur ever felt the same about you in return.

As the two men stare each other down, the air goes very still—as quiet as a cemetery at night. You can see Arthur's muscles tense like a spring ready to snap. Your chest begins to heave, drawing air into your lungs much faster now. Your heart races with anticipation. You watch Arthur like a hawk, your gaze never wavering from his. And then you see it. You see Arthur's eyes cast down ever so slightly. The hunter doesn't even notice, but you do. And your eyes go even wider with the recognition of it. It's a clear signal of which direction you will need to move.

Faster than what seems humanly possible, Arthur's body explodes into motion, pulling his gun from its holster. The mere second you see his muscles twitch, you let your body go absolutely limp like a wet string in the hunter's grasp. You slip through the man’s arms and drop down to his feet, crumpling hard to the ground. You cover your head with your hands and your knee knocks into your jaw as you curl into a ball as tightly as possible.

Three gunshots crack loudly through the air, echoing off of the treeline and ringing in your ears. You hear a loud, wet thud next to you, thick and heavy as a body hits the dirt. You are hesitant to look up, but you quickly realize that it can't be Arthur. The sound is too close in proximity to you to be him. You slowly lift your head and look over to see the bounty hunter lying motionless next to you. His eyes are wide open and still carrying the look of shock in them. You take quick note of the red weeping holes in his chest. Of the three shots that rang out, two were fired by Arthur, both hitting the hunter with deadly accuracy, with the third shot being a feeble attempt by the hunter to squeeze off a hit before bullets tore through his chest and he slumped to the ground.

But it is silent once again, now. The only sound you hear is your own heavy, terrified breathing as the smell of gunpowder lingers in the air. You stare at the dead man, confirming that he will not be a threat to you any longer. Speechless, you then turn your wide and shining eyes up at Arthur, still trying to catch your breath. Arthur stands perfectly still, a calm now settling over him. This is not a new sight for him, but one that he has been forced to pursue repeatedly. While you are sitting in the dirt, stunned, Arthur seems unphased by the dead body lying ungracefully in a heap on the ground. Sighing, he holsters his gun and slowly walks over to you.

Arthur looks down at you, tilting his head slightly. "You ok?" His voice is soft and concerned. You can only nod silently as he extends his hand down to help you stand.

You place your trembling hand into his much larger one. And in this very moment, the strength that you find there provides a comfort to you that you could not have possibly imagined. His other hand slides under your elbow, providing extra support as he carefully assists you to stand, checking that you have not been harmed in any way.

Once you've come to your feet, you suddenly launch yourself into Arthur's chest, throwing your arms tightly around his neck before he can stop you. For you, it is the safest place to be right now. Your eyes screw shut as you bury your face into the crook of his neck, your arms encircling his shoulders as you cling to him tightly. And instead of recoiling, Arthur evenly returns the gesture. A flood of relief washes over him, now that you are safe in his arms. You feel his strong arms circle around your waist and back, holding you securely to his broad chest as his chin drops to hover above your shoulder, his cheek pressed into your hair.

You still have yet to cry, but you are trembling terribly. And he holds you even closer, his hand sliding up to cradle your head now, in an effort to soothe your shaking. "It's alright," his voice floats from his lips as they hover next to your ear. "I got ya, girl. I always got you."

The two of you stay this way for several minutes, not another word spoken. You feel the nervous energy drain from you as Arthur holds you to him. His body pulls it from you and replaces it with his own body heat. Finally, you pull back from him and you gaze into each other's eyes. Your lids flutter at the wave of love you feel for him. Your gaze floats from his vividly blue eyes to his lips. You want so desperately to kiss him.

Arthur's breathing hitches slightly as he notices your chest beginning to float up and down as your heart rate speeds up at the thought of it. He catches you studying his face, your eyes lingering on his mouth. Your hands begin to slide from behind his neck, and across the plane of his shoulders, before gliding down along his arms. Your hands grasp slightly at the bulk of the muscles they find there as they travel. And suddenly, your fingers feel something wet. The quick change in sensation yanks you from your romantic reverie. You look away from his face and down to where your right hand lingers on his bicep and see bright crimson red seeping through the fabric of his green shirt.

"Your arm!" you gasp softly, blinking the fog away from your mind. The sight of Arthur's blood sharply startles you and quickly pulls your mind out of the clouds. 

Confused, Arthur stares at you for a moment, not even paying attention to what you're saying, before looking down at himself. He sees the blood on his shirt from where the hunter's stray bullet cut across his arm, but quickly dismisses it. "It’s just a graze, I’m alright." He gives you a weak smile.

"We need to wrap this," you stutter, trying to collect your thoughts and pull yourself together. Looking around for your horse, you whistle for Blue as Arthur has taught you. The horse picks his head up at the sound and quickly comes trotting over to you from the bushes where he's been grazing. You hurry to get bandages out of your saddle bag and begin to wrap the cotton around Arthur's arm to quell the bleeding. Arthur says nothing, but simply watches your every move as you work. A grin pulls at his lips as he watches how you fuss over him, amused at how your attention has been drastically redirected. His eyes cascade from your beautiful hair, now a disheveled mess, and over your face before settling to your hands and delicate fingers, now painted red with his blood.

Suddenly, off in the distance, you begin to hear voices and hoofbeats. Arthur's head snaps up to attention, his eyes narrowing as he tries to focus on the direction it’s coming from. It could be colleagues of the bounty hunter, or it could simply be passers-by. But either way, the two of you should not be found with a dead man. As you tie-off the bandage around his bicep, Arthur sets his hands on both of your arms in urgency. "C'mon, we need to get out of here."

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

Thankfully, you and Arthur make it back to camp with no more distractions after that. Once you arrive home, you quickly pull Arthur to your med tent to stitch up the gash in his arm from the bullet graze. With that properly taken care of, you split up and head to your own tents to get cleaned up and settle down after the afternoon's events. Eventually, you both wander back to join the rest of the gang who have gathered around the main fire, where you are met with curious faces when they notice Arthur's bandage and the exhausted expressions upon both your faces. With a cup of hot coffee in your hand (and a whiskey bottle in Arthur's) you begin to recount the day's events about the bounty hunter to your friends.

"It's a good thing Arthur was there, then," suggests Abigail when you finish speaking, her eyes dancing back and forth between you and Arthur with a soft approving smile on her face.

From where he sits perched upon an overturned crate, Micah snorts a laugh of disbelief at her statement. "Well, that’s one way to look at it." He leans over to spit dismissively into the grass at his feet. "The way I see it, that piece of shit was there for Arthur, not her," he emphasizes with a wave in your direction. "She wouldn't have been in trouble in the first place if it weren't for him. So it’s more like Arthur was damn lucky he was able to pull that off without getting either of their asses shot. No?"

Leave it to Micah Bell to try and stir things up. Especially when it comes to Arthur.

You pitch a heated glare at Micah over the plumes of smoke that dance in the air, one that matches the burning embers that you all are sitting around. "You have no idea what you're even talki-"

"He’s right," Arthur confesses, cutting you off mid-sentence before you can rant and tear into the weasley man sitting across from you. He takes another gulp from the whiskey bottle and casually stretches his leg out a bit and resettles his weight to get more comfortable. You snap your head to look from Micah to Arthur now, his statement halting you in your tracks. You simply stare incredulously at Arthur, eyes blinking in disbelief.

"I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you just said," the sarcasm dripping from your voice as you shake your head at this nonsense. "It sounds like you said that 'Micah Bell is right'?"

"If that guy hadn’t known me, he may have just passed us by." Arthur keeps his tone calm and stares into your eyes as if to drill this belief into your stubborn head.

"Or he would have just killed us both!" you interject, your voice getting more annoyed by the second as you ball the fabric of your skirt into your hands.

"I shouldn’t have taken you out of camp," he argues back stubbornly, his grip tightening on the neck of the whiskey bottle in his hand. "Should've had Charles do it."

"You always do th-!" your voice raises now as you start to get angry.

"Either way, it’s done now," Dutch's deep voice booms sharply from where he’s sitting by the fire. His voice cuts through the mounting tension between you and Arthur, his hand slicing through the air in the finality of discussion. "No harm done. (Y/N)’s fine, that fella’s dead, Arthur is in one piece. It's over."  Like a parent reprimanding his children, Dutch's tone is firm and unyielding in ending this argument before it can even begin. His dark eyes dart menacingly back and forth between you and Arthur, just waiting for any protest.

You bite your tongue as you hold Arthur's gaze with an unspoken irritation. After a moment of silence, Arthur abruptly gets up and storms off, intent on hiding away in his tent before he can say or do something stupid that he'll regret.

Your eyes follow him, glaring angrily out of frustration, desperately trying to ignore the stinging sensation of tears about to spill forth. The only sound to be heard is the crackling and popping of the fire in front of you.

From where she sits next to you, Abigail places a comforting hand upon your arm and sighs in disappointment. "Just let it go, (Y/N). Let him wallow."

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

The next few days are odd, to say the least. Arthur isn't specifically ignoring you, but he is definitely distracted and in his own head. There is much work to do in camp, so the distraction is welcome, but he is certainly conflicted. A few days ago, he was finally ready to sit you down and profess his affections for you; to finally come clean and speak out loud what has been rolling around in his head and bubbling in his heart for quite some time. But now, that horrible self-doubt is creeping its way back in, like ivy that climbs up the garden wall. And he feels guilty about it, too. One minute you two are inseparable, the next he won't come near you with a ten-foot pole. It has to be confusing to you, he figures. It has to be, seeing as it confuses the hell out of him, too.

Today, Arthur and Micah are riding out to follow a lead on a job. Normally, Arthur does not care to work jobs with Micah. But with John and Javier out on another route, and Bill and Charles each following their own leads, these two men are left for Dutch to send out. The two set out and make their way over to the next town to meet a man about a tip on a supply run. And with Arthur being quieter than usual, it doesn't take long for Micah to start running his mouth.

"You still poutin' over that mess with the bounty hunter, Morgan?" Micah glances over at the other man and his horse, a merciless tease in his voice as he pokes at what he knows is still a sensitive subject.

Arthur gives no answer except more silence and a scowl that deepens as he sits stiffly in his saddle while they travel the dusty road.

Micah gives a slight shrug at Arthur's lack of response. "Maybe that was an eye-opening experience?"

"What in the hell are you going on about now, Micah?" the outlaw asks irritably, finally giving Micah a brief glance in acknowledgement.

"Oh I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud is all," he says, feigning innocence. "But I'm just wondering if (Y/N) is really meant for this kind of life."

Arthur says nothing, but his eyes shift from Micah back to the path ahead of them at the thought. Micah takes quick notice at how Arthur's shoulders tense and his eyes become harder.

"I'm starting to wonder if she'd be better off without you, Arthur. I mean, let's be honest, she really don't fit in too well with the likes of us, now does she?" Micah pauses to gauge the reaction. And he sneers to see he's succeeding in getting under Arthur's skin and decides to keep prodding. "If you really like (Y/N) that much, maybe you should just stay away from her. She'd be a hell of a lot safer that way, don't you think?" Micah smirks to himself as he plants the seed into Arthur's brain. But of course, he'd swoop in on you in a heartbeat if Arthur were out of the way. “It's kinda selfish if you ask me, cowpoke.”

"Yeah, well good thing I didn’t ask you!" Arthur shouts, finally tired of Micah's needling.

Micah drops the reins of his horse for a moment and holds his hands up in surrender. "Now hold on, I didn't mean anything by it. Like I said, I'm just talking out loud here. But one of these days, that woman is gonna realize she don’t belong here with us, Arthur. And you’ll wake up one morning, or come back to camp, and..." he makes a gesture with his hand like smoke dissipating into the air, "... she’ll be gone.”

This statement makes Arthur freeze in his tracks. Although this is an idea that has been festering in the back of his mind for a while now, it is something he is not prepared to hear out loud. And certainly not something to be pointed out by the likes of Micah Bell. "Can you just shut your mouth for one damn moment so we can get this job done?!" Arthur snaps.

Micah says nothing, but holds his hands up again with a shrug.

This conversation germinates in Arthur's mind and puts him in a foul mood for days afterwards. He keeps a distance from everyone, including you. You don’t take too much offense to it at first, since you understand that Arthur sometimes gets in his own head, often needing solitude for lengths of time. Especially after running a job with Micah Bell. In fact, the space is actually a bit convenient right now, since you're trying to keep away from Arthur as well.

The run-in with the bounty hunter has forced you to take a hard look at your situation. You need to decide if you should finally confront Arthur and tell him how you feel about him. The thought of losing him the other day was almost too much for you to bear. But you are also well aware of Arthur's misgivings about personal attachments. You do not want to force Arthur into a scenario that he is not comfortable with. And, while Arthur is worried about endangering you, you are worried about being his weakness, his liability. That bounty hunter was quick to realize that you were the way to get to Arthur. Fortunately, Arthur was more than capable of dealing with that idiot. But what if he wasn't? What if Arthur is ever put in danger because of his weakness for you?

The problem is, you don’t know how much longer you can try to hide your feelings. The girls in camp already know how you feel about Arthur, and it’s pretty obvious to everyone else, for sure. You're almost positive that he feels the same for you as well, so what’s the point in denying it? You thought he’d have made a move or at least said something to you by now. You have tried to leave some not-so-subtle hints, but every time you think something will happen between you two, he always pulls away, leaving you confused and lonely. You know Arthur doesn’t have a high opinion of himself, and that things would need to go slow if this is something that you should pursue. But how can he deny what is so obvious to everyone else?  

One late afternoon you're sitting in your tent, restless from having this internal struggle yet again. So you decide to take matters into your own hands. You huff in frustration, launching yourself off of your cot, a look of resolution on your face as you smooth out your skirts. "OK, that’s it. It’s now or never.” And you burst forth out of your tent in search of Arthur.

You head out into the common area of the camp, surveying your surroundings. And of course, you spot him by the horses, brushing down Buck. He’s been stewing over there a lot, ever since that job with Micah.

You take a deep breath. "You can do this," you whisper to yourself. And you head over to the hitching posts. Your pace is hesitant at first, but the longer your gaze fixates on Arthur, the faster you walk with determination. As you get closer, you casually walk up next to your horse, Blue, rubbing his nose as he nickers at your approach.

“Hey, you,“ you say, giving Arthur a little grin along with your usual greeting for each other.

“Hey…” he grumbles out in reply. He lifts his face, but quickly averts his eyes, as if guilty of some act against you.

"Want to go out for a ride with me?" you ask, your voice hopeful. Your hand absentmindedly caresses Blue's muzzle as you gaze at Arthur, trying to pin him down.

His hands pause in their work, not sure how to answer. He really does want to go out and to be alone with you, but in light of recent events, he thinks twice about it.

You can see the gears turning in his mind to try to find an excuse when he averts his eyes and doesn't answer you.

"Come on, please?" you whine, adding a little childish stomp. "I’m getting restless just sitting around here."

Arthur takes a deep breath as he considers his answer. “Yeah, I don’t think it's…”

"Come on, if you don’t come with me, I’ll just head out on my own," you cut him off with your threat before he can say no. Your hands plant firmly on your hips as you stare him down. "You don’t want me going out by myself, do you?"

Damn it. You know he can never say 'no' to you.

With an eye roll and an exasperated sigh to match, he simply gives you an “Alright, fine.”

Smiling triumphantly with a look that could melt Arthur in moments should he look upon you for too long, you spin around and get Blue saddled up as quickly as you can before Arthur can change his mind.

The afternoon temperature has started to drop to a comfortable degree as you and Arthur head down the path and out of camp. There’s a pleasant breeze carrying the fragrance of autumn in the air. You travel fairly quietly through the woods, only making small talk here and there, before heading to one of the overlooks that you like to frequent. It's a pretty little spot, tucked up on a ridge looking down over the valley. It gives an unobstructed view of the horizon and expanse of the land before you.

The overlook itself is littered with the last bit of wildflowers for the season and is covered with lush grasses that sway with the wind. This place has always been a peaceful getaway for you, and you were so thankful when Arthur brought you here to show it to you. Ever since, this is where you come for clarity and peace of mind. And you couldn't think of a better place to finally tell Arthur of your feelings for him.

You pull your horse to a stop and eagerly hop down from Blue's saddle. Blue follows behind you like an overgrown dog as you wander through the tall grass. Arthur slowly drops down from his saddle, watching you from behind. The sun is in front and off to the left side of you, casting your face and body in a warm, golden glow. Arthur instantly takes notice of how angelic you are. Your billowy skirts unfurl as they catch on the grass and your white blouse soaks up the amber colors of the sun's rays like paint to a canvas. You are so beautiful in this moment that it makes Arthur's heart ache, knowing he’ll never have happiness with you. Micah’s words ring through his mind as he watches you and he has to remind himself that good things don’t happen to bad men.

After you wander to sit on one of the large boulders that jut out of the red soil, you bend over to pick one of the wild daisies growing at your feet. You twirl the bud absentmindedly between your fingertips as you look about at the glorious view. A calm begins to settle over you as the smooth, cold surface of the rock beneath you radiates through your body. Your eye catches a few hawks circling in the sky out over the field in front you. You watch as they magically hover in the air and a contented smile crosses your face. Blue wanders over past you, snorting and nuzzling into your back as he passes, sniffing to find treats in your pockets.

"Get out of here, Blue, I ain’t got nothing for you," you chuckle, pushing his nose away. You look over your shoulder when you notice that Arthur hasn’t followed you. "You gonna join me?" you ask, a smile gracing your features to match the twinkle in your eye.

Arthur stands next to Buck, silent and fiddling with the horse's reins as he shifts his weight. Reluctantly, he walks over and slowly sits down next to you.

The two of you sit quietly for a bit, enjoying the view, until you nervously clear your throat. "So, I'm afraid I haven't been completely truthful with you, Arthur. There’s something that I want to talk about with you." You look down at your hands in your lap as you speak, your fingers rolling over each other. "It’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile now." Taking a brief pause, you swallow before you continue. "I’m not really sure how to tell you this, to be honest."

Arthur’s stomach drops and his breathing becomes shallow as he notes how uncomfortable you are all of a sudden. You won't look him in the eye, and you're fidgeting. Something has you all worked up. And then it hits him: You're leaving. He’s sure of it. After what happened with the bounty hunter, he can't really blame you. And you've brought him out here to tell him. What else could have you this anxious? Arthur can feel his spirit deflate in disappointment. Everyone leaves at some point. But at least you are kind enough to tell him personally after all this time. Micah was right.

"God, I didn’t think I’d be so nervous about this," you mumble to yourself, your hands sweating as they continue to roll over each other in your lap.

"Look, (Y/N)…you don’t have to…" Arthur tries to speak, tries to put your mind at ease, but you hold your hand up to shush him, interrupting before he can get too far.

“Arthur, please, just…let me get this out before I lose my nerve,” you say quietly.

So he sits quietly as he sets his hands upon his thighs, fingers nervously drumming. His mouth goes dry, eyes fixated on the tips of his boots, waiting with trepidation for you to say what you have brought him here to tell him.

You close your eyes and take a deep, steadying breath...

“Arthur, I’ve come to realize…that…I have feelings for you."

And there it is, finally out in the open. Your words hang in the air for him to hear and ingest. No going back now, no hiding it any longer. And with this revelation, a great weight is lifted off of your chest.

You stop, looking at him out of the corner of your eye, testing the waters to see his reaction. But he sits there, not moving, eyes still aimed at his feet. His head is spinning, as this is not the news he was expecting to hear. He’s elated that you're not leaving after all, and breathes an internal sigh of relief. Yet that feeling of happiness quickly turns to shock and concern, when he fully realizes what it is that you have just said to him.

“What did you say?” he whispers, his body rigid with tension.

Suddenly, you become very apprehensive at Arthur's response. You thought he’d be happier than this.

“I care for you, Arthur. Deeply," you say emphatically.

You gently reach over and place your hand over his that still rests on his thigh, and lean forward to try to peer into his face to gauge his reaction. His eyes flicker to your delicate hand on top of his own calloused one. He is frozen in this moment of time, paralyzed. He’s prayed to hear those very words from your lips for so, so long. Yet, he has also dreaded it. For Arthur truly believes that he could be the very end of you.

With a great pain in his chest, Arthur slowly withdrawals his hand from under yours. You look in confusion from where your hands were once folded together, to his face, but he still won’t look at you. Your heart begins to pound loudly in your ears.

"Arthur?" Your voice quakes with trepidation, yet he still sits there, not moving, not speaking.

"Say something. Please?" You sound so small as you beg for a response from him. This void of silence is crushing.

Arthur closes his eyes and winces, knowing the next thing he has to say is the most painful thing he’s had to do in a long time. "I….I can’t," his voice barely a whisper.

Your eyes shoot open wide. "What?" your voice cracks in disbelief.

"You don’t want me, (Y/N)" he says, shaking his head, his gaze still fixated on his boot-tips.

"Why on Earth not?"

"I'm not a good man. You deserve better in this life, and so much better than me.” Arthur's answer is so simple in its delivery, as if this is something that you should have known all along.

You are stunned into silence for a few minutes, processing what he’s just said to you, desperately trying not to get upset. "Don’t I get a say in what’s best for me?" you challenge back.

“No, not in this case." Arthur still won't look at you, and his voice maintains a sad and low tone. His calmness over such a thing is almost maddening to you.

"Look at me, Arthur," you demand desperately. "Look at me!" He turns just enough to give you a side glance before guiltily averting his eyes again when he sees the tears starting to gather around your irises. "Can you really sit there and tell me you feel nothing for me?" you ask incredulously.

“It's not a matter of what I want, (Y/N)." He tries to speak calmly to you, hoping to make you understand and trying not to upset you any more than he already has. But you are not having any of it. Your emotions are a churning sea right now; intense and uncontrollable.

"Like hell it’s not!" your voice is starting to rise now. "Your wants, your dreams, they matter, Arthur. You matter. I know you don’t see that, but I see you, Arthur. I see you." You begin to rapidly blink back the tears forming in your eyes, desperate to get through to him.

"I tell my dreams to ghosts at this point," he mumbles to himself, shaking his head. His eyes dart around rapidly, trying to look anywhere but at your face right now. He abruptly stands up, pacing a few steps. He draws his hand over his mouth, wishing this conversation was not happening.  

"It’s OK to give everything you got, Arthur, but you have to keep something for yourself too,” you implore as you watch him pace in front of you.

“Not this time," he says sternly, finally looking at you with such intensity. "What the hell do you want with someone like me, anyways?!" his own voice now rising to meet yours. "I’m old, I’m ugly, I’m mean…”

“Jesus, you really are broken aren’t you?" you ask in wonder as you take in the sight of him, watching him nervously unravel before your eyes.

“Bah…” he grunts angrily, waving you off. He turns away from you to face the horizon line again, getting more annoyed by the second. But still, you keep pushing.

“Why are you making this so hard, Arthur?!”

“Because!" he spins back to face you again. "It’s only a matter of time before you figure out what a piece of shit I am, (Y/N)! I can’t go through that again. Not again. Not with you.” He waves his arm to decisively make his point. And it is now that you fully understand his greatest fear and worry.

“You don’t know that!“ you beg.

“Yes, I do!" he shouts angrily at you, his volume startling the horses grazing nearby. He is now past his breaking point, his chest heaving with the battle of emotions within him. "Why can’t you just leave things as they are, (Y/N)?!”

“Because that’s not good enough!" you holler back, not willing to give up on him. "Is that what you really want, Arthur?”

“That’s how it has to be. You shouldn’t even be here!” He throws that bomb back in your face, unaware at the severity of its delivery.

The statement cuts you like a knife, twisting into your heart so deep that it makes you gasp and your eyes go wide. And the moment it escapes Arthur's lips, the look of shock on your face makes him regret saying it. Aside from your feelings, Arthur is your best friend. He is the one who brought you here. How could he really think that? It is a blow that he meant to end this argument, but he severely underestimated the damage it would do in its wake.

You are shaken to your core. This is certainly not how you thought this conversation was going to go when you imagined it in your head. You can feel your fingertips and toes go numb, your nerves alight.

You simply stare at him, speechless, before you lean forward and bury your face into your hands, trying to comprehend this nonsense. This lovely moment that you envisioned has gone so horribly wrong. You were so sure that Arthur would fold you up into his massive arms upon your revelation. This adolescent awkwardness that the two of you have danced around for so long could finally be put behind you and you could move on together. You could put an end to the shared notion of loneliness that sits deep within you both. It was a gamble. You would expose the delicate nerves of your heart in hopes that he would accept it. But you sorely miscalculated. Maybe you are too naive? Maybe this romantic notion of loving an outlaw is just a silly idea after all?

You sniffle back the tears that still threaten to spill forth, determined to keep yourself together. Defeated, you slowly stand up, avoiding his watchful gaze, and turn to head back to the horses. Arthur's chest is heavy with guilt from having to hurt you like this. He gingerly reaches out and catches your elbow before you walk away from him.

“Please, (Y/N)," his voice quiet again, pleading for forgiveness. "This is for your own good.” His blue eyes implore you to understand his reasoning.

"Right, Arthur. My own good."

[yaeggravate]

Arlecchino is the White/Black Swan

she has swan motives all over her design; from her hair to her accessories. even her blackened hands could be a nod to the movie black swan (2010).

the ballerina playing odette usually wears a white feather headpiece that pretty much always looks like this. the shape is similar to arlecchino's swept bangs.

black swans have black wings with broad white wing tips; arlecchino's hair is cropped to match this exactly only with the colors swapped. it's like she has the wing of a black swan on the right side of her face and the wing of a white swan on the left.

arlecchino has strange red and black gems on her outfit; these look strikingly similar to the black swan's eye make up from the movie black swan.

the white and black swan from swan lake have french names: odette and odile. arlecchino is from fontaine which is basically fantasy france. i don't think she's lying about this since the developers confirmed this in the livestream.

Lyney: That was how "Father" (Otets), who you might know as The Knave, approached recruiting us back then, too...

swan lake is a russian ballet, which is interesting because they called arlecchino "otets" in the game, which is russian for father. probably just a funny coincidence but otets is pronounced similar to odette.

odile is described as fiery, dangerous and deceptive; the opposite of odette who is graceful like flowing water.

About the Knave: A wolf in sheep's clothing. To exert a higher level of control over people, she puts on a graceful and cordial front. Most of those who have seen her true, crazy self… have gone poof.

this is in line with the wanderer's voiceline about her and from what we've seen from her behavior in the archon quest. arlecchino is also confirmed to have a pyro vision.

odette and odile are usually played by the same ballerina; they are simultaneously the hero and the villain. as you know, harbingers have dual or more identities. the white/black swan fits this theme.

odile is the name of a saint who was blind and was often depicted carrying a pair of eyes on a book. arlecchino has crossed out eyes, and has two accessories resembling eyes stuck on her clothing as seen above.

swans are known to be viciously protective of their young. and well, from the fontaine siblings' character stories we can tell arlecchino is no different.

also just for fun compare arlecchino's possible constellation (the hand of glory) to the black swan's hands

[gaywarcriminals]

Shen Jiu is an Abusive Mother

Yeah this is my Mother's Day post <3 This is just for funsies, and I by no mean think its the best lens through which to see SJ and LBH's relationship— its just a comparison I find interesting, and I was feeling festive 🥰.

To start, none of this is to say that SJ is a feminine character. I don't believe that, and I think that he's often misinterpreted as more feminine by western fans due to differences in gender norms/gender roles (which is a Whole Other Coversation). Maternal/mommy are being used loosely here.

Secondly, I don't think we'd even be looking at SJ through a maternal framework if the man who took over his body wasn't Shen "I would never abort you" Yuan. SJ is mostly pulled into this because he exist in juxtaposition to Mr. Freud's Wet Dream (go read tshirt's SVSSS Freud zine btw, several points here are inspired by it).

The fact remains, though, that even without Wifebeam Supreme playing the part, there is something distinctly parental about the role of Shizun. Shizuns cannot be compared to teachers or tutors, who the child either go to visit durning the day, or who come to the child's home when it's time for lessons. Even with the respect due to them, a teacher remains distinct from a child's home and family. They do not overly incorporate themselves into these things that define a child's life. 

Shizuns are a little different. There is, ofc, lots of variation within the xianxia and wuxia genres, but in most of the stories I've encountered— and more importantly for our purposes, in SVSSS itself— unless the child’s family home is their sect, when a child is accepted as a disciple, they're expected to join their shizun/shifu either in the master's home/sect, or in free-roaming travel. In both cases, the shizun's home becomes the disciple's home, and their shizun becomes the main adult responsible for the child. The master will take over in guiding the child's development from here, shaping them by their hand. Is that not a parent? I think some such imprinting is inevitable, even among more well-adjusted disciples. Do you know who's not well-adjusted?

Luo Binghe enters the sect soon after the death of his mother. There is a mommy shaped hole in his heart. Though absolutely nothing could replace her, he's a sad, lost, and angry child, coming to a mountain of immortal masters, desperately hoping for one of them to take him as their own. As much as he's motivated by fulfilling his mother's wishes, isn't he also looking for a place to belong in this world, now that the hut that he once called home is ruined by his mother's absence? Doesn't he hope, if only for a short time, that someone else will see fit to care for him? As much as Luo Binghe is already hurt and hardened in many ways, he's still just a child; he's not yet blackened beyond dreaming of someone to love him.

Shen Jiu is very much Not That. Shen Jiu is not a merely a lofty immortal ambivalent to his disciple’s emotional needs. No, Shen Jiu hates Luo Binghe enough to unfairly punish and ostracize him, and even puts him in deadly harm's way twice before just outright trying to kill him (the manual, the demon invasion, the abyss). Going by the framework of SQQ as a parental figure, he's undeniably an abusive one. In what way could this be said to be maternal, though? In my eyes, it comes down to motive.

Shen Jiu has a lot of motivations for abusing Binghe, mostly coming down to the fact that's he's more trauma response than man at this point, but one of these is more explicitly outlined in the text than the others: Shen Qingqiu saw three things on the original flavor’s face: envy, envy, and more envy. Envy that Luo Binghe had a mother who was “the kindest in all the world to him,” envy of Luo Binghe’s talent, envy that Luo Binghe would enter Cang Qiong Mountain Sect at the best age for cultivating. He was indeed the kind of person to brim with envy and resentment toward a young child.

Envy and jealously, at least in the western canon, are usually associated with female characters (and though it’s outside the scope of this post to dissect, let it not go unremarked that this trope is deeply misogynistic in origin). They are almost always envious of a younger, more beautiful, and/or more skillful woman, who are posed at the moral superior to the jealous woman. That's right, Shen Jiu is an evil stepmother! He tolerates having no superior or equal on his peak, needing his power and superiority to go unquestioned. Outside of his abuse of Binghe, and the references early in the novel to SJ chasing away talented disciples, I think this is also shown by how the male disciple SJ tolerates the most is Ming Fan, who has only middling talent and is obsequious before his shifu, never challenging SJ in any way, and never threatening to surpass him.

But of course, SJ’s relationship to Binghe is the most obvious example. Shen Jiu sees himself in Luo Binghe (derogatory). He sees Luo Binghe as a symbol of everything he never had. Luo Binghe is a creature like himself that, for no rhythm or reason, was given so much more than SJ. It is also notable that, at least as far as Shen Qingqiu, as an outside observer, can tell, the thing which first sparked SJ's ire was the mention of LBH's mother. Never mind that LBH says in the same breath that she's dead; the fact that when she lived, she was a kind and loving mother to LBH is enough for SJ to envy him, and as he finds more to envy, it comes justification to hate the boy, and to punish him for daring to have someone who died loving him. 

(Side note: after consulting the qijiu server about the implications of SJ’s reaction, my reading is that SJ never knew his mother. The only alternative is that she was a bad mother, but I don't think he would find such unilateral comfort in women if that was the case. It's made me wonder if SJ ever believed that having a mother, a protector, would have spared him his fate. But alas, this post is not about SJ's mommy issues. Another day!)

Even outside the realm of cartoonish villains, I think this particular brand of envy is, in some ways, associate with motherhood. There's a natural tendency in parents to see themselves in their children, but as mothers are almost always the ones more involved in raising children and more expected to foster emotional connections with their children, I think this is both more common and more encouraged in mothers than fathers. Mothers are expected to be in charge of and over-involved in most aspects of a child's life, and in turn their lives are expected to revolve around their children, blurring the boarder between the self and the child. The child becomes symbolic of the mother's past self and what she can no longer be. The expectations on the child are the expectations of the mother's idealized self, and whether the child meets them or not, the mother will resent them for it, for daring to fail when they are her, or daring to succeed when they are not.

That's not to say SJ ever had such deep identification with LBH— he certainly never cared for LBH, and if anything, he's more like a mother who resents her child being born (as though he did not pick this boy out of the dirt himself)— but the hatred for a child under his care being like him but supposedly better off feels evocative of this characteristically maternal form of envy.

And finally, there is the fruit of SJ's actions, and the most explicitly/textually maternal aspect of SJ's abuse: it created Luo Bingge.

“Has Shidi ever considered that, if you hadn’t treated Luo Binghe like that in the beginning, everything that unfolded today never would have happened?”

He had singlehandedly created the Luo Binghe of today,

Luo Bingge, the all-powerful demon, the ruler of the three realms, and Shen Jiu's own personal torturer, would never have existed without SJ's intervention. Luo Bingge is shaped in Shen Jiu's image, and everything Shen Jiu ever did to destroy the boy only twisted him to further fit this mold. Luo Bingge's fate, the shape of his very soul, have been defined by SJ. And what is more maternal than giving someone their life defining trauma? 

[angel-of-the-moons]

Could you do some possessive Baraka x reader? :)

BOY CAN I

Mine

Baraka x Fem!Reader

TW/CW: NSFW, SMUT, Jealous!Baraka, sex, voyeurism (?), exhibitionism (?) unprotected sex, feral/predator, primal sex, biting (c'mon we've all seen this man's teeth), blood play (sort of), breeding kink, slight Kanon fudging for plot reasons

MINORS DNI I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR CONTENT YOU CONSUME

🥩🥩🥩🥩🥩🥩🥩🥩🥩🥩

You were his prized possession, an Edenian who wanted to learn more about Tarkatan culture and customs. Who better to learn from than the leader of the clans, Baraka, who had the good graces of Kitana Kahn?

You studied them well. From your tiny village, you'd only ever heard stories of them, or encountered the occasional raiding tribe that tried (and failed) to pillage your homes.

You knew they were nomadic, that much was a given considering how rarely your own people interacted with them.

But you always wanted to know more. Now that Kitana Kahn brokered a peace with them, you pleaded, as an imperial scribe, to study them. (And oh, boy, learning about the Ritual of Blood was very interesting.)

She agreed, believing that the people learning about one another would bring everyone closer together.

Little did she know that it would bring you and Baraka together as well.

You found out about the so-called Time Merger, what Kotal Kahn had done to his people, and what the Titan Kronika promised him in return. In spending long hours listening, conversing... Until it morphed into him glancing at you longer and longer. Imagining how your soft flesh would be so pliant in his large, leathery hands. How sweet you would taste.

It made him salivate at the thought of tasting you.

It started out with the courting rituals, bringing you freshly hunted meat, weapons, muttering soft, raspy words in his native tongue.

You had a few relationships in your long life, but none ever lasted long.

Whereas many were hesitant, or reserved, Baraka pledged himself to you wholly, "proving" he was good enough to be your mate.

And... Yeah. You gave in to his passion, so intense that your mind could barely catch up. More than once that passion wound up with you having gravel and sand embedded in your knees, bits of desert scrub clinging to your hair as he pounded into you from behind, grooves and scratches in your skin where he'd grazed you with his claws and fangs.

Sex with a Tarkatan? Intense was the tamest word you could use to describe it. Feral was one of the others. It was rough, primal, full of pure animalistic need to not make love, but to mate; to claim you. And you'd be lying if you tried to deny it and say you didn't enjoy it.

At least a little...

The marks he would leave on you, he would go on to explain, were to ensure other Tarkatans would not dare make a move on you. However, those outside of their tribe didn't understand. Yeah, explaining to Kitana Kahn what the marks meant was... awkward to say the least.

Where Tarkatans knew to leave you be, other Outworlders and Earthrealmers did not. Males especially would gaze at you with lust-filled eyes and stand far too close for his liking.

It was after one such situation, where an envoy was sent to administer some supplies as a gesture of goodwill to the tribe that Baraka was particularly set off.

One of the men in the group decided to flirt with you, lean in and give cheap compliments in hopes of getting you out of your clothes, to sneak away for a moment of unsatisfying carnal want.

He knew you were loyal, but something about the way that you smiled and genuinely laughed at one of his jokes had Baraka seething with rage. He could feel the blades in his arms flex and shift, wanting to rend the flesh from that soft, weak little man's body.

But he waited until the man's feeble attempts at courtship ended, before he dragged you off the moment the sky blackened and stars twinkled high above.

"Baraka! What--?" You were interrupted by a deep snarl; and Baraka pinned you against a boulder, inhaling deeply your scent. A mixture of his musk and the scented oils you fancied. But now, it was tainted by that foul man's stench.

It was like silt and mud staining a perfectly glassy pool in a desert oasis. He would not tolerate it.

"I can smell him on you." His gravelly voice tumbles out against your skin, his hot breath and bits of saliva dripping onto your shoulder.

"I don't like it."

You barely had a moment to think before his hands gripped the front of your tunic, and with a hard tug, ripped it right down the front, exposing your breasts to the cooling night air.

"Baraka! Someone will see us!" You hiss at him, moving to cover yourself, looking around in a panic.

It was one thing for him to pin you down and fuck you somewhere secluded, hidden, or even in his own tent...

But you were far too close to the camp and the envoy for your liking.

"Let them see. They need to know you are mine." He snarled, pinning your hands on either side of your head as he leaned in once more, scraping his jagged fangs over the flesh of your throat.

He licked at your skin, briefly, before moving up to your lips and shoving his tongue inside mercilessly, threatening to choke you out of your oxygen. For added measure, he took your bottom lip in his teeth and bit hard enough to puncture and cause a small rivulet of blood to drip down your chin, making you whine as he licked it up, before shoving his tongue back inside your mouth to tangle with your own; the sweet, coppery flavor of your blood invading your taste buds.

He pulled away, leaving a sloppy trail of saliva to mix with your blood as his hands fell to your hips, gripping you tight, the spikes on his arms tearing into the soft fabric of your dress as he tugged slightly.

You could hear the seams ripping beneath his claws as he did this.

You let out a gasp when he parted your thighs with his knee, and he grabbed your hand, forcing you to palm his fattening cock that hung beneath his trousers.

"I will make sure they know you belong to me. That you're mine." He said to you.

You felt your mouth water and your cunt flutter at the promise of having him inside of you.

You could see spittle dribble down his chin as his nostrils flared, his red-gold eyes focusing on you with all their intensity.

"I can ssssssmell you." He said, his voice rumbling lowly and hotly against your throat.

He shoved his hand beneath your skirt, chuckling madly when he discovered nothing beneath, feeling how wet you were already.

"Hrrr." Baraka hissed. "Don't lie to me. You've been wanting this all day."

You tipped your head back, biting your lip hard to stifle your moans as Baraka teased your folds, wetting his hand before he forced two of his fingers inside of you, mindful of his claws as he curled and twisted them, stretching you out.

"Be a good girl for me." He hissed, abruptly pulling himself free and aggressively licking his fingers clean while staring directly into your eyes.

You whimpered, then, when he gripped your hips and spun you around with dizzying force, his hand between your shoulders, forcing you down until you were practically bent in half in front of him. Baraka hiked your skirt up over your hips and spread your legs wide, pussy glistening and wet. All for him.

Only him. He just needed to remind you of that, and he would, he made sure of the fact as he tugged his trousers down and freed himself.

He gripped the base of his cock with one hand, taking a moment to line himself up. You had to bite into your knuckle to swallow back the wail that tried to rip from your throat as he thrust inside of you, cramming his hard cock deep within you, the tip harshly slamming against your cervix in one animalistic thrust.

Some Tarkatans mated for life, and he definitely wanted to keep you. No other weaker male would have you. He wouldn't let them. He'd slaughter them first.

He pulled out, leaving only the tip of his cock, before snapping his hips back into you, a short yelp bubbling out at the force, feeling the air in your lungs leap with the ferocity of his pace.

You bit back your sounds, not wanting anyone to overhear the two of you as Baraka relentlessly pounded into you, fucking more and more of your slick down your legs, dripping into the cracked, sandy ground below.

Baraka had no such compunction. He was quite the opposite.

He wanted someone to hear you. For them to know how good he fucked you, how he took care of you. How he satisfied you.

And god, was he doing an amazing job.

Every thrust had your mind going blank, vision fuzzy at the edges.

He brought his hand around your front, viciously swiping at your clit as he pummeled your guts ruthlessly with his dick, knowing full well you were close to cumming, he was just trying to bring you to that delicious edge quicker.

Your walls fluttering around him, you finally choked out a sob as he fucked you through your orgasm, hot tears rolling down your cheeks as he bit down on your shoulder, lapping up the blood that welled up from the punctures.

He bullied his cock into you faster, and faster until he couldn't take your pussy squeezing him any longer, snarling and snapping his jaws at the air as he emptied every last drop of his seed into your greedy womb.

He hadn't heard of a Tarkatan breeding with an Edenian, but he was certainly not above trying with you. He brought his hand up from your aching and throbbing clit, to rub at your belly with a deep rumbling laugh coming out of his throat.

You panted, legs wobbly as he kept you pressed against the rocks; the only thing keeping you upright were his hips and hands pinning you there.

His hot breathing ghosted your sweaty skin, cold against the moisture that dripped down your body, soaking the remnants of your dress.

A deep rumbling emanated from Baraka as he lifted his head, turning to the side. You couldn't see him, but you knew he was smiling, a wild look in his eyes.

It wasn't until you lifted your gaze to look at what amused him so, that you realized.

The man from the envoy was standing there, a torch in his hand. He had apparently heard the noise and came to investigate.

You turned away, burying your face in your arm with shame.

You felt Baraka snap his hips to yours again, making you sob quietly into your arm at the fresh wave of pleasure.

Baraka laughed as he started fucking you again, his expression slightly unhinged as he rocked you with each jagged thrust.

"She's mine, little man. Go back to your little camp fire."

[electronicwitchcollection]

~*Accidental mate; chapter 9*~

Here it is! I’m so sorry for the wait 😂 It was one thing after another, but I digress! Thank you to everyone, (Anonymous readers too!) for your kind support and eagerness for this to continue. Special thanks to @clone-bar-79s for motivating me to finish this chapter!

"The good news is, you've got time. His next rutting season isn't for another six months, you've got time to come to terms with it, make a decision that's best for you"  the joyful Cadence had returned to Urahara's voice, at this point you were positive it was as much of a disguise of his true thoughts and feelings as his hat and fan were. He was kindly trying to put you at ease, not letting his true concern shine through. More than you felt you deserved in this moment.

Letting your hands drop, shoulders squaring in mock determination, you raise your face to meet his eye. Fake it til you make it. "Thank you for telling me,". You raise to your feet, ready to accept your fate. Taking in a deep, soothing breath to steady your nerves. You needed to find Grimmjow. "I'll consider my options thoroughly" 

Urahara jumped to his own feet, hands presented to halt your departure, apologetic look on his angular face. Hat still secure in his hand, he looked so much younger with his mop of blond hair on show"Actually, there's more you need to know" 

More? You sat down heavily in your chair. You didn't think you could handle any more right now, you were still digesting the information you had just been fed, mind dizzyingly running though the conversation in an endless loop of uncertainty and guilt. You didn't know why you felt guilty, but it was there, heavily sitting in your stomach.

"If you were to decide to pursue a relationship with Grimmjow, there are some other factors you need to be aware of" Urahara disclosed as he rejoined you sitting down. You felt a little overwhelmed with the amount of information you had already been given, mentally exhausted with the drastic change in your life you were presented with. Though it did pique your interest, what else were you about to discover about the complicated Espada? "I'm sorry, I know it's a lot to take in" 

Your face must have betrayed how you were feeling, given the sympathetic look Urahara looked at you with. You shook your head dismissively, it wasn't through any fault of his own. Your own gluttonous actions had lead to this fiasco. Yourself and Grimmjow. Your throat tightened slightly at the thought of you and Grimmjow together in the same sentence, a couple.

Couple of idiots, you snarkily reminded yourself. Might as well get everything out in the open now, to save you from any more unwanted surprises later down the line. "Now that he has mated, part of Grimmjow's instincts will have him wanting to scent mark you. Which could be problematic " 

"problematic how?" You never realised how ignorant you were up to this point about Grimmjow's hollow side. You never realised it went as deep and animalistic as scent marking. Something you associated with mammals claiming their territory, hopefully he used another method than what you were aware of. You were pretty open minded, but you drew the line at Grimmjow pissing around your home. Or worse.

"While for the bonded pair, it can be considered rather intimate, for other hollows it's perceived as a warning... or a challenge"  For the first time since you entered the room, you notice Captain Muguruma turn to face you, seemingly interested in this part of the conversation. Arms crossed over his broad chest, he leaned back to the same window ledge Captain Hirako was using to prop himself up. "I'm sure you're well aware of the Captains and Lieutenants who have a hollow of their own residing within" 

You nod, eyes flicking to two of the captains who were visoreds , struggling to find the energy to participate verbally to the conversation yet. Shinji sent you a lazy wave, confirming what you already knew. You had seen first hand the blackening of their eyes, the inhuman warble hissing from the buff captains lips. Felt the chill run up your spine when his eyes locked onto you with a predatory gaze.

"The pheromones Grimmjow left on you can be smelt by the visored." Urahara explained, placing his hat back atop his head. Everything seemed to be falling into place, everything you had been confused about the past few days, running through your brain without answer finally being explained. Ichigo had told you that you smelt different, Grimmjow attacking him shortly after halted any further explanation. Subconsciously you breathed in deeper, trying to detect any foul smell coming from you.

Not as subtle as you had intended however, by the chuckle Urahara gave "You won't be able to smell it, neither can we" he indicated to himself and Kyoraku. That was somewhat of a relief, unimportant in the grand scheme of things, but you didn't relish in the idea of smelling.

 "Only hollows will be able to detect it, a survival instinct. It activates their instincts of fight or flight. The weaker ones, the beta's, will see it as a warning to avoid you for fear of getting into a fight with your alpha. For the stronger Alphas, they'll view it as a challenge"

"A challenge for what?" You almost didn't dare ask, not sure you wanted to hear the answer.

"To take you from him" Shinji interjected, tilting up his head to show off his smug grin. "To prove their strength, beat someone as strong as Grimmjow, steal his mate, become the most dominant" 

Your mouth fell open, gobsmacked at the new information. This was why they were here? To what? Let you know before hand that they may try and take you from Grimmjow? You felt a little nauseated at the thought. You didn't want that. Didn't want to be seen as the objectified prize of some barbaric testosterone fulled game. Offended at the thought of being passed around by whom ever claimed victory. You wouldn't accept it. You didn't want Shinji or Kensei, you wanted...

"Don't worry, this isn't us warning ya ta lock ya doors or we'll drag ya off to our caves"  Shinji's lips pulled at the corners,slowly dragging his eyes over your figure appreciatively. You fought the urge to cover yourself up from his lecherous gaze. Damn pervert. He was only joking, surely. Distasteful and outrageously unprofessional given the circumstances and his status, but he had better be only joking. "Though.."  he gave you a scandalous wink when he finally made it to your eyes " I could be tempted"

"Don't be a prick, Shinji" Kensei snarled at his colleague, seemingly reaching the end of his patience with all his teasing. Shinji held his hands up in surrender before placing them in his pockets and leaning back against the window, sulkily rolling his eyes at his fun being stopped "was only teasin' " 

Kensei rolled his eyes before focusing them on you. You shifted in your seat uncomfortably. While you didn't believe the head captain would allow any harm to befall you in his office, the large Captain scared you quite a bit. "Don't look at me with such a scared look on your face" he barked out the order, eye brows furrowed tightly. "We've got our hollows under control" 

"Most of the visored have beta hollows," Urahara took over the explanation again, saving you from having to change your facial expression for the short tempered Captain "Shinji and Kensei are the only two in soul society with Alphas. There shouldn't be a problem with Captain Otoribashi or lieutenant Kuna. " 

"Mines female, a lot easier to deal with then Kensei's." Shinji interjected, seemingly bored with the conversation now that he was denied his fun. You couldn't help but find the conversation fascinating. While you had heard the stories of Aizen's inhumane experimentation, Urahara's intervention and saving the hollowfied Captains and lieutenants, it was interesting in the way they described it. Like the hollow entity trapped within their own psyche, fighting to break out of their prison. "His is particularly aggressive.."

"An asshole is what he is," Kensei grumbled, cutting Shinji off from his deduction of the situation. Fixing you in his vision once more, he spoke with undeniable conviction "We have them under control, there won't be any problems now that we know what happened" 

"It was just a bit of a shock the other day". Shinji added, pulling attention back onto himself. You felt like you were getting whiplash, all this back and forth had the muscles in your neck stiffening "Never expected ta smell Grimmjow on ya like that, nor the reaction our hollows had " By the looks on Urahara and Kyoraku's faces, they've already been informed about your encounter with the Captains a few days prior. It eased your worry somewhat, the conviction Kensei had when he said he had his hollow under control. You released a shuddering breath, soothing the burning your lungs with the length you held it.

"You're perfectly safe here, YN. I have no doubt that the captains can control their hollows instincts"  Kyoraku spoke up, further soothing your worry. You trusted his judgment,he had proved his insightful deductions of situations to correct nearly one hundred percent of the time in your experience. He was a good judge of character. If he trusted the visored, then you could too. "The real concern lies with Ichigo Kurosaki"

"Ichigo?" You repeat surprised, you hadn't expected Grimmjow's sworn enemy to be brought into the conversation. You had just seen him. There was no reaction like what the captains exhibited. He treated you the same way he always had, friendly, relaxed. Though he did mention being able to smell you before Grimmjow attempted to knock his head clean off his shoulders

"Ichigo's hollow is still juvenile." Urahara picked up the conversation again, slipping easily back into rattling off the facts you needed to know "Though he is combative and defiant, he's not yet matured enough to want to seek out a mate, more interest in fighting for power over Ichigo. Given the history between Grimmjow and Ichigo, that could change once his hollow reaches maturity"

They were worried about it, you realised upon seeing the somber looks they all watched you with, waiting for your reaction. They were concerned not only for you, but soul society itself. There was no denying how incredibly powerful Ichigo was. No one had ever come close to reaching the level he had. The utter destruction he could cause if his hollow managed to break free and take over. The damage to soul society itself, the loss of life, the possibilities were staggering.

Grimmjow wouldn't refrain from doing something he wanted to do just because it may effect Ichigo. In fact you were pretty certain it would only make him want to do it more. Grimmjow's confidence in himself and his strength was bordering psychotic, he wouldn't care if Ichigo did challenge him. In fact, you believe he would welcome it whole heartedly, encourage it even. Idiot. He would fit in perfectly with the meat heads in the eleventh. He didn't care about the ramifications, so long as he got to thrive in the fight.

The subject would have to be brought up to both Ichigo and Grimmjow. You had the sinking feeling in your stomach, that you would have to be the one to convince Grimmjow to ignore his instincts and not mark you. If you decided to go through with it and be his mate. It would solve this problem if you simply refused to commit yourself to him, even though that decision would create problems itself. Your head was hurting, stress pinching the sides of your temples. It was too much, to many decisions falling on your shoulders.

"If Grimmjow can refrain from scent marking you,or we set up a plan for when he does, there should be little concern for ramifications". Urahara added to your silence. He could see your mind racing, thinking over all the possibilities of what you had just learned. He waited patiently for you to sift through your thoughts, silently watching as your unfocused eyes sharpened, to look him in the eye.

You had made a decision

"I need to see him

———

You walked in semi comfortable silence next to the eccentric exile, the clacking of his wooden foot ware against the stone floor, a steady beat to accompany his tuneful whistling. You appreciated the fact he didn't try to engage you in mindless chit chat as you followed him to his workspace in the outskirts of the twelfth division, Where Grimmjow was apparently staying until he was placed and housed permanently in a division. You just didn't have the capacity right now to pretend to be interested in anything Urahara could have to say to fill the silence between you.

Your mind was thick with all the information you had been given this morning. You struggled to sort through it, every question you had only leading to more questions, every solution met with an abundance of what if's and maybes. Ifs ands and buts attaching themselves to the end of every train of thought you rode on. You sigh mentally.

Remembering a time before Grimmjow forced his way into your life, with his aggressive nature and brash behaviour. When the only decisions you had to make were unimportant, mundane. Effecting you and only you. You couldn't believe how far away that seemed now. You hadn't even had the time to consider your own feelings yet. Grimmjow having invaded your every thought. Did you even like him? Well, no. Not really. His anger and snide comments annoyed you beyond belief. He was rude and infuriating, temperamental at best.

There was something there though, some pull you couldn't give name too. A niggling need in the pit of your stomach, Urging you figure out the puzzle that was Grimmjow. Wanting you to succumb to his unbending will, burn in his fiery passion. You were attracted to him, how could you not be? Handsome, strong. All the traits of a protector, a provider, that a millennia of evolution had you biologically trained to desire. There was something there. As much as you may want to deny it or ignore it, push it down and suffocate it until it no longer burns within you. It was there

A large hand settled on your shoulder, making you jump as it snapped you from your thoughts. Urahara didn't even try to hide the amusement on his face from your startled appearance. He nodded in front of you, getting you to see for the first time where you were.

"We're here" you sucked in a deep, soothing breath, releasing it slowly to rid yourself of the nerves threatening to shake you to your core. The hand on your shoulder squeezed comfortingly, departing with a tap "You'll be okay kid" 

Urahara pushed on, trusting you to follow. Opening the door with more vigour than necessary, he walked into the darkend space. "Honey I'm home!" You slipped in behind him silently, inquisitive eyes taking in the space. It was a large room, dimmed from the afternoon sun, with a desk littered with paper. Organised chaos immediately sprung to mind. Empty bottles of alcohol messily strewn on the floor, filling the space with the sharp smell of their remains.

Opposite you was a worn couch, currently moulded around the source of the rumbling growl you could feel reverberating through your chest. Grimmjow laid facing into the couch, back turned on his unwanted guest "Fuck off"  he grunted, curling in on himself, seemingly trying to disappear into the padding he was laying on. Arm thrown over his head, attempting to block out the punishing light streaming in from the open door, as well as the walking headache, Urahara.

Grimmjow Suppressed a groan, not ready to be rudely woken from his slumber. His throat was dry, scratching painfully around every forceful swallow he made in attempt to moisten the passage. His head thumped with every beat of his heart, every jolt a mercilessly cruel reminder of his rash decision making the night before. He didn't know what that freak kept in those bottles, but it sure as shit wasn't decent alcohol. Still he clung to the offered numbness it provided, willing himself to fall back into the black abyss.

"Come now ,Grimmjow," your eyes flicked to Urahara's back as he delved deeper into the room, approaching the temperamental beast with little regard to his own safety. Daringly poking Grimmjow in the back with the end of his cane, getting another growl in response "Remember your manners, we have a guest" 

"You can shove your manners up your..". Guest? Grimmjow felt his skin tingle, senses sharpening instantly. He inhaled deeply, tasting the air in the back of his throat. Mixing gently with the starchy alcohol and the dust imbedded in the couch was something sweet, rich, like thick honey clinging to the walls of the hive of the bees that created it. Fresh and salty, like the wind dancing over the oceans surface. You. You who he had ran away from, you with your bewitching eyes, your ensnaring lips. Ignoring the protesting scream of his head, Grimmjow pushed himself away from his forgiving nest, jumping to his feet, determined to not allow the discomfort to flash over his face

"The fuck do you want?"  He snarled at you, watching as your face betrayed your silly human emotions. Uncertainty, confusion, before settling on one he knew all too well, annoyance. He tried to glance at you sparingly, tried to keep himself from dissecting each and every aspect of your being, searching for the reassurance of your health. Your smell was tainted. Grimmjow could smell the musk of others lingering on your skin. He picked up the distinct notes of Urahara lingering on your clothes.

Another deep inhale and he picked up the signature of three others. The drunk, and the two who had acknowledged his claim on you. The discovery made his teeth clack together as his jaw tightened. Why the fuck were they all around his mate. Why were you looking at him, with pity.. and something else. Not quite fear.. but something he didn't recognise.

Eyes snapping to Urahara, Grimmjow snarled as he crossed the distance, chest rumbling with rising anger "What the fuck did you do!"

"Grimmjow.." Urahara's hand shot out to stop you from getting closer, halting your advance to calm him. Grimmjow roughly grabbed the lapels of his top, dragging him closer to the passed off Espada as he spit out the words "Why is she here!" 

Certain you would heed his advice and stay out of range, Kisuke lowered his arms to placate the emotional man on a subconscious level. "The head captain and I thought it best to inform YN of the situation between you." Grimmjows eyes widened, fingers slacking on the bunched up material. "We explained about the bonding, and what it means for ..hurmft!" 

The speed at which Grimmjow pulled back his fist and snapped it towards Urahara's face was impressive, if not for the unmanly exclamation of pain cutting off Urahara's explanation, you might've missed it all together. Almost instinctively you protested, scolding him with the disappointed use of his name, falling on deaf ears as Grimmjow pushed Urahara from his grip and into the desk behind him

"You had no fucking right" Grimmjow roared, fists shaking at his side with the surge of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Fixing Urahara with a dark glare, he kicked violently at one of the many bottles left forgotten on the floor, ignoring it as it smashed into the wall with excessive force. Chest swelling with frustration, Grimmjow pushed past Urahara, heading to the open door, not even sparing you a glance. "Fucking stay out of my business old man"

"Grimmjow" you reached for him, his arm slipping just out of your reach as he jerked it away, stomping through the open door. Ignoring your soft call, ignoring the indignant cry of "Old man?!" Muffled by the hand covering his bloody nose. Grimmjow needed to get out, If he stayed he was going to kill him.

You watch him leave, sighing as he slipped from your vision. Your head fell into your hands, momentarily blocking out the room and the shit show that just transpired. How you and Grimmjow were going to come to any sort of middle ground when he insisted on running away way beyond you. You let your hands slip from your face, disappointed with how that turned out.

"that didn't quite go how I expected" you mumble, disheartened by Grimmjow's disappearing act. It cut you deeper than you thought it would've, now that you knew about the bond.. it hurt to see him distance himself from you again. To reject you.

"Really?" Urahara asked surprised, gently running his fingers down his sore nose to ensure it wasn't broken " It went exactly as I had thought" 

———

Grimmjow was seething. Rage coursed through his veins like lava, obliterating any coherent thought that wasn't tinged in anger.. Why the fuck were these damn Shinigami interfering with his business, with his mate! They had no right, no fucking right to tell you. They weren't hollows, they didn't have bonds, you weren't theirs! You were his, his mate, his responsibility. He was going to tell you. The right way, not fill your head with biased bullshit from shinigami who didn't know the first thing about him or his bond.

"Grimmjow!" He rolled his eyes at your call, not stopping in his desire to put as much space between you and that fool as he could. He needed a fight. A brutal, dirty battle, where he could let go, succumb to his unconscious mind, move and act without thinking, just reacting. "Grimmjow,"

Damn woman didn't know when to fucking drop it. Whirling round he scowled at her, arms folded defensively over his chest. Her cheeks were flushed.. delicate pink, likely brought on by the jog she fell into to close the distance between them. He could feel her warmth seep off her, radiating the space around her like the sun. It was pure and gentle, not brash and damaging like him. She stopped an arms length away, watching him cautiously. It pissed him off.

They each stood in silence, waiting for the other to break the awkward tension between them. Giving the other the opportunity to dictate the way in which this conversation would go, knowing that one misspoken word could result in vicious words being spat, one misjudged movement could have them colliding together in a rush of frenzied passion..

"What!" He snapped, having enough of her inquisitive stare. She had annoyed him endlessly with her fucking bitching and complaining, now she suddenly had nothing to say? He watched as your frown softened, eyes darting to the ground between them

"They were right in telling me Grimmjow. I needed to know.."  you spoke softly, concentrating on how best to gently speak your mind. You couldn't let him bury his head in the sand and ignore it any longer. Something needed to be decided between you now, before his next rutting season came along. Grimmjow's eyes flashed with your words, not yet ready to let go of his annoyance of his privacy being talked about by a bunch of damn shinigami.

" I was going to fucking tell you! I tried!"  Grimmjow snapped defensively, stalking closer to maximise the height difference between you. Intimidation was a weapon Grimmjow had used countless times, successfully, against bigger and stronger adversaries than the small woman basked in his shadow. So why was it that this woman was meeting his eye defiantly, not a shimmer or trepidation or fear showing on her face

"You've got to stop pushing me away, Grimmjow. I know now, so stop running away and.." Grimmjows fingers wrapped around your throat and stealing your breath. Pressure squeezing threateningly against the side of your neck, fingers twitching in warning. His hand trembled, you could feel the vibration against your delicate skin as his eyes burned into your own, darkly muttering inches from your face, hot breath dancing over your lips

"I don't run away from nothing" you instinctively took hold of his wrist, yet you didn't try to push him away. You could feel your blood pumping through your jugular vein, held prisoner against his dominating hold. It was a show, a display of strength of power that he so desperately needed to hold onto so not to submit to his own confusing contradictory impulses. You shivered at his dark tone, as black and as cold as the darkest of nights. You squeeze his wrist tighter, pouring out the light of understanding, the warmth of acceptance 

"I know your scared" you were too. Scared of these confusing, consuming feelings you had never wanted. Scared of change, everything comfortable and safe being thrown into disarray . Scared you wouldn't be able to make it work, that you wouldn't be enough. Terrified that it would. "I am too.. Im your....mate."  As quiet as it was, you heard the sharp intake of breath. You watched how his eyes widened, furious rage dulling behind his eyes. He's fingers loosening their grip on your neck by a fraction, startled by your acknowledgement, acceptance"we need to come together Grimmjow, work through this together, or you're going to suffer alone. I can't sit back and watch that happen"

"you don't owe me shit, I don't want your fucking pity" Grimmjow pushed you away physically and fugitively,  creating distance from the hope you cruelly dangled in front of his nose. A life line, in the crushing reality he unknowingly made for himself. You were speaking from guilt, from some twisted sense of duty. He wouldn't let anyone pity him. You reached for his arm, stopping him from turning his back on you. You couldn't let him run away again, couldn't let him think you didn't care

"It's not pity." You had to get him to understand. He was stubborn and pigheaded, but you could get through to him. You had to. "It's not guilt. Grimmjow, talk to me" 

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!" Grimmjow screamed in your face, hoping to scare you off. Better you run now, than to pull him deeper into your Facade. Give him a sense of stability, lull him into a fabricated delusion of belonging before you pull it from under him and watch him down. You didn't back down, didn't even flinch at the display of crazed hostility. 

"Nothing. I don't want anything from you but to try. Stop shutting me out"  Grimmjow ripped his arm from you, pacing back and forth as he run his fingers through his hair as you spoke. Like a caged animal backed into a corner, comforting himself with what little freedom he had left. Clawing to it possessively, fearing you would try to take that too. "I just want a chance, a chance to see if we can make more out of this.. bond, than this... constant hostile back and forth!" 

You were struggling to keep your emotions in check. You knew Grimmjow was impossible to reason with, challenging to engage with, with anything other than anger. You didn't want to fight. Didn't want to snap and resort to his default of shouting and snarky remarks. You knew he was struggling with what he was feeling, that he wasn't happy about this bond. But it was here, it wasn't going anywhere, and all this back and forth was grating on you. If you were struggling keeping your emotions in check, then Grimmjow was loosing the damn war. 

"I don't know what the fuck you want from me woman!"  he yelled in response, glaring at you with every pass he made with his restless pacing." I can't fucking break it! I tried!" 

"Im not asking you to break it! I know you can't, and I know that you would if you could, you're clearly less than fucking pleased to be lumbered with me!" 

"Then what the fuck do you want!"

"To talk! To get to know eachother, find some mutual understanding!"  You shout back, disappointed in your inability  to not resort to a shouting match. You took a deep, soothing breath. Pulling it as far down as you could before controlling the steady release, willing your annoyance to leave your body. "I thought we could start meeting up, go on a few dates and"

"Dates?" Grimmjow sneered the word, almost offended his tongue had to manipulate around the syllable. He scoffed, seemingly finished with his mindless walking around. At last.. progress

"It's when two people..."

"I know what fucking dates are!"  That interfering old man told him about them. Offering unwanted, idiotic suggestions when all he wanted was a solution to end this infuriating bond. They sounded like they consisted of absolutely fucking nothing Grimmjow wanted to engage with. Flowers and holding hands. Fucking strolling mindlessly through fields while this bitch talked his ear off. Not this Espada. 

Sure.. don't know how to use chopsticks but is well fucking informed on dates and courting. Urahara seriously needed to reevaluate his priorities in what to teach Grimmjow.. 

"I ain't gunna fucking coddle you. I'm not going to bring you flowers or listen to you cry about your damn nails and hair. If you want all that bullshit go date the old man! Leave me the fuck out of it!"

You were instantly offended. Trying to palm you off on another man for something you didn't even want. You had no delusions about Grimmjow. You weren't expecting romance or sweetness. You certainly weren't so shallow or materialistic to demand or expect him to pander to you. Even if Grimmjow refused to see it, you were a strong, self sufficient woman. You didn't need all that from another person, you were capable of providing it for yourself. What you did require was damn respect, honesty and the same damn commitment you were willing to put into this

"I don't want to date Urahara, you fucking idiot. I want to date.." your angry retort died on your lips at the surprise widening of his eyes, the anger slipping from his face almost instantly. Inhaling deeply, you decide to finish your unintentional slip strongly. No more games. No more tiptoeing around the situation. One of you needed to stop this ridiculous back and forth and start being honest, truly honest "you, I want to date you Grimmjow. I don't need flowers. I don't need gifts or for you to change to please me. I just need a mutual respect, and a willingness to try and see if we can develop our own feelings not dictated by your bond."

He stepped towards you, a hesitancy in his movements you had never seen from him before. Questioning eyes searched your face, piercing deeply into the emotions swimming behind your eyes. "Why..?"  Searching for a hint of deception.. a sliver of hidden motives. All he could find was honestly, vulnerability. He didn't know how to deal with that. Everyone had a hidden selfish agenda. A selfish motive for everything they did. He had seen it time and time again, offering help if only it benefited you later. 

"I don't know"  you spoke softly, not a remnant of anger in your voice. Grimmjow scoffed, shoulders sagging with disappointment. He nearly fell for it, almost believed your bewitching lies.. you took hold of Grimmjow's hand, stepping closer so he had no choice but to look at you "I can't give it a name... this..pull that I feel. This feeling I get when I think of you,  these reactions I have when I see you.." 

 Grimmjow's mouth went dry, swallowing thickly as he listened.. heart thumping so loudly in his chest he thought it would bust right out his rib cage. The solidified need imbedded within the very fabric of his nature, that had been ripping him from the inside out,  suddenly sparking wildly in his stomach as you voiced your want for him. Both your small hands holding his, caressing mindlessly over his fingers, mapping out the hardened callouses, your eyes watching your fingers dance over his skin.. 

Then you looked up, the purest of eyes, shining with vulnerability, need, desire. Looking straight though him, through his defence, his armour. His breath hitched in his throat when you looked at him like that, so open, so... honest

"I don't know what it is. But it's there. It's real, and it's growing and it's not going away. I want to know what it is Grimmjow.... I want to see what it could become " 

[margareth-lv]

😵‍💫🫡 Anxiety, apathy, withdrawal, delusions 🫡😵‍💫

@odessa-2 inspired me with her note today and a reminder of the post Oliver Jeffers shared on Instagram on 3 January 2021 (side note: I have a feeling this is a completely random date and has nothing to do with anything other than Caitríona being at the time, as many people believe, already heavily pregnant with this child, whose birth wasn't announced until August,  but I could be wrong. Is there anything that you associate with this date?).

*** *** *** My body reacts nervously to any event involving Caitríona and Oliver Jeffers. Maybe it's some kind of PTSD, I'll explain in more detail below. *** *** *** Anyway, my first reaction to the news in fandom over the weekend about the New York Times article was quite nervous.

😅

In October, […] the visual artist and author Oliver Jeffers, 46, hosted a candlelit dinner for a group of Irish and Northern Irish artists and friends.

Caitríona was also present at the dinner to celebrate the launch of Oliver's latest book, 'Begin Again'.

Caitríona/Oliver, that combination doesn't sound right to me, it means smoke and mirrors and supporting the narrative. Luckily I was wrong this time.

*** *** ***

2021. Oliver Jeffers at Caitríona's 'wedding', sitting in the fireplace recess in a white suit, accompanied by a stone dog. There was no better place for him than the soot-blackened fireplace? There was no other suit than white for a friend's wedding? There was no better companion for this wedding than a stone dog? ❓

Smoke and mirrors. As dense as a spider's web, a web of connections, dependencies and interests.

*** *** ***

July 2022. Oliver Jeffers invites Caitríona to take part in the 'Our Place' festival he is organising.

Here they are in conversation with Kathy Clugston in Belfast on 2 July 2022 ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Caitríona is sitting on the stage, tense.

Excuse me. I don't mean to be rude, but she looked like she was getting dressed for the event in the dark. And when you watch the whole thing, you realise that, surprisingly, she wasn't at all comfortable on stage. She didn't have much to say except for her personal memories. She didn't have any general thoughts, any wider perspective than her own. You could see her lack of confidence and fear in her body language, the unspoken part of communication. Sadness, stress and depression. So what does she say? What does Caitríona say?

The fandom has been buzzing for years about the fact that Caitríona never referred to 🧛🏻‍♂️ as her husband. So now Caitríona, sitting uncomfortably next to Oliver Jeffers, raised her right hand in an embarrassed laugh.

Well, her husband used to say, wait, what did he used to say? Oh yes, he used to say that a strong personality keeps their accent. I mean, the most interesting thing is what happens after that. Because the most surprising thing is what she starts talking about after she calls her 'husband'. Within a couple of sentences she starts talking about Sam, you know, the one she works with. And "Sam, who I work with, for the last three months he's been saying, 'What's up with you, you're really Irish all of a sudden'". And then she talks about her 'only son'.

A brilliantly acted scene (if it weren't for all the nervous laughing and tensing up).

💁🏻‍♀️

You ask, how do we know which 'husband' was in the festival audience? From here, of course ⬇️⬇️⬇️

Smoke and mirrors. As dense as a spider's web, a web of connections, dependencies and interests.

*** *** *** Incidentally, I am keen to compare Caitríona's pictures with her 'husband' with those of her real-life friends:

*** *** *** That's why when I saw the 'NYT' article about Caitríona and Oliver Jeffers, my stomach tightened. This time, however, I couldn't have been more wrong. 🙃🙃🙃

… because Caitríona's handbag was on the floor, near her feet, as someone on 'X' pointed out.

Which means that the professional purse-holder had been given the evening off on the day of this dinner.

Can one feel more relieved?

❓

I ate my breakfast in peace and quiet.

*** *** *** Source 1: Starting at 36:29 is the short clip I quoted above.

Source 2:

*** *** ***

Voilà. Enjoy, @lovehimloveherstuff (Although reading what I've written here probably has nothing to do with 'enjoying'. I am so sorry.)

[December 11, 2023]

[lokis-army-77]

Summoning

Demon!Eddie Munson x female reader

Word Count: 3281

The Reader is home alone and decided to try her hand at summoning something. This wasn't the best idea she has ever had or is it?

Warning: 18+ Demon summoning, dubious consent, CNC, fingering, unprotected sex, PinV sex, rough sex, multiple orgasms, squirting.

Next>> Series Masterlist

Masterlist (Taglist linked here)

When no one is home you get bored. When no one is home you do some questionable things. 

Surrounded by candles and a horrible chalk-drawn summoning circle on the dark hardwood of the living room floor, I sat criss-cross with an old book clucked in my hands. It was a book of spells lent to me by my friend, who was helping me delve into my newly formed interest in the occult. 

She had warned me against trying out advanced spells, really, she had warned me about trying out any spells in general. Given my lack of knowledge, she had said, something could go horribly wrong. But she wasn’t here now and I couldn’t help my curiosity. 

Leaning forward, over the summoning circle, I began to copy the symbols which needed to be placed on the outside. Some, from what I understood were for protection and some were for containing the demon within the circle, both things that made me feel better about what I was fixing to do. 

Sitting up on my knees, I sat the chalk down and wiped my hand of its residue. I settled the book on my lap and looked at the summoning spell. I had taken Latin as an elective in high school, so pronouncing the words shouldn’t be a problem. 

As I started to read the words, the book felt heavy in my hands. So far, nothing was happening but as I kept going a soft breeze began to pick up in the room, making the skirt of my dress flutter around my legs. I paid it no mind as I kept on. 

My heart was beating out of my chest as I started the chant over again. Inside the circle, red sparks of light began to appear, flashing in the darkness. The flames of the candles started to flare as I spoke and the smell of sulfur wafted through the air. 

The energy in the room was palpable, something was coming. Slowly the white lines of the chalk circle began to glow a bright red and from those lines, a set of blackened fingers broke through. At the sight of them, my voice wavered in concern and excitement. Another hand reached out soon after and to my absolute amazement, the circle opened up completely, revealing a bright red flash. Wincing away at the light I covered my eyes.  

The air had stilled, no longer blowing the fabric of my dress around loosely. But the energy was still there, now more distinct than it had been before. Slowly, I pulled my hand away from my eyes, only to be greeted by a smiling figure standing at the edge of the circle farthest from me. 

He watched carefully as I eyed him up and down. If this truly was a demon, he was more human looking than I had expected, although, I’m not too sure what I was expecting in the first place. 

His curly hair fell over most of his face, leaving only his mouth open to my sight with his pointy teeth. Hidden by the mop of hair, at the top of his head, I could see a pair of obsidian horns pointing out behind him. From here, I could not tell how long they may be. 

Going down his body, he was naked, save for the tattered, black cloth tied to his waist. His chest was toned and smooth, nipples pierced with glinting golden bars. I gulped as I noticed the wings behind him, sinched in close to his back. 

“Why have you summoned me, mortal?” His voice reverberated around the room. 

Sitting straighter on my knees, I peered up to where his eyes must be. “I-I-” I began to stutter. I didn’t actually think this spell would work and I certainly didn’t think it would bring me one of the most attractive men, or demons, I have ever seen. 

“Well?” He questioned, bored. 

I shook my head of any thoughts and cleared my throat nervously. “I was just fooling around,” I confessed to the demon weakly. “I just wanted to see if it could really be done.”

He laughed a deep grating sound. He tipped his head forward, looking at the summoning circle I had drawn. “I’m impressed.” His sarcastic tone wasn’t lost on me. “That an amateur mortal with her poorly drawn runes could call upon me.” He bent down, long fingers reaching out to touch the outer chalk circle. 

A string of fear shot up my spine when he looked back at me with a sharp-toothed grin. Something was wrong but it didn’t stop the sudden, out-of-place, pang of need from coursing through my body to my core. 

“You can’t truly believe that these unskilful and clumsily drawn binding runes would keep me in here.” 

“I followed what the book told me to do, you can not leave that circle.” My voice quivered. I now had no confidence in those protection runes. 

“Oh you innocent little thing,” He tutted. I watched in horror as his fingers whipped away at the chalk, breaking open the circle. 

I cringed away as a wave of power was emitted from the break. “Please,” I begged him, to spare me or fuck me, I do not know.

He stood to his full height, wings now stretched out to their full glory, no longer being trapped by the invisible bonds of the circle. They were wide and black, almost identical to how a bat’s wings would look, and very intimidating. 

“Begging already? I haven’t even done anything.” He took a step forward. 

I moved from my knees, backing away from him on my bottom. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me for summoning you.” 

“It’s a little late for apologies, isn’t it, little one? I’m already here.” 

“What do you want?” I asked, my voice wavered as he came closer still.

“An offering.” He stated simply. 

I just stared at him, eyes wide.

“Your eternal soul, undying devotion, servitude, maybe even all three.” The demon let out an eerie laugh.

I couldn’t help but press my legs together tightly, trying to release some of the pressure building between them at his words. Why was I feeling this way? I was in certain danger and yet I couldn’t help the carnal need making my body buzz.

The demon laughed again, noticing what I was doing. “I think we have found how you may serve me.” He bent down in front of me and reached out his hand to caress his fingers up the bare skin of my calf. Goosebumps rose to the surface at the feeling. His hand was burning as it went further up my leg, tangling into the hem of my dress which had ridden back on my thighs. 

My heart was beating out of my chest as he continued to move his hand up under my dress and stop just before reaching the apex. His thumb, carefully smoothed over the skin of my leg and pressed into the fabric of my panties, finding my clit immediately. 

A sharp whine escaped me as he began to rub my clit harshly through the cotton garment. In my gut, I knew I should not be letting this happen. No, I should be kicking and screaming and begging for this man, no this demon, to let me go but I couldn’t, the words would not form and lust had begun to cloud every rational thought I might have had since I saw him standing in front of me. 

My legs parted wider for him and my hips began to buck to the fast-paced movements he had created with his thumb. In my lower abdomen, I could feel a growing need to be filled by him and him alone.

“Please,” I begged again, this time more wantonly than scared.

“Beg some more, I like it.” His grin was malicious as he moved my panties out of the way and stuffed a finger into my pussy, all the while still circling my clit with his thumb. My cunt gripped him tightly, fluttering around him when he moved his finger in a come hither motion.  

The feeling of his large finger inside of me had me falling apart, moaning and writing under his touch. I fell back onto my elbows, head lulling to the side as I watched him with lidded eyes. An overwhelming flood of need and arousal was building beneath my skin, heated and ready to boil over. 

“Please, please touch me. I need to feel you.” I cried out to him. 

“I am touching you little one.” I could see the glint of his eyes through his hair now, two pitch black spheres showing no emotion as he thrust his finger in and out of my soaking cunt. 

“Fuck,” I groaned, raising my hips into his thumb. “Need you to fuck me. Please, I need you to fill me with your cock. Please, please, please.” My voice became higher in pitch the more I begged him. 

He smiled, showing off all his pointy teeth, then stopped his hand, pulling his fingers away from my cunt. 

I clenched around nothing, crying in displeasure at the emptiness. My cry soon turned into a surprised shriek as the demon took hold of my ankle in a firm grip and began to drag me into the summoning circle with him. 

There, in the broken circle, surrounded by candles, he snapped his fingers, ridding me of my clothes. Naked beneath his intimidating form, I shivered. I tried to bring my hands up to cover myself, but he caught them with his other hand, pinning them above my head.

“Do not hide from me.” His wings flared out as he spoke. 

I only nodded in submission.

He said nothing as he slid his hand down from my ankle to catch the back of my knee, pulling my legs wide so he could move in between them. He was still covered by the thin cloth around his hips but even so, I could make out the protrusion of his hardened cock. 

Biding my lip, I squirmed under his hold, wanting nothing more than to see what he had hidden. It couldn’t have been small with the way it was jutting through the cloth. 

“Ah!” A moan flew from my lips as he pushed two fingers into my cunt quickly and then out again to rub the slick juices over my clit before taking his cock out from behind its curtain. 

My eyes widened and my back went ridged along the floor at what I saw. He was massive, unlike I had ever seen. The cock was long, thick, and slightly curved up. The demon caught the worried look on my face and chuckled darkly.

“Don’t worry, little one, it will fit.” He sounded determined as he brought the head closer to my cunt, rubbing it along the wetness before slowly pushing it inside. 

I couldn't help but moan deeply as his girth stretched me out beyond anything ever had. Just the tiny bit he had in me felt like so much. I was being pried apart at the seam and it felt as though the pain would never become pleasurable. 

His hand, which was holding my wrists, came up to grip the back of my knee tightly as he pushed in more and more. I could feel my body tensing, sweat breaking out all over at the stress. 

“Fuck,” I groaned, bringing my hands up to reach for him. “Stop please.” I begged, “Won’t fit.” My nails clawed at his abdomen. 

“Yes, it will.” He pushed in more, over halfway in before he eventually just slammed his hips forward. He grunted in pleasure before rocking his hips into me. 

A scream shot out of me and my back arched off the floor. My cunt clamped around the full length of the demon’s hard cock as I felt it practically pulsing in me. The pain of the suddenness of his thrust set a trimmer through my body but it soon subsided into a need for him to move more than he was.

Short, labored breaths filled my lungs as I squeezed my eyes closed. I could feel every bump and ridge of his cock inside of me as he began to thrust. 

“So tight.” He growled, leaning his head down, tongue slipping out to lick at the outer shell of my ear. It was warm and wet and surprisingly, it was forked down the middle like a snake. 

The once painful sensation gave way to more mouthwatering leisure. My pussy was becoming wetter with each deep-seated thrust he made, rocking me back against the floor. 

“Yes, yes, yes. Need more.” I pleaded, arching more into his touch. 

The demon moved his hands around my waist, each resting on my back, large fingers splayed out. He lifted my body up at my hips, leaving only the tops of my shoulders and my head resting on the floor. 

He wasn’t very vocal but deep growls and grunts sounded from his throat as he began to pummel himself into my aching cunt. Shouts and screeches of pleasure flew from my parted lips as I tried to reach out to him, to hold onto something, tether myself to reality as he worked my body. 

“Fuck,” I arched my back as much as I could manage when his hand came up to expertly play with my clit again. The stimulation from his deft fingers and his quick, deep thrusts began to build upon the pleasure I was feeling. 

“More,” I gritted out, cunt greedy for release. My toes curled and my legs stiffened. I was coming nearer and nearer to my climax and I knew he could feel it.

The gritty snarls the demon emitted as he fucked into me were echoing in the room. The sound of them went straight to my leaking pussy. His fingers worked faster, spreading the wetness around. I was soaked, the lewd squelching sounds were testimony of it. 

“Let go little one,” He commanded, propelling himself faster into me. 

I obeyed him, rapturous screams and cries fleeing from me as my body shook in his tight hold. My arousal gushed around his cock and dribbled down my ass and onto the floor, leaving us in a pool of my own quickly cooling cum. 

“That’s it.” 

At his praise, I felt another pang of deep-seated need spring through me. He kept up his blistering pace all the way through my orgasm. I was already sensitive and fucked out, but he looked like he was just getting started. 

My body writhed in his hands. The one that had been toying with my clit now moved to my breasts, pinching and pulling at the nipples. Just feeling his warmth on the peaked buds was enough to have me sighing in elation. 

“More- ah! More, please give me more.” I pushed my chest up into his touch. 

“You want more little whore?” He grunted. 

At the moment I answered, he rutted into me harshly, the head of his cock burying itself against my cervix far within me. My answer gargled down in my throat with the mewling moan which replaced it. 

My mouth was left agape and my eyes began to roll back in my head. The demon was unrelenting, fucking into me at a pace that could only be described as animalistic. Even the glimpses of his eyes told me he was becoming more and more feral. 

The sounds of pure bliss I had been making became silent as it kept building and building again. For the second time, I was nearing my orgasm. When my pussy would grip the demon’s cock, I could feel all of him as he resisted my hold. 

“Yes, yes. I want to watch you come undone around me.” I could barely hear his words over the rushing of blood in my ears. 

With a few more thrusts and a twist of my nipple, I was once again gushing around his cock. This time though, he pulled out, leaving my used hole gaping and wanting for more. 

My breathing was hard like I had run a marathon just now, as I rested beneath the demon. I was so exhausted that I could only whimper in protest as his strong hands flipped me over onto my stomach. 

“I am not through with you yet, little one.” He sneered, rubbing his hot, wet cock over the curve of my ass. 

Having no strength, I could only lay there on the ground, eyes closed, a body waiting as I felt his hands roaming my clammy body and bucking my hips up, and guiding himself through my folds. 

“Please,” I begged him, not sure if I could take anymore. 

“Do not beg.” He stated simply. “I will do as I please.” Then, with no warning, his cock pushed all the way into me. 

The new position allows me to feel him impossibly deeper within me, like he may burst through my cervix and into my womb. I could not control my sobs of painful pleasure as he began to impale me. My fingernails dug crescent moons into my palms as I tried to keep myself steady on the floor. The power he put behind his thrusts was pushing and jolting me forward. 

Again, quicker this time, my orgasm began to build and so did my tears. I had become so overwhelmed with excruciating desire that all I could do was cry. My body was vibrating, shaking so violently with the fast-approaching need to release that the demon had to crowd me with his body to keep me still. 

He was grunting into my ear, an enjoyable, wild sound. At the first out-of-beat thrust, I knew he had to be close now. He pushed himself into the gummy walls of my pussy, his tight balls, slapping torturously at my clit just enough to stimulate the sore and puffy nub. 

With a loud wail of a cry, I came again. The wetness between my thighs felt wetter somehow as, and as I looked down to watch, a stream of liquid shot from me onto the floor below. The demon reached his hand down to my clit and began to rub once more, disrupting the stream, and causing it to spray everywhere. I tried to clamp my legs together. 

“Please!” I sobbed, “Please, I can’t.” 

He only kept going. I had no time to recover from the third orgasm when a fourth came crashing down upon me. It was now that I heard a short gasp leave the demon before he gave a final thrust into me, pouring his unholy seed into my convulsing and waiting cunt. As he came, his wings flapped, blowing out the candles in the room.  

Never had I felt so full and sated. He let me down, as gently as a demon could, and I laid them splayed out on the cool floor. The room was quiet, free from the sloppy sounds of sex, save for my rapid breaths. 

“Thank you,” I mumbled into the floor. 

“Do not thank me yet. I will be back for more. You are now mine for eternity, little one.” With one last touch of his hand along my bare back, he was gone, at least I assumed so until I turned around to look around the dark room. The energy that came with him was gone and the room felt empty. 

Weirdly enough, even though he was a demon and I was now bound to him somehow, I felt like it wasn’t something to be fearful of. I missed his presence and looked forward to when we would meet again.

Eddie Taglist: @loveofmylife12@ellabellabus07@wickedwitchofwest@siriusstwelveyears@ameliakf13 @milly-louise @darkscrossfire @harrypotter-posts @dedeinspire @ccosmic-illusion @eddiesbirdie @castiels-gracex @luvwanda @whimsywisher @wool-hat7 @callsignthunder @corrodedhawkins @stefans-wife

[dgrailwar]

Round 8, Day 1 - ALL TEAMS (but mostly Team Pretender) - [ TRUE NAME DISSOLUTION ]

Team Pretender chooses to trigger the Pretender's True Name Dissolution! Oberon's gameplay style, personality, skills, and perhaps even the current state of the Grail War will cha--

"Ahh… you're sure? This would be a pretty nasty spoiler… I mean, might spoil things in a pretty nasty way."

"Well, if you say so. Let's put up a curtain, just in case anyone wants to remain in this illusion of bliss."

Ah. So you decided to keep reading? Good. I hope you're ready. Because in exchange for visuals, you'll have to live with words.

You watched as the form of 'Oberon' began to decay, his form withering and rotting away into dark, pulpy matter. The process was vile and agonizing, the smell of sloughing sinew and blackening bones filling the forest. The bugs crawled to the disgusting carcass, worming their way in, making nests and feasting greedily as the fairy king dropped to the earth, his body no more than a dark puddle that slowly grew in size, before rising.

Rising, and rising.

A swarm of darkness, rising and rising.

A vile king, an abyssal worm, rising above the digital space.

An empty entity that loathed existence itself. An eternal pit that swallowed worlds.

And as naught but innocent bystanders, the Masters could only watch in horror, for how could they have known this would happen?!

Hah!

Yeah, right. That's horseshit.

Of course they knew what would happen. They just didn't care. Not about the others, or how things would change. That's human nature, you know? Ruin things because it seems interesting at the moment. That's the simple fact of the matter.

They probably looked on proudly. 'We did it!', they would declare, 'We summoned such a mighty and powerful Servant, and none will stand in our way', they probably proclaimed. Or, perhaps even more naively (and perhaps even worse), 'Our friend now has the power to win'! Blegh. Anyways.

Then, as the audience is given a beat to grapple in the horror of the scenario, in a manner of surprising comedic timing they would check their Command Spells… and they would be gone.

'Gone? How could they be gone?', would be the question buzzing in their minds, panic beginning to settle in. Of course, the answer was simple.

That giant abyssal creature did not exist, and yet did exist. A 'hole', only truly meant for a Lost World.

Anyways, do you want a big explanation on how each Servant suffers and dies under the curse, and how the Grail crumbles and withers into itself, reverting to nothing, and how the magical energy suffused by this dark entity breaks free from this digital prison, dooming this world? I mean, I could. Sure.

But why bother? It's basically settled. Here.

What was that thing that Shakespeare had Puck say at the end of that bullshit play?

"If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream."

It's over. You can leave now.

The dream is done.

The Abyssal Wyrm comes and everyone dies. Meaning you've reached a...

I said you can go.

Leave, shoo. Go away.

There's not much past this, so bye.

…Hah! Fine. I lied. I mean, obviously. What a shit ending that would be otherwise. Let's keep it 'sporting', then. This whole farce makes me want to puke, so I need to let out my anger on someone before this ends. Ah- wait, this is narration. No more 'I'. Let's stay detached, lest this become a monologue.

Now, let's settle the matter of where this story stands.

There was the melting, the decay, the ruination of the idea of 'Oberon'. Check.

The insects feasting, nesting, and crowding on his decaying body, a ritual to send his body to the earth, and arise anew. Duh.

The vanishing Command Spells, as you realized that your connection was nothing more than a scam. Of course.

The giant abyssal creature looming over the horizon. Obviously.

That stuff happened. Remember it.

But the Servants didn't die (yet).

The digital space wasn't swallowed by darkness (yet).

All isn't lost (yet).

Those were lies. Though, if I'm the one saying it…

Ah, whatever. Now... how did these sort of things go for the others? Right, right.

Behold, the vile king of the abyss. He who resides wherever 'emptiness' lies. The wrath of the Planet, given form and cursed with eternal loathing and hollow truth. He who only should have existed within the confines of the Lost World, as he has no role within human history. He, made of lies, sheds his farcical shell. He who makes you go 'Oh, we, uh, should have summoned the Archetype of the Planet for this one' with dumb mouths agape!

Behold, the end of worlds and dreams. The one who fells the morning lark. The one who consumes the evening shroud. The one who devours the twilight.

Behold--

The Extra Class of Endless Deceit, Pretender!

[eiightysixbaby]

How do you think our boys would react to reader wearing a cute little dress and getting hit on? Do they yell at the guy for daring to speak to their girl? Rough sex in the bathroom to remind them who they belong to? Wrapping reader in their jacket so no one else can see them? So many yummy possibilities 🤤

see, I think how they react completely depends on how you react. however, conveniently enough I think each possible response you gave coincides well with one of the guys, so I’ll write this that way 😏

Steve is the one who confronts the guy for trying to hit on you. Specifically King Steve era Steve, but it just works for Steve in general. “Do you know who the hell you’re talking to?” he’d say, stepping towards the guy and pushing you to stand behind him. “That’s my girlfriend, so I suggest you keep it moving.” Meanwhile the guy’s trying to steal glances behind Steve, still throwing crass comments your way. If he gets mad enough, he grabs the other guy by the collar of his shirt, holding him in place, staring him down like he wants to kick his ass. No one tries to pick up his girl, not on his watch. “Leave her the fuck alone, buddy. One more comment out of you and I’ll make sure you fucking regret it,” he says, and his voice is unsettlingly calm but firm. You don’t want him to get into a fight, but you’d be lying if you said you didn’t love the way he so fiercely protects you. He basically shoves the other guy away, discarding him like the trash he is, leading you away from him and walking behind you cautiously.

Eddie is the one who fucks you in the bathroom to remind you that you’re his and only his. This works even better if you’re a brat and let the guy flirt with you, going along with it to rile Eddie up. But really I just think that Eddie having to watch someone else hit on you would make him so furious he’d just have to prove that he’s the only one who can make you feel so good, regardless of if you entertained the flirting or not. He grabs you by the wrist, pulling you into the bathroom and barely even shutting the door before he was all over you. He has you bent over the counter, hiking your dress up and sliding your panties to the side before just sinking himself right into you. “Who do you belong to? Huh, baby?” he grunts, one of his hands fisted in your hair, holding your head up so you’re looking at him in the vanity mirror. “That’s right, you belong to me. And I’m gonna cum inside this pretty pussy, wanna be leaking down your thighs all night so everyone else knows you’re mine,” he growls, and you swear his words alone could make you finish.

Jonathan is the one who gives you his jacket, wrapping it protectively around you to keep other wandering eyes at bay. “Leave her alone, she’s not interested,” he says to the other guy before guiding you away, and arm wrapped firmly around you. He doesn’t want a fight, knows that this guy would probably bloody his lip and blacken his eye in an instant if given the chance. He doesn’t want to subject you to that, and so he just hurries away with you. He secures his jacket over your shoulders, looking back over his to make sure the guy isn’t following - or watching you. “You okay?” he asks you, holding you close to him, unwilling to let you go too far now. He knows you can hold your own, knows you can tell a guy where to shove it if need be, but he still hates the idea of any other men trying to flirt with you. His jacket both shelters you from unwanted glances and marks you as his, so it’s a win win.

[camarocarfight]

There's A Demon In My Radio Chapter One An Alastor x Reader slow burn fic featuring human Angel Dust (Anthony), Vox, and many more. Buckle up, and grab the tissues. Rated MATURE for sexual themes, violence, and drug and alcohol use.

There's A Demon In My Radio

New Orleans, 1947

There had been a cabin in the bayou that you dreamed about living in all your childhood. Your family would drive past it on your way to your father's sugarcane fields, and your gaze would be fixated on the log structure. The cabin wasn't much to look at, being a quaint hunting shack and all, but your father said that it had been refurbished after the previous owner had died. It sat empty for years, and was listed on the market for just as long. Talk of the town was that the serial murderer from the 1930s cut up and ate his victims there, but that seemed far-fetched to you. 

Regardless of the rumors and your father's distaste for the idea, you bought the cabin after graduating from nursing school. Not at all put off by the fact that a serial killer had taken up residence there nearly two decades ago. All you cared about was that he was dead, having been shot by a hunter who mistook him for a deer. Truthfully, an unfortunate way to go, but was he deserving of any other?

Anthony, your closest friend, was meeting you at the hospital after work to help you move in. The two of you had been close since middle school, after Anthony had warded off some unwanted advancements against you by Vox. Since then, you had each other's backs, and agreed to a mutually beneficial relationship. Your first time meeting Anthony, you knew he was different. Different in the kind of way that society didn't accept and could very well get him killed if he wasn't careful. After the Vox incident, you and Anthony agreed to ‘courting’. It was the only solution you knew of to keep Vox off your back, and it would keep Anthony safe from any accusations.

For years your plan had worked, but as of late, the pressure was mounting on you to keep Anthony safe. Everyday, it seemed Anythony found himself in some sort of trouble with drugs or with selling himself for money. He would come to you at odd hours of the night either high or sporting the cuts and bruises of his latest scrape.

So it really didn't surprise you when you found Anthony sitting outside the hospital on a bench. Dressed to the nines in a charcoal gray three piece suit with a matching fedora and sporting a black eye. You bound towards the young man, shaking your head in disappointment. Anthony simply grinned, finding your motherly instincts comical.

“Honestly, you need a babysitter,” you took him by the chin and moved his head from side to side, examining the bruise. 

“Nice t’ see you too, Doll,” Anthony took your hand from his face as he stood from the bench. He easily towered over you, being 6’3 and all legs. “Coulda been worse. It was only Val dishing out the punishment.” 

“You shouldn't have to be punished,” you grumbled and took Anthony's arm and the two of you began your walk to the cabin.

“Jus’ forget it, and let's have a nice weekend puttin’ your murder shack together.”

The two of you walked in relative silence, arm-in-arm. From the hospital to the cabin was a thirty minute walk. The landscape changed drastically along the way. Going from the bustle of the city and the stately homes, to plantations that eventually tapered off into the forests that surrounded the bayou. It would no doubt be an interesting walk coming back from the hospital during those Late nights. Your father had offered to buy you an automobile, but you felt they weren't safe. Not that walking such a distance was much safer. 

“I don't know, toots,” Anthony glanced down and eyed you wearily through his blackened eye. “Quite the walk for a gal by her lonesome.”

You scoffed and pulled your arm free from Anthony and rummaged through your purse to find the keys to the cabin. 

“Have you and my father been talking?”

“You know he don't like me,” Anthony murmured and thrust his hands into the pockets of his slacks. 

The man stopped before the cabin and regarded the log structure with an unamused expression. Refurbished or not, it still wasn't much to look at. The windows in the front were caked with dust, and moss and vines had slithered their way up the siding and onto the shingles of the roof.

“What was it about this place anyhow?”

“I don't know,” you shrugged and walked up to the door. As you slid the key into the keyhole, a smile slid across your lips. “There's this je ne sais quoi I couldn't ignore.”

The lock mechanism clicked, disengaging the lock, and the door slowly creaked with the hinges squealing in protest. Light filtered into the vast space of the cabin's main room, illuminating the dust that floated and filled the musty air. The old furniture had long since been removed after the passing of the previous occupant, leaving only an old radio sitting in the corner of the room next to a stone fireplace.

Behind you Anthony whistled. “Smells wonderful,” he stepped past you and into the living space. Under his oxfords the old wooden floors creaked. “Like rotten meat.”

“Anthony, quit.”

“Maybe the killer's bodies are still buried here,” he laughed, but the look on your face had his smile fading. “Awe, c'mon, toots.”

“I really want to make this place home, Anthony. Regardless of what happened or not.”

“And we will,” Anthony put his arm around your shoulders and regarded the space. “‘Least it came with a radio.”

You hummed and walked up to the floor model radio sitting dorment in the corner. The once mahogany stained wood was tarnished and chipped, with years of dust covering its surface that was so thick that it didn't even leave a trail when you swiped your finger across the surface. There was a tiny frequency window that was yellowed and cracked and two knobs that barely turned. 

“It be neat if this still worked,” you reached down and picked up the power cord. The outer sheath was dry rotted and nearly falling apart in your hand. 

“Yeah,” Anthony shook his head. “I wouldn't, unless I want to burn the place down.”

“If the cord is in this condition, then the capacitors are probably dried out too,” the cord fell from your hand and clattered against the wooden floor. “I wonder if this was his radio.”

Anthony quirked a brow and folded his arms over his chest with his right hip cocked. “Are y’ keeping it? No use keeping someone else's junk. Especially since it doesnt work.”

“No, I'm keeping it,” the look of confusion on Anthony's face made you smirk. “It's a nice decoration.” 

“Whatever you say, toots.”